Have you ever wondered if your smartphone can think and feel by itself? With all its face-recognition technology and quad-core processors, can it experience the world through those elegant lenses? What about other smart devices and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and assistants such as Siri and Alexa who inhabit them, like in the 2013 film Her?

What about your pets, the plants on your balcony, the bugs inside those plants and the birds hovering over them? Are they all conscious? What about paralysed or comatose people? Can their consciousness be uploaded into a computer, thus saving their ghost in a new machine? These questions and more form the bedrock of inquiry in neuroscientist Christof Koch’s The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t be Computed. And while much can be derived from that subtitle alone, I would recommend the book for its concern with the “why” in that subtitle. Why is consciousness widespread? And why can’t it be computed?

Koch’s investigation into the ‘why’ of consciousness rather than just the ‘what’ — which has been the purview of Psychology since Metaphysics was asked, and some would say not kindly, to step aside on the subject — makes this inquiry valuable and substantial.

Koch first presents an accessible definition of consciousness: it “is experience ... the feeling of life itself.” In an article on Nature.com, he says consciousness is “the tune stuck in your head, the sweetness of chocolate mousse, the throbbing pain of a toothache, the fierce love for your child and the bitter knowledge that eventually all feelings will end.” Describing consciousness simply as experience — which means to encounter something — rather than the common-but-complex definition of self-awareness, allows Koch to show how the ability to encounter reality is more widespread than normally believed.

After defining it, Koch identifies the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) — the smallest and simplest neural activity that correlates with consciousness. In other words, the parts of your nervous system fundamental for consciousness. Through several fascinating studies and observations, he narrows down the footprints of consciousness: “Some parts of the nervous system, such as the spinal cord, the cerebellum and most if not all of the prefrontal cortex, are clearly out, while others, such as the posterior hot zone, are in.”

While taking this reductionist approach bears well to wrap your mind (pun intended) around the simplest possible trace of conscious experience — which in turn helps us to see if even this flicker of consciousness can be generated in a computer — parts of the brain that might not be deemed fundamental to this project do, indeed, still contribute to the quality of that experience.

Take the given example of a 24-year-old Chinese lady with “various motor deficits” caused by a missing cerebellum. I don’t think she, as the author suggests, “leads a normal life ... and experiences the world fully.” Yes, she might not be a zombie, but as the author himself says elsewhere in the book, the brain is much too interconnected and the functions so integrated that parts cannot be discounted without some level of loss. Similarly, while self-awareness and language are certainly qualities of consciousness and contribute to a sense of narrative that one can participate in with others, they are not absolutely essential to consciousness.

By logical extension alone, this opens up the door for a lot more species to be considered as conscious when they hadn’t been accorded that recognition before. So, the study of consciousness has come a long way indeed, from the heart being considered the seat of the soul to our current-day ability to pinpoint conscious activity to the posterior hot zone in the brain.

Up until the end of Chapter 6, Koch demonstrates the limits of a materialist/physicalist approach to understanding consciousness through tracing its footprints in the NCC. Then, in reckoning with what philosopher David Chalmers calls “the hard problem of consciousness” — which constitutes of such questions as: how does non-physical conscious experience emerge from a physical brain? And why is there consciousness to begin with? — Koch changes directions and shows how a phenomenological approach — taking conscious experience, rather than the brain, as the starting point — is more fruitful. To that end, he employs the Integrated Information Theory (IIT).

Proposed by neuroscientist Guilio Tononi in 2004, IIT builds on the legacy of Descartes’s famous statement: “I think, therefore I am.” It posits five fundamental postulates of consciousness and considers fundamental to consciousness the ability of a physical system to be integrated at the level of its architecture — meaning it has feedback loops that allow that system to have causal power upon itself. “Intrinsic causal power,” writes Koch, “is the extent to which the current state of, say, an electronic circuit or a neural network, causally constrains its past and future states. The more the system’s elements constrain each other, the more causal power.” More causal power means greater consciousness. And this greater or lesser can finally be quantified, thanks to IIT, which offers a metric for consciousness denoted by the Greek letter Phi.

But this idea of causal power, along with so much else in the study of the brain and of consciousness, can be quite difficult to grasp. Consciousness has been described by some as the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe and the final frontier of knowledge. The workings of the human brain are hardly known even to the subject who refers to their mind as if “it” belongs to them. As Koch says in observing how perceptions are hidden from the conscious mind, “you are a stranger to your own mind.” The film Inside Out does a good job of animating that strangeness of our minds by alluding to various competing emotions that contribute to the construction of memory and identity.

But allow me to try explaining causal power and its core place in IIT, which is the beating heart of the book. “For something to exist from the point of view of the world,” writes Koch, “extrinsically, it must be able to influence things and things must be able to influence it. That is what it means to have causal power. When something can’t make a difference to anything in the world or be influenced by anything in the world, it is causally impotent. Whether or not it exists makes no difference to anything.”

While the implications for this elemental idea at the micro-level are more straightforward — computers cannot generate consciousness because it would have to be built into them at the level of the transistors and the wiring to work like feedback loops in the brain — it also has something to say about the macro-level reality. But going into that would take us into dimensions that, albeit interesting, are tangential. Suffice it to say that IIT shares certain commonalities with panpsychism, which has been posited by some ancient traditions and even dramatised in the film Avatar.

Briefly put, it suggests that consciousness is widespread across life and, according to IIT, there is no threshold that demarcates sentient from non-sentient life. To sum it up: yes to consciousness for the entire gamut of life, all arrayed and joined by grades and shades of that consciousness; no to consciousness for AI, at least for a very long time, if ever. Which means that uploading your conscious experiences to the Cloud is not happening anytime soon.

I find it both somewhat amusing and endearing that thinking about the possibility of AI sprouting consciousness has led some neuroscientists to the realisation that all species of life share in that watering hole of consciousness, a thought that has been central to Hindu, Buddhist and other indigenous traditions for thousands of years. I also don’t want to participate in the celebration of debunking the idea of artificial/simulated consciousness because I feel the usual response to such events is the statement: ‘Oh, science will get there. It’s still young. Give it a few years’. Often, it’s even taken as a challenge. I do hope the author’s conclusions lead us to a revised and more nuanced understanding of the natural world and I was gladdened to see that it has had an effect on the author himself.

“I’m not just a scientist,” writes Koch in the beautiful final chapter ‘Coda: Why This Matters’. “I also strive to live an ethical life.” Such observations, imbued with a flair for the philosophic and the poetic, appear throughout the book. For example, “Any piece of nervous tissue is a dazzling tapestry of tightly knotted neurons of various types, more finely woven than any Persian carpet from Isfahan. A quinoa-grain-sized piece of cortex contains 50,000 to 100,000 neurons of a hundred different types, a few miles of axonal wiring, and a billion synapses.”

In concluding his investigation, Koch has this to say: “We have come to the end of our voyage. Illuminated by the light of our pole star — consciousness — the universe reveals itself to be an orderly place. It is far more enminded than modernity, blinded by its technological supremacy over the natural world, takes it to be. It is a view more in line with earlier traditions that respected and feared the natural world.”

The reviewer is an avid student of the humanities

The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t be Computed
By Christof Koch
MIT Press, US
ISBN: 978-0262042819
280pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 19th, 2020