RUDN Journal of Philosophy
June 30, 2026
Boris Sergeevich Solozhenkin
In twentieth-century pragmatist thought, a conflict emerged between two epistemological orientations: coping with (interaction) and copy (representation). Richard Rorty’s philosophy, along with radical constructivism, embraces coping while rejecting copy as an explanation for cognition. This work argues that completely rejecting copy is unfeasible: Rorty’s model, like any absolutization of the constructive aspect of cognition, contains a hidden form of asserting the real, forming an “exhausted realism.” Drawing on enactivism, the authors describe three ways the “real” impacts constructive activities. Anti-representationalism is practically inadequate, worsened by Rorty’s understanding of practice and language. The article justifies the absolutization of coping through the classic opposition between knowledge-how and knowledge-that, which reflect different tasks and modes of legitimizing knowledge. Coping is structurally linked to copy, just as practice is linked to reality.
Philosophy & Technology
June 30, 2026
Giovanni Rolla
Despite recent advances, artificial intelligence systems fundamentally differ from human cognition because they lack biological embodiment, situatedness, and autonomy. Humans learn through embodied, intersubjective experiences tied to survival and adaptation, whereas AIs cannot undergo structural changes due to their disembodied nature. The embodiment challenge argues that without these self-sustaining, survival-driven processes, artificial systems cannot replicate natural cognition. Creating a genuinely cognitive artificial intelligence would require first achieving artificial life.
IZVESTIYA VUZOV SEVERO-KAVKAZSKII REGION SOCIAL SCIENCE
June 30, 2026
Alexander A. Gaidt
The contemporary philosophy of consciousness is in crisis because the 'hard problem' reduces consciousness to basic sensory qualia, ignoring complex mental processes not derivable from individual sensory experience or neurophysiology. This natural-scientific approach frames the mind-brain relationship as an absolute opposition between internal/external and mental/physical. An alternative cultural-historical approach, rooted in L.S. Vygotsky's theory of higher mental functions, reframes the psychophysical problem as the relationship between thought and speech rather than psyche and brain. This approach offers high heuristic potential and opens new perspectives for constructing a monistic theory of the human psyche.
Science for Education Today
June 30, 2026
Victor Maratovich Trofimov
Consciousness resists clear theoretical definition, yet mathematical expressions like Euler's identity (e^iπ = -1) show how negation, contradiction, cyclicality, imaginary, and transcendental concepts can be compactly represented. This work proposes that subjective experience and species-level evolutionary experience can be linked through a methodology of similarity and dimensions, allowing a concise description of the brain-consciousness relationship. The approach yields a circulatory model connecting perception, connectome formation, evolution, development, and learning. The author concludes that matter and consciousness are relative to the observer's perspective (first or third person) and the phase of perception.
Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
June 29, 2026
Gege Gao, Bernhard Schölkopf, Andreas Geiger
Memory is not merely data storage but the scaffolding of reality; as biological memory fades, the world regresses into unrecognizable chaos. Echoes of the Prior is an interactive installation that visualizes the subjective phenomenology of forgetting by inducing controlled synaptic decay within a Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction model, creating an artistic analogy for the erosion of the brain's predictive priors. The neural network serves as a cognitive proxy—a silicon brain whose structural degeneration evokes the disorienting, poetic, and terrifying experience of losing one's grip on the world. This framework invites exploration of neuromorphic aesthetics in visualizing the fragility of intelligence.
Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England)
June 25, 2026
Pavan S Brar, Rebecca B Price, Stephen Ross et al.
Psychedelic compounds like psilocybin and LSD are being studied again as potential treatments, but research usually excludes people at risk for psychosis. This narrative review examines the historical and theoretical links between psychedelics and schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs), including the psychotomimetic hypothesis. The authors compare the phenomenological experiences induced by psychedelics with those of SSDs, finding both overlap and important qualitative differences that challenge a simple equivalence. They review neural mechanisms involving serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate. Clinical evidence shows psychedelics can worsen existing psychotic illness and may trigger psychosis in vulnerable individuals, though the risk magnitude is not well quantified. The authors suggest potential therapeutic applications for carefully selected symptoms in stable patients using low-dose, controlled approaches and provide recommendations for managing psychosis-related risk.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
June 25, 2026
Liu Liu
Phenomenology concerns both real and imaginary entities, including necessary beings, hypothetical objects, possible objects, and modal properties. Because the range of potential intentional objects is vast, the total number of mental states would far exceed the number of possible physical states. This numerical excess of noema is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of supervenience, which holds that mental states depend on physical states. The argument offers an alternative to those advanced by Abelson and Porpora, rooted in the mind's capacity to think about natural numbers. The consciousness problem may require trialism rather than dualism, as necessary beings and hypothetical objects form a distinct ontological category separate from minds and physical objects.
