Cognitive psychologist Benny 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. Rather than seeking a single neural mechanism or metaphysical substrate, the theory maps the forms, parameters, regions, and dynamic transformations of experience itself. Its central methodological premise is that ordinary consciousness cannot be adequately characterized without comparing it with dreams, hallucinations, psychedelic visions, and mystical states, which disclose normally hidden dimensions of experiential organization (Shanon, 2001, 2002, 2008).

In other words, Shanon proposes a phenomenological framework in which consciousness is charted rather than reduced: a structured system of types, levels, parameters, functional features, and dynamic operations, mapped from first-person description and covering ordinary and non-ordinary states within one taxonomy. Against the representational-computational orthodoxy he spent a career criticizing, Shanon treats the phenomenology of experience as primary data for cognitive psychology rather than as an epiphenomenal residue to be explained away. Consciousness on this account is the region of internal subjective experience, differentiated into hierarchically ordered and mutually interdependent types—from a pervasive sentience through structured mental awareness to reflexive meta-mentation—and extended upward into non-ordinary states that the framework treats as continuous with ordinary ones rather than pathological departures from them. The claim that the phenomenology in its totality exhibits coherence and internal structure is itself the theory's central empirical assertion.

Phenomenology as Cognitive Psychology

Shanon's framework grows from a sustained argument that cognitive science had mistaken its own explanatory posture. In The Representational and the Presentational, he argued that the dominant paradigm—mind as manipulation of internal symbolic representations—cannot accommodate the presentational character of experience, and proposed instead an approach closer to Gibson’s ecological psychology, treating mind as a dynamic participant in the world rather than an inner theatre modeling it (Shanon, 1993). The consequence is procedural: if experience is presentational, careful structural description of experience is not preliminary to the science but constitutive of it. Shanon had earlier addressed the function of consciousness (Shanon, 1998) and the structure of altered temporality (Shanon, 2001); his 2008 framework consolidates these into a single system (Shanon, 2008).

Types, Levels, Regions and Hierarchies

The framework is introduced in stages. Shanon distinguishes three ordinary types (or forms) of consciousness which, by his account, are hierarchically ordered and interdependent, forming a well-integrated tripartite system. The first is a primitive sentience or sensed being, without specific content or structure, pervasive and coextensive with life. This is Cons1, “sensed being” or sentience, the pervasive and minimally articulated condition of feeling alive. It is not defined by a specific image, thought, or object but by the elementary presence of subjective existence. The second is mental awareness, characteristic of higher mammals, comprising differentiated subjective experience together with its contents and forms—mental imagery, ideation, flows of consciousness, inner speech. This is Cons2, mental awareness, which encompasses differentiated contents such as perceptions, images, emotions, ideas, inner speech, and the stream of thought. The third is metamentation, the mind's capacity to take its own productions as objects for reflection, monitoring, and control. Cons3, metamentation, is the ability to take mental productions as objects of further awareness through reflection, monitoring, evaluation, and control (Shanon, 2008).

Each type (or form) is further articulated across regions of self, world, and temporality, so the framework seems two-dimensional rather than a simple ladder. These types/forms are hierarchically related but not simply cumulative. Mental awareness can occur without explicit reflection, and metamentation operates upon contents already available at lower levels. Shanon thereby separates phenomenal consciousness from self-reflective consciousness: what-it-is-like to perceive, imagine, or feel need not include a higher-order judgment that one is having the experience. At the same time, the hierarchy explains how consciousness can become increasingly articulated, distanced from immediate sentience, and capable of representing its own operations.

Non-Ordinary States as Evidence

What distinguishes Shanon's cartography is its evidential base. The Antipodes of the Mind charts the phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience from more than a hundred of his own sessions and systematic interviews across cultural contexts, producing a structural typology of visions and non-visual effects (Shanon, 2002a; Shanon, 2002b). Shanon treats these states not as distortions to be discounted but as a natural laboratory in which ordinarily invisible structural features of consciousness become salient—the constitution of the self, the sense of reality, the experience of time (Shanon, 2003a; Shanon, 2003b). His 2008 framework accordingly extends beyond the three ordinary types to non-ordinary levels, including experiences the subject does not attribute to their own mind.

Parameters, Features, and Dynamic Operations

Beyond types and levels, the framework specifies parameters along which any conscious state varies—among them the sense of reality attaching to perception, the sense of meaningfulness attaching to experience, and an aesthetic sense organizing it. It identifies functional features of consciousness, including sentience, the having of experiences, the capacity to make experiences objects of reflection, orientation toward others, and a capacity for transcendence. And it specifies dynamic operations by which the system develops: differentiation and crystallization, by which levels arise; distancing, which separates inner world from surroundings and thereby subject from object; internalization, which creates a mental domain in which one may operate when action is not feasible; reflexivization, by which products of mentation generate further mentation; and externalization, by which the mind creates objects experienced as real though not part of reality.

Method and Contested Ground

The framework's methodological stance is that first-person structural description can be systematic. Critics of phenomenological cartography generally press two objections: that introspective reports are theory-laden and unreliable, and that classification, however elaborate, is not explanation. Shanon's reply is implicit in the project—that a science lacking an adequate description of its explanandum cannot know what it is explaining. But, as usual, the framework offers no mechanism, no neural correlate, and no account of why any of the described structures should be felt. Its reliance on psychedelic phenomenology, while methodologically careful, also invites the charge that the resulting taxonomy generalizes from atypical and non-ordinary phenomenological experiences.

Assessment

Shanon's is among the more ambitious attempts to give phenomenal consciousness a systematic descriptive architecture without importing a metaphysics or a mechanism. Its distinctive contribution is the insistence that ordinary and non-ordinary states belong to a single phenomenological taxonomy, setting it against frameworks that treat altered states either as marginal and irrelevant or as veridical windows to ultimate reality. Its limitation is one it accepts by design: the framework maps the territory of experience with unusual care while remaining silent on how any of it is generated.

References

Shanon, B. (1993). The Representational and the Presentational: An Essay on Cognition and the Study of Mind. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf.

Shanon, B. (1998). What is the function of consciousness? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 5(3), 295–308.

Shanon, B. (2001). Altered temporality. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(1), 35–58.

Shanon, B. (2002a). The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shanon, B. (2002b). Ayahuasca visualizations: A structural typology. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(2), 3–30.

Shanon, B. (2003a). Altered states and the study of consciousness: The case of ayahuasca. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 24(2), 125–154.

Shanon, B. (2003b). Hallucinations. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10(2), 3–31.

Shanon, B. (2008). A psychological theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15(5), 5–47.