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     1	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
     2	Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
       
     3	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
     4	journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pbiomolbio
       
     5	A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations
     6	and implications
     7	Robert Lawrence Kuhn
     8	Closer To Truth (TV & Web), United States
       
     9	A R T I C L E I N F O
       
    10	A B S T R A C T
       
    11	Keywords:
    12	Consciousness
    13	Mind-body problem
    14	Materialism
    15	Monism
    16	Dualism
    17	Idealism
       
    18	Diverse explanations or theories of consciousness are arrayed on a roughly physicalist-to-nonphysicalist land­
    19	scape of essences and mechanisms. Categories: Materialism Theories (philosophical, neurobiological, electro­
    20	magnetic field, computational and informational, homeostatic and affective, embodied and enactive, relational,
    21	representational, language, phylogenetic evolution); Non-Reductive Physicalism; Quantum Theories; Integrated
    22	Information Theory; Panpsychisms; Monisms; Dualisms; Idealisms; Anomalous and Altered States Theories;
    23	Challenge Theories. There are many subcategories, especially for Materialism Theories. Each explanation is selfdescribed by its adherents, critique is minimal and only for clarification, and there is no attempt to adjudicate
    24	among theories. The implications of consciousness explanations or theories are assessed with respect to four
    25	questions: meaning/purpose/value (if any); AI consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death. A
    26	Landscape of Consciousness, I suggest, offers perspective.
       
    27	Explanations of consciousness abound and the radical diversity of
    28	theories is telling. Explanations, or theories, are said to work at aston­
    29	ishingly divergent orders of magnitude and putative realms of reality.
    30	My purpose here must be humble: collect and categorize, not assess and
    31	adjudicate.1 Seek insights, not answers.
    32	Unrealistically, I’d like to get them all, at least all contemporary
    33	theories that are sufficiently distinct with explanations that can sur­
    34	mount an arbitrary hurdle of rationality or conceivability.2 Falsification
    35	or verification is not on the agenda. I’m less concerned about the
    36	ontological truth of explanations/theories3 than in identifying them and
    37	then locating them on a “Landscape”4 to enable categorization and
    38	assess relationships. Next, I assess implications of categories for “big
    39	questions.” Thus, this Landscape is not about how consciousness is
       
    40	measured or evolved or even works, but about what consciousness is and
    41	what difference it makes.
    42	It’s the classic “mind-body problem:” How do the felt experiences in
    43	our minds relate to the neural processes in our brains? How do mental
    44	states, whether sensory, cognitive, emotional, or even noumenal (self­
    45	less) awareness, correlate with brain states? The Landscape of Con­
    46	sciousness explanations or theories I want to draw is as broad as
    47	possible, including those that cannot be subsumed by, and possibly not
    48	even accessed by, the scientific method. This freedom from constraint, as
    49	it were, is no excuse for wooly thinking. Standards of rationality and
    50	clarity of argument must be maintained even more tenaciously, and
    51	bases of beliefs must be specified even more clearly.
    52	I have two main aims: (i) gather and describe the various theories
       
    53	E-mail address: RLKUHN@icloud.com.
    54	Feedback is appreciated, especially explanations or theories of consciousness not included, or not described accurately, or not classified properly; also, modi­
    55	fications of the classification typology. “A Landscape of Consciousness” is a work-in-progress, permanently.
    56	2
    57	I make no attempt to be exhaustive historically: while Bohm, Jung, Aquinas, Aurobindo, and Dao De Jing are included; Plato, the Psalmist, Nagarjuna, Confucius,
    58	and the Apostle Paul are not.
    59	3
    60	I use “explanation” and “theory” interchangeably, though I chose “explanations,” not “theories,” for the subtitle. “Theories” range from the “Theory of Relativity”
    61	with high precision, to theories in the life and social sciences with confidence levels that vary wildly, to “I have a theory” (meaning “I have an idea,” about anything,
    62	say, why my favorite sports team keeps losing). Other terms are “hypothesis,” an initial idea to guide research, and “model,” a simplification of the real world to
    63	isolate and test insights. All these terms have precise definitions in the literature (see Daniel Stoljar, Kind and Stoljar, 2023, pp. 112–113). But on this Landscape
    64	everyone picks their own term. Most pick “theory,” in part because they really believe their baby is beautiful. No matter the term, we are all after the same goal: the
    65	foundation(s) of consciousness.
    66	4
    67	Deliberately, “A Landscape ….” not “The Landscape ….” I acknowledge, with pleasure, precedent to Leonard Susskind’s pioneering The Cosmic Landscape (string
    68	theory structures and the anthropic principle).
    69	1
       
    70	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2023.12.003
    71	Received 4 June 2023; Received in revised form 12 September 2023; Accepted 25 December 2023
    72	Available online 26 January 2024
    73	0079-6107/© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/).
       
    74	R.L. Kuhn
       
    75	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
    76	and array them in some kind of meaningful structure of high-level or
    77	first-order categories (and under Materialism, subcategories); and (ii)
    78	assess their implications, with respect to four big questions: meaning/
    79	purpose/value (if any); artificial intelligence (AI) consciousness; virtual
    80	immortality; and survival beyond death.
    81	Theories overlap; some work together. Moreover, while a real-world
    82	landscape of consciousness, even simplified, would be drawn with three
    83	dimensions (at least), with multiple kinds and levels of nestings—a
    84	combinatorial explosion (and likely no closer to truth)—I satisfice with a
    85	one-dimensional toy-model. I array all the theories on a linear spectrum,
    86	simplistically and roughly, from the “most physical” on the left (at the
    87	beginning) to the “least physical” on the right (near the end).5 (I have
    88	two final categories after this spectrum.) The physicalism assumed in
    89	Materialism Theories of consciousness is characterized by naturalistic,
    90	science-based perspectives, while non-materialism theories have various
    91	degrees of nonphysicalist perspectives outside the ambit of current sci­
    92	ence and in some cases not subject to the scientific method of experi­
    93	mentation and replicability.
    94	Please do not ascribe the relative importance of a theory to the
    95	relative size of its description. The shortest can be the strongest. It
    96	sometimes takes more words to describe lesser-known theories. For each
    97	description I feel the tension between conciseness and completeness.
    98	Moreover, several are not complete theories in themselves but ways to
    99	think about consciousness that strike me as original and perhaps
   100	insightful.
   101	I have followed consciousness studies in its various forms for my
   102	entire life. My PhD is in neurophysiology (thalamocortical evoked po­
   103	tentials).6 I am creator and host of Closer To Truth,7 the long-running
   104	public television series and web resource on science and philosophy,
   105	roughly one-third of which focuses on consciousness and brain/mind
   106	topics.8 I have discussed consciousness with over 200 scientists and
   107	philosophers who work on or think about consciousness and related
   108	fields (Closer To Truth YouTube; Closer To Truth website).9
   109	I use these Closer To Truth discussions as resources. I want to give feel
   110	and flavor, as well as propositions and arguments, for the astonishingly
   111	diverse attitudes and approaches to consciousness coming from radically
   112	diverse perspectives and worldviews. That’s why I use spontaneous
   113	quotes from verbal conversations along with meticulous quotes from
   114	academic papers.
   115	In one early Closer To Truth episode, “What are the Big Questions of
   116	Science,” philosopher Patricia Churchland gave the bluntest answer:
   117	“Out of meat, how do you get thought? That’s the grandest question.”
   118	She distinguishes two major questions. One is whether psychological
   119	states—our mental life of remembering, thinking, creating—are really a
   120	subset of brain activity? The other is how do high-level psychological
   121	processes come about from basic neurophysiological actions? “How do
   122	brain cells, organized in their complex ways, give rise to my watching
   123	something move, or seeing color, or smelling a rose”(Churchland, 2000;
   124	Kuhn, 2000a, 2000b).
   125	Philosopher David Papineau distinguishes three questions related to
       
   126	consciousness: How?, Where?, and What? “First, how does consciousness
   127	relate to other features of reality? Second, where are conscious phe­
   128	nomena located in reality? And, third, what is the nature of conscious­
   129	ness?” (Papineau, 2020a). Because this Landscape is structured by
   130	theories of consciousness, not by philosophical questions, each theory
   131	sets its own agenda for dealing with the three questions, mostly, of
   132	course, focusing on the How?
   133	Philosopher Thomas Nagel sees more a fundamental conundrum and
   134	he frames it crisply. “We have at present no conception of how a single
   135	event or thing could have both physical or phenomenological aspects, or
   136	how if it did they could be related” (Nagel, 1986). In his influential
   137	paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Nagel offers, “Without con­
   138	sciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With
   139	consciousness it seems hopeless” (Nagel, 1974).
   140	“Hopeless,” to me, is invigorating; I’m up for the “hopeless chal­
   141	lenge.” Take all that follows as my personal journey of consciousness;
   142	idiosyncratic, to be sure; not all for everyone, not set in cement.
   143	1. Chalmers’s “hard problem” of consciousness
   144	Philosopher David Chalmers famously characterized the core
   145	conundrum of explaining consciousness—accounting for “qualia,” our
   146	qualitatively rendered interior experience of motion-picture-like
   147	perception and cognitive awareness—by memorializing the pithy,
   148	potent phrase, “the hard problem.” This is where most contemporary
   149	theories commence and well they should (Section: Chalmers, 1995b,
   150	1996, 2007; 2014a; 2014b; 2016b).
   151	It is no exaggeration to say that Chalmer’s 1995 paper, “Facing up to
   152	the problem of consciousness” (Chalmers, 1995b) and his 1996 book,
   153	The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Chalmers, 1996),
   154	were watershed moments in consciousness studies, challenging the
   155	conventional wisdom of the prevailing materialist-reductionist world­
   156	view and altering the dynamics of the field. His core argument against
   157	materialism, in its original form, is deceptively (and delightfully)
   158	simple:
   159	1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.
   160	2. There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in
   161	which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not
   162	hold.
   163	3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our
   164	world, over and above the physical facts.
   165	4. So, materialism is false.
   166	This is the famous “Zombie Argument” (infamous to some): whether
   167	creatures absolutely identical to us in every external measure, but with
   168	no internal light, no inner subjective experience, are “conceivable”—the
   169	argument turning on the meaning and implications of “conceivable” and
   170	the difference between conceivable and possible. (It can be claimed that
   171	the Zombie Argument for consciousness being nonphysical, like the
   172	Ontological Argument for God actually existing, sneaks the conclusion
   173	into one of the premises.)
   174	Chalmers asks, “Why does it feel like something inside? Why is our
   175	brain processing—vast neural circuits and computational mecha­
   176	nisms—accompanied by conscious experience? Why do we have this
   177	amazing, entertaining inner movie going on in our minds?” (All quotes
   178	not referenced are from Closer To Truth videos on www.closertotruth.co
   179	m, including 2007, 2014a, 2014b, 2016b.)
   180	Key indeed are qualia, our internal, phenomenological, felt experi­
   181	ence—the sight of your newborn daughter, bundled up; the sound of
   182	Mahler’s Second Symphony, fifth movement, choral finale; the smell of
   183	garlic, cooking in olive oil. Qualia—the felt qualities of inner experi­
   184	ence—are the crux of the mind-body problem.
   185	Chalmers describes qualia as “the raw sensations of experience.” He
   186	says, “I see colors—reds, greens, blues—and they feel a certain way to
   187	me. I see a red rose; I hear a clarinet; I smell mothballs. All of these feel a
       
   188	5
   189	My typology is arbitrary, and any association with political connotations of
   190	“left” and “right” is coincidental and comical.
   191	6
   192	UCLA Department of Anatomy and Brain Research Institute, 1964–1968.
   193	7
   194	Closer To Truth is co-created, produced and directed by Peter Getzels.
   195	8
   196	Closer To Truth features over 100 TV episodes and over 1500 video in­
   197	terviews on consciousness and related topics, issues and questions in brain and
   198	mind, such as free will, personal identity, and alien intelligences. Closer To
   199	Truth website, www.closertotruth.com and Closer To Truth YouTube channel,
   200	www.youtube.com/@CloserToTruthTV.
   201	9
   202	In addition, viewers globally send me their theories on consciousness: some
   203	are coherent, a few are original, all are passionate. I consider them all—most,
   204	admittedly, I skim—and I learn some, enriching the Landscape. There seems a
   205	sharp division: those striving to develop purely physicalist explanations (how­
   206	ever complex), and those taking consciousness as in some sense fundamental
   207	(whether motivated by religion, parapsychology or philosophy).
       
   208	29
       
   209	R.L. Kuhn
       
   210	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   211	certain way to me. You must experience them to know what they’re like.
   212	You could provide a perfect, complete map of my brain [down to
   213	elementary particles]—what’s going on when I see, hear, smell—but if I
   214	haven’t seen, heard, smelled for myself, that brain map is not going to
   215	tell me about the quality of seeing red, hearing a clarinet, smelling
   216	mothballs. You must experience it.”
   217	Since qualia constitutes the core of the “hard problem,” and since the
   218	hard problem has come to so dominate consciousness studies such that
   219	almost every theorist must confront it, seeking either to explain it or
   220	refute it—and since the hard problem is a leitmotiv of this Landscape—I
   221	asked Dave about its backstory.
       
   222	about consciousness”) (Chalmers, 2003).
   223	“Physicalists, of course, resist these arguments,” says Philosopher
   224	Frank Jackson. “Some deny the modal and epistemic claims the argu­
   225	ments use as premises. They may grant (as they should) the intuitive
   226	appeal of the claim that a zombie physical duplicate of me is possible,
   227	but insist that, when one looks at the matter more closely, one can see
   228	that a zombie physical duplicate of me is not in fact possible. Any
   229	physical duplicate of me must feel pain when they stub their toe, have
   230	things look green to them on occasion, and so on” (Jackson, 2023).
   231	Philosopher Daniel Stoljar targets the conceivability argument
   232	(“CA”). Strictly speaking, he says, “CA is an argument against the truth
   233	of physicalism. However, since it presupposes the existence of con­
   234	sciousness, it may be regarded also as an argument for the in­
   235	compatibility of physicalism and the existence of consciousness.”
   236	Stoljar’s epistemic view offers a two-part response. “The first part sup­
   237	poses that there is a type of physical fact or property that is relevant to
   238	consciousness but of which we are ignorant.” He calls this the ignorance
   239	hypothesis. The second part “argues that, if the ignorance hypothesis is
   240	true, CA is unpersuasive” for reasons of logic (Kind and Stoljar, 2023, pp.
   241	92, 95).
   242	Philosopher Yujin Nagasawa calls “The Knowledge Argument”
   243	(Jackson, 1982, 1986, 1995, 1998) “among the strongest arguments (or
   244	possibly the strongest argument) for the claim that there is [in con­
   245	sciousness] something beyond the physical” (Nagasawa, 2012a). Based
   246	on a thought experiment by Frank Jackson, it imagines “Mary, a brilliant
   247	scientist,” who lives entirely in a black-and-white room, who acquires all
   248	physical, scientific knowledge about color—wavelengths of light in all
   249	detail—“but it seems obvious that when she comes outside her room, she
   250	learns something completely new, namely, what is like to see color.”
   251	Prior to seeing the color, “she doesn’t have phenomenal knowledge of
   252	conscious experience.” While Jackson himself no longer endorses the
   253	argument, it is still regarded as one of the most important arguments
   254	against physicalism, though of course it has its critics (Garfield, 1996).
   255	Nagasawa, who did his PhD under Jackson, responds to critics of the
   256	argument (Nagasawa, 2010), but also offers his own objections and
   257	novel proposals (Nagasawa, 2008).
   258	Frank Jackson himself has much of the contemporary literature on
   259	consciousness revolving around three questions. “Does the nature of
   260	conscious experience pose special problems for physicalism? Is the na­
   261	ture of conscious experience exhausted by functional role? Is the nature
   262	of conscious experience exhausted by the intentional contents or
   263	representational nature of the relevant kinds of mental states?”
   264	(Jackson, 1997).
   265	To philosopher Philip Goff, there are two aspects of consciousness
   266	that give rise to the hard problem, qualitivity and subjectivity: qualitivity
   267	meaning that experiences involve sensory qualities, whether in real-time
   268	or via memory recall; subjectivity meaning that there is a subject who has
   269	those experiences, that “these experiences are for someone: there is
   270	something that it’s like for me to experience that deep red.” Goff argues
   271	that these two aspects of consciousness give rise to two “hard problems.”
   272	While either problem would be sufficient to refute materialism, he says,
   273	the hard problem of qualitivity is more pronounced—or at least easier to
   274	argue for—because the vocabulary of the physical sciences, which tell a
   275	purely quantitative story of causal structures, cannot articulate the
   276	qualities of experience; the language of physics entails an explanatory
   277	limitation (Goff, 2021).
   278	Philosopher Colin McGinn provides a culinary perspective: “Matter is
   279	just the wrong kind of thing to give birth to consciousness … You might
   280	as well assert, without further explanation, that numbers emerge from
   281	biscuits, or ethics from rhubarb” (McGinn, 1993).
   282	Philosopher Jerry Fodor put the problem into what he thought would
   283	be perpetual perspective. “[We don’t know], even to a first glimmer,
   284	how a brain (or anything else that is physical) could manage to be a
   285	locus of conscious experience. This … is, surely, among the ultimate
   286	metaphysical mysteries; don’t bet on anybody ever solving it” (Fodor,
   287	1998).
       
   288	“I first remember presenting the hard problem in a talk at the first
   289	Tucson ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ consciousness in 1994.
   290	When did I first use it? Did I use it in writing before then? I’ve looked
   291	in my writing and have not found it [i.e., not prior to the 1994 talk].
   292	The hard problem was part of the talk. I remember speaking with
   293	some students beforehand, saying I’m going to talk about ‘hard
   294	problems, easy problems.’ I had been already talking this way in my
   295	seminar the previous year, so maybe it was already becoming part of
   296	my thinking. But I didn’t think about it as an ‘insight.’ I just thought
   297	it a way of stating the obvious. ‘Yeah, there’s a really hard problem
   298	here.’ So, as part of the first couple of minutes of my talk, I said
   299	something like ‘everyone knows there is a hard problem’ …. And
   300	people took it and said ‘it’s this great insight’ … Well, it did become a
   301	catchy meme; it became a way of encapsulating the problem of
   302	consciousness in a way that made it difficult to ignore, and I’m
   303	grateful for that role. I had no idea at the time that it would catch on,
   304	but it’s good because the problem of consciousness is really easy to
   305	ignore or to sidestep, and having this phrase, ‘the hard problem,’ has
   306	made it difficult to do that. There’s now just a very natural response
   307	whenever that happens. You say, ‘Well, that’s addressing the easy
   308	problem, but it’s not addressing the hard problem.’ I think this helps
   309	in getting both scientists and philosophers to take consciousness
   310	seriously. But I can’t take credit for the idea. Everyone knew that
   311	consciousness was a hard problem way before me—my colleagues,
   312	Tom Nagel and Ned Block; philosophers like C.D. Broad almost 100
   313	years ago; Thomas Huxley back in the 19th century; even Leibniz and
   314	Descartes—they all knew that consciousness was a hard problem”
   315	(Chalmers, 2016b).
   316	Over the years, while Chalmers has played a leading role in
   317	expanding and enriching the field of consciousness studies (Chalmers,
   318	2018), his overarching views have not changed: “I don’t think the hard
   319	problem of consciousness can be solved purely in terms of neurosci­
   320	ence.” As science journalist George Musser puts it, “By ‘hard,’ Chalmers
   321	meant impossible. Science as we now practice it, he argued, ‘is inher­
   322	ently unable to explain consciousness’” (Musser, 2023a,b).
   323	This does not mean, of course, that Chalmers is making a case for
   324	“substance dualism,” some nonphysical stuff (like the immortal souls of
   325	many religions). Chalmers is postulating a “naturalistic dualism,” where
   326	perhaps “information” is the connective, because while information is
   327	not material, it is embedded in the physical world. He notes, “We can
   328	also find information realized in our phenomenology.” This is a “natu­
   329	ralistic dualism,” a kind of property dualism (15.1).
   330	To Chalmers, “It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist
   331	solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of con­
   332	sciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other
   333	phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist
   334	materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not.” He
   335	encapsulates this resistance in three related arguments against materi­
   336	alism: (i) The Explanatory Argument (“explaining structure and function
   337	does not suffice to explain consciousness”); (ii) The Conceivability
   338	Argument (“it is conceivable that there be a system that is physically
   339	identical to a conscious being, but that lacks at least some of that being’s
   340	conscious states”); (iii) The Knowledge Argument (“someone could
   341	know all the physical facts … and still be unable to know all the facts
   342	30
       
   343	R.L. Kuhn
       
   344	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   345	2. Initial thoughts
       
   346	where consciousness is. But if it’s ‘a suitcase’ and it’s just a word for
   347	many different processes, they’re wasting their time. They should try to
   348	find out how each of those processes works and how they’re related”
   349	(Minsky, 2007a).
   350	Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci points out that “you do not need
   351	phenomenal consciousness in order to react to the environment. Plants
   352	do it, bacteria do it, all sorts of stuff do it.” But when it comes to emotion,
   353	he says, “Yes, you do need consciousness – in fact, that is what an
   354	emotion is. Emotion implies some level of internal perception of what’s
   355	going on, some awareness of the phenomenal experience” (Pigliucci,
   356	2023a,b).
   357	Suffice it to say that the hard problem refers to phenomenal con­
   358	sciousness. (This is not to say, of course, that cognitive or access con­
   359	sciousness is an “easy problem.”)
   360	To Alex Gomez-Marin, a theoretical physicist turned behavioral
   361	neurobiologist, “Ask not what neuroscience can do for consciousness but
   362	what consciousness can do for neuroscience.” He laments, “When it
   363	comes to serious proposals that offer an alternative to materialism, the
   364	mainstream has its doors wide shut … I believe the underlying issue of
   365	this debate is a tectonic clash about the nature of reality … In other
   366	words, the dominant physicalist paradigm can tolerate many things
   367	(including its own internal contradictions and empirical anomalies), but
   368	not panpsychism, idealism, dual-aspect monism, or any other view …
   369	Any nonmaterialist whiff in the consciousness hunger games is pun­
   370	ished. Challenge the core foundations, and you shall be stigmatized;
   371	propose a cutting-edge new color to the walls of the old building, you
   372	will be cheered (Gomez-Marin, 2023).
   373	On the other hand, philosopher Simon Blackburn cautions against
   374	overinflating consciousness as a concept. “I wouldn’t try to approach it
   375	by definition,” he said. “That’s going to be just a can of worms. Leibniz
   376	said that if we could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk
   377	around in it, we still wouldn’t find consciousness” (Blackburn, 2012).
   378	To Blackburn, the hard problem is not what Chalmers says it is. “I
   379	think the really hard problem is trying to convince ourselves that this
   380	[consciousness problem] is, as it were, an artifact of a bad way of
   381	thinking. The philosopher who did the most to try to persuade us of that
   382	was Ludwig Wittgenstein; the central exhibit in his armory was a thing
   383	called the private language argument [i.e., a language understandable
   384	by only one person is incoherent]. Wittgenstein said if you think in terms
   385	of consciousness in that classical way, we meet the problem of other
   386	minds. Why should I think that you’re conscious? I know that I am, but
   387	what about you? And if consciousness in some sense floats free, it might
   388	sort of just come and go all over the place. As I say, the hard problem is
   389	getting rid of the hard problem” (Blackburn, 2012).
   390	Physicist-visionary Paul Davies disagrees. “Many scientists think that
   391	life and consciousness are just irrelevant byproducts in a universe;
   392	they’re just other sorts of things. I don’t like that idea. I think we’re
   393	deeply significant. I’ve always been impressed by the fact that human
   394	beings are not only able to observe the universe, but they’ve also come
   395	to understand it through science and mathematics. And the fact that we
   396	can glimpse the rules on which the universe runs—we can, as it were,
   397	decode the cosmic code—seems to me to point to something of
   398	extraordinary and fundamental significance” (Davies, 2006a).
   399	To computer scientist-philosopher Jaron Lanier, “Fundamentally, we
   400	know very little about consciousness and the process of doing science is
   401	best served by humility. So, until we can explain this subjective expe­
   402	rience, I think we should accept it as being there” (Lanier, 2007a).
   403	I should note that the mind-body problem is hardly the only problem
   404	in consciousness studies: there are myriad mind-related problems.
   405	Topping the list of others, perhaps, is the problem of mental causation:
   406	How can mental states affect physical states? How can thoughts make
   407	actions?
   408	Physicist Uzi Awret argues that explaining how consciousness acts on
   409	the matter of the brain to “proclaim its existence” is just as hard as
   410	explaining how matter can give rise to consciousness. In fact, the two
   411	questions constrain each other. (For example, must panpsychists
       
   412	Consciousness has been a founding and primary theme of Closer To
   413	Truth, broadcast on PBS stations since 2000 and now a global resource
   414	on the Closer To Truth website and Closer To Truth YouTube channel.
   415	What is consciousness? What is the deep essence of consciousness? What
   416	is the deep cause of consciousness? (These are not the same question.)
   417	Again, it is the core of the mind-body problem—how thoughts in our
   418	minds and sensations of our experiences interrelate with activities in our
   419	brains.
   420	What does the word “consciousness” mean? What is its referent?
   421	“Consciousness” has multiple definitions, which has been part of the
   422	problem in its study. There are clear categories of consciousness, un­
   423	controversially recognized. For example, distinguishing “creature con­
   424	sciousness” (the somatic condition of being awake and responding to
   425	stimuli) and “mental state consciousness” (the cognitive condition of
   426	experiential engagement with the environment and oneself). More
   427	importantly, distinguishing “phenomenal consciousness” (“what it is
   428	like”) and “cognitive consciousness” (Humphrey, 2023a,b) or “access
   429	consciousness”10 (Block, 2023), which are more about function than
   430	phenomenology.
   431	Philosopher Ned Block sees “the border between perception and
   432	cognition” as a “joint in nature,” primed for exploration. He says he was
   433	drawn to this subject because of the realization that the difference be­
   434	tween what he calls “access consciousness (cognitive access to
   435	phenomenally conscious states)” and what he calls “phenomenal con­
   436	sciousness (what it is like to experience)” was rooted “in a difference
   437	between perception—whether conscious or unconscious—and cognitive
   438	access to perception” (Block, 2023).
   439	With respect to “information,” it is suggested that “the word ‘con­
   440	sciousness’ conflates two different types of information-processing
   441	computations in the brain: the selection of information for global
   442	broadcasting, thus making it flexibly available for computation and
   443	report,” and “the self-monitoring of those computations, leading to a
   444	subjective sense of certainty or error” (Dehaene et al., 2017). But, again,
   445	the issue is phenomenal consciousness, and to the extent that each type
   446	of consciousness comes with inner experience, the same issues obtain.
   447	Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky calls consciousness “a
   448	suitcase term,” meaning that all sorts of separate or mildly related
   449	concepts can be packed into it. “Consciousness,” he says, “is a clever
   450	trick that we use to keep from thinking about how thinking works. And
   451	what we do is we take a lot of different phenomena and we give them all
   452	the same name, and then you think you’ve got it.” Minsky enjoys dis­
   453	secting consciousness: “When people use the word ‘consciousness,’ it’s a
   454	very strange idea that there’s some wonderful property of the brain that
   455	can do so many different things—at least four or five major things and
   456	dozens of others. For example, if I ask, ‘were you conscious that you
   457	touched your ear?’ You might say ‘no, I didn’t know I did that.’ You
   458	might say, ‘yes.’ If you say yes, it’s because some part of your mind, the
   459	part that talks, has access to something that remembers what’s
   460	happened recently with your arm and your ear.” Minsky notes “there are
   461	hundreds of kinds of awarenesses. There’s remembering something as an
   462	image. There’s remembering something as a string of words. There’s
   463	remembering the tactile feeling of something” (Minsky, 2007a).
   464	Minsky says there is no harm in having consciousness as a suitcase
   465	term for social purposes. When a word has multiple meanings, that
   466	ambiguity is often very valuable, he says. “But if you’re trying to un­
   467	derstand those processes and you’ve put them all in one box, then you
   468	say, where in the brain is consciousness located? There’s a whole
   469	community of scientists who are trying to find the place in the brain
       
   470	10
   471	The noncognitive nature of perception precludes cognitive theories of
   472	consciousness. In particular, Block says there is an argument from one of the
   473	cases of nonconceptual perception to the conclusion that there is phenomenal
   474	consciousness without access consciousness.
       
   475	31
       
   476	R.L. Kuhn
       
   477	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   478	consider phenomenal powers and dualists kinds of interactionism?)
   479	Awret makes the insightful point that one reason the two questions
   480	should be conjoined is that they can be complementary in the sense that
   481	explaining one makes it harder to explain the other (Awret, 2024).
   482	Mental causation is an issue for every theory of consciousness: a
   483	serious one for Dualism, less of so for monistic theories—Materialism,
   484	Monisms, Idealisms, perhaps Panpsychism-—in that everything would
   485	be made of the same stuff. Yet, still, mental causation needs explanation.
   486	But that is not my task here.
   487	While precise definitions of consciousness are challenging, almost
   488	everyone agrees that the real challenge is phenomenal consciousness.
   489	Phenomenal consciousness is the only consciousness in this Landscape.
       
   490	Consciousness (including Eliminativism, Illusionism, Monisms, Dualism,
   491	Idealism) (Bourget and Chalmers, PhilPapers). In presenting a case for
   492	panpsychism, Chalmers arrays and assesses materialism, dualism and
   493	monism as well as panpsychism (Chalmers, 2016a).
   494	Neuroscientist Anil Seth and Tim Bayne gather and summarize a
   495	wide range of candidate theories of consciousness seeking to explain the
   496	biological and physical basis of consciousness (22 theories that are
   497	essentially neurobiological) (Seth and Bayne, 2022). They review four
   498	prominent theories—higher-order theories; global workspace theories;
   499	reentry and predictive processing theories; and integrated information
   500	theory—and they assert that “the iterative development, testing and
   501	comparison of theories of consciousness will lead to a deeper under­
   502	standing of this most central of mysteries.” However, Seth and Bayne
   503	intensify the mystery by observing, “Notably, instead of ToCs [theories
   504	of consciousness] progressively being ‘ruled out’ as empirical data ac­
   505	cumulates, they seem to be proliferating.” This seems telling.
   506	An engagingly novel kind of survey of the mind-body problem is an
   507	insightful (and delightfully idiosyncratic) book by science writer John
   508	Horgan (2018). Rejecting “hard-core materialists” who insist “it is a
   509	pseudo-problem, which vanishes once you jettison archaic concepts like
   510	‘the self’ and ‘free will’,” Horgan states that “the mind-body problem is
   511	quite real, simple and urgent. You face it whenever you wonder who you
   512	really are.” Recognizing that we can’t escape our subjectivity when we
   513	try to solve the riddle of ourselves, he explores his thesis by delving into
   514	the professional and personal lives of nine mind-body experts. (He ad­
   515	mits it is odd to offer “my subjective takes on my subjects’ subjective
   516	takes on subjectivity.”) (Horgan, 2019).
   517	While greater understanding of the biological (and material) basis of
   518	consciousness will no doubt be achieved, the deeper question is whether
   519	such biological understanding will be sufficient to explain, even in
   520	principle, the essence of consciousness, ever. While most adherents at
   521	both ends of the Landscape of Consciousness—materialists and ideal­
   522	ists—are confident of the ultimate vindication of their positions, others,
   523	including me, take this deeper question as remaining an open question.
   524	My high-bar attempt here is to generate a landscape that is univer­
   525	sally exhaustive, in that whatever the ultimate explanation of con­
   526	sciousness, it is somewhere, somehow, embedded in this Landscape of
   527	theories (perhaps in multiple places)—even if we have no way, now or in
   528	the foreseeable future, to discern it from its cohort Landscapees.
       
   529	3. Philosophical tensions
   530	Two types of philosophical tensions pervade all efforts to understand
   531	consciousness: (i) epistemological versus ontological perspectives, and
   532	(ii) the nexus between correlation and causation. The former distin­
   533	guishes what we can know from what really exists; they can be the same,
   534	of course, but that determination may not be a superficial one and in fact
   535	may not be possible, in practice or even in principle. The latter has an
   536	asymmetrical relationship in that causation must involve correlation
   537	whereas correlation does not necessarily involve causation; the dyadic
   538	entities that correlate might each be caused by an unknown hidden
   539	factor that just so happens to cause each of them independently.
   540	In addition, there are questions about the phylogenetic evolution of
   541	consciousness (9.10). Is it a gradual gradient, from simple single-cells
   542	seeking homeostasis via stimulus-response to environmental pressures,
   543	relatively smoothly up the phylogenetic tree to human-level con­
   544	sciousness (as is conventional wisdom)? Or is consciousness more like a
   545	step-function with spurts and stops? Is there a cut-off, as it were? Others,
   546	of course, maintain that consciousness is irreducible, even fundamental
   547	and primordial.
   548	I give “Philosophical Tensions” its own section, however short, to
   549	stress the explanatory burden of which every theory of consciousness
   550	must keep cognizant: the epistemology-ontology distinction and the
   551	correlation-causation conundrum.
   552	4. Surveys & typologies
       
   553	5. Opposing worldviews
       
   554	Philosopher Tim Bayne suggests three ways to think about what
   555	consciousness is: (i) experience, awareness and their synonyms (Nagel’s
   556	“what-its-like-to-be”); (ii) paradigms and examples, using specifics to
   557	induce the general; and (iii) initial theories to circumscribe the borders
   558	of the concept, such that a more complete definition falls out of the
   559	theory. Examples of (iii) are conducting surveys and organizing typol­
   560	ogies (see below) and constructing taxonomies (which is the intent of
   561	this paper) (Bayne, 2007).
   562	To appreciate theories of consciousness, there are superb surveys and
   563	typologies, scientific and philosophical, that organize the diverse
   564	offerings.
   565	David Chalmers offers that “the most important views on the meta­
   566	physics of consciousness can be divided almost exhaustively into six
   567	classes,” which he labels “type A” through “type F.” The first three (A
   568	through C) involve broadly reductive views, seeing consciousness as a
   569	physical process that involves no expansion of a physical ontology
   570	[Materialism Theories, 9]. The other three (D through F) involve broadly
   571	nonreductive views, on which consciousness involves something irre­
   572	ducible in nature, and requires expansion or reconception of a physical
   573	ontology [D = Dualism, 15; E = Epiphenomenalism, 9.1.2; F = Monism,
   574	14] (Chalmers, 2003).
   575	PhilPapers (David Bourget and David Chalmers, general editors)
   576	feature hundreds of papers on Theories of Consciousness, organized into
   577	six categories: Representationalism; Higher-Order Theories of Con­
   578	sciousness; Functionalist Theories of Consciousness; Biological Theories
   579	of Consciousness; Panpsychism; Miscellaneous Theories of
       
   580	At the highest level of abstraction, there are two ways to frame
   581	competing theories of consciousness. One way pits monism, where only
   582	one kind of stuff is fundamental (though manifest in ostensibly different
   583	forms), against dualism, where both physical and mental realms are
   584	equally fundamental, without either being reducible to the other.11
   585	There are two kinds of monism, each sitting at opposite ends of the
   586	Landscape of Consciousness: at one end, materialism or physicalism,12
   587	where the only real things are products of, or subject to, the laws of
   588	physics, and can be accessed reliably and reproducibly only by the
   589	natural sciences; and at the other end, idealism, where only the mental is
       
   590	11
   591	Logically, there is no necessity for dualism to be the limit; there can be
   592	innumerable kinds of irreducible “World-Stuffs”; for this Landscape, monism vs.
   593	dualism is sufficiently daunting.
   594	12
   595	“Materialism” and “physicalism” are roughly equivalent ontological terms,
   596	often used interchangeably, although physicalism can cover wider territory,
   597	including properties that the laws of physics describe, e.g., space, time, energy,
   598	matter. Moreover, physicalism can connote more epistemological matters, in
   599	terms of how we can know things. Materialism can be distinguished as the more
   600	restrictive term, meaning all that is real is matter and its equivalents. It con­
   601	notes more ontological concerns, in terms of what really exists. In this Land­
   602	scape, we go more with “materialism,” which also maintains historical
   603	continuity.
       
   604	32
       
   605	R.L. Kuhn
       
   606	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   607	Fig. 1. A landscape of consciousness - basic outline.
       
   608	fundamental, and all else, including all physical existence, is derivative,
   609	a manifestation of the mental. (Nondualism, from philosophical and
   610	religious traditions originating on the Indian subcontinent, avers that
   611	consciousness and only consciousness, which is cosmic, is fundamental
   612	and primitive. 16.1.)
   613	The second way to frame opposing explanations of consciousness is
   614	simply the classic physical vs. nonphysical distinction, though certain
   615	explanations, such as panpsychism, may blur the boundary.
       
   616	over the conundrum moot, if not meaningless?
   617	Second, if consciousness is real (and not primitive), then since in
   618	some sense it would be emergent, would this emergence of conscious­
   619	ness be “weak,” meaning that in principle it could be explained by, or
   620	reduced to, more fundamental science (even if in practice, it could not
   621	be, for a long time, if ever)?
   622	Third, if weak emergence has insufficient resources, would this
   623	emergence of consciousness be “strong,” meaning that it would be
   624	forever impossible to totally explain consciousness, even in principle, by
   625	reducing it to more fundamental levels of scientific explanation (9.1.4).
   626	Finally, is there an intermediate position, where consciousness was
   627	not fundamental ab initio, but when it evolved or emerged, conscious­
   628	ness came to become somehow inevitable, more than an accidental
   629	byproduct of physical processes? Some see in the grand evolution of the
   630	cosmos a process where elements in the cosmos—or more radically, the
   631	cosmos itself—work to make the cosmos increasingly self-aware (13.8).
   632	Some founders of quantum theory famously held consciousness as
   633	fundamental. Max Planck: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I
   634	regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind
   635	consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard
   636	as existing, postulates consciousness” (The Observer, 1931a). Erwin
   637	Schrödinger: “Although I think that life may be the result of an accident,
   638	I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted
   639	for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It
   640	cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else” (The Observer,
       
   641	6. Is consciousness primitive/fundamental?
   642	A first foundational question is whether consciousness is primitive or
   643	fundamental, meaning that it cannot be totally explained by, or
   644	“reduced” to, a deeper level of reality. (“Totally” is the operative word,
   645	because consciousness can be explained by, or reduced to, neuroscience,
   646	biology, chemistry and physics, certainly in large part, at least.)
   647	If consciousness is primitive or fundamental, we can try to explore
   648	what this means, what alternative concepts of ultimate reality may
   649	follow—though, if this were the case, there is probably not much
   650	progress to be made.
   651	On the other hand, if consciousness is not primitive or fundamental,
   652	there is much further work to be done and progress to be made. To begin,
   653	there are (at least) three next questions:
   654	First, is consciousness “real,” or, on the other hand, is it sufficiently
   655	an “illusion,” a brain trick, as it were, which would render consternation
   656	33
       
   657	R.L. Kuhn
       
   658	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   659	Fig. 2. A landscape of consciousness - complete outline.
       
   660	1931b). Also, “The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact,
   661	consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.” Arthur
   662	Eddington: “when we speak of the existence of the material universe we
   663	are presupposing consciousness.” (The Observer, 1931c). Louis de Bro­
   664	glie: “I regard consciousness and matter as different aspects of one and
   665	the same thing” (The Observer, 1931d). John von Neumann (less
   666	explicitly): "Consciousness, whatever it is, appears to be the only thing in
   667	physics that can ultimately cause this collapse or observation." John
   668	Stewart Bell: “As regards mind, I am fully convinced that it has a central
   669	place in the ultimate nature of reality” (Mollan, 2007).
   670	Of course, consciousness as fundamental would eliminate only
   671	Materialism Theories. Compatible would be Panpsychisms, Monisms,
   672	Dualisms and Idealisms; also, some Quantum Theories and perhaps In­
   673	tegrated Information Theory. (But Materialism has substantial re­
   674	sources, 9.)
       
   675	7. Identity theory
   676	I take special interest in identity theory (Smart, 2007), not because I
   677	subscribe to the early mind-brain identity theory as originally formu­
   678	lated, but because its way of thinking is far more pervasive and far more
   679	elucidating than often realized (though perhaps in a way not as sanguine
   680	as some may have hoped).
   681	In PhilPapers’ Theories of Consciousness, Mind-Brain Identity The­
   682	ory is classified under Biological Theories of Consciousness. Classic
   683	mind-brain identity theory is indeed the commitment that mental states/
   684	events/processes are identical to brain states/events/processes
   685	(Aranyosi, PhilPapers).
   686	I would want to generalize this. I would want to say that any theory
   687	of consciousness, to be complete and sufficient, must make an identity
   688	claim. Bottom line, every theory of consciousness that offers itself as a
   689	total explanation, necessary if not always sufficient—other than those
   690	where consciousness is fundamental—must be a kind of identity theory.
   691	34
       
   692	R.L. Kuhn
       
   693	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   694	Fig. 2. (continued).
       
   695	I mean identity theory in the strong sense, in the same sense that the
   696	Morning Star and the Evening Star must both be Venus, such that if you
   697	eliminate the Morning Star you cannot have the Evening Star. (David
   698	Papineau makes a virtue of this necessity in his mind-brain identity
   699	argument for physicalism. It doesn’t matter which specific materialist or
   700	physicalist theory—all of them, in essence, are mind-brain identity
   701	theories [Papineau, 2020b]—9.1.9.)
   702	Here’s the point. There is some kind of “consciousness identity”
   703	actually happening—it is always happening and it never changes.
   704	Something happening or existing in every sentient creature just is
   705	consciousness.
       
   706	8. A landscape
   707	As the title suggests, the purpose of this paper is to work toward
   708	developing a landscape of consciousness, a taxonomy of explanations
   709	and implications. The focus is ontological: what is the essence of our
   710	inner awareness of felt experience, our perceiving, our enjoying, what
   711	we call qualia.
   712	To get an overall sense of the entire Landscape, I have three Figures:
   713	Fig. 1: A high-level list of the 10 major categories, and under Mate­
   714	rialism Theories, the 10 subcategories.
   715	Fig. 2: A complete list of all the theories of consciousness, organized
   716	under the major categories and subcategories.
       
   717	35
       
   718	R.L. Kuhn
       
   719	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   720	Fig. 2. (continued).
       
   721	Fig. 3: A graphic image of the entire Landscape, with all categories,
   722	subcategories and theories (abbreviated) (created by Alex GomezMarin).
   723	Note: Categories 1–10 in the Figures correspond to sections 9-18 in
   724	the text. To convert from categories/theories in the Figures to sec­
   725	tions/theories in the text, add eight (+8). Conversely, to convert
   726	from sections/theories in the text to categories/theories in the Fig­
   727	ures, subtract eight (− 8).
       
   728	these—although all of these are recruited by various explanations on
   729	offer.
   730	Mechanisms of consciousness are relevant here only to the extent
   731	that they elucidate a core theory of consciousness. For example, the
   732	“neurogeographic” debate between the “front of the head” folks—the
   733	Global Workspace (9.2.3) and Higher-Order (9.8.3) theorists—and the
   734	“back of the head” folks—the Integrated Information (4) and Recurrent
   735	Processing (9.8.2) theorists—is essential for a complete neurobiological
   736	explanation of consciousness (Block, 2023, pp. 417–418), but it is of
   737	only mild interest for an ontological survey of the Landscape. If the
   738	Global Workplace suddenly shifted to the back of the head, and Inte­
   739	grated Information to the front, would the “trading-places” inversion
   740	make much ontological difference?
   741	Traditionally and simplistically, the clash is between materialism/
   742	physicalism and dualism or idealism; such oversimplification may be
   743	part of the problem—other categories and subcategories have standing.
       
   744	I distinguish what consciousness is ontologically from how con­
   745	sciousness happens operationally. The Landscape I present is populated
   746	primarily by claims of what consciousness actually is, not how it func­
   747	tions and not how it evolved over deep time (although both how it
   748	functions and how it evolved may well reflect what it is). This is not a
   749	landscape of how consciousness emerged or its purpose or its con­
   750	tent—sensations, perceptions, cognitions, emotions, language—none of
   751	36
       
   752	R.L. Kuhn
       
   753	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   754	Fig. 2. (continued).
       
   755	The alternative theories of consciousness that follow come about via
   756	my hundreds of conversations and decades of readings and nightmusings. I array 10 categories of explanations or theories of con­
   757	sciousness; all but one present multiple specific theories; only Materi­
   758	alism has subcategories. (There are many ways to envision a landscape,
   759	of course, and, as a result, many ways to array theories. I claim no
   760	privileged view.)
   761	Here are the 10 primary categories of explanations or theories:
   762	Materialism Theories (with many subcategories); Non-Reductive Phys­
   763	icalism; Quantum Theories; Integrated Information Theory; Panpsy­
   764	chisms; Monisms; Dualisms; Idealisms; Anomalous and Altered States
   765	Theories; Challenge Theories.
   766	It is no surprise that Materialism Theories have by far the largest
   767	number of specific theories. It is the only category with a three-level
   768	organization: there are 10 subcategories under Materialism, each
   769	housing seven to 14 specific theories. This makes sense in that there are
       
   770	more ways to explain consciousness with neurobiological and other
   771	physical models than with non-neurobiological and non-physical
   772	models, and also in that the challenge for materialism is to account for
   773	how the physical brain entails mental states (and there are increasingly
   774	innovative and diverse claims to do so).
   775	There is obvious overlap among categories and among theories
   776	within categories, and it is often challenging to pick distinguishing traits
   777	to classify theories in such a one-dimensional, artificial and imposed
   778	typology. For example, one can well argue that Non-Reductive Physi­
   779	calism, Quantum Theories, and perhaps even Integrated Information
   780	Theory and Panpsychisms, are all, in essence, Materialism Theories, in
   781	that they do not require anything beyond the physical world (whether in
   782	current or extended form). I break out these categories because, in
   783	recent times, each has developed a certain independence, prominence
   784	and credibility (at least in the sense of the credulity of adherents), and
   785	because they differ sufficiently from classic Materialism Theories,
   786	37
       
   787	R.L. Kuhn
       
   788	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   789	Fig. 2. (continued).
       
   790	exemplified by neurobiological mechanisms.
   791	In addition, the ideas of epiphenomenalism, functionalism and
   792	emergence, and the mechanisms of prediction and language models,
   793	while themselves not specific explanations of consciousness, represent
   794	core concepts in philosophy of mind that can affect some explanations
   795	and influence some implications.
   796	Some would impose an “entrance requirement” on the Landscape,
   797	such that theories admitted need be “scientific” in the sense that the
   798	scientific method should be applicable, whether in a formal Popperian
       
   799	falsification sense or with a weaker verification methodology. I do not
   800	subscribe to this limitation, although we must always distinguish be­
   801	tween science and philosophy, along with other potential forms of
   802	knowledge. (My quasi-“Overton Window” of consciousness—the range
   803	of explanatory theories I feel comfortable presenting, if not pro­
   804	pounding—may be wider than those of others, whether physicalists or
   805	nonphysicalists13 [Birth, 2023]. One reason for my wider window is the
   806	unsolicited theories of consciousness I receive on Closer To Truth, some
   807	of which I find intriguing if not convincing.)
   808	13
   809	“In politics, the ‘Overton window‘ is the range of positions that politicians
   810	can safely raise in public discourse. Propose something outside the window and
   811	you can expect resistance—not just to the proposal itself, but to the idea that,
   812	after saying what you just said, you even merit a place in the debate. Science
   813	too has Overton windows. Sometimes positions can be so far outside the
   814	mainstream that they invite the charge that we should not even be discussing this”
   815	(Birth, 2023).
       
   816	38
       
   817	R.L. Kuhn
       
   818	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   819	Fig. 3. A landscape of consciousness.
       
   820	The Landscape itself, as a one-dimensional typology, is limited and
   821	imperfect decisions must be made: which theories to include and which
   822	not; where to classify; what is the optimal order; whether to append a
   823	possessive name to the theory’s title; and the like. I’ve tried to include all
   824	the well-known theories and an idiosyncratic selection of lesser-known
   825	theories that have some aspects of originality, rationality, coherence,
   826	and, well, charm. In addition, a few theories reflect the beliefs of com­
   827	mon people, or the interests of Closer To Truth viewers, though largely
   828	dismissed by the scientific and philosophical communities. Some the­
   829	ories some think bizarre, “fabulous” in the original meaning of the word:
   830	“mythical, celebrated in fable.” All reflect the imaginations of the human
   831	mind driven by a quest to know reality. Please do not take the un­
   832	avoidable appearance of visual equality among theories as indicating
   833	their truth-value equivalence (or, for that matter, my personal opinion of
   834	them).
   835	Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (9.8.5; 9.10.2), noting “the broad
   836	nature” of the Landscape (on reviewing an early draft), suggests that
   837	“The Sniff Test” might be relevant. (He uses The Sniff Test to assess the
   838	strong AI view substituting “consciousness” for “intelligence” [LeDoux,
   839	2023a, p. 301.]) I’m all for imposing an olfactory hurdle for theories of
   840	consciousness (recognizing that olfactory bulbs do differ).
   841	Readers may well have corrections and additions, which I welcome.
   842	The Landscape is a work-in-process and I look forward to feedback so it
   843	can be extended and improved.
   844	Once again, the rough flow of the theories arraying the Landscape of
   845	Consciousness—as per my idiosyncratic approach—is on a rough, arbi­
   846	trarily linear, physicalism-nonphysicalism spectrum from, to begin with,
   847	most physical, and to end with, most nonphysical (or least physical)
   848	(Figs. 1–3).
       
   849	9. Materialism theories
   850	Materialism is the claim that consciousness is entirely physical,
   851	solely the product of biological brains, and all mental states can be fully
   852	“reduced” to, or wholly explained by, physical states—which, at their
   853	deepest levels, are the fields and particles of fundamental physics. In
   854	short, materialism, in its many forms and flavors, gives a completely
   855	physicalist account of phenomenal consciousness.
   856	Overwhelmingly for scientists, materialism is the prevailing theory
   857	of consciousness. To them, the utter physicality of consciousness is an
   858	assumed premise, supported strongly by incontrovertible empirical ev­
   859	idence from neuroscience (e.g., brain impairment, brain stimulation).
   860	This is “Biological Naturalism,” as exemplified by philosopher John
   861	Searle (Searle, 2007a, 2007b). It is a view, to a first approximation, that
   862	promises, if not yet offers, a complete solution to Chalmers’s hard
   863	problem.14
   864	To neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, the nonmaterialist view that
   865	consciousness might be irreducible is “‘a get-out-of-jail-for-free card’,
   866	that is to say, whatever I did, whatever I showed you, whatever exper­
   867	iments I did, whatever theories I had in brain terms, you could always
   868	say ‘consciousness has the extra thing,’ and this extra thing is the thing
   869	that really counts and is something that we brain scientists can’t touch.”
   870	She adds, “If reduction is a ‘dirty word,’ we can say explicable,
       
   871	14
       
   872	In producing and hosting Closer To Truth over the years, I have interviewed
   873	David Chalmers and John Searle multiple times. One of my favorite Closer To
   874	Truth TV episodes is a retrospective of three interviews I did with Dave and
   875	John over a period of 15 years: 1999, when Dave and John were together on the
   876	same panel during the first season of Closer To Truth (roundtable format); 2007
   877	(some months apart); and 2014, both at the 20th anniversary of the “Toward a
   878	Science of Consciousness” Conference in Tucson, Arizona (Chalmers and Searle,
   879	2014).
   880	39
       
   881	R.L. Kuhn
       
   882	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
   883	Theories, while giving Integrated Information Theory its own first-order
   884	category. (This reflects my sense of the nature of their mechanisms, not
   885	my opinion of the truth of their claims.)
   886	I group Materialism Theories into ten subcategories: Philosophical
   887	Theories, Neurobiological Theories, Electromagnetic Field Theories,
   888	Computational and Informational Theories, Homeostatic and Affective
   889	Theories, Embodied and Enactive Theories, Relational Theories,
   890	Representational Theories, Language Relationships, and Phylogenetic
   891	Evolution.
   892	While many of the following theories under Materialism Theories
   893	proffer to explain what happens in consciousness, or what causes con­
   894	sciousness, in that they describe alternative critical processes in gener­
   895	ating consciousness, the question always remains, are they even
   896	acknowledging, much less addressing, the question of what conscious­
   897	ness actually is?
   898	In picking out multiple materialist theories and principles, many
   899	overlap or nest, obviously, but by presenting them separately, I try to
   900	tease out emphasis and nuance. The list cannot be exhaustive.
       
   901	interpretable, or understandable,” but explaining consciousness must be
   902	always and solely in brain and body terms (Greenfield, 2012).
   903	Compared to some of the consciousness-as-primary theories that
   904	follow, Materialism Theories can be counted as deflationary (which
   905	doesn’t make them wrong, of course, or even unexciting). To physicist
   906	Sean Carroll, consciousness is “a way of talking about the physical
   907	world, just like many other ways of talking. It’s one of these emergent
   908	phenomena that we find is a useful way of packaging reality, so we say
   909	that someone is conscious of something that corresponds to certain
   910	physical actions in the real world.” Carroll is unambiguous: “I don’t
   911	think that there is anything special about mental properties. I don’t
   912	think there’s any special mental realm of existence. I think it’s all the
   913	physical world and all the manifold ways we have of describing it”
   914	(Carroll, 2016).
   915	Nobel laureate biologist Gerald Edelman agrees. He does not
   916	consider the real existence of qualia to be an insurmountable impedi­
   917	ment to a thoroughly materialistic theory of consciousness. “To expect
   918	that a theoretical explanation of consciousness can itself provide an
   919	observer with the experience of ‘the redness of red’ is to ignore just those
   920	phenotypic properties and life history that enable an individual animal
   921	to know what it is like to be such an animal. A scientific theory cannot
   922	presume to replicate the experience that it describes or explains; a the­
   923	ory to account for a hurricane is not a hurricane. A third-person
   924	description by a theorist of the qualia associated with wine tasting
   925	can, for example, take detailed account of the reported personal expe­
   926	riences of that theorist and his human subjects. It cannot, however,
   927	directly convey or induce qualia by description; to experience the dis­
   928	criminations of an individual, it is necessary to be that individual”
   929	(Edelman, 2003). While Edelman’s honest assessment may give Mate­
   930	rialism Theories their best shot, many remain unpersuaded. After all,
   931	still, we wonder: what are qualia? Literally, what are they!
   932	Even among philosophers, a majority are physicalists (but just
   933	barely). In their 2020 survey of professional philosophers, Bourget and
   934	Chalmers report 51.9% support Physicalism; 32.1%, Non-physicalism;
   935	and 15.9%, Other (Bourget and Chalmers, 2023; Bourget and Chalm­
   936	ers, 2014).
   937	Chalmers provides “roughly three ways that a materialist might
   938	resist the epistemic arguments” by mitigating the epistemic gap between
   939	the physical and phenomenal domains, where “each denies a certain sort
   940	of close epistemic relation between the domains: a relation involving
   941	what we can know, or conceive, or explain.” According to Chalmers, “A
   942	type-A materialist denies that there is the relevant sort of epistemic gap.
   943	A type-B materialist accepts that there is an unclosable epistemic gap,
   944	but denies that there is an ontological gap. And a type-C materialist
   945	accepts that there is a deep epistemic gap, but holds that it will even­
   946	tually be closed” (Chalmers, 2003).
   947	A subtle way to think about Materialism Theories recruits the
   948	concept of “supervenience” in that “the mental supervenes on the
   949	physical” such that there cannot be a change in the mental without there
   950	being a change in the physical. One such subtlety is the modal force of
   951	the connection or dependency, parsing among logical necessity, meta­
   952	physical necessity, factual or empirical necessity, as well as among
   953	explanation, entailment, grounding, reduction, emergence, ontological
   954	dependence, and the like. For this Landscape of explanations of con­
   955	sciousness, we leave “supervenience” to others (McLaughlin and Ben­
   956	nett, 2021).
   957	Similarly, the relationship between introspection and consciousness
   958	is an intimate one, linking the epistemology of self-knowledge with the
   959	metaphysics of mind. For several theories of consciousness, introspec­
   960	tion is essential (e.g., neurophenomenology, 9.6.4 and 9.6.5), though for
   961	most, it is a non-issue (Smithies and Stoljar, 2012).
   962	Two major theories of consciousness are Integrated Information
   963	Theory and Global Workspace Theory. Both are important, of course,
   964	and perhaps by situating them on the Landscape, they can be evaluated
   965	from different perspectives. In what may reflect my personal bias, I
   966	situate Global Workspace Theory under Materialism’s Neurobiological
       
   967	9.1. Philosophical Theories
   968	Philosophical theories combine relevant fundamental principles for
   969	theories of consciousness with framing of the mind-body problem and
   970	philosophical defenses of Materialism.
   971	9.1.1. Eliminative materialism/illusionism
   972	Eliminative Materialism is the maximalist physicalist position that
   973	our common-sense view of the mind is misleading and that conscious­
   974	ness is in a kind of illusion generated by the brain—a contingent,
   975	evolutionary, inner adaptation that enhanced fitness and reproductive
   976	success. This deflationary view of consciousness is associated with phi­
   977	losophers Patricia Churchland (1986), Paul Churchland (1981), Daniel
   978	Dennett (1992), Keith Frankish (2022), and others, though their views
   979	are often distorted and caricatured.
   980	Paul Churchland defines “eliminative materialism” forcefully as “the
   981	thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena
   982	constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective
   983	that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually
   984	be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neurosci­
   985	ence.” Our third-person understanding and even our first-person intro­
   986	spection, Churchland says, “may then be reconstituted within the
   987	conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may
   988	expect to be more powerful by far than the common-sense psychology it
   989	displaces” He applauds “the principled displacement of folk psychology
   990	… [as] one of the most intriguing theoretical displacements we can
   991	currently imagine” (Churchland, 1981).
   992	Patricia Churchland’s path-setting 1986 book, Neurophilosophy,
   993	places the mind-body problem within the wider context of the philoso­
   994	phy of science and argues for a complete reductionist account of con­
   995	sciousness founded on neurobiology (Churchland, 1986). Indeed,
   996	“neurophilosophy" is the proffered name of a new discipline that is to be
   997	guided by Churchland’s “unified theory of the mind-brain,” for which
   998	her "guiding aim” is to develop “a very general framework” (Stent,
   999	1987). She founds her approach on two principles: the progress of
  1000	neuroscience in addressing mental states, and the recognition by many
  1001	philosophers that philosophy is no longer “an a priori discipline in which
  1002	philosophers can discover the a priori principles that neuroscientific
  1003	theories had better honor on peril of being found wrong.”
  1004	That there remain philosophers who persist in arguing that the mind
  1005	goes beyond the brain—they reject reductionism “as unlikely—and not
  1006	merely unlikely, but as flatly preposterous"—Churchland attributes to
  1007	persistent traditions of folk myths. To discover our true nature, she
  1008	implores, “we must see ourselves as organisms in Nature, to be under­
  1009	stood by scientific methods and means” (Churchland, 1986). She rejects
  1010	the anti-reductionist weapon of “emergence” as being “of little explan­
  1011	atory value” (Stent, 1987).
  1012	40
       
  1013	R.L. Kuhn
       
  1014	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  1015	Dennett argues that qualia—the qualitive features of phenomenal
  1016	consciousness—which he notes (with a smile) compel philosophers to
  1017	develop outlandish theories, are illusory and incoherent (9.4). To
  1018	neuroscientist Michael Graziano, it’s not that consciousness doesn’t
  1019	exist or that we are fooled into thinking we have it when we don’t.
  1020	Instead, eliminative materialism likens consciousness to the illusion
  1021	created for the user of a human-computer interface such that the
  1022	metaphysical properties we attribute to ourselves are wrong15
  1023	(Graziano, 2014, 2019a, 2019c).
  1024	In spite of the word “illusion” (see below). its proponents do not
  1025	actually deny the reality of the things that compose what Wilfrid Sellars
  1026	famously called “the manifest image”—thoughts, intentions, appear­
  1027	ances, experiences—which he distinguished from “the scientific image”
  1028	(Sellars, 1962). The things we see and hear and interact with are, ac­
  1029	cording to Dennett, “not mere fictions but different versions of what
  1030	actually exists: real patterns” (Dennett, 2017). The underlying reality,
  1031	however—what exists in itself and not just apparently for us or for other
  1032	creatures—is truly represented only by the scientific image, which must
  1033	be expressed ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular
  1034	biology, and neurophysiology.
  1035	Picking up on analogies in Dennett’s work, as he puts it, Keith
  1036	Frankish proposed the term “illusionism,” which has been adopted for
  1037	the view that consciousness does not involve awareness of special
  1038	“phenomenal” properties and that belief in such properties is due to an
  1039	introspective illusion. Frankish concludes: “Considered as a set of
  1040	functional processes—a hugely complex informational and reactive
  1041	engagement with the world—it is perfectly real. Considered as an in­
  1042	ternal realm of phenomenal properties or what-it-is-likenesses, it is
  1043	illusory” (Frankish, 2022).
  1044	Although what we see and hear, for all the world, seems precisely
  1045	what really exists, ringing in our ears and stars in our eyes undermine
  1046	our realist folk psychology. (Personally, I have my own unambiguous
  1047	proof. With my normal left eye, I see a light bulb as a single point of
  1048	light; with my right eye, afflicted with advanced keratoconus, I see about
  1049	100 points of skewed, smeared light.)
  1050	Another approach claiming that there is no phenomenal conscious­
  1051	ness draws on arguments from Buddhist philosophy of mind to show that
  1052	the sense that there is this kind of consciousness is an instance of
  1053	cognitive illusion. As articulated by Jay Garfield, “there is nothing ’that
  1054	it is like’ to be me. To believe in phenomenal consciousness or ’what-it’slike-ness’ or ’for-me-ness’ is to succumb to a pernicious form of the Myth
  1055	of the Given.” He argues that “there are no good arguments for the ex­
  1056	istence of such a kind of consciousness” (Garfield, 2016).
  1057	The fact that some deny the existence of experience, says philosopher
  1058	Galen Strawson, should make us “feel very sober, and a little afraid, at
  1059	the power of human credulity.” This particular denial, he says with
  1060	flourish, “is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole
  1061	history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy”
  1062	(Strawson, 2009).
  1063	While dismissing eliminative materialism and illusionism might at
  1064	first seem obviously right, a prima facie case, I’d not so quickly jump to
  1065	that conclusion: it could self-limit the awareness of subtleties and the
  1066	nature of boundaries in the hunt for consciousness.
       
  1067	the mind, whatever else it might be, is entirely inert: our awareness of
  1068	consciousness is real, but our sense of mental causation is not. Con­
  1069	sciousness is still a kind of illusion or trick in that there is no “top-down
  1070	causation”; our sense that our thoughts can cause things is mistaken. In
  1071	this manner, epiphenomenalism is a weaker form of non-reductive
  1072	physicalism (10). All conscious mental events, including conscious
  1073	perceptions, involve unconscious processing. The classic analogy for
  1074	consciousness as an epiphenomenon is “foam on an ocean wave:” always
  1075	there, apparently active, but never really doing anything.
  1076	More formally, epiphenomenalism holds that phenomenal properties
  1077	are ontologically distinct from physical properties, and that the
  1078	phenomenal has no effect on the physical. Physical states cause
  1079	phenomenal states, but not vice versa. The arrow of psychophysical
  1080	causation points in only one direction, from physical to phenomenal
  1081	(Chalmers, 2003). This makes epiphenomenalism a weak form of
  1082	Dualism (15), but by affirming the complete causal closure of the
  1083	physical, it well deserves its spot in Materialism Theories.
  1084	Apparent support for consciousness epiphenomenalism comes from
  1085	the famous Libet experiment, which demonstrated that brain activity
  1086	associated with a voluntary movement (“readiness potential”) precedes
  1087	conscious experience of the intention to make that movement by several
  1088	hundred milliseconds (Frith and Haggard, 2018). The implication is that
  1089	the brain, rather than conscious “free will”, initiates voluntary acts.
  1090	Studied extensively, the Libet readiness potential data are reproducible
  1091	and robust under diverse experiment designs. However, its theoretical
  1092	and methodological foundations have been challenged (Gholipour,
  1093	2019), particularly with respect to stochastic noise in brain, the spon­
  1094	taneous fluctuations in neuronal activity (Schurger et al., 2012).
  1095	Epiphenomenalism highlights the need to recognize that the search
  1096	for a metaphysical theory of consciousness must integrate a theory of
  1097	mental causation, which in turn must deal with the epistemic problem of
  1098	self-knowledge. In epiphenomenalism, the integration is obvious
  1099	because the lack of mental causation is its primary feature. In other
  1100	theories of consciousness, mental causation will be less obvious but
  1101	perhaps no less important.
  1102	Daniel Stoljar notes that if phenomenal consciousness would be
  1103	“merely an epiphenomenon with no causal force,” perhaps “this will end
  1104	up being the best option for dualism 2.0 (15.10), despite its being
  1105	counterintuitive—after all, it certainly seems to us that our phenome­
  1106	nally conscious states causally matter. But any view on the problem of
  1107	consciousness is likely going to have to embrace some counterintuitive
  1108	result at some point” (Kind and Stoljar, 2023, p. 55).
  1109	Parallelism, a similar but less popular theory than epiphenome­
  1110	nalism, holds that physical events entirely cause physical events and
  1111	mental events entirely cause mental events, but there is no causal
  1112	connection between physical and mental worlds in either direction. But
  1113	if no connection, what would maintain such perfect correspondences? It
  1114	is no challenge to discern why parallelism is less popular.
  1115	9.1.3. Functionalism
  1116	Functionalism in philosophy of mind is the theory that functions are
  1117	dispositive—activities, roles, results, outputs—mediums are not. What’s
  1118	critical is how mental states work, not in what substrates mental states
  1119	are found (Levin, 2023). Mental states are not dependent on their in­
  1120	ternal constitutions, what they are, but rather only on their outputs or
  1121	roles, what they do. As long as the functions (activities) are conducive to
  1122	creating consciousness, it does not matter whether the substrates are
  1123	neural tissue or computer chips or any form of matter that can instan­
  1124	tiate information.
  1125	Ned Block defines functionalism as the theory that “mental states are
  1126	constituted by their causal relations to one another and to sensory inputs
  1127	and behavioral outputs.” Functionalism can be appreciated, he says, by
  1128	attending to “artifact concepts like carburetor and biological concepts
  1129	like kidney. What it is for something to be a carburetor is for it to mix fuel
  1130	and air in an internal combustion engine—carburetor is a functional
  1131	concept. In the case of the kidney, the scientific concept is
       
  1132	9.1.2. Epiphenomenalism
  1133	In epiphenomenalism, consciousness is entirely physical, solely the
  1134	product of biological brains, but mental states cannot be entirely
  1135	reduced to physical states (brains or otherwise), and mental states have
  1136	no causal powers. Constrained by the “causal closure of the physical,”
       
  1137	15
       
  1138	Ironically, Donald Hoffman appeals to the same analogy of a humancomputer user interface to argue for the view diametrically opposite to that
  1139	of Dennett and Graziano. Hoffman argues for Idealism, that not only is con­
  1140	sciousness real, it is the only thing that is real fundamentally (Idealism, 16;
  1141	Hoffman, 16.5).
  1142	41
       
  1143	R.L. Kuhn
       
  1144	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  1145	functional—defined in terms of a role in filtering the blood and main­
  1146	taining certain chemical balances” (Block, 1980; Block, 2007b).
  1147	Block gives the functionalist answer to the perennial question, “What
  1148	are mental states?”, stating simply that “mental states are functional
  1149	states.” The significance of this simple identity is precisely this simple
  1150	identity. Thus, he says, “theses of metaphysical functionalism are
  1151	sometimes described as functional state identity theses” (Block, 1980;
  1152	Block, 2007b).
  1153	Block explores the relationship between functionalism and reductive
  1154	physicalism. “The first step in a reductive physicalist enterprise,” he
  1155	says, “is to functionally characterize the property to be reduced and the
  1156	second step is to find the physical property that fills the functional role.
  1157	Reductive physicalism is true for the mind if both steps can always be
  1158	carried out.” Block makes the at-first counterintuitive claim that
  1159	reductive physicalism and functionalism are “incompatible rivals,”
  1160	explaining that when understood as metaphysical theses, “appearances
  1161	to the contrary stem from failure to sufficiently appreciate the upshot of
  1162	the difference between metaphysics and ontology”—in that function­
  1163	alism is agnostic on the existence of nonphysical substances (Block,
  1164	2008).
  1165	David Chalmers uses a silicon-chip-replacement thought experiment
  1166	to support a functional approach to consciousness.16 “When experience
  1167	arises from a physical system,” he says, “it does so in virtue of the sys­
  1168	tem’s functional organization.” The thought experiment replaces brain
  1169	neurons with microchips that can duplicate 100% of the neuron’s
  1170	functions, and to do so slowly, even one by one. (That such technology is
  1171	fiendishly complex is irrelevant.) The question is, what happens to one’s
  1172	conscious experience, one’s qualia? Would it gradually wink or fade
  1173	out? Chalmers says no: the conscious experience, the qualia, would not
  1174	change—there would be no difference at all. This result would support
  1175	Chalmers’s “principle of organizational invariance, holding that experi­
  1176	ence is invariant across systems with the same fine-grained functional
  1177	organization” (Chalmers, 1995a). Not everyone agrees, of course (Block,
  1178	2023; Van Heuveln et al., 1998).
  1179	Computational functionalism goes further and commits to the thesis
  1180	that performing computations of a particular, natural and likely
  1181	discoverable kind is both necessary and sufficient for consciousness in
  1182	general and ultimately for human-level consciousness (and perhaps for
  1183	speculative higher forms of consciousness). Whether consciousness is
  1184	indeed computational elicits probative and profound debate (e.g., Pen­
  1185	rose, 1999; 1996).
  1186	Functionalism with respect to consciousness is more an overarching
  1187	principle, a way of thinking, than a proffered model, a claimed expla­
  1188	nation on its own. Functionalism can apply in many Materialist Theories
  1189	and it is often assumed as an a priori premise. Functionalism is the
  1190	theoretical foundation of “virtual immortality,” the theory that the
  1191	fullness of our mental selves can be uploaded with first-person perfec­
  1192	tion to non-biological media, so that when our mortal bodies die our
  1193	mental selves will live on (Kuhn, 2016a). (See Virtual Immortality.)
       
  1194	Emergence, according to Paul Davies, means that “at each level of
  1195	complexity, new and often surprising qualities emerge that cannot, at
  1196	least in any straightforward manner, be attributed to known properties
  1197	of the constituents. ln some cases, the emergent quality simply makes no
  1198	sense when applied to the parts. Thus water may be described as wet, but
  1199	it would be meaningless to ask whether a molecule of H2O is wet”
  1200	(Davies, 2008). Moreover, it could seem astonishing that the properties
  1201	of two common gases, hydrogen and oxygen, can combine to form a
  1202	liquid that is wet and a solid that expands when cooled. Yet, physics and
  1203	physical chemistry can explain all of this, in terms of atomic structures
  1204	and bonding angles.
  1205	Emergence can be appreciated in contrast with its mortal conceptual
  1206	rival: reductionism. Reductionism is mainstream science, the bedrock
  1207	assumption of the scientific method: All, in principle, can be explained
  1208	by physics, even if all, in practice, cannot be.
  1209	Davies defines “ontological reductionism” as the state of affairs
  1210	where all reality “is, in the final analysis, nothing but the sum of the
  1211	parts, and that the formulation of concepts, theories, and experimental
  1212	procedures in terms of higher-level concepts is merely a convenience.”
  1213	(He distinguishes “methodological reductionism,” where reductionism
  1214	is a “fruitful methodology,” from “epistemological reductionism” where
  1215	all we can know is that reductionism works by explaining one scientific
  1216	level in terms of lower or more fundamental levels, without making any
  1217	claim on ultimate reality.) (Davies, 2008).
  1218	But “for emergence to be accepted as more than a methodological
  1219	convenience—that is, for emergence to make a difference in our un­
  1220	derstanding of how the world works,” Davies argues that “something has
  1221	to give within existing theory.” Davies himself has been a leader in “a
  1222	growing band of scientists who are pushing at the straitjacket of or­
  1223	thodox causation to ’make room’ for strong emergence (see below), and
  1224	although physics remains deeply reductionistic, there is a sense that the
  1225	subject is poised for a dramatic paradigm shift in this regard” (Davies,
  1226	2008).
  1227	To make sense of emergence, we distinguish between its “weak” and
  1228	“strong” forms. In its weak form, while it may not be apparent how the
  1229	properties of one level can be entirely explained by the properties of a
  1230	lower, more fundamental level, in principle, they can be explained, and
  1231	ultimately, science will advance to explain them.
  1232	In its strong form, properties at one level can never be explained in
  1233	terms of properties of lower levels, not even in principle, no matter how
  1234	ultimate the science. As Davies explains, “Strong emergence is a far more
  1235	contentious position, in which it is asserted that the micro-level prin­
  1236	ciples are quite simply inadequate to account for the system’s behaviour
  1237	as a whole. Strong emergence cannot succeed in systems that are caus­
  1238	ally closed at the microscopic level, because there is no room for addi­
  1239	tional principles to operate that are not already implicit in the lowerlevel rules.” He posits only three “loopholes”: the universe is an open
  1240	system, non-deterministic quantum mechanics, and computational
  1241	imprecision at fundamental levels—all three have obvious problems,
  1242	which is why they are “considered unorthodox departures from standard
  1243	physical theory” (Davies, 2008).
  1244	David Chalmers says that “a high-level phenomenon is strongly
  1245	emergent with respect to a low-level domain when the high-level phe­
  1246	nomenon arises from the low-level domain, but truths concerning that
  1247	phenomenon are not deducible even in principle from truths in the lowlevel domain.” He distinguishes a high-level phenomenon that is “weakly
  1248	emergent with respect to a low-level domain when the high-level phe­
  1249	nomenon arises from the low-level domain, but truths concerning that
  1250	phenomenon are unexpected given the principles governing the lowlevel domain” (Chalmers, 2008).
  1251	Strong emergence, Chalmers contends, has “radical consequences,”
  1252	such that “If there are phenomena that are strongly emergent with
  1253	respect to the domain of physics, then our conception of nature needs to
  1254	be expanded to accommodate them. That is, if there are phenomena
  1255	whose existence is not deducible from the facts about the exact distri­
  1256	bution of particles and fields throughout space and time (along with
       
  1257	9.1.4. Emergence
  1258	Emergence is the claim that qualitatively new, even radically novel
  1259	properties in biological systems and psychological states arise from
  1260	physical properties governed entirely by the laws of physics. The reemergence of emergence in the sciences, where whole entities are, or
  1261	seem to be, more than the sum of all their parts, has been controversial,
  1262	its assessment ranging from trivial and distracting to radical and revo­
  1263	lutionary (Clayton and Davies, 2008). Emergence in the study of con­
  1264	sciousness is especially foundational, more as a basic principle
  1265	undergirding and enhancing various theories than as a specific theory in
  1266	its own right.
       
  1267	16
  1268	Ned Block says that the example used in the fading qualia argument may
  1269	derive from John Haugeland (1980), but that “the best version is that of
  1270	Chalmers (1995)” (Block, 2023, p. 451).
       
  1271	42
       
  1272	R.L. Kuhn
       
  1273	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  1274	other laws of physics), then this suggests that new fundamental laws of
  1275	nature are needed to explain these phenomena” (Chalmers, 2008).
  1276	By contrasting strong and weak emergence, Chalmers sets the stage
  1277	to enact the grand epic of consciousness. “In a way, the philosophical
  1278	morals of strong emergence and weak emergence are diametrically
  1279	opposed. Strong emergence, if it exists, can be used to reject the phys­
  1280	icalist picture of the world as fundamentally incomplete. By contrast,
  1281	weak emergence can be used to support the physicalist picture of the
  1282	world, by showing how all sorts of phenomena that might seem novel
  1283	and irreducible at first sight can nevertheless be grounded in underlying
  1284	simple laws” (Chalmers, 2008).
  1285	Chalmers is not shy: “I think there is exactly one clear case of a
  1286	strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of con­
  1287	sciousness.” He suggests that “the lawful connection between physical
  1288	processes and consciousness is not itself derivable from the laws of
  1289	physics but is instead a further basic law or laws of its own. The laws that
  1290	express the connection between physical processes and consciousness
  1291	are what we might call fundamental psychophysical laws” (Chalmers,
  1292	2008).
  1293	The challenge of strong emergence, especially in consciousness, is a
  1294	deep probe of not only how the mind works but also how the world
  1295	works. Its influence is felt all along the Landscape of Consciousness.
       
  1296	The causal reducibility of consciousness leads to Searle’s major
  1297	move: “The neuronal basis of consciousness: All conscious states are
  1298	caused by lower-level brain processes.” Not knowing all the details of
  1299	exactly how consciousness is caused by brain processes casts “no doubt
  1300	that it is in fact.” Searle asserts with confidence, “The thesis that all of
  1301	our conscious states, from feeling thirsty to experiencing mystical ec­
  1302	stasies, are caused by brain processes is now established by an over­
  1303	whelming amount of evidence (Searle, 2007b). (Others, of course,
  1304	disagree.)
  1305	Finally, Searle’s two-point conclusion: (i) The neuronal realization of
  1306	consciousness: All conscious states are realized in the brain as higher
  1307	level or system features, and (ii) The causal efficacy of consciousness:
  1308	Conscious states, as real parts of the real world, function causally
  1309	(Searle, 2007b).
  1310	Searle celebrates the fact that his approach to consciousness does not
  1311	mention any of the usual-suspect theories, such as dualism, materialism,
  1312	epiphenomenalism, or any of the rest of them. He argues that “if you
  1313	take seriously the so-called ‘scientific worldview’ and forget about the
  1314	history of philosophy,” the views he puts forth are “what you would
  1315	come up with.”
  1316	Searle explains the name with which he “baptized this view,” Bio­
  1317	logical Naturalism. “‘Biological’ because it emphasizes that the right
  1318	level to account for the very existence of consciousness is the biological
  1319	level … [given] we know that the processes that produce it are neuronal
  1320	processes in the brain. ‘Naturalism’ because consciousness is part of the
  1321	natural world along with other biological phenomena such as photo­
  1322	synthesis, digestion or mitosis, and the explanatory apparatus we need
  1323	to explain it we need anyway to explain other parts of nature.”
  1324	Searle responds to critics of Biological Naturalism, striking at a key
  1325	objection. “Sometimes philosophers talk about naturalizing conscious­
  1326	ness and intentionality, but by ‘naturalizing’ they usually mean denying
  1327	the first person or subjective ontology of consciousness. On my view,
  1328	consciousness does not need naturalizing: It already is part of nature and
  1329	it is part of nature as the subjective, qualitative biological part” (Searle,
  1330	2007a, 2007b).
       
  1331	9.1.5. Mind-brain identity theory
  1332	As noted, mind-brain identity theory holds that states and processes
  1333	of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain (Smart,
  1334	2007) and as such can be considered the exemplar of materialism. Early
  1335	on, in the mid-20th century, mind-brain identity theory had been a
  1336	leader as an explanation of consciousness, but today, in its original form,
  1337	it is no longer a major contender. Though the original identity theory has
  1338	evolved in a kind of arms race with critics, it is generally considered
  1339	undermined by various objections, the most common being multiple
  1340	realizability (Aranyosi, PhilPapers).
  1341	9.1.6. Searle’s biological naturalism
  1342	“Biological Naturalism” is the name philosopher John Searle gave to
  1343	a neurobiological solution to the mind-body problem. His approach is to
  1344	ignore the mind-body problem’s philosophical history and focus on
  1345	“what you know for a fact.” He starts with a mundane, working defini­
  1346	tion of consciousness: “Conscious states are those states of awareness,
  1347	sentience or feeling that begin in the morning when we wake from a
  1348	dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until we fall asleep or
  1349	otherwise become ‘unconscious’” (Searle, 2007b; Searle, 2014a).
  1350	Searle identifies four essential features of consciousness: “1.
  1351	Conscious states, so defined, are qualitative, in the sense that there is a
  1352	qualitative feel to being in any particular conscious state …. 2. Such
  1353	conscious states are also ontologically subjective in the sense that they
  1354	only exist as experienced by a human or animal subject …. 3. Further­
  1355	more, a striking fact, at any moment in your conscious life, all of your
  1356	conscious states are experienced by you as part of a single unified
  1357	conscious field …. 4. Most, but not all, conscious states are intentional,
  1358	in the philosopher’s sense that they are about, or refer to, objects and
  1359	states of affairs.”17
  1360	Next is crucial: “The reality and irreducibility of consciousness:
  1361	Conscious states, so defined, are real parts of the real world and cannot
  1362	be eliminated or reduced to something else.” This means that one cannot
  1363	do an ontological reduction of consciousness to more fundamental
  1364	neurobiological processes, because, as stated, consciousness has a sub­
  1365	jective or a first-person ontology, while the neurobiological causal basis
  1366	of consciousness has an objective or third person ontology (Searle,
  1367	2007b).
       
  1368	9.1.7. Block’s biological reductionism
  1369	Philosopher Ned Block represents a majority of philosophers (and a
  1370	large majority of scientists) who hold that “phenomenal consciousness is
  1371	reducible to its physical basis.” (Block, 2023, p. 445; Block, 2007a). The
  1372	best candidates for this reduction, he says, involve neurobiology. “For
  1373	example, in the creatures that seem to have consciousness (e.g., pri­
  1374	mates, octopi), neurons operate via electrical signals triggering the
  1375	release of neurotransmitters, and the neurotransmitters in turn engender
  1376	further electrical signals. Neurons operate in a chemical soup, with
  1377	direct effects from one neuron to another mediated by chemicals. The
  1378	release of chemicals is not confined to the synapse but can also happen in
  1379	dendrites” (Block, 2023, p. 446).
  1380	These propagating neurophysiological sparks and diffusing neuro­
  1381	chemical transmitters compose a magnificently complex and integrated
  1382	system that carries and conveys meaning. Block appeals to “this elec­
  1383	trochemical nature of known cases of consciousness as an example of a
  1384	candidate for neurobiological reduction of consciousness.”
  1385	To Block, “the border between seeing and thinking” provides insight
  1386	into consciousness and helps adjudicate best theories (Block, 2023). He
  1387	highlights this "joint in nature" between perception and cognition and
  1388	advocates its study for demystifying the mind. He argues against the­
  1389	ories of consciousness that focus on prefrontal cortex, arguing that
  1390	perceptual consciousness does not require cognitive processing.
  1391	9.1.8. Flanagan’s constructive naturalism
  1392	To philosopher Owen Flanagan, “consciousness is neither miraculous
  1393	nor terminally mysterious,” and he argues that “it is possible to under­
  1394	stand human consciousness in a way that gives its subjective, phenom­
  1395	enal aspects their full due, while at the same time taking into account the
  1396	neural bases of subjectivity.” The result, he says, “is a powerful synthetic
       
  1397	17
  1398	Searle refines his definition: “Consciousness so defined does not imply selfconsciousness …. you do not need a general second-order consciousness to have
  1399	a first-order consciousness.” (Searle, 2007b).
       
  1400	43
       
  1401	R.L. Kuhn
       
  1402	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  1403	theory of consciousness, a ‘constructive naturalism,’ according to which
  1404	subjective consciousness is real, plays an important causal role, and
  1405	resides [without residue] in the brain” (Flanagan, 1993).
  1406	The “constructive naturalistic theory” that Flanagan sketches is
  1407	“neurophilosophical” in that “it tries to mesh a naturalistic metaphysic
  1408	of mind with our still sketchy but maturing understanding of how the
  1409	brain works.” It pictures consciousness “as a name for a heterogeneous
  1410	set of events and processes that share the property of being experienced.
  1411	Consciousness is taken to name a set of processes, not a thing or a mental
  1412	faculty.” The theory is neo-Darwinian, he says, “in that it is committed to
  1413	the view that the capacity to experience things evolved via the processes
  1414	responsible for the development of our nervous system.” The theory, he
  1415	stresses, “denies that consciousness is as consciousness seems at the
  1416	surface.” Rather, consciousness has a complex structure, and getting at it
  1417	requires “coordination of phenomenological, psychological, and neural
  1418	analyses” (Flanagan, 1993).
  1419	Flanagan explains that “there is no necessary connection between
  1420	how things seem and how they are … [and] we are often mistaken in our
  1421	self-reporting, including in our reporting about how things seem.” This
  1422	is why he cautions that phenomenology might do “more harm than good
  1423	when it comes to developing a proper theory of consciousness, since it
  1424	fosters certain illusions about the nature of consciousness” (Flanagan,
  1425	1993).
  1426	“The most plausible hypothesis,” Flanagan states, “is that the mind is
  1427	the brain, a Darwin machine that is a massively well-connected system
  1428	of parallel processors interacting with each other from above and below,
  1429	and every which way besides.” It is no wonder, he says, that “meaning
  1430	holism is true, that we somehow solve the frame problem, and that my
  1431	belief that snow is white is realized quite possibly in a somewhat
  1432	different way in my brain than the same belief is realized in yours.”
  1433	Flanagan addresses “the gap between the first-person way in which
  1434	conscious mental life reveals itself and the way it is, or can be described,
  1435	from an objective point of view” by asserting bluntly, “mind and brain
  1436	are one and the same thing seen from two different perspectives. The gap
  1437	between the subjective and the objective is an epistemic gap, not an
  1438	ontological gap.” Indeed, he claims, “it is precisely the fact that in­
  1439	dividuals possess organismic integrity that explains why subjectivity
  1440	accrues first-personally” (Flanagan, 1993).
  1441	As a physicalist, Flanagan recognizes the role of emergence, that
  1442	“there are emergent natural properties that, despite being obedient to
  1443	the laws of physics, are not reducible to physics" (Flanagan, 2003). He
  1444	rejects epiphenomenalism, where “conscious thought plays no role in
  1445	the execution of any act.” The sense that we control our actions is real,
  1446	not illusion, but the mechanism is all brain-bound; for example, an idea
  1447	originating in the prefrontal cortex that calls up information or mem­
  1448	ories from parietal association cortex (Campbell, 2004).
  1449	To Flanagan, the “really hard problem” is finding “meaning in a
  1450	material world” (Flanagan, 2007). To this end, he explores “neuro­
  1451	existentialism,” the condition “caused by the rise of the scientific au­
  1452	thority of the human sciences and a resultant clash between the
  1453	scientific and the humanistic image of persons" (Flanagan and Caruso,
  1454	2018).
       
  1455	influences non-conscious matter, by controlling bodily behaviour, and
  1456	similarly that matter influences mind, giving rise to sensory experiences,
  1457	pains and other conscious mental states,” the “compelling argument …
  1458	against this kind of interactionist stance … derives from the so-called
  1459	‘causal closure of the physical’ … the physical realm seems causally
  1460	sufficient unto itself.”
  1461	Papineau notes that we remain puzzled about why brain states give
  1462	rise to mental states “in a way that we don’t feel puzzled about why NaCl
  1463	gives rise to salt, or electrical discharges to lightning.” He attributes our
  1464	puzzlement—the “explanatory gap” of consciousness—to the psychosocial fact that “we find it hard to escape the spontaneous dualist
  1465	thought that the feeling and the physical state are not one thing, but two
  1466	different states that somehow invariably accompany each other”
  1467	(Papineau, 2020b).
  1468	Given this, Papineau says, “our knowledge of mind-brain identities
  1469	can only be based on some kind of a posteriori abductive inference,
  1470	rather than a principled a priori demonstration that a certain physical
  1471	state fills some specified role. For example, we might observe that pains
  1472	occur whenever prefrontal nociceptive-specific neurons fire, and vice
  1473	versa; we might also note that, if pains were the firing of nociceptivespecific neurons, then this would account for a number of other
  1474	observed facts about pain, such as that it can be caused by trapped
  1475	nerves, and can be blocked by aspirin; and we might conclude on this
  1476	basis that pains are indeed identical to the firing of nociceptive-specific
  1477	neurons.” Papineau singles out “the peculiarly direct nature of our
  1478	concepts of conscious states” as what “stops us deriving mind-brain
  1479	identities a priori from the physical facts.”
  1480	In exploring the basis of identity claims, Papineau states “it can only
  1481	be on the basis of an abductive inference from direct empirical evidence,
  1482	such as that the two things in question are found in the same places and
  1483	the same times, and are observed to bear the same relations to other
  1484	things, not because we can deduce the identities a priori from the
  1485	physical facts.” His examples include “Cary Grant = Archie Leach”, and
  1486	“that dog = her pet.” “Why shouldn’t this same way of thinking be
  1487	applied to consciousness, he asks?” (Papineau, 2020b).
  1488	Because, he answers, “even after we are given all the abductive ev­
  1489	idence, we still find mind-brain identity claims almost impossible to
  1490	believe. We cannot resist the dualist conviction that conscious feelings
  1491	and the physical brain states are two different things.” And this, in
  1492	Papineau’s view, “is the real reason why we feel a need for further
  1493	explanation. We want to know why the neuronal activity is accompanied
  1494	by that conscious feeling, rather than by some other, or by no feeling at
  1495	all. Our dualist intuitions automatically generate a hankering for further
  1496	explanation.” Thus, Papineau concludes, “the demand for explanation
  1497	arises, not because something is lacking in physicalism, but because
  1498	something is lacking in us.”
  1499	“If only we could fully embrace physicalism,” Papineau suggests,
  1500	“the feeling of an explanatory gap would disappear. If we could fully
  1501	accept that pains are nociceptive-specific neuronal firing, then we would
  1502	stop asking why ‘they’ go together—after all, nothing can possibly come
  1503	apart from itself.”
  1504	To Papineau, this kind of robust physicalism can dissolve “the
  1505	problem of consciousness”. The move is to “simply deny that any puzzle
  1506	is raised by the fact that it feels painful to be a human with active
  1507	nociceptive-neurons. Why shouldn’t it feel like that? That’s how it turns
  1508	out. Why regard this as puzzling?” (Papineau, 2020a).
  1509	An insight is the connotation of verbs used to describe the relation
  1510	between mind and brain. Brain processes are said to “generate”, or
  1511	“yield”, or “cause”, or “give rise to” conscious states. But this phrase­
  1512	ology, Papineau says, undermines physicalism from the start—even
  1513	when used by physicalists. As he puts it, “Fire ‘generates’, ‘causes’,
  1514	‘yields’ or ‘gives rise to’ smoke. But NaCl doesn’t ‘generate’, ‘cause’,
  1515	‘yield’ or ‘give rise to’ salt. It is salt. The point is clear. To speak of brain
  1516	processes as ‘generating’ conscious states, and so on, only makes sense if
  1517	you are implicitly thinking of the conscious states as separate from the
  1518	brain states” (Papineau, 2020b). (But even if consciousness as an
       
  1519	9.1.9. Papineau’s mind-brain identity
  1520	Philosopher David Papineau argues for neurobiological physicalism
  1521	with his theory of unabashed, robust, fundamental mind-brain identity.
  1522	It is an important argument, with implications for all materialist theories
  1523	(Papineau, 2020b).
  1524	In constructing the argument, one of Papineau’s intuitions is that
  1525	“there seems no immediate reason why consciousness should be singled
  1526	out as posing some special puzzle about its relation to the rest of reali­
  1527	ty”—given that “reality contains many different kind of things, biolog­
  1528	ical, meteorological, chemical, electrical, and so on, all existing
  1529	alongside each other, and all interacting causally in various ways”
  1530	(Papineau, 2020b).
  1531	One Papineau premise is that while we feel “conscious mind
  1532	44
       
  1533	R.L. Kuhn
       
  1534	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  1535	“output” or “effect” of the brain were wrongheaded, why are only certain
  1536	sorts of neural activity identical with consciousness while others are
  1537	not?)
  1538	To sustain his argument, Papineau must deal with zombies. Are
  1539	zombies possible? “Could a being share all your physical properties but
  1540	have no conscious life?” Everybody’s first thought is, he says, “Sure. Just
  1541	duplicate the physical stuff and leave out the feelings.”
  1542	That’s the anti-physicalist “trap”: the physicalist has already lost.
  1543	Papineau rightly states that physicalists must deny that zombies are
  1544	possible, “given that the mind is ontologically inseparable from the
  1545	brain.” If conscious states are physical states—radically identical—then,
  1546	he says, “the ‘two’ cannot come apart,” much like Marilyn Monroe
  1547	cannot exist without Norma Jean Baker. How could she exist without
  1548	herself? That makes no sense, he says.18
  1549	Papineau rejects the anti-physicalist argument that phenomenal
  1550	concepts are revelatory, in that they reveal conscious states not to be
  1551	physical. “Physicalists respond that there is no reason to suppose that
  1552	phenomenal concepts have the power to reveal such things … that ex­
  1553	periences are non-physical.” Why should introspection, he asks rhetor­
  1554	ically, “be guaranteed to tell us about all their necessary properties [of
  1555	experience]?” (Papineau, 2020b).
  1556	Papineau is blunt: “I never viewed the so-called ‘hard problem’ as
  1557	any problem at all.” The obvious answer, he says, is that brain processes
  1558	feel like something for the subjects that have them. “What’s so hard
  1559	about that?.. How would you expect them to feel? Like nothing? Why?
  1560	That’s how they feel when you have them.” The only reason that many
  1561	people believe there is a problem, Papineau stresses, is that “they can’t
  1562	stop thinking in dualist terms” (Papineau, 2020b).
  1563	As for the conventional materialist claim that ultimately neurosci­
  1564	ence will uncover the complete neurobiological basis of consciousness,
  1565	Papineau is skeptical. He does not expect that “there are definite facts
  1566	about consciousness to which we lack epistemological access—that
  1567	there is some material property that really constitutes being in pain, say,
  1568	but which we can’t find out about.” Rather, he argues, “our phenomenal
  1569	concepts of conscious states are vague—nothing in the semantic
  1570	constitution of phenomenal concepts determines precisely which of the
  1571	candidate material properties they refer to” (Papineau, 2003).
  1572	Scientific research, he says, will identify “a range of material prop­
  1573	erties that correlate in human beings with pain, say, or colors, or indeed
  1574	being conscious at all. However, this won’t pinpoint the material essence
  1575	of any such conscious state, for there will always be a plurality of such
  1576	human material correlates for any conscious property … It is not as if
  1577	conscious properties have true material essences, yet science is unable to
  1578	discover them. Rather the whole idea of identifying such essences is a
  1579	chimera, fostered by the impression that our phenomenal concepts of
  1580	conscious states are more precise than they are” (Papineau, 2003).
       
