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大腦神經學：意識篇 – 開欄文
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我求知的主要興趣從倫理學轉向認知科學後，偶而會涉及到一些討論「意識」的科普書籍。讀了恰爾莫斯教授的《具有意識的心靈：追求基本理論》一書後，在我(自以為)了解該書意旨範圍內，我對他「經驗本質」概念和「意識研究上的困難議題」說法兩者，都持存疑態度。自然也就使得我在過去20多年中，進一步讀了不少關於「意識」的書籍以及研究報告。我收集了相當多這方面的論文；本部落格在過去曾經轉載了一些。我也試圖系統性寫下自己的觀點；但因為功力不足，寫寫停停一直無法成章。
在倫理學之外，這是我最希望能把過去讀書心得整理出來的一個領域。先轉載我認為有爭議的兩篇文章來起個頭。
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意識所在之處 ---- Elizabeth Rayne
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下文報導或詮釋本欄2025/09/27柯頗納教授的論文。這是個重要又有趣的議題，值得多方面了解。
以我的了解，這當然只是外行人的外行話：「意識」離不開「記憶」；從而，神經學家也需要從和「記憶」相關的細胞、結構、機制、與大腦內部化學物質來了解「意識」。至少要加強這方面的實驗。
Scientists Think They Know Where Consciousness Lives In Your Brain
New research suggests that consciousness originates in the subcortex, and is polished by the cortex and cerebellum.
Elizabeth Rayne, 10/02/25
Experts Think They Know Where Consciousness Lives VICTOR de SCHWANBERG/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY - Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看示意圖
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
* It used to be thought that without the cerebral cortex, consciousness could not exist.
* New research, however, has found that humans and animals missing part or all of their cortices are still capable of having experiences associated with consciousness.
* This research suggests that consciousness instead originates in the subcortex, and is polished by the cortex and cerebellum.
Whether consciousness is generated by quantum forces or connected to the entire universe is still up for debate, but even the theoretical physicists who suggest these complicated theories have not yet answered one question: Where are consciousness’ origins in the brain?
Peter Coppola, a neuroscientist from the University of Cambridge, sought to answer this question with an exhaustive analysis of brain studies going back decades. Consciousness is defined (at least in neuroscience) as “qualitative subjective experience, or ‘what it is like’ to be a specific organism in a specific state,” he said in a study recently published in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. Coppola wanted to see what the evidence said, rather than relying on the dominant theories.
While there are functions in all parts of the brain that contribute to consciousness, some might be more instrumental than others in giving us that awareness of who and what we are.
The prevailing thought is that consciousness arises from the outer-layer region of the brain called the cortex, which is mostly made up of the more-recently-evolved neocortex. The cerebellum at the base of the brain and the subcortex -- which includes the brain stem and has not seen much change in 500,000 years of evolution -- are thought to be involved in consciousness, but not so critical that they can power consciousness on their own. However, that might be about to change.
Through his research, Coppola found studies showing that animals with part or all of their cortices removed -- as well as humans who were born with conditions in which the cortex was partially missing -- showed that they were still conscious to some extent. To gauge consciousness in a lab, the researchers used observable behaviors related to vision, movement, and verbalization. But those indicators bring with them a few questions. Is movement automatic, such as blinking, or does it have a purpose? Is vision following something, or just a startle response? Is verbalization intelligent or nonsensical? Even the absence of certain behaviors does not necessarily mean a subject is not conscious.
Besides the brutal and ethically questionable animal studies in which researchers surgically removed part or all of the cortex, studies of human children born with a rare condition known as hydraencephaly were telling. Hydraencephaly occurs when the cerebrum does not develop, and is instead replaced by cerebrospinal fluid. The only parts left are the basal ganglia (a cluster of nuclei in the subcortex associated with motor control, reward, and cognition), the meninges (membranes that line the skull), and the brainstem (which has been linked to consciousness in the past).
Hydraencephaly often means a permanent vegetative state. However, studies of people born with the condition showed that their brains were capable of more than they appeared to be. In one case of a 32-year-old woman with a small part of her frontal cortex preserved, she was able to react to music with pleased facial expressions and vocalizations, even though the vocalizations were not understandable. This goes directly against the theory that consciousness cannot exist without the cerebral cortex. Observations from another study focusing on hydraencephalic children were similar.
Coppola’s research suggests that the base of consciousness lies in the subcortex, while the parts of the brain that evolved more recently -- such as the neocortex -- refine consciousness. However, this idea is highly nuanced, and further investigation is needed.
“If the embodied subcortex is truly sufficient for experience to emerge, then investigations may be undertaken to narrow down what specific subcortical functions engender experience,” he said. “[more research] may yield further insights as to minimal neural circuitry required for an experience.”
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大腦神經學可能錯置意識關鍵部位 -- Peter Coppola
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Major theories of consciousness may have been focusing on the wrong part of the brain
Peter Coppola, University of Cambridge, 09/22/25
What gives rise to human consciousness? Are some parts of the brain more important than others? Scientists began tackling these questions in more depth about 35 years ago. Researchers have made progress, but the mystery of consciousness remains very much alive.
In a recently published article, I reviewed over 100 years of neuroscience research to see if some brain regions are more important than others for consciousness. What I found suggests scientists who study consciousness may have been undervaluing the most ancient regions of human brains.
Consciousness is usually defined by neuroscientists as the ability to have subjective experience, such as the experience of tasting an apple or of seeing the redness of its skin.
The leading theories of consciousness suggest that the outer layer of the human brain, called the cortex (in blue in figure 1), is fundamental to consciousness. This is mostly composed of the neocortex, which is newer in our evolutionary history.
Figure 1, the human brain (made with the assistance of AI). Peter Coppola, CC BY-SA 請至原網頁觀看人類大腦結構圖
The human subcortex (figure 1, brown/beige), underneath the neocortex, has not changed much in the last 500 million years. It is thought to be like electricity for a TV, necessary for consciousness, but not enough on its own.
There is another part of the brain that some neuroscientific theories of consciousness state is irrelevant for consciousness. This is the cerebellum, which is also older than the neocortex and looks like a little brain tucked in the back of the skull (figure 1, purple). Brain activity and brain networks are disrupted in unconsciousness (like in a coma). These changes can be seen in the cortex, subcortex and cerebellum.
What brain stimulation reveals
As part of my analysis I looked at studies showing what happens to consciousness when brain activity is changed, for example, by applying electrical currents or magnetic pulses to brain regions.
These experiments in humans and animals showed that altering activity in any of these three parts of the brain can alter consciousness. Changing the activity of the neocortex can change your sense of self, make you hallucinate, or affect your judgment.
Changing the subcortex may have extreme effects. We can induce depression, wake a monkey from anaesthesia or knock a mouse unconscious. Even stimulating the cerebellum, long considered irrelevant, can change your conscious sensory perception.
However, this research does not allow us to reach strong conclusions about where consciousness comes from, as stimulating one brain region may affect another region. Like unplugging the TV from the socket, we might be changing the conditions that support consciousness, but not the mechanisms of consciousness itself.
So I looked at some evidence from patients to see if it would help resolve this dilemma.
Damage from physical trauma or lack of oxygen to the brain can disrupt your experience. Injury to the neocortex may make you think your hand is not yours, fail to notice things on one side of your visual field, or become more impulsive.
People born without the cerebellum, or the front of their cortex, can still appear conscious and live quite normal lives. However, damaging the cerebellum later in life can trigger hallucinations or change your emotions completely.
Harm to the most ancient parts of our brain can directly cause unconsciousness (although some people recover) or death. However, like electricity for a TV, the subcortex may be just keeping the newer cortex “online”, which may be giving rise to consciousness. So I wanted to know whether, alternatively, there is evidence that the most ancient regions are sufficient for consciousness.
There are rare cases of children being born without most or all of their neocortex. According to medical textbooks, these people should be in a permanent vegetative state. However, there are reports that these people can feel upset, play, recognise people or show enjoyment of music. This suggests that they are having some sort of conscious experience.
These reports are striking evidence that suggests maybe the oldest parts of the brain are enough for basic consciousness. Or maybe, when you are born without a cortex, the older parts of the brain adapt to take on some of the roles of the newer parts of the brain.
There are some extreme experiments on animals that can help us reach a conclusion. Across mammals – from rats to cats to monkeys – surgically removing the neocortex leaves them still capable of an astonishing number of things. They can play, show emotions, groom themselves, parent their young and even learn. Surprisingly, even adult animals that underwent this surgery showed similar behaviour.
Altogether, the evidence challenges the view that the cortex is necessary for consciousness, as most major theories of consciousness suggest. It seems that the oldest parts of the brain are enough for some basic forms of consciousness.
The newer parts of the brain – as well as the cerebellum – seem to expand and refine your consciousness. This means we may have to review our theories of consciousness. In turn, this may influence patient care as well as how we think about animal rights. In fact, consciousness might be more common than we realised.
Peter Coppola, Visiting Researcher, Cambridge Neuroscience, University of Cambridge
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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大腦是意識存在的必要條件？-M. Gazzaniga/B. Queenan
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嘉薩尼嘉博士為《大腦比你先知道》一書作者；下文見解深遽、非常有趣、更是以生花妙筆娓娓道來；不愧是大師。對「意識」或大腦神經學有興趣的朋友請慢慢欣賞、咀嚼。
Is your brain really necessary for consciousness?
