Does the Brain Generate Consciousness—or Only Receive It?
Your Soul Isn't What You Think | The Physics Explanation
Bottom Line Up Front
After 400 years of treating consciousness as a product of the brain—something neurons generate the way a gland secretes a hormone—the scientific consensus is showing visible cracks. Terminal lucidity in advanced dementia patients, a 2023 PNAS study showing surging gamma-wave activity at the moment of death, the public concession in June 2023 that a 25-year bet to find the neural basis of consciousness had been lost, and the April 2024 New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness collectively point toward a field in genuine turmoil. Competing frameworks—panpsychism, integrated information theory, analytic idealism, and the classical "transmission" hypothesis advanced by William James and Aldous Huxley—are now entertained openly in peer-reviewed literature. None is proven. But the materialist orthodoxy that once permitted no other view is, for the first time in a century, under serious scientific pressure. The question of the soul—stripped of its theological wrapper—turns out to be alive and contested at the frontier of brain science.
The Anomaly That Won't Stay Buried
The clinical team knew what they were looking at. The neuroimaging had been unambiguous for years: amyloid plaques riddling the cortex, large regions of tissue effectively dead, cognitive scores in the lowest measurable range. And then, with hours to spare before the end, the patient sat up, called a family member by name, and asked about the grandchildren.
Physicians have quietly noted such cases for two centuries. The formal term is terminal lucidity—or, when it occurs earlier in the disease course, paradoxical lucidity. What makes it scientifically unsettling is not that it happens at all, but that it happens in brains whose physical architecture for producing coherent thought has, by every available measure, been destroyed.
In 2021, Alexander Batthyány of the Viktor Frankl Institute and Bruce Greyson published one of the first systematic academic examinations of the phenomenon in Psychology of Consciousness, documenting a pattern substantial enough that the National Institute on Aging has since funded prospective research. A 2024 University of Pennsylvania study led by Jason Karlawish, published in The Gerontologist, recruited 30 family caregivers of dementia patients and found that 25 of them—across 29 individuals—reported a total of 34 lucid episodes, many in patients who had been non-communicative for months. A 2025 scoping review in Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups confirmed that such episodes appear in the literature dating to the 1800s and represent a cross-cultural, cross-diagnostic pattern that conventional neuroscience has not adequately explained.
"These data suggest the need to reevaluate the role of the brain during cardiac arrest." — Jimo Borjigin et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023
The skeptical rejoinder is reasonable and should be taken seriously: perhaps there are neural pathways that imaging techniques have not yet mapped; perhaps transient fluctuations in amyloid-beta oligomerization can briefly clear enough synaptic noise to allow residual function. A 2024 perspective in Molecular Neurodegeneration explored this pathway in the context of Alzheimer's disease and psychedelic-assisted research. Biology is complicated. Anomalies have materialist explanations.
But a second line of evidence surfaced in 2023 that complicated the "biology is complicated" response considerably.
The Dying Brain's Final Surge
Jimo Borjigin, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, had been studying what happens inside the brain at the moment of death since a rat study published in PNAS in 2013 showed something startling: in the 30 seconds after cardiac arrest, the brains of dying animals produced a massive surge of gamma-wave activity—the fastest, highest-frequency oscillations the brain generates, and those most strongly correlated with wakeful conscious experience in healthy subjects.
The 2013 finding was in rats. In May 2023, Borjigin's team published results from a small human study in PNAS. They had monitored the EEGs of four comatose patients in the ICU before and after the withdrawal of life support. Two of the four exhibited a rapid and dramatic surge in gamma-band power—rising to levels, in one patient, up to 300 times the pre-death baseline. More striking still, the surge was concentrated in what consciousness researchers call the "posterior cortical hot zone": the temporo-parieto-occipital junction, a region known to be activated during dreams, visual imagery, near-death experiences, and other altered states. George Mashour, founding director of the Michigan Center for Consciousness Science and a co-author, called the phenomenon a "neuroscientific paradox."
The authors were careful. Small sample. The two patients who showed gamma surges had prior histories of seizures; the other two did not show the same pattern. No causal claims about conscious experience can be drawn from correlational EEG data. But the framing is inescapable: the signature of maximal conscious processing appears in the brain precisely as that brain permanently loses the capacity to sustain it. The factory, as it shuts down, suddenly produces its finest output.