  1581	could actually know everything there is to be a person, just by the
  1582	description of the brain stuff? I don’t think so” Goldstein (2011a),
  1583	2011b).
  1584	Goldstein says that panpsychism (13) seems plausible and she un­
  1585	derstands why some are dualists, where that internal point of view is
  1586	something that is not the body, and could, in principle, exist separate
  1587	from the body. She appreciates why some people who hope for
  1588	immortality hope dualism is true. (She herself rejects dualism.)
  1589	9.1.11. Hardcastle’s argument against materialism skeptics
  1590	Philosopher Valerie Gray Hardcastle argues that the points of divi­
  1591	sion between materialists and materialism-skeptics “are quite deep and
  1592	turn on basic differences in understanding the scientific enterprise.” This
  1593	disagreement, “the rifts,” which she frames, in part, between David
  1594	Chalmers and herself, concerns whether consciousness is a brute fact
  1595	about the world, which materialists deny and its skeptics affirm. Rather,
  1596	materialists believe that consciousness is part of the physical world, just
  1597	like everything else. “It is completely nonmysterious (though it is poorly
  1598	understood) [and materialists] have total and absolute faith that science
  1599	as it is construed today will someday explain this as it has explained the
  1600	other so-called mysteries of our age” (Section: Hardcastle, 1996).
  1601	Hardcastle gives her clear-eyed assessment: “I am a committed
  1602	materialist and believe absolutely and certainly that empirical investi­
  1603	gation is the proper approach in explaining consciousness. I also
  1604	recognize that I have little convincing to say to those opposed to me.
  1605	There are few useful conversations; there are even fewer converts.” She
  1606	epitomizes the skeptics’ position: “Isolating the causal relations associ­
  1607	ated with conscious phenomena would simply miss the boat, for there is
  1608	no way that doing that ever captures the qualitative aspects of aware­
  1609	ness. What the naturalists might do is illustrate when we are conscious,
  1610	but that won’t explain the why of consciousness.” Thus, she continues,
  1611	whatever the neural correlate(s) of consciousness may be, the naturalists
  1612	would not have explained why it is that (or those). Part of a good
  1613	explanation, skeptics maintain, “is making the identity statement (or
  1614	whatever) intelligible, plausible, reasonable” and this is what materi­
  1615	alists have not done and thus have not closed the explanatory gap.
  1616	In response, Hardcastle is frank: “To them, I have little to say in
  1617	defence of naturalism, for I think nothing that I as an already committed
  1618	naturalist could say would suffice, for we don’t agree on the terms of the
  1619	argument in the first place.” The consciousness identity, whatever it
  1620	turns out to be, could be a brute fact about the world, just like the laws of
  1621	physics. At some point, in all theories, explanations must end. Hard­
  1622	castle asks, “How do I make my identification of consciousness with
  1623	some neural activity intelligible to those who find it mysterious? My
  1624	answer is that I don’t. The solution to this vexing difficulty, such as it is,
  1625	is all a matter of attitude. That is, the problem itself depends on the spirit
  1626	in which we approach an examination of consciousness.” In character­
  1627	izing “consciousness-mysterians,” she states, “They are antecedently
  1628	convinced of the mysteriousness of consciousness and no amount of
  1629	scientific data is going to change that perspective. Either you already
  1630	believe that science is going to give you a correct identity statement, or
  1631	you don’t and you think that there is always going to be something left
  1632	over, the phenomenal aspects of conscious experience” (Hardcastle,
  1633	1996).
  1634	Hardcastle’s advice to skeptics? “Consciousness-mysterians need to
  1635	alter their concepts. To put it bluntly: their failure to appreciate the
  1636	world as it really is cuts no ice with science. Their ideas are at fault, not
  1637	the scientific method. Materialists presume that there is some sort of
  1638	identity statement for consciousness. (Of course, we don’t actually have
  1639	one yet, but for those of us who are not consciousness-mysterians, we
  1640	feel certain that one is in the offing.) Hence, the skeptics can’t really
  1641	imagine possible worlds in which consciousness is not whatever we ul­
  1642	timately discover it to be because they aren’t imagining consciousness in
  1643	those cases (or, they aren’t imagining properly). But nevertheless, what
  1644	can I say to those who insist that they can imagine consciousness as
  1645	beyond science’s current explanatory capacities? I think nothing …”
       
  1646	9.1.10. Goldstein’s mind-body problem
  1647	Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein centers the
  1648	mind-body problem around the nature of the person, with two distinct
  1649	kinds of descriptions: our physical bodies and brains, which science can,
  1650	in principle, analyze completely; and our inner thoughts, perceptions,
  1651	emotions, dreams, which science can never access completely
  1652	(Goldstein, 2011a, 2011b).
  1653	Goldstein thinks that the internal description of what it’s like to be a
  1654	person—“what I try to do in creating a character in a novel”—is “really
  1655	about the body because ultimately there are no nonmaterial states.”
  1656	Goldstein states that the kind of stuff underlining these intentional
  1657	states or states of feeling that we describe in terms of consciousness is
  1658	entirely brain stuff. “Could we ever derive the one description from the
  1659	other? Could we ever know enough about the brain stuff so that we
       
  1660	18
  1661	Papineau distinguishes possibility from conceivability. “A posteriori phys­
  1662	icalists have no choice but to allow that they [zombies] are at least conceivable,”
  1663	even if not possible (Papineau, 2020b).
       
  1664	45
       
  1665	R.L. Kuhn
       
  1666	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  1667	The fundamental difference between materialists and their skeptics,
  1668	according to Hardcastle, is that “Materialists are trying to explain to
  1669	each other what consciousness is within current scientific frameworks …
  1670	If you don’t antecedently buy into this project …, then a naturalist’s
  1671	explanation probably won’t satisfy you. It shouldn’t. But that is not the
  1672	fault of the explanation, nor is it the fault of the materialists. If you don’t
  1673	accept the rules, the game won’t make any sense” (Hardcastle, 1996).
  1674	Hardcastle’s own approach to consciousness includes: viewing it as a
  1675	lower-level dynamical structure underpinning our information pro­
  1676	cessing (Hardcastle, 1995); the relation between ontology and expla­
  1677	nation providing a framework for referring to mental states as being the
  1678	causally efficacious agents for some behavior (Hardcastle, 1998); a more
  1679	nuanced approach to the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) in
  1680	that it “there might not be an NCC—even if we adopt a purely materi­
  1681	alistic and reductionistic framework for explaining consciousness (for
  1682	example, perhaps consciousness is located out in the world just as much
  1683	as it is located inside the head) (Hardcastle, 2018; Hardcastle and Raja,
  1684	1998); and action selection and projection to help refine notions of
  1685	consciousness from an embodied perspective (Hardcastle, 2020).
       
  1686	‘here and now’ argument for incompatibility.” Thus, Stoljar argues, the
  1687	epistemic view helps us think about the problems of consciousness in a
  1688	clearer way, disentangling them from the compatibility problem (Kind
  1689	and Stoljar, 2023, pp. 64–66).
  1690	Stoljar is no traditional physicalist. He critiques “standard physi­
  1691	calism,” by which he means “versions of physicalism that make no
  1692	theoretical use of the ignorance hypothesis.” He conjectures that there
  1693	are properties of the physical world that go beyond the capacity of the
  1694	physical sciences to access and measure through its devices and in­
  1695	struments. Is this incapacity in practice, as per current science, or in
  1696	principle, such that ultimate truth is forever out of reach? Who knows?
  1697	Either way, he says, would support his ignorance hypothesis defense of
  1698	physicalism (Kind and Stoljar, 2023, p. 67). More subtly, Stolar contends
  1699	that the epistemic view does provide an “explanation of consciousness,”
  1700	at least in an abstract sense. “It tells us, for example, that conscious states
  1701	are not fundamental and so depend on other things, even if it leaves
  1702	open what exactly they depend on” (Kind and Stoljar, 2023, p. 112).
  1703	Yet Stoljar believes it is possible to construct “a science of con­
  1704	sciousness”—to study “empirical laws between each conscious state and
  1705	some physical system”— but he is skeptical of “the attempt to provide
  1706	systematic knowledge of such laws” which he rejects as “implausible on
  1707	its own terms.” Preferring “to understand the science in a more modest
  1708	way,” Stoljar is ready to accept “that we do not and may never have a
  1709	complete theory of the world” (Kind and Stoljar, 2023, pp. 67–68).
       
  1710	9.1.12. Stoljar’s epistemic view and non-standard physicalism
  1711	Philosopher Daniel Stoljar has long focused on physicalism, its
  1712	interpretation, truth and philosophical significance; his views are
  1713	nuanced and largely deflationary (Stoljar, 2010). He defines physicalism
  1714	as the thesis that "every instantiated property is either physical or is
  1715	necessitated by some physical property," where physical property is
  1716	described by “all and only the following elements: it is a) a distinctive
  1717	property of intuitively physical objects, b) expressed by a predicate of
  1718	physics, c) objective, d) knowable through scientific investigation, and
  1719	e) not a distinctive property of souls, ectoplasm, etc.” (Montero, 2012).
  1720	According to Stoljar, "Physicalism has no formulations on which it is
  1721	both true and deserving of the name"—but this “does not entail that
  1722	philosophical problems stated in terms of it [physicalism] have no
  1723	reasonable formulation” (Stoljar, 2010; Montero, 2012).
  1724	As everyone knows, the philosophical problem of phenomenal con­
  1725	sciousness is the poster-child test case for physicalism, the standard
  1726	physicalist framework being that “consciousness can be explained by
  1727	contemporary physics, biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science”
  1728	(Kind and Stoljar, 2023, p. i). To Stoljar, the problem (or problems) of
  1729	consciousness is “whether two big ideas can both be true together. The
  1730	first is the existence of consciousness. The second is a worldview (a
  1731	picture of everything that exists) that many people think you must
  1732	believe if you hold a vaguely scientific or rational approach to the world,
  1733	namely, physicalism.” Stoljar calls it the “compatibility problem”— “i.e.,
  1734	the problem of whether physicalism and claim that consciousness exists
  1735	can both be correct”—and he says that the solution is “right under our
  1736	nose.” The solution to the compatibility problem, Stoljar tells us, “is that
  1737	we are missing something”—and the depth and implications of this
  1738	simple statement are surprisingly profound (Kind and Stoljar, 2023, pp.
  1739	64–65).
  1740	What we are missing, according to Stoljar, “is a type of physical fact
  1741	or property relevant to consciousness. More than this, we are profoundly
  1742	ignorant of the nature of the physical world, and ignoring this ignorance
  1743	is what generates the problem.” He calls “the idea that we are ignorant of
  1744	a type of fact or property that is relevant to consciousness the ignorance
  1745	hypothesis” and he calls “the idea that the ignorance hypothesis solves
  1746	the compatibility problem the epistemic view.” Stoljar contends that all
  1747	arguments for the opposing view—i.e., that physicalism and con­
  1748	sciousness are incompatible—“fail, and for a single reason.” These ar­
  1749	guments, he says, “all presuppose that we have complete knowledge of
  1750	the physical facts relevant to consciousness. According to the epistemic
  1751	view, that presupposition is false, so the arguments [against
  1752	physicalism-consciousness compatibility] don’t work.” That physicalism
  1753	cannot be shown affirmatively to be true does not bother Stoljar,
  1754	because, he says, physicalism is an empirical truth, not an a priori
  1755	argument. “What the epistemic view says is that … there is no persuasive
       
  1756	9.2. Neurobiological theories
  1757	Neurobiological theories are based primarily on known mechanisms
  1758	of the brain, such as neuronal transmission, brain circuits and con­
  1759	nectome pathways, electric fields, and, of course, neural correlates of
  1760	consciousness.
  1761	9.2.1. Edelman’s neural Darwinism and reentrant neural circuitry
  1762	Nobel laureate biologist Gerald Edelman presents a purely biological
  1763	theory of consciousness, founded on Darwinian natural selection and
  1764	complex brain morphology. His foundational commitment is that “the
  1765	neural systems underlying consciousness arose to enable high-order
  1766	discriminations in a multidimensional space of signals,” that “qualia
  1767	are those discriminations” and that “differences in qualia correlate with
  1768	differences in the neural structure and dynamics that underlie them”
  1769	(Edelman, 2000, 2003, 2024).
  1770	Rejecting theories that theYes, agreed, there is, as you say, a correspondence, or an "isomorphic bridge" and it is "really a bridge", in such a way that it can be reversibly closed by means of anesthesia or some "extraordinary" cause or broken permanently so that the irreversible occurs, that is, death. brain is like a computer or instructional
  1771	system, Edelman proposes that “the brain is a selectional system, one in
  1772	which large numbers of variant circuits are generated epigenetically,
  1773	following which particular variants are selected over others during
  1774	experience. Such repertoires of variant circuits are degenerate, i.e.,
  1775	structurally different circuit variants within this selectional system can
  1776	carry out the same function or produce the same output. Subsequent to
  1777	their incorporation into anatomical repertoires during development,
  1778	circuit variants that match novel signals are differentially selected
  1779	through changes in synaptic efficacy. Differential amplification of
  1780	selected synaptic populations in groups of neurons increases the likeli­
  1781	hood that, in the future, adaptive responses of these groups will occur
  1782	following exposure to similar signals” (Edelman, 2003).
  1783	Edelman’s way of thinking is motivated by his work on the immune
  1784	system (for which he was awarded the Nobel) and his theory is devel­
  1785	oped in two domains: Neural Darwinism (neural group selection) and
  1786	Dynamic Core (reentrant neural circuitry).
  1787	Neural Darwinism is “the idea that higher brain functions are
  1788	mediated by developmental and somatic selection upon anatomical and
  1789	functional variance occurring in each individual animal” (Edelman,
  1790	1989). Neural Darwinism has two aspects: (i) development selection,
  1791	which controls the gross anatomy and microstructure of the brain,
  1792	allowing for great variability in the neural circuitry; and (ii) experiential
  1793	selection, especially of the synaptic structure where functional plasticity
  1794	is essential given the vast number of synapses (estimated at over 100
  1795	46
       
  1796	R.L. Kuhn
       
  1797	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  1798	trillion, possibly 600 trillion or more). Edelman notes that a child’s brain
  1799	contains many more neural connections than will ultimately survive to
  1800	maturity—estimates go as high as 1000 trillion—and he argues that this
  1801	redundant capacity, this functional plasticity, is needed because “neu­
  1802	rons are the only cells in the body that cannot be renewed and because
  1803	only those networks best adapted to their ultimate purpose will be
  1804	selected as they organize into neuronal groups” (Edelman, 2024). Ac­
  1805	cording to Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS),
  1806	“selectional events in the brain are necessarily constrained by the ac­
  1807	tivity of diffuse ascending value systems. The activity of these systems
  1808	affects the selectional process by modulating or altering synaptic
  1809	thresholds” (Edelman, 2003).
  1810	Dynamic Core is Edelman’s term encompassing reentrant neural
  1811	circuitry, the ongoing process of recursive signaling among neuronal
  1812	groups taking place across networks of massively parallel reciprocal fi­
  1813	bers, especially in the connections between thalamus and cerebral cor­
  1814	tex. This dynamic, relentless activity in thalamocortical circuits
  1815	generates a continuing sequence of different metastable states that
  1816	change over time, yet each of which has a unitary phenomenology at any
  1817	given moment. Edelman asserts "there is no other object in the known
  1818	universe so completely distinguished by reentrant circuitry as the
  1819	human brain" (Edelman, 2003, 2024).
  1820	Edelman stresses that reentry is “a selectional process occurring in
  1821	parallel” and that “it differs from feedback, which is instructional and
  1822	involves an error function that is serially transmitted over a single
  1823	pathway.” As a result of the correlations that reentry imposes on diverse,
  1824	interacting neuronal groups, “synchronously active circuits across
  1825	widely distributed brain areas are selectively favored.” This, Edelman
  1826	suggests, “provides a solution to the so-called binding problem: how do
  1827	functionally segregated areas of the brain correlate their activities in the
  1828	absence of an executive program or superordinate map?” Binding of the
  1829	outputs of every sensory modality, each generated by segregated cortical
  1830	areas, is essential for our commonly perceived but underappreciated
  1831	unity of consciousness (Edelman, 2003).
  1832	It is worth noting the close relationship between the Dynamic Core
  1833	and Global Workspace (9.2.3) hypotheses, as jointly suggested by the
  1834	authors of each, Edelman and Baars—each hypothesis having been put
  1835	forward, independently, “to provide mechanistic and biologically
  1836	plausible accounts of how brains generate conscious mental content.”
  1837	Whereas “the Dynamic Core proposes that reentrant neural activity in
  1838	the thalamocortical system gives rise to conscious experience,” the
  1839	“Global Workspace reconciles the limited capacity of momentary
  1840	conscious content with the vast repertoire of long-term memory.” The
  1841	close relationship between the two hypotheses is said to allow “for a
  1842	strictly biological account of phenomenal experience and subjectivity
  1843	that is consistent with mounting experimental evidence.” The authors
  1844	suggest that “there is now sufficient evidence to consider the design and
  1845	construction of a conscious artifact” (Edelman et al., 2011).
  1846	The theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS), pioneered by Edel­
  1847	man (1987), has come to undergird a cluster of theories. As Anil Seth
  1848	explains, “According to the TNGS, primary (sensory) consciousness
  1849	arose in evolution when ongoing perceptual categorization was linked
  1850	via reentry to a value-dependent memory creating the so-called
  1851	‘remembered present’ (Edelman 1989). Higher-order consciousness,
  1852	distinguished in humans by an explicit sense of self and the ability to
  1853	construct past and future scenes, arose at a later stage with reentrant
  1854	pathways linking value-dependent categorization with linguistic per­
  1855	formance and conceptual memory (Edelman 2003; Seth, 2007).
  1856	As Edelman’s mechanism for consciousness is based on the TNGS, he
  1857	first distinguishes primary from higher-order consciousness. “Animals
  1858	with primary consciousness can integrate perceptual and motor events
  1859	together with memory to construct a multimodal scene in the pre­
  1860	sent”—what James called the “specious present” and which Edelman
  1861	calls “the remembered present” (Edelman, 1989). Such an animal with
  1862	primary consciousness, Edelman says, “has no explicit narrative capa­
  1863	bility (although it has long-term memory), and, at best, it can only plan
       
  1864	to deal with the immediate scene in the remembered present” (Edelman,
  1865	2003).
  1866	As for higher-order consciousness, Edelman is mainstream: “It
  1867	emerges later in evolution and is seen in animals with semantic capa­
  1868	bilities such as chimpanzees. It is present in its richest form in the human
  1869	species, which is unique in possessing true language made up of syntax
  1870	and semantics. Higher-order consciousness allows its possessors to go
  1871	beyond the limits of the remembered present of primary consciousness.
  1872	An individual’s past history, future plans, and consciousness of being
  1873	conscious all become accessible” (Edelman, 2003).
  1874	How did the neural mechanisms underlying primary consciousness
  1875	arise during evolution? Edelman’s proposal is as follows. “At some time
  1876	around the divergence of reptiles into mammals and then into birds, the
  1877	embryological development of large numbers of new reciprocal con­
  1878	nections allowed rich reentrant activity to take place between the more
  1879	posterior brain systems carrying out perceptual categorization and the
  1880	more frontally located systems responsible for value-category memory.
  1881	This reentrant activity provided the neural basis for integration of a
  1882	scene with all of its entailed qualia … [which] conferred an adaptive
  1883	evolutionary advantage” (Edelman, 2003).
  1884	In summary, according to Edelman, “consciousness arises as a result
  1885	of integration of many inputs by reentrant interactions in the dynamic
  1886	core. This integration occurs in periods of <500 ms. Selection occurs
  1887	among a set of circuits in the core repertoire; given their degeneracy, a
  1888	number of different circuits can carry out similar functions. As a result of
  1889	the continual interplay of signals from the environment, the body, and
  1890	the brain itself, each integrated core state is succeeded by yet another
  1891	and differentiated neural state in the core … The sequences and
  1892	conjoined arrays of qualia entailed by this neural activity are the higherorder discriminations that such neural events make possible. Underlying
  1893	each quale are distinct neuroanatomical structures and neural dynamics
  1894	that together account for the specific and distinctive phenomenal
  1895	property of that quale. Qualia thus reflect the causal sequences of the
  1896	underlying metastable neural states of the complex dynamic core”
  1897	(Edelman, 2003).
  1898	Finally, Edelman addresses the hard problem. “The fact that it is only
  1899	by having a phenotype capable of giving rise to those qualia that their
  1900	‘quality’ can be experienced is not an embarrassment to a scientific
  1901	theory of consciousness. Looked at in this way, the so-called hard
  1902	problem is ill posed, for it seems to be framed in the expectation that, for
  1903	an observer, a theoretical construct can lead by description to the
  1904	experiencing of the phenomenal quality being described. If the
  1905	phenomenal part of conscious experience that constitutes its entailed
  1906	distinctions is irreducible, so is the fact that physics has not explained
  1907	why there is something rather than nothing. Physics is not hindered by
  1908	this ontological limit nor should the scientific understanding of con­
  1909	sciousness be hindered by the privacy of phenomenal experience.”
  1910	Edelman is confident. “At the end of our studies, when we have grasped
  1911	its mechanisms in greater detail, consciousness will lose its mystery and
  1912	be generally accepted as part of the natural order” (Edelman, 2003).
  1913	Personally, I like analogizing the something/nothing ontological
  1914	limit in physics to the phenomenal consciousness psychophysical pri­
  1915	vacy limit in neuroscience—the two ultimate questions of existence and
  1916	sentience. But I hesitate to draw the analogy too tightly. Something/
  1917	nothing is a kind of historical question of what happened, that is,
  1918	explaining the hypothetical process. For example, it could be that
  1919	nothing is in principle impossible. Phenomenal consciousness is a clearly
  1920	contemporary question of what is, that is, explaining the actual thing.
  1921	Moreover, I agree that even with its something/nothing ontological
  1922	limit, physics can do its work, as with its phenomenal consciousness
  1923	privacy limit, neuroscience can do its work. But that work, remember,
  1924	constitutes the “easy problems.”
  1925	9.2.2. Crick and Koch’s neural correlates of consciousness (NCC)
  1926	The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) is defined as the min­
  1927	imum activities in the brain jointly sufficient (and probably necessary)
  1928	47
       
  1929	R.L. Kuhn
       
  1930	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  1931	for any one specific conscious perception, and, extended, for subjective
  1932	experience in general, the inner awareness of qualia. Originally applied
  1933	to sleep and wakefulness (i.e., the reticular activating system in the brain
  1934	stem), the NCC were formally proposed by Francis Crick and Christof
  1935	Koch as a scientific approach to what had been believed to be the vague,
  1936	metaphysical and somewhat discredited idea of consciousness (Crick
  1937	and Koch, 1990), a program then championed by Koch (Koch, 2004,
  1938	Closer To Truth) and others (though Koch has become something of a
  1939	“romantic reductionist” [Koch, 2012a]).
  1940	While there are complex methodological issues, NCC mechanisms
  1941	include neuronal electrophysiological action potentials (spikes), their
  1942	frequencies and sequences; neurochemical transmitter flows in the
  1943	synapses between neurons; and recurrent brain circuits in specific brain
  1944	areas. An example is clusters of neurons that underlie wakefulness in the
  1945	brainstem connecting to clusters of neurons in the thalamus, hypothal­
  1946	amus, basal ganglia and cerebral cortex related to awareness/con­
  1947	sciousness (Wong, 2023).
  1948	Similarly, a "default ascending arousal network" (dANN) has been
  1949	proposed, with subcortical nodes in the brainstem, hypothalamus,
  1950	thalamus, and basal forebrain (Edlow, 2024). While necessary for
  1951	conscious arousal and wakefulness, the dANN is not sufficient for
  1952	phenomenal conscioiusness and is not what this Landscape is about.
  1953	As an example of the NCC way of thinking, an early NCC candidate
  1954	was the claustrum, which receives input from almost all regions of
  1955	cortex and projects back to almost all regions of cortex, and which, Crick
  1956	and Koch speculated, could give rise to “integrated conscious percepts.”
  1957	They used the analogy of the claustrum to a “conductor” and the cortex
  1958	to an “orchestra,” such that the claustrum as a conductor ‘coordinates a
  1959	group of players in the orchestra, the various cortical regions.” Without
  1960	the conductor, as they build the analogy, “players can still play but they
  1961	fall increasingly out of synchrony with each other. The result is a ca­
  1962	cophony of sounds.” In the absence of the claustra in both cerebral
  1963	hemispheres, attributes such as sensory modalities “may not be experi­
  1964	enced in an integrated manner and the subject may fail to altogether
  1965	perceive these objects or events or only be consciously aware of some
  1966	isolated attribute.” This would mean, they suggest, “that different at­
  1967	tributes of objects … are rapidly combined and bound in the claustrum”
  1968	(Crick and Koch, 2005).
  1969	A more recent candidate for full and content-specific NCC is located
  1970	in the posterior cerebral cortex, in a temporo-parietal-occipital hot zone
  1971	(Koch et al., 2016), though no one is yelling “Eureka” and the search
  1972	continues. Even so, while everyone knows that even strong correlation is
  1973	not causation, strong correlation is still something. NCCs can be
  1974	considered macroscopic materialism.
  1975	It was in 1998 that Christof Koch made the now legendary 25-year
  1976	bet with philosopher David Chalmers—they are long-time friend­
  1977	s—that neuroscientists would discover a “clear” NCC by 2023. No sur­
  1978	prise that the bet paid off in Chalmers’ favor. (Koch presented Chalmers
  1979	with a case of 1978 Madeira wine.) As Chalmers said, notwithstanding
  1980	neuroscience’s great progress, “It’s clear that things are not clear,” while
  1981	Koch, feigning chagrin, agreed (Horgan, 2023).
  1982	Koch was down but not out: he may have lost this consciousness
  1983	battle, but the consciousness war would still be waged. Koch offered to
  1984	re-up: another bet, another 25 years to achieve that “clear” NCC, another
  1985	case of wine. “I hope I lose,” Chalmers said, smiling, taking the new bet,
  1986	“but I suspect I’ll win.”
  1987	The smart money is again on Chalmers, although I have a different
  1988	issue. What would a “clear” NCC mean? Suppose a specific group of
  1989	neurons were proven to be both necessary and sufficient for a particular
  1990	conscious experience, a direct correlation that no other group of neurons
  1991	could claim? Koch would rightly win the bet, but would consciousness
  1992	have been explained? Still, the perennial question: How can action po­
  1993	tentials zipping along neurons and chemicals flowing between neurons
  1994	literally be the phenomenal consciousness of inner experience? By what
  1995	magic?
       
  1996	9.2.3. Baars’s and Dehaene’s global workspace theory
  1997	Proposed originally by Bernard Baars (Baars, 1988, 1997, 2002),
  1998	extended with neuroimaging and computer modeling by Stanislas
  1999	Dehaene (Dehaene and Naccache, 2000), the core claim of Global
  2000	Workplace Theory (GWT) is brain-wide presence and broad accessibility
  2001	of specific multi-sensory, multi-cognitive information, the total package
  2002	being what constitutes conscious awareness. GWT is founded on the
  2003	concept of an inner “theater of consciousness,” where the mental spot­
  2004	light of awareness shines on sequential sets of integrated perceptions
  2005	that are dominant, at least momentarily. (The global workspace “The­
  2006	ater of Consciousness” is said not to contradict Dennett’s rejected
  2007	“Cartesian Theater,” because the former is not dualistic and does not
  2008	reside in only one location in the brain; rather, the Theater of Con­
  2009	sciousness is passive not active and is spread across much of the brain.)
  2010	GWT holds that conscious mental states are those which are “globally
  2011	available” to a wide range of brain processes including attention,
  2012	perception, assessment, memory, verbal description, and motor
  2013	response. Which sets of integrated perceptions become dominant, move
  2014	to centerstage, and thus leap into conscious awareness? It’s a competi­
  2015	tion. Diverse data flows originating both within the brain (e.g., mem­
  2016	ories) and from external stimuli (i.e., sensory information) are in
  2017	constant competition, such that the “winner” is broadcast broadly (i.e.,
  2018	globally) in the brain and becomes accessible throughout the brain,
  2019	which is how we become aware of it as the content of our consciousness.
  2020	This brain-wide focus on a particular phenomenological package
  2021	integrates all the relevant sensory and cognitive streams by recruiting all
  2022	the relevant brain areas into an organic whole—while inhibiting other,
  2023	extraneous, conflicting data flows—such that what resides in the global
  2024	workspace is perceived as consciousness “snapshots” in continuous,
  2025	movie-like motion. This means that while our conscious awareness may
  2026	seem unified and seamless, in fact it is neither.
  2027	Whereas GWT started in the 1980s as a purely psychological theory
  2028	of conscious cognition, it has become a “family” of theories adapted to
  2029	today’s far more detailed understanding of the brain. The brain-based
  2030	version of GWT is called Global Workspace Dynamics because the cor­
  2031	tex is viewed as a “unified oscillatory machine”. GWT, therefore, ac­
  2032	cording to its advocates, joins other theories in taking consciousness as
  2033	the product of highly integrated and widespread cortico-thalamic ac­
  2034	tivity, including evidence that the prefrontal cortex participates in the
  2035	visual conscious stream. Cortex is extraordinarily flexible in its dynamic
  2036	recruitment of different regions for different tasks. Therefore, an arbi­
  2037	trary division between prefrontal and other neuronal regions is said to
  2038	be misleading. Consciousness requires a much broader, more integrative
  2039	view (Baars et al., 2021).
  2040	In a pioneering set of “adversarial collaboration” experiments to test
  2041	hypotheses of consciousness by getting rival researchers to collaborate
  2042	on the study design,19 preliminary results did not perfectly match GWT’s
  2043	prediction that consciousness arises when information is broadcast to
  2044	areas of the brain through an interconnected network. The transmission,
  2045	according to GWT, happens at the beginning and end of an experience
  2046	and involves the prefrontal cortex, at the front of the brain. But inde­
  2047	pendent “theory-neutral” researchers found that only some aspects of
  2048	consciousness, but not all of them, could be identified in the prefrontal
  2049	cortex. Moreover, while they found evidence of brain broadcasting, the
  2050	core of GWT, it was only at the beginning of an experience—not also at
  2051	the end, as had been predicted. Further experiments are to come, but
  2052	revisions to GWT are believed likely (Lenharo, 2023a,b, 2024).
  2053	9.2.4. Dennett’s multiple drafts model
  2054	In his intellectual memoirs, I’ve Been Thinking, philosopher Daniel
  2055	Dennett highlights two fundamental questions on which his career is
  2056	founded—the two related philosophical problems he set himself to
       
  2057	19
  2058	The adversarial experiments are envisioned and sponsored by the Tem­
  2059	pleton World Charity Foundation.
       
  2060	48
       
  2061	R.L. Kuhn
       
  2062	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  2063	solve. “First, how can it be that some complicated clumps of molecules
  2064	can be properly described as having states or events that are about
  2065	something, that have meaning or content. And second, how can it be that
  2066	at least some of these complicated clumps of molecules are conscious­
  2067	—that is, aware that they are gifted with states or events that are about
  2068	something?” (Dennett, 2023a, 2023b).
  2069	In dealing with these questions, Dennett realized, way back in his
  2070	PhD dissertation in 1965, that “the best—and only—way of making
  2071	sense of the mind and consciousness is through evolution by natural
  2072	selection on many levels.” Dennett’s core insight subsuming biological
  2073	evolution in general and the development of mind in particular is
  2074	concise: reasons without a reasoner, design without a designer, and
  2075	competence without comprehension (Dennett, 2007).
  2076	Dennett’s theory of consciousness is distinguished by four ideas: (i)
  2077	there is no “Cartesian Theater,” no inner witness viewing the con­
  2078	sciousness show; (ii) different brain regions or modules develop
  2079	different kinds of content, which Dennett calls “multiple drafts”; (iii) the
  2080	multiple drafts compete with one another for attention, the winner of
  2081	the winner-take-all competition occupying the entirety of the conscious
  2082	moment, which Dennett calls “fame in the brain”; and (iv) the collection
  2083	of all these conscious moments coalesces into a kind of life story, the
  2084	emergence of a sense of “self,” which Dennett describes as a “center of
  2085	narrative gravity.”
  2086	In Consciousness Explained, Dennett presents his multiple drafts
  2087	model of consciousness (Dennett, 1992). He states that all varieties of
  2088	perception, thought, or mental activity are processed in the brain via
  2089	parallel, multitrack interpretations and elaborations, subject to contin­
  2090	uous "editorial revision.” These “yield, over the course of time, some­
  2091	thing rather like a narrative stream or sequence, the product of continual
  2092	editing by many processes distributed around the brain.” Dennett has
  2093	the brain consisting of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies," and his
  2094	metaphor “fame in the brain” tells us what it takes for competing ideas to
  2095	determine the content of consciousness at any given moment.
  2096	In supporting his theory, Dennett needs to undermine what we take
  2097	to be common sense. He challenges the verisimilitude of inner experi­
  2098	ence, which he calls more like theorizing than like describing. He rejects
  2099	the notion of a single central location (his "Cartesian theater") where
  2100	conscious experience can be “viewed.” He dissolves the idea of the “self”
  2101	as the central character of stories made up by content fixation and
  2102	propagation in the brain. Moreover, he argues that the properties of
  2103	qualia are incompatible and therefore incoherent, thus obviating the
  2104	need to solve Chalmers’s hard problem.20 Dennett needs all four of these
  2105	counterintuitive yet deeply probative assertions; the package is admi­
  2106	rably coherent, but buying it is a tall order.
  2107	Of Dennett’s four assertions, his desired demolition of qualia is
  2108	perhaps his most critical move. Here is how he defends it. “Qualia are
  2109	user-illusions, ways of being informed about things that matter to us in
  2110	the world (our affordances) because of the way we and the environment
  2111	we live in (microphysically) are. They are perfectly real illusions! They
  2112	just aren’t what they seem to be; they are not intrinsic, unanalyzable
  2113	properties of mental states; they are highly structured and complex
  2114	activated neural networks that dispose us to do all sorts of things in
  2115	response—such as declare that we’re seeing something blue. The key
  2116	move is to recognize that we have underprivileged access to the source or
  2117	cause of our convictions about what we experience” (Rosenberg and
  2118	Dennett, 2020).
  2119	Ironically, while Dennett calls as evidence “user illusions” in his case
  2120	to deflate consciousness and support materialism, cognitive psychologist
       
  2121	Donald Hoffman calls as evidence “user illusions” in his case to inflate
  2122	consciousness and deny materialism. (16.5). This contrasting interpre­
  2123	tation of precisely the same data by two first-rate thinkers is fascinating,
  2124	perhaps telling.
  2125	Dennett is not shy in asserting that people still underestimate by a
  2126	wide margin the challenges that the brain-in-vat thought experiment
  2127	raises for views of consciousness other than Dennett’s own. The key fact
  2128	is that “you don’t know anything ‘privileged’ about the causation of your own
  2129	thoughts. You cannot know ‘from the inside” what events cause you to
  2130	think you see something as red or green, for instance, or cause you to
  2131	push button A instead of button B.” In short, to truly understand con­
  2132	sciousness, Dennett says “you need to go outside yourself and adopt the
  2133	‘third-person point of view’ of science” (Dennett, 2023a, 2023b).
  2134	Dennett stresses the importance of treating subjects’ beliefs about
  2135	their own consciousness as “data to be explained, not necessarily as true
  2136	accounts of mental reality.” He states, “This is the major fault line in
  2137	philosophy of mind today, with John Searle, Tom Nagel, David
  2138	Chalmers, Galen Strawson, and Philip Goff [all represented in this
  2139	paper], among others, thinking they can just insist they know better.
  2140	They don’t. Those who object, who hold out for some sort of ‘first-person
  2141	science of consciousness,’ have yet to describe any experiments or re­
  2142	sults that are trustworthy but unobtainable by heterophenomenology”
  2143	(the term Dennett coined for the third-person method, the phenome­
  2144	nology of other minds, which is standard procedure in cognitive science).
  2145	Dennett says his meeting with leading scientific researchers on con­
  2146	sciousness enabled him “to begin to form at least vague ideas of how
  2147	mechanisms of the brain might do all the work,” but only, he insists, “if
  2148	we deflated some of the overconfident pronouncements of introspectors
  2149	about the marvels of the phenomena” (Dennett, 2023a, 2023b).
  2150	In describing his early book, Content and Consciousness, where he puts
  2151	content before consciousness, Dennett differentiates himself from John
  2152	Searle, who puts consciousness before content. Although Searle and
  2153	Dennett are both biological naturalists and both, for example, eschew
  2154	panpsychism, Dennett believes that by prioritizing content, the mystery
  2155	of consciousness is mitigated.
  2156	Dennett has had a long, friendly, though surely adversarial rela­
  2157	tionship with Chalmers. “Even expert scientists have been fooled by
  2158	Chalmers’ ‘the Hard Problem’ into thinking that there’s one big myste­
  2159	rious fact that needs explaining, when in fact there are hundreds of lesser
  2160	problems that can be solved without any scientific revolutions, and
  2161	when they are all solved, the so-called Hard Problem will evaporate”
  2162	(Dennett, 2023a, 2023b).
  2163	It is worth noting the more general case of a multiple module way of
  2164	thinking, which posits separate if not independent cognitive components
  2165	of the mind rooted in the brain (though not needing to correspond to
  2166	identifiable brain structures). (9.2.5.)
  2167	9.2.5. Minsky’s society of mind
  2168	Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky calls the multiple semiindependent modules in the human mind, generated by physically
  2169	locatable modules in the human brain, The Society of Mind (not coinci­
  2170	dentally the name of his book). It is a model of human cognition con­
  2171	structed, step by step, from the nonconscious interactions of simple
  2172	mindless elements he calls “agents” (Minsky, 1986).
  2173	“What does it mean to say you’re aware of yourself?” Minsky asks. It
  2174	would be impossible “for any one part of the brain to know what’s
  2175	happening in all the other parts of the brain because there’s just too
  2176	much. Each part of the brain has connections to other parts of the brain
  2177	and can get some ideas, but there’s no place that knows everything”
  2178	(Minsky, 2007b).
  2179	“The Society of Mind,” according to Minsky, is the end product of a
  2180	vast evolutionary history, beginning with just clumps of neurons.
  2181	Because neurons evolved early and had to keep their physiological
  2182	integrity, progress was made by neurons gathering together, which led
  2183	to the first small brains, and when these small brains began to specialize
  2184	as well as to associate, “mind” began to develop (Minsky, 2007b).
       
  2185	20
  2186	Two witticisms exchanged by Dan Dennett and Dave Chalmers at the 2014
  2187	“Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference in Tucson, organized and
  2188	managed by Stuart Hameroff and co-organized in some years by Chalmers. Dan:
  2189	“I now know what it feels like to be a policeman at Woodstock.” Dave:
  2190	“Everyone has a crazy theory about the ‘hard problem’—even Dan, who says
  2191	there is no ‘hard problem.’”
       
  2192	49
       
  2193	R.L. Kuhn
       
  2194	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  2195	Minsky is as blunt as he is insightful. “While many neuroscientists
  2196	focus on how brain cells [neurons] work, to me, that’s pretty much like
  2197	trying to understand a computer from how transistors work. The neu­
  2198	rons and synapses are maybe six levels of organization below the
  2199	thoughts that you’re actually aware of, the important things that
  2200	distinguish a human from a crayfish. These high-level descriptions are
  2201	what counts, and each of them has to be understood by itself. Any
  2202	particular thing that happens in Level 5 can be understood as a combi­
  2203	nation of maybe 20 or 50 things that happen in Level 4 and so forth. But
  2204	you can’t understand Level 5 even if you know everything about how
  2205	neurons and synapses work. The difference between a human and a
  2206	crayfish is that a human has these multiple levels of brain organization
  2207	that the earlier animals did not have” (Minsky, 2007b).
  2208	Actually, Minsky says, “I’m interested in how this piece of machine,
  2209	the brain, can do things like decide that what it’s doing isn’t working.
  2210	How does it develop new goals? How does it develop new methods for
  2211	achieving its goals? And, most important, how does it make a model of
  2212	itself as a being in a world and think high-level stuff about its own past
  2213	and its future?”
  2214	It has been known for well over 100 years that the brain has many
  2215	different parts. Minsky envisions something “like a great network of
  2216	computers, each of which is specialized. It’s not that it’s a society of little
  2217	people, but rather a society of biological machines, say 400 or more of
  2218	these, each with different top-level functions, including the capacity to
  2219	imagine planning proposals and counterfactual histories.”
  2220	Minsky speculates that cortical columns of related neurons, which
  2221	are intermediate in complexity, can store things for a certain period
  2222	without any changes in probability or conductions. We evolved these
  2223	structures, he says, “so we could have reliable short-term memories that
  2224	represent knowledge in many different ways.” In context, Minsky advises
  2225	studying “insulation theory.” He says, “Theorists called ‘connectionists’
  2226	say what’s important about the brain is how things are connected to
  2227	each other. You could argue that it’s even more important to know how
  2228	things are insulated from each other—why you don’t get a big traffic jam
  2229	because there’s too many connections” (Minsky, 2007b).
       
  2230	What Prinz calls “attention” is a particular process of making an
  2231	integrated representation of a stimulus’ multiple properties, as
  2232	perceived from a given point of view, available to working memo­
  2233	ry—and it is this process, and only this process, that generates con­
  2234	sciousness. “Intermediateness,” as Prinz’s term of art, locates the critical
  2235	transformation when representations are “integrated into a point-ofview-retaining format that gets made available by this ’attention pro­
  2236	cess’” to working memory. This is why Prinz’s theory earns the appel­
  2237	lation, “Attended Intermediate Representation Theory” (Mole, 2013).
  2238	[Note: Prinz’s theory could be classified under Representational
  2239	Theories.]
  2240	In exploring the limits of consciousness, Prinz states, “We have no
  2241	direct experience of our thoughts, no experience of motor commands,
  2242	and no experience of a conscious self.” His strong assertion is that “All
  2243	consciousness is perceptual, and it functions to make perceptual infor­
  2244	mation available to systems that allow for flexible behavior.” Thus, Prinz
  2245	provides “a neuroscientifically grounded response to the leading argu­
  2246	ment for dualism,” and he argues that “materialists need not choose
  2247	between functional and neurobiological approaches, but can instead
  2248	combine these into neurofunctional response to the mind-body prob­
  2249	lem” (Prinz, 2012).
  2250	Prinz encourages a direct, head-to-head competition, as it were,
  2251	between his neurofunctionalism and David Chalmers’s hard problem
  2252	(Mole, 2013). “Where he [Chalmers] sought to synthesize two decades
  2253	of dualist argumentation, I [Prinz] try here to synthesize two decades of
  2254	empirical exploration” (Prinz, 2012; Mole, 2013). Whereas Chalmers
  2255	famously declares that “no explanation given in wholly physical terms
  2256	can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience.”). Prinz
  2257	counters that there is now “a satisfying and surprisingly complete theory
  2258	[contained entirely within materialism] of how consciousness arises in
  2259	the human brain” (Prinz, 2012).
  2260	9.2.8. Sapolsky’s hard incompatibilism
  2261	Neuroendocrinologist and biological anthropologist Robert Sapolsky
  2262	counts himself as a “hard incompatibilist,” affirming the truth of
  2263	determinism (i.e., all events and actions are the product of prior events
  2264	and actions) and denying the existence of free will. There is no possi­
  2265	bility, he says, “of reconciling our being biological organisms built on
  2266	the physical rules of the universe with there being free will, a soul, a ‘Me’
  2267	inside there which is somehow free of biology. You have to choose one
  2268	or the other and, philosophically, I am completely in the direction of us
  2269	being nothing more or less than our biology (and its interactions with
  2270	the environment)” (Sapolsky, 2023b).
  2271	Sapolsky’s target is free will, not consciousness, but to deal with free
  2272	will, he must deal with consciousness—after all, free will, if it exists,
  2273	would be a product of consciousness, not the reverse.
  2274	But Sapolsky is a reluctant consciousness warrior. Introducing a
  2275	section of his book labeled “What Is Consciousness?”, he enjoys some
  2276	self-deprecation. “Giving this section this ridiculous heading,” he says,
  2277	seemingly smiling, “reflects how unenthused I am about having to write
  2278	this next stretch. I don’t understand what consciousness is, can’t define
  2279	it. I can’t understand philosophers’ writing about it. Or neuroscientists’,
  2280	for that matter, unless it’s ‘consciousness’ in the boring neurological
  2281	sense, like not experiencing consciousness because you’re in a coma”
  2282	(Sapolsky, 2023a).
  2283	Referencing the Libet experiments (9.1.2), which purport to disso­
  2284	ciate conscious awareness from brain decision-making, Sapolsky argues
  2285	that “three different techniques, monitoring the activity of hundreds of
  2286	millions of neurons down to single neurons, all show that at the moment
  2287	when we believe that we are consciously and freely choosing to do
  2288	something, the neurobiological die has already been cast. That sense of
  2289	conscious intent is an irrelevant afterthought.” In another context with
  2290	another metaphor, he calls consciousness “an irrelevant hiccup”
  2291	(Sapolsky, 2023a).
  2292	Yet Sapolsky is not prepared to dismiss consciousness as “just an
  2293	epiphenomenon, an illusory, reconstructive sense of control irrelevant
       
  2294	9.2.6. Graziano’s attention schema theory
  2295	Advanced by neuroscientist Michael Graziano, attention schema
  2296	theory asserts that for the brain to handle a profusion of information it
  2297	must have developed a quick and dirty model, a simplified version of
  2298	itself, which it then reports “as a ghostly, non-physical essence, a
  2299	magical ability to mentally possess items” (Graziano, 2019a, 2019b). He
  2300	likens the attention schema to “a self-reflecting mirror: it is the brain’s
  2301	representation of how the brain represents things, and is a specific
  2302	example of higher-order thought. In this account, consciousness isn’t so
  2303	much an illusion as a self-caricature.”
  2304	Graziano claims that this idea, attention schema theory, gives a
  2305	simple reason, straight from control engineering, for why the trait of
  2306	consciousness would evolve, namely, to monitor and regulate attention
  2307	in order to control actions in the world. Thus, Graziano argues that “the
  2308	attention schema theory explains how a biological, information pro­
  2309	cessing machine can claim to have consciousness, and how, by intro­
  2310	spection (by assessing its internal data), it cannot determine that it is a
  2311	machine whose claims are based on computations” (Graziano, 2019a,
  2312	2019b).
  2313	9.2.7. Prinz’s neurofunctionalism: how attention engenders experience
  2314	Philosopher Jesse Prinz accounts for consciousness with two main
  2315	claims: first, consciousness always arises at a particular stage of
  2316	perceptual processing, the intermediate stage; and second, conscious­
  2317	ness depends on attention. “Attention” is Prinz’s focus in that it “changes
  2318	the flow of information allowing perceptual information to access
  2319	memory systems.” Neurobiologically, he says, “this change in flow de­
  2320	pends on synchronized neural firing. Neural synchrony is also impli­
  2321	cated in the unity of consciousness and in the temporal duration of
  2322	experience” (Prinz, 2012).
  2323	50
       
  2324	R.L. Kuhn
       
  2325	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  2326	to our actual behavior.” This strikes me, he says, “as an overly dogmatic
  2327	way of representing just one of many styles of neuroscientific thought on
  2328	the subject” (Sapolsky, 2023a).
  2329	Pushed to state what he believes consciousness is, Sapolsky demurs.
  2330	“Consciousness is beyond me to understand—every few years I read a
  2331	review from the people trying to understand it on a neurobiological
  2332	level, and I cannot understand a word of what they are saying. For me,
  2333	consciousness arises as a ‘complex emergent property’—which explains
  2334	everything and nothing” (Sapolsky, 2023b).
       
  2335	function, resolves conflicts between cortical agents, and regulates their
  2336	activities (Bach, 2019).
  2337	“The conductor is the only place where experience is integrated,”
  2338	Bach states. “Information that is not integrated in the protocol cannot
  2339	become functionally relevant to the reflection of the system, to the
  2340	production of its utterances, the generation of a cohesive self model, and
  2341	it cannot become the object of access consciousness.” Without the
  2342	conductor, he asserts, our brain can still perform most of its functions,
  2343	but we would be “sleepwalkers, capable of coordinated perceptual and
  2344	motor action, but without central coherence and reflection.”
  2345	Memories empower Bach’s theory. “Memories can be generated by
  2346	reactivating a cortical configuration via the links and parameters stored
  2347	at the corresponding point in the protocol. Reflective access to the
  2348	protocol is a process that can itself be stored in the protocol, and by
  2349	accessing this, a system may remember having had experiential access.”
  2350	For phenomenal consciousness, Bach claims “it is necessary and suffi­
  2351	cient that a system can access the memory of having had an experi­
  2352	ence—the actuality of experience itself is irrelevant.”
  2353	Phenomenal consciousness, according to Bach, “may simply be un­
  2354	derstood as the most recent memory of what our prefrontal cortex
  2355	attended to. Thus, conscious experience is not an experience of being in
  2356	the world, or in an inner space, but a memory. It is the reconstruction of
  2357	a dream generated [by] more than fifty brain areas, reflected in the
  2358	protocol of a single region. By directing attention to its own protocol, the
  2359	conductor can store and recreate a memory of its own experience of
  2360	being conscious” (Bach, 2019).
  2361	Unlike Integrated Information Theory (12), Bach says CTC is a
  2362	functionalist model of consciousness, with similarity to other function­
  2363	alist approaches, such as the ones suggested by Dennett (9.2.4) and
  2364	Graziano (9.2.6) (Bach, 2019).
       
  2365	9.2.9. Mitchell’s free agents
  2366	While neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell argues, contra many scientists
  2367	and philosophers, that free will, or agency, is not an illusion—that “we
  2368	are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting
  2369	with purpose”—he still asserts, "you cannot escape the fact that our
  2370	consciousness and our behavior emerge from the purely physical
  2371	workings of the brain” (Mitchell, 2023, p. 3).
  2372	Mitchell mounts an evolutionary case for how living beings capable
  2373	of choice arose from lifeless matter, stressing “the emergence of nervous
  2374	systems provided a means to learn about the world,” thus enabling
  2375	sentient animals to model, predict, and simulate. These faculties reach
  2376	their peak in humans with our capacities “to imagine and to be intro­
  2377	spective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures
  2378	through the exercise of our individual agency” (Mitchell, 2023).
  2379	Normally, there is high correlation between those who deny “real”
  2380	(libertarian) free will with the commitment that consciousness is
  2381	entirely physical, and conversely, those who affirm “real” (libertarian)
  2382	free will, are more likely to opt for nonphysical theories. Mitchell is
  2383	significant in that he defends “real” free will, but unambiguously has
  2384	consciousness as entirely physical. He describes creaturely acts of what
  2385	he considers “free will” before consciousness even evolved. “Thoughts
  2386	are not immaterial,” he says; “they are physically instantiated in pat­
  2387	terns of neural activity in various parts of the brain … There’s no need to
  2388	posit a ‘ghost in the machine’—you’re not haunting your own brain. The
  2389	‘ghost’ is the machine at work” (Mitchell, 2023, pp. 267–268).
       
  2390	9.2.11. Brain circuits and cycles theories
  2391	Brain circuits and cycles as mechanisms of consciousness are older
  2392	explanations, no longer considered sufficient in themselves, having
  2393	evolved into more sophisticated theories. Brain circuits cover the
  2394	following kinds of large-scale brain structures: lateral pathways across
  2395	the cerebral cortex linking diverse cortical areas (e.g., especially in the
  2396	prefrontal, cingulate and parietal regions of the cortex, which are
  2397	involved in higher-level activities such as planning and reasoning); the
  2398	reticular activating system focusing attention, shaping behaviors, and
  2399	stimulating motivation; and vertical thalamocortical radiations medi­
  2400	ating sensory and motor systems.22 Brain cycles cover electroencepha­
  2401	logram (EEG) waves over broad regions of the cerebral cortex, the
  2402	product of massive numbers of neurons firing synchronously (e.g.,
  2403	gamma waves at 40 Hz).
  2404	A contemporary explanation recruits bidirectional information
  2405	transfer between the cortex and the thalamus—recurrent cortico­
  2406	thalamic and thalamocortical pathways—which are said to regulate
  2407	consciousnesss. Evidence suggests "a highly preserved spectral channel
  2408	of cortical-thalamic communication that is present during conscious
  2409	states, but which is diminished during the loss of consciousness and
  2410	enhanced during psychchedlic states" (Toker et al., 2024).
  2411	Dendritic Integration Theory (DIT), linking neurobiology and phe­
  2412	nomenology, relates cellular-level mechanisms to conscioius experience
  2413	by leveraging "the intricate complexities of dendritic processing" in
  2414	brain circuits. Jaan Aru et al. propose that "consciousness is heavily
  2415	influenced by, or possibly even synonymous with, the functional inte­
  2416	gration of two streams of cortical and subcortical information that
  2417	impinge on different compartments of cortical layer 5 pyramidal (L5p)
  2418	cells" (Aru, 2023). The biophysical properties of pyramidal cells "allow
  2419	them to act as gates that control the evolution of global actiatation
       
  2420	9.2.10. Bach’s cortical conductor theory
  2421	Cognitive scientist Joscha Bach posits a functional explanation for
  2422	phenomenal consciousness, the cortical conductor theory (CTC), where
  2423	“cortical structures are the result of reward-driven learning, based on
  2424	signals of the motivational system, and the structure of the data that is
  2425	being learned.” Critical is the “conductor,” which is “a computational
  2426	structure that is trained to regulate the activity of other cortical func­
  2427	tionality. It directs attention, provides executive function by changing
  2428	the activity and parameterization and rewards of other cortical struc­
  2429	tures, and integrates aspects of the processes that it attended to into a
  2430	protocol. This protocol is used for reflection and learning” (Section:
  2431	Bach, 2019).
  2432	Bach has CTC’s “elementary agents” as columns in the cerebral
  2433	cortex that “self-organize into the larger organizational units of the brain
  2434	areas as a result of developmental reinforcement learning. The activity
  2435	of the cortical orchestra is highly distributed and parallelized, and
  2436	cannot be experienced as a whole.” However, its performance is coor­
  2437	dinated by the conductor, which is not a homunculus, “but like the other
  2438	instruments, a set of dynamic function approximators” (situated in
  2439	prefrontal cortex21). Whereas most cortical instruments, he says,
  2440	“regulate the dynamics and interaction of the organism with the envi­
  2441	ronment (or anticipated, reflected and hypothetical environments), the
  2442	conductor regulates the dynamics of the orchestra itself.” The process is
  2443	based on signals of the motivational system and it provides executive
       
  2444	21
  2445	Bach notes, “In the human brain, the functionality of the conductor is likely
  2446	facilitated via the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and
  2447	anterior insula. The conductor has attentional links into most regions” (Bach,
  2448	2019).
       
  2449	22
  2450	My PhD research at UCLA’s Brain Research Institute, under Professor John
  2451	Schlag, was on the thalamocortical pathway; my thesis title: “An Analysis of
  2452	Cortical Evoked Potentials and Concomitant Neuronal Population Activity.”
       
  2453	51
       
  2454	R.L. Kuhn
       
  2455	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  2456	patterns," such that "In conscious states, this cellular mechanism enables
  2457	complex sustained dynamics withn the thalamocortical system, whereas
  2458	during unconscious states, such signal propagation is prohibiited," Aru
  2459	et al. suggest that the DIT "hallmark of conscious processing is the
  2460	flexible integration of bottom-up and top-down data streams at the
  2461	cellular level" (Aru, 2023, 2020).
       
  2462	Upfront, Bunge defines his idiosyncratic position: ‘‘I am an un­
  2463	abashed monist’’—his objective is “to reunite matter and mind”—and ‘‘I
  2464	am a materialist but not a physicalist.’’ By the latter distinction, Bunge
  2465	means that while the material world is all there is (i.e., there are no
  2466	nonmaterial substances), the laws of physics cannot explain all phe­
  2467	nomena (i.e., “physics can explain neither life nor mind nor society”)
  2468	(Bunge, 2011; Slezak, 2011).
  2469	Bunge calls his theory, or more precisely, his “programmatic hy­
  2470	pothesis,” about the mind-body problem “emergent materialism”—his
  2471	core concept being that “mental states form a subset (albeit a very
  2472	distinguished one) of brain states (which in turn are a subset of the state
  2473	space of the whole animal).” The hypothesis is unambiguously materi­
  2474	alist, even though “biosystems, including their mental states, have
  2475	properties that are not reducible to their physical and chemical prop­
  2476	erties.” Mind, according to Bunge, “is just a collection of functions (ac­
  2477	tivities, events) of an extremely complex central nervous system.”
  2478	Mental states are distinguished from brain states broadly in that mental
  2479	states reflect only those brain states that exhibit neural plasticity,
  2480	especially learning, in contrast to brain states that are more phyloge­
  2481	netically fixed (Bunge, 1980; 2014).
  2482	Approaching the mind-body problem as a general systems theorist,
  2483	Bunge shows, in particular, “how the concept of a state space can be used
  2484	to represent the states and changes of state of a concrete thing such as
  2485	the central nervous system.” He stresses the concept of emergence—he
  2486	defines an emergent property as “a property possessed by a system but
  2487	not by its components.” He then focuses on the level where such
  2488	emergence occurs, arguing that “the mental cannot be regarded as a
  2489	level on a par with the physical or the social.” The upshot, he says, is “a
  2490	rationalist and naturalist pluralism.” While he rejects Dualism (15) as
  2491	both untestable and contradictory to science, he also rejects Eliminative
  2492	Materialism (9.1.1) and reductive materialism (9.1.7) “for ignoring the
  2493	peculiar (emergent) properties of the central nervous system.” He opts
  2494	for “emergentist materialism” as a variety of “psychoneural monism,”
  2495	but cautions that it needs detailed mechanisms, especially mathematical
  2496	ones (Bunge, 1977).
  2497	Bunge trains his delightfully acerbic guns on choice theories: com­
  2498	putationalism (“a sophisticated version of behaviorism,” “brainless
  2499	cognitive science”); studying higher level mental phenomena rather
  2500	than neuroscience and ‘‘objective brain facts’’ (“Cartesian mind-body
  2501	dualism,” “psychoneural dualism”); philosophical zombies (‘‘respon­
  2502	sible people do not mistake conceptual possibility, or conceivability, for
  2503	factual possibility or lawfulness; and they do not regard the ability to
  2504	invent fantasy worlds as evidence for their real existence’’); and pan­
  2505	psychism (‘‘illustrates the cynical principle that, given an arbitrary
  2506	extravagance, there is at least one philosopher capable of inventing an
  2507	even more outrageous one’’) (Slezak, 2011; Bunge, 2011).
  2508	Bunge also criticizes that “the division of scientific labor has reached
  2509	such a ridiculous extreme that many workers in neuroscience and psy­
  2510	chology tend to pay only lip service to the importance of studies in
  2511	development and evolution for the understanding of their subject.” Such
  2512	neglect of development and evolution, he says, has had at least three
  2513	undesirable consequences: 1) overlooking the biological maturation of
  2514	the central nervous system (e.g., the corpus callosum takes up to a
  2515	decade to develop); 2) exaggerating leaps at the expense of graduality
  2516	(particularly of the information-processing variety); and conversely, 3)
  2517	exaggerating continuity at the expense of quantitative novelty (animal
  2518	psychologists who claim that human mental abilities differ only in de­
  2519	gree from prehuman ones) (Bunge, 1989).
  2520	In sum, to explain behavior and mentation in scientific terms, Bunge
  2521	calls for a synthesis or merger of neuroscience and social science, rather
  2522	than for a reduction, “even though the behavioral and mental processes
  2523	are neurophysiological.” Put philosophically, “this is a case of ontolog­
  2524	ical reduction without full epistemological reduction” (Bunge, 1989).
       
  2525	9.2.12. Northoff’s temporo-spatial sentience
  2526	Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Georg Northoff postulates what he
  2527	calls “sentience” as “a more basic and fundamental dimension of con­
  2528	sciousness,” and he proposes that sentience arises via “temporo-spatial
  2529	mechanisms”—characterized by brain activity, spatiotemporal rela­
  2530	tionship, and structure—with which “the brain constructs its own
  2531	spontaneous activity [that] are key for making possible the capacity to
  2532	feel, namely sentience.” Northoff’s model is based on his supposition
  2533	that “in addition to the level/state and content of consciousness, we
  2534	require a third dimension of consciousness, the form or structure or
  2535	organization of consciousness.” Thus, his “temporo-spatial theory of
  2536	consciousness” leads him to posit “specific neuro-ecological and neurovisceral mechanisms that are, in their most basic nature, intrinsically
  2537	temporospatial.” We have this capacity to feel and thus for sentience, he
  2538	says, “because our brain continuously integrates the different inputs
  2539	from body and environment within its own ongoing temporo-spatial
  2540	matrix” (Northoff, 2021).
  2541	Northoff distinguishes “spatiotemporal neuroscience” from cognitive
  2542	neuroscience and related branches (like affective, social, etc.) in that
  2543	spatiotemporal neuroscience focuses on brain activity (rather than brain
  2544	function), spatiotemporal relationship (rather than input-cognitionoutput relationship), and structure (rather than stimuli/contents). In
  2545	this sense, spatiotemporal neuroscience “allows one to conceive the
  2546	neuro-mental relationship in dynamic spatiotemporal terms that com­
  2547	plement and extend (rather than contradict) their cognitive character­
  2548	ization” (Northoff et al., 2020).
  2549	Finally, Northoff and colleagues feel “the need to dissolve the mindbody problem (and replace it by the world-brain relation).” They also
  2550	address other philosophical issues like assuming “time (and space) to be
  2551	constructed in different scales, small and long, with all different scales
  2552	being nested (like the different Russian dolls) within each other.” For
  2553	example, “a mental feature may be characterized by an extremely short
  2554	and restricted spatiotemporal scale which, if abstracted and thereby
  2555	detached from its underlying longer and more extended scale may seem
  2556	to be non-dynamic and thus a re-presentation of an event or object. This
  2557	is like taking one smaller Russian doll out and consider it in isolation
  2558	from all the others (and, even worse, forgetting that any of the others
  2559	were ever present).” If, in contrast, they suggest, “one conceives the
  2560	spatiotemporal scale of mental features in the larger context of other
  2561	spatiotemporal scales, one can take into view their nestedness.” In this
  2562	view, Northoff has mental features as “nothing but a small Russian doll
  2563	that is nested within the longer and more extended scales of the brain’s
  2564	spontaneous activity (which, by itself, is nested within the yet much
  2565	larger spatiotemporal scales of body and world)” (Northoff et al., 2020).
  2566	9.2.13. Bunge’s emergent materialism
  2567	Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge rejects any “separate mental
  2568	entity,” calling it “a stumbling block to progress.” It is “unwarranted by
  2569	the available data and the existing psychological models,” he says, and it
  2570	collides “head-on with the most fundamental ideas of all modern sci­
  2571	ence.” Rather, Bunge argues that the mind-body problem requires a
  2572	psychobiological approach, based on the assumption that behavior is an
  2573	external manifestation of neural processes—an approach that also
  2574	abandons ordinary language in favor of a “state space language, which is
  2575	mathematically precise and is shared by science and scientific philoso­
  2576	phy” (Bunge, 1980; 2014). More broadly, he presents a systematic
  2577	model of mankind as a “biopsychosocial entity” and he favors “the
  2578	multilevel approach” over “the holistic, the analytic, and the synthetic
  2579	approaches” (Bunge, 1989).
       
  2580	9.2.14. Hirstein’s mindmelding
  2581	William Hirstein argues that it is “the assumption of privacy”—the
  2582	52
       
  2583	R.L. Kuhn
       
  2584	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  2585	deep, metaphysical impossibility for one person to ever experience the
  2586	conscious states of another—that has led philosophers and scientists to
  2587	claim wrongly that the conscious mind can never be explained in
  2588	straightforwardly physical terms and thus to “create vexing dualisms,
  2589	panpsychisms, views that would force changes in our current theories in
  2590	physics, views that deny the reality of consciousness, or views that claim
  2591	the problem is insoluble.” Hirstein seeks to undermine “the assumption
  2592	of privacy” by the thought experiment of “mindmelding”: connecting
  2593	one person’s cerebral cortex control network to another person’s cere­
  2594	bral cortex visual attention network. This would entail inter-brain rather
  2595	than the normal intra-brain coupling. Then the first person might
  2596	correctly say, “Wow, I am experiencing your conscious visual states. Did
  2597	you know you are color blind?” The control network functions as a
  2598	referent for “I”—the subject of the visual states—and the other person’s
  2599	conscious visual states are the referent for “your conscious visual states.”
  2600	As such, mindmelding would support phenomenal consciousness as
  2601	entirely physical, realizable in terms of neurobiology, which would be
  2602	both necessary and sufficient (Hirstein, 2012).
       
  2603	electromagnetic fields), produced by different neuronal assemblies,
  2604	“present different qualia or aspects of the whole object/scene/concept.”
  2605	At the same time, “the wholeness of the consciously perceived or
  2606	imagined is a result of synchronized operations (electromagnetic fields)
  2607	of many transient neuronal assemblies in the form of dynamic and everincreasing spatiotemporal patterns termed Operational Modules
  2608	(OM)”—where new OM configurations generate an almost infinite
  2609	number and complexity of phenomenal qualities, patterns, and objects
  2610	(Fingelkurts, 2024; Fingelkurts et. al., 2019, 2020).
  2611	Adding credence to electromagnetic field theories are recent dis­
  2612	coveries of large-scale, cerebral cortex-wide interacting spiral wave
  2613	patterns of brain waves that are said to underlie complex brain dynamics
  2614	and are related to cognitive processing. That the human brain exhibits
  2615	rich and complex electromagnetic patterns, with brain spirals propa­
  2616	gating across the cortex and giving rise to spatiotemporal activity dy­
  2617	namics with non-stationary features and having functional correlates to
  2618	cognitive processing, would be consistent with their role in conscious­
  2619	ness (Xu et al., 2023).
       
  2620	9.3. Electromagnetic field theories
       
  2621	9.3.1. Jones’s electromagnetic fields
  2622	Philosopher Mostyn Jones gathers, explains and classifies various
  2623	electromagnetic-field theories, each with its own theoretical foundation:
  2624	computationalist, reductionist, dualist, realist, interactionist, epi­
  2625	phenomenalist, globalist, and localist. He uses three questions to classify
  2626	the field theories: 1. How do minds exist relative to fields? 2. Are minds
  2627	unified by global or local fields? 3. How extensively do fields and neu­
  2628	rons interact? (Jones, 2013).
  2629	The claim is made that electromagnetic fields in the brain can solve
  2630	the “binding problem,” where distinct sensory modules combine to give
  2631	a unified sense of phenomenal experience—say, melding the red and
  2632	roundness of a balloon into a single percept. For example, there doesn’t
  2633	seem to be a single synthesizing brain area into which all visual circuits
  2634	feed, nor any well-known cortical circuits that bind (unite) color and
  2635	shape to form unified images. However, perceptual binding does seem to
  2636	involve the synchronized firing of circuits in unified lockstep (with a
  2637	temporal binding code) for specific sensory modalities (e.g., shape), but
  2638	neurons in color and shape circuits don’t synchronize. Mostyn states that
  2639	“while binding involves synchrony, binding seems to be more than
  2640	synchrony,” thus giving field theories the opening to unify visual
  2641	experience via a single field, not by a single brain area or by synchrony
  2642	(yet synchrony does amplify field activity) (Jones, 2013).
  2643	Mostyn claims that evidence is mounting that unified neural elec­
  2644	tromagnetic fields interact with neuronal cells and circuits to explain
  2645	correlations and divergences between synchrony, attention, conver­
  2646	gence, and unified minds, and that the simplest explanation for the unity
  2647	of minds and fields is that minds are fields (Jones, 2017). Moreover,
  2648	some electromagnetic-field theorists even put qualia itself on the
  2649	explanatory agenda (Jones, 2013).
  2650	Jones poses “neuroelectrical panpsychism” (NP) as “a clear, simple,
  2651	testable mind–body solution” based on the conjunction of its two
  2652	component theories: (i) “everything is at least minimally conscious,” and
  2653	(ii) “electrical activity across separate neurons creates a unified, intel­
  2654	ligent mind.” According to Jones, NP is bolstered by neuroelectrical
  2655	activities that generate different qualia, unite them to form perceptions
  2656	and emotions, and help guide brain operations. He claims, ambitiously,
  2657	that “NP also addresses the hard problem of why minds accompany
  2658	these neural correlates.” He offers the radical identity that “the real
  2659	nature of matter-energy (beyond how it appears to sense organs) is
  2660	consciousness that occupies space, exerts forces, and unites neuro­
  2661	electrically to form minds.” He also has NP solving panpsychism’s
  2662	combination problem “by explaining how the mind’s subject and ex­
  2663	periences arise by electrically combining simple experiences in brains”
  2664	(Jones, 2024).
       
  2665	Electromagnetic (EM) Field Theories treat minds as identical to, or
  2666	derivative from, the broader, brain-spanning EM fields generated by the
  2667	cumulative aggregate of multiple, specific neural currents. The brain is
  2668	packed with an intricate three-dimensional web of these EM fields—the
  2669	question is what functions do these EM fields serve (if any), and whether
  2670	these fields in any way relate to consciousness?
  2671	Diverse studies are said to support an EM field theory. For example,
  2672	“transient periods of synchronization of oscillating neuronal discharges
  2673	in the frequency range 30–80 Hz (gamma oscillations) have been pro­
  2674	posed to act as an integrative mechanism that may bring a widely
  2675	distributed set of neurons together into a coherent ensemble that un­
  2676	derlies a cognitive act.” Transitions between the moment of perception
  2677	and the motor response are marked by periods of strong desynchroni­
  2678	zation, which suggests “a process of active uncoupling of the underlying
  2679	neural ensembles that is necessary to proceed from one cognitive state to
  2680	another” (Rodriguez, 1999).
  2681	The stability of working memory is said to emerge at the level of the
  2682	electric fields that arise from neural activity, more than from the specific
  2683	neural activity itself, as “the exact neurons maintaining a given memory
  2684	(the neural ensemble) change from trial to trial.” In the face of this
  2685	“representational drift,” electric fields carry information about working
  2686	memory content, enable information transfer between brain areas and
  2687	“can act as ‘guard rails’ that funnel higher dimensional variable neural
  2688	activity along stable lower dimensional routes” (Pinotsis and Miller,
  2689	2022).
  2690	Electric fields, applied externally, have been shown to modulate
  2691	pharmacologically evoked neural network activity in rodent hippo­
  2692	campus and to enhance and entrain physiological neocortical neural
  2693	network activity (i.e., neocortical slow oscillation) in vitro as a model
  2694	system. Both show the neural efficacy of weak sinusoidal and natural­
  2695	istic electric fields (Fröhlich and McCormick, 2010).
  2696	Neuroinformatics/EEG neuroscientists Andrew and Alexander Fin­
  2697	gelkurts formulate a framework of “Operational Architectonics (OA) of
  2698	Brain-Mind Functioning,” where “consciousness is an emergent phe­
  2699	nomenon of coherent but dynamic interaction among operations pro­
  2700	duced by multiple, relatively large, long-lived and stable, but transient
  2701	neuronal assemblies in the form of spatiotemporal patterns within the
  2702	brain’s electromagnetic field.” OA’s architectural structure is “charac­
  2703	terized by a nested hierarchy of operations of increasing complexity:
  2704	from single neurons to synchronized neuronal assemblies and further to
  2705	the operational modules of integrated neuronal assemblies.” Conscious
  2706	phenomena are “brought to existence” by the brain generating a “dy­
  2707	namic, highly structured, extracellular electromagnetic field in spatio­
  2708	temporal domains and over a wide frequency range.”
  2709	Neurophysiological substrates of single operations (standing
       
  2710	9.3.2. Pockett’s conscious and non-conscious patterns
  2711	Psychologist Susan Pockett’s electromagnetic field theory of
  2712	53
       
  2713	R.L. Kuhn
       
  2714	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  2715	consciousness proposes that “while conscious experiences are identical
  2716	with certain electromagnetic patterns generated by the brain” have al­
  2717	ways been acknowledged, it is critical to “specify what might distinguish
  2718	conscious patterns from non-conscious patterns … the 3D shape of
  2719	electromagnetic fields that are conscious, as opposed to those that are
  2720	not conscious.” She calls this “a testable hypothesis about the charac­
  2721	teristics of conscious as opposed to non-conscious fields” (Pockett,
  2722	2012).
  2723	Moreover, Pockett argues that the central dogma of cognitive psy­
  2724	chology that “consciousness is a process, not a thing” is “simply wrong.”
  2725	All neural processing is unconscious, she asserts. “The illusion that some
  2726	of it is conscious results largely from a failure to separate consciousness
  2727	per se from a number of unconscious processes that normally accom­
  2728	pany it—most particularly focal attention. Conscious sensory experi­
  2729	ences are not processes at all. They are things: specifically, spatial
  2730	electromagnetic (EM) patterns, which are presently generated only by
  2731	ongoing unconscious processing at certain times and places in the
  2732	mammalian brain, but which in principle could be generated by hard­
  2733	ware rather than wetware” (Pockett, 2017).
       
  2734	that outputs are correlated with multiple inputs: the information inte­
  2735	gration is implemented in time, rather than space, and thereby cannot
  2736	correspond to physically integrated information.” He stresses that “only
  2737	energy fields are capable of integrating information in space” and he
  2738	defines CEMI field theory whereby “consciousness is physically inte­
  2739	grated, and causally active, [with] information encoded in the brain’s
  2740	global electromagnetic (EM) field.” Moreover, he posits that “con­
  2741	sciousness implements algorithms in space, rather than time, within the
  2742	brain’s EM field,” and he describes CEMI field theory as “a scientific
  2743	dualism that is rooted in the difference between matter and energy,
  2744	rather than matter and spirit” (McFadden, 2020).
  2745	9.3.4. Ephaptic coupling
  2746	An ephaptic coupling theory of consciousness leverages the idea that
  2747	neurons, being electrogenic, produce electric fields, which, if suffi­
  2748	ciently strong and precisely placed, can influence the electrical excit­
  2749	ability of neighboring neurons near-instantaneously (Chen, 2020).
  2750	Assuming that ephaptic coupling occurs broadly in the brain, it could
  2751	support, or even help constitute, an electromagnetic field theory of
  2752	consciousness.
  2753	Experiments show that a neural network can generate “sustained
  2754	self-propagating waves by ephaptic coupling, suggesting a novel prop­
  2755	agation mechanism for neural activity under normal physiological
  2756	conditions.” There is clear evidence that “slow periodic activity in the
  2757	longitudinal hippocampal slice can propagate without chemical synap­
  2758	tic transmission or gap junctions, but can generate electric fields which
  2759	in turn activate neighboring cells.” These results “support the hypothesis
  2760	that endogenous electric fields, previously thought to be too small to
  2761	trigger neural activity, play a significant role in the self-propagation of
  2762	slow periodic activity in the hippocampus” (Chiang et al, 2019).
  2763	Ephaptic coupling of cortical neurons, independent of synapses, has
  2764	been demonstrated by stimulating and recording from rat cortical py­
  2765	ramidal neurons in slices. Results showed that extracellular fields,
  2766	despite their small size, “could strongly entrain action potentials,
  2767	particularly for slow (<8 Hz) fluctuations of the extracellular field,”
  2768	indicating that “endogenous brain activity can causally affect neural
  2769	function through field effects under physiological conditions”
  2770	(Anastassiou et al., 2011).
  2771	Mesoscopic ephaptic activity in the human brain has been explored,
  2772	including its trajectory during aging, in a sample of 401 realistic human
  2773	brain models from healthy subjects aged 16–83. “Results reveal that
  2774	ephaptic coupling … significantly decreases with age, with higher
  2775	involvement of sensorimotor regions and medial brain structures. This
  2776	study suggests that by providing the means for fast and direct interaction
  2777	between neurons, ephaptic modulation may contribute to the
  2778	complexity of human function for cognition and behavior” (Ruffini
  2779	et al., 2020).
       
  2780	9.3.3. McFadden’s conscious electromagnetic information theory
  2781	Molecular geneticist Johnjoe McFadden proposes conscious elec­
  2782	tromagnetic information (CEMI) field theory as an explanation of con­
  2783	sciousness. His central claim is that “conventional theories of
  2784	consciousness (ToCs) that assume the substrate of consciousness is the
  2785	brain’s neuronal matter fail to account for fundamental features of
  2786	consciousness, such as the binding problem,” and he posits that the
  2787	substrate of consciousness is best accounted by the brain’s well-known
  2788	electromagnetic (EM) field (McFadden, 2023).
  2789	Electromagnetic field theories of consciousness (EMF-ToCs) were
  2790	first proposed in the early 2000s primarily to account for the experi­
  2791	mental discovery that synchronous neuronal firing was a strong neural
  2792	correlate of consciousness (NCC) (McFadden, 2002). While McFadden
  2793	has EMF-ToCs gaining increasing support, he recognizes that “they
  2794	remain controversial and are often ignored by neurobiologists and
  2795	philosophers and passed over in most published reviews of conscious­
  2796	ness.” In his own review, McFadden examines EMF-ToCs against
  2797	established criteria for distinguishing between competing ToCs and ar­
  2798	gues that “they [EMF-ToCs] outperform all conventional ToCs and
  2799	provide novel insights into the nature of consciousness as well as a
  2800	feasible route toward building artificial consciousnesses” (McFadden,
  2801	2023).
  2802	McFadden references the neurophysiology of working memory in
  2803	support of CEMI theory. He states that “although the exact neurons (the
  2804	neural ensemble) maintaining a given memory in working memory
  2805	varies from trial to trial, what is known as representational drift, sta­
  2806	bility of working memory emerges at the level of the brain’s electric
  2807	fields as detected by EEG.” This means, he argues that “since working
  2808	memory is considered to be, essentially, conscious memory,” con­
  2809	sciousness “resides in the brain’s electromagnetic fields rather than in its
  2810	neurons, acting as the brain’s global workspace.” He asserts that “the
  2811	higher level of correlation between the contents of working memory and
  2812	the brain’s EM fields, rather than the state of the brain’s matter-based
  2813	neurons, is a considerable challenge to all neural-ToCs” (McFadden,
  2814	2023).
  2815	McFadden positions CEMI field theory (or EMF-ToCs) as providing
  2816	“an objective criterion for distinguishing conscious from non-conscious
  2817	EM fields. This arises from the requirement that, to be reportably
  2818	conscious, a system must be able to generate (rather than merely
  2819	transmit) thoughts as gestalt (integrated) information—our
  2820	thoughts—that can be communicated to the outside world via a motor
  2821	system” (McFadden, 2023).
  2822	In distinguishing CEMI field theory from Integrated Information
  2823	Theory (12), McFadden argues that “nearly all examples of so-called
  2824	‘integrated information’, including neuronal information processing
  2825	and conventional computing, are only temporally integrated in the sense
       
  2826	9.3.5. Ambron’s local field potentials and electromagnetic waves
  2827	Biologist and pain researcher Richard Ambron suggests that under­
  2828	standing the specific consciousness of pain might help to understand the
  2829	mechanism of consciousness in general. Pain is ideal for studying con­
  2830	sciousness, he says, because it receives priority over all other sensations,
  2831	reflecting its criticality for survival (Ambron, 2023a, 2023b; Ambron
  2832	and Sinav, 2022).
  2833	Pain starts at the site of injury where damaged cells release small
  2834	molecular compounds that bind to the terminals of peripheral neurons
  2835	and trigger action potentials which encode information about the injury.
  2836	The greater the severity of the injury, the greater the number and fre­
  2837	quency of action potentials, and the greater the intensity of pain.
  2838	The pain pathway is well documented: from periphery to spinal cord
  2839	to the thalamus, where we first become aware of the injury but do not
  2840	feel the affect of onerous pain. Rather, the region for feeling the hurt­
  2841	fulness of pain is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), where input from
  2842	the thalamus activates a complex neuronal circuit. Essential are the
  2843	pyramidal neurons, which have a triangular cell body and a long
  2844	54
       
  2845	R.L. Kuhn
       
  2846	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  2847	dendrite with many branches that are vital for experiencing pain.
  2848	Because information transmitted between neurons must traverse the
  2849	minuscule space between them—the synapse—axons from thalamic
  2850	neurons transmit to dendrites of ACC neurons by releasing a neuro­
  2851	transmitter that traverses the gap, binds to the dendritic endings and
  2852	triggers action potentials. When there is prolonged activity at the syn­
  2853	apse in response to a serious injury, the synapses become “hyperre­
  2854	sponsive” and strengthened. This strengthening, called long-term
  2855	potentiation (LTP), sensitizes the synapse so that it takes fewer action
  2856	potentials to cause pain. This is why even a gentle touch to the site of an
  2857	injury will hurt (Ambron, 2023a, 2023b; Ambron and Sinav, 2022).
  2858	In addition to housing circuits for pain, the ACC receives information
  2859	from other brain regions. For example, inputs from the amygdala can
  2860	increase the intensity of the pain due to anxiety or fear, whereas those
  2861	from the nucleus accumbens can reduce the pain if the reward for
  2862	bearing the pain is considered worthwhile. Thus, what we experience as
  2863	pain depends on interactions among several areas of the brain.
  2864	To maintain electro-neutrality after an injury, there is an efflux of
  2865	positive ions from the cell body that forms a local field potential (LFP)
  2866	and creates electromagnetic (EM) waves in the extracellular space
  2867	around the pyramidal neurons. In Ambron’s novel move, he posits that
  2868	these EM waves now contain the information about the pain that was
  2869	previously encoded in the action potentials. In other words, the pain
  2870	information was transferred from action potentials to LFPs to EM waves,
  2871	which could influence nearby circuits, such as those for attention.
  2872	Ambron speculates that these EM waves contribute to consciousness.
  2873	Assuming information from other senses is also transformed into EM
  2874	waves, it also might help solve the “binding/combination problem,”
  2875	because integrating information from all the waves could explain how
  2876	individual sensory inputs combine to create “a unified, coherent version
  2877	of the world.” Unlike most theories of consciousness, Ambron believes
  2878	his hypothesis can be tested (Ambron, 2023a, 2023b).
       
  2879	of action potentials between excitable cells with the cell-cell distance
  2880	more than 10 mm (an anatomically astronomical distance in cortex).”
  2881	Moreover, “when longitudinal cells are arranged in parallel separately,
  2882	the action potential generated from one cell can ‘jump’ to other cells and
  2883	cause all the cells to fire action potentials in concert. If two cells fire
  2884	action potentials spontaneously and have their own rhythm, they tend to
  2885	‘learn’ from each other, adjust their own pace, eventually lock their
  2886	phases, and ‘remember’ this common rhythm for a long while” (Zhang,
  2887	2019).
  2888	Zhang notes, “unlike synaptic neuronal network, which is a physio­
  2889	logical transmission with the velocity of 0.2–120 m/s (synaptic delay
  2890	period is not included), traveling electrical field mediated transmission
  2891	… [has] the velocity of light speed.” In a cortical circuit, he says, “the
  2892	synaptic elements provide delicate and precise connections; while the
  2893	traveling electrical field, may provide transient, rapid, flexible rather
  2894	than fixed connections to synchronize rhythmic action potentials fired
  2895	from axons which are arranged in parallel and are well insulated by
  2896	dielectric media.”
  2897	How does “this invisible ‘tele’ bridge-linked synchronization or
  2898	harmony” work? According to Zhang, neural action potentials in human
  2899	brain circuits produce clusters of traveling electrical fields. Those with
  2900	similar frequency tend to be synchronized. Integration, imagination,
  2901	remembering, creating, etc. require considerable energy, and if these
  2902	processes are simply synchronizations between different brain regions,
  2903	the energy conserving property of sync facilitates performing these
  2904	mental activities.
  2905	Having worked on synaptic transmission for 20 years, Zhang muses:
  2906	“Glutamate receptors, for instance, are found in both human and cray­
  2907	fish synapses. Human receptors are not any ‘smarter’ than those of
  2908	crayfish.” It would be very narrow minded, he says, “to study human
  2909	synapses, which evolved from those of squid and crayfish, hoping to find
  2910	a magic thinking molecule.” If there is no super-highway (light speed)
  2911	above the traditional synaptic networks, he concludes, “I just cannot
  2912	imagine how people can be an intelligent life-form” (Zhang, 2019).
       
  2913	9.3.6. Llinas’s mindness state of oscillations
  2914	Neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas’s theory of the “mindness state” is
  2915	centered on the concept of oscillations. Many neurons possess electrical
  2916	activity, manifested as oscillating variations in the minute voltages
  2917	across the cell membrane. On the crests of these oscillations occur larger
  2918	electrical events that are the basis for neuron-to-neuron communication.
  2919	Like cicadas chirping in unison, a group of neurons oscillating in phase
  2920	can resonate with a distant group of neurons. This simultaneity of
  2921	neuronal activity, Llinas maintains, is the neurobiological root of
  2922	cognition. Although the internal state that we call the mind is guided by
  2923	the senses, it is also generated by the oscillations within the brain. Thus,
  2924	in a certain sense, Llinas would say that reality is not all "out there," but
  2925	is a kind of virtual reality (Llinas, 2002, 2007).
       
  2926	9.4. Computational and Informational Theories
  2927	Computation and Information Theories feature advanced computa­
  2928	tional structures, resonance systems, complex adaptive systems,
  2929	information-theory models, and mathematical models, all of which are
  2930	held, in whole or in part, as theories of consciousness.
  2931	9.4.1. Computational theories
  2932	Computational theories of mind developed organically as the pro­
  2933	cessing power of computers expanded exponentially to enable the
  2934	emulation of mind-like capabilities such as memory, knowledge struc­
  2935	ture, perception, decision-making, problem solving, reasoning and lin­
  2936	guistic comprehension (especially with the advent of human-like large
  2937	language models like ChatGPT). The growing field of cognitive science
  2938	owes its development to computational theories (Rescorla, 2020).
  2939	There is a reciprocal, recursive, positive-feedback relationship as
  2940	computational theories of mind seek both to enhance the power and
  2941	scope of computing and to advance understanding of how the human
  2942	mind actually works. Classical computational theories of mind, which
  2943	exemplify functionalism (9.1.3), are based on algorithms, which are
  2944	routines of systematic, step-by-step instructions, and on Turing ma­
  2945	chines, which are abstract models of idealized computers with unlimited
  2946	memory and time that process one operation at a time (with super-fast
  2947	but not unlimited speed).
  2948	Artificial intelligence adds logic, seeking to automate reason­
  2949	ing—deductive at first, then inductive and higher-order forms. Neural
  2950	networks, with a connectionism construct, were a step-function
  2951	advance. For example, chess computers have reigned supreme since
  2952	1997 when Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion, Gary Kas­
  2953	parov. But whereas the process has been literally massive brute-force
  2954	calculations—hundreds of millions of “nodes” per second (a “node” is
       
  2955	9.3.7. Zhang’s long-distance light-speed telecommunications
  2956	Synaptic neuroscientist Ping Zhang suggests that “the long-time
  2957	puzzle between brain and mind” might be solved by “a light-speed
  2958	telecommunication between remote cells that are arranged in paral­
  2959	lel.” He bases his theory on “the law of synchronization,” where “all the
  2960	individuals are connected to each other rigidly (or in a light-speed
  2961	momentum network), energy radiated from one individual will be
  2962	propagated to and conserved in all other individuals in light speed”
  2963	(Zhang, 2019).23
  2964	In explaining “how a ‘school’ of neurons in human brain behaves like
  2965	a light-speed rigid network and concentrates on a task,” Zhang cites his
  2966	own observation of “the traveling electrical field mediated transmission
       
  2967	23
       
  2968	Zhang adds, “Energy radiated from all individuals [in a synchronized sys­
  2969	tem] will be fed back to each individual at exactly the same time. Energy states
  2970	of all individuals tend to even up; entropy increase tends to be maximal when
  2971	sync is established; one’s energy output is another’s energy input. The system
  2972	tends to be energy conservatively beneficial and stable” (Zhang, 2019).
  2973	55
       
  2974	R.L. Kuhn
       
  2975	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  2976	a chess position with its evaluation and history)—recent advances in
  2977	algorithmic theory are dramatically improving capabilities. The impli­
  2978	cations go way beyond chess and are apparent.
  2979	Philosopher-futurist Nick Bostrom espouses a computational theory
  2980	of consciousness, which is consistent with his view that there is a distinct
  2981	possibility that our world and universe, our total state of affairs, is a
  2982	computer simulation (Bostrom, 2003, 2006). The logic is almost a tau­
  2983	tology: A computer simulation would require, by definition, that our
  2984	consciousness, and the consciousnesses of all sentient creatures, would
  2985	be, ipso facto, computational consciousness. Of course, Bostrom does not
  2986	argue that we are living in a simulation, so his computationalism as a
  2987	theory of consciousness is motivated by other factors, including
  2988	computational neuroscience. In fact, one could make the case that the
  2989	arrow of causal explanation points in the reverse direction: Conscious­
  2990	ness as computational would need to be a condition precedent, neces­
  2991	sary but not sufficient, for the simulation argument to be coherent.
  2992	Computer/AI scientist James Reggia explains that efforts to create
  2993	computational models of consciousness have been driven by two main
  2994	motivations: “to develop a better scientific understanding of the nature
  2995	of human/animal consciousness and to produce machines that genu­
  2996	inely exhibit conscious awareness.” He offers three conclusions: “(1)
  2997	computational modeling has become an effective and accepted meth­
  2998	odology for the scientific study of consciousness; (2) existing computa­
  2999	tional models have successfully captured a number of neurobiological,
  3000	cognitive, and behavioral correlates of conscious information processing
  3001	as machine simulations; and (3) no existing approach to artificial con­
  3002	sciousness has presented a compelling demonstration of phenomenal
  3003	machine consciousness, or even clear evidence that artificial phenom­
  3004	enal consciousness will eventually be possible” (Reggia, 2013).
  3005	Computer scientist Kenneth Steiglitz argues that all available the­
  3006	ories of consciousness “aren’t up to the job” in that “they don’t tell me
  3007	how I can know whether a particular candidate is or is not phenomenally
  3008	conscious.” Moreover, he says, we will never be able to answer the
  3009	question of AI consciousness—because “it is simply not possible to test
  3010	for consciousness.” This presents, Steiglitz worries, dangers of two kinds:
  3011	(1) damaging or even destroying our own consciousness, and (2)
  3012	bringing about new consciousness that will not be treated with proper
  3013	respect and quite possible suffer (Steiglitz, 2024).
  3014	Steiglitz states three principles of what we think we know about
  3015	consciousness—the dual nature of mind and body, the dependence of
  3016	mind on body, and the dependence of mind on computation—and he
  3017	calls them all absurd, because “these do not follow from physics, biology,
  3018	or logic.” He muses, “I wish I had a theory to account for conscious­
  3019	ness—but I don’t see how any theory could” (Steiglitz, 2024).
  3020	Philosophy-savvy attorney Andrew Hartford proposes an EP (Eternal
  3021	Past) Conjecture such that “If there ever is something there always was
  3022	something, because no-thing comes from Nothing,” and that “the always
  3023	existor exists before all time, process or computation.” What follows, he
  3024	says, is that while “it remains to be seen whether artificial consciousness
  3025	is in the domain of all possibilities, we should not presume that we will
  3026	necessarily build computational consciousness” (Hartford, 2014).
  3027	The mildly dismissive critique is that the computational theory of
  3028	mind follows the historical trend of analogizing the mind to “the science
  3029	of the day,”.24
       
  3030	idea is that the mind is an activity, not a thing, a verb not a noun—it’s
  3031	what you do, not what you have or use. His theoretical foundation is
  3032	“Adaptive Resonance Theory” (ART), a cognitive and neural concept of
  3033	how the brain autonomously learns to consciously attend, learn, cate­
  3034	gorize, recognize, and predict objects and events in a changing world
  3035	(Grossberg, 2013). Central to ART’s predictive power is its ability to
  3036	carry out fast, incremental, and stable unsupervised and supervised
  3037	learning in response to external events.
  3038	ART specifies mechanistic links in advanced brains that connect
  3039	processes regulating conscious attention, seeing, and knowing, with
  3040	those regulating looking and reaching. Consciousness thus enables
  3041	learning, expectation, attention, resonance, and synchrony during both
  3042	unsupervised and supervised learning. These mechanistic links arise
  3043	from basic properties of brain design principles such as complementary
  3044	computing, hierarchical resolution of uncertainty, and adaptive reso­
  3045	nance. These principles, recursively, require conscious states to mark
  3046	perceptual and cognitive representations that are complete, context
  3047	sensitive, and stable enough to control effective actions (Grossberg,
  3048	2019).
  3049	Foundational to Grossberg’s way of thinking is the idea that all
  3050	biological processes, notably our brains, self-organize, and that all
  3051	cellular systems illustrate variations of a universal developmental code.
  3052	All these processes are regulated using physically different instantiations
  3053	of mechanistically similar laws of short-term memory or activation, and
  3054	long-term memory or learned memory, that are conserved across spe­
  3055	cies, including in our brains (Grossberg, 2021).
  3056	Resonance in the brain comes about via bottom-up patterns inter­
  3057	acting with learned top-down expectations, leading to a persistent
  3058	resonant state that can also lead to conscious awareness when it includes
  3059	feature-selective cells that represent qualia. In this way, Grossberg uses
  3060	ART to explain many mind and brain data about how humans
  3061	consciously see, hear, feel, and know things (Grossberg, 2023).
  3062	At the risk of oversimplification, Grossberg’s unified theory of mind
  3063	has three “laws” of consciousness: (i) All conscious states are resonant
  3064	states; (ii) only resonant states with feature-based representations can
  3065	become conscious; (iii) multiple resonant states can resonate together.
  3066	He believes that the varieties of brain resonances and the conscious
  3067	experiences that they support make progress towards solving the hard
  3068	problem of consciousness (Grossberg, 2017).
  3069	9.4.3. Complex adaptive systems models
  3070	A complex adaptive system (CAS) is a dynamic network of in­
  3071	teractions whose collective behavior may not be predictable from its
  3072	component behaviors and that can “adapt” or alter its individual and
  3073	collective behavior, creating novelties. A CAS works, broadly, via kinds
  3074	of mutation and self-organizing principles related to change-initiating
  3075	events at different levels of its organizational structure (from micro to
  3076	collective), motivated in a loose sense by kinds of rules or trophisms
  3077	(Complex Adaptive System, 2023).
  3078	The application of CAS to consciousness can be argued from two
  3079	perspectives. First, because the brain is a classic CAS in that it is the most
  3080	complex system in the known universe—the brain has roughly (order of
  3081	magnitude) 100 billion neurons and one quadrillion (1015) con­
  3082	nections—with constant adaptations and emergences of novel functions
  3083	or activities, and because consciousness is the output of the brain,
  3084	therefore consciousness is a CAS.
  3085	Second, characteristics of consciousness per se are characteristics of a
  3086	CAS: interactions are non-linear and chaotic in that small changes in
  3087	inputs can cause large changes in outputs (e.g., minor physical or psy­
  3088	chological stimuli can trigger major behavioral responses); histories are
  3089	relevant for current and future evolution of the system; thresholds are
  3090	critical for initiating new actions; interactions can be recursive and
  3091	unpredictable; and the system is open such that boundaries may not be
  3092	definable (Rose, 2022).
  3093	Understanding consciousness as an intelligent CAS may affect how
  3094	we assess its impact on its environment; for example, how anthropology
       
  3095	9.4.2. Grossberg’s adaptive resonance theory
  3096	To computational neuroscientist Stephen Grossberg, "all conscious
  3097	states are resonant states." The conscious brain is the resonant brain
  3098	where attentive consciousness regulates actions that interact with
  3099	learning, recognition, and prediction (Grossberg, 2019). Grossberg’s
       
  3100	24
  3101	Closer To Truth videos on Computational Theory of Mind, including Rod­
  3102	ney Brooks, Andy Clark, Donald Hoffman, Susan Greenfield, Peter Tse, Anirban
  3103	Bandyopadhyay, Ken Mogi—https://closertotruth.com/video/broro-003/?
  3104	referrer=8107.
       
  3105	56
       
  3106	R.L. Kuhn
       
  3107	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  3108	conceives of culture (Laughlin, 2023). Consciousness may be modeled as
  3109	an intelligent CAS where intelligence means solving problems by
  3110	mediating between sensory input and behavioral output. Evolution of an
  3111	intelligent CAS is said to result in emergent properties.
       
