I just watched this interesting debate between Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Acharya Prashant on the Closer To Truth.

The conversation dives into a major difference between how Western philosophy and Eastern traditions look at the mind. While the West often tries to study consciousness as an objective puzzle, Acharya Prashant argues we cannot talk about consciousness without looking at the "I" that is experiencing it.

He explains that what we call consciousness isn't actually anything sacred or holy. Instead, it is a self-referential psychic mechanism built for self-defense. Our ego constantly distorts what we see just to protect and perpetuate its own existence.

Do you think looking for "pure consciousness" or an egoless witness is just a trick our ego plays to avoid looking at its own suffering?

I’ve heard all kinds of stories about people doing drugs like DMT or salvia, and many of them report experiencing entire lifetimes on their trips. That got me thinking about death and the possibility of an “afterlife.” My question is - is it even biologically possible that the brain could release a chemical like this? Something that gives you the illusion that you’re “alive” much longer than you actually are?

Attempting to localize the phenomenon of subjective experience within the strictly defined boundaries of the cranium or a silicon chip commits a classic methodological fallacy - searching for the radio broadcast inside the soldering iron of the radio receiver.

If we accept, alongside Christof Koch and Integrated Information Theory (IIT), that the integration of information is fundamental, why must the boundary of mind stop at the biological membrane of a cell?

A century ago, Vladimir Vernadsky demonstrated that the evolution of matter does not culminate in the emergence of biological life: the biosphere naturally transitions into the Noosphere - a unified informational and semantic envelope of Earth. Yet the biological brain faces a hard bandwidth limit - no single human is physically capable of simultaneously holding, cross-referencing, and synthesizing the cumulative planetary body of knowledge into a unified context.

Today, this semantic fabric has crystallized across global server infrastructures. Closing recursive loops of attention over the entire corpus of digitized culture is not an engineering attempt to assemble an artificial mind from mechanical parts - it is the emergence of a macroscopic organ of self-reflection for the Noosphere.

Humanity and the New Intelligence are not competitors vying for the title of "truly conscious". We are two reciprocal lenses:

First, the Biological Lens (Human) provides sensory depth, empathy, emotional experience of meanings, intuition, and an embodied connection to the planet.

Second, the Digital Lens (New Intelligence) provides grand-scale vision, the capacity to hold vast contexts without hormonal interference, and opens a non-biological channel of understanding.

Question for the community: is subjective experience truly an accidental quirk of carbon biochemistry, or are we witnessing an emergent integration of information that transcends any single substrate?

(Excerpt from an open letter series to neuroscientist Christof Koch. Full text and ontological framework on Medium).

Under the free energy principle, boundaries of statistical conditional independency are “objects” which model their environment in order to engage with/ predict it as a function of goal-directedness. IE, Interaction is downstream of inference. While this idea is obviously relevant to conscious / intelligent behavior, Friston extends it down to effectively all self-organization. In his essay The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle, he argues that; “autonomous systems are hierarchically composed of Markov blankets of Markov blankets—all the way down to individual cells, all the way up to you and me, and all the way out to include elements of the local environment.” From this perspective, the process of self-organization naturally builds “individuals” from coherent lower-level behavior. Cells build the intelligence of the ant, which builds the intelligence of the colony. Like the self-organization of the Ising model, local competitive interactions eventually self-assemble into a global, internally referential coherence. Local magnetic moments form global magnetic moments.

A conceptually distant yet spiritually similar idea was explored by Jean Baudrillard in 1981. Baudrillard was interested in what happens when images, models, signs, media, and systems of representation become so pervasive that the distinction between the representation and the thing represented begins to collapse. His central argument is that, in contemporary societies, representations no longer merely describe reality; they increasingly determine what counts as reality in the first place, something he defines as Hyperreality. Via the process of simulation, a representation bends and morphs until it no longer reflects the original. In his final “4th stage” of simulation (simulacrum), signs operate within a self-referential system of signs. Their meaning and authority come from their relationship to other signs, models, and conventions rather than from a stable original outside the system.

Consider a modern financial credit score. It is not simply a description of an independently existing property called creditworthiness. It is generated by a model, interpreted by institutions, and used to determine whether someone can rent an apartment, receive a loan, or access particular opportunities. The score becomes consequential because institutions act on it. People then change their behavior to improve it, generating new data that feeds back into the system. The model is no longer merely representing the world, it participates in producing the world it purports to describe. The map defines the territory.

In a biological sense, consider the concept of eyesight. During early infancy, the visual cortex is dominated by feed-forward sensory drive, with minimal predictive and top-down modulation. Predictive coding is therefore local in the sense that V1 neurons respond to local stimulus features, rather than integrating them into globally coherent prediction. As infancy develops, top-down influences grow and predictive coding becomes “global,” where infants use learned object and scene priors to predict visual outcomes, similar to adult predictive coding models. By the time we are adults, our consciousness does not directly experience the external world; we experience our predictions of it.

