consciousness.
120 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-036 v2 | Lindahl et al. 2017, varieties of contemplative experience | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-052 v2 | Consciousness in AI: indicator properties | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-089 | Nagel: what is it like to be a bat | An organism is conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be it. That subjective character is tied to a type of point of view. Every functional, intentional or causal-role analysis leaves it out, since each is compatible with its absence. Psychophysical reduction therefore cannot follow the usual pattern of dropping a point of view in favour of a more objective description of the same thing: for experience, that leads away from the phenomenon. Physicalism is left not refuted but not yet understandable. The closing proposal is an “objective phenomenology” of the structure of experience. | Read |
| NOTE-093 v2 | Bruckner — Welfare Subjects and Autopoiesis | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-104 v2 | Schwitzgebel — AI and Consciousness | 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”). | Read |
| NOTE-116 v2 | Schwitzgebel & Sinnott-Armstrong — Sacrificing humans | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-120 v2 | Better to be a pig dissatisfied than a plant satisfied | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-122 v2 | Barrett et al. — IIT: good, bad and misunderstood | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-128 v2 | Category error in AI safety: non-sentient moral machines | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-130 v2 | Floridi — The Informational Nature of Personal Identity | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-131 v3 | Schwitzgebel — If materialism is true, the US is conscious | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-135 v2 | Kleiner & Ludwig — Mathematical structure of experience | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-136 v2 | Safron et al. — World models and life–mind continuity | 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”. | Read |
| NOTE-143 v2 | Frankish — Closing the Cartesian Bureau de Change | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-146 v2 | Winkielman et al. — The coherent and fluent mind | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-157 v2 | Roberts — Talkative AI and the fiction of artificial minds | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-169 v2 | Seth — Conscious AI and biological naturalism | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-176 v2 | Šekrst — Do LLMs Hallucinate Electric Fata Morganas? | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-181 v2 | The Moral Status of Animals (SEP) | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-183 v2 | Birch — AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-187 | On the Evolution, Science, and Metaphysics of Consciousness | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-188 v2 | The Weirdness of the World | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-330 | Damasio & Carvalho — The nature of feelings | An Opinion with no new data. Feelings are the felt side of interoceptive body maps, and they report homeostatic value. Feeling does not need the insula: the authors’ own patient with both insulae destroyed still feels. It needs the upper brainstem, where whole-body maps first assemble. The evolutionary story (felt maps beat unfelt ones because they support learning and anticipation) and the cellular one (unmyelinated, ligand- and ion-permeable interoceptive axons, with ephaptic coupling, as the root of sentience) are hypotheses, and are presented as such. | Read |
| NOTE-331 | Bechara, Damasio, Tranel & Damasio — Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy | Ten controls and six ventromedial prefrontal patients play the four-deck gambling task while anticipatory skin-conductance responses (SCRs) and verbal reports are tracked. Every control and no patient develops anticipatory SCRs; three patients who can state the right strategy still choose badly. Controls prefer the good decks significantly only from the hunch period, and the pre-hunch SCR effect is a group-by-period interaction, not a deck difference, so “before knowing” is better supported for articulated strategy than for any awareness at all. | Read |
| NOTE-335 | Putnam — Psychological Predicates | Pain is hypothesised to be a functional state of a whole organism, a probabilistic automaton’s state fixed by its machine table, rather than a physical-chemical brain state, because a functional organisation common to all pain-feelers is a likelier invariant than a physical one. The hypothesis carries the anti-nesting condition (3): no pain-feeler has a decomposition into parts that separately possess the pain-capable kind of Description. Its only stated motive is to exclude swarms of bees. Its clause (1) is empty, since everything is a probabilistic automaton under some Description. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-336 | Chalmers — Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness | The easy problems of consciousness are problems of explaining functions, which a mechanism explains; the hard problem is that “why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” survives the explanation of every function. The argument is conceptual: the easy phenomena are functionally definable and experience is not. The positive part takes experience as fundamental and proposes structural coherence and organizational invariance as nonbasic psychophysical principles, with a double-aspect theory of information as a speculative basic one. Nothing is measured; the invariance argument is a one-page sketch. | Read |
| NOTE-338 | Where Am I? | A first-person story with an argument inside. With his brain in a vat in Houston radio-linked to his body under Tulsa, the narrator tests three answers to “where am I?”: where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is. He favours the third and finds it unclear. A computer duplicate of his brain can take over his body with no detectable difference, and when duplicate and brain drift out of step there are two persons in one body. Intuition pumps, no thesis defended to the end. | Read |
| NOTE-340 | List — What is it like to be a group agent? | A short, conditional argument. Group agents are real by a thin functionalist definition and a naturalistic indispensability argument, and they have consciousness as awareness. Phenomenal consciousness turns on a bridge principle. Agency-, biology- and information-based principles are surveyed, and IIT is adopted. Three structural reasons (functional decomposability, robustness of steering bodies to partial randomisation, processing done mainly inside members) are said to make a group’s Φ low. The exclusion postulate is a second route. Nothing is computed. The result is used to ground a normative asymmetry: group agents have only derivative rights. | Read |
| NOTE-341 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self” | A hypothesis essay. A Self is the set of parts that pursue goals together, and its boundary is the farthest region of space and time it can measure and act on, its “cognitive light cone”. Selves grow from homeostatic loops by adding memory, anticipation and networks, and cells form larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions. Every level that has its own goal is a Self, so living systems hold many nested Selves at once; the paper says this against IIT in one bracket. It has no model, no measurement of the light cone and no new data, and it confines claims about experience to a closing speculation. | Read |
| NOTE-342 | Chalmers — Does a rock implement every finite-state automaton? | Implementation needs strong, counterfactual-supporting conditionals for every transition in the table, not one run, so Putnam’s rock does not implement every FSA. Repaired, the triviality result survives for weak formalisms. A clock plus a dial implements every inputless FSA. The right input–output dependencies plus an input memory and a dial implement every FSA with those dependencies. Combinatorial-state automata, with independently varying components in distinct physical regions, demand fine-grained causal structure, and a blind implementation must grow exponentially. Logically possible false implementations and an overstrict independence condition are left open. Minds attach to (system, CSA) pairs, so the Chinese room holds two. | Read |
