"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."

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"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."

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