Then I Am Myself the World Quotes

“Like a young child who closes their eyes and assumes that you can’t see them anymore, on the infantile belief that what is true for them is also true for you, we take reality as given and implicitly assume that everyone experiences the same, when in fact few do.”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“the mind constructs what it takes to be “reality”—seeing this chair, hearing music, feeling guilty—from explicit and implicit assumptions about statistical regularities in the world around and within us. These are called priors in the language of Bayesian reasoning, or expectations in layman’s terms. Some are part of our genetic heritage, while others are learned early in life. These priors are usually inaccessible to conscious introspection.”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“Consider a startling visual illusion known as the “Lilac chaser,” which you can find on the web.15 Twelve blurry pink disks are arranged in a circle, like the numbers on a clock, against a grey background. One of the disks briefly blinks off and on again, before the adjacent disk disappears and reappears, then the next one, and so on. This missing disk, or “hole,” travels continuously around the circle. Yet, when you steadily fixate on the cross at the center of the circle, you see only a single greenish disk, moving along the circle, while the eleven stationary pink disks are gone! Remarkable, you see what’s not there, while not seeing what is there! The late vision scientist David Marr expressed it succinctly: “Perception is the construction of a description.”16 This includes not only visual and other sensory percepts but also interoceptive percepts, fears, and other feelings. All”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“nullius in verba, or “take no one’s word for it”—”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“Then I Am Myself the World, taken from Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner. This”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“Pain is particularly susceptible to the power of suggestion. If you previously obtained pain relief by taking an aspirin, you expect the same benefit when someone hands you a similar-looking pill, even though it may be a placebo. This form of analgesia can be blocked by the opioid antagonist naloxone, implying that your belief recruits your body’s own opioid-like substances called endorphins. This is in line with what my mother told me about when she assisted her father, a surgeon, in operations in the hospital’s bunker during the Allied bombing campaign in World War II Berlin: when they ran out of morphine, the injured received, unbeknownst to them, a harmless saline injection that nevertheless provided relief. Placebos don’t just work for pain or depression. Belief helps improve motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease and shapes immune response. The placebo effect is everywhere.21”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“The Perception Census, a citizen-science project in the United Kingdom led by cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth and philosopher Fiona Macpherson, seeks to map the heterogeneity of ways of seeing via interactive tasks everyone can do on their own computer.”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“It is rare to experience an elementary emotion in isolation, like “pure rage.” Most feelings are composites. Take saudade,7 from the Portuguese word for longing for something irreversibly lost, like the forsaken comfort of a childhood home, suffused with a warm glow and fond memories (the paradigmatic et in arcadia ego). Portugal has an entire music genre known as fado that epitomizes saudade; it combines sadness, longing, regret, nostalgia, anxiety, and dread.”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

“no one, as far as I know, experiences chronic pleasure, but legions suffer from chronic pain.”
― Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It