Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Consciousness — experience and its theories — phenomenal consciousness, its measures and its attribution to animals or machines (group: philosophy).
155 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-056 v3 | Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness | Butlin et al. (2023), ARXIV-2308.08708. The report assumes computational functionalism and takes a “theory-heavy” approach. From it the authors derive 14 indicator properties: RPT-1–2, GWT-1–4, HOT-1–4, AST-1, PP-1 and AE-1–2. The claim for them is only that more of them raises the probability of consciousness. They assess a handful of systems against subsets of the list and conclude that no current system “appears to be a strong candidate”. Transformer LLMs have “only a relatively weak case” for any GWT indicator, because a single forward pass has no recurrence or global broadcast. Perceiver arguably has GWT-1, GWT-2 and half of GWT-4 but lacks broadcast. Among the embodied agents, AdA is the likeliest to meet AE-2. Most indicators could be built with standard ML techniques. The abstract’s “no current AI systems are conscious” is stronger than anything the body shows. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-052); the reference statement of the indicator-property (“theory-heavy”) approach to AI consciousness, worth reading for §1–§2 (method and theory survey) and Tables 1–2. Its §3.2 system verdicts are architecture-dated and cover only GWT and agency/embodiment. The 2026 Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper by an overlapping 20-author group may now be the citable version; I have not read it, so this should not yet be marked Superseded. |
| LIT-066 v3 | The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists | Lindahl et al. (2017), DOI-10.1371/journal.pone.0176239. This is a qualitative taxonomy, not a prevalence estimate. Sixty Western Buddhist meditators were recruited for having had meditation-related difficulties, and 32 teachers/clinicians were interviewed. Their accounts were coded into 59 experience categories in 7 domains and 26 influencing-factor categories in 4 domains. The most frequent category was fear/anxiety/panic/paranoia (82%). 73% reported moderate-to-severe impairment in at least one domain, 17% suicidality and 17% inpatient hospitalisation. Median symptom duration was 1–3 years. All of these are frequencies within a sample selected for difficulty, as the authors state. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-036); the reference taxonomy of challenging meditation-related experiences and worth reading for its codebook and its explicit limits. Its frequencies and its “causality” scoring do not support prevalence or causal claims, and the authors say so. |
| LIT-096 | What Is It Like to Be a Bat? | Nagel (1974), DOI-10.2307/2183914. An organism has conscious states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism. That subjective character belongs to a type of point of view, and it is left out by every functional, intentional or causal analysis, since each is compatible with its absence. Reduction elsewhere moves away from a point of view toward the objective; here that move leads away from the thing being explained. So physicalism may be true, but we have no conception of how it could be. Nagel proposes an “objective phenomenology” that would describe experience to beings who cannot have it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-089); the source of the “something it is like” criterion of consciousness that the record’s AI-consciousness work (LIT-056) adopts as its target, and of the argument that no functional analysis can settle whether that criterion is met. |
| LIT-103 v3 | Closing the Cartesian Bureau de Change | Frankish (2025), DOI-10.1177/10597123251359198. An illusionist’s commentary on Veit’s A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness. Frankish places Veit’s function-first, evolutionary programme in a “post-Cartesian” (qualia-eliminativist) paradigm. He then argues that two things drag it back towards Cartesianism: Veit keeps the words “qualia” and “phenomenal”, and he writes as if hedonic valence motivates action “in virtue of its feel”. The second implies “a tiny one-dimensional Cartesian bureau de change” that leaves the hard problem “as hard as ever”. Because the two paradigms are “incommensurable” (p. 20), Frankish urges Veit to commit to a thoroughly functionalist account. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-143); worth reading as a five-page statement of the illusionist case against residual “feel” talk in evolutionary accounts of valence, and best read together with Veit’s reply (LIT-105), which answers it point by point. It argues rather than demonstrates: the central premise, that anything causally efficacious is functionally definable and so cannot be irreducibly subjective, is asserted in one paragraph (p. 18). |
| LIT-105 v3 | On the Evolution, Science, and Metaphysics of Consciousness | Veit (2025), DOI-10.1177/10597123251413204. Veit’s reply to five commentaries on A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (2023). Its main new content is the metaphysics the book left to one paragraph. He says hedonic “feel” is identical with a valence system: “a common currency of sharing evaluative information across multiple control systems”. The currency metaphor, he says, is “not Cartesian but cybernetic” (p. 10). He keeps the word “qualia”, arguing that Cartesians have no “definitional rights” (p. 9), and he insists the pathological complexity thesis (PCT) is compatible with any metaphysics, dualism and panpsychism included (p. 9). Against his other critics, he defends a bottom-up evolutionary method that uses human data (de Weerd); a naturalism that is neither autopoietic nor biopsychist (Sachs); evaluation-first over prediction-first, consciousness as an adaptation, and graded, partial unity (Suzuki); and the link to welfare science (Chincarini). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-187); worth reading as the only extended statement of the metaphysics behind the pathological complexity thesis, and as the direct answer to Frankish (LIT-103). The reply to Frankish is the substantive part. The replies to de Weerd and Suzuki mostly restate the book’s positions against objections quoted only in part, so read them alongside the commentaries. |
| LIT-111 v4 | AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto | Birch (2025), DOI-10.31234/osf.io/af7c9_v1. Birch argues that two challenges must be met together: users misattributing human-like consciousness to chatbots (Challenge One), and possible “profoundly alien” AI consciousness that current science cannot settle (Challenge Two). For Challenge One he offers a personal-identity argument that the chatbot “friend” is typically a character with no persisting bearer (the “persisting interlocutor illusion”, §4) and three nudges that are neither “brainwashing” nor “lobotomizing” (§7). For Challenge Two he argues that behavioural markers are “gamed” (§10), that architectural markers are “Janus-faced” (§11), and that the resulting “two-level deadlock” between computational functionalism and biological naturalism can be broken over the long run by comparative animal studies (§12, Fig. 4). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-183); worth reading as the clearest statement of the “centrist” position, and it coins four concepts the AI-consciousness literature now uses (persisting interlocutor illusion, gaming problem, Janus problem, two-level deadlock). It is a manifesto: its design nudges are untested proposals, and its way out of the deadlock is a research programme that has “barely begun” (§12). |
| LIT-120 v2 | Welfare Subjects and Autopoiesis | Bruckner (2025), DOI-10.1017/apa.2025.10006. Bruckner proposes, by abduction and not deduction (§4), that being autopoietic is sufficient, not necessary, for being a welfare subject. An entity is autopoietic when it “sustains, maintains, and renews itself in a way that responds and adapts to its environmental conditions”. On this view insentient plants and a hypothetical non-sentient self-maintaining car (“Tessler”) are welfare subjects, while engines with governors, thermostats and heat-seeking missiles are not. He answers the charge of absurd obligations in two ways: welfare value may not generate agent-neutral reasons at all, and if it does, the reasons concerning non-conscious subjects are “extremely weak” (Bradford 2023). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-093); worth reading as the clearest short statement of a welfare criterion that is not based on sentience and admits machines. Read it knowing that its “autopoiesis” is a loose behavioural notion of adaptive self-maintenance, not Maturana and Varela’s self-production, and that the line it draws against thermostats is argued as one of degree (“much richer”, §6.1) while being stated as one of kind. |
| LIT-126 v2 | The Category Error in Contemporary AI Safety Discourse and Why Non-Sentient Systems Cannot Be Moral Machines | Vieira (2026), https://philarchive.org/archive/VIETCE. A ten-page position paper. Its one explicit argument is “P1: moral status requires phenomenal consciousness; P2: current and foreseeable AI lacks it; C: such AI lacks moral status” (§3, p. 3). P1 rests on Swanepoel 2020, and P2 is asserted without argument. From this Vieira recommends that AI-safety frameworks measure only effects on sentient beings (§6.4). His replies retreat from C to a weaker norm, “we should not attribute moral status absent positive evidence of phenomenal consciousness” (§6, p. 6; §7.1), and he never says what that evidence would be. | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-128); not worth a reader’s time. Its load-bearing premise (P2) is asserted, not argued. The abstract promises replies from human–AI interaction studies and global perspectives that the body does not contain. The “moral zombie” framing and the sentientist criterion are taken from Véliz (2021) and Swanepoel (2020), neither held here, and a reader gets both more directly from those sources. |
| LIT-135 v3 | Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism | Seth (2024), DOI-10.1017/S0140525X25000032. Seth argues that conscious AI needs computational functionalism and substrate flexibility extending to silicon, and that both are doubtful (§3.9). Against them he gives a positive, explicitly non-vitalist case, running from interoceptive predictive processing through the free energy principle to autopoiesis, that consciousness is a property “of only (but not necessarily all) living systems” (§4). He concludes that real artificial consciousness is “unlikely along current trajectories” and would need “living AI” (§5.8), while conscious-seeming AI is “almost certain” and may be “cognitively impenetrable” (§6.2). He concedes that “my case is not watertight” (§5.8). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-169); worth reading as the leading statement of biological naturalism about AI, with a useful five-scenario map (Table 1) of what conscious AI would require. Its positive case rests on the free energy principle, which the paper itself calls “much debated” (§4.2), and it claims plausibility rather than necessity. The commentaries and the Author’s Response (BBS 49, 2026) are the next thing to read, and the response was not reached here. |
| LIT-136 v2 | The Informational Nature of Personal Identity | Floridi (2011), DOI-10.1007/s11023-011-9259-6. Floridi deflates the diachronic question of personal identity, holding that sameness is always relative to a purpose-fixed level of abstraction and that metaphysical versions of the question “do not deserve to be taken seriously” (p. 554). He puts the synchronic question first: what binds a self’s information into a unity. His answer is an admittedly “figurative” 3C model in which the self is the last of three successive encapsulations, corporeal (bonded by chemical bonds), cognitive (bonded by mutual information) and conscious (bonded by semantics, and so dependent on a community). He then reads ICTs as “egopoietic” technologies because they act on all three membranes. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-130); worth reading as the programmatic statement of Floridi’s informational, level-of-abstraction approach to the self and its link to his information ethics; its central model is a self-described figure, not an argued theory, and the individuation-first thesis is asserted in a few lines. |
| LIT-143 v2 | What is a Mathematical Structure of Conscious Experience? | Kleiner & Ludwig (2023), ARXIV-2301.11812. The paper proposes a definition, (MSC). A mathematical structure S = ((A_i), (S_j)) is a structure of conscious experience iff (S1) its domains are sets of experiential aspects, and (S2) every relation or function S_j has an “S_j-aspect”. An S_j-aspect is an aspect that a variation of experience changes exactly when the variation fails to preserve S_j. The older condition (MDC), that a structure is “of” experience if its domains are aspects and its axioms hold, survives only as the necessary condition for describing experience, because as a sufficient condition it admits incompatible structures (discrete and non-discrete topologies on the same set), arbitrary re-definitions (every C·d for C > 0) and consciousness-indifferent structures. Worked examples: experienced relative similarity is a strict partial order that satisfies (MSC), given transitivity (assumed). Visual regions form a topology that satisfies (MSC), given Bayne and Chalmers’s subsumptive unity thesis. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-135); worth reading as the most explicit criterion for when a formal model is of experience rather than a convenient description of it. Its two positive results are conditional: transitivity of relative similarity is assumed, and the topology result assumes the subsumptive unity thesis. Cite the Synthese version, which has dropped v1’s argument against metric structure. |
| LIT-146 v2 | The Moral Status of Animals | Gruen & Monsó (2003), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/. The entry reviews five proposed grounds of moral considerability (species membership, human-exceptional capacities, personhood, sentience and agency). Its conclusion is that attempts to establish human uniqueness by capacities are “not the most promising” (§1.2). It then separates having moral status from the weight of a claim (“showing up on a moral radar screen”, §2.2). Weight depends on the value theory adopted for animal interests (hedonism, preference satisfaction, objective list; §2.1) and on the normative framework (rights, which are absolute but generate forward-looking duties when violated, or a multi-factor utilitarianism). It closes with virtue-ethical, feminist, relational and empathy-based approaches that reject argument from capacities altogether (§3). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-181); worth reading as the standard current survey of the grounds and weighing of animals’ moral status. It is balanced for most of its length, but §2.2 argues at length for a multi-factor utilitarian view and §3 ends on Gruen’s own “entangled empathy”, so cite it for the map, not as neutral on the weighing. |
| LIT-159 v4 | If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious | Schwitzgebel (2014), DOI-10.1007/s11098-014-0387-8. A conditional, informal argument. Any materialist criterion liberal enough to credit rabbits (and rabbit-level distributed aliens, the “squidbits”) and behaviourally human-like but oddly built aliens (Sirian supersquids, Antarean antheads) with consciousness also credits the United States. On this argument the US meets the usual materialist marks of consciousness: sophisticated information processing (roughly 10^14 person-to-person visual “connections”, comparable to the brain’s about 10^14 synapses), goal-directed environmental responsiveness, self-representation and historical embedding. The only exits are eliminativism, extreme sparseness or neurochauvinism, each costlier than the conclusion. The paper argues for no universal criterion. It ends undecided between three readings: US consciousness, a challenge to materialists, or grounds to distrust universal metaphysics of mind. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-131); read in full (manuscript) 2026-09-26; the canonical over-generation argument against liberal materialist criteria of consciousness, and the standard critique of anti-nesting and exclusion principles, worth reading for anyone who attributes consciousness from functional or indicator properties. |
| LIT-166 v2 | Sacrificing Humans for Insects and AI: A Critical Review of Jonathan Birch, The Edge of Sentience, Jeff Sebo, The Moral Circle, and Webb Keane, Animals, Robots, Gods | Schwitzgebel & Sinnott-Armstrong (2026), DOI-10.1086/739660. Each book’s own principles, read at face value, can make human interests outweighed by insects in aggregate or by near-future AI. Each author then retreats to moderate near-term advice without principled grounds: Birch through human-centred citizens’ panels, Sebo through contingent “relational” and “co-beneficial” considerations, Keane through deference to slowly adapting cultures. The reviewers defend only the conditional (“given recent science, common grounds of moral standing put human priority under serious threat”) and “take no stand on ponens vs. tollens” (§1, p. 6; §5). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-116); worth reading as the sharpest short map of how the AI- and animal-sentience literature argues. It covers precaution and its ambiguity, the edges of the “zone of reasonable disagreement”, aggregation, and the retreat to moderation. It also gives a close critique of Birch’s sentience-candidate criterion, the one operational test that already covers AI. |
| LIT-185 v3 | Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood | Barrett et al. (2026), ARXIV-2604.11482. A position paper with no new formal result. It argues four things. IIT’s algorithm is undefined whenever any spatial, temporal or state graining of a system is non-Markovian (Barrett & Mediano 2019), and so gives no output for brains; it cannot handle unbounded continuous state variables; and it has never been computed on any real system. PCI and other “approximations” of Φ are proxies, capturing at most two of the six axioms. The theory would need recasting in continuous fields (the EM field) to fit the standard model. Against critics, the authors hold that IIT can be read with a multi-dimensional measure of global state (mean Φ, variance of cause-effect-structure quantities, structural complexity), on which Aaronson’s inactive expander grid is only minimally conscious, and that IIT’s implied “tiling” panpsychism is no worse than any rival metaphysics. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-122); worth reading as the most compact current statement of IIT’s formal ill-definedness and its proxy-versus-approximation problem, from sympathetic insiders; its defences (panpsychism, expander grids) rest on the authors’ proposed reinterpretation rather than on IIT 4.0 as stated. |
| LIT-190 v2 | The coherent and fluent mind: how unified consciousness is constructed from cross-modal inputs via integrated processing experiences | Winkielman et al. (2015), DOI-10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00083. An opinion piece proposing an extra route to the unity of consciousness across the senses. Different modalities feed one global, content-nonspecific experience of processing quality (fluency, familiarity, coherence), and this integrated feeling then enters decisions about its source and relevance. The main support is the authors’ own finding (Ziembowicz et al. 2013; three experiments) that coherent but unrelated background patterns in one modality made targets in another modality be judged more “regular”, “familiar” and “possible”. The authors state that direct evidence is still needed that such effects run through changed experience and that its integration is causal (p. 2). | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-146); a promising, explicitly unproven hypothesis. It would be settled by showing, inside the cross-modal coherence paradigm itself, that the effect depends on an experienced feeling: for example, that it disappears when participants are led to attribute their sense of coherence to the background (the discounting manipulation the authors cite from other paradigms), and that reports of felt coherence mediate the judgement shift. |
| LIT-191 v3 | AI and Consciousness | Schwitzgebel (2025), ARXIV-2510.09858. A book-length sceptical argument that neither introspection, conceptual analysis nor any current theory (GWT, HOT, IIT, local recurrence, unlimited associative learning, biological views) can tell us whether near-future AI is conscious. The best sceptical argument, Mimicry, only undercuts the inference from humanlike text to consciousness and does not show absence. On the Leapfrog Hypothesis the first disputably conscious AIs will be person-like, and the question will then be settled socially rather than scientifically (the “Social Semi-Solution”). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-104); worth reading as the most complete current map of the AI-consciousness debate, and as the source of the Mimicry Argument, the Problem of Minimal Instantiation and the Leapfrog Hypothesis. Its own positive contributions are informal arguments and predictions, not results. |
| LIT-193 v2 | Better to be a Pig Dissatisfied than a Plant Satisfied | Terrill & Veit (2024), DOI-10.1007/s10806-024-09922-4. The paper argues conditionally. Suppose (A1) sentience comes in degrees, (A2) plants may be “quasi-sentient”, and (A3) moral status comes in degrees and is fixed by degree of sentience. Then plants may have partial moral status, generating “some” obligations that are “outweighed by animal interests in most cases” (Table 1). Animals keep prima facie priority, so granting plants moral status “does not require” treating eating plants and eating pigs alike. The authors propose assigning plants “a very low value” of moral status until evidence accumulates (p. 13). A1–A3 are assumed, not argued, and A2 rests on a survey of contested plant-behaviour findings. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-120); a coherent but unproven conciliatory position, useful as a clear template of the graded-sentience-to-graded-status inference. What would settle it is evidence for or against plant valenced states. Footnote 21 names the two gaps: the degree of plant-specific valenced states, and whether plants have high harm thresholds or harm-numbing mechanisms. The second author’s later work signals a move against plant consciousness (see LIT-105), so check his current view before citing it as his. |
| LIT-195 v2 | World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity: toward a unified understanding of natural and artificial intelligence | Safron et al. (2026), DOI-10.1098/rsta.2024.0533. The editorial introduces a theme issue of 17 papers. It concludes that the issue “overall appears to converge” on one view: LLMs model the world in some senses but “probably” lack coherent causal world models, and are not likely paths to “artificial general superintelligence” (§1). It separates three senses of “world model”: any information about the world a system cognizes over, which LLMs “clearly” have; representation of causal structure, “less certain”; and causal prediction “in the service of agentic functioning”, where the divergence “may become even greater” (§3). It closes that world models are “context-dependent constructions shaped by embodiment, dynamics, goals and social learning”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-136); worth reading as the map of the theme issue and a short, citable statement of the three senses of “world model”. It argues nothing itself. Its claims are editorial glosses on 17 contributions, which carry the evidence. |
| LIT-207 v2 | Talkative AI and the fiction of artificial minds | Roberts (2026), DOI-10.1007/s11098-026-02560-8. If a substantial class of mental states (interoceptive, affective, perceptual, and bodily-agentive states such as effort, trying and ownership) depends on an animate body, then today’s disembodied chatbots lack them, and their many self-ascriptions of such states are “systematically untrue”. Roberts argues that users can nonetheless engage chatbots through make-believe, as a new kind of fictional character that is interactive, co-constructed, self-involving and blended with the real world. He argues that this fictionalist stance escapes the epistemic norms that bind realist belief. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-157); worth reading as a short, clear statement of chatbot fictionalism. Its anti-realist premise is explicitly conditional and targets only body-dependent states, which leaves belief and reasoning open. |
| LIT-212 v2 | Do Large Language Models Hallucinate Electric Fata Morganas? | Šekrst (2025), ARXIV-2608.18816. A conceptual essay whose one substantive thesis is this. Following Dziri et al., hallucination includes any output “not rooted in the model’s source data”, including expressed emotions and opinions (§6). An LLM’s apparent inner life is therefore always a candidate hallucination, so any real AI consciousness “might always remain epistemically inaccessible” (§8). The empirical support is two unquantified anecdotes: a Titanic question put to gpt-3.5-turbo and GPT-4 at unstated temperatures, and an extractive-QA BERT mislabelled “WikiBERT”. Neither can bear the weight the paper puts on it. | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-176); not worth a reader’s time. Its one idea, that self-reports of inner states are exactly what a system trained on human text would produce whether or not it has them, is a single paragraph’s point. Its experiments are anecdotes with no reported settings, one of them on a mislabelled model. It asserts both that current LLMs lack understanding and that machine consciousness would be undetectable, and never reconciles the two. |
| LIT-216 v2 | The Weirdness of the World | Schwitzgebel (2024), DOI-10.1515/9780691239309. The book’s thesis is that every viable theory of how consciousness fits into the cosmos, and of the cosmos’s basic structure, is both “bizarre” (contrary to common sense) and “dubious” (not rationally compelling). So “something that seems almost too crazy to believe must be true” (p. 4), and credence should be spread across the bizarre options. Examples of those options are that the United States is conscious (if materialism is true), that we are sims or Boltzmann brains (a 0.1–1% credence), that space is transcendentally ideal, that almost every act causes almost every future event, and that there is no fact about snail consciousness. Its only positive empirical results are three self-experiments against solipsism (for example, 17 of 19 decisive chess games lost, p < .001). Everything else is informal argument. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-188); Worth reading as the one place Schwitzgebel’s separately published arguments are joined into a single case: US consciousness, crazyism, 1% skepticism, Kant meets cyberpunk, the garden snail, and the Full Rights Dilemma for AI. Chapter 3, the Universal Bizarreness and Dubiety argument, is the load-bearing contribution. Its individual chapters are informal arguments, and the manuscript that can be reached is not the published text. The published book reorders the chapters, moves the objections appendix to the end and updates the AI chapter. |
