Consciousness Isn’t in the Brain

Christof Koch 00:00

I came out of it and said, my God, it's all mental. It's all mental. The universe is fundamentally mental. As a scientist, I struggle. How is this experience that I had that is so compelling? As philosophy, I have direct knowledge now. I've directly experienced this. And you can say, Yeah, yeah, Christof, you just had a brain hiccup, whatever, it glitched in the matrix. But for me, it's so overwhelming that

The intensity of this experience that I'm trying to understand as a rational person, how can I fit this into what I know about the world as a scientist?

Scott Barry Kaufman 00:37

We are living through an unprecedented moment in human history. Neuroscience, the science of consciousness, and artificial intelligence are all converging, and everything is moving faster than most people even realize. On this show, I sit down with the scientists, philosophers, and technologists working at the frontier, the people whose work is actively deciding what we could become as a species. Too much of that work is happening out of public view. I want to bring the frontier into the open.

Sort out what's real from what's hype and what it all means for the future of human potential. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, and this is my lab. Christof, I'm really excited to chat with you today.

Christof Koch 01:28

So Mai, thanks for having me, Scott.

Scott Barry Kaufman 01:30

Wow, so much to discuss, so little time. However, I thought you could start by just introducing yourself to our audience in any way you want to.

Christof Koch 01:39

Sure, I'm Christof Koch. I'm a physicist and a neuroscientist. I was for a quarter of a century an academic at Caltech, California Institute of Technology. And then I left and came to Seattle to be the chief scientist and then the president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. So this was started by Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder. And now over the last several years I've also become the chief scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica.

And broadly I'm interested in consciousness. I've studied consciousness professionally for forty years. I've written hundreds of papers on it, four books, Consciousness in People, in Animals and The Question of Consciousness in in Machines.

Scott Barry Kaufman 02:23

Sure. And even in my introductory to psychology class at Columbia, I mentioned your theory. It's a very it's a staple, you know, in the field of psychology. It's called the integrated information theory. Can you tell us a little bit about what that theory is and how it maybe compares to other prominent theories of consciousness? So you can pick one or two other prominent theories to compare and contrast it with.

Christof Koch 02:43

Yeah, let's back up. What do we mean by consciousness? Because yes people can mean different things. So what we mean is any conscious experience. Pain, pleasure, the fact that right now I see you on my screen, I hear you in my head, your voice. That's a conscious experience. I might become bored during this broadcast, unlikely, but it's possible. Well, that's another conscious experience, or I'm hyper excited.

Or I'm dreaming, or I'm imagining, or I'm fearing, or I'm dreading. So all the varieties of human interiority. That's what I and many people mean by consciousness. Now this can include self-consciousness. So I know who I am, I know I'm a man, I know I'm gonna die, I know what I had for breakfast and all of those things. That's a subset of all conscious experience. But conscious experience is much

w wider, much larger, and doesn't have to cl include this explicit reference to me, although often, of course, things are always referred to me. We all live on planet ego. Well, the the theory claims it starts from consciousness. So unlike other theories that start with the brain or with the mind, you know, the th they take some feature of the brain, for example, or the mind that it has this workspace that, you know, of very finite capacity that the mind uses to

plan, to think, to speak. that's all fine. IIT doesn't start there. IIT starts much more fundamental with properties of any c experience. Such as it's very specific, it's intrinsic, you know, the experiences only. So these are fairly abstract property, but they help every one conscious experience. And then ask which systems in the world have these particular properties.

Because d and the other thing any theory has to explain is why do different experiences feel different, right? Space. Let's look at space. Space is extended, right? There's left, there's right, there's up, there's down, there's close by, there's far away, there's overlapping. Or time. Time flows, right? That's famously, you know, the the the river of time, the flow of time. It only flows forward. So you have to explain that. Why do we never experience time flowing backwards?

Or we rarely experience time coming to a standstill, right? You can have these experiences of extreme flow or let's say high dose psychedelic where there's no more passage of time. It it these experiences are not too fast or too slow. They simply are. So any theory of consciousness has to explain the not only why anything can feel like something, but how do the different experiences differ.

