consciousness

Consciousness research has long been organised around the “hard problem”: explaining why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience. This framing presupposes a production relation between neural processes and phenomenological presence, treating the explanatory gap as independently motivated. This paper argues that such presupposition may obscure a more tractable empirical questio…

New research offers a way to identify consciousness in living and artificial systems.

Is artificial intelligence capable of consciousness? Existing approaches proceed largely top-down, deriving necessary conditions from theories of consciousness and assessing whether AI systems satisfy them. This paper proposes a complementary, bottom-up tool: a layered model for evaluating AI consciousness that is explicitly grounded in the phenomenological tradition. The model comprises four lay…

Life emerged from the fabled primordial soup, some antediluvian sea. These systems seem alive, and humans increasingly wonder if they are conscious, because they sure feel real.

One scientist’s unorthodox method could finally explain where your “soul” goes when you die, precognition, and everything in between.

The findings differ from prior work, showing it's tough to disentangle how similarly our brains register imagined thoughts and real sensations.

Quantum-enhanced humans might see further domains of reality than we could ever imagine.

Quantum-enhanced humans might see further domains of reality than we could ever imagine.

In Antonino Raffone, Consciousness: a comprehensive reference, 2nd edition. forthcomingConsciousness science appears locked in a stalemate: major theories remain unchanged, empirical tests prove inconclusive, and philosophers embrace positions—from panpsychism to illusionism—that sit uneasily with any scientific framework. We argue this impasse is itself a clue. The persistence of the hard proble…

_Behavioral and Brain Sciences_. forthcomingStockart et al. make a well-intentioned attempt to build consensus over the measurement of awareness, a topic of controversy for 40 years. But their recurring slippage between subjective and objective measures overlooks a neural tension between fundamentally distinct modes of understanding. Opposing Domains Theory explains why: disagreements persist, “t…

Major theoretical programs in consciousness studies disagree about what consciousness is while tacitly agreeing on whose consciousness is at issue. The system whose integration is measured, whose workspace is mapped, whose free energy is minimized is presupposed by each framework, not derived within it. This agreement is not benign: it fixes the referent of every downstream claim, constrains what…

How did you find PF?: Gemini recommendation Hi everyone! I am currently in the phase of writing a science fiction book that involves digital/biological virus(Neurodegenerative System or Semantic Cancer), AI, and consciousness. It is a bit complicated, i would like to ground these... Read more

Scientific studies of consciousness derive their legitimacy from individuals’ intuitions about the degree to which measured functions can be associated with consciousness. However, intuitions about consciousness are often regarded as inherently inaccurate and unreliable, as evidenced by cases that appear to reveal counterintuitive dissociations between consciousness and functions. Recent findings…

Reports of near-death experiences (NDEs), end-of-life visions (ELVs), and culturally embedded afterlife narratives frequently describe profoundly positive or distressing states. Traditional interpretations treat these phenomena as evidence of external metaphysical realms. The Dying-Moment Dream Hypothesis proposes an alternative, neurobiologically grounded explanation: that culturally conditioned…

This study investigates links between synesthesia and lucid dreaming via perceptual presence and counterfactual-richness (abundant possible sensorimotor contingencies). We hypothesized that synesthetes would report more frequent lucid dreams because enhanced counterfactual-richness facilitates dream control and clarity. We surveyed 616 adults using a synesthesia self-report, the Lucidity and Cons…

BackgroundEmerging evidence suggests that the ability to sense internal bodily signals, interoceptive awareness, is central to embodied consciousness and adaptive self-regulation. Yet, the cognitive mechanisms by which interoceptive processes shape the continuity of conscious experience remain insufficiently understood. One such mechanism may be time perspective, a framework reflecting individual…

You reach for your coffee mid-conversation and find it already in your hand. That gap between intention and action is where the mind actually lives.