Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind?

What would Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, a very friendly

robot, plus a bevy of scientists, mystics, and wannabe
scholars do at a fancy resort in Arizona? Perhaps real harm to
the field of consciousness studies, for one thing.

By Tom Bartlett June 06, 2018

S
tart with Noam Chomsky,
Deepak Chopra, and a robot that
loves you no matter what. Add a
knighted British physicist, a renowned
French neuroscientist, and a prominent
Australian philosopher/occasional blues
singer. Toss in a bunch of psychologists,
mathematicians, anesthesiologists,
artists, meditators, a computer
programmer or two, and several busloads
Biff for The Chronicle Review of amateur theorists waving self-
published manuscripts and touting grand
unified solutions. Send them all to a
swanky resort in the desert for a week, supply them with lots of free coffee and
beer, and ask them to unpack a riddle so confounding that it’s unclear how to make
progress or where you’d even begin.

Then just, like, see what happens.

The cover of the program for the Science of Consciousness conference, held
recently in Tucson, shows a human brain getting sucked into (or perhaps rising
from?) a black hole. That seems about right: After a week of listening to eye-
crossingly detailed descriptions of teeny-tiny cell structures known as
microtubules, along with a lecture about building a soundproof booth in order to
chat with the whispery spirit world, you too would feel as if your neurons had been
siphoned from your skull and launched deep into space.

Oh, by the way, attendees could also take a gong bath, during which you’re bathed
in the musical vibrations of a gong being struck. Or lie down in a curiously
unsupervised and unstable-looking sensory-deprivation chamber. Or take a black-
light yoga class, which involves — as the name suggests — doing yoga in a room
illuminated by black light accompanied by a DJ pumping out frenetic techno beats.
Meanwhile, a company offered demos of a brain-stimulation device that had to be
inserted way too far up one nostril. And an enthusiastic fellow demonstrated his
Spontaneous Postural Alignment technique, in which a misaligned subject’s elbow
is tapped with a gold medallion while the healer intones, "boy-yoi-yoing."

Please note: This is a bona fide academic conference, put on by the University of
Arizona under the aegis of its Center for Consciousness Studies. There were
plenaries, concurrent talks, a keynote, lanyards, bag lunches, a sense of initial
giddiness that gives way to acute information overload resulting in a desire never to
leave your hotel room again. I took copious notes. I nodded thoughtfully. I
pocketed the complimentary tea bags. I witnessed adults with terminal degrees
utterly defeated by Microsoft PowerPoint.

So, in that sense, it was a normal conference.

In other senses, not. The let-folks-do-pretty-much-whatever atmosphere is a

reflection of the guiding philosophy of the conference’s primary organizer, Stuart
Hameroff, who directs the university’s consciousness center. Hameroff, an
anesthesiologist with an angular gray goatee, a bulldog manner, and a penchant for
bowling shirts, is the author of articles with quizzical titles like "Quantum Walks in
Brain Microtubules — a Biomolecular Basis for Quantum Cognition?" While the
Science of Consciousness event has, technically, three program chairs and an
advisory committee, it is more or less the Stuart Show. He decides who will and
who will not present. And, to put it nicely, not everyone is in love with the choices
he makes. To put it less nicely: Some consciousness researchers believe that the
whole shindig has gone off the rails, that it’s seriously damaging the field of
consciousness studies, and that it should be shut down.

I asked Hameroff about this one evening. He was nursing a Stella Artois and
appeared as if he’d rather be talking to anyone but me. This is what he said: "The
scientists who pooh-pooh the mystical stuff can’t explain the hard problem."

That is true! Though it’s also true that the scientists who embrace the mystical stuff
can’t explain the hard problem of consciousness either. No one can explain it. Why
does it feel like something to be you? What is it that makes us more than just
information processors with feet? Why are the lights on and who, precisely, is at
home?

Nobody knows.

