Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

Dr. Christophe Koch, welcome.

Thank you for having me, Andrew.

It's been a pleasure.

It's been a...

Do you hear me?

Mm-hmm.

Do you hear me?

Yes.

Do you see me?

Yes.

The fact that you hear, not that you respond to my sound by moving your hand, the fact that you see, not the fact that you can navigate around this room, but you actually have a picture in your head.

The fact that you love, the fact that you hate, the fact that you dream, that you imagine, that you dread, those are all conscious experience.

It's the stuff of life, literally.

If I give you a billion dollars, okay, that even for you is probably a meaningful amount of money.

Okay, but there's a slight, you know, there's this thing that I'm going to remove all your conscious experiences.

So you would still love and hate and drive cars and do everything else you do right now, but there would be no light.

There wouldn't be any Andrew.

Would you take that wager?

Well, the difference is between those two states is consciousness.

So without it, you don't exist for yourself.

In fact, tonight, you're going to go to bed.

In particular, in the early stages of the night, you go into non-REM, delta wave sleep, right?

And you do not exist for yourself.

If I wake you up, I said, Andrew, Andrew, something's happening.

And I ask you, well, where did you come from?

You say, I came from nowhere, which is different, of course, later stage in the night, right, when you have dreams, which is another conscious experience.

But when you sleep, you do not exist for yourself.

When you're under anesthesia, you do not exist for yourself.

So you only exist for yourself because you are a conscious being.

So in some sense, it's very simple to define.

The study of consciousness is really a modern phenomenon.

It's really Rene Descartes.

So, you know, Aristotle and Plato, much as they are foundational fathers of philosophy, didn't really have a position on the mind or on consciousness.

That's a modern thing.

Where we have struggled is trying to put it in objective terms.

So you don't access my consciousness and I don't access your consciousness.

And this makes it different from anything else that we study, different from a black hole, from a virus, from a brain.

Because all those I can study with what philosophers call third-person properties, right?

You can stick them in a magnet.

You can point a telescope at it.

We can agree on, you know, what's the wavelength, what's the wave, what's the mass, what's the molecular constituency.

We can't do that with consciousness.

I believe you're conscious.

In fact, I ask you, how are you feeling today?

You tell me, well, I'm a little bit depressed because what happened?

Well, so I'm trying to get at your state of consciousness.

But ultimately, it's always an inference, whether it's you or whether it's a baby or whether it's an animal that can't directly talk because language is another way to infer.

So that makes it interesting.

more difficult.

And the other part is people confound consciousness with consciousness of self.

So most people, if you're asking what's consciousness, they say, oh, it's to know that I'm a man and I will die one day and I know what I had for breakfast.

Those are all conscious experience, but they really pertain to self-consciousness.

But that's just one aspect.

You can lose self-consciousness.

Like, I know you had Alex Holup here, and I know from reading and listening to some of what he says, he says, when you're really climbing at an expert level, you flow over the rock,

you're sort of, you totally lose a sense of self, that inner voice, that critic that constantly speak to you is gone during those moments.

This is blessed silence, but you're highly conscious because you're highly conscious of, you know, where you are and what's the next, you know, the next place you need to go to.

So, and of course, doing psychedelic experience, doing states of flow, doing states of meditation, you can lose yourself, but you're still conscious.

So let's not confound self-consciousness, which is one aspect, a big aspect, particularly in adult people, literally highly educated people with consciousness to cool.

That's really a much broader set of the fact that you can feel your limbs, right?

That may not even relate to you.

You just feel something there without assigning it, well, that's my body.

That is, again, it's another conscious experience.

Well, you could also be simply not there at all.

Where Andrew isn't there, the cell, the one that carries your traits and your personality, your memories, but you're still conscious.

I'm interested in all these different states of consciousness because it's all, I mean, it's dominated by everyday waking consciousness.

But as you said, that's all about doing, right?

You walk, you run, you shop, you look around, you talk to people.

But there are all these other states that don't involve the William James Times dreams of consciousness, but they are all conscious experiences.

And so the more we know about them in the physiological basis, the better we can describe and delimit what consciousness is and what is it not.

So, for instance, to your point, it's consciousness is not specific.

Primary doing.

Of course we can do things, right?

We do it all the time.

That's how we make a living.

But consciousness is really more about being.

It's a state of being.

And by the way, that's also why computers, they can do everything we can do, but they can't be what we are conscious.

Please elaborate on that.

We confound consciousness and behavior because we talk, we're speaking apes, right?

But if you take that away, you're still highly conscious.

