From "Neural correlates of consciousness" to "Neural causes of consciousness": A commentary on "Consciousness, biology and quantum hypotheses", by Bernard J. Baars and David E. Edelman.

As any other psychological phenomenon, consciousness must have tangible, measurable, and quantifiable underpinnings in the brain of any species capable of experiencing it. As Baars and Edelman point out in their review [1], the empirical body of neuronal correlates of consciousness is growing rapidly, not lastly due to the work of the authors themselves. Here, the authors address a theory that has been proposed decades ago, but never gained much traction in the mainstream of cognitive neuroscience: The Orch-OR theory of consciousness by Penrose and Hameroff. Notably, theories that neglect most mainstream evidence before ultimately being proven right or wrong usually do not endure multiple decades in cognitive neuroscience. What is different here? One big reason, in my opinion, is the biological nature of the commonly proposed neuronal underpinnings of transitive consciousness, which makes it unusually hard to take the ultimate step for a neuroscientific theory: to go from a number of neuronal correlates to a definitive set of biological causes.