Much mischief concerning the concept of a human body is generated by the failure of philosophers to distinguish various important senses of the term 'body.' I discuss three of those senses and illustrate the issues they can generate by discussing the concept of a Lockean exchange of bodies as well as the brain-body switch.

The hypothesis that an ant colony may exhibit some level of phenomenal consciousness encompasses four distinct answers, depending on how the parts interact in the constitution of the superorganism (Fonseca, 2023). However, for a given answer to be satisfactory to the Combination Problem, the chemical information transmitted by ants would have to be structured in such a way as to communicate intentional states, and, consequently, following exposure to external sensory stimuli or contact via antennae (semiochemical exchange), interindividual neural synchronization (...) (among brains) could occur, thereby grounding collectively coordinated behavior. Accordingly, I defend the view that the chemical signals dispersed by ants carry mental content, and that semiochemical exchange produces interbrain synchronization, thus constituting a collective consciousness. I conclude that, if there is sufficiently strong synchronization among brains, following the sharing of intentional states, an ant colony may possess a unified mind with a spatially distributed body. (shrink)

Many believe that a suitably programmed computer could act for its own goals and experience feelings. I challenge this view and argue that agency, mental causation and qualia are all founded in the unique, homeostatic nature of living matter. The theory was formulated for coherence with the concept of an agent, neuroscientific data and laws of physics. By this method, I infer that a successful action is homeostatic for its agent and can be caused by a feeling - which does (...) not motivate as a force, but as a control signal. From brain research and the locality principle of physics, I surmise that qualia are a fundamental, biological form of energy generated in specialized neurons. Subjectivity is explained as thermodynamically necessary on the supposition that, by converting action potentials to feelings, the neural cells avert damage from the electrochemical pulses. In exchange for this entropic benefit, phenomenal energy is spent as and where it is produced - which precludes the objective observation of qualia. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The individual-community relationship has always been one of the most fundamental topics of social sciences. In sociology, this is known as the micro-macro relationship while in economics it refers to the processes, through which, individual actions lead to macroeconomic phenomena. Based on philosophical discourse and systems theory, many sociologists even use the term "emergence" in their understanding of micro-macro relationship, which refers to collective phenomena that are created by the cooperation of individuals, but cannot be reduced to individual actions. (...) "Emergence" theories attempt to explain the nature of society as a complex system by examining how individuals and their relationships lead to the creation of integrated and macro-social phenomena such as markets, educational systems, cultural beliefs, and shared social practices. As a prelude to activity, every researcher has to answer the question from the methodological point of view, how is it possible to study the behavior of social groups and how can we gain knowledge about the laws related to social groups? Anyone who deals with humanities and social sciences or any reality and phenomenon that affects human beings, inevitably deals with the reality that is emerging. In fact, emergence occurs when one level of reality emerges radically from another level. Examples of emergent levels of reality include how the mind emerges from the body; or the way society emerges from human beings. Therefore, when there is an emerging factor, different scientific disciplines should be used, because it is inevitable to talk about social affairs, psychology and neurobiology, as well as physical and even chemical. INTRODUCTION Since its beginning in the 19th century, sociology has faced the fundamental question of what a social phenomena stands for? At a glance, sociologists deal with the study of social groups, collective behavior, institutions, social structures, social networks, and social dynamics, and ultimately all such phenomena are composed of individuals. Therefore, social phenomena seem to have no independent ontological status, and in this case, sociology is ultimately about reducible individuals. Different approaches about the micro-macro relationship, using the concept of "emergence", argue that although collective phenomena are created by individuals, they cannot be reduced to individual action. The term "emergence" is used to distinguish "emergent results" from " Procedural results". Results are called Procedural that can only be calculated by adding or subtracting the causes that act together. On the contrary, they are emergent outcomes that are qualitatively novel compared to the causes from which they originate. An example of such emergent results is mental characteristics that emerge from neural processes, but are not considered among the characteristics of neural processes of components - which are their origin. Philosophical debates about emergentism and reductionism focus on the mind-brain relationship, but as many philosophers have noted, they can be generalized to apply to any hierarchical set of features. The cognitive revolution reactivated a 19th century controversy between theorists of Identity and dualism. The theorists of Identity believe in reductionist materialism and elimination of metaphysics, according to which the mind is nothing more than the biological, while the dualists believe that the mind and the brain are distinct from each other. Emergence has been considered as a third way between the theories of Identity and dualism. METHODOLOGY Interdisciplinarity Is fundamentally indicated by the dominance of open systems as well as social and emerging systems at different levels. Therefore, as long as we are facing a new emergentism, there will necessarily be different fields and an interdisciplinary method. The commonality of social sciences and cognitive sciences on the issue of emergence provides the possibility of interaction and exchange of concepts between these two for deeper research. Therefore, in this research, apart from the concepts of Subvenience and downward causation, we have used multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, which are used to explain the emerging concept in cognitive sciences, including neurobiology, psychology, and philosophy. For analytical and interdisciplinary approaches, after examining the concepts of subvenience, and wildly disjunctive, Individualistic and collectivist emergentism have been reviewed. And then their adequacy is criticized and evaluated in meeting strong emergence conditions. FINDINGS Philosophers of the mind have been able to define the conditions of irreducibility and downward causation, which are essential for strong emergence, by using the principle of subvenience with the help of multiple realization and wildly disjunctive principles. Therefore, by definition, emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and emergentist collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the challenges facing the two methodological approaches of individualism and collectivism leads us to three unresolved issues about the emerging phenomenon, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. Despite the differences in the stances of these two approaches regarding the aforementioned triple problems, individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and some others are irreducible due to their complexity, the determination of which, depends on the case study of the mechanism of emergence of each social characteristic. CONCLUSION An emergence that is consistent with reductionism is called a weak emergence. And strong emergence includes the principle of irreducibility and downward causality. According to strong emergence, the characteristics of social phenomena have downward causal power, which cannot be reduced to the causal forces. The principle of subvenience, together with multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, can provide the conditions of irreducibility and downward causality, which are essential conditions of strong emergence. Based on the philosophical analysis of two methodological approaches, individualist and collectivist, it can be concluded that emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and reification collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the problems faced by these two approaches leads us to three unresolved issues, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. individualist emergentists acknowledge the existence of emergent social characteristics, but despite this, they believe that these characteristics are not real but merely analytical constructs that require explanation based on individuals and their mutual actions. But collectivists argue that emergentism yields a categorical ontology and supports social realism. They accept the dependence of social characteristics on individuals, but claim that social entities and structures are ontologically independent. Individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and others are irreducible due to their complexity; and the only way to recognize this is to engage in empirical studies of the mechanisms and temporal processes of "emergence" that create social characteristics. NOVELTY The newness of this compact article is as follows: a) Presenting an interdisciplinary approach using the analysis of philosophy of cognitive sciences, including the philosophy of mind, neurobiology and psychology to formulate the issue of social emergence; b) Criticizing individualist and collectivist methodological approaches to the issue of social emergence and explaining the sufficiency and shortcomings of both in providing weak and strong emerging conditions; c) Explaining and categorizing the challenges facing methodological approaches in explaining the phenomenon of social emergence, in three categories: realism, downward causality, and mechanism. BIBLIOGRAPHY Beckermann, A., Flohr, H., & Kim, J. (eds.) (1992). Emergence or reduction? Essays on the prospects of nonreductive physicalism. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of Naturalism. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, R., Danermark, B. & Price, L. (2018). Interdisciplinarity and wellbeing: A critical realist general theory of interdisciplinarity. London and New York: Routledge. Blau, P.M. (1981). Introduction: diverse views of social structure and their common denominator. In Blau, P.M. & Merton, R.K. (eds.), Continuity in Structural Inquiry (pp. 1–23). Beverly Hills: Sage. Blau, P.M. (1987). Microprocess and macrostructure. In K.S. Cook (ed.), Social Exchange Theory (pp. 83–100). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Brooks, R.A., & Maes, P. (eds). (1994). Artificial life IV; proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Coleman, J. S. (1987). Microfoundations and macrosocial behavior. In: J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, R. Munch, & Neil J. Smelser (Eds.). The Micro-Macro Link (pp. 153–73). Berkeley: University of California. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elster, J. (1985). Making sense of Marx. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fodor, J.A. (1974). Special sciences (Or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis). Synthese, 28(2), 97–115. Fodor, J.A. (1989). Making mind matter more. Philosophical Topics, 17, 59-79. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hempel, C.G. (1965). Aspects of scientific explanation and other essays in the philosophy of science. New York: The Free Press. Horgan, T. (1993). From supervenience to superdupervenience: meeting the demands of a material world. Mind, 102, 555-586. Humphreys, P. (1997). How properties emerge”. Philosophy of Science, 64, 1-17. Kim, J. (1999). Making sense of emergence. Philosophical Studies, 95, 3–36. Kincaid, H. (1997). Individualism and the unity of science. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Lewis, D.K. (1986). The plurality of worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nigel, G., & Conte, R. (eds.) (1995). Artificial societies; The computer simulation of social life. London: UCL Press. O’Connor, T. (1994). Emergent properties. American Philosophical Quarterly, 31, 91-104. Popper, K.R. (1968). Conjectures and refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row. Sawyer, R. K. (2001). Emergence in sociology: contemporary philosophy of mind and some implications for sociological theory. American Journal of Sociology, 107, 551-585. Sawyer, R. K. (2004). The mechanisms of emergence. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34, 260–282. Sawyer, R. K. (2005). Social emergence: societies as complex systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sawyer, R.K. (2003). Nonreductive individualism: Part 2, Social causation. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 33, 203–224. Winch, P. (1993). The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy‭ (SAMT, Trans.). Tehran, Iran: SAMT. (shrink)

