Conscious Correlates: Interview with Popular Mechanics

Within philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and computer science, the problem of consciousness is known as the hard problem. The problem is, succinctly, that it appears we live in a materialist universe – that everything that exists is, or can be reduced to, physical stuff – but consciousness appears intractably non-physical. Troublingly, the problem does not seem as though it will yield in time under the pressure of the scientific method: standardly, science works by reducing some phenomenon to its most elementary physical components, subtracting everything that is subjective about it. Lightening gets reduced from God’s wrath or the frightening beauty of nature to short-duration electrical discharge between the earth and a cloud; water is reduced from the wet stuff that comes from above and that is found in lakes and streams to H20. That doesn’t work with consciousness: Consciousness is the what-it’s-like of lived experience and so you can’t take the subjective experiential aspect out of it and have anything left over.

Nevertheless, it is basically agreed that consciousness is somehow realized within, emerges from, or is caused by, the brain and there are thriving research programs attempting to identify the neural correlates of consciousness. One such program is the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness, which states that consciousness is the integration of various and otherwise discrete information and that this occurs in posterior brain regions. Another research program is the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) of consciousness, which states that consciousness results from the prefrontal cortex broadcasts information broadly throughout the brain.

In a recent study published in Nature pit these two theories against one another. Researchers measured the neural activity of 256 participants using MRI, magnetoencephalography, and intracranial electroencephalography, in order to locate consciousness and thereby test each theory. In “Consciousness Begins in the Body, Not the Mind, Groundbreaking Study Finds. Could that Save Countless Coma Patients?” journalist Stav Dimitropoulos reached out to Jordan Conrad, founder and clinical director of Madison Park Psychotherapy on behalf of Popular Mechanics for an analysis and discussion of the study.

The study has both positive and negatives for both theories. Locationally, IIT came out stronger. Coauthor Christof Koch stated to Popular Mechanics that  “Either information pertaining to the conscious experience couldn’t be found in the front or it was far weaker than in the back,” continuing to explain that “while the frontal lobes are critical to intelligence, judgement, reasoning etc., they are not critically involved in seeing, in conscious visual perception.” And it seems to be the case that as long as someone was looking at the stimulus, the IIT favored region in the brain was active. However, contrary to IIT’s predictions, the prefrontal cortex appeared to be integral in coordinating and syncing brain waves, confirming GNWT.

Although the paper’s authors expressed a great deal of optimism, Jordan is more cautious about the paper’s findings. “Every couple of years, someone claims to have found a physical or neural correlate of consciousness—and that correlate gets mistaken for consciousness itself. I think that’s a big mistake.“These studies might be finding what causes consciousness—but they’re not finding consciousness itself.” Jordan explains that people often conflate what it is to experience something and what it is to cause an experience. “There is no doubt that the brain causes consciousness somehow, but the brain is not identical to consciousness. Similarly, your eyes cause you to be able to see, but eyes are not the same thing as sight.”

“While it is technically true,” Jordan says “that consciousness begins in the body, that is misleading. Where in the body is my experience of redness, for example?” Jordan is referring to Frank Jackson’s famous thought experiment known as Mary’s Room. Jackson asks us to consider Mary, a brilliant scientist who knows everything there is to know about color perception:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on

The question Jackson wants his readers to answer is, what would happen if she is released from the room and sees a bright red Cadillac. Jordan answers that Mary “learns what it’s like to see the color red. Before, she knew everything physical there was to know-but she had never experienced it.” That experience, says Jordan, is fundamental: “There’s something inherently irreducible and experiential about consciousness. That can’t be captured just by physical information in the brain.”