We can account for the evolution of consciousness only if we crack the philosophy, as well as the physics, of the brain
Over the summer, the neuroscientist Christof Koch conceded defeat on his 25-year bet with the philosopher David Chalmers, a lost wager that the science of consciousness would be all wrapped up by now. In September, over 100 consciousness researchers signed a public letter condemning one of the most popular theories of consciousness—the integrated information theory—as pseudoscience. This in turn prompted strong responses from other researchers in the field.
How then can we investigate consciousness? Although consciousness can’t be directly observed, if you’re dealing with another human being, you can ask them what they’re feeling, or look for external indications of consciousness. And if you scan their brain at the same time, you can try to match up the brain activity, which you can observe, with the invisible consciousness, which you can’t. The trouble is there are inevitably multiple ways of interpreting such data.
Evolution offers one of the strongest challenges to reductionist approaches to consciousness. Natural selection only cares about behavior, as it’s only behavior that matters for survival. Rapid progress in AI and robotics has made it clear, however, that extremely complex behaviour can exist in a system that entirely lacks conscious experience.
Would we not have noticed already if there were processes in the brain that didn’t reduce to underlying chemistry and physics? The truth is we know very little about how the brain works. We know a lot about the basic chemistry: how neurons fire, how chemical signals are transmitted. And we know a fair bit about the large functions of various brain regions. But we know almost nothing about how these large-scale functions are realized at the cellular level.
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