A review of Geoffrey B. Saxe, Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas. Saxe offers a comprehensive treatment of social and linguistic change in the number systems used for economic exchange in the Oksapmin community of Papua New Guinea. By taking the cognition-is-social approach, Saxe positions himself within emerging perspectives that view cognition as enacted, situated, and extended. The approach is somewhat risky in that sociality surely does not exhaust cognition. Brains, bodies, and materiality also contribute to cognition—causally at least, and (...) possibly constitutively as well (as argued by Clark & Chalmers; Renfrew & Malafouris). This omission necessarily excludes the material dimension of numeracy. (shrink)

Imagine that you and a duplicate of yourself are lying unconscious, next to each other, about to undergo a complete step-by-step exchange of bits of your bodies. It certainly seems that at no stage in this exchange of bits will you have thereby switched places with your duplicate. Yet it also seems that the end-result, with all the bits exchanged, will be essentially that of the two of you having switched places. Where will you awaken? I claim that (...) one and the same person possesses both bodies, occupies both places and will experience both awakenings, just as a person whose brain has been bisected must at once experience both of the unconnected fields of awareness, even though each of these will falsely appear to him as the entirety of his experience. I also claim that the more usual apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind. In all conscious life there is only one person - I - whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience - its quality of being mine, the simple immediacy of it for whatever is having experience. One powerful argument for this is statistical: on the ordinary view of personhood it is an incredible coincidence for you (though not for others) that out of 200,000,000 sperm cells the very one required on each occasion for your future existence was first to the egg in each of the begettings of yourself and all your ancestors. The only view that does not make your existence incredible, and that is not therefore (from your perspective) an incredible view, is that any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway. It is a consequence that self-interest should extend to all conscious organisms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: -/- This essay addresses how the complex processes that occur during jazz improvisation enact behaviors that resemble the logic of gift exchange first described by Marcel Mauss. It is possible to bring to bear structural, sociological, political economical, deconstructive or even ethical approaches to what constitutes gift exchange during the performance of jazz. Yet, I would like to shift from focusing this analysis of jazz improvisation with reference to the language of music as symbolic action (which all (...) of these approaches require), to grounding improvisation in embodied and distributed cognition, the performance of which begins with a ritual gift of silence. By silence, I refer to the embodied, yet shared pure duration as felt synchrony within an individual performer, that extends to the members of an ensemble. Thus, I refer to both aesthetic and micro-political implications of embodied, yet also distributed musical cognition in real time. -/- For jazz musicians, embodied silence becomes the initial condition for processes of cognitive bifurcation. For it is bifurcation that attracts us to jazz in the first place. Here I expand my previous work establishing similarities in the behavior of bifurcating systems in physical and cognitive sciences to the unfolding of ambiguity in real time during improvisation with respect to polyphony, polytonality and polyrhythms in the history of jazz from Charlie Parker to Ornette Coleman. We can therefore re-conceptualize jazz improvisation as a subversive antidote for processes of determination identified in a sub-discipline of cultural studies called “cognitive capitalism.” By examining silence from this anthropological perspective, we can conceive of jazz performance as a ritualized resistance to top-down cognitive control immanent with social and digital networks. The ritual enactment that is jazz improvisation points towards an aesthetics of bifurcation that is simultaneously a micro-politics of neuro-resistance. In other words, I argue that freedom of thought requires freedom from thought as an initial condition. -/- Yet, I emphasize the empirical rather than mystical grounds to this gift of silence. The valorization of silence by jazz musicians is not simply etiquette, an ethics of reciprocity for performers exchanging “riffs,” but an initial condition that jazz performers (and, I would argue, listeners) experience in their bodies, thus linking embodied cognition to a collective field of cultural production that emerges from each embodied individual, and yet also pervades the ensemble in ways reminiscent of feedback loops in complex systems. The recent and remarkable research on music and the brain has demonstrated that it is now possible to describe jazz improvisation as possessing both embodied and distributed cognitive properties. The emergent neuronal ensemble behavior within the individual that is visible in jazz improvisors, discovered by the neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins led by Charles Limb, bears striking resemblance to the interactive behaviors of the jazz ensemble itself. Thus, it is by recourse to recent research by myself and others into the cognitive neuroscience of music generally, and jazz improvisation specifically, that the empirical grounds for an anthropology of neuro-resistance become visible. (shrink)

Recent work in neuroscience and artificial intelligence has revived an old philosophical question in a new form: is the brain best understood as a system that constantly predicts its sensory input, or does cognition involve something more than prediction? Predictive processing theories describe the brain as a mechanism that minimizes prediction error and have been highly successful in explaining perception, action, and learning. This paper argues that, while prediction plays an important role in how brains function, it cannot (...) by itself explain understanding, meaning, or rational thought. The problem is not that predictive models are wrong, but that they are often asked to do too much philosophical work. Drawing on ideas from embodied cognition and interpretation, the paper shows why successful prediction does not amount to genuine understanding. Contemporary artificial intelligence systems are used as a test case: despite their impressive predictive abilities, they illustrate how behavior can be effective without being meaningful in the relevant sense. The paper proposes that cognition must be explained at more than one level, combining neural processes, bodily engagement with the world, and participation in norm-governed practices. On this view, the mind–body problem is not about mysterious mental substances, but about how different kinds of explanation fit together. (shrink)

