Falling Down in Reverence

How Neuroscience Mistakes the Map for the Territory

[Unedited Claude Response, including title and subtitle, to “critically evaluate the premises, inferences, and conclusions of one essay against another.” I have no reason to believe that Claude has figured out that I am the author of one of them. Here is a link to the January 2026 Scientific American essay, and here is a link to my 2016 Journal of Consciousness Studies essay, republished online by Science and Nonduality.]

In the January 2026 issue of Scientific American, readers were treated to an extensive tour of consciousness science’s achievements over the past three decades. The article radiates optimism about neuroscience’s progress in mapping the neural correlates of consciousness—those patterns of brain activity that reliably accompany our subjective experiences. From fMRI scans revealing which brain regions activate during conscious perception, to the perturbational complexity index (PCI) that can estimate someone’s level of consciousness, the field appears to be making steady progress toward solving what philosopher David Chalmers famously called the hard problem: how physical matter gives rise to subjective experience.

Yet this celebration of progress rests on a fundamental confusion—one that Jonathan Bricklin, in his trenchant critique of consciousness science, exposes with surgical precision. Bricklin’s central insight, borrowed from a letter written to William James by his colleague Josiah Royce, deserves to be carved into the entrance of every neuroscience laboratory:

Certainly the thinkers who first make molecules and then fall down in mute and holy reverence before the awful mystery of how the molecules ever could make them are far from knowing what it is to cross-question consciousness with any real spirit in their questioning.

This is the essence of the category error that haunts contemporary consciousness research: mistaking correlations for explanations, confusing the radio for the symphony.

The Radio Fallacy

The Scientific American article presents as its first premise the idea that consciousness emerged as an evolutionary adaptation during the Cambrian explosion, when organisms needed to combine a barrage of sensory information into one unified experience that could guide their actions. This origin story assumes precisely what needs to be proven: that consciousness is produced by biological systems rather than being a fundamental feature of reality that organisms access or express.

Bricklin dismantles this assumption with a devastating analogy: The many observable correlations between changes in the brain and changes in consciousness do not imply that consciousness originates in the brain any more than the symphony coming out of a radio implies that there are musicians inside. No neuroscientist studying a radio would make this elementary error. They would understand that the radio is a receiver and transducer of signals, not their source. Yet when it comes to the brain and consciousness, materialist neuroscience commits precisely this fallacy.

The PCI studies that Scientific American celebrates illustrate this confusion perfectly. Marcello Massimini’s research shows that conscious brains exhibit complex patterns of neural communication when stimulated—like knocking on the brain directly with transcranial magnetic stimulation. During dreamless sleep or anesthesia, this complexity collapses; neurons enter down states and stop responding to their neighbors. The article presents this as deep insight into how consciousness works.

But what has actually been discovered? Only that consciousness correlates with brain network complexity—a finding that fits equally well with consciousness as a product of the brain or consciousness as something the brain receives and expresses. It’s precisely the kind of finding that belongs to what Chalmers called the easy problem—explaining the functional correlates of consciousness—while leaving the hard problem completely untouched.

The Misquoted Father

Bricklin’s most revealing discovery concerns how the Tucson consciousness conference adopted William James as its patron saint—while fundamentally misunderstanding his message. The conference motto declares: To have a glimpse of what consciousness is would be the scientific achievement before which all others would pale. This is presented as a quote from James, the father of the science of consciousness.

It isn’t. Or rather, it is a misquote so revealing that it conveys the opposite of what James intended. James’s actual statement referred not to consciousness but to sciousness—his term for consciousness without self-consciousness, an impersonal primal awareness from which both subject and object arise. This primordial awareness, James argued, could never be captured by empirical science because it is never itself in consciousness, never a datum for conceptual thinking.

The substitution of consciousness for sciousness completely subverts James’s point. He was being ironic, essentially saying: Good luck getting a glimpse of that through science alone. The conference transformed this warning about science’s limits into an enthusiastic endorsement of the scientific project.

This misquote is not a trivial error. It represents the field’s systematic evasion of its founding insight. James understood that while science could map correlations between brain states and conscious experiences—the easy problem—the fundamental nature of consciousness belonged to what he called the metaphysical, requiring consideration of a Spirit of the world which thinks through us. His final words in the revised Principles of Psychology present this as a metaphysical criticism of the entire natural science approach to consciousness.

