Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Phenomenology — the first-person description of experience as a method — the philosophical tradition (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), its use in the sciences of mind, and the theories that take their data from it (group: philosophy; ADR-016).
22 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-066 v3 | The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists | Lindahl et al. (2017), DOI-10.1371/journal.pone.0176239. This is a qualitative taxonomy, not a prevalence estimate. Sixty Western Buddhist meditators were recruited for having had meditation-related difficulties, and 32 teachers/clinicians were interviewed. Their accounts were coded into 59 experience categories in 7 domains and 26 influencing-factor categories in 4 domains. The most frequent category was fear/anxiety/panic/paranoia (82%). 73% reported moderate-to-severe impairment in at least one domain, 17% suicidality and 17% inpatient hospitalisation. Median symptom duration was 1–3 years. All of these are frequencies within a sample selected for difficulty, as the authors state. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-036); the reference taxonomy of challenging meditation-related experiences and worth reading for its codebook and its explicit limits. Its frequencies and its “causality” scoring do not support prevalence or causal claims, and the authors say so. |
| LIT-209 v2 | The Phenomenology of Ritual Resistance: Colin Kaepernick as Confucian Sage | Walsh (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11712-020-09759-4. Walsh argues, drawing on Confucian texts (the Analects, Mengzi, Xunzi) and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, that Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the U.S. national anthem is “Confucian incivility” enacted bodily within the ritual. On his reading it rebukes the ritual’s current object while staying reverent towards its ideal. He further argues it is “sagely” in a deliberately deflated sense: its “citational force” founds a widely imitated bodily expression of patriotism. The paper is interpretive; it reports no data and states no formal thesis. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-164); worth reading as a careful worked example of how a norm-governed bodily practice can be contested from inside, and of Nivison and Hutton’s diachronic reading of Xunzian sagehood put to use. Its standing is as comparative-philosophy interpretation, and its central normative notion (sagehood as uptake) is under-argued. |
| LIT-443 v2 | Consciousness Explained | Dennett (1991), Little, Brown. Per its publisher, a “full-scale exploration of human consciousness” that “refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence”. Its fourteen contents entries run from “How are hallucinations possible?” and “A method for phenomenology”, through “Multiple drafts versus the Cartesian Theater” and “The architecture of the human mind”, to “Qualia disqualified” and “The reality of selves”. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only (access-restricted, printdisabled), no publisher or author copy is posted, and the Tufts Digital Library holds Dennett’s papers but not the book or draft chapters of it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-445 | From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0 | Oizumi, Albantakis & Tononi (2014), PLoS Computational Biology 10(5):e1003588. IIT 3.0 states five axioms of experience (existence, composition, information, integration, exclusion), turns each into a postulate about mechanisms in a state, and identifies an experience with the maximally irreducible conceptual structure of a “complex”. Exclusion makes a complex a local maximum of integrated conceptual information Φ over all overlapping sets of elements, so complexes cannot overlap and no subset or superset of a complex is conscious. Worked logic-gate examples show minor complexes beside a major one, an inactive network that is conscious, a minimally conscious photodiode, and a feed-forward “zombie” functionally equivalent to a conscious system. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-365), equations excepted; worth reading as the formal statement of the exclusion postulate that Schwitzgebel’s 2014 manuscript (LIT-159) attacks: “of all overlapping sets of elements, only one set can be conscious”, a complex being a local maximum of Φ against every overlapping set. It is IIT’s anti-nesting principle, stated as a postulate and motivated only by the phenomenological exclusion axiom; the paper’s Occam’s-razor argument is given for exclusion within a mechanism, not between systems. It also says plainly that function does not fix consciousness, which is IIT’s answer to whether agency built from parts brings experience with it. |