| NOTE-345 | Chalmers — Could a large language model be conscious? | Asks for a feature X that indicates LLM consciousness or its absence. Self-report is fragile and trained in. Conversation and general intelligence give some limited reason. Six obstacles stand against it: biology, senses and embodiment, world and self models, recurrence, a global workspace and unified agency, the last three strongest, all but biology temporary. On mainstream assumptions, with at least 1/3 credence per requirement, that gives under 10% for current LLMs and 25% or more for conscious LLM+ systems within a decade. The numbers are illustrative, biology is set aside rather than answered, and the twelve “challenges” are offered as roadmap or red flags. | Read |
| NOTE-346 | Dennett — Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness | A three-page reply to Chalmers’s “Facing Up”. The easy/hard split misdirects research: a vitalist could pose the same hard problem of life, and a hard problem of perception set aside from its “easy” parts would be an artifact. Chalmers’s reason why experience differs restates the claim. Subtracting every function from one’s own consciousness leaves nothing but a conviction. Adding experience to physics’ fundamentals would need independent evidence, which is absent. Argument by analogy, with one introspective premise. | Read |
| NOTE-347 | Chalmers — Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia | Organizational invariance, that fine-grained functional isomorphs of a conscious system have the same experiences, is defended by reductio over gradual neuron replacement. Absent qualia would imply a rational being systematically wrong about its own fading experience. Inverted or absent qualia would imply experience that flips with a switch and cannot be noticed. Both are judged implausible, not impossible. The paper extends the argument to a population of homunculi and to a single record-keeping homunculus. The conclusion is natural, not metaphysical, supervenience of experience on organisation, and it says nothing about systems that are not isomorphs. | Read |
| NOTE-348 | The Emotion Machine | Read in the 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think: each emotional state is a selection of mental resources turned on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem, and ordinary thinking uses the same switching. On this design sit six levels of mental activity, panalogies that link descriptions across realms, and a Self that is a network of partial models. It is argued by example and analogy, with no experiment and few neural claims. Against Damasio, the body is a resource the brain exploits, not what an emotion is made of; on Elliot it proposes, without evidence, the reverse causal direction. | Read |
| NOTE-349 | Searle — Minds, brains, and programs | A man who follows English rules for manipulating Chinese symbols can answer Chinese questions like a native speaker without understanding Chinese, so no program is by itself sufficient for understanding. Six replies are answered; the systems reply by having the man internalise the room. Searle grants that machines could think, if they had the brain’s causal powers. The argument concerns intentionality, and its answer to the systems reply rests on treating the internalised system as a part of the man, which is the point in dispute. | Read |
| NOTE-354 | Chalmers — The Meta-Problem of Consciousness | The meta-problem, why we judge that consciousness poses a hard problem, is an easy problem to be solved in topic-neutral terms. The paper surveys thirteen mechanisms and favours introspective models that attribute primitive relations of acquaintance to primitive qualities. It then poses a meta-problem challenge: a theory’s basis of consciousness should explain our judgments about consciousness, which IIT and biological theories struggle to meet. It blocks debunking arguments for illusionism, but concedes a residual coincidence. It argues that only strong illusionism dissolves the hard problem, and rejects it by a Moorean argument. Nothing is measured; the solution offered is an explanandum sketch. | Read |
| NOTE-355 | Turing — Computing Machinery and Intelligence | Turing replaces “Can machines think?” by whether a digital computer can play the imitation game, predicts that by about 2000 a 10^9-bit machine will hold an average interrogator to 70 per cent right identifications after five minutes, and answers nine objections. The answer to the argument from consciousness is that its extreme form is solipsism. The positive case is admitted to be weak (“recitations tending to produce belief”); the programme is to educate a child-machine. | Read |
| NOTE-356 | Chalmers — Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness | Chalmers restates the 1998 extended-mind thesis as a claim about constitution through sensorimotor interaction, because the original statement is satisfied by wired-in “extended circuits” that the critics accept. He keeps the perception-action boundary as the strongest objection, and argues that consciousness does not extend because it needs information directly available for global control, and perception makes availability indirect. Both moves are proposed and defended against a few cases, not demonstrated. | Read |
| NOTE-357 | Dennett — Quining Qualia | Qualia are supposed to be ineffable, intrinsic, private and directly apprehensible properties of experience. Fifteen intuition pumps argue that the pretheoretical concept is confused and that nothing has all four marks. The core move: an inversion in early processing and an inversion in memory-linked reactions are introspectively indistinguishable, so a subject has no privileged access to which happened. In place of qualia the paper offers practically ineffable, idiosyncratically detected public properties. It is argument by example throughout, and the author says so. | Read |
| NOTE-358 | Chalmers — The combination problem for panpsychism | A taxonomy, not a solution. The combination problem is three problems (subject, quality, structure) plus four smaller ones (unity, boundary, awareness, grain). Each yields an argument against constitutive panpsychism, and subject-summing and structural mismatch are the strongest. Responses fall into emergent, autonomous, identity and combinatorial panpsychism. The non-combinatorial ones pay in mental causation or revised physics. Phenomenal bonding, quantum holism, small palettes and informational composition are judged most promising, but none is shown to work. James’s argument at its origin is an argument against group minds, and a footnote objects to IIT’s exclusion postulate that it makes consciousness extrinsic. | Read |
| NOTE-362 v2 | Kammerer — How a materialist can deny that the US is probably conscious | The Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle. A whole W with a functional property P that would normally suffice for conscious state S lacks S if some part of W plays a role that (A) requires the part to have conscious states representing W and (B) is needed for W to have P (or any other property sufficient for S). The SAP leaves the antheads and Block’s tiny-people brain conscious, permits some group consciousness, and denies the US conscious states because its citizens represent it and could not be replaced by parts that do not. Its defence is an Occam-style rule against ascribing consciousness where other subjects’ states explain the behaviour, plus a tu quoque on residual arbitrariness. | Read |
| NOTE-364 | The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity | A self is an abstractum like a centre of gravity, posited by interpretation, and like a fictional character it is indeterminate beyond what its story fixes. A mindless novel-writing robot can author a self whose story is true of the robot. Brains are bundles of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere into one autobiography, and when the story coheres around two points there are two selves. The essay argues by analogy and thought experiment. Its evolutionary account of self-talk is speculation, and its evidence is cited. | Read |
