Douglas Hofstadter coined the acronym “jootsing” to describe our endless ability to jump out of the system (of rules, axioms, concepts, styles, etc.). Hofstadter viewed this as something possibly unique to human consciousness, which AI has not yet duplicated. Our minds can transcend computational and Gödelian limitations and contemplate totalities. In this paper I argue that there is in fact a hard limit to jootsing (tongue-in-cheek, we may call this the “nojootsing theorem”), but it is a limit that holds potentially important secrets about the nature and role of consciousness. This appears to be a generic result of theories that aspire to totality (theories that include observers/agents in addition to what they observe/interact with). I show how we are faced with a pair of potential stances that have a distinctly Gödelian flavor and that both include some kind of limitation on theories of totality: eternal inflation of knowledge versus closed loops. Using ideas from a recent version of dual-aspect monism based on the decomposition of a totality, I consider whether the two apparently conflicting stances can be reconciled, arguing that they can indeed, and this reconciliation reveals what is special about consciousness.
Ramana Maharshi’s practice of self-inquiry is a contemplative method aimed at investigating the nature of the “I” in order to loosen egoic identification and realize the self as non-dual awareness. His teachings emphasize that the true self is ever-present, self-aware, and not constituted by mental constructs. In this article, we propose a cognitive model in which self-inquiry can be understood as a form of self-aware open monitoring of mind wandering, oriented toward tracing the “I”-thought to its source, which Maharshi describes as non-dual awareness or the true self. This account is supported by findings from cognitive neuroscience and contemplative science. During self-inquiry, practitioners adopt a non-reactive stance toward spontaneous mental contents, while repeatedly redirecting attention toward the subject of experience – the sense of being the experiencer – without stabilizing attention on a fixed object. This provisional distinction between the observing subject and the contents of mind wandering functions instrumentally, enabling progressive disengagement from self-narrative and ownership attribution. As inquiry deepens, this distinction itself becomes transparent, giving way to the recognition of the self as non-dual awareness – pre-reflectively self-aware, intransitive, and not organized by subject-object structure. This cognitive framing is not intended to replace Maharshi’s own phenomenological description of self-inquiry, but to complement it by articulating how the practice may engage known attentional, meta-aware, and self-referential processes.
Radical Panpsychism (RP) offers a rigorous mathematical, physical, and philosophical foundation for panpsychism, addressing its central challenge ‐ the combination problem ‐ by reframing the hard problem in deflationary-structural terms: experience is identified with the dynamics by which entities model and respond to their environments and to their own organization. Each entity is modelled as a fuzzy subset of an appropriate space, equipped with internal degrees of freedom (dof) that evolve in response to environmental dof to which they are sensitive.1 This internal response, or direct model, expresses the entity’s mentality across a continuum ‐ from minimal experience in simple systems to consciousness in complex organisms. Based on a deflationary understanding of the so-called hard problem, RP shows that the label panpsychism can extend to theories that ground mentality in structural responsiveness rather than in irreducible phenomenological substance, thereby broadening the conceptual field of panpsychism itself. In this broadened sense, deflationary theories may in fact make wider claims about the ubiquity of “psychism” in nature than traditional, inflationary models, since they locate experience wherever dynamical selfmodeling occurs.
Many recent neuroimaging studies claim to be able to read minds from brain activity, giving the impression that reductionist solutions to the mind-brain problem have been confirmed. I examine the challenges of a scientific approach to that problem and explore whether recent technological advances in neuroimaging offer any hope for solving it. I come to the conclusion that although some results obtained using artificial intelligence tools may look impressive, they are just imitations of mind reading. Moreover, all neuroimaging studies rely heavily on contrasting a state of interest with a control state and averaging this contrast information across repeated measurements within and between subjects, thereby abandoning any hope of discovering brain correlates of momentary subjective states of mind. I argue that attempts of mind reading from brain activity are based on a priori assumptions about the correctness of the mind-brain identity theory. An open-minded approach to the problem of the mind-brain relationship might begin with an empirical study of how brain activity itself is organized in a given behavior, and only then attempt to link this organization to the corresponding mental constructs.
Can music depict the development of a neurological process leading to impairment? This article studies the case of the progressive loss of control due to alcohol intoxication, represented musically in a scene of Verdi???s opera Otello. After a first qualitative assessment, we propose a quantitative comparison between musically derived dynamics, capturing pitch and onset distributions, and a toy model of a brain transformational process. This yields a combination of parameters that makes the two dynamics comparable.
Neuroscience, and behavioral science more broadly, seek to characterize the relationship between functional cognition and the underlying processes operating in living tissue. The current paradigm focuses heavily on the brain, and specific mechanisms thought to underlie mental content and capabilities. One of the most interesting approaches to any field, which often leads to progress, is to highlight data which do not comfortably fit a specific dominant framework. Here, we review clinical and laboratory data in several unconventional systems which are not predicted by the current models in the field. Reduced brain mass or absent brain tissue without the expected loss of function (e.g. hydrocephalus, hemihydranencephaly), discrepancies between cognitive state and brain function (e.g. accidental awareness during anesthesia, terminal lucidity), and cases of cognitive abilities exceeding the apparent skill of the individual, all highlight interesting features of the immense plasticity of the mapping between cognition and its living substrate. These cases suggest new avenues for research that at the very least stretch existing frameworks, and parallels to discoveries being made in the emergent form and behavior of synthetic constructs. We speculate on a roadmap for the study of interesting and still poorly-understood features of embodied minds that could be impactful for biomedicine and engineering, as well as foundational philosophical issues.
