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).
16 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-044 v2 | In relational frame theory the self is verbal behaviour’s content, its process and its context, and the self as context is a perspective learned from deictic relations that cannot itself be found as content | Barnes-Holmes et al. (LIT-541) define three selves: the conceptualized self, the content of verbal relations about oneself; the knowing self, their ongoing process; and the transcendent self, their context. Hayes et al. (LIT-555) say the third arises from deictic frames (I–you, here–there, now–then) as “a sense of self as a locus or perspective”, and is “a context for verbal knowing, not the content”, so its limits “cannot be consciously known”. The account maps the three onto the record’s holdings: the content is the narrative self (Dennett, Gallagher, Strawson), and the context is what Hume could not find among his perceptions and what Metzinger calls a transparent perspective. It differs from the minimal self (Gallagher) on origin: RFT says the perspective is learned in language. The evidence for the learned origin is cited, not read, so Proposed. The clinical claim is THEORY-051. | Proposed |
| THEORY-064 | What is experienced as a self is the content of a self-model the system cannot recognise as a model, and nothing beyond such models is a self | Metzinger’s précis of Being No One (2005), LIT-568, with his encyclopedia article “Self models” (LIT-450): a phenomenal self is a transparent self-model, one whose representational character “is not accessible to subjective experience”, so that the system experiences its content “simply as ourselves”. Selfhood is “a function realized by a lack of information”, and “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency is graded, and the perspective itself is modelled, as a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation. Two things are offered: a prediction (a wholly opaque self-model would abolish selfhood) and an ontological stipulation. The précis adds no evidence; its case studies are in the book, unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-458 v2 | Within the minimal self, the sense that a movement or a thought is mine and the sense that I am its source are distinct and come apart, as in involuntary movement and thought insertion; on Frith’s comparator model the sense of agency depends on a forward model that precedes action and ownership on sensory feedback, so failed forward monitoring would explain thought insertion and, by the same mechanism, why first-person reference ordinarily cannot misidentify its subject | Gallagher (2000), LIT-453, read in NOTE-377 from the preprint. A review with no new results: the dissociation and the comparator account are reported from Frith, Haggard and others, and the link to the immunity principle is Campbell’s argument, adopted and left conditional. It is about the minimal self, not the narrative self, for which the review’s own proposal is two paragraphs. It does not say which minimal self, embodied or reflective, the analysis concerns. | Proposed |
| THEORY-498 | A mathematical structure whose domains are aspects of experience and whose axioms hold there is not thereby a structure of experience, because that test passes incompatible topologies on one set and every rescaling of a metric without consulting experience; requiring, for each relation, an aspect that changes exactly when a variation of experience breaks the relation removes those automatic passes, and has so far been met only by relative similarity and a visual topology, each on an assumed premise | Kleiner & Ludwig (2023; Synthese 2024), LIT-143, read in full in NOTE-135. The negative result is shown by construction: any set of aspects carries both the discrete topology and a coarser one, and a metric d passes whenever every C·d does. The replacement criterion (MSC) ties each relation to an aspect that co-varies with it under every variation. Its two positive cases rest on assumed transitivity and on the subsumptive unity thesis. The published version gives no structure that fails (MSC); the argument that metric spaces fail is in arXiv v1 only, and was withdrawn. | Active |
| THEORY-597 | Meditation-related experiences that Western Buddhist practitioners report as challenging span 59 kinds in seven domains, from fear and sleep change to altered self-other boundaries, and they are reported in daily practice, at under an hour a day and in the first days of practice, not only on intensive retreat; the frequencies come from a sample chosen for difficulty, and the causal link is the practitioners’ own attribution | Lindahl, Fisher, Cooper, Rosen & Britton (2017), LIT-066, read in full in NOTE-036. Interviews with 60 Western Buddhist practitioners, recruited for having had a challenging meditation-related experience, and 32 teachers and clinicians were coded into 59 experience categories in seven domains. Some practitioners reported onset within ten days of starting, at under an hour a day, or in daily practice. That rebuts the claim that difficulties arise only on retreat or in the predisposed. It gives no rates and no relative risk: the sample was chosen for difficulty, and causation is self-attributed, with a causality score of 2 or more built into inclusion. | Active |