Though some people think they know. There’s something about the topic of
consciousness that, unlike other scientific fields of inquiry, inspires an unearned
feeling of expertise. If you don’t know much about, say, the life cycle of a
protozoan, you probably wouldn’t pretend you did at parties. But because you are
conscious, you might feel as if you can say something significant about the
profoundly complex phenomenon of consciousness. You might even wish to write
down what you feel, laminate it, and thumbtack it to a free-standing bulletin board
for all to see. (In which case, I know just the conference.)
That’s not to say there isn’t serious, fascinating consciousness research going on —
there’s plenty and some of that research was presented in Tucson. Nor would it be
right to imply that consciousness is a trivial topic. In fact, it might be the single
most important topic around, the topic lurking behind all other topics. Minus
consciousness, nothing ​really matters, does it? The permanent loss of
consciousness is what often accounts for our dread of death. Who is and who isn’t
conscious is crucial in a number of weighty moral and medical dilemmas, like
figuring out when to pull the plug on someone in a coma.

It also matters because, as our computers become evermore sophisticated, some

artificial-intelligence researchers worry that those computers will acquire
consciousness. When they do, they might decide to become our best friends. Or
they might, in their algorithmic wisdom, decide to delete their troublesome flesh-
and-blood creators. With that in mind, it’s probably a wise idea to get a firm
scientific grasp on consciousness before we carelessly bestow it on our future
machine overlords. And that’s the sort of issue the Tucson gathering is about.

At least in theory.

D
avid Chalmers is the closest thing consciousness studies has to a rock
star. I sat down with Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural
science at New York University and co-director of its Center for Mind,
Brain, and Consciousness, near the pool at the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort
("You can consider us your desert oasis"), which is located on Tucson’s northern
edge at the base of the Catalina Mountains. At each Tucson conference, Chalmers
climbs on stage and gamely, perhaps a tad drunkenly, bellows his way through
"Zombie Blues," an original composition with informative lyrics such as: "I act like
you act, I do what you do/but I don’t know what it’s like to be you/What
consciousness is, I ain’t got a clue."

The zombies in question are the philosophical variety, the ones that aren’t
conscious but are eerily adept at faking it. It’s a concept that’s useful for illustrating
the oddly personal nature of consciousness and how difficult it is to verify in others
or to satisfactorily define. The seeds for this idea can be traced back to Descartes,
but Chal​mers really ran with it in his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of
a Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press). In short, I can be reasonably
confident that I’m conscious, but I kind of have my doubts about you.

The Tucson conference more or less made Chalmers. He submitted an abstract for
the inaugural gathering in 1994 on what he called "The Hard Problem of
Consciousness." He was still in his twenties and had just completed his Ph.D. in
philosophy and cognitive science at Indiana University at Bloomington, under
Douglas Hofstadter of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame. As Hameroff tells it, Chalmers
prowled the stage during his presentation "dancing like Mick Jagger with his hair
down to his ass." It’s a vivid image if a bit overstated: The videotape shows
Chalmers with shoulder-length hair stationed behind a lectern. But while he lacked
moves like Jagger’s, that 26-minute lecture established Chalmers as a thinker to be
reckoned with and goosed a nascent field into greater prominence.

Consciousness studies had already begun to come into its own. A 1990 paper titled
"Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness," by Christof Koch and
Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, provided a framework for experiments
that might reveal the neural mechanisms that drive consciousness. Daniel
Dennett’s 1991 book, Consciousness Explained (Little, Brown), also helped
increase the field’s visibility, though consciousness researchers today sniff that a
more fitting title would have been "Consciousness Explained Away," because
Dennett suggests that the phenomenon is an illusion. But it was Chalmers’s first
Tucson talk that really caught fire, thanks to his knack for persuasive clarity in what
can be a mind-bending area of study. "It was directly as a result of being here at
Tucson that those ideas blew up big time," he says now. "And obviously that made
a big difference to me too."
For Chalmers, the easy part of consciousness entails mapping exactly what the
brain is doing, whether it’s oscillations in the cerebral cortex or re-entrant loops in
the thalamocortical system. The neurochemical nitty-gritty, in other words. He’s
not saying it’s easy like diagramming a sentence; in fact, it’s likely to take several
more generations, at minimum, before the dots get connected. But those are
technical details. The hard part is sussing out why any of that gray-matter activity
should lead to the feeling of experience, what philosophers call qualia. It’s not
obvious that pinning down the pathways that govern perception and emotion will
mean that we’ll finally get a handle on consciousness. There will still be, Chalmers
and his acolytes contend, a gap that neuroscience can’t bridge.

