Lucid dreaming shows that loss of self-reflective awareness is not necessary for dreaming, challenging some theories. Because lucid dreamers can remember to perform predetermined actions and signal to the laboratory, they can mark the exact time of particular dream events. This allows experiments to establish precise correlations between physiology and subjective reports and enables methodical testing of hypotheses.
Perception can be actively shaped by top-down processes such as prior knowledge and expectations, not merely influenced by them. Two clear examples—hallucinations and mental imagery—demonstrate this, and importantly, both avoid the six confounds that Firestone and Scholl previously argued undermined claims of top-down effects on perception. This suggests that top-down influences on perception are real and not artifacts of experimental design.
Consciousness may be linked to voluntary action selection, but a narrow focus on skeletomotor control overlooks how interoception and autonomic regulation contribute to conscious selfhood and subjectivity. From the perspective of predictive processing, internal 'action'—the regulation of the body's internal state—plays a crucial role in shaping conscious experience. The argument suggests that understanding consciousness requires integrating both external action selection and internal bodily regulation.
O'Regan and Noë argue that a one-to-one correspondence between awareness and patterns of neural activity in the brain is impossible, making the project of identifying the neural correlates of consciousness doomed to fail. The authors of this response contend that such pessimism may be overstated, as recent empirical data show some convergence in describing consistent patterns of neural activity associated with visual consciousness.