People with missing brains make clear the mystery of consciousness
Michael Gazzaniga/Bridget Queenan, 08/05/25
Editor’s Note：We think that the bigger the brain, the more developed the consciousness. Humanity prides itself over the rest of the animal kingdom for having larger brains, but neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga and his colleague Bridget Queenan explore cases of people living full lives with shockingly little brain matter. Challenging the “more is better” bias, they suggest consciousness may be less about structures, and more about harmony and improvisation.
In 2007, a strange headline made its way around the world: the mysterious case of the white-collar worker “without a brain.” On the outside, a normal 44-year-old: employed, married, with two children and an acceptable IQ. On the inside, a gaping fluid-filled cavity where a brain would normally be. There was a hole in this story: How can a person lead a full and functional life while missing most of their brain?
These days, headlines feature a different white-collar worker “without a brain”: the AI systems writing emails, book reports, and manuscripts in schools and offices worldwide. Now we have another hole in our story: How can a person lead a full and functional professional life without using their brain?
Both developments challenge our already fragile definitions of “consciousness.” It may be time for a new approach to brains and “consciousness”—as the music of the mind.
As Long as she got a dime the music will never stop
The case of the missing brain is rare, but not unique. A 2013 case reported a 60-year-old missing the back of her brain. Again, normal on the outside: employed until recently, married, with one child and the ability to live alone. Inside, a cavity where the cortex should be. A 2018 case reported a 60-year-old, unmarried and unemployed, but active in a band and a choir, with his head full of fluid and only a thin sheet of cortex. A 2021 case reported a 72-year-old living independently, again largely without what we might recognize as “a brain.” Even rats got in on the action: R222 lived well into adulthood, performing well in lab-rat escapades despite a hollowed-out brain.
Collectively, these findings suggest that the human (and rat!) brain is considerably more plastic than expected. If you were born with bones or muscles half the expected size, or a quarter, or a tenth, you wouldn’t carry on unimpeded. If you were born with a tenth of your liver, we’d have a problem. Yet, somehow, the human brain can rise to the occasion—at a performance review, a brain can pass inspection; only after imaging, do we see it’s just 3 owls in a trench coat.
Now, if you are born with no cortex (hydranencephaly), things look bleak. But apparently you can get by on a lot less cortex than we thought (ventriculomegaly). When it comes to the developing human brain, you might not need the whole dollar—if you’ve got a dime, you can keep the jukebox jumping.
It’s such a sight to see somebody steal the show
“No-brainer” stories make headlines for three reasons:
1. It looks wrong: In the era of modern brain imaging (CT, MRI, PET), we know what brains look like, and these brains don’t look right. Our entire nervous system (brain + brainstem + spinal cord) is floating in cerebrospinal fluid, and our brain has a few cisterns (“ventricles”) which keep the operation pristine. But the cisterns shouldn’t be that big. If you look inside the skull of a normal adult, you see mostly brain, with some fluid in the center and around the edges. If you look inside the skulls of our friends above, you see mostly fluid with only a thin layer of brain on the outskirts—the central cisterns (the ventricles) seem to have overflown completely.
2. Fluid is bad: When the central cisterns (ventricles) overflow in adulthood, bad things happen. The adult skull is a fixed volume, and the adult brain has grown accustomed to its space. If excess fluid accumulates in the skull, it will infringe on your brain’s territory, squishing it as it tries to work. Accordingly, in adulthood, the progressive filling of the skull with excess fluid (hydrocephalus) impairs cognitive, behavioral, and motor function. Shunts need to be installed to drain the fluid. Yet, apparently, folks can grow up with a different ratio of brain-to-fluid: a skull full of fluid and a brain that can work around it. Their brain and its fluid shared the space fine, just in a different arrangement than is found in other folks’ skulls.
3. Brain is good: We have assumed for several centuries that it’s the brain part of the nervous system that does the thinking, the working, the talking, and the living. If folks are walking around, chit-chatting, getting jobs, getting married, raising children, and running their lives with a lot less brain than expected, it raises some serious questions about how we approach the conscious mind.
At the core of these concerns, we find only one issue: We assume it is possible to see whether brains are working well or poorly. We take a picture inside a person’s skull, measure how much brain they have in different places, and pronounce: too much, too little, and just right. Volumetric brain analyses assume that the overall volume of brain tells you how well those areas are working. Lots of brain volume in the memory area = good memory; little brain volume in the memory area = bad memory.
None of this seems unreasonable. It’s great to see things with your eyes. More is more, and less is less. But might it be unreasonable to care only about the volume? Might it even be kind of ridiculous to expect we could see it with our eyes?
It goes to show you never can tell
The volume of music is not the sole determinant of whether a song is good. The volume – the overall amount of sound participating at any given time—is one dimension of music, but there are many other components: the rhythm (low frequency waves which entrain the entire song), the harmony (higher frequency waves which structure the sound), the melody (highest frequency waves which tell the story). Music is the elaborate interplay between waves of sound, or vibration, in small, medium, and large (fast, medium, and slow), which braid together in a way that seems beautiful.
Similarly, the “volume” of brains is not the sole determinant of whether a brain is good. The volume —the overall amount of brain participating at any given time—is one dimension of brain activity, but there are many other components: the circadian rhythms (low frequency waves which entrain us to the Sun and seasons), the central pattern generators (higher frequency waves which structure our heartbeat and our breathing), the real-time brain activity (highest frequency waves which allow us to analyze the world and tell the story). A conscious mind is the elaborate interplay between waves of neural activity in small, medium, and large (fast, medium, and slow), which braid together in a way that seems beautiful.
It is easy to quantify the volume of music. You measure the total amount of pressure exerted by the air waves. It is harder to quantify the rhythm (especially for certain cultures). It is shockingly difficult to quantify the harmonies and melodies (ask anyone who has tried to study music theory).
It is (relatively) easy to quantify the volume of brains. You measure the total amount of signal detected in the scanner. It is harder to quantify the circadian rhythms (which are not necessarily identical based on latitude or season). It is shockingly difficult to quantify neural activity from regularly firing neurons, let alone from neurons that only respond to certain things (ask anyone who has tried to record from awake behaving brains).
In both cases, volume tells you some of the story, but not all of it. Great music isn’t the music played at the highest volume. Same apparently goes for brains.
Roll Over Beethoven
Volumetric analysis focuses on the brain’s appearance, and, admittedly, the human brain is arranged like an orchestra. There is a central ‘conductor’ (the brainstem) in our neck. Other parts of the brain form a vague semicircle, with everyone oriented towards their bandleader in the brainstem. Seated closest to the conductor, we find the hypothalamus and thalamus. Seated around them in a larger semi-circle, we find the basal ganglia. Seated beyond, in the largest arc, we find the cortex—the choir seated behind the orchestra.
Modern brain imaging has made us familiar with this orchestral arrangement. Neuroscientists have determined which part of the brain does what—we can point to a spot on a brain scan and tell you who sits there and what part they play—language is here, vision is there, memory is in that section.
However, modern brain imaging now demands that “normal brains” be orchestrated like Beethoven’s 9th Symphony—we expect to see an enormous orchestra of brain with a large choir in the cortex. We demand to see a stage (skull) full of musicians (brain areas) arranged in a specific way.
That’s why we’re surprised to see our friends “without brains”—it appears they have a bandleader in the brainstem and a small choir in the cortex, but they don’t have any of the “instruments” in the middle. We are surprised these folks’ brains can produce full and functional “consciousness”—the music of the mind—out of only a conductor and a choir.
As anyone familiar with the Gospel tradition knows, you can do a whole lot with “just” a conductor and a choir. In the absence of any instruments whatsoever, a Gospel choir can generate the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic components of music in a way that is not just acceptable, but transcendent.
Tell Tchaikovsky the news
A stage full of instruments can be lovely, but it’s not a requirement for music. A great Gospel choir is more than capable of taking matters into their own hands, literally. They can easily outperform an entire orchestra of musicians, no matter how large.
A skull full of brain can be lovely, but it’s not a requirement for consciousness. Our friends above proved you can lead full and functional lives with “only” a cortex. These folks had a cortical choir that really knew what it was doing.
Music helps us expose the inherent problem with the volumetric approach to brains. We can point to the brass section of an orchestra or band and confidently tell you where the trumpet and sax should be sitting. But that doesn’t tell you what piece they’re going to play or when. It doesn’t tell you whether they’re good or bad. The only thing you can see about an orchestra or band is how big a section is. If your brass section is no good, smaller is better. Same goes for brains—we can tell you how a brain is orchestrated (how big each section is), but we have to wait for the performance to determine whether that’s good or bad news.
We can’t see music, but we have learned to understand it. Perhaps it’s time to officially learn certain lessons from music. How would we define “consciousness” from a musical perspective?
It’s got a backbeat you can’t lose it
We tend to talk about consciousness as an object: you can have it or not, you can lose it, you can regain it, you can acquire it. But consciousness is not an object—it’s a rhythm.
When it comes to brains, the only absolute requirement—for life—is that the bandleader in the brainstem keeps time. If your brainstem can no longer keep time, you are “braindead”: your body can no longer generate the rhythms needed to beat your heart, expand your lungs, etc.
