Idealisms
Idealism is the theory that consciousness is ultimate reality, the fullness of the deepest level of all existence, the singular fundamental existent. It is the theory of consciousness that takes consciousness to its maximum meaning: Consciousness is rock-bottom reality.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
This overview sets out the organizing logic of the subcategory: framing first, then method, then the mainstream cortical case, then two entries that reframe what a neurobiological answer can look like, then mechanism descending from function through memory to brainstem and single dendrites, and finally the consequences for privacy and for free will. The sequence is neither chronological nor fame-driven; it is an argument about where the disputes lie.
OpenDualisms
Dualism is the theory of consciousness that requires two radically distinct parts: a physical brain, obviously, but also, in addition, a separate, nonphysical substance that is not only independent of the brain but also not of the physical world (as presently conceived). This would mean that reality consists of (at least) two ontological categories—physical and nonphysical, whether substances, properties, aspects, dimensions, or planes of existence. In general usage, “dualism” means “substance dualism.”
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Freud’s theory of consciousness is a depth-psychological account in which phenomenal consciousness is real but derivative, intermittent, and structurally limited: the mind is not coextensive with awareness, and what appears in consciousness is shaped by unconscious wishes, affects, conflicts, defenses, memories, and symbolic substitutions. His importance for consciousness studies is that he breaks the Cartesian identification of mind with consciousness and makes phenomenal life dynamically stratified.
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
Materialism is the claim that consciousness is entirely physical, solely the product of biological brains, and all mental states can be fully “reduced” to, or wholly explained by, physical states—which, at their deepest levels, are the fields and particles of fundamental physics. In short, materialism, in its many forms and flavors, gives a completely physicalist account of phenomenal consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
Ryle’s theory of consciousness is a conceptual, ordinary-language critique of the Cartesian picture that consciousness is an inner private theatre inhabited by mental episodes, qualia, images, volitions, and acts of introspection. He offers not a theory of phenomenal consciousness but a diagnosis of why the demand for one is malformed. His argument is that Cartesian dualism—"the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine"—rests on a category mistake: it treats mental predicates as naming occult inner episodes belonging to the same logical type as bodily events. Consciousness is not a private theater illuminated by an inner eye but an adverbial feature of intelligent performance;
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Can nonphysical consciousness (or realms) be revealed or accessed via anomalous, psi, or paranormal phenomena—extrasensory perception (ESP), out-of-body experiences (OBEs), near-death experiences (NDEs), and the like? Psychical research beginning in the late 19th century and parapsychology in the mid-20th century sought to study the phenomena scientifically. In addition, some claim that meditation and psychedelics can reveal hidden realities of consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
Electromagnetic (EM) Field Theories treat minds as identical to, or derivative from, the broader, brain-spanning EM fields generated by the cumulative aggregate of multiple, specific neural currents. The brain is packed with an intricate three-dimensional web of these EM fields—the question is what functions do these EM fields serve (if any), and whether these fields in any way relate to consciousness?
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Language obviously enriches the content of consciousness, perhaps provides a framework for human consciousness, but is there a deeper relationship? While it is generally (but not universally) accepted that language does not generate theories of consciousness per se, it features in some and is rejected in others, both of which are worth exploring.
OpenMonisms
Monism is the theory that all of reality consists of exactly one concrete object or thing, and everything that exists is, in some sense, that one concrete object or thing (or part of it). Because monisms seek to account for both mental and physical aspects of reality, avoiding the metaphysical difficulties of dualism and overcoming the explanatory weakness of materialism, it follows that monisms are also theories of consciousness.
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
Non-Reductive Physicalism takes consciousness to be entirely physical, solely the product of biological brains, but mental states or properties are irreducibly distinct from physical states or properties such that they cannot be entirely explained by physical laws, principles, or discoveries (in brains or otherwise).
OpenPanpsychisms
Panpsychism is the theory that phenomenal consciousness exists because physical ultimates, fundamental physics, have phenomenal or proto-phenomenal properties. This means that the essence of mentality, awareness, experience is a primitive, non-reducible feature of each and every part or aspect of physical reality, similar to the fundamental fields and particles in physics. Everywhere there is energy-matter, perhaps everywhere there is even spacetime, panpsychism says there is also something of consciousness. Everything that exists has a kind of inherent consciousness or “proto-consciousness,” which, in certain aggregates and under certain conditions, can generate inner awareness and experience. Panpsychism has multiple forms, nuances, and variants, as one would expect.
OpenIdealisms
Philosophical History of Idealism in Eastern and Western Philosophy.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
The phylogenetic evolution of consciousness, at first blush, is not a specific theory of consciousness per se. Rather, it is recruited as the mechanistic process for many (but not all) of the theories on the Landscape. Yet, is there a sense in which phylogenetic evolution can become a prime explanation of consciousness in its own right?
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Quantum theories of consciousness take seriously the idea that quantum mechanics plays a necessary, if not sufficient, role in the specific generation of phenomenal consciousness in certain physical entities like brains—beyond the general application of quantum mechanics in all physical entities. The kinds of quantum theories or models on offer differ radically.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
“Biological Naturalism” is the name philosopher John Searle gave to a neurobiological solution to the mind-body problem. His approach is to ignore the mind-body problem's philosophical history and focus on “what you know for a fact.” He starts with a mundane, working definition of consciousness: “Conscious states are those states of awareness, sentience or feeling that begin in the morning when we wake from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until we fall asleep or otherwise become ‘unconscious.’”
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
Daniel Dennett's theory of consciousness is illusionist, and or even eliminativist, because he denies the existence of qualia as they are traditionally conceived—private, inner, felt experience, the non-physical building blocks of subjectivity. Instead, he argues that consciousness is not what it seems to be from the first-person perspective. "There are no qualia," he states.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Philosopher Ned Block represents a majority of philosophers (and a large majority of scientists) who hold that “phenomenal consciousness is reducible to its physical basis.
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
Eliminative Materialism is the maximalist physicalist position that our common-sense view of the mind is misleading and that consciousness is a kind of illusion generated by the brain—a contingent, evolutionary, inner adaptation that enhanced fitness and reproductive success.
OpenMonisms
Leibniz’s theory of consciousness is a monad-based, panexperiential account in which phenomenal consciousness is the apperceived or more distinct form of perception within simple, immaterial perceiving substances, while all reality consists of these non-spatial monads whose internal perceptual states express the whole universe from unique perspectives and unfold by “appetition” (i.e., the internal drive or activity of a simple substance), under a pre-established divine harmony.
OpenDualisms
Philosophical History of Dualism
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
The philosophical history of materialism began in ancient Greece and India and has developed over the millennia, often in response to religious, idealist, or dualist traditions. It was accelerated by the scientific revolution, especially, in recent decades, by the cognitive and neurosciences.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Top-down predictive theories highlight brain-based, central-to-peripheral, efferent influence on sensory organs more than peripheral-to-central, afferent sensory perceptions—and while top-down predictive models may or may not be themselves explanations of consciousness, they give insight into the nature of consciousness and its evolutionary development. Top-down is a fundamental principle of how brains work, and it would be surprising if it were not relevant for understanding consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge rejects any “separate mental entity,” calling it “a stumbling block to progress.” It is “unwarranted by the available data and the existing psychological models,” he says, and it collides “head-on with the most fundamental ideas of all modern science.” Rather, Bunge argues that the mind-body problem requires a psychobiological approach, based on the assumption that behavior is an external manifestation of neural processes—an approach that also abandons ordinary language in favor of a “state space language, which is mathematically precise and is shared by science and scientific philosophy.”
OpenMonisms
James’s radical empiricism is a pluralistic neutral-monist theory in which phenomenal consciousness and physical reality are not two substances, but two functional organizations of a more primitive field of “pure experience.” In other words, mind and matter are both aspects or structures formed from a more fundamental pure experience, which is neither mental nor physical.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are defined as the minimum activities in the brain jointly sufficient (and probably necessary) for any one specific conscious perception and, extended, for subjective experience in general, the inner awareness of qualia.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Brain circuits and cycles as mechanisms of consciousness are older explanations, no longer considered sufficient in themselves, having evolved into more sophisticated theories. Brain circuits cover the following kinds of large-scale brain structures: lateral pathways across the cerebral cortex linking diverse cortical areas (e.g., especially in the prefrontal, cingulate, and parietal regions of the cortex, which are involved in higher-level activities such as planning and reasoning).
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Proposed originally by Bernard Baars, extended with neuroimaging and computer modeling by Stanislas Dehaene, along with Jean-Pierre Changuex, Lionel Naccache, and others, Global Workplace Theory (GWT) proposes that brain-wide presence and broad accessibility of specific multi-sensory, multi-cognitive information is what constitutes conscious awareness.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Cognitive neuroscientist Claire Sergent's nuanced theory of consciousness emphasizes the temporal flexibility of conscious access. Her work suggests that conscious perception is not strictly tied to the immediate processing of sensory stimuli but can occur "offline," allowing for retrospective awareness of events. She proposes an update to previous formulations of the global neuronal workspace model that she labels a “global playground.”
OpenIdealisms
Consciousness is central to the philosophical and religious traditions that emerged on the ancient Indian subcontinent, perhaps more central to Indian philosophy and religion than it is to any other global tradition.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
The extended mind, according to philosopher Andy Clark, features an “active externalism,” based on the participatory role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. He asserts that when the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, a “coupled system” is created that can be conceptualized as a cognitive system in its own right (independent of the two components).
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky revolutionized the theory of language, and although language-related theory of consciousness has not been a focus of his contributions, its relevance remains.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Daniel Dennett delights us with the wondrous and sometimes counterintuitive power of evolution in the development of consciousness (or, more generally, “minds”), notably in his psychohistory journey, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Nobel laureate biologist Gerald Edelman presents a purely biological theory of consciousness, founded on Darwinian natural selection and complex brain morphology. His foundational commitment is that “the neural systems underlying consciousness arose to enable high-order discriminations in a multidimensional space of signals,” that “qualia are those discriminations,” and that “differences in qualia correlate with differences in the neural structure and dynamics that underlie them.”
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
Mathematical physicist George Ellis approaches consciousness by combining non-reductionist strong emergence and top-down causation in the context of “possibility spaces.”
OpenMaterialism / First-Order
First-order representationalism (FOR) seeks to account for consciousness in terms of, or by reducing to, external, world-directed (or first-order) intentional states. In other words, consciousness can be explained, primarily, by understanding how the directedness of our mental states at objects and states of affairs in the world is generated directly by those objects and states of affairs.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
James’s theory of consciousness holds that normal waking rational consciousness is only one form of mind among many, bordered by subliminal, mystical, dissociative, trance, mediumistic, drug-induced, and religious forms of experience. He calls for pluralism: consciousness studies must take marginal and exceptional cases seriously because they reveal hidden dimensions of mind. He proposed that the dependence of consciousness on the brain, though empirically undeniable, does not settle whether the brain produces consciousness or merely transmits it. The distinction is foundational.
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
Philosopher Mostyn Jones gathers, explains, and classifies various electromagnetic-field theories, each with its own theoretical foundation: computationalist, reductionist, dualist, realist, interactionist, epiphenomenalist, globalist, and localist. He uses three questions to classify the field theories: 1. How do minds exist relative to fields? 2. Are minds unified by global or local fields? 3. How extensively do fields and neurons interact?
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Embodied realism is the view that the mind is inherently embodied: we think with a brain that evolved to run a body, and so every concept—even color—is shaped by our sensorimotor makeup rather than read off a mind-independent world. On this account, phenomenal consciousness is real and neurally grounded, but that its experienced contents, categories, unity, imagery, affective salience, and conceptual articulation arise through the embodied brain’s interaction with the world, structured by unconscious frames, image schemas, and metaphorical mappings rather than by disembodied reason, direct access to reality “in itself,” or a separable mental substance.
OpenPanpsychisms
Proponents position panpsychism as a solution to the vexing problems of both materialism and dualism: replacing materialism's apparent impotence to account for consciousness and avoiding dualism's sharply bifurcated reality.
OpenChallenge
Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously shook up the philosophy of mind with his seminal article, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” He begins with the premise that “reduction euphoria,” which aims to explain consciousness by “some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction,” gets it “obviously wrong,” and he states upfront and repeats at the conclusion that “we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be.”
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Penrose-Hameroff's quantum consciousness, which they call Orchestrated Objective Reduction (OrchOR), is the claim that consciousness arises in the fundamental gap between the quantum and classical worlds.
OpenMonisms
Russellian Monism, based on the insights of philosopher Bertrand Russell, is a view that phenomenal consciousness and the physical world are deeply intertwined.
OpenInformation
Integrated Information Theory (IIT), developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and supported by neuroscientist Christof Koch, is an original, indeed radical, model that states what experience is and what types of physical systems can have it. IIT is grounded in experience, the phenomenology of consciousness, and it features mathematical description, quantitative measurement, scientific testability, broad applications, and nonpareil, intrinsic, cause-effect “structures.” In other words, “IIT addresses the problem of consciousness starting from phenomenology—the existence of my own experience, which is immediate and indubitable—rather than from the behavioral, functional, or neural correlates of experience.” Controversial to be sure, IIT has become a leading theory of consciousness.
OpenPhenomenology
Phenomenology is the disciplined philosophical investigation of consciousness as it is lived, undergone, and disclosed from the first-person point of view. This systematic structuring of experience is independent of any theory about its physical basis, metaphysical presuppositions, or ultimate nature. As a theory-space for phenomenal consciousness, phenomenology seeks to clarify the forms of appearance without prematurely translating them into causal mechanisms.
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
A radically empiricist, non-substantialist account in which phenomenal consciousness consists entirely of “bundles” of transient “perceptions”—“lively" impressions and fainter ideas—organized by associative principles, affective valence, memory, custom, and imagination, with no further discoverable self, soul, mental substance, necessary connection, or mind-independent object given within experience. In other words, the mind is nothing more than the stream of these perceptions.
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
General Resonance Theory (GRT) proposes that consciousness arises from synchronized resonance across multiple scales of nature, with electromagnetic fields serving as the primary seat of consciousness rather than merely correlating with it. GRT bridges electromagnetic field theories with panpsychist foundations, offering a solution to panpsychism's combination problem of consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
To philosopher John Searle, language is crucial for consciousness, just as consciousness is crucial for language, because much of our consciousness is shaped by language and because the parts of language that are most important to us are precisely those that are conscious.
OpenIdealisms
Sri Ramana highlighted the distinction between transitive awareness, which knows objects or phenomena, and intransitive awareness, which is awareness that knows nothing other than itself. In classical Advaita Vedanta, intransitive awareness is called pure consciousness because it is consciousness devoid of any content.
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
Cognition and consciousness emerge from the fast and flexible dynamic organization of the cortex produced by traveling brain waves performing analog computations. Consciousness is the tip of the iceberg of cognition and may be a natural outcome of analog computation. Consciousness is good for flexibility and planning, and for the kind of big-picture stuff that needs a unified representation. When the analog computations create brain wave patterns that are large enough to unify the cortex, you get consciousness.
OpenIdealisms
Indian philosopher and yogi (and nationalist) Sri Aurobindo envisions an ongoing, progressing evolution of consciousness as a prime feature of world meaning and human purpose. He envisions consciousness as the foundation of existence, but not in a way that negates the reality of the material world. Ultimately, reality is multi-tiered—matter, life, mind, supermind, spirit—all expressions of the same Divine Consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / First-Order
Philosopher Fred Dretske's theory of consciousness centers around the informational and representational nature of mental states and a naturalistic account of intentionality, all within a scientific, materialistic framework. Dretske's representational theory is considered a first-order theory because it holds that conscious experiences consist in, or are identical to, certain kinds of first-order mental representations—that is, representations of the external world, not of other mental states.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
A theory of consciousness that is biologically naturalist and evolutionary gradualist, treating it as an evolved form of subjectivity that developed in diverse ways across animal life. Subjective experience is not an all-or-nothing trait but a graded phenomenon that emerged gradually over deep geological time. Consciousness arose from the basic biological need for an organism to sense its environment and coordinate a response, making it a feature of life that is likely far more widespread and far more varied than commonly assumed.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Consciousness is an intrinsic, fundamental feature of the universe rather than an emergent property of biological complexity. Based on the Penrose-Hameroff quantum theory of consciousness, the theory holds that consciousness may have enabled evolution and life in the first place. Consciousness came before life.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Huxley’s theory of consciousness is a modern mystical-filter theory: ordinary phenomenal consciousness is a biologically narrowed fragment of a wider “Mind at Large,” constrained by the brain, nervous system, language, ego, and practical survival. Psychedelics, contemplative disciplines, hypnosis, aesthetic absorption, and spontaneous visionary states may partially loosen this constriction, disclosing intensified perception, diminished ego-boundaries, altered temporality, and sometimes unitary awareness.