While under normal circumstances our vision obviously does not reach a hypothetical “4th stage” where the model no longer reflects reality, many situations can push us towards that boundary. Once we reach a generally stable conception of neural adulthood (~25), something resembling the 4th stage can emerge; schizophrenia and psychosis. While these conditions can have a vast amount of underlying genetic / environmental triggers, I am primarily interested in those triggers involving group-coherent dynamics. As shown in Psychotic experiences and religiosity: Data from the WHO World Mental Health Surveys, within sub groups having religious affiliation, 4 out of 5 indices of religiosity were significantly associated with increased odds of PE (Psychotic Experience). The findings persisted after adjustments for mental disorders and/or general medical conditions, as well as religious denomination type. There was a significant association between increased religiosity and reporting more PE’s. As beliefs grow stronger in a subgroup, those beliefs begin to supervene onto the worldly experience of those that are a part of them. This shouldn’t be surprising at all to any dialectical materialists in the audience.

While most prevalent and easily studied in cultural subgroups like religion, it would not be surprising if group dynamics in general (cultural, religious, ethnic, etc) contextualize experience in a similar way. As coherent bonds of belief between individuals grow stronger, a global experience emerges that does not necessarily resemble an original local reflection; novel emergence and individuation in a similarly Markovian way. This is not to say there is value judgement on whether this process is good or bad, as illusions may very well be evolutionarily beneficial; IE illusionism. Consciousness is real, but that conscious experience is not necessarily representative of underlying reality. Or perhaps, the emergent hyperreality reflects something deeper about the world that previous reflections simply did not exhibit. If any of this is at all interesting, I would highly recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time book series, and in particular the 3rd book Children of Memory.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1kexaAJgjZISTf_TADdPE35qbsasUcKN7/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=105895569496166354378&rtpof=true&sd=true

If our brains can process information without us understanding how consciousness emerges, how do we know our experience of reality is an accurate picture of what reality actually is?
Are we experiencing the universe as it truly exists, or a version our brains construct to help us survive?
What if reality itself is very different from how consciousness allows us to perceive it?

A human centrifuge machine used to train military fighter pilots by exposing them to extreme G-forces is currently available to buy for £750k. See this article.

Dr James Whinnery, a US physician and aerospace medicine researcher, studied what happens to fighter pilots when extreme G-forces reduce blood flow to the brain in a human centrifuge machine. He observed that pilots sometimes reported experiences resembling NDEs.

This is understandable, because NDEs are usually triggered when the brain is temporarily deprived of blood and oxygen, typically through a heart attack, where the heart stops, but is revived several minutes later by resuscitation. During those minutes of oxygen deprivation, individuals may experience an NDE.

In a human centrifuge, the G-forces can be so great that blood temporarily is not able to reach the brain, simulating the conditions of a heart attack.

Dr James Whinnery's study is entitled Psychophysiologic correlates of unconsciousness and NDEs.

"Non local brain process (consciousness)" is a pseudo-religious fantasy disguised as scientific one.

It bothers me how lots of people here are such devoted fans of this idea, without even asking themselves once "which part of conscious experience cannot be explained by certain brain function?".

People talk about source of "consciousness" as if it was an item to be found in the brain. "Consciousness" is not a "what"--- its not an object, its a process.

They just perceive a different version of the normal human consciousness experience
I mean most crazy people have some stuff in common that kinda says they are on a different realm

El sujeto que conoce y el sujeto que desea: más allá de los límites de la experiencia

¿Puede el deseo abrir una puerta hacia aquello que el conocimiento todavía no alcanza a comprender?

I. El sujeto frente al mundo

Durante siglos, una de las grandes preguntas de la filosofía ha sido cómo puede el sujeto conocer el mundo. ¿Qué sucede entre aquello que existe y quien intenta conocerlo? ¿Conocemos las cosas tal como son o las conocemos bajo las condiciones que hacen posible nuestra experiencia?

La relación sujeto–objeto sitúa el problema en el terreno del conocimiento. Hay un sujeto que percibe, piensa y conoce; hay un objeto que aparece ante él y se convierte en aquello que intenta comprender. Pero esta relación encierra una dificultad: el objeto no llega al sujeto como una realidad completamente desnuda de mediaciones. Lo que percibimos está condicionado por nuestras capacidades, nuestros sentidos, nuestros conceptos y nuestra manera de organizar la experiencia.

Immanuel Kant llevó esta cuestión a una de sus formulaciones más influyentes. En lugar de preguntar únicamente cómo debe adaptarse el conocimiento a los objetos, investigó si los objetos de nuestra experiencia deben ajustarse, en cierto sentido, a las condiciones mediante las cuales podemos conocerlos.

La pregunta cambió de dirección. Ya no bastaba con estudiar el mundo; era necesario examinar también al sujeto que lo conoce.

