Consciousness Live! with Christof Koch (S4 E3)

0:05 all right we are live joining me today a very very special guest uh christoph koch i'm probably not mispronouncing it last night i apologize for that um but kristoff i wonder if for those who don't know you can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do yeah i'm christopher i'm the chief scientist of the mind scope program at the elm institute in seattle it's privately funded by paul allen primarily a research institute focusing on understanding the brain at the cellular level the brains of mice and and

0:37 and humans what's unique about us where we are like roughly 500 scientists engineers and staff everything we do is done in in large teams and everything we do is open so all the data we make available all the metadata everything is freely freely and openly shared with the with the rest of the world and i'm also the chief scientist of the tiny blue dot foundation which is a foundation based in in santa monica dedicated to the exploration of uh consciousness particularly scientific exploration

1:09 so i'm in you i'm a physicist and a neuroscientist and for the past third of a century are focused on trying to understand how the brain gives rise to experience gives rise to the feeling of life itself first early on with francis crick in a series of roughly you know two dozen papers and subsequently hundreds of papers several books uh and doing experiments yeah very cool i mean i can say just personally for myself that uh when i was an undergraduate

1:41 back in the 1990s um i i read all of your papers with crick and uh very very avidly have been following your work for a very long time so very influential in this area um and i've you know recently you've been coming to defend iit and i noticed you you know that's kind of a newer theory but i was curious before we start talking about the details of it what sort of converted you to to that to being a defender what was it that you found attractive about it so integrated information theory of consciousness is a

2:14 is a theory in the in the best sense of the world it starts with a few sort of almost axiomatic uh assumption in this case about what every conscious experience is and then proceeds to some postulates derive the calculus and then you can now you can test evaluate its prediction it's substate independent so it doesn't it's not specific about you know squishy brains or any other it's just it tries to answer the question you have a physical system

2:48 what would it take for this physical system to have to have conscious experience it guides experimental uh research methodology it's been applied now in a variety of contexts particularly in clinical patient it's been derived to test a so-called zap and zip a procedure that allows us to test in the clinic whether or not a specific patient is actually there or is clearly alive but may not be present as in for example behavioral unresponsive or coma or some of these other um

3:21 severely impaired neurological states and it makes all sorts of really interesting prediction about who is and who is not conscious how far does consciousness extend can compute can computers ever be conscious etc that's a very powerful theory yeah it's all but it is amenable to scientif it's a it's a scientific theory in a sense it can be proven or disproven by sort of good old-fashioned science and so do you think that's something that other theories in this area lack like for instance global workspace theory or

3:54 um higher order theories or re-entry and processing or recruiting those kinds of things you think they they don't have those virtues some it depends what you mean by theory but theory you really mean a theory in a sort of mathematical physical sense that you start from a few axioms you derive postulate and then you're not free to constantly adjust the theory anymore that's not that sort of a hypothesis so for instance you may know that francis crick and i thought that 40 hertz oscillation was one of the hallmarks of consciousness

4:26 that's not a theory that's a gas that's a working hypothesis it may be right it may be wrong but that's very far from a theory right the theory is an integrated uh body of knowledge that actually predicts something and hopefully in the best case makes very accurate prediction like general relativity or quantum mechanics those are theories so in that sense they're really sort of the only other sort of theory in that sense i would say is global neural workspace and as you may know there's now a large test the so-called adversarial collaboration

4:58 that's being specifically put in place uh to test um the the the sometimes quite conflicting predictions between integrated information theory in global neuronal workspace so you know in three years or four years we'll know more which uh which theory makes a better prediction about the neural footprint of consciousness in the human and in animal brains yeah i'm very curious about that i'm going to be talking uh with some of the leaders of that project later in the in the year so i'll have all three of them on

5:30 um and uh yeah i'll be curious lucia maloney yeah yeah exactly yeah uh so we'll be talking about the details of the experiment there and i'm also involved with uh one testing higher order theories of consciousness another uh also same group um yeah it said yeah that has that has that been okay to proceed to an experimental test yeah it has okay cool yeah so that would be another instance i mean i think we need to get to this stage where

6:02 where theories make you know commit themselves make a specific predictions and then we'll see where the experimental data takes us right yeah i agree with you um i guess one of the one of the questions i have about iit specifically is the the axioms that it starts with um so and and this is one of the virtues of the theory i think that you think is that you start with the axioms and then the the link between the axioms and the postulates uh has been something that i wonder about so first i wonder why you think so why do you think those axioms are a complete list of axioms

6:35 um why something might not be left off there well i mean it's always possible that upon more mature reflection you know it may be possible that there are additional you can't prove it there's no proof that there are only these possibly accents well consciousness exists for itself uh it it's uh it's structured it is uh specific it is one and it is only one right now you could maybe also say well something else it's consciousness has to be situated or consciousness has to have a perspective

7:10 you know i'm looking at you or consciousness has to occur in time but you know then there are other cases where those things can be dissociated but i cannot conceive under circumstance in which conscious and experiment doesn't exist for itself i mean for me they're the conscious subject is shaped in a particular way is integrated it's unitary it's a particular way it is and it's only one experience there aren't simultaneously three different experiences there's only one experience

7:44 this is currently my experience so i'm i don't i i personally can't imagine what else could be there that's not included in those there could be additional things that are true some of the time but not all the time for instance people have argued well consciousness is always in time but then of course if you have certain experiences with certain um either meditative practices or with things like uh five meow dmt you get to a state where time totally disappears time stops there is no time there's no before

8:16 there's no after there's not too slow there is not too fast that there is an experience and that's all there is it's nothing else completely timeless also completely egoless by the way that's why personally i'm not in favor of high order theories because certainly under these states um there is no ego i mean that there's sort of you know what put this call on yet there is conscious experience present without an ego without time um you think that that's why i

8:52 sorry to interrupt go ahead oh i was gonna say do you because yeah i think that's an interesting point about the uh the egoless eagle dissolution in certain psychedelic um experiences do you think in those kinds of cases that there's uh that there's not a kind of still an awareness of the experience that's happening um even if the ego part is dissolved isn't there kind of a still an awareness of that it's an experience not in my i mean all i can tell you from