When it comes to brains, the only absolute requirement for consciousness is that you have a choir in your cortex making music. You can’t be awake and conscious without any cortex. But a small cortex choir that knows what it’s doing can handle things just fine.
About 75 years ago, Chuck Berry started summarizing this situation in his lyrics. “It’s got a backbeat you can’t lose it” isn’t a musical philosophy—it’s a physiological reality: if the bandleader in your brainstem loses the backbeat, you are dead, not just musically and metaphorically, but medically. That same song contains an important insight into consciousness: “That’s why I go for that rock n’ roll music any old way you choose it.” It simply doesn’t matter how your brain gets there. You can be good in a lot of different ways.
Got no kick against modern jazz, unless they try to play it too darn fast
There are a few basic requirements for consciousness, just like there are for music.
We recognize features of music that make it unacceptable: we can pinpoint when someone is massively off-beat or out of tune. However, we don’t have a formula for “great music.” We recognize characteristic features of different genres of music: music from Western Europe, West Africa, and the West Indies tends to play by different mathematical rules, so we can guess which calculations were made in which musical tradition. But we haven’t explained how certain musicians assembled constellations of waves into arrangements so exquisite that they changed the course of human history. We can’t articulate why music is great—we just know it when we hear it.
Similarly, we recognize features of brain activity that make it unacceptable: we can pinpoint when someone is having a seizure or a stroke. However, we don’t have a formula for “great minds.” We recognize characteristic features of different genres of mind: the consciousness of artists, activists, athletes, musicians, scientists, soldiers, and writers presumably play by different mathematical rules, so we can guess which calculations were made in which mental tradition. But we haven’t explained how certain minds assembled constellations of waves into arrangements so exquisite that they changed the course of human history. We can’t articulate why minds are great—we just know it when we see it.
We can explain what makes music bad, though it’s much harder to explain what makes it good or great. That’s why we need to build a definition of consciousness from the ground up.
Sitting down by the rhythm review
If we approach the human nervous system from a rhythm perspective, we can define specific classes of consciousness. In fact, we can guess that the human mind categorizes states of consciousness (in others) by observing the rhythms those bodies display:
* Dead = generates no waves, an instrument or band that is silent
* Asleep = generates a simple polyrhythm (the beat of heart v. breathing). Humans expect to observe characteristic “tempos” in each other when at rest. We expect to observe a heart rate of 40–60 beats per minute (largo to andante) and a breathing rate of 12–20 breaths per minute (below grave, slower than a funeral dirge).
* Awake = generates a complex polyrhythm (beat of heart vs. breathing vs. blinking vs. moving). This body appears to contain a whole rhythm section, and they’ve picked up the pace. For example, we expect to observe a heart rate of 60-100 beats per minute (andante to moderato) and a blink rate of 4–25 beats per minute (again, below grave).
* Awake and aware = generates a complex polyrhythm that can change and evolve in response to circumstance (the rhythms of heart vs. breath vs. blink vs. move can change independently, producing a new polyrhythm on demand). This body appears to contain a whole rhythm section that can “jam” or “improvise.”
However, if we use these quantifiable rhythmic definitions of consciousness, we will find that humans aren’t the only ones who can play. Chimps, crows, dogs, dolphins, orcas, octopi, and elephants have already made strong cases that they should be admitted to the academy—they demonstrate the sophisticated music of the mind we call “consciousness.”
Never ever learned to read or write so well
Historically, we have denied animals (and plenty of humans) a place in the consciousness club because they don’t write lyrics. Humans have been the great lyricists of the planet—we have the capacity for “language,” meaning we can write lyrics to accompany the music of the mind.
Lyrics are not the same as music. Language is not the same as consciousness. Plenty of composers —Beethoven and Tchaikovsky among them—are in the Pantheon of “Great Composers” for music alone. We don’t require them to handle the words. We only seem to demand words when we want to exclude members from the club.
It’s time to admit that many living creatures aren’t so great at language, while being perfectly good at consciousness. They are musicians, but not singers; they are composers, but not librettists—get over it and move on. Johnny B. Goode “never ever learned to read or write so well, but he could play a guitar just like a-ringing a bell.” A brain capable of generating the music of the mind gets to join the consciousness club, just like a musician who can play gets to join the band, regardless of whether they sing and write songs, too.
These are particularly timely discussions considering that AI systems are being trained daily to outperform us on language. We are outsourcing our lyric writing, meaning we are turning ourselves into Johnny B. Goode. Soon, we may have to defend our own inability to read and write so well. Hopefully, our consciousness will still be recognized as present and valid.
Any ol’ way you choose it
There is a long history of policing consciousness, just as we police music—“official” schools and conservatories determine which form is “correct” or preferable or allowed. These schools of thought pretend there is one way to “do consciousness” just as they pretend there is one way to “do music” —they are therefore always hilariously and tragically wrong. Consciousness, like music, is not a single physical object, nor is it a specific performance tactic. Consciousness, like music, emerges when a body tries to braid waves together into something coherent. However badly someone is playing or singing, rising or shining, we recognize what they’re trying to do: play. “Consciousness,” like “music,” is a standard of proof: the minimum performance necessary for us to recognize a fellow performer. You can have beginner, intermediate, and advanced performers, but if you really care about music, you want everyone to get involved. If you really care about consciousness, you should feel the same.
When Berry ushered in the new musical and mathematical philosophy of rock’n’roll, he didn’t throw out Beethoven—he just told Tchaikovsky the news: “My heart’s beating rhythm and my soul keeps a-singing the blues.” When it comes to brains, your brainstem is beating rhythm and your cortex is a-singing the blues. The music you make with those components is all “you.”
Neuroscience hasn’t yet experienced its rock’n’roll revolution. We’re still largely pretending there’s a “correct” way of doing things. We don’t yet have lots of different radio stations celebrating lots of different types of consciousness, in different folks and different species. But we will, especially if musicians help out. Stay tuned.
Michael Gazzaniga is a renowned cognitive neuroscientist known for pioneering research on split-brain patients.
Bridget Queenan is a researcher who led the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical Biology at Harvard and the Brain Initiative at UC Santa Barbara.
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The neurodivergence paradox
The reality gap
Phone addiction is worse than smoking or cocaine
Forgetting is more important than remembering
SUGGESTED VIEWING
Consciousness beyond the brain With Rupert Sheldrake
Consciousness and material reality With Avshalom Elitzur
Consciousness in the clouds
The normal and the abnormal
We misunderstand mental health
A Mad World
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決定那些性質能顯示「意識」 - Tim Bayne
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不客氣的說，下文前半段在「喃喃自語」或玩文字遊戲。在我們對「意識」的性質有共識之前，不可能對顯示「意識」的「徵象」取得共識。這種「哲學家」真是把書讀到膝蓋裏去了。
順著作者最後一段所表達的意思，我或許可以說：
根據多數意識理論科學家目前對「意識」(性質)的「共識」，意識實驗科學家應該試圖尋找能顯示研究對象具有這類「意識」的各種「徵象」。它們能夠幫助意識理論科學家增加對「『什麼』是『意識』」的了解，從而做為建立一個「意識」精準「定義」的基礎。
Babies, bees and bots: On the hunt for markers of consciousness
To truly understand consciousness, we need new methods to measure it and detect it in other intelligent systems.
Tim Bayne, 07/30/25
請至原網頁觀看示意圖
One of the key scientific questions about consciousness concerns its distribution. We know that adult humans have the capacity for consciousness, but what about human neonates, bees or artificial intelligence (AI) systems? Who else—other than ourselves—belongs in the “consciousness club,” and how might we figure this out?
It is tempting to assume, as many do, that we need a theory of consciousness to answer the distribution question. In the words of neuroscientists Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch, “we need not only more data but also a theory of consciousness — one that says what experience is and what type of physical systems can have it.” This is what philosopher Jonathan Birch has labeled the “theory-heavy” approach to the distribution problem.
But there are serious issues with the theory-heavy approach. One is that we don’t have a consensus theory of consciousness. In a highly selective review that Anil Seth and I published in 2022, we listed no fewer than 22 neurobiological theories of consciousness. This overabundance of theories could reasonably be ignored if most agreed on fundamental questions in the field, such as which systems have the capacity for consciousness or the question of when consciousness first emerges in human development, but they don’t.
A further problem with the theory-heavy approach is that in order to speak to the distribution problem, a theory cannot be restricted to consciousness as it occurs in adult humans, but must also apply to human infants, nonhuman animals, synthetic biological systems and AI. But because theories are largely based on data drawn from the study of adult humans, there will inevitably be a gap between the evidence base of a general theory and its scope. Why should we think that a theory developed in response to adult humans applies to different kinds of systems?
This isn’t just an issue of the legitimacy of applying theories developed from adult human data; it also concerns how the theory itself is specified. A comprehensive theory needs to distinguish features that might be essential to (adult) human consciousness but are not essential to consciousness as it might occur in other systems. However, it’s not clear how that distinction can be drawn if our primary data are drawn from the study of adult humans.