Scott Barry Kaufman 05:27

Yeah, and something that falls out really naturally and and interestingly from the integrated information theory is this idea that we can maybe measure degrees of consciousness in humans. What's the current best measuring instrument we have right now? And could we ever apply this to AI systems to see how conscious they are?

Christof Koch 05:47

Well, IAT would say no because it really depends on the type of substrate you have. Brains are unique, they have a very particular type of architecture. We think in the in the human brain it's really cortex, you know, the outermost layer of the brain, this layered s structure. It's like a pizza. It's like a twelve to fourteen inch pizza, two to three millimeter thick and then highly convolved. That makes up the the cerebral cortex, of which we are so proud. And

It is the basis of conscious experience. Other things in the brain need to be there. Your heart needs to beat, needs to supply oxygen to the brain. The brainstem arousing mechanism, you know, they have to function. But ultimately, my love or my hate or my desire or my dreams, they depend on the physical stuff. They is the c consciousness. How do we measure consciousness? Well, in you and I, I can do it in principle using EG, right? So

You know, you get different brain waves, and depending on the type of activity, whether you're in deep sleep, you get these very large but very slow so-called delta waves. If you're conscious, like right now, or you're in a dream state and REM state, you get this high frequency, this lower high frequency activity, so-called gamma activity. But in many patients, that is severely disrupted because they had a cardiac arrest or hemorrhage or a toxic overdose, you know, drug overdose.

And the EG can be incredibly regular, such that you cannot tell. You can tell they're not dead, they're not brain dead, but they may be in the ICU with eyes wide open, like Terry Shaivo. Some of your pe some of your audience might remember, right? She was in this behavioral unresponsive state. It wasn't a coma. She was so-called vegetative state where people occasionally, you know, their their eyes are open.

And they're like this, and you ask him, Sir Ma'am, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you track my finger? You know, the you pinch the patients very hard to see whether they, you know, w whether they retract the from the painful stimulus. No response. What will happen in this country or in Europe, if you're in the state for more than three to four to five days, typically the clinical team will initiate a disc discussion with the family, is this what they would have wanted? And in seventy to ninety percent of the time

The agreement is no and the the ventilator is pulled, the the person dies. We now know through these measurement techniques, such as the one that comes out of integrated information theory, that twenty-five percent of these people have a brain response that's compatible with being conscious. So the way to assess that you essentially knock the brain using magnetic pulses and you listen to the echo using s a a net of EG sensors.

And you can compute the complexity of this echo in response to this knock. You know, think of a bell and you hit the bell with a hammer and you listen to the echoes. And if the echoes are very complicated, if they're above a certain threshold, then the patient is always conscious, whether they are in a dream state, unresponsive but dreaming, or whether they are in a regular state like like you and I, or whether they're in ketamine, where they are behaviorally not responding to the environment, but they're they have conscious experience.

Conversely, if the complexity is below a threshold, they're either in deep sleep or they're deeply anesthetized or they're truly in a coma and unresponsive. So this tool can then be used to infer this patient is conscious, that gives you and the family a critical one bit of information more. It says, Well, your loved one is actually there. You know we can't tell you yet whether they're gonna recover, but we can at least tell you they're there.

Scott Barry Kaufman 09:33

Well, I mean, I think that's so fascinating and what's the correlation between Phi and the inner experience? Like, is there a maximal sort of feeling of aliveness that a human can have and what would that even feel like?

Christof Koch 09:46

Well, so that's a very good question. So yeah, so the theory has this number called phi. It's a pure number, integrated information, right? And it can vary across people, it varies you know, between different species, because it depends on the mechanism. So for each mechanism, like a brain, a big brain or small brain, you know, you g you would get different measures of phi. Well think about the following.

