Christof Koch
(1956-)
Christof Koch famously argues that consciousness is a fundamental property of any sufficiently complex thing. This is a variation on
panpsychism, that all material objects have a mental component, that mind is universal, that the universe itself is conscious. In a joint article with
Giulio Tononi, Koch cited the limitations of panpsychism.
Unlike idealism, which does
away with the physical world, or dualism, which accepts
both in an uneasy marriage, panpsychism is elegantly unitary: there is only one substance, all the way up from the
smallest entities to human consciousness and maybe to the
World Soul (anima mundi). But panpsychism’s beauty has
been singularly barren. Besides claiming that matter and
mind are one thing, it has little constructive to say and
offers no positive laws explaining how the mind is organized
and works
Koch bases his thinking about consciousness on
Giulio Tononi's "integrated information theory" (IIT).
In his latest book,
The Feeling of Life Itself (p.76), Koch claims that "given some substrate in some state, IIT computes the associated integrated information to determine whether that system feels like something, for only a system with a non-zero maximum of integrated information is conscious."
But he also offers this telling disclaimer.
Before I come to the mathematical innards of the theory, let me address one general objection to IIT that I frequently encounter. It runs along the following lines. Even if everything about IIT is correct, why should it feel like anything to have a maximum of integrated information? Why should a system that instantiates the five essential properties of consciousness— intrinsic existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion— form a conscious experience? IIT might correctly describe aspects of systems that support consciousness. But, at least in principle, skeptics might be able to imagine a system that has all these properties but which still doesn't feeling like anything.
[For example, David Chalmers' "zombies."]
I answer this conceivability argument in the following manner. By construction, these five properties fully delimit any experience. Nothing else is left out. What people mean by subjective feelings is precisely described by these five axioms. Any additional "feeling" axiom is superfluous. Is there a mathematically unassailable proof that satisfying those five axioms is equivalent to feeling like something? Not to my knowledge. But I'm a scientist, concerned with the universe I find myself in, and not with logical necessity. And in this universe, so I argue in this book, any system that obeys these five axioms is conscious.
References
Giulio Tononi and Koch on Consciousness, Royal Society, 19 May 2015
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