Ubiquitous Minds - Christof Koch

(consciousness redux)

Ubiquitous Minds

Panpsychism, the ancient doctrine tha t consciousness is universal,
offers some lessons in how to think about subjective experience today
By christof Koch

F or every inside there is an out- liness the Dalai Lama earlier in 2013 [see tain a belief in human exceptionalism. C h r i s t o f ko c h (Ko c h) ; g e t t y i m ag e s (h u m a n) ; g a l l e r y s t o c k (d o g ) ; t h i n k s t o c k (b e e)
side, and for every outside there is “The Brain of Buddha,” Consciousness Consider my Bernese mountain dog,
an inside; though they are differ- Redux; Scientific American Mind,
ent, they go together. July/August 2013], I noted how often he Ruby, when she yelps, whines, gnaws at
—A lan Watts, Man, Nature, and talked about the need to reduce the suf- her paw, limps and then comes to me,
fering of “all living beings” and not just seeking aid: I infer that she is in pain be-
the Nature of Man, 1991 “all people.” My readings in philosophy cause under similar conditions I behave
brought me to panpsychism, the view that in similar ways (sans gnawing). Physio-
I grew up in a devout and practic- mind (psyche) is found everywhere (p an). logical measures of pain confirm this
ing Roman Catholic family with Purzel, Panpsychism is one of the oldest of all phil- ­inference—injured dogs, just like peo-
a fearless and high-energy dachshund. osophical doctrines extant and was put ple, experience an elevated heart rate
He, as with all the other, much larger forth by the ancient Greeks, in particular and blood pressure and release stress
dogs that subsequently accompanied me Thales of Miletus and Plato. Philosopher hormones into their bloodstream. I’m
through life, showed plenty of affection, Baruch Spinoza and mathematician and not saying that a dog’s pain is exactly
curiosity, playfulness, aggression, anger, universal genius Gottfried Wilhelm Leib- like human pain, but dogs—as well as
shame and fear. Yet my church teaches niz, who laid down the intellectual foun- other animals—not only react to nox-
that whereas animals, as God’s creatures, dations for the Age of Enlightenment, ar- ious stimuli but also consciously experi-
ought to be treated well, they do not pos- gued for panpsychism, as did philosopher ence pain.
sess an immortal soul. Only humans do. Arthur Schopenhauer, father of American
Even as a child, to me this belief felt intui­ psychology William James, and Jesuit pa- All species—bees, octopuses, ravens,
tively wrong. These gorgeous creatures leontologist Teilhard de Chardin. It de- crows, magpies, parrots, tuna, mice,
had feelings, just like I did. Why deny clined in popularity with the rise of posi- whales, dogs, cats and monkeys—are ca-
them? Why would God resurrect people tivism in the 20th century. pable of sophisticated, learned, nonste-
but not dogs? This core Christian belief reotyped behaviors that would be asso-
in human exceptionalism did not make As a natural scientist, I find a version ciated with consciousness if a human
any sense to me. Whatever consciousness of panpsychism modified for the 21st were to carry out such actions. Precur-
and mind are and no matter how they re- century to be the single most elegant and sors of behaviors thought to be unique
late to the brain and the rest of the body, parsimonious explanation for the uni- to people are found in many species. For
I felt that the same principle must hold for verse I find myself in. There are three instance, bees are capable of recognizing
people and dogs and, by extension, for broad reasons why panpsychism is ap- specific faces from photographs, can
other animals as well. pealing to the modern mind. communicate the location and quality of
food sources to their sisters via the wag-
It was only later, at university, that I be- We Are All Nature’s Children gle dance, and can navigate complex
came acquainted with Buddhism and its mazes with the help of cues they store in
emphasis on the universal nature of mind. The past two centuries of scientific short-term memory (for instance, “after
Indeed, when I spent a week with His Ho- progress have made it difficult to sus- arriving at a fork, take the exit marked

