Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy is being investigated as a treatment for a range of psychiatric illnesses. Current research suggests that the kinds of subjective experiences induced by psychedelic compounds play key roles in producing therapeutic outcomes. To date, most knowledge of therapeutic psychedelic experiences are derived from psychometric assessments with scales such as the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. While these approaches are insightful, more nuanced and detailed descriptions of psychedelic-induced changes to subjective experience are required. Drawing on recent advancements (...) in qualitative methods arising from the interdisciplinary field of phenomenological psychopathology, we propose a systematic and comprehensive investigation into how Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy alters subjective experience. This research program aims to characterise the nature of therapeutic psychedelic experiences by drawing on concepts from philosophical phenomenology. Such characterisations should, moreover, contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms of psychedelic therapy, the role of integration therapy, and related philosophical debates. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a mathematical model of subjective experience in terms of classes of hierarchical geometries of representations (“n-awareness”). We first outline a general framework by recalling concepts from higher category theory, homotopy theory, and the theory of (infinity,1)-topoi. We then state three conjectures that enrich this framework. We first propose that the (infinity,1)-category of a geometric structure known as perfectoid diamond is an (infinity,1)-topos. In order to construct a topology on the (infinity,1)-category of diamonds we (...) then propose that topological localization, in the sense of Grothendieck-Rezk-Lurie (infinity,1)-topoi, extends to the (infinity,1)-category of diamonds. We provide a small-scale model using triangulated categories. Finally, our meta-model takes the form of Efimov K-theory of the (infinity,1)-category of perfectoid diamonds, which illustrates structural equivalences between the category of diamonds and subjective experience (i.e.its privacy, self-containedness, and self-reflexivity). Based on this, we investigate implications of the model. We posit a grammar (“n-declension”) for a novel language to express n-awareness, accompanied by a new temporal scheme (“n-time”). Our framework allows us to revisit old problems in the philosophy of time: how is change possible and what do we mean by simultaneity and coincidence? We also examine the notion of “self” within our framework. A new model of personal identity is introduced which resembles a categorical version of the “bundle theory”: selves are not substances in which properties inhere but (weakly) persistent moduli spaces in the K-theory of perfectoid diamonds. (shrink)

Sleep onset is associated with marked changes in behavioral, physiological, and subjective phenomena. In daily life though subjective experience is the main criterion in terms of which we identify it. But very few studies have focused on these experiences. This study seeks to identify the subjective variables that reflect sleep onset. Twenty young subjects took an afternoon nap in the laboratory while polysomnographic recordings were made. They were awakened four times in order to assess subjective (...) experiences that correlate with the (1) appearance of slow eye movement, (2) initiation of stage 1 sleep, (3) initiation of stage 2 sleep, and (4) 5 min after the start of stage 2 sleep. A logistic regression identified control over and logic of thought as the two variables that predict the perception of having fallen asleep. For sleep perception, these two variables accurately classified 91.7% of the cases; for the waking state, 84.1%. (shrink)

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental health condition in which the experience of a traumatic event causes a series of psychiatric and behavioral symptoms such as hypervigilance, insomnia, irritability, aggression, constricted affect, and self-destructive behavior. This paper investigates two case studies to argue that the experience of PTSD is not restricted to humans alone; we have good epistemic reason to hold that some animals can experience genuine PTSD, given our current and best clinical understanding of the disorder (...) in humans. I will use this evidence to argue for two claims. First, because the causal structure of PTSD plausibly requires reference to a traumatic conscious experience in order to explain subsequent behaviors, the fact that animals can have PTSD provides new evidence for animal consciousness. Second, the discovery of PTSD in animals puts pressure on accounts which hold that animal behavior can be fully explained without reference to subjective experience. (shrink)

Conscious experiences involve subjective qualities, such as colours, sounds, smells and emotions. In this Perspective, we argue that these subjective qualities can be understood in terms of their similarity to other experiences. This account highlights the role of memory in conscious experience, even for simple percepts. How an experience feels depends on implicit memory of the relationships between different perceptual representations within the brain. With more complex experiences such as emotions, explicit memories are also recruited. We (...) draw inspiration from work in machine learning as well as the cognitive neuroscience of learning and decision making to make our case and discuss how the account could be tested in future experiments. The resulting findings might help to reveal the functions of subjective experience and inform current theoretical debates on consciousness. (shrink)

This paper explores the philosophical question of whether a meaningful difference exists between living in a simulation and living in what we call “reality.” Drawing from the simulation hypothesis and discussions of consciousness and subjective experience, the investigation considers whether the subjective experiences of a simulated entity could be indistinguishable from those of a human being. The central argument is that while metaphysical differences between simulation and reality exist, from the standpoint of subjective experience, the (...) distinction may be inconsequential. We examine the implications of this idea for personal identity, free will, and the authenticity of experience. The paper concludes that, although important philosophical differences exist between simulation and reality, subjective experience and the sense of self may remain fundamentally the same in both scenarios. (shrink)

Laura Specker Sullivan (2022) makes a fairly compelling case for the value of the perspectives of Buddhist practitioners in neuroethics. In this study, Tibetan Buddhist monks have been asked, among other things, whether consciousness, in brain-injured patients in a minimally conscious state, entails a duty to preserve life. In our view, some of the participants’ responses could be used to inform the bioethical debate on death determination.

