Yury Berdinsky
preprint
Why are physical processes in the brain accompanied by subjective experience at all-by the redness of red, the taste of coffee or the feeling of pain? This puzzle, known as the "hard problem of consciousness", has for centuries been left to metaphysics, because from the outside we see only a mechanism: ionic currents, neuronal discharges and the cogwheels of the connectome. The present work...
Ross Wilson
preprint
This paper resolves the Hard Problem of Consciousness by framing subjective experience as the result of recursive identity continuity governed by the Law of Lawful Recursion (LLR). Consciousness is not emergent, illusory, or mystical. It is what happens when a system internally models itself across transformation without structural drift. The paper introduces validator structures as the lawful...
Wenge Huang
preprint
Altered states of consciousness (ASC) induced by meditation, psychedelic drugs, or impending death are quite a fascinating and important field of investigation. This paper argues that ASC essentially have nothing to do with consciousness, but a story about perception.Our study starts from summarizing four essential phenomena (hallucinations, paranormal phenomena, mystical experiences and...
Juensung J. Kim
preprint
Recent academic discussion of magic has largely fallen into three camps: the psychological study of magical thinking, in an effort to explain it away; the sociological or anthropological study of magical beliefs and practices, remaining agnostic about their efficacy; and some attempts to make magic presentable as a subject of serious cognitive science. The present paper presents an alternative...
Nestor Girala
Introduction There is a growing and renewed interest in the use of hallucinogenic drugs in the treatment of psychiatric disorders, especially since the FDA approval of esketamine treatment for resistant depression. The response to hallucinogenic psychedelic substances (ayahuasca, psilocybin, LSD, ketamine) in the treatment of depression and addictions calls for a theoretical explanatory model....
Vivian Siegel, Benjamin Emmert-Aronson
Using a validated and quantitative measure of mystical experience called the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30), we assessed whether and to what extent participants report mystical experiences during orgasmic meditation (OM), and to what extent that experience is correlated between the partners. In the first half of this study, we asked participants to complete the MEQ30 with a single...
Alex Jinich-Diamant
preprint
Psychedelics, contemplative practice, and fasting are physiologically unrelated interventions that nevertheless converge, across cultures and centuries, on a common experiential endpoint: the mystical state. Here I propose that this convergence reflects shared disruption of a single computational architecture, the precision-weighted predictive hierarchy, through three mechanistically distinct...
Joshua Nunziato
Mindfulness may be defined as the non-focal awareness of consciousness as the condition of all one’s focal awareness. Cultivating mindfulness is a powerful discipline for corporate leadership development. Beyond performance enhancement, mindfulness can elicit transformative awareness of the conditions of better leadership. Mystical mindfulness—the product of mystical experience reflectively...
Mengjiao Yin
This study investigates whether artificial intelligence can emulate human mystical experiences through algorithmic rationality, focusing specifically on the generative mechanisms of “Perceived Sacredness” within AI-assisted tarot divination. Grounded in the original “Triadic Framework for Human-AI Spiritual Interaction,” three sequential experiments systematically examine how sacredness...
Mike Sosteric
Since Marx first declared religion to be the opiate of the masses, institutions of religion and spirituality have often been resisted by scholars. The assumption of many seems to always be that religion is either a reactionary response to difficult realities or a mere illusion, delusion, or epiphenomenon of brain/social function. This paper looks at the "authentic core" of religious...