In light of the challenges facing the theory-heavy approach, many have tried to develop an alternative approach to the distribution problem: the marker approach. Think of markers as a bit like a detective’s clues. Rather than constituting proof of consciousness, markers need only be indicative (or “credence-raising”). Converging evidence of different types of markers might establish the presence of consciousness, in the same way that evidence from various clues might establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The basic idea behind the marker-based approach isn’t entirely new. Consider the fact that in ordinary life, we rely on capacities for agency and verbal communication to ascribe consciousness to other people. These behavioral markers of consciousness are crucial in clinical contexts. For example, the capacity to reliably follow commands is taken to be an indicator of consciousness in severely brain-damaged patients.
But behavioral markers have their own limitations. The capacity to produce intelligent linguistic behavior is one of the most trustworthy markers of consciousness in humans, but few of us are inclined to regard the linguistic behavior of large language models such as ChatGPT or Claude as evidence that they, too, are conscious. There are also cases—involving cerebral organoids or neonates, for example—in which consciousness might exist in the absence of complex behavioral capacities. If the marker approach is to make serious headway against the distribution problem, behavioral markers will need to be supplemented with nonbehavioral markers, such as those that involve neural, physiologic, metabolic or computational features.
Whatever form they take, markers will need to be validated, and we need to reach a consensus on when and why we should trust them. How, then, shall we proceed?
The standard approach appeals to the contrast between conscious and unconscious states in our consensus population (that is, adult humans who can report on their experiences). To see how this works in practice, consider a marker that has received significant attention recently: the “global effect.” Developed by Tristan Bekinschtein and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge, the global effect exploits the fact that consciousness appears to be required for a certain type of auditory “oddball.” It has long been known that when people are exposed to a sequence of identical tones followed by one that differs in some way (the oddball), the brain generates a “surprise” response to the stimulus. This response is known as the P300 response, because it occurs roughly 300 milliseconds after the oddball. What Bekinschtein and his colleagues found is that the brain produces P300 responses to local (or “first-order”) oddballs (e.g., AAAB) even when a person is unconscious, but consciousness does appear to be required for P300 responses to global (or “second-order”) oddballs, such as those taking the form AAAB AAAB AAAB AAAA.
Taking inspiration from this finding, theorists have suggested that the global effect might be indicative of consciousness in other populations. For example, the fact that it can be found in 3-month-old infants, newborns and perhaps even in fetuses past 35 weeks’ gestational age has been taken by many to provide some evidence in favor of consciousness in early infancy (and, more tentatively, in late-stage fetuses).
Although I myself have used data about the global effect to justify claims about the emergence of consciousness in human development, this line of reasoning is not immune to criticism. The problem is that neural responses functioning as markers of adult consciousness might not function as markers of infant consciousness. And there are questions about how well the global effect tracks consciousness in systems that are even less like “us” than infants or fetuses are. Finding a global effect in an AI system surely provides little to no evidence that it is conscious.
The upshot, then, is that we need principled ways of identifying the scope of putative markers of consciousness—an account of when features that indicate the presence (or absence) of consciousness in us also indicate the presence (or absence) of consciousness in systems that are very different from us. If such an account requires a theory of consciousness, then the marker-based approach collapses back into the theory-heavy approach. Is there a middle ground between these two approaches?
Perhaps. Together with various colleagues, I’ve suggested that we can bootstrap our way toward a solution to the distribution problem by a process of iterative revision. For example, we use our most promising theories of consciousness to tell us when the global effect is a reliable guide to the presence of consciousness, and we use what our markers tell us about the distribution of consciousness to further refine our theories. Eschewing foundationalism, we should regard neither theories nor markers as sacrosanct but look for an account that maximizes the fit between them.
Tim Bayne, Professor of philosophy, Monash University
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夢的功能 -- Clarissa Brincat
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我不是醫學院或生命科學領域出身；我的意見自不過是門外漢的道聽塗說。根據我的經驗以及讀過的相關書籍、論文、和報導，我認為：「夢」屬於意識活動種種形式中的一個；因此，我把下文歸於此欄。
What’s the purpose of dreaming?
Dream experts have plenty of possible answers.
Clarissa Brincat, 06/16/25
Your brain never rests. Image: PM Images/Getty Images5 請至原網頁觀看示意圖
We all dream — but why? As with many mysteries of the mind, science doesn’t have one neat answer.
“You’ll get as many answers to the question ‘What is the purpose of dreaming?’ as there are dream psychologists,” says Deirdre Barrett, dream researcher at Harvard University and author of The Committee of Sleep.
According to Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, dreams offered vital clues to unresolved conflicts buried deep within our psyche. But Freud’s theory, introduced in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams, sparked plenty of controversy. Critics argued that his dream interpretations were overly focused on sex, highly subjective, and impossible to verify—two analysts might offer entirely different readings of the same dream, with no objective way to know who was right.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
In the decades since Freud, other scientists have offered alternative explanations for why we dream. One of the most prominent is the threat simulation theory, proposed by Finnish neuroscientist and psychologist Antti Revonsuo in 2000. According to this view, dreaming is an ancient biological defense mechanism. By simulating dangerous situations, our brains rehearse the skills needed to recognize and avoid threats—a kind of virtual reality training ground for survival. A 2005 study lent support to this theory by examining the dreams of Kurdish children exposed to war and trauma. Compared to non-traumatized Finnish children, these children reported more frequent dreams filled with severe threats, suggesting that their minds were practicing how to cope with danger.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
But even the threat simulation theory is debated. A 2008 study comparing residents of high-crime areas in South Africa to those in low-crime parts of Wales found that South African participants, despite facing more real-world threats, actually reported fewer threatening dreams than their Welsh counterparts. This result challenges the idea that the brain uses dreams to simulate danger when exposed to trauma.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Another theory suggests that dreams are simply a side effect of memory consolidation—the brain’s way of replaying and reinforcing new memories while we sleep. As the brain’s hippocampus and neocortex work together to file away fresh information, they may also blend it with older memories, creating the often strange mashups we experience as dreams.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Dreams may also help us process and manage emotions, especially negative ones, according to the emotion regulation theory of dreaming. Research focusing on recently divorced individuals experiencing depression found that participants who dreamed about their ex-spouses were more likely to show significant improvement in their mood one year later, particularly if their dreams were vivid and emotionally rich. Another study found that people who dreamed about stressful events they had experienced before sleep woke up feeling more positively about the events the next day, suggesting that dreams can help transform emotional distress into resilience.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Recent brain imaging studies support this idea. People who frequently experience fear-related dreams show reduced activation in fear centers of the brain during waking life, hinting that these dreams may serve as a kind of overnight therapy session, helping us better regulate our emotions when awake.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
Ultimately, Barrett suggests that we may be asking the wrong question. “We’d rarely ask the analogous question: ‘What is the purpose of thinking?’” she says. Just as waking thought serves many functions—from planning to problem-solving to daydreaming—dreams likely do too. “The value of dreaming lies in its difference. It’s a distinct mode of thought—one that supplements and enriches our waking cognition.”
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
In fact, some researchers believe dreams offer a unique mental space for solving problems that stump us during the day. In this altered brain state, regions responsible for imagery become more active, allowing the mind to solve problems requiring visualisation. History is full of famous examples: Mary Shelley reportedly dreamed the central scenes of Frankenstein; German chemist August Kekulé envisioned the ring structure of benzene in a dream; and Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed his final form of the periodic table of the elements.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
In the end, dreams may serve many purposes—or none at all—but they remind us that even in sleep, the brain never truly rests.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.
Trump is already lowering the bar on China tariffs blasting President Xi as ‘hard to make a deal with’
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* How to fix your sleep schedule without pulling an all-nighter
* 5 reasons you can’t sleep
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意識面面觀 -- Erwan Dubois
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The enduring mystery of consciousness
Erwan Dubois, 06/02/25
What is consciousness? When does it begin? How can it be measured? Does AI have it? An update on an intimate, universal yet mysterious phenomenon that the neurosciences are only just starting to decipher.
Consciousness: a simple definition, but a complex measurement
From a subjective standpoint, consciousness seems to be a straightforward concept: it is the state we are in when we are awake. And yet, its scientific nature remains difficult to quantify. The main problem lies in its measurability: how do we determine whether a being, human or not, is conscious?
“If you tell me that you’re conscious, I believe you,” explains Catherine Tallon-Baudry, a CNRS research professor at the LNC2 cognitive and computational neuroscience laboratory in Paris. “But if I’m dealing with an organism that’s unable to say it’s conscious, or an artificial intelligence system that claims to be, I can’t be so sure.”
Consciousness is a subjective state. It cannot be observed directly, unlike measurable biological parameters like blood sugar levels or cardiac activity.
A bonobo looking at its own reflection in a mirror. Primates pass the test of self-recognition – including gorillas, which were previously thought to lack this capacity.
Renaud Fulconis / Biosphoto 請至原網頁觀看照片
What beings are conscious? And how do we know?
Are humans the only conscious beings? The question is subject to debate in the scientific community. There is no doubt about the intelligence of many species, but intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing.
Certain primates, dolphins and some birds show signs of self-awareness 1, in the sense that they seem to recognise themselves in a mirror. But the interpretation of this test remains problematic. Many animals fail it even though they engage in behaviours that suggest a form of consciousness 2.
The neurosciences offer another approach: the study of brain activity associated with consciousness 3. For example, laboratory tests can explore “vision at the threshold of consciousness”: an individual is shown brief flashes of images to determine at what point they become consciously perceptible. By analysing how the brain processes information, researchers can establish cerebral markers of awareness. These markers can then be measured in comatose patients who no longer communicate with the outside world, to detect the presence of any residual sentience 4.
