Writings

Consciousness is exceptionally difficult to study scientifically: it is directly accessible from a first-person perspective but must be measured indirectly from a third-person one. A person may know what it is like to feel pain or hear a sound, but a researcher must infer that experience from behaviour, physiology, or neural activity.¹ Any workable definition must therefore be operationalisable from third-person evidence. This essay expands on Seth et al.’s² work to define consciousness as the capacity for subjective experience, operationalised through three constructs: conscious level—an organism’s global state of arousal, ranging from coma to full wakefulness; conscious content—the specific, first-person experience present within that state at a given moment; and conscious access—content that has become functionally available for report, reasoning, or the guidance of action.³ This framing matches Friedman et al.’s⁴ distinction between level and phenomenal aspects, and sets the terms on which electroencephalography (EEG) can be evaluated. This essay argues that EEG can be used to understand consciousness to a substantial, but bounded extent: strong, converging evidence about conscious level, moderate evidence for conscious access, but only indirect evidence about phenomenal experience itself. It will first explain what EEG measures and where its strengths and limitations lie, then critically evaluate studies of covert command-following, event-related potentials (ERPs), and cortical complexity, situate those paradigms within the active, passive, and resting-state distinction they exemplify, and ask how theoretically secure their markers are, before concluding that EEG’s capacity to measure consciousness is strongest when its evidence converges across paradigms, rather than as a direct readout of subjective experience.

EEG does not measure consciousness itself; it records scalp voltage fluctuations generated mainly by synchronised postsynaptic activity across large populations of cortical neurons, not individual action potentials.⁵ Its principal strength is temporal precision, making it well suited to asking when neural processing occurs. It also registers radially and tangentially oriented sources, and deep structures as well as superficial cortex.⁶ However, three limitations bound what that precision can deliver. First, volume conduction through brain tissue, cerebrospinal fluid, skull, and scalp means topography does not map simply onto cortical generators, and the signal is vulnerable to ocular, muscular, cardiac, and environmental artefacts.⁷ Second, and following directly from this, that ambiguity bears directly on conscious level, which depends on bi-thalamic and brainstem arousal systems.⁸ Because no scalp pattern has a unique generator,⁹ EEG can only ever index those systems downstream, through cortex. Third, single-trial EEG has poor signal-to-noise, so an evoked response emerges only across many clean trials,¹⁰ making single-patient inference fragile in precisely the population where it matters most. Its value for conscious level therefore comes not from millisecond timing as such—an argument for tracking access—but from its capacity to index how activity propagates, integrates, and differentiates across the cortex.

EEG is particularly useful for understanding consciousness when it reveals covert command-following in patients who appear behaviourally unresponsive. Clinical diagnosis relies on observable behaviour, yet behaviour can fail because of motor impairment, aphasia, sensory impairment, fluctuating arousal, or severe brain injury.¹¹ Owen et al.¹² first demonstrated covert command-following using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): a behaviourally vegetative patient’s activation during imagined tennis-playing and spatial navigation was indistinguishable from healthy participants. Cruse et al.¹³ adapted this logic to the bedside, requiring patients diagnosed as vegetative to imagine squeezing their right hand or moving their toes, tasks producing distinguishable sensorimotor EEG patterns in conscious participants. Of 16 patients, three produced reliable, command-specific EEG responses despite being behaviourally unresponsive. This separates behavioural output from conscious access: if a patient can understand an instruction, hold it in working memory, select the correct imagery task, and modulate brain activity at the correct time, behavioural silence cannot be equated with absence of awareness. Importantly, the task required repeatedly timed, command-specific differentiation between two mental actions, which a passive sensory response cannot produce. A later reanalysis, however, found that comparing all block-pair combinations rather than only adjacent pairs reduced two of the three patients’ accuracy to chance, with no motor-imagery markers surviving correction for multiple comparisons, suggesting the original classification may reflect statistical artefact.¹⁴ The same design that makes command-following hard to fake also limits negative results: since the task is cognitively demanding, failure may reflect impaired hearing, comprehension, attention, or working memory rather than absence of consciousness. Thus, the paradigm can demonstrate preserved access when classification holds, but cannot rule out experience when the task fails.

If command-following provides the strongest positive evidence, ERPs offer a broader but less specific route. ERPs are voltage changes extracted from ongoing EEG by averaging trials time-locked to a stimulus.¹⁵ An unexpected sound interrupting a repeating pattern elicits an automatic mismatch response, a low-level comparison occurring without conscious awareness.¹⁶ Detecting a longer-term, abstract rule and noticing when it breaks is different. It requires holding the rule in mind and updating it, a more demanding process reflected in a later, larger waveform, the P3b.¹⁷ Bekinschtein et al.¹⁸ demonstrated this in healthy participants: short-term deviants elicited only the mismatch response, whereas rule violations elicited the P3b, and only when participants were aware of the structure. Faugeras et al.¹⁹ adapted this local-global paradigm for patients meeting criteria for the vegetative state. Of 22 patient recordings, two showed a P3b-like effect interpreted as evidence of conscious access, and both patients showed clinical signs of consciousness within 3 to 4 days. Bedside electrophysiology therefore provided clinically meaningful evidence before behaviour revealed awareness, though a 9% detection rate leaves the estimate highly uncertain. They excluded a deafness explanation by identifying early cortical responses in negative cases, but 29% of recordings were discarded for poor signal quality. That rate is not incidental: it is the averaging requirement made visible, and it is why an ERP null in a restless, artefact-prone patient carries little evidential weight. Motor-imagery tasks demand sustained effort, giving high specificity but low sensitivity;²⁰ ERP paradigms require no such effort, but the marker itself is unreliable. P3b-like components appear in up to 40% of comatose patients, and the P3b is absent in most brain-damaged patients who are clearly conscious.²¹ ERPs extend EEG’s reach beyond volitional command-following, but they track processing that accompanies consciousness rather than constitutes it.

Different EEG paradigms make different inferential contributions, and no single marker can settle the question alone. Sanz et al.²² divided consciousness-probing paradigms into active, passive, and resting-state approaches: active paradigms are persuasive when positive, since volitional modulation is hard to explain without conscious access, but they are vulnerable to false negatives; passive paradigms reduce response demands yet cannot always distinguish consciousness from sensory processing, prediction, or attention; and resting-state measures drop task and sensory demands altogether, moving further from specific conscious contents but closer to conscious level. This category becomes most useful once made quantitative. Engemann et al.²³ trained a multivariate classifier on spectral, connectivity, and evoked-response features from 327 EEG recordings across two independent clinical centres, distinguishing unresponsive wakefulness syndrome from minimally conscious state with an area under the curve of 0.73–0.78 on previously unseen data, generalising across different EEG equipment and recording protocols. That consciousness-relevant information can be extracted with no task or stimulus is a genuine advance, but not a clean success. For a measure that could inform withdrawal-of-care decisions, that level of discrimination is modest. More fundamentally, the classifier’s ground truth is behavioural diagnosis using the Coma Recovery Scale-Revised, the very standard that covert command-following shows to underestimate consciousness, so its apparent errors may be precisely the covert cases that matter most. This circularity constrains nearly every marker considered here: EEG is repeatedly validated against the behaviour it is meant to surpass, so the case for EEG cannot rest on any single paradigm.

Cortical complexity offers a further route to conscious level, measuring how the brain responds when its cortex is directly perturbed rather than sensorily stimulated. Massimini et al.²⁴ showed that a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulse delivered during wakefulness evokes a response propagating across interconnected cortical areas, whereas in non-rapid-eye-movement sleep it evokes a stronger but short-lived local response, indicating a breakdown in effective cortical connectivity as consciousness fades. Casali et al.²⁵ developed the perturbational complexity index (PCI) from this, measuring the joint integration and differentiation of TMS-evoked activity with no sensory stimulus and no behavioural response. Critically, PCI separated vegetative-state patients (0.19–0.31) from minimally conscious patients (0.32–0.49) and from conscious but paralysed patients with locked-in syndrome (0.51–0.62), tracking graded differences in conscious level that behavioural scoring had failed to resolve. Casarotto et al.²⁶ validated PCI independently in 81 patients, reaching 94.7% sensitivity for minimally conscious patients and identifying vegetative-state patients with a potential for consciousness that behaviour alone had missed, echoing Cruse et al.’s²⁷ covert awareness. That said, this evidence needs qualifying. The clinical groups are small—six vegetative and six minimally conscious patients in Casali et al.²⁸—and Casarotto et al.’s²⁹ threshold derives from a benchmark of 150 conscious and unconscious subjects, calibrating it against the report-based criteria it adjudicates. A more pertinent issue is that the informative manipulation here is TMS and EEG only the readout, so the strongest evidence for conscious level rests on a hybrid method that also needs neuronavigation and expertise, making it far less deployable at the bedside than routine EEG. Engemann et al.’s³⁰ purely EEG-based classification, however, reaches the same conclusion independently, itself an instance of convergence across paradigms. PCI also indexes a capacity for integrated, differentiated processing rather than experience itself, leaving complexity far more convincing on level than on content.

