This article develops a metaphilosophical account of the constitution of selfhood by situating contemporary debates on the minimal and the narrative self within Wilfrid Sellars’s distinction between the manifest and the scientific images. I argue that neither a minimal nor a narrative conception of the self straightforwardly entails a commitment to either image. Rather, depending on how they...
A long-standing assumption in cognitive neuroscience is that visual mental imagery (VMI) is “visual perception in reverse” and, as such, requires reactivation of the primary visual cortex (V1). On this view, total destruction of V1 should abolish VMI and provoke neurological aphantasia. We tested this prediction by reviewing 55 published cases of cortical blindness (CB) in which VMI abilities...
The human desire to survive death is not new. Religious traditions, philosophical systems, memorial practices, and popular culture have long offered ways of imagining continuity beyond biological life, whether through heaven, reincarnation, ancestral presence, symbolic immortality, or cultural remembrance (Bhargava; Cave; Iglesias et al.; Lifton; Nairn; Nairn and Matthews). What is changing,...
AbstractThe “entropic brain” hypothesis holds that psychedelic and other ego-dissolving states correspondto an increase in the entropy or signal diversity of spontaneous brain activity. Motivated by afirst-person report of a combined serotonergic–dissociative state (LSD/DMT together with nitrousoxide, N2O), we asked a sharper question: when a 5-HT2A agonist and an NMDA antagonist acttogether,...
Contemporary debates on human identity increasingly describe a shift away from essentialist anthropologies toward fluid, constructed, and technologically mediated forms of selfhood. While these transformations are often analyzed in terms of social, political, or technological change, their deeper phenomenological dimension remains insufficiently explored. This paper proposes that the current...
This preprint introduces the Organismic Projection Thesis (OPT), a conceptual framework in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. The central claim is that the human subject should not be understood as consciousness inhabiting an organism, but as an organism that, under physiological conditions, generates a bounded conscious projection of world, self, and duration. The paper does not aim to...
Psilocybin, a psychedelic drug with reported anxiolytic and antidepressant potential, is rapidly metabolized to its active metabolite psilocin. However, a lack of adequate toxicity studies and tissue distribution studies currently restricts its development and application. This study combined behavioral assays in zebrafish with desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry imaging...
Psychedelics were used for centuries in healing and spiritual rituals, long before the mid-20th century when they became subjects of biomedical research. Although initial trials generated optimism, these were quickly overshadowed by sensationalist media coverage and political backlash. Following decades of inactivity, research on compounds including 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) has...
Abstract Despite our proclivity to make either tacit or overt passage of time judgments in daily life, insufficient work has been done to uncover the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning such determinations. A prima facie promising account of passage of time judgments derives from the predictive processing framework. More precisely, Hohwy et al. (2016) propose that the reported speed of the...
This work aims to assess the S65487-induced disruption of the B-cell lymphoma-2 (Bcl2)/Bcl2-like protein 11 (Bim) complex at therapeutic doses via a pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic model and to reconcile pharmacokinetic data from microdoses and therapeutic doses in a single population pharmacokinetic model. The first model consists of a linear 3-compartment pharmacokinetic model linked to an...