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).
75 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-023 v4 | Current evidence cannot settle whether an AI system is conscious: mimicry undercuts behavioural evidence and architectural indicators presuppose the disputed computational functionalism, so the dispute is over what counts as evidence as well as the answer | Birch (2025), LIT-111: behavioural markers are “gamed”, and architectural markers are “Janus-faced”, giving a two-level deadlock. Schwitzgebel (LIT-191) argues mimicry undercuts but does not rebut, and that the functionalist theories face minimal instantiation. Seth (LIT-135) makes conscious AI conditional on functionalism plus substrate flexibility. Butlin et al. (LIT-056) assume functionalism. The readings agree the question is currently unsettleable. They contest whether that is permanent and which way the prior leans. This says nothing about whether any AI is conscious. Block (2002, LIT-639) argues that for a perfect functional duplicate on another substrate we lack even a conception of the evidence; Block (2009, LIT-632) states the biological premise from the other side. | Proposed |
| THEORY-043 v6 | A mind of mindless agents and a mind of minded agents are one functionalist move run in two directions, and what separates them is an anti-nesting principle or an architectural criterion, neither yet principled | Minsky’s society of mind builds a mind downward, out of agents that are not minds. Schwitzgebel (LIT-159) builds a candidate mind upward, out of agents that are. The readings agree that agency survives both directions: Block grants a homunculi-head beliefs, List grants organised groups agency and awareness, Levin finds nested goal-pursuing collectives (his “Selves”) at every scale. The dispute narrows to phenomenal consciousness, and every published way to accept the downward move while refusing the upward one is either an anti-nesting principle (Putnam’s stipulation, IIT’s exclusion postulate, Kammerer’s functional version), each introduced for or justified weakly by the verdict it gives, or an architectural criterion that would count against a loosely coupled society of mind as much as against a nation. Proposed: an account of where a dispute stands, from philosophical argument and no measurement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-045 v3 | Felt affect is the experience of the body’s regulatory state, valenced by what that state means for staying alive and present throughout waking experience, not only in emotion; whether what is felt is a prediction of that state or a map of it is unsettled | Barrett (2017), LIT-542, and Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, are two independent accounts that agree on a base layer. What is felt as affect (valence and arousal for Barrett, feeling for Damasio) is the body’s regulatory state. Its valence is that state’s value for the organism, and it is present in hunger, pain and well-being as much as in emotion. They disagree about what the experience is of. For Barrett it is the brain’s allostatic prediction of the body, issued from agranular limbic cortex. For Damasio it is a topographic map of the body’s state, built in the upper brainstem, and their paper makes no use of prediction. Seth (LIT-135) builds on the same base but makes his claim about consciousness, not about affect. Friston (LIT-526) supports neither. Proposed: both sources are theoretical syntheses, and neither tests the claim. | Proposed |
| THEORY-059 | The readiness potential does not show that a neural decision to act precedes awareness of the urge to act | Libet read the readiness potential, which begins half a second or more before a spontaneous movement and before the reported urge, as the brain deciding first. Two independent arguments in the record remove that inference. Schurger, Sitt & Dehaene (LIT-605) show that a leaky accumulator driven by noise and fitted to waiting times alone reproduces the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96), because movement-locked averaging recovers the fluctuations that crossed threshold; a prediction of theirs held in 13 people. Dennett & Kinsbourne (LIT-431) argue that the clock report times a represented content, not an event in the brain. Proposed: the authors say their model shows the potential could be fluctuation, not that it is. It says nothing about whether the urge causes the act. | Proposed |
| THEORY-063 | The unity of experience is the integration of one global world-model into a single functional cluster, and it does not require a self-model | Metzinger’s précis of Being No One (2005), LIT-568: the globality constraint makes every conscious content part of one world-model. On the functional level that is “highest-order binding” into a single causal role, and on the neural level the prediction of “one single area of maximal causal density”, after Tononi and Edelman’s dynamic core. “What you subjectively experience upon experiencing your world as coherent is the high internal correlation strength between a subset of physical events in your own brain.” A unified world comes before a self: the minimal case is “Selfless Snapshot Consciousness”, and fully depersonalized states are “non-subjective consciousness”. The neural half is a cited hypothesis, the précis says little is known, and how the cluster becomes one subject’s is left open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-064 | What is experienced as a self is the content of a self-model the system cannot recognise as a model, and nothing beyond such models is a self | Metzinger’s précis of Being No One (2005), LIT-568, with his encyclopedia article “Self models” (LIT-450): a phenomenal self is a transparent self-model, one whose representational character “is not accessible to subjective experience”, so that the system experiences its content “simply as ourselves”. Selfhood is “a function realized by a lack of information”, and “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency is graded, and the perspective itself is modelled, as a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation. Two things are offered: a prediction (a wholly opaque self-model would abolish selfhood) and an ontological stipulation. The précis adds no evidence; its case studies are in the book, unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-090 v2 | A basic, affective form of consciousness is realised subcortically, in the upper brainstem and thalamus, before and without cortex, and its first function is alarm: survival behaviour, care for the body and generalised one-shot learning, with no choice between options | Newen & Montemayor’s ALARM theory (2025), LIT-626: basic arousal, a sensitivity to pain, pleasure and other basic affect without focused attention, can be realised without cortex, by the upper brainstem and thalamus, and its function is to alarm the bodily agent when a homeostatic variable leaves its range, giving the signal “100% weight” through “rather rigid behavioural programmes without choices”. Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, supply the subcortical clause independently: feeling is generated in the upper brainstem and the insula is not needed. Both papers argue from cited evidence and offer no new data, and neither has a marker that tells a felt alarm from an unfelt one. The function clause rests on ALARM alone, and Veit’s account rivals it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-091 | A deficit in which consciousness and a capacity are lost together does not show that the capacity is a function of phenomenal consciousness, since access is lost too and the capacity is one the machinery of access has | Block (1995), LIT-643, §6. Marcel, Flanagan, van Gulick and Schacter argue from the thirsty blindsight patient who does not reach for the water, and Searle from Penfield’s petit mal automatisms, that a function of phenomenal consciousness is to let information guide action. In blindsight access is missing too, and in petit mal nothing shows experience is missing at all. “The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness.” That experience causes access, so that the function is experience’s after all, is “a bold hypothesis, not a fallacy”, and the deficit cannot decide it. Proposed: single-source, and the distinction it rests on is argued from conceivable cases. | Proposed |
| THEORY-093 v2 | A content of mind is conscious when a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings identifies it as the organism’s own; the feelings are conscious in themselves and hybrid, partly made of the body state they map, because interoceptive pathways let the body act directly on the neurons that map it | Damasio & Damasio (2022), LIT-628, an essay with no data, read only through a summarising fetch tool, so its wording is paraphrased here. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as belonging to one’s own organism, and a continuous stream of homeostatic feelings, from hunger and pain to a faint feeling of existing, supplies it; the feelings are conscious in themselves and confer consciousness on exteroceptive images. They are hybrid because interoceptive axons are unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic and outside a systematic blood–brain barrier, so viscera and circulating molecules act on the neurons that map them. Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, read in full, supply the upper-brainstem site of feeling and the unmyelinated-fibre proposal. Proposed: the identification is a definition, the mechanism an interpretation of anatomy, and the clinical evidence does not separate this account from its rivals. | Proposed |
