Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 28, 2026
Arthur Stewart
Detecting consciousness in the pre-verbal infant rests on markers, neural and behavioral signatures carried over from adult studies, and no single marker has been shown to translate reliably to infancy (Passos-Ferreira, 2024; Frohlich & Bayne, 2025). This paper supplies what the marker approach lacks: a map from an infant's behavior to the specific function of consciousness it reflects, so that...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 5, 2026
Arthur Stewart
Higher-order theories of consciousness (HOT) propose that a mental state M is conscious if and only if a higher-order state H represents M. This paper argues HOT is a labeling scheme rather than a theory of consciousness. HOT specifies a one-way relation between two mental states, applies the label "conscious" to whatever fits the relation, and supplies the actual states, the physical material,...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 26, 2026
Arthur Stewart
2 citations
Consciousness has not been medically defined. It has been defined legally and socially, and those definitions have varied across jurisdictions and across centuries. The DSM does not define consciousness. The ICD does not define consciousness. There is no diagnostic biomarker for phenomenal experience. The AI consciousness debate has been proceeding as if a constitutive specification of...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 24, 2026
Arthur Stewart
Consciousness is the point where past, present, and anticipated future converge. This paper derives that point from the brain's own wiring. Four neural loops implement four operations, gating, contextualization, resolution, and commitment, and they map onto a directed graph with one structurally exceptional node: a convergence point that receives three streams at once. One loop delivers the...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 4, 2026
Arthur Stewart
The Cogitate Consortium's preregistered adversarial collaboration (Cogitate Consortium et al., 2025) is widely cited as a rigorous test of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT). This paper argues that the collaboration's design was soft-adversarial in the structural sense, and that within the lax design the two theories failed at predictions the...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 1, 2026
Arthur Stewart
6 citations
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposes that consciousness is integrated information, quantified by a measure called Phi, with the proposal developed across four major versions (Tononi, 2004; Tononi, 2008; Oizumi, Albantakis, & Tononi, 2014; Albantakis et al., 2023). The variants share the central commitment that consciousness is identical with integrated information measured by Phi. This...
Arthur Stewart
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) proposes that a mental state is conscious if and only if its content is broadcast in a global workspace. Baars (1988) developed the cognitive workspace account. Dehaene and colleagues (Dehaene & Naccache, 2001; Dehaene, 2014) developed the Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) variant, identifying the workspace with a fronto-parietal network and proposing ignition...
Arthur Stewart
Six prominent theories of consciousness (HOT, GWT, IIT, RPT, PP, AST) disagree about the mechanism that produces consciousness. They agree on what they import to operate as theories of consciousness at all. The paper reads the six theories in three registers. The explicit register reports what each theory publicly claims. The deployed register reports what each has to put to work for the claims...