Famous Brain Scientist Loses His Mind
“I'm a seeker, I don't have answers,” says Christof Koch, one of my favorite scientists. In this photo he shows off a tattoo of “human cortical pyramidal neurons, based on a Ramon y Cajal drawing.”
HOBOKEN, MAY 22, 2015. -- I mean that headline literally, not snarkily. Christof Koch, one of the world’s leading consciousness researchers, has been experimenting with psychedelics, and in one trip he lost his mind, that is, his sense of himself as distinct from the rest of the universe. This month I zoom-talked to Koch, whose career I’ve tracked for decades, about his trips and what they mean. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation. Click this link to see the whole thing. – John Horgan.
A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
In 2020 Christof Koch inhaled 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, 5-MeO-DMT (also known as The Toad), a potent psychedelic. “At the third breath,” he says, “already space was fracturing into this hexagonal pattern, and there was this black hole that opened. I still remember my last thought: ‘Holy shit! I'm going to die!’
“And I did, it felt like death. I had this experience where there was no more Christof, there was no more body, but there was just this universe at large. Space had convulsed to a singularity, a single point, very bright. There was no time. There was no more boundary. A full-on mystical experience.”
This experience left Koch “totally confused” about the nature of reality. A mystical experience “has this noetic quality, right? And it has an authority over you. How can I make sense of this experience in light of everything else I know about the world and the universe?” Can you take mystical experiences seriously and “still be a rational scientist?”
IS MATERIALISM BALONEY?
To understand his psychedelic experience, Koch reached out to Bernardo Kastrup, a computer scientist and philosopher. Koch calls Kastrup an “unabashed modern idealist,” who thinks mind and not matter underpins reality. Kastrup, who has also taken psychedelics, defends idealism in the splendidly titled Why Materialism Is Baloney and other books.
Koch ended up tentatively agreeing with Kastrup that “what truly exists is only the mental.” Koch’s choice wasn’t strictly scientific. “If I don't have any better evidence against idealism than physicalism provides, which isn't very compelling to me,” Koch says, “then I'm going to be an idealist, because it enables me to live a happy, good life.”
He says, “I hope I haven't turned woo-woo.”
QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS
Koch has always doubted whether quantum effects underpin consciousness. “We don't have any convincing evidence that entanglement or superposition or nuclear spins are involved in biology, because biology is wet and warm.” Human consciousness involves millions of neurons. “How are you going to span vast areas of the brain while not losing entanglement, right? I'm puzzled.”
Koch still doubts a theory proposed by physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, which says consciousness emerges from quantum oscillations in cellular structures called microtubules. “I think it's unlikely that that particular hypothesis is true.”
And yet Koch’s trips have made him “much more willing” to entertain the possibility that quantum processes play some role in consciousness. “Evolution has been around for 3.8 billion years, and if there are quantum mechanical effects that natural selection can exploit, then it may well have found them.”
Quantum physics is “not my grandfather's materialism anymore,” Koch says. Conscious “observation” of a quantum system seems to affect its course by causing the “collapse” of the wave function, which describes the behavior of, say, an electron.
And perhaps the sense of cosmic unity that many mystics describe has something to do with entanglement. Particles “at opposite ends of the universe” can be entangled, Koch says, which means that observing one instantaneously determines “the state of the other one.” Spooky.
Koch is intrigued by research on xenon, a noble gas that serves as an anesthetic. There is evidence that different isotopes of xenon have different effects on consciousness. The isotopes “have different nuclear spin,” Koch says, “that have very different anesthetic potency. So if that's true, that would be a real head scratcher,” because nuclear spin is a wholly quantum effect.
Koch has been working with biologists to directly test these xenon results and other possible quantum processes in fruit flies and cerebral organoids.
INTEGRATED INFORMATION THEORY
Koch continues to defend integrated information theory, or IIT, invented by his friend neuroscientist Giulio Tononi two decades ago. The theory says consciousness emerges in systems whose components are interconnected in certain mathematically defined ways.
Many critics, including me, have knocked integrated information theory, but Koch stands by it. Most rival theories of consciousness don’t address consciousness, they “only deal with behavior” and cognitive functions associated with consciousness and not with our subjective, first-hand experiences. IIT attempts “to get at that subjectivity and try to understand why different subjective states are so distinct.”
IIT is a general theory of consciousness, not just a theory of consciousness in humans, and it makes specific predictions. For example, the theory “tells you precisely under which condition an anthill might be conscious as a whole rather than as a bunch of individual ants.”
IIT also addresses the increasingly urgent question of whether machines can be conscious. According to Koch, the information-bearing switches of conventional computers have limited interconnectivity, as defined by IIT. Hence “digital computers, including large language models [like ChatGPT], will never be conscious.”
Quantum computers are a different story. The information-bearing components of quantum computers “are fully interconnected, right? They're entangled, where every bit is entangled with every other bit.” That is why quantum computers, in principle, “are so much more powerful, right?”
Koch thinks the potential power of quantum computing can be explained by the many-worlds model of quantum mechanics, which says all possible outcomes described by a wave function unfold in different universes.
“A quantum computer is essentially a multi-world version of quantum mechanics. So you have one computer in 2 to the N universes. Each one is slightly different, and they all operate in parallel. And you can read out all these results. This is now engineering reality, we're not talking about metaphysics anymore.”
Koch’s “gut feeling” is that a quantum computer might be conscious. He has been discussing this possibility with Hartmut Neven, a VP of engineering at Google who heads a project to create quantum-based computers.
BRAIN CHIPS AND AI
Koch worries about the rapid development of conventional AIs like ChatGPT. “We're developing these creatures that are going to be as smart and soon smarter than us. And as we see in Ukraine, they'll be used for warcraft. So is this really a good idea? Is this really going to end well for Homo sapiens? What could go wrong? It's okay, we have the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to watch over us.”
In 2017 Koch proposed in The Wall Street Journal that we can “keep up with AI” by having devices implanted in our brains, devices that can communicate directly with brain cells. To my relief, Koch no longer espouses that idea.
Brain-chip technology like that being developed by Elon Musk’s Neuralink “is primitive compared to the vast complexity of the brain. And then there are regulatory hurdles and practical hurdles. I think it's going to be a long time before anyone who's normal, what we call neurotypical, will have a chip implanted, and I will certainly not be around to witness that.”
Koch, who may be the most cheerful intellectual I know, is feeling pretty good about the world, despite everything. “For America right now, things are not so good,” he acknowledges.
“On the other hand, it's another turn on the wheel, and you know life will go on. Life truly is transcendent, and it's a miracle that you're alive, and nothing in our science explains why there’s something rather than nothing. Isn't that amazing? We should appreciate that every day.”
On that, we agree.
Further Reading:
Koch talks about psychedelics, integrated information theory and other stuff in his new book Then I Am Myself the World.
I devote a chapter of Mind-Body Problems to the surprising twists and turns of Koch’s career. After the book was published, I recorded a chat with Koch for Meaningoflife.tv.
See also my chat with Bernardo Kastrup on Meaningoflife.tv.
And here are a few related columns: The Brouhaha Over Consciousness and “Pseudoscience”, The Consciousness Panel, Is God a Strange Loop?, The Consciousness Salon, The Dark Matter Inside Our Heads, The Solipsism Problem, The Rise of Neo-Geocentrism, What Is It Like to be God?