As prominent neuroscientist Christof Koch’s recent difficulties with Cancel Culture show, the cracks in materialist neuroscience are getting harder to paper over.
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Koch hoped that the “shared brain” experiment would demonstrate materialism. He may have been unprepared for Egnor’s response.
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Egnor: Consciousness is not the kind of thing that can be split, and there’s no evidence that one person can ever become two people.
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At one point, the discussion turned on the case of a girl who had her sense of guilt removed surgically. What does that prove about the mind and the brain?
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The growth of panpsychism is likely to change the nature of the science problems that are considered hard. But we shall see.
Read More ›The fate of consciousness studies may depend on how committed researchers are to finding the facts vs. how committed they are to protecting a materialist view.
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The difficulty of defining consciousness could very well be one of the reasons why tech moguls can get away with extravagant claims about conscious AI.
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When one of the world’s most prominent research neuroscientists goes off the classic materialist script — and gets away with it — things are changing.
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Giuseppina D’oro’s essay introduces two 20th-century idealist philosophers — Oakeshott and Collingwood — and their critique of psychology as a science.
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If neuroscientists are looking fruitlessly for a material basis for the human mind, progress may always be measured in conflicts, not insights.
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What’s really interesting is that all these neuroscientists see panpsychism as just as much of a threat to easy abortion as traditional monotheistic ethics is.
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Curiously, the coverage at Nature doesn’t address the critics’ concerns about IIT’s panpsychism. But it’s at Nature’s doorstep whether or not it’s noted.
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Curiously, Seth used to criticize those who see consciousness as a “mystery” but he describes it that way himself when discussing the famous wager.
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Not surprisingly, given that philosopher David Chalmers won the famous wager with neuroscientist Christof Koch last month, the topic of consciousness has been in the news a lot. In 25 years of research, no one has found a specific consciousness circuit, spot, wave, or whatever in the brain. Consciousness is still the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” At Vox, Oshan Jarow, a writer who knows the field, tells us that the bet has been renewed for another 25 years and offers an interpretation of why scientists haven’t “cracked” consciousness so far: “we still lack a definitive, falsifiable explanation. We even lack consensus on whether one may ever exist.” Eventually, in this view, the field might coalesce around a unified theory and Read More ›
Back in 1998, premier neuroscientist Christof Koch had wagered philosopher of mind David Chalmers a case of fine wine that within the next twenty-five years, a specific “signature of consciousness” would be found in the brain. In 2018, Swedish journalist Per Snaprud reminded the world of that fact at New Scientist. With five years to run, a countdown of sorts began. Snaprud’s article was titled “Consciousness: How we’re solving a mystery bigger than our minds,” telling readers that “we’re uncovering clues.” The five years are up and who won? Mariana Lenharo reports at Nature, “Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that Read More ›
This article is an excerpt of one that originally appeared in Salvo 61 (Summer 2022), under the title “Everything is Conscious? Panpsychism goes mainstream.” Panpsychism — the view that all of the universe participates in consciousness, which is most fully developed in humans — has been gaining popularity in science in recent years. Does that sound unbelievable? Is not science committed wholly to materialism and nothing but materialism? Will consciousness not soon be “explained” by an accidental glitch in brain wiring that natural selection retained? Science doesn’t seem nearly as committed to that view just now. A 2018 article at Quartz by Olivia Goldhill was titled “The idea that everything from spoons to stones is conscious is gaining academic credibility.” Read More ›
Eva Jablonka is “one of the world’s foremost experts in epigenetic inheritance and evolution” but she has also had a longstanding interest in consciousness studies. She was author, with Marion J. Lamb, of Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (MIT Press 2006/rev. 2014). She and neurobiologist Simona Ginsburg, along with illustrator Anna Zeligowski, offer a new approach to the origin of consciousness in an essay at IAI.TV — one with an interesting departure from many approaches to consciousness: Taking their inspiration from Hungarian chemist Tibor Gánti (1933–2009), who posited a chemoton — the minimal life form or protocell — as the origin of life, they first attempt to define minimal consciousness, Read More ›
Ironically, human exceptionalism, which Koch decries, holds out the possibility that some beloved animals may indeed share immortality with humans.
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Menuge argues that one problem for panpsychism is that consciousness is unitary; it does not seem composed of innumerable tiny proto-conscious elements.
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Consciousness, as a concept, is so easy to experience and so hard to define. Or explain. The most popular current theory of consciousness is Integrated Information Theory (IIT), pioneered by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and championed by Allen Institute neuroscientist Christof Koch. For the purpose of discussing IIT, science writer Mike Hogan works with this definition: Consciousness for purposes of this theory is defined as ‘self-awareness’ or the Central-Identity; the inner-voice that allows your brain to talk to itself, an awareness that ‘you’ exist, the rationalization of your own relevance to that existence, and an awareness of the cause and effect of your actions in regard to yourself and your environment. Mike Hogan, “The Best Available Story of Human Consciousness” at Read More ›