ReviewNeuroscience of consciousness2022
Consciousness matters: phenomenal experience has functional value.
Review in Neuroscience of consciousness, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- The experience of cognitive conflict is intrinsically rewarding.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- How do Faces Influence Behavior? A Proposal for Distinguishing between Mechanisms that Involve Cognitive inferences, Emotional Feelings, and Unconscious Affective Reactions.Affective science · 2026Review
- Qualities, subjectivity and spatial extension: is there a common factor?Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Confidence in naturalistic decision making.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- The function(s) of consciousness revisited: insights from a modular/constitutive model using vision as a test case.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Exploring the role of micro-valence in the phenomenal space: insights from similarity judgments and deep learning models.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Towards a neuroethological approach to consciousness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The value of consciousness: experiences worth having.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Consciousness at sea.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Without birth, without death-issues in the research of nondual awareness or consciousness itself.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Now is the time: operationalizing generative neurophenomenology through interpersonal methods.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Training can enhance unconscious response priming on fast trials even when measuring consciousness on a trial-by-trial basis.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Disclosing Results of Tests for Covert Consciousness: A Framework for Ethical Translation.Neurocritical care · 2024Review
- The case for neurons: a no-go theorem for consciousness on a chip.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- Pain anticipation is a new behavioural sign of minimally conscious state.Brain communications · 2024Article
- The function(s) of consciousness: an evolutionary perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The Fundamental Tension in Integrated Information Theory 4.0's Realist Idealism.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The Representational Similarity between Visual Perception and Recent Perceptual History.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Clinical potential of sensory neurites in the heart and their role in decision-making.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
'Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us?' In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that subject-level experience-'What it feels like'-is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains why they do certain things and avoid others. Because experiences have value and guide behaviour, consciousness has a function. Under this hypothesis of 'phenomenal worthiness', we argue that it is only in virtue of the fact that conscious agents 'experience' things and 'care' about those experiences that they are 'motivated' to act in certain ways and that they 'prefer' some states of affairs vs. others. Overviewing how the concept of value has been approached in decision-making, emotion research and consciousness research, we argue that phenomenal consciousness has intrinsic value and conclude that if this is indeed the case, then it must have a function. Phenomenal experience might act as a mental currency of sorts, which not only endows conscious mental states with intrinsic value but also makes it possible for conscious agents to compare vastly different experiences in a common subject-centred space-a feature that readily explains the fact that consciousness is 'unified'. The phenomenal worthiness hypothesis, in turn, makes the 'hard problem' of consciousness more tractable, since it can then be reduced to a problem about function.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.