Artificial intelligence is advancing on the assumption that the brain is essentially a computer and if that is true, replicating the mind in silicon is only a matter of time. Philosopher Dorothea Olkowski argues this is one of the biggest mistakes in the history of science. Consciousness does not originate in the cortex, the seat of reasoning and language, but in the brainstem, the most ancient part of the brain, shaped by body chemistry and emotion. The brain’s signalling system is too chemically complex, too slow-acting, and too entangled with the whole body to be reduced to the simple yes/no binary logic that underlies all computation.

The dominant assumption behind artificial intelligence is that the brain is essentially a computer—that thought is computation, and that consciousness, given sufficient processing power, can be replicated in silicon. The neuroscience tells a very different story. What the most important recent research reveals is that consciousness is not primarily a cortical function at all, let alone an algorithmic one: it arises from the oldest, most primitive part of the brain, is saturated with body chemistry, and is constitutively shaped by emotion.

The science I wish to focus on is neuroscience, and the first neuroscientist I would like to bring to your attention is the Estonian-American neuroscientist and psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp, whose work came to light for me when I started doing research for a course on cognition and emotion. Panksepp’s family fled Estonia for the US when he was still a child. He completed his graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts. His distinguished career began as Head of Affective Neuroscience Research at the Chicago Institute for Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch and the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics, along with two simultaneous university positions. Given this remarkable career, one wants to investigate what has prevented Panksepp’s work from being more widely known.