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A science of consciousness beyond pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness

Nature Neuroscience (2025)Cite this article

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The scientific study of consciousness was sanctioned as an orthodox field of study only three decades ago. Since then, a variety of prominent theories have flourished, including integrated information theory, which has been recently accused of being pseudoscience by more than 100 academics. Here we critically assess this charge and offer thoughts to elevate the clash into positive lessons for our field.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Rovere from Wonderstruck for the invitation to a private symposium in the summer of 2024, where both authors first met in person and where, despite their different worldviews, collegial discussions started to take place, leading to this manuscript and more. We are also grateful to A. Barrett, T. Bayne, R. Chis-Ciure, and R. L. Kuhn for insightful discussions. A.G.-M. is supported by the Spanish Research Council. A.K.S. is supported by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 programme (Advanced Investigator Grant agreement 101019254).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Neurociencias (CSIC-UMH), Alicante, Spain

    Alex Gomez-Marin

  2. Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Anil K. Seth

  3. Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Anil K. Seth

Authors
  1. Alex Gomez-Marin
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  2. Anil K. Seth
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Correspondence to Alex Gomez-Marin or Anil K. Seth.

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Competing interests

A.K.S. is an advisor to Conscium Ltd. He is also on the steering committee of the Templeton World Charity Foundation Adversarial Collaboration INTREPID, which is contrasting IIT with active inference and neuro-representationalism. He is not funded by this project. A.G.-M. declares no competing interests.

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Gomez-Marin, A., Seth, A.K. A science of consciousness beyond pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness. Nat Neurosci (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01913-6

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