If you don't move, if you meditate or sleep or you have a mystical experience, you're sitting or a psychedelic experience, you're sitting or lying, you're not moving anybody, hardly any overt movement, yet you're highly conscious, right?

So behavior is not required for consciousness.

And consciousness, of course, is not required for behavior.

There are all sorts of unconscious behaviors.

And so we shouldn't confound the two.

And this relates in an interesting way to the confounding between intelligence and consciousness when people talk about artificial consciousness and artificial intelligence.

Intelligence ultimately is about planning to do something, about behavior in the short term or in the long term.

Well, consciousness is a state of being, being happy, being sad, being full of dread or seeing something which is really different.

Well, derealization is one where you feel...

So, A, you're perfectly right.

The self is the basic kernel of our operating system, okay?

And it's very difficult for us to lose because if we lose it, we would not be, from an evolutionary point of view, in a good shape, right?

But then there are conditions where you feel... So, for instance, in derealization, a psychiatric condition, which can, by the way, happen during psychedelics, you feel...

not you anymore.

And you feel there's something off with the world.

This is not the real world.

There's something funny.

The world, they still see and hear fine, but they all believe that this isn't the real world.

And they try to wake up.

In fact, you probably remember

A year and a half ago, there was a spectacular case of the Alaska Airline pilot who asked to go onto the jump seat on a flight from Everett in Washington to, I think, Oregon or San Francisco.

I've flown that from Everett, tiny airport.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then they said, of course, he's a colleague.

He was a pilot in good standing.

Into the flight, he stood up and tried to pull the two switches.

that would kill the fuel to the two engines.

The pilots fought him and kicked him out of the cabin and he was arrested.

And in fact, the trial was three days ago.

What happened that for the first time ever, he took psychedelics three days earlier to wake for his best friend.

And then he went into this episode of derealization where he thought, okay, this is not the real world.

This is a dream.

I need to wake up.

And if in my dream, if I crash the plane, then I will finally wake up in the real world.

Whoa.

So yes, it is very robust, but of course, so I call it, we always live in the gravitational field of planet ego.

It is always about me.

It is always about me, me, me.

And even if I don't think explicitly,

There's things that, you know, there are processes monitoring my consciousness to make sure that it's important for me.

And it's very rare, but of course the self can also be highly dysfunctional.

You can catastrophize, you can be highly anxious, you can think people insult you or they say bad things about you, while in fact they don't at all.

And so there are rare conditions of selflessness when just like an astronaut that can become weightless, you can become selfless.

So during episodes when you are experiencing a state of flow.

I used to have this when I wrote computer code when I was, you know, way younger.

You can totally get absorbed by it, right?

Or you read a book or you read an engaging movie or you play some sports or something or you're Alex Holup and climb, right?

And partly these states are so addictive because it's such – you've just realized you spent the last 20 minutes in this heavenly state doing something –

But, again, the critic is gone.

And, of course, during sometimes heroic dose of psychedelics, you can also totally lose yourself, the sense of self, and you realize how profound, beautiful the world is without you, you know, the self being there and constantly interfering and relating it to what does it mean for me?

What does it give me?

So I would call it the transformative experience.

We all know changing behavior is very difficult, but there you're telling me within 10 minutes because of this 10 or 15 minute VR experience, you're now much more hyper aware of this.

So that's a rare experience and I think it would be useful for all of us to have those experiences.

So I work with somebody here in Santa Monica, Elizabeth R. Koch.

We're not related, although we shared the last name.

And she has this really interesting idea of what she calls perception box, that we all run around with our own view of reality.

You'll see how this relates, including, most importantly, my notion of self.

And it's not objective.

It's all subjective.

It's just like a Bayesian thing.

You know, the modern language would be Bayesian priors.

I have various Bayesian priors, how I expect myself to be and how I expect other people to respond to me.

So Bayesian is a view of uncertainty in the world.

There's this famous vicar, British vicar, Thomas Bayes in the 17th century that started this called Bayesian, whereby I look at something and I try to infer, well, what's the underlying reason for it?

And I update my – based on certain observations that I make, I continuously have this running estimate what I think is really going on.

And this also includes my base assumption about the world, including political assumption, including assumption how will people react or what's the true motive of people.

So the point that she's trying to make with this perception box, it includes everything.

So a benign, funny example is – do you remember what was it called?

Hashtag the dress?

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so remember, so this was the dress that went viral in 2015.

It was a wedding dress where, if you looked at it, roughly, I can't remember the exact percentages, half the people saw it unambiguously as gold and white.

That's how I see it.

There's no question.

Same, yeah.

Okay, same.