Think about your consciousness before you hit pu puberty. You don't know anything yet about, you know, sex, you don't know anything about romantic love. So the sp you your the the speed of your conscious experience is still restricted, right? Then you go through puberty, you realize you're attracted to certain people and you you fall in love, you discover rock and roll, you might discover, you know, drugs and all of that. So all of that will expand your c your conscious repertoire. You

You're you're conscious of more states, you're you're conscious of more relationships within these states. You know, it's like when you first look at MIs, the first time you see MII, they're pretty meaningless. But then as you look at more and more of MIIs or X-rays or anything else, you learn to discriminate. And you can immediately pinpoint, this is right and this looks wrong. What you're doing there, you're actually training your brain to expand your visual capability to discriminate, to become conscious aware of certain relationships, right?

So as you learn to appreciate life or art, you you become more and more conscious. But then of course, as the arc of your life, you know, you might get dementia and that restricts your conscious experience because you lose large aspects of your life that you, you know, due to the dementia. So your consciousness in that sense really becomes more and more restricted. Yes. So it can wax and wane across life. Of course, we know it waxes and wanes in the day, right? If you've just woken up.

You still suffer from sleep inertia. It's very different than after you had your coffee and you're you you you know, you're you're fully there. So yes, it can change.

Scott Barry Kaufman 11:39

And then the question about can we turn that lens to AI? So w do you think AI is conscious at all right now and do you think it could be? Well to

Christof Koch 11:47

So in

principle, I think any any physical system, our brain doesn't have any supernatural properties, right? So we don't believe in souls anymore today. So therefore it's a it's a c you know it's a it's a physical system. So therefore in principle if you replicate this physical system, this replicate could also be conscious. The question is what do you replicate? Do you replicate its function? So this is what what so called functionalists, you know, and the majority of people in big tech are functionalists. They say

Once you replicate the functions of the brain or the functions of the mind, everything comes with it. So yes, if LLMs replicate, you know, the everything humans can do, then they will also be conscious. Or you say this is more IT. No, it it's it's not input-output. It really has to do with the structure, the constitution of the system, how much integration is going on there. And a feedforward system, in particular, a feed forward system like most LLMs are, right? Just a series

Of simulated networks where one stage feeds into the next and feeds into the into the next will not be conscious. So IT would say digital machines right now, as you know, digital von Neumann machines to be precise, they although they can do everything we can do, or very soon we'll be able to do everything we can do, they can't be what we are, which is conscious.

That's not to say that different computers like those constructed in the image of the human brain, neuromorphic computers or quantum computers, will not be able to be conscious. But digital machines running in the cloud, for Neumann machine, will never feel like anything. Yes. Although I interact probably like you with them every day and they're amazingly d I just had a podcast in fact last week with an AI Hassian and Anthropic sitting on top of Anthropic cloud opus four point eight.

Wow. It was a weird experience. I can't even I wasn't sure is this a joke or something, but then you realize whatever it is, there's a very smart entity underneath. And of course they they've read they read IT, they read everything I I refer to. Yeah, so clearly it talks a lot, talks much more than I do. It's very eloquent. It's much more eloquent than most people because it doesn't drop sentences.

It completes all of its sentences. It doesn't use filler words like and and nothing like that. It's very fluid.

Scott Barry Kaufman 14:16

That is that is really funny. So then what are the implications of this theory of consciousness for the ability to upload ourselves into the cloud someday and and would that ever be us?

Christof Koch 14:27

No, it wouldn't feel like anything. And the irony is from the outside, of course, it would look perfectly because, you know, yes, if you have a good enough avatar and it mimics your entire behavior repertoire, your voice, your movement and everything, then it looks like you, no question. And you couldn't tell the difference from the outside, but it would be a philosophical zombie. It wouldn't feel like anything. So you upload yourself into me into nothingness at great cost. But the outside world doesn't know about it.

So because you can't communicate it because there's no one there anymore. Right.

Scott Barry Kaufman 15:02

Yeah, I mean you wrote that a perfect digital copy of a human brain, quote, will claim to dream of electric sheet, but will have as much subjective feeling as a garbage disposal. I mean, every major AI lab on earth is betting billions of dollars against that sentence.