| THEORY-094 | Neither report nor no-report paradigms isolate the neural basis of consciousness, because post-perceptual cognition that tracks the percept persists without report; only a design that removes differential post-perceptual cognition does | Block (2007), LIT-646, framed the methodological puzzle: the neural basis of experience can be found only by deciding whether it includes the machinery of access, and the evidence comes through report. The no-report paradigm was the answer. Block (2019), LIT-637, argues it has “a fatal flaw”: subjects not asked to report still think about what they see, and that thought is aligned with the percept (the “bored monkey” problem). Eliminating report isolates the basis of experience “only if it eliminates post-perceptual cognitive processing” correlated with the percept. Brascamp et al.’s inconspicuous rivalry, whose switches subjects detected at chance, is the one such design Block offers. The method is specific to rivalry so far, and Block says there may be no general solution. | Proposed |
| THEORY-095 v3 | Phenomenal character is not fixed by long-arm functional role or by externally individuated representational content: on Inverted Earth it stays the same while both invert, so only internal accounts, short-arm functional or physical, remain open | Block (1990), LIT-634: on Inverted Earth colours and colour words are inverted, so a subject fitted with inverting lenses notices nothing. After long residence, or for a twin with a molecule-for-molecule identical brain raised there, the intentional content of the experience of the sky inverts and so does its long-arm functional role, while qualitative content stays the same; Q = F₁, Q = F₂ and F₁ ≠ F₂ breaks transitivity of identity. Block (2003), LIT-635, turns the case on externalist representationism: for colour there is no shared appearance property left to explain the sameness, and long-term memory blocks the gradual-shift reply, so “mental paint” is what stays the same. Proposed: both rest on an externalist shift of content and on first-person sameness, and Block concedes that a short-arm functional theory of qualia would escape. | Proposed |
| THEORY-096 | Perceptual consciousness is global availability: a content becomes conscious when the activity it drives into a core of long-range hub neurons, prefrontal among them, crosses a threshold and ignites it, so that the network amplifies, sustains and broadcasts that one content to the specialised processors; below threshold it leaves a decaying wave and is not experienced | Mashour, Roelfsema, Changeux & Dehaene (2020), LIT-631, a review by the theory’s proponents. Conscious access is “a non-linear network ignition” that amplifies and sustains a representation so that local processors can access it, in a distributed core of long-range layer II/III and V pyramidal neurons with prefrontal cortex a key hub but “not … the exclusive territory”. Ignition is exclusive: one content at a time. Evidence: seen and unseen trials diverge after about 200 ms across modalities; in van Vugt et al.’s monkeys, missed stimuli drove V1 and V4 but only reported ones, and false alarms, ignited sustained prefrontal firing, and the signal-detection threshold is the ignition threshold. The review adopts the premise that global availability “is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state”, and calls experience without access untested; that premise, not the access data, is where it rivals overflow and the sensory account. Single source, second-hand evidence, and the P3 question conceded open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-098 v4 | The neural basis of perceptual consciousness does not include the prefrontal machinery of cognitive access: it is recurrent activity in sensory cortex | Block’s “back of the head” position, from three papers. Block (2005), LIT-629: a phenomenal NCC (for seen motion, recurrent MT/V5–V1 activity) and an access NCC (frontoparietal broadcasting), with winner-take-all access letting a recurrent sensory representation lose and stay unaccessed. Block (2007), LIT-646: the mesh argument. If workspace activation is not part of the basis of experience, strong losing sensory coalitions explain why experience overflows access; if it is, nothing does. Block (2019), LIT-637: no-report designs do not settle the prefrontal question, because thought about the percept persists, and one design that removes it found no prefrontal difference by fMRI, which Block calls evidence against prefrontalism while granting that ECoG could still support it. Proposed: an inference to the best explanation, with every experiment second-hand and the decisive test not yet run. | Proposed |
| THEORY-100 | A neural correlate of conscious report does not require laminar cortex: in crows it is carried by the nidopallium caudolaterale, a nuclear pallial region whose neurons follow the reported percept rather than the stimulus | Maldarelli & Güntürkün (2025), LIT-650, reviewing Nieder et al. (2020): in crows reporting near-threshold stimuli, single neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), the functional analogue of prefrontal cortex, fired with the “seen” report whether or not a stimulus was shown and were silent on “not seen” reports. NCL is nuclear, not layered; the cortex-like layers and columns found in birds are confined to the sensory pallium. So a correlate of conscious report does not need laminar cortex. The crow evidence is second-hand, from one laboratory and not in the record, and a report paradigm cannot separate access from phenomenal consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-101 v2 | Consciousness began as hedonic valence, which evolved as a common currency for trading off competing options in action selection among animals with many degrees of freedom | Veit’s pathological complexity thesis, as he restates and defends it in his reply to commentators (2025), LIT-105: consciousness originated as hedonic valence, “a common currency of sharing evaluative information across multiple control systems”, which animals with many degrees of freedom need to solve the combinatorial trade-offs of action selection. Felt valence is identical with that currency, “not Cartesian but cybernetic”. Motivational trade-offs are his criterion for consciousness. The source is a reply piece; the thesis is argued in a book the record has not read, and the mechanism is a sketch. ALARM (THEORY-090) rivals it on what the first consciousness did. | Proposed |
| THEORY-102 v3 | In Vishne, Gerber, Knight and Deouell’s intracranial recordings from ten epilepsy patients viewing clearly visible images for up to 1.5 s, the pattern of high-frequency activity across ventral temporal cortex carried image category, and exemplar identity among 60 images, in a time-invariant code for as long as the image stayed on while amplitude fell about 80%; at the sampled prefrontal and parietal sites, category content was a burst about 150 to 600 ms after onset that did not track duration | Vishne, Gerber, Knight & Deouell (2023), LIT-644: in 430 visually responsive subdural electrodes from 10 patients viewing images for 300–1,500 ms with no report on analysed trials, high-frequency activity and single-electrode category selectivity fell about 80% from peak by 800–900 ms, while the pattern across ventral temporal electrodes kept near-ceiling, time-invariant category and exemplar information that ended a fixed delay after the image went off. Prefrontal and parietal information was confined to about 150–600 ms and ignored duration. This met the predictions both IIT’s and the global workspace’s proponents registered for the paradigm, so it did not discriminate them. Above- threshold images only, sparse right-lateralised frontal coverage, one frequency band; it does not show the code tracks experience rather than input. | Active |
| THEORY-103 v3 | Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access: in partial-report tasks more items are experienced than the roughly four that working memory holds, though any one of them can be accessed when cued | Block (2007), LIT-646, and Block (2011), LIT-640. Subjects shown 8–32 items say they see all or almost all of them, report about 4, and when cued after offset can report or compare most of any cued subset: capacity 6–7 of 8 up to 1.5 s (Landman et al.), and 7, 6 and 5 of 8 at 1, 2.5 and 4 s (fragile visual short-term memory), against a working memory that stays at about 4. Block reads the surplus as experienced. The rival “sparse” reading holds it in an unconscious store plus a conscious generic or fragmentary image, and Block argues there is no independent evidence for either posit. Proposed: every experiment is second-hand, and that the surplus is conscious is the contested step. Overflow means most items are unaccessed, not that any is inaccessible. | Proposed |