But half of other people see it as blue and black.

And again, it's not something guessing.

Is it maybe one or the other?

They just see it blue and black or... Okay, so...

Then people ask, well, is there anything real?

What is the real color?

Often people ask, no, there is no real color.

What there is are photons that are, you know, from the sun that strike the two-dimensional surface of the dress that get absorbed by my photoreceptors that then get processed and they get evaluated in one way in our brain.

So we see it as white and gold and get evaluated differently in a different brain because we all have different priors.

This has to do with whether we are evening persons or morning persons.

But this also applies to things like 9-11 and October 7th.

If I tell you this, 9-11, what do you think about it?

Or October 7th, depending on whether you are Israeli or Palestinian, you have profoundly different views of it, right?

So you look at a fact that is supposedly objective, but depending what priors you bring to it, what your perception bar construct is, in what culture you grew up, you have radical different interpretation.

And this also includes your sense of self.

So I would say what you had...

With this transformative experience, you expanded your perception box, your perception of reality to now include the notion, ha, I get it now that other people, depending on their skin of their colors, will be treated differently from me.

That's invaluable.

Implicit and explicit, yeah.

So you have to think about it.

What does it mean?

What does it mean for my behavior?

What does it mean for other people's behavior?

Yeah, so you can call it psychedelic.

This is called the integration period.

So I would submit you had a transformative experience.

You had what philosophers call direct acquaintance now with some form of racism, right?

Subtle racism, right, in this VR environment.

And now you're doing the explicit work of reformulating everything.

You're changing literally your Bayesian priors.

So I imagine you're top-down, you know, from, let's say, prefrontal cortex back into whatever, you know, theory of mind, for instance, areas, right?

You are changing your priors.

So I think there are two ways to achieve transformative effect.

One is the slow one by educating yourself by reading books, by watching movies.

But as you said, very often it doesn't really bite until you have a direct experience.

You direct have acquaintance with this.

Then suddenly you say, now I get it.

And this is the character of any transformative experiences, including mystical experiences.

I mean, it's just up here, right?

200 miles or 300 miles up the coast.

Yeah, he was a great friend.

I visited him many times.

I met him through Francis Crick.

And we had this shared interest in the brain and in consciousness.

And he was incredible.

I mean, what made him so singular also in his interaction with patients was his empathy.

So you could have deep empathy with patients and try to imagine these strange otherworldly conditions, like the patient from Mars or these other patients that he described that had very specific...

pathologies that were totally explainable as arising out of brain lesions.

Yeah, he was better at that than most other people trying to imagine.

What is it, for example, to live in the eternal present?

He had one patient that had this profound amnesia, but he could still, he always lived back in, I can't remember now, 20 years earlier.

And in his entire world, his entire memory stopped 20 years earlier.

And that's how he lived.

And it looks crazy, but once you understand that, it makes perfect sense how he responded.

So we each have a bespoke reality, right?

So you have slightly different receptors.

You may have different color receptors.

You may have different taste receptors.

You have a certainly different experience from me.

Right.

You grew up in a different environment.

So it's not easy to get into someone else's head, although some people can do it.

Actors, for example, can try to do it.

The methods of acting.

We totally try to adopt the point of view of the character you're trying to play.

But, of course, that's much more difficult for other animals that share or we may share a close evolutionary history like with all mammals.

but that have very different, you know, that may have infrared sensors or they have a much more potent sense of smell.

And how do we, that have a different motor system that hang from the ceiling, right?

So how do we imagine doing that?

But I think it is possible.

It's challenging.

And of course, it's this classical essay by Thomas Nagel, what is it like to be a bat, right?

And his position, this American philosopher says, well, we can never truly know what it is like to be a bat.

But I think we can approximate it.

I can't really ever know what is it like to be Andrew Huberman, right?

But I can try to imagine it.

And, you know, this is what empathy is, right?

trying to feel like you and trying to realize that we're all conscious beings.

We're all a bookended between two eternities.

And so in some sense, we're very, very similar.

And the thing that makes us, that divide us are really tiny subsets of all the things that we share, including with cats and dogs and elephants and squids and everything else on the tree of life.

And you just gave me an example.

Your experience of VR and realizing what it is to have a black skin compared to a white skin, right?

This was clearly a beneficial experience that enables you to be more emphatic with other people, right?

And try to better understand what they mean when they talk about explicit or implicit racism, right?

And it changed you profoundly.

And you're telling me this happened when?

2008?

All right.

So, you know, so that's eight years ago.

So clearly it lasted.

So I think for most conditions, we can certainly improve them.