A 25-Year Bet, Lost
The field's most illustrative recent moment happened on June 23, 2023, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) at New York University. In 1998, computational neuroscientist Christof Koch had bet philosopher David Chalmers a case of fine wine that within 25 years, researchers would have identified the neural mechanism of consciousness—the specific physical signature that makes the lights come on. Koch was working with Francis Crick (of DNA-discovery fame) and was confident the tools were in hand.
Twenty-five years of advancing brain-scanning technology followed: functional MRI, high-density EEG, optogenetics, whole-brain connectomics, and billions of dollars in research funding. The two leading contenders—Integrated Information Theory (IIT), championed by Giulio Tononi and Koch himself, and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT)—were subjected to a formal adversarial collaboration, a pre-registered series of experiments designed to distinguish between them. The results, presented at the ASSC meeting, were inconclusive. Neither theory produced the predicted results. Koch walked on stage and handed Chalmers a case of Portuguese wine.
They promptly bet again, same terms, same stakes: 2048.
The significance is not that science failed to win a bet. It is that 25 years of the most powerful brain-scanning era in history produced, as Koch told Nature, an "ongoing quest" rather than resolution—and that the two most serious scientific theories of consciousness both failed their empirical tests simultaneously. As Chalmers noted afterward, the "hard problem" had moved from a purely philosophical puzzle toward something that even neuroscientists now acknowledge may be structurally resistant to solution within the current paradigm.
The Galilean Blind Spot
Why might that be? Philip Goff, a philosopher of mind at Durham University, has a precise answer in his 2019 book Galileo's Error. When Galileo mathematized nature in his 1623 work The Assayer, he accomplished something revolutionary and consequential in equal measure: he defined scientific reality as consisting exclusively of quantities—size, mass, velocity, position. All qualities—the redness of red, the ache of grief, the warmth of sunlight—were explicitly relocated into the perceiver's soul, outside the domain of science. This was a productive move. It gave us Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, antibiotics, and smartphones. It also, Goff argues, drilled a structural hole into the foundations of the scientific method: the one thing science was explicitly designed to exclude from its domain turns out to be the most immediate datum of human existence. You can scan a brain forever and report every firing neuron—and you will still not have captured the experience of seeing the color blue.
This is not a gap science has simply not gotten around to filling. It is a gap science was designed to create. The hard problem is not a problem at the frontier of knowledge; it is a problem with the map.
Goff's proposed solution is panpsychism—the view, rooted in early 20th-century work by Arthur Eddington and Bertrand Russell, that consciousness is not something brains produce but a fundamental, ubiquitous feature of physical reality itself, present at every level of the material world and merely concentrated in complex forms by biological nervous systems. It is, as he acknowledges, a view that "sounds crazy"—but notes that quantum mechanics, time dilation, and wave-particle duality all sound crazy too. Scientific theories, he argues, should be judged by their explanatory power, not their comfort.
A decade ago, panpsychism was largely a punchline in academic philosophy departments. Today it is a mainstream hypothesis debated in peer-reviewed journals and graduate seminars. In a March 2025 Nature Neuroscience commentary, IIT proponents and critics published simultaneous responses—a sign not of fringe status but of genuine theoretical contest at the discipline's core.
The Declaration That Changed the Argument
On April 19, 2024, a group of scientists and philosophers gathered at New York University and launched what became known as the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. The Declaration's 40 initial signatories—expanding to nearly 300 by mid-June 2024—included some of the world's foremost consciousness researchers: Anil Seth (Sussex), Christof Koch (Allen Institute), David Chalmers (NYU), Lars Chittka (Queen Mary University of London), Nicola Clayton (Cambridge), Irene Pepperberg (Boston University), and Jonathan Birch (London School of Economics).
The Declaration's core claims were three: that there is strong scientific support for attributing conscious experience to all mammals and birds; that the evidence indicates a realistic possibility of consciousness in all vertebrates, cephalopod molluscs, decapod crustaceans, and insects; and that when such a possibility exists, it is ethically irresponsible to ignore it in decisions affecting those animals.
The inclusion of insects—bees, wasps, possibly ants—is not a casual remark. Research cited in the background document by Kristin Andrews (York University), Birch, and Jeff Sebo (NYU) included a 2022 Queen Mary study showing bumblebees pushing wooden balls for no apparent reason other than play behavior; zebrafish showing exploratory curiosity; and garter snakes passing a scent-based self-recognition test. If a bee can play—if there is, as philosopher Thomas Nagel put it in a different context, something it is like to be that bee—then consciousness is not an evolutionary luxury bolted onto large brains at a late stage. It may be, as IIT's mathematics suggest, something more fundamental: a feature of any sufficiently organized, information-integrating system.