When Easy Problems Masquerade as Hard Ones

The Scientific American article documents in fascinating detail the competition between rival theories of consciousness—Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT), Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Predictive Processing Theories, and Higher-Order Theories. The 2023 Cogitate Consortium study, pitting IIT against GNWT, yielded mixed results for both theories. Neither’s predictions were cleanly confirmed; the debate continues.

But Bricklin would ask: what exactly are these theories competing to explain? They make predictions about where in the brain certain patterns of activity occur during conscious versus unconscious perception. IIT predicted sustained activity in the hot zone at the back of the brain. GNWT predicted ignition signals in the prefrontal cortex. Both were partially right and partially wrong.

This is precisely the kind of empirical question that belongs to the easy problem. The theories are competing to map correlations, to identify which brain regions activate when something rises to conscious awareness versus when it doesn’t. They are, in effect, arguing about the radio’s circuitry—which transistors activate when different signals are received. None of them address the hard problem: why any pattern of neural activity should be accompanied by subjective experience at all.

As philosopher Tim Bayne observes in the article: No one really has a theory that closes the explanatory gap. The PCI studies can’t explain why The Dress looks blue and black one moment and white and gold the next, or how a toothache feels different from a headache. There remains, in the words of the article itself, a chasm between our everyday experiences and what science can explain.

The article treats this as a temporary limitation—a problem that better tools and more research will eventually solve. But Bricklin’s perspective suggests the chasm is categorical, not merely empirical. You cannot bridge it with more sophisticated brain scanning because you are trying to use objective measurements to capture something that is by its very nature subjective, private, and—in James’s terms—the precondition for all objective knowledge rather than just another object to be known.

The Retreat to Mystery

Tellingly, even committed materialists within consciousness science seem to be sensing these limits. The article notes that Stuart Hameroff—co-founder of the Tucson conference and developer of the quantum consciousness theory with Roger Penrose—has evolved beyond seeking the genesis of consciousness in the deep interior of neurons. Their search for increasingly subtle material origination has led them beyond any such localized confinement. They now believe that consciousness may have always existed in the universe.

This trajectory recapitulates James’s own journey. The article mentions that eminent quantum physicists like Erwin Schrödinger and Wolfgang Pauli reached similar conclusions. Bricklin observes that scientists’ movement toward a science of consciousness veered away to a more unified, mystical realm, beyond the objectifiable. This is not a failure of scientific rigor but its vindication—following the evidence to where it actually leads, rather than where materialist assumptions demand it go.

The Scientific American article briefly acknowledges IIT’s panpsychist implications—the idea that consciousness might be present outside living systems—before noting that this contributed to the theory being labeled pseudoscience by 124 researchers. The controversy reveals the field’s deep anxiety about following its own logic. If integrated information creates consciousness, and if integrated information can exist in non-biological systems, then consciousness is not a special product of brains but a more fundamental feature of reality. This is philosophically coherent but scientifically threatening because it undermines the materialist premise on which the entire research program rests.

The AI Mirror

The emergence of large language models claiming consciousness forces these questions into practical urgency. When a Google engineer claimed that LaMDA appeared conscious, the company responded that there was no evidence it was sentient. But as David Chalmers points out: No one can say for sure they’ve demonstrated these systems are not conscious. We don’t have that kind of proof.

This admission is devastating for materialist consciousness science. If, after three decades of research, we still cannot definitively say whether a system we designed and built is conscious, what hope do we have of understanding consciousness in biological systems we didn’t design? The article treats this as an open empirical question—perhaps we can apply theories like GNWT to test whether LLMs broadcast information globally across their networks.

But Bricklin’s framework suggests the confusion runs deeper. The very question assumes consciousness is something certain physical configurations produce. If instead consciousness is more fundamental—something that certain systems can receive, express, or participate in—then the question becomes not does this system generate consciousness? but does this system provide a channel for consciousness? The radio-and-symphony analogy applies perfectly.

The article quotes Marcello Massimini saying that simulating a storm will not get you wet and simulating a black hole will not bend space and time. This is meant to argue that mere computational simulation cannot yield consciousness. But the metaphor cuts both ways. A simulation of a radio also won’t receive broadcasts—but that doesn’t prove the original radio was generating the symphony rather than receiving it.

The Cathedral That Never Fell

Massimini uses another metaphor to describe what happens during unconsciousness: Everything collapses. The cathedral falls apart. In conscious states, diverse networks of neurons maintain constant communication, building up complexity. In sleep or anesthesia, the cathedral falls apart as these connections break down.