The Vincent Lambert case 5 offers a good example of the difficulties in determining whether a person is conscious when they are unable to communicate. But what about animals? Experimental protocols, often reward-based, raise questions: do the subjects’ responses indicate true consciousness or mechanical learning?
Is the brain the only arbiter?
Does consciousness reside solely in the brain? “The entire organism is conscious, not just 1.2 kilos of brain matter,” Tallon-Baudry notes. She supports the idea that consciousness is the result of a complex interaction between the brain and the body – an aspect often overlooked by conventional theories. In the course of multiple studies 6, the neuroscientist has demonstrated that the connections between the heart and the brain make it possible to predict both self-awareness and awareness of the outside world.
Combining neuroscience and experimental psychology, the work of CNRS research professor Nathan Faivre at the LPNC 7 bolsters this theory. His studies 8 have shown that bodily disruptions, such as alterations in corporeal perception, significantly influence our self-awareness and capacity to process sensory information. Faivre’s findings indicate that physical changes can affect our interaction with the environment and alter our entire conscious experience.
A universal theory of consciousness: mission impossible?
Science continues to progress, but with caution. As Tallon-Baudry puts it, “We have hypotheses, but it’s too soon to talk about a theory.” Consciousness is still a young field of study, and the phenomenon itself is exceedingly complex.
A baby plays with coloured plastic balls in front of a mirror. The acquisition of self-awareness is a key stage in child development, but it remains difficult to determine precisely when it occurs.
JCDH / shutterstock.com 請至原網頁觀看照片
Rather than seeking a global explanation, current research focuses on identifying the various components of consciousness and the related biological mechanisms. The path forward will involve breaking the mystery down into a number of more accessible elements.
The philosophical and religious interpretations of consciousness are considered beyond the scope of science. Tallon-Baudry, who identifies herself as a materialist, maintains that research should be limited to what can be studied and measured.
Can artificial intelligence achieve consciousness?
Still, certain questions remain: could an artificial intelligence (AI) system one day reach the point of being conscious? If we define consciousness solely by the ability to process information and exercise reason, some AI systems could already be considered conscious. But if consciousness necessarily implies an organic, subjective and emotional aspect, these machines still have a long way to go.
Jean-Rémy Hochmann, a CNRS research professor at the ISC-MJ 9, explores the developmental origins of unique human abilities such as language and logic by studying cognition in infants: “If you ask a mother if her eight-month-old baby is conscious, she will certainly say yes!” he comments. “Indeed, her baby moves around, smiles, laughs, interacts with others and is even starting to babble. But what about a five-month-old child? Three months? A newborn after only a few minutes or hours of life? In those cases, their behaviour is much less controlled, but our research – as well as the work by Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz 10 and Sid Kouider 11 – suggests that the basic cognitive and neuronal structures that enable consciousness are in place very early on, perhaps from birth. Still, we have shown that these structures function more slowly in infants, as much as six or seven times slower at five months than for an adult.”
In the film "Captain America: Civil War" (2016), the character of Vision, played by Paul Bettany, is a digital assistant that has become an autonomous, conscious entity.
Marvel Entertainment / Marvel Studios / Studio Babelsberg / Collection ChristopheL請至原網頁觀看照片
With artificial intelligence becoming more and more powerful and refining its capacity for reasoning, today’s world is nearly reminiscent of the evolution of JARVIS from Marvel comics, Tony Stark’s digital assistant that becomes Vision, an autonomous entity endowed with its own consciousness. It transforms from a simple utility into a being capable of thinking and feeling. Is it pure science fiction? Perhaps. But this metamorphosis raises a very real question: could artificial intelligence one day become conscious?
Consciousness remains one of the deepest mysteries of modern science. Researchers are now trying to unravel its workings by exploring it from various perspectives: sensory perception, self-representation, emotional states, etc. It’s a real puzzle, each piece of which brings us a bit closer to answering that age-old question: what makes us conscious?
Footnotes：
1. “Animal consciousness”, EFSA supporting publication, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2903/sp.efsa.2017.EN-1196(link is external)
2. “The Scientific Study of Consciousness Cannot and Should Not Be Morally Neutral”, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(3), 535-543. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221110222(link is external)
3. “Neural correlates of consciousness: progress and problems”, Nature Review Neuroscience 17, 307–321 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2016.22(link is external)
4. “Neural responses to heartbeats detect residual signs of consciousness during resting state in comatose patients”, Journal of Neuroscience, 2021, 41(24) 5251:5262. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1740-20.2021(link is external)
5. The Vincent Lambert case in France provides an illustration of the ethical and medical issues related to consciousness. A patient in a state of minimal consciousness sparked a national debate on the end of life, highlighting the difficulty of defining the boundary between consciousness and the lack of consciousness, as well as the implications of this distinction for medical and legal decisions.
6. “Interoceptive rhythms in the brain”, Nature Neuroscience 26, 2023, 1670-1684; “Visceral signals shape brain dynamics and cognition”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23 (6), 2019, 488-509. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.03.007(link is external)
7. Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition (CNRS / Université Grenoble Alpes / Université Savoie Mont Blanc).
8. “Visual consciousness and bodily self-consciousness”, Current Opinion in Neurology 28(1):p 23-28, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1097/wco.0000000000000160(link is external)
9. Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc-Jeannerod (CNRS / Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1).
10.. CNRS research professor at the language neuroimaging and brain development laboratory (UNICOG – CNRS / CEA / INSERM / Université Paris-Saclay).
11. CNRS research professor at the LSCP cognitive sciences and psycholinguistics laboratory (CNRS / EHESS / ENS-PSL).
For further reading:
Downloading the human mind
AI needs to align with human values
How to speak to extraterrestrials?
The vestibular system, a little-known sixth sense (video – in French)
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物理學觀點看「意識」及其科學研究 -- Ethan Siegel
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下文中的子標題是我加上的。希構博士這篇文章在提供大量相關資訊外，第1節的「唯物論者的基本前提」和第6節的「意識研究方法論」，對意識研究的論述基礎和研究方法兩者分別提出完整的觀點。所附參考圖和超連接也都很有價值；在此鄭重推薦。
Does physics truly have anything to say about consciousness?
Many, from neuroscientists to philosophers to anesthesiologists, have claimed to understand consciousness. Do physicists? Does anyone?
Ethan Siegel, 05/14/25
The brain is a network of neurons, connected by synapses, embedded in a substrate of four different types of glial cells. There is both white and gray matter in the brain, and a three-layer protective casing surrounding it, all fed by blood vessels. How this organ produces consciousness remains highly mysterious.
Dr_Microbe / Adobe Stock 請至原網頁觀看神經細胞照片
Key Takeaways
* One of the great scientific unknowns here in the 21st century is the physical mechanism behind the observed phenomenon of consciousness.
* What makes human beings like you and me conscious? Is it something mystical? Is it simply electricity? Is quantum physics at the root of it all?
* There are a great many scientists and philosophers, from a great variety of backgrounds, who opine on their approach to the puzzle of consciousness. What does physics have to say?
0. 前言
Every once in a while, scientists will bite off more than they can chew. Just as we normally use that phrase to mean “taking on a task that’s beyond your means to accomplish with the resources you currently have,” that same limitation applies to a wide variety of scientific problems. Whereas the fundamental laws, particles, and interactions of the Universe are exquisitely well known (up to a point), the vast array of complex, composite structures that emerge from those basic building blocks of reality often attain properties that arise in a non-obvious way from their constituent parts.
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Sometimes, by simulating many-body systems and imposing the proper boundary conditions, we can indeed derive large, macroscopically observable properties from those fundamental rules; the color of a sodium lamp is one such example, the success of a coaxial cable in transmitting radio-frequency signals is another.
At other times, however, the rules are a lot more complex, and we can only state that something happens (or must happen), lacking a full understanding of how it happens. Perhaps no puzzle that falls into this category is more mysterious than the nature of consciousness: something that humans definitively possess, and yet can only describe subjectively.
What does it truly mean to be conscious? Where does consciousness come from? Are humans the only conscious species, or do other animals, non-animal forms of life, or even non-living things possess some form of consciousness? While many have opined and put forth hypotheses on the matter, it remains a mystery. Here’s what physics — the most fundamental of all the sciences — has to say about consciousness.
This rough sketch shows an interconnected network of neurons, similar to the ones present in the human brain. Note that the substrate for this network, including glial cells and the blood vessels that feed them, are present, but not shown here.
Credit: Sunny Labh/Cantor’s Paradise 請至原網頁觀看神經細胞網路圖
1. 唯物論者的基本前提
At the very core of the matter are two basic ideas:
* the idea that we live in a material reality, and that everything that exists in our material reality can be described in terms of, well, the constituent parts of reality that exist in space and time,
* and the idea that any phenomenon — including consciousness — can be rigorously defined and put to experimental, observational, and/or measurable tests.
To a physicist’s way of thinking, these are non-negotiable starting points for attempting to gain a physical understanding of any phenomenon in the Universe.
