TYPE Editorial PUBLISHED 20 April 2023 DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1182690 OPEN ACCESS EDITED AND REVIEWED BY Erika Dyck, University of Saskatchewan, Canada *CORRESPONDENCE Narayanan Srinivasan nsrini@iitk.ac.in RECEIVED 09 March 2023 ACCEPTED 03 April 2023 PUBLISHED 20 April 2023 CITATION Srinivasan N, Simione L, Arsiwalla XD, Kleiner J and Raffone A (2023) Editorial: Insights in consciousness research 2021. Front. Psychol. 14:1182690. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1182690 COPYRIGHT © 2023 Srinivasan, Simione, Arsiwalla, Kleiner and Raffone. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Editorial: Insights in consciousness research 2021 Narayanan Srinivasan 1 *, Luca Simione 2,3 , Xerxes D. Arsiwalla 4 , Johannes Kleiner 5,6,7 and Antonino Raffone 8 1 Department of Cognitive Science, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India, 2 Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome, Italy, 3 Faculty of Interpreting and Translation, UNINT, Università degli Studi Internazionali, Rome, Italy, 4 Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain, 5 Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany, 6 Munich Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany, 7 Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science, Munich, Germany, 8 Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy KEYWORDS consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, complexity, non-local, hypnosis, meditation, EEG, microstates Editorial on the Research Topic Insights in consciousness research 2021 In recent years, multiple theories have been proposed and are being tested to advance consciousness science (Seth and Bayne, 2022). Critical reviews focusing on these theories have proposed criteria for evaluating such theories (Doerig et al., 2021) and evaluated their potential convergence (Northoff and Lamme, 2021). The Research Topic on insights in consciousness research focuses on some critical aspects in consciousness research. The paper by Marchetti focuses on the phenomenal aspects of consciousness (PAC), more specifically the “why” of the PAC, deriving an explanation for the evolutionary and functional understanding of consciousness. For him, PAC allows an agent to have a sense of self and provides information on how various mental operations influence the self. Marchetti uses a notion of information that is available only for an agent or self to understand the PAC, which forms the basis of conscious information processing. He argues that conscious information processing is due to two important components, self, and attention. In a functional perspective, self as a process reduces the complexity of the organism into a “single voice,” while attention focuses on specific aspects of the self. He argues that attentional activity on the state of self modulates the “energy level” of the neural substrate underlying the attentional activity. According to this perspective, different dimensions of PAC like quantitative, qualitative, hedonic, temporal, and spatial are associated with different features of modulation of energy level of the organ of attention and sense of self involved. Amongst the prominent current theories of consciousness is the integrated information theory (IIT: Oizumi et al., 2014), which depends on measures of complexity (Arsiwalla and Verschure, 2018). There have been multiple criticisms of IIT [see Singhal et al. (2022) for a criticism based on temporal phenomenology]. The paper by Koculak and Wierzcho´ n argues that the focus of those studying the theoretical and empirical basis of IIT has been primarily on the states of consciousness and not directly on the contents of consciousness itself. They argue for the need to pay attention to complexity measures in understanding our conscious experience in terms of both states and contents of our conscious experience, while IIT provides only a quantitative measure of the degree of integration. The authors point to the need to dissociate the use of complexity measures from the ontological assumptions of IIT so that empirical studies on neural correlates of consciousness can study whether complexity measures can directly quantify properties of the contents of consciousness. One example Frontiers in Psychology 01 frontiersin.org