Abstract Gender identity plays a crucial role in how we come to feel our bodies as our own. When the inner sense of gender does not align with bodily appearance, the resulting tension can shape both conscious and pre-reflective aspects of embodiment. In this study, we examined how gendered self-representations influence bodily self-consciousness using the Full-Body Illusion in immersive virtual...
Cognitive science is the scientific study of thinking. However, thinking in the colloquial sense of the term is conscious, attentive deliberation, and the vast majority of cognitive science is concerned with automatizable operations such as detecting stimuli, storing and retrieving information, and parsing sentences. This paper argues that cognitive science has lost sight of deliberative...
Autopoiesis, originally developed by Maturana and Varela, has been influential across multiple disciplines, but its application to rehabilitation medicine remains theoretically underdeveloped. This paper proposes Neurophenomenological Rehabilitation, a theoretical framework for understanding recovery not as the restoration of isolated bodily functions, but as the reorganization and expansion of...
This paper offers a rigorous examination of the concept of prosochē—the attentive mindfulness or vigilant focus on oneself—within Hellenistic Stoicism and its later transformations in Late Antiquity, and compares it to the modern psychological notion of the “flow state.” We analyze prosochē as a Stoic spiritual exercise (askēsis) essential to ethical development and life in accordance with...
Scientific theories are typically evaluated by their explanatory and predictive power rather than by their ability to resolve ultimate ontological questions. This methodological perspective is particularly important in consciousness research, where phenomenal consciousness is often treated as difficult to investigate because of its private and subjective nature. In this paper, we propose the...
PsychedelicsAugust 14, 2026Robert McGrath, Everett B. Sackett
Artificial intelligence is entering psychedelic-assisted therapy (PaT) through at least two channels, pre-licensure facilitator training simulators and in-session administrative tools. This arrival is occurring in a context where relational factors, those interpersonal considerations between patients and providers, are not incidental but highly impactful. A 2025 international Delphi consensus...
Must life be made of anything at all? Where its companion volume The Other Chemistry asked whether life could be built on a different chemistry — silicon rather than carbon — this sister essay climbs one rung higher and asks whether life must be chemistry, or matter, in the first place. It descends a ladder of abstraction through three candidates for what the living fundamentally is: matter...
Abstract The relevant sort of monism is type monism, according to which all actual, concrete phenomena are such that there is exactly one unified, substantive, fundamental nature that they share. Considerations about monism help (i) motivate physicalism, idealism, and neutral monism; (ii) ground a traditional taxonomy in the philosophy of mind; (iii) explain core commitments of physicalism,...
Everyone lives within a Perception Box (PB). What we see and hear—how we interpret it and what it means to us—depends on our brain and learning history. Recognizing that perception is subjective, and understanding why, are key steps to open our minds, counteract bias, and reduce suffering. This project seeks to establish a rigorous theoretical and empirical foundation for the science of the PB....
This paper introduces the Frame Theory of consciousness, a functional account of why consciousness arises in sufficiently complex cognitive systems. It argues that consciousness is not an emergent epiphenomenon of information processing, but an architectural necessity: once the number of parallel subprocesses in a system exceeds what any single processing instance can handle (estimated at N ≥...