Speaker

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

American public intellectual, investment banker, and China commentator [?] who created and produces the PBS interview series Closer To Truth and built Landscape of Consciousness, the most extensive taxonomy of consciousness theories yet assembled.

Kuhn holds a doctorate in neuroscience (cerebral cortex electrophysiology). As a teenager deciding between physics and philosophy, he settled on brain science instead, reasoning that since ‘anything we can think about… comes from our brain,’ understanding the brain might offer an orthogonal route into the nature of ultimate reality. That question became a life passion. He began developing Closer To Truth around 1996 with producer-director Peter Getzels; broadcasting started in 1999–2000, organised around three founding themes — cosmology, consciousness, and philosophy of religion — and Kuhn has since interviewed a large share of the living philosophers, physicists, and scientists named in his own taxonomy.

Landscape of Consciousness began as an invitation to write an 8,000-word introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology on quantum consciousness. Kuhn refused, then relented after six months, and delivered a peer-reviewed paper of 175,000 words — so far from finished, by his own judgement, that he had the journal pull an early online version for two weeks before its final publication. The paper catalogued roughly 225 theories; the interactive site that succeeded it, built with visual designer Alex Gómez-Marín and hosted at loc.closertotruth.com, now holds 444 and is still growing as readers and the theorists themselves submit corrections. Kuhn organises the whole field along a rough spectrum running from pure materialism to pure idealism, with materialism alone split into twelve subcategories, and separate top-level categories for non-reductive physicalism, quantum theories, information theories (including integrated information theory), panpsychism, monism, dualism, idealism, anomalous and altered states, theological approaches, and a residual ‘Challenge’ category for theories that reject the spectrum itself as the right frame.

Core positions

Kuhn is primarily a taxonomist, not a partisan: he built the map to represent every theory with a serious claim to rationality, regardless of his own view, and deliberately kept his own opinion out of the published survey — 72 words out of 175,000 — so as not to colour any entry. His sorting principle is procedural rather than metaphysical: a theory counts as materialist if nothing in it is, even in principle, permanently beyond the scientific method; anything that requires an element no future science could ever reach counts as non-physical.

Pressed directly, Kuhn says he leans toward ‘some kind of dualism’ — a non-physical component to consciousness — with quantum theories as a fallback position and illusionism, representationalism, or neurobiological materialism as a further fallback should dualism fail. He estimates his own confidence in some form of non-physicalism at roughly 60–65%, a figure he says shifted a few points toward materialism after an emotionally moving family experience (his daughter’s successful pregnancy from a mosaic embryo frozen for over a decade) — a shift he is careful to characterise as purely emotional, and structurally no different from the near-death or psychedelic experiences that move other researchers toward non-physicalism. He assigns no ontological weight to psychedelic or near-death experiences, not having had either himself, though he says that scepticism has softened somewhat since he began the survey.

In the wiki