The Behavioral and brain sciences
July 10, 2026
Giulio Ongaro
I contrast Singh's subjective functionalism with structuralist-related approaches in anthropology, where "attractors" are not isolated packages of beliefs and practices but robust relationships between such packages within cultural systems. While impressive in its synthesis, Singh's account falls short of explaining a defining feature of human culture: its holistic nature. I use shamanism as an...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
June 25, 2026
Matan Mazor
In consciousness science, theoretical predictions are often untestable, such as claims about phenomenal consciousness in other beings. This evidential underdetermination, in combination with the perceived moral significance of consciousness, puts consciousness science at risk of becoming a marketplace of rationalizations: a field that produces theories that reaffirm social practices and...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
June 25, 2026
Malcolm A MacIver, Daniel A Dombeck
Consciousness arose through natural selection. Yet, few accounts suggest how it garnered selective benefit. Fleming & Michel provide a testable thesis: separating the real from the hypothetical, triggered by the profligate generativity of land for possible futures, is essential for a land animal to survive. Unexplained in the account is conscious planning, important for humans and perhaps other...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
June 25, 2026
Michael H Herzog, Adrien Doerig
Fleming and Michel associate consciousness with sensory horizons, model-based computations, reality monitoring, and decision termination. However, these functions can be implemented without consciousness and may make consciousness epiphenomenal. As with other current theories of consciousness, too much explanatory weight rests on a small number of explanatory factors.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
June 25, 2026
Brian Key
The sensory horizons hypothesis as an explanation of consciousness depends on visual experience directly affecting neural activity underlying conscious model-based planning. Given that there is no known mechanism for subjective experience to generate action potentials, the sensory horizons hypothesis lacks explanatory insight into the function of consciousness. We contend that a better strategy...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
June 25, 2026
Megan A. K. Peters
Fleming and Michel suggest that conscious vision reflects a reality monitoring (RM) mechanism that evolved to separate planning from perception. Here, I critically examine the RM decision policy implied by the authors - a slow, winner-take-all strategy tagging only one first-order representation as "real." Specifically, I explore how expectations about environmental or reality-tagging stability...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
June 25, 2026
Susan Blackmore
The authors make common assumptions that I reject: that consciousness has functions distinct from those of the brain processes on which it depends, that there is a moment at which consciousness happens, and that consciousness itself can be measured. This leads to Cartesian materialism and asking such unanswerable questions as when and why consciousness evolved. An alternative view is proposed.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
June 25, 2026
John W Krakauer, Jake Quilty-Dunn
Fleming & Michel (F&M) argue that the function of perceptual consciousness is to aid unconscious model-based planning. Unfortunately, unconscious model-based planning probably does not exist. F&M therefore face a dilemma: either perceptual consciousness is for conscious model-based planning or it is for something else. We argue that it is for something else.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
June 25, 2026
Stephen M Fleming, Matthias Michel
Our response to commentaries further clarifies the links between visual postdictive phenomena, conscious experience, reality monitoring, and planning. We also engage with suggestions about the limits and generality of our conclusions for other sensory modalities and visually guided behavior in aquatic organisms. We conclude that the role of sensory horizons in visual consciousness offers...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
November 3, 2025
Sheryl Coombs, Michael Trestman
Our target article proposed that vertebrates, cephalopod mollusks, and euarthropods independently converged onto high levels of brain and cognitive complexity and that this macroevolutionary trend was coupled with and facilitated by the acquisition of a small set of pivotal traits, used in visuomotor control of three-dimensional and targeted movements. In response to commentaries that...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
July 22, 2025
François Stockart, Maor Schreiber, Pietro Amerio et al.
