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FOHO

An Adversarial Collaboration Testing First Order versus Higher Order Theories of Consciousness

Leadership

Lucia Melloni, Liad Mudrik, Michael Pitts

Consciousness is one of the most familiar phenomena in nature, and yet also one of the least understood. What is the relationship between consciousness and the brain? Many theories have emerged in recent years, but consensus remains elusive. Led by project director Biyu Jade He (New York University Grossman School of Medicine), together with David Chalmers and Ned Block (New York University), this project aims to test two families of theories concerning the brain basis of visual consciousness: first-order, and higher-order theories.
According to first-order theories, visual consciousness involves a sensory representation of the external world, supported by a neural basis in the visual cortex. In higher-order theories, visual consciousness involves a higher-order representation of a sensory representation, supported by a neural basis in the prefrontal cortex. This project takes the form of an adversarial collaboration between proponents of two leading higher-order theories and a leading first-order theory of consciousness. The former being represented by the Higher-Order Representation of Representation theory (HOROR) and the Perceptual Reality Monitoring theory (PRM), and the latter by the Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT).

Leaders of each theory proposed an experimental paradigm could falsify competing accounts by dissociating visual consciousness from correlated processes such as task performance and cognitive processing that accompany perception. In this way, it becomes possible to rigorously test the neural basis of visual consciousness, and thus to help adjudicate between theories.
The experiments are designed to meet the high standards of open science and simultaneous replication. Independently of the specific result, such an adversarial collaboration promotes a higher level of rigor within scientific research and narrows down the space of viable theories for consciousness.