9:24 my own experience there was no oh here's christoph and christoph has his interesting experience no there wasn't in fact it was god awful it was absolutely terrifying there was this uh this experience of terror and ecstasy it was this weird thing combined but there was no there was i can assure you at least in this that's all i can say this one explains there was no one observing that was just the experience it was completely disillusioned between the the experience and the you know the the conscious observer

9:56 observing and experience and also you know in dreams when i have dreams there really isn't any any me and i wake up and then i say oh i'm surprised that i had this experience i was surprised you know in hindsight that i met this this dad this person not doing the experience during the experience you just you know doing the dream you just have these different things so i think higher order theory sort of there they they come because people obsess about consciousness particularly highly

10:27 literary people who write books about consciousness and so they generalize this so clearly if you're so i used to be a rock climber if you're really engaged in rock climbing you have no i mean you don't have the luxury to think huh yeah i am being glued to to a piece of granite you're just fully out there in the world you know trying to to climb up that wall yeah i i get that uh i've had similar kinds of flow experiences and being in the moment but so i mean i don't want to derail this to a discussion of higher theories but i

11:00 would just say that that it's not that there's a you that's observing the experience it's just there's a kind of inner awareness and awareness of the experience um which is very minimal and could be still present in the kinds of cases that you're describing i think yeah i mean in the limit you know how do i know how can i experimentally access this right whether there's still a minimum me there that however i don't have any conscious experience of right yeah no i understand that um so but the other

11:32 the other reasons why i'm not very sympathetic to higher order thought is that i believe you know being a neurobiologist that consciousness really extends across a very large range of species a species that may have much much simpler brains than than we than we do and the limits may not have brains at all but may still be very very complex entities and so i just don't see i think me the me is a it's a special construct of very large brains like our brains you know and when we need this to survive over a long time we have this construct

12:05 of of the self and the selfs observing etc but i believe like much of buddhism does that the south is an illusion at any one particular point in time yeah i would just want to distinguish between self-consciousness and this kind of inner awareness that we're talking about so i'm i'm on board with the self as illusion idea the question is how do you distinguish that experimentally yeah well we're trying to do that actually so we'll have to wait three to five years as you were saying earlier and and get back to this but i i guess just

12:38 the last thing i'd say about this i wonder what you think about um the kind of what motivates a lot of thinking about higher order approaches in general which is the idea that if you're not aware of the experience then we don't count it as conscious uh so that if there's a state like a subliminal state or something like that and the person sincerely says i didn't see anything then we we take we count that as an unconscious state uh does iit or does your personal view conflict with that way of putting things that they're no by by if i'm not conscious of it if i have no conscious experience then for me then

13:12 you don't have a conscious experience you might have behavior you can still push buttons and you you know do a tool you know to alternate first choice but it's it's it's uh so it's behavior it's a dissociation between behavior on the one side and consciousness on the other right so but you wouldn't say you're conscious of the stimuli in that case uh when you're subliminally present no i'm not no i i'm clearly not well i mean you might be grateful of it but not consciously conscious of it so i don't know if it's that uh um well yeah but then in the limit i

13:45 could say any physical activity in my brain i'm al is always conscious except i don't have you know my liver i don't know how to know my liver isn't conscious i mean you know in principle the activity in my brain isn't that different from the activity in my liver cells it's highly complex biochemicals they're being up and down regulated yet i have no conscious experience what goes on in my liver right well you could say well it's it's conscious but it's it's not telling me yeah you could i mean there are many things you could postulate i i have no experience of that so therefore first order unless you're

14:17 very strong proof to the country i'm going to assume it's simply not there it's simply unconscious yeah um i guess well anyway so i i can see what you're saying um i would like iit better if i had an axiom about self-reflection or self-awareness or something like that but i guess that's just a personal preference um the other thing that i i mean it's interesting it's interesting because so iit unlike for example global neuron workspace or higher order thoughts here is not a psychological theory right it's not a cognitive theory

14:50 it doesn't say there's attention there's self there there's memory etc clearly those things exist but iit doesn't uh doesn't uh talk about that i.t doesn't address those points right yeah that is an interesting point um for better or worse second for better or worse iit does is it's not a theory of psychology in that sense right exactly i mean that's one of the things you might wonder about because consciousness is a psychological property someone might say or think

15:23 and so you might want to have a theory that addresses it at the psychological level but iit is is not that kind of theory so i guess it it's more physical theory because ultimately it says uh you know it's a physical property of physic of particular physical systems that have this you know intrinsic causal power in us it takes these highly complex forms that we associated with psychology but it could also be present in in others so in that sense it bypasses

15:56 this this psychological problem it says it's a physical property associated that's why also it by it's it's not it's very difficult to put into an isn't you know people always ask me the dualism or something like that well it doesn't have this distinction the physical systems and physical systems have external causal power and they have intrinsic chemical power and the intrinsic causal power that's what we call consciousness yeah that was going to lead me to my next question which which was the intrinsic causal power thing so i get that there's the the axiom that consciousness exists for itself i think

16:28 that's a fairly safe axiom um but uh then the the leap to that to causal power i guess is something that i've always wondered about because they're you know there are property duelists and other people who agree that consciousness is intrinsic or something like that but they go a different way so i wonder why you think the the emphasis on causal power and i know the thing about the aliantic stranger and the you know causal powers is something that's uh a sign of existence but why is that what what in your mind is the link between cause effect power and consciousness besides the intrinsic

17:00 point you mean at the conceptual level why does a theory postulate this does it have to postulate this i mean that's what makes the heart of a theory if you wouldn't have this you wouldn't have i t you could have a different theory and the different theory could also be tested but it's it it is what the theory possibly that ultimately i mean that's its strength and its weakness it says

17:32 you know you take a particular mechanism in a particular state it it depends on states in the past it will in turn influence its own state in the future you know depending on its uh dynamics on its evolutionary equation and that is what consciousness is that's sort of its fundamental postulate without that you don't have iit does it have to do that i don't automatically you can take those

