Neuroanatomy of the Will.

Questions about consciousness and individual agency have practical implications for health, social policy, and economics, including ethical issues around patient consent in dementia or coma, the health impacts of individual choices, and moral dilemmas in animal testing. New scientific methods and theories in biology, physics, computer science, and philosophy are enabling testable hypotheses about consciousness. This Topical Collection provides a peer-reviewed space for discussing falsifiable hypotheses about consciousness across disciplines, emphasizing their relevance to human health, society, and policy.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Questions regarding the nature and source of consciousness and individual agency to make decisions have enormous practical implications that include human health and wellbeing, social policy, and economics. Ethical issues involving the ability for patients to make conscious, informed choices, such as in cases of dementia or coma, abound, and the health implications of individual choice on public wellbeing are becoming increasingly important as population densities increase. Furthermore, the use of animals for drug testing presents moral dilemmas related to our concepts of consciousness, pain, and consent. While philosophers have long debated aspects of consciousness, the means to scientifically address specific questions regarding regional and cellular functions of the brain are constantly emerging, as are new theories of physical laws and particle interactions which allow for the formation of new hypotheses of the source of consciousness. These emerging capabilities and hypotheses are increasingly able to be subjected to methodological scrutiny by the scientific community. To facilitate open discussion and advances in investigations regarding the nature of consciousness, this Topical Collection is intended to provide a peer-reviewed space to discuss or propose falsifiable hypotheses of consciousness in a full range of systems, using methods across disciplines of biology, physics, computer science, and philosophy of science that can inform such a discussion, while emphasizing the role that our conception of consciousness has on human health, society, and policy.