Two Books about Consciousness

Christof Koch and Erik Hoel --Jottings

1.

I am a fan of Erik Hoel’s Substack and picked up his new nonfiction book a few weeks ago, but decided to read his novel first. The premise intrigued me from the start. A brilliant young scientist drops out of his PhD program in Neurobiology at Madison where he’d been studying with a world-renown consciousness researcher. Spiraling he ends sleeping in his car until he is invited to come to NYU and join a team of elite postdocs working at the cutting edge of consciousness research. Then one of the postdocs dies.

There are two things that are particularly brilliant about this book. The first is it is written in a style that evokes consciousness itself. A book about the mind that simulates how the mind actually works. Every chapter begins with him waking up…. coming back to consciousness from his dream-state (another kind of conscious state)… and this is followed by a chaotic stream of events and pivoting scenes of interiority, with very frequent in-chapter POV changes between characters… all of these things evoking the chaotic nature of our conscious thoughts, how we go in and out in interiority and inner monologues, interspersed with outward-focused flow states— with the occasional POV changes hinting at those moments we when we experience something of the unbounded and porous self. Our alpha protagonist is Kierk Suron (aka Kierkegaard, the philosopher in search of truth…. something he could live or die for). Not a lovable guy.

The second thing I admired so much about this book is the deep dives in exposition. I was not surprised to hear that Hoel re-read Moby Dick FIVE TIMES during the course of writing Revelations. Melville, one of my beloved writers was no stranger to exposition as Moby Dick has a non-trivial amount of essayistic content. These days that would make the novel “genre-bending” but it is nice to recall that across time and space, there was never any such rule regarding story over exposition in novels. That is just Hollywood talking. I found it incredibly stimulating to follow Hoel and his man down many scientific and philosophical rabbit holes. Hoel is brilliant as many of you already know.

Two small points. I respect that he gave an accurate picture of animal experimentation in this type of research. I think he is ambivalent and he gives the other side some voice in the form of the student movement against animal experimentation. He doesn’t totally do it justice though, since they come across as unstable elements (violent or lacking in understanding). I think we can agree that curiosity-led research is crucial at top tier research institutions and should be prioritized, but the impact on animal research subjects in the field of consciousness studies —the animals are being tortured basically— seems questionable when the research is basically purely curiosity-driven. That is not to say it is not important research or that no important practical use will later emerge from it, but none of the characters in the book questioned their use in this kind of research. Some scenes were quite hard to read. The other small point is a wish he had more conclusively worked out the murder or accident. It would have been easy to tie that up—even from within a dream.

This novel will be orders of magnitude more interesting to people who have read Christof Koch’s memoir, Consciousness: Conversations of a Romantic Reductionist, which brings up so many of these issues. Koch's theory of consciousness builds on that of University of Wisconsin–Madison neuroscientist Giulio Tononi's integrated information theory (IIT), which posits that the degree of consciousness an organism experiences is a function of brain integration. Hoel studied under Tononi and made him the model of the very unflattering character of Moretti, the teacher who bullied him at Madison, causing him to drop out of his PhD program.

2.

The question of what is "consciousness" has troubled philosophers for centuries. When I was an undergraduate in the philosophy department at UC Berkeley in the early 90s, John Searle was famously working on the issue --and guess what? He is still plugging away at it! And, it's not just philosophers either. Scientists also tackle the problem of reconciling a conscious, aware mind with a physical brain. According to them, consciousness emerges from chemistry and electricity in our brains. But how it arises --the mechanism-- remains an unsolved problem. This as-yet unsolved mystery has led to two schools of thought. On the one hand we have the reductionists, who believe consciousness can be boiled down to molecules obeying scientific laws. And in the other camp we have the dualists, believing that consciousness cannot be explained solely by classical physics.

Consciousness: Conversations of a Romantic Reductionist, is wonderfully quirky, blending hard science and memoir. Calling himself a reductionist (and a "romantic" one at that), Koch tackles the question in terms of physics by trying to isolate the part of the brain responsible for consciousness in human beings. He is looking for the physicality of consciousness. And this can be done, for example, by performing EEG diagnostics on victims of brain injury to try and understand what kinds of brain trauma cause a loss in consciousness. Likewise, it can be done on people in deep sleep.

Some questions immediately emerge:

How does anesthesia work? There are various anesthetic agents--but no common mechanism. What is going on in the brain?

Can free will be described as a kind of quantum superposition?

How about LSD? What does it tell us about consciousness?

Koch's theory of consciousness builds on that of University of Wisconsin–Madison neuroscientist Giulio Tononi's integrated information theory (IIT), which posits that the degree of consciousness an organism experiences is a function of brain integration. Going back to the question concerning anesthesia, what appears to be disrupted by the various drugs is the large-scale functional integration in the corticothalamic complex (relating to the cerebral cortex and the thalamus). And this is also what happens to patients in a vegetative state. A person can experience brain trauma in various local areas of the brain and not lose consciousness (only capabilities). Complexity is necessary, but what really matters in terms of consciousness, Koch argues, is how interconnected and organized – how “integrated” – these neural circuits are. Computers are capable of storing much more memory than we are, but the information is not cross-referenced. As Koch explains it, his Mac, as yet, cannot recognize that various photos of his daughter at different stages of her life, from infancy to adulthood, are the same person; and not just the same person, but his beloved daughter. And this is because the data (or information) has not been integrated within the "brain" of the computer.

I loved this book. I loved the hard science—and appreciated how clear Koch writes about what is a very slippery topic. More than anything, I admired the richness of his mind and character. Well-read, well-traveled and extremely soulful, I agree, if dogs can’t go to heaven then there is a very big problem with the paradigm! IIT is probably the most promising approach to the problem. Am now reading a very different one on consciousness by Douglas Hofstadter, called I am a Strange Loop—which also is a mixing of memoir and science. Also with a romantic touch. Highly recommend Sean Carroll’s podcast with David Chalmers as well to get a better idea of a non-reductionist approach. Looking at Penrose on consciousness as well is interesting as points on the graph to be better able to position Koch. His work at the Allen Institute is fascinating.