TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS 2011  - STOCKHOLM

MAY 1-8, 2011

WORKSHOP  -    NEURAL CORRELATES

Sunday, MAY 1, 2011  (Afternoon)

Time and Location: TBA

RON CHRISLEY

DAVID GAMEZ

FROM NEURAL CORRELATES TO FALSIFIABLE PREDICTIONS:

HOW CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH CAN BECOME MORE SCIENTIFIC

Although the scientific study of consciousness has made a great deal of progress in recent years, there is still an extensive debate about what is meant by ‘consciousness’, and a large number of conflicting theories have been put forward. These problems are highlighted by Metzinger (2003), who claims that the science of consciousness is in a pre-paradigmatic state. Similarly, Coward and Sun (2007, p. 947) argue that our understanding of consciousness suffers from “considerable metatheoretical confusion”.

One source of these problems is that most consciousness research has been broadly inductive in character and there has been very little emphasis on falsifiable predictions that can be used to discriminate between different theories (Popper, 2002). As Crick and Koch (2000, p 103) point out, if the science of consciousness is to move forward it needs to make predictions according to competing theories and use empirical measurements to eliminate theories that make bad predictions.

The first part of the tutorial will provide some philosophical background to these problems, followed by a historical introduction to the philosophy of science that explains the importance of falsifiable predictions and the unique characteristics of scientific theories. The current state of consciousness research will then be covered, including work on the neural correlates of consciousness and the characteristics of the available data. The tutorial will then explore the attempts that have been made to develop algorithmic, mathematical and robotic models of theories of consciousness, and the extent to which these can make falsifiable predictions. After explaining some of the tools that are available for generating predictions about a system’s consciousness, the tutorial will conclude with a brain storming session exploring how current theories of consciousness could be empirically tested.

This tutorial would be of interest to people with a scientific background who would like to see consciousness research develop into a fully scientific research area. It would also be useful for people working on philosophical or cognitive theories of consciousness who would like to test their theories on empirical data.

Ron Chrisley                                                                               David Gamez

Centre for Research in Cognitive Science                            Department of Computing

School of Informatics, University of Sussex                          Imperial College, London

Ron Chrisley is a faculty member of the Sackler Centre for Conscious Science at the University of Sussex.  At Sussex he is also the Director of COGS (the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science), a Reader in Philosophy, and leads the PAICS lab as part of the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems research group in the School of Informatics.  He has held various research positions  in Artificial Intelligence, including a Leverhulme Research Fellowship at the University of Birmingham and a Fulbright Scholarship at the Helsinki University of Technology, as well as intern positions at NASA-Ames, Xerox PARC, the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory and ATR Laboratories in Kyoto.  He was awarded his doctorate by the University of Oxford in 1997.

David Gamez  has PhDs in Continental philosophy and machine consciousness from the University of Essex. He is currently at Imperial College, London, where he is working on new techniques for the simulation and analysis of spiking neural networks. Gamez is the author of What We Can Never Know - a book exploring the limits of philosophy and science through studies of perception, time, madness and knowledge - and the co-editor of What Philosophy Is - a collection of essays on the nature of philosophy. He is currently working on a book that will provide a framework for the scientific study of human and machine consciousness.

The half day workshops are open to the public; registration required

 Student   $76

 Standard $96

       ONLINE: TSC TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

       Online Payment System

       CLICK HERE

       Conference Participants may sign up for optional workshops at any time.

       General Public - please open a general registration. You may just choose

       Workshops.

References
Coward, L.A. and Sun, R. (2007). Hierarchical approaches to understanding consciousness. Neural Networks 20: 947–54.
Crick, F. and Koch, C. (2000). The Unconscious Homunculus. In T. Metzinger (ed.), Neural Correlates of Consciousness:
Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, pp. 103-10.
Metzinger, T. (2003). Being No One. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Popper, K. (2002). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London and New York: Routledge.