Christof Koch: Consciousness

Recorded for MIT's course on artificial general intelligence, this conversation introduces Christof Koch, a seminal figure in the neuroscience of consciousness, president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and author of books including Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.

Zooming out, Koch says the sheer scale of the universe makes intelligent life overwhelmingly likely, yet what makes him feel special is simply that he has experiences — he feels and accesses the world in a strange, compelling way that he calls the core of human existence.

He argues consciousness is not uniquely human but probably spread across biology; what sets humans apart is mainly that we can talk about it. Evolved aliens would experience their own worlds too, differently, through a different sensorium we might never understand.

Recalling a childhood dachshund and his own path, Koch cannot name a discrete moment he realized he was conscious, but says physics and philosophy in college revealed how mysterious it is: nowhere in quantum mechanics, the periodic table, or the ATGC of our genes is consciousness, yet he wakes each morning to a world of experience — the ancient mind-body problem.

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?

Asked what consciousness is, Koch answers simply: experience. Echoing Thomas Nagel, it feels like something to be a bat or to be in love or in pain — any possible experience, from sitting in a chair to a mystical moment in meditation.

The hard question is the gap between a super-smart Watson and a being that actually feels. Koch insists we commingle two very different concepts: intelligence, which is about function, and consciousness, which is about being.