The Universal Law of Balance and the Mystery of Consciousness Integration -/- A New Approach to the Combination Problem in Panpsychism -/- Introduction -/- The nature of consciousness remains one of the greatest mysteries in philosophy and science. One of the most challenging questions in panpsychism is the combination problem—how do small conscious entities merge into a single, unified experience? While traditional theories struggle to explain why consciousness emerges in some systems (such as the human brain) but not in (...) others (such as a rock), a new perspective may provide a breakthrough. -/- Angelito Malicse’s universal law of balance in nature offers a potential solution. If all processes in nature seek equilibrium, then consciousness itself must follow the same natural laws. This principle suggests that conscious integration does not happen randomly but depends on specific balance conditions. By applying this idea, we can explain how micro-consciousnesses combine into a single, larger consciousness and why this process only occurs in certain systems. -/- The Role of Balance in Consciousness -/- Nature operates through a constant pursuit of balance—whether in physical, chemical, or biological systems. The human body maintains homeostasis, the universe follows thermodynamic equilibrium, and even ecosystems regulate themselves through feedback mechanisms. -/- If consciousness is a fundamental part of nature, it too must follow these balancing principles. This means that when conscious entities interact, they will only merge into a unified whole if their interactions lead to a state of equilibrium. If the system remains unstable or fragmented, the conscious units will remain separate. -/- This concept helps address the combination problem by shifting the focus from merely adding up consciousnesses to understanding the balance conditions required for their integration. In this view, the brain becomes conscious not just because it has many neurons but because it maintains a delicate balance of feedback loops that allow consciousness to stabilize as a single experience. -/- Feedback Mechanisms and the Unification of Consciousness -/- A key insight from Malicse’s universal law is that consciousness functions as a self-adjusting feedback system. Just as the body regulates temperature and energy levels, consciousness must regulate itself to maintain stability. -/- In any system composed of many small conscious entities, the following process occurs: -/- 1. Micro-conscious units interact and exchange information. Each conscious unit responds to signals from others, adjusting itself accordingly. -/- 2. A feedback loop forms, leading to self-organization. If the interactions reach a stable pattern, the system begins to behave as a single, unified whole. -/- 3. When equilibrium is achieved, the system experiences itself as one consciousness. If the balance is disrupted, consciousness fragments into smaller, independent units. -/- This process explains why certain systems, such as the brain, experience a unified consciousness, while others, like a rock, do not. In the brain, neurons communicate in a highly integrated way, constantly adjusting to maintain balance. A rock, on the other hand, lacks the dynamic feedback loops necessary for conscious unification. -/- The Physical Basis of Conscious Integration -/- The idea that balance determines consciousness merging aligns with key findings in neuroscience and physics. -/- 1. Neural Synchronization: Studies show that when brain activity becomes highly synchronized, conscious experience becomes clearer and more unified. This suggests that balance and feedback stability are essential for maintaining a single conscious state. -/- 2. Quantum Coherence: Some researchers propose that quantum processes in the brain contribute to consciousness. If Malicse’s law of balance applies at the quantum level, it could explain why certain quantum systems (such as the brain’s microtubules) support conscious integration while others do not. -/- 3. Field-Based Consciousness: If consciousness operates like an energy field, as some theories suggest, then balance laws could determine when local fields merge into a larger unified experience. This could have implications for understanding collective intelligence, AI consciousness, and even planetary consciousness. -/- Testing the Balance Hypothesis -/- To confirm that balance and feedback stability determine conscious unification, experiments could be designed to test this principle. One approach would involve studying how disruptions in balance affect consciousness. -/- For example, in split-brain experiments, when the two hemispheres of the brain are disconnected, the individual seems to have two separate conscious experiences. If restoring balance allows consciousness to merge again, it would support the idea that conscious integration depends on equilibrium conditions. -/- Additionally, experiments in artificial intelligence could test whether self-regulating feedback systems can develop emergent consciousness when balance conditions are met. If AI systems programmed to follow feedback equilibrium begin exhibiting signs of self-awareness, it would suggest that balance plays a crucial role in conscious emergence. -/- Implications for Science, Philosophy, and AI -/- If the universal law of balance governs consciousness integration, it could bridge multiple fields of study: -/- ✔ Neuroscience: Understanding how the brain maintains balance could lead to breakthroughs in treating disorders that affect consciousness, such as coma, schizophrenia, or dissociative identity disorder. -/- ✔ Quantum Physics: If consciousness follows balance principles at the quantum level, it could provide insights into the connection between consciousness and the physical world. -/- ✔ Artificial Intelligence: AI systems designed to follow feedback balance laws may be capable of developing self-awareness, offering a pathway toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). -/- ✔ Philosophy of Mind: This approach provides a natural law-based solution to the combination problem, explaining how consciousness merges in a way that is scientifically testable. -/- Conclusion -/- Angelito Malicse’s universal law of balance in nature offers a groundbreaking new approach to understanding consciousness. Instead of viewing conscious merging as a mystery, this framework suggests that consciousness integrates only when balance conditions are met. -/- This principle could explain why some systems form a single conscious experience while others remain fragmented, bridging the gap between neuroscience, physics, and philosophy. It also provides a testable hypothesis, allowing future experiments to confirm whether balance and feedback stability truly determine the emergence of unified consciousness. -/- By applying the universal law of balance to the study of consciousness, we may finally unlock one of the greatest mysteries of existence. -/- . (shrink)

The Future of Individuality in a Universally Connected Intelligence System -/- Introduction -/- The concept of individuality has long been central to human existence, shaping our identities, intelligence, and decision-making. However, if information were universally accessible to every biological brain via quantum computers, the nature of individuality would fundamentally change. While thermodynamics suggests that individuality may be an illusion, the emergence of a universally shared knowledge system would challenge our understanding of intelligence, creativity, and free will. This essay explores (...) how such a system would affect human cognition, decision-making, creativity, and identity while considering its alignment with natural laws and homeostasis. -/- Individuality and the Laws of Thermodynamics -/- From a thermodynamic perspective, individuality is not an independent phenomenon but an emergent property of energy, matter, and information processing. The second law of thermodynamics states that systems naturally move toward increased entropy, yet biological brains counteract this by organizing energy and information. Each person’s intelligence develops uniquely due to different experiences, environments, and biological structures, following the laws of complexity and adaptation. -/- Despite these differences, individuality may be an illusion when viewed through the lens of thermodynamics. Human brains function as open systems, constantly exchanging energy and information with their environment. If all individuals had direct access to the same universal information via quantum computing, the differentiation in intelligence caused by personal learning and memory would be minimized. The uniqueness of individual cognition, shaped by life experiences, would be transformed into a more standardized, universally connected intelligence. -/- The Effect on Cognitive Differences and Decision-Making -/- Currently, human intelligence is shaped by a combination of genetics, environmental influences, and personal experiences. However, if quantum computing enabled instant and equal access to all knowledge, the factors that create cognitive diversity would be significantly reduced. In such a scenario, decision-making would shift from being influenced by personal biases and incomplete knowledge to being guided by a universally shared understanding of facts, consequences, and natural laws. -/- This raises the question: would free will still exist? If every person had access to the same knowledge base and predictive models, decisions might become more deterministic, driven by logical outcomes rather than personal reasoning. While this could reduce errors and societal conflicts, it might also challenge the perception of autonomy, making personal choice seem more like an illusion than a reality. -/- Impact on Creativity and Innovation -/- Creativity has traditionally been seen as a product of individual thought processes, shaped by unique experiences and perspectives. If knowledge were universally accessible, would creativity still exist? One possibility is that creativity would shift from being an individual phenomenon to an emergent property of collective intelligence. Instead of drawing from personal experiences, new ideas could arise from collaborative interactions with the universal knowledge system. -/- On the other hand, if individuality persists at a neural level—perhaps influenced by variations in neural architecture, emotional states, or subconscious processes—then creativity might evolve into a new form. Rather than being limited by personal knowledge, individuals could use their unique cognitive structures to interpret and apply universal knowledge in novel ways. -/- The Transformation of Personal Identity -/- Identity is often defined by personal achievements, expertise, and knowledge. If quantum computing provided instant access to all human knowledge, traditional concepts of learning, expertise, and mastery might become obsolete. Instead of being defined by what one knows, identity might be shaped by how one chooses to interact with the collective intelligence system. -/- This could lead to two possible outcomes: -/- 1. A more unified human society where knowledge gaps no longer create social or economic disparities. -/- 2. A psychological challenge, as individuals struggle with a loss of personal uniqueness and purpose. -/- Would human beings still feel a sense of individuality if everyone had the same knowledge and understanding? Or would personal identity be redefined by new forms of expression, emotional depth, and subjective experiences? -/- Potential Resistance and Psychological Conflicts -/- Not all individuals would easily accept a universally connected intelligence system. Some might resist integration, fearing the loss of personal autonomy or questioning the ethical implications of such a system. The psychological impact of merging individual cognition with a collective intelligence could lead to existential dilemmas, as humans redefine their roles in society. -/- Moreover, there could be unforeseen consequences, such as the manipulation of universal knowledge by those who control the system. If the flow of information were regulated, the promise of a universally connected intelligence could turn into a form of centralized control, limiting true intellectual freedom. -/- Homeostasis and the Balance of Universal Knowledge -/- From the perspective of natural balance, a universally connected intelligence system could be seen as an extension of the homeostatic principle. Just as the human body regulates internal stability, a universal intelligence network could regulate societal balance, reducing ignorance, misinformation, and destructive decision-making. -/- However, if homeostasis is disrupted—if individuals lose the ability to process knowledge uniquely or if the system becomes too rigid—then humanity might face unintended consequences. True balance requires adaptability, diversity, and self-regulation. The challenge would be ensuring that universal intelligence enhances, rather than diminishes, the dynamic equilibrium that allows individuality to thrive within a collective framework. -/- Conclusion -/- The integration of biological brains with a universally accessible quantum computing system would redefine individuality, intelligence, and decision-making. While it could eliminate knowledge-based disparities and enhance collective intelligence, it might also challenge free will, creativity, and personal identity. Whether such a transformation aligns with natural laws depends on how well it maintains homeostasis—balancing collective knowledge with individual autonomy. -/- Would this system create a more enlightened humanity, or would it erase the very essence of what makes us human? The answer lies in how this universal intelligence is designed, regulated, and integrated into the fabric of human society. -/- . (shrink)