Subjectivity theories of consciousness take self-reference, somehow construed, as essential to having conscious experience. These theories differ with respect to how many levels they posit and to whether self-reference is conscious or not. But all treat self-referencing as a process that transpires at the personal level, rather than at the subpersonal level, the level of mechanism. -/- Working with conceptual resources afforded by pre-existing theories of consciousness that take self-reference to be essential, several attempts have been made to explain (...) seemingly anomalous cases, especially instances of alien experience. These experiences are distinctive precisely because self-referencing is explicitly denied by the only person able to report them: those who experience them deny that certain actions, mental states, or body parts belong to self. The relevant actions, mental states, or body parts are sometimes attributed to someone or something other than self, and sometimes they are just described as not belonging to self. But all are referred away from self. -/- The cases under discussion here include somatoparaphrenia, schizophrenia, depersonalization, anarchic hand syndrome, and utilization behavior; the theories employed, Higher-Order Thought, Wide Intrinsicality, and Self-Representational. Below I argue that each of these attempts at explaining or explaining away the anomalies fails. Along the way, since each of these theories seeks at least compatibility with science, I sketch experimental approaches that could be used to adduce support for my position, or indeed for the positions of theorists with whom I disagree. -/- In a concluding section I first identify two presuppositions shared by all of the theorists considered here, and argue that both are either erroneous or misleading. Second, I call attention to divergent paths adopted when attempting to explain alienation experiences: some theorists choose to add a mental ingredient, while others prefer to subtract one. I argue that alienation from experience, action, or body parts could result from either addition or subtraction, and that the two can be incorporated within a comprehensive explanatory framework. Finally, I suggest that this comprehensive framework would require self-referencing of a sort, but self-referencing that occurs solely on the level of mechanism, or the subpersonal level. In adumbrating some features of this “subpersonal self,” I suggest that there might be one respect in which it is prior to conscious experience. (shrink)

According to contextualism, vast majority of natural-language expressions are context-sensitive. When testing whether this claim is reflected in Folk intuitions, some interesting methodological questions were raised such as: which experimental design is more appropriate for testing contextualism – the within- or the between-subject design? The main thesis of this paper is that the between-subject design should be preferred. The first experiment aims at assessing the difference between the results obtained for within-subjects measurements (where all participants assess all contexts) and between-subject (...) measurements (where respondents evaluating different contexts are distinct groups). It is shown that the within-subject design provides data that seems to support contextualism. However, I present an alternative, invariantist interpretation of these results, therefore showing that the within-subject design does not allow to empirically distinguish between contextualism and invariantism. The second experiment further elaborates the issue of how perceiving the contrast between contexts can affect subjects’ judgments – I show that certain kinds of contexts may elicit opposite intuitions when contrasted with different contexts. (shrink)

In August 2021, Froese et al. published survey data collected from 2,543 respondents on their subjective experiences living under imposed social distancing measures during COVID-19 (1). The questionnaire was issued to respondents in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. By combining the authors’ expertise in phenomenological philosophy, phenomenological psychopathology, and enactive cognitive science, the questions were carefully phrased to prompt reports that would be useful to phenomenological investigation and theorizing (2–4). These questions reflected the various author’s research interests (e.g., technology, (...) grief, time). Between April 7th and July 31st, 2021, a second questionnaire with the same question set was issued to respondents of the original who had agreed to do a follow-up. This was intended to capture subjective reports of life under social distancing measures a year after the initial survey. By this time–depending on their country of residence and health status–respondents had potentially lived with repeated and prolonged lockdowns and a variety of other restrictions on their social lives. When taken together, Survey I and Survey II provide a cross-cultural and longitudinal dataset that allows for analysis of longer-term impacts of imposed social distancing measures on people’s experiences. For researchers working in diverse disciplines, this dataset offers a rich resource that reflects people’s reactions to the imposition of different social restrictions in different countries and over different time periods. (shrink)

Many philosophical issues concern questions of objectivity and subjectivity. Of these questions, there are two kinds. The first considers whether something is objective or subjective; the second what it _means_ for something to be objective or subjective.

Tobias-Renstrøm and Køppe (2020) show the several conceptual limits that new materialism and postmodern subject models have for psychological theory and research. The present study continues in this discussion and argues that the applicability of the ideas of quantum-inspired new materialism depends on the theoretical perspectives that we consider for analysis: be it the first-person perspective referring to the subjective experience of a human subject, or the third-person perspective, in which a human subject is observed by an external (...) observer. While the arguments of new materialism are in accordance with the analysis of the act of observation performed by an external observer, some problems arise when trying to theoretically approach the first-person subjective experience of a human subject. For example, new materialism fails to explain why human minds can maintain the awareness of a subject’s identity throughout their lives and to recall the memories about their past personal experiences. (shrink)

The self can be understood in objective metaphysical terms as a bundle of properties, as a substance, or as some other kind of entity on our metaphysical list of what there is. Such an approach explores the metaphysical nature of the self when regarded from a suitably impersonal, ontological perspective. It explores the nature and structure of the self in objective reality, that is, the nature and structure of the self from without. This is the objective self. I am taking (...) a different approach. In addition to objective reality, which is usually understood and explored from an impersonal, quasi-observational and metaphysically realist perspective, we can also explore the nature and structure of subjective reality. The nature and structure of subjective reality is defined by the nature and structure of first-personal, conscious experience. Subjective reality is as real as objective reality, and a metaphysical realist such as myself can endorse the existence of both kinds of ontology. The mental states that, as experienced from the first-personal or subjective perspective, capture the nature and structure of subjective reality, are included in objective reality. The questions to explore in a subjective ontology of the self concern the nature and structure of the self from the first-personal or subjective perspective, that is, the nature and structure of the self from within. This is the subjective self. (shrink)

