Bernabé Mallo
Doctor en Filosofía por la Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU)
Investigador
en neurofilosofía, evolución humana y origen del arte. / PhD in
Philosophy – University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Researcher in neurophilosophy, human evolution, and the origins of art.
A commentary on Hugo de los Campos' article in La Diaria (2026)
Introduction: milk, the radio, and the mystery of experience
Where does milk come from? A child, asked by his mother, answers with the available evidence: "From the bottle." The answer is reasonable, but incomplete. To understand the real origin of milk, the child needs to leave the kitchen, travel to the countryside, see the cows, understand the chain that goes from milking to the greenish glass bottle that decorates the tables of his childhood. This anecdote, which Hugo de los Campos retrieves in his article for La Diaria (2026), encapsulates with precision the problem that science has been trying to solve for decades without success: where does consciousness come from?
The article, titled "The problem of consciousness," invites us to explore this enigma with a gaze that does not settle for the usual answers. De los Campos, with agile prose and a notable command of philosophical dissemination, leads us from Newtonian physics and Einstein's relativity to David Chalmers' "hard problem," passing through William James' provocative hypothesis about the "transmissive" function of the brain . His conclusion is as elegant as it is unsettling: we do not know whether consciousness is something the brain produces or something the brain transmits. And, more importantly, perhaps we do not have the means to decide.
Three kinds of enigmas and a structural limit
De los Campos distinguishes three types of scientific enigmas. The first is that which, when solved, adds a brick to the theoretical edifice without knocking it down —like carbon polymorphism, which explains why the same atom can be graphite or diamond . The second is that which, when solved, brings down the entire building —like Einstein's general relativity, which replaced the Newtonian conception of space, time, and gravity . The third is qualitatively different: that which does not refer to a particular phenomenon within a discipline, but to its own object of study.
It is in this last category that consciousness resides. We are not faced with a phenomenon that neuroscience can explain with more data or better models, but with a question that questions the very limits of scientific explanation. As the article notes, we know with increasing precision what happens in the brain when we see the colour red, but we do not know why that process is accompanied by the sensation of redness. The gap between the neural correlate and the subjective experience does not close by adding more correlates.
Search results reinforce this intuition. An article from The Conversation translated by Dialektika notes that philosophical theories of consciousness are "empirically equivalent": it is impossible to decide between physicalism, panpsychism, or dualism through experiment . Similarly, the interview with Anil Seth in Ciencia Cognitiva distinguishes between the "easy problem" (how the brain works) and the "hard problem" (why that functioning feels like something) . Seth proposes an intermediate approach, the "real problem," which seeks to build explanatory bridges between the brain and experience, but recognises that the fundamental gap persists .
The radio and the bottle: the problem of causality
The most original contribution of de los Campos' article is his use of the radio metaphor to illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing between the "productive" and "transmissive" hypotheses. The person who has never seen a radio assumes that the music is produced in the device. All the available evidence —the buttons, the dial, the antenna cable— confirms their hypothesis. But they are wrong: the music reaches the radio from a remote antenna, through electromagnetic waves. The radio does not produce the music; it transmits it.
William James applied this same logic to consciousness in an 1897 lecture. If the brain is an organ that produces consciousness, damaging it alters consciousness. If the brain is an organ that transmits or limits a pre-existing consciousness, damaging it also alters it. The neurological correlates are identical under both hypotheses. As de los Campos notes, "neither correlation nor intervention alone suffice to decide whether the brain produces, constitutes, enables, or modulates/transmits consciousness".
The argument is sound, but it also reveals the difficulty of making progress. To resolve the dispute with our radio character, we need something more than logical arguments: we need to take him to the transmitting station and show him the origin of the waves. In the case of consciousness, we have nothing equivalent. As the article notes, "without a theory there is no experiment, without experiment there is no technology, and without technology there is no way to take anyone to see where consciousness comes from".
The problem of authority and scientific consensus
The article also addresses a sociological dimension that is often ignored in debates about consciousness: science is a collective artefact, with its hierarchies, its consensuses, and its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Citing Ian Hacking and Charles Sanders Peirce, de los Campos notes that the academic marginality of the transmissive hypothesis is not necessarily a sign that it is false, but perhaps a consequence that no one with the necessary resources and institutional backing has seriously dedicated themselves to developing it .
The analogy with the history of physics is illuminating. Ludwig Boltzmann dedicated his life to defending the physical reality of atoms at a time when the dominant current considered them a mere useful calculating instrument. His suicide, in 1906, coincided with the publication of Einstein's articles on Brownian motion, which would provide the decisive proof of their existence. Science can be cruel to dissenters, even when they are right.
De los Campos does not pretend to demonstrate that the transmissive hypothesis is correct. His point is more subtle: to dismiss it by decree, without having resolved the underlying logical problem, is exactly the kind of error that science, in its best version, is called upon to avoid.
Connection with research on the origin of art (S/Y/C)
The debate on consciousness raised by de los Campos resonates deeply with the research we have been developing on the S/Y/C model of neuronal functioning and the Law of Biological Coherence (Mallo, 2023, 2025, 2026a, 2026b). The question of the origin of consciousness and the question of the origin of art share the same root: how to explain subjective experience without reducing it to its physical correlates?
