I don't see the importance of this study outside of the neuroscience field. They just found another way of making people to stop reacting to external stimuli.
I've come to the conclusion, that science will never be able to even define consciousness, let alone explain it.
For starters, if it can be induced externally without shoving wires into your brain, it could conceivably be a safer, more reliable form of surgical anesthesia. Even with "anesthesiologist" being a dedicated career path, botched anesthesia kills more people than we'd like to admit, plus there's the rare-but-horrific surgical awareness cases. Even if it can't be induced by (say) an external magnetic field, a minimally-invasive implant might be provided to a patient who's expected to need repeated surgeries.
Also, as the article points out, reversing the process could potentially be useful in awakening coma patients.
Of course all that's very speculative, and more research is called for, but that's how science is done.
Apart from being an increase in knowledge, it could have significant implications for our understanding of the experiences of non-human animals.
It appears that mice have a claustrum, and I would be very interested to see the effect of manipulating that area on their behaviour. If it has little effect, one might conclude that mice don't experience consciousness the way we do, for example, or the reverse.
Edit: here is an open access version of Crick & Koch's paper on the claustrum:
> I think the real problem is that people don't really want consciousness defined. They want to keep it as this magical, special thing.
I disagree, what makes you think so? Hard problem of consciousness is the real problem. Consciousness isn't a physical thing, that's why physics can't define it.
If you want to keep the assumption that consciousness and the physical world share causal interactions, consciousness must be a physical thing. How could consciousness and the physical world interact causally if consciousness is not part of the physical world?
The reason physics can't define consciousness isn't that consciousness isn't physical. Consciousness is just part of the world our current physics, and really our current philosophies, haven't developed satisfactory means to address.
Many physical phenomena, now explained by physics, were once unexplained by previous iterations of physics. Previous physics were just incomplete, until people came along with new ideas to expand what phenomena physics could explain. Doesn't mean those phenomena weren't physical things before physics evolved ways to understand them.
>Consciousness isn't a physical thing, that's why physics can't define it.
Says who? It is most certainly caused by physical neurons which are built by particles following the laws of physics. In principle it is both understandable and explainable in terms of physics, though likely any explanation will follow some other nomenclature (e.g. we don't describe weather in terms of motions of quarks)
The first step is to understand consciousness and how it works. Once we understand how it works it has a multitude of applications. Not least in computer science (eg. trying to create machines that display consciousness), and neuro-medicine (eg. how do we wake people up that are in a coma).
> If so isn't this a case of the snake trying to eat it's own tail ?
Pretty much. Consciousness is one level above science in a way, so every attempt to only use science to explain consciousness will fail. Consciousness is a metaphysical concept, "meta" = an abstraction layer above.
I've come to the conclusion, that science will never be able to even define consciousness, let alone explain it.