For decades, neuroscience has treated consciousness as something the brain manufactures — neurons firing until awareness emerges. Now Christof Koch, a veteran of that very tradition, is asking whether the field has been solving the wrong problem entirely. Speaking in Porto in April 2026 and drawing on a lifetime of research, Koch proposes that the brain may be a filter for consciousness rather than its source — and that consciousness itself may be woven into the structure of reality, not assembled from tissue. It is a quiet but profound inversion, one that places science at the edge of its own