Abstract Background and aims An increasing number of individuals seek psychedelics for mental illness, and when seeking psychotherapy in the aftermath, psychotherapists have an ethical duty to attempt to reduce harms and maximise benefits from these experiences. The Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of therapy is sometimes chosen as the therapeutic approach in psychedelic-assisted...
William James was one of the first American philosophers with a significant global influence. His radical empiricism served as his metaphysical philosophy but has not received a sufficient scholarly attention. James’ radical empiricism formed and emerged gradually, ultimately holding that pure experience is the key to understanding reality while emphasising the reality of relations and the...
Despite the intensification of dialogue between Buddhism and Western science within the framework of interdisciplinary research in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, a systematic approach to the Buddhist philosophy of time remains underdeveloped, which limits the scope for comparative analysis. This article attempts to trace the development of the Buddhist concept of time, from the...
Meditation practices often involve sustaining attention on the body. Typically, attention is understood to enhance both neural resource allocation and the subjective salience of the attended target. However, in deep meditative states, practitioners sometimes report a dissolution of bodily boundaries, a phenomenon known in Pali as bha[Formula: see text]ga. This presents a paradox: why does...
This narrative review explores the potential neurophysiological correlates of the subjective experience of shared consciousness in romantic intimacy, synthesizing evidence from hyperscanning (simultaneous recording from two brains) EEG (electroencephalography), fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), and MEG (magnetoencephalography) studies. It examines how neural synchrony, specifically...
Abstract Visual hallucinations (VHs) occur across psychedelic states and diverse psychiatric and neurological conditions, yet their phenomenology remains difficult to characterise. Empirical research on VHs is hindered by the lack of large-scale phenomenological datasets, which limits both mechanistic accounts and the systematic characterisation of when and how they arise. Stroboscopic light...
This essay treats language as a paradoxical cognitive technology: a compact, lossy code that nonetheless seems to enable the felt continuity of consciousness and deliberation. I propose that inner speech is primarily a communicative act—even when its audience is oneself—because producing language requires implicitly modeling an interpreter. That recursive “communicator–interceptor” loop yields...
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are increasingly treated by the public as if theypossess subjective experience. Colombatto and Fleming (2024) recently showed that most U.S.adults attribute at least some phenomenal consciousness to ChatGPT, despite a scientific consensusthat current AI systems are not conscious. The present study provides the first large-scalemeasurement of this...
While quantum theory has significantly advanced our understanding of the physical world—describing fundamental particles and their interactions—it remains limited in addressing metaphysical dimensions such as consciousness, feeling, and other subjective experiences. To bridge this conceptual gap, this article introduces the qualum approach, a novel framework designed to explain the fundamental...
This study, situated within the theoretical continuity of relational consciousness, analyzes the structural transformation experienced by human thought in AI-mediated environments. Expanding upon the previously discussed concepts of the “delegation ofjudgment” and the “critical threshold of thought,” this paper interprets the present transformation not as the disappearance of thought, but as a...