Curr Top Behav Neurosci
November 2, 2024
Chiara Caporuscio, Sascha Benjamin Fink
7 citations
Belief change is central to therapeutic benefit in psychedelic-assisted therapy, but it poses unique challenges. Psychedelics can cause drastic belief shifts faster than in regular therapy, leading to confusion and disorientation. Hallucinatory experiences often carry a high degree of confidence and noetic certainty despite not necessarily being connected to reality. Telling a patient which beliefs are true is beyond a therapist's competence and risks abuse of authority, especially given the power imbalance and patient suggestibility during altered states. This chapter explores, through a philosophical and epistemological lens, how therapists can help patients navigate epistemic uncertainty around psychedelic insights while preserving autonomy. It argues that dynamically adapting strategies to individual patient needs can significantly reduce epistemic risks.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
April 19, 2022
Sascha Benjamin Fink
7 citations
This philosophical commentary argues that while psychedelics can trigger processes of discovery, they rarely contribute directly to justification or epistemic success—truth, veridicality, aptness, or skillfulness—which are essential for a mental state to count as knowledge. The heavy epistemic work that turns a mental state into knowledge remains largely independent of psychedelic influence. However, the mechanisms Chris Letheby associates with psychedelics do provide crucial epistemic benefits when linked to understanding, offering a broader picture that includes cases where truth or justification is absent.
Die Psychotherapie
February 9, 2024
Dimitris Repantis, Michael Koslowski, Sascha Benjamin Fink
4 citations
Clinical research on psychedelic-assisted therapy for mental disorders has resumed in recent years, with a steadily increasing number of studies and publications. This has raised many ethical questions that have not yet been sufficiently examined and answered. This article provides an overview of the state of clinical research and then addresses the central ethical issues arising from this particular form of therapy. Using current literature and examples from an ongoing study in Germany, ethical questions are examined in detail.
Front Psychol
June 27, 2024
Sascha Benjamin Fink
2 citations
The search for neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) remains central to the neuroscience of consciousness, despite criticism. The author distinguishes between NCCs as data (recorded observations) and NCCs as hypotheses (interpretations that go beyond data and are testable). A framework for 'sufficiency tests' is presented, with four classes: tests for creature consciousness (which systems are conscious), state consciousness (when a system is conscious), phenomenal content (what a system is conscious of), and phenomenal character (how a system experiences). Tests for phenomenal character (How-Tests) are argued to be preferable because they avoid problems with other tests, but they imply a stronger metaphysical connection between neural and phenomenal domains than supervenience, rely on first-person methods, and adopt a form of direct neurophenomenal structuralism.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 2, 2022
Chiara Caporuscio, Sascha Benjamin Fink
1 citation
A book symposium on Chris Letheby's Philosophy of Psychedelics (2021) examines the tension between psychedelic therapy and philosophical naturalism. The special issue opens with an introduction by Matthew Johnson, followed by Letheby's overview of his main arguments. Seven contributions either critique or expand on Letheby's proposed mechanism for psychedelic therapy or discuss its epistemic implications. The symposium concludes with Letheby's responses to the commentaries.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
February 9, 2026
Sascha Benjamin Fink, Andrew Y. Lee
Conscious experiences have many structural features, such as color experiences varying in hue, saturation, and brightness, decreasing visual acuity from the center to the periphery of the visual field, pain experiences in different magnitudes, and temporal experience flowing as a continuous stream. Structuralism, broadly defined, is an approach to consciousness research focused on investigating these structures. Varieties include methodological structuralism, which holds that scientific methods yield knowledge only of structural features, and ontic structuralism, which claims consciousness is nothing but structure. This special volume collects articles on the structures of conscious experiences and their role in research, aiming to establish a foundation and agenda for a structuralist research program in the science of consciousness.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 19, 2021
Sascha Benjamin Fink, Ying-Tung Lin
This paper introduces the second part of a special issue on the neural correlates of consciousness, examining progress and paradigms in consciousness science from a philosophy of science perspective.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 19, 2021
Sascha Benjamin Fink, Lukas Kob, Holger Lyre
Distinguishing neural correlates that are genuinely tied to conscious experience from those that are merely coincidental requires a principled approach. The authors propose neurophenomenal structuralism, which relies on the fact that phenomenal experiences form structures of similarity and difference. By using these structures to individuate experiences in neuroscience and psychophysics, they derive a structural similarity constraint: a neural activation must preserve the structure of the associated phenomenal domain to qualify as a neural correlate of consciousness proper. An example from Brouwer and Heeger illustrates the constraint. This approach aims to refine the search for neural correlates by filtering out merely statistical associations.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 30, 2020
Sascha Benjamin Fink
This special issue marks 30 years since the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) research program was revived and 20 years since the standard definition of an NCC was published. The authors examine conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions that have arisen and assess how the field has evolved over that period.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2016
Sascha Benjamin Fink
A widely accepted definition of the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC), proposed by Chalmers in 2000, defines an NCC as a neural system minimally sufficient for a conscious experience. This definition has several shortcomings: it focuses on the capacity to experience rather than actual experiences, fails to address cases motivating NCC research, does not match how scientists use the term, and prevents comparative hypothesis testing. An improved operationalization, called NCC2.0, is proposed that avoids these problems while retaining compatibility with extended, embedded, enacted, or embodied accounts of consciousness and allowing for non-biological or artificial experiencers.