"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."

much more at the link

Quick summary:

#3

"Dreams are neurologically and emotionally real, even if they don't happen in the physical world.

Your brain processes dream experiences just like waking life, activating the same sensory and emotional centers. They are mental simulations driven by your memories, emotions, and subconscious processing."

- just pablum

Perhaps, perhaps not. When some of the very best neuroscientists pull in the reins on materialism alone, it's time to at least hear them out.

Especially when some of the very best astrophysicists are doing the same on everything from space, time, gravity, matter...

- #15 | Posted by ClownShack

Doubting what the faux religious say is mentally healthy... but actual religious people say almost none of that.

Time is insignificant to an actual Time Lord; NT Wright noted recently that there could have just as well been an Adam Hominid and an Eve Hominid.

Or perhaps God likes primordial soup.

And many have noted that, 'a day is as a thousand years to God'.

The problem the New Atheists had was an edgy sort of conceit that, well, sort of resembled the conceit of some theists; it was their demise.

The idea that Matter created itself may have some value, but it also seems quite possible that it didn't; that it was created by immaterial means.... particularly when the universe appears to be so finely tuned... and so full of Information: