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Articles 241 - 270 of 1226

Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Mind

In This Issue Of Ijts Jan 2022

In This Issue Of Ijts

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

N/A


Unexpected Side Effects: A Cautionary Note On Challenges Of Persistent Self-Transcendence, Elizabeth D. Stephens, Harris L. Friedman Jan 2022

Unexpected Side Effects: A Cautionary Note On Challenges Of Persistent Self-Transcendence, Elizabeth D. Stephens, Harris L. Friedman

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Self-transcendence is an ambiguous construct without consensual meaning, yet many claim that it relates to, or even causes, beneficial outcomes. Few discuss its potential deleterious side effects, choosing to focus primarily on positive effects. However, anything with sufficient potency to heal may have unintended side effects, especially when it leads beyond a transitory state to becoming an enduring trait, such as when self-transcendence (ST) becomes persistent self-transcendence (PST). With PST, evidence is overviewed here, along with two illustrative case reports, that people can suffer emotional difficulties, motivation changes, loss of self-reflexivity, anhedonia, dissociation, depersonalization, memory problems, and other psychological concerns. …


Emotion And Judgment In Young Women Of A Society In Transition, Maura A. E. Pilotti, Khadija El Alaoui Jan 2022

Emotion And Judgment In Young Women Of A Society In Transition, Maura A. E. Pilotti, Khadija El Alaoui

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The present study asked whether emotional responses to narratives of moral transgressions are shaped by the reader’s assumed relationship with the injured party (i.e., oneself, familiar other, and unfamiliar other). Its goal was to test a cultural, religious, and individualistic account of such responses in young females of a traditional society in transition towards a sustainable integration into the global economy. To this end, female college students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were asked to identify their emotional reaction to each of several moral transgressions, report its intensity and then judge the severity of the transgression. In agreement with …


How Perception Meets Hermeneutics: An Empirical Investigation Of Tasseography, Elizabeth Avetisian Jan 2022

How Perception Meets Hermeneutics: An Empirical Investigation Of Tasseography, Elizabeth Avetisian

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Tasseography is a divination method to provide insight about the seeker’s past, present, or future life by interpreting patterns in the dregs of a liquid. Although it has been practiced with coffee throughout Europe and Middle East, particularly among women, no known studies exist on the seer’s perceptual process of the ambiguous patterns or how the roles of the seeker and seer, symbols, ritual, and cultural epistemology shape the divinatory hermeneutics. This study focused on the Armenian coffee divination ritual, asking what are the processes and conditions that enable experienced cup readers to obtain divinatory insight in tasseography? Two seekers …


Free Will And Animal Suicide, Sabina Schrynemakers Jan 2022

Free Will And Animal Suicide, Sabina Schrynemakers

Animal Sentience

David Peña-Guzmán presents two arguments against the view that because only humans have free will only humans can commit suicide: (1) nonhuman animals may possess free will, and (2) the libertarian notion of free will is incompatible with scientific explanation. The free will objection to animal suicide is indeed mistaken, but Peña-Guzmán’s criticism of the libertarian notion of free will seems misplaced. His target should instead be the assumption that free choices must be made consciously or self-reflectively or the assumption that freedom cannot come in degrees.


Pain Sentience Criteria And Their Grading, Eva Jablonka, Simona Ginsburg Jan 2022

Pain Sentience Criteria And Their Grading, Eva Jablonka, Simona Ginsburg

Animal Sentience

On the basis of the target article by Crump and colleagues, we suggest a more parsimonious scheme for evaluating the evidence for sentience. Since some of the criteria used by Crump et al. are not independent and some are uninformative we exclude some criteria and amalgamate others. We propose that evidence of flexible learning and prioritization, in conjunction with relevant data on brain organization, is sufficient for assigning pain-sentience to an animal and we suggest a scoring scheme based on four criteria.


Truly Minimal Criteria For Animal Sentience, Mark Solms Jan 2022

Truly Minimal Criteria For Animal Sentience, Mark Solms

Animal Sentience

The criteria for determining animal sentience proposed in the target article are sensible but they lack an explicit functional justification for the focus on pain. This commentary provides an abbreviated account of the most basic functional principles that underpin animal sentience and articulates some minimal criteria for determining its presence.


Crustacean Pain, Michael Tye Jan 2022

Crustacean Pain, Michael Tye

Animal Sentience

This commentary discusses the target article’s methodology, the relevance of the claim that crustaceans lack a neocortex to the thesis that they feel pain, and the evaluation of the results of some trade-off experiments done with hermit crabs.


