Abstract This chapter defends the claim that Spinoza had a theory of consciousness against Garber (2021). The claim that Spinoza’s idea of the idea is the form of the idea, not because it represents the formal reality of the lower-order idea (Bennett 1984), but rather because it refers to the way in which a subject’s mind takes a representation of some modification of her body as representing...
A main characteristic of biological systems is their capacity to dynamically adapt to environmental changes. In the brain, synaptic plasticity enables the strengthening or weakening of connections between neurons, allowing neural circuits to adapt based on experience, learning, and environmental changes. Yet, it is homeostatically regulated such that it avoids excessive proliferation of...
Despite many years of research, the quest to identify neural correlates of perceptual consciousness (NCC) remains unresolved. One major obstacle lies in methodological limitations: most studies rely on non-invasive neural measures with limited spatial or temporal resolution making it difficult to disentangle proper NCCs from concurrent cognitive processes. Additionally, the relatively low...
Contemporary mind science has reached an impasse over the "hard prob-lem" of consciousness, facing the predicament of data-rich yet theoreti-cally fragmented. This paper proposes the "Generative Theory of the Sensation-Behavior Cycle," achieving a fundamental paradigm shift: from abstract speculation about "consciousness" to the study of life itself as a generative process of the "Youjue...
This article positions Metatron's Cube as a unifying framework bridging ancient geometric principles with contemporary visionary phenomenology. Tracing sacred geometry's evolution from utilitarian applications in the Indus Valley, Babylonia (π ≈ 3.125), and Egypt (π ≈ 3.1605) circa 3000 BCE through its philosophical refinement in 6th-century BCE Greece, the analysis integrates convergent...
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) may arise from misattributed inner speech. However, it is unclear if inner speech frequency and phenomenology differ in schizophrenia-spectrum voice-hearers compared with healthy individuals, and how different inner speech varieties relate to AVH and affect. Using experience sampling methodology (ESM), this study...
Consciousness is fundamentally a process of selection, a continuous "collapse" from a manifold of potential states into a singular, coherent narrative. This article introduces the Ze formalism, a theoretical framework that models this process through a cognitive localization parameter, Γ_Ze. We posit that the critical distinction between wakefulness and sleep is not the presence of...
A comparison will be made between emergentism and panpsychism to answer the question of whether panpsychism represents a sound alternative to emergentism: I think that physicalist emergentism is a good solution for the problems raised by the mind-body problem, despite its inhability to define the ontological status of the mental states and to solve the ancient problems connected to dualism....
This article proposes a dual-self states framework to demonstrate how phenomenology and neuroscience of embodied and altered states of consciousness illuminate the nature of consciousness and the sense of self. It argues that consciousness is best conceived as dynamic configurations of a reflective and an experiential self state, rather than as static, taxonomic layers of self. The reflective...
Anesthesia has revolutionized surgical practice and offers a controlled model to study the neurobiology of consciousness. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that anesthesia primarily disrupts connectivity across association cortices, suggesting that impaired integration between higher-order brain regions underlies unconsciousness. However, traditional fMRI paradigms...