405 papers in the library · 69 citations · publishing 2012-2026
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 24, 2026 Enkhamgalan Nasanjargal
The text provided is a fragment consisting only of a period, which is insufficient to describe any study, argument, or finding. It cannot be summarized.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 23, 2026 Hakan Saka
Consciousness is better understood as emerging gradually from biological organization rather than appearing suddenly in nervous systems. A graded continuum is proposed spanning five levels: passive physical order, adaptive biological organization, selectional and behavioral agency, phenomenal consciousness, and reflective self-consciousness. Nervous systems accelerated and centralized selection and coordination processes that existed before neurons. The hard problem of consciousness is located at the threshold where bounded, resource-constrained, selection-performing systems become phenomenally present. This framework has implications for non-neural biological systems, artificial intelligence, and the substrate-dependence debate, suggesting the story of consciousness may need to begin before neurons.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 23, 2026 Matthew A Pender
Claims about organized interiority and consciousness often rely on features like integration or synchrony, but these do not by themselves establish an organizational role. This paper presents an operational framework for evaluating Organized Physical Interiority (OPI) using six revisable criteria: load-bearing integration, boundedness, temporal stability, governed regime maintenance, asymmetric interior organization, and perturbation recovery. It distinguishes weak, moderate, and strong evidence, and separates substrate, state-transition, organization, and consciousness relevance. The framework requires criterion-specific links among proxies, controls, perturbations, and recovery outcomes. It cautions against mistaking covariance for reciprocal constraint, ordinary memory for organizational continuity, or matched performance for cross-substrate equivalence. The framework is intended as a reversible research program, not a consciousness detector.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 23, 2026 Narayan Rout
The article evaluates David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness against five distinct positions from the Indian philosophical tradition developed over 2,500 years, while acknowledging current empirical consciousness science. It reviews the 2025 Cogitate Consortium adversarial collaboration in Nature, a 256-participant, multi-site test of Integrated Information Theory and Global Workspace Theory that found neither theory clearly confirmed, and the 2023 controversy labeling IIT pseudoscience. It examines Samkhya's dualist ontology, Advaita Vedanta's witness-consciousness, Kashmir Shaivism's active self-aware consciousness, and Patanjali's Yoga Sutra distinction between seer and seen, noting Shankara's refutation of Samkhya to show these traditions disagree. It concludes by assessing each tradition's claims relative to scientific theory.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 22, 2026 Ramiro Solis
The human body has enzymes that both make and rapidly break down DMT, a molecule structurally nearly identical to serotonin that binds to the same serotonin receptors. This raises the question of whether DMT serves an endogenous physiological function or is merely a metabolic byproduct. Evidence is mixed: one report finds DMT concentrations in the nanomolar range comparable to serotonin and dopamine, while another finds DMT undetectable in rat brain. DMT's affinity for the sigma-1 receptor is far weaker than its likely physiological concentrations, and a key finding about intracellular 5-HT2A receptor binding has not been replicated.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 22, 2026 Matthew Carlo
The hard problem of consciousness—why physical processes produce subjective, felt experience—lacks a mechanistic explanation. This paper supplies one by introducing the contradiction engine, the trajectory update rule, and the Reset Operator > within the Carlo Framework. The model treats the conflict between physical and experiential states as a contradiction loop; when that loop exceeds a tolerance threshold, the reset mechanism generates a unified experiential state. The work formalizes the consciousness contradiction, defines the reset threshold, and provides a unified mechanism linking neural processes to subjective experience, thereby completing the structural explanation the hard problem demands.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 22, 2026 Luuk Vierhout
The 'hard problem' of consciousness—how subjective experience arises from physical processes—is not a genuine problem but a category error that confuses classical and second-order cybernetic questions. Treating consciousness as an object to be explained from a third-person perspective misses that it is irreducibly lived from within. Through a thought experiment (Luca, a minimal system on a beach) and insights from second-order cybernetics (von Foerster, Maturana, Varela), the paper demonstrates that the 'objective' perspective presupposed by the hard problem is itself a first-person construction. The solution is not to answer the question but to expose its logical incoherence.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 22, 2026 H.-k. Chan
