Christof Koch - Is Consciousness Unified?

We feel as if our consciousness is unified—we integrate sight, sound, all the senses. Our minds feel as an indivisible whole. But eye or brain injury can alter or eliminate sight. A stroke can destroy subtle aspects of language capacity—you can write and not speak, speak and not write. The brain is compartmentalized. So is unified consciousness an illusion?

Christof Koch is an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness. He is the President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute of Brain Science in Seattle.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[NicholasWilliams-ukxu]

This guy is awesome, he has so much great insights.

[jsaving]

I hate when people watch this show and say he is right or he is wrong.
RLK does not dabble in the objectively knowable. If you want right and wrong, watch jeopardy.
This show is about intellectual brinksmanship.

[kennethmalafy]

The split brain proves consciousness is more than the sum of its parts. Two individual consciousnesses arose from one brain. If consciousness was just the sum of its parts, each brain would only ever be able to produce just one- regardless of what you did to it (it only has parts for one). The fact that there were two, with less parts after the split brain demonstrates that it is more than "parts."

[XOPOIIIO]

Before the split the two parts were just communicating to each other and coordinated their activity, it doesn't mean they were unified. Unified experience implies enormous change after the split, but it doesn't seem that two parts of the person noticed much of the difference, they continued to function like they functioned before.

[TracyWitham]

Here's a take on the unity of consciousness deduced from Wm. James' view of consciousness prompting the development of will: Since "the development of will" in any adaptive sense implies learning through experience and consciousness is transitory, and therefore incapable of being a locus of development, what consciousness contributes to the development of will is fixed at whatever level of conscious complexity the brain can accommodate. So, when James wrote that the realization of the development of the will is "proportional to the possible complication of consciousness, " he implied that any way of reducing the scope of conscious experience impaired the quality of the information used in developing the will, aka learning from experience. So, why is consciousness unified? In James' view because the unification maximizes the information (or quality of information--the extrapolation is too abstract to differentiate) that is used in learning.

[eiymlqh]

The ability to learn and understand, with Intuition is its own layer.

[kallianpublico]

I'm beginning to believe that belief is the...frame of consciousness.
The content of consciousness is correlated by belief. Belief such as reason, logic, art, neuroses and "other" correlates corresponding to other worlds.
Belief is the spectrum and the separate bands of belief are the colors of differing frequencies of beliefs. Belief is the light that consciousness perceives, and that self-consciousness correlates.
Do you believe in a God of logic and reason, or is your God made in another image?

[-handala-]

If i walked into a bar and saw you two i would immediately know who are the most interesting people there were.

[Appleblade]

Dr. Koch from midpoint on is expressing Berkeley's Manifest Qualities Thesis, found in thesis #25 of his The Principles of Human Knowledge, if anyone cares. ;)

[holgerjrgensen]

We all have our very own Eternal Consciousness,
Earth have its own Consciousness,
our Consciousness is part of Earths Consciousness.
10 min. in Earths perspective, is 3.000 years in ours.
So, all Consciousness is part the Eternal Life's
Consciousness.

[dennistucker]

Christof is correct, consciousness is unified and integrated.

[MikeWiest]

I am a neuroscientist and physicist. I agree that consciousness is essentially unified. However, this insight IMPLIES that the brain basis must be a quantum state: because ALL classical dynamics are reducible to local neighbor interactions. There are no irreducible wholes in classical physics!

[Whitelird]

I think the main question which we ignore, and which is central to this discussion is:
Why are we conscious at all? Let me try to answer this:
I am conscious because I am aware that I just asked: why are we conscious at all.
But what does this question mean? Why did I ask it? Because I am conscious. It's Ok, I am conscious, but why do I ask the question: why am I conscious? Because I want to know? But why am I questioning why I am questioning? And why am I questioning at all?
It seems questioning is central to high level consciousness, the more you are conscious, the more you will raise questions.
Addressing the question of questioning may resolve the problem of consciousness.

[Dion_Mustard]

I am a "rational-minded" British man with no religious belief, and yet I've had what is called an "out of body experience". Infact I've had that happen twice, as well as lucid dream states which felt just as real as my waking reality. In fact, I once "awoke" from a lucid dream and could not establish which was the "dream-world" and which was not, which I found rather frightening. But in terms of my "OBE", I am pretty certain that my awareness was not local to my brain. By this I mean that my consciousness, whatever consciousness is, was above my body and in fact I was able to travel to a certain location and witness things happening. I could later prove this as accurate as I visited the exact same location to verify what I had seen. So although I am not 100% certain, I am reasonably confident that consciousness can separate from the body. Had you told me about this before I had my experience I would've thought you were crazy, but now I've experienced it first hand. So in terms of what I think consciousness is, I would argue that consciousness can become "non-local" so to speak.

[dravhomeo]

This guy is determined to look for answers everywhere except internally, all the best finding the truth outside where it can never be found.

[ravipratapmishra]

Is consciousness unified strikes me of the thought we used to study in schools that is "God is one"

[jamesruscheinski]

could causation unify conscious experience? conscious awareness of information from causation?

[jamesruscheinski]

might conscious experience evaluate and deliberate physical nature?

[lucianmaximus]

research the microtubules and the moment of quantum consciousness after the collapse

[tunahelpa]

Not sure if Dr Koch explains this as well as he could. The billions of neurons and synapses are reduced to a reasonable number and presented to the conscious mind, which performs the feat of unifying them in real time.
It's not that the numerous neurons are unified but that the perception they - as well as the mindset - give is that of a unified whole.
One could, if one wanted to - or if misled by sleight of hand - remove some part by choosing to forcefully ignore it, just as you do when listening to a person in a noisy room.
So my conclusion is that the conscious brain does the unifying, and presents it to the seat of consciousness in such a way as to make it seem to be a unity.