Theories · about 5 minutes
The Tasting Menu
You have now spent five rooms inside two theories of consciousness, in some detail, and been told repeatedly that neither of them has won. Here is the part nobody mentions: those two are not the only ones on the menu. They are simply the two with the best-funded kitchens.
Six more, one paragraph each. But we are not going to tell you whose is whose until you have chosen.
Six claims about what consciousness is. No names, no citations, no reputations -- just the idea, plainly. Pick the one that sounds most likely to you. Go on instinct; that is rather the point.
The full menu, with names
All six, at full strength, with what each one buys you and what it costs. Every one of these is held by serious people who have thought about it far longer than either of us.
Not on the menu tonight
Someone always asks about quantum consciousness -- usually Penrose and Hameroff's "Orch-OR", in which consciousness arises from quantum computations inside microtubules in your neurons. It is left off for a specific reason, not for being outlandish.
The objection is a calculation. Max Tegmark ran the numbers on how long a quantum superposition could survive in a warm, wet, electrically noisy brain and got timescales fantastically shorter than the milliseconds neurons work on -- decoherence washes it out long before it could matter. Hameroff and colleagues contest the assumptions and the argument continues, but the burden sits with them and has for twenty-five years.
There is also a softer worry, and it applies well beyond this one theory: it is very tempting to explain a mystery with another mystery. Consciousness is baffling; quantum mechanics is baffling; the urge to connect them is strong and is not, by itself, evidence. A real theory has to say why this baffling thing produces that one -- and the honest version of that demand would finish off several items on the menu above, too.
Why these are paragraphs and not rooms
This wing has a house rule, and it is the reason you have been made to do things rather than read about them: a theory earns a room only when we can find its load-bearing phenomenon and let you collide with it first. Wonder before explanation -- the whole building runs on it.
Global workspace got a room because the attentional blink happens to you in eight trials (Exhibit № 28). Integrated information got one because you can be handed a photodiode's job and tie with it (Exhibit № 29). Predictive processing got one because whistles turn into a sentence in your own ears and never turn back (Exhibit № 31).
The six above have not got that -- not yet. Either their load-bearing phenomenon is too subtle to stage on a laptop, or it belongs to a room you have already walked through. If we ever find the right one for higher-order thought, it will get its own door and this menu will get shorter. Until then, giving each of them a room would mean lecturing you, and a museum that lectures you is a book with worse navigation.
The thing you just did, though
Look back at what happened at the top of this page. You chose a theory of consciousness before you knew who held it, what it was called, or what it committed you to. And you almost certainly chose quickly.
That is not a criticism, and it is not a trick. It is a reasonably accurate description of how theory choice works in this field, including among professionals, and saying so out loud is not cynicism -- it is the reason the field's recent behaviour is so admirable. When you cannot settle a question by experiment yet, and everyone can feel their own intuitions doing the work, the honest response is to build machinery that catches you: preregistration, adversarial collaboration, and dated bets with wine on them.
Which is the next room, and now you know why it comes last.
One more thing about your pick
Whichever door you opened, notice what it did to the others. Illusionism and panpsychism are not merely different answers -- they are opposite ones. One says experience is the only thing you can be certain of and must therefore be fundamental to reality. The other says experience is precisely the thing you are most systematically wrong about. Both are held by careful people. Both cannot be right.
And whichever you picked, the room down the corridor still works: Exhibit № 24 will take your theory, agree with every word of it, and then ask why any of that machinery should be accompanied by an experience rather than running in the dark. So far it has done that to everybody.
Take it further
For the whole landscape in one honest volume, Susan Blackmore's Consciousness: An Introduction is the standard survey and is scrupulous about giving each position its best shot. Keith Frankish's Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness collects the case and its critics; Philip Goff's Galileo's Error does the same for panpsychism and is the best-written of the bunch. Michael Graziano's Rethinking Consciousness lays out the attention schema, David Rosenthal's Consciousness and Mind the higher-order view, and Colin McGinn's The Mysterious Flame makes the case that you should stop reading all of them.
An honest note on our six paragraphs: each of these positions has decades of argument behind it, and a paragraph is not a fair hearing -- it is a menu description. If one of them made something click, go and read the person who actually holds it before deciding you agree. The point of a tasting menu is to find out what you want a full plate of.