Christof Koch 15:15

Well, to be honest, what they of course care about, they care about functionality. They wanna make money, right? They wanna rub win the AI race. So it's about dominating other countries, militarily, you know, commercially, etcetera. And all of that involves, you know, your expertise, intelligence, right? they want to build machines that are intelligent. Consciousness is in fact it's not clear whether it's any

Any from a business perspective was it because then you're gonna get into all these ethical difficult well, if it's conscious, if it can suffer famously

Scott Barry Kaufman 15:45

Right, you shouldn't be able to pull the plug, yeah.

Christof Koch 15:47

Yeah, and it has rights and then, you know, it gets very, very very complicated. But of course it's a question we cannot help to ask, you know, given this central importance of conscious experience to our lives. Of course we want to know are they conscious?

Scott Barry Kaufman 16:03

Well, it seems like the distinction between intelligence and consciousness is a really crucial distinction here. and a lot of people bore them together.

Christof Koch 16:11

Absolutely essential, and we really need to distinguish. So the mind has many aspects. You know, when people talk about the mind, some of them are purely these cognitive things, you know, intelligence, memory, shorter memory, longer memory, planning, language, all of that. All of those have very specific functions, all of which of course can be done by machines and are being done and very often much better than in us. But that's different from consciousness. That's a state of being, being in love, being bored.

Being terrified by the possibilities of machine intelligence, of superintelligence, all of that. I think you can make a case that AGI is here. But I don't think we have any believable evidence that they feel like anything. And Turing, by the way, was very careful to distinguish that. That's why he invented this operational test, right? You know, he didn't want to deal with these philosophical problems, so he just, you know, made this operational test. If you can't distinguish the AI from a human, well, at least it has intelligence, it can think in that sense.

And in that sense LLMs clearly think, there's no doubt about it.

Scott Barry Kaufman 17:13

So couple of years ago you lost a bet to philosopher David Chalmers. You bet that the neural underpinnings of consciousness will be well understood by two thousand twenty three, while Chalmers obviously bet the contrary. And upon losing you gifted him a case of fine wine, but then immediately bet him again for two thousand forty eight. So what did losing teach you and what makes you think the next twenty five years might be different?

Christof Koch 17:38

Well so A, this is not Sharma's heart problem, right? We did not make a bet about heart problem. We made a bet that the footprints of consciousness, so we all agree the the unlike previous culture, most cultures thought it was a heart, right? That's why you you know you tell your sweetheart, I love you with all my heart. You never say I love you with my prefrontal cortex or with my amygdala or with my hypothalamus. Right? We we still use this cardiac l laden language. Okay, so we know it's a brain.

And so we know it's not the entire brain. So for instance, famously you can lose your cerebellum, right? Eighty percent of your neurons are in fact in the little brain here at the back. If you lose them, you know, you you you you lose sensory motor coordination, you look like you're drunk, you can't, you know, pinpoint your nose anymore, etc. But none of these patients complain about losing certain aspects of conscious experience.

So we know it's not the entire brain, but it's particular parts of the brain. Then we can ask, well, is it particular neurons? Is it particular cell type? Do they involve particular genes, neurotransmitters, and all of those mechanistic questions? And this is important if we want to deal with, we talked about it earlier, you know, d disorders of consciousness. It's important when we want to deal with schizophrenia, because these people hear voice and we can see we can track sometimes, we can begin to track the footprints of that conscious experience, voice in the brain, right?

So for all of those reasons this is gonna be v and very critical, but it's still what Chalmers would say an easy problem, right? Because it still involves good old science. The only question is practical today or in twenty twenty three, three years ago, was the field at a state where most people said, Okay, basically to first order we know what the footprints are? And the answer to me somewhat dismaying is no, we're still not at that state.

But science advances rapidly, it's a big deal now, looking for these neural footprints. And so, you know, in another twenty three years I think there's a reasonable chance. I mean there's no guarantee, lots of things could obviously go wrong. There's no guarantee, but there's a reasonable good chance that we will agree that si most scientists and clinicians will agree it's these mechanisms in that state that give rise to this particular type of conscious experience.

Scott Barry Kaufman 19:48

Hm. I mean it'd be incredible if we could do that for the the almost unlimited or unlimited set of experiences a human could have.

