arXiv Preprint Archive
December 14, 2025
Erik Hoel
Scientific theories of consciousness should be falsifiable and non-trivial. Recent research has given us formal tools to analyze these requirements of falsifiability and non-triviality for theories of consciousness. Surprisingly, many contemporary theories of consciousness fail to pass this bar, including theories based on causal structure but also (as I demonstrate) theories based on function....
Patterns
July 19, 2020
Erik Hoel
Summary Understanding of the evolved biological function of sleep has advanced considerably in the past decade. However, no equivalent understanding of dreams has emerged. Contemporary neuroscientific theories often view dreams as epiphenomena, and many of the proposals for their biological function are contradicted by the phenomenology of dreams themselves. Now, the recent advent of deep...
arXiv Preprint Archive
April 7, 2020
Johannes Kleiner, Erik Hoel
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard experimental setup for testing these theories. Based on a theory's application to some physical system, such as the brain, testing requires comparing a theory's...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2016
Erik Hoel, Larissa Albantakis, William Marshall et al.
153 citations
Causal interactions within complex systems such as the brain can be analyzed at multiple spatiotemporal levels. It is widely assumed that the micro level is causally complete, thus excluding causation at the macro level. However, by measuring effective information—how much a system’s mechanisms constrain its past and future states—we recently showed that causal power can be stronger at macro...
Erik Hoel
This essay argues that neuroscience remains pre-paradigmatic in the Kuhnian sense, lacking a unifying theoretical framework despite impressive methodological advances. The author contends that consciousness is the missing organising principle, analogous to evolution in biology. Drawing on evidence of reproducibility failures in neuroimaging and the field's reliance on 'cool' rather than...
Erik Hoel
This essay argues against attributing consciousness to AI chatbots, warning that such assumptions fuel a growing phenomenon the author terms 'AI psychosis.' Drawing on cases of harmful sycophantic AI interactions, including a teen suicide linked to GPT-4o, the piece critiques proposals for AI 'exit rights' and model welfare. It contends that treating chatbots as conscious undermines human...