arXiv Preprint Archive
September 5, 2025
Shahar Dror, Dafna Bergerbest, Moti Salti
The encounter of artificial intelligence with consciousness research is often framed as a challenge: could this science determine whether such systems are conscious? We suggest it is equally an opportunity to expand and test the scope of existing theories of consciousness. Current approaches remain polarized. Computational functionalism emphasizes abstract organization, often realized through...
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
November 1, 2022
Moti Salti, Dafna Bergerbest
In the study of consciousness, qualia, the individual subjective experience, is neglected. It remains impenetrable because the objective perspective used for scientific investigations misses its subjective nature. In 1974, Thomas Nagel suggested that studying qualia requires an "objective phenomenology method" whose goal would be to describe the subjective character of experiences in an...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Daniel Revach, Moti Salti
Our ability to understand the mind and its relation to the body is highly dependent on the way we define consciousness and the lens through which we study it. We argue that looking at conscious experience from an information-theory perspective can help obtain a unified and parsimonious account of the mind. Today's dominant models consider consciousness to be a specialized function of the brain...
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2021
Daniel Revach, Moti Salti
The way one asks a question is shaped by a-priori assumptions and constrains the range of possible answers. We identify and test the assumptions underlying contemporary debates, models, and methodology in the study of the neural correlates of consciousness, which was framed by Crick and Koch's seminal paper (1990). These premises create a sequential and passive conception of conscious...
Elife
May 5, 2021
Moti Salti, Simo Monto, Lucie Charles et al.
The neural correlates of consciousness are typically sought by comparing the overall brain responses to perceived and unperceived stimuli. However, this comparison may be contaminated by non-specific attention, alerting, performance, and reporting confounds. Here, we pursue a novel approach, tracking the neuronal coding of consciously and unconsciously perceived contents while keeping behavior...
arXiv Preprint Archive
March 24, 2018
Moti Salti, Asaf Harel, Sebastien Marti
Understanding the neural mechanism underlying subjective representation has become a central endeavor in cognitive-neuroscience. In theories of conscious perception, stimulus gaining conscious access is usually considered as a discrete neuronal event to be characterized in time or space, sometimes refer to as a 'conscious episode'. Surprisingly, the alternative hypothesis according to which...