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Our guest on this episode is Christof Koch, PhD. A physicist and neurobiologist, Christof was a professor of biology and engineering for more than 25 years at Caltech. In 2011, he became the Chief Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and in 2015, he became its president. He remains at the Allen Institute, now as a Meritorious Investigator, and is currently the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, where he seeks to understand consciousness, its place in nature, and how this knowledge can benefit all of humanity.
We are glad to share this energetic conversation between Nick and Christof with you today. As you’ll hear, they discuss a wide range of topics—including quantum computing, the neural correlates of consciousness, how mystical experiences come about, and even Christof’s own experience with psychedelics. They also discuss Christof’s qualms with the worldview known as physicalism—sometimes called scientific materialism.
Physicalism is still the dominant worldview in academia today, but its limitations are becoming more evident, as Christof and I discuss at length in this episode. After decades in neuroscience, Christof finds some of the metaphysical claims of physicalism to be naive. This framework has given us extraordinary explanatory and technological power over the material world, but it’s also left us with a striking lack of consensus about the nature of consciousness. We at the CCR hope that conversations like this one encourage people to consider what might become possible if we carefully relax some of the methodological constraints that have been motivated by the physicalist picture of reality.
We hope you’ll stick around until the end of this episode, where Christof discusses his plans upcoming plans for a dark retreat: a kind of meditation retreat performed in complete darkness, which Nick also happens to have done himself. We hope you enjoy and benefit from this conversation.
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