No Need For Certainty In Animal Sentience, Yew Kwang Ng Jan 2022

No Need For Certainty In Animal Sentience, Yew Kwang Ng

Animal Sentience

This commentary supports Crump et al.’s (2022) point that where risks to welfare are severe, strong evidence of sentience is sufficient to warrant protecting welfare. Crump et al.’s eight criteria for sentience are also useful. Flexible decision-making (5) and flexible behaviour (6) are consistent with Ng (1995). The concession that the “no-need-for-sentience” proposition is unnecessary also strengthens the importance of the target article’s conclusions.


Generalizing Frameworks For Sentience Beyond Natural Species, Michael Levin Jan 2022

Generalizing Frameworks For Sentience Beyond Natural Species, Michael Levin

Animal Sentience

Crump et al. (2022) offer a well-argued example of an essential development: a rigorous framework for assessing sentience from the perspective of moral concern over an agent’s welfare. Current and forthcoming developments in bioengineering, synthetic morphology, artificial intelligence, biorobotics, and exobiology necessitate an expansion and generalization of this effort. Verbal reports (the Turing Test) and homology to human brains are utterly inadequate criteria for assessing the status of novel, unconventional agents that offer no familiar touchstone of phylogeny or anatomy. We must develop principled approaches to evaluating the sentience of (and thus, our responsibility to) beings of unfamiliar provenance and …


Does The Sentience Framework Imply All Animals Are Sentient?, Kristin Andrews Jan 2022

Does The Sentience Framework Imply All Animals Are Sentient?, Kristin Andrews

Animal Sentience

The eight criteria proposed in Crump et al.’s framework for evaluating pain sentience in decapod crustaceans are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to markers that could increase confidence in an animal’s sentience more generally. Some of the commentaries have already pointed out that pain is only one kind of sentience (Souza Valente). It has also already been pointed out that there are other criteria for pain that could be usefully added to the framework’s eight (Burrell). This expansive thinking about criteria that can be used to increase confidence in sentience raisess the question: in an expansive …


Distinguishing Epistemic And Moral Grounds For Legal Protection, Carlos Montemayor Jan 2022

Distinguishing Epistemic And Moral Grounds For Legal Protection, Carlos Montemayor

Animal Sentience

The criteria proposed by Crump et al. are based on various cognitive roles associated with sentience. A subset of them may be sufficient for certain kinds of welfare, but the presence of all of them should be considered as clearly sufficient for substantial kinds of legal protection based on their relation to capacities that we consider essential for moral standing in human beings.


Unconscious Humans, Autonomous Machines And The Difficulty Of Knowing Which Animals Are Sentient, Marian Stamp Dawkins Jan 2022

Unconscious Humans, Autonomous Machines And The Difficulty Of Knowing Which Animals Are Sentient, Marian Stamp Dawkins

Animal Sentience

The framework proposed by Crump et al. still leaves much doubt about whether invertebrates such as crabs are sentient. For example, many complex behaviours - even in humans - occur without sentience. Also, simple machines could easily meet all of Crump et al.’s eight proposed criteria for sentience. Acknowledging the limitations of what we currently know about sentience is important both for formulating legislation correctly and for advancing scientific understanding of this most puzzling of biological phenomena.


Sentience Criteria To Persuade The Reasonable Sceptic, Patrick Butlin Jan 2022

Sentience Criteria To Persuade The Reasonable Sceptic, Patrick Butlin

Animal Sentience

When presented with evidence that Crump et al.’s criteria are satisfied for the animals in some taxon, a sceptic could reasonably continue to suspend judgement about whether those animals are sentient. This is because the criteria refer to abilities which are associated with sentience in humans, but it is not clear that sentience is necessary for these abilities. The criteria could be strengthed by requiring evidence of a contrast in performance between cases in which information is carried by felt and unfelt states.



Jenny Wade: Building The Next Generation Of Scholars In Transpersonal Psychology, Glenn Hartelius, Harris Friedman Jan 2022

Jenny Wade: Building The Next Generation Of Scholars In Transpersonal Psychology, Glenn Hartelius, Harris Friedman

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

N/A


What Is Transpersonal Psychology? A Concise Definition Based On 20 Years Of Research, Glenn Hartelius Jan 2022

What Is Transpersonal Psychology? A Concise Definition Based On 20 Years Of Research, Glenn Hartelius

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Research on definitions of the field of psychology and themes in the literature of the field over a period of 20 years inform this description: Transpersonal psychology is a transformative psychology of the whole person embedded within a diverse, interconnected, and evolving world that pays particular attention to states of consciousness and developmental models reflecting expansion beyond conventional notions of self. Each element of this definition is examined, as well as the four phases of definitional development within the field from its founding in 1968 up to the present.


