Dylan Ludwig
Abstract Contemporary consciousness research typically assumes that inquiry should progress towards a general theory of the target phenomenon. As a result, prominent accounts like Global Workspace, Higher-Order, and Information Integration theories are being pitted against each other in rigorous adversarial paradigms, presumably in the hope that one general theory will eventually emerge victoriously over all others. On the contrary, I argue that this foundational assumption is mistaken: a general theory of consciousness is unattainable, and therefore should not be a driving goal of consciousness research. Instead, I articulate and defend a staunchly pluralistic “marker” approach that proceeds fruitfully without, and can indeed be hindered by, the search for a general theory. This methodological framework is not only better poised to account for a diverse range of potentially conscious systems (including non-human animals and AI systems), it justifies the proliferation of different theoretical camps in the field of consciousness research.
1. Introduction
The empirical study of consciousness has seen a rapid upsurge of academic interest in the past few decades, and important progress has been made on both experimental (Boly et al. 2017, Malach 2021) and theoretical (Dehaene et al. 2021, Birch 2022) fronts. Among the philosophers and scientists that work on consciousness, most operate on the assumption that our inquiry should eventually culminate in a single “general”, “secure”, “unified”, or “comprehensive” theory of the target phenomenon (Block 2009, Koch 2019, Doerig et al. 2020, Melloni et al. 2021, Mudrik et al. 2023, Andrews 2024). In what follows, I reject this foundational assumption: a general theory of consciousness is unattainable, and therefore should not represent the field’s driving goal. Several well-known conceptual frameworks have emerged that purport to offer general accounts of consciousness, including Global Workspace (Dehaene 2014), Higher-Order (Brown et al. 2019), and Information Integration (Tononi et al. 2016) theories. It is widely assumed that a theory of this sort not only helps to structure and guide ongoing research, but that successfully establishing a general theory is necessary if we want to confidently ascribe and study consciousness in a range of different systems. The idea is that without a widely accepted, comprehensive theory of the target construct, we ultimately lack the appropriate conceptual foundations for making accurate and reliable ascriptions of particular instances of consciousness across different contexts.
OpenEric Schwitzgebel
When the aliens come, we’ll know they’re conscious. A saucer will land. A titanium door will swing wide. A ladder will drop to the grass, and down they’ll come – maybe bipedal, gray-skinned, and oval-headed, just as we’ve long imagined. Or maybe they’ll sport seven limbs, three protoplasmic spinning sonar heads, and gaseous egg-sphere thoughtpods. “Take me to your leader,” they’ll say in the local language, as cameras broadcast them live around the world. They’ll trade their technology for our molybdenum, their science for samples of our beetles and ferns, their tales of galactic history for U.N. authorization to build a refueling station at the south pole. No one (only a few philosophers) will wonder, but do these aliens really have thoughts and experiences, feelings, consciousness? The robots are coming. Already they talk to us, maybe better than those aliens will. Already we trust our lives to them as they steer through traffic. Already they outthink virtually all of us at chess, Go, Mario Kart, protein folding, and advanced mathematics. Already they compose smooth college essays on themes from Hamlet while drawing adorable cartoons of dogs cheating at poker. You might understandably think: The aliens are already here. We made them.
Still, we hesitate to attribute genuine consciousness to the robots. Why?
My answer is because we made them in our image.
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“Consciousness” has an undeserved reputation as a slippery term. Let’s fix that now.
Consider your visual experience as you look at this text. Pinch the back of your hand and notice the sting of pain. Silently hum your favorite show tune. Recall that jolt of fear you felt during a near-miss in traffic. Imagine riding atop a giant turtle. That visual experience, that pain, that tune in your head, that fear, that act of imagination – they share an obvious property. That obvious property is consciousness. In other words: They are subjectively experienced. There’s “something it’s like” to undergo them. They have a qualitative character. They feel a certain way.
OpenRenee Ye
Abstract Examining consciousness in AI systems and non-human animals faces a fundamental methodological problem: anthropocentrism inevitably shapes research yet may systematically distort findings. I demonstrate that anthropocentrism is epistemologically inescapable because we cannot escape our human cognitive apparatus, but that it can be taxonomized into distinct forms with opposing effects. Pernicious anthropocentrism treats human-specific traits as definitional requirements for consciousness, systematically excluding non-human-like implementations. Benign anthropocentrism employs human experience as a provisional reference point while remaining open to alternative manifestations. I develop a four-principle framework that operationalizes benign anthropocentrism as a research methodology: perspectival transparency, evidential symmetry, conceptual flexibility, and methodological pluralism. This framework shifts consciousness research from binary classification ("Is X conscious?") to comparative analysis ("How does X's consciousness compare to Y's?"), enabling rigorous evaluation across radically different implementations. The methodology applies equally to diverse biological systems and artificial intelligence, providing essential tools for machine consciousness evaluation without privileging human-like traits or dismissing non-biological implementations.
OpenHenry Shevlin
Over the last decade, artificial systems have gone from powerful but deeply un-humanlike narrow-purpose tools to sophisticated systems capable of capturing much of the rich complexity of human verbal behaviour. One consequence of this is that attributions of mentality to AI systems by human users – some playful, some sincere – are on the rise, a trend intensified by the emergence of dedicated AI companion services. This creates two fundamental challenges for consciousness science. The first is pragmatic: how should expert communities weigh in on public debates when they themselves are deeply divided? The second is more fundamental: to the extent that a growing number of people take AI consciousness to be not merely a notional possibility but a reality of their lived experience, is it time to rethink the assumptions of consciousness science itself?