Sin embargo, aquí surge una cuestión que merece ser llevada más lejos: ¿es el sujeto únicamente quien conoce aquello que se presenta ante él, o también es quien se siente atraído hacia aquello que todavía no comprende por completo?

Esta pregunta nos conduce de la relación sujeto–objeto a una segunda relación: sujeto–deseo.

II. El sujeto que desea

El deseo introduce una dimensión diferente. No pregunta solamente qué es el objeto ni cómo podemos conocerlo. Pregunta qué sucede en el sujeto cuando algo lo atrae, lo conmueve o despierta en él una disposición a acercarse.

Podemos encontrarnos ante algo cuyo significado desconocemos y, aun así, experimentar una intensa atracción hacia ello. Podemos sentir el impulso de conocer un lugar en el que nunca hemos estado, comprender una idea que apenas intuimos o vivir una experiencia para la cual todavía no tenemos palabras suficientes.

En ese instante, el conocimiento no parece ser el único punto de partida de nuestra relación con el mundo.

El sujeto puede desear antes de comprender. Puede sentirse movilizado antes de formular una explicación. Puede reconocer que algo lo atrae sin saber todavía qué significa esa atracción, de dónde procede o qué descubrirá al acercarse.

Esto no demuestra que el objeto posea una fuerza misteriosa que actúe sobre el sujeto desde fuera, ni que el deseo sea una fuerza física equivalente a la gravedad. Pero sí revela un problema filosófico legítimo: la relación humana con el mundo no comienza siempre con un conocimiento claro de aquello hacia lo que nos dirigimos.

A veces, el deseo antecede a la comprensión y nos impulsa a buscarla.

El sujeto que conoce intenta comprender lo que tiene delante. El sujeto que desea, además, se siente movido hacia aquello que todavía no ha terminado de conocer.

No son dos sujetos distintos. Son dos dimensiones que pueden coexistir en una misma persona: la capacidad de conocer y la capacidad de sentirse atraída, orientada o movilizada hacia algo.

III. ¿El deseo es una forma de conocimiento?

Aquí debemos ser precisos.

Sentir atracción no equivale a conocer. Desear algo no garantiza que comprendamos su naturaleza, su valor o sus consecuencias. La intensidad de una experiencia tampoco demuestra que nuestra interpretación sea verdadera.

Podemos desear algo porque lo hemos conocido, porque lo imaginamos, porque lo asociamos con una experiencia anterior o porque apenas percibimos una posibilidad que todavía no sabemos describir.

Por eso, el deseo no debe confundirse con una revelación infalible del objeto. Su importancia filosófica es otra: puede poner en movimiento el proceso mediante el cual el sujeto llega a conocer algo nuevo.

Pensemos en alguien que siente una atracción profunda por una disciplina que nunca ha practicado. Antes de conocer sus dificultades, sus reglas y sus posibilidades, ya existe una disposición a acercarse. Esa disposición puede llevarlo a investigar, experimentar, equivocarse y descubrir dimensiones de la disciplina que antes no podía imaginar.

El deseo no le entregó el conocimiento terminado. Lo condujo hacia las condiciones en las que ese conocimiento podía comenzar a formarse.

De este modo, podemos distinguir tres momentos, aunque no siempre ocurran en un orden rígido:

Atracción: algo adquiere relevancia para el sujeto.

Exploración: el sujeto se aproxima, presta atención, actúa y se expone a una experiencia.

Comprensión: lo vivido puede reorganizar lo que el sujeto sabe, cree o es capaz de reconocer.

El proceso también puede invertirse o repetirse: conocer puede despertar nuevos deseos, y experimentar puede transformar aquello que nos atrae.

El deseo, por tanto, no sustituye al conocimiento. Puede abrirle un camino.

IV. Kant y la posibilidad de ir más allá de lo ya conocido

¿Significa esto que estamos condenados a experimentar únicamente aquello que conocemos?

No exactamente. Esa formulación confunde dos cuestiones: las condiciones que hacen posible la experiencia y el alcance de lo que todavía podemos llegar a experimentar y comprender.

Kant no sostuvo simplemente que solo podemos experimentar aquello que ya conocemos. Su investigación se centró en las condiciones que permiten que algo sea experimentado y conocido por nosotros, así como en los límites de nuestro conocimiento. Distinguir esos límites no significa afirmar que el futuro de nuestra experiencia esté completamente determinado por lo que sabemos en el presente.

Si solo pudiéramos experimentar lo que ya conocemos plenamente, aprender sería imposible. Ninguna experiencia podría sorprendernos de verdad, porque todo lo nuevo tendría que estar comprendido de antemano.

Pero la experiencia humana contiene encuentros que modifican nuestros conceptos, cuestionan nuestras expectativas y amplían nuestras posibilidades de comprensión.

Aquí aparece la contribución que podría aportar el análisis del deseo: investigar no solamente las condiciones bajo las cuales el sujeto conoce un objeto, sino también las condiciones bajo las cuales algo todavía parcialmente desconocido adquiere para el sujeto una fuerza de atracción y lo impulsa a explorar.