The Role Of Spiritual Intelligence And Differentiation In Predicting Marital Adjustment Of Married Iranian Students, Sedigheh Ahmadi, Richard H. Morley, Faezeh Ghalebi, Hossein Ilanloo, Christine D. Nguyen Jan 2022

The Role Of Spiritual Intelligence And Differentiation In Predicting Marital Adjustment Of Married Iranian Students, Sedigheh Ahmadi, Richard H. Morley, Faezeh Ghalebi, Hossein Ilanloo, Christine D. Nguyen

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of spiritual intelligence and differentiation in predicting marital adjustment of Iranian students. The participants of this study were 312 married students from Yazd University. The instruments used in this study were the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) to measure marital adjustment, Differentiation of Self- Inventory, and the Spiritual Intelligence Self-Report Inventory (SISRI). The results of the study demonstrated that spiritual intelligence predicted the marital adjustment of married students (p


Transformative, Noetic, And Transpersonal Experiences During Personal Development Workshops, Helané Wahbeh, Cassandra Vieten, Garrett Yount, Agnes Cartry-Jacobsen, Dean Radin, Arnaud Delorme Jan 2022

Transformative, Noetic, And Transpersonal Experiences During Personal Development Workshops, Helané Wahbeh, Cassandra Vieten, Garrett Yount, Agnes Cartry-Jacobsen, Dean Radin, Arnaud Delorme

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The global personal development market was valued at $38.28 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow an additional 5% from 2020 to 2027. Many of these workshops promise to be transformational. This secondary analysis study examined transformative, transpersonal, and noetic aspects of personal development workshops. We found that 74% of post-survey records endorsed that participants experienced a moment of clarity or profound insight during their workshop. In addition, 66% endorsed that participants had experienced at least one noetic experience, and 84% endorsed at least one transpersonal experience. These analyses provide preliminary evidence for the transformational potential of personal development …


Eliciting Awe In The Spectator: The Case Of A Dhrupad-Based Dance Performance, Alfonso Santarpia, Andrée Martin, Armando Menicacci, Pierre De Oliveira, Daniel Lemieux, Laurence Éthier, Caroline Charbonneau, Bruno Pucella, Christophe Flambard, Les Frères Gundecha, Louis-Charles Lusignan, Alice Bourgasser, Élisabeth-Anne Dorléans, Ariane Dubé-Lavigne, Angélique Poulin Jan 2022

Eliciting Awe In The Spectator: The Case Of A Dhrupad-Based Dance Performance, Alfonso Santarpia, Andrée Martin, Armando Menicacci, Pierre De Oliveira, Daniel Lemieux, Laurence Éthier, Caroline Charbonneau, Bruno Pucella, Christophe Flambard, Les Frères Gundecha, Louis-Charles Lusignan, Alice Bourgasser, Élisabeth-Anne Dorléans, Ariane Dubé-Lavigne, Angélique Poulin

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

This paper describes “Kalos, eîdos, skopeîn,” an immersive Dhrupad-based dance installation designed to elicit feelings of awe in the spectators, in a real-life artistic context. This study used a mixed-methods approach in order to explore spectators’ awe experience (N=45), using specific scales and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Results suggested that “Kalos, eîdos, skopeîn,” with its combination of nature motifs and the slow dance-walk associated with the Dhrupad music in the choreography, was able to produce awe-related moments in some spectators and inspire a degree of positive emotions. Our qualitative results viewed awe explicitly as a positive emotion and showed that generally …


Table Of Contents—Masthead Jan 2022

Table Of Contents—Masthead

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

N/A


Table Of Contents—Masthead Jan 2022

Table Of Contents—Masthead

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

N/A


Empirical Research On Transpersonal Topics From Around The World During The Pandemic, 2020–2023, Glenn Hartelius Jan 2022

Empirical Research On Transpersonal Topics From Around The World During The Pandemic, 2020–2023, Glenn Hartelius

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

N/A


Independence, Weight And Priority Of Evidence For Sentience, Elizabeth Irvine Jan 2022

Independence, Weight And Priority Of Evidence For Sentience, Elizabeth Irvine

Animal Sentience

This commentary maps out relationships of dependency between the criteria proposed in the target article (Crump et al. 2022), identifying the criteria that carry most of the weight of the evidence, and suggesting which criteria should have priority in research on sentience.