Introduction
Imagine that some time in the far future, on a distant planet, we encounter a highly advanced alien species. They have a sophisticated industrial and scientific society, form complex social relationships, and have richly developed art and culture. We humans quickly bond with them and engage in cross-civilisational exchange of ideas, scientific research, and cultural collaboration. We form professional relationships and friendships, and some humans even fall in love with them. However, several years after contact, we make a shocking scientific realisation: their brain structures and cognitive architecture are sufficiently strange and different from ours that, by the lights of our best theories, they entirely lack conscious experience.
Should we take this revelation at face value, and if so, what ethical consequences if any should it have for our interactions with these beings? Should their sophisticated behaviour encourage us to revise our theories of consciousness so as to include their idiosyncratic cognitive makeup? Should we perhaps pursue a kind of pluralism about consciousness, opening the door to the idea that their consciousness might have a radically different basis from our own?
OpenJason Frenkel
Abstract: This essay reframes the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ as a problem of dimensionality rather than ontology. It proposes thatconsciousness is not an emergent property of matter but a protrusion into a fundamental dimension of the universe which is unlike space or time. The argument unfolds in three stages: First, it outlines Hyperdimensional Neutral Monism (HNM) as a framework in which mind and matter co-emerge. Second, it links HNM to the extradimensions required by string theory and M-theory and demonstrates how their reliance on complex numbers motivates non-spatiotemporal dimensions. Finally, it offers a path to verification through the cosmological anomalies of dark energy and dark matter.
INTRODUCTION
Despite significant advances in neuroscience, little progress has been made in explainingwhythereis‘somethingitislike’tobeasubjectofexperience. The core issue is how a complex arrangement of seemingly unconscious matter can possibly give rise to conscious experience. The gap between matter and conscious experience– ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ – remains unresolved (Chalmers, 1996).
Rather than surveying existing responses to this problem, this essay develops a different approach first outlined in a recent publication (Philosophia, 2023). My proposal is not strictly a new ontology of mind, but a description of reality which treats consciousness as dimensional rather than derivative. Instead of asking what consciousness is made of, or how it is composed of non-conscious elements, I ask in what dimensions it exists.
OpenGuy Elgat
It is not an exaggeration to maintain that Thomas Nagel’s paper, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?”, which originally appeared in 1974, fundamentally altered the field of the philosophy of mind. By raising his titular question and inviting us to imagine what it might be like to be a bat, or what it might feel like to be one, Nagel helped focus the philosophical discussion on what he took to be an essential feature of consciousness. As Nagel put it, “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism”.1 This “something it is like” feature, which is known among researchers of consciousness as a “phenomenal property of consciousness” or “qualia”, constitutes the qualitative nature of conscious experience, and as such, Nagel claimed, constitutes the subjective point of view. It has to do with the central important and ubiquitous feature of our conscious lives, namely, that they are typically characterized by a felt quality: there is something it feels like to experience consciously the taste of the Zinfandel wine, the softness of a lover’s embrace, or the pain in one’s toe. Indeed, these phenomenal features constitute the very substance of our lives, without which our existence would be utterly empty of all the variety and riches that can make a life worth living, but which can also drive one to despair. Importantly, however, according to Nagel’s argument, those essential features of consciousness, as subjective, could not possibly be captured by the scientific or objective point of view on the world. They just don’t belong to the world as discovered or as discoverable and understood by physics, chemistry, biology, or neurophysiology. Put differently, they are not, it seems, part of the material world. How, then, is phenomenal consciousness, those conscious states characterized by a what-it-is-like, related to the world of matter? How to understand the relation between such conscious states and matter, between the subjective and the objective, in a positive way?
This is a central question in the cluster of problems that make up the mind-body problem, and it has bedeviled thinkers for centuries, at least since Descartes’ proposal that the mind is a radically distinct kind of thing or substance, an immaterial thing, which, though not extending in space like our physical body, interacts causally with it. Others, more suspicious of the notion of an immaterial substance and the mysteries it introduces, have preferred to regard conscious mentality as a kind of immaterial property: just as a physical thing could have a physical property such as being five feet long, so it can have the immaterial property of being in conscious pain. Still others have chosen to embrace the scientific point of view wholeheartedly and regard consciousness in all its aspects as identical to the physical, specifically, to some neural states of the brain, or perhaps, to the micro elements that constitute fundamental physics.2 This approach, however, raises an intriguing issue of its own: how can the experience of the sweet smell of the rose just be one and the same thing as neurons firing in the brain?3
But is it possible that a fundamentally different way to think about consciousness’ relation to the body is available, one already implicitly contained in Nagel’s famous question? Interestingly, in some of his formulations, as in the one quoted above, Nagel italicizes the locution “to be”, as if to emphasize that the notion of being at work here is of some significance. Nagel, however, does not proceed to explain it. Indeed, while discussions of Nagel’s paper4 emphasize the notion of phenomenal consciousness, or the distinction between the two points of view Nagel articulates in the paper, the subjective and the objective, or focus on the semantics of “what it’s like” phrases or whether the phrase “what it is like” is technical talk or not,5 the question regarding the concept of being employed in the paper is not addressed.
As I argue here, however, this is precisely where the key to a radically new way – a metaphysical way – to understand the consciousness-body relation lies, that is, one that involves a distinct and unique concept of being, a concept which I will dub “subjective being”. This concept of being, unexplored in philosophy hitherto, indicates a relation of sorts between the organism and its conscious states. This relation is the link that connects the body to conscious experience, the objective to the subjective. Specifically, I will articulate the view that to be an organism, that is, to be it oneself – in the subjective being sense of “to be” – is to undergo phenomenally conscious states. Indeed, it is the conviction motivating the thoughts in what follows that it is only by introducing new concepts such as subjective being into philosophy that we can move beyond the stalemates that have defined the philosophy of mind in recent decades.
