Following are brief comments on consciousness from participants on Closer To Truth (arranged alphabetically). Perspectives are diverse. Quotes are from the Closer To Truth website – www.closertotruth.com.
Tim Bayne: “We're not in a position to advance theories of any detail with any degree of certainty. The science of consciousness is so immature and there are so many fundamental disputes. I think what we should be looking for are constraints on theories, and once we've got those, then we're going to be in a better position to discern the underlying theories … And there's a fundamental sense in which we don't know what we're talking about. I think we need to be honest. But we can still make progress” (Bayne, 2007).
Susan Blackmore: “What we need to do and have totally failed to do so far, is have some kind of true, nondual understanding of the world. What feels like an outside world of physical things, and what feels like an inside world of my experience—we must somehow bring these together. Physicists are trying at one level, psychologists at another, philosophers at still another … Nobody knows what consciousness is” (Blackmore, 2007).
Colin Blakemore: “The problem of brain and mind is that it's chalk and cheese. I know what a brain is. It's a physical thing; I know what it looks like, what it contains. I can see brain sections under the microscope. Then this other word, ‘mind’—and we all know what that means too, in a way. But you can't put ‘mind’ under a microscope. We don't know what constitutes it. Mind is a useful word in dialogue but it doesn't map onto something you can study easily experimentally. So, neuroscientists have tended to simply put the concept to one side. It's not the mind we're working on; it's the brain. How much of an animal's behavior can be explained just by studying its brains? You can go a long way, a very long way” (Blakemore, 2012b).
Stephen Braude: “It's not just that I'm an anti-physicalist, I'm an anti-mechanist. I don't think we can give lower-level explanations, explanations by analysis, in terms of psychological regularities or capacities. This takes us to new ways of understanding human behavior: not as if it's emitted by a kind of behavior mechanism, but to see and understand human action as one of an indefinitely large number of possibilities in a much grander action space” (Braude, 2007b).
Hubert Dreyfus: “Nobody has any idea [about consciousness], and they should just keep quiet until they do, because I think it is the hardest question: How in the world could ‘matter,’ which is this third-person material stuff, ever produce consciousness? And AI and computers are not helping us understand it one bit” (Dreyfus, 2009).
Susan Greenfield: “I find unhelpful this notion that our brains are like satellite dishes, and out there floating in the ether is consciousness, which our brains pick up” (Greenfield, 2012).
Jaron Lanier: “The real drama of the question of consciousness—on which I have absolutely no insight—is the possibility of an afterlife.” Post-mortem survival, Lanier says, is “the name of the game for a lot of people who concern themselves with consciousness … I think the scientific community ought not to tread on that territory unless it has something constructive to say.” It's “simply dumb,” he says, for scientists to tell people, “Don't believe in that.” “Don't have any hope.” “Don't have any faith.” It's not something we have evidence about, Lanier posits, then cautions, “Make your faith disciplined so you don't get manipulated by people trying to build power bases or trying to sell silly superstitions.” Lanier says that “hard attack on soft faith will backfire and is destructive.” Moreover, “ultimately it isn't honest, because many of us do feel this consciousness thing inside, and many of us wonder what it’s all about on some larger level. We just don't have the tools to do anything but wonder” (Lanier, 2007a, 2007b).
Ken Mogi: “In Eastern traditions, there's no such strict separation between the mind and the body. The mind is the body, and vice versa. If you go to a Kyoto Zen temple, you see this rich tradition of contemplation and meditation, in which people generally assume that the mind is the body and by modifying the body state, you can modify your mind state as well… It’s really nice to have this tradition behind you, but at the same time, we are living in the modern era, and we have to link to contemporary science. I think the gist of the mind-body problem from this perspective is that we are living here and now. We can talk about the mind, but the fact is that the mind is here and now. And what is here and now, our body… What Einstein confessed that he didn't understand is the nature of the ‘now.’ How is it that this present, the now, is so special in the almost infinite history of the universe?” (Mogi, 2014b).
Massimo Pigliucci: “The only examples we have of consciousness are biological. That doesn't mean that, in principle, it is not possible to build artificial consciousness, but we have no idea how to do it. And we don't know whether, in fact, it is even possible. This truly is an open question where I am entirely agnostic. But the fact of the matter is, in science, when you study something, you start with what you have, not with what you might know in the future. And the thing that we know about consciousness is that it is an evolved biological phenomenon based on particular substrates” (Pigliucci, 2023a, Pigliucci, 2023b.).
Alex Rosenberg: “I think that the available scientific evidence which drives us to atheism should also drive us to a denial of free will, to a denial of the existence of absolute fundamental ethical theories, to a physical materialism about the nature of consciousness, and to a denial that the history or trajectory of our species' existence on the planet has any particular goal, or purpose, or endpoint, or meaning” (Rosenberg, 2022.).
Eric Schwitzgebel: “I don't rule out the possibility that we're not in fact physically embodied in the way that we think we are. One possibility on my map, although not generally accepted in contemporary philosophy, is idealism. On an idealist view, minds and bodies are just kind of constructions of our minds. And so it would be misleading in a certain way to say that minds were physically embodied. It would be more like bodies are ‘enminded’” (Schwitzgebel, 2014).
Gino Yu: “The Western way of thinking, the Western framing of the world, is to try to understand who or what I am by looking outward, rather than by looking inward, observing what is happening …. Trying to understand the realm of the mind intellectually is like trying to scratch an itch you cannot reach” (Yu, Gino. 2013).
Samir Zaki: “Not a single sentence written about consciousness is worth reading. There's a lot about how it's being made a subject worthy of scientific study—I don't think it will produce anything too worthwhile, actually … Philosophical problems become philosophical problems by virtue of the fact that there are no solutions to them. What new theories have been produced by consciousness? They have been negligible” (Zeki, 2019).
In addition, “Must the Universe Contain Consciousness?”—with Paul Davies, Leonard Susskind, J. Richard Gott, Saul Perlmutter, Alan Guth, Leonard Mlodinow, Christof Koch, Brian Josephson, Stuart Hameroff, Michael Shermer, and Deepak Chopra (Must the Universe Contain, n.d.).
Separately, physics-savvy filmmaker Curt Jaimungal offers a “layering” approach to consciousness, in which successive levels (“layers”) of multiple theories reveal greater complexities and depth, much as he does in expounding string theory on his “Theory of Everything” podcast (Jaimungal, 2014a, 2014b). While more an epistemological framework than an ontological theory, “layering” could facilitate novel ways to think about consciousness.
Finally, the elemental enigma of consciousness—the implicit failure of any of the myriad theories to suffice—sugggests the inconvenient idea that perhaps the whole consciousness enterprise is fundamentally flawed. For example, post-realist philosopher Hilary Lawson has reality as an "unspecified other"—which he calls "Opennesss"—in principle inaccessible and unknowable—and what we do is "Close" the Openness of the forever-hidden "real world" by taking parts and pieces into "our world" of things and thoughts and properties. We "Close" via language, observation and reason, which is required to engage and intervene, but in doing so we also limit or cut off untold realms of reality (Lawson, 2001). One could suppose this is what we do with consciousness.