Christof Koch: Consciousness
生物与进化哲学与宗教心理与人性音乐与艺术物理与宇宙学
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🔑 关键词
consciousnessexperienceconsciousbrainintelligencehumandoncoursedoesntalkcomputercalledexperiencestheorysouluniversegeneralgoingphysicsmachine
💬 精彩语录
"is less capable of suffering than a well developed, normally developed human and they think consciousness"
与一个发展良好、正常发展的人类相比，他们承受痛苦的能力要小，他们认为意识
— Christof Koch （35:52.160）
"So everything having some elements of consciousness, is there something special about human consciousness?"
那么万物都有意识的成分，人类的意识有什么特别之处吗？
— Christof Koch （33:02.160）
"There is the concept of intelligence, natural or artificial, and there is a concept of consciousness,"
有一个智能的概念，无论是自然的还是人工的，还有一个意识的概念，
— Christof Koch （07:39.200）
"So for beneficial AI, for creating an AI system that's, so you mentioned ethics, that is exceptionally"
因此，对于有益的人工智能，对于创建一个人工智能系统，你提到了道德，这是非常重要的
— Christof Koch （29:58.360）
🎙️ 完整对话（940 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
As part of MIT course 6S099 on artificial general intelligence, I got a chance to sit
作为麻省理工学院关于通用人工智能课程 6S099 的一部分，我有机会参加
Lex Fridman (00:05.800)
down with Christoph Koch, who is one of the seminal figures in neurobiology, neuroscience,
克里斯托夫·科赫 (Christoph Koch) 是神经生物学、神经科学领域的开创性人物之一
Lex Fridman (00:12.960)
and generally in the study of consciousness.
一般而言，在意识研究中。
Lex Fridman (00:15.640)
He is the president, the chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science
他是艾伦脑科学研究所所长、首席科学官
Lex Fridman (00:21.180)
in Seattle.
在西雅图。
Christof Koch (00:22.480)
From 1986 to 2013, he was a professor at Caltech.
1986年至2013年，他担任加州理工学院教授。
Lex Fridman (00:27.360)
Before that, he was at MIT, he is extremely well cited, over 100,000 citations.
在此之前，他在麻省理工学院工作，他的引用次数非常多，超过 100,000 次引用。
Christof Koch (00:33.880)
His research, his writing, his ideas have had big impact on the scientific community
他的研究、他的写作、他的想法对科学界产生了巨大的影响
Lex Fridman (00:38.760)
and the general public in the way we think about consciousness, in the way we see ourselves
以及公众对意识的思考方式以及我们看待自己的方式
Christof Koch (00:43.720)
as human beings.
作为人类。
Christof Koch (00:44.840)
He's the author of several books, The Quest for Consciousness and Neurobiological Approach,
他是多本书的作者，《意识的探索》和《神经生物学方法》，
Lex Fridman (00:49.360)
and a more recent book, Consciousness, Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.
以及最近的一本书《意识，一个浪漫还原主义者的自白》。
Christof Koch (00:55.180)
If you enjoy this conversation, this course, subscribe, click the little bell icon to make
如果您喜欢这个对话，这个课程，订阅，点击小铃铛图标即可
Christof Koch (01:00.000)
sure you never miss a video, and in the comments, leave suggestions for any people you'd like
确保您不错过任何视频，并在评论中为您想要的任何人留下建议
Lex Fridman (01:05.180)
to see be part of the course or any ideas that you would like us to explore.
查看课程的一部分或您希望我们探索的任何想法。
Christof Koch (01:09.800)
Thanks very much and I hope you enjoy.
非常感谢，希望您喜欢。
Christof Koch (01:11.760)
Okay, before we delve into the beautiful mysteries of consciousness, let's zoom out a little
好吧，在我们深入研究意识的美丽奥秘之前，让我们把镜头缩小一点
Lex Fridman (01:17.360)
bit and let me ask, do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?
我想问一下，你认为宇宙中存在智慧生命吗？
Lex Fridman (01:23.200)
Yes, I do believe so.
是的，我确实这么认为。
Christof Koch (01:25.560)
We have no evidence of it, but I think the probabilities are overwhelming in favor of
我们没有证据证明这一点，但我认为可能性是压倒性的
Lex Fridman (01:29.600)
it.
Christof Koch (01:30.600)
Given a universe where we have 10 to the 11 galaxies and each galaxy has between 10 to
Lex Fridman (01:35.200)
the 11, 10 to the 12 stars and we know most stars have one or more planets.
Lex Fridman (01:41.520)
So how does that make you feel?
Lex Fridman (01:43.480)
It still makes me feel special because I have experiences.
Christof Koch (01:49.020)
I feel the world, I experience the world and independent of whether there are other creatures
Christof Koch (01:55.320)
out there, I still feel the world and I have access to this world in this very strange
Christof Koch (02:00.520)
compelling way and that's the core of human existence.
Christof Koch (02:04.760)
Now, you said human, do you think if those intelligent creatures are out there, do you
Lex Fridman (02:10.480)
think they experience their world?
Christof Koch (02:13.680)
Yes, if they are evolved, if they are a product of natural evolution as they would have to
Christof Koch (02:18.120)
be, they will also experience their own world.
Lex Fridman (02:20.200)
The consciousness isn't just human, you're right, it's much wider.
Christof Koch (02:24.640)
It may be spread across all of biology.
Lex Fridman (02:27.920)
The only thing that we have special is we can talk about it.
Christof Koch (02:30.880)
Of course, not all people can talk about it.
Lex Fridman (02:33.360)
Babies and little children can talk about it.
Christof Koch (02:35.600)
Patients who have a stroke in the left inferior frontal gyrus can talk about it, but most
Christof Koch (02:41.200)
normal adult people can talk about it and so we think that makes us special compared
Christof Koch (02:45.760)
to let's say monkeys or dogs or cats or mice or all the other creatures that we share the
Christof Koch (02:49.480)
planet with, but all the evidence seems to suggest that they too experience the world
Lex Fridman (02:54.240)
and so it's overwhelmingly likely that aliens would also experience their world.
Christof Koch (02:59.520)
Of course, differently because they have a different sensorium, they have different sensors,
Christof Koch (03:02.520)
they have a very different environment, but the fact that I would strongly suppose that
Lex Fridman (03:08.280)
they also have experiences.
Christof Koch (03:09.760)
They feel pain and pleasure and see in some sort of spectrum and hear and have all the
Lex Fridman (03:16.400)
other senses.
Christof Koch (03:17.760)
Of course, their language, if they have one, would be different so we might not be able
Lex Fridman (03:21.080)
to understand their poetry about the experiences that they have.
Christof Koch (03:24.600)
That's correct.
Lex Fridman (03:26.240)
So in a talk, in a video, I've heard you mention Siputzo, a dachshund that you came up with,
Christof Koch (03:33.200)
that you grew up with, it was part of your family when you were young.
Lex Fridman (03:37.160)
First of all, you're technically a Midwestern boy.
Christof Koch (03:40.840)
You just –
Lex Fridman (03:41.840)
Technically.
Christof Koch (03:42.840)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:43.840)
But after that, you traveled around a bit, hence a little bit of the accent.
Christof Koch (03:48.480)
You talked about Siputzo, the dachshund, having these elements of humanness, of consciousness
Lex Fridman (03:55.920)
that you discovered.
Lex Fridman (03:56.920)
So I just wanted to ask, can you look back in your childhood and remember when was the
Christof Koch (04:01.440)
first time you realized you yourself, sort of from a third person perspective, are a
Lex Fridman (04:07.280)
conscious being?
Christof Koch (04:08.800)
This idea of stepping outside yourself and seeing there's something special going on
Christof Koch (04:15.480)
here in my brain.
Lex Fridman (04:17.960)
I can't really actually – it's a good question.
Christof Koch (04:19.640)
I'm not sure I recall a discrete moment.
Lex Fridman (04:21.960)
I mean, you take it for granted because that's the only world you know.
Christof Koch (04:25.880)
The only world I know and you know is the world of seeing and hearing voices and touching
Lex Fridman (04:33.040)
and all the other things.
Lex Fridman (04:34.040)
So it's only much later at early – in my underguided days when I enrolled in physics
Lex Fridman (04:40.040)
and in philosophy that I really thought about it and thought, well, this is really fundamentally
Christof Koch (04:43.480)
very, very mysterious and there's nothing really in physics right now that explains
Lex Fridman (04:48.040)
this transition from the physics of the brain to feelings.
Lex Fridman (04:52.000)
Where do the feelings come in?
Lex Fridman (04:53.480)
So you can look at the foundational equation of quantum mechanics, general relativity.
Christof Koch (04:57.560)
You can look at the periodic table of the elements.
Christof Koch (04:59.960)
You can look at the endless ATGC chat in our genes and nowhere is consciousness.
Christof Koch (05:05.680)
Yet I wake up every morning to a world where I have experiences.
Lex Fridman (05:09.600)
And so that's the heart of the ancient mind body problem.
Lex Fridman (05:12.680)
How do experiences get into the world?
Lex Fridman (05:16.760)
So what is consciousness?
Christof Koch (05:19.720)
Experience.
Lex Fridman (05:20.800)
This is any experience.
Christof Koch (05:24.560)
Some people call it subjective feeling.
Lex Fridman (05:26.500)
Some people call it phenomenology.
Christof Koch (05:29.520)
Some people call it qualia of the philosopher.
Lex Fridman (05:31.500)
But they all denote the same thing.
Christof Koch (05:32.840)
It feels like something in the famous word of the philosopher Thomas Nagel.
Christof Koch (05:37.200)
It feels like something to be a bat or to be an American or to be angry or to be sad
Christof Koch (05:45.200)
or to be in love or to have pain.
Lex Fridman (05:49.440)
And that is what experience is, any possible experience.
Christof Koch (05:53.080)
Could be as mundane as just sitting in a chair.
Lex Fridman (05:55.320)
Could be as exalted as having a mystical moment in deep meditation.
Christof Koch (06:01.240)
Those are just different forms of experiences.
Lex Fridman (06:03.520)
Experience.
