Theories of Consciousness

 Our lab combines empirical and philosophical methods to explore the nature of consciousness. A recent review explored a host of theoretical approaches for making inferences about whether other species have consciousness (Hunt, Ericson, & Schooler, 2022). A second article introduced a theory of consciousness termed "Nested Observer Windows" or "NOW," which postulates that consciousness may be likened to a mosaic photograph where each pixel is itself a photograph (Riddle & Schooler, 2024). This theory raises the possibility that the mind may be constituted of windows upon windows of potentially independent streams of consciousness. Three principles, based on the signal analysis of electrical activity, describe this nested hierarchy and generate testable predictions. First, nested observer windows disseminate information across spatiotemporal scales with cross-frequency coupling. Second, observer windows are characterized by a high degree of internal synchrony (with zero phase lag). Third, observer windows at the same spatiotemporal level share information with each other through coherence (with non-zero phase lag). A third model introduces a theory that relates the nested observer window model to discrepancies between the phenomenal experience of time and the manner in which it is conceptualized by modern physics (Schooler & Riddle, 2024). Towards this end, a framework is presented that characterizes the observer as a window moving through information space with three dimensions of time: objective time, corresponding to clock time; subjective time, the experience of the passage of time; and alternative time, the branching genuine possibilities presented by the future.