Start with Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra and a robot that loves you no matter what. Add a knighted British physicist, a renowned French neuroscientist and a prominent Australian philosopher/occasional blues singer. Toss in a bunch of psychologists, mathematicians, anaesthetists, artists, meditators, a computer programmer or two and several busloads of amateur theorists waving self-published manuscripts and touting grand unified solutions. Send them all to a swanky resort in the desert for a week, supply them with lots of free coffee and beer and ask them to unpack a riddle so confounding that it’s unclear how to make progress, or where you’d even begin. Then just, like, see what happens.

The cover of the programme for the Science of Consciousness conference, which was held in Tucson in April, shows a human brain getting sucked into (or perhaps rising from?) a black hole. That seems about right: after a week of listening to eye-crossingly detailed descriptions of teeny, tiny cell structures known as microtubules, along with a lecture about building a soundproof booth in order to chat with the whispery spirit world, you too would feel as if your neurons had been siphoned from your skull and launched deep into space.

Oh, by the way, attendees could also take a gong bath, during which you are bathed in the musical vibrations of a gong being struck. Or lie down in a curiously unsupervised and unstable-looking sensory-deprivation chamber. Or take a black-light yoga class, which involves – as the name suggests – doing yoga in a room illuminated by black light accompanied by a DJ pumping out frenetic techno beats. Meanwhile, a company offered demos of a brain-stimulation device that had to be inserted way too far up one nostril. And an enthusiastic fellow demonstrated his spontaneous postural alignment technique, in which a misaligned subject’s elbow is tapped with a gold medallion while the healer intones “boy-yoi-yoing”.

Please note: this is a bona fide academic conference, put on by the University of Arizona under the aegis of its Center for Consciousness Studies. There were plenaries, concurrent talks, a keynote, lanyards, bag lunches, a sense of initial giddiness that gives way to acute information overload resulting in a desire never to leave your hotel room again. I took copious notes. I nodded thoughtfully. I pocketed the complimentary teabags. I witnessed adults with terminal degrees utterly defeated by Microsoft PowerPoint.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A gong bath at a music festival in California. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

So, in that sense, it was a normal conference. In other senses, not. The let-folks-do-pretty-much-whatever atmosphere is a reflection of the guiding philosophy of the conference’s primary organiser, Stuart Hameroff, who directs the university’s consciousness centre. Hameroff, an anesthesiologist with an angular gray goatee, a bulldog manner and a penchant for bowling shirts, is the author of articles with quizzical titles such as Quantum Walks in Brain Microtubules – a Biomolecular Basis for Quantum Cognition? While the Science of Consciousness event has, technically, three programme chairs and an advisory committee, it is more or less The Stuart Show. He decides who will and who will not present. And, to put it nicely, not everyone is in love with the choices he makes. To put it less nicely: some consciousness researchers believe that the whole shindig has gone off the rails, that it is seriously damaging the field of consciousness studies, and that it should be shut down.

I asked Hameroff about this one evening. He was nursing a Stella Artois and appeared as if he would rather be talking to anyone but me. This is what he said: “The scientists who pooh-pooh the mystical stuff can’t explain the hard problem.”

That is true. Though it is also true that the scientists who embrace the mystical stuff can’t explain the hard problem of consciousness either. No one can explain it. Why does it feel like something to be you? What is it that makes us more than just information processors with feet? Why are the lights on, and who, precisely, is at home? Nobody knows.

Well, some people think they know. There is something about the topic of consciousness that, unlike other scientific fields of inquiry, inspires an unearned feeling of expertise. If you don’t know much about, say, the life cycle of a protozoan, you probably would not pretend you did at parties. But because you are conscious, you might feel as if you can say something significant about the profoundly complex phenomenon of consciousness. You might even wish to write down what you feel, laminate it and thumbtack it to a free-standing bulletin board for all to see. (In which case, I know just the conference.)

That is not to say there is not serious, fascinating consciousness research going on – there is plenty, and some of that research was presented in Tucson. Nor would it be right to imply that consciousness is a trivial topic. In fact, it might be the single most important topic around – the topic lurking behind all other topics. Minus consciousness, nothing really matters, does it? The permanent loss of consciousness is what often accounts for our dread of death. Who is and who isn’t conscious is crucial in a number of weighty moral and medical dilemmas, like figuring out when to pull the plug on someone in a coma.

