This paper asks: if large language models (LLMs) gave rise to phenomenal consciousness, what would it be like? I argue that if LLMs gave rise to phenomenal consciousness, it would be like being an impartial, improvising playwright rather than a character or a (roleplaying) actor or an author writing a first-personal narrative. My argument has three steps. I first argue that if LLMs give rise to...
I treat Proust’s Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a fictional case history centered around dynamic tension between dissociation, memory, and creativity. I argue that three pivotal breakthroughs of long dissociated memories and feelings in Proust’s novel result from thawing within a dyadically-determined dissociative process, not simply the chance triggering of involuntary memories as the...
The Freudian concept of the unconscious is generally presented in terms of a region of the mind that is inaccessible to consciousness. Against this background, classical phenomenologists insisted that, be it latent dream-thoughts or repressed wishes, the mind can disguise the inappropriate content and repress the unwanted only if it somehow “knows” what it thereby represses and disguises. What...
In homeopathic practice, dreams are not simply repertory symptoms or marginal details of the examination, but a form of language through which vital force is expressed. They are fragments of truth embedded in the individual's constitution that emerge during sleep, when consciousness slackens and leaves room for what remains invisible and unheard in waking life. Narrating a dream is not simply...
We propose the Chaos-State Space Dream Model (CSSDM): a candidate neural correlate of dream consciousness. CSSDM treats dreaming as the brain's exploration of hierarchically organized attractor landscapes when sensory anchoring lifts and prefrontal control attenuates during REM sleep. The proposal combines two published frameworks. From chaos-theoretic accounts of dream phenomenology, we take...
There has been much critical writing about guilt, morality and psychological agony in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. The psychological conflicts involved in Raskolnikov’s divided consciousness have been a subject of numerous psychoanalytical interpretations, but the connection between his self-fashioning of ideology and psychological conflict is open to further analysis. In...
Quantifying consciousness from brain activity remains a major challenge in neuroscience and clinical practice. Many existing EEG measures focus on a single feature of neural activity, such as complexity, synchrony, or spectral structure, but no single feature appears sufficient across different brain states. We introduce a composite dynamical framework that combines three complementary...
We aim to explore and qualitatively compare individuals’ experiences of mental imagery during waking and dreaming consciousness in order to understand how these states are similar and different in phenomenological structure, focusing on the sensory modalities that are different or common between states. Additionally, we seek to better understand how absent or low waking visual imagery might...
This is a multidisciplinary cultural analysis of the Blaan-T’boli Dream Weaving tradition in Mindanao, Philippines and compare the Filipino culture and ethics - such as Kapwa - shared identity and Loob – relational will (for which there are no equivalent words in English) - to Western sociological and anthropological theories: Geertz’s ideology as a cultural system and social mapping; Emile...
Psychosis has been likened to dream-like mentation permeating waking, with hallucinatory experiences, flawed logic, and salience of one’s internal world over sensory perception. Some exceptional dream and sleep experiences have been viewed as representing hybrid states between sleep and waking, for example, dreams of falling/flying, dreams of awakening, lucid dreams, sleepwalking, hypnagogic...