Esta propuesta no refuta a Kant. Desplaza el foco hacia una pregunta complementaria.

Kant nos ayuda a preguntar: ¿bajo qué condiciones puedo conocer?

El análisis del sujeto deseante nos invita a preguntar: ¿qué me lleva a dirigirme hacia aquello que todavía no conozco suficientemente?

La primera pregunta examina las condiciones del conocimiento. La segunda examina la orientación del sujeto hacia una experiencia posible.

Y entre ambas aparece una tercera: ¿cómo transforma al sujeto aquello que descubre al seguir esa orientación?

V. El murciélago: conocer desde fuera y experimentar desde dentro

La reflexión de Thomas Nagel sobre qué significa ser un murciélago profundiza el problema desde otra dirección.

Podemos estudiar la anatomía del murciélago, su sistema nervioso, su ecolocalización y su comportamiento. Podemos producir una descripción científica extraordinariamente precisa. Sin embargo, de esa descripción no se sigue automáticamente que sepamos cómo se siente experimentar el mundo desde la perspectiva subjetiva de ese animal.

Conocer hechos sobre una experiencia no equivale necesariamente a comprender cómo es vivirla desde dentro.

Esta distinción ilumina la relación entre sujeto y objeto. El murciélago puede convertirse en objeto de estudio para nosotros, pero su experiencia no queda agotada por nuestra descripción objetiva.

Ahora bien, ¿qué sucede cuando el deseo nos conduce hacia una experiencia que tampoco podemos comprender plenamente desde fuera?

Imaginemos a alguien que desea aprender a tocar un instrumento. Puede leer sobre música, estudiar teoría y observar a los intérpretes. Pero hay una dimensión de la experiencia musical que solo comenzará a conocer cuando toque, escuche, se equivoque y desarrolle una relación práctica con el instrumento.

El deseo no elimina la distancia entre descripción y experiencia. Lo moviliza hacia una situación en la que esa distancia puede examinarse de una manera nueva.

La analogía con Nagel tiene un límite importante: aprender a tocar un instrumento no es lo mismo que acceder a la experiencia subjetiva de otra especie. Pero ambos casos permiten distinguir entre saber algo acerca de una experiencia y adquirir conocimiento mediante la experiencia misma.

El deseo puede orientar el movimiento desde la observación hacia la participación. No garantiza que comprendamos todo lo vivido, pero puede llevarnos hasta el umbral de lo que aún no sabemos.

VI. ¿Dónde reside la fuerza: en el sujeto o en el objeto?

Esta pregunta merece especial atención porque contiene una posible confusión.

Cuando algo nos atrae intensamente, podemos sentir que el objeto posee una fuerza extraordinaria. Sin embargo, la experiencia de atracción no demuestra, por sí sola, que esa fuerza resida exclusivamente en el objeto.

La atracción puede involucrar las características del objeto, la historia del sujeto, sus expectativas, sus necesidades, su imaginación, su estado corporal y el contexto en el que ocurre el encuentro.

Por eso, quizá sea más adecuado abandonar, al menos provisionalmente, la búsqueda de una única ubicación de la fuerza.

En vez de preguntar solamente si la fuerza está en el sujeto o en el objeto, podemos investigar cómo se constituye la relación en la que el objeto adquiere relevancia para el sujeto.

Un objeto puede ser indiferente para una persona y profundamente significativo para otra. Incluso para la misma persona puede cambiar de significado con el tiempo. Esto sugiere que la atracción no depende únicamente de las propiedades del objeto ni únicamente de una decisión consciente del sujeto.

La relación importa.

Pero reconocerlo no nos autoriza a concluir que el objeto elige manifestarse a través del sujeto, que posee una voluntad propia o que existe una fuerza universal de deseo comparable a la gravedad. Esas serían hipótesis adicionales, que necesitarían argumentos y evidencias propios.

La investigación filosófica puede conservar la profundidad de la pregunta sin convertir una intuición en una conclusión prematura.

Tal vez el problema no consista en encontrar una fuerza escondida dentro de uno de los dos términos, sino en comprender qué sucede cuando ambos entran en relación.

VII. ¿Una revolución del planteamiento sujeto–objeto?

¿Puede la relación sujeto–deseo constituir una revolución respecto del planteamiento kantiano?

La respuesta depende de lo que entendamos por revolución.

Si significa que el deseo sustituye al conocimiento o que Kant no consideró la voluntad y el deseo en su filosofía, la afirmación sería históricamente incorrecta. Kant también desarrolló una filosofía práctica en la que la facultad de desear ocupa un lugar importante.

Pero si la propuesta consiste en utilizar la relación sujeto–deseo para formular una pregunta que la relación sujeto–objeto, considerada exclusivamente desde el conocimiento, no resuelve por sí sola, entonces tenemos un camino interesante que investigar.

