The book “Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist” is written by Dr. Christof Koch, a professor at CalTech and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Brain Institute. This post features some quotes from the book.
“In the molecular signature of our genes, we can trace our descent from the primate lineage and, in the remoteness of deep time, from pond scum. As a consequence, much religious doctrine is incompatible with the modern world view.”
“With perfect hindsight, I now realize that what drew me to studying consciousness was a compelling and entirely subterranean desire to justify my instinctual belief that life is meaningful.”
“Indeed, when we introspect, we routinely deceive ourselves, because we only tap into a minute fraction of what is going on in our head. This deception is why so much of philosophy about the self, the will, and other aspects of our mind has been barren for more than two thousand years.”
“Provided mankind avoids Nightfall – a thermonuclear Armageddon or a complete environmental meltdown – there is no reason why this web of hypertrophied consciousness cannot spread to the planets and, ultimately, beyond the stellar night to the galaxy at large.”
“Yet I always knew that there is but a single reality out there, and science is getting increasingly better at describing it. Humanity is not condemned to wander forever in an epistemological fog, knowing only the surface appearance of things but never their true nature. We can see something; and the longer we gaze, the better we comprehend.”
“I lost my childhood faith, yet I’ve never lost my abiding faith that everything is as it should be! I feel deep in my bones that the universe has meaning that we can realize.”
“Whereas computer scientists and programmers are probably several decades away from achieving human intelligence, there is, in principle, no difficulty in doing so.”
“Despite the hectoring of deconstructionist, ‘critical’ scholars and sociologists, science remains humanity’s most reliable, cumulative, and objective method for comprehending reality. It is far from fail-safe; it is beset with plenty of erroneous conclusions, setbacks, frauds, power struggles among its practitioners, and other human foibles. But it is far better than any alternative in its ability to understand, predict, and manipulate reality. Because science is so good at figuring out the world around us, it should also help us to explain the world within us.”
“A habitual misperception is that science first rigorously defines the phenomena it studies, then uncovers the principles that govern them. Historically, progress in science is made without precise, axiomatic formulations. Scientists work with malleable, ad hoc, definitions that they adapt as better knowledge becomes available. Such working definitions guide discussion and experimentation and permit different research communities to interact, enabling progress.”
“Emotions are indispensable to a well-balanced and successful life but are not essential for consciousness.”
“The brain is not like a hologram, in which everything contributes equally to the image. Some regions add little, if anything, and can be damaged without loss of phenomenal experience, whereas others are crucial to consciousness.”
“Every phenomenal, subjective state is caused by a particular physical mechanism in the brain.”
“Perturbing the neural correlate of any specific conscious experience will change the percept. Destroying or otherwise silencing the relevant neurons will make the percept disappear, although the brain, especially a young one, can compensate for limited damage within weeks.”
“Artificially inducing a neural correlate of consciousness will trigger the associated percept. This is done routinely in neurosurgery: The surgeon places an electrode onto the surface of the brain and sends an electric current through it. Depending on the location and intensity, this external stimulus can trigger a poignant memory, a song last heard years before, the feeling of wanting to move a limb or the sensation of movement.”
“The best experiment is one in which everything but the variable of interest is kept fixed. That way, the difference this one thing makes to the action of the entire system can be isolated.”
“Recently, clinicians recorded the EEG of two classes of severely brain-injured patients, those that remain unconscious and those that recover at least some measure of awareness. They found that the critical difference is the presence or absence of communication between prefrontal regions and temporal, sensory cortical regions in the back. If such feedback is present, consciousness is preserved. If not, it is absent.”
“Consciousness does not arise from regions but from highly networked neurons within and across regions.”
“The history of any scientific concept – energy, atom, gene, cancer, memory – is one of increased differentiation and sophistication until it can be explained in a quantitative and mechanistic manner at a lower, more elemental level.”
“A stroke, a car accident, a virus infection, the controlled trauma of a neurosurgeon’s scalpel can all destroy brain matter. In their wake they often leave permanent deficits. What is of great interest to the neuroscientist is when the damage is limited and circumscribed. The fact that losing a particular chunk of nervous tissue turns the world into gray tones and well-known faces into unfamiliar ones indicates that this region must be, at least partially, responsible for generating the sense of color or face identity.”
“The take-home message is that small chunks of the cerebral cortex are responsible for specific conscious content.”
“Like a sculptor patiently releasing a Venus de Milo or Pieta out of a block of marble, the learning algorithms of the brain sculpt the synaptic fields in which concept neurons are embedded.”
“The MRI scanner could be a lifeline for grievously brain-injured patients because it opens up a means of communication: ‘If you are in pain, think of playing tennis. If not, imagine walking through your house.’”
“Another enabling factor for consciousness is the set of five intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus, also clustered around the midline. These nuclei receive input from brain-stem nuclei and the frontal lobes and send their output throughout the cerebral cortex. Lesions no bigger than a sugar cube in both the left and right intralaminar nuclei cause consciousness to flee, most likely permanently.”
