Oddbean new post about login | logout Wow! 124 brain researchers call out what journalists call the "leading theory of consciousness" (integrated information theory, IIT) as pseudoscience. https://psyarxiv.com/zsr78/ 💯: We need testable theories about the brain to move forward. Every theory starts as a proto-theory (and that's fine). But when theories are not even wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong we must acknowledge that. Especially when the stakes are as high as they are here, with big ethical implications (eg for organoids and coma patients, as the authors describe).
@8599d6ab Letter feels oddly light in informational value. Would have been useful to lay out core ideas of IIT, its definition of consciousness, etc. Indeed, we get to the end without any concrete idea what the crux of the disagreement is, just that the theory hasn't been satisfactorily empirically tested. For me, a theory is not a pseudoscience "until" it has been empirically tested. A theory is a pseudoscience if it *cannot* be satisfactorily tested. Is this the case? Letter vague on this.