March 2025
A ‘consciousness quarrel’ among scientists has flared up again. A new paper accuses a theory called IIT of being pseudoscientific. The critics dislike the idea that consciousness might pervade everything. But others plead for “healthy diversity and daring humility”.
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There is an ongoing battle of minds over how consciousness should be understood scientifically. In September 2023 the battle turned into an open quarrel, when 124 neuroscientists and philosophers published an open letter accusing one in a growing number of competing theories of being ‘pseudoscience’.
The object of the anger is the Integrated information theory, IIT, whose primary proponents are Giulio Tononi and Christoph Koch but has lately enticed other prominent figures, such as philosopher Bernardo Kastrup.
Very simplified, IIT posits that consciousness arises from the integration of information in a system, and the theory implies that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe.
IIT’s backers defended the theory and called for steadier ground for the criticism.
The steadier ground was provided on 10 March, when the signatories behind the open letter – or at least 103 of the original 124 signatories – published a paper in Nature Neuroscience arguing in more detail why they find IIT ‘pseudoscientific’.
They contend that the core claims of IIT are untestable in principle and that the theory has counterintuitive and ‘non-empirical’ consequences, including a form of panpsychism (the idea that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous).
“We realise that the word ‘pseudoscience’ shouldn’t be used frivolously, but there are good reasons to think it is applicable in this case”, they conclude.
A response was published by Tononi et. al. on the same day in the same journal. IIT is certainly testable, they retort: “IIT starts from consciousness, which is subjective, and accounts for its presence and quality in objective, testable terms.”
A couple of weeks later, neuroscientists Alex Gómez-Marín and Anil K Seth published a comment in Nature aimed at calming the waves. Gómez-Marín and Seth claim neutrality in their view on IIT, but they find it unfair to dismiss the theory as ‘pseudoscience’.
“Calling out pseudoscience is important, but the term can be weaponized in part through its ambiguity and stigma. The demarcation problem can be used as a defamation solution when the pseudo-use of the word pseudoscience is used to cancel people or ideas”, they write.
Gómez-Marín and Seth end with an inclusive appeal: “We end with a plea for healthy diversity and daring humility. When it comes to consciousness, we have the right to be wrong and perhaps even the duty to be bold. The hard problem seems unlikely to be solved (or dissolved) without some radical rethinking. Let us keep an open mind while holding on to our brains. Paraphrasing the mystic poet Rumi, beyond ideas of pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness there is a field. Let’s meet there.”
Anders Bolling