Lex Fridman (06:04.520)
So if you were to sit down with maybe the next, skip a couple generations, of IBM Watson,
Christof Koch (06:11.920)
something that won Jeopardy, what is the gap, I guess the question is, between Watson, that
Christof Koch (06:18.320)
might be much smarter than you, than us, than any human alive, but may not have experience,
Lex Fridman (06:26.280)
what is the gap?
Christof Koch (06:27.280)
Well, so that's a big, big question.
Christof Koch (06:30.520)
That's occupied people for the last, certainly last 50 years since we, you know, since the
Christof Koch (06:35.720)
advent, the birth of computers.
Lex Fridman (06:39.040)
That's a question Alan Turing tried to answer.
Lex Fridman (06:40.920)
And of course he did it in this indirect way by proposing a test, an operational test.
Lex Fridman (06:46.280)
But that's not really, that's, you know, he tried to get at what does it mean for a person
Lex Fridman (06:50.400)
to think, and then he had this test, right?
Christof Koch (06:52.840)
You lock them away, and then you have a communication with them, and then you try to guess after
Christof Koch (06:57.200)
a while whether that is a person or whether it's a computer system.
Christof Koch (07:00.720)
There's no question that now or very soon, you know, Alexa or Siri or, you know, Google
Lex Fridman (07:05.400)
now will pass this test, right?
Lex Fridman (07:07.640)
And you can game it, but you know, ultimately, certainly in your generation, there will be
Christof Koch (07:12.440)
machines that will speak with complete poise that will remember everything you ever said.
Lex Fridman (07:16.680)
They'll remember every email you ever had, like Samantha, remember in the movie Her?
Christof Koch (07:21.320)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (07:22.320)
There's no question it's going to happen.
Lex Fridman (07:24.360)
But of course, the key question is, does it feel like anything to be Samantha in the movie
Lex Fridman (07:28.280)
Her?
Lex Fridman (07:29.280)
Or does it feel like anything to be Watson?
Lex Fridman (07:32.200)
And there one has to very, very strongly think there are two different concepts here that
Christof Koch (07:38.200)
we co mingle.
Christof Koch (07:39.200)
There is the concept of intelligence, natural or artificial, and there is a concept of consciousness,
Christof Koch (07:45.160)
of experience, natural or artificial.
Lex Fridman (07:47.400)
Those are very, very different things.
Christof Koch (07:49.440)
Now, historically, we associate consciousness with intelligence.
Lex Fridman (07:53.440)
Why?
Christof Koch (07:54.440)
Because we live in a world, leaving aside computers, of natural selection, where we're
Christof Koch (07:59.240)
surrounded by creatures, either our own kin that are less or more intelligent, or we go
Christof Koch (08:04.120)
across species.
Lex Fridman (08:06.040)
Some are more adapted to a particular environment.
Christof Koch (08:08.120)
Others are less adapted, whether it's a whale or dog, or you go talk about a paramecium
Lex Fridman (08:12.760)
or a little worm.
Lex Fridman (08:15.040)
And we see the complexity of the nervous system goes from one cell to specialized cells, to
Christof Koch (08:21.240)
a worm that has three nets, that has 30 percent of its cells are nerve cells, to creature
Christof Koch (08:26.000)
like us or like a blue whale that has 100 billion, even more nerve cells.
Lex Fridman (08:30.160)
And so based on behavioral evidence and based on the underlying neuroscience, we believe
Christof Koch (08:35.160)
that as these creatures become more complex, they are better adapted to their particular
Christof Koch (08:40.840)
ecological niche, and they become more conscious, partly because their brain grows.
Lex Fridman (08:46.520)
And we believe consciousness, unlike the ancient, ancient people thought most, almost every
Lex Fridman (08:50.840)
culture thought that consciousness with intelligence has to do with your heart.
Lex Fridman (08:55.240)
And you still see that today.
Lex Fridman (08:56.920)
You see, honey, I love you with all my heart.
Lex Fridman (08:59.420)
But what you should actually say is, no, honey, I love you with all my lateral hypothalamus.
Lex Fridman (09:04.440)
And for Valentine's Day, you should give your sweetheart, you know, hypothalamus, a piece
Christof Koch (09:09.280)
of chocolate and not a heart shaped chocolate.
Lex Fridman (09:11.400)
Anyway, so we still have this language, but now we believe it's a brain.
Lex Fridman (09:14.560)
And so we see brains of different complexity and we think, well, they have different levels
Lex Fridman (09:18.720)
of consciousness.
Christof Koch (09:19.720)
They're capable of different experiences.
Lex Fridman (09:25.300)
But now we confront the world where we know where we're beginning to engineer intelligence.
Lex Fridman (09:32.040)
And it's radical unclear whether the intelligence we're engineering has anything to do with
Lex Fridman (09:37.080)
consciousness and whether it can experience anything.
Lex Fridman (09:40.120)
Because fundamentally, what's the difference?
Lex Fridman (09:42.900)
Intelligence is about function.
Christof Koch (09:44.840)
Intelligence no matter exactly how you define it, sort of adaptation to new environments,
Christof Koch (09:48.840)
being able to learn and quickly understand, you know, the setup of this and what's going
Christof Koch (09:53.240)
on and who are the actors and what's going to happen next.
Lex Fridman (09:55.900)
That's all about function.
Christof Koch (09:58.200)
Consciousness is not about function.
Lex Fridman (10:00.800)
Consciousness is about being.
Christof Koch (10:02.420)
It's in some sense much fundamental.
Lex Fridman (10:05.640)
You can see this in several cases.
Christof Koch (10:08.760)
You can see it, for instance, in the case of the clinic.
Christof Koch (10:12.160)
When you're dealing with patients who are, let's say, had a stroke or had were in traffic
Christof Koch (10:17.200)
accident, et cetera, they're pretty much immobile.
Christof Koch (10:20.120)
Terri Schiavo, you may have heard historically, she was a person here in the 90s in Florida.
Christof Koch (10:26.640)
Her heart stood still.
Lex Fridman (10:27.640)
She was reanimated.
Lex Fridman (10:28.640)
And then for the next 14 years, she was what's called in a vegetative state.
Lex Fridman (10:31.760)
So there are thousands of people in a vegetative state.
Lex Fridman (10:34.000)
So they're, you know, they're, you know, they're like this.
Christof Koch (10:36.720)
Occasionally, they open their eyes for two, three, four, five, six, eight hours, and then
Christof Koch (10:40.680)
close their eyes.
Lex Fridman (10:41.680)
They have sleep wake cycle.
Christof Koch (10:42.680)
Occasionally, they have behaviors.
Christof Koch (10:44.160)
They do like, you know, but there's no way that you can establish a lawful relationship
Christof Koch (10:50.480)
between what you say or the doctor says or the mom says and what the patient does.
Lex Fridman (10:55.360)
So there isn't any behavior, yet in some of these people, there is still experience.
Christof Koch (11:03.120)
You can design and build brain machine interfaces where you can see there's still experience
Lex Fridman (11:08.840)
something.
Lex Fridman (11:09.840)
And of course, these cases of locked in state, there's this famous book called The Diving
Christof Koch (11:13.640)
Bell and the Butterfly, where you had an editor, a French editor, he had a stroke in the brainstem,
Christof Koch (11:19.640)
unable to move except his vertical eyes, eye movement.
Lex Fridman (11:22.960)
He could just move his eyes up and down.
Lex Fridman (11:25.280)
And he dictated an entire book.
Lex Fridman (11:27.840)
And some people even lose this at the end.
Christof Koch (11:30.320)
All the evidence seems to suggest that they're still in there.
Lex Fridman (11:33.360)
In this case, you have no behavior, you have consciousness.
Christof Koch (11:37.520)
Second case is tonight, like all of us, you're going to go to sleep, close your eyes, you
Christof Koch (11:41.880)
go to sleep, you will wake up inside your sleeping body, and you will have conscious
Christof Koch (11:46.520)
experiences.
Lex Fridman (11:47.520)
They are different from everyday experience.
Christof Koch (11:49.840)
You might fly, you might not be surprised that you're flying, you might meet a long
Lex Fridman (11:53.520)
dead pet, childhood dog, and you're not surprised that you're meeting them.
Lex Fridman (11:58.280)
But you have conscious experience of love, of hate, they can be very emotional.
Christof Koch (12:02.420)
Your body during this state, typically it's REM state, sends an active signal to your
Christof Koch (12:07.680)
motor neurons to paralyze you.
Lex Fridman (12:09.360)
It's called atonia.
Lex Fridman (12:11.720)
Because if you don't have that, like some patients, what do you do?
Lex Fridman (12:14.220)
You act out your dreams.
Christof Koch (12:15.660)
You get, for example, REM behavioral disorder, which is bad juju to get.
Lex Fridman (12:19.960)
Okay.
Christof Koch (12:20.960)
Third case is pure experience.
Lex Fridman (12:22.760)
So I recently had this, what some people call a mystical experience.
Christof Koch (12:27.400)
I went to Singapore and went into a flotation tank.
Lex Fridman (12:30.240)
Yeah.
Christof Koch (12:31.240)
All right.
Lex Fridman (12:32.240)
So this is a big tub filled with water, that's body temperature and Epsom salt.
Christof Koch (12:37.800)
You strip completely naked, you lie inside of it, you close the lid.
Lex Fridman (12:41.440)
Darkness.
Christof Koch (12:42.440)
Complete darkness, soundproof.
Lex Fridman (12:44.920)
So very quickly, you become bodiless because you're floating and you're naked.
Christof Koch (12:48.640)
You have no rings, no watch, no nothing.
Lex Fridman (12:50.580)
You don't feel your body anymore.
Christof Koch (12:52.880)
There's no sound, soundless.
Christof Koch (12:54.640)
There's no photon, sightless, timeless, because after a while, early on you actually hear
Christof Koch (13:01.080)
your heart, but then you sort of adapt to that and then sort of the passage of time
Lex Fridman (13:06.600)
ceases.
Christof Koch (13:07.600)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (13:08.600)
And if you train yourself, like in a meditation, not to think, early on you think a lot.
