++The science of consciousness still has no theory. +
++In 1998, at the conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), the neuroscientist Christof Koch made a bet with the philosopher David Chalmers: by 2023, science would be able to explain how the brain’s tangle of neurons gives rise to the phenomenon we call consciousness. The winner would get a case of wine. +
++Koch was a professor of cognitive biology who helped pioneer the mechanistic study of the “neural correlates of consciousness,” which maps the relationship between brain activity and subjective experiences. He believed that consciousness was fundamentally measurable and that it was only a matter of time before science identified how it arose in the brain. +
+ ++Chalmers was both a philosopher and cognitive scientist who was skeptical that science would be able to build explanatory bridges between neural correlates in the brain and the subjective experience of consciousness. Famously, he called consciousness “the hard problem,” which he believed was sufficiently challenging to keep any explanation of consciousness at bay for at least a quarter of a century. +
++At the 26th ASSC conference this past weekend, 25 years after the initial wager, the results were declared: Koch lost. Despite years of scientific effort — a time during which the science of consciousness shifted from the fringe to a mainstream, reputable, even exciting area of study — we still can’t say how or why the experience of consciousness arises. +
++Galileo split consciousness away from science 400 years ago +
++While the Western science of consciousness only grew into a reputable field over the past few decades, part of the reason answers remain so elusive may be buried in the deep structure of scientific inquiry itself, reaching back to the 1600s. +
++The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei is widely credited with inventing the scientific method. As the philosopher Philip Goff recounts in his 2019 book Galileo’s Error, in order to formalize the study of objective qualities like size, shape, location, and motion, Galileo bracketed out the fuzzier domain of conscious experiences. The modern scientific endeavor he helped create is a study of the universe shorn of what Galileo called the soul, and what we today might call sensory qualities, the gestalt of what consciousness feels like. The scientific method can explain the electrical activity that sparks in the brain when you jump into a freezing lake, but it can’t explain why a subjective experience of invigoration comes along with it. +
++“Those sensory qualities have come back to bite us,” Goff writes. “Galileo’s error was to commit us to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious.” +
++In other words, Galileo’s scientific method required walling off the study of consciousness itself, which is why it’s perhaps not surprising that even centuries later, his method’s inheritors still struggle to explain it. +
++New avenues in the science of consciousness +
++As the years passed, Chalmers and Koch forgot about their bet, but in 2018, the science journalist Per Snaprud brought it back to their attention. A few years later, as part of a $20 million project supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, a series of “adversarial experiments” were designed to pit theories of consciousness against each other, including global workspace theory (GWT) and integrated information theory (IIT). +
++GWT imagines consciousness as a theater: The brain is populated by a crowd of local information streams, but only what gets broadcast to the whole crowd — put onstage — becomes conscious. IIT identifies consciousness with the degree of, yes, integrated information, represented by the Greek character phi (Φ). The more phi, the more consciousness. +
++Preliminary findings from one Templeton-sponsored gauntlet comparing GWT and IIT were presented at the recent ASSC conference and ultimately used to settle the Koch/Chalmers bet. Six independent laboratories followed a shared protocol designed to test how well each theory could predict brain activity. IIT fared slightly better than GWT, but neither made entirely accurate predictions. This uncertainty was enough to make Chalmers the victor, while scattering researchers off to update the theories or consider new ones altogether. +
++Goff’s preferred resolution is to reintroduce consciousness into our understanding of nature by way of a secular version of panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous element of the physical world. In this view, physical sciences à la Galileo describe matter from “the outside.” Consciousness is also a property of matter, but matter as experienced from the inside. +
++Meanwhile, Karl Friston, the world’s most-cited living neuroscientist, has an idea called the free-energy principle. Stripped of all the math, it suggests that the behavior of all living systems follows a single principle: To remain alive, they try to minimize the difference between their expectations and incoming sensory input. (Other terms for that difference include surprise and free energy.) In this model, human brains minimize surprise by generating internal models that predict the outside world. Here, consciousness is basically the experience of an internally generative model complex enough to imagine states of the world that have not yet happened. +
++The process by which brains generate these internal models has a theory of its own, known as predictive processing, perhaps most associated with the philosopher Andy Clark. To grasp the idea, think of what’s happening during a dream. You’re lying in bed, eyes closed in a dark room, completely still. But your brain is generating a rich internal dream world that feels entirely convincing (lucid dreams aside). Well, predictive processing claims that the same sort of thing is happening during waking consciousness, with a few caveats. +