  3112	formulated by Dennis Gabor). (“Holonomic” refers to representations in
  3113	a Hilbert phase space defined by both spectral and space-time co­
  3114	ordinates.) (Section: Holonomic brain theory, 2023).
  3115	Holograms are three-dimensional images encoded on twodimensional surfaces and Pribram’s claim is that this counterintuitive
  3116	capacity is fundamental in explaining consciousness. (There is precedent
  3117	in that the holographic principle in quantum cosmology describes black
  3118	hole entropy and information, with applications in string theory and
  3119	quantum gravity [Holographic principle, 2024].)
  3120	Holograms are generated from patterns of interference produced by
  3121	superimposed wavefronts, created by split beams of coherent radiation
  3122	(i.e., lasers) that are recorded and later re-constructed. A prime char­
  3123	acteristic is that every part of the stored information is distributed over
  3124	the entire hologram. Even if most parts of the hologram are damaged, as
  3125	long as any part of the hologram is large enough to contain the inter­
  3126	ference pattern, that part can recreate the entirety of the stored image
  3127	(but if the image is too small it will be noisy, blurry)
  3128	The application of holographic models to consciousness was inspired
  3129	by this non-locality of information storage within the hologram. It was
  3130	Karl Pribram who first noted the similarities between an optical holo­
  3131	gram and memory storage in the human brain, extrapolating what
  3132	psychologist Karl Lashley had discovered about the wide distribution of
  3133	memory in the cerebral cortex of rats following diverse surgical lesions.
  3134	Pribram had worked with Lashley on Lashley’s engram experiments,
  3135	which sought to determine exact locations of specific memories in pri­
  3136	mate brains by making small lesions. The surprising result was that these
  3137	targeted extirpations had little effect on memory. In contrast, removing
  3138	large areas of cortex caused multiple serious deficits in memory and
  3139	cognitive function. The conclusion was a milestone in neuroscience:
  3140	Memories are not stored in a single circuit or exact location, but were
  3141	spread over the entirety of a neural network. Thus, according to Holo­
  3142	nomic Brain Theory, memories are stored in holographic-like fashion
  3143	within certain general regions, but stored non-locally within those re­
  3144	gions. This enables the brain to maintain function and memory even
  3145	after it is damaged. (This can explain why some children retain normal
  3146	intelligence when large portions of their brains—in some cases, half­
  3147	—are removed.) (Holonomic brain theory, 2023).
  3148	More fundamentally, Holonomic Brain Theory conjectures that
  3149	consciousness is formed by quantum events within or between neurons.
  3150	This early theory of quantum consciousness, which Pribram developed
  3151	initially with physicist David Bohm, combines quantum biology with
  3152	holographic storage. Pribram suggests these processes involve electric
  3153	oscillations in the brain’s fine-fibered dendritic webs, which differ from
  3154	the commonly accepted action potentials along axons and traversing
  3155	synapses. These oscillations are waves and create wave interference
  3156	patterns in which memory is encoded such that a piece of a long-term
  3157	memory is similarly distributed over a dendritic arbor. The remark­
  3158	able result is that each part of the dendritic network contains all the
  3159	information stored over the entire network—a mechanism that maps
  3160	well onto laser-generated holograms. Thus, Holonomic Brain Theory is
  3161	said to enable distinctive features of consciousness, including the fast
  3162	associative memory that connects different pieces of stored information
  3163	and the non-locality of memory storage (a specific memory is not stored
  3164	in a single location; there is no dedicated group or circuit of specific
  3165	neurons) (Holonomic brain theory, 2023).
  3166	Although Holonomic Brain Theory has not come to threaten main­
  3167	stream neuroscience, it has intriguing features that should be explored. I
  3168	don’t hold it against the theory that it has stimulated unusual and cre­
  3169	ative speculations; for example, holographic duality and the physics of
  3170	consciousness (Awret, 2022); holographic principle of mind and the
  3171	evolution of consciousness (Germine, 2018); and quantum hologram
  3172	theory of consciousness as a framework for altered states of conscious­
  3173	ness research (Valverde et al., 2022). In fact, for a theory to have a shot
  3174	at explaining consciousness, if it does not stimulate strange ideas, it
  3175	probably doesn’t have the disruptive firepower that is surely required.
  3176	For example, physicist Uziel Awret’s dual-aspect information theory
       
  3177	9.4.4. Critical brain hypothesis
  3178	According to biophysicist John Beggs, the Critical Brain Hypothesis
  3179	“suggests that neural networks do their best work when connections are
  3180	not too weak or too strong.” This intermediate “critical” case avoids “the
  3181	pitfalls of being excessively damped or amplified.” In criticality, the
  3182	brain capacity for transmitting more bits of information is enhanced
  3183	(Beggs, 2023).
  3184	The hypothesis posits that the brain operates optimally near the
  3185	critical point of phase transitions, oscillating between subcritical, crit­
  3186	ical, and modestly supercritical conditions. “The brain is always tee­
  3187	tering between two phases, or modes, of activity,” Beggs explains; “a
  3188	random phase, where it is mostly inactive, and an ordered phase, where
  3189	it is overactive and on the verge of a seizure.” The hypothesis predicts,
  3190	he says, that “between these phases, at a sweet spot known as the critical
  3191	point, the brain has a perfect balance of variety and structure and can
  3192	produce the most complex and information-rich activity patterns. This
  3193	state allows the brain to optimize multiple information processing tasks,
  3194	from carrying out computations to transmitting and storing information,
  3195	all at the same time” (Beggs, 2023).
  3196	The Critical Brain Hypothesis traces its origin to physicist Per Bak,
  3197	who suggests that “the brain exhibits ‘self-organized criticality,’ tuning
  3198	to its critical point automatically. Its exquisitely ordered complexity and
  3199	thinking ability arise spontaneously … from the disordered electrical
  3200	activity of neurons.” Founding his ideas on statistical mechanics, Bak
  3201	hypothesizes that, “like a sandpile, the network balances at its critical
  3202	point, with electrical activity following a power law. So when a neuron
  3203	fires, this can trigger an ‘avalanche’ of firing by connected neurons, and
  3204	smaller avalanches occur more frequently than larger ones” (Ouellette,
  3205	2018).
  3206	The same sense of a critical brain being “just right,” Beggs says, also
  3207	explains why information storage, which is driven by the activation of
  3208	groups of neurons called assemblies, can be optimized. “In a subcritical
  3209	network, the connections are so weak that very few neurons are coupled
  3210	together, so only a few small assemblies can form. In a supercritical
  3211	network, the connections are so strong that almost all neurons are
  3212	coupled together, which allows only one large assembly. In a critical
  3213	network, the connections are strong enough for many moderately sized
  3214	groups of neurons to couple, yet weak enough to prevent them from all
  3215	coalescing into one giant assembly. This balance leads to the largest
  3216	number of stable assemblies, maximizing information storage” (Beggs,
  3217	2023).
  3218	Beggs claims that “experiments both on isolated networks of neurons
  3219	and in intact brains have upheld many of these predictions” derived
  3220	from networks operating near the critical point, especially in the cortex
  3221	of different species, including humans. For example, it is possible to
  3222	disrupt the critical point. “When humans are sleep deprived, their brains
  3223	become supercritical, although a good night’s sleep can move them back
  3224	toward the critical point.” It thus appears, he suggests, that “brains
  3225	naturally incline themselves to operate near the critical point, perhaps
  3226	just as the body keeps blood pressure, temperature and heart rate in a
  3227	healthy range despite changes to the environment” (Beggs, 2023).
  3228	Two challenges are identified: (i) how is criticality maintained or
  3229	“fine-tuned” in a biological environment (Ouellette, 2018), and (ii)
  3230	“distinguishing between the apparent criticality of random noise and the
  3231	true criticality of collective interactions among neurons” (Beggs, 2023).
  3232	9.4.5. Pribram’s holonomic brain theory
  3233	Neurosurgeon/neuroscientist Karl Pribram’s Holonomic Brain The­
  3234	ory is the novel idea that human consciousness comes about via quan­
  3235	tum effects in or between brain cells such that the brain acts as a
  3236	holographic storage network (building on theories of holograms
  3237	57
       
  3238	R.L. Kuhn
       
  3239	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  3240	of consciousness—holographic-duality—is motivated by certain antiphysicalist problem intuitions associated with representational content
  3241	and spatial location and attempts to provide these with a topic neutral,
  3242	consciousness-independent explanation—which, he says “is ‘hard’
  3243	enough to make a philosophical difference and yet ‘easy’ enough to be
  3244	approached scientifically.” This is achieved by, “among other things,
  3245	showing that it is possible to conceive of physical scenarios that protect
  3246	physicalism from the conceivability argument without needing to
  3247	explain all the other anti-physicalist problem intuitions.” Awret argues
  3248	that “abstract algorithms are not enough to solve this problem and that a
  3249	more radical ‘computation’ that is inspired by physics and that can be
  3250	realized in ‘strange metals’ may be needed” (Awret, 2022).
       
  3251	“this double life of information spaces corresponds to a duality at a deep
  3252	level.” He even suggests that this “double realization” of information is
  3253	the key to the fundamental connection between physical processes and
  3254	conscious experience. If so, Doyle concludes, we might develop a truly
  3255	fundamental theory of consciousness. And it may just be that informa­
  3256	tion itself is fundamental (Doyle, n.d.b).
  3257	9.4.7. Informational realism and emergent information theory
  3258	Philosopher/theologian/mathematician William Dembski argues
  3259	that “informational realism,” understood properly, can “dissolve the
  3260	mind-body problem.” Information realism “asserts that the ability to
  3261	exchange information is the defining feature of reality, of what it means,
  3262	at the most fundamental level, for any entity to be real.” It does not deny,
  3263	he says, the existence of things (i.e., entities or substances). Rather, it
  3264	defines things as “their capacity for communicating or exchanging in­
  3265	formation with other things,” such that “things make their reality felt by
  3266	communicating or exchanging information.” This means that informa­
  3267	tion is “the relational glue that holds reality together” and “thus assumes
  3268	primacy in informational realism” (Dembski, 2021, 2023).
  3269	A key move in dissolving the mind-body problem, according to
  3270	Dembski, is to substitute information for perception under an informa­
  3271	tional realism framework, thereby giving the mind direct access to
  3272	fundamental properties (9.8.10). Moreover, he says, informational re­
  3273	alism is “able to preserve a common-sense realism that idealism has
  3274	always struggled to preserve” because all things simply communicate
  3275	information to their “immediate surroundings, which then ramifies
  3276	through the whole of reality, reality being an informationally connected
  3277	whole” (Dembski, 2021, 2023).
  3278	Engineering professor Jaime Cardenas-Garcia links consciousness
  3279	with “infoautopoiesis” (i.e., the process of self-production of informa­
  3280	tion) and seeks to “demystify” both. Infoautopoiesis, he says, “allows a
  3281	human organism-in-its-environment to uncover the bountifulness of
  3282	matter and/or energy as expressions of their environmental spatial/
  3283	temporal motion/change, i.e., as information or Batesonian differences
  3284	which make a difference.” Thus, “individuated, internal, inaccessible,
  3285	semantic information is the essence of consciousness,” and neither selfproduced information nor consciousness is “a fundamental quantity of
  3286	the Universe” (Cardenas-Garcia, 2023).
  3287	Independent researcher Daniel Boyd presents Emergent Information
  3288	Theory (EIT) to bridge the mind-body gap by considering biological and
  3289	technological information systems as a possible mechanism of “nonmaterial mind” (as defined in an informational context) influencing the
  3290	physical body. EIT uses the term “information” as exemplified by com­
  3291	puter binary “values.” While associated with a physical state (e.g., a
  3292	magnetic polarity) they are distinct from it. The system design allows the
  3293	“value” to be deduced from the state. However, being not composed of
  3294	matter or energy the value itself, as defined, cannot interact with or be
  3295	detected by any device. Yet it is these values that underlie the com­
  3296	puter’s function. EIT proposes that brain function is based on compa­
  3297	rable primitive information associated with neuronal states (Boyd,
  3298	2020).
  3299	These basic units of information are of no use individually. In com­
  3300	puters they are combined to form hierarchical levels of organ­
  3301	ization—bytes, subroutines and programs—which cannot be observed,
  3302	but can be deduced using the coding systems used to create them. Each
  3303	level has properties that do not exist in underlying levels: the “emer­
  3304	gence” referred to in EIT. Brain functions are based on equivalent hi­
  3305	erarchical, emergent phenomena which are equally non-detectable. This
  3306	applies not just to consciousness, but to all functional brain phenomena.
  3307	That, in an organic system, this generic approach can result in the
  3308	remarkable properties of consciousness should come as no surprise.
  3309	Based on the top-down causation that is common in strongly emergent
  3310	systems, EIT provides a mechanism for the influence of non-material
  3311	mind over the physical body (Boyd, 2020).
       
  3312	9.4.6. Doyle’s experience recorder and reproducer
  3313	“Information Philosopher” Bob Doyle proposes the “Experience
  3314	Recorder and Reproducer (ERR)” as an information model for the mind.
  3315	He says that the mind, like software, is immaterial information, a human
  3316	being “is not a machine, the brain is not a computer, and the mind is not
  3317	processing digital information.” His proposal is that “a minimal primitive
  3318	mind would need only to ‘play back’ past experiences that resemble any
  3319	part of current experience, because “remembering past experiences has
  3320	obvious relevance (survival value) for an organism.” However, beyond
  3321	its survival value, “the ERR evokes the epistemological ‘meaning’ of
  3322	information perceived in that it may be found in the past experiences
  3323	that are reproduced by the ERR, when stimulated by a new perception
  3324	that resembles past experiences in some way” (Section: Doyle, n.d.b).
  3325	Without prior similar experience, new perceptions will be "mean­
  3326	ingless." A conscious being is constantly recording information about its
  3327	perceptions of the external world and most importantly for ERR, it is
  3328	simultaneously recording its feelings. Experiential data such as sights,
  3329	sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations are recorded in a sequence
  3330	in association with emotional states, such as pleasure and pain, fear and
  3331	comfort levels, etc. This means that when the experiences are repro­
  3332	duced (played back in a temporal sequence), the accompanying emo­
  3333	tions are once again felt, in synchronization. The capability of
  3334	reproducing experiences is critical to learning from past experiences, so
  3335	as to make them guides for action in future experiences.
  3336	The ERR biological model has information stored in “neurons that
  3337	have been wired together.” (Neuroscientist Donald Hebb said that
  3338	"neurons that fire together wire together.”) The stored information does
  3339	not get recalled or retrieved (as computers do) to create a representation
  3340	that can be viewed. Doyle prefers to call the reproduction a “re-pre­
  3341	sentation” in that the ERR is simply presenting or “re-presenting" the
  3342	original experience in all parts of the conscious mind connected by the
  3343	neural assembly. Humans are conscious of our experiences because they
  3344	are recorded in (and reproduced on demand from) the information
  3345	structures in our brains. Mental information houses the content of an
  3346	individual (Doyle, n.d.b).
  3347	ERR, Doyle says, also solves the "binding problem,” the unification of
  3348	experience, because the sensory components are bound together when
  3349	initially stored in the ERR (together with the accompanying emotion).
  3350	They remain bound on playback. “They do not have to be assembled
  3351	together by an algorithmic scheme.”
  3352	Consciousness, Doyle says, can be defined in information terms as a
  3353	property of an entity (usually a living thing but can also include com­
  3354	puters and artificial intelligence) that reacts appropriately to the infor­
  3355	mation (and particularly to changes in the information) in its
  3356	environment. In the context of information philosophy, Doyle posits that
  3357	the Experience Recorder and Reproducer can provide us with “infor­
  3358	mation consciousness.”
  3359	The treatment of information is said to link the physical and the
  3360	phenomenal. Wherever there is a phenomenal state, it realizes an in­
  3361	formation state, which is also realized in the cognitive system of the
  3362	brain. Conversely, for at least some physically realized information
  3363	spaces, whenever an information state in that space is realized physi­
  3364	cally, it is also realized phenomenally. This leads Doyle to suppose that
  3365	58
       
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  3368	9.4.8. Mathematical theories
  3369	Mathematics can apply to consciousness in two ways. The first
  3370	approach involves methods, models and simulations that are increas­
  3371	ingly rigorous and sophisticated, describing and explaining essential
  3372	features and mechanisms of conscious experience, primarily its struc­
  3373	ture, level, content and dynamics (Labh, 2024). Here mathematics
  3374	supports various headline theories. Integrated Information Theory (12)
  3375	relies on a mathematical determination of consciousness. Friston’s
  3376	Free-Energy Principle formalizes and optimizes the representational
  3377	capacities of physical/brain systems (9.5.4). Hoffman’s Conscious Re­
  3378	alism (Idealism) utilizes a mathematical formulation of consciousness
  3379	(16.5).
  3380	The second approach posits deep claims that mathematical struc­
  3381	tures form the foundations of consciousness, much as mathematical
  3382	structures form the foundations of quantum mechanics. In a sense, the
  3383	first way, clear and common, is epistemological; the second, highly
  3384	speculative, is ontological.
  3385	As for mathematics as ontology, Max Tegmark has the entire uni­
  3386	verse, all reality, as a fundamental mathematical structure (Tegmark,
  3387	2014a). Roger Penrose has the Platonic world of perfect forms as pri­
  3388	mary such that physical and mental worlds are its “shadows.” We
  3389	“perceive mathematical truths directly,” Penrose says, in that “whenever
  3390	the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato’s
  3391	world of mathematical concepts” (Penrose, 1996). Both visions,
  3392	certainly controversial, would be consistent with mathematical con­
  3393	structions of consciousness, suggesting that consciousness is “made of’
  3394	mathematics.
  3395	Initiatives to link the abstract formal entities of mathematics, on the
  3396	one hand, and the concreta of conscious experience, on the other hand,
  3397	have proliferated, the challenge being to “represent conscious experi­
  3398	ence in terms of mathematical spaces and structures.” But what is “a
  3399	mathematical structure of conscious experience?” (Kleiner and Ludwig,
  3400	2023).
  3401	Mathematicians Johannes Kleiner and Tim Ludwig seek a general
  3402	method to identify and investigate structures of conscious experi­
  3403	ence—quality, qualia or phenomenal spaces—to perhaps serve as a
  3404	framework to unify approaches from different fields. Their prime cri­
  3405	terion is that for a mathematical structure to be literally of conscious
  3406	experience, rather than merely a tool to describe conscious experience,
  3407	“there must be something in conscious experience that corresponds to
  3408	that structure.” In simple terms, they say, such a mathematical structure
  3409	consists of two building blocks: the first brings in one or more sets called
  3410	the ‘domains’ of the structure, where the elements of sets correspond to
  3411	aspects of conscious experiences. The second are relations or functions
  3412	which are defined on the domains. The authors claim that this definition
  3413	does not rely on any specific conception or aspects of conscious expe­
  3414	rience. Rather, it can work with any theory of consciousness in that
  3415	“every conscious experience comes with a set of aspects,” whether ho­
  3416	listic, irreducible approaches to qualia and phenomenal properties, or
  3417	theories built on atomistic conceptions of consciousness such as multiple
  3418	mind modules (Kleiner and Ludwig, 2023).
  3419	Mathematician Yucong Duan proposes a mathematically based “bug”
  3420	theory of consciousness in that, with respect to consciousness, a bug is
  3421	“not only a limitation in information processing, but also an illusion that
  3422	leads human beings to create abstract and complete semantics and use
  3423	them as tools” (Duan and Gong, 2024a). He calls mathematics as “the
  3424	language of consciousness,” required to find patterns, periodicity, rele­
  3425	vance and other characteristics in consciousness, to reveal causal re­
  3426	lationships and interactions among them, and to understand the
  3427	structure, dynamics and functions of consciousness.” For example,
  3428	“dynamic system theory can describe the evolution track and stable state
  3429	of consciousness, and information theory can quantify the information
  3430	flow and entropy value in consciousness, thus revealing the dynamic
  3431	characteristics and information processing mechanism of conscious­
  3432	ness.” Moreover, Fourier transform can “decompose complex con­
  3433	sciousness signals into simple frequency components and reveal the laws
       
  3434	and mechanisms of consciousness activities through frequency domain
  3435	analysis, filtering and time-frequency analysis”—combining to yield
  3436	“new perspectives of consciousness regularities.” Duan does recognize
  3437	the limitations of mathematics (Duan and Gong, 2024b).
  3438	9.5. Homeostatic and affective theories
  3439	Homeostatic and Affective Theories stress predictive, homeostatic,
  3440	free-energy (active inference), equilibrium, and emotion-related the­
  3441	ories, and have become increasingly recognized as important theories of
  3442	consciousness.
  3443	9.5.1. Predictive theories (Top-down)
  3444	Top-down predictive theories highlight brain-based, central-to-pe­
  3445	ripheral, efferent influence on sensory organs more than peripheral-tocentral, afferent sensory perceptions—and while top-down predictive
  3446	models may or may not be themselves explanations of consciousness,
  3447	they give insight into the nature of consciousness and its evolutionary
  3448	development. Top-down is a fundamental principle of how brains work
  3449	and it would be surprising if it were not relevant for understanding
  3450	consciousness.
  3451	According to Anil Seth and Tim Bayne, there are two general ap­
  3452	proaches to understanding consciousness via the centrality of top-down
  3453	signaling in shaping and enabling conscious perception. The first is
  3454	reentry theories where recurrent, reentrant pathways are in some sense
  3455	conscious perceptions—and thus reentry theories are theories of con­
  3456	sciousness per se. The second approach, broadly described as predictive
  3457	processing, starts instead from a foundation principle of how the brain
  3458	works—in terms of prediction as a core principle underlying perception,
  3459	action, and cognition, and therefore does not directly specify theories of
  3460	consciousness. Nonetheless, the “core claim of reentry theory and pre­
  3461	dictive processing (PP) is that conscious mental states are associated
  3462	with top-down signaling (reentry, thick arrows) that, for PP, convey
  3463	predictions about the causes of sensory signals (thin arrows signify
  3464	bottom-up prediction errors), so that continuous minimization of pre­
  3465	diction errors implements an approximation to Bayesian inference”
  3466	(Seth and Bayne, 2022).
  3467	Cognitive philosopher Andy Clark puts it succinctly: Rather than
  3468	your brain perceiving reality passively, your brain actively predicts it.
  3469	Your brain is a powerful, dynamic prediction engine, mediating our
  3470	experience of both body and world. From the most mundane experiences
  3471	to the most sublime, reality as we know it is the complex synthesis of
  3472	predictive expectation and sensory information, “sculpting” all human
  3473	experience. Thus, the extraordinary explanatory power of the predictive
  3474	brain (Clark, 2023).
  3475	Leveraging the work of Karl Friston (9.5.4), Clark states that in
  3476	predictive processing, perception is structured around prediction, which
  3477	he suggests is the fundamental operating principle of the brain (Musser,
  3478	2023a,b). While the rudimentary evolutionary driver of the predictive
  3479	brain is simply survival, staying alive, the emergence of consciousness
  3480	can be seen as facilitating the predictive capabilities in terms of
  3481	awareness, responsiveness, and conformity to external realities.
  3482	Clark stresses that even though biological brains are increasingly cast
  3483	as “prediction machines” this should not constrain us “to embrace a
  3484	brain-bound ‘neurocentric’ vision of the mind.” The mind, such views
  3485	mistakenly suggest, consists entirely of the skull-bound activity of the
  3486	predictive brain, an inference from predictive brains to skull-bound
  3487	minds that Clark rejects. Predictive brains, he argues, can be apt par­
  3488	ticipants in larger cognitive circuits. The path is thus cleared for a new
  3489	synthesis in which predictive brains act as entry-points for extended
  3490	minds (9.7.1), and embodiment and action contribute constitutively to
  3491	knowing contact with the world (Clark, 2017a; 2017b.)
  3492	Cognitive psychologist Richard Gregory pioneered conceptualizing
  3493	the brain as actively shaping perception, not the assumed inert recep­
  3494	tacle of sensory signals. (Gregory himself credited Herman von Helm­
  3495	holtz for realizing that “perception is not just a passive acceptance of
  3496	59
       
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  3499	stimuli, but an active process involving memory and other internal
  3500	processes.”) Gregory’s key insight was that “the process whereby the
  3501	brain puts together a coherent view of the outside world is analogous to
  3502	the way in which the sciences build up their picture of the world, by a
  3503	kind of hypothetico-deductive process.” Although timescales differ,
  3504	Gregory advocated the guiding principle that perception shares pro­
  3505	cesses with the scientific method. In particular, Gregory incorporated
  3506	“explicitly Bayesian concepts” into our understanding of how sensory
  3507	data is combined with pre-existing beliefs ("priors") to modify and mold
  3508	perceptions. Consciousness evolved, according to Gregory, to enable
  3509	rapid comparisons between real-world events and counterfactual sim­
  3510	ulations in order to make optimum decisions (Gregory, 2023).
  3511	Neuroscientist Rudolfo Llinas traces the evolution of the "mindness
  3512	state" to enable predictive interactions between mobile creatures and
  3513	their environment, arguing that the nervous system evolved to allow
  3514	active movement in animals. Because a creature must anticipate the
  3515	outcome of each movement on the basis of incoming sensory data, the
  3516	capacity to predict is most likely the ultimate brain function. Llinas even
  3517	suggests that Self is the centralization of prediction (Llinas, 2002).
       
  3518	emotions, continuously represents the ongoing state of the life of an
  3519	organism in terms of how close or how far that state is from ideal, that
  3520	ideal being homeostasis (Damasio and Damasio, 2023, 2024; Damasio,
  3521	1999).
  3522	Neuroanatomically, the homeostatic feeling representations are
  3523	achieved by the interoceptive system which collects signals—via inter­
  3524	oceptive axons in peripheral nerves and spinal and brainstem nucle­
  3525	i—from the entire spectrum of viscera, from smooth musculature to end
  3526	organs. Interoception is distinct from exteroception in a number of ways,
  3527	but quite importantly because it pertains to an internal, animated
  3528	landscape. Feelings represent evolving, active states but the “descri­
  3529	ber”—the nervous system—happens to be located inside the organism
  3530	being “described”, with the consequence that the describer and
  3531	described can interact. Moreover, the interaction is facilitated by the fact
  3532	that the interoceptive nervous system is especially open, given its
  3533	primitive nature, which includes neurons without myelin, whose axons
  3534	are open to receiving signals at any point in their course, away from
  3535	synapses (Damasio and Damasio, 2023, 2024).
  3536	Other reasons why homeostatic feelings are distinct, according to
  3537	Damasio, include (1) the fact that they are naturally, spontaneously,
  3538	informative; and (2) that the information they provide is used to adjust
  3539	the life process such that it may best correspond to ideal conditions. In
  3540	brief, homeostatic feelings are regulatory because their spontaneous
  3541	consciousness is used to achieve homeostasis and guarantee the
  3542	continuation of life.
  3543	Homeostatic feelings are the natural source of experiences. When they
  3544	are combined with images generated by exteroceptive channels such as
  3545	vision, they produce subjectivity.
  3546	Thus, according to Damasio, homeostatic feelings are the core phe­
  3547	nomena of consciousness. They are spontaneously conscious processes of
  3548	hybrid nature, combining mental features and bodily features. Their
  3549	presence informs the rest of the mind, e.g., the images that correspond to
  3550	current perceptions or to perceptions retrieved from memory, that (1)
  3551	life is ongoing inside a specific body/organism, and that (2) the life
  3552	process is (or is not) operating within a range conducive to the contin­
  3553	uation of life. Feelings offer spontaneous guidance on this specific issue
  3554	and are thus a key to life regulation and survival (Damasio and Damasio,
  3555	2023, 2024).
  3556	Damasio recounts that “the approach to the nature and physiology of
  3557	consciousness has taken two distinct paths. One of those paths, by far the
  3558	most frequent, has tied consciousness to cognitive processes, mainly
  3559	exteroception, and most prominently, to vision. The other path has
  3560	related consciousness to affective processes, specifically to feeling. ‘The
  3561	cognitive path’ has seen consciousness as a complex and late arrival in
  3562	biological history. It culminates in cognition writ large, e.g. exterocep­
  3563	tive processes, memory, reasoning, symbolic languages, and creativity.
  3564	The ‘affect path’ has located the emergence of consciousness far earlier
  3565	in biological history, and interoceptive processes provide the key”
  3566	(Damasio and Damasio, 2021b, 2023, 2024; Damasio, 2019).
  3567	In making his argument, Damasio explains “how and why con­
  3568	sciousness entered biology through the avenue of affect. The feelings
  3569	that translate fundamental homeostatic states—hunger, thirst, malaise,
  3570	pain, well-being, desire—offer organisms a new layer of life regulation
  3571	because of their inherent conscious status. Consciousness spontaneously
  3572	delivers valuable knowledge into the decision-making mental space.
  3573	Consciousness allows organisms to act deliberately and knowingly,
  3574	rather than acting or failing to act, automatically and blindly. Con­
  3575	sciousness is what makes deliberate life regulation possible. The
  3576	intrinsic conscious nature of feelings is their grace and was their pass­
  3577	port into natural selection. Their conscious nature is not a neutral trait.”
  3578	Damasio assumes that “the emergence of consciousness occurred when
  3579	homeostatic feelings first arose, there and then, and naturally provided
  3580	knowledge concerning life” (Damasio, 2019, 2021a; Damasio, 2019).
       
  3581	9.5.2. Seth’s “beast machine” theory
  3582	Neuroscientist Anil Seth extends top-down predictive theories with
  3583	his neuroscience-informed “beast machine” theory that conscious ex­
  3584	periences can be understood as forms of brain-based perceptual pre­
  3585	diction, within the general framework of predictive processing accounts
  3586	of brain perception, cognition, and action. More specifically, his theory
  3587	proposes that phenomenological properties of conscious experiences can
  3588	be explained by computational aspects of different forms of perceptual
  3589	prediction. A key instance of this is in the ability to account for differ­
  3590	ences between experiences of the world and experiences of the self. The
  3591	theory also proposes that the predictive machinery underlying con­
  3592	sciousness arose via a fundamental biological imperative to regulate
  3593	bodily physiology, namely, to stay alive. We experience the world
  3594	around us, and ourselves within it, with, through, and because of our
  3595	living bodies (Seth, 2021a, 2021b).
  3596	Seth says that our conscious experiences of the world and the self are
  3597	forms of brain-based prediction—which he labels “controlled halluci­
  3598	nations.”25 He asks, how does the brain transform what are inherently
  3599	ambiguous, electrical sensory signals into a coherent perceptual world
  3600	full of objects, people, and places? The key idea is that the brain is a
  3601	“prediction machine,” and that what we see, hear, and feel is nothing
  3602	more than the brain’s “best guess” of the causes of its sensory inputs.
  3603	Because perceptual experience is determined by the content of the (topdown) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals, we never
  3604	experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience in­
  3605	terpretations of them. Thus, “what we actually perceive is a top-down,
  3606	inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality, not a trans­
  3607	parent window onto whatever that reality may be.” Taking this idea
  3608	seriously and seeking its implications, Seth proposes that the contents of
  3609	consciousness are a kind of waking dream—the “controlled hallucina­
  3610	tion”—that is both more than and less than whatever the real world
  3611	really is. He offers slyly the insight that “you could even say that we’re
  3612	all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our
  3613	hallucinations, that’s what we call reality” (Seth, 2021a, 2021b).
  3614	9.5.3. Damasio’s homeostatic feelings and emergence of consciousness
  3615	Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s perspective on consciousness is
  3616	distinctive in a variety of ways. Crucially, the root process behind con­
  3617	sciousness, he argues, is that of feelings related to the interior of complex
  3618	organisms endowed with nervous systems. These feelings, which Dam­
  3619	asio calls “homeostatic” to distinguish them from the feelings of
       
  3620	25
  3621	Seth first heard the phrase “controlled hallucination” from British psy­
  3622	chologist Chris Frith and traced it back to a seminar given in the 1990s by
  3623	Ramesh Jain (Seth, 2021a).
       
  3624	9.5.4. Friston’s free-energy principle and active inference
  3625	Theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston conceptualizes consciousness
  3626	60
       
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  3629	as the natural outcome of his “free-energy principle for action and
  3630	perception (active inference),” which stresses the primacy of minimizing
  3631	in all organisms the difference between perceptual expectations
  3632	(required for homeostasis) and real-time sensory inputs (Friston et al,
  3633	2017). In this mechanism, human brains seek to minimize the differ­
  3634	ence—reduce the “surprise,” as it were—by generating internal models
  3635	that predict the external world.
  3636	As a physicist and psychiatrist, Friston says: “I find it difficult to
  3637	engage with conversations about consciousness. My biggest gripe is that
  3638	the philosophers and cognitive scientists who tend to pose the questions
  3639	often assume that the mind is a thing, whose existence can be identified
  3640	by the attributes it has or the purposes it fulfills.” The deeper question,
  3641	he asks, is “what sorts of processes give rise to the notion (or illusion)
  3642	that something exists?” Thus, Friston treats consciousness “as a process
  3643	to be understood, not as a thing to be defined.” Simply put, his argument
  3644	is that “consciousness is nothing more and nothing less than a natural
  3645	process such as evolution or the weather” (Friston, 2017).
  3646	Friston’s perspective on process leads him to “an elegant, if rather
  3647	deflationary, story about why the mind exists.” It focuses on “inference,”
  3648	which Friston characterizes as “actually quite close to a theory of
  3649	everything—including evolution, consciousness, and life itself.” We are
  3650	processes and processes can only reason towards what is “out there”
  3651	based on “sparse samples of the world; ” hence, the criticality of infer­
  3652	ence. This view, Friston says, “dissolves familiar dialectics between
  3653	mind and matter, self and world, and representationalism (we depict
  3654	reality as it is) and emergentism (reality comes into being through our
  3655	abductive encounters with the world)” (Friston, 2017).
  3656	But how did inert matter ever begin the processes that led to con­
  3657	sciousness? It starts with complex systems that are self-organizing
  3658	because they possess “attractors,” which are “cycles of mutually rein­
  3659	forcing states that allow processes to achieve a point of stability, not by
  3660	losing energy until they stop, but through what’s known as dynamic
  3661	equilibrium. An intuitive example is homeostasis ….” (Friston, 2017).
  3662	It’s at this point that Friston focuses on inference, “the process of
  3663	figuring out the best principle or hypothesis that explains the observed
  3664	states of that system we call ‘the world.’” Every time you have a new
  3665	experience, he says, “you engage in some kind of inference to try to fit
  3666	what’s happening into a familiar pattern, or to revise your internal states
  3667	so as to take account of this new fact.”
  3668	That’s why attractors are so crucial, he stresses, “because an
  3669	attracting state has a low surprise and high evidence.” A failure to
  3670	minimize surprise means “the system will decay into surprising, unfa­
  3671	miliar states” – which would threaten its existence. “Attractors are the
  3672	product of processes engaging in inference to summon themselves into
  3673	being,” he says. “In other words, attractors are the foundation of what it
  3674	means to be alive” (Friston, 2017).
  3675	Friston applies the same thinking to consciousness and suggests that
  3676	consciousness must also be a process of inference. “Conscious processing
  3677	is about inferring the causes of sensory states, and thereby navigating
  3678	the world to elude surprises … This sort of internalization of the causal
  3679	structure of the world ‘out there’ reflects the fact that to predict one’s
  3680	own states you must have an internal model of how such sensations are
  3681	generated” (Friston, 2017).
  3682	Learning as well as inference, Friston continues, relies on minimizing
  3683	the brain’s free energy. “Cortical responses can be seen as the brain’s
  3684	attempt to minimize the free energy induced by a stimulus and thereby
  3685	encode the most likely cause of that stimulus. Similarly, learning
  3686	emerges from changes in synaptic efficacy that minimize the free energy,
  3687	averaged over all stimuli encountered” (Friston, 2005).
  3688	In short, consciousness is the evolved mechanism for simulating
  3689	scenarios of the world. It is the internal emergent model that monitors
  3690	and minimizes the free energy principle, the difference between internal
  3691	perceptual expectations and real-time sensory input that reflects the
  3692	external world. Friston proposes that “the mind comes into being when
  3693	self-evidencing has a temporal thickness or counterfactual depth, which
  3694	grounds the inferences it can make about the consequences of future
       
  3695	actions.” Consciousness, he contends, “is nothing grander than inference
  3696	about my future” (Friston, 2017).
  3697	Friston’s consciousness as active inference leads to its metaphysical
  3698	stamp as “Markovian monism,” which, he says, rests upon the infor­
  3699	mation geometry induced in any system whose internal states can be
  3700	distinguished from external states—such that “the (intrinsic) informa­
  3701	tion geometry of the probabilistic evolution of internal states and a
  3702	separate (extrinsic) information geometry of probabilistic beliefs about
  3703	external states that are parameterized by internal states.” Friston calls
  3704	these information geometries intrinsic (i.e., mechanical, or state-based)
  3705	and extrinsic (i.e., Markovian, or belief-based). He suggests the mathe­
  3706	matics may help frame the origins of consciousness (Friston et al., 2020).
  3707	Several theories of consciousness build on the free-energy paradigm,
  3708	including Solms’s Affect (9.5.5), Carhart-Harris’s Entropic Brain (9.5.6)
  3709	and Projective Consciousness Model (9.5.11).
  3710	9.5.5. Solms’s affect as the hidden spring of consciousness
  3711	Neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms applies Friston’s free
  3712	energy principle to the hard problem of consciousness. He identifies the
  3713	elemental form of consciousness as affect and locates its physiological
  3714	mechanism (an extended form of homeostasis) in the upper brainstem.
  3715	Free energy minimization (in unpredicted contexts) is operationalized
  3716	“where decreases and increases in expected uncertainty are felt as
  3717	pleasure and unpleasure, respectively.” He offers reasons “why such
  3718	existential imperatives feel like something to and for an organism”
  3719	(Solms, 2019).
  3720	A physicalist, Solms argues that the brain does not “produce” or
  3721	“cause” consciousness. “Formulating the relationship between the brain
  3722	and the mind in causal terms,” he says, “makes the hard problem harder
  3723	than it needs to be. The brain does not produce consciousness in the
  3724	sense that the liver produces bile, and physiological processes do not
  3725	cause—or become or turn into—mental experiences through some
  3726	curious metaphysical transformation” (Solms, 2019).
  3727	Objectivity and subjectivity are observational perspectives, he says,
  3728	not causes and effects. “Neurophysiological events can no more produce
  3729	psychological events than lightning can produce thunder. They are dual
  3730	manifestations of a single underlying process. The cause of both light­
  3731	ning and thunder is electrical discharge, the lawful action of which ex­
  3732	plains them both. Physiological and psychological phenomena must
  3733	likewise be reduced to unitary causes, not to one another. This is merely
  3734	a restatement of a well-known position on the mind–body problem: that
  3735	of dual-aspect monism”26 (Solms, 2021b). (6.)
  3736	Given the centrality of affect in Solms’ theory of consciousness, he
  3737	must argue that emotion is the most efficient mechanism, perhaps the
  3738	only effective mechanism, to optimize survival. His reasoning applies
  3739	the free energy principle (9.5.4) in neurobiology such that feelings
  3740	would uniquely enable humans to monitor interactions with unpre­
  3741	dictable environments and modify their behaviors accordingly.
  3742	Solms explains that “complex organisms have multiple needs, each of
  3743	which must be met in its own right, and, indeed, on a context-dependent
  3744	basis, they cannot be reduced to a common denominator. For example …
  3745	fear trumps sleepiness in some contexts but not in others.” So, he says,
  3746	the needs of complex organisms like ourselves must be coded as cate­
  3747	gorical variables, which are distinguished qualitatively, not quantita­
  3748	tively. Thirst feels different from sleepiness feels different from
  3749	separation distress feels different from fear, etc., such that their com­
  3750	bined optimized resolution must be computed in a context-dependent
  3751	fashion, which would lead to “excessively complex calculations,” a
       
  3752	26
  3753	Although Solms refers to “dual-aspect monism,” his ideas relate more to the
  3754	elemental properties of bodies, namely an insulating membrane (the ectoderm
  3755	of complex organisms, from which the neural plate derives) and adaptive
  3756	behavior, rather than a theory of fundamental ontology. Hence, the inclusion
  3757	here under Materialism Theories, Homeostatic and Affective, not under
  3758	Monisms.
       
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  3762	“combinatorial explosion.” In terms of time spent and energy expended,
  3763	the invention of affect, emotion, feeling is a much more efficient algo­
  3764	rithm. Moreover, Solms adds, since “the needs of complex organisms
  3765	which can act differentially, in flexible ways, in variable contexts, are
  3766	‘color-coded’ or ‘flavored,’ this provides at least one mechanistic
  3767	imperative for qualia” (Solms, 2021a, 2021b).
  3768	Solms seeks to demystify consciousness by showing that “cortical
  3769	functioning is accompanied by consciousness if and only if it is ‘enabled’
  3770	by the reticular activating system of the upper brainstem. Damage to just
  3771	two cubic millimeters of this primitive tissue reliably obliterates con­
  3772	sciousness as a whole.” He rejects arguments that the reticular activating
  3773	system generates only the quantitative “level” of consciousness (con­
  3774	sciousness in a waking/comatose sense) and not its qualitative “con­
  3775	tents” (consciousness as experience). This is affect, Solms says, and it is
  3776	supported by “overwhelming” evidence. Therefore, since cortical con­
  3777	sciousness is contingent upon brainstem consciousness, and since
  3778	brainstem consciousness is affective, Solms concludes that “affect is the
  3779	foundational form of consciousness. Sentient subjectivity (in its elemen­
  3780	tary form) is literally constituted by affect” (Solms, 2021a).27
  3781	Solms distinguishes between information processing models in
  3782	cognitive science, which seem to lack question-askers, and selforganizing systems, which are obliged to ask questions—“their very
  3783	survival depends upon it. They must chronically ask: ‘What will happen
  3784	to my free energy if I do that?’ The answers they receive determine their
  3785	confidence in the current prediction.” This is why Solms states “not all
  3786	information processing (‘integrated’ or otherwise) is conscious;
  3787	sentience appears to be a property of only some information processing
  3788	systems with very specific properties, namely those systems that must
  3789	ask questions of their surrounding world in relation to their existential
  3790	needs” (Solms, 2021a)
  3791	In summary, Solms claims that the functional mechanism of con­
  3792	sciousness can be reduced to physical laws, such as Friston’s free-energy
  3793	law, among others. These laws, he says, “are no less capable of
  3794	explaining how and why proactively resisting entropy (i.e., avoiding
  3795	oblivion) feels like something to the organism, for the organism, than
  3796	other scientific laws are capable of explaining other natural things.
  3797	Consciousness is part of nature, and is mathematically tractable.”
  3798	As a corollary, with respect to Crick’s research program on the neural
  3799	correlates of consciousness, Solms declares that there can be no objects
  3800	of consciousness (e.g. visual ones) in the absence of a subject of con­
  3801	sciousness. To Solms, the subject of consciousness is literally constituted
  3802	by affect (Solms, 2021a).
  3803	Regarding AI consciousness, Solms posits that if his theory is correct,
  3804	“then, in principle, an artificially conscious self-organizing system can
  3805	be engineered.” The creation of an artificial consciousness would be, he
  3806	says, “the ultimate test of any claim to have solved the hard problem.”
  3807	But, he warns, “we must proceed with extreme caution.”
       
  3808	consciousness (Carhart-Harris, 2018).
  3809	The “entropy” in the Entropic Brain Hypothesis is defined as “a
  3810	dimensionless quantity that is used for measuring uncertainty about the
  3811	state of a system but it can also imply physical qualities, where high
  3812	entropy is synonymous with high disorder.” Entropy is then applied in
  3813	“the context of states of consciousness and their associated neuro­
  3814	dynamics, with a particular focus on the psychedelic state … [which] is
  3815	considered an exemplar of a primitive or primary state of consciousness
  3816	that preceded the development of modern, adult, human, normal
  3817	waking consciousness.” Based on neuroimaging data with psilocybin, a
  3818	classic psychedelic drug, Carhart-Harris argues that “the defining
  3819	feature of ‘primary states’ is elevated entropy in certain aspects of brain
  3820	function, such as the repertoire of functional connectivity motifs that
  3821	form and fragment across time. Indeed, since there is a greater repertoire
  3822	of connectivity motifs in the psychedelic state than in normal waking
  3823	consciousness, this implies that primary states may exhibit ‘criticality’”
  3824	(Carhart-Harris, 2018).
  3825	Significantly, “if primary states are critical, then this suggests that
  3826	entropy is suppressed in normal waking consciousness, meaning that the
  3827	brain operates just below criticality.” This leads to the idea that “entropy
  3828	suppression furnishes normal waking consciousness with a constrained
  3829	quality and associated metacognitive functions, including reality-testing
  3830	and self-awareness.” Carhart-Harris and colleagues also propose that
  3831	“entry into primary states depends on a collapse of the normally highly
  3832	organized activity within the default-mode network” (DMN—a set of
  3833	regions more active during passive tasks than tasks requiring focused
  3834	external attention, Buckner, 2013),28 thus maintaining the brain’s ho­
  3835	meostasis and “a decoupling between the DMN and the medial temporal
  3836	lobes (which are normally significantly coupled)” (Carhart-Harris et al.,
  3837	2014).
  3838	Increased entropy in spontaneous neural activity is one of the most
  3839	notable neurophysiological signatures of psychedelics and is said to be
  3840	relevant to the psychedelic experience, mediating both acute alterations
  3841	in consciousness and long-term effects. While overall entropy increases,
  3842	entropy changes are not uniform across the brain: entropy increases in
  3843	all regions, but the larger effect is localized in visuooccipital regions. At
  3844	the whole-brain level, this reconfiguration is related closely to the to­
  3845	pological properties of the brain’s anatomical connectivity (Herzog et al
  3846	2023). (For how psychedelic experiences and mechanisms may or may
  3847	not inform theories of consciousness, see 18.21.)
  3848	Computational neuroscientist Gustavo Deco uses the concept of
  3849	equilibrium in physics to explore consciousness. Since a physical system
  3850	is in equilibrium when in its most stable state, the question is how close
  3851	to equilibrium are the electrical states of the brain while people perform
  3852	different tasks? Using a sophisticated mathematical theorem to analyze
  3853	neuroimaging data, “they found that the brain is closer to a state of
  3854	equilibrium when people are gambling than when they are cooperat­
  3855	ing,” suggesting that “there are many shades of consciousness”
  3856	(Callaghan, 2024).
       
  3857	9.5.6. Carhart-Harris’s entropic brain hypothesis
  3858	Psychopharmacologist Robin Carhart-Harris proposes the Entropic
  3859	Brain Hypothesis in which the entropy of spontaneous brain activity
  3860	indexes the informational richness of conscious states (within upper and
  3861	lower limits, after which consciousness may be lost). A leading psy­
  3862	chedelic researcher, Carhart-Harris reports that the entropy of brain
  3863	activity is elevated in the psychedelic state, and there is evidence for
  3864	greater brain “criticality” under psychedelics. (“Criticality … is the
  3865	property of being poised at a ‘critical’ point in a transition zone between
  3866	order and disorder where certain phenomena such as power-law scaling
  3867	appear.”) He argues that “heightened brain criticality enables the brain
  3868	to be more sensitive to intrinsic and extrinsic perturbations which may
  3869	translate as a heightened susceptibility to ‘set’ and ‘setting.’” Measures
  3870	of brain entropy, he suggests, can inform the treatment of psychiatric
  3871	and neurological conditions such as depression and disorders of
  3872	27
       
  3873	9.5.7. Buzsáki’s neural syntax and self-caused rhythms
  3874	Neuroscientist György Buzsáki presents the brain as “a foretelling
  3875	device that interacts with its environment through action and the ex­
  3876	amination of action’s consequence,” restructuring its internal rhythms
  3877	in the process. In his telling, “our brains are initially filled with nonsense
  3878	patterns, all of which are gibberish until grounded by action-based in­
  3879	teractions. By matching these nonsense ‘words’ to the outcomes of ac­
  3880	tion, they acquire meaning.” Once brain circuits are “calibrated” or
  3881	trained by action and experience, “the brain can disengage from its
  3882	sensors and actuators, and examine ‘what happens if’ scenarios by
  3883	peeking into its own computation, a process that we refer to as cogni­
  3884	tion.” Buzsáki stresses that “our brain is not an information-absorbing
       
  3885	28
  3886	It is also active during directed tasks that require participants to remember
  3887	past events or imagine upcoming events (Buckner, 2013).
       
  3888	Referencing Zeman, A. (2001.) Consciousness, Brain, 124 (Solms, 2021a).
  3889	62
       
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  3892	coding device, as it is often portrayed, but a venture-seeking explorer
  3893	constantly controlling the body to test hypotheses.” Our brain does not
  3894	process information. He says, our brain “creates it” (Buzsáki, 2019).
  3895	Buzsáki focuses on "neural syntax", which segments neural infor­
  3896	mation and organizes it via diverse brain rhythms to generate and
  3897	support cognitive functions. One expression is the “hierarchical orga­
  3898	nization of brain rhythms of different frequencies and their crossfrequency coupling.” Buzsáki shows that “in the absence of changing
  3899	environmental signals, cortical circuits continuously generate selforganized cell assembly sequences”—clusters of neurons acting as
  3900	focused functional units—that are the neuronal assembly basis of
  3901	cognitive functions. He also shows “how skewed distribution of firing
  3902	rates supports robustness, sensitivity, plasticity, and stability in
  3903	neuronal networks” (Buzsáki, Wikipedia).
  3904	Buzsáki’s foundational idea is that “spontaneous neuron activity, far
  3905	from being mere noise, is actually the source of our cognitive abilities,”
  3906	and that “self-emerged oscillatory timing is the brain’s fundamental
  3907	organizer of neuronal information." The perpetual interactions among
  3908	these multiple network oscillators, he says, “keep cortical systems in a
  3909	highly sensitive ‘metastable’ state and provide energy-efficient syn­
  3910	chronizing mechanisms via weak links” (Buzsáki, 2011).
  3911	Taken together, Buzsáki coins his “inside-out” view. “The brain,” he
  3912	says, “is a self-organized system with preexisting connectivity and dy­
  3913	namics whose main job is to generate actions and to examine and predict
  3914	the consequences of those actions”. Brains draw from and interact with
  3915	the world, rather than detect it. “In other words, rather than the world
  3916	filling in the brain with information, the brain fills out the world with
  3917	action.” Flipping the brain–world relationship, Buzsáki posits that brain
  3918	activity is fundamentally self-caused (Gomez-Marin, 2021).
  3919	Brain rhythms are Buzsáki’s key mechanisms. “Spanning several
  3920	orders of magnitude, and organized in nested frequency bands, these
  3921	fascinating neuronal oscillations support neuronal syntax.” As Buzsáki
  3922	puts it, “activity travels in neuronal space, much like waves in a pond.”
  3923	Cognition is merely internalized action, and it arises when the brain
  3924	disengages from the world. He thus recasts “the cognitive into the neural
  3925	by means of action as a kind of ultimate cognitive source. It is action all
  3926	the way in, all the way out, and all the way down” (Gomez-Marin, 2021).
  3927	Still, Buzsáki must explain how endogenously produced neural syn­
  3928	tax acquires its meaning, and to do so, he reaches outside the brain.
  3929	Semantics are selected by the world, he stresses, and here’s how it
  3930	works. External inputs, sequences of perceptions that constitute wholes
  3931	or fragments of meaning, engage and modify self-organized neural
  3932	patterns so that they become meaningful and useful (broadly). Similarly,
  3933	Buzsáki has learning as a matching process. “Existing, spontaneous
  3934	neural patterns are selected rather than constructed anew. The brain is
  3935	not a blank slate but one filled with syntactically correct gibberish that
  3936	progressively acquires meaning via the pruning of the arbitrariness that
  3937	the world affords” (Gomez-Marin, 2021).
  3938	Related, Buzsáki and Tingley explain cognition, including memory,
  3939	“by exaptation and expansion of the circuits and algorithms serving
  3940	bodily functions.” They explain how “Regulation and protection of
  3941	metabolic and energetic processes require time-evolving brain compu­
  3942	tations enabling the organism to prepare for altered future states.” The
  3943	exaptation of such circuits, according to the authors, was likely exploi­
  3944	ted for exploration of the organism’s niche, giving rise to “a cognitive
  3945	map,” which in turn “allows for mental travel into the past (memory)
  3946	and the future (planning)” (Buzsáki and Tingley, 2023). Moreover,
  3947	Buzsáki’s “two-stage model of memory trace consolidation, demon­
  3948	strates how neocortex-mediated information during learning transiently
  3949	modifies hippocampal networks, followed by reactivation and consoli­
  3950	dation of these memory traces during sharp wave-ripple patterns of
  3951	sleep” (Buzsáki, 2024).
  3952	While explaining that cognition is not the same thing as explaining
  3953	phenomenal consciousness, Buzsáki’s theory of cognition can develop
  3954	into its own theory of consciousness. Moreover, it can help select among
  3955	other theories of consciousness, as it aligns more consistently with some
       
  3956	Neurobiological Theories (9.2), such as Brain Circuits and Cycles
  3957	(9.2.11); possibly Electromagnetic Field Theories (9.3); and certainly
  3958	Homeostatic and Affective Theories (9.5), especially Top-Down Pre­
  3959	dictive Theories (9.5.1).
  3960	9.5.8. Deacon’s self-organized constraint and emergence of self
  3961	Neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon, whose research combines
  3962	human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, asserts that the origins of
  3963	life and the origins of consciousness both depend on the emergence of
  3964	self: the organizational core of both is a form of self-creating, self-sus­
  3965	taining, constraint-generating processes (Deacon, 2011a, 2011b).
  3966	Deacon characterizes consciousness as “a matter of constraint,”
  3967	focusing as much on what isn’t there as on what is. He goes beyond
  3968	complexity theory, non-linear dynamics and information theory to what
  3969	he calls "emergent dynamics" theory where constraints can become their
  3970	own causes, how constraints become capable of maintaining and pro­
  3971	ducing themselves. This, he says, is essentially what life accomplishes.
  3972	But to do this, life must persistently recreate its capacity for selfcreation. What Deacon means by self “is an intrinsic tendency to
  3973	maintain a distinctive integrity against the ravages of increasing entropy
  3974	as well as disturbances imposed by the surroundings” (Deacon, 2011a,
  3975	2011b).
  3976	The nexus to consciousness is the emergence of self: “this kind of
  3977	reciprocal, self-organizing logic (but embodied in neural signal dy­
  3978	namics) must form the core of the conscious self.” Conceiving of
  3979	neuronal processes in emergent dynamical terms, Deacon reframes as­
  3980	pects of mental life; for example, the experience of emotion relates to the
  3981	role metabolism plays in regulating the brain’s self-organizing dy­
  3982	namics, which are triggered whenever a system is perturbed away from
  3983	its equilibrium, a process that shifts availability of energy in the brain.
  3984	Thus, Deacon suggests that “conscious arousal is not located in any one
  3985	place, but constantly shifts from region to region with changes in de­
  3986	mand” (Deacon, 2011a, 2011b).
  3987	9.5.9. Pereira’s sentience
  3988	Neuroscientist Antonio Pereira, Jr. hypothesizes that cognitive con­
  3989	sciousness depends on sentience. He distinguishes “two modalities of
  3990	consciousness: sentience, in the sense of being awake and capable of
  3991	feeling (e.g., basic sensations of hunger, thirst, pain) and, second,
  3992	cognitive consciousness, i.e. thinking and elaborating on linguistic and
  3993	imagery representations.” He proposes that the physiological correlates
  3994	of sentience are “the systems underpinning the dynamic control of
  3995	biochemical homeostasis,” while the correlates of cognitive conscious­
  3996	ness are “patterns of bioelectrical activity in neural networks. His pri­
  3997	mary point is that “cognitive consciousness depends on sentience, but
  3998	not vice versa” (Pereira, 2021).
  3999	Pereira applies his concept of sentience as a theory of consciousness
  4000	to the medical sciences, especially neurology and psychiatry, for both
  4001	diagnostics and therapy. This implies that “medical practice should also
  4002	address the physiological correlates of sentience in the diagnostics and
  4003	therapy of disorders of consciousness.” The minimal requirement, he
  4004	says, “for considering a person minimally conscious is … if she can feel
  4005	basic sensations such as hunger, thirst, and pain. The capacity for feeling
  4006	is conceived as closely related to the capacity of dynamically controlling
  4007	the physiological processes of homeostasis.”
  4008	In applying theories of consciousness to medical care, Pereira posits
  4009	that higher-level capacities “such as verbal or imagery thinking, the
  4010	retrieval of episodic memories, and action planning (e.g. imagining
  4011	playing tennis, a technique for assessing residual consciousness in
  4012	vegetative states), may not be adequate as a general standard for medical
  4013	diagnosis of prolonged disorders of consciousness, since … in many
  4014	cases the person may not be able to perform these tasks but still be able
  4015	to consciously experience basic sensations” (Pereira, 2021).
  4016	Taking general anesthesia as an example, Pereira states that “if the
  4017	main criterion is not being able to feel pain, the goal of the procedure
  4018	would be broader than the loss of cognitive consciousness. In some
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  4022	real body in physical space … a sort of virtual ‘user interface’ for the
  4023	representation and control of the actual body.”
  4024	Thus, the PCM claims to account for fundamental psychological
  4025	phenomena: the spatial phenomenology of subjective experience; the
  4026	distinctions and integral relationships between perception, imagination
  4027	and action; and the role of affective processes in intentionality. The PCM
  4028	suggests that brain states becoming conscious “reflect the action of
  4029	projective transformations” (Rudrauf et al, 2017).
       
  4030	cases, the neural correlates of cognitive representations may not be the
  4031	main target of treatment, since they correspond to a high-level specific
  4032	ability that is not necessary for lower-level sentient experiences, which
  4033	also deserve attention for proper medical and also bioethical reasons”
  4034	(Pereira, 2021).
  4035	9.5.10. Mansell’s perceptual control theory
  4036	Clinical psychologist Warren Mansell proposes Perceptual Control
  4037	Theory (PCT) in which “reorganization is the process required for the
  4038	adaptive modification of control systems in order to reduce the error in
  4039	intrinsic systems that control essential, largely physiological, variables.”
  4040	It is from this system, he says, that primary [phenomenal] consciousness
  4041	emerges and “is sustained as secondary [access] consciousness through a
  4042	number of processes including the control of the integration rate of
  4043	novel information via exploratory behavior, attention, imagination, and
  4044	by altering the mutation rate of reorganization.” Tertiary [selfawareness] consciousness arises when “internally sustained perceptual
  4045	information is associated with specific symbols that form a parallel,
  4046	propositional system for the use of language, logic, and other symbolic
  4047	systems” (Mansell, 2022).
  4048	Mansell’s objective is to give an “integrative account of conscious­
  4049	ness,” which “should build upon a framework of nonconscious behavior
  4050	in order to explain how and why consciousness contributes to, and ad­
  4051	dresses the limitations of, nonconscious processes.” Such a theory, as
  4052	noted, “should also encompass the primary (phenomenal), secondary
  4053	(access), and tertiary (self-awareness) aspects of consciousness,” and
  4054	“address how organisms deal with multiple, unpredictable disturbances
  4055	to maintain control.” Such categories of consciousness come about, ac­
  4056	cording to PCT, because of “purposiveness,” which is “the control of
  4057	hierarchically organized perceptual variables via changes in output that
  4058	counteract disturbances which would otherwise increase error between
  4059	the current value and the reference value (goal state) of each perceptual
  4060	variable” (Mansell, 2022).
       
  4061	9.5.12. Pepperell’s organization of energy
  4062	Artist and perceptual scientist Robert Pepperell suggests that while
  4063	energetic activity is fundamental to all physical processes and drives
  4064	biological behavior, consciousness is a specific product of the organi­
  4065	zation of energetic activity in the brain. He describes this energy, along
  4066	with forces and work, as “actualized differences of motion and tension,”
  4067	and believes that consciousness occurs “because there is something it is
  4068	like, intrinsically”—from the intrinsic perspective of the system—“to
  4069	undergo a certain organization of actualized differences in the brain”
  4070	(Pepperell, 2018).
  4071	Pepperell laments that “energy receives relatively little attention in
  4072	neuroscientific and psychological studies of consciousness. Leading
  4073	scientific theories of consciousness do not reference it, assign it only a
  4074	marginal role, or treat it as an information-theoretical quantity. If it is
  4075	discussed, it is either as a substrate underpinning higher level emergent
  4076	dynamics or as powering neural information processing.” He argues that
  4077	“the governing principle of the brain at the neural level is not infor­
  4078	mation processing but energy processing,” although the informationtheoretic approach can complement the energetic approach. Pepperell
  4079	puts “information in the biological context as best understood as a
  4080	measure of the way energetic activity is organized, that is, its complexity
  4081	or degree of differentiation and integration.” While “information theo­
  4082	retic techniques provide powerful tools for measuring, modeling, and
  4083	mapping the organization of energetic processes,” he says, “we should
  4084	not confuse the map with the territory” (Pepperell, 2018).
  4085	In comparison with mainstream brain organization frameworks at
  4086	the global level or localized, Pepperell offers, as an alternative or com­
  4087	plementary way of thinking, how the energetic activity in the brain is
  4088	organized. The challenge for the model is why energetic processing is
  4089	associated with consciousness in the brain but not in other organs, like
  4090	the liver or heart. Pepperell claims that energetic activity in the brain
  4091	efficiently actuates differences of motion and tension that make the dif­
  4092	ference, perhaps via dynamic recursive organization – the “appropriate
  4093	reentrant intracortical activity.”
  4094	“If we are to naturalize consciousness,” Pepperell concludes, "then
  4095	we must reconcile energy and the mind.” Treating the brain as a dif­
  4096	ference engine that serves “the interests of the organism is a natural
  4097	approach to understanding consciousness as a physical process”
  4098	(Pepperell, 2018).
       
  4099	9.5.11. Projective consciousness model
  4100	The Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) is a mathematical model
  4101	of embodied consciousness that “relates phenomenology to function,
  4102	showing the computational advantages of consciousness.” It is based on
  4103	“the hypothesis that the spatial field of consciousness (FoC) is structured
  4104	by a projective geometry and under the control of a process of active
  4105	inference.” The FoC in the PCM is said to combine “multisensory evi­
  4106	dence with prior beliefs in memory” and to frame them “by selecting
  4107	points of view and perspectives according to preferences.” This “choice
  4108	of projective frames governs how expectations are transformed by
  4109	consciousness. Violations of expectation are encoded as free energy.
  4110	Free energy minimization drives perspective taking, and controls the
  4111	switch between perception, imagination and action” (Rudrauf et al,
  4112	2017).
  4113	Founding assumptions of the PCM include: consciousness as an
  4114	evolved mechanism that optimizes information integration and func­
  4115	tions as an algorithm for the maximization of resilience; relating the free
  4116	energy principle (9.5.4) to perceptual inference, active inference and
  4117	(embodied) conscious experience; an integrative predictive system
  4118	projecting a global 3-dimensional spatial geometry to multimodal sen­
  4119	sory information and memory traces as they access the conscious
  4120	workspace; and emphasis on the embodied nature of consciousness
  4121	(9.6.1), without reducing consciousness to embodiment. A pivotal idea
  4122	is that embodied systems have “an evolutionary advantage of devel­
  4123	oping an integrative cognition of space in order to represent, simulate,
  4124	appraise and control spatially distributed information and the conse­
  4125	quences of actions” (Rudrauf et al, 2017).
  4126	Much is made of “the lived body,” because “in contrast to most
  4127	contents of consciousness, the lived body is normally always present in
  4128	the conscious field … a proxy for the integrity of the actual body … an
  4129	anchor point for our efforts at preserving autonomy and well-being.”
  4130	The lived body, therefore, is “a kind of inferential representation of the
       
  4131	9.6. Embodied and enactive theories
  4132	Embodied and Enactive Theories emphasize the importance of the
  4133	body and its interaction with the environment as an integral part of what
  4134	consciousness is, not only what consciousness does. It also includes
  4135	neurophenomenology, unifying two disparate ways of studying
  4136	consciousness.
  4137	9.6.1. Embodied cognition
  4138	Embodied Cognition is the concept that what makes thought mean­
  4139	ingful are the ways neural circuits are connected to the body and
  4140	characterize embodied experience, and that abstract ideas and language
  4141	are embodied in this way as well. While cognition and consciousness are
  4142	not the same, cognitive linguist George Lakoff argues that the mind is
  4143	embodied, in that even pure mentality depends on the body’s sensori­
  4144	motor systems and emotions and cannot be comprehended without
  4145	engaging them (Lakoff, 2007, 2012).
  4146	64
       
  4147	R.L. Kuhn
       
  4148	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  4149	In their classic book on the embodied mind, Philosophy in the Flesh,
  4150	Lakoff and Mark Johnson stress three points: "The mind is inherently
  4151	embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely
  4152	metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosophy, they claim,
  4153	such as the nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self,
  4154	relies heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience.
  4155	Thought requires a body, they assert, “not in the trivial sense that you
  4156	need a physical brain with which to think, but in the profound sense that
  4157	the very structure of our thoughts comes from the nature of the body”
  4158	(Lakoff and Johnson, 1999).
       
  4159	variance with that of mental content as it figures in the Anglo-American
  4160	philosophy of mind.” He advocates examining, “beyond the spook of
  4161	subjectivity, the concrete possibilities of a disciplined examination of
  4162	experience that is at the very core of the phenomenological inspiration.”
  4163	He repeats: “it is the re-discovery of the primacy of human experience
  4164	and its direct, lived quality that is phenomenology’s foundational
  4165	project” (Varela, 1996).
  4166	Varela’s key point is that by emphasizing a co-determination of both
  4167	accounts—phenomenological and neurobiological—one can explore the
  4168	bridges, challenges, insights and contradictions between them. This
  4169	means that both domains have equal status in demanding full attention
  4170	and respect for their specificity. It is quite easy, he says, to see how
  4171	scientific accounts illuminate mental experience, but the reciprocal di­
  4172	rection, from experience towards science, is what is typically ignored.
  4173	What do phenomenological accounts provide? Varela asks. “At least
  4174	two main aspects of the larger picture. First, without them the firsthand
  4175	quality of experience vanishes, or it becomes a mysterious riddle. Sec­
  4176	ond, structural accounts provide constraints on empirical observations.”
  4177	He stresses that “the study of experience is not a convenient stop on our
  4178	way to a real explanation, but an active participant in its own right.” And
  4179	while phenomenal experience is at an irreducible ontological level, “it
  4180	retains its quality of immediacy because it plays a role in structural
  4181	coherence via its intuitive contents, and thus keeps alive its direct
  4182	connection to human experience, rather than pushing it into abstrac­
  4183	tion” (Varela, 1996).
  4184	This makes the whole difference, Varela argues: The “hardness” and
  4185	riddle become an open-ended research program with the structure of
  4186	human experience playing a central role in the scientific endeavor. “In
  4187	all functionalistic accounts what is missing is not the coherent nature of
  4188	the explanation but its alienation from human life. Only by putting
  4189	human life back in, will that absence be erased” (Varela, 1996). (The
  4190	common thread said to run through Varela’s extensive and heterogenous
  4191	body of work is “the act of distinction”—distinctions as processes, dis­
  4192	tinctions in ways of distinguishing—“the aim of which was to address
  4193	and supersede the challenges inherent in the dualist [modernist]
  4194	thought style, especially the infamous two-pronged problem of the
  4195	bifurcation and disenchantment of nature” [Vörös, 2023].)
  4196	In the quarter century since Varela’s neurophenomenology paper
  4197	was published, its research program has made some advances and
  4198	encountered some tensions; for example, investigating the experience of
  4199	boundaries of the self, both phenomenologically and neurobiologically.
  4200	The biggest challenge remains first-person reporting and interpretation,
  4201	such as subtle aspects of self-consciousness. The continuing hope is that
  4202	neurophenomenology can inform the science of consciousness, that the
  4203	ongoing interaction between human experience and neuroscience be­
  4204	comes “an act of art, a deep listening, an improvisational dance, which
  4205	slowly develops into a skillful scientific dialogue” (Berkovich-Ohana
  4206	et al., 2020).
       
  4207	9.6.2. Enactivism
  4208	Enactivism is the way of thinking that posits to explore mental ac­
  4209	tivities, one must examine living systems interacting with their envi­
  4210	ronments. Cognition is characterized as embodied activities. A mind
  4211	without a body would be as if incoherent.
  4212	“Enaction” was the term introduced in The Embodied Mind, the 1991
  4213	book by Varela, Rosch and Thompson (Varela et al., 1991). The enactive
  4214	view is that cognition develops via dynamic, bidirectional exchanges
  4215	between an organism and its surroundings. It is not the case that an
  4216	organism seeks optimum homeostasis in a static environment, but rather
  4217	that the organism is shaping its environment, and is being shaped by its
  4218	environment—actively, iteratively, continuously—all mediated by that
  4219	organism’s sensorimotor processes. Thus, organisms are active agents in
  4220	the world who affect the world and who are affected by the world.
  4221	(Section: Hutto, 2023; Enactivism, 2024).
  4222	Enactivists would harbor no hope of understanding mentality unless
  4223	it were founded on histories of such bidirectional organism-environment
  4224	interactions because that’s the core concept of how minds arise and
  4225	work. Organisms are self-creating, self-organizing, self-adapting, selfsustaining living creatures who regulate themselves and in doing so can
  4226	change their environments, which then, iteratively, recycles the whole
  4227	process.
  4228	The scientific consensus is that phenomenal consciousness evolved
  4229	via stages of cognition and proto-consciousness selected by fitnessenhanced traits in challenging environments. Although focused on
  4230	cognition, enactivism enriches the consciousness-generating conditions
  4231	by adding interactive dynamism between the organism and the envi­
  4232	ronment. (Enactment is also said to be “a genuinely metaphysical idea”
  4233	and “an ontological breakthrough” in that “Something is the case if and
  4234	only if it is enacted” [Werner, 2023].)
  4235	9.6.3. Varela’s neurophenomenology
  4236	Neuroscientist and philosopher Francisco Varela proposes what he
  4237	calls “neurophenomenology,” which seeks to articulate mutual con­
  4238	straints between phenomena present in experience, inspired by the style
  4239	of inquiry of phenomenology, and the correlative field of phenomena
  4240	established by the cognitive sciences (Varela Legacy, 2023). He starts
  4241	with one of Chalmers’s basic points: first-hand experience is an irre­
  4242	ducible field of phenomena. He claims there is no “theoretical fix” or
  4243	“extra ingredient” in nature that can possibly bridge this gap. Instead,
  4244	the field of conscious phenomena require a rigorous method and an
  4245	explicit pragmatics. It is a quest, he says, to marry modern cognitive
  4246	science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby
  4247	placing himself in the lineage of the continental tradition of phenome­
  4248	nology (Varela, 1996).
  4249	Varela calls for gathering a research community armed with new
  4250	tools to develop a science of consciousness. He claims that no piecemeal
  4251	empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will do the job.
  4252	He advocates turning to a systematic exploration of the only link be­
  4253	tween mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the
  4254	structure of human experience itself.
  4255	Varela’s phenomenological approach starts with the irreducible na­
  4256	ture of conscious experience. Lived experience, he says, is “where we
  4257	start from and where all must link back to, like a guiding thread.” From a
  4258	phenomenological standpoint, “conscious experience is quite at
       
  4259	9.6.4. Thompson’s mind in life
  4260	Philosopher Evan Thompson heralds “the deep continuity of life and
  4261	mind.” His foundational idea is “Where there is life there is mind, and
  4262	mind in its most articulated forms belongs to life,” and his organizing
  4263	principle is “Life and mind share a core set of formal or organizational
  4264	properties, and the formal or organizational properties distinctive of
  4265	mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life.” More pre­
  4266	cisely, he says, “the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched
  4267	version of the self-organizing features of life. The self-producing or
  4268	‘autopoietic’ organization of biological life already implies cognition,
  4269	and this incipient mind finds sentient expression in the self-organizing
       
  4270	65
       
  4271	R.L. Kuhn
       
  4272	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  4273	dynamics of action, perception, and emotion, as well as in the selfmoving flow of time-consciousness” (Thompson, 2002; Maturana and
  4274	Varela, 1980).29
  4275	From this perspective, Thompson sees mental life as bodily life and as
  4276	situated in the world. The roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain,
  4277	he says, “but ramify through the body and environment. Our mental
  4278	lives involve our body and the world beyond the surface membrane of
  4279	our organism, and therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain processes
  4280	inside the head.”
  4281	With this framework, Thompson seeks to reduce (if not bridge) the
  4282	so-called “explanatory gap” between consciousness and world, mind and
  4283	brain, first-person subjectivity and third-person objectivity (i.e., the
  4284	hard problem of consciousness). He works to achieve this (to over­
  4285	simplify) by having the same kinds of processes that enable the transi­
  4286	tion from nonlife to life to enable the transition from life to mind. (I’d
  4287	think he would rather eliminate the concept of “transition” altogether
  4288	and consider life-mind as a unified concept—perhaps like, in cosmology,
  4289	the once apparent independent dimensions of space and time now uni­
  4290	fied by a single physical concept, spacetime.)
  4291	As a pioneer of enactivism (9.6.2), Thompson posits that “the enac­
  4292	tive approach offers important resources for making progress on the
  4293	explanatory gap” by explicating “selfhood and subjectivity from the
  4294	ground up by accounting for the autonomy proper to living and cogni­
  4295	tive beings.” He extends the idea with "embodied dynamism,” a key
  4296	concept that combines dynamic systems and embodied approaches to
  4297	cognition. While the former reflects enactivism, the latter is the
  4298	enhancement (Thompson, 2002).
  4299	According to Thompson, the central idea of the dynamic systems
  4300	approach is that cognition is an intrinsically temporal phenomenon
  4301	expressible in “the form of a set of evolution equations that describe how
  4302	the state of the system changes over time. The collection of all possible
  4303	states of the system corresponds to the system’s ‘state space’ or ‘phase
  4304	space,’ and the ways that the system changes state correspond to tra­
  4305	jectories in this space.” Dynamic-system explanations, he says, consist of
  4306	“the internal and external forces that shape such trajectories as they
  4307	unfold in time. Inputs are described as perturbations to the system’s
  4308	intrinsic dynamics, rather than as instructions to be followed, and in­
  4309	ternal states are described as self-organized compensations triggered by
  4310	perturbations, rather than as representations of external states of affairs”
  4311	(Thompson, 2002).
  4312	To make real progress on the explanatory gap, Thompson says, “we
  4313	need richer phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience,
  4314	and we need scientific accounts of mind and life informed by these
  4315	phenomenological accounts.” My aim, he says, “is not to close the
  4316	explanatory gap in a reductive sense, but rather to enlarge and enrich
  4317	the philosophical and scientific resources we have for addressing the
  4318	gap.”
  4319	Calling on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugu­
  4320	rated by Edmund Husserl and developed by others, primarily Maurice
  4321	Merleau-Ponty, Thompson seeks to “naturalize” phenomenology by
  4322	aligning its investigations with advances in biology and cognitive sci­
  4323	ence and to complement science and its objectification of the world by
  4324	reawakening basic experiences of the world via phenomenology. His
  4325	main move is for cognitive science “to learn from the analyses of lived
  4326	experience accomplished by phenomenologists …. which thus needs to
  4327	be recognized and cultivated as an indispensable partner to the experi­
  4328	mental sciences of mind and life” (Thompson, 2002).
  4329	The deeper convergence of the enactive approach and phenome­
  4330	nology, Thompson says, is that “both share a view of the mind as having
  4331	to constitute its objects.” He stresses that “constitute” does not mean
       
  4332	fabricate or create, but rather “to bring to awareness, to present, or to
  4333	disclose.” Thus, “the mind brings things to awareness; it discloses and
  4334	presents the world. Stated in a classical phenomenological way, the idea
  4335	is that objects are disclosed or made available to experience in the ways
  4336	they are thanks to the intentional activities of consciousness.” Thompson
  4337	argues that weaving together the phenomenological and neurobiolog­
  4338	ical can “bridge the gap between subjective experience and biology,
  4339	which defines the aim of neurophenomenology (9.6.4), an offshoot of
  4340	the enactive approach” (Thompson, 2002).
  4341	9.6.5. Frank/Gleiser/Thompson’s “The Blind Spot”
  4342	Astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcello Gleiser,
  4343	and philosopher Evan Thompson elevate and promote “the primacy of
  4344	consciousness” in that “There is no way to step outside consciousness
  4345	and measure it against something else. Everything we investigate,
  4346	including consciousness and its relation to the brain, resides within the
  4347	horizon of consciousness.” Lest they be misunderstood, the authors
  4348	reject any inference that “the universe, nature, or reality is essentially
  4349	consciousness or is somehow made out of consciousness,” because “this
  4350	does not logically follow.” Such “a speculative leap,” they say, goes
  4351	beyond what we can know or establish on the basis of “consciousness as
  4352	experienced from within and as an irreducible precondition of scientific
  4353	knowledge.” Furthermore, “this speculative leap runs afoul” of what
  4354	they call “the primacy of embodiment,” which “is as equally undeniable
  4355	as the primacy of consciousness” (Frank et al., 2024, pp. 186, 188).
  4356	What now confronts us, Frank/Gleiser/Thompson say, is “a strange
  4357	loop,” where “horizonal consciousness subsumes the world, including
  4358	our body experienced from within, while embodiment subsumes con­
  4359	sciousness, including awareness in its immediate intimacy.” The authors
  4360	stress that “the primacy of consciousness and the primacy of embodi­
  4361	ment enfold each other.” They call for unveiling and examining this
  4362	strange loop, which normally disappears from view and is forgotten in
  4363	what they call The Blind Spot. They describe the Blind Spot as “human­
  4364	ity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective
  4365	truth” (Frank et al., 2024, p. 189), and they seek “to reclaim the central
  4366	place of human experience in the scientific enterprise by invoking the
  4367	image of a ‘Blind Spot’” (Gomez-Marin, 2024). In other words, they
  4368	reject the way of thinking that “we can comprehend consciousness
  4369	within the framework of reductionism, physicalism, and objectivism or,
  4370	failing that, by postulating a dualism of physical nature versus irre­
  4371	ducible consciousness that we could somehow grasp outside the strange
  4372	loop.” This is why they label the hard problem of consciousness an
  4373	“artifact of the Blind Spot.” It is “built into blind-spot metaphysics, and
  4374	not solvable in its terms” because “it fails to recognize the ineliminable
  4375	primacy of consciousness in knowledge” (Frank et al., 2024, p. 192).
  4376	Frank/Gleiser/Thompson see “only a few options for trying to deal
  4377	with consciousness within the confines of the blind-spot worldview,”
  4378	and that “ultimately, they’re all unsatisfactory, because they never come
  4379	to grips with the need to recognize the primacy of consciousness and the
  4380	strange loop in which we find ourselves.” They argue that the three
  4381	major options—neural correlates of consciousness (9.2.2); metaphysical
  4382	bifurcation of physical reality and irreducible mental properties
  4383	(whether naturalistic dualism, substance dualism or panpsychism—13,
  4384	15); and illusionism (9.1.1)—are all “within the ambit of the Blind Spot”
  4385	(Frank et al., 2024, p. 196).
  4386	What Frank/Gleiser/Thompson offer is “a radically different
  4387	approach beyond the Blind Spot.” They reference papers by astrophys­
  4388	icist Piet Hut and cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard (Hut and She­
  4389	pard, 1996), and neuroscientist Francisco Varela (1996), making the
  4390	case for “a major overhaul of the science of consciousness based on
  4391	recognizing the primacy of experience.” They note “we inescapably use
  4392	consciousness to study consciousness,” such that “unless we recover
  4393	from the amnesia of experience and restore the primacy of experience in
  4394	our conception of science, we’ll never be able to put the science of
  4395	consciousness on a proper footing.” A science of consciousness can work,
  4396	all say, only if “experience really matters” (Frank et al., 2024, p. 218).
       
  4397	29
  4398	Personal note: Evan Thompson’s father was social philosopher and cultural
  4399	critic William Irwin Thompson, who had great influence on me (RLK)—espe­
  4400	cially his books, At the Edge of History (1971) and Passages about Earth (1974).
  4401	The influence would help lay the foundation for Closer To Truth.
       
  4402	66
       
  4403	R.L. Kuhn
       
  4404	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  4405	(Bitbol, 2021a).
  4406	Bitbol’s method is “a metaphysical compensation for the antimetaphysical premise of the neurophenomenological dissolution of the
  4407	‘hard problem.’” This can be achieved, he says, by designing this alter­
  4408	native metaphysics “to keep the benefit of a shift from discourse to ways
  4409	of being, which is “the latent message of neurophenomenology” (Bitbol,
  4410	2021a). In its most radical version, “neurophenomenology asks re­
  4411	searchers to suspend the quest of an objective solution to the problem of
  4412	the origin of subjectivity, and clarify instead how objectification can be
  4413	obtained out of the coordination of subjective experiences. It therefore
  4414	invites researchers to develop their inquiry about subjective experience
  4415	with the same determination as their objective inquiry.” Bitbol proposes
  4416	a methodology to explore lived experience faithfully (via micro­
  4417	phenomenological interviews retrieving or “evoking past experiences”)
  4418	and thereby “addresses a set of traditional objections against intro­
  4419	spection” (Bitbol and Petitmengin, 2017).
  4420	Bitbol gives neuroscience no privilege, priority or pride of place.
  4421	“The effective primacy of lived experience should be given such prom­
  4422	inence that every other aspect, content, achievement, distortion, and
  4423	physicalist account of consciousness, is made conditional upon it.” From
  4424	a (radical) phenomenological standpoint, he says, “one must not mistake
  4425	objectivity for reality. Reality is what is given and manifest, whereas
  4426	objectivity is what is constituted by extracting structural invariants from
  4427	the given experience. Along with this phenomenological approach, an
  4428	objective science is not supposed to disclose reality as it is beyond ap­
  4429	pearances, but only to circumscribe some intersubjectively recognized
  4430	features of the appearing reality.” Having said that, Bitbol stresses that
  4431	“neuroscientific data should not be granted a higher ontological status
  4432	than phenomenological descriptions; they should not be given the power
  4433	to render a compelling verdict about what is real and what is deceptive
  4434	in our experience.” Thus, he sums up: “from a phenomenological
  4435	standpoint, the neuro-phenomenological correlation is plainly perceived
  4436	as an extension of the lived sense of embodiment, not as a sign that some
  4437	naturalistic one-directional ‘fundamental dependence’ of consciousness
  4438	on the bodily brain is taking place” (Bitbol, 2015).
  4439	Bitbol’s affirmative solution is to formulate a “dynamical and
  4440	participatory conception of the relation between body and conscious­
  4441	ness … with no concession to standard positions such as physicalist
  4442	monism and property dualism.” Bitbol’s conception is based on Varela’s
  4443	formalism of “cybernetic dialectic,” “a geometrical model of self-pro­
  4444	duction,” and it is “in close agreement with Merleau-Ponty’s ‘intraontology’: an engaged ontological approach of what it is like to be,
  4445	rather than a discipline of the contemplation of beings” (Bitbol, 2021a).
  4446	Bitbol’s approach to quantum physics complements his “radical
  4447	phenomenology,” such that quantum mechanics becomes more a
  4448	"symbolism of atomic measurements,” rather than “a description of
  4449	atomic objects.” He supports the notion that “quantum laws do not ex­
  4450	press the nature of physical objects, but only the bounds of experimental
  4451	information.” Similarly, Bitbol supports QBism, where the wave func­
  4452	tion’s probabilities are said to be, shockingly (to me), Bayesian proba­
  4453	bilities, which means they relate to prior subjective degrees of belief
  4454	about the system, paralleling some ideas in phenomenology (Bitbol,
  4455	2023).
  4456	Bitbol calls out “three features of such non-interpretational, noncommittal approaches to quantum physics” that “strongly evoke the
  4457	phenomenological epistemology.” These are: “their deliberately firstperson stance; their suspension of judgment about a presumably
  4458	external domain of objects, and subsequent redirection of attention to­
  4459	wards the activity of constituting these objects; their perception-like
  4460	conception of quantum knowledge.” Moreover, Bitbol claims that
  4461	these new approaches of quantum physics go beyond phenomenological
  4462	epistemology and “also make implicit use of a phenomenological
  4463	ontology.” He cites Chris Fuch’s “participatory realism” that “formulates
  4464	a non-external variety of realism for one who is deeply immersed in
  4465	reality,” adding, “but participatory realism strongly resembles MerleauPonty’s endo-ontology, which is a phenomenological ontology for one
       
  4466	The key, according to the authors, is “recognizing [both] the primacy
  4467	of consciousness and the primacy of embodiment,” which, they claim
  4468	“changes how we think about the problem of consciousness.” The
  4469	problem for neuroscience “can no longer be stated as how the brain
  4470	generates consciousness.” Rather, “the problem is how the brain as a
  4471	perceptual object within consciousness relates to the brain as part of the
  4472	embodied conditions for consciousness, including the perceptual expe­
  4473	rience of the brain as a scientific object. The problem is to relate the
  4474	primacy of consciousness to the primacy of embodiment without
  4475	privileging one over the other or collapsing one onto the other. The
  4476	situation is inherently reflexive and self-referential: instead of simply
  4477	regarding experience as something that arises from the brain, we also
  4478	have to regard the brain as something that arises within experience. We
  4479	are in the strange loop” (Frank et al., 2024, pp. 219–220).
  4480	Frank/Gleiser/Thompson support Varela’s neuroscience research
  4481	program, “neurophenomenology” (9.6.3), based on “braiding together
  4482	first-person accounts of consciousness with third-person accounts of the
  4483	brain within the I-and-you experiential realm.” They advocate that
  4484	phenomenology and neuroscience “become equal partners in an inves­
  4485	tigation that proceeds by creating new experiences in a new kind of
  4486	scientific workshop, the neurophenomenological laboratory. Firstperson experiential methods for refining attention and awareness
  4487	(such as meditation), together with second-person qualitative methods
  4488	for interviewing individuals about the fine texture of their experience,
  4489	are used to produce new experiences, which serve as touchstones for
  4490	advancing phenomenology. This new phenomenology guides in­
  4491	vestigations of the brain, while investigations of the brain are used to
  4492	motivate and refine phenomenology in a mutually illuminating loop”
  4493	(Frank et al., 2024, pp. 219–220). The authors call neuro­
  4494	phenomenology “probably the strongest effort so far to envision a
  4495	neuroscience of consciousness beyond the Blind Spot (Frank et al., 2024,
  4496	p. 221). Consciousness, particularly human consciousness, is “an
  4497	expression of nature and is a source of nature’s self-understanding.”
  4498	9.6.6. Bitbol’s radical neurophenomenology
  4499	Philosopher of science and phenomenologist Michel Bitbol promotes
  4500	a “radical neurophenomenology” in which a “tangled dialectic of body
  4501	and consciousness” is the “metaphysical counterpart” and whose goal is
  4502	to advance Varela’s neurophenomenology project (9.6.3) of criticizing
  4503	and dissolving the “hard problem” of consciousness (Bitbol, 2021a).
  4504	Bitbol claims that the neurophenomenological approach to the “hard
  4505	problem” is underrated and often misunderstood; indeed, “in its original
  4506	version, neurophenomenology implies nothing less than a change in our
  4507	own being to dispel the mere sense that there is a problem to be theo­
  4508	retically solved or dissolved. Neurophenomenology thus turns out to be
  4509	much more radical than the enactivist kinds of dissolution” (9.6.2)
  4510	(Bitbol and Antonova, 2016).
  4511	Did Varela himself have a theory to solve the hard problem? No,
  4512	Varela declared (in Bitbol’s report) “only a ‘remedy”—the point being
  4513	that “there exists a stance (let’s call it the Varelian stance) in which the
  4514	problem of the physical origin of primary consciousness, or pure expe­
  4515	rience, does not even arise.” The implications, according to Bitbol, are
  4516	that “the nature of the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is changed from
  4517	an intellectual puzzle to an existential option.” The “constructivist
  4518	content,” he says, is that “The role of ontological prejudice about what
  4519	the world is made of (a prejudice that determines the very form of the
  4520	‘hard problem’ as the issue of the origin of consciousness out of a preexisting material organization) is downplayed” (Bitbol, 2012).
  4521	Bitbol blames “the standard (physicalist) formulation of this prob­
  4522	lem” for both generating it and turning it into “a fake mystery.” But he
  4523	recognizes that dissolving the hard problem is very demanding for re­
  4524	searchers, because “it invites them to leave their position of neutral
  4525	observers/thinkers, and to seek self-transformation instead.” Bitbol’s
  4526	approach “leaves no room for the ‘hard problem’ in the field of
  4527	discourse, and rather deflects it onto the plane of attitudes.” This runs
  4528	the risk, he says, of “being either ignored or considered as a dodge”
  4529	67
       
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  4532	who deeply participates in Being” (Bitbol, 2020; Gefter, 2015).
  4533	QBist theorists assert that “quantum states are ‘expectations about
  4534	experiences of pointer readings,’” rather than expectations about
  4535	pointer positions. Their focus on lived experience, not just on macro­
  4536	scopic variables, is tantamount to performing the transcendental
  4537	reduction instead of stopping at the relatively superficial layer of the
  4538	life-world reduction.” Bitbol believes that “quantum physics indeed
  4539	gives us several reasons to go the whole way down to the deepest variety
  4540	of phenomenological reduction … not only reduction to experience, or
  4541	to ‘pure consciousness,’ but also reduction to the ‘living present’”
  4542	(Bitbol, 2021b).
       
  4543	2024; Lobo et al., 2018).
  4544	If perception is direct, and affordances provide the possibilities, then
  4545	affordances are a kind of state space of the mind. That environmental
  4546	affordances may have enabled or selected for consciousness would be
  4547	consistent with embodied and enactive theories of consciousness.
       
  4548	9.6.7. Direct perception theory
  4549	Direct Perception Theory is the idea that “the information required
  4550	for perception is external to the observer; that is, one can directly
  4551	perceive an object based on the properties of the distal stimulus alone,
  4552	unaided by inference, memories, the construction of representations, or
  4553	the influence of other cognitive processes” (APA, website). Philosopher
  4554	Ned Block describes non-mainstream views of phenomenal conscious­
  4555	ness that take it to work via this kind of “a direct awareness relation to a
  4556	peculiar entity like a sense datum [i.e., that which is immediately
  4557	available to the senses] or to objects or properties in the environment.”
  4558	This direct awareness would seem to have to be “a primitive unana­
  4559	lyzable acquaintance relation that is not a matter of representation.”
  4560	According to these direct realist or naïve realist theories of conscious­
  4561	ness, “the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is objectconstituted in the sense that a perceptual experience of a tomato de­
  4562	pends for its existence and individuation on the tomato. Any experience
  4563	that is of a different tomato will have a different phenomenal character,
  4564	even if it is phenomenally indistinguishable and even if the different
  4565	tomato is exactly the same in all its properties and causes exactly the
  4566	same activations in the brain.” Even subjectively indistinguishable
  4567	hallucinatory experience would have to be different in phenomenal
  4568	character as well (Block, 2023).
       
  4569	9.7.1. A. Clark’s extended mind
  4570	The extended mind, according to philosopher Andy Clark, features
  4571	an “active externalism,” based on the participatory role of the envi­
  4572	ronment in driving cognitive processes. He asserts that when the human
  4573	organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, a
  4574	“coupled system” is created that can be conceptualized as a cognitive
  4575	system in its own right (independent of the two components). This is
  4576	because all the components in the system play an active causal role, and
  4577	they jointly govern behavior in the same sort of way that cognition in a
  4578	single system (brain) usually does. To remove the external component is
  4579	to degrade the system’s behavioral competence, just as it would to
  4580	remove part of its brain. Clark’s thesis is that this sort of coupled process
  4581	counts equally well as a cognitive process, whether or not it is wholly in
  4582	the head (Clark and Chalmers, 1998).
  4583	Clark concludes his book, Supersizing the Mind, by inviting us “to
  4584	cease to unreflectively privilege the inner, the biological, and the neural
  4585	… The human mind, viewed through this special lens, emerges at the
  4586	productive interface of brain, body, and social and material world.” He
  4587	marvels that “minds like ours emerge from this colorful flux as sur­
  4588	prisingly seamless wholes” (Clark, 2010).
  4589	According to Owen Flanagan, “Walking, talking and seeing are all
  4590	things the enactive, embodied, extended (code words for this hip new
  4591	view) mind does in the world.” Clark “provides the best argument I’ve
  4592	seen for the idea that minds are smeared over more space than neuro­
  4593	science might have us believe, and that mind will continue spreading to
  4594	other nooks and crannies of the universe as cognitive prostheses pro­
  4595	liferate” (Flanagan, 2009).
       
  4596	9.7. Relational theories
  4597	Relational Theories of consciousness are those explanations whose
  4598	distinctive feature is some kind of active or transformative connection
  4599	with something other than brain circuits and pathways themselves.
       
  4600	9.6.8. Gibson’s ecological psychology
  4601	Experimental psychologist James J. Gibson proposes an “embodied,
  4602	situated, and non-representational” approach to perception (which,
  4603	while not a surrogate for phenomenal consciousness, has features in
  4604	common). Gibson attacks both behaviorism and cognitivism (e.g., in­
  4605	formation processing), arguing for direct perception and direct realism.
  4606	Gibson calls his overarching theory, “Ecological Psychology,” and while
  4607	his specific aim is “to offer a third way beyond cognitivism and behav­
  4608	iorism for understanding cognition,” an extension to consciousness can
  4609	be cautiously inferred (Lobo et al., 2018; Gibson, 2024).
  4610	Gibson maintains that there is far more information available to our
  4611	perceptual systems than we are consciously aware of. He posits that “the
  4612	optical information of an image is not so much an impression of form
  4613	and color, but rather of invariants. A fixated form of an object only
  4614	specifies certain invariants of the object, not its solid form.” Perceptual
  4615	learning is said to be “a process of seeing the differences in the
  4616	perceptual field around an individual” (Gibson, 2014, 2024).
  4617	Gibson rejects “the premise of the poverty of the stimulus, the
  4618	physicalist conception of the stimulus, and the passive character of the
  4619	perceiver of mainstream theories of perception.” Rather, he has the main
  4620	principles of ecological psychology as “the continuity of perception and
  4621	action” and the “organism-environment system as unit of analysis”
  4622	(Lobo et al., 2018).
  4623	Significantly, Gibson develops the original idea of “affordances” (he
  4624	coins the term), which are the ways the environment provides oppor­
  4625	tunities for and motivates actions of animals—human examples include
  4626	steep slopes inspiring the design of stairs and deposits of hydrocarbons
  4627	encouraging drilling. Gibson defends the radical idea that “when we
  4628	perceive an object we observe the object’s affordances and not its
  4629	particular qualities” because it is both more useful and easier, which
  4630	would mean that affordances are the objects of perception (Gibson,
       
  4631	9.7.2. Noë’s “out of our heads” theory
  4632	Philosopher Alva Noë argues that only externalism about the mind
  4633	and mental content, which requires active and continuous engagement
  4634	between the brain and its environment, body and beyond, can succeed as
  4635	a theory of consciousness (Noë, 2010). He uses his attention-alerting
  4636	phrase “Out of Our Heads” as descriptor, not as metaphor, and he ap­
  4637	plies it literally. His hypothesis is that expanding the locus of where
  4638	consciousness occurs may help explain its essence and mechanism. What
  4639	does this actually mean?
  4640	Noë takes issue with both dualism and materialism; attacking the
  4641	weaknesses of each is not hard going. “We have no better idea how the
  4642	actions of cells in the head give rise to consciousness than we do how
  4643	consciousness arises out of immaterial spiritual processes.” So, brain
  4644	science, he says, while it has the imprimatur of the scientific worldview,
  4645	is not really going anywhere. It’s like trying to understand what makes a
  4646	dance “a dance” by studying the movement of muscles (Noë, 2007).
  4647	He challenges the assumption that an event in the brain is alone
  4648	sufficient for consciousness. “We spend all our lives, not as free-floating
  4649	brains; we’re embodied, we’re environmentally embedded; we’re so­
  4650	cially nurtured from the very beginnings of our lives.” His idea is that
  4651	“The world shows up for us,” with “multiple layers of meaning.”
  4652	Noë offers an alternative framework, a novel way of thinking. “There
  4653	are lots of discrete processes going on inside the head. But that’s not
  4654	where we should look for consciousness. We occupy a place in the
  4655	world—all sorts of things are going on around us—and consciousness is
  4656	that activity of keeping tabs, keeping touch, paying attention to,
  4657	68
       
  4658	R.L. Kuhn
       
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  4660	interacting with the world.”
  4661	But what does it mean to say consciousness “is” that activity? “Is” as
  4662	… “part of the process?” Or “enabling,” “bringing about” or “causing”?
  4663	Or, in the strong sense of “is” as identity theory?
  4664	Noë distinguishes the meaning and purposes of consciousness, which
  4665	take place “out of our heads,” from the mechanical locus of conscious­
  4666	ness, the substrate on which its symbols are physically encoded and
  4667	manipulated.
  4668	Noë uses dreams as corroborating evidence that consciousness occurs
  4669	outside of the brain. He distinguishes dreams from real-life experiences,
  4670	in that the latter has greater density, detail and robustness. “You can’t
  4671	experience in a dream everything that you can experience outside of a
  4672	dream” (Noë, 2007).
  4673	Consciousness to Noë means “How the world shows up for us de­
  4674	pends not only on our brains and nervous systems but also on our bodies,
  4675	our skills, our environment, and the way we are placed in and at home in
  4676	the world.” This does not happen automatically, passively, done to the
  4677	organism, but it is what the organism must do deliberately, proactively.
  4678	“We achieve access to the world. We enact it by enabling it to show up
  4679	for us.… If I don’t have the relevant skills of literacy, for example, the
  4680	words written on the wall do not show up for me” (Noë, 2012).
  4681	He stresses that consciousness isn’t just a matter of events triggered
  4682	inside us by things outside us because things are triggered inside us all
  4683	the time by all sorts of things outside of us and they don’t rise to con­
  4684	sciousness. Much depends on context, interest, knowledge and
  4685	understanding.
  4686	Thus, consciousness is what happens when sentient creatures
  4687	interact with their environment via their brains; consciousness is not
  4688	what their brains are doing to them. A science of consciousness, Noë
  4689	says, must explain the role the brain is playing in a dynamic active
  4690	involvement. It’s not just that consciousness happens in the brain; it’s
  4691	not like that. “We are not our brains” (Noë, 2012).
       
