Robert Lawrence Kuhn on the Landscape of Consciousness, Materialism, and Idealism

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Pleasure to be here. Nice to be on the other side.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Great. Well, it's a life passion, and I really appreciate the work you've done over the last few years. I've followed it, and I look forward to our interactions.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Well, it's a great question, and consciousness to me has been a life passion. When I was deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up, as a teenager planning for college, I wanted to understand ultimate reality, as a small fraction of humanity may want to do — we're part of that passionate group. And I thought of physics and philosophy. And then one evening — I remember this, I was 16 years old, whatever — I had the realisation that anything we can think about, physics, philosophy, whatever, comes from our brain. And maybe if I could understand the brain, that would be an orthogonal, different way to approach the nature of reality. That started a long quest: I did my doctorate in neuroscience, cerebral cortex electrophysiology, and so on. And then, doing Closer to Truth, beginning really 30 years ago, in 1996, though we didn't start broadcasting until 1999 or 2000, I began to focus on consciousness as one of the main themes. We had originally three themes: cosmos, dealing with cosmology, physics, mathematics; consciousness, which is all mind–body problem, free will, personal identity, different kinds of intelligences; and then meaning, basically philosophy of religion from a non-sectarian philosophical point of view.

This has been my passion, and I've followed it with Closer to Truth. I should say the versions of Closer to Truth you've seen were co-created by Peter Getzels, who was the producer and director for much of that time. I just loved exploring consciousness, and I did it with anybody I thought had something interesting to say. I didn't necessarily have to agree with it, but anybody who had an idea that I hadn't had, as long as it had some rationality to it, I explored. We built up this large corpus of material, and I never thought of organising it.

Then one of the viewers, who happened to be on the editorial board of the Journal of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, said they were going to do a special issue on quantum consciousness and asked me to write the introductory article — a basic five- or eight-thousand-word introduction to consciousness. I refused. I said I couldn't do it, it was too complicated, because I knew that putting something in writing is permanent, you worry about every word — very different from interviewing somebody, reading their books, talking verbally where the exact words don't particularly matter. I said no, and he pursued me. Make a long story short: after about six months, I realised this was something I should do in my life, and if I wasn't going to do it now, I never would. So I took the challenge. And honestly, it's not an exaggeration — the work it required was at least twenty-fold, maybe fifty-fold more than I'd expected.

In the process of gathering all the theories together, I began to realise this was a jumble, and I needed some organisational structure to make sense of it. I enjoyed doing that — I'd done it before for other things, like different kinds of cosmogenesis and different levels of nothing, which I pursued on Closer to Truth. I wanted to do the same for consciousness. I thought the best way was a rough linear spectrum, from the most physicalist, materialist kinds of theories to the most non-physicalist kinds — pure non-physical stuff, which we now call idealism. That would be the basic spine of the organisational structure.

As I started categorising theories within this, I realised a couple of things. First, the number of theories under materialism — the first category — was vastly more than any other category. In the end, almost fifty per cent of all the theories were materialist. It's interesting to explore why that's the case, and I have a good idea why. So materialism needed subcategories, and I developed a series of them, because there were so many.

Then, this isn't given by God or anything, it's just my way of doing it, and it's changed a little over time: start with materialism, which has lots of subcategories. Then, what's next? Non-reductive physicalism — still one hundred per cent physicalism, but with a very different feel. Then quantum theories, which are physical but people can take beyond that. Dimensional theories, which are kind of quasi-physical. Then information, where information is fundamental — now, complexity makes this a little more complicated, because computational functionalism, computation, is itself a subcategory under materialism. But when information becomes my fourth big category, it's information of a different kind — fundamental in some independent sense. Then panpsychism, then monism — there's a lot of overlap between them — dualism, and idealism. That's eight.

Then I began to realise there were theories that could go in those categories but were odd — founded on a different principle than a fundamental ontology. They were founded on some experiential idea: near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, ESP and parapsychological motivations, meditation, psychedelics. All of these mechanisms aren't theories themselves, but they inform people's theories much more than the philosophy does. So I built a ninth category, anomalous and altered states. Again, those aren't theories — it's a separate category, and within each modality, like psychedelics or meditative states or near-death experiences, particular people then have theories beyond that.

Finally, I saw there were some things that didn't fit any of those categories — challenges to the nature of the question, or the idea that the human brain hasn't evolved to even understand the question, or different theoretical approaches to the whole subject. So I had a final section called challenge. That's the organisational structure: materialism, non-reductive physicalism, quantum and dimensional theories, information theories, panpsychism, monism, dualism, anomalous and altered states, and finally challenge.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Okay, can't forget idealisms. So: panpsychism, dualism, idealism, altered states, and then challenges. That's the ten. And under materialism, I now have twelve separate subcategories.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah, thank you. After the paper was published, many people said I should write a book. I spent almost a week putting a proposal together, and as soon as I did, I realised — I had so much feedback from so many people that the paper, after just a week, felt almost archaic. New people were giving me critique, telling me what I'd forgotten and what I should include. And I realised a book would just be obsolete by the time it was republished — embarrassingly so — and would take a huge amount of time.

So we converted it into an interactive, current website instead. We spent almost a year developing it, and now it's launched and clickable in a strong way. The number of theories has increased greatly. I should give some credit: the beautiful map was created by Alfonso Gómez-Marín, a friend I sent early drafts of the whole paper to, with the organisational structure, and he turned it into this one nice map. The original paper had maybe 225 theories. The website — I did a count last night, knowing we'd be talking — has 444. That's going to change; there's nothing magical about four, I'm not going to start a religion based on getting to 444. Actually, I realised that in Chinese, four is the worst number you can have, because it's a homophone for death, so 444 is death, death, death in Chinese. So I'm going to change it and add a few more — I have some backlog, as people write to me telling me what I've forgotten, and most of the time it's beyond what I'd consider a theory, but a lot of times it isn't.

When I did the original paper — very interesting point — it went through multiple versions and peer review. At peer review it was 55,000 words; remember, it was originally supposed to be about eight thousand. After three or four more peer reviews, and me being obsessed with it, it was eventually published at 175,000 words. One of the earlier peer reviews — I think the third — passed when it was about 130,000 words, and they published it immediately on Science Direct, because that's their policy in science: as soon as something's peer reviewed, it goes on the website even if it won't be in the journal for another eight months or so. I absolutely panicked. I said, take it down, I'm not finished, it's incomplete, there are theories not there. They said they couldn't do that. I begged them, and after two weeks they said, look, we'll take it down — the only time we do that is when we suspect plagiarism or fraud. I said, I don't care, take it down, you can explain it later. So they did, and six months later it was published in final form.

