Appendix 4: Transcripts of Interviews with Participants Interview Transcript -Pl Q: Was there a particular point at which you underwent transformation?Yes, it happened after a terrible breakup with my last girlfriend, and I was for the first time in my life thinking of giving up fighting for getting better from my deep depression.It was a sudden, and in fact brutal transformation induced in a...
Reviewed by: Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception by Eviatar Shulman David Nowakowski (bio) Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception. By Eviatar Shulman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 206. isbn 978-1-107-06239-9. Eviatar Shulman’s Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative...
Starting from a comparison of the similarities between a poem by Sylvia Plath called Tulips and the words of someone in the thrall of a delusion I develop a phenomenology of how mood is basic to our articulation of the world. To develop this argument I draw on Heidegger's (1962) concept of attunement [befindlichkeit] and his contention that basic emotions open up aspects of the world for closer...
This case report describes a patient with a dysembryogenic neuroepithelial tumor localized in the posterior thalamus and internal capsule, which presented with psychosis including religiously determined severe self-mutilation, auditory hallucinations, and rituals. The patient's history includes periodic religiousness over decades of her life suggesting that spirituality in this case might be a...
On the basis of four historical and ethnographic case studies of modeling in neuroscience laboratories, this chapter introduces a distinction between transparent and opaque models. A transparent model is a simplified representation of a real world phenomenon. If it is not patently clear, it is at least much better comprehended than its objects of representation. An opaque model, by contrast,...
From the perspective of a comparative neuroanatomist studying the avian pallium, Woodruff’s (2017) claims about the behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for teleost sentience blur the lines between phenomenal and access consciousness (Block, 1995). I discuss the bias that complex cognition can only arise in the cortical layering typical of the mammalian pallium and conclude that...
It is not yet well understood how we become conscious of the presence of other people as being other subjects in their own right. Developmental and phenomenological approaches are converging on a relational hypothesis: my perception of a "you" is primarily constituted by another subject's attention being directed toward "me." This is particularly the case when my body is being physically...
Errol E. Harris devoted his life to grappling with the big questions concerning the relationship between nature and mind. Harris’s career was distinguished, his works were widely published, and yet his metaphysics has until now been excluded from mainstream discourse. The purpose of this work is to outline Harris’s philosophies of nature, mind, and science so as to provide his overarching...
The neural substrates of Yogic meditation are not well understood. Meditation is theorized to be a conscious mental process that induces a set of complex physiological changes within the areas of the brain termed as the "relaxation response." Pilot data of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study is presented to observe and understand the selective activations of designated brain...
The dominant view among philosophers and scientists today is that the world, and everything in it, is constructed from a relatively small set of fundamental entities: roughly those picked out by physics. This view is known as materialism. Materialism is not the view that only these fundamentals exist. The world contains many wondrous things that are not themselves fundamental physical entities:...