We discuss the striking similarities between Friedrich Nietzsche's and Wilfrid Sellars's respective philosophies of mind. Drawing especially on recent Nietzsche scholarship by Riccardi and Katsafanas, we argue that the Nietzschean picture of consciousness is essentially the same as Sellars's view of conceptually structured thought. In particular, we argue that both consider structured thinking...
The field of contemplative studies honours self-reflection in inquiry; and narrative and introspection, seed a symbiotic terrain. But while the land of the contemplative flourishes in the first person, its methodological discourse is complicated by the presence of the third person voice dominating academic research. How do we describe a contemplative methodology as a narrative/aesthetical...
The main purpose of this chapter is to introduce Embodied Spiritual Inquiry (ESI) as a novel participatory research method in the context of spiritual and contemplative studies. ESI applies Albareda and Romero's interactive embodied meditations (Ferrer 2003) in the context of a participatory research paradigm inspired by Cooperative Inquiry (CI; Heron 1996) in order to access multiple human...
Phenomenology is one of the most promising approaches to study conscious experience. It holds that a rigorous study of conscious experience requires a transition in the subject from the “natural attitude” (NA) to the “phenomenological attitude” (PA). NA describes our ordinary stance, in which our attention is directed at external objects and events. PA is a distinctive, reflective stance in...
Consciousness is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the brain. The simple and yet fundamental question, “How do we have subjective experience?” remains a matter of great debate among neuroscientists. These debates have generated some challenges for consciousness research, namely the hard problem—do normal scientific approaches work for consciousness— and the binding problem—how are...
In this research, I have examined the possibility of machine consciousness and related philosophical challenges that are at the face. The research will progress in the following manner. First, I will discuss the concept of consciousness from scientific and philosophical perspective, and try to show the extend of our understanding regarding problem of consciousness. I will discuss the cognitive...
Abstract In Jylkkä's ( Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience , Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2022) Mary on Acid: Experiences of unity and the epistemic gap, the author contends that psychedelic experience, by inducing unitary—nondual—experiences of subject–object dissolution, brings to light the epistemic gap between unitary knowledge, constituted by experience,...
Philosophical preoccupation with the hard problem of self-consciousness often takes human becoming for granted. In archaeology, the opposite is the norm. The emphasis is on when and how we became human while the problem of self (how did the ability to think about one’s own self come about? ) is largely neglected. This article suggest that those two aspects of human becoming cannot be...
Delirium has conventionally been considered a disorder of consciousness. Alertness and arousal are used as surrogates in clinical practice but are insufficient for the purposes of a more dimensional assessment of consciousness. We present a process of development and validation of candidate measures of phenomenal consciousness that could be applied to the diagnosis of delirium. First, a...
Background: This paper brings ethnographic and cultural studies into dialogue with ritual and value theory. It is based on the tripartite premise psychedelics can fundamentally effect humans’ involuntary reactions to beauty and goodness (sensorium), ways of being and acting in the world (habitus), and what we think can(not) be the case about the world ((super-)plausibility). Structure: Firstly,...