The New York Times has a fascinating article on measuring consciousness, a topic I wrote a bit about in my book.

In particular, I developed a theory about human dignity based on personhood, which I rooted in consciousness — what I called the story we tell about ourselves. It was the disruption of this narrative, I argued, that was at the center of every abuse of human rights.

This theory, of course, has all sorts of implications for debates about the beginning and end of human life and, as part of the chapter, I discussed some of the implications that accepting my theory would have for the abortion and euthanasia debates … which I thought might make me somewhat unpopular with both liberals and conservatives (respectively). In effect, I made the case that we could work out — based on electrical activity in the brain — whether or not a human being was conscious and thus whether that human being was a bearer of personhood, dignity, and finally rights.

Not too many people have read the book, I suppose, so my popularity remains unchanged!

That said, I presented this chapter to an audience of human rights theorists and practitioners in Berlin once and it made them all incredibly uncomfortable, so much so that they translated it into German, retitled it “The Right to Life,” and published it in an edited volume … which, apparently, not too many people have read (since I am invited back with some regularity).

Now, it seems, Giulio Tononi is working to make my argument more practically applicable or at least more easily tested:

He and his colleagues are translating the poetry of our conscious experiences into the precise language of mathematics. To do so, they are adapting information theory, a branch of science originally applied to computers and telecommunications. If Dr. Tononi is right, he and his colleagues may be able to build a “consciousness meter” that doctors can use to measure consciousness as easily as they measure blood pressure and body temperature.

The entire article on Tononi’s research is well worth reading and I look forward to thinking more carefully about what this all of this will ultimately mean for my little-discussed theory!