Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the...
Two important issues of recent discussion in the philosophy of biology and of the cognitive sciences have been the ontological status of living, cognitive agents and whether cognition and action have a normative character per se. In this paper I will explore the following conditional in relation with both the notion of affordance and the idea of the living as self-creation: if we recognize the...
The enactive and ecological approaches to embodied cognitive science are on a collision course. While both draw inspiration from similar views in psychology and phenomenology, the two approaches initially held seemingly contradictory views and points of focus. Early enactivists saw value in the ecological approach but insisted that the two schools remain distinct. While ecological psychology...
Silence is an important aspect of various meditation practices, but little work has focused specifically on the underlying neurophysiology of silence-related meditative practice, and on how it relates to the self-reported experiences of practitioners. To expand current knowledge regarding the neurophenomenology of silence in meditation, we directly investigated first-person reports of...
Problems are raised with the global workspace hypothesis of consciousness, for example about exactly how global the workspace needs to be for consciousness to suddenly be present. Problems are also raised with Carruthers's (2019) version that excludes conceptual (categorical or discrete) representations, and in which phenomenal consciousness can be reduced to physical processes, with instead a...
This chapter explores the foundations of the Buddhist doctrine of the anattā or “non-self,” and what the concept means and does not mean. It then examines the utility and limitations of the doctrine and proposes that the self is best understood as a set of interrelated reflective organismic processes. The chapter explains why Buddhism views the self as problematic and explores the degree to...
INTRODUCTION: , are known to induce meditative states, reduce stress, and increase lung capacity. However, the physiological mechanisms by which these practices modulate the human nervous system still need to be unveiled. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this work was to review studies describing the influence of breathing exercises on the brain/mind of humans. METHODOLOGY: We reviewed articles written...
Libro Comunicaciones2020R. Pinilla, Psicologa Clara Rodriguez, Diana Batet et al.
Objetivo: Exponer los potenciales beneficios terapéuticos del uso de ayahuasca, desde la neurofarmacología y la evidencia clínica existente hasta el momento. Material y métodos: Se realizó una revisión de la literatura en las bases de datos pubmed, clinical key y textos de difusión científica. Resultados y conclusiones: Existe literatura acerca del potencial uso terapéutico del ayahuasca en...
Ontology, the ideas we have about the nature of reality, and epistemology, our concepts about how to gain knowledge about the world, are interdependent. Currently, the dominant ontology in science is a materialist model, and associated with it an empiricist epistemology. Historically speaking, there was a more comprehensive notion at the cradle of modern science in the middle ages. Then...
A novel, heuristic model based upon chaotic complex systems theory and quantum mechanics is proposed to overcome the dichotomy between mind and body. The mind-body interface represents a chaotic system, ruled by the probability principle, as shown in quantum mechanics. Neuronal activity shows many patterns of chaotic behavior, and applications of chaotic patterns seem to be relevant for...