The hard problem of consciousness is to explain why certain physical states are conscious: why do they feel the way they do, rather than some other way or no way at all? Arthur Reber (2016) claims to solve the hard problem. But he does not: even if we grant that amoebae are conscious, we can ask why such organisms feel the way they do, and Reber’s theory provides no answer. Still, Reber’s...
Reber’s axiom: “Any organism with flexible cell walls, a sensitivity to its surrounds and the capacity for locomotion will possess the biological foundations of mind and consciousness” does not seem to be supported by things we know and the logic of evolutionary biology. The latter leads to the conclusion that conscious species are flexible in their behavior (rather than in their cell walls),...
Reber believes he has simplified Chalmers’s “hard problem” of consciousness by arguing that subjectivity is an inherent feature of biological forms. His argument rests on the related notions of continuity of mind and gradual accretion of capacities across evolutionary time. These notions need to be defended, not just asserted. Because Reber minimizes the differences in mental faculties among...
In my target article, I argued that the brains of ray-finned fishes of the teleost subclass (Actinopterygii) are sufficiently complex to support sentience — that these fishes have subjective awareness of interoceptive and exteroceptive sense experience. Extending previous theories centered on the tectum, I focused on the organization of the fish pallium. In this Response to the commentaries, I...
Donald Griffin co-discovered bat sonar and founded the field of echolocation. He studied bird migration and founded Cognitive Ethology, the study of animal awareness and mental experiences. In all these endeavors, he faced hostile opposition. The biography (Ristau 2024) examines Griffin's life and the scientific explorations by him and others in these fields. This Précis emphasizes his...
The present study offers a critical revision of the phenomenological approach to intersubjectivity and simultaneously justifies an alternative theoretical optics centered around the concept of the transindividual. The author shows that Husserl's apprehension of the alter ego, which implicitly reproduces Leibniz's monadological logic, encounters fundamental aporetic difficulties. The "Other" in...
Dreaming during anaesthesia has been documented for over a century, yet it remains poorly understood. This scoping review synthesises evidence on the frequency, phenomenology, predictors, outcomes, and neural correlates of anaesthesia dreaming. We systematically searched multiple databases for studies examining anaesthesia dreaming, including clinical trials, observational studies, and...
From an epistemological standpoint, attributing sentience to non-human animals poses significant challenges. The apparatus that records the electrical activity of the brain can only demonstrate that a certain specific neurological state is taking place. It is impossible to empirically prove that an organism has subjective, qualitative consciousness. Whether an animal has this kind of...
Contemporary discourse treats distraction almost exclusively as a deficit: a failure of attention, a moral lapse, a symptom of technological overreach. This article argues that such a framing forecloses a more interesting phenomenological question, namely what kind of presence distraction itself constitutes. Drawing on Husserl's account of intentionality, Heidegger's analysis of falling and...
This article offers a comprehensive philosophical and critical reading of poet and the great Odia lyricist Dr. Panchanan Nayak's Bird (Whispers of the Wind, Melodies of the Soul), translated into English by Dr. Sonali Sahu. Rather than treating the collection merely as a volume of lyrical poems, the present study argues that Bird constitutes a sustained philosophical meditation on existence,...
This paper advances a novel framework for understanding feelings of reality (FR), the elusive yet fundamental dimension through which the self and the world are felt as real. Drawing on descriptive phenomenology, clinical psychopathology, and altered-state research, we characterize FR as non-conceptual phenomenal qualities through which the self and world are experienced as immediate and...
Abstract Psychedelic substances such as psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, DMT, or mescaline, when employed with knowledge and skill, can sometimes lead to profoundly meaningful and transformative subjective experiences. This chapter discusses how the predictive processing theory can further our understanding of these deeply meaningful spiritual psychedelic experience. It makes a more specific...
In this article, I investigate the relationship between touch and self-world boundaries in the phenomenology of autism.While tactile differences are increasingly recognized as fundamental to autistic experience, they are predominantly conceptualized within a quantitative framework that measures autistic sensing up against a putative norm of sensory processing.By contrast, first-person reports...
Research on the continuity and discontinuity between the waking and dreaming minds has largely focused on similarities and differences in waking and dream content. The present study expands this debate by examining another dimension: the relationship between the dream self and the waking self at the phenomenal level. Specifically, it investigates how bodily and affective dimensions of dream...
RATIONALE: Contemporary psychiatry increasingly recognises the importance of person-centred, recovery-oriented, and biopsychosocial approaches to care. Yet these frameworks do not fully resolve the methodological question of how clinicians should investigate patients' lived experience in ways that inform ethical psychiatric practice. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: This paper argues that phenomenology...
We propose the Chaos-State Space Dream Model (CSSDM): a candidate neural correlate of dream consciousness. CSSDM treats dreaming as the brain's exploration of hierarchically organized attractor landscapes when sensory anchoring lifts and prefrontal control attenuates during REM sleep. The proposal combines two published frameworks. From chaos-theoretic accounts of dream phenomenology, we take...
Meditative expertise involves sustained attention, rapid recovery from distraction, and coordinated dynamics of large-scale brain networks. We present a computational phenomenology of focused-attention meditation traversing four attractor states: breath focus, mind-wandering, meta-awareness, and redirect attention. Within a dual-process active inference formulation, the model implements a...
This research contributes to an innovative rearticulation of the Philosophy of Information by defining it as a phenomenology of information, both in its most basic sense as a phenomenology of certainty and as a phenomenology of identity. It is argued that the ultimate condition of possibility of conscious experience is certainty, understood in terms of reflexive identity and informational...
InquiryJuly 15, 2026Aleks Knoks, Johan Largo, Thomas Raleigh
This paper identifies and criticizes a common line of argument for the negative conclusion that Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot think, or for the closely related conclusions that they cannot understand or that their outputs are meaningless. This line of argument can be found in several recent papers. We begin by discussing a representative example – Stoljar, D., and Z. Zhang. 2026. “Why...
Abstract: The philosophical tradition has been preoccupied with the concept of the mind throughout various intellectual traditions. Indian philosophy gives us a great insight of mind and its workings. The classical schools of Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika give a distinctive account of mind (manas) as an internal organ mediating between the self, the senses and external objects. Unlike materialistic...