Exploring Extraordinary Subjective Experiences

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The chapter delves into various subjective experiences like near-death, mystical, and psychedelic encounters, discussing their significance and the disconnect from reality they entail. The speaker shares a personal consciousness-altering experience, emphasizing the need for firsthand understanding of such states. The discussion delves into the role of consciousness in perceiving and defining existence, touching on philosophical musings about perception and reality.

In Then I Am Myself the World, Christof Koch explores the only thing we directly experience: consciousness. At the book’s heart is integrated-information theory, the idea that the essence of consciousness is the ability to exert causal power over itself, to be an agent of change. Koch investigates the physical origins of consciousness in the brain and how this knowledge can be used to measure consciousness in natural and artificial systems.

Enabled by such tools, Koch reveals when and where consciousness exists, and uses that knowledge to confront major social and scientific questions: When does a fetus first become self-aware? Can psychedelic and mystical experiences transform lives? What happens to consciousness in near-death experiences? Why will generative AI ultimately be able to do the very thing we can do, yet never feel any of it? And do our experiences reveal a single, objective reality?   

Christof Koch is a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute and at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, the former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a former professor at the California Institute of Technology. Author of four previous titles — The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, and The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach — Koch writes regularly for a range of media, including Scientific American. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Shermer and Koch discuss: “subjective experience” • the author’s near-death experience changed him • the difficulties of materialism/physicalism • a fundamental theory of consciousness that explains subjective experiences in objective measures • designing a “consciousness detector” for unresponsive patients • why magic mushrooms and Ayahuasca are of so fascinating to neuroscientists • how our minds are shaped by our beliefs, prior experiences, and intentions • insights crucial to those suffering from anxiety, low self-esteem, post-traumatic stress, and depression. • the future of advanced brain-machine interfaces • why digital computers will never be conscious.