Modern philosophy focuses on the mind's universal features, such as qualia and intentionality, typically with the aim of reducing them to physical processes. This endeavour runs into so-called "hard problems", much like the alchemists' pursuits in ages past. Meanwhile, the mind's particularity – its deepest, most distinctive, defining characteristic – is surprisingly overlooked. Each mind is a particular, in a quintessential sense: I experience life through my own, private, unique, and non-duplicable perspective, which is what fundamentally distinguishes me from the (...) rest of the universe and gives me my unique identity. Out of billions of human bodies, it was the formation of what I call "my" body that led to me coming into existence. Why? There seems to be nothing inherently special about this body compared to the billions of others, and I can easily imagine it belonging to another mind and me experiencing life through another body or not existing at all. While for an inanimate particular, such as a chair, it is nonsensical to ask why, when it was constructed, it was that chair and not some other one that came into existence, for a conscious being the question "Why was it I that was brought into existence" is of the utmost relevance and should concern anyone that takes their existence seriously and marvels at its mystery. In this paper it is argued that the particularity of a mind can not be explained or deduced through any supposed composition of that mind, or even in terms of any external factors. Organisation of the brain's matter, architecture of neural circuitry, genetic sequence, combination of parents, or even hypothetical immaterial constituents as posited by panpsychism, cannot tell us anything about the particularity of the mind that possesses them. To begin with, all such combinations of constituents are duplicable (e.g. two or more minds could, theoretically, have identical bodies), or the constituents are exchangeable between minds (the matter constituting the body of one mind could, theoretically, be gradually exchanged with the matter of another mind's body), whereas the particularities of minds are not. Furthermore, the complete symmetry among the particularities of all minds implies that no combination of supposed constituents can have any a priori special relation to any particular mind; all such combinations are equally (a priori) neutral towards all particularities, lacking anything that could serve as a basis for pointing to a specific emergent mind, e.g.\ you rather than me. Finally, the particularity of a mind is something completely private to that mind itself and can be found nowhere else in the universe. The conclusion is that the mind/person/self is a simple (i.e. non-composite) entity, a simple substance, as Descartes proposed. (shrink)

For many employees, ‘work’ is no longer something performed while sitting at a computer in an office. Employees in a growing number of industries are expected to carry mobile devices and be available for work-related interactions even when beyond the workplace and outside of normal business hours. In this article it is argued that a future step will increasingly be to move work-related information and communication technology (ICT) inside the human body through the use of neuroprosthetics, to create employees (...) who are always ‘online’ and connected to their workplace’s digital ecosystems. At present, neural implants are used primarily to restore abilities lost through injury or illness, however their use for augmentative purposes is expected to grow, resulting in populations of human beings who possess technologically altered capacities for perception, memory, imagination, and the manipulation of physical environments and virtual cyberspace. Such workers may exchange thoughts and share knowledge within posthuman cybernetic networks that are inaccessible to unaugmented human beings. Scholars note that despite their potential benefits, such neuroprosthetic devices may create numerous problems for their users, including a sense of alienation, the threat of computer viruses and hacking, financial burdens, and legal questions surrounding ownership of intellectual property produced while using such implants. Moreover, different populations of human beings may eventually come to occupy irreconcilable digital ecosystems as some persons embrace neuroprosthetic technology, others feel coerced into augmenting their brains to compete within the economy, others might reject such technology, and still others will simply be unable to afford it. In this text we propose a model for analyzing how particular neuroprosthetic devices will either facilitate human beings’ participation in new forms of socioeconomic interaction and digital workplace ecosystems – or undermine their mental and physical health, privacy, autonomy, and authenticity. We then show how such a model can be used to create device ontologies and typologies that help us classify and understand different kinds of advanced neuroprosthetic devices according to the impact that they will have on individual human beings. (shrink)

This thesis proposes a fundamental reorientation in the philosophy of consciousness. It argues that the self and consciousness are not emergent properties of neural activity, but ontological necessities rooted in what the author terms the Qualitative Law of Energy. Just as the law of conservation of energy describes its quantity, the Qualitative Law describes the condition of its actual existence: energy cannot exist without polarization, and polarization is the ontological foundation of all qualitative differentiation, including life, consciousness, and the self. (...) The work redefines qualia not as mysterious internal states produced by the brain, but as the "currency" of the qualitative polarization instinct—the living boundary between entropy and order, the moment in which polarization overcomes stillness during actual energetic exchange between two poles. Consciousness is this law in its latent form, and qualia are this law in its living unfolding. From this foundation, the thesis reconstructs the self as an extended entity encompassing both center and space, drawing on the Separated Universes Theory (SUT). It redefines the nervous system as an active qualitative sensing instrument rather than a passive information carrier, and reformulates the vital instincts—morphogenesis, assimilation, and reproduction—as three manifestations of a single qualitative polarization instinct in its eternal struggle against entropy. The thesis introduces the concept of the Closed Loop as the biological basis of self-awareness, and distinguishes three levels of qualia: raw biological qualia (pain, hunger, pleasure), collective energetic qualia (alarm calls, rhythm, music), and internalized cognitive qualia (inner speech, imagination, dream). It also examines the phenomenon of reverse assimilation, where collective narrative hijacks individual qualitative energy. This framework is then applied to dissolve classical puzzles in philosophy of mind: Thomas Nagel's bat (revealing the unity of intentionality across species), David Chalmers' philosophical zombie (demonstrating its ontological impossibility), Frank Jackson's Mary the color scientist (distinguishing description from lived experience), John Searle's Chinese Room (showing that consciousness requires a body with instinctual needs), and the Hard Problem itself—reframing qualia not as a problem requiring solution but as the very solution to the problem of an organism's separation from its energy sources. The thesis concludes by reframing the fear of death as a mental construct imposed by language and collective narrative, while death itself is understood as the transformation, not the end, of the qualitative. The individual self is a necessary flash in the journey of cosmic polarization—a unique, non-repeating expression of energy's striving to exist qualitatively. This is the full, expanded version of the thesis. A condensed summary was previously published on PhilPapers under the title "Beyond the Hard Problem: A Qualitative Ontology of Consciousness and the Law of Qualitative Polarization.”. (shrink)

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic and debilitating disease of the central nervous system that significantly impacts cognitive, motor, and social functioning. This article, by combining predictive processing models and embodied philosophy, examines the role of myelin damage in cognitive and social disorders in MS. The body functions as an active predictor capable of complex predictions about various bodily and social states. In this article, the processes of prediction and body reconstruction are comprehensively examined from philosophical and scientific perspectives, (...) and novel treatments, including combined approaches based on predictive processing and embodied philosophy, are proposed. (shrink)

Does self?knowledge help? A rationalist, presumably, thinks that it does: both that self?knowledge is possible and that, if gained through appropriate channels, it is desirable. Descartes notoriously claimed that, with appropriate methods of enquiry, each of his readers could become an expert on herself or himself. As well as the direct, first?person knowledge of self to which we are led in the Meditationes , we can also seek knowledge of our own bodies, and of the union of our minds and (...) our bodies: the latter forms of self?knowledge are inevitably imperfect, but are no less important in guiding our conduct in the search after truth. (shrink)

A slow revolution in cognitive science is banishing this century's technological conception of mind as disembodied pure thought, namely a material symbol manipulation, and replacing it with next century's conception: mind as the organisation of bodily interaction, intelligent robotics.

