Beyond Cortical Signatures: Measurement Gaps Across Theories of Consciousness

Abstract

Adversarial testing has strengthened the empirical standards of consciousness science, but recent results also expose a measurement problem: competing theories frequently make predictions about the same neural quantities and can therefore be challenged without being decisively discriminated. This evaluative review incorporates a purposive structured audit of contemporary theories and theory-relevant experiments rather than a systematic census. The audit separates trial-level from origin-level frameworks, explicit from interpreted commitments, and positive from stated-null predictions. Policy count and incompatibility remain sparsely occupied coordinates, whereas organism-wide cortical-autonomic coherence is not explicitly formulated as an access criterion by the trial-level accounts and is therefore treated as a sensitivity-dependent gap rather than an unqualified absence. Importantly, an unoccupied coordinate is not itself a discriminating prediction: direct theoretical adjudication requires opposed commitments. In the baseline theory-addressed content-bearing sample, valenced content is absent; under the most permissive sensitivity rule, it rises to 6 of 57 experiment rows (4 of 30 publications). The crossed conflict-by-valence experiment specified here can be run now, but it does not discriminate among theories that are silent on those coordinates; the autonomic-only condition that would generate a genuinely opposed test cannot yet be run because a validated report-independent measure of interoceptive access is lacking.