You have to believe that you can change.

Right.

So if you're being told, oh, the story is it's all the system is nothing you can do is just hopeless.

You can just change.

you know, take this pill and suffer through to the end of your days.

That I think highly counterproductive.

No, you have to believe I'm an active agent of my own mind.

I can shape my reality.

I would call it my perception box with various, you know, ways, either talk therapy or psychedelic therapy or some other therapy.

It requires a lot of work.

It doesn't come sort of for free, right?

And

At the end of the day, I'm still left, let's say, with my traumatic memory, but now I can realize, okay, I had this bad experience, but it doesn't have to define me.

I can go on past it, and there are various ways we can talk about that this can be achieved.

Absolutely.

I do believe in the malleability of the human mind.

even in older people.

In almost every condition you can, but maybe except for the most extreme, you can change your outlook on life.

If you really want to, that's one issue.

It's a little bit of trying to convince somebody who's an alcoholic that they should stop drinking until they have the realization, okay, I don't want to land in the gutter anymore.

I don't want to wake up at 8 a.m.

in the morning drunk outside my house.

I want to change.

Then you can change.

And, you know, 2,000 years of therapies, of all sorts of things, you know, take alcoholic anonymous, right?

The first thing you do, you have to recognize that I am an alcoholic.

And then I can begin.

Before I do that, there isn't really a hope.

But once I do that, I can change.

It may be difficult.

It may be obvious.

But you can change.

It's true.

I acknowledge that.

I personally wouldn't say it requires divine intervention because I'm not sure there is such a divine entity that could intervene in this.

But acknowledging and also acknowledging that I can't do it by myself.

I would say at least I would need community.

I would need help from others.

Again, you have to acknowledge that.

Yes.

So, A, there are certain enabling conditions.

Okay, one enabling condition, your heart has to beat.

Because if your heart doesn't beat, it doesn't supply oxygen to your brain, and you will lose consciousness within 8 to 10 seconds.

Okay?

Same thing in the brainstem.

Your brainstem has to be active to perfuse the rest of the forebrain with no adrenaline and dopamine and all of that.

But those don't provide the content.

You don't love...

or you hate or see with your brainstem, with your locus coeruleus, for instance, okay?

So the circuits that convey experience in us, I'm not saying it's the same in other species, particularly, you know, non-mammals, but in us,

that grew up with the normal brain.

Again, I'm not talking about people who never, you know, unencephalic individuals.

That's very different.

So for most of us, we grew up with the normal brain.

And I think there the relevant circuits are the corticothalamo circuits.

And we can, in fact, we can exploit this knowledge now to test whether someone is conscious.

Because in principle, so what you can do

You can knock the brain using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, right?

And then you listen to its echo using a high-density EEG net, okay?

And you can see if you knock here or here, depending where exactly you knock, you get these up and down states.

And if they last for, let's see, 200, 300, 400 milliseconds, and they occur at different places, you can formally compute what's called brain complexity using Lempel-Ziv complexity.

And you can show when...

Everyone who's either awake like us or we sleep in a dream state or we're on ketamine where we dissociate it, in all those cases, the brain complexity is high.

It's above a threshold.

However, when you're in a non-REM state, when you're in a state of deep sleep or you're anesthetized or you're, of course, in the most extreme case, your brain dead, then the brain complexity is very low.

And in animals, we've even done at the Allen Institute, we've done this experiment where we can systematically manipulate the corticothalamocortical circuits to really show it is this circuit that is really, that is the one that's critically involved

In fact, what we discovered over the last 10 years is this very abrupt threshold in brain complexity defined using this technique.

There's a thing called perturbational complex index.

It's a single number, PCI, between zero and one.

Zero means there's no complexity.

It's flat, like in a dead brain, flat line.

One, it means every EG is totally, electrode is totally independent from anyone else, never happens in a real brain.

In a real brain, typically, wake brain, you get things between 0.65 and 0.3.

Let's see.

There's a sharp threshold at 0.31.

Anyone that we've had now, there are 300 people that are both patient and normal, people that have been measured.

If you're above the threshold of 0.31, you're conscious.

If you're below the threshold, you're unconscious.

That probably means, as it's nonlinear, just like Hodgkin-Huxley, there's probably a nonlinear circuit mechanism that once the circuit is intact—

It's sufficient to support consciousness.

Now, you can ask, well, this is all very nice.

Why is this relevant?

Well, it is relevant in the following case, something that could happen to any of us.

I step out here onto the Pacific Coastal Highway.

I get hit by a car, okay?

I'm now unconscious.

