Christof Koch Quotes

how does it feel,' wonders the neuroscientist Christof Koch, 'to bhe the mute hemisphere, permanently encased in one skull in the company of a dominant sibling that does all the talking?

Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner.

Make a decision, trust yourself and stick with it.

Humanity is not condemned to wander forever in an epistemological fog, knowing only the surface appearance of things but never their true nature.

It was only as a mature man that I became mortal. The visceral insight of my end came to me abruptly more than a dozen years ago. I had wasted an entire evening playing an addictive, firstperson shooter video game that belonged to my teenage son—running through eerily empty halls, flooded corridors, nightmarishly twisting tunnels, and empty plazas under a foreign sun, emptying my weapons at hordes of aliens pursuing me relentlessly. I went to bed late and, as always, fell asleep easily. I awoke abruptly a few hours later. Knowledge had turned to certainty —I was going to die! Not right there and then, but someday. ... My interpretation of this queer event is that all the killing in the video game triggered unconscious thoughts about the annihilation of the self. These processes produced sufficient anxiety that my cortico-thalamic complex woke up on its own, without any external trigger. At that point, self-consciousness lit up and was confronted with its mortality.

In summary, every conscious experience has five distinct and undeniable properties: each one exists for itself, is structured, informative, integrated and definite. These are the five essential hallmarks of any and all conscious experiences, from the commonplace to the exalted, from the painful to the orgiastic.

At the other end of life are elders with severe dementia. The final stage of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases is marked by extreme apathy and exhaustion. Individuals cease speaking, gesturing, and even swallowing. Has their conscious mind permanently left its abode, a shrunken brain full of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques?

Mind-as-software is an unspoken background assumption that needs no justification. It is as obvious as the existence of the devil used to be. For what is the alternative to mind-as-software? A soul? Come on! In reality, though, mind-as-software and its twin, brain-as-computer, are convenient but poor tropes when it comes to subjective experience, an expression of functional ideology run amok. They are more rhetoric than science. Once we understand the mythos for what it is, we wake as from a dream and wonder how we ever came to believe in it. The mythos that life is nothing but an algorithm limits our spiritual horizon and devalues our perspective on life, experience, and the place of sentience in time's wide circuit.

Finally, Tononi argues that the neural correlate of consciousness in the human brain resembles a grid-like structure. One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is how visual, auditory, and touch perceptual spaces map in a topographic manner onto visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortices. Most excitatory pyramidal cells and inhibitory interneurons have local axons strongly connected to their immediate neighbours, with the connections probability decreasing with distance. Topographically organized cortical tissue, whether it develops naturally inside the skull or is engineered out of stem cells and grown in dishes, will have high intrinsic causal power. This tissue will feel like something, even if our intuition revels at the thought that cortical carpets, disconnected from all their inputs and outputs, can experience anything. But this is precisely what happens to each one of us when we close our eyes, go to sleep, and dream. We create a world that feels as real as the awake one, while devoid of sensory input and unable to move. Cerebral organoids or grid-like substances will not be conscious of love or hate, but of space.; of up, down, close by and far away and other spatial phenomenology distinctions. But unless provided with sophisticated motor outputs, they will be unable to do anything.

