Free Republic

A letter, signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week1, has caused an uproar in the consciousness research community. It claims that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something conscious — called the integrated information theory (IIT) — should be labelled “pseudoscience”. Since its publication on 15 September in the preprint repository PsyArXiv, the letter has some researchers arguing over the label and others worried it will increase polarization in a field that has grappled with issues of credibility in the past. “I think it’s inflammatory to describe IIT as pseudoscience,” says neuroscientist Anil Seth, director of...

I just won a bet I made in 2002 with physicist Michio Kaku. I bet him $1,000 that “by 2020, no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, which recognized solid work in cosmology (yay Jim Peebles!) and astronomy, was Kaku’s last chance to win before 2020. Kaku and I made the bet under the auspices of Long Bets, a “public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake.” Long...