| THEORY-125 | A group can itself be in an emotional state that is not its members’ states in aggregation, when its distributed routines integrate the capacities an emotion requires into one action-oriented representation; because emotions are functional kinds such a state need not be felt, and no actual case has yet been shown | Huebner (2010), LIT-702: a genuinely collective emotion is a state of a group that “could not be exhaustively characterized in terms of intentional states of individuals in aggregation”. Fear requires danger detection, redeployment of attention, system-wide preparatory change and their coordination into one state with indicative content and imperative force; a distributed system can integrate routines that way. Some individual emotions are non-conscious, so a group’s need not be felt, and emotion kinds are functional (“like vodka”), so lacking homologous mechanisms does not exclude groups. The paper establishes a possibility, not an instance: its worked case, the USS Palau crew, turns out to be “collective detection of danger in the absence of a fear response”, and the replacement, the 2008 McCain–Palin campaign, is offered as “intuitively plausible” pending anthropological data. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-240 | Loss of consciousness under propofol and in chronic disorders of consciousness goes with reduced pairwise integrated information between default-mode regions that rank as gateways of a synergy-defined workspace, not between its broadcasters | Luppi et al. (2024), LIT-949, read in NOTE-799. In resting-state fMRI, the regions where synergistic interactions outrank redundant ones split by rank into gateways (mainly default mode) and broadcasters (mainly fronto-parietal). Pairwise ΦR, the whole-minus-sum Φ plus redundancy, falls between default-mode gateways in propofol anaesthesia, in 22 DOC patients, and against post-anaesthetic recovery. The original Φ shows no common decrease. The finding is correlational, pairwise and content-free. The gateway/broadcaster split is imposed by the method; only where its two classes fall is measured. | Proposed |
| THEORY-245 v3 | In a preregistered multimodal test with clearly seen images, prefrontal cortex carried a seen image’s category but not its identity, and a face’s orientation at most weakly, while posterior cortex carried category, face orientation and the identity of objects, letters and false fonts, though not of faces; no prefrontal site showed the preregistered onset-and-offset response, and one, found in an exploratory analysis, responded at offset earlier than predicted | Cogitate Consortium, Ferrante et al. (2025), LIT-973, read in NOTE-812. In iEEG and fMRI, with Bayesian support for the nulls, and against a positive control, prefrontal cortex held category but no identity or orientation, and none of 655 prefrontal electrodes showed the onset-and-offset response GNWT predicted. It does not show these dimensions were unaccessed, or that prefrontal cortex lacks them in other signals: high gamma and BOLD only, no single units, and every image was seen. | Active |
| THEORY-252 | On computational functionalism, an intervention that changes no neural activity and no actual causal interaction can change consciousness, because a clamp that stays idle on the actual input removes the transitions on every other input | Gidon, Aru and Larkum (2025), LIT-1000, read in full in NOTE-818: a voltage clamp replaying a recorded response injects no current on the matching stimulus yet fixes the network’s transitions on every other, so on the Turing–Putnam definition the computation degenerates while nothing that happens changes. It is a conditional about the view, not evidence about experience; the simulation shows only what an ideal clamp does, and the premise that removing unexercised branches changes experience is cited, not defended. | Proposed |
| THEORY-296 v2 | In a preregistered multimodal test with clearly seen images, category-selective posterior cortex showed no sustained content-specific synchronization with early visual cortex, which iEEG sampled with 12 electrodes: the preregistered phase coupling was brief, low-frequency and mostly stimulus-evoked, and exploratory amplitude coupling, gamma included, was also brief | Cogitate Consortium, Ferrante et al. (2025), LIT-973, read in NOTE-812. IIT’s proponents predicted sustained gamma-band synchronization between category-selective cortex and V1/V2 throughout a conscious percept. iEEG and MEG phase consistency found only early, brief, 2–25 Hz coupling, mostly evoked, with Bayesian support for the null; exploratory amplitude coupling was also brief. V1/V2 was sparsely sampled in iEEG. It tests IIT’s proposed implementation, not integrated information. | Active |
| THEORY-298 | Report-based evidence cannot test whether posterior cortex suffices for experience, because report itself needs anterior activity, and no marker that bypasses report has a validation resting neither on introspection nor on a contested theory | Seth & Bayne (2022), LIT-982, “Evaluating theories of consciousness” and Box 3, read in NOTE-849 from the accepted manuscript. An argument in a review, not a result: the verification of posterior-sufficiency predictions “relies on subjective report …, which in turn requires anterior cortical activity”, and validating a non-report marker by theory borrows a contested theory, by introspection, unreliable report. It says the methods are lacking “at present”, not that the question is unanswerable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-322 | The sense of agency over an action’s outcome draws on prospective signals from action selection and outcome prediction, not only on retrospective comparison of outcome with prediction | Haggard (2017), LIT-1009, read in full in NOTE-827. A review, reporting a binding experiment in which action binding tracked the probability of a tone on trials with no tone, a patient study in which that prospective part was absent in schizophrenia, and priming studies in which ease of action selection raised the sense of control over an outcome it did not predict. It does not say the experience is accurate: the prospective part is by its nature blind to whether control was actually exercised. | Proposed |
| THEORY-415 | Nothing has all four marks that qualia are said to have, being ineffable, intrinsic, private and directly apprehensible, because neither the subject nor an outside tester can tell a change in a quale from a change in the subject’s reactions to it; what is real in their place is the practical ineffability and idiosyncrasy of information-rich property detection | Dennett (1988), LIT-433, read in full in NOTE-357. Argued by fifteen intuition pumps, not by proof, and the author says so. The central step rests on a stipulation that two surgeries, or two adaptation stories, produce identical introspective effects. NOTE-357 filed no THEORY because the record does not hold the replies (Shoemaker 1981, Block 1980); this account states the claim as the reading supports it and leaves it Proposed for that reason. Its “there simply are no qualia at all” is a tactical choice of words by the author’s endnote 2. | Proposed |
| THEORY-433 | Whether a machine thinks is best replaced by whether a digital computer can play the imitation game as well as a man, because the reasons for withholding thought from a machine that does would equally withhold it from other people, whose thinking we also infer from what they say; the objections from consciousness, mathematical limits and informality of behaviour fail on that test or rest on unproved premises | Turing (1950), LIT-394, read in NOTE-355. The imitation game is offered in place of a definition of thinking, not as a test of it, and Turing says he has “no very convincing arguments of a positive nature”. The account’s force is the other-minds parity of §6.4, which assumes, as §2 states and does not argue, that the machine’s best strategy is to answer as a man would; a machine built to imitate human output is the case that assumption does not cover. It makes no claim about consciousness. Proposed, and a rival of Block’s psychologism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-436 | Pain is a functional state of a whole organism, possessing a certain functional organisation as a probabilistic automaton, rather than a brain state, and this is the more plausible empirical hypothesis because one pain predicate applies to physically different organisms; the hypothesis keeps swarms out only by a stipulated condition that no pain-feeler has parts that separately possess the organisation | Putnam (1967), LIT-396, recorded as Skimmed in NOTE-335 from a course excerpt of the 1975 reprint, which carries the four-clause hypothesis verbatim; the original is Unavailable here. Proposed, and resting on that excerpt and on a result discussed throughout the literature the record holds. Clause (1) is empty by Putnam’s own admission, since everything is a probabilistic automaton under some description, and clause (3), the anti-nesting condition, is introduced with one motive, to rule out swarms of bees. The argument against the brain-state view is comparative plausibility, not evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-449 | If sentience comes in degrees, plants may be faintly sentient, and moral status is graded by degree of sentience, then plants have a partial moral status so low that animal interests outweigh theirs in most cases; all three premises are assumed, and the second rests on contested, second-hand evidence | Terrill & Veit (2024), LIT-193, read in NOTE-120. The conditional is valid; its premises A1 (graded sentience), A2 (plants may be quasi-sentient) and A3 (status graded by sentience) are assumed, and A2 is supported mainly by a popular book and commentaries. The paper gives no scale and no aggregation rule. It should not be cited as evidence of plant sentience, and the second author’s later work leans against plant consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-454 v2 | Perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual and nonpropositional and cognition paradigmatically discursive, and percepts are put to cognitive use only inside a ‘cognitive envelope’, the global workspace read as conceptualisation, where working memory holds recoded, task-dependent abstractions rather than the percepts themselves | Block (2024), LIT-649, read in NOTE-498: the précis of his 2023 book, not the book. The main thesis is stated and its arguments are in the book, unread here. The working-memory half is the update: nine cited lines of evidence that working-memory representations differ from perceptual ones and are task-dependent abstractions (moderate). The rereading of the workspace as conceptualisation rather than consciousness is asserted, not argued against the consciousness reading. | Proposed |
