2023
DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/28z3y
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What is a Pseudoscience of Consciousness? Lessons from Recent Adversarial Collaborations

Hakwan Lau
1

Abstract: Some colleagues have questioned about our recent joint statement (Fleming et al 2023), so I try to address them here, as well as to provide some background. I also discuss what I think really went wrong with the recent adversarial collaboration on testing theories of consciousness (ARC-Cogitate), which has in part led to the statement. In a previous open review I already discussed the scientific content of their recent preprint. Here I focus on the institutional context, from my own personal perspective, as so… Show more

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Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)
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“…A declaration of victory is difficult for us to see in the cited Science article (Finkel, 2023) or Nature article (Lenharo, 2023), though it may apply slightly more to articles in the Economist (2023) or the New York Times (Zimmer, 2023). Lau (2023) explained in more detail why he considered the IIT to be pseudoscience and disliked the process by which the adversarial collaboration was carried out. On September 18, 2023, on X (formerly Twitter), David Chalmers (@davidchalmers42) wrote, “IIT [information integration theory] has many problems but ‘pseudoscience’ is like dropping a nuclear bomb over a regional dispute.…”
Section: Strengths and Limits Of Various Theories Of Consciousnessmentioning
confidence: 99%
Exaggerated anticipatory anxiety is common in social anxiety disorder (SAD). Neuroimaging studies have revealed altered neural activity in response to social stimuli in SAD, but fewer studies have examined neural activity during anticipation of feared social stimuli in SAD. The current study examined the time course and magnitude of activity in threat processing brain regions during speech anticipation in socially anxious individuals and healthy controls (HC). Method Participants (SAD n = 58; HC n = 16) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during which they completed a 90s control anticipation task and 90s speech anticipation task.
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“…A declaration of victory is difficult for us to see in the cited Science article (Finkel, 2023) or Nature article (Lenharo, 2023), though it may apply slightly more to articles in the Economist (2023) or the New York Times (Zimmer, 2023). Lau (2023) explained in more detail why he considered the IIT to be pseudoscience and disliked the process by which the adversarial collaboration was carried out. On September 18, 2023, on X (formerly Twitter), David Chalmers (@davidchalmers42) wrote, “IIT [information integration theory] has many problems but ‘pseudoscience’ is like dropping a nuclear bomb over a regional dispute.…”
Section: Strengths and Limits Of Various Theories Of Consciousnessmentioning
confidence: 99%
Exaggerated anticipatory anxiety is common in social anxiety disorder (SAD). Neuroimaging studies have revealed altered neural activity in response to social stimuli in SAD, but fewer studies have examined neural activity during anticipation of feared social stimuli in SAD. The current study examined the time course and magnitude of activity in threat processing brain regions during speech anticipation in socially anxious individuals and healthy controls (HC). Method Participants (SAD n = 58; HC n = 16) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during which they completed a 90s control anticipation task and 90s speech anticipation task.
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“… See Lau (2023), for a recent controversy regarding the scientific nature of the Information Integrated Theory of consciousness. …”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
Exaggerated anticipatory anxiety is common in social anxiety disorder (SAD). Neuroimaging studies have revealed altered neural activity in response to social stimuli in SAD, but fewer studies have examined neural activity during anticipation of feared social stimuli in SAD. The current study examined the time course and magnitude of activity in threat processing brain regions during speech anticipation in socially anxious individuals and healthy controls (HC). Method Participants (SAD n = 58; HC n = 16) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during which they completed a 90s control anticipation task and 90s speech anticipation task.
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“…Consciousness is not a function of these physical complexes, it is the complexes [ 10 ]. This important distinction led a prominent group of researchers to describe IIT as unscientific, even as pseudoscience [ 15 , 24 , 25 ]. The group highlighted the implausibility of IIT’s claim that a grid of connected logic gates could be conscious by virtue of their informational configuration, even when they were functionally inactive, a criticism applicable to all theories appealing to panpsychism.…”
Section: Published Critique Of Iit’s Conceptual Structurementioning
confidence: 99%
Exaggerated anticipatory anxiety is common in social anxiety disorder (SAD). Neuroimaging studies have revealed altered neural activity in response to social stimuli in SAD, but fewer studies have examined neural activity during anticipation of feared social stimuli in SAD. The current study examined the time course and magnitude of activity in threat processing brain regions during speech anticipation in socially anxious individuals and healthy controls (HC). Method Participants (SAD n = 58; HC n = 16) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during which they completed a 90s control anticipation task and 90s speech anticipation task.
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