YouSaid · the spoken record

Christof Koch

lines on the record: 62
first: 2018-09-02
most recent: 2018-09-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So there isn't any behavior. Yet in some of these people there is still experience. You can design and build brain machine interfaces where you can see they still experience something. And of course there are these cases of locked in state. There's this famous book called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly where you had an editor, a French editor. He had a stroke in the brain stem, unable to move except his vertical eye movement. He could just move his eyes up and down and he dictated an entire book. And some people even lose this at the end. All the evidence seems to suggest that they're still in there. So in this case, you have no behavior of consciousness. Second case is tonight, like all of us, you're going to go to sleep, close your eyes, you go to sleep. You will wake up inside your sleeping body and you will have conscious experiences. They are different from everyday experience.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can see this in several cases. You can see it, for instance, in the case of the clinic. When you're dealing with patients who are, let's say, had a stroke or were in traffic accident, etc. They're pretty much immobile. Terry Shivo, you may have heard historically, she was a person here in the 90s in Floridas. Her heart stood still. She was reanimated. Then for the next 14 years, she was what's called in a vegetative state. There's thousands of people in the vegetative state. So they're like this. Occasionally they open their eyes for two, three, four, five, six, eight hours and then close their eyes. You have sleep wake cycle. Occasionally they have behavior. They do, but there's no way that you can establish a lawful relationship between what you say or the doctor says or the mom says and what the patient does.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But now we confront a world where we know where we're beginning to engineer intelligence and it's radically unclear whether the intelligence we're engineering has anything to do with consciousness and whether it can experience anything. Because fundamentally, what's the difference? Intelligence is about function. Intelligence, no matter exactly how you define it, sort of adapt to new environments, being able to learn and quickly understand the setup of this and what's going on and who are the actors and what's going to happen next. That's all about function. Consciousness is not about function. Consciousness is about being. It's in some sense much fundamental.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what you should actually say is say, no, honey, I love you with all my lateral hypothalamus. And for Valentine's Day, you should give your sweetheart a hypothalamic piece of chocolate, not a hard-shaped chocolate, right? Anyway, so we still have this language, but now we believe it's a brain. And so we see brains of different complexity and we think, well, they have different levels of consciousness. They're capable of different experiences.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The system goes from one cell to a specialized cell to a worm that has 30% of its cells are nerve cells to a creature like us or like a blue whale that has 100 billion even more nerve cells. And so based on behavioral evidence and based on the underlying neuroscience, we believe that as these creatures become more complex, they are better adapted to their particular ecological niche and they become more conscious, partly because their brain grows and we believe consciousness, unlike the ancient, ancient people thought most, almost every culture thought that consciousness with intelligence has to do with your heart. And you still see that today. You see, honey, I love you with all my heart.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a big, big question. That's occupied people for the last, certainly the last 50 years since the advent of the birth of computers. That's a question, Alan. There's no question that's going to happen. But of course, the key question is does it feel like anything to be Samantha in a movie her does it feel like anything to be Watson? And there one has to very strongly think there are two different concepts here that we commingle. There is a concept of intelligence, natural or artificial, and there is a concept of consciousness, of experience, natural or artificial. Those are very, very different things. Now, historically, we associate consciousness with intelligence. Why? Because we live in a world, leaving aside computers of natural selection, where we are surrounded by creatures, either our own kin that are less or more intelligent, or we go across species. Some are more adapted to particular environment, others are less adapted, whether it's a whale or dog or you go talk about a permeum or a little worm, right? And we see the complexity of the nervous.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience. Consciousness is any experience. Some people call it subjective feeling. Some people call it phenomenology. Some people call it qualia of their philosopher. But they all denote the same thing. It feels like something in the famous word of the philosopher, Thomas Nagel. It feels like something to be a bad or to be an American or to be angry or to be sad or to be in love or to have pain. And that is what experience is any possible experience. Could be as mundane as just sitting in a chair, could be as exalted as having a mystical moment in deep meditation. Those are just different forms of experiences.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't really actually, it's a good question. I'm not sure I recall a discrete moment. I mean, you take it for granted because that's the only world you know, right? The only world I know is the world of seeing and hearing voices and touching and all the other things. So it's only much later at early in my unguided days when I enrolled in physics and in philosophy that I really thought about it and thought, well, this is really fundamentally very, very mysterious. And there's nothing really in physics right now that explains this transition from the physics of the brain to feelings. Where do the feelings come in? So you can look at the foundational equation of quantum mechanics general relativity. You can look at the table of the elements. You can look at the endless ATG seat chat in our genes and nowhere is consciousness. Yet I wake up every morning to a world where I have experiences. And so that's the heart of the ancient mind-body problem.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But all the evidence seems to suggest that they too experience the world. And so it's an overwhelmingly likely that other aliens would also experience their world. Of course, differently because they have a different sensorium, they have different sensors, they have a very different environment. But the fact I would strongly suppose that they also have experiences. They feel pain and pleasure and see in some sort of spectrum and hear and have all the other senses.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are evolved if they are a product of natural evolution, as they would have to be, they will also experience their own world. So consciousness isn't just human, you're right. It's much wider. It's probably, it may be spread across all of biology. The only thing that we have special is we can talk about it. Of course, not all people can talk about it. Babies and little children can talk about it, patients who have a stroke in, let's see, the left inferior frontal gylet can talk about it. But most normal adult people can talk about it. And so we think that makes us special compared to little monkeys, the dogs, a cat, a mice, or all the other creatures that we share the planet with.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still makes me feel special because I have experiences. I feel the world. I experience the world. And independent of whether there are other creatures out there, I still feel the world and I have access to this world in this very strange, compelling way. And that's the core of human existence.”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I do believe so. We have no evidence of it, but I think the probabilities are overwhelming in favor of it. Give me a universe where we have 10 to the 11 galaxies and each galaxy has between 10 to the 11, 10 to the 12 stars, and we know most stars have one or more planets”
2018-09-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Christof Koch: Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source