A common objection to consciousness research is that researchers cannot agree on what consciousness is. But how should a consensus on the nature of consciousness be reached? Does consciousness have essential features that one can be right or wrong about? Should we select theories of consciousness based on their descriptions of the essential features of experience alone? In this article, we will...
As neuroscientific theories of consciousness continue to proliferate, the need to assess their similarities and differences - as well as their predictive and explanatory power - becomes ever more pressing. Recently, a number of structured adversarial collaborations have been devised to test the competing predictions of several candidate theories of consciousness. In this review, we compare and...
Whether consciousness serves a biological and psychological function is a topic of intense interest. We reexamine this issue by first focussing on an objection against consciousness having a function raised amongst others by Jaegwon Kim. His argument targets a form of non-reductive physicalism stating that consciousness has causative power beyond that of the physical substrate. In contrast, we...
We aim to investigate the spatial experience of patients with chronic scotomas caused by lesion to early visual cortex, including primary visual cortex (V1) and adjacent extrastriate visual areas. These experiments are conducted as part of an adversarial collaboration testing contrasting theories of consciousness: Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and two Predictive Processing accounts,...
PLoS One2026Clement Abbatecola, Bernard Marius ’t Hart, Belén M. Montabes De la Cruz et al.
We investigate the subjective experience of space around the visual blind spot area, the cortical representation of which is missing feedforward connectivity from one eye. We performed these experiments as part of an adversarial collaboration to test contrasting theories of consciousness; Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Predictive Processing Active Inference (AI), and Predictive Processing...
Active inference, a first-principles framework for modelling the behaviour of sentient agents, is beginning to be applied in consciousness research. One hypothesis arising from the framework is that active inference is necessary for changes in conscious content. As one component of an extensive adversarial collaboration among competing theories of consciousness, active inference will be...
Significant advances in the scientific investigation of the neurobiology of consciousness have been slow to be translated into clinical settings, limited by factors of conceptual (e.g., what is consciousness?), methodological (e.g., how to identify reliable indicators of consciousness?), and technical (e.g., how to improve sensitivity and specificity of the technological identification of...
PsyArXivJuly 5, 2025Clement Abbatecola, Bernard Marius 'T Hart, Belen Maria Montabes de la Cruz et al.
preprint
We investigate the subjective experience of space around the visual blind spot area, the cortical representation of which is missing feedforward connectivity from one eye. We performed these experiments as part of an adversarial collaboration to test contrasting theories of consciousness; Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Predictive Processing Active Inference (AI), and Predictive Processing...
PLoS One2025Kengo Takahashi, Samuel Pontes Quero, Julien Fiorilli et al.
A major debate in the field of consciousness pertains to whether neuronal activity or rather the causal structure of neural circuits underlie the generation of conscious experience. The former position is held by theoretical accounts of consciousness based on the predictive processing framework (such as neurorepresentationalism and active inference), while the latter is posited by the...
eNeuroSeptember 1, 2024Simone Ciceri, Matthijs N Oude Lohuis, Vivi Rottschäfer et al.
Conscious reportability of visual input is associated with a bimodal neural response in the primary visual cortex (V1): an early-latency response coupled to stimulus features and a late-latency response coupled to stimulus report or detection. This late wave of activity, central to major theories of consciousness, is thought to be driven by the prefrontal cortex (PFC), responsible for...
How is conscious experience related to material brain processes? A variety of theories aiming to answer this age-old question have emerged from the recent surge in consciousness research, and some are now hotly debated. Although most researchers have so far focused on the development and validation of their preferred theory in relative isolation, this article, written by a group of scientists...
How deep is the current diversity in the panoply of theories to define consciousness, and to what extent do these theories share common denominators? Here we first examine to what extent different theories are commensurable (or comparable) along particular dimensions. We posit logical (and, when applicable, empirical) commensurability as a necessary condition for identifying common denominators...
Critics of Artificial Intelligence posit that artificial agents cannot achieve consciousness even in principle, because they lack certain necessary conditions for consciousness present in biological agents. Here we highlight arguments from a neuroscientific and neuromorphic engineering perspective as to why such a strict denial of consciousness in artificial agents is not compelling. We argue...
This review provides an update on Neurorepresentationalism, a theoretical framework that defines conscious experience as multimodal, situational survey and explains its neural basis from brain systems constructing best-guess representations of sensations originating in our environment and body [1]. It posits that conscious experience is characterized by five essential hallmarks: (i) multimodal...
Abstract Background Assessing consciousness in other subjects, particularly in non-verbal and behaviourally disabled subjects (e.g., patients with disorders of consciousness), is notoriously challenging but increasingly urgent. The high rate of misdiagnosis among disorders of consciousness raises the need for new perspectives in order to inspire new technical and clinical approaches. Main body...
Merker et al.'s critique calls for a deeper analysis of panpsychism. In principle, the concept of integrated information can be applied to photodiodes and subatomic particles, but I suggest the main obstacle is the lack of any evidence to confirm the presence of consciousness. Also MRW's perspectivalist theory illustrates the difficulties in synthesizing a full-fledged theory of consciousness.
In today's society, it becomes increasingly important to assess which non-human and non-verbal beings possess consciousness. This review article aims to delineate criteria for consciousness especially in animals, while also taking into account intelligent artifacts. First, we circumscribe what we mean with "consciousness" and describe key features of subjective experience: qualitative richness,...
Neuronal activity is markedly different across brain states: it varies from desynchronized activity during wakefulness to the synchronous alternation between active and silent states characteristic of deep sleep. Surprisingly, limited attention has been paid to investigating how brain states affect sensory processing. While it was long assumed that the brain was mostly disconnected from...
How consciousness (experience) arises from and relates to material brain processes (the "mind-body problem") has been pondered by thinkers for centuries, and is regarded as among the deepest unsolved problems in science, with wide-ranging theoretical, clinical, and ethical implications. Until the last few decades, this was largely seen as a philosophical topic, but not widely accepted in...
A key question in studying consciousness is how neural operations in the brain can identify streams of sensory input as belonging to distinct modalities, which contributes to the representation of qualitatively different experiences. The basis for identification of modalities is proposed to be constituted by self-organized comparative operations across a network of unimodal and multimodal...
Taking phenomenal consciousness as explanandum, we first circumscribe it using five hallmarks. Fundamentally, conscious experience corresponds to generating a best-guess representation of what the sensory inputs the wakeful brain receives are about. This process can be computationally approached with predictive processing (PP): the brain constantly generates inferential, predictive...