  4692	relationship to its socio-physical environment” (Loorits, 2019).
  4693	In defending internalism as the “location” of consciousness, Loorits
  4694	argues that “structural phenomena are describable and analyzable in
  4695	public terms even if those phenomena themselves are private.” More­
  4696	over, “the structure of our consciousness is always present in our neural
  4697	processes and only sometimes (additionally) in an extended system that
  4698	includes elements of the environment” (Loorits, 2018).
  4699	Loorits offers modest support to illusionists who propose that “the
  4700	apparently non-structural features of consciousness are in fact fully
  4701	structural and merely seem to be non-structural.” He argues that “such a
  4702	position is tenable, but only if the non-structural ‘seemings’ are inter­
  4703	preted as perspectival phenomena and not as theorists’ fictions or ab­
  4704	solute nothingness” (Loorits, 2022).
  4705	When George Musser was musing that qualia might be relational
  4706	(9.7), he met with Loorits, and to Musser’s surprise, Loorits “had gone
  4707	off the idea.” The disjunction is between third and first-person per­
  4708	spectives, where the former is how qualia is explained relationally and
  4709	the latter is precisely the hard problem. According to Musser, Loorits’s
  4710	current thinking was that “qualia may well be relational behind the
  4711	scenes, but as long as they feel intrinsic to us, they still elude scientific
  4712	description.” Loorits concluded, “There is still a hard problem in a sense
  4713	that we seem to be able to experience qualia without being aware of
  4714	their relational components” (Musser, 2023a,b). (I tip my hat when a
  4715	philosopher changes their mind.)
  4716	9.7.4. Lahav’s relativistic theory
  4717	Physicist Nir Lahav characterizes consciousness as a physical phe­
  4718	nomenon that is relative to the measurements of a "cognitive frame of
  4719	reference." Just as different observers can have different measurements
  4720	of velocity in a relativistic context, the same is true for consciousness.
  4721	Two people can have different cognitive frames of reference, experi­
  4722	encing conscious awareness for themselves but only measuring brain
  4723	activity for the other. The brain doesn’t create conscious experiences
  4724	through computations; rather, conscious experiences arise due to the
  4725	process of physical measurement. Different physical measurements in
  4726	different frames of reference manifest different physical properties, even
  4727	when measuring the same phenomenon. This leads to different mani­
  4728	festations of conscious experience and brain activity in separate cogni­
  4729	tive frames (Lahav and Neemeh, 2022).
       
  4730	9.7.3. Loorits’s structural realism
  4731	Philosopher Kristjan Loorits’s Structural Realism posits that
  4732	“conscious experiences are fully structural phenomena that reside in our
  4733	brains in the form of complex higher-order patterns in neural activity.”
  4734	He claims that the structural view of consciousness solves both the hard
  4735	problem and the problem of privacy (Loorits, 2019).
  4736	On the hard problem, according to Loorits, while some properties of
  4737	our conscious experiences seem to be qualitative and non­
  4738	structural—qualia—“these apparently nonstructural properties are, in
  4739	fact, fully structural.” He conjectures that qualia are “compositional
  4740	with internal structures that fully determine their qualitative nature”
  4741	(Loorits, 2019), that “qualia are the structures of vast networks of un­
  4742	conscious associations, and that those associational structures can be
  4743	found in our neural processes.” He makes the ambitious prediction that
  4744	“with the proper brain-stimulating technology, it should be possible to
  4745	reveal the structural nature of qualia to the experiencing subject
  4746	directly” (Loorits, 2019). Loorits concludes that “consciousness as a
  4747	whole can be seen as a complex neural pattern that misperceives some of
  4748	its own highly complex structural properties as monadic and qualitative.
  4749	Such neural pattern is analyzable in fully structural terms and thereby
  4750	the hard problem is solved (Loorits, 2014). (As for “the notion of
  4751	structure,” Loorits’s Structural Realism has some structures existing in
  4752	the world in an objective sense and has conscious experiences among
  4753	such structures [Loorits, 2019].)
  4754	On the privacy problem, according to Loorits, while our “powerful
  4755	intuition” is that “the content of my consciousness is directly accessible
  4756	only to me”—a brain-bound internalist approach to consciousness,
  4757	which comports well with neurobiological theories—some argue that
  4758	“we can only talk about phenomena whose defining properties are
  4759	known to us from the public realm.” According to this externalist
  4760	approach, “if our conscious experiences were entirely private, we could
  4761	not talk or theorize about them”—a way of thinking that suggests
  4762	“conscious experiences should be understood in terms of an organism’s
       
  4763	9.7.5. Tsuchiya’s relational approach to consciousness
  4764	Neuroscientist Nao Tsuchiya’s relational approach to consciousness
  4765	is not so much a theory of consciousness per se but more a fresh meth­
  4766	odology, “an alternative approach to characterize, and eventually
  4767	define, consciousness through exhaustive descriptions of conscious­
  4768	ness’s relationships to all other consciousnesses.” His approach is
  4769	founded in category theory (i.e., mathematical structures and their re­
  4770	lations), which is used to characterize the structure of conscious phe­
  4771	nomenology as a category and describe the interrelationships of
  4772	members with mathematical precision. Tsuchiya proposes several
  4773	possible definitions of categories of consciousness, both in terms of level
  4774	and contents—the objective being for these conceptual tools to clarify
  4775	complex theoretical concepts about consciousness, which have been
  4776	long discussed by philosophers and psychologists, and for such con­
  4777	ceptual clarification to inspire further theoretical and empirical
  4778	research. To the extent that the project is successful, it will support
  4779	relational theories of consciousness (Tsuchiya and Saigo, 2021).
  4780	9.7.6. Jaworski’s hylomorphism
  4781	Philosopher William Jaworski argues that the hard problem of con­
  4782	sciousness arises only if hylomorphism is false. Hylomorphism is the
  4783	claim that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle, and
  4784	is responsible for individuals being the kinds of things they are, and
  4785	having the powers or capacities they have. As Jaworski explains, “A
  4786	human is not a random collection of physical materials, but an indi­
  4787	vidual composed of physical materials with a structure that accounts for
  4788	69
       
  4789	R.L. Kuhn
       
  4790	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  4791	what it is and what it can do—the powers it has. What is true of humans
  4792	is true of their activities as well.” Structured activities, he says, include
  4793	perceptual experiences, which means that everything about a perceptual
  4794	experience, including its phenomenal character, can be explained by
  4795	describing the perceiver’s structure: perceptual subsystems, the powers
  4796	of those subsystems, and the coordination that unifies their activities
  4797	into the activity of the perceiver as a whole. Conscious experiences,
  4798	Jaworski concludes, “thus fit unproblematically into the natural
  4799	world—just as unproblematically as the phenomenon of life” (Jaworski,
  4800	2020).
  4801	According to Jaworski, from a hylomorphic perspective, “mind-body
  4802	problems are byproducts of a worldview that rejects structure, and
  4803	which lacks a basic principle which distinguishes the parts of the
  4804	physical universe that can think, feel, and perceive from those that can’t.
  4805	Without such a principle, the existence of those powers in the physical
  4806	world can start to look inexplicable and mysterious.” But if mental
  4807	phenomena are structural phenomena, he says, then they are part of the
  4808	physical world and thus “hylomorphism provides an elegant way of
  4809	solving mind-body problems” (Jaworski, 2016).
  4810	While hylomorphism exemplifies a suite of arguments purporting to
  4811	undermine the hard problem, its own challenge seems two-fold: (i) by
  4812	defining structure as primitive and fundamental, it almost embeds the
  4813	desired conclusion in the definitional premise; and (ii) by not dis­
  4814	tinguishing kinds of structure, all structure holds the same level of ul­
  4815	timate explanation, which may not fit consciousness.
       
  4816	9.8. Representational theories
  4817	Representational Theories of consciousness elevate the explanatory
  4818	power of mental representations, which are inner-perceived notions or
  4819	imagery of things, concrete or abstract, that are not currently being
  4820	presented to the senses. Representational theories seek to explain con­
  4821	sciousness in terms of mental representations rather than simply as
  4822	neural or brain states. Mental representations utilize cognitive symbols
  4823	that can be manipulated in myriad ways to describe, consider and
  4824	explain an endless variety of thoughts, ideas, and concepts (Mental
  4825	representation, 2024. Wikipedia). According to strict representation­
  4826	alism, conscious mental states have no mental properties other than
  4827	their representational properties (Van Gulick, 2019).
  4828	According to philosopher Michael Tye, “representationalism is a
  4829	thesis about the phenomenal character of experiences, about their im­
  4830	mediate subjective ‘feel’. At a minimum, the thesis is one of super­
  4831	venience: necessarily, experiences that are alike in their representational
  4832	contents are alike in their phenomenal character. So understood, the
  4833	thesis is silent on the nature of phenomenal character. Strong or pure
  4834	representationalism goes further. It aims to tell us what phenomenal
  4835	character is.” In this view, “phenomenal character is one and the same as
  4836	representational content that meets certain further conditions” (Tye,
  4837	2002).
  4838	Philosopher Fred Dretske’s "Representational Thesis" is the claim
  4839	that: (1) All mental facts are representational facts, and (2) All repre­
  4840	sentational facts are facts about informational functions (Dretske, 2023).
  4841	Philosopher Amy Kind observes that “as philosophers of mind have
  4842	begun to rethink the sharp divide that was traditionally drawn between
  4843	the phenomenal character of an experience (what it’s like to have that
  4844	experience) and its intentional content (what it represents), represen­
  4845	tationalist theories of consciousness have become increasingly popular”
  4846	(Kind, 2010).
  4847	While almost all theories of consciousness have representational
  4848	features, the representational theories themselves, including those that
  4849	follow, are distinguished by the more robust claim that their represen­
  4850	tational features are what explain consciousness (Van Gulick, 2019). A
  4851	hurdle for all theories is the need to explain phenomenology in terms of
  4852	intentionality, the “aboutness” of mental states, under the assumption
  4853	that intentionality must be represented (Lycan, 2019).
  4854	This is Jerry Fodor’s challenge: “I suppose that sooner or later the
  4855	physicists will complete the catalog they’ve been compiling of the ulti­
  4856	mate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of
  4857	spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness
  4858	surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep” (Fodor, 1989).
       
  4859	9.7.7. Process theory
  4860	A process theory of consciousness is founded on process philosophy,
  4861	the metaphysical idea that fundamental reality is dynamic, change,
  4862	shift—the action of becoming.30 With respect to consciousness, process
  4863	philosophy has refused to bifurcate human experience from nature, and
  4864	as a consequence, process philosophy holds to a “panexperientialist”
  4865	ontology where experience goes all the way down in nature, and con­
  4866	sciousness genuinely emerges as an achievement of the evolution of
  4867	experience through time. Only in the case of God (if God exists, of
  4868	course) does consciousness belong to nature as an ontological primitive.
  4869	(Davis, 2020, 2022; Faber, 2023).
  4870	David Ray Griffin suggests that “panexperientialist physicalism,” by
  4871	allowing for “compound individuals” and thereby a “nondualistic
  4872	interactionism” that combines these strengths, can provide a theory that
  4873	overcomes the problems of materialist physicalism (Griffin, 1997).
  4874	Panexperientialist physicalism, he says, portrays the world as comprised
  4875	of creative, experiential, physical-mental events. His process-type pan­
  4876	experientialism agrees with materialism that there is only one kind of
  4877	stuff, but enlarges “energy” to “experiential creativity” (thus dis­
  4878	tinguishing it from panpsychism, 13.12). Process panexperientialists
  4879	assume that it lies in the very nature of things for events of experiential
  4880	creativity to occur—for partially self-creative experiences to arise out of
  4881	prior experiences and then to help create subsequent experiences. The
  4882	process by which our (sometimes partly conscious) experiences arise out
  4883	of those billions of events constituting our bodies at any moment is
  4884	simply the most complex example of this process—and the only one the
  4885	results of which we can witness from the inside.
       
  4886	9.8.1. First-order representationalism
  4887	First-order representationalism (FOR) seeks to account for con­
  4888	sciousness in terms of, or by reducing to, external, world-directed (or
  4889	first-order) intentional states (Gennaro, n.d.). In other words, con­
  4890	sciousness can be explained, primarily, by understanding how the
  4891	directedness of our mental states at objects and states of affairs in the
  4892	world is generated directly by those objects and states of affairs (Searle,
  4893	1979).
  4894	Fred Dretske asserts that “the phenomenal aspects of perceptual
  4895	experiences are one and the same as external, real-world properties that
  4896	experience represents objects as having.” He argues that “when a brain
  4897	state acquires, through natural selection, the function of carrying in­
  4898	formation, then it is a mental representation suited (with certain pro­
  4899	visos) to being a state of consciousness.” (In contrast, “representations
  4900	that get their functions through being recruited by operant conditioning,
  4901	on the other hand, are beliefs.”) (Dretske, 1997).
  4902	As philosopher Peter Carruthers explains, “the goal [of FOR] is to
  4903	characterize all of the phenomenal—‘felt’—properties of experience in
  4904	terms of the representational contents of experience (widely individu­
  4905	ated). On this view, the difference between an experience of red and an
  4906	experience of green will be explained as a difference in the properties
       
  4907	30
  4908	I wanted to include a process philosophy approach to consciousness, but
  4909	decided it could not by itself carry a separate category, because consciousness
  4910	per se is not a central concern in process philosophy. Given that the process of
  4911	becoming implies shifting relationships between things, over time and space, I
  4912	include process philosophy here in “Relational Theories.” Considering its
  4913	advocacy of “panexperientialism,” Panpsychism was the initial option, but I
  4914	thought it could prove misleading to tie the two together metaphysically,
  4915	because the meaning of panexperientialism in process philosophy differs subtly
  4916	from its meaning in philosophy of mind broadly. So, Solomonically, I split the
  4917	baby, including Process Theory in both Relational Theories under Materialism
  4918	(9.7.7) and in Panpsychism (14.12).
       
  4919	70
       
  4920	R.L. Kuhn
       
  4921	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  4922	represented—reflective properties of surfaces, say—in each case. And
  4923	the difference between a pain and a tickle is similarly explained in
  4924	representational terms—the difference is said to reside in the different
  4925	properties (different kinds of disturbance) represented as located in
  4926	particular regions of the subject’s own body” (Carruthers, 2000).
  4927	Carruthers recounts his unusual transition from higher-order theory
  4928	to first-order theory.31 He originally explained phenomenal conscious­
  4929	ness in terms of “dispositionalist higher-order thought theory,” which he
  4930	characterized as “a certain sort of intentional content (‘analog’, or finegrained), held in a special-purpose short-term memory store in such a
  4931	way as to be available to higher-order thoughts … all of those contents
  4932	are at the same time higher-order ones, acquiring a dimension of seeming
  4933	or subjectivity” (Carruthers, 2000). (One of his goals, he says, is “to
  4934	critique mysterian [10.2] and property-dualist accounts of phenomenal
  4935	consciousness … [by] defending the view that consciousness can be
  4936	reductively explained in terms of active non-conceptual representa­
  4937	tions.” He sought to “disarm (and explain away the appeal of) the
  4938	various ‘hard problem’ thought experiments (zombies, explanatory
  4939	gaps, and the rest)” (Carruthers, 2017).
  4940	The later Carruthers concludes that the earlier Carruthers had
  4941	“rejected first-order representational theories of consciousness on
  4942	inadequate grounds.” As a result, “since there is extensive evidence that
  4943	conscious experience co-occurs with the global broadcasting of firstorder non-conceptual contents in the brain [9.2.3], and since this evi­
  4944	dence is most easily accommodated by first-order representationalism,
  4945	the latter is preferable to any form of higher-order account” (Carruthers,
  4946	2017).
  4947	Philosopher Neil Mehta and anesthesiologist George Mashour
  4948	describe FOR as consisting of “sensory representations directly available
  4949	to the subject for action selection, belief formation, planning, etc.” They
  4950	posit a neuroscientific framework, according to which neural correlates
  4951	of general consciousness include prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal
  4952	cortex, and non-specific thalamic nuclei, while neural correlates of
  4953	specific consciousness include sensory cortex and specific thalamic
  4954	nuclei” (Mehta and Mashour, 2013).
  4955	FOR’s core philosophical idea, Mehta and Mashour state, is that “any
  4956	conscious state is a representation, and what it’s like to be in a conscious
  4957	state is wholly determined by the content of that representation. By
  4958	definition, a representation is about something, and the content of a
  4959	representation is what the representation is about. For instance, the
  4960	word ‘dolphins’ (representation) is about dolphins (content).” But, they
  4961	clarify, “a representation is not identical to its content.” The English
  4962	word “dolphins” has eight letters, but dolphins themselves do not have
  4963	any letters. “Conversely, dolphins swim, but the word ‘dolphins’ does
  4964	not swim.”
  4965	This distinction leads to the strong view that neural states seem to
  4966	have very different properties than conscious perceptions. “For instance,
  4967	when someone consciously perceives the color orange, normally there is
  4968	nothing orange in that person’s brain. First-order representationalists
  4969	explain this by holding that a conscious perception of orange is a rep­
  4970	resentation of orange, and (as the ‘dolphin’ example shows) the prop­
  4971	erties of a representation can be very different from the properties of its
  4972	content” (Mehta and Mashour, 2013).
  4973	FOR’s core neurobiological idea is that “each specific type of
  4974	conscious state corresponds to a specific type of neural state.” Ned Block
  4975	seeks to “disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from
  4976	the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of
  4977	phenomenal consciousness.” He argues that, in a certain sense,
  4978	“phenomenal consciousness overflows cognitive accessibility.” He posits
  4979	that “we can find a neural realizer of this overflow if we assume that the
  4980	neural basis of phenomenal consciousness does not include the neural
  4981	basis of cognitive accessibility and that this assumption is justified
  4982	(other things being equal) by the explanations it allows” (Block, 2007c).
  4983	31
       
  4984	Block hypothesizes that the conscious experience of motion is a
  4985	certain kind of activation of visual area V5, which suggests that sensory
  4986	systems are the neural correlates of sensory consciousness. He further
  4987	speculates that what’s required for consciousness in general are con­
  4988	nections between these cortical regions and the thalamus, “which sug­
  4989	gests that sensory and perhaps post-sensory systems … are the neural
  4990	correlates of general consciousness, as well” (Block, 2007c).
  4991	Block says he favors the first-order point of view, and if it is right, he
  4992	says, “It may be conscious phenomenology that promotes global
  4993	broadcasting, something like the reverse of what the global workspace
  4994	theory of consciousness supposes. First-order phenomenology may be a
  4995	causal factor in promoting global broadcasting; but according to the
  4996	global workspace theory, global broadcasting constitutes consciousness
  4997	rather than being caused by it” (Block, 2023, pp. 8–9).
  4998	With a pungent example, Block compares first-order representa­
  4999	tionalism with higher-order representationalism (9.8.3), higher-order
  5000	theories (HOT). “We have two perceptions that equally satisfy the
  5001	descriptive content of the HOT, but one and not the other causes the
  5002	HOT. But that gives rise to the problem of how a thought to the effect
  5003	that I am smelling vomit could make a perception of crimson a conscious
  5004	perception. The perception of crimson could cause the HOT while a
  5005	simultaneous first-order smell-representation of vomit does not cause
  5006	any higher-order state. The consequence would be that the perception of
  5007	crimson is a conscious perception and the perception of vomit is not,
  5008	even though the subject experiences the perception of crimson as if it
  5009	were the perception of vomit.” Block concludes that “a descriptivist view
  5010	based on content is inadequate,” and that “the difficulty for the HOT
  5011	theory is that it is unclear what relation has to obtain between a HOT
  5012	and a perception for the perception to be conscious” (Block, 2023, pp.
  5013	425–426).
  5014	9.8.2. Lamme’s recurrent processing theory
  5015	Neuroscientist Victor Lamme proposes Recurrent Processing Theory,
  5016	which stresses brain sensory systems that are massively interconnected
  5017	and involve feedforward and feedback connections, as being necessary
  5018	and sufficient for consciousness. The visual system provides a case
  5019	where “forward connections from primary visual area V1, the first
  5020	cortical visual area, carry information to higher-level processing areas,
  5021	and the initial registration of visual information involves a forward
  5022	sweep of processing.” Moreover, many feedback connections link visual
  5023	areas with other brain regions, which, later in processing, are activated
  5024	and thereby yield dynamic activity within the visual system (Wu, 2018).
  5025	Lamme proposes four stages of visual processing: Stage 1: Visual
  5026	signals are processed locally within the visual system (i.e., superficial
  5027	feedforward processing). Stage 2: Visual signals travel further forward in
  5028	the processing hierarchy where they can influence action (i.e., deep
  5029	feedforward processing). Stage 3: Information travels back into earlier
  5030	visual areas, leading to local recurrent processing (i.e., superficial
  5031	recurrent processing). Stage 4: Information activates widespread brain
  5032	areas (i.e., widespread recurrent processing) (Wu, 2018).
  5033	According to Lamme, it is the recurrent processing in Stage 3, which
  5034	is a first-order theory and can occur in both sensory and post-sensory
  5035	areas, that he claims to be necessary and sufficient for consciousness.
  5036	In other words, “for a visual state to be conscious is for a certain
  5037	recurrent processing state to hold of the relevant visual circuitry” (Wu,
  5038	2018).
  5039	Ned Block calls Recurrent Processing Theory “basically a truncated
  5040	form of the global workspace account: It identifies conscious perception
  5041	with the recurrent activations in the back of the head without the
  5042	requirement of broadcasting in the global workspace.” Block points out
  5043	that “first-order theories do not say that recurrent activations are by
  5044	themselves sufficient for consciousness. These activations are only suf­
  5045	ficient given background conditions. Those background conditions
  5046	probably include intact connectivity with subcortical structures.” What
  5047	then is “enough for conscious perceptual phenomenology” is “the active
  5048	recurrent loops in perceptual areas plus background conditions.” Block
       
  5049	Again, I love when a philosopher changes their mind.
  5050	71
       
  5051	R.L. Kuhn
       
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  5053	concludes: “So long as high-level representations participate in those
  5054	recurrent loops, conscious high-level content is assured” (Block, 2023,
  5055	pp. 8–9).
  5056	Lamme critiques Global Workspace Theory [9.2.3] as “all about ac­
  5057	cess but not about seeing” (even though his Stage 4 is consistent with
  5058	global workspace access). The crucial distinction is that Global Work­
  5059	space Theory has recurrent processing at Stage 4 as necessary for con­
  5060	sciousness, while Recurrent Processing Theory has recurrent processing
  5061	at Stage 3 as sufficient. The latter would enable phenomenal con­
  5062	sciousness without access by the global neuronal workspace (Wu, 2018).
  5063	Overall, Lamme avers that “neural and behavioral measures should
  5064	be put on an equal footing” and that “only by moving our notion of mind
  5065	towards that of brain can progress be made” (Lamme, 2006). He depicts
  5066	“a notion of consciousness that may go against our deepest conviction:
  5067	‘My consciousness is mine, and mine alone.’ It’s not,” he says (Lamme,
  5068	2010).
       
  5069	content, thereby in some sense representing itself to the person who is
  5070	the subject of that state.
  5071	According to Ned Block, there are two approaches to higher-order
  5072	thought (HOT) theories of consciousness. The “double representation”
  5073	approach says that the HOT involves a distinct coding of the perceptual
  5074	content, such that a conscious perception will be “accompanied” by a
  5075	thought of that experience, giving two representations of the conscious
  5076	experience, one perceptual, one cognitive and conceptual. He considers
  5077	it “mysterious” how a perception can be conscious. The second version
  5078	of HOT has a thought or at least a cognitive state that makes a perception
  5079	conscious but that thought does not itself have any perceptual content.
  5080	Block refers to Hakwan Lau, who sometimes describes the higher-order
  5081	state as a “pointer” to a first-order state. The pointer theory is cognitive
  5082	in that the pointer is a thought, but it is not conceptualist since it in­
  5083	volves no concept of a conscious experience involved in the thought that
  5084	is supposed to make a perception conscious (Block, 2023, pp. 425–426).
  5085	Lau himself argues that the key to characterizing consciousness lies
  5086	in its connections to belief formation and epistemic justification on a
  5087	subjective level (Lau, 2019a); he describes consciousness as “a battle
  5088	between your beliefs and perceptions” (Lau, 2019b). A clue, he sug­
  5089	gests—at least at the level of functional anatomy—is that the neural
  5090	mechanisms for conscious perception and sensory metacognition are
  5091	similar, sensory metacognition meaning the monitoring of the quality or
  5092	reliability of internal perceptual signals. Both mechanisms involve
  5093	neural activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortices, outside of primary
  5094	sensory regions (9.8.4).
  5095	Reflexive theories, which link consciousness and self-awareness, are
  5096	either a sister or a cousin of Higher-Order Theories. They differ in that
  5097	reflexive theories situate self-awareness within the conscious state itself
  5098	rather than in an independent meta-state focusing on it. The same
  5099	conscious state is both intentionally outer-directed awareness of
  5100	external perceptions and intentionally inner-directed awareness of selfsense. A strong claim is that this makes reflexive awareness a central
  5101	feature of conscious mental states and thereby qualifies as a theory of
  5102	consciousness. Whether reflexive theories are variants of Higher-Order
  5103	Theory (“sister”) or a “same-order” account of consciousness as selfawareness (“cousin”) is in dispute (Van Gulick, 2019).
  5104	Social psychologist Alexander Durig claims that our two brain
  5105	hemispheres, operating as two brains, aware of each other and inter­
  5106	acting with each other, exist in a system of “interactive reflexivity,” and
  5107	it is this reflexivity, while being perpetually aware of the world and each
  5108	other’s perception of the world, that is the foundation of consciousness
  5109	(Durig, 2023).
       
  5110	9.8.3. Higher-order theories
  5111	According to Higher-Order Theories of consciousness, what makes a
  5112	perception conscious is the presence of an accompanying cognitive state
  5113	about the perception. This means that phenomenal consciousness is not
  5114	immediate awareness of sensations. Rather, it is the higher-level sensing
  5115	of those sensations, a product of second-order thoughts about first-order
  5116	perceptions or mental states—a two-level process. Higher-Order The­
  5117	ories are distinguished from other cognitive accounts of phenomenal
  5118	consciousness which assume that first-order perceptions or mental states
  5119	can themselves be directly conscious—a one-level process (9.8.1, 9.8.2)
  5120	(Carruthers, 2020, Higher-order theories of consciousness, 2023).
  5121	According to Peter Carruthers, “humans not only have first-order
  5122	non-conceptual and/or analog perceptions of states of their environ­
  5123	ments and bodies, they also have second-order non-conceptual and/or
  5124	analog perceptions of their first-order states of perception.” This higherorder perception theory holds that “humans (and perhaps other animals)
  5125	not only have sense-organs that scan the environment/body to produce
  5126	fine-grained representations, but they also have inner senses which scan
  5127	the first-order senses (i.e. perceptual experiences) to produce equally
  5128	fine-grained, but higher-order, representations of those outputs.” Hence,
  5129	Higher-Order Theories are also called “inner-sense theory.” Notably,
  5130	“the higher-order approach does not attempt to reduce consciousness
  5131	directly to neurophysiology but rather its reduction is in mentalistic
  5132	terms, that is, by using such notions as thoughts and awareness”
  5133	(Cardenas-Garcia, 2023).
  5134	The main motivation driving higher-order theories of consciousness,
  5135	according to Carruthers, “derives from the belief that all (or at least
  5136	most) mental-state types admit of both conscious and unconscious va­
  5137	rieties … And then if we ask what makes the difference between a
  5138	conscious and an unconscious mental state, one natural answer is that
  5139	conscious states are states that we are aware of.” This translates into the
  5140	view that conscious states are states “that are the objects of some sort of
  5141	higher-order representation—whether a higher-order perception or
  5142	experience, or a higher-order thought” (Cardenas-Garcia, 2023).
  5143	Various flavors of higher-order theories can be distinguished,
  5144	including the following (Cardenas-Garcia, 2023):
       
  5145	9.8.4. Lau’s perceptual reality monitoring theory
  5146	Cognitive neuroscientist Hakwan Lau introduces Perceptual Reality
  5147	Monitoring Theory, which he says is an empirically-grounded higherorder theory of conscious perception. He proposes that conscious
  5148	perception in an agent occurs “if there is a relevant higher-order rep­
  5149	resentation with the content that a particular first-order perceptual rep­
  5150	resentation is a reliable reflection of the external world right now. The
  5151	occurrence of this higher-order representation gives rise to conscious
  5152	experiences with the perceptual content represented by the relevant
  5153	first-order state.” This structure allows us to distinguish “reality from
  5154	fantasy in a generally reliable fashion” (Lau, 2019a).
  5155	The agent is not conscious of the content of this higher-order rep­
  5156	resentation itself, Lau says, “but the representation is instantiated in the
  5157	system in such a way to allow relevant inferences to be drawn (auto­
  5158	matically) and to be made available to the agent (on a personal level, in
  5159	ways that make the inferences feel subjectively justified)” (Lau, 2019a).
  5160	It is a subpersonal process. “That is, we don’t have to think hard to come
  5161	up with this higher-order representation. It’s not a thought in that
  5162	sense.” Rather, “this higher-order representation serves as a tag or label
  5163	indicating the suitable epistemic status of the sensory representation,
  5164	and functions as a gating mechanism to route the relevant sensory
       
  5165	Actualist Higher-Order Thought Theory (championed by David
  5166	Rosenthal): A phenomenally conscious mental state is a state that is
  5167	the object of a higher-order thought, and which causes that thought
  5168	non-inferentially.
  5169	Dispositionalist Higher-Order Thought Theory: A phenomenally
  5170	conscious mental state is a state that is available to cause (noninferentially) higher-order thoughts about itself (or perhaps about
  5171	any of the contents of a special-purpose, short-term memory store).
  5172	Self-Representational Theory: A phenomenally conscious mental
  5173	state is a state that, at the same time, possesses an intentional
  5174	72
       
  5175	R.L. Kuhn
       
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  5177	information for further cognitive processing” (Lau, 2022, p. 28).
  5178	This structural mechanism, Lau asserts, sets his view “apart from
  5179	global theories” (9.8.3). This is because, he says, “such further pro­
  5180	cessing is only a potential consequence, but not a constitutive part of the
  5181	subjective experience … In other words, consciousness is neither
  5182	cognition nor metacognition. It is the mechanistic interface right be­
  5183	tween perception and cognition.” Lau believes that “such higher-order
  5184	mechanisms likely reside within the mammalian prefrontal cortex,
  5185	where the functions of perceptual metacognition are also carried out”
  5186	(Lau, 2022, p. 28).
  5187	But can we ask what happens when higher-order representation is
  5188	missing? Wouldn’t subjective experience also be missing? This explains,
  5189	Lau says, “why sometimes sensory representations alone do not lead to
  5190	conscious experiences at all, as in conditions like blindsight, where,
  5191	because of brain damage, a person (or an animal) is able to respond
  5192	accurately to visual stimuli while denying any conscious awareness of
  5193	them” (Lau, 2022, pp. 35–36).
  5194	Blindsight, in fact, is a litmus test for any theory of consciousness and
  5195	Lau claims his theory offers the most coherent explanation: Blindsight
  5196	“occurs when a first-order representation occurs without the corre­
  5197	sponding higher-order representation … That’s why the perceptual ca­
  5198	pacity is there (due to the first-order representations), but the
  5199	phenomenology of conscious perception is missing” (Lau, 2019b).
  5200	Lau says his theory is a functionalist account. As such, he says, “some
  5201	animals may not be conscious. And yet, perhaps even a robot or com­
  5202	puter program could be.” He highlights “the role of memory in conscious
  5203	experience, even for simple percepts. How an experience feels depends
  5204	on implicit memory of the relationships between different perceptual
  5205	representations within the brain” (Lu et al., 2022).
  5206	Lau critiques both the global view of consciousness (9.2.3) and the
  5207	local view (9.8.1 and 9.8.2) as “polar extremes,” arguing that his own
  5208	intermediate or centrist position is superior (Lau, 2022, pp. 25, 26, 130).
  5209	As part of his model, he takes from artificial intelligence the idea of a
  5210	“discriminator,” which can distinguish between “real” and “self-­
  5211	generated” images (Lau, 2022, p. 142). Applied to human consciousness,
  5212	an analogous “discriminator” “distinguishes between true perceptions of
  5213	the world, memory, fantasy, and neuronal noise. For conscious
  5214	perception of an object to occur, this discriminator must confirm that the
  5215	early sensory information represents the object. This model, Lau asserts,
  5216	accounts for sensory richness, because higher-order representations
  5217	access richer, lower-level perceptions of first-order representations
  5218	(Stirrups, 2023). Bottom line, Lau strikes the ambitious claim that his
  5219	theory explains the subjective “what-it-is-like-ness” of first-person
  5220	experience—why it “feels like something” to be in a particular brain
  5221	state, say with a sharp pain—mediated by higher-order representations
  5222	in the brain (Lau, 2022, p. 197).
  5223	Enhancing his model, Lau proposes that “because of the way the
  5224	mammalian sensory cortices are organized, perceptual signals in the
  5225	brain are spatially ‘analog’ in a specific sense,” which enables
  5226	“computational advantages.” Given this analog nature, “when a sensory
  5227	representation becomes conscious, not only do we have the tendency to
  5228	think that its content reflects the state of the world right now, also
  5229	determined is what it is like to have the relevant experience—in terms of
  5230	how subjectively similar it is with respect to all other possible experi­
  5231	ences.” Lau submits that this addresses the hard problem, “better than
  5232	prominent alternative views” (Lau, 2022, p. 29).
       
  5233	GNC and “self-centered higher-order states are essential for emotional
  5234	experiences” (Ledoux and Brown, 2017).
  5235	LeDoux challenges the traditional view that emotional states of
  5236	consciousness (emotional feelings) are “innately programmed in
  5237	subcortical areas of the brain,” and are “as different from cognitive states
  5238	of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external
  5239	stimuli.” Rather, LeDoux argues that “conscious experiences, regardless
  5240	of their content, arise from one system in the brain” and that “emotions
  5241	are higher-order states instantiated in cortical circuits.” In this view, all
  5242	that differs in emotional and nonemotional states are “the kinds of in­
  5243	puts that are processed.” According to LeDoux, “although subcortical
  5244	circuits are not directly responsible for conscious feelings, they provide
  5245	nonconscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of neural signals in
  5246	the cognitive assembly of conscious emotional experiences.”
  5247	For understanding the emotional brain, LeDoux focuses on “fear,”
  5248	defining it as “the conscious feeling one has when in danger.” In the
  5249	presence of a threat, he says, “different circuits underlie the conscious
  5250	feelings of fear and the behavioral responses and physiological responses
  5251	that also occur.” But it is the “experience of fear,” the conscious
  5252	emotional feeling of fear, that informs LeDoux’s theory of consciousness,
  5253	which he explains as follows. “A first-order representation of the threat
  5254	enters into a higher-order representation, along with relevant long-term
  5255	memories—including emotion schema—that are retrieved. This initial
  5256	HOR involving the threat and the relevant memories occurs non­
  5257	consciously. Then, a HOROR [i.e., a third-order state, a HOR of a rep­
  5258	resentation, a HOR of a HOR] allows for the conscious noetic experience
  5259	of the stimulus as dangerous. However, to have the emotional autonoetic
  5260	experience of fear, the self must be included in the HOROR” (Ledoux and
  5261	Brown, 2017).
  5262	Advancing his theory, LeDoux explores “introspection,” the term
  5263	given by higher-order theorists to this third level of representations, that
  5264	is, “to be aware of the higher-order state (to be conscious that you are in
  5265	that state).” LeDoux proposes “a more inclusive view of introspection, in
  5266	which the term indicates the process by which phenomenally experi­
  5267	enced states result.” Introspection, he says, “can involve either passive
  5268	noticing (as, for example, in the case of consciously seeing a ripe
  5269	strawberry on the counter) or active scrutinizing (as in the case of
  5270	deliberate focused attention to our conscious experience of the ripe
  5271	strawberry).” Both kinds of introspection lead to phenomenal experi­
  5272	ence, in LeDoux’s view (Ledoux and Brown, 2017).
  5273	HOROR theory states that “phenomenal consciousness does not
  5274	reflect a sensory state (as proposed by first-order theory) or the relation
  5275	between a sensory state and a higher-order cognitive state of working
  5276	memory (as proposed by traditional HOT). Instead, HOROR posits that
  5277	phenomenal consciousness consists of having the appropriate HOR of
  5278	lower-order information, where lower-order does not necessarily mean
  5279	sensory, but instead refers to a prior higher-order state that is rerepre­
  5280	sented.” He says, “This second HOR is thought-like and, in virtue of this,
  5281	instantiates the phenomenal, introspectively accessed experience of the
  5282	external sensory stimulus. That is, to have a phenomenal experience is to
  5283	be introspectively aware of a nonconscious HOR.” He distinguishes or­
  5284	dinary introspective awareness, which is the passive kind of “noticing”
  5285	that he postulates is responsible for phenomenal consciousness, “from
  5286	the active scrutinizing of one’s conscious experience that requires
  5287	deliberate attentive focus on one’s phenomenal consciousness.” Active
  5288	introspection, he stresses, “requires an additional layer of HOR (and thus
  5289	a HOR of a HOROR).”
  5290	In studies of human patients, LeDoux and his PhD adviser, Michael
  5291	Gazzaniga, “concluded that conscious experiences are the result of
  5292	cognitive interpretation situations in an effort to help maintain a sense
  5293	of mental unity in the face of the neural diversity of non-conscious
  5294	behavioral control systems in our brain” (LeDoux, 2023b).
  5295	Rejecting the notion of the “self,” and certainly mind-body dualism,
  5296	LeDoux positions “consciousness” as the fourth and final “realm of ex­
  5297	istence” for animal life, the four realms being “bodily, neural, cognitive,
  5298	and conscious.” LeDoux replaces the self with an “ensemble of being”
       
  5299	9.8.5. LeDoux’s higher-order theory of emotional consciousness
  5300	Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux’s Higher-Order Theory of Emotional
  5301	Consciousness combines his approach to higher-order representation­
  5302	alism (9.8.3) and his commitment to the centrality of emotion. His thesis
  5303	is that “the brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotional
  5304	feelings are not fundamentally different from those that give rise to
  5305	perceptual conscious experiences.” Both, he proposes, “involve higherorder representations (HORs) of lower-order information by cortically
  5306	based general networks of cognition” (GNC). The theory argues that
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  5310	that “subsumes our entire human existence, both as individuals and as a
  5311	species” (LeDoux, 2023a).
  5312	LeDoux’s views continue to develop. In particular, he picks out two
  5313	overarching perspectives. First, his multi-state hierarchical model of con­
  5314	sciousness, which features an intricate anatomical framework evincing
  5315	the complexity of higher-order processing via redundancy. The multistate hierarchical model of consciousness, he says, “replaces the tradi­
  5316	tional volley between the sensory cortex and the lateral PFC [prefrontal
  5317	cortex] with a more complex anatomical arrangement consisting of a
  5318	hierarchy of structures, each of which creates different kinds of states
  5319	that are re-represented/re-described by circuits of sub-granular and
  5320	granular PFC and that contribute to higher-order mental modeling and
  5321	conscious experience. The states that constitute the functional features
  5322	of the multi-state hierarchical higher-order theory of consciousness, and
  5323	the brain areas that are associated with these states, include primary
  5324	lower-order states (areas of the sensory cortex); secondary lower-order
  5325	states (memory areas and other convergence zones in the temporal
  5326	and parietal lobes); sub-higher-order states (meso-cortical areas of subgranular PFC, including the anterior cingulate, orbital, ventromedial,
  5327	prelimbic, and insula PFC); and higher-order states that re-represent/redescribe/index the various other states to construct mental models in
  5328	working memory (granular PFC)” (LeDoux, 2023a, p. 234).
  5329	LeDoux’s second overarching perspective is the dual mental hypoth­
  5330	esis that shows the interplay between preconscious and conscious states
  5331	and the role of narratives in driving them. In the dual mental-model
  5332	hypothesis, he says, “explicit consciousness of complex events emerges
  5333	from interactions between granular and sub-granular PFC states. Lowerorder non-PFC states, while often involved as inputs to the PFC, are not
  5334	necessary for such higher-order conscious experiences. In other words, a
  5335	thought, which is a higher-order state constructed by a pre-conscious
  5336	mental model, is sufficient to populate the conscious higher-order
  5337	state via the second mental model.” The output of the conscious
  5338	mental model, he says, “much like the output of the pre-conscious
  5339	mental model, is an abstract mentalese narrative (albeit a conscious
  5340	one) that feeds distributaries flowing to motor circuits that control overt
  5341	behavior and verbal expression.” LeDoux senses that “this implies that
  5342	we have conscious agency, which you may know of as free will”­
  5343	—adding, “the question of whether we actually make conscious choices
  5344	is a matter of debate” (LeDoux, 2023a, pp. 296–297).
       
  5345	activity must map onto the phenomenal properties of conscious expe­
  5346	rience.” He calls the hard problem “the wrong problem” (Humphrey,
  5347	2022).
  5348	Humphrey believes that our best approach to explaining sentience
  5349	(which is how he labels phenomenal consciousness) will be “forward
  5350	engineering”—reconstructing the steps by which natural selection could
  5351	have invented it. He proposes that sensations originated in primitive
  5352	animals as evaluative responses to stimulation at the body surface. Thus,
  5353	sensations started out as something the animal did about the stimulation
  5354	rather than something it felt about it. Early on, however, animals hit on
  5355	the trick of monitoring these responses—by means of an “efference
  5356	copy” of the command signals—to yield a simple representation of what
  5357	the stimulation is about. In short, a feeling (Humphrey, 2023a,b).
  5358	Humphrey’s story quickens, as that feeling became privatised,
  5359	resulting in activity in neural feedback loops, which became recursive
  5360	and stretched out in time, taking on complex higher-order properties. It
  5361	was then refined and stabilised to generate mathematically complex
  5362	attractor states, which would give rise—“out of the blue”—to the
  5363	apparently unaccountable qualities of sensory qualia. Quite possibly, he
  5364	says, phenomenal experience involves the brain generating something
  5365	like an internal text, which it interprets as being about phenomenal
  5366	properties. The driving force behind these later developments was the
  5367	adaptive benefits to the animal of the emergence of the phenomenal self.
  5368	This is why Humphrey takes phenomenal consciousness as a rela­
  5369	tively late evolutionary invention, having evolved only in animal species
  5370	that (a) have brains capable of entertaining and enjoying these fancy
  5371	mental representations, and (b) lead lives in which having this bold
  5372	sense of self can give them an edge in the fitness game. Thus, Humphrey
  5373	challenges conventional wisdom that phenomenal consciousness in the
  5374	animal kingdom is a gradient; his “hunch” is that only mammals and
  5375	birds make the cut. Chimpanzees, dogs, parrots have it. Lobsters, lizards,
  5376	frogs do not (Humphrey, 2023a,b).
  5377	9.8.7. Metzinger’s no-self representational theory of subjectivity
  5378	Philosopher Thomas Metzinger presents a representationalist and
  5379	functional analysis of subjectivity, the consciously experienced firstperson perspective (Metzinger, 2004). What has been traditionally
  5380	called “conscious thought,” he argues, is actually “a subpersonal pro­
  5381	cess, and only rarely a form of mental action. The paradigmatic, stan­
  5382	dard form of conscious thought is non-agentive, because it lacks
  5383	veto-control and involves an unnoticed loss of epistemic agency and
  5384	goal-directed causal self-determination at the level of mental content.”
  5385	Conceptually, Metzinger states, “conscious thought … must be described
  5386	as an unintentional form of inner behaviour” (Metzinger, 2015).
  5387	A starting assumption is that phenomenal consciousness (subjective
  5388	experience), “rather than being an epiphenomenon, has a causal role in
  5389	the optimisation of certain human behaviours” (Frith and Metzinger,
  5390	2016). A leitmotif of Metzinger’s models is that there are no such things
  5391	as “selves”; selves do not exist in the world: “nobody ever had or was a
  5392	self.” All that exists, he argues, are “phenomenal selves, as they appear
  5393	in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing
  5394	but an ongoing process; it is the content of a ‘transparent self-model’”
  5395	(Metzinger, 2004).
  5396	Metzinger employs empirical research to support his deflationary noself model, showing how “we are not mentally autonomous subjects for
  5397	about two thirds of our conscious lifetime, because while conscious
  5398	cognition is unfolding, it often cannot be inhibited, suspended, or
  5399	terminated.” This means that “the instantiation of a stable first-person
  5400	perspective as well as of certain necessary conditions of personhood
  5401	turn out to be rare, graded, and dynamically variable properties of
  5402	human beings” (Metzinger, 2015).
  5403	Drawing on a large psychometric study of meditators in 57 coun­
  5404	tries—more than 500 experiential reports—Metzinger focuses on “pure
  5405	awareness” in meditation—the simplest form of experience there is—to
  5406	illuminate, as he puts it, “the most fundamental aspects of how con­
  5407	sciousness, the brain, and illusions of self all interact.” Metzinger
       
  5408	9.8.6. Humphrey’s mental representations and brain attractors
  5409	Neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey employs an evolutionary
  5410	framework, combining mental representations with what he calls
  5411	“attractor states in the brain,” to develop a novel materialistic theory of
  5412	phenomenal consciousness, which he sees as a late and not ubiquitous
  5413	evolutionary development. His multi-discipline argument follows (Sec­
  5414	tion: Humphrey, 2023a,b, 2022, 2024; Humphrey, 2023a,b).
  5415	Sensations, he says, are ideas we generate: mental representations of
  5416	stimuli arriving at our sense organs and how they affect us. Their
  5417	properties are to be explained, therefore, not literally as the properties of
  5418	brain-states, but rather as the properties of mind-states dreamed up by
  5419	the brain. Remarkably, we (and presumably other sentient creatures)
  5420	represent what’s happening as having “phenomenal properties”, or
  5421	“qualia”, that fill the “thick time” of the subjective present. The result is
  5422	we come to have a psychologically impressive sense of self—a
  5423	“phenomenal self” that is semi-independent of our physical bodies. This
  5424	idea of “what it’s like to be me” may be in some respects “fake news”; but
  5425	Humphrey’s point is that, to us as the subjects, it’s big news!
  5426	When it comes to how sensations are generated in the brain, Hum­
  5427	phrey points out this has to be a two-stage process: first the gathering of
  5428	sensory information, which is the sensory text, then the interpretation of
  5429	this information, which is the conscious reading. This two-stage process
  5430	generates our subjective take on what this is like for us. Phenomenal
  5431	properties arise only at the interpretative stage. This, Humphrey
  5432	stresses, is “a point often lost on researchers looking for the neural
  5433	correlates of consciousness, who assume the properties of the brain
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  5437	explores “the increasingly non-egoic experiences of silence, wakeful­
  5438	ness, and clarity, of bodiless body-experience, ego-dissolution, and
  5439	nondual awareness” in order to assemble “what it would take to arrive at
  5440	a minimal model explanation for conscious experience and create a
  5441	genuine culture of consciousness” (Metzinger, 2024).
  5442	Metzinger uses an interdisciplinary, multi-layer analysis of
  5443	phenomenological, representationalist, informational-computational,
  5444	functional, and physical-neurobiological kinds of descriptions. His
  5445	representationalist theory analyzes its target properties—those aspects
  5446	of the domain to be explained. He seeks to make progress “by describing
  5447	conscious systems as representational systems and conscious states as
  5448	representational states” (Metzinger, 2000). He argues that “individual
  5449	representational events only become part of a personal-level process by
  5450	being functionally integrated into a specific form of transparent
  5451	conscious self-representation, the ‘epistemic agent model’ (EAM).” The
  5452	EAM, he suspects, “may be the true origin of our consciously experi­
  5453	enced first-person perspective” (Metzinger, 2015).
  5454	Metzinger’s resolution of the mind-body problem follows directly:
  5455	our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences, phenomenal con­
  5456	sciousness, “can never be reductively explained are themselves ulti­
  5457	mately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious
  5458	minds” (Metzinger, 2004).
  5459	A corollary of Metzinger’s work concerns individual behavior and
  5460	collective culture, based on our perception of the experience of being an
  5461	agent that causes events in the world and the belief that we “could have
  5462	done otherwise” (the test of libertarian free will). This experience and
  5463	belief enable us “to justify our behaviour to ourselves and to others and,
  5464	in the longer term, create a cultural narrative about responsibility.”
  5465	Metzinger concludes that “conscious experience is necessary for opti­
  5466	mizing flexible intrapersonal interactions and for the emergence of cu­
  5467	mulative culture” (Frith and Metzinger, 2016).
       
  5468	representational character exhausts phenomenal character, “the physi­
  5469	calist must still face a representationalist version of the Mary challenge,
  5470	which inherits the difficulty of the original” (Alter, 2003).
  5471	9.8.9. Lycan’s homuncular functionalism
  5472	Philosopher William Lycan defends a materialist, representational
  5473	theory of mind that he calls “homuncular functionalism” and which
  5474	posits that “human beings are ‘functionally organized informationprocessing systems’ who have no non-physical parts or properties.”
  5475	Lycan does recognize “the subjective phenomenal qualities of mental
  5476	states and events, and an important sense in which mind is ‘over and
  5477	above’ mere chemical matter” (Lycan, 1987). But he defends materi­
  5478	alism in general and functionalist theories of mind in particular by
  5479	arguing for what he calls the "hegemony of representation," in that
  5480	“there is no more to mind or consciousness than can be accounted for in
  5481	terms of intentionality, functional organization, and in particular,
  5482	second-order representation of one’s own mental states” (Lycan, 1996).
  5483	Reviewing “an explosion of work” in consciousness studies by phi­
  5484	losophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, Lycan is “struck by an
  5485	astonishing diversity of topics that have gone under the heading of
  5486	“consciousness”—he lists more than 15, only six of which, he says, deal
  5487	with “phenomenal experience,” that is, qualia and the explanatory gap.
  5488	From this he draws “two morals.” First, he says, “no one should claim
  5489	that problems of phenomenal experience have been solved by any purely
  5490	cognitive or neuroscientific theory.” (Here Lycan finds himself in “sur­
  5491	prising agreement with Chalmers.”) Second and perhaps more impor­
  5492	tantly, he says, some of “the theories cannot fairly be criticized for
  5493	failing to illuminate problems of phenomenal experience”—because that
  5494	is not what they intend to do, that is, “they may be theories of, say,
  5495	awareness or of privileged access, not theories of qualia or of subjec­
  5496	tivity or of ‘what it’s like’” (Lycan, 2004).
  5497	Lycan defends “the Representational theory of the qualitative fea­
  5498	tures of apparent phenomenal objects: When you see a (real) ripe banana
  5499	and there is a corresponding yellow patch in your visual field, the yel­
  5500	lowness ‘of’ the patch is, like the banana itself, a representatum, an
  5501	intentional object of the experience. The experience represents the ba­
  5502	nana and it represents the yellowness of the banana, and the latter yel­
  5503	lowness is all the yellowness that is involved; there is no mental patch
  5504	that is itself yellow. If you were only hallucinating a banana, the unreal
  5505	banana would still be a representatum, but now an intentional inexis­
  5506	tent; and so would be its yellowness. The yellowness would be as it is
  5507	even though the banana were not real” (Lycan, 2004).
  5508	Lycan agrees that the “explanatory gap” is real. But this is for two
  5509	reasons, he argues, “neither of which embarrasses materialism.” First, he
  5510	says, “phenomenal information and facts of ‘what it’s like’ are ineffable.
  5511	But one cannot explain what one cannot express in the first place. (The
  5512	existence of ineffable facts is no embarrassment to science or to mate­
  5513	rialism, so long as they are fine-grained ‘facts,’ incorporating modes of
  5514	presentation.)” Second, he says, “the Gap is not confined to conscious­
  5515	ness in any sense or even to mind; there are many kinds of intrinsically
  5516	perspectival (fine-grained) facts that cannot be explained” (without first
  5517	conceding a pre-existing identity) (Lycan, 2004).
  5518	In their review, Thomas Polger and Owen Flanagan describe Lycan’s
  5519	view as, roughly, that “conscious beings are hierarchically composed
  5520	intentional systems, whose representational powers are to be under­
  5521	stood in terms of their biological function.” They call the view “teleo­
  5522	logical functionalism” or “teleofunctionalism” and state “the
  5523	homuncular part, for which Lycan and Daniel Dennett argued convinc­
  5524	ingly, is now so widely accepted that it fails to distinguish Lycan’s view
  5525	from other versions of functionalism. This, by itself, is a testament to the
  5526	importance of Lycan’s work” (Polger and Flanagan, 2001).
  5527	In his review, Frank Jackson explains that when Lycan argues “there
  5528	is no special problem for physicalism raised by conscious experience,”
  5529	he is rightly distinguishing two questions. “Does consciousness per se
  5530	raise a problem? And: Do qualia pose a special problem?” Lycan answers
  5531	the first question on consciousness by defending an “inner sense account
       
  5532	9.8.8. Jackson’s diaphanous representationalism and the knowledge
  5533	argument
  5534	Philosopher Frank Jackson develops a representationalist view about
  5535	perceptual experience. “That experience is diaphanousness (or trans­
  5536	parent) is a thesis about the phenomenology of perceptual experience. It
  5537	is the thesis that the properties that make an experience the kind of
  5538	experience it is are properties of the object of experience.” In other
  5539	words, “accessing the nature of the experience itself is nothing other
  5540	than accessing the properties of its object” (Jackson, 2007).
  5541	Jackson uses his Diaphanous Representationalism theory to under­
  5542	mine his own prior argument against materialism/physicalism based on
  5543	the famous thought experiment of Mary the brilliant neurophysiologist
  5544	who is forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a
  5545	black and white television monitor, and who acquires all the physical
  5546	information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see colors.
  5547	“What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white
  5548	room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or
  5549	not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world
  5550	and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her pre­
  5551	vious knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical infor­
  5552	mation. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false”
  5553	(Jackson, 1982).
  5554	Jackson argues that “although the diaphanousness thesis alone does
  5555	not entail representationalism, the thesis supports an inference from a
  5556	weaker to a stronger version of representationalism. On the weak
  5557	version, perceptual experience is essentially representational. On the
  5558	strong version, how an experience represents things as being exhausts its
  5559	experiential nature.” This means that there is nothing else needed to
  5560	bring about phenomenal consciousness (qualia). Hence, according to
  5561	Jackson, “strong representationalism undermines the claim that Mary
  5562	learns new truths when she leaves the room”—which would defeat the
  5563	defeater of materialism/physicalism (Jackson, 2007).
  5564	Philosopher Torin Alter disagrees, arguing that representationalism
  5565	provides no basis for rejecting the knowledge argument, because even if
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  5569	of consciousness,” holding that "consciousness is the functioning of in­
  5570	ternal attention mechanisms directed at lower-order psychological
  5571	states and events." Jackson is less satisfied by Lycan’s rejection of the
  5572	knowledge argument, which Jackson calls “the most forceful way of
  5573	raising the problem posed by qualia for physicalism.” (Jackson says this
  5574	“as someone who no longer accepts the argument”) (Jackson, 1997).
  5575	According to Jackson, Lycan is confident that phenomenal nature is
  5576	exhausted by functional role. In other words, “for Lycan, it is very hard
  5577	for functional nature to fail to exhaust phenomenal nature. Almost
  5578	anything you might cite as escaping the functional net is, by his lights,
  5579	functional after all.” Moreover, Lycan has “the nature of conscious
  5580	experience exhausted by the intentional contents or representational
  5581	nature of the relevant kinds of mental states” in that “the representa­
  5582	tional facts which make up a package [is] sufficient to capture in full the
  5583	perceptual experience” (Jackson, 1997).
  5584	Lycan attacks neurobiological conventional wisdom in that “all too
  5585	often we hear it suggested that advances in neuroscience will solve
  5586	Thomas Nagel’s and Frank Jackson’s conceptual problem of “knowing
  5587	what it’s like.” To Lycan, “this is grievously confused. For Nagel’s and
  5588	Jackson’s claim is precisely that there is an irreducible kind of
  5589	phenomenal knowledge that cannot be revealed by science of any kind.
  5590	Nagel’s and Jackson’s respective ‘Knowledge Arguments’ for this radical
  5591	thesis are purely philosophical; they contain no premises that depend on
  5592	scientific fact.” Lycan now presses his sharp point. “Either the arguments
  5593	are unsound or they are sound. If they are unsound, then so far as has
  5594	been shown, there is no such irreducible knowledge, and neither science
  5595	nor anything else is needed to produce it. But if the arguments are sound,
  5596	they show that no amount of science could possibly help to produce the
  5597	special phenomenal knowledge. Either way, neither neuroscience nor
  5598	any other science is pertinent.”
  5599	Lycan seems sure that the “what it’s like to be” and knowledge ar­
  5600	guments are unsound and he can go about formulating his Representa­
  5601	tional theory of mind standing squarely in the materialist camp. (I am
  5602	not so sure. It is my uncertainty that motivates this Landscape of
  5603	Consciousness.)
       
  5604	supervenes on intentional content (Pace, 2007).
  5605	Philosopher Dirk Franken characterizes “the transparency of
  5606	appearing” as follows: "The phenomenal quality of a particular state of
  5607	appearing is fully exhausted by the sensible properties present to the
  5608	subject of the state and their distribution over the respective field of
  5609	appearance.” Starting “from the assumption that the transparency of
  5610	appearing is a purely phenomenological feature,” Franken describes his
  5611	“Transparency Thesis” with several propositions: “There are no other
  5612	properties, next to the sensible properties, that have any bearing on the
  5613	phenomenal quality of a state of appearing. The presentation of sensible
  5614	properties is just all there is to the phenomenal quality of a state of
  5615	appearing. No properties of the subject (insofar as it is the subject of this
  5616	state) or of the state itself contribute to this phenomenal quality.” He
  5617	defends “surprising consequences” of the Transparency Thesis. First,
  5618	“one has to give up the idea of the first-person-perspective as a kind of
  5619	inner seeming or appearing directed onto mental states (at least, if the
  5620	relevant states are states of appearing).” Next, two assumptions entailed
  5621	in numerous popular accounts of phenomenal consciousness are
  5622	negated: (i) “phenomenal qualities are properties of states of appearing
  5623	that are independent or partly independent of the (sensible) properties
  5624	presented in these states; ” and (ii) “there can be phenomenally
  5625	conscious states of appearing even though there is nothing that is pre­
  5626	sented to their subjects” (Franken, n.d.).
  5627	9.8.11. Tye’s contingentism
  5628	Philosopher Michael Tye proposes a theory of consciousness he calls
  5629	“contingentism,” which is a kind of identity theory (i.e., phenomenal
  5630	states and physical/brain states are literally the same) but with a novel
  5631	twist: while the identity is indeed true in our world, it is not meta­
  5632	physically true in all possible worlds. “Scenarios in which the relevant
  5633	physical processing is present and consciousness is missing are easily
  5634	imaginable (and thus metaphysically possible), but this is irrelevant if it
  5635	is only a contingent fact that consciousness is a physical phenomenon”
  5636	(Tye, 2023).32
  5637	Contingentism, Tye states, “finds its origins in the views of Feigl,
  5638	Place and Smart in the 1950s and 1960s. These philosophers held that
  5639	sensations are contingently identical with brain processes, where sen­
  5640	sations are understood to be conscious states such as pain or the visual
  5641	experience of red.” The identity here was taken to be contingent, in part,
  5642	because “it was taken to be clear that scientific type-type identities
  5643	generally are contingent.” Smart’s example was that he could imagine
  5644	that lightning is not an electrical discharge. (These claims are mistaken,
  5645	Tye says; “If in actual fact lightning is an electrical discharge, it could not
  5646	have been otherwise.”) (Tye, 2023).
  5647	Tye says, “the contingentist about consciousness agrees with the
  5648	above remarks concerning lightning and is happy to extend them to
  5649	many other scientific identity statements. But the contingentist holds
  5650	that the case of conscious mental states—states such that there is
  5651	something it is like to undergo them—is different. Here the claim is not
  5652	that such states are contingently identical with brain processes, but that
  5653	such states are contingently identical with physical states of some sort or
  5654	other, where the notion of a physical state is to be understood broadly to
  5655	include not only neurophysiological states but also other states that are
  5656	grounded in microphysical states, including functional states or states of
  5657	the sort posited by representationalism, for example. For conscious
  5658	states, the identities are contingent since we can easily imagine their
  5659	having not obtained. For example, we can easily imagine a zombie un­
  5660	dergoing the physical state with which the experience of fear is to be
  5661	identified and yet not experiencing fear at all. Similarly, we can easily
  5662	imagine someone experiencing fear without undergoing the given
  5663	physical state” (Tye, 2023).
       
  5664	9.8.10. Transparency theory
  5665	Transparency theory makes the argument that because sensory (e.g.,
  5666	visual) experience represents external objects and their apparent prop­
  5667	erties, experience has no other properties that pose problems for mate­
  5668	rialism. We “see right through” perceptual states to external objects and
  5669	take no notice that we are actually in perceptual states; the properties we
  5670	perceive in perception are attributed to the objects themselves, not to
  5671	the perception (Lycan, 2019). If we look at a tree and try to turn our
  5672	attention to the intrinsic features of our visual experience, the only
  5673	features there to turn our attention to are features of the actual tree it­
  5674	self, including relational features of the tree from the perspective of the
  5675	perceiver (Harman, 1990).
  5676	To make the argument, at a minimum, an additional premise is
  5677	needed: If a perceptual state has mental properties over and above its
  5678	representational properties, they must be “introspectible.” But “not even
  5679	the most determined introspection ever reveals any such additional
  5680	properties.” This is the transparency thesis proper (Lycan, 2019).
  5681	Philosopher Amy Kind cites experiential transparency as a major
  5682	motivation driving representational theories of consciousness, which
  5683	view phenomenal character as being reduced to intentional content.
  5684	Assuming experience is transparent in that we “look right through”
  5685	experience to the objects of that experience, “this is supposed to support
  5686	the representationalist claim that there are no intrinsic aspects of our
  5687	experience” (Kind, 2010).
  5688	Philosopher Michael Tye states that one important motivation for the
  5689	theory that “phenomenal character is one and the same as representa­
  5690	tional content” is “the so-called ‘transparency of experience.’” He ad­
  5691	dresses introspective awareness of experience and one problem case for
  5692	transparency, that of blurry vision (Tye, 2002). A similar theory is
  5693	“intentionalism,” the view that the phenomenal character of experience
       
  5694	32
  5695	Tye notes that “contrary to orthodoxy, there is no obvious difficulty with
  5696	holding that identity statements in which the identity sign is flanked by rigid
  5697	designators are sometimes contingent” (Tye, 2023).
       
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  5699	R.L. Kuhn
       
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  5701	The solution, Tye suggests, “lies with the realization that it is a
  5702	mistake to model the consciousness case on that of physical-physical
  5703	relationships. Qualitative character Q is identical with physical prop­
  5704	erty R, if physicalism is true. But this is a contingent identity (even
  5705	though the designators ‘Q’ and ‘R’ are rigid). So, we can imagine Q
  5706	without R (and R without Q), but the fact that we can do so is not an
  5707	indicator of an explanatory gap. A creature could indeed have been in a
  5708	state having Q without being in a state having R and vice-versa” (Tye,
  5709	2023).
  5710	Might things have been different in the actual world? Indeed, they
  5711	might, Tye says. “The physical processing might have gone on just as it
  5712	does, the information processing might have been just the same, the
  5713	cognitive machinery might have functioned as it does, and yet along
  5714	with all of this, Q might not have been present in experience. That is
  5715	certainly intelligible to us. But it creates no explanatory puzzle; for that
  5716	is only a metaphysically possible world. It is not the actual world. As far
  5717	as the actual world goes, there is nothing puzzling or problematic,
  5718	nothing left to explain … No mystery remains” (Tye, 2023).
  5719	This is because “in the actual world,” consciousness is physical, ac­
  5720	cording to the physicalist, “since it is only on the hypothesis of physi­
  5721	calism with respect to the actual world that problems of emergence and
  5722	causal efficacy can be handled satisfactorily, or so the physicalist
  5723	believes.”
  5724	Thus, Tye concludes, “once we become contingentists, the hard
  5725	problem has a straightforward and satisfying solution.”
  5726	In support of his views, Tye turns to “vagueness” in assessing con­
  5727	sciousness in the hierarchical taxonomy of life and in the process of
  5728	evolution (Tye, 2021). According to Tye, “The two dominant theories of
  5729	consciousness argue it appeared in living beings either suddenly, or
  5730	gradually. Both theories face problems. The solution is the realization
  5731	that a foundational consciousness was always here, yet varying
  5732	conscious states were not, and appeared gradually.” Given that it is
  5733	hardly obvious how to discern which organisms are conscious, and, if so,
  5734	their kind or level of consciousness, borderline cases of consciousness
  5735	can make no sense. As David Papineau reviews Tye, “But this isn’t
  5736	because a sharp line is found somewhere as we move from
  5737	non-conscious physical systems to conscious ones. Rather [according to
  5738	Tye] it’s because no such line exists at all. Even the most basic constit­
  5739	uents of physical reality are already endowed with consciousness”
  5740	(Papineau, 2022). Thus, Tye transitions from his traditional physicalism
  5741	to a form of panpsychism, though differing from those of mainstream
  5742	panpsychists (13).33
  5743	In admirable full disclosure, Tye states that his contingentism “is
  5744	written from the perspective of the reductive physicalist (understood
  5745	broadly to include functionalists and representationalists),” and that he
  5746	believes contingentism presents “the best hope for a defense of reductive
  5747	physicalism.” However, he adds, “I myself am no longer a thorough­
  5748	going reductive physicalist. I now believe that there is an element in our
  5749	consciousness that cannot be captured via higher level reductions” (Tye,
  5750	2023).
  5751	In addition, Tye suggests that, from the representationalist perspec­
  5752	tive and supporting its views, “history matters crucially to phenome­
  5753	nology. What it is like for an individual at a given time is fixed not just by
  5754	what is going on in the individual at that time but also by what was
  5755	going on in the individual in the past. Two individuals can be exactly
  5756	alike intrinsically at a time and yet differ in the phenomenal character of
  5757	their mental life at that time” (Tye, 2019).
  5758	Tye concludes that “once we think of experiences in a representa­
  5759	tionalist and broadly reductionist way,” we can better appreciate phe­
  5760	nomenology, including its presence or absence, such as in thought
  5761	experiments where “a person slowly acquires a silicon chip brain” (see
       
  5762	Virtual Immortality, 25).
  5763	9.8.12. Thagard’s neural representation, binding, coherence, competition
  5764	Philosopher Paul Thagard poses big questions upfront. “Why do
  5765	people have conscious experiences that include perceptions such as
  5766	seeing, sensations such as pain, emotions such as joy, and abstract
  5767	thoughts such as self-reflection? Why is consciousness central to so much
  5768	of human life, including dreams, laughter, music, religion, sports, mo­
  5769	rality, and romance? Are such experiences also possessed by other ani­
  5770	mals, plants, and robots?” (Thagard, 2024).
  5771	Thagard’s theory of consciousness “attributes conscious experiences
  5772	to interactions of four brain mechanisms: neural representation, bind­
  5773	ing, coherence, and competition.” It distinguishes itself from current
  5774	theories in several respects, he says. “The four brain mechanisms
  5775	described are empirically plausible and clearly stated. Conscious expe­
  5776	riences emerge from their interactions in areas across the brain.” The
  5777	mechanisms, he argues, “explain not only ordinary perceptual experi­
  5778	ences such as vision, but also the most complex kinds of conscious
  5779	experience including self-valuation, dreams, humor, and religious awe.”
  5780	Moreover, he adds, “A crucial but often neglected aspect of conscious­
  5781	ness is timing, but the four mechanisms fit perfectly with recent
  5782	neuroscientific findings about how time cells enable brains to track ex­
  5783	periences” (Thagard, 2024).
  5784	Thagard’s founds his theory on strict, empirically based neurosci­
  5785	ence. His way of thinking is exemplified by his “Attribution Procedure,”
  5786	an eight-step process for using what he calls “explanatory coherence” as
  5787	a touchstone to establish “whether or not an animal or machine has a
  5788	mental state, property, or process.” (Thagard, 2021, pp. 13–14). For
  5789	example, he offers twelve features of intelligence (i.e., problem solving,
  5790	learning, understanding, reasoning, perceiving, planning, deciding,
  5791	abstracting, creating, feeling, acting, communicating) and eight mech­
  5792	anisms to explain these features (i.e., images, concepts, rules, analogies,
  5793	emotions, language, intentional action, consciousness). “All eight of
  5794	these mental mechanisms can be carried out by a common set of neural
  5795	mechanisms, many of which have been modeled computationally.” This
  5796	account of twelve features and eight mechanisms, Thagard says, “yields
  5797	a twenty-item checklist for assessing intelligence in bots and beasts.” A
  5798	similar way of thinking he applies to consciousness, stating that con­
  5799	sciousness results from competition among neural representations
  5800	(Thagard, 2021, pp. 3–4, 50, 49).
  5801	Claiming that his theory of consciousness possesses “the accuracy
  5802	and breadth of application to mark a solid advance in the grand task of
  5803	explaining how and why consciousness is so central to human life,”
  5804	Thagard highlights an empirically supported explanation of conscious­
  5805	ness resulting from the four brain mechanisms (i.e., neural representa­
  5806	tion, binding, coherence, and competition); application to a broad range
  5807	of conscious experiences including smell, hunger, loneliness, selfawareness, religious experience, sports performance, and romantic
  5808	chemistry; use of these four brain mechanisms to generate novel theories
  5809	of dreaming, humor, and musical experience; a new theory of time
  5810	consciousness; assessment of consciousness in non-human animals and
  5811	machines, including the new generative AI models such as ChatGPT
  5812	(Thagard, 2024).
  5813	Working together, these four brain mechanisms, Thagard says,
  5814	“explain the full range of consciousness in humans and other animals,
  5815	and show why plants, bacteria, and ordinary things lack consciousness.”
  5816	No current computers are conscious, he asserts, using a checklist of
  5817	features and mechanisms of consciousness, “but the new generative
  5818	models in artificial intelligence have similar mechanisms to humans that
  5819	might enable some degree of consciousness.” He concludes with high
  5820	physicalist confidence: “Consciousness does not need to be a mystery
  5821	once we understand how brains build it” (Thagard, 2024).
  5822	9.8.13. T. Clark’s content hypothesis
  5823	Philosopher Thomas Clark posits phenomenal consciousness as the
  5824	representational content of a cognitive system’s sufficiently structured
       
  5825	33
  5826	To speak of “mainstream panpsychists”—when I was doing neurophysi­
  5827	ology (mid 1960s, UCLA Brain Research Institute)—would have seemed an
  5828	oxymoron.
       
  5829	77
       
  5830	R.L. Kuhn
       
  5831	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  5832	representational processing (Clark, T., 2019). Conscious experience ex­
  5833	ists only for the conscious system, so is categorically subjective, and its
  5834	basic elements are irreducibly qualitative. As a general rule, he says, we
  5835	don’t find representational content in the world it participates in rep­
  5836	resenting, which can help explain subjectivity. Moreover, following
  5837	Metzinger’s concept of an “untranscendable object,” a representational
  5838	system must have epistemic primitives that resist further representation
  5839	on pain of a metabolically expensive representational regress. This can
  5840	help explain the non-decomposable, monadic character of basic sensory
  5841	qualities such as red, sweet, pain, etc. Developments in the science of
  5842	representation and representational content, he says, may (or may not)
  5843	vindicate the Content Hypothesis. Clark says that his model is consistent
  5844	with Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and
  5845	Predictive Processing, all of which involve representation (Clark, T.,
  5846	2019, 2024).
  5847	Clark, a proponent of naturalism as a worldview (Clark, T., 2007),
  5848	believes that a materialist can see that “consciousness, as a strictly
  5849	physical phenomenon instantiated by the brain, creates a world sub­
  5850	jectively immune to its own disappearance … it is the very finitude of a
  5851	self-reflective cognitive system that bars it from witnessing its own
  5852	beginning or ending, and hence prevents there being, for it, any condi­
  5853	tion other than existing” (Clark, T., 1994). While this sounds odd, almost
  5854	an oxymoron, Clark develops the idea of “generic subjective continuity"
  5855	based on a thought experiment inspired by the work of philosopher
  5856	Derek Parfit. Clark argues in that at death we shouldn’t anticipate the
  5857	onset of nothingness or oblivion—a common secular intuition—but
  5858	rather the continuation of experience, just not in the context of the
  5859	person who dies. The end of one’s own consciousness, he offers, “is only
  5860	an event, and its non-existence a current fact, from other perspectives.”
  5861	After death we won’t experience non-being, he says, we won’t ‘fade to
  5862	black’. Rather, as conscious being we continue “as the generic subjec­
  5863	tivity that always finds itself here, in the various contexts of awareness
  5864	that the physical universe manages to create” (Clark, T., 1994).
       
  5865	9.9. Language relationships
  5866	Language Relationships discern connections, causal and other, be­
  5867	tween consciousness and language. Language obviously enriches the
  5868	content of consciousness, perhaps provides a framework for human
  5869	consciousness, but is there a deeper relationship? Does consciousness
  5870	require language, in that if there is no language capability there can be
  5871	no inner experience? Conversely, does language require consciousness,
  5872	in that if there is no inner experience, there can be no language capa­
  5873	bility? (Note that while language does not generate theories of con­
  5874	sciousness per se, it features in some and is rejected in others, both of
  5875	which are worth exploring.)
  5876	Much depends on careful definitions. To take the consciousnessrequires-language causal paradigm, if by consciousness we mean
  5877	phenomenal consciousness, raw inner experience only, then if we claim
  5878	that language is required, then our claim would limit phenomenal
  5879	consciousness, inner experience, to human beings and would exclude all
  5880	(or at least almost all) other animals. Argue this to a happy dog owner
  5881	and you will confront an angry dog owner.
  5882	To take the language-requires-consciousness causal paradigm, with a
  5883	definition of language sufficiently loose to subsume computer languages
  5884	or communications between paramecia or signals between embryonic
  5885	stem cells, consciousness would not be required.
  5886	The philosophical debate regarding whether language is necessary
  5887	for consciousness has a long and meandering history. Many argue that
  5888	consciousness does not at all require language; others, that conscious­
  5889	ness is facilitated by language or even is not possible without it. A
  5890	contemporary consensus is building around the idea that increasing
  5891	levels of consciousness, ranging from unconsciousness to highly
  5892	conscious reflective self-awareness, requires increasing use of language.
  5893	What follows would be that language is not needed for pure phenomenal
  5894	consciousness, a general state of awareness, or in responding to external
  5895	stimuli—such as in preverbal infants—but phenomenal consciousness
  5896	would be needed for complex expressions of consciousness, like selfawareness, information integration, and metaconsciousness, which are
  5897	based on language-powered capacities, especially inner speech (Ivory
  5898	Research, 2019).
  5899	Because we sense that many animal species are conscious—much
  5900	like we assume that other humans are conscious like we are conscious­
  5901	—and we know that language is much more restricted, to humans and,
  5902	in a lesser sense, some other animals (e.g., primates, cetaceans, birds),
  5903	this would seem to weaken the consciousness-language nexus. More­
  5904	over, language seems to be a much more recent evolutionary emergent
  5905	than consciousness (Berwick and Chomsky, 2016).
  5906	Philosopher Rebecca Goldstein maintains that language does not
  5907	exhaust all that there is in consciousness. She calls as evidence infants
  5908	prior to or in the early stages of acquiring language, where “it’s clear
  5909	how much consciousness goes on before there is language” (Goldstein,
  5910	2014).
  5911	Neuroscientist Colin Blakemore sees an intimate relationship be­
  5912	tween the structure of language and the high-level aspects of con­
  5913	sciousness, especially consciousness of self, the consciousness of
  5914	intention—“the concept that I am the helmsman of myself, carrying
  5915	myself around the world, making decisions.” He calls the grammatical
  5916	forms of language “intentional in their style” and argues that our
  5917	conscious representation of self is a meta-representation of what’s really
  5918	doing the work down below, and that the reason “our brains go to the
  5919	trouble of building this false representation of how we really are is to
  5920	implement and to support language” (Blakemore, 2012a).
  5921	Blakemore speculates that we don’t come pre-programmed to be
  5922	conscious; that we learn to be conscious and our consciousness develops
  5923	and changes over time. Recognizing that the term “consciousness” can
  5924	refer to diverse forms of subjectivity, and that even a newborn baby has
  5925	“a kind of brute awareness of the world, sensory experiences,” he sug­
  5926	gests that the nature of subjectivity grows through individual experience
  5927	and that the complexities of the internal representation of the self is
       
  5928	9.8.14. Deacon’s symbolic communication (human consciousness)
  5929	Neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon asserts that symbolic
  5930	communication has radically altered the nature of human conscious­
  5931	ness, whereas consciousness broadly is coextensive with the develop­
  5932	ment of brains in animals that regulate their movement with the aid of
  5933	long-distance senses, such as vision, because of the predictive capacity
  5934	this affords and requires. However, symbolic communication has given
  5935	humans the capacity of being conscious of a virtual realm that has
  5936	become untethered from physical contiguity and immediacy (Deacon,
  5937	1998, 2024).34
  5938	Moreover, by virtue of the way that symbolic communication allows
  5939	us indirect access to others’ thoughts and experiences, we have become a
  5940	symbolically eusocial species that derives our personal identities and
  5941	ability to think from a physically and temporally extended shared
  5942	mentality. Some, he says, have referred to this structure as “Extended
  5943	Mind.”
  5944	Deacon sees this symbolic mode of cognition as enabling the emer­
  5945	gence of novel kinds of remembering and unprecedented forms of
  5946	emotional experience, as well as unprecedented forms of value, such as
  5947	ethical norms and aesthetic sense. This is also, he says, the source of our
  5948	feeling of incompleteness and need to find Meaning.
       
  5949	34
  5950	Note that Terrence Deacon has two theories of consciousness on the Land­
  5951	scape: “Self-Organized Constraint and Emergence of Self” earlier (9.5.8) and
  5952	“Symbolic Communication” here. This is not an error; nor does it imply that the
  5953	two cannot be woven together. Rather, it recognizes that, at this time, the two
  5954	are sufficiently different, and sufficiently interesting, to warrant their separate
  5955	locations.
       
  5956	78
       
  5957	R.L. Kuhn
       
  5958	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  5959	mediated by language.
  5960	Experimental psychologist Jeremy Skipper hypothesizes that lan­
  5961	guage, with an emphasis on inner speech, generates and sustains selfawareness, that is, higher-order consciousness. He develops a “HOLIS­
  5962	TIC” model of neurobiology of language, inner speech, and conscious­
  5963	ness. It involves a “core” set of inner speech production regions that take
  5964	on affective qualities, involving a largely unconscious dynamic “pe­
  5965	riphery,” distributed throughout the whole brain. He claims that the
  5966	“model constitutes a more parsimonious and complete account of the
  5967	neural correlates of consciousness’” (at least of self-consciousness)
  5968	(Skipper, 2022).
  5969	Ned Block points to a related distinction between consciousness and
  5970	cognition. Cognition doesn’t have to be linguistic, he says, because nonlinguistic animals have some cognition. But then there are animals that
  5971	seem to have little or no cognition, just perception. Block concludes,
  5972	“We can see consciousness at its purest in perceptual consciousness, and
  5973	it has nothing to do, or little to do, with language” (Block, 2014).
  5974	While the overwhelming contemporary consensus is that con­
  5975	sciousness does not require language, human consciousness is obviously
  5976	and fundamentally affected or even framed by language. We explore
  5977	several approaches to the consciousness-language nexus.
       
  5978	phenomena exceed its bounds.”
  5979	As for clarifying the concept of the body, the physical, matter,
  5980	Chomsky states, “the material world is whatever we discover it to be,
  5981	with whatever properties it must be assumed to have for the purposes of
  5982	explanatory theory. Any intelligible theory that offers genuine expla­
  5983	nations and that can be assimilated to the core notions of physics be­
  5984	comes part of the theory of the material world, part of our account of
  5985	body.”
  5986	To Chomsky, a mechanical model of the world, developed in early
  5987	modern philosophy and inchoate science, could never account for as­
  5988	pects of the mental. Thus, while he understands Descartes’ motivation to
  5989	postulate a separate, nonphysical “thinking substance,” he rejects Des­
  5990	cartes’ classic dualism and trains his analytic guns on the mechanical
  5991	model in particular and on matter in general.
  5992	Chomsky feels no pressure to devise his own theory of consciousness.
  5993	If anything, he shuns grand solutions. “There seems to be no coherent
  5994	doctrine of materialism and metaphysical naturalism, no issue of elim­
  5995	inativism, no mind-body problem (Chomsky, 2020). In short, as Edward
  5996	Feser notes, “if the problem has no clear content, neither do any of the
  5997	solutions to it” (Feser, 2022b). Chomsky is content to allow science to do
  5998	its work, advancing knowledge of the brain and of the mind, leaving to
  5999	the future the construction of proper theories of consciousness irre­
  6000	spective of current notions of the physical and matter.
  6001	One may infer that Chomsky contemplates an expanded view of the
  6002	physical, with matter having features now unknown, which then would
  6003	“naturally” subsume the mental. (Note: Chomsky rejects panpsychism.)
  6004	However, in an overarching sense, he remains unsure whether human
  6005	beings have the capacity to solve what he believes are genuine mysteries
  6006	about the nature of reality, but he is also unsure whether consciousness
  6007	will prove to be an ultimate mystery.
       
  6008	9.9.1. Chomsky’s language and consciousness
  6009	Philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky revolutionized the theory
  6010	of language, and although language-related theory of consciousness has
  6011	not been a focus of his contributions, its relevance remains. Chomsky
  6012	famously posited linguistic capacity, especially syntactic knowledge, as
  6013	at least partially innate and mostly (if not entirely) unique to human
  6014	beings. Thus, language acquisition in all human children is somewhat
  6015	instinctual and surprisingly rapid, conditioned by language-specific
  6016	features of diverse languages. Chomsky labels this core set of inherited
  6017	grammatical rules “universal grammar” and characterizes these inborn,
  6018	subconscious capabilities as “deep structure”.
  6019	Does Chomsky’s universal grammar with its deep structure carry
  6020	implications for consciousness? How does Chomsky approach the hard
  6021	problem of phenomenal consciousness? His views are complex, not
  6022	easily categorized (Section: Chomsky, 2022a, 2022b; Feser, 2010,
  6023	2022b).
  6024	Chomsky is an aggressive critic of behaviorism—it makes no sense,
  6025	he says, to study internal phenomena by observing external manifesta­
  6026	tions. The study of language is entirely inconsistent with behaviorist
  6027	principles. “Nothing there,” he says. To understand it, one must examine
  6028	internal processes. Thus, the connection between the deep structure of
  6029	language and the essence of consciousness.
  6030	Chomsky is also a critic of the hard problem, labeling it a “pseudoproblem.” Some questions, by their simple structures, are not real
  6031	questions, he says, in that there is no logical way to answer them. His
  6032	example question “Why do things happen?” cannot be answered in the
  6033	general, while a similar-sounding question, say, “Why did this earth­
  6034	quake happen?” can be answered in the specific. Chomsky believes that
  6035	the hard problem of consciousness is an example of the former and
  6036	therefore is not a genuine question (while the “easy” problems of con­
  6037	sciousness, discovering neural correlates, are examples of the latter).
  6038	Exemplifying Chomsky’s unorthodox approach to consciousness,
  6039	even though he commits to a materialism/physicalism ontology that the
  6040	mind is generated only in the brain, rather than deflating the ontological
  6041	status of the mental, his contrarian position is to challenge the onto­
  6042	logical status of the physical—arguing that science does not know what
  6043	matter really is. To Chomsky, matter, not mental, is the main mystery.
  6044	As Chomsky says, “The mind-body problem can be posed sensibly
  6045	only insofar as we have a definite conception of body. If we have no such
  6046	definite and fixed conception, we cannot ask whether some phenomena
  6047	fall beyond its range” (Chomsky, 1987). Moreover, “The mind-body
  6048	problem can therefore not even be formulated. The problem cannot be
  6049	solved, because there is no clear way to state it. Unless someone pro­
  6050	poses a definite concept of body, we cannot ask whether some
       
  6051	9.9.2. Searle’s language and consciousness
  6052	To philosopher John Searle, language is crucial for consciousness,
  6053	just as consciousness is crucial for language, because much of our con­
  6054	sciousness is shaped by language and because the parts of language that
  6055	are most important to us are precisely those that are conscious (Searle,
  6056	2014b).
  6057	Searle contrasts human and animal consciousness: “My dogs have a
  6058	kind of consciousness which is incredibly rich. They can smell things I
  6059	can’t smell and they have a kind of inner life that I don’t have, but all the
  6060	same, there are all kinds of conscious experiences they simply cannot
  6061	have. My doggy lying there may be thinking about chasing other dogs
  6062	but he’s not thinking about doing his income tax or writing his next
  6063	poem or figuring out how he’s going to have a better summer vacation
  6064	next year.”
  6065	Searle stresses how language gives us enormous power in shaping
  6066	consciousness. A favorite quotation is from the French philosopher La
  6067	Rochefoucauld: “Very few people would ever fall in love if they never
  6068	read about it.” Searle’s point is that language shapes experience; there
  6069	are all kinds of experiences you just can’t have without language.
  6070	As for how language and consciousness articulate and developed
  6071	over time, Searle envisions an evolutionary “boot-strapping effect.” It
  6072	starts off with pre-linguistic consciousness, and then develops linguistic
  6073	meaning and communication, which enrich consciousness. The result is
  6074	an elaborate structure of language, which makes for a more elaborate
  6075	structure of consciousness, which then enables you to enrich your lan­
  6076	guage. There is a continuous reinforcing and compound effect (Searle,
  6077	2014b).
  6078	Non-linguistic animals can’t do this, Searle continues: “My doggie
  6079	can think somebody is at the door, but he cannot think I wish 17 people
  6080	were at the door, or I hope we get more people at the door next week.
  6081	Because to do that, he has got to be able to shuffle the symbols in a way
  6082	that human beings can with their inner syntax.”
  6083	Although animals do not form or express their beliefs in a symbolic
  6084	language, Searle attributes to them intentional states, and because
  6085	intentional states require consciousness, it follows that consciousness
  6086	79
       
  6087	R.L. Kuhn
       
  6088	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  6089	innate nor fundamental. To Jaynes, language plays a central role in
  6090	consciousness; language is “an organ of perception, not simply a means
  6091	of communication” (Jaynes, 1976; Bicameral Mind, 2024).
  6092	Jaynes defines consciousness idiosyncratically by distinguishing it
  6093	from sensory awareness and cognition; as such it more closely resembles
  6094	“introspective consciousness,” as he calls it, than it does phenomenal
  6095	consciousness, which is the target of this Landscape. Nonetheless, it is
  6096	helpful to work through Jaynes’s definitions and arguments, clarifying
  6097	how to avoid what could be confounding or muddled thinking about
  6098	consciousness. While Jaynes’s consciousness is not phenomenal con­
  6099	sciousness, his careful parsing of his definition gives insight into the
  6100	subtleties of the parsing process. Moreover, appreciating the flow of
  6101	Jaynes’s arguments as well as the substance of his claims sharpens our
  6102	view of the entire Landscape.
  6103	In Jaynes’s words, “Consciousness is not a simple matter and it
  6104	should not be spoken of as if it were.” He starts with what his con­
  6105	sciousness is not. (i) Not the “many things that the nervous system does
  6106	automatically for us. All the variety of perceptual constancies … all done
  6107	without any help from introspective consciousness.” (ii) Not what he
  6108	calls “preoptive” activities, such as how we sit, walk, move. “All these
  6109	are done without consciousness, unless we decide to be conscious of
  6110	them.” (iii) Not even speaking, where “the role of consciousness is more
  6111	interpolative than any constant companion to my words.” Conscious­
  6112	ness, he stresses, is not sense perception; it does not copy experience; it is
  6113	not necessary for learning; it is not even necessary for thinking or
  6114	reasoning; and it has only an arbitrary and functional location (Jaynes,
  6115	1987).
  6116	To Jaynes, consciousness, or what he refines as “subjective conscious
  6117	mind,” is an analog of the real world. “It is built up with a vocabulary or
  6118	lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the
  6119	physical world … It allows us to short-cut behavioral processes and
  6120	arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator
  6121	rather than a thing or a repository. And it is intimately bound with
  6122	volition and decision … Every word we use to refer to mental events is a
  6123	metaphor or analog of something in the behavioral world” (Jaynes,
  6124	1987).
  6125	Jaynes says that the primary feature of his consciousness is an
  6126	“associated spatial quality that, as a result of the language used to
  6127	describe such psychological events, becomes, with constant repetition,
  6128	this spatial quality of our consciousness or mind-space …. It is the space
  6129	which you preoptively are introspecting on at this very moment.”
  6130	The second most important feature of Jaynes’ consciousness is the
  6131	subject of the introspecting, the introspective “I”. Here Jaynes uses
  6132	analogy, which differs from metaphor in that the similarity is between
  6133	relationships rather than between things or actions. “As the body with its
  6134	sense organs (referred to as I) is to physical seeing,” he says, “so there
  6135	develops automatically an analog ‘I’ to relate to this mental kind of
  6136	‘seeing’ in mind-space.”
  6137	A third feature of Jaynes’ consciousness is narratization, “the
  6138	analogic simulation of actual behavior.” Consciousness, he says, “is
  6139	constantly fitting things into a story, putting a before and an after
  6140	around any event.” Other features of Jaynes’ consciousness include:
  6141	“concentration, the ‘inner’ analog of external perceptual attention; sup­
  6142	pression, by which we stop being conscious of annoying thoughts, the
  6143	analog of turning away from annoyances in the physical world; excerp­
  6144	tion, the analog of how we sense only one aspect of a thing at a time; and
  6145	consilience, the analog of perceptual assimilation.” Jaynes “essential
  6146	rule” is that “no operation goes on in consciousness that was not in
  6147	behavior first. All of these are learned analogs of external behavior”
  6148	(Jaynes, 1987).
  6149	Definition in hand, Jaynes asks, “When did all this ‘inner’ world
  6150	begin?”, which he calls “the most important watershed in our
  6151	discussion.”
  6152	Jaynes famously introduces the hypothesis of the "bicameral mind", a
  6153	non-conscious mentality supposedly prevalent in early humans that
  6154	featured a kind of auditory hallucinations. He argued that relatively
       
  6155	does not require symbolic language. He cites as evidence that animals
  6156	“correct their beliefs all the time on the basis of their perceptions”
  6157	(Searle, 2002; Proust, 2003).
  6158	9.9.3. Koch’s consciousness does not depend on language
  6159	Neuroscientist Christof Koch asserts without ambiguity, “con­
  6160	sciousness doesn’t depend on language,” and he offers vivid clinical
  6161	cases of brain trauma or insult where language is obviously lost and
  6162	consciousness is obviously retained. Koch is especially exercised by the
  6163	claim that “only humans experience anything,” that other animals have
  6164	no sentience, a belief he calls “preposterous, a remnant of an atavistic
  6165	desire to be the one species of singular importance to the universe at
  6166	large. Far more reasonable and compatible with all known facts is the
  6167	assumption that we share the experience of life with all mammals”
  6168	(Koch, 2019).
  6169	Koch recounts and rejects how “Many classical scholars assign to
  6170	language the role of kingmaker when it comes to consciousness. That is,
  6171	language use is thought to either directly enable consciousness or to be
  6172	one of the signature behaviors associated with consciousness.” He con­
  6173	cludes, “language contributes massively to the way we experience the
  6174	world, in particular to our sense of the self as our narrative center in the
  6175	past and present. But our basic experience of the world does not depend
  6176	on it” (Koch, 2019).
  6177	9.9.4. Smith’s language as classifier of consciousness
  6178	Philosopher Barry Smith states that while we think of consciousness
  6179	as “moments of experience,” the way we capture what’s similar or
  6180	different in our experiences over time is via language. The “passing
  6181	show,” he says, “gets assembled into larger, more meaningful groups
  6182	when we use language to classify and categorize.” How do we do this?
  6183	How do we connect up these bits of consciousness with something sta­
  6184	ble? How do we classify the world, not just our own experience, and
  6185	communicable between experiencers? The answer is language, he says,
  6186	which he calls a species-specific property of human beings. With lan­
  6187	guage, we codify our own experience, represent the content of our own
  6188	minds, and compare it with the contents of other minds (Smith, 2012).
  6189	Distinguishing consciousness from language, Smith tells of someone
  6190	who lost all of their words for fruit and vegetables, and only those words.
  6191	They could use language normally and they had conscious awareness of
  6192	fruits and vegetables, but they could not use, pronounce or even
  6193	recognize words for fruit and vegetables. “It’s as if a whole shelf of
  6194	meanings had been taken away.”
  6195	Smith relates grades of consciousness to grades of language. One can
  6196	lose the word for an object but can still recognize the object (a form of
  6197	aphasia). Deeper, one can not only lose the word as a piece of sound
  6198	representing an object, but also not recognize the object either and lose
  6199	the whole meaning (a form of agnosia). He describes stroke patients
  6200	who, for example, can’t use the word “glove”. “What is that?” “Can’t
  6201	say.” Perhaps just the word is missing, because if they are asked, “Is
  6202	there a glove on the table?”, they answer, “Yes.” But other stroke pa­
  6203	tients answer, “I’ve no idea.” And if you show them a glove and ask,
  6204	“What’s this for?”, they say, “I don’t know, maybe it’s for keeping
  6205	coins.”
  6206	Smith suggests that words are ways that our visual consciousness
  6207	categorizes and structures the world. And perhaps a deeper loss of lan­
  6208	guage can lead to a dissolution of the very categories that we use to
  6209	classify our perceptual experiences. So, it’s not just that I can’t name or
  6210	categorize some object, but without language the actual conscious
  6211	experience of that object is radically different. If so, language is
  6212	responsible, at least in part, for organizing consciousness (Smith, 2012).
  6213	9.9.5. Jaynes’s breakdown of the bicameral mind
  6214	Psychohistorian Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book, The Origin of Conscious­
  6215	ness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, proposes that consciousness,
  6216	particularly "the ability to introspect," is a learned behavior rooted in
  6217	language and culture and arises from metaphor; consciousness is neither
  6218	80
       
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  6221	recent human ancestors as late as the ancient Greeks did not consider
  6222	emotions and desires as stemming from their own minds but rather as
  6223	the actions of external gods (Bicameral mentality, 2024).
  6224	Jaynes takes the oldest parts of the Iliad and asks, “Is there evidence
  6225	of consciousness?” The answer, he thinks, is no. “People are not sitting
  6226	down and making decisions. No one is. No one is introspecting. No one is
  6227	even reminiscing. It is a very different kind of world” (Jaynes, 1987).
  6228	Who, then, makes the decisions? Whenever a significant choice is to
  6229	be made, Jaynes suggests that “a voice comes in telling people what to
  6230	do. These voices are always and immediately obeyed. These voices are
  6231	called gods.” To Jaynes, this is the origin of gods. He regards them as
  6232	“auditory hallucinations” similar to, although not the same as, “the
  6233	voices heard by Joan of Arc or William Blake. Or similar to the voices
  6234	that modern schizophrenics hear.”
  6235	Jaynes coins the “bicameral mind” using the metaphor of a bicameral
  6236	legislature. It simply means that human mentality at this time was in two
  6237	parts, a decision-making part and a follower part, and neither part was
  6238	conscious in the sense in which Jaynes has described it (above) (Jaynes,
  6239	1987).
  6240	The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in
  6241	which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain
  6242	which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and
  6243	obeys—the bicameral mind—and that the breakdown of this division
  6244	gave rise to consciousness in humans.
  6245	Jaynes supports his theory with historical texts and archaeological
  6246	evidence. He places the origin of consciousness around the 2nd mil­
  6247	lennium BCE and suggests that the transition from the bicameral mind to
  6248	consciousness was triggered by the breakdown of the bicameral system
  6249	of society (Bicameral mentality, 2024).
  6250	Jaynes describes bicameral societies as “strict and stable hierar­
  6251	chies,” including bicameral theocracies, where “everything went like
  6252	clockwork providing there was no real catastrophe or problem.” But
  6253	such a system is precarious, especially as society grows in population
  6254	and complexity, such that “given a time of social and political instability,
  6255	bicamerality can break down like a house of cards.” Whereas all sig­
  6256	nificant decisions previously had been based on the bicameral mind,
  6257	after its breakdown, after the hallucinated voices no longer told people
  6258	what to do, a new way of making decisions had to develop, which was a
  6259	kind of proto-consciousness (Jaynes, 1987).
  6260	There is an obvious, perhaps tempting, neurobiological correlate: the
  6261	two cerebral hemispheres, especially based on the pioneering split-brain
  6262	research of Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, which explained
  6263	functional brain lateralization and how the cerebral hemispheres
  6264	communicate with each another. Jaynes puts it simply: “the right
  6265	hemisphere was ‘talking’ to the left, and this was the bicameral mind”
  6266	(Jaynes, 1987).
  6267	Although Jaynes’s physicalist, deflationary theory of consciousness
  6268	continues to intrigue, it is not accepted by consciousness experts.
  6269	Nevertheless, Jaynes’s ideas and arguments can inform our view of the
  6270	Landscape.
       
