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What makes a theory of consciousness unscientific?

Theories of consciousness have a long and controversial history. One well-known proposal — integrated information theory — has recently been labeled as ‘pseudoscience’, which has caused a heated open debate. Here we discuss the case and argue that the theory is indeed unscientific because its core claims are untestable even in principle.

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Acknowledgements

Co-author D.C.D. sadly passed away on 19 April 2024, in the final stages of preparing this paper for submission.

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Correspondence to Michał Klincewicz, Tony Cheng, Michael Schmitz, Miguel Ángel Sebastián or Joel S. Snyder.

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IIT-Concerned., Klincewicz, M., Cheng, T. et al. What makes a theory of consciousness unscientific?. Nat Neurosci (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01881-x

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