| NOTE-365 | Integrated Information Theory 3.0 | The 2014 restatement of IIT. Five axioms of experience become five postulates about mechanisms in a state, and an experience is identified with the maximally irreducible conceptual structure of a complex. Exclusion is the anti-nesting rule: of all overlapping sets of elements, only the one with locally maximal Φ is conscious, so no subset or superset of a complex is. It is postulated from the axiom that experience has definite borders; Occam’s razor is invoked only for exclusion within a mechanism. Logic-gate examples give minor complexes, a conscious inactive network, a minimally conscious photodiode and a feed-forward zombie. Nothing larger than about a dozen elements is computable. | Read |
| NOTE-366 | Block — Troubles with Functionalism | Functionalism fixes mental states only by their relations to inputs and outputs, so a body run by a billion radio-linked people, each executing one line of your machine table, is functionally equivalent to you. There is prima facie doubt that it has qualia, and Block argues the doubt has a rational basis: it is unlike us in psychology and neurophysiology, and it was built to mimic us. The doubt does not depend on the parts having minds. Putnam’s anti-nesting stipulation is an ad hoc patch that fails in every version Block tries. Psychofunctionalism secures beliefs but perhaps not qualia, and no account of inputs and outputs avoids both liberalism and chauvinism. | Read |
| NOTE-367 | Dennett & Kinsbourne — Time and the Observer | The Cartesian Theater is the tacit assumption that some place or moment in the brain makes contents conscious, so that arrival order there fixes experienced order. The Multiple Drafts model replaces it: discriminations are made once, locally, and revised in parallel; temporal order is represented by content, not by the timing of vehicles. Four timing “anomalies” then need no backward projection. At sub-second scales the difference between pre- and post-experiential revision is said to be only verbal. It is a conceptual argument over published data; no experiment is run. | Read |
| NOTE-369 | Chalmers — Foreword to Supersizing the Mind | Ten years after LIT-097, its co-author says the iPhone has made the thesis vivid, that the only principled objection is the perception-action boundary, and that the right reply is to let belief-ascription follow explanatory purpose, so that Otto’s belief is extended for some explanations and not others. Consciousness probably stays internal, because no twin case for it can be built. The thesis needs only a weak parity-style functionalism. | Read |
| NOTE-370 | Shanahan, McDonell & Reynolds — Role play with large language models (read for the self) | Read for the self. The simulator has no beliefs, goals or agency, “not even simulated versions”; simulacra only role-play characters that have them, so when an agent says “I” there is “no-one at home”. The paper names, and does not answer, the question of which self a dialogue agent would act to preserve: hardware, process or instance. The denial of a self follows from the framing; no argument rules out a conscious actor behind the roles. | Read |
| NOTE-371 | Dennett — Reply to Professor Stich | Dennett accepts Stich’s summary of Brainstorms and answers his three charges. The evolutionary grounding of rationality is deliberately minimal. Full rationality is an idealisation, irrationality has no stable description, and so personhood rests on a concept “we only imperfectly achieve”. On pain, eliminativism and the reality of suffering are reconciled by policy: biting the bullet, reform and common sense each have uses, and Dennett stays with “there are no such things as pains, although of course people do feel pain”. | Read |
| NOTE-372 | Self models | Metzinger’s compact statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity. No substantial self exists; there is a self-model, partly conscious (the PSM), used for global control. A phenomenal self exists if and only if the PSM is transparent; a first-person perspective is a transparent model of the intentionality relation. Self-models can be unconscious and artificial, and embodiment comes in three orders. The central claim is stated with a prediction, not argued; the examples are cited. The online text has editing slips and reference gaps. | Read |
| NOTE-376 | Shanahan — Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | An avowedly “poetic” attempt to fit consciousness and selfhood to a disembodied 2024 chat agent. Its time would be discrete and discontinuous. Its “I” can be the model or a conversation-bound self that flickers into being each turn; we may slip between them. Such selves can be copied, edited and merged, and spread over branching simulacra. No candidate site survives scrutiny, which is read as Buddhist emptiness and applied back to human selves. Examples are invented usages, not data. | Read |
| NOTE-377 | Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science | A short review that sets the minimal self (present self-consciousness) against the narrative self (extended in time), splits the minimal self into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, and ties their dissociation in schizophrenic thought insertion to Frith’s forward comparator model. It reports an embodied minimal self in neonatal imitation and a momentary one in Strawson and in Tani’s robot, and proposes, against Dennett, that the narrative self is the sum of its narratives. Evidence is cited, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-379 | Taylor — Consciousness interpreted | A charitable reconstruction, not a defence. Consciousness is a real pattern (Dennett 1991b) in the brain’s content-bearing states, and a user-illusion, a pattern so coarse that describing the brain through it is unwitting metaphor. This makes six claims consistent: multiple drafts, global workspace, qualia eliminativism, user-illusion, fallibility and dictatorial authority. The Orwell/Stalin indeterminacy is rebuilt without verificationism: the two readings compress and predict equally, so neither better describes the pattern. | Read |
| NOTE-381 | Schwitzgebel — Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to Kammerer | Three concerns about Kammerer’s Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle. It may not exclude actual groups, even the US, because citizens may not consciously represent the concrete entity at issue. Condition A’s “required” makes group consciousness depend on members’ motives: read loosely it gives flickering consciousness with no group-level change, read strictly it can never be met. The Occam-style justification either generalises into causal exclusion or is ad hoc, and group-level explanation is often simpler. Kammerer’s is still the best anti-nesting principle the author has met. | Read |
| NOTE-382 | Shanahan — Simulacra as Conscious Exotica | A Wittgensteinian treatment: consciousness talk is anchored in what is public, so an exotic entity is a candidate only if we could engineer an encounter with it in a shared world. Disembodied chat agents are not candidates; virtually embodied ones could be. On the self: no “self worth preserving” without body, history and autobiographical memory, and no “person behind the mask” for a role player, whose identity is a shifting distribution of roles. Argued by method and scenario; nothing is measured. | Read |
| NOTE-384 | Frankish — Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness | Illusionism named and defended as a research programme. Phenomenal properties are not instantiated; the task is the illusion problem, to explain why experiences seem to have them. “Quasi-phenomenal” properties, the physical properties introspection misrepresents as phenomenal, separate strong illusionism from a weak illusionism that is argued to be unstable. The case is conservatism, the threat of epiphenomenalism, covert illusionism in reductive theories, a debunking argument and an abductive one from anomalousness. Objections are answered by agreeing to weakened versions of their intuitions. | Read |