  6271	view of human consciousness as language-dependent by stressing our
  6272	capacity for “inner speech, or more generally inner symbols, as central to
  6273	human thought” (Parrington, 2023, p. 55).
  6274	Regarding use of tools, Parrington argues that “tool use by other
  6275	species tends to be both occasional and also very limited in the type of
  6276	tools that are created. In contrast, a unique feature of our species is that
  6277	practically all of our interactions with the world are through tools that
  6278	we have created.” Moreover, “we are continually in a process of
  6279	inventing new types of tools and technologies” (Parrington, 2023, p. 19).
  6280	Parrington’s theory focuses on human brains, which are “not just
  6281	much bigger than those of other primates, but radically different in
  6282	structure and function” (a claim that hangs on “radically”) (Parrington,
  6283	2023, p. 20). He references different brain regions, highlighting the
  6284	cerebellum, long thought limited to coordinating repetitive movements
  6285	but now shown to play a role in human creativity and imagination
  6286	(Parrington, 2023, p. 47), and the prefrontal cortex, greatly expanded in
  6287	humans, the locus of reasoning, planning, decision making, control of
  6288	social behavior and some aspects of language, all of which relate to
  6289	human uniqueness (Parrington, 2023, p. 126). He has brain waves of
  6290	different frequencies conveying specific sensory signals and combining
  6291	together into a unified conscious whole, thus explaining how we bind
  6292	together different aspects of experience into a seamless experience
  6293	(Parrington, 2023, p. 19).
  6294	Parrington argues that “the effect of language and other cultural
  6295	tools” have transformed human consciousness, which “provides another
  6296	level of binding.” This surely means, he says, that “our sense of self is not
  6297	an illusion, but rather a very real phenomenon based on the binding role
  6298	of brain waves and the extra element of unity based on conceptual
  6299	thought” (Parrington, 2023, p. 147). Rejecting what he calls “outdated
  6300	models of the brain as a hard-wired circuit diagram,” he argues that
  6301	meaning is created within our heads through a dynamic interaction of
  6302	oscillating brain waves.
  6303	Parrington believes that “in some ways” he has addressed the hard
  6304	problem and “hopefully demonstrated that there is nothing magical
  6305	about human consciousness” (Parrington, 2023, p. 196). He frames his
  6306	theory, as he must, within an evolutionary context, seeking to explain
  6307	inner speech, thought, and self-conscious awareness in terms of the
  6308	evolved neural circuitry that undergirds these uniquely human capac­
  6309	ities, especially as manifest in language and tools. While Parrington’s
  6310	goal, as Susan Blackmore puts it, is to develop “a material explanation of
  6311	human consciousness”—and “he has done a great job of exploring ma­
  6312	terial explanations of thought, perception, self-representation and
  6313	behavioral control”—but none of this, Blackmore concludes, “gets at the
  6314	deeper questions about subjective experience” (Blackmore, 2023).
  6315	9.10. Phylogenetic evolution
  6316	Phylogenetic Evolution, the phylogenetic evolution of consciousness,
  6317	at first blush, is not a specific theory of consciousness per se. Rather, it is
  6318	recruited as the mechanistic process for many (but not all) of the the­
  6319	ories on the Landscape. Yet, is there a sense in which phylogenetic
  6320	evolution can become a prime explanation in its own right?
  6321	Certainly, according to Dennett (9.10.1), LeDoux (9.10.2) and
  6322	Ginsburg/Jablonka (9.10.3), consciousness exemplifies Theodosius
  6323	Dobzhansky famous adage, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in
  6324	the light of evolution” (Dobzhansky, 1973).
  6325	Neuroscientists and writers Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam present a stepby-step simulation of how evolution produced consciousness. It is a tale
  6326	of eighteen “increasingly intelligent minds,” as they say, from the simple
  6327	stimulus-response of microbes interacting with their environments to
  6328	the limitless creativity of humankind (and beyond). Leveraging the
  6329	“resonance” theories of Stephen Grossberg (9.4.2), their mentor, they
  6330	tell a story of what each “new” mind could do that previous minds could
  6331	not (Ogas and Gaddam, 2022).
  6332	To physicist Lawrence Krauss, “consciousness is a slippery quality
  6333	because it exists on a spectrum in the evolutionary development of life
       
  6334	9.9.6. Parrington’s language and tool-driven consciousness
  6335	Biologist John Parrington proposes that a qualitative leap in con­
  6336	sciousness—“human self-conscious awareness”—occurred during
  6337	human evolution as “our capacity for language and our ability to
  6338	continually transform the world around us by designing and using tools”
  6339	transformed our brains. His challenge is to distinguish human language
  6340	and use of tools from analogous activities of animals, particularly other
  6341	primates, as contemporary research uncovers more complex animal
  6342	capacities (Parrington, 2023).
  6343	Regarding language, Parrington stresses the “highly distinctive
  6344	feature of human language” as “an interconnected system of abstract
  6345	symbols, linked together by grammar.” This is why, he says, “only
  6346	human beings are able to use language to convey complex ideas like
  6347	past, present and future, individual versus society, location in space and
  6348	even more abstract concepts.” (Parrington, 2023, p. 22). He defends his
  6349	81
       
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  6352	that is very difficult to measure or quantify” (Krauss, 2023, p. 195). He
  6353	stresses “the phenomenon of consciousness is the one area I know of in
  6354	science where the forefront discussions seem to be made by philosophers
  6355	equally as often as they are made by experimental cognitive scientists,”
  6356	which, he says softly, is “an indication of a science in its early stages”
  6357	(Krauss, 2023, pp. 193–194).
  6358	Amidst the surfeit of competing neurobiological theories, Krauss is
  6359	most comfortable pursuing “the possible distinct evolutionary advan­
  6360	tages that consciousness might endow humans with.” He follows the
  6361	thread that “feelings emerged as ever more complex systems evolved to
  6362	incorporate higher-order cognitive processing to issues of survival and
  6363	homeostasis” (9.5.). Consciousness, through introspection, he says,
  6364	“could build on the nervous system monitoring of basic internal body
  6365	conditions to produce novel, rather than innate, survival strategies. The
  6366	ability to use internal representations of goals, whether from cognitive
  6367	maps or stored memories, to flexibly respond to the changing environ­
  6368	mental conditions, was a huge evolutionary leap, and has been noted to
  6369	probably exist only in some mammals and perhaps in birds” (Krauss,
  6370	2023, pp. 211–212).
  6371	Philosophers David Buller and Valarie Hardcastle offer an alternative
  6372	to the strong evolutionary claim that “the mind contains ‘hundreds or
  6373	thousands’ of ‘genetically specified’ modules, which are evolutionary
  6374	adaptations for their cognitive functions.” They argue that “while the
  6375	adult human mind/brain typically contains a degree of modularization,
  6376	its ‘modules’ are neither genetically specified nor evolutionary adapta­
  6377	tions. Rather, they result from the brain’s developmental plasticity,
  6378	which allows environmental task demands a large role in shaping the
  6379	brain’s information-processing structures.” They maintain that “the
  6380	brain’s developmental plasticity is our fundamental psychological
  6381	adaptation, and the ‘modules’ that result from it are adaptive responses
  6382	to local conditions, not past evolutionary environments” (Buller and
  6383	Hardcastle, 2000).
  6384	Questions remain. What creatures are conscious and to what degree?
  6385	How low on the phylogenetic scale must one descend to wink out any­
  6386	thing resembling human consciousness? For example, does an octopus
  6387	have phenomenal consciousness? Philosopher (and scuba-diver) Peter
  6388	Godfrey-Smith not only affirms octopus higher intelligence, he also
  6389	traces the evolution of mental properties in the primordial seas, claiming
  6390	that “evolution built minds not once but at least twice (Godfrey-Smith,
  6391	2016).
  6392	Appreciating Godfrey-Smith’s work, Carlo Rovelli uses the “complex
  6393	intellectual abilities” of octopuses as “a valuable case study” of con­
  6394	sciousness. In recent decades, he observes, “the phrase ‘the problem of
  6395	the nature of consciousness’ has taken the place of what in the past used
  6396	to be the problem of the meaning of soul, spirit, subjectivity, intelli­
  6397	gence, perception, understanding, existing in the first person, being
  6398	aware of a self …” Consciousness is neurobiological, Rovelli asserts, and
  6399	one way to tackle the issue is to observe our non-human cousins and
  6400	even octopuses, an extremely distant relative. The octopus, he offers, “is
  6401	the extraterrestrial that we have been looking for in order to study a
  6402	possible independent realization of consciousness” (Rovelli, 2020).
  6403	Raymond Tallis questions the entire enterprise of assuming “the
  6404	[evolutionary] advantage of being a conscious organism rather than a
  6405	self-replicating bag of chemicals innocent of its own existence.” His
  6406	skeptical argument against “what seems like a no-brainer” is “not to start
  6407	near the end of the story, with complex, sophisticated organisms such as
  6408	higher mammals … [whose] life depends on conscious navigation
  6409	through the world.” No, he says, “we must begin at the beginning: by
  6410	asking, for example, what survival value is conferred on a photosensitive
  6411	cell in virtue of its organism being aware of the light incident upon it.
  6412	And the answer appears to be: ‘none.’” Tallis argues, “If there’s no
  6413	reason to believe that the sentience of primitive organisms would give
  6414	them an edge over the competition, there is no starting point for the
  6415	evolutionary journey to the sophisticated consciousness we see in higher
  6416	organisms like you and me.” The mystery of consciousness, he con­
  6417	cludes, “remains intact” (18.4) (Tallis, 2023).
       
  6418	Most experts, scientists and philosophers who study the evolution of
  6419	mind, support a gradual, incrementalistic theory of mental develop­
  6420	ment, much like Dennett, Godfrey-Smith, and Ogas/Gaddam. There are
  6421	dissenting voices: for example, Nicholas Humphrey (9.8.6) and perhaps
  6422	Noam Chomsky (9.9.1).
  6423	Here’s the point. In considering the multifarious theories on the
  6424	Landscape of Consciousness, one should overlay each theory with its
  6425	putative phylogenetic evolutionary development. Ask, “What was the
  6426	process that brought it about?”
  6427	9.10.1. Dennett’s evolution of minds
  6428	Daniel Dennett delights us with the wondrous and sometimes
  6429	counterintuitive power of evolution in the development of conscious­
  6430	ness (or, more generally, “minds”), notably in his psychohistory journey,
  6431	From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (Dennett, 2017).
  6432	Even if one doesn’t wholly subscribe to Dennett’s own explanations of
  6433	consciousness (9.2.4)—which I don’t—everyone’s understanding of
  6434	consciousness can be enriched by Dennett’s probative and insightful
  6435	way of thinking (Dennett, 2007, 2023a, 2023b). Dennett describes
  6436	evolution as a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every
  6437	traditional concept, revolutionizing world-views” (Dennett, 1995).
  6438	“How come there are minds?” is Dennett’s big evolutionary question,
  6439	“And how is it possible for minds to ask and answer this question?” His
  6440	short answer is that “minds evolved and created thinking tools that
  6441	eventually enabled minds to know how minds evolved, and even to
  6442	know how these tools enabled them to know what minds are … We
  6443	know there are bacteria; dogs don’t; dolphins don’t; chimpanzees don’t.
  6444	Even bacteria don’t know there are bacteria. Our minds are different. It
  6445	takes thinking tools to understand what bacteria are, and we’re the only
  6446	species (so far) endowed with an elaborate kit of thinking tools”
  6447	(Dennett, 2017).
  6448	Dennett reflects that he has been struggling through the “thickets and
  6449	quagmires” of the mind question for over fifty years, and he has found a
  6450	path, built on evolution, that “takes us all the way to a satisfactory—and
  6451	satisfying—account of how the ‘magic’ of our minds is accomplished
  6452	without any magic, but it is neither straight nor easy” (Dennett, 2017).
  6453	9.10.2. LeDoux’s deep roots of consciousness
  6454	Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux argues that the key to understanding
  6455	human consciousness and behavior lies in viewing evolution through the
  6456	prism of the first living organisms. He tracks the evolutionary timeline to
  6457	show how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same
  6458	problems we and our cells have to solve, and how the evolution of
  6459	nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive
  6460	and have brought about the emergence of consciousness (LeDoux,
  6461	2019).
  6462	Motivated by his long-standing interest in how organisms detect and
  6463	respond to danger, LeDoux found in evolution the “deep roots” of human
  6464	abilities, hence the “deep roots” of consciousness, which “can be traced
  6465	back to the beginning of life.” LeDoux argues that what we have
  6466	inherited from our long chain of biological ancestors is not a fear circuit
  6467	but rather “a defensive survival circuit that detects threats, and in
  6468	response, initiates defensive survival behaviours and supporting physi­
  6469	ological adjustments.” Fear, on the other hand, from LeDoux perspec­
  6470	tive, is a recent expression of cortical cognitive circuits. Danger and
  6471	survival have a deep history; consciousness, a shallower one (LeDoux,
  6472	2021).
  6473	9.10.3. Ginsburg and Jablonka’s associative learning during evolution
  6474	Neurobiologist Simona Ginsburg and evolutionary theorist Eva
  6475	Jablonka propose that learning during evolution has been “the driving
  6476	force” in the transition to basic or minimal consciousness. They identify
  6477	the evolutionary marker as “a complex form of associative learning,
  6478	which they term “unlimited associative learning” and which “enables an
  6479	organism to ascribe motivational value to a novel, compound, nonreflex-inducing stimulus or action, and [to] use it as the basis for
  6480	82
       
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  6483	future learning” (Ginsburg and Jablonka, 2019).
  6484	Associative learning, Ginsburg and Jablonka argue, “drove the
  6485	Cambrian explosion and its massive diversification of organisms.” They
  6486	suggest that “consciousness can take many forms and is found even in
  6487	such animals as octopuses (who seem to express emotions by changing
  6488	color) and bees (who socialize with other bees)” (Ginsburg and
  6489	Jablonka, 2022). As for the evolutionary transition to human rationality,
  6490	they propose “symbolic language as a similar type of marker” (Ginsburg
  6491	and Jablonka, 2019).
       
  6492	regions causing similar behaviours and emotional expressions in
  6493	humans and other animals; neural circuits supporting behavioural/
  6494	electrophysical states of attentiveness, sleep and decision-making;
  6495	mirror self-recognition; and similar impacts of hallucinogenic drugs
  6496	across species” (Andrews, 2023).
  6497	But Andrews posits that “emphasis on the neurological … may be
  6498	holding the science back,” and that animal research suggests “multiple
  6499	realizability—the view that mental capacities can be instantiated by very
  6500	different physical systems.” If neuroscience looks only at slightly
  6501	different physical systems (say, just other primates or even mammals),
  6502	she says, “we may be overlooking the key piece to the consciousness
  6503	puzzle.”
  6504	Andrews asks, “What might we learn if our anthropocentrism didn’t
  6505	lead us to focus on the brain as the relevant part of physiology needed for
  6506	consciousness, but instead led us to examine the behaviours that are
  6507	associated with experiences?” She advocates studying “the nature of
  6508	consciousness by looking at bees, octopuses and worms as research
  6509	subjects. All these animals have a robust profile of behaviours that
  6510	warrant the hypothesis that they are conscious. Moving away from
  6511	painful stimuli, learning the location of desirable nutrients, and seeking
  6512	out what is needed for reproduction is something we share widely with
  6513	other animals.” By studying simple animals, she offers, we can simplify
  6514	research on consciousness (Andrews, 2023).
  6515	Andrews likens studying consciousness to studying the origin of life
  6516	on earth and searching for life on other planets. For each, there is only
  6517	one confirmed instance. It’s the “N = 1 problem.” “If we study only one
  6518	evolved instance of consciousness (our own),” she says, “we will be
  6519	unable to disentangle the contingent and dispensable from the essential
  6520	and indispensable.” She offers “good news” in that “consciousness sci­
  6521	ence, unlike the search for extraterrestrial life, can break out of its N = 1
  6522	problem using other cases from our own planet.” Typically, conscious­
  6523	ness scientists study other primates (e.g., macaque monkeys) and, to a
  6524	lesser extent, other mammals, such as rats. “But the N = 1 problem still
  6525	bites here. Because the common ancestor of the primates was very
  6526	probably conscious, as indeed was the common ancestor of all
  6527	mammals—we are still looking at the same evolved instance (just a
  6528	different variant of it). To find independently evolved instances of
  6529	consciousness, we really need to look to much more distant branches of
  6530	the tree of life” (Andrews and Birch, 2023).
  6531	Andrews speculates that “sentience has evolved only three times:
  6532	once in the arthropods (including crustaceans and insects), once in the
  6533	cephalopods (including octopuses) and once in the vertebrates.” But she
  6534	cannot rule out “the possibility that the last common ancestor of
  6535	humans, bees and octopuses, which was a tiny worm-like creature that
  6536	lived more than 500 million years ago, was itself sentient—and that
  6537	therefore sentience has evolved only once on Earth.”
  6538	In either case, she argues, “If a marker-based approach does start
  6539	pointing towards sentience being present in our worm-like last common
  6540	ancestor, we would have evidence against current theories that rely on a
  6541	close relationship between sentience and special brain regions adapted
  6542	for integrating information, like the cerebral cortex in humans. We
  6543	would have grounds to suspect that many features often said to be
  6544	essential to sentience are actually dispensable” (Andrews and Birch,
  6545	2023). Conversely, it could mean that sentience is related to some un­
  6546	known feature(s).
  6547	To Andrews, the philosophy of animal minds addresses profound
  6548	questions about the nature of mind as they cut across animal cognition
  6549	and philosophy of mind. Key topics include the evolution of con­
  6550	sciousness, tool use in animals, animal culture, mental representation,
  6551	belief, communication, theory of mind, animal ethics, and moral psy­
  6552	chology (Andrews, 2020a). Andrews outlines “the scientific benefits of
  6553	treating animals as sentient research participants who come from their
  6554	own social contexts” (Andrews, 2020b).
  6555	Andrews concludes: “Just as Crick and Koch pushed back on the
  6556	popular view of their time that language is needed for consciousness,
  6557	today we should push back on the popular view of our time that a
       
  6558	9.10.4. Cleeremans and Tallon-Baudry’s phenomenal experience has
  6559	functional value
  6560	Cleeremans and Tallon-Baudry propose that “subject-level experi­
  6561	ence—’What it feels like’—is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is
  6562	precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains
  6563	why they do certain things and avoid others.” Because experiences have
  6564	value and guide behavior, they argue, “consciousness has a function”
  6565	and that under “this hypothesis of ‘phenomenal worthiness’ … conscious
  6566	agents ‘experience’ things and ‘care’ about those experiences”
  6567	(Cleeremans and Tallon-Baudry, 2022).
  6568	The authors note that “the function of consciousness” has been
  6569	“addressed mostly by philosophers,” yet “surprisingly few things have
  6570	been written about [it] … in the neuroscientific or psychological liter­
  6571	ature.” The reason, they surmise, is the “classical view” that “subjective
  6572	experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advan­
  6573	tage." They reject such “consciousness inessentialism” by appealing to
  6574	“how the concept of value has been approached in decision-making,
  6575	emotion research and consciousness research” and by arguing that
  6576	“phenomenal consciousness has intrinsic value”—such as it being “the
  6577	central drive for the discovery and creation of new behaviours.” They
  6578	conclude that consciousness “must have a function” (Cleeremans and
  6579	Tallon-Baudry, 2022).
  6580	Under their hypothesis, “consciousness would have evolved and
  6581	been selected because it adds an important degree of freedom to the
  6582	machinery of reward-based behaviour: behaviour that seems purpose­
  6583	less from a purely functional perspective nevertheless has intrinsic
  6584	value. But this, crucially, only holds when associated with conscious
  6585	experience.” Phenomenal experience, they speculate, “might act as a
  6586	mental currency of sorts, which not only endows conscious mental states
  6587	with intrinsic value but also makes it possible for conscious agents to
  6588	compare vastly different experiences in a common subject-centered
  6589	space”—a feature, they claim, that “readily explains the fact that con­
  6590	sciousness is ‘unified.’” They offer the “phenomenal worthiness hy­
  6591	pothesis” as a way to make “the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness more
  6592	tractable, since it can then be reduced to a problem about function”—an
  6593	offering unlikely to persuade nonmaterialists (Cleeremans and
  6594	Tallon-Baudry, 2022).
  6595	9.10.5. Andrew’s consciousness without complex brains
  6596	Philosopher Kristin Andrews, an expert on animal minds, argues that
  6597	progress in consciousness studies has been hampered by prevailing
  6598	conventional wisdom that for an organism to be conscious, a complex
  6599	brain is required. She advocates moving “past a focus on complex
  6600	mammalian brains to study the behavior of ‘simpler’ animals” (Andrews,
  6601	2023).
  6602	In forming her argument, Andrews rehearses how Crick and Koch
  6603	helped turn consciousness studies into a real science by supposing that
  6604	“higher mammals” possess some essential features of consciousness
  6605	(9.2.2), by setting aside the still-common Cartesian view that language is
  6606	needed for conscious experience, and by assuming that a nervous system
  6607	is necessary for consciousness. She recruits the Cambridge Declaration
  6608	on Consciousness, which states that “there is sufficient evidence to
  6609	conclude that ‘all mammals and birds, and many other creatures,
  6610	including octopuses’ experience conscious states.” The Declaration, she
  6611	notes, identifies five consciousness markers (not all of which would be
  6612	necessary): “homologous brain circuits; artificial stimulation of brain
  6613	83
       
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  6616	origins of mind from complex neural structures to foundational biome­
  6617	chanical ones; and (c) it reformulates the long-term research focus from
  6618	looking for ‘miracle moments’ where a brain is suddenly capable of
  6619	making a mind to discovering how complex and sophisticated cognitive,
  6620	emotional and behavioral functions evolve from more primitive ones”
  6621	(Reber, 2016).
  6622	In addressing the hard problem, Reber argues that the reason it looks
  6623	“hard” is “because it assumes that there is some ‘added’ element that
  6624	comes from having a mind.” However, he says, “from the CBC
  6625	perspective the answer is easily expressed. Organisms have minds, or the
  6626	precursors of what we from our philosophy of mind perspective think of
  6627	as minds, because they are an inherent component of organic form.
  6628	What gets ‘added’ isn’t ontologically novel; it’s a gradual accretion of
  6629	functions that are layered over and interlock with pre-existing ones”
  6630	(Reber, 2016).
  6631	In the CBC framework, “All experience is mental. All organisms that
  6632	experience have minds, all have consciousness.” Reber contends that
  6633	this way of thinking repositions the problem, from how brains create
  6634	consciousness (i.e., the hard problem) to how all experience is con­
  6635	sciousness. “Instead of trying to grasp the neuro-complexities in brains
  6636	that give rise to minds, we can redirect the focus toward understanding
  6637	how particular kinds of basic, primitive organic forms came to have the
  6638	bio-sensitivity that is the foundation of subjectivity.” Reber recognizes
  6639	that “this argument requires a commitment to a biological reduc­
  6640	tionism.” It would also undermine Functionalism (9.1.3) in that mental
  6641	states would be “intrinsically hardware dependent” (Reber, 2016).
       
  6642	complex brain is needed for consciousness.” She also speculates: “If we
  6643	recognize that our starting assumptions are open to revision and allow
  6644	them to change with new scientific discoveries, we may find new puzzle
  6645	pieces, making the hard problem a whole lot easier” (Andrews, 2023).
  6646	In essence, then, Andrews reverses the traditional “neurocentric”
  6647	argument of consciousness. Whereas the common assumption is that
  6648	consciousness is (somehow) related to the complexity of the nervous
  6649	system, but because all neurobiological advances, collectively, have not
  6650	progressed in solving the hard problem, then perhaps the common
  6651	assumption is not correct and the generation of consciousness can be
  6652	found outside the nervous system. Thus, rather than assuming that or­
  6653	ganisms without complex nervous systems cannot be conscious, perhaps
  6654	a radical new approach might be to consider that these organisms are (in
  6655	a way) conscious and focus research on how such “lower” or “primitive”
  6656	consciousness might come about.
  6657	Finally, regarding our current obsession with discerning AI
  6658	sentience, Andrews claims that “without a deep understanding of the
  6659	variety of animal minds on this planet, we will almost certainly fail”
  6660	(Andrews and Birch, 2023).
  6661	Neuroscience/consciousness writer Annaka Harris goes further,
  6662	questioning our potentially false but deeply ingrained intuition that
  6663	“systems that act like us are conscious, and those that don’t are not.”
  6664	Plants and philosophical zombies, she says, indicate that this humancentric intuition “has no real foundation.” (A. Harris, 2020, 2019).
  6665	Consciousness may not even require a brain (A. Harris, 2022).
  6666	9.10.6. Reber’s cellular basis of consciousness
  6667	Cognitive psychologist Arthur Reber dubs his theory of the origins of
  6668	mind and consciousness the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC),
  6669	arguing that “sentience emerged with life itself.” He states, “The most
  6670	primitive unicellular species of bacteria are conscious, though it is a
  6671	sentience of a primitive kind. They have minds, though they are tiny and
  6672	limited in scope.” He rejects that “minds are computational and can be
  6673	captured by an artificial intelligence.” He develops CBC using standard
  6674	models of evolutionary biology, leveraging the “remarkable repertoire
  6675	of single-celled species that micro- and cell-biologists have discovered …
  6676	Bacteria, for example, have sophisticated sensory and perceptual sys­
  6677	tems, learn, form memories, make decisions based on information about
  6678	their environment relative to internal metabolic states, communicate
  6679	with each other, and even show a primitive form of altruism.” All such
  6680	functions, Reber contends, “are indicators of sentience” (Reber, 2016,
  6681	2018).
  6682	Reber’s model is based on a simple, radical axiom: “Mind and con­
  6683	sciousness are not unique features of human brains. They are grounded
  6684	in inherent features present in simpler forms in virtually every species.
  6685	Any organism with flexible cell walls, a sensitivity to its surrounds and
  6686	the capacity for locomotion will possess the biological foundations of
  6687	mind and consciousness.” In other words, “subjectivity is an inherent
  6688	feature of particular kinds of organic form. Experiential states, including
  6689	those denoted as ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness,’ are present in the most
  6690	primitive species” (Reber, 2016).
  6691	Reber founds his model on several principles: “Complexity has its
  6692	roots in simplicity. Evolution has a pyramidal schema. Older forms and
  6693	functions lie at the base, the more recently evolved ones toward the
  6694	zenith …. In virtue of the nature of pyramidal systems, the older
  6695	structures and the behaviors and processes that utilize them will be
  6696	relatively stable, showing less individual-to-individual and species-tospecies variation. They will also, in virtue of their foundational status,
  6697	be robust and less likely to be lost. Adaptive forms and functions are not
  6698	jettisoned; they are modified and, if the selection processes are effective,
  6699	they will become more complex and capable of greater behavioral and
  6700	mental flexibility and power” (Reber, 2016).
  6701	Reber claims that his model has several conceptual and empirical
  6702	virtues, among them: “(a) it (re)solves the problem of how minds are
  6703	created by brains—the "Hard Problem"—by showing that the apparent
  6704	difficulty results from a category error; (b) it redirects the search for the
       
  6705	9.10.7. Feinberg and Mallatt’s ancient origins of consciousness
  6706	Neurologist/psychiatrist Todd Feinberg and evolutionary biologist
  6707	Jon Mallatt propose that consciousness appeared much earlier in
  6708	evolutionary history than is commonly assumed, and therefore all ver­
  6709	tebrates and perhaps even some invertebrates are conscious. By
  6710	assembling a list of the biological and neurobiological features that seem
  6711	responsible for consciousness, and by juxtaposing the fossil record of
  6712	evolution, the authors argue that about 520–560 million years ago, “the
  6713	great ‘Cambrian explosion’ of animal diversity produced the first com­
  6714	plex brains, which were accompanied by the first appearance of con­
  6715	sciousness; simple reflexive behaviors evolved into a unified inner world
  6716	of subjective experiences” (Fineberg and Mallatt, 2016).
  6717	Doing what they call “neuroevolution,” Feinberg and Mallatt put
  6718	forth the even more unconventional idea that the origin of consciousness
  6719	goes back to the origin of life, in that single-cell creatures respond to
  6720	stimuli from the environment, whether attracted to food sources or
  6721	repelled by harmful chemicals. The authors call this process “sensory
  6722	consciousness” [but which others may call stimulus-response patterns
  6723	unworthy of the “consciousness” appellation]. In addition, the cell
  6724	membrane distinguishes self from non-self, which becomes another
  6725	baby step on the long evolutionary journey to human consciousness. A
  6726	crucial developmental step, they say, was the evolution of “hidden
  6727	layers” of clusters of intermediary nerve cells that process and relay
  6728	internal signals between sensory-input and motor-output nerve cells.
  6729	Driven by evolutionary pressures, these clusters would go on to evolve
  6730	into primitive and then more complex brains (Fineberg and Mallatt,
  6731	2016; Rose, 2017).
  6732	If indeed these were the historical facts, it would naturally follow
  6733	that “all vertebrates are and have always been conscious—not just
  6734	humans and other mammals, but also every fish, reptile, amphibian, and
  6735	bird.” Moreover, Feinberg and Mallatt find that many inverte­
  6736	brates—arthropods (including insects and probably crustaceans) and
  6737	cephalopods (including the octopus)—"meet many of the criteria for
  6738	consciousness.” Their proposal challenges standard-model theory that
  6739	“consciousness evolved simultaneously but independently in the first
  6740	vertebrates and possibly arthropods more than half a billion years ago.”
  6741	Combining evolutionary, neurobiological, and philosophical approaches
  6742	enables Feinberg and Mallatt to cast a broader group of animals that are
  6743	conscious, though it is less clear how their theory offers—as the
  6744	84
       
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  6747	non-, and maladaptive options. But the question remains, Witham says,
  6748	whether consciousness is, at least, a good prima facie fit, to address what
  6749	can be called “the selection problem.”
  6750	The hypothesis that underlies James’s view, she says, is that con­
  6751	sciousness increases an organism’s fitness by “bringing … pressure to
  6752	bear in favor of those of its performances which make for the most
  6753	permanent interests of the brain’s owner …” (James, 1890, p. 140).
  6754	Specifically, the role James gave to consciousness must be under­
  6755	stood only in the context of the formation of de facto ends which he
  6756	believed form when preferred sensations are recalled in their absence
  6757	(James, 1890, p. 78). This context is crucial, because it is consciousness
  6758	that confers the preferences for some sensations over others and thereby
  6759	serves as the source of the ends. But to understand why James gave
  6760	consciousness that role, Witham says we need to understand his
  6761	two-word phrase, "cerebral reflex," (James, 1890, p. 80). which implies a
  6762	stimulus-and-response schema is the basis for the ends-and-means cou­
  6763	plings that form cerebral reflexes. However, there is a problem with the
  6764	implication. For this to work, ends must stand in for stimuli, arising in
  6765	interactions between organisms and their environments.
  6766	The problem is solved, Witham says, if consciousness just is what it
  6767	seems to be: the means by which we reflect on our interactions with our
  6768	environments to sense whether the interactions are favorable or not. So,
  6769	what consciousness seems to be fits James’s hypothesis perfectly, that its
  6770	role is to "bring … pressure to bear [in favor of] those of our perfor­
  6771	mances" that are adaptive. Reflective experience, in short, makes it
  6772	possible to identify experiences of our environmental interactions that
  6773	contain adaptive behaviors and retain them as cerebral reflexes for
  6774	future use. But then, as the means to solve the selection problem, con­
  6775	sciousness becomes an adaptive adaptation in the sense of being an
  6776	adaptation selecting for adaptive behaviors. And it does so by being,
  6777	indeed, what it seems to be: an adaptive adaptation that is a marvelous
  6778	source of solutions, not a confounding source of problems.
  6779	The critical question, however, is whether a zombie-like black box of
  6780	sufficient complexity could perform environmentally driven, fitness
  6781	enhancing, evolutionarily successful activities, and if so, why then the
  6782	radical advent of something so startlingly novel in the universe: inner
  6783	experience? In other words, while the question of why consciousness
  6784	was favored and selected by evolution is important, it is not the question
  6785	of what consciousness actually is, which of course is the hard problem.
       
  6786	marketing claims, the authors less so—“an original solution to the ‘hard
  6787	problem’ of consciousness” (Fineberg and Mallatt, 2016).
  6788	9.10.8. Levin’s technological approach to mind everywhere
  6789	Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin introduces “a
  6790	framework for understanding and manipulating cognition in uncon­
  6791	ventional substrates,” which he calls ‘TAME—Technological Approach
  6792	to Mind Everywhere.” He asserts that creating “novel embodied cogni­
  6793	tive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of
  6794	chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and
  6795	software”—via synthetic biology and bioengineering—“are disrupting
  6796	familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of
  6797	thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose
  6798	composition and origin are not like any of the available natural model
  6799	species.” TAME, Levin says, “formalizes a non-binary (continuous),
  6800	empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency,” and it
  6801	“provides a natural way to think about animal sentience as an instance of
  6802	collective intelligence of cell groups, arising from dynamics that mani­
  6803	fest in similar ways in numerous other substrates” (Levin, 2022).
  6804	By focusing on cognitive function, not on phenomenal or access
  6805	consciousness, Levin takes “TAME’s view of sentience as fundamentally
  6806	tied to goal-directed activity,” noting carefully that “only some aspects
  6807	of which can be studied via third-person approaches.” Provisionally,
  6808	Levin suggests that consciousness “comes in degrees and kinds (is not
  6809	binary),” for the same reasons he argues for continuity of cognition: “if
  6810	consciousness is fundamentally embodied, the plasticity and gradual
  6811	malleability of bodies suggest that it is a strong requirement for pro­
  6812	ponents of phase transitions to specify what kind of ‘atomic’ (not further
  6813	divisible) bodily change makes for a qualitative shift in capacity con­
  6814	sciousness” (Levin, 2022).
  6815	Although Levin takes the null or default hypothesis to be the rela­
  6816	tively smooth continuity of consciousness across species and phyloge­
  6817	netically, he hedges that “the TAME framework is not incompatible with
  6818	novel discoveries about sharp phase transitions.” He points to future,
  6819	radical brain-computer interfaces in human patients as “perhaps one
  6820	avenue where a subject undergoing such a change can convince them­
  6821	selves, and perhaps others, that a qualitative, not continuous, change in
  6822	their consciousness had occurred.”
  6823	In a radical implication of TAME, Levin argues that “while
  6824	‘embodiment’ is critical for consciousness, it is not restricted to physical
  6825	bodies acting in 3D space, but also includes perception-action systems
  6826	working in all sorts of spaces.” This implies, he says, “counter to many
  6827	people’s intuitions, that systems that operate in morphogenetic, tran­
  6828	scriptional, and other spaces should also have some (if very minimal)
  6829	degree of consciousness. This in turn suggests that an agent, such as a
  6830	typical modern human, is really a patchwork of many diverse con­
  6831	sciousnesses, only one of which is usually capable of verbally reporting
  6832	its states (and, not surprisingly, given its limited access and selfboundary, believes itself to be a unitary, sole owner of the body).”
  6833	Levin remains “skeptical about being able to say anything definitive
  6834	about consciousness per se (as distinct from correlates of consciousness)
  6835	from a 3rd-person, objective perspective.” Yet, he muses, “The devel­
  6836	opmental approach to the emergence of consciousness on short, onto­
  6837	genetic timescales complements the related question on phylogenetic
  6838	timescales, and is likely to be a key component of mature theories in this
  6839	field” (Levin, 2022).
       
  6840	10. Non-reductive physicalism
  6841	Non-Reductive Physicalism takes consciousness to be entirely phys­
  6842	ical, solely the product of biological brains, but mental states or prop­
  6843	erties are irreducibly distinct from physical states or properties such that
  6844	they cannot be entirely explained by physical laws, principles or dis­
  6845	coveries (in brains or otherwise) (Macdonald and Macdonald, 2019).
  6846	Non-reductive Physicalism was, in part, a response to conceptual
  6847	problems in the early identity theories of physicalism where mental
  6848	properties or kinds were literally the same thing as physical properties or
  6849	kinds. This was challenged by several conceptual conundrums: the
  6850	multiple realizability of the same mental properties or kinds by different
  6851	physical properties or kinds (Hilary Putnam); the intentional essence of
  6852	mental phenomena, which seems so radically different from physical
  6853	laws or things (Donald Davidson’s “Anomalous Monism,” 14.2); and the
  6854	apparent unbridgeable gap between physics and the special sciences
  6855	(Jerry Fodor) (Macdonald and Macdonald, 2019).
  6856	While mental states are generated entirely by physical states (of the
  6857	brain), non-reductive physicalism maintains that they are truly other
  6858	than physical; mental states are ontologically distinct.
  6859	This would seem to make Non-Reductive Physicalism a form of
  6860	property dualism (15.1) in that both recognize real mental states and yet
  6861	only one kind of substance, matter—but, as expected, some adherents of
  6862	each reject the claims of the other. If Non-Reductive Physicalism is
  6863	indeed a form of property dualism, it would be perhaps the predominant
  6864	contemporary kind.
       
  6865	9.10.9. No hard problem in William James’s psychology
  6866	Writer Tracy Witham argues that William James flipped the para­
  6867	digm in which the hard problem arises, because James viewed con­
  6868	sciousness through a problem he believed it solves by selecting for
  6869	adaptive responses to specific environmental situations (James, 1890).
  6870	Essentially, James believed that a brain complex enough to support a
  6871	proliferation of options for responding to environmental situations is
  6872	more likely to obscure than to identify the best option to use, unless that
  6873	brain also has a selection mechanism for choosing adaptive over less,
  6874	85
       
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  6877	A core mechanism of Non-Reductive Physicalism is emergence,
  6878	where novel properties at higher levels of integration are not discernible
  6879	(and perhaps not even predictable, ever) from all-you-can-know at lower
  6880	or more fundamental levels. A prime feature of Non-Reductive Physi­
  6881	calism is often “top-down causation,” where the content of conscious­
  6882	ness is causally efficacious—qualia can do real work (contra
  6883	Epiphenomenalism, 9.1.2).
  6884	Some Christian philosophers, such as Nancey Murphy (10.2), who
  6885	seek greater consonance between contemporary science and the Chris­
  6886	tian faith, look to Non-Reductive Physicalism as a nondualistic account
  6887	of the human person. It does not consider the "soul" an entity separable
  6888	from the body, such that scientific statements about the physical nature
  6889	of human beings would be referring to exactly the same entity as theo­
  6890	logical statements concerning the spiritual nature of human beings
  6891	(Brown et al., 1998). The structure of Non-Reductive Physicalism is said
  6892	to enhance the Judeo-Christian concept of “resurrection of the dead” as
  6893	opposed to what is said to be the non-Judeo-Christian doctrine of an
  6894	“immortal soul” (Van Inwagen, 1995).
  6895	On the other hand, Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland takes
  6896	dualism to be “the clear teaching of Scripture” that “overwhelmingly
  6897	sets forth a dichotomy of soul and body” and he decries those Christian
  6898	thinkers who deny this conclusion, especially adherents of NonReductive Physicalism (Moreland, 2014).
  6899	Philosopher Jaegwon Kim’s objections to Non-Reductive Physi­
  6900	calism, based on causal closure and overdetermination, highlight its
  6901	three principles: the irreducibility of the mental to the physical; some
  6902	version of mental-physical supervenience; and the causal efficaciousness
  6903	of mental states. The problem, according to Kim, is that when these three
  6904	commitments are combined, an inconsistency is generated that entails
  6905	the causal impotence of mental properties (Kim, 2024).
  6906	I’ve always been puzzled by Non-Reductive Physicalism in that I can
  6907	well understand how, under physicalism, consciousness is non-reductive
  6908	in practice, but how non-reductive in principle? Conversely, if indeed
  6909	consciousness is in principle non-reductive—impossible for science ever
  6910	to explain how it works in terms of fundamental physical con­
  6911	stituents—it would seem to require the ontological reality of nonphysical properties (at least by current boundaries), which would
  6912	seem to embed a contradiction. Or else, by what mechanisms could such
  6913	higher-level non-reducible “laws” work? Perhaps by something analo­
  6914	gous to quantum fields but operating at higher levels? Occam is sharp­
  6915	ening his Razor.
       
  6916	with its own character. Ellis says, “The rationale is always the same: if
  6917	these aspects of consciousness occur, then it is possible that they occur;
  6918	and that possibility was there long before they ever occurred, and so is
  6919	an abstract feature of the universe. The physical existence of brains
  6920	enables their potential existence to be actualized” (Ellis, 2015).
  6921	Ellis embeds his theory of consciousness in the presence and power of
  6922	strong emergence, where properties of a system are impossible to predict
  6923	in terms of the properties of its constituents, even in principle; and of
  6924	top-down causation, where higher hierarchical levels exert causal force
  6925	on lower levels, even though the higher levels are comprised only of the
  6926	lower levels. Strong emergence, according to Ellis, works throughout the
  6927	physical world, particularly in biology where the whole is more than just
  6928	the sum of its parts (Ellis, 2017b, 2019).
  6929	He explains that “emergence is possible because downward causa­
  6930	tion takes place right down to the lower physical levels, hence, argu­
  6931	ments from the alleged causal completeness of physics and
  6932	supervenience are wrong. Lower levels, including the underlying phys­
  6933	ical levels, are conscripted to higher level purposes; the higher levels are
  6934	thereby causally effective, so strong emergence occurs. No violation of
  6935	physical laws is implied. The key point is that outcomes of universally
  6936	applicable generic physical laws depend on the context when applied in
  6937	specific real world biological situations … including the brain” (Ellis,
  6938	2019).
  6939	Continuing to focus on emergence and downward causation, Ellis
  6940	“considers how a classification of causal effects as comprising efficient,
  6941	formal, material, and final causation can provide a useful understanding
  6942	of how emergence takes place in biology and technology, with formal,
  6943	material, and final causation all including cases of downward causation;
  6944	they each occur in both synchronic and diachronic forms.” Taken
  6945	together, he says, the four causal effects “underlie why all emergent
  6946	levels in the hierarchy of emergence have causal powers (which is No­
  6947	ble’s principle of biological relativity) and so why causal closure only
  6948	occurs when the upward and downward interactions between all
  6949	emergent levels are taken into account, contra to claims that some un­
  6950	derlying physics level is by itself causality complete” A key feature, Ellis
  6951	adds, is that “stochasticity at the molecular level plays an important role
  6952	in enabling agency to emerge, underlying the possibility of final
  6953	causation occurring in these contexts” (Ellis, 2023).
  6954	Ellis’s two points here, if veridical and representing reality, would
  6955	have extraordinary impact on theories of consciousness, and the two
  6956	bear repeating: (i) emergence has causal powers at all levels in biology,
  6957	and (ii) top-down causation as well as bottom-up causation is necessary
  6958	for causal closure. At once, almost every Materialism Theory—maybe
  6959	every Materialism Theory (more than 90 at last count)—would be shown
  6960	insufficient to explain consciousness (even if one or more were still
  6961	necessary to do so).
  6962	Ellis highlights questions that he claims reductionists cannot answer:
  6963	“Reductionists cannot answer why strong emergence (unitary, branch­
  6964	ing, and logical) is possible, and in particular why abstract entities such
  6965	as thoughts and social agreements can have causal powers. The reason
  6966	why they cannot answer these questions is that they do not take into
  6967	account the prevalence of downward causation in the world, which in
  6968	fact occurs in physics, biology, the mind, and society” (Ellis 2017b,
  6969	2019).
  6970	David Chalmers distinguishes strong downward causation from weak
  6971	downward causation. “With strong downward causation, the causal
  6972	impact of a high-level phenomenon on low-level processes is not
  6973	deducible even in principle from initial conditions and low-level laws.
  6974	With weak downward causation, the causal impact of the high-level
  6975	phenomenon is deducible in principle, but is nevertheless unexpected.
  6976	As with strong and weak emergence, both strong and weak downward
  6977	causation are interesting in their own right. But strong downward
  6978	causation would have more radical consequences for our understanding
  6979	of nature.” However, Chalmers concludes, “I do not know whether there
  6980	is any strong downward causation, but it seems to me that if there is any
  6981	strong downward causation, quantum mechanics is the most likely locus
       
  6982	10.1. Ellis’s strong emergence and top-down causation
  6983	Mathematical physicist George Ellis approaches consciousness by
  6984	combining non-reductionist strong emergence and top-down causation
  6985	in the context of “possibility spaces” (Ellis, 2017a). While he calls con­
  6986	sciousness “the biggest unsolved problem in science,” he sees the larger
  6987	vision that consciousness transforms the nature of existence itself such
  6988	that existence is quite different than it might have been had there been
  6989	only nonconscious matter (Ellis, 2006).
  6990	Ellis begins with four kinds of entities, or “Worlds,” whose existence
  6991	requires explanation: matter and forces, consciousness, physical and
  6992	biological possibilities, and mathematical reality. An adequate expla­
  6993	nation of what exists, he says, must encompass all four kinds of entities,
  6994	in two forms: generic forms of the kinds of entities that might exist, and
  6995	specific instantiations of some of these possibilities that actually occur or
  6996	have occurred in the real universe. The first are possibilities, and the
  6997	second are actualizations of those possibilities (Ellis, 2015).
  6998	“Possibility spaces,” then, show what is and what is not possible for
  6999	entities of whatever kind we are discussing. For example, the possibility
  7000	space for classical physics is all possible states of the system; for quan­
  7001	tum physics, the state spaces for the system wave function are Hilbert
  7002	spaces.
  7003	For consciousness, possibility spaces include separate subspaces for
  7004	all possible thoughts, all possible qualia, all possible emotions—each
  7005	86
       
  7006	R.L. Kuhn
       
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  7008	for it … The question remains wide open, however, as to whether or not
  7009	strong downward causation exists” (Chalmers, 2008).
       
  7010	Christian philosopher Nancey Murphy, reflecting increasing Chris­
  7011	tian scholarship calling for acceptance of physicalism, argues that the
  7012	theological workability of physicalism depends on the success of an
  7013	argument against reductionism. She takes Non-Reductive Physicalism, a
  7014	common term in philosophy of mind, to “signal opposition to anthro­
  7015	pological dualisms of body and either mind or soul, as well as to phys­
  7016	icalist accounts that reduce humans to nothing but complex animals.” She
  7017	sets herself the task of showing that “non-reductive physicalism is
  7018	philosophically defensible, compatible with mainstream cognitive
  7019	neuroscience, and is also acceptable biblically and theologically”—a
  7020	task made more difficult because she must be able to explain “how
  7021	Christians for centuries could have been wrong in believing dualism to
  7022	be biblical teaching” (Murphy, 2017, 2018).
  7023	To Murphy, part of the answer lies in translation. She focuses on the
  7024	Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures that dates from
  7025	around 250 BC. This text translated Hebrew terminology into Greek, and
  7026	“it then contained terms that, in the minds of Christians influenced by
  7027	Greek philosophy, referred to constituent parts of humans. Later Chris­
  7028	tians have obligingly read and translated them in this way.” A key
  7029	instance, she says, is “the Hebrew word nephesh, which was translated as
  7030	psyche in the Septuagint and later into English as ‘soul’ … In most cases
  7031	the Hebrew or Greek term is taken simply to be a way of referring to the
  7032	whole living person” (Murphy, 2018).
  7033	Murphy is impressed by how many capacities or faculties of the soul,
  7034	as attributed by Thomas Aquinas, are now well explained by cognitive
  7035	science and neurobiology. She is moved by “localization studies—that is,
  7036	research indicating not only that the brain is involved in specific mental
  7037	operations, but that very specific regions are.”
  7038	That gives her the physicalism—the easy part, I’d say. What about
  7039	the non-reductive—the hard part?
  7040	An obvious answer to the problem of neurobiological reductionism,
  7041	Murphy says, would be the presence and power of downward causation
  7042	or whole-part causation. That is, if causal reductionism is the thesis that
  7043	all causation is from part to whole, then the complementary alternative
  7044	causation would be from whole to part. If we describe a more complex
  7045	system, such as an organism, as a higher-level system than the simple
  7046	sum of its biological parts, then causal reductionism is bottom-up
  7047	causation, and the alternative, causal anti-reductionism, or causal
  7048	non-reductionism, is top-down or downward causation (Murphy, 2017).
  7049	To support Non-reductive Physicalism by undermining reductionist
  7050	determinism, Murphy recruits contemporary concepts in systems the­
  7051	ory, such as chaos theory, non-linear dynamics, complex adaptive sys­
  7052	tems, systems probabilities, and systems biology. Thus, Murphy posits,
  7053	an understanding of downward causation in complex systems allows for
  7054	the defeat of neurobiological reductionism.
  7055	Finally, Murphy muses that “non-reductive physicalism, while it is
  7056	the term most often used in philosophy, is perhaps not the best for
  7057	purposes of Christian anthropology, because, at least by connotation, it
  7058	places disproportionate stress on the aspect of our physicality.” She
  7059	quotes theologian Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen in proposing a replacement:
  7060	“multi-aspect monism” (Murphy, 2018).
       
  7061	He states, “Most Christians seem to have a picture of the afterlife that
  7062	can without too much unfairness be described as ‘Platonic.’ When one
  7063	dies, one’s body decays, and what one is, what one has been all along, an
  7064	immaterial soul or mind or self, continues to exist”—a picture and a
  7065	doctrine that Van Inwagen finds “unsatisfactory, both as a Christian and
  7066	as a philosopher” (Van Inwagen, 1995).
  7067	He reflects, “when I enter most deeply into that which I call myself, I
  7068	seem to discover that I am a living animal. And, therefore, dualism
  7069	seems to me to be an unnecessarily complicated theory about my nature
  7070	unless there is some fact or phenomenon or aspect of the world that
  7071	dualism deals with better than materialism does” (which he does not
  7072	find). As for the argument from phenomenal consciousness, he admits,
  7073	“It is a mystery how a material thing could have sensuous properties
  7074	[phenomenal consciousness],” but then retorts, “simply and solely
  7075	because it is a mystery how anything could.”
  7076	Van Inwagen rejects dualism biblically as well as philosophically.
  7077	After examining biblical texts in the Old Testament, Van Inwagen finds
  7078	“little to support dualism in the Old Testament, and much that the
  7079	materialist will find congenial.” His analysis of New Testament texts
  7080	requires more elaborate (some may say more convoluted) exegesis:
  7081	“twisting and turning, impaled on intransigent texts,” in Van Inwagen’s
  7082	own self-deprecating words. For example, Jesus’s parable of the “Rich
  7083	Man” and his words to the “Good Thief” on the cross (“Today you shall
  7084	be with me in Paradise.”). Moreover, Paul’s repeated representation of
  7085	death as “sleep” cannot be discounted.
  7086	An important philosophical argument for Christian dualism, Van
  7087	Inwagen says, is that the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead seems
  7088	to presuppose dualism. “For if I am not something immaterial, if I am a
  7089	living animal, then death must be the end of me. If I am a living animal,
  7090	then I am a material object. If I am a material object, then I am the
  7091	mereological sum of certain atoms. But if I am the mereological sum of
  7092	certain atoms today, it is clear from what we know about the metabo­
  7093	lisms of living things that I was not the sum of those same atoms a year
  7094	ago” (Van Inwagen, 1995).
  7095	For the materialist who believes in the biblical resurrection of the
  7096	dead as a literal future event, as Van Inwagen does, the fact that the
  7097	atoms of which we are composed are in continuous flux is a “stumbling
  7098	block.” He asks, “How shall even omnipotence bring me back—me,
  7099	whose former atoms are now spread pretty evenly throughout the
  7100	biosphere?” This question does not confront the dualist, who will say
  7101	that there is no need to bring me back because I have never left. But what
  7102	shall the materialist say?” (Van Inwagen, 1995).
  7103	Van Inwagen challenges Divine power: “For what can even omnip­
  7104	otence do but reassemble? What else is there to do? And reassembly is not
  7105	enough, for I have been composed of different atoms at different times.”
  7106	This leads to the conundrum of myriad duplicates.
  7107	In the end, Van Inwagen concludes, “there would seem to be no way
  7108	around the following requirement: if I am a material thing, then, if a man
  7109	who lives at some time in the future is to be I, there will have to be some
  7110	sort of material and causal continuity between this matter that composes
  7111	me now and the matter that will then compose that man.” Van Inwagen
  7112	finds this requirement looking very much like Paul’s description of the
  7113	resurrection: “when I die, the power of God will somehow preserve
  7114	something of my present being, a gumnos kókkos [bare/naked grain/
  7115	kernel35], which will continue to exist throughout the interval between
  7116	my death and my resurrection and will, at the general resurrection, be
       
  7117	10.3. Van Inwagen’s Christian materialism and the resurrection of the
  7118	dead
       
  7119	35
       
  7120	10.2. Murphy’s non-reductive physicalism
       
  7121	Gumnos kókkos [bare/naked grain/kernel] comes from 1 Corinthians 15:37,
  7122	referring to how on Earth God could resurrect the dead. Here, in context: 1
  7123	Corinthians 15:35–38, King James Version—“But some man will say, ‘How are
  7124	the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?’ Thou fool, that which
  7125	thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: And that which thou sowest, thou
  7126	sowest not that body that shall be, but bare [naked] grain, it may chance of
  7127	wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him,
  7128	and to every seed his own body.”
       
  7129	Christian philosopher/metaphysician Peter van Inwagen combines a
  7130	wholly materialist ontology of the human person (Van Inwagen, 2007a)
  7131	with a committed belief in the resurrection of the dead as the Christian
  7132	hope of eternal life. His thesis is that “dualism is a Greek import into
  7133	Christianity and that the Christian resurrection of the dead does not
  7134	presuppose dualism” (Van Inwagen, 1995, 2007b).
  7135	87
       
  7136	R.L. Kuhn
       
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  7138	clothed in a festal garment of new flesh” (Van Inwagen, 1995).
  7139	While van Inwagen would be the first to admit that “oddly enough,”
  7140	few Christian dualists have been persuaded by his arguments against a
  7141	Christian immortal soul, I (for one) consider his arguments probative,
  7142	disruptive, insightful (if not dispositive) (Van Inwagen, 2007b).
       
  7143	perspectives, each containing an equivalent observer function (Sanfey,
  7144	2023).
  7145	10.6. Northoff’s non-reductive neurophilosophy
  7146	Northoff frames his views on consciousness (1.2.12) as “non-reduc­
  7147	tive neurophilosophy,” which, he says, is “primarily a methodological
  7148	approach,” a particular strategy that takes into account “certain phe­
  7149	nomena which otherwise would remain outside our scope [conscious­
  7150	ness studies].” He deems “the link of conceptual models and ontological
  7151	theories with empirical data to be key in providing insight into brainmind connection and its subjectivity” (Northoff, 2022).
  7152	Paraphrasing Kant, Northoff says that “brain data without brainmind models are blind, brain-mind models without brain data are
  7153	empty.” Thus, Northoff has non-reductive neurophilosophy allowing for
  7154	“a systematic and bilateral connection of theoretical concepts and
  7155	empirical data, of philosophy and neuroscience.” His emphasis is on
  7156	“systematic,” by providing and defining “different steps in how to link
  7157	concepts and facts in a valid way without reducing the one to the
  7158	respective other.” Taken in such sense, Northoff considers non-reductive
  7159	neurophilosophy “a methodological strategy of analyzing the relation­
  7160	ship of concepts and facts just like there are specific methods of logical
  7161	analyses in philosophy and empirical data analysis in neuroscience.” In
  7162	other words, “non-reductive neurophilosophy is a methodological tool
  7163	at the interface of philosophy and neuroscience. As such it can be
  7164	applied to problems in both philosophy and neuroscience” (Northoff,
  7165	2022).
       
  7166	10.4. Nagasawa’s nontheoretical physicalism
  7167	Philosopher Yujin Nagasawa interrelates central debates in philoso­
  7168	phy of mind (phenomenal consciousness) and philosophy of religion
  7169	(existence of God) to construct a unique metaphysical thesis, which he
  7170	calls “nontheoretical physicalism,” by which he claims that although
  7171	this world is entirely physical, there are physical facts that cannot be
  7172	captured even by complete theories of the physical sciences (Nagasawa,
  7173	2008). This is no defense of traditional Non-Reductive Physicalism, but
  7174	it is consistent with some of its distinguishing features.
  7175	Nagasawa’s unique methodology, moving from epistemology to
  7176	ontology, draws heretofore unrecognized parallels between funda­
  7177	mental arguments in philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion,
  7178	using in the former the Knowledge Argument that Mary cannot know
  7179	what it is like to see color in her black-and-white room, and in the latter
  7180	atheistic arguments that God cannot know what it is like to be evil or
  7181	limited due to his perfections. From what Nagasawa takes as the failures
  7182	of traditional arguments against physicalism, yet in still rejecting a
  7183	physicalist approach to phenomenal consciousness, he constructs his
  7184	“nontheoretical physicalism” (Nagasawa, 2023).
  7185	What Nagasawa means by “nontheoretical” is an explanation of
  7186	physicalism that is entity-based, not theory-based, which is consistent
  7187	with his view that even with complete and final physical theories all
  7188	reality cannot be explained (Nagasawa, 2008).
       
  7189	11. Quantum theories
  7190	Quantum theories of consciousness take seriously the idea that
  7191	quantum mechanics plays a necessary, if not sufficient role, in the spe­
  7192	cific generation of phenomenal consciousness in certain physical entities
  7193	like brains—beyond the general application of quantum mechanics in all
  7194	physical entities. The kinds of quantum theories or models on offer differ
  7195	radically.
  7196	Philosopher of science Paavo Pylkkänen explores whether the
  7197	dynamical and holistic features of conscious experience might reflect
  7198	“the dynamic and holistic quantum physical processes associated with
  7199	the brain that may underlie (and make possible) the more mechanistic
  7200	neurophysiological processes that contemporary cognitive neuroscience
  7201	is measuring.” If so, he says, “these macroscopic processes would be a
  7202	kind of shadow, or amplification of the results of quantum processes at a
  7203	deeper (pre-spatial or ‘implicate’) level where our minds and conscious
  7204	experience essentially live and unfold.” At the very least, Pylkkänen
  7205	says, “a quantum perspective will help a ‘classical’ consciousness theo­
  7206	rist to become better aware of some of the hidden assumptions in his or
  7207	her approach.” What quantum theory is all about, he stresses, is
  7208	“learning, on the basis of scientific experiments, to question the
  7209	‘obvious’ truths about the nature of the physical world and to come up
  7210	with more coherent alternatives” (Pylkkänen, 2018).
  7211	There is certainly growing interest in the putative quantumconsciousness nexus. For example, Quantum and Consciousness Revis­
  7212	ited, with papers the product of two conferences, present various phil­
  7213	osophical approaches to quantum paradoxes including further
  7214	considerations of the Copenhagen Interpretation and alternatives with
  7215	implications for consciousness studies, mathematics and biology. Topics
  7216	include observation and measurement; collapse of the wave function;
  7217	and time and gravity. All the papers, the editors write, “reopen the
  7218	questions of consciousness and meaning which occupied the minds of
  7219	the early thinkers of quantum physics” (Kafatos et al., 2024).
  7220	In his technical review article, “Quantum Approaches to Con­
  7221	sciousness,” theoretical physicist Harald Atmanspacher describes three
  7222	basic approaches to the question of whether quantum theory can help
  7223	understand consciousness: (1) consciousness as manifestation of quan­
  7224	tum processes in the brain, (2) quantum concepts elucidating
       
  7225	10.5. Sanfey’s Abstract Realism
  7226	Medical doctor John Sanfey’s Abstract Realism (AR) claims to bridge
  7227	the mind-matter explanatory gap with two arguments suggesting a
  7228	complementarity between first and third-person perspectives, with each
  7229	perspective containing an equivalent observer function. The first argu­
  7230	ment posits that science must use abstract devices integrating past and
  7231	future moments of continuous time that reflect first-person perception.
  7232	The second argument tackles the hard problem by examining phenom­
  7233	enal simultaneity, where no time separates experiencer from experi­
  7234	enced (Sanfey, 2023).
  7235	In “something it is like to experience redness,” the experiencer knows
  7236	they are not simultaneously causing the redness; one cannot consciously
  7237	cause something without being conscious of doing so, obviously. But an
  7238	intelligent system not experiencing conscious presence cannot be certain
  7239	it is not causing what it perceives because its observing self must reside
  7240	in the same physical systems that may or may not be producing illusions.
  7241	This suggests, to Sanfey, that experiencing presence is sufficient to
  7242	create logical possibilities such as disembodied mind or idealism.
  7243	Rooted in phenomenal simultaneity, these causal mechanics of con­
  7244	sciousness are unobservable in principle, he says, making consciousness
  7245	indistinguishable from strong emergence. Proven causal power means
  7246	that consciousness can be produced by physical systems even synthetic
  7247	ones without introducing new physics. (In Sanfey’s AR, the brain gen­
  7248	erates consciousness when two information systems, two electromag­
  7249	netic fields [9.3], interact bi-directionally, causally, and with sufficient
  7250	complexity such that one is the observing reference for the other.)
  7251	(Sanfey, 2023).
  7252	Simultaneous causation cannot happen, but experiential simulta­
  7253	neity is certain, and with causal power, consciousness can be integrated
  7254	with physics within a Non-Reductive Physicalism paradigm—without
  7255	appealing to psycho-identity, panpsychism, idealism, or reductive
  7256	physicalism. Matter, defined as that which behaves according to phys­
  7257	ical laws independently of conscious mind, is always either a sensory or
  7258	conceptual model, a complementarity of first and third-person
  7259	88
       
  7260	R.L. Kuhn
       
  7261	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  7262	consciousness without referring to brain activity, and (3) matter and
  7263	consciousness as dual aspects of one underlying reality (Atmanspacher,
  7264	2020a).
  7265	For example, one approach considers how quantum field theory can
  7266	describe why and how classical behavior emerges at the level of brain
  7267	activity. The relevant brain states themselves are properly considered as
  7268	classical states. The idea, Atmanspacher says, is “similar to a classical
  7269	thermodynamical description arising from quantum statistical me­
  7270	chanics,” and works “to identify different regimes of stable behavior
  7271	(phases, attractors) and transitions between them. This way, quantum
  7272	field theory provides formal elements from which a standard classical
  7273	description of brain activity can be inferred” (Atmanspacher, 2020a).
  7274	Atmanspacher reports applications of quantum concepts to mental
  7275	processes, focusing on complementarity, entanglement, dispersive
  7276	states, and non-Boolean logic. These involve quantum-inspired concepts
  7277	to address purely mental (psychological or cognitive) phenomena,
  7278	without claiming that actual quantum mechanics is necessary to make it
  7279	work. This includes research groups studying quantum ideas in cogni­
  7280	tion (Patra, 2019). While the term “quantum cognition” has gained
  7281	acceptance, Atmanspacher says that a more appropriate characteriza­
  7282	tion would be “non-commutative structures in cognition,” and he
  7283	questions whether it is “necessarily true that quantum features in psy­
  7284	chology imply quantum physics in the brain?” (Atmanspacher, 2020a).
  7285	After reviewing major quantum theories of consciousness (several
  7286	are discussed below), Atmanspacher suggests that progress is more
  7287	likely made by investigating “mental quantum features without focusing
  7288	on associated brain activity” (at least to begin with). Ultimately, he says,
  7289	“mind-matter entanglement is conceived as the hypothetical origin of
  7290	mind-matter correlations. This exhibits the highly speculative picture of
  7291	a fundamentally holistic, psychophysically neutral level of reality from
  7292	which correlated mental and material domains emerge” (Atmans­
  7293	pacher’s Dual-Aspect Monism, 14.7.).
  7294	To position quantum theories of consciousness, consider each as
  7295	representing one of two forms: (i) quantum processes, similar to those in
  7296	diverse areas of biology (e.g., photosynthesis), that uniquely empower
  7297	or enable the special activities of cells, primarily neurons, to generate
  7298	consciousness; and (ii) the more radical claim that these two great
  7299	mysteries, consciousness and quantum theory, are intimately connected
  7300	such that the solution to both mysteries can be solved only together.
  7301	Physicist Carlo Rovelli disagrees. Consciousness and quantum me­
  7302	chanics, he says, have no special, intimate relationship. With respect to
  7303	quantum mechanics, Rovelli says, “Consciousness never played a role …
  7304	except for some fringe speculations that I do not believe have any solid
  7305	ground. The notion of ‘observer’ should not be misunderstood. In
  7306	quantum physics parlance an ‘observer’ can be a detector, a screen, or
  7307	even a stone. Anything that is affected by a process. It does not need to
  7308	be conscious, or human, or living, or anything of the sort” (Rovelli,
  7309	2022).
  7310	Philosopher of physics David Wallace sees “potentially intriguing
  7311	connections between consciousness and quantum mechanics, tied partly
  7312	to the idea that traditional formulations of quantum mechanics seem to
  7313	give a role to measurement or observation—and, well, what is that?” He
  7314	says, “the natural hypothesis is that measurement or observation is
  7315	conscious perception,” which somehow implies “a role of a conscious
  7316	observer.” Although this would be “extremely suggestive for connecting
  7317	the two”—consciousness and quantum mechanics—"but you can con­
  7318	nect them in a lot of ways.” Some, Wallace says, might try to explain
  7319	consciousness reductionistically in terms of quantum mechanical pro­
  7320	cesses. But, “In my view, that works no better than explaining con­
  7321	sciousness in terms of classical processes.” However, “Another way is not
  7322	try to reduce consciousness, but find roles for consciousness in quantum
  7323	mechanics. That’s one of the big questions about consciousness. What
  7324	does it do? What is it here for? How can it affect the physical world? So,
  7325	I’m at least taking seriously the idea that maybe consciousness plays a
  7326	potential role in quantum mechanics. It’s a version of the traditional
  7327	idea that consciousness collapses the wave function. It’s not an
       
  7328	especially popular idea among physicists these days, partly because it
  7329	takes consciousness as fundamental—but if, like me, you think there are
  7330	independent reasons to do that, then I think it’s an avenue worth looking
  7331	at” (Wallace, 2016b).
  7332	Chalmers and McQueen readdress the question of whether con­
  7333	sciousness collapses the quantum wave function. Noting that this idea
  7334	was taken seriously by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner but is
  7335	now widely dismissed, they develop the idea by combining a mathe­
  7336	matical theory of consciousness (Integrated Information Theory, 12)
  7337	with an account of quantum collapse dynamics (continuous spontaneous
  7338	localization). In principle, versions of the theory can be tested by ex­
  7339	periments with quantum computers. The upshot is not that
  7340	consciousness-collapse interpretations are clearly correct, but that there
  7341	is a research program here worth exploring (Chalmers and McQueen,
  7342	2022).
  7343	Physicist Tim Palmer argues that our ability for counterfactual
  7344	thinking—the existence of alternative worlds where things happen dif­
  7345	ferently—which is both an exercise in imagination and a key prediction
  7346	of quantum mechanics—suggests that “our brains are able to ponder
  7347	how things could have been because in essence they are quantum
  7348	computers, accessing information from alternative worlds” (he recruits
  7349	the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics). Consciousness
  7350	(along with understanding and free will), he states, “involves appealing
  7351	to counterfactual worlds” and thus “quantum computing is the key to
  7352	consciousness” (Palmer, 2023).
  7353	At the very least, for quantum processing to play a content or
  7354	informational role in the brain it would require some mechanism that
  7355	stores and transports quantum information in qubits for sufficiently
  7356	long, macroscopic times. Moreover, the mechanism would need to
  7357	entangle vast numbers of qubits, and then that entanglement would
  7358	need to be translated into higher-level chemistry in order to influence
  7359	how neurons trigger action potentials (Ouellette, 2016). Experiments
  7360	with anesthetics and brain organoids hint that quantum effects in the
  7361	brain may be in some way involved in consciousness (Musser, 2024).
  7362	Although most physicists and neuroscientists have not taken quan­
  7363	tum theories of consciousness seriously, such theories are proliferating,
  7364	becoming more sophisticated and mainstream, and are increasingly
  7365	backed up by claims of experimental evidence. Personally, I started out
  7366	an incorrigible, utter skeptic about quantum consciousness; I’m still a
  7367	skeptic, though no longer so incorrigible, no longer so utter.
  7368	11.1. Penrose-Hameroff’s orchestrated objective reduction
  7369	Penrose-Hameroff’s quantum consciousness, which they call
  7370	Orchestrated Objective Reduction (OrchOR), is the claim that con­
  7371	sciousness arises in the fundamental gap between the quantum and
  7372	classical worlds. Formulated by mathematician and Nobel laureate
  7373	Roger Penrose (Penrose, 2014; 1996; Penrose, 2014, 2023), and devel­
  7374	oped by anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff (Hameroff, 2014a, 2014b),
  7375	consciousness is non-computational, yet still explained by the physics of
  7376	neurons, but a physics distinct from and broader than that which we
  7377	currently understand.
  7378	Penrose claims that only a non-computational physical process could
  7379	explain consciousness. He is not saying that consciousness is beyond
  7380	physics, rather that it is beyond today’s physics. “Conscious thinking
  7381	can’t be described entirely by the physics that we know,” Penrose said,
  7382	explaining that he “needed something that had a hope of being noncomputational.”36 He focuses on “the main gap in physics”: the
  7383	contradiction between the continuous, probabilistic evolution given by
  7384	the Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics and the discrete,
  7385	deterministic events when you make measurements in classical
  7386	36
  7387	Quotes from Penrose and Hameroff come from their Closer To Truth videos:
  7388	Roger Penrose—https://closertotruth.com/contributor/roger-penrose/; Stuart
  7389	Hameroff—https://closertotruth.com/contributor/stuart-hameroff/.
       
  7390	89
       
  7391	R.L. Kuhn
       
  7392	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  7393	physics—“how rules like Schrödinger’s cat being dead and alive at the
  7394	same time in quantum mechanics do not apply at the classical level”
  7395	(Penrose, 2014, 2023),
  7396	Penrose argues that the missing physics that describes how the
  7397	quantum world becomes the classical world “is the only place where you
  7398	could have non-computational activity.” But he admits that it’s “a tall
  7399	order” to sustain quantum information in the hot, wet brain, because
  7400	“whenever quantum systems become entangled with the environment,
  7401	‘environmental decoherence’ occurs and information is lost.”
  7402	“Quantum mechanics acting incoherently is not useful [to account
  7403	for consciousness],” Penrose explains; “it has to act coherently. That’s
  7404	why we call [our mechanism] ‘Orch OR’, or ‘orchestrated objective
  7405	reduction’—the ‘OR’ stands for objective reduction, which is where the
  7406	quantum state collapses to one alternative or another, and ‘Orch’ stands
  7407	for orchestrated. The whole system must be orchestrated, or organized,
  7408	in some global way, so that the different reductions of the states actually
  7409	do make a big difference to what happens to the network of neurons”
  7410	(Penrose, 2014, 2023),
  7411	So how can the hot, wet brain operate a quantum information sys­
  7412	tem? Hameroff proposed a biological mechanism utilizing microtubules
  7413	in neurons. As an anesthesiologist who had shepherded thousands of
  7414	conscious-unconscious-conscious transitions, Hameroff, together with
  7415	Penrose, developed their quantum theory of consciousness.
  7416	“Objective reduction in the quantum world is occurring every­
  7417	where,” Hameroff recognizes, “so proto-conscious, undifferentiated
  7418	moments are ubiquitous in the universe. Now in our view when
  7419	orchestrated objective reduction occurs in neuronal microtubules, the
  7420	process gives rise to rich conscious experience” (Hameroff, 2014b).
  7421	In Hameroff’s telling, microtubules are cylindrical polymers of the
  7422	protein tubulin capable of information processing, with fundamental
  7423	units being states of a billion tubulins per neuron. Microtubules in all
  7424	cells enact purposeful spatiotemporal activities, and in the brain, mi­
  7425	crotubules establish neuronal shape, create and regulate synapses, and
  7426	are proposed to underlie memory, cognition and consciousness. Tubulin
  7427	is the brain’s most prevalent protein, so the brain is largely made of
  7428	microtubules, each with unique, high frequency vibrational and quan­
  7429	tum properties from non-polar aromatic ring pathways. The claim is
  7430	made that experimental evidence shows that anti-depressants, psyche­
  7431	delics and general anesthetics, which selectively alter or block con­
  7432	sciousness, all act via microtubules (Brophy and Hameroff, 2023).
  7433	Some evidence suggests that entangled states can be maintained in
  7434	noisy open quantum systems at high temperature and far from thermal
  7435	equilibrium—for example, counterbalancing decoherence by a “reco­
  7436	herence” mechanism—such that, “under particular circumstances,
  7437	entanglement may persist even in hot and noisy environments such as
  7438	the brain” (Atmanspacher, 2020a). Moreover, Anirban Bandyopadhyay
  7439	describes experiments with the tubulin protein in microtubules where
  7440	conductivity resistance becomes so low it’s almost a macroscopic
  7441	quantum-like system (Bandyopadhyay, 2014).
  7442	Penrose’s ontology requires basic conscious acts to be linked to
  7443	gravitation-mediated reductions of quantum states, with “real quantum
  7444	jumps” related to conscious thoughts and, by extension, to neural cor­
  7445	relates of consciousness. A complete theory seems to require a robust
  7446	theory of quantum gravity, long the holy grail of physics.
  7447	As noted, the Orch OR theory proposes that consciousness arises
  7448	from orchestrated (Orch) quantum state objective reductions (OR) in
  7449	microtubules within brain neurons, which connect, adherents say, to the
  7450	fine-scale structure of spacetime geometry. Adherents posit that Orch
  7451	OR accounts for cognitive binding, real-time conscious causal action
  7452	(through non-computable Penrose OR and retroactivity), memory
  7453	encoding, and, ambitiously, the hard problem of phenomenal experi­
  7454	ence. Moreover, consciousness as a non-local quantum process in
  7455	spacetime geometry provides potentially plausible mechanism for neardeath and out-of-body experiences, pre-cognition, afterlife and rein­
  7456	carnation (Brophy and Hameroff, 2023). Quite the claim, that.
  7457	Hameroff makes the striking statement that “consciousness came
       
  7458	before life.” Based on observations of extraterrestrial organic material,
  7459	in context of the Penrose-Hameroff quantum theory of consciousness,
  7460	Hameroff challenges the conventional wisdom that consciousness
  7461	evolved after life, posing that “consciousness may have been what made
  7462	evolution and life possible in the first place” (Hameroff et al., 2024).
  7463	For years, Penrose-Hameroff stood largely alone, defending their
  7464	quantum consciousness model against waves of scientific critics (Baars
  7465	and Edelman, 2012), some of whom largely dismissed the notion as
  7466	fanciful and fringy. Then, as quantum biology began emerging as a real
  7467	science with broad applications—with quantum mechanisms shown to
  7468	play essential roles in photosynthesis, vision, olfaction, mitochondria,
  7469	DNA mutations, magnetoreception, etc.—a larger community began
  7470	taking quantum consciousness more seriously.
  7471	Today, while Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR remains the most wellknown quantum theory of consciousness, with increasing interest,
  7472	there are other, diverse theories of how quantum processes are essential
  7473	in consciousness. Their numbers are growing.
  7474	11.2. Stapp’s collapsing the wave function via asking “questions”
  7475	Mathematical physicist Henry Stapp argues for the quantum nature
  7476	of consciousness by relying on a traditional interpretation of quantum
  7477	mechanics, where quantum wave functions collapse only when they
  7478	interact with consciousness in an act of measurement. He envisions a
  7479	“mind-like” wave-function collapse that exploits quantum effects in the
  7480	synapses between neurons, generating consciousness, which he believes
  7481	is fundamental to the universe (Stapp, 2011, 2023, 2007.)
  7482	Stapp founds his theory on the transition from the classical-physics
  7483	conception of reality to von Neumann’s application of the principles
  7484	of quantum physics to our conscious brains (Stapp, 2006; Von Neumann,
  7485	1955/1932). Von Neumann extended quantum theory to incorporate
  7486	the devices and the brain/body of the observers into physical theory,
  7487	leaving out only the stream of conscious experiences of the agents. Ac­
  7488	cording to von Neumann’s formulation, “the part of the physically
  7489	described system being directly acted upon by a psychologically
  7490	described ‘observer’ is the brain of that observer” (Stapp, 2011).
  7491	The quantum jump of the state of an observer’s brain to the ‘Yes’
  7492	basis state (vector) then becomes the representation, in the state of that
  7493	brain, of the conscious acquisition of the knowledge associated with that
  7494	answer ‘Yes,’ which constitutes the neural correlate of that person’s
  7495	conscious experience. This fixes the essential quantum link between
  7496	consciousness and neuroscience (Stapp, 2006).
  7497	To Stapp, this is the key point. “Quantum physics is built around
  7498	‘events’ that have both physical and phenomenal aspects. The events are
  7499	physical because they are represented in the physical/mathematical
  7500	description by a ‘quantum jump’ to one or another of the basis state
  7501	vectors defined by the agent/observer’s choice of what question to ask.
  7502	If the resulting event is such that the ‘Yes’ feedback experience occurs
  7503	then this event ‘collapses’ the prior physical state to a new physical state
  7504	compatible with that phenomenal experience” (Stapp, 2006).
  7505	Thus, in Stapp’s telling, mind and matter thereby become dynami­
  7506	cally linked in a way that is causally tied to an agent’s free choice of how
  7507	to act. “A causal dynamical connection is established between (1) a
  7508	person’s conscious choices of how to act, (2) that person’s consciously
  7509	experienced increments in knowledge, and (3) the physical actualiza­
  7510	tions of the neural correlates of the experienced increments in knowl­
  7511	edge” (Stapp, 2006).
  7512	More colloquially, Stapp argues that given the perspective of clas­
  7513	sical physics, where all is mechanical, where the physical universe is a
  7514	closed system, “there’s nothing for consciousness to do … and so it must
  7515	be some sort of an illusion.” Why would there have been consciousness
  7516	at all, he asks? Under classical physics, “consciousness is just sitting
  7517	there inert, a passive observer of the scene in which it has no function; it
  7518	does nothing. So, it’s a mystery why consciousness should ever come
  7519	into existence” (Stapp, 2007).
  7520	In stark contrast, Stapp says, the way quantum mechanics works, in
  7521	90
       
  7522	R.L. Kuhn
       
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  7524	function, then the wave function would be constantly collapsing and we
  7525	know that doesn’t happen because you get interference effects in double
  7526	slit experiments. So, I think these two ideas, panpsychism and con­
  7527	sciousness collapsing the wave function, should be pursued on separate
  7528	tracks (Wallace, 2016a; 2016b; 2016c.)
       
  7529	order to get consequences, predictions, there must be a question posed.
  7530	It’s like “20 questions,” yes-or-no questions. A question is posed in the
  7531	quantum mechanical scheme; then there is an evolution according to the
  7532	Schrodinger equation, and then nature gives an answer (which is sta­
  7533	tistically determined).
  7534	The axial idea, Stapp says, is that there is nothing in quantum me­
  7535	chanics that determines what decides the questions. This means that
  7536	there’s a gap, a critical causal gap in quantum mechanics. And the way
  7537	it’s filled in practice is that an observer, on the basis of reasons or mo­
  7538	tivations or with rules, sets up a certain experiment in a certain way. For
  7539	example, putting a Geiger counter or some other detector in the path of
  7540	particles.
  7541	This yields Stapp’s concept of quantum consciousness. Nobody de­
  7542	nies that thoughts exist, he says, but how do they do something? And
  7543	that’s the place where quantum consciousness has causal impact.
  7544	The crux of quantum mechanics is what questions are going to be
  7545	asked. There is nothing in classical physics that asks such questions. But
  7546	in quantum mechanics questions are answered by the psychological
  7547	process of the experimenter, who is interested in learning something.
  7548	And because there is nothing in the way quantum mechanics works that
  7549	explains the choice of the question, there is an opening for the injection
  7550	of mental events into the flow of physical events. The choice of the
  7551	question is not determined by the laws as we know them (Stapp, 2007).
  7552	This means we need another process, which is consciousness. And
  7553	this gives consciousness an actual role to play and allows it to do things
  7554	causally. And if consciousness can act causally and do things, Stapp says,
  7555	then classic materialism is out.
  7556	Niels Bohr had a famous quote: “one must never forget that in the
  7557	drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.” In the
  7558	classical worldview, Stapp says, “we were just spectators; always we
  7559	would just watch what’s happening but couldn’t do anything. In the
  7560	quantum mechanical worldview, we are actors. We are needed to make
  7561	the theory work.”
  7562	Moreover, Stapp says, “this mental process cannot just be the product
  7563	of the brain, because the brain, like all physical things, evolves via
  7564	quantum mechanical rules. While quantum mechanics describes the
  7565	evolution of potentialities for events to happen, that’s all they describe,
  7566	only potentialities—they do not describe what chooses the events that
  7567	are going to happen, the actual events. Something must ask the ques­
  7568	tions, something outside of quantum mechanics—quantum mechanics
  7569	forces that process.” The only candidate, Stapp says, must be the inde­
  7570	pendent existence of consciousness (Stapp, 2007).
  7571	Stapp’s conclusions are as bold as they are controversial. First, the
  7572	ontological foundations of consciousness and quantum mechanics are
  7573	inextricably linked. Second, classical materialism is defeated (Stapp,
  7574	2007).
  7575	Philosopher of physics David Wallace is sympathetic with the idea
  7576	that consciousness with respect to quantum physics has to be taken
  7577	somehow as fundamental and irreducible, but there are two different
  7578	ways that could go. “There’s the dualist way, where you have physics
  7579	and you have consciousness as two separate things, and there’s the
  7580	panpsychist idea, where consciousness underlies all of physics and is
  7581	present at the most fundamental level of every physical process. Those
  7582	are two different ideas” (Wallace, 2016a, 2016b).
  7583	When Wallace thinks about consciousness collapsing the wave
  7584	function, as in quantum mechanics, he says, “That’s the dualist half of
  7585	my head. You’ve got physics, you’ve got a wave function, and you’ve got
  7586	consciousness, which is observing the wave function. And somehow
  7587	consciousness is something distinct from the physical wave function and
  7588	every now and then affecting it in this interesting phenomenon of
  7589	collapse. In a way, it’s an updated version of Rene Descartes’s dualism:
  7590	there’s mind and then there’s body; they’re separate and they interact.”
  7591	Wallace says one could try to combine dualism and panpsychism
  7592	with respect to the relationship between consciousness and quantum
  7593	mechanics, “but I don’t think they’d combine all that well,” he said. “If
  7594	consciousness is everywhere and consciousness collapses the wave
       
  7595	11.3. Bohm’s implicate-explicate order
  7596	Quantum physicist David Bohm, colleague of Einstein, famously
  7597	introduced the idea of “implicate order” and “explicate order” as onto­
  7598	logical implications of quantum theory to explain two radically opposed
  7599	perspectives of the same phenomenon—something seems to be needed
  7600	to account for the bizarrely divergent ways of conceiving reality,
  7601	quantum and classical, both of which seemed undeniably correct.
  7602	Bohm is a big thinker, leveraging the counterintuitive concepts of
  7603	quantum mechanics to try to see reality as it really is. He envisions
  7604	matter and mind as intertwined. He worked with Karl Pribram to
  7605	develop “Holonomic Brain Theory” (9.4.5). He explored the essence of
  7606	thought with Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Of particular
  7607	import is what he calls “undivided wholeness,” meaning that the subject
  7608	actively participates with the object, rather than being a detached
  7609	observer. Bohm developed his “wholeness” as innately dynamic, alive,
  7610	and open-ended (Gomez-Marin, 2023a).
  7611	According to Bohm, everything is in a state of process or becoming
  7612	(folding and unfolding)—Bohm calls it the "universal flux". All is dy­
  7613	namic interconnected process. In the same manner, Bohm says,
  7614	“knowledge, too, is a process, an abstraction from the one total flux,
  7615	which latter is therefore the ground both of reality and of knowledge of
  7616	this reality” (Section: Bohm, 1980; Bohm, Wise Insights Forum, website).
  7617	Now, regarding “implicate order,” Bohm means “order which is
  7618	enfolded (the root meaning of ‘implicate’) and later unfolded or made
  7619	explicate.” Relating the enfolding-unfolding universe to consciousness,
  7620	Bohm contrasts mechanistic order with implicate order. In mechanistic
  7621	order, which is inherent to classical physics, “the principal feature of this
  7622	order is that the world is regarded as constituted of entities which are
  7623	outside of each other, in the sense that they exist independently in
  7624	different regions of space (and time) and interact through forces that do
  7625	not bring about any changes in their essential natures. The machine
  7626	gives a typical illustration of such a system of order …. By contrast, in a
  7627	living organism, for example, each part grows in the context of the
  7628	whole, so that it does not exist independently, nor can it be said that it
  7629	merely ‘interacts’ with the others, without itself being essentially
  7630	affected in this relationship” (Bohm, 1980; Bohm, n.d.).
  7631	Bohm contends, “the implicate order applies both to matter (living
  7632	and non-living) and to consciousness, and that it can therefore make
  7633	possible an understanding of the general relationship between these
  7634	two”—yet he recognizes “the very great difference in their basic quali­
  7635	ties.” Still, he believes that because both consciousness and matter are
  7636	extensions of the implicate order, a connection is possible.
  7637	To Bohm, the explicate order, which is “the order that we commonly
  7638	contact in common experience,” has room “for something like memory”,
  7639	with the fact that “memories are first enfolded and then unfolded during
  7640	recall” being consistent with Bohm’s concepts of implicate and explicate
  7641	order. “Everything emerges from and returns to the Whole” (Bohm, n.
  7642	d.).
  7643	Confirming his non-materialist status, Bohm proposes, “the more
  7644	comprehensive, deeper, and more inward actuality is neither mind nor
  7645	body but rather a yet higher-dimensional actuality, which is their
  7646	common ground and which is of a nature beyond both.” What we
  7647	experience consciously, Bohm offers, is a projection of a higherdimensional reality onto our lower-dimensional elements. “In the
  7648	higher-dimensional ground the implicate order prevails,” he says. “Thus,
  7649	within this ground, what is is movement which is represented in thought
  7650	as the co-presence of many phases of the implicate order …. We do not
  7651	say that mind and body causally affect each other, but rather that the
  7652	movements of both are the outcome of related projections of a common
  7653	91
       
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  7656	higher-dimensional ground” (Bohm, 1980; Bohm, n.d.).
       
  7657	about having ways to integrate what’s happening to make it somehow
  7658	coherent and to allow what we might see as ‘definite thoughts’ to be
  7659	formed about it.” Surprisingly, “rather than consciousness being some­
  7660	how beyond ‘generalized intelligence’ or general computational so­
  7661	phistication,” he instead sees consciousness “as a kind of ‘step down’—as
  7662	something associated with simplified descriptions of the universe based
  7663	on using only bounded amounts of computation.” In addition, “for our
  7664	particular version of consciousness, the idea of sequentialization seems
  7665	to be central” (Wolfram, 2021b).
  7666	Wolfram probes consciousness by asking, “Why can’t one human
  7667	consciousness ‘get inside’ another?” It’s not just a matter of separation in
  7668	physical space, he says, “It’s also that the different consciousnesses—in
  7669	particular by virtue of their different histories—are inevitably at
  7670	different locations in rulial space. In principle they could be brought
  7671	together; but this would require not just motion in physical space, but
  7672	also motion in rulial space” (Wolfram, 2021a).
  7673	Quantum mechanics is involved in Wolfram’s consciousness, but
  7674	with more than its usual putative mechanisms. Considering the foun­
  7675	dations of quantum mechanics in context of the ruliad—quantum me­
  7676	chanics emerges “as a result of trying to form a coherent perception of
  7677	the universe”—Wolfram offers a sharp epigram to describe conscious­
  7678	ness: “how branching brains perceive a branching universe” (Wolfram,
  7679	2021b).
  7680	To Wolfram, to grasp the core notion of consciousness goes beyond
  7681	explicating consciousness per se because it “is crucial to our whole way
  7682	of seeing and describing the universe—and at a very fundamental level
  7683	it’s what makes the universe seem to us to have the kinds of laws and
  7684	behavior it does.” The richness of what we see, he says, reflects
  7685	computational irreducibility, “but if we are to understand it we must
  7686	find computational reducibility in it.” This is how consciousness “might
  7687	fundamentally relate to the computational reducibility we need for
  7688	science, and might ultimately drive our actual scientific laws” (Wolfram,
  7689	2021a).
       
  7690	11.4. Pylkkänen’s quantum potential energy and active information
  7691	Philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen proposes a view in which “the mech­
  7692	anistic framework of classical physics and neuroscience is com­
  7693	plemented by a more holistic underlying framework in which conscious
  7694	experience finds its place more naturally” (Pylkkänen, 2007). Recog­
  7695	nizing that it is “very likely that some radically new ideas are required if
  7696	we are to make any progress” on the hard problem, he turns to quantum
  7697	theory “to understand the place of mind and conscious experience in
  7698	nature.” In particular, Pylkkänen and physicist Basil Hiley focus on the
  7699	ontological interpretation of quantum theory proposed by David Bohm
  7700	and Hiley (1993) and make “the radical proposal that quantum reality
  7701	includes a new type of potential energy which contains active infor­
  7702	mation. This proposal, if correct, constitutes a major change in our
  7703	notion of matter” (Hiley and Pylkkänen, 2022).
  7704	Pylkkänen and Hiley’s intuition is that the reason “it is not possible
  7705	to understand how and why physical processes can give rise to con­
  7706	sciousness is partly the result of our assuming that physical processes
  7707	(including neurophysiological processes) are always mechanical.”
  7708	However, they say, if “we are willing to change our view of physical
  7709	reality by allowing non-mechanical, organic and holistic concepts such
  7710	as active information to play a fundamental role,” this might make it
  7711	possible to understand the relationship between physical and mental
  7712	processes in a new way (Hiley and Pylkkänen, 2022). For example, the
  7713	human brain could operate in some ways like a “quantum measuring
  7714	apparatus” (Pylkkänen, 2022).
  7715	Philosophically, according to Pylkkänen, that the physical domain is
  7716	causally closed has left “no room for mental states qua mental to have a
  7717	causal influence upon the physical domain, leading to epiphenome­
  7718	nalism and the problem of mental causation.” One road to a possible
  7719	solution is called “causal antifundamentalism:” causal notions cannot
  7720	play a role in physics, because the fundamental laws of physics are
  7721	radically different from causal laws.” While “causal antifundamentalism seems to challenge the received view in physicalist
  7722	philosophy of mind and thus raises the possibility of there being genuine
  7723	mental causation after all,” Pylkkänen rejects it in favor of the onto­
  7724	logical interpretation of quantum theory imparting active information
  7725	(Pylkkänen, 2019).
       
  7726	11.6. Beck-Eccles’s quantum processes in the synapse
  7727	Sir John Eccles, Nobel laureate for his seminal work on the synapse,
  7728	the small space between neurons across which neurochemicals flow to
  7729	excite or inhibit contiguous neurons, was a pioneer in early efforts to
  7730	construct a “quantum neurobiological” theory of consciousness. In their
  7731	formulation, Beck and Eccles applied concrete quantum mechanical
  7732	features to describe how, in the cerebral cortex, incoming nerve im­
  7733	pulses cause the emission of transmitter molecules in presynaptic neu­
  7734	rons (i.e., exocytosis) via information transfer and “quantal selection”
  7735	with a direct relationship with consciousness (i.e., influenced by mental
  7736	actions) (Beck and Eccles, 1992).
  7737	Beck and Eccles propose that “the quantum state reduction, or se­
  7738	lection of amplitudes, offers a doorway for a new logic, the quantum
  7739	logic, with its unpredictability for a single event.” Because conscious
  7740	action (e.g., intention) is a dynamical process which forms temporal
  7741	patterns in relevant areas of the brain (cerebral cortex), they propose
  7742	how regulating the myriad synaptic switches between innumerable
  7743	neurons in those relevant areas can be regulated effectively by a quan­
  7744	tum trigger (based on an electron transfer process in the synaptic
  7745	membrane). Thus, they conclude, “conscious action is essentially related
  7746	to quantum state reduction” (Beck and Eccles, 1998).
  7747	Stapp supports the hypothesis that quantum effects are important in
  7748	brain dynamics in connection with cerebral exocytosis. Exocytosis is
  7749	instigated by a neuronal action potential pulse that triggers an influx of
  7750	calcium ions through ion channels into a nerve terminal, such that, due
  7751	to the very small diameter of the ion channel, the quantum wave packet
  7752	that describes the location of the ion spreads out to a size much larger
  7753	than the trigger site. This means that “one must retain both the possi­
  7754	bility that the ion activates the trigger, and exocytosis occurs, and also
  7755	the possibility that the ion misses the trigger site, and exocytosis does
  7756	not occur” (Stapp, 2006).
       
  7757	11.5. Wolfram’s consciousness in the ruliad
  7758	Physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram seeks “to
  7759	formalize issues about consciousness, and to turn questions about con­
  7760	sciousness into what amounts to concrete questions about mathematics,
  7761	computation, logic or whatever that can be formally and rigorously
  7762	explored” (Wolfram, 2021b). He begins by embedding consciousness in
  7763	what he calls the “ruliad” (neologism from “rules”), which he defines as
  7764	“the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible: the
  7765	result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways.”
  7766	The ruliad, he says, is “a kind of ultimate limit of all abstraction and
  7767	generalization,” encapsulating “not only all formal possibilities but also
  7768	everything about our physical universe” (Wolfram, 2021a). The ruliad is
  7769	crucial for formalizing the “rules” of consciousness, he argues, because
  7770	“everything we experience can be thought of as sampling that part of the
  7771	ruliad that corresponds to our particular way of perceiving and inter­
  7772	preting the universe” (Wolfram, 2021b).
  7773	Consciousness, Wolfram says, is not about the general computation
  7774	that brains can do. “It’s about the particular feature of our brains that
  7775	causes us to have a coherent thread of experience.” And this invokes the
  7776	ruliad, which “has deep consequences that far transcend the details of
  7777	brains or biology.” It defines (what we consider to be) the laws of physics
  7778	(Wolfram, 2021b).
  7779	While consciousness involves computational sophistication,
  7780	Wolfram says, “its essence is not so much about what can happen as
  7781	92
       
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  7783	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  7784	As Beck and Eccles hypothesize, “the mental intention (the volition)
  7785	becomes neurally effective by momentarily increasing the probability of
  7786	exocytosis in selected cortical areas” (Beck and Eccles, 1992). If so, this
  7787	fundamental indeterminism of the nature of each specific quantum state
  7788	collapse is said to open opportunity for mental powers to affect brain
  7789	states, with supposed implications for conscious intervention and even
  7790	for free will.
       
  7791	retrieved from them via the central nervous system as the “algorithm”
  7792	for translating local and non-local cellular physiologic memories into
  7793	thought (Torday, 2022a).
  7794	He claims that quantum entanglement is integral to our physiology,
  7795	and that it links our local consciousness with the non-local consciousness
  7796	of the cosmos, distinguishing causation from coincidence based on sci­
  7797	ence. Moreover, he posits that local physiologic memories are paired
  7798	with non-local memories that dwell in cosmic consciousness and that all
  7799	cellular memories are on a continuum of local and non-local properties,
  7800	and that under certain conditions we may be more locally or non-locally
  7801	conscious. He speculates that as we evolve, we move closer to the nonlocal by transcending the local. He maintains that we can take advantage
  7802	of certain experiences in order to attain a transcendent level of con­
  7803	sciousness: lucid dreaming, near-death experiences, out-of-body expe­
  7804	riences, Maslow peak experiences, runner’s high (Torday, 2022a).
  7805	Torday’s main point is that “the quantum” is native to our physiology
  7806	(Torday, 2022a, 2022b, 2023, 2024). Moreover, “since our physiology
  7807	derives from the Cosmos based on Symbiogenesis,” he hypothesizes that
  7808	“the cell behaves like a functional Mobius Strip, having no ‘inside or
  7809	outside’ cell membrane surface—it is continuous with the Cosmos, its
  7810	history being codified from Quantum Entanglement to Newtonian Me­
  7811	chanics,
  7812	affording
  7813	the
  7814	cell
  7815	consciousness
  7816	and
  7817	unconsciousness-subconsciousness as a continuum for the first time”
  7818	(Torday, 2024).
       