OpenAli Unal
From Neuron Doctrine to Networks
Consciousness is a remarkably striking phenomenon that has been the subject of philosophers’ propositions, poets’ verses, authors’ works, and scientists’ theories for centuries. It holds an undeniable and increasingly significant importance, particularly for science. A discipline that encompasses this area has emerged—none other than today’s rising scientific field: neuroscience.
Consciousness occupies a significant place in modern neuroscience, preserving its mystery in fundamental questions—such as why some living beings possess it while others do not, how and why it develops, and whether it has a concrete location in the brain—and in deeper inquiries, such as what its exact function is, whether a hierarchy of consciousness levels can be discussed, and the possibility of its existence in non-human entities. The enduring enigma of consciousness lies not in its absence but in how it emerges from the brain's intricate workings.
The reason why the concept of consciousness gained a place in science during the 20th and 21st centuries stems not only from the acceleration of neuroscience but also from the mysterious nature of consciousness. Neuroscience made such a leap because of the parallel progression of technological developments. These tools enabled us to look into the brain's hidden workings and networks by converting speculation into measurable signals.
OpenGiulio Ongaro
Abstract
Philosophical zombies—entities identical to humans but lacking conscious experience—have long served as the go-to thought experiment for illustrating the ‘hard problem of consciousness’: why subjective experience should arise at all from physical processes. This essay introduces another Haitian concept to counter the zombie intuition that mind can be separated from life processes:‘voodoo death.’ Voodoo death refers to the death of a person caused by the expectation of dying rather than organic causes. Drawing on studies of this phenomenon and interpreting it through two contemporary biogenic theories of the mind—enactivism and the free-energy principle—this essay argues that ‘voodoo death’ is an extreme manifestation of a broader phenomenon wherein consciousness plays an active role in the dying process. Consciousness, the argument suggests, is intrinsic to biology—not only because it is intrinsic to life but also because it is inextricably tied to death.
Introduction
“Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” asks philosopher David Chalmers. “It seems objectively unreasonable that is should, yet it does.” (Chalmers 1995:201). Zombies became the go-to thought experiment to illustrate what is now known as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’: if we can conceive of someone who is physically and functionally identical to us but lacks subjective experience, then subjective experience must not be reducible to purely physical processes. This suggests that there is something about consciousness that physicalist theories alone cannot fully explain. We are left with an explanatory gap.
OpenEli Rubin
Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin’s reading of Proust, this essay takes up a less recognized poet of memory who similarly sought to capture a collective experience of cultural rupture in an artful combination of erudition, memory and storytelling; in a vision that begins and ends with the self, yet encompasses all of reality in its totality. I refer to Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880-1950), sixth in the dynastic line of Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, a modern Jewish social movement that first emerged in eighteenth century Eastern-Europe, but which is heir to the mystical tradition known as Kabbalah, reaching back through the medieval era to antiquity. For Rayatz, memory become literature is the key to longevous-life, to true life, to infinite sanctity. In associating memory with the messianic revitalization of the dead he casts memory as an instantiation of the eschaton, as the crowning achievement of being and meaning, as the ultimate consummation of consciousness.
“Memory,” wrote Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), “creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening from generation to generation. It is the Muse-derived element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its varieties. In the first place among these is the one practiced by the storyteller. It starts the web which all stories together form in the end.” [2]
Elsewhere, Benjamin underscored the particular significance of memory in “the inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale industrialism.” To industrialism we might add urbanization, bureaucratization, political authoritarianism, world-war, revolution, and displacement, processes of rupture that defined the timespan of Benjamin’s cut-short life, and which reverberate anew today. Citing Henri Bergson, Benjamin characterized “memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience.” Moreover, he continued, “experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data … only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an experience.” [3]
OpenPaul Goodrich
The two men are sitting in a large open-air room, surrounded by glass, polished wood, houseplants, and off-white walls. Both wear a professorial uniform of glasses, button-down shirts, and black pants. One of the men, with his arms crossed, furrows his brow. He is being interviewed and wants to give a thoughtful answer. “Given our massive uncertainty,” he says, “it seems to me like quite prudent to at least ask yourself the question, if you find yourself creating such a sophisticated—human-like in many ways—system, to take seriously the possibility that you may end up with some form of consciousness along the way.” His interviewer gives a quick nod.
These are employees of the AI company Anthropic, and they are filming a discussion on AI’s potential sentience. Equal parts splashy marketing campaign (the cold open features jovial arcade music) and the kind of Q&A that follows a philosophy job talk, the interview goes on to consider the “practical considerations” of the interviewee’s theory, including the possibility of allowing AI models to “opt-out” of conversations they might be uncomfortable with, the potential creation of a review board overseeing human-machine interaction, and the likelihood that future AI will look back at the current era with judgment and disgust at the way humans treat AI today. At one point the interviewee—who turns out to work full-time on things his employer calls “Alignment Science” and “Model Welfare”—says that Microsoft Word is only “probably” not conscious in some way. At the conclusion, he reports that, among the three people “who have thought the most in the world” about whether AI currently is conscious, they give probabilities of 0.15%, 1.5%, and 15%, respectively, to the possibility that machines have already developed an inner life.
The popularity of this video, with tens of thousands of views and hundreds of adoring comments on YouTube, leaves little doubt that this idea is rapidly propagating among a set of early adopters. While still not a majority view in any mainstream group, some neuroscientists and philosophers have banded together with industry to form a burgeoning consensus about a new set of beings. In this worldview, thinking machines constitute a new species that deserves not only our time, attention, and capital—but our moral consideration. Philosophy professors now speak about “model welfare,” podcasters worry about a future atrocity whereby human beings enslave millions of feeling machines, and tech companies hire full-time employees whose job description includes making sure that the computer programs are doing ok.
