CoChat
Sign Up
PreprintCited by 37Philosophy and Theoretical SciencePhilosophy and History of ScienceEmbodied and Extended Cognition

Brain states matter. A reply to the unfolding argument.

Kleiner, Johannes·2019·Consciousness and Cognition
DOI 10.31234/osf.io/jdcfh
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Recently, it has been claimed that Integrated Information Theory and other theories of its type cannot explain consciousness ("unfolding argument"). We unravel this argument mathematically and prove that the premises of the argument imply a much stronger result according to which the observed problem holds for almost all theories of consciousness. We find, however, that one of the premises is unwarranted and show that if this premise is dropped, the argument ceases to work. Thus our results show that the claim of the unfolding argument cannot be considered valid. The premise in question is that measures of brain activity cannot be used in an empirical test of theories of consciousness.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.31234/osf.io/jdcfh

Cites

19 of 19 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Global Workspace Theory is not subject to the unfolding argument because broadcasting is a general concept that can be implemented in many different ways.

    “GWT is not subject to the unfolding argument because broadcasting is a general concept, which can be implemented in many di ff erent ways (even though GWT is usually framed in recurrent terms, recurrence is not essential, Doerig, Schurger, et al., 2019; but see Kleiner, 2019; Kleiner & Hoel, 2020).”

    From Hard criteria for empirical theories of consciousness (2021) · cites this paper as Kleiner, 2019

  • The unfolding argument does not apply to PPT because predictive processing can be unfolded.

    “The unfolding argument does not apply, because predictive processing can be unfolded (Doerig, Schurger, et al. (2019); but see Kleiner (2019) and Kleiner and Hoel (2020)).”

    From Hard criteria for empirical theories of consciousness (2021) · cites this paper as Kleiner (2019)

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Kleiner, J.
Affiliations
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE)
Corresponding author
Kleiner, Johannes
ORCID
Kleiner, Johannes
Venue
Consciousness and Cognition
Publisher
Center for Open Science
Published
2019-07-17
Volume
85
Pages
102981-102981
ISSN
1053-8100 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.31234/osf.io/jdcfh
OpenAlex
W3088997805
Cited by
37
References
18
Citations by year
2026: 20 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 2
FWCI
3.14
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Consciousness and Cognition (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Philosophy and Theoretical Science
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Philosophy and History of Science
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Embodied and Extended Cognition
Keywords
integrated information theory, theory of consciousness, consciousness, brain states
MeSH terms
Brain, Consciousness, Humans

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review