Current neuroscientific paradigms primarily rely on emergentism to explain subjective qualitative experience (qualia), positing that consciousness arises organically from complex neural architecture. Despite extensive mapping of neural correlates, the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" remains unresolved, failing to explain how physical matter generates subjective awareness. The Fundamental...
ExploreOctober 10, 2026Siddhant Nikam, Nimisha S Narayan
The human body is commonly approached through the language of anatomy, yet anatomy alone may not fully capture the lived experience of being embodied. This reflection explores the relationship between anatomical structure, embodied consciousness, spirituality, and healing through an osteopathic perspective. Drawing on osteopathic philosophy, phenomenology, fascial science, interoception, and...
Command auditory verbal hallucinations (CAVH) are a subtype of auditory hallucinations perceived as instructing the hearer to perform specific actions, carrying an elevated risk of harm due to potential compliance with harmful behaviours. Despite the risk, the prevalence, clinical associations and content of CAVH in first episode psychosis (FEP) remain largely underexplored, leaving important...
Existentialism and phenomenology, although emerging from different intellectual backgrounds, share certain conceptual and methodological intersections. While it is not historically possible to classify Kierkegaard’s thought under the heading of existential phenomenology, this study examines the intersections between Kierkegaard’s existentialism and Husserl’s phenomenology, aiming to reveal the...
As different as Lisa Guenther (2019, 2021) and Johanna Oksala (2022) may be, they agree that the positing of transcendental structures of meaningful experience leads to oppressive normativity. Their contestation of transcendental structures reflects a trend in recent critical phenomenology that resists phenomenological appeals to transcendental structures in favor of quasi-transcendental ones....
Brain and EnvironmentOctober 1, 2026Sophie Schuller, Annique Laurens Janse, Lisanne Bergefurt et al.
Despite extensive research on the influence of office environments on occupant health, the sensory mechanisms through which workplaces influence psychophysiological stress remain poorly understood, particularly beyond visual and acoustic factors. This pilot study examined how olfactory and tactile qualities of office environments influence psychophysiological stress using a...
The aim of this article is to present an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between music, rhythm, and embodied cognition, and to outline the role of rhythmic synchronization as a factor regulating the formation of social bonds in the contemporary world, saturated with new technologies. This proposed framework integrates three research perspectives—neuroscientific, phenomenological,...
The article provides a comprehensive philosophical and psychological analysis of transpersonal psychology as an approach to the study of human consciousness, boundary forms of human experience, and the possibilities of personal transformation. The historical prerequisites for the emergence of transpersonal psychology are examined in the context of humanistic psychology, research on altered...
English. This article revises the concept of the "Fourth Turning of the Wheel of Dharma", introduced by the author in an earlier version (March 2026), as a philosophical investigation of how the mind operates in technically mediated environments, and explicitly lowers the status of the claim: from a possible historical fourth turning to a figure of reading and a call to doctrinal work, with no...
Abstract During wakefulness, experience continually changes the functional organization of neural networks. Repetition, attention, emotional significance, and other forms of experience-dependent activation can affect the relative strength of synaptic relationships (Hebb, 1949; Bliss & Lømo, 1973; Dudek & Bear, 1992). During sleep, direct coupling to external sensory input and behavioral output...
Contemporary clinical practice increasingly recognizes the centrality of attention, presence, and affect regulation in healing trauma and restoring psychological integration. Early Christian ascetical writers-particularly Hesychios, Evagrius, and Cassian-developed a sophisticated spiritual anthropology centered on watchfulness (nepsis) and attentive presence (prosoche), practices aimed at...
This article examines foundational tenets of logotherapy and proposes an embodiment-focused reinterpretation of Frankl’s dimensional ontology. We begin by contrasting negative orientations to suffering via the existential vacuum with positive orientations to transformation grounded in three expressions of the noetic: discovery of meaning, self-detachment, and self-transcendence. Next, we...
Abstract Embodiment is a particularly difficult dimension of experience to capture for transgender individuals, particularly individuals who identify as nonbinary. Accounts of embodiment in both philosophy and psychology often fail to capture the layers of perplexity which nonbinary individuals experience when attempting to understand the relationship between the lived body and social...
Before asking why experience occurs for an experiencer, one must first ask what that experiencer is and why it has been exempted from the explanandum. The canonical hard-problem formulation places the experiencer in a primitive explanatory position; this paper subjects that placement to a biological and causal-temporal audit. Rather than treating the familiar narrator-level “I” as an antecedent...
Western eschatology often depicts the afterlife as either static contemplation or undifferentiated union with the Divine, leaving the social mechanics of disembodied interaction undertheorized. Using an autoethnographic case study anchored in a lifelong twin bond, this paper investigates post-mortem sociality through a strictly Christocentric lens. Drawing on experiential data of communication...
Subjectivity and awareness are widely regarded as core properties of consciousness, and explaining their nature remains a major challenge in consciousness research. While many existing theories provide predominantly qualitative accounts, the development of quantitative modeling may bridge the explanatory gap. This study expands the Twin Cognitive Cycle (TCC) model by focusing on quantifying the...
This theoretical-conceptual essay reconsiders epoché in qualitative phenomenological research and its relation to experiential emergence. Rather than a one-time technique of bracketing, epoché is conceptualized as a sustained discipline of epistemic suspension, attentional reorientation, and phenomenological restraint. On this basis, protoexistence is reformulated as a heuristic for incomplete...
This essay develops a methodological proposal complementary to the research programme outlined in CEFA – Proposta di indagine. Taking the hard problem of consciousness as its starting point, it distinguishes subjective experience, the data through which we study it, and hypotheses concerning its origin. An examination of selected neuroscientific studies clarifies why the limitations of...
This article addresses David Chalmers's hard problem of consciousness by asking why information processing is accompanied by a subjective 'what it is like'. Its point of departure is the distinction between intelligence and phenomenal consciousness: the achievements of contemporary artificial intelligence show that reasoning, planning, language, and the accurate description of emotions do not...