What is Consciousness, Really?
I Don't Know. And Neither Do You.
Recently, I joined a livestream discussion with Ishmael Hodges and Benjamin J Curtis on a deceptively simple question: What is consciousness?
Few questions have occupied me as persistently as this one. Consciousness sits at the intersection of philosophy, neuroscience and psychology. It touches not only how we understand the mind, but also what we take reality itself to be. In that sense, it is difficult to imagine a more fundamental question. It is also difficult to imagine a more frustrating one.
For centuries, philosophers and scientists have tried to explain why there is something it is like to be a conscious subject. Despite remarkable advances in our understanding of the brain, there remains little consensus on how, or even whether, consciousness can be fully explained. Many regard it as the hardest problem in philosophy. Some suspect it may be a problem that cannot be solved at all.
In preparation for an upcoming series on consciousness, I wanted to take stock of where I currently stand. Consider this article a snapshot of my present thinking: a point of departure before we examine consciousness through the lenses of thinkers such as Daniel Dennett, Thomas Kuhn, Susan Blackmore as well as a range of competing theories and perspectives.
Over the coming weeks, I will explore the topic from several angles before returning to write a synthesis examining whether, and how, my views have changed. See this text therefore more as an exploration. It is less an argument than an attempt to think through the problem with you.
Please excuse some repetition or lack of structure. This is, in essence, a single-pass mind-dump. Pun intended.
The Problem of the Starting Point
One of the hardest aspects of explaining consciousness is actually finding the right question to ask and avoiding category mistakes. Essentially, in this text I want to address the nature of consciousness, which is referred to as the “ontology” of consciousness. But I will also have to begin by asking “epistemological” questions concerning what we can know about consciousness.
In order to answer these fundamental questions, we have to start somewhere—ideally at the beginning. But where is the beginning? Is there actually a premise we can safely assume as a starting point? No, and that is where the squabble already begins. Still, I can outline what I take to be a sensible starting point, if any.
I would start with this: we know that we are conscious (although a few people might also already disagree here); this thing “it is like,” as Nagel puts it, is the primary thing that defines our very existence. We can also call this “phenomenal experience”.
However, we also seemingly experience this physical, material world around us, so how can this apparently ineffable “what-it’s-likeness” emerge from the physical that is the content of our experience? How can we get consciousness from this “grey, soggy matter”?
Thinking about this for a long time led me to believe this might actually be the wrong starting point for answering the question, as we have skipped one very important aspect: that “matter” is itself something experienced, although to be fair already alluded to it. I believe matter is not over and above that which we are trying to explain here. Thus, we need to look at Kant’s famous argument for transcendental idealism as the most logical starting point.
What Can We Know?
Kant argued that we only ever perceive “phenomena” as experiential in nature, which are therefore also bound to certain mental structures such as time and space. This means everything we perceive of reality is a functional representation, but not what he called “the thing in itself.” This, according to Kant, is where our epistemology finds a dead end. We cannot, and will never be able to, step outside the mental structures that filter our knowledge of the world. This point is also later supported by evolutionary psychology, which showed how our perception is shaped by millions of years of evolution to serve survival. In other words, it is functional, it shows what is important to survive, not what is true.
Additionally, what we can empirically study or experience is always already structured through certain a priori conditions of cognition, as Kant already emphasized: forms like space and time, and other basic conditions of intelligibility, are not derived from experience but make experience possible in the first place. In that sense, every possible content of experience is necessarily given within a perspective, and cannot simply be identified with a view from nowhere or with “objective reality” in a fully unmediated sense.
So, to already anticipate an important point, the term “physical” itself is relative to our current models, which are always subject to revision. If we define it in terms of present theories, it will necessarily become outdated as those theories change. If we define it in terms of future theories, we are appealing to an unknown content, which could in principle include any ontological commitments, including ones that take consciousness to be fundamental.
It is therefore simply wrong to present this clean, naïve realist picture of physicalism, as if we could just look at “objective reality” and read off its structure directly. For some reason, however, only non-physicalist positions are often treated as naïve. I think this cuts both ways.
Now, there are always a lot of confusing terms floating around to describe this phenomenon, such as “dashboard of experience”, “appearance”, or “representation”. All of them try to point at something important, but they also share a central problem. I think it is not necessary to use these terms in order to accurately critique direct realism, understood as the claim that we can know reality in a fully unmediated way through experience alone.
Because the point is not to imply a Cartesian theatre, as if there were someone looking at a representation of reality. There is no homunculus perceiving representations of things in themselves. Rather, the point is that experience is always already an interpretation of the world; it is inherently functional and necessarily reduces the informational overflow of the environment. This is a point even illusionists such as Dennett seem to accept.
So why isn’t there just “subjective experience,” and why doesn’t everything exist only insofar as it is experienced, as in Berkeley’s subjective idealism? Kant’s answer is that there must be something like an objective ground, a noumenal basis, that explains why different subjects converge on broadly stable and intersubjectively consistent representations.
Otherwise it becomes unclear why experience is so structured and why, for instance, a candle can burn down and wax can be found later even when no one is observing it, unless one introduces something like Berkeley’s appeal to an observing God to guarantee continuity.
So the idea is that if we only ever encounter interpreted reality, then there has to be something that is being interpreted in the first place, something that exists independently of that interpretation.