But while it was up online for two or three weeks, I got dozens of emails from people I didn't know — many of them professionals in the field, or philosophers, or devotees of different theories — angry that I'd left out a certain theory. Some of these I hadn't heard of before, and looking at them, they were good, solid theories, not very well known. Others I'd rejected because they didn't pass my level of acceptance. But I saw this groundswell of people saying, I want to hear that theory — things I might have rejected, like Steiner's thinking. So I included those as well, and I credit people when they tell me. This has continued to happen — a lot of the theories that have come in have been self-generated, in a positive, virtuous feedback circle. It's not me coming out with my own brilliance finding all these theories, but because we had this core, people writing in. It's really a wonderful collective effort. I had the vision of trying to be the repository of the best thinking of humanity at this time — reflecting a lot of history, not everything, but reflecting the theories currently most expressive of the totality of humanity. That's my goal: to have that place, easily understandable and searchable. That's what the website does. There are different kinds of maps, lists — a lot of ways to discern each of these theories.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Let me go back to a foundational idea I feel strongly about, and I know you do too. The nature of consciousness is the single most important clue, or window, whatever metaphor you want, to ultimate reality. Because if consciousness is entirely physical, that would be a strong indication — not a proof, not one hundred per cent, but a strong indication — that ultimate reality is ultimately only physical. On the other hand, if consciousness has any non-physical aspect, component, property, whatever, and we can go into all these subtle differences, then that's a hint in the other direction: that the physical world does not exhaust ultimate reality. That doesn't prove God, doesn't prove anything, but it says something. So that's the fundamental idea we start with.

Second: we really have two words. You mentioned materialism and physicalism, and we use them synonymously, rightly so, but there's a subtle difference. Materialism has more of a historical context and deals with the ontology — what is the stuff made of. Physicalism is a broader concept, a superset of materialism, in a way that also deals with properties — it's also epistemological, in terms of methodology. I went with materialism because the idea of this landscape of consciousness is purely ontological: what is it, at its ultimate reality? Not epistemological, not developmental — those things matter, and we deal with a lot of them, but at the core it's ontological. What is consciousness? Hence materialism.

By the way, I took the word "landscape" from Leonard Susskind's book The Cosmic Landscape — I think he published it around 2007 or 8 — about the string theory landscape and anthropic ways of thinking about the universe. That's the concept: dealing with the entirety of all the possibilities that consciousness could be. So materialism is a word people tend to reject now, because we know things aren't matter in the old sense — they're quantum fields, with all sorts of weirdness, entanglement, superposition, and things people misinterpret. Murray Gell-Mann famously called these quantum extrapolations "flapdoodle." But nonetheless, there's this other stuff there. Still, materialism, to me, is the stronger term, and it has that historical context. I'm using it in an ontological sense — that there is stuff, made of physical stuff, which can certainly be quantum fields with all their complexity, or whatever lies below that. We deal with a lot of those theories.

One of the most interesting observations — I start the original paper with this — is how broad consciousness is in its hierarchical positioning. There are theories from the most fundamental stuff below quantum physics to every level you can think of: below the quantum level, the quantum level, the cellular level, the neuronal cellular components, microtubules, in the Penrose–Hameroff version. Then it's within cells, then the neuron itself, then the connections between neurons, then the broader connections in the brain, then the electromagnetic fields over the whole brain, then some go to an extended-brain theory, where consciousness is beyond the brain, involving the environment. And then you go all the way up to panpsychism and idealism — cosmopsychism, where the whole of the universe is a division of panpsychism, and panprotopsychism, where proto-consciousness is distributed widely. So you have this vast hierarchy of being, and I try to plot, in later papers, where on that hierarchical line the key moment is for each theory — the point that's critical for consciousness.

Another point I really want to stress — the second foundational idea, after building the map — is that all theories about sentience in any way whatsoever — the nature of free will, whether there's life after death, whether virtual immortality is possible in a real sense, AI consciousness, personal identity, alien intelligence, all these kinds of questions — are directly related to your theory of consciousness. Very few people, if any, address that. Everybody has their own theory about free will or personal identity or AI consciousness, but nobody talks about what theory that's based on. Depending which of these theories you hold, that's a major determinant of the reality of that subject. I've tried to plot that — nothing's absolute, but between certainty and impossibility I have six categories in a paper I did: certainty, almost certainty, likely, possible, unlikely, almost impossible, and impossible. So if you plot any of these big ideas — life after death, free will, AI consciousness — against theories of consciousness, you can rate it as unlikely, or almost impossible, or likely, and so on. So the importance of the map isn't just an intellectual exercise — I think it directly affects a lot of the questions we deal with elsewhere, such as the whole public-policy issue of AI consciousness today. People don't realise that many are assuming one theory of consciousness — computational functionalism, one theory under one subcategory under materialism, a third-level theory in my landscape — when there are almost five hundred other theories. I'm not saying they're all weighted the same, but people aren't appreciative of how important the theory of consciousness is to these big issues.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Okay, there are two ways to approach the question. Let me start with the harder one. Some of my big categories — non-reductive physicalism, quantum theories, even information — can also be thought of as materialist. Even panpsychism: Galen Strawson famously says the real materialism is basically panpsychism. And that's not a frivolous point of view — some people say anything that's real is materialism or physicalism, and if you bring something in you didn't expect, like proto-consciousness, all right, that's the new materialism; bring in something else, quantum theories, dimensional patch physicalism, that too. You can get caught in that trap, which would put everything under materialism. I try not to do that. I try to distinguish the big categories by something sufficiently different in the way of understanding. Non-reductive physicalism says there's something that is non-reductive, and to me that's a huge difference.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Non-reductive means it's impossible in principle to explain behaviours or actions at a higher level of the physical world by the activities of the lower level. Reductionism says that ultimately we can describe everything at the fundamental levels of physics. A classical example is the wetness of water: an H2O molecule isn't wet, but take a zillion of them and you have wetness. Where does wetness come from? It seems radically different — an emergent phenomenon — but you can calculate how it arises from the bonding angles between hydrogen and oxygen and how they behave under different temperatures. So it's hard and complicated, but predictable, that something like wetness could occur. That's reductive — weak emergence, we sometimes call it. That would be strictly part of materialism.

