Abstract Objectives Meditation can elicit intense experiences that change the sense of self, alter worldview, and evoke strong negative and positive emotions, impacting daily life. These intense meditation-related experiences (IMREs) often begin suddenly but their emotional impact and meaning can change significantly as meditators reflect on and interpret them over time, shaped by an interplay...
Cebu has become one of the Philippines’ liveliest destinations for religious tourism, marked by daily acts of faith, ritual customs, and spiritual activities. This study examines how different groups, such as regular believers, local pilgrims, domestic tourists, international visitors, and commercial stakeholders, interact with the sacred sites of Cebu, including the Basilica Minore del Santo...
This case study examines how consciousness functions under extreme physiological stress, drawing on first‑person observations from a subject experiencing full‑body CRPS, chronic migraines, post‑surgical complications, nausea, and post‑cancer recovery. Despite severe and persistent bodily distress, the subject demonstrates organized, high‑level cognitive output, including structured scientific...
The relationship between human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) is often framed competitively, but a rigorous comparative analysis reveals fundamental differences in origin, substrate, consciousness, embodiment, intentionality, emotionality, creativity, ethical reasoning, learning efficiency, autonomy, and spiritual capacity. Drawing on theological perspectives (Okoronkwo & Dike,...
Abstract Hallucinations may involve any of the sensory modalities – auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory and may present in mixed or complex perceptual hallucinations. Among the rarer forms of hallucinations are functional hallucinations. Functional hallucinations are a rare and understudied phenomenon in which hallucinations are consistently triggered by a specific real external...
It is of interest whether artificial intelligence systems can emulate conscious information processing of the human brain. Here I discuss the aspects of conscious computation leading to artificial consciousness. One of the salient differences between biological neural networks and digital computers is the ubiquitous presence of noise in the former. I outline how noise robustness could correlate...
The goal of detecting, measuring, and engineering machine consciousness depends on making explicit key metaphysical assumptions about the nature of consciousness that may be lying dormant in the minds of AI researchers. In this position paper, we lay out a small set of arguments that call into question a particular family of these assumptions. These assumptions all arise from the dominant...
Amid growing concern about whether frontier artificial intelligence could instantiate consciousness-relevant capacities, we argue that attention self-modelling provides a uniquely tractable target for empirical research in current and future systems. Recent findings in multi-agent and control settings lend fresh support to this approach, demonstrating that attention self-modelling enables both...
This paper offers a rigorous philosophical roadmap that challenges the hegemony of contemporary reductionist scientism and explores new pathways toward an integrative view of reality. Taking the "hard problem of consciousness" and its explanatory gap as a starting point, the author deconstructs the ontological claims of materialism and maps out alternative models of the mind-brain relationship,...
Metacognition is an important aspect of information processing in the brain, subserving judgement and making cognition robust. In the literature, there are different views on the role metacognition plays in consciousness. The role of meta-cognition has been addressed by various studies. In relation to consciousness, some authors argue that metacognition is not necessarily essential in...