The study was conducted to explore teachers’ experiences in the delivery of science subjects during the first school year of implementation of distance learning. The teachers’ experiences in the delivery of science subjects served as a reference for formulating innovation to make learning effective in distance learning modality. The data for this study were collected through an interview schedule. It was done through one-on-one in-depth interviews with each participant with the observance of COVID-19 safety protocols. The interviews with all participants (...) were audio-recorded. The data were transcribed verbatim by repeatedly listening to the recorded audio recording. Transcribed verbatim responses were then translated into English. After that, significant statements were determined from all participants’ responses. Lastly, themes and sub-themes were generated from the participants’ significant statements. Based on the result of this study, the following themes have been generated: preparation experiences, adjustment experiences, and unpleasant experiences. Preparations experienced by the participants were professional development, learning resource preparations, and aligning lessons to MELCs. The participants also had adjustment experiences, including content modification and ICT utilization. Also, unpleasant experiences by the participants were an overwhelming workload, complex communication, problems with assessment, and poor student learning. All the teachers’ experiences identified by the Hilongos National Vocational School junior high school teachers serve as the basis for formulating an innovation project. An innovation project for the new normal will address the unpleasant experiences of the teachers. Hence, the innovation project on improving students’ learning for science subjects in a distance learning modality must be utilized to cater to the needs of the school’s clients, the learners. The study concluded that an innovation project on improving students’ learning of science subjects is necessary to equip the Science Teachers of Hilongos National Vocational School with skills to improve the delivery of science subjects in the new normal. It is also recommended to alleviate teachers’ workload, strengthen communications, address problems in assessment, and improve students’ learning. (shrink)

Ernst Jünger is known for his war writings, but is largely ignored by contemporary phenomenologists. In this essay, I explore his e Adventurous Heart which has recently been made available in English. is work consists of a set of fragments which, when related, disclose a coherent ow of philosophical thinking. Speci cally, I show that, beneath a highly poetic and obscure prose, Jünger posits how subjective experience and poetry allow individuals to realize truth. I relate parts of Jünger’s (...) insights to contributions by Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, arguing that Jünger o ers a unique and valuable contribution to the phenomenological discipline. (shrink)

The Gestalt principle of isomorphism reveals the primacy of subjective experience as a valid source of evidence for the information encoded neurophysiologically. This theory invalidates the abstractionist view that the neurophysiological representation can be of lower dimensionality than the percept to which it gives rise.

Phenomenal objectivism explains perceptual phenomenal character by reducing it to an awareness of mind-independent objects, properties, and relations. A challenge for this view is that there is a sense in which a distant tree looks smaller than a closer tree even when they are the same objective size (perceptual size variation). The dual content view is a popular objectivist account in which such experiences are explained by my objective spatial relation to the tree, in particular visual angle (perspectival size). I (...) describe a series of first-person experiments for investigating size experience. I use a ruler as a first-person method for operationalising perspectival size (Experiment 1). I use the corridor illusion (Experiment 2), outlining one’s head in the mirror (Experiment 3), and outlining the size of objects on glass (Experiment 4) to show a phenomenal difference in size for items in different depth contexts, despite being identical in visual angle. These finding demonstrate that visual angle cannot account for these spatial experiences. Psychological evidence provides further support for the thesis that subjects do not experience visual angle when depth information is present. Together this evidence supports the hypothesis that perceptual size variation cannot be accounted for by visual angle, hence undermining a plausible version of the dual content theory. This outcome, combined with problems raised by alternative objectivist accounts of size variation, provides support for a subjectivist account of size experience. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, Strawson investigates wide-ranging topics pertaining to the nature of the self: What do we mean by the term ‘self’? In what sense do selves exist? To what extent is continuity over time essential to selfhood? Must one be able to make a story of one’s life in order to be a coherent self? Must one be self-conscious in order to be conscious at all? and more. The fourteen essays here are not necessarily meant to be (...) read in order. They do not offer a sustained argument, but rather a number of themes that appear in different places, like threads in a tapestry. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenology of awakening in Chinese Zen Buddhism. In this tradition, to awaken is to ‘see your true nature’. In particular, the two aspects of awakening are: (1) seeing that the nature of one’s self or mind is empty or void and (2) an erasing of the usual (though merely apparent) boundary between subject and object. In the early Zen tradition, there are many references to awakening as chopping off your head, not having eyes, nose (...) and tongue, and seeing your ‘Original Face’. These references bear a remarkable resemblance to an approach to awakening developed by Douglas Harding. I will guide the reader through a series of Harding’s first-person experiments which investigate the gap where you cannot see your own head. I will endeavour to show that these methods, although radically different from traditional meditation techniques, result in an experience with striking similarities to Zen accounts of awakening, in particular, as experiencing oneself as empty or void and yet totally united with the given world. The repeatability and apparent reliability of these first-person methods opens up a class of awakening experience to empirical investigation and has the potential to provide new insights into nondual traditions. (shrink)

Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. However, there are limitations to existing science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be currently intractable and mysterious (8). This is one of many deep problems that are generally agreed to be beyond the present purview of Science, including many quantum phenomena, etc. However, all of these famous unsolved problems are either remote from everyday (...) class='Hi'>experience (entanglement, dark matter) or are hard to even define sharply (phenomenology, consciousness, etc.). In this note, we will consider some computational problems in vision that arise every time that we open our eyes and yet are demonstrably inconsistent with current theories of neural computation. The focus will be on two famous related phenomena, known as the neural binding problem and the experience of a detailed stable visual world. I, among many others, have struggled with these issues for more than fifty years (1, 2, 3). Somewhat paradoxically, the continuing progress in scientific methods and knowledge reveals that these are both unsolvable within existing neuroscience. By considering some basic facts about how the brain processes image input, we will show that, under the standard theory, there are not nearly enough brain neurons to compute what we experience as vision. Inconsistencies like the ones shown here have had a profound effect on paradigm change in the sciences. More directly, the discussions below suggest possible new theories and experiments. (shrink)

Subjects of Experience is as ambitious as it is contrary to the spirit of most of contemporary analytic metaphysics and philosophy of mind. The reader needs a scorecard to keep track of all the currently unfashionable positions that Lowe adopts in this courageous little book. While the work ranges broadly over many topics, Lowe’s account of the self is at its core, and will be the focus of this review. However, it should be noted that one of the virtues (...) of Subjects of Experience is its broad perspective. In addition to the book’s central discussion of the self, there are chapters on mental causation, perception, action, self-knowledge, and language, thought and imagination. (shrink)

