Is There Room for the Soul?
New challenges to our most cherished beliefs about self and the human spirit
Although Crick died in 2004, Koch has continued to work on the subject in his laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In his own book, The Quest for Consciousness, he sounds even more confident than his former mentor that focused work on neurons will soon yield not just the correlates but the causes of consciousness. As he demonstrated during the recent 10th annual conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Oxford, England, Koch can sometimes come across as an affable taskmaster, not quite humorless but still Teutonically firm in telling his colleagues, some 300 cognitive scientists and philosophers on this occasion, where the real investigating should be done.
That domineering tendency surfaces during a debate between him and another prominent consciousness researcher, Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at Oxford and the director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. Koch, a bit of a showman with his red-dyed hair, yellow shirt, purple tie, and red running shoes, reminds the audience that the great moral of 20th-century biology is specificity, indeed, specific molecular machinery. Dismissing fuzzy holistic approaches, he states his belief that "there are very specific neurons that subserve consciousness." The real challenge, he insists, is to develop genetic techniques to selectively activate and deactivate specific groups of neurons to see how they are related to different conscious states.
Greenfield, no shrinking violet herself, makes it clear that she finds Koch's agenda much too restrictive. She is interested in the broader problem of the gap between consciousness and unconsciousness, or, really, the continuum between the two states. "I suggest that consciousness is continuously variable," she says, "that there are varying degrees of consciousness." Greenfield emphasizes the importance of the neuronal assembly-the nets of neurons that extend over wide areas of the brain-and particularly the neuromodulating chemistry that activates these assemblies, bringing them into concerted focus for less than a second, until they are supplanted by the activation of other (possibly closely related or associated) neuronal assemblies. The neuromodulators are the underlying chemistry of mood, emotions, and feelings, and, as Greenfield has written in her book, The Private Life of the Brain, "emotions are the most basic form of consciousness."
It is at moments like this that the definitional fuzziness of the enterprise can hit you full force. Are the two debaters really talking past each other? Are they even talking about the same thing? David Galin, a neuropsychiatrist and professor emeritus at the University of California-San Francisco, makes the point that researchers are often in such a hurry to explain consciousness in terms of their pet theories that they don't adequately examine just what they are trying to explain. "People treat consciousness as a thing," he says, "or as the system that generates the qualia or as the central mechanism that directs how it is employed-and those are all different things."
States of experience. At least some of the philosophers involved with the modern study of consciousness have been aware of this problem from the earliest years of the enterprise. One of them, David Chalmers, now at the Australian National University, is widely known within the field for a speech he gave in 1994 at the first of a series of ongoing biannual conferences on consciousness held in Tucson, Ariz. (Out of these conferences would come both The Journal of Consciousness Studies and the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, a center that Chalmers would come to direct in 1997 and that is now directed by Stuart Hameroff, a professor of anesthesiology at the same university.)
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