This brings me to an objection to integrated information theory by the quantum physicist Scott Aaronson. His argument has given rise to an instructive online debate that accentuates the counterintuitive nature of some IIT's predictions. Aaronson estimates phi.max for networks called expander graphs, characterized by being both sparsely yet widely connected. Their integrated information will grow indefinitely as the number of elements in these reticulated lattices increases. This is true even of a regular grid of XOR logic gates. IIT predicts that such a structure will have high phi.max. This implies that two-dimensional arrays of logic gates, easy enough to build using silicon circuit technology, have intrinsic causal powers and will feel like something. This is baffling and defies commonsense intuition. Aaronson therefor concludes that any theory with such a bizarre conclusion must be wrong. Tononi counters with a three-pronged argument that doubles down and strengthens the theory's claim. Consider a blank featureless wall. From the extrinsic perspective, it is easily described as empty. Yet the intrinsic point of view of an observer perceiving the wall seethes with an immense number of relations. It has many, many locations and neighbourhood regions surrounding these. These are positioned relative to other points and regions - to the left or right, above or below. Some regions are nearby, while others are far away. There are triangular interactions, and so on. All such relations are immediately present: they do not have to be inferred. Collectively, they constitute an opulent experience, whether it is seen space, heard space, or felt space. All share s similar phenomenology. The extrinsic poverty of empty space hides vast intrinsic wealth. This abundance must be supported by a physical mechanism that determines this phenomenology through its intrinsic causal powers. Enter the grid, such a network of million integrate-or-fire or logic units arrayed on a 1,000 by 1,000 lattice, somewhat comparable to the output of an eye. Each grid elements specifies which of its neighbours were likely ON in the immediate past and which ones will be ON in the immediate future. Collectively, that's one million first-order distinctions. But this is just the beginning, as any two nearby elements sharing inputs and outputs can specify a second-order distinction if their joint cause-effect repertoire cannot be reduced to that of the individual elements. In essence, such a second-order distinction links the probability of past and future states of the element's neighbours. By contrast, no second-order distinction is specified by elements without shared inputs and outputs, since their joint cause-effect repertoire is reducible to that of the individual elements. Potentially, there are a million times a million second-order distinctions. Similarly, subsets of three elements, as long as they share input and output, will specify third-order distinctions linking more of their neighbours together. And on and on. This quickly balloons to staggering numbers of irreducibly higher-order distinctions. The maximally irreducible cause-effect structure associated with such a grid is not so much representing space (for to whom is space presented again, for that is the meaning of re-presentation?) as creating experienced space from an intrinsic perspective.

Resumiendo, nuestra consciencia vive en el pasado; Christof Koch estima que lleva un retardo de un cuarto de segundo respecto al mundo exterior.

Christof Koch: Bir bilim insanı olarak yalnızca şunu söyleyebilirim: Platon'a veya Descartes'a kadar geri gidebiliriz ve geçtiğimiz 2300 yıl boyunca bilincin felsefi veçhelerinde herhangi bir ilerleme kat edemedik. Son 2000 yıldır filozoflar, güneşin altında bulunan hemen hemen bütün sorular konusunda son derece yanılmışlardır. Hiçbir zaman filozofların verdiği cevaplara kulak asma, ama sordukları sorulara mutlaka kulak ver. Filozoflar ilginç sorular sorarlar, ancak cevapları genellikle faydalı veya anlamlı değildir. Bilim insanları ise oldukça farklıdır; genellikle daha mütevazı olursun, çünkü bir sistemi üç veya dört değişkenle bile anlamak için oldukça sınırlı bir kabiliyetin olduğunu bilirsin. Bütün bu bilgilerin geçici olduğunu ve önümüze neler çıkacağını görmek için beklememiz gerektiğini bilirsin. Bu yüzden, son 200 yılda müthiş bir şekilde başarılı olmuş bir şeyi yapmaya neden devam etmeyeyim, anlamıyorum. Susan Blackmore: Kesinlikle aynı fikirdeyim. Peki, bilinç üzerine çalışan günümüz filozoflarının herhangi bir katkıda bulunup ileri doğru herhangi bir adım attığını düşünmüyor musun? Christof Koch: Bunların hepsi benim değerli meslektaşlarım. Kişisel olarak hepsini seviyorum; bir bilim insanı olarak yaşamımda filozofların bana katkısının, bazı sorunları netleştirmeme yardım etmeleri olduğunu düşünüyorum. Örneğin, kullandığım dili ele alalım. Nedenden bahsederken veya BNB'nin bilinç için yeterli olup olmamasından veya bilince neden olup olmadığından bahsederken çok daha dikkatliyim. Filozofların bu noktada bir katkıda bulunduğuna şüphe yok. Fakat onları bilincin varolduğu, varolmadığı veya asla açıklanamayacağı gibi sonuçlara götüren ve temelde dil oyunlarına dayanan bu incelikle işlenmiş argümanların hiçbirine inanmıyorum. Benim için bilinç arayışı ampirik bir sorun. O halde, hadi onu iyice zorlayalım ve bakalım ne oluyor.