| LIT-453 | Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science | Gallagher (2000), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(1):14–21. Divides philosophical accounts of the self into the “minimal self”, accessible to present self-consciousness without temporal extension, and the “narrative self”, extended in time through memory and story. The minimal self splits into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which come apart in involuntary movement and, after Frith, in schizophrenic thought insertion when a forward comparator fails. Neonatal imitation suggests an embodied minimal self; Strawson’s and Tani’s are momentary. Against Dennett’s narrative centre, the self is “the sum total of its narratives”. Read in the author’s preprint. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-377), in the author’s preprint, not the typeset article; worth reading as the paper that set the minimal self against the narrative self for cognitive science, and for the split of the minimal self into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which it ties to Frith’s comparator model of schizophrenic thought insertion. It is a short review: the empirical support is cited, not shown, and its own proposal, the self as “the sum total of its narratives”, is offered in two paragraphs. |
| LIT-463 v2 | Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective | Zahavi (2005), MIT Press. Per its publisher, a defence of the self against neuroscientists and philosophers who doubt it, arguing that “the notion of self is crucial for a proper understanding of consciousness” and that experience, self-awareness and selfhood cannot be understood apart. It uses Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to give an account of the “experiential givenness of the self” for philosophy of mind, cognitive science, developmental psychology and psychiatry. Its chapters run from self-awareness and phenomenal consciousness through time-consciousness and reflection to self and other, theory of mind, autism and embodiment. Unread: registered from the description and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The MIT Press Direct edition is not open access (Crossref carries no licence, OpenAlex reports it closed), and no author copy of the book is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-568 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger (2005), PSYCHE 11(5), the author’s précis of Being No One. Minimal consciousness is a global world-model in a window of presence that cannot be recognised as a model (globality, presentationality, transparency). A phenomenal self is a transparent self-model: “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency comes in degrees, and the self-model’s opaque partition is what lets humans doubt their own self-representation. The unity of consciousness is a single global functional cluster. A first-person perspective is a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, and iterating it yields introspective and social intelligence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-460), as the read substitute for Being No One (LIT-467), which it summarises in Metzinger’s own words. Worth reading as the most complete short statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT): more of the machinery than “Self models” (LIT-450), in particular the six constraints, the degrees of transparency, and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Phenomenal selfhood is a transparent self-model, “a function realized by a lack of information”; “no such things as selves exist in the world”. The unity of a conscious world is a global functional cluster bound by “highest-order binding”. It states the theory and its predictions; the evidence is cited, not shown, and the neural sections say how little is known. |
| LIT-571 | Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition | De Jaegher & Di Paolo (2007), Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4):485–507. Coordination between coupled systems is cheap and common. When patterns of coordination and the course of an encounter shape each other, the interaction acquires its own operationally closed, precarious organization. Social interaction is then regulated coupling between autonomous agents that constitutes an autonomous relational organization without destroying the agents’ autonomy. Because sense-making is embodied in movement, interactors can coordinate their sense-making, along a spectrum from modulated individual sense-making to jointly created meaning. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-456), from the published version posted on De Jaegher’s own site. Worth reading as the founding statement of participatory sense-making. A social interaction is defined as regulated coupling between autonomous agents that itself becomes an autonomous organization in the relational domain, without destroying the agents’ autonomy; coordinating sense-making in interaction can generate meanings neither individual had. The argument is conceptual, illustrated by everyday cases and by the perceptual-crossing experiments; nothing is measured in the paper. |
| LIT-697 v2 | The feeling of being a group: Corporate emotions and collective consciousness | Schmid (2014), in von Scheve & Salmela (eds.), Collective Emotions (OUP), pp. 3–16. Unread. By summaries of its abstract: against the view that groups cannot have emotions because they lack consciousness, it argues that a group with proper intentional attitudes has consciousness, as plural pre-reflective self-awareness, and so meets a precondition for emotion. Groups probably cannot have “fast” emotions but can have “slow” ones such as confidence, happiness or grief. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The chapter is paywalled at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall finds no open copy, and the University of Vienna’s research portal refused the request; the author’s preprint is posted only on ResearchGate and academia.edu, which this record does not use. What is said of it comes from summaries of its abstract returned by a search service, labelled unverified. A person could supply the chapter from the OUP volume or ask the author; a reading would move this to Active and should test whether its “corporate emotions” are corporate attitudes in List’s sense. |
| LIT-910 v3 | Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action | Bruya (ed.) (2010), MIT Press. An edited collection arguing that attention and action can be at once highly focused and effortless, as in flow, against accounts that tie focus to effort. Unread. | Unavailable — unread, registered 2026-10-11 from Crossref and publisher metadata (MIT Press, Bradford Books; Brian Bruya, editor; ISBN 9780262013840). The editor’s introduction is listed on PhilArchive and was not opened. A full PDF on a third-party site was seen in search results and not used. Filed because it is the collection that names effortless attention as a problem for effort-based accounts of control; reading the introduction would place it. |
| LIT-914 v3 | The Concept of Flow | Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi (2002), chapter 7 of Snyder & Lopez (eds.), Handbook of Positive Psychology, pp. 89–105: the standard short statement of flow, the state of complete absorption in an activity that is done for its own sake. Unread; registered so the record’s claims about flow have a work to name. | Unavailable — unread, registered from Crossref metadata 2026-10-11. No lawful open copy was found: Oxford Academic’s chapter page is paywalled, and the only full copy a search turned up is an unofficial Scribd upload of the later 2009 chapter, which was not opened. Filed as the record’s anchor for flow, which it held nothing on. A reading of the chapter, or of Csikszentmihalyi (1990), would place it. |
| LIT-1191 v2 | Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference | Sandved-Smith, Hesp, Mattout, Friston, Lutz & Ramstead (2021). A three-level discrete active-inference model: attentional states (focused, distracted) set the precision of the perceptual likelihood, and meta-awareness states (high, low) set the precision with which the agent observes its own attentional state. Mental action is a policy, ‘stay’ or ‘switch’, over attentional states, defined at that level only and driven by a preference to observe oneself ‘focused’. Single simulations of a passive oddball reproduce focus, mind-wandering, noticing and refocusing, with longer mind-wandering under low meta-awareness. Stimuli are fixed by the generative process, so mental action changes how strongly they update belief, not what they are; no likelihood is learned. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-958) in full, from the PubMed Central deposit of the journal version; worth reading as the active-inference model of mental action: attentional states set the precision of the perceptual likelihood, meta-awareness states set the precision of the attentional likelihood, and the agent selects ‘stay’ or ‘switch’ over its own attentional state against a preference to observe itself ‘focused’, reproducing the cycle of focus, mind-wandering and refocusing. Read it knowing that action is defined at the attentional level only; that the agent’s attentional state is modelled as a generative process the mental action acts on, so the loop is action and perception one level inward; that the perceptual observations are fixed in advance and mental action changes only their precision; that nothing is learned; and that the results are single illustrative simulations with no data fitted. |
