Consciousness is a global activity of the nervous system. Its physiological and pathological mechanisms have been studied in relation to the natural sleep-wake cycle and various forms of normal or morbid unconsciousness, mainly in neurophysiology and clinical neurology. Neuropsychology has been more interested in specific higher brain functions, such as perception and memory and their...
This paper focuses on the role and value of thought experiments concerning phenomenal consciousness. It is divided in two parts. The first part surveys the philosophical and scientific context in which many well-known thought experiments concerning the mind and consciousness have their roots. In particular it focuses on the problems left open by scientific theories about consciousness and by...
With the aim of further advancing the understanding of the human brain’s functional connectivity, we propose a network metric which we term the geodesic entropy. This metric quantifies the Shannon entropy of the distance distribution to a specific node from all other nodes. It allows to characterize the influence exerted on a specific node considering statistics of the overall network...
Recent experiments (gedanken or otherwise) and theorems in quantum mechanics (QM), such as new iterations on Wigner's friend and delayed choice, have led many people to claim that QM is not compatible with determinate and intersubjectively consistent experience (what some call absoluteness of observed events), such as experiences of experimental outcomes. In the case of delayed choice the...
Psychedelics exert unique effects on human consciousness. The thalamic filter model suggests that core effects of psychedelics may result from gating deficits, based on a disintegration of information processing within cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) feedback loops. To test this hypothesis, we characterized changes in directed (effective) connectivity between selected CTSC regions after...
Metaphysical underdetermination arises when we are not able to decide, by purely theoretical criteria, between competing interpretations of scientific theories with different metaphysical commitments. This is the case in which non-relativistic quantum mechanics (QM) founds itself in. Among several available interpretations, there is the interpretation which states that the interaction with the...
The surge of interest about mindfulness meditation is associated with a growing empirical evidence about its impact on the mind and body. Yet, despite promising phenomenological or psychological models of mindfulness, a general mechanistic understanding of meditation steeped in neuroscience is still lacking. In parallel, predictive processing approaches to the mind are rapidly developing in the...
The phenethylamine 4-fluoroamphetamine (4-FA) is a so-called novel psychoactive substance with a chemical structure resembling that of amphetamine and MDMA. Since 4-FA users report their subjective experience ranges between the effects induced by amphetamine and MDMA, and it is known that both substances can produce an altered state of consciousness, this study tests whether 4-FA induces a...
The chapter looks at the mind-body problem from a more reasonable point of view. Mental processes, whether conscious or unconscious, may be observed as brain processes or neural process. The new, somewhat more generalized, dogma thus becomes: the feelings of animals look as if they were brain processes whenever brain specialists observe these feelings through their instruments and their senses....
Friedrich von Schelling was a significant cultural influence when Henrik Ibsen lived in Germany in the 1850s. However, because of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, which stood out as irreconcilable with the scientific philosophy of the positivists, Schelling came to be more and more neglected after the mid-nineteenth century. His pronounced idealism, belief in God, and metaphysical comments were...