Psychopharmacology is often reduced to treating biological symptoms while ignoring patients' subjective, embodied experience. This paper proposes an enactive and embodied framework that integrates phenomenology, neuroscience, and physiology to understand how psychotropic drugs affect the entire lived body—altering emotional processing, perception, existential feelings, and the embodied sense of self. Medications shape how patients engage with their environment, which in turn influences the embodied system. The clinician's role is to mediate these embodied changes, supporting patients through shifts in self-perception and relationality. The authors advocate for phenomenological drug profiles and patient-centered interventions that account for subjective and embodied changes alongside clinical efficacy.
A recent information-theoretic structural realist theory of the self and consciousness, presented as a form of panpsychism, is examined and argued to face the hard problem of consciousness, similar to Integrated Information Theory. The author proposes introducing a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic structure and dynamics—specifically intrinsic information and intrinsic structure—to help the theory overcome this problem. These metaphysical enhancements move the theory beyond physicalism. Instead of panpsychism or physicalism, the author suggests combining the information-theoretic structuralist theory with neutral monist ontology, which better fits the framework. These reworkings could yield an improved naturalistic account called the neutral-structuralist theory of consciousness and the self.