Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.

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So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Christoph Kolk.

Christoph is a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute and at the

tiny blue dot foundation. He's the former president of the

Allen Institute for Brain Science and a former professor at Caltech.

He's the author of five books. Most recently,

Then I Am Myself the world, what consciousness is, and how to expand it.

Which is the topic of today's conversation.

Christoph and I speak about his development as a neuroscientist,

his collaboration with Francis Crick,

their studies of the visual system,

change blindness and binocular rivalry, the significance of sleep and anesthesia

for consciousness studies, the limits of physicalism, non-locality, and other quantum mechanical phenomena, brains as classical systems, the possibility of conscious

AI, idealism and panpsychism, integrated information theory, also known as IIT, what it means to say that something

exists, the illusion of the self, the possibility of brain bridging that is connecting two human

brains in a shared experience, Christoph's recent experience with

psychedelics and other topics. Anyway this is the deep end of the pool with respect to the scientific understanding of consciousness,

and I certainly enjoyed it.

And now I bring you, Christoph Kolk. I am here with Christoph Koch.

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