Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press)

By: Christof Koch

Narrated by: Walter Dixon

What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bio-electrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience.

This engaging book - part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation - describes Koch's search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest - his instinctual (if not romantic) belief that life is meaningful.

Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness (once considered a fringy subject) as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation.

Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics. All are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work - to uncover the roots of consciousness.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title published by The MIT Press.

“I loved every minute of it.” - Nature

“Science writing at its best.” - Times Higher Education

“Destined to takes its place as a timeless masterpiece in the history of science.” - Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine

©2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2017 Redwood Audiobooks

Incredible

Amazing insights into the depths of human consciousness on a both scientific and philosophical level written with thoughtful and enduring prose.

Superb!

Loved it!!! I truly enjoyed reading every bit of it, from start to finish. It's a wonderful feast for the mind, which touches the heart. I can't wait to read Christof Koch's next book The Feeling of Life Itself. And Thank You, Christof!

Hard science and consciousness brought closer

Christof Koch is in the hardcore science of Biophysics and Neural correlates of consciousness, subjects that are at the forefront of empirical brain science.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see some philosophy, and dare I say a touch of what some might call, beyond the known. This could be because it is very hard to speak about consciousness with dabbling with the "Hard Problem" of Qualia.

I found this book enlightening with some unique hypothesis that did not shy away from the subjective experience and how science might tackle this issue.

This together with a bit of autobiography creates a well rounded and enjoyable book, with a humbling experience as to how little we know, recommended for those who are interested in knowing how hard is the Hard Problem of consciousness.

For students of the mind this is a tasty treat!

I enjoyed the book greatly. Many insightful descriptions and explanations. I'm forced to write another sentence for the review to be accepted lol.

The hard problem of letting go of the faith!

It was a very informative book for me personally, I learned a lot about the anatomy of the brain, neurological activities and their relations to our physical behavior / actions. Specifically I was fascinated by the mentioned method of measuring / quantifying consciousness in brain damaged patients. However, I didn’t find the book necessarily helpful (again, for me) on the subject of consciousness!
I found the description of the IIT (integrated information technology) incomplete (without explaining how consciousness can emerge from integrated information), sort of hoping that consciousness miraculously emerges when a computing system can integrate high level data, explores and finds relations between them!
Additionally,
Nevertheless, I found the content of the book matching its title: confessions of a hopeless scientific mind loosing its faith to scientific discoveries and objectiveness of the physical world, yet hoping there is a meaning to the life and universe!
I strongly believe this book is absolutely useful for people of the faith and those who believe in metaphysical world, because the writer patiently walks you out of many illusions graciously easier the way he helped himself, the hard way.
— Remarks on a technical matter: the writer believes consciousness is a property built into a whole system and therefore you cannot simulate consciousness using digital computer, the same way simulation of a black hole won’t wrap the space-time around the simulating computer [Nature 2018]. I found this argument bizarre and the analogy utterly wrong! This argument, I think, attest on the writer believe that he thinks consciousness is something on top of a system like a mind or spirit that emerges from it, and not a result of information processing. The way I understand it he’s saying since the brain is an analog system, you cannot simulate it using a digital computer. But this contradicts his adherence to the IIT! Also, if consciousness is the result of information processing, the information being analog or digital would not matter (incomparable to simulation of gravity in a computer). After all, all analog signals are digital in nature … so, it’s a matter of resolution. Will a digital computer built based on multi-value logics capable of simulating consciousness, but not a binary computer?!