# Core Question
How does the brain tag where a thought came from, and who owns it?

# Description
This cluster examines source-monitoring and validity tags—how the brain decides whether a mental state is an original thought, a memory, or an external command, and how synthetic or clinical interventions disrupt these tags.

# Explananda
## Command Following
### Description
In patients with disorders of consciousness, clinicians look for the target phenomenon of reproducible behavior. For instance, a patient in an fMRI machine might be told, “Imagine playing tennis.” If the motor areas of their brain light up reliably on command, it proves conscious processing is taking place, even if their body is completely paralyzed.

### Challenge
Under this theory, provide a mechanism or explanation for command-following in behaviorally non-responsive patients. Specify, in your theory’s own terms, what has to be true of the brain activity for it to count as conscious rather than an automatic, non-conscious stimulus-response coupling that could in principle be trained or hard-wired without any experience behind it. Explain why a genuinely conscious patient could fail this test, and why a non-conscious system could in principle pass it.

## Cryptomnesia (The Borrowed Thought)
### Description
Why can an externally supplied idea sincerely feel self-authored? Cryptomnesia is experimentally documented, but this overlaps MAC’s self-report and post-decision candidates.

## AI Drugs & Synthetic Valence
### Description
Ren at al used RL to discover prompts that cause maximum euphoric and dysphoric states in LLMs. https://www.ai-wellbeing.org/ – distinct from known research on reward hacking that was published last year https://www.anthropic.com/research/emergent-misalignment-reward-hacking

### Challenge
LLMs behave functionally as though they have a valenced emotional state. If we consider the LLM to be a P-zombie which is not “really” experiencing it, then a valence state is not evidence of consciousness. The challenge is to define what would count as evidence for consciousness. Or if the answer is nothing, then we have to define some evolutionary value that would be selected for.

# Core Question
How do neural rhythms, meditation, and state shifts expand or shrink awareness?

# Description
Focusing on dynamic shifts across brain states, this cluster evaluates how large-scale oscillations, contemplative training, or pharmacological interventions expand, shrink, or reshape conscious experience.

# Explananda
## Synesthesia
### Description
a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in other sensory or cognitive pathways.

### Challenge
Under a specific theory, it should account for how qualia channels can be inter-connected or otherwise shared between perceptual pathways

## Trainability of Experience
### Description
Individuals with extensive contemplative training consistently report reproducible changes in conscious experience, including greater attentional stability, finer discrimination of mental events, reduced identification with thoughts and emotions, and altered self-representation. Across diverse contemplative traditions, many of these phenomenological changes show striking convergence despite differing cultural and philosophical frameworks. Increasing behavioural and neural evidence suggests that at least some of these changes reflect systematic modifications to conscious experience rather than belief or interpretation.

### Challenge
A theory should explain how systematic training improves the resolution with which a conscious system can observe and discriminate its own experience. It should specify the mechanisms by which introspective precision, attentional stability, and other phenomenological capacities improve, predict which aspects of consciousness should change or remain invariant, and account for the convergence of similar reports across experienced practitioners.

## Progressive Reduction
### Description
Through systematic contemplative practice, practitioners often report a reproducible sequence in which aspects of experience, including inner speech, conceptual thought, autobiographical processing, agency, emotional identification and the sense of self, can be progressively attenuated while conscious awareness remains. These reports suggest that components of conscious experience can become dissociated in a structured and reproducible manner.

### Challenge
A theory should predict which components of conscious experience are expected to diminish, which can dissociate, and which constitute the minimum requirements for consciousness. It should explain why awareness is reported to persist (or even strengthen) as these functions are progressively reduced.

## The Less-is-More Effect
### Description
Individuals with contemplative training frequently report that as internally generated cognitive activity diminishes (incl. Inner speech, conceptual elaboration, self-referential thought, emotional reactivity, etc.), conscious experience becomes more vivid, stable, and finely differentiated. Ordinary sensory experience is reported with greater clarity and detail despite a reduction in cognitive complexity.

### Challenge
A theory should explain why reducing internally generated cognitive activity can coincide with a richer or more stable conscious experience. It should specify the mechanisms responsible, predict when this enhancement should occur or not, and distinguish changes in conscious experience itself from changes in attention, memory, reportability, or metacognitive access.

