Science and the Quest for Consciousness

HISTSCI 1771 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

In 1990, in a paper cited more than 3,000 times, Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist Francis Crick and neurobiologist Christof Koch declared "the time is now ripe for an attack on the neural basis of consciousness." Thirty years later, though, we have largely lost the bullish certainties of the 1990s. People still speak of "consciousness studies," but it is unclear who polices the borders of that field. Instead, we see increasing interest in phenomena that even a decade ago would have been beyond the pale, from psychedelics to near-death experiences, to deathbed visioning, to lucid dreaming. The spaces in which consciousness research happens has also expanded: no longer just the neuroscience lab, but the hospice, the meditation retreat, the ICU, the operating theater, the wildlife preserve, and AI research labs. This course is an invitation to travel to these spaces and others, to try to understand what is happening in each of them, how they relate to one another, and what it would mean, really, for science to understand consciousness.