Michele Riva

This paper presents an epistemic challenge to intuitionist moral realism by examining systematic neurochemical modulation of moral judgment. Drawing on pharmacological evidence regarding the effects of MDMA, psilocybin, and alcohol, I argue for a "Calibration Problem": since moral intuition varies predictably with neurochemical state and lacks independent verification, intuitionists cannot non-circularly privilege one chemical standpoint over another. The paper concludes that a sophisticated non-cognitivism—framing moral statements as expressions of neurochemically grounded attitudes—provides a more parsimonious explanation of the data than traditional realism.

This paper argues that memory structures consciousness and proposes that awareness is its ground. Consciousness is understood as experience organized by memory, graded by the depth of memory that sustains it: retention and working memory give experience temporal flow, while autobiographical memory gives it a continuing, narrated self. Drawing on Rovelli’s account of time as nonfundamental, the case of Clive Wearing, and contemplative reports, the argument shows that the narrative self can collapse while experience continues, and contends, against Zahavi’s minimal-self view, that even first-personal givenness belongs to the organization of experience rather than to its condition. What remains when that organization falls away is awareness, the bare occurrence of experience, understood in a sense close to Advaita Vedānta, without subject or object. Awareness is shown to be conceptually prior to consciousness, while its ontological fundamentality is advanced as an explicit hypothesis whose contested premise is identified and set against the strongest physicalist alternative. The hard problem is thereby relocated rather than dissolved: explaining how memory organizes experience does not explain why experience occurs at all.