Thomas Beddoes’s and Humphry Davy’s accounts of the nitrous oxide experiments carried out at the Pneumatic Institution in 1799 include extravagant descriptions of its mind-altering effects. Many people, both at the time and subsequently, have considered these descriptions to be the product not of the gas but of its subjects’ overheated imaginations. To what extent were these effects ‘all in the...

Imagining oneself performing a simple action can trigger false memories of self-performance, a phenomenon called imagination inflation. However, people can, and often do, imagine others' behavior and actions. According to a visual-similarity account, imagining another person's actions should induce the same kind of memory error, a false memory of self-performance. We tested this account in thre...

Mathematical approaches to modeling the mind since the 1950s are reviewed. Difficulties faced by these approaches are related to the fundamental incompleteness of logic discovered by K. Gödel. A recent mathematical advancement, dynamic logic (DL) overcame these past difficulties. DL is described conceptually and related to neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy. DL models h...

Art is defined as expression or application of human creative skill and imagination producing works to be appreciated primarily for their aesthetic value or emotional power. This definition encompasses two very important elements-the creation and reception of art-and by doing so it establishes a link, a dialogue between the artist and spectator. From the evolutionary biological perspective, act...

Information technology helps people in many ways, but it doesn't help them answer important questions like: What do I do with my life? How should I act? How should I treat others? Perhaps IT can help ordinary people create and live a personal moral philosophy. This paper offers a framework for research on this possibility. Ethical choice is viewed as guided imagination, and moral development as...

The paper – similarly to our earlier publications since 1993 – is trying to ‘synchronize’ early quantum physics, the Kalmanian representation theory, Jungian analytic psychology, and certain aesthetical categories. The number ‘137’, the so-called inverse Fine Structure Constant (FSC), is placed at the centre of this heuristic and epistemological experiment, along with the scientific cooperation...

We argue that all primates primarily perceive the actions of conspecifics as meaningful expressions of agency. Social understanding is a perceptual capacity that does not require human reason or imagination. Conversely, only humans have an additional, sophisticated ability to decontextualize and objectify actions into abstract movements. We thereby turn the traditional consensus on its head: wh...

This essay aims to inquire about the literary representation of animal and political imagination nowadays, as “human life” paradigm represents a biopolitical boundary that states which lives deserve such status are left out symbolic legal recognition. Starting with “Yzur” (1096) by Leopoldo Lugones, shows how this “anthropological machine” works, in its capture living imposes logic domination e...

The eminent mathematician Felix Klein wrote, in his intimate history of nineteenth-century mathematics, that “mathematics is not merely a matter of understanding but quite essentially a matter of imagination” (cf. Klein [1979], p. 207). Klein was responding to the turbulent trajectory of imagination’s role inmathematics during the nineteenth century, which beganwith Gaspard Monge teaching new w...