18:05 axons and of necessity show that the only thing that satisfies those five axioms is the something called the intrinsic causal power now maybe that could be done that would be pretty powerful if you could do that right if you had those five axioms and out of necessity you have to have this particular calculus that assigns consciousness uh or identifies consciousness with intrinsic power as far as i'm personally aware of that's not the case

18:37 yeah i mean because this is i think one of the critiques that i hear of iit i think it's most associated with like ned block um who who has suggested that it seems more like a theory of intelligence and i know you think it's intelligence and consciousness are separated separable separated um and certainly not that yes it's certainly not that because again intelligence ultimately is about do by doing something intelligent you know responding intelligent to your question behaving adaptively in a complex

19:10 environment that's intelligent we value that a great deal but this theory isn't it it isn't about doing it's about being so again this theory quite clearly you know i've talked about in my book you can totally dissociate consciousness and intelligence that now in us the neuronal basis may overlap although intelligence tend to be more associated with the front lobe consciousness with the back but they're they're really fundamentally different things well i guess i guess people maybe like ned think that

19:41 since the emphasis on cause and effect relationships that's a kind of doing yeah but the doing inside the system it's nothing to do with with external doing in fact i t you know you you can look at the mathematics you can take two systems two input output systems they have the same input output mapping right uh one is sort of you know uh you you can show for example it's easy to show in a simple feed forward network like a deep machine learning network that that system has no consciousness while you can have an

20:14 equivalent system that that does the same thing but using a lot of nonlinear feedback that is that it feels like something so you would have two systems from the outside you cannot distinguish them so in terms of turing tests both do the same input output transform yet once is is goes hand in hand with having an experience and the other one doesn't exist for itself it's just i guess this i was going to ask about this as well so you know the unfolding argument that's been put forward recently which sort of takes this point that you're making and tries to use it as an

20:45 argument against iit by basically saying that it's either falsified or unscientific uh because you have two behaviorally equivalent systems you say one's conscious and the other is not but how can you really know that i guess is one way yeah so the way to a it's a good point so the theory addresses this you have to build a theory it's like you know i mean an analogy would be black holes in theory of relativity right so black holes at first were thought they were ridiculous in fact the name black hole was sort of a pun um you know by fred hoyle

21:20 but they are a logical consequence of general relativity and now we have enough evidence to believe in their existence although we cannot directly observe them you know there's hawking radiation it's etcetera you know gravitational waves etc etc so it turns out we now most physicists believe in the existence of black hole same thing with consciousness a we have our own experience i know i'm conscious i don't need any proof i don't need anybody to tell me that i'm conscious then we do inference we do what's called abduction right i test you i put you in a scanner i compute your integrated

21:54 information measure etc and to the extent that that in cases when it's obvious or when we believe people are conscious or you know pets are conscious or babies are conscious then and it it agrees with the theory to that extent i become more and more confident of the theory and then can extrapolate to cases where i'd have no intuitions like computers or the case we just discussed yeah i mean it's hard though if you have a feed forward system that's telling you look i'm i know i'm conscious you know i don't need you to tell me i'm

22:26 conscious or not and then you come and say well no actually i have a theory and it says you're not conscious look do you have alexa at home uh no i got siri though hanging around well ask siri ask her go ahead ask her whether she's conscious okay siri are you conscious well i'm soft aware what did she say she said well i'm software all right but you know you could typically get her to say yes i'm conscious right yeah do you would you believe today that

22:59 she's conscious um i wouldn't but i have friends who would all right so again so it depends but i mean clearly we can't just depend on our intuition because of this example shows our intuition you know whale is obviously fish it smells like a fish lives in the water it's a fish right so that's why we get more you know we get more knowledgeable we have scientific theory then we try to answer to address those questions yeah so on the face of it to get back to the unfolding it's a it's a it's a tricky argument but one has to have systematically study consciousness

23:32 and all sorts of conditions to then come this to conclusion yes certain systems are conscious but other systems are not conscious even though from the outside they may look very similar yeah okay um so i wanted to ask you about the uh could you just mention the front of the brain versus the back of the brain i know your views about the posterior hot zone um and i i think it's interesting because like i said i've been a reader of your work for a very long time and i know like back in the i think it was like 97 or 98 you got a paper with with a

24:04 qrik work like a review paper called neuroscience and consciousness or something like that right and in that paper you guys were defending the front of the the prefrontal cortex as being importantly involved in consciousness and so now you've changed your mind about that and so i am curious about so what is it is it's just the iit that's changed your mind about this or is there some other thing which has changed your mind no in this case it's primarily the empirical evidence evidence so a for the records iits no enmity against the prefrontal cortex right again iit is not an architectural theory unlike global neuron workspace it

24:39 doesn't say this part of the brain is is better for consciousness than the other it it depends on the connectivity and the processing okay um and if and even if it's true that one part of the brain is spurred as as being sort of the home if you want of consciousness in your colleague of conscience but not another you then need a a principal reason to explain why what is different about this part of the brain the foreign compared to this part of the brain superficially at least they look rather similar right they have neurons they have connectivity

25:13 etc however the the current clinical evidence and also the the psychological evidence tells you you can remove large parts of the of the front of the brain and your intelligence may be impacted your ability to speak may be impacted but it's remarkable how uh how little your your consciousness is impacted in fact it's well known to neurosurgeons there's eloquent cortex and there's non-eloquent cortex most of the prefrontal cortex is non-eloquent in the sense you can remove the surgeon can remove that and they

25:45 have removed it at different times of the last 120 years in various patients without the patient complaining oh i've lost my consciousness i don't hear anymore i don't see any anymore or i don't i don't you know i i have no self-awareness anymore so um you can look at evoked potential for example um there's a large literature now things like that the visual awareness negativity or the auditory awareness negativity those are all in the back compared to the p3b so the experimental evidence seems to suggest that it is this

26:18 for visual auditory somatosensory so in other words for seeing hearing touching and also for the the the perception of willful initiation you know when i felt i decided to lift my hand those all appear to be um in the back you can stimulate electrically and you get these feelings well if you stimulate much of prefrontal cortex again you don't get much of any of any conscious sensation so the empirical evidence seems to be in favor of the back of the brain the

