Chapter 3: The Troubles with (As-Is) Consciousness Science

Humankind faces a variety of pressing and significant challenges, and an array of tremendous opportunities. Surprisingly, upgrading our current approach to consciousness science will be a crucial part of navigating this 21st-century social, economic, and ecological territory. [Chapter 1 from 'The Science We Need - One Experiment to Change the World'.]

2007

This excellent book is aptly titled. It presents a closely argued analysis of the current state of consciousness studies and suggests a strategy of investigation, which the author believes is necessary to establish a robust science of consciousness. Before he introduces the details of his framework for a ...

This paper was my contribution to World Mental Health Day, 2019 (October 10th): "Perhaps ironically, given its well-meaning intentions to help address mental-health challenges, mainstream conscious-experiential science itself seems to enact distorted thinking ..." "This article blows the whistle on the whole scientifically-incoherent mainstream project, and initiates a broad conversation on whether there is appetite and resource to start an eminently-feasible, scientifically-pristine replacement ..."

1992

The following article reports on ideas about how to study consciousness that emerged during the course of the January 1992 Athens Symposium on Science and Consciousness, one of the principal aims of the meeting being as far as possible to escape from constraints on thinking about consciousness that might be imposed by conventional modes of thought. The first half of the report discusses in general terms the question of opening up the mind to wider ways of thinking, and this is followed by a more detailed compendium of concepts and specific ways of proceeding.

Nature Human Behavior, 2019

Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.

2018

At the birth of psychology as a science, consciousness was its central problem. But throughout the twentieth century, ideological and methodological concerns pushed the explicit empirical study of consciousness to the sidelines. Since the 1990s, studying consciousness has regained a legitimacy and impetus befitting its status as the central feature of our mental lives. Nowadays consciousness science encompasses a rich interdisciplinary mixture drawing together philosophical, theoretical, computational, experimental, and clinical perspectives. While solving the metaphysically ‘hard’ problem of why consciousness is part of the universe may seem as intractable as ever, scientists have learned a great deal about the neural mechanisms underlying conscious states. Further progress will depend on specifying closer explanatory mappings between (first person subjective) phenomenological descriptions and (third person objective) descriptions of biological and physical processes. Such progress...

2007

Abstract Those who are optimistic about the prospects of a science of consciousness, and those who believe that it lies beyond the reach of standard scientific methods, have something in common: both groups view consciousness as posing a special challenge for science. In this paper, we take a close look at the nature of this challenge.

In Being No One, Metzinger (2004[2003]) introduces an approach to the scientific study of consciousness that draws on theories and results from different disciplines, targeted at multiple levels of analysis. Descriptions and assumptions formulated at, for instance, the phenomenological, representationalist, and neurobiological levels of analysis provide different perspectives on the same phenomenon, which can ultimately yield necessary and sufficient conditions for applying the concept of phenomenal representation. In this way, the " method of interdisciplinary constraint satisfaction (MICS) " (as it has been called by Weisberg, 2005) promotes our understanding of consciousness. However, even more than a decade after the first publication of Being No One, we still lack a mature science of consciousness. This paper makes the following meta-theoretical contribution: It analyzes the hurdles an approach such as MICS has yet to overcome and discusses to what extent existing approaches solve the problems left open by MICS. Furthermore, it argues that a unifying theory of different features of consciousness is required to reach a mature science of consciousness.