Cull of Personality: Ayahuasca, Shamanism and the Death of the Healer tells a story of colonial encounters with different worlds, with a primary focus on the processes associated with turning human and non-human others into resources. Along with Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World and the signing of the Treaty at Tordesillas, which divided its territory between European empires,...
Abstract Prevalence of major depression in people with chronic heart failure is higher than in normal populations. Depression in heart failure has become a major issue. Psilocybin-containing mushrooms commonly known as magic mushrooms, have been used since ancient times for their mind healing properties. Their safety in cardiovascular disease conditions is not fully known and may pose as a risk...
The Cartesian model of mind-body dualism concurs with religious traditions. However, science has supplanted this idea with an energy-matter theory of consciousness, where matter is equivalent to the body and energy replaces the mind or soul. This equivalency is analogous to the concept of the interchange of mass and energy as expressed by Einstein's famous equation [Formula: see text]. Immanuel...
(1) Let me begin by thanking Doerig et al. for including my work in their survey of empirical theories of consciousness (although I am a bit spooked by being assigned the number 13!), especially given the authors’ concern for the large number of currently competing theories. I also appreciate their idea that the reason for this abundance may be a lack of stringent selection criteria although I...
Whether we are awake or asleep is believed to mark a sharp divide between the types of conscious states we undergo in either behavioural state. Consciousness in sleep is often equated with dreaming and thought to be characteristically different from waking consciousness. Conversely, recent research shows that we spend a substantial amount of our waking lives mind wandering, or lost in...
The brain is composed of electrically excitable neuronal networks regulated by the activity of voltage-gated ion channels. Further portraying the molecular composition of the brain, however, will not reveal anything remotely reminiscent of a feeling, a sensation or a conscious experience. In classical physics, addressing the mind-brain problem is a formidable task because no physical mechanism...
In this chapter, the authors present the model of the four states of consciousness, which describes four main states of consciousness in terms of restrictiveness and degree of multiplicity: (1) Restricted consciousness, (2) Adult state of consciousness, (3) Mindful state of consciousness, and (4) Nondual awareness. Restricted consciousness is related to the highest degree of the multiplicity...
This article presents a theory of mind whereby interoception (i.e., a sense of signals originating from the body) provides a transdisciplinary framework in which theories from diverse fields may be conformed to ideas from other areas of science. Through a science of interoception, the mind itself investigates the mind and thus can explore how the universe and consciousness came about and...
4E’s cognition – embodied, embedded, enacted, extended – replaces the cognitivist notion of world-mirroring with an active process of world-making: cognition needs no mental representation and is distributed over body, brain and environment. In recent years, the remark that extended cognition is not enactive and that the embodied approach to cognition fails to provide a definition of body raise...
We review 4E (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) approaches to the analysis of art and aesthetic experience. We argue that extended mind analyses that focus on tool use miss important aspects, and that it requires 4 or more E’s to address the broad spectrum of aesthetic experiences that correlate to the broad variety of artistic genres. We develop an enactive, affordance-based approach...