I get to the ICU, whether that's a traumatic brain injury or cardiac arrest or hemorrhage.

I'm unconscious.

I'm like this.

I might be aroused, so, you know, my eyes are open.

I'm now what used to be called vegetative state, what's now more often called behavioral unresponsive state, okay?

And there are thousands of these people worldwide because with proper care, with proper nursing care, you can stay in this state for weeks or months or, in the case of Terry Shivo, 14 years, okay?

Furthermore, what happens after, typically in most cases, after four to five days, the doctors will talk with their loved ones, is this what he would have wanted?

And 70 to 90% of the time they decide, no, this is not what you wanted and you withdraw life-sustaining therapy.

But we now know that 25% of these patients have what's called covert consciousness.

They're there.

We know this because, for example, some of these patients you can – there was a big study last year in New England Journal of Medicine made a front page of the New York Times where it can show 25% of these patients can still voluntarily up and down regulate their motor cortex in response to a command –

Clench your fist for 30 seconds, relax it.

Clench your fist for 30 seconds, relax it.

So these people that otherwise when you ask them, sir, can you hear me?

Can you track my finger?

Can you pinch them very hard to see do they do a withdrawal of limb reflex?

They don't do any of that.

So they have what's called a Glasgow Coma Scale, a very low Glasgow Coma Scale or Coma and Recovery Scale.

GSC-R scale, very low, but they still seem to be conscious.

They either have high brain complexity or they can modulate their brain.

So this is now the first time ever that we have a practical way in people that cannot respond, that clinically, behaviorally are considered unresponsive, first to convince the family that although their loved one doesn't respond, doesn't mean that they're unconscious.

And then try to see, well, okay, so this person is conscious.

Can we now give particular treatments to enable them to recover?

We also have some pilot data to show that those patients that are conscious compared to the patients that are truly unconscious in this behavioral wakefulness state, that they have a better chance to recovery.

Yeah, so this was a case back in 1998 or 2000 under President Bush.

She had a cardiac arrest, was diagnosed,

The heart was started up again.

She was in the state for 14 years.

And then there was this fight between her husband who said that she didn't want to be in this state and her parents that were profoundly devout that said, no, we want to keep you alive.

And went back and forth.

And finally, the court allowed her withdrawal of life support.

So she died after 14 years.

And the analysis, the postmortem showed in her case, her brain was totally shrunk in her case.

know we didn't do this procedure then we didn't have it but clearly it's she was probably one of the 75 patient that are truly unconscious yeah so it's important to get this into the icu so in fact i started a company called intrinsic powers because it's the intrinsic powers of the brain that mediate consciousness and we're now trying we met with the fda and they said well you this is all

Cool, but you really need to do a clinical trial.

So we're trying to fundraise now.

So if anyone in the audience here is willing to invest in this, to get this procedure into the ICU so we can tell for sure, is this patient conscious or are they just non-responsive?

So it pertains to what we said early on.

The fact that you don't behave is not the same as the fact that you're unconscious.

Those are two different things.

Yes.

So, A, typically people don't, when they do recover, they typically don't have explicit memory.

Because, again, memory is something different than actually being, you know, conscious experience.

Just like most of us don't remember our dreams.

We're clearly conscious, but, you know, we don't remember them.

But there's a study now systematically at Harvard that tries to explore that.

And some people explicitly say that.

In fact, there's one really interesting case.

where the person who then recovered, a young guy, who first said first he was upset that they didn't follow his explicit instruction to terminate life.

But then, of course, later on, now he's relatively normal.

He was very happy that they saved him.

Yeah, so we can pull back, you know, particularly with modern technology, 9-11, etc., rescue helicopters, we can pull back people from the brink of death.

But that may not be the same as, you know, having them actually conscious.

So people are now, the medical community is now beginning to recognize this idea of covert consciousness, which is something that was only really realized over the last 10 years.

Yes, that's a trouble because... Right, you don't know what will be available.

And the other thing is called this bias, this disability bias.

So let's say you look like a person who's highly active, right?

So you probably cannot imagine being in a state where you can't move anymore.

Okay, but now you have to change your prior.

You've had this accident or whatever.

Now you are in this state.

This is a given.

You're now in the state where you had a bad, whatever, car accident, and you can't move anymore.

Or you may not be able to see anymore.

Now, what is it you want?

And most people, to those people that you can communicate, like they did a study in Israel with locked-in patients.

So these are patients that have a stroke at the level of the pons, where they're typically most of their motor commands, they can't execute anymore except, you know, some neck and some vertical eye movements.

And they ask them because they can't communicate.