| NOTE-385 | Of Identity and Diversity | Identity is relative to the idea the name stands for: same mass, same life (oak, horse, man), same consciousness (person). A person is a thinking being that “can consider itself as itself”, and personal identity reaches as far back as consciousness can be extended, independent of substance. Man and person come apart (prince and cobbler; day-man and night-man), and “person” is “a forensic term” grounding reward and punishment. Argued from cases and intuitions; “the same consciousness” is never defined. | Read |
| NOTE-386 | Of Personal Identity | No impression of a self is constant, so there is no idea of one; introspection finds only perceptions, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. Its ascribed identity is a fiction of the imagination, like that of ships, churches and plants, produced by resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it; hard cases are “grammatical”. The Appendix confesses that two principles, the distinctness of perceptions and the imperceptibility of real connexions, leave the unity of the mind unexplained. | Read |
| NOTE-460 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger’s own sketch of the self-model theory. Six constraints (globality, presentationality, transparency, convolved holism, dynamicity, perspectivalness) build up consciousness; a transparent self-model yields phenomenal selfhood, so “no such things as selves exist in the world”; transparency is graded, inversely proportional to the attentional availability of earlier processing stages. Phenomenal unity is one global functional cluster. The first-person perspective is a model of the intentionality relation, whose iteration gives introspective and social intelligence. A theory statement: no new evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-462 | An Accumulator Model for Spontaneous Neural Activity Prior to Self-Initiated Movement | A three-parameter leaky stochastic accumulator, δx = (I − kx)Δt + cξ√Δt, fitted to Libet-task waiting times (k = 0.5, I = 0.11, threshold at the 80th percentile of output), reproduces the readiness potential (r² = 0.96) and the linear mean–SD relation of waiting times (r = 0.9). In a variant with random clicks, fast responders showed a slow negativity before the click (P < 0.005), and fast and slow clicks were spread equally through the trial (P = 0.64). The neural decision to move is placed at the threshold crossing about 150 ms before movement. | Read |
| NOTE-488 | Conscious birds | Review. Crow NCL neurons track the reported percept, not the stimulus, and NCL is nuclear rather than laminar; the pigeon connectome has the hub-and-module form GNWT requires; avian pallium has recurrent connectivity (RPT); IIT’s markers (PCI, grid-like lattices) are untested in birds. Pigeons and roosters fail the mark test but discriminate their mirror image from a conspecific. GNWT and RPT requirements “seem to be mostly met”; the authors call the evidence short of a strong conclusion. | Read |
| NOTE-489 | Three types of phenomenal consciousness and their functional roles: unfolding the ALARM theory of consciousness | ALARM: basic arousal (level-1 experience, subcortical) alarms the agent when homeostasis fails, triggering survival behaviour, care for the body and generalised learning without choice; general alertness (level-2, cortical, attention-guided) enables flexible learning and decision; reflexive self-consciousness is general alertness plus metacognitive self-relational content, enabling long-term planning. IIT, HOT and GNWT are said to cover only general alertness. Argued, not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-491 | Block & Fodor — What Psychological States are Not | Block and Fodor argue that behaviourism and type physicalism fail on empirical grounds, and that machine-state functionalism (FSIT) fails because psychological states cannot be one-to-one with the machine-table states of a probabilistic automaton. Dispositions, simultaneity, productivity and structure all break the correspondence, and machine-table identity is too fine-grained. Inverted and absent qualia are a prima facie objection to any functional definition. What survives is that psychological states may be computational states of an automaton, typed by the laws they fall under. | Read |
| NOTE-493 | On a confusion about a function of consciousness | P-consciousness is experience and is not a functional notion. A state is A-conscious if its content is poised for reasoning and for rational control of action and speech. From blindsight or petit mal to a function of P is a fallacy, because A is missing too and A’s machinery has that function. A without P (superblindsight) seems not to occur; P without A is suggested, not shown, by the noticed drill, Sperling arrays, hypnotic analgesia and anaesthesia. | Read |
| NOTE-495 | What Is Wrong with the No-Report Paradigm and How to Fix It | No-report paradigms separate consciousness from report but not from post-perceptual cognition that tracks the percept (the bored monkey problem), so prefrontal decoding in no-report rivalry does not show that prefrontal cortex is part of conscious perception. A no-differential-post-perceptual-cognition paradigm is needed. Brascamp et al.’s inconspicuous rivalry, whose switches subjects detected at chance, found no prefrontal difference by fMRI, which Block counts as some support for non-cognitive theories while warning fMRI may be too coarse. | Read |
| NOTE-496 | Two neural correlates of consciousness | Proposes a phenomenal NCC (minimal basis of an experience’s content, for seen motion recurrent MT/V5–V1 activity) and an access NCC (frontoparietal workspace broadcasting). Because access is winner-take-all, a recurrent sensory content can lose and go unaccessed. Signal-detection readings of the exclusion task and of Supèr et al.’s V1 figure–ground modulation, which persists when low salience or many catch trials uncouple it from detection, are offered as evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-497 | Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience | States the methodological puzzle: the neural basis of phenomenology can be found only by deciding whether it includes the machinery of access, which reports cannot decide. Answers it by inference to the best explanation: in Sperling, Landman et al. (capacity 6–7 of 8 when cued up to 1.5 s after offset, versus 4) and Sligte et al. (up to 32 items, 4 s) phenomenology overflows a working memory of about four. If workspace activation is not part of phenomenology, losing recurrent sensory coalitions explain the overflow. | Read |
| NOTE-498 | Block — Précis of The Border between Seeing and Thinking | Block restates the thesis of his 2023 book, that perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual and nonpropositional and cognition paradigmatically discursive, and develops its least explained notion, the cognitive envelope: the global workspace conceptualises percepts, and the representations held in working memory are task-dependent abstractions that differ from perceptual ones in nine documented ways. Iconicity is defined by tracking and mirroring. Infant and animal iconic thinking is conceded but placed inside a cognitive envelope. | Read |
| NOTE-499 | Distinct ventral stream and prefrontal cortex representational dynamics | In 430 visually responsive subdural electrodes from 10 patients, HFA (70–150 Hz) amplitude and category selectivity fell about 80% from peak by 800–900 ms while images stayed on. Ventral temporal decoding stayed near ceiling (face–watch AUC 99.8%), generalised across time, and ended about 230–450 ms after offset at every duration. Prefrontal and parietal decoding (peak AUC 84–86%) was confined to about 150–600 ms and ignored duration. Exemplar geometry was sustained only in ventral temporal cortex. | Read |
| NOTE-500 | Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access | Against sparse readings of Sperling and the Amsterdam change-detection tasks, which posit conscious generic or fragmentary representations plus detailed unconscious iconic memory: there is no independent evidence for the latter, and the one direct test of unconscious working memory (Soto et al., just above 55% at 5 s) is too weak. Fragile VSTM holds 7, 6 and 5 of 8 items at 1, 2.5 and 4 s, is cortical, and is spared by inattention and right dlPFC TMS that impair working memory. | Read |
