Explaining Consciousness by Redefining Reality
Perhaps the most interesting question
is no longer whether consciousness
can be explained by matter
When Consciousness Becomes Fundamental
by John D. Wise, PhD
What if the brain does not create consciousness? (ScienceDaily, 30 July 2026). In this article, neuroscience professor Christof Koch attempts to solve the “hard problem of consciousness” from a materialist perspective.
Christof Koch is taking on one of science’s deepest mysteries: how the brain creates conscious experience, or whether it creates it at all. He argues that materialism has yet to solve this “hard problem.”
Christof Koch is no fringe philosopher speculating from the scientific sidelines. He is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, a former president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a longtime Caltech professor, and, together with Nobel laureate Francis Crick, one of the scientists who helped launch the modern scientific investigation of consciousness.
Long a scientific materialist, Koch has searched for consciousness in the brain for decades. But this report presents a far more unsettling question to the scientific community:
Does the brain create consciousness, or is consciousness a more basic feature of reality?
That question was raised in Koch’s presentation at the 15th “Behind and Beyond the Brain” symposium. It is difficult to overstate how far its implications reach.
Consensus science has generally assumed that consciousness “emerges” from the brain’s material processes. Inorganics come first, then chemistry followed by biological organization that becomes increasingly sophisticated. Eventually, somehow, subjective experience appears.
But consciousness has stubbornly refused to fit that comfortable story.
Correlation is not Explanation
Neuroscience can now measure neurons, map brain regions, and record electrical activity. It can even correlate patterns of neural activity with particular conscious states.
But correlation is not explanation.
Why should electrochemical activity in a specific organ be accompanied by the experience of seeing red, hearing music, remembering a childhood event, or feeling pain? Why should there be an interior world at all?
Koch has spent much of his career pursuing these questions. His collaboration with Francis Crick (of DNA fame) helped establish the search for the “neural correlates of consciousness” as a major scientific program. Yet as the research progresses, the deeper we “see,” the more problematic the materialist assumptions become. ScienceDaily reports that Koch’s
… work points toward the possibility that consciousness may be woven into reality itself.
That is a remarkable admission for a neuroscientist-of-standing to entertain, reversing the direction of the evolutionary materialist story. Instead of asking how complex matter ‘gives rise’ to consciousness, Koch invites us to ask, as Hegel argued in the 19th century, whether consciousness is a (or “the“) fundamental feature of reality.
The Retreat from Methodological Naturalism
Koch floats this claim, and he is not unaware of its materialist implications. He is not claiming it has been proven, nor even that it establishes consciousness’ independence from the brain. But we should not fail to take notice of what has happened: a materialist scientist who helped build the modern scientific search for consciousness in the brain is now asking whether consciousness might be more fundamental than the brain.
And he is not alone in exploring possibilities that would have been declared pseudo-science only a generation ago. Integrated Information Theory, with which Koch is closely associated, has raised questions about whether consciousness might be an intrinsic property of certain physical systems. Koch has also openly discussed philosophical positions antithetical to science’s commitment to methodological naturalism:
Koch believes researchers may need to reconsider philosophical ideas such as idealism and panpsychism while continuing to apply modern scientific methods.
The point is that the old materialist certainty is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, and not just in consciousness research, as CEH has been documenting for some time.
The 19th-Century Exclusion
Nineteenth century science adopted a prescriptive, a priori philosophical doctrine: reality will be understood as immanent, material, and self-contained. Transcendence was not disproven. It was excluded. The divine foot was summarily driven from the laboratory floor, and science proceeded as if nothing important had been lost.
But inconveniently for materialism, metaphysically excluding a category from scientific explanation does not prevent reality from declaring itself. Consciousness remained, along with rationality, the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics, intentionality and information, all of which remain inexplicable in purely materialist terms. And the extraordinary discoveries of modern molecular biology and genomics have only made the question of how to understand these things more difficult, not less.
The Unavoidable Binary
Perhaps this is why the unavoidable binary is becoming harder to avoid. If reality is not exhausted by blind, purposeless matter, then something has to give in light of 21st century scientific discovery. The choice is no longer simply between “science” and “religion.” It is increasingly a question of what kind of reality science is uncovering, and which form of rational structure it will embrace for reality.
Materialism has failed.
Is consciousness at some level intrinsic to reality itself? Koch doesn’t claim to answer this question. But he is helping to clarify the arrogance that took it off the table. Now, perhaps the most interesting question is no longer whether consciousness can be explained by matter.
Perhaps it is why science ever duped itself into believing that matter was the whole of reality in the first place.
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.