A lot of perception is a con job.

Judged by single nucleotides polymorphisms (or SNP) in DNA, the difference between people and chimpanzees is 1.23 percent, compared to around 0.1 percent difference in SNPs between two randomly picked humans.

On this scale, the human brain is 7.5 times bigger than the brain of a typical mammal weighing as much as we do, with all other mammals having smaller encephalization quotients. Why the size of say, the prefrontal cortex, should relate to the size

Of the 30 trillion cells in a 70 kg adult body, 25 trillion are erythrocytes. Fewer than 200 billion cells, under 1 percent, make up the brain, half of which are neurons. The same body also plays host to about 38 trillion bacteria, its microbiome (Sender, Fuchs, & Milo, 2016).

In particular, judging one’s own confidence in having seen or heard something—metacognition, or “knowing about knowing” (recall the four-point confidence scale in chapter 2)—is linked to anterior regions of prefrontal cortex.

any experience exists for itself, is structured, is the specific way it is, is one, and is definite.

Consciousness is experience. That’s it. Consciousness is any experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted. Some add subjective or phenomenal to the definition. For my purposes, these adjectives are redundant. Some distinguish awareness from consciousness. For reasons I’ve given elsewhere,1 I don’t find this distinction helpful and so I use these two words interchangeably. I also do not distinguish between feeling and experience, although in everyday use feeling is usually reserved for strong emotions, such as feeling angry or in love. As I use it, any feeling is an experience. Collectively taken, then, consciousness is lived reality. It is the feeling of life itself. It is the only bit of eternity to which I am entitled. Without experience, I would be a zombie, a nothing to myself.

Three additional properties hold for any conscious experience. They cannot be doubted. First, any experience is highly informative, distinct because of the way it is. Each experience is informationally rich, containing a great deal of detail, a composition of specific phenomenal distinctions, bound together in specific ways. Every frame of every movie I ever saw or will see in the future is a distinct experience, each one a wealth of phenomenology of colors, shapes, lines, and textures at locations throughout the field of view. And then there are auditory, olfactory, tactile, sexual, and other bodily experiences—each one distinct in its own way. There cannot be a generic experience. Even the experience of vaguely seeing something in a dense fog, without being clear what I am seeing, is a specific experience.

Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand “non-being.” Every day includes much more non-being than being. … Although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner. … When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.15

Given that you make more than 100,000 daily saccades, each one lasting between 20 and 100 milliseconds, saccadic and blink suppression adds up to more than an hour a day during which you are effectively blind! Yet until scientists started studying eye movements, no one was aware of this remarkable fact.

While cortex grabs the lion’s share of headlines, other structures may also play an important role in the expression of consciousness. Francis Crick was fascinated, literally to his dying day, with a mysterious thin layer of neurons underneath the cortex called the claustrum. Claustrum neurons project to every region of cortex and also receive input from every cortical region. Crick and I speculated that the claustrum acts as the conductor of the cortical symphony, coordinating responses across the cortical sheet in a way that is essential to any conscious experience. Laborious but stunning reconstructions of the axonal wiring of individual nerve cells (which I call “crown of thorns” neurons) from the claustrum of the mouse confirm that these cells project massively throughout much of the cortical mantle.25

Quantum mechanics is the established text-book theory of molecules, atoms, electrons, and photons at low energies. Much of the technological infrastructure of modern life exploits its properties, from transistors and lasers to magnetic resonance scanners and computers. QM is one of humanity’s supreme intellectual achievements, explaining a range of phenomena that cannot be understood within a classical context: light or small objects can behave like a wave or like a particle depending on the experimental setup (wave–particle duality); the position and the momentum of an object cannot both be simultaneously determined with perfect accuracy (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle); and the quantum states of two or more objects can be highly correlated even though they are very far apart, violating our intuition about locality (quantum entanglement).

