“Welcome to the official start of the Francis Crick Scholarship Program. I’m Norman Bennett, the director of the program. To me this is a truly momentous day, because when I was just beginning in neuroscience you couldn’t mention the word ‘consciousness’ without drawing derisive laughter or strange looks. This skepticism began to end due to the efforts of Francis Crick, whom I counted among my close friends. After discovering DNA he figured he could do whatever he wanted. He also noticed we don’t actually have any scientific laws that relate consciousness to neurological states. So in the early nineties he started a research program to investigate this mystery, with this working definition: by ‘consciousness’ we mean the inner domain of sensations and perceptions and thoughts, all centered around a self, that make up your life. The world of experience that begins when you wake up in the morning and vanishes when you enter a deep dreamless sleep. Your consciousness is what it is like to be you. Now Francis was smart enough to avoid being bogged down in philosophical arguments, so he called it ‘the search for the neural correlates of consciousness.’ Neuroscience can start by merely correlating brain states to particular conscious states. It’s a mark of how far this research program has come that we are being supported by the Department of Defense, specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA. It should be obvious why they’re interested: solving the mystery of consciousness might lead to general artificial intelligence. Or discovering how to directly intervene on people’s minds. And there are other fantastical possibilities, like brain uploading, brain-to-brain communication, and curing long-standing diseases. They’ve recognized that being ahead of other nations on this problem is a national imperative, and thanks to them, we’re going to have the first group of young researchers in the history of the world that are all explicitly focused on the science of consciousness. Let’s give a warm welcome to the eight new scientists!”

Light applause, and Kierk claps with the uncertainty of someone clapping for himself.