Why Current AI Cannot Be Conscious | Dr. Christof Koch

Background and Scientific Framework

0:00I experimented with psychedelics when I was young. I'm 70 now, and it very much informed my view of the world, or view of reality, or view of civilizations, structures, and all of that. But could it simply be the suppression of the self and the resulting experience? It's just your brain. In the case of psychedelics, it's your brain on drugs. Okay, so all it teaches us is that brains can reach extraordinary states. If you have someone in a vegetative state who's been declared in a vegetative state, and you use this device and detect that there is complex neural activity that suggests consciousness, if you pull the life support on that picture, do you see some spike in complexity that might correlate to their recognition of what's happening?

0:51We now know that a quarter of these patients, one out of four of these patients, is actually conscious. They're there. They're present. They're just not able to signal it. If you lose the cerebellum, it's not good for you. Cerebellum is there to do sensory motor coordination, among others. But people never complain that if lesion in the cerebellum, never complain about loss of consciousness. It doesn't seem to relate to consciousness because it's not very well integrated. Everything is mental. Everything is phenomenal. Everything ultimately is consciousness. I'm a physicist. I got my PhD in theoretical physics, but I studied for the past 40 years brains. I'm a neuroscientist. I was for 25 years a professor at Caltech, California Institute of Technology, where I had a lab studying the biophysics of the brain, but also cognitive neuroscience and the way people see and experience.

1:44And as you mentioned, I worked for 14 years with Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist who discovered, you know, co-discovered the double helical nature of the DNA and then shifted as he went from England to La Jolla in Southern California, shifted his interest from molecular biology to consciousness. I left Caltech 15 years ago to join the Paul Allen Institute. Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft for brain science here in Seattle. I was chief scientist and then its president. I've stepped down from executive duties. I'm still employed at the Allen Institute.

2:26And I also run a foundation called the tiny blue dot foundation based in Santa Monica to study perception that what we call the perception box and its therapeutic benefits for, for, for all people.

Redefining Physicalism and Materialism

2:39So that's briefly my biography. Yeah. So as scientists, you are a physicalist. Well, it used to be known as materialist as in until early the 20th century, an ancient metaphysical position. Democritus is one of the first pre-Socratic Greek thinker. He famously said, all there is, is atoms and the void. And today this is called physicalism that essentially asserts everything is physical.

3:15Put differently, everything is quantities is numbers. Now the devil's in the details. And what used to be called physical or material, if we go back to materialism was very simple to understand on a classical physics. So on a classical physics, you take an object like this, you know, this is one of these things to, you know, train your muscles and it has position and velocity and momentum.

3:45Classical physics, you can completely determine its course, its past and its future. And if you knew the location and momentum of every particle in the universe, everything would be an open book. In principle, if you had a big enough computer, you can compute everything that happened in the past and everything that you expect to happen in the future. Now, of course, we know the world is not described by classical physics, because one of the two revolutionary theories of the 20th century is quantum mechanics.

4:20So now we have this underlying thing that cannot be observed, the wave function, and the wave function is interpreted to be in a probabilistic way. And then, of course, to get from wave function to real things happening, you have so-called the collapse of the wave function, and you've got these weird paradoxes that are very paradoxical for us to understand because we don't observe them at our level. So things like can be simultaneously in two states, so Schrödinger's cat experiment, where the cat is simultaneously dead and alive.

4:56And our intuition tells us, well, look, either you're dead or the cat's alive. It can be in both states. But under certain conditions, this is exactly what nature permits.

Quantum Mechanics and Spooky Action

5:06More recently, although this goes back to Erwin Schrödinger, he had predicted this property of quantum system called entanglement. What we mean, so if you have a system, a single quantum mechanical system, and this relates to consciousness already, a single quantum mechanical system, you can separate them over vast distances, but there's still one system. What do I mean by that? So let's say you take a pair of entangled particles.

5:38One is spin up and the other spin down. So because they're in a superposition, the system could be like this. It's in a superposition of this state and this state. OK, and you don't know which. And then you move them very far apart. Let's say a light year such that you turn on a flashlight at one location. That light wouldn't get to the other location until a year later. So they're really, really, really far apart. Yet, what we know now to be true empirically, beyond a doubt, that as soon as something interacts with that one system,

6:14let's say the system on my left, and knows that the spin is up, instantaneously, independent of the distance, the state of the other one is down. Yeah. Now, did Einstein famously call this in 1935 spooky action at a distance? Because what mechanism allows the information, the state to propagate across vast distances? And now there are even weirder things called quantum contextuality that people are testing. We know this to be true because now we have an industry called quantum computer industry that exploits some of these weird superposition.

6:48But what that means is that we don't know anymore what it means exactly to be physical. And some people in the foundation of physics, in fact, are now arguing that there may not be absolute facts in the sense that I'm a biker. I don't own a car. I don't own a car. I have several bikes. My bike at rest has a particular mass. It weighs like, I don't know, 25 kilo or whatever. But quantum mechanics would say until and unless something interacts with that bicycle, it doesn't have, properly speaking, a math.

7:26It's not that you don't know the math. That's just an epistemic limitation. We, you know, I don't know most things in the world. No, it's that it simply doesn't make sense to talk about it like it has a specific math until, depending on the reading, either something as something observes it or otherwise interacts with it. Now, again, this is not my grandfather's materialism anymore. So that's been one persistent challenge. And in fact, some physicists in foundational physics are now bringing in consciousness.

