It's always exciting when new correlates are discovered, but this doesn't really uncover anything about consciousness per se. At least not as classified by Davi

It's always exciting when new correlates are discovered, but this doesn't really uncover anything about consciousness per se. At least not as classified by David Chalmers and others who use the term The Hard Problem of Consciousness - which seems to show that consciousness is impossible to understand in our current paradigm. Understand meaning - to the point we could reproduce it. The Hard Problem is contrasted with the so-called Easy Problems - which are still very hard to solve, and many of them still aren't - but they are ultimately of a class of solvable problems, like neural correlates, the role of dopaminergic pathways, and so-on. These everyday neurological findings are needed to make progress toward understanding the brain, but they don't really have anything to do with consciousness. Some definitions: let intelligence mean the acquisition and understanding of knowledge let self mean who you refer to when you say "I" or "me" let consciousness mean raw sensations/happenings: *the aroma of coffee*, *the taste of chocolate*, *the sound of a drop of water* Intelligence and selfhood fall under the Easy Problems - both philosophically and neurologically. We have machines that for all intents and purposes are intelligent. Even though it's not perfect, we know what kind of problem that is and how to solve it mechanistically. While nobody has invented a true "self" yet, if we ever find out exactly what conscious experiences are, scaffolding those experiences with self/identity becomes an organizational task (an Easy Problem). Still a very hard one involving neural correlates, cortical pathways, etc. from which we may derive new algorithms and paradigms, but ultimately solvable. So that leaves the mystery of raw experiences ("the aroma of coffee") which do not seem solvable in any scientific sense. You could say that a digital camera that detects faces in its viewfinder is intelligent, but it doesn't "see" the face, we know that it only unconsciously "detects" the face. So a mystery arises when we examine the human eye, because we see basically the same hardware as the camera: Lens (lens), sensor (retina), wire (optic nerve), chip (visual cortex). Even after mapping the entire visual cortex to all visual features, it just doesn't get us any closer to understanding that raw experience of "sight" that happens when you look at something. It's not the same thing. I applaud all progress toward understanding the brain, and sometimes wonder why the whole of humanity are not all focused on solving problems like death and aging (by way of solving consciousness), as it seems like pretty much the most important possible thing to all of us! Favorites on the topic: Donald Hoffman, John Searle, David Chalmers, Dan Dennett, Colin McGinn, Susan Blackmore, Sam Harris.