However, when it comes to consciousness, many who opine on the matter find themselves unconstrained by these concerns. For example, there are those who posit that instead of the “material reality” assumption — an assumption that has held true over and over again whenever we’ve been able to put reality itself to the critical test — that either the mind, a mind-like aspect, or some ill-defined form of consciousness is what’s truly a fundamental and omnipresent feature of reality. This idea, known as panpsychism, is a very old notion in the circles of philosophy, but comes along with the dual problem of being untestable and unfalsifiable. As all of our tests of reality rely on testing objects that are measurable within reality itself, panpsychism is forever locked away from the realm of scientific testability, and hence, holds no interest to physicists who adhere to an evidence-based worldview.
This chart of particles and interactions details how the particles of the Standard Model interact according to the three fundamental forces that quantum field theory describes. When gravity is added into the mix, we obtain the observable Universe that we see, with the laws, parameters, and constants that we know of governing it. However, many of the parameters that nature obeys cannot be predicted by theory, they must be measured to be known, and those are “constants” that our Universe requires, to the best of our knowledge.
Credit: Contemporary Physics Education Project/CPEP, DOE/NSF/LBNL 請至原網頁觀看物理世界解說圖
A materialist view of reality, importantly, doesn’t simply state that “reality is nothing more than the sum of its parts.” Instead, it’s important to remember that, from a physical standpoint, even:
* a very simple set of fundamental ingredients,
* adhering to a simple set of just a few rules,
* can very swiftly wind up creating large numbers of extremely complex outcomes,
* many of which display emergent properties that are not “obviously” encoded, in a trivial way, by the underlying rules and ingredients.
For example, if you take all of the quarks in the Standard Model of particle physics and just leave them in a confined space, they will swiftly bind together into a huge array of composite structures (baryons) that will then swiftly decay away into other, less massive particles. After only about a microsecond, the only quark-containing particles remaining will be protons and neutrons.
Similarly, if you take only protons and neutrons and attempt to combine them together into any imaginable configuration, you will find that there are hundreds of stable (or quasi-stable, i.e., stable over cosmically long time intervals) configurations: the elements and isotopes of the periodic table. It is from these combinations that all of chemistry and biology fundamentally arises, all from just a few fundamental rules and types of raw ingredients.
The elements of the periodic table, and where they originate, are detailed in this image above. Alongside, at right, is a color-coded representation of where the elements composing the human body arise from. Despite being made only of protons, neutrons, and electrons, there are more than 90 naturally occurring elements (and over 200 total isotopes) in the periodic table, each with their own unique physical and chemical properties.
Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/K. Divona 請至原網頁觀看週期表元素圖
2. 人體的物質基礎
For human beings, the material reality of our composition has been well-studied for centuries. We know that, atomically, we are made of approximately ~1028 atoms. The most abundant atomic species are oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen by mass, with a substantial amount of nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, followed by smaller amounts of potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. Other elements, present in smaller quantities, also play a major biological roles, for example: iron, fluorine, zinc, copper, lithium, and even vanadium, which is the least abundant element in the body (with just 110 nanograms worth in a typical human) that has a known biological function.
Those atoms are configured together into a variety of molecules, which are distributed across trillions of cells within the body, which are further organized into organs — large collections of cells that possess specific structures that perform certain essential biological functions — and those organs sum up to make a complete human being. Within the body, of specific relevance to consciousness, is the body’s nervous system, including the human brain. For most of us, there’s an assumption that seems so obvious that “of course consciousness arises in the brain” that it’s rarely challenged. It would mean, if true, that if we want to study human consciousness, we have no choice but to study the human brain.
The human mind is one of the great mysteries of modern science, as we cannot sufficiently explain how the brain in general, or consciousness in particular, works. However, it’s a reasonable “null hypothesis” to presume that electricity, i.e., the flow of electrons, is the primary driver behind our perceptions that we are conscious. Although quantum effects may play a role, it’s an unnecessary complication to presume that consciousness is anything other than the flow of electricity.
Credit: agsandrew/Adobe Stock 請至原網頁觀看示意圖
3. 大腦結構與功能
You then might wonder just how the brain produces consciousness, and what mechanisms are at play. To begin, we can talk about the structure of the brain with some confidence. The human brain, primarily, is composed of two classes of cells:
* neurons, which transmit electrical and chemical signals,
* and glial cells, which are defined by the fact that they do not produce electrical impulses, and are instead thought to form a substrate that supports neurons.
Nearly all discussions of consciousness focus on the neurons and ignore the glial cells. This makes sense on the surface, as one can easily argue that the only difference between a living human (which possesses consciousness) and a deceased human (which no longer does) is the presence of those electrical neural impulses. Take them away, and consciousness ceases to be.
But glial cells may yet play a vital, if only poorly understood, role in the presence of consciousness. Glial cells are known to come in four different types: ependymal cells, astrocytes, microglial cells, and oligodendrocytes. Each type of glial cell performs a series of functions: producing cerebrospinal fluid and aiding in neuroregeneration for the ependyma, biochemically controlling the cells of the blood-brain barrier and providing nutrients to neurons for the astroglia, performing immune functions and maintaining and sustaining normal brain functions for the microglia, and supporting and insulating the axons of neurons for the oligodendroglia.
Microglia (colored green), the smallest of the four main classes of glial cells, play several essential roles in maintaining brain health and function. They are thought to provide support to neurons, but their role in the phenomenon of consciousness has yet to be quantified.
Credit: Gerry Shaw/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA 請至原網頁觀看神經膠質細胞圖
In addition, the brain contains blood vessels, salts, a differentiated composition (gray matter and white matter), and is covered in three different types of meninges, or protective coverings: dura mater, arachnoid, and pia mater.
4. 意識ABC和量子意識論
Most often, when people discuss consciousness, they assume that:
* it arises from the brain,
* it is driven by neuronal activity and that all other cells serve only as “support,”
* it appears, definitively, in humans (but not necessarily in any other living creature),
* and that it’s associated with our most advanced, highest-level abstract thoughts.
It is in this framework that examinations of consciousness often take place. We typically conduct MRI studies while humans are in various states — sober or intoxicated, calm or stimulated, awake or asleep, in REM sleep versus in non-REM sleep, in a state where long-term memories are formed versus one in which they are not, etc. — measuring the various types of brain activity that are and aren’t present, in our attempt to study how the firing of neurons in the brain corresponds to a variety of conditions experienced by a human subject.
But these are experiments that, although they are an important part of research into the workings of the human brain, assume that consciousness is simply driven by classical, electrical activity in the human brain. That’s a possibility, but far from the only one.
A fruit fly brain as viewed through a confocal microscope. The workings of the brain of any animal are not fully understood, but it’s eminently plausible that electrical activity in the brain and throughout the body is responsible for what we know as “consciousness,” and furthermore, that human beings are not so unique among animals or even other living creatures in possessing it.
Credit: Garaulet et al., Developmental Cell, 2020 請至原網頁觀看顯微鏡下果蠅大腦圖
There are a variety of functions that take place inside living organisms, including in brains, that rely not only on signals (electric and chemical) that invoke classical physics alone, but that either suggest or even require some sort of quantum interaction. Some animals can orient themselves with Earth’s magnetic field by taking advantage of inherently quantum processes like magnetoreception. A mathematical equivalence has been shown between the classical physics of brain responses and the probabilistic wave equations of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics plays an essential role in photosynthesis, and large networks of tryptophan, found in sub-elements of neurons (as well as elsewhere), exhibit the phenomenon of quantum superradiance.
One hypothesis about consciousness is that it doesn’t arise from electro-chemical impulses and neural connections, but rather that quantum entanglement between microscopic cellular structures known as microtubules is the underlying culprit. Because neurons contain these microtubules, the idea goes, and these microtubules control a number of functions — controlling the movement, growth, and shape of the cells — perhaps they are the site of quantum processing that’s fundamental to consciousness. An experiment performed on microtubules showed that laser-induced excitations propagated within them to great distances in awake patients, but not within patients under anesthesia. However, almost nobody defines “consciousness” as the opposite of “being unconscious” (except, perhaps, for anesthesiologists), and so this hypothesis remains on the fringes.
Natural neurons are connected to one another across various synapses, and as synaptic connections are strengthened, neurons become more likely to fire together: something that occurs when the brain learns. An artificial neural network models these neurons as nodes that are encoded with a specific value, and the connectedness of the nodes can strengthen or weaken dependent on whether they take on identical or different values from one another.
Credit: Johan Jarnestad/Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 請至原網頁觀看自然與人工神經細胞比較圖
5. 意識相關課題
But one must wonder: how can we even define what “consciousness” is? Many give it a definition akin to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s threshold test for pornographic content: I know it when I see it. This, however, is an arbitrary definition in many ways, and there is no widely agreed-upon definition for what consciousness actually is.
* Are all humans conscious? Does this include newborn babies? Sleeping humans? Humans still developing in the womb?
* Are animals other than humans conscious? Many brain-containing animals, from dogs to cats to horses to birds, exhibit strong individualistic preferences and behavioral oddities — what many would call personalities — and observations such as these have been validated through scientific studies. Is a brain a sufficient and necessary ingredient for consciousness to be achieved?
* Do living organisms without brains exhibit consciousness? Simple subjective awareness, or the ability for an organism as a whole to act as a unified structure that engages in acts of self-protection and self-preservation, particularly in response to various stimuli in their environments, may be enough, as many have suggested.
