For the past twelve years my research team has been using all the brain research tools at its disposal, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed  light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness.

I am now happy to report that we have acquired a  good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit or a sound).

STANISLAS DEHAENE is a Professor at the Collège de France and Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology. His research focuses on the cerebral bases of specifically human cognitive functions such as language, calculation, and reasoning. His work centers on the cognitive neuropsychology of language and reading, and his main scientific contributions include the study of the organization of the cerebral system for number processing. He is the author of The Number Sense: How Mathematical Knowledge Is Embedded In Our Brains; and Reading in the Brain the Science and Evolution of a Cultural Invention. Stanislas Dehaene's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Daniel Kahneman, Sam Harris, George Dyson, Steven Pinker, Donald Hoffman, Arnold Trehub

Introduction by
John Brockman

On October 17, Edge organized a Reality Club meeting at The Hotel Ritz in Paris to allow neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene to present his new theory on how consciousness arises in the brain to a group of Parisian scientists and thinkers. The theory, based on Dehaene's past twelve years of brain-imaging research  is called the global neuronal workspace. It promises to offer new tools for diagnosing consciousness disorders  in patients.

"For the past twelve years,"  says Dehaene, "my research team has been using every available brain research tool, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed  light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness. I am now happy to report that we have acquired a  good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit or a sound). 

"Furthermore, when we render the same information non-conscious or "subliminal," all  the signatures disappear. We have a theory about why these signatures occur, called the global neuronal workspace theory. Realistic computer simulations of neurons reproduce our main experimental findings: when the information processed exceeds a threshold for large-scale communication across many brain areas, the network ignites into a large-scale synchronous state, and all  our signatures suddenly appear. 

But this is already more than a theory. We are now applying our ideas to non-communicating patients in coma, vegetative state, or locked-in syndromes. The test that we have designed with Tristan Bekinschtein, Lionel Naccache, and Laurent Cohen, based on our past experiments and theory, seems to reliably sort out which patients retain some residual conscious life and which do not. 

"My laboratory is now pursuing this research intensively on patients, animals, human adults and young children, with the hope of turning our brain-imaging measurements into a real-time monitor of conscious experience. The time thus seems ripe to share this work with a broader audience of readers interested in cutting-edge science and technology, but also those concerned with the philosophical, personal and ethical implications of these findings."

Participating in the event and joining the Edge dinner that followed were:

Noga Arikha, Historian of ideas; Author, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours 
Patrick Cavanagh, University of Paris researcher on visual perception and its implications 
Laurent Cohen, Neurologist, Hôpital de la Salpêtrière (Paris); Author, L'homme thermomètre (Thermometer Man), a science-based single-case study  similar to the work of Oliver Sachs
Emmanuel Dupoux, Director of Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP)
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, CNRS,  Neuro-paediatrician and researcher studying  infant brain development
Janine di Giovanni, Journalist; Vanity Fair and The New York Times
Juan Enriquez, Life Sciences investor and Academic; Author, As the Future Catches Us
Etienne Klein, Physicist; Author of many books on epistemology and history of science
Katinka Matson, Cofounder, Edge
Lionel Naccache, Neurologist; Author, Le Nouvel Inconscient, (The New Unconscious), which establishes  a new science-based dialog between research on non-conscious processing and Freudian view
Gloria Origgi, Philosopher and Researcher, Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique
Sharon Pepperkamp, Linguist, University of Paris; Researcher, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique
Philip Pettit, Philosopher, Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton; Author, Made with Words: Hobbes on Mind, Society and Politics
Jaqui Safra, Investor, (Encyclopædia Britannica, Spring Mountain Vineyards); Movie Producer
Dan Sperber, Directeur de Recherche au CNRS, Paris, Social and Cognitive scientist; Author,Rethinking Symbolism; On Anthropological Knowledge; Explaining Culture
Aalam Wassef, Digital Artist, Music Composer, Network Designer

— JB

[1hr 20 minutes]

http://www.edge.org/events/darwin-in-chileThere's a mismatch between the modern versus ancestral world. Our minds are equipped with programs that were evolved to navigate a small world of relatives, friends, and neighbors, not for cities and nation states of thousands or millions of anonymous people. Certain laws and institutions satisfy the moral intuitions these programs generate. But because these programs are now operating outside the envelope of environments for which they were designed, laws that satisfy the moral intuitions they generate may regularly fail to produce the outcomes we desire and anticipate that have the consequences we wish. ...

Since Descartes invested the Western mind with res cogitans and res extensa, the seemingly insurmountable philosophic and scientific questions his dualism posed have stalked us. Indeed, a friendly observer of the past 350 years of the philosophy of mind might be forgiven for saying that res cogitans and res extensa, despite all our efforts with Dualism, Materialism, Idealism, and now the Mind Brain Identity Theory, have held us at bay. I say 'at bay' because it is clear that there is no agreement that we have solved the mighty problems of consciousness and mind.

STUART A. KAUFFMAN is a professor at the University of Calgary with a shared appointment between biological sciences and physics and astronomy. He is also the leader of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics (IBI) which conducts leading-edge interdisciplinary research in systems biology.

Dr. Kauffman is also an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of Reinventing the Sacred, The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization, and Investigations.

Stuart A. Kauffman's Edge Bio Page

We discovered a new vein of research — the relation between physical and social or psychological concepts — that we came to by taking evolutionary principles seriously and applying them to psychology. We weren't using evolutionary psychology, which has largely been focused on mating and reproduction. Our focus, rather, was in terms of evolutionary biology and the basic principles of natural selection: and that field makes clear that humans must have had these kinds of mechanisms or these processes to guide our behavior prior to evolution or emergence of consciousness.

[16:52 minutes]

Introduction

"They say that in science there are complicators and there are simplifiers," says John Bargh, Yale social psychologist known for his early work on the topic of automaticity, and more recently for bringing experimental methodology to the philosophical question of free will.

According to Bargh, the tension between the complicators and the simplifiers is a good thing in any field of ideas or science. "I've always been a simplifier." he says, "looking for the simple mechanisms that produce complex effect, instead of building a complicated model. Once we find one of these veins — one of these avenues of research — we just go for it and mine it and mine it until we run out of gold.

Bargh's lines of research all focus on unconscious mechanisms that underlie social perception, evaluation and preferences, and motivation and goal pursuit in realistic and complex social environments. That each of these basic psychological phenomena occur without the person's intention and awareness, yet have such strong effects on the person's decisions and behavior, has considerable implications for philosophical matters such as free will, and the nature and purpose of consciousness itself.

He maintains that the resulting findings "are very consistent and in harmony with evolutionary biology. And this is very unlike psychology, which has always presumed a kind of consciousness bottle-neck or a self, some kind of a homunculus type of self sitting there, making all the decisions and deciding without any explanation of where they comes from or what's causing the self or what's causing the conscious choices. Emphasizing what our unconscious systems do for us, in turn, links us very strongly to other organisms and other animals very closely. Recent primate research is showing that primates are closer to us than we thought. They fall for the same kind of economic fallacies that Kahneman and Tversky talked about in humans 30 years ago."

— Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher, Edge

JOHN A. BARGH is professor of social psychology at Yale University and director of the ACME (Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Evaluation) Lab.

John Bargh's Edge Bio Page