7:59They are beginning to argue that consciousness, in a sense, has to be built into the rock bottom, the rock bottom description of our reality. So that demarcation line between physicalist and non-physicalist is very, very difficult to define. And so people say, well, it's a future physics. Well, OK, but the future physics, you know, that's like waiting for, you know, waiting for the rapture. Yeah, maybe in future we'll have a physics and maybe that includes consciousness for all I know.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

8:32So it's difficult to pin down physicalism. The other challenge with physicalism has always been what the philosopher David Schalmers calls a hard problem. Yeah. To explain why is it that three pounds of brain matter like this and in principle, it's just like another piece of matter like this. OK, this is hard matter or semi-hard matter. This is, you know, soft matter, squishy matter. But in principle, it's constituted out of atoms and molecules and electrons and all of that interacting by the laws of quantum mechanics.

9:02Nothing special here. Yet this thing can love and hate. Well, where does that come from? And even if you take it down, even if you carry out the program that Francis Crick and I initiated in the in the early 1990s of identifying for any one experience, what are the exact neurons? In what state do they have to be? Do they have to involve microtubule or superposition or whatever you want to come up with? Why is it that this particular mechanism? You know, it's a mechanism like any other mechanism, like a fancy Swiss clock.

9:34Why is it that this mechanism can feel pain or feel pleasure or feel boredom? I mean, it's a complete non sequitur, right? On the one hand, you have the laws of physics. On the other hand, you have you have experiences, pain, pleasure, boredom, anger. You know, they're linked, you know, just a single hit on the head will tell you. Yeah, if the brain is if you hurt the brain, you're going to, you know, you're going to seriously interfere with conscience. But why should they be linked? There's nothing in the laws of science that tells us matter can love and hate.

10:10So that's those are the two the two challenges. And I mean, they've been around for several decades now. The neural correlates exactly what was lighting up at the time that you were feeling or experiencing certain phenomena. And at what point did you decide that that wasn't going to be enough? I mean, I guess you knew that wasn't going to be enough, but you you thought it was useful in the absence of some other empirical experiment that you.

10:43Well, if assuming we had the and of course, I lost a famous bet against David Chalmers. Yeah, because we had not discovered them after 25 years. But he agrees with me, they will be discovered. This isn't discovering the footprints of consciousness in the brain. It's another way to think about them. That that is a perfectly feasible project. And that will be immensely useful because once I know what the footprints are, I can look for them. For instance, there are many patients that are behavioral unresponsive.

11:13They used to be called vegetative state. We know now we now know that 25 percent of these people are actually conscious called covert conscious. They're fully conscious or they may be fully conscious. We simply don't know. But we can't communicate. They can't communicate that to the outside. So they're like a standard astronaut. OK, well, if I have the NCC, I can just look. Are they present in this patient? I can decide, for example, most people, most experts who concern themselves would assume that a third trimester fetus probably is conscious.

11:47Well, if I have the NCC, I can say, well, are they there or when do they occur? Are they present already in the second trimester or maybe only in the third trimester? What about here? I have a dog, a Bernice Mound dog. What about dogs? You know, and I can. So this is an empirical program tracking the footprints of consciousness. There will be immensely practical importance to the term consciousness, to measure it, to maybe quantify it in normal people, in people with various diseases, disorders, psychiatric disorders, animals, etc.

12:21So it's useful. But of course, it does not explain why this particular, these particular thing in this configuration gives rise to red and slightly different to orange or to an orgasm or to toothache. Right.

Integrated Information Theory

12:36So there are two ways to look at that. So one for the longest, you have to start rather. So most people who think about consciousness and make theories of consciousness, they take the brain and try to squeeze the juice of consciousness out of it. You know, they're trying to turn the waters of the brain into the wine of consciousness to adopt the biblical metaphor. And they say, well, it has to be this thing. It has to be a global workspace or broadcast of information or layer five neurons or NMDA receptors or microtubule, like Stu Hameroff, you know, or whatever.

13:16Well, again, why this and not that? Why microtubule, not other, some other cellular organism? You know, ultimately, it's very difficult to go beyond that question. So there's one theory that's unique, really, that's called integrated information theory. It's a different attack. It's a consciousness first account. So it really starts where René Descartes started. The only thing I'm absolutely certain of is that I'm conscious, because even in doubting it, I reassert it.

13:52And consciousness, furthermore, is the only way I encounter the world. If I'm a scientist, I still depend on, I have to read papers or books. That's visual consciousness. I have to look at a, you know, an oscilloscope. Again, I interact. I have to listen to a Geiger counter. That's auditory consciousness. So the only way I interact with the world, including my own body, is through my conscious experience. So if you think about it, the only thing I have direct acquaintance with, I have direct knowledge of, is conscious experience.

14:25And so any theory has to start with, any theory of consciousness, which is different from a theory of the neural correlates, the physical substrate of consciousness. Any theory of consciousness has to start with consciousness and then sort of go from there to say, well, which system is conscious and what are they conscious of? And this theory, integrated information theory, the main architect of that theory is an Italian-born American psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a theory that does that.

15:02Now it's a scientific theory. It may well be wrong. Yeah. Let me ask, first of all, I'm fascinated by, you have a startup, right, that's working on an instrument or instruments that would be able to detect consciousness in people who are otherwise considered brain dead.