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
Maxwell’s Unique-Matching Theory integrates multiple modes of understanding—scientific, personalistic, and metaphysical—without collapsing them into a single paradigm. It posits a one-to-one, structure-preserving isomorphism between a multidimensional space of all possible sensations and a corresponding space of functionally described brain processes. This structural necessity accounts for specific correlations without requiring reductive explanation.
OpenIdealisms
Spiritual guru and philosopher Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar’s monistic philosophy of infinite Supreme Consciousness is summarized in his 1962 book Ananda Sutram (“Bliss Sutras”): 85 Sanskrit sutras and brief explanatory purports that elaborate the spiritual and social philosophy of Ananda Marga (“Path of Bliss”), which is a synthesis of Vedic intuitional knowledge and Yogic intuitional practices. Sarkar’s philosophy of Infinite Consciousness, absolute reality, consists of uncaused, infinite, non-qualified Supreme Consciousness (Nirguna Brahman). This is composed of a Supreme Cognitive Principle—Shiva or Purusha—and an unexpressed Supreme Operative Principle or creative power—Shakti, Prakriti, or Maya.
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
A biologically grounded account of consciousness centered on large-scale neuronal synchrony. Conceiving consciousness as an emergent process from a dynamical system, this theory reframes consciousness not as a function of isolated brain areas or fixed representational codes, but as an emergent, temporally structured phenomenon arising from transient synchronization across distributed neural assemblies in different brain areas.
OpenIdealisms
Consciousness (chit) is the fundamental reality of the universe. Kashmir Shaivism’s foundational doctrine is its steadfast emphasis on the intrinsic unity between the individual soul, known as Jiva, and the universal consciousness, identified as Shiva.
OpenIdealisms
Bhartṛhari integrates language and metaphysics to formulate a unique theory of consciousness, which can be called Linguistic Idealism. It posits that ultimate conscious reality is one indivisible linguistic principle, according to which language is not merely a tool for communication but the substance of which the universe is made.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Consciousness emerges as “the current winner of Darwinian copying competitions in cerebral cortex,” competitions among a multitude of subconscious mindsets—spatiotemporal firing patterns of cerebrocortical neurons, particularly within the association areas of the neocortex. This process is dynamic, not static, recursive, and shaped by selective pressures similar to natural selection. In this view, consciousness is not a constant state of awareness but rather the fleeting victor in an ongoing Darwinian struggle within the brain.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
The physical substrate of consciousness is a single, precisely specified quantum-mechanical event: the formation of a superposition. The theory proposes that conscious experience is generated not by classical computation and neural information processing alone, nor by the collapse of a quantum state, but by the creation of a quantum superposition itself: “Conscious experience arises whenever a quantum mechanical superposition forms.”
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Hawkins’s Thousand Brains Theory is primarily a theory of neocortical intelligence; its relevance to consciousness lies in explaining how massively parallel cortical models yield the unified, stable, object-centered perceptual world we experience. Consciousness is a brain-generated phenomenon dependent on neocortical modeling, voting, prediction, and action.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Psychiatrist/psychoanalyst Carl Jung famously posits a “collective unconscious,” a hidden, quasi-nonphysical aspect of reality with which each individual human subconsciousness is in some sense connected. Prime features of the collective unconscious, according to Jung, are “archetypes” and “synchronicity.” Archetypes are ancient primal symbols, themes, and images that are apparently universal and recurring and can impact individual psyches; and synchronicity describes putative connections between physical and/or mental events that are acausal and seemingly random but appear to be meaningfully related.
OpenIdealisms
Consciousness in Buddhism is sufficiently distinct, with its concepts of emptiness and illusion, that it could command a prime category of its own on the Landscape, yet it also fits decently in idealism, appropriately after Hinduism.
OpenMonisms
Anomalous Monism, developed by philosopher Donald Davidson, holds that mental properties and events must have a physical ontology but that psychology cannot be reduced to physics. As such, Anomalous Monism is a form of property dualism and shares features with Non-Reductive Physicalism.
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
In epiphenomenalism, consciousness is entirely physical, solely the product of biological brains, but mental states cannot be entirely reduced to physical states (brains or otherwise), and mental states have no causal powers.
OpenDualisms
Dualism is the oldest and most ubiquitous theory of consciousness in the sense that nonphysical aspects of the world and mind, such as animism and ancestor worship, had long seemed the default assumption of millennia of pre-modern human groups and cultures.
OpenMaterialism / First-Order
Neuroscientist Victor Lamme proposes Recurrent Processing Theory, which stresses brain sensory systems that are massively interconnected and involve feedforward and feedback connections, as being necessary and sufficient for consciousness. The visual system provides a case where “forward connections from primary visual area V1, the first cortical visual area, carry information to higher-level processing areas, and the initial registration of visual information involves a forward sweep of processing.”
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human consciousness and behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms.
OpenChallenge
Philosopher Colin McGinn argues that the bond between the mind and the brain is “an ultimate mystery, a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel.”
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
Christian philosopher Nancey Murphy, reflecting increasing Christian scholarship calling for acceptance of physicalism, argues that the theological workability of physicalism depends on the success of an argument against reductionism. She takes Non-Reductive Physicalism, a common term in philosophy of mind, to “signal opposition to anthropological dualisms of body and either mind or soul, as well as to physicalist accounts that reduce humans to nothing but complex animals.”
OpenPanpsychisms
Panprotopsychism is distinguished from panpsychism in that the most basic protophenomenal properties are not themselves forms of consciousness but rather must combine to generate forms of consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
Psychologist Susan Pockett's electromagnetic field theory of consciousness proposes that “while conscious experiences are identical with certain electromagnetic patterns generated by the brain” have always been acknowledged, it is critical to “specify what might distinguish conscious patterns from non-conscious patterns … the 3D shape of electromagnetic fields that are conscious, as opposed to those that are not conscious.”
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Neuroscientist Anil Seth extends top-down predictive theories with his neuroscience-informed “beast machine” theory that conscious experiences can be understood as forms of brain-based perceptual prediction within the general framework of predictive processing accounts of brain perception, cognition, and action.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Mathematical physicist Henry Stapp argues for the quantum nature of consciousness by relying on a traditional interpretation of quantum mechanics, where quantum wave functions collapse only when they interact with consciousness in an act of measurement.
OpenPhenomenology
Peirce reconstructs consciousness "phaneroscopically," as the observational study of whatever appears to mind, analyzed through three irreducible categories—Firstness (qualitative feeling), Secondness (brute reaction), and Thirdness (mediation, habit, signification). Phenomenal consciousness falls under Firstness, a simple quality "veiled from introspection." Rejecting introspection and intuition, Peirce makes experience continuous with semiosis and, cosmologically, with an idealist universe where matter is "effete mind." Recent scholarship positions him as phenomenology's independent precursor—chronologically prior to Husserl, outside his lineage.
OpenDualisms
Descartes’s theory of consciousness holds that phenomenal consciousness is a self-present mode of thinking belonging to an immaterial mind, but that much of its sensory and affective character arises only in the embodied union of mind and body. In other words, Descartes held that consciousness—which he called thought (cogitatio)—constitutes the essence of an immaterial mental substance (res cogitans) radically distinct from the extended, mechanical body (res extensa).
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Joint Determinant Theory is a pluralistic and integrative neurobiological approach to understanding consciousness, encompassing the diverse neural underpinnings of conscious experience. It emphasizes the complexity and diversity of conscious experiences that arise from the interplay of multiple neural determinants rather than a single neural correlate.
OpenDualisms
Late 19th/early 20th-century philosopher Henri Bergson's non-reductive consciousness is an unapologetic, sophisticated challenge to Materialism Theories. Bergson distinguishes between consciousness and matter, between mind and body, according to the distinction between “time” (understood as “duration”) and “space”. In consciousness, he says, “we find succeeding states without distinction; and, in space, simultaneities which, without succeeding, are distinguished, in the sense that one is no longer there when the other one appears. Outside of us, reciprocal exteriority without succession: within, succession without reciprocal exteriority.”
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Georg Northoff postulates what he calls “sentience” as “a more basic and fundamental dimension of consciousness,” and he proposes that sentience arises via “temporo-spatial mechanisms”—characterized by brain activity, spatiotemporal relationship, and structure—with which “the brain constructs its own spontaneous activity [that] are key for making possible the capacity to feel, namely sentience.”
OpenChallenge
Fodor deliberately declined to theorize phenomenal consciousness and argued that this was the correct strategy. His theory of consciousness is best understood as indirect and architectural. His Representational Theory of Mind explains cognition as computation over syntactically structured mental representations, and he explains thought as an internal Language of Thought. But he does not explain why any of this should have subjective phenomenal character. Nobody, Fodor held, has any idea how anything material could be conscious, nor even what having such an idea would be like.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Cognitive scientist Joscha Bach posits a functional explanation for phenomenal consciousness, the cortical conductor theory (CTC), where “cortical structures are the result of reward-driven learning, based on signals of the motivational system, and the structure of the data that is being learned.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Philosopher Jesse Prinz accounts for consciousness with two main claims: first, consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate stage; and second, consciousness depends on attention. “Attention” is Prinz's focus in that it “changes the flow of information, allowing perceptual information to access memory systems.”
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Passive Frame Theory assigns phenomenal consciousness a narrow, evolutionarily grounded function: it provides a common field in which otherwise encapsulated systems can jointly constrain skeletal-muscle action when their action tendencies conflict. Consciousness does not exercise executive command; unconscious mechanisms do the work. The conscious field is “passive” because its causal contribution lies in making incompatible action-relevant contents simultaneously available to the somatic nervous system
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Phenomenal consciousness is a brain-built, multimodal “display” of the organism and its world, generated too slowly to direct most immediate behavior but useful for detecting failures in the unconscious systems that do. Conscious experience supplies an arena in which actual outcomes can be compared with prediction. It is a naturalistic account of conscious contents and their adaptive function, while conceding that it does not explain why the relevant neural processes should feel like anything at all
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Phenomenal consciousness is identified with the ever-changing sequence of short-term memories produced by the patterned electrical firing of hippocampal neurons, so that the hippocampus—not the cerebral cortex—is the primary generator of experience, and qualia are held to be, in principle, a function of neuronal impulse activity rather than any exotic or non-physical property.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Dalla Barba distinguishes two irreducible modes in which objects and events appear in consciousness: knowing consciousness, which presents them through general knowledge, and temporal consciousness, which presents them as uniquely situated within one’s personal past, present, or future. The theory’s central claim is that episodic remembering, present orientation, and future projection are expressions of a single first-person temporal mode rather than separable memory operations.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Merker’s mid-brain proposal holds that basic phenomenal consciousness can be generated without the cerebral cortex, principally through an evolutionarily ancient upper-brainstem system that solves one control problem: matching needs to opportunities in a mobile body by integrating perception, motivation, and action within an egocentric world model. The cortex enriches the content of consciousness but does not constitute it, a claim supported by decortication in mammals and by children born without cortex.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Ward and Min independently propose that phenomenal consciousness arises from recurrent, synchronized interactions between the thalamus and cortex, with the thalamus functioning as an active organizer rather than a passive sensory relay. Together, the models propose that the cortex supplies highly differentiated representational content, while thalamic dynamics help determine whether that content forms a unified conscious field. The two mechanisms differ in their neurophysiological algorithms.
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
Emergence is the claim that qualitatively new, even radically novel properties in biological systems and psychological states arise from physical properties governed entirely by the laws of physics.
OpenDualisms
Property Dualism is the idea that while there is only one kind of substance in the world, physical substance, there are two kinds of properties, mental and physical properties, such that mental properties cannot be reduced to or explained by physical properties alone, even though both kinds of properties are generated by the same physical thing, namely brains.
OpenDualisms
Epiphenomenalism is considered a kind of dualism—specifically a type of property dualism—because it maintains a fundamental ontological distinction between mental and physical properties, even though all mental states are instantiated in physical states or generated by physical processes.
OpenChallenge
Philosopher and humanist Raymond Tallis, a former geriatric neurologist and clinical neuroscientist, has a baffling yet coherent and penetrating perspective on consciousness.
OpenChallenge
Wittgenstein does not offer a theory of phenomenal consciousness but rather an argument that the demand for one rests on grammatical confusion—treating sensation-words as names of private inner objects, on the model of nouns naming public things. A principal resource for deflationary treatments of qualia, his theory is not a specific ontology of mind but a grammatical therapy for the philosophical confusion generated by treating phenomenal consciousness as this private inner object. He does not deny pain, imagery, emotion, thought, or first-person immediacy; he denies that their intelligibility depends on an intrinsically private mental theater whose contents are named by inner pointing or designation.
OpenChallenge
Consciousness is not a “thing” or a substance or a unitary phenomenon that can be isolated or explained by neuroscience. Instead, it refers to a complex array of capacities and states—like perception, thought, emotion, intention, and self-awareness.
OpenChallenge
A naturalistic, computational-neuroscientific account of access consciousness joined to a carefully calibrated “mysterian-light” position on phenomenal consciousness: all evidence ties consciousness to brain activity and information processing, yet the subjective “what-it-is-like” character of experience may be a sui generis conceptual problem that human cognition is poorly equipped to solve.
OpenChallenge
Neuroscientist, technologist, and author David Eagleman labels himself a “possibilian” in that he calls for “an openness in approaching the big questions of our existence.”
OpenChallenge
Michael Shermer puts the hard problem of consciousness into the category of “a known unknown that may be unknowable.” He concludes that “the hard problem is asking of us a question that is impossible to answer: what’s it like to be the neural wiring? That is, what’s it like to be you? How should I know?”
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Quantum physicist David Bohm, colleague of Einstein, famously introduced the idea of “implicate order” and “explicate order” as ontological implications of quantum theory to explain two radically opposed perspectives of the same phenomenon—something seems to be needed to account for the bizarrely divergent ways of conceiving reality, quantum and classical, both of which seemed undeniably correct.
OpenPanpsychisms
Cosmopsychism reverses the standard explanatory ontology that facts about big things are grounded in facts about small things. It posits that facts about little things are grounded in facts about big things.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's perspective on consciousness is distinctive in a variety of ways. Crucially, the root process behind consciousness, he argues, is that of feelings related to the interior of complex organisms endowed with nervous systems.
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
Functionalism in philosophy of mind is the theory that functions are dispositive—activities, roles, results, outputs—mediums are not.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Neurobiologist Simona Ginsburg and evolutionary theorist Eva Jablonka propose that learning during evolution has been “the driving force” in the transition to basic or minimal consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
Molecular geneticist Johnjoe McFadden proposes conscious electromagnetic information (CEMI) field theory as an explanation of consciousness.
OpenIdealisms
Every phenomenon whatsoever is empty (śūnyatā) of svabhāva—intrinsic nature, or existence from its own side or nature—because whatever arises in dependence on causes, parts, or concepts cannot possess a nature that is its own. Phenomenal consciousness or experience is not denied, but it has no intrinsic nature, no ultimate subject to whom it belongs, and no self-illuminating core, arising only in dependence on faculty, object, and conditions, and thus as empty as the objects it discloses.
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Quine offered no theory of phenomenal consciousness, but his philosophy of language supplies one of the most consequential instruments for demoting it: the linguistic machinery through which the phenomenal is stripped of foundational standing. Quine's claim is not that qualia are unreal but that they are second-grade—admissible in the loose idioms of daily life yet excluded from the extensional, public language in which he holds that the true structure of reality must be described.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Coming at consciousness from an empirical point of view, parapsychologist Dean Radin calls on what he believes to be the overwhelming evidence for psi phenomena in order to infer that “intention affects the physical world.
OpenChallenge
Philosopher, author, and neuroscientist Sam Harris, who is not known for timidity in offering opinions, does not offer his own theory of consciousness. Instead, he offers a mystery. The problem, he says, “is that no evidence for consciousness exists in the physical world.”
OpenDualisms
Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne is a leading advocate of substance dualism. “If you want to tell the whole story of the world, you must say what objects there are in the world, what substances there are, and what properties they have at different times,” Swinburne said on Closer to Truth. “Of course, that will include all the physical objects, all the tables and chairs and planets and atoms.”
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
Christian philosopher/metaphysician Peter van Inwagen combines a wholly materialist ontology of the human person with a committed belief in the resurrection of the dead as the Christian hope of eternal life.
OpenMonisms
Psychologist Max Velmans describes Reflexive Monism as “a dual-aspect theory” (in the tradition of Spinoza), which argues that the one basic stuff of which the universe is composed has the potential to manifest both in physical forms and as conscious experience.