Non-reductive physicalism says it's impossible in principle — another term is strong emergence — that no matter how much we learn, it will be impossible in principle ever to explain mental states by the actions of the most fundamental aspects of physics, whatever they are, string theory, quantum loop gravity, it doesn't matter — it's impossible to ever go down to that. But non-reductive physicalism is still physicalism — it's not claiming anything other than something in the physical world that has this impassable barrier in terms of explanation.

Anything in materialism can ultimately be reduced to its lower level, though the theories themselves constitute activities at much higher levels — from subcellular up to whole brains or beyond. It was a massive task to organise all these materialist theories. I said almost half of all the theories are materialist, and I have a good idea why: if you have a non-materialist theory, you can describe it — we have hundreds of those — but you can't make much progress beyond that, because by saying it's non-physical, it's not subject, in the same way or at all, to the scientific method. If your theory is materialist, it's all physical, then you can make progress — you may not be right, but you can use the scientific method. So there's a proliferation of materialist theories, because you can make progress, and each one locates where consciousness makes its big impact at a different level.

I can give you some of the categories. The first I call philosophical — basic ideas like emergence, identity theory, functionalism. Second is eliminative materialism, or illusionism — where, not in the comic-book sense, consciousness doesn't exist. That sounds self-contradictory, and people make fun of it, but if you really understand it, it's a serious idea. I originally had illusionism as a subset under philosophical, and Dave Chalmers, when he saw the paper, said it would be better in its own subcategory — an important decision, and on the website it's its own category now.

Then neurobiological theories — biological naturalism, which John Searle had, and Gerald Edelman's neural Darwinism, an older neurobiological theory I'd heard of but hadn't studied closely; when I did, I was actually pretty impressed. Then a newer area: electromagnetic field theories. Mostyn Jones, Tam Hunt, and Jonathan Schooler each have their General Resonance Theory. Earl Miller at MIT has a kind of analog brain-wave theory, which I think is very strong too. There's Susan Pockett, McFadden, and others, each with their own electromagnetic theories.

Then computational functionalism, very famous — Hilary Putnam started that. Lenore Blum, Manuel Blum, and Avrim Blum have a very elaborate explanation of this, and there are many different kinds of computational functionalism in that category. Then quickly beyond that: homeostatic and affective theories — basically emotion. Antonio Damasio famously did this work, where emotion is the generator of consciousness, not just a product of it — it may be that too now, but originally it was the generator and cause of consciousness. So that's a very strong homeostatic approach. Karl Friston, with free energy and active inference, is also in that category.

Next, under materialism, is embodied and enactivist theories — where you need a body in some sense; enactivism requires an interaction between the body and the environment, you can't have consciousness without that. Neurophenomenology, Varela's original positing, developed well by Evan Thompson. Then some philosophical categories: relationalism — people like Hofstadter's strange loops, or a Japanese researcher, Tsuchiya, on relations between qualia; Nicholas Humphrey has his own work. Then first-order representationalism, where the representation of the initial sense is the seat of consciousness, and higher-order representationalism, where you have to have a thought about the thought — a second level, a kind of second derivative.

The second-to-last category is language, which is interesting because I rejected it as a category in my original paper — I knew about Chomsky's and other people's work, but it didn't seem to me to have a real causal role in consciousness. You could have consciousness without language. But the anonymous peer reviewer, who was very helpful, said I should have a language category, and I'm happy I put it back in — it deals with theories where language is instrumental to the nature of consciousness, certainly human consciousness. It's a weaker category in terms of the fundamental ontology, but important for human consciousness.

The final category is phylogenetic, or evolutionary — everything is evolutionary in some sense, but this category is where evolution is the mechanism you can point to directly. So those are twelve subcategories under materialism, each with ten to twenty different individual theories. One of my favourite ways to compare them is to plot where each one sits in the hierarchy of being — at what level it's making its critical point.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah — I can define it apophatically, in the negative. Materialism is a worldview in which there is nothing non-physical. That sounds tautological, but I don't think it is. There's a fuzzy boundary, as I said — panpsychism can be described as materialist if you define materialism as anything that's real, and a philosophically committed materialist would say that. Just as in alternative medicine, many sceptics say there's no such thing as alternative medicine — if something proves to have legitimacy, say acupuncture, then it's part of medicine, there's no alternative. So there's no alternative to materialism — it's whatever's real. That's not the definition I take.

I take the definition that the material world as we know it today, down to the quantum-field level or below, is the structure of the world, and that anything requiring something other than that — in principle, irrevocably, no matter how advanced our science gets, even given a billion years — that science will never be able to bridge, is outside materialism. Anything that could in principle be explained within the scientific method is part of materialism. So it's not a simple answer — a simple answer would just say it's quantum fields and whatever explains quantum field theory, and however that's generated, that's materialism. As I said, that's not quite the approach I take: I approach it by excluding whatever's non-physical.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

And that's why consciousness is so probative of ultimate reality — it forces you to think that way, and I think that's terrific. Now, it is explainable — we can take an evolutionary approach to the nature of our sense data and phenomenology, and people have used this against materialism, because our brains evolved to escape jaguars and leopards on the plains of Africa, not to solve differential equations or create string theory. So our brains can be missing something — we have a lot of those theories under challenge in the landscape.

But I'm not an advocate of the view that our brains simply aren't able to understand. I think what we understand — getting back to the first ten-to-the-minus-thirty-sixth or thirty-ninth of a second before, or prior to, the Big Bang, with inflationary theory, understanding pretty certainly how heavy elements are made in stars, how the universe is structured — it's remarkable how much we know. So I'm not so willing to write off what science can discern about materialism. That's a separate question from whether materialism is all there is, and whether you can explain consciousness with materialism — because I skew toward there being some kind of non-physical element. If you ask my own ultimate thoughts, not that they're very important, I always say what I think isn't important — what's important, at this stage in human history, is understanding all these theories and how they work. We shouldn't be excluding any access to reasonable theories about consciousness. It's so important to understand ourselves and reality.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah, I think that's entirely valid, and the conversation is extremely probative — not just about consciousness and everything derivative from it, like whether there's life after death or whether AI is conscious, but about the nature of ultimate reality itself. So I think it's extremely important. But the difference, to me, is discernible, and again it's in the negative: is there something we'd classify as non-physical that needs to be part of the story? And I'd define non-physical further — maybe this isn't quite right, but I think it is — as anything not one hundred per cent subject to the scientific method. Non-physical things are subject to logic and ways of organisation, but not to the methodological approach of naturalism and physicalism — the scientific method of experimentation, observation, repetition, falsification, all the basic properties of the scientific method.