Detecting Consciousness in Unresponsive Patients

15:27How far along have you gone in that? Have you abandoned that? Yeah. Oh, no, no, no, no. As I said, it's just independent of what you believe about the metaphysics of consciousness. There's no question that we have now tools, so this was developed over the last 20 years, techniques to query the brain. Essentially, you do it, you hit the brain using magnetic pulses, and then you're sounding, you're listening to the echoes using EG, electrical brainwaves.

16:02So you send in a pulse of energy, you essentially, you know, it's like taking a bell and hitting it with a hammer and then listening to it. And a conscious brain, whether that person is awake like you or I, or in a REM sleep where the person is experiencing, or on a high dose psychedelic where they may be immobile but highly conscious, the complexity of this brainwave. So you can compute how complex it is called Lempel-Ziv complexity.

16:32And in conscious people, it's always above a threshold. In unconscious people, whether they're regular people, regular folk, but they're anesthetized or they're truly in a very deep coma where it's unambiguous that there is no activity, the brain complexity is very low. In the simplest case, EG is flat lined. I mean, that's extreme case of very low complexity. And so we've developed this tool now and started this company that you mentioned called Intrinsic Powers.

17:03We were working with people at MGH, at Harvard and in Madison and in Columbia, trying to put this into the workflow. Because what happens today is if you or I have a car accident or hemorrhage or cardiac arrest and you're alive, you know, someone calls 9-11, you get into the ICU. You're on life support now, on ventilator, you might be there, you know, unresponsive, eyes open.

17:33So these people were called vegetative states, but as I said, are now called behavioral unresponsive. And if you remain in this state for three or four or five days, then the clinical team will initiate discussion with the family and says, is this what they would have wanted? And here in the developed world, between 70% and 90% of the time, family and doctors decide no and they pull support. But we now know that a quarter of these patients, it was a very large paper last year published in the New England Journal of Medicine,

18:08roughly a quarter percent, depending on the demographics and all of that, one out of four of these patients is actually conscious. They're there, they're present. They're just not able to signal it. And so we want to know that because then I can give, this device can give the clinical team and the family one additional bit. Literally, it's one bit. Are they there or are they not there? And that can then help further inform, you know, what the doctor and what the family wants to do with that information.

18:39So that's a, so I like it a lot because while a, we help people and b, demonstrate that this very airy, ephemeral topic of consciousness, you know, it's been around with us for the last 3000 years, seems very airy fairy. Right. But this, if you ever called upon this to make this, this call for a loved one, right? This is the most consequential decision you can make. It's a very existential, are they there or are they not there? And should we pull vent, you know, should we pull the plug or not?

19:10And so this is where the, this, this abstract mind body problem hits the, you know, the rubber hits the road. Yeah. And let me just, I don't want to get lost on that, but have you, how far are these experiments gone? If you have someone in a vegetative state who's been declared in a vegetative state and you, uh, use this device and, uh, detect that, that there is complex, uh, neural activity that suggests consciousness.

19:44If you pull the life support on that patient, do you see some spike in complexity that might correlate to their recognition of what's happening or, or do you see any, any change in that, uh, complexity? No, because I mean, the, the technique is, so it takes an hour, an hour and a half to establish. Um, uh, and then of course, you know, you'll have to make this, uh, you make this information available to the doctors and ultimately to the, to the team.

20:20And then it takes, you know, a lot of back and forth and it's, it's complicated, uh, Craig, because it's a very complicated question and we cannot help. So there are three, when you get that call, there are three things you want to know. Are they alive first? Are they there? And then lastly, are they going to recover? And, you know, right now we can't, we can't say that very well, whether or not the fact that they're conscious is encouraging, even though they can, they may not be able to respond.

20:54Right. So, um, it's, it's a very difficult decision to make. Do you think, I mean, imagine yourself, if you are, if you're in this situation, unable to communicate and it's unclear. It depends of course on your age. If you're 20, it's much better than if you're, you know, 60 or 70. What would you like, do you want to be forever in this, in this state where you can communicate, but you're conscious.

21:24And then, you know, now your brother or your sibling, I mean, or your parent or your child has to make this decision. So it's a very complicated decision environment. And, um, because at this point we can tell you, yes, he's there and 95% chance he's going to recover. I can't tell you that. So was that work concurrent with your work with Crick? Um, yeah. So this was primarily done. Um, so we, you know, it's why this work on patients sort of widely published done over the last, uh, 20 years by, by Giulio Tononi.

22:01And then, um, an Italian, a neuroscientist, neurologist, uh, Marcello Massimini. Yeah. And that went on at the same time as we, as we, you know, try to push this empirical program in people and in, in lab animals to study the footprints of consciousness in, um, in the brain. A purely empirical program that, by the way, does not depend on whether you're a physicalist or dualist or a panpsychist or, you know, an, an idealist. It's just, we just want to know the, the, the footprints of consciousness, how to study them, how to measure them, detect them that we could then use for, for diagnostic and prognostic purposes.

22:42What point did you decide that, that you were never going to close that gap between correlation and causality and, and switch to a form of panpsychism? I mean, was it, I guess it was at a moment or is it, was it? Well, first of all, I don't, I've never abandoned the hope that we can get a theory that explains, I mean, the theory, like integrated information theory and, you know, panpsychism.

23:14Panpsychism, certainly the way I think about it, uh, is in the sense that it may well be possible, a, that every member, every evolved organism, including simple, single, simple cells, individual cells, a mobile may feel like something itsy bitsy. Okay. And integrated information theory in principle, because the vast complexity of the 10,000s of different proteins present even in a single cell is such no computers ever managed to simulate that.

