#dennett — Public Fediverse posts

The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle

This page exists for readers who want a map of the consciousness sequence published on BolesBlogs in the spring of 2026. Three articles, taken together, cover the contemporary terrain on the deepest question philosophy still asks. Each can be read alone. Read in sequence, they form a coordinated treatment of the consciousness problem that points beyond any single solution toward what the field as a whole has and has not accomplished.

The problem itself is older than philosophy as a discipline. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We extend that knowledge to other people, to animals, and possibly to stones, on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory. David Chalmers named the difficulty the hard problem of consciousness in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the difficulty has not been resolved in the thirty-one years since. Why does any arrangement of physical stuff feel like something from the inside? Why does any neural configuration produce the experience of redness, sourness, dread, or hope? No materialist account has explained this convincingly, and the standard moves to dissolve the question have either denied that consciousness exists in the way we ordinarily mean (illusionism), extended consciousness to every level of organization (panpsychism), or made consciousness the only substrate with matter as its appearance (analytic idealism). The three articles treat each of these alternatives in turn, by way of its strongest contemporary defender.

The first article, The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle, takes up Iain McGilchrist’s 2021 book The Matter With Things and his proposal that matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its source, the way ice and vapor are phases of water. It evaluates his case, with credit for what works and pressure on what fails, and concludes that panpsychism remains a serious option whose central difficulty (the combination problem of how micro-experiences merge into macro-experiences) has not been adequately addressed in McGilchrist’s work or in the panpsychist tradition more broadly.

The second article, Consciousness Explained Away: Daniel Dennett’s Illusionism and the Theory That Spends Its Own Foundation, considers Dennett’s lifelong project of arguing that phenomenal consciousness as ordinarily conceived does not exist. It gives Dennett full credit for his demolition of the Cartesian Theater and his contributions to cognitive science, while showing why the central illusionist claim (that consciousness is a user illusion the brain stages for itself) collapses on close inspection because illusions presuppose conscious subjects to whom they appear. Written in the wake of Dennett’s death in April 2024, the piece tries to argue with him at the level of seriousness his work always demanded.

The third article, The Dissociated Universe: Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism and the Mind That Contains the World, examines Bernardo Kastrup’s claim that reality is mental at base, with individual minds being dissociated alters of universal consciousness, comparable to the alternate personalities that appear in cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder. It presents Kastrup’s strongest moves, including the empirical work on psychedelics, NDEs, and quantum measurement, and tests them against the difficulties his position inherits, including the decombination problem, the contested status of DID as a clinical category, and the challenge of accounting for the resistance the world offers to subjective will. It closes by drawing the three positions together and showing what the trilogy as a whole accomplishes.

Several reading paths are available, depending on what the reader brings to the sequence.

A reader new to philosophy of mind should start with the first article. McGilchrist provides the easiest entry into the territory because his prose is generous and his analogies accessible, and the article’s analysis demonstrates the analytical method that the next two articles will apply to harder cases. Read the second article next for the materialist counter-position, then the third for the closing turn that completes the triangulation.

Readers already familiar with the consciousness debate can take the articles in any order, since each contains a self-contained treatment of its primary subject. The third article’s closing section synthesizes all three positions and may serve as a useful entry point for the impatient reader, who can then proceed to whichever individual article most interests her.

Skeptics of the entire enterprise should start with the second article. Dennett offers the most aggressive case against making the consciousness question a serious metaphysical issue, and the article’s evaluation of why his case nonetheless fails will give the skeptical reader a more accurate sense of why the question persists than any defense of consciousness as fundamental could provide.

Readers of theological or contemplative orientation will find the third article most directly engaged with positions that have been held in non-Western contemplative traditions for thousands of years. Kastrup himself acknowledges the affinity between analytic idealism and Advaita Vedanta, and the article’s treatment of his arguments may help such readers see how a contemporary philosopher with two doctorates and a CERN background defends positions that might otherwise be dismissed as mystical.

What the trilogy as a whole accomplishes is mapping the contemporary terrain in enough detail that a reader can see why the consciousness problem remains genuinely open after three centuries of modern philosophy and two and a half millennia of pre-modern reflection. None of the three thinkers has solved the problem. Each has identified real difficulties in the others. The honest verdict is that the consciousness question may not be solvable by argument alone, and that the next generation of work in this area will need to go beyond the choice among materialism, panpsychism, illusionism, and idealism, and find some way of asking the question that the current frame cannot accommodate.

