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
|
Dr. Colborn argues that, perhaps surprisingly, the worldview of the technology elite is shifting from fundamentalist materialism to a form of apocalypticism that echoes fundamentalist Christianity. This shift in belief is, according to Colborn, not based on an honest search for truth, but instead an attempt to legitimize agendas of power and control. As such, it risks dehumanizing humanity. The analysis in this essay is particularly important in today’s world of emerging agentic AI, wherein—insofar as we believe that AI mechanisms are conscious—we may end up believing that conscious beings are mere mechanisms. Dr. Colborn has just published a book with our own imprint, Essentia Books: What Lies Beyond.
|
In this interview, Dr. Philip Cozzolino, an associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, talks with Natalia Vorontsova about his research results and methods for dealing with the fear of death. He also delves into intriguing reincarnation-like cases and past-life memories in children, as well as the metaphysical implications of his research.
From the archives
|
Hans Busstra talks to Dr. Bernardo Kastrup about the groundbreaking work of Professor Michael Levin and Dr. Christof Koch. Levin’s research into bio-electric fields reveals that cellular networks use electrical signals not just for immediate physiological tasks, but to coordinate complex patterning and memory across tissues—suggesting a kind of distributed intelligence in living systems. Christof Koch, meanwhile, champions Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which proposes that consciousness is an intrinsic property of certain physical systems with high levels of causal interconnectivity. Both lines of inquiry challenge the traditional reductionist view that mind is merely an emergent byproduct of neural activity. Instead, they point to a more holistic, perhaps even fundamental, role for information and consciousness in nature. Though Levin and Koch make no explicit metaphysical claims in their work, their empirical findings and views are very much in line with analytic idealism.
|
“If experience is all I have, I may be alone—but the essential emotional necessity of the other demands that I live as if I am not,” argues Dr. Moreira in this heart-felt essay. He embodies a long-overdue reemergence of existentialist thought in the 21st century and, as an active and successful AI scientist, in 21st century terms. We think both the worlds of philosophy and popular culture will be hearing a lot more from Dr. Moreira in the coming years…
|
Dr. Edward Kelly, a professor of experimental psychology, talks about his many years of study of a variety of psi and anomalous phenomena. In this interview with Natalia Vorontsova, he candidly shares how phenomenological evidence has led him to re-examine his metaphysical views on the nature of reality. Are our minds confined to our brains? Do we survive our biological death? Is mind primary to matter? Why should we take anomalous phenomena seriously? These are some of the topics covered in this conversation.
Reading
Essays
|
What if phenomenal consciousness, signs, communication, and interpretation are fundamental aspects of all living systems, whether or not we can detect brains? This is the departure point of biosemiotics, an interdisciplinary field that combines biology, semiotics (the study of signs and meaning), and philosophy. Environmental philosopher Dr. Yogi Hendlin is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biosemiotics and, in this conversation, Hans Busstra talks to him about the widespread meaning-making in nature. All living beings, from bacteria to plants to mammals, have an ‘Umwelt,’ a dashboard representation of the world. In a sense, biosemiotics states that our mind is in the world: we are embodied beings, and with every inhalation 50.000 microbes enter our body, and they communicate to us by influencing our microbiome.
|
Professor Zaghi introduces Relational Quantum Dynamics (RQD), a further development of Carlo Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) with a solid mathematical and metaphysical basis. RQD circumvents the infinite regress inherent to RQM (everything being constituted of relations between meta-relations, and these consisting of relations between meta-meta-relations, etc., ad infinitum) by proposing that, although all physical entities are indeed relational, the relations—and even spacetime itself—arise within an underlying field awareness.
|
Hans Busstra talks to Dr. Bernardo Kastrup about the groundbreaking work of Professor Michael Levin and Dr. Christof Koch. Levin’s research into bio-electric fields reveals that cellular networks use electrical signals not just for immediate physiological tasks, but to coordinate complex patterning and memory across tissues—suggesting a kind of distributed intelligence in living systems. Christof Koch, meanwhile, champions Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which proposes that consciousness is an intrinsic property of certain physical systems with high levels of causal interconnectivity. Both lines of inquiry challenge the traditional reductionist view that mind is merely an emergent byproduct of neural activity. Instead, they point to a more holistic, perhaps even fundamental, role for information and consciousness in nature. Though Levin and Koch make no explicit metaphysical claims in their work, their empirical findings and views are very much in line with analytic idealism.
|
“If experience is all I have, I may be alone—but the essential emotional necessity of the other demands that I live as if I am not,” argues Dr. Moreira in this heart-felt essay. He embodies a long-overdue reemergence of existentialist thought in the 21st century and, as an active and successful AI scientist, in 21st century terms. We think both the worlds of philosophy and popular culture will be hearing a lot more from Dr. Moreira in the coming years…
|
Dr. Edward Kelly, a professor of experimental psychology, talks about his many years of study of a variety of psi and anomalous phenomena. In this interview with Natalia Vorontsova, he candidly shares how phenomenological evidence has led him to re-examine his metaphysical views on the nature of reality. Are our minds confined to our brains? Do we survive our biological death? Is mind primary to matter? Why should we take anomalous phenomena seriously? These are some of the topics covered in this conversation.
Seeing
Videos
|
Fredric Nord argues that knowing reality through language is fundamentally and inescapably a misunderstanding of reality. We misunderstand what language actually does and, thereby, misunderstand what life is. The key to understanding life is, he argues, a reframing of language and representation. This should end the paradigm of materialism and facilitate transcendence as a priori.
|
Physicist Dr. Lídia Del Rio, Essentia Foundation’s Research Fellow for Quantum Information Theory at the University of Zürich, explains to Hans Busstra one of the strangest quantum conundra confronting the foundations of physics: the Frauchiger-Renner (FR) thought experiment.
|
Dr. Dolezal invites us to consider the uncanny similarities between the ancient stories of creation, across many religious and philosophical traditions, and how the human imagination, when prompted or triggered by words, creates entire universes.
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 contributions from people like you to continue to do our work. There are many ways to contribute.
