Christof Koch: Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #2

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   As part of MIT…

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      As part of MIT course 6.099 on artificial general intelligence, I got a chance to sit down with Christof Koch, who is one of the seminal figures in, uh, neurobiology and neuroscience, and generally in the study of consciousness. He is the president, the chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 to 2013 he was a professor at Caltech. Before that, he was at MIT. He is extremely well-cited, over 100,000 citations. His research, his writing, his ideas have had big impact on the scientific community and the general public in the way we think about consciousness and the way see ourselves as human beings. He's the author of several books, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, and a more recent book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. If you enjoy this conversation, this course, subscribe, click the little bell icon to make sure you never miss a video. And in the comments, leave suggestions for any people you'd like to see be part of the course or any ideas that you would like us to explore. Thanks very much and I hope you enjoy. Okay, before we delve into the beautiful mysteries of consciousness, let's zoom out a little bit and let me ask, do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?

   2. CKChristof Koch1:23

      Uh, yes, I do believe so. We have no evidence of it, but I think the probabilities are overwhelming in favor of it, given a universe, uh, where we have 10 to the 11th galaxies and each galaxy has between 10 to the 11th, 10 to the 12th stars and we know most stars have one or more planets.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:41

      So how does that make you feel?

   4. CKChristof Koch1:43

      It still makes me feel special because I have experiences. I feel the world, I experience the world. And, uh, independent of whether there are other creatures o- out there, I still feel the world and I have access to this world in this very strange compelling way, and that's the core of, uh, human existence.

   5. LFLex Fridman2:05

      Now, you said human. Do you think... If those intelligent creatures are out there, do you think they experience their world that's shared?

   6. CKChristof Koch2:14

      Yes, if they are evolved, if they are a product of natural evolution as they would have to be, they will also experience their own world. So consciousness isn't just, uh, human, you're right, it's, it's much wider. It's probably... it may be spread across all of biology. We have... The only thing that we have special is we can talk about it.

   7. LFLex Fridman2:31

      (laughs)

   8. CKChristof Koch2:31

      Of course, not all people can talk about it. Babies and little children can't talk about it, patients who have, um, who have a stroke in the, let's say the left inferior frontal gyrus can't talk about it, but most normal adult people can talk about it and so we think that makes us special compared to, let's say, monkeys or dogs or cats or mice or all the other creatures that we share the planet with. But all the evidence seems to suggest that they too experience the world and so it's, like, overwhelmingly likely that other alien- that aliens would also experience their world. Of course differently because they have a different sensorium, they have different sensors, they have a very different environment. But the fact that... I, I would s- uh, strongly suppose that they also have experiences, they feel pain and pleasure and see in some sort of spectrum and hear and have all the other senses.

   9. LFLex Fridman3:17

      Of course their language, if they have one, would be different so we might not be able to understand their poetry about the experiences that they have.

   10. CKChristof Koch3:24

       That's correct.

   11. LFLex Fridman3:25

       Right. So in a talk, in a video I've- I've heard you mention Sapozzel, a dachshund that you came up with, that you grew up with as part of your family when you were young. Uh, first of all you're technically a Midwestern boy.

   12. CKChristof Koch3:41

       Technically.

   13. LFLex Fridman3:41

       (laughs)

   14. CKChristof Koch3:43

       Yes.

   15. LFLex Fridman3:43

       But, uh, after that you traveled around a bit, hence a little bit of the accent. You talked about Sapozzel, the dachshund, having these elements of hum- humanness, of consciousness that you discovered. So I, I just wanted to ask, can you look back on your childhood and remember when was the first time you realized you yourself, sort of from a third person perspective, are, are a conscious being? This idea of, you know, stepping outside yourself and seeing there's something special going on here in my brain.

   16. CKChristof Koch4:18

       I can't really... Actually it's a good question. I'm not sure I recall a discrete moment. I mean, you take it for granted because that's the only world you know, right? The only world I know and you know is the world of seeing and hearing voices and touching and all the other things. So it's only much later at early in my undergraduate days when I became, um, when I enrolled in physics and in philosophy that I really thought about it and thought, "Well, this is really fundamentally very, very mysterious and 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?" Right? So you can look at the foundational equation of quantum mechanics, general relativity, you can look at the periodic table of the elements, you can, you can look at the endless ATG seed chat in our genes and nowhere is consciousness, yet I wake up every morning to a world where I have experiences. And so that's the heart of the ancient mind/body problem: How do experiences get into the world?