And most of them, except the ones that have chronic pain, most of them want to continue to live.

Although before when you would have asked him, you would have said, no, no way.

And so it's difficult with this medical directive because you don't know until you get there.

Resilience.

Well, there's also this phenomenon of akinetic mutism that's also found in lesion, that area where people seem to have completely lost their will to do anything at all.

They just sit there all day, and they don't say anything.

They've lost essentially their will...

do or say anything.

And if you inject them with dopamine or others, then sometimes they retrieve and you ask them, why was it?

I just had no desire.

Do we know what brain area is involved in this case?

Yeah.

It's a cingulate.

Well, so based on the study of your colleague, Joseph Parvizi, right, at Stanford, we know if you go a little bit back into the posterior cingulate, that's where you have the sense of self.

If you stimulate there or in these people who have epileptic seizures in there, right, they have these weird symptoms.

dissociative states or where they feel themselves floating or they can hear themselves have a conversation, but observing themselves having a conversation.

So we know some of the self, you know, the sense of self here.

And we also know doing meditation and doing psilocybin, those areas are reduced.

So, yeah, there is a footprint for everything we experience.

There is a footprint in the brain.

That doesn't mean we can reduce it to the brain.

Not at all.

But there is a physical neuronal correlate of it.

And Francis Crick and I, of course, used to call this neural correlates of consciousness and try to pursue it.

Well, you never left the perception box because it is your construction of reality.

Well, we could also have what some people in the Bayesian community calls a metaprior.

So you have your priors, right?

So the priors are all the assumptions that let you judge a fact, supposedly fact.

So to stay with yesterday's examples, trying not to politicize it, but you may have read after the assassination was announced in the House that

the speaker called for 30 seconds of silence, which was fine, and then someone called for prayer, said out loud, and then all pandemonium broke out, okay?

So among the representatives, they screamed at each other.

You know, it only took this one thing, and then suddenly, because they have radical different priors, they just have, they're partly, you know, your two, the ones that you described,

But what they should do is sort of have a meta prior.

Okay, wait a minute.

We're now screaming at each other.

We all believe that shooting other people, that's what they all said, universal, this is bad.

This is not good.

No matter who did it, for what reason, this is bad and evil.

Maybe we should stop.

screaming at each other to change our higher order prior because this isn't going to end well.

This just keeps on getting worse.

And where is it going to end?

How is it going to end?

There has to be this insight.

So it's a little bit when we talked before about, you know, Alcohol Anonymous.

There has to be this insight.

Wait, we can't do this.

There has to be a realization that there is a problem and we've got to do things differently.

If we lost this narrative, yeah.

So we had more or less, I mean, in the 50s and 60s, right, there were three TV channels and we had a common narrative.

I totally agree with you.

And we lost that.

And we're never going to regain that, right, unless there's extreme political repression, you know, maybe in China, but not here.

It's not going to happen here, right?

So what do we do?

Is this just getting worse every day with more and more violence and other things?

Or is there going to be some point in awakening a meta, you know, a realization that we've got to change our priors here?

Humanity has...

bumbled through history for the last, you know, however long, you know, several million years.

And modern history, since we can speak and have recorded thought, at least 10,000 years, right?

So ultimately, somehow we'll make it through, most likely.

On the whole.

On the whole.

But it could be much better.

Individuals, empires crumble in half.

And of course, we're an empire like any other empire, you know.

And yes, this...

This Western-style liberal democracy, you know, you can be pessimistic about it.

And, you know, it's not just U.S.

Of course, here it's the most because we have all these guns.

But if you look at, you know, and you look at Hungary, look at Germany, look at in France, right, they have these world, they now have these countrywide protests against everything.

against everything?

Yeah.

And then, of course, England, right?

And so, yeah, so we're certainly the Western ideal, Western national states, liberalism certainly in a crisis.

What's going to help?

And adding AI, of course, just accelerates everything, right?

We're going through this acceleranda, this tremendous acceleranda, right, where AI is getting better literally every day, right?

I'm sure you use it just as much as I do.

It's very powerful.

It's getting ever more powerful, right?

You throw that into the mix, well, that's probably with unemployment, massive change, right?

Most people don't like change, right?

But if it's all intellectual, it's like what you said, when you really experience what it is to have black skin, I mean, not fully, but to experience something of what is it like to walk around being black, right?

You had to visit, you told me yourself, right, early on that you said, well, you can't get that from reading.

You really have to experience it.

So people have to have this moment, this come to Jesus moment where they say, okay, shit, we can't go on like this anymore.

We have to change our way of doing this.

I agree.

