Tucson article / Bourdain / Weiskrantz memorial

it's been a rather emotional couple of days. it was Larry Weiskrantz's memorial. and then my favorite living author Anthony Bourdain died. strangely these have been helpful in putting things into perspective, for something i've struggled with for a while.

people often think of Bourdain as a TV celebrity. i enjoyed watching those shows too. but Kitchen Confidential was something else. in a better world that would have been how i like my book on consciousness to read like. but too bad i'm not as good a writer, nor do i think the world is quite ready to accept a scientist to write in that kind of tone exactly.

but i have to say that sense of mourning paled in comparison when i watched Larry's memorial online (https://livestream.com/oxuni/weiskrantz). unlike my relationship with Bourdain, i knew Larry in person. in the last post i also hinted at some interesting kind of academic lineage. but above all, Larry's work defined my adult life. one could sum up all my work on consciousness to date as nothing more than some footnotes to help people understand what blindsight really means. i only got to have work to do at all thanks to people who continue to miss the point entirely (e.g. this; search for the word "judiciously").

it is in this sentimental context that i respond to this piece on the Tucson conference, which just came out. on a different day maybe i would have been more bothered by how lunatic some of my soundbites appeared, when they are somewhat taken out of context. but i guess these are just the nature of soundbites.

i did write to Dave Chalmers to clarify and had a nice exchange of a few emails. thanks Dave for ever having a heart so big to not take offense.

i may write more to clarify later. but for now... whatever is really all i can come up with. i'm sorry. just as Bourdain was important but not nearly as important as Weiskrantz, whatever happens to the Tucson conference is just not that important to me anymore. if you are bothered or intrigued by the article and wanted to talk more, i can only recommend two things.

first is to go to the other conference which is actually run by a professional society. without doing that one really should not be judging the field, making funding decisions for or about it etc.

second is to watch the stream from Larry's memorial (https://livestream.com/oxuni/weiskrantz), and ponder in that context what they mean when people say the modern study of consciousness was revived / reorganized in the 1990s.

to those who know the history - as a field we have made a Faustian pact of sort, and borrowed something we don't deserve via sheer black magic. we should be aware that we will probably have to repay that debt one day. sometimes debts are better settled sooner rather than later, for the interests may well rake up.

i remember Larry Weiskrantz

it's been a long time since i last posted. it's been some funny few months, more than just busy. i'll explain in another post.

today i have to finish a piece that is almost overdue.

***

when i tell people i went to Oxford for graduate school, and i study consciousness, people often ask if i have worked with Larry Weiskrantz. short answer is: no, not really. he only taught me how to tickle myself.

there is a longer version of the story, but i'm sorry that it is no less corny.

when i was a graduate student in Dick Passingham's lab, it was clear from the beginning that i had no idea what i was doing. with inexplicable kindness, Dick trained me from scratch; i literally didn't even know where the central sulcus was.

my general scientific ignorance, together with being a foreign student, mean that often i found it easier to sit by my office and read, rather than to socialize at work. Larry would call in now and then, check on how i was doing. in the beginning he would just crack some random jokes, perhaps to cheer me up as i probably looked miserable and overworked. i wasn't expecting the retired former head of department to be quite so friendly. at one point he realized my real interest was to study consciousness, he seemed ever the more amused. consciousness? with Dick? and a philosophical bent! really!?! oh how wonderful!

we would bump into each other in the corridor, at talks, at conferences, but most often he would call in - sometimes looking for another colleague who worked in the same office - and casually take a peek at what i've been reading. from there we would often talk a little, especially if i were (caught) reading something 'conceptual'. sometimes these 'tutorials' were short, in the form of a pun  - sometimes at the expense of the relevant author - followed by a jolly smile. but sometimes they could be more elaborate, with interesting historical references too.

once i was reading a paper by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Daniel Wolpert, and Chris Frith, an fMRI study on why we can't tickle ourselves. with some pride Larry told me he had done a similar behavioral study decades earlier, and one of the authors was my advisor Dick's wife, Clare! what a small world!

i told him i'd read the paper and come back to chat with him more about it. but he said unfortunately he had to have back surgery and may not see me for a while. before goodbye, he said: maybe next time i see you i can tickle myself~

i did see Larry in a few weeks, and the surgery went ok. i was glad to be able to hear more stories.

