Pharmacological agents that alter consciousness, including classic psychedelics and non-classic agents such as nitrous oxide, are known to affect multiple domains of conscious experience, including visual perception. While most neuroimaging studies rely on resting-state data to characterize altered states of consciousness, task-based approaches enable investigation of specific perceptual...
The modernist novel---Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner above all---rebuilt fiction's architecture around consciousness itself, and its stream-of-consciousness technique remains the century's most consequential narrative invention. This article presents a narrative review of the technique's canonical line: James's late style as preface, Joyce's 1922 Ulysses, Woolf's 1925 Mrs Dalloway and 1927 To the...
Abstract Over the last few years, issues related to the phenomenology of norms, normality, and normativity have been widely discussed in the scholarship. While several contributions devoted to Husserl’s account of normality exist, a systematic investigation of the categories of “non-normality” proves to be lacking. Moreover, such an investigation is necessary to grasp the essential link between...
The mind-body problem---how conscious experience relates to the physical brain---remains philosophy's sharpest unsolved boundary question. This article presents a narrative review of the positions that define the debate: Descartes's substance dualism, Ryle's category-mistake critique, the mind-brain identity theory of Smart, Putnam's multiple realizability and functionalism, Davidson's...
This work introduces the Critical Reconstructability Corridor (CRC) hypothesis, a theoretical, computational, and empirically testable framework for investigating consciousness-relevant neural dynamics beyond the conventional notion of a single “edge of chaos.” The central proposal is that biological dynamics capable of supporting consciousness may occupy a bounded, multidimensional and...
This conceptual article examines a neglected asymmetry in the philosophical-zombie thought experiment. A Chalmersian zombie, being physically and functionally identical to a conscious person, can produce the same verbal questions, reports, and judgments about consciousness. The paper therefore distinguishes three senses of asking: the production of an interrogative token, functional inquiry,...
The neural correlates of consciousness have been characterized primarily through temporal EEG features, while the spatial dynamics of cortical activity across consciousness states remain poorly understood. Here, we analyze the spatial mode structure of the Robinson corticothalamic neural field model (CTM) across five consciousness states: healthy wakefulness, emergence from minimally conscious...
This conceptual article isolates an unresolved transition in the cognitive and philosophical study of mortality and afterlife belief. It distinguishes three propositions that are frequently conflated: the desire for more embodied life, the representation of the experiential subject as continuing after biological death, and the assignment of that continuation to a consciousness or agency of...
Purpose: This study explored how adults who participated in a Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program experience self-compassion, and interpreted the meaning structure of that experience to reveal its underlying essence. Methods: Van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenology was adopted. Data were collected from three adults who had completed a standard MSC program through individual written accounts and...
The article presents an expanded version of the topological theory of consciousness (TTC), which includes a generative level – recursive rules for generating discriminations. TTC asserts that consciousness emerges as a discrete phase transition (an ultrametric collapse) that is a projection of a higher-rank generative process. Unlike IIT, TTC explains not only the quantitative but also the...