On June 23, 1998 in New York, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), neuroscientist Christof Koch, then an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), bet against philosopher David Chalmers that in 25 years we , i.e. currently in the year 2023, would have already revealed one of the great mysteries of science: How the brain enables consciousness.
I met Christof Koch in person nine years after that bet during my sabbatical at Caltech in 2007 and was collaborating in his lab on experiments on the brain’s mechanisms of consciousness. In one of the most significant of these experiments, we were trying to figure out how to abolish consciousness, how we can see without seeing, so to speak. For this purpose, a special optical device made it possible to send a different image to each eye of the test subject. A fixed image, such as a face, was continuously projected onto one eye, and successive, ever-changing images of Mondrian paintings were projected onto the other eye.
The inevitable attention to these fluctuations in one eye prevented the subject from being aware of what he was seeing with the other eye. But that didn’t stop his brain from subconsciously registering the image of the face, as was later shown when the same image performed better than any other (unseen) other in a new association experiment between different stimuli. By canceling out the conscious experience, one should find out which minimal parts of the brain make this possible.
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These types of experiments and many others performed using advanced techniques (such as functional magnetic resonance and computerized electroencephalography) in different countries and laboratories have ultimately led to two main theories about how the brain generates consciousness. One of them, proposed by US-based scientists such as the Italian Julius Tononi and Koch himself, is the theory of functional integration of the activity of neurons: to date, he considers that consciousness results spontaneously from the complexity structure of the neurons posterior Portions of the cerebral cortex (millions of neurons and trillions of connections between them). That is, if artificial intelligence were able to build a device with this level of complexity, that device would be spontaneously conscious.
The other is the network, or global workspace, theory proposed by scientists such as Gerald Edelman, Joseph Gally, and Bernard Baars, according to which consciousness arises when specific information is projected onto different areas of the brain through a network of equally complicated connections. This proposal implicates the brain’s prefrontal cortex as the main culprit.
At this point, as the known wager between Koch and Chalmers expires, neither of these theories is exempt from criticism; that is, none of them have progressed far enough to be considered a definitive explanation of consciousness. Functional integration theory has not demonstrated the synchronization between areas of the brain that would make this possible, and that of global neural space is not always in the prefrontal cortex. That’s why the philosopher Chalmers won the bet: In the past 25 years we haven’t been able to uncover how the brain has to work to make consciousness possible.
But Koch, a reductionist romantic, as he calls himself, is not giving up and is already talking about turning the bet with Chalmers over again. He appears in his usual German character. I remember attending a retreat in Santa Barbara, California while I was at Caltech, where students filled the classroom even on weekends when Koch was the speaker. He was a scientific idol who, among other things, allowed himself to travel to Spain to attend performances of Wagner operas at the Barcelona Lyceum, accompanied by fellow neuroscientist Semir Zeki, professor of neurobiology at the University of London.
Christof Koch recently left Caltech to join the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington as Research Emeritus, where he remains committed to exploring the mysteries of consciousness. For David Chalmers, currently co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University, it’s possible he’ll take a repeat of the bet and we’ll be resubmitted for another 25 years to see if there’s more then there is happiness.
gray matter is a space that attempts to explain in an understandable way how the brain creates the mind and controls behavior. The senses, motivations and feelings, sleep, learning and memory, language and consciousness, and their main disorders are analyzed in the belief that knowing how they work is tantamount to knowing ourselves better and improving our well-being and relationships improve other people.
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