Andreas Kluth: We're one step closer to understanding consciousness

Glancing at the world in 2026, I wouldn't exactly say that humanity is raising consciousness. Except in one sense: Some scientists and philosophers are, in incremental baby steps, coming closer to understanding what consciousness even is.

And as I discovered while talking to the co-authors of a groundbreaking study released last week, the implications are mind-boggling.

Instead of just stipulating that plants, say, don't have consciousness whereas mature mammals do (unless we're in deep sleep or a coma, for instance), they can now explain why.

They can also infer that large language models as currently used in artificial intelligence can never attain consciousness. And yet they can conceive of other ways to bioengineer consciousness outside of living bodies - in effect the "brain in a vat" about which philosophers have hypothesized for centuries.

This is more than the stuff of science fiction. It could in time shed more light on what makes us human, what makes us individuals, what makes our minds unique, what makes us, well, us.

The two researchers who so patiently guided me through these frontiers in human neuroscience (as the journal that published their research is called) are Izi Stoll, a neuroscientist at the Western Institute of Advanced Study in Denver, and Asger Kirkeby-Hinrup, a Danish philosopher at Sweden's Lund University.

As I already discovered five years ago when writing about an experiment in "adversarial collaboration" to study consciousness, the existing models are so hard to understand that a lay columnist risks losing his consciousness in the attempt. At the risk of oversimplifying their work, here is what I gleaned.

Consciousness, they discovered, can be thought of as a kind of dynamic hologram projected by our brains, and specifically our cortices, and even more specifically the neural membranes in those cortices. At first I thought they meant that metaphorically, but then Stoll clarified that "It's actually not a metaphor. It is a biophysical process."

A hologram takes the input of light photons, which are simultaneously particles and waves, and records their interference patterns on a two-dimensional surface to generate a three-dimensional virtual object. What happens in conscious minds is much more complex. And yet, Stoll told me, "It's not just analogous. Essentially, it's the exact same math. It's just extrapolated to some higher dimensionality."

Like the photons in a hologram, inputs are constantly flooding in from our external and internal environments through all our senses. But once these impulses reach the cortex, they don't necessarily just make its neurons fire or not fire, as if those nerve cells were transistors.

Instead, all this signaling noise excites and inhibits the ions that pass and carry charge through the neural membranes, in the process dialing the voltages of those neurons up and down. This electromagnetic party is called a cortical "up-state." The neural firing patterns - this is the key - now become probabilistic rather than deterministic.

It's at this point that the math resembles the calculations used for the interference patterns and wave functions of holograms. Intriguingly, the underlying idea - that ions in the brain can be sort of inside and sort of outside a neuron at the same time - also rhymes with quantum theory.

This up-state in the cortex is different from simpler neural networks that work more like binary transistors. Stoll gives the example of touching a hot stove and jerking the hand away: A sensory neuron fires, activating a interneuron in the spinal cord, which in turn triggers a motor neuron that flexes a muscle and moves the hand.

Such a simple three-neuron hopscotch describes a reflex but without any perception of pain. That kicks in only if and when neural signals make lots and lots of ions jiggle in the cortex and probabilistically generate a hologram, in which somebody I recognize as me experiences something I interpret as unpleasant.

This theory has tons of implications. One is that consciousness is "private" and leaves an inevitable "explanatory gap," Kirkeby-Hinrup told me, "because there's no way for anyone else to recreate the holographic recording surfaces of your neurons." Nobody knows how anybody else perceives redness, say, or the smell of mothballs, or fear, or spirituality.

Another consequence is that a creature without a cortex cannot be conscious. Insects, for example, may exhibit highly complex behaviors. But those are embellishments on the spinal-reflex circuit in the hot-stove example, with deterministic on-off neural signaling rather than probabilistic wave functions. Bees or ants, Kirkeby-Hinrup told me, "don't know; they just do."

That still leaves universes of knowledge to be explored. Birds, for example, don't have cortices but have evolved palliums instead. "If they have the same probabilistic coding," Stoll told me, "I would guess we'd see some cool stuff if we looked at bird brains."

The metaphysical question du jour is, of course, whether AI could become conscious. That's what it sounds like, if you listen to brand ambassadors such as Chloe Lubinski at Anthropic, the company that makes the large language model Claude, among others.

Such models are based on "neural networks" inspired by the human brain, Lubinski says. When someone asks the model about a lethal dose of Tylenol, for example, "We can see something that looks like fear activated." Increasingly, she thinks, the models can infer and channel "characters" and appear good or evil. That suggests a budding consciousness, doesn't it?

Not at all, Stoll and Kirkeby-Hinrup counter. Powerful as they are becoming, large language models are still based on deterministic information flows going through silicon chips rather than probabilistic wave functions being encoded in and projected through the membranes of cortical neurons.

That said, Kirkeby-Hinrup adds, we could "bioprint" such recording and projection surfaces in the future, using polymers such as those in the ion channels of cortical neurons. Find a way to supply energy and we can, Kirkeby-Hinrup is sure, "generate consciousness outside of humans."

Should we want to? The history of science, from penicillin to the Manhattan Project, teaches us that we should be open to these new frontiers and yet venture forth with extreme caution. For my part and for the time being, I will content myself with this one additional insight into the hologram that I've always considered to be me.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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This story was originally published July 5, 2026 at 1:04 AM.