but he never told me that in this small world, Dick was also once a postdoc in his lab. had he done so, maybe i would not have been so completely puzzled when Dick told me i could study whatever topic i wanted, when i stayed on to do a postdoc with him after my PhD. i asked Dick: really? i can study visual awareness in your lab even though you told me many times you have little interest in perception? but why?

i have never gotten an answer to that, just as Larry never told me why he had a young postdoc working on action and the prefrontal cortex in his lab, funded by a grant on visual awareness.

they say there are two kinds of scientists: the creative and the careful. Larry was certainly well known for being enormously imaginative, but i think it would be wrong to think he didn't value careful experimentation just as much. you can tell by how he chose his colleagues and collaborators. just as he was quick to crack irreverent jokes, i vividly remembered how stern he looked, with disapproval, when i once described someone else's decade-old study with the details mixed up. from Larry, i've learned that you can be funny and serious at the same time. to do good science, you have to be.

another time we were discussing with another professor how long it may take for one to read a doctoral thesis, and Larry said he would spend at least one day just to check all the references. i don't think that was a joke.

the power of puns and jokes is, they can stay on even if people don't fully get what they mean. i think Larry understood that. what does blindsight really mean? everyone says they know what is it, but do they truly get how deep the implications are? i guess it is our jobs to see to it they do. Larry had done enough for us.

every now and then, as i read papers i thought of how serious Larry was about getting things exactly right, especially regarding knowing the literature. i would recall his stern look of disapproval and feel we all still have a lot of shaping up to do. but as though he would also remind us: don't forget to tickle yourself now and then to see what happens too!

thank you Larry, those puns meant a lot to an awkward graduate student, once trying too hard to impress

between the vanilla & the metaphysical

on social media, the last week has been an interesting one for consciousness. from Anil Seth's pushback againat panpsychism, we see some interesting discussion coming out of it re: the legitimacy of consciousness research. and independently there's also been some relevant discussion by serious AI researchers too.

to recap, a certain pop media article claimed that panpsychism i.e. roughly the idea that simple creatures / plants may be conscious to some degree, is gaining academic credibility. i thought my response was a bit harsh, but one notable 'tweet' may be Adrian Owen's, which openly called panpsychism 'nonsense'. hurray, Adrian~

in truth, much as i agree, i do worry a bit that this may become a war between the disciplines. whereas in neuroscience panpsychism is generally written off, in philosophy some seriously people do take it seriously. some have now expressed the worry that they may get caught in the cross-fire.

that's a point that i think some scientists without my unhealthy level of philosophical bent may not appreciate initially. why would anyone be so crazy to think consciousness is everywhere? in a way, it all goes back to the issue of the hard problem. when it comes to qualia, i.e. the subjective, ineffable, qualitative, phenomenological aspects of conscious experiences, e.g. the redness of red when you see red.... that sort of thing is just not easy to model with an usual reverse engineering approach. when we write programs to do things like humans, we look through the lines of codes, where does it ever say that red has to look a certain qualitative way? why does it have to feel anything at all? it's not clear if there is something it is like to be the program. why isn't color just a wavelength, that is just different from the others? why does it have to feel this very specific way? if there is such a thing as subjective experiences for a program, to be represented by some numbers, the program will work just fine if we had swapped these numbers for red vs green. so long as such 'labels' are consitent, the program will work just fine. but our subjective experiences don't seem to work that way. and because it is so hard to pin down what may be the mechanisms / basis, some radical solutions like panpsychism are considered live possibilities by serious philosophers - maybe qualia is a fundamental property of physical stuff so we can't explain it in simpler mechanistic terms.

to some people, this problem about subjective qualia is a nonsensical problem. it's not even the kind of problem that scientists should be concerned with. to a certain extent, i sympathize. but at the same time, i think it is a legitimate thing - and maybe even important thing - for philosophers to ponder about. to some extent, their jobs are different in nature from ours. it's just good to keep the two businesses separate (in terms of evaluating what's right within each field).

but when philosophers working on these issues start to pretend that certain scientific theories support their worldview (e.g. panpsychism), then we get into trouble. as it turns out, the science itself doesn't support their views. it's just that some scientists endorse their views. but there's a world of difference between an empirically supported scientific theory, vs a theory endorsed by empirical scientists - the latter does not need to be a scientific theory at all. when philosophers cite such poor evidence as supporting their view, i fear it cheapens their philosophy, and they are asking for the backfiring.

