PLoS One
January 30, 2020
Vanessa Charland-Verville, D. Ribeiro de Paula, Charlotte Martial et al.
20 citations
The notion that death represents a passing to an afterlife, where we are reunited with loved ones and live eternally in a utopian paradise, is common in the reports of people who have encountered a “Near-Death Experience” (NDE). NDEs are thoroughly portrayed by the media but empirical studies are rather recent. The definition of the phenomenon as well as the identification of NDE experiencers...
arXiv Preprint Archive
January 26, 2020
Ulrike Barthelmeß, Ulrich Furbach, Claudia Schon
preprint
This paper aims at demonstrating how a first-order logic reasoning system in combination with a large knowledge base can be understood as an artificial consciousness system. For this we review some aspects from the area of philosophy of mind and in particular Tononi's Information Integration Theory (IIT) and Baars' Global Workspace Theory. These will be applied to the reasoning system Hyper...
Frontiers in Neuroscience
January 24, 2020
Nirit Soffer-Dudek
45 citations
OPINION article Front. Neurosci., 24 January 2020Sec. Sleep and Circadian Rhythms Volume 13 - 2019 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2019.01423
International Journal of Neural Systems
January 23, 2020
Wen Shi, Yamin Li, Zhian Liu et al.
Dynamically assessing the level of consciousness is still challenging during anesthesia. With the help of Electroencephalography (EEG), the human brain electric activity can be noninvasively measured at high temporal resolution. Several typical quasi-stable states are introduced to represent the oscillation of the global scalp electric field. These so-called microstates reflect spatiotemporal...
January 22, 2020
D. Seamon
Many researchers of Western esotericism today assume a “methodological agnosticism” whereby they limit themselves to historical and textual verification. They do not adjudicate whether the specific esoteric tradition studied is genuine or spurious, reasonable or unsound, grounded in a spiritual reality or premised in fantastical impossibilities. In this article, I draw on G.I. Gurdjieff’s...
Neuron
January 22, 2020
Michelle J. Redinbaugh, Jessica M. Phillips, Niranjan A. Kambi et al.
preprint
SUMMARY: Functional MRI and electrophysiology studies suggest consciousness depends on large-scale thalamocortical and corticocortical interactions. However, it is unclear how neurons in different cortical layers and circuits contribute. We simultaneously recorded from central lateral thalamus (CL) and across layers of frontoparietal cortex in awake, sleeping and anesthetized macaques. We found...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
January 22, 2020
Charlotte Martial, Héléna Cassol, Steven Laureys et al.
90 citations
Forty-five years ago, the first evidence of near-death experience (NDE) during comatose state was provided, setting the stage for a new paradigm for studying the neural basis of consciousness in unresponsive states. At present, the state of consciousness associated with NDEs remains an open question. In the common view, consciousness is said to disappear in a coma with the brain shutting down,...
Insights of Anthropology
January 18, 2020
C Mocombe Paul
This work contrasts the concept of the philosophical zombie, p-zombie, with its conception as found in Haitian ontology, zonbi, to understand the material nature of consciousness constitution in the multiverse. Whereas the former is utilized to substantiate the mind-body dualism; the latter as I see it negates the dualism to offer a complete materialist understanding of consciousness...
Ricerca Psicoanalitica
January 17, 2020
Manlio Iofrida
Psychoanalysis has had different philosophical interpretations: from Freud's positivist background, to Jung's Romanticism veined with mysticism and magic, to Lacan's structural linguistics. Today, not even this last great interpretation appears more sustainable: it is a renewed materialism, in the light of the phenomenological research of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but also of ancient and new...
Our Love Affair with Drugs
January 10, 2020
J. Winter
We will consider just two drugs in this chapter. They are phencyclidine and ketamine. Both are widely used as anesthetic agents, ketamine in humans and phencyclidine in animals. The acronym for phencyclidine that we will use, PCP, comes from its chemical name 1-(1-PhenylCyclohexyl)-Piperidine. In addition to their medical use, both ketamine and PCP have gained roles as recreational drugs or, as...