Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press)

I was pleasantly surprised to find this book. I have been following the work of Guilio Tononi for some time and that involves reading articles co-authored by Christof Koch as one his main collaborators. There also have several excellent videos available on YouTube where they discuss consciousness and Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness. In this book we learn about Koch's personal and professional trajectory in the field and several of his influences. He is currently the President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and a Professor of Biology and Engineering at Caltech. His academic credentials are available at the link to his web page and they are reviewed in this book as a backdrop to how he came to the field of consciousness studies.The layout of the book is 10 chapters over 166 pages. It is well written in that it contains technical terms but they are well explained for the novice. On the other hand there are also higher level concepts pertaining to consciousness that will probably not be obvious to many readers that are well explained and worthwhile reading for anyone who is not an expert in the field. The text reminds me of a slim guide to neuropathology that one of my med school professors claimed was the only book he studied to pass his subspecialty boards exams. In other words, the more you bring to a book like this, the more you may take away. At the same time it is interesting reading for a novice.A typical chapter is organized around clinical and scientific observations, associated philosophy and the personal experience and meaning to the author. I thought about characterizing the writing as a very good blog, but this writing by one of the top neuroscientists of our time is several levels above that. Koch writes from the perspective of admiration of some of the best scientists in the world when it is clear that he is among them. He adds a unique perspective referencing his training, his family and social life, and the relationships he has with colleagues and mentors. In the final chapter he describes how his career and experience has impacted on his belief system and personal philosophy.I will touch on a couple of examples of what he covers and the relevance to consciousness. Chapter 5: Consciousness in the Clinic is a chapter that is most accessible to clinicians specializing in the brain. He briefly summarizes achromatopsia and prosopagnosia or face-blindness. He discusses prosopagnosia from the perspective of clinical findings and associated disability, but also consciousness. For example, patients with this lesion do not recognize faces but they do have autonomic responses (galvanic skin resistance) when viewing faces that they know (family or famous people) relative to unknown people. This is evidence of processing that occurs at an unconscious level that he develops in a subsequent chapter. He describes the Capgras delusion - as the "flip-side" of prosopagnosia in that they face is recognized but the patient believes the original person has been replaced by an impostor. In this case the expected increase in galvanic skin resistant is lacking because there is no autonomic response to unconscious processing.In the same chapter he details the problem of patients in a coma, persistent vegetative state (PVS) and minimally conscious state (MCS) and how some new developments in consciousness theory and testing may be useful. From a consciousness perspective coma represent and absence of consciousness - no arousals and no sleep transitions. Persistent vegetative state result in some arousals and sleep-awake transitions. In the minimally conscious state there are awakenings and purposeful movements. The minimally conscious person may be able to communicate during the brief arousals. At the clinical level being able to distinguish between the persistent vegetative state and the minimally conscious state is important from both a clinical and medico-legal perspective. He discusses the use of fMRI in the case of apparently unresponsive patients who are able to follow direction to think about very specific tasks and produce the same brain pattern of activation seen in controls. In a subsequent chapter Tononi and Massimini use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and electroencephalography (EEG) for the same purpose. This technique is considered proof of IIT as well as a clinical test to differentiate PVS from a minimally conscious state. In normal awake volunteers the TMS impulse results in brief but clear pattern of reverberating activation that spreads from the original stimulation site to surrounding frontal and parietal cortex. The pattern can be viewed in this online paper (see figure 1). In the patient who is in non-REM sleep there is no cortical spread from this impulse and the total impulse duration is less, illustrating a lack of cortical integration required for a conscious state. When applied to PVS versus MCS patients, the MCS patients show the expected TMS/EEG response that would be seen in conscious patients. The PVS patients do not. He describes the TMS/EEG method as a "crude consciousness meter" but obviously one that probably has a lot more potential than traditional clinical methods.There are many other clinical, philosophical and scientific issues relevant to consciousness that are discussed in this book that I won't go into. I will touch on a recurring theme in the book that gets back to the title and that is science and reductionism. Philosophical perspectives are covered as well as the idea that the origin of consciousness may not be knowable by scientific methods. Koch's opinion is that most everything is knowable by science and that science generally has a better track record of determining what is knowable. That is certainly my bias and I am on record as being an unapologetic reductionist rather than a romantic one.This is a book that should be read by psychiatrists and residents. These concepts will hopefully be some of the the mainstays of 21st century psychiatry. It can be read at several levels. I was interested in the development of Koch's ideas about consciousness. I wanted to learn about his relationship with collaborators. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that we had similar thoughts about popular media, philosophy, and and psychodynamic psychiatry. I have had career long involvement in neuropsychiatry and behavioral neurology so the description of cortical localization and clinical syndromes was second nature to me. But even against that background, he makes it very clear where consciousness comes in to play. One of my concerns about psychiatric training is that there is not enough emphasis on neuroscience and consciousness. Condensed into this small book there are number of jumping off points. Each chapter has a collection of annotations and there is a list of about 100 scientific references at the end. It may take some work, but this book is a brief syllabus on how to get up to speed in this important area and greatly extend your knowledge of how the brain works.George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

