Science routinely puts forward theories, then batters them with data till only one is left standing. In the fledgling science of consciousness, a dominant theory has yet to emerge. More than 20 are still taken seriously.
It’s not for want of data. Ever since Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix, legitimized consciousness as a topic for study more than three decades ago, researchers have used a variety of advanced technologies to probe the brains of test subjects, tracing the signatures of neural activity that could reflect consciousness. The resulting avalanche of data should have flattened at least the flimsier theories by now.
Five years ago, the Templeton World Charity Foundation initiated a series of “adversarial collaborations” to coax the overdue winnowing to begin. This past June saw the results from the first of these collaborations, which pitted two high-profile theories against each other: global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT) and integrated information theory (IIT). Neither emerged as the outright winner.
The results, announced like the outcome of a sporting event at the 26th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, were also used to settle a 25-year bet between Crick’s longtime collaborator, the neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and the philosopher David Chalmers of New York University, who coined the term “the hard problem” to challenge the presumption that we can explain the subjective feeling of consciousness by analyzing the circuitry of the brain.
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