Name: Megan Peters (Associate Professor of Computational Cognition, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London)

Title: Can we arbitrate theories of consciousness with cognitive and computational neuroscience approaches?

Abstract: How does your brain create conscious subjective experience? Everybody has a theory. Some people have very “mature” theories. Some people argue that their theory is the one that has the most empirical support. But we definitely don’t have a “leading theory” of consciousness — in part because the explanations, empirical support, and even target metaphysical construct change from one theory to the next. I co-lead two branches of two ‘adversarial collaborations’ on consciousness, seeking to arbitrate among pairs or clusters of theories using all sorts of tools in a cognitive computational neuroscientist’s toolkit, from psychophysics to machine learning to neuroimaging, targeting “first-order” and “higher-order” theories. In this talk, I’ll share our ongoing work and findings. Has one theory lost one of these contests yet? You’ll have to come to the talk to find out.

Website: https://meganakpeters.org/ and https://www.reflexionlab.io 

Bluesky: @meganakpeters