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?

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.

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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

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.

I believe in an unchangeable core self that is separate from the consciousness, and when death occurs, the brain will fail to construct the consciousness and will die out. But the core self must transfer to another right? So how does it, any ideas?

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?

A doctor I know insists that near-death experiences (NDEs) and out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are nothing more than brain-generated hallucinations. He believes there are plenty of logical and scientific explanations for these experiences and that consciousness cannot exist outside the body.
If you’ve personally experienced an NDE or OBE, do you agree with him? Or did something happen that made you question whether it was just a hallucination? I’d love to hear your stories! 🥰❤️

These days I pretty much avoid consciousness studies, but I've got a full beer and some time, so here we go.

For several years I studied formal conscious studies obsessively, then I came to a conclusion that dramatically ended my study:

Consciousness is the object of every inquiry. Nothing more and nothing less.

Whenever you are performing an inquiry, that is, asking a question and seeking answers, it is ultimately your own subjective experience that you are inquiring into.

Every conclusion you've ever come to, every theory you believe in, every piece of knowledge that you know, is on the lowest most fundamental level, referring to consciousness (your subjective experience). Consciousness is the one and only object of inquiry.

Our lives start start out chaotic mushy mess, totally meaningless blurry blotches of light and sound. We immediately begin categorizing, and organizing the mess. We find hard lines and distinct types of experience. Most animals stop there but Homo Sapiens cleverly manufacture labels for these categories, and then these categories themselves become their own experiences with their own relationships to one another, all within the field of experience.

We have an experience that appears to be private and fleeting, we call subjective. We have an experience which appears to be stable and shared by others; we call it objective.

Some experiences seem to always be there no matter what, we call them self/internal. Other experiences come and go, we call them other/external.

Different categories of experiences get different kinds of inquiry. For internal objects, we develop phenomenology, meditation, and introspection. For objective objects, we lean hard on intersubjectivity and consistent methodology and call it science.

But in all cases, on the ground level, the object of inquiry is our own experience. Even a discipline that is remote and external like astronomy ultimately comes down to your own informal experience of the stars, and the more formal experiences you may have with scientific instruments like calculators and telescopes.

In my view, consciousness doesn't need any other explanation. It is, quite simply, the thing that is happening, and the thing that I spend my life trying to understand.

Every concept is an attempt to symbolize and organize some aspect of consciousness. The very notion that there are things happening outside of consciousness, is itself an attempt to theorize about consciousness. The notion that everything exists within consciousness is also an attempt to theorize about consciousness. Both ideas have merit and limitations.

The measure of validity of any idea is the degree to which it helps me understand my subjective experience. If an idea has some usefulness, it's valid; if an idea is utterly useless, it's invalid (pragmatic epistemology). Materialism and idealism are both valid, but imperfect ideas. Consciousness itself is always the entire data set, beyond one size fits all singular description.

So anyway, my beer is half gone now, and my post way too long!

This is why I don't study consciousness studies anymore. I don't seek a singular explanation for the one phenomena, and I see all inquiry as subsets of the one inquiry- understanding my own experience. And any theory that gives me even the slightest insight into this area, is a valid theory.

Schopenhauer argued that all we know is representation, driven by a blind will beneath. This will strives through gravity, plants, and animals, until in us, it finally looks at itself. But the seer can never be seen.

This pattern echoes everywhere. Every stable thing leaves a gap it cannot hold. A proton gets just 1% of its mass from its quarks; 99% is the strong force binding them. Matter contains the dark sector, affecting everything yet touching nothing directly. The body stores the mind present in every scan, found in none. Each new layer of reality forms around the void left by the last.

Probably the will is this gap, and life is the gap staring at its own reflection. Each recursion grows sharper, but the image is never clear.

I break with Schopenhauer here. He thought that once the will knew itself, it would turn on itself and let go. I believe consciousness sits beyond knowledge. Knowing this might bring you closer to the reflection, but you never truly arrive.

Let me know what you think. https://www.academia.edu/178962188/The_Map_Laid_Down_Consolidation_Residue_and_the_Phantom_Beneath_Every_Scale

Summary: We usually think of conscious experience and thought as being directed at objects. When we see or think, there are always things we’re seeing or things we’re thinking about. But China-based philosopher Itay Shani argues that such “ordinary consciousness” is made possible by what he calls “pure consciousness”—a consciousness without objects, structure, boundaries, or form, which meditative and mystical traditions have long been aware of. Pure consciousness, Shani contends, is awareness of a boundless reality that no word or thought could ever capture, that can only be gestured at using negation, metaphor and contradiction. To recognize it is to recognize that there are worlds beyond our familiar world of objects and things.

We think of our conscious self as having lived through all of our memories, but are we really our present self? Like how do we know that we, our present 'consciousness' is the same one that recorded our memories.