26:50 back of of of cortex behind the central sulcus rather than the front of the so that's the that's primarily why i prefer the the the back to the front that's not to say nothing in the front ever becomes sort of uh activity in the front can never become part of conscious experience but at least the bulk of what's been studied so far is compatible with um this posterior heart zone so and if you think so for instance we at the beginning we mentioned this

27:22 project where you're testing iit versus global workspace theory or global neuronal workspace theory if the experimental evidence came back a certain way then you would that would put pressure on this view uh or or do you think the evidence is so strong against that yeah that wouldn't work yeah i think that's the right way to say it depending on the outcome there will be pressure on one theory or the other now unlike physics you know let's say general relativity where you can't really you know you can't fiddle around that much of course you can you have this one

27:54 degree of freedom that einstein did i post his biggest blunder according to himself yeah exactly but in general in physics you don't have you can't just you know the degrees of freedom are far less now neurobiology and in the brain you've got endless amount of freedom right you could always say well you know in general here but except when this changes then it's there so but it certainly puts pressure on one or the other theory to say well this can't really be right at least under some conditions

28:26 that then your consciousness the footprint of new conscience are here but not they are contrary to your expectation or they last for much longer than you thought or they last for much uh shorter than you thought and that would certainly will it kill off a theory no because we're not in that we're not in that we don't operate in that domain at least not today right exactly but it definitely will put pressure on it and i mean i think the the prefrontal stuff is interesting because like i said i've been following this debate for a long time and you know i for instance i saw the exchange in the journal neuroscience that uh you and bob knight had

29:01 over exactly you know this this kind of historical case and in in kind of comparing that to the older view when when the 98 paper i mentioned when you guys were saying well we got to be very careful when we evaluate these prefrontal patients um we do so you agree with that and but but it sounds like in this in the more recent debate that you guys think that sort of settled already by these by these kind of cases i mean you know nothing in the brain i mean the brain is by far the most complex piece of active matter in the known universe every time you meddle with it you make a

29:34 lesion you stimulate it you do an optogenetic lesion you know the other effects right reverberate the brain adapts so you always have to be you know very circumspect and and very measured and and every any data and any tools has advantages and disadvantages it's it's you know the brain is very very very complex but right now the evidence seems to be in it certainly right now the evidence is in in favor of the back we'll see how this evolves over the next five to ten years

30:07 yeah i mean mind you this is only in normal typical subjects right it is very different for example if you never grew up with a cortex you know if you're an unencephalic uh infant or a bird on octopus that doesn't have a cortex right but but but i'm speaking about people like you and me who who are you know who are non-impaired who you know who grew up with with the normal cortex their consciousness appears to be in the back rather than in the front right

30:39 yeah i i think it's an interesting it'll be interesting to see how this unfolds um i agree it's a complicated issue uh one of the things can i i wrote a little bit about this one of the things that struck me about the debate in the journal of neuroscience was whether or not uh you know patient a the famous historical person um had any precious patient yes sagan preakness patient patient a yes whether and for the benefit of the audience so brightness patient had a a large glue with the glioblastoma so he had a large tumor and they had the

31:13 surgeon had to remove almost sort of a 250 gram a very large fraction of his brain almost everything in front of area 9 and 10 except of course broca's area he could still speak he was a stock broker i mean that was one of the things that i was bringing up was it looked like there was you guys disagreed over how much of the prefrontal cortex was actually removed in that case um so if you compare the figures in your paper versus the paper from bob knight's group um that you put the central sulcus in a

31:45 different place and so i i mean i think that these these cases are complicated and the historical cases especially are complicated and i agree that there's a lot of evidence that for the back of the brain there's not zero evidence for the front of the brain so i think we're still sort of uh should keep our minds open about this but it sounds like you would that you what you're saying is that there's some you have these empirical reasons for thinking this but iit is compatible with finding out that the neural correlates well okay so so what does it predict so i t predict if you for example so julia tononi you know the originator of it has

32:19 done the simple model com calculation very very simple highly naive you take a an architecture that's more compared with the prefrontal cortex where you have random access where in principle you know you have random connectivity which allows you to do general types of computation versus in the back where you have more a great network of grids a pyramid of grids topographic relationships and certainly what you can show using the calculus that iit has that the

32:52 that the the measure of consciousness the quantity of consciousness within iit which is called by this greek letter phi it's a measure of the irreducibility of the system it's a measure of how much the system exists for itself it ultimately it's a measure of how conscious conscious the system is this is vastly larger by orders of magnitude in these topographic regions that are organized at a variety of spatial scales compared to a random access architecture so i t say based if it's true that the back of the brain which is

33:27 more topographic because that is where our spatial representations are you know of touch of sound of sight those would give rise to much higher causal power than the front of the brain that has a very different network architecture so within iit that is that that's how it would explain why these two parts of cortex although superficially they look similar because their connectivity is different they give rise to very different internal intrinsic cause effect power and therefore to different consciousness yeah interesting i mean i guess there's still a problem with measuring phi

34:00 in in practice and even computing it i mean i i saw talk about tech marquee he basically said there's like seven different ways to measure the compute phi and you get different values depending on which one that what approximation you use and so forth so i think these are still oh yeah there are lots of oh yeah there are lots of issues lots of issues i would say that i mean to me sort of you know i spent most of my life after the age of 18 or 20 thinking about consciousness and i i'm not saying it's a final correct description of it i mean it would be surprising if after 2004 2400

34:34 years we suddenly you know had one theory that explained it all but it has it has all the right ingredients it makes some interesting prediction it makes some very powerful prediction about foreign split brain or combining my brain with your brain what happens there it gives rise to this procedure to test the presence and absence of consciousness so uh you know it seems to work in the in the at least in the few simple cases where people have applied it so i think it's a very promising it's by far the most promising theory that we have

35:07 i am curious about the zap and zip procedure because what and i wonder since you i know you've spoken with the dalai lama and you've had some contact with eastern traditions um but and one of the things that you know uh that sometimes you hear from people in in that camp is that deep dreamless sleep involves a kind of conscious experience like a pure conscious experience that doesn't involve any content or anything like that but if you're using the zap and zip technique then you're you know saying this person is unconscious in the deep dreamless sleep case do you think well anyway so i

