The result is really interesting, and I would love to read more when they reach n=5. (Or even n=1 on a reasonably normal brain.)
But Crick's notion sounds a lot like what Dennett derisively calls the "Cartesian Theater", the tendency to imagine consciousness as little room where a tiny homunculus watches the screens where all sensory data is displayed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
In Dennett's view, consciousness is basically a distributed system. There is no single place where consciousness "really happens". That a single electrode can disrupt consciousness doesn't suggest otherwise. If a backhoe hitting a cable junction triggered an AWS failure, we wouldn't say that the cable junction is where AWS "really happens".
But Crick's notion sounds a lot like what Dennett derisively calls the "Cartesian Theater", the tendency to imagine consciousness as little room where a tiny homunculus watches the screens where all sensory data is displayed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
In Dennett's view, consciousness is basically a distributed system. There is no single place where consciousness "really happens". That a single electrode can disrupt consciousness doesn't suggest otherwise. If a backhoe hitting a cable junction triggered an AWS failure, we wouldn't say that the cable junction is where AWS "really happens".