The MIT Press eBooks
December 16, 2025
David Rudrauf
The chapter you are about to read is much about how other minds played a role in shaping my views and theories about consciousness.It only seemed natu ral to me from the outset that the phenomenology of subjective experience should play a pivotal role in a scientific theory of consciousness.But my intuitions found firmer methodological ground in my brief yet meaningful, and retrospectively...
Brain Sci
October 9, 2023
David Rudrauf, Grégoire Sergeant-Perthuis, Yvain Tisserand et al.
The Projective Consciousness Model: Projective Geometry at the Core of Consciousness and the Integration of Perception, Imagination, Motivation, Emotion, Social Cognition and Action.
arXiv Preprint Archive
April 1, 2023
Grégoire Sergeant-Perthuis, Nils Ruet, David Rudrauf et al.
In human spatial awareness, 3-D projective geometry structures information integration and action planning through perspective taking within an internal representation space. The way different perspectives are related and transform a world model defines a specific perception and imagination scheme. In mathematics, such collection of transformations corresponds to a 'group', whose 'actions'...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Björn Merker, Kenneth Williford, David Rudrauf
In our response to a truly diverse set of commentaries, we first summarize the principal topical themes around which they cluster, then address two "outlier" positions (the problem of consciousness has been solved vs. is intractable). Next, we address ways in which commentaries by non-integrated information theory (IIT) authors engage with the specifics of our IIT critique, turning finally to...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
May 19, 2021
Björn Merker, Kenneth Williford, David Rudrauf
Giulio Tononi's integrated information theory (IIT) proposes explaining consciousness by directly identifying it with integrated information. We examine the construct validity of IIT's measure of consciousness, phi (Φ), by analyzing its formal properties, its relation to key aspects of consciousness, and its co-variation with relevant empirical circumstances. Our analysis shows that IIT's...
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 23, 2020
David Rudrauf, Grégoire Sergeant-Perthuis, O. Belli et al.
Consciousness has been hypothesized to operate as a global workspace, which accesses and integrates multimodal information in a unified manner, supports expectation violation monitoring and reduction, and the motivation, programming and control of action. One important yet open issue concerns how the subjective perspective at the core of consciousness, and subjective properties of manifestation...
Journal of Neuroscience Research
November 20, 2019
Carissa L. Philippi, J. Bruss, A. Boes et al.
Functional neuroimaging research has consistently associated brain structures within the default mode network (DMN) and frontoparietal network (FPN) with mind‐wandering. Targeted lesion research has documented impairments in mind‐wandering after damage to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and hippocampal regions associated with the DMN. However, no lesion studies to date have applied lesion...
Frontiers in Psychology
2018
Kenneth Williford, Daniel Bennequin, Karl Friston et al.
85 citations
We summarize our recently introduced Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) (Rudrauf et al., 2017) and relate it to outstanding conceptual issues in the theory of consciousness. The PCM combines a projective geometrical model of the perspectival phenomenological structure of the field of consciousness with a variational Free Energy minimization model of active inference, yielding an account of...
Journal of theoretical biology
September 7, 2017
David Rudrauf, Daniel Bennequin, Isabela Granic et al.
We introduce a mathematical model of embodied consciousness, the Projective Consciousness Model (PCM), which is based on the hypothesis that the spatial field of consciousness (FoC) is structured by a projective geometry and under the control of a process of active inference. The FoC in the PCM combines multisensory evidence with prior beliefs in memory and frames them by selecting points of...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
May 2, 2014
Carissa L. Philippi, Daniel Tranel, Melissa Duff et al.
152 citations
Functional neuroimaging studies have implicated the default mode network (DMN) in autobiographical memory (AM). Convergent evidence from a lesion approach would help clarify the role of the DMN in AM. In this study, we used a voxelwise lesion-deficit approach to test the hypothesis that regions of the DMN are necessary for AM. We also explored whether the neural correlates of semantic AM (SAM)...
Psychophysiology
May 22, 2008
Sahib S. Khalsa, David Rudrauf, Antonio Damasio et al.
276 citations
Attention to internal body sensations is practiced in most meditation traditions. Many traditions state that this practice results in increased awareness of internal body sensations, but scientific studies evaluating this claim are lacking. We predicted that experienced meditators would display performance superior to that of nonmeditators on heartbeat detection, a standard noninvasive measure...
Biological research
2003
David Rudrauf, Antoine Lutz, Diego Cosmelli et al.
194 citations
This paper reviews in detail Francisco Varela's work on subjectivity and consciousness in the biological sciences. His original approach to this "hard problem" presents a subjectivity that is radically intertwined with its biological and physical roots. It must be understood within the framework of his theory of a concrete, embodied dynamics, grounded in his general theory of autonomous...