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“Mind-as-software is an unspoken background assumption that needs no justification. It is as obvious as the existence of the devil used to be. For what is the alternative to mind-as-software? A soul? Come on!
In reality, though, mind-as-software and its twin, brain-as-computer, are convenient but poor tropes when it comes to subjective experience, an expression of functional ideology run amok. They are more rhetoric than science. Once we understand the mythos for what it is, we wake as from a dream and wonder how we ever came to believe in it. The mythos that life is nothing but an algorithm limits our spiritual horizon and devalues our perspective on life, experience, and the place of sentience in time's wide circuit.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“At the other end of life are elders with severe dementia. The final stage of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases is marked by extreme apathy and exhaustion. Individuals cease speaking, gesturing, and even swallowing. Has their conscious mind permanently left its abode, a shrunken brain full of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques?”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“In summary, every conscious experience has five distinct and undeniable properties: each one exists for itself, is structured, informative, integrated and definite. These are the five essential hallmarks of any and all conscious experiences, from the commonplace to the exalted, from the painful to the orgiastic.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Finally, Tononi argues that the neural correlate of consciousness in the human brain resembles a grid-like structure. One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is how visual, auditory, and touch perceptual spaces map in a topographic manner onto visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortices. Most excitatory pyramidal cells and inhibitory interneurons have local axons strongly connected to their immediate neighbours, with the connections probability decreasing with distance. Topographically organized cortical tissue, whether it develops naturally inside the skull or is engineered out of stem cells and grown in dishes, will have high intrinsic causal power. This tissue will feel like something, even if our intuition revels at the thought that cortical carpets, disconnected from all their inputs and outputs, can experience anything. But this is precisely what happens to each one of us when we close our eyes, go to sleep, and dream. We create a world that feels as real as the awake one, while devoid of sensory input and unable to move.
Cerebral organoids or grid-like substances will not be conscious of love or hate, but of space.; of up, down, close by and far away and other spatial phenomenology distinctions. But unless provided with sophisticated motor outputs, they will be unable to do anything.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“This brings me to an objection to integrated information theory by the quantum physicist Scott Aaronson. His argument has given rise to an instructive online debate that accentuates the counterintuitive nature of some IIT's predictions.
Aaronson estimates phi.max for networks called expander graphs, characterized by being both sparsely yet widely connected. Their integrated information will grow indefinitely as the number of elements in these reticulated lattices increases. This is true even of a regular grid of XOR logic gates. IIT predicts that such a structure will have high phi.max. This implies that two-dimensional arrays of logic gates, easy enough to build using silicon circuit technology, have intrinsic causal powers and will feel like something. This is baffling and defies commonsense intuition. Aaronson therefor concludes that any theory with such a bizarre conclusion must be wrong.
Tononi counters with a three-pronged argument that doubles down and strengthens the theory's claim. Consider a blank featureless wall. From the extrinsic perspective, it is easily described as empty. Yet the intrinsic point of view of an observer perceiving the wall seethes with an immense number of relations. It has many, many locations and neighbourhood regions surrounding these. These are positioned relative to other points and regions - to the left or right, above or below. Some regions are nearby, while others are far away. There are triangular interactions, and so on. All such relations are immediately present: they do not have to be inferred. Collectively, they constitute an opulent experience, whether it is seen space, heard space, or felt space. All share s similar phenomenology. The extrinsic poverty of empty space hides vast intrinsic wealth. This abundance must be supported by a physical mechanism that determines this phenomenology through its intrinsic causal powers.
Enter the grid, such a network of million integrate-or-fire or logic units arrayed on a 1,000 by 1,000 lattice, somewhat comparable to the output of an eye. Each grid elements specifies which of its neighbours were likely ON in the immediate past and which ones will be ON in the immediate future. Collectively, that's one million first-order distinctions. But this is just the beginning, as any two nearby elements sharing inputs and outputs can specify a second-order distinction if their joint cause-effect repertoire cannot be reduced to that of the individual elements. In essence, such a second-order distinction links the probability of past and future states of the element's neighbours. By contrast, no second-order distinction is specified by elements without shared inputs and outputs, since their joint cause-effect repertoire is reducible to that of the individual elements. Potentially, there are a million times a million second-order distinctions. Similarly, subsets of three elements, as long as they share input and output, will specify third-order distinctions linking more of their neighbours together. And on and on.