26 s c i e n t i fi c a m e r i c a n m i n d January/February 2014

by the color at the entrance”). Bees can have bigger brains. Only an expert neu- of consciousness in the sense that it feels
fly several kilometers and return to their roanatomist, armed with a microscope, like something to be that system. If the
hive, a remarkable navigational perfor- can tell a grain-size piece of cortex of a system falls apart, consciousness ceases
mance. And a scent blown into the hive mouse from that of a monkey or a hu- to be; it doesn’t feel like anything to be a
can trigger a return to the site where the man. Biologists emphasize this structur- broken system. And the more complex
bees previously encountered this odor. al and behavioral continuity by distin- the system, the larger the repertoire of
This type of associative memory was fa- guishing between nonhuman and h uman conscious states it can experience.
mously described by Marcel Proust in À a nimals. We are all nature’s children.
la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Other an- My subjective experience (and yours,
imals can recognize themselves, know Given the lack of a clear and compel- too, presumably), the Cartesian “I think,
when their conspecifics observe them, ling Rubicon separating simple from therefore I am,” is an undeniable certain-
and can lie and cheat. complex animals and simple from com- ty, one strong enough to hold the weight
plex behaviors, the belief that only hu- of philosophy. But from whence does

The past two centuries of scientific progress have made it

( )difficult to sustain a belief in human exceptionalism.

Some people point to language and mans are capable of experiencing any- this experience come? Materialists in-
the associated benefits as being the thing consciously seems preposterous. A voke something they call emergentism to
unique defining feature of consciousness. much more reasonable assumption is that explain how consciousness can be ab-
Conveniently, this viewpoint rules out all until proved otherwise, many, if not all, sent in simple nervous systems and
but one species, Homo sapiens (which multicellular organisms experience pain emerge as their complexity increases.
has an ineradicable desire to come out on and pleasure and can see and hear the Consider the wetness of water, its abili-
top), as having sentience. Yet there is lit- sights and sounds of life. For brains that ty to maintain contact with surfaces. It
tle reason to deny consciousness to ani- are smaller and less complex, the crea- is a consequence of intermolecular inter-
mals, preverbal infants [see “The Con- tures’ conscious experience is very likely actions, notably hydrogen bonding
scious Infant,” Consciousness Redux; to be less nuanced, less differentiated and among nearby water molecules. One or
Scientific American Mind, Septem- more elemental. Even a worm has per- two molecules of H2O are not wet, but
ber/October 2013] or patients with se- haps the vaguest sense of being alive. Of put gazillions together at the right tem-
vere aphasia, all of whom are mute. course, each species has its own unique perature and pressure, and wetness
sensorium, matched to its ecological emerges. Or see how the laws of heredi-
None other than Charles Darwin, in niche. Not every creature has ears to hear ty emerge from the molecular properties
the last book he published, in the year and eyes to see. Yet all are capable of hav- of DNA, RNA and proteins. By the same
preceding his death, set out to learn how ing at least some subjective feelings. process, mind is supposed to arise out of
far earthworms “acted consciously and sufficiently complex brains.
how much mental power they dis- The Austere Appeal
played.” Studying their feeding and sex- of Panpsychism Yet the mental is too radically differ-
ual behaviors for several decades—Dar- ent for it to arise gradually from the
win was after all a naturalist with uncan- Taken literally, panpsychism is the physical. This emergence of subjective
ny powers of observation—he concluded belief that everything is “enminded.” All feelings from physical stuff appears in-
that there was no absolute threshold be- of it. Whether it is a brain, a tree, a rock conceivable and is at odds with a basic
tween lower and higher animals, includ- or an electron. Everything that is physi- precept of physical thinking, the Ur-
ing humans, that assigned higher mental cal also possesses an interior mental as- conservation law—e x nihilo nihil fit. So
powers to one but not to the other. pect. One is objective—accessible to ev- if there is nothing there in the first place,
erybody—and the other phenomenal— adding a little bit more won’t make
The nervous systems of all these crea- accessible only to the subject. That is the something. If a small brain won’t be able
tures are highly complex. Their constitu- sense of the quotation by British-born to feel pain, why should a large brain be
tive proteins, genes, synapses, cells and Buddhist scholar Alan Watts with which able to feel the god-awfulness of a throb-
neuronal circuits are as sophisticated, I began this essay. bing toothache? Why should adding
variegated and specialized as anything some neurons give rise to this ineffable
seen in the human brain. It is difficult to I will defend a narrowed, more nu- feeling? The phenomenal hails from a
find anything exceptional about the hu- anced view: namely that any complex sys- kingdom other than the physical and is
man brain. Even its size is not so special, tem, as defined below, has the basic attri- subject to different laws. I see no way for
because elephants, dolphins and whales butes of mind and has a minimal amount