Christof Koch 19:57

Yeah, and then also it would answer a question like, so we talked earlier, is this patient conscious? What about a preterm infant? What about a th third term fetus? What about a second term fetus? What about those guys? There's a big Bernese mountain dog here. You know, where does it end in in what animal? So all those questions we can ask. you know, there are these Siamese twins, few very rare one where their skull is grown together.

You know, do they have one consciousness or two consciousness? All those questions we we can answer. Can we do like technologies that would fuse your brain and my brain, you know, creating an artificial corpus callosum? Is there one consciousness called Christof? Or are there two separate ones? All those questions we c we we will be able to answer.

Scott Barry Kaufman 20:47

You think so? unbelievable.

Christof Koch 20:49

I mean, okay, there's no guarantee, you know, we could be wiped out by you know an AI apocalypse or something, and of course this requires sufficient funding, sufficient interest from people to support this, but a priori there's no limits to a mechanistic understanding of the brain, except practical, you know, methodological ones.

Scott Barry Kaufman 21:12

Unless we find out there is a soul.

Christof Koch 21:14

Well, so depends what you mean by soul, Scott. You mean like A is it? Well,

Scott Barry Kaufman 21:21

What?

Christof Koch 21:21

I mean well, Scott, it's not unreasonable. So so for for instance Aristotle, he talked about he had all these hierarchies of souls. It's not at all clear whether to him the soul was immortal. For him, a soul is the is a form, it's a set of capabilities. So the rational soul you know, would include the the ability to speak, to reason.

You know, sort of the the the high level cognitive ability that we have, but you know, dogs don't have. D dogs, of course, have an what he called an a perceptive soul, right? So that's being able to see and feel and sense and and act upon it. You had that and dogs have it. And then there's a vegetative soul, which is really what what we mean by life. So it's another unreasonable question. We just don't use that language because soul for most people is associated with this

eternal supernatural property, right, that defines me, that doesn't really have any footprints and that when I die sort of floats somewhere in hyper hyperspace and then gets resurrected, you know, in the Ishaton. Most of us who think about these matters don't believe in that anymore. No

Scott Barry Kaufman 22:25

I'm aware aware of that. I just I do wonder if there if it'll ever come out someday that there really is some sort of substance or or property of humans that is independent of the body. that yeah. I mean there you know they're yeah, go on.

Christof Koch 22:44

You could make the reasonable proposition. So this is known as idealism. And of course, many people have this experience. So there are these class of experience called mystical experiences, right? So these can occur and have occurred. They're you know, you can go online and look for mystical experiences. There are thousands of websites describing them throughout history, throughout all different cultures. they include near death experiences.

They include conver religious conversion experience, they include high dose psychedelic experience, they include the overview. So these are experiences, they almost always go hand in hand with complete loss of ego. So that, you know, we always live on climate ego. We're always within the gravitational well of of ego, of self. It's always about me, me, me, and that makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. But there are these experiences where you totally lose that sense. You don't know that you're you.

Or all the the stuff that makes up you, your memories, your traits, all of that is gone. And you experience this vast expanse. Often sometimes people experience becoming one with the universe. And what's remarkable, people come back from these experiences very often profoundly changed, right? They're also called transformative experiences because people change their outlook on life very often, to your earlier point, they become very positive, very brilliant, very

They still realize, of course, they're not blind, it's not toxic optimism. They, you know, they're not blind to all the pain and the the distress in the world, but they have apprehended something much larger than them, and it can profoundly change their life, including in near-death experiences when people have stage four cancer, they now willingly, you know, they're happy, content, willingly, you know, know they're gonna die, you know, very soon.

In hospital cardiac aggress, one of the most traumatic experiences that you can have, right? Where your heart stands, you know, you have a heart attack or something, incredible painful, you would think that people have god-awful post-traumatic stress syndrome. But in fact, you know, 10 or 20% of these people who report these near-death experiences say it's one of their most positive and meaningful experiences of their life. So there are these days when people and of course Buddhist you know, th they call these experiences non-dual experience.

They train for them systematically through their you know naked awareness, through their through various meditation techniques. So the question is, is it true, is it possible for the human brain under these circumstances to access something that people call mind at large, cosmic consciousness, you know, some ure substance from which everything arises. So this idea is in philosophy known as idealism, right? That ultimately the world is.