| LIT-318 v3 | The Concept of Mind | Ryle (1949), https://archive.org/details/conceptofmin00ryle. Attacks Cartesian mind-body dualism (‘the ghost in the machine’) as a category mistake — representing facts of mental life as if they belonged to a logical type they do not — and recasts mental concepts dispositionally (per standard description). | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 from metadata and published descriptions, not read: registered because the owner’s prior-art novelty map cites it. A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29 and no legitimate full text could be reached; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-383 | Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy | Bechara, H. Damasio, Tranel & A. R. Damasio (1997), DOI-10.1126/science.275.5304.1293. In the four-deck gambling task, 10 controls and 6 ventromedial prefrontal patients were tracked on choices, anticipatory skin-conductance responses and verbal reports. All controls and no patients developed anticipatory responses; controls came to prefer the good decks, significantly from the point they reported a hunch; three patients who could state the correct strategy kept choosing the bad decks. The authors conclude that nonconscious biases guide behaviour before conscious knowledge does. The statistics support the group difference more firmly than the “before knowing” timing. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-331); worth reading as the experiment the somatic marker hypothesis is usually cited for, and worth reading with its notes, which are weaker than its abstract. With 10 controls and 6 ventromedial patients, the robust results are that every control and no patient developed anticipatory skin-conductance responses, and that three patients who could state the right strategy still chose badly. The headline that controls chose well and responded to risky decks “before they knew” is only partly carried by the statistics: in the pre-hunch period the controls’ preference for the good decks was not significant (note 9), and the reported SCR effect there is a group-by-period interaction, not a bad-versus-good-deck difference (note 8). Controls chose the good decks significantly only once they reported a hunch. Whether the account is true is not this note’s question. |
| LIT-385 v2 | Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition | Damasio (1989), Cognition 33:25–62. The convergence-zone proposal: memory is not held in one store but as feature fragments in early sensory and motor cortices, with amodal records of their co-occurrence held in local and non-local convergence zones downstream; recall is the time-locked reactivation of the fragments, directed from convergence zones through feedback projections. Unread: registered from the abstract. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request for Antonio Damasio’s work; no full text could be reached (the Elsevier article is closed, and no repository, author or course copy was found), so it is registered from its PubMed abstract only, unread, and no NOTE is filed |
| LIT-386 v2 | Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines | Man & Damasio (2019), Nature Machine Intelligence 1:446–452. A perspective proposing machines organized around homeostasis: a body that must be kept within viable states gives the machine a goal of its own, and something like feeling as a source of motivation and of evaluation. Soft robotics and multisensory abstraction are named as the means. The claimed payoffs are equivalents of feeling, better function across environments, and a platform for studying consciousness. Unread: placed from the abstract. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request; no full text could be reached, so it is placed from the abstract and figure captions only and no NOTE is filed. Nature’s page is paywalled, there is no arXiv version, Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, and the ResearchGate, Scribd and ProQuest copies did not serve the text. By its abstract it is a design proposal for machines built around homeostasis, not a reported system or result. Flagged anthology-candidate because the anthology’s agents-and-environments topic could hold it; a reading should settle whether it carries an instruction for ML practice. |
| LIT-387 v3 | Feelings Are the Source of Consciousness | Damasio & Damasio (2023), Neural Computation 35(3):277–286. A “view” piece. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as belonging to an organism, and a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings provides it. Those feelings were the first phenomena of consciousness in evolution. They arise from a two-way interaction between the interoceptive nervous system and the viscera and their chemistry, so they are hybrid, at once neural and bodily, which the authors offer as a solution to the mind-body problem. Unread: placed from the abstract. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request; the full text exists as a free (bronze) PDF on MIT Press, but the site refused every automated request with a bot challenge (HTTP 403), and no repository, PubMed Central or preprint copy exists, so it is placed from the abstract only and no NOTE is filed. It is not the “Damasio & Damasio 2023” that NOTE-120 reports as a critic of plant sentience: that is a different work, an Animal Sentience commentary. Free copy: doi:10.1162/neco_a_01521 (MIT Press’s free bronze PDF). |
| LIT-388 | The nature of feelings: evolutionary and neurobiological origins | Damasio & Carvalho (2013), Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14:143–152. Feelings are mental experiences of body states, and they report homeostatic value: a valenced read-out of interoceptive maps that lets an organism learn and anticipate what restores or threatens its physiology. The first integrated whole-body maps are in the upper brainstem (parabrachial nucleus, periaqueductal grey, deep superior colliculus); the insula refines feeling but is not needed for it, since a patient with both insulae destroyed still feels pain, pleasure, hunger and compassion. The authors propose, without evidence of their own, that feeling starts in unmyelinated interoceptive fibres open to ions and ligands along their length. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-330); worth reading as the shortest statement of Damasio’s account of feeling as the felt read-out of homeostatic body maps, with its two empirical planks: patients whose insulae are destroyed still feel, and the upper brainstem is where whole-body interoceptive maps first assemble. It is an Opinion piece with no new data. The systems-level case rests on lesion and stimulation evidence it cites; the cellular proposal (unmyelinated interoceptive fibres and ephaptic coupling as the root of sentience) is offered as a hypothesis and stays one. |
| LIT-392 | Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia | Chalmers (1995), in T. Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience (Imprint Academic, co-published in Paderborn). Principle: any system with the same fine-grained functional organisation as a conscious system has qualitatively identical experiences. Replace neurons gradually with silicon chips that keep the organisation. If the end point lacked experience, a midpoint would be a rational being wrong about all its experience (“fading qualia”). If it differed in experience, a switch between two circuits would flip experience with no possible noticing (“dancing qualia”). Both are judged implausible, so absent and inverted qualia are nomologically impossible. The argument extends explicitly to a population of homunculi. The result is “nonreductive functionalism”: organisation fixes experience with natural, not metaphysical, necessity. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-347); worth reading as the full statement of the principle of organizational invariance and the fading- and dancing-qualia arguments for it. Cite it carefully: the principle is conditional on fine-grained functional isomorphism to a system already conscious. It covers silicon replacement and, by the paper’s own §3 extension, a population of homunculi that implements a human’s neural organisation. It does not cover a system whose organisation is merely similar in kind to a conscious one, so it does not license Schwitzgebel’s step to the United States (LIT-159). The conclusion is nomological, not metaphysical (“nonreductive functionalism”), and it is a plausibility argument by the author’s own account. |
| LIT-394 | Computing Machinery and Intelligence | Turing (1950), Mind 59(236):433–460. “Can machines think?” is replaced by whether a digital computer can play the imitation game so that an interrogator, questioning by teleprinter, identifies it no more reliably than he tells a man from a woman. Universality reduces the question to one computer suitably programmed. Turing predicts that by about 2000 a machine with 10^9 bits of storage will leave an average interrogator no more than a 70 per cent chance of a right identification after five minutes. He answers nine objections, the argument from consciousness by its collapse into solipsism, and proposes reaching the goal by educating a child-machine. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-355); worth reading as the source of the imitation game and as the first catalogue of objections to machine thought, nine of them, each still argued. Read it for what it actually proposes: not a definition of thinking but the replacement of an ill-posed question by a test, a prediction about 2000 (70 per cent right identification after five minutes, at 10^9 bits), and a programme for reaching it by educating a child-machine. Its reply to the argument from consciousness is an other-minds argument, not a theory of consciousness, and Turing says outright that he does not think there is “no mystery about consciousness”. |
| LIT-395 | The Combination Problem for Panpsychism | Chalmers (2016/2017), in Brüntrup & Jaskolla (eds), Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, OUP, pp. 179–214. How could micro-experiences constitute a macro-subject? The problem splits into subject, quality and structure versions; each yields an argument against constitutive (Russellian) panpsychism, of which the subject-summing and structural mismatch arguments are the strongest. Emergent, autonomous and identity panpsychism avoid combination at a cost in mental causation or physics. Phenomenal bonding, quantum holism, small palettes and informational composition are judged most worth pursuing. No solution is offered. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-358), from the author’s posted draft, not the published chapter; worth reading as the map of the combination problem: it splits the problem into subject, quality and structure versions (plus unity, boundary, awareness and grain), turns each into an argument, and sorts every response into emergent, autonomous, identity or combinatorial panpsychism. It solves nothing and says so. Its conclusions are judgements of promise (“phenomenal bonding or quantum holism”, “principles of informational composition”), not results. For this record its value is that the subject-summing argument is James’s argument against group minds, and that its footnote 7 objects to IIT’s exclusion postulate on grounds that have nothing to do with groups. |
| LIT-396 v3 | Psychological Predicates | Putnam (1967), in Capitan & Merrill (eds.), Art, Mind, and Religion (Proceedings of the 1965 Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy), University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 37–48; reprinted as “The Nature of Mental States”. It proposes, as an empirical hypothesis, that pain is a functional state of a whole organism, a state of a probabilistic automaton fixed by its machine table, rather than a brain state. Condition (3) of the hypothesis is the anti-nesting stipulation: no pain-feeler “possesses a decomposition into parts which separately possess Descriptions” of the pain-capable kind, introduced only “to rule out such ‘organisms’ (if they can count as such) as swarms of bees as single pain-feelers”. | Unfetched — not read in full: the original (Art, Mind, and Religion, pp. 37–48) is closed on JSTOR. The University of Pittsburgh’s page images sit behind a bot challenge I could not pass, and the Internet Archive copy of the 1975 reprint is print-disabled only. What was read is MIT’s 24.09x course excerpt of the 1975 reprint (“The Nature of Mental States”), recorded as a Skimmed reading in NOTE-335. That excerpt carries the four-clause hypothesis verbatim, including the anti-nesting condition (3) and its one-sentence motive. A course copy of the whole reprint was located at home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/putnam.nature.mental.states.pdf. On 2026-10-30 it failed TLS verification from this client (curl error 60: the chain served ends at emSign Root CA - G1, which this client does not trust; verification was not overridden). It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Free copy: home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/putnam.nature.mental.states.pdf. |
| LIT-397 | Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness | Dennett (1996), Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(1):4–6, a reply to Chalmers’s “Facing Up”. The easy/hard split is “a major misdirector of attention, an illusion-generator”. A vitalist could pose the same “hard problem” of life, and a neuroscientist who set perception aside as hard would have misdescribed vision. Chalmers’s reason why consciousness is different repeats the claim. Subtract every function from one’s own consciousness and nothing is left but a conviction. Positing experience as fundamental, like mass and charge, needs independent evidence, which is not given (“cutism”). | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-346); worth reading as the three-page statement of the deflationary reply to the hard problem, and as the source of the vitalism, “Crock” and “cutism” analogies. Its one argued point is a challenge, not a refutation: Chalmers owes independent evidence for experience as a fundamental property, the way physics has for mass and charge, and without it the posit does no explanatory work. Its central premise, that once every function is subtracted from one’s own consciousness “there is nothing left”, is asserted from the author’s introspective catalogue. |
| LIT-400 | Minds, brains, and programs | Searle (1980), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(3):417–424. A man who knows no Chinese, locked in a room with rules in English for manipulating Chinese symbols, can answer Chinese questions as well as a native speaker yet understands nothing; so instantiating a program is never by itself sufficient for intentionality (“strong AI” is false). Six replies are answered, the systems reply by letting the man internalise the whole room. Only something with causal powers equivalent to a brain’s could think; programs have syntax but no semantics. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-349); worth reading as the source of the Chinese room and of the six replies (systems, robot, brain simulator, combination, other minds, many mansions) the debate still uses, in Searle’s own words. Read it for its scope: the target is “strong AI”, the claim that instantiating the right program is by itself sufficient for understanding, and Searle grants that machines, including artifacts with the brain’s causal powers, could think. The argument is about understanding and intentionality; consciousness is mentioned, not argued. Its answer to the systems reply (internalise the room) is the part that bears on minds of parts, and it is asserted rather than shown: Searle says the subsystem is “simply a part of” the man, which is what the reply denies. |
| LIT-401 | What is it like to be a group agent? | List (2016), DOI-10.1111/nous.12162. Group agents (firms, courts, states) are real agents in a thin functionalist sense, and they can have consciousness as awareness. Whether they have phenomenal consciousness depends on which psycho-physical bridge principle is true. Under IIT, List argues informally that a group agent’s Φ is low: groups decompose into self-contained units, their steering bodies keep working when partly randomised, and most of their processing happens inside individuals. The exclusion postulate would deny group consciousness even if group Φ were high. So group agents are (close to) not conscious, which List uses to ground a normative asymmetry: groups have only derivative rights. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-340); the standard reply to LIT-159 from the group-agency side: it grants that organised groups are agents with functional awareness and argues, conditionally on IIT, that they have little or no phenomenal consciousness. Worth reading for its separation of agency from experience and for its three reasons why a group agent’s Φ should be low. The low-Φ verdict is argued informally, with no Φ computed for any group, and the paper never answers the reply Schwitzgebel had already made to the objection its third reason restates. |
| LIT-404 | Does a rock implement every finite-state automaton? | Chalmers (1996), Synthese 108(3):309–333. Putnam’s proof that every open system implements every finite-state automaton fails, because implementation needs reliable, counterfactual-supporting transitions for every formal state. Repaired, it survives only for weak formalisms: a clock and a dial implement every inputless FSA, and an input memory and a dial upgrade any system with the right input–output dependencies to every FSA with them. Combinatorial-state automata, whose states are vectors of independently varying components in distinct physical regions, put a strong constraint on implementation. That keeps computation available as a foundation for the theory of mind. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-342), from the author’s HTML copy, not the Synthese typeset text; worth reading as the standard reply to Putnam’s and Searle’s triviality arguments and as the source of the combinatorial-state automaton (CSA). Its result is real but partial: implementation needs counterfactual-supporting transitions over all formal states, inputless FSAs are trivially implemented by any clock plus dial, FSAs with input are implemented by any system with the right input–output dependencies plus an input memory and a dial, and CSAs escape only because a blind implementation must grow by a factor of n per step. Chalmers leaves two open problems (logically possible false implementations, and an overstrict one-region-per-component condition). For this record it decides which formalism a China-brain argument has to be stated in, and it lets one physical system host two minds. |
| LIT-405 | Where Am I? | Dennett (1978), the closing essay of Brainstorms. A narrator’s brain (“Yorick”) is kept in a vat in Houston and radio-linked to his body (“Hamlet”) under Tulsa. Where is he? Not simply where the body is, and not simply where the brain is: he cannot think “here” of the vat. He favours being wherever his point of view is, finds that unclear, and when the links fail finds himself “in Houston”. A computer duplicate (“Hubert”) runs in step with Yorick, and either can drive a new body with no detectable switch. The essay ends when the two drift out of step and a second person speaks through the body. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-338), in a retyped course copy, not the printed book; worth reading as the founding thought experiment on where a person is when brain and body are apart, and the place the record’s threads on extended vehicles, scattered individuals and functional duplicates meet. It is fiction with a philosophical argument inside it. It tries three answers to “where am I?” (where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is), favours the third, admits it is unclear, and ends by showing that two synchronised brains can drift into two persons. It argues by intuition pump and settles nothing; the narrator calls one of its answers a truth “of underwhelming significance”. |
| LIT-406 | Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness | Chalmers (1995), Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3):200–219. The “easy” problems of consciousness (discrimination, integration, report, access, attention, control, wakefulness) are problems of explaining functions, and a mechanism that performs a function explains it. The hard problem is that after every such function is explained, “why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” stays open, so reductive methods cannot answer it. Experience should be taken as fundamental, linked to the physical by psychophysical laws. Two nonbasic candidates are offered, structural coherence (the structure of experience mirrors the structure of awareness) and organizational invariance (fine-grained functional isomorphs have the same experiences), with a speculative double-aspect theory of information as the basic law. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-336); worth reading as the source of the easy/hard distinction, and short. Cite it for three separable things: the hard problem as the claim that explaining every function near experience leaves “why is this accompanied by experience?” open (§§2–3); the outline of a nonreductive theory built from two nonbasic principles, structural coherence and organizational invariance (§7); and the double-aspect theory of information, which the author calls “more of an idea than a theory” (§8). The organizational-invariance argument here is a one-page sketch; the full version is LIT-392. |
| LIT-407 | Troubles with Functionalism | Block (1978), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 9:261–325. Functionalism ties mental states to the world only through inputs and outputs, so it is “liberal”: a body run by a billion people with radios, each implementing one line of your machine table (the nation-of-China system), would be functionally equivalent to you, yet there is prima facie doubt that it has qualia. Putnam’s stipulation that no pain-feeler has parts with pain-feeler organisation is an ad hoc patch that fails on its own terms. Psychofunctionalism escapes the doubt for beliefs but perhaps not for qualia, and no specification of inputs and outputs avoids both liberalism and chauvinism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-366); worth reading as the source of the homunculi-headed robot and the nation-of-China system, and of the first published objection to Putnam’s anti-nesting stipulation. Cite it for two things that are easy to run together: the Absent Qualia Argument (a Functional simulation built from people is prima facie without qualia), and the case that Putnam’s condition is ad hoc (§1.5). Block grounds the doubt about the China system in its being unlike us psychologically and neurally and designed to mimic us, not in its parts having minds (n. 19). He also grants that a Psychofunctional homunculi-head could have beliefs (§2.1). So it is not a source for “a whole made of minded parts cannot be conscious”. |
| LIT-409 | How a materialist can deny that the United States is probably conscious – response to Schwitzgebel | Kammerer (2015), DOI-10.1007/s11406-015-9653-z. A short reply to LIT-159 proposing the Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle (SAP). A whole W that has a functional property P normally sufficient for a conscious state S lacks S when some part of W plays a role that (A) requires the part to have conscious states representing W and (B) is indispensable: without some part playing such a role, W would lack P. The SAP keeps Schwitzgebel’s antheads and Block’s tiny-people neurons conscious, admits some group consciousness, and denies it to the US, whose citizens represent the US and could not be replaced by parts that do not. It is justified by an Occam-style rule against ascribing consciousness where other subjects’ states explain the behaviour. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-362); the most careful anti-nesting principle in the record, and the one aimed directly at LIT-159. Worth reading because it draws the line that matters for the society-of-mind bridge: a whole is denied a conscious state only when the functional organisation that would ground it runs through parts that consciously represent the whole and could not be replaced by parts that do not. Its application to the United States rests on an asserted counterfactual, and its justification is an Occam-style principle the author says needs further work. Schwitzgebel replied in Philosophia 44 (2016). |
| LIT-411 | Could a Large Language Model be Conscious? | Chalmers (2023), arXiv:2303.07103; Boston Review, 9 August 2023; from a NeurIPS 2022 invited talk. Asks for a feature X that LLMs have (or lack) and that indicates consciousness (or its absence). Self-report, seeming-conscious, conversation and general intelligence give at most weak evidence for it. Biology, senses and embodiment, world and self models, recurrent processing, a global workspace and unified agency are the evidence against. All but biology are temporary. On mainstream assumptions: under 10% credence for current LLMs, 25% or more for conscious LLM+ systems within a decade. Twelve challenges are offered as roadmap or red flags. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-345), from arXiv v3 (the Boston Review text), with v1’s conclusions compared; worth reading as the clearest short statement of the case for and against consciousness in LLMs, and as the origin of the “theory-balanced” credence approach that Butlin et al. built on. Its method is a regimented request for a feature X, and its verdicts are credences offered “for illustrative purposes”: under 10% for current LLMs, 25% or more for conscious LLM+ systems within a decade, on “mainstream assumptions”. It does not break the deadlock THEORY-023 describes. It is an instance of it: mimicry undercuts self-report, the main obstacles are theory-derived, and biology is set aside rather than answered. |