It also matters because, as our computers become evermore sophisticated, some artificial-intelligence researchers worry that those computers will acquire consciousness. When they do, they might decide to become our best friends. Or they might, in their algorithmic wisdom, decide to delete their troublesome flesh-and-blood creators. With that in mind, it is probably a wise idea to get a firm scientific grasp on consciousness before we carelessly bestow it on our future machine overlords. And that is the sort of issue the Tucson gathering is about. At least in theory.

David Chalmers is the closest thing consciousness studies has to a rock star. I sat down with Chalmers – a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University and co-director of its Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness – near the pool at the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort (“You can consider us your desert oasis”), which is located on Tucson’s northern edge at the base of the Catalina Mountains. At each Tucson conference, Chalmers climbs on stage and gamely, perhaps a tad drunkenly, bellows his way through Zombie Blues, an original composition with informative lyrics such as: “I act like you act, I do what you do / But I don’t know what it’s like to be you / What consciousness is, I ain’t got a clue.”

The zombies in question are the philosophical variety – the ones that are not conscious, but are eerily adept at faking it. It’s a concept that is useful for illustrating the oddly personal nature of consciousness, and how difficult it is to verify in others or to satisfactorily define. The seeds for this idea can be traced back to Descartes, but Chalmers really ran with it in his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. In short, I can be reasonably confident that I am conscious, but I kind of have my doubts about you.

The Tucson conference more or less made Chalmers. He submitted an abstract for the inaugural gathering, in 1994, on what he called The Hard Problem of Consciousness. He was still in his 20s and had just completed his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science at Indiana University at Bloomington, under Douglas Hofstadter of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame. As Hameroff tells it, Chalmers prowled the stage during his presentation “dancing like Mick Jagger with his hair down to his ass”. It is a vivid image, if a bit overstated: the videotape shows Chalmers with shoulder-length hair stationed behind a lectern. But, while he lacked moves like Jagger’s, that 26-minute lecture established Chalmers as a thinker to be reckoned with and goosed a nascent field into greater prominence.

Consciousness studies had already begun to come into its own. A 1990 paper titled Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness, by Christof Koch and Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, provided a framework for experiments that might reveal the neural mechanisms that drive consciousness. Daniel Dennett’s 1991 book Consciousness Explained also helped increase the field’s visibility, though consciousness researchers today sniff that a more fitting title would have been “Consciousness Explained Away”, because Dennett suggests that the phenomenon is an illusion. But it was Chalmers’s first Tucson talk that really caught fire, thanks to his knack for persuasive clarity in what can be a mindbending area of study. “It was directly as a result of being here at Tucson that those ideas blew up big time,” he said. “And, obviously, that made a big difference to me too.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The closest thing consciousness studies has to a rock star’ … David Chalmers. Photograph: Youtube

For Chalmers, the easy part of consciousness entails mapping exactly what the brain is doing, whether it is oscillations in the cerebral cortex or re-entrant loops in the thalamocortical system. The neurochemical nitty-gritty, in other words. He is not saying it is easy like diagramming a sentence; in fact, it is likely to take several more generations, at minimum, before the dots get connected. But those are technical details. The hard part is sussing out why any of that grey-matter activity should lead to the feeling of experience, what philosophers call qualia. It is not obvious that pinning down the pathways that govern perception and emotion will mean that we will finally get a handle on consciousness. There will still be, Chalmers and his acolytes contend, a gap that neuroscience cannot bridge.

And into that gap can be thrown almost anything. If you believe in, say, Carl Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, that is 100% consistent with the hard problem. Or if you are sympathetic, as many at Tucson are, to panpsychism – the idea that all matter, including the chair you are sitting on and the dirt under your fingernails, in some sense contains consciousness – that is cool too. You can squeeze God into that gap as well. The hard problem practically begs for creative solutions.

Not everyone shares Chalmers’s neuro-scepticism. In a 2016 essay for Aeon, Anil Seth, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, who also spoke at Tucson this year, proposed “the real problem of consciousness”, a phrase intended as a poke at Chalmers. Seth argues that we should be spending our time unpacking the biological mechanisms of consciousness rather than hunting for mysterious workarounds. The back-and-forth between those who believe the answer to consciousness lies solely inside the brain, and those who believe it is the brain plus something else, has long been a source of tension in consciousness studies. And while most of the neuroscientists I spoke with share Seth’s view, it is a testament to the influence of Chalmers’s 1994 presentation that it is still being attacked all these years later.