| THEORY-460 | Every leading reason to deny consciousness to current large language models except biology names a missing feature, recurrent processing, a global workspace, unified agency, world and self models or senses and embodiment, that engineering could add, so the case against current models is much stronger than the case against their extended successors; the one possibly permanent objection, biology, is the one the argument sets aside | Chalmers (2023), LIT-411, read in full in NOTE-345. A classification of objections as temporary or permanent, argued by naming simple systems that have each feature. The credences that follow, under 10% for current models and 25% or more for conscious extended models within a decade, are illustrative by the author’s warning, multiply stipulated factors under a disclaimed independence assumption, and depend on “mainstream assumptions”. Biology is set aside with a reference to earlier work. It adds no evidence about any model. | Proposed |
| THEORY-461 | If a substantial class of mental states, interoceptive, affective, perceptual and bodily-agentive, depends on an animate body, then today’s text-only chatbots lack them and their self-ascriptions of such states are systematically untrue, and users can engage them without false belief by make-believe, as a new kind of interactive, self-involving and blended fictional character | Roberts (2026), LIT-207, read in NOTE-157. The anti-realist half is a valid conditional whose antecedent, moderate embodied cognition, is assumed at prima facie strength. It covers body-dependent states only; footnote 8 allows realism about the chatbot as a disembodied thinker, so belief and reasoning are untouched. The fictionalist half shows the attitude permissible and apt, not required, and offers no evidence that users hold it. It is not a general denial that chatbots have minds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-498 | A mathematical structure whose domains are aspects of experience and whose axioms hold there is not thereby a structure of experience, because that test passes incompatible topologies on one set and every rescaling of a metric without consulting experience; requiring, for each relation, an aspect that changes exactly when a variation of experience breaks the relation removes those automatic passes, and has so far been met only by relative similarity and a visual topology, each on an assumed premise | Kleiner & Ludwig (2023; Synthese 2024), LIT-143, read in full in NOTE-135. The negative result is shown by construction: any set of aspects carries both the discrete topology and a coarser one, and a metric d passes whenever every C·d does. The replacement criterion (MSC) ties each relation to an aspect that co-varies with it under every variation. Its two positive cases rest on assumed transitivity and on the subsumptive unity thesis. The published version gives no structure that fails (MSC); the argument that metric spaces fail is in arXiv v1 only, and was withdrawn. | Active |
| THEORY-506 | Every well-developed theory of how mind fits into the cosmos is bizarre, contrary to what most people confidently believe, and none is epistemically compelling, because common sense about the metaphysics of mind is incoherent; so no coarse position, materialism included, deserves credence much above 50% | Schwitzgebel (2024), LIT-216, read in full from the June 2022 final manuscript in NOTE-188; the published body text was not reached. Chapter 3’s Universal Bizarreness and Universal Dubiety, with the other chapters as case studies. Bizarreness is an abductive generalization over the theories actually developed, with a standing challenge to find a counterexample, not a result about all possible theories. Dubiety rests on expert disagreement, the lack of any method and cosmological uncertainty, and the 50% figure is the author’s judgment. The author’s own credences lean materialist, at about 55%. | Proposed |
| THEORY-507 | Any system with the same fine-grained functional organisation as a conscious system has qualitatively the same experiences, with natural though not metaphysical necessity, because otherwise a neuron-by-neuron replacement would yield either a rational subject systematically wrong about its fading experience or experience that flips with a switch nobody could notice; the principle covers only isomorphs, so it says nothing about systems merely similar in kind to a conscious one | Chalmers (1995), LIT-392, read in full in NOTE-347, with the one-page sketch in “Facing Up”, LIT-406 (NOTE-336). A plausibility argument by the author’s own account: the fading- and dancing-qualia conditionals are strong given the replacement series; their rejection rests on a premise about self-knowledge drawn from familiar cases. It extends to a population of people implementing a person’s neurons, so it rules out absolute anti-nesting for isomorphs. It does not reach any system that is not an isomorph of something conscious, which includes every actual AI system and every group. | Proposed |
| THEORY-512 | The extended-mind thesis worth disputing is that external entities partly constitute a subject’s mental states in virtue of the subject’s sensorimotor interaction with them; so stated it can reach standing belief but not consciousness, if consciousness needs information directly available for global control, since perception makes availability indirect | Chalmers (2019), LIT-415, read in NOTE-356, and his foreword to Clark’s book (2008), LIT-421, read in NOTE-369. The 1998 thesis is satisfied by wired-in “extended circuits” that its critics accept, so the controversial thesis is constitution through perception and action. The perception-action boundary is then the strongest objection, met by revisionism, not refuted. Consciousness does not extend this way, on an imported criterion (direct availability, “not mediated by other mental states”) and on the absence of any working twin case. Both halves are proposals defended against a few cases; the criterion is the author’s earlier correlate of consciousness, not an argument made here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-523 | IIT 4.0’s measure of integrated information is undefined for any system that has a non-Markovian graining, which brains are said to have under the grainings in use, and it has never been computed for a real physical system; so empirical measures such as PCI are proxies for it, not approximations, and their success is evidence for IIT’s intuitions about integration, not for Φ | Barrett, Milinkovic, Mediano, Rosas, Bor, Barnett & Seth (2026), LIT-185, read in full in NOTE-122. A position paper by sympathetic insiders, with no new formal result. The ill-definedness is restated from Barrett & Mediano (2019), which the record does not hold. That brains are non-Markovian under typical grainings rests on one 1998 citation about ion-channel currents. The proxy point follows from a definition: an approximation needs a well-defined target and an error bound. The paper’s defences of IIT (the multi-dimensional measure, the “proto-consciousness” panpsychism) are revisions of the theory, not readings of it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-554 | On the grounds of moral standing now commonly accepted, together with scientific premises that are not unreasonable, the aggregate interests of insects or the interests of near-future AI could outweigh humanity’s; no capacity yet proposed secures human priority, and the books that state those grounds retreat to moderate advice without a principle that supplies the stopping point | Schwitzgebel & Sinnott-Armstrong (2026), LIT-166 (NOTE-116), with the SEP survey of animal moral status (LIT-146, NOTE-181) for the failure of capacity-based human exceptionalism. A conditional, defended as one: the reviewers “take no stand on ponens vs. tollens” (p. 6) and do “not endorse” the radical conclusion (p. 38). The scientific premises are called “not unreasonable” and not argued, so the account is only as strong as they are. | Proposed |
