Consciousness and cognition
November 1, 2024
Benjamin Kozuch
5 citations
A new method for evaluating theories of consciousness uses evidence from complementary domains: neuroscientific evidence to judge philosophical theories and vice versa. The approach works when a neuroscientific and a philosophical theory are conceptually linked, so evidence confirming or disconfirming one can apply to the other. Applying this method to leading theories—including first- and second-order representationalism and theories emphasizing the prefrontal cortex's role—yields conclusions about their relative support. The method aims to improve how evidence is brought to bear on theories across disciplines.
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
September 22, 2023
Benjamin Kozuch
3 citations
Local Recurrency Theory (LR) proposes that feedback loops confined to the visual cortex are sufficient for visual consciousness. Although LR has lost favor to theories that require higher-level brain areas, such as the prefrontal cortex, those competing theories now face evidence that those areas may not be essential. This article re-examines LR, clarifies its formulation, and reviews the evidence against it. It argues that none of the evidence refutes LR but instead encourages its refinement. The conclusion is that LR remains a strong candidate among neuroscientific theories of visual consciousness.
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Benjamin Kozuch
1 citation
This chapter examines two contemporary, empirically based challenges to the idea that conscious mental states causally influence certain actions. The first, from Libet's research, suggests that neural events initiating voluntary actions occur before conscious willing, implying the conscious will does not cause those actions. The second, from Milner and Goodale's studies, shows cases where visual consciousness and motor action dissociate, challenging the intuitive view that visual consciousness guides visually based motor actions. Unlike classical epiphenomenalism, which denies all causal efficacy to conscious mental events, these modern challenges only question their efficacy for specific kinds of actions.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2026
Benjamin Kozuch, Peter Kok
A framework is proposed for identifying the neural correlates of a low-level component of visual consciousness called base experience, defined as the spatial arrangement of colors across the visual field. A content-matching method compares the content of base experience with that represented by candidate neural systems, using matches and mismatches as evidence for or against a neural system being the neural basis of base experience. A formal system specifies the content of both experience and neural activity in a common quantitative format for precise comparison. Three matching strategies—region-matching, grain-matching, and representational-matching—are outlined for testing hypotheses about the neural basis of conscious visual content. Applying this method can help adjudicate between competing theories of consciousness.