  7819	11.7. Kauffman’s mind mediating possibles to actuals
  7820	Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman posits the following: (i)
  7821	Quantum measurement converts Res potentia—ontologically real Pos­
  7822	sibles—into Res extensa - ontologically real Actuals. (ii) Brain/mind/
  7823	consciousness cannot be purely classical physics because no classical
  7824	system can be an analog computer whose dynamic behavior can be
  7825	isomorphic to “possible uses”, and therefore, brain/mind/consciousness
  7826	must be partly quantum. (iii) Res potentia and Res extensa suggest a role
  7827	for mind/consciousness in collapsing the wave function converting
  7828	Possibles to Actuals, because no physical cause can convert a Possible
  7829	into an Actual. (iv) Our brain/mind/consciousness entangles with the
  7830	world in a vast superposition and we collapse the wave function to a
  7831	single state which we experience as qualia, allowing “seeing” or
  7832	“perceiving” of X to accomplish Y (Kauffman, 2019, 2023; Kauffman and
  7833	Roli, 2022)37
  7834	As Kauffman and parapsychologist Dean Radin put it, “We propose a
  7835	non-substance dualism theory, following a suggestion by Heisenberg
  7836	(1958), whereby the world consists of both ontologically real Possibles
  7837	that do not obey Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle, and ontologi­
  7838	cally real Actuals, that do obey the law of the excluded middle.” Mea­
  7839	surement, they say, is what converts Possibles into Actuals” (Kauffman
  7840	and Radin, 2020).
  7841	The “culprit” at the root of the mind-body problem, according to
  7842	Kauffman and Radin, is the causal closure of classical physics. “We ask
  7843	mind to act causally on the brain and body, but in classical physics all of
  7844	the causes are already determined.” Because of this, they conclude, no
  7845	form of substance dualism can work while quantum mechanics as the
  7846	foundational mechanism of consciousness should be taken serious­
  7847	ly—which, they say, would lead to “the intriguing possibility that some
  7848	aspects of mind are nonlocal, and that mind plays an active role in the
  7849	physical world” (Kauffman and Radin, 2020). (9.)
       
  7850	11.9. Smolin’s causal theory of views
  7851	Physicist Lee Smolin approaches the question of how qualia fit into
  7852	the physical world in the context of his “relational and realist comple­
  7853	tion of quantum theory, called the causal theory of views” (Smolin, 2020).
  7854	Smolin has long focused on a “realist” double completion of quantum
  7855	mechanics and general relativity that would give a full description of, or
  7856	explanation for, all individual physical processes, independent of our
  7857	knowledge or interventions. Such a completion is required for unifying
  7858	gravity, spacetime, and cosmology into the rest of physics. His common
  7859	theme has been that of a relational “hidden variables” theory: a realist
  7860	description of precisely what goes on in each individual event or process,
  7861	which reduces to quantum mechanics in a certain limit and averaging
  7862	procedure.
  7863	In Smolin’s theory, the first key idea is that “the universe is con­
  7864	structed from nothing but a collection of views of events, where the view
  7865	of an event is what can be known about that event’s place in the universe
  7866	from what can be seen from that event.” In other words, “the beables of
  7867	this theory [‘beable’ is short for ‘maybe-able,’ i.e., anything that could
  7868	possibly be, in any superimposed quantum states] are views from events,
  7869	the information available at each event from its causal past, such as its
  7870	causal predecessors and the energy and momentum they transfer to the
  7871	event." Smolin calls this the “view” of an event—that is, “a causal uni­
  7872	verse that is composed of a set of partial views of itself.” Within such an
  7873	ontology of views, Smolin says it’s “natural to propose that instances or
  7874	moments of conscious experience are aspects of some views. That is, an
  7875	elementary unit of consciousness is not a single qualia, but the entire of a
  7876	partial view of the universe, as seen from one event” (Smolin, 2020.)
  7877	Smolin’s second key idea restricts the views that are associated with
  7878	consciousness to within a very small set. Most events and their views are
  7879	common and routine, he says, in that they have many near copies in the
  7880	universe within their causal pasts. He proposes that these common and
  7881	routine views have no conscious perceptions. Then, “there are a few,
  7882	very rare views which are unprecedented, which are having their first
  7883	instance, or are unique, in that they have no copies in universal history.”
  7884	Smolin proposes it is “those few views of events, which are unprece­
  7885	dented, and/or unique, and are hence novel, [i.e., they are not dupli­
  7886	cates of the view of any event in the event’s own causal past] which are
  7887	the physical correlates of conscious perceptions.”
  7888	This addresses, he says, “the problem of why consciousness always
  7889	involves awareness of a bundled grouping of qualia that define a
       
  7890	11.8. Torday’s cellular and cosmic consciousness
  7891	Developmental physiologist John Torday offers an original cellularbased explanation of consciousness that embeds quantum mechanics
  7892	(Torday, 2022a, 2022b, 2023, 2024). He describes consciousness as a
  7893	two-tiered-system, derivative from physiology, having been “con­
  7894	structed” from the environment via factors in the environment that have
  7895	been assimilated via symbiogenesis and integrated as cell physi­
  7896	ology—the cell semi-permeable membrane being the first tier, and the
  7897	compartmentation and integration of cell physiologic data as cell-cell
  7898	communication as the second tier. Basing his model on both classical
  7899	Newtonian and quantum mechanical principles, he proposes that con­
  7900	sciousness is stored within and between our cells based on control
  7901	mechanisms, referencing the “First Principles of Physiology", that is,
  7902	negative entropy, chemiosmosis and homeostasis, and consciousness is
  7903	37
       
  7904	Kauffman says this new way of thinking about the mind-body problem
  7905	differs from those of Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley, and materialism. Res
  7906	potentia and Res extensa are not substance dualism because “potentia” are not
  7907	substances. But Res potentia and Res extensa are not Spinozian monism, a
  7908	single substance with mental and physical properties. Nor are they Idealism,
  7909	which has no Res extensa. Nor are they materialism, which has no Res potentia.
  7910	Kauffman says he bases his way of thinking, in part, on Werner Heisenberg’s
  7911	ontological interpretation of the quantum state as “potentia.”
  7912	93
       
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  7914	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  7915	momentary self. This gives a restricted form of panpsychism defined by a
  7916	physically based selection principle which selects which views have
  7917	experiential aspects.”
  7918	To summarize, Smolin bases his theory on two concepts: First, the
  7919	beables of a relational theory to be the views of events. Second, the
  7920	possibility of making a physical distinction between common and
  7921	routine states, on the one hand, and novel and unique states, on the
  7922	other. “A relational theory that incorporates both ideas offers a possible
  7923	setting for bringing qualia and consciousness into physics. The physical
  7924	correlates of consciousness would be the novel or unique views of
  7925	events” (Smolin, 2020.)
       
  7926	“mental space.” He says, “Just as there’s a physical world that reconciles
  7927	innumerable observations of the physical world, there is this ‘mental
  7928	space’ that allows connections between different minds and between
  7929	minds and the physical world—because, remember, the physical world
  7930	is also part of this bigger space.”
  7931	Carr offers another category of explanations for psi which involves
  7932	quantum theory, where entanglement can connect spatially separated
  7933	objects and events. “Maybe we’re all entangled in some weird quantum
  7934	mechanical way. Now, that’s probably the view which is currently the
  7935	most popular among parapsychologists.” However, that’s not Carr’s own
  7936	view. “As noted, my own favorite view is that there is this bigger space,
  7937	this mental space, that in some sense links minds and perhaps matter as
  7938	well.”
  7939	Carr discerns the relationship between quantum theory and this
  7940	mental space. “If you want consciousness to come into physics, quantum
  7941	theory is going to play a role. All I’m saying is I don’t think that quantum
  7942	theory alone can explain all the phenomena. You need some form of
  7943	mental space to accommodate these psi or paranormal phenomena (if
  7944	you believe in these phenomena, of course, which most of my colleagues
  7945	do not).” Carr stresses, rightly I think, that psi or paranormal phenomena
  7946	are worth taking seriously (17), because even with a minimalist view
  7947	that the probability of these phenomena being real is small, their sig­
  7948	nificance for a final theory of physics would be huge” (Carr, 2016d).
       
  7949	11.10. Carr’s quantum theory, psi, mental space
  7950	Mathematician-astronomer Bernard Carr speculates that “mental
  7951	space,” an unknown aspect of reality, may be the ultimate foundation of
  7952	consciousness. “Even if you believe that consciousness collapses the
  7953	wave function,” he says, “that doesn’t really accommodate conscious­
  7954	ness within physics. It’s saying that quantum theory is weird and
  7955	therefore maybe it can explain consciousness, which is also weird—but
  7956	that is illogical because it’s just explaining one mystery in terms of
  7957	another. We need to get consciousness into physics in a more funda­
  7958	mental way” (Carr, 2016a).
  7959	Carr notes that most physicists take the view that “consciousness is
  7960	just an epiphenomenon produced by the brain, independent of physics,
  7961	and that as physicists they don’t have to confront the problem of con­
  7962	sciousness because, after all, physics has a third-person perspective,
  7963	objects in the outside world, whereas consciousness has a first-person
  7964	perspective. In other words, clearly brains exist and brains are phys­
  7965	ical systems, but consciousness is simply beyond the domain of physics.
  7966	The real issue is how can physics ever accommodate that first-person
  7967	perspective?” (Carr, 2016b).
  7968	Carr considers the radical view that “consciousness actually is more
  7969	fundamental, that the brain’s role is to limit your experience. So, when
  7970	you see the world through your eyes and hear it through your ears, the
  7971	brain is limiting your experience—which, on the face of it, might seem a
  7972	completely bizarre thing to say, but that, at least, is an alternative view,
  7973	that consciousness is not actually generated by the brain, but merely
  7974	encounters the world through the brain” (Carr, 2016c).
  7975	“The only way I can see this,” Carr poses, is a state of affairs “where
  7976	consciousness is primary, a fundamental aspect of reality. In other
  7977	words, consciousness is not just generated as a result, as the endpoint, of
  7978	physical processes. In some sense, it’s there from the beginning” (Carr,
  7979	2016c).
  7980	As to the relationship between consciousness and mathematics, Carr
  7981	sees them “on a par because I feel that the final picture of the world must
  7982	marry matter and mind. They come together. Which is primary? I’m not
  7983	sure the question even makes sense, because I prefer a picture in which
  7984	matter and mind co-exist right from the beginning.” Carr is careful to
  7985	clarify what he means by “mind.” He says, “When I use the word ‘mind’
  7986	in this context, I’m using ‘Mind’ with an upper-case ‘M’, rather than
  7987	mind with a lower-case ‘m’, which is generated by the brain. ‘Mind’ with
  7988	a big ‘M’ is like consciousness with a big ‘C’” (Carr, 2016c).
  7989	In forming his theory, Carr sees support from psi or the paranormal.
  7990	While he recognizes that psi “encompasses a multitude of sins,” there are
  7991	some aspects, such as telepathy and clairvoyance, which he takes seri­
  7992	ously, whereas other aspects, such as precognition and psychokinesis,
  7993	less so. Still, he regards even these psi phenomena as possible because of
  7994	potential deep interactions between consciousness and physics. Thus,
  7995	psi is another reason why, he says, “We need a theory of physics that
  7996	accommodates consciousness.” (Carr stresses that he gives no credence
  7997	to many aspects of psi or the paranormal.) (Carr, 2016d).
  7998	Carr’s “favorite view,” he says, is that “the way to explain this link
  7999	between minds, and indeed between minds and the physical world, is to
  8000	say that there is in some sense a ‘bigger space’ and this bigger space in
  8001	some sense links your mind and my mind.” He labels this bigger space
       
  8002	11.11. Faggin’s quantum information-based panpsychism
  8003	Physicist/inventor Federico Faggin postulates “with high confi­
  8004	dence” that “consciousness and free will are properties of quantum
  8005	systems in pure quantum states” because they depend on quantum
  8006	entanglement, a nonlocal property that cannot exist in any classical,
  8007	deterministic universe (Faggin, 2023). The kind of information involved
  8008	in consciousness needs to be quantum for multiple reasons, he says,
  8009	“including its intrinsic privacy and its power of building up thoughts by
  8010	entangling qualia states.” As a result, Faggin comes to a “quantu­
  8011	m-information-based panpsychism” (QIP) (D’Ariano and Faggin, 2022).
  8012	The essence of QIP is that “a quantum system that is in a pure
  8013	quantum state is conscious of its own state, that is, it has a qualia
  8014	experience of its state.” Faggin calls this “a highly plausible postulate”
  8015	because “a qualia experience is definite (integrated, not made of a
  8016	mixture of separable parts) and private since it can only be known by the
  8017	experiencer.”
  8018	More formally, the theory says that a quantum state is an effective
  8019	mathematical representation of a conscious experience because it pos­
  8020	sesses the same crucial characteristics of what it represents: the defi­
  8021	niteness and privacy of the experience. “Within QIP, quantum
  8022	information describes the subjective inner reality of quantum systems, a
  8023	reality that is private for each system” (Faggin, 2023).
  8024	But this mathematical description of an experience (a vector in Hil­
  8025	bert space), Faggin stresses, is not the experience itself. Quantum in­
  8026	formation is non-cloneable and thus can be only partially objectified
  8027	with classical information. Moreover, “the nature of that private
  8028	knowing is not numeric but qualitative and subjective, because a
  8029	conscious system ‘knows’ its own state by feeling it through qualia.”
  8030	Faggin says his hypothesis has creative possibilities, which are the
  8031	foundation of imagination, intuition, vision, creativity, comprehension,
  8032	and inventiveness, emerging “from the quantum level of reality, since a
  8033	classical world is deterministic, that is, algorithmic and predictable, and
  8034	thus incapable of real creativity.” True creativity, Faggin says, like free
  8035	will and consciousness, “are non-algorithmic properties that can only
  8036	exist in a fundamental layer of the universe ruled by quantum physics.”
  8037	Because quantum consciousness is not reproducible, Faggin predicts that
  8038	no machine can ever have it or create it (it is not reducible to mecha­
  8039	nisms) and, he says, it could continue to exist after the death of the body
  8040	(Faggin, 2023).
       
  8041	94
       
  8042	R.L. Kuhn
       
  8043	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  8044	11.12. Fisher’s quantum cognition
       
  8045	objects under quantum description at microscopic, mesoscopic and
  8046	macroscopic scales.” Globus claims his “unconventional formulation
  8047	revives a version of monadology via quantum brain theory” (Globus,
  8048	2022).
  8049	Globus decries how “philosophers have said some rather naive things
  8050	by ignoring the extraordinary advances in the neurosciences in the 20th
  8051	century. The skull is not filled with green cheese!” On the other hand, he
  8052	criticizes “the arrogance of many scientists toward philosophy and their
  8053	faith in the scientific method,” which he calls “equally naïve,” asserting
  8054	that “scientists clearly have much to learn from philosophy as an intel­
  8055	lectual discipline” (Globus, 2012).
       
  8056	Condensed matter physicist Matthew Fisher proposes that quantum
  8057	processing with nuclear spins might be operative in the brain and key to
  8058	its functioning. He identifies “phosphorus as the unique biological
  8059	element with a nuclear spin that can serve as a qubit for such putative
  8060	quantum processing—a neural qubit—while the phosphate ion is the
  8061	only possible qubit-transporter.” He suggests the “Posner molecule”
  8062	(calcium phosphate clusters, Ca9(PO4)6) as “the unique molecule that
  8063	can protect the neural qubits on very long times and thereby serve as a
  8064	(working) quantum-memory” (Fisher, 2015).
  8065	To be functionally relevant in the brain, he says, “the dynamics and
  8066	quantum entanglement of the phosphorus nuclear spins must be capable
  8067	of modulating the excitability and signaling of neurons”—which he
  8068	takes as a working definition of “quantum cognition”. Phosphate uptake
  8069	by neurons, he says, might provide the critical link.
  8070	Because quantum processing requires quantum entanglement, Fisher
  8071	argues that “the enzyme catalyzed chemical reaction which breaks a
  8072	pyrophosphate ion into two phosphate ions can quantum entangle pairs
  8073	of qubits,” and that “Posner molecules, formed by binding such phos­
  8074	phate pairs with extracellular calcium ions, will inherit the nuclear spin
  8075	entanglement.” Continuing the explanatory sequence, Fisher says
  8076	“Quantum measurements can occur when a pair of Posner molecules
  8077	chemically bind and subsequently melt, releasing a shower of intracellular calcium ions that can trigger further neurotransmitter release
  8078	and enhance the probability of post-synaptic neuron firing. Multiple
  8079	entangled Posner molecules, triggering non-local quantum correlations
  8080	of neuron firing rates, would provide the key mechanism for neural
  8081	quantum processing” (Fisher, 2015).
  8082	The possible centrality of quantum processing in the brain is sup­
  8083	ported by the emerging field of quantum biology. It can be called,
  8084	“quantum neuroscience” (Ouellette, 2016). Fisher’s proposal, even if
  8085	incorrect in its specifics, is useful in identifying the kinds of processes
  8086	and sequences of explanatory steps required if quantum processing is to
  8087	be fundamental for brain function in general and for consciousness in
  8088	particular.
       
  8089	11.14. Poznanski’s dynamic organicity theory
  8090	Neuroscientist Roman Poznanski proposes a Dynamic Organicity
  8091	Theory (DOT) of consciousness, a quantum biological theory based on a
  8092	multiscale interpretation of type-B materialism.38 DOT utilizes a mul­
  8093	tiscalar temporal-topological framework to include quantum biological
  8094	effects in the sense of what happens to macroscopic systems upon
  8095	interaction with quantum potential energy that exists when a living
  8096	negentropic39 state of the brain imposes thermodynamic constraints
  8097	(Section: Poznanski, 2024).
  8098	DOT does not deal with quantum consciousness or assume quantum
  8099	brain dynamics. However, according to Poznanski, a Schrödinger-like
  8100	equation describes the quantum effects within the multiscale
  8101	complexity, where multiscale complexity is both functional and struc­
  8102	tural through changeable boundary conditions (resulting in the topology
  8103	being a holarchical modularity). This is made possible by treating time
  8104	consciousness, i.e., “consciousness-in-the-moment,” on a nonlinear
  8105	temporal scale and implicitly grounding space to the contingency of
  8106	changing boundary conditions. The approach is based on the dynamics of
  8107	functional relations (not to be confused with functionalist or relational
  8108	theories of consciousness). It is a nonspatial topological framework (not
  8109	the mathematical study of “space” in a general sense of topological
  8110	spaces) associated with the temporal aspect of the functionality. Here,
  8111	functionality refers to the biological realization of the physical as those
  8112	features of usefulness that exist subjectively. Therefore, Poznanski says,
  8113	it rules out functionalism and focuses on the qualitativeness of brain
  8114	functioning. As noted, the approach is type-B materialism (Chalmers,
  8115	2003), where consciousness is a physical process, but epistemic objec­
  8116	tivism alone does not define physicalism (Shand, 2021). This means that
  8117	functionality as the quality of usefulness only refers to physical prop­
  8118	erties assessed subjectively, which can be possible only through quan­
  8119	tum biological effects.
  8120	Moreover, the functional capability of the negentropic state chang­
  8121	ing over time must satisfy the following necessary condition for con­
  8122	sciousness to arise: the functionality of multiscale complexity must
  8123	exceed the functionality of maximum complexity, i.e., FMultiComplexity >
  8124	FMaxComplexity. This means that consciousness arises when the function­
  8125	ality of multiscale complexity reaches above the functionality of
  8126	maximum complexity. This required increase in functionality of multi­
  8127	scale complexity is derived from an additional degree of freedom made
  8128	possible by quantum biology40 beyond that of the functionality of
  8129	maximum complexity as derived from brain structure, dynamics, and
  8130	function. FMaxComplexity is an insufficient measure of consciousness.
  8131	FMultiComplexity provides an epistemically subjective approach to dynamic
  8132	organicity, including self-referential dynamic pathways that give an
       
  8133	11.13. Globus’s quantum thermofield brain dynamics
  8134	Psychiatrist-philosopher Gordon Globus seeks to link two seemingly
  8135	independent discourses: An application of quantum field theory to brain
  8136	functioning, which he calls “quantum brain dynamics,” and the conti­
  8137	nental postphenomenological tradition, especially the work of Martin
  8138	Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Underlying both, he says, “is a new
  8139	ontology of non-Cartesian dual modes whose rich provenance is their
  8140	between" (Globus 2003).
  8141	The key issue, in Globus’s telling, is that of primary “closure”—the
  8142	nonphenomenality of quantum physical reality—and the action that
  8143	brings “dis-closure.” Dis-closure of the phenomenal world, he argues,
  8144	“can be understood within the framework of dissipative quantum ther­
  8145	mofield brain dynamics without any reference to consciousness”
  8146	(Globus, 2011). He posits to “deconstruct” the field of consciousness
  8147	studies by combining “two persistently controversial areas: the hard
  8148	problem of qualia and the measurement problem in quantum physics ….
  8149	within the framework of dissipative quantum thermofield brain dy­
  8150	namics: disclosure.” His claim is that “the problematics of conscious­
  8151	ness/brain, qualia, and measurement in quantum physics are resolved
  8152	by substituting disclosure for perceptual consciousness and dis­
  8153	tinguishing the phenomenal brain-p from the macroscopic quantum
  8154	object brain-q” (Globus, 2013).
  8155	Metaphysically, Globus conceives the world as a “continual creation”
  8156	on the part of each quantum thermofield brain in parallel, which is
  8157	“triply tuned”: by sensory input, memory and self-tuning. Such a brain,
  8158	he says, “does not primarily process information—does not compu­
  8159	te—but through its multiple tunability achieves an internal match in
  8160	which a world is disclosed, even though there is no world out there, only
       
  8161	38
  8162	A type-B materialist “accepts that there is an unclosable epistemic gap, but
  8163	denies that there is an ontological gap” (Chalmers, 2003).
  8164	39
  8165	“Negentropy” is a reduction in entropy and a corresponding increase in
  8166	order.
  8167	40
  8168	Quantum biology does not imply that quantum mechanics applies here. It is
  8169	a classical-to-quantum analog approach, based on wave mechanics, that is
  8170	sufficient to illustrate the process.
       
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  8174	extra quality of energy-negentropy exchange for path selection as real­
  8175	ization relations. FMultiComplexity is not a step-function but a gradual
  8176	ascendance to plateaus accounting for different degrees of conscious­
  8177	ness. (Whether this condition is sufficient is beyond DOT to decipher;
  8178	something with an equivalent topology could cause consciousness in
  8179	other systems.) (Poznanski, 2024).
  8180	Poznanski states that “the act of understanding uncertainty is the
  8181	main qualifier of consciousness” and “the ’act’ connotes the experi­
  8182	enceable form, which is, in essence, a precursor of the experience of
  8183	acting.” The process entails the potential for understanding “meaning”
  8184	through self-referential dynamical pathways “instead of recognizing (cf.
  8185	introspection) sensory information through perceptual channels, form­
  8186	ing the basis of understanding uncertainty without relying on memory
  8187	recall.” It is not, he says, “coming into existence” because “quantumthermal fluctuations are irreducible, yet the process as a whole comes ‘to
  8188	exist’ perhaps not instantaneously but appears spontaneously. Its output
  8189	is intentionality as an instruction to act in path selection.”
  8190	The self-reference principle, which Poznanski says can replace
  8191	emergence and self-organization when dealing with functionality rather
  8192	than structure, “establishes dynamical pathways from the microscale to
  8193	the macroscale (this includes nonlocal pathways), in which diachronic
  8194	causation and how the disunity of causal order in the redundancy creates
  8195	a weak unity of consciousness through its temporal structure,” the
  8196	inferred purpose giving rise to “a sense of self.”
  8197	Poznanski avoids discussing phenomenological properties of con­
  8198	sciousness, such as qualia, because, he says, they do “not apply to
  8199	conscious reality when considered in the context of functional-structural
  8200	realism, an offshoot of structuralism, without relying on introspection.”
  8201	Phenomenological consciousness, he says, “appears like a black box of
  8202	‘being’ instead of ‘doing.’” However, functional interactions that entail
  8203	self-referential dynamics “are uniquely fathomed and, hence, not
  8204	phenomenally equivalent in other functional systems.”
  8205	Thus, Poznanski concludes, “a living negentropic state that supports
  8206	biological function is a dynamic state of being organic representing an
  8207	additional degree of freedom for intrinsic information to be structured,
  8208	which makes it possible for a dynamic organicity theory of conscious­
  8209	ness to take shape in the material brain” (Poznanski, 2024).
       
  8210	sensations, images, and feelings emerge and then dissolve back into, just
  8211	as subatomic particles do in the quantum field. Mental experiences and
  8212	quanta are transient, shaped by uncertainty, and are, in essence, ener­
  8213	getic fluctuations within the consciousness field.” Chopra points to the
  8214	infinite nature of the quantum and the consciousness fields, and to the
  8215	essential entanglement within each, such that local realism—i.e., the
  8216	world of isolated physical objects and mental thoughts—is “out the
  8217	window” for both physical and mental phenomena. This entanglement,
  8218	he says, “suggests that physical objects are intertwined with perception
  8219	and consciousness, blurring the boundaries between the observer and
  8220	the observed.” Chopra proposes “a drastic paradigm shift” in which
  8221	“consciousness comes first, being the field that is the origin of creation,
  8222	acting in concert with the quantum field” (Chopra, 2023a,b).
  8223	Philosopher Emmanuel Ransford proposes “quantum panpsychism”
  8224	where matter is richer “with an extra content or dimension”—he calls it
  8225	“holomatter,” composed of “holoparticles”—and consciousness is “a
  8226	nonmaterial content of the world.” It assumes two types of causality:
  8227	“out-causation,” causation from outside, out of reach and deterministic;
  8228	and “in-causation,” causation from within, unpredictable and “self-wil­
  8229	led,” a kind of randomness. Holoparticles, Ransford offers, also have two
  8230	parts: one obvious, deterministic and out-causal; the other hidden,
  8231	random-looking and in-causal. This hints, he says, that “the randomness
  8232	of some quantum events is a smoking-gun evidence of in-causation.” He
  8233	adds the “im-im hypothesis,” where “im-im” stands for immaterial and
  8234	immanent, and his claimed insight is that the brain is a catalyst of the
  8235	mind. “It is a biological ‘lamp’ of sorts that pours out untold sparks of
  8236	consciousness instead of untold sparks of light (or photons) in the case of
  8237	ordinary lamps.” Indeed, the brain spawning large flows of active and
  8238	entangled in-causal holoparticles within the im-im framework would
  8239	underpin ordinary consciousness—holoparticles linking quantum and
  8240	consciousness. This is why “consciousness, albeit immaterial, needs a
  8241	physical structure to ‘catalyze’ it into being” (Ransford, 2023).
  8242	Theoretical engineer Edward Kamen proposes that “the human soul
  8243	is a type of quantum field,” which interacts with only certain fields in the
  8244	physical universe, and not directly with matter. The claim is made that
  8245	“fields that interact with the soul field include electromagnetic waves,”
  8246	citing as evidence “near-death experiences where events that could not
  8247	have been seen through the eyes of the individual are verified.”
  8248	Extending the theory, Kamen speculates that because “electric fields and
  8249	electromagnetic fields have the same quanta consisting of photons,
  8250	electric fields may also interact with the soul field.” This could result in
  8251	the transfer of information, he says, from working memory to the soul
  8252	through electric fields produced by neural ensembles in the human
  8253	brain. Further, the soul field may also affect neurons on the molecular
  8254	level, perhaps via electric fields and cytoelectric coupling (Kamen and
  8255	Kamen, 2023).
  8256	Quantum consciousness: a growth market.
       
  8257	11.15. Quantum consciousness extensions
  8258	The following theories of consciousness are not quantum theories per
  8259	se in that they do not have quantum mechanics as the essence or
  8260	generator of consciousness. Rather, each reflects how quantum me­
  8261	chanics could facilitate or interact with other theories of consciousness.
  8262	All are highly speculative.
  8263	Computer scientist Terry Bollinger enjoys speculating about possible
  8264	mechanisms of quantum consciousness; these include, non-linear soliton
  8265	Schrödinger wave models in sensory neural networks; neural dendrites
  8266	as antennas for wave collapses; how warm brains might actively main­
  8267	tain and manipulate quantum wave functions; and how “quasiparticles”
  8268	might enable quantum consciousness by quantizing classical data
  8269	transfers between neurons (Bollinger, 2023).
  8270	Complexity theorist Sudip Patra posits that mathematical tools used
  8271	in quantum science (information theory included) can be also used to
  8272	describe cognition; for example, Hilbert space modeling of cognitive
  8273	states might provide better descriptions of different features like con­
  8274	textuality in decision making, or even exploring ‘entanglement-like’
  8275	features of mental states (Patra, 2023; Rooney and Patra, 2022). Though
  8276	Patra is agnostic about any underlying physics of consciousness, he
  8277	works with Kauffman (11.7) to construct a non-local theory of con­
  8278	sciousness outside the constraints of physical space-time.
  8279	New-age physician-author Deepak Chopra explains “the intricate
  8280	relationship between consciousness and the quantum field” by applying
  8281	the same word “field” to both. Consciousness isn’t individual, he says.
  8282	“Instead, it is a vast field that individuals share in. This field encom­
  8283	passes myriad possibilities. It is the source from which thoughts,
       
  8284	11.16. Rovelli’s relational physics
  8285	Physicist Carlo Rovelli focuses on “the profoundly relational aspect
  8286	of physics, manifest in general relativity, but especially in quantum
  8287	mechanics.” 20th century physics, he says, “is not about how individual
  8288	entities are by themselves. It is about how entities manifest themselves
  8289	to one another. It is about relations.” This vindicates, he offers, “a very
  8290	mild form of panpsychism,” but “this same fact may undermine some of
  8291	the motivations for more marked forms of panpsychism” (Rovelli,
  8292	2021).
  8293	“Although there is nothing specifically psychic or mental in the
  8294	relational properties of a system with respect to another system,” Rovelli
  8295	says “there is definitely something in common with panpsychism,
  8296	because the world is not described from the outside: it is always
  8297	described relative to a physical system. So, physical reality is, in our
  8298	current physics, perspectival reality” (Dorato, 2016).
  8299	Rovelli takes a deflationary view of the hard problem: “If our basic
  8300	understanding of the physical world is in terms of more or less complex
  8301	96
       
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  8304	systems that interact with one another and affect one another, the
  8305	discrepancy between the mental and the physical seems much less
  8306	dramatic.” He concludes, “It is a world where physical systems—simple
  8307	and complex—manifest themselves to other systems—single and com­
  8308	plex—in a way that our physics describes. I see no reason to believe that
  8309	this should not be sufficient to account for stones, thunderstorms, and
  8310	thoughts” (Dorato, 2016).
  8311	According to George Musser, one way to argue that relationalism
  8312	could solve the hard problem is, first, to recognize that “third-person
  8313	physics isn’t up to the task of explaining first-person experience and,
  8314	specifically, its qualitative aspect (qualia).” Then, Rovelli’s approach is
  8315	to say that “physics is not, in fact, third-person; it is specific to each of us,
  8316	just as each of us has our own private stream of consciousness.” Thus,
  8317	“the two sides are not so mismatched after all.” However, Musser adds,
  8318	“although physics may well be relational, subjective experience doesn’t
  8319	seem to be” (Musser, 2023a,b).
       
  8320	experiences. Just think of all the frames of all the movies you’ve ever
  8321	seen or movies that will ever be made until the end of time. Each one is a
  8322	unique visual experience and you can couple that with all the unique
  8323	auditory experiences, pain experiences, etc. All possible conscious ex­
  8324	periences are a gigantic number. Second, at the same time, each expe­
  8325	rience is integrated—what philosophers refer to as unitary. Whatever I
  8326	am conscious of, I am conscious of as a whole. I apprehend as a whole.
  8327	So, the idea is to take these two axioms seriously and to cast them into an
  8328	information theory framework. Why information theory? Because in­
  8329	formation theory deals with different states and their interrelationships.
  8330	We don’t think the stuff the brain is made out of is really what’s critical
  8331	about consciousness. It’s the interrelationship that’s critical” (Koch,
  8332	2012b).
  8333	IIT starts from phenomenology itself—a point that Tononi stresses
  8334	cannot be overstressed—with axioms that are deemed to be unequivo­
  8335	cally and universally true for all instances of consciousness, such that
  8336	whatever systems manifest these axioms will ipso facto manifest
  8337	consciousness.
  8338	It is at this point that IIT seeks a mathematical expression of the
  8339	fundamental properties of experience. It is not the reverse: IIT does not
  8340	start from mathematics hoping to explain phenomenology; rather it
  8341	starts with phenomenology and ends with mathematics (Tononi,
  8342	2014a). Because IIT’s consciousness is a purely information-theoretic
  8343	property of systems, not limited to brains or even to biology, Tononi
  8344	constructs a mathematical function φ (phi) to measure a system’s
  8345	informational integration, with levels of φ covarying with degrees of
  8346	consciousness (Van Gulick, 2019).
  8347	In IIT, each experience, each conscious percept, has clear charac­
  8348	teristics: it is specific: it is what it is by how it differs from alternative
  8349	experiences; it is unified: irreducible to noninterdependent components;
  8350	it is unique: it has its own one-off borders and a particular spatiotemporal grain (Oizumi et al., 2014; Haun and Tononi, 2019).
  8351	These pillar concepts, all grounded in experience, are expressed by
  8352	five phenomenological axioms: intrinsic existence, composition, infor­
  8353	mation, integration and exclusion. These axioms are then formalized
  8354	into postulates that prescribe how physical mechanisms, such as neurons
  8355	or logic gates, must be configured to generate experience (phenome­
  8356	nology). The postulates are used to define integrated information as
  8357	information specified by a whole that cannot be reduced to that speci­
  8358	fied by its parts (Tononi and Koch, 2015).
  8359	Each of IIT’s five postulates defines and constrains the properties
  8360	required of physical mechanisms to support consciousness (Tononi and
  8361	Koch, 2015).
       
  8362	12. Integrated information theory
  8363	Integrated Information Theory (IIT), developed by neuroscientist
  8364	Giulio Tononi and supported by neuroscientist Christof Koch, is an
  8365	original, indeed radical model that states what experience is and what
  8366	types of physical systems can have it (Tononi and Koch, 2015). IIT is
  8367	grounded in experience, the phenomenology of consciousness, and it
  8368	features mathematical description, quantitative measurement, scientific
  8369	testability, broad applications, and nonpareil, intrinsic, cause-effect
  8370	“structures.” In other words, “IIT addresses the problem of conscious­
  8371	ness starting from phenomenology—the existence of my own experi­
  8372	ence, which is immediate and indubitable—rather than from the
  8373	behavioral, functional, or neural correlates of experience” (Tononi et al.,
  8374	2022). Controversial to be sure, IIT has become a leading theory of
  8375	consciousness.41
  8376	IIT accounts for consciousness in the following way. First, intro­
  8377	spection and reason identify the essential properties of conscious­
  8378	ness—the axioms of phenomenal existence. Then, each axiom is
  8379	accounted for terms of cause–effect power; that is, “translating” a
  8380	“phenomenal property into an essential property of the physical sub­
  8381	strate of consciousness” [PSC]—yielding the postulates of physical ex­
  8382	istence. In this way, IIT claims to “obtain a set of criteria that a physical
  8383	substrate of consciousness (say, a set of cortical neurons) must satisfy”
  8384	(Tononi et al., 2022).
  8385	IIT asserts that distinct conscious experiences are in a literal sense
  8386	distinct kinds of conceptual structures in a radical and heretofore un­
  8387	known kind of “qualia space.” IIT says (and introduced the idea) that for
  8388	every conscious experience, there is a corresponding mathematical ob­
  8389	ject such that the mathematical features of that object are isomorphic to
  8390	the properties of the experience.
  8391	“Integrated information theory means that you need a very special
  8392	kind of mechanism organized in a special kind of way to experience
  8393	consciousness,” Tononi says. “A conscious experience is a maximally
  8394	reduced conceptual structure in a space called ‘qualia space.’ Think of it
  8395	as a shape. But not an ordinary shape—a shape seen from the inside.”
  8396	Tononi stresses that simulation is “not the real thing.” To be truly
  8397	conscious, he said, an entity must be “of a certain kind that can constrain
  8398	its past and future—and certainly a simulation is not of that kind”
  8399	(Tononi, 2014b).
  8400	Christof Koch envisions how IIT could explain experience—how
  8401	consciousness arises out of matter. “The theory makes two fundamental
  8402	axiomatic assumptions,” Koch explains. “First, conscious experiences
  8403	are unique and there are a vast number of different conscious
       
  8404	(i) Intrinsic Existence. Consciousness exists of its own inherent na­
  8405	ture: each experience is real, and it exists from its own inherent
  8406	perspective; to account for experience, a system of mechanisms in
  8407	a state must exist intrinsically and it must have cause–effect
  8408	power.
  8409	(ii) Composition. Consciousness is structured: each experience is
  8410	composed of phenomenological distinctions; the system must be
  8411	structured: subsets of system elements (composed in various
  8412	combinations) must have cause–effect power upon the system.
  8413	(iii) Information. Consciousness is specific: each experience is the
  8414	particular way it is; the system must specify a cause–effectenabling structure that is the particular way it is; the system has a
  8415	set of specific cause–effect repertoires that distinguishes it from
  8416	all other possible structures (differentiation).
  8417	(iv) Integration. Consciousness is unified: each experience is irre­
  8418	ducible to noninterdependent subsets of phenomenal distinc­
  8419	tions; the cause–effect structure specified by the system must be
  8420	unified: it must be intrinsically irreducible.
  8421	(v) Exclusion. Consciousness is definite, in content and spatiotemporal grain: each experience has the set of phenomenal dis­
  8422	tinctions it has, not less or more, and flows at the speed it does,
  8423	not faster or slower; the cause–effect structure specified by the
       
  8424	41
  8425	I do not give Integrated Information Theory its own category because I
  8426	think IIT is the leading theory of consciousness. I do so because IIT is (i) a
  8427	leading theory; (ii) original in premises and approach; (iii) controversial; and
  8428	(iv) it would be misleading if classified in any of the other categories.
       
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  8432	content of my experience, including alternatives, reasons, and decisions,
  8433	corresponds to a sub-structure [i.e., Φ-folds] within my Ф-structure, not
  8434	to a functional property emerging from my [neural] substrate (Tononi
  8435	et al., 2022).
  8436	Because “IIT starts from phenomenal existence and defines physical
  8437	existence operationally in terms of cause–effect power ‘all the way
  8438	down,’ with no intrinsic residue, such as mass and charge … a physical
  8439	substrate should not be thought of as an ontological or ‘substantial’
  8440	basis—an ontological substrate—constituted of elementary particles
  8441	that would exist as such, endowed with intrinsic properties.”
  8442	This means, according to IIT, “because I actually exist—as a large
  8443	intrinsic entity—the neurons of my substrate as such but the Ф-structure
  8444	expressing its causal powers … Moreover, because my alternatives,
  8445	reasons, and decisions exist within my experience—as sub-structures
  8446	within an intrinsic entity—the neuronal substrates of alternatives, rea­
  8447	sons, and decisions cannot also exist.” If this picture is correct, IIT claims
  8448	controversially, “it leaves no room for emergence or dualism of any sort”
  8449	(Tononi et al., 2022).
  8450	As a defining corollary to its radical theory of consciousness, IIT
  8451	claims that true free will exists, based on “the proper understanding of
  8452	experience as true existence and on the intrinsic powers view: what truly
  8453	exists, in physical terms, are intrinsic entities, and only what truly exists
  8454	can cause.” In contrast, in materialistic theories, with ontological and
  8455	causal micro-determination, much of the debate about free will has
  8456	revolved not around existence but around determinism/indeterminism,
  8457	so that true free will is incompatible (Tononi et al., 2022).
  8458	In the same set of “adversarial collaboration” experiments that tested
  8459	Global Workspace Theory (9.2.3), IIT was also subjected to the puta­
  8460	tively rigorous protocols (Templeton World Charity Foundation, n.d.).
  8461	“The specific IIT prediction examined was that consciousness is a kind of
  8462	“structure” in the brain formed by a particular type of neuronal con­
  8463	nectivity that is active for as long as a given experience, say, seeing an
  8464	image, is occurring. This structure is said to be in the posterior cortex
  8465	(the occipital, parietal, and temporal cortices in the back part of the
  8466	brain). Preliminary results indicate that while “areas in the posterior
  8467	cortex do contain information in a sustained manner”—which could be
  8468	taken as evidence that the “structure” postulated by the theory is being
  8469	observed—the independent “theory-neutral” researchers didn’t find
  8470	sustained synchronization between different areas of the brain, as had
  8471	been predicted. Preliminary brain-scanning data to calculate φ for
  8472	simplified models of specific neural networks within the human brain,
  8473	such as the visual cortex, seem to correlate with states of consciousness
  8474	(Lenharo, 2023a,b, 2024). Scanning the brain as people “slip into
  8475	anesthesia” is said to offer support for IIT by calculating phi “for
  8476	simplified models of specific neural networks within the human brain
  8477	that have known functions, such as the visual cortex” (Wilson, 2023)—
  8478	though, by all accounts, the empirical neuroscience of IIT is still
  8479	rudimentary.
  8480	More recently, Koch defines IIT’s consciousness as “unfolded
  8481	intrinsic causal power, the ability to effect change, a property associated
  8482	with any system of interacting components, be they neurons or tran­
  8483	sistors. Consciousness is a structure, not a function, a process, or a
  8484	computation.” He calls out “the theory’s insistence that consciousness
  8485	must be incorporated into the basic description of what exists, at the
  8486	rock-bottom level of reality”—a claim that “has also drawn considerable
  8487	fire from opponents.” He explains that IIT “quantifies the amount of
  8488	consciousness of any system by its integrated information, character­
  8489	izing the system’s irreducibility. The more integrated information a
  8490	system possesses, the more it is conscious. Systems with a lot of inte­
  8491	gration, such as the adult human brain, have the freedom to choose; they
  8492	possess free will” (Koch, 2024, p. 16).
  8493	Personally, I see IIT operating in three dimensions. First, measure­
  8494	ment: IIT is a test of consciousness, assessing what things are conscious,
  8495	and in those things that are, quantifying the degree of consciousness (e.
  8496	g., coma patients). Second, mechanism: IIT can predict brain structures
  8497	and functions involved in consciousness. Third, ontology (the most
       
  8498	system must be definite and is maximally irreducible intrinsically
  8499	(“conceptual structure”).
  8500	It is this conceptual structure that is especially intriguing. Maximally
  8501	irreducible intrinsically, it is also known as a “quale” (plural: qualia). Its
  8502	arguably infinite varieties are formed when higher-order mechanisms
  8503	specify concepts, with the constellation of all concepts specifying the
  8504	overall form or shape of the quale. On this basis, Tononi and Koch
  8505	formulate the central identity of IIT quite simply: an experience is iden­
  8506	tical to a conceptual structure that is maximally irreducible intrinsically
  8507	(Tononi and Koch, 2015).
  8508	Questions that IIT seeks to address: Why the cerebral cortex gives rise
  8509	to consciousness but the cerebellum does not, though the latter has even
  8510	more neurons and appears to be just as complex? Is consciousness pre­
  8511	sent in coma patients, preterm infants, non-mammalian species? Can
  8512	computers, artificial intelligence (e.g., large language models) become
  8513	conscious as humans are conscious?
  8514	Most relevant to our Landscape is IIT’s fundamental ontology. Put
  8515	simply, it begins with “the ontological primacy of phenomenal exis­
  8516	tence.” The proper understanding of consciousness, IIT states, is “true
  8517	existence, captured by its intrinsic powers ontology: what truly exists, in
  8518	physical terms, are intrinsic entities, and only what truly exists can
  8519	cause” (Tononi et al., 2022).
  8520	Seeking to embed its theory of consciousness within a coherent
  8521	metaphysical framework, IIT introduces its “0th postulate” or “principle
  8522	of being.” To exist physically, IIT states, “means to have cause–effect
  8523	power—being able to take and make a difference. In other words,
  8524	physical existence is defined purely operationally, from the extrinsic
  8525	perspective of a conscious observer, with no residual ‘intrinsic’ prop­
  8526	erties (such as mass or charge). Furthermore, physical existence should
  8527	be conceived of as cause–effect power all the way down—namely down
  8528	to the finest, ‘atomic’ units that can take and make a difference” (Tononi
  8529	et al., 2022).
  8530	IIT deep conclusion is that “only a substrate that unfolds into a
  8531	maximum of intrinsic, structured, specific, irreducible cause–effect
  8532	power—an intrinsic entity—can account for the essential properties of
  8533	phenomenal existence in physical terms.” IIT goes on to claim that “only
  8534	an intrinsic entity can be said to exist intrinsically—to exist for itself, in
  8535	an absolute sense. By contrast, if something has cause–effect power but
  8536	does not qualify as an intrinsic entity, it can only be said to exist
  8537	extrinsically—to exist for something else—say, for an external observ­
  8538	er—in a relative sense. And intrinsic, absolute existence is the only ex­
  8539	istence worth having—what we might call true existence. Said
  8540	otherwise, an intrinsic entity is the only entity worth being.”
  8541	In a crucial move, according to Tononi and colleagues, “IIT asserts an
  8542	explanatory identity: an experience is identical to a Φ-structure. In other
  8543	words, the phenomenal properties of an experience—its quality or how
  8544	it feels—correspond one-to-one to the physical properties of the cause­
  8545	–effect structure unfolded from the physical substrate of consciousness.
  8546	Thus, all the contents of an experience here and now—including spatial
  8547	extendedness; temporal flow; objects; colors and sounds; thoughts, in­
  8548	tentions, decisions, and beliefs; doubts and convictions; hopes and fears;
  8549	memories and expectations—correspond to sub-structures in a cause­
  8550	–effect structure (Ф-folds in a Ф-structure)” (Tononi et al., 2022).
  8551	This means that “all contents of experience correspond to substructures within a maximally irreducible cause–effect structure—to
  8552	Φ-folds within a Φ-structure. This applies not only to the experience of
  8553	space, time, and objects, but also to conscious thoughts and feelings of
  8554	any kind … Conscious alternatives, too, are Φ-folds within the
  8555	Φ-structure corresponding to an experience.
  8556	Fundamentally, then, it is IIT’s claim that when one is conscious,
  8557	“what actually exists is a large Ф-structure corresponding to my expe­
  8558	rience, and it exists at its particular grain. No subsets, supersets, or
  8559	parasets of that Ф-structure also exist, just as no other grains also exist.
  8560	Moreover, what actually exists is only the Ф-structure corresponding to
  8561	my experience, not also an associated physical substrate. Crucially, any
  8562	98
       
  8563	R.L. Kuhn
       
  8564	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  8565	controversial): IIT speculates that the conceptual structures of qualia are
  8566	“located” in some kind of “qualia space” (13.5).
  8567	The first two dimensions, IIT’s measurement and mechanism, could
  8568	sit comfortably in the Materialism Theories area of the Landscape. The
  8569	third, IIT’s ontology of qualia, is radically distinct, its classification
  8570	unclear—which is part of the reason why I have given IIT its own
  8571	category on the Landscape.42
  8572	IIT claims that integrated information is both necessary and suffi­
  8573	cient for consciousness: necessary seems uncontroversial; sufficient is
  8574	the rub to many. But what I especially like about IIT’s “conceptual
  8575	structures” in “qualia space” is that IIT makes a stake-in-the-ground
  8576	commitment to what consciousness per se may literally be—an appre­
  8577	ciated rarity on the Landscape of consciousness (which does not mean
  8578	that I subscribe to it).
       
  8579	a sizable group of researchers think that IIT is pseudoscience” (Lau,
  8580	2023).
  8581	To physicist-neuroscientist Alex Gomez-Marin, “IIT ticks too many
  8582	nonmaterialist boxes. There is academic hate for nonphysicalist speech
  8583	… Cancel culture has unfortunately landed in the sciences, and just now
  8584	in neuroscience. Using the pseudo-word is a pseudo-argument akin to
  8585	name-calling to get rid of people … We have the responsibility to tell the
  8586	truth, to the best of our ability” (Gomez-Marin, 2023).
  8587	My own view straddles the barbed fence. On one side, I agree that IIT
  8588	has more weight than warrant in the pop-sci and even scientific com­
  8589	munities, and that the results of the adversarial collaboration experi­
  8590	ments, even if they could achieve their preset objectives, would not,
  8591	perhaps could not, justify the core IIT theory. Moreover, the one-on-one
  8592	adversarial experiments in general, with their high publicity, give the
  8593	inappropriate impression that the two protagonists are the finalists in a
  8594	theory-of-consciousness “run off,” as it were, when in fact there are
  8595	many dozens of other theories, nonphysical as well as physical, still in
  8596	the game.
  8597	On the other side, I do not sign on to the “pseudoscience” branding;
  8598	just because IIT may not be subject to traditional kinds of scientific
  8599	methodologies, such as falsification, does not ipso facto force it out of
  8600	bounds. (The multiverse in cosmology faces similar kinds of criticism.43)
  8601	It could be that discerning consciousness escapes traditional science
  8602	methodologies, as would a majority of theory-categories on this Land­
  8603	scape (not that discerning truth is a democratic process).
       
  8604	12.1. Critiques of integrated information theory
  8605	IIT has its critics, of course, as should every scientific theory. Some
  8606	like to highlight IIT’s “anti-common sense” predictions imputing con­
  8607	sciousness to objects and things that just do not in any way seem to be
  8608	conscious. The early exchange between theoretical quantum computer
  8609	scientist Scott Aaronson and Giulio Tononi is illuminating (Aaronson,
  8610	2014a, 2014b, 2014c; Tononi, 2014a).
  8611	More sensational, though not necessarily more illuminating, is the
  8612	open letter from 124 neuroscientists and philosophers, including leading
  8613	names, that characterizes IIT as “pseudoscience,” a damning descriptor
  8614	that relegates IIT with the likes of astrology, alchemy, flat Earth and
  8615	homeopathy. The impact is such that one can no longer discuss IIT
  8616	without referencing the letter (Fleming et al., 2023).
  8617	The letter is titled “The Integrated Information Theory of Con­
  8618	sciousness as Pseudoscience” and it expresses concerns that the media,
  8619	including both Nature and Science magazines “celebrated” IIT as “a
  8620	‘leading’ and empirically tested theory of consciousness”—prior to peerreview. Moreover, the letter criticizes the large-scale adversarial
  8621	collaboration project as testing only “some idiosyncratic predictions
  8622	made by certain theorists, which are not really logically related to the
  8623	core ideas of IIT.” The letter concludes, “As researchers, we have a duty
  8624	to protect the public from scientific misinformation”—thereby igniting a
  8625	firestorm in consciousness studies (Fleming et al., 2023).
  8626	Nature called it an “uproar” (Lenharo, 2023a,b). Responding,
  8627	Christof Koch said, “IIT is a theory, of course, and therefore may be
  8628	empirically wrong,” but it makes its assumptions very clear—for
  8629	example, that consciousness has a physical basis and can be mathe­
  8630	matically measured.
  8631	David Chalmers was quick to comment: “IIT has many problems, but
  8632	‘pseudoscience’ is like dropping a nuclear bomb over a regional dispute.
  8633	It’s disproportionate, unsupported by good reasoning, and does vast
  8634	collateral damage to the field far beyond IIT. As in Vietnam: ‘We had to
  8635	destroy the field in order to save it’” (Chalmers, 2023).
  8636	Hakwan Lau, one of the lead co-authors of the open letter, writes in
  8637	an extended response to the “uproar” that “it is already false to char­
  8638	acterize IIT, a panpsychist theory, as being empirically tested at all in a
  8639	meaningful way.” He argues that the entire field, including his own
  8640	theory, is not at the stage where predictions can logically apply, stating
  8641	“the advertised goal of really testing and potentially falsifying theories is
  8642	unrealistic, given where the field is at the moment.” Lau concludes by
  8643	doubling down: “The world has now seen the nature of the conflicts and
  8644	problems in our field, which can no longer be unseen. As a matter of fact,
       
  8645	12.2. Koch compares integrated information theory with panpsychism
  8646	Neuroscientist Christof Koch states that Integrated Information
  8647	Theory (IIT) shares many intuitions with panpsychism (13), in particular
  8648	that “consciousness is an intrinsic fundamental property of reality, is
  8649	graded, and can be found in small amounts in simple physical systems.”
  8650	Unlike panpsychism, Koch continues, IIT “articulates which systems are
  8651	conscious and which ones are not [partially] resolving panpsychism’s
  8652	combination problem and why consciousness can be adaptive.” The
  8653	systemic weakness of panpsychism, or any other-ism, he says, “is that
  8654	they fail to offer a protracted conceptual, let alone empirical, research
  8655	program that yields novel insights or proposes new experiments” (Koch,
  8656	2021).
  8657	While uncertainty in theoretical development and inconceivability of
  8658	empirical experiments are indeed weaknesses, should they ipso facto
  8659	disqualify the theory? Experimental verification of string theory seems
  8660	impossible because the energy levels required are many orders of
  8661	magnitude larger than instrumentation could ever be built, and while
  8662	some argue that this incapacity to be falsified should indeed disqualify
  8663	string theory as a scientific theory, many string theorists disagree,
  8664	betting their careers on it.
  8665	Koch’s comparing IIT with panpsychism provides insight into both.
  8666	Although admitting “I’ve always had a secret crush on the singular
  8667	beauty of panpsychism,” Koch counts himself among those surprised by
  8668	its resurgence. He claims that IIT addresses several major shortcomings
  8669	of panpsychism—“it explains why consciousness is adaptive, it explains
  8670	the different qualitative aspects of consciousness (why a ‘kind of blue’
  8671	feels different from a stinky Limburger cheese), and it head-on addresses
  8672	the combination problem”—per IIT’s exclusion postulate, only systems
  8673	with a maximum of Φ have intrinsic existence and are conscious” (Koch,
  8674	2021).
  8675	The exclusion postulate, Koch explains, “dictates whether or not an
  8676	aggregate of entities—ants in a colony, cells making up a tree, bees in a
  8677	hive, starlings in a murmurating flock, an octopus with its eight semiautonomous arms, and so on—exist as a unitary conscious entity or not.”
  8678	Koch claims that IIT “offers a startling counter-example to Goff’s
       
  8679	42
  8680	In attempting to classify IIT’s ontology of “conceptual structures in qualia
  8681	spaces,” one could make a case that IIT could be a form of Panpsychism, a kind
  8682	of Dualism, or part of a much-enhanced Materialism. IIT leaders reject Dualism,
  8683	distance themselves from Panpsychism (13.2), and probably would argue that,
  8684	to subsume IIT, Materialism as currently practiced would need to be stretched
  8685	to the snapping point.
       
  8686	43
  8687	We do not carry the multiverse analogy too far, because the multiverse has
  8688	more independent theoretical motivations and mechanisms.
       
  8689	99
       
  8690	R.L. Kuhn
       
  8691	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  8692	claim that qualitative aspects of conscious experience cannot be
  8693	captured by quantitative considerations”—“a detailed, mathematical
  8694	account of how the phenomenology of two-dimensional space, say an
  8695	empty canvas, can be fully accounted for in terms of intrinsic causal
  8696	powers of the associated physical substrate, here a very simple, grid-like
  8697	neural network” (Koch, 2021, quoting Huang, ). Integrated Information
  8698	Theory may well be wrong, Koch says, but it “provides proof-of-principle
  8699	for how quantitative primary qualities (here intrinsic causal power of
  8700	simple model neurons that can be numerically computed; it doesn’t get
  8701	more quantitative than that) correspond to secondary qualities—the
  8702	experience of looking at a blank wall” (Koch, 2021). (For Goff’s
  8703	response, 13.8.)
       
  8704	mental aspects could play a useful explanatory role.” Part of the reason is
  8705	the “causal closure of the physical” such that “Without dramatically
  8706	upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room
  8707	for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.”
  8708	Other than materialism/physicalism, Carroll characterizes all theories of
  8709	consciousness, including panpsychism, thus: “To start with the least
  8710	well-understood aspects of reality and draw sweeping conclusions about
  8711	the best-understood aspects is arguably the tail wagging the dog”
  8712	(Carroll, 2021).
  8713	Here I array the nature and kinds of panpsychism on offer. I then
  8714	summarize the perspectives of several well-known panpsychists.
  8715	13.1. Micropsychism
       
  8716	13. Panpsychisms
       
  8717	Proponents position panpsychism as a solution to the vexing prob­
  8718	lems of both materialism and dualism: replacing materialism’s apparent
  8719	impotence to account for consciousness and avoiding dualism’s sharply
  8720	bifurcated reality (Goff et al., 2022). The challenge, according to
  8721	Chalmers, is how microphysical properties, characterized by a
  8722	completed physics, relate to phenomenal (or experiential) properties,
  8723	the most familiar of which is simply the property of phenomenal con­
  8724	sciousness (Chalmers, 2013).
  8725	If panpsychism is correct, Chalmers says, there is microexperience
  8726	and there are microphenomenal properties, which are obviously very
  8727	different from human experience. Though a proper panpsychist theory
  8728	of consciousness is currently lacking, some progress can be made.
  8729	Chalmers posits “constitutive panpsychism” as the thesis that mac­
  8730	roexperience is (wholly or partially) grounded in microexperience. It is
  8731	the thesis that microexperiences somehow add up to yield macro­
  8732	experience. “Nonconstitutive panpsychism” holds that microexperience
  8733	does not ground the macroexperience; rather, macroexperience is
  8734	strongly emergent from microexperience and/or from microphysics
  8735	(Chalmers, 2013).
  8736	In either case, traditional panpsychism is micropsychism, the posi­
  8737	tion that all facts of panpsychism are formed at the micro-level. Two
  8738	forms are distinguished, based on which aspect of mentality is privileged
  8739	to be fundamental and ubiquitous: thought (pancognitivism) and con­
  8740	sciousness (panexperientialism).
  8741	Panpsychism’s thorniest problem, long recognized, is the “combi­
  8742	nation problem”: How could micro-level entities with their own very
  8743	basic forms of conscious experience somehow come together in brains to
  8744	constitute human and animal conscious experience? The problem is
  8745	severe: How could minuscule conscious subjects of rudimentary expe­
  8746	rience somehow coalesce to form macroscopic conscious subjects with
  8747	complex experiences? (Goff et al., 2022).
       
  8748	Panpsychism is the theory that phenomenal consciousness exists
  8749	because physical ultimates, fundamental physics, have phenomenal or
  8750	proto-phenomenal properties. This means that the essence of mentality,
  8751	awareness, experience is a primitive, non-reducible feature of each and
  8752	every part or aspect of physical reality, similar to the fundamental fields
  8753	and particles in physics. Everywhere there is energy-matter, perhaps
  8754	everywhere there is even spacetime, panpsychism says there is also
  8755	something of consciousness. Everything that exists has a kind of inherent
  8756	“proto-consciousness” which, in certain aggregates and under certain
  8757	conditions, can generate inner awareness and experience. Panpsychism
  8758	has multiple forms, nuances, and variants, as one would expect.
  8759	Panpsychism is one of the oldest theories in philosophy of mind,
  8760	going back to pre-modern animistic religions, the ancient Greeks,
  8761	Leibniz’s monads, and a host of 19th century thinkers (Goff et al., 2022).
  8762	Of late, in reaction to the seemingly intractable hard problem of con­
  8763	sciousness, panpsychism has been gathering adherents and gaining
  8764	momentum, especially among some analytic philosophers.
  8765	Panpsychism has strong non-Western roots, not often explored. In
  8766	particular, the ideas and arguments from Indian philosophical tradi­
  8767	tions—especially Vedānta, Yogācāra Buddhism, and Śaiva Non­
  8768	dualism—can enrich contemporary debates about panpsychism
  8769	(Maharaj, 2020).
  8770	Panpsychism is also finding new supporters. Take “Kabbalah Pan­
  8771	psychism,” an interpretation of the Jewish mystical tradition that un­
  8772	derstands consciousness to be holographically and hierarchically
  8773	organized, relativistic, and capable of downward causation (Schipper,
  8774	2021).
  8775	Yujin Nagasawa provides a careful critique of panpsychism, arguing
  8776	that although it seems promising, it reaches “a cognitive dead end” in
  8777	that “even if it’s true, we can’t prove it.” He challenges so-called
  8778	constitutive Russellian panpsychism (14.1), which many consider to
  8779	be the most efficacious panpsychist approach to the hard problem of
  8780	consciousness, by arguing that it “seems caught in a deadlock: we are
  8781	cognitively unable to show how microphenomenal properties can
  8782	aggregate to yield macrophenomenal properties (or how cosmopheno­
  8783	menal properties can be segmented to yield macrophenomenal proper­
  8784	ties)” (Nagasawa, 2021).
  8785	Panpsychism’s revival, indeed its flourishing, has left some philos­
  8786	ophers (as well as scientists) dumbfounded and dismayed. (I’d feel
  8787	remiss if I did not make an exception and at least recognize panpsy­
  8788	chism’s critics.) When I asked John Searle about panpsychism’s
  8789	increasing scholarly acceptance, he said, “I don’t think that’s a serious
  8790	view. If you’ve got panpsychism, you know you’ve made a mistake. And
  8791	the reason is that consciousness comes in discrete units. There has to be a
  8792	place where my consciousness ends and your consciousness begins. It
  8793	can’t just be spread over the universe like a thin veneer of jam. Pan­
  8794	psychism has the result that everything is conscious, and you can’t make
  8795	a coherent statement of that” ( Searle, 2014a).
  8796	To physicist Sean Carroll, “our current knowledge of physics should
  8797	make us skeptical of hypothetical modifications of the known rules, and
  8798	that without such modifications it’s hard to imagine how intrinsically
       
  8799	13.2. Panprotopsychism
  8800	Panprotopsychism is distinguished from panpsychism in that the
  8801	most basic protophenomenal properties are not themselves forms of
  8802	consciousness, but rather must combine to generate forms of con­
  8803	sciousness. Panprotopsychism would then be a kind of “emergent pan­
  8804	psychism,” with the “phenomenal magic” requiring actions at two
  8805	levels. Such emergence could be weak or strong, depending on whether
  8806	one could in principle explain with perfection, solely from all the rele­
  8807	vant facts about protophenomenal properties, all the relevant facts
  8808	about phenomenal properties as manifest in conscious creatures (Goff
  8809	et al., 2022).
  8810	“Panqualityism” is the view that protophenomenal properties are
  8811	thin unexperienced qualities, whereas our conscious experience is thick
  8812	with experienced qualities. Their challenge is to explain how such
  8813	unexperienced qualities come to be experienced (Goff et al., 2022).
  8814	13.3. Cosmopsychism
  8815	Cosmopsychism reverses the standard explanatory ontology that
  8816	100
       
  8817	R.L. Kuhn
       
  8818	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  8819	facts about big things are grounded in facts about small things. It posits
  8820	that facts about little things are grounded in facts about big things. In
  8821	other words, all things ultimately exist and are the way they are because
  8822	of certain facts about the universe as a whole. Following the argument to
  8823	its logical conclusion, there would be one and only one fundamental
  8824	thing: the universe (Goff et al., 2022).
  8825	The minimal commitment of cosmopsychism is that the universe is in
  8826	some sense “conscious.” But just as micropsychism can have quantum
  8827	particles with experience but no thought, so cosmopsychism can have
  8828	the universe with some kind of experience, but without thought or
  8829	agency.
  8830	Philip Goff makes a grander case. He develops a form of cosmopsy­
  8831	chism, according to which the universe is a value-responding agent, an
  8832	ultimate explanation motivated to account for the fine-tuning of the
  8833	laws of physics and for the emergence of life and mind. He states that
  8834	assuming fine-tuning needs explanation (it is not “an implausible
  8835	fluke”), then there are three prime categories to evaluate: theism, mul­
  8836	tiverse, and “agent cosmopsychism.” He argues that “agentive cosmop­
  8837	sychism is more theoretically virtuous than theism” because “God”
  8838	would require “a commitment to both physical and non-physical kinds,
  8839	and to both necessary and contingent kinds.” Similarly, on the multi­
  8840	verse, he argues that “its structural complexity is realized by an astro­
  8841	nomical number of distinct individuals” that “we cannot directly
  8842	observe,” whereas on agentive cosmopsychism, “the structural
  8843	complexity is realized by the properties of a single individual,” so there
  8844	is no need to “postulate a single new individual.” Goff reasons that
  8845	agentive cosmopsychism is more parsimonious in that it requires “only
  8846	one causal capacity rather than multiple” (Goff, 2019a,b). In his book,
  8847	Why? The Purpose of the Universe, Goff calls this third way “teleological
  8848	cosmopsychism”—some kind of conscious cosmos with some kind of
  8849	goal-directed intent (Goff, 2023).
  8850	Thus, Goff rejects both theism and multiverse as explanations of finetuning, claiming that each has prediction errors and insurmountable
  8851	problems. He focuses on the one universe that we have and know to be
  8852	real, “merely” adding some new properties. “The universe is a conscious
  8853	mind,” he concludes, “with purposes of its own” that are “still unfolding”
  8854	(Goff, 2023).
  8855	Yujin Nagasawa makes a novel case for cosmopsychism by drawing
  8856	parallels between the relationship between mind and body in philoso­
  8857	phy of mind and the relationship between God and cosmos in philosophy
  8858	of religion. In analyzing articulations between panpsychism and cos­
  8859	mopsychism in philosophy of mind, and between polytheism and
  8860	pantheism in philosophy of religion, he argues that by replacing divinity
  8861	with phenomenality in pantheism we can derive cosmopsychism, and
  8862	that doing so undercuts the combination problem (panpsychism’s
  8863	greatest challenge). He claims that using a top-down approach (with
  8864	which he derives polytheism from pantheism) in conjunction with
  8865	endorsing cosmopsychism, “the consciousness of the cosmos is onto­
  8866	logically prior to the consciousnesses of individuals like us.” This, he
  8867	says, avoids the combination problem (Nagasawa, 2019).
  8868	Sophisticated arguments for cosmopsychism come from Indian phi­
  8869	losophy. Swami Vivekananda, the 19th century Indian monk who
  8870	introduced Hinduism and Vedānta to the West, champions (with his
  8871	followers) a distinctive form of cosmopsychism, a panentheistic cos­
  8872	mopsychism, according to which the sole reality is Divine Conscious­
  8873	ness, which manifests as everything and everyone in the universe
  8874	(Medhananda, 2022).
       
  8875	laws of physics. Although in some sense derivative from the funda­
  8876	mental laws of physics, this qualia force sustains its own faculties and
  8877	capacities.
  8878	13.5. Qualia space
  8879	In the theory of Qualia Space, consciousness is an independent, nonreducible feature of reality that exists in addition to the deepest laws of
  8880	fundamental physics (i.e., the four forces, spacetime, mass-energy). This
  8881	heretofore unknown qualia-space aspect of the world may take the form
  8882	of a radically new structure or organization of reality, perhaps a
  8883	different dimension of reality.
  8884	The clearest current example would be Integrated Information
  8885	Theory’s (IIT) “conceptual structures” in qualia space (12). While this
  8886	radically novel feature might suggest that IIT should be classified as a
  8887	Panpsychism variant, I prefer to keep IIT independent but recognize the
  8888	implicit connection by including “qualia space” here under Panpsy­
  8889	chism. Note that IIT makes no claim that IIT’s qualia space is ubiquitous
  8890	in reality, as it would need be for IIT to be classic panpsychist in nature
  8891	(Tononi and Koch, 2015). I can imagine other, distinct, non-IIT theories
  8892	of consciousness founded on qualia-space.
  8893	In addition, the Qualia Research Institute’s (QRI) “State-Space
  8894	Consciousness Via Qualia Formalism and Valence Realism” holds that
  8895	phenomenal properties are a fundamental feature of the world and
  8896	aren’t spontaneously created only when a certain computation is being
  8897	performed” (Qualia Research Institute, n.d.). Although it “mostly fits
  8898	well with a panpsychist view,” QRI members prefer to classify them­
  8899	selves as a dual-aspect or neutral monism (6).
  8900	13.6. Chalmers’s panpsychism
  8901	Panpsychism’s renaissance can be attributed, at least in part, to
  8902	philosopher David Chalmers, who has long entertained panpsychism as
  8903	a possibly viable theory of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996; 2007; 2014a;
  8904	2014b; 2016c). “To find a place for consciousness within the natural
  8905	order,” he wrote, “we must either revise our conception of conscious­
  8906	ness, or revise our conception of nature” (Chalmers, 2003). This sen­
  8907	tence prepares the way, as it were, because if one is unwilling to deflate
  8908	consciousness (as a kind of illusion), then one has no choice but to
  8909	expand nature.
  8910	In his early work, Chalmers raised panpsychism, tentatively, in the
  8911	context of his kind of dualism. “I resisted mind-body dualism for a long
  8912	time, but I have now come to the point where I accept it, not just as the
  8913	only tenable view but as a satisfying view in its own right. It is always
  8914	possible that I am confused, or that there is a new and radical possibility
  8915	that I have overlooked; but I can comfortably say that I think dualism is
  8916	very likely true. I have also raised the possibility of a kind of panpsy­
  8917	chism. Like mind-body dualism, this is initially counterintuitive, but the
  8918	counterintuitiveness disappears with time. I am unsure whether the
  8919	view is true or false, but it is at least intellectually appealing, and on
  8920	reflection it is not too crazy to be acceptable” (Chalmers, 1996; Doyle, n.
  8921	d.a).
  8922	While Chalmers’s initial considerations of panpsychism were
  8923	perhaps motivated by a “when-all-else-fails” perspective, his more
  8924	recent papers address complex philosophical issues inherent in pan­
  8925	psychism (Chalmers, 2013).
  8926	Chalmers divides the most important views on the metaphysics of
  8927	consciousness “almost exhaustively into six classes,” three involving
  8928	broadly reductive views, “seeing consciousness as a physical process
  8929	that involves no expansion of a physical ontology,” and three involving
  8930	broadly nonreductive views, “on which consciousness involves
       
  8931	13.4. Qualia force
  8932	In the theory of Qualia Force, consciousness is a deep feature of
  8933	physical reality that emerges from the fields and particles of funda­
  8934	mental physics, perhaps in the strong emergence sense that it cannot be
  8935	explained by fundamental physics, even with knowledge beyond the
  8936	current, even in principle. This qualia force differs from traditional
  8937	panpsychism, where consciousness is co-fundamental with the deepest
  8938	101
       
  8939	R.L. Kuhn
       
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  8941	something irreducible in nature, and requires expansion or reconception
  8942	of a physical ontology.” Chalmers’s sixth class embeds panpsychism44
  8943	(Chalmers, 2003).
  8944	Panpsychism, more formally, is the theory that “consciousness is
  8945	constituted by the intrinsic properties of fundamental physical entities:
  8946	that is, by the categorical bases of fundamental physical dispositions. On
  8947	this view, phenomenal or protophenomenal properties are located at the
  8948	fundamental level of physical reality, and in a certain sense, underlie
  8949	physical reality itself” (Chalmers, 2003).
  8950	In one line of argument, channeling Hegel, Chalmers starts with the
  8951	thesis of materialism and the antithesis of dualism, and reaches the
  8952	synthesis of panpsychism. This synthesis encounters the antithesis of
  8953	panprotopsychism (13.2), from which he reaches the new synthesis of
  8954	Russellian monism (14.1). This synthesis encounters the new antithesis
  8955	of the combination problem, and whether there can be a new synthesis,
  8956	Chalmers avers, remains an open question. Still, he argues that there is
  8957	“good reason to take both panpsychism and panprotopsychism very
  8958	seriously,” and he concludes boldly: “If we can find a reasonable solution
  8959	to the combination problem for either, this view would immediately
  8960	become the most promising solution to the mind-body problem”
  8961	(Chalmers, 2016a).
  8962	Chalmers has explored all the major non-materialism theories,
  8963	including Quantum Theories (Chalmers and McQueen, 2022) and
  8964	Idealism (Chalmers, 2020d) as well as Panpsychism, not wholly
  8965	committing to any one. Although he favors Panpsychism, he recognizes
  8966	its problems (Chalmers, 1996; 2007; 2014a; 2014b; 2016c).
       
  8967	explanatory tension: “Nothing is more certain than consciousness, and
  8968	yet nothing is harder to incorporate into our scientific picture of the
  8969	world” (Goff, 2019a,b).
  8970	Goff sets out to undermine materialism’s traditional argument that
  8971	neuroscience has both made enormous advances, evincing its power,
  8972	and it has a long way to go, explaining its lack of success. None of the
  8973	neuroscientific advances, Goff says, “has shed any light on how the brain
  8974	produces consciousness” and while many neuroscientists take this as
  8975	evidence that one day neuroscience will “crack the mystery of con­
  8976	sciousness,” Goff turns their argument around and claims it is evidence
  8977	that the cause of consciousness differs in kind from the causes of other
  8978	scientific problems. “Explaining consciousness will require a change in
  8979	our understanding of what science is,” he argues; this is because “the
  8980	scientific revolution itself was premised on putting consciousness
  8981	outside of the domain of scientific inquiry” (i.e., Galileo’s Error). “If we
  8982	ever want to solve the problem of consciousness,” he declares, “we will
  8983	need to find a way of putting it back” (Goff, 2019a,b).
  8984	Goff positions panpsychism as conceding that “there is an element of
  8985	truth” in each of the claims of naturalistic dualism, that immaterial
  8986	minds are part of the natural order, and materialism, that the physical
  8987	world will ultimately explain inner experience. No doubt, as Goff states,
  8988	“An increasing number of philosophers and even some neuroscientists
  8989	are coming around to the idea that it [panpsychism] may be our best
  8990	hope for solving the problem of consciousness” (Goff, 2019a,b). It’s
  8991	fascinating to explore why.
  8992	Targeting each of the major competing theories of consciousness,
  8993	Goff claims to show their inadequacies—which, given the challenge of
  8994	explaining consciousness, is not the most difficult of tasks. Goff defends
  8995	panpsychism, stressing arguments from simplicity and parsimony.
  8996	Panpsychism, obviously, has its own problems—especially the pesky
  8997	combination problem—which Goff gamely addresses. His debates with
  8998	intellectual opponents are probative (Kastrup, 2020a, 2020b).
  8999	Goff responds to Christof Koch’s “startling counter-example to Goff’s
  9000	claim that qualitative aspects of conscious experience cannot be
  9001	captured by quantitative considerations” (4.2). But while Goff voices
  9002	“no doubt that we can in principle map out the quantitative structure of
  9003	visual experience in mathematical language,” he denies that such a
  9004	mathematical description can fully capture the qualities that fill out that
  9005	structure. If it could, he says, “we could use the mathematical descrip­
  9006	tion to explain to a colorblind neuroscientist what it’s like to see color,”
  9007	which, he says, is absurd. Purely quantitative language entails an
  9008	“explanatory limitation,” Goff contends, and “if a purely quantitative
  9009	theory can’t even convey the qualities of experience, then it certainly
  9010	can’t reductively account for them” (Goff, 2021).
  9011	In a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies dedicated to
  9012	Goff’s panpsychism, Goff responds extensively to commentators and
  9013	critics (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2021). He frames his argument
  9014	broadly: “The problem of consciousness is rooted in the philosophical
  9015	foundations of science” such that “we can’t account for the qualities of
  9016	consciousness in the purely quantitative language of physical science”
  9017	(Goff, 2021).
  9018	In his multifaceted replies to scientists, Goff stresses science’s
  9019	explanatory limitation and he is not persuaded that the various argu­
  9020	ments, such as Rovelli’s relational or perspectival approach (11.16), can
  9021	solve the “two aspects of consciousness that give rise to a hard problem:
  9022	qualitivity and subjectivity”46—either, in Goff’s view, would be “suffi­
  9023	cient to refute materialism” (Goff, 2021).
  9024	In his multifaceted replies to philosophers, Goff focuses on panpsy­
  9025	chism’s combination problem and offers a form of “hybrid panpsy­
  9026	chism,” which distinguishes sharply “between subjects and their
  9027	experiences, holding that the former are ‘strongly emergent’ (i.e., they
  9028	can’t be reductively explained) whilst the latter are ‘weakly emergent’
       
  9029	13.7. Strawson’s panpsychism
  9030	Philosopher Galen Strawson calls panpsychism “the most parsimo­
  9031	nious, plausible and indeed ‘hard-nosed’ position that any physicalist
  9032	who is remotely realistic about the nature of reality can take up in the
  9033	present state of our knowledge” (Strawson, 2008, 2011). Conversely, he
  9034	calls the denial of “conscious experience, the subjective character of
  9035	experience, the ‘what-it-is-like’ of experience,” in his words, “the silliest
  9036	claim ever made” (Strawson, 2018).
  9037	Strawson is a sophisticated (and unabashed) champion of panpsy­
  9038	chism, yet I decided to classify his theory under Monism (14), the next
  9039	category, not here under Panpsychism. The reason is the prominence of
  9040	his argument to subsume panpsychism under his enlarged understand­
  9041	ing of “materialism” or “physicalism”—amplified by his insistence that,
  9042	in essence, committing to panpsychism makes one a “real materialist” or
  9043	“real physicalist” (Strawson, 2009) (14.4.). Strawson’s social construc­
  9044	tivist view: “Panpsychism is not a new theory, but it is newly popular,
  9045	and it is still widely held to be ‘absurd’. It remains to be seen whether it
  9046	will ever advance to ‘obvious’”45 (Strawson, 2019b).
  9047	13.8. Goff’s panpsychism
  9048	Philosopher Philip Goff starts from the premise “one thing that sci­
  9049	ence could never show is that consciousness does not exist” and he
  9050	mounts a vigorous, rigorous case for panpsychism, the staggering idea
  9051	(at least initially) that “consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous
  9052	feature of the physical world.” He positions consciousness as “funda­
  9053	mental to what we are as human beings,” “the source of much that is of
  9054	value in existence,” “the ground of our identity and a source of great
  9055	value,” and “the only thing we know for certain is real.” He sets up the
  9056	44
  9057	The sixth class is labeled “Monism,” which means only one of a kind of
  9058	fundamental stuff, a stuff with both phenomenal and physical properties
  9059	(Chalmers, 2003).
  9060	45
  9061	Strawson’s quote follows his reference to William James: “‘First, you know,
  9062	a new theory is attacked as absurd,’ William James once remarked; ‘then it is
  9063	admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so
  9064	important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.’”
       
  9065	46
  9066	Goff in “Chalmers’s Hard Problem of Consciousness,” near the beginning of
  9067	this paper.
       
  9068	102
       
  9069	R.L. Kuhn
       
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  9071	(i.e., they can be reductively explained, in terms of consciousness at the
  9072	level of physics)” (Goff, 2021).
  9073	Thus, Goff addresses the challenge that strong emergent panpsy­
  9074	chism, which postulates fundamental psychophysical laws of nature,
  9075	suffers problems similar to those of dualism, and weak emergent pan­
  9076	psychism, without such extra laws, suffers problems similar to those of
  9077	physicalism. He argues that this "new hybrid of the strong and weak
  9078	emergentist forms of panpscyhism"—where "subjects of experience are
  9079	strongly emergent but their phenomenal properties are weakly
  9080	emergent"—is a form of cosmopsychism rather than micropsychism
  9081	(Goff, 2024).
  9082	In his multifaceted replies to theologians, Goff disputes the notion
  9083	that “the case for panpsychism should also lead one to theism,” because,
  9084	for one, a “self-explainer” can be the universe itself; God is not the only
  9085	choice here (Goff, 2021).
       
  9086	awareness, or consciousness” (Sheldrake, 2021).
  9087	Sheldrake defines consciousness, idiosyncratically, as “largely about
  9088	making choices, considering alternative possibilities.” He states, “Con­
  9089	sciousness is about choice. It’s about choosing among possibilities.”
  9090	What then does consciousness do?” he asks. “It enables different possi­
  9091	bilities to be held together and chosen among”—yielding his nonmainstream postulate that “any system in nature that has possibilities
  9092	that are not fixed would have some measure of consciousness.” A key to
  9093	Sheldrake’s consciousness is how “physical reality at any moment opens
  9094	up into the future through a range of possibilities … And it’s those future
  9095	possibilities which are the realm in which consciousness operates.” All
  9096	things that have consciousness are in this same state (Sheldrake, 2007b).
  9097	Referencing the indeterminate nature of quantum mechanics, Shel­
  9098	drake says, “even a hydrogen atom and an electron has a whole realm of
  9099	possibility open to it, of which only a small fraction is realized … [but]
  9100	to what extent it’s making real choices, to what extent consciousness
  9101	[occurs] in something as simple as an electron, is arguable and probably
  9102	undecidable.”
  9103	He then makes his even more startling move: “I think it gets much
  9104	more interesting when we look at larger systems like the sun or the
  9105	galaxy.” Here’s Sheldrake’s argument: “If consciousness emerges from
  9106	patterns of electrical activity in our brains, as materialists would assume,
  9107	the sun has vastly more complex patterns of electrical activity than our
  9108	brains. So why shouldn’t that be associated with consciousness? Why
  9109	shouldn’t the sun have a mind? And if the sun has a mind, why not all the
  9110	stars? If all the stars have minds, what about huge collections of stars in
  9111	galaxies, linked up by vast plasma currents of electricity surging across
  9112	trillions of miles of galactic space, with rhythmic patterns connecting all
  9113	parts” (Sheldrake, 2007b).
  9114	Sheldrake goes ultimate: “Maybe the entire universe has a mind.
  9115	Why not? There may be many, many levels of consciousness.” Shel­
  9116	drake’s consciousness is a nesting of consciousnesses at all levels of or­
  9117	ganization resident in reality. (Actually, Sheldrake would prefer the
  9118	term “mind” or “mind-like aspects” than “consciousness,” because from
  9119	our perspective these nonbiological “minds” might be considered “un­
  9120	consciousness” or “nonconscious.”)
  9121	Sheldrake clarifies that these kinds of nonbiological consciousnesses
  9122	would be totally different from human consciousness. Just as human
  9123	consciousness differs from dog consciousness, he says, “sun conscious­
  9124	ness’ differs from “earth consciousness,” and so on. If the sun is
  9125	conscious, “it may be concerned with the regulation of its own body and
  9126	the entire solar system through its electromagnetic activity, including
  9127	solar flares and coronal mass ejections. It may also communicate with
  9128	other star systems within the galaxy” (Sheldrake, 2021).
  9129	“It’s hard for us to imagine other forms of consciousness,” Sheldrake
  9130	stresses. Nonetheless, he suggests, “there’s mind-like organization at all
  9131	levels of the universe and in nature,” including a mind-like organization
  9132	of the entire universe.”
  9133	Sheldrake suggests that “the electrical fields of organized or selforganizing systems are a good candidate for an interface between con­
  9134	sciousness and the physical structure”—whether cells, animals, humans
  9135	or stars. Note that in Sheldrake’s system the electrical fields are not the
  9136	consciousness per se, which he describes as “matters of possibilities.”
  9137	Rather, the electrical fields mediate between physical and consciousness
  9138	(as defined).
  9139	Sheldrake concludes that all levels or kinds of organization in nature
  9140	have their own kind of mind, mediated by electrical fields, and that the
  9141	entire universe as a whole also has some kind of consciousness or mind,
  9142	which would play an important part in what happens as the universe
  9143	evolves (Sheldrake, 2021, n.d.a).
       
  9144	13.9. A. Harris’s panpsychism as fundamental field
  9145	Neuroscience/consciousness writer Annaka Harris posits that “con­
  9146	sciousness isn’t self-centered” and that we should “think of conscious­
  9147	ness like spacetime—a fundamental field that’s everywhere.” In
  9148	Conscious, her “meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience,” she
  9149	wonders whether “we’ve been thinking about the problem backward.
  9150	Rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a
  9151	particular way, is it possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of
  9152	matter—that it was there all along?” (A. Harris, 2020, 2019).
  9153	Harris argues that contemporary panpsychism, the idea that “all
  9154	matter is imbued with consciousness in some sense,” differs significantly
  9155	from its earlier versions, now “unencumbered by any religious beliefs …
  9156	[and] informed by the sciences and fully aligned with physicalism and
  9157	scientific reasoning.” She carefully distinguishes between consciousness
  9158	and thought, so that if some primitive consciousness does inhabit all
  9159	matter, this does not mean that inanimate objects, like rocks, have ex­
  9160	periences or “points of view.” Only certain complex systems, like
  9161	humans and other animals, have such (A. Harris, 2020).
  9162	Harris has a disarmingly simple solution for panpsychism’s vexing
  9163	combination problem. “We run into a combination problem,” she says,
  9164	“only when we drag the concept of a ‘self’ or a ‘subject’ into the equa­
  9165	tion. The solution to the combination problem is that there is really no
  9166	‘combining’ going on at all with respect to consciousness itself.” It all
  9167	depends on “the arrangement of the specific matter in question” (A.
  9168	Harris, 2020).
  9169	As for “the correct resolution to the mystery of consciousness,” Harris
  9170	says she personally “is split between a brain-based explanation and a
  9171	panpsychic one. So while I’m not convinced that panpsychism offers the
  9172	correct answer, I am convinced that it is a valid category of possible
  9173	solutions that cannot be easily dismissed.” She prefers, however, a more
  9174	neutral term, such as “intrinsic nature theory” or “intrinsic field theory”
  9175	(A. Harris, 2020).
  9176	13.10. Sheldrake’s self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity
  9177	Iconoclastic biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s radical views on the nature
  9178	of reality inform theories of consciousness in two ways. One, covered
  9179	here, envisions self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity as a
  9180	robust form of panpsychism. A second, covered later, is how “morphic
  9181	fields” relate to consciousness (17.9) (Sheldrake, n.d.a).
  9182	Sheldrake sees no “sharp separation of consciousness in physical
  9183	reality; ” rather, “our consciousness and our physical reality go hand in
  9184	hand.” He says, “I am certainly not a dualist,” but he does posit “a kind of
  9185	mind or consciousness at all levels of nature”—in atoms and molecules,
  9186	cells and organisms, plants and animals—and, astonishingly, “in the
  9187	earth, in the sun, in the galaxy, and in the whole universe” (Sheldrake,
  9188	2007a). Motivated in part by “the recent panpsychist turn in philosophy,
  9189	” Sheldrake suggests that “self-organizing systems at all levels of
  9190	complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience,
       
  9191	13.11. Wallace’s panpsychism inside physics
  9192	To philosopher of physics David Wallace, one way to motivate
  9193	panpsychism is as a kind of synthesis of materialism (consciousness is
  9194	just reducible to the physical) and dualism (consciousness is separate
  9195	103
       
  9196	R.L. Kuhn
       
  9197	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  9198	from the physical). Each, he says, has major advantages and major
  9199	disadvantages. “Materialism seems like it can’t adequately explain
  9200	consciousness. Dualism can’t give an adequate causal role to con­
  9201	sciousness.” Wallace envisions panpsychism “as a way of getting the best
  9202	features of both materialism and dualism without their disadvantages,”
  9203	which is why he envisions “panpsychism potentially as the synthesis of
  9204	materialism and dualism” (Wallace, 2016a).
  9205	Wallace starts with dualism, where “consciousness is real and
  9206	fundamental, existing at the bottom-most level of nature”—but dualism,
  9207	he stresses, has a serious problem: “How can dualism play a causal role
  9208	in physics, because physics looks to be closed and autonomous?” This is
  9209	where Wallace has panpsychism playing the critical causal role by
  9210	looking to the intrinsic nature of physics. “Physics tells us how fields and
  9211	particles relate to each other, but it doesn’t tell us about what they really
  9212	are in themselves. According to panpsychism, consciousness is right
  9213	there inside the physical world, as its intrinsic nature, and thus when one
  9214	field or particle affects another, it’s really consciousness which is doing
  9215	the causing. So, you get a causal role for consciousness in physics and
  9216	you get consciousness as real and fundamental.” That’s a set of advan­
  9217	tages, Wallace argues, “that no other theory has—and it motivates
  9218	panpsychism” (Wallace, 2016a).
  9219	Wallace explains that when physics gives a mathematical theory of
  9220	how all fundamental physical entities relate to one another quantita­
  9221	tively, it doesn’t tell us what these entities actually are. This gives room,
  9222	he says, for panpsychism to offer a hypothesis about what these entities
  9223	actually are. However, Wallace stresses that the intrinsic relationship
  9224	among all these entities, non-conscious and conscious, must be as
  9225	described by the laws of physics. There is no need to postulate a fifth
  9226	kind of force or feature as the carrier of panpsychic consciousness, he
  9227	says; rather, the need is, as Stephen Hawking put it, “What is it that
  9228	breathes fire into the equations?” That would be the fundamental nature
  9229	of the reality that physics is describing (Wallace, 2016a, 2016b).
  9230	Regarding consciousness itself, Wallace would have it not so much as
  9231	requiring an extra force or feature in the physical world (as panpsychists
  9232	sometimes imply), but rather as the underlying nature of the processes
  9233	that physics is describing mathematically.
       
  9234	facts of an inherited past and the potential forms of an anticipated
  9235	future” (Segall, 2020).
  9236	While Segall has “the philosophical payoff of panpsychism” dis­
  9237	solving the hard problem of consciousness by “giving experience its
  9238	proper place in Nature without undermining the scientific image of the
  9239	universe.” Regarding substance-property panpsychism’s combination
  9240	problem, Segall says that Whitehead’s process-relational approach
  9241	“doesn’t so much solve this problem as it does reframe the problem’s
  9242	presuppositions.” Whitehead does this not by “struggling to understand
  9243	how abstract little bits of extended matter with mental intrinsic prop­
  9244	erties might combine to form bigger bits of minded matter,” but rather
  9245	by starting “with a more concrete conception of energetic activity that is
  9246	more easily analogized to agitations of experience. Neither ‘matter’ nor
  9247	‘mind’ is composed of simply located bits or states.” Thus, “the ongoing
  9248	composition of the cosmos is achieved not through the summation of
  9249	tiny parts, nor through subtraction from some larger whole (as cos­
  9250	mopsychists would have it), but by a dipolar relational process with both
  9251	a stability providing material pole and a novelty inducing mental pole.”
  9252	According to Segall, “Whitehead is neither a micropsychist nor a
  9253	cosmopsychist exclusively. He tries to have it both ways. There is a
  9254	universal soul, a psyche of the cosmos, a primordial actuality or God of
  9255	this world, and there are countless creatures creating in concert with it.
  9256	Creativity transcends both God and finite actualities; it is the source of
  9257	all co-evolving parts, wholes, bodies, and souls. Whitehead’s account of
  9258	process includes moments of combination and decombination,
  9259	conjunction and disjunction. For Whitehead the combination problem
  9260	becomes a logic of concrescence [i.e., ‘the production of novel togeth­
  9261	erness’], a feature and not a bug, a way of thinking change as more than
  9262	just the rearrangement of pre-existing parts or the fragmentation of a
  9263	pre-existing whole but as genuine becoming, as an ‘emergent evolution’ or
  9264	‘creative advance’ where neither wholes nor parts pre-exist their re­
  9265	lations … and in each act of creation the past is not destroyed but reincarnated in the novel occasion … Concrescence is thus a cumulative
  9266	process and not a merely additive one” (Segall, 2020).
  9267	Some call Whitehead’s defense of a panpsychist philosophy the
  9268	theory’s most significant development in the 20th century. Whitehead
  9269	radically reforms “our conception of the fundamental nature of the
  9270	world, placing events (or items that are more event-like than thing-like)
  9271	and the ongoing processes of their creation and extinction as the core
  9272	feature of the world, rather than the traditional triad of matter, space
  9273	and time. His panpsychism arises from the idea that the elementary
  9274	events that make up the world (which he called occasions) partake of
  9275	mentality in some—often extremely attenuated—sense, metaphorically
  9276	expressed in terms of the mentalistic notions of creativity, spontaneity
  9277	and perception” (Goff et al., 2022).
  9278	This makes Whitehead an emergentist rather than a constitutive
  9279	panpsychist. “A given moment of conscious experience is not reducible
  9280	to nor simply identical with its constituent parts.” It is “a creative
  9281	repetition of the past rather than a combination of parts” (Segall, 2020).
       
  9282	13.12. Whitehead’s process theory
  9283	Although Process Theory is already classified under Materialism
  9284	Theories/Relational, motivated by Griffin’s “panexperiential physi­
  9285	calism” (9.7.7), I am making the odd decision to classify it also here
  9286	under Panpsychism, motivated by process philosopher Matthew Segall’s
  9287	bringing Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism “into con­
  9288	versation with the recent panpsychist turn in analytic philosophy of
  9289	mind.” According to Segall, “Whitehead’s unabashedly metaphysical
  9290	project broadly aligns with recent critiques of reductive physicalism and
  9291	the turn toward a conception of experience as basic to Nature.” White­
  9292	head’s panexperientialism, he says, attempts to take consciousness at
  9293	face value, resisting inflationary accounts toward absolute idealism and
  9294	deflationary toward eliminative materialism (Segall, 2020).
  9295	Segall distinguishes Whitehead’s process-relational panexper­
  9296	ientialism from the dominant substance-property variants of panpsy­
  9297	chism, arguing that Whitehead’s version avoids many of panpsychism’s
  9298	conceptual difficulties. To begin, “Whitehead’s process-relational
  9299	rendering doesn’t claim that experience is a ‘primary attribute’ or
  9300	‘intrinsic property’ of matter. This is because in Whitehead’s view,
  9301	physics has moved beyond the substantialist view of matter, and talk of
  9302	essential or accidental properties only made sense given such an
  9303	[archaic] ontology … While there was an ‘essential distinction between
  9304	[substantial] matter at an instant and the agitations of experience,’ with
  9305	this conception of matter having been swept away, a door is opened to
  9306	analogies between energetic activity and concrete experience.” Thus,
  9307	“Experiences, like energy vectors, are intrinsically process-relational in
  9308	that they always involve transition beyond themselves: They manifest in
  9309	a ‘specious present’ [Whitehead] as a tension between the actualized
       
  9310	14. Monisms
  9311	Monism is the theory that all of reality consists of exactly one con­
  9312	crete object or thing, and everything that exists is, in some sense, that
  9313	one concrete object or thing (or part of it) (Schaffer, 2018). Because
  9314	monisms seek to account for both mental and physical aspects of reality,
  9315	avoiding the metaphysical difficulties of dualism and overcoming the
  9316	explanatory weakness of materialism, it follows that monisms are also
  9317	theories of consciousness. In one way or another, monisms must cover or
  9318	contain everything we call mental as well as everything we call physical.
  9319	(The existence of various kinds of monisms does not much affect how
  9320	monisms are theories of consciousness.)
  9321	There is substantial and obvious articulation, or overlap, between
  9322	Monism and Panpsychism. Both are motivated by the need to integrate
  9323	consciousness into the deep nature of reality; thus, monism theories
  9324	have panpsychism features and panpsychism theories can be seen as
  9325	104
       
  9326	R.L. Kuhn
       
  9327	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  9328	monisms (to first approximations). Perhaps it is simply the case of each
  9329	reinforcing the other in what are merely different perspectives, histori­
  9330	cal and theoretically, on essentially the same stance regarding the
  9331	fundamental nature of ultimate reality. However, they are not entirely
  9332	the same in that panpsychism has phenomenal or protophenomenal
  9333	properties as a part or aspect of some larger, fundamental entity, while
  9334	monism has only one fundamental entity that encompasses everything
  9335	(although it is not intuitively obvious that this distinction makes much of
  9336	a difference). Separate categories for monism and panpsychism are
  9337	certainly justified, yet the boundary can be fuzzy.
  9338	Some of the theories or ways of thinking that follow are categorized
  9339	under Monism because all other categories seem less appropriate,
  9340	imposing a belief system that should not apply. (I hope each of these
  9341	theories feels less uncomfortable in Monisms.)
       