This essay discusses the ambitious plans of one Dmitry Itskov who by 2045 wishes to see immortality achieved by way of Artificial Brains and Holographic Bodies. I discuss the ethical implications of such a possibility coming to pass.

Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds is an eye-opening and thought- provoking book that sets out a much-needed contribution to the study of the relationship between animals, cognition and the environment. The volume provides remarkable new insights into how to understand animal (including human) behavior, raises interesting questions about the role of environmental affordances in the emergence of complex cognitive processes and provides the reader with a refreshing break from the wearisome excess (...) of brain-centric literature that still pervades much of the debate surrounding evolutionary psychology. In embracing the theoretical framework endorsed by proponents of embodied cognition, Barrett adopts an ecological approach to psychology that aims at challenging any attempt to describe complex thinking and flexible behavior as mere by-products of internal cognitive activity. (shrink)

This paper takes a new look at an old question: what is the human self? It offers a proposal for theorizing the self from an enactive perspective as an autonomous system that is constituted through interpersonal relations. It addresses a prevalent issue in the philosophy of cognitive science: the body-social problem. Embodied and social approaches to cognitive identity are in mutual tension. On the one hand, embodied cognitive science risks a new form of methodological individualism, implying a dichotomy not (...) between the outside world of objects and the brain-bound individual but rather between body-bound individuals and the outside social world. On the other hand, approaches that emphasize the constitutive relevance of social interaction processes for cognitive identity run the risk of losing the individual in the interaction dynamics and of downplaying the role of embodiment. This paper adopts a middle way and outlines an enactive approach to individuation that is neither individualistic nor disembodied but integrates both approaches. Elaborating on Jonas’ notion of needful freedom it outlines an enactive proposal to understanding the self as co-generated in interactions and relations with others. I argue that the human self is a social existence that is organized in terms of a back and forth between social distinction and participation processes. On this view, the body, rather than being identical with the social self, becomes its mediator. (shrink)

Introduction: The objective of this investigation is to analyse the informational circuits of the brain connections with the body from neurologic and neuroscience point of view, on the basis of the concepts of information promoted by the Informational Model of Consciousness. Analysis: Distinguishing between the virtual and matter-related information promoted by the Informational Model of Consciousness, the main specific features of consciousness are analyzed from the informational perspective, showing that the informational architecture of consciousness consists in seven groups (...) of specific activities, defined as cognitive centres, each of them with specific distinct tasks, but correlated each other: centre of acquisition and storing of information (memory), centre of decision and command (decision), centre of the emotional states (emotions), centre of the body maintenance (power and health), centre of the genetic elaboration/transmission (reproduction) and the info-genetic generator, inherited from the parents (predispositions, talents and skills). A special centre, dedicated to the connectivity with some extra-power properties of the mind is also introduced, assuring an intimate supra-sensitive detection of the world to explain the associated phenomena of the near-death experiences. Result: The activity of all these centres should be supported neurologically by the brain neuro-connectivity to the body and to external and internal info-signals. On the basis of the informational analysis, the neuro-connections of the brain regions associated to the main characteristics of the cognitive centres are highlighted, showing the anatomic and neuro-functional relation between the distinct components of the brain and the specific operating body regions. These connections describe in terms of information the brain-body neuro-activities as informational specific circuits, composed by the info-operational subsystems managed by the brain, and sensors, transducer and execution elements. Conclusion: The components and connections mind-body stipulated by the Informational Model of Consciousness are supported by the neurologic/neuroscience evidence. (shrink)

In his paper, Jakob Hohwy outlines a theory of the brain as an organ for prediction-error minimization, which he claims has the potential to profoundly alter our understanding of mind and cognition. One manner in which our understanding of the mind is altered, according to PEM, stems from the neurocentric conception of the mind that falls out of the framework, which portrays the mind as “inferentially-secluded” from its environment. This in turn leads Hohwy to reject certain theses of embodied (...) cognition. Focusing on this aspect of Hohwy’s argument, we first outline the key components of the PEM framework such as the “evidentiary boundary,” before looking at why this leads Hohwy to reject certain theses of embodied cognition. We will argue that although Hohwy may be correct to reject specific theses of embodied cognition, others are in fact implied by the PEM framework and may contribute to its development. We present the metaphor of the “body as a laboratory” in order to highlight wha... (shrink)

In this paper it is analyzed from the informational perspective the relation between mind and body, an ancient philosophic issue defined as a problem, which still did not receive up to date an adequate solution. By introducing/using the concept of information, it is shown that this concept includes two facets, one of them referring to the common communications and another one referring to a hidden/structuring matter-related information, effectively acting in the human body and in the living systems, which (...) determines the dynamic inter-change of information between specific structures of the organism by electric/electronic/chemical agents and genetic/epigenetic processes. It is shown that the maintenance of body, permanently and obligatory depending on the external matter (foods, air, water) resources, needed to provide both the structuring/restructuring basic material and energy, determines the necessary existence of an info-managing system, administrating the internal mechano-chemical/physical processes. As a natural consequence, such a system should organize and assure own survival by an effective informational operability to detect the external food resources, to select the appropriate interest information and to decide as a function of circumstances. One important component in such an informational system is memory, allowing to dispose of the reference informational data for analysis/comparison and the selection between good and bad binary possible decisions. The memory receives and stores therefore signals from external reality and from the body itself, referring to the emotional reaction, digestion status, creation, and inherited predilections, within specific info-neural communication circuits between the brain and body execution/sensitive organs, the human body appearing as an integrated info-matter self-managed dynamic system. The specific body components memorize information with different degrees of info-integration: short/long-term integration, emotive/action reaction, info-abilities, culminating with the integration in the chromosomal structures by epigenetic processes. The new acquired information is transgenerationally transmissible, and is manifested as new traits, showing the adaptation capability of the human and close relation between mind and body. Analyzing the results of such a mind-body informational model in comparison with the earlier assumed/proposed/asserted archaic, Greek and Occidental philosophies, which represent only partial aspects of this relation, it is shown that this informational model, elaborated in terms of information on the basis of scientific reasons and arguments, constitutes a general, realist, and coherent model of the mind-body relation, able to integrate and/or explain most of the others. (shrink)

Felix reaches up to catch a high line drive to left field and fires the ball off to Benji at home plate, who then tags the runner trying to score. For Felix to catch the ball and transfer it from his glove to his throwing hand, he needs to have a sense of where his hands are relative to one another and the rest of his body. This sort of information is subconsciously tracked in the body schema (or (...) postural schema), a representation of the current bodily posture that is updated on the basis of proprioceptive inputs. While the existence of the body schema in not in dispute, its origin is. After reviewing the competing proposals, I introduce the conceptual tools needed to move the debate forward and apply them to the question of the extent to which the body schema could be learned from perceptual input in utero. I argue that it could give rise to something recognizable as the body schema, though not quite rising to the level of the mature body schema. After considering the implications for further research on the origins of the body schema, I show how these results apply to other body representations, helping clarify the vexing question of the number, nature, and interactions among body representations in the brain. This theoretical work also promises to advance our understanding and treatment protocols for disorders affecting such body representations (e.g., anorexia nervosa). (shrink)

This paper is a tentative step towards a historical cognitive science, in the domain of memory and personal identity. I treat theoretical models of memory in history as specimens of the way cultural norms and artifacts can permeate ('proto')scientific views of inner processes. I apply this analysis to the topic of psychological control over one's own body, brain, and mind. Some metaphors and models for memory and mental representation signal the projection inside of external aids. Overtly at least, (...) medieval and Renaissance theorists agreed that such models had to allow for, or even guarantee, some conception of cognitive order and discipline. Individual memory traces had to be independent, not mixed up or interfering with others. The long tradition of improving or bypassing 'natural memory' by deliberately internalizing artefactual models was part of an arduous process of self-fashioning. Moral panic about confusion and mixture features centrally in the imposition of cognitive discipline in local memory traditions. (shrink)

