Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

I tend to agree that it does loom on the horizon. The first "winter" came about because consciousness was declared a concern of metaphysics -- and therefore outside of and not amenable to scientific investigation and explanation. In this revival or second potential "winter", they are instead simply denying that there is consciousness (eliminative materialism was the most dominant view at the last ICCS conference).
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Why the 21st century could bring a new “consciousness winter”
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/erik-hoe...sness-wars

KEY POINTS: Big Think recently spoke with Erik Hoel about the possibility that a new “consciousness winter” could once again sideline research into the mind. Hoel argues that the “real bottleneck” in modern consciousness research is a shortage of good ideas. He suggests the creation of artificial general intelligence might lead people to think not that AI is conscious, but rather that it is highly intelligent, and therefore consciousness doesn’t matter much.

INTRO: Roughly 150 years ago, Harvard University’s William James became one of the first educators to offer a psychology course in the United States. Among other ideas, James put forth the notion of a “stream of consciousness” and encouraged his students to explore it, hoping the concept would lead to a spring of new ideas in the nascent discipline.

To no avail. In 1913, psychologist John Watson proposed that legitimate psychology had to be based on what we objectively observe, not suppositions about someone’s mental state. By the 1930s, the reductionist, radical behaviorism of B.F. Skinner dominated the field. Living things (apart from humans) were viewed as automata, and thinking about subjective experience was de facto banned from experimental psychology.

In his most recent book, The World Behind, the writer and neuroscientist Erik Hoel described this period — which lasted until the 1990s — as a “consciousness winter,” an artful phrase that captured the lack of new, groundbreaking ideas in the field. Since then, Hoel writes, we’ve seen a bevy of new ideas and scientific research about consciousness — a true spring if there ever was one. Among them: Integrated Information Theory. At its most basic level, IIT argues that consciousness arises from integrated information within a physical system, and it tries to understand the properties of experience within that system using math and neuroscience.

Hoel would know. He earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under Professor Giulio Tononi, the godfather of IIT. He later created causal emergence theory, which offers a framework for how causality can emerge within a large system when its constituent parts only appear weakly connected — how we are composed of atoms, for instance, and we are conscious, but atoms are not.

After a hiatus to write books — both fiction and nonfiction — and a popular Substack, The Intrinsic Perspective, which seeks to bridge the cultures of science and the humanities, Hoel returned to scientific research, publishing a paper on the math of emergence. I caught up with him to chat about the next generation of consciousness researchers, where he thinks his field is headed, and his fears that a new consciousness winter is coming... (MORE - details)

I know Erik Hoel! I subscribe to his Substack page! Good writer..

Quote:I tend to agree that it does loom on the horizon. The first "winter" came about because consciousness was declared a concern of metaphysics -- and therefore outside of and not amenable to scientific investigation and explanation. In this revival or second potential "winter", they are instead simply denying that there is consciousness (eliminative materialism was the most dominant view at the last ICCS conference).

Hoel seems to think scientists will be the ones who will crack the riddle. But as long as they keep falling into the trap of thinking of consciousness as an epiphenomenon or mirage, then it will still be up to the philosophers and creative thinkers to keep reminding them of the reality and indeed extraordinary nature of consciousness. Like Colin McGinn points out below:

"But in the case of consciousness the Darwinian explanation does not tell us what we need to know, for the simple reason that it is unclear how matter can be so organized as to create a conscious being. The problem is in the raw materials. It looks as if with consciousness a new kind of reality has been injected into the universe, instead of just a recombination of the old realities. Even if minds showed no hint of design, the same old problem would exist: How can mere matter originate consciousness? How did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness? Consciousness seems like a radical novelty in the universe, not prefigured by the after-effects of the Big Bang, so how did it contrive to spring into being from what preceded it.

This big problem manifests itself countless times a day. Every time a sentient organism comes into existence, its consciousness freshly minted, we have the same transition from insentient matter to “mindedness.” Cells combine and grow during gestation until the brain is mature enough to decant experiences: At first this clump of cells is without mentality, and before you know it there is consciousness throbbing away in there. Where does it come from? What manner of secretion is this? How does mere meat turn itself into conscious awareness? Once you were just insentient cells, no more aware of anything than your liver is now. Today you are brimming with consciousness. How did you make the grade? What catapulted you into consciousness? There must be some kind of natural process behind this astonishing leap, but this process is obscure."