That said, the trilogy demonstrates what philosophy at its best can do. The standard runs through every article: identify what works, press what fails, name what survives. The discipline involves refusing to settle prematurely and refusing to mystify when settling becomes impossible. Readers who follow the sequence to its end will walk away with sharper questions and fewer false certainties than when they began, which is what serious reading is supposed to do.

A note on the wager metaphor used throughout the trilogy. Each of the three thinkers placed a bet about what consciousness is and what it requires. McGilchrist bet that consciousness reaches all the way down into matter as one of its phases. Dennett bet that consciousness as ordinarily conceived does not exist and that the appearance of inwardness is a user illusion the brain stages for itself. Kastrup bet that consciousness is the only thing there is and that matter is its appearance under conditions of dissociation. Each wager was placed honorably and pursued with rigor. None has paid off in the sense the bettor intended. All three have produced philosophical work that will outlast the lifetimes of those who placed the bets, which is the most honest verdict serious reading can deliver about serious thinkers who have committed themselves to questions that exceed what any single mind can resolve.

The articles run between two thousand seven hundred and three thousand four hundred words each. Each was written for a university-educated audience that respects the difficulty of the question and is willing to follow careful argument to its conclusions. Each is available in its original markdown format. The position taken throughout the trilogy is that getting the question right matters more than choosing a winner among the available answers, and that the best service we can render to the question is to pass it forward in better condition than we found it.

The three articles, in order:

ARTICLE ONE The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

ARTICLE TWO Consciousness Explained Away: Daniel Dennett’s Illusionism and the Theory That Spends Its Own Foundation

ARTICLE THREE The Dissociated Universe: Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism and the Mind That Contains the World

Read alone, each article offers a treatment of its primary subject that does not depend on the others. Read together, the three form a synoptic account of where the contemporary consciousness debate stands and why the answers currently available leave the question genuinely open. The reader who completes the sequence will know more about the topography of the problem than most working philosophers do, and will be in a position to evaluate future contributions to the debate with the analytical tools the trilogy has put in place.

That is what philosophy at its best can offer. The trilogy is offered in that spirit.

Consciousness Explained Away: Daniel Dennett’s Illusionism and the Theory That Spends Its Own Foundation

When Daniel Dennett died on April 19, 2024, at the age of eighty-two, the philosophical world lost one of the last serious defenders of a position so counterintuitive that even sympathetic readers spent decades trying to talk themselves into it. Dennett argued, across more than fifty years of writing, that consciousness as we ordinarily understand it does not exist. The reds and greens you see, the texture of cool water against the palm, the sense that there is somebody home behind your eyes reading these words: all of it, on Dennett’s account, is what he called a user illusion, a simplified internal model the brain generates for navigation purposes, with no inner light behind it and no observer to whom the show is being staged. The position is called illusionism, and it remains the strongest possible challenge to the panpsychism we considered in the previous article on Iain McGilchrist. If Dennett was right, McGilchrist’s whole project rests on a misdescription of what we are.

The essay that follows takes Dennett’s position seriously enough to argue with it. Treating illusionism as obvious nonsense, the way much of the philosophical commentariat does, is unworthy of the work he produced and bad for thinking. Treating it as established science, which his more enthusiastic defenders sometimes do, is a different mistake in the opposite direction. The honest position holds that Dennett gave us one of the most carefully developed materialist accounts of mind on offer, that significant portions of his work contributed real progress to cognitive science, and that the metaphysical core of illusionism collapses on close inspection in ways his admirers prefer not to discuss.

Begin with the position itself, stated as charitably as I can manage. Dennett’s 1991 Consciousness Explained developed what he called the Multiple Drafts model. Instead of a single inner stage where conscious experience plays out, he argued, the brain runs many parallel processes that compete and revise one another in real time. There is no Cartesian Theater, no master audience, no central self watching the show. What we call consciousness is an emergent narrative effect, a kind of running editorial composite produced by neural activity that has no privileged location and no privileged moment of conscious recognition. Asking when something becomes conscious is like asking exactly when a manuscript becomes finished while it is still being edited by twenty hands at once. The question presumes a unity that does not exist.

