There are about 50 diverse theories behind consciousness and one of the two currently oft-accepted theories, known as the integrated information theory (IIT), was recently declared by a group of 124 scholars, including Bernard Baars, Daniel Dennett, and Joseph LeDoux, to be a pseudoscience with a panpsychic slant that is having damaging effects on biology (Fleming et al, 2023; Lenharo, 2023). This accusation caused a considerable uproar and prompted other experts on consciousness, including Christoph Koch and Anil Seth, to defend the IIT concept (Lenharo, 2023). IIT proposes a mathematical model to explain why some systems, such as brains, are conscious. Generally, it assumes that the model could infer from objective and causal properties whether a given system is conscious, to what degree and what particular experience it is having. We have discussed IIT elsewhere (Reber, 2019; Reber et al, 2023) and will briefly note here that there are serious theoretical weaknesses. Most stem from the assumption that the various parts of a system must be integrated for it to become sentient. As Reber (2019) pointed out, this component of the model ends up producing nonsensical situations where a pile of sand or a camera would become sentient under the right circumstances. For example, if the pile of sand is in a beaker and it is shaken, the grains, being of slightly different diameters would undergo a vertical sorting. In short, they would now be interacting with each other, but we would not conclude that there is an existential consciousness in the beaker. An insentient camera should, according to IIT, become conscious when it is integrated into a moving vehicle that is equipped with the sensors and feedback systems found in selfdriving cars. There are other problems with the overall theory, including a lack of any coherent way to measure the amount of “information” that is in any system or determine precisely what it means for it to be “integrated”.

In order to keep consciousness a legitimate research field, we need a new fresh look on the mystery of consciousness, which our Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) theory offers without becoming enmeshed in the kinds of conundrums that the IIT invites. CBC differs in important ways from that taken by others in the broad field of consciousness science—a stance we’ve labeled the Standard Model of Consciousness (SMC).