🧠🎭 Decoding Consciousness: How the Brain’s Architecture Creates Our Sense of Self A highly complex, self-organized system, a dynamic theatrical stage, and the ultimate question: Can the brain ever fully understand itself? In this issue of Zoomposium, we take a deep dive into neurophilosophy. Our guest this time is none other than the renowned neuroscientist Prof. Dr. Wolf Singer. The thematic focus is on one of the most exciting questions in modern neuroscience: How does the physical architecture of our brain give rise to the elusive phenomenon of consciousness? The focus is on a particularly elegant explanation developed in the 1980s: the “Workplace of Consciousness” theory (Baars). Let’s imagine the cerebral cortex as an extremely distributed system. The individual elements of our experience are widely scattered: visual stimuli in the visual cortex, sounds in the auditory cortex, and complex decisions in the prefrontal cortex. But how do these isolated fragments merge into the single, seamless perception that we experience as our consciousness? The answer lies in a fascinating, fluid dynamic: • The theater metaphor: Consciousness does not reside in a fixed location in the brain. It is constituted only through the temporary and lightning-fast linking of different brain regions as needed. • The Orchestra in Our Heads: In conscious states, a significant increase in certain measures of coherence can be measured. This means that when we consciously perceive something, regions of the cerebral cortex that are far apart suddenly cooperate in perfect synchrony. • A Highly Dynamic Process: This flexible architecture allows our thinking organ to retrieve any content from memory, connect it with other information, and hold it in the spotlight of consciousness for a brief moment. It is precisely this nonlinear dynamic that leads us directly to the great philosophical puzzles we examine in our interview with Wolf Singer: Does this naturalistic approach actually close the notorious “explanatory gap” of philosophy’s “hard problem”? If everything is based on neurophysiological processes, is free will then merely a useful social construct? And could such complex feedback mechanisms perhaps even be replicated “in silicio” in the future as strong artificial intelligence? An absolutely gripping conversation at the intersection of hard science and profound epistemology. 📺 Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/C2FVIbAyaH4 📎 More information: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2022/03/22/kann-das-gehirn-das-gehirn-verstehen/