How a scientific community is organized can affect whether disagreement drives progress or leads to isolation. Students and postdocs are uniquely placed to build communities that bridge theoretical and methodological divides. Drawing on a student-led society in consciousness science, we show how empowering early-career researchers can turn fragmentation into collaboration.
Determining which entities deserve moral consideration is crucial to policy debates about animal welfare and artificial intelligence regulation. A common assumption is that consciousness is a key criterion for moral status, often considered to be necessary or sufficient for it. However, it is unclear whether public attitudes also share this assumption. In a large, preregistered study (N=1493),...
Here, we present a large-scale, multi-center dataset of combined magnetoencephalographic (MEG) and electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings, along with eye-tracking data and high-resolution structural MRI (T1); complementing with iEEG and fMRI datasets that are shared in accompanying data papers. The data was obtained through an adversarial collaboration between advocates of two neuroscientific...
We present a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) dataset collected as part of an adversarial collaboration aimed at arbitrating between the Global Neuronal Workspace theory (GNWT) and the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness. Participants (N = 118) were presented with suprathreshold visual stimuli belonging to four different categories (faces, objects, letters, false fonts)...
Different theories explain how subjective experience arises from brain activity1,2. These theories have independently accrued evidence, but have not been directly compared3. Here we present an open science adversarial collaboration directly juxtaposing integrated information theory (IIT)4,5 and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT)6-10 via a theory-neutral consortium11-13. The theory...
We introduce an intracranial EEG (iEEG) dataset collected as part of an adversarial collaboration between proponents of two theories of consciousness: Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory. The data were recorded from 38 patients undergoing intracranial monitoring of epileptic seizures across three research centers using the same experimental protocol. Participants...
The study of consciousness has developed well-controlled, rigorous methods for manipulating and measuring consciousness. Yet, in the process, experimental paradigms grew farther away from everyday conscious and unconscious processes, which raises the concern of ecological validity. In this review, we suggest that the field can benefit from adopting a more ecological approach, akin to other...
Different theories explain how subjective experience arises from brain activity1,2. These theories have independently accrued evidence, yet, confirmation bias and dependence on design choices hamper progress in the field3. Here, we present an open science adversarial collaboration which directly juxtaposes Integrated Information Theory (IIT)4,5 and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT)6–10,...
The relationship between conscious experience and brain activity has intrigued scientists and philosophers for centuries. In the last decades, several theories have suggested different accounts for these relationships. These theories have developed in parallel, with little to no cross-talk among them. To advance research on consciousness, we established an adversarial collaboration between...