Andrew W. Corcoran
Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Andrew W. Corcoran is a cognitive neuroscientist and postdoctoral research fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health and the Department of Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His work focuses on predictive processing, active inference, neural oscillations, and computational phenomenology.
Corcoran is widely recognized for his systematic critical syntheses comparing competing paradigms in consciousness science. In high-impact adversarial reviews, he has mapped the theoretical tensions and shared structural assumptions between Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Predictive Processing (PP), examining how generative error-minimization dynamics relate to intrinsic cause-effect power.
Corcoran’s research provides a rigorous framework for evaluating synthetic architectures, investigating whether predictive generative models naturally generate high integrated information complexes or require distinct architectural constraints to support conscious access.
Known for. Adversarial evaluation of Integrated Information Theory vs. Predictive Processing, computational phenomenology, hierarchical active inference
Coverage on this site
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Andrew W. Corcoran is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.