Gaan onze superintelligente computers bewustzijn ontwikkelen?

Bewustzijn is niet iets magisch, ook machines kunnen bewustzijn krijgen. Maar dan hebben we wel heel andere computers nodig dan we nu kennen. Neurowetenschapper Christof Koch ontwikkelde een wiskundige bewustzijnstheorie.

Dit artikel is gepubliceerd in NRC Handelsblad van zaterdag 7 maart 2020

Neurowetenschapper Christof Koch, expert op het terrein van het bewustzijn, dreef al twee uur in een prikkelvrije drijfcabine toen zijn bezorgde dochter op de wand bonkte: „Hé papa, is alles in orde?” Kochs tijdgevoel was volledig in de war geraakt. Zelf dacht hij dat hij maar vijf minuten in de drijfcabine had gelegen.

„Ik was geheel naakt in het water gaan liggen”, vertelt hij in een Skype-interview. „Zelfs mijn ring had ik afgedaan. Het water is zo zout dat je erin drijft als in de Dode Zee. Ik hoorde niets, ik zag niets. In het begin spookten dagelijkse beslommeringen nog door mijn hoofd en hoorde ik mijn hart kloppen. Na een tijdje verdwenen alle gedachten en hoorde ik ook mijn hart niet meer. Ik raakte in een toestand die eigenlijk niet in woorden is te omschrijven. Ik voelde mijn lichaam niet meer en ik verloor elk gevoel van ruimte en tijd. Alsof ik een stipje in een oneindige ruimte was. Ik was volledig bij bewustzijn, maar dat bewustzijn had geen enkele inhoud. De psycholoog William James heeft die ervaring een mystieke ervaring genoemd.”

Koch is de wetenschappelijke baas van het Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle (VS), een instituut dat de volledige bedrading van het menselijk brein in kaart probeert te brengen. Samen met de mede-ontdekker van dna, Francis Crick, stond Koch aan de wieg van het neurobiologische onderzoek naar bewustzijn. En samen met neurowetenschapper en psychiater Giulio Tononi ontwikkelde hij de Integrated Information Theory, een soort wiskundige bewustzijnstheorie.

Lees het hele artikel op de website van NRC Handelsblad.

Go to the lab and your mind can be read

This column was written for the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ)

Science is what scientists do. But what scientists really do, only partly appears in their scientific publications. In the publications we read what went well, not what went wrong; we read the results, not the struggle to find the results. When I was doing science myself – as a PhD-student in physics – I have seen colleagues struggling four or five years building an experiment and getting it to work. When the experiment finally worked, the data were sometimes collected in a month. From their scientific publications you would guess that the research had gone smoothly and logically, but the reality had been the opposite.

Science is a process, not even a logical process, but an irregular one. To understand that process, science journalists should regularly go out and see science in action: in the lab, at the accelerator, to the Arctic, on a volcano, or wherever. We can not fully understand science from scientific publications alone.

As I have reported regularly about brain scan experiments, I finally wanted to be part of such an experiment myself. Not just for fun, but as a subject in a scientific study. Last Thursday I was for an hour lying in an fMRI-scanner at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. With a three-tesla magnetic field my brain was being scanned and my mind being read.

The final aim of the researchers is to let ‘locked-in’-patients communicate with their family and friends. ‘Locked-in’-patients are suffering from a stroke or an illness so that they can not move, they cannot speak, they cannot even blink with their eyes. But they are conscious, as we know from those who luckily managed to recover. They can hear what others are telling but they cannot react in any way. German Karl-Heinz Pantke was one of the lucky ones who recovered and he wrote his striking experiences in the book Locked-in – Gefangen im eigenen Körper. These patients would be helped enormously if their minds could be read.

Researchers from the Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre now invented a way to indirectly read the letters the patient produces in his mind. For example, when I was in the scanner, we had defined that the letter D stood for telling in my mind the Shakespeare-quote ‘To be or not to be, that’s the question’, and that A stood for mentally drawing a house. I produced seven letters by different cognitive tasks, and the researchers reconstructed all the letters correctly from the scans, of course not knowing which letters I wanted to produce. The principle works and they read my mind. And I will be one of the six subjects on whose experimental results the scientific publication will be based.

Sure, it’s very cool to lie in the scanner, have your mind scanned and after the experiment see your own brain inside out on a high resolution scan. But it also gave me much more insight in the scientific process. I saw the clever way in which they had devised the experiment, but I also noticed little things that went wrong. When I had not understood a certain task, I started to analyze my own mistake. This messed up that part of the experiment, because I couldn’t concentrate well anymore on the cognitive tasks I had to do.

I know, going out there to watch science in action takes time, and time is money, but it is an essential part of science journalism. I am afraid that with the growing commercial pressure on journalism, there will be even less journalists than today that will take the time and the effort to go to the lab. But without that effort our job will lose a lot of meaning. As it is said: one dead person is a tragedy, a thousand dead ones is statistics. Science is more than telling the statistics. To show this, we have to go out there and report science in action.

Internet

Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre: http://mbic.unimaas.nl/

Talking brain cells

Have you ever heard how your brain cells communicate with each other? Biologist and author professor Brian Ford recorded the sound of talking brain cells. He shifted the frequencies so that the human ear can hear it. Click on the link above.

Read this article (in Dutch) to learn how intelligent behaviour can emerge from the cooperation of an enormous amount of simple units, like a single brain cell: http://benniemols.blogspot.com/2008/02/hoe-kan-een-mierenkolonie-intelligent.html

Brain Research in the Netherlands 2005-2015

"We should recognize that brain, mind and body are one."

Ron de Kloet, professor medical pharmacology


The brain is an organ with billions of nerve cells, each with over one thousand interconnections, and thus representing a vast complexity. We already know a great deal about this part of our body, but there is even more that we currently do not know. However, unmistakably, this organ determines everything we think and do. Unfortunately, one in three people in the Netherlands will at some point in their lives be confronted with a brain disorder that will lead to physical and/or mental limitations, and this number will continue to rise in the next decades, as the result of a society that is aging as well as growing ever more complex.

Anything to do with the brain has enormous societal importance. It is our brain that enables us to keep on learning throughout our lives and to continuously adapt our social skills to an ever-changing environment. Brain diseases, brain injury, psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, the sequelae of aging, and stress-related afflictions all have far-reaching consequences for our functioning in society. A large part of current health care expenses is related to the treatment of brain disorders. For 2004, these expenses were estimated at 18 billion euro in the Netherlands. For the same year, the percentage of people with a brain disorder was estimated at 30-40% of the total population. Unless the Netherlands invests sufficiently in brain research, society will have every reason to blame politics as well as science in ten years’ time.

Improvements in the clinical approach to brain disorders require adequate fundamental scientific research. Every breakthrough in neuroscience has been brought about by close collaboration between fundamental and clinical researchers. Over the past two decades of the previous century, novel imaging techniques have shown, for the first time, the actual functioning of the live human brain. At the same time, researchers have taken the first steps to understand how the brain works at the molecular level. The great challenge for the 21st century will be to link our knowledge of the single neuron to that of the brain as a whole. How does consciousness come about? What about memory, perception, movement, language and emotion? How do we learn things?

As our understanding of the brain grows, the possibilities to intervene will increase. Will it be possible, eventually, to counter memory loss or regain functions lost as a result of brain damage caused by brain tumors, traumatic injury, neurodegenerative disease or other neurological or psychiatric diseases? In the next decade neuroscientists will have to make serious progress in order to be able to answer these questions.

This strategy report - Brain Research in the Netherlands 2005-2015 - explains the societal need for brain research, describes the most important scientific developments in brain research of the past decade, particularly in the Netherlands, and formulates the main scientific challenges for the next decade. The Netherlands has a strong tradition in neuro-ethology, (behavioral) pharmacology, neuroendocrinology, cognitive psychology, neuroanatomy and human neurophysiology. In the past ten years, the Netherlands has also made excellent contributions to a number of other fields. This report identifies Integrative Neuroscience as the greatest challenge for the next 10 years and indicates how Dutch brain research may best contribute to the expected societal and scientific developments.

Read the full report on:
www.neurofederatie.nl/publications/Strategy_0515_english.pdf