Families in intensive care ask a question medicine still answers with a shrug: is my mother still in there? This session is about the attempt to replace that shrug with a measurement, and about what happened when the measurement was tested against its own limits.

The talk covers how a measure of integration and differentiation distinguishes conscious from unconscious states across a large body of clinical recordings, why it is not a consciousness detector despite being described as one, and what a pre-registered attempt to break it revealed about the information such measures discard. The same instrument runs on a language model, and the session closes on what that result does and does not mean.

Attendees leave with a clear picture of where consciousness measurement currently stands, what it can responsibly claim, and why the honest limits matter more than the headline accuracy.

general audience · 45 min