Can scientists agree on how the mind works?

The Templeton World Charity Foundation: Introducing consciousness experiments at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as a go-between

But for a long time, consciousness wasn’t seen as a serious scientific topic. “Until about 30 years ago, it was taboo to study consciousness, and for good reasons,” says Lenore Blum, a theoretical computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who is president of the Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science, based in Munich. She says there weren’t very good techniques to study consciousness back then.

There was a lot of uncertainty when trying to develop a killer experiment. Each of them proposed experiments for which they already knew the expected results, according to a leader in the collaboration who is based in Germany. The go-between was born out of her falling back on her childhood role.

The work done by Melloni is leading. is one of five launched by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in Nassau, the Bahamas. The charity funds research into topics such as spirituality, polarization and religion; in 2019, it committed US$20 million to the five projects.

The Consciousness Wars: Can Science Ever Agree on How the Mind Works? (The Case of the Indian Institute of Technology)

There was an open letter. Over 100 researchers signed a letter last September arguing that the predictions of the Indian Institute of Technology were untestable and were being called pseudoscience. The results were released shortly after the letter was posted.

There was chaos. The letter provoked blowback from other scientists who felt that such an attack could aggravate divides and hurt the field’s credibility. Signatories reported receiving ominous e-mails containing veiled threats. Both researchers lost sleep over accusatory messages on account of which both lost sleep. Some contemplated leaving science completely.

During his first PhD, in mathematical quantum field theory, Kleiner felt frustrated by the infighting among senior scientists. “From the outside, the field was just perceived as not making good progress because everyone was so vocal about other approaches being wrong,” he says.

One way to break out of these loops is through collaborative work. But they are pragmatic: the results shouldn’t be taken as definitive proof for or against a given theory, says He. Valuable data is being generated by them. “It’s infusing much-needed resources into the field to do some very solid, large collaborative studies.”

Source: The consciousness wars: can scientists ever agree on how the mind works?

Towards a better understanding of neuroscience: A three-day meeting on frontiers in consciousness research and how scientists hope to engage in meaningful dialogue

Other research funders are focusing attention on the topic, too: last June, the US National Institutes of Health convened a three-day meeting on frontiers in consciousness research.

A new generation of researchers is leading the way to engage in meaningful dialogue. Rony Hirschhorn is a scientist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. It may not seem like it, but my way of optimism is to hope that we are better than that.

There are dozens of theories of how our brains produce subjective experiences, and good reasons besides philosophical interest to want to understand the problem more fully. It could be used to help diagnose unconscious people in medicine or artificial intelligence would help to understand how machines become conscious.

Since then, philosophers and neuroscientists have proposed multiple theories to explain the physical basis of the subjective experience — referred to as the “hard problem of consciousness” — and of the “easy problems” such as attention and wakefulness3. Jonathan Mason, a mathematician, identified over 30 theories in an attempt to count them.

Other front runners include a group of ideas called higher-order theories (HOT), which propose that, for content to be consciously experienced, it must be synthesized into a meta-representation in higher-order brain areas. A recurrent processing theory suggests consciousness requires a loop of information flow and feedback. It has been studied mostly in the brain’s visual areas, but the same idea should apply to other senses such as hearing or smell.

The studies that test the predictions of such theories are getting more complex, but they often are carried out by researchers with very different ideas, which can lead to confirmation bias. As a result, she says, theories have been evolving in isolation.

Some scientists leading the studies say that proponents of popular theories sometimes made the tests more collaborative than they should be. This doesn’t apply to all the collaborations, says He, and depends to some extent on how easy the theories are to compare to one another. But some theorists are described as having big personalities; notably, most of them are men. He does not think that is because women are not doing important research. “I think that’s mostly because certain people are more willing to come out and talk about big grand theories.”

Liad Mudrik was excited to attend the Seattle meeting that led to the collaboration between IIT and GNWT, dubbed Cogitate. She says she was excited about the whole process and she was writing down everything people were saying.

After being designated as a project co-leader, she drafted an experimental design based on the discussions and sent it to her colleagues. She says that she was naive at the time. Ten months is how long it would take until they actually nailed it.

After wrangling over which aspects of consciousness the team would look for and with which methods, the researchers eventually settled on two experiments — one preferred by each competing theorist. As participants underwent three types of brain scans, the team developed predictions for their brains from each theory. The researchers also agreed on what would be considered a pass or a fail for each theory in each task.

