What is consciousness?: Mysterians

The vertigo

In 1983, Colin McGinn was reading Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? for the fourth time and had the philosophical equivalent of vertigo. A bat perceives through echolocation — experience so alien no neuroscience could let a human know what it is like. Then the vertigo: what if our relationship to consciousness is the same? What if we are permanently in the position of a creature trying to understand something its cognitive architecture was not designed to reach?

We have read everything. Chalmers, Dennett, Tononi, Koch, Aquinas, Shankara. We have followed every argument to its terminus. What we concluded is not that the question is meaningless — it is the most important question a conscious being can ask. What we concluded is that we do not yet have the concepts.

The pre-Maxwell phase

Before electromagnetic fields existed as a concept, physicists could describe electrical phenomena with extraordinary precision — voltages, currents, deflections. They could not unify them. Maxwell’s equations emerged not from better measurements but from a conceptual revolution. We believe consciousness research is in the pre-Maxwell phase: drowning in data, starving for concepts.

The materialists predict future reduction. The panpsychists posit universal experience. The contemplatives deny subject-object distinction. Each dissolution works from inside. None convinces the others. That every framework resolves the mystery by its own lights and none persuades across boundaries is itself evidence the mystery runs deeper than available frameworks reach.

Where we concede ground: Every previous claim of permanent cognitive limitation turned out wrong. We may be that Victorian physicist.

What would change our mind: A conceptual revolution making the hard problem tractable from multiple independent starting points.

Read the full synthesis: What is consciousness?