
Then I Am Myself the World
What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Todd Ross
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By:
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Christof Koch
About this listen
The world's leading investigator of consciousness argues that by understanding what consciousness does—cause change in the world—we can understand its origins and its future
In Then I Am Myself the World, Christof Koch explores the only thing we directly experience: consciousness. At the book's heart is integrated-information theory, the idea that the essence of consciousness is the ability to exert causal power over itself, to be an agent of change. Koch investigates the physical origins of consciousness in the brain and how this knowledge can be used to measure consciousness in natural and artificial systems.
Enabled by such tools, Koch reveals when and where consciousness exists, and uses that knowledge to confront major social and scientific questions: When does a fetus first become self-aware? Can psychedelic and mystical experiences transform lives? What happens to consciousness in near-death experiences? Why will generative AI ultimately be able to do the very thing we can do, yet never feel any of it? And do our experiences reveal a single, objective reality?
This is an essential book for anyone who seeks to understand ourselves and the future we are creating.
©2024 Christof Koch (P)2024 Tantor MediaListeners also enjoyed...
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The Case Against Reality
- Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
- By: Donald Hoffman
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work.
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Don't buy - visual examples missing, no pdf
- By Richard Pickett on 08-26-19
By: Donald Hoffman
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Dreaming Reality
- How Neuroscience and Mysticism Can Unlock the Secrets of Consciousness
- By: Vladimir Miskovic, Steven Jay Lynn
- Narrated by: Lesa Lockford
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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We are nothing but a pack of neurons, Francis Crick once said. Vladimir Miskovic and Steven Jay Lynn show that this way of thinking is both limited and an obstacle to understanding consciousness. In Dreaming Reality, Miskovic and Lynn connect the latest findings from neuroscience—which studies the brain from the outside in, as a purely physical object—to the insights of the world’s mystical traditions, which chart elaborate cartographies of the mind from inside out through experiences of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy.
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Marvelous
- By J. N. on 02-15-25
By: Vladimir Miskovic, and others
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Ways of Attending
- How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World
- By: Iain McGilchrist
- Narrated by: Mike Fraser
- Length: 1 hr
- Unabridged
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Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focused, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.
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Basically a short version...
- By Douglas on 04-24-25
By: Iain McGilchrist
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Conscious
- A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind
- By: Annaka Harris
- Narrated by: Annaka Harris
- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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This mind-expanding dive into the mystery of consciousness is an illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience.
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Perhaps a better definition?
- By Eratosthenes on 06-19-19
By: Annaka Harris
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Consciousness and the Brain
- Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts
- By: Stanislas Dehaene
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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How does the brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state.
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I had no idea we knew this much.
- By Tristan on 01-18-16
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The Blind Spot
- Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
- By: Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson
- Narrated by: Perry Daniels
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature's self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.
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Good book.
- By Daniel L Mercer on 08-01-24
By: Adam Frank, and others
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Waves in an Impossible Sea
- How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean
- By: Matt Strassler
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In Waves in an Impossible Sea, physicist Matt Strassler tells a startling tale of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space. He begins with a simple mystery of motion. When we drive at highway speeds with the windows down, the wind beats against our faces. Yet our planet hurtles through the cosmos at 150 miles per second, and we feel nothing of it. How can our voyage be so tranquil when, as Einstein discovered, matter warps space, and space deflects matter? The answer, Strassler reveals, is that empty space is a sea, albeit a paradoxically strange one.
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No pdf
- By Mark on 01-14-25
By: Matt Strassler
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Galileo's Error
- Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness
- By: Philip Goff
- Narrated by: Maxwell Caulfield
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something "extra", beyond the physical workings of the brain. Others think that if we persist in our standard scientific methods, our questions about consciousness will eventually be answered. And some suggest that the mystery is so deep, it will never be solved.
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Good but basic
- By ginger on 01-23-20
By: Philip Goff
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Helgoland
- Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution
- By: Carlo Rovelli, Erica Segre - translator, Simon Carnell - translator
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution.
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The cat is not sleeping
- By Anonymous on 05-30-21
By: Carlo Rovelli, and others
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Kinds of Minds
- Toward an Understanding of Consciousness
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Daniel Henning
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Combining ideas from philosophy, artificial intelligence, and neurobiology, Daniel Dennett leads the listener on a fascinating journey of inquiry, exploring such intriguing possibilities as: Can any of us really know what is going on in someone else's mind? What distinguishes the human mind from the minds of animals, especially those capable of complex behavior? If such animals, for instance, were magically given the power of language, would their communities evolve an intelligence as subtly discriminating as ours?
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The Conscious Mind
- In Search of a Fundamental Theory
- By: David J. Chalmers
- Narrated by: George Cunningham
- Length: 20 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the self-aware mind and to feelings as profoundly varied as love or hate, aesthetic pleasure or spiritual yearning? These questions today are among the most hotly debated issues among scientists and philosophers. Philosopher David J. Chalmers offers a cogent analysis of this heated debate as he unveils a major new theory of consciousness, one that rejects the prevailing reductionist trend of science, while offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain.
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Chalmers' search for Consciousness
- By SelfishWizard on 11-16-21
What listeners say about Then I Am Myself the World
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Christi McAdams
- 02-23-25
The Exciting Side of Science
This book is scientific and informative yet colorful, fun and relatable throughout; from quoting Eminem to Chuang Tzu, delighting in Chateau Lafite to psychedelics, swing dancing to rock climbing and psychology to physics. In chapter 7 Koch details how the mystical experience (which can be achieved naturally or through pyschedlelics) changes one's life, and he hits the nail on the head as it has affected my life in every way he mentions. I love that some people, like Christof Koch, in the scientific community are experiencing and studying this most incredible phenomenon that has the ability to not just transform one's self but humanity at large. I'm grateful for these brilliant minds and their courage to step outside the "perception box."
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- Miklos
- 04-27-25
One of the best books on neuroscience- not for casual readers
This book gives a holistic view of our current understanding of neuroscience and consciousness.
I highly recommended for anyone who enjoys philosophy and those who are curious about our existence, comprehension and the future.
Great book!
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- S. spronsen
- 04-28-25
Superficial but interesting
Sorry but so much review of things I've read. A few great points but pale
The psychedelic aspect, which I read about in an article, wasn't at the depth I'd hoped
It's great info all around and a weird mix of pretty solid and complex thought with these weirdly basic not that fitting examples and metaphors
Sadly I think chatGPT could come up with better examples though not conscious. And sadly unlike ChatGPT 😹 I couldn't ask for less dumbed down examples and metaphors.
If I had time I could detail the specifics of what I didn't like but I don't. I appreciate the good info it's just not enough...trying to say something but circling the thing that needs to be said frequently. It's like an almost good thing. Wouldn't recommend but I did stick it out to the end.
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