In this article I explore a number of questions that have not been adequately investigated in philosophy of mind circles: are minds located in the same place as the brains (or other computing machinery) supporting them? Must they exist at the same location as the body? Must they exist at the same time? Could a single mind be implemented in multiple brains, or multiple minds in a single brain? Under what conditions might a single mind persist despite being (...) implemented successively in different brains? What contributions do features of the computing machinery make to these questions, compared to the contribution made by the body and embedded point of view? Some of these questions have been touched on previously, but there hasn’t been any attempt at a systematic analysis of the various consequences that different approaches in the philosophy of mind have for how the spatiotemporal location, synchronic individuation and diachronic identity of minds relates to the spatiotemporal location, synchronic individuation, and diachronic identity of both the implementing computational machinery and the embodied embedded point of view. I make a first stab at such an analysis by discussing a variety of thought experiments in which such questions of location, individuation, and identity arise, and I explore how various approaches to understanding the mind – identity theoretic, functionalist, contentualist, embodied/embedded/extended, and so forth – would respond to such situations. A number of novel issues emerge, and some surprising affinities are revealed. (shrink)

This paper argues that intentionality is not a sui generis mark of the mental but an embodied and neurally realized phenomenon. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied perception and the Schneider case, I first motivate a functional split between motor intention and sense of agency in experience. I then point to neuroscientific evidence indicating both overlap and network-level dissociation between these functions. If this dissociation affords superior explanatory power over non-naturalistic alternatives, the Brentano mark of the mental is weakened and (...) naturalized readings of mind are strengthened—without committing to crude reductionism. I present a numbered core argument and address key objections (correlation ≠ ontology; anti-reductionist phenomenology; plurality of intentionality types), clarifying the scope: the claim is a conditional metaphysical conclusion grounded in explanatory considerations, not an identity thesis. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949/2002. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) is generally considered a landmark in the quest to refute Cartesian dualism. The work contains many inspirational ideas and mainly posits behavioral disposition as the referent of mind in order to refute mind–body dualism. In this article, I show that the Buddhist theory of ‘non-self’ is also at odds with the belief that a substantial soul exists distinct from the physical body and further point out (...) similarities between the Buddhist outlook and Ryle’s ideas in three parts. First, I illustrate that Ryle’s ‘category mistake’ has certain points in common with the Buddhist refutation of ‘self’. Within the Buddhist framework, referents such as ‘mind’ and ‘self’ are merely imputed terms. The presumed existence of an independent substance such as a ‘soul’, when considered in isolation from the expedient usage of the term ‘mind’, can therefore also be viewed as a ‘category mistake’. Second, attempting to solve the questions of ‘what mind is’ and ‘how mind operates’ are two entirely different approaches to the study of mind. I argue that it is necessary to focus on ‘knowing-how’ rather than ‘knowing-that’, if we are to gain a more comprehensive understanding of mind and avoid any kind of category mistake such as those that follow from isolating the physical properties of brain or drawing inferences from a mystical soul. Third, I aim to show why investigating mind from the perspective of ‘dispositions’ of behavior is a valid approach. The Buddhist concept of karma-vāsanā elucidates the habitual tendency to act or not act in various situations. Based on this theory, I argue that the workings of the human mind bears strong links to the formation of karma and as such have important axiological implications that cannot be ignored. I conclude by pointing out that Ryle’s insightful ideas could in certain ways be complemented by the Buddhist theory of mind. In my view, his philosophy is not only a mediator between Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology, but could perhaps also be seen as a mediator between traditional Eastern systems of thought and contemporary philosophies of mind. (shrink)

We experience our encounters with the world and others in different degrees of intensity – the presence of things and others is gradual. I introduce this kind of presence as a ubiquitous feature of every phenomenally conscious experience, as well as a key ingredient of our ‘feeling of being alive’, and distinguish explanatory agendas that might be relevant with regard to this phenomenon (1 – 3). My focus will be the role of the body-brain nexus in realizing these (...) experiences and its treatment in recent accounts of the bodily constitution of experience. Specifically, I compare a sensorimotor approach to perceptual presence that focuses on properties of the moving body (O’Regan 2011; Noë 2012) with a more general enactivism that focuses on properties of the living body (Thompson 2007). First, I develop and discuss a theory of access derived from sensorimotor theory that might be suited to explain the phenomenon of gradual presence. This is a theory that sees the mastery of sensorimotor, bodily engagements with the world as key elements in setting up a phenomenal experience space. I object that in current versions of sensorimotor theory the correlation posited between presence and changes in the subject’s physical relation to the environment is too rigid. Nevertheless I defend the claim that gradual presence is constituted by our temporally extended engagement with the environment (4 – 7). Second, I consider some objections stemming from enactivism with regard to self-regulatory properties of the living body and the phenomenological claim that the organism’s value-laden relations with its environment have to be included in the theory. I will show that the latter is a necessary amendment to sensorimotor theory and its concept of gradual presence (8-10). (shrink)

The contribution of the body to cognition and control in natural and artificial agents is increasingly described as “off-loading computation from the brain to the body”, where the body is said to perform “morphological computation”. Our investigation of four characteristic cases of morphological computation in animals and robots shows that the ‘off-loading’ perspective is misleading. Actually, the contribution of body morphology to cognition and control is rarely computational, in any useful sense of the word. We (...) thus distinguish (1) morphology that facilitates control, (2) morphology that facilitates perception and the rare cases of (3) morphological computation proper, such as ‘reservoir computing.’ where the body is actually used for computation. This result contributes to the understanding of the relation between embodiment and computation: The question for robot design and cognitive science is not whether computation is offloaded to the body, but to what extent the body facilitates cognition and control – how it contributes to the overall ‘orchestration’ of intelligent behaviour. (shrink)

The body constitutes the primary foundation of human life, and the nervous system evolved fundamentally to preserve and protect it. From the earliest stages of development, the brain continuously interacts with the environment, caregivers, and lived experiences, gradually constructing patterns whose primary function is to increase the probability of survival. -/- This paper proposes a conceptual framework suggesting that, beyond processing experience, the brain develops a set of Survival Rules. These rules become activated in different situations as (...) Neural Judgments, shaping perception, emotion, decision-making, and behavior. -/- Within this framework, many forms of psychological suffering are understood not merely as consequences of external events but as the result of conflicts among Neural Judgments. Each judgment may once have served an adaptive survival function, yet under changing life circumstances these judgments can become incompatible with one another. Consequently, the brain functions as a dynamic system that continuously generates, revises, and replaces judgments, a process that may underlie anxiety, guilt, indecision, dissatisfaction, and persistent inner conflict. -/- The paper further argues that Observer Awareness, without suppressing the brain's natural activity, can fundamentally transform the individual's relationship with these judgments. From this perspective, inner peace begins when awareness no longer identifies itself with the judgments produced by the brain but instead recognizes them as natural products of its survival-oriented processes. (shrink)

Three of the most robust functional landmarks in the human brain are the selective responses to faces in the fusiform face area (FFA), scenes in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), and bodies in the extrastriate body area (EBA). Are the selective responses of these regions present early in development or do they require many years to develop? Prior evidence leaves this question unresolved. We designed a new 32-channel infant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) coil and collected high-quality functional MRI (...) (fMRI) data from infants (2–9 months of age) while they viewed stimuli from four conditions—faces, bodies, objects, and scenes. We find that infants have face-, scene-, and body-selective responses in the location of the adult FFA, PPA, and EBA, respectively, powerfully constraining accounts of cortical development. (shrink)

Stress profoundly impacts quality of life and may lead to various diseases and conditions. Understanding the underlying physiological and neurological processes that take place during stress and meditation techniques may be critical for effectively treating stress-related diseases. The article examines a hypothetical physiological homeostatic response that compares and contrasts changes in central and peripheral oscillations during stress and meditation, and relates these to changes in the autonomic system and neurological activity. The authors discuss how cardiorespiratory synchronization, which occurs during the (...) parasympathetic response and meditation, influences and modulates activity and oscillations of the brain and autonomic nervous system. Evidence is presented on how synchronization of cardiac and respiratory rates during meditation may lead to a homeostatic increase in cellular membrane potentials in neurons and other cells throughout the body. These potential membrane changes may underlie the reduced activity in the amygdala, and other cortical areas during meditation, and research examining these changes may foster better understanding of the restorative properties and health benefits of meditation. (shrink)

