Can neuroscience tell us what consciousness really is , even when introspection and behavior fall short? Viktor Lamme argues that recurrent neural processing, not global workspace activation, is the fundamental ingredient of conscious experience. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Viktor Lamme opens with a challenge to the dominant paradigm in consciousness research: if we cannot reliably know what we are conscious of at any given moment, then searching for neural correlates of consciousness is fundamentally misguided. Instead, he proposes building a definition of consciousness from neuroscientific evidence itself , using neural arguments rather than behavioral reports to determine when and where conscious experience occurs. At the core of his theory are four stages of cortical processing. Stages one and two in ...