Notable Links and Miscellanea—March 23, 2025
#1. Many readers will recall the 2023 controversial letter, posted as a preprint and signed by 124 prominent scholars, calling Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness (ITT) “pseudoscience.” Along with many others at the time, I thought the letter was ill-advised and unpersuasive with regards to the accusation. An updated version of that letter has now been published in Nature Neuroscience, along with a reply from Giulio Tononi and colleagues (team ITT) and comments from Alex Gomez-Marin & Anil K. Seth.
IIT-Concerned and others. What makes a theory of consciousness unscientific?
Tononi et al. Consciousness or pseudo-consciousness? A clash of two paradigms
Gomez-Marin & Seth. A science of consciousness beyond pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness
Tononi et al.:
“Contingent motivations aside, we argue here that these (and other) heated attacks are symptomatic of a much deeper issue, one that does deserve to be addressed — the fundamental crisis of the dominant computational-functionalist paradigm and its clash with IIT’s consciousness-first paradigm. Paradigms tend to die when a stubborn fact refuses to be accommodated; in this case, the stubborn fact is consciousness itself.”
Gomez-Marin & Seth:
“Respectable (and respected) groups of scientists do not need to disrespect each other to prove themselves right (or wrong)… We do not know the correct answer to the problem of consciousness. We may not have even asked the right question yet. The future science of consciousness may require that we return to Galileo’s foundations to build a new true science of experience.”
#2. There is a flurry of interesting activity around the launch of Laura Delano’s Unshrunk and the spotlight on Inner Compass Initiative: a detailed story in the New York Times by Ellen Barry, which I personally thought was quite well done but generated pretty heated debate, a fierce commentary by Freddie deBoer, and a hard-hitting review by Judith Warner in the Washington Post (“Like many mental health memoirs, “Unshrunk” suffers by sharing its author’s symptomology: In this case, it’s a study in black-and-white thinking.”).
#3. The brilliant
has a new preprint updating his theory of causal emergence: Causal Emergence 2.0: Quantifying emergent complexity. See Hoel’s introduction to the paper on his substack. I really enjoyed Hoel’s discussion of causal emergence in his book, The World Behind the World (2023), when it came out, and I’ve been citing his work in some of my talks that touch on issues of bio-psycho-social causal interactions.#4. Benjamin G. Druss and Nev Jones in JAMA Psychiatry. Evidence-Based Practicing in Mental Health
“Researchers and funders regularly express frustration about the lack of uptake of ESTs (empirically supported treatments) into practice. Decision makers, such as service users, clinicians, managers, and policymakers, may find that existing ESTs do not map well onto the problems they are trying to solve, nor align with local values and priorities. One reason for this disconnect may be that, in their current form, ESTs could be replicating the very problem that EBM was developed to address: overreliance on expert authority as a substitute for the judicious use of all types of evidence at point-of-care delivery… ESTs are necessary but not sufficient for evidence-based practicing.”
#5. I’ve been advocating for scientific pluralism in psychiatry and have been saying things like, “Mental Disorders Both Are and Are Not Brain Diseases.” Such thinking is not peculiar to psychiatry or psychology, however. Michael Levin writes in Noema magazine, Living Things Are Not Machines (Also, They Totally Are):
“Let’s stop presuming our formal models (and their limitations) are the entirety of the thing we are trying to understand and pretending that one universal objective metaphor is a genuine representation of “living things” while all others are false. In other words, let’s reject the one thing organicists and mechanists agree on — the assumption that there is a single accurate and realistic picture of systems if we could only discover which one is right.
I propose instead that it’s all about perspective and context. In some scenarios, certain formalisms and tools appropriate for some kinds of machines will pay off; in other scenarios, they are woefully inadequate. If we give up the idea that there needs to be one correct answer and we get comfortable with having to specify context and prospective payoff, we can make real progress.”
#6. When I wrote “Rejection of Hijab as a Psychiatric Problem in Iran” a few weeks ago, I had no idea that the reaction of Americans would be, ‘Hold my beer.’ Minnesota bill labels Trump derangement syndrome as mental illness. JFC!
#7. I appeared on the Thinking Mind podcast with Anya Borissova, talking about various conceptual and critical issues around psychiatric diagnosis and classification.