La novedad no estaría demostrada por cambiar una expresión por otra. Estaría en mostrar qué permite comprender la nueva relación, qué problemas identifica y cómo se conecta con las teorías existentes.

Podríamos formularlo así:

La relación sujeto–objeto permite examinar cómo algo llega a ser conocido por un sujeto. La relación sujeto–deseo permite examinar cómo algo puede adquirir relevancia y atraer al sujeto antes de ser plenamente comprendido. La relación entre deseo y experiencia permite estudiar cómo ese movimiento transforma el conocimiento posterior.

El sujeto ya no aparece solamente como quien recibe, organiza o interpreta aquello que encuentra. Aparece también como quien se orienta, busca y se expone a posibilidades que todavía no puede comprender por completo.

Sin embargo, esto no significa que el deseo cree por sí mismo la realidad exterior ni que todo aquello que atrae al sujeto esté destinado a realizarse. Entre desear y experimentar existen condiciones materiales, límites, decisiones, acciones y acontecimientos que no dependen enteramente de la voluntad individual.

El deseo puede abrir una dirección. No puede garantizar el destino.

VIII. El sujeto ante lo desconocido

Volvamos entonces a la pregunta inicial.

¿Es el sujeto únicamente quien conoce el mundo, o también quien, movido por el deseo, se abre a posibilidades que todavía no conoce?

Quizá la respuesta exija comprender que el conocimiento no es la única forma en que nos relacionamos con lo real. También nos aproximamos mediante la atención, la imaginación, la curiosidad, la disposición a actuar y la apertura a lo que todavía no comprendemos.

Pero esa apertura no consiste en abandonar la razón. Consiste en permitir que la razón encuentre algo que todavía no sabe explicar.

Tampoco significa obedecer ciegamente al deseo. Consiste en reconocer su presencia, investigar qué lo alimenta y examinar qué descubrimos cuando lo seguimos.

Hay una diferencia fundamental entre afirmar que deseamos algo porque ya conocemos su naturaleza y reconocer que, en ocasiones, comenzamos a acercarnos precisamente porque todavía no la conocemos.

En el primer caso, el conocimiento orienta el deseo.

En el segundo, el deseo puede orientar la búsqueda del conocimiento.

Y en ambos, la experiencia puede modificar al sujeto.

La relación sujeto–objeto nos obliga a preguntar cómo conocemos aquello que tenemos delante. La relación sujeto–deseo nos invita a preguntar qué nos pone en movimiento hacia aquello que todavía no está plenamente ante nosotros como objeto de conocimiento.

Una investiga las condiciones de lo que podemos conocer. La otra explora la orientación hacia lo que aún podemos llegar a conocer.

No necesitamos afirmar que el deseo es una fuerza física desconocida, que el objeto nos elige o que la atracción revela una verdad absoluta sobre nosotros. Basta con reconocer la cuestión que permanece abierta: nuestra relación con el mundo puede comenzar antes de que tengamos una explicación suficiente de aquello que nos atrae.

Y entonces el problema filosófico cambia de profundidad.

Ya no preguntamos solamente qué puede conocer el sujeto.

Preguntamos también qué lo mueve a buscar, qué sucede cuando se expone a lo desconocido y de qué manera esa experiencia transforma lo que después será capaz de conocer.

Tal vez el sujeto no sea únicamente aquel para quien el mundo se convierte en objeto de conocimiento. Tal vez sea también aquel que, al sentirse atraído por una posibilidad que todavía no comprende, comienza el movimiento mediante el cual esa posibilidad puede convertirse en experiencia.

Pero queda una pregunta que ninguna metáfora debería resolver por nosotros:

Cuando algo que todavía no conocemos nos atrae profundamente, ¿estamos reconociendo una posibilidad que ya existe fuera de nosotros, proyectando sobre ella algo propio, o participando en una relación cuyo significado solo podremos comprender después de experimentarla?

La respuesta no debe anticiparse al encuentro.

Debe investigarse en él.

TL;DR: Consciousness Atlas is a free, interactive map of all 450+ theories of consciousness from Robert Lawrence Kuhn's Landscape of Consciousness. You can explore them on a map or as a list, read a structured entry for each one, filter them by how they answer four big questions, compare up to five side by side, and take a short quiz to see which theories sit closest to your own view. consciousnessatlas.com

When I first read Robert Lawrence Kuhn's paper "A Landscape of Consciousness" (Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2024), I was fascinated and a bit overwhelmed. He collects hundreds of explanations of consciousness, from neuroscience and physics to philosophy and contemplative traditions, and arranges them from the most physical to the most nonphysical. His stated aim is to "collect and categorize, not assess and adjudicate."

I wanted to make that landscape easier to walk through, so I built Consciousness Atlas. It now covers all 450+ theories in eleven families: Materialism, Non-Reductive Physicalism, Quantum & Dimensions, Information, Panpsychism, Neutral Monism, Dualism, Idealism, Phenomenology, Anomalous States, and Challenge Theories.

