Encounters with apparently autonomous and intelligent non-human entities are a striking and recurrent feature of high-dose N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) experi-ences. Such encounters are typically interpreted as complex hallucinations derived from internally generated brain activity, although many features of the DMT state remain a challenge to explain within the standard neuroscientific...
Abstract Bain was a materialist in some sense, rejecting substance dualism and providing neurological explanations for many psychological phenomena. But he denied the mind location or extension in space. This chapter critically explores Bain’s metaphysics and epistemology of mind and the arguments that kept him from identifying each mind with the brain or nervous system of an animal. Bain’s...
We propose the Sensation Modulating Network (SMN): the cognitive agent as the whole body, organized at every scale by opponent dynamics, built from Sensation Modulators -- tissue that senses and acts through one substrate -- paired into Coordinated Action Zones routed by a body-wide broadcast. It is an inclusive model of the body, in which gravity, elasticity, and the body's topology and...
This paper provides a critical desk-based review of the relationship between the pineal gland and “hyperdimensional wisdom” by drawing on neuroendocrinology, consciousness studies, religious and cultural history, and public science narratives. It does not define hyperdimensional wisdom as objective knowledge from higher-dimensional space, nor does it treat the pineal gland as an empirically...
Current diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia overlook the patient's subjective experience, offering a simplified view. To describe the subjective anomalies in the personal experience of the "lived world" in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia via the EAWE interview (Examination of Anomalous World Experience). A qualitative study was conducted between January and May 2024. Semistructured...
The neurophenomenological theory of time unites the phenomenological understanding of the structure of temporal experience and its constituent elements with the findings of experimental cognitive neuroscience. On the one hand, this leads to a process of external manifestation of strictly defined neurobiological temporal attributes, and on the other – to a phenomenological description that...
This chapter aims at presenting micro-phenomenology, a concrete “introspective” method enabling us to become aware of usually unrecognized dimensions of our lived experience, to describe them with rigor and precision, and to detect possible generic experiential structures. After a description of its origins, the chapter presents the devices used by the method to elicit the process of becoming...
Abstract This chapter traces the development of Bertrand Russell’s philosophy of mind from his early engagements with panpsychism and idealism through his dualist period and finally to his mature neutral monism. It advances three central claims. First, Russell’s positions on the mind are consistently shaped by his sustained engagement with empirical psychology and the natural sciences. Second,...
Altered states of consciousness, including hallucinations, psychedelic experiences, and ego dissolution, differ qualitatively, yet no unified computational framework describes what varies and along which dimensions. Computational phenomenology (CP) has emerged as a promising bridge between first-person experience and computational models, yet current formalisations rely predominantly on the...
A psychological sentence is commonly understood as representing a mental fact. This paper offers an alternative and argues that saying “Someone S is in a mental state M” is saying “There are some circumstances C such that S is in C, and it is rational for anyone in C to behave in a certain way.” To argue for this alternative, the paper appeals to the Sellarsian philosophy of mind but transforms...