phenomenology.
16 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-036 v2 | Lindahl et al. 2017, varieties of contemplative experience | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-164 v2 | Kaepernick as Confucian sage: ritual resistance | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-365 | Integrated Information Theory 3.0 | The 2014 restatement of IIT. Five axioms of experience become five postulates about mechanisms in a state, and an experience is identified with the maximally irreducible conceptual structure of a complex. Exclusion is the anti-nesting rule: of all overlapping sets of elements, only the one with locally maximal Φ is conscious, so no subset or superset of a complex is. It is postulated from the axiom that experience has definite borders; Occam’s razor is invoked only for exclusion within a mechanism. Logic-gate examples give minor complexes, a conscious inactive network, a minimally conscious photodiode and a feed-forward zombie. Nothing larger than about a dozen elements is computable. | Read |
| NOTE-377 | Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science | A short review that sets the minimal self (present self-consciousness) against the narrative self (extended in time), splits the minimal self into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, and ties their dissociation in schizophrenic thought insertion to Frith’s forward comparator model. It reports an embodied minimal self in neonatal imitation and a momentary one in Strawson and in Tani’s robot, and proposes, against Dennett, that the narrative self is the sum of its narratives. Evidence is cited, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-456 | Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition | An enactive account of social cognition built on coordination dynamics. When coordination and the encounter shape each other, the interaction gains its own precarious operational closure; it is social only if the interactors stay autonomous. Coordinated sense-making then ranges from one partner’s sense-making being modulated to meanings made jointly. Conceptual throughout; evidence is illustrative (corridor, charades, mother–infant timing, perceptual crossing). | Read |
| NOTE-460 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger’s own sketch of the self-model theory. Six constraints (globality, presentationality, transparency, convolved holism, dynamicity, perspectivalness) build up consciousness; a transparent self-model yields phenomenal selfhood, so “no such things as selves exist in the world”; transparency is graded, inversely proportional to the attentional availability of earlier processing stages. Phenomenal unity is one global functional cluster. The first-person perspective is a model of the intentionality relation, whose iteration gives introspective and social intelligence. A theory statement: no new evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-958 | Sandved-Smith et al. — computational phenomenology of mental action | A three-level discrete active-inference model in which attentional states set the precision of the perceptual likelihood and meta-awareness states set the precision of the attentional likelihood; mental action is a choice of ‘stay’ or ‘switch’ over attentional states, defined at the second level only, against a preference to observe oneself ‘focused’. Simulations reproduce the cycle of focus, mind-wandering, noticing and refocusing, with longer mind-wandering under low meta-awareness. The stimuli are fixed by the generative process, so mental action changes only how strongly they update belief; the likelihoods themselves are not learned. | Read |
| NOTE-1058 | Chandia-Jorquera et al. — Neurophenomenological signatures of pure awareness in Transcendental Meditation | Thirty-three experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners and 33 age- and sex-matched controls who counted instead. Drawn retrospectively, the practitioners’ traces of “pure awareness” were higher and more variable than the controls’ (d = 0.77 and 1.32). A random-forest classifier separated meditation from counting at 65% balanced accuracy, chiefly on permutation entropy and aperiodic EEG, and meditation from the practitioners’ own rest at 88%, chiefly on low-frequency phase coherence. No EEG feature was shown to track the reports. | Read |
| NOTE-1065 | Ward — What is enactivism? | A conceptual paper. The usual taxonomy, which lumps every view stressing sensorimotor loops as “enactivism” and splits it into autopoietic, sensorimotor and radical variants, hides what is distinctive about The Embodied Mind. A second axis, organicist against informationalist, runs across the cognitivist–embodied one. Enactivism is organicist, and it adds the primacy of lived experience and a reciprocity in which scientific vocabularies reshape the experience they describe. Most embodied views, predictive processing among them, are informationalist. It argues for a taxonomy, not for enactivism’s truth. | Read |