Next is the vegetative state (VS), which I wrote about in chapter 2. VS patients, in contrast to comatose ones, have irregular cycles of eye opening and closure. They can swallow, yawn, may move their eyes or head but not in an intentional manner. No willed actions are left—only activity that controls basic processes such as breathing, sleep–wake transitions, heart rate, eye movements, and pupillary responses. Bedside communication—“If you hear me, squeeze my hand or move your eyes”—meets with failure. With proper nursing care to avoid bedsores and infections, VS patients can live for years.

There are many forms of attention such as saliency-based, automatic attention, spatial and temporal attention, and feature- and object-based attention. Common to all is that they provide access to processing resources that are in short supply. Because of the limited capacity of any nervous system, no matter how large, it can’t process all of the incoming streams of data in real time. Instead, the mind concentrates its computational resources on any one particular task, such as part of a scene unfolding in front of your eyes, and then switches to focus on another task, such as a simultaneously ongoing conversation. Selective attention is evolution’s answer to information overload. Its actions and properties have been investigated in considerable detail in the mammalian visual system for more than a century.

The brain’s most distinct neurons are cerebellar Purkinje cells (fig. 6.2) whose fan-shaped dendritic tree is the recipient of a staggering 200,000 synapses. Purkinje cells have complex intrinsic electrical responses and their axons convey the cerebellum’s output to the rest of the brain. They are stacked, like books on a shelf, within the folds making up the cerebellar sheet. Collectively, Purkinje cells receive excitation from a mind-blowing 69 billion granule cells—four times more than all the neurons in the rest of the brain combined!4

Face blindness, described in the last chapter, is an agnosia specific for faces.

Let me highlight three further deficits involving loss of color perception (achromatopsia), loss of motion perception (akinetopsia), and loss of knowing about these deficits (anosognosia).

A.R.’s very apparatus that determines color was damaged, he didn’t know what colors were (except in an abstract sense). Denying an objective sensory or motor deficit due to neurological damage is a form of agnosia termed anosognosia. It is really a deficit in self-awareness: not knowing what it is that one no longer knows.

We might even have to hunt for the NCC down at the subcellular level, seeking mechanisms operating inside cells rather than across large neural coalitions, as is widely assumed. Indeed, some have hypothesized, as a possible NCC, all-or-none electrical events occurring in the dendritic tree of cortical neurons, a sort of handshake confirming that a bottom-up signal has encountered top-down feedback within a certain time window.

For something to exist from the point of view of the world, extrinsically, it must be able to influence things and things must be able to influence it. That is what it means to have causal power. When something can’t make a difference to anything in the world or be influenced by anything in the world, it is causally impotent. Whether or not it exists makes no difference to anything.

This theoretical edifice is the singular intellectual creation of Giulio Tononi, a brilliant, sometimes cryptic, polyglot and polymath renaissance scholar, a scientist-physician of the first rank. Giulio is the living embodiment of the Magister Ludi of Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, the head of an austere order of monks-intellectuals, dedicated to teaching and playing the eponymous glass bead game, capable of generating a near infinity of patterns, a synthesis of all arts and sciences.

Even if everything about IIT is correct, why should it feel like anything to have a maximum of integrated information? Why should a system that instantiates the five essential properties of consciousness—intrinsic existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion—form a conscious experience? IIT might correctly describe aspects of systems that support consciousness. But, at least in principle, skeptics might be able to imagine a system that has all these properties but which still doesn’t feeling like anything.

When we sleep, consciousness fades. We spend one-quarter to one-third of our life asleep, more when we’re young and less as we age. Sleep is defined by behavioral immobility (which is not absolute, as we continue to breathe, move our eyes, and occasionally twitch a limb) and reduced responsiveness to external stimuli. We share this need for daily sleep with all animals.

