Synthese Library
2026
Michał Oleksowicz
The new mechanistic philosophy (NMP) seeks to identify and explain the mechanisms of various phenomena, including their overall organization and the interactions between the individualized components. I argue that mechanistic explanation focuses on mechanisms conceived of as organized complex systems and should not be considered as merely a form of metaphysical reductionism. I discuss that...
International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis
2026
Kevin Sheldrake, Yesesvi Konakanchi, Zoltan Dienes
The micro-phenomenological interview is a technique for investigating phenomenology in detail during an activity lasting seconds to minutes. Here, we applied it to understanding the moment-to-moment experiences of subjects responding to imaginative suggestions that were aimed at temporarily altering perceived reality through deployment of phenomenological control. Our intention was to generate...
Medical Research Archives
2026
Abdullah Alabdulgader
Recent advances in psychedelic neuroscience have revitalized scientific inquiry into the biological foundations of consciousness. Large-scale neuroimaging studies have consistently demonstrated that psychedelics increase functional integration across distributed brain networks while weakening the stability of normally dominant neural architectures associated with self referential processing and...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
2026
Lena Palaniyappan
Biological psychiatry faces a significant epistemic challenge in identifying valid objects for mechanistic research. Both diagnostic constructs and individual symptoms are abstract symbols defined circularly within a closed hermeneutic system, creating a symbol grounding problem that hinders the discovery of biophysical substrates (biomarkers). I argue that progress requires an epistemological...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Valerie van Mulukom
This article proposes a dual-self states framework in which reflective and experiential modes of consciousness are understood as dynamic configurations along a processing continuum. The reflective/experiential self-state corresponds to narrative, denotational, and self-referential consciousness underpinned by default mode network activity. The experiential self state is characterized as an...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
María del Carmen Tejada, Antonia Zepeda, Alejandro Troncoso et al.
Empathy plays a fundamental role in social bonding and intersubjective understanding. While recent research has emphasized how bodily processes shape empathic engagement and underlie individual differences, the impact of bodily disruptions on empathic experience in Parkinson's disease (PD) remains largely unexplored. In this study, we used a neurophenomenological approach to investigate Empathy...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
2026
Søren Esben Rytter Heilskov, Julie Nordgaard, Unn Kristin Haukvik et al.
In the assessment of criminal insanity, delusions play a particularly important role, because they express reality judgments, which, due to their verbalized form, serve well as "evidence" of psychosis. However, psychosis, understood as a fundamentally impaired sense of reality, can also involve disturbances that are neither verbalized nor inferential, but mainly enacted. In this paper, we...
Consciousness and Cognition
2026
Guillaume Pepin, Hélène Lœvenbruck, Alan Chauvin et al.
Hallucinations (HAs), the perceptual experiences that occur without external stimuli, are classically associated with psychiatric disorders, but also occur in the general population. Involuntary mental imagery (IMI), the spontaneous occurrence of visual or auditory mental content, shares several features with HAs. The continuum hypothesis suggests that these phenomena exist on a spectrum...
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science
2026
Florestan Delcourt, Henry R Cowan, Jordan Sibéoni et al.
The self and its disorders in schizophrenia have been studied extensively over recent decades. Much of this literature is grounded in a bipartite understanding of the self, distinguishing the pre-reflective, minimal self from the reflective, narrative self. However, few studies have systematically examined the links between disturbances at these two levels of self. This integrative review...
Artificial General Intelligence
2026
Oisín Hugh Clancy
We outline a research agenda for mutually beneficial artificial consciousness (MBAC): Artificial intelligence (AI) whose own subjective experience is positive and whose behaviour enhances human and non-human flourishing. Our starting point is the notion of beneficial states of consciousness (BSC)–qualitatively valued mind states such as kindness, joy, clarity, and non-duality–which we group...