Christof Koch (13:12.560)
It's a little bit spooky.
Lex Fridman (13:13.560)
You feel somewhat uncomfortable or you think, well, I'm going to get bored.
Lex Fridman (13:17.000)
And if you try to not to think actively, you become mindless.
Christof Koch (13:20.640)
There you are, bodiless, timeless, you know, soundless, sightless, mindless, but you're
Christof Koch (13:27.120)
in a conscious experience.
Lex Fridman (13:28.120)
You're not asleep.
Christof Koch (13:29.120)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (13:30.120)
You're not asleep.
Christof Koch (13:31.120)
You are a being of pure, you're a pure being.
Lex Fridman (13:33.640)
There isn't any function.
Christof Koch (13:34.640)
You aren't doing any computation.
Lex Fridman (13:36.280)
You're not remembering.
Christof Koch (13:37.280)
You're not projecting.
Lex Fridman (13:38.280)
You're not planning.
Christof Koch (13:39.280)
Yet you are fully conscious.
Lex Fridman (13:40.680)
You're fully conscious.
Christof Koch (13:41.960)
There's something going on there.
Lex Fridman (13:42.960)
It could be just a side effect.
Lex Fridman (13:44.320)
So what is the...
Lex Fridman (13:45.320)
You mean epiphenomena.
Lex Fridman (13:47.880)
So what's the select, meaning why, what is the function of you being able to lay in this
Lex Fridman (13:57.480)
sensory free deprivation tank and still have a conscious experience?
Lex Fridman (14:01.120)
Evolutionary?
Lex Fridman (14:02.120)
Evolutionary.
Christof Koch (14:03.120)
Obviously we didn't evolve with flotation tanks in our environment.
Christof Koch (14:06.720)
I mean, so biology is notoriously bad at asking why question, telenormical question.
Lex Fridman (14:11.520)
Why do we have two eyes?
Lex Fridman (14:12.520)
Why don't we have four eyes like some teachers or three eyes or something?
Christof Koch (14:15.520)
Well, no, there's probably, there is a function to that, but we're not very good at answering
Lex Fridman (14:20.440)
those questions.
Christof Koch (14:21.440)
We can speculate endlessly where biology is very, or science is very good about mechanistic
Lex Fridman (14:25.200)
question.
Lex Fridman (14:26.200)
Why is there a charge in the universe?
Lex Fridman (14:27.200)
Right?
Christof Koch (14:28.200)
We find a certain universe where there are positive and negative charges.
Lex Fridman (14:30.200)
Why?
Lex Fridman (14:31.200)
Why does quantum mechanics hold?
Lex Fridman (14:33.040)
You know, why doesn't some other theory hold?
Christof Koch (14:36.040)
Quantum mechanics holding our universe is very unclear why.
Lex Fridman (14:38.600)
So telenormical question, why questions are difficult to answer.
Christof Koch (14:42.120)
There's some relationship between complexity, brain processing power and consciousness.
Lex Fridman (14:49.000)
But however, in these cases, in these three examples I gave, one is an everyday experience
Christof Koch (14:53.800)
at night.
Lex Fridman (14:54.800)
The other one is trauma.
Lex Fridman (14:55.800)
And third one is in principle, you can, everybody can have these sort of mystical experiences.
Lex Fridman (15:00.520)
You have a dissociation of function from, of intelligence from consciousness.
Christof Koch (15:09.440)
You caught me asking a why question.
Lex Fridman (15:12.260)
Let me ask a question that's not a why question.
Christof Koch (15:15.180)
You're giving a talk later today on the Turing test for intelligence and consciousness, drawing
Lex Fridman (15:19.440)
lines between the two.
Lex Fridman (15:21.320)
So is there a scientific way to say there's consciousness present in this entity or not?
Lex Fridman (15:28.320)
And to anticipate your answer, cause you, you will also, there's a neurobiological answer.
Lex Fridman (15:34.220)
So we can test the human brain, but if you take a machine brain that you don't know tests
Christof Koch (15:38.640)
for yet, how would you even begin to approach a test if there's consciousness present in
Lex Fridman (15:45.440)
this thing?
Lex Fridman (15:46.440)
Okay.
Christof Koch (15:47.440)
That's a really good question.
Lex Fridman (15:48.440)
So let me take it in two steps.
Lex Fridman (15:49.440)
So as you point out for, for, for, for humans, let's just stick with humans.
Christof Koch (15:54.280)
There's now a test called the Zap and Zip is a procedure where you ping the brain using
Christof Koch (15:58.680)
transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Christof Koch (16:00.960)
You look at the electrical reverberations essentially using EG, and then you can measure
Christof Koch (16:06.000)
the complexity of this brain response.
Lex Fridman (16:07.880)
And you can do this in awake people, in asleep, normal people, you can do it in awake people
Lex Fridman (16:12.360)
and then anesthetize them.
Lex Fridman (16:13.740)
You can do it in patients.
Lex Fridman (16:15.640)
And it, it, it has a hundred percent accuracy that in all those cases, when you're clear,
Christof Koch (16:20.400)
the patient or the person is either conscious or unconscious, the complexity is either high
Christof Koch (16:23.920)
or low.
Lex Fridman (16:24.960)
And then you can adopt these techniques to similar creatures like monkeys and dogs and,
Christof Koch (16:28.640)
and, and mice that have very similar brains.
Christof Koch (16:32.080)
Now of course you, you point out that may not help you because we don't have a cortex,
Christof Koch (16:36.320)
you know, and if I send a magnetic pulse into my iPhone or my computer, it's probably going
Lex Fridman (16:40.120)
to break something.
Lex Fridman (16:41.520)
So we don't have that.
Lex Fridman (16:42.520)
So what we need ultimately, we need a theory of consciousness.
Christof Koch (16:47.460)
We can't just rely on our intuition.
Lex Fridman (16:49.400)
Our intuition is, well, yeah, if somebody talks, they're conscious.
Lex Fridman (16:52.840)
However, then there are all these patients, children, babies don't talk, right?
Lex Fridman (16:56.760)
But we believe that, that the babies also have conscious experiences, right?
Lex Fridman (17:01.400)
And then there are all these patients I mentioned and they don't talk.
Lex Fridman (17:04.960)
When you dream, you can't talk because you're paralyzed.
Lex Fridman (17:07.800)
So what we ultimately need, we can't just rely on our intuition.
Lex Fridman (17:11.220)
We need a theory of conscience that tells us what is it about a piece of matter?
Lex Fridman (17:15.560)
What is it about a piece of highly excitable matter like the brain or like a computer that
Lex Fridman (17:19.720)
gives rise to conscious experience?
Christof Koch (17:21.840)
We all believe, none of us believes anymore in the old story.
Lex Fridman (17:24.400)
It's a soul, right?
Christof Koch (17:25.680)
That used to be the most common explanation that most people accept that instill a lot
Christof Koch (17:28.680)
of people today believe, well, there's, there's God endowed only us with a special thing
Christof Koch (17:34.040)
that animals don't have.
Christof Koch (17:35.440)
Rene Descartes famously said, a dog, if you hit it with your carriage may yell, may cry,
Lex Fridman (17:39.900)
but it doesn't have this special thing.
Lex Fridman (17:41.840)
It doesn't have the magic, the magic soul.
Christof Koch (17:45.120)
It doesn't have res cogitans, the soul.
Lex Fridman (17:46.680)
Now we believe that isn't the case anymore.
Lex Fridman (17:48.920)
So what is the difference between brains and, and these guys, silicon?
Lex Fridman (17:55.680)
And in particular, once their behavior matches.
Lex Fridman (17:58.200)
So if you have Siri or Alexa in 20 years from now that she can talk just as good as any
Christof Koch (18:03.220)
possible human, what grounds do you have to say she's not conscious in particular, if
Christof Koch (18:07.680)
she says it's of course she will, well, of course I'm conscious.
Lex Fridman (18:11.520)
You ask her how are you doing?
Lex Fridman (18:12.600)
And she'll say, well, you know, they, they'll generate some way to, of course she'll behave
Lex Fridman (18:17.840)
like a, like a person.
Christof Koch (18:19.880)
Now there's several differences.
Lex Fridman (18:21.640)
One is, so this relates to the problem, the very hard, why is consciousness a hard problem?
Lex Fridman (18:28.260)
It's because it's subjective, right?
Christof Koch (18:30.760)
Only I have it, for only I know I have direct experience of my own consciousness.
Christof Koch (18:36.440)
I don't have experience in your consciousness.
Christof Koch (18:38.780)
Now I assume as a sort of a Bayesian person who believes in probability theory and all
Christof Koch (18:42.720)
of that, you know, I can do, I can do an abduction to the, to the best available facts.
Lex Fridman (18:46.960)
I deduce your brain is very similar to mine.
Christof Koch (18:48.920)
If I put you in a scanner, your brain is roughly going to behave the same way as I do.
Lex Fridman (18:53.160)
If, if, if, you know, if I give you this muesli and ask you, how does it taste?
Lex Fridman (18:56.480)
You tell me things that, you know, that, that I would also say more or less, right?
Lex Fridman (19:00.520)
So I infer based on all of that, that you're conscious.
Christof Koch (19:02.680)
Now with theory, I can't do that.
Lex Fridman (19:03.920)
So there I really need a theory that tells me what is it about, about any system, this
Christof Koch (19:09.280)
or this, that makes it conscious.
Lex Fridman (19:11.240)
We have such a theory.
Christof Koch (19:12.240)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (19:13.240)
So the integrated information theory, but let me first, maybe as an introduction for
Christof Koch (19:17.640)
people who are not familiar, Descartes, can you, you talk a lot about pan, panpsychism.
Lex Fridman (19:24.280)
Can you describe what, uh, physicalism versus dualism?
Lex Fridman (19:29.320)
This you, you mentioned the soul, what, what is the history of that idea?
Lex Fridman (19:33.520)
What is the idea of panpsychism or no, the debate really, uh, out of which panpsychism
Christof Koch (19:39.600)
can, um, emerge of, of, of, um, dualism versus, uh, physicalism or do you not see panpsychism
Lex Fridman (19:48.480)
as fitting into that?