EEG’s usefulness is further limited because its proposed consciousness markers are theoretically contested. Koch et al.³¹ argue that prominent candidates, such as gamma activity or the P3b, have not shown the predictive values once attributed to them. Friedman et al.³² similarly describe the P3b as historically important but increasingly interpreted as post-perceptual processing rather than phenomenal awareness itself. That reinterpretation is where EEG comes closest to conscious content, and where it stops. If the P3b indexes access rather than experience, a content marker should survive when report is removed; in no-report paradigms much of the late frontal response does disappear while posterior activity persists,³³ which is why Koch et al.³⁴ locate content-specific correlates posteriorly. Yet such markers are still identified by contrasting trials participants reported seeing against those they did not, leaving them validated against the access process they are meant to be separated from. This uncertainty extends to the theories meant to explain these markers. A large adversarial collaboration testing Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) against Integrated Information Theory (IIT) in 256 participants, using fMRI, magnetoencephalography, and intracranial recordings, found neither theory’s core predictions held: prefrontal activity was not sustained as GNWT predicts, and posterior activity was sparse where IIT predicted robustness.³⁵ No waveform maps onto consciousness one-to-one. Jackson and Bolger³⁶ add that polarity, scalp location, and waveform shape are not direct evidence of a generator beneath an electrode. Seth et al.³⁷ make the broader point: measures of consciousness gain meaning within theoretical frameworks and through convergence among behavioural and neurophysiological evidence. Thus, EEG cannot settle phenomenal consciousness on its own—it forces researchers to distinguish conscious level, access, and content rather than hiding those distinctions behind a single brain marker.

In conclusion, this essay has shown that EEG can be used to understand consciousness to a substantial, but bounded extent, with strong evidence for conscious level, moderate evidence for access, and only indirect evidence for content. EEG does not reveal subjective experience directly, and scalp voltage is not equivalent to consciousness itself. Rather, it provides evidence about the neural conditions under which consciousness becomes accessible, clinically detectable, or theoretically plausible. Three contributions support this position. Covert command-following reveals conscious access when behaviour is absent, separating what a patient can do from what a patient can show. ERPs extend this reach to patients who cannot sustain a demanding task, tracking rule-based processing that may anticipate clinical recovery. Cortical complexity indexes graded conscious level without any task or sensory input, extending the argument to patients who cannot perform command-following or rule-use. Read together across active, passive, and resting-state measures, and against the theories behind them, this evidence clarifies the dynamics of conscious level and access; it forces researchers to specify what their task can and cannot show, especially in fragile clinical populations; and it warns that behavioural silence is not always experiential absence. If consciousness can persist when outward response is absent, then diagnosis, prognosis, pain assessment, rehabilitation, and family communication depend on resisting overconfident conclusions from behaviour alone—including in the EEG measures still calibrated against it. EEG’s capacity to measure consciousness is therefore strongest when its evidence converges across paradigms, rather than as a direct readout of subjective experience.

Internet search engines, such as Google, are ubiquitous tools for information seeking, processing billions of queries daily. Yet critics argue they may worsen confirmation bias (CB)—the tendency to seek, interpret, and favour belief-consistent information¹—by creating “filter bubbles” that limit diverse exposure. Filter bubbles refer to algorithmic personalisation that isolates users within information ecosystems tailored to their existing preferences, potentially insulating them from challenging perspectives.² This essay first outlines reasons why search engines are thought to exacerbate CB, drawing on algorithmic and user-driven mechanisms; then critically evaluates the extent to which these concerns are well-founded through empirical evidence; before discussing implications for mitigation. It is argued throughout that while concerns are well-founded in specific contexts—particularly for low-literacy users and semantically biased queries—they are overstated at the population level, where user self-selection rather than algorithmic filtering drives most echo chamber effects.