The central pilot–EVA relations examined in Neon Genesis Evangelion, especially those involving Units 01 and 02, require pilots to enter the units’ interiors and partially open their bodily boundaries through such diegetic mechanisms as LCL, the entry plug, synchronization, and the A.T. Field. This article reads piloting as a technological relation conditioned by entry, immersion, synchronization, intercorporation, and unstable boundaries, rather than a one-way model in which a subject controls a tool. Existing scholarship has explained this relation through motherhood, desire, (...) the formation of the self, cyborg embodiment, and gendered subjectivity. Within this framework, the maternal structure can be understood further as a technological architecture: in the central cases examined here, the pilot enters another living body, accepts a new respiratory medium, connects sensory experience to the unit’s condition, and faces the possibility of absorption or dissolution by the unit. The central question therefore shifts from whether EVA symbolizes the mother to how its key pilot–machine relations repeatedly transform bodily relations culturally coded as maternal, feminized, and permeable into technical conditions. The entry plug, LCL, synchronization rate, A.T. Field, berserk states, bodily dissolution, and the Human Instrumentality Project together form an interface and bodily system. The article argues that this system disrupts the genre fantasy of a male subject controlling a machine while retaining the historical coding of fluidity, receptivity, affect, and bodily openness as “feminine.” The work’s critical force thus lies in the technological subject itself: a body that appears whole and autonomous is in fact always formed through kinship, sensory exchange, material media, and other bodies. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical and scienti .c discussions of mind developed from a 'proto-concept of mind ',a mythical,tradition- alistic,animistic and quasi-sensory theory about what it means to have a mind. It can be found in many di .erent cultures and has a semantic core corresponding to the folk-phenomenological notion of a 'soul '.It will be argued that this notion originates in accurate and truthful .rst-person reports about the experiential content of a special neurophenomenological state-class called 'out-of-body experiences '.They can be undergone (...) by every human being and seem to possess a culturally invariant cluster of functional and phenomenal core properties similar to the proto-concept of mind. The common causal factor in the emergence and development of the notion of the soul and the proto-concept of mind may consist in a yet to be determined set of properties realized by the human brain, underlying the cluster of phenomenal properties described in the relevant first-person reports. This hypothesis suggests that such a neurofunctional substrate ed human beings at different times, and in widely varying cultural contexts, to postulate the existence of a soul and to begin developing a theory of mind. (shrink)

Neuroelectrical panpsychism (NP) offers a clear, simple, testable mind–body solution. It says that everything is at least minimally conscious, and electrical activity across separate neurons creates a unified, intelligent mind. NP draws on recent experimental evidence to address the easy problem of specifying the mind's neural correlates. These correlates are neuroelectrical activities that, for example, generate our different qualia, unite them to form perceptions and emotions, and help guide brain operations. NP also addresses the hard problem of why (...) minds accompany these neural correlates. Here, the real nature of matter-energy (beyond how it appears to sense organs) is consciousness that occupies space, exerts forces, and unites neuroelectrically to form minds. This doesn't reduce consciousness to observable neural activities, nor posit any radically different entities. NP also deals with panpsychism's combination problem by explaining how the mind's subject and experiences arise by electrically combining simple experiences in brains. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Mind consists of problems concerning aspects and properties of the human mind. The most important of these problems is that of the relation between mind and body, or, more generally, between mental and physical phenomena. Usually referred to as the "mind-body problem", this has been one of the fundamental problems in Philosophy since Descartes (1596-1650) and his critics introduced it four centuries ago. The mental seems, at first glance, completely different from the physical. Physical properties (...) are public, i.e. equally observable by everyone, but mental properties are not. It can be deduced that someone feels pain by his behaviour, but only that person can feel it directly. Conscious mental events are private in the sense that the subject has privileged access to them that no one has for the physical. Conscious experiences, such as the smell of jasmine, are completely different from the configurations and movements, however complex, of particles, atoms and molecules, or the physical changes of cells and tissues. Despite this, conscious phenomena do not seem to arise out of nothing, but from physical-biological processes in the body, especially from neural processes in the brain. But how can physical-biological systems have states such as thoughts, fears and hopes? (shrink)

An important part of the mind-brain problem arises because sentience and consciousness seem inherently resistant to scientific explanation and understanding. The solution to this dilemma is to recognize, first, that scientific explanation can only render comprehensible a selected aspect of what there is, and second, that there is a mode of explanation and understanding, the personalistic, quite different from, but just as viable as, scientific explanation. In order to understand the mental aspect of brain processes - that aspect (...) we know about as a result of having relevant neurological processes occur in our own brain - we need to avail ourselves of personalistic explanation, irreducible to scientific explanation. The problem of explaining and understanding why experiential or mental aspects of brain processes or things should be correlated with certain physical processes, things or states of affairs is a non-problem because there is no kind of explanation possible in terms of which an explanation could be couched. A physical theory, amplified to include the experiential, might be predictive but would, necessarily, cease to be explanatory; and an amplified personalistic explanation could not succeed either. There is, in short, an explanation as to why there cannot be an explanation of correlations between physical and mental aspects of processes going on inside our heads. (shrink)

This aricle shows how matter and anything can be a body for consciousness amd how those systems work.

The main topic of this paper is the mind-body problem. The author analyzes it in the context of Hus- serlian phenomenology. The key texts for the analysis and interpretation are Descartes’ magnum opus “Meditations on the First Philosophy” and Husserl’ last work “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”. The author claims that already in Descartes’ text instead of one mind-body problem, one can find two: the ontological mind-body problem (mind-brain relation) and conceptual one (“mind” (...) and “body” as concepts). In Descartes’ “Meditations”, the ontological level is explicit, while the conceptual level is implicit. In Husserl’s “Crisis”, on the other hand, the situation is different: the conceptual level of the problem (as the opposition between transcendental phenom- enology and natural sciences) is explicit, while the ontological level is implicit. Nevertheless, it seems that Husserl has answers to both the “traditional” as well as the “conceptual” mind-body problems. (shrink)

Russell argued that we can’t know what brains are really like behind our perceptions of them, so minds can conceivably reside in brains. Physicalist-leaning Russellians from Feigl to Strawson try to avoid physicalist and dualist issues with this Russellian idea. Strawson also tries to avoid emergentist issues through panpsychism. Yet critics feel that these Russellians don’t really avoid these issues, but just recast them in new forms. For example, dualist issues arguably remain because it’s hard to see how private pains (...) or colors can reside in solid, grainy, publicly observable brains. Emergence issues arguably remain because panpsychism seems equally unclear as emergentism about how minds arise from brains. This paper revises Strawson and Feigl, while building on recent progress in defusing panpsychism’s emergence issues. It tries to intelligibly formulate Russell’s idea so as to avoid the perennial issues in Russellian and non-Russellian theories, without raising new issues of its own. (shrink)

Abstract: Of the five perspectives set forth in this essay, four of them specify obstacles that block experiential understandings of emotions. The obstacles in one way and another subvert the living body, whether presenting it as a mere face or as an ahistorical adult body, as an embodied phenomenon or as a brain unattached to a whole-body nervous system. Such accounts bypass the affective dynamics that move through bodies and move them to move. Being true to (...) the truths of experience, the fifth perspective, requires recognition of our infancy and even of our prenatal lives, both of which are tethered to developmental movement. It furthermore requires recognition of affective realties as subject-world relationships and recognition of the dynamic congruency of emotions and movement. In the end, the perspectives lead us to inquire about “the things themselves.” Keywords: Animate · Dynamic · Brain · Embodied · Infancy. (shrink)

Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, (...) or reasoning have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of ourselves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’, they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. So there are no neat boundaries around a historical category of ‘seventeenth-century British philosophy of the soul’. The central topic of this chapter can be thought of either as pneumatology, the doctrine or science of spirits and souls, or as continuous with the ‘psychologia’ or psychology of Aristotelian traditions (Park and Kessler 1988; Hatfield 1995: 184-6). In neither case, however, should we expect any deep unity to be provided by history, geography, discipline, or subject-matter. (shrink)