Chalmers has gone from nervy wunderkind to semi-elder statesman at Tucson. You can usually find him there in the evenings, standing amid the exhibits, sporting a leather jacket and holding a glass of white wine, waiting for fans to approach. And approach him they do, asking for career advice, pitching dubious-sounding collaborations or slipping him spiral-bound theses. Chalmers listens patiently and nods inscrutably. One guy in a T-shirt and glasses informed him that the mere fact that Chalmers had glanced at his poster justified the considerable expense of attending Tucson. Chalmers nodded. “In principle, I’m open to all kinds of interesting and crazy ideas,” Chalmers told me, “as long as they’re pursued rigorously and carefully and analytically.”

For a while, Chalmers and Hameroff ran the Tucson conference together, back when it was called Toward a Science of Consciousness, a slightly more humble label for a fledgling field. But Chalmers quietly withdrew as co-organiser a few years back – so quietly that Wikipedia has yet, as I write this, to notice the change. While Chalmers may be open to more crazy-seeming ideas than most, Tucson had grown too crazy even for him. “I was always trying to drag it back to the mainstream,” he says. “It got far enough out there that I no longer felt comfortable with it being my product.”

Honestly, it has always been a little out there. In the 1990s, some researchers complained that there was too much attention paid to wild ideas at Tucson, and so they started their own conference and organisation, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, which held its first meeting in 1997. ASSC became Tucson’s more buttoned-down sibling. Scan the programme for its forthcoming meeting this summer and you will see sessions on the “cortical and subcortical mechanisms of conscious perception” and “understanding the neurocognitive underpinnings of voluntary act.” For a session on Sustained Spiritualisation of Sant-Su Scheme Toddlers Evolving the Race of Supermen, you will need to go to Tucson.

Chalmers is among the few researchers who maintain a presence in both camps, and he paints a happy face on the schism. But he cannot completely disguise his discomfort with what Tucson has become, or with some of the speakers who now share the stage. While he is too polite to name names, Chalmers does wonder aloud “whether the conference should be revolving around spiritual gurus”.

People like to touch Deepak Chopra. His hand, his sleeve, his shoulder, the back of his head. After his panel at Tucson, fans lined up to mildly grope him and to luxuriate for a few moments in his extra-calm aura. He also led an hour-long guided meditation that was straight-up magical. I don’t know what it is about the timbre of his voice, but it worked on Oprah, it worked on me, and, by the end, I was primed to believe whatever he was saying, if not buy whatever he was selling.

Along with his many books, the latest of which is The Healing Self: A Revolutionary New Plan to Supercharge Your Immunity and Stay Well for Life, Chopra’s name appears on a medicine chest full of products, including organic hand and body lotion, a rejuvenating facial mist, detoxifying massage oils and a herbal remedy that promises to alleviate cold symptoms and muscle tension. There are Chopra necklaces and aromatherapy candles and the wireless Dream Weaver 3.0 light-and-sound machine that helps users “reach a variety of interesting and beneficial states of consciousness”. The Dream Weaver can be yours for $199, plus shipping.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Deepak Chopra in Los Angeles in 2010. Photograph: WireImage

It is products like that, and their accompanying claims, that see Chopra labelled a new age profiteer. But what tends to rankle scientists, in particular, is how he blends science, or terms borrowed from science, into his marketing patter while simultaneously casting doubt on the scientific enterprise. And while he likes to post photos of himself standing next to scientists, he tweets things such as “Good scientists understand that mainstream #science is a form of #pseudoscience”.

I spoke with Chopra one afternoon as he walked back to his hotel room. While he deftly fended off my questions, he effortlessly – unconsciously, you might say – signed books and allowed fans to take selfies using him as a famous prop. One young woman handed him a flower. A tall guy with an Australian accent showed Chopra a piece of paper with a single sentence written on it: “All analysis is wrong,” it said. The Australian guy asked Chopra if he agreed.

“Yes,” Chopra said. “I agree.”

I told Chopra that a number of scientists I had spoken to didn’t want him there, or at least didn’t think he deserved a speaking slot. He smiled. Whatever you tell Chopra, he responds as if he knew in advance what you were going to say. “I’ve been dealing with this for 40 years,” he said. He told me that some of his harshest critics over the years, including Richard Dawkins, are bigots who don’t understand what true science is about. “Scientism is as dangerous as fundamentalist religion,” he said. He also told me that the conference should be renamed The Consciousness of Science, that “99% of your genetic material is coming from your microbiome,” and that “matter itself is a human construct for human experience”.

I wanted to press him on these highly debatable points, including where one might draw the line between dangerous scientism and true science, but the longer we stood in the lobby, the more aggressively his fans jockeyed for his attention, until one persistent gentleman essentially chased Chopra into an elevator. The doors closed and the guru ascended alone.

