Editorial: Bridging gaps in understanding consciousness: multidisciplinary perspectives.

Understanding consciousness requires integrating insights from philosophy, physics, neuroscience, computational modeling, behavioral science, and clinical studies. This editorial introduces a research topic that collected 12 articles from 33 authors to bridge gaps across these disciplines. The authors argue that progress has been made in measuring neural networks, formalizing principles, and quantifying subjective experience, but integrating these multi-dimensional insights across levels of analysis remains a central challenge. Rather than pursuing a single unified framework, the collection aims to advance multi-levelled understanding by presenting diverse approaches that currently shape consciousness science.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Mapping the concepts, mechanisms, and processes that give rise to conscious, preconscious, and unconscious experience remains one of the most enduring challenges in contemporary science. Philosophical reflections around consciousness are millennia old, although its systematic empirical investigation is relatively recent, wherein "consciousness science" has become its own discipline within the last three decades. Progress has been made across domains, including philosophy and physics for conceptual clarity and theoretical grounding; neuroscience and neuroimaging for the measurement of neural networks and interactions; computational modeling to formalize principles and generate testable predictions; behavioral science paradigms to quantify subjective experience; and clinical and developmental studies in which insights from patient and population cohorts inform adaptive and maladaptive operations of consciousness. Collectively, these disciplines provide powerful frameworks and tools for investigating "consciousness". They enrich understanding of the structures and dynamics underlying diverse biological and cognitive systems, potentially extending to other life forms/systems. Albeit, integrating multi-dimensional insights across levels of analysis, rather than pursuing a single unified framework, remains a central scientific challenge.Our intention with this Research Topic, Bridging Gaps in Understanding Consciousness: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, was to pursue measured steps toward addressing these challenges by bringing together contributions that illuminate the diverse approaches currently shaping contemporary consciousness science research, and advancing its multi-levelled understanding. Without leaning too strictly into semantics; hypotheses provide targeted, testable claims about specific mechanisms, whereas theories aim to integrate diverse findings into a coherent and comprehensive framework, describing broader relationships among processes, functions, and phenomena across levels of analysis. This is a provisional file, not the final article As we welcomed work that refined extant models and data, alongside contributions that brought 38 perspectives to the field. 39The 12 articles, involving 33 authors, within this collection bridge these (sub)