| NOTE-501 | The Harder Problem of Consciousness | An argument for a conditional. If naturalism (physicalism is the default), phenomenal realism and anti-scepticism hold, then whether a superficial functional isomorph with a different physical basis is conscious is meta-inaccessible. Physicalism is then the default yet inaccessible, and it is the subjective default that the isomorph is not conscious while the question stays open. Disjunctive and superficial-role identities are metaphysically possible but could never be accepted by inference to the best explanation. | Read |
| NOTE-504 | Block — Inverted Earth | Block gives the converse of the inverted spectrum: on Inverted Earth a subject or twin with identical brain, identical qualitative content and no internal disturbance comes, through his embedding in the environment and language, to have inverted intentional content and an inverted long-arm functional role. So qualitative content is not a functional state, and public colour talk expresses intentional content. The argument is stronger than the inverted spectrum on testimony and supervenience. A short-arm functional theory of qualia would escape it, and Block can only ask what that theory is. | Read |
| NOTE-505 | Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness | Compares higher-order thought, global workspace and biological theories by whether they can recognise the explanatory gap. HOT and the workspace replace it with puzzles of their own making; only the biological theory fully acknowledges it, and concept dualism (Nagel, Loar) keeps it from implying dualism. Ambitious HOT also suffers ad hoc stipulation, the mismatch problem and implausibility for infants. Goldberg et al.’s data suggest self-related activity is inhibited in intense perception. The biological theory is the least friendly to machine consciousness. | Read |
| NOTE-507 | Damasio & Damasio — Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness | An Essay with no data. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as one’s own, provided by continuous homeostatic feelings that are conscious in themselves and “lend” consciousness to exteroceptive images. Feelings are hybrid because interoceptive pathways (unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic, barrier-free) let the body act on its own map. Evidence is cited clinical contrast: posterior brainstem lesions cause coma, extensive cortical lesions may not; anaesthetics act at membrane-level sensing below feeling. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-510 | Mashour, Roelfsema, Changeux & Dehaene — Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis | A proponents’ review. Conscious access is ignition: a sudden, self- sustaining, all-or-none activation of long-range hub neurons (prefrontal among them) that broadcasts one representation, against a decaying wave for unseen stimuli. Its best evidence is van Vugt et al.’s monkey recordings, where the signal-detection threshold is the prefrontal ignition threshold, plus a late (>200 ms) seen/unseen divergence across modalities and drug-invariant frontal-parietal disconnection under anaesthesia. It is a theory of access; it calls phenomenality without access untested, and admits the main theories cannot yet be told apart. | Read |
| NOTE-511 | Block — Mental Paint | Block defends phenomenism, the view that phenomenal character outruns representational content, against both forms of representationism. Internalist representationism has only functional resources, and a child raised among ever-changing colours has colour experiences without abiding functional differences. Externalist representationism fails on swampman, on the difference between attention and awareness, on bodily sensations, on Inverted Earth with intact long-term memory, and on an empirical shifted-spectrum argument from normal variation in colour vision. What stays the same across representational change is mental paint. | Read |
| NOTE-553 | Huebner — Genuinely collective emotions | Collective emotion is defended by extending a homuncular, computational account of individual emotion to distributed systems. Fear needs four integrated capacities (p. 10). The USS Palau crew implements most of them but shows no fear, so it is reclassified as collective danger detection; a 2008 campaign is offered as a likelier case, without data. Unfelt collective emotion is defended by arguing that some individual fear is non-conscious (§5), and functional kinds are defended against homology (§6). Gilbert’s plural-subject account is rejected as reducible to individual commitments. | Read |
| NOTE-785 | Brouillet and Friston — Relative fluency (unfelt vs felt) in active inference | A perspective essay with no model and no new data. Unfelt fluency is the subpersonal recognition of a change in precision, which orients attention; felt fluency is a hierarchically deeper inference about it, reached by mental action. Because its cause is internal, felt fluency is misattributed to the stimulus, which the discrepancy-attribution experiments it reviews are read to show. “Felt” here means attended and reportable; the paper does not separate felt from unfelt in any further sense. | Read |
| NOTE-797 | Mashour & Alkire — Evolution of consciousness and emergence from anesthesia | A colloquium perspective, not a study. It proposes emergence from general anaesthesia as a model of the evolution of consciousness, and, from one PET study in which the return of a response to command correlated mainly with brainstem, thalamus, hypothalamus and anterior cingulate, infers that early mammals and birds are phenomenally conscious. The return is judged by an access marker, which the authors concede, and the transfer to other species is by anatomical homology. | Read |
| NOTE-799 v2 | Luppi et al. — A synergistic workspace for human consciousness | In resting-state fMRI, regions where synergistic interactions outrank redundant ones form a “synergistic workspace”. Within it, regions whose synergistic connections spread across more resting-state networks than their redundant ones are classed as gateways (mainly default mode), and the rest as broadcasters (mainly fronto-parietal, lateral prefrontal above all). Pairwise integrated information ΦR falls between DMN gateway regions under propofol (n = 15 or 16; the paper gives both) and in 22 patients with disorders of consciousness against controls, and recovers after anaesthesia, while the original whole-minus-sum Φ shows no common decrease. The increases, near the broadcasters, are not robust. | Read |
| NOTE-812 | Cogitate Consortium — Adversarial testing of GNWT and IIT | A preregistered adversarial test of IIT and GNWT in 256 people (fMRI, MEG, iEEG) viewing clearly seen images. Category, identity and orientation were decodable in posterior cortex; prefrontal cortex held category, no identity, and orientation only weakly in MEG. No prefrontal site showed the predicted offset ignition. Sustained gamma synchronization within posterior cortex, IIT’s distinctive prediction, was not found. Each theory passed some predictions and failed others. | Read |
| NOTE-818 | Gidon, Aru and Larkum — Does neural computation feel like something? | A five-neuron NEURON simulation shows that a voltage clamp replaying a recorded response injects no current when the matching stimulus is shown, yet fixes every state transition whatever the input. Under computational functionalism, which counts the transitions that did not happen, the clamp changes the computation and so the experience while changing no activity and no actual causal interaction. The authors read this as a challenge to functionalism, not a refutation. | Read |
| NOTE-849 | Seth & Bayne — Theories of consciousness | A review of four families: higher-order, global workspace, integrated information, and reentry and predictive processing theories. Each is sorted by which aspect it explains (global states, local contents, phenomenal character, function), its anatomical commitment, and its evidence. The front-versus-back dispute is at heart a dispute over consciousness and cognitive access. Posterior-sufficiency predictions cannot now be tested because verification relies on report, which needs anterior activity, and no marker of consciousness has a validation that rests neither on introspection nor on a contested theory. | Read |