OpenPhenomenology
James’s phenomenological theory of consciousness is his account of the “stream of thought”: a continuous, personal, changing, selective, object-directed flow in which the fringe, transitions, relations, bodily feelings, attention, emotion, and will are as integral as focal contents. His theory is proto-phenomenological because it analyzes consciousness as lived, dynamic, perspectival, temporal, and interest-laden.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Douglas Hofstadter posits “strange loops” as the foundation of consciousness and of its derivatives, especially the self and free will, describing strange loops as “a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains.” He calls “I” the most central and complex symbol in our brains, and his book, I Am a Strange Loop, makes the case that, “In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that embody small miracles of self-reference.” He describes the mind as a “near-infinitely extendable, self-referential loop of symbols.”
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
Neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás’s theory of the “mindness state” is centered on the concept of oscillations. Many neurons possess electrical activity, manifested as oscillating variations in the minute voltages across the cell membrane.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Panksepp’s affective-neuroscience theory holds that the most basic form of phenomenal consciousness is not perceptual representation, reflective thought, or cortical access, but felt affect generated by evolutionarily ancient subcortical action systems. Consciousness therefore grows upward from a bodily, affective core rather than downward from higher cognition. In other words, phenomenal consciousness in its most basic form is affective rather than cognitive or perceptual, and that raw feeling is generated by ancient subcortical circuitry homologously conserved across mammals rather than by neocortex.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Neuroscientist Naotsugu ('Nao') Tsuchiya's relational and structural approach to consciousness—more specifically, to qualia—is not so much a theory of consciousness per se but more a fresh methodology, which he calls 'the Qualia Structure Paradigm.' It is “an alternative approach to characterize, and eventually define, consciousness through exhaustive descriptions of consciousness's relationships to all other consciousnesses.”
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
An ephaptic coupling theory of consciousness leverages the idea that neurons, being electrogenic, produce electric fields, which, if sufficiently strong and precisely placed, can influence the electrical excitability of neighboring neurons near-instantaneously.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Cleeremans and Tallon-Baudry propose that “subject-level experience—‘What it feels like’—is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains why they do certain things and avoid others.”
OpenDualisms
Modern dualism in philosophy of mind begins with Descartes, who famously divides the world between the physical and the mental. He was motivated by the obvious distinction that the mind has thought but no extension, while the body has extension but no thought. Yet, body and mind both seem needed to have a human person.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston conceptualizes consciousness as the natural outcome of his “free-energy principle for action and perception (active inference),” which stresses the primacy of minimizing in all organisms the difference between perceptual expectations (required for homeostasis) and real-time sensory inputs.
OpenChallenge
Consciousness cannot be reduced to brain states of physical processes. “You are not your brain.” Consciousness is not a ‘substance’ but a ‘field of sense,’ ways in which the world becomes intelligible. Consciousness is the condition of appearance for intelligibility and meaning.
OpenPanpsychisms
In the theory of Qualia Force, consciousness is a deep feature of physical reality that emerges from the fields and particles of fundamental physics, perhaps in the strong emergence sense that it cannot be explained by fundamental physics, even with knowledge beyond the current, even in principle.
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
Neuropsychologist/neurobiologist Roger Sperry, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for hemispheric lateralization in split-brain patients, proposes a “mentalist paradigm” in which consciousness is a causal emergent in brain function. “Emergent determinism,” he says, “is the basic key concept behind this paradigm shift.”
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Consciousness explorer Charles Tart proposes “Emergent Interactionism” as a dualistic theory of consciousness, based on his long work on altered states of consciousness, transpersonal psychology, and multiple forms of parapsychology.
OpenIdealisms
Yogācāra understands ordinary phenomenal consciousness as a dependently conditioned flow that presents itself in the dual form of an experiencing subject confronting an independently existing world, although this subject–object division is itself a cognitive construction. Its “consciousness-only” or “cognition-only” thesis holds, at minimum, that what is directly experienced consists entirely of appearances within cognition; on stronger interpretations, consciousness and its transformations constitute the sole ultimate basis of phenomenal reality.
OpenPhenomenology
Brentano’s theory of phenomenal consciousness is a structured field of mental acts intrinsically directed toward objects and simultaneously aware of themselves. His decisive thesis is that intentionality—being of, about, or directed toward something—is the mark of the mental; every conscious episode presents an object—it is about something. Brentano thereby created the immediate prehistory of Husserlian phenomenology.
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
The Operational Architectonics (OA) framework of brain-mind functioning is a unified theoretical model that bridges neurophysiological processes and subjective mental experience. At its foundation lies the concept of the operation—a spatiotemporally bounded, functionally meaningful event that serves as a common denominator for both brain activity and phenomenological experience.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Mishlove’s theory of consciousness is an evidence-based, parapsychologically grounded, survival-oriented account in which phenomenal consciousness is not produced by the brain, but is filtered, localized, expressed, or constrained by brain-body systems within a wider field of universal mind.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
A Neuroethological Approach to Consciousness is a cross-species, developmental framework that expands the scope of consciousness research from traditional human-centric, report-dependent methods to a broader comparative strategy that accounts for the ecological, evolutionary, developmental, and neural diversity of conscious phenomena.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Chalmers and McQueen draw parallels between our understanding of quantum mechanics and consciousness. On the one hand, “One of the hardest philosophical problems arising from contemporary science is the problem of quantum reality. What is going on in the physical reality underlying the predictions of quantum mechanics?” On the other hand, “Another of the hardest philosophical problems arising from contemporary science is the mind-body problem. What is the relation between mind and body, or more specifically, between consciousness and physical processes?”
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
A phases of energy resonator model of consciousness is a two-way exchange of energy between the conscious mental realm and the physical realm of the brain—the mental and physical phases of energy are likened to the phases (e.g., gas/liquid) of matter—and a possible realization in the form of a generic resonator.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Philosopher Kristjan Loorits's Structural Realism posits that “conscious experiences are fully structural phenomena that reside in our brains in the form of complex higher-order patterns in neural activity.”
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Anthropologist and social scientist Marilyn Schlitz proposes a Theory of Mind (ToM) that views consciousness as an interconnected blend of inner and outer realms of existence. Essentially, ToM is the link between subjective consciousness (what it feels like to be someone) and objective phenomena (how someone behaves or reacts). This interface is a potential explanatory model for psi phenomena and other transpersonal experiences.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Consciousness is perceiving your own brain. This isn’t because all consciousness is a brain state; it’s because all consciousness is brain perception. Consciousness is brain awareness—awareness of the brain. All consciousness is consciousness-of… the brain. This can be stated as an identity theory: mental states are identical to perceptual states of brain awareness.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
A dual framework for understanding the place of consciousness in reality: Nondual Naturalism, which serves as a metaphysical and epistemological worldview, and the Living Mirror Theory, which situates consciousness within the very dynamics of life.
OpenChallenge
Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin introduces "a framework for detecting, understanding, and communicating with cognition in unconventional substrates," which he calls 'TAME-Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere.'
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Elementary consciousness does not exist in all things, but it does exist in all organic things. The mind is confined to animate things. There are traces of it in all living tissue, but none in anything else. The mind is pan-biological but not pan-physical. Organic tissue is prone to developing mentality, but the same is not true of inorganic objects. Being organic is a precondition of consciousness; it disposes things to having minds in the full sense.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Nobel laureate physicist Brian Josephson approaches consciousness from the dual perspectives of fundamental science and psi phenomena. He posits understanding the brain by “implementing the demands of an appropriate collection of models, each concerned with some aspect of brain and behaviour”—in particular, explaining “higher-level properties [e.g., phenomenology] in terms of lower-level ones by means of a series of inferences based on these models.”
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
Biologist and pain researcher Richard Ambron suggests that understanding the specific consciousness of pain might help to understand the mechanism of consciousness in general.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Philosopher Kristin Andrews, an expert on animal minds, argues that progress in consciousness studies has been hampered by prevailing conventional wisdom that for an organism to be conscious, a complex brain is required.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Harman argues that objects exist and interact independently of human consciousness, that human consciousness is just one way that objects relate to other objects, and that it should not be privileged ontologically.
OpenMaterialism / Mind-Brain Identity
Mind-brain identity theory holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain and, as such, can be considered the exemplar of materialism.
OpenPanpsychisms
In the theory of Qualia Space, consciousness is an independent, non-reducible feature of reality that exists in addition to the deepest laws of fundamental physics (i.e., the four forces, spacetime, mass-energy).
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms applies Friston's free energy principle to the hard problem of consciousness. He identifies the elemental form of consciousness as affect and locates its physiological mechanism (an extended form of homeostasis) in the upper brainstem.
OpenDualisms
The influential Christian scholastic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas gives an account of the soul that is non-Cartesian in character, according to Catholic philosopher Eleonore Stump, who has Aquinas taking the soul to be something essentially immaterial or configurational but nonetheless realized in material components.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram seeks “to formalize issues about consciousness, and to turn questions about consciousness into what amounts to concrete questions about mathematics, computation, logic or whatever that can be formally and rigorously explored.” He begins by embedding consciousness in what he calls the “ruliad” (neologism from “rules”), which he defines as “the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible: the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways.”
OpenMaterialism / Mind-Brain Identity
Place’s theory holds that phenomenal consciousness is not merely caused by or correlated with neural activity but is literally constituted by processes in the brain. Descriptions of experience and descriptions of physiology differ in meaning and verification, yet may identify the same event. He combines this claim with the “phenomenological fallacy,” which mistakes descriptions of how things appear for descriptions of private objects possessing the apparent qualities.
OpenMaterialism / Mind-Brain Identity
Feigl’s mind–brain identity theory holds that phenomenal consciousness—the “raw feels” of color, sound, pain, emotion, imagery, and thought as directly lived—is empirically identical with neural processes. The phenomenal and neurophysiological vocabularies are not the same; first-person acquaintance and third-person scientific description provide two epistemic routes to the same event. Feigl described his position as “double knowledge”: A phenomenal report and a neural description can refer to one event. The subject knows the event by acquaintance; scientists know it by behavioral evidence, causal theory, and neurophysiological description.
OpenMaterialism / Mind-Brain Identity
Smart’s identifies sensations and phenomenal experiences with processes in the brain while denying that ordinary experience reports mean the same as neuroscientific statements. Scientific evidence and ontological parsimony eliminate irreducibly psychical “nomological danglers” from an otherwise physical account of nature. The properties we introspect are "topic-neutral," so that experience does not commit us to irreducibly non-physical properties. Sense data and mental images are not entities in the world.
OpenMaterialism / Mind-Brain Identity
Armstrong’s central-state materialism combines a functional analysis of mental concepts with an empirical identity theory: a mental state is identified by the causal role it normally plays among stimuli, behavior, and other mental states, while science determines which physical state occupies that role. In humans, the occupants are states and processes of the brain, so sensations, perceptions, beliefs, desires, and conscious experiences are not merely caused by brain states but are brain states. For phenomenal consciousness, the upshot is deflationary: their felt qualities carry no ontological weight—the precise point at which critics locate the explanatory gap.
OpenMaterialism / Mind-Brain Identity
Quine is a physicalist who advocates the identity theory of mind—"mental states are states of the body." Consciousness is real but wholly bodily—a condition of the nervous system—while particular mental events are identical with physical events even when mental classifications cannot be reduced to neurological classifications. His account explains how sensory stimulation, behavioral dispositions, and public language support knowledge and mental attribution, but leaves unexplained why neural activity has subjective, qualitative character.
OpenMaterialism / Mind-Brain Identity
Sellars’s theory of consciousness distinguishes conceptual thought from sensory consciousness and gives each a different naturalistic treatment; both are identity theories, but of distinct types. Thoughts are functionally classified inner episodes modeled on public language, whereas sensations are nonconceptual, intrinsically qualitative states—“sensa”—postulated to explain phenomenal qualities. Sellars looks to a completed scientific image that must expand beyond present-day physics to accommodate qualitative sensory processes in a wholly physical world.
OpenMaterialism / Mind-Brain Identity
Lewis’s theory of phenomenal consciousness is a reductive materialism combining functional analysis with psychophysical identity: experiences are characterized by their causal relations to stimuli, behavior, and other mental states, while science discovers which physical states occupy those roles, typically neural states. Applied to experience, Lewis's reductive materialism yields a deflationary but non-eliminative account: qualia are real, but they are the occupants of a functional role, not intrinsic felt properties transparently revealed in having them.
OpenMaterialism / Mind-Brain Identity
Philosopher David Papineau argues for neurobiological physicalism with his theory of unabashed, robust, fundamental mind-brain identity.
OpenMaterialism / Mind-Brain Identity
Kripke’s theory of phenomenal consciousness is not an affirmative psychophysical model but a modal-metaphysical argument that conscious states such as pain are essentially characterized by their felt phenomenal character, so that any attempted identity between such states and brain states would have to be necessary if true, yet appears not to be necessary. As such, it remains the most influential modal argument against the physicalist reduction of phenomenal consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
Supervenience theory of consciousness seeks to reconcile mental causation with a physicalist ontology. Supervenience is a way of thinking that defines how mental states relate to physical states, especially in the context of reductionism and the causal closure of the physical domain. According to Jaegwon Kim, “mental properties supervene on physical properties” means that “no mental difference without a physical difference.”
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Physicist/inventor Federico Faggin’s “Quantum Information-based Panpsychism” (QIP) states that consciousness isn’t an emergent byproduct of matter, but rather an irreducible property of nature. He leverages quantum properties—uncertainty, entanglement, superposition—to show that classical reductionism fails and that reality includes an “inner” experiential dimension. He proposes that “the holistic Whole contains not only the seeds of the inanimate universe but also those of free will, consciousness, and life.”
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
To philosopher Owen Flanagan, “consciousness is neither miraculous nor terminally mysterious,” and he argues that “it is possible to understand human consciousness in a way that gives its subjective, phenomenal aspects their full due, while at the same time taking into account the neural bases of subjectivity.”
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Human consciousness is not a fixed faculty observing an independently constituted world, but a historically mutable structure through which self, world, space, time, causality, and meaning become phenomenally manifest. His five structures—archaic, magic, mythical, mental, and integral—are discontinuous mutations rather than rungs in a linear ladder; each remains operative within contemporary consciousness and may function efficiently or deteriorate into a deficient form.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Philosopher John Campbell's relational theory of consciousness emphasizes the integral role of conscious attention in our ability to refer to and think about objects in the world. Conscious attention is the basis for reference such that our capacity to refer to objects—especially through demonstratives like “that tree” or “this cup”—depends fundamentally on conscious visual attention. He posits that to refer to an object, one must not only perceive it but also consciously attend to it, distinguishing it from its surroundings. This conscious attention enables the formation of thoughts about specific objects.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
William Fish’s theory of consciousness is grounded in naïve realism, also known as relationalism. This perspective posits that conscious experiences are direct relations to external, mind-independent objects and their properties, rather than internal representations or constructions. Fish asserts that in veridical perception—when our sensory experiences accurately reflect the external world—the phenomenal character of experience is constituted by the external objects themselves.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
To be conscious is to be an experiencing subject. A subject is a living being with interests, and subjects with interests are conceptually (and evolutionarily) prior to consciousness. Thus, consciousness is intimately tied up with being an experiencing subject. Not just having a point of view at any moment, but being an integrated self with continuity and extension through time.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Mind-Object Identity theory is the physicalist thesis that one's phenomenal experience of an object is identical to the external object itself, rather than to any brain-based processes. Its radical realism claim is that phenomenal consciousness is not an emergent brain property, but, by being identical with the physical object itself, the body and brain are causal-enabling conditions for experience, whereas the experienced object is the experience itself.
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein centers the mind-body problem around the nature of the person, with two distinct kinds of descriptions: our physical bodies and brains, which science can, in principle, analyze completely, and our inner thoughts, perceptions, emotions, dreams, which science can never access completely.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Physicist Nir Lahav characterizes consciousness as a physical phenomenon that is relative to the measurements of a “cognitive frame of reference.”
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Consciousness is the capacity by which finite agents stabilize and render intelligible an empirical world that exists only as a boundary (interface) between a non-empirical ground and cognitive limitation. Drawing on Kant’s transcendental idealism, the theory treats empirical reality not as a self-standing domain of objects, but as an interface: a structured boundary at which a deeper, non-empirical ground becomes partially available to finite knowers.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Charismatic, iconoclastic philosopher Ken Wilber puts forth “Integral Theory” as an overarching metatheory that seeks to harmonize numerous (100+), diverse philosophical and spiritual theories—including consciousness studies, meditative traditions, religious traditions, psychology, transpersonal psychology, parapsychology, and sociology—into a single, coherent framework that accounts for the human condition, broadly conceived.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Psychopharmacologist Robin Carhart-Harris proposes the Entropic Brain Hypothesis in which the entropy of spontaneous brain activity indexes the informational richness of conscious states (within upper and lower limits, after which consciousness may be lost).
OpenPanpsychisms
Panpsychism's renaissance can be attributed, at least in part, to philosopher David Chalmers, who has long entertained panpsychism as a possibly viable theory of consciousness.