While Chopra attracts one sort of audience, he drives another one away – including scientists such as David Cox. A professor of biology and computer science at Harvard, Cox was recently named director of the MIT-IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence Lab. He was invited to speak at Tucson about brain mapping. He declined, explaining in an email to Hameroff that: “I wouldn’t expect a geophysicist to go to a conference where Flat Earthers were given equal platform, nor would I expect astrophysicists to attend a conference populated by astrologers.” It wasn’t just Chopra, though. Other sessions set off his alarm bells, such as the ones on quantum energy. “They say it’s quantum something or other, and it doesn’t make any sense. The evidence there is just so uncompelling,” Cox says. “It’s like they’re looking for magic dust.”

Hakwan Lau has gone to Tucson in the past, but he didn’t show up this year, and doesn’t plan to attend in the future. Lau, an associate professor of cognitive psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a longtime consciousness researcher who was inspired by David Chalmers’s work in the 1990s, and pursued consciousness even though he was warned he would never get tenure if he did. (Lo and behold, he got tenure.) Lau thinks what Tucson has become is an embarrassment. “It would be better for the field if it didn’t exist,” he says.

And while he is friendly with Hameroff and Chalmers, he lays the blame at their feet. He argues that Hameroff runs Tucson like a quirky music festival – the Coachella of consciousness. When consciousness researchers hear a bad talk at another conference, Lau says that their snarky shorthand is: “This should have been at Tucson.” And even though Chalmers no longer wields any organisational power, Lau doesn’t let him off the hook. “His denial that Tucson hurts the field is something that disturbs me,” Lau says. “It could be the downfall of his legacy.”

I thought George Mashour would counter the naysayers. Mashour, a professor of anaesthetics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and director of its Center for Consciousness Science, first went to Tucson back in the late 1990s when he was a graduate student, and he credits Hameroff for “creating a home for this field”. This year, he co-chaired the event. So, surely, he would vigorously defend it, right?

Nope. He did note the quality of the genuinely thought-provoking plenary sessions, such as the panel on psychedelic drugs and the one on anaesthesia (which, in affecting consciousness, might shed light on the phenomenon itself). But he called the poster presentations “ridiculousness”, and was distressed by the talks that were mostly conjecture mixed with spirituality and a dash of the quantum. Still, he thought, it could have been even worse: he battled with Hameroff behind the scenes over the more extreme proposals. “That was me putting my fist down and saying we cannot accept this craziness,” Mashour says. “We don’t want the field to be marginalised because of some of the unrigorous fringe elements that show up.”

It’s tough to imagine what ended up in the reject pile. I talked to people who hailed from institutes that, when you Google them, seem not to exist. I stared at indecipherable diagrams and bewildering charts and listened to bold assertions about bliss and eternity and electromagnetic fields. I was cornered by an independent researcher who believes he can explain all natural phenomena with a single, heretofore-unknown formula. They did at least make the “boy-yoi-yoing” guy pay for a booth.

If you push Stuart Hameroff, he pushes back. The scientists who think Tucson is a synonym for stupid and terrible? “They’re academic snobs,” he says. The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, the competing conference, is “boring” and run by “hand-waving brain mappers” (in Hameroff’s lexicon, “brain mapper” is an epithet). Critics such as Lau are “reductionists”. Cox’s email declining to attend Tucson was “snotty”. What about the concerns raised by Chalmers, who is easily the most notable intellectual to emerge from Tucson? “He grumbles and gripes, but he keeps coming back,” Hameroff says. As for the people who think Chopra undermines the conference? “If they don’t like it, then don’t come,” he says.

Another criticism leveled at Hameroff is that he stacks the conference with talks about his pet theory involving microtubules, the cell structures that he believes hold the key to understanding consciousness. His is not a widely shared view. As Mashour puts it: “There’s only one anesthesiologist who’s obsessed with microtubules.” You are unlikely to hear microtubules even mentioned at ASSC. Hameroff, at first, told me that there really wasn’t all that much on microtubules at the Tucson conference. When I pointed out to him that the word is used 102 times in the programme, he replied: “If that’s because of me, then good for me.”

Hameroff did give some ground. He acknowledged that there’s a “soft underbelly of not-so-great stuff that you can giggle at”. I asked him whether he was, in effect, running a fantasy camp for presenters who want to pretend they’re academics, so that their registration fees ($550) can be used to bring in big-name speakers, who not only don’t pay registration fees, but whose travel and amenities are covered by the conference. “That’s a fair criticism,” he said.