++In other words, the kind of world you’re experiencing when awake is basically the same kind of world you experience in a dream: a hallucination. The difference is that our brains are constantly comparing our waking hallucinations to the sensory input they receive from the outside, fine-tuning the waking dream to keep it in line with what the incoming sensory data suggests is going on beyond our skulls. That’s what the neuroscientist Anil Seth means when he calls consciousness a “controlled hallucination.” +
++Okay, so living systems want to minimize surprise, and predictive models help brainy creatures do so. But what makes consciousness feel the way it does? How can we explain why some states of consciousness feel so rich and alive while others feel so dreary? One interesting idea hovering on the periphery of consciousness science is the symmetry theory of valence (STV), first proposed by the independent philosopher Michael Johnson and his collaborators at the Qualia Research Institute, a nonprofit focused on the science of consciousness. +
++The STV starts with the idea that you can map every state of consciousness onto a perfect mathematical representation, like a unique objective signature for each subjective state (it shares this idea with IIT). Next, it claims that the valence, or positive/negative feeling of any given state of consciousness, depends on the symmetry of that representation. In practice, drawing on the work of neuroscientist Selen Atasoy, they use the underlying neural activity as that representation. +
++Every conscious state has an associated orchestra of neural activity that gives rise to harmonic patterns across the brain. QRI co-founder Andrés Gómez Emilsson figured out how to decompose that activity in a way that deciphers how much consonance exists across the brain harmonics, which works as a proxy for the symmetry. The more symmetry in the brain, the more positive the experience. Inversely, the more dissonance and less symmetry, the more negative the experience. While the STV hasn’t received much mainstream attention, its ideas are beginning to crawl their way into citations on papers at the forefront of the science of consciousness. +
++So we have a growing constellation of relevant theories, though as the result of the Koch/Chalmers bet suggests, we still lack a definitive, falsifiable explanation. We even lack consensus on whether one may ever exist. +
++Toward a paradigm of consciousness science — or not +
++Still, some neuroscientists argue that we are living in the dawn before a theory of consciousness arises, like those who lived in the time shortly before Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This paints the current field as “pre-paradigmatic,” a term developed by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn to describe an immature science where competing schools of thought do not share the same basic understanding of their subject. Everything from methodologies to metaphysics can differ in a pre-paradigmatic science of consciousness. +
++Eventually, in this view, the field might coalesce around a unified theory and the first true paradigm of consciousness science would begin. This is the view Koch continues to hold (despite being down a case of fine Portuguese wine). He doubled down at the recent ASSC conference, renewing the bet on the same 25-year horizon. Chalmers, too, reports plenty of progress, telling Nature that the problem of consciousness “has gradually been transmuting into, if not a ‘scientific’ mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically.” +
++But there’s no guarantee that some critical mass of correlations between brain states and feelings can ever tell us how or why consciousness happens. Chalmers suspects that at the conclusion of their renewed bet in 2048, despite all the surrounding progress of insight that’s sure to unfold, the mystery may remain as perplexing as ever. +
++The willingness to erase white women from the story of affirmative action is part of the problem. +
++Editor’s note, June 29, 2023: The Supreme Court on Thursday effectively ended affirmative action in higher education in a pair of cases concerning admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Read our latest coverage here. The original story, on a separate 2016 case out of Texas, follows. +
++The University of Texas Austin was Abigail Fisher’s dream school. Fisher, from Sugar Land, Texas, a wealthy Houston suburb, earned a 3.59 GPA in high school and scored an 1180 on the SATs. +
++Not bad, but not enough for the highly selective UT Austin in fall 2008; Fisher’s dreams were dashed when she was denied admission. +
++In response, Fisher sued. Her argument? That applicants of color, whose racial backgrounds were included as a component of the university’s holistic review process, were less-qualified students and had displaced her. +
++Students graduating in the top 10 percent of any Texas high school are granted an automatic spot at UT Austin. Other students are evaluated through a holistic review process including a race-blind review of essays and creating a personal achievement score based on leadership potential, honors and awards, work experience, and special circumstances that include socioeconomic considerations such as race. +
++A few are accepted through provisional slots that include attending a summer program prior to the fall. One black student, four Latino students, and 42 white students with lower scores than Fisher were accepted under these terms. Also rejected were 168 African-American and Latino students with better scores than Fisher. +
++According to court documents, even if Fisher had received a perfect personal achievement score that included race (which, in itself, oversimplifies the admissions process), she still would not have necessarily qualified under UT’s admission rubric. +