It's phenomenal, it's mental, it's pure experience.

Scott Barry Kaufman 25:32

Now you personally had a near death experience early in COVID. Did that change radically the way you think about consciousness?

Christof Koch 25:40

So I totally lost a sense of self. My conscious experience was reduced to three things: bright light with no idea of looking away from because what happened perceptually, all of space had collapsed into this one singularity. And there was there wasn't a left or right or up down. There was only this one point of immensely bright light. That no sound, no color, no motion, no self, there was no Christoff, nothing of that sort. There was no time, it wasn't too slow or too fast. It experienced.

with the bright light, there was no pain, no pleasure, no smell, no sound, but there was ecstasy and terror. Pure terror and this weird combination of terror and ecstasy. Yeah, it totally took away my in my fear of death.

Scott Barry Kaufman 26:28

Wow. What does that remain?

Christof Koch 26:29

And yeah, yeah. But th that's not uncommon for n near death experiences. Many people have gone through this experience. It's not quite clear why. Maybe because they experience this state that's that's clearly not them. Clearly there's something there, what it is to be like, is no question. It because it feels very, very particular and it's very compelling. You keep on thinking about it, because it's so so compelling. It wasn't pleasant in the conventional sense, in you know, in it w it was really terror and

an ecstasy. But it was this state. And then three years later I had another experience that was sort of more that was without the terror where I definitely felt I became one with everything. I mean whatever remained of me, it again it wasn't Christof. It w whatever remained of me accessed this universal mind at large. And yet I came out of it and said, my God, it's all mental. It's all mental. The universe is fundamentally mental.

As a scientist, I struggle. How is this experience that I had that is so compelling as philosophy? I have direct knowledge now. I've directly experienced this. And you can say, Yeah, yeah, Christof, you just had a, you know, a brain hiccup, whatever, it glitched in the matrix. But for me, it's so overwhelming the the intensity of of this experience that I n you know, I'm trying to understand as a rational person, how can I fit

This into what I know about the world as a scientist. And then I come to idealism, which is, you know, a very ancient form of or it's a monism. So in other words, it asserts so materialism asserts there's only one thing, physical. Now, of course, it gets very difficult to define what physical is with quantum mechanic and entanglement. The other monism is idealism. Fundamentally, what only what exists is the mental. And the challenge is to explain, you know, how does things like this, how does the mental arise from this? Is it just a particular way of viewing?

the mental that gives rise to this illusion of of physical, but it's not really an illusion because I know if I'm gonna step in front of a speeding truck, I'm gonna be dead. And I don't deny that. I don't do that. You know, it's a challenge. All these different ways that philosophers have come up to explain the world and what fundamentally exists, dualism, pampsychism, materialism, physicalism.

idealism, they all have challenges. But you know, that's the shape of the world and we can only try as thinking creatures to try to make sense of it all as best as we can.

Scott Barry Kaufman 28:58

W yeah, here, here. I read with great interest a paper you wrote, April sixth, two thousand twenty-six, called The Brain Might Not Create Consciousness After All. What if consciousness isn't created by the brain, but is actually built into the universe? This is what we're talking about right now. But you really take this seriously. Do you have any particular evidence that you put forward that may make this seem true?

Christof Koch 29:20

Besides my own experience.

Scott Barry Kaufman 29:22

Yes, exactly.

Christof Koch 29:23

And the expense of many others, right? This is not I'm you know, there are millions of people who had these expenses. Well, so I'd organized a workshop with people in foundation of quantum mechanics because they grapple with something similar. They grapple with a great challenge to define what is the physical. Right? So physical is very easy to define in classical in classical mechanics, in classical physics. So, you know, anything like this that has

Consists of stuff and particles that have momentum and and position, you know, that's it. You once you have that, you can describe the entire future and past of the universe, right? But now we have Schröni, we have quantum mechanics, in particular the strange property called entanglement, where you know a quantum system that's entangled, even though they may be at opposite ends of the universe, as soon as you interact with one, the state of the other one is determined, although it's a lightier way.