OpenDualisms
Catholic philosopher Edward Feser's account of consciousness combines a neo-Thomistic view that some mental faculties are immaterial and a neo-Aristotelian view that we perceive the world actually as it appears to be (i.e., direct realism, such that color and sound are properties of external objects as real as size and shape).
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Philosopher William Jaworski argues that the hard problem of consciousness arises only if hylomorphism is false. Hylomorphism is the claim that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle and is responsible for individuals being the kinds of things they are and having the powers or capacities they have.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Cognitive psychologist Arthur Reber dubs his theory of the origins of mind and consciousness the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), arguing that “sentience emerged with life itself.”
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
Kevin Mitchell offers 15 questions that an explanatory, integrated theory of consciousness should encompass, and he posits that if we had a theory accommodating all these elements and providing some coherent framework in which they related to each other, that would be a theory of consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Consciousness is an entropy-resisting amplifier of persistence, a fractalized, bootstrapped, reversible computation—a recursively coherent information structure that persists at the boundary of collapse.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Entropic theories explain consciousness in special relationships with the Second Law of Thermodynamics—entropy. While the brain is always and obviously involved, here there is something special about entropy in endowing consciousness with its deceptive sense of a nonphysical nature.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Consciousness evolved as part of the episodic memory system, likely to enable a flexible recombining of information, and it was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language. The theory challenges traditional views that consciousness is a mechanism for perceiving the immediate present or making real-time decisions. Rather, episodic memory required a conscious system to create and retrieve explicit event memories in the first place.
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
Philosopher Alyssa Ney argues that consciousness can and should be understood within a physicalist framework, but physicalism should be informed by fundamental physics rather than by outdated or folk notions of “the physical.”
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Neuroscientist György Buzsáki presents the brain as “a foretelling device that interacts with its environment through action and the examination of action's consequence,” restructuring its internal rhythms in the process.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Consciousness researcher and systems theorist Allan Combs uses nonlinear dynamics, and more specifically chaos theory, to understand how all the elements of conscious experience “cling together to form the many states and structures of consciousness that characterize the onflow of our experiential lives.”
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Neurologist/psychiatrist Todd Feinberg and evolutionary biologist Jon Mallatt propose that consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed, and therefore all vertebrates and perhaps even some invertebrates are conscious.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman posits the following: (i) Quantum measurement converts Res potentia—ontologically real Possibles—into Res extensa - ontologically real Actuals. (ii) Brain/mind/consciousness cannot be purely classical physics because no classical system can be an analog computer whose dynamic behavior can be isomorphic to “possible uses”, and therefore, brain/mind/consciousness must be partly quantum.
OpenDualisms
Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland defines a robust “generic substance dualism” as the view according to which “(i) there is a substantial soul (self, ego, I, substantial form) that is wholly immaterial; (ii) the soul is not identical to its physical body; and (iii) the soul is that which grounds personal identity for human persons.”
OpenPanpsychisms
Philosopher Galen Strawson calls panpsychism “the most parsimonious, plausible and indeed ‘hard-nosed’ position that any physicalist who is remotely realistic about the nature of reality can take up in the present state of our knowledge.”
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
A Participatory Theory of Consciousness shifts the ontological focus from a search for foundational substances—whether matter or consciousness—to the co-creative, enactive relationship between the human and the mystery of the Real. Thus, phenomenal consciousness is an embodied and relational event. Subjective experience is not an isolated “inner light” but is inextricably linked to the relational field—between persons, between the body and the environment, and between the human and the Real.
OpenDualisms
The primary problem of Dualism—many would say the defeater of Dualism—is how nonphysical substances could possibly interact with physical substances, especially given the common assumption that the physical world is a closed system.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Mathematician-astronomer Bernard Carr speculates that a higher dimension, or “mental space,” an unknown aspect of reality, may be the ultimate foundation of consciousness. “Even if you believe that consciousness collapses the wave function,” he says, “that doesn't really accommodate consciousness within physics.”
OpenPanpsychisms
Philosopher Philip Goff starts from the premise “one thing that science could never show is that consciousness does not exist” and he mounts a vigorous, rigorous case for panpsychism, the staggering idea (at least initially) that “consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.”
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Experimental psychologist Jonathan Schooler outlines a theory of consciousness that combines two novel ideas: “General Resonance Theory” (co-developed with Tam Hunt), where multiple levels of consciousness interact, and “subjective time,” where consciousness arises with an observer's movement through objective time relative to a currently unacknowledged dimension of subjective time.
OpenDualisms
The longstanding Leibniz-to-Dennett objection to interactionist dualism based on the conservation of energy and momentum suffers from circular reasoning, once neglected aspects of the physics of conservation laws are considered. Two typically neglected aspects of conservation laws are locality and the (bi)conditional relation to symmetries. With these features properly understood, non-conservation of energy and momentum could be a consequence of interactionism.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposes “morphic fields” as a field of form or shape or organization, “such that every entity has its own field: each ant colony, each termite nest, a flock of birds, a pack of wolves and a herd of animals.”
OpenPanpsychisms
Philosopher Michael Tye has come to support a nuanced version of panpsychism, because he now holds that there are no borderline cases of phenomenal consciousness: it’s an on/off matter. Phenomenal consciousness is irreducible, and at the most fundamental level, there is what Tye labels ‘consciousness*,’ which others would call ‘protoconsciousness.’
OpenDualisms
David Chalmers constructs a ‘naturalistic dualism’ to harmonize what he sees as two undeniable but ostensibly contradictory facts: (i) Mental states of phenomenal consciousness, the subjective experience of inner awareness, cannot be reduced to physical states of the brain. (ii) The physical world, the natural world, is all there is; there is nothing supernatural.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Imants Barušs proposes a transcendent theory of consciousness that takes into account anomalous phenomena, altered states, and quantum field theories, and in which “meaning fields” play a special role.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Iconoclastic neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum presents a psychophysiological theory of consciousness—“The syntergic theory”—which postulates that “the human brain is able to create a hypercomplex field of interactions that are the result of the activation of all its neuronal elements.” He calls this interaction matrix the “neuronal field,” and “one of the effects of its activation is the unification of neuronal activity.”
OpenDualisms
Emergent dualism is the idea that while mind or consciousness is not fundamental in reality, it comes into existence “naturally” when a certain kind of complex arrangement of physical atoms comes together, say, in biological neurons.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Psychologists Peter Halligan and David Oakley propose that consciousness is an epiphenomenon—inner feelings without causal powers—that evolved from underlying brain physiology. They argue that much of the mind’s cognitive architecture evolved to service sociality (the tendency of groups and people as persons to develop social links and live in communities), a key survival strategy for human growth, well-being, and species reproduction.
OpenPanpsychisms
Philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch advocates a version of panpsychism that integrates insights from both philosophy and neuroscience. It is inspired by Bertrand Russell's concept of a neutral monism, where consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world, meaning that even basic particles possess rudimentary forms of consciousness. In her “Phenomenal Powers” view, Mørch proposes that phenomenal properties—our inner felt awareness (i.e., consciousness)—are not just passive experiences but have active, real-world, causal efficacy.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Physicist Lee Smolin approaches the question of how qualia fit into the physical world in the context of his “relational and realist completion of quantum theory, called the causal theory of views.”
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Primal Eye theory, also termed Median Vision Theory (MVT), holds that phenomenal consciousness, REM dreaming, abstract thought, and self-volitional modeling emerged from the evolutionary atrophy of the ancestral median, parietal, or “primal” eye during the transition from cold- to warm-blooded vertebrate physiology.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Human conscious experiences are ‘grainy,’ and they are built of discrete ‘atomic feels’ that emerge as microprocesses in our brains out of the continuous universe. Ultimately, large numbers of atomic feels ordered in rich spectra of qualities (qualia) are all there is to build knowledge from. A Multi-Aspect Monism, where reality is understood through multiple interrelated perspectives, emphasizes that consciousness cannot be reduced to a single scientific domain and must be studied through interdisciplinary lenses.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Near-death experiences (NDEs) command great popular interest but receive only modest discussion here on the Landscape. Obviously, if even a minuscule fraction of this vast ocean of anecdotes were actually true, it would instantly falsify every materialist theory and support (but not confirm) a host of nonphysical theories. I [RLK] am open-minded—and obviously something is going on here—but as to the core claim, I still skew skeptical.
OpenDualisms
Philosopher Amy Kind defends dualism 2.0, “a thoroughly modern version of dualism … decoupled from any religious or non-scientific connotations.” Her argument is direct and forceful: “A physicalist framework cannot adequately capture the full reality of our conscious experience”—which has a “qualitative nature.”
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen proposes a view in which “the mechanistic framework of classical physics and neuroscience is complemented by a more holistic underlying framework in which conscious experience finds its place more naturally.” Recognizing that it is “very likely that some radically new ideas are required if we are to make any progress” on the hard problem, he turns to quantum theory “to understand the place of mind and conscious experience in nature.”
OpenPanpsychisms
A new version of panpsychism, called “Superpsychism,” where the fundamental level of physics has a more advanced form of consciousness than spacetime occupants do.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Affective Survival Theory (AST) is a Darwinian framework for the evolution of conscious experience. According to AST, consciousness evolved not as an incidental byproduct of brain complexity but as an adaptive system of affective prioritization selected for its contribution to behavioral flexibility, memory encoding, and social cooperation.
OpenDualisms
A version of dualism that is stronger than property dualism and that may be taken to be a version of so-called substance dualism. But because “substance dualism” invites associations that she would like to avoid, she uses “subject-body dualism” to describe her theory of consciousness. While not a dualist in the Cartesian sense, she endorses a non-reductive, non-physicalist account of consciousness, where phenomenal properties are ontologically basic.
OpenPanpsychisms
A panprotopsychist form of Russellian monism in which the fundamental basis of the physical world is intrinsically qualitative but not intrinsically conscious, so that phenomenal consciousness arises only when organized qualities are made subjectively available by an awareness-conferring structure such as higher-order representation, thereby recognizing qualia without positing ubiquitous micro-subjects.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Physicist Joachim Keppler posits that consciousness is an intrinsic feature of the universe embedded in the quantum vacuum, specifically the zero-point field (ZPF) from quantum field theory, and that the brain acts as a resonant, dynamical interface that modulates and orchestrates specific modes of the ZPF, allowing access to certain conscious states.
OpenDualisms
Stephen Arnold Mascari offers his “Qualion-Mind Paradigm” as a “biophysically generated dualism,” a “physicalistic/materialistic dualism that manifests supraphysical properties.” Mascari’s model was motivated by the recognition that something “new” is needed to explain our conscious mental life and that Nature could provide organic life-forms with a higher-level component, a “robust dualism,” that could account for mental phenomena in a fairly straightforward way.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Maria Strømme proposes that consciousness is not an emergent property of neural processes, but is a fundamental field of reality from which space–time, matter, and individual minds emerge. It is a non-reductive, non-dual, cosmological theory, where solving the mind–brain problem requires reframing the ultimate, deep structural relation among consciousness, physics, individuality, and reality as a whole. The result is a non-dual metaphysics, where individual subjects of experience are not separate centers of consciousness in the deepest ontological sense; they are localized differentiations of a single field
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Sir John Eccles, Nobel laureate for his seminal work on the synapse, the small space between neurons across which neurochemicals flow to excite or inhibit contiguous neurons, was a pioneer in early efforts to construct a “quantum neurobiological” theory of consciousness.
OpenPanpsychisms
“Monadic panpsychism” is a relational explanation of how simple subjects could constitute complex experiences, without them having to combine in virtue of their subjectivity.” The claim is that monadic panpsychism overcomes the notorious main obstacle for panpsychism: “the difficulty of explaining how simple subjects could combine to form complex subjects." This version of panpsychism "avoids talk of combination” by recruiting "microphenomenal structuralism," which views phenomenal qualities as relational, at the level of fundamental simples, though it admits of the basic consciousness of microsubjects-in-isolation as well.
OpenDualisms
If one wants to pay attention to the nature of consciousness or soul in the Hebrew scriptures (which is recognized as foundational by traditional Christianity and Islam as well as by Judaism), there are two essential words to consider: “nephesh” (נֶפֶשׁ), often translated as “soul,” and “ruach” (רוּחַ), often translated “spirit.”
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), a research unit within the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, has contributed both empirically and conceptually to emerging nonphysical theories of consciousness, which picture mind as irreducible and grounded in some sort of highest consciousness that forms the ontological foundation of reality as a whole.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Condensed matter physicist Matthew Fisher proposes that quantum processing with nuclear spins might be operative in the brain and key to its functioning. He identifies “phosphorus as the unique biological element with a nuclear spin that can serve as a qubit for such putative quantum processing—a neural qubit—while the phosphate ion is the only possible qubit-transporter.”
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
The Catecholaminergic Neuron Electron Transport (CNET) theory sits among quantum theories, but with an important qualifier: it is best understood as a quantum-biological neural-correlate theory rather than a general quantum-metaphysical account of consciousness. Its central explanatory target is phenomenal consciousness as integrated, selected, salient, and action-guiding experience. Its proposed contribution is to identify a possible physical binding and selection mechanism linking GNW-style global availability, GPR-style action selection, prefrontal organization, catecholaminergic modulation, and ferritin/neuromelanin electron transport
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Contentless Consciousness Theory posits that true consciousness is an eternal, non-dual state devoid of independent mental phenomena, a "contentless" reality that is obscured by our ordinary "delusional" consciousness, which erroneously perceives the self and the external world as permanent and separate. Drawing heavily from Buddhist wisdom, Shiah argues that what we commonly call “consciousness”—the stream of perceptions, desires, and ego-driven thoughts—is actually a transient, dependent illusion.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Conscious experience could be registered in the brain by being embedded in entangled radical-pair spin states associated with N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors, and the information so embedded is transferred into the spike-frequency and timing codes of the associated neural circuits. The framework describes electronic wavefunctions across successive scales—photons and spins, molecular conformation, ion channel gating, circuit oscillation, and finally the spiking patterns from which qualia are held to emerge.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Cryptochrome Theory proposes that cryptochrome—a flavoprotein found in all living systems—functions as a biological "transducer" that translates consciousness-driven information into physical manifestations of psi (psychic) phenomena through quantum-mechanical radical-pair reactions.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Philosopher of science Michel Bitbol suggests that a radical view of neurophenomenology amplifies “the available range of interpretations of altered states of consciousness, from OBEs and NDEs to meditation and psychedelics, and which may suggest a new ontological category.” There are generally three such interpretations, he says: “two objectivist-realist and one non-committal (mild) phenomenological interpretation.”
OpenInformation
IIT has its critics, of course, as should every scientific theory. Some like to highlight IIT's “anti-common sense” predictions imputing consciousness to objects and things that just do not in any way seem to be conscious. The early exchange between theoretical quantum computer scientist Scott Aaronson and Giulio Tononi is illuminating.
OpenIdealisms
Among my favorite lines in all philosophical literature are the deceptively simple opening lines of the Dao De Jing, the Chinese classic text that is the foundation of Daoism. “The Dao [Ultimate Reality, Way] that can be spoken of [expressed] is not the Constant [Eternal] Dao; the Name that can be named [understood] is not the Constant [Eternal] Name” (道可道非常道; 名可名非常名). “Dao” (道) refers to “Ultimate Reality” but also means “Way” or “Path.” “Constant” comes from “Chang” (常), which also means “invariable” and may connote “eternal.”
OpenMaterialism / Electromagnetic Field
Synaptic neuroscientist Ping Zhang suggests that “the long-time puzzle between brain and mind” might be solved by “a light-speed telecommunication between remote cells that are arranged in parallel.”
OpenPanpsychisms
Neuroscience/consciousness writer Annaka Harris posits that “consciousness isn't self-centered” and that we should “think of consciousness like spacetime—a fundamental field that's everywhere.”
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Computational theories of mind developed organically as the processing power of computers expanded exponentially to enable the emulation of mind-like capabilities such as memory, knowledge structure, perception, decision-making, problem solving, reasoning and linguistic comprehension (especially with the advent of human-like large language models like ChatGPT). The growing field of cognitive science owes its development to computational theories.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon, whose research combines human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, asserts that the origins of life and the origins of consciousness both depend on the emergence of self: the organizational core of both is a form of self-creating, self-sustaining, constraint-generating processes.
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Enactivism is the way of thinking that to explore mental activities, one must examine living systems interacting with their environments, agents bringing forth a mental world through embodied, sensorimotor coupling with the physical world. Cognition is characterized, not by representations in the brain, but by embodied activities and organisms-environment dynamics. A mind without a body would be as if incoherent.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
According to Higher-Order Theories of consciousness, what makes a perception conscious is the presence of an accompanying cognitive state about the perception. This means that phenomenal consciousness is not immediate awareness of sensations. Rather, it is the higher-level sensing of those sensations, a product of second-order thoughts about first-order perceptions or mental states—a two-level process.
