Making the hard problem of consciousness easier

Melloni, Lucía; Mudrik, Liad; Pitts, Michael; Koch, Christof

doi:10.1126/science.abj3259

Cited by 158 publications

(143 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…emergence is completely congruent with the prevalent conventional-emergence/identity-theoretic stance of the field [e.g. (Melloni et al, 2021)] (despite its minimally-necessary theoretical contrast with undifferentiated, generic, conventionalemergence). It doesn't assert ontological property-dualism, and can be read in an identity-theoretic way.…”

Section: Definition (D4)mentioning

confidence: 77%

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True Consciousness Science Requires Strongly Dynamically-Unorthodox Physics

Rosseinsky¹

2021

Preprint

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Whether there can be a science of consciousness is both of the utmost importance, and a matter of intense current debate in the field. Two major papers seemed to reach dramatically conflicting conclusions recently, one denying scientific method currently exists in the field, the other promoting a way to ‘make the hard problem easier’. Here I apply uncontroversial mathematical physics together with a new symbolism for conscious experience, to decisively resolve this issue. Under dynamically-orthodox physics (e.g. current physical theory), there can’t be a scientifically-reliable approach. But under a strong form of dynamically-unorthodox physics, subjective report is not provably unreliable, thus meeting the minimal necessary conditions for a true science. Implications for the epistemological foundations of science are briefly discussed.

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Section: Definition (D4)mentioning

confidence: 77%

“…The current 'headline' field [e.g. (Melloni et al, 2021)] is not concerned with h1/h2arbitrations, and it appears many commentators completely reject their significance. [Nevertheless, whether phenomenal consciousness overflows access is a live sub-field (Phillips, 2018;Wang et al, 2021).]…”

Section: Remarkmentioning

confidence: 99%

True Consciousness Science Requires Strongly Dynamically-Unorthodox Physics

Rosseinsky¹

2021

Preprint

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“…Until agreed-upon criteria emerge, we believe that mechanisms such as "adversarial collaboration" might offer a viable alternative for arbitrating among competing theories, as proven by the current existence of several such projects in the field (such as Melloni et al, 2021). This practice consists in bringing advocates of two or more opposing theories together to work on a common experiment or set of experiments (Cowan et al, 2020).…”

Section: Relying On Theories and Their Inferential Power: Comparing Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The search for the neural correlate of consciousness: Progress and challenges

Lepauvre

Melloni

2021

PhiMiSci

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Twenty years ago, Thomas Metzinger published the book "The Neural Correlates of Consciousness" amassing the state of knowledge in the field of consciousness studies at the time from philosophical and empirical perspectives. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of this impactful publication, we review the progress the field has made since then and the important methodological challenges it faces. A tremendous number of empirical studies have been conducted, which has led to the identification of many candidate neural correlates of consciousness. Yet, this tremendous amount of work has not unraveled a consensual account of consciousness as of now. Many questions, some already raised twenty years ago, remain unanswered, and an enormous proliferation of theories sharply contrasts with the scarcity of compelling data and methodological challenges. The contrastive method, the foundational method used to study the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC), has also been called into question. And while awareness in the community of its shortcomings is widespread, few concrete attempts have been made to go beyond it and/or to revise existing theories. We propose several methodological shifts that we believe may help to advance the quest of the NCC program, while remaining uncommitted to any specific theory: (1) the currently prevalent “contrastive method” should lose its monopoly in favor of methods that attempt to explain the phenomenology of experience; (2) experimental data should be shared in centralized, multi-methods databases, transcending the limitations of individual experiments by granting granularity and power to generalize findings and “distill” the NCC proper; (3) the explanatory power of theories should be directly pitted against each other to overcome the non-productive fractioning of the field into insular camps seeking confirmatory evidence for their theories. We predict these innovations might enable the field to progress towards the goal of explaining consciousness.

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“…As scientific theories of consciousness, the ultimate test of which perspective best accounts for consciousness will come from experimental work. IIT has generated a range of testable predictions that have been and continue to be explored experimentally [18,66,74]. As with IIT, the proposal of consciousness-as-inference has precise mathematical foundations that can be used to generate testable predictions, such as expecting perception to function in an approximately Bayesian manner [11,75].…”

Section: Beyond the Axioms; Perception And The Qualitative Character Of Consciousnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One approach is to provide empirical proof of the predictive power of the theory. These theories are indeed precise enough to generate predictions that can be tested experimentally [18]. Until we accrue enough evidence to assess the predictive power of these theories, we can assess them by considering their explanatory power.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference

Cooke

2021

Entropy

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Any successful naturalistic account of consciousness must state what consciousness is, in terms that are compatible with the rest of our naturalistic descriptions of the world. Integrated Information Theory represents a pioneering attempt to do just this. This theory accounts for the core features of consciousness by holding that there is an equivalence between the phenomenal experience associated with a system and its intrinsic causal power. The proposal, however, fails to provide insight into the qualitative character of consciousness and, as a result of its proposed equivalence between consciousness and purely internal dynamics, into the intentional character of conscious perception. In recent years, an alternate group of theories has been proposed that claims consciousness to be equivalent to certain forms of inference. One such theory is the Living Mirror theory, which holds consciousness to be a form of inference performed by all living systems. The proposal of consciousness as inference overcomes the shortcomings of Integrated Information Theory, particularly in the case of conscious perception. A synthesis of these two perspectives can be reached by appreciating that conscious living systems are self-organising in nature. This mode of organization requires them to have a high level of integration. From this perspective, we can understand consciousness as being dependent on a system possessing non-trivial amounts of integrated information while holding that the process of inference performed by the system is the fact of consciousness itself.

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Making the hard problem of consciousness easier

Abstract: Championing open science, an adversarial collaboration aims to unravel the footprints of consciousness

Cited by 158 publications

References 14 publications

True Consciousness Science Requires Strongly Dynamically-Unorthodox Physics

True Consciousness Science Requires Strongly Dynamically-Unorthodox Physics

The search for the neural correlate of consciousness: Progress and challenges

What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference

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