Oct 15, 2021 10:38 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 15, 2021 10:42 PM by C C.)
https://nautil.us/issue/107/the-edge/the...istof-koch
INTRO (excerpts): Consciousness is a thriving industry. [...] Consciousness is a buzzing business in neuroscience labs and brain institutes. But it wasn’t always this way. ... Perhaps no one did more to legitimize its study than Francis Crick...
[...] In the 1980s Crick found a brilliant collaborator in the young scientist Christof Koch. In some ways, they made an unlikely team. Crick, a legend in science, was an outspoken atheist, while Koch, 40 years younger, was a Catholic yearning for ultimate meaning. Together, they published a series of pioneering articles on the neural correlates of consciousness until Crick died in 2004.
Koch went on to a distinguished career at Caltech before joining the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Today, as the president and chief scientific officer, he supervises several hundred scientists, engineers, and informatics experts trying to map the brain and figure out how our neural circuits process information...
Koch is one of the great thinkers about consciousness. He has a philosophical frame of mind and jumps readily from one big idea to the next. He can talk about the tough ethical decisions regarding brain-impaired patients and also zoom out to give a quick history of Christian thinking on the soul. In our conversation, he ranged over a number of far-out ideas—from panpsychism and runaway artificial intelligence to the consciousness of bees and even bacteria.
INTERVIEW (excerpt): . . . Isn’t there still the old “mind-body problem?” How do three pounds of goo in the human brain, with its billions of neurons and synapses, generate our thoughts and feelings? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the physical world and the mental world.
No, it’s just how you look at it. The philosopher Bertrand Russell had this idea that physics is really just about external relationships—between a proton and electron, between planets and stars. But consciousness is really physics from the inside. Seen from the inside, it’s experience. Seen from the outside, it’s what we know as physics, chemistry, and biology. So there aren’t two substances. Of course, a number of mystics throughout the ages have taken this point of view.
It does look strange if you grew up like me, as a Roman Catholic, believing in a body and a soul. But it’s unclear how the body and the soul should interact. After a while, you realize this entire notion of a special substance that can’t be tracked by science—that I have but animals don’t have, which gets inserted during the developmental process and then leaves my body—sounds like wishful thinking and just doesn’t cohere with what we know about the actual world.
It sounds like you lost your religious faith as you learned about science.
I lost my religious faith as I matured. I still look fondly back upon it. I still love the religious music of Bach. I still get this feeling of awe. In a cathedral, I can get a feeling of luminosity out of the numinous. When I’m on a mountain top, when I hear a dog howling, I still wake up some mornings and say, “I’m amazed that I exist. I’m amazed there is this world.” But you can get that without being a Catholic.
Does that experience of awe or the numinous feel religious?
Not in a traditional sense. I was raised to believe in God, the Trinity, and particularly the Resurrection. Unfortunately, I now know four words: “No brain, never mind.” That’s bad news. Once my brain dies, unless I can somehow upload it into the Cloud, I die with it. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m not going to believe something if it’s opposed by all the facts.
A few years ago, you and some other scientists spent a week with the Dalai Lama. Was that a meaningful experience?
Yes, it was. There were thousands of monks in the Drepung Monastery who were listening to our exchange. This particular Tibetan Buddhist tradition is quite fascinating. I’m not a scholar of it, but they view the mind primarily from an interior perspective. They’ve developed very sophisticated ways of analyzing it that are different from our way. We take the external way of Western science, which is independent of the observer. But ultimately, we’re trying to approach the same thing. We’re trying to approach this phenomenon of conscious experience. They have no trouble with the idea of evolution and other creatures being sentient. I found that very heartening—in particular the Dalai Lama’s insistence on the primacy of science. I asked him, “What happens if science is in conflict with certain tenets of Buddhist faith?” He laughed and said, “Well, if this belief doesn’t accord with what science ultimately discovers about the universe, then we have to throw it out.”
But the Dalai Lama believes in reincarnation.
We talked about that. In fact, I said, “Well, I’m really sorry, Your Holiness, but I think we just have to agree that Western science shows that if there’s no physical carrier, you’re not going to get a mind. You’re not going to get memory because you need some mechanism to retain the memory.” I asked him, “Were you not reincarnated from the previous Dalai Lama?” And he just laughed and said, “Well, I don’t remember anything about that anymore.”
Has this scientific knowledge helped you sort out the deep existential questions about meaning, about why we’re here?
My last book is titled Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. I’m a reductionist because I do what scientists do. I take a complex phenomenon and try to pull it apart and reduce it to something at a lower level. I’m also romantic in the sense that I believe I can decipher the distant contrails of meanings. I find myself in a universe that seems to be conducive to life—the Anthropic Principle. And for reasons I don’t understand, I also find myself in a universe that became conscious, ultimately reflecting upon itself. Who knows what might happen in the future if we continue to evolve without destroying ourselves? To what extent can we become conscious of the universe as a whole?
I don’t know who put all of this in motion. It’s certainly not the almighty God I was raised with. It’s a god that resides in this mystical notion of all-nothingness. I’m not a mystic. I’m a scientist. But this is a feeling I have. I find myself in a wonderful universe with a very positive and romantic outlook on life. If only we humans could make a better job of getting along with each other... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO (excerpts): Consciousness is a thriving industry. [...] Consciousness is a buzzing business in neuroscience labs and brain institutes. But it wasn’t always this way. ... Perhaps no one did more to legitimize its study than Francis Crick...
[...] In the 1980s Crick found a brilliant collaborator in the young scientist Christof Koch. In some ways, they made an unlikely team. Crick, a legend in science, was an outspoken atheist, while Koch, 40 years younger, was a Catholic yearning for ultimate meaning. Together, they published a series of pioneering articles on the neural correlates of consciousness until Crick died in 2004.
Koch went on to a distinguished career at Caltech before joining the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Today, as the president and chief scientific officer, he supervises several hundred scientists, engineers, and informatics experts trying to map the brain and figure out how our neural circuits process information...
Koch is one of the great thinkers about consciousness. He has a philosophical frame of mind and jumps readily from one big idea to the next. He can talk about the tough ethical decisions regarding brain-impaired patients and also zoom out to give a quick history of Christian thinking on the soul. In our conversation, he ranged over a number of far-out ideas—from panpsychism and runaway artificial intelligence to the consciousness of bees and even bacteria.
INTERVIEW (excerpt): . . . Isn’t there still the old “mind-body problem?” How do three pounds of goo in the human brain, with its billions of neurons and synapses, generate our thoughts and feelings? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the physical world and the mental world.
No, it’s just how you look at it. The philosopher Bertrand Russell had this idea that physics is really just about external relationships—between a proton and electron, between planets and stars. But consciousness is really physics from the inside. Seen from the inside, it’s experience. Seen from the outside, it’s what we know as physics, chemistry, and biology. So there aren’t two substances. Of course, a number of mystics throughout the ages have taken this point of view.
It does look strange if you grew up like me, as a Roman Catholic, believing in a body and a soul. But it’s unclear how the body and the soul should interact. After a while, you realize this entire notion of a special substance that can’t be tracked by science—that I have but animals don’t have, which gets inserted during the developmental process and then leaves my body—sounds like wishful thinking and just doesn’t cohere with what we know about the actual world.
It sounds like you lost your religious faith as you learned about science.
I lost my religious faith as I matured. I still look fondly back upon it. I still love the religious music of Bach. I still get this feeling of awe. In a cathedral, I can get a feeling of luminosity out of the numinous. When I’m on a mountain top, when I hear a dog howling, I still wake up some mornings and say, “I’m amazed that I exist. I’m amazed there is this world.” But you can get that without being a Catholic.
Does that experience of awe or the numinous feel religious?
Not in a traditional sense. I was raised to believe in God, the Trinity, and particularly the Resurrection. Unfortunately, I now know four words: “No brain, never mind.” That’s bad news. Once my brain dies, unless I can somehow upload it into the Cloud, I die with it. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m not going to believe something if it’s opposed by all the facts.
A few years ago, you and some other scientists spent a week with the Dalai Lama. Was that a meaningful experience?
Yes, it was. There were thousands of monks in the Drepung Monastery who were listening to our exchange. This particular Tibetan Buddhist tradition is quite fascinating. I’m not a scholar of it, but they view the mind primarily from an interior perspective. They’ve developed very sophisticated ways of analyzing it that are different from our way. We take the external way of Western science, which is independent of the observer. But ultimately, we’re trying to approach the same thing. We’re trying to approach this phenomenon of conscious experience. They have no trouble with the idea of evolution and other creatures being sentient. I found that very heartening—in particular the Dalai Lama’s insistence on the primacy of science. I asked him, “What happens if science is in conflict with certain tenets of Buddhist faith?” He laughed and said, “Well, if this belief doesn’t accord with what science ultimately discovers about the universe, then we have to throw it out.”
But the Dalai Lama believes in reincarnation.
We talked about that. In fact, I said, “Well, I’m really sorry, Your Holiness, but I think we just have to agree that Western science shows that if there’s no physical carrier, you’re not going to get a mind. You’re not going to get memory because you need some mechanism to retain the memory.” I asked him, “Were you not reincarnated from the previous Dalai Lama?” And he just laughed and said, “Well, I don’t remember anything about that anymore.”
Has this scientific knowledge helped you sort out the deep existential questions about meaning, about why we’re here?
My last book is titled Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. I’m a reductionist because I do what scientists do. I take a complex phenomenon and try to pull it apart and reduce it to something at a lower level. I’m also romantic in the sense that I believe I can decipher the distant contrails of meanings. I find myself in a universe that seems to be conducive to life—the Anthropic Principle. And for reasons I don’t understand, I also find myself in a universe that became conscious, ultimately reflecting upon itself. Who knows what might happen in the future if we continue to evolve without destroying ourselves? To what extent can we become conscious of the universe as a whole?
I don’t know who put all of this in motion. It’s certainly not the almighty God I was raised with. It’s a god that resides in this mystical notion of all-nothingness. I’m not a mystic. I’m a scientist. But this is a feeling I have. I find myself in a wonderful universe with a very positive and romantic outlook on life. If only we humans could make a better job of getting along with each other... (MORE - missing details)
