Hamid Nourbakhshi

Avicenna’s Flying Man is standardly taken to support the ontological independence of the conscious self from the body. I argue that this inference is unfounded. I distinguish what is absent from the content of self-awareness – the body as a consciously identified object – from what may remain among its conditions – the body as a causal and constitutive basis of conscious experience, and argue that body-identification, not total sensory absence, is the epistemically operative feature through which the dualist conclusion is generated. A virtual reality countermodel physically realizes the relevant dissociation while preserving constitutive dependence on the body, defeating the evidential schema by which dualists take phenomenological dissociation to be evidence for ontological independence. A dilemma follows: either the relevant isolation is representational and evidentially neutral, or it is total phenomenological disembodiment, whose positive conceivability remains unestablished.

I argue that dreaming and waking differ not in content or vividness but in the organizational form of experience itself. I identify three phenomenological discontinuities -- qualitative structural differences, not scalar variations along shared continua. First, dream experience lacks the temporal depth that characterizes waking consciousness: the longitudinal unity of the experiential flow, biographical continuity, and anticipatory horizons grounded in bodily familiarity are disrupted, leaving the dreamer in an untethered present whose apparent “memories” are confabulated rather than genuinely recollected. Second, the motor-intentional field undergoes a structural transformation: the reliable relationship between intention, bodily capacity, and environmental constraint that governs waking agency is replaced by an associative-affective logic in which the body can fly yet cannot run, acts without being willed and fails to act when willed. Third, metacognitive monitoring is not merely attenuated but structurally reconfigured into what I call a fascination structure -- a captivation by the dream’s own productions that renders the experiential field indefeasibly transparent, precluding the reflective stance from which anomalies could be registered as anomalous. This third discontinuity occupies a privileged position as a meta-discontinuity: it is the structural condition that shields the other two from detection, explaining why dreamers characteristically fail to notice even conspicuous departures from waking experience. I advance an accessibility thesis: despite this shielding, the discontinuities are detectable from within the dream. Each possesses a distinctive accessibility profile -- the temporal discontinuity is phenomenologically quiet but diagnostically powerful when probed; the agentive discontinuity is experientially salient but requires metacognitive registration; the metacognitive discontinuity is self-referentially paradoxical, since detecting it would require the very capacity whose absence defines it. The paradox is resolved through a cascade model in which detecting one discontinuity partially restores metacognitive capacity, enabling detection of further anomalies, which deepens the restoration -- a bootstrapping process that constitutes a phenomenological account of lucid dream onset. The framework generates testable predictions about the differential efficacy of lucidity-induction techniques, the typical sequence of lucidity onset, and the conditions under which trained discontinuity detection may bear on clinical approaches to nightmare disorder.

Design inferences from cosmic fine-tuning are routinely dismissed as epistemically defective -- a leap to an opaque cause where mechanistic explanation fails. Yet opacity alone has never been a disqualifying feature of rational inference. Scientific practice and artificial intelligence research both rely on black-box reasoning wherever explanatory power or strong evidential indicators compensate for incomplete transparency in causal mechanism. The fine-tuning inference, I argue, exploits precisely this structure: it earns provisional acceptance as an inference to the best explanation, not despite its opacity but through the same epistemic trade-offs that license reliance on empirically successful but interpretively opaque models elsewhere. Keith Lehrer’s distinction between acceptance and belief clarifies the doxastic attitude such an inference warrants. The conclusion is affirmative: design inference from fine-tuning is a defeasible but epistemically legitimate exercise of abductive reasoning.

Can visual experience represent deific properties? I argue that it can. Some perceptual experiences, I claim, represent properties like being a creation of God or being a manifestation of divine beauty. To defend this thesis, I use Siegel’s method of phenomenal contrast. I compare an ordinary perception of an object with a perception of that same object during a religious experience in which it appears imbued with transcendent significance. These experiences differ phenomenologically. The best explanation of this difference, I argue, is that in the religious experience a deific property partly constitutes the visual phenomenology. I consider several rival explanations -- shifts in attention, post-attentive gestalt properties, inference from lower-level features, cognitive phenomenology, emotional accompaniment, background mood -- and argue that none adequately accounts for the contrast. I also argue that genuine cognitive penetration is compatible with, rather than opposed to, deific perception. If deific perception is real, it has significant epistemic consequences: perceptual experience may furnish defeasible, prima facie justification for theistic beliefs, connecting the high-level-content debate in philosophy of perception with long-standing questions about the evidential force of religious experience.

