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
Lena Lindström, Petri Kajonius, Etzel Cardeña
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
July 14, 2022
Chris Letheby
2 citations
Psychedelic experiences can alter users' religious or metaphysical beliefs, but discussions of the evidence are often misleading. A critique of arguments by Wayne Glausser shows that two studies provide stronger evidence for atheist 'deconversion' than he acknowledges, while his objections to the 'Metaphysical Belief Theory' of psychedelic therapy rely on scientifically dubious claims. The strongest version of this theory posits belief shifts from metaphysical naturalism to nonnaturalism, rather than from atheism to classical monotheism.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
September 30, 2023
Alexandre Billon
1 citation
The author examines the claim that people with schizophrenia or depersonalization disorder possess superior introspective abilities that reveal normally hidden features of experience, a view termed the superintrospectionitis thesis. Through argumentation, the author introduces distinctions and questions about introspection's architecture and function that could expand the framework proposed by Kammerer and Frankish for considering introspection in non-human animals, enhanced humans, artificial intelligences, and aliens. The note focuses on disordered or neurodiverse minds rather than other possible forms of introspection.
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
January 30, 2023
Petr Jedlička, Marek Malůš, Filip Tylš et al.
An exploratory study examined whether a period of restricted environmental stimulation (Chamber REST) can alter scientists' metaphysical beliefs about the nature of reality. Participants experienced perceptual effects such as visual or auditory pseudo-hallucinations. The technique showed potential to induce changes in underlying beliefs, but the outcome likely depends on individuals' pre-existing views, including those gained from prior altered states of consciousness. The effects of Chamber REST appear comparable to those of psychedelic sessions.
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.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2026
Barbara Montero
A commentary on Schneider and Bailey's hypothesis that conscious experience may reside in 'prototime', an aspatial, quasi-temporal reality from which space-time emerges. The author agrees this offers a possible solution to the hard problem of consciousness but argues that a timeless reality could serve a similar explanatory role. The author also suggests that the lesson of emergent space-time is not necessarily that consciousness is fundamental to prototime, but that the apparent incomprehensibility of one phenomenon emerging from another should not lead to the conclusion that such emergence is impossible.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Enrico Terrone
The universe can be an object of aesthetic appreciation, and consciousness may either enhance or diminish its aesthetic value. This paper examines how aesthetic appreciation of the universe changes when consciousness is considered, weighing arguments for and against the idea that consciousness enriches the universe's aesthetic worth.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
October 1, 2025
Jerome R. Busemeyer, Meijuan Lu
This article examines three distinct but related approaches to the intersection of quantum mechanics and consciousness: quantum consciousness theories, which explore the role of quantum mechanics in understanding consciousness and vice versa; quantum brain theories, which propose that quantum processes in neurons affect cognition and consciousness; and quantum cognition, a field applying quantum mathematical principles to human judgment and decision-making. The author argues that quantum consciousness theories are more relevant to quantum physics than to psychology, quantum brain theories lack clear implications for complex cognition, and quantum cognition avoids addressing consciousness and remains agnostic about quantum brain hypotheses. The article aims to connect these ideas by linking quantum cognition to the other two topics.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2025
Amy Kind
A commentary challenges Josh Weisberg's attempt to debunk the hard problem of consciousness through his automated compression theory (ACT). Weisberg argues that consciousness appears to have exceptional properties inexplicable by science, but ACT provides an easy explanation showing these properties are illusory. The commentary presents the Goldilocks dilemma: either Weisberg's account fails to capture what makes consciousness seem exceptional, or if it does capture it, then ACT cannot adequately explain why consciousness would appear exceptional if it were not. The dilemma suggests it is difficult for explanatory optimists to find a specification of consciousness's exceptional properties that is neither too small to capture exceptionalness nor too big to be debunked.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
August 1, 2025
Martyna Iwanicka-Kabat
Mystical union experiences, such as feeling at one with the divine, involve specific disturbances in how time is experienced through intentionality. This philosophical analysis identifies four such disturbances in mystical unions and compares them to similar temporal disruptions found in psychopathological conditions like psychosis. The author argues that the process of synthesis—how the mind combines experiences into a coherent whole—is central to shaping the temporal dimension of both mystical and psychotic anomalous experiences. Intentionality, the directedness of consciousness toward objects, provides a powerful framework for understanding these phenomena.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2025
William Seager
The paper explores a convergence between William James and David Bohm, both of whom envisioned the world as an undivided whole, beyond categories of thought and perception. While Bohm is known for his 'hidden variables' interpretation of quantum mechanics, his deeper metaphysical vision was of a unitary reality. James, from a philosophical and psychological starting point, arrived at a similar holistic view. This shared vision offers a novel approach to the hard problem of consciousness, addressing it in a way that dissolves traditional dualisms.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
April 1, 2025
James A. Reggia
Conscious experience may arise from electromagnetic waves propagating through time, not just space. Standard Maxwell's equations are likely incomplete; extending them with complex-valued field components implies that electromagnetic fields extend temporally. Applied to the brain's self-generated fields, this hypothesis accounts for the extended duration of conscious moments and the subjective flow of time—phenomena unexplained by current physics. It also reframes episodic memory: recalling past experiences becomes partly a perceptual re-experiencing process rather than pure retrieval from storage. Complex-valued fields substantially increase the explanatory power of electromagnetic field theories of consciousness.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2025
V. O’Reilly-Shah
The state space theory of consciousness proposes that the cortex processes information by using recurrent neural network engines to embed sensory input into a state space, following Takens' theorem. Consciousness arises at the highest-order engines within a hierarchy of parallel pathways, making it a dynamic process rather than a static neuronal state. This reconciles dualist intuitions with a monist perspective. Each individual's neuronal representations develop uniquely due to history-dependent training, explaining the privacy of qualia, cortical plasticity, and heuristic processing. The theory's non-linear dynamics, sensitive to initial conditions, account for ambiguous figure interpretation and suggest a pathway to free will. It aligns with and expands upon higher-order theories, global workspace theories, and integrated information theory by providing a unifying computational mechanism.