Christof Koch on "The Neurobiology and Mathematics of Consciousness" at Singularity Summit 2011

The Singularity Summit 2011 was a TED-style two-day event at the historic 92nd Street Y in New York City. The next event will take place in San Francisco, on October 13 & 14, 2012. For more information, visit:
http://www.singularitysummit.com

• Category

  Science & Technology

[luxaeternae]

Smoke weed, every day.

[Andrew McKnight]

This is a great fast-paced talk. I like how Christof gets across some important and potentially complicated mathematical ideas (like integrated information and the space of experiences) extremely quickly. Even if he's wrong about this theory of consciousness, estimating integrated information of minds could be useful and interesting on its own.

[LegendLength]

So given a system's full history (i.e. over time) you can quantify its 'integration' by the number of possible states at each time slice. But can we really look at a system's history (say 2d digital data, 1 time axis) and say whether some other state was possible or not? If the machine is deterministic it has only one option at each time right? Or does this concept of integration sit at a more abstract level of 'decisions' etc.?

[SigLNY]

It's about causal efficacy. It's about how many states are available to the system vs. how many of those states are ruled out. A system is delineated by analyzing the causal efficacy of the network. For a system to have high integration it usually requires a very specific kind of organization not seen in most networks.

[3Gyro]

Christof Koch writes some great fucking books, you guys should give "The Quest for Consciousness" a read.

[stikowsky]

no

[blueelectricsmoke]

Koch should have pointed out that if Hawkins was right, we should have strong AI by now. That's at least why I don't get why people buy his ideas...

[TheMikakoivu]

12:15 Christof Koch does the robot

[AlienCardKid]

That's your prejudice, in fairness it is a random silly comment however to imply that someone wouldn't comprehend it because they smoke weed is ridiculous. I can say without smoking weed I would never have become as interested in history, philosophy and in turn neurobiology, weed encourages thought despite what you may believe and on that note i think I'll skin one up

[BloodBrotherStudios]

I love how the top fucking comment is about smoking weed because apparently that person is unable to comprehend this material.

[Lőcsei Bence]

I have problems understandig the term "integrated" in this context. Can someone help?