The question of whether artificial beings or machines could become self-aware or conscious has been a philosophical question for centuries. The main problem is that self-awareness cannot be observed from an outside perspective and the distinction of being really self-aware or merely a clever imitation cannot be answered without access to knowledge about the mechanism's inner workings. We...
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...
For the materialist, the hard problem is fundamentally an explanatory problem. Solving it requires explaining why the relationship between brain and experience is the way it is and not some other way. We use the tools of the interventionist theory of explanation to show how a systematic experimental project could help move beyond the hard problem. Key to this project is the development of...
An erratum on: Hunt T and Schooler JW (2019) The Easy Part of the Hard Problem: A Resonance Theory of Consciousness. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 13:378. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00378Due to a production error, block quotes were formatted as normal text throughout the article.The publisher apologizes for this mistake. The original version of this article has been updated.
The neuroscience of empathy has enormously expanded in the past two decades, thereby making instrumental progress for the understanding of neural substrates involved in affective and cognitive aspects of empathy. Yet, these conclusions have relied on ultrasimplified tasks resulting in the affective/cognitive dichotomy that was often modeled and overemphasized in pathological, developmental, and...
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...
Article describing the findings regarding thematic analysis of seventeen near-death experience accounts provided by Iranian Shia Muslims to determine how these experiences overlap or diverge from accounts given by experiencers from Western cultures.
“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...
Anomalies of imagination are frequent and handicapping in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) but neglected in psychopathology due to the lack of a conceptual framework to model disorders of imagination. Recently, the link between minimal self disorders and pathology of imagination has been emphasized. The aim of the present article is to discuss this initiative by stressing their paradigm...
In this article I take on the "Transcendentalist Challenge" to naturalized phenomenology, highlighting how the ontological and methodological commitments of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy point in the direction of an integration of the transcendental and the scientific, thus making room for a productive exchange between philosophy and psychological science when it comes to understanding...
This paper is a practical guide to neurophenomenology. Varela's neurophenomenological research program (NRP) aspires to bridge the gap between, and integrate, first-person (1P) and third-person (3P) approaches to understanding the mind. It does so by suggesting a methodological framework allowing these two irreducible phenomenal domains to relate and reciprocally support the investigation of...
This article aims to present a map of consciousness studies, which consists of a list of fundamental questions about consciousness and existing approaches to them. The question list includes five fundamental categories: Definitional, Phenomenological, Epistemological, Ontological, and Axiological. Each fundamental category is divided into more determinate questions. Existing approaches to each...