23:47But of all this vast complexity may arise some very, very simple proto feeling of being alive versus not being alive. That's entirely possible. I don't know how to empirically test it right now, but it's, it's, it's entirely, it's entirely possible.

Transformative Experiences and Idealism

24:03What happened to me is, it's slightly different. I had, um, two extraordinary experiences that I described in my last book, then I am myself the world. Um, one of which was sort of a near death experience in the first week of the, of the pandemic where, uh, Christoph was gone. The world was gone. Everything was gone except this light, this very bright light. Some people describe it as a tunnel. There's a tunnel and a feeling of, uh, of terror and ecstasy. Just those three things, terror, ecstasy, a bright light.

24:39There was no space. All of space had convulsed itself into the single, the single point, the singularity. There was no time. Passage of time. That's always with us. Collapse. That's moment. This experience didn't last too long or too short. It simply was. It was probably under 10 minutes by the clock. And there was no self. There was no Christoph. There was nothing there. You know, the usual distinction between observer and observed, knower and knowing, apprehender and apprehended. All of that was gone. And so it, it's, uh, what some Buddhists often call a non-dual experience.

25:15Yep. It wasn't particularly pleasant. I mean, as I said, it was terror and ecstasy. Yeah. But not, not, it wasn't the result of a psychedelic experience. It was something I, uh, yeah, I prefer not to, to talk about it. Sure. Yeah. Um, but what, what it taught me is two things that a, the sense of self, you know, we all have a sense of self explicit or implicit. Some people have it weaker. They constantly belittle themselves. You know, they, they, they constantly think, Oh my God, everyone hates me.

25:48And other people like, uh, our president have a, let's just call it a highly exaggerated sense of, uh, of self. Um, and it's always, we all live in this gravitational field of planet ego. It's always about me, me, me explicitly, implicitly, but then just like an astronaut on a special condition can become weightless and floating out of space. So on a certain conditions, including psychedelics, of course, you can totally lose itself. And what you realize then that self-consciousness is just a subset of all possible experiences.

26:24The fact that I know I'm me, I know what I had for breakfast. I know I'm going to die one day. All of that is, is, is consciousness, but you can also, if you don't have that, like in that state, whatever remains is clearly highly conscious. And then it took away the, and the fear of death, you know, which is not uncommon. But then I had a second expert, but it didn't change fundamentally my metaphysics, the way I think about the world. That happened several years later, three years ago.

26:57Um, when I had, uh, uh, uh, a mystical experience where again, you lose a sense of self, you lose where you are and what you are. And you feel, I mean, it's, it's very strange to put it in words. You feel you become one with everything. You merge with the universe. Yeah. And, and I mean, the title of this book, Then I, Myself, The World comes from this, um, it's a translation from the German,

27:27Selbst dann bin ich die Welt, which is what Tristan in Isolde, in Richard Wagner, you know, Porno's opera sing. And when they, they have this mystical experience where they become one, the two, the lovers become one, but they also become one with the universe. So they, that's what they sing. Then I, under the most rapturous music composed in the Western Canon, they become one, whatever remains become one with everything. And that is, you know, profoundly transformative because, you know, once I came out of it, I don't know how long it lasted, probably under an hour.

28:05Um, it's just, I mean, you now have direct acquaintance, I had direct acquaintance with what I felt was like, what, what is truly underlying everything is mental. That I realized, oh my God, everything is mental. Everything is phenomenal. Everything ultimately is consciousness. And this material universe in which we exist ultimately is a manifestation of something mental. So this is known as idealism, right?

28:35They believe that, you know, most of Western mind, body, metaphysics revolves around these two poles, the physical and the mental. And, you know, since the Greeks, most people say, well, the only pole that really exists, it's the physical and everything else has to somehow emerge out of that in ways we don't understand. Or some people say, no, it's both. So that's your classical dualism. Most people are probably in this country, probably dualist, right? There's clearly the brain and, and matter and all of that.

29:05But then there is my soul, you know, and that's separate. Yeah. And then, of course, and then there are idealists. Well, then there are also panpsychists, like, like, Geoff you interviewed. And then there are also idealists, like Arthur Schopenhauer, probably the best known 18th century, early 19th century germ philosopher. And then modern idealists, like Bernardo Castro, who says what ultimately exists is mental. The mental follows laws. It's not supernatural. So it doesn't imply existence of a God or God or hierarchies of God, any, anything like that.

29:39It just says, finally, what exists or truly exists is something, it may be very primitive. It may be evolving under some sort of instinctual law or something, and that gives rise itself to, and to the material. And that's, to me, that's exactly what it felt like when I had this experience. Yeah. And, and the, I mean, I, not to get into why I'm interested in this, but, you know, I was, I experimented with psychedelics when I was young, I'm 70 now.

Psychedelics and the Dissolution of Self

30:20And it, it very much informed my view of the world, or view of reality, or view of, you know, the civilizations, structures, and all of that. How is that? What's that? I mean, how is that, in what way? Well, just in the way that you're describing the breakdown of, of a sense of self and, and understanding, not a logical understanding, but the feeling that everything in the universe is all one thing.

31:04And so you're all made of the same stuff. Yes. And, and so what, what, what, what interests me about reading about your research, you, you identify in the Crick work, or maybe it happened after the Crick work, the, the areas of the brain responsible for the sense of self, for the experience of the self. Yeah. And could it be that, that, that psychedelics in that self organizes perception in a way that you can operate in the world, manipulate the world.

31:41Yeah. But if you remove that sense of self, which you have a physical correlate, then you're, you're without that structure. And that gives you the feeling of oneness. But could it simply be the suppression of the self and, and the resulting experience? Yeah. Rather than a, yeah, go ahead. Yes. So physicalists would say, okay, great, great that you had this experience.

32:12Congratulations. But it's ultimately, it's just your brain in the case of psychedelics. Yeah. So it's your brain on drugs. Okay. So all it teaches us that brains can reach extraordinary states. Now, if we just stay with that for a moment, what is still extraordinary are the fact that many of these experiments can be very transformative in a positive, almost always in a positive way. You know, we know this going back from psychedelics, going back to the research at John Hopkins, where people that have stage four cancer that, you know, where medicine has given up, we can't really do anything anymore.

32:47They're terrified of dying. They, they get a high dose psychedelics and then they totally transform themselves. It doesn't cure them of the cancer. They will still die, but they're not willing. They have this completely transformed psyche. And we know, for instance, you know, there are hundreds of clinical trials, both here and abroad doing psychedelics for, you know, treatment resistant depression, major depressive disorder, generalizing, PTSD, et cetera, et cetera. And we know through these questionnaires, MEQ 30, the mystical experience questionnaire, that the extent to, to which people have a mystical experience in these trials directly correlates to the extent that they derive therapeutic benefit.

33:30So in other words, it's quite likely when that patient who's depressed has a mystical experience, in this case induced by psychedelic, no matter the underlying metaphysics will help them and they will, they might fall out of, they might not even score as a depressed anymore. You know, not immediately afterwards, you know, this is not an instantaneous effect, but then you think about it, you, you know, you cannot help. I mean, you must probably still, Craig, think back about your experience, right? That you had 50 years ago.

34:00So, because you constantly think about it and, and, and you talk with other people about it, you read about it. Maybe you have a therapist and you talk to them about it and slowly it changes your entire life and your attitude, your motivation. So independent of the metaphysics, the fact that an experience typically lasts under an hour. That's, you know, you can't really control very well, right? Can have this transformative experience itself is, I mean, you know, nothing short of miraculous. It's even more challenging to think about when you have near death experiences.

34:35So near death experiences are very similar in character to these mystical experience. People have showed that. And these are, of course, typically occur in a highly traumatic circumstances. So for instance, you have an in-hospital cardiac arrest, right? Or you're, you're near drowning or on the battlefield or a car accident where you bleed out. So these are, you know, but all of our knowledge, they should be massive causing massive trauma. But instead people radiate this equanimity and they're content. They say it's the most meaningful experience I've ever had in my life.

35:08It totally changed my attitude to my loved ones. So no matter what the underlying metaphysical implications are for first, they are very, they're among the most meaningful and profound experiences in that we know of, period. Yeah. Independent of what you think about it. Yes. But then there are these two obvious interpretations. One is, okay, ultimately it's just your brain, nothing else, move, nothing else to see, move on, move on, nothing to see. Or you can say, no, what happened in those circumstances? And that's the road I'm trying to, I'm going down.

35:41Somehow your own, you, so usually we are, we are, we have this boundary between my consciousness and your consciousness. I don't experience you directly, right? Yep. To find out how you feel, I have to ask Craig, how do you feel? And you can be with your partner, your wife or your spouse. You can, your bodies can physically penetrate, but you still don't know what she is or he is thinking. Ultimately, all you have is their words and their gestures, right? It's always indirect. So we live in a world where we each have our own planets, if we want, our own bubbles.

36:16But under certain circumstances, this boundary becomes dissociative or becomes sort of dissociates, you know, dissolves. And suddenly you can, you now become part of this greater reality. That's my, that's my interpretation. And the question is, is this compatible with some currents in modern physics, where, you know, given these weird quantum effects and entanglement, contextuality, etc.

36:46And the fact that even, you can't even define whether things exist without them interacting and being observed. Well, to what extent are these, are this interpretation compatible with some of these foundational physics? About, I don't know. I'm talking, I'm talking a lot to these physicists. I organized a workshop on this topic, etc. To see, can they be reconciled? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Neural Correlates and Brain Structure

37:14So, I mean, there's the physicalist view. And what I'm hearing is that in your correlate work, your work on the correlates of consciousness, what neurons in the brain fire to correlate with certain mental states, that you just cannot close that gap between the physical and the experience.

37:45And so you offload it to, it's a fundamental property, and these complex neural mechanisms somehow can capture that fundamental property. And, but I guess my one question off that, do we know yet, or at least broad brush, which parts of the brain consciousness depends on?

38:20Well, okay. So it depends on many things. It depends on your heart. You know, if your heart doesn't beat, you will faint within 10 seconds, approximately. Yeah. So we know that. It depends on mechanism in the brainstem. And we know small strokes in the brainstem can render you dead or in coma where you're totally unresponsive. But as far as we can tell, you know, given what that we can see, these complex scenes that I see right now, given that I can hear and, you know, be conscious of so many different things.

38:55That is a property of the outermost layer of the brain, the cortex, you know, which is really, it's, it's a, it's a sheet like this, you know, like a cloth, like two to three millimeters. So it's like a pizza, 12 to 14 inch pizza, that thickness. And you have two of them that highly convert, you know, highly convolved and convoluted. And they crammed into my left and my right hemisphere. In particular, it seems to be the back, the back part of that structure that seems to give rise to seeing and hearing and touching and wanting, which are the, there's the modalities that we understand best.

39:34But that's under both, again, that's independent of whether you're a physicalist or an idealist, because we can be, I think it's clear, the evidence shows that if you don't have these parts of the brain, you're going to be in severe trouble. Or we can predict, I mean, Oliver Sacks wrote about the 30 years ago, depending on which part of cortex are gone, you will have specific deficits, like you are unable to see your face. Although, you know, you can perfectly well see the eyes and the nose and the hair, but you don't, you don't have that conscious experience of a face anymore because he lost the neurons that convey that.

40:08So in that sense, we, there are footprints and you can track them and you can identify them. The question, are they the, do they give rise to consciousness or, you know, did you, is it, what is the nature of the substrate or do you need a substrate at all? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's why I was so interested in, in Penrose and Hamroff's theory, because they were trying to pinpoint a mechanism in the neurons of the brain that would channel or in which there would be some quantum effect.

40:49And, and then you could offload consciousness to, to, to the quantum realm.

Quantum Biology and Microtubules

41:00How do you feel about that, about the microtubules? Well, leaving aside the microtubules, I think that's extremely speculative. And Roger Penrose is the first to admit that. Let's take the more general question. What do we know about quantum mechanics and consciousness? Well, we can even ask the empirical question. Is there any evidence that quant, that large scale microscope, microscopic quantum events are relevant to biology? Let's put it that. Okay.

41:30So clearly the creatures like me and you and dogs and trees are subject to the same laws of quantum mechanics, just like anything else. Right. But of course they operate, unlike if you go, for example, to quantum, to Google, to quantum computers, like Google makes them, they operate at 27 milli Kelvin. Okay. So zero degree milli Kelvin is absolute zero. No more molecular motion. We live at, you know, roughly, you know, 270. We live at 300 degrees Celsius, 300 degrees above that.

42:03Right. Unimaginable cold is vastly colder than outer space because outer space is four degrees Kelvin, right? The background radiation. So you need extreme isolated environments, extreme vacuum to eliminate all this motion, the jostling of the molecules and the atoms that would eliminate these quantum mechanical effects. Given that biology on this planet evolved in what physicists would call a warm and wet environment, you know, with lots of water. Yeah. The vast majority of people, of, of biologists and physicists argue, okay, biology, quantum mechanics simply isn't relevant for biology in general.

42:41Yeah. There are some special effects, like maybe where light meets the photons in your photoreceptors, but by and large, all these large scale, particularly like superposition and collapse thing, those things don't matter. So I have a collaboration with a bunch of people where we try and very hard to show empirically that there are these, that there are quantum effects, that things like nuclear spin do matter for biology. And there's some tantalizing evidence that we could go into, but it gets very technical about such, such hypothesis.

43:19But so far the verdict is still, there's so far not, not a believable reproducible experiment that shows microscopic quantum mechanical effects in biology at room temperature. Yeah. I see. Yeah. Although it must be there. I mean, to manipulate quantum states, yeah, you need to, to super cool them, but that doesn't mean that, that quantum effects stop happening at room temperature.

43:50Well, except that you're right, but then they would immediately within 10 to the minus nine seconds wash out because, you know, everything is constantly vibrating. Yeah. You know, and, and so the, the, the, the way you operate quantum computers, you're in this incredible static environment where there's almost no more molecular motion and you can freeze it. And then you get the superposition given that, you know, our brains are in this state, any, any, any, any superimposed or entangled state would immediately within, you know, a nanosecond disappear.

44:24So that's the challenge. Is there now, are there special protected environments? I mean, evolution is very clever and evolution had a lot of time to select things and anything not, this is also Stu Hammerhoff's argument. I agree with that. Anything not ruled out by the laws of physics can in principle be exploited by, by biology in general and by neurobiology in particular. But right now we simply don't have any, any positive evidence for that. We and other people are trying, but so far it's still, uh, nothing too convincing.

44:58Yeah. One thing that fascinated me in, in one of your talks, you, you talked about, uh, that, uh, under psychedelics, the, the, uh, com, is it the complexity or the electrical impulses slow down? In, uh, in the brain, uh, where you would expect it to do the opposite? Well, there's actually some evidence that the complexity slightly increases.

45:30Mm-hmm. This perturbational complexity, the, uh, or Lempelziv actually under, um, magic mushrooms increases, um, um, um, in the brain. But on the other hand, you know, if you think back your own experience, you know, noise, for example, you know, if you just look at, well, you and I are old enough that we still remember television when they went off air. Right. When there was a speck of noise. Right. Well, that's highly complex. That's very complex, but it's not very meaningful.

46:00But the fact is our experiences on a psychedelic can be incredibly meaningful, right? As I said, as we said before, they can be the most meaningful of your life. So it can't quite be that, well, okay, just sort of frozen some, some more noise, some more complexity. Uh, so I think we, we're still very early on in terms of the neuroscience of psychedelic, despite what press announcement keep on promising. We're still in very, very early days. We still don't understand, uh, what they do to the brain.

46:31Yeah. Let, let me ask again, going back to integrated information theory, that's, is there a correlate to that in the brain that you have all these different structures of the brain that are cooperating, but operating independently. And, and, but they're, they're integrated and that that's necessary for consciousness. Is that, am I?

47:01Yeah. In fact, that's why, so for instance, if you ask me where most of the neurons, 80% of your neurons are here in the back in a little brain called the cerebellum. Okay. That's where 80% disc, this, this cortex has roughly 16 billion. This in the back of 69 billion of the 80 and the, all the rest is only 1 billion. But it turns out they're not very integrated. They're organized in two dimensional slabs and they have primarily feed forward loops.

47:32So, you know, where, like in a deep, uh, in an LLM where one stage excites the next stage, excites the next stage. It has massive feedback, which I think is precisely why the, if you lose the cerebellum, it's not good for you. You know, when you go to the doctor to do these sorts of tests, right, that's when, that's when you test for a cerebellar function. You look like you're drunk, you, you know, you tumble about your speech, your slurred, etc. So the cerebellum is there to do sensory motor coordination among others.

48:02But, but people never complain that if lesion in the cerebellum never complain about loss of consciousness. So it doesn't seem to do it empirically. It doesn't seem to relate to, to consciousness because it's not very well integrated. And this is really what cortex does because of its very dense connectivity. that's, uh, that's feedback and excitatory, a small world connectivity, rich hubs, etc., etc. That's why I think cortex is, uh, is the, the, the, the substrate that in, in us, um, gives rise to this very high degree of,

48:35particularly in adults, in normal, typical adults give rise to people like you and I who are very conscious. Yeah, uh, the, um, you know, when I was younger and paying more attention to this than I have been in the last 30 years,

Split Brains and Isolated Consciousness

48:55because I had a different career, uh, the split brain, I did a lot of reading about the split brain. Yeah. And to me, naively, uh, that age that settled it for me. Well, that's the end of dualism that, uh, you know, you split the brain, you have two consciousness, consciousnesses, more or less opaque to each other. Yes. And how do you, uh, reconcile that with, uh, with, with the idea that, uh, consciousness is a fundamental property that.

49:34It's still just so, well, I mean, so in general, there's a question leaving aside for a moment, split brains. I don't right now access your conscience. I don't access this universal consciousness, mine at large, as Huxley said, right? Assuming it exists. Why is that? Well, because typically in order for me to survive, I need to care, you know, evolutionary. I need to worry about me and my genes and my kids. Right. Well, that doesn't work. If I feel I'm one with everything. Right. Evolutionary. I mean, that's a wonderful feeling, but that doesn't give rise to competition that you need.

50:06Right. Cause I need to struggle. My genes need to survive it to make it into the next generation. So there are lots of reasons why, why my consciousness is isolated from this universal consciousness. Uh, Schopenhauer's beautiful metaphors. These ripples or this wave, you take a ocean, think of it like mine at large or universal consciousness. It's this gigantic ocean. And there's this little eddy. This eddy has existed for 69 years and, you know, maybe, you know, God willing, it'll exist for another 10 or 20 years.

50:38But ultimately this eddy will merge, will become, you know, will, of course, disintegrate, will lose its identity. It's egoic consciousness will be gone forevermore. And it, it returns to, to the ocean. And so that's also why you and I, you know, you are an eddy and I'm an eddy. And, and we don't have access directly to each other. But on a certain condition, these mystical experience, somehow, possibly when the brain's activity is turned very, very, very low due to psychedelics,

51:08because we know psychedelics depress a lot of activity, you might be able to access this, this sort of more universal. But usually you do not. And so now we come to split brain. What's I, I grind to, so these were done at Caltech, right? By Roger Sperry, you got the Nobel Prize for them. You take a brain, you cut it along the midline here, the, the corpus callosum, 200 million fibers. And then you have two, two consciousness. This one speaks, this one can sing and hum, but it's also conscious. And although, as you said, they are opaque, although they sit, the brain sits, you know, one centimeter away from the other,

51:42they don't know about each other. They may as well be at the dark side of the moon. And there are all sorts of conflicts that you can see in the clinic that arise because of that. So each one has its own dissociative boundary that dissociates it from its neighbor, just, you know, just one, you know, a tiny, tiny gap away. But that's the expense of all of our lives. I'm isolated from you and from any other conscious. And it's only under special circumstance that we can lose this dissociative boundary and access everything else.

52:15So that the split brain wouldn't really make that more challenging than just to explain in general. How is it, if mine is truly universal, why don't I access it all the time? Yeah. Yeah. So, so the, the, you, you split the substrate and, and it channels two separate. Well, now you have, because now you have two smaller brains effectively. That's what you're having. Yeah. You have two smaller cortices. You can't do it in, you know, you can't quarter it.

52:46You can't do it indefinitely. You can only bisect it in, in, in this way. Yeah. You have two independent, you have two independent related experience that we know very little about it is conjoined twins. Right. There are some, it's a very rare occurrence that, that like Siamese twins, but that twins are connected at the level of, of a brain. There's one case I know in, in here north of us in, in British Columbia, where they share part of their brain.

53:18And it may be under those circumstances that, that particularly during sleep, when the, when the, when the, when the boundaries may be down, they may be able to access each other. It's a rather strange case. And the other case may be, um, multiple personality disorder, you know, DID, Density Dissociation Disorder, where there may live various personalities inside one brain where they have managed to build typically, uh, to deal with massive emotional, sexual, or physical trauma.

53:50They, these people deal with that by having these multiple personalities. And we know they can have different memories. They can have even different immune states. They can have different memories of, for infections, et cetera. So there you have a case where you have to, so where the, the brain due to had to adapt to traumatic circumstances did dissociate. Because typically they don't co-exist, right? These, these different personalities, they, they go over time, but they don't exist at, at the same point in time.