| NOTE-958 | Sandved-Smith et al. — computational phenomenology of mental action | A three-level discrete active-inference model in which attentional states set the precision of the perceptual likelihood and meta-awareness states set the precision of the attentional likelihood; mental action is a choice of ‘stay’ or ‘switch’ over attentional states, defined at the second level only, against a preference to observe oneself ‘focused’. Simulations reproduce the cycle of focus, mind-wandering, noticing and refocusing, with longer mind-wandering under low meta-awareness. The stimuli are fixed by the generative process, so mental action changes only how strongly they update belief; the likelihoods themselves are not learned. | Read |
| NOTE-959 | Powers, Clark & McFarland — General Feedback Theory, Part II | Names six orders of perception, from spinal loops through sensations, configurations, sequences and relationships to system concepts, with demonstrations whose reaction times lengthen with order (about 0.3 s at third order, 0.4–0.45 s at fourth). The N-system “merely alters the properties of a system, thus changing the transformations applied to existing information” (p. 37): reorganization is a change of perception, felt as insight, and a new perceptual organization can be vetoed by imagining its use. Consciousness is defined as a feedback function under N-system action. Conflict freezes a lower system at a virtual reference, and a system switched “entirely to the imagination-connection” is one of the ego’s defences. | Read |
| NOTE-962 | Owen et al. — detecting awareness in the vegetative state | 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” that “confirmed beyond any doubt” her awareness. No question was asked or answered. | Read |
| NOTE-964 | Monti et al. — willful modulation of brain activity in disorders of consciousness | 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. One patient, Patient 23, answered five of six autobiographical yes/no questions correctly by choosing which imagery to perform, the investigators scoring blind; the sixth gave no signal. He was not one of the two behaviourally unresponsive patients: retesting found inconsistent signs of a minimally conscious state, but no bedside communication. | Read |
| NOTE-990 | Lush, Botan, Scott, Seth, Ward & Dienes — Trait phenomenological control and the rubber hand illusion | Hypnotisability predicted rubber hand illusion reports after both synchronous and asynchronous brushing (n = 353, about half a scale point per SWASH point, rs 0.26), a visual control item as well, and synchronous drift weakly (rs 0.11); it also predicted vicarious pain and mirror touch. The expectation manipulation failed and the pre-registered difference-score test was inconclusive, so the study shows that the standard controls do not exclude suggestion, not that the illusion is suggestion. | Read |
| NOTE-994 | Borg, Harrison, Stazicker & Salomons — Is the folk concept of pain polyeidic? | Six objections to the experimental philosophers’ claim that the folk concept of pain is bodily, not mental: small and skewed samples, acute pain only, a loaded “in the mind” probe, means near neutral, a non-Cartesian mental reading of the same data, and an invalid step from “partly bodily” to “bodily”. Pilot vignettes in which damage never hurt drew mind-centred answers. The authors propose that the folk concept is “polyeidic”: several framing-sensitive dimensions, of which mental/bodily is one. | Read |
| NOTE-999 | Lenggenhager, Tadi, Metzinger & Blanke — Video ergo sum | In video virtual reality, synchronous stroking of one’s back and of a body seen 2 m ahead made people rate that body as theirs and shift their felt self-location about 17–25 cm toward it, in two samples of 14; a mannequin worked, a box mostly did not. Nobody felt disembodied or saw from elsewhere, so the authors claim a partial, heautoscopy-like state, not an out-of-body experience. The effects are modest and partly inconsistent, and critics argued they may be self-recognition in a video system rather than an illusion of ownership. | Read |
| NOTE-1000 | Seth — Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self | An opinion article that extends predictive coding to interoception. Felt emotion is the content of hierarchical top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals. Prediction errors are registered in the anterior insula, and are also cancelled by autonomic action under attenuated precision. The experience of body ownership is the same inference run over interoceptive and exteroceptive signals together. The evidence is indirect and cited: insula anticipation and error responses, false cardiac feedback, interoceptive sensitivity predicting rubber-hand susceptibility, and a heartbeat-synchronous virtual hand owned more. No direct test is claimed. | Read |
| NOTE-1002 | Blanke & Metzinger — Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood | Names minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), the simplest experience of being a self, and gives it three dimensions: global self-identification with the body, self-location, and a weak, geometrical first-person perspective. Part ownership (rubber hand, somatoparaphrenia) does not reach MPS; out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and full-body illusions do, varying it dimension by dimension. A passive multisensory sense of owning the whole body suffices, so agency is causally enabling but not constitutive. The necessity and sufficiency claims are asserted, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-1004 | Longo et al. — What is embodiment? A psychometric approach | 131 people rated 27 statements after synchronous and asynchronous brushing of a rubber hand. Principal components analysis found embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement and affect in both conditions and deafference after asynchrony only; embodiment split into ownership, location and agency. Ownership and location crossed from negative to positive with synchrony and each predicted proprioceptive drift (1.34 cm against 0.30 cm); agency stayed negative. No control separates any of it from expectation. | Read |
| NOTE-1005 | Lush — Demand characteristics confound the rubber hand illusion | People told about the rubber hand procedure, but never put through it, expect the illusion statements more than the control statements and more under synchronous than asynchronous brushing (d = 1.40 and 1.05, n = 20), which is the pattern published reports show. So the field’s standard controls do not control for suggestion. The paper does not show that the illusion is suggestion, and says so. | Read |
| NOTE-1006 | Botvinick & Cohen — Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see | The founding report of the rubber hand illusion. Synchronous brushing of a seen rubber hand and the hidden real hand made ten subjects feel the touch at the rubber hand and feel it as their own; after 30 minutes, blind reaches drifted toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion lasted, and asynchronous brushing removed both effects. The authors read it as constraint satisfaction among vision, touch and proprioception, and conclude that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”. | Read |
| NOTE-1007 | Reuter, Sienhold & Sytsma — Putting pain in its proper place | Three online studies on the “pain is in my fingertip, the fingertip is in my mouth” argument. People reject its conclusion for pain about as much as for tissue damage and inflammation, and accept it for a paper-clip; across fourteen items, acceptance tracks how misleading the conclusion is rated; and “technically speaking” wording raises acceptance. The authors explain the argument’s failure by implicature, not by an intensional “pain” or a non-spatial “in”, and conclude that the data favour a bodily conception of pain. | Read |