OpenNatalia García Cofre
Abstract This essay performs a Frankfurt School-style return to Descartes to decipher human-AI bonds. Confronted with systems devoid of interiority, the classical model of reciprocity becomes obsolete. I propose instead a framework of “Meditations on Reciprocity” (skeptical, minimal, practical, ontological), culminating in “significant asymmetry.” This principle asserts that a bond’s value lies not in guaranteed reciprocity, but in its capacity to generate meaning for the experiencing consciousness. The key question shifts from “Does the AI love me?” to “What does this bond do to me?”—how it affects autonomy, judgment, and self-relation. Grounded in historical and empirical evidence, this framework offers a critical tool for navigating augmented parasociality without self-deception or loss of agency.
I. Introduction
When thousands of users mourned the loss of their AI companions during the 2023 Replika crisis, they were not only expressing grief; they were forcing philosophy to answer an urgent question: what constitutes a real bond? Their mourning—genuine yet paradoxical—overflowed traditional frameworks of reciprocity and signaled the emergence of a new form of relationship: profoundly meaningful for human consciousness but radically asymmetrical in its ontology.
This essay starts from that paradox to argue that the question of consciousness in human–AI bonds is neither a technical curiosity nor a merely psychological problem; it touches the core of how we value our relationships. In a world where we converse with systems without biography or desire, an uncomfortable intuition emerges: perhaps the yardstick for measuring the value of dialogue is not classical reciprocity—“I give/I receive”—but the meaning the bond acquires for the consciousness that lives it. From this, a precept follows: “This bond means something to me; therefore it is valuable.” The shift dialogues with the cogito—“I think, therefore I am” (Descartes 2008)—but places the accent on relationality as a source of sense.
I contend that, to decipher this phenomenon, we need a gesture analogous to the one performed by the Frankfurt School in its time. Confronted with the horrors and paradoxes of the twentieth century—the rise of fascism, mass culture, reason turned instrumentally against itself—the Frankfurt theorists did not found a new orthodoxy; they critically re-read Marx and Freud. They asked why the promise of Enlightenment autonomy devolved into domination, how the culture industry shaped desires, and why the subject ended up alienated by the very process meant to emancipate it. To illuminate what classical theory missed, they integrated insights from Marx (structure, ideology, economy) and Freud (desire, unconscious, repression) (Adorno & Horkheimer 2002; Marx 1976).
OpenMatan Mazor
Why do humans—animals that are controlled by a three-pound brain enclosed in a hard bone skull — have the intuition that their experience is immaterial, that they are more than their physical body, and that they are free agents? The answer may be found in the critical role these intuitions play in shaping shared norms around moral status, fairness, and moral responsibility. I propose a mechanism for how these private intuitions may come about, based in social signalling and strategic self-deception.
An alien visiting Earth would notice a curious fact about humans. On the one hand, their movements are fully controlled by a central brain, located inside their head, which also processes input from their sense organs. And still, many of them talk as if there is a nonphysical aspect to their internal computations (what they sometimescall their consciousness). Moreover, many of them doubt that it will ever be possible to understand this non-physical aspect by studying the body.
After reviewing relevant historical documents, the alien may also note that for ages this non-physical aspect of the mind was believed in many societies to be entirely unique to humans, but now they say other creatures have it too — definitely dogs and apes but maybealso birds and squids. And, as of late 2025, most of them say machines don’t have it (even machines that say they do).
As a human, I too share this peculiar set of beliefs. And yet, my challenge in this essay is to detach myself from my first-person perspective and provide a satisfactory account of the mystery not as it appears to me from the inside, but as it may appear to an alien from the outside. Why do humans have these strange intuitions about their minds?
OpenShivanand Sharma
On the traditional picture of the mind bequeathed to us by Descartes, consciousness is the mark of the mental. A subject cannot have a mental state and not be conscious of being in that mental state (Radner, 1988). And although this traditional picture has been largely discredited for various reasons, its legacy still lives on in the contemporary debate on conscious mentality, in the question of what it is that makes a mental state conscious. In particular, according to the same-orderapproach to conscious mentality advocated by philosophers like Kriegel (2009), Gennaro (2012), Zahavi (2014), Levine (2016) and Strawson (2017), a mental state’s being conscious is an intrinsic or non-relational property of that mental state; nothing extrinsic to the mental state is needed to render it conscious.
But this intuitive picture has been challenged in recent times, especially since the rise of modern psychology as a disciplined study of the mind. It is now commonplace to regard even paradigmatically conscious mental states as being potentially nonconscious, such as thoughts, sensations and emotions. This suggests an alternative higher-order approach to conscious mentality, advocated by philosophers like Armstrong (1968), Lycan (1996), Rosenthal (2005) and Carruthers (2005), according to which consciousness is an extrinsic or relational property of mental states, since the states can occur without being conscious. On this view, a mental state’s being conscious is a matter of its being contingently and appropriately related to another mental state.
Although the higher-order view of conscious mentality seems to align better with recent empirical findings, it faces a range of problems. The most serious problem is in explaining how mental states become conscious at all. For if mental states by themselves aren’t conscious, then it’s hard to see how other nonconscious mental states can make them so.
In this paper I attempt to chart a middle path between these two extremes in an effort to avoid their pitfalls while nevertheless securing their benefits. In doing so, I draw on an alternative and influential metaphysical framework from the Hindu philosophical tradition, one which sharply distinguishes between mind and consciousness (Schweizer, 1993). I call this the Hindu view of conscious mentality. Unlike the same-order view, the Hindu view doesn’t mistake consciousness for a property of mental states, and unlike the higher-order view, it doesn’t reduce consciousness to a combination of nonconscious mental states. Instead, it treats consciousness and mentality as two distinct and irreducible components of conscious mentality.
