A RECENT GROUNDBREAKING EXPERIMENT in which anesthesia was administered to rats has convinced scientists that tiny structures in the rodents' brains are responsible for the experience of consciousness ...

For decades, debates about consciousness have been driven by elegant theories and small, carefully controlled experiments. Now a large-scale analysis of existing research is forcing a harder question: ...

An experiment seven years in the making has uncovered new insights into the nature of consciousness and challenges two prominent, competing scientific theories: Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Science routinely puts forward theories, then batters them with data till only one is left standing. In the fledgling science of ...

You know that feeling when you walk into a room and immediately forget why you came in? Maybe you were there to fetch your keys. On your way to the room, you were thinking about grabbing your keys.

For some theories of consciousness, such as displaying complex cognitive abilities, LLM s score a lot higher than the baseline assumption. For others, such as biological traits, they score lower. As ...

A group photo from the original meeting in March 2018 at the Allen Institute in Seattle, WA, that kicked off the set of adversarial collaborations. IIT suggests that consciousness emerges when ...