IAES International Journal of Artificial Intelligence
August 1, 2026
Andreas Yumarma, Tjong Wan Sen
The question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can attain consciousness remains central ontological challenge within interdisciplinary discourse spanning AI, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience. This study investigates the metaphysical status of AI systems by interrogating the explanatory clarity of their existence and the potential emergence of subjectivity from...
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
August 1, 2026
Hamid Nourbakhshi
Abstract Can visual experience represent deific properties? I argue that it can. Some perceptual experiences, I argue, could represent properties like being a creation of God or being a manifestation of divine beauty . To defend this thesis, I use Susanna Siegel’s method of phenomenal contrast. I compare an ordinary perception of an object with a perception of the same object during a similar...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2026
Mark Solms, St John Grimbly, Bruce Bassett et al.
Creatures that display ‘hedonic place preference behaviour’ are thought by many scientists to experience feelings, on the assumption that their attraction to pleasure-producing substances which lack nutritional value (e.g. cocaine, morphine) cannot easily be attributed to unconscious instinctual behaviour. In this paper, we discuss how a simple artificial agent that instantiates attributes of...
Cell Reports
August 1, 2026
Rui Dai, Hyunwoo Jang, Anthony G. Hudetz et al.
Understanding the relationship of conscious states to large-scale brain dynamics remains a central challenge in neuroscience. Here, diverse pharmacological and physiological perturbations-including psychedelics, sleep, and propofol sedation-are used to examine integration-segregation organization of brain networks across altered states of consciousness in humans using functional MRI. Across...
The Journal of Neurobehavioral Sciences
August 1, 2026
Peter Lugten
Living beings bring more order to the world, and are required by the second law of thermodynamics, to simultaneously produce more disorder through metabolic heat dissipation. Consciousness in living beings produces even more order, enhancing survival and reproduction, and incurs an entropy debt that must be paid separately, and non-metabolically, through heat dissipation produced by Landauer’s...
Translational Psychiatry
August 1, 2026
Patrick A. McConnell, Jackson Raffety, Andrew Li et al.
Abstract Psychedelic drugs exert rapid and profound effects on human consciousness [1–7] and are increasingly being investigated for their therapeutic potential [8–14]. Yet the transcriptional programs through which they may reshape brain function and structure remain incompletely understood, in part because the available evidence is heterogeneous and largely preclinical [15, 16]. In a...
British Journal of Psychotherapy
August 1, 2026
Matthew Goldreich
Abstract In the philosophy of mind literature, consciousness is commonly defined not in terms of its physical correlates but rather its subjective character – the ‘something that it is like to be' an organism. In this conceptual article, this formulation is applied to the study of neonate subjectivity, giving rise to the question: what is it like to be an infant? I begin by outlining prevailing...
IBRO Neuroscience Reports
August 1, 2026
Remko Van Lutterveld, Thomas Cahaly, Lukas van Herk et al.
Advanced meditation includes meditative endpoints that are outcomes of meditation practice and occur with time and mastery of meditation. The “cessation” event (c.f. nirodha in Theravada Buddhism) is a meditative endpoint characterized by a loss of consciousness followed by a sense of mental reset and deep clarity. In general, organization of brain activity exists along a “criticality”...
Cortex
August 1, 2026
Matteo Fecchio, David R Schreier, Morgan K Cambareri et al.
Early detection of consciousness in critically ill patients with severe brain injuries can profoundly impact prognostication and clinical care decisions. Advanced multimodal protocols to detect signs of consciousness include standardized behavioral assessments, task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and task-based electroencephalography (EEG). However, these approaches have...
Journal of Sleep Research
August 1, 2026
Nicola De Pisapia, Erdem Taskiran, Stefano Mastino et al.
Lucid dreaming, defined as the experience of becoming aware of dreaming while dreaming, offers a unique window into a state of consciousness characterised by a blending of the sensory vividness of REM sleep with the self-awareness of wakefulness. While past functional imaging has shed light on the neural activity supporting lucid dreaming, the structural brain correlates of lucid dream...