Pennartz, C. M.A., & Engeser, M. (2026) Could we perceive the world differently than we do? Neuroscience-based emergentism and the biological function of consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition, 143, 104077 doi:10.1016/j.concog.2026.104077.
[Abstract]Whether consciousness serves a biological and psychological function is a topic of intense interest. We reexamine this issue by first focussing on an objection against consciousness having a function raised amongst others by Jaegwon Kim. His argument targets a form of non-reductive physicalism stating that consciousness has causative power beyond that of the physical substrate. In contrast, we argue for a monistic conceptualization in which high-level, phenomenal representations correspond to low-level, neuronal representations, together constituting one functional entity. This neurorepresentationalist position supports a non-classical emergentism in which phenomenal consciousness and its neural substrate cannot be functionally separated. We next ask why our perceptual phenomenology is structured the way it is, making the case that conscious experiences are not accidental constructs, but are generated as a multimodal, situational survey of the brain’s environment (including the body) whose features precisely function to enable deliberate, planned behaviors. This function is illustrated by, for instance, examining why we see the world ’upside up’ instead of ’upside down’, why multisensory integration and other forms of integration are biologically useful, and what function spatial object constancy has in the face of ongoing eye and body movements. Pathological cases of hallucination, such as Anton and Bonnet syndrome, further buttress the argument by showing how behavior can be severely impaired when conscious brain systems misrepresent reality. Finally, we compare neurorepresentationalism to other proposals on functions of consciousness, and especially point out some differences with proposals for a learning function of consciousness.
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 3. From dualism to monism: Reducibility and levels of representation
* Kim writes: “mental properties are not reducible to, and are not identical with, physical properties”. Here, reducibility (in the sense of reductive physicalism or identity theory) is taken to mean that mental states can be equated with physical states, or at least correlate with, and refer to, the same under-lying phenomenon (Feigl, 1958; Place, 1956; Smart, 2022). From its Latin root reducere, however, to ‘reduce’ means to ‘lead back’, hence the term can also indicate that consciousness can be ‘brought back’ to (or derived from) a material origin, without applying a strict identity claim. Indeed, this is the position we will defend here: there exists a consistent monistic, physicalist position that is non-reductive in the sense that consciousness is not taken to be identical with an underlying physical process, whereas properties of conscious experience can nonetheless be derived (explained) from those of the underlying physical process. Reduction does not necessarily imply elimination: a phenomenon X may be explained from a set of underlying mechanisms Y, but is nonetheless recognized as something ontologically different, for instance, because not all properties of X are recognized to be the same as those found in Y. For example, think of how the greenness of a tree leaf is not literally found in what neurons or sets of spike trains in brain areas involved in color vision (e.g. V4) look like.