Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

In fact, tonight, you're going to go to bed.

In particular, in the early stages of the night, you go into non-REM, delta wave sleep, right?

And you do not exist for yourself.

If I wake you up, I said, Andrew, Andrew, something's happening.

And I ask you, well, where did you come from?

You say, I came from nowhere, which is different, of course, later stage in the night, right, when you have dreams, which is another conscious experience.

But when you sleep, you do not exist for yourself.

When you're under anesthesia, you do not exist for yourself.

So you only exist for yourself because you are a conscious being.

So in some sense, it's very simple to define.

The study of consciousness is really a modern phenomenon.

It's really Rene Descartes.

So, you know, Aristotle and Plato, much as they are foundational fathers of philosophy, didn't really have a position on the mind or on consciousness.

That's a modern thing.

Where we have struggled is trying to put it in objective terms.

So you don't access my consciousness and I don't access your consciousness.

And this makes it different from anything else that we study, different from a black hole, from a virus, from a brain.

Because all those I can study with what philosophers call third-person properties, right?

You can stick them in a magnet.

You can point a telescope at it.