Accelerating Research on Consciousness: The Structured Adversarial Collaboration Process

This paper provides an overview of the adversarial collaboration portfolio funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF) under its Accelerating Research on Consciousness (ARC) initiative. I designed and launched the portfolio in 2018 and managed it until the end of July 2022. The first project released a tranche of results (Ferrante et al., 2023) that received a significant amount of media attention (e.g. Finkel, 2023; Lenharo, 2023) along with praise, critique, and disagreements over what the findings really mean. I have since received requests for information about the grantmaking process, and this paper is my general reply to those requests. I provide an overview of our motivation to fund these unique research projects, a brief history of how the portfolio was developed, and some perspectives on the value and limitations of our approach. My intent is not to comment on any of the research methods, validity of the theories, or to weigh in on potential disagreements. Rather, I write this paper hoping to benefit the scientific community by informing future discussions.