"The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates and many invertebrates including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects." — New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, April 19, 2024
This is not a statement that would have been publishable—let alone signed by Christof Koch—at the turn of the century. The ground has shifted.
Integrated Information Theory: Mathematics Meets the Mind
Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory, developed over the past two decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, represents the most ambitious attempt to mathematize consciousness. Its central construct, phi (Φ), measures the degree to which a system integrates information in a way that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. High phi means high consciousness; low phi means minimal experience. The theory's most philosophically radical implication—and the one that has made it controversial—is that phi is never exactly zero in any physical system. This is a form of panpsychism built from information theory: not as metaphor but as rigorous mathematical claim.
IIT passed its first adversarial collaboration test only partially. The COGITATE consortium's experiments, results from which were among those leading to Koch's 2023 concession, were testing specific IIT predictions about posterior-cortex involvement in consciousness; the results were inconclusive. In March 2025, Nature Neuroscience published competing commentaries—one listing 16 peer-reviewed empirical tests IIT proponents claimed supported the theory's core claims; another by Alex Gomez-Marin and Anil Seth acknowledging IIT's empirical limitations while defending it as scientifically legitimate. The debate is active, technical, and far from settled.
The Transmission Hypothesis: Science's Oldest Subversive Idea
Beneath the technical debates runs an older and stranger idea that has never quite gone away. In 1898, William James—the father of American psychology and a Harvard professor of impeccable credentialed respectability—delivered the Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard Divinity School. He proposed that the brain might not generate consciousness but instead transmit or filter it—that consciousness, rather than being a product of neural activity, is a field into which neural activity provides a window. The brain, on this view, is less a generator than a transceiver: limiting, tuning, and localizing a broader medium of experience into the individual first-person perspective.
James was careful to note that all the evidence then available to neurophysiology was equally consistent with either the production hypothesis or the transmission hypothesis. The correlation between brain states and conscious states—he pointed out—no more proves that the brain produces consciousness than the correlation between a television's tuner position and the program it displays proves that the television generates the broadcast.
Henri Bergson, then at the peak of his influence in French philosophy, developed a parallel argument. Aldous Huxley popularized it in his 1954 book The Doors of Perception, where he suggested that the function of the brain and nervous system is "eliminative"—filtering out most of what consciousness might otherwise be aware of in order to produce the narrow, survival-focused tunnel of normal waking experience. More recently, Bernardo Kastrup—holding dual doctorates in computer engineering (specializing in artificial intelligence) and philosophy (ontology and philosophy of mind), with a background as a researcher at CERN and co-founder of a parallel-processing company acquired by Intel—has built a rigorous formal framework he calls analytic idealism, arguing that what we call the physical world is the external appearance of a fundamentally experiential reality.
Kastrup's argument is not a mystical claim. It is a logical one: all the evidence of brain-consciousness correlation is equally consistent with both production and transmission accounts. The selection of the production account as default is not dictated by evidence but by historical momentum and the Galilean methodological choice to exclude qualities from scientific reality in the first place.
What the Physics Actually Says—and Doesn't
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in her 2022 book Existential Physics, makes a point worth pausing on. Physics gives us equations—extraordinarily precise and predictive equations—describing the behavior of matter and energy. What physics does not tell us is what matter is at its most fundamental level. Mathematical descriptions specify relationships, structures, and behaviors. They do not specify the intrinsic nature of whatever it is that enters into those relationships.
This is not a gap in the equations; it is a categorical limit. The Schrödinger equation tells you a particle's probability distribution in space. It does not tell you what the particle is in the sense of its inner character. Nobel laureate Arthur Eddington, who confirmed general relativity in 1919, wrote in 1928 that "the stuff of the world is mind-stuff." Erwin Schrödinger, whose equation is among the most successful in physics, wrote that "consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown." The most foundational figures in 20th-century physics quietly entertained the possibility that the substrate of physical reality might be experiential in character—precisely because their own equations said nothing about what matter is, only what it does.
The concept of strong emergence compounds the puzzle. In standard (weak) emergence, complex behaviors can in principle be derived from simpler components given sufficient knowledge—a hurricane from the physics of molecules. Strong emergence describes a different scenario: genuinely new properties arising at a higher level of organization that cannot, even in principle, be predicted from lower-level description. Consciousness is the strongest candidate for strong emergence in the scientific literature. You can specify every physical fact about a brain processing visual information, and you still haven't specified what it's like to see red. Something is left out.
