The same criticism about a lack of meaningful empirical tests could be made about other theories of consciousness, says Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and writer who lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, and who is a former student of Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is a proponent of IIT. “Everyone who works in the field has to acknowledge that we don’t have perfect brain scans,” he says. “And yet, somehow, IIT is singled out in the letter as this being a problem that’s unique to it.”
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