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How the social structure of a field shapes whether disagreement fuels progress or isolation — and how MESEC, a student-led society in consciousness science, turns fragmentation into collaboration by empowering early-career researchers.

Splits Biological Naturalism — the view that only biological systems can be conscious — into two exhaustive kinds: one holding that biology matters for what it is made of (empirically untestable in principle), the other that biology affords unique information-processing abilities (testable, and compatible with computational functionalism). The upshot: biology alone cannot tell us which systems are conscious, but it can guide us toward the information processing that does.

A biologically grounded dynamical account of conscious access. Using a mesoscale connectome-based model of macaque cortex, we identify a bifurcation mechanism underlying ignition-like all-or-none cortical activity and highlight a hierarchical NMDA/AMPA receptor gradient supported by autoradiography data.