Christof Koch - How are Brains Conscious?

Brains are conscious. The heart is not. What does the brain do that the heart does not do? How does it come to be that brains generate inner subjective experience, the movies of our minds? Why do brains seem to be the only place where such mental magic occurs? Could a complete understanding of physical laws account for consciousness?

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.

[murfdog]

When I first looked at the thumbnail, I saw Han Solo with a bowl cut.

[AOmar]

He’s a mixture of Harrison Ford and Jurgen Klinsmann

[whycantiremainanonymous]

There's always a bait and switch at the very start: the claim is *not* that science has *nothing* to say about consciousness. It can say a lot, based on the prior assumption that consciousness exists in the first place. The claim is that a scientific account cannot possibly explain how consciousness can come into existence in the first place.

[TheJohnsonseviltwin]

Came for Christoph Koch, got Rick Deckard from Blade Runner.

[electricmanist]

Consciousness itself is not contained within the brain, but rather operates through it.

[copernicus]

It might be helpful to define 'consciousness' first before we ask how the brain gives rise to it.

[TerryBollinger]

Nice interview. Professor Koch approaches the correlation problem with impressive care.

[theceilidhboy]

Still making the fundamental blunder of confusing mind with consciousness. He’s describing mental functioning and calling it consciousness and thus avoids the hard problem altogether.

[michaelbartlett]

Free Will is absolutely fundamental in our consciousness and in the universe. We use it in every choice we make. Quantum probabilities in your brain make determinism impossible. Free will decisions that you make, are made in an infinite number of ways, but they all come down to just two things, logic and emotion, with an infinite number of ways that they are weighted and combined to reach a decision.
Think of emotion as being more of an animalistic drive for what you want, and logic as being what you determine to be the best choice for you, either morally or physically. There are an infinite number of combinations that will lead you to a decision. The idea that you could predict that or that it could be predetermined is ridiculous!
Some will be beneficial for you and some will not. If you tend to give in to emotion, it makes you much more likely to develop addictions to what gives you pleasure or makes you feel good. On the other hand, always following logic makes you more methodical and less animalistic.
Both are needed in infinitely varying degrees to make you wholly human, but the more you understand them, the easier it is to recognize attempts at manipulation, and avoid having your consent modified and manufactured by it, in different forms of advertising and persuasion thrust upon you by others and by media, either social or mainstream.
Here is your free will - You can choose to think about something other than what you are currently thinking about at any time. You can change the subject to anything you want, not just follow some mind/body machine program. You can actively suppress thoughts and memories at will and choose to follow a different mental path whenever you want, to as far to any end as you want and make it your new free will reality.

[alexovnz]

They keep trying to figure it out how consciousness happens but the question that matters is WHY...

[pchabanowich]

In my opinion, the question does not address what is going on.

[transmogrifiers]

What he's talking about is not consciousness. It's word representations in the brain. Artificial neural networks produce these without being conscious. So this guy is basically missing the point and his life's work is worthless.
But that's ok because everybody missing the point and doing worthless things. As soon as someone is uttering a word, they're in their little puppet game. Since humans function as a herd, when someone utters a word, the listener believe it designates something real. This leads to a sticky consensus, and that's how words, perceptions of concepts, and the feeling of their reality, emerge and add to a common "objective" reality. This is how we create man and woman (etc.) and believe to be them. Whereas in fact we are the field of consciousness in which this dreamed universe, and all universes, happen. We cannot describe it or put words on it because we are it. Just like the Sun can shed light on a world but cannot see itself. We are prior to words. Not in the sense of prior in time, because time is also a word. But prior in reality, as we are what gives them reality. We are the reality in which they exist, just like space is the reality in which an object exists, and as such, the object cannot define space.

[diggie]

As a German, i find his accent hillarious.

[gilbey]

He looks like he could be Arsen Wenger's brother. Uncanny. Great conversation

[monkkeygawd]

Good lord... the brain does NOT create consciousness!!! The brain APPEARS IN Consciousness. Consciousness is Primal.

[sanjaymajhi]

Life is a force which acts against entropy. Why does something want to persist against obstacles from entropy. This force must be consciousness which may not be confined to life, but must exist in equal amounts in the universe to nullify entropy.

[mtshasta]

there is individual consciousness that becomes powerful when combined with the organized and collective efforts of all humanity. while it is elusive, the real question should be what do we do with the combined efforts and direction of humanities consciousness. some combined efforts are concerned with the outcome of seasonal sports, some care about political power, and some care about the cosmos, etc, etc.. who's to say what's more important?

[kitstamat]

No brain is conscious - you are coscious, and you are not your brain. The brain belongs to you, it's an important part of your body, but no part of your body is you. Your body is what belongs to you, and what belongs to you cannot be you. Only your self is conscious, that which is witnessing all your experience. You are that witness, that field of consciousness, that playground of awareness in which everything comes and goes... like these words for example... which you will rightly forget if they didn't touch your self.

[bretnetherton]

Awareness is known by awareness alone.

[TheSouthernorycle]

Lots of brilliant insights but with consciousness you have to go past the how and venture into the why. I don’t think this logic tells us anything about WHY. You can’t get an ought from an is.