That's the distinction I'd make: does the theory have any element that's ultimately not susceptible to the scientific method? If it does, it's outside materialism. If it says all these weird things but science can ultimately discern them through the scientific process, it is materialism. So if somebody convinced us that the panpsychist's view — that real materialism is panpsychism, because every element has, in addition to the four fundamental forces, an element of proto-consciousness — if that idea is subject to the scientific method in some ultimate science, I'd classify it under materialism. But frankly, I don't think it is. It may be, but I'd keep panpsychism and others as separate, non-materialist theories, because there's an element to them not subject to the scientific method.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

I think there's overlap, and I'm always fascinated by the fights — the intellectual fights between theories that are closest to one another. It's a human tendency. As I put it about geopolitics: Peru and Thailand never had a problem, because they're not close to each other. Look at the history of any religion — Christianity, the different sects, how they fight each other, when you can sometimes hardly discern the ideological difference. We see the same thing in consciousness studies. It's a human trait: whenever we're close to something but slightly disagree, we have these intense fights. I agree that panpsychism and idealism have a lot of similarities, and even dualism in some ways has similarities to both. But they do have a distinction.

The simple distinction: panpsychism has the physical world as equally real, and consciousness, or proto-consciousness, is part of all of reality, alongside the fundamental forces, whatever they turn out to be — we know four fundamental forces today, but clearly that's not a final theory, there has to be something significantly below the standard model. But that's still a physical theory. Idealism says that consciousness, in some sense, is everything, and everything other than consciousness is either derivative of consciousness or an illusion. Derivative of consciousness means, instead of consciousness being the product of matter, matter is a product of consciousness. How that occurs, everybody has a different theory, and they're all fun to listen to. As I put it once, when people ask me my favourite theory, I say I'm in love with the last girl I kissed — when I'm working on these theories, I totally immerse myself, I pretend for a day or two that this is my theory and I want the world to know it, I'm really struggling to explain it and show how it works, and there's truth in that.

So when you take that approach to idealism, the physical world is secondary. If it's illusion — as Vedic and Hindu traditions have said — then that's the complete answer. But more interesting is if the physical world is real in some sense but derivative of consciousness — how does that occur, and what would it mean? There are subsets here: is it a non-personal cosmic consciousness, somehow programmed from time immemorial to generate consciousness or complexity — a movement towards higher complexity built into reality — or is there something like a God, in one sense a subset of consciousness, or a separate philosophical issue, where those who believe in the Abrahamic God have God as preeminent and independent, sort of creating consciousness. So the distinction is that idealism has the physical world as derivative or illusion, whereas panpsychism has the physical world at an equal level of ontological reality with consciousness.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, very similar, though I think there's a distinction: in panpsychism, the elements — the crumbs — would have physical properties with equal ontological status to the proto-consciousness. In idealism, you wouldn't need that at all, because idealism is completely comprehensive — I don't want to overuse a quantum analogy, but it's like a wave function of the universe, one big wave function. Under panpsychism you have cosmopsychism, which is sort of a subset, where the main property is — between cosmopsychism and idealism, those are really —

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Sorry?

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah, well, that's because you don't understand it too well.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah, it's very close to idealism. We're putting linguistic categories on ideas, and this is very natural, but it's one of the most interesting elements of really digging into consciousness, to look at theories and compare them. Cosmopsychism versus idealism is one; another I find fascinating is non-reductive physicalism versus property dualism — these are more epistemological than ontological, I'll come back to what that means. It's a fascinating subject. Whether it's a distinction without a difference, or with a difference — I think it's a distinction with a difference, though it's challenging.

With cosmopsychism, it still has the whole universe as the primary conscious element — so it's not proto-consciousness in a tiny thing, it's the consciousness of the big thing — but it still has the material world with equal ontological status. That's the key difference. Idealism doesn't have the physical world as equal — it's derivative, or illusion. Cosmopsychism has the physical world with equal ontological status. That's the difference.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Very good question, and I can give you feedback I've had from many theorists who see their own classification. Everybody exaggerates — everybody wants to be a monist.

It does have that character, and there's a very large overlap between panpsychism and monism, and the different kinds of monism. I made a category of monism to highlight exactly the point you've made — there's one kind of stuff with two expressions — but I try to be extremely strict about who I let into that category. Russellian monism is the classic one, and then there are particular theories built on it. Donald Davidson had a very interesting one — he called it anomalous monism. He had three premises, axiomatic ideas: one, mental events cause physical events; two, causation requires laws — there has to be a process by which things work; three, there are no psychophysical laws.

Now, if you look at those together, that's contradictory — it seems like a null set, there's no way to hold all three at once. You need the mental to cause the physical — first premise. Second, causation requires laws, it isn't just going to happen randomly. And there are no such laws.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Right. So it seems contradictory, and the only logical solution is that the mental and the physical are the same — a radical identity theory. David Papineau also has a radical identity theory, where the mental and the physical are exactly the same, in the strong sense that the morning star and the evening star are both Venus — take away one and you automatically take away the other. Superman and Clark Kent. Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane Mortenson, whatever her original name was — you can't separate one from the other, they're exactly the same expression. To me there's a strong logic to that. Whether it's satisfactory is a different story — to me it isn't — but it has a logical coherence.

So there are monisms super-focused on that one point, and I try to highlight that, though the critique is valid — this is a two-dimensional toy model, if you will, of what reality is supposed to be, and there are many facets. As I said, non-reductive physicalism versus property dualism: they both say there are irreducible mental states that can't be explained by anything in the physical world, but there's only one kind of stuff, and it's physical — not a dual aspect, just pure physical stuff, the physical stuff we know. How are they different? Epistemologically: property dualism says the mental property itself has ontological status, that it's real, whereas non-reductive physicalism takes the process of emergence — in a strong sense it can't be reduced, but emergence is the way, using top-down causation. By comparing different theories this way, you begin to luxuriate in the problem of consciousness — you understand all these aspects, which is why I love it, and I'm not disturbed that I don't have a final answer, because I just love the process.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

As of today, yeah.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah, I think that's entirely valid, but I come at it from a different perspective, because I'm not trying to solve the problem, I'm trying to unpack it, to tease it apart and see how it works. Each theory, by emphasising something different, helps us. Certainly the materialist theories are very different from each other under that rubric, with very different ways of working. Just to take an example in quantum theories: Penrose and Hameroff have the collapse of the wave function within microtubules, while Hartmut Neven has the view that it's the formation of the wave function. One has collapse, one has formation. If one of these is the right theory, the other is probably wrong — they're each making a different claim, both very confident it's a quantum process, which is a minority view generally, but they disagree about where it occurs. Go through each one and it's really important — electromagnetic field theories make a very specific point, that consciousness is this electromagnetic field in some sense, which is very different from a neurobiological theory with neuronal circuitry, as Damasio and others have developed.

