science – CGW's Blog

What is human consciousness?

Consciousness is “under siege.”

Suddenly lightning-fast computing seems to recreate tasks we commonly associate with intelligence. Yet we’re unprepared as a society to define, let alone create and control, something as pervasive as being. Across close to two-dozen scientific theories of why consciousness appears at all, the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” none has widespread agreement.

We’re behind in part because at the dawn of the Enlightenment, early scientists focused on measurable phenomenon, in part because they believed that leaving the soul to the church would avoid a political backlash. That allowed hundreds of years of scientific flourishing, but left an underdeveloped sense of self.

That’s from A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, a 2026 book by author-science journalist Michael Pollan. Across dozens of interviews and an approachable survey of the research landscape, he ably walks the reader through what we know now. Two stages are easier to test than the two later ones, since it requires consciousness to describe consciousness, but to put it simply:

Cognition is processing information, perhaps by instinct
Intelligence is, as William James defined it, “a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it”
Sentience is a precursor to consciousness, or, as Evan Thompson described it, “the feeling of being alive”
Consciousness is a sense of self, of knowing you know

It’s a fun book, I recommend it.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Science communication at a crossroads

I joined a spirited conversation at the University of Maryland BioPark for a system-wide symposium on science communication.

I filed a story for Technical.ly here. Our panel looked like this:

Megan Nicholson, a senior editor at Issues in Science and Technology
Heath Kelsey, director of the Integration and Application Network at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
Christopher Wink, cofounder and publisher, Technical.ly
Moderator, Michael Sandler, the UM system’s vice chancellor for communications and marketing

What happens after Eureka?

We love to celebrate the spark of a good idea, but we too often skip over the long, uneven road it takes to get that idea into the world.

Research on innovation keeps pointing to the same tension: breakthroughs come from serendipity and “structural holes,” where people from different disciplines collide, but impact only happens when we deliberately smooth the path that follows. That’s what made a conversation I led at Baltimore’s University of Maryland Biopark, inside the innovation district’s year-old 4MLK building feel special.

I contributed Technically coverage here and here. The Biopark team had a photographer on site, so I also just pulled some of the shots of me in action below.

In Covid’s Wake

Before the covid-19 outbreak, public health officials around the world largely agreed that containment of a flu pandemic is largely futile so better to focus on the most at risk populations: speak honestly, encourage healthy behaviors and work fast on a vaccine.

It didn’t all go to plan. In the United States, the Trump administration successfully oversaw a historic vaccine development, while injecting hostile politics into the system. Meanwhile, left-leaning states over-relied on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as widespread masking and extended school closures, that had limited gains for considerable cost. Right-leaning states contributed to vaccine skepticism, which led to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.

The new book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, written by Princeton University political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, attempts to put forward an unimpassioned assessment of the American-led public health response. I simplified their assessment of a handful of the most prominent public health measures into the chart below, and in a social video here.

*My summary of In Covid’s Wake interpretation*

It’s one of my favorite nonfiction books of the year. Below I share my notes for future reference.

Katalin Karikó on “Breaking Through”

Katalin Karikó’s neurosurgery department chair kept asking her about hitting his preferred metric of “dollars per net square footage,” in terms of funding her lab time with grants, or even prestigious publication. It’s amusingly anodyne and corporate when recounted by a now eminent scientist, who had just told her boss about beginning to collaborate with a cross-disciplinary immunologist Drew Weissman, with whom she would later share the Nobel Prize.

That’s from Breaking Through: My Life in Science, the October 2024 autobiography by biochemist Katalin Karikó, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine for her work on mRNA which contributed to the rapid deployment of the covid-19 vaccine. I admire her greatly.

In an over-simplification, cell and gene therapies directly influence DNA, whereas her research focused on using mRNA to send a temporary message to cells. mRNA is considered more unstable and difficult to work on, so it had long been dismissed as not an effective means of treatment. She’s become a canonical example of a delayed payoff for hyper-fixation on a particular problem (almost 20 years with limited academic or industry recognition).

The autobiography is an enjoyable read, starting with her being raised in Soviet Hungary. She criticizes the surveillance system, but remembers fondly its elevation of science and spotting kids with promise from households with less education. She remembers that her school transcripts always had an “F”, for “fizkai” to clarify her parents had worked “physical” jobs and were low educated, which got her extra attention from educators in communist Hungary.

She says half of her elite biology college cohort came from this working class tradition: can any elite American institution claim this?

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Book of The Dead by Richard Dawkins

Science enhances our experience with the world, rather than diminishes it.

For example, by understanding genes, we better understand that all of us are a kind of palimpest, messages layered up ones before us. This is the beginning thrust of Book of The Dead, written by eminent science thinker Richard Dawkins last year.

I didn’t finish this. It didn’t capture me but I respect Dawkins. Below some notes for my future reference.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Initially set in 1992, later editions of the science fiction classic “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” updated the setting to 2021. And so, we have now lived through Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel.

Perhaps best known as inspiring the 1982 Harrison Ford movie Bladerunner, the novel won mixed reviews at launch but has developed a cult following. Dick (1928-1982) is not remembered as a great writer as much as a great thinker (Minority Report and Total Recall also inspired by his stories), and that’s felt truer still after a new wave of artificial intelligence hype.

The title plays off a subplot of the book in which the humans who remain on earth (after nuclear fallout) covet the status symbol of a living animal, as opposed to artificial ones. So, the question is whether androids (the increasingly human-passing machines that the main character is chasing) would dream of electric ones? Its big theme: What defines humanity, especially if machines increasingly recreate many of the skills we identify with? I enjoyed the book, and below share notes for my own future reference.

Quantum Supremacy by Michio Kaku

Newtonian physics works for most of our everyday experiences. But for the biggest systems we encounter, we need Einstein’s theories of relativity to make sense of spacetime.

Neither, nor does our own intuitive understanding of the world, work at the smallest scale we understand. This is the quantum level, where electrons can be at two places at the same time, transmit information faster than speed of light and instantly analyze infinite paths between two points.

As Danish physicist and Nobel laureate Neils Bohr (1885-1962) wrote: “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it.”

And much like we didn’t understand all the ramifications of the atomic age before we developed nuclear weapons, governments and companies are busy investing in the military and commercial implications of the potentially radical advancement in quantum computing.

That’s the timing from prominent physicist and science communicator Michio Kaku in his 2023 book “Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything.”

By no means exhaustive, I picked up the book for a primer on the technology my work overlaps with. Below I share my notes for future reference.

How will the world end?

Given our odds, it’s a lot more likely the human species will go extinct long before Earth itself is destroyed. Funny that we don’t given that chilling nuance more thought.

The 2019 book “End Times” by journalist Bryan Walsh discusses various potential catastrophes that could threaten humanity’s survival. One of the main points made in the book is that humans have a tendency to underestimate the likelihood and consequences of catastrophic events, and that we should be more proactive in addressing potential threats to our survival. Fitting that the book was published before the covid-19 pandemic was identified.

The book covers a range of topics, including the risk of a nuclear war or environmental disaster, the possibility of an asteroid impact, the threat of pandemics and epidemics, and the long-term consequences of climate change. It also explores the psychological and economic factors that influence our ability to address these issues, such as the “arithmetic of compassion” and the social discount rate.

I found the book a mix of big-picture thinking and practical evaluation, a thought-provoking reminder of the fragility of human civilization and the importance of being prepared for potential disasters.

I shared below my notes from reading the book.