This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program on mindful awareness and perceived stress levels in women affected by disasters. The study was a parallel-group, superiority pretest–posttest randomized controlled trial involving women aged 18–65 who were affected by the 6 February 2023, earthquakes in Türkiye and temporarily living in...
In this paper, I examine the relationship between the mind-body disciplines of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain systems of yoga, focusing on the use of psychoactive substances in the Indic religious context and the ways that modern cosmopolitan forms of yoga have been intersected with the use of psychedelic substances.The foundation of the study is a comparative examination of the semantic field of...
This article addresses David Chalmers's hard problem of consciousness by asking why information processing is accompanied by a subjective 'what it is like'. Its point of departure is the distinction between intelligence and phenomenal consciousness: the achievements of contemporary artificial intelligence show that reasoning, planning, language, and the accurate description of emotions do not...
Functionalism is among the most influential positions in the philosophy of mind. Its central idea is that mental states are determined not by their material constitution but by their functional or causal role. This gives rise to the possibility of multiple realization: if the same functional organization can be realized in biological and artificial systems, then, in principle, the same mental...
This study examines how lay women engage with, adapt, and transmit the heart-mind esoteric Buddhist tradition known as Foxin Jing () in contemporary China. Previous scholarship on Chinese esoteric Buddhism has predominantly focused on issues related to legitimacy, lineage, institutional power, and master-disciple relations. However, there has been a relative lack of focus on the role played by...
The question of whether artificial intelligence could bear the imago Dei, possess a soul, be a subject of salvation, or suffer in a religiously weighty sense increasingly frames debates at the intersection of AI and faith. Such debates typically rest on an intellectualist criterion: they treat mind as intelligence or information processing, so that as machine performance advances, the sacred...
Two of the most active subjects in research today are happiness and longevity. This paper aims to understand the difference between happiness and pleasure and further investigate the correlation between happiness and longevity. We have re-defined happiness by using Quantum Science and compared happiness and pleasure. We have concluded that if we focus more on real happiness, which is expanding...
In daily life, resilience helps us bounce back from challenges, staying strong in both mind and body. Yet, many attempts to strengthen resilience have had limited success. We explored whether practicing meditation for over a year might lead to higher resilience by comparing 94 long-term meditators with an equal number of non-meditators, matched by age and sex. We found that the meditators...
The Fundamental Phenomenality Hypothesis (FPH) identifies phenomenal consciousness witha specific class of computational states in predictive brains. Subjective experience occurswhen a hierarchical generative model jointly satisfies four conditions: (i) sufficient integratedhierarchical content, indexed by the magnitude of generatively engaged inference acrosshierarchical levels; (ii)...
We consider two recent arguments concerning the question of empirical falsifiability of consciousness theories: the Unfolding Argument (UA) against causal structure theories and the Substitution Argument (SA) according to which if prediction of experience and inference from behaviour are independent, any non-behavioural theory of consciousness is a priori falsified. We argue that the UA is...