Is consciousness a product of the brain, or could it be something more fundamental? This is one of the central questions addressed by Christof Koch, one of the most influential contemporary neuroscientists, in his contribution to the 15th “Behind and Beyond the Brain” Symposium, promoted by the Bial Foundation and taking place from April 8 to 11 in Porto.
At a time when materialism remains the dominant worldview in science, Koch offers a critical reflection on its limitations. Despite advances in neuroscience, how subjective experience emerges from brain activity remains unexplained - the so‑called “hard problem” of consciousness.
His presentation will address three areas of tension: the difficulty of reducing conscious experience to physical mechanisms; the challenges posed by contemporary physics to defining what is “real”; and the role of extraordinary experiences - such as near‑death experiences, mystical states, or episodes of terminal lucidity - that continue to resist a strictly scientific explanation.
From this analysis, Koch argues for the need to reconsider classical metaphysical frameworks, such as idealism or panpsychism, in light of current scientific methods, acknowledging that these perspectives regard consciousness as a fundamental element of reality rather than a mere by‑product of the brain. The neuroscientist is an advocate of Integrated Information Theory, which posits that any system with a high degree of integrated information possesses subjective experience - a scientific formulation of panpsychism.
A researcher at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and former professor at MIT and Caltech, Koch has been a central figure in consciousness research, developing innovative methods to detect signs of conscious activity in unresponsive patients.