testingflink

This post is by Michael D. Kirchhoff and Julian Kiverstein. They present their recent book, Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: a Third Way . Kirchhoff is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He has edited a special issue of Synthese on Predictive Brains and Embodied, Enactive Cognition. His research spans across topics in philosophy of mind and cognition, philosophy of neuroscience, and theoretical biology. He is currently a member of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project exploring the explanatory basis of minds in skillful performance. Julian Kiverstein is Senior Researcher in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He has published extensively on philosophy of 4e cognition and phenomenologically-inspired philosophy of mind. He is currently a member of an interdisciplinary project investigating changes in lived experience of patients being treated with deep brain stimulation for obsessive compulsive d...

This post is by Marc Wittmann , Research Fellow at the Institute of Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Here, he writes about his new book on altered states of consciousness. Subjective time emerges through the existence of the self across time as an enduring and embodied entity. This is clearly revealed in everyday states of consciousness such as transiently being in states of boredom or flow. An increased awareness of the self is associated with an increased awareness of time when we are bored. In contrast, we lose track of time and the self when fully immersed in challenging activities accompanied by the feeling of enjoyment – experienced in the state of flow. The relation between self-awareness and time is even more prominently disclosed in anecdotal reports and empirical studies on altered states of consciousness such as in meditative states, in music-induced trance, and after ingestion of psychedelic substances. In peak states the experience of ‘t...