Will we ever understand the nature of consciousness?
Let’s swing for the fences with this one, shall we?
Some questions are timeless because they’re so fundamental that everyone ponders them at some point in life (often—for me at least—in the shower). Others are timeless because, regardless of how many times they’re asked, no definitive answer may exist.
This one seems to fall in both categories. Consciousness—the awareness of yourself, your mind and body and its surroundings—is intrinsic to what may be called “the human experience.” And yet despite being something we all viscerally know, it’s also one of the hardest things to pin down and study in any objective, empirical manner.
Leaving aside whether or not insights from something like string theory (or any other area of knowledge) can offer real advances in this domain by better explaining basic neurophysiology, the deeper quandary is whether the question itself is tractable. Asking whether we’ll ever understand the nature of consciousness may well be in the same quasi-nonsensical realm as wondering what’s north of up, or what occurred before the beginning of time.
Perhaps, if an answer ever comes, it will arise less through studying and more through making; already there’s no shortage of speculation about glimmers of consciousness in various instantiations of artificial intelligence. Then again, the query itself may miss the mark here, too: what we consider “consciousness” may be more an anthropomorphic quirk of our evolutionary biology than some reflection of deeper, universal truths.
We’re unlikely to find certitude here, of course. But it’s still fun to talk about. What do you think?
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At the least, this study presents a new way to approach neurophysics. I think it's important.
Being aware of self, mind, body, and surroundings-- the human experience-- doesn't really give any information about what consciousness is. What consciousness is, as detailed in the book, "Who Are We, Really: The Truth About Why We Think and Act the Way We Do", by Robert Wiedemeyer, MD, is the ability to receive in our brains perceptive impulses through one or more of our five senses, evaluate these impulses in the associative areas of our brain, and choose how to react to those perceptive impulses. The key word here is "choose". If you can't voluntarily choose a reaction to perceptive impulses, you're not conscious. If you can choose voluntarily to react to a perceptive impulses, then you're conscious. It's that simple.
One might wonder if someone who hypothetically had no sense of vision, hearing, touch, taste, or smell could them be conscious, since they would be unable to receive any perceptive impulses into their brain. The answer is that they could not be conscious, as they would be unable to choose a reaction to a perceptive impulse since they could not receive any perceptive impulses.
I don't think that we can even define consciousness in a way that is objective and allows falsification. It is fundamentally a subjective phenomenon. I know that I am conscious, but I don't know that you are. Can anyone prove that I am conscious?
I think the problem behind the question is the implication of a unitary 'I', so that 'awareness of yourself' suggests that the 'I' that is aware is the same 'I' that is the object of awareness. But it isn't! One is by definition a subject, the other an object that is grasped.
Behind this, there is our brain, with different functions that can go on at the same time. I sometimes offer therapy clients the experiment of doing something while insisting that they can't do it!
Many researchers and writers have written in very similar ways about the different functions of self: Daniel Stern (Emergent, Core, Subjective and Narrative), Antonio Damasio (Proto-self, Core Consciousness and Extended Consciousness), and my Gestalt Therapy's own Fritz Perls and Paul Goodman (Id, Ego, Personality). Vilanur Ramachandran and Iain McGilchrist on different functioning of left and right brain hemispheres.
So Core self can view Narrative self, Extended Consciousness can assign forms to sensed processes. And then Core self/Ego can act on the experience put together as a Gestalt by the senses, the narrative, memory, fantasy. And that action reflexively changes what is sensed and the narratives.
Conscious living is the interplay of all these activities to form a life that is experienced as coherent (by putting the rough edges out of awareness!), and yet can and does change radically over time (growing up, becoming independent, making relationships, getting work and retiring, major bodily changes including illness and ageing). The narrative and proprioception in any period is taken as if it had always been in order to give the illusion of coherence over time (state-dependent memory is one aspect of this).
As non-human life, maybe even plants, show signs of consciousness, along with AI, we will change the definition of consciousness. Moving the bar is easier that actually knowing. Of course, some people have claimed to understand consciousness. Daniel Dennett is an example. Do you understand Dennett? I don't, really., and I have read him deeply.
I like the idea from SL about biting off a smaller chunk of the cosmos-size consciousness question. I assume various research groups are looking at which creatures display various aspects of this "ability" or phenomenon. At the same time, I'm curious about the essence of human consciousness and what are the most creative ways to study it as observers.
In 2025, on the PBS program Closer to the Truth, narrator and visionary Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn created a central database of theories of consciousness. As I write this in January 2026, there are over 300 theories outlined on a website called the Landscape of Consciousness; the number of theories is growing as more people reach out to share their professional perspectives. Dr. Kuhn’s monumental compilation of consciousness theories was created in collaboration with Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín, a Spanish physicist and neuroscientist.
How might we make sense of over 300 theories of consciousness? I put the question to Microsoft’s AI, Co-Pilot, which consolidated the 300 theories into seven categories.
One: Mechanistic Theories: Consciousness is what the brain does, and nothing more. Consciousness is a science problem, a physics problem. Matter manifests consciousness.
Two: Non-Reductive Theories: Consciousness arises from physical systems but is not reducible to them. Consciousness is a real, irreducible property that emerges from the physical.
Three: Panpsychist Theories: Consciousness is fundamental in nature, woven into the fabric of reality; everything in the universe has some degree of consciousness.
Four: Non Physicalist Monisms: Consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness manifests matter.
Five: Dualisms and Pluralisms: Mind and matter are two different kinds of stuff or properties. This is classic Cartesian dualism: God’s world separate from man’s world.
Six: Quantum Theories: Quantum processes give rise to consciousness or influence the evolution of consciousness. Quantum reality is implicated in the creation of both matter and consciousness.
Seven: Meta Theories: Theories that challenge the coherence, definability, or tractability of consciousness itself. We struggle to define consciousness; if we can’t say for sure what consciousness is, how can we ask where it came from?
Since I do not believe in the truly supernatural, it seems to me that there is no reason not to believe that we will someday understand the nature of consciousness. Developments in AGI may help us along the way by giving us a second example of consciousness. It may even be possible someday to 'know' the conscious experience of another.
The search itself represents an infinite loop unto novel conceptions which themselves carry contradictions - whether in scientific, mathematical, or philosophical conceptions. This does not invalidate the emotive and compassionate process that almost certainly come along and arise during this search for "consciousness," but rather implies that situating the search for consciousness as something integrated into our experience of ourselves and the world around us may be more salient and accessible, albeit more mystical than frameworks for rational or theoretical bases of consciousness.
It's good that Sci Amer is looking at consciousness! I wish you'd address the claim in
"Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife" By: Eben Alexander M.D. M.D. that his Near Death Experience could not have come from his brain because his brain was not functioning, thereby proving that consciousness originates outside the brain. I'd like to know.
Evolutionary biology makes it difficult to deny the existence of conscious beings on Planet Earth. While we agree that animals, including humans, are conscious, there is no consensus on what consciousness is. The perennial quest for the essence of things (What is the nature of x?) has not fared well for our quandaries about the mind. We have, however, made lots of progress on observing how conscious beings behave in different settings, which does not guarantee a path to a grand theory of consciousness. Maybe we might do well to lower our ambitions. Instead of searching for the nature. of consciousness, we just search for the various behaviors different animal species display when they are conscious. And the search for the nature of our consciousness may be just a fool's errand as well.