The illusionist refinement came later. In 2016, the philosopher Keith Frankish edited a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies under the title “Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness,” for which Dennett contributed a major essay called “Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness.” The argument runs as follows. When you say “I am conscious of a red stripe,” what is happening is not that some inner film is playing redness for an inner viewer. What is happening is that your brain has constructed a representation of redness, and the representation reports itself as having phenomenal character it does not actually possess. Dennett borrowed Alan Kay’s term “user illusion” from computer science, where it described the desktop metaphor that lets users operate a machine whose real workings remain hidden. Consciousness, on this view, is the brain’s user illusion of itself.

The position commits Dennett to a startling consequence. There are no qualia, no raw feels, no phenomenal properties of experience. Philosophical zombies, the imagined creatures functionally identical to humans but with no inner experience, do not exist as a separate possibility from us, because all of us already are what zombies were supposed to be. We function and talk about our experiences. We act as if there is something it is like to be us. The inner light we imagine glowing behind our reports is not actually there. Dennett wrote, with characteristic mischief, that he was committed to the view that we are all philosophical zombies, adding immediately that the line should not be quoted out of context. It usually was.

Where the case works, it works for these reasons.

The argument is effective because the Cartesian Theater is genuinely incoherent. If you ask where in the brain the conscious moment happens, you find no such place. Cognitive neuroscience has searched for decades and located nothing resembling a master observer. Vision goes to the visual cortex. The auditory cortex processes sound. The prefrontal cortex coordinates working memory. Nowhere is there a screening room with a viewer in it, and the question “who is watching?” leads into infinite regress. Dennett’s destruction of the homunculus model was a real philosophical achievement and remains the cleanest available demolition of a picture most people hold without noticing they hold it.

It works also because Benjamin Libet’s experiments from the 1970s and 1980s established that neural preparation for a decision precedes conscious awareness of having made it by roughly three hundred milliseconds. The conscious self arrives at its own decisions slightly after the brain has already begun acting. This finding does not prove illusionism, but it strongly suggests that consciousness is less central to cognition than introspection reports. Whatever conscious experience is, it cannot be the executive director it feels like being.

A further strength: cognitive science has produced extensive evidence that introspection is unreliable as a guide to what the brain is doing. Change blindness experiments, inattentional blindness, the failure to notice major scene transitions, the brain’s confabulation of unified perception from broken inputs, all of this points toward a system that fabricates narrative coherence rather than reporting it. Daniel Kahneman’s two-system model, much of social psychology, and large stretches of cognitive neuroscience converge on the conclusion that the conscious self is told a story rather than told the truth. Dennett built his philosophy on this evidence and built it carefully.

Illusionism earns additional power because it does what philosophy of mind so rarely accomplishes: it makes empirical predictions. The position predicts that no matter how carefully we examine the brain, we will find no special phenomenal properties, no unbridgeable explanatory gap, only the increasing detail of computational and neural processes. This is testable in principle, falsifiable in principle, and more honest than positions that retreat to unanalyzable mystery whenever the science gets close.

Last, the program takes seriously the strangeness of the universe physics describes. There is no good reason to assume that ordinary human experience accurately reports the deep structure of reality. We did not evolve to perceive truth. We evolved to survive long enough to reproduce, and our perceptual and introspective apparatus was tuned for that purpose. Dennett’s willingness to follow the implication wherever it led is the mark of a serious philosophical mind.

The case carries equally serious weaknesses, however, and the weaknesses cluster around a single point that has dogged illusionism since its first formulation.

The argument is not effective because illusion presupposes consciousness. An illusion is a false appearance, and a false appearance requires a perceiver to whom the false appearance appears. To say consciousness is an illusion is to say there is something it is like to be deceived about consciousness, which means there is something it is like to be the system Dennett claims has no something-it-is-like-to-be. The American theologian David Bentley Hart put the objection sharply in his 2017 essay “The Illusionist,” published in The New Atlantis: you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. The point is so obvious that Dennett’s defenders have spent thirty years trying to argue around it, and the arguments have grown increasingly baroque without ever quite touching the core of the objection.