And into that gap can be thrown almost anything. If you believe in, say, Carl Jung’s
notion of the collective unconscious, that is one-hundred-percent consistent with
the hard problem. Or if you’re sympathetic, as many at Tucson are, to
panpsychism, the idea that all matter, including the chair you’re sitting on and the
dirt under your fingernails, in some sense contains consciousness, that’s cool too.
You can squeeze God into that gap as well. The hard problem practically begs for
creative solutions.

Not everyone shares Chalmers’s neuro-skepticism. In a 2016 essay for Aeon, Anil
Seth, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of
Sussex, who also spoke at Tucson this year, proposed "the real problem of
consciousness," a phrase intended as a poke at Chalmers. Seth argues that we
should be spending our time unpacking the biological mechanisms of
consciousness rather than hunting for mysterious workarounds. The back-and-
forth between those who believe the answer to consciousness lies solely inside the
brain, and those who believe it’s the brain plus something else, has long been a
source of tension in consciousness studies. And while most of the neuroscientists I
spoke with share Seth’s view, it’s a testament to the influence of Chalmers’s 1994
presentation that it’s still being attacked all these years later.
Chalmers has gone from nervy wunderkind to semi-elder statesman at Tucson. You
can usually find him there in the evenings, standing amid the exhibits, sporting a
leather jacket and holding a glass of white wine, waiting for fans to approach. And
approach him they do, asking for career advice, pitching dubious-sounding
collaborations, or slipping him spiral-bound theses. Chalmers listens patiently and
nods inscrutably. One guy in a T-shirt and glasses informed him that the mere fact
that Chalmers had glanced at his poster justified the considerable expense of
attending Tucson. Chalmers nodded. "In principle I’m open to all kinds of
interesting and crazy ideas," Chalmers told me, "as long as they’re pursued
rigorously and carefully and analytically."

For a while, Chalmers and Hameroff ran the Tucson conference together, back
when it was called "Toward a Science of Consciousness," a slightly more humble
label for a fledgling field. But Chalmers quietly withdrew as co-organizer a few
years back — so quietly that Wikipedia has yet, as I write this, to notice the change.
While Chalmers may be open to more crazy-seeming ideas than most, Tucson had
grown too crazy even for him. "I was always trying to drag it back to the
mainstream," he says. "It got far enough out there that I no longer felt comfortable
with it being my product."

Honestly, it’s always been a little out there. In the 1990s, some researchers
complained that there was too much attention paid to wild ideas at Tucson, and so
they started their own conference and organization, the Association for the
Scientific Study of Consciousness, which held its first meeting in 1997. ASSC
became Tucson’s more buttoned-down sibling. Scan the program for its
forthcoming meeting this summer and you’ll see sessions on the "cortical and
subcortical mechanisms of conscious perception" and "understanding the
neurocognitive underpinnings of voluntary act." For a session on "Sustained
Spiritualization of ‘Sant-Su’ Scheme Toddlers Evolving the Race of Supermen,"
you’ll need to go to Tucson.
Chalmers is among the few researchers who maintain a presence in both camps,
and he paints a happy face on the schism. But he can’t completely disguise his
discomfort with what Tucson has become, or with some of the speakers who now
share the stage. While he’s too polite to name names, Chalmers does wonder aloud
"whether the conference should be revolving around spiritual gurus."