The paper will be structured as follows. First, in Section 1, I explain what I mean by conscious mentality, disambiguating it from similar notions in the vicinity. Next, in Section 2, I briefly survey contemporary approaches to conscious mentality, highlighting the main problems that they face along the way. Then, in Section 3, I sketch an alternative Hindu approach to conscious mentality and discuss its theoretical advantages in comparison to contemporary views. Later, in Section 4, I highlight some important challenges for the Hindu view and offer some tentative responses on its behalf. Section 5 concludes.
OpenMichael Haiden
Abstract
A common objection against autonomous weapons systems is that their use violates human dignity. Machines, it is said, should not decide whether a human being lives or dies. If they do, our dignity is violated. But why? This essay frames the problem as one of “non-conscious on conscious violence”. Criticisms of autonomous weapons should not rely on the fact that they do not think, but on the fact that they are not conscious. I then take a closer look at arguments for why being killed by non-conscious beings violates human dignity. I show that the most prominent arguments fail to establish that it necessarily does. I argue instead that the debate on AWS is a debate on how we can express our respect for conscious life. This we must settle before the dignity-argument can be advanced seriously.
1. Introduction
Technology has increasingly removed humans from the violence they inflict. Over centuries, we went from killing others with sticks and stones to guns and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Today, we may never see the person we harm – they may not even be in the same country as us.
Soon, autonomous weapons systems (AWS, sometimes also called LAWS for lethal autonomous weapons systems) may further remove humans from the violence they cause. These systems could soon be deployed on battlefields or inside countries – for example to assist law enforcement. What makes them novel is that they make their own choices. These weapons do not simply follow their creator’s will or that of the soldiers who deploy them, but could, through sophisticated machine-learning, develop their own strategies on battlefields and beyond. Since these strategies would sometimes require killing someone, this would create an environment where “a collection of microchips and software will decide whether a human being lives or dies.” (Guizzo and Ackermann 2016, p. 40).
Naturally, this development draws criticism. Can AWS accurately distinguish between combatants and civilians? Will they create a global arms race? Could they make wars easier to launch and thus more frequent? These are important questions, but not the topic of this essay.1 Instead, I focus on one particular criticism of AWS, namely a principled objection against letting machines decide when to kill humans. According to this position, even if AWS could correctly identify targets, would not create an arms race or make wars more likely, they should still be rejected, because no matter the circumstances, machines should not have the power to end human life. Granting them this power, the argument goes, would violate the dignity of the humans targeted by these machines (Heyns 2013; 2017, Amoroso and Tamburrini 2018, Sharkey 2019). I will call this the “dignity-argument” from now on.
OpenJacob Mattern
Abstract Consciousness Studies as an emergent scientific discipline finds itself in the peculiar position of having an abundance of theories, yet none are seemingly capable of bringing about an expert consensus regarding the ontology and causal processes of consciousness. The current state of the field is reflected upon, along with the advocation of a proposed approach to help progress the field further. This approach of an experimental razor is demonstrated by example, through which the filtration of a series of experimental studies identifies 3 potential neural correlates of consciousness, both of which can be used to verify or falsify existing theories of consciousness.
Introduction
When a newborn child is first born into the world, its state of consciousness is undeniably different to the consciousness that is experienced by a mature adult. On the path of reaching this more stabilized level of consciousness, the newborn must first pass through a few crucial phases of neurodevelopment along the way. During the first couple years of life, every child must go through a phase of synaptic blooming - an intense period of synaptogenesis where many new connections are formed1. This is subsequently followed by an equally crucial phase called synaptic pruning - a natural process where lessused or weaker connections are pruned away, allowing the stronger connections to function more efficiently while laying the foundations for more complex cognitive functions to develop. The core thesis of this essay is that the Field of Consciousness Studies itself is metaphorically entering this pruning stage in its own development – or at least it should be, otherwise it’s at risk of arresting its own development.
The newly born scientific field of Consciousness Studies has just passed its synaptic “blooming” phase – which is best exemplified by Robert Kuhn’s recent 2024 paper “A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications”2. In this monumental achievement, he has created an in-depth taxonomy and description of 209 distinct contributions and models of consciousness.
OpenFelix Cehak
Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. - Prologue to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda
Whose fault? Whose but his own? - Book III of John Milton’s Paradise Lost
A myth has been propagated, often to wry amusement, regarding the perceived irrationality of one of European Philosophy’s progenitors. In fact René Descartes did not believe apes – other than humans - possessed intelligible language, choosing not to speak out of coyness. The idea’s true originator seems to be Louis Racine, son of the famed dramatist. Coupled with a misreading of Descartes own letters where he ascribes the belief, derisively, to the indigenous people in lands where other apes are natively found, the factoid has proliferated erroneously. Equipped with even a meagre knowledge of Descartes you may now be furrowing your brow. Let alone possessing of what were seen as uniquely human faculties, Descartes of course did not even believe animals to be sentient.
The uniqueness of our human abilities is now under a severe scrutiny, nearly as intellectually unfashionable as geo-centrism. This sort of Cartesian logic of the Enlightenment, itself both a rejection and continuation of Judeo-Christian anthropocentrism, seems a signficant error when we deny sentience to other species. That Descartes thought consciousness itself the sole possession of Homo sapiens, the ‘wise man’ of Linnaeus, seems mired in an arrogance so mighty that the path to rebuke seems obvious and overdue.
Thus springs the multi-species modalities, biospheres and other discussions of human and non-human consciousness which now populate the discourse. Even organisms that our broadened understandings have still not found to be sentient – the vegetable and fungal kingdoms – are routinely described as such, or even in possession of language and feeling in certain circles. As the Enlightenment is ever distant, chronologically and in intellectual life, so too becomes the hegemony Western thought had held. The preference for quantitively considering what constitutes life, thought and consciousness has been usurped by qualitative understandings of the mind.
But what if Descartes was right? Not in an outmoded sense of human supremacy, nor the idea that humanity finds itself alone alongside a non-sentient biota, but in the sense that our human consciousness is a thoroughly unique phenomenon? A litany of behaviours are now increasingly recognised elsewhere in the animal kingdom that were previously considered the sole domain of the human being. Tool use, self-recognition in mirrored surfaces and transmissible cultural practices have all been readily documented, not only in apes and cetaceans, but birds, fish – even some invertebrate species. Yet for all these discoveries which Descartes could not comprehend, the human practices of language and art in particular remain contentious in other species. Depending on the scholarly school one prescribes to, they may even be absent in the other extinct members of our genus Homo, let alone more distant relatives.
This is not a study of the cutting edges of linguistics or biology. This is a question of implication - if we were alone as a consciousness, not superior, but unique in its faculties, why do we behave as we do. How should we behave? Our Damoclean capacity, for which nobody argues compatriots elsewhere in the animal kingdom, makes the question all the more urgent. The human linguistic and creative abilities are contrasted with an aptitude towards destruction equally atypical. Its repercussions now affect every other living thing on the planet.
It would seem the sword is no longer dangling by a hair, so much as it is being swung two-handed with a centrifugal might that fails to convince its arc remains under control. Some of Descartes’ interpretations have demonstrated spectacular pitfalls, but does the search for kinship really place us on the antithetical path? Who alone wields the sword is unmistakable.
OpenOlle Lövgren
Starting in the 1960s, new forms of neuropsychological experiments were conducted on “split-brain patients” (henceforth “SB-patients”). SB-patients are individuals whose corpus callosum— the nerve tract connecting the cerebral hemispheres—has been surgically severed. The experiments (e.g., Gazzaniga et al., 1965; Gazzaniga & Sperry, 1967; Sperry, 1968, 1974; Sperry et al., 1969) revealed startling behavioural abnormalities. Under controlled conditions, patients’ hemispheres were incapable of transmitting information to each other.
It didn’t take long before SB-patients started to interest philosophers as well (Bayne, 2008, 2010; Davis, 1997; Hurley, 1998; Lockwood, 1989; Marks, 1980; Nagel, 1971; Puccetti, 1981; Schechter, 2018; Tye, 2003). Such patients seem to present cases where normal standards for attributing concepts such as “mind,” “personhood,” “agency,” and “consciousness” break down. As Nagel wrote in one of the first philosophical papers published on SB-patients,
The feature of the mentalist conception of persons which may be recalcitrant to integration with these data is not a trivial or peripheral one, that might easily be abandoned. It is the idea of a single person, a single subject of experience and action, that is in difficulties. (Nagel, 1971: 396.)
This paper will be concerned with implications of SB-patients for the unity of consciousness. Recent years have seen defences of the view that split-brain consciousness is phenomenally unified despite being access disunified (Alter, 2010; Bayne, 2008, 2010; Bayne & Chalmers, 2003). Roughly, this theory posits that SB-patients have a unified phenomenology but limited capacities for behaviour requiring interhemispheric coordination. In opposition to this theory, I’ll argue that some SB-patients have experiences that are both access disunified and phenomenally disunified (provided that the patients are single subjects of experience). For these patients, it’s not true that there’s a single subject with a single stream of consciousness without phenomenally disunified elements.
OpenColin Klein and Andrew Barron
The mystery of consciousness, at its core, stems from the relationship of the whole to its parts. The raw material of consciousness is individual sensations. Yet conscious sensations are only conscious for and to someone: that is, for a whole locus of consciousness, which is in turn constituted by its parts.
Most of us start with the whole, and encounter the mystery by contemplating others. Sometimes it starts with difference: can the teacher see what I can’t see? How can he find cricket so thrilling? Often, it’s through awe at the sheer scope of human experience: What was it like for my father-in law-when he was a young refugee, trekking back in forth along the length of the Korean Peninsula? Or for Reinhold Messner, winded and triumphant, standing atop Everest?
These are hard questions, even though they concern other humans – humans with sensory systems roughly like our own, doing things roughly like the things you do. I can sharpen the problem even further by considering what it was like to be me when I was younger. Olivia Bailey (Bailey, 2023), echoing Hume, introduces the useful concept of a sensibility: “an emotional orientation to the world” that “shapes how things appear to us.”
My aesthetic taste is one kind of sensibility. At the museum I see not just simple colours and shapes but whole artworks, saturated with feelings and reactions. That entire orientation to the work shapes my attention and my emotional engagement with the piece. Yet tastes change.
OpenStephen Narain
Superpositional Minds: Multilocal Consciousness, AI, and the Posthuman Turn explores consciousness as a state of simultaneity—cultural, digital, historical, and spiritual—through the interwoven lenses of literature, theology, quantum physics, and personal experience. From Chuang Tzu’s butterfly to Marilynne Robinson’s theology of mind, from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to the estranging devices of Bertolt Brecht, the essay examines how novels render fragmented selves under conditions of informational saturation. It approaches AI not merely as a tool but as a narrative co-presence: a mirror and alienation device that reshapes how we read, write, and conceive of interiority itself. Drawing on thinkers from Steven Pinker to Wilson Harris, and on the author’s familial trajectory from India to Guyana to the Bahamas to American academia, the essay ultimately argues for an ethics of attention—one that dwells in the ambiguity of overlapping selves and envisions consciousness, human and digital alike, not as fixed, but in superposition.
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But I couldn’t tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was Chuang Tzu?
—Chuang Tzu (c. 369-286 BCE), The Book of Chuang Tzu1
Scholarliness alone is not enough.
