Christof Koch: The Future of Consciousness - Schrödinger at 75: The Future of Biology

[Music] physical scientists who become interested in biological problems a subset of them had difficulty embracing the evolutionary constraints and complexity of biology and this keeps them from really having an impact on the field of biology but the best ones engaged with the details of biology while still looking for understanding at the level that's expected in the physical sciences so Christof Koch who give the last lecture of the symposium is certainly in this latter group a one time physicist Christoph is now president and chief executive officer of the Allen Brain Institute which is having a transformative influence not only on computational neuroscience but also an experimental neurobiology so I was a PhD student in Caltech the california sea of technology when Christopher arrived in 1987 as nestin professor and Lee Lee hood was the head of department at that time so coming from tomaso pojos lab at MIT and also previously from the Max Planck Institute for bio cybernetics Christophe had very strong connections to the Terek tradition of physicists and biologists at Caltech a list that included Linus Pauling Seymour Benzer and particularly to max delbruck so not surprisingly Christoph fits seamlessly into this community so I'd like to show a slide which which is of Christoph and his kids which I discovered in my collection a picture that I took at a party in Max and Manny's Dell Brooks backyard about 30 years ago so it appears that interestingly that the first PhD student of one of the first to start working with Christoph was max delbruck son Toby del Brooke who sort of assures me that Christophe won't mind if I share this story with you so one Sunday morning Toby and I went over to the Romans bookshop in Pasadena looking for some novels to buy and he found Christophe in one of the aisles reading or looking at a rather thick book and he wandered over and Toby looked over shoulder and found was something about Heidegger and so Toby said oh Christophe is that is that fun and Christophe said hum you think this is fun and we sort of retreated at that point and and went and purchased our books and ten minutes later we came back and we found Christophe we had no no opposite no opportunity avoided we had to walk past him again we found him still looking at his book but muttering under his breath fun so so at a visceral level we realized that while we were out there looking for a spot of entertainment we had actually interrupted an intellectual animal that is kill so while why it was attending to its hunger for information and slaking its thirst for deep understanding so perhaps a formative influence for Christophe at Caltech was his membership in the Helmholtz Club in Southern California an outfit that I think has had an enormous influence in cognitive neuroscience so it was founded in the 1980s by Francis Crick who was both patron and founding pillar and it included people with expertise going all the way from Europe anatomy neurophysiology to engineering so some of the members include vs Ramachandran John almond Terry Sejnowski john hopfield Carver Mead and Christophe and all of them shared an interest in understanding vision as well as cognitive functions that rely on visual perception and consciousness so this I would like to think influenced Christoph who had worked previously before Caltech in extraordinary depth on the biophysics of neurons assimilating action potential propagation and axons and dendrites so at Caltech he and his group became a major hub for the new computational neuroscience program which had just begun they simulated and modeled the properties of single neurons neural circuits and processes at increasingly higher levels of complexity so particularly stunning was his work showing how bottom-up mechanisms starting from sensory neurons in the retina could lead to the final assignment of visual salience that is to select out salient objects and selective attention in the brain so synthesis of this work he wrote but this postdoc Lawrence 80 is among the most cited papers in the field of attention so in addition to influencing several really great neuroscientist who ran through his lab I know several terrific young scientists who attribute their research direction now to the methods and computational neuroscience summer in the summer course in the marine biological labs in Woods Hole and also to the to the neuromorphic engineering summer school in Telluride Colorado that christoph started and and initiated some twenty twenty twenty-five thirty years ago and have still been held every year since so despite all of this various contributions as christoph has made he is now best known or probably most visible for his work on consciousness he writes a regular column for Scientific American called consciousness Redux and he's also written several books including most recently consciousness confessions of a romantic reductionist so before I end I'd like to show one more slide exactly two slides down and this is of this is of Christoph not so many years ago doing a hugely impressive Tyrolean Traverse high above Yosemite Valley so I think this picture serves as a metaphor for sure engineer and for Christoph both of whom seem compelled with the courage and desire to take a leap and explore the biological unknown while Steve's still staying connected to Earth by the steel legs made of fundamental physical science so to deliver the 2018 Schrodinger lecture entitled the future of consciousness please welcome Christophe Kok thinking off-limits whoa what a day so I'm a neuroscientist and we have a technical expression in the field that says my brain is full when you just have to listen to so many awesome lectures over the last two days I've also noted and I have a private suspicion maybe one of the reasons I was invited here I seem to be the only one who correctly can correctly pronounce the name of the physicist in whose honor we here now you can all speak after me it's a ravine Schrodinger with a navin an umlaut all right so I am I have the challenge of talking about not only about consciousness but the future of consciousness so I'm just gonna briefly define it a lot of people claim it's very difficult to define it's actually very easy to define because it's any possible experience any experience like this one you're looking at something I'm looking out at you you're looking back at me that's an experience if you remember tomorrow that's an experience if you now you know your your back is beginning to hurt because you're you you've been sitting here all day that's another experience if you think if you cast your mind back what was some of the previous points or slides that have a viewer showed that's an experience you can be aware that you're having an experience that says that's a particular class of experience called self-consciousness but it's just a small subset of the much larger universe of all possible experiences you can think about yourself and most interestingly at least for some of us you can have what Buddhists call a naked awareness pure experience she experienced when you are for instance in a in an immersion tank or particular types of meditation when you're conscious so you know to sleep you're conscious but there's no content there's no desire no dream no no fear no ego no no sensory messages but you're still conscious pure consciousness very interesting so I've divided this talk into three sections the past the present in the future so the past so much of what certainly what I learned in the in philosophy can be dated back it can be sort of goes back to the Greeks the ancient Greeks particularly dispute between the first and still one of the most influential philosophers of scientists or biologists he was all three of them Aristotle in the meeting in the middle who points downward and Plato who points upwards and in the number of times ideas I'm gonna refer to iris total because he not only thought about Bohr how to define biological creatures he thought how to define parts and whole he had very interesting ideas about the about the soul and about the critical role of causal powers to explain existence of anything whether it's external existence or internal existence like my experience so the the from my point of view the most the most relevant and also the most famous deduction in Western thought is of course the pawns don't really by Rene Descartes that he formulated roughly three and fifty years ago he used this you know he was in this mindful of doubting and if everything and he wanted to ascertain to himself what is it that he could not deny what is it what was a few facts that were two beyond any doubt and the only thing he could conclude because he was conscious he expands on this later on on this Japanse it's later on of course translated into cogito ergo sum on modern language I am there I'm calm I'm conscious therefore I exist it's that because he had conscious experiences he could be deluded about the nature he could be like neo remember neo and matrix who is of course totally deluded at first because he thought he lived in a real world where in reality was he was stacked in his double D battery by the by by these aliens but the fact that neo had expenses could not be doubted - he he existed and you can go back and find earlier statements of this in st. Augustine or in even in Aristotle he also introduced us to a way of the thinking that's nothing very productive but it's been very very powerful for the past 150 years namely what we today refer as Cartesian dualism the idea is that in everything everything the existence falls into one of two categories either it has extension it's physical stuff extensa or has or its mental stuff let's go get tons and famously he of course argued that only humans have it that animals are pure machines and human have their special thing this cognitive stuff and this entire way of thinking about about the the the the the world of the material in the world of the mental has not been very productive in terms of a well on the one hand it's led to the spectacular origin of physics so it has been very successful but in terms of trying to understand the mind-body problem it's been it's been disastrous the main problem was this view of thinking about the mind is that how does the mind this ineffable thing interact was matter so it's a it's a very uneasy marriage of two things that don't really interact with each other so that's always been the in the problem now I like many of us so I got my copy of the book where and this is the original copy I bought in 1977 when I was an undergrad I was terrible in the influence by it and in fact he in this book that two books one is mind and matter a series of lectures he he vote in nineteen fifty fifty six there were published 1958 he makes two very relevant comments one is this the strange fact that on the one hand all of our knowledge about the world around us both had gained in everyday life and that revealed by the most carefully planned and painstaking lab experiments rests entirely on immediate sense perception while on the other hand this knowledge feels to reveal the relation of the sense perception to the outside world so that in the picture model we form of the outside world guided by our scientific discoveries all central qualities are absent what he means to say by that that experiences prior to physics the way the only way I access anything is through my experiences and for my experiences I abuse it's a process of it's a deductive probabilistic inference that people today call abduction I abuse the existence of an external world because I do not have direct access to this external world all i hack cess to is the pain the mechanical sensation of the external world right so I do see of an external world including the existence of other people and stars and dogs and atoms and viruses and black holes and whatnot but that's all indirect it's a very powerful abduction but it's indirect the only thing I know for certain has access to as direct acquaintance with my my you know this picture in my head the sounds inside my skull my all my my Larry's feelings and so if we want to achieve a complete picture if we want to have a complete scientific view of the world not just of the external world of black holes and viruses and in quantum mechanics and all the good stuff but also Mike my own consciousness we have to reconcile those two those two aspects of our of our world and this was very much the program that that Francis Crick and I am in embarked upon you heard Manny says so when I came to Caltech in in in 1986 I very quickly fell in with with with Francis Crick and we had a very productive 16 year long very intense relationship including publishing 20 papers he gave me this tie that I'm wearing in his honor it's a it's a DNA tiles it's made by the artist niki de san father and that is francis gift one of his gifts to me so the peasant so what we started at the time was sort of what today seems perfectly obvious it's a search for what people now call the NCC in your own correlates of consciousness so here you are walking in the world you see a dog you become conscious of the dog and something has to happen in your body not only in your body we now know in since four-night years roughly it's in your head not just anywhere in your head but particularly in your cerebral cortex something has to happen you know and and so what has to happen we call it because we're careful scientists and your own college of consciousness and so we can I in order for you to see to have this particular person and you can ask for instance what is common about the percept of a dog here and a dog there or dog here and a dog here or dog and a cat and what's common between the the NCC for seeing a dog versus hearing a dog bark or close - imagining my dog right these are all deficit these are all different conscious experiences and we can ask what is common is it always the same neurons that are active consciousness neurons like or is it a particular mode that neurons operate in a particular mode like you know the body hurts or they all synchronize these are all various proposals people have made and how do they relate to the different sensory modalities what happens if you for example have a loss of consciousness like if you have a specific stroke and you lose a particular class of percept focus um you're unable to see color unable to see motion what happens in in animals what happens on an anesthesia so this search for the NCC is a very viable search program that you can carry ordinate that people have many many people now do so this is how we define it it's a minimum neuronal mechanisms that are jointly sufficient for anyone conscious percept and it's a causal note so for every conscious percept there will be an NCC no matter how to's you know if you think you live in late-stage capitalist society and you really have a feeling for that while there's going to be some neural mechanism you can and it's a causal notion because if you induce the NCC for instance using optogenetics of the type pioneered by cowardice of you will induce a perception conversely if you inactivate the NCC again by optogenetics or drugs or TMS or some other device you will eliminate the NCC and therefore you'll eliminate the the conscious person so it's a it's a it's a it's a research strategy for doing a whole bunch of research in humans using primarily non-invasive tools like brain scanning and eg in Emogene all these other things and in people and in animals using invasive technology so this is for example this is a typical experiment I flash up very briefly this this faint face only let's say 50 milliseconds and half the time you see actually a face and half the time you don't for various factors intrinsic to your brain probably because it says it's a noisy system and so now you couldn't collect all the time when you saw the face you push a yes button you collect all the times when you didn't see it and you do a contest between those two brain states and then you can for example see here in this cartoon you can see a set of cortical areas so-called exercise cortex fusiform gyrus and and and prefrontal cortex that are active now of course you have to be very careful the art of the experiment is that there are many possible confounds one confound is pressing the button maybe this response is just because I press the S versus no so you have to control for that you have to control for attention attention is not the same as consciousness as we now know you can attend to things that you don't see you can attend to invisible things you have to control for that you have to control for the task you have to control for the fact that the person sitting there and having to remember which button to press all those things here you have to control for but this is the ingenuity of modern neuroscience cognitive neuroscience people can do all of that and then you can do a different experiment where you just can't contrast being conscious let's see you line the magnet your eyes are closed you're not thinking of anything particular versus being for example in deep sleep stage 3 or anesthetized and then again you can look at the differences this is done much more in the clinic the first one is sort of more done in the lab and you're conceptually you have to distinguish these the the causal factors that you can direct consciously manipulate to induce a phase percept to make you believe there's a phase there one actually you don't do it which neurosurgeons can do by now stimulating particular regions in the fusiform gyrus with electrodes that they have put there because they need to monitor onset of epileptic seizures for more general arousal factors we know there's a number of things that have to be go on for you to be capable of any of having any experiences your heart has to beat we know if your heart doesn't beat within 10 seconds you faint your line has to pump air into your into your into the lungs and you know endow oxygen to the red blood cells otherwise again very quickly you become unconscious there's a whole bevy we now know it's a very complicated set of 40 or 50 different nuclei with different specific neurotransmitters have to be active in the brainstem that's a tube like two inch long maybe a little bit less than an inch thick that is absolutely essential for conscious life or for regulation for all sorts of thing if you have stroke there it's typically bad news you can have a stroke in context and lose specific aspects of conscious perception like you can lose a class of of having body ownership of seeing colors or something but if you lose something down if you have a stroke in the brainstem your your you typically are unconscious so what the what this tells us that here these mechanisms are necessary for consciousness but they're really back on condition this is not where this is not where the content of consciousness has provided the colors the sound that make up a lived life they provided upstairs by a structure I'll talk to in a second in a minute so we know there are whole bunch of parts of the neural system that do not give rise to conscious that are not NCC that's very interesting because we can then ask well where's the difference the spinal cord so we know this right this is a Superman actor who had a stroke from a quadruped here so I noticed oh yeah he took a fall and he was paralyzed for the rest of his life Christopher Reeves he was fully conscious and we know this from lots of of such accident victims that you can lose the 200 million neurons down here your life has changed forever but your conscious perception doesn't change so wherever the mechanisms are that give rise to consciousness they're not here they're not in the I artists pointed this out in the 19th century you do not see with the eye you see with your brain there are many reasons for this one of them is for example we know we have a blind spot yet we don't see the blind spot the we we constantly moved our eye three to four times every second yet your your vision is very perceptive it's very stable it's really a job bye-bye higher order sent us not by not by the retina then there is most striking structure at the back of our brain called the cerebellum the little brain ironically it carries more nuance than anywhere else so 80% of all yourselves 80% plus of all your neurons are in the cerebellum the cerebellum has some of the most glorious neurons ever I mean poking yourself there freaking awesome there this coral shape beautiful beautiful morphology even I not working a cerebellum have to admit they are the most beautiful cells they have very complicated internals spike dynamics calcium dynamics they have the cerebellum as input Maps as output Maps it has all the stuffs that the rest of the brain has but if you lose bits and pieces of it I I was just recently talking to a neurological resident he just had a three months ago an operation where due to brain cancer the surgeons had to take out three by three by four that's a piece of that's a piece of cerebellum that's you know roughly this volume and I asked him I spent a lot of time talking with him where's the difference you know do do you have different experiences it's a character of your expensive and you see different you smell different you remember different you have a different self-consciousness no the main thing is he couldn't play piano anymore and you could only type very flow on his on his iPhone and we know that and there are some individuals like this lady in China who a very rare condition they're born without a cerebellum altogether and they're clearly conscious they have various other deficits it's not good to be born without a cerebellum but but they do not complain of loss of consciousness and again this guy this gives rise to the question well why not where's the difference many people think all conscience has just neurons sort of doing their stuff it happens automatically well it doesn't something else seems to be involved the key culprit is this piece of tissue it's a two-dimensional sheet I call a 2 plus epsilon dimensional because it expanded by evolution across probably 100,000 times in size from tiny itsy-bitsy nm eyes to a 14-inch pizza in us to 22 inch pizza in in whales the thickness hasn't changed so much so there you have it it's really a sheet a sheet of neurons the cortical sheet and it gives rise to a higher-order percept 2/3 to intelligence to reasoning and to consciousness we know this the character of the evidence that I won't discuss really in detail is lesion studies so we can infer with you have to be very careful about it for all sorts of reasons but people who come to the clinic and who lose particular bits and pieces of the brain and then have particularly a particular function that tells us something about the location of that function we also have strong causal evidence from stimulation since roughly hundred years or so neurosurgeons stimulate the brain using typically micro electrodes now sometimes more advanced tools like ultrasound and in magnetic pulses but traditionally with electrical pulses so we know we can stimulate conscious percept in particular parts of the brain and we cannot stimulate in other parts of the brain and then more recently I'll be it weaker from a from a from an evidentiary point of view it's correlational evidence from putting people in magnetic scanner I'm going to leave so this is typically the the bulk of my of my standard academic talks but this is just one slide and the only thing I want to want to tell you that all the evidence points toward the region that we call the posterior hot zone the back part of cerebral cortex has been critically involved when you're whether it's a visual percept whether it's an auditory percept whether it's a smarter sensory percepts have been best studied or whether it's a feeling of intentionality so particularly neurosurgeons have stimulated these part of this region and people get feelings of agency and of wanting to do things so the feel the feeling of I want to do this I want to do that you can induce that by electrical stimulation to this to the back part of the brains very interesting and of course this immediate rise to the question why here and what not here it's all cortex where's the difference very interesting question that we can we can talk about later people have also invented now tools to measure the presence or absence of confidence this is a very very recent development it essentially uses what it does it it zaps a brain with pulses of magnetic energy perturb the brain so think of a bell and you hit the bell with a hammer and you're now listening for the reverberations you you listen to the reverberation by placing eg put on the brain and then looking at the complexity of the responses and essentially it's called zap and zip you zap the brain and then you'll use the lamp as if compression algorithm that's just for the Nerds in order to test it is this patient conscious or not it's not easy to tell always in anesthesia because there's up to two to three percent of people who have so-called Awakening and anesthesia they can tell you that because separately they're paralyzed plus of course there are many patients who are in hovering somewhere between coma minimal conscious state persistent vegetative state where it's not really clear with us anybody home so it's really very important to develop such practical clinical tool to test for the presence of consciousness in humans this is now in various clinical stages being tried as well as trying to apply the same message to animals like monkeys and mice where you can was very precise spatial and temporal and genetic precision turn off specific parts of the brain on and off like again like dice off showed yesterday and then measure the presence or absence of consciousness by looking at the intact that the amount of differentiation and integration in the cortical sheet so it's done here in a clinical study now here you see two mammals I'm sorry Emma Emma is wrong the most interesting animals besides us of course not bats but dogs so I assume well I've yet to meet maybe this one here in the audience I've yet to meet a dog owner or cat owner who does not assume that their cat has experiences it's conscious we how do we abuse consciousness and others well it's an abductive process I really don't know that you're conscious all right I have to infer you could be a zombie but I infer this now I can't even use language always because if your baby I can't ask you if you had a stroke or you're severely demented I can't ask you but you could but you still seem to be conscious so same thing with with non-human animals we abuse consciousness in others because the behavior similar is not identical they have things like very complicated emotion we all know the emotional life of animals the brain architecture is so similar so I run an institute with 3.30 people we did an all staff meeting recently where showed him 12 pictures one after the other of cortical human cortical cells and mouse cortical cells I removed a scale bar even though these are many neuroanatomists and other people who everyday record from brain cells people are chance telling a little bit of a brain tissue from a mouse for many humans it's all but it's not the same but it's all very very similar we have more of it but of course other creatures like whales have even more of it we also all closely related the main difference is we have to language with a very sophisticated sense of self as adult not as kids and we have an overly developed sense of of importance particularly in the in the West where of course human exceptionalism has been its present very very strong it's different among for example if you hang out with Tibetan Buddhist so now this gives rise to a question this is a tree of life you've seen a number of them already this is a Hillis plot I prefer so the last Universal common I am organism Luca is here and all extant species every living species is outside here on this Tree of Life that of course has you know millions or so of leaves I only show a few the mammals we are here gorgeous bernese mountain dog that's all the mammals and from all the complexity of the behavior there's no shadow of a doubt that it feels like something to be a cat a dog and mouse it doesn't have the mouse doesn't have an inner voice like I do because it doesn't have language but it's there's no question it feels it sees its senses it can be afraid choose all the say manifestation and dog of course that's why we hang out with them because we have this close emotional bi-directional emotional affinity but of course there are lots of other complicated animals that have architectures very different these guys kovetz write amazing feats of memory very complicated cognitive function they don't have a cortex they have sort of an homologue structure called the Bulls but they don't have a cortex cephalopods they are totally separate parents invertebrates right if you just go on YouTube and look at some of the capability what octopus can do they're amazingly complex was amazingly complex brain even a humble bean I love bees they have it that in a tiny volume of an anagram they have more than a million neurons circuit density ten times higher than our circuit density that vastly complex nobody has ever ever sort of analyzed that that vast complexity they can waggle dance they have very comp if you remember how long it took you to found a house they can find a new nest in freeside in three days using three hundred Scouts it's if you look at it's an amazing complex computation that these guys are capable of they can recognize individual faces so based on their complexity of the nervous system based on the complexity of behavior it's very difficult to argue that these don't that they don't feel like something now once again they don't have a voice in their head but that's very different from saying that these are just automata which is what we particularly here in in the West sort of are led to believe they're just bugs then then of course it raises a question well what about animals what about all multicellular eukaryotes and then what about our lives so this is a principle that dates back to lightness Darwin was very fond of it right for evolutionary continuity there's nothing really unique in nature there's always great continuity across all phyla across all different animals well if you if you have that principle in fact the last book that Darwin world was on worms and it's somewhere in the book he says there is no Rubicon that separates simple teachers that are non sentient from creatures that are sentient it's a con total it's a it's a continuum so it sort of it goes back to this very ancient philosophical school called PAMP psychism pants like isn't everything is mind that that experience is much more widespread than we like to believe so yes it may feel like something to see some of those creatures those single-celled creatures that you saw on the various movies once again this idea doesn't say that they have complicated emotions or anything like that but it's the claim is it feels like something to be a worm and when you take the worm apart into its constituent component when it dies it doesn't feel like anything anymore that's the critical difference all right so let me come to to a two to the two dominant theories today so today if you go to consciousness meetings meet scientific meetings that are just about consciousness you find among scientists to glue two models one is called the global neuronal workspace it's particular associate here in Europe was Annette was standing in in in Peru in in in Paris so for they claim they work on the assumption that's relatively common particularly in they in Silicon Valley that consciousness is a particular type of information processing that it's a property of particular type of information processing in their case having to do with was globally broadcasting information which why it's called global work space you broadcast you want information information gets into the brain once it's globally available but it gets into the prefrontal cortex and it's sent to everybody that act in making it globally available that's that is what consciousness is okay so that's that's one theory and there's huge amount of literature I'm not going to discuss there's the other theory the other very popular theory called integrated information theory it's very different it takes sort of a much more fundamental Aristotelian point of view it says it's it's a mathematical theory so for any particular system it can compute certain quantities and it says ultimately any conscious experience any experience the same it said this doesn't really mean anything to you is identical to the maximal it essentially were what it says consciousness is causal power of the system upon itself it's an identity theory says that's what conscious experience is it's identical to into intrinsic cause cause effect power you can map every conscious experience on to intrinsic causal power of any system and nothing's left over and you can measure the quantity but not the quality of the of the irreducible of the system of the the using a measure called integrated information it's a number and it tells you how much a system exists for itself again it recalls at least to tell you notions of the whole verse versus some it's it's a very different animal from from global your own workspace and now I'll show you how these two different theory because this is the future so they're now conferences organized around this there's a attempt to try to find experiments to test different these different prediction of these two different theories so there number of prediction there number of very counterintuitive prediction that integrated information theory has that I've to admit I favor okay so that's so it predicts that that the the neural colleague of continents whatever days in a so and birds or in squids or in in B's it's going to be structures that maximizes integrated information it says that experiences very widespread in the animal kingdom that even single cells have some experience so if