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Neuroscientist Christof Koch asserts without ambiguity, “Consciousness doesn't depend on language,” and he offers vivid clinical cases of brain trauma or insult where language is obviously lost and consciousness is obviously retained.
OpenChallenge
Philosopher Yujin Nagasawa poses the disruptive idea: what would happen to the mind-body problem if there were no such thing as the deepest level of reality because the universe is infinitely decomposable? He argues that such a possibility would be devastating to theories of consciousness because it would undermine all traditional responses to the mind-body problem, such as physicalism, dualism, idealism, and neutral monism.
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
Philosopher Yujin Nagasawa interrelates central debates in philosophy of mind (phenomenal consciousness) and philosophy of religion (existence of God) to construct a unique metaphysical thesis, which he calls “nontheoretical physicalism,” by which he claims that although this world is entirely physical, there are physical facts that cannot be captured even by complete theories of the physical sciences.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Writer Tracy Witham argues that William James flipped the paradigm in which the hard problem arises because James viewed consciousness through a problem he believed it solves by selecting for adaptive responses to specific environmental situations.
OpenDualisms
Almost all Christian denominations feature an immortal soul as essential doctrine, and it is conventional wisdom that the immortal soul is supported by passages in the New Testament. Yet there are opposing views; for example, Peter van Inwagen's “Christian materialism.”
OpenMonisms
In defining an all-pervading materialism, encompassing all mental as well as all physical properties and objects, philosopher Galen Strawson espouses his kind of monism, “Realistic Monism,” as he calls it. “I'm attracted to the thing-monist view,” he says, “according to which the universe is a single thing in some non-trivial sense.”
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Developmental physiologist John Torday offers an original cellular-based explanation of consciousness that embeds quantum mechanics. He describes consciousness as a two-tiered system, derivative from physiology, having been “constructed” from the environment via factors in the environment that have been assimilated via symbiogenesis and integrated as cell physiology—the cell semi-permeable membrane being the first tier, and the compartmentation and integration of cell physiologic data as cell-cell communication as the second tier.
OpenMaterialism / Relational
Whitehead’s theory of consciousness is founded on his broader process philosophy, the metaphysical idea that fundamental reality is dynamic, change, shift—the action of becoming. Reality is made of ‘actual occasions’—momentary events of experience—but experience is not consciousness. He denies that consciousness is the basic building block of reality, and he doesn’t give a standalone model of consciousness. Rather, he integrates consciousness into his metaphysics of reality as a whole.
OpenIdealisms
Kant’s theory of consciousness holds that phenomenal consciousness is not a self-standing inner arena or an introspected mental substance, but the sensibly given, temporally ordered, and qualitatively affected side of experience that becomes experience of objects only through a priori forms of intuition, synthesis by imagination and understanding, and the unity of apperception by which representations can belong to one subject.
OpenIdealisms
Fichte’s theory of consciousness is a transcendental-idealist account in which phenomenal experience is not a passive reception of a mind-independent world but the lived manifestation of the finite I’s self-positing activity as checked, limited, affected, embodied, and socially summoned into determinate self-conscious experience.
OpenIdealisms
Schelling's theory of consciousness is that mind and nature are not two kinds of being but two poles or aspects of one absolute reality—captured in his formula that "nature is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature"—so that consciousness is nature's own coming-to-awareness rather than a contingent anomaly imposed on physical matter: nature is a graded, self-organizing productivity harboring an unconscious, proto-mental dimension that ascends through successive stages until, in the human being, it awakens to full self-consciousness.
OpenIdealisms
Hegel’s theory of phenomenal consciousness is a developmental and social account in which immediate feeling, sensation, perception, self-consciousness, recognition, and rational spirit are not separate faculties but progressively articulated “shapes” through which experience becomes aware of its own conceptual, embodied, and intersubjective conditions.
OpenIdealisms
Schopenhauer’s theory of phenomenal consciousness holds that ordinary experience is the world as “representation”—objectified under the forms of subject-object cognition, space, time, and causality—while the embodied subject also has immediate inner access to itself as “will,” a blind striving that underlies both affective consciousness and the metaphysical character of nature as a whole.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Armstrong’s higher-order perception theory proposes that a first-order mental state becomes introspectively conscious when the subject has a distinct, perception-like awareness of that state. On his materialism, both levels are neural: one brain process “scans” or represents another, producing phenomenal consciousness. This makes Armstrong's the founding modern version of Higher-Order Perception (HOP), or inner-sense, theory, and, because the scanning is a physical process operating on physically realized first-order states, it extends his materialism to consciousness.
OpenIdealisms
Nothing exists but minds and the ideas they perceive, that the world we sense is constituted by the qualitative contents of perception themselves rather than by any mind-independent matter lying beneath them, and that these passive, perceived, lawfully ordered ideas are sustained as a coherent public world by the perception and will of an infinite spirit, God.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Functionalism is the theory that mental states are generated by their functional roles—i.e., by what they do rather than by what they are made of. Functionalism contends that all mental states (like sensations, beliefs, emotions) are defined by their causal roles or functional states of the system, such that what really matters is not the physical composition or structure of the brain, not the neurobiology, but the causal relations between inputs (stimuli), internal states, and outputs (behavior).
OpenChallenge
Arnold Zuboff's approach to consciousness is founded on a metaphysical position he terms ‘universalism,’ which states that there is exactly and only one subject of experience and that this one subject of experience is instantiated wherever awareness occurs. While Universalism is more a theory of personal identity than a theory of consciousness per se, it would, if true, directly affect the entire enterprise of theories of consciousness.
OpenChallenge
An “ultra-fine-tuned personal consciousness” means that absolutely all indispensable a priori events and conditions, bar none, of physics, chemistry, stellar and planetary development, biology and evolution, physiology and human brain structure, world history and personal family history, in all needed sequences and interrelationships, occurred unerringly as required for you, the reader of these words, to now be experiencing the immediate, first-person qualia of being conscious.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Philosopher David Rosenthal proposes “a higher-order-thought [HOT] theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought that one is in that state.”
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Kriegel’s Cross-Order Integration theory holds that a phenomenally conscious state is a single, unified representational state containing two integrated components: a first-order representation of an object or condition and a higher-order representation of that very first-order state. Unlike standard higher-order theories, which posit one mental state representing another, Kriegel’s self-representationalism makes the awareness of experience internal to the experience itself.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Cleeremans proposes that consciousness is not an intrinsic property of certain neural states but something the brain learns to do. His Radical Plasticity Thesis takes consciousness not as an intrinsic feature of particular neural states, but as an acquired capacity: the brain learns to represent, evaluate, and predict the consequences of its own representational activity.
OpenChallenge
Science journalist George Musser explores the relationship between consciousness and physics with two explanatory arrows pointing in opposite directions. In addition to the normal using-science-to-explain-consciousness framework, he focuses on “why physicists are studying human consciousness and AI to unravel the mysteries of the universe.”
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Philosopher William Lycan defends a materialist, representational theory of mind that he calls “homuncular functionalism” and that posits that “human beings are ‘functionally organized information-processing systems’ who have no non-physical parts or properties.” Lycan does recognize “the subjective phenomenal qualities of mental states and events, and an important sense in which mind is ‘over and above’ mere chemical matter.”
OpenChallenge
The "No-Go / No-Supervenience theorem" claims that self-certainty, or the capacity of healthy conscious humans to 'know' with certainty that they are conscious, is inconsistent with the properties possible in any meaningful definition of a physical system. Thus, a whole family of theories—materialist/physicalist, supervenience-based, and perhaps some forms of dual-aspect monism or panpsychist physicalism—cannot account for all the properties of human consciousness. Any physicalist theory that describes a self-aware, intelligent system must be internally inconsistent. Non-reductive physicalist theories are similarly pressured.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
The Blums contend that a machine capable of interacting with its environment through input sensors and output actuators, constructing internal models of its world, and viewing these models as being the world is the basis for its consciousness, both access and phenomenal. In their view, addressing the Hard Problem of consciousness reduces to demonstrating that subjective experience is computational in nature.
OpenIdealisms
Absolute Idealism has sentient experience as the sole reality, and phenomenal consciousness, at its most primitive level, is “feeling” or immediate experience: a pre-relational unity of qualitative diversity from which subject-object consciousness, judgment, body, self, and nature are abstracted, and within which finite sentient centers are partial appearances of one all-inclusive Absolute Experience.
OpenChallenge
The search for neural correlates of consciousness is not only philosophically neutral but also religiously inclusive, inviting the atheist materialist as well as the theistic dualist to scientifically investigate the miraculous link between, as philosopher Matthew Owen puts it, “the wine of consciousness and the water of biological brains.”
OpenChallenge
A semiotic account of consciousness that pivots on C. S. Peirce’s demonstration that qualities can be extricated from causal and inferential relations only in thought, not in fact. By expanding the standard type/token framework to include tone, and by foregrounding similarity-based reference, Champagne claims to construct a new conceptual toolbox that prevents experiential qualities from being explanatorily anomalous. The task, he says, is not to solve the hard problem but to dissolve it, by not reifying the warranted distinction that generates it.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Cognitive neuroscientist Hakwan Lau introduces Perceptual Reality Monitoring Theory, which he says is an empirically grounded higher-order theory of conscious perception. He proposes that conscious perception in an agent occurs “if there is a relevant higher-order representation with the content that a particular first-order perceptual representation is a reliable reflection of the external world right now.”
OpenChallenge
The ‘Calculus of Qualia’ (CQ) is a formal system for consciousness studies that incorporates non-referential terms—logical primitives like █ that present phenomenal experiences (qualia) directly in awareness, rather than referring to them. This would mean that qualia are logical primitives, irreducible in themselves, and thus their intrinsic nature cannot be explained further.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
In his intellectual memoirs, I've Been Thinking, philosopher Daniel Dennett highlights two fundamental questions on which his career is founded—the two related philosophical problems he set himself to solve. “First, how can it be that some complicated clumps of molecules can be properly described as having states or events that are about something, that have meaning or content.”
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
“Illusionism” is a term coined by the philosopher Keith Frankish for a revisionary view of consciousness, which builds on earlier work on qualia eliminativism (notably that of Daniel Dennett). The key idea is that consciousness, though real, is not what it seems. What we call 'phenomenal consciousness' is a brain-generated impression, not an intrinsic metaphysical feature of the mind. While not denying that conscious experiences are real, Frankish argues that the mysterious “phenomenal properties” or “qualia” often ascribed to them are, in fact, an introspective illusion.
OpenIdealisms
Absolute Idealism holds that phenomenal consciousness is the only intrinsically concrete reality, that physical reality as described by science is an abstract relational structure requiring an intrinsic experiential ground, that the countless momentary centers of experience composing nature are ultimately partial aspects of a single, all-inclusive cosmic experience (the Absolute), and that finite minds are perspectival, value-laden phases within a panpsychic Absolute or universal consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
Nicholas Humphrey’s theory of consciousness is a form of illusionism and compatible with eliminativism, because phenomenal consciousness—what it's like to feel inner experience—is not what it seems to be. Rather than revealing a deep metaphysical reality, consciousness is a user-illusion evolved to enhance our survival. He says, “Phenomenal consciousness is a magical mystery show that the brain lays on for itself.”
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
Advanced by neuroscientist Michael Graziano, attention schema theory asserts that for the brain to handle a profusion of information, it must have developed a quick and dirty model, a simplified version of itself, which it then reports “as a ghostly, non-physical essence, a magical ability to mentally possess items.”
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
All mental models are conscious. These models all have ‘something it is like’ to be them, while bats, cats, and humans do not. If we ask, “What is it like to be a bat?”, we cannot answer. We cannot even be sure whether the bat (or dog, cat, robot, or even another human) is, or is not, conscious at all. On the other hand, if we ask, “What is it like to be the bat’s model of the world?” we can answer. The answer is that if that creature is building models of its world, then there is something it is like to be whatever those models describe—whatever they say it is like.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux's Higher-Order Theory of Emotional Consciousness combines his approach to higher-order representationalism and his commitment to the centrality of emotion. His thesis is that “the brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not fundamentally different from those that give rise to perceptual conscious experiences.”
OpenIdealisms
Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup's “analytic idealism” is “a consciousness-only ontology” that has refocused attention, within the philosophical community and more broadly, on metaphysical idealism, that is, an idealism that is grounded in philosophical argument as opposed to promoted by religious tradition or spiritual belief.
OpenPhenomenology
Husserl’s theory of consciousness is a transcendental phenomenology: a rigorous descriptive inquiry into how anything can appear as meaningful, objective, temporal, embodied, and intersubjectively available within lived experience. Phenomenal consciousness is therefore not adequately captured by neural correlation, behavioral report, functional access, or introspective inventory alone; it is the field in which objects, worlds, others, selves, meanings, and evidences are constituted as appearing.
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
Philosopher François Kammerer defends an illusionist conception of phenomenal consciousness, according to which phenomenal consciousness does not exist but simply seems to exist. He thinks that such a conception defends physicalism better than other more standard versions of physicalism.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky calls the multiple semi-independent modules in the human mind, generated by physically locatable modules in the human brain, The Society of Mind (not coincidentally the name of his book). It is a model of human cognition constructed, step by step, from the nonconscious interactions of simple mindless elements he calls “agents.”
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
It is time to come to terms with the difficulty of understanding what it means to be physical and start thinking about the mind–body problem from a new perspective. Instead of construing it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally physical world, we should think of it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally nonmental world, a world that is at its most fundamental level entirely nonmental.
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Philosopher Barry Smith states that while we think of consciousness as “moments of experience,” the way we capture what's similar or different in our experiences over time is via language.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Consciousness researcher (and former nuclear physicist) Thomas Campbell presents “My Big TOE,” his theory of everything: “Consciousness is the fundamental reality. The physical world is an illusion, a virtual reality that only exists in our minds. We are Individuated Units of Consciousness: immortal, interconnected parts of a Larger Consciousness System. We choose to be players in the virtual reality game called life on Earth, set in a virtual universe computed by the system to aid our consciousness evolution.”
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
‘Qualia quietism’ to support an anti-realist theory of consciousness, labeled ‘neurofunctionalism,’ which integrates representationalism, self-representationalism, and neurobiological realism, aiming to naturalize phenomenal consciousness by tying it to brain-based representational structures. This is a naturalistic theory: phenomenal states are real, physical states in the brain with both causal powers and intentional content.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Sejnowski’s theory of consciousness is a computational framework that focuses on the global dynamics of spiking neurons and traveling waves. He proposes that consciousness arises from a sophisticated, "two-tier" organizational structure within the cerebral cortex, where high-level cognition coexists with, but remains functionally distinct from, standard sensorimotor processing.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Agüera y Arcas's “computational functionalism” exemplifies the theory of consciousness widely accepted in AI communities and other scientific disciplines: consciousness is simply an emergent function of the right kinds of computations.
OpenPhenomenology
Meinong’s account of consciousness crafts Brentano’s intentionality into a systematic theory of how experience can be directed toward anything—existent, possible, fictional, incomplete, or impossible. Phenomenal consciousness comprises differentiated acts and psychological contents that disclose objects without creating them or requiring that they possess being/existence.
OpenPhenomenology
Phenomenal consciousness is never a bare succession of contents but always a structured field with this invariant tripartite structure: a theme occupying focal awareness, a thematic field of contents experienced as materially relevant to the theme, and a margin of co-present but irrelevant data. Thus, phenomenal consciousness is a dynamically organized totality rather than a succession of isolated sensations or a narrow attentional spotlight.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Philosopher-futurist Nick Bostrom espouses a computational functionalism theory of consciousness, which is consistent with his view that there is a distinct possibility that our world and universe, our total state of affairs, is a computer simulation.
OpenPhenomenology
Heidegger’s theory of consciousness is best understood not as a theory of inner mental activities, qualia, or subject-object representation, but as an anti-Cartesian phenomenological ontology in which what we call phenomenal consciousness is a derivative of Dasein’s more basic being-in-the-world: an affectively attuned, practically absorbed, temporally structured, socially normed disclosure of beings as meaningful. Heidegger displaces “consciousness” from the foundational role, arguing that the primary phenomenon is not an inner subject inspecting contents, but a finite being already involved with tools, others, tasks, moods, possibilities, and mortality,
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Julia Mossbridge’s Informational Substrate as Collective Unconscious (IS/CU) model has several motivations for a theory of consciousness. One is the recognition that the collective unconscious is an ontological reality (but is rarely included in theories of consciousness). Another is the recognition that consciousness theories rarely separate consciousness per se (i.e., pure awareness) from its contents.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
To computational neuroscientist Stephen Grossberg, “all conscious states are resonant states.” The conscious brain is the resonant brain where attentive consciousness regulates actions that interact with learning, recognition, and prediction. Grossberg's idea is that the mind is an activity, not a thing; a verb, not a noun—it's what you do, not what you have or use.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Biological computationalism postulates that the specific physical and energetic properties of biological substrates are constitutive of the computations capable of supporting consciousness. Biological systems support conscious processing because they (i) instantiate scale-inseparable, substrate-dependent multiscale processing as a metabolic optimisation strategy, and (ii) alongside discrete computations, they perform continuous-valued computations due to the very nature of the fluidic substrate from which they are composed.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Linguist/philosopher Ray Jackendoff presents an “intermediate-level cognitive representations” theory of consciousness as a cognitively and computationally grounded, representational theory that accounts for consciousness, not by locating it in specific brain structure (as in the neural correlates of consciousness), but by identifying which types of mental representations are accessible to consciousness and why. There is no “central observer,” no “Cartesian Theater.”
