If this description leaves you wondering how this kind of research is really going to help us understand consciousness, it may well be that you already have an intuitive feel for what David Chalmers was referring to when he distinguished between the “hard problem” and the “easy problems” of consciousness. By Chalmers' definition, Koch's work, and that of the other panelists, is entirely concerned with one of the easy problems. No matter how clear a snapshot we can get of what type of neuronal activity correlates with which sorts of conscious perceptions, we will still be no closer to understanding how the brain could possibly produce something like conscious experience itself. As philosopher John Searle wrote in a recent review of Koch's latest book, The Quest for Consciousness, “The subjects on whom these experiments are performed are already conscious. . . . So the most we can reasonably expect from this research is an explanation of how, within a brain that is already conscious, we can cause this or that perceptual experience. . . . In my view we will not understand consciousness until we understand how the brain creates the conscious field to begin with.”

During the question-and-answer session following Koch & co.'s presentation, the questions ranged from experimental technicalities to quantum physics to the paranormal. One woman asked Koch how his “neurobiological framework for consciousness” would account for near-death experiences in which patients are able to report on events that happened while their brains were not functioning. Koch's curt reply was, “If they're having an experience, there must be neural correlates. I'd need to see a double-blind study.” As I was pondering just how one would go about recruiting volunteers for such a study, I made my way to the stage to introduce myself to Chalmers. Engrossed in the business of conference organizing, he paused for a brief chat—until he connected my name to the magazine I'd sent him before the conference. Obviously pegging me for someone on the “fringier” end of the spectrum, he asked: “How would you feel about moderating the panel on Nonlocal and Paranormal Effects? The person we had scheduled didn't show up.”

Always up for a little stage time, I smiled. “Sure, when is it?”

“It starts in ten minutes.”

“Do I need to know anything? I'm not really an expert in the paranormal.”

“No, you'll be fine. Just get there in time to talk with the panelists beforehand.”

Let a thousand flowers bloom

Compared to the auditorium-sized plenary session; the breakout room with seats for about a hundred and fifty felt almost cozy. By the time I had found my way through the maze of hallways, all of the panelists had arrived, as well as most of the audience. Catching my breath, I did the fastest four interviews of my life, thought up a few jokes about materialism for my opening comments, and proceeded to try to lay out some context for the session.

The first panelist was prominent paranormal, or psi, researcher, Gary Schwartz, whose book The Afterlife Experiments reports on a series of experiments done with spirit mediums that suggest strongly that whatever consciousness is, it seems to be able to survive physical death. Schwartz, who runs the Human Energy Systems Lab at the University of Arizona, delivered a robust talk in which he summarized this impressive body of research, and expressed his frustration with the mainstream scientific community's unwillingness to even consider what it might mean for our understanding of consciousness. He was followed by Katherine Creath, another researcher from the UA psi lab, who presented evidence for intentional remote energy healing—of plants. Using biophoton imaging technology, Creath found that “energy healers” from three different disciplines were able to significantly increase biophoton emissions (a sign of health) in injured plants, simply by “treating” them with the intention to heal. After my joke about never eating salad again failed to rouse the expected laughs, we moved quickly on to a talk on remote viewing by a young student from Florida and a presentation of research by a German scientist showing that we can consciously “will” the nervous systems of others into a calm state, even at considerable distance.

Following the materialism of the opening panel, I found it something of a respite to spend a bit of time contemplating the mysteries of consciousness beyond the brain. Given the conference's clearly neuroscientific bent, I was surprised to find a session so far outside the scientific mainstream. Indeed, over the days that followed, I was intrigued to discover that, in addition to a plethora of sessions devoted to discussing the intricacies of the brain, there was also a wide range of presentations on topics that would generally be considered fringe. One well-attended session explored the current state of research on “meditation and consciousness.” Another, entitled “Art and Consciousness,” included a talk on the relationship between altered states of consciousness and “visionary art.” Stanford's Stephen LaBerge gave a workshop on lucid dreaming. And one of the plenary sessions was even devoted to research on the effects of psychedelic drugs.

Perhaps not quite as fringe, but no less far out, were several presentations from the artificial intelligence crowd on the possibility of building conscious robots, and a surprising number of panels and papers on models employing quantum physics to explain the relationship between consciousness and the brain. Over lunch one afternoon at a nearby Mexican restaurant, I asked Chalmers how a serious academic conference had remained open to such a wide range of approaches. Pausing momentarily from his chicken burrito, he replied, “There is so much that we don't understand about this that it's always been our approach to 'let a thousand flowers bloom.' There's room here for everybody, precisely because we don't know where the answers are going to come from.”

But despite the conference organizing committee's open-mindedness in embracing alternative thinking, it was nonetheless clear which camp is gaining the most ground. For although a thousand flowers may have been blooming in Tucson that spring, there was little doubt where the vast majority of them were rooted: in materialism and its fervent aspiration to reduce all human experience to the workings of the brain.

Indeed, though I had come to Tucson in full awareness of the conference's materialistic focus, as the week wore on, the larger implications of what it would actually mean to demonstrate the neurobiological basis of consciousness began to set in. And it is a disconcerting picture, to say the least. If consciousness is, in fact, created by the brain, it turns out, very little of our commonsense picture of reality is true. Over the course of the week, I learned several important things:

1) free will is an illusion

2) so is the self

3) consciousness sort of is, too, or at least, it doesn't do anything

4) even if we were to discover that we are living in the “Matrix,” we should act as if it's real, and not worry about it. In other words, Neo took the wrong pill.

Having jumped in at the deep end, by the end of the conference, I was more or less thoroughly confused. In part, my confusion was conceptual. As a layperson, trying to listen in as professionals debate the finer points of brain science, AI, and philosophy of mind is not exactly an easy entry into the territory. I often found myself asking whoever was sitting next to me to translate what had just been said into “English.” But I think the deeper source of my confusion was on a human level. Having someone look you in the eye and calmly tell you that they are “nothing but a complex of algorithms”—or worse, that they “have no conscious control over their actions”—is the kind of thing that makes you start scanning the room for a security guard. Over and over as the week wore on, I found myself wondering how it was that so many people could become so convinced of ideas that run so counter to our most basic experience of being alive. Given all the talk about artificial intelligence, I secretly began to suspect that, in fact, the speakers were all sophisticated robots programmed to try to convince us that we were too. I left the conference even more determined to understand the roots of this strange predicament, but I knew that before I could, I would have to figure out why it was that scientists are so sure that we are nothing but our brains.