Neuroscience's approach: NCCs and Global Workspace Theory

Context

The DNA man changes the subject. Francis Crick spent his second act on what he called "the astonishing hypothesis": that consciousness is entirely the behavior of nerve cells, and — more provocatively — that it could be studied now, with electrodes and psychophysics, rather than deferred to philosophy. With Christof Koch in the early 1990s he proposed the research program that still frames the field: find the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, the minimal neural activity sufficient for a specific conscious experience. It was a deliberately modest wedge — correlates first, explanation later — and it made consciousness a respectable laboratory subject for the first time in a century.

The leading theory inside the program. Global Workspace Theory (Baars 1988; made neural by Dehaene and Changeux) holds that consciousness is broadcast: many specialized processors compete, and the winning content is globalized to a "workspace" accessible to memory, report, and planning — consciousness as fame in the brain. It fits the data from masking, attentional blink, and ignition experiments unusually well, and it is quietly deflationary: if GWT is the whole story, the hard problem shrinks toward an easy one.

Science betting against itself, in public. In 1998 Koch bet Chalmers a case of fine wine that the NCCs would be nailed down within 25 years; in June 2023, at the field's New York meeting, he handed the wine over. The same meeting reported the first results of a pre-registered adversarial collaboration — IIT and GWT forced to state divergent predictions in advance, tested across multiple labs, published in Nature (2025): mixed results, both theories wounded, neither falsified. Imperfect, contested, and still one of the healthiest things to happen to consciousness science — a field learning to make its theories risk something.

How to read it

Anchor. Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain. The clearest presentation of GWT by its leading working scientist. ~12 hours.

Companion. Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself — a GWT-adjacent scientist who converted to IIT. Read critically; he's a convert and it shows — which is exactly why he's useful.

Companion (context). The adversarial-collaboration Nature paper plus one commentary. ~2 hours. Know what was tested and what wasn't resolved.

The methodological question to carry into the next unit: why do many working neuroscientists prefer GWT to IIT on method, not evidence?