What questions should a real theory of consciousness encompass?
Well, now! The consciousness field is all atwitter! A letter has been published, with 124 signatories, claiming that one prominent “theory of consciousness” – the Integrated Information Theory proposed and developed by Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch and colleagues over several years – is “pseudoscience”. That’s a serious charge to level in print, and one that I presume the authors of the letter did not make lightly. The letter was a response to some of the media coverage around the COGITATE study – an adversarial collaboration which purports to test the predictions of several theories of consciousness in an open and fair way. (You can see here , from Hakwan Lau, some commentary on whether it is actually designed and executed appropriately to achieve that). The letter seems to reflect the growing exasperation of some researchers in the field with the perceived hype and misrepresentation of IIT, its claims, and the results of the COGITATE study, which apparently came to a head an