original version of this story Appeared in Quanta Magazine.
Science routinely proposes theories and then bombards them with data until only one theory remains. In the nascent science of consciousness, no dominant theory has yet emerged. More than 20 cases are still taken seriously.
It’s not because I want data. Since Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, legitimized consciousness as a research topic more than 30 years ago, researchers have used a variety of advanced techniques to study human subjects’ brains and We have been tracking signs of neural activity that may reflect. consciousness. The resulting avalanche of data should have at least flattened the flimsy theory by now.
Five years ago, the Templeton Global Charitable Foundation launched a series of “adversarial collaborations” to persuade the overdue cull to begin. This June, he published the first results of these collaborations, pitting his two high-profile theories, Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) and Integrated Information Theory (IIT), against each other. Neither was an outright winner.
The results, presented like the results of a sporting event at the 26th annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, are the result of a 25-year relationship between Crick and his longtime collaborator, the neuroscientist. It was also used to settle long-distance bets. Christoph Koch Doctor and philosopher at the Allen Institute for Brain Science david chalmers at New York University coined the term “hard problem” to challenge the assumption that we can explain our subjective sense of consciousness by analyzing brain circuits.
On stage at New York University’s Skirball Center, after a rock music interlude, a rap performance about consciousness, and a presentation of their results, the neuroscientist conceded the bet to the philosopher. In other words, the neural correlates of consciousness had not yet been determined.
Nevertheless, Koch declared, “This is a victory for science.”
But was it? The event received mixed reviews. Some researchers have noted that they have not been able to meaningfully test the differences between the two theories. Others have highlighted the project’s success in advancing consciousness science, both by providing large, novel, and well-executed datasets and by encouraging other participants to collaborate adversarially. I am.
correlation of consciousness
When Crick and Koch was published their groundbreaking paper In 1990’s Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness, their aim was to put consciousness, which had been the springboard of philosophers for 2,000 years, on a scientific basis. They argued that the concept of consciousness itself is too broad and controversial a concept to serve as a starting point.
Instead, they focused on scientifically tractable aspects: visual perception, which involves being conscious of seeing red, for example. The scientific goal was to find circuits that correlate with that experience, or in their words, “neural correlates of consciousness.”
Decoding the first stages of visual perception was already proving to be fertile ground for science. The patterns of light that hit the retina send signals to the visual cortex deep in the brain. There, more than a dozen different neural modules process signals that correspond to edges, color, and movement in the image. Their outputs are combined to build the final dynamic picture of what we consciously see.
What determined the usefulness of vision for Crick and Koch was that the last link in the chain, consciousness, could be separated from the rest. Since the 1970s, neuroscientists have known about people with “blindsight” who are able to move around a room without bumping into obstacles, despite having no visual experience due to brain damage. They retain the ability to process images, but have lost the ability to be conscious of them.