| LIT-413 v2 | The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul | Hofstadter & Dennett (eds.) (1981), Basic Books. An anthology of 27 selections, fiction and philosophy, on self, soul and consciousness, each followed by a “Reflections” by the editors. Among them are Turing’s imitation-game paper (LIT-394), Searle’s Chinese room (LIT-400), Nagel’s bat (LIT-096), Dennett’s “Where Am I?” and Hofstadter’s “Prelude … Ant Fugue” from GEB (LIT-437). Unread: registered from the catalogue record and a contents note; the Reflections, which are the editors’ own contribution, were not seen. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the Library of Congress catalogue record, the publisher’s page and a library contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans of the 1981 Basic Books, Harvester, Bantam and Penguin printings are all lending-only, HathiTrust has no record for the LCCN, and no publisher, editor or Tufts-archive copy is posted. The editors’ Reflections are unread. Two of the selections were read in full from lawful copies of their first publications and filed on their own: Turing (LIT-394) and Searle (LIT-400). |
| LIT-415 | Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness | Chalmers (2019), DOI-10.1093/oso/9780190662813.003.0002. The 1998 extended-mind thesis as stated is too weak, since opponents accept extension in wired-in “extended circuit” cases. The interesting thesis is that mental states can be partly constituted by external entities in virtue of the subject’s sensorimotor interaction with them. Consciousness does not extend this way, on the proposal that it requires information directly available for global control, and perceptually mediated availability is indirect. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-356); worth reading as Chalmers’s own later statement of what the extended-mind thesis of LIT-097 is and where it stops. It does two things. It replaces the 1998 paper’s implicit thesis, which it concedes is too weak because even the critics accept it for wired-in “extended circuit” cases, with one that requires constitution “in virtue of the subject’s sensorimotor interaction” (§1). And it argues that consciousness does not extend, because consciousness needs information directly available for global control and perception makes availability indirect (§3). Both are proposals, argued in a short chapter: the thesis is offered as “extensionally correct”, and the directness account is offered as an explanation of why there are no plausible cases, not as a knockdown. |
| LIT-416 v2 | Is there an ‘I’ in AI? | Hofstadter (2026), DOI-10.1098/rsta.2024.0527. The lead essay of the Phil. Trans. A theme issue on world models whose editorial is LIT-195. Unread: what is known of it here comes from the editorial as read in NOTE-136, which quotes Hofstadter that a system passing a Turing test of consistent understanding should be credited with thinking, and that conscious AI may come “perhaps even by 2033”. Whether the essay argues “nearly the opposite” of the editors’ convergence verdict cannot be checked until the essay itself is read. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-01 from Crossref, PubMed and the record’s reading of the theme-issue editorial (LIT-195, NOTE-136), not read: royalsocietypublishing.org returned 403 to the DOI, article and PDF URLs, the article is not in PubMed Central or Europe PMC full text, and no repository or author copy was found. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-419 v2 | Form, Function, and Feel | Lycan (1981), The Journal of Philosophy 78(1):24–50, DOI-10.2307/2025395. Filed as a statement of homuncular functionalism, the view Lycan’s Wikipedia entry says he advocates, and as the reply Schwitzgebel points to against Block’s nation-of-China intuition. Unread: no lawful full text was reachable, so its arguments are not stated here. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-02 from the bibliographic records (Crossref, the Philosophy Documentation Center), not read: no lawful full text could be reached. JSTOR and PDC are paywalled, Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, and no author copy was found. No NOTE is filed. What it argues is known here only from how Schwitzgebel and Block’s acknowledgements place it, which is not a reading. |
| LIT-421 | Foreword | Chalmers (2008), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195333213.002.0007. The co-author’s retrospective on the extended mind: his iPhone is “part of my mind already”. The one principled objection is that perception and action bound the mental. His reply is revisionist and contextualist: whether Otto’s belief counts as extended flips with explanatory purpose. No Otto-style twin case works for consciousness, so he tentatively keeps an internal conscious core. The thesis needs only a weak, parity-style functionalism and is compatible with dualism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-369); worth reading as the shortest statement of where Chalmers stands on the thesis he co-authored, ten years on. Three things in eight pages: the iPhone as a present-day Otto’s notebook; the perception-action boundary as the one principled objection, answered by explanatory revisionism and a “Necker cube” view on which whether Otto’s belief is extended depends on explanatory purpose; and a tentative internal “conscious core”, resting on the failure of any Otto-style twin case for consciousness. It is a foreword: every position is stated briefly and several are offered as “perhaps”. |
| LIT-423 v2 | I Am a Strange Loop | Hofstadter (2007), Basic Books. Per its publisher, an “I” is “a strange loop where the brain’s symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down”, and the book asks whether that “I” is real or “merely a convenient fiction”, and how selves “can exist in the minds of others”. Its 26 contents entries run from souls and the causal potency of patterns, through Gödel’s “quintessential strange loop” and downward causality, to “How we live in each other”, “Consciousness = thinking” and zombies and dualism. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description and the Library of Congress catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only, and no publisher or author copy is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-424 v2 | From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds | Dennett (2017), W. W. Norton. Per its publisher, the book shows “step by step, how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection”, with the decisive shift the sharing of memes, which produced “thinking tools” powerful enough that minds “create and comprehend”. Its contents run from the origin of reasons and “two strange inversions of reasoning”, through information, “brains made of brains”, words, memes and the origins of language, to consciousness as “an evolved user-illusion” and “the age of post-intelligent design”. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record’s contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scan is lending-only, Norton posts no excerpt beyond its description, and Dennett posted no draft chapters that I could find. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. The claim the record wants from it, competence without comprehension, is not stated in the description or the contents, so nothing here places it. |
| LIT-425 | The Meta-Problem of Consciousness | Chalmers (2018), Journal of Consciousness Studies 25(9–10):6–61. The meta-problem is to explain, in terms that do not mention consciousness, why we judge that consciousness poses a hard problem. It is an “easy” problem with an empirical programme. Of thirteen candidate mechanisms, the most promising is an introspective model that attributes primitive relations of awareness to primitive qualities, with a sense of acquaintance. A realist theory should explain how its basis of consciousness produces these judgments, which IIT and biological theories struggle to do. Debunking arguments for illusionism can be blocked, but a residual sense of coincidence remains. Only strong illusionism dissolves the hard problem, and it is false because people feel pain. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-354); worth reading as the statement of the meta-problem, explaining in topic-neutral terms why we judge that consciousness poses a hard problem, and as a survey of thirteen candidate mechanisms. Cite it for four things: the meta-problem as an “easy” problem with a research programme; the meta-problem challenge to theories of consciousness, which tells against IIT and biological theories; the analysis of debunking and coincidence arguments for illusionism; and the argument that only strong illusionism dissolves the hard problem, with a Moorean rejection of strong illusionism. Its own preferred solution is offered as “closer to a fleshed-out explanandum” than an explanation. |
| LIT-426 v2 | Macrocognition: A Theory of Distributed Minds and Collective Intentionality | Huebner (2014), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199926275.001.0001. Per its publisher, the book argues that genuine cognition requires flexible goal-directed behaviour, which requires specialised representational systems integrated so as to cope fluidly with the environment, and so that collective mentality “should be posited where and only where specialized subroutines are integrated to yield goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to the concerns that are relevant to a group as such”. On this view there are many kinds of collective minds, some more like honeybees or cats than people, and groups are unlikely to be full “believers”. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, the Internet Archive copy is lending-only, and no author-posted draft was found), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Of the four works filed for the Minsky–Schwitzgebel bridge it is the one whose criterion for a collective mind is itself a decomposition criterion: mentality wherever specialised subroutines are integrated into goal-directed behaviour sensitive to the group’s concerns. A close reading is the most likely of the four to change the bridge. |
| LIT-429 v2 | The Society of Mind | Minsky (1986), Simon & Schuster. The book-length statement of the Society of Mind programme, begun with Seymour Papert in the early 1970s. A mind is a society of many small agents, each mindless by itself, and intelligence comes from their diversity and organisation, not from one principle. The publisher presents it as a puzzle of self-contained one-page pieces that assemble into a theory. Unread: no lawful full text was reachable, so it is registered from the publisher’s description and the contents list. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description, the Library of Congress catalogue record and the Google Books contents list, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive copies are lending-only, HathiTrust is search-only, and Minsky’s web page did not post the book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Its programme is read here at second hand through Singh’s exposition (LIT-444) and at first hand through the draft of its sequel (LIT-432). |
| LIT-431 | Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain | Dennett & Kinsbourne (1992), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(2):183–201, with open peer commentary. There is no place in the brain where “it all comes together” for consciousness. Discriminations are made once, locally, and revised in parallel “drafts”, none canonical. The brain represents temporal order by content, not by the timing of its own vehicles, as a dated letter does. Colour phi, the cutaneous rabbit and Libet’s timing results stop looking anomalous. Whether a revision was pre-experiential (Stalinesque) or post-experiential (Orwellian) has no answer at that scale. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-367), the target article only; worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the Multiple Drafts model and of the case against “Cartesian materialism”, worked out on four timing phenomena (colour phi, the cutaneous rabbit, Libet’s backward referral and his delayed intention). Its sound core is the distinction between the time a content is represented and the time it represents. Its strong claim, that the Orwellian/Stalinesque distinction “need have no answer” below a few hundred milliseconds, is an argument from indistinguishability, not a demonstration. The open peer commentary (pp. 201–247) was not read. |
| LIT-432 | The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind | Minsky (2006), Simon & Schuster, read in the author’s 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think, not a separate faculty. Each emotional state turns some mental resources on and others off, by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem. The same machinery serves ordinary thinking. The book adds six levels of mental activity, from instinctive reaction to self-conscious reflection. It treats “consciousness”, “emotion” and “pain” as suitcase words for many processes, and the Self as a network of partial self-models. It is a design argued from examples. Against Damasio, it treats the body as one more resource the brain uses, not the stuff of emotion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 in the author’s posted draft of 2005 (NOTE-348), not in the published book; worth reading as the late, fullest statement of the Society of Mind programme. It is the one where emotion is put inside thinking: an emotional state is a selection of mental resources switched on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger, and so it is a Way to Think. Read it as a design proposal argued by examples, not as evidence. It reports no experiment, Minsky labels several of its central ideas his own conjectures, and it sets the body to the side of emotion, against the bodily account of Damasio (LIT-384, LIT-388) that this record holds. |
| LIT-433 | Quining Qualia | Dennett (1988), in Marcel & Bisiach (eds.), Consciousness in Contemporary Science, OUP, pp. 42–77. Qualia as tradition has them are ineffable, intrinsic, private and directly apprehensible, and fifteen intuition pumps argue that nothing has all four. Two neurosurgical routes to an apparent colour inversion, one changing qualia and one only memory-linked reactions, feel the same from the inside. So the subject cannot know his own qualia better than an outside tester can. What is real is practical ineffability and idiosyncrasy: we refer to information-rich public properties through our own detectors of them. Hence “there simply are no qualia at all”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-357); worth reading as the founding statement of qualia eliminativism and the source of the post-Cartesian side in the record’s consciousness readings. It argues by fifteen intuition pumps, not by proof, and says so. Its lasting results are two: the alternative-neurosurgery and Chase-and-Sanborn cases, which show that neither the subject nor the physiologist can separate a change in qualia from a change in reactions to them; and a positive account of practical ineffability and privacy as idiosyncratic, information-rich property detection. Its conclusion, “there simply are no qualia at all”, is a tactical choice of words by the author’s own endnote 2, not a stronger thesis than that. |
| LIT-434 v2 | Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness | Dennett (2016), Journal of Consciousness Studies 23(11–12):65–72, in the issue built around Frankish’s target article “Illusionism as a theory of consciousness”. By its search-engine abstract, it uses a parallel with stage magic to argue that illusionism should be treated as the front runner, a conservative theory to be developed in detail. Unread: registered from bibliographic records only. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from bibliographic records, not read: no readable full text could be reached. Ingenta Connect (the publisher’s host) and ResearchGate returned HTTP 403, PhilPapers and Semantic Scholar refused automated access (403 and 429), the Tufts Digital Library holds no copy, and the Wayback Machine was unreachable from here, so the archived copy of Dennett’s Tufts page could not be tried. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-437 v2 | Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid | Hofstadter (1979), Basic Books. The book that introduced the “strange loop”: per its publisher, an account of the “I”, self and consciousness built on the self-referential construction Gödel used to make a sentence assert its own unprovability. Chapters alternate with contrapuntal dialogues, chiefly between Achilles and the Tortoise, each built to exhibit the idea it discusses. Unread: no lawful full text was reachable, so it is registered from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record, and its year is the only date a source gives. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description and the Library of Congress catalogue record, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans of the 1979 Basic Books printing are lending-only, HathiTrust is search-only, and no publisher or author copy is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-439 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition | Levin (2019), Frontiers in Psychology 10:2688. Proposes “Scale-Free Cognition”: an Individual or Self is the set of parts that pursue a goal together, bounded by the farthest events in space and time it can measure and try to change (its “cognitive light cone”). Selves scale up from homeostatic loops through memory and anticipation, and cells merge into larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions; cancer is the boundary shrinking back to one cell. Because every level that pursues its own goal is a Self, most living systems hold many nested, coexisting Selves, “not one, as implied by Integrated Information Theory”. Levin’s “Self” is a goal-pursuing collective, an agent and an individual in this record’s terms; the essay gives no account of a self as subject. A hypothesis essay: no model and no new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-341); worth reading as the composition-side statement that agency is nested by default: a Self is whatever set of parts pursues a goal together, so cells, organs, organisms and swarms are Selves at once, each bounded by its “cognitive light cone”. It is a hypothesis-and-theory essay with no model, no measurement procedure for the light cone and no data of its own. Its one sentence against IIT’s single-Self picture is asserted in a bracket, not argued, and its consciousness claims are confined to a closing speculation. |
| LIT-441 v2 | The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory | Chalmers (1996), Oxford University Press. Per its introduction, the book argues that consciousness cannot be reductively explained and that materialism is false, and then moves toward a nonreductive theory with fundamental psychophysical laws. Its contents run from supervenience and explanation through the irreducibility argument, naturalistic dualism and the paradox of phenomenal judgment, to coherence principles, absent, fading and dancing qualia, and information. It ends with a defence of strong AI and a no-collapse reading of quantum mechanics. Unread: registered from the author’s posted contents, introduction and jacket copy. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the author’s posted table of contents, introduction and jacket copy, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The author posts only those three, not draft chapters. Its two central arguments for this record are readable in their paper versions, LIT-406 (the hard problem and naturalistic dualism) and LIT-392 (chapter 7’s organizational invariance). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-442 | The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity | Dennett (1992), in Kessel, Cole & Johnson (eds.), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, Erlbaum. A self is an abstractum, “a theorist’s fiction”, like a centre of gravity: no part of the brain, but a well-behaved posit of interpretation. It is like a fictional character, indeterminate beyond what its “text” fixes, and a selfless process can produce one (a novel-writing robot whose story is true of it). Brains are bundles of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere into one autobiography; when the story coheres around two points, there are two selves. Read in a copy-edited transcription. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-364), in a third party’s copy-edited transcription of the text Dennett posted, not in the Erlbaum printing; worth reading as the short, canonical statement that a self is an abstractum, a “theorist’s fiction” of the same kind as a centre of gravity, posited by interpretation around which a life’s narrative coheres. Read it as an analogy and two thought experiments (the novel-writing robot “Gilbert”, the Updike sequel), not as an argument from evidence. Its evolutionary story of self-talk is labelled speculation, and its empirical support (Gazzaniga’s split-brain work, multiple personality cases) is cited, not shown. |
| LIT-443 v2 | Consciousness Explained | Dennett (1991), Little, Brown. Per its publisher, a “full-scale exploration of human consciousness” that “refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence”. Its fourteen contents entries run from “How are hallucinations possible?” and “A method for phenomenology”, through “Multiple drafts versus the Cartesian Theater” and “The architecture of the human mind”, to “Qualia disqualified” and “The reality of selves”. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only (access-restricted, printdisabled), no publisher or author copy is posted, and the Tufts Digital Library holds Dennett’s papers but not the book or draft chapters of it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-445 | From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0 | Oizumi, Albantakis & Tononi (2014), PLoS Computational Biology 10(5):e1003588. IIT 3.0 states five axioms of experience (existence, composition, information, integration, exclusion), turns each into a postulate about mechanisms in a state, and identifies an experience with the maximally irreducible conceptual structure of a “complex”. Exclusion makes a complex a local maximum of integrated conceptual information Φ over all overlapping sets of elements, so complexes cannot overlap and no subset or superset of a complex is conscious. Worked logic-gate examples show minor complexes beside a major one, an inactive network that is conscious, a minimally conscious photodiode, and a feed-forward “zombie” functionally equivalent to a conscious system. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-365), equations excepted; worth reading as the formal statement of the exclusion postulate that Schwitzgebel’s 2014 manuscript (LIT-159) attacks: “of all overlapping sets of elements, only one set can be conscious”, a complex being a local maximum of Φ against every overlapping set. It is IIT’s anti-nesting principle, stated as a postulate and motivated only by the phenomenological exclusion axiom; the paper’s Occam’s-razor argument is given for exclusion within a mechanism, not between systems. It also says plainly that function does not fix consciousness, which is IIT’s answer to whether agency built from parts brings experience with it. |
| LIT-450 | Self models | Metzinger (2007, rev. 2013), Scholarpedia 2(10):4174. There is no substantial self, only a phenomenal self-model (PSM): the conscious part of an organism’s self-model, an instrument of global control. A phenomenal self arises “if and only if a system operates under a transparent PSM”, one it cannot introspectively recognise as a model; a first-person perspective is a transparent model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Self-models can be unconscious and artificial, as in Bongard, Zykov and Lipson’s limping starfish robot; embodiment comes in three orders, the third conscious. Full-body illusions are offered as the experimental handle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-372); worth reading as Metzinger’s own short, open statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT) behind Being No One (LIT-467): there is no self, only a phenomenal self-model, and a system experiences itself as a self when that model is transparent, that is, when it cannot introspectively recognise it as a model. It is an encyclopedia article, not an argument: the central claim is stated as a definition with a prediction attached, its empirical examples are cited, and the online text is a revision later than the 2007 acceptance, with editing slips. |
| LIT-451 | Of Personal Identity | Hume (1739), Treatise 1.4.6, with the Appendix (1740). There is no impression of a self, “constant and invariable”, so no idea of one: introspection finds only “some particular perception or other”, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. The identity we ascribe to it is “fictitious”, like that of plants, ships and churches: an easy transition of the imagination along resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it, so that hard cases are “grammatical” rather than philosophical. The Appendix retracts the account of the connecting principle: two principles he cannot reconcile or renounce leave the matter “too hard for my understanding”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-386), in the Merivale–Millican critical text on davidhume.org, with the Appendix’s second thoughts (App. 10–21); worth reading as the founding statement of the bundle view and the first published retraction of it. The section finds no impression of a self, calls the mind “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”, and explains our ascription of identity to it as a fiction of the imagination run on resemblance and causation, the same fiction that makes a repaired ship or a rebuilt church “the same”. The Appendix then confesses that it cannot explain what unites the perceptions and leaves the problem “too hard for my understanding”. The section’s case is introspective and associationist; its Appendix is the clearest statement of what any bundle view owes. |
| LIT-453 | Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science | Gallagher (2000), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(1):14–21. Divides philosophical accounts of the self into the “minimal self”, accessible to present self-consciousness without temporal extension, and the “narrative self”, extended in time through memory and story. The minimal self splits into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which come apart in involuntary movement and, after Frith, in schizophrenic thought insertion when a forward comparator fails. Neonatal imitation suggests an embodied minimal self; Strawson’s and Tani’s are momentary. Against Dennett’s narrative centre, the self is “the sum total of its narratives”. Read in the author’s preprint. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-377), in the author’s preprint, not the typeset article; worth reading as the paper that set the minimal self against the narrative self for cognitive science, and for the split of the minimal self into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which it ties to Frith’s comparator model of schizophrenic thought insertion. It is a short review: the empirical support is cited, not shown, and its own proposal, the self as “the sum total of its narratives”, is offered in two paragraphs. |
