Psychedelic or ecodelic medicines (e.g., psilocybin, ayahuasca, iboga) for the care and treatment of addiction, post‐traumatic stress disorder, cancer, cluster headaches, anxiety, and depression have surged to the forefront of discussions about mental health in the US, leading to the emergence of well‐capitalized biotech companies offering multimillion‐dollar IPOs. Venture capital website...
This article describes the history of modern metaphysics as the history of the immanentization of transcendence. We show this from the concept of the “idea of god”, which is the phenomenon that violently separates subjectivity from transcendence and opens up a tear in it that we call “psycho-theological”: the divine violently leaves a trace in us by its very distance. We describe this...
Focusing on human capacity to design, the volume's final chapter draws attention to the fascinating role imagination can play in human life. The relationship between human consciousness and the evolution of the species continues to captivate and puzzle scholars. By revisiting the dialogue between consciousness and evolution, the authors demonstrate how enigmas often necessitate dynamic...
Music has often been linked to the capacity to induce trance-like states, with listeners sometimes describing their experiences as “hypnotic-like”. However, it is still unclear whether music can induce effects similar ¬¬¬to those found in response to a hypnotic induction, or whether these references rest on a metaphor. Using matched samples (n=266), this exploratory study compared the...
Over the past decades, reductive materialism has made a recipe for philosophy of mind to explore the subtle nature of the human mind. By and large, many identity theorists were likely to argue that mental states can be found in cognitive faculties of the brain so that the mind, if not most, associates with discoverable phenomena with no burden of proof. To put this bluntly, reductive...
Divinisation rituals establishing oneness between practitioners and divinities are common across Tantric traditions. While scholars largely argue that divinisation occurs through meditative practices, implying a clear demarcation between contemplative samayācāra rituals and body-focused kaulācāra rituals, I suggest that samayācāra divinisation rituals entail fundamental corporeal elements;...
Abstract: This chapter outlines Dickens’s revised thinking in Bleak House about introspection and the potential legibility of the flesh. Esther Summerson’s notoriously coy narration, this chapter argues, works to underscore the fundamental privacy of consciousness, reinforcing the notion that introspection provides the most reliable means by which to know the mind. But even as it insists on the...
In this paper, I explore the fruitful relationship between science fiction and philosophy regarding the topic of artificial intelligence. I establish a connection between certain paradigms in the philosophy of mind and consciousness and the imagination of possible future scenarios in sci-fi, especially focusing on the different ways of conceiving the role of corporeality in constituting...
Journal of Neurology & StrokeAugust 11, 2022Andrea Catalina Nassar Tobón, Fernando Yaacov Peña, Christian Stephan‐Otto
This study aimed to investigate the cerebral volumetric changes measurable by brain magnetic resonance imaging, as well as the different physiological variables documented through neurobiofeedback equipment, before and after 30 serial sessions of guided meditations in a sensory isolation tank. A pilot test was carried out, with a single subject, and it was concluded that serial sessions of...
Chapter 2 begins by presenting the classic formulation of the No-self doctrine, according to which the personality is reducible to its physical and psychological constituents the way that a chariot is reducible to its parts. The chapter then develops a cognitive scientifically informed interpretation of Buddhist insight meditation, traditionally understood as a technique for internalizing the...