Photo © the author Tim Parks, novelist, essayist and translator, is the author of nineteen works of fiction, including Europa, shortlisted for the Booker. He is a regular contributor to both The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books. He lives in Italy, where he teaches literature and translation studies at IULM in Milan.

Photo © Giulio Manzotti Riccardo Manzotti is a philosopher, psychologist, and robotics engineer who has written more than 50 scientific papers and several books, among them The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One. A former Fulbright Visiting Scholar at MIT, he is now visiting professor at UAEU University (Emirates).

Does Information Smell?

In our first two dialogues, we presented the standard, or "internalist" version of how our conscious experience of the world comes about: very bluntly, it assumes that the brain receives "inputs" from the sense organs-eyes, ears, nose, etc.-and transforms them into the physical phenomenon we know as consciousness, perhaps the single most important phenomenon of our lives. We also pointed out, particularly with reference to color perception, how difficult it has been for scientists to demonstrate how, or even whether, this really happens. Neuro¬scientists can correlate activity in the brain with specific kinds of experience, but they cannot say this activity is the experience. In fact, the neural activity relating to one experience often seems nearly indistinguishable from the neural activity relating to another quite different experience. So we remain unsure where or how consciousness happens. All the same, the internalist model remains dominant and continues to be taught in textbooks and broadcast to a wider public in TV documentaries and popular non-fiction books. So our questions today are: Why this apparent consensus in the absence of convincing evidence? And what new ideas are internalists exploring to advance the science? -Tim Parks

Tim Parks: Riccardo, I know I should be asking the questions, not answering them. But I'm going to suggest that one reason for this consensus is that we are in thrall to the analogy of the brain as computer. For example, a recent paper I was reading about the neural activity that correlates with the sense of smell begins, "The lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) computes and transfers olfactory information from the olfactory bulb to the hippocampus". Words like "input", "output", "code", "encoding", and "decoding" abound. It all sounds so familiar, as if we knew exactly what was going on.

Riccardo Manzotti: We must distinguish between internalism as an approach to the problem of consciousness (the idea that it is entirely produced in the head) and neuroscience as a discipline. The neuroscientists have made huge progress in mapping out the brain and analyzing the nitty-gritty of what goes on there: which neurons are firing impulses in which rhythms to which others, what chemical exchanges are involved, and so on. But you are right: the way they describe their experiments by way of a computer analogy-in particular of information processing and memory storage-can give the mistaken impression that they're getting nearer to understanding what consciousness is.

Photo © the author Tim Parks, novelist, essayist and translator, is the author of nineteen works of fiction, including Europa, shortlisted for the Booker. He is a regular contributor to both The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books. He lives in Italy, where he teaches literature and translation studies at IULM in Milan.

Photo © Giulio Manzotti Riccardo Manzotti is a philosopher, psychologist, and robotics engineer who has written more than 50 scientific papers and several books, among them The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One. A former Fulbright Visiting Scholar at MIT, he is now visiting professor at UAEU University (Emirates).

Does Information Smell?

In our first two dialogues, we presented the standard, or "internalist" version of how our conscious experience of the world comes about: very bluntly, it assumes that the brain receives "inputs" from the sense organs-eyes, ears, nose, etc.-and transforms them into the physical phenomenon we know as consciousness, perhaps the single most important phenomenon of our lives. We also pointed out, particularly with reference to color perception, how difficult it has been for scientists to demonstrate how, or even whether, this really happens. Neuro¬scientists can correlate activity in the brain with specific kinds of experience, but they cannot say this activity is the experience. In fact, the neural activity relating to one experience often seems nearly indistinguishable from the neural activity relating to another quite different experience. So we remain unsure where or how consciousness happens. All the same, the internalist model remains dominant and continues to be taught in textbooks and broadcast to a wider public in TV documentaries and popular non-fiction books. So our questions today are: Why this apparent consensus in the absence of convincing evidence? And what new ideas are internalists exploring to advance the science? -Tim Parks

Tim Parks: Riccardo, I know I should be asking the questions, not answering them. But I'm going to suggest that one reason for this consensus is that we are in thrall to the analogy of the brain as computer. For example, a recent paper I was reading about the neural activity that correlates with the sense of smell begins, "The lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) computes and transfers olfactory information from the olfactory bulb to the hippocampus". Words like "input", "output", "code", "encoding", and "decoding" abound. It all sounds so familiar, as if we knew exactly what was going on.

Riccardo Manzotti: We must distinguish between internalism as an approach to the problem of consciousness (the idea that it is entirely produced in the head) and neuroscience as a discipline. The neuroscientists have made huge progress in mapping out the brain and analyzing the nitty-gritty of what goes on there: which neurons are firing impulses in which rhythms to which others, what chemical exchanges are involved, and so on. But you are right: the way they describe their experiments by way of a computer analogy-in particular of information processing and memory storage-can give the mistaken impression that they're getting nearer to understanding what consciousness is.