Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
F. Kammerer
43 citations
Phenomenal consciousness is often thought to carry special moral weight, making sentience central to animal ethics. The author argues that if materialism about the mind is correct, phenomenal consciousness is probably not especially normatively significant. Therefore, we should accept its likely insignificance and develop an ethics that does not rely on sentience.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2022
25 citations
In-depth interviews with ten people who had self-transcendent experiences—where the usual sense of self is lost—reveal that while all reported losing a sense of separateness and identification with their body and narrative self, other aspects of self varied. Bodily awareness, spatial self-location, sense of agency, perspectival ownership, thoughts, emotions, sensory impressions, metacognition, and personal identity were sometimes lost and sometimes retained. Participants often singled out the absence of one of these optional aspects as key to their feeling of selflessness. The authors conclude that what people experience as lost differs greatly, and recommend avoiding broad terms like 'ego-dissolution' in favor of more precise descriptions.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2024
Julien Tempone-Wiltshire
12 citations
The project of finding neural correlates for Buddhist awakening faces serious definitional, operational, and methodological obstacles. Awakening is highly contested within and across Buddhist traditions, its meaning context- and concept-dependent, and possibly non-conceptual and ineffable. Secular operationalized definitions divorced from soteriological and cultural factors bear little relation to traditional Buddhist constructs. Introspective and neuroimaging issues further complicate secular approaches, though recent advances in empirical first-person phenomenology may help reduce introspective bias. Overall, decontextualizing awakening and placing it within a scientific naturalistic framework creates significant problems that require careful attention to these obstacles.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2023
Tom Froese, John J Sykes
10 citations
The enactive approach to cognitive science, originally expressed through neurophenomenology, rests on three tenets: phenomenological pragmatics, embodied cognition, and conscious efficacy. Most empirical work has focused only on the first tenet, using improved subjective reports to correlate with brain data, while the second tenet has received less attention and the third has been actively avoided. A critical review of four case studies shows that neurophenomenology falls short of its potential by not demonstrating that lived experience itself makes a difference to the living body's dynamics. The authors propose integrating all three tenets, using conscious efficacy as a pivot, to develop genuinely experience-involving accounts of neurophysiological activity during embodied action.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2023
A. Newen, Carlos Montemayor
8 citations
A novel theoretical framework called the ALARM theory of consciousness distinguishes two levels: basic arousal, an alarm system for survival under sudden intense threats, and general alertness, which enables flexible learning and behavior. This two-level account explains recent discoveries of subcortical brain activities involving the thalamus, differences in non-human animal behavior suggesting two types of conscious experience, unifies neural evidence for subcortical and cortico-cortical processes, and clarifies the evolutionary and functional role of conscious experiences.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2024
S. Medhananda
2 citations
The cosmopsychist doctrine of Indian philosopher-mystic Sri Aurobindo has distinct advantages over rival panpsychist positions. After tracing recent philosophical debates about panpsychism, the author brings Aurobindo into dialogue with Miri Albahari's panpsychist idealism based on Śankara's Advaita Vedānta. Albahari's view is critiqued from an Aurobindonian standpoint: its Śankaran metaphysical commitments and eliminativist implications make it an unsatisfactory account of consciousness. Aurobindo's cosmopsychism is then summarized, and its distinctive solution to the individuation problem is explained: Divine Consciousness individuates into multiple creaturely consciousnesses through 'self-limitation' and 'exclusive concentration'. The paper concludes by addressing several potential objections.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2023
Radmila Lorencova, Radek Trnka
2 citations
Indigenous concepts of consciousness are often relational and inseparable from environmental and religious ideas, varying widely across cultural groups. This exploration of variability among a few Indigenous understandings reveals that they view consciousness as layered, with global and local consciousness not in opposition. The study discusses how these adaptive concepts can inform contemporary scientific debates.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2023
Pekka Rechardt
1 citation
The paper argues that understanding how distributed brain events bind together into unified conscious experience requires examining the dimensional structure of phenomenal space. It proposes that phenomenal space and consciousness appear beyond empirical observation because they involve a fourth spatial dimension. A transcendence principle of detection (TPD) is introduced: transcendent degrees of freedom in an n+1 dimension are necessary for experiencing an n-dimensionally extended physical structure as an n-dimensionally extended phenomenal structure. The three-dimensional phenomenal structure of human experience is postulated to be the first-person outcome of three-dimensional neurophysical structures monitored at a fourth spatial dimension.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
July 14, 2022
Leonard Dung
1 citation
Sensorimotor enactivism claims that perceptual experience is shaped by implicit knowledge of how bodily movements alter sensory input. Proponents argue this view uniquely explains why specific material realizers produce particular experiences, closing the 'explanatory gap' that rival theories leave open. The author challenges this by showing the notion of 'material realizer' is ambiguous. Under a narrow interpretation, enactivism fails to bridge the gap; under a wide interpretation, it succeeds only to the same degree as established theories of consciousness. Therefore, enactivism offers no superior explanatory power over traditional accounts of conscious experience.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2026
Pierre Uzan
Cognition may extend beyond the individual mind and beyond spatiotemporal locality. The article first reviews established externalist views—extended mind, distributed cognition, and multiscale enaction—that challenge the idea that cognition is solely internal to a subject. It then examines a more controversial non-local dimension: extrasensory perception (ESP). The reality of ESP is suggested by non-reductive theories of consciousness and supported by significant experimental results, with historical roots including references in the Yoga Sutra. The article presents experimental tests and theoretical modeling for ESP, discusses why the scientific community generally rejects it despite evidence, and argues that this rigorous field deserves attention in cognitive science.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Anand Vaidya
This philosophical paper distinguishes the hard problem of consciousness (HPC), central to contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, from the hard problem of the self (HPS), which preoccupied classical Indian philosophy. It critically evaluates Miri Albahari's perennial idealism (PI), a view she associates with Śaṅkara's Advaita Vedānta, which proposes non-dual universal consciousness as a solution to the HPC. Focusing on Albahari's response to objections about whether such consciousness can ground subject-level phenomenal-intentional consciousness, the author argues that Śaṅkara's metaphysics of non-dual universal consciousness as the ground of all being cannot solve the HPC because it is not fit to ground that type of consciousness.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2025
Charles Fink
The sense of self is a pervasive yet elusive feature of conscious experience. The author argues that this elusiveness arises because we experience ourselves as beings in the world, but this is not what we truly are. The paradox of self-identity is explored through the lens of Advaita Vedānta, which holds that the true self, the ātman, is not a subject of consciousness but consciousness itself. This consciousness is not a worldly phenomenon and does not exist within us, which explains why the self cannot be objectified. The paper presents this philosophical solution to the paradox.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2025
A. Hilton
The term 'cosmic consciousness' is used in two distinct ways: as a metaphysical fundamental or to name a mystical event, but it was originally popularized as a psychological state following such an event. Drawing on six people's reports of spontaneous cosmic consciousness, including the author's own, this article presents first-person accounts of both the mystical event and the subsequent state. It reviews the historical conflation of event and state, examines the phenomenology and conceptual structure of the experience, and suggests a paradigm form while considering 'enlightenment' and the role of psi.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
Christopher F. Masciari
In the debate about whether phenomenal consciousness is rich or sparse, the rich view holds that conscious experience contains more information than can be accessed or held in working memory, while the sparse view denies this. Some sparse-view proponents argue that the subjective feeling of richness arises from scene statistics and a cognitive illusion. This paper argues that the sparse view has further, underappreciated resources to explain intuitions of richness, drawing on research on feature binding and activity-silent working memory.