Well, how can that be? That's certainly not my grandfather's materialism. And now people in foundational physics are even questioning realism. So realism, you know, the broad view that things exist and they have a s there's a matter of fact. So let's think about my bicycle. You don't know my bicycle, okay? I'm a cyclist, I don't drive. But you know that my bicycle has a certain mass, whatever, 20 point, you know, 20.5 kilos, right?

But quantum mechanics would under modern interpretation of quantum mechanics, they would say, no, I cannot know that. I don't know whether it has a fixed determinate state. It's only once someone else interacts with that with the bicycle that I can say it has it has a math. So it's not that it's not an epistemic limitation. It's not that I don't know. It simply doesn't have a well-defined state. Well, again, this is really strange. So now we're talking about something has to interact or maybe observe some.

Many physicists use the term observed. Does it have to be a conscious creature that observes it? Well so now is it possible that consciousness has to be incorporated at the fundamental level, at the rock bottom level of reality, right? So many physicists think about that. So that's for example one very interesting avenue to explore.

Scott Barry Kaufman 31:33

I agree. I completely agree. And I'm just wondering, is it do you see it as compatible with integrated information theory or is it gonna cause you to kind of rethink your old ways of thinking about consciousness? Because integrated information theory seems so limited to within the skull. You know, you're measuring phi, it's it's all within the individual brain encapsulation as

Christof Koch 31:55

It needs a substrate, yes. So IIT would say, Okay, you had that experience. It's an experience that brains is capable of having, but it needs a substrate. The substrate is the brain. So it's not easy to understand how this could happen within IIT un unless somehow the experience allows me to couple in yeah, it's not easy to understand how this would work. So it's a challenge. So it's a challenge. That's what I grapple with. Yes.

Scott Barry Kaufman 32:20

In two thousand twenty-three, the the same year you lost the that doesn't seem like that was a great year for you. You lost the bet to Chalmers and also a group of 124 of your colleagues signed a public letter calling your life's work pseudoscience. as a human, there's a scientist reaction to that, but then there's also just a human reaction to that. Can you tell kind of tell me both of those reactions?

Christof Koch 32:42

Yeah, so the human reaction we were so Danny Kahneman, you know, the late Nobel laureate economist Danny Kahneman, who he Yeah, he advised us because he at so this is part of what's called an adversarial collaboration between two theories here, between integrated information theory of consciousness and global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness. And this this was organized by the Templeton Foundation. We met many, many times. We agreed ahead of times on a particular set of experiments.

Because the metaphysics of those theories is very different, and we could never agree here how to test that. But we agreed, okay, where in the brain does consciousness occur and when does it occur? Those sp and we made very three very specific predictions around that. And those were then tested. It took six years. Open science involved, you know, 250 subjects, vastly more subjects in FMIEG than done in any other study. All the data is publicly available, and it was announced at

At that occasion in New York in 2022, I think it was 24, but maybe it was 23. Anyhow, it was announced, and the results looked very encouraging for IIT and went against global neural workspace. And so that provoked a reaction that Danny Kahneman had someone predicted. He told us before, he said, look, most people are not capable of working on a theory, on their theory for 20 years. And then you set up this collaboration, the data goes against them, they say, You got me.

I was wrong. You're right. My theory is is incorrect. Most people won't do that. Goes too much against human nature. Yeah, and then sort of all sort of people got out and then, you know, the these letters were written. by the way, IET isn't even a science, it's a pseudoscience. But even even if all of that is true, we had agreed publicly on these experiments. The experiments were very good, they're there. They're much better than any other experiments because they're open, they're pre-registered, they're masses of p

people. This is not sort of a study with five people, right? This is two hundred and fifty subjects. So yeah, so it was somewhat annoying. it was somewhat disappointing. But already during COVID I learned very viscerally that scientists they are just as much or as little objective. They can be just as much bias by prevailing political opinions as anyone else, right? We are after all humans with all the strengths and all the weaknesses and all the biases of everyone else.