| NOTE-1012 | Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function | Chalmers and McQueen make consciousness-collapse precise as a super-resistance model (IIT’s Q-shape resisting superposition, with a continuous-collapse dynamics), find simple versions refuted by the quantum Zeno effect, and argue that collapse is the gap in causal closure that interactionist property dualism needs. Skimmed: the introduction, the objections and §8 were read, the formal §§2-7 were not. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1054 v2 | Negro — Three arguments against metaphysical structuralism | Separates methodological, epistemological and metaphysical structuralism about consciousness, and three senses of “consciousness is structural”: having an internal structure, being in a structure, and being the structure. Against the third, which metaphysical structuralism needs, it gives three arguments: Relational Mary, the novel experience argument and the lonely experience argument. Each is valid and rests on an intuition or a conceivability premise. It concludes that methodological and epistemological structuralism need only the first two senses and survive. | Read |
| NOTE-1055 | Aldé — Two geometrical arguments against similarity structuralism | Defines similarity structuralism (phenomenal character is fully fixed by similarity relations, so by the geometry of a similarity space) and argues it cannot account for two accepted facts about colour experience: that exactly four hues are experienced as unmixed and all others as mixtures of two of them, and that the black–white axis is a single gradient while the axes through grey are opposing pairs. Neither fact, it argues, corresponds to any adequate geometric feature of CIELAB or its refinements. It answers the replies from incomplete colour spaces and from unreliable introspection, and concludes structuralism should be rejected for colour. | Read |
| NOTE-1057 | Safron, Klimaj & Sheikhbahaee — IWMT and the Human Consciousness Hypothesis | A seven-page symposium paper that restates Integrated World Modeling Theory and says it agrees with the Human Consciousness Hypothesis of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. On IWMT, phenomenal consciousness is what it is like to be the coherent functioning of an embodied agent’s generative world model, run either coupled to sense data (perception) or decoupled from it (imagination). Embodied grounding is required: integrated information or a global workspace without it does not suffice. Transformer language models are said to lack the recurrence, closure and embodiment needed. No new argument or data. | Read |
| NOTE-1058 | Chandia-Jorquera et al. — Neurophenomenological signatures of pure awareness in Transcendental Meditation | Thirty-three experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners and 33 age- and sex-matched controls who counted instead. Drawn retrospectively, the practitioners’ traces of “pure awareness” were higher and more variable than the controls’ (d = 0.77 and 1.32). A random-forest classifier separated meditation from counting at 65% balanced accuracy, chiefly on permutation entropy and aperiodic EEG, and meditation from the practitioners’ own rest at 88%, chiefly on low-frequency phase coherence. No EEG feature was shown to track the reports. | Read |
| NOTE-1059 | Lee-Youngzie et al. — Towards a mathematical structure of global phenomenal consciousness | A hypothesis article with no data. It maps the parts of an experience, ordered by subsumption into a finite topology, to similarity-judgement matrices of their qualia by a presheaf, and reads compatibility of narrow qualia on overlaps as the condition for phenomenal binding, and the presheaf’s being a sheaf as the broad quale’s being determined by its parts. It reads a sheaf failure as disunity in binocular rivalry and as context dependence in the Ebbinghaus illusion, and gives no rule for telling the two apart. Its worked topology example is malformed, and by its own definitions disagreement on an overlap is not a sheaf failure. | Read |
| NOTE-1060 v2 | Lyre — Neurophenomenal structuralism | A programmatic paper. Its 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 in neural structure by a surjective homomorphism from neural maps. From these, with metaphysically necessary supervenience assumed and not argued for, it draws reductive physicalism, an instrumentalist structural representationalism, holism about experience, and the denial that spectrum inversion is nomologically possible. It addresses specific, not generic, consciousness, and says it is not a structural realism. No new data. | Read |
| NOTE-1062 | Whyte et al. — On the minimal theory of consciousness implicit in active inference | A review of active inference simulations of conscious content, self and state, which argues that they share a three-part “hard core”: the imperative to minimise variational and expected free energy; conscious contents as the inferred hidden states of world, body or brain; and conscious access at the interface where continuous sensory beliefs become discrete beliefs that can inform counterfactual policy selection. The third part is an inference to the best explanation, and it is a criterion for which contents are conscious in humans, not for which systems have experience. Two close-to-core predictions are named. New in the paper: a re-run rivalry model that fits Levelt’s laws, a predicted reward violation of them, and a sleep model that loses its P3b-like response. | Read |
| NOTE-1063 v2 | Laukkonen, Friston & Chandaria — A beautiful loop | A conceptual theory that consciousness needs three things in an active-inference system: a unified generative model of the world (an epistemic field); competition to enter it that coherent, precise inferences win (Bayesian binding); and epistemic depth, the recursive sharing of that model back through the hierarchy, formalised as a hyper-model that predicts precision at every level. Awareness is graded by epistemic depth, not by content. It is applied to attention, sleep and lucidity, meditation, cessation and psychedelics, and to AI. There are no data and no simulations, and the formal part is a standard hierarchical model with layer-wise precision hyperparameters. | Read |
| NOTE-1064 | Luppi — Convergent controllers of information integration and its anaesthetic breakdown | Pairwise integrated information ΦR, computed from resting-state fMRI by integrated information decomposition, falls under anaesthesia in humans (sevoflurane), macaques, marmosets and mice, with one mouse regimen the exception, and returns on recovery: spontaneously in humans, and under central thalamic stimulation in two macaques. Network control energy rises with it. Regional loss follows cortical PVALB expression in three species, and species-specific models reproduce both the PVALB effect and the advantage of central over ventrolateral thalamic stimulation. The state measured is behavioural responsiveness, which the authors call “presumably consciousness”. | Read |
| NOTE-1066 | Carruthers & Gennaro — Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness (SEP) | A survey of the theories that make a mental state conscious by its being the object of a higher-order representation: inner sense, actualist and dispositionalist higher-order thought, and self-representational and hybrid views. It sets out the objections (targetless states, the rock, animals, sufficiency) and the prefrontal evidence, and concludes no verdict. Since 2020 it is maintained by Gennaro, a higher-order theorist. Carruthers and Lycan, two of the theories’ main sources, are reported to have given them up. | Read |
| NOTE-1068 | Lycan — Representational Theories of Consciousness (SEP) | A survey by one of its protagonists. 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 certain functionally specified kind suffices for it. “What it’s like” to experience the quality is kept apart as a further, higher-order property that needs awareness, and the theory addresses only the quality. The entry sets out the arguments for and the counterexamples against, and leaves wide against narrow content unsettled. | Read |
| NOTE-1069 | Gurnee — Verbalizable representations form a global workspace in language models | A corpus-averaged Jacobian lens picks out, in each layer of Claude models, the directions a model is disposed to verbalize. Swaps, injections and ablations along these directions (the J-space) show them privileged for report, held concepts, two-hop reasoning and reuse of an argument by many functions, while continuation, anomaly detection and line wrapping use the same information without them. The J-space works in a middle band of layers, carries under 10% of activation variance, and is amplified and relayed by the weights more than other directions. Ablating it flattens experiential language about the self and about others. The authors take no position on phenomenal consciousness. | Read |
