Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 27, 2026
Vivian Mizrahi
Smell and taste, unlike vision, touch, and hearing, are directly oriented toward stuffs rather than individual objects. Stuff constitutes an irreducible ontological category distinct from both individuals and universals. Chemistry itself is best understood as a science of stuffs rather than of atoms or molecules. The distinctive phenomenology of smell and taste—including mixture, concentration, and the sense of presence—is best explained by a stuff theory of their proper objects. This view has implications for how to individuate the senses of smell and taste.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 13, 2026
Brandon Ashby
Philosophers often consider hypothetical beings that are physically identical to us but lack conscious experience (zombies) or have reversed experiences (inverts). This paper introduces a new hypothetical being, the phenomenal smuggler, which is physically identical to us but has more kinds of conscious experiences. These smugglers raise novel questions about what limits exist on the number or types of extra experiences such a being could conceivably have. The author appeals to five structural features of consciousness—dimensional, precision, combinatorial, syntactic, and integration—to clarify and answer questions about the conceivable upper bounds of consciousness.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
February 11, 2026
Jeffrey Yoshimi, Jason Ford
The authors propose a structuralist account of conscious experience by examining the parts that compose the minimal sense of self. Using a variational method, they argue that the feeling of agency, the feeling of privacy, and the feeling of “me-ness” are separable components that can be dissociated in various combinations, as supported by empirical and clinical cases. Removing or altering any of these components changes the whole experience in a holistic but determinate way, much like altering an instrument in a symphony alters the overall sound.
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
January 31, 2026
Alexander Maier, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
A structural approach to studying consciousness maps mathematical descriptions of qualia—the qualitative aspects of conscious experience—onto mathematical structures derived from brain activity and neuronal connectivity, aiming for general mappings akin to physical laws like E=mc². This review surveys literature from psychophysics and the neuroscience of consciousness, critically examines classical models such as Shepard's pitch helix and visual color space, and explores the structure of their neuronal correlates. It extends analysis to visual similarity spaces, including face space and general image spaces, and suggests that exact experimental comparisons yield an enriched psychophysics that expands single-valued measures into richer scientific exploration.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 30, 2026
Johannes Kleiner
The Newman problem threatens structural assumptions and theories across philosophy and science. In consciousness science, it undermines structuralist approaches and theories of consciousness if not properly addressed. However, when phenomenal spaces and mathematical structures of conscious experience are correctly understood, the Newman problem does not arise. Consciousness science must carefully choose which definition of structure to adopt; doing so makes the problem disappear.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 5, 2026
Jennifer Windt, Manuela Kirberg, Tomas Andrillon
This special issue brings together theoretical and empirical work on dreaming and waking mind wandering, two areas with growing attention in cognitive neuroscience and psychology but limited philosophical exploration. Despite being studied separately, phenomenological and neurophysiological overlaps between waking mind wandering and sleep-related experiences indicate they are closely linked. These connections prompt questions about the nature and functions of spontaneous mental phenomena, their relationship to wakefulness and sleep, and implications for theories of attention, action, and consciousness.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 22, 2025
M. Päßler, Adrien Doerig
Conscious experiences are defined by their relationships to one another, and these relationships are mirrored by brain structures. However, simply matching brain patterns to mental patterns is not enough to explain what a conscious experience is about. The brain's downstream processes must actively use those patterns in a way that preserves their structure and influences behavior. Purely anatomical or overly broad causal brain structures fail this test, but activation patterns can succeed when embedded in the right computational context. This means that local structuralist theories, which ignore how brain activity is used by subsequent processing, are incomplete. Any adequate structuralist account of consciousness must incorporate computational context.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
November 5, 2025
Valerie Bernard
Jean-Paul Sartre argues that the feeling of phenomenal presence—the sense that what one experiences is actually there—accompanies only perception, not imagination or dreaming. This puts him against contemporary philosophers like Amy Kind, who holds that imagination provides a sense of “presence in absence,” and Jennifer Windt and Michael Barkasi, who claim that dreaming involves immersion in a spatiotemporal dreamscape. The paper explains how Sartre’s theory of perception shares key objectives with contemporary naïve realism, and that his rejection of imaginative presence is consistent with why a naïve realist would also reject it. It contrasts Sartre’s view of why a dreamer lacks true immersion with the views of Windt and Barkasi.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
November 3, 2025
Miguel Ángel Sebastián
Phenomenal structuralism argues that what makes a conscious experience what it is depends on the relationships among its qualities, not on any intrinsic features of those qualities. This view, while illuminating, creates serious problems for comparing experiences across different people or even within the same person over time. If experiences are individuated only by their relational structure, it becomes doubtful that two people can ever share the same kind of pain, raising ethical concerns. The approach also fails to explain how different sets of qualities could lead to the same discriminations. The paper suggests representationalism as an alternative that might preserve the strengths of phenomenal structuralism without these problematic consequences.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 23, 2024
Nadine Meertens
This is a book review of Walter Veit's 'A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness,' which argues for a pragmatic, evolutionary approach to studying animal minds. Veit proposes that consciousness is a biological trait that varies across species and can be investigated through comparative methods, avoiding anthropocentric biases. The review discusses the book's main arguments, including its call for a more inclusive science of consciousness that considers diverse animal taxa. It highlights Veit's synthesis of philosophical analysis with empirical research, aiming to bridge gaps between disciplines. The review evaluates the book's contributions and limitations, noting its relevance for researchers in philosophy, biology, and psychology.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
April 19, 2022
Matthew Johnson
A review of Chris Letheby's 2021 book 'Philosophy of Psychedelics' highlights its role as a foundational work for understanding the modern therapeutic science of psychedelics. The book explores key philosophical topics that are likely to shape the future of psychedelic therapy, including how philosophical inquiry can deepen insights into therapeutic mechanisms and ethical considerations. The review emphasizes that philosophy will become increasingly important in the psychedelic therapy renaissance, and Letheby's work is positioned to influence responsible development and treatment advancement. The text recommends the book to both the public and academics seeking a deeper understanding of psychedelic medicine.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 20, 2024
Elly Vintiadis
The author argues that Lisa Bortolotti's book, Why Delusions Matter, provides a novel approach to countering a key criticism of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy known as the Comforting Delusions Objection. This objection suggests that the benefits of such therapy may rely on comforting but false beliefs. Bortolotti's work is presented as offering a framework to address this concern.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 19, 2021
Morten S. Overgaard, Asger Kirkeby-Hinrup
Neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) are often used as evidence for or against competing conceptual theories of the mind, but this is an overestimation of what NCC findings can do. There is neither an isomorphism nor a homomorphism between the conceptual frameworks of these theories and the data obtained from neuroimaging. Consequently, neural activation profiles alone cannot distinguish between competing theories. Two approaches are suggested to address this issue.
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
Tomáš Marvan, Michal Polák
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) concept, as applied to conscious perceptual episodes, conflates content-related processing with the neural substrate that makes perceptual contents conscious. This paper proposes splitting the perceptual NCC into two distinct subnotions to clarify the distinction. Arguments are presented for this reconceptualization, along with its potential advantages for ongoing methodological debates in consciousness research.
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.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
March 24, 2020
Miguel Ángel Sebastián
A minimal form of self-awareness—Perspectival First-Person Awareness (PFP-Awareness)—is a non-conceptual, identification-free self-attribution that defines the first-person perspective for conscious experience. Contrary to claims that altered states such as those induced by psychedelics, meditation, or dreams disrupt this minimal self-awareness, the evidence does not support its absence. While some typical forms of self-awareness may be compromised, PFP-Awareness remains intact. Reports suggesting a radical disruption likely stem from confirmation bias, influenced by subjects' expectations and metaphysical views, and should be mistrusted.