| NOTE-1070 | Woods, Windt & Carter — Contentless experiences in meditation are neither truly contentless nor identical | An evidence synthesis of 135 expert texts on the goal-states of Shamatha (Wallace), Transcendental Meditation and Stillness Meditation. It codes 65 features. The states are said to lack thoughts, concepts, perceptions, images and memories, but to keep wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, knowing, freedom, unity and more. They are the same across the practices on 14 features, different on 4 (chiefly Shamatha’s far greater attentional stability and vividness) and unclear on 47. So, on the texts, they are neither truly contentless nor identical. The data are teachers’ descriptions, not participants’ reports. | Read |
| NOTE-1163 | Isaac — Phenomenal structure: what is it and what is it for? | A structuralist programme for the science of phenomenal experience, set out as a stance and not a thesis. Experience has three layers of structure: quality-space geometry, which is a precondition for meaning; group-theoretic constancy, which “induces a distinction between subject and object”; and dynamic structure, vector fields of valence and affordance, which guide action. The method is the search for structure-preserving maps among experience, world and brain, held as a regulative ideal and advanced by de-idealizing the models where the maps fail. The evidence that such models target experience, not mere behaviour, is chiefly convergence between models built by different behavioural routes, which the paper admits is always partial. The group-theoretic and dynamic layers are, in the author’s words, “mere suggestive sketches”. | Read |
| NOTE-1289 | Second-Person Engagement, Self-Alienation, and Group-Identification | A reconstruction and defence of Husserl’s empathy-based account of the “we”. Truly social acts need an I–Thou relation of reciprocal, communicative address, beyond even reciprocal empathy. In it I am aware of myself as addressed, and by taking over the other’s perspective on me (“self-alienation”) the self–other difference stays present but is “somewhat downplayed”. That is a formal, necessary but not sufficient, condition of seeing oneself as one of us. “A we, a first-person plural, is not an enlarged I.” Zahavi likens it to self-categorization theory’s self-stereotyping, replies to Heidegger and Schmid that the “we” can be analysed and that self-awareness precedes in-group bias, and concedes that the face-to-face “we” does not cover anonymous ones. | Read |
| NOTE-1309 | Being one of us: we-identities and self-categorization theory | A we-identity is held as a group member, is at times salient, is endorsed, and varies in affective salience. Self-categorization theory explains we-identities by depersonalization: seeing oneself as an interchangeable exemplar of a prototype. Phenomenologists (Zahavi, Salice) have adopted it for the “we” in general. But close relationships, such as long friendships and partnerships, yield we-identities by mutual individualization, in which each grasps the other as non-substitutable. So depersonalization is not necessary for a we-identity. León sketches a socially extended account, drawing on Husserl and on extended-mind criteria. | Read |
| NOTE-1434 | Metzinger — Why are dreams interesting for philosophers? | Metzinger proposes that minimal phenomenal selfhood reduces to transparent spatiotemporal self-location, because people report a stable self in bodiless dreams and asomatic out-of-body experiences, located at an extensionless point without a body. He predicts that such self-location is necessary and sufficient for a minimal sense of self, and asks whether a phenomenally opaque self-location, experienced as a representation, has ever been observed. The paper is an agenda: its evidence is other people’s prevalence figures, which it calls ambiguous, and it reports no opaque case. | Read |
| NOTE-1498 | Metzinger — Minimal phenomenal experience | A conceptual paper. It proposes “minimal phenomenal experience”, the phenomenology of pure awareness in meditation, as the entry point for a minimal-model explanation of consciousness. Six phenomenological constraints are drawn from contemplative and Western texts and illustrated by sixteen quoted reports. The hypothesis: pure awareness is a temporally thin, nonegoic model of the organism’s tonic alertness, “an internal model of an epistemic space”. It has representational content, lacks a first-person perspective, time, space and even phenomenal oneness, and cannot itself be remembered. | Read |
| NOTE-1499 | Metzinger — The Elephant and the Blind | More than 500 meditators’ retrospective reports of “pure awareness”, from a survey of 1,403 people in 57 countries, are offered as evidence that consciousness occurs without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. Pure awareness is modelled as the top level of a nested active-inference hierarchy, “a highest-level but nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness. The book concedes that retrospective reports cannot show that a state was selfless when it happened, and its summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established” all the same. | Skimmed |