The S (Survival) dimension reminds us that consciousness, like art, is rooted in homeostatic needs. The productive hypothesis —consciousness as a function of the brain— is attractive precisely because it connects experience with the survival of the organism. But the transmissive hypothesis, however strange it may seem, could also be compatible with a homeostatic approach: if consciousness is a more fundamental principle, the brain would be the organ that shapes it, limits it, and guides it toward survival.
The Y (Symbolon) dimension is central to understanding why the problem of consciousness is so resistant to solution. Consciousness is not only a biological phenomenon; it is also a symbolic phenomenon. The fact that we can formulate the question "what is consciousness?" and communicate it to others already presupposes a symbolic capacity that science, on its own, cannot explain. As the article notes, accounts of supposedly extrasensory experiences question the fundamental assumption of the productive hypothesis, but they need a theory that articulates them.
The C (Wholeness) dimension points to the human need to close forms, to find coherent totalities. The problem of consciousness is, in this sense, a yearning for epistemic completeness: we want an explanation that integrates all data into a coherent narrative. But perhaps, as de los Campos suggests, we are facing a structural limit: consciousness may be something that, by its very nature, can only be experienced from within, not explained from outside.
Surgical Philosophy invites us to make a precise analytical cut in this debate. It is not about choosing between the productive and the transmissive hypothesis without more, but about distinguishing the levels at which each operates. At the level of clinical practice and empirical research, the productive hypothesis has proven its usefulness: it allows us to develop drugs, design brain-machine interfaces, and treat mental illnesses. At the philosophical level, however, the productive hypothesis remains just that: a hypothesis. And the transmissive hypothesis, however marginal, points to a logical gap that cannot be ignored without falling into dogmatism.
Final considerations: the question as a result
Hugo de los Campos' article offers no definitive answers. And that is, perhaps, its greatest virtue. At a time when scientific discourse tends toward overconfidence, reminding us that there are questions we still do not know how to answer —and perhaps may never be able to answer with the available methods— is an act of necessary intellectual humility.
Consciousness remains an enigma, as life was for biologists before chemistry and physics began to dissolve the mystery. It is possible that, as Anil Seth suggests, the "hard problem" will dissolve as we build explanatory bridges between brain and experience . But it is also possible that consciousness is, as some very serious thinkers maintain, a structural limit of science, something that by its nature can only be experienced, not explained .
What matters, as de los Campos concludes, is that the question itself —the fact that we can formulate it with precision and honestly recognise that we have no answer— is already a result. It keeps the path of research open. And as long as that path remains open, science and philosophy will continue to have something to say to each other. Perhaps the deepest lesson of the article is that we do not need to choose between the bottle hypothesis and the cow hypothesis. We need, simply, to keep asking.
References
De los Campos, H. (2026, June). El problema de la conciencia. La Diaria. https://ladiaria.com.uy/ciencia/articulo/2026/6/el-problema-de-la-conciencia/
Mallo, B. (2023). La construcción neuro-simbólica. Una aproximación al funcionamiento del cerebro desde una perspectiva multidisciplinar [Doctoral thesis, University of the Basque Country - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea]. ADDI Repository. http://hdl.handle.net/10810/62701
Mallo, B. (2025). Arte y biología: Una aproximación neurofilosófica al origen de la experiencia estética. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0E8Y5WZMK
Mallo, B. (2025). Art and biology: A neurophilosophical approach to the origin of aesthetic experience. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0E8Y6C2XN
Mallo, B. (2026a). De la filosofía quirúrgica a la ley de coherencia biológica S/Y/C: Hacia una investigación sobre el origen del arte en la especie Homo. https://isbn.bibna.gub.uy/catalogo.php?mode=detalle&nt=57196
Mallo, B. (2026a). De la filosofía quirúrgica a la ley de coherencia biológica S/Y/C: Hacia una investigación sobre el origen del arte en la especie Homo [Kindle edition]. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYGTJD5C
Mallo, B. (2026b). From surgical philosophy to the law of biological coherence S/Y/C: Toward a study of the origin of art in the Homo lineage. https://isbn.bibna.gub.uy/catalogo.php?mode=detalle&nt=57197
Autor / Author
Bernabé Mallo
Doctor en Filosofía – Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
Investigador independiente en neurofilosofía, evolución humana y origen del arte.
Bernabé Mallo
PhD in Philosophy – University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
Independent researcher in neurophilosophy, human evolution, and the origin of art.
Enlaces / Links
Página de autor Amazon / Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/bernabemallo
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9002-9728
Plataforma EHUenRed / Link EHUenRed: https://www.ehu.eus/es/web/masterrak-eta-graduondokoak/red-latinoamericana-de-posgrados
Canal YouTube / Channel YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neuroideas815
Canal YouTube / Channel YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBsf6OZ482NjST6QA-hvYtQ
Publicaciones y proyectos en desarrollo / Publications and projects:
https://www.amazon.com/author/bernabemallo
https://ehuenred.theglocal.network/ideas/el-origen-del-arte-en-el-cerebro-de-makapansgat-al-moma-del-primate-al-sapiens