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(consciousness redux)

the divide between unconscious and Furthermore, panpsychism does not ex- the relevant parts of your brain. If parts
conscious states to be bridged by bigger plain why a healthy brain is conscious, of the brain become fragmented and bal-
brains or more complex neurons. whereas the same brain, placed inside a kanized, as occurs in deep sleep or in an-
blender and reduced to goo, would not esthesia, consciousness fades.
A more principled solution is to as- be. That is, it does not explain how aggre-
sume that consciousness is a basic feature gates combine to produce specific con- To be conscious, then, you need to be
of certain types of so-called complex sys- scious experience. a single, integrated entity with a large
tems (defined in some universal, mathe- repertoire of highly differentiated states.
matical manner). And that complex sys- Integrated Panpsychism Even if the hard disk on my laptop ex-
tems have sensation, whereas simple sys- ceeds in capacity my lifetime memories,
tems have none. This reasoning is These century-old arguments bring none of its information is integrated.
analogous to the arguments made by sa- me to the conceptual framework of the The family photos on my Mac are not
vants studying electrical charge in the integrated information theory (IIT) of linked to one another. The computer
18th century. Charge is not an emergent psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio does not know that the boy in those pic-

A healthy brain is conscious, whereas the same brain,

( )placed inside a blender and reduced to goo, w ould not be.

property of living things, as originally Tononi of the University of Wisconsin– tures is my son as he matures from a tod-
thought when electricity was discovered Madison. It postulates that conscious dler to an awkward teenager and then a
in the twitching muscles of frogs. There experience is a fundamental aspect of re- graceful adult. To my computer, all in-
are no uncharged particles that in the ag- ality and is identical to a particular type formation is equally meaningless, just a
gregate produce an electrical charge. El- of information—integrated informa- vast, random tapestry of 0s and 1s. Yet I
ementary particles either have some tion. Consciousness depends on a phys- derive meaning from these images be-
charge, or they have none. Thus, an elec- ical substrate but is not reducible to it. cause my memories are heavily cross-
tron has one negative charge, a proton That is, my experience of seeing an linked. And the more interconnected,
has one positive charge and a photon, the aquamarine blue is inexorably linked to the more meaningful they become.
carrier of light, has zero charge. As far as my brain but is different from my brain.
chemistry and biology are concerned, These ideas can be precisely expressed
charge is an intrinsic property of these Any system that possesses some non- in the language of mathematics using no-
particles. Electrical charge does not zero amount of integrated information tions from information theory such as en-
emerge from noncharged matter. It is the experiences something. Let me repeat: tropy. Given a particular brain, with its
same, goes the logic, with consciousness. any system that has even one bit of inte- neurons in a particular state—these neu-
Consciousness comes with organized grated information has a very minute rons are firing while those ones are qui-
chunks of matter. It is immanent in the conscious experience. et—one can precisely compute the extent
organization of the system. It is a proper- to which this network is integrated. From
ty of complex entities and cannot be fur- IIT makes two principled assumptions. this calculation, the theory derives a sin-
ther reduced to the action of more ele- First, conscious states are highly differen- gle number, Φ (pronounced “fi”) [see “A
mentary properties. We have reached the tiated; they are informationally very rich. Theory of Consciousness,” Conscious-
ground floor of reductionism. You can be conscious of an uncountable ness Redux; Scientific American
number of things. Think of all the frames Mind, July/August 2009]. Measured in
Yet, as traditionally conceived, pan- from all the movies that you have ever bits, Φ denotes the size of the conscious
psychism suffers from two major flaws. seen or that have ever been filmed or that repertoire associated with the network of
One is known as the problem of aggre- will be filmed! Each frame, each view, is a causally interacting parts being in one
gates. Philosopher John Searle of the Uni- specific conscious percept. particular state. Think of Φ as the syner-
versity of California, Berkeley, expressed gy of the system. The more integrated the
it recently: “Consciousness cannot spread Second, each such experience is high- system is, the more synergy it has and the
over the universe like a thin veneer of ly integrated. You cannot force yourself more conscious it is. If individual brain re-
jam; there has to be a point where my to see the world in black and white; its gions are too isolated from one another or
consciousness ends and yours begins.” color is an integrated part of your view. are interconnected at random, Φ will be
Indeed, if consciousness is everywhere, Whatever information you are conscious low. If the organism has many ­neurons
why should it not animate the iPhone, the of is wholly and completely presented to and is richly endowed with synaptic con-
Internet or the United States of America? your mind; it cannot be subdivided. Un- nections, Φ will be high. Basically, Φ cap-
derlying this unity of consciousness is a
multitude of causal interactions among

