What does it mean to be conscious? How do we determine whether a person has lost consciousness or not? How does your experience presumably differ from mine? This master-level seminar offers an in-depth exploration of consciousness, the jewel in the crown of the mind sciences. The course bridges neuroscientific and philosophical perspectives, linking empirical research with theoretical inquiry. Students will examine the mind–body problem, the difference between phenomenal and access consciousness, the inferential challenges of attributing consciousness across species and substrates, and the empirical methods that have made consciousness a tractable scientific question.
The course covers altered states of consciousness, disorders of consciousness, the thalamic and cortical mechanisms that gate awareness, the role of brain structures and intrinsic dynamics in conscious experience, and the rapidly evolving questions surrounding consciousness in infants, animals, and artificial intelligence. Through interactive lectures, structured student-led presentations, and one instructor-led debate on the inferential difficulty of detecting consciousness in non-verbal subjects, students will engage with experimental paradigms (no-report, masking, perturbational complexity, deep brain stimulation), neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques, and the methodological confounds of attention, working memory, and decision-making that have shaped the field. The course integrates the major theories of consciousness (Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, Higher-Order Theories, Recurrent Processing, Predictive Processing) and culminates in a discussion of how adversarial collaborations are reshaping the field’s epistemic practice.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Articulate the philosophical and neuroscientific foundations of consciousness studies, including the easy, hard, real, harder, and hardest problems.
• Differentiate between phenomenal and access consciousness, and between state and content consciousness, including their candidate neural correlates.
• Critically evaluate the empirical paradigms used to study consciousness, with particular attention to the report confound and the NCC-prerequisite / NCC-proper / NCC-consequence distinction.
• Analyse the major theories of consciousness (GNWT, IIT, HOT, RPT, PP) and their commitments, predictions, and refutation conditions.
• Critically appraise the methodological and ethical challenges of attributing consciousness in infants, brain-injured patients, sleepers, anaesthetized individuals, non-human animals, and artificial systems.
• Distinguish cortical and subcortical (intralaminar thalamic) contributions to conscious states, and the causal evidence that supports the distinction.
• Engage with adversarial collaboration as a methodological response to underdetermination in consciousness science.
• Read, present, and lead discussion on a primary book chapter at master-level depth.
- Kursleiter/in: Lucía Andrea Melloni Buljevic
- Kursleiter/in: Marta Rüdiger