Sep 21, 2023 02:32 PM
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-0...-1#ref-CR1
EXCERPTS: A letter, signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week, has caused an uproar in the consciousness research community. It claims that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something conscious — called the integrated information theory (IIT) — should be labelled “pseudoscience”. Since its publication on 15 September in the preprint repository PsyArXiv, the letter has some researchers arguing over the label and others worried it will increase polarization in a field that has grappled with issues of credibility in the past.
“I think it’s inflammatory to describe IIT as pseudoscience,” says neuroscientist Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, adding that he disagrees with the label. “IIT is a theory, of course, and therefore may be empirically wrong,” says neuroscientist Christof Koch, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, and a proponent of the theory. But he says that it makes its assumptions — for example, that consciousness has a physical basis and can be mathematically measured — very clear.
There are dozens of theories that seek to understand consciousness...
[...] Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University, in Israel, who co-led the adversarial study of IIT versus GNW, also defends IIT’s testability at the neural level. “Not only did we test it, we managed to falsify one of its predictions,” she says. “I think many people in the field don’t like IIT, and this is completely fine. Yet it is not clear to me what is the basis for claiming that it is not one of the leading theories.”
The same criticism about a lack of meaningful empirical tests could be made about other theories of consciousness, says Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and writer who lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, and who is a former student of Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is a proponent of IIT. “Everyone who works in the field has to acknowledge that we don’t have perfect brain scans,” he says. “And yet, somehow, IIT is singled out in the letter as this being a problem that’s unique to it.” (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: A letter, signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week, has caused an uproar in the consciousness research community. It claims that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something conscious — called the integrated information theory (IIT) — should be labelled “pseudoscience”. Since its publication on 15 September in the preprint repository PsyArXiv, the letter has some researchers arguing over the label and others worried it will increase polarization in a field that has grappled with issues of credibility in the past.
“I think it’s inflammatory to describe IIT as pseudoscience,” says neuroscientist Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, adding that he disagrees with the label. “IIT is a theory, of course, and therefore may be empirically wrong,” says neuroscientist Christof Koch, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, and a proponent of the theory. But he says that it makes its assumptions — for example, that consciousness has a physical basis and can be mathematically measured — very clear.
There are dozens of theories that seek to understand consciousness...
[...] Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University, in Israel, who co-led the adversarial study of IIT versus GNW, also defends IIT’s testability at the neural level. “Not only did we test it, we managed to falsify one of its predictions,” she says. “I think many people in the field don’t like IIT, and this is completely fine. Yet it is not clear to me what is the basis for claiming that it is not one of the leading theories.”
The same criticism about a lack of meaningful empirical tests could be made about other theories of consciousness, says Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and writer who lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, and who is a former student of Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is a proponent of IIT. “Everyone who works in the field has to acknowledge that we don’t have perfect brain scans,” he says. “And yet, somehow, IIT is singled out in the letter as this being a problem that’s unique to it.” (MORE - missing details)