These depend on the fact that GWT predicts brain activity only when attention is
actively being paid to something, whereas mere conscious awareness of something is
enough for IIT to predict activity. The tests’ details vary (some involve stationary letters,
objects or faces on a screen while others have shapes moving across the screen). In all of
them, though, the distinction between attention and awareness is clear—and so,
therefore, are the predictions.
Whatever emerges from the experiment will not be anywhere near a definitive
explanation of consciousness. In particular, it will not address the “hard” problem of the
phenomenon: the “feeling of what it is like to be something” that was raised in 1974 by
Thomas Nagel, an American philosopher, in an essay titled “What is it like to be a bat?”
It will, however, by providing what are known as neural correlates of conscious
experience, point to directions in which future investigations might usefully travel.
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