The problem of consciousness hangs over both science and philosophy like a bad smell. Nobody is sure what to do with it. The problem of consciousness makes everything uncertain and unclear. In this article, Riccardo Manzotti offers us an ingeniously simple solution to this problem. So simple it becomes almost unintuitive. But possibly, this is exactly what we have needed to finally get to grips with consciousness.

Einstein claimed that when “the consistent use of traditional fundamental concepts leads us to paradoxes difficult to resolve […] it is necessary over and over again to engage in a critique of fundamental concepts, in order that we may not unconsciously be ruled by them”. The problem of consciousness falls precisely in this category. From the pioneering studies of Hermann von Helmholtz, more than 150 years ago, to the recent works of Anil Seth, Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch, neuroscientists have been trying to find something that resembles consciousness inside the nervous system; so far they have always failed to address the key issue: how can a brain experience something that the brain is not. The neural evidence they have observed never amounts to more than correlations. The nervous system is home to all kinds of interesting phenomena, but no consciousness has been found. In fact, the more we know about what goes on in the brain, the less space remains to find anything unexpected.