28 s c i e n t i fi c a m e r i c a n m i n d January/February 2014

tures the quantity of c­ onsciousness. The Unlike classical panpsychism, not all copper cables that rapidly instantiate

quality of any one experience—the way in physical objects have a Φ that is differ- specific connections using ultrafast

which red feels different from blue and a ent from zero. Only integrated systems communication protocols. Each of

color is perceived differently from a do. A bunch of disconnected neurons in these processors in turn is made out of

tone—is conveyed by the informational a dish, a heap of sand, a galaxy of stars a few billion transistors. Taken as a

geometry associated with Φ. The whole, the Internet has perhaps
theory assigns to any one brain 1019 transistors, about the

state a shape, a crystal, in a fan- number of synapses in the

tastically high-dimensional qua- brains of 10,000 people. Thus,

lia space. This crystal is the sys- its sheer number of compo-

tem viewed from within. It is the nents exceeds that of any one

voice in the head, the light inside human brain. Whether or not

the skull. It is everything you will the Internet today feels like

ever know of the world. It is your something to itself is complete-

only reality. It is the quiddity of ly speculative. Still, it is cer-

experience. The dream of the lo- tainly conceivable.

tus eater, the mindfulness of the When I talk and write about

meditating monk and the agony panpsychism, I often encounter

of the cancer p­ atient all feel the blank stares of incomprehen-

way they do because of the shape sion. Such a belief violates peo-

of the distinct crystals in a space ple’s strongly held intuition

of a trillion dimensions—truly a that sentience is something

beatific vision. The water of­inte- only humans and a few closely

grated information is turned into related species possess. Yet our

the wine of experience. intuition also fails when we are

Integrated information In this map of the Internet, different colors indicate different first told as kids that a whale is
makes very specific predictions countries and domains. Although the Internet contains 10,000 not a fish but a mammal or that
about which brain circuits are times as many transistors as one human brain, it is unknown people on the other side of the
involved in consciousness and whether its connections are integrated enough to allow a sense planet do not fall off because
of feeling or consciousness to emerge.

which ones are peripheral play- they are upside down. Panpsy-

ers (even though they might contain many or a black hole—none of them are inte- chism is an elegant explanation for the

more neurons, their anatomical wiring grated. They have no consciousness. most basic of all brute facts I encounter

C o u r t e s y o f B a r r e t t Lyo n T h e O p t e P r o j e c t (t h r e e - d i m e n s i o n a l I n t e r n e t m a p) differs). The theory has most recently They do not have mental properties. every morning on awakening: there is

been used to build a consciousness meter Last, IIT does not discriminate be- subjective experience. Tononi’s theory

to assess, in a quantitative manner, the ex- tween squishy brains inside skulls and offers a scientific, constructive, predic-

tent to which anesthetized subjects or se- silicon circuits encased in titanium. Pro- tive and mathematically precise form of

verely brain-injured patients, such as Ter- vided that the causal relations among panpsychism for the 21st century. It is a

ri Schiavo, who died in Florida in 2005, the circuit elements, transistors and oth- gigantic step in the final resolution of

are truly not conscious or do have some er logic gates give rise to integrated in- the ancient mind-body problem.  M
conscious experiences but are u­ nable to formation, the system will feel like

signal their pain and discomfort to their something. Consider humankind’s larg- CHRISTOF KOCH is chief scientific officer

loved ones [see “A Consciousness Meter,” est and most complex artifact, the Inter- at the Allen institute for Brain Science in

Consciousness Redux; S­ cientific net. It consists of billions of computers Seattle. He serves on Scientific American

American Mind, March/April 2013]. linked together using optical fibers and Mind’s board of advisers.

IIT addresses the problem of aggre-

gates by postulating that only “local

maxima” of integrated information ex- Further Reading

ist (over elements and spatial and tempo- ■■Panpsychism in the West. David Skrbina. MIT Press, 2005.
ral scales): my consciousness, your con-
sciousness, but nothing in between. ■■Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Christof Koch. MIT Press, 2012.
That is, every person living in the U.S. is,
■■Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness: An Updated Account. Giulio Tononi in
Archives Italiennes de Biologie, Vol. 150, No. 4, pages 293–329; December 2012.

self by self, conscious, but there is no su- From Our Archives

perordinate consciousness of the U.S. ■■The Essence of Optimism. Elaine Fox; January/February 2013.

population as a whole. ■■Listening to Voices. Eleanor Longden; September/October 2013.

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