Then I Am Myself The World: Dr. Christof Koch’s journey into psychedelics
Seeing | Neuroscience | 2025-02-21
Hans Busstra, MA
Christof Koch, PhD
Neuroscientist Dr. Christof Koch’s latest book has a title quoting the second act of the famous opera, Tristan und Isolde: “Then I Am Myself The World.” In this book Koch describes how he, during a psychedelic experience on 5-MeO-DMT, felt that he was one with the universe, which echoes the epic tale by Wagner. Essentia Foundation’s Hans Busstra interviewed Koch on his book, his psychedelic trip and, of course, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), the scientific theory of consciousness Christof Koch and Gulio Tononi are famous for.
IIT offers a mathematical way to quantify consciousness using a measure called Phi (Φ). Phi represents the degree to which a system is both highly integrated and differentiated—two essential properties of conscious experience. According to IIT, the higher the Phi of a system, the richer its subjective experience. In what can be considered a strength of IIT, it makes few assumptions about what a conscious system should look like: literally any system has a Phi that can be measured, whether it’s an AI or bacteria.
Interestingly, Koch points out that all current AI’s have a rather low Phi: though their computing power is daunting and they may very well simulate consciousness, their integrated information is still very low compared to the neurons in our brains.
But can IIT, next to offering perhaps the first truly scientific measure of consciousness, also account for the mystical-type experience Koch himself had? The difficulty here is that, for IIT to have any explanatory power, it needs a substrate to analyse. If Koch indeed had become part of a larger consciousness, what then was the ‘new’ substrate—extending beyond his own brain—to analyze?
But where IIT does have a strong advantage over computational theories, which regard consciousness as emergent from computation, is that it has a way to distinguish between ‘parts’ and ‘wholes.’ If two systems become highly interconnected, IIT predicts a measurable moment when the Phi of the interconnected system is higher than that of the sum of its parts. Then a new—say, ‘higher’—mind comes into existence, and the consciousnesses of the ‘lower’ parts cease to exist.
To watch the full conversation between Busstra and Koch on YouTube, click here:
00:00 Introduction
05:12 Is Integrated Information Theory as a materialist theory?
08:46 Unpacking IIT: intrinsic conscious experience as the starting point
11:05 Feelings have a specific structure
14:37 What is ‘intrinsic causal power’ and why is it important?
18:38 The difference between being in love and the mass of an object
21:05 Unfolding the intrinsic causal power of a system
21:51Can you give me the algorithm of the taste of garlic?
25:50Consciousness is NOT the brain
29:16The unfolded causal structure of a teapot
31:25The difference between IIT and panpsychism and the consciousness of bacteria and bees
35:03Consciousness vs Self-Consciousness
36:18The combination problem and how to establish the boundary of a (conscious) system
39:23The experiment of brain bridging
41:50Split brain experiments
49:45Brains are nog magical: neuro morphic engineering
52:11What is a whole and what a part?
55:55How a larger consciousness would wipe out you and me: the Borg example from Star Trek
57:03Christof Koch on his DMT trip
59:58The ontological shock of psychedelics
1:04:24How to make sense of the psychedelic experience?
1:08:50Is IIT idealist?
1:13:56Are hearts conscious?
1:15:16On the filter hypothesis
1:17:44What can IIT say about the psychedelic state and NDE’s?
1:25:40What could a couple billion dollars buy when invested in neuroscience?
1:27:31On the critique on IIT
1:30:40Why we have to remain skeptical
1:32:51 ‘Naive’ physicalism
1:34:55On the placebo effect
1:40:01 Everyone wants to do psychedelics
1:40:38 The Near Death Experience on 5-MeO-DMT
1:44:26Will psychedelics change your scientific career
1:47:04On the mental gravity of the self
1:48:16 Closing remarks
Essentia Foundation communicates, in an accessible but rigorous manner, the latest results in science and philosophy that point to the mental nature of reality. We are committed to strict, academic-level curation of the material we publish.
Recently published
|
Stephen Lester invites us to contemplate the relationship between the seemingly individual self and the world—including other seemingly individual selves—merely as different perspectives within a continuous ecosystem. Ecology has taught us to see the world as an interconnected whole. In much the same way, embodied awareness can teach us that we aren’t separate from the world, but instead that the objects we observe are merely other perspectives within the same consciousness we are.
|
Dr. Koch argues that, because AI computers have a feed-forward structure very reminiscent of the human cerebellum—which is empirically known not to be involved in human consciousness—we have no reason to expect AI computers to have a conscious inner life of their own. He further substantiates his argument with the clear, quantified prediction of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) that systems with low integrated information, such as silicon computers implementing Large Language Models, do not feel like anything from the inside.
