Submitted by Griffin Bay Bookstore.

Griffin Bay Bookstore presents Christof Koch, one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists, on “What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It,” on Tuesday, Aug. 26 at 6 p.m. in the bookstore café. Koch is the author of the new book “Then I Am Myself the World”; he is the former chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and he has authored more than 350 scientific papers and six books about how computers and neurons process information.

He writes about himself, “My passion in life is to understand how I came to be in this wonderful, mysterious universe. Not so much me, personally, but me as a conscious, experiencing organism, surrounded by other people, dogs, trees, stars, and the sea.”

“Within seconds, my entire field of view became engulfed by dark, swirling smoke. The space around me fractured into a thousand hexagons and shattered. The speed with which this happened left no time to regret the situation I had gotten myself into. As I was sucked into a black hole, my last thought was that with the dying of the light, I too would die. And I did.”

In these first lines of “Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It,” Koch describes what he learned from his own near-death experience. This experience is the starting point for a comprehensive exploration of the spectrum of conscious experiences. It covers the ordinary facets of everyday experiences and feelings, before soaring to the heights of expanded consciousness during a mystical experience or while partaking of psychedelics. This odyssey extends to the edge of the known, including liminal consciousness in severely injured brains or mindless computers running large language models and other advanced AI algorithms. These phenomena are all captured within the framework of the integrated information theory of consciousness, which has emerged as perhaps the most prominent scientific theory of consciousness over the past two decades.

His presentation will address theoretical, computational and experimental neuroscience and philosophy, and look at what consciousness means in regard to artificial intelligence.

Griffin Bay Bookstore, located at 155 Spring St., Friday Harbor, is an independent bookstore. When you shop locally and support your independent bookstore, you nurture your own community.