Abstract
Twenty years ago, Thomas Metzinger published the book "The Neural Correlates of Consciousness" amassing the state of knowledge in the field of consciousness studies at the time from philosophical and empirical perspectives. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of this impactful publication, we review the progress the field has made since then and the important methodological challenges it faces. A tremendous number of empirical studies have been conducted, which has led to the identification of many candidate neural correlates of consciousness. Yet, this tremendous amount of work has not unraveled a consensual account of consciousness as of now. Many questions, some already raised twenty years ago, remain unanswered, and an enormous proliferation of theories sharply contrasts with the scarcity of compelling data and methodological challenges. The contrastive method, the foundational method used to study the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC), has also been called into question. And while awareness in the community of its shortcomings is widespread, few concrete attempts have been made to go beyond it and/or to revise existing theories. We propose several methodological shifts that we believe may help to advance the quest of the NCC program, while remaining uncommitted to any specific theory: (1) the currently prevalent “contrastive method” should lose its monopoly in favor of methods that attempt to explain the phenomenology of experience; (2) experimental data should be shared in centralized, multi-methods databases, transcending the limitations of individual experiments by granting granularity and power to generalize findings and “distill” the NCC proper; (3) the explanatory power of theories should be directly pitted against each other to overcome the non-productive fractioning of the field into insular camps seeking confirmatory evidence for their theories. We predict these innovations might enable the field to progress towards the goal of explaining consciousness.
Highlights
Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears
We remain neutral regarding the different hypotheses that have been advanced in the field and their explanatory power, while at the same we wish to speak to the methodological challenges that lie ahead of us
The initial enthusiasm and the abundance of data obtained through the contrastive method were followed by the development of a number of theories attempting to explain how consciousness fits into the physical world
Summary
Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears. By quantifying which neural activity best correlates with conscious experience, one could begin to narrow down the mechanisms involved in consciousness, and to eventually formulate theories to answer the hard questions of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) This bottom-up strategy has dominated the field for the past thirty years, further propelled by the development of ever more refined methods for investigating the human brain non-invasively, e.g., high-field imaging (7T) with laminar and columnar resolution, and the rapid development of machine-learning algorithms that have enabled researchers to track the contents of perception. We aim to take a critical look at Crick and Koch’s framework for studying consciousness, taking the progress made since as lessons for a renewed strategy for finding the neural processes that give rise to consciousness In this process, we remain neutral regarding the different hypotheses that have been advanced in the field and their explanatory power, while at the same we wish to speak to the methodological challenges that lie ahead of us. We hope addressing the latter will enable us to look at the data and the proposed theories through a new lens and to gain a unified, and acceptable, explanation of consciousness in the not-so-distant future
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