++In fact, when she applied for the class of 2012, the admission rate for non-automatic admits was more competitive than that of Harvard University. +
++Nonetheless, Fisher spent the past seven years in court, and Thursday the US Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that UT’s admissions policy procedures are constitutional. +
++But the battle to erase race from the application review process for admission comes with an interesting paradox: “The primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been Euro-American women,” wrote Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw for the University of Michigan Law Review in 2006. +
++A 1995 report by the California Senate Government Organization Committee found that white women held a majority of managerial jobs (57,250) compared with African Americans (10,500), Latinos (19,000), and Asian Americans (24,600) after the first two decades of affirmative action in the private sector. In 2015, a disproportionate representation of white women business owners set off concerns that New York state would not be able to bridge a racial gap among public contractors. +
++A 1995 report by the Department of Labor found that 6 million women overall had advances at their job that would not have been possible without affirmative action. The percentage of women physicians tripled between 1970 and 2002, from 7.6 percent to 25.2 percent, and in 2009 women were receiving a majority of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, according to the American Association of University Women. To be clear, these numbers include women of all races; however, breaking down affirmative action beneficiaries by race and gender seems to be rare in reported data. +
++Contrary to popular belief, affirmative action isn’t just black. It’s white, too. But affirmative action’s white female faces are rarely at the center of the conversation. +
++Gender was a blind spot in the original affirmative action policy +
++Sex discrimination protections were not included when affirmative action policy was initially institutionalized in the 1960s. +
++The National Labor Relations Act in 1935 was one of the first federal documents to use the term “affirmative action” to correct unfair labor practices. While the Public Works Administration temporarily followed racially proportional hiring practices (which were dismantled at the end of World War II), it wasn’t until President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order in 1961 requiring affirmative action to counter employment discrimination among federal contractors, with specific attention to race, that affirmative action was institutionalized. +
++In some ways, the narrow focus on “race” and “color” was the government’s response to the demands of the burgeoning civil rights movement that brought racial discrimination front and center in America. +
++However, affirmative action was ambiguous, referring, at the very least, to federal contractors taking a step or gesture in opposition of discriminating against groups of people, but one of the limits of the order was that penalties were not enforceable. +
++Kennedy created a President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity to monitor the order, chaired by then–Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. +
++However, it was not until October 1967, following pressure from the surging Women’s Movement, that President Johnson amended an earlier order to include gender provisions. Further actions would be taken in 1973 and 1974 to address anti-discrimination protections for people with disabilities and Vietnam veterans, respectively. +
++White women have become some of affirmative action’s fiercest opponents +
++In general, women today are more educated and make up more of the workforce than ever before, in part because of affirmative action policies. Indeed, from the tech industry to publishing, diversity has emerged as an overwhelming increase in the presence of white women, not necessarily people of color. +
++Incidentally, over the years white women have become some of affirmative action’s most ardent opponents. +
++According to the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, nearly 70 percent of the 20,694 self-identified non-Hispanic white women surveyed either somewhat or strongly opposed affirmative action. +
++White women have also been the primary plaintiffs in the major Supreme Court affirmative action cases, with the exception of the first — Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978 — that was brought to the courts by a white man. +
++Twenty-five years after Bakke found that race can be one but not the only criterion for evaluating admissions applications, four white women have filed lawsuits seeking retribution for admissions rejections based on the premise that they were denied a spot over less-deserving students of color. +
++The first successful case to challenge affirmative action policy was Hopwood v. Texas in 1996. Cheryl Hopwood claimed that despite excellent scores and fitting the profile of a surefire admit, the University of Texas School of Law admitted 62 people of color, only nine of whom had better LSAT and GPA scores than she did. +
++The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that diversity alone was not enough to justify racial preferences. For example, only Mexican-American and African-American students’ racial backgrounds were taken into consideration at UT’s law school. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, but the decision dismantled UT’s earlier racial affirmative action policy and catalyzed UT’s 10 percent policy to admit the best students in a state that still suffers from de facto segregation according to UT’s Supreme Court briefs for the Fisher case. +