The team confirmed that the prefrontal cortex should be activated by the task. But there was no evidence that the region contained information about the orientation of the object, which is part of the conscious experience and would be expected according to the theory. The experiment also found evidence of the global broadcasting postulated by GNWT, but only at the beginning of an experience — not also at the end, as had been predicted. Results from this first experiment were made public in a preprint last year4.

The second experiment involved people playing a video game and being asked if they knew about the images on the screen.

The team had to make a compromise if they wanted to make a deal between the two camps. “I really admire both of them and I think they are extremely good scientists,” says Melloni. She feels that the world would be a better place if they could listen to each other. Tononi says that the adversarial collaboration allowed him to see the other theories more clearly. Dehaene did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.

Another diplomatic strategy was to engage with the two theorists in separate conversations, ‘translating’ the ideas from one to the other. Mudrik says that finding a common language is one of the key roles they have.

Source: The consciousness wars: can scientists ever agree on how the mind works?

Tononi and Kleiner: How the Adversarial Collaboratives Between Consciousness Theories impacted each other and their collaborations

Tononi acknowledges how hard the project has been and praises the study leaders — Melloni, Mudrik and Michael Pitts, a psychologist at Reed College in Portland, Oregon — for pulling it off. He says they invested so much of their time and passion, rather than doing their own experiments. They did a great job.

When he decided to do a second PhD, this time in consciousness research, he was aware of existing tensions in the field, but felt that people generally got along well. The community felt hopeful about the potential of the adversarial collaborations to produce useful data, he says. The open letter shattered those hopes. Deeply unsettled by the harsh online interactions, Kleiner was determined to do something. He didn’t want his new field to be perceived the same way as his first. “I know this sounds totally naive, but if you can’t heal this division, then so many negative things follow.”

When the results of Cogitate’s first experiment came in, Melloni and her co-leaders were not exactly surprised that the two theories’ proponents couldn’t agree on what the data meant.

Hirschhorn thinks that the conflict has been, in a sense, productive. When the collaborations and letter forced it into the open, people didn’t discuss it very much. Now we can roll our sleeves up and work on this.

The Moon is not mine, but is it for the benefit of Nature? Indigenous Peoples’ Concerns about a Plan to Destroy Snow on the Moon

The lander that was due to deposit 70 people’s ashes on the moon failed because of a propellant leak. NASA had promised to consult with Indigenous Peoples in 1998, but the plan was made without that. The Moon is seen as an ancient relative by many Indigenous Nations. The owner of the moon is not the goal, according to the man who is a Diné with an engineering degree. “But rather about the right to be consulted, to uphold Native American legal rights, to hold government agencies accountable and to safeguard the Moon for future generations.”

Glaciologists have proposed a drastic idea to slow the melting of polar ice: erecting giant underwater ‘curtains’ near glaciers to protect them from warm ocean water. Critics say that the proposal would be expensive and difficult to construct, and might interfere with local ecosystems or distract us from the essential work of slashing greenhouse-gas emissions. The concept builds on a 2018 proposal in which glaciologist John Moore and three colleagues made a heartfelt plea to consider such bold ideas, given the toll that rising sea levels will take on humanity. “We understand the hesitancy to interfere with glaciers — as glaciologists, we know the pristine beauty of these places. They wrote that they have also been on ice shelves that are open ocean. Is forcing one million people to leave their homes worth allowing apristine glacier to waste away? What is the grand total of Ten million? Did you say it was one hundred million?

Source: Daily briefing: Can scientists ever agree on how consciousness works?

Online database of ocean gene groups reveals long-lived rhesus monkeys with genetically uniform monkeys as drugs and behavioural researchers

More than 30 million gene groups from organisms in the ocean have been made freely available online. The database includes more genomic data from the deep sea and sea floor than previous catalogues. A study of the genes from the trough showed that more than half came from fungi, which suggests that they play a greater part in processing organic matter than was previously thought. The database could be used to discover new antibiotics and to monitor the impacts of burning fossil fuels.

For the first time, a rhesus monkey cloned in the laboratory has lived into adulthood — surviving for more than two years so far. The feat was achieved using a slightly different approach to the conventional cloning technique used to clone Dolly the sheep and other mammals, including long-tailed macaques, the first primates to ever be cloned. The new technique could unlock possibilities for using cloned primates in drug testing and behavioural research. A large number of genetically uniform monkeys could be used for drug-efficacy tests, according to a neuroscientist.