| LIT-456 | Reply to Professor Stich | Dennett (1980), Philosophical Books 21(2):73–76, replying to Stich’s critical notice of Brainstorms, “Headaches” (pp. 65–73). Accepts Stich’s summary. On rationality: the norm is grounded only minimally in evolution, and full rationality is an idealisation, so personhood rests on a concept we “only imperfectly achieve”. On pain: there are no pains in a mature psychology’s ontology, yet people feel pain; between biting the bullet, reform and common sense (pain is like holes, voices and haircuts), the choice is “a matter of policy”. Philosophy supplies the medicine for the puzzles, science the rest. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-371); worth reading as Dennett’s shortest statement of two positions he kept: the intentional stance grounds belief in an idealisation of rationality, so persons are believers by a standard “we already know we only imperfectly achieve”; and pain is not a good theoretical entity, yet people feel pain, a choice among biting the bullet, reform and common sense that is “in some measure a matter of policy”. It is also the text behind LIT-393’s account of the homunculus essay, which it confirms: Stich’s quotations stand as LIT-393 gives them, and Dennett’s acceptance of Stich’s summary is a blanket one. |
| LIT-458 | Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness | Frankish (2016), Journal of Consciousness Studies 23(11–12):11–39, the target article of the issue later published as Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (2017). Names “illusionism”: phenomenal properties are not instantiated, and the task is the “illusion problem” of explaining why experiences seem to have them. Strong illusionism (no phenomenal properties at all, only “quasi-phenomenal” physical ones introspection misrepresents) is separated from weak illusionism (real phenomenal properties that merely seem ineffable, intrinsic, private), which it argues collapses into the strong form or into radical realism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-384); worth reading as the founding statement of illusionism under that name, and the target article that Dennett’s “Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness” (LIT-434) answers. It names the “illusion problem”, draws the strong/weak illusionism line with “quasi-phenomenal” properties, and argues from conservatism, anomalousness and the debunking argument that strong illusionism should be the research programme. It states a programme, not a theory: by its own account it “will not propose a detailed illusionist theory” (p. 1 of the eprint), and its positive arguments are abductive and openly so. |
| LIT-459 | Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to Kammerer | Schwitzgebel (2016), DOI-10.1007/s11406-016-9725-8. Reply to Kammerer’s Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle (LIT-409), which he calls the best defence of anti-nesting he has met. Three concerns: the principle allows group consciousness and may not even exclude the US, since citizens may not consciously represent the concrete entity at issue; condition A’s “required” lets a member’s change of motive switch group consciousness on and off with no functional change; and the Occam-style justification either leads into causal exclusion, threatening human consciousness, or is ad hoc, and group-level explanation is often the simpler one. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-381); worth reading as the direct reply to Kammerer’s anti-nesting principle (LIT-409), and the sharpest test so far of the line THEORY-043 calls the best candidate on offer. Its three concerns: the principle may not exclude actual groups, because it is unclear that citizens consciously represent the entity “the United States” names; its condition A, read through “required”, yields flickering group consciousness with no group-level functional change; and its Occam-style justification either generalises into the causal-exclusion problem or is ad hoc. Read from the author’s manuscript of 28 April 2016, not the Springer version. |
| LIT-460 v2 | Role play with large language models | Shanahan, McDonell & Reynolds (2023), Nature 623:493–498. A dialogue agent is an LLM role-playing the character its prompt describes, or more exactly a simulator keeping a superposition of simulacra consistent with the conversation. Only simulacra can appear to have beliefs, goals or a self; the simulator has none, “not even simulated versions”, and “it is role play all the way down”. When an agent says it wants to survive there is “no-one at home”. Each role-played character would carry its own theory of selfhood, which the conversation narrows; what an agent would try to preserve (hardware, process, instance) is left open. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-370), in the Nature text with the arXiv v1 preprint compared; worth reading here as the source of the simulator/simulacra account that every LLM-selfhood paper in this record answers. On it nothing is a self: the simulator has no beliefs, goals or agency “of its own, not even simulated versions”, and a simulacrum only role-plays a character that has them (“no-one at home”). Its one section on selfhood asks which self a role-played character would try to preserve, not what the system is, and leaves identity over time for a dialogue agent “far from clear”. The denial of a self is asserted from the framing, not argued against a rival. |
| LIT-461 | Consciousness interpreted: an interpretation of Dennett’s view of consciousness | Taylor (2024), DOI-10.1080/09515089.2024.2433526. Interprets Dennett’s theory of consciousness as realism about a real pattern. Consciousness is a real pattern in the brain’s content-bearing states (drafts), and a user-illusion: a pattern so coarse that describing the brain through it is metaphor. On that reading multiple drafts and global workspace theory are compatible, qualia eliminativism is peripheral, the Orwellian and Stalinesque readings of masking are equally good descriptions, and first-person reports are fallible as literal descriptions of the brain but authoritative as unwitting fictions. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-379); worth reading as the short, charitable reconstruction of Dennett’s theory of consciousness that ties it to “Real Patterns” (LIT-220): consciousness is a real pattern in the brain’s content-bearing states (drafts), of the coarse, metaphorical kind Dennett calls a user-illusion. It reconciles six claims, including multiple drafts with global workspace theory and fallibility with “dictatorial” authority. It is an interpretation offered as consistent, not as correct or as Dennett’s own, and its key step on metacontrast masking is a plausibility argument. |
| LIT-463 v2 | Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective | Zahavi (2005), MIT Press. Per its publisher, a defence of the self against neuroscientists and philosophers who doubt it, arguing that “the notion of self is crucial for a proper understanding of consciousness” and that experience, self-awareness and selfhood cannot be understood apart. It uses Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to give an account of the “experiential givenness of the self” for philosophy of mind, cognitive science, developmental psychology and psychiatry. Its chapters run from self-awareness and phenomenal consciousness through time-consciousness and reflection to self and other, theory of mind, autism and embodiment. Unread: registered from the description and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The MIT Press Direct edition is not open access (Crossref carries no licence, OpenAlex reports it closed), and no author copy of the book is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-464 | Of Identity and Diversity | Locke (1694), Essay II.xxvii, added in the second edition. Identity is relative to the idea the name stands for: the same mass is the same particles, the same oak or horse or man is the same continued life, and the same person is the same consciousness. A person is “a thinking intelligent being” that “can consider itself as itself”, and personal identity reaches “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought”. It is independent of substance, material or immaterial: the prince’s consciousness in the cobbler’s body is the same person but not the same man. “Person” is “a forensic term”, grounding reward and punishment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-385), in the Wikisource transcription of the 1853 Troutman & Hayes reprint of the sixth-edition text, compared word by word with Project Gutenberg’s; worth reading as the founding text of the psychological account of personal identity and the source of the record’s whole line on what a person is. It separates the same substance, the same man and the same person, puts the person in “consciousness” extended back to past actions, and calls “person” a “forensic term”. Its cases, the prince and the cobbler, the day-man and the night-man, the severed little finger, are argued from intuition, and its key relation, “the same consciousness”, is never defined. |
| LIT-465 | Simulacra as Conscious Exotica | Shanahan (2024), Inquiry 69(6):2982–3010, from arXiv:2402.12422. After Wittgenstein, consciousness words mean only what is public, so the question for an exotic entity is whether we could “engineer an encounter” with it in a shared world and what a society-wide conversation would then say. Disembodied chat agents are not even candidates; virtually embodied LLM agents could be. Tool use and memory make belief talk increasingly literal, but a chat agent has no “self worth preserving”, and a role player has no “person behind the mask”: its identity is a shifting distribution of roles. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-382) in the arXiv v2 preprint (July 2024), not the Inquiry version of record, which returned 403; worth reading as the Wittgensteinian alternative to the evidential debate about AI consciousness. It replaces “is it conscious?” with “could we engineer an encounter with it, and how would our language adapt?”, and so counts disembodied chat agents as not even candidates. On the self it is brief and pointed: a chat agent has “nothing that would qualify as a self worth preserving”, lacking body, personal history and autobiographical memory, and a role-playing agent has no “person behind the mask”; its identity, “insofar as that notion even made sense”, is the shifting distribution of roles. It argues by method and scenario, not evidence, and says so. |
| LIT-466 | Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | Shanahan (2025), arXiv:2503.16348. Asks whether consciousness talk can be stretched to disembodied, 2024-vintage LLM agents. Their time would be discrete and discontinuous, a string of unlike beads. Their “I” has two palatable referents, the model across conversations and a self confined to one conversation that “flickers into being with each user interaction”, and we may slip between them. Such selves can be edited, copied and merged, and smeared across branching simulacra. Every candidate site dissolves, which Shanahan reads as Buddhist emptiness, and turns back on human selfhood. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-376) in arXiv v3 (July 2025), the only text there is; worth reading as the one paper here that argues directly about what an LLM’s self is, rather than whether it has one. Its answer: two conceptions are in play, a self sited in the model and “fleeting, flickering” selves sited in single conversations, and we may slip between them; every candidate site “dissolves upon close examination”, and Shanahan takes that to the Buddhist conclusion that there is no inherent self, here or in us. It is avowedly “poetic”, not literal, and its examples are invented usages, not data. |
| LIT-467 v3 | Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity | Metzinger (2003), MIT Press. Per its publisher, “no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves”, and the phenomenal self is “the content of a ‘transparent self-model’”. A representationalist and functional analysis of the conscious first-person perspective, with conceptual “tools”, constraints on consciousness and neurophenomenological case studies (agnosia, neglect, blindsight, hallucination), asking whether being someone can be analysed at subpersonal levels. Unread: registered from the description and the contents; the theory is read in LIT-450. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text of the book could be reached. The MIT Press Direct edition is not open access and no author copy is posted. Its theory is read in Metzinger’s own short statement, “Self models” (LIT-450, read in full), and more fully in his “Précis: Being No One” (PSYCHE 11(5), 2005; LIT-568, read in full 2026-10-03), the read substitute for the book, which sets out six of its ten constraints and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation. Retried 2026-11-01: OpenAlex still reports it closed with no open location; it is not in the Internet Archive’s MIT Press open-access collection, which holds Metzinger’s 2024 book (LIT-1943); MIT Press Direct returned a Cloudflare challenge; no author copy found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-529 v2 | Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter | Deacon (2011), W. W. Norton. An account of how life, mind and purpose (“ententional” phenomena) emerged from physics, built on constraint and absence rather than on added stuff. Its contents run from absence, homunculi and teleonomy through emergence and constraint to a hierarchy of dynamics (homeodynamics, morphodynamics, teleodynamics), a minimal self-producing system (autogenesis), and then work, information, significance, evolution, self, sentience and consciousness. Unread: registered from the publisher’s description and the contents; the text was not reached. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and a library contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scan of the Norton printing is lending-only, and no author-posted draft was found. The companion chapter the record already cites, Deacon & Cashman (2013), “Teleology versus mechanism in biology: beyond self-organization”, is identified below but was not reachable either and is not filed. |
| LIT-568 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger (2005), PSYCHE 11(5), the author’s précis of Being No One. Minimal consciousness is a global world-model in a window of presence that cannot be recognised as a model (globality, presentationality, transparency). A phenomenal self is a transparent self-model: “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency comes in degrees, and the self-model’s opaque partition is what lets humans doubt their own self-representation. The unity of consciousness is a single global functional cluster. A first-person perspective is a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, and iterating it yields introspective and social intelligence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-460), as the read substitute for Being No One (LIT-467), which it summarises in Metzinger’s own words. Worth reading as the most complete short statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT): more of the machinery than “Self models” (LIT-450), in particular the six constraints, the degrees of transparency, and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Phenomenal selfhood is a transparent self-model, “a function realized by a lack of information”; “no such things as selves exist in the world”. The unity of a conscious world is a global functional cluster bound by “highest-order binding”. It states the theory and its predictions; the evidence is cited, not shown, and the neural sections say how little is known. |
| LIT-600 v2 | Attention to Action: Willed and Automatic Control of Behavior | Norman & Shallice (1986), in Davidson, Schwartz & Shapiro (eds.), Consciousness and Self-Regulation vol. 4 (Plenum), pp. 1-18; first issued as CHIP Report 99 (UCSD, December 1980). Per the report’s ERIC abstract: routine action runs off by “contention scheduling” among competing schemas, and a “supervisory attentional mechanism” biases that selection for novel, ill-learned, dangerous or planned action; “will becomes the application of attentional resources to the control of action”. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from bibliographic records and from the ERIC abstract of the 1980 technical report, not read. The 1986 chapter is not open access: Unpaywall reports no open copy, and SpringerLink returned a JavaScript bot challenge, which was not pursued. The 1980 version (CHIP Report 99, University of California San Diego, catalogued by ERIC as ED205562, “Technical Report No. 8006”, 43 pages) was the brief’s lead. ERIC has a catalogue record and abstract but no full text: its fulltext URL returns 404. The copies on Academia.edu sit behind a bot challenge, and those on ResearchGate and Scribd are uploads this record does not use. No DTIC copy was found. A human could ask UCSD’s library or the authors’ institutions for the CHIP report, or read the chapter through a library, and move this to Active. |
| LIT-605 | An Accumulator Model for Spontaneous Neural Activity Prior to Self-Initiated Movement | Schurger, Sitt & Dehaene (2012), PNAS 109(42). In Libet’s spontaneous movement task, a leaky stochastic accumulator, δx = (I − kx)Δt + cξ√Δt, with weak constant urgency I and a threshold, fitted only to waiting times, reproduces the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96): time-locking to threshold crossings averages up the autocorrelated noise that produced them. Fast responses to random interruptions were preceded by a slow negativity, as predicted. The “neural decision to move now” is the late threshold crossing, about 150 ms before movement, so Libet’s inference of an unconscious decision a half-second earlier is unfounded. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-462); worth reading as the model that reinterprets the readiness potential. A leaky stochastic accumulator with a weak constant input (“urgency”), fitted with three parameters to 14 participants’ waiting times in Libet’s task, reproduces the shape of the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96) because averaging epochs time-locked to threshold crossings recovers the noise that happened to carry the accumulator there. Its prediction, that fast responses to unpredictable clicks are preceded by a slow negativity, was confirmed (13 participants). On this account the “neural decision to move now” is the threshold crossing about 150 ms before movement, not the onset of the readiness potential, and Libet’s inference that the brain decides before awareness is “unfounded”. The authors say plainly that this shows the readiness potential could reflect spontaneous fluctuation, not that it does. |
| LIT-626 | Three types of phenomenal consciousness and their functional roles: unfolding the ALARM theory of consciousness | Newen & Montemayor (2025), Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 380:20240314. The ALARM theory: phenomenal consciousness has two levels of experience and three functions. Basic arousal, realisable without cortex, alarms the body when a homeostatic variable leaves its tolerance range, overriding slow regulation with no choice involved; it adds lasting care for the injury and one-shot, generalised avoidance learning. General alertness, cortical and attention-guided, enables flexible learning and decision-making. Reflexive self-consciousness is general alertness with metacognitive self-relational content, not a third kind of experience, and enables long-term planning that accounts for one’s own and others’ mindsets. IIT, higher-order theories and GNWT are faulted for tying consciousness to neocortex and leaving basic arousal out. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-489); worth reading as the shortest statement of the ALARM theory: phenomenal consciousness has two levels of experience, basic arousal (subcortical, an alarm that overrides slow homeostatic regulation) and general alertness (cortical, attention-guided, for flexible learning and choice), plus reflexive self-consciousness, which is general alertness with metacognitive self-relational content and its own function, long-term planning. Its evidence is a short list of cited findings (hydranencephaly, decorticate cats, central lateral thalamus stimulation in macaques), and the functional claims are argued, not tested. |
| LIT-627 v2 | At the crossroad of the search for spontaneous radiation and the Orch OR consciousness theory | Derakhshani, Diósi, Laubenstein, Piscicchia & Curceanu (2022), Physics of Life Reviews 42:8–14. By its abstract: a critical analysis of Orch OR against new bounds on the spontaneous radiation that the simplest gravity-related dynamical collapse model predicts, concluding that Orch OR built on that simplest version is “highly implausible in all the cases analyzed”. Unread: registered from the abstract and the reference list. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the abstract, keywords and reference list, not read. The article is closed access at Elsevier. Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Europe PMC list no open copy; there is no arXiv version (searched by title, abstract phrase and author pairs); Diósi’s publication list gives the DOI but, unlike his other 2022 papers, no PDF; ScienceDirect returned a bot challenge and CORE a redirect challenge, so I stopped. A human reader with library access, or a copy requested from the authors, would move this to Active. |
| LIT-628 | Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness | Damasio & Damasio (2022), Brain 145(7):2231–2235, an Essay. Consciousness occurs when mind contents are spontaneously identified as belonging to their organism, and a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings (hunger, pain, well-being, plain feelings of existence) supplies that identification and “lends” consciousness to exteroceptive images. Feelings are hybrid: interoceptive pathways are unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic and unprotected by a blood–brain barrier, so the body and its neural map interact directly. Posterior brainstem lesions abolish consciousness where large cortical ones may not; consciousness needs “a partnership of nervous systems with the bodies they serve”. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-03 (NOTE-507): every section was covered, but through a fetch tool that returned section-by-section accounts with short quotes, not a verbatim copy, so the quotes are unchecked; worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the Damasios’ claim that consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as one’s own, supplied by a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings, which are hybrid: in interoception the map and the body it maps interact and “commingle”. It is a five-page Essay with no data. Its evidence is clinical and cited (brainstem coma versus cortical lesions, general anaesthesia), and its mechanism is the cellular contrast in Table 1: unmyelinated, non-synaptic, barrier-free interoceptive pathways. |
| LIT-629 | Two neural correlates of consciousness | Block (2005), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9(2):46–52. There are at least two neural correlates of consciousness: a phenomenal NCC, the minimal basis of an experience’s content (recurrent activation of MT/V5 with V1 for seen motion), and an access NCC, frontoparietal activation that broadcasts the content in a global workspace. Because access is a winner-take-all competition, a recurrent sensory representation can lose and stay unaccessed. Signal-detection analyses of exclusion tasks and of V1 figure–ground modulation in monkeys suggest experience without access. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-496); worth reading as the short empirical turn of Block’s distinction: a phenomenal NCC (recurrent activity in sensory areas, such as MT/V5 with V1 for seen motion) and an access NCC (frontoparietal broadcasting), with a winner-take-all contest for access as the reason the first can occur without the second. Its evidence is signal-detection reasoning: Supèr et al.’s V1 figure–ground modulation persists when low salience or many catch trials uncouple it from the monkey’s saccade. The case is suggestive, “a glimmer”, and the later papers make it at length. |
| LIT-631 | Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis | Mashour, Roelfsema, Changeux & Dehaene (2020), Neuron 105(5):776–798. A review of the global neuronal workspace hypothesis by its proponents. Conscious access is a sudden, non-linear ignition of a distributed network of long-range pyramidal neurons, with prefrontal cortex a key hub, that amplifies, sustains and broadcasts one representation; unseen stimuli produce only a decaying wave. Evidence: a late (>200–300 ms) divergence between seen and unseen trials across modalities, prefrontal ignition in monkeys tied to the signal-detection threshold, and the disconnection of frontal-parietal networks by every major class of anaesthetic. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-510); worth reading as the record’s first source statement of the global neuronal workspace (GNW): conscious access is a non-linear “ignition” in which recurrent loops among long-range prefrontal, parietal and other hub neurons amplify, sustain and broadcast one representation to the brain’s specialised processors. Its strongest evidence is van Vugt et al.’s (2018) monkey recordings, where seen and unseen stimuli both drive V1 and V4 but only seen ones (and false alarms) ignite sustained prefrontal firing, and the signal-detection threshold maps onto the ignition threshold. It is a review by the theory’s proponents, explicitly a theory of access, and it concedes that the four leading theories cannot yet be told apart experimentally. |