Sentience In Decapods: Difficulties To Surmount, Michael L. Woodruff Jan 2022

Sentience In Decapods: Difficulties To Surmount, Michael L. Woodruff

Animal Sentience

In the target article Crump et al. present 8 criteria to assess whether decapods experience pain. Four of these -- sensory integration, motivational trade-offs, flexible self-protection, and associative learning -- could be used to assess sentience in general. In this commentary I discuss difficulties with using these criteria to provide evidence of sentience in decapods, particularly if this evidence is to change public opinion and policies. These difficulties are lack of evidence, the potential to eventually explain the neurobiological basis of the behaviors chosen as criteria, thereby eliminating any explanatory work for sentience, and the reluctance to bring animals that …


Pain In Pleocyemata, But Not In Dendrobranchiata?, Gary Comstock Jan 2022

Pain In Pleocyemata, But Not In Dendrobranchiata?, Gary Comstock

Animal Sentience

Crump et al.’s contribution to assessing whether decapods feel pain raises an important question: Is pain distributed unevenly across the order? The case for pain appears stronger in Pleocyemata than in Dendrobranchiata. Some studies report pain avoidance behaviors in Dendrobranchiata (Penaeidae) shrimp, but further studies are needed to determine whether the chemicals used are acting as analgesics to relieve pain, or as soporifics to reduce overall alertness. If the latter, the most farmed shrimp species may not require the same level of protection as crabs, crayfish, and lobsters.


Sentience As Part Of Emotional Lives, Frans B. M. De Waal Jan 2022

Sentience As Part Of Emotional Lives, Frans B. M. De Waal

Animal Sentience

It is high time to explore the sentience of invertebrate animals, but this topic cannot be discussed without also exploring their emotional lives, including positive emotions. Sentience probably evolved to allow the regulation of emotions by endowing them with feelings.


How Much Of A Pain Would A Crustacean “Common Currency” Really Be?, Simon A. B. Brown Jan 2022

How Much Of A Pain Would A Crustacean “Common Currency” Really Be?, Simon A. B. Brown

Animal Sentience

We should be suspicious of the idea that experiencing pain could enable animals to trade off different motivations in a common currency. It is not even clear that humans have a common motivational currency reflected in evaluative experience. Instead, pain may capture attention, inhibiting attention to competing motivations and needs, thereby making genuine trade-offs harder. Our criteria for pain in invertebrates should be part of a more subtle theory of the relationship between pain and decision-making.


Decapod Sentience: Promising Framework And Evidence, Jon Mallatt, Todd E. Feinberg Md Jan 2022

Decapod Sentience: Promising Framework And Evidence, Jon Mallatt, Todd E. Feinberg Md

Animal Sentience

Strong points of the target article by Crump et al. are that it offers clear criteria for judging whether decapods are sentient, an effective semi-quantitative grading system for this purpose, and an astute, critical review of the literature. It concludes plausibly that major subgroups of decapods are sentient. A minor problem is that it includes classical, Pavlovian learning as a marker of sentience along with the more valid marker of complex (e.g., operant) learning. Another minor problem is that it does not distinguish results that are negative because of likely absence of sentience from results that are negative because they …


A Framework For Evaluating Evidence Of Pain In Animals, Matilda Gibbons, Lars Chittka Jan 2022

A Framework For Evaluating Evidence Of Pain In Animals, Matilda Gibbons, Lars Chittka

Animal Sentience

Crump et al. define eight criteria indicating sentience in animals, with a focus on pain. Here, we point out the risk of false negative or false positive diagnoses of pain. Criteria of different levels of inclusivity are useful for using the precautionary principle in animal welfare considerations, and for more formal scientific evidence of pain. We suggest tightening the criteria -- from more general evidence of sentience to pain alone -- because crucial evidence for animal welfare decisions might otherwise be missed for animals subjected to invasive and injurious procedures.


Integrating Evolution Into The Study Of Animal Sentience, Walter Veit Jan 2022

Integrating Evolution Into The Study Of Animal Sentience, Walter Veit

Animal Sentience

Like many others, I see Crump et al. (2022) as a milestone for improving upon previous guidelines and for extending their framework to decapod crustaceans. Their proposal would benefit from a firm evolutionary foundation by adding the comparative measurement of life-history complexity as a ninth criterion for attributing sentience to nonhuman animals.