The neural basis of consciousness

Christof Koch - Allen Institute for Brain Science, Tiny Blue Dot Foundation

[freeloader]

I'm pretty sure it was a mistake to smoke a bowl before watching this. I'll have to circle back when I'm conscious enough to soak this in. ✌🏾

[ParallelNewsNetwork]

So In short there is no neural basis for consciousness

[craigsips]

I thought it was novelty or a change within the environment.
The mind is always projecting signals from the external world with categorised past experience and while everything lines up and there are no surprises the mind just hums along happily but when there is a mismatch the hippocampus jumps from 7 MHz to 10 MHz and suddenly you are paying attention, the perception of time slows and you remain in a state of tension until your system is able to appraise the environmental change and everything goes back normal.

When I was 7 years old we moved house. I spent 9 weeks in a completely new place before school. Even at that age I new something was strange about those 9 weeks, my perception of time of that event against everything before it was askew. Those 9 weeks felt more like several months.
I experienced the same kind of thing later in life. Near car crashes, large fall from a high point and 12 hour raves in the 90's (LSD) that felt more like 2 days.
If the event is novel, new, impactful or explosive the mind speeds up in relation to the world around it giving the effect of felt time slowing down. I think consciousness is here, somewhere.

[haluk]

A stone causally exist, it is intrinsic etc etc. It still doesn't explain the mechanism of the being aware of the qualia blue.

[nanotech_republika]

@51:00 "Just like a laptop simulating gravity will not affect nearby space-time, a computer simulating conscious behavior will not be conscious". This statement highlights the mistake in Koch's reasoning. Basically he forgets that an animal brain (or AI brain) creates a movie (a model) of reality and that that model is IT. So it does not matter if the movie is done by the artificial neural networks or biological neural network, what matters is that it creates that model/movie. This situation is unlike the gravity and the model of gravity in the laptop, the real deal for the gravity is the gravity itself. While for consciousness or simply any brain thinking the real deal is what it creates in the neural nets.

[sparkside]

Very interesting, split-brain continues to mesmerize me

[rockyabhay]

I want to use the rest of my remaining life to study/explore the possibility of separating my consciousness from my physical body so i can remain immortal until i want to die. I think every other invention can wait. Imagine Nicola Tesla is still alive, world would be a lot different place today, we probably would not be needing a battery because Tesla would have got us flying electricity. Okay where do i start? i have to go to college again, because i am right now like 0 level on neurology or brain related study :D.

[freeloader]

I believe it is possible to construct a system that replicates the neural basis of consciousness. I wish I could help bring that about. Thank you for all your hard work! Please keep going.

[jalundblad]

So someone who has lost the ability to interact with the outside world, with no input, no output, can be conscious where the causal power is all internal? Alone with their thoughts and memories.

[mmx]

50:00 and on doesn't make sense to me. Saying simulation cannot create true consciousness. Our brain by itself is causing physical changes just as a computer creating the simulation is. Both the brain and the computer alone don't have actuators to manipulate things around them. But that argument doesn't make sense to me... Ok I listened a little more and he mentions needed to build a device for AI which makes sense. As far as not simulating it, simulation requires hardware tho, so that confuses me.

[Telencephelon]

It gets worse with time. But everything before 50:00 where it drifts into total pseudoscience was really good and informative. Let's just agree to disagree

[reasontruthandlogic]

If you could track down the minimal physical system which behaviourally correlates perfectly with simple consciousness, that would doubtless have a great many important applications in medicine and machine intelligence, but you would still be no nearer to answering the question of what consciousness actually is. That will require a purely subjective explanation of the nature of thought and meaning, like an extension of mathematics. Furthermore, the separate most primitive qualities, or qualia, which make up any frame of experience, will never be explainable because being pure experiences they can have no internal structure to explain. This may sound vacuous, but it means that no one will ever be able to say for sure whether or not any human, or any machine, is conscious.

[klammer]

Excellent presentation! I’d also like to add there’s Karl Fristons free energy principle, Graziano’s attention schema of consciousness, Phenomenal vs Access consciousness by Block, Hammeroff’s and Penrose’s ideas on microtubules and quantum effects, Donald Hoffman’s conscious agent theory and so many more back in history like Hume, Kant, Locke, Descartes and so much more…..great stuff!🥳🤩🎓💪🏼

[silvomuller]

50:30 Sure, a simulated black hole does not suck in our world, but it does suck in the world it is simulated in and for simulated people, a simulated black hole is very real. Also, see Chalmers book reality+.

[NoName-ypow]

Very interesting, thank you ! It seems that you do not provide an explanation for NDEs, do you ? Indeed how one can speak about causal power when there is no neural activity ?

[kishorekulchandra]

Sir I feel that the time has come for you to to tell the world about Putin's state of mind and his threats about nuke