Functions of consciousness: conceptual clarification

Abstract

There are many theories of the functions of consciousness. How these theories relate to each other, how we should assess them, and whether any integration of them is possible are all issues that remain unclear. To contribute to a solution, this paper offers a conceptual framework to clarify the theories of the functions of consciousness. This framework consists of three dimensions: (i) target, (ii) explanatory order, and (iii) necessity/sufficiency. The first dimension, target, clarifies each theory in terms of the kind of consciousness it targets. The second dimension, explanatory order, clarifies each theory in terms of how it conceives of the explanatory relation between consciousness and function. The third dimension, necessity/sufficiency, clarifies each theory in terms of the necessity/sufficiency relation posited between consciousness and function. We demonstrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some existing scientific and philosophical theories of the functions of consciousness.

The Fundamental Tension in Integrated Information Theory 4.0’s Realist Idealism

“…Arguably, this may result in a better version of IIT, one which would be more aligned to an ontological form of emergentism [6,47]. This emergentist IIT could provide, given the theory's robust causal formalism [21,[48][49][50][51], a crucial aid to advance our scientific understanding of the causal difference that consciousness seems to make in a diversity of phenomena such as motivation [52][53][54][55][56], psychedelic medicine [57][58][59][60], information integration and behavioural flexibility [61], free will [62-65], and other psychological and behavioural functions [66][67][68][69], thus holding the potential to significantly advance our scientific knowledge of consciousness and its place in nature.…”

From the origins to the stream of consciousness and its neural correlates

“…Yet, as being static in nature, most of them aim to explain the structure of conscious experience per se without accounting for the successive alternation of conscious states over time. Many authors attempt to compare these theories (Doerig et al, 2021;Del Pin et al, 2021;Signorelli et al, 2021), or even to reconcile some of them (Shea and Frith, 2019;Chang et al, 2020;Graziano et al, 2020;Mashour et al, 2020;Northoff and Lamme, 2020;Mallatt, 2021;Seth and Hohwy, 2021;VanRullen and Kanai, 2021;Niikawa et al, 2022). Another tendency is to incorporate these static theories into a more general dynamical framework such as the Temporospatial Theory of Consciousness (Northoff and Zilio, 2022) which is somewhat reminiscent of Operational Architectonics (Fingelkurts et al, 2010), the whole-brain mechanistic models from a bottom-up perspective (Cofré et al, 2020), or the self-organizing harmonic modes coupled with the free energy principle (Safron, 2020).…”