Abstract The essay offers an interpretation of psychedelic peak experiences. It criticizes the quasi-scientific naturalistic attempts to explain such experiences and offers an alternative ontology underlying a more complex sense of naturalism, thus defending an entheogenic view irreducible to mere psychological effects. First, the mainstream ontology in the paradigm of natural sciences is...
Stroboscopic light stimulation (SLS) on closed eyes typically induces simple visual hallucinations (VHs), characterised by vivid, geometric and colourful patterns. A dataset of 862 sentences, extracted from 422 open subjective reports, was recently compiled as part of the Dreamachine programme (Collective Act, 2022), an immersive multisensory experience that combines SLS and spatial sound in a...
Dreams are part of our lives. Day and night, we live with them. Dreams are personal and significant to the individual who is dreaming them. The psychological significance of dreams is evident in the unconscious thoughts of our inner concerns, worries, fears, wishes, expectations, and fantasies. No one should underestimate the value of dreams in their lives because they can provide the right...
Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) was a major 20th-century German physician-poet and essayist. He successfully completed his medical studies and worked across several hospitals and disciplines, including pathology, performing many autopsies. Later in life, Benn ran his own practice to treat skin and venereal diseases in Berlin for many years. Benn is not well-known in English-speaking countries and...
ABSTRACT This narrative review explores the phenomenon of inner speech – mental speech without visible articulation – and its implications for cognitive science and clinical practice. Despite its importance, the many neural mechanisms underlying inner speech remain unclear. We propose classifying inner speech into monologic, dialogal, elicited, and spontaneous forms, and discuss related...
In a recent set of articles (Klein et al., 2023; Klein & Loftus, 2024), my colleagues and I used the logic of adaptationism—the application of evolutionary principles to study the functional design of naturally selected systems (e.g., Klein et al., 2002)—to help make sense of the role natural selection played in the evolution of consciousness. To avoid well-known, seemingly intractable problems...
This chapter examines the embodied, phenomenological experience of witnessing another body in pain, exploring how empathy arises from our visceral responses to suffering. Drawing on Edith Stein’s 1917 theory of empathic experience, contemporary cognitive science, and performance studies, the discussion interrogates the limits of empathy, arguing that our capacity to empathize depends on the...
This article suggests that the influence of philosophy of mind and metaphysics in the study of consciousness, has become excessive and is not well-founded. Metaphysical terms are often ill-defined and equivocal, and philosophy of mind relies largely on weak, concrete arguments which lack the power of more abstract mathematical formulations. An example is given of a mathematical argument, the...
The article is focused on ontological issues related to inner-body sensations in the context of cognitive sciences and modern philosophy of mind. Initially, the concept of interoception was limited to physiological processes and reactions associated with internal organs. Nevertheless, further developments in cognitive science led to a reassessment of the role of bodily characteristics in...
Large parts of the Western philosophical tradition, powerful in Kant’s transcendental conception, have reserved the concept of autonomy for rational subjects that think and act on reasons. While this captures an essential aspect of autonomy, the dimensions of embodiment and vulnerability remain unreflected or are subsumed under the heteronomous conditions of the human subject. If the conception...