20 citations
The scope of unconscious processing has long been, and still remains, a hotly debated issue. This is driven in part by the current diversity of methods to manipulate and measure perceptual consciousness. Here, we provide ten recommendations and nine outstanding issues about designing experimental paradigms, analyzing data, and reporting the results of studies on unconscious processing. These...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
July 1, 2025
Manvir Singh
1 citation
Human societies reliably develop complex cultural traditions with striking similarities. These "super-attractors" span the domains of magic and religion (e.g., shamanism, supernatural punishment beliefs), aesthetics (e.g., heroic tales, dance songs), and social institutions (e.g., justice, corporate groups), and collectively constitute what I call the "cultural manifold." The cultural manifold...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
April 21, 2025
Stephen M Fleming, Matthias Michel
26 citations
It is not obvious why we are conscious. Why can't all of our mental activities take place unconsciously? What is consciousness for? We aim to make progress on this question, focusing on conscious vision. We review evidence on the timescale of visual consciousness, showing that it is surprisingly slow: postdictive effects reveal windows of unconscious integration lasting up to 400 milliseconds....
The Behavioral and brain sciences
April 21, 2025
Anil K. Seth
1 citation
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, it is natural to ask whether AI systems can be not only intelligent, but also conscious. I consider why people might think AI could develop consciousness, identifying some biases that lead us astray. I ask what it would take for conscious AI to be a realistic prospect, challenging the assumption that computation provides a sufficient basis...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
September 29, 2022
Richard Menary, Alexander J Gillett
We agree with Bruineberg and colleagues' main claims. However, we urge for a more forceful critique by focusing on the extended mind debate. We argue that even once the Pearl and Friston versions of the Markov blanket have been untangled, that neither is sufficient for tackling and resolving the question of demarcating the boundaries of the mind.
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.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Moshe Gur
The integrated information theory (IIT) equates levels of consciousness with the amount of information integrated over the elements that constitute a system. Conscious visual perception provides two observations that contradict the IIT. First, objects are accurately perceived when presented for ≪100 ms during which time no neural integration is possible. Second, an object is seen as an...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Sarah L Eagleman, David M Eagleman, Vinod Menon et al.
Merker, Williford, and Rudrauf make several arguments against the integrated information theory of consciousness; whereas some have merit, their conclusion that the theory should be discarded is premature. Coming years promise advances in the empirical study of consciousness, and only after theories are independently tested with shared data can they be ruled in or out. We propose future...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Andrew M. Haun
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.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Jerome A Feldman
Advances in behavioral and brain sciences have engendered wide ranging efforts to help understand consciousness. The target article suggests that abstract computational models (such as integrated information theory [IIT]) are ill-advised. This commentary broadens the discussion to include mysteries of subjective experience that are inconsistent with current neuroscience. It also discusses...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Giulio Tononi, Melanie Boly, Matteo Grasso et al.
The target article misrepresents the foundations of integrated information theory (IIT) and ignores many essential publications. It, thus, falls to this lead commentary to outline the axioms and postulates of IIT and correct major misconceptions. The commentary also explains why IIT starts from phenomenology and why it predicts that only select physical substrates can support consciousness....
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Jonathan Delafield-Butt, Colwyn Trevarthen
Consciousness directs the actions of the agent for its own purposive gains. It re-organises a stimulus-response linear causality to deliver generative, creative agent action that evaluates the subsequent experience prospectively. This inversion of causality affords special properties of control that are not accounted for in integrated information theory (IIT), which is predicated on a linear,...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Marshall Devor, Mary Koukoui, Mark Baron
Doubtless, the conscious brain integrates masses of information. But declaring that consciousness simply "emerges" when enough has accumulated, doesn't really explain how first person experience is implemented by neurons. Moreover, empirical observations challenge integrated information theory's (IIT) reliance on thalamo-cortical interactions as the information integrator. More likely, the...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Walter Veit
The idea that consciousness and complexity are closely related has been a major driver of the popularity of integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness, despite its major formal, phenomenological, and neuroscientific shortcomings. Here, I argue that we can recover this intuition by replacing its biologically neutral notion of complexity with an evolutionary one that I shall dub...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Cyriel M A Pennartz
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.