From the perspective of the Aristotelian notion of 'Form', the author explores the history of the concepts of mind and soul focusing on their ontologized version, as entertained by conventional science. He concludes that current neuroscience lacks the conceptual wherewithal required to deal with the meaning of mind and soul and with agential consequences such as free will and moral decision...
Based on autoethnography, this article adopts a (neuro)phenomenological lens to explore sensory experiences following a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Although focussing particularly on pain, vision, hearing, and somatic experiences connected with sleep, we also touch on how these are interwoven with other symptoms associated with TBIs. We use these experiences to enliven, and thereby enrich,...
The task of ethicists, philosophers, and theologians to restore the dignity of human labor and vocation in a (post)industrial, techno-driven society is motivated by an often unacknowledged concern to restore the underlying spirituality of the human experience of work. Due to its ability to interrogate the range of givenness in human experience, phenomenology is a method particularly suited to...
Delusions are often portrayed as paradigmatic instances of incomprehensibility and meaninglessness. Here we investigate the relationship between delusions and meaning from a philosophical perspective, integrating arguments and evidence from cognitive psychology and phenomenological psychopathology. We review some of the empirical and philosophical literature relevant to two claims about...
Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings (SSAs) are subjective experiences characterised by a sudden sense of direct contact, union, or complete nondual merging (experience of oneness) with a perceived ultimate reality, the universe, “God,” or the divine. These profound transformative experiences have scarcely been researched, despite extensive anecdotal evidence suggesting their potential to catalyse...
In the flagship journal Science, Melloni et al. recently claimed to offer a way of making the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness easier. In fact, in their chosen analytical setting, the hard problem is impossible, and their claims simply further muddy the already-opaque waters in the mainstream field of conscious-experiential science.
Temporality and the feeling of 'now' is a fundamental property of consciousness. Different conceptualizations of time-consciousness have argued that both the content of our experiences and the representations of those experiences evolve in time, or neither have temporal extension, or only content does. Accounting for these different positions, we propose a nested hierarchical model of multiple...
The recent development of specialized research fields in philosophy of memory and philosophy of perception invites a dialogue about the relationship between these mental capacities. Following a brief review of some of the key issues that can be raised at the interface of memory and perception, this introduction provides an overview of the contributions to the special issue, and outlines...
‘The phenomenology of psychedelic therapy’ provides a selective overview of experiences commonly reported by those who take psychedelics in controlled and structured settings, such as clinical trials and religious rituals. The first half of this chapter reviews a variety of typical changes to perception and the sense of self. The second half reviews qualitative evidence concerning patients’...
Anesthetic manipulations provide much-needed causal evidence for neural correlates of consciousness, but non-specific drug effects complicate their interpretation. Evidence suggests that thalamic deep brain stimulation (DBS) can either increase or decrease consciousness, depending on the stimulation target and parameters. The putative role of the central lateral thalamus (CL) in consciousness...
Comparative TheologyJuly 12, 2021Alireza Khajehgir, Susan Izadi Dastenaei, Parvin Forouzandeh
Abstract The issue of religion has been very important in humans’ life from the beginning until now in such a way that it has played a special role even in their individual and social life. In this regard, theorists have studied this issue with different approaches and have offered different definitions of religion. One of these theorists is Mircea Eliade, who is a great researcher in the field...
Abstract The paper defends the position that phenomenological interviews can provide a rich source of knowledge and that they are in no principled way less reliable or less valid than quantitative or experimental methods in general. It responds to several skeptic objections such as those raised against introspection, those targeting the unreliability of episodic memory, and those claiming that...
ABSTRACT Prof. Ralph Hood’s career can be approached from many angles. One such perspective is that his work has consistently engaged in-depth interactions with people to understand the thick, rich, details of their individual stories. The context for these investigations has been predominately one of mystical or ineffable experiences that occur in “thin spaces” involving decisive moments with...
In recent years, the use of psychedelic drugs to study brain dynamics has flourished due to the unique opportunity they offer to investigate the neural mechanisms of conscious perception. Unfortunately, there are many difficulties to conduct experiments on pharmacologically-induced hallucinations, especially regarding ethical and legal issues. In addition, it is difficult to isolate the neural...
A philosopher and a cognitive neuroscientist conversed with Buddhist lama Tilmann Lhündrup Borghardt (TLB) about the unresolved phenomenological concerns and logical questions surrounding “pure” consciousness or minimal phenomenal experience (MPE), a quasi-contentless, non-dual state whose phenomenology of “emptiness” is often described in terms of the phenomenal quality of luminosity that...
Schizophrenia is characterized by visual distortions in ~60% of cases, and visual hallucinations (VH) in ~25-50% of cases, depending on the sample. These symptoms have received relatively little attention in the literature, perhaps due to the higher rate of auditory vs. visual hallucinations in psychotic disorders, which is the reverse of what is found in other neuropsychiatric conditions....
AbstractWhat does it mean to adopt a phenomenological approach when doing philosophy of perception? What form should such an approach take? This chapter addresses these questions by first distinguishing three different kinds of phenomenological approach: ‘Humean’ phenomenology, which attempts to discern the structure of perceptual experience via reflection on its surface properties; ‘Kantian’...
The experience of oneself in the world is based on sensory afferences, enabling us to reach a first-perspective perception of our environment and to differentiate oneself from the world. Visual hallucinations may arise from a difficulty in differentiating one's own mental imagery from externally-induced perceptions. To specify the relationship between hallucinations and the disorders of the...
There have been several recent attempts at using Artificial Intelligence systems to model aspects of consciousness (Gamez, 2008; Reggia, 2013). Deep Neural Networks have been given additional functionality in the present attempt, allowing them to emulate phenological aspects of consciousness by self-generating information representing multi-modal inputs as either sounds or images. We added...
The purpose of this paper is to argue that (1) that the hard problem of consciousness is concerned with subjective experience; (2) subjective experience arises from the measure of absolute quantities directly by our senses; (3) objective experience, on the other hand, arises from the measure of relative quantities which are invariant to perception; (4) only relative quantities can be shared...