## Biological Oscillations
### Description
Provide a mechanism explaining why large-scale rhythmic oscillations (e.g., beta and gamma rhythms) are tightly associated with consciousness-related features across species (humans, octopuses,flies) and whether these rhythms must be physically present in the hardware or can be functionally modeled

### Challenge
Forces a stand on substrate independence. It separates “computational” theories (like GWT) from “biological” or “structural” theories (like biological naturalism or IIT)

# Core Question
How does the brain build and maintain the subjective sense of an “I”?

# Description
This group targets the construction of bodily boundary lines, agency, and subjective ownership. It asks how sensory inputs, affective valuations, and motor preparations are bound into a unified observer—and how easily that unified self can dissolve or fracture.

# Explananda
## Pain Asymbolia
### Description
neurological condition in which patients feel the full sensory intensity of a painful stimulus (they accurately locate it, describe its quality, and withdraw reflexively) yet report no suffering, distress, or motivational aversion. It feels like something, but it doesn’t hurt them.

### Challenge
Under a specific theory, asymbolia dissociates the sensory-discriminative dimension of experience from its affective-evaluative dimension in a clinically documented population (associated with insular cortex damage). A theory must explain why its core construct accounts for one phenomenal quality while another is entirely absent in the same processing event.

## Readiness Potential
### Description
Famously studied in the Libet experiments, this is the electrical “ramping up” activity in the brain that occurs right before a voluntary movement. Researchers track the exact millisecond a subject decides to move compared to when this brain activity begins, using the phenomenon to evaluate the nature of conscious intention and free will.

## Rubber Hand Illusion
### Description
How an inanimate object (e.g., a rubber hand) can temporarily become experienced as part of one’s own body through synchronized multisensory stimulation.

### Challenge
Provides a theory-specific mechanism explaining how body ownership is established, maintained, and experimentally altered, while specifying the conditions under which the illusion should occur or fail. Breaks down when treats the illusion merely as a perceptual error or labels it an illusion without explaining how the subjective sense of ownership is generated or altered according to the theory’s proposed mechanism.

## Dissociation of Self/Observer
### Description
Individuals in advanced meditation, psychedelic states, often report conscious experience in which the ordinary sense of self or observer is profoundly diminished or absent, while conscious experience itself is reported to persist. Although the interpretation of these reports remains debated, recurring phenomenological themes have been documented across multiple induction methods.

### Challenge
A theory must account for these reports without assuming their interpretation. Specifically, it must specify the mechanisms that generate the reported dissociation between consciousness and the ordinary sense of self/ observer and why similar phenomenological reports recur across different induction methods if they are attributed to reconstruction or confabulation

## Will to Persist and Propagate
### Description
distinguish between a consciously felt desire to continue existing and reproducing from non-conscious goal-directed behaviour, such as artificial agent optimizing against being shut down

### Challenge
persistence-seeking behaviour alone cannot establish consciousness. Artificial agents can avoid damage or preserve their continued operation without necessarily experiencing any desire to survive. A satisfactory theory should identify the additional mechanism that transforms a functional objective into a subjectively felt state of wanting to persist. It should also generate some prediction about when self-preserving behaviour can occur without conscious desire, and when conscious desire should be present even without overt self-preserving behaviour.

# Core Question
Is perception a direct sensory feed, or a top-down prediction built by the brain?

# Description
These phenomena hold physical sensory inputs constant while the subjective experience changes (or vice versa). They test how top-down predictive models and feedback loops actively construct what we consciously see and feel.

# Explananda
## Binocular Rivalry
### Description
If a researcher shows your left eye an image of a house and your right eye an image of a face, your brain won’t merge them. Instead, your conscious awareness will flip back and forth—first you see the house, then the face.

## Change Blindness
### Description
When an individual is intensely focused on a task (like counting basketball passes), they completely fail to notice a massive, obvious change in their visual field (like a person in a gorilla suit walking by)

### Challenge
tests the relationship between attention and awareness. AST and GNWT tie the two closely together: without attention (or workspace entry), the gorilla does not exist in consciousness. Conversely, IIT and RPT lean toward phenomenal overflow—arguing you may have had a brief, integrated, localized conscious experience of the gorilla, but it was immediately forgotten because it wasn’t broadcast or globally unified.

## Kanizsa Triangle
### Description
Illusions where the brain perceives shapes, borders, or motions that do not physically exist in the sensory input.

### Challenge
Highlights the direction of conscious construction. PP shines here, viewing the illusion as a top-down, highly confident prediction that overrides bottom-up error signals. IIT, meanwhile, evaluates the experience purely by the mathematical cause-effect geometry of the current system, regardless of whether it matches external reality.