| LIT-1193 v2 | Le scaphandre et le papillon | Bauby (1997). A memoir of classic locked-in syndrome after a brainstem stroke, dictated letter by letter by blinking the left eyelid as Claude Mendibil, sent by the publisher, read out an alphabet ordered by French letter frequency that his speech therapist had devised. Published two days before Bauby’s death on 9 March 1997. English: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-16, not read; a lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-16 and none exists to reach: the book is in copyright (Bauby died in 1997) and sold, not given, by Robert Laffont (laffont.fr product page, ISBN 978-2-221-08172-3). Looked at: the publisher’s page (sale only); Open Library, whose one 1997 Laffont edition is an Internet Archive scan (lescaphandreetle0000baub) that is access-restricted, lending and print-disabled only, not usable here; HathiTrust (no record for ISBN 2-221-08172-2); Gallica and Google Books (refused or empty to this client; in copyright in any case). A publisher preview would not be a reading. Registered from the exchange of 2026-10-16 on active inference and locked-in syndrome (the workbench entry of 2026-10-16). No NOTE is filed. The publication date and the dictation method were checked against secondary sources (history, version 2). |
| LIT-1351 v2 | Evidence synthesis indicates contentless experiences in meditation are neither truly contentless nor identical | Woods, Windt & Carter (2022). An evidence synthesis of 135 texts by eight teachers of Shamatha (Wallace), Transcendental and Stillness Meditation identifies 65 features of the so-called contentless goal-states. The states are described as lacking thoughts, concepts, perceptions, images and memories but keeping wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, knowing, freedom and unity. They are the same across practices on 14 features, different on 4 (chiefly Shamatha’s attentional stability and vividness) and unclear on 47. So, on the texts, most are not truly contentless, and they are not identical. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1070) from the submitted preprint on MindRxiv (osf.io/ve7z2); worth reading as the systematic case that meditative states called contentless are described by their own teachers as lacking thoughts, perceptions, images and memories but keeping wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, a non-conceptual knowing, freedom and unity, and as differing across Shamatha, TM and Stillness Meditation, chiefly in Shamatha’s far greater attentional stability and vividness. 135 texts by eight teachers, 65 features: the same on 14, different on 4, unclear on 47. Its main limit is that the evidence is teachers’ descriptions, not practitioners’ reports, and that “not truly contentless” rests on counting qualities such as calm and simplicity as content, which the paper does not define. |
| LIT-1354 v2 | Distilling the Neurophenomenological Signatures of Pure Awareness during Transcendental Meditation | Chandia-Jorquera, van Mil, Estarellas, Dauphin, Pascovich & Canales-Johnson (2026). EEG with retrospective temporal experience tracing in 33 experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners and 33 sex- and age-matched controls who counted. Practitioners traced higher and more variable “pure awareness” (d = 0.77 and 1.32). A random-forest classifier on distributed EEG patterns separated meditation from counting at 65% balanced accuracy, led by permutation entropy and aperiodic activity, and meditation from rest at 88% sensitivity, led by low-frequency phase coherence. No robust association between the reports and the EEG was found. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1058) from the bioRxiv preprint, version 3; worth reading as the largest EEG study of Transcendental Meditation with time-resolved reports: 33 practitioners traced more, and more variable, “pure awareness” than 33 matched controls who counted, and a classifier on distributed EEG patterns separated meditation from counting (65% balanced accuracy, on entropy and aperiodic activity) and from rest (88% sensitivity, on low-frequency phase coherence). Its main limit is that the reports were not shown to track any EEG feature. The reports are retrospective ratings on a scale whose top the experimenters defined as “free from content”, demand is conceded only for controls, and the study was funded by, and recruited through, the TM organisation. Evidence about a practice period and about reports, not a neural signature of experience with little content. |
| LIT-1356 v2 | What Is Enactivism? | Ward (2026). Treating “enactivism” as an umbrella for any view that stresses sensorimotor loops ignores what sets apart the enactive approach of Varela, Thompson and Rosch: life–mind continuity, the primacy of lived experience, and reciprocity between science and self-understanding. A second axis, organicist against informationalist, runs across the cognitivist–embodied one. Embodied predictive processing, extended functionalism and cybernetics are embodied and informationalist; the enactive approach is organicist. A taxonomy, not an argument that organicism is true. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1065) from the author’s accepted manuscript in the University of Edinburgh repository; worth reading as a short, clear map that separates where a view puts cognition’s processes (skull, or brain–body–world) from what it says meaning depends on (information, or organization distinctive of living things). On that map embodied predictive processing, extended functionalism and cybernetics are embodied but informationalist, and the enactive approach of The Embodied Mind is organicist, further marked by the primacy of lived experience and by reciprocity, in which the vocabularies we understand ourselves with reshape the experience they describe. Its main limit is that it argues for a taxonomy, not for organicism, and gives no criterion for which properties are distinctive of life. It does not discuss brains in vats, development or grounding. |
