Integrated Information Theory - Christof Koch | Living Mirrors #8 clips

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My guest this week is Christof Koch. Christof is the neuroscientist who, along with Francis Crick, initiated modern scientific research into the neuroscience of consciousness in the 1990s. Much of this work was done while he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology and he is now president and chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Consciousness. His books include Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist and most recently The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can't be Computed. Christof also writes the Consciousness Redux column for Scientific American Mind.

Welcome to Living Mirrors with Dr. James Cooke. Living Mirrors is a new podcast in which neuroscientist Dr. James Cooke will be interviewing people on topics like consciousness, science, spirituality, meditation and the renaissance in psychedelic research. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts.
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#consciousness #science #philosophy
We live in a world filled with suffering, where attempts to help have been split into largely separate scientific and spiritual communities. As a spiritually engaged neuroscientist I hope to communicate how these seemingly separate world views can be reconciled. I produce weekly videos on topics at the intersection of neuroscience and wellbeing, including consciousness, meditation and psychedelic science.

Dr. James Cooke:
Neuroscientist, writer & speaker, focusing on perception, meditation, psychedelics, mental health and wellbeing.
PhD in Neuroscience, Oxford University
MSc in Neuroscience, Oxford University
MA in Experimental Psychology, Oxford University

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[mattsigl]

A better definition is “irreducible causal power.” For example, the sun seems like it has lots of causal power but in fact the causal power of the sun “reduces” down to its component parts, there’s just A LOT of parts there, so it seems to have lots of causal power to us, but only as an aggregate of its material parts. Our brains are conscious and the sun isn’t (as a whole) because our brain (or, rather, part of it) has, via it’s complicated information processing structure, a mathematically defined irreducible causal structure that makes it more causally real, as a single entity, and therefore conscious.