{"slug": "consciousness-might-be-a-fundamental-feature-of-reality-like-gravity", "title": "Consciousness might be a fundamental feature of reality, like gravity", "summary": "Neuroscientist Christof Koch argued at an April 2026 symposium in Porto that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, similar to gravity or electric charge, rather than a product of brain activity. Koch's proposal, grounded in Integrated Information Theory, asserts that any system with sufficient integrated information possesses subjective experience, challenging the mainstream materialist framework that has failed to explain why subjective experience exists.", "body_md": "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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nOne 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.\n\n## What Koch is actually proposing\n\nIt 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.\n\nKoch 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](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260406192809.htm) 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.\n\nThe 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](https://neurosciencenews.com/consciousness-panpsychism-neuroscience-30464/) 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.\n\nThis 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.\n\n## What the hard problem actually is\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe 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 transmitted to the visual cortex, how the cortex processes the signals to identify objects, colors, motion, and the various other features of visual experience. The framework can explain, with comparable detail, the various functional features of how the visual system operates.\n\nWhat the framework cannot, on the available evidence, explain is why there is something it is like to see red. The processing produces, in the brain, a particular pattern of neural activity calibrated to wavelengths of light around 700 nanometers. The pattern is functional. The pattern is also, by every available account of how consciousness operates, accompanied by the subjective experience of redness. The accompanying is the hard problem. The accompanying is what mainstream neuroscience has not, on the available evidence of the last century of inquiry, produced any actual explanation of.\n\nKoch’s argument is that the persistent failure to produce the explanation is not, on close examination, the result of insufficient research or insufficient instrumentation. The failure is, more specifically, the structural consequence of operating on a framework that is calibrated to a question the framework cannot, by its own structural design, answer. The framework treats consciousness as something to be explained in terms of physical processes. The hard problem is precisely the question of why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience. The framework, by definition, cannot answer the question by appealing to physical processes alone, because the question is asking about the relationship between physical processes and something else.\n\n## What credentials Koch is operating with\n\nThe structural feature worth attending to, on close examination, is that the argument is being made by someone whose credentials within the mainstream scientific framework are essentially impossible to dismiss. [Koch is currently the chief scientist](https://nautil.us/what-counts-as-consciousness-579734) at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. He was previously a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology for twenty-seven years. He earned his PhD from the Max Planck Institute. He has published, across his career, several hundred scientific papers on the neural correlates of consciousness. He is, by every available measure of how mainstream scientific credentials are assessed, one of the most credentialed neuroscientists currently working.\n\nThe argument he is making is, accordingly, not the argument of someone outside the mainstream scientific framework attempting to undermine it from the outside. The argument is, more specifically, the argument of someone who has spent four decades working inside the mainstream framework and who has, on the basis of that work, concluded that the framework is structurally incapable of solving the problem it has been calibrated to solve. The conclusion is uncomfortable. The conclusion is, by every available measure of how scientific paradigm shifts actually occur, the kind of conclusion that tends to drive the eventual revision of the framework rather than the dismissal of the conclusion.\n\n## What this would actually imply\n\nThe structural implications of the proposal, if it turns out to be correct, are considerable. The implications include, among other things, the revision of how the wider scientific community thinks about the relationship between mind and matter. The mainstream framework has been organized around the assumption that mind is what matter does when it is configured in particular ways. The alternative framework would suggest that mind is a fundamental feature of reality that matter expresses in particular configurations rather than produces from nothing.\n\nThe implications also extend to how the wider community thinks about consciousness in non-human systems. If consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality that depends on integrated information rather than on biological substrate, the implication is that artificial systems with sufficient integration could, in principle, possess subjective experience. [Koch himself has been explicit](https://cbmm.mit.edu/node/1551) in his MIT lectures that IIT, paradoxically for a theory often associated with computational frameworks, implies that digital computers running functional simulations of the human brain would experience next to nothing, because the integration of information in digital systems is structurally different from the integration in biological neural networks.\n\nThe implications also extend to the various edge cases that the mainstream framework has been unable to adequately address. These include near-death experiences, terminal lucidity in dementia patients, and the various other phenomena that resist strict materialist explanations. Koch has been increasingly explicit that these phenomena warrant scientific attention rather than dismissal, on the grounds that they may be providing evidence about features of consciousness that the mainstream framework has been structurally unable to incorporate.\n\n## The acknowledgment this article wants to leave\n\nChristof Koch, one of the most credentialed neuroscientists currently working, has been arguing for some years that mainstream science has been wrong about consciousness for approximately the last century. The argument is that consciousness is not something the brain produces, but rather a fundamental feature of reality itself, more like gravity than like a thought. The argument is grounded in the persistent failure of the mainstream framework to solve the hard problem of consciousness, alongside the development of Integrated Information Theory as a structurally distinct alternative framework that treats consciousness as a basic component of reality rather than as a byproduct of brain activity.\n\nThe argument has not, on the available evidence, been accepted by the wider scientific community. The argument has, however, become increasingly difficult to dismiss, both because of the credentials of the person making it and because of the structural failure of the mainstream framework to produce the explanations the framework has been claiming, across the previous century, to be on the verge of producing. Whether the framework will eventually be revised in the direction Koch is suggesting is, on the available evidence, an open question. The question is, in some real way, considerably more open than the wider cultural register has been treating it as.\n\nWhat the argument requires, more modestly, is the wider absorption of the structural fact that one of the most credentialed neuroscientists currently working has concluded that the mainstream framework his own career has been conducted inside is structurally inadequate to the question it has been claiming to address. The conclusion is uncomfortable. The conclusion is also, on the available evidence of how scientific frameworks actually undergo revision, the kind of conclusion that tends to precede the revision rather than to be successfully dismissed. The wider register would benefit, on close examination, from absorbing this with considerably more seriousness than it has so far.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/consciousness-might-be-a-fundamental-feature-of-reality-like-gravity", "canonical_source": "https://spacedaily.com/d-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-n/", "published_at": "2026-05-25 19:01:16+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-25 19:07:21.781856+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-research", "neural-networks"], "entities": ["David Chalmers", "Christof Koch"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/consciousness-might-be-a-fundamental-feature-of-reality-like-gravity", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/consciousness-might-be-a-fundamental-feature-of-reality-like-gravity.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/consciousness-might-be-a-fundamental-feature-of-reality-like-gravity.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/consciousness-might-be-a-fundamental-feature-of-reality-like-gravity.jsonld"}}