It’s a very challenging problem: one of a universally agreed-upon definition for what consciousness even is. Before we can move on to questions such as, “Is consciousness quantum in nature?” we should at least be able to answer the yet-unanswered question of “What even is consciousness?“
A fascinating class of organisms known as siphonophores is itself a collection of small animals working together to form a larger colonial organism. These lifeforms straddle the boundary between a multicellular organism and a colonial organism. Because it responds to stimuli in its environment all as one unified unit, it could arguably be construed to be conscious as a whole, beyond the mere behavior of its constituent parts.
Credit: Kevin Raskoff, Cal State Monterey; Crisco 1492/Wikimedia Commons 請至原網頁觀看管水母圖
It might seem like these are scientific questions, as there are certainly scientific ideas and hypotheses out there about consciousness, and a number of scientific experiments that have been performed and documented that touch upon many of these (and other surrounding) issues.
But consciousness, without an agreed-upon, robust definition for what it is, can hardly be said to have advanced to a point where we can study it scientifically. Much like chemistry 400 years ago, physics 1000 years ago, or astronomy 5000 years ago, consciousness research today is an example of the very beginnings of science: science in its infancy, or science that has not yet moved beyond the realm of speculation or philosophy.
In fact, the most compelling definition of consciousness that I’ve ever heard didn’t come from a scientist of any variety, but rather from the recently-deceased philosopher Daniel Dennett, who simply posed that consciousness was the ability to understand, “I am me,” or to otherwise possess an internal conception of what we call “one’s self.” Humans have clearly crossed this threshold and are conscious; dogs have as well, as if you have two dogs and call one of their names, the dog whose name you called will respond differently from the dog whose name you didn’t call. Rather than being a property that’s special to humans and to human brains, consciousness may simply be a physical manifestation of an emergent property associated with any form of life itself.
This drawing shows a variety of human, monkey, and ape skulls from a variety of extant species. The older apes have smaller cranial capacities and smaller brains than humans, but all such examples of the specimens shown here are assumed to have achieved what we would call “consciousness.” Many less-evolved creatures, and perhaps even all living things, may justifiably be considered conscious at some level.
Credit: schinz de Visser, 1845/public domain 請至原網頁觀看多種動物顱骨圖
6. 意識研究方法論
The big takeaway from all of this is that if you hear a claim that purports to explain consciousness, there are a few critical things you should be asking yourself.
* What is the definition of consciousness that they’re using, and how can it be tested for, at least qualitatively?
* In terms of explanatory power, any theory of consciousness should be able to make testable predictions that, if they are shown not to be borne out by experiment, measurement, and observation, will falsify that theory. What, therefore, are this theory’s testable predictions?
* And, perhaps most importantly, can this explanation detail how what we perceive of as consciousness arises from purely physical entities, without invoking some sort of mystic quality that exists outside of our physical reality?
If the claim does not clearly answer any of these three types of questions, then what you have encountered is not an explanation of consciousness; it is merely a not-fully-baked germ of an idea. To be sure, there are a lot of non-physicalist theories of consciousness out there, but none of them are “theories” in a scientific sense; only in an informal, idea-esque sense. If we want an understanding of how something we can observe within our physical reality behaves, there must be a physical underpinning of it: whether that’s fundamental, emergent, or a combination of the two. There are a great many things that remained unexplained at the present time, and consciousness is one of them. However, that doesn’t give me cause for any despair; it simply reminds me of what my differential equations professor told my class back in college:
“Most of the differential equations that exist cannot be solved. And most of the differential equations that can be solved cannot be solved by you.”
Consciousness is a very difficult puzzle: one that is difficult to even define, much less to solve. But it is just as much a part of our physical reality as anything else we interact with, and any approach that asserts otherwise has a fatal flaw from the outset: it’s already abandoned science.
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大腦空空 -- Ed Cara
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Brains Scans Reveal What Really Happens When Your Mind Goes Blank
Scientists argue that blanking out is its own state of consciousness, distinct from having your mind wander off.
Ed Cara, 04/24/25
Mind blanking might be a universal experience, but some people are more prone to it, a new review suggests. © Cans Creative via Shutterstock 請至原網頁觀看示意圖
If you’ve ever had your mind blank out while in the middle of something, you’re far from alone. In research published this week, scientists are making the case that mind blanking is a genuine brain phenomenon.
Researchers from Belgium, France, and Australia conducted the study, a review of the existing data on mind blanking. They argue that blanking out should be seen and studied as its own state of consciousness, similar to but separate from things like having your mind wander.
The authors are all experts in consciousness research, and they were inspired to collaborate following a related annual conference about three years ago. According to Athena Demertzi, director of the Physiology of Cognition lab at the University of Liège, the topic of mind-blanking isn’t exactly new to some scientists, particularly those studying meditation. But interest in it has also been steadily gathering steam among researchers studying cognition and sleep in recent years.
“Cognitive scientists have begun to recognize that individuals may also experience moments of blankness during wakefulness in their everyday life,” she told Gizmodo in an email. “Meanwhile, in the field of sleep and dreaming research, special categories of dreams, such as so-called ‘white dreams,’ where individuals recall having dreamt but cannot retrieve any content, have drawn increasing attention.”
Demertzi and her colleagues reviewed data from around 80 research papers relevant to mind blanking, which included studies of theirs where they measured people’s brain activity during reported moments of the volunteers having nothing on their mind. And they came to a simple conclusion.
“Mind blanking is real, it’s not just a matter of forgetting or a failure to report. At times during the day, our stream of thoughts can simply stop, leaving us with the experience of thinking about nothing,” she said. “In our review, we show that mind blanking is not merely a subjective impression or an illusion. It corresponds to a distinct brain state, one that differs from those associated with the experience of specific mental content.”
According to the researchers, mind blanking is linked to its own unique patterns of brain activity. In studies where people were asked to explicitly clear their mind of any thoughts, for instance, brain scans revealed reduced activity in certain regions like the supplementary motor cortex and hippocampus. Data from electroencephalograms (EEG) also indicate that parts of the brain might enter a sleep-like state when we blank out.
The team’s findings, published Thursday in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, also suggest that people experience mind blanking between 5% and 20% of the time on average. And certain people seem more prone to blanking out than others, such as those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). That said, more research is needed to confirm these findings and to help answer plenty more open questions about the nature of mind blanking.
“For instance, we don’t yet know how long mind blanking episodes typically last, or whether there are different types. Could some instances be voluntary? Might mind blanking occur during high-performance states, such as flow?” Demertzi noted. “A deeper understanding of its neural mechanisms is also needed. Is mind blanking the result of a failure to generate mental content, or is it a failure of access (where content exists but doesn’t reach conscious awareness)?”
The authors ultimately hope their work can inspire others in the field to start paying more attention to blanking out. Meanwhile, I just want scientists to one day unravel where exactly in the brain all my intrusive thoughts about my cat come from.
相關網頁：
Brains Cognition
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昏迷病患的意識狀態 ---- Aria Bendix
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先進儀器能夠更精準的測出：昏迷病患是否仍然有「隱蔽知覺」。
Brain scans of some unresponsive hospital patients show detectable activity
Scans suggest many people with severe brain injuries are more aware than originally thought.
Aria Bendix, 08/18/24
When a patient with a brain injury is unresponsive, doctors turn to certain basic tests to see if they could still have some awareness: calling their name, clapping near their ear or inserting a cotton swab in their nose.
Those who don’t wake up are often believed to have lost consciousness.
But a new study suggests that a quarter of brain-injured patients who don’t physically respond to commands are doing so mentally. The results were published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study looked at 353 patients who, from the outside, seemed to have lost consciousness due to a brain injury. The sources of these injuries varied from accidents to heart attacks and strokes. Of those patients, 241 were diagnosed as being in a coma, a vegetative state or having only minimal consciousness.
The researchers gave the patients verbal commands, like telling them to imagine themselves swimming or to open and close their hands. For 60 of the 241 patients, there was evidence that they could still perform those tasks in their head. The study refers to this as “cognitive motor dissociation.” Some doctors prefer the term “covert awareness.”
The mental tasks were demanding enough that even some of the other patients who had recovered enough to physically respond to verbal queues couldn’t perform them, said Dr. Nicholas Schiff, an author of the study and a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The findings suggest that covert awareness is more common than originally thought: Small studies previously estimated that around 10%-20% of unresponsive patients had it. The new study is larger than its predecessors.
“It’s both an incredible finding, but also kind of scary,” said Caroline Schnakers, assistant director of the Casa Colina Research Institute, who studies the same phenomenon but was not involved in the new research.
The idea that so many patients “could be able to at least respond to their environment, but are not given the right tools for doing so — that’s very alarming for clinicians,” she said.
Schiff said 1 in 4 patients is likely a conservative estimate.
“We know we missed people,” he said. “We also know that patients who have severe brain injury have what are called fluctuations in arousal. They have good and bad times of the day.”
His team measured patients’ mental activity through brain wave tests and functional MRIs. Unlike a standard MRI, which produces 3D images of the brain, a functional MRI measures activity in the brain based on blood flow. When conscious people are told to follow a command, certain areas of the brain become more active, and blood flow to these areas will increase.
Not all hospitals have this technology, however, meaning doctors could miss out on diagnosing patients. Many hospitals use CAT scans or standard MRIs — along with physical exams — to determine if a patient’s mind is still active. If those tests don’t show signs of consciousness, doctors may falsely assume there’s no hope for improvement.
