Recently, theories of consciousness have proliferated, partly because traditional empirical approaches focusing on neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) offer limited constraints. Unlike most traditional studies, which use binary paradigms (e.g., “seen” vs. “unseen”), a structural approach aims to characterize qualia and their physical substrates through relationships among qualia and between qualia and neural mechanisms. We present initial structural experiments and analyses that map properties of qualia (e.g., color, motion, sound, face) onto neural connectivity and activity. This framework may eventually yield a systematic catalogue of qualia–substrate relationships, akin to a “periodic table of qualia, ” providing a path toward addressing the hard problem of consciousness.
