Fleming and Michel suggest that conscious vision reflects a reality monitoring (RM) mechanism that evolved to separate planning from perception. Here, I critically examine the RM decision policy implied by the authors - a slow, winner-take-all strategy tagging only one first-order representation as "real." Specifically, I explore how expectations about environmental or reality-tagging stability...
Rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities has drawn fresh attention to the prospect of consciousness in AI. There is an urgent need for rigorous methods to assess AI systems for consciousness, but significant uncertainty about relevant issues in consciousness science. We present a method for assessing AI systems for consciousness that involves exploring what follows from...
Debates about artificial consciousness are often framed in terms of verdicts: whether a given system is or is not conscious, and which criteria or theories can deliver such judgments. This paper argues that this framing obscures a more fundamental epistemic challenge.Consciousness science has largely been developed within a narrow population – humans – under background assumptions that support...
Higher-order representations are neural or computational states that are “about” first-order representations, encoding information not about the external world per se but about the agent’s own representational processes – such as the reliability, source, or structure of a first-order representation. These higher-order representations appear critical to metacognition, learning, and even...
Visual experience can sometimes depart from visual performance, providing a powerful lens into the mechanisms generating conscious perception. In one proposed dissociation—subjective inflation—unattended locations in the periphery appear stronger than attended ones despite equated performance. Subjective inflation has played a central role in motivating theories of consciousness that reject the...
Studying subjective experience is hard. We believe that pain is not identical to nociception, nor pleasure a computational reward signal, nor fear the activation of "threat circuitry". Unfortunately, introspective self-reports offer our best bet for accessing subjective experience, but many still believe that introspection is "unreliable" and "unverifiable". But which of introspection's faults...
We recently completed the Fund Consciousness Science! Project: a workshop and subawards program aimed to align United States federal funding mechanisms and consciousness research. Here we describe the project’s motivation, execution, and outcomes to motivate similar efforts both locally and globally.
Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness ('C-tests') are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural...
The comparison between conscious and unconscious perception is a cornerstone of consciousness science. However, most studies reporting above-chance discrimination of unseen stimuli do not control for criterion biases when assessing awareness. We tested whether observers can discriminate subjectively invisible offsets of Vernier stimuli when visibility is probed using a bias-free task. To reduce...
The media, including news articles in both Nature and Science, have recently celebrated the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a ‘leading’ and empirically tested theory of consciousness. We are writing as researchers with some relevant expertise to express our concerns.
Claims that an AI system "instantiates" a consciousness- or cognition-theoretic construct are often supported by a cheap correlate: aggregate dependence read as irreducible integration, ordinary shared-store efficiency read as global access, or a confidence-labelled signal read as metacognitive monitoring. Such inferences trade on a construct's appearance while omitting the property that...
Whether current or near-term AI systems could be conscious is a topic of scientific interest and increasing public concern. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing existing AI systems in detail, in light of our best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness. We survey several prominent scientific theories of...
There is growing interest in the relationship been AI and consciousness. Joseph LeDoux and Jonathan Birch thought it would be a good moment to put some of the big questions in this area to some leading experts. The challenge of addressing the questions they raised was taken up by Kristin Andrews, Nicky Clayton, Nathaniel Daw, Chris Frith, Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters, Susan Schneider, Anil Seth,...
In this article, I discuss recent media attention paid to consciousness research through coverage of the “25 years of consciousness” event at the 2023 Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness annual meeting, including:NatureScienceThe EconomistThe New York TimesScientific AmericanScienceAlertTheDebriefNewScientistNautilusI present critical additional context to these pieces,...
Science and philosophy have long struggled with how to even begin studying the neural or computational basis of qualitative experience. Here I review psychological, neuroscience, and philosophical literature to reveal how perceptual metacognition possesses five unique properties that provide a powerful opportunity for studying the neural and computational correlates of subjective experience:...
Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.
The scientific study of consciousness emerged as an organized field of research only a few decades ago. As empirical results have begun to enhance our understanding of consciousness, it is important to find out whether other factors, such as funding for consciousness research and status of consciousness scientists, provide a suitable environment for the field to grow and develop sustainably. We...
Rounis, Maniscalco, Rothwell, Passingham, and Lau (2010) reported that stimulation of prefrontal cortex impairs visual metacognition. Bor, Schwartzman, Barrett, and Seth (2017) attempted to replicate this result, but adopted an experimental design that reduced their chanceof obtaining positive findings. Despite that, their results appeared initially consistent with those of Rounis et al., but...
In our ASSC20 symposium, “Does unconscious perception really exist?”, the four of us asked some difficult questions about the purported phenomenon of unconscious perception, disagreeing on a number of points. This disagreement reflected the objective of the symposium: not only to come together to discuss a single topic of keen interest to the ASSC community, but to do so in a way that would...
Response bias (or criterion) contamination is insidious in studies of consciousness: that observers report they do not see a stimulus may not mean they have absolutely no subjective experience; they may be giving such reports in relative terms in the context of other stimuli. Bias-free signal detection theoretic measures provide an excellent method for avoiding response bias confounds, and many...