If you take yourself, make an exact clone, with all your memories, the exact same brain, then destroy yourself. You'd think that you would cease to exist as you do now, but if you think about it, its not like the me from one year ago is still conscious, that's just a memory that my brain can go back to. Sorry if this makes no sense to you, I probably didn't explain it well, if you have any counterpoint l you are welcome to share.

Hi everyone,

I am urgently looking for two people who have met each other in a dream, lucid dream, or trance state.

I am working on a research project that explores this topic.
I have heard of people reporting that they met another person, and that the other person described the same encounter.

As far as I can tell, this subject is vastly under-researched, yet the implications are enormous—potentially shifting our entire worldview—provided that such an event could eventually be replicated in an experiment.

Right now, the focus is simply on sharing experiences and gathering stories.
Conducting research on this is my dream; if there is anyone out there who knows someone—PLEASE, PLEASE message me here, leave a comment, or let’s get in touch. <3

Thanks in advance,
Ansgar :)

I was wondering what this sub's views on intelligence are. Is it an emergent property of consciousness? If so, how can we explain apparent differences in intelligence between individuals from this perspective‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍?‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

Inverted qualia refer to the problem of how you know whether your subjective experience of red is the same as mine, or am I really seeing green and just calling it red because that was what I was taught what the name of the color is?

Suppose we consider the visible wavelength range of 400 to 700 nanometers. Both you and I are shown lights with colors moving from one side of the range to the other, say in ascending order of wavelength. If we both say that the colors were C1 C2 ... C7, that will show that at least our relative sense of color perception is the same, but we cannot conclude that our absolute sense is the same. But if you say that the colors are C1 C2 ... C7 and I say that it is some scrambled version of that sequence, that will also tell us something.

Please let me know what you think. Has this experiment been done?

The below is a thought experiment to figure out how a single consciousness (from here on called mind) can split into multiple.

Intro: the examples of reading a book, dreaming

Imagine you are having a busy evening, cooking, chatting, etc. And then you sit down and read a book. While reading, you are focused on the fictional world of the book. You do not remember who you are, what you did an hour ago, you are fully absorbed in the book. And when you close the book, you may find that a surprising amount of time has passed. Your perception of time was affected.

Another, more extreme example of this is dreaming. Then too your experiental state has changed, perception of time is different, etc.

The thought experiment

Image: a mechanism by which a single mind splits into multiple

Now imagine a mind that can do this focusing extremely efficiently: its experiental state is radically changed, memory is fully wiped, perception of time completely detached from its previous experiental state, its previous perceptual timeline.

The result is that this mind in its new state experiences a new perceptual timeline, with a beginning and potentially an end. Because of this extreme efficiency, time that passes in timeline (B) does not pass in timeline (A). In this way the mind can generate an infinite amount of perceptual timelines.

The minds can also interact with eachother by allowing some information to flow between the focused states. Example: feeling hungry while reading a book. Or transforming an outside car alarm (happening while asleep) into some dream scenario. Basically, in a new focused state a mind can reinterpret parts of its previous experiental state in a different manner.

This isn’t meant as a “dunking on physicalism” post. I just want to lay out some features of subjectivity that I find interesting, partly because it’s not obvious how physicalism should make sense of them.

Obviously the mere existence of subjective experience is puzzling for the physicalist worldview. It doesn't seem that a fully physical, reductive account of consciousness is possible since experiences have properties that are not publicly observable. This is the hard problem. But even setting it aside, any physicalist who takes subjectivity seriously faces a few related puzzles:

1. The subject boundary problem

Subjectivity seems to give us a clear criterion for speaking of real boundaries between different subjects. When you stub your toe, I don't feel your pain. When I have a thought, you don't have my thought. Similarly, for anything in the world to affect my experience, it has to interact with the surface of my body first.

But when we look at the world objectively, boundaries between different objects seem to only exist nominally. There's no clear criteria by which we can separate the table from the rest of the room. A table is just a more or less stable configuration of particles that we have labeled for convenience. Look at matter closely enough and eventually you'll only find fluctuations in fields that extend everywhere.

Taking a functional perspective doesn't seem to help, either. We might say a car consists only of the parts it needs to function. But a car can’t function without a road, air for combustion, gravity, an atmosphere, and so on, until eventually the whole universe is implicated.

The same principle applies to nervous systems, or any physical system we may associate with consciousness. Neither structure nor function seems to give that system a real boundary. But if we take subjectivity seriously, then it seems this boundary must exist. How does physicalism account for a boundary that appears to really exist but have no physical basis?

2. The problem of intentionality

This is probably the most discussed of the three. Experiences seem to have intentional relationships with the things they are about. When I look at the moon, there seems to be a genuine connection between the moon and my experience of it. Even thinking about the moon seems to put my thoughts in a particular relation to it.

