The form of spirit possession performed by practitioners who are readily initiated into Dominican Vodou requires them to be excellent (inter-)actors, dancers, and poets. The article focuses on the ritual practice of spirit possession in the Southwest of the Dominican Republic with emphasis on the question as to what constitutes effectiveness of spirit performance and how it is produced. The...
Reviewed by: Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception by Eviatar Shulman David Nowakowski (bio) Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception. By Eviatar Shulman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 206. isbn 978-1-107-06239-9. Eviatar Shulman’s Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative...
It is not yet well understood how we become conscious of the presence of other people as being other subjects in their own right. Developmental and phenomenological approaches are converging on a relational hypothesis: my perception of a "you" is primarily constituted by another subject's attention being directed toward "me." This is particularly the case when my body is being physically...
Abstract The vividness of Homeric poetry has been admired since antiquity, but has been difficult to pin down with precision. It is usually thought to come about because readers are prompted to visualize the storyworld in the form of mental images seen with the mind's eye. But this cannot be right, both because there are serious scientific problems with the concept of ‘pictures in the head’ and...
Howhy (Hohwy 2016, Hohwy 2017) argues there is a tension between the free energy principle and leading depictions of mind as embodied, enactive, and extended (so-called ‘EEE cognition’). The tension is traced to the importance, in free energy formulations, of a conception of mind and agency that depends upon the presence of a ‘Markov blanket’ Andrey Markov demarcating the agent from the...
N-Benzyl-substituted 2C class phenethylamines (NBOMes) are psychoactive designer drugs, with strong hallucinogenic and stimulant effects, even at low doses. The designer drug, 2-(4-bromo-2, 5-dimethoxyphenyl)-N-(2methoxybenzyl) ethanamine (25B-NBOMe) is considered to be one of the most potent agonists of the serotonin-2A (5HT2A) receptor. Recently, we reported the first lethal case of 25B-NBOMe...
The continuity hypothesis (1) posits that there is continuity, of some form, between waking and dreaming mentation. A recent body of work has provided convincing evidence for different aspects of continuity, for instance that some salient experiences from waking life seem to feature in dreams over others, with a particular role for emotional arousal as accompanying these experiences, both...
An exploratory study into the recent popular emergence of mindfulness (Achsamkeit). Contemporary mindfulness practices encompass secular self-help and therapeutic pedagogies such as MBSR, spiritual exploration and religious doctrine. This study is a qualitative analysis of the concept of mindfulness as it is entertained by its practitioners. The study was conducted according to a constructivist...
Background. The structure of consciousness has long been a cornerstone problem in the cognitive sciences. Recently it took on applied significance in the design of computer agents and mobile robots. This problem can thus be examined from perspectives of philosophy, neuropsychology, and computer modeling. objective. In the present paper, we address the problem of the computational model of...
Tiletamine is a non-competitive N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist chemically related to ketamine and phencyclidine. A common veterinary anesthetic drug, tiletamine is currently a Schedule III controlled substance in USA. This compound exerts sedative effects in humans and animals, also having an abuse potential, toxicity and dissociative hallucinogenic properties clinically....