The German psychiatrist Hans Berger pioneered electroencephalography (EEG) in his lifelong quest to prove the reality of telepathy. He first recorded the brain waves of a patient in 1924 but, filled with doubt, did not publish his findings until 1929. EEG became the foundational tool of an entire field of medicine, clinical neurophysiology, although Berger was never accorded any significant recognition in Nazi Germany and hanged himself in 1941, despite being nominated several times for the Nobel Prize.

fusiform face area with the same electrodes (fig. 6.6). Stimulating the right fusiform area led one patient to exclaim: “You just turned into someone else. Your face metamorphosed. Your nose got saggy and went to the left.”18 Others reported similar distortions that bring to mind portraits painted by Francis Bacon. This didn’t happen when nearby regions were stimulated or during sham trials when Parvizi pretended to inject current. For these patients, the fusiform face area seems to be an NCC for seeing faces,19 as activity here correlates closely and systematically with seeing faces and stimulation of this region alters the perception of faces. Furthermore, damage to this region can lead to prosopagnosia or face blindness. Affected individuals are unable to recognize familiar faces, including their own.20 Faces of spouses, friends, celebrities, presidents all look alike, indistinguishable as pebbles in a riverbed. In its more severe forms, patients can’t even recognize a face as a face anymore. They perceive the distinct elements making up a face, the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, but they can’t synthesize them into the unitary percept of a face. Intriguingly, these patients may still react unconsciously to familiar faces, with their autonomic system responding with an enhanced galvanic skin response. The unconscious has its own ways of detecting familiar faces.

We have rooms in ourselves. Most of them we have not visited yet. Forgotten rooms. From time to time we can find the passage. We find strange things . . . old phonographs, pictures, books . . . they belong to us, but it is the first time we have found them.

We are, quite literally, star dust.

Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland by George Gamow,

The history of any scientific concept—energy, atom, gene, cancer, memory—is one of increased differentiation and sophistication until it can be explained in a quantitative and mechanistic manner at a lower, more elemental level.

Purkinje cells are among the most elaborate of all neurons; the cerebellum maps the body and outside space onto its tens of billions of neurons. Yet none of this seems sufficient to generate consciousness. Why not? Important hints can be found within its highly stereotyped, crystalline-like circuitry. First, the cerebellum is almost exclusively a feedforward circuit. That is, one set of neurons feeds the next one that , in turn, influences a third one. There are few recurrent synapses that amplify small responses or lead to tonic firing that outlasts the initial trigger. While there are no excitatory loops in the cerebellum, there is plenty of negative feedback to quench any sustained neuronal response. As a consequence, the cerebellum has no reverberatory, self-sustaining activity of the type seen in cortex. Second, the cerebellum is functionally divided into hundreds or more independent modules. Each one operates in parallel, with distinct, nonoverlapping inputs and outputs. What matters for consciousness is not so much the individual neurons but the way they are wired together. A parallel and feedforward architecture is insufficient for consciousness.

The cause-effect information is defined as the smaller (minimum) of the cause-information and the effect-information. If either one is zero, the cause-effect information is likewise zero. That is, the mechanism's past must be able to determine its present, which, in turn, must be able to determine its future. The more the past and the future are specified by the present state, the higher the mechanism's cause-effect power. Note that this usage of 'information' is very different from its customary meaning in engineering and science introduced by Claude Shannon. Shannon information, which is always assessed from the external perspective of an observer, quantifies how accurately signals transmitted over some noisy communication channel, such as a radio link or an optical cable, can be decoded. Data that distinguishes between two possibilities, OFF and ON, carries 1 bit of information. What that information is, though - the result of a critical blood test or the least significant bit in a pixel in the corner of a holiday photo - completely depends on the context. The meaning of Shannon information is in the eye of the beholder, not in the signals themselves. Shannon information is observational and extrinsic. Information in the sense of integrated information theory reflects a much older Aristotelian usage, derived from the Latin in-formare, 'to give form or shape to.' Integrated information gives rise to the cause-effect structure, a form. Integrated information is causal, intrinsic, and qualitative: it is assessed from the inner perspective of a system, based on how its mechanisms and its present state shape its own past and future. How the system constrains its past and future states determines whether the experience feels like azure blue or the smell of wet dog.