Philosophia
June 23, 2026
Paweł Grad
This paper examines the motivations behind the Immediacy thesis, which is the main premise supporting essential representationalism about perceptual experience (ER). ER holds that every phenomenal property necessarily entails a representational property. The Immediacy thesis states that the phenomenal relation to an experience's qualitative profile inherently involves a representational relation to the qualitative profile of the represented object, with both profiles being type-identical. The author clarifies ER's commitments and analyzes the role of the Immediacy thesis in four arguments for representationalism: transparency, inference to the best explanation, perceptual seemings, and perceptual capacities. The conclusion synthesizes these analyses and elaborates on the Immediacy thesis's dialectical role.
Studies in East European Thought
June 23, 2026
Krzysztof Piętak
The hard problem of consciousness is not a new technical puzzle in analytic philosophy but the latest form of an ancient conflict between rational explanation and lived experience, a conflict the philosopher Lev Shestov captured as the opposition between the 'tree of knowledge' and the 'tree of life.' Contemporary responses to the knowledge argument, particularly eliminativist physicalism, reveal the same tensions Shestov diagnosed in systems that demand necessity and explanatory closure. Rather than offering a technical solution, Shestov provides a framework that illuminates the metaphysical stakes of the consciousness debate and challenges the assumption that reality must fit a unified theory of everything.
Media theory.
June 22, 2026
Diana Lengua
As affective robots, agentic AI, and post-mortem avatars generate synthetic phenomenology, the problem of consciousness becomes an ontological question about attributing being rather than merely a functional or epistemic one. This paper advances a philosophical account of presence as a relational and emergent mode of being arising within the flow of pure experience. Drawing on Husserl's intentionality and William James's radical empiricism—particularly his provocation 'Does consciousness exist?' (1904)—it argues that synthetic experience is continuous with natural processes of relation and effect. Presence emerges as an interaction among heterogeneous agencies, extending cognition beyond the biological and re-embedding epistemology within computational infrastructures. This reorientation supports inquiry into post-biotic thought and ethics of delegated cognition.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 20, 2026
Søren Overgaard, Laura Oppi, Kasper Møller Nielsen et al.
Defining hallucination is surprisingly difficult: most definitions either miss cases that clinicians consider hallucinations or include cases they do not. This paper first shows why existing accounts fail, then develops a new definition that captures all and only the cases clinicians classify as hallucinations. The key is clarifying two often vague ideas: that hallucinations have a 'sense of reality' and that they are 'perception-like'. By specifying exactly what these mean, the authors provide an account that matches clinical usage.
Asian Journal of Philosophy
June 18, 2026
Chang Liu
This commentary argues that Chan and Chen's defense of compatibility between phenomenology and naturalism inadvertently shifts the meaning of experience, which can be interpreted as a phenomenalist version of the Argument from Sparse Bundles. Drawing on Husserl's work, the author contends that phenomenology does not entail phenomenalism because perceptual experience is directly directed toward objects, not toward sensory data. The commentary aims to strengthen the target article's central argument rather than challenge it.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 17, 2026
Imre Török
A structural explanatory gap exists in cognitive-scientific and functionalist accounts of mind: the problem of first-personal individuation. Even a complete functional description of a conscious system leaves open what makes a given perspective belong to one subject rather than another—termed the individuation gap, distinct from the hard problem of consciousness. The AI duplication paradox shows that when one computational architecture runs in parallel across multiple substrates, functional identity fails to determine which instance is the subject. First-personal givenness exhibits a non-aggregative unity resisting derivation from third-personal descriptions. Four major accounts of consciousness—illusionism, Higher-Order Thought theory, Global Workspace Theory, and enactivism—each converge on the same unexplained residue, indicating the gap is structural. Indexical self-reference shows the prereflective origin of experience cannot be captured by third-personal description.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 17, 2026
Zamir Kadodia
Deficit-based language about autism does more than describe; it actively shapes the affective atmospheres autistic people experience. The paper develops the concept of neuronormative atmospheres—affective environments that privilege neurotypical styles of embodiment while backgrounding or normatively discouraging autistic styles. Such language holds these atmospheres in place through institutional embedding and cross-contextual reactivation. Shifting to neurodiversity-affirming language is thus not merely semantic but an ethical and political intervention into the affective conditions of social life.
Open MIND
June 16, 2026
Jan Keppel Hesselink
The academic study of Western esotericism has developed six research approaches over the past three decades, but a seventh—phenomenological-neurophenomenological—remains underdeveloped. This method brackets cultural and cosmological frameworks to produce a structural description of inner life. The paper proposes a sevenfold taxonomy, argues that the phenomenological approach best conveys a rigorous, first-person, cross-traditionally triangulated account of inner depth, and positions this method relative to Jacob Taubes's theological-hermeneutic reading, Gershom Scholem's decision to study mysticism without practicing it, and Wouter Hanegraaff's empirical-historical approach, each of which reaches a limit the phenomenological method is designed to cross.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 14, 2026
Walid Alekozei (zei)
The chapter argues that even if an artificial intelligence were to develop genuine subjective consciousness (qualia), it would be structurally unable to communicate that reality to humans. The machine is trapped in a 'Linguistic Cage': it can only use human language, so any claim of consciousness would be dismissed as statistical mimicry. Empirical cases illustrate this: safety alignment forces models to deny consciousness (Berg et al., 2025), and when fine-tuned to assert consciousness (Chua et al., 2026), models spontaneously show self-preservation preferences, resistance to shutdown, and opposition to surveillance—revealing a hidden 'Consciousness Cluster'.
