Product Code Database
Christof Koch ( ; born November 13, 1956) is an American cognitive scientist, neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness.
He was president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and remains at the Institute as a Meritorious Investigator.
He is also chief scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, in Santa Monica, California, which funds research into alleviating people's suffering, anxiety, and other distress.
From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at the Caltech.
In 1986 Koch and Shimon Ullman proposed the idea of a visual saliency map in the primate visual system. Subsequently, his then PhD-student, Laurent Itti, and Koch developed a popular suite of visual saliency algorithms.
For over two decades, Koch and his students have carried out detailed biophysical simulations of the electrical properties of neuronal tissue, from simulating the details of the action potential propagation along axons and dendrites to the synthesis of the local field potential and the EEG from the electrical activity of large populations of excitable neurons.
Since the early 1990s, Koch has argued that identifying the mechanistic basis of consciousness is a scientifically tractable problem, and has been influential in arguing that consciousness can be approached using the modern tools of neuroscience. He and his student Nao Tsuchiya invented continuous flash suppression, an efficient psychophysical masking technique for rendering images invisible for many seconds. They have used this technique to argue that selective attention and consciousness are distinct phenomena, with distinct biological functions and mechanisms. Koch's primary collaborator in the endeavor of locating the neural correlates of consciousness was the molecular biologist turned neuroscientist, Francis Crick, starting with their first paper in 1990 and their last one, that Crick edited on the day of his death, July 24, 2004, on the relationship between the claustrum, a mysterious anatomical structure situated underneath the insular cortex, and consciousness. MIT CBMM briefing (Sep 23, 2014) - the story presented by Koch himself
Over the last decade, Koch has worked closely with the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. Koch advocates for a modern variant of panpsychism, the ancient philosophical belief that some form of consciousness can be found in all things. Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness differs from classical panpsychism in that it only ascribes consciousness to things with some degree of irreducible Causality power, which could include the internet "Thus, its sheer number of components exceeds that of any one human brain. Whether or not the Internet today feels like something to itself is completely speculative. Still, it is certainly conceivable." but does not include "a bunch of disconnected neurons in a dish, a heap of sand, a galaxy of stars or a black hole," and by providing an analytical and empirically accessible framework for understanding experience and its mechanistic origins. He and Tononi claim that IIT is able to solve the problem in conceiving how one mind can be composed of an aggregate of "smaller" minds, known as the combination problem.
Koch writes a popular column, Consciousness Redux, for Scientific American Mind on scientific and popular topics pertaining to consciousness.
Koch co-founded the Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole in 1988, the Neuromorphic Engineering summer school in Telluride, Colorado in 1994 and the Dynamic Brain summer course at the Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island in 2014. All three summer schools continue to be taught.
In early 2011, Koch became the chief scientist and the president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, leading their ten-year project concerning high-throughput large-scale cortical coding. The mission is to understand the computations that lead from photons to behavior by observing and modeling the physical transformations of signals in the visual brain of behaving mice.Koch C (2013) Project MindScope Allen Institute for Brain Science. The project seeks to catalogue all the building blocks (ca. 100 distinct cell types) of the then visual cortical regions and associated structures (thalamus, colliculus) and their dynamics. The scientists seek to know what the animal sees, how it thinks, and how it decides. They seek to map out the murine mind in a quantitative manner. The Allen Institute currently employs about 300 scientists, engineers, technologists and supporting personnel. The first eight years of this ten-year endeavor to build brain observatories were funded by a donation more than $500 million by Microsoft founder and philanthropist Paul Allen.
Koch is a proponent of the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of Complex network. In 2014, he published a short discussion work, In which I argue that consciousness is a fundamental property of Complexity things, where he introduced the concept that consciousness is a fundamental property of networked entities, and therefore cannot be derived from anything else, since it is a simple substance.Koch, Christof (2014) In which I argue that consciousness is a fundamental property of complex things..., MIT Press.
In 2023, Koch lost a 25-year bet to philosopher
/ref>
|
|