   17. LFLex Fridman5:16

       So what is consciousness?

   18. CKChristof Koch5:19

       Experience. Consciousness is any, any con- uh, any experience. Some people call it subjective feeling, some people call it phenomen- phenomenology, some people call it qualia if they're a philosopher, but they all denote the same thing. It feels like something, in the famous word of, of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, it feels like something to be a bat or to be a, you know, an, um, um, uh, an American or to be angry or to be sad or to be in love or to have pain. And that is what experience is. Any possible experience. Could be as mundane as just sitting in a chair, could be as exalted as, you know, having a mystical moment, uh, you know, in, in deep meditation. Those are just different forms of experiences.

   19. LFLex Fridman6:03

       Experience. So if you...... were to sit down with maybe the next, skip a couple generations of IBM Watson, something that won Jeopardy, what is the gap, I guess the question is, between Watson, uh, that might be much smarter than you, than us, than all, any human alive, but may not have experience? What is the gap?

   20. CKChristof Koch6:28

       Well, so that's a big, big question. That's occupied people for the last, um, certainly, uh, last 50 years since we, you know, since the advent, the birth of, um, of computers. That's a question Alan Turing tried to answer and, of course, he did it in this indirect way by proposing this test, an operational test. So, but that's not really, that's, you know, he tried to get at what does it mean for a person to think and then he had this test, right? You lock 'em away and then you have a communication with them and then you try to, to guess after a while whether that is a person or whether it's a computer system. There's no question that now or very soon, you know, Alexa or Siri or, you know, Google Now will pass this test, right? And you can game it, but, you know, ultimately, certainly in your generation, there will be machines that will speak with complete poise, that will remember everything you ever said, that will remember every email you ever had. Like, like Samantha, remember, in the movie Her?

   21. LFLex Fridman7:21

       Yep.

   22. CKChristof Koch7:21

       It's no question it's gonna ha- uh, happen. But, of course, the key question is does it feel like anything to be Samantha in the movie Her?

   23. LFLex Fridman7:28

       That's right.

   24. CKChristof Koch7:28

       Or to, or do- does it feel like anything to be Watson? And there, one has to ve- very, um, very strongly think there are two different concepts here that we commingle. There is the concept of intelligence, natural or artificial, and there is a concept of consciousness, of experience, natural or artificial. Those are very, very different things. Now historically, we associate consciousness with intelligence. Why? Because we live in a world, leaving aside computers, of, of natural selection.

   25. LFLex Fridman7:58

       Mm-hmm.

   26. CKChristof Koch7:58

       Where we are surrounded by creatures, either our own kin that are less or more intelligent or we go across species. Some, some are more adapted to a particular environment, others are less adapted. Whether it's a whale or a dog or you go talk about a paramecium or a little worm, all right? And, and we see the complexity of the nervous system goes from one cell to, to a specialized cells to a worm that has three net- that has 30% of its cells are nerve cells, to a creature like us or like a blue whale that have- has 100 billion even more nerve cells. And so ba- based on behavioral evidence and based on the underlying, uh, neuroscience, we believe that as these creatures become more complex, they are better adapted to a, to their particular ecological niche and they become more conscious, b- partly because their brain grows and we believe consciousness, unlike the ancient, ancient people thought most, almost every culture thought that consciousness with intelligence has to do with your heart.

   27. LFLex Fridman8:55

       Mm-hmm.

   28. CKChristof Koch8:55

       And you still do see that today.

   29. LFLex Fridman8:56

       Yeah.

   30. CKChristof Koch8:56

       You see honey, I love with all my heart.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   From consciousness. You caught…

   1. CKChristof Koch15:00

      You have a dissociation of function from, of intelligence, from, um, uh, from consciousness.

   2. LFLex Fridman15:08

      From consciousness. You caught me asking a why question. Uh, let me ask a question that's not a why question. You're giving a talk later today on the Turing test, uh, for intelligence and consciousness and drawing lines between the two. So is there a scientific way to say there's consciousness present in this entity or not? And, uh, uh, to anticipate your answer 'cause you, w- you also... There's a neurobiological answer. So we can test a human brain but if you take a machine brain that you don't know tests for yet, uh, how would you even begin to approach a test if there's consciousness present in this thing?

