Qeios
April 27, 2020
Genis Oña, José Carlos Bouso
7 citations
Psychiatry faces major challenges, as many mental disorders still lack effective treatments despite recent innovations. The therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs within psychotherapeutic settings offers a promising, integrative treatment that produces enduring effects for patients. Psychedelic psychotherapy combines complex pharmacological action with enhanced psychotherapeutic interventions, representing an important innovation in the field.
Qeios
October 13, 2023
4 citations
The article examines how significance—the meaningfulness that things have for us—plays a foundational role in the historical formation and change of social reality. Drawing on enactive cognitive science, which views cognition as emerging from an organism's active engagement with its environment, the authors propose a conceptual framework in which significance is not merely subjective but actively shapes social structures and historical processes. The argument suggests that social reality is continuously constituted and transformed through the dynamic interplay between embodied agents and their meaningful environments, offering a new perspective on the relationship between cognition, history, and society.
Qeios
December 24, 2024
2 citations
Consciousness remains poorly defined despite centuries of study. The hard problem is the explanatory gap between phenomenal experience and neurobiological functions, while the easy problem—evolutionary emergence from biological substrate—also resists explanation. Debates extend into quantum mechanics and information theory, reviving panpsychism and the idea that information precedes material substrate. Neopanpsychism proposes consciousness in physical elements and astrophysical networks. Information theories allow non-biological objects to have proto-mental abilities if they meet architectural and informational criteria. The author argues for refocusing empirical research on consciousness using established metrics rather than scholastic debates about non-physical nature.
Qeios
January 10, 2024
David Leong
2 citations
This interdisciplinary paper argues that Buddhism's Eighth State of Consciousness, quantum holography, and the Jungian collective unconscious share conceptual links. The Eighth Consciousness in Buddhism is described as a realm beyond ordinary sensory and mental states, connecting to universal awareness. Quantum holography holds that every part of the universe contains information about the whole, similar to the collective unconscious, a shared reservoir of human memories and ideas. The paper suggests that photons oscillating between particle and wave states mediate perception through resonance, hinting at a multi-layered consciousness mirroring quantum reality. Through comparative analysis, it posits that integrating quantum theories and Buddhist wisdom can deepen understanding of the psyche, championing such approaches for decoding the interplay of mind and universe.
Qeios
April 17, 2024
Ted Christopher
1 citation
The materialist view of life faces problems, notably the missing heritability problem that challenges the idea that DNA alone determines life. This, combined with humans' innate dualistic understanding, provides a preliminary argument for the basic dualism common to religions. The paper focuses on experiences of transcendence or enlightenment from religious and mystical practices, using Jacque Lusseyran's unity experience and Buddhist examples. It suggests a framework connecting these experiences to a soul and discussions on meaning. A modern framing compares traditional Buddhism with its science-influenced Western counterpart, using Sam Harris's "Waking Up" as a guide, noting other traditions face similar detours in a science-led era.
Qeios
January 17, 2024
Ana María Rosso
1 citation
Psychoactive plants have been used across cultures for medicine, religion, ritual, and recreation, inducing altered states of consciousness (ASCs) that include bodily sensations, visions, dreams, and cognitive impacts. These ASCs differ on dimensions of arousal versus sedation, pleasure versus pain, and expansion versus contraction. The article examines the distinction between psychotropic, analgesic, stimulant, and visionary substances, and explores shamanism and ecstasy techniques. It then focuses on mandrake and peyote as representative species, comparing their biological effects, long histories of medicinal use, and symbolic beliefs. Peyote was notably sought after by Western intellectuals around 1960 and is used by both drug abusers and traditional cultures.
Qeios
May 31, 2026
Marco Masi
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but lack true semantic understanding; they manipulate symbols based on patterns and probabilities without genuine meaning. Current debates often conflate operational semantic competence—achieved through human feedback and training—with intrinsic semantic understanding, which requires a connection to subjective experience. The paper defends a conscious-semantics thesis: intrinsically grounded meaning plausibly requires phenomenal consciousness. True artificial general intelligence may demand semantic understanding tied to qualia and the first-person perspective, offering more meaningful tests of intelligence than the Turing test.
Qeios
May 15, 2026
This work critically examines speculative consciousness hypotheses circulating on social media, categorizing them as fact, theory, or metaphysical postulate. The author argues that many popular claims about consciousness—such as panpsychism or simulation theories—are often presented as established facts but lack empirical grounding, functioning instead as untestable metaphysical postulates. The classification system clarifies the epistemological status of these ideas, distinguishing between scientifically plausible theories and speculative beliefs. The analysis highlights how social media blurs these boundaries, leading to widespread misconceptions about what is known regarding consciousness.
Qeios
May 5, 2026
Yat Ho Tiu
Consciousness may arise from nested coupling of brain oscillations across multiple time scales, driven by specific cellular mechanisms in deep-layer cortical neurons. The theory proposes that this coupling must span a broad frequency range, large spatial extent, and show top-down causal dominance. Evidence from sensory deprivation, dreaming, amnesia, and clinical cases indicates that external sensory input is not necessary for consciousness, long-term memory is not necessary but a very short temporal buffer (~200–250 ms) likely is, and motivational drive is deeply entangled with arousal systems that enable consciousness. The framework includes mathematical indices for measuring consciousness and seven testable predictions.
Qeios
February 26, 2026
Jonathan David Nash
A consensual definition and taxonomy of consciousness remains elusive due to several factors: the conflation of 'conscious' and 'consciousness', competing descriptions and types, and the term's polysemantic nature. The author proposes an orthographic convention to distinguish tangible and intangible connotations. Methodological challenges in consciousness research and the search for neural correlates are reviewed, along with a contrast between consciousness as a singular phenomenon versus a multifaceted process. Theoretical and procedural obstacles to classifying consciousness within a taxonomic framework are examined, and several attempts are evaluated. Suggestions for minimizing obstacles are offered, including a perspective from foundational Indian scriptures.
Qeios
December 9, 2025
Jacques Suspène, Sarah Huet, Sabine Berteina‐raboin et al.
Alcohol use disorder involves excessive drinking, and existing medications often fail to prevent relapse. Psilocybin is being studied as a treatment for substance use disorders. This review of recent clinical trials finds that psilocybin appears to reduce craving for alcohol, but its effect on overall alcohol consumption is less clear. The authors note that future trials would benefit from larger sample sizes and standardized tests.
Qeios
October 23, 2025
The essay argues that the hard problem of consciousness—the subjective experience of 'what it's like'—may be unsolvable by current scientific methods. Neuroscience identifies neural correlates of consciousness, but these are only proximate manifestations, not the fundamental nature of consciousness. The core critique is the 'subset problem': if consciousness is a superset that includes brain structures, defining it solely through brain mechanisms is inherently limited. Scientific instruments, designed for the physical realm, cannot measure phenomena that may transcend material dimensions, suggesting rules beyond the brain. Consciousness could be a primary, abstract constituent of reality, like information or mathematics, rendering the hard problem a consequence of applying subset-oriented tools to a superset phenomenon. The essay proposes that a broader conceptual paradigm is necessary.
Qeios
September 29, 2024
Jonathan Nash
The author argues that progress in consciousness research is hindered by imprecise language, conflated terminology, and a lack of operational definitions. A review of historical and current definitions reveals a plethora of overlapping concepts. The paper critiques the search for neural correlates of consciousness, calling for greater semantic clarity. It discusses whether consciousness should be understood as a process rather than a tangible thing located within the nervous system. Suggestions for improving discourse include adhering more strictly to operational definitions and reconsidering the conceptual foundations of the field.
Qeios
Milad Olfat
Merleau-Ponty's innovation is treating the body as existence or ontology, rejecting the separation of thought and body. He opposed mechanical psychology and two forms of absolutism—absolute Christianity and absolute Marxism—by introducing perception to connect consciousness and objectivity. Following Cezanne, he rejected dualism, integrating soul and body, sight and action. He emphasized the body's role in emotional perception and believed in a unified subject or Gestalt rather than isolated emotion or consciousness. His phenomenology extracts hypotheses humans make about themselves and their world. Time, for him, rises in human beings, who live in a continuum moving toward the future while reflecting on past experiences.
Qeios
Jose Luis Garcia Vigil
Time appears to slow down during meditation and dreaming compared to objective clock time, based on introspective self-observation by the author. The work uses the phenomenological approach of perception to explore subjective and objective time, comparing personal experience with clock measurements. The findings highlight the complex and interconnected nature of time perception in human consciousness.
Qeios
April 22, 2026
The work argues that without consciousness, there can be no genuine meaning or understanding, and therefore artificial general intelligence (AGI) as commonly conceived is unattainable. It contends that current AI systems, which lack subjective experience, cannot possess meaning in the way humans do. The piece explores the philosophical relationship between consciousness, meaning, and intelligence, concluding that true AGI would require consciousness.