so, all good. no need to worry about zombies for now (i.e. roughly creatures who functionally behave like us but have no subjective qualitative experiences). let's assume they don't exists - which is my tentative stance in our recent Science paper by the way, that qualia empirically correlates with certain neural computation in humans, so we should assume they do as such for now.

but there's another worry, from the opposite end. when we try to do this as a Hard Science, do we end up studying consciousness at all? or, are we just studying good old perception or attention, but we call it conscious perception just to sound sexy and cool?

this is the question brought up in a great post by @neurograce, which i find really thoughtful and fair. in truth, that's something i worry about a lot too. i thought i was to reply more directly onto @neurograce's blog, but i think the discussion on twitter more or less took care of it, with some useful input from Ken Miller too, and @neurograce kindly reflected it all on her blog - which i highly recommend.

in essence, the answer is: yes there is a meaningful work to be done, even if we aren't concerned with qualia and zombies and all that. it is just a basic neurobiological question why some processes in the brain are conscious, in the sense that we can talk/think about them, and why some processes are not. a science of the mind is incomplete if we can't say what makes the difference. however, the danger is that we need to make sure when we are talking about unconscious processes, we aren't just talking about feeble, weak, processes. for otherwise, we would just be equating consciousness with stregnth of perception. and in that case we can just talk about perception and do without the loaded c-word. there is something more to it than just strong perception though; there are very powerful forms of unconscious perception, as in the neurological phenomenon of blindsight. conscious perception just seems to be a different sort of process. mapping out the difference is meaningful work. we don't have a perfect solution as to how to do this yet. there's not yet a consensus; it's ongoing, so @neurograce's skepticism & critiques are very much welcome.

we can likewise frame this as a challenge to AI researchers: can we characterize different forms of processing, each of which somewhat similarly powerful, but some allows the system to reflect upon and report of them, and some are more opague to such introspection? like Yoshua Bengio (see this), i do think we may be getting there.... if we are careful not to confound it with other psychological phenomena such as attention, language, depth of processing etc. that is, we really need to make sure we are honing in on the critical mechanisms truly necessary and sufficient to make the difference between the conscious vs unconscious.

as the work becomes more rigorous, the concepts become better defined in cognitive/computational terms, can we just bypass the historical baggage, and avoid the c-word altogether? i think we shoulnd't, because there are already theories of consciousness that are explicitly as such, and some of them can be meaningfully arbitrated. it is odd for those doing this work to pretend we are not studying consciousness per se.

but above all, i also feel we can't sidestep it & pretend there isn't such a problem in the first place. we owe it to the rest of the field to fix this mess. people are going to talk about consciouenss and related issues. as we see in this recent debate between experts of the fear circuit like Michael Fanselow and Joe Ledoux (click the links to see their respective arguments), these are genuine problems, with real clinical and practical implications. between worrying about the metaphysical, lofty hard problems, vs going vanilla to avoid being too controversial, i fear we have not really done our jobs. amid all the pop media noise, we made it look like there are no serious scientific answers to these basic questions. it is time to do our parts.

on combat, part 2; my argument with Stan Dehaene over 13 years ago

.... i was a young postdoc then. like, relatively young even for a postdoc. i was 25. and that's just after 3-4 years of living in an English-speaking country.

some uber-rich people / expats will tell u that Hong Kong people speak English. in reality if you are the average people, outside of the classroom, the most you ever hear are the occasional single English words inserted in Cantonese banters. my English was... ok. or maybe i could even dare say, good, by the standard of a local Hong Kong student. i could talk. but man, it was tiring to talk all day in English. so... that was what i was saying in a previous post. when i figured that you can ask tough questions after talks, or just talk about science, it was a great relief.  instead of not talking at all, to be point of having my office-mates thinking i was anti-social, finally i could interact with people in English! it was just way way way easier than talking about soap operas that i haven't seen, or jokes that i wouldn't ever get, in a pub. you could even read the stuff to prepare before hand~

so in 2005 i had already been living in England for 3-4 years, and was used to that way of talking - always arguing about science. i don't have much of other sorts of vocabulary, frankly. it was ASSC9 (the meetig of the only professional society for scientific studies of consciousness), in Caltech. it was my first time in LA, my current 'home', when i first met people like Christof Koch, Frank Tong, Nao Tsuchiya, Stan Dehaene, Alva Noe, Giulio Tononi, Bruno Breitmeyer etc

i won the James Prize, for a paper that really wasn't that good, in hindsight. i was to subsequently stop doing any of this 'Libet clock' stuff. but still, the paper remains my most cited to date. well at least i get to tell people that i published one of my least favorite papers in Science~

