Did You Hear of The 25-Year Bet Between the Philosopher and the Neuroscientist?

It’s true, two-and-a-half decades ago, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that scientists by this year would have solved one of the deepest mysteries about the human body — how the brain’s neurons produce what we know as consciousness.

It’s a crucial issue in both men’s disciplines because it is a fulcrum of the basic assumption that underlies scientific materialism — the idea that the physical world is all there is to reality — and classical philosophy, which holds, on the basis of various arguments, that consciousness is evidence of non-material aspects of reality.

It turns out, according to this article in Nature, that the two men actually met up and settled their 25-year-old wager on June 23 at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City.

“Koch, who holds the title of meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, began his search for the neural footprints of consciousness in the 1980s. Since then, he has been invested in identifying ‘the bits and pieces of the brain that are really essential — really necessary to ultimately generate a feeling of seeing or hearing or wanting,’ as he puts it,” reports Nature’s Mariano  Lenharo.

As for the “winner” of the bet, Chalmers told Lenharo that “It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof. Chalmers, who is co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University, says the case of wine he won from Christoff as a result of the wager is not the end of the story.

“There’s been a lot of progress in the field,” Chalmers told Lenharo. And Christoff is equally optimistic, saying he is ready to double down on another 25 year bet. Go here for Lenharo’s complete account of an extremely unusual phenomena — two smart guys with dramatically different views about a crucial issue who make a long-term wager and then come back together years later in a spirit of collegiality to see how things turned out.

And to renew the wager!

NOTE TO READERS: Please forgive the dunce (yours truly) who first composed this post. He missed the fact — until just now at 2:43 PM EST — that he had ineptly put a dollar sign on the 25 in the headline. I have taken away the dunce’s laptop for a week and put him on probation for another three weeks. Be assured that any further such mistakes will be instantly dealt with and much more severely.

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