Search engines are thought to exacerbate CB through personalised algorithms that tailor results to user history, potentially reinforcing existing beliefs. Pariser posits that platforms like Google use data on past searches, clicks, and demographics to prioritise “relevant” content, creating echo chambers where users encounter mostly confirming views.³ For instance, a climate skeptic querying “climate change myths” might receive denialist sites and skeptic blogs ranking prominently, while a believer gets peer-reviewed scientific journals and environmental advocacy sites first.⁴ This aligns with Pilgrim et al.’s BIASR model, where CB emerges from boundedly rational Bayesian updating—a process where individuals make probability judgments using mental shortcuts rather than rigorous statistical calculations, leading them to treat their prior beliefs and new evidence as more independent than they actually are.⁵ Users approximate independence between beliefs and source reliability, leading to biased source selection. In search contexts, this manifests as preferring “reliable” (belief-consistent) results, amplified by engines’ ranking confirmatory content.⁶ Furthermore, information overload from vast results worsens this. Goette et al. experimentally showed that processing difficulty strengthens CB, as users filter overload toward confirmations—mirroring the deluge of search engine results pages.⁷

User-driven factors likewise contribute, as people phrase queries in biased ways that produce confirming results. Kayhan demonstrated that when queries contain opposing evidence using dissimilar terms (e.g., “coffee and hypertension” vs. “coffee and no hypertension”), engines return mostly confirming results due to keyword mismatches, leading to selective engagement and biased decisions.⁸ Similarly, Leung and Urminsky showed that participants unintentionally used belief-aligned terms (e.g., conservatives querying “aborting risks” vs. liberals “abortion rights”) when searching information, yielding reinforcing results.⁹ Combined with CB’s evolutionary roots in argumentative reasoning,¹⁰ search engines thus facilitate CB by enabling easy access to supportive “evidence”. Yet, the extent of this effect remains contested, as some studies find that personalisation can also broaden users’ information exposure.

Empirical findings suggest that algorithmic personalisation and user behaviour do not always amplify CB to the extent often claimed. Instead, several studies indicate that algorithms often increase rather than limit informational diversity. First, Arguedas et al.’s literature review found that search engines and social media generally expose users to more cross-cutting content than self-selected sources.¹¹ In particular, it rejects the strong filter bubble hypothesis, concluding that no such echo chambers exist from personalisation alone. While this review focuses primarily on political news consumption, similar patterns emerge across topics. Suzuki and Yamamoto found that while CB was evident in health searches, it was moderated by literacy.¹² High-literacy users explored deeper and mitigated bias, whereas personalisation primarily worsened it for low-literacy groups. Finally, Kayhan complicates this picture, showing that in searches involving semantically similar terms, engines yield balanced results and largely unbiased outcomes.¹³ Taken together, these findings challenge claims that search engines exacerbate CB, suggesting instead that such bias also reflects offline cognitive tendencies,¹⁴ and users’ selective engagement.

Exploring the implications for mitigation demonstrates that concerns about search engine-induced bias are partially justified. However, they can be effectively addressed through user education. While personalisation and query biases exacerbate CB in dissimilar-term or low-literacy scenarios,¹⁵ empirical reviews show limited population-level effects, with self-selection driving most echo chambers.¹⁶ Evolutionary models, such as Pilgrim et al.’s, suggest CB’s adaptive roots in Bayesian approximations make search engines’ role context-dependent, and mitigable via interventions.¹⁷ Leung and Urminsky found broader prompts (e.g., “pros and cons”) reduce narrow search effects, promoting belief updating.¹⁸ Furthermore, Shi’s proposed eye-tracking study proposes intelligent systems providing diverse viewpoints, informing debiasing designs.¹⁹ Thus, education, literacy training, and default diverse rankings could transform search engines into productive tools for fostering balanced information access and reducing cognitive biases.