35:40 wonder what you think about first of all the claim that deep dreamless sleep involves a kind of conscious experience do you think that's uh that's all what do you think ethical particular worthwhile elements in buddhism you know particularly the the eightfold path and the realization that the root of everything is suffering but they're also things that are decidedly odd like if you think about it they all believe in incarnation and i had this debate including his holiness the dalai lama you know about incarnation that my

36:13 consciousness if i die sort of goes into this um you know into this limbo um and then um becomes reincarnated and to me me i said no that's not possible four words my koan no brain never mind you know without a mechanism there has to be some mechanism it could be something really esoteric physical you know strain in space-time etc whatever but without such a mechanism no you can't get conscious so if if it's really true if i have a dream

36:45 estate if i'm in a d in a state of of deep sleep seamless then according to my understanding of the brain and and certainly i t you're not conscious of anything yeah and zip and zap zip and zap has showed that if you wake people up and you ask them what went before your mind you know and you look at whether it's rem or non-ram then every time when they claim they had a dream this this so zip and zap i should mention for the audience it's a procedure you you take a brain like your mind you um

37:17 you knock it using magnetic pulses magnetic stimulation or electrical pulses also and then essentially you're listening to the echoes you're listening to the resonances by doing a high-density eg so it's essentially you take a church spell you hit it with a hammer and you're listening to the resonances and then you try to compress those if they're very simple-minded you can compress them a lot like like for example if you're in deep coma you may have flat eg well you know that's really easy to compress right but when you're conscious whether you're

37:50 a dreaming or a weight consciousness or let's see under ketamine under certain hallucinatory agents your complexity is very calm it's very high and it's difficult to compress in deep sleep it's easier to compress under anesthesia it's easy to compress in coma it's it's easier to compress so it seems to be a good measure that's now being tested once again in a clinical trial right now as we speak with we are setting this up to test this in a variety of clinics as a practical way to test for the absence of presence of consciousness and if you're in a dream esteem

38:22 dream i'm i'm i'm confident at least all the data so far shows that this device would say there's very little complexity there you're not conscious yeah interesting i mean i guess one of the arguments you hear from people who like this is that when you wake up um and someone said did you sleep well you could answer the question yes or no which i guess you know there are a couple ways you can answer that question one is by inference or something but another is that you had a kind of experience of sleeping well um yeah um of course you can also just monitor your

38:56 own body you have all sorts of body markers right that if you're in this state for seven or eight hours that you could read off that they tell you whether you slept well or not you know how tired are you for instance right i mean there is a conscious sensation of being tired or being awake it's a conscious sensation you can tap into biomarkers without needing to be conscious again one has to be careful because ultimately if i don't if i ask you and you said no i wasn't conscious and i have to take that at face value unless i've reason to believe you're systematically lying or you're deluded like in certain types of you know

39:30 psychotic syndromes but without that i have to take you at face value if you didn't experience anything i'm i believe you didn't experience anything yeah so and i also i i know that you have taken recently become a vegetarian i don't know how recent actually but you know relative many many years ago because but because of iit i think is that correct no because of consciousness but because you of your right of the prediction that consciousness is more widespread yeah but that's really it was really susan blackmore

40:03 she's a she's a you know an early star student a psychologist student of consciousness and she interviewed me about consciousness this was i don't know 15 years ago and she asked me spontaneously out of the blue because we were talking about continents in in animals and how widespread it is and she said well do you eat meat and that really struck me and she just said tastes so good doesn't it and yeah when my dog my beloved german shepherd died that night i promised 14 years ago i think

40:37 now that promise i'd never eat flesh of another conscious creature now just have to do the realization that really biological continuity naturally non-fat there's all this continuum and certainly if i look at you know dogs that i love and that are highly conscious and lamb and sheep and pigs they're all roughly the same brain complexity yet we need one keep them under atrocious condition and eat them and we love the other one and that just seems ethically unacceptable so you don't have to be

41:08 you can be a vegetarian because you believe that there are other creatures that suffer and you should minimize conscious suffering without necessarily having to believe in iit right no i agree i'm i was raised vegetarian i've been vegetarian my whole life oh wow yeah i was uh and you know um i'm vegan now actually but uh i i for for moral reason because of consciousness yeah i agree with that wholeheartedly but so um yeah that question then i think that was a good that was a nice question but definitely it is a prediction of iit that that's um

41:41 that consciousness is much more widespread i mean you know i think most people would agree mammals yes some birds may be octopus their special case perhaps but you know iat says you know bees maybe even bacteria so it's much more widespread and that kind of yes in principle you have to look at the architecture in each case right so iot it doesn't make a blanket assertion anything biological is conscious it says no you have to look at the architecture if you find intrinsic power that's different from zero then it feels like something to be such

42:16 a system it may feel like very little these systems may not have any psychology they don't know about the weekend or they don't feel fat but they may feel like something and when they're not there anymore they don't feel like anything and then so you know at the alan institute we have an entire institute with 80 people dedicated to cell biology no one today not a single super computer not a single person has managed to model the entire vast complexity of a single cell let's say you do oocyte or you take a cardiomyocyte you take any other cell right

42:48 that has maybe a you know a few billion uh proteins in it of a of 5000 different types no one has ever modeled that vast complexity and so it it is quite likely if you just look at all these vast you know causal chain interacting all these binding constants that the phi of this system the intrinsic causal power will be different from zero now it could be minute or this man you'd compared to my file ufi but that means at least in principle it may feel like something to be an isolated parameter how do you test that well right now we don't

43:21 so we get back to the previous point let's first test theories in cases we're confident you and i and babies and children and infants and great apes and dogs and cats and et cetera and then as we get more confident with the theory let's test it in in in other systems that are more complex it may well be that all of biology that the entire tree of life feels like something now it's it's it's very important to think to think about this i'm not saying that every cell in my

43:54 body is conscious so iot makes a very precise prediction what for if we take my case what is conscious it says well what is conscious is the maximum of causal effect power that's going to be some um uh configuration of neurons that causally interact very highly much more so than with other parts of the brain although ultimately of course every neuron interacts with every other neuron but that there's it's a discrete set of elements in my brain and the maximum causal power the the set of mechanism that gives rise to the