Christof Koch (19:49.480)
No, you can argue there's some, okay, so let's step back.
Lex Fridman (19:52.640)
So panpsychism is a very ancient belief that's been around, uh, I mean, Plato and Aristotle
Christof Koch (19:57.800)
talks about it, uh, modern philosophers talk about it.
Christof Koch (20:01.560)
Of course, in Buddhism, the idea is very prevalent that, I mean, there are different versions
Christof Koch (20:06.200)
of it.
Christof Koch (20:07.200)
One version says everything is ensouled, everything, rocks and stones and dogs and people and forest
Lex Fridman (20:12.400)
and iPhones, all of us all, right?
Lex Fridman (20:14.480)
All matter is ensouled.
Christof Koch (20:15.480)
That's sort of one version.
Christof Koch (20:17.240)
Another version is that all biology, all creatures, small or large, from a single cell to a giant
Christof Koch (20:24.120)
sequoia tree feel like something.
Lex Fridman (20:26.160)
This one I think is somewhat more realistic.
Christof Koch (20:28.280)
Um, so the different versions, what do you mean by feel like something, have, have feelings,
Christof Koch (20:33.180)
have some kind of, it feels like something, it may well be possible that it feels like
Christof Koch (20:37.000)
something to be a paramecium.
Christof Koch (20:39.360)
I think it's pretty likely it feels like something to be a bee or a mouse or a dog.
Christof Koch (20:45.080)
Sure.
Lex Fridman (20:46.080)
So, okay.
Christof Koch (20:47.080)
So, so that you can see that's also, so panpsychism is very broad and you can, so some people,
Christof Koch (20:53.200)
for example, Bertrand Russell, tried to advocate this, this idea, it's called Rasselian Monism,
Christof Koch (20:59.520)
that that panpsychism is really physics viewed from the inside.
Lex Fridman (21:04.400)
So the idea is that physics is very good at describing relationship among objects like
Lex Fridman (21:09.920)
charges or like gravity, right?
Lex Fridman (21:12.920)
You know, describe the relationship between curvature and mass distribution, okay?
Christof Koch (21:16.840)
That's the relationship among things.
Lex Fridman (21:18.480)
Physics doesn't really describe the ultimate reality itself.
Christof Koch (21:21.000)
It's just relationship among, you know, quarks or all these other stuff from like a third
Lex Fridman (21:25.720)
person observer.
Christof Koch (21:27.280)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (21:28.280)
Yes.
Christof Koch (21:29.280)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (21:30.280)
And consciousness is what physics feels from the inside.
Lex Fridman (21:31.880)
So my conscious experience, it's the way the physics of my brain, particularly my cortex
Lex Fridman (21:36.760)
feels from the inside.
Lex Fridman (21:38.680)
And so if you are paramecium, you got to remember, you say paramecium, well, that's a pretty
Lex Fridman (21:42.720)
dumb creature.
Christof Koch (21:43.720)
It is, but it has already a billion different molecules, probably, you know, 5,000 different
Christof Koch (21:49.960)
proteins assembled in a highly, highly complex system that no single person, no computer
Christof Koch (21:54.880)
system so far on this planet has ever managed to accurately simulate.
Lex Fridman (21:59.280)
Its complexity vastly escapes us.
Christof Koch (22:01.040)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (22:02.040)
And it may well be that that little thing feels like a tiny bit.
Christof Koch (22:04.800)
Now, it doesn't have a voice in the head like me.
Lex Fridman (22:06.520)
It doesn't have expectations.
Christof Koch (22:07.520)
You know, it doesn't have all that complex things, but it may well feel like something.
Lex Fridman (22:12.520)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (22:13.520)
So this is really interesting.
Christof Koch (22:14.520)
Can we draw some lines and maybe try to understand the difference between life, intelligence
Lex Fridman (22:20.920)
and consciousness?
Lex Fridman (22:23.360)
How do you see all of those?
Christof Koch (22:25.480)
If you had to define what is a living thing, what is a conscious thing and what is an intelligent
Lex Fridman (22:31.320)
thing?
Lex Fridman (22:32.320)
Do those intermix for you or are they totally separate?
Lex Fridman (22:34.480)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (22:35.480)
So A, that's a question that we don't have a full answer to.
Christof Koch (22:38.040)
A lot of the stuff we're talking about today is full of mysteries and fascinating ones,
Lex Fridman (22:42.080)
right?
Christof Koch (22:43.080)
For example, you can go to Aristotle, who's probably the most important scientist and
Christof Koch (22:46.880)
philosopher who's ever lived in, certainly in Western culture.
Lex Fridman (22:49.760)
He had this idea, it's called hylomorphism.
Christof Koch (22:51.760)
It's quite popular these days, that there are different forms of soul.
Lex Fridman (22:55.160)
The soul is really the form of something.
Christof Koch (22:57.400)
He says, all biological creatures have a vegetative soul.
Lex Fridman (23:00.760)
That's life principle.
Christof Koch (23:01.760)
Today, we think we understand something more than it is biochemistry and nonlinear thermodynamics.
Lex Fridman (23:07.400)
Then he said they have a sensitive soul.
Christof Koch (23:09.480)
Only animals and humans have also a sensitive soul or a petitive soul.
Lex Fridman (23:15.080)
They can see, they can smell, and they have drives.
Christof Koch (23:18.240)
They want to reproduce, they want to eat, et cetera.
Lex Fridman (23:21.080)
And then only humans have what he called a rational soul, okay?
Lex Fridman (23:26.080)
And that idea then made it into Christendom and then the rational soul is the one that
Lex Fridman (23:30.040)
lives forever.
Christof Koch (23:31.040)
He was very unclear.
Christof Koch (23:32.040)
He wasn't really, I mean, different readings of Aristotle give different, whether did he
Christof Koch (23:35.640)
believe that rational soul was immortal or not.
Lex Fridman (23:38.240)
I probably think he didn't.
Lex Fridman (23:39.800)
But then, of course, that made it through Plato into Christianity, and then this soul
Lex Fridman (23:43.040)
became immortal and then became the connection to God.
Lex Fridman (23:48.440)
So you ask me, essentially, what is our modern conception of these three, Aristotle would
Lex Fridman (23:54.440)
have called them different forms.
Lex Fridman (23:56.200)
Life, we think we know something about it, at least life on this planet, right?
Christof Koch (24:00.200)
Although we don't understand how to originate it, but it's been difficult to rigorously
Christof Koch (24:04.040)
pin down.
Lex Fridman (24:05.280)
You see this in modern definitions of death.
Christof Koch (24:08.640)
In fact, right now, there's a conference ongoing, again, that tries to define legally and medically
Lex Fridman (24:14.160)
what is death.
Christof Koch (24:15.400)
It used to be very simple.
Christof Koch (24:16.400)
Death is you stop breathing, your heart stops beating, you're dead, totally uncontroversial.
Christof Koch (24:21.780)
If you're unsure, you wait another 10 minutes.
Lex Fridman (24:23.480)
If the patient doesn't breathe, he's dead.
Christof Koch (24:25.320)
Well, now we have ventilators, we have heart pacemakers, so it's much more difficult to
Lex Fridman (24:29.540)
define what death is.
Christof Koch (24:30.880)
Typically, death is defined as the end of life and life is defined before death.
Lex Fridman (24:35.840)
Okay, so we don't have really very good definitions.
Christof Koch (24:39.280)
Intelligence, we don't have a rigorous definition.
Lex Fridman (24:41.840)
We know something how to measure, it's called IQ or G factors, right?
Lex Fridman (24:46.640)
And we're beginning to build it in a narrow sense, right?
Christof Koch (24:50.360)
Like go, AlphaGo and Watson and, you know, Google cars and Uber cars and all of that,
Christof Koch (24:56.800)
it's still narrow AI and some people are thinking about artificial general intelligence.
Lex Fridman (25:01.240)
But roughly, as we said before, it's something to do with ability to learn and to adapt to
Christof Koch (25:05.320)
new environments.
Lex Fridman (25:06.600)
But that is, as I said, also, it's radical difference from experience.
Lex Fridman (25:11.080)
And it's very unclear if you build a machine that has AGI, it's not at all a priori, it's
Lex Fridman (25:16.480)
not at all clear that this machine will have consciousness, it may or may not.
Lex Fridman (25:20.760)
So let's ask it the other way, do you think if you were to try to build an artificial
Christof Koch (25:25.000)
general intelligence system, do you think figuring out how to build artificial consciousness
Lex Fridman (25:31.080)
would help you get to an AGI?
Lex Fridman (25:34.960)
So or put another way, do you think intelligent requires consciousness?
Christof Koch (25:40.480)
In human, it goes hand in hand.
Christof Koch (25:43.160)
In human, or I think in biology, consciousness, intelligence goes hand in hand, quay is illusion
Christof Koch (25:48.360)
because the brain evolved to be highly complex, complexity via the theory integrated information
Lex Fridman (25:54.480)
theory is sort of ultimately is what is closely tied to consciousness.
Christof Koch (25:59.720)
Ultimately it's causal power upon itself.
Lex Fridman (26:01.680)
And so in evolved systems, they go together.
Christof Koch (26:05.100)
In artificial system, particularly in digital machines, they do not go together.
Lex Fridman (26:09.440)
And if you ask me point blank, is Alexa 20.0 in the year 2040, when she can easily pass
Lex Fridman (26:16.480)
every Turing test, is she conscious?
Lex Fridman (26:18.280)
No, even if she claims she's conscious.
Christof Koch (26:21.080)
In fact, you could even do a more radical version of this thought experiment.
Lex Fridman (26:24.180)
You can build a computer simulation of the human brain.
Christof Koch (26:26.840)
You know what Henry Markham in the Blue Brain Project or the Human Brain Project in Switzerland
Lex Fridman (26:31.240)
is trying to do.
Christof Koch (26:32.240)
Let's grant them all the success.
Lex Fridman (26:33.640)
So in 10 years, we have this perfect simulation of the human brain.
Christof Koch (26:36.720)
Every neuron is simulated and it has a larynx and it has motor neurons.
Christof Koch (26:40.440)
It has a Broca's area and of course they'll talk and they'll say, hi, I just woke up.
Christof Koch (26:45.480)
I feel great.
Christof Koch (26:46.480)
OK, even that computer simulation that can in principle map onto your brain will not
Christof Koch (26:50.480)
be conscious.
Lex Fridman (26:51.480)
Why?
Christof Koch (26:52.480)
Because it simulates, it's a difference between the simulated and the real.
Lex Fridman (26:56.000)
So it simulates the behavior associated with consciousness.
Christof Koch (26:59.280)
It might be, it will, if it's done properly, will have all the intelligence that that particular
Lex Fridman (27:04.000)
person they're simulating has.
Lex Fridman (27:06.080)
But simulating intelligence is not the same as having conscious experiences.
Lex Fridman (27:10.800)
And I give you a really nice metaphor that engineers and physicists typically get.
Christof Koch (27:15.200)
I can write down Einstein's field equation, nine or ten equations that describe the link
Lex Fridman (27:19.720)
in general relativity between curvature and mass.
Christof Koch (27:23.400)
I can do that.
Christof Koch (27:24.400)
I can run this on my laptop to predict that the central, the black hole at the center
Christof Koch (27:29.920)
of our galaxy will be so massive that it will twist space time around it so no light can
Lex Fridman (27:36.440)
escape.
Christof Koch (27:37.440)
It's a black hole.
Lex Fridman (27:38.580)
But funny, have you ever wondered why doesn't this computer simulation suck me in?
Christof Koch (27:44.400)
It simulates gravity, but it doesn't have the causal power of gravity.
Lex Fridman (27:49.020)
That's a huge difference.
Lex Fridman (27:50.760)
So it's a difference between the real and the simulator, just like it doesn't get wet
Lex Fridman (27:55.520)
inside a computer when the computer runs code that simulates a weather storm.
Lex Fridman (27:59.080)
And so in order to have, to have artificial consciousness, you have to give it the same
Lex Fridman (28:04.560)
causal power as the human brain.
Christof Koch (28:06.880)
You have to build so called a neuromorphic machine that has hardware that is very similar
Lex Fridman (28:11.560)
to the human brain, not a digital clocked phenomenon computer.
Lex Fridman (28:16.520)
So that's, just to clarify though, you think that consciousness is not required to create
Lex Fridman (28:24.000)
human level intelligence.
Christof Koch (28:25.560)
It seems to accompany in the human brain, but for machine not.
Lex Fridman (28:30.360)
That's correct.
Lex Fridman (28:31.840)
So maybe just because this is AGI, let's dig in a little bit about what we mean by intelligence.
Lex Fridman (28:39.220)
So one thing is the G factor, these kind of IQ tests of intelligence.
Lex Fridman (28:44.280)
But I think if you, maybe another way to say, so in 2040, 2050, people will have Siri that
Lex Fridman (28:51.400)
is just really impressive.
Lex Fridman (28:54.840)
Do you think people will say Siri is intelligent?
Lex Fridman (28:57.800)
Yes.
Christof Koch (28:58.800)
Intelligence is this amorphous thing.
Lex Fridman (29:01.200)
So to be intelligent, it seems like you have to have some kind of connections with other
Christof Koch (29:05.560)
human beings in a sense that you have to impress them with your intelligence.
Lex Fridman (29:11.520)
And there feels, you have to somehow operate in this world full of humans.
Lex Fridman (29:17.480)
And for that, there feels like there has to be something like consciousness.
Lex Fridman (29:21.820)
So you think you can have just the world's best natural NLP system, natural language
Christof Koch (29:26.600)
understanding generation, and that will be, that will get us happy and say, you know what,
Lex Fridman (29:32.000)
we've created an AGI.
Christof Koch (29:33.920)
I don't know happy, but yes, I do believe we can get what we call high level functional
Christof Koch (29:40.520)
intelligence, particular sort of the G, you know, this fluid like intelligence that we
Christof Koch (29:46.760)
cherish, particularly at a place like MIT, right, in machines.
Christof Koch (29:51.280)
I see a priori no reasons, and I see a lot of reason to believe it's going to happen
Christof Koch (29:54.920)
very, you know, over the next 50 years or 30 years.
Lex Fridman (29:58.360)
So for beneficial AI, for creating an AI system that's, so you mentioned ethics, that is exceptionally
Christof Koch (30:06.360)
intelligent but also does not do, does, you know, aligns its values with our values as
Lex Fridman (30:11.880)
humanity.
Lex Fridman (30:12.880)
Do you think then it needs consciousness?
Christof Koch (30:14.880)
Yes, I think that that is a very good argument that if we're concerned about AI and the threat
Christof Koch (30:19.960)
of AI, a la Nick Bostrom, existentialist threat, I think having an intelligence that has empathy,
Christof Koch (30:26.320)
right, why do we find abusing a dog, why do most of us find that abhorrent, abusing any
Lex Fridman (30:32.200)
animal, right?
Lex Fridman (30:33.200)
Why do we find that abhorrent because we have this thing called empathy, which if you look
Christof Koch (30:37.840)
at the Greek really means feeling with, I feel a path of empathy, I have feeling with
Lex Fridman (30:42.560)
you.
Christof Koch (30:43.560)
I see somebody else suffer that isn't even my conspecific, it's not a person, it's not
Christof Koch (30:48.760)
my wife or my kids, it's a dog, but I feel naturally most of us, not all of us, most
Christof Koch (30:53.560)
of us will feel emphatic.
Lex Fridman (30:55.840)
And so it may well be in the long term interest of survival of homo sapiens sapiens that if
Christof Koch (31:02.200)
we do build AGI and it really becomes very powerful that it has an emphatic response
Lex Fridman (31:08.320)
and doesn't just exterminate humanity.
Lex Fridman (31:11.960)
So as part of the full conscious experience to create a consciousness, artificial or in
Christof Koch (31:17.640)
our human consciousness, do you think fear, maybe we're going to get into the earlier
Christof Koch (31:23.800)
days with Nietzsche and so on, but do you think fear and suffering are essential to
Lex Fridman (31:29.760)
have consciousness?
Lex Fridman (31:30.760)
Do you have to have the full range of experience to have a system that has experience or can
Lex Fridman (31:37.200)
you have a system that only has very particular kinds of very positive experiences?
Christof Koch (31:41.880)
Look you can have in principle, people have done this in the rat where you implant an
Christof Koch (31:46.180)
electrode in the hypothalamus, the pleasure center of the rat and the rat stimulates itself
Christof Koch (31:51.040)
above and beyond anything else.
Christof Koch (31:52.960)
It doesn't care about food or natural sex or drink anymore, it just stimulates itself
Christof Koch (31:57.680)
because it's such a pleasurable feeling.
Lex Fridman (32:00.440)
I guess it's like an orgasm just you have all day long.
Lex Fridman (32:04.080)
And so a priori I see no reason why you need a great variety.
Lex Fridman (32:11.240)
Now clearly to survive that wouldn't work, right?
Lex Fridman (32:14.600)
But if I'd engineered artificially, I don't think you need a great variety of conscious
Lex Fridman (32:22.640)
experience.
Christof Koch (32:23.640)
You could have just pleasure or just fear.
Christof Koch (32:25.440)
It might be a terrible existence, but I think that's possible at least on conceptual logical
Christof Koch (32:30.280)
ground.
Christof Koch (32:31.280)
Because any real creature whether artificially engineered, you want to give it fear, the
Christof Koch (32:35.400)
fear of extinction that we all have.
Lex Fridman (32:38.480)
And you also want to give it positive repetitive states, states that you want the machine encouraged
Christof Koch (32:44.240)
to do because they give the machine positive feedback.
Lex Fridman (32:48.120)
So you mentioned panpsychism, to jump back a little bit, everything having some kind
Christof Koch (32:54.640)
of mental property.
Lex Fridman (32:57.520)
How do you go from there to something like human consciousness?
Lex Fridman (33:02.160)
So everything having some elements of consciousness, is there something special about human consciousness?
Lex Fridman (33:08.840)
So it's not everything.
Christof Koch (33:10.720)
Like a spoon, the form of panpsychism I think about doesn't ascribe consciousness to anything
Lex Fridman (33:17.760)
like this, the spoon on my liver.
Christof Koch (33:20.040)
However, the theory, the integrated information theory does say that the system, even one
Christof Koch (33:26.800)
that looks from the outside relatively simple, at least if they have this internal causal
Christof Koch (33:30.560)
power, it does feel like something.
Lex Fridman (33:35.320)
The theory a priori doesn't say anything what's special about human.
Christof Koch (33:38.920)
Biologically we know the one thing that's special about human is we speak and we have
Lex Fridman (33:44.240)
an overblown sense of our own importance.
Christof Koch (33:48.360)
We believe we're exceptional and we're just God's gift to the universe.
Lex Fridman (33:54.360)
But behaviorally the main thing that we have, we can plan over the long term, we have language
Lex Fridman (33:58.660)
and that gives us an enormous amount of power and that's why we are the current dominant
Lex Fridman (34:03.640)
species on the planet.
Lex Fridman (34:05.840)
So you mentioned God, you grew up a devout Roman Catholic family, so with consciousness
Christof Koch (34:15.400)
you're sort of exploring some really deeply fundamental human things that religion also
Christof Koch (34:21.240)
touches on.
Lex Fridman (34:22.240)
Where does religion fit into your thinking about consciousness?
Christof Koch (34:27.400)
You've grown throughout your life and changed your views on religion as far as I understand.
Christof Koch (34:31.800)
Yeah, I mean I'm now much closer to, I'm not a Roman Catholic anymore, I don't believe
Christof Koch (34:37.000)
there's sort of this God, the God I was educated to believe in, sits somewhere in the fullness
Christof Koch (34:43.280)
of time, I'll be united in some sort of everlasting bliss, I just don't see any evidence for that.
Christof Koch (34:49.920)
Look, the world, the night is large and full of wonders, there are many things that I don't
Christof Koch (34:55.200)
understand, I think many things that we as a cult, look we don't even understand more
Christof Koch (34:59.200)
than 4% of all the universe, dark matter, dark energy, we have no idea what it is, maybe
Lex Fridman (35:03.640)
it's lost socks, what do I know?
Lex Fridman (35:06.680)
So all I can tell you is it's sort of my current religious or spiritual sentiment is much closer
Christof Koch (35:13.040)
to some form of Buddhism, without the reincarnation unfortunately, there's no evidence for it
Christof Koch (35:19.880)
than reincarnation.
Lex Fridman (35:20.880)
So can you describe the way Buddhism sees the world a little bit?
Christof Koch (35:25.560)
Well so they talk about, so when I spent several meetings with the Dalai Lama and what always
Christof Koch (35:32.240)
impressed me about him, he really, unlike for example let's say the Pope or some Cardinal,
Christof Koch (35:36.940)
he always emphasized minimizing the suffering of all creatures.
Lex Fridman (35:40.800)
So they have this, from the early beginning they look at suffering in all creatures, not
Christof Koch (35:45.240)
just in people, but in everybody, this universal and of course by degrees, an animal in general
Christof Koch (35:52.160)
is less capable of suffering than a well developed, normally developed human and they think consciousness
Christof Koch (35:59.500)
pervades in this universe and they have these techniques, you can think of them like mindfulness
Christof Koch (36:06.480)
etc. and meditation that tries to access what they claim of this more fundamental aspect
Christof Koch (36:12.600)
of reality.
Christof Koch (36:13.600)
I'm not sure it's more fundamental, I think about it, there's the physical and then there's
Christof Koch (36:17.000)
this inside view, consciousness and those are the two aspects that's the only thing
Christof Koch (36:21.120)
I have access to in my life and you've got to remember my conscious experience and your
Christof Koch (36:25.520)
conscious experience comes prior to anything you know about physics, comes prior to knowledge
Lex Fridman (36:29.680)
about the universe and atoms and super strings and molecules and all of that.
Christof Koch (36:34.780)
The only thing you directly are acquainted with is this world that's populated with things
Lex Fridman (36:39.080)
in images and sounds in your head and touches and all of that.
Christof Koch (36:43.120)
I actually have a question, so it sounds like you kind of have a rich life, you talk about
Christof Koch (36:49.200)
rock climbing and it seems like you really love literature and consciousness is all about
Lex Fridman (36:55.120)
experiencing things, so do you think that has helped your research on this topic?
Christof Koch (37:00.800)
Yes, particularly if you think about it, the various states, so for example when you do
Christof Koch (37:05.260)
rock climbing or now I do rowing, crew rowing and a bike every day, you can get into this
Christof Koch (37:11.320)
thing called the zone and I've always wanted about it, particularly with respect to consciousness
Christof Koch (37:16.360)
because it's a strangely addictive state.
Christof Koch (37:20.960)
Once people have it once, they want to keep on going back to it and you wonder what is
Christof Koch (37:24.680)
it so addicting about it and I think it's the experience of almost close to pure experience
Christof Koch (37:30.840)
because in this zone, you're not conscious of inner voice anymore, there's always inner
Christof Koch (37:35.620)
voice nagging you, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to pay your taxes,
Lex Fridman (37:39.200)
you have to fight with your ex and all of those things, they're always there.
Lex Fridman (37:42.480)
But when you're in the zone, all of that is gone and you're just in this wonderful state
Christof Koch (37:46.320)
where you're fully out in the world, you're climbing or you're rowing or biking or doing
Christof Koch (37:51.480)
soccer or whatever you're doing and sort of consciousness is this, you're all action or
Christof Koch (37:57.500)
in this case of pure experience, you're not action at all but in both cases, you experience
Christof Koch (38:02.320)
some aspect of conscious, you touch some basic part of conscious existence that is so basic
Lex Fridman (38:10.120)
and so deeply satisfying.
Christof Koch (38:12.720)
You I think you touch the root of being, that's really what you're touching there, you're
Lex Fridman (38:16.480)
getting close to the root of being and that's very different from intelligence.
Lex Fridman (38:21.800)
So what do you think about the simulation hypothesis, simulation theory, the idea that
Lex Fridman (38:25.920)
we all live in a computer simulation?
Christof Koch (38:28.040)
Rapture for nerds.
Lex Fridman (38:30.400)
Rapture for nerds.
Christof Koch (38:31.400)
I think it's as likely as the hypothesis had engaged hundreds of scholars for many centuries,
Lex Fridman (38:39.440)
are we all just existing in the mind of God?
Lex Fridman (38:42.680)
And this is just a modern version of it, it's equally plausible.
Christof Koch (38:47.680)
People love talking about these sort of things, I know they're book written about this simulation
Christof Koch (38:51.400)
hypothesis, if that's what people want to do, that's fine, it seems rather esoteric,
Lex Fridman (38:56.280)
it's never testable.
Lex Fridman (38:58.320)
But it's not useful for you to think of in those terms, so maybe connecting to the questions
Christof Koch (39:02.660)
of free will which you've talked about, I vaguely remember you saying that the idea
Christof Koch (39:07.840)
that there's no free will, it makes you very uncomfortable.
Lex Fridman (39:13.480)
So what do you think about free will from a physics perspective, from a conscious perspective,
Lex Fridman (39:19.440)
what does it all fit?
Christof Koch (39:20.440)
Okay, so from the physics perspective, leaving aside quantum mechanics, we believe we live
Lex Fridman (39:24.840)
in a fully deterministic world, right?
Lex Fridman (39:27.160)
But then comes of course quantum mechanics, so now we know that certain things are in
Christof Koch (39:30.400)
principle not predictable, which as you said I prefer, because the idea that the initial
Christof Koch (39:36.700)
condition of the universe and then everything else, we're just acting out the initial condition
Christof Koch (39:40.640)
of the universe, that doesn't…
Lex Fridman (39:42.680)
It's not a romantic notion.
Christof Koch (39:45.320)
Certainly not.
Lex Fridman (39:47.160)
Now when it comes to consciousness, I think we do have certain freedom.
Christof Koch (39:50.780)
We are much more constrained by physics of course and by our past and by our own conscious
Lex Fridman (39:55.120)
desires and what our parents told us and what our environment tells us.
Lex Fridman (39:59.160)
We all know that, right?
Lex Fridman (40:00.160)
There's hundreds of experiments that show how we can be influenced.
Lex Fridman (40:03.760)
But finally in the final analysis, when you make a life – and I'm talking really about
Christof Koch (40:08.360)
critical decision where you really think, should I marry, should I go to this school
Lex Fridman (40:11.560)
or that school, should I take this job or that job, should I cheat on my taxes or not?
Christof Koch (40:18.680)
These are things where you really deliberate and I think under those conditions, you are
Christof Koch (40:22.560)
as free as you can be.
Christof Koch (40:24.720)
When you bring your entire being, your entire conscious being to that question and try to
Christof Koch (40:31.440)
analyze it under all the various conditions, then you make a decision, you are as free
Lex Fridman (40:37.080)
as you can ever be.
Christof Koch (40:38.880)
That is I think what free will is.
Lex Fridman (40:40.680)
It's not a will that's totally free to do anything it wants.
Christof Koch (40:44.560)
That's not possible.
Lex Fridman (40:45.920)
Right.
Lex Fridman (40:46.920)
So as Jack mentioned, you actually write a blog about books you've read, amazing books
Lex Fridman (40:52.760)
from, I'm Russian, from Bulgakov, Neil Gaiman, Carl Sagan, Murakami.
Lex Fridman (41:01.080)
So what is a book that early in your life transformed the way you saw the world, something
Lex Fridman (41:06.760)
that changed your life?
Christof Koch (41:09.880)
Nietzsche I guess did.
Lex Fridman (41:10.880)
That's Brooks R. Truster because he talks about some of these problems.
Christof Koch (41:14.520)
He was one of the first discoverer of the unconscious.
Lex Fridman (41:17.920)
This is a little bit before Freud when he was in the air.
Christof Koch (41:23.240)
He makes all these claims that people sort of under the guise or under the mass of charity
Lex Fridman (41:29.040)
actually are very noncharitable.
Lex Fridman (41:32.360)
So he is sort of really the first discoverer of the great land of the unconscious and that
Lex Fridman (41:39.840)
really struck me.
Lex Fridman (41:41.600)
And what do you think about the unconscious, what do you think about Freud, what do you
Lex Fridman (41:45.480)
think about these ideas?
Lex Fridman (41:47.880)
Just like dark matter in the universe, what's over there in that unconscious?
Lex Fridman (41:51.920)
A lot.
Christof Koch (41:52.920)
I mean much more than we think.
Lex Fridman (41:53.920)
This is what a lot of last 100 years of research has shown.
Lex Fridman (41:57.480)
So I think he was a genius, misguided towards the end, but he started out as a neuroscientist.
Christof Koch (42:02.840)
He contributed, he did the studies on the lamprey, he contributed himself to the neuron
Christof Koch (42:09.480)
hypothesis, the idea that there are discrete units that we call nerve cells now.
Lex Fridman (42:13.400)
And then he wrote about the unconscious and I think it's true, there's lots of stuff happening.
Lex Fridman (42:20.920)
You feel this particular when you're in a relationship and it breaks asunder, right?
Lex Fridman (42:25.560)
And then you have this terrible, you can have love and hate and lust and anger and all of
Christof Koch (42:29.880)
it's mixed in.
Lex Fridman (42:31.520)
And when you try to analyze yourself, why am I so upset?
Christof Koch (42:35.080)
It's very, very difficult to penetrate to those basements, those caverns in your mind
Christof Koch (42:41.080)
because the prying eyes of conscious doesn't have access to those, but they're there in
Christof Koch (42:45.840)
the amygdala or lots of other places.
Christof Koch (42:48.560)
They make you upset or angry or sad or depressed and it's very difficult to try to actually
Christof Koch (42:53.720)
uncover the reason.
Christof Koch (42:54.720)
You can go to a shrink, you can talk with your friend endlessly, you construct finally
Christof Koch (42:58.360)
a story why this happened, why you love her or don't love her or whatever, but you don't
Christof Koch (43:02.520)
really know whether that actually happened because you simply don't have access to those
Christof Koch (43:07.640)
parts of the brain and they're very powerful.
Lex Fridman (43:09.280)
Do you think that's a feature or a bug of our brain?
Lex Fridman (43:12.600)
The fact that we have this deep, difficult to dive into subconscious?
Christof Koch (43:16.840)
I think it's a feature because otherwise, look, we are like any other brain or nervous
Christof Koch (43:24.320)
system or computer, we are severely band limited.
Christof Koch (43:28.640)
If everything I do, every emotion I feel, every eye movements I make, if all of that
Christof Koch (43:34.480)
had to be under the control of consciousness, I wouldn't be here.
Lex Fridman (43:42.720)
What you do early on, your brain, you have to be conscious when you learn things like
Christof Koch (43:46.460)
typing or like riding on a bike, but then what you do, you train up routes, I think
Lex Fridman (43:52.320)
that involve basal ganglia and striatum.
Christof Koch (43:54.640)
You train up different parts of your brain and then once you do it automatically like
Christof Koch (43:58.800)
typing, you can show you do it much faster without even thinking about it because you've
Christof Koch (44:02.000)
got these highly specialized, what Frans Krik and I call zombie agents, they're taking care
Christof Koch (44:07.800)
of that while your consciousness can sort of worry about the abstract sense of the text
Christof Koch (44:11.320)
you want to write.
Lex Fridman (44:12.320)
I think that's true for many, many things.
Lex Fridman (44:15.000)
But for the things like all the fights you had with an ex girlfriend, things that you
Lex Fridman (44:21.240)
would think are not useful to still linger somewhere in the subconscious.
Lex Fridman (44:25.280)
So that seems like a bug that it would stick to there.
Christof Koch (44:28.400)
You think it would be better if you can analyze it and then get it out of the system.
Christof Koch (44:31.320)
Better to get it out of the system or just forget it ever happened.
Lex Fridman (44:34.800)
That seems a very buggy kind of.
Christof Koch (44:37.400)
Well yeah, in general we don't have, and that's probably functional, we don't have an ability
Lex Fridman (44:41.620)
unless it's extreme, there are cases, clinical dissociations, right?
Christof Koch (44:45.240)
When people are heavily abused, when they completely repress the memory, but that doesn't
Lex Fridman (44:50.360)
happen in normal people.
Christof Koch (44:53.560)
We don't have an ability to remove traumatic memories and of course we suffer from that.
Christof Koch (44:59.040)
On the other hand, probably if you had the ability to constantly wipe your memory, you'd
Christof Koch (45:04.000)
probably do it to an extent that isn't useful to you.
Lex Fridman (45:07.160)
So yeah, it's a good question to balance.
Lex Fridman (45:11.000)
So on the books, as Jack mentioned, correct me if I'm wrong, but broadly speaking, academia
Lex Fridman (45:18.440)
and the different scientific disciplines, certainly in engineering, reading literature
Christof Koch (45:23.480)
seems to be a rare pursuit.
Lex Fridman (45:26.680)
So I'm wrong on this, but that's in my experience, most people read much more technical text
Lex Fridman (45:30.680)
and do not sort of escape or seek truth in literature.
Lex Fridman (45:36.760)
It seems like you do.
Lex Fridman (45:38.440)
So what do you think is the value, what do you think literature adds to the pursuit of
Lex Fridman (45:42.340)
scientific truth?
Lex Fridman (45:43.880)
Do you think it's good, it's useful for everybody?
Lex Fridman (45:46.640)
Gives you access to a much wider array of human experiences.
Lex Fridman (45:52.600)
How valuable do you think it is?
Christof Koch (45:54.320)
Well if you want to understand human nature and nature in general, then I think you have
Christof Koch (45:58.560)
to better understand a wide variety of experiences, not just sitting in a lab staring at a screen
Lex Fridman (46:04.720)
and having a face flashed onto you for a hundred milliseconds and pushing a button.
Christof Koch (46:08.040)
That's what I used to do, that's what most psychologists do.
Christof Koch (46:10.680)
There's nothing wrong with that, but you need to consider lots of other strange states.
Lex Fridman (46:16.880)
And literature is a shortcut for this.
Christof Koch (46:18.560)
Well yeah, because literature, that's what literature is all about, all sorts of interesting
Christof Koch (46:22.840)
experiences that people have, the contingency of it, the fact that women experience the
Lex Fridman (46:28.680)
world different, black people experience the world different.
Christof Koch (46:32.320)
The one way to experience that is reading all these different literature and try to
Lex Fridman (46:35.920)
find out.
Christof Koch (46:36.920)
You see, everything is so relative.
Christof Koch (46:37.920)
You read a book 300 years ago, they thought about certain problems very, very differently
Christof Koch (46:41.600)
than us today.
Lex Fridman (46:43.320)
We today, like any culture, think we know it all.
Christof Koch (46:46.120)
That's common to every culture.
Lex Fridman (46:47.440)
Every culture believes at its heyday they know it all.
Lex Fridman (46:50.100)
And then you realize, well, there's other ways of viewing the universe and some of them
Lex Fridman (46:53.400)
may have lots of things in their favor.
Lex Fridman (46:56.800)
So this is a question I wanted to ask about time scale or scale in general.
Christof Koch (47:02.720)
When you, with IIT or in general, try to think about consciousness, try to think about these
Christof Koch (47:07.160)
ideas, we kind of naturally think in human time scales, and also entities that are sized
Lex Fridman (47:17.640)
close to humans.
Lex Fridman (47:18.640)
Do you think of things that are much larger and much smaller as containing consciousness?
Lex Fridman (47:22.560)
And do you think of things that take, you know, eons to operate in their conscious cause
Lex Fridman (47:32.480)
effect?
Lex Fridman (47:33.480)
That's a very good question.
Lex Fridman (47:35.560)
So I think a lot about small creatures because experimentally, you know, a lot of people
Lex Fridman (47:38.920)
work on flies and bees, right?
Lex Fridman (47:41.380)
So most people just think they are automata, they're just bugs for heaven's sake, right?
Lex Fridman (47:45.360)
But if you look at their behavior, like bees, they can recognize individual humans.
Christof Koch (47:48.840)
They have this very complicated way to communicate.
Christof Koch (47:52.520)
If you've ever been involved or you know your parents when they bought a house, what sort
Christof Koch (47:55.740)
of agonizing decision that is.
Lex Fridman (47:57.880)
And bees have to do that once a year, right, when they swarm in the spring.
Lex Fridman (48:01.320)
And then they have this very elaborate way, they have free and scouts, they go to the
Christof Koch (48:04.880)
individual sites, they come back, they have this power, this dance, literally, where they
Christof Koch (48:08.080)
dance for several days, they try to recruit other deets, this very complicated decision
Christof Koch (48:12.160)
rate, when they finally, once they make a decision, the entire swarm, the scouts warm
Christof Koch (48:16.440)
up the entire swarm and then go to one location.
Christof Koch (48:18.480)
They don't go to 50 locations, they go to one location that the scouts have agreed upon
Christof Koch (48:21.960)
by themselves.
Lex Fridman (48:22.960)
That's awesome.
Christof Koch (48:23.960)
If we look at the circuit complexity, it's 10 times more denser than anything we have
Lex Fridman (48:27.040)
in our brain.
Christof Koch (48:28.040)
Now they only have a million neurons, but the neurons are amazingly complex.
Christof Koch (48:31.140)
Complex behavior, very complicated circuitry, so there's no question they experience something,
Christof Koch (48:35.020)
their life is very different, they're tiny, they only live, you know, for, well, workers
Lex Fridman (48:39.600)
live maybe for two months.
Lex Fridman (48:42.160)
So I think, and IIT tells you this, in principle, the substrate of consciousness is the substrate
Christof Koch (48:47.980)
that maximizes the cause effect power over all possible spatial temporal grains.
Lex Fridman (48:53.140)
So when I think about, for example, do you know the science fiction story, The Black
Lex Fridman (48:55.960)
Cloud?
Christof Koch (48:56.960)
Okay, it's a classic by Fred Hoyle, the astronomer.
Christof Koch (49:00.040)
He has this cloud intervening between the earth and the sun and leading to some sort
Christof Koch (49:06.240)
of, to global cooling, this is written in the 50s.
Christof Koch (49:09.040)
It turns out you can, using the radio dish, they communicate with actually an entity,
Christof Koch (49:14.440)
it's actually an intelligent entity, and they sort of, they convince it to move away.
Lex Fridman (49:19.680)
So here you have a radical different entity, and in principle, IIT says, well, you can
Christof Koch (49:24.840)
measure the integrated information, in principle at least, and yes, if the maximum of that
Christof Koch (49:30.200)
occurs at a time scale of months, rather than in assets for a fraction of a second, yes,
Christof Koch (49:35.980)
then they would experience life where each moment is a month rather than, or microsecond,
Lex Fridman (49:41.600)
right, rather than a fraction of a second in the human case.
Lex Fridman (49:46.800)
And so there may be forms of consciousness that we simply don't recognize for what they
Lex Fridman (49:50.500)
are because they are so radical different from anything you and I are used to.
Christof Koch (49:55.480)
Again, that's why it's good to read or to watch science fiction movies, well, to think
Lex Fridman (49:59.720)
about this.
Lex Fridman (50:00.720)
Do you know Stanislav Lem, this Polish science fiction writer, he wrote Solaris and was turned
Lex Fridman (50:06.640)
into a Hollywood movie?
Christof Koch (50:07.640)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (50:08.640)
His best novel is in the 60s, a very engineer, he's an engineer in background.
Christof Koch (50:13.080)
His most interesting novel is called The Victorious, where human civilization, they have this
Christof Koch (50:19.240)
mission to this planet and everything is destroyed and they discover machines, humans got killed
Lex Fridman (50:25.120)
and then these machines took over and there was this machine evolution, Darwinian evolution,
Lex Fridman (50:30.080)
he talks about this very vividly.
