A caveat regarding the unfolding argument: implications of plasticity.
Neuroscience of consciousness January 1, 2026 Vikas N O'Reilly-Shah, Alessandro Maria Selvitella, Aaron Schurger
The unfolding argument claims that causal structure cannot matter for consciousness because any recurrent neural network can be replaced by a feedforward network with the same input-output behavior. This paper shows a boundary condition: when a network has rapid plasticity—weights that change quickly based on history—the equivalence fails. Mathematical proofs demonstrate that such systems encode information in ways a static feedforward network cannot capture, including history-dependent dynamics, complex temporal encoding, and perturbational instability. The results do not prove that recurrence or plasticity is necessary for consciousness, but they show that the unfolding argument does not block empirical tests of whether these properties matter.