Stan was the president, or president-elect, or something, of ASSC. so he gave a presidential address, talking about how his neuroscience experiments supported the global workspace view. some of you are too young too know, some just don't remember. but back then, this neuronal global workspace thing was huge. it's like, the shining light. it still is, to my mind.

straight away, after his presidential lecture, i gave my James talk. it wasn't exactly prepared or intended as such, but i ended up spending the whole hour criticizing Stan's work, occasionally using the very same figures he had just presented to illustrate what was wrong. the main arguments are summarized here. and then there is a bit of this.

the written works linked above were, of coz, a lot more toned down. but with jetlag, and just winning a prize and everything, on stage it just went straight to my head. and i've always improvised too much in my talks.... i was sheer hostile. it was not really very professional.

i don't think i ever apologized to Stan per se. (sorry, Stan!). but to his credit, even right after the talk, he spent time discussing with me, taking my points seriously. and later on, when i was visiting Paris to do another project, he invited me to give a talk in his lab. he even cited my work, and talked about it positively, in his later papers as well as in his book.

i'd like to think my challenge to the global workspace view has made it stronger. that it could withstand challenges like that is a sign that something is right about it. i had really thought, when i controlled for those performance confounds i was obsessed with, all the prefrontal activations would go away! but they didn't. i've been on the other side to know what the arguments are.

but in any case,  above all i think the field's tolerance to my junenvile behavior is a reflection of its strength too. there is never ever a justification to talk so aggressively & dismissively to colleagues in the way i did. but on the whole, we deal with criticisms objectively, constructively. we take what is useful, and make the most out of it. we realize our limitations, and try to do better. we try our best to not take things personally, becoz there's just no point in doing so. this is how we roll. always has been. 

in fact, i still stand by some of my arguments then too. i still don't fully agree with the global workspace view. but -

thanks, Stan, for everything, and also for everything you've done for the field.

it is in this light that i think people should read Dehaene, Lau, Kouider (2017) Science.

is the use of torture gaining academic credibility?

in the last post i said i would talk about a 13-year-old story, about my argument with Stan Dehaene. but something relevant and interesting happened on social media, which makes me feel i should write about this first

long story short: @david_colquhoun is a highly influential pharmacologist, a fellow of the royal society. he made a few remarks on twitter, that much of consciousness science is futile and unfalsifiable. that has gotten a couple of my colleagues worked up. since i work in the US, i have heard this kind of accusations often, and understand where they are coming from. not that i think they are fair, but i pointed out it is true that the popular media often portrait us in unflattering lights; works and ideas discussed there often represent the least rigorous of us. so it is understandable why an outsider may think we are all idiots.

this has gotten my friend Anil Seth to write this excellent piece, to push back on a pop article titled "The idea that everything from spoons to stones are conscious is gaining academic credibility". perhaps what is even more spectacular, however, is the 'meta-push back' on social media (as Dave Chalmers put it). 

the discussion has gotten confusing, but the point as i see it is simple. you can 'define' academic credibility whichever way you like. but if we allow ourselves to cite a few 'prominent' scientists' metaphysical views as support to mean that certain views are gaining 'academic credibility', we will soon enough to be able to say all sorts of crazy stuff is gaining credibility, e.g. climate change denial, anti-semitism, homophobia, use of torture (there *are* psychologists who have done work on this, very prominent ones no less), etc. just because they are scientists doesn't mean everything they say is remotely warranted by the science they do. (i'm focusing on the use of quotes of scientists here; philosophers are a bit different - in some cases it is their jobs to consider far fetched stuff; when we quote scientists as such we are implying it is a scientifically informed opinion).

on top of that, there is this particular worry: in other fields 'prominence' is usually achieved via peer review. but our peer group in the field of consciousness is small. historical reasons mean that many senior scholars achieved their status not via work done directly in the area; their work on consciousness may not be particularly well liked /respected in the field at all. so citing a few 'prominent' scientists' opinion on consciousness is really dangerous business. when it is clear that the overall consensus of the field does not take a view seriously, to claim that it has gain 'credibility' via a few quotes from a few 'serious guys' is just wrong on so many levels. 

all i can say is, this point has probably fallen on many deaf ears. i understand philosophers have different concerns. above all, they probably don't appreciate how this can reflect very badly on the field as a whole, affecting funding, job prospects for junior scientists. they may not care how a scientific giant like Colquhoun sees us. 

e.g. in response Dave Chalmers insisted he didn't think the our image in the popular media affects our funding and jobs. as someone who has seen how things work first hand, and have to actually participate in these competitions, i can only beg to differ. jobs and funding opportunities are often created for a research topic. in the past decades i've seen many jobs and funding opportunities opened specifically for social neuroscience, neuroeconomics, etc. in the US at least, i don't see such openings for consciousness. and i'm not surprised. these decisions are made by senior colleagues who are often outside of the field, and i know how they think of us in general.

Dave rightly pointed out that if we are putting out a lot of good, rigorous work, we should do fine in the end. but our field remains small. so we're back to this problem - how do we grow, since we have to, if our popular image does not really reflect who we are, and is instead hurting our very capacity for growth? 

Tobias Schlicht usefully suggseted this is all just a science politics game, making impact via media / popular influences. if some 'prominent' scholars didn't make that huge buzz back in the 90s, the field as we know it may well not have existed. that's exactly right. the modern reincarnation of our field was created out of sheer stardom. but as we mature as a science, should we still operate the same way? should there be a point where the consensus within our professional society matters more than the opinions of a few 'authorative' figures?

in honesty, i really think it is fine that people entertain far-fetched metaphysical views. they are totally entitled to do that. but the question is whether these subjective viewpoints should dominate our public image, making funding & policy decisions directly or indirectly on our behalf etc, via their 'prominent' status.

to some, maybe stardom & authority will always matter. i once asked an emminent philosopher a simple technical question, and his reply was essentially that: i don't know, but i recently went to a really fancy & exclusive boat trip sponsored by some wealthy tycoon, and many famous people there agreed with me.

in this age of open science, let this naive scientific millenial, a first-generation high school graduate no less, say this: we don't appreciate this arcane way of donig things anymore.

***
ps - a friend pointed out that this piece could be mis-read. the arguments here are intended to target those who claim / give the impression that science increasingly supports panpsychism. i totally respect the philosophical panpsychists; as i've said elsewhere in this blog if not for Dave Chamlers i wouldn't be here doing what i'm doing in the first place. and these arguments are also not targetted at IIT and its proponents either. i have elsewhere argued against them, but that's that. here i'm talking in general about the danger of pretending something is supported by science when it is not. e.g. when i say certain senior scholars' work may not be respected in the field of coz i wasn't thinking of Christof or Giulio specifically. they are veterans in the field. .... guess i'll have to clarify it in a future blogpost further, probably On Combat 3 or something

reflections on machine consciousness (recent Science paper with Dehaene & Kouider)

when that paper came out, a good friend commented: "it didn't sound like you."

my reply was, ah well, i was just a middle co-author.... :-)

more to the point is, the main idea of writing about AI & consciousness did come from Stan first, and in many ways, i think overall his voice is more prominent in this collaborative effort than mine. Sid has worked with Stan before, so i assume they share many common views. my views are well known to be quite different from Stan's on many issues (will explain more in the next post). arguing over all of them would have been quite some work, but more than that, the trouble is space. the nature of this sort of general reviews is for a broad audience. so much details and intricate stuff are left out. of course there are many things i don't necessarily agree with Stan and Sid, and at times we feel it is more important we put aside our differences. in terms of this i think we have done quite well.

there are still a lot of stuff i hate to have left out. for instance i say this elsewhere too: Victor Lamme's local recurrency view and Ned Block's interpretation / variant are definitely important forces to be reckoned with. but i think ultimately we left them out becoz these views have the core assumption that subjective experience is constitutively disconnected from cognition. in the context of thinking how one many build a machine that will be conscious, they aren't much useful. still i would have liked to have discussed this delicate point more clearly, if we had the space. just becoz the theory isn't useful here if one were to build a conscious machine, doesn't mean the theory isn't true. i independently think the theory is wrong (based on empirical reasons), but if it were true, the whole business of building conscious machines will get very tricky if not downright impossible.

