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.
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