Michael Shermer with Christof Koch — Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed (#84)

About this episode:

Listen to the Science Salon Podcast # 84 (audio-only):

http://bit.ly/ScienceSalon84

In this fascinating discussion of one of the hardest problems in all of science — the hard problem of consciousness, that is, explaining how the feeling or experience of something can arise from neural activity — one of the world’s leading neuroscientists Christof Koch argues that consciousness, more widespread than previously assumed, is the feeling of being alive, not a type of computation or a clever hack. Consciousness is experience. Consciousness is, as his book title states, The Feeling of Life Itself — the feeling of being alive. Shermer and Koch discuss:

• the Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC)

• where consciousness is located in the brain (or, more precisely, where it is not located)

• what comas and vegetative states teach us about consciousness

• what brain injuries and diseases teach us about consciousness

• what hallucinogens teach us about consciousness

• what split-brain surgeries teach us about the nature of the self and identity

• Koch’s experience with psilocybin and what he learned about consciousness

• Koch’s experience in a flotation tank and what he learned about consciousness

• why computers as they are currently configured can never create consciousness

• why mind-uploading cannot copy or continue consciousness

• Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness

• Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness

• why consciousness is not an illusion, and

• mysterian mysteries.

Christof Koch is President and Chief Scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, following twenty-seven years as a Professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press), The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, and other books.

This dialogue was recorded on August 15, 2019 as part of the Science Salon Podcast series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society, in California.

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