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Understanding the qualitative nature of human consciousness

Song, Chen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5418-5747 2025. Understanding the qualitative nature of human consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 29 , pp. 105-106. 10.1016/j.tics.2024.10.005
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Abstract

Understanding what conscious experiences feel like from a first-person perspective, known as the hard problem of consciousness, remains one of the most intriguing yet elusive topics in science and philosophy [1,2]. In their timely article in TiCS, Fleming and Shea propose the quality space approach as a promising path forward [3]. They suggest that the qualitative nature of consciousness can be studied by correlating the subjective similarity between stimulus-evoked conscious experiences with the similarity in neural activity patterns. While I support their endeavor, I wish to highlight two foundational challenges: first, how to infer the qualitative nature of consciousness from subjective similarity, and second, how to link the qualitative nature of consciousness to the nature of neural activity. These challenges represent key directions for future research, with new developments offering potential breakthroughs.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Psychology
Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC)
Publisher: Cell Press
ISSN: 1364-6613
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 1 November 2024
Date of Acceptance: 7 October 2024
Last Modified: 12 Feb 2025 14:45
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/172889

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