In this paper, I explore how Christian theology grapples with whether God has a gender—or if God transcends gender altogether—and how these perspectives influence both doctrine and worship. Many theologians insist on referring to God as exclusively masculine, while feminist and egalitarian voices challenge this practice, claiming that an overtly gendered God can conflict with the ideals of equality and with the principle of the imago Dei. After examining the socio-linguistic and historical factors behind the predominance of masculine divine imagery, I move on to discuss Michael Rea’s argument that attributing an unequal gender to God is metaphysically problematic. Rea argues that framing God in a strictly masculine way conflicts with the belief that men and women are equal image-bearers of God. I then present an objection to Rea’s view, based on the idea that not every divine attribute has to be mirrored in humanity. By distinguishing between attributes that are “image-relevant” and those that are not, I argue how one might conceive of a gendered God without undermining human equality and perfect being theology. I furthermore argue that why gender cannot be an image-relevant attribute of God, opening a conceptual room for the reconciliation of tradition, egalitarianism, and the doctrine of imago dei. Finally, I highlight the importance of considering socio-linguistic realities, feminist insights, and pastoral ramifications in deciding how best to speak of God in ways that respect both traditional theology and modern ethical commitments.

Considerable recent research in neurosciences has dealt with the topic of consciousness, even though there is still disagreement about how to identify and classify conscious states. Recent behavioral work on the topic also exists. We survey recent behavioral and neuroscientific literature with the aims of commenting on strengths and weaknesses of the literature and mapping new directions and recommendations for experimental psychologists. We reconcile this literature with a view of human information processing (Cowan, 1988; Cowan et al., 2024) in which a capacity-limited focus of attention is embedded within the activated portion of long-term memory, with dual bottom-up and top-down control of the focus of attention. None of the many extant theories fully captures what we propose as the organization of conscious thought at cognitive and neural levels. It seems clear that information from various cognitive functions, based on signals from various brain areas, is integrated into a conscious whole. In our new proposal, the integration involves funneling information to a hub or focus of attention neurally centered in the parietal lobes and functionally connected to areas representing the currently attended information. This funneling process (bringing information from diverse sensory and frontal sources to contact a small parietal area where attended information is coordinated and combined) may be the converse of global broadcasting, from other proposals (Baars et al., 2021; Baars & Franklin, 2003; Dehaene & Changeux, 2011). The proposed system incorporates many principles from previous research and theorization and strives toward a resolution of the relation between consciousness and attention. Keywords: consciousness, attention, embedded processes model, experimental psychology, neuroscience.

It is highly consensual that we can perceive so-called low-level properties such as shape, color, motion, spatial location, and illumination through vision. But it’s more controversial whether the contents of visual perception can reach beyond the limits of weakness and involve high-level properties as well. By high-level property, it’s meant properties such as natural/artificial/functional kind, causality, dispositional properties, gender, roughness, aesthetic properties, bodily sensations, states of mind, agency features, action features, and moral properties. In this dissertation, setting Susanna Siegel's rich content thesis as a framework and relying on her method of phenomenal contrast as a way of discovering the contents, I am intending to assess an account of perceiving moral properties. I will impose two objections against this model: The first one invokes the ignored role of imagination and recollection in the method and generally targets the method of contrast. The second one invokes the thesis of phenomenal holism and targets specifically the machinery of drawing contrast in the proposed moral pair. Finally, I’ll conclude that this account of moral perception, as well as other phenomenal-contrast-based accounts, is not tenable.

The method of phenomenal contrast (in perception) invokes the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as a means to discover its contents. The method implicitly takes for granted that ‘what it is like’ to have a perceptual experience e is the same as ‘what it is like’ to imagine or recall it; accordingly, in its various proposed implementations, the method treats imaginations and/or recollections as interchangeable with real experiences. The method thus always contrasts a pair of experiences, at least one of which is imagined or remembered rather than occurrent. Surveying all eighteen forms of implementing the method, I argue that in all of the proposed pairings, the substitution of imagination or recollection for perceptual experience in the method, is either inconceivable or impermissible. I identify four reasons why I think imagination cannot be substituted for real experience, and three reasons why recollection cannot be substituted for real experience. If my argument works, there is no form of implementing the method that is useful for discovering the contents of experience, and thus the method is not a well‐functioning tool to study the contents of perception.