   3. CKChristof Koch15:46

      Okay, that's a really good question. So let me take it in two steps. So as you point out, for, for, for, for humans, let's just stick with humans, there's now a test called a zap and zip. It's a procedure where you ping the brain using transcranial magnetic stimulation. You look at the electrical reverberations, essentially using EG. And then you can measure the complexity of this brain response and you can do this in awake people, in their sleep, normal people. You can do it in awake people and then anesthetize them. You can do it in patients and it, it, it has 100% accuracy that in all those cases when you're clear the patient or the person is either conscious or unconscious, the complexity's either high or low. And then you can adopt these techniques to similar creatures like monkeys and dogs and, and, and mice that have very similar brains. Now, of course, you, you point out that may not help you because we don't have a cortex, you know, and if I send a magnetic pulse into my iPhone or my computer, it's probably gonna break something.

   4. LFLex Fridman16:41

      Yeah.

   5. CKChristof Koch16:41

      So we don't have that. So what we need ultimately, we need a theory of consciousness. We can't just rely on our intuition. Our intuition is, well, yeah, if somebody talks, they're conscious.

   6. LFLex Fridman16:52

      Right.

   7. CKChristof Koch16:53

      However, then there are all these patie- children, babies don't talk, right? But we believe that, that th- babies also have conscious experiences, right? And then there are all these patients I mentioned, um, that, uh, and they don't talk. When you dream, you can't talk because you're paralyzed. So, so what, what we ultimately need... We can't just rely on our intuition. We need a theory of conscious that tells us what is it about a piece of matter, what is it about a piece of highly excitable matter like the brain or like a computer that gives rise to conscious experience? We all believe, none of us believes anymore in the old story it's a soul, right?

   8. LFLex Fridman17:25

      Right.

   9. CKChristof Koch17:25

      That used to be the most common explanation that most people accepted and still a lot of people today believe, well, there's this, there's God endowed only us with this special thing that animals don't have. Rene Descartes famously said, "A dog, if you hit it with your carriage, it may yell, it may cry, but it doesn't have this special thing." It doesn't have the magic, the magic sauce.

   10. LFLex Fridman17:43

       Soul, yeah.

   11. CKChristof Koch17:45

       It doesn't have ............................ The soul. Now, we believe that isn't the case anymore. So what is the difference between brains and, and these guys, silicon? And, um, in particular, once their behavior matches, so if you have Siri or t- or Alexa in 20 years from now that she can talk just as good as any possible human, what grounds do you have to say she's not conscious, in particular if she says, as of course she will...

   12. LFLex Fridman18:10

       ... (laughs)

   13. CKChristof Koch18:10

       Well, of course I'm conscious. You ask-

   14. LFLex Fridman18:11

       So they-

   15. CKChristof Koch18:11

       ... "How are you doing?" and she'll say, "Well..." You know, they, they'll generate some way to-

   16. LFLex Fridman18:15

       Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

   17. CKChristof Koch18:17

       Of course. She, she'll behave like a, like a person. Now there are several differences. One is... So this relates to the problem, the, the, the very hard... Why is consciousness a hard problem? It's because it's subjective, right? Only I have it, for which only I know. I have direct experience of my own consciousness. I don't have experience your consciousness. Now, I assume as a sort of a Bayesian person who believes in probability theory and all of that, you know, I can do, I can do an abduction to the, to the best available facts. I deduce your brain is very similar to mine. If I put you in a scanner, your brain is roughly gonna behave the same ways I do. If, if, if, you know, if I give you this muesli and ask you, "How does it taste?" you would tell me things that, you know, that, that I would also say more or less, right?

   18. LFLex Fridman19:00

       Yeah.

   19. CKChristof Koch19:00

       So I infer based on all of that that, that you're conscious. Now with theory I can't do that, so there I really need a theory that tells me what is it about, about any system, this or this, that makes it conscious. We have such a theory.

   20. LFLex Fridman19:12

       Yes. So the, the integrated information theory, uh, is... But let me first, maybe as introduction for people who are not familiar, Descartes. Can you... Y- you talk a lot about pan, uh, panpsychism. Can you describe what, uh, physicalism versus dualism? This, you, you mentioned the soul. What, what is the history of that idea? What i-

   21. CKChristof Koch19:33

       The idea of panpsychism?

