Christof Koch is a neuroscientist who studies consciousness, and is best known for integrated information theory. IIT is a consciousness-first theory, which states that the experience of being someone (or something) is directly related to the causal powers of the underlying system. Up until relatively recently, Koch was something of a materialist - he believed that it would be possible to find the specific series of neural events in the brain that produce lived experience. A series of events, which he details in his new book "The I Am Myself the World" have led him to embrace more of an idealist perspective, which says that we are instantiations of a a much larger universal consciousness that permeates the universe. We talk to him about his transformation, the nature of consciousness and will, what it "causal powers" of a system have to do with consciousness, and the value of mystical experiences.