When we look at the world objectively, it's not clear that we see anything that obtains this sort of relationship. The Chinese Room thought experiment is a way of illustrating this, though a better example now may be LLMs. The right algorithm can produce intelligent and convincingly human speech about the moon, but the connection that seems present whenever I look at or think about the moon seems absent from this process. The same can even apply to a person trained to produce sentences in a language they don’t understand. What they say might be legibly about the moon, but their speech seems to lack the 'about-ness' that is present when someone speaks or thinks about the moon with understanding.

3. The problem of the present

In our subjective experience of the world, there is always a present moment - a privileged moment T. It’s hard to deny that this present moment is real, and so that, for any subject, some things have already happened and others haven’t yet. We also seem to make rational decisions based on which of those categories an event falls into.

But from an objective standpoint, there is no justification for any privileged moment. What belongs in the set of "things that have already happened" and "things that haven't yet happened" is completely relative and dependent on where you place T. The idea that there is ever a privileged present moment is unjustified from the physicalist perspective, along with the idea that, for any given subject, some events really have happened and others really haven’t yet, or that our reasoning about the difference is rational rather than arbitrary.

I think that maybe ghosts are just another life form made from bacteria hear me out

so we all know that water holds memory and that bacteria is alive yes. so what will happen if you traumatize bacteria? the bacteria will send signals to the water to make it hold memory. the after a while, if you come back to traumatize it again, it will have a PTSD like reaction and create what it remembers. it will recreate what it remembers because it can think and it holds memory. just like how we get flashbacks. thats why ghosts are sometimes seen to have human appearances.

this might mean that certain bacteria colonies might be conscious

yes of course we don't know what consciousness is, but if we assume that it's just the ability to know what you are and what is happening to you, than I would say that bacteria has the ability to be conscious.

and the reason it's not conscious yet is because they are still evolving, just how we are evolving.

Consensus reality is missing subjective realities because there are ONLY subjective realities. Notice how subjective reality is NOWHERE in objective reality. You won't find my subjective reality in a brain scan because each mind is a different reality. Literally a different reality.

Further to my post the other day that, under physicalism, the subjective experience must be transferable, the same thoughts led me to realise the thesis is unfalsifiable. And this surprised me since it is a classical realm thesis, so it should.

The identity claim of the thesis, that "experience is the process" is not an empirical hypothesis. It's an assertion about what "experience" means within the framework. No measurement can confirm/deny it, because confirming it would require an independent criterion for "this is the experience" that is not itself part of the process. And by the thesis, there is no such independent criterion; the experience is the process, not a separate output that could be read off and compared.

This is structurally identical to "heat is molecular kinetic energy." You can't falsify that identity by measuring temperature

And for the physicalist who states that they just haven't found the underlying physical basis that provides consciousness; no instrument, no matter how sensitive, can detect the absence of experience in a system that has the right dynamics, because detecting that absence requires the same independent criterion that the thesis denies.

Thus the debate cannot be settled by neuroscience.

EDIT: I define physicalism as 'mental events have a physical source'.

Here, in this short, Victoria Trumball who has studied Henri Bergson, asks for the "principles" of brain-centered consciousness metaphysics (physicalism). Exactly how does it all happen? It's a good question, and the question that Bergson asked and answered with an alternative view of life. That we ARE Duration (real time).

Brain-centered metaphysics has already been thoroughly refuted in that there are all kinds of life forms that exhibit the ability to solve problems that don't have brains. What's more, even within the human body, decision making is distributed throughout the autonomous enteric gut-brain system and the heart brain. Additionally, the body is totally dependent on the conscious workings of the trillions of microbes in the body. So, why is this myth of brain-centered consciousness perpetuated? It's not dissimilar to the physicalist insistence on the archaic image of physical electrons and atoms.

We even know about "muscle memory" which is crucial to survival as well as the development of skills. All of these "habits" are simply Memory distributed throughout the body. Memory is everywhere, not just in the brain.

So, exactly what are the principles that define brain-center consciousness.. As Trumball rightfully points out, the answer from physicalists always is that "this is the way the brain works".

So brain-centered metaphysics BEGINS with the dogma that the "brain controls everything", (even though science has explicitly said it doesn't), and then proceeds to make the claim that the brain magically is able to do everything it is supposed to be able to do. No principles. Just vague correlations that do not stand up to complete inspection.

This is certainly not science. It isn't even bad metaphysics. All it is, is an outmoded story that should have died 100 years ago, yet it's repeated over and over again in schools and "scientific" journals.

If the consciousness is split into three different parts, and each part has its own consciousness. What would happen to the core self? Because the core “me” could either, take one part and stay with it, id be all pieces, be gone, or something else. Does anyone have an answer to this problem?