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Consciousness has been science's great holdout. We're building the logical machinery — and the falsifiability bounds — to change that. Consciousness has been a unique holdout for science. The past decades have produced hundreds of neuroscientific theories — and empirical research has ruled out none of them. Even the best-funded, best-intentioned adversarial collaborations have publicly failed to falsify a single theory. Urgent questions — like the necessary and sufficient conditions for artificial consciousness — remain stuck in assumption-dependent quagmires. Pet theories, one-off papers, and small-scale lab tests are not progressive or focused enough to solve the hardest problem in all of science. Our recent researchView onalphaXiv shows that the strict requirements for falsifiability create narrow bounds a theory of consciousness must meet — bounds that constrain the field significantly. Most current theories are unfalsifiable, or trivial, or admit known mathematical counterexamples

More than 300 theories compete to explain consciousness. We do not need another pet theory. We need a way to find the right one: eliminate weak theories, discover what survives, and falsify our way toward a final theory. The Human Genome Project mapped the code of life; we are working to map the principles of experience. The age of artificial intelligence has made the question impossible to ignore. We are creating machines that increasingly resemble human intelligence, yet we still cannot answer the more fundamental question: can they experience anything? Solving consciousness would open an…

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