Is the frontoparietal network necessary for the experience of qualia?
” Perception 38 ECVP Abstract Supplement, page 163 Is the frontoparietal network necessary for the experience of qualia? P U Tse The field of consciousness researchers is divided. Indeed, some members of this symposium fall into one or the other of the two camps. Some argue that the frontoparietal network is necessary to have conscious contents, while others argue that this is not necessarily so, and that there can be conscious contents even in the absence of frontoparietal network activity. I will discuss a conceptual framework that can encompass evidence for both of these camps. I conclude that the frontoparietal network allows one to experience qualia in the particular sense of an attended object that is tracked through some representational space. However, even in the absence of attentional engagement, qualia can exist as ‘feature soup’ (ie unbound and untracked) in the perceptual background, and these experiences can be reported when probed. Such unattended qualia can be realized
