We are not short of theories of consciousness. Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s epic survey of the consciousness ‘landscape’ — the most comprehensive ever published — runs to some 175,000 words and is by no means exhaustive.
Yet even though Kuhn surveys dozens of theories from many branches of science and philosophy — including a version of my energy–based model of consciousness — he concludes that we still have no ‘ultimate’ theory of consciousness.
And he is right.
No current theory can explain the subjective nature of consciousness in a way that is consistent with the known principles of physics, chemistry and biology; no theory is at once practically testable, falsifiable and able to generate non-obvious predictions.
This is despite centuries of toil by philosophers and scientists and — in more recent times — the expenditure of countless millions of dollars of research funding.
What’s the problem?
In a new book, I argue that we have so far failed to explain consciousness because we have overlooked something very simple. We have neglected the most basic and obvious feature of sentience, the one that we are most familiar with in our own mental lives.
We have ignored the fact — or more precisely, we have been unable to grasp the full implications of the fact — that sentience exists from the inside out. It exists, as I put it in the book, from the ‘intrinsic perspective’ of the thing that is conscious.
And why have we neglected, or been unable to grasp the implications of, this fact? Because of the way we habitually do science.
The way we do science (and I say this as someone who has published many scientific papers) prevents us from studying the intrinsic perspective of the thing that is conscious because it operates from the outside in, that is, from the ‘extrinsic perspective’.
Geologists, cosmologists, chemists, particle physicists and bacteriologists habitually treat the objects they study as mindless and lifeless matter, not as systems having a sentient inner life. Even neuroscientists and psychologists, in some cases, can be accused of treating their living subjects in this way.
As things stand, we have no scientific framework within which to study the intrinsic perspectives of physical systems, what’s going on from their point of view. And this is as true of brains as anything else. In fact, in most areas of physical science it is just assumed — without rationale or evidence — that physical systems like atoms, molecules, cells, apples, mountains and planets have no intrinsic perspective to study.
In a series of upcoming articles for this Medium publication, I’ll be sharing some key insights from the book. They will guide us towards a new framework for the study of consciousness that meets all the scientific criteria noted above.
It is the first framework to seriously explore the idea that all physical systems have intrinsic perspectives and to offer a way to study and explain conscious experience from first principles.
I’m happy to accept that the framework may be wrong, or only partially right; but at least we can find out either way by testing it!
Many people will find the ideas I present in the articles surprising (although some of them are not particularly new). For other people the ideas may be — quite literally — unthinkable because they challenge some of our deepest preconceptions about science and about nature itself.
I look forward to presenting the ideas in the coming weeks, and hearing from those who are interested in them, and especially from those most opposed to them.