The nature of personal identity is ultimately theological in nature. Through a survey of some of the recent philosophical evidence for the soul (in the analytic philosophical tradition), the following lays out reasons for why personal identity is accounted for by a soul because of the nature of phenomenal consciousness as essentially descriptive of persons. Yet, this conclusion is buttressed by...
This essay engages descriptive, experiential methods of phenomenology, prompts from butoh, and insights of Zen Buddhism. Butoh is the dance and theatre form that arose from the ashes of Japan in the shadow of ecological and social crisis after the Second Word War. It is interpreted widely in current forms that extend well beyond the borders of Japan. The everyday is articulated in the...
Jhāna meditation was little known in the West before the 1980s, historically shrouded in mystery and mostly confined to monastic traditions in Buddhist countries. In recent years, however, deep states of meditation in general, but particularly the jhānas, have been attracting interest from neuroscience researchers as another avenue to explore neural networks and functions in the human brain....
This chapter takes a point of departure in observations about instituting a ‘safe space’ in the ‘Two Months of War’ project that facilitated reflections, meditations, narrativization of experiences and affects, and a communicative engagement with others. It argues that the key conceptual axis of the project was that of (preventing) a traumatic ‘freezing’ through application of practical methods...
Nonauditory hallucinations in psychosis have not received as much attention relative to voice-hearing experiences. The current paper aimed to document the characteristics of these hallucinations in affective and nonaffective psychosis. Participants were selected from a primary voice-hearing sample, who had endorsed visual, tactile, or olfactory hallucinations ( N = 55-75). A comprehensive,...
The present study aimed to investigate the spontaneous dynamics of large-scale brain networks underlying mindfulness as a dispositional trait, through resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) microstates analysis. Eighteen participants had attended a standardized mindfulness-based stress reduction training (MBSR), and 18 matched waitlist individuals (CTRL) were recorded at rest while they...
ABSTRACT Patients suffering from delusions of thought insertion (TI) report that external agents of different nature have placed thoughts into their minds. The symptom involves distressing feelings of intromission and exposition, loss of mental privacy, diminished ego boundaries, and a – often neglected – peculiar “physicality”. A dominant approach within cognitive sciences characterizes TI as...
Abstract As reliable facilitators of characteristically unique altered states of consciousness that are notoriously difficult to comprehend, psychedelics naturally attract a multidisciplinary scope for their research, with direct relevance to neuroscience, pharmacology, psychology, as well as philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology — disciplines united by the common inquiry into the...
Psychedelic substances are known to facilitate mystical-type experiences which can include metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality. Such insights have been criticized as being incompatible with naturalism and therefore false. This leads to two problems. The easy problem is to elaborate on what is meant by the "fundamental nature of reality," and whether mystical-type...
There are two basic aspects of attentional control. The ability to direct attention toward different objects is typically experienced as a fundamental indicator of attentional freedom. One can control what one attends to and directing attention is a relatively simple task. In contrast, sustaining attention on a chosen object proves to be difficult as mind-wandering seems to be inevitable. Does...
Max Scheler’s philosophy of religion is, in fact, the essential phenomenology of religion. The core of his discussion of religion is the concept of "Religious Act," which Scheler introduced as a "givenness" in which the divine/holy is given. He believes that "Person" communicates with God in the religious act, and the experience of this communication is unique and irreducible. This action is...
This behavioral study was undertaken to provide empirical evidence in favor of or opposed to the notion that animals across a wide breadth of the animal kingdom have subjective (personal) experience that varies with their lifestyles, ecological constraints, or phylogeny. Twelve species representing two invertebrate phyla and six vertebrate classes were observed unobtrusively in 15-min episodes,...
AbstractRecent philosophy has seen a resurgence of the realist view of sensible qualities such as colour. The view holds that experienced qualities are properties of the objects in the physical environment, not mentally instantiated properties like qualia or merely intentional, illusory ones. Some suggest that this move rids us of the explanatory gap between physical properties and the...
Parkinson disease (PD) psychosis (PDP) is a spectrum of illusions, hallucinations and delusions that are associated with PD throughout its disease course. Psychotic phenomena can manifest from the earliest stages of PD and might follow a continuum from minor hallucinations to structured hallucinations and delusions. Initially, PDP was considered to be a complication associated with dopaminergic...
This study presents phenomenological features of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in schizophrenia and associated anomalies of experience. The purpose is to compare the lived experience of AVH to the official definition of hallucinations as a perception without object. Furthermore, we wish to explore the clinical and research implication of the phenomenological approach to AVH. Our...
Mystical experience, non-dual awareness, selflessness, self-transcendent experience, and ego-dissolution have become increasingly prominent constructs in meditation and psychedelic research. However, these constructs and their measures tend to be highly overlapping, imprecise, and poorly integrated with similar pathological experiences. The present study seeks to clarify the common factors...
Abstract Does artificial intelligence (AI) exhibit consciousness or self? While this question is hotly debated, here we take a slightly different stance by focusing on those features that make possible both, namely a basic or fundamental subjectivity. Learning from humans and their brain, we first ask what we mean by subjectivity. Subjectivity is manifest in the perspectiveness and mineness of...
Anthropology has long resisted becoming a nomothetic science, thus repeatedly missing opportunities to build upon empirical theoretical constructs, choosing instead to back away into a kind of natural history of sociocultural differences. What is required are methods that focus the ethnographic gaze upon the essential structures of perception as well as sociocultural differences. The...
The purpose of this article is to explain the relationship between Life-world (Lebenswelt) and the concepts of Originality (Originalität) and Primordiality (Primordialität) founded in Edmund Husserl’s philosophy developed in the 20’s. In order to achieve this goal, we need to begin with a transcendental phenomenological analysis to then gain access to Ontology of the World in general....
Working memory is typically measured with specifically designed psychological tasks. When evaluating the validity of working memory tasks, we commonly focus on the reliability of the outcome measurements. Only rarely do we focus on how participants experience these tasks. Accounting for lived experience of working memory task may help us better understand variability in working memory...