| THEORY-768 v2 | Minimal selfhood is identification with the whole body, located where that body is felt to be and seen from inside it; owning a body part does not reach it, and bodily agency enables it causally without being part of it | Blanke & Metzinger (2009), LIT-1274, read in full in NOTE-1002, with Lenggenhager et al. (2007), LIT-1279, read in full in NOTE-999, for the full-body illusion it leans on. Minimal phenomenal selfhood is given three dimensions: global self-identification, self-location and a weak first-person perspective. Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and full-body illusions vary them; the rubber hand illusion is said not to. The necessity and sufficiency claims are asserted, and the agency thesis rests on adults whose agency was intact. | Proposed |
| THEORY-866 v2 | Expert texts of Shamatha, Transcendental and Stillness Meditation describe their so-called contentless goal-states as lacking thoughts, perceptions, images and memories but keeping many forms of content, and as differing across the practices in attentional stability and vividness | Woods, Windt & Carter (2022), LIT-1351, read in the submitted preprint in NOTE-1070. An evidence synthesis of 135 texts by eight teachers codes 65 features of the goal-states: the same across practices on 14, different on 4, unclear on 47. The states lack everyday content but keep wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, knowing, freedom and unity; Shamatha’s has far greater attentional stability and vividness. The sharp edge: it is a finding about how teachers describe the states, not about what practitioners experience, and “not truly contentless” depends on counting calm or simplicity as content. | Active |
| THEORY-867 v2 | The geometry of the colour similarity space does not mark the four unique hues, nor the difference between the black–white axis, along which every grey is a mixture of both ends, and the opponent axes, along which each half shows only one end; so a structuralism on which phenomenal character is fixed by similarity relations alone cannot account for how colour experiences are composed | Aldé (2026), LIT-1348, read in full in NOTE-1055. Two arguments, the unique hues objection and the opposing dimensions objection, from colour facts the paper takes as accepted. The decisive premise of each, that no adequate geometric property marks the facts, rests on inspection of CIELAB and extrapolation to better models; no analysis is reported. The target is similarity structuralism only. | Proposed |
| THEORY-868 v2 | The structuralist methods and evidence in consciousness science support only that experiences have structure or stand in relations to other experiences, not that an experience is nothing but its relations; the stronger, metaphysical thesis implies that relational knowledge fixes what an experience is like, that every new experience changes all the others, and that a system with a single experience is impossible, and each consequence is doubtful | Negro (2025), LIT-1346, read in full in NOTE-1054. The distinctions (three structuralisms; having, being in and being a structure) are sound and the arguments valid. Each argument’s decisive premise is an intuition or a conceivability claim, and a structuralist such as Lyre (THEORY-880) accepts the holism Negro takes to be absurd. The paper also says that making judgement constitutive saves the view only by aligning it with eliminativism, which bears directly on CLAIM-412. | Proposed |
| THEORY-870 v2 | In one study of 33 experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners and 33 matched controls who counted instead, the practitioners rated their session higher on a retrospective pure-awareness scale whose top was defined for them as free from content (d = 0.77), and a classifier on EEG separated meditation from counting at 65% balanced accuracy on held-out subjects and, within practitioners, meditation from rest with 88% sensitivity; the authors found no robust association between the ratings and the EEG features | Chandia-Jorquera et al. (2026), LIT-1354, read in the bioRxiv v3 preprint in NOTE-1058. 33 practitioners against 33 matched controls who counted: higher and more variable retrospective pure-awareness traces (d = 0.77, 1.32); 65% balanced accuracy separating meditation from counting, on entropy and aperiodic EEG; 88% sensitivity separating meditation from rest, on low-frequency phase coherence. The sharp edge: the authors found no robust association between the reports and the EEG, so this is a finding about a practice period and about reports, not a neural signature of an experience with little content. | Active |