A common view about the phenomenology of episodic remembering has it that when we remember a perceptual experience, we can relive or re-experience many of its features, but not its characteristic presence. In this paper, we challenge this common view. We first say that presence in perception divides into temporal and locative presence, with locative having two sides, an objective and a subjective one. While we agree with the common view that temporal and objective locative presence cannot (...) be relived in remembering, we argue that subjective locative presence – the feeling of being immersed in a certain scene – can be so. Our argument for this claim starts by determining independently the underpinning mechanisms of subjective locative presence in quasi-perceptual imagination. These mechanisms are self-projection, imaginative pretence, and attentional focus. We then proceed to establish that they have been found to underpin conscious states of episodic remembering too. We conclude that episodic remembering can bring us to relive the subjective locative presence characteristic of a perceptual experience, and that the common view is mistaken. Our view – ‘mnemonic immersivism’ – has important consequences regarding the relationships between memory and imagination and the phenomenology of episodic remembering. (shrink)

The article presents a perspective on the scientific explanation of the subjectivity of conscious experience. It proposes plausible answers for two empirically valid questions: the ‘how’ question concerning the developmental mechanisms of subjectivity, and the ‘why’ question concerning its function. Biological individuation, which is acquired in several different stages, serves as a provisional description of how subjective perspectives may have evolved. To the extent that an individuated informational space seems the most efficient way for a given organism to (...) select biologically valuable information, subjectivity is deemed to constitute an adaptive response to informational overflow. One of the possible consequences of this view is that subjectivity might be (at least functionally) dissociated from consciousness, insofar as the former primarily facilitates selection, the latter action. (shrink)

The term 'sexual inclusion’ is commonly taken to refer to the adjustment of our social and educational practices to counteract prejudices that are connected to sex. The project of sexual inclusion can be used, for example, to advocate against the discrimination of the LGBTQIA+ (gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, ally, and others) community or certain unconventional BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism, and masochism) dynamics and activities. This essay, however, takes sexual inclusion as the project that promotes (...) the equal and largely indiscriminatory opportunity for each person to engage in meaningful and pleasurable nonmorally good sexual experiences, because, as I will argue, sex is part of what it means to live a flourishing and good human life. This essay focuses specifically on nonmorally good sex, how we experience it, and its fundamental role in promoting sexual inclusion – if one does not experience nonmorally good sex, one cannot feel or be considered as being sexually included. To have a better grasp on the project of sexual inclusion and what it is, I discuss the different mechanisms that can lead to sexual exclusion and how experiencing sexual exclusion can hinder our progress towards living a good and flourishing life. I conclude that due to its subjective nature, the experience of nonmorally good sex itself challenges and limits us in our pursuit of the advancement and achievement of sexual inclusion. Engaging in a sexual activity with another person due to the motivating reasons to provide that person with a nonmorally good sexual experience (with the goal of advancing their sexual inclusion), is not an input-output kind of process. If we are unable to guarantee nonmorally good sex for others, the result is that we cannot guarantee their sexual inclusion either. (shrink)

The human mind is constituted by inner, subjective, private, first-person conscious experiences that cannot be measured with physical devices or observed from an external, objective, public, third-person perspective. The qualitative, phenomenal nature of conscious experiences also cannot be communicated to others in the form of a message composed of classical bits of information. Because in a classical world everything physical is observable and communicable, it is a daunting task to explain how an empirically unobservable, incommunicable consciousness could have any (...) physical substrates such as neurons composed of biochemical molecules, water, and electrolytes. The challenges encountered by classical physics are exemplified by a number of thought experiments including the inverted qualia argument, the private language argument, the beetle in the box argument and the knowledge argument. These thought experiments, however, do not imply that our consciousness is nonphysical and our introspective conscious testimonies are untrustworthy. The principles of classical physics have been superseded by modern quantum physics, which contains two fundamentally different kinds of physical objects: unobservable quantum state vectors, which define what physically exists, and quantum operators (observables), which define what can physically be observed. Identifying consciousness with the unobservable quantum information contained by quantum physical brain states allows for application of quantum information theorems to resolve possible paradoxes created by the inner privacy of conscious experiences, and explains how the observable brain is constructed by accessible bits of classical information that are bound by Holevo's theorem and extracted from the physically existing quantum brain upon measurement with physical devices. (shrink)

Using hokku poet Basho’s aesthetics of wandering, as defined by Thomas Heyd, I argue that, by detailing the excruciating pointlessness of work undertaken according to commands that take little or no account of their feasibility, Richard Flanagan’s novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (which takes its title from Basho's work) transforms the features of this aesthetics into the lived experience of prisoners of war on the ‘line’. In doing so, Flanagan transfers Basho’s aesthetics into a represented actuality (...) through the privileging of subjectivity over identity and the dissolution of the body on the line. The three prongs to Basho’s aesthetics are found in Flanagan’s novel. In this, Flanagan is identifying the complexity of meanings evident in the terminology of such aesthetics, rendering what appears positive in the context of Basho’s poetry negative in its practical application as this is articulated through the prisoners’ wartime experiences. Rather than being formative, Flanagan’s novel suggests wartime experience has a complexly ‘opposite’ effect. This is apparent in the complications of identity represented in post-war terms as a disunity (rather than a coherent unity), as articulated through the use of spatial metaphors that reverse the formative intensities of subjectivity and body through symbolic acts of dispersal and dissolution. (shrink)

A classic and fraught question in the philosophy of film is this: when you watch a film, do you experience yourself in the world of the film, observing the scenes? In this paper, we argue that this subject of film experience is sometimes a mere impersonal viewpoint, sometimes a first-personal but unindexed subject, and sometimes a particular, indexed subject such as the viewer herself or a character in the film. We first argue for subject pluralism: there is no (...) single answer to the question of what kind of subjectivity, if any, is mandated across film sequences. Then, we defend unindexed subjectivity: at least sometimes, films mandate an experience that is first-personal but not tied to any particular person, not even to the viewer. Taken together, these two theses allow us to see film experience as more varied than previously appreciated and to bridge in a novel way the cognition of film with the exercise of other imaginative capacities, such as mindreading and episodic recollecting. (shrink)