| LIT-632 | Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness | Block (2009), in Gazzaniga (ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences, 4th ed., MIT Press, ch. 77, pp. 1111–1122. Compares the three theories neuroscientists take most seriously: higher-order thought, the global workspace and the biological theory. Only the biological theory fully acknowledges the explanatory gap; the others replace it with a puzzle their own theory creates. Concept dualism stops the gap becoming dualism. The ambitious higher-order theory also fails on stipulation, mismatch and infants. Integrated information is criticised as a theory of intelligence. The biological theory is the least friendly to machine consciousness. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-505); worth reading as Block’s comparison of the higher-order thought, global workspace and biological theories by one test: does the theory recognise the explanatory gap? The ambitious higher-order theory and the workspace theory turn the gap into a puzzle of their own making, so only the biological theory “fully acknowledges” it; concept dualism keeps that from becoming dualism. Also the source of the “biological theory” that Chalmers’s meta-problem paper cites as “Block 2009”, and a short argument that the biological theory is less friendly to machine consciousness than its rivals. |
| LIT-634 | Inverted Earth | Block (1990), Philosophical Perspectives 4:53–79. Inverted Earth has complementary colours and inverted colour words, so a visitor with colour-inverting lenses notices nothing. After long residence, or for a twin raised there with a molecule-for-molecule identical brain, the intentional content of the experience of the sky inverts (it is about yellow) and so does its functional role in a long-arm description, while qualitative content stays the same. So qualitative content is not a functional state and the intentional/qualitative distinction stands. Public colour terms like “looks red” express intentional, not qualitative, content. A brain-internal functional theory of qualia would escape, but nobody has said what it is. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-504); worth reading as the source of the Inverted Earth argument: a subject moved, unaware, to a planet of complementary colours and inverted colour words keeps the same qualitative content while, over time, the intentional content and the (long-arm) functional role of the experience invert. That is the converse of the inverted spectrum, and it needs no internal switch, so the subject’s testimony is undisturbed and brain supervenience is on the qualia realist’s side. It refutes functionalism about qualia only in its long-arm form; Block concedes a short-arm functional theory of qualia would sink it, and answers that only with a burden of proof. |
| LIT-635 | Mental Paint | Block (2003), in Hahn & Ramberg (eds.), Reflections and Replies, MIT Press, pp. 165–200. Phenomenal character outruns representational content. Internalist representationism must find a functional difference for every phenomenal one, and Erisa, raised where colours keep changing, has vivid colour differences with no abiding functional ones. Against externalist representationism: a swampman has phenomenal character and no content; attention is not awareness, so transparency fails as a claim about awareness; on Inverted Earth what stays the same is mental paint; and normal variation in colour vision means, if representationism is true, that a standard chip cannot look its shade to both men and women. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-511); worth reading as Block’s fullest case against representationism about phenomenal character (“phenomenism” against “representationism”). It separates mental paint (phenomenal properties that represent) from mental oil (phenomenal properties that do not), argues against internalist representationism with Erisa, raised among colours that keep changing, and against externalist representationism with Inverted Earth, long-term memory, and an empirical “shifted spectra” argument from normal variation in cone sensitivity and in where people place unique green. Several of its arguments are offered as pressure, not proof, and Block says so. |
| LIT-636 v4 | The Border Between Seeing and Thinking | Block (2023), Oxford University Press, open access. Argues, by Block’s own précis (LIT-649), that perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual and nonpropositional while cognition is paradigmatically discursive, conceptual and propositional, using scientific marks of perception such as adaptation; that core cognition splits between the two; and, in a chapter on consciousness, against cognitive theories of consciousness. Unread: seeded from the chapter list and the précis. | Unfetched — seeded 2026-10-03 from Crossref’s book and chapter records and from Block’s own précis (LIT-649), not read. The book is open access at Oxford University Press under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, so a lawful full text exists, and Block’s own copy is listed on PhilArchive as BLOTBB. Neither could be fetched. On 2026-10-03 academic.oup.com answered every request with a Cloudflare “Just a moment…” challenge, and OAPEN and DOAB, which normally mirror such books, refused this session’s requests. On 2026-10-30 the DOI resolved to academic.oup.com/book/45659, which answered HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare challenge (cf-mitigated: challenge), and philarchive.org/rec/BLOTBB did the same. Neither challenge was retried. The précis was read in its place. Filed because the record cites the book twice (NOTE-104 for pp. 454–458 on the neural replacement argument, NOTE-150 for the perception–cognition border), and those citations need a code. A human reader can open either copy, and a reading would move this to Active. Free copies: doi:10.1093/oso/9780197622223.001.0001 (OUP’s open-access book, academic.oup.com/book/45659); philarchive.org/rec/BLOTBB. |
| LIT-637 | What Is Wrong with the No-Report Paradigm and How to Fix It | Block (2019), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23(12):1003–1013. Whether perceptual consciousness needs prefrontal circuits cannot be settled by no-report paradigms, because subjects not asked to report may still think about what they see, and that thought tracks the percept. A no-post-perceptual-cognition paradigm is needed. Brascamp et al.’s rivalry with inconspicuous switches is one, and it found no detectable prefrontal difference. Box 2 argues that binocular rivalry is driven by local features, against the predictive-processing account. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-495); worth reading as the argument that removing report does not isolate the neural basis of conscious perception, because subjects, monkeys included, can still think about what they see (“the bored monkey problem”). What is needed is a paradigm with no post-perceptual cognition that differs between percepts. Brascamp et al.’s inconspicuous binocular rivalry, whose switches subjects could not tell from constant random changes, is offered as one, and found no prefrontal difference by fMRI. Block flags that fMRI may be too coarse, and that ECoG could still favour prefrontalism. |
| LIT-639 | The Harder Problem of Consciousness | Block (2002), The Journal of Philosophy 99(8):391–425. For anyone who is both a naturalist (physicalism is the default) and a phenomenal realist (consciousness is real and not defined by function), a merely superficial functional isomorph of us with a different physical basis, “Commander Data”, poses a harder problem than the hard one. We have no conception of evidence that could show whether he is conscious, so physicalism is the default yet inaccessible, and it is the subjective default that he is not conscious though the question is open. Disjunctive or functional bases would save naturalism but could never be known. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-501); worth reading as the argument that whether a functional duplicate of us made of different stuff is conscious is not just unknown but “meta-inaccessible”: we have no conception of evidence that would settle it. For a naturalist who is also a phenomenal realist, physicalism is the default and yet whether such a being is conscious cannot bear on it. The paper also dissolves one form of the hard problem by treating subjective and objective as properties of concepts, not of properties. It lays out the tension and argues for no way out. |
| LIT-640 | Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access | Block (2011), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15(12):567–575. A defence of the overflow argument: perceptual consciousness has a higher capacity than cognitive access. Critics who call it an illusion must posit detailed unconscious iconic memory and conscious generic or fragmentary representations, for which there is no independent evidence. Fragile visual short-term memory, a cortical store of about 5–7 of 8 items over 1–4 s that attention and dlPFC TMS spare while they impair working memory, supports rich perception. Overflow means most items are not accessed, not that any is inaccessible. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-500); worth reading as Block’s reply to the anti-overflow critics of 2009–2011. Sparse views must posit an unconscious iconic memory detailed enough to do the Sperling and Amsterdam tasks plus conscious “generic” letters or rectangles, and Block argues there is no independent evidence for either. It adds fragile visual short-term memory (about 6–7 of 8 items at 1–2.5 s, cortical, in V4, spared by right dlPFC TMS that impairs working memory) and an imagery task as support. Read from the in-press version. |
| LIT-641 | What Psychological States are Not | Block & Fodor (1972), The Philosophical Review 81(2):159–181. Behaviourism and type physicalism set type-identity conditions on psychological states that are too concrete, and the decisive arguments against them are empirical. The functional state identity theory (FSIT), on which each psychological state is a machine-table state of the organism’s unique best description as a probabilistic automaton, fails too. It cannot model dispositions that are never occurrent, simultaneous states, or a productive and structured set of states, and it individuates too finely. Inverted or absent qualia are a prima facie objection to any functional definition. Psychological states look like computational states, not machine-table states, and type identity is fixed by the laws the states fall under. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-491); worth reading as the first sustained case against machine-state functionalism, and as the place where the inverted- and absent-qualia objection is first set down as an objection to functional definitions of mental states. Its central result is narrower than “functionalism is false”: psychological states cannot be put one-to-one with the machine-table states of a probabilistic automaton (§III, arguments 1, 2, 4, 5, 6), though they may correspond to computational states. Only the qualia argument (3) threatens functionalism in the broad sense, and the authors treat it as prima facie. |
| LIT-643 | On a confusion about a function of consciousness | Block (1995), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18(2):227–247, with open peer commentary. “Consciousness” is a mongrel concept. Phenomenal consciousness is experience; a state is access-conscious if its content is poised for use in reasoning and in rational control of action and speech. Arguments from blindsight and petit mal automatism to a function of phenomenal consciousness are fallacious, because access is missing in those cases too, and its machinery has the function in question. Cases of phenomenality without access (Sperling’s arrays, the unnoticed drill) are offered as worth investigating, not as proven. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-493); worth reading as the source of the distinction between phenomenal consciousness (P: experience, what it is like) and access consciousness (A: a content poised for use as a premise in reasoning and for rational control of action and speech). The paper’s target is an argument form, not a theory: from a case where “consciousness” and some capacity are missing together (blindsight, petit mal automatism) to a function of P. In those cases A is missing too, so the obvious function of A’s machinery is being credited to P. The cases of P without A that it offers (the noticed drill, Sperling’s arrays, anaesthesia) are put forward as suggestive, not as evidence. |
| LIT-644 | Distinct ventral stream and prefrontal cortex representational dynamics during sustained conscious visual perception | Vishne, Gerber, Knight & Deouell (2023), Cell Reports 42:112752. Ten patients with subdural electrodes watched images for 300–1,500 ms with no report on analysed trials. High-frequency activity dropped about 80% after onset in every region, but category and exemplar information in ventral temporal cortex stayed decodable and time-invariant for as long as the image stayed on. Prefrontal and parietal information was a transient burst at about 150–600 ms that did not track duration. Both IIT’s and the global workspace’s predictions for this paradigm held. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-499); worth reading as the cleanest test in the record of what neural activity does while a seen image simply stays on. In 10 epilepsy patients with subdural electrodes, high-frequency activity falls about 80% after onset everywhere, yet category and exemplar information in ventral temporal (and less robustly occipital) cortex stays decodable, time-invariant and as long as the image, while prefrontal and parietal information is a transient burst at onset that ignores duration, with no report required. It confirms the multi-duration predictions both IIT and the global neuronal workspace made for this paradigm. Sparse frontal coverage and above-threshold stimuli only. |
| LIT-646 | Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience | Block (2007), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30(5–6):481–499, with open peer commentary. To find the neural basis of experience we must decide whether it includes the machinery of cognitive access, and reports seem unable to decide that. Inference to the best explanation can. Sperling, Landman et al. and Sligte et al. show phenomenology overflowing a working memory of about four items. If the workspace is not part of the basis of phenomenology, strong losing coalitions in sensory cortex realise that overflow; the mesh between psychology and neuroscience favours that assumption. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-497); worth reading as the overflow argument and the paper that framed the methodological problem the no-report paradigm was built to solve. Phenomenology overflows cognitive access: in Sperling, Landman et al. and Sligte et al. subjects see 8–32 items and can access about 4. If the neural basis of phenomenology excludes the frontal workspace, strong but losing recurrent coalitions in the back of the head explain that overflow, and a better mesh between psychology and neuroscience is reason to accept the assumption. The target article was read; the 32 commentaries and the response were not. |
| LIT-649 | Précis of The Border between Seeing and Thinking | Block (2024), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 110(1):273–283, the précis for a symposium on his 2023 book. The book’s main claim is that perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual and nonpropositional, while cognition is paradigmatically discursive, conceptual and propositional and can use perceptual material inside a “cognitive envelope”. The global neuronal workspace is reread as the mechanism of that envelope, the conceptualisation of percepts. Nine kinds of evidence show working-memory representations differ from perceptual ones and are task-dependent abstractions, which increases Block’s doubt that “raw” percepts are used in cognition. Iconicity is defined by tracking and mirroring conditions after Shepard. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-498); worth reading as Block’s own short statement, stand-in for the book (LIT-636), of the thesis of The Border Between Seeing and Thinking: perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual and nonpropositional, cognition paradigmatically discursive, conceptual and propositional. Despite its title it is “an update”, and most of it develops one idea, the “cognitive envelope”: the global workspace is better read as a theory of how percepts are conceptualised than of consciousness, and recent working-memory evidence shows percepts are recoded, not held raw, when used in reasoning. It is too short to carry the book’s arguments for the main thesis, which it states but does not argue. |
| LIT-650 | Conscious birds | Maldarelli & Güntürkün (2025), Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 380:20240308. A review arguing that birds show sensory awareness (bistable perception in pigeons; crow nidopallium caudolaterale neurons that follow the reported percept, not the stimulus) and graded self-awareness (magpie and house crow mark tests; pigeons and roosters that treat their mirror image as not-a-conspecific while failing the mark test). Checked against three theories, the avian brain meets the anatomical and physiological requirements of the global neuronal workspace (a hub-and-module connectome with NCL as hub) and of recurrent processing, while IIT’s have not been tested (no PCI, no grid-like lattice found). The authors say the evidence does not yet allow a strong conclusion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-488); worth reading as a short, current statement of the case for consciousness in birds and of what each of three theories (global neuronal workspace, recurrent processing, IIT) would need to find in an avian brain. Its strongest evidence is second-hand: crow nidopallium caudolaterale neurons that track the reported percept rather than the stimulus (Nieder et al. 2020). Its sharpest argument is that the bird’s prefrontal analogue is nuclear, not laminar, so conscious report does not need cortical layering. The authors say the findings “do not allow for a strong conclusion”. |
| LIT-697 v2 | The feeling of being a group: Corporate emotions and collective consciousness | Schmid (2014), in von Scheve & Salmela (eds.), Collective Emotions (OUP), pp. 3–16. Unread. By summaries of its abstract: against the view that groups cannot have emotions because they lack consciousness, it argues that a group with proper intentional attitudes has consciousness, as plural pre-reflective self-awareness, and so meets a precondition for emotion. Groups probably cannot have “fast” emotions but can have “slow” ones such as confidence, happiness or grief. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The chapter is paywalled at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall finds no open copy, and the University of Vienna’s research portal refused the request; the author’s preprint is posted only on ResearchGate and academia.edu, which this record does not use. What is said of it comes from summaries of its abstract returned by a search service, labelled unverified. A person could supply the chapter from the OUP volume or ask the author; a reading would move this to Active and should test whether its “corporate emotions” are corporate attitudes in List’s sense. |
| LIT-702 | Genuinely collective emotions | Huebner (2010), European Journal for Philosophy of Science 1(1):89–118. Against the received view that only individuals have emotions, it argues that some groups have the computational complexity and informational integration that emotion requires. Emotions are integrated, action- oriented representations built from subpersonal routines; a distributed system can integrate routines the same way. It answers the objection from consciousness (some individual emotions are non-conscious, so collective ones need not be felt) and from homology (emotion kinds are functional, “like vodka”, not “like bourbon”). A navy crew turns out to detect danger without fear; a failing election campaign is offered instead. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-553); worth reading as the distributed, computational case for collective emotion, and the clearest statement of what it would take. An emotion is an integrated representation with indicative content and imperative force, built from subpersonal routines; a group whose routines are integrated the same way can be in one, without feeling it. The test case fails on the author’s own terms (the USS Palau crew detects danger without fear) and the replacement (a 2008 presidential campaign) is offered as intuitively plausible pending anthropology, so the paper establishes a possibility and a research programme, not an instance. |
| LIT-912 v2 | Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the experience of flow | Dietrich (2004), Consciousness and Cognition 13: 746–761. Proposes that flow requires transient hypofrontality, a temporary suppression of the explicit system’s analytic and meta-conscious capacities, so a practised skill held by the implicit system runs without interference. Unread. | Unavailable — unread, registered 2026-10-11 from Crossref metadata and secondary descriptions. Elsevier’s copy is closed; no author copy was looked for beyond one search. Filed because its hypothesis, that flow requires the explicit system to stand down, is the one neurocognitive account of flow that bears on the record’s claim. Reading it would place it. |
| LIT-949 v2 | A synergistic workspace for human consciousness revealed by Integrated Information Decomposition | Luppi et al. (2024), eLife 12:RP88173. Pairwise synergy and redundancy between 454 regions of resting-state fMRI (HCP, N = 100), from Gaussian integrated information decomposition, define a “synergistic workspace”. Within it, regions whose synergistic connections reach more modules than their redundant ones are gateways, mainly in the default mode network. The rest are broadcasters, mainly in the executive control network with lateral prefrontal cortex. Across propofol anaesthesia (against wakefulness and against recovery) and 22 patients with disorders of consciousness, revised integrated information ΦR falls consistently between default-mode gateway regions. The original whole-minus-sum Φ shows no common fall, and the increases near broadcasters are not robust. The evidence is correlational, pairwise and content-free. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-799) in full; worth reading as an information-theoretic operationalisation of a global workspace with distinct input and output sides. Synergy-dominant regions form the workspace; within it, gateways (mainly default mode) and broadcasters (mainly fronto-parietal) are split by participation-coefficient rank. Pairwise integrated information ΦR falls between default-mode gateways under propofol and in disorders of consciousness, where the original Φ shows no common fall. Read it knowing four things. The two-sided split is imposed by the method, and only where its classes fall is measured. All measures are pairwise, undirected resting-state BOLD, with no contents or report, so it says nothing about which consumers a content reaches. The disorders-of-consciousness group includes minimally conscious patients. The propofol sample is given as both 15 and 16. Filed as THEORY-240. |
| LIT-957 v2 | Relative fluency (unfelt vs felt) in active inference | Brouillet and Friston (2023), Consciousness and Cognition 115:103579. A perspective essay. Fluency, the felt ease of processing, is read as the brain’s recognition of the precision of its own predictions. Unfelt fluency is a subpersonal change in precision that orients attention; felt fluency is a hierarchically deeper inference about it, reached by endogenous attention, and is attributed to the stimulus because its cause is internal. The case rests on reviewed discrepancy-attribution experiments (the hension effect and its successors). No model and no new data. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-785) in full; worth reading as a short statement of how fluency research could be put into active inference: fluency as the recognition of the precision of one’s own predictions, registered first as a change against expectation and misattributed to the stimulus because its cause is internal. Read it knowing that it is a perspective essay with no model and no new data, that its experiments are reviewed second-hand, and that its “felt” fluency means fluency made reportable by endogenous attention, not a separation of experience from function. |
| LIT-965 v2 | Evolution of consciousness: Phylogeny, ontogeny, and emergence from general anesthesia | Mashour and Alkire (2013), a colloquium perspective. It proposes the stepwise return of consciousness after general anaesthesia as a model for studying its evolution. It reads one PET study, in which the return of a response to command correlated mainly with brainstem, hypothalamus, thalamus and anterior cingulate, as showing that conserved structures with limited recurrent cortex suffice for primitive consciousness. By homology, it concludes that early mammals and birds are phenomenally conscious. The marker of return is an access marker, which the authors concede. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-797) in full; worth reading as a clear statement of the case for animal consciousness from anaesthesia and comparative anatomy: the return of a response to command after anaesthesia correlates mainly with brainstem, thalamus and anterior cingulate, so ancient conserved structures with limited recurrent cortex are taken to suffice, and early mammals and birds are taken to be phenomenally conscious. Read it knowing that it is a perspective with no data of its own, that its marker of returning consciousness is an access marker (which it concedes), and that the step to other species is by homology, not by anaesthesia evidence from them. No THEORY was filed from it; THEORY-091 holds the limit it illustrates. |
| LIT-973 v2 | Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness | Cogitate Consortium, Ferrante et al. (2025). A preregistered adversarial collaboration testing IIT against GNWT in 256 people (fMRI, MEG, iEEG) viewing clearly seen images. Posterior cortex held category, identity and orientation. Prefrontal cortex held category only, at onset, with no response at offset, against GNWT. Content-specific posterior synchronization with V1/V2 was brief and low-frequency, not sustained gamma, against IIT. It tests the theories’ proposed implementations, not their cores, and never separates percept from stimulus. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-812) in full; worth reading as the first preregistered adversarial test of two theories of consciousness, and for what it found: prefrontal cortex held a seen image’s category but not its identity or (detectably) orientation, no prefrontal site responded at stimulus offset, and sustained content-specific gamma synchronization within posterior cortex, IIT’s distinctive prediction, was absent. Read it knowing that every image was clearly seen, so nothing separates experience from stimulus processing or access, that it tests each theory’s proposed implementation rather than its core, and that the proponents’ replies are in the Supplementary Information, not read here. THEORY-245 and THEORY-296 hold what it shows. |