These are very different kinds of theories, so it depends on the granularity by which you want to look at it. There are certainly commonalities — panpsychism and idealism is an excellent example where you could probably reduce the number of theories. But I'm not looking at these theories as mutually exclusive so much as different ways of exposing the problem, of deeply understanding it — an epistemological approach to understanding. If I really had to reduce it down: under materialism, there are very different explanations, because they occur at different levels of the hierarchy, different expressions of how things work in the brain, and they're very different from each other. So there's more mutual exclusivity within materialism than there is between panpsychism, monism, idealism, and even dualism — those have a lot of similarities, which is natural, because each has some kind of non-physical component, my favourite term to use, because it's very neutral — a non-physical aspect. When you have that, there are natural commonalities that blend together.

That's why this conversation is so informative to understand — one of my missions is to make people realise that these big questions we ask — AI, consciousness, life after death, the nature of free will, personal identity — depend on your theory of consciousness. If you don't think so, you're doing it anyway, you just don't know what you're doing.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

There's a radical difference between property dualism and substance dualism, which also has its own subcategories. Substance dualism is basically what you said — two different kinds of stuff that are ontologically primitive. I've always had a soft spot in my brain for dualism, even though it's extremely unpopular among physicists and scientists. The interaction problem is a real problem. Everybody has one, though — panpsychism has the combination problem, how these little proto-consciousnesses make a big consciousness. Idealism has the de-combination problem — you have this giant cosmic consciousness, and how does some little piece bubble off so I have my consciousness and you have yours, and we never find them intermixing? I've never had that feeling with anybody, my closest family, my wife. So how does that happen? Every theory has its problem, no question. Dualism has the interaction problem, to do with the causal closure of the physical world — every effect has a cause — so how do you get in at the joint, so to speak, for a non-physical response? It's a valid point, not a knockout argument, but a strong one, like the others.

I should tell you a story, if you'll give me two minutes, because people ask me all the time what I believe, and I always say it doesn't matter — I want each theory to live on its own. They say, oh, but you've got to tell us anyway. This happened with the original paper — I didn't put my view in, and when people noticed, they said, we looked through the whole paper and didn't see what you believe. I said, you didn't see it because I didn't put it in — I don't want my confidence level colouring these theories. I put my life into each theory as if it were my own, and I want each to live on its own, uncoloured by my view. But then people said, ah, but then it looks like you have a hidden agenda, that you're manoeuvring it. So, rock and a hard place. What I did in the paper was put in thirty-three words of my own opinion, plus a footnote with another thirty-nine — seventy-two words out of 175,000. That's the confidence level I put in my own view.

The first level was some kind of dualism — that there is some non-physical component you need. The footnote said, if that's not true, I might go to some kind of quantum theory, which for many years on Closer to Truth I rejected, not made fun of, but really thought wasn't right — having studied all these different quantum theories, I actually changed my mind writing the paper, giving it more credit. And then, to be totally, seemingly contradictory, if neither dualism nor quantum theory is right, maybe I'd go to some sort of illusionism, or representational or neurobiological theory. So my smorgasbord of ideas is very fluid.

But here's the story. When physicalists change their mind and become non-physicalists — there are quite a few examples, some well known — when I talk to them, the reason, in almost every case I can recall, is because they had some kind of experience. It might have been an out-of-body experience, which some very sophisticated scientists have told me they've had, or a near-death experience, and that changed their view. Psychedelics have done that for some people — I certainly believe psychedelics give you a different image, but I don't put any ontological, foundational reality into what comes out of that. Other people do, and I respect that. Religious experience — I've had very distinguished scientists tell me of their religious experiences, mainly from a Christian perspective, and that's their foundational belief, and I understand that.

Now, I too have had an experience, but it's one that moved me more towards materialism than towards dualism. How is that possible — an experience that makes you more physicalist? I didn't say totally physicalist, just moved me slightly. My daughter Daniela — she's given me permission to tell this — got married late, at forty-five, to a husband significantly younger. They tried to have a baby and got pregnant, which was itself a minor miracle, but the pregnancy had severe genetic problems and had to be terminated. That was very traumatic, and they couldn't try again naturally, but she'd frozen her eggs at thirty-four, roughly ten or eleven years earlier. So they defrosted the eggs, tested them, and two were what they call mosaics — a chance of being good, but not certain, and it was the only choice. Her husband flew to New York, fertilised it in vitro, and it grew to what they call a blastula, 128 cells, tested with no apparent defect at that point. They refroze the blastula for another two years while my daughter — who didn't want a surrogate — prepared her own body, at around forty-eight, to carry the baby herself. My wife and I weren't happy about the hormonal treatments that required, but it was her body and her decision.

The bottom line is that six years later, my grandson Louie is bilingual, plays ping pong, chess, and piano, and is extremely social. For all I know about biology — my doctorate is in biology, neuroscience — I'm still flabbergasted, having lived through that process literally every day for years, watching it happen. It made me realise the latent strength in the physical world beyond what I'd appreciated. It's an emotional thing. As I said, it's moved me a few percentage points, if you will, back towards materialism, because of the latent potential in the world.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

I like that, yeah.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

I'd say maybe that's right, but I'd have different numbers — maybe sixty-five per cent to sixty-one per cent, something like that, toward materialism. The point I'm making is that it was entirely emotional — an emotional reaction, but no different in kind from people who've had an emotional reaction the other way, from a near-death experience, an out-of-body experience, or psychedelics. I don't dismiss my own, any more than theirs. I really had that feeling that there are more latent possibilities in the physical world than I'd appreciated, and it's purely emotional, but it certainly doesn't turn me over — I still believe consciousness has some non-physical component, and I'm not comfortable going more specific than that, which would subsume dualism, panpsychism, and idealism all together.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

A very valid point, and I've been criticised, politely, for exactly this reason. I don't claim to be a consciousness practitioner — I've never taken psychedelics, I don't meditate, I've not had a religious, out-of-body, or near-death experience. I joke that intense table tennis gives me an emotional high, but my critics say that doesn't count. In all seriousness, in the paper, in the section on psychedelics, I gave the arguments for why I think it's very important for treatment of PTSD or depression — a lot of great research being done, which I support entirely — but I don't give it ontological status. What's the difference between hitting your eye on the refrigerator and seeing stars — a physical insult to your optical system — and psychedelics, which does something more complicated with the neurochemistry? I don't know that it's different. In doing the paper, I was ninety-eight per cent sure there's no ontological status to psychedelics; having read the substantial people who believe otherwise, I put in a comment that it's put a hairline fracture in my bone-strength rejection of ontological status for psychedelic experience. So I've moved a little off a hardcore physicalist approach, but not much.