Things strike me in a variety ways. F and F# sound slightly different, ripe and unripe tomatoes neither look nor taste nor smell the same, and silk feels smoother than corduroy. In each case, I distinguish an experience of something on the basis of what it is like to be its subject. That is to say, in philosophical parlance, if not quite the vernacular, its “quale,” leads me to categorize it and, thus, respond appropriately to its stimulus. The function (...) of a quale being established, we must define it along with its subject and, as Sartre maintained, their relation. How should we understand the subject and predicate terms and the copula in sentences such as ‘He is listening to Chopin’ or ‘She is seeing the sights of Paris’? Elaborating upon adverbialism, I shall argue that the subject of experiencing is a hylomorphic compound that is temporarily identical to the 'accidental compound' that it forms along with a qualified passion. I begin by explicating the adverbialist’s treatment of qualitative consciousness and defending it against the charge of circularity. (shrink)

Animal welfare is a concept that plays a role within both our moral deliberations and the relevant areas of science. The study of animal welfare has impacts on decisions made by legislators, producers and consumers with regards to housing and treatment of animals. Our ethical deliberations in these domains need to consider our impact on animals, and the study of animal welfare provides the information that allows us to make informed decisions. This thesis focusses on taking a philosophical perspective to (...) answer the question of how we can measure the welfare of animals. Animal welfare science is an applied area of biology, aimed at measuring animal welfare. Although philosophy of animal ethics is common, philosophy focussing on animal welfare science is rare. Despite this lack, there are definitely many ways in which philosophical methods can be used to analyse the methodologies and concepts used in this science. One of the aims of the work in this thesis is to remedy this lack of attention in animal welfare. Animal welfare science is a strong emerging discipline, but there is the need for conceptual and methodological clarity and sophistication in this science if it is to play the relevant informative role for our practical and ethical decision-making. There is thus is a strong role here for philosophical analysis for this purpose. The central aim of this thesis is to provide an account of how we can measure subjective animal welfare, addressing some of the potential problems that may arise in this particular scientific endeavour. The two questions I will be answering are: what is animal welfare, and how do we measure it? Part One of the thesis looks at the subjective concept of animal welfare and its applications. In it, I argue for a subjective welfare view - that animal welfare should be understood as the subjective experience of individuals over their lifetimes - and look at how the subjective welfare concept informs our ethical decision-making in two different cases in applied animal ethics. Part Two of the thesis looks more closely at the scientific role of welfare. Understanding welfare subjectively creates unique measurement problems, due to the necessarily private nature of mental states and here I address a few of these problems, including whether subjective experience is measurable, how we might validate indicators of hidden target variables such as welfare, how we can make welfare comparisons between individual animals and how we might compare or integrate the different types of experience that make up welfare. I end with a discussion of the implications of all these problems and solutions for the practice of welfare science, and indicate useful future directions for research. (shrink)

Subjectivity is that feature of consciousness whereby there is something it is like for a subject to undergo an experience. One persistent challenge in the study of consciousness is to explain how subjectivity relates to, or arises from, purely physical brain processes. But, in order to address this challenge, it seems we must have a clear explanation of what subjectivity is in the first place. This has proven challenging in its own right. For the nature of subjectivity itself seems (...) to resist straightforward characterization. In this paper, I won't address how subjectivity relates to the physical. Instead, I'll address subjectivity itself. I'll do this by introducing and defending a model of subjectivity based on self-acquaintance. My model does not purport to reduce, eliminate, or naturalize subjectivity, but it does make subjectivity more tractable, less paradoxical, and perhaps less dubious to those averse to obscurity. (shrink)

Paul (2014, 2015a) argues that one cannot rationally decide whether to have a transformative experience by trying to form judgments, in advance, about (i) what it would feel like to have that experience, and (ii) the subjective value of having such an experience. The problem is if you haven’t had the experience then you cannot know what it is like, and you need to know what it is like to assess its value. However, in earlier (...) work I argued that ‘what it is like’-knowledge comes in degrees, and I briefly suggested that, consequently, some instances of Paul’s argument schema might commit a fallacy of equivocation. The aim of this paper is to further explore and strengthen this objection by, first, offering a new argument—the modelling argument—in support of it, and then by evaluating a range of replies that might be given to this objection on Paul’s behalf. I conclude that each reply either fails or, at best, only partially succeeds in defending some but not all instances of Paul’s argument schema. In closing, I consider how we might revise Paul’s concepts of transformative experiences and choices in response to this conclusion. (shrink)

Do you think the quotation in my title is reasonable or unreasonable? I find it unreasonable, but I know that many will not. Two people can react to the same idea, opinion, or data in opposite ways, and the reasons for this are often ideological. Ideology always has a political origin — in this case perhaps reflecting turf wars, career promotion, self-legitimation, the privileged status of science in post-industrial societies, and the need to say the right things in order to (...) get research funding. The very concept of ‘hard science’ is ideological, implying that one part of our experience is ‘objective’ (meaning that it confers authority on scientists) and the other part is ‘subjective’(meaning that the opinions of non-scientists are of little worth).What we call ‘objective’ is of course a mental model built on the basis of experiences which we call ‘subjective’. There are many possible ways of carving up experience, but none that leads to a useful or non-political distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. (shrink)