but anyway, i tried to cite as much stuff i think are worth citing as possible. in the end, space limitations means i didn't cite much of my own work at all. in hindsight perhaps i really should have pushed to cite this piece of using decoded neurofeedback to manipulate metacognition, for instance. but anyway, i truly believe that others' work are important too. e.g. this i'm very happy to have cited. so you see, i'm torn, and i've tried. if you feel unfairly ignored, i'm sorry; i'm sure some of my own students and postdocs feel the same way too.

so overall, i wouldn't say i totally took the backseat in this exercise. there are specific ideas that i am happy to have brought to the table: the idea that perceptual reality monitoring may be a particularly important aspect of C2 processing; the relationship between that Generative Adversarial Networks, in particular how currently they don't address perceptual reality monitoring and this may well be crucial; the argument that empirically losing C1 & C2 does mean you lose subjective experience, for example.

naturally, others commented, and we had to respond. some of the ideas that i insisted on including (as listed above) became handy - apparently they just missed them on first reading. of coz just having some C1 and some C2 doesn't mean you are conscious - you have to have the right kind, implemented the right way, and that's exactly the point of the exercise in making the first step in mapping these out.

one anecdote is, in checking the copyedited proofs, i found that the tone of the piece was edited somewhat such that we sounded more confident than we had. i asked for it to be toned down a bit, but it may still be much....

overall, i think this may be most interesting point to some: are we really so sure as to say we already know how to build a conscious machine? no, not really. for me personally, may be not at all. you know i tend to emphasize on a more conservative, foot on the ground, empirical approach. that philosophy remains. but the issue here is that the question of machine consciousness will no doubt arise. currently, the so-called more mathematical theories are, to my mind, non-starters. it would be nice if we can agree on how to demonstrate consciousness, a Turing test of sort for qualia. would be nice .... but good luck. so all we are suggesting is, instead of going for some abstract theoretical proof or consensus that we'll never get, why don't we start with the brain? like, a good ol' empirical science approach - as an alternative, realistic solution to this pressing issue that is for sure going to arise sooner or later? if we understand enough about brain computations, and know which kinds are conscious which kinds are not, we can say meaningfully say how much an artificial cognitive architecture mimics human consciousness. ultimately, that may be the best we can do - just as how we may be able to say whether some animals are conscious. all of this means: the NCC project is not done. more empirical work is still needed. but we would do well to focus on this first rather than something else - something wilder.

in this sense, this doesn't sound like a very strong revelation. in fact, i would say it sounds almost boring / commonsense. then why take the trouble to write this? i guess the 3 of us all feel that, there is some urgency to this becoz in recent years the field might have shown signs of slipping off to a different direction. as i have expressed here earlier,  such theoretically-indulgent direction may be extremely dangerous. to me, it is a problem of some urgency. we are at such crossroad, right here. i'd like to think this is what brought Stan and i together, which, i have to say, sappy it may sound, warms my heart. because as some of you know, Stan and i had once disagreed rather intensely ......

how much did we disagree exactly? why is the agreement of that both C1 and C2 are important and perhaps conceptually orthogonal aspects of consciousness such a remarkable progress? well, nearly 13 years ago, a foolish young man misbehaved .....  for this, we have to resume to the series On Combat....

on combat, part 1

(to those of you who just wanted to know why i asked the anatomy question the other day re: where to place the central sulcus, feel free to skip the first part and go straight to the apart below ***)

happy 2018~

before xmas i said i would talk about what it means to argue, sometimes rather intensely and heatedly, with close colleagues & friends. so here it is, a multi-part essay on the pros and cons of this sort of academic 'lifestyle', contra being a civilian, where does all this come from, and all that.

i use not to know how to call it. aggressive? critical? contentious? argumentative? play fighting? as is often the case about finding the right words, i think Ned Block has it - 'combative' is the word i borrow from him here.

although Ned is my grand-teacher (he taught Joe Lau, who taught me most of the philosophy i know), we hardly ever see each other eye to eye re: our own views on consciousness. but it is exactly through arguing with him over and over that i've learned so much. he is by far my favorite debate opponent. someone i can count on to catch the kitchen sink with a smile when you throw it at him as hard as you can - and then he'll give you a reply that got you thinking for weeks. no offence will ever be taken personally becoz we both know this is good for you - if you care about getting things right.

