Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

But if you take that away, you're still highly conscious.

If you don't move, if you meditate or sleep or you have a mystical experience, you're sitting or a psychedelic experience, you're sitting or lying, you're not moving anybody, hardly any overt movement, yet you're highly conscious, right?

So behavior is not required for consciousness.

And consciousness, of course, is not required for behavior.

There are all sorts of unconscious behaviors.

And so we shouldn't confound the two.

And this relates in an interesting way to the confounding between intelligence and consciousness when people talk about artificial consciousness and artificial intelligence.

Intelligence ultimately is about planning to do something, about behavior in the short term or in the long term.

Well, consciousness is a state of being, being happy, being sad, being full of dread or seeing something which is really different.

Well, derealization is one where you feel...

So, A, you're perfectly right.

The self is the basic kernel of our operating system, okay?

And it's very difficult for us to lose because if we lose it, we would not be, from an evolutionary point of view, in a good shape, right?

But then there are conditions where you feel... So, for instance, in derealization, a psychiatric condition, which can, by the way, happen during psychedelics, you feel...

not you anymore.

And you feel there's something off with the world.

This is not the real world.

There's something funny.

The world, they still see and hear fine, but they all believe that this isn't the real world.

And they try to wake up.