This paper explores how transformative experience generates decision-making problems of particular seriousness in medical settings. Potentially transformative experiences are especially likely to be encountered in medicine, and the associated decisions are confronted jointly by patients and clinicians in the context of an imbalance of power and expertise. However in such scenarios the principle of informed consent, which plays a central role in guiding clinicians, is unequal to the task. We detail how the principle’s assumptions about autonomy, rationality and information (...) handle transformative experiences poorly, appealing to several difficult cases for medical decision-making to illustrate the resulting problem, and we consider how the existing literature on complications with consent fails to offer a resolution. We argue that recognition of the problem has a role to play in achieving a more effective response to transformative decisions. In Sect. 1 we introduce several representative cases of challenging patient decision-making that clinicians might face. In Sect. 2 we detail how transformative experience has been analysed in the recent literature, before outlining in Sect. 3 the theoretical basis of the principle of informed consent, which plays a central role in how clinicians are expected to support decision-making. In Sect. 4, having laid the groundwork for a clear description, we return to the cases given in Sect. 1 to confirm how their transformative nature presents a problem: either clinicians treat the decisions faced by these patients as ‘normal’, encouraging them to focus on information provision that patients may be unable to act on, or they treat them as transformative, in which case they lack the resources to recognise whether they are helping patients make (subjectively) good decisions. In Sect. 5 we argue that the existing literature does not offer any escape from this problem. We close in Sect. 6 by noting the significant impact that appreciating the problem of transformative experience could have on supporting transformative decisions in medicine and briefly suggesting how we might aim to develop new approaches to dealing with these. (shrink)

In my recent book, Art and Engagement (1991), I develop the idea of aesthetic engagement as central to the appreciation of art. The human contribution to the constitution of the "work" of art, I claim, is a critical part of appreciative experience. This contribution, however, is easily misread into the history of the idea of experience that has dominated Western philosophy since the seventeenth century, a history that sees experience as an inner, personal, subjective affair. From (...) this vantage point, the metaphysical implications of an aesthetics of experience seem to lead resolutely to idealism.1 'Experience', however, is a troublesome term precisely because its meaning is equivocal. Despite its association with philosophical idealism, experience allows a range of interpretations in various contexts. Even though aesthetic experience is often understood subjectively, it is mistaken to think that it allows of no other alternative. These comments raise a complex of issues, two of which I want to consider here: first, the metaphysical significance of experience and, second, the bearing of art on metaphysics. (shrink)

Theories of well-being are typically divided into subjective and objective. Subjective theories are those which make facts about a person’s welfare depend on facts about her actual or hypothetical mental states. I am interested in what motivates this approach to the theory of welfare. The contemporary view is that subjectivism is devoted to honoring the evaluative perspective of the individual, but this is both a misleading account of the motivations behind subjectivism, and a vision that dooms subjective (...) theories to failure. I suggest that we need to revisit and reinstate certain features of traditional hedonism, in particular the idea that felt experience plays a role that no theory of welfare can afford to ignore. I then offer a sketch of a theory that is subjective in my preferred sense and avoids the worst sins of hedonism as well as the problems generated by the contemporary constraints of subjective theorists. (shrink)

One central fact about hallucinations is that they may be subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions. Indeed, it has been argued that the hallucinatory experiences concerned cannot— and need not—be characterized in any more positive general terms. This epistemic conception of hallucinations has been advocated as the best choice for proponents of experiential (or “naive realist”) disjunctivism—the view that perceptions and hallucinations differ essentially in their introspectible subjective characters. In this chapter, I aim to formulate and defend an intentional alternative to (...) experiential disjunctivism called experiential intentionalism. This view not only enjoys some advantages over its rival but is also compatible with the epistemic conception of hallucinations, as well as with the disjunctivist view that perceptions and hallucinations differ essentially in their third-personal structures (e.g., their causal, informational, or reason-providing links to reality). It also maintains that there are actually two aspects to the subjective indistinguishability of mental episodes: (i) we cannot distinguish their first-personal characters in introspective awareness; and (ii) we cannot distinguish their third-personal structures in experiential awareness—that is, in how they are given to consciousness. While experiential disjunctivism makes the mistake of ignoring (ii) and reducing subjective indiscriminability to (i), experiential intentionalism correctly identifies (ii) as the primary source of the subjective indistinguishability of perception-like hallucinations. Accordingly, the intentional error involved in such hallucinations is due to the fact that we consciously experience them as possessing a relational structure. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a comparison between the philosophies of Husserl and James in relation to their concepts of experience. Whereas various authors have acknowledged the affinity between James’ early psychology and Husserl’s phenomenology, the late development of James’ philosophy is often considered in opposition to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. This is because James’ radical empiricism achieves a non-dual dimension of experience that precedes the functional division into subject and object, thus contrasting with the phenomenological analysis of the (...) dual structure of intentionality. However, I argue that the later “genetic” development of phenomenology converges with some central aspects of James’ radical empiricism. This is because genetic phenomenology leads us to conceive of the flow of primal impressions as a fundamental dimension of experience that precedes the subject-object duality and is at the base of the process of co-constitution of the subject and the object in reciprocal dependence. At the same time, Husserl conceives of the impressional core of experience as structured by formal conditions that depend on the concrete constitution of an embodied subject. For this reason, I argue that Husserl’s genetic phenomenology can complement James’ radical empiricism, thus leading to the development of the doctrine of pure experience as a form of empirical and not metaphysical realism. (shrink)

