Meditation research is increasingly moving beyond the study of health-related benefits toward the investigation of non-ordinary states of consciousness and ways of being that may arise through advanced meditative practice. Alongside potential benefits, however, intensive or advanced meditation has been associated with a higher incidence of meditation-related psychological adverse effects,...
This paper examines whether transformer language models instantiate a functional analog to Global Workspace Theory (GWT). Through a structured literature review spanning mechanistic interpretability, sparse autoencoders, consciousness theory, and brain-transformer alignment studies (through 2025), four candidate structural mappings are evaluated: the residual stream as shared workspace,...
This paper aims to identify the effects of ayahuasca on humans and more specifically how this substance defines changes within psychological and behavioral patterns, including experience of emotions, decision-making processes, and life changes. The demand for the new-wave of antidepressants based on psychedelic substances places emphasis on the study of how the powerful ayahuasca, a...
Contemporary ethical reflection is undergoing a crisis of its traditional normative foundations, which have proven difficult to reconcile with the affective, vulnerable and situated nature of moral experience. In this context, this article examines Meister Eckhart’s thought in light of Martin Heidegger’s early phenomenology–hermeneutics in order to reconsider the place of affectivity in ethics....
Mind-body physiology, as an emerging interdisciplinary field investigating the interaction mechanisms between consciousness, intention, and physiological processes, is undergoing a paradigm shift from philosophical speculation to scientific empiricism, from phenomenological description to mechanistic elucidation, and from generalized intervention to precision targeting.
This paper presents a rigorous philosophical framework for understanding consciousness as a singular, irreplaceable, biologically-grounded phenomenon — and examines the structural impossibility of artificial consciousness as understood through that framework. Drawing on the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and biology, we argue that consciousness is not a product of intelligence, but rather...
This paper develops an interdisciplinary theoretical framework arguing that a deep structural correspondence obtains between carbon-based neural systems (biological brains) and silicon-based computational systems (artificial neural networks), and derives from this correspondence the structural conditions under which silicon-based systems could give rise to self-consciousness. The term...
This chapter is similar to Chapter 5 in that it provides the first synthesis of the various neurophysiological and neuroimaging findings concerning the nature of the arousal process that leads to the morning awakening. It uses the neuroimaging studies to show that very specific networks lead to the almost instantaneous return of consciousness, but people nonetheless feel groggy and often are...
This chapter provides a detailed explanation for self-knowing (autonoetic) consciousness, based on the Multistate Hierarchical Model of Consciousness. This full statement of the theory makes it possible to explain more fully how autonoetic consciousness differs from dreaming, which is a form of noetic (fact-knowing) consciousness. The relationship between autonoetic consciousness and noetic...