Abstract Psychedelic drugs, including lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and other agonists of the serotonin 2A receptor (5HT2A-R), induce drastic changes in subjective experience, and provide a unique opportunity to study the neurobiological basis of consciousness. One of the most notable neurophysiological signatures of psychedelics, increased entropy in spontaneous neural activity, is thought...
According to the historically dominant interpretation of the anattā teaching, human being is a conglomerate of the five aggregates (khandha-s). However, several early Buddhist Nikāya texts seem to suggest that within human being there exists a dichotomy of the aggregates and their counterpart. The latter may cling to the khandha-s but also become dissociated from them. In this paper, I...
In his works, Kriegel criticizes a common viewpoint in the philosophy of mind upon which there is no direct relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness. He knows the problem of this view in that its proponents have not been able to make distinction between different kinds of self-consciousness. Kriegel, after making distinction between four different kinds of self-consciousness,...
This study is a comparative cognitive analysis of the identical symbols of Divine Love in the poetry of the oriental Pakistani poet Omer Tarin and the occidental English poet William Blake. It adopts the Mental Spaces theory in Cognitive Poetics and the theory of Perennialism in Comparative Mysticism as the main theoretical frameworks. The study aims at demonstrating the mental operation of...
What happens in the brain during meditation? Neuroscientists such as Andrew Newberg, who studies religious experiences on the neural level, may provide an answer. He calls the devolution, which is similar to all mystical experiences in different faiths, self-transcendent experience (STE); in a further instance, he also calls it the feeling of Absolute Unitary Being (AUB). A more detailed...
This study is an exploration of how the quantum self, the quintessence of the individual, drawson archetypal symbols and mythologems during the process of intrapsychic communication. Theprocess relates to the confluence of a subjective, inner experiential reality and reality as a socialconstruct during transcendent cycles of the unique individual. The Jungian constructs of archetypalimages,...
Jackson (1982) introduced the Knowledge Argument to elucidate the phenomenal, interior aspects of experience. In 1908 McTaggart defined two series that characterize one dimension of time, the A-series and the B-series. The A-series is usually thought to be phenomenal Farr (2019), SEP (2018). Thus there is the possibility of giving a Knowledge Argument for time. One (informal) statement of the...
The neural systems' electric activities are fundamental for the phenomenology of consciousness. Sensory perception triggers an information/energy exchange with the environment, but the brain's recurrent activations maintain a resting state with constant parameters. Therefore, perception forms a closed thermodynamic cycle. In physics, the Carnot engine is an ideal thermodynamic cycle that...
The scientific study of consciousness has seen a resurgence in the 21st century. This collection of reviews, essays, and theories on various aspects of comparative animal consciousness takes a biological and evolutionary approach. As defined here, consciousness refers to the process by which an animal has perceptual and affective experience or feelings, arising from the material substrate of a...
The Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (IIT) has generated much excitement inside and outside the scientific community, and seems to many the leading contender for a satisfactory theory grounded in systems neuroscience. It is a bold theory, one that provides plausible explanations for various recognized neuroscientific facts, makes surprising predictions that go beyond current...