Since neuroscientists began excavating the human mind in search of the root cause of consciousness, they’ve acting on one foundational assumption — that consciousness is a function of the brain. It’s highly intuitive: we’re conscious, while rocks and dirt and other inanimate matter don’t seem to be.

However, one researcher is flipping that assumption on its head. At a neuroscience symposium in Portugal, Allen Institute neuroscientist Christof Koch made a brave challenge — that consciousness might actually be a natural quality of the universe, rather than a product of gray matter.

In a new unpublished essay viewed by ScienceAlert, Koch basically asserts that scientists are sniffing around for the root cause of consciousness in the wrong place.

“Nothing in science explains how three pounds of matter, a piece of furniture of the Universe like any other, subjects to the same natural laws, can love, hate, dream, imagine, fear or hope for its future,” Koch wrote.

To get to the bottom of things, Koch explains that we may need to scrap centuries of philosophical and scientific notions and return to basic idealism, where consciousness isn’t seen as the product of any physical phenomenon in the brain, but as the fundamental feature of reality.

But proving that hypothesis may be easier said than done.

The neuroscientist has numerous papers out on the topic, a body of work stretching back as far as 2016. The idea stems from a life-altering experience on a beach several years ago, Koch told ScienceAlert, in which the “boundary between himself and the world” began to dissolve, leaving only a feeling of timelessness (he described the experience as the “most meaningful of my life.”)

Though the beach trip might be the inspiration behind his work on consciousness, Koch avoids painting the subjective experience as empirical evidence. Instead, he explains that it expanded his “view of mind-at-large,” and calls on researchers to re-examine their baseline assumptions on consciousness as a whole.

“The most important task for the future,” Koch writes, “is to take these insights and translate them into empirically testable hypotheses.”

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