Then I Myself Am The World

Christof Koch is well-known in the field of consciousness studies as a neuroscientist and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. His work in this field goes back to his early collaboration with Francis Crick and neural correlates of consciousness, and this book, subtitled ‘what consciousness is and how to expand it’ charts his transformative intellectual and personal journey since that time in remarkably lucid prose. The title itself hints at the expanded states covered in the book, which begins with the development of self and consciousness from babyhood. Subsequent chapters cover the varieties of conscious experience, our own construction of reality, consciousness and the physical, the causal power of what truly exists, consciousness and the brain, expansive and transformative states, death, the putative future of consciousness, and the limitations of computational functionalism.

Koch’s experiences of expansive states inform the narrative from a first-person view where the self and ego disappear, leaving only pure consciousness beyond the gravitational field of the self: ‘the mind merges with the universe itself.’ (p. 4) This has led him to understand and postulate the primacy of consciousness, and therefore the limitations of approaches that try to retrofit the ‘subjective’ world of experiences into an ‘objective’ world. He elaborates a systematic account of integrated information theory whereby consciousness ‘is unfolded, intrinsic causal power… it is a structure, not a function, a process, or a computation.’ (p. 7) As such, it is irreducible. Koch takes issue with functionalist views, observing that ‘intelligence is computable, but consciousness is not’ – a non-algorithmic position shared with Sir Roger Penrose and implying that ‘machines will never be sentient, no matter how intelligent they become.’

In a discussion of Cartesian philosophy, Koch notes the mill thought experiment of Leibniz whereby entering into a thinking machine one finds an interior, but no interiority – ‘we will never find anything to explain a perception’ (p. 73) – a remarkably prescient remark. He sees physicalism as Cartesian dualism stripped of thinking substance and involving a denial of the lived reality of conscious experience that fails to explain its qualitative and felt aspects, as Mary Midgley also scathingly observed. Koch then describes a number of other approaches, including Hilary Putman’s computational functionalism as the mythos of our information age; then panpsychism and dual-aspect monism (p. 86) before setting out his own view of integrated information theory whereby consciousness has causal power, and is the launching pad for everything else, not its physical substrate, the brain. The explanation includes five axioms about essential properties of experience: intrinsicality, information, integration, exclusion, and composition, each of which is paired with a physical postulate.

Koch makes it clear that his position is still grounded in the substrate of neurobiology (p. 76). Consciousness, he argues, cannot exist in the pure vacuum: ‘without a substrate, there can be no experience.’ He also takes the view (p. 104) – unlike in Indian philosophy - that his consciousness ceases to exist in dreamless sleep or in a coma. This leads him to assert (p. 150) in relation to near-death experiences that the brain must have lost its causal powers, so he writes that ‘unless there is extraordinary compelling evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon the principle that a silenced brain does not support consciousness.’ He is clearly unaware of the literature of veridical near-death experiences, and especially the 128 documented cases in The Self Does Not Die, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, not to mention the extensive evidence for survival of consciousness. This suggests that there may be more subtle substrates and bodies beyond the brain. For Koch, though, death is the end (pp. 177 ff)

He is right, however, to compare some features of NDEs with powerful psychedelic experiences along with mystical states, which he takes seriously in terms of their noetic quality (he quotes an interesting account from Jane Goodall as well as his own experience of Mind at Large, which he describes as an ontological shock). Koch takes transformative experiences seriously as an antidote to the malaise of our time, reinforced by spiritual practices and showing that what he calls our perception box can be expanded.

The last two chapters provided a hugely Informative discussion of the future of consciousness and the limits of computational approaches. He discusses the difference between the real and the simulated, noting that many philosophers and most neuroscientists and computer engineers are functionalists, and think that computation is sufficient for mind. To the contrary, Koch argues that consciousness relates not to function but to structure, and is not merely a clever algorithm. In this context, he discusses developments in GPT large language models, noting that ‘they’ state that they are not conscious. He is right to assert that it all comes down to metaphysical assumptions: whether or not you assume that computations are sufficient for consciousness, or rather that consciousness cannot be simulated; nor can the lived experience of free choice (p. 209): ‘I decide, not my neurons.’ This is a cutting-edge contribution to neuroscience and the philosophy of consciousness that should be widely read and discussed, especially for its acute analysis of the distinction between consciousness and computation.