P
eople like to touch Deepak Chopra. His hand, his sleeve, his shoulder, the
back of his head. After his panel at Tucson, fans lined up to mildly grope
him and to luxuriate for a few moments in his extra-calm aura. He also led
an hourlong guided meditation that was straight-up magical. I don’t know what it
is about the timbre of his voice, but it worked on Oprah, it worked on me, and by
the end I was primed to believe whatever he was saying.

If not buy whatever he was selling. Along with his many books, the latest of which is
The Healing Self: A Revolutionary New Plan to Supercharge Your Immunity and
Stay Well for Life, Chopra’s name appears on a medicine chest full of products,
including organic hand and body lotion, a rejuvenating facial mist, detoxifying
massage oils, and an herbal remedy that promises to alleviate cold symptoms and
muscle tension. There are Deepak Chopra necklaces and Deepak Chopra
aromatherapy candles and the wireless Deepak Chopra Dream Weaver 3.0 light-
and-sound machine that helps users "reach a variety of interesting and beneficial
states of consciousness." The Dream Weaver can be yours for $199, plus shipping.

It’s products like that, and their accompanying claims, that get Chopra labeled a
New Age profiteer. But what tends to rankle scientists in particular is how he blends
science, or terms borrowed from science, into his marketing patter while
simultaneously casting doubt on the scientific enterprise. And while he likes to post
photos of himself standing next to scientists, he tweets things like "Good scientists
understand that mainstream #science is a form of #pseudoscience."

I spoke with Chopra one afternoon as he walked back to his hotel room. While he
deftly fended off my questions, he effortlessly — unconsciously, you might say —
signed books and allowed fans to take selfies using him as a famous prop. One
young woman handed him a flower. A tall guy with an Australian accent showed
Chopra a piece of paper with a single sentence written on it: "All analysis is wrong,"
it said. The Australian guy asked Chopra if he agreed.

"Yes," Chopra said. "I agree."

I told Chopra that a number of scientists I’d spoken with didn’t want him there, or
at least didn’t think he deserved a speaking slot. He smiled. Whatever you tell
Deepak Chopra, he responds as if he knew in advance what you were going to say.
"I’ve been dealing with this for 40 years," he said. He told me that some of his
harshest critics over the years, including Richard Dawkins, are bigots who don’t
understand what true science is about. "Scientism is as dangerous as
fundamentalist religion," he said. He also told me that the conference should be
renamed "The Consciousness of Science," that "99-percent of your genetic material
is coming from your microbiome," and that "matter itself is a human construct for
human experience."

I wanted to press him on these highly debatable points, including where one might
draw the line between dangerous scientism and true science, but the longer we
stood in the lobby, the more aggressively his fans jockeyed for his attention, until
one persistent gentleman essentially chased Chopra into an elevator. The doors
closed and the guru ascended alone.

While Chopra attracts one sort of audience, he drives another one away —
including scientists like David Cox. A professor of biology and computer science at
Harvard, Cox was recently named director of the MIT-IBM Watson Artificial
Intelligence Lab; he was invited to speak at Tucson about brain mapping. He
declined, explaining in an email to Hameroff that "I wouldn’t expect a geophysicist
to go to a conference where ‘Flat Earthers’ were given equal platform, nor would I
expect astrophysicists to attend a conference populated by astrologers." It wasn’t
just Chopra, though. Other sessions set off his alarm bells, like the ones on
quantum energy. "They say it’s quantum something or other, and it doesn’t make
any sense. The evidence there is just so uncompelling," Cox says. "It’s like they’re
looking for magic dust."

Hakwan Lau has gone to Tucson in the past, but he didn’t show up this year and
doesn’t plan to attend in the future. Lau, an associate professor of cognitive
psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a longtime
consciousness researcher who was inspired by David Chalmers’s work in the 1990s
and pursued consciousness even though he was warned he would never get tenure
if he did (lo and behold, he got tenure). Lau considers what Tucson has become an
embarrassment. "It would be better for the field if it didn’t exist," he says.

