Wiring the Brain

Why do we need judges? Why do we leave important decisions to flawed, biased, distracted, even corruptible human beings? Couldn’t A.I. do this job so much better now? So much more cleanly, precisely – without all that messy, human subjectivity? Couldn’t we just submit the evidence to a great big algorithm to determine guilt or innocence? Or, if that involves too much ambiguity, at least to determine appropriate sentencing, taking all appropriate factors into consideration? Shouldn’t there be a single right answer that can be reached in each case?   After all, we have, in most jurisdictions, a constitution that lays out our moral and societal values and guiding legal principles. Of course, these aren’t specific to any situation, so we also have a set of laws that dictate very clearly what’s allowed and what isn’t. Admittedly, we keep having to make new ones to keep up with a changing world, but they’re as comprehensive and up-to-date as our political systems allow. We know what...

Well, now! The consciousness field is all atwitter! A letter has been published, with 124 signatories, claiming that one prominent “theory of consciousness” – the Integrated Information Theory proposed and developed by Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch and colleagues over several years – is “pseudoscience”. That’s a serious charge to level in print, and one that I presume the authors of the letter did not make lightly.    The letter was a response to some of the media coverage around the COGITATE study – an adversarial collaboration which purports to test the predictions of several theories of consciousness in an open and fair way. (You can see here , from Hakwan Lau, some commentary on whether it is actually designed and executed appropriately to achieve that). The letter seems to reflect the growing exasperation of some researchers in the field with the perceived hype and misrepresentation of IIT, its claims, and the results of the COGITATE study, which apparently came to ...