Their [personal digital assistants] siren voices are living proof of our times - that our mind is software, running on the computer that is our brain. Consciousness is just a couple of clever hack away. We are only meat machines, no better, and increasingly, worse, than computers. According to the more triumphalist voices in the tech industry, we should revel in our soon-to-come obsolescence; we should be grateful that Homo Sapiens will have served as a bridge between biology and the inevitable next step in evolution, superintelligence. Smart money in Silicon Valley thinks so, op-ed pieces proclaim it to be so, and sleek sci-fi flicks reinforce this poor man's Nietzschean ideology. Mind-as-software is the dominant mythos of liquid modernity, of our hyper-individualized, glove-trotting, technology-worshipping culture. It is the one remaining mythos of an age that believes itself immune to mythology. An age whose elite is witnessing with incomprehension and indifference the dying struggle of the once all-powerful mythos that sustained the West for two millennia - Christianity.

To bring home the centrality of consciousness to life, consider a devil’s bargain in which you gain unlimited wealth at the expense of your conscious experiences. You get all the money you want but must relinquish all subjective feeling, turning into a zombie. From the outside, everything appears normal—you speak, act, dispose of your vast riches, engage in a vigorous social life, and so on. Yet your inner life is gone; no more seeing, hearing, smelling, loving, hating, suffering, remembering, thinking, planning, imagining, dreaming, regretting, wanting, hoping, dreading. From your point of view, you might as well be dead, for it would feel the same—like nothing.

your consiousness lives in the past, with Christof Koch estimating that it lags behind the outside world by about a quarter second. Intriguingly, you can often react to things faster than you can become conscious of them, which proves that the information processing in charge of your most rapid reactions must be unconscious.

Bilincimiz geçmişte yaşar. Christof Koch'un tahminine göre de dış dünyayı çeyrek saniye geriden takip eder.

Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness,” one of the first synoptic articles to come out of his collaboration with Christof Koch at Caltech. I felt very privileged to see this manuscript, in particular their carefully laid-out argument that an ideal way of entering this seemingly inaccessible subject would be through exploring disorders of visual perception. Crick and Koch’s paper was aimed at neuroscientists and covered a vast range in a few pages; it was sometimes dense and highly technical. But I knew that Crick could also write in a very accessible and witty and personable way; this was especially evident in his two earlier books, Life Itself and Of Molecules and Men. So I now entertained hopes that he might give a more popular and accessible form to his neurobiological theory of consciousness, enriched with clinical and everyday examples.

I pondered the significance of my personal annihilation for the next several months, facing down an existentialist abyss of oblivion and meaningless within me. Eventually, through some unconscious process of recalibration, I returned to my basic attitude that all is as it should be. There is no other way I can describe it: no mountaintop conversion or flash of deep insight, but a sentiment that suffuses my life. I wake up each morning to find myself in a world full of mystery and beauty. And I'm profoundly thankful for the wonder of it all. Here I am, a highly organized pattern of mass and energy, one of seven billion, insignificant in any objective accounting of the world. And in short while I will case to exist. What am I to the universe? Practically nothing. Yet the certainty of my death makes my life more significant. My joy in life, in my children, my love to dogs, running and climbing, books and music, the cobalt blue sky, are meaningful because I will come to an end. And that is as it should be. I do not know what will come afterward, if there is an afterward in the usual sense of the world, but whatever it is, I know in my bones that everything is for the best.

there is but a single reality out there, and science is getting increasingly better at describing it.