This book is a combination of scientific views intertwined with a confessional and very personal autobiography, touching on moving topics that we all struggle with, such as loss of love and in his case, even loss of faith. I would give the autobiography portion five stars because of its honesty, but I would give the ideas component fewer stars. I will only comment on one core part of the ideas that Koch presents, which I also commented on in my review of Tononi’s ‘Phi”. In short, I was dismayed to read in this book that Koch now buys into Tononi's theory. I much preferred the views that he expressed in his previous book 'The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach" (5 stars) where he argues that the neural correlates of consciousness are to be found in certain kinds of neural activity. The problem is that the idea of integrated information as the core realization of consciousness is I suspect simply wrong. If it were correct, then anything with informational inputs and outputs would have some degree of consciousness, a country, a city or an ant colony. In the extreme, wouldn't this drive one to a form of pan-psychism where even a rock has a low but non-zero degree of consciousness? Pan-psychism might have a certain allure, but what exactly would a rock be conscious of? While the idea of an ant colony being conscious, with ants playing the role of neurons is alluring, and while there is no doubt that an ant colony or city seems to process information, it is improbable, even if not disprovable, that an ant colony or city or country experiences anything. If China is experiencing something, what is it experiencing? The basic idea is that information is not just reduction of possibilities for a receiver as Shannon described it, making information fundamentally epistemological. For Tononi, information becomes an ontological attribute of a system. If it can occupy vastly many possible states in its state space, but occupies only a small subset of possible states at a time, then it has a high phi. There is no need for a Shannonesque receiver or decoder on this account of information. Information just is. Information, according to Tononi, is not the reduction from many possible outcomes to fewer in the knowledge space of a receiver, it is being able to occupy many states. Since highly integrated information processing systems can occupy more states, they have more of this unusual ontological type of information. Phi is the hypothesized measure of integrated information. It remains hypothesized because no one can measure phi and there is no device to do so now, and I suspect there never will be such a device. How we then go from having high integrated information or phi to consciousness, qualia or subjective experience is a mystery to me. Rooting the idea of information in the number of possible states rather than in acts of decoding gives rise to a fundamental problem for any theory of consciousness that wants to build on this unorthodox conception of information: nothing is represented. But consciousness is intentional. States of the world and body are represented. The informational content of consciousness is about something. I therefore think building a theory of consciousness on the idea of integrated information is a doomed project. I realize that Drs. Tononi and Koch probably dream of a phi-measuring device that we can hold up to a rock or lifeform to get a reading on its level of consciousness. I just think such dreams are misguided. So if you are looking for books about how consciousness might really be realized in the brain I would first buy Koch's 'The Quest for Consciousness,' then Tse's 'The Neural Basis of Free Will,' which takes the views that Koch expressed in that book even further, and third I would try the philosopher Prinz's book 'The Conscious Brain.' The latter two in particular link consciousness and its neural basis with attentional processing. This new book by Koch offers a moving account of the personal struggles and revelations of a great scientist working at the forefront of research on the neural basis of consciousness. But oddly enough, he seems to have come under the spell of Tononi’s theory of consciousness, which is not a theory of qualia or experience at all, but is instead a theory of information. I would argue that integrated information is an incorrect theory of information to boot, because it does away with the central role played by receivers or decoders in Shannon’s theory of information. But the brain, from the level of channels on up to neurons and circuits is all about decoding inputs. Building a theory of consciousness on Shannon's traditional conception of information as reduction in uncertainty for a receiver is hard enough in that it is unclear how qualia or first-person subjectivity could emerge from information. But reconceiving information in a way that dispenses with the 'perspective' of a receiver seems to me to get us farther away from solving the hard problem, not closer.

