David Gamez

The Science of Consciousness and Scientific Theories about the Brain

Scientific research on consciousness has had promising results, but it remains entangled in philosophical problems, such as the definition of consciousness, the hard problem and the causal relationship between consciousness and the physical world.  We lack clarity about the form that a scientific theory of consciousness should take.

The first part of this talk will explain how the philosophical problems with consciousness can be neutralized with a framework of systematic assumptions. These enable us to measure consciousness, measure the physical world and develop mathematical theories of consciousness that map between formal descriptions of conscious states and formal descriptions of physical states. Computational methods could be used to discover theories of consciousness automatically.

The second part of this talk will make some speculative suggestions about how this approach could be used to develop general theories about the relationship between the brain and its behaviour. At the present time we have large-scale measurements of the brain and detailed information about the functioning of its individual components. We do not have testable mathematical theories that connect neurons' microscopic operation with the brain's macroscopic external behaviour. To address this problem we need to develop formal ways of describing the brain's external behaviour. We can then use machine learning to discover mathematical theories of the brain that can make testable predictions about its external behaviour. This approach could be prototyped on simulations of the nematode worm C. elegans.