Endnotes

Mary’s Room Thought Experiment - Frank Jackson (1982): Introduced the knowledge argument with Mary, a color scientist who learns something new upon experiencing color, suggesting a gap between physical knowledge and conscious experience.

Perturbational Complexity Index - Casali et al. (2013): Demonstrated a TMS - EEG method to quantify consciousness levels. Conscious wakeful brains showed high complexity responses (PCI), while unconscious states (sleep, anesthesia, vegetative) showed lower complexity, with a tentative threshold around which consciousness presence could be inferred.

fMRI Command - Following in Vegetative Patient - Owen et al. (2006): Reported that a patient clinically diagnosed as vegetative was able to modulate brain activity intentionally (imagining tennis vs. house navigation) as seen on fMRI, indicating covert awareness and pioneering a new method to communicate with non - responsive patients.

Blindsight Case - Weiskrantz (1974): Early research on a patient with visual cortex damage who could accurately “guess” visual stimuli he denied seeing. Blindsight provided evidence of visual processing without conscious perception, highlighting the distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness.

Split - Brain Experiments - Gazzaniga & Sperry (1960s): Studies on patients with severed corpus callosum revealed each hemisphere can act somewhat independently - e.g., patients could only verbally report stimuli seen in the left hemisphere but respond nonverbally to stimuli seen in the right. These findings spurred debates on unity of consciousness and the brain’s modular organization.

Animal Consciousness Declaration (Cambridge Declaration, 2012): A group of neuroscientists formally stated that many non - human animals (mammals, birds, octopuses) have the neural substrates of consciousness and likely experience affective states, influencing scientific and public views on animal sentience and welfare.

Crow Intelligence Tool Use - Weir et al. (2002): Documented a New Caledonian crow (named Betty) spontaneously bending a wire into a hook to retrieve food from a tube on the first attempt. Such complex problem - solving in a bird suggested high cognitive function, fueling discussion of consciousness (or at least awareness and planning) in corvids.

Attention Schema Theory - Graziano (2015): Proposed that the brain constructs a simplified model of its own attention (an “attention schema”), and this model leads to the impression of an intangible self or conscious awareness. This theory frames consciousness as the brain’s narrative illusion about its processes, offering an explanation aligned with illusionism.

Higher - Order Theories of Consciousness - Rosenthal et al. (1990s): Argue that a mental state is conscious only when accompanied by a higher - order thought (HOT) or representation of that state. This emphasizes meta - cognition - the mind’s awareness of its own states - as key to consciousness and has guided experiments on confidence, introspection, and misinterpretation of one’s own experiences.

Global Workspace Theory - Baars (1988) / Dehaene (2014): Views consciousness as a global broadcast of information to multiple brain systems. Empirical support comes from findings that consciously perceived stimuli evoke late, widespread brain activation (e.g., a P3b wave) whereas unconscious stimuli do not. This theory has driven experimental designs distinguishing conscious vs. unconscious processing and informed computational models of awareness.