People who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious (SBNR) hold more paranormal beliefs and report more mystical experiences and feelings of universal connectedness than either religious or non-religious individuals. However, SBNR individuals resemble religious individuals in their patterns of cognitive biases. They also score higher on measures of schizotypy. Conversions between groups since childhood are linked to specific cognitive differences: dualism predicts conversion to religion, while schizotypy predicts conversion to SBNR.
Radical enactivists worry that using the concept of information in ecological psychology implies content, which would conflict with non-representational cognitive science. This article argues that James J. Gibson's later notion of information was intended to be content-less—information for affordances rather than information about the environment. The authors contend that subsequent ecological psychology has drifted into cognitivist language, but that reclaiming Gibson's original insight—that there is no information in content, only in use—allows the concept to be applied without invoking representation. Embracing this content-free notion of information can help situate the enactivist's "basic mind" within larger, more complex scales of coordination.
People can have a phenomenal experience—a raw, qualitative feel—without having immediate access to it or being able to report it at the moment. Using a novel paradigm, participants (Experiment 1, N = 40) lacked online access to a stimulus but could later retrospectively judge its phenomenal, qualitative aspects. A second experiment (N = 40) ruled out explanations based on unconscious processing or responses to stimulus offset. The results suggest that phenomenal and access consciousness are not only conceptually distinct but can also be empirically separated, supporting Ned Block's controversial dissociation.