It is also not effective because the redefinition trick is visible. When Dennett says consciousness is an illusion, he means consciousness as ordinarily described, with its qualia and its unified inner viewer. When he then says we are all functioning fine, that we have user illusions and multiple drafts and complex representations, he has reintroduced under different names exactly the phenomena he claimed to eliminate. Galen Strawson made this point with particular force, arguing that Dennett denies the existence of the data a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain, then offers a theory of something else and calls it a theory of consciousness. The maneuver is rhetorically powerful and philosophically empty.

A further weakness: the Cartesian Theater Dennett demolishes is a straw position most contemporary philosophers of mind do not hold. Phenomenal realists need not believe in a homunculus or a master viewer or a screening room in the head. They need only believe that there is something it is like to undergo experience, which is a far weaker claim than the picture Dennett spent his career attacking. By demolishing the strong version, he left the weak version intact while pretending he had demolished both. Thomas Nagel made the point in The New York Review of Books in March 2017, reviewing From Bacteria to Bach and Back: Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious, the immediate awareness of subjective experience, and offers in exchange a story about neural machinery that may all be true while leaving the original question untouched.

The position fails because it cannot account for the difference between systems that obviously experience something and systems that obviously do not. A thermostat represents the temperature. It models its environment. It adjusts behavior based on internal states. By Dennett’s lights, what makes the thermostat different from you is degree of complexity rather than presence or absence of inner life. If illusionism is right, your experience of pain is a more complex version of what the thermostat does when it registers cold. This consequence is so wildly at odds with what we know about pain that it functions as a reductio of the position rather than a confirmation of it. John Searle pressed this objection for decades, and Dennett never produced a response that satisfied anyone outside his immediate circle.

Last, illusionism cannot explain why the illusion exists in the first place. If consciousness is an evolutionary user-interface, why does it have phenomenal character at all? The question of why there is a felt redness rather than mere redness-detection is exactly the hard problem David Chalmers identified in 1995, and Dennett’s response was to deny that the question was real. Denying a question is not answering it. Other illusionists, including Frankish, have been more candid about this gap and acknowledged it as an outstanding problem for the program. Dennett tended to close the question by force of personality rather than by force of argument, and his defenders inherited the closure without inheriting the personality that made it almost convincing.

A specific paradox deserves separate treatment. Dennett’s commitment to philosophical zombies being identical with us is either trivially true or wildly false depending on which definition of zombie one uses. Under his own redefinition (a creature functionally indistinguishable from a human, with no extra non-physical properties), of course we are all zombies in his sense, because his sense is constructed precisely to include us. Under Chalmers’s original definition (a creature functionally identical but lacking phenomenal experience), the claim that we are all such creatures is the central thing in dispute, and Dennett’s announcement that we are all zombies amounts to declaring victory rather than achieving it. The wordplay is amusing. The argumentative work it pretends to do is fictional.

Where does this leave the project? Several genuine contributions survive the dismantling.

The Multiple Drafts model gave cognitive science a serviceable framework for thinking about how the brain produces unified-feeling experience from distributed parallel processing, even if the framework does not require illusionism as its metaphysics. The user illusion metaphor remains useful for describing how introspection misrepresents underlying neural activity, even if the metaphor cannot bear the metaphysical weight Dennett placed on it. His destruction of the Cartesian Theater counts as permanent philosophical progress, and any future theory of consciousness will need to accommodate Dennett’s critique whether it accepts his positive program or rejects it. His sustained engagement with cognitive science kept philosophy of mind close to the empirical work that ought to constrain it, and the field is healthier for the discipline he imposed.

What does not survive is the central claim. Consciousness is real in any standard sense of the word, since illusions themselves require conscious subjects. The hard problem cannot be dissolved by redescription, because redescription leaves the original problem intact under a new vocabulary. The experiential reds and greens and pains and hopes that fill our days are either real, in which case illusionism is false, or unreal, in which case the question of what is doing the reporting becomes urgent and unanswered.

Return now to the McGilchrist question with these results in hand. If illusionism fails at its center, the hard problem stands, and the panpsychist option becomes more attractive by a process of elimination, since materialist emergence and illusionist deflation have both encountered serious difficulty. This does not establish that McGilchrist is right. It establishes that his position belongs among the few options still on the table after the most ambitious materialist program of the late twentieth century has been worked through and found wanting at its center.