  9342	Non-reductive Physicalism (10). As Davidson writes, “anomalous
  9343	monism holds that mental entities (particular time- and space-bound
  9344	objects and events) are physical entities, but that mental concepts are
  9345	not reducible by definition or natural law to physical concepts”
  9346	(Davidson, 1993).
  9347	Anomalous Monism is distinguished from other theories of con­
  9348	sciousness by the intersection of three propositional claims: (i) Mental
  9349	events have genuine causal powers and cause physical events. (ii) All
  9350	causal relationships are backed by natural laws. (iii) There are no nat­
  9351	ural laws connecting mental phenomena with physical phenomena.
  9352	While each claim has adherents, it is the conjunction of the three claims,
  9353	taken together, that gives Anomalous Monism its distinctive look,
  9354	because at first glance there surely appears to be inconsistency (if not
  9355	contradiction) (Silcox, n.d.).
  9356	To appreciate Anomalous Monism’s originality and subtleties, it
  9357	needs to be unpacked. A foundational principle is that “psychology
  9358	cannot be a science like basic physics, in that it cannot in principle yield
  9359	exceptionless laws for predicting or explaining human thoughts and
  9360	actions (mental anomalism).” And it is “precisely because there can be
  9361	no such strict laws governing mental events that those events must be
  9362	identical to physical events” (Yalowitz, 2021).
  9363	How to make sense of this? What may seem like a non sequitur is in
  9364	fact the heart of the argument. If the physical is the only existent, then
  9365	ipso facto the mental (like everything else) must come from the physical
  9366	with robust regularities. But how do the mental and physical articulate?
  9367	What is this connection?
  9368	Here’s the flow of the argument. Given that the mental has causal
  9369	powers (claim 1), and that all causal relationships require natural law
  9370	(claim 2), because there are no natural (psychophysical) laws that
  9371	connect the mental and the physical (claim 3), therefore there is only
  9372	one logical way to connect mental events and physical events—now
  9373	denied a causal relationship (combining claims 2 and 3): they must be
  9374	literally the same thing, the mental and the physical must be in the strong
  9375	sense identical.
  9376	As identity theories of consciousness are a leitmotif, and a touch­
  9377	stone, for comprehending the Landscape, we go deeper. Earlier identity
  9378	theories held that “claims concerning the identity of particular mental
  9379	and physical events (tokens) depended upon the discovery of lawlike
  9380	relations between mental and physical properties (types) … Tokenidentity claims thus depended upon type-identity.”
  9381	But Anomalous Monism, almost by its founding premise, does not
  9382	depend on such psychophysical laws. “Davidson’s position is dramati­
  9383	cally different … It in effect justifies the token-identity of mental and
  9384	physical events through arguing for the impossibility of type-identities
  9385	between mental and physical properties” (Yalowitz, 2021).
  9386	Now of course this argument proves that the mental and the physical
  9387	are identical only to the extent that the three premises are all accepted as
  9388	valid, because the conclusion is embedded (or “hidden”) within the
  9389	premises (as are all deductive arguments structured in this way).
  9390	Anomalous Monism differs from other theories especially in claiming
  9391	that there are no natural laws connecting mental phenomena with
  9392	physical phenomena. Other theories assume there are laws or ways to
  9393	connect the mental and the physical, or laws or ways where the mental
  9394	and the physical are part of, or derived from, the same stuff.
       
  9395	14.1. Russellian Monism
  9396	Russellian Monism, based on the insights of philosopher Bertrand
  9397	Russell, is a view that phenomenal consciousness and the physical world
  9398	are deeply intertwined (Alter and Nagasawa, 2012). It characterizes the
  9399	fundamental essence of matter as beyond that which can be accessed by
  9400	empirical science or described by mathematical models. The claim is
  9401	that the conundrum of consciousness, and how it fits into the physical
  9402	world, is so critical that integrating consciousness (or
  9403	proto-consciousness) into fundamental reality could suggest that the
  9404	elements integrated are distinct from the ones revealed as a result of
  9405	integration, thus shadowing if not revealing hidden, deep, intrinsic
  9406	features of the physical world (Goff et al., 2022).
  9407	Three core concepts conjoin to generate Russellian monism: (i)
  9408	structuralism about physics (describing the world in terms of its spatio­
  9409	temporal/relational structure and dynamics); (ii) realism about quiddities
  9410	(or inscrutables) (there are quiddities/inscrutables, which underlie but are
  9411	not limited by the structure and dynamics physics describes); and (iii)
  9412	quidditism (or “inscrutinism”) about consciousness (at least some quiddi­
  9413	ties/inscrutables are either phenomenal or protophenomenal properties
  9414	and are thereby relevant to the essence of consciousness) (Alter and
  9415	Nagasawa, 2012; Alter and Pereboom, 2019).
  9416	Daniel Stoljar presents four different accounts of the inscrutables:
  9417	“(i) Phenomenal monism: The inscrutables are phenomenal in nature.
  9418	(ii) Protophenomenal monism: The inscrutables are not themselves
  9419	phenomenal in nature but they are a precursor to phenomenal proper­
  9420	ties. (iii) Physical monism: The inscrutables are physical in nature,
  9421	though they are outside the domain of physics. (iv) Neutral monism: The
  9422	inscrutables are neither phenomenal nor physical but rather have a
  9423	nature that is neutral between the two” (Kind and Stoljar, 2023).
  9424	To Russellian monists, if the intrinsic nature of fundamental matter is
  9425	itself infused by phenomenal properties that express consciousness, then
  9426	the model is “Russellian panprotopsychism.” Either way, the claim is
  9427	that Russellian Monism bests dualism by avoiding problematic physicalnonphysical causation and bests materialism by taking consciousness
  9428	seriously and grounding it in ultimate reality (Goff et al., 2022).
  9429	Philip Goff explains that “Russellian monism comes in both smallest
  9430	and priority monist forms. For the smallest, fundamental categorical
  9431	properties are instantiated by micro-level physical entities, perhaps
  9432	electrons and quarks. For the priority monist, the most fundamental
  9433	categorical properties are instantiated by the universe as a whole.” Each
  9434	of the categories can be matrixed by whether its properties are “con­
  9435	sciousness evolving” or “not consciousness evolving,” yielding four
  9436	categories of Russellian monism (Goff, 2019a,b).
       
  9437	14.3. Velmans’s reflexive monism
  9438	Psychologist Max Velmans describes Reflexive monism as “a dualaspect theory” (in the tradition of Spinoza) which argues that the one
  9439	basic stuff of which the universe is composed has the potential to
  9440	manifest both in physical forms and as conscious experience. According
  9441	to the theory, in the universe’s “evolution from some primal undiffer­
  9442	entiated state,” it differentiates into “distinguishable physical entities, at
  9443	least some of which have the potential for conscious experience, such as
  9444	human beings” (Velmans, 2008).
  9445	Velmans’s “Monism” is straightforward: “the view that the universe,
       
  9446	14.2. Davidson’s anomalous monism
  9447	Anomalous Monism, developed by philosopher Donald Davidson,
  9448	holds that mental properties and events must have a physical ontology,
  9449	but that psychology cannot be reduced to physics. As such, Anomalous
  9450	Monism is a form of property dualism (15.1) and shares features with
  9451	105
       
  9452	R.L. Kuhn
       
  9453	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  9454	at the deepest level of analysis, is one thing, or composed of one
  9455	fundamental kind of stuff.” His “Reflexive” is more complex: “Each
  9456	human participates in a process whereby the universe differentiates into
  9457	parts and becomes conscious in manifold ways of itself, making the
  9458	entire process reflexive.”
  9459	Velmans focuses on “the ontological status and seeming ‘out-there­
  9460	ness’ of the phenomenal world and to how the ‘phenomenal world’ re­
  9461	lates to the ‘physical world’, the ‘world itself’, and processing in the
  9462	brain.” He seeks both to bridge the materialist-dualist gap and to
  9463	differentiate Reflexive Monism from “both dualism and variants of
  9464	physicalist and functionalist reductionism, focusing on those aspects of
  9465	the theory that challenge deeply rooted presuppositions in current
  9466	Western thought.” Within Reflexive Monism, he says, “the brain is
  9467	simply what the human mind looks like when it is viewed from an
  9468	external (third-person) perspective, and neither the observations of
  9469	external observers nor those of subjects have a privileged status”
  9470	(Velmans, 2008).
  9471	Central to Velmans’s argument is that in terms of their phenome­
  9472	nology, “experiences of the external world are none other than the
  9473	physical world-as-experienced, thereby placing aspects of human con­
  9474	sciousness in the external phenomenal world, rather than exclusively
  9475	within the head or brain” (Velmans, 2023). His reflexive model also
  9476	makes the strong claim—the radical claim—that, “Insofar as experiences
  9477	are anywhere, they are roughly where they seem to be.” For example, “A
  9478	pain in the foot is in the experienced foot, and this perceived print on
  9479	this visible page really is out here on this visible page. Nor is a pain in the
  9480	foot accompanied by some other, additional experience of pain in the
  9481	brain, or is this perceived print accompanied by some additional expe­
  9482	rience of print in the brain. In terms of phenomenology, this perceived
  9483	print, and my experience of this print are one and the same.” Technically,
  9484	he says, this is a form of phenomenological externalism (Velmans, 2008).
  9485	To understand how experienced objects and events might really be
  9486	(roughly) where they are experienced to be, Velmans looks closely at
  9487	“the way that phenomenal space relates to ‘real’ space. No one doubts
  9488	that physical bodies can have real extension and location in space.” But
  9489	we “find it hard to accept that experiences can have a real, as opposed to
  9490	a ‘seeming’ location and extension.” We do not doubt, he says, that a
  9491	physical foot has a real location and extension in space, but a pain in the
  9492	foot can’t really be in the foot, as we are “committed to the view that it is
  9493	either nowhere or in the brain.” Although this common understanding
  9494	that “location in phenomenal space is not location in real space,” ac­
  9495	cording to Reflexive Monism, “this ignores the fact that, in everyday life,
  9496	we take the phenomenal world to be the physical world. It also ignores
  9497	the pivotal role of phenomenal space in forming our very understanding
  9498	of space, and with it, our understanding of location and extension in
  9499	measured or ‘real’ space” (Velmans, 2008).
  9500	Velmans says that Reflexive Monism provides a different perspective
  9501	on the hard problem of consciousness by viewing physical and experi­
  9502	ential aspects of mind as arising from a common “psychophysical
  9503	ground.” Thus, he argues, of the competing views of consciousness on
  9504	offer, Reflexive Monism, being a non-reductionist dual-aspect theory,
  9505	“most closely follows the contours of ordinary experience, the findings
  9506	of science, and common sense” (Velmans, 2008).
       
  9507	“materialism,” showing that, historically, it had nothing to do with
  9508	denial of the existence of consciousness, but rather that consciousness is
  9509	wholly material. He laments that the words “materialism” and “physi­
  9510	calism” have come to be treated as synonymous and to involve denial of
  9511	the existence of consciousness. It is, he says, ironic that these two words
  9512	have “been used to name a position in the philosophy of mind that
  9513	directly rejects the heart of materialism and is certainly false” (Strawson,
  9514	2011).
  9515	Strawson asserts that physicalism (or materialism47), that is, “real
  9516	physicalism” (or “real materialism”), entails panexperientialism or
  9517	panpsychism, on one assumption: it entails panpsychism given the
  9518	impossibility of “radical” emergence. Moreover, given that all physical
  9519	stuff is energy, in one form or another, we may suppose that “all energy
  9520	is an experience-involving phenomenon” (Section: Strawson, 2003,
  9521	2009, 2015; 2020a; Strawson and Russell, 2021; Strawson, 2011).
  9522	Strawson happily admits, “This sounded crazy to me for a long time,
  9523	but I am quite used to it, now that I know that there is no alternative …”
  9524	It may also sound odd to use “physical” to characterize mental phe­
  9525	nomena like experiential phenomena, but real physicalism, realistic
  9526	physicalism, entails panpsychism, and whatever problems are raised by
  9527	this fact, he exhorts, are problems a real physicalist must face.
  9528	Strawson defines physicalism to be the view that “every real, con­
  9529	crete phenomenon in the universe is … physical.” It is a view about the
  9530	actual universe, and that he assumes it is true. But then comes the
  9531	“Strawsonian Twist.”
  9532	What does it take to be a “realistic physicalist” or a “real physicalist?”
  9533	He makes one thing absolutely clear. “You’re certainly not a realistic
  9534	physicalist, you’re not a real physicalist, if you deny the existence of the
  9535	phenomenon whose existence is more certain than the existence of
  9536	anything else: experience, ‘consciousness’, conscious experience, ‘phe­
  9537	nomenology’, experiential ‘what-it’s-likeness’, feeling, sensation,
  9538	explicit conscious thought as we have it and know it at almost every
  9539	waking moment.”
  9540	All materialists hold that every concrete phenomenon in the universe
  9541	is physical, and they are neither sensible nor realistic, Strawson says, if
  9542	they have any inclination to deny the concrete reality of mental phe­
  9543	nomena like experiential phenomena. He concludes by taking no pris­
  9544	oners: “Full recognition of the reality of experience, then, is the
  9545	obligatory starting point for any remotely realistic version of physi­
  9546	calism … It is the obligatory starting point for any theory that can
  9547	legitimately claim to be ‘naturalistic’ because experience is itself the
  9548	fundamental given natural fact” (Strawson, 2008).
  9549	As a “real physicalist,” in his definition, Strawson holds that the
  9550	mental/experiential is physical, and he is happy to say, along with many
  9551	other physicalists, that experience is ‘really just neurons firing’, at least
  9552	in the case of biological organisms like ourselves. But when he says these
  9553	words he means something radically different from what almost all
  9554	physicalists mean. He does not mean that all characteristics of what is
  9555	going on, in the case of experience, can be described by physics and
  9556	neurophysiology (or any non-revolutionary extensions of them). His
  9557	claim is stunningly different. It’s that experiential phenomena “just are”
  9558	physical, so that there is a lot more to neurons than physics and
  9559	neurophysiology account for (or can account for). No one who disagrees
  9560	with this, he says, is a “real physicalist.” This is Strawson’s challenge.
  9561	Reviewing Strawson’s book subtitled, “Does Physicalism Entail
  9562	Panpsychism?”, philosopher Jerry Fodor shares Strawson’s intuition
  9563	that the hard problem is “not going to get solved for free” and “views
  9564	that we cherish will be damaged in the process.” Fodor concludes, “If
  9565	you want an idea of just how hard the hard problem is, and just how
       
  9566	14.4. Strawson’s realistic monism and real materialism
  9567	In defining an all-pervading materialism, encompassing all mental as
  9568	well as all physical properties and objects, philosopher Galen Strawson
  9569	espouses his kind of monism, “Realistic Monism,” as he calls it
  9570	(Strawson, 2009). “I’m attracted to the thing-monist view,” he says,
  9571	“according to which the universe is a single thing in some non-trivial
  9572	sense” (Strawson, 2020a). His principal thesis is “the primacy of pan­
  9573	psychism” and he claims “compelling reasons for favoring panpsychism
  9574	above all other positive substantive proposals about the fundamental
  9575	nature of concrete reality” (Strawson, 2020b).
  9576	Strawson deconstructs the concept and use of the term
       
  9577	47
       
  9578	Strawson uses “physicalism” and “materialism” interchangeably as onto­
  9579	logical descriptors, though at one point preferring “physicalism” because
  9580	“matter” is now specially associated with mass-energy while “physical” is more
  9581	encompassing. For the uses of “materialism” and “physicalism” in this paper,
  9582	see Footnote 12.
  9583	106
       
  9584	R.L. Kuhn
       
  9585	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  9586	strange things can look when you face its hardness without flinching,
  9587	this [Strawson’s book] is the right book to read” (Fodor, 2007).
       
  9588	human soul is. The soul is the information-bearing pattern; that’s the
  9589	real me” (Polkinghorne, 2007).
  9590	Thus, Polkinghorne reconceives the “soul” as an information-bearing
  9591	pattern that is encoded by and carried in the body/brain, and which is
  9592	dissolved at death along with the dissolution of the body. However, this
  9593	unique pattern, this real me, is retained in the divine memory for reembodiment at the resurrection of the dead (Polkinghorne, 2003).
  9594	During this post-death, pre-resurrection state, this (reconceived) “soul”
  9595	has no consciousness and no awareness.
  9596	“God will remember the pattern, not lose it,” Polkinghorne says, and
  9597	ultimately, God “will reconstitute that pattern in an act of resurrection.”
  9598	That’s the continuity side of things. The discontinuity side, Pol­
  9599	kinghorne says, “is that I’m not made alive again in order to die again, so
  9600	while I’m going to be embodied, I must be embodied in some new form
  9601	of matter. And it is perfectly coherent to believe that God can bring into
  9602	being such a new form of matter” (Polkinghorne, 2007).
  9603	To Richard Swinburne, the idea of afterlife existence germinating
  9604	from a renewed instantiation of the pattern of information that we had
  9605	when living on Earth is problematic. "The trouble is not merely how
  9606	could God, if God so chose, bring into [renewed] existence a being with a
  9607	specific pattern of information, but rather that God could [therefore]
  9608	bring into existence a few thousand such beings. But because only one of
  9609	them could be me, a pattern of information provides no additional cri­
  9610	terion for distinguishing which one that would be. And whatever the
  9611	extra criterion is, it would have to be such that there [logically] could
  9612	only be one instance of it at one time. And if we have such a criterion,
  9613	then what need is there for the pattern of information to be the same as a
  9614	previous pattern?" (Swinburne, 2016; Kuhn, 2016b).
       
  9615	14.5. Polkinghorne’s dual-aspect monism
  9616	To mathematical physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne,
  9617	the psychosomatic nature of human persons is best understood in terms
  9618	of a “dual-aspect monism,” in which matter and mind are complemen­
  9619	tary aspects of a unitary being (Polkinghorne, 2009). He is sure that
  9620	we’re not simply matter, that reality is more than just ideas, and that
  9621	none of the classical solutions seem to correspond to our experience.
  9622	In fact, Polkinghorne argues that classical materialism, idealism and
  9623	Cartesian dualism all exhibit a bankruptcy in the face of the manylayered, and yet interconnected, character of our encounter with re­
  9624	ality. This recognition encourages the search for some form of dualaspect monism—similar theories are called “double-aspect theo­
  9625	ries”—an account that would acknowledge the fundamental distinction
  9626	between experience of the material and experience of the mental but
  9627	which would neither impose on reality a sharp division into two un­
  9628	connected kinds of substance nor deny the psychosomatic unity of
  9629	human beings (Polkinghorne, 2001).
  9630	Dual-aspect monism is designed to take seriously both our mental
  9631	experiences and the material world. It claims that they are related in a
  9632	very deep and complementary way in that there is only one stuff in the
  9633	world. Dual-aspect monism seeks to avoid devaluing or subordinating
  9634	either side. Polkinghorne rejects the charge that dual-aspect monism is a
  9635	subtle form of materialism, because, he says, “It doesn’t treat the mental
  9636	as being just an epiphenomenon of the material” (Harris, 1998).
  9637	To give physical systems the kind of freedom and top-down control
  9638	that he desires, Polkinghorne recruits complexity theory, with its dual­
  9639	ities of parts/whole and energy/information. The intrinsic un­
  9640	predictabilities present in nature, he states, afford the metaphysical
  9641	opportunity to consider dissipative systems as exhibiting top–down
  9642	causality (Polkinghorne, 2009).
  9643	Given that in dual-aspect monism there cannot be a nonphysical soul,
  9644	much less an immortal soul, how does Polkinghorne account for the
  9645	eschatological requirements of his strong Christian faith, especially the
  9646	biblical resurrection of the dead? How might resurrecting the body and
  9647	reconstituting the “soul” work?
  9648	Speaking on Closer To Truth, Polkinghorne asks, "Can you make
  9649	credible understanding of a destiny beyond death for human beings?"
  9650	From his theological perspective, he sets two equal and opposite re­
  9651	quirements for the afterlife of a soul: continuity, in that the same person
  9652	must live after death, and discontinuity, in that the afterlife-person must
  9653	live on forever (Section: Polkinghorne, 2007).
  9654	“There is not much point in making Abraham, Isaac and Jacob alive
  9655	again if they are going to die again,” he says. “So, you must have both
  9656	continuity and discontinuity. Now when you think about the continuity
  9657	side, what could make those people the same as the ones who lived on
  9658	earth before? The traditional answer has been the soul, often understood
  9659	in platonic terms—there is some sort of spiritual bit of us liberated at
  9660	death that exists and carries on.”
  9661	Polkinghorne has none of that. “I think that’s a mistake,” he says.
  9662	“We are animated bodies, not animated souls. We’re not apprentice
  9663	angels; we are embodied human beings. But if we’ve lost our ‘spiritual
  9664	soul’ [as a resource], have we lost our continuity? I don’t think so, but
  9665	we have to reconceive the soul.”
  9666	Polkinghorne focuses on the carrier of continuity for a person in this
  9667	life. “It’s quite difficult,” he says; “here am I, an aging, balding aca­
  9668	demic—what makes me the same person as that little boy with the shock
  9669	of black hair in the school photograph of many years ago? It’s not
  9670	atomic-material continuity: the atoms in my body are totally different
  9671	than the atoms in that schoolboy’s body.”
  9672	“It cannot be the atoms,” he continues, “but it is the pattern of how
  9673	some of those atoms are organized, in some extraordinary, elaborate,
  9674	and complex way.” That, Polkinghorne states, is “what I think the
       
  9675	14.6. Teilhard de Cardin’s evolving consciousness
  9676	The Jesuit philosopher/theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teil­
  9677	hard de Chardin envisioned the evolution of consciousness as axial in a
  9678	grand cosmic system of continuing complexification where conscious­
  9679	ness becomes planetized and even “God” is an emergent in a process of
  9680	“theogenesis” (Delio, 2020). Teilhard helped coin the concept of a
  9681	“noosphere,” describing “the layer of mind, thought and spirit within the
  9682	layer of life covering the earth” (Teilhard de Chardin, 1964).
  9683	According to theologian (and former neuroscientist) Ilia Delio,
  9684	Teilhard has the total material universe "in movement toward a greater
  9685	unified convergence” such that “as life systems unite and form more
  9686	complex relationships, consciousness rises.” Teilhard, she says, “speaks
  9687	of evolution as the rise of consciousness toward a hyper-personalized
  9688	organism, what he called an irreversible personalizing universe.” He
  9689	speaks of “the human person as a co-creator. God evolves the universe
  9690	and brings it to its completion through the human person.” Now the
  9691	computer, according to Teilhard, “has evoked a new level of shared
  9692	consciousness, a level of cybernetic mind giving rise to a field of global
  9693	mind through interconnecting pathways” (foreshadowing the internet)
  9694	(Delio, 2021).
  9695	Teilhard was a dual-aspect monist. He “considered matter and con­
  9696	sciousness not as two substances or two different modes of existence, but
  9697	as two aspects of the same cosmic stuff.” Mind and matter “are neither
  9698	separate nor is one reducible to the other, and yet neither can function
  9699	without the other.” From the Big Bang onward, Delio says, Teilhard has
  9700	“a ‘withinness’ and ‘withoutness,’ or what he called radial energy and
  9701	tangential energy. Consciousness is, in a sense, the withinness or ‘inside’
  9702	of matter, and attraction is the ‘outside’ of matter; hence, the energy of
  9703	matter is both attractive (tangential) and transcendent (radial).” The
  9704	complementarity of mind and matter is said “to explain both the rise of
  9705	biological complexity and the corresponding rise of consciousness.”
  9706	Teilhard identifies “the core energy of the universe as love, which both
  9707	unifies and transcends by way of consciousness. The greater the exterior
  9708	levels of physical complexity, the greater the interior levels of con­
  9709	sciousness” (Delio, 2021).
  9710	To Teilhard, evolution describes “the dynamic impulse in life toward
  9711	107
       
  9712	R.L. Kuhn
       
  9713	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  9714	more being and consciousness” and that which drives evolution is con­
  9715	sciousness. In short, “evolution is the rise of consciousness.” Following
  9716	Julian Huxley, he writes that the human person “is nothing else than
  9717	evolution become conscious of itself”—and adds, “The consciousness of
  9718	each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself”
  9719	(Teilhard de Chardin, 1959). The human person is “the point of emer­
  9720	gence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and
  9721	declares itself” (Delio, 2021).
  9722	Moreover, “the presence of mind in matter and the openness of
  9723	matter to greater wholeness is the religious phenomenon of nature.”
  9724	Radically unorthodox, Teilhard sees this reality as the incarnation of
  9725	God, where “God and world are in a process of becoming a new reality
  9726	together.” Simply put, Delio says, “we cannot speak of God apart from
  9727	human evolution, an idea that led Teilhard to state that God and world
  9728	form a complementary pair. God and world are entangled with one
  9729	another to the extent that talk of God is impossible apart from talk about
  9730	nature and creative change, and talk of nature makes no sense apart
  9731	from God” (Delio, 2021).
  9732	In summary, Teilhard describes “matter as the matrix of conscious­
  9733	ness.” He posits “the law of complexity-consciousness” as a fundamental
  9734	principle of evolution, and conversely, “evolution is fundamentally the
  9735	rise of consciousness.” Moreover, the human person is “evolution
  9736	become conscious of itself,” with the ultimate goal of “the maximization
  9737	of thought” whereby consciousness radiates “throughout the whole, in
  9738	every aspect of the cosmos,” and then of “self-reflective consciousness,”
  9739	whereby “the human person can stand apart from the world and reflect
  9740	on it” (Delio, 2023, pp. 30–32).
  9741	Finally, the foundation of Teilhard’s paradigm is “Omega,” which he
  9742	sees as the “prime mover of evolution,” the unifying power in evolution.
  9743	Omega works its guiding magic from the very beginning of things,
  9744	“acting on pre-living cosmic elements,” moving into consciousness as it
  9745	emerged as the goal toward which evolution complexifies and con­
  9746	verges. “Omega is the absolute whole,” making “wholeness in nature not
  9747	only possible but also intensely personal. Teilhard identifies Omega with
  9748	God” (Delio, 2023, p. 35).
       
  9749	conjecture by quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and analytical psy­
  9750	chologist Carl Jung on the concept of synchronicity and draws on
  9751	dual-aspect elements from the two disciplines (17.2; Double-aspect
  9752	theory, 2023)
  9753	In other words, Atmanspacher’s dual-aspect theory hypothesizes that
  9754	mental and material manifestations may inherit mutual correlations
  9755	because they are jointly caused by the psychophysically neutral level.
  9756	Such correlations, he says, would be “remnants reflecting the lost holism
  9757	of the underlying reality” (Atmanspacher, 2020a).
  9758	Atmanspacher and philosopher of physics Dean Rickles extend the
  9759	metaphysical position of dual-aspect monism by aligning “the deep
  9760	structure of meaning” as “a fundamental feature of the nature of reality,”
  9761	stressing that “the decompositional version of dual-aspect monism
  9762	considers the mental and the physical as two aspects of one underlying
  9763	undivided reality that is psychophysically neutral.” Crediting their
  9764	forerunners (Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung, Arthur Eddington, John
  9765	Wheeler, David Bohm, and Basil Hiley), the authors “reconstruct the
  9766	formal structure of these approaches, and compare their conceptual
  9767	emphases as well as their relative strengths and weaknesses.” Their
  9768	intent is to establish dual-aspect monism as a scientifically and philo­
  9769	sophically robust alternative to physicalism, dualism and idealism
  9770	(Atmanspacher and Rickles, 2022).
  9771	14.8. Ramachandran’s new physics and neuroscience
  9772	Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran states that the question of con­
  9773	sciousness cannot be answered “in any obvious terms.” Most neurosci­
  9774	entists don’t think about the question of consciousness, as it doesn’t
  9775	typically arise in neuroscience or in physics. But, he says, the ancient
  9776	Vedic texts of India do address the problem of consciousness, the
  9777	problem of qualia (Section: Ramachandran, 2019).
  9778	“Physics, by definition, is a third-person description of the world; its
  9779	laws have no subjective quality at all.” Physics has different wavelengths
  9780	of electromagnetic radiation, but “you see colors: where does these come
  9781	from? Consciousness emerges only in a first-person description of the
  9782	world. I see red; not red is seen by me. I see red!”
  9783	“How can physics, including neuroscience, be a complete description
  9784	of the world if it excludes my primary sensory experience, if it does not
  9785	admit a first-person perspective?” Ramachandran asks. (He considers
  9786	neuroscience a branch of physics.) “That I’m looking at the cosmos from
  9787	here now has no privileged status in science. For me, I have a privileged
  9788	status. How is that possible? That’s the problem.”
  9789	“We need a new hybrid discipline, physics and neuroscience, that
  9790	includes consciousness,” Ramachandran asserts. “Consciousness is part
  9791	of reality, but how it entwines with physical laws needs to be explored”
  9792	(Ramachandran, 2019).
       
  9793	14.7. Atmanspacher’s dual-aspect monism
  9794	Physicist-philosopher Harald Atmanspacher presents mind and
  9795	matter, mental and material domains of reality, as manifestations, or
  9796	aspects, of one underlying, fundamental reality in which mind and
  9797	matter are inseparable. He distinguishes between the epistemic
  9798	discernment of both the separate domains and the underlying reality,
  9799	and the ontic existence of the “psychophysically neutral domain”
  9800	(Atmanspacher, 2020a).
  9801	He also distinguishes two classes of dual-aspect theories based on
  9802	“the way in which the psychophysically neutral domain is related to the
  9803	mental and the physical.” In Russellian monisms, “the compositional
  9804	arrangements of psychophysically neutral elements decide how they
  9805	differ with respect to mental or physical properties. As a consequence,
  9806	the mental and the physical are reducible to the neutral domain”
  9807	(Atmanspacher, 2020a).
  9808	Whereas in decompositional dual-aspect theories, “the basic meta­
  9809	physics of the psychophysically neutral domain is holistic, and the
  9810	mental and the physical (neither reducible to one another nor to the
  9811	neutral) emerge by breaking the holistic symmetry or, in other words, by
  9812	making distinctions. This framework is guided by the analogy to quan­
  9813	tum holism …. [which is] based on speculations that clearly exceed the
  9814	scope of contemporary quantum theory.”
  9815	Atmanspacher establishes connections between the ontic and
  9816	epistemic domains of dual-aspect theory and David Bohm’s famous
  9817	notions of implicate and explicate order (11.3). “Mental and physical
  9818	states emerge by explication, or unfoldment, from an ultimately undi­
  9819	vided and psychophysically neutral implicate, enfolded order.” This
  9820	order is dynamic, not static, as in Whitehead’s process philosophy
  9821	(Atmanspacher, 2020a). Atmanspacher finds dual-aspect potency in the
       
  9822	14.9. Tegmark’s state of matter
  9823	Physicist Max Tegmark speculates that “the subjective experience
  9824	that we call consciousness is the way information feels when being
  9825	processed in certain complex ways,” and he comes to this strong phys­
  9826	icalist view because his starting point is that “It’s all physics.” This
  9827	means, he says, “I’m not allowed to have any extra ‘secret sauce’ to add
  9828	to the physical world and brain. Thus, explaining consciousness is much
  9829	harder for me, but at the same time, it [i.e., the physicalist constraint]
  9830	limits or focuses my work to or on very concrete problems” (Tegmark,
  9831	2014a).
  9832	Clearly, Tegmark says, “there must be some additional principle
  9833	about information processing in nature that distinguishes between the
  9834	conscious kind and the unconscious kind.” “I would love to find it,” he
  9835	continues, “not just because it’s philosophically fascinating, but because
  9836	it’s important. Assessing consciousness is a critical need, whether in
  9837	caring for comatose patients or in communicating with super-advanced
  9838	AI” (Tegmark, 2014a).
  9839	Tegmark examines the hypothesis that consciousness can be
  9840	108
       
  9841	R.L. Kuhn
       
  9842	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  9843	understood as a “state of matter,” “perceptronium", as he coins it, with
  9844	distinctive information-processing abilities (Tegmark, 2015). Assuming
  9845	that consciousness is a property of certain physical systems, with no
  9846	“secret sauce" or non-physical elements, and given that the key differ­
  9847	ence between a solid, a liquid and a gas lies not in the types of atoms, but
  9848	in their arrangement, he conjectures that consciousness can be under­
  9849	stood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of
  9850	liquids, he says, there are many types of consciousness.
  9851	To distinguish conscious matter from other physical states of matter,
  9852	Tegmark explores four basic principles: “the information, integration,
  9853	independence, and dynamics principles.” These principles may identify
  9854	conscious entities, account for our three-dimensional world, even
  9855	involve the emergence of time. Tegmark’s approach generalizes Giulio
  9856	Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (12) for neural-network-based
  9857	consciousness as well as for arbitrary quantum systems.
  9858	Founded on his concept that mathematics is the ultimate nature of
  9859	reality (Tegmark, 2014b, 2014c, 2014d), Tegmark’s quest is to better
  9860	understand the internal reality of our mind and the external reality of
  9861	our universe, such that they will hopefully co-explain or at least assist
  9862	each other. This view sits somewhat apart from most materialist theories
  9863	of consciousness, in which the emergence of consciousness is a contin­
  9864	gency of evolution.
       
  9865	Theory (12), which QRI calls the first mainstream theory of conscious­
  9866	ness to satisfy a Qualia Formalist account of experience. QRI leverages
  9867	the idea from Integrated Information Theory that for every conscious
  9868	experience, there is a corresponding mathematical object such that the
  9869	mathematical features of that object are isomorphic to the properties of
  9870	the experience, and that without this idea, no matter the neurobiological
  9871	theory, we cannot solve the hard problem of consciousness (Qualia
  9872	Research Institute, n.d.).
  9873	14.11. Bentley Hart’s monism: consciousness, being, God
  9874	Philosopher, theological scholar, and intellectual provocateur, David
  9875	Bentley Hart, constructs an ultimate unified monism, first by showing
  9876	that consciousness/mind and being/existence are profoundly insever­
  9877	able. He argues that “rational thought and coherent order are two sides
  9878	of a single reality,” and that only by embracing God “as the absolute
  9879	unity of consciousness and being,” can the one ontological reality be
  9880	confirmed (Hart, 2022b). In a sense, it is a higher-order monism.
  9881	Oversimplified, an idealist form of panpsychism (Hart, 2021a).
  9882	Hart is not a timorous monist: “At the end of the day, I’m a monist as
  9883	any sane person is … any metaphysics that is coherent is ultimately
  9884	reducible to a monism” (Hart, 2024).
  9885	Unsurprisingly, Hart is a fierce critic of materialism (Hart, 2019a):
  9886	“The incommensurability between physical causation and mental events
  9887	is so vast that one can confidently assume that no purely physical
  9888	explanation of their relation will ever succeed” (Hart, 2021a). He argues
  9889	that it would be very odd to claim that physiology and mental agency
  9890	can be characterized within the same “mereological hierarchy.” Far
  9891	from being inverse descriptions of one and the same causal structure, he
  9892	says, “the causal description peculiar to each sphere—the material and
  9893	the mental—is not even vaguely similar to that peculiar to the other. If
  9894	the mental merely supervened physically upon the material, in the way
  9895	the shape of the wheel supervenes upon the wheel’s iron molecules, it is
  9896	impossible coherently to conceive of that miraculous conjugation as
  9897	merely a structural extension of inherent physical propensities. Here
  9898	each level operates in ways radically disparate from—even contrary
  9899	to—the ways in which the other operates. Material structures and forces,
  9900	if the reductionist picture of nature is correct, are composite, frag­
  9901	mentable, non-purposive, non-intentional, and essentially third-person;
  9902	mental agency, by contrast, is indivisibly unified, physically infrangible,
  9903	thoroughly teleological, inherently intentional, and irreducibly
  9904	first-person (that is, conscious)” (Hart, 2019a, 2022a, 2022d).
  9905	Hart is certain that “nothing like an actual science of mental reality
  9906	will ever be conceivable (much less practicable) so long as the culture of
  9907	the sciences clings to a belief in the principle of the ‘causal closure of the
  9908	physical’” (Hart, 2021b). He rejects irreducible emergence as “logical
  9909	nonsense; whatever properties appear in an effect, unless imposed
  9910	adventitiously, are already implicit in its ‘lower’ causes, even if only as a
  9911	kind of virtual intentionality.” He avers that “‘Strong emergence’ is
  9912	either a myth, a category error, or a truth so bizarre as to suggest that
  9913	truth as such is impenetrable to reason; to invoke such a principle is to
  9914	say nothing” (Hart, 2022a). He recommends reconsidering “something
  9915	like causal language proposed in Aristotelian tradition” (Hart, 2022b).
  9916	Hart’s intuition is that “The conditions necessary for knowledge of
  9917	the world and the conditions necessary for the world’s existence as an
  9918	object of knowledge at any number of vital points seem insensibly to
  9919	merge into a single reality, a single act,” a simplicity and an ultimacy, he
  9920	says, that cannot be found within nature as a closed totality and cannot
  9921	be consistent with any physicalist theory of the world. It becomes
  9922	impossible not to wonder, he continues, “whether the only properly
  9923	empirical approach to the question of mental reality should begin with a
  9924	radically different kind of methodological bracketing: one that suspends
  9925	every presupposition regarding a real distinction between epistemology
  9926	and ontology.”
  9927	He continues, “At least, we should never refuse to reflect upon the
  9928	ancient metaphysical quandary of whether being and consciousness are
       
  9929	14.10. Qualia Research Institute’s state-space, qualia formalism, valence
  9930	realism
  9931	The Qualia Research Institute (QRI), a not-for-profit pursuing unique
  9932	approaches to the science of consciousness, stresses “Qualia Formalism,”
  9933	the hypothesis that the internal structure of our subjective experience
  9934	can be represented precisely by mathematics, and “Valence Realism,”
  9935	the central importance of emotion/affect, that is, valence (how good or
  9936	bad an experience feels) as a real and well-defined property of conscious
  9937	states (Qualia Research Institute). Within the formalism, symmetry is
  9938	said to play a significant compositional, functional, and aesthetic role. It
  9939	is called the Symmetry Theory of Valence (proposed by philosopher
  9940	Michael Edward Johnson): the symmetry of an information geometry of
  9941	mind corresponds with how pleasant or unpleasant it is to be (or have)
  9942	that experience. (“The biggest mystery hiding in plain sight is what gives
  9943	experiences valence.”) (Johnson, 2023).
  9944	The key QRI move (or assumption) is that every distinct state of
  9945	conscious experience is unique and can be described mathematically;
  9946	the number of such states, a “combinatorial explosion of unexpected
  9947	phenomena,” is an unimaginably vast (but not infinite) “state-space of
  9948	consciousness,” which is an independent, quasi-dimensional aspect of
  9949	reality that grows “supergeometrically.” It is the specific geometry of
  9950	each state-space of consciousness that is the conscious percept; each
  9951	experience would correspond to a single point in the state-space of
  9952	consciousness; the set of all possible experiences are organized in such a
  9953	way that the similarities between experiences are encoded in the ge­
  9954	ometry of the state-space; and the degrees of symmetry or lack of sym­
  9955	metry of the geometry reflect the balance of positive and negative
  9956	valence, both reflecting brain harmonics which somehow interact with
  9957	the quasi-dimensional state-space and its symmetries (Shinozuka,
  9958	2020). (The “state-space of consciousness” resonates with a similar kind
  9959	of structure in Integrated Information Theory, 12.)
  9960	QRI says its position is close to dual-aspect monism or neutral
  9961	monism. It is committed to an extended physicalism in the sense that
  9962	extended laws of physics ultimately must describe fields of qualia.
  9963	Included is the idea that emotional valence (the pleasantness/unpleas­
  9964	antness of an experience) is a natural kind, a real division of the world
  9965	carved at its joints, which is said to provide substantial information
  9966	about phenomenology (Qualia Research Institute, n.d.).
  9967	QRI rejects functionalism as creating confusion but considers exotic
  9968	states of consciousness as important data points for reverse-engineering
  9969	the underlying formalism for consciousness. As noted, QRI is most
  9970	compatible with, but not synonymous with, Integrated Information
  9971	109
       
  9972	R.L. Kuhn
       
  9973	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
  9974	featured quantum computations, computers which weren’t quantum
  9975	computers, might be incapable of such knowledge.
  9976	Leslie concludes, “Innumerable further things worth contemplating
  9977	would exist inside each infinite mind, many of them quite unlike our
  9978	universe and its living beings. Examples could be utterly lifeless uni­
  9979	verses; universes very unlike ours in their physical laws, or obeying no
  9980	laws at all; countless things of interest or of beauty, each not forming
  9981	part of any universe” (Leslie, 2001).
       
  9982	ever truly severable from one another.” To exist fully, he says, is “to be
  9983	manifest to consciousness,” and “there is no such thing as ontological
  9984	coherence that is not a rational coherence,” such that the irreducibility
  9985	of mind to physical causes and the irreducibility of being to physical
  9986	events are one and the same irreducibility. There is a point then, Hart
  9987	argues, “at which being and intelligibility become conceptually indis­
  9988	tinguishable” and “being in itself is pure intelligibility” (Hart, 2022b).
  9989	Given that “world and mind really are open to one another,” Hart
  9990	accords “a certain causal priority to mind over matter in our picture of
  9991	reality” in that materialism would have more difficulty to account for
  9992	consciousness than consciousness would for matter.
  9993	Hart invokes Bernard Lonergan’s argument that the “unrestricted
  9994	intelligibility” of reality leads to God as the one “unrestricted act of
  9995	understanding.” The ascent towards ever greater knowledge is, Hart
  9996	says, “an ascent towards an ultimate encounter with limitless con­
  9997	sciousness, limitless reason, a transcendent reality where being and
  9998	knowledge are always already one and the same, and so inalienable from
  9999	one another” (Hart, 2022b).
 10000	“A restricted instance of that unrestricted act,” Hart says, is his “best
 10001	definition of mind.” He then goes to God, reasoning that “every act of
 10002	conscious, unified, intentional mind is necessarily dependent upon
 10003	infinite mind—which is to say, God.” God, then, is “the logical order of
 10004	all reality, the ground both of the subjective rationality of mind and the
 10005	objective rationality of being …. the one ontological reality of reason as
 10006	it exists both in thought and in the structure of the universe” (Hart,
 10007	2019b, 2022b).
 10008	The final step in forming Hart’s ultimate monism will seem strange to
 10009	most, blasphemous to some: taking consciousness and being, already
 10010	one and the same, and unifying it with God, to become, all together, the
 10011	ultimate one and the same. This is not pantheism (or panentheism), but
 10012	based on Hart’s Orthodox Christian convictions, a Christological
 10013	monism. He quotes Maximus the Confessor, who says, “in the union with
 10014	God, we ultimately are destined to become uncreated.” In Hart’s ulti­
 10015	mate monism, “God doesn’t become God, but God in those who are
 10016	becoming God” (Hart, 2022c).
       
 10017	15. Dualisms
 10018	Dualism is the theory of consciousness that requires two radically
 10019	distinct parts: a physical brain, obviously, but also in addition, a sepa­
 10020	rate, nonphysical substance that is not only independent of the brain but
 10021	also not of the physical world (as presently conceived). This would mean
 10022	that reality consists of (at least) two ontological categories—physical
 10023	and nonphysical, whether substances, properties, aspects, dimensions or
 10024	planes of existence. Dualism is often called “substance dualism,” to
 10025	distinguish it from “property dualism,” which is ontologically different
 10026	(15.1). In general usage, “dualism” means substance dualism.
 10027	For dualism to be true, what follows must be that the physical world,
 10028	at its most fundamental level of fields and forces, is not in some way
 10029	causally closed, and that mental properties play a causal role in affecting
 10030	the physical world. This perspective, often called interactionism, provides
 10031	that physical states cause phenomenal states, and phenomenal states
 10032	cause physical states, and whatever psychophysical laws there may be
 10033	will operate in both directions (Chalmers, 2003; 15.8).
 10034	Common forms of dualism identify the essence of the person with a
 10035	nonphysical “soul,” generally an immortal soul. This kind of “soulcentered dualism” is also the theory of consciousness most widely
 10036	believed by the vast majority of the world’s population, largely
 10037	implicitly via acculturation to belief systems, whether organized reli­
 10038	gion or folk traditions. Dualism (substance dualism), certainly, is the
 10039	default doctrine in the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and
 10040	Islam.
 10041	Dualism is largely rejected by philosophers, at least by most pro­
 10042	fessional philosophers in the West48 (PhilPapers Survey, 2009, 2020).
 10043	Dualism has fallen out of philosophical favor for at least four reasons. (i)
 10044	No Interactions: given the scientific understanding that the physical
 10045	world is a causally closed system in that every event has a prior, phys­
 10046	ically efficient cause, how could anything outside such a closed system
 10047	affect it? (Goff, 2020). (ii) Not Parsimonious: two kinds of world stuffs
 10048	seem excessively complex; Occam’s razor cuts unnecessary entities in
 10049	explanations. (iii) No Knowledge: souls are slippery; how to know
 10050	anything about how they work? (iv) Fading Divine Creator: With God
 10051	less prominent in academia, there seems one less way to create or
 10052	allocate souls.
 10053	In trying to characterize souls (assuming for a moment that souls do
 10054	exist), we ask questions. Are all souls exactly the same, as all electrons in
 10055	the electron quantum field are the same? Are souls undifferentiated
 10056	(everyone gets the same “starter kit”), or specially tailored to each in­
 10057	dividual? Are souls created by God? Or are souls the inevitable, auto­
 10058	matic product of a set of deep psychophysical laws; in other words, given
 10059	specific, complex structures of atoms, do souls pop into existence? Or are
 10060	souls always existing, part of a cosmic consciousness—journeying,
 10061	reincarnating, transitioning, transforming, reincarnating ….?
 10062	Notably, because consciousness, under dualism, would require both
       
 10063	14.12. Leslie’s consciousness inside an infinite mind
 10064	Philosopher John Leslie suggests that ethical requirements, when not
 10065	overruled by stronger ethical requirements, are creatively effective. The
 10066	cosmos they create is a collection of infinitely many minds, each infinite
 10067	mind eternally conscious of all that’s worth contemplating. Our universe
 10068	is a structure inside one such mind, its reality consisting simply in its
 10069	being contemplated. (Infinitely many finer universes might join our
 10070	universe in that mind’s consciousness, but it does at least deserve its
 10071	place there.) (Leslie, 2001).
 10072	How, though, would one’s own consciousness fit into this scenario?
 10073	Well, each infinite mind is “a single existent” in this sense, that its in­
 10074	gredients stand to it somewhat as a ruby’s shape and its redness stand to
 10075	the ruby; they couldn’t exist independently, any more than could the
 10076	particles in the Bose-Einstein condensates described by quantum phys­
 10077	ics. But despite how all the parts of each universe which any such mind
 10078	contemplated would exist—remember, solely through entering into that
 10079	mind’s contemplations—some of those parts could each have con­
 10080	sciousness of its own. They could be conscious brains, or conscious
 10081	computers. Being inside the existential unity of that mind wouldn’t
 10082	make these know that it was there that they existed, or what other things
 10083	existed there. Conscious, when it contemplated us, of every quark and
 10084	electron of your brain and mine, that mind could leave us in ignorance
 10085	even of each other’s existence (Leslie, 2001).
 10086	Similarly, our lives from birth to death could be eternally present to
 10087	that mind’s awareness whereas we could only guess what would fill our
 10088	next few hours. Still, one’s consciousness might itself be existentially
 10089	unified at any given moment, perhaps thanks to quantum-physical
 10090	processes. This could explain how the entirety of a painting, for
 10091	instance, can be known in a single glance. Brains without regions that
       
 10092	48
 10093	The first PhilPapers Survey of philosophy faculty and PhDs, conducted in
 10094	2009, reported: Accept or lean toward: Physicalism, 56.5%; Non-physicalism,
 10095	25.9%; Other, 16.4%. (Bourget and Chalmers, 2009; PhilPapers Survey,
 10096	2009). The latest Survey in 2020 showed a modest but meaningful shift away
 10097	from Physicalism (51.93%) and toward Non-physicalism (32.08%); Other,
 10098	about the same (16.56%) (Bourget and Chalmers, 2023; PhilPapers Survey,
 10099	2020).
       
 10100	110
       
 10101	R.L. Kuhn
       
 10102	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 10103	a non-physical substance and a physical brain (somehow working
 10104	together), it is conceivable, following the death of the body and the
 10105	dissolution of the brain, that this nonphysical substance by itself could
 10106	maintain some kind of existence, conscious or otherwise. (Although this
 10107	nonphysical substance is traditionally called a “soul”—a term laden with
 10108	theological burdens—a soul is not the only kind of thing, or form, that
 10109	such a nonphysical substance could be.)
 10110	Philosopher Dean Zimmerman reviews “a spectrum of dualisms,”
 10111	resulting from different meanings of “nonphysical”. Are souls simple,
 10112	with no parts, or composite, with internal components (whether fixed or
 10113	flexible)? To pose an extreme, could souls be abstract objects, outside of
 10114	space and time, necessary existents? Most dualists would have souls as
 10115	concrete, nonphysical objects. Some would even have souls extended in
 10116	space, sharing the same special coordinate system as bodies
 10117	(Zimmerman, 2005).
 10118	David Bentley Hart welcomes confrontation by claiming that most
 10119	early modern scientists were better able to understand the mind-body
 10120	problem than are many in the sciences today. The 17th century solu­
 10121	tion to the seeming irreconcilability of mind and matter was “to adopt a
 10122	casual and contented dualism, allowing the mental and the physical
 10123	each its own discrete autonomous sphere: nature, not being teleological
 10124	or intentional in any way, is nothing like mind; mind, not being com­
 10125	posite, purposeless, and impersonal, is nothing like nature.” The two can
 10126	somehow interact, probably, Hart suggests, through the sheer power of
 10127	God, but “neither is reducible or even qualitatively similar to the other.”
 10128	Hart recognizes the inherent problems in describing “any kind of
 10129	coherent ontological, causal, or epistemological continuity between the
 10130	two spheres”—Hart himself is a monist (14.11)—“it [dualism] was no­
 10131	where near so magnificent a disaster as the later, materialistically
 10132	monistic attempts to reduce mental events to mechanical [processes]
 10133	have so far proved” (Hart, 2019a, 2021a).
 10134	To Galen Strawson, “Dualists who postulate two distinct substances
 10135	while holding that they interact causally not only face the old and
 10136	seemingly insuperable problem of how to give an honest account of this
 10137	interaction. They also face the (even more difficult) problem of justi­
 10138	fying the claim that there are two substances.” To think that dualism has
 10139	anything in its favor, Strawson asserts, “is simply to reveal that one
 10140	thinks one knows more about the nature of things than one does—and it
 10141	has Occam’s razor (that blunt, sharp instrument) against it” (Strawson,
 10142	2008). The dualism theories that follow in this section challenge this
 10143	denial.
 10144	Jaron Lanier says, “You’ve got two choices. Either you know
 10145	everything [about consciousness], or you organize your ignorance in
 10146	some intelligent and organized manner. Dualism is the most honest
 10147	manner of organizing your ignorance, okay?” (Lanier, 2007b).
 10148	As noted, Closer To Truth viewers regularly send me diverse theories
 10149	related to consciousness, some just ideas, some elaborate systems, and
 10150	occasionally they are hard to classify. For example, a consciousness
 10151	system operating independently of the central nervous system, consti­
 10152	tuted by “a Material B” (exhibiting “coupling properties” beyond the
 10153	boundaries of physics) and explored by “memory-related thought pro­
 10154	cesses” and “illogical nonlinear-thinking”49 (Ma et al., 2023).
 10155	It is well known that mental causation is a vexing problem for du­
 10156	alists. By what conceivable mechanism could nonphysical stuff effect
 10157	physical stuff? This is not a primary issue for this Landscape (15.8), but it
 10158	is for Dualism.
 10159	Again, the purpose of this section on Dualisms as a theory of con­
 10160	sciousness is to describe various kinds of dualism, not to argue in favor
 10161	or against (a self-imposed hurdle on which I occasionally trip).
       
 10162	15.1. Property dualism
 10163	Property Dualism is the idea that while there is only one kind of
 10164	substance in the world, physical substance, there are two kinds of
 10165	properties, mental and physical properties, such that mental properties
 10166	cannot be reduced to or explained by physical properties alone, even
 10167	though both kinds of properties are generated by the same physical
 10168	thing, namely brains. More specifically, property dualism maintains that
 10169	human persons are entirely physical objects, composed wholly by the
 10170	constituents of fundamental physics and subject only to the laws of
 10171	physics, but also they have, at the same time and equally inherent, nonphysical properties or aspects, namely mental properties or aspects
 10172	(thoughts, concepts, ideas) that are not reducible to, and not explainable
 10173	by, the properties of fundamental physics (and its special science
 10174	derivatives)—even though all of property dualism’s properties must
 10175	come from those constituents of fundamental physics. Simply, human
 10176	persons would have nonphysical properties but no nonphysical parts.
 10177	According to Dean Zimmerman (following Chalmers), property
 10178	dualism means that, “For at least some mental states, it is not possible to
 10179	define, in terms of microphysical properties alone, a physical property
 10180	common to all individuals in that mental state, and only to them.”
 10181	Property dualism, then, would be the failure of supervenience, which
 10182	states that “among all the possible individuals in all the possible worlds,
 10183	there is no pair with all the same microphysical properties but different
 10184	mental properties” (Zimmerman, 2005).
 10185	Zimmerman applies property dualism to two famous questions in
 10186	philosophy of mind: “It seems easy to imagine physically indiscernible
 10187	zombies (animate human bodies with no consciousness) or people
 10188	whose spectrum of color experiences is the reverse of one’s own. If
 10189	genuinely possible, these scenarios show that the mental does not su­
 10190	pervene upon the physical” (Zimmerman, 2005).
 10191	But in a wholly physical world, how could the mental not supervene
 10192	upon the physical? How could different mental states arise from pre­
 10193	cisely the same microphysical states (down to the most fundamental
 10194	physics)? If mental states can so arise, mustn’t something be missing, or
 10195	arbitrary, in the physical world? If mental states cannot so arise, what
 10196	then of property dualism?
 10197	To oversimplify, property dualism is dualistic only in its deep epis­
 10198	temology, not in its deep ontology, which remains entirely materi­
 10199	alistic—consciousness remains wholly the product of brain function.
 10200	Under property dualism, the mind still comes entirely from the brain,
 10201	without residue. When super-advanced neuroscience accounts for all
 10202	that can be known about the brain—though obviously it would be
 10203	fiendishly complex—will there be nothing left over to explain about the
 10204	mind?
 10205	Yet, property dualism has some mental properties as irreducible, a
 10206	move that perhaps help blunt attacks on materialist theories of con­
 10207	sciousness. (Property dualism shares features with Non-Reductive
 10208	Physicalism, 10.) But what does this really mean? How irreducible?
 10209	Irreducible in practice, for sure. But irreducible in principle? What
 10210	would an absolute complete science, from fundamental physics to
 10211	neuroscience, not capture?
 10212	Philosopher Ralph Weir evaluates the common preference in phi­
 10213	losophy of mind for varieties of property dualism over other alternatives
 10214	to physicalism and certainly over substance dualism. He argues that the
 10215	standard motivations for property dualism “lead directly to nonphysical
 10216	substances resembling the soul of traditional metaphysics.” Using the
 10217	conceivability of modal arguments for zombies and ghosts and
 10218	critiquing Russellian monist forms of property dualism, he concludes
 10219	that “if you posit nonphysical properties in response to the mind-body
 10220	problem, then you should be prepared to posit nonphysical substances
 10221	as well” (Weir, 2023).
 10222	Property dualism is the first subcategory under dualism because it is
 10223	the most materialistic, the least dualistic, of the bunch. While I appre­
 10224	ciate its important role in the development of philosophy of mind, I must
 10225	admit that I’ve never had it near top-of-list in the marketplace of
       
 10226	49
 10227	The three Chinese scientists are, inclusively, from Mainland China, Taiwan,
 10228	and the USA. It is good that consciousness can catalyze harmony.
       
 10229	111
       
 10230	R.L. Kuhn
       
 10231	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 10232	fundamental theories.
 10233	Peter van Inwagen muses that “‘property dualism’ is a very odd name
 10234	to give it.” His argument clarifies the essence of dualism itself. “If there
 10235	are non-physical substances, then physical and non-physical substances
 10236	(a cat and an angel, for example) are clean different kinds of thing.
 10237	Although they are both substances right enough, the division of the
 10238	category ‘substance’ into the sub-categories ‘physical’ and ‘non-phys­
 10239	ical’ is an ontologically significant division. We call Descartes and Plato
 10240	dualists because they think there are substances in both sub-categories. I
 10241	would suppose that ‘property dualists’ call themselves dualists because
 10242	they think that the division of properties into physical and non-physical
 10243	properties is an ontologically significant division of the category
 10244	‘property’, a division as significant as the physical/non-physical division
 10245	of the category ‘substance’. If this is so, I think that the self-chosen
 10246	description ‘property dualist’ indicates a metaphysical confusion in
 10247	the way property dualists conceive of properties” (Van Inwagen, 2007b).
 10248	Nonetheless, unlike much-disparaged substance dualism, property
 10249	dualism remains a respectable position within philosophy of mind
 10250	(Zimmerman, 2005).
       
 10251	asserts that in order to tell "the whole story of the world," one must "pick
 10252	out subjects of experience—not just by the experiences they have, not
 10253	just by the physical bodies with which they are associated" but also with
 10254	"separate mental entities for which the natural word is ’soul’ … If you
 10255	can’t bring ’soul’ into the account of the world, you will not tell the
 10256	whole story of the world, because you will not tell who has which
 10257	conscious life" (Swinburne, 2007; Swinburne, 2006).
 10258	"If the only things were physical objects, including bodies and brains,
 10259	we would not be able to distinguish a case where you have the body
 10260	which is presently yours and I have the body which is presently mine,
 10261	from the case where you have the body which is presently mine and I
 10262	have the body which is presently yours," he adds. "If physical properties
 10263	and mental properties were just properties of bodies there would be no
 10264	difference between these cases; " but because there are obvious differ­
 10265	ences between "you" and "me," Swinburne claims that "there must be
 10266	another essential part of me which goes where I go, and this we can call
 10267	my ’soul.’" Truths about persons, Swinburne stresses, are not truths
 10268	about brains or bodies (Swinburne, 2007).
 10269	Swinburne’s argument for the existence of a soul—that "souls
 10270	constitute personal identity and the continued existence of me will
 10271	consist in the continued existence of my soul"—"is quite apart from what
 10272	might happen in the world to come." Moreover, Swinburne’s arguments
 10273	for the reality of a nonphysical soul do not depend, he says, on theo­
 10274	logical revelation or his own religious convictions (Swinburne, 2016;
 10275	Kuhn 2016b).
       
 10276	15.2. Historical and traditional dualisms
 10277	Dualism is the oldest and most ubiquitous theory of consciousness in
 10278	the sense that nonphysical aspects of the world and mind, such as
 10279	animism and ancestor worship, had long seemed the default assumption
 10280	of millennia of pre-modern human groups and cultures. Plato’s
 10281	description of immortal souls in ancient Greece, where the person was
 10282	entirely immaterial, and the profound ruminations about consciousness
 10283	in ancient India, debating individual and cosmic varieties, were
 10284	consistent with common intuitions and thus readily accepted.
 10285	On the other hand, biblical accounts of the nature of the person,
 10286	especially in the Hebrew scriptures, stress human physicality and mor­
 10287	tality, with no obvious assertions about immortal souls (Van Inwagen,
 10288	1995). In Genesis, humans became (were not inherently) “a living soul”
 10289	(Gen. 2:7). Ezekiel writes, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezek.
 10290	18:20). Paul, in the New Testament, has “the wages of sin is death”
 10291	(Rom. 6:23). Granted, theologians can interpret “death,” as, say, a soul
 10292	that is separated from God. But the Psalmist is clear, saying of humans,
 10293	“His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his
 10294	thoughts perish” (Ps. 146:4). And Solomon is unambiguous, “the dead
 10295	know nothing” (Eccles. 9:5).
 10296	Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of adherents to the Abra­
 10297	hamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, along with most of
 10298	their religious teachers, assume that human beings are, in essence, a soul
 10299	and that the soul has some kind of future beyond death.
 10300	John Leslie describes the historical understanding of souls as “exis­
 10301	tentially unified,” noting, "When the parts of a soul were viewed as
 10302	existentially unified at each particular instant, it wasn’t thought that
 10303	God, when manufacturing unified souls, had to do some kind of special
 10304	mixing involving many separate steps. It was believed simply that souls
 10305	had, from the moment of their creation by God, the property of being
 10306	complex yet existentially unified. Many distinguishable elements of such
 10307	complexity were present when a soul had a thought or an experience,
 10308	but still, a soul remained existentially unified at each instant and
 10309	remained the very same soul at successive instants" (Leslie, 2006).
       
 10310	15.4. Composite dualism
 10311	Modern dualism in philosophy of mind begins with Descartes who
 10312	famously divides the world between the physical and the mental. He was
 10313	motivated by the obvious distinction that the mind has thought but no
 10314	extension while the body has extension but no thought. Yet body and
 10315	mind both seem needed to have a human person.
 10316	Composite dualists require both body and mind to constitute a per­
 10317	son, where “body” generally denotates brain and “mind” generally
 10318	denotates soul. There are of course variations and problems
 10319	(Zimmerman, 2005). A key question is whether the nonphysical part, the
 10320	soul, has mental states independent from the body/brain? To most du­
 10321	alists, both historical and contemporary, the soul does indeed.
 10322	As to the relationship between the body and the soul, Swinburne is
 10323	ambivalent. "Maybe, of course, a soul can’t function on its own," he said.
 10324	"Maybe it can only function when associated with a body. In that case,
 10325	my continued existence would consist in it being joined to a body again,
 10326	perhaps an entirely new body. I think a soul could exist on its own, but
 10327	not a great deal turns on that." A body is required, Swinburne said,
 10328	because "for us to interact with others, to recognize others, we need
 10329	different public characteristics” (Swinburne, 2016; Kuhn 2016b).
 10330	I asked Swinburne to speculate on the essence or composition of such
 10331	a soul. Is it a differentiated substance? What’s to prevent your soul from
 10332	getting mixed up with my soul?
 10333	"The difference between souls is ultimate, unanalyzable by anything
 10334	else," Swinburne responded. "A soul has no extension. It is an ’imma­
 10335	terial particular’, to use an old-fashioned philosophical term. It does, of
 10336	course, have characteristics, properties. It has thoughts, feelings, atti­
 10337	tudes, and so on. But the way we distinguish in practice between souls is
 10338	in terms of the bodies with which they are associated because the dif­
 10339	ference between your soul and my soul, being ultimate, does not consist
 10340	in their relations to our respective bodies. There is of course nothing
 10341	paradoxical about the difference between souls being unanalyzable,
 10342	because some differences must be ultimate; if you can analyze ’a’ by ’b’
 10343	and ’b’ by ’c’ and so on, you eventually get to things which you can’t
 10344	analyze, and the differences between human souls in my view are one of
 10345	those things. This is why the only way souls can have a public presence is
 10346	through their attachment to bodies” (Swinburne, 2007, 2016).
       
 10347	15.3. Swinburne’s substance dualism
 10348	Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne is a leading advocate of
 10349	substance dualism (Swinburne, 2013). "If you want to tell the whole
 10350	story of the world, you must say what objects there are in the world,
 10351	what substances there are, and what properties they have at different
 10352	times," Swinburne said on Closer to Truth. "Of course, that will include all
 10353	the physical objects, all the tables and chairs and planets and atoms. But,
 10354	of course, that won’t tell the whole story. You will also have to tell the
 10355	story of conscious life, which is associated with each body." Swinburne
 10356	112
       
 10357	R.L. Kuhn
       
 10358	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 10359	15.5. Stump’s Thomistic dualism
       
 10360	combines a neo-Thomistic view that some mental faculties are imma­
 10361	terial and a neo-Aristotelian view that we perceive the world actually as
 10362	it appears to be (i.e., direct realism, such that color and sound are
 10363	properties of external objects as real as size and shape) (Section: Feser,
 10364	2012a; 2012b; 2012c; 2022a; 2022b).
 10365	As Feser explains, Aristotelians and Thomists use the term “intellect”
 10366	as that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts, make judgments
 10367	and reason logically. Intellect is to be distinguished from “imagination,”
 10368	the faculty by which we form mental images (visual, auditory, etc.), and
 10369	from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the external material
 10370	world and the internal world of the body. Feser argues that the irre­
 10371	ducibility of intellect to imagination and sensation is undeniable (e.g.,
 10372	the intellect’s concepts are universals while mental images and sensa­
 10373	tions are particulars). He also argues that “the reason why intellectual
 10374	activity cannot in principle be reduced to sensation or imagination is, as
 10375	it happens, related to the reason why intellectual activity cannot in
 10376	principle be reduced to, or entirely supervenient upon, or in any other
 10377	way explicable in terms of material processes of any sort” (Feser,
 10378	2012a).
 10379	To explain intellectual activity entirely in terms of material pro­
 10380	cesses, Feser says, is to inevitably deny the existence of some essential
 10381	aspect of the intellectual activity. If you identify thought with material
 10382	processes, you are necessarily committed to denying, implicitly or
 10383	explicitly, that our thoughts really ever have any determinate or un­
 10384	ambiguous content. According to Feser, some materialists have seen
 10385	this, including Quine and Dennett, and decided “to bite the bullet and
 10386	accept that the content of all thought and language is inherently
 10387	indeterminate.”
 10388	Feser asserts that such claims are indefensible because it would
 10389	contradict making sense of mathematics and logic, and hence of
 10390	empirical science, all of which presupposes that we have determinate
 10391	concepts. “Anyone who thinks that thought can even in principle be
 10392	entirely material,” he says, “hasn’t thought carefully enough about the
 10393	nature of thought” (Feser, 2012a).
 10394	But Feser’s dualism is not Descartes’s dualism, which makes as­
 10395	sumptions about the nature of matter as much as or more than as­
 10396	sumptions about the nature of mind, and thus is responsible, in part, for
 10397	generating the mind-body problem. The key point, Feser says, is that by
 10398	characterizing matter in purely quantitative, mathematical terms, Des­
 10399	cartes left no place in it for qualitative features like color, odor, taste,
 10400	sound, smell, heat and cold as common sense understands them.
 10401	Accordingly, he treated these qualitative features—as Galileo before
 10402	him and countless others after him did—as entirely mind-dependent,
 10403	existing only in our conscious experience of the world but not in the
 10404	world itself (Feser, 2012b).
 10405	This means that if these qualitative features as common sense un­
 10406	derstands them exist only in the mind and not in the material world, it
 10407	follows that these features cannot themselves be material. A kind of
 10408	dualism follows, Feser claims, precisely from the materialist conception
 10409	of matter. The so-called “qualia problem” that contemporary philoso­
 10410	phers of mind fret over, he argues, “is the inevitable result of the
 10411	conception of matter to which modern scientists in their philosophical
 10412	moments have wedded themselves” (Feser, 2012b).
 10413	In Feser’s reading, Descartes and other moderns had an austere
 10414	concept of nature as inherently devoid of the qualitative features we
 10415	know from conscious experience (e.g., color, sound, heat, cold) as well
 10416	as of meaning or purpose of any kind. Thus, they conceived of the human
 10417	mind as an immaterial substance that somehow interacts with those
 10418	parts of the natural world we call human bodies and brains. This spawns
 10419	Descartes’s novel form of dualism, which is notoriously problematic (i.
 10420	e., the interaction problem) such that modern materialists throw out
 10421	Descartes’s immaterial substance while holding on to his view of the
 10422	material world. (But their own position, Feser adds, is even more
 10423	problematic, since it leaves them with no place at all to locate qualitative
 10424	features or meaning.) (Feser, 2012c).
 10425	Moreover, because Descartes took the human body as just one
       
 10426	The influential Christian scholastic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas
 10427	gives an account of the soul that is non-Cartesian in character, according
 10428	to Catholic philosopher Eleonore Stump, who has Aquinas taking the
 10429	soul to be something essentially immaterial or configurational but
 10430	nonetheless realized in material components. This suggests, she argues,
 10431	not only that Cartesian dualism isn’t essential to Christianity but also
 10432	that the battle lines between dualism and materialism are misdrawn
 10433	(Stump, 1995).
 10434	Stump recognizes that because Cartesian dualism is widely regarded
 10435	(among philosophers) as false, and because “it is also the case that the
 10436	major monotheisms have traditionally been committed to dualism of a
 10437	Cartesian sort, then in the view of many philosophers the apparent or
 10438	putative falsity of Cartesian dualism becomes an embarrassment for
 10439	those religions.”
 10440	In building his alternative to a Cartesian sort of dualism (in historical
 10441	context, to Plato’s account of the soul), Aquinas is guided by “two
 10442	complex, culturally conditioned sets of intuitions,” each of which relates
 10443	to a biblical passage. The first is "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou
 10444	return" (Gen. 3:19), conveying that a human being is a material object,
 10445	“made out of the same sort of constituents as the earth is,” and the
 10446	second is "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit
 10447	shall return to God who gave it" (Eccles.12:7), conveying that a human
 10448	person survives death, “because her spirit or soul continues to exist after
 10449	the dissolution of her body.” Stump has Aquinas accommodating both
 10450	sets of intuitions with his account of the human soul (Stump, 1995).
 10451	Famously, Aquinas takes the soul to be the form of the body, but, as
 10452	Stump points out, “the soul not only is the form that makes this matter a
 10453	living human body but also is the form that makes the matter this human
 10454	being.” And when, after death, all that is left of a human being is the
 10455	soul, “individuality persists on Aquinas’s account.”
 10456	“Soul” is a larger category for Aquinas, his generic term for the
 10457	substantial forms of all material objects that are living. Plants have souls,
 10458	not in the human sense, but in that they enable “a configuration of
 10459	matter which allows for nutrition, growth, reproduction.” Animals, too,
 10460	have souls, since they, too, are living things; but the configuration of
 10461	their matter also allows them perception. The forms that constitute
 10462	human beings allow a more distinctive set of capacities, namely, intel­
 10463	lective processes. Aquinas tends to call the human soul “the intellective
 10464	soul” or “the rational soul”.
 10465	Aquinas’s soul is created directly by God and infused into matter.
 10466	The soul is the act of the body, “because it is in virtue of the soul that
 10467	something is actually a living human body.” Moreover, because the soul
 10468	is the form of the body, it has a spatial location; while the body is alive,
 10469	the soul is located where the body is.
 10470	As for the post-mortem, disembodied soul, while it does persist, it is
 10471	not the complete human being who was the composite but only a part of
 10472	that human being. A separated soul does exist on its own after death, but
 10473	it nonetheless isn’t a substance in its own right. Disembodied existence
 10474	isn’t natural to the soul.
 10475	Stump sums up: “The soul is an essentially configurational state
 10476	which is immaterial and subsistent, able to exist on its own apart from
 10477	the body. On the other hand, the soul is the form that makes the living
 10478	human body what it is. While it is possible with divine help for the soul
 10479	to exist and exercise cognitive function on its own, apart from the body,
 10480	that state is unnatural to it. In the natural condition, human cognitive
 10481	functions are to be attributed to the whole composite and not to the soul
 10482	alone, although the composite exercises cognitive functions by means of
 10483	the soul.” In Stump’s view, the real lesson of Aquinas’s account of the
 10484	soul is to show that the dichotomy between materialism and dualism is
 10485	misleading (Stump, 1995).
 10486	15.6. Feser’s neo-Thomistic, neo-Aristotelian, common-sense dualism
 10487	Catholic philosopher Edward Feser’s account of consciousness
 10488	113
       
 10489	R.L. Kuhn
       
 10490	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 10491	entirely mathematically definable bit of the material world among
 10492	others, entirely devoid of qualitative features, and took all consciousness
 10493	to reside in the res cogitans, which he regarded as immaterial, Descartes’s
 10494	position implies that sensation and imagination are immaterial. Hence if
 10495	sensation and imagination turn out to be material after all, it is under­
 10496	standable how some would infer that all operations of the res cogitans, all
 10497	mental activity, might be susceptible to materialist explanation as well
 10498	(Feser, 2012b).
 10499	But, Feser argues, the Aristotelian tradition has always regarded
 10500	sensation and imagination as corporeal faculties, and as having nothing
 10501	essentially to do with the reasons why our distinctively intellectual ac­
 10502	tivities are incorporeal, in that strictly intellectual activity on the one
 10503	hand and sensation and imagination on the other, differ in kind, not
 10504	merely in degree, so that to establish the corporeal nature of the latter is
 10505	irrelevant to the question of whether the former is corporeal.
 10506	Aristotle and the Scholastic tradition that built on his thought took
 10507	the common-sense view that the natural world is filled with irreducibly
 10508	different kinds of objects and qualities: people; dogs and cats; trees and
 10509	flowers; rocks, dirt, and water; colors, odors, sounds; heat and cold;
 10510	meanings and purposes (Feser, 2012c). The founders of modern phi­
 10511	losophy and science overthrew Aristotelianism, and, on Feser’s view,
 10512	common sense along with it. On the new view of nature inaugurated by
 10513	Galileo and Descartes, the material world is comprised of nothing more
 10514	than colorless, odorless, soundless, meaningless, purposeless particles in
 10515	motion, describable in purely mathematical terms. The differences be­
 10516	tween dirt, water, rocks, trees, dogs, cats, and human bodies are on this
 10517	view superficial.
 10518	Common sense, Feser says, takes ordinary physical objects to have
 10519	both (a) size, shape, motion, etc. and (b) color, sound, heat, cold, etc.
 10520	Early modern philosophers and scientists characterized features of type
 10521	(a) as “primary qualities” and features of type (b) as “secondary quali­
 10522	ties,” and they argued that the latter are not genuine features of matter
 10523	as it is in itself, but reflect only the way conscious awareness presents
 10524	matter to us. What exists in mind-independent reality is nothing more
 10525	than particles in motion. Color, sound, taste, odor, etc. exist only in the
 10526	mind’s experiences of that reality (Feser, 2022a).
 10527	But, Feser argues, to draw a sharp distinction between primary and
 10528	secondary qualities is much more difficult than it at first appears. The
 10529	Aristotelian philosopher who defends common sense would say that this
 10530	is a good reason to think that secondary qualities are, after all, as
 10531	objective as primary qualities.
 10532	The more common approach, however, was to try to make some
 10533	version of the primary/secondary quality distinction work, which made
 10534	a Cartesian sort of dualism an inevitable consequence of the primary/
 10535	secondary quality distinction. For if color, sound, heat, cold, etc. as
 10536	common sense understands them don’t exist in matter, then they don’t
 10537	exist in the brain or the rest of the body (since those are material). And if
 10538	they do nevertheless exist in the mind, then we have the dualist
 10539	conclusion that the mind is not identical with the brain or with any other
 10540	material thing.
 10541	Feser claims that the very conception of matter that modern mate­
 10542	rialism has committed itself to is therefore radically incompatible with
 10543	materialism. Attempting to develop a materialist account of conscious­
 10544	ness while at the same time presupposing the conception of matter
 10545	inherited from Galileo and Co. is like trying to square the circle. “It is a
 10546	fool’s errand,” Feser opines, “born of conceptual confusion and neglect
 10547	of intellectual history” (Feser, 2022a).
 10548	To Feser, the hard problem of consciousness is a pseudo-problem. It
 10549	arises only if we follow Galileo and his successors in holding that color,
 10550	odor, sound, heat, cold, and other “secondary qualities” do not really
 10551	exist in matter in the way common sense supposes them to, but instead
 10552	exist only in the mind (as the qualia of conscious experience) and are
 10553	projected by us onto external reality. If you take this position, Feser says,
 10554	you are stuck with a conception of matter that makes it impossible to
 10555	regard consciousness as material.
 10556	The solution, Feser offers, is simply not to go along with this
       
 10557	assumption in the first place, but to return to the Aristotelian-Scholastic
 10558	view the early moderns reacted against, and which is compatible with
 10559	the commonsense view of matter. The so-called hard problem of con­
 10560	sciousness then dissolves (Feser, 2022b).
 10561	Feser highlights Gilbert Ryle’s critical characterization of Descartes’s
 10562	dualism as the theory of the “ghost in the machine.” It is often supposed
 10563	that modern philosophy and science after Descartes preserved his me­
 10564	chanical model of matter while getting rid of the “ghost” of the Cartesian
 10565	mind. To Feser, the haunting problem is not the “ghost” but the me­
 10566	chanical model of matter (Feser, 2022b).
 10567	15.7. Moreland’s Christian soul
 10568	Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland defines a robust “generic sub­
 10569	stance dualism” as the view according to which “(i) there is a substantial
 10570	soul (self, ego, I, substantial form) that is wholly immaterial; (ii) the soul
 10571	is not identical to its physical body; and (iii) the soul is that which
 10572	grounds personal identity for human persons” (Moreland, 2023). He
 10573	defends a Thomistic-like dualism, taking the body to be an ensouled,
 10574	spatially extended, physical structure, and the soul to be a substantial,
 10575	unified reality that informs (gives form to) its body, animates it and
 10576	makes it human. Thus, a body requires a soul to be a body, and this is
 10577	why a body is of value. A body without a soul in it is just a corpse. In
 10578	contrast to a body, a corpse is of little intrinsic value (Moreland, 2014).
 10579	Similarly, a soul requires a body to be fully realized; for a soul to have
 10580	a body is its natural state. By analogy, the soul is to the body like God is
 10581	to space—it is fully “present” at each point within the body. Breaking the
 10582	analogy, Moreland’s soul and body relate to each other in an informing
 10583	and cause-effect way (Moreland, 2014).
 10584	Moreland argues that the unity of consciousness cannot be explained
 10585	if a person is a brain, because a brain is just an aggregate of different
 10586	physical (separable) parts. He accepts constituent realism regarding
 10587	properties (and relations), according to which properties (and relations)
 10588	are universals that, when exemplified (they need not exist), become
 10589	constituents of the ordinary particulars that have them. Moreover, he
 10590	asserts that whereas a physicalist may claim a unified awareness of one’s
 10591	visual field consists of combining several different physical parts of the
 10592	brain each terminating a different wavelength, each of which is aware of
 10593	only part (not the whole) of the complex view, “this cannot account for
 10594	the single, unitary awareness of the entire visual field” (Moreland,
 10595	2018).
 10596	Offering “a comprehensive defense of contemporary substance
 10597	dualism,” Christian philosophers Brandon Rickabaugh and J.P. More­
 10598	land present arguments that they claim support substance dualism and
 10599	defeat those that deny it. These include: introspection, self-awareness
 10600	and intentionality; the fundamental unity of conscious beings (e.g.,
 10601	mereological essentialism and the diachronic endurance of the soul);
 10602	and updated arguments from modality and libertarian freedom (e.g.,
 10603	problems of causal interaction, neuroscientific objections, and causal
 10604	closure of the physical) (Rickabaugh and Moreland, 2023).
 10605	15.8. Interactive dualism
 10606	The primary problem of Dualism—many would say the defeater of
 10607	Dualism—is how nonphysical substances could possibly interact with
 10608	physical substances, especially given the common assumption that the
 10609	physical world is a closed system. Also called the "pairing problem," how
 10610	could an immaterial thing, the mind, interact with a material thing, the
 10611	body (or brain)? Notwithstanding our folk perception that the physical
 10612	world affects my mind through my senses and my mind affects the
 10613	physical world through my actions, most scientists and philosophers
 10614	deny this is what is in fact happening. There would be no commonalities
 10615	between physical and nonphysical substances, no means of exchan­
 10616	ge—the problem of mental causation on steroids. Moreover, if
 10617	nonphysical substances could somehow affect and alter physical sub­
 10618	stances, wouldn’t that require a transference of energy, and wouldn’t
 10619	114
       
 10620	R.L. Kuhn
       
 10621	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 10622	such an addition violate the sacrosanct physical law of the conservation
 10623	of energy? (Section: Robinson, 2023; Interactionism, 2023).
 10624	Advocates of Interactive Dualism (not that there are many among
 10625	scientists and philosophers) say they have resources. They reject the
 10626	weak dualism of Epiphenomenalism where the physical affects the
 10627	mental but the mental does not affect the physical (9.1.2). They can
 10628	claim that the interaction problem is founded on archaic 19th century,
 10629	billiard-ball physics, where causation requires hard substances to be in
 10630	physical contact, to touch one another, as it were. Quantum mechanics,
 10631	on the other hand, allows for various, albeit speculative ways, for the
 10632	mental to affect the physical, even beyond the classic but controversial
 10633	view that an “observer” is needed to “collapse” the wave function.
 10634	Moreover, because quantum mechanics introduces fundamental uncer­
 10635	tainty into the universe, and if by this indeterminism holds, nonphysical
 10636	substances might enjoy “wiggle room” to effect causation.
 10637	Advocates can also appeal to different kinds of ethereal forces or
 10638	energy transference systems. Perhaps mental powers can influence the
 10639	distribution but not the quantity of energy in the brain (“a little more
 10640	here, a little less there” does seem a bit of a cheat). Perhaps each indi­
 10641	vidual brain is not a causally closed system so that the conservation of
 10642	energy need not apply. Perhaps causal closure for the entire universe is
 10643	also a 19th century invention, based on classical thermodynamics and
 10644	statistical mechanics, which are now superseded by quantum me­
 10645	chanics, general relativity, dark matter, dark energy, and who knows
 10646	what else? (I can make up another. Since string theory offers, depending
 10647	on flavor, 10, 11 or 26 “compactified” extra dimensions, why couldn’t
 10648	nonphysical substances work via these extra dimensions? I can conceive
 10649	of a precedent for this. To account for the “hierarchy problem” in
 10650	physics, where gravity is vastly weaker than the other fundamental
 10651	forces, some postulate that gravity “leaks” or “bleeds” into these extra
 10652	dimensions.) It gets crazy.
 10653	That’s not all. Perhaps, one could just blow away the interaction
 10654	problem by just asserting that in systems that have minds, the law of
 10655	conservation of energy is false. Perhaps because downward causation
 10656	goes to the lower physical levels and emergence is enabled, the causal
 10657	completeness of physics is wrong (Ellis, 2019). Further, because the
 10658	whole idea of a closed physical system is based on the assumption that
 10659	there are no nonphysical forces involved, wouldn’t this assumption
 10660	undermine the argument against interaction by making it circular? Then
 10661	there is “overdetermination,” where mental and physical factors can
 10662	each, independently, affect actions—an approach that, while possibly
 10663	solving one problem, creates other problems (Robinson, 2023; Inter­
 10664	actionism, 2023).
 10665	Finally, there is always a theological solution. God can help. God
 10666	could have created souls with powers, especially since “real” (i.e., lib­
 10667	ertarian) free will is an essential part of “God’s plan,” such that neither
 10668	conservation of energy nor determinism holds, at least with respect to
 10669	minds. (It is challenging how even God could make this coherent.)
 10670	Christian philosopher William Lane Craig describes himself as a
 10671	“dualist-interactionalist” in that “the brain is itself part of... the physical
 10672	reality with which the soul immediately interacts (Craig, 2015). He ar­
 10673	gues that even though souls do not have spatial locations, “the question
 10674	becomes why we should think that only spatial relations can pair a cause
 10675	with its effect. Prima facie this seems overly restrictive” (Craig, 2023).
 10676	I mustn’t forget “Occasionalism,” the idea that created substances,
 10677	physical and nonphysical, cannot be efficient causes of events in them­
 10678	selves and that all events are caused directly by God. This would mean
 10679	that while mind and body appear to interact, in fact it is God that is
 10680	changing each separately and ceaselessly. While Occasionalism is dis­
 10681	missed (often ridiculed), there is a kind of logic here. If God acts as
 10682	intermediary, as it were, between nonphysical and physical substances,
 10683	then because God would have created both in the first place, this would
 10684	make the apparent causal connection between nonphysical and physical
 10685	substances not especially troublesome for God to bring about. This way
 10686	of thinking—all these possible mechanisms for Interactive Dual­
 10687	ism—reflects the depth of Dualism’s problem.
       
 10688	15.9. Emergent dualism
 10689	Emergent dualism is the idea that while mind or consciousness is not
 10690	fundamental in reality, it comes into existence “naturally” when a
 10691	certain kind of complex arrangement of physical atoms come together,
 10692	say, in biological neurons. The resultant new substance that emerges
 10693	would be nonphysical, generated by some meta-psychophysical pro­
 10694	cesses or laws, and it would become the first-person subject of the mind
 10695	or consciousness. This freshly emergent nonphysical substance, to take
 10696	the extremes, could be either entirely dependent on the brain for
 10697	continued existence or take on independent ontological existence in
 10698	some strong sense (though the latter, to me, would seem a rather odd
 10699	way for reality to be).
 10700	For some philosophers, emergent dualism is a softer-sell “dualismlight,” because souls would then be a normal part of the physical world,
 10701	however extended, where these as-yet-unknown “natural” metapsychophysical laws would determine their automatic manifestation
 10702	from complex structures, especially from brains (perhaps only from
 10703	brains). Dualism’s “pairing problem”—how can nonphysical substances
 10704	(“souls”) have causal relations with physical substances (brains) with
 10705	zero tolerance for failure?—would be reduced under emergent dualisms
 10706	because (i) souls would seem in a way tethered in space (Zimmerman,
 10707	2005), and (ii) souls would have been generated by physical substances
 10708	(brains) in the first place.
 10709	As a theist, Richard Swinburne holds the creationist position that
 10710	God creates anew each new soul. But, if he came to believe that this
 10711	position was mistaken, then, as a theist, he would hold the view that God
 10712	had already built into atoms their propensity to produce souls
 10713	(Swinburne, 2016).
 10714	Out-of-body and near-death experiences (OBEs and NDEs) are said to
 10715	support emergent dualism, in that if one starts by assuming OBEs and
 10716	NDEs to be actual disembodied conscious experiences (17.12), then
 10717	emergent dualism is said to be a candidate to explain them. And once
 10718	this nonphysical substance (soul) comes into existence, it is then logi­
 10719	cally possible for this “soul” to become independent of its progenerating
 10720	physical substance (brain) and to maintain its existence beyond the
 10721	dissolution of the physical (Kopel, 2023).
 10722	Finally, there would be no necessity that the kind of metapsychophysical laws that generate emergent dualism should be
 10723	restricted to complex arrangements of atoms in biological entities or
 10724	contexts. Thus, under emergent dualism, AI consciousness would not be
 10725	impossible, as it would be under traditional forms of dualism (AI Con­
 10726	sciousness, 24).
 10727	15.10. Kind’s dualism 2.0
 10728	Philosopher Amy Kind defends dualism 2.0, “a thoroughly modern
 10729	version of dualism … decoupled from any religious or non-scientific
 10730	connotations.” Her argument is direct and forceful: “A physicalist
 10731	framework cannot adequately capture the full reality of our conscious
 10732	experience”—which has a “qualitative nature.” However physicalism is
 10733	defined, she says, “whether it’s in terms of current physics or future
 10734	physics, or some other way entirely—we should see the theory as
 10735	committed to an important constraint: Physicalism can be true only if
 10736	the phenomenality is not a primitive aspect of the world” (Kind and
 10737	Stoljar, 2023, pp. 4, 58).
 10738	She analyzes and rejects Materialist Theories of Representationalism
 10739	(9.8) and High-order Theories (9.8.3), and Russellian Monism (14.1),
 10740	and she deflects the counterattack that “rejecting physicalism is tanta­
 10741	mount to believing in ghosts, or fairy dust, or magic.” She stresses that
 10742	“the claim that consciousness is not a physical thing does not commit
 10743	one to the existence of spooky stuff. Rather, it should be seen as perfectly
 10744	consistent with an adoption of a broadly naturalistic conception of the
 10745	world and our place in it.” She calls Dualism 2.0 “a rebooted version of
 10746	dualism … what it looks like to adopt this kind of view from the vantage
 10747	point of the 21st century” (Kind and Stoljar, 2023, p. 5).
 10748	115
       
 10749	R.L. Kuhn
       
 10750	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 10751	Kind’s claim is a simple one: “Just as physical states, events, and
 10752	processes are an irreducibly real part of the world, so too are phenom­
 10753	enal states, events, and processes an irreducibly real part of the world”
 10754	(jointly, “activity”). Given “the existence of both phenomenal activity
 10755	and physical activity, and further, in virtue of its claim that these two
 10756	kinds of activity cannot be reduced to one another,” she declares that
 10757	“the view is appropriately characterized as dualistic.” Immediately,
 10758	however, she stresses that “this duality need not be thought of in terms
 10759	of mental substances. We can have duality of activity without duality of
 10760	entities” (Kind and Stoljar, 2023, p. 53).
 10761	While obviously distinct from physicalism, Kind’s dualism 2.0 dis­
 10762	tinguishes itself from Russellian Monism (and Panpsychism, 13),
 10763	because, although the “claim that phenomenality (or proto­
 10764	phenomenality) can be found at the fundamental level of reality … is
 10765	consistent with dualism 2.0 … it is not required by it.” Dualism 2.0, she
 10766	says, “need not take mass and charge to be the appropriate model for
 10767	phenomenality.” Nor does dualism 2.0 “commit itself to the ubiquity of
 10768	phenomenality,” nor “to anything spooky.” Just because “something
 10769	cannot be reduced to the physical” does not mean, ipso facto, “that it is
 10770	magical or mystical.” Her example is mathematics (Kind and Stoljar,
 10771	2023, pp. 53–54).
 10772	What about the physicalist argument that specifying the putative
 10773	phenomenal laws seems a project from nowhere? Kind reminds her
 10774	critics of their lack of progress “in giving precise physical or functional
 10775	specifications of phenomenally conscious states”—and she concludes
 10776	that “dualism 2.0 is not here in any worse shape than its competitors.”
 10777	She holds out hope for “a better and broader understanding of the nature
 10778	of causation” that could enable us “to accommodate mental causes and
 10779	thus affirm the causal efficacy of the phenomenal … without those
 10780	seeming either mysterious or spooky” (Kind and Stoljar, 2023, pp.
 10781	55–56).
       
 10782	but "only came to be a thinking thing at a certain point in the devel­
 10783	opment of her body (or brain).” Other respectable metaphysical views,
 10784	he argues, “have us existing for just as long and undergoing trans­
 10785	formations no less radical than this. For example, according to one
 10786	prominent view, anything that ever exists, always existed and always
 10787	will exist. Nothing really goes into or out of existence. What looks like
 10788	going into and out of existence is just a matter of going from being ab­
 10789	stract (with no causal powers and no location, like a feature) to being
 10790	concrete (with causal powers and a particular location, like a person),
 10791	and back again. An immaterialist who goes this route need not maintain
 10792	that any of us has undergone a transformation so radical as from the
 10793	abstract to the concrete: just from unthinking to thinking” (Olson and
 10794	Segal, 2023; Segal, 2023).
 10795	Segal then moves to a view he calls “closer to home”: animalism—a
 10796	prominent version of materialism that each of us is a human organism.
 10797	“Quite plausibly,” he says, “animalism has as a consequence that each of
 10798	us was once an unthinking fetus. So, according to that prominent version
 10799	of materialism, each of us has undergone a transformation from an un­
 10800	thinking thing to a thinking thing.”
 10801	Physicist/businessman Eduard Shyfrin, who has developed a
 10802	“Kabbalah of Information” framework that integrates information the­
 10803	ory with the Jewish mystical tradition, calls the Kabbalah soul “the in­
 10804	formation entity with the dimension of self that is structurally part of the
 10805	informational foundations of the worlds (The Tree of Sefirot)” (Shyfrin,
 10806	n.d.).
 10807	The Kabbalah of Information, Shyfrin says, holds that God created
 10808	only information, nothing else, as the building blocks of all reality. Thus,
 10809	there is no fundamental difference between material and spiritual.
 10810	Creation is an information space (“infospace”), composed of concepts of
 10811	different complexity and dimensionality. The distance between concepts
 10812	in infospace is measured by the likeness of their meaning, generating a
 10813	form of hierarchy of concepts or “worlds”—as determined by the
 10814	Kabbalah Law of Likeness. Moreover, all the worlds are structurally
 10815	invariant; the Tree of Sefirot has a fractal structure. The transfer from
 10816	one concept to another is incremental; it takes place when information
 10817	change reaches an “error threshold” (Shyfrin, 2019).
 10818	Based on the above, Shyfrin explains that the “soul” is the informa­
 10819	tion structure similar to the structure of the “worlds” (Tree of Sefirot),
 10820	with the additional dimension of “self.” This structural similarity allows
 10821	for the smooth interaction between the soul and the Tree of Sefirot. Souls
 10822	can “move” in infospace, which, for example, is the process of learning
 10823	and thinking. All souls intrinsically have the same kinds of concepts in
 10824	general, but in particular, souls are distinguished by their taking con­
 10825	cepts from different parts of the hierarchy of concepts. This process
 10826	determines the “DNA” of the soul and all its potential functions (i.e.,
 10827	intellect, memory, etc.) (Shyfrin, 2019).
 10828	In addition, according to Shyfrin, because “according to the Torah
 10829	the soul is in the blood” (hence the Judaic prohibition against eating
 10830	blood), "the information content of part of the soul’s hierarchy may be
 10831	structurally similar to that of DNA.” Perhaps, at the moment of the soul’s
 10832	creation, "G-D chooses its complexity and dimensionality, which have
 10833	hierarchies of structure and which entail the soul’s intellectual
 10834	potential."50
       
 10835	15.11. Soul in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish philosophy
 10836	If one wants to pay attention to the nature of consciousness or soul in
 10837	the Hebrew scriptures (which is recognized as foundational by tradi­
 10838	tional Christianity and Islam as well as by Judaism), there are two
 10839	essential words to consider: “nephesh” (‫ש‬
 10840	ׁ ‫פ‬
 10841	ֶ ‫)ֶנ‬, often translated as “soul,”
 10842	and “ruach” (‫ח‬
 10843	ַ ‫)רּו‬, often translated “spirit.” Neither word is translated
 10844	consistently, nor does either map cleanly unto modern meanings of soul
 10845	or consciousness.
 10846	The essential verse for nephesh is Genesis 2:7: “God formed man from
 10847	the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,”
 10848	and “the man became a living being (or soul, nephesh).” If nephesh is
 10849	translated “soul,” that “soul” was not immortal (in that it had to be
 10850	described as “living”); it was not a nonphysical substance given to the
 10851	man, but rather it was what the man became. Nephesh applies to all
 10852	sentient creatures, not just to humans, and although mostly translated
 10853	“soul”, it is elsewhere translated as life, person, creature, mind, heart
 10854	(emotions), desires. There are several places where the context seems to
 10855	require that nephesh be translated “dead”—it would be an odd coupling,
 10856	indeed, for nephesh to be an immortal soul and at the same time be dead.
 10857	The first use of ruach in the Hebrew bible is Genesis 1:2, where it is
 10858	the “spirit” (ruach) of God that is hovering in the darkness over the
 10859	surface of the waters of a formless and desolately empty earth. But ruach
 10860	is elsewhere translated “wind” (many verses), as well as vigor, courage,
 10861	anger, disposition, patience, desire, even mind as the seat of mental acts
 10862	or moral courage. Ruach is used in “holy spirit” as well as in God’s spirit.
 10863	While neither nephesh nor ruach means soul or consciousness, ruach
 10864	seems closer to a mental designator and nephesh closer to a living body
 10865	designator.
 10866	Philosopher and rabbi Aaron Segal offers a defense of a traditional
 10867	Judaic view that there are souls and that they exist long before being
 10868	embodied. Responding to the materialist challenge that it’s very sur­
 10869	prising that none of us remembers anything from before we were born,
 10870	he proposes that each of us has “been in existence for a very long time"
       
 10871	15.12. Soul in the New Testament and Christian philosophy
 10872	Almost all Christian denominations feature an immortal soul as
 10873	essential doctrine and it is conventional wisdom that the immortal soul
 10874	is supported by passages in the New Testament. Yet there are opposing
 10875	views; for example, Peter van Inwagen’s “Christian materialism” (10.3)
 10876	50
 10877	According to Shyfrin, the Kabbalah Law of Correspondence states that every
 10878	concept has a multitude of corresponding concepts in all parts of information
 10879	space, which has a fractal, hierarchical structure that generates differences in
 10880	complexity and dimensionality.
       
 10881	116
       
 10882	R.L. Kuhn
       
 10883	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 10884	(Van Inwagen, 1995).
 10885	Biblical scholar James Tabor points out that although many assume
 10886	that the New Testament abandons the Hebrew view of the “soul”
 10887	(nephesh) as simply a “living being,” referring in Genesis 1 to all
 10888	breathing creatures, such is not the case. The Greek term usually
 10889	translated “soul” (ψυχ ή psykhḗ/psychi) essentially means “life,” and thus
 10890	refers to a living “breathing” being; so that rather than having souls,
 10891	humans are souls. The central concept is that of breathing or not
 10892	breathing—which equates to being alive or dead. Thus “soul” is most
 10893	often used for the “self,” which is the “whole” being and it can be
 10894	destroyed along with the body (Matthew 10:28). Thus, we read of “fear
 10895	coming upon every soul” meaning every individual (Acts 2:23) or Ja­
 10896	cob’s children numbering “seventy-five souls”—or persons (Acts 7:14).
 10897	The Apostle Paul metaphorically speaks of the dead as “asleep”—no
 10898	longer conscious or breathing, so that resurrection is an “awakening” in
 10899	a new transformed body. Without the resurrection they would “perish”
 10900	(1 Corinthians 15:18). Likewise, giving up the “spirit” (pneuma) is to
 10901	breathe one’s last breath and die (John 19:30) (Tabor, 1989; Tabor,
 10902	2023b; TaborBlog).
 10903	“But, of course, what I assert here can be contested,” Tabor adds,
 10904	especially by Christian apologists and theologians who consider the
 10905	subsequent idea of the immortal soul fundamental to Christianity.
 10906	However, he says, there are very few texts in the New Testament that
 10907	picture the “afterlife” in the lower Hadean world as “conscious” or semiconscious, or in a state more actively aware than Paul’s metaphor of
 10908	“sleep,” which is grounded solidly in the Hebrew Bible (Tabor, 2023a).
 10909	Historian of ancient religions Jonathan Z. Smith emphasizes the
 10910	shifting nature of perceptions taking place in the late Hellenistic/Early
 10911	Roman period (200 BCE to 200 CE), when forms of Christianity and
 10912	Judaism that became dominant were emerging (Smith, Encyclopedia
 10913	Britannica). The shift is from the archaic, which Smith calls the “Loca­
 10914	tive” view of the cosmos—in which human beings had their place: death
 10915	was death, and life was life—to what he calls the “Utopian”—a perfect
 10916	heavenly world beyond this one in which we really “belong” or to which
 10917	we “return” (Tabor, 2022).
 10918	Still, by and large, the New Testament is strikingly “Hebraic” in its
 10919	views of body, soul, and spirit as constituting the whole person, and
 10920	death or the grave as a place of no return—except that the idea of
 10921	resurrection provided future hope of “making the dead live,” which is
 10922	the standard Hebrew expression to this day (Tabor and Wise, 1995).
 10923	Christian philosopher Andrew Ter Ern Loke surveys, from a Christian
 10924	perspective, how human beings are generated (after Adam and Eve). In
 10925	the early church there were three competing views: Traducianism,
 10926	Creationism and Pre-existence, all of which assume substance dualism.
 10927	According to Traducianism, God uses parents to create the souls of
 10928	children; according to Creationism, the souls of children are directly
 10929	created by God (either at or soon after biological conception). Preexistence is the doctrine that God has a “stock of souls from eternity
 10930	and allocates them as needed” (Loke, 2022).
 10931	Pre-existence is widely regarded as unorthodox, while theologians
 10932	have been divided on Traducianism and Creationism, with Augustine
 10933	acknowledging that he does not know which position is the correct one.
 10934	Creationism has been the dominant though informal position in
 10935	Reformed Theology and the Catholic Church since the time of Peter
 10936	Lombard (c. 1100–1160), while Traducianism has been the dominant
 10937	position in Lutheran theology51 (Loke, 2022).
       
