Religions
March 20, 2026
Byoungjai Lee
1 citation
Meditation-related difficulties have been systematically documented in contemporary contemplative science, yet the prescriptive resources preserved in the ancient Buddhist commentarial literature remain underutilized in comparative research. This study analyzes the case of five hundred monks in the Paramatthajotikā I’s commentary on the Karaṇīya-metta-sutta. During intensive practice, these...
BMJ
March 20, 2026
Jeffrey K Aronson
1 citation
Psychedelic drugs produce effects on the mind that manifest as an apparent expansion of consciousness often accompanied by hallucinations. Psychedelics, which act as agonists at serotonin 5-HT2A receptors in the brain, include psilocybin, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine, and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (tryptamine derivatives), mescaline (a phenethylamine derivative), and lysergic acid diethylamide...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 19, 2026
Lorand Bruhacs
preprint
Debates about consciousness often move too quickly from the failure of a physical, functional, or structural representation to discharge some explanatory or epistemic task to a verdict about ontology. A better diagnosis is representational. Behaviorism, functionalism, knowledge arguments, conceivability arguments, and hard-problem reasoning are recast here as disputes about whether a given...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
March 19, 2026
Alexandros Constantinou, John Donaldson, Will Hornett et al.
Mazviita Chirimuuta’s The Brain Abstracted (2024) is a fascinating intervention into the philosophy of mind and neuroscience, containing deeply interesting ideas and arguments. Our aim is to critically probe whether Haptic Realism is neutral on some substantive issues which Chirimuuta would like it to be neutral on. Firstly, it is unclear whether Haptic Realism is compatible with Chirimuuta’s...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 19, 2026
Giulio Ruffini
preprint
This document provides a self-contained overview of the Kolmogorov Theory (KT) of consciousness---a research program spanning over two decades (2000--2026) that grounds the study of cognition, agency, and structured experience in Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT). KT proposes that brains and, more generally, algorithmic agents build and run compressive models of the world, and that the...
March 19, 2026
Jingyu Wu
1 citation
Current debates surrounding concepts such as “basal cognition,” “minimal cognition,” “plant intelligence,” and “consciousness” are deeply mired in terminological demarcation and phenomenological description, with each side entrenched in its own position and consensus elusive. This paper proposes a meta-theoretical framework based on the “Sentient Principle,” shifting the focus of cognitive...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 19, 2026
Agordi Paul Oluwatosin
preprint
This paper presents a philosophical and systematic examination of the question, “Can computers think?” It begins by looking at the different meanings of the concept of thinking, positing that the answer to the question depends on how such a concept is conceived. On the one hand, this paper argues that if thinking is understood as problem solving, information processing, and intelligent...
March 19, 2026
XiaoYao Guo
This paper adopts a specific metaphysical stance rather than providing a proof based on physical theorems. From the philosophical perspective of information ontology, it proposes and demonstrates the essential characteristics of the universe as an absolutely self-consistent information system. The core thesis argues that: all existence itself is the instantiation of rules rather than the...
Philosophies
March 19, 2026
J. M. Alves Ferreira
The intricate relationships between humans and animals have long shaped philosophical, cultural and scientific inquiry. This narrative review examines evolving conceptions of animal consciousness, agency and sentience within broader historical, ethical and epistemological contexts. Drawing on philosophy, ethology, neuroscience, psychology and animal studies, it critically engages debates on...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
March 19, 2026
Mazviita Chirimuuta
The Brain Abstracted tackles the question of how we should interpret neuroscience for the purposes of doing philosophy of mind. Neurophilosophy rests on the premise that the findings presented in the theories and models of neuroscience are directly relevant to longstanding philosophical topics such as the nature of perception and agency. Insufficient attention has been paid to the challenge of...