Andy Clark
The Adversarial Collaboration: IIT vs. GWT in the Ring
In 2019, the John Templeton Foundation committed $20 million to what may be the most ambitious experiment in the history of consciousness science: a structured adversarial collaboration pitting the two leading scientific theories of consciousness against each other in head-to-head empirical...
Consciousness Science at the Crossroads: From the Hard Problem to the Engineering Era
In 1994, David Chalmers stood before an audience at the first Tucson conference on consciousness and articulated what he called the "hard problem" — why does subjective experience exist at all? Why is there something it is like to see red, feel pain, taste coffee?
The Extended Mind: Consciousness Beyond the Brain
You are sitting in a cafe, reading a book. The back of your neck prickles.
Rupert Sheldrake: The Experiments That Suggest the Mind Extends Beyond the Brain
Rupert Sheldrake holds a doctorate in biochemistry from Cambridge University. He was a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.
Fecal Transplant and Personality Changes: The Most Direct Evidence That Gut Bacteria Shape Who You Are
Of all the evidence linking the gut microbiome to consciousness, the most unsettling comes from a procedure that most people find viscerally repulsive: fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) — the transfer of stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of a recipient.
Open-Label Placebo: The Breakthrough That Broke the Model
For decades, the placebo effect was understood through a simple equation: deception equals healing. The patient must believe they are receiving a real treatment.
REBUS and the Entropic Brain: How Psychedelics Rewrite Reality
In 2019, Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston published what has become the most influential theoretical paper in psychedelic science: "REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics" in Pharmacological Reviews. The paper synthesizes two frameworks —...