| THEORY-880 v2 | The specific phenomenal character of an experience is fixed by its place in a quality space, the structure of all the discriminations a sensory system can make, and that structure is mirrored many-to-one in neural feature maps; whether the state is conscious at all is left to a separate general mechanism; so experiences are holistic, a change anywhere in the space can change every experience in it, and spectrum inversion is excluded actually by the asymmetry of colour space and nomologically by its ties to the other senses | Lyre (2022), LIT-1344, read in full in NOTE-1060: neurophenomenal structuralism as a programme. The thesis is assumed and motivated, not shown. Its neural evidence is one cited imaging study of colour in V4. The reduction it draws rests on metaphysically necessary supervenience, which the author says he cannot argue for. It is filed so that the objections read with it, Negro (THEORY-868) and Aldé (THEORY-867), have a stated target. | Proposed |
| THEORY-959 | Perceptual constancies are invariants of transformations that act within experience, not only of physical transformations or planar projections, since perceived shape and depth match no linear projection and the transformations can be realized with no physical change; on Isaac’s structuralist account, after Cassirer, it is these invariants, co-present in experience with the varying appearances they abstract from, that make experience represent an objective world and so distinguish subject from object | Isaac (2025), LIT-1361, read in NOTE-1163: the group-theoretic layer of a structuralist account of experience. The paper’s evidence supports the weaker half: constancy needs invariance under transformations internal to experience. The stronger half, that this invariance is what makes experience objective and induces a subject–object distinction, is Cassirer’s, argued from the co-presence of two levels of experience, and the paper gives no way to tell invariant extraction with a subject from invariant extraction without one. “Group-theoretic” is used loosely: the paper’s own examples are groupoids or toy models. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1241 | Experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners report more pure awareness than matched counting controls, and multivariate EEG separates the meditation period from counting and from rest, but the reports are not shown to track any EEG feature | The general form of Chandia-Jorquera et al.’s finding, filed beside THEORY-870 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-870, Active, holds what the one study measured; whether practitioners in general report more pure awareness, robustly to demand, and whether EEG separates the practice from other effortless ones, is this entry’s question. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1246 | The so-called contentless goal-states of Shamatha, Transcendental and Stillness Meditation are neither truly contentless nor identical: they lack thoughts, perceptions, images and memories but keep wakefulness, calm, stillness, a non-conceptual knowing and the like, and they differ across the practices in attentional stability | Woods, Windt and Carter’s thesis about the experiences, filed beside THEORY-866 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-866, Active, holds what the teachers’ texts describe; whether practitioners’ experience is so is this entry’s question, with THEORY-866’s old condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1295 | Metzinger 2024 calls consciousness without an egoic self or first-person perspective “empirically established” on the strength of retrospective, self-selected reports from meditators, while its own methods chapter grants that a remembered report of a selfless state is “highly dubious” evidence that the state was selfless when it occurred, and leaves that problem open | Metzinger (2024), LIT-1943, read in part in NOTE-1499. The summary chapter says that “full-absorption episodes, nonegoic self-awareness, and nondual modes of consciousness are empirically established phenomena” (p. 457), and that the strong reading of subjectivity “is false” (p. 459). The methods chapter grants self-selection, theory contamination, unreliable recall and, at p. 19, that reports of having been selfless are “highly dubious from a methodological perspective” because autobiographical memory represents events as a self’s. It calls the question “open”. Active: the two passages are read and quoted. Whether selfless consciousness occurs is not settled either way here. | Active |
| THEORY-1299 | Pure awareness, on Metzinger’s account, is the content of a temporally thin model of the organism’s own tonic alertness, its capacity to know; experience in this minimal form lacks an egoic self-model, a first-person perspective, time, space and even phenomenal oneness, but not self-modelling, and tonic alertness that is not so modelled is not experienced | Metzinger (2020), LIT-1946, read in full in NOTE-1498, and Metzinger (2024), LIT-1943, skimmed in NOTE-1499. MPE is “an inner representation of tonic alertness”, “non-egoic self-modelling” that “definitely has representational content”. In the 2024 sketch it is “a highest-level but nonegoic self-model” of the system’s epistemic openness, which “really endows the content generated on all lower-order levels with phenomenality”. It is a hypothesis fitted to retrospective reports. It does not say that consciousness needs no model of the system, only that it needs no model of a knowing self. | Proposed |