   22. LFLex Fridman19:36

       Well, no, the debate, really, uh, o- out of which pan- panpsychism can, um, emerge, of, of, of, um, dualism versus, uh, physicalism or, or do you not see p- uh, panpsychism as fitting into that

   23. CKChristof Koch19:49

       No, you can argue there's some... Well, okay, so let's step back. So panpsychism is a very ancient belief that's been around, uh, I mean, Plato and Aristotle talks about it, uh, modern philosophers talk about it. Uh, of course, in Buddhism, the idea is very prevalent. That, I mean, there are different versions of it. One version says everything is ensouled. Everything. Rocks and stones and dogs and people and forests and iPhones, all of us souled, right? All matter is ensouled. That's sort of one version. Another version is that all biology, all creatures small or large, from a single cell to a giant sequoia tree, feel like something. That's the one I think is somewhat more realistic. Um, so there are different versions of-

   24. LFLex Fridman20:30

       What do you mean by feel like something?

   25. CKChristof Koch20:31

       Well, have-

   26. LFLex Fridman20:32

       Have feeling, have some kind of experience?

   27. CKChristof Koch20:33

       It feels like some... It may well be possible that it feels like something to be a paramecium. I think it's pretty likely it feels like something to be a bee or a mouse or a dog.

   28. LFLex Fridman20:45

       Sure. So, okay.

   29. CKChristof Koch20:46

       So, so that you can say that's also... So panpsychism is very broad, right?

   30. LFLex Fridman20:51

       Yeah.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Yes. I think that's,…

   1. LFLex Fridman30:00

      for creating an AI system that's, um, so you mentioned ethics, that is exceptionally intelligent but also does not do...... does, you know, aligns its values with our values as humanity, do you think then it needs consciousness?

   2. CKChristof Koch30:14

      Yes. I think that's, that is a very good argument that if we're concerned about AI and the threat of AI, a la Nick Bostrom, existential threat, I think having an intelligence that has empathy... Right? Why do we find abusing a dog, why do most of us find that abhorrent? Abusing any animal, right? Why do we find that, um, abhorrent? Because we have this thing called empathy which, if you look at the Greek really means feeling with. I feel, it comes pathos, empathy, I have feeling with you. I see somebody else suffer that isn't even my conspecific, right? It's not a, a person. It's not a love, it's not my wife or my kids, it's, it's a dog, but I feel naturally most of us, not all of us, most of us will feel empathic. And so it may well be in the long-term interest of survival of Homo sapiens sapiens that if we do build AGI and it's really becomes very powerful that it has an empathic response and doesn't just exterminate humanity.

   3. LFLex Fridman31:11

      So as part of the full conscious experience, uh, to cr- to create a consciousness, artificial, or in our human consciousness, do you think fear... Maybe we're gonna get into, um, your earlier days with Nietzsche and so on, but do you think fear and suffering are essential, uh, to have consciousness? Do you have to have the full range of experience to have a, to have a system that has experience? Or can you have a system that only has a very particular kinds of very positive experiences?

   4. CKChristof Koch31:41

      Look, you can have... In principle, you can... Uh, people have done this in the rat where you implant electrode in the hypothalamus, the pleasure center of the rat and the rat stimulates itself above and beyond anything else. It doesn't care about food or natural sex or, or drink anymore, it just stimulates itself because it's- it's such a pleasurable feeling. I guess it's like an orgasm, just you have, you know, all day long. And so, uh, a priori I see no reason why you need, um, different f- why you need a great variety. Now clearly to survive, that wouldn't work, right? But if I engineer it artificially, I don't think, um, I don't think you need, uh, a great variety of conscious experience. You could have just pleasure or just fear. It might be a terrible existence but I think that's possible, at least on conceptual logical account. 'Cause any real creature, whether artificially engineered, you wanna give it fear, the fear of extinction, right? That we all have. Uh, and you also wanna give it positive, appetitive states. States that it wants to... that you want the machine encouraged to do because it- they give the machine positive feedback.

   5. LFLex Fridman32:48

      So, um, you mentioned panpsychism, to jump back a little bit. You know, everything having some kind of mental property. Uh, how- how do you go from there to something like human consciousness? So everything having some elements of consciousness to... Well, is there something special about human consciousness?

   6. CKChristof Koch33:08

      Well, so it's- it's... so, so just as a... It's not everything. Like a- a spoon, there's no... I... The- the form of panpsychism I think about doesn't ascribe consciousness to anything like this, the spoon or my liver. However, uh, it is, uh, the theory, the integrated information theory does say that system, even one that look from the outside relatively simple at le- if they have this internal causal power, they are... they- they- they... it does feel like something. The theory a priori doesn't say anything what's special about human. Biologically, we know what... The- the one thing that's special about human is we speak and we have an overblown sense of our own importance.

   7. LFLex Fridman33:47

      (laughs) Right.

   8. CKChristof Koch33:48

      We believe we're exceptional and we're just God's gift to- to-... uh, to the universe. But the... but behaviorally the main thing that we have, we can pla-... we can plan over the long term and we have language and that gives us enormous amount of power. And that's why we are the- the current dominant species on the planet.

   9. LFLex Fridman34:05

      So you mentioned God, you grew up a devout Roman Catholic, uh, in a Re- Roman Catholic family. So, you know, w- with consciousness you're sort of exploring some really deeply fundamental human things that religion also touches on. So where does- where does religion fit into your thinking about consciousness? And you've- y- you've grown throughout your life and changed your views on religion as far as I understand.

   10. CKChristof Koch34:32

       Yeah. I mean, I'm now much closer to... So I- I'm not a ca- Roman Catholic anymore. I don't believe there's sort of, um, this God, the God I was- I was educated to believe in, you know, who sits somewhere in the fullness of time, I'll be united in some sort of everlasting bliss. I- I just don't see any evidence for that. Look, the world... the night is large and full of wonders, right?

   11. LFLex Fridman34:53

       (laughs)

   12. CKChristof Koch34:54

       There are many things that I don't understand, there are, I think, many things that we as a cult... Look, we don't even understand more than 4% of all the u- uh, the universe, right? Dark matter, dark energy, we have no idea what it is. Maybe it's the last socks, what do I know?

   13. LFLex Fridman35:05

       (laughs)

   14. CKChristof Koch35:06

       So- so all I can tell you is... And so sort of my- my current, uh, religious or spiritual sentiment is much closer to some form of Buddhism.

   15. LFLex Fridman35:16

       Can you describe what that-

   16. CKChristof Koch35:16

       Without the reincarnation, unfortunately. There's no evidence for any reincarnation.

   17. LFLex Fridman35:21

       So can you describe, um, the- the way Buddhism sees the world a little bit?

   18. CKChristof Koch35:25

       Well, so the, you know, they talk about... So when- when I- I spent, uh, several meetings with, uh, with the Dalai Lama and what always impressed me about him, he really unlike, for example, let's say the- the- the Pope or some Cardinal, he always emphasized minimizing the suffering of all creatures. So they have this from the early beginning, they look at suffering in all creatures, not just in people but in- in everybody, this universal. And of course by degrees, right? An animal, generally will have le- le- is less capable of suffering than a- th- than a well-developed, uh, um, uh, normally developed human. And, um, they think consciousness pervades, uh, in this universe. Uh, and they have these techniques, you know, m- you can think of them like mindfulness, et cetera, and meditation that tries to access sort of what they claim of this more fundamental aspect of reality. I'm not sure it's more fundamental as I- I think about it. There's the physical and then there's this inside you, consciousness, and those are the two aspects. That's the only thing I have a- I have access to in my life. And you gotta remember, my conscious experience and your conscious experience comes prior to anything you know about physics, comes prior to knowledge about y- the universe and atoms and super strings and molecules and all of that.... the only thing you're directly acquainted with is this world that's populated with, with things and images and, and sounds in your head and touches and all of that.

   19. GUGuest36:43

       Actually, I have a question. So, um, it sounds like, um, you kind of have a, a rich life. You talk about rock climbing and it seems like you really love, uh, literature and, um, consciousness is all about experiencing things. So, do you think that has helped your research on this topic?

   20. CKChristof Koch37:00

       Yes. Particularly if you think about it, the, the various states, so for example, when you do rock climbing or now I do, um, uh, rowing, crew rowing and, and I bike every day, you can get into this thing called the zone and I've always I wanna, I wondered about, about it, particularly with respect to consciousness because it's a strangely addictive state. You wanna, you wanna p- p- I mean, once people have it once, they wanna keep on going back to it and you wonder why, what is it so addicting about it? And I think it's the experience of p- of almost close to pure experience because in this, in this zone, you're not conscious of inner voice anymore, but there's always this inner voice nagging you, right? "You have to do this, you have to do that, you have to pay your taxes, you have this fight with your ex," and all of those things, they're always there. But when you're in the zone, all of that is gone and you're just this, in this wonderful state where you're fully out in the world, like you're, you're, you're climbing or you're rowing or biking or, or doing soccer what, or whatever you're doing and sort of consciousness sort of is this, you're all action or in this case of pure experience, you're not action at all, but in both cases you experience some aspect of, of con- you touch some basic part of, of, of conscious existence that is so basic and so deeply satisfying. You, I think you touch the root of being. That's really what you're touching there, you're getting close to the root of being and that's very different from intelligence.

   21. LFLex Fridman38:21

       So, what do you think about the simulation hypothesis, simulation theory, the idea that we all live in a computer simulation? Have you given it much thought?

   22. CKChristof Koch38:30

       Raptures for nerds. Raptures for nerds. I think it's-

   23. LFLex Fridman38:33

       Raptures for nerds? (laughs) All right.

   24. CKChristof Koch38:33

       ... I think it's, I, it's, it's as likely as the hypothesis that engaged hundreds of scholars for many centuries, are we all just existing in the mind of God?

   25. LFLex Fridman38:42

       Right.

   26. CKChristof Koch38:42

       Right? And this is just a modern version of it. It's, it's, it's, it's equally plausible. People love talking about these sorts of things, I know there are book writtens about the simulation hypothesis. If that's what people want to do, that's fine.

   27. LFLex Fridman38:54

       (laughs)

   28. CKChristof Koch38:54

       It seems rather esoteric. It's never testable.

   29. LFLex Fridman38:58

       But it's not useful for you to think of it in those terms. So, maybe connecting to the questions of free will which you've talked about, um, I, I think I vaguely remember you saying that the idea that there's no free will, uh, it makes you very uncomfortable. Uh, so what do you think about free will in the, from the, y- d- from a physics perspective, from a consciousness perspective? Where does it all f- fit?

   30. CKChristof Koch39:20

       Okay, so from the physics perspective, leaving aside quantum mechanics, we believe we live in a fully deterministic world, right?
4. 45:00 – 57:55

   Yeah. It's a, it's…

   1. CKChristof Koch45:00

      probably if you had the m- ability to constantly wipe your memory, you'd probably do it to an extent that isn't useful to you. So...

   2. LFLex Fridman45:08

      Yeah. It's a, it's a-

   3. CKChristof Koch45:09

      It's a good question.

   4. LFLex Fridman45:10

      ...

   5. NANarrator45:10

      Yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman45:10

      ... it's a balance.

   7. CKChristof Koch45:10

      Yes.

   8. LFLex Fridman45:11

      So, um, on the books as, as Jack mentioned, correct me if I'm wrong, but, uh, broadly speaking, academia and the different scientific disciplines, certainly in engineering, reading literature seems to be a rare pursuit. Uh, perhaps I'm wrong in this but that's in my experience, most people read much more technical texts and do not sort of escape or seek truth in literature. Um, it seems like you do. Uh, so what do you think is the value? What do you think literature adds to the pursuit of scientific truth? Do you think it's good, it's useful for, uh, everybody?

   9. CKChristof Koch45:47

      Give you access to a much wider array of, uh, of human experiences.

   10. LFLex Fridman45:52

       How valuable do you think it is?

   11. CKChristof Koch45:54

       Well, if you wanna understand human nature and nature in general, then I think you have to better understand wide variety of experiences, not just sitting in a lab staring at a screen and having a face flashed onto you for 100 milliseconds and pushing a button. That's what, that's what I used to do. That's what most psychologists do. There's nothing wrong with that but you need to consider lots of other strange, uh, states, you know.

   12. LFLex Fridman46:16

       Mm-hmm. And literature's a shortcut for this as

   13. NANarrator46:18

       Yeah.

   14. CKChristof Koch46:18

       Well, yeah, because literature, that's, uh, that's what literature's all about, all sorts of interesting experiences that people have, the c- you know, the contingency of it, the fact that, you know, women experience the world different, Black people experience the world different. And, t- you know, the, the one way to experience that is reading all these different literature and try to f- find out new... You see, everything is so relative, right? You read a books from 100 years ago, they thought about certain problems very, very differently than, th- than, than us today. We, today, like any culture, think we know it all, that's common to every culture, every culture believes at its heyday they know it all and then you realize, well, there's other w- ways of viewing the universe and some of them may have lots of things in their favor.

   15. LFLex Fridman46:55

       Mm-hmm. So I... This is a question I wanted to ask about timescale or scale in, in general. Uh, when you... with IIT or in general, t- try to think about consciousness, try to think about these ideas, w- we kinda naturally think in human timescales. So do you, um, or/and also s- uh, entities that are sized close to humans, do you think of things that are much larger and much smaller as containing consciousness and do you think, uh, things that take, you know, what is it? (laughs) You know, uh, ages-

   16. CKChristof Koch47:28

       Eons.

   17. LFLex Fridman47:28

       Yeah, eons to, uh, uh, to operate in their conscious cause-effect, uh, cause-effect?

   18. CKChristof Koch47:34

       It's a very good question. So yeah, I think a lot about small creatures because experimentally, you know, a lot of people work on flies and, and bees, right? So... And most people just think they're automata, they're just bugs for heaven's sake, right? But if you look at their behavior, like bees, they can recognize individual humans. They have this very complicated, um, way to communicate. If you've ever been involved or you know your parents when they bought a house, what sort of agonizing decision that is.

   19. LFLex Fridman47:57

       Mm-hmm.

   20. CKChristof Koch47:57

       And bees have to do that once a year, right, when they swarm in the spring and then they have this very elaborate way. They have 300 scouts, they, they, they go to the individual sites, they come back, they have this power, this dance literally where they dance for several days. They try to recruit other leads. There's very complicated decision way. When they finally want to make a decision, the entire swarm, their scouts warm up the entire swarm and then go to one location. They don't go to 50 location, they go to one location that the scouts have agreed upon by themself. That's awesome. If you look at the circuit complexity, it's 10 times more denser than anything we have in our brain. Now, they only have a million neurons but the neurons are amazingly complex. Complex behavior, very complicated circuitry so there's no question they experience something. Their life is very different. They're tiny. They only live, you know, for, for a while. Workers live m- maybe for two months. So I think f- and, and IIT tells you this, in principle t-... the substrate of consciousness is the substrate that maximizes the cause-effect power over all possible spatial temporal grains.

   21. LFLex Fridman48:52

       Mm-hmm.

   22. CKChristof Koch48:53

       So when I think about, for example, do you know the science fiction story, The Black Cloud?

   23. LFLex Fridman48:57

       Uh...

   24. CKChristof Koch48:57

       It's a classic by Fred Hoyle, the astronomer. He has this cloud intervening between the earth and the s- and the sun and, um, leading to some sort of, to global cooling. This was written in the '50s. It turns out you can, uh, by, uh, using the, the, um, the radio dish they communicate with actually an entity. It's actually intelligent entity. And they, they, they sort of, they convince it to move away.

   25. LFLex Fridman49:19

       (laughs) Yeah.

   26. CKChristof Koch49:20

       So here you have a radical different entity and in principle IT says, "Well, you can measure the, the integrated information in principle at least." And yes, if that, if the maximum of that occurs at a timescale of month rather than in us it's sort of fraction of a second, yes, and they would experience life where each moment is a month rather than, um, or microsecond, right, rather than a, a fraction of a, of a second in, in the human case. And so there may be forms of conscience that we simply don't recognize for what they are because they are so radical different from anything you and I are used to. Again, that's why it's good to read-

   27. LFLex Fridman49:57

       (laughs) And think about.

   28. CKChristof Koch49:58

       ... or to watch science fiction movie or to think about this. Like there's this fe-... Do you know Stanislaw Lem, this Polish science fiction writer? He wrote Solaris that was turned into a Hollywood movie.

   29. LFLex Fridman50:07

       Yes.

   30. CKChristof Koch50:08

       His best novel, so it was in the '60s, a very s- a very engineer, is an engineering background. His most interesting novel is called The Victorious where, um, human civilization, they, they, they, they, they have this mission to this planet and everything is destroyed and they discover machines. Humans got killed and then these machines, uh, took over and there was this, uh, machine evolution, a Darwinian evolution. He talks about this very vividly. And finally the dominant, the, the dominant machine intelligence organism that survived were gigantic clouds of little hexagonal universal cell automata. This was written in the '60s.

Episode duration: 57:53