A co-authored paper on Qualia Structure by Dr. Francesco Ellia, a participant in Summer School 2024 and a member of the Publicly Offered Research Group, and Dr. Naotsugu Tsuchiya, our representative, has been published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. This is an opinion paper that was released as a preprint in September 2025.

 The full text is available here. Please take a moment to read it.

Paper Information

Authors： Francesco Ellia and Naotsugu Tsuchiya

Title： Intrinsic Universal Structures and Extrinsic Local Functions

Journal：   Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2026

ISSN：1364-6613

DOI：https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2026.03.005

Abstract: 

 Contemporary consciousness science faces an impasse: competing theoretical frameworks—structuralist versus functionalist, universal versus local, intrinsic versus extrinsic—appear to be inducing philosophical deadlocks and conceptual standstills. While these debates have generated valuable insights, they have proceeded in parallel, without a systematic framework for understanding their relationships and implications. We contend that these parallel disputes reflect deeper, unresolved tensions in the conceptualization of consciousness. These debates can be addressed by recognizing three fundamental dimensions that encompass models of consciousness at a meta-theoretical level: explanatory medium, scope, and perspective. We show the interplay among different dimensions and how they mutually condition evidence, language, and concepts, reframing theoretical conflicts into tractable disagreements.

Keywords: 

consciousness; theories of consciousness; functions; structures; universality