++But in 2003, two other white women approached the Court in parallel cases citing a misuse of race in admissions policies. In Grutter v. Bollinger, Barbara Grutter argued that she was denied admission to the University of Michigan Law School as a direct result of the law school’s consideration of race in the admissions process. In Gratz v. Bollinger, Jennifer Gratz argued similarly that she was denied acceptance to the University of Michigan’s flagship university in Ann Arbor as an undergrad because of race. +
++The Supreme Court decisions were split between the two cases. In Gratz, the justices ruled that race was being valued in ways that violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause — students received 20 points if they were from an underrepresented racial group compared with 5 points for artistic achievement. However, the justices ruled in Grutter that there was nothing unconstitutional about the way race was included in the law school’s holistic admissions policy. +
++The primary distinction between the two decisions had to do with the weight given to race in affirmative action admissions policies. Nonetheless, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had high hopes for such programs. +
++“We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” O’Connor wrote for the majority in Grutter. +
++Justice Anthony Kennedy, while recognizing the University’s complex policy, reiterated O’Connor’s sentiments in Fisher. +
++“The Court’s affirmance of the University’s admissions policy today does not necessarily mean the University may rely on that same policy without refinement,” Kennedy wrote for the majority opinion. “It is the University’s ongoing obligation to engage in constant deliberation and continued reflection regarding its admission policies.” +
++Racial affirmative action doesn’t undermine merit +
++“I’m hoping that they’ll completely take race out of the issue in terms of admissions and that everyone will be able to get into any school that they want no matter what race they are but solely based on their merit and they work hard for it,” Fisher told the New York Times in 2012. +
++But does race inherently undermine an admit’s qualifications? +
++The question itself is dubious considering the fact that other forms of affirmative action, including gender, are rarely mentioned. The aforementioned CCES survey, which only asked about racial affirmative action, is just one example. +
++Yet it’s a widespread assumption that even Justice Antonin Scalia brought to the fore last December during oral arguments for the Fisher case. He asserted that affirmative action hurts African-American students by putting them in elite institutions they are not prepared for. Study after study shows there’s simply no evidence for the claim. +
++A look at the effects of affirmative action bans also suggests the idea is based on a false dichotomy. Since California passed Prop 209 in 1996 barring racial considerations for college admissions at public universities, UC Berkeley witnessed a significant drop in the number of black students, from 8 percent pre–Prop 209 to an average of 3.6 percent of the freshman class from 2006 to 2010. +
++But that drop isn’t necessarily tied to underqualified students of color. Rather, 58 percent of black students admitted from 2006 to 2010 rejected Berkeley’s offer of admission. Alumni, administrators, and current students noted that a possible reason could be a feeling of isolation, or lack of other students of color, at UC’s flagship campus — an ironic consequence of the affirmative action ban. +
++Asian-American applicants also challenge the colorblind meritocracy myth. According to a sociological study in 2009, white applicants were three times more likely to be admitted to selective schools than Asian applicants with the exact same academic record. And a 2013 survey found that white adults in California deemphasize the importance of test scores when Asian Americans, whose average test scores are higher than white students, are considered. +
++Furthermore, existing race-neutral admissions policies like legacy admissions show that taking race out of the equation doesn’t make admissions processes any more just. +
++According to a 2011 study by the Chronicle of Higher Education, a review of 30 elite universities’ admissions processes found that a legacy connection gave an applicant a 23.3 percentage point advantage over a non-legacy applicant. For applicants who had a parent who was an alum, the average advantage was 45.5 percentage points. +
++Many college campuses, however, have historically had predominantly white student bodies — 84 percent of college students in the US were white in 1976 compared with only 60 percent in 2012 — which makes it far more likely that the beneficiaries of legacy admissions practices are white applicants like Fisher, whose sister and father went to UT Austin. +
++Fisher advocated for a colorblind, meritocratic admissions process for which she, as an individual, may still not have been qualified. But a look at the marginalized group that has most benefited from affirmative action shows that race was never a barrier for that group to begin with. +
++White women, like Fisher, stand as a testament to affirmative action’s success. If anything, the dismantling of affirmative action is launched at people of color, but it affects white women, too. And the willingness to erase them from the story is part of the problem. +
++France finds itself at the center of the global reckoning over police violence. +
++Widespread protests have continued for days across France after police killed a 17-year-old in a Paris suburb when he refused to comply with a traffic stop, prompting a national reckoning on racism and excessive force in policing. +