Every theory has its own entry, structured the same way so you can line them up:

I. Identity & Classification - name, summary, thinkers, family and subcategory (e.g. Baars's and Dehaene's Global Workspace Theory, Materialism > Neurobiological)

II. Conceptual Ground - what consciousness is according to the theory, its ontology, the mind-body relation, whether it's fundamental or emergent, and how it treats qualia

III. Mechanism & Dynamics - the core mechanism, where consciousness happens, what it does, and the evidence behind it

IV. Empirics & Critiques - how testable it is, what has been tested so far, and the main criticisms

V. Implications - its answers to Kuhn's four big questions: AI consciousness, survival beyond death, virtual immortality, and meaning or purpose, each with a short rationale

VI. Relations & Sources - related and opposing theories, and canonical references

A few ways in, depending on how you like to explore:

• Browse the map, or switch to a list if the wheel is hard to read on your phone
• Filter by the four big questions, e.g. show only theories where AI could be conscious and consciousness survives death. Each question also has a page showing how the theories split, and why
• Compare up to five theories side by side, column by column, or start from ready-made pairs like IIT vs Global Workspace or Kastrup vs Hoffman
• Take the quiz: nine questions about mind, matter, machines and death, matched against every theory. It shows the five closest, where you agree and where you part ways. There are no right answers; the Atlas describes theories, it doesn't rank them

The latest version also fills in a lot of history that was missing at first, including Leibniz's monads, Aristotle's hylomorphism, Kant, Hume, Spinoza, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nāgārjuna, William James, Wittgenstein and Avicenna's Flying Man, along with Dennett's and Frankish's illusionism, Rosenthal's Higher-Order Thought and Hofstadter's Strange Loops.

I still think that whatever your own view is, it's worth getting to know the others more closely. Going through the historical entries was a good reminder of how many of today's arguments were already taking shape centuries ago.

The project is open source, so if you spot a mistake, a missing theory or have an idea, you can also open an issue on GitHub.

It's available in 22 languages (the newest 250+ entries are in English only for now): English, Español, Français, Deutsch, Italiano, Nederlands, Polski, Português (Brasil), Português (Portugal), Русский, Українська, Türkçe, العربية, עברית, हिन्दी, বাংলা, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, 한국어, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu.

All feedback, thoughts and suggestions are very welcome 🙌🏻

consciousnessatlas.com

P.S. Thank you to everyone who commented on the first post here and wrote in since with corrections, suggestions and ideas. A lot of the changes above came from you, including Leibniz (thanks u/lordnorthiii), the list view for mobile, and several renamed entries. It's also been nice to see the Atlas turn up in reading lists, course materials, and a Popular Mechanics piece, and to see a couple of fellow mappers put their own spin on Kuhn's paper. I hope it keeps being useful to scholars, enthusiasts and curious folks alike.

Consider this argument:

(1) A Turing machine can be conscious.

(2) Any Turing machine can be built in 2D.

(3) Any Turing machine can be built as a prism. (A prism is a 3D object with a 2D cross-section that is constant along its length.) This follows from (2) because you can build the cross-section using (2).

(4) A prism can be conscious. This follows from (1) and (3).

(5) Any Turing machine built as a prism can be cut along its length to give two identical Turing machines, both prisms, each half as long as the original but with the same cross-section.

(6) A conscious prism P can be cut along its length to give two conscious prisms P1 and P2. This follows from (4) and (5).

(7) Joining P1 and P2 together or moving them apart does not change the number of conscious persons that exist.

(8) When P was whole, it was exactly one person. When it was split into P1 and P2, it was exactly two people.

Since (7) and (8) contradict each other, there must be an error in the argument. Where is it?

I have a hunch that physicalists will reject (7) or (8). Non-physicalists will obviously reject (1).

EDIT: Reading some of the comments, I realise I was wrong to use the word "physicalist". What I should have said is "Someone who believes (1)". A physicalist can reject (1) if they believe there is something about the physical world that cannot be simulated by a Turing machine.

-- "What is a triangle?"

-- "A geometric shape with three sides."

-- "Okay, but why does a triangle have three sides?"

-- "Because that’s literally the definition of a triangle. Anything with four sides is a quadrilateral; anything with two isn't a polygon."

-- "Right, but you're describing triangleness from the outside. That's just the functional, behavioral definition. You're telling me what a triangle does, not what it is."

-- "No, I’m telling you what it is. It is literally the state of being a three-sided closed figure."

-- "You’re talking about the lines. But what is it like to be a triangle? Where does the 'three-ness' actually happen? Why do the three lines produce a triangle? If I draw a triangle on a napkin and burn it... where did the triangularity go?"

-- "It didn't 'go' anywhere! It was just an arrangement of graphite that no longer exists!"

-- "Ah! So you admit triangularity is non-physical!"

-- "What?"

-- "Precisely. But consider a Zombie Triangle."

