The simple questions cracking the hard problem of conscio...

What’s Happening

Alright so Or feel joy and sadness alike?

Mapping how our inner experiences relate to one another could finally reveal how physical processes in the brain give rise to consciousness Mind The simple questions cracking the hard problem of consciousness Do we all see the same red? I had flown to Madison, Wisconsin, to visit neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and learn about his much-debated theory of consciousness, integrated information theory. (yes, really)

The most tangible outcome of Tononi’s work is a consciousness detector, which has been used to check whether unresponsive patients are wide awake inside.

The Details

I sat in a dentist’s-type chair as two doctors wired up my scalp for electrical readings and then brought what looked like a garden hose and nozzle up to my head. They applied harmless magnetic pulses to my cranium.

A conscious brain should electrically reverberate. If I were a philosophical zombie , pretending to be sentient but not actually having any interior life, my brain would thud like a cracked bell.

Why This Matters

After a couple of hours, the doctors gave me my test results: I was conscious. I was pretty sure of that already, and now the world has proof. How studying babies minds is prompting us to rethink consciousness But a yes-or-no measurement says nothing of the qualities that conscious experience has – the qualia, such as the delightful mushiness of stepping on slush or the monotony of a dog walk.

The scientific community tends to find developments like this significant.

The Bottom Line

This gap between inner sensations and measurable brain signals – known as the hard problem of consciousness – seems insurmountable. But just, neuroscientists have been upping their game, making much finer-grained distinctions of sensations and signals that could crack the mystery entirely.

How do you feel about this development?