The future of consciousness science is going through very interesting turbulent times. Three decades ago, the C-word was taboo in mainstream academia. Today, it is teeming with all sorts of approaches, techniques, and theories. Then, there wasn’t hardly any signal. Today, there is perhaps too much noise. Join us at the heart of consciousness science, as we delve into an in-depth exploration of the field’s trajectory from its nascent stages to its current state and future prospects. This online series is a unique opportunity to learn from and interact with some of the very minds currently leading the field forward.

In his seminal 1884 observation, Thomas Huxley likened the enigma of consciousness and its relation to nervous tissue to the inexplicable emergence of a djinn from Aladdin’s magic lamp. This metaphor strikingly encapsulates the persistent complexity of what is now known as the mind-body problem. Despite the exponential growth in our scientific understanding, particularly of the brain, we find ourselves scarcely closer to unraveling this mystery than in Huxley’s time.

For centuries, consciousness was considered to be outside the reach of scientific investigation. Yet in recent decades, more and more studies have tried to probe the neural correlates of conscious experience, and several neuronally-inspired theories for consciousness have emerged. In this talk, I will focus on four leading theories of consciousness: Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW), integrated Information Theory (IIT), Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT) and Higher Order Theory (HOT).

This presentation is about whether we can learn anything about consciousness from the free energy principle (FEP). This presentation will first gently introduce the FEP to a general, nontechnical audience. The FEP says that anything with a Markov blanket will look as if it infers the statistics of other things “beyond” the blanket, to which it is coupled, but from which it can be separated. We will then discuss the “inner screen model” of consciousness that follows directly from applying the FEP to model known human neurophysiology. The ensuing neo-Cartesian model of consciousness provides a deflationary account of the “homunculus.”

Discussions about the nature of consciousness are typically couched in a way that endorses a tacit adult-centric and vision-based perspective. Here I will examine the nature of subjective experiences through a bottom-up developmental lens, drawing attention to experiencing subjects as embodied and situated organisms essentially concerned with self-preservation within a precarious environment. How do embodied experiences ‘arise’ from square one?