44:27 highest phi it is this system taking as a whole that's conscious not its individual component so the individual neurons are unconscious my whole body is unconscious you can remove some of my body you can remove focusing on my cerebellum my part of my cerebellum i'll talk like i'm drunk i might stumble but i haven't lost my consciousness same thing if i look at you and i we interact right clearly we interact i'm speaking you in response to a question etc but there isn't an uber consciousness there isn't there isn't something that's you and i simultaneously now there could be if i

45:00 start running wires between my brain and your brain and if i run enough wires let's see on the order of a few hundred million as many wires as they are connecting my left hemisphere with my right hemisphere the theory says at some point at a very precise point when the the integrated information across this amalgamation of of of richard and christoph exceeds that the phi inside your brain or inside my brain i will disappear i will die you will disappear instead there will be this new entity

45:33 this new richer christoph thing it will be one mind right and again once you start cutting those connection again then i fall back into my consciousness falls back into my brain into your brain and krista will be there again and richard will be there again so it is so that the powerful thing about the theory says precisely the spatial temporal granularity of the system that is conscious not above it not below it not the micro constituents of that system but just that system yeah this is the exclusion postulate uh perfect

46:06 see but i mean some people think that might be optional so i mean there's nothing in the theory really which demands that you have that um well except it's part of my phenomenological experience when i experience something there many things i'm not experienced right now i'm not experienced i'm not experienced i'm desperately unhappy so therefore all the exclusion apostle it says consciousness has definite borders there are certain things that i'm experiencing whatever it is and there's a vast universe of things that i'm not experienced right now

46:40 and so that means there's certain things that are in and certain things that out i mean it's it's sort of i find it obvious how can it be otherwise it it's not this nebulous thing now of course i can switch my attention to other things but that takes time and my brain switches for a particular configuration of my brain i explain certain things and i don't experience other things that's all that the exclusion postulate says but it has these monumental consequences it said that certain elements in my brain are not part of the the physical substrate

47:11 although they they of course they connect to it because the brain is suddenly connected certain neurons are other neurons are not part of this of this physical substrate right so um i mean i guess some people someone might respond by saying look you you've always had the kind of conscious experience that you've had so if there were all these you know micro consciousnesses that were part of it it would just be that's kind of the normal way we've experienced things oh yeah i mean i'm not someone who buys that kind of argument but uh if the argument is from you know introspection i can tell that there's

47:43 just kristoff or richard here i think you know maybe that's people can question that or challenge that oh questioning they've questioned the entire existence of consciousness and you know so yes people question everything but what i can tell from my experience i am conscious at night i'm not in deep sleep i'm simply not there anymore in you know i've had two anesthesia i simply wasn't there and presumably when i'm dead unfortunately i won't be there anymore

48:17 yeah so i mean i guess i wonder about you know this famous objection i know you talk about it in the book but i wanted to ask you about it uh the objection from scott aaronson about the the logic gates the grid the inactive grid and i also i i heard julio talk about this once too not the grid per se but about um an inactive brain a brain that had no activity at all but which supported conscious experience so you defend this idea in the book and say these aren't that these are good predictions of the theory and they they're not some people take this as being

48:48 oh the theory has these ridiculous implications but you don't think so so i wonder if you can tell us uh a little bit about why okay so that okay so you talked about two very separate let's go through them serially so one is the inactive brain so for most people particularly for neuroscientists like i am looking down at the brain so i'm an observer now i mean we all are right when we do brain science we look at the brain we can see activity either in an mri with a microelectrode array here there and there and i say oh

49:19 consciousness is sending information from here to there to there to there to there so clearly when the brain is inactive it's not sending any efficient anywhere okay but at least according to iit it's not about sending information from a to b because that implies there's an observer at a and observer and b and you know that's we know that's not the case although it's deeply deeply embedded in in the information age and we're all children of the information age ultimately it's a state of being that has a particular causal power there it's absolutely nothing in the

49:52 theory that says a system right now where all the gates are off doesn't have causal power of course it has it has a lot lots of latent causal power it just happens to be right now this particular brain let's see its cortex let's say it's big pyramidal cells don't happen to fire but they could fire in fact it says even more counterintuitive richard you can say i take two brains i look at them they look identical one doesn't fire because right now it's in a state that it doesn't cause it to fire the other one can fire because i

50:24 poisoned all the neurons with ttx right okay neuroscientists they would say well of course the state's the same in both cases no neurons are firing but the one case they could but do not in the other case they can't it's like it's like the sherlock holmes story silver blaze like the dog who doesn't bark the dog could if the dog would have been dead then of course that explains why but the dog was alive but it didn't bark and that allowed you know sherlock holmes to make the to make his uh uh abduction same thing here this brain that could fire but didn't

50:57 will be in a specific conscious state in fact i suspect that if you take something like 5mu dmt that can i can act within 10 seconds and we're trying to test is how many well shown much of cortex actually if you yet you're highly conscious okay so that's one prediction that i think is eminently plausible the other prediction that iit makes is that certain networks of element you can take some very simple networks and switch them

51:29 together in huge you know arrays that in principle have high up that if they feel like something and you can say well how can that be i mean how can these very you know computationally might not do anything interesting right they just do a simple you know simple local computation but of course that doesn't mean those are not evolved systems those are engineered systems right and when you have engineering you're sub you're subject to very different constraints i know it feels very counterintuitive that they feel like anything but maybe they do feel like

52:01 something of course what they feel may be very simple it just may be some vast feeling of extended space without any content because clearly these kids don't know about images they don't know about movies they don't know about 911 and covet they don't know all of that so the experience may be commodious maybe vast but maybe in some sense very very highly simplified compared to what we experienced it's accounted to a prediction we'll see how it pans out i mean so about the the brain thing i wonder what if just

52:33 uh this is something that i i thought of once and i just wonder what the general approach would say about this so when it comes to near-death experiences uh people often claim that you have experience conscious experiences the absence of brain activity uh but but the kinds of experiences they report are more complex than the ones that you would expect from iit so if you did have those kind of complex conscious experiences like seeing the operating room etc um noticing a card up in the corner without brain activity that would be a problem for iit because well that would be a problem for any so if it's really

53:06 so i mean the the and the near-death experience literature is huge and people claim different things matter which is not of course done on any sort of carefully controlled circumstance right but some people claim yes the eg supposedly was was uh flat so a just because your ag is flat doesn't mean your brain is inactive right in fact clinically eg is not used in the determination of death i know this okay in the us because for example your hippocampus could be active your thalamus could be active it doesn't

53:38 show eg primarily picks up uh cortical activity all right but yes any physical account of consciousness that's based on the brain is in trouble if it's actually true that the brain is actually totally inactive and you still have deep experiences because i mean forget about it just any physical account of consciousness that's based on the brain if the brain is is dead then that all today's theory says yes you have no consciousness um in fact you know there was a study out

54:12 of yale by about two years ago that the the pig brain study right where they revived pigs a pig's breast left in a slaughterhouse and of course what they did to prevent the problem the issue the ethical concern of these conscious these peaks possibly experiencing something they use synaptic blockers and channel blockers so there was no electrical activity in the scene so according to any brain scientist any physiologist this brain didn't experience anything these pigs brain may have been alive you may have been able to bring them back but that's of course separate from

54:45 being uh and from being consciousness right so such evidence indeed would be challenging just to be clear though so iit does predict though that a completely inactive brain could experience something yes it would be one state they would experience one state associated with that right but it wouldn't have any way to explain if you you know you see jesus and talk to saints and your grandmother and all of those sort of things yeah exactly okay so um but but that is already by itself pretty

55:19 counterintuitive that a completely inactive brain um a brain that for instance is dead would have uh these kinds of well it depends i mean it's a complex question what do you mean by death okay death is very ill-defined i mean do you mean clinical debt and of course even if the person is legally declared dead at 1202 that doesn't mean that every single unit immediately turns off right right yes lots of biochemical events like we know you get you you know you get the rigor you get the lazarus phenomena you get all sorts of phenomena in the so-called dead body

55:51 right because there's still biochemistry going on there's still there's still electrochemical gradients there's still maybe some remnants of electrical activity that very quickly runs down so you know once you actually get to the situation you have to be a little bit careful what you mean by you have to very precisely define your terms right yeah no that yeah that makes sense but i think experimentally it's easier to do can you get people for under certain psychedelic drugs in a state where according to the eg at least part of their cortex clearly they're alive because they continue to

56:23 breathe and all of that right so clearly the brain stem has to be active but is it possible that cortex which most people believe this you know generates conscious experience is relatively low active yet very powerful you know psychedelic experiences that would be interesting yeah that would be very interesting and i think people all sorts of people are trying to test that right now oh yeah i'd be interested they follow that uh follow up on that um and about the logic the grid of logic gates so

56:55 i think one of the things that people find counterintuitive about that is hey that the thing is inactive and having some kind of experience but also that the phi is much higher than for human beings right that you can it could be in the limit if i make it or a huge grid but i don't know a million by a million right yeah but the the once again the the conscious experience that thing it's fine maybe high but it's highly highly simplified it doesn't have any of the distinction you know any of the trillion distinction that that you can make that you're capable of because you have

57:29 this highly heterogeneous network of neurons and you have a lifetime of experience that is reflected in in your synaptic connectivity that this doesn't have yeah but i guess that's one of the questions is so you know i know that's like these you know the concepts or things that julia has talked about these these uh mix and actually irreducible conceptual structures and that leads to one version of it i guess that's changed or whatever um so they'll have less of those things i think but but what does it mean to have a super high five that so i mean i guess it's just not clear how to interpret what the theory

58:03 is telling us at that point well in principle the theory that this system is highly is conscious that's counterintuitive i grant you all of that look if i would have asked hundred years ago you get this little p slab of of titanium and glass and it can speak to you people would have said no way you're crazy i would say you're crazy for sure yeah yeah and today you know we all have them in our pockets so what's count intuitive one day is you know is just is just accepted 100 years later so

58:34 one has to be careful about i agree right now it's counterintuitive uh because we think consciousness has to look roughly you know we know what conscious this looks like it comes like packages like you and i and maybe you know other creatures that have fern that have two eyes and you know that we can hang out with and already a squid we find or b we find it very implausible but you know it we just have to see where the science guides us yeah i mean i think it's interesting um

59:08 so i want to ask you about artificial intelligence if you if you uh still have a couple of minutes to talk um so i i this is what i mean i've always had the the i this is the idea that intelligence and consciousness separate so that it's i think it's not just one of the nice attributes of uh of the theory is that it predicts that at least by methods we're using right now we're not going to get artificial consciousness um but i am curious about why why so one of the questions i had was so if you simulate something that has a hi-fi and you mentioned you talk about this in

59:42 your book and this is one of the parts that went by kind of quick and i wasn't sure why why what the ultimate answer was so if you simulate something that has a hi-fi you still claim that it's not going to be conscious right the simulated thing is not conscious because it's simulated on a computer which isn't having a hi-fi and doesn't exist intrinsically or something like that so i just wasn't sure why why the thing it simulated on mattered well so the the the the metaphor i use here is i can

1:00:16 simulate in fact people um what's her name at um ucla she got a nobel prize last year for using computer simulation and observation to infer that sagittarius a star at the center of our galaxy uh is probably a black hole of several million solar masses right okay you can simulate this on your computer on your super computer but you don't have to be concerned that you're going to be sucked into your computer simulation

1:00:50 now why not you're simulating this you're simulating gravity we know that gravity bends space time six million solar masses that should completely bend space time around me so i'm inside this singularity but of course no one worries about that well why not i mean where's the difference between that and consciousness both things are about causal power gravity is about external causal power uh according to iit consciousness is about intrinsic causal power and unless you have those causal powers i let's say the caudal powers of of a

1:01:24 equivalent of brain you have to have them in your hardware if you want and you have to build them into the physics of the system and having um if you look at actually the gates where typically one gate talks to three or four other gates if it's in the cpu or the alu or the tpu is with very low connectivity compared to the brain very low fan in very low fan out very little overlap among the inputs and outputs that is a structure that minimizes intrinsic causal power yes you can simulate things but again those

1:01:57 that that's different from actually doing it so if you wanted to get human level consciousness you have to build into the hardware you have to build what's known as neomorphic engineering neomark neuromorphic architecture you have to build something that's much closer to the architecture of of brains then you could get consciousness so it's nothing to do with there's nothing magic about the brain per se it's the way the brain is wired up and you need to build that into your system in order to get to get the experience yeah so i mean i guess so some people want to make it

1:02:30 say some things are substrate invariants you know this is a phrase that comes from people like homer's and nick bostrom but uh so you know simulation of a black hole isn't a black hole but a simulation of a computer is a computer so there are some things which simulations of them are are that are being simulated so the question is whether consciousness is is of the form oh not according to id it's like charge think of it like electrical charge electrical charge or you can perfectly well simulate the effect of electrical charge but it doesn't make your computer

1:03:02 charge right you can simulate how electrons move and ions move in the brain constant it simply does not make the physical the system now having charge you can create charge by just simulating it you actually have to move charge child carrier around it's the same thing with conscience consciousness in that sense is something physical it's not something that you can compute i mean so but if if the if the causal power of the brain is simulated in its entirety like if the you know the blue brain project were like

1:03:33 successful and did the whole brain not just like a cortical column of a mouse or something but like the whole thing then you still think that that thing wouldn't be conscious but all of the causal power of the brain is simulated so it's different than i mean yeah it's black hole doesn't suck you into the computer but any simulated thing in the computers is going to be sucked into the simulated black hole yeah yes at the simulated level so you get something simulated just like you know alexa or siri may say i'm conscious yes so if you believe that's consciousness saying unconscious fine you get that inside your machine

1:04:06 yes but but i mean i guess what i'm confused about is why the simulated causal power doesn't doesn't count uh if you see because it's not real it's just like charge i mean you know at the meta level i guess you can simulate you can simulate a simulation and you can you know you can do this at now the um but in order to get intrinsic causal power you need something physical that actually has that physical power it's a basic ontological principle i would say yeah

1:04:38 let me try one more time because i mean i understand what you're saying but uh if if the iit is right then consciousness is just integrated information in the computer you have something in which there is integrated information in the simulated creature so if what you're saying is right then consciousness isn't just integrated information because it's there in the computer and you're saying there's no consciousness well it's there in this funny way in the sense that you can do this mapping from certain physical i mean ultimately what are you doing in a

1:05:11 computer you're mapping certain variables right charge on a gate onto an abstract entity you know let's say you write down einstein's field equation or the the stock market or you know whether what a particular creature will say that mapping by itself i just does not have that's just an abstract physical that's an abstract mathematical mapping it's a difference between mathematics and the physical world i mean to me it seems very obvious right

1:05:45 yeah but it just sounds like then there's more to consciousness than iit it's the uh it's not the physical it says it is it's causal power yeah it's causal power right and causal power is the ability to influence your own intrinsic power the ability to influence your own future and be influenced by your past and unless you have that yes that you don't need yeah so i don't see why you don't have that but i'll i'll let it go because uh um so i mean

1:06:20 one last question i have is about the simulation hypothesis generally so you know from coming from people like nick bostrom david chalmers has defended it so i think one of the interesting implications of what you're saying is that given that we know we're conscious then we also know we're not in a simulation ah i don't know i mean i mean this reminds me of the discussion that this scholastic had you know how many angels can dance on a pinhead it seems completely whatever yes i mean it seems absurd i'm i'm a

1:06:55 scientist ultimately i'm dealing with with things that exist in nature why the ex so for example a question that i find vastly more interesting uh sorry richard is that's fine if iit happens to be a true theory of consciousness why i mean why why ultimately you can say well okay it's fine i t is true so but why should it feel like something right uh similar to it and that reminds me of the question that physicists ask these days quantum mechanics seems to be the best description banana we have of the microphysics of the universe

1:07:28 but we can certainly imagine other universes that don't follow for classical physics right you know if i imagine a universe classical physics then it doesn't obey quantum mechanics so what is it why quantum mechanics is it a multiverse and there are infinite different laws and we happen to be to to live in one that that has that obese quantum mechanics and same thing i think with with iit if it is a is a correct say why why does it feel like the simulation hypothesis i don't know i just don't find all that interesting

1:08:01 yeah no that's cool um i i wonder so is this the hard problem in another guys that you're just now mentioning though that this question of why that's not being answered uh i don't know it sort of it seems to be i mean it's one of these questions why is there anything rather nothing right and one suspect it's one of these fundamentally unanswerable questions i mean people have tried to answer why is there something other than nothing not nothing is really terrible satisfying it's the problem of infinite regress right there's turtles and you know turtle you know elephants upon turtles upon turtle turtles

1:08:34 and the only answer is well they're turtles all the way down right so it's but it sounds like what you're saying is that iit doesn't solve the hard problem where some i've heard some people um like now he has said that he thinks it does uh so so it's i mean it sounds like you disagree a little bit there no but it doesn't solve it i mean it depends what you mean by the hard problem it you know iit makes some the i.t makes some very explains why space feels the way it does right it makes some very specific predictions

1:09:07 if you take it to a space and it it it it derives the underlying cause effect power and that explains exactly why space feels the way it is why it's extended why their neighborhood relationships why there's farther and closer by all those things you know while they're inclusion and exclusion things all those things that are typical of space i think that explains the hard problem this is a different problem is why you know what why do we live in a universe that happens to be

1:09:41 iit just like why do we live in a universe that happens to obey quantum mechanics that's different what you're saying is that you think it's uh conceptually possible or something like that that consciousness could have been something other than iiit to me clearly it seems to be just like it's conceptually possible that we live in a in a classical universe not in a quantum mechanical i know we don't accept that but why but i suspect this is one of these many unanswerable questions of the thought why is there anything rather than

1:10:14 something right yeah sorry why is there something rather than anything nothing exactly no these ones these are these these are notoriously hard to solve um so i see where over time i know you said you gotta you have things you have to do and you have to go oh yeah yes yes yes so i want to thank you for joining me today christoph this has been a very interesting and fascinating discussion um and with that i will say goodbye and just hang out for a second i'll say officially buy off the air