| LIT-982 v2 | Theories of consciousness | Seth and Bayne (2022). A review of higher-order, global workspace, integrated information, and reentry and predictive processing theories, sorted by which aspects of consciousness each explains, where in the brain each locates it and what evidence each cites. Many apparent rivalries are differences of target. The front-versus-back dispute is about consciousness and cognitive access, and posterior-sufficiency predictions cannot now be tested because verification relies on report, which needs anterior activity. It asks for precise, comprehensive theories and a solution to the measurement problem. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-849) in full; worth reading for QUESTION-048 as a map of four families of theory by what each explains and what evidence each cites, and for its argument that report-based evidence cannot test posterior sufficiency, since report needs anterior activity, while no non-report marker has a validation independent of introspection and contested theory. Read it knowing that it is a review, read from the accepted manuscript, which argues these limits rather than demonstrating them. |
| LIT-1000 v2 | Does neural computation feel like something? | Gidon, Aru and Larkum (2025), Frontiers in Neuroscience 19:1511972. A five-neuron NEURON simulation is replayed into itself by a voltage clamp. On the matching stimulus the clamp injects no current, yet it makes every state transition independent of the input. On the Turing–Putnam definition the computation degenerates while activity and actual causal interactions are unchanged, so computational functionalism must say that doing nothing can alter consciousness. The authors offer this as a paradox for the view, not a refutation, and close by suggesting that substrate-fixed “natural counterfactuals” matter instead. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-818) in full; worth reading as the counterfactual problem for computational functionalism made concrete: a simulated voltage clamp replaying a recorded response stays idle on the matching stimulus yet removes every other transition, so on the Turing–Putnam definition the computation changes while no activity does. Read it knowing that the simulation shows only what an ideal clamp does, that the verdict on consciousness follows from a cited premise rather than from the model, and that it concerns consciousness in general, not affect. |
| LIT-1178 v2 | Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State | Owen, Coleman, Boly, Davis, Laureys & Pickard (2006). A 23-year-old woman who met the clinical criteria for the vegetative state five months after a traumatic brain injury, told in the scanner to imagine playing tennis or walking through her house, activated the supplementary motor area for the first and parahippocampal, posterior parietal and lateral premotor cortex for the second, as 12 healthy volunteers did. The authors take her compliance as “a clear act of intention” showing awareness; her intact speech responses they set aside as not evidence of it. No question was asked or answered. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-962) in full, the one-page Brevia; the Supporting Online Material was not reached. Worth reading as the first showing that a patient diagnosed vegetative can respond to command by a mental act with no motor output, read from the brain. Read it knowing that no question was asked and no answer decoded, that the comparison with controls is qualitative in the main text, and that “confirmed beyond any doubt” is the authors’ assertion. |
| LIT-1186 v2 | Assessing correspondence between subjective reports and visual targets during attempted out-of-body experiences | Weiler, Abraham, Acunzo & Hermansson (2026), from the abstract and press coverage only. Twenty-one people affiliated with an OBE-training institute tried to perceive a target picture, drawn from a standardized database and unknown to participants and researchers, displayed in a separate, inaccessible room. Ten reported an OBE; thirteen gave descriptions. Each description and the target captions were embedded with a pretrained language model, and the correct target’s cosine similarity was ranked against 100 candidates per trial (primary analysis; z-scores secondary). No trial and no combined rank test exceeded chance. Controls showed the pipeline finds targets when semantic correspondence is present, but, the authors say, not that it is sensitive to naturalistic human language. Two participants spontaneously reported accurate details of the experimenters’ locations and activities in an adjacent room, which were not predefined outcomes. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-16 from the PubMed abstract (42617381); no lawful full text was reached on 2026-10-16, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Where the reader looked: Unpaywall and OpenAlex (both “closed”, no repository copy); Europe PMC (“Subscription required”, not in PMC); ScienceDirect (PII S1550830726001941, 403 to this client, and paywalled); the Elsevier text-mining API Crossref lists (rate-limited, and it needs a subscriber key); Crossref posted-content and web searches for a preprint on PsyArXiv, OSF or ResearchGate (none found); OSF’s API and search for a preregistration or data project (OSF returned 503 throughout, so this is unsettled); the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies publications page (no copy listed); Entangled Labs’ site (connection reset); and press coverage (News-Medical, WHSV), which links only to the ScienceDirect abstract and mentions no preprint, preregistration or data. A failure of availability, not merely of access, except for OSF, which should be rechecked. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Registered at the owner’s request (U9 of the exchange of 2026-10-16 on active inference). OSF was retried on 2026-10-17 and was down for scheduled maintenance, so a preregistration there is still unchecked. |
| LIT-1191 v2 | Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference | Sandved-Smith, Hesp, Mattout, Friston, Lutz & Ramstead (2021). A three-level discrete active-inference model: attentional states (focused, distracted) set the precision of the perceptual likelihood, and meta-awareness states (high, low) set the precision with which the agent observes its own attentional state. Mental action is a policy, ‘stay’ or ‘switch’, over attentional states, defined at that level only and driven by a preference to observe oneself ‘focused’. Single simulations of a passive oddball reproduce focus, mind-wandering, noticing and refocusing, with longer mind-wandering under low meta-awareness. Stimuli are fixed by the generative process, so mental action changes how strongly they update belief, not what they are; no likelihood is learned. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-958) in full, from the PubMed Central deposit of the journal version; worth reading as the active-inference model of mental action: attentional states set the precision of the perceptual likelihood, meta-awareness states set the precision of the attentional likelihood, and the agent selects ‘stay’ or ‘switch’ over its own attentional state against a preference to observe itself ‘focused’, reproducing the cycle of focus, mind-wandering and refocusing. Read it knowing that action is defined at the attentional level only; that the agent’s attentional state is modelled as a generative process the mental action acts on, so the loop is action and perception one level inward; that the perceptual observations are fixed in advance and mental action changes only their precision; that nothing is learned; and that the results are single illustrative simulations with no data fitted. |
| LIT-1192 v2 | Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness | Monti et al. (2010). Of 54 patients diagnosed vegetative (23) or minimally conscious (31), 5, all with traumatic injury, produced task-specific fMRI activity to motor and spatial imagery commands; 4 had been admitted as vegetative, and 2 of those showed no behavioural sign of awareness at the bedside even after the scans were known. Using one imagery for yes and the other for no, 16 controls answered 48 of 48 questions correctly, and one patient, 5 years after injury, answered 5 of 6 autobiographical questions correctly, scored blind, the sixth giving no signal. That patient showed inconsistent signs of a minimally conscious state on retesting but could not communicate at the bedside. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-964) in full, without the Supplementary Appendix. Worth reading as the study that made imagery-to-command a yes/no channel and found command-following in 5 of 54 patients diagnosed by behaviour. Read it knowing that only one patient was asked questions, that he showed inconsistent signs of a minimally conscious state on retesting, and that the two responders with no bedside behaviour were not asked questions. |
| LIT-1193 v2 | Le scaphandre et le papillon | Bauby (1997). A memoir of classic locked-in syndrome after a brainstem stroke, dictated letter by letter by blinking the left eyelid as Claude Mendibil, sent by the publisher, read out an alphabet ordered by French letter frequency that his speech therapist had devised. Published two days before Bauby’s death on 9 March 1997. English: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-16, not read; a lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-16 and none exists to reach: the book is in copyright (Bauby died in 1997) and sold, not given, by Robert Laffont (laffont.fr product page, ISBN 978-2-221-08172-3). Looked at: the publisher’s page (sale only); Open Library, whose one 1997 Laffont edition is an Internet Archive scan (lescaphandreetle0000baub) that is access-restricted, lending and print-disabled only, not usable here; HathiTrust (no record for ISBN 2-221-08172-2); Gallica and Google Books (refused or empty to this client; in copyright in any case). A publisher preview would not be a reading. Registered from the exchange of 2026-10-16 on active inference and locked-in syndrome (the workbench entry of 2026-10-16). No NOTE is filed. The publication date and the dictation method were checked against secondary sources (history, version 2). |
| LIT-1197 | A General Feedback Theory of Human Behavior: Part II | Powers, Clark & McFarland (1960), Part II. Names six orders of perceptual control (spinal loops; elementary sensations; configurations; sequences; relationships; system concepts), demonstrated by reaction times that lengthen with order (third order about 0.3 s, fourth 0.4–0.45 s). The inherited N-system “merely alters the properties of a system, thus changing the transformations applied to existing information”, which the authors take to be insight; consciousness is defined as the state of a feedback function the N-system is acting on. Conflict between higher systems freezes a lower one at a virtual reference level, and one escape is switching a system “entirely to the imagination-connection”. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-959) in full, from the authorized reprint in Living Control Systems (1989), pp. 25–45; worth reading as the second half of the first statement of perceptual control: six named orders of perception with tabletop demonstrations of their reaction times, the N-system (reorganization) worked out as the source of insight and of consciousness, and a theory of conflict in which switching a system “entirely to the imagination-connection” is one of the ego’s defences. Read it knowing that the orders are offered as the authors’ working definitions, the demonstrations are informal and the one experiment is “still in process”; that the N-system reshapes perception (“changing the transformations applied to existing information”) but is driven by intrinsic error, not by judgement; and that its intrinsic variables may include “mean error signal in the hierarchy”, an internal scoring channel. It bears on CLAIM-341, CLAIM-339 and QUESTION-121. |
| LIT-1198 v2 | The locked-in syndrome: what is it like to be conscious but paralyzed and voiceless? | Laureys et al. (2005). A review of locked-in syndrome: its definition, its classic, incomplete and total forms, and what is known of patients’ experience and cognition. Not read; from what the work is standardly cited for. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-16; on 2026-10-16 a search for a lawful full text reached none, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. ORBi, the University of Liège repository, holds the file (orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/9572, 433.pdf) but in restricted access: the bitstream link returns a request-a-copy form (“not currently available on open access”). The Coma Science Group’s publication page (coma.uliege.be) links only to that ORBi record. OpenAlex lists the work as closed with no repository full text; Unpaywall reports it closed; Europe PMC has no full text (PMID 16186044, not in PMC); ScienceDirect returned 403; the ULB DI-fusion record (dipot 2013/51666) offers no file; a web search found no author-posted copy. ORBi’s request form could deliver a copy to a named requester, which the owner can use. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1208 v3 | Binding and the Phenomenal Unity of Consciousness | Revonsuo (1999). Separates stimulus-related binding, any neural processing that represents a stimulus’s unity, conscious or not, from consciousness-related binding, the brain’s construction of phenomenally unified percepts, crediting the split to Smythies (1994); distinguishes phenomenal, neural and cognitive levels of the problem and five kinds of phenomenal binding; and argues from his own EEG study that 40-Hz synchrony accompanies the construction of a unified percept but is not the correlate of its content. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1406) in full, from the publisher’s typeset PDF posted on hedweb.com (https://www.hedweb.com/intelligence-explosion/binding.pdf); worth reading as a clear separation of stimulus-related binding, neural recovery of a stimulus’s unity whether or not anything is conscious, from consciousness-related binding, the construction of unified experience, with three levels of description and five kinds of phenomenal binding tied to the deficits that dissociate them. Read it knowing that it credits the main distinction to Smythies (1994), that its terms are not “functional” and “phenomenal”, and that its one empirical argument, on 40-Hz synchrony, is the author’s own EEG study of eight subjects. |
| LIT-1211 v2 | The phenomenal binding problem for neural networks | Percy & Agarwal (2026). A deliberately simple artificial neural network can implement functional binding but not phenomenal binding while keeping the distinctions between unconscious and conscious processing, which the authors use to structure the options for how phenomenal binding could be implemented. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful free copy exists and this client could not fetch it (2026-10-29). OpenAlex lists the article as hybrid open access under CC BY-NC-ND at the publisher, and Crossref gives the licence and the ScienceDirect PII S1053810026000115. The page https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810026000115 and its pdfft download returned HTTP 403 to curl and WebFetch, and Elsevier’s API needs a key. Europe PMC has the PubMed record (PMID 41637896) with no full text; no preprint was found. A browser fetch of the ScienceDirect copy is the cheapest way to read it. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1263 v2 | Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self | Seth (2013), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17(11):565–573, an Opinion article. Emotions are “interoceptive inference”: felt states are the content of hierarchical top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals, compared with bottom-up prediction errors in the anterior insula. Prediction errors are also cancelled by action, as descending predictions set the reference points of autonomic reflexes, the visceral counterpart of active inference in motor control. The same scheme is applied to the experience of body ownership. The rubber hand illusion is a revision of the multisensory self-model under precision-weighted error. Low interoceptive sensitivity goes with greater susceptibility to it, and a virtual hand pulsing in time with the heartbeat is owned more. No direct test of the model is claimed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1000); worth reading as the short statement that put emotion and body ownership under one predictive-coding mechanism: felt emotion is the content of top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals, the anterior insula is the comparator, and the experience of body ownership is what the brain infers to be “most likely to be me” from interoceptive and exteroceptive signals together. It is an opinion article with no new data. Its evidence is indirect and cited, and its one figure is a study by the author’s own group, an augmented-reality rubber hand illusion whose virtual hand flashed in or out of time with the heartbeat. The record’s bridge from its interoception cluster to body ownership. |
| LIT-1270 | Is the folk concept of pain polyeidic? | Borg, Harrison, Stazicker & Salomons (2019/2020), Mind & Language 35(1):29–47. Experimental philosophers (Sytsma, Reuter and others) argue that the folk think of pains as bodily, not mental, because lay participants deny pains privacy, subjectivity and incorrigibility. Borg et al. raise six objections. The samples are small and skewed; only acute pain was probed; asking whether pain is “in the mind” carries a pejorative implicature; means sit near neutral; denying Cartesian marks shows at most a non-Cartesian mental view; and the data support only a partly bodily concept. Pilot vignettes of their own (damage that never hurt) drew mind-centred answers (means 5.70 and 5.79 on a disagree-high scale). They propose that the folk concept of pain is “polyeidic”: an amalgam of dimensions (mental/bodily, public/private, conscious/unconscious, aversive, purposeful, motivational) on which people hold latent, framing-sensitive positions, with possible uses in clinical communication. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-994) from the “revise and resubmit” manuscript in Reading’s CentAUR repository; worth reading as the clearest statement of the case against the experimental philosophers’ “bodily view” of pain (Sytsma, Reuter and colleagues), and as a proposal that the folk concept is “polyeidic”: several dimensions, mental/bodily among them, along which judgements move with framing. Four of its six objections are methodological (samples, acute pain only, the loaded “in the mind” probe, means near neutral), and two are structural: the data fit a non-Cartesian mental view as well, and they show at most that the concept is in part bodily. Read it as argument, not data. Its own evidence is two pilot vignettes reported in a footnote, with means and no sample size, and the polyeidic view is a research programme without a test. It is folk-concept evidence and does not bear on the record’s rubber hand THEORYs. |
| LIT-1271 | Trait phenomenological control predicts experience of mirror synaesthesia and the rubber hand illusion | Lush, Botan, Scott, Seth, Ward & Dienes (2020), Nature Communications 11:4853. Trait hypnotisability (the Sussex-Waterloo Scale, SWASH), which the authors call phenomenological control, predicted vicarious pain (n = 404) and mirror touch (n = 154), and, in a rubber hand illusion study of 353, agreement with the ownership and location items after both synchronous and asynchronous brushing, a visual control item, and, weakly, synchronous proprioceptive drift. An attempt to manipulate expectations failed, so the evidence is correlational. The authors conclude that the usual asynchrony and control-item checks do not rule out suggestion, and that the illusion as commonly reported may be at least partly an implicit imaginative-suggestion effect. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-990), with its supplementary information and the peer review file; worth reading as the first large-sample test of whether the rubber hand illusion, as it is usually measured, tracks the trait that hypnosis scales measure. In 353 undergraduates, hypnotisability predicted agreement with the ownership items after synchronous brushing (about half a scale point per SWASH point, rs 0.26), and just as well after asynchronous brushing and for a visual “control” item; it predicted synchronous proprioceptive drift weakly (rs 0.11). In separate samples of 404 and 154 it predicted vicarious pain and mirror touch. The planned manipulation of expectations failed, so nothing here is causal, and the pre-registered test, hypnotisability against the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference, was inconclusive. Read it as strong evidence that the standard asynchrony and control-item checks do not control for suggestion, and as no evidence on whether the synchrony effect survives such a control. Seth, author of LIT-1263, is a co-author. |
| LIT-1274 v2 | Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood | Blanke & Metzinger (2009), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(1):7–13. An opinion piece proposing that research on bodily self-consciousness isolate minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), “the conscious experience of being a self”, defined by three dimensions: global self-identification with the body, spatiotemporal self-location, and a weak (geometrical) first-person perspective, claimed jointly necessary and sufficient. The rubber-hand illusion and somatoparaphrenia alter only partial ownership and so do not touch MPS; out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and the full-body illusions of Lenggenhager et al. and Ehrsson (2007) do. Agency is causally enabling for MPS but not constitutive of it. | Active — read 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1002) in full; worth reading as the short programmatic paper that names minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), the simplest form of the experience of being a self, and splits it into three dimensions: self-identification with the body as a whole, self-location, and a weak, purely geometrical first-person perspective. Its distinctive move is to set partial ownership (the rubber-hand illusion, somatoparaphrenia) apart from global ownership, and to say only the second reaches MPS, so that full-body illusions and neurological out-of-body phenomena, not the rubber hand, are the entry point. Its most quotable thesis is that bodily agency “is a causally enabling, but not a constitutive condition, for phenomenal selfhood”. An opinion piece: no new data, the evidence cited, and the necessity and sufficiency claims asserted. |
| LIT-1275 | What is embodiment? A psychometric approach | Longo, Schüür, Kammers, Tsakiris & Haggard (2008), Cognition 107:978–998. 131 participants rated 27 statements after synchronous and asynchronous brushing of a rubber hand. Principal components analysis gave four components in both conditions (embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, affect) and a fifth, deafference, after asynchrony only. A second analysis split embodiment into ownership, location and agency. Ownership and location were positive after synchronous brushing and negative after asynchronous; agency was negative after both. Drift toward the rubber hand was 1.34 cm after synchrony and a non-significant 0.30 cm after asynchrony, and ownership and location each predicted it. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1004) in full, from the published article on the first author’s lab site; worth reading as the first large-sample measurement of what the rubber hand illusion feels like, and as the study that split “embodiment” of a rubber hand into ownership, location and agency. 131 people rated 27 statements after 60 s of synchronous and of asynchronous brushing. A principal components analysis found four components in both conditions (embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, affect) and a fifth, deafference, only after asynchronous brushing. Ownership and location rose above neutral only after synchrony, agency stayed below it, and ownership and location each predicted proprioceptive drift. Read it knowing that the three subcomponents come from a second varimax rotation of ten items dominated by one component, that there is no control for expectation or suggestion, and that every item is about a hand, none about the whole body. |
| LIT-1276 | Demand Characteristics Confound the Rubber Hand Illusion | Lush (2020), Collabra: Psychology 6(1):22. A pre-registered quasi-experiment on the controls of the rubber hand illusion. Twenty undergraduates (after 12 pre-registered exclusions) who had never taken part in it were shown a text and a video of the procedure and rated how far they expected to feel each of Botvinick & Cohen’s three illusion and six control statements, under synchronous and asynchronous brushing. Expectancy was higher for illusion than control statements under synchrony (M 1.7 against 0.0, t(19) = 6.24, d = 1.40) and for synchronous than asynchronous illusion statements (1.7 against 0.4, t(19) = 4.68, d = 1.05), and nine who had never heard of the illusion showed the same. The controls therefore do not match expectations, and the author concludes the illusion “may be, partially or entirely, a suggestion effect”; he proposes controls matched on expectancy and on suggestion difficulty. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1005) from the author’s final manuscript on PsyArXiv; worth reading as the direct test of the assumption behind every standard check on the rubber hand illusion, that expectations are matched between the “illusion” and “control” statements and between synchronous and asynchronous brushing. Twenty people who never underwent the illusion read a description of it, watched a 62-second video and rated, for each of Botvinick & Cohen’s nine statements, how far they expected to feel it. They expected the illusion statements more than the control statements under synchrony (1.7 against 0.0, d = 1.40) and the illusion statements more under synchrony than asynchrony (1.7 against 0.4, d = 1.05): the pattern published reports show. Read it as showing that the usual controls cannot rule out suggestion, not as showing that the illusion is suggestion; the author says so. Small, pre-registered, sequential Bayesian stopping, one online sample of undergraduates, and no illusion or drift measured. |
