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“Could we really reduce your conscious mind to a set of underlying processes that, when composed, create the feeling of you, the view of right now?” This is what my guest questions and proposes. David Sussillo is a world-renowned neuroscientist, an adjunct professor at Stanford University and has been a scientist at the Google Brain group and Meta Reality Labs. In his professional pursuits, David researches brain-machine interfaces to develop the next generation of computers. He works to understand the ghost in the machine – how cells in our brain collectively give rise to the computations that determine behavior. But David is not just a researcher. He’s his own test subject. He had a difficult childhood, to put it mildly. He spent five years living in the Albuquerque Christian Children’s Home. A home for children who were basically abandoned. They had unfit parents, but weren’t up for adoption. This was near to my heart, as my family and I served at a similar children’s home in Gallup, NM, and I understand much of the heartbreak associated with such a place. My core interest was how David came from such a traumatic childhood, to be the high achieving adult he is today. His sister, who experienced much of the same lifestyle, killed herself. So again, what was different about David? And the point here is not David and his story. But you and me and our stories, and understanding how we imprison, and free ourselves. David discusses his journey in his new book, EMERGENCE: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of Mind.
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