The experiencing subject plays a central role in ordinary conceptions of consciousness, yet it has received comparatively little attention as an explicit target of scientific theorizing. This is surprising because subjectivity, persistence across changing experiences, and the apparent individuality of conscious systems all seem closely related to the notion of an experiencing subject. The...
Scientific theories are typically evaluated by their explanatory and predictive power rather than by their ability to resolve ultimate ontological questions. This methodological perspective is particularly important in consciousness research, where phenomenal consciousness is often treated as difficult to investigate because of its private and subjective nature. In this paper, we propose the...
A central challenge in consciousness research is the lack of agreement on what a theory of consciousness should explain, which makes it difficult to compare existing theories. We propose a framework for organizing explanatory targets of theories based on a minimal set of seven questions designed to be theoretically neutral, causally and functionally relevant, and applicable across different...
The mind-brain problem is to bridge relations between in higher-level mental events and in lower-level neural events. To address this, some mathematical models have been proposed to explain how the brain can represent the discriminative structure of qualia, but they remain unresolved due to a lack of validation methods. To understand the qualia discrimination mechanism, we need to ask how the...