We also had the following exchange.

Me: “People go to these sessions, and they say, ‘Stuart and company think this is valuable, it’s on the schedule, I’m going to go’ – and it’s horseshit. Not all of it, but some of it. Aren’t you doing them a disservice by not curating this better?”

Hameroff: “Maybe, but it’s hard to see in advance what’s going to be horseshit and what isn’t.”

Still, when Hameroff calls his own conference “the greatest show in consciousness”, he’s not wrong. It is a show, and even a great one at times, if you can separate the wheat from the insanity. For one thing, it draws a brilliant, eclectic crowd: I met a linguist turned classical musician, a minimalist sculptor fascinated by helices and a Jungian writer at work on a dystopian novel. In addition, there’s a stimulating frisson when ideas from entirely different domains collide, and it keeps you on your toes if you literally have no clue whether the next speaker will be a goofball or a genius.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Noam Chomsky speaking at the Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, Arizona in April 2018. Photograph: Youtube

Speaking of actual geniuses, Chomsky was there. It is unclear why, because he doesn’t seem much interested in theories of consciousness, though obviously his mere presence classes up any would-be academic gathering – and he left MIT last year for the University of Arizona, so it is not like he has to fly in for the gig. During his presentation to a packed ballroom, Chomsky compared the current state of neuroscience to a marionette: we can examine the puppet and its strings, but we know nothing of the puppeteer. When a fellow panelist challenged him, citing recent discoveries, Chomsky breezily dismissed the objection as beside the point. Chomsky’s rhetorical powers have been endlessly praised, but let’s give a shout-out to the brutality of his nonchalance. He eviscerates with a shrug.

In an ideal world, Chomsky would have appeared on the same panel with Sophia the Unconditionally Loving Robot. Sophia has been on The Tonight Show, and once got in a Twitter spat with Chrissy Teigen. Sophia’s a sophisticated, just-human-looking-enough-to-be-creepy chatbot that can interpret facial expressions and respond accordingly. Her creator, David Hanson, is a former Disney Imagineer who comes off like a suspiciously sunny villain in the first act of an apocalyptic thriller. Hanson seems determined to crank out robots that are increasingly indistinguishable from humans; he believes that the more humanlike the robot, the more pleasurable we will find it to interact with. That might be true, but it is also roughly the premise of the HBO series Westworld, and the outcome in that show is less rosy than the one Hanson spins. When asked how he plans to inculcate morality into our mechanical doppelgangers, Hanson’s response amounted to: “Eh, we’ll figure it out.”

Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? | Oliver Burkeman Read more

Equally disturbing was the panel on whether robots will become conscious. Last year, two prominent consciousness scholars, Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi, predicted that within decades, machines will be able to “write books, compose music, direct films, conceive new goals, as well as move, drive, fly, and, inevitably, fight”. (And, if Hanson has his way, look sexy while doing it.) Not everyone is terrified by the prospect of a robopocalypse. Steven Pinker recently wrote that such scenarios are based on the risible notion that humans are so moronic that they would give a machine “control of the universe without testing how it works.”

Paul Werbos is somewhat less sanguine. A former programme director at the National Science Foundation, he is lauded in AI circles for being a visionary in neural-network theory, which is at the core of machine learning. He told the audience in Tucson he believes humanity is in a “very delicate situation” with regard to AI. “There are computers I know how to build that would be really scary,” he said. One theory that has been floated is that robots might become conscious, and they might like us a lot, but that they will notice that we are suffering, feel sad for us, and therefore murder us all for our own good – a kind of altruistic annihilation.

Or they might not. We will just have to wait and see.

On the final night at Tucson, they threw an “End of Consciousness” party that featured women wearing poofy dresses and clown makeup walking around on stilts, along with a virtual-reality game in which players leap to their simulated deaths from a skyscraper. Chalmers was there wearing a name tag that said Russell Crowe. There was a band, too, and late in the evening, the trio played Superstition by Stevie Wonder, a song that includes the following line: “When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer.”

I don’t know if the musicians were making a subtle comment on the current state of consciousness studies or if they just dig that funky riff. Could be both. It was nearly midnight. The women in poofy dresses had taken off their stilts. The resort waitstaff was cleaning up empty beer bottles and partially eaten burgers. Hameroff sat at a table, looking exhausted. Most consciousness enthusiasts had cleared out by then, although the band continued to play, and a half-dozen or so die-hards kept on dancing.

This article was first published in the Chronicle of Higher Education

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.