in a way, i'd like to think of it as a form of humility. given how hard the problem it is that we're dealing with, how little data we have (because we aren't really funded by the mainstream national agencies, at least in the US), the only way to know if our theory is any good is by testing it through harsh criticisms. we have to learn not to be annoyed by our critics, however nitpicky or destructive we feel they are. the devils are often in the details. & if you can't stand this sort of arguments, are prone to take things personally, you just have no business in studying consciousness.

one funny thing is, if you do this kind of arguing often and for long enough, you also get to develop a certain kind of taste. you'll know when some views are just not solid enough, from the sheer smell of it. you know if you go poke it, it would just fall apart. no number of big equations can mask sheer nonsense, or superficial trivial rubbish. for this reason, i do enjoy chatting with Ned a lot about other people's work. there, we usually agree, ironically. seeing him in conferences provides much moral support - "yeah that stuff is BS... such a shame that it came out at a keynote." ... but meanwhile we still won't ever agree about our own views.

besides Ned & Joe, my doctoral father (and postdoc advisor) Dick Passingham has a great influence on me too, of coz. though he never fully approved of my philosophical bent, he himself studied philosophy as an undergrad. i'd like to think his style of argumentation often has the same flavor. we destroyed each other's views and ideas on a regular basis. there was not ever a tough question too 'nasty' to be asked - one thing i learned as a young grad student at Oxford was, so long as you ask it in a posh voice, and ask it at the end of the seminar talk rather than interrupting people in the middle, the tougher the question was, the better. it was a real disappointment to learn later on that such culture was not universal across departments and countries. as an awkward foreigner, doing that was at at some point somewhat easier and more enjoyable than chatting with people 'casually' in the pub, where the conversations can go into any directions, with cultural references that i didn't have clue about.....

***

i have mentioned previously that this commentary on IIT was one of the more 'serious' (as in provocative) pieces of writing i've done last year. but actually, thinking more about it, i think this paper with Brian Odegaard & Bob Knight was the real deal. maybe not just for 2017, but in recent years. funny though, the 'opponents' are the same people (who defends IIT, i.e. Koch, Tononi, Tsuchiya, Boly, etc).

we knew already for some time that if we don't ask people to press buttons to report, simple fMRI activity decreases in the PFC. that's not really new & it doesn't mean that the area isn't still doing something meaningfully re: conscious perception, as quite easily measurable by other methods (including just slightly more modern ways of doing fMRI, such as MVPA).

unfortunately, the confusion grew in the literature again in the past few years, in ways that i think are just getting out of hand. i have defended the role of PFC in consciousness previously, but am really not sure if it is so easy set the record straight this time. along with catchy phrases like 'no report paradigm', several claims that are empirically misleading/plain wrong (e.g. PFC activity does not reflect perceptual content) seem to have caught on, as they appeared in multiple high profile reviews.

i hope Brian's piece will do some good in clarifying the issues. it is by far one of my favorites of all papers coming out from my lab recently. tighly argued, concise, fair, thorough. i certainly couldn't have done a better job myself if i did it solo. it makes me happy & proud that Brian has taken our 'family' style of writing & argumentation and developed it into something better - something more mature. i hope Joe & Dick will both see their influences there too. (ok, enough self praise, please go read it yourself).

and of course, i've been corresponding with Melanie (Boly) about this too. i'd like to think overall we have the better arguments. but as usual, the devils are in the details. one case study comes down to where we place (i.e. label) the central sulcus......

see below: which of the two ways of labeling the sulci strike you as more plausible?



... the above brain has gone through frontal lobectomy so we can't estimate where the central sulcus is from the front end; we don't know how much was cut. but from the parietal end we should be able to tell where it is more likely to be central sulcus. i recommend you make a choice between the two first, and then read Brian's paper, and focus especially on Boly et al's comments near the end of our piece.

it does get hairy, doesn't it? and this is just about the sinlge case (reported by Brickner). such is the way of science. what worries me is: if we as a field can't resolve such relatively straightforward empirical issues, what business do we have in talking about more slippery things like IIT?

the debate goes on...... & if you worry that this is getting a little intense, or that some of us may take this personally, you probably understimate us as a field..... (to be continued)