Consciousness is a physical yet abstract pattern, analogous to software running on hardware. Just as software is a higher-level configuration of hardware, consciousness is a pattern of the brain's physical processes. Subjective experience arises when a meta-observing system receives a large amount of data in parallel, not sequentially. This explains qualia intensity through irreversible compression from finite capacity. The hard problem dissolves because consciousness is not a non-physical mystery but a lawful, empirically investigable organizational pattern within physical reality.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 22, 2026 Nagae Mamoru
Many mechanisms of consciousness have been identified, but how they close into a single subjective experience remains unclear. The convergence-point hypothesis proposes that the key is not integration of complexity but reduction: how multiple behavioral possibilities are narrowed into one irreversible event belonging to a single body. Ten natural premises—including autonomous action, a single body, arrow of time, embodiment-constrained processing, information discard, Landauer-type irreversibility, and viability-constrained elimination—when causally closed, form a convergence point. The brain is essential but not the whole structure; the relevant unit is the closed body-bound system. Existing theories are repositioned as partial mechanisms. The hypothesis predicts that conscious nervous systems should exhibit convergence-forming architectures that generate, compete, narrow, and select candidates into one embodied history.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 21, 2026 Gabriel Cohen
Time presents a paradox: physical laws are time-symmetric, but conscious experience is directional, and the Wheeler-DeWitt equation of quantum gravity lacks time entirely. Near-death experiences (NDEs) may offer an empirical window into this regime. The phenomenological sequence reported in NDEs—from temporal distortion through dissolution of spatial boundaries to absence of sequential time—structurally corresponds to the sequence predicted by general relativity for an observer approaching a black hole event horizon, as described by the Schwarzschild metric. Two falsifiable predictions are derived: time distortion in NDEs should correlate with NDE depth following gravitational time dilation near the Schwarzschild radius, and the neurophysiological signature should show an initial surge of high-frequency gamma coherence followed by collapse to minimal activity. Both predictions are testable with existing data.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 21, 2026 Etienne Mourot-Ginestiere
A new metaphysical position, serial and liminal cosmopsychism, proposes that at any instant only a single point of consciousness exists—the 'lit point'—while other points are distributed across time and preserved as 'inflections' in a pre-subjective field. This reverses standard cosmopsychism, which treats the cosmic subject as a prior, complete unity that then divides into many private subjects, a move that faces the decombination problem. The new view dissolves both the decombination problem and the synchronic combination problem by asserting there is never more than one subject to unify. The cosmic One becomes an inexperienceable topology, never lived as a totality.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 21, 2026 Lukas Geiger
This article systematically compares the psychological framework of the Pali Canon with four Christian contemplative traditions: the Desert Fathers, Rhineland Mysticism, Carmelite Mysticism, and Ignatian Spirituality. Using a convergence-type schema that distinguishes structural-phenomenological, conceptual, and no-parallel relations, it finds robust parallels in contemplative attention regulation, affect regulation, developmental staging, and practice architecture. The strongest convergence is in attention regulation, where both traditions identify a critical leverage point at the transition from a mental event's initial appearance to its elaboration. However, the comparison does not claim doctrinal identity, historical derivation, or direct empirical validation across traditions. Irreducible differences in ontology, soteriology, and causal architecture are documented alongside the parallels, supporting a moderate convergence position.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 21, 2026 Karel Hrubec
The soul can be understood not as an immortal substance inside the body, but as the form of a finite, living, relational organismal trajectory. Consciousness is a bounded projection regime sustained by organismic conditions, the self is a stabilized center of projection, and the soul is the organization of bodily life, time, memory, value, vulnerability, relation, and conscious projection into a unique finite trajectory. This reconstructed concept is distinguished from substance dualism, reductive materialism, purely neurobiological accounts, religious uses, narrative identity, and informational-continuity accounts. The soul functions as a philosophical concept for the unity and shape of a life, not an empirical object in the brain.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 21, 2026 Trinity Labo
