Stanislas Dehaene
Can Machines Be Conscious? The Substrate Problem
The question of whether machines can be conscious is not a parlor trick for philosophers. It is the most consequential engineering question of the 21st century.
The Adversarial Collaboration: IIT vs. GWT in the Ring
In 2019, the John Templeton Foundation committed $20 million to what may be the most ambitious experiment in the history of consciousness science: a structured adversarial collaboration pitting the two leading scientific theories of consciousness against each other in head-to-head empirical...
Consciousness Science at the Crossroads: From the Hard Problem to the Engineering Era
In 1994, David Chalmers stood before an audience at the first Tucson conference on consciousness and articulated what he called the "hard problem" — why does subjective experience exist at all? Why is there something it is like to see red, feel pain, taste coffee?
Transcranial Focused Ultrasound: The New Scalpel for Consciousness Research
For decades, consciousness researchers faced an engineering bottleneck that no amount of theoretical brilliance could solve: they could not precisely stimulate deep brain structures without cutting open the skull. Surface-level tools like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial...
McFadden's CEMI Field Theory: Consciousness IS the Brain's Electromagnetic Field
In 2002, Johnjoe McFadden — a Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, a specialist in quantum biology and tuberculosis, and decidedly not a New Age mystic — published a paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies that proposed one of the most radical and testable theories...