Christof Koch: Consciousness

You okay? Before we delve into the beautiful mysteries of consciousness, let's zoom out a little bit. And let me ask do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?

Yes, I do believe so. We have no evidence of it, but I think the probabilities are overwhelming in favor of it. Give me a universe where we have ten to the eleven galaxies, and each galaxy has between ten to the 1110 to the twelve stars, and we know most stars have one or more planets.

So how does that make you feel?

It still makes me feel special because I have experiences. I feel the world. I experience the world. And independent of whether there are other creatures out there, I still feel the world. And I have access to this world in this very strange, compelling way. And that's the core of human existence.

Now, you said human. Do you think if those intelligent creatures are out there, do you think they experience their world?

If they are evolved, if they are product of natural evolution, as they would have to be, they will also experience their own world. So consciousness isn't just human. You're right, it's much wider. It may be spread across all of biology. The only thing that we have special is we can talk about it. Of course, not all people can talk about it. Babies and little children can talk about it. Patients who have a stroke in, let's see, the left inferior frontal gyrus can talk about it, but most normal adult people can talk about it. And so we think that makes us special compared to, let's say, monkeys or dogs or cats or mice or all the other creatures that we share the planet with. But all the evidence seems to suggest that they too, experience the world. And so it's overwhelmingly likely that other alien, that aliens would also experience their world, of course, differently, because they have a different sensorium, they have different sensors, they have a very different environment. But the fact that I would strongly suppose that they also have experiences. They feel pain and pleasure and see in some sort of spectrum and hear and have all the other senses, of.

Course, their language, if they have one, would be different. So we might not be able to understand their poetry about the experiences that they have.

That's correct. Right.

So in a talk, in a video I've heard, you mention Seputzel, a Dax hound that you came up with, that you grew up with, it was part of your family when you were young. First of all, you're technically a.

You just technically.

But after that, you traveled around a bit, hence a little bit of the accent. You talked about Sopotzo, the Dax Hound, having these elements of humanness, of consciousness that you discovered. So I just wanted to ask, can you look back in your childhood and remember when was the first time you realized you yourself, sort of from a third person perspective, are a conscious being? This idea of stepping outside yourself and seeing there's something special going on here in my brain.

I can't really. Actually. It's a good question. I'm not sure I recall a discrete moment. I mean, you take it for granted because that's the only world you know, right? The only world I know you know is the world of seeing and hearing voices and touching and all the other things. So it's only much later, at early in my undergraduate days, when I enrolled in physics and in philosophy, that I really thought about it and thought, well, this is really fundamentally very mysterious. And there's nothing really in physics right now that explains this transition from the physics of the brain to feelings. Where do the feelings come in? So you can look at the foundational equation of quantum mechanics, general relativity. You can look at the period table of the elements. You can look at the endless ATG seed chat in our genes. And nowhere is consciousness yet. I wake up every morning to a world where I have experiences. And so that's the heart of the ancient mind body problem. How do experiences get into the world?

So what is consciousness?

Experience. Consciousness is any experience. Some people call it subjective feeling. Some people call it phenomenology. Some people call it qualia of their philosopher. But they all denote the same thing. It feels like something in the famous word of the philosopher Thomas Nagel. It feels like something to be a bat or to be an american or to be angry or to be sad or to be in love or to have pain. And that is what experience is. Any possible experience could be as mundane as just sitting here in a chair, could be as exalted as having a mystical moment in deep meditation. Those are just different forms of experiences.

Experience. So if you were to sit down with maybe the next, skip a couple generations of IBM, Watson, something that won jeopardy. What is the gap? I guess the question is between Watson that might be much smarter than you, than us, than all, any human alive, but may not have experience, what is the gap?

Well, so that's a big question that's occupied people for the last, certainly last 50 years, since the advent, the birth of computers. That's a question Alan Turing tried to answer. And of course, he did it in this indirect way by proposing a test, an operational test, but he tried to get it. What does it mean for a person to think? And then he had this test, right? You lock them away, and then you have a communication with them, and then you try to guess after a while whether that is a person or whether it's a computer system. There's no question that now or very soon, Alexa or Siri or Google now will pass this test, right? And you can game it, but ultimately, certainly in your generation, there will be machines that will speak with complete poise, that will remember everything you ever said. They'll remember every email you ever had. Like Samantha, remember in the movie her? There's no question it's going to happen. But of course, the key question is, does it feel like anything to be Samantha in the movie her? Or does it feel like anything to be Watson? And there one has to very strongly think. There are two different concepts here that we commingle. There is a concept of intelligence, natural or artificial. And there is a concept of consciousness of experience, natural or artificial. Those are very, very different things. Now, historically, we associate consciousness with intelligence. Why? Because we live in a world, leaving aside computers of natural selection, where we are surrounded by creatures, either our own kin, that are less or more intelligent, or we go across species. Some are more adapted to particular environment. Others are less adapted, whether it's a whale or dog, or you go talk about a permetium or a little worm, all right? And we see the complexity of the nervous system goes from one cell to specialized cells, to a worm that has three net, that have 30% of its cells are nerve cells, to creature like USo, like a blue whale that has 100 billion even more nerve cells. And so, based on behavioral evidence and based on the underlying neuroscience, we believe that as these creatures become more complex, they are better adapted to