“They’re going to be treated as if they’re fully unresponsive,” Schiff said. “No one’s going to guess that they’re there.”
Dr. David Greer, chair of the neurology department at Boston University School of Medicine, pointed to one limitation of the study: The patients didn’t all have the same injuries or level of brain dysfunction.
“It’s a fairly heterogeneous group, and I think that has to be a caveat,” said Greer, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Schiff, however, said brain dysfunction tends to be relatively similar across injuries.
Among the patients in his study, young people and those with traumatic brain injuries — the kind linked to external events like falls or car crashes — were more likely to have covert awareness.
“Traumatic brain injury patients are notorious for looking really bad for weeks to even months, and then having a remarkable delayed recovery at six months or 12 months,” Greer said. “Those are the ones that I’m always super cautious about to make sure I’m not making any snap judgments.”
But he noted that even if a patient is conscious, it’s not a guarantee that they’ll return to their normal lives one day.
“The worst message that people can take from this as a family is to say, ‘Oh, they’re in there and they’re going to make a full recovery,’” Greer said. “I think that would be very misleading for families to have that kind of false hope, because many if not most of these patients will still have a severe disability.”
But the findings do offer hope for connecting patients to certain treatments in the future. For now, the options are limited: A Parkinson’s drug, amantadine, has shown some promise in helping people recover consciousness. Some doctors also prescribe Ambien, stimulants or antidepressants.
Brain implants or neuromodulation (using electrical currents to alter brain activity) could represent the next wave of treatments, Schnakers said. She emphasized the need to provide families with options for their loved ones.
“The family will ask, ‘What can we do?’ It’s actually something that we have not thought about very seriously,” she said, adding: “This is not acceptable anymore.”
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《意識理論小百科》簡介 ----- Àlex Gómez-Marín
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Seeing the consciousness forest for the trees
Towards a map of consciousness
Àlex Gómez-Marín, 07/25/24
編者前言：
The American public intellectual and creator of the television series Closer to Truth, Robert Lawrence Kuhn has written perhaps the most comprehensive article on the landscape of theories of consciousness in recent memory. In this review of the consciousness landscape, Àlex Gómez-Marín celebrates Robert Kuhn’s rejection of the monopoly of materialism and uncovers the radical implications of these new accounts of consciousness for meaning, artificial intelligence, and human immortality.
The scientific study of consciousness was not sanctioned by the mainstream until the nineties. Let us not forget that science stands on the shoulders of giants but also on the three-legged stool of data, theory, and socio-political wants. Thirty years later, the field has grown into a vibrant milieu of approaches blessed and burdened by covert assumptions, contradictory results, and conflicting implications. If the study of behaviour and cognition has become the Urban East, consciousness studies are the current Wild West of science and philosophy.
The American public intellectual, international corporate strategist, and PhD in neurophysiology, Robert Lawrence Kuhn is one of the few pioneers attempting to provide some comprehensive order to such a vexed matter. In a recent article entitled “A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications”, the creator and host of the public television series Closer to Truth has begun to rescue such an ultimate frontier of human knowledge from the sterile provincial quarrels, egocentric delusions of grandeur, and myopic glares that plague the field of consciousness research.
The origins of our perplexity in making sense of experience itself can be traced back to Galileo Galilei, who programmatically excluded subjective experience from the purview of science. One can interpret this sagacious move as a means to understand nature in two phases: let us first start with what lends itself to measurement and mathematisation (the “primary phenomena of motion and touch”, in Galileo’s words) and leave for later what resists it. “I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on (…) reside only in consciousness”, he wrote in The Assayer in 1623.
Such a strategy proved tremendously successful, giving rise to physics, then chemistry, next biology, and finally psychology. The progression of scientific disciplines reaped great (but progressively diminishing) returns. Studying matter is, no doubt, hard. But there is something about life and mind that particularly defies the so-called scientific method. Four hundred years later, we can’t ignore the elephant in the room anymore: experience is what makes science possible and yet a proper science of consciousness seems unattainable. The Galilean knot remains untied. Today we call it “the hard problem”.
It is ironic and fascinating to note that the hard problem of consciousness has amplified the “toothbrush problem” of theorists. Consciousness researchers treat their explanations much like toothbrushes: everyone has their own, but nobody wants to use someone else’s. Moreover, until quite recently, most researchers could only get their toothpaste in the supermarket monopoly of materialism, a philosophical doctrine often presented as a scientific fact. But things are changing. To hold on to the analogy, an orthodontics of consciousness is coming about. New comprehensive views are allowing to expand our jaws, correct misplaced teeth, and prevent misaligned bite patterns.
Kuhn’s review is a paradigmatic instance of such an individual and collective reckoning. His is not a normal piece of work. It is a beauty and a beast—a unique creature in content and style. It could have been a book, but he decided to publish his magnum opus in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology as open-access 142-page double-column article. The piece is 175 thousand words long, including nearly a thousand references. In it, Kuhn articulates a taxonomy of about 225 theories of consciousness.
Gathering under the same roof most of the greatest contemporary thinkers of one of the greatest questions one can ever try to answer, Kuhn’s landscape enacts the quasi-extinct art of true scholarship. Very few scholars can see beyond their theoretical bellies, nor would devote the time and effort necessary to put such a myriad of views together with his exquisite intellectual humility and rigour. The living proponents (too often deadly opponents) will still agree to disagree but, at least, they can now see the forest for the trees.
The landscape comprises 10 major categories and it is organised in a gradient of “isms”, from die-hard materialist positions to mind-only propositions. Materialism gets a great deal of space and attention with nearly a hundred authors nested in 10 subcategories, such as neurobiological, computational and informational, homeostatic and affective, embodied and enactive, representational, etc. The landscape also makes some dualisms respectable. The (false) two-alternative forced choice between (promissory) materialism and (ridiculed) dualism is over. Materialism is not the only game in town anymore. Quantum approaches to consciousness do have their deserved place too. We then encounter a great range of fascinating kinds of panpsychism, monism, and idealism. Integrated Information Theory has its own category, remaining the only scientific approach that is philosophically unclassifiable in the landscape.
Remarkably, Kuhn devotes an entire section to “anomalous and altered states”, describing decades-long serious scientific investigations on taboo topics such as extra-sensory perception and survival of consciousness after bodily death. I call them “the edges of consciousness” because they are true frontiers of knowledge and also marginalised (stigmatised and/or ignored) by dogmatic skeptics. The final category gathers “challenge theories” which point to the intractability of the mind-body problem. The piece ends underscoring the implications of all such explanations of consciousness for ultimate meaning, artificial intelligence, and human immortality.
Apart from the imperative presence of the godfathers of the field such as Christof Koch and David Chalmers (and along with other legendary philosophers and neuro-celebrities), it is delightful to find a series of not-so-popular but crucial authors such as David Bentley Hart, Michel Bitbol, David Bohm, Jacobo Grinberg, Dean Radin, Rupert Sheldrake, Rudolf Steiner, and Ian Stevenson. When was the last time you read a piece cordially inviting philosophy, neuroscience, quantum physics, psychical research, theology, and religion to the same table?
Yes, the map is not the territory (nor the terrain). Yes, all models are ultimately wrong (but some are more useful than others). Yes, too often we conflate models with captivating metaphors or cartoonish mechanisms enacting covert metaphysics. And yes, most theories of consciousness aren’t mathematically formulated nor empirically testable. Shall we then rush to prune the landscape? Not yet.
Let us enjoy a real taste of epistemic and metaphysical pluralism after years of philosophical monotheism and neuroscientific chauvinism. Of course brains play a key role in consciousness. But the real question, as William James saw more than a century ago, is whether their function is productive or permissive. Much like the picture of Earth that astronaut William Anders took from the Moon during the Apollo 8 mission, Kuhn’s landscape simultaneously offers an orienting and disorienting experience. We need a larger Overton window from which to contemplate what we know, what we don’t, and what we think we do but actually ignore.
At the end of the day, beyond the sweet dopamine hit of seeing one’s name in the hall of fame, Kuhn’s forest may reveal to each and every fervent tree advocate that they are all missing the point but, additionally, that they all have a point. As Leibniz wrote in a letter to Nicolas Remond in 1714, “I have found that most of the sects are right in a good part of what they propose, but not so much in what they deny”. Isn’t it both commendable and ludicrous to realise that hundreds of extremely clever people think they solved the problem of consciousness and are convinced that everyone else is wrong?
Kuhn’s faithful description of each position without the urge to adjudicate deserves nothing but praise and gratitude. This uncommon ability is an urgent antidote to the academic vice of hearing only one’s own voice while shouting at each other. In fact, if there is something more interesting than consciousness itself is the sociology of its researchers. Let us leave the consciousness hunger games behind and realise that there is plenty of food for thought for everyone. Rather than divide and conquer, let us unite and wonder.
表單的底部Àlex Gómez-Marín：
Theoretical physicist and neuroscientist, professor at the Instituto de Neurociencias of Alicante in Spain, and director of the Pari Center in Italy.
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The mystery of emergence With Suchitra Sebastian, Hilary Lawson, Philip Goff, Jack Symes
Models, metaphors and minds With Kenneth Cukier, Mark Salter, Peter Sjöstedt-H, Joanna Bryson
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