Recent pseudoscience accusation echoes historic pushback against general relativity

Last year, a controversial letter criticized a highly cited theory of consciousness, integratedinformation theory or IIT, as “pseudoscience”. The letter was penned by 10 prominentpsychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists, and signed by over 100 additional researchers,creating a group called “IIT-Concerned.” The pseudoscience accusation, while controversial, hassince been repeated by one of IIT-Concerned most vocal members. Herein, we will challenge IIT-Concerned’s criticism by providing a historical parallel. And yet, our goal is not to promote IIT over other theories of consciousness. As discussed below, we believe that IIT has both strengths and weaknesses as a theory of consciousness; we are not arguing against reasonable criticisms of the theory. Rather, our goal is to critique the reasoning of IIT-Concerned. In what follows, we provide a brief background on IIT for context before diving into the controversy surrounding the theory and, finally, drawing a historical analogy that we believe to be illuminating.