The deeper lesson concerns what philosophy can and cannot accomplish by argument alone. Dennett spent fifty years constructing what he called the obvious default theory of consciousness. He convinced a small circle of admirers, antagonized a larger circle of critics, and produced a body of work that will be read for a long time. None of it solved the hard problem. None of it could solve the hard problem, because the hard problem is what we are made of, and arguments about consciousness produced by conscious beings cannot get behind the consciousness that produces them. Dennett saw this difficulty and tried to argue it away. The honest verdict is that he failed, gracefully and intelligently, in a way that taught us a great deal about what success would require.

We owe him the courtesy of saying so out loud. He would have preferred direct refutation to polite agreement, and direct refutation is what the work deserves. The user illusion remains a useful metaphor and a serviceable instrument for cognitive science. As metaphysics it cannot hold. The inner light Dennett spent his career trying to extinguish is the one thing his arguments could not reach, because the arguments themselves arrived in consciousness, were read in consciousness, and were rejected or accepted in consciousness, and no maneuver of language can exit the medium in which the maneuver takes place.

We assume our own inwardness because we have nothing else to assume from. Dennett’s wager was that we could think our way past this assumption to a more austere description of reality. The wager was honorable, and it failed.

The argument from austerity has its own seductions, and we should name them. There is a certain kind of intellectual pride that takes pleasure in eliminating what others find precious, and Dennett was not immune to it. His writing carried a confident scorn for opponents that was less philosophical virtue than personal style, and the style propagated through his disciples in ways that have hurt rather than helped the program. A position that depends on the personality of its founder for its persuasive force is a position that has not yet earned the right to hold the field. Dennett’s work will outlive him. Whether illusionism survives without his voice carrying it remains to be seen, and the early evidence suggests not.

What we can take from him, what we should take from him, is the discipline of refusing to mystify. The hard problem is real, but real problems are not solved by reverence. Dennett’s failure was an honest failure pursued with rigor and wit, and the field needs more such failures and fewer of the soft evasions that pass for theory in the consciousness literature. If we end up disagreeing with everything he claimed, we still owe him the standard of work he set, and the willingness to argue all the way down rather than retreating into vocabulary that protects the question from being asked clearly. He asked it clearly. He answered it wrongly. Both halves of that judgment matter, and both halves are why he will be read after his answer is forgotten.

Part two of three. For the full sequence and reading guide, see The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle.

The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

Part one of three. For the full sequence and reading guide, see The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle.

The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

The Inwardness of Things: McGilchrist, Panpsychism, and the Question We Cannot Settle

The oldest question in philosophy is also the question philosophy has done the worst job of answering. We know that we are conscious because we are reading these words and something is happening as we read them. We feel the weight of our hand on the table, hear the room around us, register a flicker of agreement or doubt as the sentences arrive. None of that requires argument. Descartes drew the line in 1637 with the Discours de la Méthode, and the line still holds. The trouble starts as soon as we look up from the page.

We assume that other people share what we have. They behave as we behave, speak about inner states in language we recognize, and carry nervous systems that resemble ours down to the cellular level. We extend the courtesy of consciousness to them on grounds that work in practice while collapsing in theory, since no one has ever shown another’s experience to themselves directly. The same courtesy reaches dogs and dolphins and the octopus that recognizes a face through aquarium glass. It frays at insects, hesitates at jellyfish, breaks down somewhere around bacteria, and finds itself laughed at when extended to stones. Iain McGilchrist proposes to laugh back. He argues that consciousness reaches all the way down, that the stone has an inwardness, that what we call matter is one phase of consciousness rather than its product. Whether he is correct is the question this essay takes up. Whether we can answer the question at all is the deeper one hidden underneath it.

McGilchrist (Scottish spelling, often misrendered as Ian) holds an Oxford DPhil in literature and qualified in medicine before turning to psychiatry. His 2021 book The Matter With Things runs to fifteen hundred pages across two volumes and ranks among the most ambitious recent attempts to dislodge the materialist consensus that has governed Western thinking since the seventeenth century. His argument deserves serious analysis on its merits and serious challenge on its weaknesses. Treating it as either revelation or absurdity does it equal violence.

