Title & abstract

Abstract: When does consciousness first emerge in human development? When is it retained or regained in clinical conditions characterized by behavioural non-responsiveness, such as sleep, epileptic absence seizures, and the unresponsive wakefulness syndrome? Which non-human animals have the capacity for consciousness? Might consciousness occur in organoids, xenobots and AI systems? Not only is there disagreement about the answers to these questions, there is also disagreement about how to answer them. Two methods for identifying the distribution of consciousness dominate the current landscape: a theory-based approach and a marker-based approach. Advocates of the theory-based approach argue that the distribution question can be addressed by appealing to the resources of a general theory of consciousness, while advocates of the marker-based approach argue that the distribution question can be addressed by invoking (theory-independent) markers of consciousness. In this talk, I evaluate these two approaches, comparing them to a third approach that has emerged in recent years: the iterative natural kind approach.

Abstract: Neuroscientific studies of decision-making, from Libet’s experiments to modern fMRI paradigms, are often interpreted as showing that free will is an illusion because brain activity predicting decisions precedes conscious awareness. This talk challenges that interpretation, arguing that anticipatory neural activity is an expected feature of decision-making rather than evidence against free agency. Decisions emerge through neural competition processes that necessarily unfold before conscious awareness. The talk emphasizes the importance of distinguishing agency, understood as the causal origin of action, from intentionality, defined as conscious awareness of intending to act. The two concepts are however frequently conflated in neuroscientific discussions of free will. While neuroscience can illuminate the mechanisms underlying simple choices and actions, it currently lacks the tools to operationalize consciousness, a prerequisite for addressing higher-level notions such as intentionality, moral responsibility, and free will. The talk concludes by situating these findings within a compatibilist philosophical framework and calling for caution in neuroscientific extrapolations.

Abstract: Spontaneous thought is a pervasive aspect of our daily lives, prominently featured in mental phenomena such as mind-wandering, daydreaming, and creative thinking. In this talk, I will describe what spontaneous thought is from the perspective of the Dynamic Framework of Thought: namely, thoughts that arise relatively freely, relatively unconstrained by deliberate effort (i.e., executive processing) or automatic constraints (such as habits or salience). I will also summarize a number of neuroscientific findings that, together, point to spontaneous thoughts arising through the dynamic interactions between cortical and subcortical structures across different large-scale brain networks. In particular, the medial temporal lobe (MTL) appears to play a prominent role in the arising of spontaneous thoughts and becomes recruited seconds prior to the conscious experience of a spontaneous thought. These findings, along with recent findings from intracranial recordings of hippocampal sharp-wave ripples in humans, suggest the presence of a prominent imagination-derived stream of thought linked to complex hippocampal-cortical interactions. This hippocampal-cortical stream of processing also includes dynamic interactions between large-scale brain networks, including the Default, Salience and Frontoparietal Control Networks. Our recent extension of the Dynamic Framework of Thought specifically discusses the mental phenomenon of fantasy, including its compulsive form (sometimes referred to as “maladaptive daydreaming”). Understanding better different spontaneous thought phenomena, including fantasy, presents an enormous opportunity for expanding the scientific study of subjectivity.

Abstract: Body self-awareness is included in the concept of minimal self-consciousness or what phenomenologists call first-person, pre-reflective self-awareness, a concept related to phenomenal experience (qualia) and sentience. Despite its relevance to a variety of complex issues a number of theorists have recently pointed out that the concept is not well defined. In order to provide some clarification about the role of the body and sensory processes in minimal self-consciousness I'll consider a well-known 11th century thought experiment: Avicenna’s Flying Man argument. I'll propose an updated version -- the super flying man -- that takes into consideration our contemporary neuroscientific understanding of interoception.

Abstract: TBD

Abstract: Confidence-based approaches in the science of consciousness use confidence ratings to detect the threshold between conscious and unconscious perception. They are typically classed as subjective measures of consciousness. Proponents typically hold that they are methodologically superior to alternatives in terms of validity, accuracy, and adaptability. Objective measures seem to lack validity because of the recognition that discrimination performance can come apart from conscious perception. Other subjective measures (specifically visibility-based approaches) are less accurate because they cannot be adequately experimentally controlled and are very limited in adaptability across modalities and species. In this talk I consider how confidence-based approaches manage to secure all their claimed methodological advantages. As I will argue, an important aspect of this is to clarify in what sense these approaches count as subjective measures and whether this involves relying on subjects’ first-person access to their conscious states in delivering confidence ratings.

Abstract: Everything we see, hear, feel, and smell is a reconstruction generated by the brain. Our experienced reality is therefore not a direct copy of the world, but a biologically constrained interpretation, systematically shaped by subjectivity.

In this lecture, I will show how modern methods that reveal the connective architecture of the human brain, applied across neurosurgery, neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, and fMRI, have helped uncover the neural foundations of subjective experience. I will present evidence on the network bases of visual neglect, a severe condition that can lead to the functional disappearance of an entire visual hemifield, and demonstrate how normal asymmetries in structural connectivity in healthy individuals partially mirror this phenomenon. I will also discuss how complex patterns of disconnection can produce profound anosognosias, such as unawareness of hemiplegia.

More broadly, I will argue that the non-random distribution of neurological symptoms has historically biased our models of cognition, and that integrating principles of structural connectivity into functional neuroimaging reshapes how we understand large-scale brain dynamics and the stream of consciousness itself.

Key studies discussed will include: Thiebaut de Schotten et al. (Science, 2005; Nature Neuroscience, 2011; Nature Communications, 2020, Science, 2022), Pacella et al. (eLife, 2019; Nature Communications 2024), Nozais et al. (Communications Biology, 2022), and Mar-Signes et al. (Communications Biology, 2025).