Everyone lives within a Perception Box (PB). What we see and hear—how we interpret it and what it means to us—depends on our brain and learning history. Recognizing that perception is subjective, and understanding why, are key steps to open our minds, counteract bias, and reduce suffering. This project seeks to establish a rigorous theoretical and empirical foundation for the science of the PB....
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...
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...
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...
Many hold that visual experience is sparse and its richness illusory, relying on high-level summaries rather than detailed content. However, we argue here that seeing is more than this - it is unfathomably rich. We distinguish three levels of visual phenomenology: high level object and scene categorizations; mid-level feature groupings; and a fundamental spatial field composed of spots and...
This paper presents Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 4.0. IIT aims to account for the properties of experience in physical (operational) terms. It identifies the essential properties of experience (axioms), infers the necessary and sufficient properties that its substrate must satisfy (postulates), and expresses them in mathematical terms. In principle, the postulates can be applied to any...
The target article's critique of the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness is misguided on several fronts, which I hope are addressed in other comments, but here I focus on the connection (or supposed lack thereof) between IIT and rigorous phenomenology, and IIT's connection to the psychophysics of perception.
SUMMARY: The neural substrates of consciousness remain elusive. Competing theories that attempt to explain consciousness disagree on the contribution of frontal versus posterior cortex and omit subcortical influences. This lack of understanding impedes the ability to monitor consciousness, which can lead to adverse clinical consequences. To test substrates and measures of consciousness, we...
Objective correlates-behavioral, functional, and neural-provide essential tools for the scientific study of consciousness. But reliance on these correlates should not lead to the 'fallacy of misplaced objectivity': the assumption that only objective properties should and can be accounted for objectively through science. Instead, what needs to be explained scientifically is what experience is...
Neuroscience has made remarkable advances in accounting for how the brain performs its various functions. Consciousness, too, is usually approached in functional terms: the goal is to understand how the brain represents information, accesses that information, and acts on it. While useful for prediction, this functional, information-processing approach leaves out the subjective structure of...
Major theories of consciousness disagree on the key neural substrates. In Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Higher-order Theories, consciousness depends on frontal cortex, whereas Integrated Information Theory and Recurrent Processing Theory highlight posterior contributions. Most theories omit subcortical influences. To test these theories, we performed simultaneous frontal, parietal,...
There must be a reason why an experience feels the way it does. A good place to begin addressing this question is spatial experience, because it may be more penetrable by introspection than other qualities of consciousness such as color or pain. Moreover, much of experience is spatial, from that of our body to the visual world, which appears as if painted on an extended canvas in front of our...
It has been argued that the bandwidth of perceptual experience is low-that the richness of experience is illusory and that the amount of visual information observers can perceive and remember is extremely limited. However, the evidence suggests that this postulated poverty of experiential content is illusory and that visual phenomenology is immensely rich. To properly estimate perceptual...
A significant problem in neuroscience concerns the distinction between neural processing that is correlated with conscious percepts from processing that is not. Here, we tested if a hierarchical structure of causal interactions between neuronal populations correlates with conscious perception. We derived the hierarchical causal structure as a pattern of integrated information, inspired by the...
Abstract Integrated information theory postulates that the particular way stimuli appear when we consciously experience them arises from integrated information relationships across neural populations. We investigated if such equivalence holds by testing if similar/different percepts map onto similar/different information structures. We computed integrated information structure from intracranial...
In their recent article, the unfolding argument, Doerig et al argue that a theory of consciousness cannot be based in the characterization of the physical structure of the brain. They argue that such theories must be “either false or outside the realm of science”. Instead, they prefer theories of consciousness based only on “input-output” descriptions. By their implicit treatment of phenomenal...