In conclusion, this essay has demonstrated that concerns about search engines exacerbating CB are well-founded in specific contexts but overstated at the population level. While algorithmic personalisation and biased query formulation can amplify CB for users with low digital literacy or when using semantically dissimilar search terms, empirical evidence reveals that search engines generally increase rather than limit exposure to diverse viewpoints, with self-selection being the primary driver of echo chambers. It has shown the need for user-focused mitigations over blanket critiques. Practical interventions such as teaching users to formulate neutral search queries and developing digital literacy programs emphasising critical source evaluation could significantly reduce bias effects.

Philosopher Nick Riggle argues that awesomeness is not mere hyperbole for “excellence”, but a deliberate act of creating “social openings”—moments where individuals break free from rigid social scripts to foster mutual appreciation and community.¹ This essay begins by examining Riggle’s concept of awesomeness, followed by what makes an interaction awesome. It then illustrates how Socrates exemplifies awesomeness and concludes with a discussion on the role of hope in sustaining it. It is argued throughout that awesomeness is not only an important virtue, but a vital one for our fragmented, digitally distracted age.

Riggle’s concept of awesomeness captures a unique social virtue defined by spontaneity, individuality, and the creation of meaningful human connection. Awesomeness refers to actions that instil awe not through excellence alone but by disrupting expectations in a way that reveals individuality and invites others to do the same.² When someone is being awesome, they aren’t merely performing a role in a social script; rather, they create openings for others to break free and step into authentic interaction. Riggle argues that the modern usage of ‘awesome’ reflects this specific virtue, which contrasts with its corresponding vice: suckiness. To suck, in this sense, is to fail to engage—to stifle or ignore the opportunities others offer for connection.³ A sucky person doesn’t just fail to be interesting when presented with an opportunity to be expressive—they shut it down, retreating into predictability and refusing to participate in shared authenticity. Awesomeness, by contrast, embraces risk and openness. Where suckiness closes doors, awesomeness swings them wide open. In this way, Riggle redefines ‘awesome’ not as empty praise but as a moral recognition of someone choosing connection and creativity over routine, thereby enriching the social world of others.⁴ This reframing invites us to see everyday encounters not as throwaway moments, but as opportunities for playful self-expression. Whether ordering coffee, receiving a package, or paying for groceries, the awesome person is attuned to the potential in the everyday for sparks of shared individuality.

Imagine you’re checking out at the grocery store, and the cashier asks, “Would you like a receipt?” Instead of saying “No, thank you”, you reply “Only if it doubles as a certificate of survival!” This tiny break in script creates a moment for connection. If the cashier laughs and says, “You’ve earned it!”, the social opening is completed. The moment shifts from purely transactional to expressive. However, if the cashier offers a dismissive “Ok”, the opportunity collapses; this is suckiness—not as cruelty, but as a missed chance to reciprocate in the deviation from social scripts. These moments seem trivial, but Riggle argues that they accumulate into a cultural ethos. Awesomeness cultivates a world where people feel free to be expressive, receptive, and generous.⁵ It is a value that encourages both individuality and community, without sacrificing one to the other. In an era marked by online echo chambers and routine interactions lacking depth, the capacity to forge spontaneous, genuine connections is rare. Awesomeness, in this time, becomes an antidote that models how we might live together—not just civilly, but meaningfully.

While such everyday moments highlight awesomeness in the present, historical figures like Socrates provide a compelling example of Riggle’s notion of awesomeness, revealing its deeper roots. As Riggle notes, Socrates was ‘awesome’ not because he followed conventional norms, but because he disrupted them in ways that opened space for others to think differently.⁶ Through the Socratic method he invited people to step outside of their habitual thinking and engage in deeper reflection. This disruption of social scripts created new possibilities for dialogue and self-understanding, aligning with Riggle’s idea that awesomeness involves fostering “social openings.” Rather than conforming to expectations of professional decorum, Socrates was willing to appear foolish, even provocative, in order to spark meaningful exchange. In this way, he did not merely reject convention; he actively made space for others to join him in the creation of a more authentic, dynamic community. The figure of Socrates not only exemplifies awesomeness, but it also shows us how being awesome is not just about being different—it’s about using one’s difference to encourage others to be more fully themselves.

Awesomeness, then, is not simply a distraction from moral seriousness—it is a different mode of it. Like kindness, or courage, it flourishes in the everyday. It takes creativity, timing, and sensitivity. It requires attentiveness to others and a willingness to be vulnerable—for it is not always successful. Not every joke lands, not every gesture is reciprocated, yet this is part of its moral power: to be awesome is to risk rejection for the chance of connection; it is a hopeful act. In this way, Riggle’s awesomeness builds upon Frankfurt’s insight that sincerity is increasingly rare in an age of bullshit—speech divorced from concern for truth or meaning.⁷ The awesome person, like the sincere one, seeks out something real. But while Frankfurt focuses on epistemic integrity, Riggle shifts our attention to aesthetic and interpersonal integrity. In this light, awesomeness resists the flattening of culture into scripts by insisting that our social lives can still surprise, delight, and transform.

Thus, this essay has demonstrated—through Riggle’s theory, practical examples, and the case of Socrates—that awesomeness is not just about being different, it’s about using difference to invite others into a more authentic dialogue. It is a virtue rooted in hope: that others will respond; that creativity will be met with receptivity; and that through our willingness to go off-script, we can build communities where individuality is not merely tolerated but celebrated. Awesomeness emerges as a timeless virtue—one that counters modern disconnection with hope and creativity. In a time of increasing post-pandemic social disconnection, awesomeness is not only important—it is vital.

John Locke’s theory of personal identity, as articulated in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, posits that continuity of consciousness is essential for personal identity over time. For Locke, consciousness primarily involves memory of past experiences. As such, this essay examines Locke’s theory, evaluates its strengths and limitations, and argues that consciousness alone is insufficient to fully account for identity. It begins by examining why Locke thinks psychological continuity is essential to identity.

Locke defines a person as a “thinking intelligent being” capable of self-reflection and of recognising itself as the same entity across time.¹ In contrast to theories tying identity to the body or soul, Locke argues that identity is rooted in psychological continuity, specifically memory of past actions and thoughts. He supports this with the famous thought experiment—the prince and the cobbler. In this thought experiment, the prince’s consciousness, including his memories, inhabits the cobbler’s body and vice versa. Because the prince retains his memories and self-awareness in the cobbler’s body, he remains the prince, showing that identity is tied to consciousness, not the physical form or social relationships.² Here, Locke’s theory aligns with our intuitive sense of self, where memory links past and present, rather than bodily features or social roles. Yet, despite its intuitive appeal, Locke’s reliance on memory as the sole criterion for identity invites significant philosophical challenges.

Locke’s memory-based theory of personal identity faces key challenges of circularity and logical inconsistency. Joseph Butler argues that Locke’s theory is circular: memory presupposes an existing self who recalls experiences, so it cannot define identity.³ If identity depends on memory, but memory already assumes a self to do the remembering, Locke’s definition becomes circular and fails to establish identity independently. Thomas Reid’s “Brave Officer” paradox further challenges Locke: a boy (A) flogged at school becomes an officer (B) recalling the flogging, then a general (C) remembering B but not A. Per Locke’s theory, A = B, and B = C, but C ≠ A. However, this violates identity’s transitivity such that if A = B, and B = C, then it must follow that C = A.⁴ Building on the critiques of Locke’s theory, the challenges posed by amnesia further expose the incompleteness of his framework.

Amnesic patients who lose significant portions of autobiographical memory are still recognised as the same person legally, socially, and morally. This persistence of self, grounded in physical and social continuity, demonstrates that memory alone cannot account for personal identity. Even when psychological continuity is severed, the individual’s obligations, traits and relational history remain, indicating that identity transcends remembered content. Any robust theory of identity must therefore supplement psychological continuity with factors such as physical or social continuity to account for cases of memory loss.

In summary, this essay examined Locke’s argument, evaluated its strengths and limitations, and argued that consciousness alone is insufficient to robustly account for identity. While Locke’s emphasis on the sameness of consciousness provides a compelling psychological foundation of personal identity, its circularity, logical inconsistencies, and failure in cases like amnesia suggest memory alone cannot fully explain identity. Though influential, Locke’s theory needs refinement to address the complexities of personal identity.