UNIFR ExRe Colloquium 2024-25

EXRE (Experience & Reason) was established in 2010 in Fribourg by Fabian Dorsch. It consists of a group of philosophers who are based at the Philosophy Department of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), and who work together on phenomena and ideas related to consciousness and normativity.

Giovanni Rizzotto

Will Moorfoot

In Defence of Indeterministic Building

In this paper, I set out a new argument for the coherence of indeterministic building and defend its premises. The argument hinges on the underexplored notion of indeterministic supervenience. First, I argue that the logical possibility of an indeterministic supervenience relation entails the coherence of indeterministic building. Second, I argue that indeterministic supervenience is indeed logically possible. I conclude that there is a straightforward argument for the coherence of indeterministic building that has so far gone unnoticed.

Dirk Franken

Existence Originalism

Patrik Engisch & André Sant’anna

Aesthetic Rememberings

Jason Day

Welcome to Hyperspace: A Phenomenology of the DMT Experience

N,N-DMT, or simply ‘DMT,’ is a psychedelic substance that, when vaporised as freebase or smoked in ‘changa’ blends, induces experiences of a deeply strange nature. This strangeness pertains not only to how radically different DMT experiences are to ordinary experience, but even to the already strange experiences induced by other psychedelics – LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and ayahuasca (a brew that contains DMT as a primary psychoactive component). In this talk, I will present a phenomenology of DMT experiences, basing my description on an extensive phenomenological qualitative analysis of over 500 first-hand descriptions of DMT experiences, i.e., ‘trip reports.’ I will focus upon detailing the two defining characteristics of DMT experiences. First, I will discuss world shifting as the experience of being transported from the ordinary world of experience to an entirely different ‘world,’ ‘dimension’ or ‘realm’ that is commonly known in the psychedelic subculture as ‘hyperspace.’ Here, I will classify the different temporal stages of the trip to hyperspace and further classify the different ‘layers’ and more particular ‘environments’ of hyperspace that are commonly experienced. Second, I will discuss entity encounters as sensing the presence of, meeting, or interacting with what are experienced as autonomous hyperspatial beings. As I will elaborate, DMT entities can be classified into four broad types according to their general disposition towards the experiencer (friendly, benevolent, indifferent, and hostile) and further subclassified according to their more specific manner of interaction with them.

Sharon Casu

Moral Value of Consciousness

Our lives are valuable partly because we are moral agents. We can lead a morally good life because we can act, morally, in the right way, towards others and towards the world. I will argue that moral agency requires the capacity for consciousness, and therefore that consciousness is valuable. First, I will suggest that there can be no moral agency without intentional agency. While the non-intentional actions of an otherwise intentional agent can still be morally evaluated, the actions of an agent who is unable to act intentionally escape moral evaluation. Thus, moral agency requires intentional agency. Secondly, I will argue that intentional agency requires the capacity for consciousness. For one must know that one is F-ing in order to intentionally F, and this knowledge has a particularly special source: conscious awareness. I will conclude that consciousness is necessary for moral agency. There can be no morally evaluable action, no morally evaluable life, and therefore no morally good life, without consciousness. Thus, consciousness is valuable because moral agency necessarily depends on it, and moral agency is required for much of our life’s value.

Dirk Franken

Ontological Form

Alex Moran

Simon Morand

Pauline Sabrier