•  397
    Deep learning and synthetic media
    Synthese 200 (3): 1-27. 2022.
    Deep learning algorithms are rapidly changing the way in which audiovisual media can be produced. Synthetic audiovisual media generated with deep learning—often subsumed colloquially under the label “deepfakes”—have a number of impressive characteristics; they are increasingly trivial to produce, and can be indistinguishable from real sounds and images recorded with a sensor. Much attention has been dedicated to ethical concerns raised by this technological development. Here, I focus instead on …Read more
  •  402
    Selfless Memories
    Erkenntnis 0-22. 2022.
    Many authors claim that being conscious constitutively involves being self-conscious, or conscious of oneself. This claim appears to be threatened by reports of `selfless' episodes, or conscious episodes lacking self-consciousness, recently described in a number of pathological and nonpathological conditions. However, the credibility of these reports has in turn been challenged on the following grounds: remembering and reporting a past conscious episode as an episode that one went through is onl…Read more
  •  313
    Drug-Induced Body Disownership
    In Chris Letheby & Philip Gerrans (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Psychedelic Psychiatry, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    In recent years, a debate has emerged on whether bodily sensations are typically accompanied by a sense of body ownership, namely a distinctive experience of one's body or body part as one's own. Realists about the sense of body ownership heavily rely on evidence from experimentally-induced bodily illusions (e.g., the rubber hand illusion) and pathological disownership syndromes (e.g. somatoparaphrenia). In this chapter, I will introduce novel evidence regarding body disownership syndromes induc…Read more
  •  144
    Text-guided image generation models can be prompted to generate images using nonce words adversarially designed to robustly evoke specific visual concepts. Two approaches for such generation are introduced: macaronic prompting, which involves designing cryptic hybrid words by concatenating subword units from different languages; and evocative prompting, which involves designing nonce words whose broad morphological features are similar enough to that of existing words to trigger robust visual as…Read more
  •  624
    This thesis investigates the relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness. I consider two broad claims about this relationship: a constitutive claim, according to which all conscious experiences constitutively involve self-consciousness; and a typicalist claim, according to which ordinary conscious experiences contingently involve self-consciousness. Both of these claims call for elucidation of the relevant notions of consciousness and self-consciousness. In the first part of the th…Read more
  •  145
    Are There Degrees of Self-Consciousness?
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (3-4): 252-282. 2019.
    It is widely assumed that ordinary conscious experience involves some form of sense of self or consciousness of oneself. Moreover, this claim is often restricted to a ‘thin’ or ‘minimal’ notion of self-consciousness, or even ‘the simplest form of self-consciousness’, as opposed to more sophisticated forms of self-consciousness which are not deemed ubiquitous in ordinary experience. These formulations suggest that self-consciousness comes in degrees, and that individual subjects may differ with r…Read more
  •  217
    The Varieties of Selflessness
    Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 1 (1): 1-41. 2020.
    Many authors argue that conscious experience involves a sense of self or self-consciousness. According to the strongest version of this claim, there can be no selfless states of consciousness, namely states of consciousness that lack self-consciousness altogether. Disagreements about this claim are likely to remain merely verbal as long as the target notion of self-consciousness is not adequately specified. After distinguishing six notions of self-consciousness commonly discussed in the literatu…Read more
  •  188
    Bayne and Carter argue that the mode of consciousness induced by psychedelic drugs does not fit squarely within the traditional account of modes as levels of consciousness, and favor instead a multi-dimensional account according to which modes of consciousness differ along several dimensions—none of which warrants a linear ordering of modes. We discuss the assumption that psychedelic drugs induce a single or paradigmatic mode of consciousness, as well as conceptual issues related to Bayne and Ca…Read more
  •  301
    Drug-Induced Alterations of Bodily Awareness
    In Adrian J. T. Alsmith & Andrea Serino (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness, Routledge. 2022.
    Philosophical and empirical research on bodily awareness has mostly focused so far on bodily disorders – such as anorexia nervosa, somatoparaphrenia, or xenomelia (body integrity dysphoria) – and bodily illusions induced in an experimental setting – such as the rubber hand illusion, or the thermal grid illusion. Studying these conditions can be illuminating to investigate a broad range of issues about the nature, function, and etiology of bodily experience. However, a number of psychoactive comp…Read more
  •  519
    Radical disruptions of self-consciousness
    Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 1 (I): 1-13. 2020.
    This special issue is about something most of us might find very hard to conceive: states of consciousness in which self-consciousness is radically disrupted or altogether missing.
  •  440
    The Controversy over the Existence of the World (henceforth Controversy) is the magnum opus of Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden. Despite the renewed interest for Ingarden’s pioneering ontological work whithin analytic philosophy, little attention has been dedicated to Controversy's main goal, clearly indicated by the very title of the book: finding a solution to the centuries-old philosophical controversy about the ontological status of the external world. There are at least three reasons for …Read more
  •  465
    Are There Degreess of Self-Consciousness?
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (3-4): 252-282. 2019.
    It is widely assumed that ordinary conscious experience involves some form of sense of self or consciousness of oneself. Moreover, this claim is often restricted to a 'thin' or 'minimal' notion of self-consciousness, or even 'the simplest form of self-consciousness', as opposed to more sophisticated forms of self-consciousness which are not deemed ubiquitous in ordinary experience. These formulations suggest that self-consciousness comes in degrees, and that individual subjects may differ with r…Read more
  •  439
    Psychedelics, Meditation, and Self-Consciousness
    with Robin L. Carhart-Harris, Leor Roseman, Fynn-Mathis Trautwein, and Aviva Berkovich-Ohana
    Frontiers in Psychology 9 375105. 2018.
    In recent years, the scientific study of meditation and psychedelic drugs has seen remarkable developments. The increased focus on meditation in cognitive neuroscience has led to a cross-cultural classification of standard meditation styles validated by functional and structural neuroanatomical data. Meanwhile, the renaissance of psychedelic research has shed light on the neurophysiology of altered states of consciousness induced by classical psychedelics, such as psilocybin and LSD, whose effec…Read more
  •  1182
    There is converging evidence that high doses of hallucinogenic drugs can produce significant alterations of self-experience, described as the dissolution of the sense of self and the loss of boundaries between self and world. This article discusses the relevance of this phenomenon, known as “drug-induced ego dissolution (DIED)”, for cognitive neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of mind. Data from self-report questionnaires suggest that three neuropharmacological classes of drugs can induce e…Read more