And with social media, you know, all it takes is a small fraction of people that reignite this, right?

That post something nasty and then someone else posts it and then they all pile on.

The Chinese AI or the OpenAI or Cloud or Anthropic or Grog or any of the other ones being developed?

Once we've agreed on which...

What is the function we're trying to maximize?

I mean, do you really believe that it's going to be – because we haven't agreed, of course, on the optimal framework, right?

Because they're Marxists, they're liberalists, they're market people oriented, right?

They all believe we should maximize different things.

So we're just going to give this to the AI and they're going to figure it out somehow, right?

Or do you think when they'll be our overlords, then they'll figure out, well, for the peace of all humanity, this is what we have to impose?

Yeah, but look, I mean, I'm more with Steve Pinker here.

Over the last several hundred years, the total amount of violence, I mean, so my forefathers, you know, being German here, initiated World War II.

That led to killing in Europe probably, I mean, 20 million Russians alone, you know, 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, many millions more throughout Germany.

So...

You know, so I don't think in absolute terms, just in terms of number of people killed, it's nothing like... In World War I, every day, 10,000 soldiers died.

Every day for four years of the different size for essentially having accomplished nothing whatsoever, right?

For one mile going back and forth in the trench warfare on the Western Front.

So in terms of absolute numbers, this is...

It's not about absolute numbers.

It's now, of course, we have nuclear weapons and, you know, we have other nasty things.

But in terms of total people killed, it's still tiny fractions of what might happen and what has happened routinely over the last hundred years.

Yeah, so if I know where all your priors are in the brain, if I know the neural substrate of all your basic beliefs, this is what priors are, right?

It's just a fancy word.

All your beliefs of how you interpret humans' behavior in the light of culture and history and everything.

If I knew them, yes, then maybe we could swap and suddenly we would understand each other's point of view much better.

And maybe we are, you know, of the sort that your experience has.

But that's always, you know...

Does that scale in modern Silicon Valley speak?

Does that scale?

Can we do this for 8 billion of us?

So the emotional impact is much, much bigger.

And this is totally new in human history.

So we're going through this rapid period.

Some people call it the acceleranda, this rapid acceleration towards some distant point that we don't, that may not be that far away, that we don't yet realize.

I doubt it's a singularity of Kurzweil.

Yeah, so it's a serotonergic tryptamine, very similar to psilocybin or quite similar to DMT.

So chemically, they're all very similar, but each one, of course, binds to slightly different, you know, there are 14 different serotonin receptors, binds to different cells and different proportions.

So 5-MU is so unique about that.

You inhale it, although they're now trying to deliver something that you can inject into your nose, but traditionally you inhale it and literally within three breaths, you do.

And the third one, the visual field starts fracturing into a hexagonal.

And I thought to myself, holy shit, what I got myself into.

I wasn't.

And you think you're going to die.

You said, shit, this was a mistake.

I'm going to die.

And you die.

I died.

And in a sense that myself was gone.

Christoph was gone.

There was no voice.

There was no body.

People who looked at me, so this was all done in fairly controlled circumstance, people who looked at me all just saw me sort of...

whining a little bit and with eyes wide open huge expanded pupils but you don't see you don't see you don't hear you get totally cut off from the world when i say i it wasn't christoph it was a conscious there's no question did it ever i mean whatever remained was man woman child god angel demon but it it didn't experience anything except

a point of overwhelming brightness.

So there wasn't color.

There wasn't left or right because there was no space.

Space had collapsed into this point.

There was no stereo or texture.

There was no pain.

There was no pleasure.

There was no sound, no smell, nothing.

There was just this point of icy bright light and terror and ecstasy.

That's it, three things, bright light, terror and ecstasy.

For timeless, there was no time.

There was no perception of time.

So it wasn't too long or too short.

It simply was.

There was no space, as I said.

There was no self.

So all of that was gone, except terror, ecstasy, and light.

And then after this timeless moment,

They'd asked me to put on a piece of music.

I asked them to put on a piece of music.

I will part as minimalist.

And so that last nine minutes, I just heard the first thing that became apparent was the ending of that two-instrument piece.

And then, you know, it's almost 10 minutes, and then you rapidly come to, and I stripped, I went into fetus, I cried, I had all these other, you know, autonomic reaction.

But within an hour, it's remarkable, you go into the void, and you come back, you can speak within an hour.

You can speak about it if you wanted to.

And there's no long-lasting physiologic.

I had my watch on, highly registered a difference.

No big increase in blood pressure or, you know, heart rate.

So there's still not a single day.

This was in the first week of the pandemic.