This quickly balloons to staggering numbers of irreducibly higher-order distinctions. The maximally irreducible cause-effect structure associated with such a grid is not so much representing space (for to whom is space presented again, for that is the meaning of re-presentation?) as creating experienced space from an intrinsic perspective.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“To bring home the centrality of consciousness to life, consider a devil’s bargain in which you gain unlimited wealth at the expense of your conscious experiences. You get all the money you want but must relinquish all subjective feeling, turning into a zombie. From the outside, everything appears normal—you speak, act, dispose of your vast riches, engage in a vigorous social life, and so on. Yet your inner life is gone; no more seeing, hearing, smelling, loving, hating, suffering, remembering, thinking, planning, imagining, dreaming, regretting, wanting, hoping, dreading. From your point of view, you might as well be dead, for it would feel the same—like nothing.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Next is the vegetative state (VS), which I wrote about in chapter 2. VS patients, in contrast to comatose ones, have irregular cycles of eye opening and closure. They can swallow, yawn, may move their eyes or head but not in an intentional manner. No willed actions are left—only activity that controls basic processes such as breathing, sleep–wake transitions, heart rate, eye movements, and pupillary responses. Bedside communication—“If you hear me, squeeze my hand or move your eyes”—meets with failure. With proper nursing care to avoid bedsores and infections, VS patients can live for years.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“For something to exist from the point of view of the world, extrinsically, it must be able to influence things and things must be able to influence it. That is what it means to have causal power. When something can’t make a difference to anything in the world or be influenced by anything in the world, it is causally impotent. Whether or not it exists makes no difference to anything.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Even if everything about IIT is correct, why should it feel like anything to have a maximum of integrated information? Why should a system that instantiates the five essential properties of consciousness—intrinsic existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion—form a conscious experience? IIT might correctly describe aspects of systems that support consciousness. But, at least in principle, skeptics might be able to imagine a system that has all these properties but which still doesn’t feeling like anything.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“This theoretical edifice is the singular intellectual creation of Giulio Tononi, a brilliant, sometimes cryptic, polyglot and polymath renaissance scholar, a scientist-physician of the first rank. Giulio is the living embodiment of the Magister Ludi of Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, the head of an austere order of monks-intellectuals, dedicated to teaching and playing the eponymous glass bead game, capable of generating a near infinity of patterns, a synthesis of all arts and sciences.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Quantum mechanics is the established text-book theory of molecules, atoms, electrons, and photons at low energies. Much of the technological infrastructure of modern life exploits its properties, from transistors and lasers to magnetic resonance scanners and computers. QM is one of humanity’s supreme intellectual achievements, explaining a range of phenomena that cannot be understood within a classical context: light or small objects can behave like a wave or like a particle depending on the experimental setup (wave–particle duality); the position and the momentum of an object cannot both be simultaneously determined with perfect accuracy (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle); and the quantum states of two or more objects can be highly correlated even though they are very far apart, violating our intuition about locality (quantum entanglement).”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“We might even have to hunt for the NCC down at the subcellular level, seeking mechanisms operating inside cells rather than across large neural coalitions, as is widely assumed. Indeed, some have hypothesized, as a possible NCC, all-or-none electrical events occurring in the dendritic tree of cortical neurons, a sort of handshake confirming that a bottom-up signal has encountered top-down feedback within a certain time window.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“While cortex grabs the lion’s share of headlines, other structures may also play an important role in the expression of consciousness. Francis Crick was fascinated, literally to his dying day, with a mysterious thin layer of neurons underneath the cortex called the claustrum. Claustrum neurons project to every region of cortex and also receive input from every cortical region. Crick and I speculated that the claustrum acts as the conductor of the cortical symphony, coordinating responses across the cortical sheet in a way that is essential to any conscious experience. Laborious but stunning reconstructions of the axonal wiring of individual nerve cells (which I call “crown of thorns�� neurons) from the claustrum of the mouse confirm that these cells project massively throughout much of the cortical mantle.25”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“A.R.’s very apparatus that determines color was damaged, he didn’t know what colors were (except in an abstract sense). Denying an objective sensory or motor deficit due to neurological damage is a form of agnosia termed anosognosia. It is really a deficit in self-awareness: not knowing what it is that one no longer knows.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Let me highlight three further deficits involving loss of color perception (achromatopsia), loss of motion perception (akinetopsia), and loss of knowing about these deficits (anosognosia).”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Face blindness, described in the last chapter, is an agnosia specific for faces.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“The brain’s most distinct neurons are cerebellar Purkinje cells (fig. 6.2) whose fan-shaped dendritic tree is the recipient of a staggering 200,000 synapses. Purkinje cells have complex intrinsic electrical responses and their axons convey the cerebellum’s output to the rest of the brain. They are stacked, like books on a shelf, within the folds making up the cerebellar sheet. Collectively, Purkinje cells receive excitation from a mind-blowing 69 billion granule cells—four times more than all the neurons in the rest of the brain combined!4”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“fusiform face area with the same electrodes (fig. 6.6). Stimulating the right fusiform area led one patient to exclaim: “You just turned into someone else. Your face metamorphosed. Your nose got saggy and went to the left.