The Skeptic's Position—Fairly Stated
It would be intellectually irresponsible not to state the skeptical position plainly. Most working neuroscientists remain physicalists, and not without good reason.
The brain is extraordinarily complicated. Its redundancies and compensatory mechanisms are poorly understood. Cases of terminal lucidity may reflect transient clearing of synaptic noise through fluctuations in amyloid-beta oligomerization—a 2024 hypothesis explored in Molecular Neurodegeneration—or may involve unmapped neural pathways that temporarily restore function like traffic rerouting around a closed highway. The gamma-wave surges in Borjigin's study appeared in only two of four patients and may reflect seizure-like excitatory cascades rather than organized conscious processing. The adversarial collaboration testing IIT was inconclusive, not definitive. Panpsychism, however mathematically serious, still faces what philosophers call the "combination problem": how do the micro-experiences of individual particles combine into the unified, integrated experience of a human being?
And there is the humbling precedent of vitalism—the once-serious scientific view that living things were animated by a special life force, irreducible to chemistry. It turned out to be just chemistry. Consciousness could go the same way: not mystical, just more biology than we currently understand. The explanatory gap might close.
It might. But it is worth noting that vitalism was resolved when chemistry provided a genuine mechanistic explanation. The consciousness version of this resolution—a credible account of why any physical process gives rise to first-person experience—has not appeared in 400 years of trying. The gap has not narrowed. The Koch-Chalmers bet was lost precisely because even the definition of what a solution would look like remains contested.
Where the Field Stands in 2026
As of mid-2026, consciousness research is at an unusually volatile juncture. The two major materialist theories (IIT and GNWT) failed their adversarial test in 2023 without producing a decisive defeat for either. In April 2026, a new commentary from BIAL Foundation researchers echoed what has become an increasingly common refrain in the literature: the brain might not create consciousness at all—a framing that would have been career-limiting to publish in a mainstream venue 15 years ago.
The New York Declaration formalized the empirical case that consciousness extends far beyond what centralized vertebrate nervous systems would suggest—implying either that consciousness is more primitive and widely distributed than classic models allow, or that the relationship between neural complexity and experiential richness is far more nuanced than any current theory captures.
Terminal lucidity continues to accumulate as a data set. The NIH now funds prospective research on it. The University of Pennsylvania study published in 2024 found that lucid episodes were reported in an overwhelming majority of caregiver interviews—not a rare clinical oddity but a commonplace occurrence that has been systematically underreported because it defies the explanatory frameworks clinicians are trained to apply.
And the gamma-surge finding from Borjigin's lab sits in the literature, unrebutted in its particulars, awaiting a theoretical framework adequate to contain it.
The Question Science Can't Avoid
The question of the soul is, stripped to its philosophical minimum, the question of whether consciousness is ontologically primary—whether experience is the foundation of reality rather than a product of it. It is the question Descartes was gesturing at with cogito ergo sum. It is the question Schrödinger was gesturing at when he said there is only one consciousness. It is the question encoded in every bedside report of a dying woman who, against every neurological prediction, sat up and called her daughter by name.
Science cannot currently answer it. More precisely, science as currently constituted—built on the Galilean exclusion of qualities from its domain—may not be able to answer it from within its own tools. That is not a failure of science. It is an invitation to expand what science means.
What is emerging, tentatively, from convergent lines of evidence is something that deserves to be said plainly: the hypothesis that the brain generates consciousness is in genuine, documented, empirically measurable trouble. The hypothesis that the brain filters, restricts, or channels a more fundamental substrate of experience is—for the first time in the modern scientific era—being entertained seriously by credentialed researchers at major institutions, published in peer-reviewed journals, and tested with formal mathematical frameworks.
Whether that substrate is what a philosopher calls panpsychism, what a physicist calls the intrinsic nature of matter, or what a theologian calls the soul depends on which language you find most useful. The underlying referent—the possibility that experience is not produced by the brain but received through it—is the same in each case.
The question is not settled. The question is, for the first time in a very long time, genuinely open.