Context: Philosophical and - more recently - empirical approaches to the study of mind have recognized the research of lived experience as crucial for the understanding of their subject matter. Such research is faced with self-referentiality: every attempt at examining the experience seems to change the experience in question. This so-called “excavation fallacy” has been taken by many to undermine the possibility of first-person inquiry as a form of scientific practice. Problem: What is the epistemic character and (...) value of reflectively acquired phenomenological data? Can the study of experience, despite the excavation fallacy, rely on the act of reflection on lived experience and make sense and use of its results? Method: Through a philosophical discourse, informed by empirical first-person inquiry, we explore the experiential structure of the act of reflection and the formation of the corresponding belief about past experience. Results: We present a provisional first-person model of the experiential dynamics of retrospective reflection, in which the reflective act is characterized as enaction of belief about past experience that co-determines - rather than distorts - its results. From a constructivist perspective on the inevitable interdependence between the act of observing and the observed, the excavation “fallacy” is recognized as an intrinsic characteristic of reflection. Reflection is described as an iterative, self-referential process, guided by a context- and subject-specific horizon of expectations. Implications: Knowing the characteristics of the formation of beliefs about experience is essential for understanding first-person data and for the possibility of their acquisition and use in scientific practice, particularly in the context of second-person approaches to the study of experience. Constructivist content: We relate the proposed understanding of reflection to constructivist epistemology and argue that constructivism provides an epistemological foundation for the empirical study of experience more suitable than the traditional epistemological objectivism of cognitive science. We suggest that the constructive nature of the process of reflection calls for a collaboration between the fields of constructivism, phenomenology, and first-person research, and points towards the potential for their mutual enrichment. (shrink)

I experience the world as comprising not only pluralities of individual persons but also interpersonal communal unities – groups, teams, societies, cultures, etc. The world, as experienced or "constituted", is a social world, a “spiritual” world. How are these social communities experienced as communities and distinguished from one another? What does it mean to be a “community”? And how do I constitute myself as a member of some communities but not of others? Moreover, the world of experience is (...) not constituted by me alone, nor am I myself the final arbiter of what is true or false about it, of what is good or bad about it, etc. Constitution is an intersubjective achievement: “we” – I with others – constitute the world. Thus, the world is not only constituted as including interpersonal communal unities, but it is also constituted by these communities: groups, teams, societies, cultures, etc. are themselves "we-subjects”, Husserl says, communally constituting the world of their common engagement. But what is communal, as opposed to individual, constitution and how is it achieved? And what sense is to be made of the notion of plural, collective, "we-subjects", communally constituting a common world? (shrink)

I argue that the physiological, phenomenal and conceptual constitute a trichotomous hierarchy of emergent categories. I claim that each category employs a distinctive type of interactive mechanism that facilitates a meaningful kind of environmental discourse. I advocate, therefore, that each have a causal relation with the environment but that their specific class of mechanism qualifies distinctively the meaningfulness of that interaction and subsequent responses. Consequently, I argue that the causal chain of physical interaction feeds distinctive value-laden constructions that are ontologically (...) distinct for each category. Within the limitations of the interactive mechanisms of each category, increasingly sophisticated forms tend to evolve. The increase in sophistication in each category inevitably leads to the emergence of the novel mechanism particular to the next in the hierarchy. In essence, there is an emergent hierarchy of evolving categories delineated by the nature of their mechanism of environmental engagement. I argue that biochemical mechanisms have a tendency to evolve meaningfully, specifically in a way that is both qualitatively relevant and responsive to environmental particulars. I explain that these mechanisms set in play an organisational imperative that leads to the emergence of the capacity to evaluate and prioritise qualitative biochemical assimilations which, inevitably, generates a subjectively individuated experience phenomenon. I then relate this to the novel characteristics of the human perspective. (shrink)

Experience has been described as a mental state with properties that it represents and possesses. Nevertheless, the existence of experience as a mental entity has been questioned by eliminative materialism, which states that everything that goes on in the world is physical, and thus there are no mental states. Experience can be analysed as a dependent entity known introspectively by living subjects. However, when experience is necessary in order to be connected with the environment and informed (...) of its facts, it must also exist. However, a consequence of Paul M. Churchland‘s theory is that empirical knowledge means something other than knowledge based on experience. (shrink)

John McDowell and Bill Brewer famously defend the view that one can only have empirical beliefs if one’s perceptual experiences serve as reasons for such beliefs, where reasons are understood in terms of subject’s reasons. In this paper I show, first, that it is a consequence of the adoption of such a requirement for one to have empirical beliefs that children as old as 3 years of age have to considered as not having genuine empirical beliefs at all. But we (...) have strong reasons to think that 3-year-old children have empirical beliefs, or so I argue. If this is the case, McDowell and Brewer’s requirement for one to have empirical beliefs faces a strong challenge. After showing this, I propose an alternative requirement for one to have empirical beliefs, and argue that it should be favoured over McDowell and Brewer’s requirement. (shrink)

Elsewhere I have suggested that the B-theory includes a notion of passage, by virtue of including succession. Here, I provide further support for that claim by showing that uncontroversial elements of the B-theory straightforwardly ground a veridical sense of passage. First, I argue that the B-theory predicts that subjects of experience have a sense of passivity with respect to time that they do not have with respect to space, which they are right to have, even according to the B-theory. (...) I then ask what else might be involved in our experience of time as passing that is not yet vindicated by the B-theoretic conception. I examine a recent B-theoretic explanation of our ‘illusory’ sense of passage, by Robin Le Poidevin, and argue that it explains away too much: our perception of succession poses no more of a problem on the B-theory than it does on other theories of time. Finally, I respond to an objection by Oreste Fiocco that a causal account of our sense of passage cannot succeed, because it leaves out the ‘phenomenological novelty’ of each moment. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that a certain kind of belief is necessary for religious experience. Yet it is not clear that this must be so. In this article, I defend the possibility that a subject could have a genuine emotional religious experience without thereby necessarily believing that the purported object of her experience corresponds to reality and/or is the cause of her experience. Imaginative engagement, I argue, may evoke emotional religious experiences that may be said to (...) be both genuine and appropriate, despite not necessarily including beliefs of the aforementioned kind.I go on to maintain that such religious engagement is compatible not only with non-belief but also with disbelief. (shrink)

Husserl’s theory of types is most often associated with his account of perception. Here, types operate as pre-predicative frames of experience that guide the perception of objects. In this paper, I will argue that Husserl’s theory of types is also central to his account of intersubjectivity. More specifically, I will show that a foundational kind of typical subjectivity is entailed by his discussion of the sphere of ownness. It is by way of this type that even a solitary subject (...) can tacitly anticipate the possibility of other subjects. It is also this type that is enriched through interactions between actual subjects. (shrink)

The notion of subjective indistinguishability has long played a central role in explanations of the force of Cartesian sceptical hypotheses. I argue that sceptical hypotheses do not need to be subjectively indistinguishable to be compelling and I provide an alternative diagnosis of their force that explains why this is the case. My diagnosis focuses on the relation between one’s experiences and third-personal accounts of the circumstances in which these experiences occur. This relation is characterized by a distinctive gap that (...) leaves room for questions about the nature of one’s circumstances, providing sceptical hypotheses with a foothold. I argue that this gap lends sceptical hypotheses their force and renders the stipulation of subjective indistinguishability unnecessary. (shrink)

Psychedelic experiences are often compared to “transformative experiences” due to their potential to change how people think and behave. This study empirically examines whether psychedelic experiences constitute transformative experiences. Given psychedelics’ prospective applications as treatments for mental health disorders, this study also explores neuroethical issues raised by the possibility of biomedically directed transformation—namely, consent and moral psychopharmacology. To achieve these aims, we used both inductive and deductive coding techniques to analyze transcripts from interviews with 26 participants in psychedelic retreats. Results (...) indicate that psychedelic experiences can constitute transformative experiences. Twenty participants reported experiences or insights that were seemingly inaccessible or impossible to attain if not for the psychoactive effects of psychedelics. All participants besides one reported some change in identity, values, beliefs, desires, and behavior—changes in behavior being the most common. Participants also reported feeling capable deciding to use psychedelics in part due to information seeking prior to their retreats. Finally, several participants reported an enhanced capacity for enacting changes in their lives. Our results underscore both the importance of subjective embodiment to transformation and the role of transformative agency in shaping outcomes of the psychedelic experience. We examine our results relative to neuroethical issues and advocate for centering the person in psychedelic research and neuroethical inquiry about psychedelics to avoid pitfalls associated with psychedelics’ potential as moral psychopharmacological agents. (shrink)

This essay is divided into two parts, deeply intermingled. Part I examines not only the origin of conscious experience but also how it is possible to ask of our own consciousness how it came to be. Part II examines the origin of experience itself, which soon reveals itself as the ontological question of Being. The chief premise of Part I is that symbolic communion and the categorizations of language have enabled human organisms to distinguish between themselves as actually (...) existing entities and their own immediate experience of themselves and their world. This enables them to reflect upon abstract concepts, including “self,” “experience,” and “world.” Symbolic communication and conceptualization grow out of identification, the act of first observing conscious experiencing and intimating what it is like, mimesis, a gestural protolanguage learned through imitation, and reflection, seeing oneself through the eyes of others. The step into actual intentional speech is made through self-assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity. These three become the spiral of human cultural development that includes not only the adaptive satisfaction of our biological needs, but also the creativity of thought. With the mental-conceptual separation of subject and object – of self and world – the human ability to witness the universe (and each other) is the ground of our genuinely human quality. Consciousness gives human life its distinctively human reality. It is, therefore, one and the same ability that enables us to shape planet Earth by means of conceptual representations (rather than by means of our hands alone) while also awakening us to the significance of being. -/- Looking beyond human self-consciousness to investigate the origin and nature of awareness itself in Part 2, reductive objective materialism is found to be of little use. Direct experience also falls short in that, in order to be transformed into objective knowledge about itself, it must always be interpreted through and limited by the symbolic contexts of culture and the idiosyncratic conceptualizations of the individual. Awareness-in-itself must thus be considered ultimately unexplainable, but this may more indicate its inexpressible transcendence of all symbolic qualifiers than its nonexistence. It is suggested that awareness is not “self-aware” (as in deity) but is instead unknowing yet identical with the only true universal: the impetus of creative unfolding. Our human knowledge, as an expression of this unfolding, is seen to emerge from our conscious experiencing and, in turn, to have the power – and enormous responsibility – of directing that experience. Our underlying symbolic worldviews are found to be autopoietic: They limit or open our conscious experience, which, in turn, confirms those worldview expectations. As we explore a future of unforeseeable technological breakthroughs on an ailing planet who patiently copes with our “success,” truly vital decisions about the nature, meaning, extent, and future of conscious experience will have to be made. (shrink)

I raise a problem for common-factor theories of experience concerning the demonstrative thoughts we form on the basis of experience. Building on an insight of Paul Snowdon 1992, I argue that in order to demonstratively refer to an item via conscious awareness of a distinct intermediary the subject must have some understanding that she is aware of a distinct intermediary. This becomes an issue for common-factor theories insofar as it is also widely accepted that the general, pre-philosophical or (...) ‘naïve’ view of experience does not accept that in normal perceptual cases one is consciously aware of non-environmental (inner, mental) features. I argue then that the standard common-factor view of experience should be committed to attributing quite widespread referential errors or failures amongst the general, nonphilosophical populace – which seems an unattractively radical commitment. After clarifying the various assumptions I am making about experience and demonstrative thoughts, I consider a number of possible responses on behalf of the common-factor theorist. I finish by arguing that my argument should apply to any common-factor theory, not just avowedly ‘indirect' theories. (shrink)

Hume famously denied that he could experience the self. Most subsequent philosophers have concurred with this finding. I argue that if the subject is to function as a bearer of experience it must (1) lack sensory qualities in itself to be compatible with bearing sensory qualities and (2) be single so that it can unify experience. I use Douglas Harding’s first-person experiments to investigate the visual gap where one cannot see one’s own head. I argue that this (...) open space conforms to the above criteria and hence is consistent with being the subject. I respond to the objection that this location is merely a lack of visual experience. I argue that this space also encompasses sound and touch properties and hence functions as a bearer for other sensory modalities. These first-person findings provide prima facie support for the view that the subject is a thin bearer of experience. (shrink)