Human consciousness is a mystery that has occupied great thinkers for centuries, from philosophers who have puzzled over the nature of the mind to biologists trying to figure out how a network of neurons can work together to create self-awareness. On one hand, consciousness is a basic trait we all have in common; but, on the other, it’s abstract, transparent, undefinable, and—worst of all, from a scientific point of view—unquantifiable. That makes it very hard to study.
Now that may be changing. Over the last few years, Giulio Tononi, an eminent neurobiologist at the University of Wisconsin, has been working on a way to quantify consciousness. He argues that it’s possible to define consciousness mathematically. More than that, he says, it’s possible to measure it. Measuring consciousness—assigning a number to your current state of awareness—might sound impossible. But, using a combination of information theory and neuroscience, Tononi has come up with a plausible way to gauge how much consciousness is unfolding inside a brain at any given time. He’s already taken some rough measurements of people who are awake, sleeping, and even in vegetative or “locked-in” states.
Comments
"I think conscious things are more real [than material things] like stones and cars and mountains and planets. Conscious things are really real. They don't need an external observer. They exist in and of themselves." Oops, I think Prof. Tononi tripped up here. We need to remember that as strange as it sounds, things like stones and planets are a product of culture, and are not "material things" in and of themselves. Indeed a "material thing" is very much a product of Western Civilization, of modern science. A 'stone' in English is quite different from what a stone meant in 4th century BC Athens (which used the word petros) or in 19th century Cherokee (which used the word 'nv-yu'). The cultural origins of these 'things' is even more apparent with the word 'planet'--it was only in the course of the 19th century did science even begin to understand what a planet is. In ancient Hebrew the word for star refers to a burning oil lamp, because that's precisely what it looked like to them. So, Tononi needs to rethink how he constructs his phi, and to take a closer look at what is meant by "real".