Where Is Consciousness Located—or How Is It Generated? A Taxonomy of Explanatory Claims in Consciousness Science

Abstract

Where is consciousness located, and how is it generated? These are routinely treated as two formulations of one problem, yet they assert different things and rest on different evidence. This paper proposes a five-level taxonomy of explanatory claims—location, correlation, causal dependence, constitution, and generation—and uses it as an analytical instrument throughout. Each level is logically stronger than the one below, and evidence for one does not license the next without additional argument. Three results follow. First, neuroscience has largely dissolved the search for a single anatomical seat: evidence implicates interacting cortical, thalamic, and other subcortical systems, and distributed rather than modular representation. Second, the leading theories—Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, Recurrent Processing Theory, Higher-Order theories, Integrated Information Theory, and predictive processing—do not merely disagree about mechanism; they pitch claims at different rungs and, in several cases, address different explananda. Third, the 2025 Cogitate adversarial collaboration is best read not as an inconclusive result but as evidence that the field’s disagreement is substantive rather than statistical. The paper further separates generation from emergence, arguing that calling consciousness emergent redescribes the explanandum rather than discharging it. The conclusion is methodological: consciousness science has produced genuine explanations of the conditions, organization, differentiation, and accessibility of conscious experience, while the inference from those to the generation of experience remains an open commitment rather than an established result. The failure to find a seat is not a scientific failure but a conceptual clarification.