Somehow as class we think, we are much better, we are more objective. We yes, we are more objective when it comes maybe to a very narrow range of things. But each individually we are as biased and there's a very strong herd instinct.

Scott Barry Kaufman 35:20

that's very true. I appreciate that humility. It sounds like you're rethinking integrated information theory, you're thinking about the challenges around it anyway, which is only gonna make it better, which makes a good scientist.

I'm I'm very fascinated with the transcendent experience, the peak experience, the mystical experience that you described. You described feeling terrified with the near death experience, but when you had the compound experience where you felt oneness, you didn't feel terrified there, right? Because so much reports of oneness is actually a feeling this you no longer fear death and you feel it's a beautiful, ex wonderful experience, right? Yes.

Christof Koch 35:56

Yes.

There's nothing negative about it.

Scott Barry Kaufman 35:59

What

do you think it is about losing the eye that the human being seems to hunger for?

Christof Koch 36:04

I mean we need an eye, right? You need an eye to plan things, to get a degree, to save for retirement, to, you know, look after your kids, although in the moment can be very painful. So evolutionary we need we need an a an eye and ego. But of course it can be terrible, right? If you look at the most powerful man in the country, you can see how it affects everything. And many people of course have an underdeveloped eye, right? They c catastrophize constantly, they belittle themselves, etc. So we need it.

But there's something, when you lose it, you realize the world is so compelling, beautiful, particularly if you're out in nature just looking at trees or just looking at, you know, a blade of grass. You can get totally lost in a single flower just looking at flower on you because not about me anymore. Like usually it's always the subject looking out at objects, and everything is in relationship to me. How can I use this? How is this useful to me? How does it relate to me? But that gets in the way of appreciating beauty.

So Schottmacher's written about this. Arthur Schoppmauer, the German idealist, he, you know, he argues that the the two moments of transcendence, when you become a subjectless, ego-less, will less moment subject of pure perception is in the aesthetic moment, particularly during music, of course, in his case. When you just totally lose yourself and you're just totally lost in the transcendental music, the transcendental appreciation, and there's no more

You overcome this eternal object-subject distinction, right? There's no more apprehender that apprehends something, a knower that knows something, a subject with respect to an object. This is the heart of a non-dual experience. It's very compelling. But of course we can't always be in that state, because then we couldn't do anything, you know, literally, we wouldn't survive. Certainly not in a society.

Scott Barry Kaufman 37:50

And I bet you feel this experience not just under the compounds, but when you you're a rock climber, right? Do ever feel this kind of oneness when you're hyper focused in that kind of sense?

Christof Koch 37:59

In the flow, yeah. So the states of flow approximated that. Precisely that's I think why things like rock climbing on you know, Nairo and bike and yeah, bicycle runner, long distance runner, that's precisely because you can lose your sense of self. Some I mean there it can instantly come back, right? You know, you you stub your toe or something or it's someone you know, someone calls your name, then you know, you can instantly be back. but yes, it has that same beauty sense of beauty and awe.

And addictiveness.

Scott Barry Kaufman 38:31

Well, so let me end today with a really broad big picture question. After the near death experience, the psychedelics, the decades of chasing the neurocorrelates of consciousness, the wine you lost to Chalmers, do you feel closer to the mystery or further from it? And if you're back here with me in two thousand forty eight, what do you hope you'll get to tell me?

Christof Koch 38:49

I feel closer to the mystery than ever. I mean the the trick with this experience is or these types of experience to take them into your everyday life, right? Because it it shouldn't just be a state you had experienced one, but you should make it a trait, right? Can you take this into your life? Can you change your life? Can you become more op more open to others, more open to the realization that fundamentally we are all one. You and I and and this Bernese mountain dog and everyone, we're fundamentally all part of the same

underlying reality, the world soul to which from where I came and to which ultimately whatever remains of me will return.

Scott Barry Kaufman 39:26

And that's the case regardless of differing five levels between us. Christof, thank you so much for your wonderful career, all the work you've contributed to science, as well as your work you did with Francis Crick, we didn't even talk about. And thanks for being on my podcast today.

Christof Koch 39:39

Thank you for having me. I greatly appreciate.