++The victim, who was of French-Algerian descent, has been identified by police as Nahel M. In the wake of his death, protests have broken out in the cities of Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, and Nanterre, the suburb where Nahel was reportedly from. Some of them have turned violent, with protesters throwing stones, bottles, and fireworks at police and setting fire to garbage bins and vehicles. Police in turn have used tear gas to try to disperse the crowds. +
++The French interior minister has reported that at least 180 protesters were arrested and 170 law enforcement officers injured as of Thursday morning. He said that 40,000 officers would be deployed across France Thursday night in anticipation of further clashes. +
++“It’s an explosion of general anger” directed not just at police oppression, but also at economic and racial inequities, said Mathieu Rigouste, a researcher in social sciences and the author of La Domination Policière, a book examining how French policing practices are rooted in colonialism. +
++Many in France see Nahel’s killing as a reflection of racism against Arab and Black communities in the country, given that it’s not the first time something like this has happened. In 2020, four police officers beat a Black music producer inside his studio in a viral video, just as French President Emmanuel Macron was considering legislation that would impose new restrictions on posting videos of police online. And in 2005, teens Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré — who were of Tunisian and Mauritanian origins, respectively — died after fleeing a police identity inspection and running into an electricity substation where they were accidentally electrocuted. +
++“You have a kind of immediate feeling among the public that this is symptomatic of more global trends in terms of police violence,” said Jacques de Maillard, a political science professor at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin who studies comparative policing. Those trends include, as the UN pointed out in 2021, “a steady increase in the use of excessive force, police brutality, and other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, as well as arbitrary detention” around the world — and often reflect factors including racial tensions. +
++The circumstances of Nahel’s killing certainly seem to mirror many deadly traffic stops in the US and elsewhere. The public prosecutor in the case said that police tried to stop the vehicle because of erratic driving and the driver was young. But Nahel refused to stop, ran a red light, committed additional traffic violations, and endangered pedestrians, they said. +
++Police pursued him, and in a video of the incident released Tuesday morning, approached his car on foot, one officer pointing a gun. Nahel starts to drive away, but the officer fatally shoots him in the chest. That officer is now under formal investigation for voluntary homicide — the French equivalent of being charged with a crime in the US legal system. +
++France’s longstanding police brutality problem +
++France is seen as one of the worst offenders in Europe when it comes to police brutality. +
++After Macron rammed through controversial reforms to raise the retirement age earlier this year, French police used tear gas and batons, as well as stun grenades and rubber bullets — which are banned in most other European countries — to disperse the mass protests that broke out. That prompted the UN’s Human Rights Council in May to criticize France’s use of excessive force in law enforcement. Members of the council also urged France to address more general “racial profiling by security forces.” +
++The existence of racial discrimination in French policing is also well-documented. The French government’s own human rights watchdog found in a 2016 survey of over 5,000 people that men and boys perceived as Black or Arab were 20 times more likely to be stopped by police than others. +
++Civil society organizations have filed a class action suit challenging ethnic profiling in policing in France, and the French government was ordered to pay a fine in a case brought by three teens of color who were stopped and searched by police while returning from a school trip in 2021. Aside from Nahel’s encounter with police, there have been many more such incidents of law enforcement targeting people in diverse suburban areas — including in Beaumont-sur-Oise, where Adama Traoré, a Black man, died in 2016 due to police restraint methods. +
++“In spite of international criticism and local struggles, the French state has continually reinforced its police, prisons, and borders (multiplying weapons, laws, and units specialized in ferocity) as well as judicial impunity over the last 30 years,” Rigouste said. +
++Attempts at reform have been met with fierce opposition by French police unions. In response to French solidarity protests over the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Macron’s administration weighed the possibility of disciplining officers guilty of “proven suspicions of racism” and banning the use of chokeholds. The first of those provisions was softened and the second was abandoned on account of pressure from police unions. +
++Again after Nahel’s killing, Macron seemed to be careful not to anger police unions in public remarks. While he called the killing inexcusable, he has also criticized the violent reaction from protesters and come to the defense of the police: “Our police and gendarmes are committed to protecting us and serving the Republic. I thank them every day for that. They do so within an ethical framework that must be respected,” he tweeted. +
++Even so, de Maillard said that Nahel’s killing might mark a turning point in actually getting some measure of real police reform enacted. +
++“The calls for reform have not been heard — until now,” he said. +
