Bicameral Labs is a nonprofit research organization dedicated to a civilization-level goal: solving consciousness scientifically.

The science of consciousness didn’t get to have a 20th century. Due to the “consciousness winter” of behaviorism, the first scientific conferences on consciousness didn’t start until the 1990s. The field is just a few decades old.

But we don’t have time to wait anymore. The lag in consciousness science is felt everywhere. AI’s development has created machines that increasingly resemble and even sometimes surpass human intelligence, yet without a theory of consciousness we are flying blind—morally, scientifically, and culturally—including the risk of not understanding what makes humans special.

Questions of AI consciousness are just the beginning: every field that touches the mind is waiting on the same answers, and solving consciousness will unlock entire branches of the tech tree.

“We will see a consciousness revolution in the 2030s or even earlier.”

Erik Hoel, Bicameral Labs founder, in Nature

While the past decades have produced hundreds of neuroscientific theories of consciousness, empirical testing has ruled out none of them.

“Two Theories of Consciousness Faced Off. The Ref Took a Beating.”

The New York Times, April 2025

The problem lies upstream of the experiments themselves. Consciousness science is pre-paradigmatic: it does not yet create falsifiable theories. The goal of Bicameral Labs is to transform consciousness science from pre-paradigmatic to post-paradigmatic.

To accomplish this, Bicameral will lead an international consortium of major neuroscience labs. Its early-stage phases include creating the equivalent of meta-scientific no-go theorems for theories of consciousness, cultivating extremely high-quality data sets, and developing a unique style of experiment designed not to promote or test individual theories, but to narrow down the state space of possible theories.

Once we know a thousand ways to not build a theory of consciousness, the same process and data can be inverted to reverse-engineer a final post-paradigmatic theory.

The ability to manipulate conscious states could be either Prometheus’ fire or Pandora’s box. Bicameral’s purpose is not only to make scientific progress on consciousness, but to shepherd the far-reaching consequences of that progress toward ethical outcomes for humanity as a whole, ensuring the myriad applications preserve the inherent dignity of human consciousness.

Bicameral Labs is a permanent nonprofit research organization for consciousness science, modeled after other public-goods projects dedicated to solving a specific hard scientific question, such as LIGO for gravitational waves or the Human Genome Project for the genetic code.

Erik Hoel received his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, working closely with Giulio Tononi on the “theory team” to help develop Integrated Information Theory. He has been a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, a research assistant professor at Tufts University, a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

He is known for highly original scientific work across a number of fields, including consciousness science. His previous research projects have been funded by DARPA, the NSF, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Army Research Office. He blogs at www.theintrinsicperspective.com.

We are assembling the team and looking for driven scientists determined to crack consciousness. Write to us →

We are inviting empirical labs to run coordinated experiments. Email us to express interest in helping narrow down the state space of possible theories of consciousness in a globe-wide hunt. Register your lab’s interest →

Bicameral Labs, a public charity with full 501(c)(3) status, depends on philanthropic support to build a permanent home for consciousness science. If you would like to help fund our work, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch about giving →