Bautista Baron

This conceptual essay examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping academic production and creating risks of overload that surpass human capacities for attention and peer review. Drawing on public indicators and illustrative scenarios, it argues that accelerated publication rates threaten to erode authorship and intellectual responsibility. The essay outlines three researcher profiles defined by their patterns of AI use and associated risks, and discusses preliminary evidence of potential cognitive costs linked to technological dependence. It concludes with policy and practice recommendations—including disclosure protocols, ethical training, and strengthened review capacity—intended to highlight the magnitude of the challenge and to foster collective deliberation on the future of scientific integrity.

This paper argues that time and motion are ontologically identical as aspects of change: what physics calls “time” is a parameterization of motion rather than an independent entity. Drawing on phenomenology (Kant, Husserl, McTaggart), cognitive science, and physics (Einstein, Rovelli), it distinguishes lived temporality—dependent on consciousness—from the causal order of events, which exists without it. Historically, the split between time and motion (from Aristotle to Newton) reflects a conceptual error; by reframing time as a perspectival map of motion, the paper aligns Leibniz’s relational view with modern theories of emergent time in quantum gravity. This unified framework challenges temporal realism and offers a phenomenological reinterpretation of change for both philosophy and physics.

This paper develops a unified ontological framework that reconciles scientific realism and empiricism through the lens of relational ontology. Building on structural realism and information theory, it proposes that existence is grounded in relational structures rather than in substantial entities. This framework is applied to the study of consciousness, offering a naturalistic account in which subjective experience arises from cosmic-scale organizational complexity and self-referential dynamics. Integrating thermodynamic and information-theoretic principles, the paper positions consciousness as a natural continuation of cosmic evolutionary processes. The model provides a structural criterion for scientific explanation and yields empirically testable metrics for consciousness, bridging neuroscience, philosophy of science, and cosmology. This work contributes to longstanding philosophical debates by addressing the hard problem, the explanatory gap, and the binding problem within a coherent, scientifically grounded ontological perspective.

The indexical problem—why am I this particular conscious being rather than another—has long appeared intractable. Rather than attempting to solve this puzzle, I argue it should be reframed. Drawing on Perry's essential indexicals, Lewis's de se attitudes, and Kaplan's direct reference, I contend that the question "Why am I me?" reflects fundamental features of conscious self-reference rather than a metaphysical mystery requiring solution. Integrating this philosophical analysis with neuroscientific evidence from split-brain studies, self-referential processing networks, and Integrated Information Theory, I propose that conscious systems necessarily adopt an "indexical stance"—a mode of processing involving direct self-reference from a particular perspective. This reframing transforms the indexical problem from an unsolvable puzzle into an empirically tractable question about how neural architectures generate first-person perspective. The approach opens new research directions while preserving the irreducible nature of indexical experience.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for consciousness as an emergent manifestation of universal organizational principles in cosmic evolution. Extending relational ontology through thermodynamic and information-theoretic foundations, it argues that consciousness arises when systems achieve sufficient relational complexity to sustain self-referential organization. Mathematical formalization links neural structures to cosmic processes. The approach reinterprets the hard problem and explanatory gap from evolutionary-naturalistic perspectives, opening interdisciplinary research pathways across philosophy, cosmology, and complexity science.

This paper proposes relational ontology, which defines existence through relations, as a bridge between scientific realism and empiricism in scientific explanation. By introducing a structural criterion grounded in empirically verifiable relational structures, we unify realist commitments to unobservable entities with empiricist demands for observable consequences. Through case studies in quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, we demonstrate how relational ontology underpins scientific theories while addressing philosophy of science debates, including realism, reductionism, and demarcation. The framework’s explanatory limits are explored through the lens of consciousness, contrasting scientific and non-scientific accounts like classical theism. Engaging with thinkers such as Lakatos, Kuhn, Cartwright, van Fraassen, Ladyman, and Chakravartty, this work advances a rigorous, unifying approach to scientific explanation within the philosophy of science.