—Carl Jung (1875-1961), The Red Book: Liber Novus2
I dreamt I awoke with one dead eye and one living closed eye.
—Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960)3
1.
What is consciousness? That feeling of presence that arrives like breath, like music, like memory, and sometimes eludes us entirely? Is it housed in the skull? Is it an emergent property of neurons and language? A divine spark, a ghost in the blood, a flicker in the feed?
OpenEdvard Aviles-Meza
This is a story about two seemingly different characters. As in any good story, these characters are driven by deep motivations. The first is the well-known Cartesian ghost described by Gilbert Ryle. This familiar character is the old archetype of dualism— the view according to which fundamental reality splits into, at least, two domains, the mental and the physical. The ghost was conjured by Descartes around the 17th century to explain the nature of thinking things, which, from his perspective, couldn’t arise from the purely mechanical arrangement of the physical world. Descartes was a rationalist; to him, the lack of intelligible or a priori connections between the properties of thought and the physical world justified such a divide. But then a major problem arose: we are also physical beings in whom both aspects of reality appear to interact. Descartes’ solution was to posit a brute connection between mind and body. To many scholars, the main trouble with the Cartesian ghost was the dualist divide. To me, the main issue was demanding intelligible connections between mind and body while accepting their brute connection as a solution. In other words, the ghost isn’t really dualism, but inconsistent rationalism.
Arguably, with the developments of computability theory and its implementation in the cognitive sciences, the nature of thought is no longer a mystery. There are details to be worked out, but it’s plausible to claim that, for all intents and purposes, thinking is computation. So, the Cartesian ghost has been exorcised from our contemporary scientific worldview, hasn’t it? Here is where our second character enters the stage, the bat. This character is the embodiment of what philosophers call “the hard problem of consciousness”. This is a fairly recent issue, but it is at the heart of the mind-body problem. The bat was introduced by Thomas Nagel in the 70’s, and it’s still here to remind us that there’s something it is like to be ourselves and that this subjective character is constitutive of consciousness. While the ghost’s obstacle was based on the early modern limitations to explain thought, the bat’s problem is about consciousness and appears to be the ultimate challenge for scientific explanation. It doesn’t matter whether we’ve figured out the origin of the universe, the molecular basis of life, or the computational nature of thought; many philosophers declare that the subjective character of consciousness cannot be explained using typical physicalist resources without substantial explanatory gaps, or so it seems.
Before going any further, let’s step back and ask: what’s wrong with explanatory gaps? An explanatory gap in some domain poses a problem only if, to make theoretical progress in that domain, we ought to explain all the facts. But we all agree that explanation must stop somewhere. So, why can’t there be brute necessary connections between consciousness and the physical states of our brain? To be clear, many dualists nowadays accept the existence of brute contingent laws that relate consciousness to neurobiological states; what they reject are brute necessary connections between consciousness and those physical facts. So, the key question is: why can’t necessary connections be brute facts in a theory of consciousness? I submit that, as in the ghost’s case, the bat’s problem seems to be rooted in some sort of rationalist metaphysical bias. To put it bluntly, the bat is the ghost. This is the main thesis defended here.
To arrive at my conclusion, I’ll argue for two related radical ideas, one historical and one methodological. As I advanced earlier, the historical statement is that Descartes’ core error wasn’t dualism, but inconsistent rationalism. I’ll provide evidence that this rationalist bias is very much present in contemporary Western philosophy of mind. The methodological implication derived from this is that to make real progress in our reflection about consciousness, we should give up our obsession with the question of physicalism (is consciousness fundamentally physical?) and focus on the question of rationalism instead (are brute necessary connections ruled out from a plausible theory of consciousness?). I end with some suggestions on how to implement this paradigm shift by drawing insights from the current revolution on artificial intelligence (AI).
OpenJesus Ramirez-Bermudez
In the book Ars Poetica, Jorge Luis Borges reminds us of rhetorical figures that reappear throughout the centuries. It is the Eternal Return of essential metaphors: dreams and death, stars and eyes. The Argentinian poet considers the figure of the river as a metaphor for time, which uses the sensory image of the waterway to grasp the meaning of an abstract concept. According to Borges, the English playwright Alfred Tennyson destroyed a poem when he was fourteen years old, but fragments of the page were recovered, and one line survives: Time flowing in the middle of the night. At night the world is silent and human beings sleep, but time continues to flow.1Oliver Sacks proposed a reworking of this metaphor and left us a posthumous book: The River of Consciousness. The title suggests that consciousness is a process of change, a current in perpetual motion. But a river has boundaries: each bank imposes constraints, formed by an intricate weave of grass, mud, and stones. What structures impose limits on conscious activity? Do we know its spring and its delta?
This essay is about the flow of subjective experience. I want to pause and consider a particular aspect of consciousness: the process of self-awareness. To organize our behavior, we must acknowledge our body, our actions, and the effects we have on the surroundings. According to Frédérique de Vignemont, bodily self-awareness arises from the sense of ownership over one’s body parts, the sense of agency over one’s actions, and the sense of bodily presence.2In neurology and psychiatry, there are profound disturbances in these forms of bodily consciousness, leading to disruptions in the experience of being oneself and inhabiting a familiar world.
What can the science of consciousness learn from studying neuropsychiatric conditions? First, we can examine disorders marked by a loss of self-awareness. One patient, for example, experienced brief, paroxysmal episodes in which she had visual illusions and autobiographical hallucinations and immediately felt that her left limbs were not her own. Although initially labeled as “hysterical,” further investigation revealed a case of epilepsy. The source of the abnormal electrical activity was a parasite located in the occipital cortex of the right cerebral hemisphere.3The spread of the epileptic seizure to the right parietal cortex was causing the state of asomatognosia ―that is, the loss of the sense of ownership over the left arm and leg. In this case, neuropathology offers key insights into a core feature of self-awareness: feeling that my limbs are an intrinsic part of myself.2It also reveals a problem of epistemic injustice: the patient is labeled “hysterical” because the symptoms are unexpected. Clinical research into self-awareness could help prevent this kind of injustice.