“By controlling the release of a cocktail of neurotransmitters, the intralaminar nuclei and other nuclei in the catacombs of the brain tune synaptic and neuronal activity up or down, enabling the cortico-thalamic complex to form and shape the tightly synchronized coalition of neurons that is at the heart of any one conscious experience.”
“Somewhere in the brain, my body is monitored; love, joy, and fear are born; thoughts arise, are mulled over, and discarded; plans are made; and memories are laid down. The conscious me, Christof, is oblivious to all of this furious activity.”
“I now understand that the actions of the sovereign ‘I’ are determined by habits, instincts, and impulses that largely bypass conscious inspection.”
“The overwhelming conclusion from such findings is a humbling one: Your actions are profoundly shaped by unconscious processes to which you are not privy.”
“Zombie agents carry out routine missions below the radar screen of consciousness. You can become conscious of the action of a zombie agent, but only after the fact.”
“You might believe as fervently as I did as a young man that your conscious intentions and your deliberate choices control your interactions with family members, friends, and strangers. Yet decades of social psychology research have clearly shown otherwise. Your interactions are largely governed by forces beyond your ken, by unconscious desires, motivations, and fears.”
“An inexhaustible multiplicity of factors influences your day-to-day encounters with people. Their age, gender, ethnicity, dress, bearing, and emotional expression will imprint themselves on your mind and will guide the way you approach, talk to, and judge them.”
“But even if you try hard to avoid stereotyping, you can still harbor unconscious biases and predilections. You can’t escape being a child of your culture and upbringing, soaking up implicit judgments from fairy tales and myths, from books, movies, and games, from your parents, playmates, teachers, and contemporaries.”
“We are so immersed in the products of the advertisement industry that we cease to notice them. Yet there is a reason that the industry spent approximately half a trillion dollars worldwide in 2010 to influence the buying decisions of consumers. It works!”
“To fail when one has given everything one has is homorable; not to try because one is afraid of failure is a major character flaw.”
“You frequently have little idea why you do the things you find yourself doing. Yet the urge to explain is so strong that you make up a story on the spot, justifying your choice, confabulating without realizing it.”
“In a remote corner of the universe, on a small blue planet gravitating around a humdrum sun in the unfashionable, outer districts of the Milky Way, organisms arose from the primordial mud and ooze in an epic struggle for survival that spanned eons. Despite all evidence to the contrary, these bipedal creatures thought of themselves as extraordinarily privileged, as occupying a unique place in a cosmos of a trillion trillion stars. Conceited as they were, they even believed that they, and only they, could escape the iron law of cause and effect that governs everything. They could do this by virtue of something they called free will, which allowed them to do things without any material reason.”
“Your freedom is restricted by the habits and consistent choices you’ve made in the past. The very riverbed that holds and channels your stream of consciousness is fashioned by the family and the culture you were raised in.”
“Even the minute expenditures of energy needed to tweak synaptic transmission have to show up on nature’s balance sheet. Physics doesn’t allow any exceptions.”
“At least in the laboratory, the brain decides well before the mind does; the conscious experience of willing a simple act – the sensation of agency or authorship – is secondary to the actual cause.”
“You and I find ourselves in a cosmos in which any and all systems of interacting parts possess some measure of sentience. The larger and more highly networked the system, the greater the degree of consciousness.”
“Our knowledge is but a fire lighting up the vast darkness around us, flickering in the wind. So, let us be open to alternative, rational explanations in the quest for the sources of consciousness.”
“Phenomenal experience does not arise from active or silent brain regions but from the ceaseless formation and dissolution of coalitions of neurons whose complexity and representational capacity is the ultimate substrate of our most intimate thoughts.”
“The theory of integrated information postulates that conscious, phenomenal experience is distinct from its underlying physical carrier. Informationally speaking, the experience of being sad is a crystal, a fantastically complex shape in a space of a trillion dimensions that is qualitatively different from the brain state that gives rise to sadness. The conscious sensation arises from integrated information; the causality flows from the underlying physics of the brain, but not in any easy-to-understand manner. This is because consciousness depends on the system being more than the sum of its parts.”
“Nobody is immune from self-deception and self-delusion. We all have intricate, subliminal defense mechanisms that allow us to retain beliefs that are dear to us, despite contravening facts.”
“The idea that the experiences and thoughts of men who lived thousands of years ago are relevant to our understanding of the universe and our place in it strikes me as quaint.”
“I do believe that some deep and elemental organizing principle created the universe and set it in motion for a purpose I cannot comprehend.”
“Religious sentiments, as expressed through music, literature, architecture, and the visual arts, bring out some of what is best in humankind. Yet collectively, they are only of limited use in making sense of the puzzle of our existence. The only certain answers come from science.”
“When all is said and done, I am left with a deep and abiding sense of wonder.”
