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Descartes was a dualist, which means he thought that the brain was not sole responsible for conscious experience. Dualist views today have evolved and hold within the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" which you will find definition easily on the net. To summarize, the HPC says that information only cannot account for human experience hence that materialism is false. To do this, it refers to a few experiments that cannot be solved by materialism except by discarding conscious experience altogether or assuming that it cannot be different from information processing, which I find deeply unsatisfying. However, the dualist approach also has problems because the interaction between brain and whatever else consciousness would be made of is unknown. Alternatives to these theories have evolved, like "quantum consciousness" which would have consciousness being a property of quantum systems (collapse of the wave function), which kind of implies panpsychism where all matter is conscious. These theories and dualism I find more satisfying than materialism. But today's scientist have based most of their career within the assumption that these theories were at best a waste of time or not worth investigating by denying HPC. However, we have always known that scientists are not more open-minded than any other people. This is intelligently exposed by Thomas Kuhn in the structure of scientific revolutions.