Consciousness has baffled philosophers since the days of Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece. So it’s helpful to start with some simple definitions. Consciousness is considered the central fact of existence: It’s everything you experience. It gives you a sense of self. Consciousness is focusing on the present, remembering the past, and planning for the future.
The past two centuries of clinical and laboratory studies have revealed an intimate relationship between the conscious mind and the brain – although the exact nature of this relationship remains evasive.
“There is no question the brain is the organ of consciousness,” Christof Koch explains from his home in the US. “And it’s not the entire brain, it’s bits and pieces of the brain.”
The 64-year-old German-American neuroscientist is president and chief scientist of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a key mover in one of the most intriguing experiments imaginable.
Many scientists have proposed numerous theories on consciousness, all the result of independent research. So can a collaborative consensus be reached among the global scientific community as to how consciousness arises in the brain?
In 2018, Koch and a number of other neuroscientists had a meeting at the Allen Institute to address this issue. They came up with a practical solution: to run an adversarial collaboration competition between two opposing hypotheses on consciousness.
The Accelerating Research on Consciousness Initiative began in November 2020. The two theories going head-to-head are the integrated information theory (IIT) proposed by Giulio Tononi, and the global neuronal workspace (GNW), proposed by psycho-biologist Bernard Baars and neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux.
“This collaboration involves 12 labs, where the IIT proponents get together with the