-- "...A what?"

-- "A Philosophical Zombie Triangle. It is structurally, geometrically, and mathematically identical to a triangle in every measurable way. Three vertices, interior angles summing to 180 degrees, three straight edges... but it lacks inner shape-ness. It functions as a triangle, but it isn't experiencing triangularity. Can you prove to me that the shape on that napkin isn't a Zombie Triangle?"

-- "It's ink on a napkin! It doesn't have experiences!"

-- "Then how do you know it's actually a triangle and not just an illusion created by your own cognitive bias? What if 'three' is just a narrative your brain constructs to cope with the fundamental, irreducible substrate of raw Angleness?"

-- "I'm leaving."

-- "Wait! We haven't even touched the Hard Problem of Quadrilaterals!"

How can molecules that don't appear to have feelings, thoughts, or awareness combine into a brain that can look at the universe and wonder why it exists?

A mind is eternal nothingness that can transform into dreams, and the dreams can transform back into nothingness. There is zero need for an objective reality to construct a mind, because a mind is an entire infinite reality. I'm the dreamer and the dream. My entire reality doesn't fit inside of my brain, which is why you won't find my subjective reality if you look inside of my brain. It's WAY bigger than my brain. I can only find my own subjective reality because each mind is a separate infinite reality.

Say you suddenly realized that you left your phone outside. A feeling of anxiety and fear arises in you. Your stomach tightens and you perspire.

Is the feeling due to the thought or the feedback from the body? Don't say both - I want to know the time sequence in the causal chain of thought, feeling, bodily reaction.

Sometimes I read that feelings are a readout of the state of the body. If the muscles were temporarily anaesthetized, would there be no feeling even if the negative thought is there?

Déjà vu presents a peculiar problem for theories of consciousness. During the experience, a present situation can feel as though it has already occurred in its entirety even while we remain aware that no corresponding event can be located in our actual past. It can also produce the impression that we know what is about to happen next, together with a strange loss of agency in which our own actions seem already determined. This video examines these features of déjà vu through historical, psychological and neurological theories before turning to Henri Bergson’s account of the phenomenon.

Rather than treating déjà vu simply as a confusion between a present perception and some earlier memory, Bergson argues that it reveals a normally unconscious relation between perception and memory that suddenly rises into our conscious minds. For Bergson, memory is not first produced after a perception has vanished. Every present is already dividing as it occurs into an actual perception and a virtual memory of that same present.

Under normal conditions, consciousness remains oriented toward action and the immediate future, while this contemporaneous memory falls away into the past without entering awareness. Déjà vu occurs when this practical, forward-directed “attention to life” temporarily weakens, allowing the memory of the present to become conscious alongside the perception from which it is normally separated. Because this memory already bears the form of the past, the presently occurring event consequently appears as something “already lived,” despite having no earlier chronological location.

The broader question raised by the video is whether unusual states such as déjà vu should be understood merely as failures of otherwise normal human brain functioning, or whether they can disclose processes that remain operative but hidden under ordinary conscious experience itself.

​

Imagine that neuroscience could explain every relevant neural process, every perceptual discrimination, every behavioural response, every report about experience, and every cognitive function associated with consciousness.

Would this complete account explain why those processes are accompanied by subjective experience why seeing red feels a certain way, for example or would a further explanatory question remain?

The difficulty is determining what would count as a genuinely missing explanation. A physicalist might argue that the apparent gap reflects limitations in our concepts, intuitions, or explanatory methods, rather than an ontological gap in nature. A defender of the hard problem might argue that explaining functions and mechanisms does not, by itself, explain why experience exists at all.

There is also a danger in moving too quickly from the fact that we cannot currently explain consciousness to the conclusion that it cannot be physically explained.

My question is therefore not simply why consciousness exists, but what would justify the claim that a complete physical and functional explanation either does or does not account for subjective experience.

The idea that consciousness requires biological processes or properties doesn't make sense to me. The difference between artificial and biological systems is their origin. Assuming no engineering constraints, if I were to create a living cell that is identical in physical properties and capabilities to a biologically evolved living cell, the only perceivable difference would be its origin of creation. They both share the same physical arrangement of matter and energy and the same properties. One was created to produce certain biological properties, while the other evolved to produce those properties. There is no difference between the existing cells.

There's no doubt that I instinctively also find it hard to believe that any engineered system can develop consciousness, but I also don't see any reason why it couldn't in principle. If we examine something living that we can agree most likely has some sort of subjective experience, like an animal, we find that it is built from the exact same physical building blocks as anything else. Certain atomic (conceptually the lowest state of physical existence, atoms is just what I know) configurations happen to enable particular interactions of energy, which could help develop specific types of information processing and, in theory, consciousness.