From the archives
|
Prof. Larry Nazareth recounts the fundamental difference in perspective that underlies the Cartesian and Bergsonian views of life and world. The former’s dictum states: ‘I compute, algorithmically, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I am, experientially.’ The latter, however, reverses this dictum: ‘I am, experientially, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I compute, algorithmically.’ Depending on which of these views we choose to base our understanding of nature and life, we may or may not have a future, Nazareth argues.
|
How is it possible that the cerebellum, which contains roughly 80% of all the neurons in the human brain, can be severely damaged, or even absent, without abolishing consciousness? In this conversation, Jeremiah Hendren, a member of the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) Lab and long-term collaborator of IIT founder Giulio Tononi, joins Hans Busstra to unpack Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a theory that answers this fascinating neuroscience mystery.
|
Dr. Currie argues that framing the effectiveness of shamanic medicine in terms of placebo effects alone does not do justice to the sophistication of shamanic practice. The latter, she maintains, is based on a complex, multi-tiered metaphysics whereby cause and effect relations beyond the visible material world are deliberately exploited by the shaman.
Reading
Essays
|
The search for authenticity fails because we conduct it in the wrong place: thought itself. The epistemic gap—the inability of concepts to capture experiential reality—produces the persistent sense that something fundamental about existence is amiss, a tension that underlies much existential questioning. When representations are mistaken for reality, three pervasive forms of suffering follow: fear of death, violence, and pride. Each dissolves when the error is recognized. But recognition alone fades; only sustained disengagement from conceptual identification makes the insight a lived experience, argues Steven Pashko.
|
Anil Seth is a world-leading neuroscientist who has made important contributions to our understanding of reality as a controlled hallucination. According to the concept of active inference, our perception of reality is not a direct reflection of the world but, instead, the most accurate guess that our brain can muster, which it continually checks and updates with incoming sensory information. But strange things happen when neuroscientists play around with sensory input in unexpected ways. Anil Seth and his team at Sussex University created the Dream Machine, a stroboscopic device that syncs flickering light to music to induce vivid, often complex, hallucinatory visuals in the viewer. In group sessions, exactly the same white light and music gives rise to a tremendous diversity in perception.
|
Prof. Larry Nazareth recounts the fundamental difference in perspective that underlies the Cartesian and Bergsonian views of life and world. The former’s dictum states: ‘I compute, algorithmically, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I am, experientially.’ The latter, however, reverses this dictum: ‘I am, experientially, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I compute, algorithmically.’ Depending on which of these views we choose to base our understanding of nature and life, we may or may not have a future, Nazareth argues.
|
How is it possible that the cerebellum, which contains roughly 80% of all the neurons in the human brain, can be severely damaged, or even absent, without abolishing consciousness? In this conversation, Jeremiah Hendren, a member of the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) Lab and long-term collaborator of IIT founder Giulio Tononi, joins Hans Busstra to unpack Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a theory that answers this fascinating neuroscience mystery.
|
Dr. Currie argues that framing the effectiveness of shamanic medicine in terms of placebo effects alone does not do justice to the sophistication of shamanic practice. The latter, she maintains, is based on a complex, multi-tiered metaphysics whereby cause and effect relations beyond the visible material world are deliberately exploited by the shaman.
Seeing
Videos
|
In this rigorous and absolutely clear essay, which might as well have been published in an academic journal, Haswell shows that Eliminativism—the notion that the qualities of experience don’t really exist—contradicts not only the most obvious pre-theoretical facts of nature, it also contradicts itself in a manner that cannot be remedied.
|
In this conversation with Hans Busstra, the legendary CPU inventor explains his quantum theory of consciousness in more detail and outlines some of his novel ideas, to be presented in his upcoming new book. He discusses, for instance, how we should regard our material universe: “spacetime and matter are the permanent memory of the experience of the self knowing of One.”
|
In this remarkably observant essay, Brian Fang shows that the mathematics of the ubiquitous Fourier transform—which ties the words of events and frequencies together—provides a formal grammar for understanding how temporality is a facet of eternity, and vice-versa. As such, perhaps what we call “the world” is not fundamentally made of matter unfolding in time, but of patterns that admit atemporal readings. This does not prove idealism, but makes it less strange. If being can be fully captured in structural terms, then perhaps the ultimate constituents of reality are not particles in motion, but intelligible patterns that merely appear temporal when viewed from within.
Let us build the future of our culture together
Essentia Foundation is a registered non-profit committed to making its content as accessible as possible. Therefore, we depend on non-financial contributions from people like you to continue to do our work.
