Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 6, 2026
Niccolò Negro
Analogical abduction is a form of reasoning that combines analogical analysis with inference to the best explanation to address the epistemological problem of other consciousnesses—that is, what justifies our ascriptions of consciousness to other entities? In this paper, I apply analogical abduction to the case of fetal consciousness, focusing on fetuses at the end of the second trimester. I...
Philosophy of Science
August 27, 2025
Niccolò Negro, Liad Mudrik
4 citations
Abstract Advances in animal sentience research, neural organoids, and artificial intelligence reinforce the relevance of justifying attributions of consciousness to nonstandard systems. Clarifying the argumentative structure behind these attributions is important for evaluating their validity. This article addresses this issue, concluding that analogical abduction—a form of reasoning combining...
Synthese
June 19, 2025
Niccolò Negro
1 citation
Phenomenal structuralism is the view that understanding consciousness requires describing its relational and structural properties, a perspective that can have implications for both explaining why experiences feel the way they do and identifying the neural correlates of consciousness. Phenomenal structuralism has gained considerable traction in recent years, with proponents advocating for its...
Erkenntnis
June 1, 2024
Niccolò Negro
AbstractThe integrated information theory (IIT) is an ambitious theory of consciousness that aims to provide both a neuroscientific and a metaphysical account of consciousness by identifying consciousness with integrated information. In the philosophical literature, IIT is often associated with a panpsychist worldview. In this paper, I show that IIT can be considered, instead, as a form of...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2024
Niccolò Negro
19 citations
Abstract The neuroscience of consciousness is undergoing a significant empirical acceleration thanks to several adversarial collaborations that intend to test different predictions of rival theories of consciousness. In this context, it is important to pair consciousness science with confirmation theory, the philosophical discipline that explores the interaction between evidence and hypotheses,...
Frontiers in Psychology
2024
Ignacio Cea, Niccolò Negro, Camilo Miguel Signorelli
In this article we present two ontological problems for the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness 4.0: what we call the (i) the intrinsicality 2.0 problem, and (ii) the engineering problem. These problems entail that truly existing, conscious entities can depend on, and be engineered from, entities that do not objectively exist, which is problematic: if something does not exist in...
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
October 16, 2023
Ignacio Cea, Niccolò Negro, Camilo Miguel Signorelli
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is currently one of the most influential scientific theories of consciousness. Here, we focus specifically on a metaphysical aspect of the theory's most recent version (IIT 4.0), what we may call its idealistic ontology, and its tension with a kind of realism about the external world that IIT also endorses. IIT 4.0 openly rejects the mainstream view that...
Frontiers in Psychology
2023
Marius Usher, Niccolò Negro, Hilla Jacobson et al.
7 citations
In this paper, we revisit the debate surrounding the Unfolding Argument (UA) against causal structure theories of consciousness (as well as the hard-criteria research program it prescribes), using it as a platform for discussing theoretical and methodological issues in consciousness research. Causal structure theories assert that consciousness depends on a particular causal structure of the...
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
August 3, 2022
Niccolò Negro
In consciousness science, theories often differ not only in the account of consciousness they arrive at, but also with respect to how they understand their starting point. Some approaches begin with experimentally gathered data, whereas others begin with phenomenologically gathered data. In this paper, I analyse how the most influential phenomenology-first approach, namely the Integrated...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Niccolò Negro
Merker et al. argue that integrated information theory (IIT) is not a theory of consciousness because the IIT formalism does not match phenomenology. I argue that the authors ultimately fail to articulate the problem of the inference of the postulates from the axioms. I suggest a different version of this problem, and argue that this can help rethink IIT's potential for consciousness science.
Phenomenology and Mind
September 17, 2018
Niccolò Negro
Modern science was born when physicists started studying phenomena by recruiting mathematical explanatory frameworks. Since this appears to be the direction followed in recent studies on consciousness, philosophers have to analyze the justification of this third-person methods of explaining a phenomenon that is supposed to be entirely subjective. In this paper I argue that this kind of...
Ignacio Cea, Niccolò Negro, Pedro A. M. Mediano et al.
preprint
The Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 4.0 is an influential framework aiming to explain consciousness mathematically in terms of intrinsic existence, namely what exists for itself in a specific, maximally irreducible, structured form. IIT thus posits that the minimal substrates of consciousness are also the ultimate building blocks of what exists. These are called ‘monads’, and are defined as...