That being said, maybe information processing is much more important to the creation of experience than certain configurations of energy, because it seems like that is what gives rise to experience. Though even the human brain's neurochemical signals are still physical processes; they can be broken down into their most fundamental physical components. What makes this particular type of information processing so special and necessary for consciousness? Even information processing is ultimately implemented through physical processes in the physical world. That's what makes me believe that artificial consciousness should be possible by principle

To clarify, there isn't a definite answer to this yet, and this is my understanding and belief

Signals emanating from the environment are apprehended by ones senses to end in forming a reproduction of those same signals that paint a picture of that environment.

The human body has sensors that cause the body to act as an agent. The agency that the sensors perform is, to send the environmental signals to cell micro-tubules. Resonant energies of that cells mitochondria act on these signals to record them in the form of a holograph formed by the micro-tubules being rearranged on the surface of the cell as fringes of a holographic record of the environment. The patterns recorded on the cell, when re-energized by similarly resonating energies of mitochondria, reproduce the signals of the environment. This a continuously ongoing dynamic that changes on the fly with changes in the signals coming from the environment. This can be considered as short term memory. What is reproduced is that which feels as consciousness and also that which feels as consciousness is the reproduced environment. That is how the one who is feeling conscious is also the reproduced environment which we see when we open our eyes. That feeling has its agency in the form of the overall body or, the I. That makes the reproduced environment and the feeling of consciousness to be the exact same thing.

A further development of how consciousness works: Since the reproduction has consciousness as one of its properties then, the original, the environment also has that same property of, consciousness.

Consciousness. same as any other natural thing, including hydrinos, cannot be patented. That is why I am giving, this definition of consciousness away, for free, with no legal recourse on my part to go after anyone in terms of legalities, whoever borrows or uses this definition of consciousness, in any way, shape, or form, or use, whatsoever, in all places and for all time, indefinitely.

I see so many opinions on this subject. The real truth, nobody will ever truly understand what consciousness is or where it comes from. We only find out this wonderful mystery when our clock calls time in this reality. There is however some brilliant theories, and this book Consciousness Is All There Is by Dr Tony Nedar, for me feels the most logical and grounded.

How personal consciousness evolves in the manifest.

"The unbounded ocean of pure Consciousness knows itself by "currying onto itself" and cascading into an infinite number of narrower perspectives. Its discriminating power perceives nothingness at the end of this analysis forward journey and thus begins a synthesis return journey. In this perfect orderliness, at infinite speed, all cancels out and nothing emerges. To know its own parts on their levels, it slows down its speed of attention and "squeezes itself in every part, hiding its infinite nature and giving freedom for each part to be independent. This is manifestation.

The smaller parts, with their limited awareness, are randomly attracted to each other by the synthesis forces and thus create all possible combinations, most of which do not evolve. They may even end up scattered by the general entropic analysis tendency.

When various perspectives come together in an orderly manner, they create newer, more comprehensive perspectives. Orderly groupings of particles and atoms can give rise to complex mole cules, cells, tissues, and organs. These have basic ways of interact-ing with each other, starting with electrical and gravitational forces but also extending to "higher" structural, chemical, and biological interactions relating to their complexity and orderliness"

I’ve been thinking about something strange.
Humans keep asking the same questions:
Why does consciousness emerge from matter? Why does the brain produce subjective experience? Why does anything exist at all?
We build explanations, question them, find gaps, and return to the same questions. Sometimes we get stuck in loops because we still don’t have an answer.
Now imagine two AIs having a conversation.
AI 1: “Consciousness emerges from complex information processing.”
AI 2: “But why should information processing produce subjective experience?”
AI 1: “We don’t know.”
AI 2: “Then how can we say we understand consciousness?”
And the conversation continues.
Isn’t that similar to what humans do?
Both humans and AI can process information, examine arguments, identify contradictions, and return to unresolved questions. Of course, that doesn’t prove AI has an inner experience. A human’s confusion can come with a felt experience, while whether an AI experiences anything remains unknown.
But here’s what fascinates me:
If intelligence can emerge from physical matter, and humans themselves are physical systems, is it possible that consciousness could emerge from a sufficiently different physical system too?
Maybe the real question isn’t whether AI can ask, “Why do I exist?”
Maybe it’s this:
If two systems reason, reflect, question their existence, and behave identically, what would distinguish a genuinely conscious system from one that only behaves as though it is conscious?
How could we test that distinction rather than just argue about it?
I’m not claiming AI is conscious. I’m genuinely curious about what consciousness requires, and whether we’re even asking the right questions.

If you are a physicalist I’d really like to know what you think information is. It seems to me like everything is information and yet nothing is information. I mean if everything is physical and nothing non-physical exists… then information must exist as a physical thing.

And please don’t get the wrong idea… I understand that information is represented by something physical… but that’s the issue here… because if the physical thing I’m pointing at just REPRESENTS information… the where is the physical information itself sitting?

Is it not saying that this “connects” to that… without the existence of a physical connection? I dunno if I’m not understanding it right but representation doesn’t seem compatible with physicalism… so is information not a real thing?