BI 228 Alex Maier: Laws of Consciousness

45 snips

Dec 31, 2025

In this enlightening discussion, Alex Maier, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University and head of the Maier Lab, dives deep into the neuroscience of consciousness. He shares his journey from vision research to exploring integrated information theory, emphasizing the role of mathematics in understanding perception. Alex vividly discusses structuralism and the intriguing concept of mapping subjective experiences to brain mechanisms, all while advocating for open science and collaboration in neuroscience. It's a captivating blend of science and philosophy!

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INSIGHT

Math Brings Rigor To Consciousness Study

Formalized mathematics gives consciousness science precision, rigor, and testable predictions.
Alex Maier argues laws like Fechner's show perception becomes scientific when expressed mathematically.

ANECDOTE

Crick's Book Launched A Career

Alex Maier recounts discovering Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis and joining Nikos Logothetis' lab.
That early experience launched his career in visual neuroscience and consciousness research.

INSIGHT

IIT Made A Novel, Testable Prediction

A Science paper using IIT predicted TMS-EEG would show reduced integration during unconsciousness, and experiments supported it.
This empirical success drew Alex Maier into IIT and its mathematical development.

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Alex is an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University where he heads the Maier Lab. His work in neuroscience spans vision, visual perception, and cognition, studying the neurophysiology of cortical columns, and other related topics. Today, he is here to discuss where his focus has shifted over the past few years, the neuroscience of consciousness. I should say shifted back, since that was his original love, which you'll hear about.

I've known Alex since my own time at Vanderbilt, where I was a postdoc and he was a new faculty member, and I remember being impressed with him then. I was at a talk he gave - job talk or early talk - where it was immediately obvious how passionate and articulate he is about what he does, and I remember he even showed off some of his telescope photography - good pictures of the moon, I remember. Anyway, we always had fun interactions, even if sometimes it was a quick hello as he ran up stairs and down hallways to get wherever he was going, always in a hurry.

Today we discuss why Alex sees integration information theory as the most viable current prospect for explaining consciousness. That is mainly because IIT has developed a formalized mathematical account that hopes to do for consciousness what other math has done for physics, that is, give us what we know as laws of nature. So basically our discussion revolves around everything related to that, like philosophy of science, distinguishing mathematics from "the mathematical", some of the tools he is finding valuable, like category theory, and some of his work measuring the level of consciousness IIT says a whole soccer team has, not just the individuals that comprise the team.

Maier Lab
Astonishing Hypothesis (Alex's youtube channel)
Twitter:
Sensation and Perception textbook (in-the-making)
Related papers

Various things Alex mentioned:
- “An Antiphilosophy of Mathematics,” Peter J. Freyd youtube video about "the mathematical".
- David Kaiser's playlist on modern physics.
Here's a link to the Integrated Information Theory Wiki.

Read the transcript.

0:00 - Intro 4:27 - Discovering consciousness science 11:23 - Laws of perception 15:48 - Integrated information theory and mathematical formalism 23:54 - Theories of consciousness without math 28:18 - Computation metaphor 34:44 - Formalized mathematics is the way 36:56 - Category theory 41:42 - Structuralism 51:09 - The mathematical 54:33 - Metaphysics of the mathematical 59:52 - Yoneda Lemma 1:12:05 - What's real 1:26:22 - Measuring consciousness of a soccer team 1:35:03 - Assumptions and approximations of IIT 1:43:13 - Open science