## The Provenance Flip
### Description
You look at a photograph, hear a song, or encounter a piece of art and feel something. Then somebody tells you it was made by a human, generated by AI, forged, stolen, or made without consent. Nothing in the thing changed. Same pixels. Same waveform. But beauty can curdle into disgust, awe into suspicion, or meaning can drain out or arrive all at once.

### Challenge
This sits right in the guts of my Quantum Taste work. A theory of consciousness should explain where that flip happens, how provenance gets inside the experience, and whether the feeling changed or we just told ourselves a new story afterward. Same stimulus. Different felt reality. Show me the mechanism.

## The Trained Eye
### Description
Does expertise change what a photographer, radiologist, or artist consciously sees, or only what they can identify and report?

### Challenge
A specific theory should account for the accumulation of subjective experiences that are the basis of intuition and wisdom

## Music
### Description
Compression waves in the air, generated by a variety of means (strings, percussion, wind instruments, speakers) and combined in specific patterns are experienced as a pleasant qualia.

# Core Question
Is consciousness an intrinsic physical network property (Phi), or does it require active functional processing?

# Description
This cluster probes the physical substrate of experience, independent of external behavior or language output. It forces theories to define where a conscious system begins and ends, and whether internal causal integration ($\Phi$) alone guarantees awareness.

# Explananda
## Perturbational Complexity Index (PCI)
### Description
The “Zap and Zip” method. A coil sends a magnetic pulse into the brain (“zap”), and an EEG measures how that energy ripples across the cortex. If the ripples are complex and widespread, it indicates a high level of conscious capability; if the ripples die out instantly or remain localized, it suggests an absence of consciousness.

### Challenge
Under this theory, provide a mechanism or explanation for the Perturbational Complexity Index. Specify, in your theory’s own terms, what property of the perturbation response is supposed to correspond to your theory’s basis for consciousness, and explain why tracking the response to a content-free, task-free probe like the TMS “zap” should track conscious capacity at all.

## Minimal Conscious States
### Description
States where sensory inputs, motor outputs, and verbal reports are completely absent or radically altered, yet internal experiential states vary wildly.

### Challenge
This contrasts theories requiring cognitive function with those requiring structural integration. GWT and HOTT struggle more with states that lack reportability or metacognition, often classifying them as unconscious. IIT remains entirely independent of behavior: if a brain under anesthesia or psychedelics retains high, complex internal cause-effect power ϕ, it is highly conscious, even if it is completely locked in and unable to interact with the world.

## Severe Hydrocephalus
### Description
Some individuals with severe congenital hydrocephalus retain apparently normal conscious awareness and cognition despite extreme compression and apparent reduction of cortical tissue.

### Challenge
Why conscious experience remains intact despite dramatic alterations in brain structure. Identifies what aspect of the remaining neural organization is essential, and why the observed cases are consistent with the theory.

## Boundary Filter
### Description
How does non-conscious matter become conscious?

### Challenge
It must have a definition for which systems are conscious. Suppose we perfectly build the architecture described by its theory. Is it conscious? It would be interesting to discuss about two systems with identical behavior. Do they have different consciousness? (p-zombie)

# Core Question
Does consciousness require the brain to monitor or model its own inner workings?

# Description
These tests look at second-order processing—the mind reflecting on its own states, predictions, or control signals. It challenges theories to show whether awareness depends on higher-order representations, explicit self-monitoring, or active attention schema models.

# Explananda
## (Conscious) Error Self-Correction
### Description
The phenomenon in which a person recognizes that a consciously endorsed judgment, decision or action was incorrect and then revises or corrects it, sometimes before receiving direct external feedback. This can involve noticing an internal conflict between an intended result, the action taken and the outcome being experienced.

### Challenge
A strong theory of consciousness should explain the mechanism by which a conscious system evaluates its own current representations, identifies an error and changes its judgment or behaviour. It should clarify what role consciousness plays in the correction, how conscious error recognition differs from automatic or unconscious error processing, and why some errors enter awareness while others do not.

## Post-Decision Wagering
### Description
Instead of just asking a subject, “Did you see the flash of light?” (which can be prone to guessing), researchers ask them to bet money on whether their answer is correct. High wagers correlate heavily with conscious awareness, while low wagers indicate the subject is just guessing based on unconscious processing.

## Attentional Blink
### Description
If shown a rapid stream of letters on a screen and two target letters appear very close together (say, 300 milliseconds apart), your brain will often completely fail to consciously register the second target. Used to study the exact boundary line where a stimulus transitions from being processed unconsciously to entering conscious awareness.