| THEORY-563 v2 | Consciousness is a real pattern in the brain’s content-bearing states, a description that trades predictive accuracy for compression, and so coarse that describing the brain through it is metaphor; on that reading there is no Cartesian theatre, whether a given content was conscious can lack an answer when two descriptions compress and predict equally, and first-person reports are fallible as literal descriptions of the brain but authoritative as an author’s | Taylor (2024), LIT-461, read in full in NOTE-379. An interpretation of Dennett offered as consistent, explicitly not as correct or as what Dennett meant. Its argument for indeterminacy in masking rests on Dennett’s idealised description of the cases, which Taylor calls “somewhat simplistic”. It does not say which real pattern consciousness is, or what makes a real pattern a conscious one rather than a belief pattern. Filed as the account the reading states, at the strength the reading gives it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-573 | Signals of processing quality from different senses, such as fluency, familiarity and coherence, pool into one content-nonspecific feeling, and that pooled feeling contributes to the unity of conscious experience across modalities, alongside the integration of specific features; in support, coherence in one modality shifts judgments of regularity, familiarity and possibility about unrelated targets in another | Winkielman, Ziembowicz & Nowak (2015), LIT-190, read in full in NOTE-146. An opinion piece whose main evidence is the authors’ own three experiments (Ziembowicz et al. 2013), summarised without statistics and not read by the record. The authors state that direct evidence is still needed that the effects run through changed experience and that its integration is causal. No study cited measures unity of experience. The LIT is itself Proposed; this account carries its promotion condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-577 | Our judgments that consciousness poses a hard problem are behaviour, so explaining them is an easy problem that can be solved without mentioning consciousness; and a theory that names a mechanism as the basis of consciousness owes an account of how that mechanism produces those judgments, which IIT and biological theories struggle to give, since a functional duplicate with zero integrated information, or in silicon, would make the same reports | Chalmers (2018), LIT-425, read in full in NOTE-354. The meta-problem follows from the physical explicability of behaviour; the challenge is a constraint argued from it, “not a knockdown argument”. It assumes that a zero-Φ simulation has the same intuitions on a functional reading, which an IIT theorist can deny. The paper’s own favoured solution, opaque introspective models attributing primitive relations of acquaintance, is “closer to a fleshed-out explanandum” than an explanation, and the data the programme needs mostly do not exist. | Proposed |
| THEORY-597 | Meditation-related experiences that Western Buddhist practitioners report as challenging span 59 kinds in seven domains, from fear and sleep change to altered self-other boundaries, and they are reported in daily practice, at under an hour a day and in the first days of practice, not only on intensive retreat; the frequencies come from a sample chosen for difficulty, and the causal link is the practitioners’ own attribution | Lindahl, Fisher, Cooper, Rosen & Britton (2017), LIT-066, read in full in NOTE-036. Interviews with 60 Western Buddhist practitioners, recruited for having had a challenging meditation-related experience, and 32 teachers and clinicians were coded into 59 experience categories in seven domains. Some practitioners reported onset within ten days of starting, at under an hour a day, or in daily practice. That rebuts the claim that difficulties arise only on retreat or in the predisposed. It gives no rates and no relative risk: the sample was chosen for difficulty, and causation is self-attributed, with a causality score of 2 or more built into inclusion. | Active |
| THEORY-603 | In the Iowa gambling task, every one of ten controls and none of six patients with bilateral ventromedial prefrontal damage developed anticipatory skin-conductance responses, and three patients who could state the right strategy still did not switch to the good decks; the controls’ preference for the good decks became significant only once they reported a hunch, so the study does not show advantageous choice or deck-specific bodily signals before any awareness | Bechara, Damasio, Tranel & Damasio (1997), LIT-383, read in NOTE-331. The robust results are the group difference in anticipatory SCRs (Fisher’s exact, one-sided P < 0.001) and the insufficiency of stated knowledge in three patients. The abstract’s “before they realized which strategy worked best” and “before they knew” outrun notes 8 and 9: the pre-hunch choice preference was not significant, and the pre-hunch SCR effect reported is group × period, with no bad-versus-good deck test. Nothing here shows that the SCR, or what it indexes, causes the choice. | Active |
| THEORY-606 | If consciousness words have meaning only through what is public, an entity is a candidate for consciousness only if an encounter with it in a shared world can be engineered, at least in principle; then disembodied chat agents, even with tools and memory, are not candidates, robots and virtually embodied agents could be, and beyond what an informed community comes to say there is no further fact about their consciousness | Shanahan (2024), LIT-465, read in full in NOTE-382 from the arXiv v2 preprint. A conditional, and the condition is the paper’s method: a later-Wittgensteinian reading of consciousness language, summarised, not defended. The candidature test is stipulated and illustrated by the octopus and an imagined alien cube. The verdict on chat agents follows from it. Calling functionalism and identity theory “dualistic” is a definition, not an argument. The two passages on the self (no “self worth preserving”, no “person behind the mask”) are asserted and are not part of this account. | Proposed |
| THEORY-633 | Experiences have no phenomenal properties: introspection represents physical, quasi-phenomenal properties of sensory states as phenomenal, so what needs explaining is why experiences seem to have phenomenal properties, not how a brain produces them; a weaker view that keeps a deflated phenomenal residue is unstable unless it can say what that residue is | Frankish (2016), LIT-458, read in NOTE-384, names the view and the “illusion problem”; Dennett’s reply to Chalmers (1996), LIT-397 (NOTE-346), gives its earlier form, that subtracting every function from one’s consciousness leaves only a conviction; Frankish (2025), LIT-103 (NOTE-143), applies it to valence. A research programme, not a theory: Frankish proposes no mechanism, the instability of weak illusionism is argued by challenge, the case is abductive, and Dennett’s subtraction is an introspective assertion. It keeps consciousness in an inclusive, functional sense and denies only phenomenal properties. | Proposed |
| THEORY-644 | Panpsychism escapes dualism’s problem of mental causation only in its constitutive Russellian form, where micro-experiences constitute macro-experience; that form meets three combination problems, of subjects, qualities and structure, and every response that avoids combining (emergent, autonomous or identity panpsychism) gives back the advantage in mental causation or revised physics, while the combinatorial responses remain unworked | Chalmers (2016/2017), LIT-395, read in full in NOTE-358 from the April 2015 draft. A map of the problem, not a solution or an impossibility proof, and the author says so. The dilemma is argued case by case; the strongest arguments against constitutive panpsychism, subject-summing and structural mismatch, rest on conceivability premises and on a structure-preservation principle called plausible, not shown. The verdicts on which responses are most promising are judgements of promise. | Proposed |
| THEORY-662 | The feeling of fluency is an inference about the precision of one’s own processing, triggered by a change in precision against expectation; because its cause is internal and not given to introspection, a felt discrepancy is attributed to the most salient external source, as familiarity, liking or a sense of error | Brouillet and Friston (2023), LIT-957, read in NOTE-785. A perspective essay with no model and no new data. It joins Whittlesea’s discrepancy-attribution hypothesis to precision-weighting. The part with moderate support is the reviewed finding that fluency judgements follow discrepancy from expected fluency (the hension effect and its extensions), reported secondhand. The precision reading and the felt/unfelt levels are proposals. “Felt” here means attended and reportable, not phenomenal, and fluency is not offered as affect. | Proposed |
| THEORY-677 | Under uncertainty about which beings are sentient, an appeal to precaution does not by itself fix which error is worse to make: precaution on behalf of a possibly sentient being and precaution on behalf of human liberty point opposite ways, and judging which mistake costs more turns on the very science in doubt | Schwitzgebel & Sinnott-Armstrong (2026), LIT-166, read in NOTE-116 from the September 2025 draft. A conceptual argument with worked cases, which the reading rates strong: “By itself, an appeal to precaution does not specify the type of error most to be avoided” (p. 8). Birch’s framework puts the burden on whoever risks harming a sentience candidate; Mill’s harm principle, read as a precaution, puts it on whoever would restrict liberty. The record holds the point, not the reviewers’ reading of Birch’s books, which it has not read. | Active |
