What Christof Koch Misunderstands About the Mind and the Brain
In his revealing interview at Closer to Truth, the Allen Institute neuroscientist, though he doubts physicalism, attributed subjective experiences to “brains”As I noted earlier this week, neuroscientist Christof Koch, who is chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, seems to be having second thoughts about a purely physical view of consciousness. Koch has long been a proponent of a physicalist understanding of the mind-brain relationship—that the mind is in some sense reducible to the brain. He has proposed that consciousness arises as a product of brain-network complexity. But when he was interviewed a month ago on Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s show Closer to Truth, he seemed to be reconsidering his physicalist perspective on the mind-brain relationship. He noted that experience—the first-person subjective character of consciousness—cannot be derived from matter by any mechanism we currently understand. He seems Read More ›