Scientists still don’t know how consciousness emerges from the brain. New ideas suggest it may not emerge at all, but instead be a basic feature of reality.
Is consciousness produced by the brain, or is it a deeper feature of reality? This question is a key focus of Christof Koch, one of today’s leading neuroscientists, in his presentation at the 15th “Behind and Beyond the Brain” Symposium, organized by the Bial Foundation and held April 8 to 11 in Porto.
The Limits of Materialism and the “Hard Problem”
Materialism continues to shape most scientific thinking, but Koch highlights where it falls short. Even with major progress in neuroscience, scientists still cannot explain how subjective experience arises from physical brain activity. This unresolved mystery is known as the “hard problem” of consciousness.
Key Challenges in Explaining Conscious Experience
Koch outlines three major areas where current understanding struggles. First is the challenge of fully reducing conscious experience to physical processes in the brain. Second is the difficulty modern physics faces when trying to define what is truly “real.” Third is the persistence of unusual experiences – including near-death experiences, mystical states, and episodes of terminal lucidity – that do not fit neatly within existing scientific explanations.
Rethinking Consciousness as a Fundamental Part of Reality
Based on these issues, Koch suggests it may be time to revisit older philosophical perspectives such as idealism and panpsychism. These approaches treat consciousness as a basic component of reality rather than something generated by the brain alone. He supports Integrated Information Theory, which proposes that any system with a high level of integrated information has some form of subjective experience – a scientific version of panpsychism.
A Leading Researcher in Consciousness Studies
Koch, a researcher at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and a former professor at MIT and Caltech, has played a major role in advancing the study of consciousness. His work includes developing new methods to identify signs of awareness in patients who appear unresponsive, helping to expand how scientists detect and understand conscious states.
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17 Comments
Bs at its best!
Brain Science. BS. Ha ha
Such a coincidence we share the same name and opinion. This article really didn’t accomplish anything…
I happen to think that the only thing that actually exists is consciousness; everything else is illusion.
Yep. “I can’t explain it so it has to be mystical.” Haven’t be been there, done that?
*haven’t we, not “be”. Sheesh.
You need to read “The Death of Materialism: A Skeptic’s Journey from Materialism to Panpsychism”
By David Michael Gibbs
Agreed! BS.
No explanation, just doubt.
Brain Science. BS. Ha ha
Such a coincidence we share the same name and opinion. This article really didn’t accomplish anything…
An inflation of Ians
‘Materialism’ is how philosophers reduce Science, so they can still feel superior
The above is wishful thinking. Even though you walk around in a blaze of radiation, a small portion of which seems to provide visual info, the vast super-computer of your brain makes this delightful fantasy world that most take for granted and believe is the actual view before them.
Then they don’t want to die so they make up a story that somehow that experience generator comes from somewhere else – but like all ‘religions’ the reality of it will dispel.
And we are getting closer to understanding that reality. The great dispeller (knowledge) is coming to quell all illusions.
In my opinion Consciousness surrounds us and throughout our being. That includes the Cosmos which is not understood but theorized by some. We are still trying to understand our Universe of atoms.Our brains are only developed to be aware of and understand just so much. That is called self consciousness. That is a step above animals and below. As we continue as humans and our receptors develop to an order above our present abilities will we know the next stage of Cosmic Energies.
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
While I don’t believe that the only thing that exists is consciousness, I do believe that our thoughts can exist outside our brains/bodies. I’ve had many psychic experiences. If you have never had one, you will likely think this is all BS and I feel sorry for you. You are really missing out. But…the only explanation for psychic experiences is that our thoughts exist outside of our bodies.
I think this article confuses energy with consciousness and thoughts. They are not the same thing at all.
Consciousness arises from a living body & brain because consciousness must be felt. It’s a feeling and experience. You need a living body in order to feel and to experience things. Your brain does not feel or experience things, YOUR BODY DOES. The air and other inanimate objects cannot experience or feel anything. There is no way they can be conscious. It’s sheer lunacy to think that they can feel or experience anything. That goes for computer programs, AI and machines, as well. They can’t feel so they will NEVER be conscious. Or self-aware. Or alive. They can only be programmed to act as though they are. It’s an illusion, a deception.
There is no mystery to me about how subjective experiences arise from physical brain processes…it’s because the brain is inside a body which feels and experiences the things. The brain is just processing information, it’s the body that is experiencing the consciousness. And here’s the part where I simply lack terminology to explain what happens further. When a thought occurs, something is created in space and I don’t know what to call it because we don’t have a word for it yet because it hasn’t been discovered yet. This new thing that is created from a thought is something that contains information. Somehow that information gets sent or is emanated outside the body and can be picked up by other bodies and brains. Mark my words. It is a matter of time before this physical process of emanating information can be detected, measured, quantified, defined, proven and then finally given a name.
Based upon my own subjective experiences during very brief and deep natural forays into alternate states of consciousness beginning in late 1975, I can mostly closely agree with Jennifer. A very, very long time ago a single sentient entity became instantaneously dissatisfied with being alone in a cold, dark and quiet place and created evolution in a physical universe with a single thought, perhaps, a “Big Bang” with just “Let there be light.” With “God” and universe being mutually exclusive, we now exist in a universe with an energy spectrum that ranges from mindless matter (black hole matter?) to matterless mind (pure sentient energy) and a set of laws of energy and rules of life that mostly keep things in working order.
Life may be defined as the gradual conversion of lower forms of energy to the highest (e.g., ice to water to steam). The great conflict is between expansion (sentience) and contraction (gravity) with no such things as good and evil. As far as humanity is concerned, there is social and there is anti-social. We judge ourselves with our lives and when our mortal bodies succumb to the rigors of life our eternal sentient essences (ESEs; souls?) appear to have about three options: be free to roam the universe, hang-out in some kind of an ethereal limbo or be attracted by gravity to the molten core of the earth (volcano fodder) until the sun dies and offers a chance to escape into the void.
I might have explained this, and more, in greater detail long ago but the US FDA approval of the expanded use of added artificially cultured “free” brain damaging, mind altering MSG in 1980, as an alleged “flavor enhancer,” put a rather abrupt end to most of my “insights” in 1981 and ever since. One notable exception was my “vision” of the true nature of gravity in 2009 (e.g., https://odysee.com/@charlesgshaver:d/5Gravity:c). As to an as yet unnamed driving force, Jennifer, how about reverberations of the Big Bang?
Many persons seem to forget that computers are basically nothing but logic switches. Theoretically they could all be simulated with enough relays. According to Integrated Information Theory a giant warehouse with millions of relays could then become conscious – possibly by connecting to some universal panpsychic field. How panpsychic believers rationalize that each of us differs in our consciousness if it all comes from connecting to a universal field? Which still leaves unanswered why such a field produces subjective effects such as color, taste, from identical nerve impulses.
In spite of having the usual psychic experiences and such I just put them down to tricks of memory/ confirmation bias and will never accept the idea that consciousness exists outside a mind to experience it. Mystics, grifters and holy fools have always been part of human society their purpose notably to avoid hard labour, put one over and thereby turbo-charge their own personal success in the cut and thrust of our selfish genes. It seems they too are victims of possibility and probability and competition for those limited places in the sun.
You can have too many prophets, take the Catholic Church for example. They went beyond simple elimination to make the necessary cull public and as unpleasant as possible. If there was a mechanism to latch onto and interpret another’s brain waves, read minds or foresee the future beyond an educated guess, thereby avoiding the stake or winkling out the desirable it stands to reason evolutionary principles would have made extra senses universal and we would be forever evolving beyond the same old but here we are.