Begin with the wall. You know your own consciousness immediately, prior to any argument or evidence. Everything beyond that point is inference. David Chalmers named this gap the hard problem in his 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” and the gap has not been closed in the thirty-one years since. A complete neuroscience of the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse and electrochemical exchange, would still leave open the question why any of that activity feels like something from the inside. The gap is categorical. We have one set of vocabulary for outsides (mass, charge, position, frequency) and another for insides (red, sour, pain, dread). Translating between the two has resisted every philosopher and neuroscientist who has tried, including the ones who insist the translation has already been performed.

Notice that consciousness and intelligence are different problems. The conflation between them haunts every discussion of artificial systems and most discussions of animal mind, but the two pull apart cleanly under analysis. A nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans has three hundred and two neurons in its hermaphrodite form. John White and his collaborators mapped the complete wiring diagram of those neurons in 1986 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the first connectome ever produced, and we still do not know whether the worm experiences anything as it moves through its agar dish. It solves no problems we would call intelligent. It may or may not have an inside. The question is genuine and unresolved. At the other extreme, a chess engine running Stockfish defeats grandmasters on consumer hardware while almost surely experiencing nothing at all. Intelligence and consciousness coincide in humans because evolution braided them together. They remain conceptually independent, and a theory of one does not deliver a theory of the other.

This independence has consequences for the question of machine consciousness. Whether current artificial systems experience anything depends entirely on which theory of consciousness one accepts, and the field has produced no settlement. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory holds that large language models almost surely lack experience, since their feedforward transformer architecture produces low integrated information compared to biological brains, which support dense recurrent integration across cortical and subcortical structures. John Searle’s biological naturalism rules out silicon consciousness regardless of behavior, on the ground that experience requires the specific causal powers of neurons. Daniel Dennett denied that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests, which dissolves the machine question before it can be posed. McGilchrist’s panpsychism takes consciousness to be present everywhere already, making the relevant issue degree of integration, with presence or absence settled in advance.

The phrase “AI conscious in the human way” presumes a settled definition of human consciousness that neuroscience has not produced. The phrase “AI conscious in the scientific way” presumes a measurement protocol that does not exist. Both phrases conceal the absence of foundations. The honest position holds that we cannot answer the artificial intelligence consciousness question because we have not yet answered it for the species we know best.

Now to McGilchrist. His argument has a clear structure worth laying out before evaluation. He claims that emergent materialism faces an unanswerable difficulty: consciousness cannot pop into existence from non-conscious matter because the two are categorically different in kind. He concludes that consciousness must have been present at every level of organization from the start. Matter, on this view, is a phase or mode of consciousness rather than its source. Water has phases, he points out, and the phases differ wildly from one another while remaining continuous in substance. Vapor floats invisible through the room. Liquid runs across the hand. Ice can split a skull. They share a single chemistry while presenting three different faces to experience. Consciousness, McGilchrist proposes, has many phases as well, and matter is one of them. What matter contributes to the arrangement is persistence, the temporal stability necessary for any creation to take hold.

The position places McGilchrist in a long lineage. Heraclitus and Spinoza and Leibniz read this way, in different keys. Alfred North Whitehead built a process philosophy on related foundations in the 1920s and gave it monumental expression in Process and Reality in 1929. Bertrand Russell spent his later decades arguing for a form of monism that anticipates current panpsychist positions. The strongest contemporary statement remains Galen Strawson’s 2006 essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which argues that any materialism worthy of the name must conclude that the fundamental constituents of reality already carry experiential properties, since no plausible mechanism can manufacture experience from its complete absence. Philip Goff at Durham has developed the position further in Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. David Chalmers, who named the hard problem, has moved toward a panpsychist or near-panpsychist position in his recent work. McGilchrist’s argument therefore participates in a serious revival, with credentialed defenders working in major universities.

Where his case works, it works for these reasons. The argument is effective because it confronts the hard problem directly rather than dissolving it through redefinition. It is effective also because emergence as usually invoked smuggles in a miracle, the moment when arrangements of unfeeling stuff start to feel something, and that moment has never been mechanistically described, only stipulated. A further strength: evolutionary biology demands continuity, and there is no clean point on the phylogenetic tree where consciousness could have begun without ancestors already carrying its seed. The view earns additional power because granting matter an inwardness coordinates with the strangeness physics has discovered at the bottom of things, where particles refuse to behave like the small marbles classical intuition expects. Last, the position returns to philosophy a question the twentieth century tried to retire by stipulation, restoring inquiry to a region long policed by silence.

