C-Wars: The Unfolding Argument Strikes Back -- A Reply to 'Falsification & Consciousness'

The'unfolding argument' presented in [1] made the case that IIT and other causal structure theories (CSTs) are either already falsified or outside the realm of science. This argument was first extended in [2] and a more generalized version was presented as the'substitution arguments' in [3].The author here will assume that readers are pretty familiar with all 3 papers -[1], [2] and [3]. The focus will be on the last one which we find to be the most general version of the arguments and the most broad in claims. It is very interesting work, accessible and proposes a descriptive mathematical framework that could be very useful moving forward. For the sake of brevity, we will borrow the symbols and terminologies from [3] as much as possible to point out the errors in that model and make suitable corrections. With these corrections incorporated, we should be able see that the substitutions argument does not apply for functionalist theories (or at best have not been proven to do so) in [3]. In this short note, we will start by introducing some relevant concepts and definitions from [3] in section 2. The main contribution of this note is section 3, where we present arguments as to why the results of the substitution argument does not apply for functionalist theories of consciousness by pointing what the formalism missed. The note will conclude in section 4 summarizing the ideas presented here.