| LIT-1361 v3 | Phenomenal structure: What is it and what is it for? | Isaac (2025). Sets out a structuralist science of phenomenal experience: experience has geometric structure (quality spaces), group-theoretic structure (perceptual constancies, which induce a distinction between subject and object) and dynamical structure (valence and affordance). Its method is to find structure-preserving maps between these and neural and physical structures, made testable because structural relations between experiences show up in behaviour, and evidenced chiefly by convergence between models built from different behavioural procedures, which it concedes is partial. | Active — read in full 2026-10-25 (NOTE-1163) from the publisher’s gold open-access PDF (version of record, CC BY), which the publisher’s site served on 2026-10-25 after refusing every request on 2026-10-22; worth reading as a structuralist programme that, unlike Lyre’s (LIT-1344), denies that quality-space geometry is enough: it adds constancy as invariance under transformations within experience, which after Cassirer it takes to make experience objective and to separate subject from object (THEORY-959), and fields of valence and affordance; and for its account of how a third-personal science reaches experience, chiefly by convergence between models built from different behavioural procedures (THEORY-953). Read it knowing that it is programmatic and tests nothing, that the author calls the group-theoretic and dynamic layers “mere suggestive sketches”, that “group-theoretic” is used for invariance in general (its own examples are groupoids or toy models), that it gives no criterion separating a subject–object distinction from mere invariant extraction, that the convergence it cites is coarse and its argument does not exclude a shared stimulus geometry as the common factor, and that, like Lyre, it addresses the character of experience, not whether a state is conscious. |
| LIT-1721 | Being one of us: we-identities and self-categorization theory | León (2023). A we-identity is one a subject has as a group member, is at times aware of, endorses, and cares about. Self-categorization theory explains we-identities by depersonalization, and phenomenologists (Zahavi, Salice) have adopted it as an account of the “we” in general. But the we-identities of close relationships arise by mutual individualization: partners grasp each other as non-substitutable and complementary. León proposes a socially extended account, drawing on Husserl and integrationist extended-mind criteria. | Active — read in full 2026-10-28 (NOTE-1309) from the open-access published article; worth reading as a philosopher’s limit on self-categorization theory: the we-identities of close relationships (long friendships, romantic partnerships) rest on mutual individualization and non-substitutability, the opposite of depersonalization, so the theory cannot be the general account of the “we” that phenomenologists have taken it to be. It proposes a socially extended account of such identities. An argument from cases and from relationship research, with no data of its own. Source of THEORY-1115. |
| LIT-1758 | Second-Person Engagement, Self-Alienation, and Group-Identification | Zahavi (2016/2019) reconstructs and defends Husserl’s empathy-based account of the “we” against Heidegger and Hans Bernhard Schmid. Truly social acts need a second-person relation: an I–Thou relation of reciprocal, communicative address, in which I am aware of the other and of myself as addressed by them. Taking over the other’s perspective on oneself, a self-apprehension Husserl calls “self-alienation”, lets the difference between self and other stay present but be “somewhat downplayed”, and that is a formal condition of coming to see oneself as “one of us”. A we is “not an enlarged I”: it preserves plurality and is not fusion. Zahavi likens the condition to self-categorization theory’s self-stereotyping, while noting that Husserl attends far more to the interpersonal encounter beneath it. Against Schmid he argues that the sense of “us” can be analysed, that not every social relation is a we, and that children’s self-awareness precedes their in-group bias. He concedes that an account built on the dyadic face-to-face “we” does not cover anonymous, institutional “we”s. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1289) from the peer-reviewed accepted manuscript in the University of Copenhagen’s repository (curis.ku.dk); worth reading as the phenomenologist’s case that coming to see oneself as one of us is a change in how one apprehends oneself, through another’s eyes, and that the resulting “we” is a plurality, not an enlarged I. |
