In this paper, I analyse a specific kind of loneliness that can be experienced in the networked life, namely "extended loneliness". I claim that loneliness-conceived of as stemming from a lack of satisfying relationships to others-can arise from an abundance of connections in the online sphere. Extended loneliness, in these cases, does not result from a lack of connections to other people. On...
Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose...
Experiences of enlightened unity with Nature or with Deity are reported not only in the mystical literature of the past but also in contemporary accounts of the psychedelic adventurer. In Chapter 13, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes seeks to fathom such reported states within the framework of the metaphysics of Benedict de Spinoza – a metaphysics encompassing monism, pantheism, panpsychism, and the...
Book Review| July 01 2022 Review: Explosions in the Mind: Composing Psychedelic Sounds and Visualisations, by Jonathan Weinel Review of Explosions in the Mind: Composing Psychedelic Sounds and Visualisations by Jonathan Weinel ( Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 228 pp, $119.99). George Reid George Reid George Reid is a lecturer in musicology at Kingston University. His research currently explores the...
This paper presents a case of anomalous perception, mainly in the form of out-of-body experiences (OBEs), of a healthy individual. The individual has been experiencing massive out-of-body experiences, spontaneously or at will, on a daily basis, since birth, which is more than 45 years. The paper further presents some characteristics of phenomenology as well as semiology of OBEs of the above...
For more than 20 years, Western science education has been incorporated into Tibetan Buddhist monastics' training. In this time, there have been a number of fruitful collaborations between Buddhist monastics and neuroscientists, neurologists, and psychologists. These collaborations are unsurprising given the emphasis on phenomenological exploration of first-person conscious experience in...
Contemplative psychology is concerned with the psychological study of contemplative processes and practices, such as meditation, mindfulness, yoga, introspection, reflection, metacognition, self-regulation, self-awareness, and self-consciousness. Although contemplative psychology borders with other psychological and nonpsychological disciplines, some of its underlying assumptions distinguish it...
The development of artificial intelligence has entered a new stage associated with the problem of creating General Artificial Intelligence (AGI), approaching in its functions to the abilities of natural intelligence. Along with the phenomenological studies of the cognitive structures of subjective reality, the most important resource for the creation of AGI is the use of the results of...
Phenomenological psychopathology focuses on the first-person experience of mental disorders. Although it is in principle descriptive, it also entails an explanatory dimension: single psychological symptoms are conceived as genetically arising from a holistic structure of personal experience, i.e., the patient's being-in-the-world - and of its dynamic unfolding over time. Yet both classical and...
Perceptual filling-in for vision is the insertion of visual properties (e.g., color, contour, luminance, or motion) into one's visual field, when those properties have no corresponding retinal input. This paper introduces and provides preliminary empirical support for filled/non-filled pairs, pairs of images that appear identical, yet differ by amount of filling-in. It is argued that such image...