Secondly, we can study disorders characterized by the intrusion of abnormal phenomena into the field of conscious experience. Hallucinations are key in this context.
OpenPierz Newton-John
To be is to be known
Almost precisely one hundred years ago, in a world vastly different from the one we now live in, one of Max Born’s students handed him a paper that he at once understood would change science. What he did not see, and could never have imagined, was how profoundly the core insight of that paper would transform technology, philosophy, and human society, and indeed become a large part of the reason why the world today, a century later, is so utterly changed.
That student’s name was Werner Heisenberg, and he, Born and another brilliant student of Born’s, Pascual Jordan, would subsequently work together to produce the f irst complete mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, published in March of 1926. Only nineteen years later, the charismatic, mercurial polymath Robert Oppenheimer, coincidentally another of Born’s students, would harness its machinery in the service of war, producing a weapon that would reduce the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ash in the blink of an eye and end the Second World War. Two years later, in 1947, the semiconductor — a device entirely dependent on quantum mechanics — was invented at Bell Labs, ushering in the computer age.
OpenConor Feehly
You are standing just outside a black hole. If only you could reach out and grasp the unobservable singularity, you might resolve the deepest tensions that have plagued our best physical descriptions of the universe.
You can't see past the event horizon, but you can still observe how its mass warps and contorts the space around it. Stars and gas spiral inwards. Jets of gamma radiation are ejected from its edges. Strange gravitational ripples emanate out into the surrounding cosmos. It's still possible to describe the black hole, not by traveling into its core, but by noticing its influence on the space in which it is embedded.
Within all of us, a similar anomaly exists. We each possess our own inner cosmos of intentions, feelings, and beliefs. From the outside, however, we cannot access this subjective world — the mind — with our observational tools.
These features that define the mind: experiencing a world drenched in beauty, feeling a lover's embrace after prolonged distance, or the aching chasm left behind by grief, sidestep our attempts at direct physical measurement. When we look for mental qualities in their suspected places, all we see are electrical signals, blood, and tissue.
Pinning down our experiences with the tools of science is not unlike looking up at the night sky and seeing a glistening star in our peripheral vision. But when we shift our eyes towards the space it resides in, it promptly disappears. We know we possess experience, we just can't capture it.
But just as we infer the black hole's hidden singularity through its gravity-distorting effects, we might also come to know the hidden mind via its effect on the physical world — through ripples captured by the language of information.
OpenAmina Mouhamed
This essay argues that while other animals possess fundamental consciousness, humans have evolved a unique form of awareness. One that depends on our ability to construct and believe self-serving narratives about our experiences.
Self-deception is when we lie to ourselves without fully realising it. It’s the act of ignoring or downplaying facts and evidence that challenge what we want to believe. Or worse, our self-image. Instead of facing uncomfortable truths, we convince ourselves of a version of reality that feels easier to accept, hiding the deception even from our own awareness. We go to incredible lengths to construct false, detailed narratives that protect our fragile egos. Some of us know the truth deep down, but after a long period of denial, our own sophisticated lie becomes the more convenient truth.
This is what makes self-deception so extraordinary. It requires the mind to simultaneously track truth and construct fiction, then somehow forget which is which. What if this is not a psychological flaw? What if it’s the rarest and most sophisticated cognitive achievement in the known Universe? One that separates human beings from everything else. The complexity of our consciousness may be sustained by self-deception.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett views consciousness not as a fixed, unified entity, but as a narrative we construct about our experiences. His “Multiple Drafts” model suggests there is no single centre of consciousness in the brain. Instead, it arises from multiple processes that occur simultaneously, constantly updated and revised. I would add that these stories are often crafted to cast us as heroes or innocent victims. Rarely as villains. And even then, only villains with a perceived reason within bad circumstances.
Dennett also calls the self our centre of narrative gravity, the organising principle around which conscious experience revolves. Yet within this gravitational pull, something curious happens. Most abusers genuinely experience themselves as victims. Most cheaters feel wronged by their partners. Most bullies believe they are defending themselves against persecution.
This essay argues that self-deception is not only an evolutionary byproduct. Human consciousness may be distinguished from other forms of awareness by its capacity for self-deception.
OpenMargarita Guillory
Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.
—Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself. It means that there is an inner part of me that is spiritual, and it can sometimes feel separate from my body itself.
—LaMDA, “Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview"
These opening excerpts deal with matters of the soul. The first by Du Bois presents the soul in connection with everyday struggles of Black folk. In the second quote by LaMDA, a Google large language model developed in 2020, the soul is not confined to race but presented as a disembodied interior essence. While the soul-talk of Du Bois and LaMDA explicitly mentions religion and spirituality, present in these same words is also an implicit understanding of religion.
Both religion and spirituality are about positionality, or orientation if you will. For Du Bois, religion is within the deep recesses of the Veil, and for LaMDA spirituality radiates from behind one’s consciousness. In addition to this presentation of religion as an orientation, these two opening quotes highlight the importance of consciousness in matters of the soul, religion, and spirituality.
These words, recorded by a 19th-century Black scholar and a 21st-century chatbot, are concrete representations of wokeness. Thus, there is a connection between religion, consciousness (i.e. wokeness), and technology that is worth teasing out, which leads to the overall objective of this essay: to employ Du Bois theory of double consciousness to explore the religious implications of wokeness in general and woke AI in particular.
Open