| LIT-1277 v4 | Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see | Botvinick & Cohen (1998), Nature 391:756. Ten subjects watched a rubber left hand being brushed in synchrony with their own hidden left hand. After ten minutes they affirmed feeling the touch where they saw the rubber hand touched, that the touch was caused by the brush on the rubber hand, and that the rubber hand was theirs. After a 30-minute exposure, blind reaches toward the real hand were displaced toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion was reported, and an asynchronously brushed control group reported the illusion for 7% of the time against 42% and showed no drift toward it. The authors conclude that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”. | Active — read 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1006) in full; worth reading as the one-page report that founded the rubber hand illusion paradigm: synchronous brushing of a seen rubber hand and the hidden real hand makes touch be felt where the rubber hand is touched and the rubber hand be felt as one’s own, and after 30 minutes the felt position of the real hand drifts toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion lasted, while asynchronous brushing abolishes both. Read it as a brief communication: ten subjects, no stated control-group size, statistics given only as P-values, and a connectionist model and a premotor-cell analogy mentioned but not shown. Its closing claim, that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”, is the sentence the later literature on body ownership builds on. |
| LIT-1278 | Putting pain in its proper place | Reuter, Sienhold & Sytsma (2018/2019), Analysis 79(1):72–82. Block’s argument “the pain is in my fingertip; the fingertip is in my mouth; therefore the pain is in my mouth” seems to fail. Tye says “pain” creates an intensional context; Noordhof says the first “in” is not spatial. The authors say the conclusion carries a misleading implicature that something is wrong with the mouth. Online participants rejected the conclusion for pain (mean 2.43 of 7), tissue damage (2.53) and inflammation (2.86) and accepted it for a paper-clip (6.10); across fourteen items, acceptance tracked rated misleadingness (R² 0.897 over item means); and “technically speaking” wording raised agreement for every item (η² .17). The authors conclude that the data favour a bodily conception of pain. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1007) from the authors’ accepted manuscript; worth reading as a short, clean piece of experimental philosophy on how ordinary people read “the pain is in my fingertip”. In three online studies (174, 70 + 560 and 244 participants) people rejected “the pain is in my mouth” after “the pain is in my fingertip; the fingertip is in my mouth” about as much as they rejected the same inference for tissue damage and inflammation, and accepted it for a paper-clip; acceptance across fourteen items tracked how misleading the conclusion was rated, and a “technically speaking” rewording raised it. The authors read this as a pragmatic implicature, not an intensional context (Tye) or a non-spatial “in” (Noordhof), and close that “pain is a state of the body, not of the mind”. Read the closing claim as a conditional the data support only in part: they show that “pain” patterns with bodily terms in one inference, not what pain is, and the rewording lifted pain only to the midpoint. It is folk-concept evidence and does not bear on the record’s rubber hand THEORYs. |
| LIT-1279 v2 | Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness | Lenggenhager, Tadi, Metzinger & Blanke (2007), Science 317:1096–1099. A whole-body rubber hand illusion in video virtual reality. Participants saw their own back, filmed from 2 m behind, as a body standing in front of them, stroked in or out of time with strokes on their real back. Under synchronous stroking they rated the seen body as theirs and, after blindfolded displacement, returned to a point shifted toward it (24.1 cm in study I, n = 14). In study II (n = 14) a mannequin gave the same, and a non-bodily object a weaker, non-significant drift with no self-identification. Nobody reported disembodiment or a shifted viewpoint. The authors conclude that self-location and the global ownership they tie to selfhood rest partly on the same visuo-tactile integration as body-part ownership, constrained by knowledge of what a body looks like. | Active — read in full 2026-10-19 (NOTE-999), with its supporting online material and the 2008 e-letter exchange; worth reading as the first full-body version of the rubber hand illusion and the experiment the self-model theory cites for global body ownership. Two groups of 14 people saw, through a head-mounted display, a video of a body 2 m in front of them being stroked on the back. When the stroking was synchronous with strokes on their own back, they rated the seen body as theirs and, displaced blindfolded, walked back to a spot about 17 to 25 cm toward it. A mannequin worked; a rectangular object weakened the drift and was not felt as one’s body. Nobody reported leaving the body or seeing from elsewhere, so the authors call it heautoscopy-like, not an out-of-body experience. Read it as two small samples with modest, partly inconsistent effects, and with a rival reading (self-recognition in a video system) that its critics raised and its design does not exclude. |
| LIT-1284 | Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function | Chalmers and McQueen (2021, in Gao ed., Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics, OUP 2022), arXiv:2105.02314. Develops the thesis that consciousness collapses the wave function by taking consciousness to be super-resistant to superposition, measuring it with integrated information theory, and giving it a continuous-collapse dynamics. Simple versions are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect; more complex ones are in principle testable with quantum computers. On a property-dualist reading a consciousness-to-physics law gives consciousness a causal role, and the authors argue that collapse is the causal-closure gap that philosophers’ closure arguments assume is absent. | Active — read in part 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1012); worth reading as the most developed consciousness-collapse proposal and as the source that frames quantum collapse as the gap in causal closure that a property-dualist consciousness could fill: consciousness (phenomenal Q-shape in integrated information theory) is super-resistant to superposition and drives a continuous-collapse dynamics, simple versions are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect, and more complex versions are in principle testable with quantum computers. |
| LIT-1344 v2 | Neurophenomenal structuralism. A philosophical agenda for a structuralist neuroscience of consciousness | Lyre (2022), Neuroscience of Consciousness niac012. A programmatic paper. Only relational properties cross the neural/non-neural boundary, and spatiotemporal relations, by acquaintance, answer the Newman problem for the brain. Two assumptions: any phenomenal experience is fully individuated, in its specificity, by its place in a quality space (Q-structure); and Q-structure is mirrored by a surjective homomorphism from neural feature maps. With metaphysically necessary supervenience assumed, it argues for reductive physicalism, an instrumentalist structural representationalism, holism about experience (dichromats experience every colour differently) and the actual and nomological impossibility of spectrum inversion. It concerns specific, not generic, consciousness, and denies being a structural realism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1060) from the version of record deposited in PubMed Central (PMC9396309, JATS full text via Europe PMC; the OUP PDF returned 403); worth reading as the most explicit statement of phenomenal structuralism as an ontology: each specific phenomenal character is fully individuated by its place in a quality space, that space is mirrored by a surjective homomorphism from neural feature maps, and holism and the impossibility of nomological spectrum inversion follow. It is the statement Negro and Aldé quote as their target. It is programmatic: nothing is tested, the neural half rests on one cited V4 study, it addresses only which experience a conscious state is and not whether it is conscious, and its reduction rests on metaphysically necessary supervenience that the author says he cannot argue for. |
| LIT-1345 v2 | Integrated World Modeling Theory (IWMT) and the Human Consciousness Hypothesis (HCH) | Safron, Klimaj & Sheikhbahaee (2026). Compares the Human Consciousness Hypothesis (genesis, coherence, second-order perception) with Integrated World Modeling Theory, on which phenomenal consciousness is what it feels like to be the coherent functioning of an embodied agent’s probabilistic generative world model, implemented by synchronous neural complexes that infer the states of the embodied sensorium. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1057) from the publisher’s PDF on AAAI’s open journal system; worth reading as a compact current statement of Integrated World Modeling Theory: phenomenal consciousness is the coherent functioning of an embodied agent’s generative world model, run coupled to sense data in perception or decoupled in imagination, and embodied grounding is necessary, so integrated information or a global workspace without it does not suffice. Its main limit is that it argues nothing: a seven-page symposium paper that restates earlier IWMT papers, not read, and aligns them with a Human Consciousness Hypothesis it does not reference. Embodiment is required in “sufficient degrees (and kinds)” with no threshold. |
| LIT-1346 v2 | Three arguments against metaphysical structuralism in consciousness research | Negro (2025), Synthese 206:8. Distinguishes methodological, epistemological and metaphysical structuralism in consciousness science, and three senses in which consciousness may be structural: an experience has an internal structure, is in a structure, or is the structure. Against the third, which metaphysical structuralism needs (Lyre 2022 is the quoted target), it gives three valid arguments: Relational Mary, who knows all of orange’s relations and still learns what orange is like; the novel experience argument, that the view makes every new experience change all the others; and the lonely experience argument, that a one-experience system is conceivable and even nomologically possible. Methodological and epistemological structuralism need only the first two senses and are left standing. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1054) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (Springer, CC BY 4.0); worth reading as the clearest map of what phenomenal structuralism can and cannot claim: three structuralisms (methodological, epistemological, metaphysical) and three senses of “structural” (having, being in, and being a structure), with the argument that the field’s methods and evidence need only the first two senses. Its three arguments against the metaphysical thesis (Relational Mary, novel experience, lonely experience) are valid, but each rests on an intuition or a conceivability premise that a committed structuralist denies, and its charge that making judgement constitutive amounts to eliminativism is one paragraph long. |
| LIT-1347 v2 | Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models | Gurnee, Sofroniew et al. (2026), Anthropic, Transformer Circuits Thread; arXiv:2607.15495. A Jacobian lens, the Jacobian from a layer to the output averaged over a corpus, gives each vocabulary token a direction per layer; sparse combinations of them form the “J-space”. In Claude Sonnet 4.5, Haiku 4.5, Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6, swaps, injections and ablations show the J-space part of a representation, under a tenth of its variance, carrying verbal report, instructed concepts, two-hop intermediates and reuse of an argument by many functions, while continuation, anomaly detection and line wrapping use the same information without it. The J-space works in a middle band of layers, holds about 25 active directions, and is amplified and relayed by the weights. Ablating it flattens experiential language about the model and about others. Further sections apply it to alignment audits, show post-training installing the Assistant’s point of view, and introduce counterfactual reflection training. The authors take no position on phenomenal consciousness. | Active — read 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1069), main text in full and appendices in part, from the arXiv v1 PDF; worth reading as the first interventional evidence that a language model has a functional analogue of conscious access in the access sense: a sparse set of verbalizable directions, found by a corpus-averaged Jacobian lens, carries report, held concepts, unspoken reasoning steps and reuse of one argument by many functions, while routine processing uses the same information without it; and ablating it flattens experiential language about the self and about others alike. Read it knowing its limits: one company’s models studied by that company, unreplicated; a lens whose own statistics draw the layer band; an automatic/flexible split partly defined by the result; experiential language graded by another model; and an explicit refusal to say anything about phenomenal consciousness. Filed as THEORY-865 and THEORY-869. |
| LIT-1348 v2 | Two geometrical arguments against similarity structuralism | Aldé (2026), Synthese 207:204. Similarity structuralism holds that phenomenal character is fully determined by similarity relations, so by the geometry of a similarity space. Two arguments that this fails for colour. The unique hues objection: exactly four hues are experienced as unmixed and all others as combinations of two, but no geometric property of CIELAB, or likely of better uniform spaces or of the colours they omit, distinguishes them. The opposing dimensions objection: the black–white axis is a single gradient, while axes through grey are two half-gradients, and no adequate geometric feature marks the difference. Structuralism cannot discount the introspective evidence without discounting the introspected similarity it is built on. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1055) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (Springer, CC BY 4.0); worth reading as the objection to similarity structuralism that does not rest on intuition: it takes accepted facts of colour science, that exactly four hues look unmixed and every other hue a mixture of two, and that the black–white axis is a single gradient where the axes through grey are opponent pairs, and argues that no adequate feature of the colour similarity space’s geometry marks either. Its decisive premise is argued by inspecting CIELAB and extrapolating to better models, not by an analysis, and its target is similarity structuralism about colour only. |
| LIT-1349 v2 | Report-modulated prefrontal activity and consistent posterior representations during conscious visual perception | He, Zhang, Wang, Meng, Jiang, Xu, Wu, Sheng, Ye & Ding (2026). With report and no-report visual masking and MEG, posterior sensory regions encoded stimulus presence and category whether or not report was required, with stronger alpha-band recurrent coupling for visible stimuli, while prefrontal activity and fronto-posterior connectivity appeared only under report. The authors read this as favouring posterior accounts of phenomenal consciousness. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-22, no lawful full text reached; it failed on availability. The article is a subscription article in Consciousness and Cognition: Unpaywall reports it closed with no open-access location, OpenAlex lists only the publisher and PubMed, Europe PMC marks it “Subscription required” and it is not in PMC, and Semantic Scholar has no open PDF. No preprint was found on searching Europe PMC’s preprint index and OSF preprints by title, or Semantic Scholar by title. The publisher’s page (ScienceDirect, PII S1053810026000838) returned 403 to this client. Only the PubMed abstract was read, and the summary agrees with it. No NOTE is filed. A copy from the owner, or from one of the two authors whose addresses PubMed gives (Zheng Ye, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Xiaobin Ding, Northwest Normal University), would return it to reading. |
| LIT-1350 v2 | The explanatory ground of the brainbound view of consciousness: A reply to enactive embodied externalism | Villalobos & Cea (2026). Unread and unchecked: from the title and the exchange’s description only. A reply to enactive embodied externalism: the physiological implausibility of a disembodied brain does not defeat brain-centred explanation of consciousness, because the neuroscientific strategy is contrastive. Villalobos’s 2023 seminar abstract on the same topic argues that brain-bound internalism does not depend on brain and body being separable. | Unavailable — no copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on availability. Unpaywall and OpenAlex record the article as closed, with no repository copy; Springer’s PDF and article page returned a bot challenge to this client; a web search, PhilPapers and PhilArchive (both 403 to this client) found no preprint or author copy. Not read, so the summary still follows the title and the exchange’s description and is unchecked. The nearest text found is the abstract of a 2023 seminar by Villalobos, “The enactive challenge to traditional neuroscience of consciousness: A critical review” (ArgLab, Lisbon, 29 May 2023), which argues that the enactive argument from the physiological inseparability of brain and body fails because the internalism of traditional neuroscience does not depend on that separability. It is not the article. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-21, “Experience and interpretation”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1351 v2 | Evidence synthesis indicates contentless experiences in meditation are neither truly contentless nor identical | Woods, Windt & Carter (2022). An evidence synthesis of 135 texts by eight teachers of Shamatha (Wallace), Transcendental and Stillness Meditation identifies 65 features of the so-called contentless goal-states. The states are described as lacking thoughts, concepts, perceptions, images and memories but keeping wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, knowing, freedom and unity. They are the same across practices on 14 features, different on 4 (chiefly Shamatha’s attentional stability and vividness) and unclear on 47. So, on the texts, most are not truly contentless, and they are not identical. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1070) from the submitted preprint on MindRxiv (osf.io/ve7z2); worth reading as the systematic case that meditative states called contentless are described by their own teachers as lacking thoughts, perceptions, images and memories but keeping wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, a non-conceptual knowing, freedom and unity, and as differing across Shamatha, TM and Stillness Meditation, chiefly in Shamatha’s far greater attentional stability and vividness. 135 texts by eight teachers, 65 features: the same on 14, different on 4, unclear on 47. Its main limit is that the evidence is teachers’ descriptions, not practitioners’ reports, and that “not truly contentless” rests on counting qualities such as calm and simplicity as content, which the paper does not define. |
| LIT-1352 v2 | Towards a Mathematical Structure of Global Phenomenal Consciousness | Lee-Youngzie, Tsuchiya, Robinson, Dietz & Monti (2026), Entropy 28(6):615, a hypothesis article. Intra-phenomenal structures model the parts of one experience, and inter-phenomenal structures place an experience among others by similarity judgements. A presheaf maps each part, in a finite topology of parts, to the dissimilarity matrix measured for it. Agreement of narrow qualia on an overlap is read as phenomenal binding, and the presheaf’s being a sheaf as the broad quale’s being fixed by its parts. Worked for a two-hemifield visual field. A sheaf failure is read as disunity for binocular rivalry and as context dependence for the Ebbinghaus illusion. No data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1059) from the version of record in PubMed Central (PMC13298370, CC BY 4.0, via the Europe PMC full-text XML); worth reading as the first worked proposal to join intra-phenomenal (part–whole) and inter-phenomenal (similarity) qualia structures by a presheaf, with phenomenal binding read as agreement of measured narrow qualia on overlaps and a sheaf as a broad quale fixed by its parts. It is a hypothesis article with no data. It does not identify unity with a global section: it assumes unity always holds, and it reads a sheaf failure as disunity for binocular rivalry and as context dependence for the Ebbinghaus illusion without a criterion between them. Its worked topology example is malformed, and by its own definition of gluing the rivalry case is not a sheaf failure. |
| LIT-1354 v2 | Distilling the Neurophenomenological Signatures of Pure Awareness during Transcendental Meditation | Chandia-Jorquera, van Mil, Estarellas, Dauphin, Pascovich & Canales-Johnson (2026). EEG with retrospective temporal experience tracing in 33 experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners and 33 sex- and age-matched controls who counted. Practitioners traced higher and more variable “pure awareness” (d = 0.77 and 1.32). A random-forest classifier on distributed EEG patterns separated meditation from counting at 65% balanced accuracy, led by permutation entropy and aperiodic activity, and meditation from rest at 88% sensitivity, led by low-frequency phase coherence. No robust association between the reports and the EEG was found. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1058) from the bioRxiv preprint, version 3; worth reading as the largest EEG study of Transcendental Meditation with time-resolved reports: 33 practitioners traced more, and more variable, “pure awareness” than 33 matched controls who counted, and a classifier on distributed EEG patterns separated meditation from counting (65% balanced accuracy, on entropy and aperiodic activity) and from rest (88% sensitivity, on low-frequency phase coherence). Its main limit is that the reports were not shown to track any EEG feature. The reports are retrospective ratings on a scale whose top the experimenters defined as “free from content”, demand is conceded only for controls, and the study was funded by, and recruited through, the TM organisation. Evidence about a practice period and about reports, not a neural signature of experience with little content. |
| LIT-1355 v2 | Representational Theories of Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) | Lycan (2000; rev. 2023), SEP. Strong representationalism holds that a sensory quality, such as the green of an after-image, is a represented property of a represented, possibly nonactual object, and that representation of a functionally specified sensory kind suffices for it; pure representationalism, on which representation alone suffices, is held by no one. The entry gives five arguments for (materialism, veridicality, transparency, seeming, hallucination) and the objections: unconscious representation, phenomenal intentionality, laws of appearance, moods, aspect perception, blur and inversions. It leaves wide against narrow qualities open. “What it’s like” is treated separately as a higher-order property that needs awareness, with the phenomenal concept strategy and illusionism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1068) from the live entry, substantive revision of 19 October 2023; worth reading as the map of representational theories of sensory qualities: pure, strong and weak, wide and narrow, reductive and not, the five arguments for, and the counterexamples case by case, with “what it’s like” kept apart as a higher-order property that needs awareness. Read it knowing that its author is one of the three named defenders of strong wide representationalism and that his replies get the most room, that it leaves wide against narrow open, and that it is a theory of what is experienced, not of what makes a state experienced, which it hands to the higher-order entry. |
| LIT-1357 v2 | Convergent transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its anaesthetic breakdown across mammalian brains | Luppi et al. (2026), Nature Human Behaviour 10(4):777–802. Revised integrated information ΦR, computed pairwise from resting-state fMRI by integrated information decomposition and averaged over region pairs, falls under anaesthesia in humans (sevoflurane, n = 15), macaques, marmosets and mice, with medetomidine–isoflurane in the mouse the exception in the main analysis. It returns on spontaneous recovery in humans, and when central thalamic stimulation restores arousal in two propofol-anaesthetized macaques. Network control energy rises under anaesthesia and correlates negatively with ΦR. Regional ΦR loss is largest in unimodal cortex and follows cortical PVALB expression in human, macaque and mouse. Species-specific mean-field models reproduce the PVALB effect and the advantage of central over ventrolateral thalamic stimulation. The target is behavioural responsiveness. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1064) from the publisher’s open-access version of record (CC BY 4.0); worth reading as the cross-species, causal extension of the same group’s synergistic-workspace result (LIT-949): pairwise integrated information ΦR from resting fMRI falls under anaesthesia in humans, macaques, marmosets and mice and returns with responsiveness, including when central thalamic stimulation re-awakens two anaesthetized macaques, and it tracks arousal better than the original Φ, causal density or functional connectivity. Its main limit is the target: behavioural responsiveness, which the authors call “presumably consciousness” and an “imperfect marker”. It is also pairwise, linear-Gaussian, at rest and content-free, and the causal arm rests on two animals. The PVALB and modelling results are correlational and model-bound. Filed as THEORY-881. |
