Buddhist Jhāna meditation and the Christian practice of speaking in tongues appear wildly distinct. These spiritual techniques differ in their ethical, theological, and historical frames and seem, from the outside, to produce markedly different states of consciousness-one a state of utter calm and the other of high emotional arousal. Yet, our phenomenological interviews with experienced...
Objective: To explore what it is like to have a distressing near-death experience (NDE) and its aftereffects. Method: We accessed all distressing NDE narratives from the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) database and analyzed eight individual narratives using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results: Distressing NDEs include features such as disturbing...
Current evidence suggests that the efficacy of psychedelic therapy depends, in part, on the character of psychedelic experiences themselves. One pronounced aspect of psychedelic experiences is alterations to the experience of time, including reports of timelessness or transcending time. However, how we should interpret such reports remains unclear, and this lack of clarity has philosophical and...
In the article, I present changes that analytic philosophy of mind underwent throughout the twentieth century, as well as consequences these transformations have for the latest debates. I argue that over the past century, the analytical movement abandoned its anti-metaphysical stance and accepted materialism that supposed to respect main assumptions of the early program of analysis. However, by...
Shamanism is a spiritual tradition in which trance practitioners deliberately modify their state of consciousness to seemingly interact with an invisible world to resolve their community members' problems. This review aims to provide a multidisciplinary overview of scientific research on shamanic trance. The search was performed using PubMed and Google Scholar databases. Twenty-seven articles...
The article brings into conversation phenomenology and the Ignatian tradition of discernment as it explores phenomena of illusion in spiritual life. Special attention is paid to harmful illusions, such as religiously motivated and/or justified sexual abuse, abuse of authority, and terrorist acts. Here the article explores both the resilience of illusions, as they enter at different phases of...
Psychotic-like anomalous self-experiences (ASEs) are core and early features of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, which have been recently also postulated to underlie embodiment disturbance in feeding and eating disorders (FEDs). The present study was aimed at investigating the interplay between ASEs and specific psychopathology in FED. Ninety persons with Anorexia Nervosa and 41 with Bulimia...
Based on the former work Conscious Turing Machine, in this paper, we attempt to talk about the consciousness of CTM, dig deeper into the self-consciousness in CTM, offer a clear definition of it, and design a possible model of the Model-of-the-World processor. To prove the consciousness of CTM does exist, we chose two definitions of human consciousness and extracted four key points to see if...
The purpose of the scientific article is a comparative analysis of the philosophy of consciousness in the context of Western and Eastern theory. In the process of the three stages of scientific research, the authors used general scientific and unique methods, such as analysis, synthesis, generalization, induction, comparative, and content analysis methods. The Western and Eastern philosophy...
Since its inception, phenomenological philosophy has engaged with empirical data of lived experiences. Recently, phenomenological philosophy itself has branched out into performing systematic qualitative research, resulting in a heterogeneous field of qualitative phenomenological philosophy. By introducing and outlining the research approach of ‘Qualitative Critical Phenomenology’ (QCP), this...
The objective of this paper is to propose a reference point in the phenomenology of poltergeists either for people who want to know more about these phenomena or for researchers looking for cases and sources associated with some particular phenomenon. In parallel, an ongoing work is conducted aimed at building a global case repository of poltergeist cases with their phenomenological...
Abstract: This chapter explores the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science in understanding consciousness, addressing both historical and modern perspectives on the mind-body problem, perception, cognition, and self-awareness. It delves into key philosophical theories, such as dualism, materialism, and emergentism, while also examining cognitive science’s contributions through...
Debates concerning the reliability and validity of operationalized criteria and diagnostic tools have surrounded the issue of schizophrenia diagnosis and clinical decision-making related to the disorder. The notion of the praecox feeling (PF) has played a prominent role in the discussions as an example of the possibility of a rapid and potentially valid diagnosis based solely on “intuition” or...
Enactivism is a branch of embodied cognition theory that argues for a highly distributed model of cognition as a sense-making process involving brain, body, environment, and subjective experience. It is a theoretical framework with potential value for nursing since it offers an integrated framework for human sense-making that includes physiological and psychological factors as well as the...
Consciousness science faces the challenge of bridging first-person experience with third-person empirical measurements. Neurophenomenology aims to build such `generative passages' connecting the content of experience with behavioural and neuroscientific data. However, the mathematical machinery for such bridges remains underdeveloped. Here we develop a Rosetta Stone hypothesis from predictive...
Abstract This essay defends the claim that episodic remembering is a mental action by arguing that episodic remembering and sensory- or experience-like imagining are of a kind in a way relevant for agency. Episodic remembering is a type of imaginative project that involves the agential construction of imagistic-content and that aims at (veridically) representing particular events of the...
Philosophers have conjectured that human cognitive limitations might preclude our ever resolving the hard problem of consciousness. Few, however, have offered suggestions as to what it might be about our conceptual apparatus that poses the problem. I do so in this essay, arguing that our central difficulties lie with two conceptual categories that pervade philosophical discussion of the hard...
ABSTRACT The concept of mindfulness within the contemporary mindfulness movement was the subject of a recent phenomenological critique. The present article confronts that critique in order to develop a phenomenologically viable interpretation of mindfulness that corresponds with how the word sati is used in the Pāli suttas. By clarifying the distinction between intentional objects and...
This paper explores the hypothesis that the OpenAI-o1 model--a transformer-based AI trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)--displays characteristics of consciousness during its training and inference phases. Adopting functionalism, which argues that mental states are defined by their functional roles, we assess the possibility of AI consciousness. Drawing on theories...
. This has led to widespread interest in psychedelic compounds being used for recreation, treatment of mental illness and addiction, and even the so-called "enhancement" of individuals and society. This renewed interest in psychedelics has resulted in seemingly endless publications in both the popular and the academic press, including authors from fields as diverse as philosophy, theology,...