Challenge Additional Theories

Colin McGinn is not alone in wondering whether humanity will ever truly understand consciousness. Martin Rees, the UK Astronomer Royal, also questions the human cognitive capacity to discern consciousness (Rees, 2007).

Similarly, mathematical physicist and leading string theorist Edward Witten, who is optimistic that physics can solve nature's most profound mysteries of fundamental structure and ultimate origins, is pessimistic about prospects for a scientific explanation of consciousness. “I think consciousness will remain a mystery,” Witten said. “I tend to think that the workings of the conscious brain will be elucidated to a large extent … But why something that we call consciousness goes with those workings, I think that will remain mysterious. I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness …” (Horgan, 2016).

Morales's Transitive Analysis of Accumulated Human Experience

Independent researcher Fabian Morales (Instituto de las Ciencias Transitivas™, Venezuela) proposes the Transitive Analysis of Accumulated Human Experience, not directly as a theory of consciousness, but as the claimed first executable scientific method that includes first-person experience within its legitimate scientific domain—producing, among its results, two independent demonstrations that individual consciousness is the constitutive ground of reality and the dissolution of the hard problem of consciousness (Morales, 2026).

The method operationalizes consilience of inductions—identified by William Whewell (1840) as the most robust epistemological criterion available to science—as an executable protocol: the first systematic method to produce consilience by design rather than waiting for it to emerge spontaneously from the history of a discipline. Applied to the totality of accumulated human experience across all cultures, disciplines, and epochs, the method extracts universal operative truths validated by convergence, without exception, under an active search for counterexamples.

According to Morales, a central contribution is the identification of an epistemological category without precedent: the collective first-person datum—categorically distinct from the individual first-person datum that science legitimately rejects. While a single introspective report is an anecdote, the consilient convergence of thousands of cultures across millennia on the same structural conclusion constitutes the most robust scientific result available about what humanity has actually experienced (Morales, 2026).

What distinguishes this contribution from other theories of consciousness is categorical: every other entry proposes a theory about phenomenal consciousness—what it is, how it arises, what generates it. The Transitive Analysis operates at a different level: it is a scientific method that can evaluate all such theories through consilience, while simultaneously establishing—through the dual scientific proof (formal proof confirmed independently by transitive consilience)—that individual consciousness is not one feature among others but the constitutive foundation from which the predicate "real" has been deployed in every language, culture, and epoch without exception. The method establishes three ontological dimensions of reality—D1: operative-independent physical reality; D2: collective consciousness; D3: individual consciousness as constitutive ground. Thus, the hard problem is dissolved, not by answering it within its original framing, but by revealing that its framing was structurally inverted: it asked how D1 generates D3, when D1 as a known, described, and meaningful reality is always already constituted within D3.

Morales claims that independent operational validation includes convergence across eight independent AI architectures and institutional peer validation at IUTCM (Instituto Universitario de Tecnología Dr. Cristóbal Mendoza), Venezuela.

References

Morales, F. (2026). The Birth of Rigorous First-Person Science: The Collective First-Person Datum and the Transitive Analysis of Accumulated Human Experience. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21455287 (Full nine-publication corpus accessible through DOI links within.)

Whewell, W. (1840). The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. London: Parker.

Lawrence’s Neopragmatics

Independent researcher Adrian Lawrence’s Neopragmatics proposes that consciousness is irreducible to any single category, but emerges holographically from the recursive, parallel relations in the structure, process, information, complexity and control between categories, while treating agency as separate and distinct.

Existing theories often privilege one explanatory category: information, integration, computation, physical substrate, experience, or fundamental properties. Neopragmatics argues that this creates an artificial isolation and a partial projection of relational phenomena.

If we look at mind/body or psychosomatic/epigenetic approaches, does that mean we are limited to either the body or the mind? Taking a holistic view, it simply means that one aspect of consciousness causes a ripple that affects another through mutual flow, pressure, feedback, and connections.

Holographic means each category identifies partial information about the whole and the overlap between perspectives increases resolution. Consciousness is affected by each category without beginning or end as consciousness emerges in the relational interaction between categories.

If consciousness depends on reciprocal relationships rather than on a single substrate or property, then disagreements between theories may partly reflect different measurement frames rather than mutually exclusive explanations. According to Lawrence, this explains why multiple approaches can identify genuine aspects of consciousness while failing to fully account for it.

Consciousness describes the integrated experience of being. Agency describes the capacity to influence outcomes through control, intention, and action. They interact but are not identical, and both exist on a spectrum of traits rather than as a simple on-or-off.

Neopragmatics converges on many theories independently. A cybernetic approach with recursive self-modeling, information integration, adaptive feedback, memory, prediction, internal regulation, and control, operating under dynamic tension, serves as a metastable anti-foundation.

Paradoxes are productive and can be entirely logical. Holding multiple contradictions simultaneously under tension can be coherent, particularly when analyzing in parallel and sequencing from multiple frames; e.g., “material idealism,” “pancomputational panpsychism,” “monist dualism.”

Lawrence quotes Alfred Korzybski, "the map is not the territory,” and Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message.” Neopragmatics was written, Lawrence says, not to hand-wave emergence, but to demonstrate, provoke, and inspire connections between the architecture, poems, and prose.

Reference

Lawrence, Adrian. Neopragmatics: Deus Per/Intra/Ex Machina. Each of the paper’s 195 (and counting) paragraphs was designed to fit within 280 characters. PhilPapers. https://philpapers.org/rec/LAWNUE-2.