There is a difference between not being convinced and casting a whole body of work as "unscientific". This is a grave accusation that a very strong argumentation should support.
The critics of PCI for example is incorrect. PCI does not just measure wakefulness. PCI reaches a similar level under ketamine anesthesia as during wakefulness. This is very clear from the paper introducing PCI. The very least would be to read seriously the work produced by researchers behind IIT.
True, PCI does not prove IIT. Yet, PCI was inspired by the theoretical framework of IIT. IIT might not be right, but to some, it is very useful, just like many theories in science. Why would this not be science?
no, sorry for the joke, but i mean, Mohammad Ali is not science. we can be inspired by all sorts of things in our work, but it doesn't make them science.
Look. My criterion for a meaningful theory is that it is clear what is predicted from which assumptions. IIT does not have that structure. Hence it is not a meaningful theory and I call it pseudoscience. All the rest is details.
Most theoretical proposals in cog science would be pseudo-scientific then! Which theory of C makes real testable predictions? Most are post-hoc accounts of pre-existing data!
The "rest" (empirical work inspired by IIT) is not details. It's the work of fellow scientists that should be respected.
i feel that @kordinglab.bsky.social does respect the details (& the fellow scientists doing the empirical work). his point is just that the details don't really test or support the theory.
" PCI reaches a similar level under ketamine anesthesia as during wakefulness." - so if PCI is a measure of consciousness, ppl *anesthesized* by ketamine are fully conscious? what dosage are you talking about? k-hole level (which would be bit trivial, coz that's not really 'anesthesized') or beyond?
thank you for your instruction, master. but i don't see the relevance / argument though. maybe we're talking past each other. but our point is not that PCI measures wakefulness. in some studies wakefulness is a confound. but the concern is that "the comparison of different global states ...
... *such as wakefulness and coma*, is confounded by many different cognitive and behavioral factors". so when ppl are on K, they *may* have high PCI measures becoz there is a lot of ongoing cognition, rather than conscious experiences per se.
to be clear we didn't say the whole body of IIT-related/inspired work (including e.g. yours) is unscientific. we were just considering the strong (& "most dominant") version of IIT. if "unscientific" sounds too much, perhaps u can understand what we say as meaning that it is just beyond science.
"But you can't have the IIT-related work without IIT!" - really? i thought ppl could have come up w/ something close to PCI w/o all the axioms & metaphysics
the concern is that if these measures were validated, some might then be misled to take that those axioms & metaphysics are themselves proven.
Of course they could. As a matter of fact, they did not. Theories, even when they are wrong, can speed up discoveries. That's why science shouldn't be censored unless there are very good reasons for that. That's Anil's right to be wrong argument.
I concede I read it in a state of exhaustion while waiting for my 3.5 hr delayed flight so I may have missed some deep insight but to me his response reads essentially as "If you silly people just accepted the logic of my argument, the logic of my argument would be acceptable."
Whilst not offering any compelling argument for how we might find out if it is right... There is some stuff about visual space and the blind spot that to my knowledge has already been shown to be false (including by our own recent work on this amongst several studies...)
If that is true the paper doesn't make a very convincing case for that and instead opting to call out perceived tribunals and dogma (which is one of the reddest flags of pseudoscience movements in my book)
Comments
The "rest" (empirical work inspired by IIT) is not details. It's the work of fellow scientists that should be respected.
These are highly cited, not-so-recent, published results! I think before trashing/questioning this whole literature, reading what they did would be the bare minimum.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01242-7
It's even in the highlights of the article!
this point was first made by Ned Block, but ...
But you can't have the IIT-related work without IIT!
Some parts of IIT might be beyond what science can achieve, test, or prove. I don't personally know.
But IIT follows a scientific agenda, with empirical studies to prove it.
the concern is that if these measures were validated, some might then be misled to take that those axioms & metaphysics are themselves proven.
& i don't think IIT has been censored / cancelled. they are still publishing & 'inspiring' ppl like u, aren't they?