| LIT-1871 | Why are dreams interesting for philosophers? The example of minimal phenomenal selfhood, plus an agenda for future research | Metzinger (2013), Frontiers in Psychology 4:746. Minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), defined by Blanke and Metzinger (2009) as global identification with the body, self-location and a weak first-person perspective, may reduce to transparent spatiotemporal self-location: reports of bodiless dreams and asomatic out-of-body experiences describe a stable self located at an extensionless point, with no body. The paper proposes a phenomenal “unit of identification”, an “epistemic agent model” for the knowing self, and a research agenda for dream science, including the test case of phenomenally opaque self-location. No new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1434), from the publisher’s open-access PDF (frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00746/pdf; also PMC3813926), text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading as Metzinger’s own later statement of minimal phenomenal selfhood: he proposes reducing it to “transparent self-location in a spatiotemporal frame of reference”, on the evidence of bodiless dreams and asomatic out-of-body reports, and names, as an open research question, whether any case of phenomenally opaque self-location exists. It is a metatheoretical agenda: it reports survey figures from others and offers no new data, and the decisive case it asks for is not reported. |
| LIT-1943 | The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports | Metzinger (2024), MIT Press, open access. More than 500 anonymised reports of “pure awareness” from an online survey of meditators (1,403 usable respondents from 57 countries, 92 questionnaire items, twelve factors), grouped by theme in 34 chapters with commentary. The book’s thesis is that consciousness can occur without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. It models pure awareness as a highest-level but “nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness, its tonic alertness, and so treats a first-person perspective as content, not a condition, of consciousness. The evidence is retrospective report from a self-selected sample. The methods chapter concedes that such reports cannot show the state was selfless when it occurred, while the summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established”. | Active — skimmed 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1499), from the publisher’s open-access PDF: the introduction, the theoretical commentary of chapters 2, 4, 8, 25, 28 and 31, all of chapter 34 and the epilogue’s ethics sections were read; the report chapters were sampled, not read through. Worth reading as the fullest statement of Metzinger’s later account of consciousness without a self. It offers “pure awareness” as minimal phenomenal experience and models it as a highest-level but nonegoic model of the organism’s own epistemic openness. Its evidence is retrospective, self-selected reports from meditators. The methods chapter concedes the limits of that evidence and the summary overstates what it shows. |
| LIT-1946 | Minimal phenomenal experience: Meditation, tonic alertness, and the phenomenology of “pure” consciousness | Metzinger (2020), Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 1(I):7. Proposes minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) as a candidate for the simplest consciousness and the entry point to a “minimal model” explanation. MPE is to lack minimal phenomenal selfhood, time and a spatial frame. Six constraints are drawn from contemplative and Western texts: Wakefulness, Low Complexity, Self-Luminosity, Introspective Availability, Epistemicity and Transparency/Opacity. Sixteen case studies flesh them out. The hypothesis: pure awareness is a temporally thin Bayesian representation of the organism’s tonic alertness, a model of an “unpartitioned epistemic space”. It “definitely has representational content” and is “non-egoic self-modelling”. Tonic alertness without that model, as in unresponsive wakefulness, is not conscious. A conceptual paper. Its evidence is quoted report. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1498) from the journal’s open-access PDF. Worth reading as the founding statement of minimal phenomenal experience, the concept the record’s reading of Chandia-Jorquera et al. (LIT-1354) takes as given. It holds that pure awareness has representational content: a temporally thin, nonegoic model of the organism’s tonic alertness, its “epistemic space”. On that account, consciousness without a self-model in the egoic sense still involves self-modelling, and it lacks even a phenomenal quality of oneness. Its evidence is sixteen quoted reports and texts. Its methodological problems, performative self-contradiction among them, are deferred to other papers. |