54:21So the question is that more like what happens in every day? I don't know. There are lots of interesting questions and lots of research you could do.

Artificial Intelligence and Simulation

54:29Yeah. And I want to go just end on, uh, artificial intelligence and the current, uh, complex, uh, large language models. Jeff Hinton, who I've had several times on the podcast, uh, is speaking. And, and he, and he has for a long time, as soon as LLMs came out, I talked to him and he believed that there was understanding. He was saying at that time, now he's using the term consciousness.

55:02Why could, uh, complex, uh, set of artificial neurons not have experience? And I know that you don't believe that they can. Well, it's, uh, in principle, yes, of course it can. Once again, the brain is just a regular piece of matter. And, you know, silicon is another piece of matter. So a priori, there's nothing. It's not that this is supernatural somehow, right?

55:33A special property that the other one doesn't have. And in fact, were you to build what's called a neuromorphic computer? Yeah. So computer. Okay. So that, that computer, if it's truly has our sort of constitution, like my brain or your brain, it would be conscious. But, but IIT sort of, it's not a functional theory. So functional theory, the majority of scientific theories of consciousness are functional says, well, the brain consciousness has a certain number of functions, whatever they are. And once you reproduce these functions, even in a universal Turing machines, then all the properties will come with it, including consciousness.

56:10Yeah. So sooner or later, you know, entropic either will be conscious or is already conscious, you know, Claude. And you can argue, well, maybe not quite because there's still this one missing gadget, you know, whatever. But at least according to the IIT, within IIT, you can formally show using formally mathematics and models of von Neumann digital machines that have very low connectivity. They're essentially much more like a series of feed forward networks.

56:40Yeah. They're not, they don't have this heavily interconnected character that cortex has. So you can formally show that you can have two networks, you can have a model of a brain and an LLM or something like an LLM or von Neumann machine simulating an LLM. Although functionally, they have the exact same transformation from input to output. One will have a lot of causal power, will feel like something. The other one will not feel like something because experience, according to IIT, has to do with the structure, the causal powers inherent in a mechanism.

57:16And that really depends on the way it's wired together. You have to look under the hood. According to IIT, you can't just do it like a Turing-like test, like ask it a bunch of questions. And if it gives me the right answer, then I can say check mark. No, I have to open the hood and look at the underlying hardware. But of course, you could argue it's immaterial because many people already today, right? There are millions of people who have them as their friends, as their girlfriends, you know, use them as therapists. So practically speaking, people seem to behave like they're conscious.

57:49There's something about, you say that what counts in a computer is the transistors opening and closing gates. I think that was you, not the pattern. IIT is a causal theory. It's really concerned with causal powers. And you have to look at the causal power of the actual machine, which means you have to go to the CPU sitting in the cloud and analyze the flow of the sort of the causal flow of, you know, electrons going down the, you know, going in the valence band and the copper wire going on the gate of a transistor opening that, etc.

58:28It's not. Let me give you a really good metaphor. Today, we can perfectly well simulate Einstein's equation of general relativity that described the central sun at the center of our galaxies in Sagittarius A star. Okay. It weighs 3 million solar masses. It has 3 million solar masses. And so it's, it bends space time around it. So nothing can escape. I.e. it's a black hole. And you can simulate this. But funnily enough, when you turn on the simulation, you don't have to be afraid that it's going to suck you into that space time is going to distort around the computer doing doing carrying out the simulation.

59:09Well, why not? Well, people say that's a stupid question. It's just a simulation. Well, so it is with consciousness. Yes. Today, LLMs, like in this interview I did with Kasia, and he seemed perfectly seemed to be a very smart, very eloquent person. But that's a simulation. And simulation, you have, this is the difference between simulating something and actually physically making a difference to yourself. It doesn't have the causal power that the human brain has. And that, according to IT, makes all the difference.

59:41Yeah. And just, I mean, but what bothers me about, about that separation of, of the patterns and the information that the gates are processing. I mean, if you look at the gates, it's just a mechanism, but if you look at the pattern, that's, that's a meta layer. It's, it's, it's being executed by the transistors and their gates.

1:00:11But the pattern itself, I mean, it's, there's, James Gleick has a wonderful book, The Information. I don't know if you've read it, but that everything comes down to a code, to information. No, but the code is in your head. The code, when we talk like you and I, we are two conscious creatures. And so the coding metaphor makes, makes sense. There's no one to read them inside the machine. So the, the, this code metaphor. Yeah.

1:00:41To you and I, it might be a code because we're conscious creatures. We can look down at it. But the question is, does the machine by itself, is it meaningful? No. And all it does, it just takes whatever it gets and then it predicts the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. It does it amazingly well. I, I grant all of that. It's clearly passed the Turing test, but that doesn't mean it feels like anything. Yeah. Okay. Well, I've taken up more than an hour of your time. What, where are you going next? You're working on the quantum.

1:01:11Yeah. We're doing experiments on, yeah, that, that's one thing. I'm just really interested in it. Uh, I always thought the chances are very small and I still think the chances are very small, but the great thing about science and nature is if you ask the right scientific question to nature, you will get the right answer. Yeah. You will get an answer. And the, you know, this is what we claim with what it can tell us about nature. So that's the great thing. You have to design the right experiment to, to test this, but then you will get an answer one way.

1:01:44So we will know sooner or later, whether it's going to be on my watch or not. Who knows? Okay. Okay. Okay.