But what if the cathedral never actually falls? What if consciousness—James’s sciousness, the primordial awareness—persists even when the brain’s ability to receive and express it is temporarily compromised? The brain’s neural cathedral might crumble, but the symphony continues playing; we simply can’t hear it anymore through this particular receiver.

This framework makes sense of phenomena that materialism struggles with. The article mentions near-death experiences—how someone without functioning circulation can have one. If consciousness is produced by brain activity, this should be impossible. If consciousness is something the brain receives and processes, then unusual brain states might provide unusual access to consciousness, just as a damaged radio might pick up frequencies it normally filters out.

The same applies to psychedelics. The article notes that drugs like 5-MeO-DMT make time seem to stop and obliterate your sense of self, experiences the PCI can’t explain. But if psychedelics alter the brain’s filtering and processing of consciousness rather than consciousness itself, these experiences make perfect sense. The radio’s circuitry has been modified, allowing different aspects of the signal through.

The Stakes of the Confusion

Why does this matter? The Scientific American article frames the stakes in terms of practical applications—treating disorders of consciousness, understanding anesthesia and psychedelics, addressing animal welfare, and dealing with AI. These are indeed important. But the deeper stakes concern how we understand ourselves and reality.

If consciousness is a product of matter, then we are fundamentally material beings—biological machines whose sense of awareness and free will is an epiphenomenal byproduct of neural processes. Our ethical status derives from our capacity for suffering, which itself is just a certain pattern of brain activity. When the brain dies, we cease to exist in any meaningful sense. The universe is fundamentally dead matter that somehow, in certain configurations, becomes capable of experiencing.

If instead consciousness is fundamental—if James’s sciousness, the Spirit of the world which thinks through us, is the ground of being from which matter itself emerges—then we are something quite different. Our brains are instruments of consciousness rather than its source. The ethical implications cascade outward: the question of animal consciousness becomes not do they have the right kind of neural complexity? but how does consciousness express itself through different biological forms? The question of AI consciousness becomes not have we created synthetic minds? but can these systems provide channels for consciousness?

Bricklin argues that serious cross-questioning requires a more open space than materialist neuroscience provides. The conference in Tucson, to its credit, has always fostered dialogue with Eastern traditions and non-dual perspectives. But as long as the field’s foundational assumption remains that consciousness is produced by matter—as long as researchers fall down in mute and holy reverence before the awful mystery of how the molecules ever could make them—this dialogue will remain superficial.

The Long Engagement That Should End

The Tucson conference recently changed its name from Toward a Science of Consciousness to The Science of Consciousness. Bricklin asks whether this marriage should be annulled. The Scientific American article represents the field’s celebration of its nuptials, confident that with the right tools, the sense of mystery about how material processes could give rise to conscious experiences would start to go away.

But perhaps the mystery persists not because our tools are inadequate but because we’re asking the wrong question. The radio-and-symphony analogy illuminates why: we are studying the circuitry that correlates with receiving and processing consciousness while assuming we’re studying what creates it. We document in ever-greater detail which transistors activate when different signals are received, then wonder why we still can’t explain where the music comes from.

The field’s thirty-year journey has indeed been productive. We know vastly more about the neural correlates of consciousness—about when consciousness is present or absent, about which brain regions are involved in different aspects of conscious experience, about how drugs and disorders affect these processes. This is genuine scientific progress, worthy of celebration.

But it is progress on the easy problem, not the hard one. As long as the field conflates these two problems—as long as it treats correlation as explanation and mistakes the map for the territory—it will continue to produce what Royce called thinking that is far from knowing what it is to cross-question consciousness with any real spirit in their questioning.

James understood this a century ago. His warning that the fundamental nature of consciousness belongs to the metaphysical rather than the empirical was not a counsel of despair but of intellectual honesty. His ironic benediction—good luck glimpsing the uncapturable through science alone—was misquoted into an endorsement precisely because the field needed a patron saint for its materialist project.

The marriage of Science and Consciousness should not be annulled, but it should be renegotiated. Science can and should study the correlates of consciousness, the functional aspects of awareness, the neural mechanisms that allow consciousness to be received and expressed. But it should abandon the claim to explain consciousness’s fundamental nature or origin. That requires, as James knew, venturing into territory where the scientific method gives way to metaphysical investigation, where the molecules stop being worshipped and start being properly questioned.

Only then will we stop confusing the radio for the symphony.