Ema Demar: It was a late summer after noon in 2014, and I was about to start my first serious attempt at meditation.I closed my eyes.I inhaled, and exhaled.I opened a nonjudgmental (or so I tried) attention to whatever was there.What did I notice?A colorful kaleidoscope of bodily sensations, brief images, half-finished spoken sentences; a series of hasty shifts in my focus; the feeling of the...
The experimental approach adopted by cognitive psy chol ogy researchers (and to some extent also, by most cognitive neuroscience researchers) when investigating consciousness is to target the transition between unconscious and conscious vision.As a consequence, and somewhat ironically, the study of conscious experience is de facto mostly the study of what conscious experience is not.In this...
Exploring Consciousness from the InsideStephen FulderConsciousness arises dependent on sense data and stimulation of the senses.Therefore it is dependent and has no self-existence.-Anguttara Nikaya 41:7 (Bodhi, 2012) Personal ReflectionsI have been interested in spiritual practice and inner exploration for most of my life.I can remember as a child, realizing that, like Mowgli in The Jungle...
The chapter you are about to read is much about how other minds played a role in shaping my views and theories about consciousness.It only seemed natu ral to me from the outset that the phenomenology of subjective experience should play a pivotal role in a scientific theory of consciousness.But my intuitions found firmer methodological ground in my brief yet meaningful, and retrospectively...
Consciousness is mystery.Not a par tic u lar mystery-just mystery.It is a subject of countless scientific debates and theories, widely regarded as one of the greatest unresolved questions in science.In the first, theoretical section of my piece, I draw from my experience with scientific methods and spiritual practices to pre sent the idea that consciousness studies involve multiple...
Personal ReflectionsSince my first years as a mature person, the puzzles relating to subjective experience perplexed me.The attempts to describe what subjectivity means and to distinguish it from an objective realm often use the (meta phorical) distinction between an inner sphere and an outer sphere.According to this view, the subjective content of consciousness constitutes an inner sphere that...
This paper examines how Stuart Turton's The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018) engages in ongoing debates concerning embodied consciousness and personal identity yet to be resolved by current theories linking mind and body. The analysis integrates a neuroscientific approach (Greenfield), narrative self theory (Dennett, Schechtman), pre-narrative self-consciousness (Zahavi), embodied...
This study proposes a new operational framework for distinguishing Artificial Intelligence (AI) from Natural Born Intelligence (NBI) based on a two-layer structure of representational schemas. AI constructs mappings within a fixed input and representational space, characterized by optimization and generalization inside this closed structure. In contrast, NBI employs (1) the Co-Applicability of...
The Trance phenomenon in the Terbang Buhun Majalaya performance is an event or incident that is often performed among the people of the Majalaya region, precisely in West Java. Trance is always presented in two presentations, namely natural or real trance and trance with a scenario. Terbang Buhun Majalaya has a fairly long artistic historical value and has evolved over time, this art has...
This study critically examines the epistemology of mysticism in Islamic thought through Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdi’s concept of Knowledge through Presence (al-‘ilm al-huduri). The research positions Yazdi’s epistemological framework as a bridge between classical Islamic illuminationist philosophy (hikmah al-ishraq) and contemporary philosophical discourse. Employing qualitative-descriptive and...