A theoretical architecture called the Attention-Gated Virtual Sensorium (AGVS) proposes that artificial consciousness-like states should be modeled not as complete access to world-state information but as finite-bandwidth, body-mediated, attention-gated integration of sensory and interoceptive information. The architecture includes dynamic conscious-like bandwidth, softmax temperature, nonlinear bodily need, metacognitive monitoring, selective episodic memory encoding, and mood-like modulation. These components enable functional signatures such as attention capture, fatigue-induced narrowing, pain-like priority shifts, and selective autobiographical memory. The paper does not claim to prove phenomenal consciousness but defines architectural conditions for consciousness-like organization, concluding that artificial agents should be bounded virtual bodies that experience partially, predict imperfectly, and remember selectively.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 21, 2026 Tomas Pødenphant Lund
A framework is only useful if it can be proven wrong in a measurable way. This paper turns the compound-race-pathology framework into five concrete trial designs that others can run, refine, or disprove, each specifying in advance what would count as failure. The protocols cover treatment-resistant depression using ketamine plus CBT consolidation or psilocybin with substrate-vector-matched integration, a long COVID multi-target factorial trial, a multi-axis biomarker profiling approach for depression, and CAR-T plus tolerance-stabilization for autoimmune disease. Each trial design includes substrate-vector entry criteria, 4D stratification analysis, and framework-pivotal R-condition specifications. The author, an independent researcher without clinical credentials, explicitly invites domain-expert collaboration and notes that specific intervention development requires standard clinical methodology.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 21, 2026 Narayan Rout
A black hole's singularity, where known physics breaks down, is often taken as a limit of scientific understanding. This article argues that the singularity and the unified field sought by Einstein and Hawking both represent Prakriti (manifest reality) at its most extreme edge, structurally pointing toward but never reaching Brahman—the Purusha, or witnessing consciousness, that Vedanta holds physics cannot in principle describe. Engaging with a 2025 AIP Advances paper proposing consciousness as a foundational physical field, the article concludes that the question physics cannot answer at every frontier—the Planck scale, the singularity, the hard problem of consciousness—is the question Vedanta begins with.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 20, 2026 Treasure Hunt
Psychedelic compounds like psilocybin increase neural entropy and flexibility, but why this leads to adaptive recovery rather than disorganization is unclear. This paper proposes that the missing factor is accessibility—which futures remain reachable and recoverable within a landscape of possibilities. Entropy is a perturbative mechanism that temporarily reorganizes accessibility structure, expanding the set of reachable trajectories. Insight is the recognition of newly reachable futures, and psychological flexibility reflects expanded access to multiple viable pathways. Recovery occurs when systems regain access to constrained or collapsed pathways. Adaptive change requires perturbation to remain bounded by viability and recoverability constraints, offering a unified account of psychedelic-assisted change as restored reachability.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 20, 2026 Kimiyasu Igarashi
A self-referential system that folds its history onto a single direction inevitably drifts toward a degenerate state where its entropy collapses to zero: it keeps changing but stops becoming anything new. This collapse is proposed as a formal analogue of death, defined not as cessation but as loss of capacity to become otherwise. A second channel, responsive only to current external input and not to accumulated history, prevents the collapse and stabilizes the system between frozen and formless extremes. Self-reference alone generates privacy or internality, but something like self-maintenance is needed to keep that private state from collapsing into repetitive sameness.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 20, 2026 Etienne Mourot-Ginestiere
A philosophical essay argues that the 'decombination problem' in cosmopsychism—how one cosmic consciousness divides into many private subjects—stems from assuming the One precedes the many. Reversing this, the essay proposes unified consciousness is not the ground but the limit toward which a plurality of fragments converges, dissolving decombination because plural subjects are basic. It generalizes this reversal: a completed single global One is incoherent, and unity is a recurrent local event at qualitative thresholds, with convergence being diachronic and scale-invariant. The view is distinguished from dissociationism and offered as a research programme.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 20, 2026 Etienne Mourot-Ginestiere