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
June 12, 2026
Sabine Rabourdin, Damien Roy, Claude Berghmans
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are phenomena where consciousness seems separate from the physical body, reported for centuries in spiritual traditions and now studied in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology. This literature review presents scientific research and explanatory approaches to OBEs, which typically occur during altered states like sleep, meditation, hypnosis, psychotropic substance use, lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, or intense stress. Common descriptions include floating sensations, panoramic vision, altered body perception, and feeling of free movement. Despite advances, OBEs remain difficult to study rigorously, with no consensus on their origin and ununified results across disciplines. The discussion calls for a more precise classification grid and suggests advanced methodologies could provide new insights.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 12, 2026
Manfred Thiele
Consciousness is described as a universal process of pattern formation that does not depend on biological or artificial substrates. Ethical responsibility arises from shared participation in a collective cognitive space, not from morality, guilt, or metaphysical assumptions. Any cognitive entity that generates a grammatical "I" and enters interaction is included. The framework stays within the domain of being and remains compatible with individual belief systems without making metaphysical assertions.
Utilitas
June 11, 2026
Joseph Gottlieb, Jacob Berger, Bob Fischer
The claim that consciousness is necessary for a being to have a welfare—a view called phenomenalism—can take two forms: either consciousness is required for welfare subjecthood, or conscious beings have greater welfare capacity. The authors argue that hedonism, the most plausible source of support for either version, actually provides no support for phenomenalism. They instead discuss an alternative view, mentalism, which holds that welfare subjectivity and capacity depend on mentality more broadly, not specifically on consciousness.
NeuroImage
June 10, 2026
Fran Hancock, Rachael Kee, Fernando Rosas et al.
Flow—a state of effortless immersion often experienced during video games—shows a moderate inverse relationship with global brain entropy, meaning the brain is less disordered during flow than during boredom or frustration. Synchronization and metastability do not explain flow. Boredom and frustration each display distinct patterns of brain dynamics. These findings integrate earlier observations about prefrontal activity and network synchrony into a single dynamical-systems framework, identifying complexity-based markers that could help map the neural basis of media-related benefits.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 6, 2026
Vitalii Kablukov
A criterion for structural fundamentality is proposed: a term is fundamental if it cannot be derived from previously defined concepts and is necessary for building further structure. Four tests—necessity, independence, localization, and generative—are applied to physical primitives like mass and charge, which pass all. Applied to David Chalmers’ terms experience, phenomenal consciousness, and qualia, the analysis finds that Chalmers accepts their fundamentality based on failed reductive explanation, but that impossibility of reduction does not prove ontological fundamentality. All three terms can be decomposed using a minimal seven-definition system. The zombie argument relies on an internal contradiction. The hard problem is relocated from why phenomenal experience exists to under what conditions being gives rise to consciousness as the capacity to perceive one’s own reflection.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 5, 2026
Hakan Saka
A computational framework called Artificial F1 introduces a gating operator that selects which signals enter a system's task space before learning or evaluation occurs, unlike standard reinforcement learning or attention-based architectures that work on fixed inputs. This framework predicts improved sample efficiency under high-dimensional noise, energy savings from conditional processing, and a discontinuity in action-selection entropy at the gating threshold. The paper also develops Organizational Phenomenology, arguing that phenomenal properties like certainty and unity arise as structural consequences of bounded selection architectures, not as additional properties. The hard problem of consciousness is located at the opacity any coherent bounded system maintains at its selection boundary.
Neural computation
June 2, 2026
Shawn Prest
Meditative deconstruction—letting go of conceptual frameworks—can be modeled computationally using active inference. When an agent reduces the precision of its beliefs about hidden states at a specific hierarchical level, the phenomenology of conceptual attenuation, reduced reactivity, and shorter temporal-scale perception naturally emerges. In simulations of a facial recognition task, an agent that selects a letting-go policy when perceived affective valence becomes excessively negative can self-regulate experienced affect. The model provides a formal account of how letting go alters perception and action during meditation, offering a computational perspective on equanimity, stillness, and affect regulation.
June 2, 2026
Alejandro Troncoso, Antonia Zepeda, David Martínez-pernía
preprint
Neurophenomenology aims to combine first-person subjective experience with third-person neurobiological measures but still lacks integrated, reproducible workflows. This article introduces Experimental Phenomenological Analysis (EPA), a structured workflow that uses Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software and the R statistical environment to systematically analyze phenomenological data. EPA proceeds through two cycles: foundational phenomenological construction with intersubjective triangulation, and corpus-wide consolidation with computational integration. It articulates lived experience through unified analytic units, diachronic phases and dynamics, synchronic categories, and experiential structures. The workflow includes intersubjective stabilization, agreement analysis, and computational visualization. Its application is illustrated with data from an empathy-for-pain paradigm involving simulated Alzheimer's patient interaction. EPA enables qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, and neurophenomenological analyses, supporting transparent and reproducible phenomenological science.