There are some preliminary studies showing that, in near-death experience, for example, there's an extra flow of serotonin, a neurotransmitter — I don't know how scientifically reproducible that's been, because you can't do that in humans, obviously, but in animals. It's a neurochemical reaction, and when people tell me I should take psychedelics or have a religious experience, my reaction is: if I did, I wouldn't trust it. Why would I trust that, in my present state? That so many people have made comments like yours, I deeply respect, and I've shifted from being really hard-nosed about it to being a little softer-nosed —

Yeah. No, it's not impossible, but I'm still not a fan of the idea that psychedelics give us a window into a deeper reality.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Those are very valid points, and I appreciate them more now than maybe I did originally. My same daughter just told me she did psychedelics for the first time recently, had some similar experiences, and is telling me maybe I should do it too. I appreciate the view, but I still don't put a lot of foundational value in it. And even if I did it myself — it'd be a fun experience, I imagine, but I don't see it as given, given anything. Maybe I'll do it, maybe I'll come back and tell you, Alex, you were right, I have a whole new view of the world, throw out the whole first category, no more materialists, get rid of half the theories. I don't know, maybe.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

It's a category that classifies approaches taking a radically different, orthogonal view to the linearity between materialism and idealism — those eight categories. It could start with Colin McGinn's famous mysterianism — I think he wrote it in the 1980s — the idea that isn't it time we give up trying to solve consciousness, because we're never going to be able to. That approach says that for some reason we're not capable of doing it — not that there isn't an answer, he wasn't advocating any non-physical stuff at all, that's not his worldview — just that we're not capable. Many have told me perhaps the human brain didn't evolve to understand consciousness — it evolved to survive on the plains of Africa, escape predators, hunt in tribes, whatever drove the nature of our brains. Just as we crave sweets and fats today, built up under prior evolutionary pressure during ice ages, which today may be counterproductive for our health but was necessary for survival then, our brains were shaped by different pressures. That's the view that we're not capable of it. I'm not in favour of that view — it's possible, but it'd have to be a pretty fine line, where we can understand quantum field theory and what happened at ten to the minus thirty-six or thirty-nine seconds at the Big Bang, understand all these things with pretty high confidence, and yet not be able to understand consciousness. It's possible — an excluded part of the Venn diagram where we can understand everything else but not this — because if consciousness is indeed part of the physical world, it should be susceptible to the same methods. That's why I classify the distinction around a non-physical aspect as something not susceptible to the scientific method. If that's the case, science will never understand consciousness, and therefore it has to be some other, non-physical component of some kind. That's as far as I can really feel confident going, in terms of the distinction.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

That's right — it's a recognition that all the approaches we took, materialist, idealist, panpsychist, aren't satisfactory, and all have problems. So what's the answer? Maybe there's something systemic, that we're just not capable, given our current brain, evolved as it is, of understanding that piece of reality, whatever it may be. That's one part of the challenge, and there are lots of different expressions of it. David Eagleman has possibilianism, where each possibility has its own kind of ontological status and we can't distinguish between them. There are different approaches that look at the problem in different ways.

Let me tell you one I really like, reflecting two of my intellectual heroes: Raymond Tallis and Peter van Inwagen. Raymond Tallis started as a neurologist, a great participant in the health system, and became a humanist philosopher — a wonderful thinker, one of my favourites. Peter van Inwagen is a Christian philosopher, perhaps the leading metaphysician in the world under some classifications. Let me tell you each one's theory, and why I have Ray classified under challenge. Ray is an absolute atheist, doesn't believe in God in any sense whatsoever — a firm atheist — but he's a non-reductionist about consciousness. He calls reductionist theories of consciousness "neuromania," as opposed to the "neurophilosophy" Pat Churchland coined. Ray thinks an attempt to reduce consciousness to material is just impossible. So he's an atheist about the nature of reality, no God, but a realist about consciousness in terms of it being non-physical, non-reductive. Peter van Inwagen, a Christian philosopher, deeply believes in God, a specific kind of God, but he's a materialist about consciousness — he believes consciousness is entirely physical. Then he has a different problem: he believes in God, in resurrection, so if the person is physical, how do you get a resurrection? A completely separate issue, but an interesting one, which I've classified under non-reductive physicalism, because there are Christian philosophers, like van Inwagen or Nancey Murphy, who believe in a purely physicalist explanation for the person, for consciousness, yet believe in non-physical realities too. So this is the kind of nuance you see from very sophisticated people who take contradictory sides across different questions — Ray, an atheist but a non-reductionist about the mind; van Inwagen, a strong theist who's a materialist about the mind. The arguments on each side are deeply probative, and I love them. Ray is classified under challenge because he's very clear he's not saying what consciousness is, only what it isn't — not reducible to the physical world, cannot be explained neurobiologically.

Thomas Nagel's view of consciousness — famously, what is it like to be a bat — takes it further: there's something about the world, and Tom is equally a very strong atheist. I think his famous line is something like, it's not that I don't believe in God, it's that I hope there is no God — a world with a God would be a terrible place. And yet he's non-materialist about the nature of consciousness. So those are the kinds of thoughtful people within the challenge category, challenging either our capacity, through the kind of brains we have, or the idea that there's something we can't even know what it is — though I'm very confident, in my own feeling, that the reductionist approach isn't going to work, even though I've no confidence about what it actually is.

Then there are teleological explanations. Paul Davies, famously — another of my intellectual heroes — his approach is that explaining the universe by some externality like God doesn't work, but claiming consciousness is all material and a late accidental development is also wrong. He takes consciousness seriously, developing this through quantum histories of the universe — it sounds like retrocausation, but it isn't. It builds on John Wheeler's work: because consciousness will emerge at some point, it can, in some sense, back-select the quantum histories that brought about that consciousness. So Paul — not a theist, not an atheist either, exactly — believes consciousness is fundamental and somehow brought about by a selection of quantum histories, by what will happen at a later development. These are unclassifiable ideas, and that's why they're in the challenge category.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

As to the first: quantum can certainly be considered materialism, because it's part of the material world — likewise non-reductive physicalism and panpsychism, and information theories, which we haven't talked about, where information is fundamental — integrated information theory, Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch, very important theories putting a foundational ontology into the nature of information, which can also be part of the physical world. But I separated these out — non-reductive physicalism, quantum theories, and information — because each deals with the problem in a sufficiently different way from the traditional materialist theories we're used to, whether neurobiological, electromagnetic, or philosophical. I'd be happy with a different organisational structure, but I broke those out, even though they could be considered materialism in some larger superset, because they're sufficiently different, and sufficiently strongly felt by their advocates.

I don't know exactly how many I have under quantum theories, but at least twenty or twenty-five, radically different in terms of where the quantum effect is meant to occur — in the microtubule, in the formation of the wave structure, in the cell, in some larger entanglement across the brain. All different theories, largely mutually exclusive about where it works. There's also dimensionality — different dimensions of consciousness. Bernard Carr has theories along those lines, built with some credibility given to parapsychological findings. These could be physicalist in some sense, but different enough from traditional materialism that I wanted them in a separate category.

As to why I gave it more credibility: looking at each of these theories, understanding the quantum-field aspect, there are sufficiently interesting possibilities — and as quantum computing has developed, and we've seen quantum supremacy, factoring large numbers in minutes or hours that would take a regular computer the lifetime of the universe, there are certain capabilities in quantum systems radically different from neuronal impulses, or philosophical manoeuvres like representationalism or relationalism, sufficiently different that it deserved its own category. So, as I said, I hope I never ridiculed it, but I took it much less seriously before I started the study than I do today.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

This is a very pertinent question to the current status of consciousness studies. Integrated information theory was originally formulated by Giulio Tononi, a sleep researcher and neuroscientist, very good in sleep research and psychiatry, and supported strongly by Christof Koch, who famously developed the neuronal correlates of consciousness with Francis Crick in the 1990s, which really opened the whole field. So these are very strong people, and it's a radically different approach — it takes consciousness seriously as a starting point and explains from there. It's a structural analysis of consciousness, not based on specific neurobiology but on conceptual ideas about consciousness, and it has a test called Phi, the amount of consciousness, plus a structural approach. It's a little vague, and they're often accused of being a form of panpsychism, which they reject — though the criticism keeps coming.

Famously, 124 philosophers and scientists called IIT a pseudoscience — a scandal in the field. Some say calling something a pseudoscience is the worst thing you can say about somebody — I can call you ugly and stupid, and pseudoscience is worse than that.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

We can tease this apart. The reason they felt the need was that IIT was getting such substantial prominence, and there was a so-called adversarial collaboration between different theories of consciousness — famously IIT versus global workspace theory, a kind of neurobiological theory, that competed against each other in a very well-funded, independently tested programme, with genuinely interesting results. Some things favoured one, some the other. IIT predicts consciousness comes from integrated information at the back of the brain; global workspace says it should occur at the front. This was tested, and it seemed to favour IIT a little, but not totally — some results favoured global workspace. It became a public matter, covered in Nature, Science, the major publications. A group of people felt this was — not a publicity stunt exactly, but excessive publicity, giving the impression IIT was the leading theory, when there were two or three other strong candidates and a huge number of other theories, particularly higher-order representationalism under materialism. People felt the public was being misled, because of the prominence of the theory, the adversarial collaboration, and the individuals involved.

My approach was different. I didn't like the label of pseudoscience — I've seen similar accusations against string theory, against the multiverse, which are either twenty orders of magnitude beyond experimental testing, or impossible in principle to access directly, though there are some possibilities around interacting brains. Those too have been accused of pseudoscience, and I think that's unfair — science, given the range of orders of magnitude it deals with, should listen to theories that have coherence and explanatory power. I'm one who accepts a lot of different possible theories.

But I also made the point that comparing IIT with global workspace theory, each had a prediction — IIT predicting the back of the brain, global workspace the front — and from my point of view, that prediction wasn't really an indication of each theory's fundamental ontology. In global workspace theory, it's more like fame in the brain, as Dennett might put it — which circuitry becomes most prominent and recruits others to be part of it. Whereas IIT has consciousness as some sort of structural element, maybe in an n-dimensional space, some equivalent of Hilbert space, where there's a kind of consciousness space with structures that occur in some dimensional sense. That's the fundamental ontology of each theory — one is brain circuitry, the other an ontological structure. Where each predicts something, you could reverse them — say global workspace predicts the back, IIT the front — and it wouldn't change the fundamental ontology of either one. So I didn't feel comfortable that the adversarial collaboration, whatever it found, would yield a fundamental result. Maybe a fundamental result isn't, in principle, possible through scientific explanation here. But you'd think both could be subject to the scientific method, since neither poses anything directly non-physical, though IIT may sit on the fuzzy border between something non-physical and physical.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Good — I like the structure, where they have premises and then deductions, scientifically. But I want to tease apart two elements. One is the scientific approach to the presence of consciousness, using the Phi test — a very innovative, important idea, with clinical applications for coma patients. There are serious elements to it, and they've developed that well. So the Phi explanation of the presence of consciousness, how you judge it through integration and brain waves, is very scientific and very useful. The other part, what consciousness actually is, has this different dimensional structure to it, and they're very cautious, cagey even, about that, because it's not really part of the physical world in the usual sense. By blending those together, I think they do each part a disservice. The work on Phi, using integrated information to assess the presence of consciousness, is a legitimate scientific approach with great clinical applications. But as to what consciousness is — this structure, where every conscious percept might be some kind of unique structure in this other kind of reality — that's an inference from their basic axioms, and I radically distinguish that from their scientific work on Phi. It can look like panpsychism, even though they'd reject that.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Again, distinguishing the presence of consciousness — the Phi element — from what consciousness is, the product of it: you're absolutely right that it starts with consciousness, just as panpsychism and idealism do, and then takes a very different approach, looking at systems and the nature of information and how it's integrated — and, sure, they get ridiculed, can a thermometer be conscious because it has some kind of information. By the way, John Searle's classic remark about panpsychism is that it's like a thin layer of jam over the whole universe — that was his metaphor.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

That was just John's way of describing panpsychism, because —

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Well, I mean — it's because you have consciousness as being part of everything, so it's adding something to the physical world. John was a materialist, biological naturalism, and a realist about consciousness in terms of its ontological status — which to me never quite — I could argue with that — but he was a realist about consciousness while being a hardcore physicalist, biological naturalism, meaning consciousness is a product of the brain, like urine is a product of the kidney — not something he'd flinch from saying, though obviously much more complicated than that. His approach to panpsychism was that if every little part of the universe has consciousness, it's like a thin layer of jam spread over the whole universe, because it's part of every little thing — a small part of everything, so it's thin, and jam just makes the image work.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Well, it's the old story — if I'd known ahead of time what I'd have to do, I never would have started, but each step was one step at a time, one theory at a time, and that I could do. Looking back, I'm happy I did it, but knowing what it was, having done it, I never would have started. It's been a huge amount of work, mostly at night because of other responsibilities, but it's been a great personal gift to explore these things, and I give credit to the people who developed all these theories — that's the richness of what the human mind has produced.