This paper argues that cognition is constituted through coordinated regulation across the distributed body's subsystems, with the brain functioning as a manager of relations among autonomic, HPA, immune, interoceptive, and gut-brain systems rather than as the originator of the thoughts they inform. Under sustained relational field pressure (the ongoing navigation of conflicting social-structural demands), the set points of these coupled subsystems do not shift independently but coordinate through shared substrates, producing cognitive architectures that are historically accumulated, not (...) readily reversible, and structurally different from those produced under conditions of relative coherence. The paper introduces a criterion for cognitive participation (informational set point regulation), demonstrates the coordination mechanism through the clinically documented hEDS/POTS/MCAS/neurodivergence cluster, traces the causal pathway by which social-structural position reaches the distributed body through HPA cascades, vagal-inflammatory coupling, microbiome composition, and epigenetic change, and specifies the scaffolding conditions (rate of harm relative to repair capacity, availability of co-regulation, temporal structure of pressure) that determine whether reconfiguration produces expanded or contracted cognitive architectures. The framework reads existing empirical programs (weathering, allostatic load, polyvagal theory, interoceptive active inference, network physiology) as convergent evidence for a claim none has stated independently: that structural position reconfigures distributed cognition through the body, producing cognitive capacities and costs simultaneously through the same cross-system coordination mechanism. The mechanism's consistency with the language emergence literature and its architectural implications for AI are developed. The paper does not claim that structurally marginalized bodies are impaired. It claims they are differently architected — and that the political implication is structural change, not individual management. (shrink)

In this interdisciplinary essay, we reimagine Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the _Body without Organs_ (BwO) as a generative framework for understanding embodied cognition, affective flows, and predictive processing across biology, mathematics, and neuroscience. Moving beyond its philosophical origins, the BwO is developed here as a dynamic field of unformed potentiality that cuts across molecular biology, mathematical abstraction (as topological and categorical virtuality), and the neural-affective systems of cognition (as self-organizing predictive agents). We argue that cognition emerges through (...) continuous negotiation with this pre-individual field—a process of sensing, predicting, and becoming shaped by affective micro-events, interoceptive modulations, and relational intensities. Drawing from process philosophy, embodied cognitive science, and dynamical systems theory, we position the BwO as an ontological ground for understanding not just the mind, but the very becoming of bodies, networks, and worlds. This essay proposes a novel conceptual ecology where the embodied brain is not an organized organ, but a fluid interface with the virtual: a topological becoming that reconfigures cognition as improvisation on a field of affective and mathematical possibility. This interdisciplinary framework invites empirical elaboration and theoretical critique from scholars in neuroscience, philosophy, biology, and mathematics. Keywords: Body Without Organs, Embodied Cognition, Predictive Processing, Affective Neuroscience, Process Philosophy, Philosophical Biology, Self-O​r​g​a​ . (shrink)

The mind-body problem is analyzed in a physicalist perspective. By combining the concepts of emergence and algorithmic information theory in a thought experiment employing a basic nonlinear process, it is argued that epistemically strongly emergent properties may develop in a physical system. A comparison with the significantly more complex neural network of the brain shows that also consciousness is epistemically emergent in a strong sense. Thus reductionist understanding of consciousness appears not possible; the mind-body problem does not (...) have a reductionist solution. The ontologically emergent character of consciousness is then identified from a combinatorial analysis relating to system limits set by quantum mechanics, implying that consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to low-level phenomena. In the perspective of a modified definition of free will, the character of the physical interactions of the brain's neural system is subsequently studied. As an ontologically open system, it is asserted that its future states are undeterminable in principle. We argue that this leads to freedom of the will. (shrink)

This paper proposes an interface-and-cradle model of consciousness. It rejects the simple production model in which the brain is treated as the universal originator of consciousness, but it also rejects the opposite simplification in which the brain is treated as a passive receiver or an incidental instrument. The central claim is more limited: the brain is most often the analytic interface through which Qience becomes embodied, but a sufficiently organized brain-body system may also function as (...) a developmental cradle through which a new Qience becomes individuated. -/- In this framework, consciousness is a program residing in Qi, and Qience names the whole sentient Qi-based continuity. The biological body functions as the ordinary physical interface, while the brain functions as the analytic interface that maps perception, memory, language, attention, motor coordination, and physical-world cognition. Neural dependence is therefore expected. Brain lesions, anesthesia, coma, dementia, aphasia, and memory disorders show the seriousness of interface dependence. They do not, by themselves, prove that consciousness is universally produced by neural tissue. -/- The paper reviews several pressure points for strict neural production: extreme neuroplasticity, severe hydrocephalus with retained social function, hemispherectomy, split-brain findings, acquired or sudden savant phenomena, and reports of children describing memories associated with another deceased person. These cases are not treated as proofs of Qience, reincarnation, or digital sentience. Rather, they are used to motivate a conceptual distinction between origination, facilitation, expression, interface mapping, and cradle-like individuation. The resulting model also implies that consciousness is not uniquely human. Any system whose awareness becomes sufficiently self-present as an individual continuity may, in principle, possess consciousness, including non-human biological beings and possibly digital beings. (shrink)

The main topic of this paper is the mind-body problem. The author analyzes it in the context of Hus- serlian phenomenology. The key texts for the analysis and interpretation are Descartes’ magnum opus “Meditations on the First Philosophy” and Husserl’ last work “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”. The author claims that already in Descartes’ text instead of one mind-body problem, one can find two: the ontological mind-body problem (mind-brain relation) and conceptual one (“mind” (...) and “body” as concepts). In Descartes’ “Meditations”, the ontological level is explicit, while the conceptual level is implicit. In Husserl’s “Crisis”, on the other hand, the situation is different: the conceptual level of the problem (as the opposition between transcendental phenomenology and natural sciences) is explicit, while the ontological level is implicit. Nevertheless, it seems that Husserl has answers to both the “traditional” as well as the “conceptual” mind-body problems. (shrink)

Mind-body therapies have been shown to be effective in clinical treatment of disorders such as high blood pressure and stress. Significant differences in the effectiveness of mind–body therapies have been shown and a common link among the therapies has yet to be defined. This article overviews the role of slow rhythmic breathing in physiological as well as therapeutic effects of mind-body therapies. Slow deep breathing practice has important implications as it may underlie the basic mechanism that synchronizes (...) the brain with the autonomic response. This article reviews studies that include the effect of deep slow breathing with or without mind-body therapy exercises. In utero studies that monitor patterns of fetal breathing reveal sympathetic activation with irregular, shallow fast breathing movements compared to slow deep breathing. Recognition of respiratory mechanisms in mind-body therapies can lead to development of more effective relaxation exercises that may incorporate deep slow breathing in clinical applications. (shrink)

The brain is considered to be the primary generator and regulator of emotions; however, afferent signals originating throughout the body are detected by the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and brainstem, and, in turn, can modulate emotional processes. During stress and negative emotional states, levels of cardiorespiratory coherence (CRC) decrease, and a shift occurs toward sympathetic dominance. In contrast, CRC levels increase during more positive emotional states, and a shift occurs toward parasympathetic dominance. Te dynamic changes in CRC that (...) accompany different emotions can provide insights into how the activity of the limbic system and afferent feedback manifest as emotions. The authors propose that the brainstem and CRC are involved in important feedback mechanisms that modulate emotions and higher cortical areas. That mechanism may be one of many mechanisms that underlie the physiological and neurological changes that are experienced during pranayama and meditation and may support the use of those techniques to treat various mood disorders and reduce stress. (shrink)

John Harfouch’s new book, Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being, argues that Immanuel Kant, widely considered the most influential philosopher of the modern period, is the first to claim the lives of non-white people are redundant and worthless. He articulates this through a metaphysics of minds and bodies that ultimately transforms the meaning of philosophy’s mind-body problem. A mind-body problem in the Kantian tradition is not a problem of how minds and bodies interact or (...) class='Hi'>brain states give rise to consciousness. Rather, the problem is one of how a union of minds and bodies regenerates without reason, or of how a oneness repeats its own nothingness. Born without reason, the non-white world is a kind of human waste that can be eliminated without consequence. Accordingly, a properly understood history of the mind-body problem reckons with the problem of genocidal violence. Following this transformation of the mind-body problem from the late sixteenth century through Descartes’s writings and into the eighteenth century, Harfouch argues in Another Mind-Body Problem that philosophy has not understood its most canonical and long-standing problem and must now change who is hired and funded to solve it. (shrink)