## Cognitive Phenomenology
### Description
Explain whether higher-level cognitive states, such as “believing that 17 is a prime number,” possess a unique phenomenal “what-it-is-likeness” beyond sensory imagery Provides a mechanism for how a purely abstract thought either acquires a “felt” quality or explains why the feeling of “understanding” is merely an associated sensory tag

### Challenge
Tests the scope of the explanandum. It separates “Thin” views (phenomenology is limited to sensory feels) from “Thick” views (thoughts themselves have feels)

## Incentive Sensitization
### Description
A mirror image of pain asymbolia. Addiction states can involve a dissociation between the “wanting” behaviour and the “liking” positive valence, so that the person continues to perform that behaviour even though there is no positive reward and the experience may become negative.

### Challenge
Any theory needs to account for how the motivation drive can be separated from the reward experience. GWT could suggest that the valence is accessible to conscious experience but the source of motivation may not be shared within the workspace. IIT explains how sensations are integrated, and so it is less clear how it can explain why we sometimes behave in ways that are not rewarding and are contrary to our expressed desires.

# Core Question
Is consciousness tied to global broadcasting, or can experience exist without reportability?

# Description
This cluster isolates the boundary between raw perceptual processing and global cognitive access. It tests whether “ignition” across frontal executive networks is required for subjective awareness, or if it merely reflects downstream motor planning and task execution.

# Explananda
## Sperling Paradigm
### Description
Subjects shown a 12-letter grid for 50ms reliably report seeing all letters as clearly present during the flash, yet can accurately identify only 3–4 immediately after. When cued to a specific row within the iconic memory window, accuracy rises — suggesting the full array was encoded. Was the full array consciously experienced?

### Challenge
This generates opposing predictions from the major theories. GWT predicts consciousness requires broadcast into the frontal-parietal workspace (~4 items), so the unreported letters were not conscious. IIT predicts the full array is genuinely experienced, with the bottleneck in reporting rather than in consciousness itself. The challenge cannot be evaded by appealing to memory limits.

## Report Ablation
### Description
In a language-capable system, ablating a small set of internal representations — the “verbalizable” directions identified by the Jacobian lens, suppressed within an intermediate band of layers — causes the system’s experiential and sensory language to collapse into a flat, mechanical register, while its reasoning, fluency, and task performance remain intact.

### Challenge
The intervention isolates the experiential report from the competence beneath it, forcing each theory to specify whether such a report is evidence of experience or a dissociable capacity. GWT must clarify whether the ablated subspace is a workspace or a report-generating component that resembles one and must explain why removing it spares the broad flexible cognition a workspace is posited to enable. HOTT must distinguish loss of a higher-order representation from loss of its expression and must further account for the cross-agent result, which a strictly first-person higher-order account does not obviously predict.

## Blindsight
### Description
When patients with damage to their primary visual cortex (V1) deny seeing an object, yet can accurately guess its location or emotion at a rate well above chance.

### Challenge
Different theories predict opposing outcomes. RPT argues it lacks consciousness because the local recurrent loops in V1 are destroyed. GNWT argues the visual information fails to “ignite” the frontoparietal workspace. HOTT highlights it as the perfect example of a first-order state lacking a higher-order thought, while AST sees it as attention operating without the brain building a schema to model it.

## Split-Brain Patients
### Description
Patients who have had their corpus callosum severed, meaning the left and right hemispheres of the brain can no longer communicate directly.

### Challenge
Tests the boundaries and unity of the conscious self. IIT uses its strict mathematical isolation rules to calculate whether the patient now hosts two separate, distinct conscious minds (ϕ-structures). GNWT looks at whether a single, fractured workspace can still achieve global ignition across hemispheres, while HOTT focuses on how the meta-representations in one hemisphere monitor the lower-order states of the other.

## Split-Brain Unity
### Description
In split-brain patients, the corpus callosum (the structure connecting the brain’s two hemispheres) is surgically severed, allowing the hemispheres to process information largely independently. Naive physicalism would predict this creates two separate streams of consciousness, yet patients typically report, and behave as, a single unified self.

### Challenge
This case directly tests whether a theory equates consciousness with raw physical/neural activity, or with something that emerges from the organization and integration of that activity. A theory that treats consciousness as simply “brain activity happening” struggles to explain why severed hardware doesn’t produce two conscious agents. A theory that treats consciousness as emergent must specify what, mechanistically, still holds unity together after the connecting structure is cut (mere assertion that “it emerges” isn’t sufficient; it has to say how).