Mental causation is vitally important to the integrated information theory (IIT), which says consciousness exists since it is causally efficacious. While it might not be directly apparent, metaphysical commitments have consequential entailments concerning the causal efficacy of consciousness. Commitments regarding the ontology of consciousness and the nature of causation determine which...
July 27, 2020G. Ellis, Jingxian Jiang, P. Freeman et al.
Abstract The nature, causes, and effects of immediate conscious leisure experiences have long been central interests of scholars. Significant contributions to the field include Abraham Maslow’s studies of ecstasy and peak experience, Sigmund Koch’s descriptions of two forms of consciousness, John Neulinger’s classification of immediate conscious experiences based on their motivational contexts,...
ABSTRACT Kambô is the name for the secretion of the Giant Leaf Frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor) containing a plethora of bioactive peptides. Originally, it is ritually used by different ethnicities from the Amazon basin as a remedy against bad luck in hunting. In the last twenty years, Kambô has spread to Western urban centers, often associated with the use of ayahuasca. Anecdotal reports claim...
ReligionsJuly 21, 2020Carlos Miguel Gómez Rincón3 citations
This article offers an intercultural interpretation of the sense of the sacred in the practice of yage shamanism in Colombia. This practice is based on the ritual use of a plant medicine which for centuries has been the basis of the medical, spiritual and cultural systems of indigenous peoples of the Amazon piedmont in Colombia, Ecuador and Perú. Since the 1990s, this practice has expanded to...
DiscourseJuly 20, 2020Alexei Vsevolodovich Nesteruk, Alexander V. Soldatov
Introduction. The paper deals with the philosophical problems of functioning of the most complex phenomena in the universe: creation of the universe, emergence of life and appearance of consciousness. The scientific timeliness of the research is determined by that unceasing interest to the origin of the universe and life in it. The most difficult problem is the origin of intelligence in the...
Robin Carhart-Harris moved to Imperial College London in 2008 after obtaining a PhD in Psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol and an MA in Psychoanalysis from Brunel University. At Imperial, he has designed and/or carried out brain imaging studies involving LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and DMT, plus a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, and an ongoing study...
Summary Understanding of the evolved biological function of sleep has advanced considerably in the past decade. However, no equivalent understanding of dreams has emerged. Contemporary neuroscientific theories often view dreams as epiphenomena, and many of the proposals for their biological function are contradicted by the phenomenology of dreams themselves. Now, the recent advent of deep...
Whilst lucid dreaming (LD) is defined as being aware of dreaming whilst dreaming, a misconception exists in the public domain as a referral to controlling dream content and plot (Neuhäusler et al., 2018). This misconception reflects a number of widely-held beliefs about the nature of dreaming, which in part this commentary will seek to explain and rectify. Furthermore, the aim of this piece is...
In clinical setting, consciousness can be described by two components: wakefulness and awareness. It is now established that a wide range of states or experiences characterized by dissociation between these two components exists. This chapter discusses certain of those most intriguing instances, such as disorders of consciousness, hypnosis, anaesthesia and near-death experiences. We here...
This chapter will focus on ‘bodily feelings’, which express the various facets of the enduring relation that the subject has with her body in relation to the world. In particular, it will focus on three such feelings: the feeling of bodily presence, the feeling of bodily capacities, and the feeling of bodily ownership. After describing these bodily feelings in more detail, we will ask to what...