Consciousness might not be something the brain creates — it might be a fundamental feature of reality itself, more like gravity than like a thought — and one of the most credentialed neuroscientists alive is now arguing that mainstream science has been wrong about it for a century

Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.

The mainstream scientific framing of consciousness has been, for most of the last century, calibrated to a particular structural assumption. The assumption is that consciousness is something the brain produces, that the production occurs through the various electrochemical activities of neurons and their networks, and that the underlying problem of explaining how subjective experience arises from physical matter is, in principle, soluble within the standard materialist framework that has been operating across the wider scientific community since approximately the 1920s.

The framing has been productive. The framing has produced, on the available evidence, considerable progress in identifying the various neural correlates of consciousness, the various regions of the brain that activate during particular kinds of conscious experience, and the various structural features of how the conscious brain operates. The framing has not, on the available evidence, produced any actual explanation of why subjective experience exists at all. The not-producing of the explanation is what the philosopher David Chalmers, in 1995, called the "hard problem of consciousness." The hard problem has remained, in the intervening three decades, structurally unsolved.

One of the most credentialed neuroscientists currently working, Christof Koch, has been arguing for some years now that the mainstream framing has been wrong, and that the consequences of having been wrong are now starting to become structurally undeniable. The argument has been developing across his published work for over a decade. The argument has, in the last several years, become considerably more explicit. The argument is now being articulated in public venues with a directness that the wider register has been considerably slower to absorb than the underlying claim would warrant.

What Koch is actually proposing

It is worth being precise about what Koch is actually proposing, because the wider register has tended to absorb the proposal in vaguer terms than the underlying claim warrants.

Koch is proposing that consciousness is not something the brain produces. Consciousness is, more accurately, a fundamental feature of reality itself, more like gravity or electric charge than like a thought the brain is generating. In his April 2026 presentation at the 15th "Behind and Beyond the Brain" symposium organized by the Bial Foundation in Porto, Koch argued explicitly that the persistent failure of mainstream neuroscience to explain why and how subjective experience arises from neural activity suggests that the underlying framework requires revision.

The framework Koch has been advocating is called Integrated Information Theory, or IIT, developed in collaboration with the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi across the last two decades. According to the Neuroscience News coverage of Koch’s recent work, IIT proposes that consciousness is measured by a mathematical quantity called Phi, which represents the degree to which a system can integrate information. Any system with a sufficiently high value of Phi possesses, by the theory’s structural claim, some form of subjective experience. The implication is that consciousness is not exclusive to humans or animals. The implication is, more specifically, that any system with sufficient integrated information has some form of subjective experience, regardless of whether the system is biological.

This is, on close examination, a scientific formulation of what philosophers call panpsychism. The wider register has tended to absorb panpsychism as a piece of ancient mystical speculation. The accurate framing is more specific. Panpsychism is the philosophical position that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality rather than something that emerges from particular configurations of matter. The position has been articulated, in various forms, for considerably longer than the contemporary scientific framework has been operating, and the position is now being revived, on the available evidence, because the contemporary scientific framework has not, in three decades of trying, succeeded in solving the hard problem.

What the hard problem actually is

The structural feature of the contemporary debate worth attending to is the specific nature of the hard problem that the mainstream framework has been failing to solve.

The hard problem is the gap between explanations of how the brain processes information and explanations of why the processing produces subjective experience. The mainstream framework can explain, with considerable detail, how light enters the eye, how the optical signals are...