 10938	51
       
 10939	Loke proposes a possible way in which Traducianism and Creation­
 10940	ism may be combined, utilizing a modified hylomorphic theory of
 10941	human souls such that, “while the soulish potentialities are passed down
 10942	from parents to children in accordance with Traducianism, the partic­
 10943	ular restrictions on the form of soul-stuffs are created by God so as to
 10944	bring into existence particular individuals.”52 Separately, Christian
 10945	substance dualism is said to be consistent with Darwinian evolution
 10946	(Loke, 2022).
 10947	Souls, of course, remain core Christian doctrine, and they are
 10948	defended as “a better explanation for consciousness.” Dualism is said to
 10949	imply theism and that dualism and theism are “ontologically tied
 10950	together.” Joshua Farris “advances a case for the person or self as being
 10951	the fundamental bearer of conscious properties … where the primary
 10952	bearer, binder, and ground of consciousness is the soul as an immaterial
 10953	substance” (Farris, 2023, 2024).
 10954	15.13. Soul in Islamic philosophy
 10955	In Islam, the nature of the soul is a central concern, and is not dis­
 10956	similar to the soul in Christianity and Judaism (understandable because
 10957	the three developed side by side during the Middle Ages, rather
 10958	harmoniously, too). Building on ancient and Neo-Platonist philosophers,
 10959	medieval Islamic philosophers, mainly al-Kindî, al-Farabi, Avicenna,
 10960	and Averroes, developed an Islamic metaphysic of the soul by evaluating
 10961	the concepts of intellect, soul, nafs and body. Especially important is
 10962	nafs, which literally means “self,” but can be translated “psyche” and
 10963	“soul.” In building an Islamic theory of consciousness, the relationship
 10964	between the soul and body is shaped by the unification of the soul with
 10965	the body, the soul’s effect on the body, the soul’s independence, the state
 10966	of the body, the separation of the soul after the body’s death, and
 10967	whether the soul preserves its individuality (Islamic Soul-Body, 2020).
 10968	Avicenna has the soul in an accidental relation to a particular body,
 10969	given that body’s need for a central organizing and sustaining principle.
 10970	“The soul itself is generated by the separate intelligences of the heavens
 10971	and emanated by them upon the body” (Ivry, 2012).
 10972	Averroes focuses on the hierarchical structure of the soul, with each
 10973	faculty sustained by a lower, more material, or less “spiritual,” faculty.
 10974	Thus, the nutritive faculty is substrate for the sensory faculty, which is
 10975	substrate for the common-sense faculty, which is substrate for the
 10976	imaginative faculty, which is, finally, the substrate for the rational fac­
 10977	ulty. While consciousness per se is not a direct concern, it would be
 10978	enriched at each level (Ivry, 2012).
 10979	The Islamic scholar, teacher and classicist Hamza Yusuf describes the
 10980	Islamic understanding of consciousness as “a spiritual light that God has
 10981	placed into the human being.” It’s not metaphor, he says, “It’s a light, a
 10982	spiritual light.” Noting that the term “consciousness” is relatively new
 10983	and that “the pre-moderns would have had a very different view of
 10984	things,” Yusuf explains that in a person’s relationship with God, “the
 10985	mirror of the soul has to be polished because the light cannot shine
 10986	properly unless there is a polishing. Remembrance of God is how one
 10987	polishes the soul.” He adds, "the human soul is considered ’aeviternal;’ it
 10988	has a beginning but no end" (Yusuf, 2023).
 10989	Contemporary Islamic philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr presents a
 10990	full flowering of the soul in the afterlife, similar to the Tibetan Book of the
 10991	Dead or Hindu doctrines of the afterlife. In some sense, he says, devel­
 10992	opment does not stop with death. “Something stops,” he says, “but the
 10993	soul continues to develop” (Nasr, 2007).
       
 10994	For other Christian philosophers, see Baker (2005).
       
 10995	52
 10996	According to Loke, this proposal provides a metaphysical explanation for
 10997	the counterfactuals of human freedom that are required by so-called “middle
 10998	knowledge,” which seeks to reconcile divine predestination and human free
 10999	will, whereby God via God’s perfect knowledge knew prior to Creation what
 11000	every free creature would freely do if instantiated in any and all circumstances.
 11001	Loke says his commitment to substance dualism does not depend on which
 11002	model is correct, not even his own.
       
 11003	117
       
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 11006	According to Nasr, Islam identifies paradise with a garden, which
 11007	includes sexuality as well as eating—these raise, not lower, the value of
 11008	paradise, he says. “All of these are to cut the soul loose from attraction to
 11009	the lower reflections of these realities and have the soul gaze upon the
 11010	real reality itself. That’s what paradise is. And even within paradise,
 11011	there are levels. The highest paradise is called the paradise of the
 11012	essence, in which every single concept and idea and limited form of
 11013	existence is transcended beyond the paradisal estate in the ordinary
 11014	sense.”
 11015	The state of the soul, Nasr says, is “meta cosmic,” a kind of merging
 11016	without destruction of the individual. “It’s what Meister Eckhart called
 11017	‘fusion without confusion’—a beautiful expression. It’s like swimming in
 11018	the ocean of divinity. To transcend that into divine unity is what you
 11019	might call a bi-unity. By some great mystery, we are given the power to
 11020	be conscious of our own nothingness in divinity” (Nasr, 2007).
       
 11021	Historically, and perhaps ironically, one of the oldest Indian philo­
 11022	sophical schools, Samkhya, advocated the fundamental existence of two
 11023	distinct, universal realities: prakriti is matter or nature (time, space,
 11024	energy), and purusha is consciousness or spirit. While the entirety of our
 11025	perceived universe is nature (prakriti), including our bodies and brains,
 11026	even our minds and emotions, that which experiences the external world
 11027	and the internal world of the mind is consciousness or the self (purusha).
 11028	Hence, dualism (Sarvapriyananda, 2020). Swami Sarvapriyananda ex­
 11029	plains: “The Samkhyans were strict dualists. They said there is no larger
 11030	consciousness. Each of us is an individual consciousness”
 11031	(Sarvapriyananda, 2023b).
 11032	According to Swami Medhananda, Samkhya is indeed dualist. It is
 11033	founded on the eternal purusha (spirit or self), which alone is sentient; it
 11034	is the witness-consciousness; it is absolute, independent, free, beyond
 11035	perception, above any experience by mind or senses, and impossible to
 11036	describe in words. Everything else (including the mind) is only a
 11037	modification of insentient prakriti (primordial nature); it is inactive,
 11038	unconscious, and is a balance of the three gunas (qualities or innate
 11039	tendencies) (Medhananda, 2022; Samkhya, 2024).
 11040	As Swami Vivekananda explains, the English word “mind” corre­
 11041	sponds to what Samkhya philosophers call the antaḥkaraṇa (internal
 11042	organ), which comprises four aspects: the cogitating or thinking faculty;
 11043	the will (or the intellect); the self-conscious egotism; and the substance
 11044	in and through which all the faculties act, the floor of the mind as it
 11045	were. Swami Vivekananda describes the Samkhyan approach to con­
 11046	sciousness: “Mind, intelligence, will, and everything else is insentient.
 11047	But they are all reflecting the sentiency, the cit [consciousness] of some
 11048	being who is beyond all this, whom the Samkhya philosophers call
 11049	puruṣha.” Thus, Samkhya has a metaphysical dualism between conscious
 11050	spirit and insentient matter. Fundamentally, even the mind (antaḥkar­
 11051	aṇa) is actually a subtle form of insentient matter, but it appears to be
 11052	conscious because of the “light” of the puruṣha behind it (Medhananda,
 11053	2022). In other words, the body/brain is “a gross form of matter” and the
 11054	mind is “a subtle form of matter”—and the soul is necessary to “illu­
 11055	minate the mind with consciousness” (Medhananda, 2023).
 11056	Souls have always existed; souls are not created by God or by any­
 11057	thing else; souls are part of the divine consciousness. How then do we
 11058	each have our own unique conscious perspective? Swami Medhananda’s
 11059	mechanism is that "the one divine consciousness playfully limits itself" in
 11060	the form of each person’s private consciousnesss (Medhananda, 2023).
 11061	To enrich contemporary debate about consciousness, Swami Med­
 11062	hananda calls for considering the relevance and epistemic credentials of
 11063	meditative techniques and spiritual experience. Doing such, he says,
 11064	would bring philosophy of mind into fruitful dialogue with philosophy
 11065	of religion (Medhananda, 2022).
 11066	Indian philosopher and yogi (and nationalist) Sri Aurobindo envi­
 11067	sions an ongoing, progressing evolution of consciousness as a prime
 11068	feature of world meaning and human purpose. “He holds that the human
 11069	mind is much too imperfect a type of consciousness to be the final resting
 11070	point of nature, and that just as life developed out of matter, and mind
 11071	out of life, a still higher form of consciousness is bound to develop out of
 11072	the mind” (Cornelissen, 2004).
 11073	Sri Aurobindo bases the ontology of his evolutionary consciousness
 11074	on the Vedāntic view of consciousness, which, in one telling, says that
 11075	“consciousness is pervasive throughout reality and that it manifests as a
 11076	range of ever-higher gradations of consciousness and being.” In each
 11077	category of reality, consciousness has its tailored form. “In matter,
 11078	consciousness is fully engrossed in its own existence and shows itself
 11079	only as matter’s habit of form and its tendency to obey fixed laws. In
 11080	plant and animal life, consciousness begins to emancipate a little, there
 11081	are the first signs of exchange, of giving and taking, of feelings, drives
 11082	and emotions. In the human mind we see a further emancipation of
 11083	consciousness in the first appearance of an ability to ‘play with ideas in
 11084	one’s mind’ and to rise above the immediate situation.” The mind,
 11085	however, constitutes opposing characteristics. On the one hand, it is “the
 11086	plane of objective, generalized statements, ideas, thoughts, intelligence,
       
 11087	15.14. God as the supplier of souls
 11088	Many in the Abrahamic religious traditions—Judaism, Christianity,
 11089	Islam—believe that God dispenses souls actively to each individual
 11090	(whether at birth, conception or some arbitrary time is irrelevant here).
 11091	Whether all these original souls are the same kind of tabula rasa,
 11092	indistinguishable initially one from another, or whether each soul has its
 11093	own particular properties or propensities, is a matter of debate.
 11094	Aaron Segal addresses another anti-dualist challenge—i.e., dualism
 11095	would require material things like our bodies to have the extraordinary
 11096	power to generate souls ex nihilo—by invoking the God who created
 11097	them. “If God exists,” he argues, “then God might well be creating those
 11098	souls in accordance with the laws; otherwise, this process would happen
 11099	by itself. Either way, I’m not sure how much more extravagance any of
 11100	this adds to the fact that souls are coming into existence ex nihilo in the
 11101	first place. God is already supposed to be able to create ex nihilo, so if
 11102	God is creating the souls, this would add no more extravagance at all. If
 11103	God isn’t involved, there would be no agent at all creating the souls—the
 11104	body would be no more of an agent than the sun is in growing trees”
 11105	(Olson and Segal, 2023; Segal, 2023).
 11106	A few religious denominations, especially in the Christian tradition,
 11107	go further and assert that not only does God dispense a soul to each
 11108	individual, but also God makes a determination, prior to or at that
 11109	moment of allocation, what the future holds for that individual soulperson: the soul-person’s ultimate destiny, whether that soul-person
 11110	will attain salvation or be condemned to damnation. This controver­
 11111	sial doctrine is called “predestination,” and most mainstream religions
 11112	reject it (Predestination, 2024).
 11113	15.15. Personal and cosmic consciousness in Indian philosophy
 11114	Theories of consciousness that developed in the ancient Indian sub­
 11115	continent, based on the Vedic scriptures, focus on the relationship be­
 11116	tween individual human consciousness and cosmic consciousness.
 11117	Roughly, there were two major views: each individual human con­
 11118	sciousness is a “piece,” as it were, of the cosmic consciousness, or each
 11119	individual human consciousness, in some mystical sense, is the entirety
 11120	of the cosmic consciousness, even though there are innumerable in­
 11121	stantiations of the same thing (Sarvapriyananda, 2023b; Sarvapriya­
 11122	nanda, 2023a; Medhananda, 2023).
 11123	These centers of individual consciousness would reincarnate through
 11124	countless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth before a final disposition
 11125	would be made, with the individual consciousness being absorbed back
 11126	into the cosmic consciousness, as if a single drop of rain, having evap­
 11127	orated from the ocean, condenses back into it.
 11128	While the main Advaita Vedanta tradition is nondualist, meaning
 11129	that consciousness is the only fundamental existent and all else,
 11130	including the entire physical world, is derived from consciousness, there
 11131	are minority schools that maintain that the physical world has realist
 11132	existence (Medhananda, 2022, 2023).
 11133	118
       
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 11136	etc.” On the other hand, it “is also an inveterate divider, making dis­
 11137	tinctions between subject and object, I and thou, things and other
 11138	things” (Cornelissen, 2004).
 11139	From the Vedic perspective, “ordinary human mentality is consid­
 11140	ered to be only the most primitive form of mental consciousness, most
 11141	ego-bound, most dependent on the physical senses. Above it there is the
 11142	unitary Higher Mind of self-revealed wisdom, the Illumined Mind where
 11143	truths are seen rather than thought, the plane of the Intuitive Mind
 11144	where truth is inevitable and perfect, and finally the cosmic Overmind,
 11145	the mind of the Gods, comprehensive, all-encompassing.” But one must
 11146	rise beyond all of them to find ultimate perfection, “one with the divine
 11147	consciousness that upholds the universe” (Cornelissen, 2004).
 11148	While various spiritual traditions have set life’s highest goal as
 11149	connecting or even merging with the absolute consciousness, Sri Auro­
 11150	bindo distinguishes his vision by announcing, “It is at this moment for
 11151	the first time becoming possible to let a supramental consciousness enter
 11152	into one’s being and transform it in every respect.” It is this “compre­
 11153	hensive, supramental transformation of all aspects of human nature”
 11154	that is the central theme of Sri Aurobindo’s work—and it is his grand
 11155	prediction that human progress via the evolution of consciousness will
 11156	eventually bring about “supramental consciousness as much an intrinsic,
 11157	‘natural’ part of earthly life as our ordinary mentality is now” (Corne­
 11158	lissen, 2004).
 11159	According to Ravi Gomatam, a quantum physicist and a monk of the
 11160	Gaudiya Vaishnava (GV) Vedanta school of India, GV Vedanta is mono­
 11161	theistic, with a pluralist ontology that distinguishes between the ener­
 11162	getic personal God (shaktiman) and the diverse energies (shaktis) such as
 11163	consciousness and matter, which emanate from God. Both the energetic
 11164	personal God (the Universal "I”) and his diverse energies, which include
 11165	consciousness and matter, are ontologically real. While the material
 11166	atoms lack consciousness and therefore are indistinguishable, the plane
 11167	of non-material consciousness comprises innumerable individual units
 11168	of consciousness, each with its own unique “I” (Gomatam, 2021).
 11169	Yet, Gomatam says, GV Vedanta is uniquely compatible with the
 11170	materialistic perspective informing modern cognitive science—namely
 11171	that thinking, feeling, willing, intelligence, and even our present sense of
 11172	“I” spring entirely from matter. This is via the GV Vedanta idea that
 11173	many properties of consciousness can be separated from consciousness
 11174	and instantiated in appropriate complementary “levels of matter,” a
 11175	novel technical concept that Gomatam is introducing through his work
 11176	in the foundations of quantum mechanics. He says it is different from the
 11177	prevailing idea of hierarchy of matter at various scales in physics.
 11178	The color, size and shape of an apple can be instantiated on paper. A
 11179	plastic apple may instantiate even further properties of the apple, such
 11180	as its 3-dimensional shape, weight and texture. In either case, the apple
 11181	itself is not reduced to the painting or the plastic object that instantiates
 11182	its properties. Similarly, Gomatam explains, GV Vedanta allows various
 11183	traits of consciousness to be instantiated sans consciousness in matter at
 11184	various “levels” of matter, which are mutually exclusive, causal realms
 11185	that complement one another, with each higher level not being consti­
 11186	tuted by its lower levels (Gomatam, 1987).
 11187	Even though matter instantiates properties such as thinking, feeling,
 11188	experience and even an “I” via an apparent self onto these levels of
 11189	matter, matter itself is not aware it carries these cognitive and affective
 11190	properties. Only consciousness can know matter has these properties.
 11191	GV Vedanta further explains that we mistake these materially
 11192	instantiated traits to be part of our intrinsic consciousness due to maya
 11193	(illusion), imposed upon the individual souls in the material world by
 11194	the Universal Person (purushottama), from whom all individual “I”s
 11195	emanate, but who is different from them. In this way, Gomatam suggests
 11196	that GV Vedanta can contribute novel, sophisticated notions of levels of
 11197	matter to instantiate various features of consciousness, without reducing
 11198	consciousness itself to matter. Gomatam points out that here GV
 11199	Vedanta differs from Advaita Vedanta, which holds both matter and
 11200	individual “I”s to be ultimately non-existent, and admits only an
 11201	impersonal Universal “I”. Jainism and Buddhism, two other schools of
       
 11202	Indian thought, additionally treat the Universal “I,” personal or imper­
 11203	sonal, to be also non-existent (Gomatam, 2021).
 11204	15.16. Soul in indigenous religions
 11205	The concept of the soul, in multifarious forms, has infused indige­
 11206	nous and folk religions throughout the world, and although we tend to
 11207	categorize these ancient belief systems as “pre-modern” and “pre-sci­
 11208	entific,” lacking the sophistication of the major Eastern and Abrahamic
 11209	traditions, we may be remiss not to recognize the data and to assess its
 11210	implications (if any). The geographic ubiquity of soul belief, spanning
 11211	the globe and including all racial and cultural groups, and its resiliency
 11212	over time, should not be ignored.
 11213	The cognitive science of religion, a relatively recent field of inquiry,
 11214	can account for beliefs in supernatural agents and entities, from souls
 11215	and ghosts to angels and gods (Barrett, 2000; Boyer, 2001; Lawson,
 11216	1993). Psychologist Justin Barrett’s idea of a “hyperactive agent
 11217	detection device” can explain why human beings evolved concepts of
 11218	gods and spirits. (Barrett asserts that this evolved psychological mech­
 11219	anism is agnostic on whether such gods and spirits would actually exist:
 11220	“Having a scientific explanation for mental phenomena does not mean
 11221	we should stop believing in them,” he says [Barrett, 2012].)
 11222	Although the soul in indigenous religions is often more a vital prin­
 11223	ciple or an immanent power resident in all animate and even inanimate
 11224	objects, not a non-physical substance in each individual, there is wide
 11225	recognition of spiritual aspects of human beings. While it is not fruitful
 11226	to try to discern the metaphysics of what is designated by some ab­
 11227	origines as "spirit of the man," or "spirit in the man," there is certainly
 11228	widespread belief in the existence of forces, powers and entities beyond
 11229	their physical worlds (Rivière, 1987, 2005).
 11230	Whether these beliefs can be classified as substance dualism as
 11231	presently conceived is debatable, although numerous examples show
 11232	that “there exists a quite noticeable distinction between the body
 11233	element and the diversity of spiritual entities that one may call ‘souls’ for
 11234	the sake of convenience, entities that may have the body as a prop.”
 11235	What James Frazer in The Golden Bough called the “external soul” has
 11236	some characteristics of dualism’s souls or spirits, such as the capacity to
 11237	depart the body during dreams. (Differences include, for example, the
 11238	external soul living in an animal double or in one’s shadow.)
 11239	The origin of the indigenous soul, compared with that of dualism’s
 11240	soul, also has similarities (e.g., coming from an almighty spirit) and
 11241	differences (e.g., obtained as a gift or by conquest or by choice). The Ewe
 11242	of Togo use specific, separate terms for the "substance of the soul" and
 11243	the "breath of life," and believe that the individual, before incarnation,
 11244	exists as a spirit, and together with the supreme creator (Mawu-Lisa) he
 11245	or she chooses their own destiny. Other indigenous groups have very
 11246	physical means to obtain souls, such as pilgrimage, fasting, eating,
 11247	combat and killing (Rivière, 1987, 2005).
 11248	Regarding its destiny after death, souls can reach new worlds in
 11249	which to live or be transmitted as a vital force to descendants. The
 11250	majority believe that after death their ancestors live in another world.
 11251	Many African religions focus on ancestors, who, in some cases, can
 11252	reincarnate in a newborn baby.
 11253	The Native American Dakota have four types of souls (given by the
 11254	sky god): one is judged after death—if deserving, one’s soul enters the
 11255	world of spirits; if not, it must wander forever. Almost everywhere, the
 11256	soul after death involves a gradual purification through a series of trials.
 11257	The ultimate destination is a celestial space or an undifferentiated earthbased place (underground, marshes, desert). While living in the other
 11258	world, the dead person can be present elsewhere; as a specter or a ghost
 11259	(Rivière, 1987, 2005).
 11260	In Chinese folk religion, the majority of supernatural beings are
 11261	thought to originate from the "souls" of dead people (Harrell, 1979).
 11262	Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is said to engage “a deeper level of
 11263	consciousness that touches various organs of the human body.” Every
 11264	organ is in some sense involved in consciousness. This includes the
 11265	119
       
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 11268	of individuality is merged in the whole” (Consciousness, Absolute, n.d.).
 11269	Theosophy approaches personal consciousness “as sentience or
 11270	awareness of internal and external existence.” In this view, Theosophy’s
 11271	consciousness “includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling, or
 11272	perception.” A special case of consciousness is "self-consciousness" or
 11273	"self-awareness," which is “the experience or perception of one’s own
 11274	personality or individuality.” Theosophy’s consciousness is “a funda­
 11275	mental (not an emergent) property of the cosmos, which is present in
 11276	everything including inorganic matter.” The implication of this univer­
 11277	sal ubiquity is that “consciousness is not necessarily a cognitive function
 11278	as normally experienced by humans, but rather the more basic ability to
 11279	perceive and respond to the environment in some form.” Thus, Theos­
 11280	ophy regards each individual atom as “possessing a principle of con­
 11281	sciousness in its most basic form. This does not mean that there is some
 11282	process of thinking in the atom.” Rather, "’atomic consciousness’ could
 11283	be its ability to ‘perceive’ or ‘identify’ atoms with which it has affinity,
 11284	responding to them by forming molecules” (Consciousness, 2023).
 11285	In Theosophy’s telling, there are many levels of consciousness,
 11286	“depending on the plane or body through which it manifests.” In addi­
 11287	tion, the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness is also
 11288	important, “since the latter is said to be a special feature that is fully
 11289	developed only in human beings, especially in connection to the phys­
 11290	ical plane” (Consciousness, 2023).
 11291	A contemporary Theosophy thinker is Edi Bilimoria, an engineer,
 11292	classical musician and life-long student of perennial philosophy. He
 11293	takes “Unfolding Consciousness” as his overarching framework “to show
 11294	how the Universal Wisdom Tradition—the Perennial Philosophy—and
 11295	the corroboration of some of its tenets by enlightened science of the
 11296	quantum era, broadens and contextualises mainstream science beyond
 11297	its existing metaphysical limitations.” He explores, “in the manner of the
 11298	Universal Wisdom Tradition, the unfolding of Consciousness from its
 11299	Unmanifest and Implicate realms, through Cosmos, and Man.” Mind and
 11300	consciousness, he contends, cannot be wholly explained without indepth understanding of “the subtle (i.e., non-physical) bodies of the
 11301	human being on all levels” (Bilimoria, 2022; Bilimoria, n.d.).
       
 11302	brain, of course, but it also includes the liver, the kidney, the heart, etc.
 11303	each with its own essence or contribution, thus forming “an integrated
 11304	consciousness system.” “Shen” (神) is the TCM concept corresponding to
 11305	“consciousness” and the classic TCM text (Huangdi Neijing) describes
 11306	“how to understand the meaning of Shen in the heart, soul in the liver,
 11307	meaning in the spleen, soul in the lungs, essence in the kidney, and will.”
 11308	According to TCM theory, “the human body is a little universe. Things
 11309	outside the body form the big universe. These outside and inside uni­
 11310	verses are closely connected together in one holistic overall system.” The
 11311	claim is that this idea corresponds to the cognitive-science concepts of
 11312	embodiment, specifically Ecological Psychology (9.6.7) and Embodied
 11313	Cognition (9.6.1) (Lu et al., 2022).
 11314	The imaginative varieties of indigenous souls reflect the richness and
 11315	abundance of human creativity. The Fang of Gabon name seven types of
 11316	souls: three disappear at death; two persevere after death; one is a dis­
 11317	incarnated spirit (which can appear as a ghost); and one is “both shadow
 11318	and soul.” (Harrell, 1979). While these “souls” are not dualist sub­
 11319	stances, they reflect aspects of dualism.
 11320	No claim is made that souls in indigenous religions, however ubiq­
 11321	uitous, corroborate dualism as a theory of consciousness. On the other
 11322	hand, the substantial and similar anthropological data should at least be
 11323	acknowledged.
 11324	15.17. Realms of the soul
 11325	Many, I’d say most, religious traditions present elaborate levels or
 11326	stages or realms of the soul, accommodating the soul and its elaborate
 11327	journeys before birth and after death—Yogācāra Buddhism, Sufism in
 11328	Islam, Kabbalah in Judaism, Christian mysticism, occult sects such as
 11329	Theosophy (15.18). These religions espouse different doctrines super­
 11330	ficially, but the complex, multi-level, multi-dimensional, geometric
 11331	structures of the habitats of the soul—the bewildering imagery of what
 11332	souls are, where they come from, where they go, what they do—look
 11333	remarkably alike.
 11334	While such visions of the soul do not address directly the essence of
 11335	consciousness, the fact that they espouse a nonphysical substance or
 11336	entity, the soul, that is prominent, primitive, and permanent makes
 11337	personal consciousness derivative and hence also nonphysical.
 11338	Yet, all this means little for purposes of this dualism category. In no
 11339	way does any of this, in no way does all of this, add verisimilitude to the
 11340	story of souls, but humanity’s fascination, obsession, with souls cannot
 11341	be denied.
       
 11342	15.19. Steiner’s esoteric soul and consciousness
 11343	The esotericist, philosopher and spiritual teacher Rudolf Steiner had
 11344	a complex and changing relationship with Theosophy, from apologist
 11345	and thought leader to competitor and reprobate. He developed a large
 11346	following in his time, which to some degree continues. His “spiritual
 11347	science” sought to expand knowledge and wisdom (Steiner, 2024.)
 11348	Consciousness, particularly the evolution of consciousness, is central
 11349	to Steiner’s belief system and spiritual teachings. He explains “how it is
 11350	possible to develop higher faculties of consciousness—Imagination,
 11351	Inspiration, and Intuition”—and how humanity could “gradually take in
 11352	hand its own destiny through the conscious and free development of
 11353	spiritual capacities.” He devoted much of his teaching to the esoterica of
 11354	consciousness and soul, describing vividly “one’s life after death and the
 11355	progress of the individual through the planetary spheres where tasks and
 11356	goals for future incarnations are prepared in cooperation with the
 11357	spiritual beings of the Hierarchies” (Steiner, 1923a).
 11358	Steiner differentiates consciousness from “soul life,” though they are
 11359	obviously related. His consciousness is a “continuous stream of visuali­
 11360	zations,” while it is “not the same thing as the continuous stream of the
 11361	soul life.” Moreover, “a visualization can live on in the soul without
 11362	entering consciousness.” This relates to memories, which are usually not
 11363	conscious and are held in our soul life, and “in order to be conscious of
 11364	them [memories] we must first call them up out of the unconscious life
 11365	of the soul by an act of will.” Consciousness, Steiner says, “illuminates
 11366	but a part of the soul life” (Steiner, 1909).
 11367	Steiner defines consciousness in (at least) two ways: (i) the over­
 11368	lapping in the present of the current (streams or flows) of emotions
 11369	coming out of the future and the current of visualizations flowing out of
 11370	the past; and (ii) the meeting of the astral and etheric bodies (Steiner,
       
 11371	15.18. Theosophy’s eclectic soul and consciousness
 11372	Soul and consciousness are core doctrines of Theosophy, an occult
 11373	amalgam of esoteric ideas from Western and Eastern religions, traditions
 11374	and philosophies. Theosophy defines itself as “Wisdom-religion” or
 11375	"Divine Wisdom,” and considers itself “The substratum and basis of all
 11376	the world-religions and philosophies, taught and practiced by a few elect
 11377	ever since man became a thinking being” (Theosophy, 2023).
 11378	Theosophy’s “soul” describes three of the seven principles that are
 11379	said to compose human beings: animal soul (astral body, astral shape,
 11380	and the animal or physical intelligence); human soul (“a compound in its
 11381	highest form, of spiritual aspirations, volitions, and divine love; and in
 11382	its lower aspect, of animal desires and terrestrial passions imparted to it
 11383	by its associations with its vehicle, the seat of all these”); spiritual soul
 11384	(“irrational in the sense that as a pure emanation of the Universal mind it
 11385	can have no individual reason of its own on this plane of matter”) (Soul,
 11386	2023).
 11387	The Secret Doctrine, Theosophy’s primary text (written by its founder,
 11388	Madame Blavatsky), speaks of consciousness as “the dark mystery of
 11389	non-Being; unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness; unrealisable, yet
 11390	the one self-existing reality.” The state of consciousness is described as
 11391	“beyond limitation, and hence is beyond the cognizer, cognition and
 11392	cognized.” It is the state attained in Nirvana, a state “in which all sense
 11393	120
       
 11394	R.L. Kuhn
       
 11395	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 11396	1909, 1923b). What does this mean?
 11397	Steiner states that “the riddles of consciousness will be solved and the
 11398	whole peculiar nature of the soul life clarified if you start with the
 11399	premise that the current of desire, love and hate comes to meet you out
 11400	of the future, and meets the current of visualizations flowing out of the
 11401	past into the future. At every moment you are actually in the midst of
 11402	this encounter of the two streams, and considering that the present
 11403	moment of your soul life consists of such a meeting, you will readily
 11404	understand that these two currents overlap in your soul. This overlapping
 11405	is consciousness” (Steiner, 1909).
 11406	To get a sense of how such overlapping happens, one begins with
 11407	Steiner’s description of the human being as having seven distinct
 11408	members, the first three of which are “bodies”—physical, etheric,
 11409	astral—and the fourth is Ego or I. The physical body covers the workings
 11410	of physics and chemistry. The etheric body or “life body” describes forces
 11411	or energy fields that are spatial and take the form of our physical body.
 11412	The astral body expresses affect, feelings and emotions, and has
 11413	“movements,” such as expansion and contraction (reflecting positive
 11414	and negative emotions, respectively).
 11415	To Steiner, how these bodies articulate is critical. For example,
 11416	“throughout the whole of an earthly life the physical body and the
 11417	etheric remain together, never separating even when, in sleep, the
 11418	etheric body and the astral body have to part company.” Similarly, the
 11419	Ego and the astral body never “part from one another during life on
 11420	Earth. In our waking state we give life to our senses through our Ego, and
 11421	through the astral body to our nervous system” (Steiner, 1923b).
 11422	Two critical elements are: (i) “clairvoyant consciousness about the
 11423	etheric and astral bodies,” and (ii) “the intersection of the two streams …
 11424	the two currents meet in the physical body.” In this way, Steiner har­
 11425	monizes his two definitions of consciousness—overlapping streams of
 11426	emotions from the future and of visualizations from the past, and the
 11427	meeting of the astral and etheric bodies, the two streams intersecting in
 11428	the physical body.
 11429	What happens “when a man passes through the gate of death,” as
 11430	Steiner puts it? To simplify, “The etheric body detaches itself from the
 11431	physical body—something that never happens during earthly life. And
 11432	now, when the etheric body is free of the physical, all that has been
 11433	interwoven into the etheric body is gradually dispersed … the experi­
 11434	ences that have gradually penetrated into the etheric body … pass out
 11435	into the universal cosmic ether, and dissolve.” Steiner offers an intricate
 11436	tapestry of the worlds beyond death: spiritual beings, a speaking uni­
 11437	verse, uniting with the whole Cosmos, the music of the spheres, rebirths,
 11438	and more (I spare the reader the details) (Steiner, 1923b).
       
 11439	My 1969 conjecture was that a “nonphysical component” might be
 11440	needed to explain the vast difference between the mental outputs of
 11441	humans and other mammals, especially those whose brains are larger
 11442	than human brains.
 11443	To pursue the speculation, if consciousness per se requires some kind
 11444	of dualist theory, and if human mentality is step-function qualitatively
 11445	superior to any animal mentality, it might follow that if a certain kind of
 11446	nonphysical component is needed for human consciousness, then
 11447	perhaps a different nonphysical component structure is needed for an­
 11448	imal consciousness.
 11449	To crawl farther out on this shaky limb, such a nonphysical
 11450	component difference between humans and animals could come about
 11451	in two ways: (i) human and animal consciousness have different kinds of
 11452	nonphysical components; or (ii) there is one kind of nonphysical
 11453	component for pure consciousness, applicable to both humans and other
 11454	animals equally, and another kind of nonphysical component that
 11455	transforms basic animal consciousness into human consciousness. (Un­
 11456	daunted by nested speculations, I had a curious Bible story where this
 11457	might apply.53)
 11458	Suffice it to say that I wrote my “nonphysical component” paper
 11459	more than 55 years prior to writing this paper, so I ask that my views
 11460	(and my style) then should not color too darkly my views now. (Well,
 11461	maybe just a bit of coloring is fair …)
 11462	16. Idealisms
 11463	Idealism is consciousness as ultimate reality, the fullness of the
 11464	deepest level of all existence, the singular fundamental existent. It is the
 11465	theory of consciousness that takes consciousness to its maximum
 11466	meaning. The focus here is ontological idealism, where ultimate reality
 11467	is mind or awareness or thought, while everything else, including all
 11468	physical worlds and universes and all that they contain, are derivative or
 11469	illusionary. (I do not consider epistemological idealism, where all we
 11470	can know is constrained by the structure of human thought.) (Guyer and
 11471	Horstmann, 2023).
 11472	Consciousness as ultimate reality is the age-old claim, rooted in some
 11473	wisdom traditions, that the only reality that’s “really real” is con­
 11474	sciousness—everything else, from physical laws to physical brains, is the
 11475	generative product of an all-pervading and all-encompassing “cosmic
 11476	consciousness.” Each individual instance of consciousness—human,
 11477	animal, artificial or otherwise—is a subset of this cosmic consciousness,
 11478	the ultimate superset.
 11479	Idealism has a rich intellectual history, especially in the 18th century
 11480	(e.g., Berkeley, Kant) and 19th century (e.g., Hegel, Bradley); it was
 11481	anticipated by elements of 17th century philosophy and continued to
 11482	develop into the 20th century (Guyer and Horstmann, 2023). Though
 11483	often eliciting “the incredulous stare" (in David Lewis’s delightful
 11484	phrase), Idealism is taken seriously by philosophers. Moreover, it is the
 11485	foundation of major religious traditions, especially among those that
 11486	arose in ancient India.
 11487	To the surprise of some, Idealism as a theory of consciousness has not
 11488	been fading in light of scientific advances. If anything, Idealism’s
       
 11489	15.20. Nonphysical component in the human mind
 11490	This theory of consciousness is a generalized notion that in order to
 11491	make the human mind, some kind of “nonphysical component,” working
 11492	with the human brain, might be needed. It is the speculative position I
 11493	took in my first paper, published in 1969, where I emphasized that such
 11494	a hypothetical nonphysical component would not be a traditional
 11495	immortal soul (Kuhn, 1969).
 11496	I did not impute to this nonphysical component, on its own, con­
 11497	sciousness or any kind of awareness, only its (potential) power, when
 11498	working with the human brain, to transform the human brain into the
 11499	human mind. I can almost find, if I stretch, parallels or resonance with
 11500	Polkinghorne’s “information-bearing pattern.” (14.5) and Van Inwa­
 11501	gen’s “naked kernel” (10.3).
 11502	Here I distinguish human mind from consciousness, which we pre­
 11503	sume to exist in many animals. Few doubt that mammals such as pri­
 11504	mates, dogs, and cetaceans are conscious and have mental experiences.
 11505	Human mind and consciousness are like intersecting, non-overlapping
 11506	Venn diagrams: some but not all of human mind is consciousness, and
 11507	some (but not all) of consciousness is human mind; stated in reverse,
 11508	aspects of human mind go beyond consciousness and instances of con­
 11509	sciousness go beyond human mind.
       
 11510	53
       
 11511	At one point in my early ruminations, I wondered if there was anything in
 11512	the Bible that might reflect the essence of human-level consciousness, dis­
 11513	tinguishing humans from other animals. In Daniel 4, an incredible account is
 11514	given of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, who was “driven from men and
 11515	dwelt with the beasts of the field” for seven years: “Let his heart [mind] be
 11516	changed from man’s, and let a beast’s heart [mind] be given unto him.” (Dan. 4:
 11517	16). Then, after the seven years, “my understanding returned to me and I
 11518	blessed the most High.” (Dan. 4:34). Assume (for the moment) that this really
 11519	happened, how could this have literally happened? Mental illness and its
 11520	spontaneous remission would be a naturalistic explanation. I speculated
 11521	something else: a change made to some “nonphysical substance” in Nebu­
 11522	chadnezzar’s mind; conveniently, I had a “nonphysical component” at the
 11523	ready.
 11524	121
       
 11525	R.L. Kuhn
       
 11526	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 11527	explanatory star seems on the ascent, shining brighter, as consciousness
 11528	maintains its mysteries and Idealism attracts more adherents.
 11529	David Chalmers muses, “One starts as a materialist, then one be­
 11530	comes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up as an idealist. I
 11531	don’t know where this comes from, but I think the idea was something
 11532	like this. First, one is impressed by the successes of science, endorsing
 11533	materialism about everything and so about the mind. Second, one is
 11534	moved by problem of consciousness to see a gap between physics and
 11535	consciousness, thereby endorsing dualism, where both matter and con­
 11536	sciousness are fundamental. Third, one is moved by the inscrutability of
 11537	matter to realize that science reveals at most the structure of matter and
 11538	not its underlying nature, and to speculate that this nature may involve
 11539	consciousness, thereby endorsing panpsychism. Fourth, one comes to
 11540	think that there is little reason to believe in anything beyond con­
 11541	sciousness and that the physical world is wholly constituted by con­
 11542	sciousness, thereby endorsing idealism” (Chalmers, 2020d).
 11543	Chalmers defines idealism broadly “as the thesis that the universe is
 11544	fundamentally mental, or perhaps that all concrete facts are grounded in
 11545	mental facts. As such it is meant as a global metaphysical thesis analo­
 11546	gous to physicalism, the thesis that the universe is fundamentally
 11547	physical, or perhaps that all concrete facts are grounded in physical
 11548	facts. The only difference is that ‘physical’ is replaced by ‘mental.’”
 11549	Idealists are not necessarily committed to anti-realist views about the
 11550	physical world, though some are, especially among Eastern traditions. It
 11551	is perfectly coherent for an idealist to regard the physical world as “real”
 11552	in the sense that it exists when no one is looking; “it just has a surprising
 11553	nature,” having been formed from mental fundamentals (Chalmers,
 11554	2020d).
 11555	Chalmers distinguishes three types of idealism. (i) “Micro-idealism is
 11556	the thesis that concrete reality is wholly grounded in micro-level men­
 11557	tality: that is, in mentality associated with fundamental microscopic
 11558	entities (such as quarks and photons).” (ii) “Macro-idealism is the thesis
 11559	that concrete reality is wholly grounded in macro-level mentality: that
 11560	is, in mentality associated with macroscopic (middle-sized) entities such
 11561	as humans and perhaps non-human animals.” (iii) “Cosmic idealism is the
 11562	thesis that concrete reality is wholly grounded in cosmic mentality: that
 11563	is, in mentality associated with the cosmos as a whole or with a single
 11564	cosmic entity (such as the universe or a deity)” (Chalmers, 2020d).
 11565	Thus, micro-idealism has all fundamental forces and particles as
 11566	entirely (not in part) mental; macro-idealism privileges what we
 11567	commonly call mental as somehow constituting the foundations of re­
 11568	ality; and cosmic idealism can be conceived as kinds of pantheism or
 11569	theism, though not the dominant strands, of course. Moreover, there is
 11570	resonance between these three kinds of idealism with three similar kinds
 11571	of panpsychism, the rough difference being that whereas in panpsy­
 11572	chism the mental, while everywhere, is not everything; in idealism, the
 11573	mental is both everything and everywhere.
 11574	To Huston Smith, world religion expert and devotee, matter is not
 11575	fundamental, but consciousness is. “Matter is like an iceberg protruding
 11576	out of the sea of consciousness.” Consciousness can never be destroyed,
 11577	he said, but “can oscillate between different forms,” which leads, he
 11578	recognizes, to the issue of death. “We know what our consciousness is
 11579	like; we can’t explain it, but we can experience it. What will it be when
 11580	we drop our body? Well, what we can say is if consciousness is the
 11581	fundamental reality and it can’t be destroyed, consciousness will
 11582	continue. The light on the television screen will never go out. Now what
 11583	the image on that screen will be after death, after we drop the body, we
 11584	do not know. That’s the ultimate mystery” (Smith, 2007).
 11585	To philosopher-theological scholar David Bentley Hart, “reason ab­
 11586	hors a dualism, all phenomena should ideally be reducible to a single,
 11587	simpler, more capacious model of reality. So, then, rather than banish­
 11588	ing mind from our picture of nature, perhaps we should reconsider the
 11589	ancient intuition that nature and mind are not alien to one another
 11590	precisely because nature already possesses a rational structure analo­
 11591	gous to thought” (Hart, 2022b).
 11592	Not sufficiently contrarian, Hart then considers “the ground of the
       
 11593	possibility [that] regular physical causation is a deeper logical coin­
 11594	herence of rational relations underlying all reality.” Perhaps, more to his
 11595	point, “mind inhabits physical nature not as an anomaly, but as a
 11596	revelation of the deepest essence of everything that exists.”
 11597	16.1. Indian cosmic consciousness
 11598	Consciousness is central to the philosophical and religious traditions
 11599	that emerged on the ancient Indian subcontinent, perhaps more central
 11600	to Indian philosophy and religion than it is to any other global tradition.
 11601	The sophistication and subtleties of the millennia-long discussions on
 11602	consciousness in Indian traditions have enriched human understanding
 11603	of, and appreciation for, consciousness as core of human sentience.
 11604	All the schools of ancient Indian philosophy were concerned with
 11605	ideas about consciousness and self, which were based on the Upani­
 11606	shads, the late Vedic, sacred Sanskrit texts (800-300 BCE). Although the
 11607	motivation was often the perennial question, “How does one [Self]
 11608	overcome suffering?”, the explorations developed sophisticated philos­
 11609	ophies and subtle ontologies (Sarvapriyananda, 2020; Sarvapriyananda,
 11610	2023a).
 11611	Speaking on Closer To Truth, Swami Sarvapriyananda explains why
 11612	ancient Indian thinkers of all varieties—Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, etc.—
 11613	were so interested in consciousness. Their central quest was to overcome
 11614	suffering, he reiterates, to attain liberation of the self. “Once you do that,
 11615	you see immediately that consciousness and the self are very intimately
 11616	connected. I am obviously conscious. I am aware. And it is in my
 11617	awareness that I experience suffering, and the struggle to liberate myself
 11618	from suffering. But all of it requires consciousness. Even the search for
 11619	God requires consciousness” (Sarvapriyananda, 2023b).
 11620	Sarvapriyananda defines consciousness as “that to which everything
 11621	else appears.” So, this world, he asks, “Is it consciousness? No. Nothing
 11622	in this world is consciousness because it’s an object to you. Is this body
 11623	consciousness? No. Because it’s an object to you. Now, what about the
 11624	mind, our thoughts and emotions, which would normally be taken as
 11625	related to consciousness? By this elegant definition of consciousness as
 11626	‘that to which everything else appears,’ can you designate this thought
 11627	or this emotion subjectively from your perspective? You can. And if you
 11628	can, then even thoughts and emotions are also objects to consciousness.
 11629	The result is that consciousness is clearly distinguished from all objects.
 11630	Whatever appears to you belongs to material nature. And consciousness
 11631	is not that. Consciousness does exactly one thing. It gives you a firstperson experience” (Sarvapriyananda, 2023b). (“Consciousness” is the
 11632	usual translation of the Vedantic term “Chaitanya,” although alternative
 11633	English words, such as “awareness” and “sentience,” are also used.)
 11634	The preeminence of consciousness, both intrinsically and to the self,
 11635	elicited a wide diversity of speculation about what consciousness is, and
 11636	how it arises and functions. “Indian philosophy had different schools,
 11637	and they argued with each other fiercely. Each of the schools fashioned
 11638	its own approach to consciousness and to its relationship with self. The
 11639	range of beliefs parallels consciousness studies today, from materialistreductionism to idealism. Although the ancient Indian materialists
 11640	(Charvakas) were a popular school, the dominant theme of the primary
 11641	Vedanta schools, especially Advaita Vedanta, became nondual idealism,
 11642	‘nondualism’” (Sarvapriyananda, 2020). Other schools said there are
 11643	two kinds of consciousness: a personal consciousness associated with
 11644	individual bodies and minds, and a cosmic consciousness associated
 11645	with all bodies and minds. “You are the consciousness associated with
 11646	your body and mind. And God is the consciousness associated with all
 11647	bodies and minds. God is cosmic consciousness” (Sarvapriyananda,
 11648	2023b).
 11649	“But this goes further,” Swami Sarvapriyananda says. “How does
 11650	consciousness interact with material nature? There were multiple an­
 11651	swers from multiple schools. One is that material nature is real, and
 11652	consciousness is just an expression of material nature. (There were
 11653	modern materialists in ancient India!) The second school says that the
 11654	universe is produced from consciousness. And who says that? Every
 11655	122
       
 11656	R.L. Kuhn
       
 11657	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 11658	theistic school in the world says that. If God is the creator God, and God
 11659	is obviously conscious, then in some sense, consciousness produces the
 11660	material universe. These are the dualists. The third school is the
 11661	Samkhyan, where consciousness and matter are parallel; neither pro­
 11662	duces the other; both are fundamental, irreducible realities.”
 11663	The fourth, Advaita Vedanta, Swami Sarvapriyananda’s own school,
 11664	is nondualist, “which means that you cannot solve the interaction
 11665	problem. If consciousness and matter are fundamentally different, then
 11666	there is no way they could interact. Where would be the place, the
 11667	boundary, where interaction could occur?” So, not being able to solve
 11668	the interaction problem, what to do? “Let’s just stick to our experience,”
 11669	he advises. “What is matter? That which appears in consciousness. And if
 11670	matter appears in consciousness, then matter can be reduced to con­
 11671	sciousness. Thus, the materialist reduces consciousness to matter, the
 11672	nondualist reduces matter to consciousness” (Sarvapriyananda, 2023b).
 11673	Advaita Vedanta, a monistic system, eradicates the dualistic di­
 11674	chotomy between consciousness and its object. Even more fundamental
 11675	than the mind is nondual pure consciousness. The term for this ultimate
 11676	consciousness is Brahman, “the vast” or “the limitless” (literally, "that
 11677	which expands into everything"), and it is the key concept that unifies
 11678	the consciousness of the individual with the consciousness of the
 11679	cosmos, which is the fundamental, nondual reality of the universe.
 11680	Rather than conceiving of prakriti/nature as a transformation of purusa/
 11681	consciousness, in Advaita Vedanta, prakriti is considered an appearance
 11682	of purusa (Sarvapriyananda, 2020).
 11683	In the succinct expression of the Mandukya, the briefest of the major
 11684	Upanishads, “Brahman is all, and the Self is Brahman.”
 11685	Thus, Advaita Vedanta’s nondualism asserts that each individual
 11686	soul, in some literal sense, is non-different from the infinite Brahman.
 11687	“You are that underlying reality, Brahman. Not you as the body; not you
 11688	as the mind; not even you as the person you think yourself to be, but as
 11689	an underlying consciousness that shines through, functions through, and
 11690	expresses itself through this body-mind complex.” Swami Vivekananda,
 11691	who introduced Vedanta to Western audiences, put it this way: “If only
 11692	you knew yourselves as you truly are.” Not as a body, bound to age,
 11693	decay, and die; not even as a mind, a changing, limited personality, but
 11694	as an unlimited consciousness expressing itself through a mind and a
 11695	body (Sarvapriyananda, 2020).
 11696	The modern Hindu sage Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi clarified the
 11697	fundamental principles of Advaita Vedanta, as explained by philoso­
 11698	pher/translator Michael James, an expert on Sri Ramana. With regard to
 11699	consciousness, “Sri Ramana highlighted the distinction between transi­
 11700	tive awareness (suṭṭaṟivu in Tamil) and intransitive awareness (suṭṭaṯṟa
 11701	aṟivu). Transitive awareness is awareness that knows objects or phe­
 11702	nomena, whereas intransitive awareness is awareness that knows
 11703	nothing other than itself. In classical Advaita Vedanta, intransitive
 11704	awareness is called pure consciousness (śuddha caitanya), because it is
 11705	consciousness devoid of any content, and being-consciousness (sat-cit),
 11706	not only because it is conscious only of its own being, ‘I am’, but also
 11707	because it is the consciousness (cit) that is itself pure being (sat),
 11708	meaning that it is what alone actually exists, so it is the one real sub­
 11709	stance (vastu) from which all other things derive their seeming existence,
 11710	just as gold ornaments derive their existence from gold. Transitive
 11711	awareness, on the other hand, is called cidābhāsa, meaning that it is an
 11712	ābhāsa (semblance, likeness or reflection) of consciousness (cit), because
 11713	it is not real consciousness, since it is consciousness of things that do not
 11714	actually exist but merely seem to exist, like all the things seen in a
 11715	dream. Only consciousness of what actually exists is real consciousness,
 11716	and since what actually exists is only pure consciousness, it alone is real
 11717	consciousness” (James, 2012, 2024).
 11718	However, according to James, “these are not two separate con­
 11719	sciousnesses, but two forms of the one and only consciousness, one form
 11720	of which is consciousness as it actually is, namely intransitive aware­
 11721	ness, and the other form of which is an unreal appearance, namely
 11722	transitive awareness. Intransitive awareness is real because it is per­
 11723	manent, unchanging, self-existent and self-shining. It is self-existent
       
 11724	because it exists independent of all other things, and it is self-shining
 11725	because it shines by its own light of consciousness, underived from
 11726	anything else. Transitive awareness, on the other hand, is impermanent
 11727	and constantly changing, and it is neither self-existent nor self-shining,
 11728	because it derives its seeming existence from the real existence of
 11729	intransitive awareness and it shines by the light of consciousness that it
 11730	borrows from intransitive awareness. Intransitive awareness is therefore
 11731	the reality that underlies and supports the illusory appearance of tran­
 11732	sitive awareness, just as a rope is the reality that underlies and supports
 11733	the illusory appearance of a snake. That is, we cannot be aware of
 11734	anything without being aware, but we can be aware without being
 11735	aware of anything, so intransitive awareness is primary and funda­
 11736	mental whereas transitive awareness is secondary and emergent”
 11737	(James, 2024).
 11738	Sri Ramana concluded that “transitive awareness (awareness of
 11739	anything other than ourself) is an unreal appearance, and that the only
 11740	real consciousness is pure intransitive awareness (awareness of nothing
 11741	other than our own being). That is, consciousness or awareness is not an
 11742	object but the reality of the subject, so no objective investigation can
 11743	enable us to know consciousness as it actually is. Since we ourself are
 11744	consciousness, in order to know ourself as we actually are, we need to
 11745	turn our entire attention back on ourself, away from all other things”—a
 11746	practice Sri Ramana called self-investigation (ātma-vicāra), which means
 11747	“keeping our attention fixed firmly on what we actually are, namely our
 11748	fundamental awareness ‘I am’, which is our very being, so he also called
 11749	this practice ‘awareness-investigation’ (jñāna-vicāra)” (James, 2012,
 11750	2024).
 11751	According to artist and computer scientist Ganapathy Subramaniam,
 11752	Brahman as "Consciousness/Awareness/Self" can be compacted to “I”.
 11753	While all things can be reduced to this “I,” this “I” cannot be reduced (i.
 11754	e., the Vedanta fundamental irreducible is in the first person). So, when
 11755	Vedanta says, “I am that,” meaning “I am the fundamental,” it does not
 11756	mean that the individual person is fundamental; rather the irreducible I
 11757	is the fundamental. This leads to the declaration, "Atman is Brahman,"
 11758	meaning, "The Individual Consciousness is the same as Universal Con­
 11759	sciousness" (which is the irreducible "I") (Subramaniam, 2023).
 11760	Subramaniam states that “reincarnation and the interrelated concept
 11761	of karma are stepping stones to understand ultimate truth. Under­
 11762	standing ultimate truth is called Nirvana. It’s nothing more nothing
 11763	less.” How do the multiple reincarnations "stop" with Nirvana? he asks
 11764	rhetorically. “Nirvana means apprehending that the concept of births
 11765	and deaths is an illusion and the consciousness that you truly are, does
 11766	not get born or die. Consciousness is fundamental. and you are that. This
 11767	is the only truth, and this obviously negates reincarnation—which is the
 11768	true meaning of the statement that ‘Once you achieve Nirvana, you no
 11769	longer reincarnate.’ It’s simply a logical conclusion from the definition
 11770	of Nirvana.”
 11771	“Indian thought is layered and progressive, and as you move through
 11772	the layers you need to abandon and evolve out of the previous one,”
 11773	Subramaniam says. “Within mainstream Indian thought you have Karma
 11774	theory as well as negation of Karma theory. If you look at both at the
 11775	same time, it appears to be a contradiction. But if you look at both as a
 11776	progression, it fits in well.”
 11777	Consciousness qua consciousness is “incapable of experiences,”
 11778	Subramaniam contends, “so, only a person (or any sentient) is capable of
 11779	physical and mental experience. When you investigate who ‘you’ are,
 11780	you will logically arrive at the conclusion that ‘you’ are not the person.”
 11781	But you will still be experiencing all the events of life, accumulating
 11782	experiences, much like in a dream or a novel or a movie or a video game.
 11783	But the fact is you are not the person. Nobody is ever the person they
 11784	think they are or as they appear to be. And it all converges to the singular
 11785	consciousness” (Subramaniam, 2023).
 11786	In that Advaita Vedanta’s central teaching is “That Thou Art,” with
 11787	“That” representing God and “Thou” standing for the individual, how to
 11788	counter the charge of blasphemy, equating oneself with God? The
 11789	Advaita exculpatory answer is that when the limited personality is
 11790	123
       
 11791	R.L. Kuhn
       
 11792	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 11793	transcended, the divinity within is revealed. Each soul is potentially
 11794	divine. (Reasoning in reverse, the Advaita Vedanta system claims to
 11795	prove the existence of God in that “our own existence is the existence of
 11796	God”—although the reasoning, at least superficially, has a touch of
 11797	circularity.)
 11798	Concisely, with respect to consciousness, the central paradigm of
 11799	Advaita Vedanta is that there is only one nondual reality, which is
 11800	consciousness, and it is this all-pervading cosmic consciousness that is
 11801	our individual consciousness and generates our first-person inner ex­
 11802	periences (qualia) (Sarvapriyananda, 2020).
 11803	Naturally, within Hinduism, different traditions understand the na­
 11804	ture of consciousness in different ways, but most of them do take con­
 11805	sciousness to be fundamental (Medhananda, 2023). One school follows
 11806	the tradition of Sri Ramakrishna (a 19th century mystic in India), and his
 11807	view was that while consciousness is fundamental, the one divine con­
 11808	sciousness is not just impersonal but also personal, and that everything
 11809	in the universe in reality is one and the same Divine Consciousness, even
 11810	though everything in the universe in appearance, manifests as various
 11811	and diverse forms. (This might compare to the Western metaphysics of
 11812	panentheistic cosmopsychism, according to which the sole reality is one
 11813	cosmic consciousness, which grounds all of the individual-level con­
 11814	sciousnesses.) (Medhananda, 2022).
 11815	Aphorisms give flavor.
       
 11816	respect to positions on the topic and, more fundamentally, with respect
 11817	to how questions and debates are framed in the first place” (Garfield,
 11818	2015, pp. 135–136).
 11819	Buddhism describes nine kinds or levels of consciousness. The first
 11820	five reflect the five senses: eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose
 11821	consciousness, tongue consciousness, and body consciousness. The sixth
 11822	is mind consciousness, which integrates the five senses and provides
 11823	meaning. The seventh consciousness is directed inward, toward one’s
 11824	private thoughts and apprehends spiritual issues; it also creates the
 11825	concept of self (from which all the deception is said to come because
 11826	there is no entity ‘self’). The eighth consciousness is known as “store­
 11827	house consciousness” where all our experiences, actions and deeds, are
 11828	in some sense “stored,” accumulating a lifetime of karma. (The eighth
 11829	consciousness persists after death, unlike the first seven that cease when
 11830	the body dies.) The ninth and highest consciousness, known as the
 11831	Buddha nature, is the purest, forming the foundations for one’s life and
 11832	serving as the core of our energy and the source for all mental and
 11833	spiritual activity. It cannot be affected by any of the karmic energy from
 11834	the previous eight levels and attaining the ninth is to find peace and
 11835	ultimate fulfillment” (Yifa, 2023; The Nine Consciousness, 2022).
 11836	Garfield analyzes these nine levels of consciousness by kind. These
 11837	include: “sensory and conceptual forms of consciousness; consciousness
 11838	that is introspectible and consciousness that is too deep for introspec­
 11839	tion; consciousness that takes external phenomena as objects and con­
 11840	sciousness that takes inner phenomena as objects; consciousness that is
 11841	merely receptive and consciousness that is constructive and even pro­
 11842	jective. In general, the complex set of phenomena is opaque to casual
 11843	introspection, and are knowable only theoretically or perhaps by highly
 11844	trained meditators.” Garfield draws parallels between the nine levels
 11845	and modern theories of consciousness: reflexive models of selfconsciousness and self-knowledge, higher-order thought models,
 11846	higher-order perception models and self-luminosity models (Garfield,
 11847	2015).
 11848	Regarding the Buddhist approach to phenomenal consciousness, the
 11849	story is complex. On the one hand, as Garfield puts it, “There is no
 11850	phenomenal consciousness; there is nothing ‘that it is like’ to be me. To
 11851	believe in phenomenal consciousness or ‘what-it-is-like-ness’ of ‘for-meness’ is to succumb to a pernicious form of the ‘Myth of the Given’.54..
 11852	the sense that there is such a kind of consciousness is an instance of
 11853	cognitive illusion … The very idea that there is an inner world of
 11854	qualitative states must be illusory” (Garfield, 2016).
 11855	On the other hand, there is rich tradition of Buddhist debate about
 11856	perceptual consciousness and representationalism: how inner percep­
 11857	tion articulates with external objects and what we can know about the
 11858	relationship. The Yogācāra school goes for idealism, “arguing that since
 11859	direct realism is incoherent, as is representationalism, the direct and
 11860	only object of conscious experience is an inner state,” while its worthy
 11861	competitor, the Madhyamaka school, “analyzes consciousness, as they
 11862	analyze all phenomena, as a set of relations, not as an independent
 11863	phenomenon or characteristic.” In this deflationary account, “the illu­
 11864	sion that there is a special property or center of consciousness is resolved
 11865	in favor of a network of processes” (i.e., perceived object, sense organ,
 11866	sensory system, conceptual system) (Garfield, 2016).
 11867	From the Madhyamaka perspective, all that we lose is “the illusion
 11868	that there is more in conscious experience than the psychology and
 11869	physiology of experience. In particular, reference to internal represen­
 11870	tations, qualia, phenomenal properties and other such ghostly mediators
 11871	of our experience drop away.” Garfield argues that such a more natu­
 11872	ralistic, more public (less private) view “forces the theorist who takes
       
 11873	The soul/consciousness is smaller than the smallest, larger than the
 11874	largest, and is everything everywhere all at once.
 11875	Consciousness localized is Body; globalized is Mind; universalized is
 11876	Soul; and synchronized is Life.
 11877	To understand properly Advaita Vedanta’s conception of con­
 11878	sciousness, one must introduce reincarnation, the guiding belief in most
 11879	India-based religious traditions that the soul goes through innumerable,
 11880	perhaps endless, cycles of birth-death-rebirth. Without discussing rein­
 11881	carnation as a doctrine, with its (to be expected) myriad nuances, suffice
 11882	it to say that reincarnation works to distinguish among soul, self and
 11883	consciousness. While the underlying soul may be in a sense immortal, its
 11884	consciousness is contingent on its current incarnation, with scant, if any,
 11885	awareness of its prior existences (although the karma of past lives would
 11886	influence the condition of future lives).
 11887	Relating consciousness to ultimate reality, Swami Sarvapriyananda
 11888	explains what it means that “Brahman, the ultimate reality, is limitless
 11889	existence, limitless consciousness, existence and consciousness without
 11890	limit.” Without limit, he says, “should be understood technically as no
 11891	limits in space and no limits in time, and no limits in something called
 11892	‘object limitation.’ Limit in space means it’s here and it’s not there. But
 11893	Brahman is not something that’s located in one place. It’s everywhere.
 11894	And limit in time means it does not exist earlier, it does not exist later.
 11895	But Brahman is not something that appears and disappears. It always is.
 11896	Object limitation is interesting. A table is not a chair. A horse is not a
 11897	cow. But Brahman does not have object limitation. Consciousness does
 11898	not have object limitation. There is no object which is other than con­
 11899	sciousness because they are all appearances of consciousness, in con­
 11900	sciousness, and ultimately, nothing but consciousness itself”
 11901	(Sarvapriyananda, 2023b).
 11902	16.2. Buddhism’s empty, illusory phenomenal consciousness
 11903	Consciousness in Buddhism is sufficiently distinct, with its concepts
 11904	of emptiness and illusion, it could command a prime category of its own
 11905	on the Landscape, yet it also fits decently in idealism, appropriately after
 11906	Hinduism. Buddhism also arose in ancient India and the legendary
 11907	philosophical disputes between Hindu and Buddhist sages enriched
 11908	both.
 11909	Buddhist discussions of consciousness feel radically different from
 11910	contemporary Western discussions, as philosopher Jay Garfield ex­
 11911	plains, yet “can be valuable sources of viable alternatives, both with
       
 11912	54
       
 11913	“The Myth of the Given is the myth that there is some level of our expe­
 11914	rience that is immediate, immune from error, given to us, as opposed to con­
 11915	structed, and that this level of experience constitutes the foundation or
 11916	transcendental condition of the possibility of knowledge of anything else”
 11917	(Garfield, 2016).
 11918	124
       
 11919	R.L. Kuhn
       
 11920	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 11921	something like the qualitative character of experience to be real, and to
 11922	be essential to consciousness, to defend and not to presuppose that view”
 11923	(Garfield, 2016).
 11924	To go deeper into Buddhist consciousness is to go “empty.” Empti­
 11925	ness is a foundational concept in Buddhism and is easily misunderstood
 11926	(and inappropriately ridiculed). Simply put, “Emptiness is the lack of
 11927	any intrinsic nature, not another intrinsic nature instead of those we
 11928	naively superimpose on entities.” Emptiness, Garfield stresses, is never
 11929	“emptiness of existence” but rather “always emptiness of some more
 11930	determinate metaphysical property.” As Garfield explains the doctrine
 11931	of the “two truths,” illuminating Nāgārjuna (c.150 - c.250 CE), perhaps
 11932	Buddhism’s greatest philosopher-saint (other than the Buddha, of
 11933	course), “nothing turns out to be ultimately real, everything is merely
 11934	conventionally real, and the ultimate and conventional truths, while
 11935	radically different in one respect, are in fact identical in another. That is
 11936	the profound doctrine of the emptiness of emptiness” (Garfield, 2016).
 11937	Applied to consciousness, if phenomenal consciousness, like every­
 11938	thing else, is empty of intrinsic nature, its claim of qualitative distinction
 11939	from all other phenomena, its claim of radical subjective experience as a
 11940	nonpareil occurrence in the cosmos, would seem to weaken. Moreover,
 11941	though debate abounds, whereas Madhyamaka “takes all phenomena,
 11942	including mind and the external world, to be conventionally real but
 11943	ultimately empty, and to be interdependent, Yogācāra takes external
 11944	objects to be mere appearances to mind, to be utterly non-existent, and
 11945	takes mind to be the substantially real subjective substrate of those
 11946	representations,” confirming the Yogācāra position as idealist (Garfield,
 11947	2015).
 11948	That Buddhism rejects the self, asserting that we are persons, not
 11949	selves, makes for fascinating explorations (Garfield, 2022). Debate has
 11950	continued whether the Buddhist “Atman,” often translated self or soul, is
 11951	permanent and unchanging, a position that Buddhist traditions and texts
 11952	largely reject. No matter. The nature of the Buddhist non-self (or self) or
 11953	the Buddhist person does not seem to much affect the deflationary na­
 11954	ture of Buddhist consciousness. Self, non-self, person—phenomenal
 11955	consciousness is the same empty illusion.
       
 11956	refers frequently to the ideal of a flow state, including in the context of
 11957	armed combat. Though sometimes considered to be an “unconscious” or
 11958	“less conscious” condition, from the Daoist perspective a flow state is a
 11959	deeper state of consciousness. Both the Zhuangzi and the Dao De Jing
 11960	could be considered guides for cultivating such a condition (Pratt, 2020,
 11961	2023).
 11962	Personally, my long interest in the Dao De Jing’s opening verses is
 11963	rooted in my long interest in Nothing, the metaphysics/ontology of
 11964	Leibniz’s haunting question, “Why is there Something rather than
 11965	Nothing?” “Why is there anything at all?” In my essay, “Levels of
 11966	Nothing,” I pose nine levels of increasing Nothingness (or decreasing
 11967	Somethingness). If consciousness is not fundamental, it would disappear
 11968	at the most simplistic level of Nothing, Nothing Level 1. If consciousness
 11969	is fundamental, it wouldn’t disappear until Nothing Level 7 (Kuhn,
 11970	2013).
 11971	16.4. Kastrup’s analytic idealism
 11972	Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup’s “analytic idealism” is “a
 11973	consciousness-only ontology” that has refocused attention, within the
 11974	philosophical community and more broadly, on metaphysical idealism,
 11975	that is, an idealism that is grounded in philosophical argument as
 11976	opposed to promoted by religious tradition or spiritual belief. Kastrup’s
 11977	modern, analytic version of the ontology of idealism asserts “(a)
 11978	phenomenal consciousness, as an ontological category, is fundamental;
 11979	and (b) everything else in nature can ultimately be reduced to, or
 11980	grounded in, patterns of excitation of phenomenal consciousness.”
 11981	(Kastrup, 2019). Thus, he proposes “there is only cosmic consciousness”
 11982	(Kastrup, 2018), in that “spatially unbound consciousness is posited to
 11983	be nature’s sole ontological primitive” (Kastrup, 2017).
 11984	In Kastrup’s idealism, human beings, along with all other living or­
 11985	ganisms, are but “dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness” (Kastrup,
 11986	2018), that are “surrounded like islands by the ocean of its mentation.”
 11987	The inanimate universe we see around us, he says, is “the extrinsic view
 11988	of thoughts and emotions in universal consciousness. The living crea­
 11989	tures we share the world with are the extrinsic views of other dissociated
 11990	alters of universal consciousness. A physical world independent of
 11991	consciousness is a mistaken intellectual abstraction” (Kastrup, 2016a,b)
 11992	Evidence that consciousness is not reductionist-materialist, Kastrup
 11993	argues, comes from, among others, neuroimaging of brains in altered
 11994	states induced by psychedelic substances. That these “unfathomably rich
 11995	experiential states” correlate with significantly reduced activity in
 11996	multiple brain areas is said to “contradict the mainstream metaphysics
 11997	of physicalism for obvious reasons: experience is supposed to be
 11998	generated by metabolic neuronal activity.” He dismisses “the best
 11999	physicalist hypothesis to explain psychedelic experiences” based on the
 12000	idea that psychotomimetic drugs cause brain desynchronization, pro­
 12001	cesses labeled “brain entropy,” “complexity,” “diversity”—which
 12002	Kastrup interprets as “very straightforward: brain noise.” The “entropic
 12003	brain hypothesis” (9.5.6), Kastrup says, is “a linguistic charade,” leaving
 12004	mainstream physicalism unsupported as a viable metaphysics of mind
 12005	(Kastrup, 2023). (Neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt contends that
 12006	“we don’t need to adopt an untestable metaphysical worldview to
 12007	explain the subjective richness of psychedelic experiences” and that
 12008	neuroscience and neuroimaging research have resources to develop
 12009	complete theories—for example, chaotic cortical entropy may “release
 12010	the usual brake” that the cortex holds on sub-cortical structures, espe­
 12011	cially the emotion centers, liberating the amygdala and hippocampus
 12012	from “top-down” inhibitory control [Nutt, 2023]. Kastrup counters that
 12013	such disinhibition, if it were the case, should itself correspond to
 12014	increased brain activity somewhere in the brain, which is not what is
 12015	observed.)
 12016	How to explain, under idealism, the correlation between inner
 12017	experience and brain states? According to Kastrup, “the brain and its
 12018	patterns of neuronal activity are not the cause of inner experience, but
 12019	the image, the extrinsic appearance of inner experience. In other words,
       
 12020	16.3. Dao De Jing’s constant dao
 12021	Among my favorite lines in all philosophical literature are the
 12022	deceptively simple opening lines of the Dao De Jing, the Chinese classic
 12023	text that is the foundation of Daoism. “The Dao [Ultimate Reality, Way]
 12024	that can be spoken of [expressed] is not the Constant [Eternal] Dao; the
 12025	Name that can be named [understood] is not the Constant [Eternal]
 12026	Name” (道可道非常道; 名可名非常名). “Dao” (道) refers to “Ultimate
 12027	Reality” but also means “Way” or “Path.” “Constant” comes from
 12028	“Chang” (常), which also means “invariable” and may connote “eternal.”
 12029	“Name” comes from “Ming” (名), which also means “to name,” and as a
 12030	homophone of the character “Ming” (明), may connote “to understand.”
 12031	The verses are nuanced, even vague, perhaps deliberately so, allowing
 12032	high variance in interpretive translation. The core sense, however,
 12033	seems to be that whatever you think the Dao may be, it is not that, and
 12034	whatever you think the Name may be, it also is not that.
 12035	Sinologist and translator Joseph Pratt says it’s hard to read those first
 12036	lines and not think that the Dao is the source and manifestation of
 12037	conscious experience or awareness and not think that the Name is the
 12038	related cognition or thoughts. Supporting evidence comes from the Dao
 12039	De Jing’s Chapter 42 cosmogenic process: “The Dao begets the One, the
 12040	One begets the Two, the Two begets the Three, the Three begets the Ten
 12041	Thousand Things” (which includes human beings) (Pratt, 2020).
 12042	In short, the Dao (or Consciousness) and the Name (or Cognition) are
 12043	both “Constant” or “Eternal” (常), giving rise to the YinYang of Con­
 12044	sciousness and Cognition and eventually to the individual phenomeno­
 12045	logical dynamic of Consciousness, including Cognition and Form/
 12046	Thinghood. So, in this ancient text, according to Pratt, consciousness is
 12047	really the first thing and the last thing.
 12048	Moreover, the Zhuangzi, the other of Daoism’s main founding texts,
 12049	125
       
 12050	R.L. Kuhn
       
 12051	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 12052	brain activity is what inner experience looks like when observed from the
 12053	outside.” As such, he says, “the correlations ordinarily observed between
 12054	patterns of brain activity and inner experience are due to the trivial fact
 12055	that the appearance of a phenomenon correlates with the phenomenon.”
 12056	And when this correlation is broken, as observed in the psychedelic
 12057	state, the reason is that, “unlike a cause, the appearance of a phenomenon
 12058	doesn’t need to be always complete”—it can leave out much about the
 12059	phenomenon it is an appearance of (Kastrup, 2023).
 12060	Kastrup maintains that idealism’s key challenge is “to explain how
 12061	the seemingly distinct phenomenal inner lives of different subjects of
 12062	experience can arise within this fundamentally unitary phenomenal
 12063	field.” This is called the “decomposition problem” and it is the core
 12064	problem Kastrup needs to address. Other challenges include: “how to
 12065	reconcile idealism with the fact that we all inhabit a common external
 12066	world; why this world unfolds independently of our personal volition or
 12067	imagination; why there are such tight correlations between measured
 12068	patterns of brain activity and reports of experience” (Kastrup, 2019).
 12069	Kastrup’s unabashed challenge to his metaphysical competitors is
 12070	that an idealist ontology “makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious
 12071	and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottomup panpsychism, and cosmopsychism” (Kastrup, 2018). He argues that
 12072	an idealist ontology “offers more explanatory power than these three
 12073	alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of con­
 12074	sciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem,
 12075	respectively.” (Panpsychists seem to be taking the challenge more seri­
 12076	ously than do physicalists55 [Kastrup, 2020b; Goff, 2020].)
 12077	Given his consciousness-only ontology, Kastrup explores what might
 12078	follow in two areas of high interest and continuing controversy: foun­
 12079	dations of quantum mechanics and prospects for life after death.
 12080	Regarding quantum mechanics, he stresses the centrality of con­
 12081	sciousness, making the startling but perhaps coherent argument that
 12082	“the dynamics of all inanimate matter in the universe correspond to
 12083	transpersonal mentation, just as an individual’s brain activity—which is
 12084	also made of matter—corresponds to personal mentation” (Kastrup
 12085	et al., 2018).
 12086	Regarding life after death, Kastrup speculates that “the implication is
 12087	that, instead of disappearing, conscious inner life expands upon bodily
 12088	death, a prediction that finds circumstantial but [claimed] significant
 12089	confirmation in reports of near-death experiences and psychedelic
 12090	trances, both of which can be construed as glimpses into the early stages
 12091	of the death process” (Kastrup, 2016a,b).
 12092	Say this for Kastrup’s analytic idealism: it expands and enlivens the
 12093	consciousness debate.
       
 12094	pixels are in the screen, still part of the desktop interface. Similarly, tiny
 12095	nuclei and electrons are in spacetime, still part of our spacetime inter­
 12096	face.” But “spacetime is not objective reality and does not resemble re­
 12097	ality, whatever reality might be” (Hoffman, 2019b).
 12098	Hoffman’s ultimate ontology is what he calls “conscious realism,”
 12099	which states that the objective world consists of conscious agents and
 12100	their experiences. This means, fundamentally, that instead of assuming
 12101	that “particles in spacetime are fundamental, and somehow create
 12102	consciousness when they form neurons and brains,” he proposes the
 12103	reverse: “consciousness is fundamental, and it creates spacetime and
 12104	objects.” He posits a mathematical theory of consciousness that “reality
 12105	is a vast social network of interacting ‘conscious agents,’ in which each
 12106	agent has a range of possible experiences, and each agent can act to
 12107	influence the experiences of other agents.”
 12108	What follows for Hoffman is that “no object within spacetime is itself
 12109	a conscious agent; spacetime is simply a format for conscious experi­
 12110	ences—an interface—employed by agents like us, and physical objects
 12111	are just icons in that interface” (Hoffman, 2019b).
 12112	Remarkably, Hoffman reverses the arrow of causation for the
 12113	abundance of experimental evidence correlating mental states of the
 12114	mind with physical states of the brain. These correlations arise, he states,
 12115	“because consciousness creates brain activity and indeed creates all
 12116	objects and properties of the physical world” (Hoffman, 2008).
 12117	Hoffman is clear: “Consciousness is fundamental in the universe. It is
 12118	not a product of space and time or anything inside space and time. I
 12119	think that efforts to derive consciousness from spacetime, either by
 12120	identity theories or causal theories, have proven ineffective, and I’ve
 12121	been forced to take the view that consciousness is actually fundamental
 12122	in the universe” (Hoffman, 2013).
 12123	16.6. McGilchrist’s relational, creative-process idealism
 12124	Psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist’s
 12125	idealist metaphysics has consciousness as “irreducible, primordial and
 12126	omnipresent.” But consciousness is “not a thing; it is a creative process,”
 12127	he says. “All that exists, exists in consciousness … consciousness is the
 12128	stuff of the cosmos.” Moreover, given “that consciousness is ‘the
 12129	fundamental given natural fact’, it clearly follows that it cannot be
 12130	reduced to something more fundamental” (McGilchrist, 2021b, 2021a,
 12131	p. 1601).
 12132	Matter, to McGilchrist, is “a theoretical abstraction that no one has
 12133	seen.” The term clearly has meaning, he clarifies; “it refers to the qual­
 12134	ities of certain elements within consciousness which offer relative
 12135	resistance and relative permanence as a necessary part of that creative
 12136	process” (McGilchrist, 2021b). Matter is also critical for individuality to
 12137	arise.
 12138	Put another way, McGilchrist has matter as “a special case, or a phase
 12139	of consciousness.” Matter is not a separate thing, he says, any more than
 12140	ice is separate from water; it’s a phase of water; it’s neither less nor more
 12141	than water; it’s not separate from water; it’s a kind of water. And matter
 12142	is a kind of consciousness—for a time—that has certain quite marked
 12143	properties that are different from the way we normally think of con­
 12144	sciousness, just as water is transparent and flows and all the rest, and ice
 12145	is hard and opaque and can split your head open. So they’re different but
 12146	they’re part of the same ontology.” McGilchrist stresses that “con­
 12147	sciousness and matter must be distinguished”—but “there should be no
 12148	need to set the one against the other.”
 12149	McGilchrist’s consciousness turns on its relational nature. He holds
 12150	that “everything is relational, and that what we call things, the relata,
 12151	are secondary to relationship.” Consciousness, he argues, is always “of”
 12152	something, then he asks: “what is the nature then of that something that
 12153	is both in part constitutive of, and in part constituted by, that
 12154	relationship?”
 12155	A consequence, counterintuitive to most, is that while some scientists
 12156	consider a “Reality Out There” to be independent of any consciousness
 12157	whatsoever—naïve realism—McGilchrist says, “In reality, we
       
 12158	16.5. Hoffman’s conscious realism: the case against reality
 12159	Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman’s “Case Against Reality”
 12160	argues that our visual perceptions are not veridical of ultimate reality
 12161	because evolution selects for fitness to reproduce, not for access to
 12162	ontological truth (Hoffman, 2019a). “This is consistent with the inter­
 12163	face theory of perception, which claims that natural selection shapes
 12164	perceptual systems not to provide veridical perceptions, but to serve as
 12165	species-specific interfaces that guide adaptive behavior” (Prakash et al.,
 12166	2020).
 12167	Hoffman likens our perceptions of objects around us to “interfaces”
 12168	constructed by natural selection, taking as analogy the file icons on our
 12169	computer screens, which may look like little paper folders but are in
 12170	truth written in the complex binary code of machine language. Simi­
 12171	larly, he says, evolution has shaped our perceptions, not as true de­
 12172	pictions of an animal-independent world, but rather as simplistic
 12173	illusions to help us navigate the world around us (Hoffman, 2019a).
 12174	Continuing his computer-screen interface analogy, he says, “The
 12175	55
 12176	See the energetic, illuminating debate between idealist Bernardo Kastrup
 12177	and panpsychist Philip Goff (Kastrup, 2020b; Goff, 2020).
       
 12178	126
       
 12179	R.L. Kuhn
       
 12180	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 12181	being: a process” (McGilchrist, 2021a, pp. 1722, 1723).
 12182	Yet, the grounding of consciousness is not deterministic, McGilchrist
 12183	says. It has none of the characteristics of being pre-programmed by “an
 12184	omnipotent and omniscient engineering God constructing and winding
 12185	up a mechanism. It is in the process of discovering itself through its
 12186	creative potential (one thing we all know directly from our own expe­
 12187	rience is that consciousness is endlessly creative)” (McGilchrist, 2021a).
 12188	The cosmos has purpose, McGilchrist says. “It has direction, but not
 12189	direction of the hydraulic kind, being pushed blindly from behind,
 12190	rather of the kind that is drawn from in front, by attractors that call it
 12191	ever forward” (McGilchrist, personal communication).
       
 12192	participate in the knowing: there is no ‘view from nowhere’”
 12193	(McGilchrist, 2021b).
 12194	Given that McGilchrist has consciousness as primordial and matter as
 12195	a phase of consciousness, how does he have the relationship between the
 12196	brain and consciousness? He says, “I do not suggest that the brain
 12197	originates anything. I do not know that the brain ‘causes’ consciousness:
 12198	it might or might not.” He goes on to note, rightly, “I know of no way of
 12199	proving the point one way or the other, since the observable facts would
 12200	look the same whether it [the brain] gave rise to, or simply mediated,
 12201	consciousness.” In other words, the same findings are equally compat­
 12202	ible with the brain emitting consciousness, transmitting consciousness, or
 12203	permitting consciousness. (The latter two options are similar, except that
 12204	permitting substitutes the idea of a constraint that is creative, fashioning
 12205	what it allows to come into being, replacing the merely passive idea of
 12206	transmitting.)” McGilchrist argues that “it is the last of these possibilities
 12207	– permitting – that is the most convincing” (McGilchrist, 2021a, pp. 55,
 12208	1592).
 12209	Logically, McGilchrist’s ontology would skew to the brain alone not
 12210	causing consciousness and his medical training would skew to the brain
 12211	not being a mere passive receiver of consciousness. His solution seems to
 12212	be something like this: the brain structures, shapes and physically ac­
 12213	tualizes the consciousness we experience so that it can be expressed and
 12214	felt by a body.
 12215	It’s worth noting that McGilchrist’s consciousness-matter ontology
 12216	has a kind of relationship to his hemisphere hypothesis, which states
 12217	that the brain’s “two hemispheres have evolved so as to attend to the
 12218	world, and therefore bring into being the only world we can know, in two
 12219	largely opposing ways: the left hemisphere paying narrowly targeted
 12220	attention to a detail that we need to manipulate; the right hemisphere
 12221	paying broad, open, sustained, vigilant, uncommitted attention to the
 12222	rest of the world while we focus on our desired detail” (McGilchrist,
 12223	2009, 2021a).
 12224	This means, he argues, that “each hemisphere brings into being a
 12225	world that has different qualities … In the case of the left hemisphere, a
 12226	world of things that are familiar, certain, fixed, isolated, explicit,
 12227	abstracted from context, disembodied, general in nature, quantifiable,
 12228	known by their parts, and inanimate. In the case of the right hemisphere,
 12229	a world of Gestalten, forms and processes that are never reducible to the
 12230	already known or certain, never accounted for by dissolution into parts,
 12231	but always understood as wholes that both incorporate and are incor­
 12232	porated into other wholes, unique, always changing and flowing,
 12233	interconnected, implicit, understood only in context, embodied and
 12234	animate” (McGilchrist, 2009, 2021a).
 12235	Most importantly, the world of the right hemisphere is the world that
 12236	presences to us, that of the left hemisphere a re-presentation: the left
 12237	hemisphere a map, the right hemisphere the world of experience that is
 12238	mapped.” To McGilchrist, loosely associating the right hemisphere with
 12239	consciousness and the left hemisphere with matter may be more than
 12240	metaphor.
 12241	Finally, McGilchrist sees “the cosmos as fundamentally relational,
 12242	and the ground of Being as driven to come to know itself in and through
 12243	creating an evolving cosmos. The ground of Being and the cosmos
 12244	respond to each other. (So far this is in keeping with Whitehead.) What
 12245	life does is to increase by untold orders of magnitude the responsiveness
 12246	of that cosmos. I, like Nagel, see that ‘value is not just an accidental sideeffect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of
 12247	value.’” What life brings, McGilchrist maintains, “is not consciousness,
 12248	then—which, as I have argued, is present from the beginning—but the
 12249	coming into being of the capacity for value: thus, a mountain cannot
 12250	value, though it can have value for creatures, like ourselves, who value.
 12251	And it is not just we, but all living creatures, that for the first time are
 12252	able to recognize value. Life vastly enhances the degree of responsive­
 12253	ness of, to and within the world.” Indeed, “life could be seen as the very
 12254	process of the cosmic consciousness continually both discovering and
 12255	furthering its beauty, truth, and goodness; both contemplating and (not
 12256	separately but in the same indivisible act) further bringing them into
       
 12257	16.7. Chopra’s only the whole is conscious
 12258	Holistic physician Deepak Chopra defines consciousness as “It is
 12259	what makes experience possible. It is what makes perception possible. It
 12260	is what makes cognition possible. Everything we call reality, con­
 12261	sciousness makes possible. Consciousness is the ultimate reality”
 12262	(Chopra, 2013).
 12263	To Chopra, progress in cognitive neuroscience, such as brain scans
 12264	that translate electrical patterns in the brain into real words in synthe­
 12265	sized speech, are “false clues,” like tracking a fox in the snow only to find
 12266	that the tracks have led you in a circle. “This looks like progress,” he
 12267	says, “and yet the progress is built up from false clues, for the same
 12268	reason that pertains to circular tracks in the snow. It is physically
 12269	impossible for brain cells to create the human mind. Brain cells are
 12270	composed of the same basic organic chemicals as any other cell in the
 12271	body, and organic chemicals can’t think. It doesn’t matter how many
 12272	billions of neurons the human brain contains, or the quadrillions of
 12273	synaptic connections between them. Complexity doesn’t get around the
 12274	simple impossibility that chemicals aren’t conscious, and the brain is
 12275	nothing but chemicals. The presence of electrical activity in the brain is
 12276	also a false clue, because electricity can’t think, either” (Chopra, 2023a,
 12277	b). “If you want to understand consciousness, then the last thing you
 12278	want to be is a neuroscientist,” Chopra half-jokes, referring to my/RLK
 12279	background. “Because neuroscience doesn’t give you a clue” (Chopra,
 12280	2013).
 12281	Chopra’s persistent claim is that there is only one way to get past
 12282	every false clue in the hunt for consciousness. “You must make it the
 12283	‘stuff’ of creation, a non-physical state from which matter, energy, time,
 12284	and space are created. It is not, he says, that every phenomenon we can
 12285	experience has consciousness or exhibits mind. It is that consciousness
 12286	shapes itself into every mode of knowing and experiencing reality.” In
 12287	other words, Chopra says, “the ‘hard problem’ isn’t a problem at all.
 12288	Consciousness, being our source and origin, explains everything by it­
 12289	self, needing no outside explanation” (Chopra, 2013).
 12290	According to Chopra, taking idealism to its logical extreme—some
 12291	say to its simplest condition—what’s conscious is only the whole, not the
 12292	parts like us. The entirety of reality, the fullness of the cosmos, a mul­
 12293	tiverse of innumerable universes (if there are such), everything every­
 12294	where all together, is the expression of a unitary consciousness.
 12295	In their essay, “Why You Aren’t Conscious and Never Have Been,”
 12296	Chopra and physicist Menas Kafatos, after rejecting both materialism
 12297	and panpsychism, seek to explain consciousness not by trying to figure
 12298	out how individuals are conscious, which they claim is doomed to fail­
 12299	ure, but rather by assuming that all reality is conscious and individual
 12300	instances of consciousness are conscious only with respect to their being
 12301	part of the whole. “When you arrive at the conclusion that nothing
 12302	material is conscious, bizarre as this sounds, you make a tremendous
 12303	breakthrough. ‘I am conscious’ misstates the reality, which is ‘I am
 12304	consciousness itself’” (Chopra and Kafatos, 2023).
 12305	“The way that humans are conscious is what matters,” the authors
 12306	write. “Consciousness is everywhere all the time embracing past, present
 12307	and future. I am part of that reality. Therefore, I am consciousness itself.
 12308	Who I really am is beyond time.”
 12309	Nothing can be conscious on its own, Chopra and Kafatos claim; the
 12310	127
       
 12311	R.L. Kuhn
       
 12312	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (2024) 28–169
       
 12313	only way to be conscious is to be part of the “All and One.” As for where
 12314	the All-and-One Consciousness comes from or came from, the answer is
 12315	the same as to “Who made God?” “Our origin story begins with absolute,
 12316	pure awareness, which has no explanation. It simply is” (Chopra and
 12317	Kafatos, 2023).
       
 12318	participate. The ego, he says “is constricted consciousness, much like a
 12319	localized object. You cannot understand consciousness without experi­
 12320	encing expanded states of consciousness.”
 12321	Consciousness, according to Goswami, plays an active role in con­
 12322	structing physical reality by “choosing” the results of a measurement. He
 12323	views our mental activities, our thoughts and feelings, as “mental ob­
 12324	jects” in a sense similar to material objects, subject to the same laws of
 12325	physics, particularly quantum mechanics. Thus, Goswami envisions the
 12326	brain, not simply as a passive measuring device that intervenes in the
 12327	quantum world, but more significantly as an active quantum system that
 12328	selects and determines which unconscious processes become conscious.
 12329	Goswami concludes that all creation is interconnected, including us
 12330	(Goswami, 1993).
       
 12331	16.8. How consciousness becomes the physical universe
 12332	Idealism works well as an explanation of creature consciousness,
 12333	provided, of course, that one accepts its foundational premise that
 12334	consciousness, and consciousness alone, is fundamental reality. One
 12335	challenge for idealism is coming to consider what seems to be an odd,
 12336	perhaps outlandish, idea so alien to our life experiences: If all is con­
 12337	sciousness, how does the physical world come about?
 12338	The claim is made that quantum theory, which, unlike classical
 12339	physics, assigns (in some interpretations) a fundamental role to the act
 12340	of observation, can bridge the explanatory gap between idealism as
 12341	foundational reality and the physical world as empirically apparent. Can
 12342	quantum theory, as its adherents believe, open the door “to a profoundly
 12343	new vision of the cosmos, where observer, observed, and the act of
 12344	observation are interlocked,” thus hinting “at a science of wholeness,
 12345	going beyond the purely physical emphasis of current science?” Ad­
 12346	herents look to developments in the intersection of quantum theory,
 12347	biology, neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. Non-local in­
 12348	teractions of the quantum universe are cited as evidence of the inter­
 12349	connectedness of everything, supporting the idea that “consciousness
 12350	and matter are not fundamentally distinct, but rather are two comple­
 12351	mentary aspects of one reality, embracing the micro and macro worlds,”
 12352	ultimately founded on consciousness as the ultimate reality (Kafatos
 12353	et al., 2011).
 12354	There are elaborate theories that claim to explain how consciousness,
 12355	once assumed to be fundamental in nature and reality, generates or
 12356	interacts with matter and energy and interfaces with the brain. In one
 12357	version, developed by computer science professional Mahendra
 12358	Samarawickrama, consciousness governs causation and creates energy
 12359	and matter. The interplay of consciousness, matter and energy un­
 12360	derpins what we experience and observe in reality (Consciousness
 12361	Studies, Australia, 2024). Consciousness itself is “a high-speed sequen­
 12362	tial process that leads to awareness” (notwithstanding the brain’s
 12363	massive parallel-processing capability). “Like time, consciousness is also
 12364	subjected to relativity. When the observer is moving, both time and
 12365	consciousness dilate.” Further, “the electromagnetic energy of con­
 12366	sciousness follows quantum principles and wave-particle duality …. This
 12367	interplay of consciousness with matter and energy makes consciousness
 12368	and reality interrelate and follows determinism, realism, and physi­
 12369	calism” (Samarawickrama, 2023).
 12370	No surprise that none of this is taken seriously by a large majority of
 12371	quantum physicists (Rovelli, 2022) (11.16).
       
 12372	16.10. Spira’s non-duality
 12373	Spiritual teacher (and pottery artist) Rupert Spira espouses nonduality as “the recognition that underlying the multiplicity and di­
 12374	versity of experience there is a single, infinite and indivisible reality,
 12375	whose nature is pure consciousness from which all objects and selves
 12376	derive their apparently independent existence.” He states, “The greatest
 12377	discovery in life is that our essential nature does not share the limits or
 12378	the destiny of the body and mind” (Section: Spira, n.d.).
 12379	To Spira, a non-dual understanding addresses two essential ques­
 12380	tions: one, “How may we be free of suffering and find the lasting peace
 12381	and happiness for which all people long above all else?”, and two, “What
 12382	is the nature of reality?” While the first is most meaningful to individuals
 12383	and to the global community, only the second is relevant for this
 12384	Landscape.
 12385	Spira begins his non-dual teaching with an investigation into the
 12386	essential nature of our self, and it is this “clear knowledge of oneself,” he
 12387	says, that is also the basis of the second aspect of the non-dual under­
 12388	standing, “namely, the recognition that reality is an infinite, indivisible
 12389	whole, made of pure consciousness, from which all separate objects and
 12390	selves borrow their apparently independent existence.” Everything we
 12391	know or experience, he states, “is mediated through the mind, and
 12392	therefore, the mind’s knowledge of anything can only ever be as good as
 12393	its knowledge of itself. In order to know what anything truly is—that is,
 12394	what reality truly is—the mind must first know its own essential nature.
 12395	Therefore, the investigation into the nature of the mind must be the
 12396	highest endeavor upon which any mind can embark, and the knowledge
 12397	of its essence or nature the highest knowledge.”
 12398	Spira suggests that approaching non-duality as a means of finding an
 12399	answer to the ultimate question about the nature of reality “is found at
 12400	the heart of all the great religious and spiritual traditions.” For instance,
 12401	“In Christianity, it is said, ‘I and my Father are one’. That is, the essence
 12402	of our self and the ultimate reality of the universe are the same.” Simi­
 12403	larly, “in the Sufi tradition, ‘Whosoever knows their self knows their
 12404	Lord’. That is, whoever knows the essential nature of their self knows the
 12405	ultimate reality of the universe.” And “in Buddhism, ‘Samsara and
 12406	Nirvana are one’, meaning the nature of the world and the essence of the
 12407	mind are identical” (Spira, n.d.).
       
 12408	16.9. Goswami’s self-aware universe
 12409	Quantum physicist Amit Goswami proposes that consciousness, not
 12410	matter, is the primary “stuff” of creation, and indeed it is consciousness
 12411	that creates the material world, not the other way around. He uses
 12412	quantum physics, particularly the Copenhagen interpretation (where an
 12413	“observer” is required for the collapse of the wave function), to disabuse
 12414	us of the false notion that matter is simple, solid and foundational.
 12415	Consciousness, he says, “is the agency that collapses the wave of a
 12416	quantum object, which exists in potentia, making it an immanent par­
 12417	ticle in the world of manifestation” (Goswami, 1993; Woronko, 2020).
 12418	Goswami sees Idealism as not only the most parsimonious theory of
 12419	consciousness but also mitigating and perhaps solving the famous par­
 12420	adoxes of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement, superposition and
 12421	non-locality.
 12422	The key, Goswami offers, is that there is only one consciousness in
 12423	the universe, one subject of experience, in which we all (somehow)
       
 12424	16.11. Nader’s all there is
 12425	Transcendental Meditation leader (and former neuroscientist) Tony

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