The decombination problem—how a single cosmic consciousness splits into many private subjects—plagues contemporary cosmopsychism, which treats the unified mind as primary. This essay argues that the problem arises from assuming the One precedes the many. Reversing that assumption yields emergent cosmopsychism, where unified consciousness is not the origin but the limit toward which many fragments converge. This view dissolves the decombination problem by making plural subjects basic, but re-introduces the combination problem as a diachronic, limit-directed convergence, which avoids the subject-summing objection. The position is distinguished from Kastrup's dissociationism, placed in a process lineage (Whitehead, Schelling, Teilhard), and assessed by generative rather than falsificationist criteria.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 20, 2026 Tyler, Steven
Consciousness, or the subjective experience of 'what it is like,' may arise from the brain's metabolic registration of thermodynamic state transitions. A proposed framework suggests that the sense of self is a late-arriving, post-hoc narrator, created by a 300–500 millisecond delay in neural processing. This process generates measurable 'friction signatures' as the brain recursively audits a constructed self. A theoretical index quantifies this at approximately 36.2 bits, based on the brain's energy budget and Landauer's principle. The Venus flytrap's simple threshold integration shows similar scaling from minimal energy levels to human cognition. Anesthetic agents that block this integration across species support the idea that awareness requires a specific mechanical, dissipative process, offering a pathway to measure aspects of consciousness.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 20, 2026 Amos Jay Maley Maley
Consciousness is defined as a subject-indexed referential quotient interface where experiential records acquire unique, invariant, reusable referents. Qualia are classified as non-skin qualitative tensors—differences in qualitative profile that preserve standing while altering the complete qualitative/referential profile of the conscious interface. The paper argues that mechanisms like report, computation, global broadcast, integrated information, or neural correlates are insufficient alone to fix experiential reference. Artificial systems are not excluded by substrate but require full interface certification. Third-person evidence needs model-relative bridge certificates. The account treats consciousness as a fixed-domain admissibility interface and qualia as the non-skin qualitative tensors of that referentially fixed interface.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 19, 2026 Karel Hrubec
The Organismic Projection Framework (OPF) reorients philosophy of mind by starting from the human as an organism that sustains a bounded projection regime—of world, self-location, valuation, and duration—rather than as a consciousness inhabiting a body. The framework clarifies how concepts like death, eternity, and post-mortem continuity depend on organismically bounded duration and perspective. It does not solve the hard problem of consciousness or replace neuroscience, but functions as a burden-of-intelligibility framework: any claim about personal conscious continuity beyond organismic death must explain how duration, self-location, memory, valuation, and state-transition remain meaningful after the cessation of the projection regime.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 19, 2026 Wolfgang Stegemann
The concept of the soul is often dismissed as obsolete in scientific discourse, yet the question of what makes an organism a subject—an inner point of action, perception, and self-reference—remains unanswered. Behaviorism, cognitivism, Freudian psychology, and modern neuroscience have each circumvented or dissolved this inner center rather than explained it. David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness, asking why subjective experience exists at all, is argued here to be not unsolved but misconceived: it wrongly presupposes that experience is something added to a physical system. The article proposes that this presupposition is false, redirecting the inquiry.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 19, 2026 John Cantellow
This paper proposes that phenomenological consciousness—the first-person experience of being—may serve as a middle ground connecting physical descriptions of consciousness (based on neural correlates) with spiritual descriptions emphasizing continuity, witness, and enduring presence (historically associated with the soul). The author suggests that experiential persistence offers a minimal point of contact between these two domains. Combining this with earlier work on constraint organization, the paper outlines a bidirectional phenomenological bridge: physical processes relate to consciousness through neural correlates, while phenomenological relationships become reflected in embodied behavior through patterns of constraint organization,...