Yesterday, Closer to Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn taped another episode with prominent neuroscientist Christof Koch. Koch, readers may recall, is best known for his Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness, one of the leading theories. Kuhn asked Koch to discuss his ultimate philosophical beliefs.

Readers may recall that Koch and philosopher of mind David Chalmers had a 25-year bet going (1998–2023) that by last year, the neural basis of consciousness would be found. It wasn’t found and, as noted at Nature last June, “It’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0.”

No hard feelings until last September when over 100 neuroscientists and philosophers of mind denounced Koch in a letter. They made clear that his “panpsychist commitments” were an issue.

Many neuroscientists hold the materialist view that the mind is a user illusion generated by the brain. Panpsychists, by contrast, say that consciousness is real — it is a part of nature but still real. Thus, Koch has not been much help to materialism. Not surprisingly, Darwinian philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett signed the letter denouncing Koch.

So what does Koch believe?

Kuhn, who has a PhD in neuroscience, begins by asking him a blunt question:

Kuhn: [0:31] Does the work that you’ve done making consciousness potentially a new aspect of the physical world that’s different from the matter/energy/space–time forces of physics and postulating that consciousness can be a new independent element to explain the world — does that add any potential for meaning or purpose in the cosmos?

Kuhn is pointing to the Third Rail here. As noted earlier, panpsychism — which generated that neuroscientists’ Cancel letter — is a naturalist theory (nature is all there is). But it is not a materialist theory. It does not assume that human consciousness is an illusion generated by the brain. Rather, panpsychists argue that human consciousness is a real part of nature (that is, not beyond nature). There are, of course, many varieties of panpsychism. But they all agree that consciousness is real.

And Koch responds by pointing to the fine-tuning of the universe, often called the Anthropic Principle:

Koch: [1:06] The title of my last book was Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist [MIT 2012]. I’m a reductionist because I use the good old reductionist techniques of science to study consciousness. I’m a romantic because I find myself in a universe where I can decipher the contours of meaning. We live in a universe that’s particularly conducive to life, right? That’s the Anthropic Universe where the … laws of physics are tuned to be conducive to life. We also live in a universe where complex structures, the ones that life produces give rise to consciousness. So therefore we find ourselves in universe that’s conducive to being ever more conscious… and for all I know, maybe the universe is evolving towards some sort of strange level of self-consciousness. So at least it’s plausible, it’s compatible with everything I know about the physics of the world and so this makes me very hopeful. I don’t know what it means but it gives a gigantic arc to the entire unfolding history of the universe …

Kuhn responds [2:43] that this is hardly what orthodox materialist scientists would say. They hold that consciousness is an accident of natural selection acting on random mutations and may be a mere byproduct of other processes. Thus “Most scientists would say that any meaning or purpose is just either a fantasy of our own wish or something we create ourselves for ourselves, which is almost the same thing.”

Indeed. And by contrast, Koch is citing the fine-tuning of the universe as evidence for the real existence of consciousness. It’s easy to see why so many knives were out for him last September. Remember, he is one of the world’s most prominent research neuroscientists. And here he is, going right off script.

He continues off script. Several times, he cites Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), a priest, philosopher, and paleontologist who held similar views:

Teilhard’s attempts to combine Christian thought with modern science and traditional philosophy aroused widespread interest and controversy when his writings were published in the 1950s. Teilhard aimed at a metaphysic of evolution, holding that it was a process converging toward a final unity that he called the Omega point. He attempted to show that what is of permanent value in traditional philosophical thought can be maintained and even integrated with a modern scientific outlook if one accepts that the tendencies of material things are directed, either wholly or in part, beyond the things themselves toward the production of higher, more complex, more perfectly unified beings.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Apr. 2023. Accessed 14 March 2024.

What does the “Cancel Koch” drive amount to?

The “letter” episode noted above, which was seen by many as damaging the reputation of the discipline, can be seen, in context, as a frantic effort to avoid a growing realization: No materialist theory of the mind makes any sense. Koch’s interest in Teilhard and in some form of panpsychism did not, after all, prevent him from becoming a world class neuroscientist.

To some, that’s scary. But they had better get used to it. The iron grip of materialism may be loosening. The same sort of thing happened in origin-of-life studies when chemist (and devout Christian) James Tour took on the seamy side of origin of life studies. And may start to happen elsewhere as well.