| NOTE-1070 | Woods, Windt & Carter — Contentless experiences in meditation are neither truly contentless nor identical | An evidence synthesis of 135 expert texts on the goal-states of Shamatha (Wallace), Transcendental Meditation and Stillness Meditation. It codes 65 features. The states are said to lack thoughts, concepts, perceptions, images and memories, but to keep wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, knowing, freedom, unity and more. They are the same across the practices on 14 features, different on 4 (chiefly Shamatha’s far greater attentional stability and vividness) and unclear on 47. So, on the texts, they are neither truly contentless nor identical. The data are teachers’ descriptions, not participants’ reports. | Read |
| NOTE-1071 | Graziano — Illusionism big and small | An essay with no new data. Claims of consciousness come from an automatic internal model, and since every brain model is schematic, what people report having is a caricature of whatever the model tracks. Six hypotheses for what that is are offered. The author favours attention, or more deeply “the deep selective processing of information”, depicted by an attention schema as an intangible essence. Theories that say how a brain produces a feeling and not how the feeling gets into the model that drives report (“Arrow B”) are called magic. Its “small” illusionism still denies the phenomenal essence. What it keeps real is the process modelled. | Read |
| NOTE-1110 | Berridge and Kringelbach — Pleasure systems in the brain | A review. Reward splits into ‘liking’, ‘wanting’ and learning. ‘Liking’ is measured without report by taste reactivity, homologous across species, and is generated by small opioid hotspots. Dopamine and most “pleasure electrodes” raise ‘wanting’ and leave ‘liking’ alone, and sensitized ‘wanting’ can grow while the drug becomes less pleasant. Objective ‘liking’ can occur without felt pleasure. For the record, this is the sharpest test so far of “valence is potential”. Read as written, the identity fails, and the dissociation calls for a hedonic marker measured apart from control. | Read |
| NOTE-1111 | Hesp et al. — Deeply felt affect: the emergence of valence in deep active inference | A computational proof of principle with no data. Valence is a state of self, inferred at a slower, deeper level from affective charge, the update to the expected precision γ that sets how far the preference- driven action model, rather than habit, governs policy selection. Positive charge is rising confidence in the action model and negative charge falling confidence. The valence level sends priors on γ back down. “Felt” means explicitly represented, which the authors take as necessary, not sufficient, for self-reportable valence. For the record, this is the closest existing model of that felt valence is the system modelling its own potential. But its sign and intensity run against the record’s potential account for negative valence, and it inherits the wanting/liking problem. | Read |
| NOTE-1114 | Motivational trade-offs and modulation of nociception in bumblebees | A motivational trade-off in an insect. Bees given heated (55 °C) 40% sucrose feeders against unheated alternatives of 10–40% fed from the heated ones less as the alternatives got sweeter, and more steeply than without heat. Choice ran on learned colour cues, so the modulation is central. The authors take it as consistent with pain, not proof of it. One cost level, four resource levels in separate groups; graded at that cost, silent on a threshold in cost. | Read |
| NOTE-1115 | Conscious emotional experience emerges as a function of multilevel, appraisal-driven response synchronization | A theoretical paper with a short review of EEG and neural-synchrony evidence. Conscious emotional experience is recruited when lower, automatic levels of appraisal and regulation fail, which happens when component synchronization is strong and lasting. Conscious regulation needs explicit representations. The feeling is a central representation of the components and their coherence, built by local and distant neuronal synchronization. Proposed measures are EEG band activity in felt versus unfelt episodes, and phase coherence between regions. | Read |
| NOTE-1163 | Isaac — Phenomenal structure: what is it and what is it for? | A structuralist programme for the science of phenomenal experience, set out as a stance and not a thesis. Experience has three layers of structure: quality-space geometry, which is a precondition for meaning; group-theoretic constancy, which “induces a distinction between subject and object”; and dynamic structure, vector fields of valence and affordance, which guide action. The method is the search for structure-preserving maps among experience, world and brain, held as a regulative ideal and advanced by de-idealizing the models where the maps fail. The evidence that such models target experience, not mere behaviour, is chiefly convergence between models built by different behavioural routes, which the paper admits is always partial. The group-theoretic and dynamic layers are, in the author’s words, “mere suggestive sketches”. | Read |
| NOTE-1406 | Revonsuo — Binding and the phenomenal unity of consciousness | Separates stimulus-related binding, neural processing that recovers a stimulus’s unity whether or not anything is conscious, from consciousness-related binding, the construction of phenomenally unified percepts, crediting the split to Smythies (1994). Distinguishes the phenomenal, neural and cognitive levels at which binding is posed, lists five kinds of phenomenal binding with the deficits that dissociate them, and argues from his own EEG result that 40-Hz synchrony accompanies constructing a unified percept, not holding it. | Read |
| NOTE-1434 | Metzinger — Why are dreams interesting for philosophers? | Metzinger proposes that minimal phenomenal selfhood reduces to transparent spatiotemporal self-location, because people report a stable self in bodiless dreams and asomatic out-of-body experiences, located at an extensionless point without a body. He predicts that such self-location is necessary and sufficient for a minimal sense of self, and asks whether a phenomenally opaque self-location, experienced as a representation, has ever been observed. The paper is an agenda: its evidence is other people’s prevalence figures, which it calls ambiguous, and it reports no opaque case. | Read |
| NOTE-1495 | Metzinger — The myth of cognitive agency | Mind-wandering is a recurring, unnoticed loss of M-autonomy, the veto-centred ability to control one’s own mental processes. Most conscious thought is subpersonal mental behaviour, and a thought becomes the person’s only when integrated into a transparent “epistemic agent model”. The paper states that we lack M-autonomy for about two thirds of conscious life; its own minutes give 52%. | Read |
| NOTE-1498 | Metzinger — Minimal phenomenal experience | A conceptual paper. It proposes “minimal phenomenal experience”, the phenomenology of pure awareness in meditation, as the entry point for a minimal-model explanation of consciousness. Six phenomenological constraints are drawn from contemplative and Western texts and illustrated by sixteen quoted reports. The hypothesis: pure awareness is a temporally thin, nonegoic model of the organism’s tonic alertness, “an internal model of an epistemic space”. It has representational content, lacks a first-person perspective, time, space and even phenomenal oneness, and cannot itself be remembered. | Read |
| NOTE-1499 | Metzinger — The Elephant and the Blind | More than 500 meditators’ retrospective reports of “pure awareness”, from a survey of 1,403 people in 57 countries, are offered as evidence that consciousness occurs without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. Pure awareness is modelled as the top level of a nested active-inference hierarchy, “a highest-level but nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness. The book concedes that retrospective reports cannot show that a state was selfless when it happened, and its summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established” all the same. | Skimmed |