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
Canxian is a non-reductive physicalist, monist ontology that reframes the fundamental mind-body distinction not as a dualism of substance but as an opposition between the strict locality of the physical world and the intrinsic non-locality of the conscious realm, which emerges as a real, causally efficacious level of reality constructed from countless “Cognitive Canxians.” This theory posits that consciousness is a genuine organizational structure born from physical processes, possessing unique principles and the capacity for downward causation, thereby offering a solution that avoids both eliminativism and substance dualism.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
A complex adaptive system (CAS) is a dynamic network of interactions whose collective behavior may not be predictable from its component behaviors and that can “adapt” or alter its individual and collective behavior, creating novelties.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Maverick physicist Jack Hiller posits an “eternal discarnate consciousness” or, as he says, in common parlance, the “soul”—which, “when freed from its hard attachment to the body, functions in a Universal Field of Consciousness (UFC), which may also be characterized as the mind of God.” The soul brings to the body the moral values that exist in the UFC, and these values may often conflict with, in Hiller's Freudian terms, “the Id and the Ego's pleasure-seeking functions.”
OpenIdealisms
Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman's “Case Against Reality” argues that our visual perceptions are not veridical of ultimate reality because evolution selects for fitness to reproduce, not for access to ontological truth.
OpenPhenomenology
Consciousness is not a thing, a container of contents, or a self behind experience, but a wholly intentional, self-transcending activity—always consciousness of some transcendent object—that is at the same time implicitly and in a non-objectifying way aware of itself in a non-positional or pre-reflective mode.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Mathematician and integral studies professor Brian Swimme presents the cosmology of a creative universe—cosmogenesis—in which human consciousness plays an essential role. He views the evolution of the universe toward greater complexity and consciousness as “the ultimate aim of the universe.”
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
A translation model in which a unified field-level state and a biological substrate are linked, with consciousness as an organized mode of awareness embedded in the field-level state and rendered or filtered through the brain’s biological substrate as localized experience. The model is called “I Think Therefore, 'I AM'” (ITTIA) because it proposes that the irreducible nature of a single human thought within conscious awareness, together with the unique features of NDEs, reflects participation in a deeper organizing field rather than being generated by the brain. The claimed veridical nature of NDEs forms the foundation of the theory.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Graboi, motivated by telepathy and clairvoyance being real and nonphysical, proposes a “three-aspect model of consciousness”: matter, mind (nonphysical), and pure awareness (an “absolute”). In his model, “pure awareness energy” interacts with a brain to produce consciousness in the mind, which exists in a nonphysical dimension of reality.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
“Nested Field Theory” has consciousness as a ubiquitous quantum-like field, an information field that is “nested” within quantum fields and operates at a higher frequency than the rest, such that it cannot be directly detected. Nested Field Theory is founded on the purported reality of paranormal phenomena, events, and experiences, and their tangible signs and symptoms, and it claims to account for such paranormal phenomena more naturally than any other theory of consciousness.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Physicist and “spiritual scholar” Dennis Harp, who seeks to unify theoretical physics and spiritual teachings, claims that “each of us exists as consciousness attached to a mind and body, making sense of the universe by experiencing individual states in a causal sequence.”
OpenIdealisms
Psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist's idealist metaphysics has consciousness as “irreducible, primordial and omnipresent.” But consciousness is “not a thing; it is a creative process,” he says.
OpenPhenomenology
Merleau-Ponty locates consciousness not in an interior theater of mental states but in the lived body (le corps propre), whose pre-reflective, motor engagement with a world is the condition of there being any phenomenal field at all. Phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally perceptual, embodied, motoric, affective, spatial, temporal, and intersubjective: the world shows up not first as neutral information but as a field of solicitations, possibilities, obstacles, meanings, and bodily powers.
OpenIdealisms
Philosopher, theological scholar, and intellectual provocateur David Bentley Hart constructs an ultimate unified monism, his form of idealism, first by showing that consciousness/mind and being/existence are profoundly inseverable. He argues that “rational thought and coherent order are two sides of a single reality” and that only by embracing God “as the absolute unity of consciousness and being” can the one ontological reality be confirmed.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
The Urantia Book (UB) presents consciousness within a “theocosmic cosmopsychism” and frames it as participation in a personal, Deity-originated mindal architecture (Urantia Book, 1955). In this model, consciousness originates in an infinite personal source and flows through a hierarchical, top-down, mindal architecture that manifests through progressively complex levels of mind.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Schiff’s mesocircuit hypothesis explains severe impairment and recovery of consciousness after widespread brain injury through the dynamics of an anterior forebrain loop linking central thalamus, frontal cortex, striatum, and globus pallidus interna. Multifocal injury reduces excitatory drive throughout this circuit, producing a self-reinforcing downregulated state; recovery occurs when surviving networks regain sufficient activity to restore thalamocortical and corticostriatal function.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Dendritic Integration Theory (DIT) is a neurobiological theory of consciousness that emphasizes the role of dendrites—the branched extensions of neurons—in integrating information and posits that conscious experience arises from nonlinear computations occurring in the apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons, particularly in the neocortex. Linking neurobiology and phenomenology, DIT relates cellular-level mechanisms to conscious experience by leveraging the intricate complexities of dendritic processing in brain circuits.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Bieberich’s Fractality Principle of Consciousness posits that the unity of phenomenal experience arises when information distributed across neural networks is recursively mapped into self-similar structures at progressively smaller scales, reaching the dendrites and neuromolecules of individual neurons. This cross-scale “fractalization” closes a "psychic loop" between the external world and an internal phenomenal "endospace." Bieberich postulates “bright matter” composed of hypothetical conscious units called sentyons, whose internal fractality would make each unit both local and connected to the whole conscious system.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
William Hirstein argues that it is “the assumption of privacy”—the deep, metaphysical impossibility for one person to ever experience the conscious states of another—that has led philosophers and scientists to claim wrongly that the conscious mind can never be explained in straightforwardly physical terms and thus to “create vexing dualisms, panpsychisms, views that would force changes in our current theories in physics, views that deny the reality of consciousness, or views that claim the problem is insoluble.”
OpenIdealisms
Holistic physician Deepak Chopra defines consciousness as “It is what makes experience possible. It is what makes perception possible. It is what makes cognition possible.”
OpenPhenomenology
Michel Henry’s theory of phenomenal consciousness is a radical phenomenology of Life: consciousness in its most original sense is not intentional awareness of objects in a world, not ecstatic, and not directed toward a world, but is life feeling itself—an immediate self-affection with no distance, no gap, and no otherness internal to it but Life’s immediate, invisible, affective self-revelation in radical immanence.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
Neuroendocrinologist and biological anthropologist Robert Sapolsky counts himself as a “hard incompatibilist,” affirming the truth of determinism (i.e., all events and actions are the product of prior events and actions) and denying the existence of free will. There is no possibility, he says, “of reconciling our being biological organisms built on the physical rules of the universe with there being free will, a soul, a ‘Me’ inside there which is somehow free of biology.”
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Hobson proposes that rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep constitutes a protoconscious state: a genetically programmed, brain-generated virtual reality that models a world and a body, and serves to develop and maintain waking consciousness. Dreaming is thus not a degraded form of waking experience but the evolutionary-prior, pure expression of primary consciousness—perception and emotion generated without external input—while the waking state adds the secondary but content-rich features of language, abstraction, self-reflective awareness, and volition.
OpenIdealisms
Idealism works well as an explanation of creature consciousness, provided, of course, that one accepts its foundational premise that consciousness, and consciousness alone, is fundamental reality.
OpenMaterialism / Neurobiological
While neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell argues, contra many scientists and philosophers, that free will, or agency, is not an illusion—that “we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose”—he still asserts that “you cannot escape the fact that our consciousness and our behavior emerge from the purely physical workings of the brain.”
OpenPhenomenology
A phenomenological account of phenomenal consciousness as intrinsically first-personal, self-manifesting, and pre-reflectively self-conscious. An experience is not first a neutral mental event that subsequently becomes “mine”; rather, its very appearing involves “for-me-ness,” or first-personal givenness. This minimal selfhood is not an introspected object, substantial soul, or social construction, but the subjective character without which phenomenal consciousness would not be experience at all.
OpenIdealisms
The Fundamental Awareness Theory is a metaphysical framework that challenges conventional scientific materialism by positing consciousness, not matter, as the fundamental ontological reality of the universe. In this theory, awareness is not an emergent property of complex systems (like the human brain), but rather a foundational aspect of all that exists, even a multiverse.
OpenPhenomenology
D.W. Smith’s theory of consciousness is an ontological phenomenology in which phenomenal consciousness is understood through three inseparable but distinguishable facets: intentional form, phenomenal appearance, and natural substrate. Consciousness is not reducible to neural or computational mechanisms, yet neither is it beyond nature; it is a structured phenomenon whose subjectivity, intentionality, qualitative appearance, embodiment, and basis in biological-cultural life require an ontology broad enough to hold them together
OpenIdealisms
Computer scientist Subhash Kak proposes that consciousness is primary and that the very understanding of physical reality takes place in consciousness. He argues that consciousness cannot be a property of the brain; therefore, it is nonmaterial and transcends materiality. It is like a light that illuminates the physical universe.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
The scientific consciousness community generally recognizes that meditation can provide insights into consciousness, at least enriching descriptions.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
According to biophysicist John Beggs, the Critical Brain Hypothesis “suggests that neural networks do their best work when connections are not too weak or too strong.”
OpenIdealisms
Quantum physicist Amit Goswami proposes that consciousness, not matter, is the primary “stuff” of creation, and indeed it is consciousness that creates the material world, not the other way around.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey employs an evolutionary framework, combining mental representations with what he calls “attractor states in the brain,” to develop a novel materialistic theory of phenomenal consciousness, which he sees as a late and not ubiquitous evolutionary development. His multidisciplinary argument follows.
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Psychohistorian Julian Jaynes's 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, proposes that consciousness, particularly “the ability to introspect,” is a learned behavior rooted in language and culture and arises from metaphor; consciousness is neither innate nor fundamental.
OpenInformation
Neuroscientist Christof Koch states that Integrated Information Theory (IIT) shares many intuitions with panpsychism, in particular that “consciousness is an intrinsic fundamental property of reality, is graded, and can be found in small amounts in simple physical systems.
OpenMonisms
To mathematical physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, the psychosomatic nature of human persons is best understood in terms of a “dual-aspect monism,” in which matter and mind are complementary aspects of a unitary being.
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
Abstract Realism claims to bridge the mind-matter explanatory gap by demonstrating that consciousness has a precisely definable physical function. The Temporal Uncertainty Principle (TUP) defines consciousness as the integration of two contradictory, temporal perspectives, diachronic and simultaneous, whose interaction manages the same fundamental problem that mystifies the integration of quantum and classical mathematics. Consciousness evolves as a physical mechanism that enables temporally extended information to operate at point-equivalent instants without computational paralysis.
OpenPhenomenology
Neuroscientist and philosopher Francisco Varela proposes what he calls “neurophenomenology,” which seeks to articulate mutual constraints between phenomena present in experience, inspired by the style of inquiry of phenomenology and the correlative field of phenomena established by the cognitive sciences.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
State Space Theory (SST) proposes that phenomenal consciousness arises from hierarchical delay coordinate embedding (DCE) in plastic recurrent neural networks, in which the brain reconstructs the dynamical history of its own states and its environment through recurrent feedback. The accompanying metaphysical framework, Computational Dynamic Monism (CDM), identifies consciousness with the temporally extended computational process itself, not with any static neural state, functional role, or intrinsic property of matter. The claim is that this dissolves the hard problem through identity rather than explanation
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
“Process Identity Theory” proposes that conscious experience is identical to the brain’s recursive, temporally integrated, embodied self-modeling dynamics. This view extends classical mind–brain identity theories by identifying consciousness with ongoing dynamical activity rather than static neural states, much as weather arises from atmospheric dynamics.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Consciousness evolved in biological systems as a regulatory mechanism to manage the uncertainties of life. Consciousness, in this view, is an “emergent optimization process” situated at the intersection of material and mental structures, enabling life to navigate metastable states without succumbing to disorder.
OpenInformation
Chalmers proposed a “double-aspect theory of information,” which holds information as ontologically fundamental, and it offers what it states: Information with two aspects: a physical aspect and a phenomenal (or experiential) aspect.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Philosopher Thomas Metzinger presents a representationalist and functional analysis of subjectivity, the consciously experienced first-person perspective. What has been traditionally called “conscious thought,” he argues, is actually “a subpersonal process, and only rarely a form of mental action.”
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Neuroscientist Antonio Pereira, Jr. hypothesizes that cognitive consciousness depends on sentience. He distinguishes “two modalities of consciousness: sentience, in the sense of being awake and capable of feeling (e.g., basic sensations of hunger, thirst, pain), and, second, cognitive consciousness, i.e., thinking and elaborating on linguistic and imagery representations.”
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Neurosurgeon/neuroscientist Karl Pribram's Holonomic Brain Theory is the novel idea that human consciousness comes about via quantum effects in or between brain cells such that the brain acts as a holographic storage network (building on theories of holograms formulated by Dennis Gabor).
OpenPanpsychisms
Iconoclastic biologist Rupert Sheldrake's radical views on the nature of reality inform theories of consciousness in two ways. One, covered here, envisions self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity as a robust form of panpsychism.
OpenDualisms
In Islam, the nature of the soul is a central concern and is not dissimilar to the soul in Christianity and Judaism (understandable because the three developed side by side during the Middle Ages, rather harmoniously, too). Building on ancient and Neo-Platonist philosophers, medieval Islamic philosophers, mainly al-Kindî, al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, developed an Islamic metaphysic of the soul by evaluating the concepts of intellect, soul, nafs, and body.
OpenIdealisms
Spiritual teacher (and pottery artist) Rupert Spira espouses non-duality as “the recognition that underlying the multiplicity and diversity of experience there is a single, infinite and indivisible reality, whose nature is pure consciousness from which all objects and selves derive their apparently independent existence.”
OpenMonisms
The Jesuit philosopher/theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin envisioned the evolution of consciousness as axial in a grand cosmic system of continuing complexification where consciousness becomes planetized and even “God” is an emergent in a process of “theogenesis.”
OpenMonisms
Pauli's speculative psychophysical ontology, developed through his long dialogue with Carl Jung, treats conscious experience as one aspect of a deeper, neutral, archetypally ordered reality in which psyche and matter are complementary manifestations rather than separate substances. Phenomenal consciousness is therefore not reduced to brain process, nor elevated into idealist world-foundation; it is the subjective pole of a broader order in which symbolic, mathematical, affective, and physical structures may share common roots.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
The brain is a control system operating as a multi-layered predictive engine that constructs a future-oriented world model by minimizing qualia potential—a latent dynamical quantity analogous to the gunas of Sāṅkhya philosophy. Within this parallel predictive architecture, top-down priors are continuously calibrated against bottom-up sensory signals through a delayed error-integration loop. Consciousness is modeled as an emergent process observing the world model, experiences variations in qualia potential, and can identify with a self-model embedded within it, offering a formal account of subjective phenomena emphasized in Eastern philosophy.
OpenIdealisms
Transcendental Meditation leader (and former neuroscientist) Tony Nader states “there is nothing other than consciousness, and that matter and the multiplicity of loci of consciousness, us, for one, are nothing but consciousness experiencing itself from limited perspectives that hide the true nature of both the observer and the observed.”
OpenMonisms
Physicist-philosopher Harald Atmanspacher presents mind and matter, mental and material domains of reality, as manifestations, or aspects, of one underlying, fundamental reality in which mind and matter are inseparable. He distinguishes between the epistemic discernment of both the separate domains and the underlying reality, and the ontic existence of the “psychophysically neutral domain.”
OpenInformation
Physicist Paul Davies speculates that information may be a fundamental principle in understanding the nature of reality, including life and mind, and that our current physical theories may be incomplete without incorporating both information and consciousness in a radically new way. Davies has long taken consciousness seriously and has woven it into his broader inquiries into physics, cosmology, and the informational structure of the universe. His views on “hidden webs of information” and consciousness appear throughout his work.
