Brandon Keim of wired.com reports on Neuroscientist Christof Koch’s radical theory of how networks might become conscious.
Western psychology knows that consciousness exists yet does not know where it comes from whereas Eastern psychology spoken on consciousness for eons.
Christof Koch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science has devoted the last three decades studying the neurological basis of consciousness. Considering consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system, and all living beings, from humans to the smallest cells are conscious, he found even the internet could be!
That’s just the way the universe works.
Koch says, “The electric charge of an electron doesn’t arise out of more elemental properties. It simply has a charge. Likewise, I argue that we live in a universe of space, time, mass, energy, and consciousness arising out of complex systems.”
What Koch proposes is a scientifically refined version of the ancient philosophical doctrine called panpsychism – one of the oldest philosophical theories attributed to philosophers such as Plato, Spinoza and Schopenhauer. More importantly it is also contained in eastern philosophies such as Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, and appears more rooted in spirituality than science.
Koch was asked, “The internet is integrated. Could it be conscious?”
He answered, “It’s difficult to say right now. But consider this. The internet contains about 10 billion computers, with each computer itself having a couple of billion transistors in its CPU. So the internet has at least 10^19 transistors, compared to the roughly 1000 trillion (or quadrillion) synapses in the human brain. That’s about 10,000 times more transistors than synapses. But is the internet more complex than the human brain? It depends on the degree of integration of the internet.
“For instance, our brains are connected all the time. On the internet, computers are packet-switching. They’re not connected permanently, but rapidly switch from one to another. But according to my version of panpsychism, it feels like something to be the internet — and if the internet were down, it wouldn’t feel like anything anymore. And that is, in principle, not different from the way I feel when I’m in a deep, dreamless sleep.”
Read the full interview at wired.com
Related discourse excerpts by Osho:
Three Ordinary States of Consciousness
The Human Mind is Itself a Bio-computer
Bhagawati, Osho News
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