The Status and Future of Consciousness Research

As papers about consciousness are so often introduced, consciousness was until few decades ago considered a philosophical problem only, and the current interest in empirical consciousness research was unforeseen. This development was of course influenced by the technological advancements in neuroscience during those decades, but more important and fundamental was a new openness to interdisciplinary integration of research questions, methods and arguments. Cognitive scientists and neuroscientists agreed that the philosophical problems of why and how there is consciousness are also their problems. Philosophers agreed that empirical evidence may resolve or at least influence this debate. Scientists across disciplines generally agree that consciousness is subjective, characterized by a kind of privileged first-person access. Consciousness research has proven to be an actual and functioning discipline able to provide meaningful and reproducible results. Nevertheless, it has yet only scratched the surface in the attempt to solve some its bigger challenges, e.g., its many underlying questions of metaphysics (i.e., why does consciousness exist?) and questions of mechanisms (how does consciousness exist?). One major obstacle for consciousness research is the lacking consensus of how to optimally measure consciousness empirically. Another major challenge is how to identify neural correlates of consciousness. This challenge clearly relates to the first as one needs to apply a measure of consciousness in order to identify its correlates. Current consciousness research is already occupied with these questions that may even be said to dominate the scientific debate. As it will be argued below, consciousness research may face problems in the future that are currently less debated but which are logical extensions of the challenges above. It is a natural ambition when developing a measure of consciousness to be able to determine whether nonreporting subjects or even machines are conscious and of what. And it is a natural ambition when finding neural correlates of consciousness to understand how these correlates relate to a deeper metaphysical understanding of the relation between subjective experience and the physical substrate of the brain.