Pain and suffering are inevitable realities of life. Not only do humans suffer from physical pain but animals too. Recently, the advent of the covid-19 pandemic has led to a global rise in suffering. The significance of physical pain and the emotional dimension of pain is long understood. Here we are trying to understand the significance of suffering pathway in the human brain. The recent advancement in neuroscience related to insights into pain perception, mirror neuron networks, suffering and compassion has created an appeal to revisit the pain and suffering from a contemporary neuroscience perspective. This article analyzes the benefits of suffering from an evolutionary and neuroscientific approach. Suffering affects people differently as some may become more compassionate and/or resilient while others develop depression. Here we are attempting to explain the underlying neural circuitry involved in suffering, empathy and compassion and to point out the interconnectedness among them. Subsequently, the article proposes a neuroscientific perspective to manage the emotional overdrive associated with suffering.
The phenomenological research initiated by Helmuth Plessner in the 1920s under the banner of an “aesthesiology of the spirit” highlights, at the same time, the role of corporality for the relationship of the human being with the environmental reality in which he is inserted, the meaning of the dimension of corporality, and the normative meaning of the sensory relationship with this reality. A peculiar role in Plessner’s theory plays the reference to sound and music. We intend to take up this theoretical approach and verify it in the light of some salient examples in the compositional work of Anton Webern and two contemporary Italian composers, Dario Buccino and Giovanni Damiani.
Synchronization and the bodily coordination of people in social interaction is by now a regular finding in psychotherapy research and social psychology. Recently, we have expanded the scope of synchrony research to empirical aesthetics and music. Studying audience members of public classical concerts, we hypothesized that the shared musical stimuli synchronize the physiological dynamics of listeners and, if so, the individual degree of synchrony is linked to a listener’s aesthetic experiences, music appreciation, affect and personality traits. The same may be expected for synchronized movement. After data acquisition with over 900 participants, we can now report significant evidence of physiological synchrony (cardiac and respiratory measures, skin conductance response) as well as movement synchrony in classical audiences, and distinct patterns of association with self-rated subjective experience. We believe this shows how the experience of music is embodied in listeners??? synchronies. We conclude this empirical review with suggestions how the embodiment approach may be situated in the philosophy of mind.
Music can have extrinsic and/or intrinsic meaning. The former is relevant in the case of program music. The latter conforms to pure (absolute) music, i.e. music that can be understood without reference to extrinsic sources. Taking the intrinsic content of music as basic, we must ask about its nature. I propose to identify it with aesthetic emotion. As tonal music is organized by series of chords relative to the context of a tonal scale, the question is how music forms can be mapped onto aesthetic emotions. I propose to ground the analysis on a two-dimensional space of emotions, where one dimension refers to arousal (activity) and the other dimension refers to valence. Relating valence with consonance and arousal with entropic uncertainty leads to an account which directly relates structural and probabilistic aspects of tonal music with its affective content. The present bare-bone semantics of pure music proposes an explicit modeling of the affective response based on an algebraic meaning conception.
Recent research suggests that in quantum physics facts are relative. One of the main interpretations of quantum mechanics that agrees with this view is Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics (RQM). Basically, Rovelli considers that what underlies quantum physics is a network of relations – things do not have intrinsic existence, everything is related to something else. Rovelli also advocates for a relational understanding of the mind. However, for Rovelli the network of relations associated to quantum physics and the network of relations associated to the mind do not seem to be related in any relevant sense. Here we discuss Rovelli's recent attempt to relate RQM to the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy. We also discuss the Prāsangika-Madhyamaka subschool, considered by some to be the subtlest interpretation of the Madhyamaka school. This subschool suggests that the mind should indeed play a relevant role in the network of relations that Rovelli associates to quantum physics. We discuss how we might reconcile the Prāsangika-Madhyamaka subschool with Rovelli's recent take on RQM. We also introduce some conjectures as to how quantum mechanics might emerge from a Prāsangika-Madhyamaka perspective.
In an influential article, Thomas Nagel (1979) was one of the first to address the doctrine of panpsychism after a long time of silence about it. The present paper focuses on Nagel's account in detail, and how it seems to oscillate between the apparently conflicting positions of panpsychism and neutral monism. To resolve the tension between them it is proposed to consider the mental and the physical as different dispositions, both grounded in a psychophysically neutral domain of nature.
The "consequence argument", together with the "luck objection", which are summed up by the "standard argument against free will", state that if our volition were dependent on physical causally indeterministic processes, our actions would lack control and, thereby, result in random behavior that would be a mere matter of luck and chance. In particular, quantum indeterminacy is supposed to be of no use in support of libertarian agent-causation theories because any volitional act interfering with the probability distributions defining quantum laws would lead to its violation. Building upon recent conjectural work questioning this assumption (Clarke 2010, Kastner 2016, Masi 2023), it is shown, with a concrete example involving quantum indeterminacy, how a hypothetical agent with access to the temporal ordering of events can pre-determine the result of a process taking place in time without modifying the probability laws defining it. This conclusion is then taken as a basis for a libertarian panpsychist interpretative model.
