Christof Koch > Quotes

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

“Make a decision, trust yourself and stick with it.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“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.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“Humanity is not condemned to wander forever in an epistemological fog, knowing only the surface appearance of things but never their true nature.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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?”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“Like a young child who closes their eyes and assumes that you can’t see them anymore, on the infantile belief that what is true for them is also true for you, we take reality as given and implicitly assume that everyone experiences the same, when in fact few do.”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“the mind constructs what it takes to be “reality”—seeing this chair, hearing music, feeling guilty—from explicit and implicit assumptions about statistical regularities in the world around and within us. These are called priors in the language of Bayesian reasoning, or expectations in layman’s terms. Some are part of our genetic heritage, while others are learned early in life. These priors are usually inaccessible to conscious introspection.”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“Pain is particularly susceptible to the power of suggestion. If you previously obtained pain relief by taking an aspirin, you expect the same benefit when someone hands you a similar-looking pill, even though it may be a placebo. This form of analgesia can be blocked by the opioid antagonist naloxone, implying that your belief recruits your body’s own opioid-like substances called endorphins. This is in line with what my mother told me about when she assisted her father, a surgeon, in operations in the hospital’s bunker during the Allied bombing campaign in World War II Berlin: when they ran out of morphine, the injured received, unbeknownst to them, a harmless saline injection that nevertheless provided relief. Placebos don’t just work for pain or depression. Belief helps improve motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease and shapes immune response. The placebo effect is everywhere.21”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“any experience exists for itself, is structured, is the specific way it is, is one, and is definite.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“We are, quite literally, star dust.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“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.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“Consider a startling visual illusion known as the “Lilac chaser,” which you can find on the web.15 Twelve blurry pink disks are arranged in a circle, like the numbers on a clock, against a grey background. One of the disks briefly blinks off and on again, before the adjacent disk disappears and reappears, then the next one, and so on. This missing disk, or “hole,” travels continuously around the circle. Yet, when you steadily fixate on the cross at the center of the circle, you see only a single greenish disk, moving along the circle, while the eleven stationary pink disks are gone! Remarkable, you see what’s not there, while not seeing what is there! The late vision scientist David Marr expressed it succinctly: “Perception is the construction of a description.”16 This includes not only visual and other sensory percepts but also interoceptive percepts, fears, and other feelings. All”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“It is rare to experience an elementary emotion in isolation, like “pure rage.” Most feelings are composites. Take saudade,7 from the Portuguese word for longing for something irreversibly lost, like the forsaken comfort of a childhood home, suffused with a warm glow and fond memories (the paradigmatic et in arcadia ego). Portugal has an entire music genre known as fado that epitomizes saudade; it combines sadness, longing, regret, nostalgia, anxiety, and dread.”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“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).”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“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.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed