Then I Am Myself the World

Then I Am Myself the World

Bibliography

• Author: Christof Koch
• Full_Title: Then I Am Myself the World
• Category: books
• Last Highlighted Date: 2024-10-29 01:28:15.027483+00:00

Highlights

• science tries to retrofit the “subjective” world of experiences onto this “objective” world. That is, without adding anything else to its worldview, it wants to explicate consciousness as arising out of the mindless actions of a gazillion molecules. It is here, however, that science runs into metaphysical difficulties.
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• The reduction of the experience of the “self” during intense physical-mental exertions that demand full concentration is known to athletes, soldiers, or fly-fishers as being in the flow, in the zone, or in peak experience. The complete abolition of the sense of self has been reported by many, throughout history, as experiencing a bright light or a luminous expanse, losing the sense of having a body, being someone with a particular history and agency, and a slowing or even a complete cessation of the passage of time. Such experiences can leave deep contentment and awe or even ecstasy in their wake. When the mental barriers that define us as individuals fade away, when the gravitational field of the self has lost its dominion over consciousness, the mind merges with the universe itself. The distinction between the individual and the world dissolves. They become one and the same.
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• The mind is not the passive recipient of sensory data streaming in from eyes, ears, and other sensors, from which it derives an unambiguous description of what is out there. No, the mind constructs what it takes to be “reality”—seeing this chair, hearing music, feeling guilty—from explicit and implicit assumptions about statistical regularities in the world around and within us.
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  • Note: This is reminiscent of Dzogchen Buddhism ^rw796401662
• Neuroplasticity, the modern understanding that the brain retains an ability to rewire itself, enables us to actively mold how we interpret and understand ourselves. We are not just helpless victims of fate but are the agents in charge of our own narrative, for better or worse, victorious or defeatist. This forceful shaping of our attitudes to events beyond our control has profound consequences for well-being and sickness.
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• integrated information theory, a quantitative, causal account of consciousness. Its development over the past twenty years has drawn in neuroscientists, neurologists, physicists, computer engineers, and philosophers as it makes startling, controversial (to some), but testable claims concerning who is conscious, of what, and why. According to the theory, consciousness is unfolded intrinsic causal power, the ability to effect change, a property associated with any system of interacting components, be they neurons or transistors. Consciousness is a structure, not a function, a process, or a computation.
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• Against the grain, integrated information theory radically disagrees with this functionalist view. It argues from first principles that digital computers can (in principle) do everything that humans can do, eventually even faster and better. But they can never be what humans are. Intelligence is computable, but consciousness is not.
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• It means that these machines will never be sentient, no matter how intelligent they become. Furthermore, that they will never possess what we have: the ability to deliberate over an upcoming choice and freely decide.
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• Life begins before consciousness does. You can be alive yet unconscious, an object to others (relative existence) rather than a subject to yourself (absolute existence).
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  • Note: Link to James Low talk where he speaks of being a subject of his parents consciousness. ^rw797392458
• You are the endpoint of an unbroken, billion-element chain of organisms, each arising from the preceding generation: your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, reaching all the way back to the last universal common ancestor of all life (endearingly known as LUCA)
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• Relevant to consciousness is the discovery by neonatologists that the fetus—floating in its own isolation tank, connected to the placenta that pumps blood, nutrients, and hormones into its growing body and brain, and suffused by sedation-promoting substances—is asleep.
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• I will focus on the way experiences appear or feel, without analyzing the content of these appearances or feelings. This is known as phenomenology, a term derived from phenomenon, which means “that which appears.” When Eminem sings, “I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like,” he takes a phenomenological point of view.
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• I here distinguish two broad kinds of experiences: percepts, also referred to as sensations, which can be sensory and concrete or more thought-like and abstract, and feelings, which have an emotional character.
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• Furthermore, much of adult human consciousness is taken up by reflecting on these immediate experiences, so-called meta-consciousness.
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• Visual, auditory, and somatosensory percepts are bound to space—when you see, hear, or sense something, you usually see, hear, or feel it at a specific location.
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• Collectively, these bodily sensors build up the experience of a spatially extended, highly mobile and jointed body, a set of sensations that anchors you in the physical world as much as the visual plenum of the world you see locates you in space.
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• The self can become aware of its own experiences, as in “Hmm, my toe is hurting. Maybe I should have bought those shoes in a larger size.” This is meta-consciousness: becoming conscious of an experience, a form of self-reflective introspection, consciousness being mirrored by the self. This operation can be applied recursively to itself; that is, you can become conscious that you’re conscious of your toe hurting. Meta-consciousness involves selectively attending to an experience, which changes the character of the experience, rendering it more salient. I
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• Indeed, some psychologists argue that much of thinking is carried out unconsciously; what is consciously accessible are the projections of these thoughts onto the visual, auditory, or linguistic processing machinery in the brain. That is, when you are thinking, “I need to book a ticket to Venice,” accompanied by images of the lagoon of Venice, of an airplane, perhaps of a map of Italy, the cognitive work associated with planning such a trip and turning these plans into action is done away from consciousness’s limelight.6
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• Emotions and percepts differ in a couple of ways. While percepts are short-lived (you quickly adapt to any sustained stimulus, such as a pungent odor or the rumbling of a car engine and cease to smell or hear it), feelings usually ebb and flow slowly and can persist for long times.
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• Percepts, by and large, are not experienced as good or bad. Often an image, a song, or a smell will trigger a memory with powerful positive or negative emotions, but shorn of such associations, percepts lack the affective component that marks emotions: seeing or hearing is experienced as neutral. Emotions, on the other hand, are defined by their valence; these can be either negative, such as fear, or positive, such as romantic love.
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• The stream metaphor is, despite its powerful appeal, misleading in at least three ways. First, there is evidence to suggest that each experienced “now” is a discrete snapshot in time, akin to watching a film, which is essentially a series of stills, with each stationary frame rapidly being replaced by the next one. How long each moment lasts by the clock can vary, subject to attention, arousal, motivation, and so on. This would explain moments of protracted duration reported upon in the context of accidents, falls, or other life-threatening events—“When I fell, I saw my life flash before me” or “It took him ages to lift the gun and aim at me.”12 Second, consciousness of the passage of time, slower or faster, can be altogether suspended, as during psychedelic experiences when the passage of time may cease altogether, a topic I pick up in a few pages. Third, the flow of the stream of consciousness, or, perhaps more accurately, the string of conscious moments, like pearls on a necklace, is periodically interrupted by episodes of unconsciousness, when you fall asleep.
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• Modernity frowns on stillness, on simply being and watching the world go by, and favors busyness. This comes at a cost to well-being.
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• The habitual distinction between me and my experience, the apprehender and the apprehended, the subject and the object, the knower and the known, had vanished. Some contemplative Buddhist practices refer to such states without a center as nondual states of consciousness.
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• Can there be an experience not involving seeing, hearing, fearing, wanting? This might bear some resemblance to what long-term practitioners of Buddhist meditation describe as sheer or naked awareness attained during samadhi, the complete cessation of all mental content, quieting and stilling consciousness until it is suspended in a luminosity of nothingness.
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• These genetic differences are superimposed and amplified by the unique conditions we grow up in. Dramatic events—say, a period of malnutrition early in life or even in the previous generation—act directly on genomes through something called epigenetics.
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• The brain is like a palimpsest; traumatic memories can be overwritten and effaced but are never truly forgotten.
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• Neuroplasticity manifests itself by appropriate changes in the underlying architecture of the central nervous system. In humans, unlike in mice, few new neurons are formed after birth.3 Rather than adding new cells, the brain continuously adjusts its wiring by up- or down-regulating the heft or synaptic “weight” by which any one neuron extends its influences over the neurons it is connected to.
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• Neuroplasticity is blunted by chronic stress or by depression and other mental disorders4 but can increase following psychedelic experiences.
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• Colors, like any other experience, have what is called a quale (plural qualia), a unique feeling that makes seeing orange quite different from seeing purple and radically different from smelling garlic or touching a wet towel.
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• We each live in our own Perception Box, to adopt an evocative metaphor coined by the writer, creator, and visionary Elizabeth R. Koch, a box whose walls are invisible and unbreakable, as we can only experience what our neural circuitry allows us to experience.13 These walls become the filter through which we interpret everyone and everything. This ineluctable fact is true of all sentient beings, each adapted to its ecological niche, and, therefore, with its own Perception Box.
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• The late vision scientist David Marr expressed it succinctly: “Perception is the construction of a description.”
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• Furthermore, we can expand the invisible walls that constitute our Perception Box by interventions and transformative experiences. Reality is malleable. Even if we start out with identical brains—say, as identical twins—circumstances and our choices about what to focus on, what to honor, and what to neglect influence our experience of the world.
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• Rather than being a troublesome artifact, an annoying nuisance that researchers must deal with, the placebo effect is a powerful mechanism for self-regulation. Think of it as a manifestation of belief: the more the patient believes in a procedure or manipulation, the more likely it is to help.
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• Negative expectations lead to worse outcomes; your belief that something will hurt is more likely to cause you hurt. This is the nocebo response.
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• Indubitably, patients suffer; yet the causes of their suffering and the extent to which their conscious or unconscious mind, responding to stress and anxiety, influences their symptoms remain controversial. Patients react with anger at any suggestion that their problems are psychosomatic in nature, for that implies that it is “all in their head” or that they choose to be sick for a nefarious purpose. Instead, they cast about for a physical cause: nerve gas, sonic weapons, vaccination, electric power lines, and so on. It is far easier to believe that those debilitating aches are caused by some unidentified agent than, say, that they are the body’s learned reaction to anxiety, leaving a hypervigilant nervous system in its wake.
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• One of the main objections to Cartesian dualism is the causal interaction problem: How does ethereal, thinking stuff impose its will onto concrete, physical stuff?
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• What is true for hunger is true for all experiences. All are defined by their private attributes to which you, and only you, have immediate and direct access.
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• The most intuitive way of thinking about the physical and the mental is that they belong to two fundamentally distinct realms of reality. This is what most of humanity believes.
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• Descartes reified the difference between the physical and the mental by postulating that they make up two fundamentally different magisteria, made from two kinds of substances: res extensa (literally, “extended thing”), or physical stuff that has length, width, and a particular location, here or over there; and res cogitans (literally, “thinking thing”), or mental stuff, without extension and nowhere located, but with the ability to sense, think, reason, and feel.4
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• the four words that make up what I call the neuroscientist’s dictum: “No brain, never mind.”10 Consciousness cannot exist in a pure vacuum. It requires a substrate, such as brain cells, electronic circuits, or maybe something more exotic, such as entangled quantum states.
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• Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that at rock bottom everything is reducible to quantities that can be described in an observer-independent manner
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• You don’t need to see my bike to know that it has a definite rest mass.13 Since Heisenberg, we know that this is not the case for microscopic variables. Furthermore, object properties are thought to only depend on what is happening within a certain spatial neighborhood around my bike. This is called locality.
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• That physical reality is observer dependent and nonlocal is established fact
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• a school of thought called reductive physicalism assumes that every mental state is fully reducible to the physical state of the underlying substrate
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• When I am in a truly dreamless sleep, there are no experiences; there is nothing; I do not exist for myself. My sleeping body is there, in bed, breathing in and out, for others to observe. But not for me. This is relative, or extrinsic, existence; existence for others. Stars, rocks, cars, and garbage cans exist in this derivative manner, only for others, not for themselves. When I wake up, groggily groping to turn off the alarm on my phone, I come from nowhere into being. This mind hears a jarring sound and senses a supine body, without yet even being fully aware of where it is or what day it is. But at that point, the conscious mind exists already for itself, intrinsically. It doesn’t have to experience anything exalted, mystical, or searing. Just being without much conscious content is entirely sufficient for intrinsic existence. Being as compared to nonbeing. This is absolute existence, the only existence worth having.
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• Besides the reasonable assumption that there are persistent objects outside my experience, integrated information theory presupposes that things exist to the extent they have cause-effect power.
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• Causal power is not some intangible notion but rather something quite concrete: the extent to which something can be the source of change—say, the fact that those three neurons over there being simultaneously on will cause that neuron over here to go off. It is the ability of the system’s recent past to specify its present state (cause power) and the extent to which the present state specifies its immediate future state (effect power).
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• Defining existence as causal power traces its origin to Plato8 and is a near-universal but rarely acknowledged principle for what science means when it stipulates the existence of something, such as a Higgs boson, a virus, or a black hole. Everything that exists in a fundamental sense has causal power, the power to take and to make a difference. All of physics can be expressed in this operational manner, using conditional probabilities. That is what is meant by being physical: having causal powers on others.9
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• IIT accounts for subjective experience via five axioms of phenomenal existence.
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  • Note: How are these axioms measured? ^rw801164654
• The first axiom is intrinsicality. This means that any experience is subjective, existing for itself, not for others. It exists from the intrinsic perspective, from within, not from an outsider’s perspective. The second axiom is information. Every experience is specific. It feels a particular way to read this book. If it were different, it would not be this experience. The third axiom is integration. It reflects the unitary, undivided nature of every experience.
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• The fourth axiom is exclusion. It states that every experience is definite. It has the content it has, neither less nor more.
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• The fifth axiom is composition. Any experience is structured into components. Its components are phenomenal distinctions
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• A specific physical mechanism in a particular state—a circuit with these neurons turned on and those turned off—that satisfies all five postulates is the substrate of a particular conscious experience. In the case of the brain, this physical substrate is also known as the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC).14 However, the theory is not limited to brain-based experiences. Indeed, it is agnostic as to whether the substrate is a nervous system, an extended root system of a tree, electrical currents circulating in an ocean of superfluid helium II on a lone exoplanet wandering between the stars, or silicon circuitry. However, to keep things simple, I’ll remain focused on the brain, picking up the theme of machine consciousness in the final chapter.
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• Integration means that the substrate of consciousness must have cause-effect power that is unitary: the substrate must not be reducible to separate subsets that do not exist for themselves. Nor must the distinctions and relations they specify. Their degree of irreducibility is measured by integrated information, a number symbolized by the lowercase Greek letter phi, written as φ, and pronounced fi. The sum of the φ’s of all distinctions and relations is the integrated information of the circuit in this state, symbolized by the uppercase letter phi, Φ. This number measures the irreducibility of the substrate. Something with no integrated information does not exist as an integrated entity, as it can be reduced to two or more subsystems without any loss. The more integrated the information, the more irreducible the substrate, the more it exists for itself, the more it is conscious.
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• Some neurons will be part of the substrate, the neural correlates of consciousness, and some will not, even though they are directly or indirectly connected to each other
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• The same approach applies to the question of the spatial or temporal grain at which the unfolded causal powers are evaluated. What exists for itself is the spatio-temporal grain that maximizes integrated information.
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• Finally, the composition axiom implies that the neural correlates of consciousness must have cause-effect power that is structured: the substrate must have subsets that specify causal distinctions bound by relations, yielding a cause-effect structure.
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• The phenomenal properties of an experience—its quality or how it feels—correspond one-to-one to the physical properties of the intrinsic cause-effect structure unfolded from the underlying substrate.
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• All quality is a structure, not a function, a process, or a computation. One implication is that consciousness is nonalgorithmic; it is not (Turing) computable.
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• This also answers the classic Philosophy 101 riddle: “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if no one is around to hear it?” Indeed, there is no sound without a conscious observer to hear.
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• Integrated information theory shares some of the intuitions of panpsychism, the school of thought that holds that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality and that experience is much more common than assumed.
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• Integrated information theory has no requirement that a brain must house only a single substrate of consciousness. Provided they do not causally overlap, there might be one large substrate, a maximum of integrated information, that includes part of Broca’s area and houses the egoic consciousness that can speak about its experiences, peacefully coexisting with another, nonoverlapping region of neocortex in the same brain that is also a local maximum of cause-effect power.
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• Finally, there is no threshold of integrated information, say forty-two, below which there is no experience. Provided the system has some itsy-bitsy intrinsic causal power, it will feel-like-something.22
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• Many parts of the nervous system play little role in consciousness.
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• The cerebellum is the “little brain” tucked underneath the neocortex, at the back of the head. It instantiates the automatic, “thoughtless” processes that silently coordinate sensory information streaming in from stretch and position sensors embedded in muscles and joints, as well as the equilibrium organs in the inner ear and the eyes, with the motor commands that go out to the hundreds of muscles in the limbs and trunk.
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• What matters is not the constitution of brain tissue but the way it is wired, its structure. A cerebellum-like architecture, with its myriad independent circuits, is insufficient for consciousness.
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• The matchup was between integrated information theory (IIT) and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT), today’s two most prominent theories of consciousness. The latter is a functional, computational account of the mind in which information accesses a global workspace by broadcasting it from the prefrontal cortex, in front of the brain, to the back of the cortex, thereby generating consciousness.40
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• IIT starts with consciousness and infers its substrate from there, while GNWT seeks to distill consciousness out of computations carried out by the brain; IIT emphasizes the rich, subjective nature of perceptual experience, while GNWT stresses that what people report is limited to a handful of items at any one point in time, such as the identity of a face or a thought.
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• Similarly, invertebrates, such as bees and cephalopods, display complex cognition and capabilities. Yet they have no extended sheetlike neural architecture. Should we deny them sentience because they do not have a neocortex? No! The evolutionary and behavioral evidence is compatible with the thesis that all animals are sentient to a larger or smaller degree. This is also the prediction of integrated information theory. Given the ten-times-greater circuit density of the tiny brain of a bee (compared to the mammalian neocortex), with its approximately one million neurons wired up in stunningly complex patterns, it too will have a cause-effect structure with a nonzero amount of integrated information. It too is likely to experience some degree of contentment, flying in the warm rays of the sun, carrying a load of golden nectar back to its sisters in the hive.49 Indeed, it may be that every organism on the tree of life feels-like-something, is sentient, although its phenomenal content may take a primitive form unrecognizable to us.50
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• What makes humans different is not so much our basic sensorial, experiential repertoire but a powerful language module, flexible intelligence, an ability to self-reflect, and a hypertrophied sense of self-importance.
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• This “I” consciously thinks, perceives, senses, and interacts with the world. It is your perennial companion, essential for self-reflection and for pursuing long-term goals—say, going to professional school for an advanced degree. Yet the mental chatter and negative thoughts that accompany the self can become overwhelming
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• The experience of self is as real as any other conscious experience, such as pain or pleasure. What is illusory, as emphasized by Buddhism, is the idea of a permanent and fixed essence that constitutes the “true self,” the “real me.”
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• For philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the perennial duality between the subject and the object, the perceiver and the perceived, the knower and the known, ceases in aesthetic experiences. “We… devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present.… We lose ourselves entirely in this object… we forget our individuality, our will… so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one.”
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• Psychedelics can induce profound visions with an astonishing verisimilitude that any Hollywood director would envy. These are not hallucinations, as the user understands that what they experience is not “waking” reality; furthermore, these visions occur with closed eyes
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• Psychiatrist Judson Brewer, at the time at the Yale University School of Medicine, discovered that these “open” or “closed” states of consciousness map onto activities of the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus complex, part of the neocortical regions engaged when ruminating, introspecting, and daydreaming. Anger and anxiety, paradigmatic “closed” states, are associated with high activity in these regions; this activity is reduced by mindfulness training that minimizes excessive self-scrutiny by focusing on the here and now. Put differently, the neural signature of a preoccupied and worried self, the substrate of closed experiences, is activity in the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus complex. When this activity is at an ebb, the self is disengaged, and the conscious mind is open to the world at large.22
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• From this point of view, the situation is clear: a silent brain has intrinsic causal powers that are unfolded into a vast causal structure of irreducible cause-effect power, while a silenced brain possesses none.33
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• potential to control how you respond to these events, how you interpret and judge them. This calls for the lifelong cultivation of fortitude and equanimity, what the ancient Greeks called ataraxia, an imperturbability and freedom from distress, anxiety, and worry. Stoics sought to attain this suspension of judgment as one of the ultimate aims of life.
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• It appears that the less these midline structures are active and/or the less they communicate with other neocortical structures, the less the self is present.
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• No one, no matter how wise or intelligent, has privileged access to the one and only “true” reality. Indeed, no one has direct, unmediated access to the noumenal, unknowable reality that Immanuel Kant postulated, the thing-in-itself. What we perceive, what we experience, is a construct of the brain, shaped by our implicit and explicit expectations. If we believe something to be true, if it fits into our belief system, we are more likely to notice it and to remember it. If it does not reinforce our prior beliefs, we will ignore the facts of the matter to the extent possible.
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• Just as daily flossing and tooth brushing prevents tooth decay, mental flossing, such as proper breathing techniques to facilitate a calm, relaxed attitude, or daily meditation or gratefulness sessions, can be cultivated and turned into a lifelong practice for mental well-being.
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• Human brain tissue is brain tissue; a chunk of cortical matter from a patient is not fundamentally different from a chunk of mouse cortex, with similar synapses and cells. This is astonishing to most, since we humans instinctively assume that our brains must harbor something extra, some fancy, super-powerful thingamajig not shared by any other species. But there is no evidence for that. Our brain has lots of minute, molecular differences, tweaks to the basic neuronal machinery, but so does every other species, each one according to its own ecological niche.
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• As social creatures, we evolved to take consciousness in other people as a given, particularly when they speak to and with us. It is therefore seductive to assume that anything that uses language in the sophisticated ways we do must, of necessity, also be conscious.
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• Contrary to what functionalists aver, consciousness relates not to function but to structure.
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• Consciousness is not a clever algorithm. Its beating heart is intrinsic causal power, not computation. Causal power is not something intangible, ethereal, but something physical—the extent to which the system’s recent past specifies its present state (cause power) and the extent to which this current state specifies its immediate future (effect power). And here’s the rub: causal power, the ability to influence oneself, cannot be simulated. Not now or in the future. It must be built into the system, part of the physics of the system. To illustrate this intuitively, consider computer code that simulates the field equations of Albert Einstein’s celebrated theory of general relativity, relating mass to spacetime curvature. The software accurately models the supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. This black hole exerts such extensive gravitational effects on its surroundings that nothing, not even light, can escape its attraction. To absolutely no one’s surprise, the astrophysicist simulating the black hole doesn’t get sucked into their laptop by the simulated gravitational field. Of course they don’t. Why should they? This seemingly absurd question emphasizes the difference between the real and the simulated. For if the simulation is faithful to reality, spacetime should warp around the laptop, creating a black hole that swallows everything around it. But it doesn’t. Why not? The answer is that gravity is not a computation. If it were, then the physics simulation engine should affect the gravitational field around the computer. Gravity has extrinsic causal powers, attracting anything with mass. Imitating a black hole’s causal powers requires an actual superdense sphere about four million times the mass of our sun. Causal power can’t be simulated; it must be constituted. Aspects of gravity can be simulated but not its raw causal powers.13
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• digital computer has extremely low connectivity, with the output of one transistor hooked up to the input of three to four transistors, compared with that of the neocortex, in which pyramidal neurons, the workhorses of the mammalian brain, receive inputs from and make outputs to up to a hundred thousand other pyramidal neurons.
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• Once again, it is important to emphasize that the brain experiences life not by dint of a soul-like substance but by its massive intrinsic causal power.
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• In an exactly analogous manner, the theory identifies the cause and the effect of a causal process, such as the one leading me to pick one of the two dishes, and determines its borders, that is, when the decision was initiated and when it ended. The theory concludes that only what exists for itself can truly cause. Since only consciousness truly exists for itself, only a conscious entity can freely decide.14
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