Several thousand years ago, our human ancestors realized that the brain was the organ of the mind and movement. But, how does the brain generate a voluntary movement and adds consciousness to it? Here, we assume that these two processes can be explained by neuroscience, but a large proportion of our society -including some scientists- considers consciousness as some immaterial substance that...
The Free Energy Principle and Active Inference Framework (FEP-AI) begins with the understanding that persisting systems must regulate environmental exchanges and prevent entropic accumulation. In FEP-AI, minds and brains are predictive controllers for autonomous systems, where action-driven perception is realized as probabilistic inference. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) begins with...
From an embodied and enactive point of view, the mind-body problem has been reformulated as the relation between the lived or subject body on the one hand and the physiological or object body on the other ("body-body problem"). The aim of the paper is to explore the concept of circularity as a means of explaining the relation between the phenomenology of lived experience and the dynamics of...
Abstract Increasing evidence suggests that altered states of consciousness (ASC) are associated with both positive and negative effects on components of creative performance, and convergent and divergent thinking in particular. We provide a metacontrol framework that allows characterizing factors that induce ASC in terms of their general impact on the information processing style of problem...
This sequel to Lycan's Consciousness (1987) continues the elaboration of his general functionalist theory of consciousness, answers the critics of his earlier work, and expands the range of discussion to deal with the many new issues and arguments that have arisen in the intervening years -- an extraordinarily fertile period for the philosophical investigation of consciousness.Lycan not only...
Abstract: Despite their different etiologies, three types of spiritually transformative experiences (STEs)--near-death experiences, psilocybin experiences, and meditative experiences of cosmic consciousness--appear to have attributes that are common to a broad range of mystical experiences, including an experience of expanded awareness. In addition, all three appear to be associated with...
The paper deals with the issue of the phenomenological foundations of polyculturalism on the basis of the categories of the following concepts: multi-layer being, concretization, intentionality, life world, and epoché. A comparison of phenomenology with eastern psychotechnics allows us to stress the importance of Husserl's break with the tradition of speculative philosophy. Phenomenology is a...
“Blindness” to the problem of the symbol necessarily follows from the main positions of the research \nstrategy of Husserl phenomenology. However, both noema and noesis, as well as the flow of cogitations \nin our minds are initially infected with symbolism, and therefore the project of phenomenological \ndescription needs a “symbolic correction.” The supposed and experienced object is supposed...
For several decades, a diverse set of approaches to embedded, embodied, extended, enactive and affective cognition has been challenging the cognitivist orthodoxy. Recently, the prospect of a combination of ecological psychology and enactivism has emerged as a promising candidate for a single unified framework that could rival the established cognitivist paradigm as "a working metatheory for the...