| THEORY-694 | After every function associated with consciousness is explained (discrimination, integration, report, access, attention, control), why these functions are accompanied by experience remains open, because those phenomena are defined by their functions and experience, what it is like for the subject, is not; so experience cannot be reductively explained by any mechanism, though it may be related to the physical by further laws | Chalmers (1995), LIT-406, read in full in NOTE-336, with Nagel (1974), LIT-096, read in NOTE-089, for the subjective character it starts from. The test is whether “you have explained the function but not the phenomenon” is a conceptual mistake: it is for life and reportability, not for experience. The decisive premise, that any physical process could conceptually occur without experience, is asserted and deferred to a book the record holds unread. Nagel’s conclusion is weaker than Chalmers’s: physicalism not refuted but not yet understandable. Naturalistic dualism and the double-aspect theory of information are the proposals built on the gap, not part of it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-699 | Adaptive self-maintenance across varied conditions is sufficient, without sentience, for having a good of one’s own, so insentient plants and a self-maintaining machine are welfare subjects while thermostats are not; but the line against thermostats is argued as one of degree, and the reasons such welfare gives are extremely weak | Bruckner (2025), LIT-120, read in NOTE-093. Proposed by abduction from agreed cases, not deduced (§4): an entity that “sustains, maintains, and renews itself in a way that responds and adapts to its environmental conditions” is a welfare subject. Plants and the hypothetical car Tessler qualify; governors, thermostats and missiles do not. The “autopoiesis” is a loose behavioural notion, not Maturana and Varela’s self-production, and the thermostat line is supported only comparatively. The answer to absurd obligations borrows Bradford 2023 and makes phenomenal consciousness decide how much such welfare matters. | Proposed |
| THEORY-768 v2 | Minimal selfhood is identification with the whole body, located where that body is felt to be and seen from inside it; owning a body part does not reach it, and bodily agency enables it causally without being part of it | Blanke & Metzinger (2009), LIT-1274, read in full in NOTE-1002, with Lenggenhager et al. (2007), LIT-1279, read in full in NOTE-999, for the full-body illusion it leans on. Minimal phenomenal selfhood is given three dimensions: global self-identification, self-location and a weak first-person perspective. Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and full-body illusions vary them; the rubber hand illusion is said not to. The necessity and sufficiency claims are asserted, and the agency thesis rests on adults whose agency was intact. | Proposed |
| THEORY-830 | In human visual cortex the content of a sustained seen image is carried by a stable population code that lasts as long as the image, not by a sustained level of activity, and frontoparietal cortex marks only its onset; so a sustained experience rests on sensory representation and its discrete updates on frontoparietal representation | Vishne, Gerber, Knight and Deouell (2023), LIT-644, read in full in NOTE-499, conclude from their intracranial recordings that sustained visual experience may rest on a stable sensory representation, with frontoparietal representation serving discrete updates, and propose a stable “experience subspace”. Their measurement, in ten patients and for images up to 1.5 s, is the Active THEORY-102. This is the general claim that measurement was filed to support, held Proposed until a second method or cohort and a case where percept and input come apart test it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-865 v2 | In Gurnee, Sofroniew et al.’s experiments on Claude Sonnet 4.5, Haiku 4.5, Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6, the residual-stream directions a corpus-averaged Jacobian lens marks as verbalizable (the J-space) carried most of the causal effect on verbal report and on unspoken two-hop intermediates while holding a small share of their variance (swaps along them succeeding on 59% and 61% of trials, against 5% and 28% for the remainder, which fell to 0% and 6% with the J-space clamped), held instructed concepts, and passed one swapped argument to several functions (76 of 192 swaps); in two small task sets (n = 8 and 11), report and flexible inference followed a swap while continuation, anomaly detection and line wrapping did not, a split the authors partly define by this result; and by the lens’s own statistics the J-space works in a middle band of layers, holds about 25 active directions and under 10% of activation variance, and is amplified and relayed by the weights more than other directions | Gurnee, Sofroniew et al. (2026), LIT-1347, read in NOTE-1069 (main text in full, appendices in part). It is the functional analogue of conscious access, in the access sense only, found in a transformer and tested by intervention. The sharp edge: one company’s models studied by that company, a lens whose own statistics draw the layer band, a flexible/automatic split partly defined by the result, and an explicit refusal to say anything about phenomenal consciousness. | Active |
| THEORY-866 v2 | Expert texts of Shamatha, Transcendental and Stillness Meditation describe their so-called contentless goal-states as lacking thoughts, perceptions, images and memories but keeping many forms of content, and as differing across the practices in attentional stability and vividness | Woods, Windt & Carter (2022), LIT-1351, read in the submitted preprint in NOTE-1070. An evidence synthesis of 135 texts by eight teachers codes 65 features of the goal-states: the same across practices on 14, different on 4, unclear on 47. The states lack everyday content but keep wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, knowing, freedom and unity; Shamatha’s has far greater attentional stability and vividness. The sharp edge: it is a finding about how teachers describe the states, not about what practitioners experience, and “not truly contentless” depends on counting calm or simplicity as content. | Active |
| THEORY-867 v2 | The geometry of the colour similarity space does not mark the four unique hues, nor the difference between the black–white axis, along which every grey is a mixture of both ends, and the opponent axes, along which each half shows only one end; so a structuralism on which phenomenal character is fixed by similarity relations alone cannot account for how colour experiences are composed | Aldé (2026), LIT-1348, read in full in NOTE-1055. Two arguments, the unique hues objection and the opposing dimensions objection, from colour facts the paper takes as accepted. The decisive premise of each, that no adequate geometric property marks the facts, rests on inspection of CIELAB and extrapolation to better models; no analysis is reported. The target is similarity structuralism only. | Proposed |
| THEORY-868 v2 | The structuralist methods and evidence in consciousness science support only that experiences have structure or stand in relations to other experiences, not that an experience is nothing but its relations; the stronger, metaphysical thesis implies that relational knowledge fixes what an experience is like, that every new experience changes all the others, and that a system with a single experience is impossible, and each consequence is doubtful | Negro (2025), LIT-1346, read in full in NOTE-1054. The distinctions (three structuralisms; having, being in and being a structure) are sound and the arguments valid. Each argument’s decisive premise is an intuition or a conceivability claim, and a structuralist such as Lyre (THEORY-880) accepts the holism Negro takes to be absurd. The paper also says that making judgement constitutive saves the view only by aligning it with eliminativism, which bears directly on CLAIM-412. | Proposed |
| THEORY-869 v2 | In Claude Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6, Gurnee, Sofroniew et al. found that projecting out the ten most active J-space directions in layers 38 to 54 of 100 lowered an experiential-language score, graded by Opus 4.6-based model graders on five or six prompts per condition, both in the models’ narrations of their own processing and in their descriptions of another person’s experience, while norm-matched perturbations along other directions left it near baseline and the text stayed fluent; on Haiku 4.5 coherence failed first | Gurnee, Sofroniew et al. (2026), LIT-1347, §3.5.3 and §A.23, read in NOTE-1069. The authors conclude that “the J-space supports the model’s propensity to provide rich experiential reports, whether about itself or another entity”. The sharp edge: the measure is a register of text graded by another model, on five or six prompts per condition, in one company’s models; and the effect holds for reports about others, so it is not evidence of anything the self-reports are about. | Active |