I think about it every day.

I had two such experiences.

The other one was very different.

Every day I think about it, and what it taught me was two things.

So A, a student of consciousness, it taught me that mind doesn't depend on space, on time, and on self.

And this is really something that, you know, the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant taught us, transcendental idealism, that they're all categories.

They're all categories that we need to perceive.

We cannot but perceive.

put an object in a place.

We cannot but assign a time to an event.

And we cannot but have a sense of self.

But they're all optional.

They're there most of the time, but not always, not in this case.

And then the other gift I discovered four or six weeks later that

I never thought about death again.

You know, as you get older, this may happen with you, maybe in a slow way that you lie awake at night and you think about beyond death, you know, death being dead for a long time, for a very long time, for a very, very, very long time.

And it's a little bit like getting to this, stepping to the abyss and looking down into this abyss that's bottomless.

You get this existential vertigo.

Never had that again since then.

So I don't want to die, but I've lost the fear of that.

So both things are reported.

I mean, everyone has a slightly different experience.

In fact, there were two papers recently published about this, about what happens to the brain of these people.

But very often it's sort of going to the void, having these feelings of terror and ecstasy or awe.

And if you think about the etymology of the word awful,

Full of awe.

When you, for example, theologians talk about the mysterium tremendum, for example, this Otto, the theologian.

When you're in the presence of God, you have this, this is awful, the terror and the ecstasy.

And that's what you...

This is what you can experience.

So I'm never going to do it again, never, ever.

Now you're done?

It's been offered to me now.

The toad, it's called the toad, because it comes ultimately from the glands of the original stuff, comes from the gland of the Sonora desert toad.

It's given me its gift, and I don't ever need to do this again.

But it's useful, both as a student of consciousness as well as as being a human.

Well, think about dreaming.

When you dream, Andrew, are you directing the show?

No, I wish.

I've tried, yeah.

So things happen to you, but you don't have insights.

It's a little bit like that.

Things happen to you, you fly, you meet long lost lovers or friends or pets, but the you is strangely muted.

So it's a more extreme version of that.

In fact, I think for mystical, this wasn't a mystical experience.

For mystical experience,

Most people report they go hand in hand.

In fact, I think they're probably necessary but not sufficient.

You have to lose the sense of self.

You have to get off this planet ego and become selfless.

And then this allows you to experience the doors of perception, right?

Foundational text for the age of Aquarius, 60s and 70s, right?

Aldous Huxley was here in LA when he, you know, a British intellectual, when he took mescaline, he also talks about the, and this loss of self.

So I think it's not untypical for these powerful experiences to lose your sense of self, to realize that, you know, it's fine.

There's still mind there without,

being your mind.

So I had a separate experience two years later at midnight, past midnight on a beach in Brazil.

So that was a more classical, mystical experience.

So there again, loss of Christoph, loss of self.

And I...

I don't want to talk about the details.

It's still too, you know, I still have processing every day.

But I became, whatever remained of me became one with the universe.

the title of my last book, Then I Am Myself, the book.

This is what it's, Then I Am Myself, the world.

Suddenly, I know it sounds terrible, but you feel you're one with the universe and that, holy maloney, it shifted my, you know, so at the time I was 65 and

You believe in what truly exists, what really exists.

It's pretty established.

But it completely shifted the tectonic planes of my metaphysics.

So I'm now much more of an idealist who believes that ultimately what truly exists, Andrew, is not the physical.

There's atoms and matter and energy and information, space and time.

They exist in some sense, but they're ultimately the product of something phenomenal, something mental, because I felt I became part of reality.

This cosmic consciousness, whatever, for some timeless moment.

And so to directly answer your question, I now believe that when I die, Christoph will be gone.

Christoph will never come again, right?

Christoph, I mean, this person looks like this, talks with this funny accent, has these particular traits and behavior and memories.

That will be gone.

But...

my conscious experience will go back to where it came from.

This is where it came from.

This ultimately, this, and Schopenhauer, the German idealist for Schopenhauer, this beautiful piece where he talks about, it's like, you know, there's this ocean and there's this froth, and for a brief moment, you know, this little bubble that's part of this wave believes, oh, I'm an individual, I'm supreme.

And then, of course, it lives for 60 or 80 years, and then it gets absorbed by the ocean again, becomes part of the overall ocean.

So that's, I think, that's my current belief.

And to everything.

And so the...

this belief in idealism is not totally woo-woo, because once again, so the standard metaphysical belief of scientists and most philosophers, most people who think hard about it, is not some sort of belief in a supreme being, but what's known as physicalism.