In his April 2026 presentation at the 15th "Behind and Beyond the Brain" symposium organized by the Bial Foundation in Porto, Christof Koch argued that the persistent failure of mainstream neuroscience to explain why and how subjective experience arises from neural activity suggests that the underlying framework requires revision. Koch is proposing that consciousness is not something the brain produces. Consciousness is, more accurately, a fundamental feature of reality itself, more like gravity or electric charge than like a thought the brain is generating. The framework Koch advocates is called Integrated Information Theory, developed with psychiatrist Giulio Tononi. According to the theory, consciousness is measured by a mathematical quantity called Phi, which represents the degree to which a system can integrate information.
Maybe the hard problem of consciousness stays hard because the brain does not produce experience at all, it only witnesses it.