What we haven't touched on, which I'll just mention, is theological approaches to consciousness, which were part of the human experience, maybe more historically than today, though certainly still believed by a lot of people, and historically held by very important thinkers, very diverse. It was important for me to include it. I included Hinduism, where consciousness is very significant in the original Vedic scriptures, and Buddhism, the Tao Te Ching. Hinduism has many different expressions — maybe five or six, though there are literally hundreds — and I picked five or six very specific ones: Kashmiri Shaivism, Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramana. These are all expressions of the core idea, but each very different in interesting ways. And then the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — each with a different aspect on the nature of the soul. Whether you believe these things or not, they're part of this human desire to know, and to me they were very important.

A short story: when I submitted my first draft to the Journal of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, the reviewer — whom I appreciate very much — made some important suggestions that helped the paper enormously, but also said, look, the scientific theories you have are great, we accept those, we want to publish those, but you have these philosophical, even theological theories, and the readers of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology aren't really interested in that — why don't you take those out, and add some of the other categories, like language, which he'd suggested and which are important for our readers. I wrote back and said, I appreciate everything you're telling me, and I agree — make the changes, thank you. And I said, if I were you, in your position, I would already have rejected the paper, because it has these extraneous theories, panpsychism to immortal-soul theories. But I said, as it happened, I wasn't planning to do this, and now I've put a lot of effort into it, and I realise I'm going to do this once in my life, and I have to do it in a way that satisfies my own sense of the totality of human thought on the nature of consciousness. So I have to include the philosophical and theological theories — folk-religion theories of consciousness from Africa and China, because that's part of the human experience. We may not agree with it, it may seem pre-scientific, but it's part of human understanding, and people today believe many of these things too. So I have to do this, and if you don't want to publish it, I understand, I'll try somewhere else, or worst case publish it myself. To their credit, they said they'd allow all of it in, and I give them real credit for that.

There are some very interesting theories under dualism we haven't mentioned — emergent dualism, for instance, the theory that everything is physical, but at a certain level of complexity, like in brains, some kind of meta-psychophysical law of the universe produces a non-physical element — it pops out, at a certain degree of complexity. That's a very different kind of dualism. Richard Swinburne, a well-known Christian philosopher who's defended substance dualism independent of his religious views, is one of the major defenders of classical substance dualism, believing, because of his religious training, in the traditional soul. But he's said that if he turned out to be wrong about that, he wouldn't be rejecting emergent dualism — he believes strongly, even from a non-religious standpoint, that dualism is a proper explanation for consciousness, and if it turned out to be an emergent kind, with no immortal soul, no God, but emerging out of complexity, that would satisfy his non-theological arguments for dualism too.

That's a variant of dualism I find a very interesting category. When we say dualism, we generally think of something simple — an interaction between physical and non-physical, rejected by the scientific community, probably five per cent or fewer of philosophers believing in it. But the richness of the different kinds of dualism, theologically and philosophically, is to me one of the most interesting categories, because it's not generally appreciated — it tends to get characterised overly simplistically, accepted or rejected on that basis, when it has all this richness to it.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Right, I completely agree, and I've grown, as I said, to appreciate the sophistication of the various religious communities over the years, in dealing with the philosophical approaches to consciousness, in all their richness. I've learned a lot from that, and there's some very strong thinking there. People make fun of the philosophical approaches during the Middle Ages, in Christian, Islamic, or Jewish philosophy, but it was really an interesting flourishing period, with very sophisticated thinkers dealing with consciousness as the only thing they could do, pre-science — ideas that are worth contemplating.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

It's been a pleasure. Landscape of Consciousness is at loc.closertotruth.com, though "Landscape of Consciousness" you can find very quickly too. It's a collective project — a large percentage of the theories have come from people who've suggested them, either their own or something I'd left out that they're passionate about. It's really trying to be a collective effort — more than a personal one.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah. Alfonso Gómez-Marín.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Yeah, I agree — the role he played in putting this together, I thank him for.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Really a pleasure, Alex. You're making an important contribution to the world, and I follow it, we all should. Let me end with one idea that had nothing to do with my original desire to do Closer to Truth or the Landscape of Consciousness: over the last five or so years, really since the pandemic, we've seen more and more people from diverse parts of the world writing in with their ideas, suggestions, praise, or criticisms, from real diverse peoples and countries. When we started, we were one hundred per cent American, because we were driven by public broadcasting, where our television show was. Now we're less than forty per cent US, sixty per cent from other parts of the world. From the Islamic world, the Hindu world, there are many people, and often you'll have people writing in from different regions, nations, religions, races, ethnicities that are in conflict, in the superficiality part of humanity we read about in the news every day. But on the questions of consciousness and raw existence in the universe, everybody is united among the people who write in — they self-select because they're interested in these things, and their superficial affiliations disappear, and everybody's asking the same kinds of questions we're talking about. To me that's now an exciting thing — maybe if more people really explored the depth of what human beings are, in terms of the nature of reality or consciousness, there'd be less concern about our superficial differences. We really see that in the people who write in. You probably have the same experience.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Great. As I said, it's been a wonderful journey, and I appreciate everyone who's written in and given ideas and participated in the process. What I try to do on the Landscape of Consciousness is, for each theory, for those theorists still alive, send it to them after I put it together and ask them to critique or edit it. It's not a large percentage, but for the original paper, maybe twenty-five or thirty per cent had been edited or given feedback by the theorists themselves. On the website, we note where it's been verified by the individual — that's important. Most of the time the corrections are small. There were a few where I had big corrections, and I said, oh, I'm sorry, I got the theory wrong, and they said, no, that's what I thought five years ago, those are the papers you read — here's what I think today. So the website is designed to be constantly updated, when people have a new reference or a new idea they can add it. It's not a wiki, where anyone can edit it — we have to curate it, so people aren't making random changes, to keep it relatively consistent. But it's been a collective process, and I appreciate it.