A central idea in autopoietic enactivism is that the living organism is an autonomous system that “enacts” or “brings forth” its environment. In this paper, I connect this thesis to the general philosophical framework developed by Varela, Thompson and Rosch in The Embodied Mind, which is centred on the concept of the co-determination of subject and object of cognition, and I liken this notion...
The development of chronic pain is a complex mechanism that is still not fully understood. Multiple somatic and visceral afferent pain signals, when experienced over time, cause a strengthening of certain neural circuitry through peripheral and central sensitization, resulting in the physical and emotional perceptual chronic pain experience. The mind-altering qualities of psychedelics have been...
This article is intended as a response to Goldinger et al. and to all those, an increasing minority in the sciences, who still belittle the contribution of embodied cognition to our understanding of human cognitive behaviour. In this article (section 1), I introduce the notion of embodiment and explain its dimensions and reach. I review (section 2) a range of embodied cognition theories and...
When it comes to the body, the professional pedagogical field shows a paradoxical attitude: With regard to sense-oriented school subjects, educational policies tend to underline a close relatedness of body and mind. However, where learning is primarily connected with mental activities and intellectual engagement, the body is rarely assigned an integral role. Discussing the grounding ideologies...
Waugh's last comic novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) takes ‘exterior modernism’ to a new height, no longer avoiding interiority – as in his interwar fiction – but exteriorising the interior through dissociation. ‘The Box’, to which the writer-protagonist attributes the source of the tormenting voices, may well be his own mind, an extended – albeit unhealthy – mind that works as a...
This chapter advocates for integral ecological healing, particularly by attending to the practices of indigenous Amazonian communities. The use of psychedelic plant medicines in Amazonian shamanism exemplifies the kind of non-rational ways of knowing that expand human consciousness beyond the individual ego and into intimate communion with the more-than-human world.
At the extreme spectrum of consciousness during sleep, some patients with rare hypersomnias reported experiencing a specific night 'blackout' when sleeping, i.e., an absence of experiences or recall of them from sleep onset to offset. Thus, we explored through questionnaires the conscious experiences (dreaming experience, mind, self) during the night in 133 patients with idiopathic hypersomnia,...
Physical pain represents a common feature of Bondage and Discipline/Dominance and Submission/Sadism and Machochism (BDSM) activity. This article explores the literature accounting for how painful stimuli may be experienced as pleasurable among practitioners of BDSM, and contrasting this with how it is experienced as painful among non-BDSM individuals. We reviewed the available literature on...
This essay addresses Cartesian duality and how its implicit dialectic might be repaired using physics and information theory. Our agenda is to describe a key distinction in the physical sciences that may provide a foundation for the distinction between mind and matter, and between sentient and intentional systems. From this perspective, it becomes tenable to talk about the physics of sentience...
Perhaps the two most important concepts in the history of philosophy are God and mind. Unsurprisingly, both are notoriously vague, which is a large part of the reason why there has been such a diversity of views on these topics. Needless to say, the literature on each is vast. Less examined, though, is the intersection of these two concepts. ›God as mind‹; ›mind as God‹—what can these mean?...