��18 Others reported similar distortions that bring to mind portraits painted by Francis Bacon. This didn’t happen when nearby regions were stimulated or during sham trials when Parvizi pretended to inject current. For these patients, the fusiform face area seems to be an NCC for seeing faces,19 as activity here correlates closely and systematically with seeing faces and stimulation of this region alters the perception of faces. Furthermore, damage to this region can lead to prosopagnosia or face blindness. Affected individuals are unable to recognize familiar faces, including their own.20 Faces of spouses, friends, celebrities, presidents all look alike, indistinguishable as pebbles in a riverbed. In its more severe forms, patients can’t even recognize a face as a face anymore. They perceive the distinct elements making up a face, the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, but they can’t synthesize them into the unitary percept of a face. Intriguingly, these patients may still react unconsciously to familiar faces, with their autonomic system responding with an enhanced galvanic skin response. The unconscious has its own ways of detecting familiar faces.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“The German psychiatrist Hans Berger pioneered electroencephalography (EEG) in his lifelong quest to prove the reality of telepathy. He first recorded the brain waves of a patient in 1924 but, filled with doubt, did not publish his findings until 1929. EEG became the foundational tool of an entire field of medicine, clinical neurophysiology, although Berger was never accorded any significant recognition in Nazi Germany and hanged himself in 1941, despite being nominated several times for the Nobel Prize.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“When we sleep, consciousness fades. We spend one-quarter to one-third of our life asleep, more when we’re young and less as we age. Sleep is defined by behavioral immobility (which is not absolute, as we continue to breathe, move our eyes, and occasionally twitch a limb) and reduced responsiveness to external stimuli. We share this need for daily sleep with all animals.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“There are many forms of attention such as saliency-based, automatic attention, spatial and temporal attention, and feature- and object-based attention. Common to all is that they provide access to processing resources that are in short supply. Because of the limited capacity of any nervous system, no matter how large, it can’t process all of the incoming streams of data in real time. Instead, the mind concentrates its computational resources on any one particular task, such as part of a scene unfolding in front of your eyes, and then switches to focus on another task, such as a simultaneously ongoing conversation. Selective attention is evolution’s answer to information overload. Its actions and properties have been investigated in considerable detail in the mammalian visual system for more than a century.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand “non-being.�� Every day includes much more non-being than being. �� Although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner. �� When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.15”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Given that you make more than 100,000 daily saccades, each one lasting between 20 and 100 milliseconds, saccadic and blink suppression adds up to more than an hour a day during which you are effectively blind! Yet until scientists started studying eye movements, no one was aware of this remarkable fact.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Three additional properties hold for any conscious experience. They cannot be doubted. First, any experience is highly informative, distinct because of the way it is. Each experience is informationally rich, containing a great deal of detail, a composition of specific phenomenal distinctions, bound together in specific ways. Every frame of every movie I ever saw or will see in the future is a distinct experience, each one a wealth of phenomenology of colors, shapes, lines, and textures at locations throughout the field of view. And then there are auditory, olfactory, tactile, sexual, and other bodily experiences—each one distinct in its own way. There cannot be a generic experience. Even the experience of vaguely seeing something in a dense fog, without being clear what I am seeing, is a specific experience.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Consciousness is experience. That’s it. Consciousness is any experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted. Some add subjective or phenomenal to the definition. For my purposes, these adjectives are redundant. Some distinguish awareness from consciousness. For reasons I’ve given elsewhere,1 I don’t find this distinction helpful and so I use these two words interchangeably. I also do not distinguish between feeling and experience, although in everyday use feeling is usually reserved for strong emotions, such as feeling angry or in love. As I use it, any feeling is an experience. Collectively taken, then, consciousness is lived reality. It is the feeling of life itself. It is the only bit of eternity to which I am entitled. Without experience, I would be a zombie, a nothing to myself.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“any experience exists for itself, is structured, is the specific way it is, is one, and is definite.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“In particular, judging one’s own confidence in having seen or heard something—metacognition, or “knowing about knowing�� (recall the four-point confidence scale in chapter 2)—is linked to anterior regions of prefrontal cortex.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Of the 30 trillion cells in a 70 kg adult body, 25 trillion are erythrocytes. Fewer than 200 billion cells, under 1 percent, make up the brain, half of which are neurons. The same body also plays host to about 38 trillion bacteria, its microbiome (Sender, Fuchs, & Milo, 2016).”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“On this scale, the human brain is 7.5 times bigger than the brain of a typical mammal weighing as much as we do, with all other mammals having smaller encephalization quotients. Why the size of say, the prefrontal cortex, should relate to the size”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“Judged by single nucleotides polymorphisms (or SNP) in DNA, the difference between people and chimpanzees is 1.23 percent, compared to around 0.1 percent difference in SNPs between two randomly picked humans.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed