The Feeling of Life Itself, Koch

Last updated on 15 Jul 2022.

Review and notes on The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t be Computed, by Christof Koch.

1. What is Consciousness?

• Straightforward understanding - consciosuness is experience.
• Decartes - I think, therefore I am. Experiencing is the basis of being.
• Consciousness is prior to physics.
• Assertion: any experience is structured. Saussurean/structuralist approach to the textual nature of reality.
• An experience is informative, integrated, and definite; it has a point of viw and occurs in time.

2. Who is Conscious?

• Abductive reasoning - extrapolate backwards to infer hypotheses that fit the given data best.
• Psychologists can quantify phenomenology under laboratory conditions.
• Perception is an active process: construction of useful features.
• Phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness: what you experience and what you can report

3. Animal Consciousness

• We can abduce experiences to fellow mamamls.
  • Mammals are evolutionarily speaking very similar to us. Modern humans are genetically linked closely to chimpanzees.
  • The nervous system is very similar across all mammals.
  • The behavior of mammals is important to people.
• Experience without voice - language is not a prerequisite for language.

4. Consciousness and the Rest

• Most refined cognitive capabilities are not directly accessible to experience.
• Unconscious homunculus - we are not conscious of either raw sensory data or the highest processing stages of mind. We are instead sensor of the ‘in-between’.

5. Consciousness and the Brain

• Previously, we have associated consciousness with the heart. Only later did we understand the association with the brain.
• Neural Correlates of Consciousness - the minimal neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious percept.

6. Tracking the Footprints of Consciousness

• The brainstem enables consciousness. It is the central canal through which information is transmitted. Brainstem neurons enable consciousness by providing the cortex neuromodulatory substances.
• Losing the cerebellum does not affect consciousness, even though it maps the body and outside space onto its neurons. But it does not generate consciousness: it is feedforward.
• Consciousness resides in the cortex.
• Little evidence suggests the brain exploits macroscopic quantum effects.

7. Why We Need a Theory of Consciousness

• Experience cannot be explained by reductionist materialism, physicalism.
• Experience is the starting point from which I abduce all else.
• Philosophical zombies - can they exist? Sure. Consciousness is currently above science.
• Integrated Information Theory asks how matter must be organized to support the mental. It links ontology with phenomenology in physics and biology.
• Five phenomenologgical properties/axiomatics of Integrated Information Theory.
  • Intrinsic existence - it exists for itself
  • Composition - it is structured
  • Information - it is the specific way it is
  • Integration - it is one
  • Exclusion - it is definite
• Why should integrated information be experienced? Subjective feeling is completely defined by these five axioms.

8. Of Wholes

• Integrated Information Theory - consciousness arises from causal properties. COnsciousness is a property of a mechanism which has cause-effect power upon itself.
• The more a system’s components constrain each other, the more causal power we have.
• Intrinsic existence. Consciousness exists for itself, without an observer. It removes the ouitside observer: it exists. For you to observe something, it must be a difference which makes a difference. Only things with causal power exist.
• Composition. It must be structured in a recursive way, a structure is either an atomic or combines substructures.
• Information. It is the specific way it is: the state of the system is informative in that its effect on the future and where it came from the past can be analyzed.
• Integration. Integration equires a cause-effective sturcture to be irreducible. \(\phi\) represents the extent to which cause-effect changes if it is reduced along the minimum inofmration partition. \(\phi \ge 0\)
• Exclusion. Only the maximum set exists; all other overlapping subsets are not ocnsidered. Thus the graph corresponding to \(\phi^\text{max}\) is the most conscious one.
• Central identity: any experience is identical to the maximally irreducible cause-effect structure associated with the system in that state.

9. Tools to Measure Consciousness

• When language fails, how do we measure consciousness?
• Motor function vs cognition, measured by internal perception
• Gamma oscillations?
• Zip-and-zap

10. The Uber-Mind and Pure Consciousness

• Splitting a brain creates two conscious wholes. When the brain is split, the maximum information forms in each of the split networks.
• Brain-bridging and the Uber-mind: connections between brains would need to be abundant enough such that \(\phi^\text{max}\) occurs across the uber-mind.
• Neuronal hegemony

11. Does Consciousness Have a Function?

• Unconscious behaviors rule much of our life. Many important activities are performed without consciousness.
• Integrated Information is adaptive. A whole doesn’t have to be useful for it to be an expeirence. As such it does not subscribe to evolutionary teleologism. Experience has no function.
• Experiments show that artificial brain simulations increase in integrated information when regulated for fitness.
• Intelligence-consciousness plane - you can be conscious without being intelligent, and vice versa.

12. Consciousness and Computationalism

• Can we represent consciousness through computation? Many in the information age seem to think so.
• The Turing machine demonstrates that computation must occur in this simple state. So computation must also be written here. Can human biology and thought be expressed as a Turing machine?
• Computationalism is a variatn of functionalism - functionalism, the mind can exist apart from the body
• The brain-as-computer metaphor can be easily abused/misused.
• Cortical networks are not feedforward, but neural networks certainly are.
• Can we emulate the entire brain?
• Global neuronal workspace model of consciousness - neural correlates of consciousness appear relatively late after stimulus; attention is necessary for conscious perception/

13. Why Computer’s Can’t Experience

• The same networks can have different integrated information. Feedfoward networks have zero integrated information since they have no causality; recurrent networks have some causal information, but when unrolled they also have zero influence.
• Digital computers have miniscule intrinsic existence. A Boolean circuit, when simulated by a computer circuit, has very littel integrated information. And this is true for all networks and their simulations.
• Mind uploading: we cannot retain the causal relationships in the brain by simulating it all.

14. Is Consciousness Everywhere?

• Most animals have some level of consciousness.
• Consciousness is in the universe.
• Many, but not all things, have minds.
• IIT rejects group-mind; the whole has definite borders. The irreducible Whole forms my conscious experience, not the underlying neurons. It forms as an aggregative/joint operation.
• IIT’s exclusion postulate suggests that a group of beings cannot both be independently conscious and conscious as a group - the self-consciousness would dissolve into the whole.
• We must assert the feeling of life, of the ontological reality of phenomenology.