In the past few years, the subject of AI rights-the thesis that AIs, robots, and other artefacts (hereafter, simply 'AIs') ought to be included in the sphere of moral concern-has started to receive serious attention from scholars. In this paper, I argue that the AI rights research program is beset by an epistemic problem that threatens to impede its progress-namely, a lack of a solution to the...
Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature by Douglas Duckworth Roshni Patel (bio) Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature. By Douglas Duckworth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 328. Hardcover $105.00, ISBN 978-0-19-088395-9. Douglas Duckworth’s Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature introduces a thematic way to understand the terrain of Buddhist philosophy...
Meta-awareness refers to the capacity to explicitly notice the current content of consciousness and has been identified as a key component for the successful control of cognitive states, such as the deliberate direction of attention. This paper proposes a formal model of meta-awareness and attentional control using hierarchical active inference. To do so, we cast mental action as policy...
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of neuroscientific theories of consciousness. These include theories which explicitly point to EM fields, notably Operational Architectonics and, more recently, the General Resonance Theory. In phenomenological terms, human consciousness is a unified composition of contents. These contents are specific and meaningful, and they exist from a...
In their paper Doerig et al. argue that we should put the hard problem aside and focus on empirical data to solve the 'easy' problems of consciousness - finding the neural and functional correlates of consciousness. In other words 'shut up and measure'. This has worked well with other thorny issues, such as explaining life, so why not adopt this approach here? We argue that despite the...
There is a paucity of research examining the phenomenology and energetic effects of spiritually transformative experiences with an energetic component, often referred to as kundalini awakenings (KAs). This limits our ability to understand and support individuals who have these often unexpected and powerful experiences. This study aimed to explore not only the nature of these experiences but...
In a recent podcast (2012), Professor James Cox has briefly sketched an outline of the phenomenology of religion. His overview has taken broadly the concept of Husserl’s notions of epoche and the eidetic intuition and carried them through to typologies for the purpose of comparisons. Now, Cox provides us with a rather comprehensive phenomenology which, though briefly explained in the podcast,...
This paper is an introduction to William James' philosophy of mind and is intended to prepare the reader for his work “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing”. The views of William James on three topics in the philosophy of mind are considered: panpsychism, neutral monism, and combination problem. There is a very deep connection between the modern analytical philosophy of mind and the philosophy of...
We explore definite theoretical assertions about consciousness, starting from a non-reductive psycho-informational solution of David Chalmers's 'hard problem', based on the hypothesis that a fundamental property of 'information' is its experience by the supporting 'system'. The kind of information involved in consciousness needs to be quantum for multiple reasons, including its intrinsic...