And while he’s friendly with Hameroff and Chalmers, he lays the blame at their
feet. He argues that Hameroff runs Tucson like a quirky music festival — the
Coachella of consciousness. When consciousness researchers hear a bad talk at
another conference, Lau says that their snarky shorthand is "This should have been
at Tucson." And even though Chalmers no longer wields any organizational power,
Lau doesn’t let him off the hook. "His denial that Tucson hurts the field is
something that disturbs me," Lau says. "It could be the downfall of his legacy."

I thought George Mashour would counter the naysayers. Mashour, a professor of

anesthesiology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and director of its Center
for Consciousness Science, first went to Tucson back in the late 1990s when he was
a graduate student, and he credits Hameroff for "creating a home for this field."
This year he co-chaired the event. So surely he would vigorously defend it, right?

Nope. He did note the quality of the genuinely thought-provoking plenary sessions,
like the panel on psychedelic drugs and the one on anesthesia (which, in affecting
consciousness, might shed light on the phenomenon itself). But he called the
poster presentations "ridiculousness" and was distressed by the talks that were
mostly conjecture mixed with spirituality and a dash of the quantum. According to
Mashour, though, it could have been even worse: He battled with Hameroff behind
the scenes over the more extreme proposals. "That was me putting my fist down
and saying we cannot accept this craziness," Mashour says. "We don’t want the
field to be marginalized because of some of the unrigorous fringe elements that
show up."

It’s tough to imagine what ended up in the reject pile. I talked to people who hailed
from institutes that, when you Google them, seem not to exist. I stared at
indecipherable diagrams and bewildering charts and listened to bold assertions
about bliss and eternity and electromagnetic fields. I was cornered by an
independent researcher who believes he can explain all natural phenomena with a
single, heretofore unknown formula. They did at least make the boy-yoi-yoing guy
pay for a booth.

I
f you push Stuart Hameroff, he pushes back. The scientists who think Tucson
is a synonym for stupid and terrible? "They’re academic snobs," he says. The
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, the competing
conference, is "boring" and run by "hand-waving brain mappers" (in Hameroff’s
lexicon, "brain mapper" is an epithet). Critics like Hakwan Lau are "reductionists."
David Cox’s email declining to attend Tucson was "snotty." What about the
concerns raised by Chalmers, who is easily the most notable intellectual to emerge
from Tucson? "He grumbles and gripes, but he keeps coming back," Hameroff says.
As for the people who think Chopra undermines the conference? "If they don’t like
it, then don’t come," he says.

Another criticism leveled at Hameroff is that he stacks the conference with talks
about his pet theory involving microtubules, the cell structures that he believes
hold the key to understanding consciousness. His is not a widely shared view; as
Mashour puts it, "There’s only one anesthesiologist who’s obsessed with
microtubules." You’re unlikely to hear microtubules even mentioned at ASSC.
Hameroff at first told me that there really wasn’t all that much on microtubules at
the Tucson conference. When I pointed out to him that the word is used 102 times
in the program, he replied: "If that’s because of me, then good for me."

Hameroff did give some ground. He acknowledged that there’s a "soft underbelly of
not-so-great stuff that you can giggle at." I asked him whether he was, in effect,
running a fantasy camp for presenters who want to pretend they’re academics so
that their registration fees ($550) can be used to bring in big-name speakers, who
not only don’t pay registration fees but whose travel and amenities are covered by
the conference. "That’s a fair criticism," he said.

We also had the following exchange:

Me: "People go to these sessions, and they say ‘Stuart and company think this is
valuable, it’s on the schedule, I’m going to go’ — and it’s horseshit. Not all of it, but
some of it. Aren’t you doing them a disservice by not curating this better?"

Hameroff: "Maybe, but it’s hard to see in advance what’s going to be horseshit and
what isn’t."