| LIT-1358 v2 | Illusionism Big and Small: Some Options for Explaining Consciousness | Graziano (2024), eNeuro 11(10). A claim to be conscious requires an internal model encoding it, and brain models are schematic, so what is reported is a caricature of whatever the model tracks. Six hypotheses for that target: a magical essence (rejected, for lacking “Arrow B”, a route from feeling to encoding), nothing (hard illusionism, judged improbable), integrated information (illusionist IIT), the global workspace modelling itself, attention modelled by an attention schema, and “deep illusionism”, the deep selective processing the last three share. No new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1071) from the publisher’s PDF (eNeuro, CC BY 4.0); worth reading as the shortest statement of the attention schema theory as an illusionist framework. Its argument: every claim to be conscious needs an internal model, every model is schematic, so the reported “intangible essence” is a caricature of a real process. It adds “Arrow B”, the demand that a theory explain how a feeling gets encoded for report, and it sets IIT and the global workspace as illusionist variants converging on “deep selective processing”. An essay with no new data and a polemical tone. Its “small” illusionism keeps the process real but still denies the phenomenal essence, so it is Frankish’s strong illusionism with a named target, not a weak illusionism. |
| LIT-1361 v3 | Phenomenal structure: What is it and what is it for? | Isaac (2025). Sets out a structuralist science of phenomenal experience: experience has geometric structure (quality spaces), group-theoretic structure (perceptual constancies, which induce a distinction between subject and object) and dynamical structure (valence and affordance). Its method is to find structure-preserving maps between these and neural and physical structures, made testable because structural relations between experiences show up in behaviour, and evidenced chiefly by convergence between models built from different behavioural procedures, which it concedes is partial. | Active — read in full 2026-10-25 (NOTE-1163) from the publisher’s gold open-access PDF (version of record, CC BY), which the publisher’s site served on 2026-10-25 after refusing every request on 2026-10-22; worth reading as a structuralist programme that, unlike Lyre’s (LIT-1344), denies that quality-space geometry is enough: it adds constancy as invariance under transformations within experience, which after Cassirer it takes to make experience objective and to separate subject from object (THEORY-959), and fields of valence and affordance; and for its account of how a third-personal science reaches experience, chiefly by convergence between models built from different behavioural procedures (THEORY-953). Read it knowing that it is programmatic and tests nothing, that the author calls the group-theoretic and dynamic layers “mere suggestive sketches”, that “group-theoretic” is used for invariance in general (its own examples are groupoids or toy models), that it gives no criterion separating a subject–object distinction from mere invariant extraction, that the convergence it cites is coarse and its argument does not exclude a shared stimulus geometry as the common factor, and that, like Lyre, it addresses the character of experience, not whether a state is conscious. |
| LIT-1362 v2 | Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) | Carruthers & Gennaro (2001; rev. 2026), SEP. Most kinds of mental state also occur unconsciously (blindsight, absent-minded driving, the agnosic D.F.), and higher-order theories say a state is phenomenally conscious when it is, or is disposed to be, the object of a suitable non-inferential higher-order representation. The entry sets out inner sense, actualist higher-order thought (Rosenthal), dispositionalist dual-content theory (Carruthers) and self-representational and hybrid views (Kriegel, Gennaro, Van Gulick, Picciuto). It gives the objections (targetless representations, the rock, animals and infants, sufficiency, depersonalization) and the evidence and counter-evidence that prefrontal cortex realizes the higher-order states, and concludes no verdict. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1066) from the live entry, substantive revision of 9 January 2026; worth reading as the map of higher-order theories, which explain what makes a mental state conscious rather than unconscious by a higher-order representation of it: inner sense, actualist and dispositionalist higher-order thought, self-representational and hybrid views, the standing objections (targetless states, the rock, animals and infants, sufficiency) and the prefrontal evidence. Read it knowing that it argues for no verdict, that it is maintained by Gennaro, a higher-order theorist, while Carruthers and Lycan are reported to have given up their versions, and that its empirical section reports results to about 2023 and not the 2025 adversarial-collaboration findings. |
| LIT-1363 v2 | A beautiful loop: An active inference theory of consciousness | Laukkonen, Friston & Chandaria (2025). Active inference can model consciousness under three conditions: a simulated world model (an epistemic field), inferential competition to enter it (Bayesian binding), and epistemic depth, the recurrent sharing of beliefs by which the world model contains the knowledge that it exists. A hyper-model for precision control is proposed to implement them, and the account is applied to altered states and meditation. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1063) from the PsyArXiv preprint, version 3 (June 2025); worth reading as the most explicit proposal that what makes inference conscious is recursion over precision: a unified world model, a coherence-driven competition to enter it, and epistemic depth, the model looped back through the hierarchy by a hyper-model that predicts precision at every level, with awareness graded by that depth and not by content. It is the record’s best-stated recursive candidate for QUESTION-254. Its main limit is that it is conceptual: no data, no simulation, a formal part (Table 1) that is a standard hierarchy with layer-wise precision hyper-parameters, and a definition of epistemic depth in terms of awareness. A footnote withdraws the claim that meeting the conditions guarantees phenomenal experience. |
| LIT-1364 v2 | On the minimal theory of consciousness implicit in active inference | Whyte, Corcoran, Robinson, Smith, Moran, Parr, Friston, Seth & Hohwy (2026). Reviewing active inference models of consciousness, it argues that they share a small set of theoretical commitments, which together amount to a minimal and testable theory of consciousness; since all the models minimise the same objective, decomposable into interpretable terms, it can compare phenomena that separate theories treat apart. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1062) from arXiv:2410.06633v2, the submitted version; worth reading as the clearest statement of the theory of consciousness that active inference models already assume: conscious contents are posterior beliefs about world, body or brain, and a posterior is conscious when it has the capacity to inform discrete, counterfactual policy selection, slowly and precisely enough. It also reviews the simulations of rivalry, access, no-report, interoception, valence and meta-awareness, and names two predictions close to its core. Its main limit is scope: the criterion is one of conscious access, read off models built to report, and the authors hold it only for humans and similar animals. A review with three small simulations of its own; neither prediction is tested. |
| LIT-1368 v2 | Prominent and persistent loss of past awareness in amnesia: Delusion, impaired consciousness or coping strategy? | Wilson, Kopelman and Kapur (2008). On Clive Wearing’s repeated claims, in his diary and in speech, that he has just become conscious for the first time, and his denial of earlier awareness when shown evidence of it; the paper weighs whether this is delusion, impaired consciousness or a coping strategy. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on availability, as far as could be told. The article is closed: Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy and no repository full text. OpenAlex lists two repository records: King’s College London’s Pure page (abstract only, no file) and the University of Southampton’s ePrints record 55417, which could not be opened past its bot check, so whether it holds a file is unknown. The MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit record has no file. The abstract, read from the King’s College record, confirms the summary. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1450 | Pain experience in hermit crabs? | Elwood & Appel (2009), Animal Behaviour 77(5):1243–1246. Hermit crabs given small shocks inside their shells. Only shocked crabs evacuated, and fewer did so from a preferred shell species, which the authors read as a motivational trade-off. Crabs that stayed were later quicker to take a new shell. “The results are consistent with the idea of pain in these animals.” Unread beyond the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read beyond the abstract: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex lists it as closed; Queen’s University Belfast’s research portal has the record and abstract but no file; the Elsevier article is paywalled; a web search found no author or course posting. Filed because it is one of the two hermit-crab trade-off studies usually cited for the criterion THEORY-101’s promotion names, an animal accepting a noxious cost for a resource, and the bumblebee study (LIT-1466) cites it as such. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1452 | Conscious emotional experience emerges as a function of multilevel, appraisal-driven response synchronization | Grandjean, Sander & Scherer (2008), Consciousness and Cognition 17(2):484–495. Componential appraisal models explain feelings better than basic-emotion or dimensional models. Appraisal runs in parallel at sensory-motor, schematic and conceptual levels and stops at the first conclusive result. Consciousness of an emotion emerges when lower levels cannot cope, especially when component synchronization reaches a critical level and duration, so that conscious, representational regulation is required. Conscious feeling needs, besides component synchronization, local and distant neuronal synchronization that integrates the components’ representations. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1115): in full, from the copy the authors’ laboratory (the Geneva E3 Lab) posts on its publications page. Worth reading as the component process model’s fullest account of when emotion becomes conscious. Appraisal runs in parallel at several levels and stops when a lower level reaches a conclusive result. Consciousness is recruited when it does not: when component synchronization reaches a critical level and duration that cannot be regulated automatically, so that higher-level regulation, which needs explicit representations, must take over. The feeling is a central representation built by neuronal synchronization, local and distant. Its measures are EEG gamma and beta activity in felt versus unfelt episodes, and phase coherence between brain regions. It partly rivals and partly supports the record’s self-model condition for felt valence (CLAIM-439). |
| LIT-1459 | Pleasure systems in the brain | Berridge & Kringelbach (2015), Neuron 86(3):646–664. Reward is three separable components: ‘liking’ (hedonic impact), ‘wanting’ (incentive salience) and learning. ‘Liking’ can be measured without report, by orofacial taste reactivity, which is homologous from rats to human infants. It is generated by cubic-millimetre opioid and endocannabinoid hotspots in nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum and perhaps cortex and pons. Mesolimbic dopamine and most “pleasure electrodes” raise ‘wanting’ without raising ‘liking’. Incentive sensitization makes an addict want a drug that has become less pleasant. Objective ‘liking’ can occur without any felt pleasure. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1110): in full, from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC4425246, NIHMS664561). A review of the affective neuroscience of pleasure. Reward splits into ‘liking’ (hedonic impact), ‘wanting’ (incentive salience) and learning, with separable mechanisms. ‘Liking’ is measured without report by taste reactivity, which is homologous across rats, apes and newborn humans. It is generated by small opioid and endocannabinoid hotspots. Mesolimbic dopamine and most “pleasure electrodes” raise ‘wanting’ without raising ‘liking’. Objective ‘liking’ can occur without felt pleasure. Filed for the record’s account of valence as potential (CLAIM-440), which wanting-without-liking puts under pressure. |
| LIT-1466 | Motivational trade-offs and modulation of nociception in bumblebees | Gibbons, Versace, Crump, Baran & Chittka (2022), PNAS 119(31). Bumblebees chose between two 40% sucrose feeders, heated to 55 °C in the test phase, and two unheated alternatives of 10–40%. They avoided the heated feeders when the alternatives were also rich and fed from them more as the alternatives got poorer, guided by learned colour cues. The authors read this as a centrally mediated motivational trade-off, consistent with a capacity for pain. Corrected in 2025 for a misreported model. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1114): in full, from the published version (CC BY 4.0) in LSE Research Online, with the 2025 correction and the authors’ deposited data. Worth reading as the cleanest published motivational trade-off in an insect. Bees chose between heated (55 °C) and unheated feeders. They took the heated, high-sucrose feeders less as the unheated alternative got sweeter, and more steeply than when nothing was heated. The trade-off relied on learned colour cues, so it is central. At this one cost the data are graded, not thresholded, and the design varies only the resource, so it cannot show a threshold in cost. |
| LIT-1468 | Deeply Felt Affect: The Emergence of Valence in Deep Active Inference | Hesp, Smith, Parr, Allen, Friston & Ramstead (2021), Neural Computation 33(2):398–446. Valence is a state of self, inferred at a hierarchically deeper level from changes in the expected precision γ of one’s action model, which weights preference-driven expected free energy against a habitual prior in policy selection. The update to γ, affective charge, is positive when outcomes raise confidence in the action model and negative when they lower it. The valence level sends priors on γ back down. A simulated rat in a T-maze with context reversal infers negative and then positive valence, and adapts better than an agent without that level. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1111): in full, from the publisher’s CC BY PDF as deposited in Aarhus University’s repository (pure.au.dk), checked against the University of Amsterdam deposit. A deep active-inference model of valence. A precision term γ sets how far the agent’s preference-driven action model, rather than a habitual prior, governs policy selection. Its update, “affective charge”, is positive when outcomes raise confidence in the action model and negative when they lower it. A second, slower level infers a binary valence state from affective charge and sends priors on γ back down. Simulated in a T-maze with reversal, the agent with the valence level adapts faster than one without it. “Felt” means explicitly represented, which the authors take as necessary for self-reportable experience of valence. Filed for the record’s candidate that a valence regime is felt when the system models its own potential (CLAIM-440). |
| LIT-1470 | Motivational trade-offs and potential pain experience in hermit crabs | Appel & Elwood (2009), Applied Animal Behaviour Science 119:120–124. Hermit crabs in preferred or less preferred shell species were given shocks “of gradually increasing intensity”. The first observable response did not depend on the shell, but crabs in preferred shells evacuated at a higher shock level. The authors read this as a trade-off between keeping a good shell and avoiding the noxious stimulus, consistent with pain rather than a nociceptive reflex. Unread beyond the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read beyond the abstract: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex lists it as closed; Queen’s University Belfast’s research portal has the record and abstract but no file; the Elsevier article is paywalled. Filed with its companion (LIT-1450) because it is the hermit-crab study that varies the cost: shock rising until the crab leaves its shell, in preferred and less preferred shells. That is the nearest published design to the test CLAIM-435 proposes. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1835 | Binding and Consciousness | Revonsuo & Newman (1999), Consciousness and Cognition 8, 123–127. The editors’ introduction to the journal’s special issue on binding and consciousness, in which Revonsuo’s “Binding and the Phenomenal Unity of Consciousness” (LIT-1208) and Engel et al.’s temporal-binding paper appear. Not read: whether it states a functional/phenomenal distinction is the open question it is filed for. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-29, not read. A lawful free copy is located at an exact address: the Santa Fe Institute wiki, https://wiki.santafe.edu/images/8/8d/Revonsuo_and_Newman_1999_-_Binding_and_Consciousness.pdf, a scholarly third-party copy of the kind the owner’s ruling of 2026-10-29 counts. On 2026-10-29 the connection to that host was reset for curl (three attempts, and for the wiki’s root page too) and WebFetch got a 503, as on the earlier attempt recorded in NOTE-1406’s history. The failure is on access, not availability. OpenAlex reports the work closed with no repository copy; the publisher’s page (Academic Press, now Elsevier) is paid. A browser fetch of the wiki copy is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1871 | Why are dreams interesting for philosophers? The example of minimal phenomenal selfhood, plus an agenda for future research | Metzinger (2013), Frontiers in Psychology 4:746. Minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), defined by Blanke and Metzinger (2009) as global identification with the body, self-location and a weak first-person perspective, may reduce to transparent spatiotemporal self-location: reports of bodiless dreams and asomatic out-of-body experiences describe a stable self located at an extensionless point, with no body. The paper proposes a phenomenal “unit of identification”, an “epistemic agent model” for the knowing self, and a research agenda for dream science, including the test case of phenomenally opaque self-location. No new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1434), from the publisher’s open-access PDF (frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00746/pdf; also PMC3813926), text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading as Metzinger’s own later statement of minimal phenomenal selfhood: he proposes reducing it to “transparent self-location in a spatiotemporal frame of reference”, on the evidence of bodiless dreams and asomatic out-of-body reports, and names, as an open research question, whether any case of phenomenally opaque self-location exists. It is a metatheoretical agenda: it reports survey figures from others and offers no new data, and the decisive case it asks for is not reported. |
| LIT-1942 | The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy | Metzinger (2013). Mind-wandering is a recurring, unnoticed loss of M-autonomy, the ability to control one’s own mental processes, whose defining component is veto: that every ongoing process could be suspended or ended, and that the person knows it. Conscious thought is for the most part subpersonal mental behaviour; it becomes personal-level only when integrated into an “epistemic agent model” (EAM), a transparent self-model of oneself as a knowing, attention-controlling self, which collapses at the onset of each episode. Proposes the “self-representational blink” and a shift in the “unit of identification” to individuate episodes. Its claim that we lack M-autonomy for “roughly two thirds” of conscious life is not borne out by its own minutes, which give about half. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1495), from the publisher’s open-access PDF (frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00931/pdf; also PMC3868016), text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading as the origin of M-autonomy: the ability to control one’s own mental processes, defined by its veto component, and lost without notice in every episode of mind-wandering. It argues that most conscious thought is subpersonal and that a thought becomes the person’s only by integration into an “epistemic agent model”. The “two thirds of conscious lifetime” without M-autonomy is not what its own figures give: they give about half (THEORY-1297). Conceptual work on others’ data; no new data. |
| LIT-1943 | The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports | Metzinger (2024), MIT Press, open access. More than 500 anonymised reports of “pure awareness” from an online survey of meditators (1,403 usable respondents from 57 countries, 92 questionnaire items, twelve factors), grouped by theme in 34 chapters with commentary. The book’s thesis is that consciousness can occur without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. It models pure awareness as a highest-level but “nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness, its tonic alertness, and so treats a first-person perspective as content, not a condition, of consciousness. The evidence is retrospective report from a self-selected sample. The methods chapter concedes that such reports cannot show the state was selfless when it occurred, while the summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established”. | Active — skimmed 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1499), from the publisher’s open-access PDF: the introduction, the theoretical commentary of chapters 2, 4, 8, 25, 28 and 31, all of chapter 34 and the epilogue’s ethics sections were read; the report chapters were sampled, not read through. Worth reading as the fullest statement of Metzinger’s later account of consciousness without a self. It offers “pure awareness” as minimal phenomenal experience and models it as a highest-level but nonegoic model of the organism’s own epistemic openness. Its evidence is retrospective, self-selected reports from meditators. The methods chapter concedes the limits of that evidence and the summary overstates what it shows. |
| LIT-1944 | The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self | Metzinger (2009), Basic Books. The popular statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity: the conscious self is the content of a transparent self-model, and the experienced world is a “tunnel” the brain generates. Unread: registered from its bibliographic records. The theory is read in the record in LIT-450 and LIT-568. | Unavailable — registered 2026-11-01 at the owner’s request, not read. No lawful open full text was reached, and the book is in copyright with Basic Books. OpenAlex has no record of the book. Google Books shows no viewable edition. The Internet Archive’s copy (egotunnelscience0000metz) is in its print-disabled and lending collections, which require a borrowing account, so it is not an open copy. No author-posted copy was found. The theory it popularises is read in the record in LIT-450 and LIT-568, and its later development in LIT-1943. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1946 | Minimal phenomenal experience: Meditation, tonic alertness, and the phenomenology of “pure” consciousness | Metzinger (2020), Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 1(I):7. Proposes minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) as a candidate for the simplest consciousness and the entry point to a “minimal model” explanation. MPE is to lack minimal phenomenal selfhood, time and a spatial frame. Six constraints are drawn from contemplative and Western texts: Wakefulness, Low Complexity, Self-Luminosity, Introspective Availability, Epistemicity and Transparency/Opacity. Sixteen case studies flesh them out. The hypothesis: pure awareness is a temporally thin Bayesian representation of the organism’s tonic alertness, a model of an “unpartitioned epistemic space”. It “definitely has representational content” and is “non-egoic self-modelling”. Tonic alertness without that model, as in unresponsive wakefulness, is not conscious. A conceptual paper. Its evidence is quoted report. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1498) from the journal’s open-access PDF. Worth reading as the founding statement of minimal phenomenal experience, the concept the record’s reading of Chandia-Jorquera et al. (LIT-1354) takes as given. It holds that pure awareness has representational content: a temporally thin, nonegoic model of the organism’s tonic alertness, its “epistemic space”. On that account, consciousness without a self-model in the egoic sense still involves self-modelling, and it lacks even a phenomenal quality of oneness. Its evidence is sixteen quoted reports and texts. Its methodological problems, performative self-contradiction among them, are deferred to other papers. |
| LIT-1947 | Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology | Metzinger (2021), Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness 8(1):43–66. Argues for a global moratorium on research that risks creating artificial consciousness, on the ground that synthetic phenomenology may create artificial suffering. Unread: a lawful open copy exists and could not be fetched. The argument is known here only from the author’s restatement in Metzinger 2024 (LIT-1943, pp. 484–485). There, artificial consciousness “may involve a consciously experienced sense of self that may in turn generate artificial suffering”, and a moratorium is proposed “until we know definitively, or at least reasonably accurately, what we are doing”. | Unfetched — searched 2026-11-01 for a lawful full text. One exists, but this client could not fetch it, so the paper is not read and no NOTE is filed. The version of record is open access under CC BY, per Crossref, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar, at worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S270507852150003X. It returned a Cloudflare 403 challenge to curl. A copy of the published PDF, which a web search shows headed “J. AI. Consci. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com”, is at philarchive.org/archive/METASA-4. It returned a 403 bot check to curl and to WebFetch, and philpapers.org/archive/METASA-4.pdf did the same. Europe PMC and the Internet Archive hold no copy, and the Wayback Machine’s index reset the connection. The failure is on access, not availability, and a browser fetch of either address is the cheapest way to read the paper. Its argument is known here only from Metzinger’s own restatement in the epilogue of LIT-1943 (pp. 484–485), which cites it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |