Christof Koch: Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #2

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?

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.

So how does that make you feel?

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.

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

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.

(laughs)

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.