Still, when Hameroff calls his own conference "the greatest show in
consciousness," he’s not wrong. It is a show, even a great one at times, if you can
separate the wheat from the insanity. For one thing, it draws a brilliant, eclectic
crowd: I met a linguist turned classical musician, a minimalist sculptor fascinated
by helices, and a Jungian writer at work on a dystopian novel. In addition, there’s a
stimulating frisson when ideas from entirely different domains collide, and it keeps
you on your toes if you literally have no clue whether the next speaker will be a
goofball or a genius.

Speaking of actual geniuses, Noam Chomsky was there. It’s unclear why, because
he doesn’t seem much interested in theories of consciousness, though obviously
his mere presence classes up any would-be academic gathering — and he left MIT
last year for the University of Arizona, so it’s not like he has to fly in for the gig.
During his presentation to a packed ballroom, Chomsky compared the current
state of neuroscience to a marionette: We can examine the puppet and its strings,
but we know nothing of the puppeteer. When a fellow panelist challenged him,
citing recent discoveries, Chomsky breezily dismissed the objection as beside the
point. Chomsky’s rhetorical powers have been endlessly praised, but let’s give a
shout-out to the brutality of his nonchalance. He eviscerates with a shrug.

In an ideal world, Chomsky would have appeared on the same panel with Sophia
the Unconditionally Loving Robot. Sophia has been on The Tonight Show and once
got in a Twitter spat with Chrissy Teigen. Sophia’s a sophisticated, just-human-
looking-enough-to-be-creepy chatbot that can interpret facial expressions and
respond accordingly. Her creator, David Hanson, is a former Disney Imagineer who
comes off like a suspiciously sunny villain in the first act of an apocalyptic thriller.
Hanson seems determined to crank out robots that are increasingly
indistinguishable from humans; he believes that the more humanlike the robot, the
more pleasurable we’ll find it to interact with. That might be true, but it’s also
roughly the premise of the HBO series Westworld, and the outcome in that show is
less rosy than the one Hanson spins. When asked how he plans to inculcate
morality into our mechanical doppelgängers, Hanson’s response amounted to "Eh,
we’ll figure it out."

Equally disturbing was the panel on whether robots will become conscious. Last
year, two prominent consciousness scholars, Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi,
predicted that within decades, machines will be able to "write books, compose
music, direct films, conceive new goals, as well as move, drive, fly, and, inevitably,
fight." (And, if Hanson has his way, look sexy while doing it.) Not everyone is
terrified by the prospect of a robopocalypse. Steven Pinker recently wrote that such
scenarios are based on the risible notion that humans are so moronic that they
would give a machine "control of the universe without testing how it works."
 Paul Werbos is somewhat less sanguine. Werbos, a former program director at the
National Science Foundation, is lauded in AI circles for being a visionary in neural-
network theory, which is at the core of machine learning. He told the audience in
Tucson he believes humanity is in a "very delicate situation" with regard to AI.
"There are computers I know how to build that would be really scary," he said. One
theory that’s been floated is that robots might become conscious, and they might
like us a lot, but that they’ll notice that we’re suffering, feel sad for us, and therefore
murder us all for our own good — a kind of altruistic annihilation.

Or they might not. We’ll just have to wait and see.

O
n the final night at Tucson, they threw an "End of Consciousness" party
that featured women wearing poofy dresses and clown makeup walking
around on stilts, along with a virtual-reality game in which players leap
to their simulated deaths from a skyscraper. Chalmers was there wearing a name
tag that said "Russell Crowe." There was a band, too, and late in the evening the
trio played "Superstition," by Stevie Wonder, a song that includes the following
line: "When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer."

I don’t know if the musicians were making a subtle comment on the current state
of consciousness studies or if they just dig that funky riff. Could be both. It was
nearly midnight. The women in poofy dresses had taken off their stilts. The resort
waitstaff was cleaning up empty beer bottles and partially eaten burgers. Hameroff
sat at a table, looking exhausted. Most consciousness enthusiasts had cleared out
by then, though the band continued to play, and a half-dozen or so die-hards kept
on dancing.

Tom Bartlett is a senior writer at The Chronicle.

Copyright © 2018 The Chronicle of Higher Education