The Bardo Thodol (bar do thos grol), commonly known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, has traditionally served as a spiritual manual guiding consciousness through the postmortem bardo (bar do) states toward liberation or rebirth. While prior interpretations have framed the text in ritualistic, psychological, or mystical terms, this essay proposes an original and interdisciplinary...
Consciousness remains one of the most profound unsolved problems in science, particularly regarding the persistence of a unique self across disruption, duplication, or time. Existing frameworks—Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT), Integrated Information Theory (IIT), and Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR)—describe mechanisms of awareness but fail to explain continuity and uniqueness...
While neurophenomenal structuralism (NPS) is typically viewed as an account of why an experience, i.e. a conscious mental state, has a specific phenomenal character, Sascha Fink has suggested that NPS might also account for why one has an experience in the first place. According to Fink, the character-determining structures are incorporated in larger (meta-)structures that make the incorporated...
Hallucinations figure prominently in a range of psychiatric disorders but, to date, their developmental origins are not well understood. The aim of the present article is to explore how ideas from mainstream developmental psychology can enhance understanding of how hallucinations develop in different modalities across the lifecourse. Hallucinations vary in their clinical significance depending...
arXiv Preprint ArchiveOctober 5, 2025Teruki Mayama, Sota Shimizu, Yuki Takano et al.
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The relationship between Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and the Free-Energy Principle (FEP) remains unresolved, particularly with respect to how integrated information, proposed as the intrinsic substrate of consciousness, behaves within variational Bayesian inference. We investigated this issue using dissociated neuronal cultures, previously shown to perform perceptual inference...
Abstract The vexed ‘psychotomimetic model’ of psychedelics claims to offer insights into both psychedelic experiences and psychosis, by weaving across these sets of experiences. One enduring opposition to the model distinguishes between psychedelic experiences as voluntary or ‘willed’, and psychosis as an affliction to be endured. This opposition is useful for projects seeking to sanitise and...
Abstract Psychedelic drugs exert rapid and profound effects on human consciousness and are increasingly explored for their clinical potential. Yet, the genetic programs through which psychedelics reshape brain function and structure remain incompletely understood, in part because most studies have been conducted in preclinical models and cell cultures. We conducted a systematic literature...
Purpose: This study aims to explore the secret knowledge within the Sufi views of Ibn Sina, focusing on how his philosophical and scientific perspectives intersect with spiritual interpretations. The objective is to understand Ibn Sina’s contribution to Sufi thought, especially his vision of the macrocosm (olami akbar) as perceived through the soul. Research methodology: The research adopts a...
This paper challenges the dominant representationalist paradigm in the philosophy of mind by developing a process-monistic, anti-representationalist account of cognition. It argues that the persistent mind-body problem is a consequence of a flawed substance ontology and the representationalist framework it necessitates. To overcome this, the paper constructs a critical synthesis of three...
Detached self-observation, a central dimension of mindfulness meditation, has emerged as a key metacognitive and emotional-regulatory capacity across psychology, education, and neuroscience. This theoretical paper proposes meditation as a developmental catalyst, drawing on contemporary scholarship. Detached observation is reframed here as a culturally mediated competence grounded in both...