Das Buch beschreibt in spannender Weise die Fortschritte der Gehirnforschung zu Fragen des Bewusstseins u.ä.Der Autor bettet es ein in seine persönliche Geschichte und erspart einem auch nicht die Arbeit, echte Forschung zu verstehen.Koch ist Amerikaner deutscher Abstammung und verbindet beide Wissenschaftskulturen in wunderbarer Weise.Ein Lesevergnügen, bei dem man wirklich etwas neues versteht

Es un texto caracterizado por combinar rigor científico con accesibilidad, lo cual, teniendo en cuenta las implicaciones científico-filosóficas del tema, es de agradecer. Sin lugar a dudas este libro tiene como garantía la posición privilegiada de un investigador como Christof Koch en su disciplina de investigación. Muy recomendable, pero ojo: hay que dedicarle su tiempo.

Le dernier ouvrage de Christof Koch ‘Consciousness. Confession of a romantic reductionnist’ analyse finement et avec beaucoup d’humour la nature neuronale de la conscience en s’appuyant sur de nombreux exemples cliniques. Son précédent ouvrage ‘The Quest for Consciousness : A Neurobiological Approach’ est tout aussi remarquable, je le recommande également.Etant directeur de recherche d’une société travaillant dans les domaines de la robotique et de l’intelligence artificielle, ces deux ouvrages m’ont particulièrement intéressé en raison des investigations que nous avons menées dans le domaine de la robotique autonome qui nous ont conduit à démontrer formellement le rôle opératif essentiel que doit jouer paradoxalement cette conscience élusive qui nous permet d’être au monde autrement strictement clos sur lui-même, pour que des machines physico-chimiques soient autonomes, artificiellement vivantes. C’est-à-dire des machines qui, comme nous, ont la capacité d’assurer la durabilité de leur structure face aux contraintes infiniment variables d'un environnement qui ne peuvent que les dégrader.L’analyse fonctionnelle des robots autonomes fait apparaître un point de désaccord notable avec la thèse que soutient Christof Koch en ce qui concerne le rôle de la conscience dans les êtres vivants. Mais ce désaccord n’enlève en rien à la qualité de son analyse neurobiologique de la conscience. Pour Christof Koch, la conscience n’a en effet qu’un rôle relativement mineur dans l’existence des êtres vivants car ne servant qu’à planifier plus efficacement certaines tâches de la vie qui ne sont pas répétitives. Alors que suivant l’analyse que nous avons menée dans le cadre de la robotique autonome – c’est-à-dire de la vie artificielle –, la conscience est au contraire un opérateur essentiel à l’existence de ces machines physico-chimiques autonomes. La conscience ne serait donc pas un épiphénomène comme cela est très souvent affirmé, une ‘cerise sur le gâteau’ en quelque sorte, elle serait en fait un donné fondamental de la nature qui explique l’existence sur Terre de structures physico-chimiques autonomes, autrement dit vivantes.

Per uno studente di Neuroscienze, questo libro è un confronto confortante con un gigante del proprio campo. Koch segue i passi di Crick, incamminandosi con Tononi verso la prima teoria scientifica predittiva sulla Coscienza, tappezzando la via di aneddoti intimi e stimolanti.Un must per chiunque voglia emozionarsi.

Koch was a colleague of Francis Crick (of DNA and Nobel fame) in his (late in life) search for the mechanisms in the brain that yield consciousness. Consciousness is a vexed and hoary topic of particular interest to philosophers and physicists. Koch gives us a review of some of the widely varied and highly imaginative conclusions that have been reached by some distinguished thinkers. The Koch/Crick focus was on trying to tie down the neural pathways which combine to give us a sense of being conscious. Of course, this is a very daunting task which (not surprisingly) has not yet been accomplished. My sense though is that they are/were on the right track. Koch's writing is informal, informative, and, at times, amusing. Sadly, he chose to write a confessional in the last chapter, an astonishing (for this reader) and unhelpful ending. Skip the last chapter, and you should have a good read. However, I would also strongly recommend that you read Daniel Dennett's "Sweet Dreams - Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness" to get a broader view of the subject. Dennett's book is much less coherent, since it is a compilation of various talks and papers. The reader has to put up with a certain amount of repetition as a result, but Dennett has a razor sharp mind and, at times, a wicked sense of humour. Both books are quite short and easy to read.