Lex Fridman (50:32.200)
And finally, the dominant machine intelligence organism that survived were gigantic clouds
Lex Fridman (50:39.200)
of little hexagonal universal cellular automata.
Christof Koch (50:42.520)
This was written in the 60s, so typically they're all lying on the ground individual
Christof Koch (50:46.560)
by themselves, but in times of crisis, they can communicate, they assemble into gigantic
Christof Koch (50:50.920)
nets into clouds of trillions of these particles and then they become hyper intelligent and
Lex Fridman (50:55.840)
they can beat anything that humans can throw at it.
Christof Koch (51:00.000)
It's very beautiful and compelling where you have an intelligence where finally the humans
Christof Koch (51:05.080)
leave the planet, they're simply unable to understand and comprehend this creature.
Christof Koch (51:09.440)
They can say, well, either we can nuke the entire planet and destroy it or we just have
Christof Koch (51:13.160)
to leave because fundamentally it's an alien, it's so alien from us and our ideas that we
Christof Koch (51:18.480)
cannot communicate with them.
Christof Koch (51:20.280)
Yeah, actually in conversation, so you're talking to us, Steven Wolf from Brought Up
Christof Koch (51:25.960)
is that there could be ideas that you already have these artificial general intelligence
Christof Koch (51:32.440)
like super smart or maybe conscious beings in the cellular automata, we just don't know
Lex Fridman (51:36.240)
how to talk to them.
Lex Fridman (51:37.240)
So it's the language of communication, but you don't know what to do with it.
Lex Fridman (51:41.440)
So that's one sort of view is consciousness is only something you can measure.
Lex Fridman (51:46.800)
So it's not conscious if you can't measure it.
Lex Fridman (51:50.160)
So you're making an ontological and an epistemic statement.
Christof Koch (51:53.200)
One is it's just like seeing the multiverses, that might be true, but I can't communicate
Christof Koch (51:59.240)
with them.
Lex Fridman (52:00.240)
I can't have any knowledge of them.
Christof Koch (52:01.640)
That's an epistemic argument.
Lex Fridman (52:02.640)
Right?
Lex Fridman (52:03.640)
So those are two different things.
Lex Fridman (52:04.640)
So it may well be possible.
Christof Koch (52:05.640)
Look, in another case that's happening right now, people are building these mini organoids.
Lex Fridman (52:09.320)
Do you know what this is?
Lex Fridman (52:10.960)
So you can take stem cells from under your arm, put it in a dish, add four transcription
Christof Koch (52:14.640)
factors and then you can induce them to grow into large, well, large, they're a few millimeters.
Christof Koch (52:19.920)
They're like a half a million neurons that look like nerve cells in a dish called mini
Lex Fridman (52:23.540)
organoids at Harvard, at Stanford, everywhere they're building them.
Christof Koch (52:27.300)
It may well be possible that they're beginning to feel like something, but we can't really
Lex Fridman (52:31.920)
communicate with them right now.
Lex Fridman (52:33.560)
So people are beginning to think about the ethics of this.
Lex Fridman (52:36.400)
So yes, he may be perfectly right, but it's one question, are they conscious or not?
Christof Koch (52:41.840)
It's a totally separate question.
Lex Fridman (52:43.040)
How would I know?
Christof Koch (52:44.040)
Those are two different things.
Christof Koch (52:45.800)
If you could give advice to a young researcher, sort of dreaming of understanding or creating
Lex Fridman (52:52.940)
human level intelligence or consciousness, what would you say?
Lex Fridman (52:59.120)
Just follow your dreams.
Christof Koch (53:01.440)
Read widely.
Lex Fridman (53:02.440)
No, I mean, I suppose with discipline, what is the pursuit that they should take on?
Lex Fridman (53:08.880)
Is it neuroscience?
Lex Fridman (53:09.880)
Is it computational cognitive science?
Lex Fridman (53:11.700)
Is it philosophy?
Lex Fridman (53:12.700)
Is it computer science or robotics?
Christof Koch (53:15.400)
No, in a sense that, okay, so the only known system that have high level of intelligence
Lex Fridman (53:22.840)
is homo sapiens.
Lex Fridman (53:24.480)
So if you wanted to build it, it's probably good to continue to study closely what humans
Lex Fridman (53:28.480)
do.
Lex Fridman (53:29.480)
So cognitive neuroscience, you know, somewhere between cognitive neuroscience on the one hand
Lex Fridman (53:32.920)
and some philosophy of mind and then AI, AI computer science.
Christof Koch (53:37.360)
You can look at all the original ideas in your network, they all came from neuroscience,
Lex Fridman (53:42.120)
right?
Christof Koch (53:43.120)
Reinforce whether it's Snarky, Minsky building is Snarky or whether it's, you know, the early
Christof Koch (53:47.360)
Hubel and Wiesel experiments at Harvard that then gave rise to networks and then multi
Christof Koch (53:50.960)
layer networks.
Lex Fridman (53:52.920)
So it may well be possible, in fact, some people argue that to make the next big step
Christof Koch (53:57.240)
in AI once we realize the limits of deep convolutional networks, they can do certain things, but
Lex Fridman (54:02.680)
they can't really understand.
Christof Koch (54:03.680)
They don't, they can't really, I can't really show them one image.
Christof Koch (54:08.800)
I can show you a single image of somebody, a pickpocket who steals a wallet from a purse.
Christof Koch (54:14.880)
You immediately know that's a pickpocket.
Lex Fridman (54:17.040)
Now computer system would just say, well, it's a man, it's a woman, it's a purse, right?
Lex Fridman (54:21.200)
Unless you train this machine on showing it a hundred thousand pickpockets, right?
Lex Fridman (54:24.520)
So it doesn't have this easy understanding that you have, right?
Lex Fridman (54:29.800)
So some people make the argument in order to go to the next step or you really want
Christof Koch (54:33.000)
to build machines that understand in a way you and I, we have to go to psychology.
Christof Koch (54:37.140)
We need to understand how we do it and how our brains enable us to do it.
Lex Fridman (54:40.440)
And so therefore being on the cusp, it's also so exciting to try to understand better our
Christof Koch (54:45.040)
nature and then to build, to take some of those inside and build them.
Lex Fridman (54:48.800)
So I think the most exciting thing is somewhere in the interface between cognitive science,
Christof Koch (54:52.720)
neuroscience, AI, computer science and philosophy of mind.
Lex Fridman (54:55.920)
Beautiful.
Christof Koch (54:56.920)
Yeah.
Christof Koch (54:57.920)
I'd say if there is from the machine learning, from our, from the computer science, computer
Christof Koch (55:00.520)
vision perspective, many of the researchers kind of ignore the way the human brain works
Christof Koch (55:05.800)
or even psychology or literature or studying the brain, I would hope Josh Tenenbaum talks
Christof Koch (55:12.160)
about bringing that in more and more.
Lex Fridman (55:14.760)
And that's, yeah, so you've worked on some amazing stuff throughout your life.
Lex Fridman (55:20.120)
What's the thing that you're really excited about?
Christof Koch (55:24.640)
What's the mystery that you would love to uncover in the near term beyond, beyond all
Lex Fridman (55:30.560)
the mysteries that you're already surrounded by?
Lex Fridman (55:32.400)
Well, so there's a structure called the claustrum.
Christof Koch (55:36.720)
This is a structure, it's underneath our cortex, it's yay big.
Christof Koch (55:40.040)
You have one on the left, on the right, underneath this, underneath the insula, it's very thin,
Christof Koch (55:44.200)
it's like one millimeter, it's embedded in, in wiring, in white matter, so it's very difficult
Lex Fridman (55:48.280)
to image.
Lex Fridman (55:50.200)
And it has, it has connection to every cortical region.
Lex Fridman (55:55.080)
And Francis Crick, the last paper he ever wrote, he dictated corrections the day he
Christof Koch (55:58.360)
died in hospital on this paper.
Christof Koch (56:00.840)
You know, we hypothesize, well, because it has this unique anatomy, it gets input from
Christof Koch (56:05.920)
every cortical area and projects back to every, every cortical area.
Christof Koch (56:10.800)
That the function of this structure is similar, it's just a metaphor to the role of a conductor
Christof Koch (56:16.760)
in a symphony orchestra.
Lex Fridman (56:18.760)
You have all the different cortical players.
Christof Koch (56:20.560)
You have some that do motion, some that do theory of mind, some that infer social interaction
Lex Fridman (56:24.640)
and color and hearing and all the different modules in cortex.
Lex Fridman (56:28.160)
But of course, what consciousness is, consciousness puts it all together into one package, right?
Lex Fridman (56:32.040)
The binding problem, all of that.
Lex Fridman (56:33.560)
And this is really the function because it has relatively few neurons compared to cortex,
Lex Fridman (56:38.200)
but it talks, it receives input from all of them and it projects back to all of them.
Lex Fridman (56:43.720)
And so we're testing that right now.
Christof Koch (56:45.120)
We've got this beautiful neuronal reconstruction in the mouse called crown of thorns, crown
Christof Koch (56:50.040)
of thorns neurons that are in the claustrum that have the most widespread connection of
Lex Fridman (56:54.520)
any neuron I've ever seen.
Christof Koch (56:56.360)
They're very, you have individual neurons that sit in the claustrum tiny, but then they
Christof Koch (57:00.280)
have this single neuron, they have this huge axonal tree that cover both ipsy and contralateral
Christof Koch (57:05.480)
cortex and trying to turn using, you know, fancy tools like optogenetics, trying to turn
Lex Fridman (57:11.000)
those neurons on or off and study it, what happens in the, in the mouse.
Lex Fridman (57:15.440)
So this thing is perhaps where the parts become the whole.
Christof Koch (57:20.520)
Perhaps it's one of the structures, it's a very good way of putting it, where the individual
Christof Koch (57:25.440)
parts turn into the whole of the whole of the conscious experience.
Lex Fridman (57:30.080)
Well, with that, thank you very much for being here today.
Christof Koch (57:35.400)
Thank you very much.
Lex Fridman (57:36.400)
Thank you very much.
Christof Koch (57:37.400)
All right, thank you very much.
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