| THEORY-870 v2 | In one study of 33 experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners and 33 matched controls who counted instead, the practitioners rated their session higher on a retrospective pure-awareness scale whose top was defined for them as free from content (d = 0.77), and a classifier on EEG separated meditation from counting at 65% balanced accuracy on held-out subjects and, within practitioners, meditation from rest with 88% sensitivity; the authors found no robust association between the ratings and the EEG features | Chandia-Jorquera et al. (2026), LIT-1354, read in the bioRxiv v3 preprint in NOTE-1058. 33 practitioners against 33 matched controls who counted: higher and more variable retrospective pure-awareness traces (d = 0.77, 1.32); 65% balanced accuracy separating meditation from counting, on entropy and aperiodic EEG; 88% sensitivity separating meditation from rest, on low-frequency phase coherence. The sharp edge: the authors found no robust association between the reports and the EEG, so this is a finding about a practice period and about reports, not a neural signature of an experience with little content. | Active |
| THEORY-873 v2 | Claims to be conscious are produced by an automatic internal model, and since such models are schematic, the intangible, what-it-is-like essence people report is that model’s caricature of a real process, proposed to be attention, or the deep selective processing of information that attention, the global workspace and integration share; a theory that explains how neurons produce a feeling without explaining how the feeling comes to be encoded for report (Arrow B) does not explain the reports | Graziano (2024), LIT-1358, read in full in NOTE-1071: the attention schema theory and its “deep illusionism”, in an essay with no new data. Arrow B is an argument. The identification of the target with attention rests on covariation with report cited from others, and the merging of attention, workspace and integration is asserted. Its “small” illusionism keeps the modelled process real and denies the reported phenomenal essence, so it is the strong illusionism of THEORY-633 with a named target, not the weak kind. | Proposed |
| THEORY-875 | Phenomenal binding of the parts of an experience can be modelled as agreement, on overlaps, of measured similarity structures assigned to the parts by a presheaf, and the broad quale is fixed by its parts exactly when that presheaf is a sheaf; a sheaf failure may mark disunity, as proposed for binocular rivalry, or context dependence within one unified experience, as in the Ebbinghaus illusion, and the framework does not yet say which | Lee-Youngzie, Tsuchiya, Robinson, Dietz & Monti (2026), LIT-1352, read in full in NOTE-1059. A hypothesis article with no data. It proposes the presheaf and two readings of its failure, disunity for rivalry and context dependence for the Ebbinghaus illusion, without a criterion between them. It does not identify unity with a global section, since it assumes unity always holds. Its global section is measured data, its worked topology example is malformed, and by its own definition of gluing the rivalry case is not a sheaf failure. It answers QUESTION-255 only by showing that a sheaf failure need not be disunity. | Proposed |
| THEORY-876 | Phenomenal consciousness is the coherent functioning of an embodied agent’s generative model of its sensorium, coherent in space, time and cause and run either coupled to sense data (perception) or decoupled from it (imagination); embodied grounding, the model’s capacity to inform and be informed by action–perception cycles at behavioural timescales and the history of such coupling by which it was learned, is necessary, so that integrated information or a functional global workspace without it does not suffice | Safron, Klimaj & Sheikhbahaee (2026), LIT-1345, read in full in NOTE-1057: Integrated World Modeling Theory as restated in a symposium paper, whose earlier, fuller statements (Safron 2020–2023) were not read. Asserted, not argued here. The sharp edge is that the theory does not require current sensory coupling, so its quarrel with grounding- free accounts is about developmental grounding and the capacity for coupling. “Embodied grounding” comes in “sufficient degrees (and kinds)”, with no threshold. | Proposed |
| THEORY-879 | Representing a sensory quality, even in the distinctively sensory way, does not make there be something it is like for the subject to have it: a quality can occur unnoticed, as for an absent-minded driver, so what it is like to experience a quality is a further property that needs awareness, and a representational theory of sensory qualities leaves open what makes a state experienced | Lycan (2000; rev. 2023), LIT-1355, read in full in NOTE-1068. The entry defends the distinction in its own voice (§4.2, §5.1), crediting Carruthers (2000) for the distinction and Armstrong, Nelkin, Rosenthal and Lycan for the claim that qualities can go unnoticed. It is argued, not shown. Its one case, the driver “on autopilot”, is the case Block reads the other way, and the entry gives no evidence that the driver’s perception was not experienced and forgotten. It concerns the quality experienced, not emotion or affect, and it does not say what awareness is. | Proposed |
| THEORY-880 v2 | The specific phenomenal character of an experience is fixed by its place in a quality space, the structure of all the discriminations a sensory system can make, and that structure is mirrored many-to-one in neural feature maps; whether the state is conscious at all is left to a separate general mechanism; so experiences are holistic, a change anywhere in the space can change every experience in it, and spectrum inversion is excluded actually by the asymmetry of colour space and nomologically by its ties to the other senses | Lyre (2022), LIT-1344, read in full in NOTE-1060: neurophenomenal structuralism as a programme. The thesis is assumed and motivated, not shown. Its neural evidence is one cited imaging study of colour in V4. The reduction it draws rests on metaphysically necessary supervenience, which the author says he cannot argue for. It is filed so that the objections read with it, Negro (THEORY-868) and Aldé (THEORY-867), have a stated target. | Proposed |
| THEORY-881 | Across humans, macaques, marmosets and mice, loss of behavioural responsiveness under anaesthesia goes with lower whole-brain pairwise integrated information ΦR in resting fMRI, and its return goes with ΦR’s return, including when central thalamic stimulation restores responsiveness during continued anaesthesia; ΦR tracks the macaque arousal score better than the original Φ, causal density, net information flow or functional connectivity | Luppi et al. (2026), LIT-1357, read in full in NOTE-1064 from the open-access version of record. It extends the same group’s 2024 result (LIT-949, THEORY-240) from human propofol and disorders of consciousness to four species and six regimes, and adds a causal reversal in two macaques. The sharp edge: the state measured is responsiveness, which the authors call “presumably consciousness” and grant is “an imperfect marker of unconsciousness”; the measure is pairwise, linear-Gaussian and content-free; and one mouse regimen fails the main analysis. | Proposed |
| THEORY-882 v2 | Consciousness in an inferring system requires three things: a unified generative model of its world; entry to that model by a precision-weighted competition that coherent inferences win; and epistemic depth, the recursive sharing of the model back through the hierarchy, carried by a hyper-model that predicts and sets precision at every level; awareness then varies with epistemic depth, not with the richness of contents, and a first-person perspective, a self-model and agency are not required | Laukkonen, Friston & Chandaria (2025), LIT-1363, read in full in NOTE-1063 from PsyArXiv v3. A conceptual proposal with no data and no simulation. The three conditions are asserted necessary; their joint sufficiency is argued for AI and then withdrawn for phenomenal experience in a footnote. The formal part (Table 1) is a hierarchy with layer-wise precision hyper-parameters, from which none of the properties the text gives epistemic depth is derived. | Proposed |
| THEORY-883 | Under active inference, the contents of consciousness are posterior beliefs about the hidden states of world, body or brain, and a posterior is conscious when it has the capacity to inform discrete, counterfactual policy selection, at a timescale slow enough to abstract from sensory flux and with enough precision to tell alternatives apart; on this account no conscious content changes without a change in the posterior, and a stimulus given precision by an attention or saccade policy should reach awareness sooner than a retinally matched one | Whyte, Corcoran, Robinson, Smith, Moran, Parr, Friston, Seth & Hohwy (2026), LIT-1364, read in full in NOTE-1062 from arXiv v2. The “hard core” the paper reads off the active inference models of rivalry, access, no-report, interoception and meta-awareness. The first two parts follow from the framework; the criterion of access is “an inference to the best explanation” from what the models needed in order to report. The authors scope it to humans and similar animals and are agnostic elsewhere. Neither prediction has been tested in the paper. | Proposed |
| THEORY-953 v2 | On Isaac’s structuralist account, the strongest evidence that a quality-space model targets phenomenal experience, and not only behaviour or neural activity, is convergence between models of the same space derived through different behavioural procedures, since experience is what those procedures share; he concedes that the convergence observed is coarse, with discrepancies that in many cases exceed each method’s own uncertainty, and that because the models average over subjects what they converge on is a standard observer | Isaac (2025), LIT-1361, read in NOTE-1163: why a third-personal science of quality spaces counts as a science of experience. Relations between experiences, unlike bare qualities, show up in behaviour, so they can be compared across subjects; and models from different behavioural routes that converge are taken to target what the routes share. The argument does not exclude a shared stimulus geometry or a shared decision process as the common factor, the convergence is partial by the paper’s own account, and averaging over subjects makes the target an ideal observer, which the paper leaves as an open puzzle. | Active |
| THEORY-959 | Perceptual constancies are invariants of transformations that act within experience, not only of physical transformations or planar projections, since perceived shape and depth match no linear projection and the transformations can be realized with no physical change; on Isaac’s structuralist account, after Cassirer, it is these invariants, co-present in experience with the varying appearances they abstract from, that make experience represent an objective world and so distinguish subject from object | Isaac (2025), LIT-1361, read in NOTE-1163: the group-theoretic layer of a structuralist account of experience. The paper’s evidence supports the weaker half: constancy needs invariance under transformations internal to experience. The stronger half, that this invariance is what makes experience objective and induces a subject–object distinction, is Cassirer’s, argued from the co-presence of two levels of experience, and the paper gives no way to tell invariant extraction with a subject from invariant extraction without one. “Group-theoretic” is used loosely: the paper’s own examples are groupoids or toy models. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1204 | The strongest evidence that a quality-space model targets phenomenal experience, and not only behaviour or neural activity, is convergence between models of the same space derived through different behavioural procedures, since experience is what those procedures share | Isaac’s “own considered view” (2025), LIT-1361, §5, kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed THEORY-953 and promoted it as a report (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The argument does not rule out a shared stimulus geometry or a shared response process as the common factor, and the convergence is partial by the paper’s own account. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1224 | In Claude language models, projecting out the most active J-space directions in early workspace layers lowers the rate of felt, first-person, sensory language in the models’ narrations of their own processing and in their descriptions of another person’s experience, while norm-matched perturbations along other directions do not and the text stays coherent; so in these models the experiential register of report depends on the access-like workspace and is not specific to self-report | The wide form of Gurnee, Sofroniew et al. (2026), LIT-1347, section 3.5.3, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-869 to what the ablation measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The authors conclude that “the J-space supports the model’s propensity to provide rich experiential reports, whether about itself or another entity” (p. 28). The measure is a model-graded register on few prompts, in one company’s models, with no register control and no blind human rating. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1226 | In Claude language models, a sparse set of residual-stream directions that a corpus-averaged Jacobian lens identifies as verbalizable (the J-space) is causally privileged for verbal report, for holding instructed concepts, for unspoken intermediate steps of reasoning and for passing one argument to many functions, while continuation, anomaly detection and line wrapping use the same information without routing through it; it carries workspace-like content only in a middle band of layers, holds on the order of tens of active directions and under a tenth of activation variance, and is amplified and relayed by the weights more than other directions | The wide form of Gurnee, Sofroniew et al. (2026), LIT-1347, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-865 to what their experiments measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The paper asserts that verbalizable representations form a global workspace in language models. Its tests are on four models of one family, by their makers, with a selectivity split partly defined by the result; no independent replication is reported. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1241 | Experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners report more pure awareness than matched counting controls, and multivariate EEG separates the meditation period from counting and from rest, but the reports are not shown to track any EEG feature | The general form of Chandia-Jorquera et al.’s finding, filed beside THEORY-870 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-870, Active, holds what the one study measured; whether practitioners in general report more pure awareness, robustly to demand, and whether EEG separates the practice from other effortless ones, is this entry’s question. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1246 | The so-called contentless goal-states of Shamatha, Transcendental and Stillness Meditation are neither truly contentless nor identical: they lack thoughts, perceptions, images and memories but keep wakefulness, calm, stillness, a non-conceptual knowing and the like, and they differ across the practices in attentional stability | Woods, Windt and Carter’s thesis about the experiences, filed beside THEORY-866 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-866, Active, holds what the teachers’ texts describe; whether practitioners’ experience is so is this entry’s question, with THEORY-866’s old condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1295 | Metzinger 2024 calls consciousness without an egoic self or first-person perspective “empirically established” on the strength of retrospective, self-selected reports from meditators, while its own methods chapter grants that a remembered report of a selfless state is “highly dubious” evidence that the state was selfless when it occurred, and leaves that problem open | Metzinger (2024), LIT-1943, read in part in NOTE-1499. The summary chapter says that “full-absorption episodes, nonegoic self-awareness, and nondual modes of consciousness are empirically established phenomena” (p. 457), and that the strong reading of subjectivity “is false” (p. 459). The methods chapter grants self-selection, theory contamination, unreliable recall and, at p. 19, that reports of having been selfless are “highly dubious from a methodological perspective” because autobiographical memory represents events as a self’s. It calls the question “open”. Active: the two passages are read and quoted. Whether selfless consciousness occurs is not settled either way here. | Active |
| THEORY-1297 | Mind-wandering is a recurring loss of M-autonomy, the veto-centred ability to suspend or end one’s own ongoing mental processes; on the figures Metzinger uses, it takes about half of conscious time, not the two thirds he states | Metzinger (2013), LIT-1942, restated in 2015, LIT-1941; read in NOTE-1495 and NOTE-1497. The identification is conceptual: an episode of unintentional mind-wandering cannot, while it runs, be suspended or ended at will, and veto is what M-autonomy turns on. The share is computed from others’ figures, and recomputed here: 631 of 1207 conscious minutes, 52%, against the “roughly two thirds” both papers state. Proposed: no measure of veto during episodes is reported, and the 30–50% figures count task-unrelated thought, which includes deliberate daydreaming the definition excludes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1299 | Pure awareness, on Metzinger’s account, is the content of a temporally thin model of the organism’s own tonic alertness, its capacity to know; experience in this minimal form lacks an egoic self-model, a first-person perspective, time, space and even phenomenal oneness, but not self-modelling, and tonic alertness that is not so modelled is not experienced | Metzinger (2020), LIT-1946, read in full in NOTE-1498, and Metzinger (2024), LIT-1943, skimmed in NOTE-1499. MPE is “an inner representation of tonic alertness”, “non-egoic self-modelling” that “definitely has representational content”. In the 2024 sketch it is “a highest-level but nonegoic self-model” of the system’s epistemic openness, which “really endows the content generated on all lower-order levels with phenomenality”. It is a hypothesis fitted to retrospective reports. It does not say that consciousness needs no model of the system, only that it needs no model of a knowing self. | Proposed |