you look at a Paramecium or you know one of these or a single-cell organism that we only discovered you know 1628 or something even as small of these organism may contain 10 million proteins three thousand different types of protein vastly exceed the computational power of anybody's ever tried to model this and of course we don't have the knowledge of the you know of of the of the interaction of 5000 proteins you know in each of each present in in various numbers in a single cell so there's various complexity there even in individual cells that we're unable to understand at this particular point in the in the history of of science it makes some very interesting prediction that you can test in animals or potentially also in humans it makes a prediction there no group minds there's no collective minds you can do you can sort of do the inverse of split brain experiments or Mike Gazzaniga told you about about you know there is beautiful and X well these were experiments but conclusion based for when the neurosurgeon cuts to brain at one brain the two cortical hemispheres into to prevent spread of epileptic seizure from one to the other you can also do the inverse experiment right now it's only a thought experiment you can tube two brains like my brain and the brain of my wife at somewhere in the audience and we can try to connect our to each other and what the theory predicts as you increase some sort of the number of connections between my neurons and her neurons just like you add an artificial corpus callosum at some point apparently a properly at a point defined by the integrated information among between our two brains when that integrated information among our two brains exceed the integrated information my brain on her brain I will die Custer will disappear her conscious mind will disappear and there will be this new thing this new entity it's it's one mind but now it has four cortical hemispheres it sees the worlds of four eyes and four years it's one mind so it comes at the cost of individuality there's nothing perfect so in principle you can do this in in in animals and I'm sure people will will will do this so it's a little bit like the bark you know from from the Star Trek universe because this is exactly what happens in the Borg if you you know if Captain Picard if you know sort of is taken up by by the bog he loses his consciousness but he enlarges II the the consciousness of them of the whole IET predict say the existence of states of pure consciousness which is very interesting if you care about so called mystical States or if you care about meditation and it makes a very surprising predictions it predicts that the causal power the intrinsic causal power of brain of computers you have to look at the hardware it's not about software ultimately consciousness is is created if you want by by the intent by the ability of a system to influence its own state in the to be influenced by its previous state its past and to be influenced by its future State Espinoza had this beautiful phrase talking about the their pregnant was the future of their possibilities computers if you analyze them rigorously as you can do at the level of the gate given their architecture which is very different from the architecture of neurons have minimal cause effect power and the cause effect how they have they have is in doesn't depend on the software this has a few very surprising consequences I'll come to in my almost last slides so in a strict sense / I T experience has no function it's just part of the universe it's part of the fabric it's a it's a naturalist theory it says physics is incomplete physics describes only the relationship the extrinsic relationship the wave the wave physical systems feel from the inside that's conscious explained so the way my brain feels from the inside this the the maximum of cause effect power that is that's my experience and nobody would in physics would ask well what's the evolutionary function of electric charge however through evolutionary pressure and you can show this very nice with simulation with with using simulated life evolutionary pressure will lead to systems that have high integrated information because when you have high integrated information you can process complex information that comes in through your sensors much better so the important thing is and this is makes it very different from go from global your own workspace global in your own workspaces it's a theory about input-output transformation it's about computation it ultimately it's about behavior it's about function and it's about behavior I'd altum Utley global neuronal workspace says well ultimately it's a particular type of computation you take input you do something with it or you store do you make it globally available and then you control some output processes IIT it's not you don't you cannot compute your way to to consciousness you have to build it into the system it's about intrinsic cause-effect power so it makes some very different predictions so it's rather interesting where we have we now have two scientific theories of consciousness this one is a functional theory as I said it's very popular among the Silicon Valley cloud it has a particular NC C and you can debate is that the right one or the wrong one it does say very conclusively that one software implements this global broadcasting and you get sophisticated self monitoring then the machine will have experiences maybe not like us now it depends on the complexity of its sensory of its internal representation but it will experience something so just to give you one intuition why pariah tea so if you have somebody if you have a colleague she's an astrophysicist and she can simulate on their laptops you can write down in Python programming language the equation the nine equation that aniline Stanfield's equation of general relativity and she can predict that the the solar mass at the center of our of our galaxy they are ten to the six million solar masses will be a black hole in other words it'll it'll it becomes so powerful it twists space-time around it so much that nothing can escape not even light so that's why it's called black hole but funny you don't worry about her safety because in a sense well if it really simulates the gravitational why wouldn't she be sucked into her simulation I'd so this gives rise to the question that's really non-trivial where's the difference between the real and the simulated the claim is that my software running on this computer simulates the the situation of the black hole well but it doesn't have any it does there is some relationship between variables that are simulated in my laptop and the variables out there in at the center of our galaxy but the simulation doesn't have the causal power of gravity so therefore it's impotent it doesn't twist it doesn't it doesn't affect space-time around it same thing with consciousness we will come soon in our lifetime certainly in you in your lifetime of the majority of members of the audience will come to a place where there will be creatures like super evolved Alexis that can talk they can move they will claim they're conscious and they will simulate consciousness and they will insist that they are conscious but to use an idiom that somebody in the White House uses a lot it's all fake consciousness now you can build a there's nothing magic there's neck there's nothing Supernatural about the human brain if you want to get human level consciousness you have to build it into the architecture and people are doing that some people are doing that's called neuromorphic architecture and so you know this movie best science fiction ever played on a-- so you can ask you know these so these are poor taste if protagonist played Rana ex machina Ava and in West world where we can ask and ultimately the challenge of the next hundred years is we are going to be confronted with very very complex cognitive entities and this gives rise to the question to what extent are they conscious and this question is not just abstract but they have very concrete consequences I'm not talking about extension as whiskey I'm talking about the SQL consequences because we believe all of us believe as a society certainly that if you're conscious you get you have a special moral status the moral status of my refrigerator is very low I can do with it what I want nobody's going to get upset I can beat it with a hammer and nobody's that's my thing it's just an object but if I abuse my dog people will rightfully call the police on me now be shamed on public media why is that well because we believe the dog is conscious and therefore has certain rights and this can be justified on different grounds you can use extension as justification so you can see just for being because if you're conscious that's the only existence we're entitled to all right so we're book in there between two eternities in the only real existence we have is that as conscious being if we are zombies then it there's no life if I'm a zombie I don't experience life and for me that's like death there is no difference between being a zombie and being dead for me as a trinsic person for you externally of coffey is or you can see i'm sentient grounds any creature that doesn't want to suffer that doesn't want to end its life has some moral eyes or you can do it on the cognitive ground which is dangerous given the rise of these machines you can say well any machine that has my level of cognitive complexity that machine deserves special rights and so if functionalism is cool which you know it's still an open question then machines sooner or later will become conscious with all the attendant moral status and with all the challenges that's going to pose to us as as a society and if a different view of consciousness is to if it really requires causal power and even artificial general intelligence even if came super-intelligent would not have special newell moral standing you can just sort of click it off because you're not hurting anybody there isn't anybody home there to hurt it's just a sophisticated machine this of course will conflict with our innate desire I mean why movies like ex machina and in West world are so so appealing to us because of course William cute agency that's how we evolved we cannot but help when we see a beautiful person a beautiful woman in a movie even though we I mean that was the point about ex machina right there the what's-his-name keep any other in the nerd right he perfectly well knew she was a robot but he still fall fell in love with her and and and was manipulated so we'll see how it goes over the next century with that I'm gonna leave you with last quote again from a trading of mine in matter he says something that's not relevant was a necessary condition for the world to flash up to itself in the light of consciousness would it otherwise have remained a play before empty benches not existing for anybody that's quite properly speaking not existing I think it's a wonderful metaphor to and my talk thank you much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Trinity College Dublin

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Keywords: Trinity College Dublin, Trinity, TCD, University, University of Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

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Length: 48min 3sec (2883 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 20 2018