Tiny Blue Dot Foundation

The Tiny Blue Dot Foundation is a 501(c)(3) currently funding and managing investigations of consciousness. Our mission statement is to develop a collaborative effort to understand the nature of consciousness and its place in nature by developing and validating theoretically-motivated and clinically useful measures of consciousness. Our strategy is to formulate and derive a principled, quantitative, comprehensive, and empirically testable account of what consciousness is; to understand mechanistically how consciousness is generated, altered, and lost in humans and animals; how it can be measured reliably in neurologically impaired patients, and whether and how it can be present in machines; and, finally, to explore the ethical, legal, philosophical and other societal implications of this knowledge. Specifically, our aims include: Aim I: Develop a practical system with which to measure the presence and the quantity of consciousness Aim II: Establish which brain regions constitute the physical substrate of consciousness in the brain Aim Estimate states of consciousness from the ‘connectome’ of the human brain, and infer consciousness in animals, computers and groups of people, animals and computers Aim IV: Grow a community of scholars, scientists and clinicians debating, testing and evaluating these ideas We are currently working with a team of researchers from: The Allen Institute University of Wisconsin-Madison Massachusetts General Hospital University of California-Los Angeles Medical University of South Carolina University of Milan