Self-modeling epistemic spaces and the contraction principle

Metzinger, Thomas

doi:10.1080/02643294.2020.1729110

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The representation of the self as a solid entity includes in parallel the processing of internal stimuli from one’s own body with emotions and cognition which are also examined through self-reference and bound to that entity 7 207 . This complex multi-layered representation of the self has various features such as a sense of being, ownership of a body, temporal order, spatial location, ownership and authorship of thoughts, emotions and actions, and a history 208 . Along this line, a recent EEG-ERP study using an auditory self-monitoring task found that psilocybin abolished self-stimuli encoding via a P300 mechanism associated with current source density changes in the supragenual anterior cingulate cortex and right insula 209 .…”

Section: Neural Correlates Of Altered Self- and Emotion-processing In...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Classic Psychedelic Drugs: Update on Biological Mechanisms

Vollenweider¹,

Smallridge²

2022

Pharmacopsychiatry

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Renewed interest in the effects of psychedelics in the treatment of psychiatric disorders warrants a better understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the effects of these substances. During the past two decades, state-of-the-art studies of animals and humans have yielded new important insights into the molecular, cellular, and systems-level actions of psychedelic drugs. These efforts have revealed that psychedelics affect primarily serotonergic receptor subtypes located in cortico-thalamic and cortico-cortical feedback circuits of information processing. Psychedelic drugs modulate excitatory-inhibitory balance in these circuits and can participate in neuroplasticity within brain structures critical for the integration of information relevant to sensation, cognition, emotions, and the narrative of self. Neuroimaging studies showed that characteristic dimensions of the psychedelic experience obtained through subjective questionnaires as well as alterations in self-referential processing and emotion regulation obtained through neuropsychological tasks are associated with distinct changes in brain activity and connectivity patterns at multiple-system levels. These recent results suggest that changes in self-experience, emotional processing, and social cognition may contribute to the potential therapeutic effects of psychedelics.

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Section: Neural Correlates Of Altered Self- and Emotion-processing In...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Classic Psychedelic Drugs: Update on Biological Mechanisms

Vollenweider¹,

Smallridge²

2022

Pharmacopsychiatry

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“…For a concrete mechanism (i.e., attention schema) to build such an artificial consciousness (see Graziano et al, 2020). With regard to the relation between Graziano's and Metzinger's models (see Metzinger, 2020). While Xuanzang and Kuiji never explicitly envisage a phenomenal model of consciousness, their writings laid the groundwork of the early-twentieth century Chinese Yogācārins to conceive such a model.…”

Section: Intersubjectivity and Incommensurabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adhipati, Yogācāra Intersubjectivity, and Soteriology in Kuiji’s Commentaries

2024

SOPHIA

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This study sheds light on a key concept of Yogācāra intersubjectivity that played a significant role in medieval Chinese Yogācāra. Specifically, it analyzes how Kuiji 窺基 (632–682) reinterprets adhipati (activating and amplifying influence; Ch: zengshang 增上 or zengshang li 增上力 or zengshang yuan 增上緣) to account for intersubjective karmic interactions across different lifeworlds in the events of teaching and killing.As this line of investigation shows, Kuiji’s theory of adhipati attempts to sidestep the entanglement of the problems of intersubjectivity and incommensurable worlds in Yogācāra. Extant scholarship on intersubjectivity often presumes one spatio-temporal world populated by sentient beings and insentient objects, which is fundamentally at odds with the Yogācāra tenet that each mental stream generates its distinct lifeworld. To address the pragmatic question of how different mental continuums of consciousnesses can impinge into each other’s lifeworlds, Kuiji employed adhipati in a specific way to account for intersubjective interplay across different, potentially incommensurable worlds. In this framing of intersubjectivity, the problem of one world or many worlds is explained non-dualistically: these lifeworlds are neither the same nor different, neither one nor many, but karmically interconnected.Expanding on recent discussions of the puzzle of intersubjectivity in Yogācāra, this paper shows that Kuiji’s deployment of adhipati provides an account of genuine intersubjectivity in which different mental continuums are recognized as subjects and engage in causal interactions among different spatio-temporal worlds. In Kuiji’s framing, this genuine intersubjectivity gives rise to the sense of one shared world.

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“…"wholeness" show an absence of mental conflict and an increased degree of integration. This is to be expected in all states in which a) the constant competition of different mental processes for the focus of attention (for example, the automatic arising of spontaneous, task-unrelated thought; [23][24][25][26]) has subsided, and b) representational contraction into a first-person perspective [27] and the resulting fragmentation of one's overall experiential space by goaldirected mental agency have been attenuated. A low degree of perturbation also confirms the second of six semantic constraints for the working concept of "MPE" which were extracted in the above-mentioned study, this one termed "Low Complexity" (PC2; cf.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In our study, it refers to an experiential quality of "pure knowing" without a sense of self and without any object. The relevant items describe an uncontracted, unbounded, and non-dual experience of wakefulness without content, which is self-aware, knowing only itself in a way that lacks any markers of egoic self-consciousness like agency, ownership, and autobiographical narrative, or spatiotemporal self-location [27,30]. However, our formulation of the strongest-loading item in "Emptiness and Non-egoic Self-awareness" may mistakenly conflate "emptiness" with the merely spatial phenomenology of consciously experiencing a void or a vacuum.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

The Minimal Phenomenal Experience questionnaire (MPE-92M): Towards a phenomenological profile of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators

Gamma

Metzinger

2021

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

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Objective To develop a fine-grained phenomenological analysis of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators. Methods An online survey in five language versions (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian) collected data from January to March 2020. A total of 92 questionnaire items on a visual analogue scale were submitted to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Results Out of 3627 submitted responses, 1403 were usable. Participants had a median age of 52 years (range: 17–88) and were evenly split between men and women (48.5% vs 50.0%). The majority of meditators practiced regularly (77.3%), were free of diagnosed mental disorders (92.4%) and did not regularly use any psychoactive substances (84.0%). Vipassana (43.9%) followed by Zen (34.9%) were the most frequently practiced meditation techniques. German (63.4%) and English (31.4%) were by far the most frequent questionnaire languages. A solution with 12 factors explaining 44% of the total variance was deemed optimal under joint conceptual and statistical considerations. The factors were named “Time, Effort and Desire,” “Peace, Bliss and Silence,” “Self-Knowledge, Autonomous Cognizance and Insight,” “Wakeful Presence,” “Pure Awareness in Dream and Sleep,” “Luminosity,” “Thoughts and Feelings,” “Emptiness and Non-egoic Self-awareness,” “Sensory Perception in Body and Space,” “Touching World and Self,” “Mental Agency,” and “Witness Consciousness.” This factor structure fit the data moderately well. Conclusions We have previously posited a phenomenological prototype for the experience of “pure awareness” as it occurs in the context of meditation practice. Here we offer a tentative 12-factor model to describe its phenomenal character in a fine-grained way. The current findings are in line with an earlier study extracting semantic constraints for a working definition of minimal phenomenal experience.

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Self-modeling epistemic spaces and the contraction principle

Cited by 5 publications

References 25 publications

Classic Psychedelic Drugs: Update on Biological Mechanisms

Classic Psychedelic Drugs: Update on Biological Mechanisms

Adhipati, Yogācāra Intersubjectivity, and Soteriology in Kuiji’s Commentaries

The Minimal Phenomenal Experience questionnaire (MPE-92M): Towards a phenomenological profile of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators

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