I actually believe this “theory” of what we can know of the world is undeniably true. The only question that remains is whether we can know nothing, a little, or a great deal about this noumenal world, or whether the noumenal world is even relevant. Kant would obviously say we cannot and will never even be able to conceive of the noumenal world. Here Kant’s critics often highlight a potential contradiction: if Kant says that we are unable to conceive of the nature of the noumena, how could he possibly posit their existence? This is a valid criticism to bear in mind, although I find the contradiction dubious, given that the nature of the noumena does not necessarily include their existence.
What Can Science Tell Us?
What, then, is science able to tell us? Well, if we follow this route, science is still incredibly helpful in that it lets us navigate this “interpreted”. And since it seems to help us navigate noumenal reality, it seems to tell us something — that is, as Russell proposed, what things do, how things relate and are structured. This means when it comes to science, physics, and the material and “appearential” nature of reality, we cannot answer what things truly are.
So let us take one example. The first thing I see right now when looking outside is a tree. So what is a tree? It is made of wood. What is wood made of? Atoms. What are atoms made of? Electrons, protons, and so on. So what is an electron? It is a negatively charged entity with certain dynamical properties. But what is it, in itself? We can extend the same question to quantum fields and beyond.
At some point, the description shifts. We no longer talk about “what things are” in an intuitive sense, but about mathematical relations, laws, and structural dependencies. What remains is a system of equations describing behaviour and interaction, but not an intrinsic qualitative account of the underlying entities.
Now, I can already hear what the sophisticated naturalist might answer: “But maybe the world is only explicable by what things do, how they behave; maybe structure and relation are the only things we need to explain and there is not anything else that can be explained.” That is indeed a sensible answer!
However, to circle back to where we started — what about consciousness? Doesn’t there seem to be this “what-it’s-likeness” in the very nature of our experience? If someone asks me what it is like to be sad, I know the answer; I know what this experience is, or at least I can intuitively answer the question.
The point being, scientific explanation ceases to be useful when describing what things truly are. And what consciousness is, too, cannot be explained, in my opinion, by physical processes and the neural architecture of the brain.
Schopenhauer’s Leap and Its Problems
Next, I want to present an alternative to explain what reality is, or at least a possible route. Returning to Kant’s phenomena–noumena distinction, Schopenhauer rejects Kant’s claim that we can never know the nature of the thing in itself. According to him, we have direct access to its inner nature in a specific case: in self-experience, where we do not merely observe ourselves as an object, but immediately intuit ourselves as willing. This, for Schopenhauer, is not representational knowledge but a direct disclosure of the inner character of reality as will.
Schopenhauer also notes that we nonetheless appear as physical beings from another person’s perspective, or when looking in a mirror. This introduces a dual aspect: internally as will, externally as representation.
From here, Schopenhauer makes a significant leap. If we know our will or consciousness internally, but appear as physical from the outside, then it becomes plausible that everything which appears physical might, in some sense, also have a “will” or proto-conscious aspect. On this view, matter is not fundamentally inert, but grounded in something experiential or volitional in character.
This theory is what we might call “objective idealism.” In this theory, the world has an objective inner noumenal conscious nature but is perceived, from a certain perspective, as a physical world. The physical world is therefore simply the phenomenal experience of the noumenal world. Everything is experience from a certain perspective. Proponents of this theory would simply posit that we can know what consciousness is by being conscious, and that it cannot be completely defined in terms of what things do.
This then also explains why consciousness emerges at the level of brains, since in every part of nature there is consciousness, albeit in very basic and prototypical form. And just as all puzzle pieces contain an informational part of the finished puzzle, the brain is simply what a bundle of consciousness looks like from the outside.
There are also related and rather promising views which can emerge here, such as panpsychism and analytic idealism; each going in slightly different directions.
Having laid out that route, let me be clear that I see several problems with it. My first disagreement is with the claim that we know the inner nature of our own consciousness.
Because can we really be 100% certain about our own conscious experience? No, we cannot, and this is an important point I want to stress. Consciousness does indeed seem like an ineffable “what-it-is-like” phenomenon that is not exhaustively describable in terms of what each part of the brain, neurons and astrocytes, does, and it can feel as if we had direct access to its “noumenal” nature. But that is simply how it appears. We have to be honest about this.
If we say we only know “appearances” of reality, then we also need to acknowledge that we maybe only know appearances of consciousness itself. The only difference seems to be that consciousness intuitively presents itself as a direct, intrinsic, subjective form of “knowledge” of its own nature. Experiencing consciousness in that sense feels different from explaining what a tree is made of, but perhaps it is not. Perhaps consciousness can indeed be fully accounted for in terms of mathematical structure and “grey, soggy matter.”
Moreover, even if we agreed that we understood the ineffable nature of consciousness, it would be easy to argue in that direction. However, it could also be anything other than “consciousness”. Secondly, aside from simplicity, I see no reason to assume that everything else has consciousness of some sort. While it does solve the hard problem, there is no direct reason to believe it.
Additionally, the brain is incredibly complex, strikingly so. There seems to be something special about it. The question is whether this proposed proto-consciousness, which is said to be inherent in all parts of nature, is still significant.
Another question that is often overlooked is what a conscious part of nature even is — when does “a part” or “mind” start and stop. This seems to me both a problem for panpsychism and idealism.