Verified Sources & Formal Citations
- Batthyány, A., & Greyson, B. (2021). Spontaneous remission of dementia before death: Overview of the literature and case report. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 8(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000259
- Borjigin, J., Lee, U., Liu, T., Pal, D., Huff, S., Klarr, D., Sloboda, J., Hernandez, J., Wang, M. M., & Mashour, G. A. (2013). Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(35), 14432–14437. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1308285110
- Xu, G., Mihaylova, T., Li, D., Tian, F., Farrehi, P. M., Parent, J. M., Mashour, G. A., Wang, M. M., & Borjigin, J. (2023). Surge of neurophysiological coupling and connectivity of gamma oscillations in the dying human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(19), e2216268120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216268120
- Karlawish, J., Grill, J. D., & Kupfer, J. (2024). Caregiver accounts of lucid episodes in persons with advanced dementia. The Gerontologist, 64(4), gnad170. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnad170 [National Institute on Aging coverage: https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/study-caregivers-finds-brief-bouts-lucidity-are-common-among-people-dementia]
- Mueller, K. D., Hale, M. R., Goulette, O., Belay, H., Sanson-Miles, L., Benson, C., & Gilmore-Bykovskyi, A. (2024). A scoping review of episodes of lucidity in people living with dementia near the end of life: The potential role of speech-language pathology in research and practice. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 10(2), 463–476. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_PERSP-24-00033 [PMC: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12315051/]
- Perera, S. (2025). Terminal lucidity as a health promotion challenge in end-of-life care. OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying. https://doi.org/10.1177/10541373251334317
- Lin, C., Du, X., & Wang, X. (2024). A perspective on Alzheimer's disease: Exploring the potential of terminal/paradoxical lucidity and psychedelics. Molecular Neurodegeneration, 19, Article 79. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13024-024-00761-5 [PMC: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11475160/]
- Mashour, G. A., et al. (2023). Do not go gently into that good night: The dying brain and its paradoxically heightened electrical activity [Commentary]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(22), e2305985120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2305985120
- Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219. [Seminal paper introducing "the hard problem."]
- Schurger, A., Sitt, J. D., & Dehaene, S. (2023). Adversarial collaboration on rival theories of consciousness [COGITATE Consortium results]. Nature. Referenced in: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends—and it's philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0. Nature, June 24, 2023. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8
- Koch, C., & Chalmers, D. (1998/2023). The Koch-Chalmers bet (settled June 23, 2023, ASSC annual meeting, New York University). Coverage: Bhattacharya, A. (2023, July 12). Scientist loses 25-year consciousness bet—to a philosopher. Big Think. https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/consciousness-bet-25-years/
- Scientific American staff. (2024, February 20). A 25-year-old bet about consciousness has finally been settled. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-25-year-old-bet-about-consciousness-has-finally-been-settled/
- Andrews, K., Birch, J., Sebo, J., & Sims, T. (2024). Background to the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/background
- New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. (2024, April 19). [Formal declaration text and signatory list.] https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration
- Goff, P. (2019). Galileo's error: Foundations for a new science of consciousness. Pantheon Books. [Penguin Random House page: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/599229/galileos-error-by-philip-goff/]
- Tononi, G., Boly, M., Massimini, M., & Koch, C. (2016). Integrated information theory: From consciousness to its physical substrate. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(7), 450–461. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2016.44
- IIT-Concerned et al., & Tononi, G. et al. (2025). Consciousness or pseudo-consciousness? A clash of two paradigms [competing commentaries]. Nature Neuroscience, March 2025. [See also: Gomez-Marin, A., & Seth, A. (2025). A science of consciousness beyond pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness. Nature Neuroscience.]
- Moerch, H. H. (2018). Is the integrated information theory of consciousness compatible with Russellian panpsychism? Erkenntnis. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9995-6
- BIAL Foundation. (2026, April 6). The brain might not create consciousness after all [press release]. EurekAlert! / ScienceDaily. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1123000; https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260406192809.htm
- Hossenfelder, S. (2022). Existential physics: A scientist's guide to life's biggest questions. Viking.
- Kastrup, B. (2019). The idea of the world: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. iff Books.
- James, W. (1898). Human immortality: Two supposed objections to the doctrine [Ingersoll Lecture, Harvard Divinity School]. Houghton Mifflin. [Public domain; widely reprinted.]
- Huxley, A. (1954). The doors of perception. Chatto & Windus.
- Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.
- Chittka, L., & Niven, J. (2009). Are bigger brains better? Current Biology, 19(21), R995–R1008. [Background for bee cognition research.] See also: Chittka, L. (2022). The mind of a bee. Princeton University Press.
- Eddington, A. S. (1928). The nature of the physical world. Cambridge University Press. [Macmillan.] (Quote: "The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.")
- Schrödinger, E. (1944). What is life? Cambridge University Press. (Quote: "Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.")
Comments
Post a Comment