What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

Griffin Bay Bookstore presents Christof Koch, one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists, in the bookstore café. Koch is the author of the new book Then I Am Myself the World; he is the former chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and he has authored more than 350 scientific papers and six books about how computers and neurons process information. The book covers the ordinary facets of everyday experiences and feelings, before soaring to the heights of expanded consciousness during a mystical experience or while partaking of psychedelics. This odyssey extends to the edge of the known, including liminal consciousness in severely injured brains or mindless computers running large language models and other advanced AI algorithms. These phenomena are all captured within the framework of the integrated information theory of consciousness, which has emerged as perhaps the most prominent scientific theory of consciousness over the past two decades.