Franklin Stan;March 2003. A computer-based model of Crick and Koch’s Framework for Consciousness. Editorial Review: Science & Consciousness Review.
Recently Crick and Koch offered a “Framework for Consciousness” (2003). Pradeep Mutalik’s review of that article in SCR (Mutalik 2003) asserts that “Crick and Koch describe ten aspects of a framework that they believe offers a coherent scheme for explaining the neural correlates of consciousness.” Crick and Koch explain that a framework must not be confused with a set of hypotheses. Rather a framework for consciousness offers a point of view from which to address the problems of consciousness. It’s intended to guide research. A good framework should fit within current scientific knowledge reasonably well and should be roughly correct. It needn’t be correct in all its details, but rather should guide research to fill in and correct it details. Such frameworks have proved useful in Biology and Physics. This one can be expected to be useful in consciousness studies. 2 Frameworks, by their very nature contain large gaps that can be filled with the results of later research. They can also be filled, temporarily, by hypotheses derived from cognitive models to give more specific guidance to research than does the framework itself. In this case, hypotheses from the IDA model of consciousness and cognition can serve to clarify some aspects of this framework and to flesh out others.