Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness

Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness

Crick, Francis, and Christof Koch
Seminars in the Neurosciences, Saunders Scientific Publications, vol. 2 (1990): 263-275.

“It is remarkable that most of the work in both cognitive science and the neurosciences makes no reference to consciousness (or ‘awareness’), especially as many would regard consciousness as the major puzzle confronting the neural view of the mind and indeed at the present time it appears deeply mysterious to many people. This attitude is partly a legacy of behaviorism and partly because most workers in these areas cannot see any useful way of approaching the problem. In the last few years several books have appeared that address the question directly but most of these have been written largely from a functional standpoint and so have said rather little about neurons and other machinery of the brain.

We suggest that the time is now ripe for an attack on the neural basis of consciousness. Moreover, we believe that the problem of consciousness can, in the long run, be solved only by explanations at the neural level.
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— Crick & Koch