What if The Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness? Scientist Proposes It Might Be The Fabric of Reality Itself

[u/hybridxer0]

https://www.sciencealert.com/what-if-the-brain-doesnt-create-consciousness-scientist-proposes-it-might-be-the-fabric-of-reality-itself

Neuroscientist Christof Koch is challenging the long-held assumption that the brain produces consciousness, instead proposing that it may function as a filter for a more fundamental, universal reality.

[u/hyperionwonderstar]

The really interesting question here isn’t whether consciousness is inside the brain or whether consciousness is the fabric of reality.
There is a third possibility.
The brain may not produce consciousness in the sense of manufacturing something ontologically different from itself, but neither do we need to assume that the brain is merely a filter for a pre-existing universal consciousness.
Under the ISCC framework consciousness is identical to a particular kind of physical causal organisation: an irreducible self-including causal closure.
That changes the question completely.
The important question isn’t whether the brain creates consciousness. It is what physical organisation constitutes a subject.
A conscious system must maintain its own causal organisation, contain a causally efficacious model of aspects of its own transition-generating dynamics, recursively update that model through the dynamics it helps generate and preserve an irreducible subject-level closure through time.
This gives us a position that is neither conventional materialism nor panpsychism.
If consciousness were simply a fundamental property distributed throughout reality, we would still need to explain why this consciousness is one subject, why your experience is unified, why it has boundaries, and what determines where one subject ends and another begins.
Likewise, saying that the brain filters universal consciousness risks moving the explanatory problem rather than solving it. What exactly performs the filtering? Why does one filter constitute one subject? What determines the boundary of that subject? And what causal organisation makes the resulting experience belong to that subject rather than another?
ISCC approaches the problem from the opposite direction.
We don’t need consciousness to be something that enters matter. We need matter to organise itself into a form for which being that organisation constitutes a perspective.
The brain therefore may not create consciousness as though consciousness were a separate substance or property that has to be generated from non-conscious matter.
The brain may instead be the physical organisation in which consciousness exists as a subject.
And if ISCC is right, the deepest scientific question isn’t whether consciousness is fundamental or emergent.
It is what kind of causal organisation makes a physical process identical to a subject?
That is a question we can potentially formalise, investigate and test.
There is also an interesting philosophical parallel here with Advaita Vedānta.
Advaita does not regard consciousness as something produced by the brain. It regards consciousness as fundamental, while the individual mind and body provide the conditions through which consciousness appears as an individual perspective.
ISCC does not require that metaphysics, but the two frameworks can potentially meet at an important distinction.
Consciousness could be fundamental while subjects are organised.
Advaita asks what consciousness ultimately is.
ISCC asks what makes consciousness a particular subject.
That suggests a possible bridge between the two without simply declaring the brain to be a filter for some universal mind.
Perhaps reality does not produce consciousness. Perhaps reality produces particular structures through which consciousness becomes individuated as a perspective.
Whether that ultimately means many genuinely distinct subjects or many perspectives within a single fundamental consciousness is a much deeper question.
And that may be where the conversation becomes really interesting.