Consciousness Might Not Be Something the Brain Creates

"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:

neurosciencenews.com

"One neuroscientist's deep dive into perception and reality | Christof Koch

Big Think

How do you know you exist? Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute, explains.

He challenges "naive realism," showing how reality is filtered through our senses and shaped by culture, bias, and brain wiring.

Using examples like the viral 2015 Gold Dress' phenomenon and his own experience with meditation, Koch explains how expanding our Perception Box fosters empathy, openness, and a deeper sense of belonging in the world."

www.youtube.com

That's like 6+ mins overview.

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If you are a glutton for knowledge, here's an interview of Koch with Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman:

"My guest is Dr. Christof Koch, PhD, a pioneering researcher on the topic of consciousness, an investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation.

We discuss the neuroscience of consciousness " how it arises in our brain, how it shapes our identity and how we can modify and expand it.

Dr. Koch explains how we all experience life through a unique "perception box," which holds our beliefs, our memories and thus our biases about reality.

We discuss how human consciousness is changed by meditation, non-sleep deep rest, psychedelics, dreams and virtual reality.

We also discuss neuroplasticity (rewiring the brain), flow states and the ever-changing but also persistent aspect of the "collective consciousness" of humanity."

www.youtube.com

#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."

medium.com

The DR Hamster dreams of never having to read a Trumper's posts ever, ever again.

- 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:

www.youtube.com
short
less than a minute, I think

- (I understand there are 3?)

I know, right?

This is a good way to look at it:

www.google.com

The basic story is that a non-material entity, the leader of among many such beings (ALIENS!), created matter; ie, matter didn't create itself.

This being wasn't limited by time or space, and now is not limited to the non-material (spiritual, there, I said it) world.

His aspect in the material world is Jesus who, like the Temple previously, is his abode in this new world; heaven, the spiritual realm was never meant to be separate from earth, a part of the physical realm... but a third of heaven (Trumpers most likely!) disagreed, and screwed up the works.

The whole story is about bringing heaven and earth back together, just as it was in the Garden; it's NOT about people flying off to heaven, which is Platonism; it's about God returning to earth by bringing the two dimensions together again, and doing so while in Jesus' body... along with all the faithers, who receive similar eternal bodies.

So, Jesus and the Spirit are deeply imbedded in the God entity, with the Spirit as the, 'helper' who guides humans through their trying physical and spiritual lives.

And none of this is a, 'Meritocracy' for humans; we aren't perfect spiritually or physically, and must only be conscious of this and express this to be a part of the New Creation; the combining of the two dimensions of heaven and earth once again.

That's the story, anyway. On a spiritual level, I met the Spirit at a very young age, although we aren't always in synch. On an intellectual level, I got to study for literal decades with a top professor of the subject.

What helps is that SCIENCE is observation of our reality; Isaac Newton wrote many more times the material on the bible than he did science... he predicted the AC being knocked off in 2060, btw.

But the bible itself has literally 100's of predictions that, according to the science of carbon dating, has since the 1950's proven that the original predictions are dated 100's, sometimes thousand of years before they occurred.

Which accurate predictions tend to give credence to the whole story.

- we are not allowed to remember.

As you know, many people do remember; my wife did after her NDE. But people don't seem to always remember, though those that do remember strikingly similar things.

Even those with no spiritual inclinations.