OpenMaterialism / First-Order
Philosopher Frank Jackson develops a representationalist view about perceptual experience. “That experience is diaphanousness (or transparent) is a thesis about the phenomenology of perceptual experience. It is the thesis that the properties that make an experience the kind of experience it is are properties of the object of experience.”
OpenMaterialism / First-Order
Peter Carruthers’s theory of consciousness is a first-order theory because it holds that conscious experience arises directly from non-meta-representational, first-order perceptual states—that is, from representations of the world, rather than from representations of those representations (which are central to higher-order theories).
OpenInformation
The “Ingressing Minds from Platonic Space” framework proposes that phenomenal consciousness is not generated by brains as self-sufficient, wholly physical devices, but rather, like mathematical truth and biological form, "ingresses" into the physical world from a structured, non-physical "latent [Platonic] space" of patterns—a space that contains not only “low-agency patterns” such as facts about triangles and prime numbers but also high-agency cognitive patterns such as "kinds of minds."
OpenMonisms
Philosopher of science Alfredo Pereira, Jr., has developed a “triple-aspect monism,” the physiological, mental unconscious, and conscious aspects of brain activity, positing that consciousness is a co-emergent property that arises from these three inseparable aspects of brain and mind, all grounded in a single substance with three aspects.
OpenMaterialism / First-Order
Philosopher Michael Tye has proposed a theory of consciousness he calls “contingentism,” which is a kind of identity theory (i.e., phenomenal states and physical/brain states are literally the same) but with a novel twist: while the identity is indeed true in our world, it is not metaphysically true in all possible worlds. More recently, however, he has come to hold that, at the most fundamental level, there is a kind of 'consciousness*' or a protoconsciousness, a version of panpsychism (see “Tye's Irreducible Consciousness*” under Panpsychism).
OpenInformation
Erik Hoel’s theory of consciousness centers on ‘causal emergence,’ the idea that macroscopic structures in the brain can have stronger or clearer causal power than their microscopic components and that consciousness arises where macro-level causal structure is maximized. “Consciousness is what it’s like for information to be causally emergent.”
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Giorgio Marchetti maintains, following Damasio (1998), that the phenomenal aspect of consciousness (PAC) provides the agent with a sense of self and with information about how its own operations affect its self. The PAC, Marchetti argues, is produced by attentional activity, which modulates the energy level of the neural substrate—namely, the organ of attention—that underpins this activity.
OpenMonisms
Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran states that the question of consciousness cannot be answered “in any obvious terms.” Most neuroscientists don't think about the question of consciousness, as it doesn't typically arise in neuroscience or in physics. But, he says, the ancient Vedic texts of India do address the problem of consciousness, the problem of qualia.
OpenMaterialism / First-Order
Naturalism philosopher Thomas W. Clark posits phenomenal consciousness as the representational content of a cognitive system's sufficiently structured representational processing. Conscious experience exists only for the conscious system, so it is categorically subjective, and its basic elements are irreducibly qualitative. As a general rule, he says, we don't find representational content in the world it participates in representing, which can help explain subjectivity. Qualitativeness is entailed by the system’s need for representational primitives that aren’t themselves objects of representation.
OpenPhenomenology
Phenomenal consciousness must be studied as lived, embodied, temporally structured, intentionally world-disclosing experience, using disciplined first-person, second-person, contemplative, and neurobiological methods in reciprocal constraint. It is best understood as an embodied, naturalized, neurophenomenological account of phenomenal consciousness
OpenIdealisms
Philosopher-theologian Keith Ward's “personal idealism” integrates his philosophical convictions about consciousness and souls, idealism in Eastern traditions, and his Christian faith. it's a heady brew.
OpenInformation
“Information Philosopher” Bob Doyle proposes the “Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR)” as an information model for the mind. He says that the mind, like software, is immaterial information; a human being “is not a machine, the brain is not a computer, and the mind is not processing digital information.” His proposal is that “a minimal primitive mind would need only to ‘play back’ past experiences that resemble any part of current experience,” because “remembering past experiences has obvious relevance (survival value) for an organism.”
OpenInformation
Independent thinker, autodidact Christopher Langan claims that what he calls the “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe” (CTMU) provides the logical framework of a true Theory of Everything. It explains the connection between mind and reality, and proves the existence of God [as defined], the soul, and an afterlife. It identifies CTMU’s relationship to consciousness as a reflexive identity describing self-awareness, and must inevitably define the reality of self-aware beings.
OpenInformation
Emergent Information Theory (EIT) bridges the mind-body gap by proposing that the brain creates a “non-material mind” (as defined in an informational context) that is capable of influencing events in the physical body. As such, EIT can be considered as an alternative form of emergent dualism that unifies all biological and technological information systems.
OpenMonisms
Physicist Max Tegmark speculates that “the subjective experience that we call consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways,” and he comes to this strong physicalist view because his starting point is, “It's all physics.”
OpenMaterialism / First-Order
Transparency theory makes the argument that because sensory (e.g., visual) experience represents external objects and their apparent properties, experience has no other properties that pose problems for materialism. We “see right through” perceptual states to external objects and take no notice that we are actually in perceptual states; the properties we perceive in perception are attributed to the objects themselves, not to the perception.
OpenMonisms
The Qualia Research Institute (QRI), a not-for-profit pursuing unique approaches to the science of consciousness, stresses “Qualia Formalism,” the hypothesis that the internal structure of our subjective experience can be represented precisely by mathematics, and “Valence Realism,” the central importance of emotion/affect, that is, valence (how good or bad an experience feels) as a real and well-defined property of conscious states (Qualia Research Institute).
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
The ‘holographic principle’ of quantum gravity offers the possibility of “an admittedly very strange, single physical mechanism that can provide novel insights to many of the problems that bedevil our theories of consciousness,” especially how mental states of the mind are in some sense identical to physical states of the brain. That’s why, “we need a physics in which things that seem completely different are in some sense identical.”
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
Northoff frames his views on consciousness as “non-reductive neurophilosophy,” which, he says, is “primarily a methodological approach,” a particular strategy that takes into account “certain phenomena which otherwise would remain outside our scope [consciousness studies].”
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Biologist John Parrington proposes that a qualitative leap in consciousness—“human self-conscious awareness”—occurred during human evolution as “our capacity for language and our ability to continually transform the world around us by designing and using tools” transformed our brains.
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Philosopher Evan Thompson heralds “the deep continuity of life and mind.” His foundational idea is “Where there is life there is mind, and mind in its most articulated forms belongs to life,” and his organizing principle is “Life and mind share a core set of formal or organizational properties, and the formal or organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Wang’s Layered Reference Model of the Brain treats consciousness as the highest-level, collectively organized state within a formal architecture of natural intelligence. Consciousness integrates information about the organism’s bodily and emotional condition, its external environment, and the relations between them, while depending on lower layers of sensation, memory, perception, action, homeostasis, unconscious processing, and subconscious processing.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
The central idea of HOROR theory (Higher-Order Representation of a Representation) is that consciousness arises not from a higher-order representation of a mental state (like sights or sounds) but rather from a higher-order representation of a representation. In other words, for a state to be conscious, the subject must represent the fact that there is a representation going on, without necessarily representing the first-order content directly. This second-order awareness is still conceptual or cognitive, but it targets the representational status of the first-order state.
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Philip Bitar proposes an architectural theory of consciousness (ATC) in which the structure of the mind is the basis for explaining consciousness.
OpenDualisms
Many in the Abrahamic religious traditions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—believe that God dispenses souls actively to each individual (whether at birth, conception, or some arbitrary time is irrelevant here).
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Clinical psychologist Warren Mansell proposes Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) in which “reorganization is the process required for the adaptive modification of control systems in order to reduce the error in intrinsic systems that control essential, largely physiological, variables.”
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Consciousness is a reductive but non-eliminative physicalism: phenomenal properties are real but non-fundamental mental properties, best understood as physically realized representational properties of sensations, while the “hard problem” arises largely from a misleading but psychologically formidable “intuition of distinctness” that makes such properties seem unable to be physical or functional, even though, in fact, they are.
OpenPhenomenology
Consciousness is best understood via neurophenomenology—through the reciprocal constraint of first-person phenomenology and third-person neurobiology, mind and brain alike being manifestations of the inherent structures of the human organism. Humans possess several biologically based modes of consciousness—waking, deep sleep, dreaming, and a fourth "integrative mode" underlying altered states. Phenomenal consciousness is the organism's cognized model of the world, built from "neurognostic" structures: innate, genetically predisposed forms of knowing.
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcello Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson elevate and promote “the primacy of consciousness” in that “There is no way to step outside consciousness and measure it against something else. Everything we investigate, including consciousness and its relation to the brain, resides within the horizon of consciousness.”
OpenMaterialism / Computational & Functionalism
Mathematics can apply to consciousness in two ways. The first approach involves methods, models, and simulations that are increasingly rigorous and sophisticated, describing and explaining essential features and mechanisms of conscious experience, primarily its structure, level, content, and dynamics.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Philosopher Paul Thagard poses big questions upfront. “Why do people have conscious experiences that include perceptions such as seeing, sensations such as pain, emotions such as joy, and abstract thoughts such as self-reflection? Why is consciousness central to so much of human life, including dreams, laughter, music, religion, sports, morality, and romance? Are such experiences also possessed by other animals, plants, and robots?”
OpenDualisms
Theories of consciousness that developed in the ancient Indian subcontinent, based on the Vedic scriptures, focus on the relationship between individual human consciousness and cosmic consciousness. Roughly, there were two major views: each individual human consciousness is a “piece,” as it were, of the cosmic consciousness, or each individual human consciousness, in some mystical sense, is the entirety of the cosmic consciousness, even though there are innumerable instantiations of the same thing.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
The Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) is a mathematical model of embodied consciousness that “relates phenomenology to function, showing the computational advantages of consciousness.”
OpenDualisms
GV Vedanta can contribute novel, sophisticated notions of levels of matter to instantiate various features of consciousness without reducing consciousness itself to matter.
OpenPhenomenology
Philosopher of science and phenomenologist Michel Bitbol promotes a “radical neurophenomenology” in which a “tangled dialectic of body and consciousness” is the “metaphysical counterpart” and whose goal is to advance Varela's neurophenomenology project of criticizing and dissolving the “hard problem” of consciousness.
OpenInformation
Consciousness, reality, and computation are deeply integrated at a fundamental level. In philosophy of mind, functionalism says it's how a mind works that matters, not what stuff it's made of. In philosophy of mathematics, Platonism says that mathematical objects have an independent existence. Functionalism and Platonism are both leading theories in their respective fields, but when they are taken together, something extraordinary happens.
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Amanda Gefter’s theory of consciousness unifies QBist physics with enactive cognitive science. Qbism is a quantum-Bayesian interpretation that treats quantum theory as a normative ‘user’s manual’ for agents in a participatory universe. Enactivism is the adaptive, embodied cognitive science framework in which cognition is the enactment of a subject–object boundary through ongoing sensorimotor engagement with the environment. Taken together, they offer the possibility of a unified metaphysics—one that brings subject and object, mind and world, back together again.
OpenInformation
The “Integrated World Modeling Theory” (IWMT) combines multiple theories into a unified model of consciousness to account for core aspects of phenomenology across computational/functional, algorithmic, and implementational/mechanistic (supervenient) levels of analysis.
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Murray Shanahan explores the conceptual boundaries of consciousness by examining the plausibility and coherence of disembodied ‘minds’—in particular, AI/LLMs in computers—‘minds’ that exist without bodies or sensory interaction with the physical world, and in doing so, he assumes and supports an embodied and enactive understanding of biological consciousness, where cognition is inseparable from embodiment.
OpenDualisms
The concept of the soul, in multifarious forms, has infused indigenous and folk religions throughout the world, and although we tend to categorize these ancient belief systems as “pre-modern” and “pre-scientific,” lacking the sophistication of the major Eastern and Abrahamic traditions, we may be remiss not to recognize the data and to assess its implications (if any).
OpenDualisms
Trialism is the theory of mind that posits reality as consisting of three fundamental substances or aspects, as opposed to the one of monism (e.g., materialism or idealism) or the two of dualism. There are two distinct kinds of trialism: a reinterpretation of René Descartes's dualism (implicitly in a religious context of the “soul”) and secular-philosophical three-part models of existence.
OpenMaterialism / First-Order
Direct Perception Theory is the idea that “the information required for perception is external to the observer; that is, one can directly perceive an object based on the properties of the distal stimulus alone, unaided by inference, memories, the construction of representations, or the influence of other cognitive processes.” Philosopher Ned Block describes non-mainstream views of phenomenal consciousness that take it to work via this kind of “a direct awareness relation to a peculiar entity like a sense datum [i.e., that which is immediately available to the senses] or to objects or properties in the environment.”
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Psychiatrist-philosopher Gordon Globus seeks to link two seemingly independent discourses: an application of quantum field theory to brain functioning, which he calls “quantum brain dynamics,” and the continental postphenomenological tradition, especially the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida.
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Philosopher Alva Noë argues that only externalism about the mind and mental content, which requires active and continuous engagement between the brain and its environment, body and beyond, can succeed as a theory of consciousness.
OpenDualisms
Many, actually almost all, religious traditions present elaborate levels or stages or realms of the soul, accommodating the soul and its elaborate journeys before birth and after death—Yogācāra Buddhism, Sufism in Islam, Kabbalah in Judaism, Christian mysticism, occult sects such as Theosophy.
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Irruption Theory of consciousness takes phenomenology to be dynamically relevant, yet thermodynamically non-reductive, treating the subjective mind as a causally efficacious “black box” that makes a measurable difference in the living body. Subjective states are not an epiphenomenon, but a distinct aspect of reality that interacts with measurable matter through specific entropy exchanges: intentions “irrupt” into bodily dynamics as deviations that initiate action, and lived experience “absorbs” physiological variations into perceptual awareness.
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Perception and action are not just inputs and outputs but dynamically interwoven components of cognition. Thus, consciousness is not merely the result of internal representations processed in isolation but emerges from sensorimotor loops between perception and action and embodied interaction with the world.
OpenInformation
A Multitrack Consciousness Conjecture (MCC) suggests a new structure for consciousness in time, aiming to resolve the paradox of our subjective experience of a privileged now that seems fundamentally at odds with the physical model of block time (also known as the block universe).
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
The Dynamic Organicity theory of consciousness is a materialist framework grounded in an ontology of quasi-strong emergence. Quasi-strong emergence serves as a conceptual bridge between Polanyian emergence and nonreductive physicalism, offering an account of consciousness as a self-intending projection of intrinsically agential dynamics arising from embodied, quantum-delocalized information systems.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
The Quantum Panprotopsychism theory of consciousness proposes that an ontology of quantum mechanics in terms of states and events with internal phenomenal aspects, that is, a form of panprotopsychism, is well suited to explaining consciousness.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
‘Symbiotic Existential Cosmology’ is a biogenic, psycho-physical cosmology of conscious life in the universe. Subjective consciousness and the physical universe have an irreducible, asymmetric, complementary interactive relationship in which life is a biospherically symbiotic climax phenomenon in the mature universe. Interactivity is key to cosmology, affirming the ability of subjective consciousness to participate in causal intent and acausal anticipation through coupled, physically indeterminate phase transition states, which are seen as key to why subjective consciousness has been preserved by biological evolution over computational biology.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
The “Science of Unity” model posits matter and consciousness as deeply intertwined, following a fractal-like hierarchical arrangement from fundamental forms to macro-structures. Reality unfolds across higher frequential dimensions, where different Standard Models coexist within the same space but experience distinct physical properties.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Arturo Tozzi offers a topological and computational framework for neuroscience by challenging the view that neural activity is confined to three spatial dimensions plus time. Leveraging advances in big data, computational modeling, and topological mathematics, he posits that brain functions, ranging from perception and cognition to emotion and consciousness, are best understood within high-dimensional phase spaces exceeding conventional spatial representation.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Colin Morrison posits that the direct physical correlate of our subjective experience is the wavefunction of a single rare particle (no doubt of a complex, compound nature), confined within a very small region of the brain (most likely a single neuron) that he calls ‘the cavity.’
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Van Dusen’s dimensional theory of consciousness proposes that mind is not contained within ordinary four-dimensional physical space-time, but is identical with operations in real higher-dimensional spaces. Phenomenal consciousness, on this view, is not produced by the brain; it is the differentiated “line of awareness” running through these levels, with the brain serving as its lower physical anchor.
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Experimental psychologist James J. Gibson proposes an “embodied, situated, and non-representational” approach to perception (which, while not a surrogate for phenomenal consciousness, has features in common). Gibson attacks both behaviorism and cognitivism (e.g., information processing), arguing for direct perception and direct realism.
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
Philosopher Valerie Gray Hardcastle argues that the points of division between materialists and materialism-skeptics “are quite deep and turn on basic differences in understanding the scientific enterprise.”
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Artist and perceptual scientist Robert Pepperell suggests that while energetic activity is fundamental to all physical processes and drives biological behavior, consciousness is a specific product of the organization of energetic activity in the brain.
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
Physicist Carlo Rovelli focuses on “the profoundly relational aspect of physics, manifest in general relativity, but especially in quantum mechanics.” 20th-century physics, he says, “is not about how individual entities are by themselves. It is about how entities manifest themselves to one another. It is about relations.”
OpenDualisms
Soul and consciousness are core doctrines of Theosophy, an occult amalgam of esoteric ideas from Western and Eastern religions, traditions, and philosophies. Theosophy defines itself as “Wisdom-religion” or “Divine Wisdom,” and considers itself “The substratum and basis of all the world-religions and philosophies, taught and practiced by a few elect ever since man became a thinking being.”
OpenPanpsychisms
To philosopher of physics David Wallace, one way to motivate panpsychism is as a kind of synthesis of materialism (consciousness is just reducible to the physical) and dualism (consciousness is separate from the physical). Each, he says, has major advantages and major disadvantages.
OpenInformation
Information additional theories include William Dembski arguing that “informational realism,” understood properly, can dissolve the mind-body problem; Jaime Cardenas-Garcia linking consciousness with “infoautopoiesis” (i.e., the self-production of information); and Jesse Bettinger proposing a fundamental, information driven ontological process.
OpenPanpsychisms
Although Process Theory is already classified under Materialism Theories/Relational, motivated by Griffin's “panexperiential physicalism,” I [RLK] am making the odd decision to classify it also here under Panpsychism, motivated by process philosopher Matthew Segall's bringing Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism “into conversation with the recent panpsychist turn in analytic philosophy of mind.”
OpenIdealisms
Comparative philosopher Miri Albahari defends “Perennial Idealism” as a mystical solution to the mind-body problem. She faces the “vicious dilemma” of subjects arising from unconditioned consciousness. “If the manifest world of subjects is real, it irrevocably undercuts the purely unconditioned nature of the ground by imposing boundaries between subjects and the ground.”
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
Philosopher Daniel Stoljar has long focused on physicalism, its interpretation, truth, and philosophical significance; his views are nuanced and largely deflationary.
OpenIdealisms
It is metaphysically necessary that Idealism is true, that every fundamental entity is conscious, and moreover that every fundamental property is a phenomenal property.
OpenIdealisms
Philosopher Helen Yetter-Chappell’s theory of consciousness integrates epiphenomenalist dualism with a non-theistic form of idealism. Her work challenges conventional physicalist and non-physicalist perspectives by proposing that consciousness is both fundamental and causally inert, yet central to the fabric of reality, a counterintuitive combination. She does this by developing a new quasi-Berkeleyan realist idealism, which does not depend upon God to do the metaphysical heavy lifting. This non-theistic idealism requires a fresh approach to the persistence and stability of the physical world.
OpenMaterialism / Philosophical
A physicalist explanation of phenomenal consciousness remains a plausible and positive path. The hard problem looks hard because first-person appearances are systematically misleading. The key step is an empirical model of first-person access: Automated Compression Theory (ACT), which holds that first-person access to consciousness is accomplished by automated accessing of compressed sensory information. Because of the distorting nature of this compressed access, it seems to subjects that consciousness possesses ‘exceptional’ properties—properties leading to the hard problem—even though no such properties are present.
OpenIdealisms
Complex Idealism posits that reality is fundamentally a continuous, mental, and informational flow of duration, and that consciousness is an “unsplittable unity” that cannot be modeled computationally. Rather than viewing consciousness as an emergent property of material structures, the framework asserts the ontological primacy of a primary, continuous mental mobility. "Complex" signifies the dual-aspect architecture of existence, the intersection of "real" and "imaginary" domains.
OpenIdealisms
Consciousness is the fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. In the cosmic cycle, consciousness is transformed first into cosmic mind and then into the material world. When conditions on a planet allow it, living organisms can arise and evolve, such that eventually sentient beings may evolve that strive to complete the creation cycle by becoming one with Cosmic Consciousness.
OpenIdealisms
Biomedical scientist Dirk K. F. Meijer explains consciousness in the context of a “Universal Knowledge Field” (UKF), the concept that a collective storage of all information that is present and/or evolves in our universe can take on a universal character and that all information is present in a general knowledge field.
OpenIdealisms
Computer/AI scientist Mahendra Samarawickrama posits that consciousness is a fundamental dimension of reality that brings experience prior to cognition or analysis, constructing knowledge, logic, or language. Within this framework, consciousness and its concomitants (e.g., feeling, perception, volition, attention, etc.) are attributed to the individual mind as a primary phenomenon. Consequently, knowledge emerges as a secondary construct of consciousness. Consciousness is directly experiential and independent of the brain’s cognitive, analytical, logical, or linguistic processes. This foundational layer of awareness underlies all knowledge constructs and can be experienced through meditation. During meditation, suspending external sensory input and internal brain cognition allows for direct confirmation of conscious experience.
OpenIdealisms
Cosmin Vișan proposes that self-reference, looking-back-at-itself, is the foundation of the structure and of the qualities of phenomenal consciousness within an idealist worldview.
OpenMaterialism / Higher-Order
Neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon asserts that symbolic communication has radically altered the nature of human consciousness, whereas consciousness broadly is coextensive with the development of brains in animals that regulate their movement with the aid of long-distance senses, such as vision, because of the predictive capacity this affords and requires.
OpenMonisms
Philosopher John Leslie suggests that ethical requirements, when not overruled by stronger ethical requirements, are creatively effective. The cosmos they create is a collection of infinitely many minds, each infinite mind eternally conscious of all that's worth contemplating. Our universe is a structure inside one such mind, its reality consisting simply in its being contemplated.
OpenIdealisms
Consciousness Endomitosis Theory (CET) offers a vision rooted in the non-dualist metaphysical tradition of Advaita Vedānta, reinterpreted through a contemporary philosophical and cosmological lens. CET posits that reality unfolds through a process of recursive self-division and self-recognition akin to cellular mitosis—but occurring within and by Consciousness itself. The cosmos, then, is not an object but a living, recursive grammar of self-consciousness.
OpenIdealisms
Intelligent Idealism argues that reality is best understood not as dead matter accidentally producing mind, but as Mind / Intelligence under constraint. Its deeper claim is that Mind is primary, constraint is the grammar of Mind, and intelligence is the signature of that grammar. It develops cumulatively across agency, qualia, evolution, perception, time, spacetime, physical actuality, biology, suffering, artificial intelligence, local selfhood, and the wider Mind-field. Rather than asking how mind emerges from matter, it asks what must be true of reality for law, agency, experience, structure, science, and intelligibility to be possible at all. Its central formula is: possibility before access, access before refinement, refinement through local avatars inside a rendered interface.
OpenIdealisms
The universe is the structured constraint architecture that consciousness imposes upon itself to make experience possible. Every conscious experience involves distinction—the ability to differentiate one state from another—and the structural features of consciousness closes the circle with modern physics. The challenge is to recognize that consciousness is not the question—it is the answer, and we have always been part of it.
OpenIdealisms
As creator and host of Closer To Truth, Robert Lawrence Kuhn receives ideas from viewers globally. These unsolicited papers are often elaborate treatises, the majority of which focus on consciousness or cosmology. He says he looks at all of them, keeps an open mind (with at least one eye squinty skeptical), learns some, and responds as he can. Here are some of them.
OpenDualisms
The esotericist, philosopher, and spiritual teacher Rudolf Steiner had a complex and changing relationship with Theosophy, from apologist and thought leader to competitor and reprobate.
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Throughout human history, psychedelics have been used for spiritual purposes by inducing altered conscious experiences dramatically different from the norm. Colors explode. Time slows, speeds up, stops. Self-shatters, dissolves. The body dissipates, melts away. Magical creatures emerge. Spirit Beings appear. All things vibrate, resonate. All is alive. All is connected. All is One. Some attribute the advent of religion to the use of psychotomimetic or hallucinogenic substances in rituals. In each culture or condition, interpretations of psychedelic experiences were made. Mystics conjoined with cosmic consciousness.
OpenDualisms
The Christian mystic Jakob Lorber asserts in his self-claimed revelations that the human being consists of a soul and a divine spirit, which, for a very short time, are incarnated in a material body.
OpenDualisms
This theory of consciousness is a generalized notion that in order to make the human mind, some kind of “nonphysical component,” working with the human brain, might be needed.
OpenPhenomenology
Phenomenal consciousness is an embodied and enactive account that is not a process occurring inside the brain, but an activity of the whole embodied organism engaged with its environment, and on which the structure of that experience is best disclosed by subjecting phenomenological distinctions to empirical scrutiny. The central contribution is two distinctions—between body image and body schema, and between the minimal self and the narrative self.
OpenChallenge
To come
OpenPanpsychisms
Radical Panpsychism is a mathematically grounded philosophical framework for understanding consciousness, which proposes that experience is a fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of reality, not limited to complex organisms but present in all entities.
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Consciousness is an emergent, embodied, energy-driven phenomenon. It is unified in principle, diverse in implementation, and fully grounded in physical processes. It emerges from sensory–motor interactions between an organism and its environment, mediated through embodied brain–body dynamics. It arises from the collapse of both first-order perceptual states and higher-order symbolic states that enable the translation of physical stimuli into symbolic representations, thereby creating subjective awareness.
OpenPhenomenology
Petitmengin’s theory of consciousness is best understood methodologically as micro-phenomenology: a disciplined first-person and second-person method for making the fine-grained, normally unnoticed structure of lived experience available to description, analysis, and scientific use.
OpenPhenomenology
Shanon’s Psychological Theory of Consciousness presents phenomenal consciousness as a differentiated but coherent system spanning elementary sentience, ordinary mental awareness, reflective metamentation, and non-ordinary or self-transcendent states. The theory maps the types, parameters, regions, and dynamic transformations of experience itself. Its central claim is that ordinary consciousness cannot be adequately characterized without comparing it with dreams, hallucinations, psychedelic visions, and mystical states.
OpenChallenge
A "Model Dependent Ontology" (MDO) seeks to advance a trans-ontological account of consciousness that operates by dissolving conceptual divisions without committing to any ontological substrate, whether material, mental, or otherwise. Consciousness is not the primitive; it is a "Cognition 2 (C2)" organization through which experience is rendered as language, self, and world (see below). In MDO, the world is not outside consciousness; it is part of what C2 renders. The framework is designed less as a competing theory of consciousness than as a structural device, in the manner of an extended Zen koan, for clearing the conceptual ground on which any theory of consciousness must operate.
OpenPhenomenology
Derrida offers a sustained argument against the assumption underlying most Western theories of consciousness, a sustained deconstruction of the assumption that consciousness is a primal, foundational, self-present, and self-transparent immediacy in which the subject coincides with itself and its experience is given "in person."
OpenChallenge
Akselrud's explanatory-faculty theory holds that phenomenal consciousness is constituted by the mind's innate, ungrounded capacity to generate and recognize explanations, turned reflexively upon its own states—"self-consciousness is internalized explanation." On this account, the hard problem is neither solved nor dissolved but denied: it is not a property of nature but a structural collision between two mutually exclusive explanatory forms: impersonal physical lawfulness and first-person givenness, each coherent alone and paradoxical when fused.
OpenChallenge
The Eternal Conjecture (EC) posits that “If there ever is Something, there always was Something, because no something (existence) comes from absolute Nothing (no existence)”. The EC theory of consciousness argues that because always is the single Source of all existence—including the 1st person mindedness we possess (consciousness)—that always Something (Source) must be Minded; otherwise, we couldn't be.
OpenChallenge
The emergence of awareness was not an insignificant event in cosmic history. Imagine the universe without anything like human consciousness. It would be dark, dreary, and dismal to unconscious entities, large or small. The spark of consciousness became a magical screen on which countless simple and complex attributes of the physical universe came to be projected.
OpenChallenge
Physicist and polymath Paul Davies asserts the heterodox view among scientists that consciousness is something very significant in the evolution of the universe. “Although we see consciousness only in response to some set of physical systems, nevertheless it seems to me to play an absolute and fundamental role.”
OpenQuantum & Dimensions
The following theories of consciousness are not quantum theories per se in that they do not have quantum mechanics as the essence or generator of consciousness. Rather, each reflects how quantum mechanics could facilitate or interact with other theories of consciousness. All are highly speculative.
OpenChallenge
Additional Challenge theories
OpenAnomalous & Altered States
Additional theories of anomalous or altered states.
OpenChallenge
CROW’s Funhouse of Consciousness
OpenPanpsychisms
Additional panpsychism theories, often from less well-known individuals, that offer original ideas and perspectives.
OpenMaterialism / Phylogenetic/Evolutionary
Phylogenetic/Evolutionary Additional Theories
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
There is an intimate relationship between language and consciousness. The phenomenon of thought and that of sensation form the two main aspects of conscious experience. Thought is a collective term encompassing individual thoughts, cognitive phenomena with which we organize the rational flow of consciousness.
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Consciousness is a language-mediated psychic process whose result is the experiencing of one's own psyche—a capacity that emerges neither in the brain nor from sensory experience alone but with the acquisition of the linguistic sign, because a word is a dual system pointing simultaneously outward to the sensory world and inward to another sign within the mind, such that every use of a word is at once a reference to the world and an experience of one's own mental content, rendering consciousness a socially constituted, developmentally acquired, and (as far as is known) a distinctively human phenomenon
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Brand Deisler proposes that the human biographical Self arises when other people’s linguistic attributions construct an enduring referent linked to the child, which becomes coupled with the organism’s accumulated history and eventually functions as the entity to which actions are unconsciously attributed. Although the theory does not explain why experience exists or why any state has qualitative character, it may explain how human phenomenal consciousness becomes organized around selfhood—the importance of language in how experiences acquire autobiographical significance, personal ownership, temporal extension, anticipated consequences, and the character of happening to or being enacted by a persisting person.
OpenChallenge
Metaphorming: Revealing the Nature of Consciousness with Metaphorms
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Consciousness is a highly specialized brain function that enables the encoding of personal information into communicative messages. On a subjective level, awareness of mental images signifies the readiness of information to be transmitted to an interlocutor. The Communication Hypothesis allows us to determine the position of conscious processes in relation to other cognitive processes, such as sensory detection, decision-making, and emotions. Consciousness can influence only those components of behavior that are related to the transmission of messages between people.
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Conscious experience is a property of human behavioral immersion (contra functioning) within an environment empowered by a particular understanding of 'language' as the fundamental expression or self-manifestation of reality.
OpenMaterialism / Language Relationships
Psychologist Stella Skopelitou offers a fundamental theory of everything, which she calls “Logos,” according to which, if “everything” is, first of all, a word (which includes time, space, selfhood, the universe), then so is consciousness a word, and all that it entails. The theory of Logos proposes that language is not merely a communicative tool or cognitive supplement but the fundamental structure by which consciousness manifests and the world becomes intelligible or meaningful. In this view, consciousness does not precede language; rather, it is through language that consciousness becomes possible in the first place.
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
Scientific eliminativism claims that consciousness does not exist and/or that talk of consciousness should be eliminated from science. These are strong positions to take, and require serious defense.
OpenChallenge
Me, I just don't know … My own hunch, right here, right now—if I'm coerced to disclose it and for what little it's worth—might be something of a ....
OpenMaterialism / Embodied & Enactive
Understanding human systems requires discovering “an anatomy of the universe that does away with the mind-body dualism” and replacing it with “the spatial and temporal dualities that constitute everything that exists from the ground up.” Thus, consciousness becomes superseded by the actual-possibility duality intrinsic to human systems that avoids postulating a “collective person” with a consciousness of its own or an “artificial man” without its own purpose.
OpenMaterialism / Eliminative/Illusionism
Consciousness is a recursive illusion: a simulated interface generated by a pattern-completion machine built for survival—not for truth. Consciousness is the byproduct of sensory data, memory that enables prediction, and a persistent self-narrative.
OpenMaterialism / Homeostatic & Affective
Theorists offer their Homeostatic and Affective theories
OpenMonisms
Theorists offer their theories
OpenPhenomenology
Heterophenomenology is not a phenomenology at all, but a deliberate opposition to the entire phenomenology enterprise—a third-person method for studying what subjects say, believe, judge, remember, and report about their conscious lives, giving the third-person study greater veridical value than first-person reports. Phenomenal consciousness should not be approached through allegedly incorrigible first-person access, but through the same disciplined evidential stance used in the sciences: subjects’ reports are indispensable data, but not privileged revelations of inner qualitative reality.
OpenNon-Reductive Physicalism
A conscious episode is the stabilization of one configuration within a structured state-space; its felt "overlay" belongs to a separate, non-structural constituent, the Sentience Factor, that unites with structure only when the system responds to a configuration.
Open