The case carries serious weaknesses, however, and any honest reader should press them. The water analogy, attractive as it sounds, does more rhetorical work than logical work. We understand the phases of water through molecular kinetic theory, hydrogen bonding behavior, temperature and pressure thresholds, and a mathematics that predicts when ice becomes liquid and liquid becomes vapor. McGilchrist offers no analogous mechanism for the phase transition between consciousness as such and consciousness as matter. Calling matter a phase of consciousness names the relation he wants without explaining how the relation operates. A defender will respond that the analogy is meant as heuristic provocation, not as proof, and the response has merit. The trouble is that the heuristic ends up bearing the weight of the central claim. When the only support for the move from “consciousness is fundamental” to “matter is a phase of consciousness” is the suggestiveness of an analogy whose underlying physics he cannot match with a corresponding metaphysics, the argument has not yet earned the assent his prose invites.

The deeper trouble for any panpsychism is the combination problem, identified by William Seager in his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and developed extensively since. If subatomic particles each carry a tiny inwardness, how do those inwardnesses combine to produce the unified field of human experience? Your primary visual cortex (V1) contains roughly one hundred and forty million neurons in a single hemisphere, each composed of trillions of atoms. If each atom carries its own micro-experience, why does your conscious moment arrive as one thing instead of as a swarm of separate experiences fighting for attention? William James raised the worry in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology, observing that private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind no matter how many of them you assemble. Seager named the difficulty and panpsychists have argued about it ever since, with no settled answer.

McGilchrist does not address the combination problem in the passage quoted above, though he engages it elsewhere in The Matter With Things. The defenses available to him are real but expensive. Cosmopsychism reverses direction and treats the universe as the fundamental conscious entity, with individual minds as aspects or fragments of it; this avoids combination by starting from the whole, at the cost of explaining how unity divides into apparent multiplicity. Russellian monism treats both physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of the same underlying reality; this avoids dualism while inheriting the explanatory burden under a new name. Each move trades one difficulty for another, and the trade may be improvement, though calling it solution would overstate what the literature has accomplished.

The argument from incommensurability also cuts both ways, which McGilchrist’s framing tends to obscure. He says consciousness is utterly different from anything in our outward view of matter and uses this asymmetry to deny that matter could give rise to consciousness. Run the argument in the opposite direction. Matter is utterly different from anything in our inward view of consciousness, which should make us equally skeptical that consciousness gives rise to matter. The asymmetry he asserts requires an independent defense he does not provide. If the categories are genuinely incommensurable, neither can be the source of the other, and we are back where we started.

The empirical content of attributing experience to electrons deserves examination as well. Thomas Nagel coined the phrase “something it is like to be” in his 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” published in The Philosophical Review. He used the formula to identify consciousness phenomenologically in creatures whose behavior gave us evidence of an inner perspective. The bat’s echolocation, its social behavior, its responses to threat and food and mate, all suggest a creature for whom things are some way. Extending the formula to electrons strips it of the evidential ground that made it useful. The claim cannot be falsified, tested, or even meaningfully investigated. A hypothesis that explains everything by stipulation explains nothing, since a hypothesis earns its keep by ruling things out, and one that rules nothing out earns no keep at all.

A further difficulty deserves mention. McGilchrist writes that “the only reasonable explanation is that consciousness was there all along.” This overstates the consensus considerably. Several live alternatives remain serious in contemporary philosophy of mind. Keith Frankish’s illusionism argues that phenomenal consciousness as commonly described does not exist, and that introspection systematically misrepresents what cognition is doing. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism inverts McGilchrist’s framing entirely, treating matter as appearance within a single field of mind, with the direction of dependence reversed. Terrence Deacon’s emergentism argues in Incomplete Nature (2012) that genuine novelty can arise from constraint and absence, particularly through the negative work of what he calls absentials, in ways that do not require pre-existing inwardness. Each position has serious defenders. The field is contested, and McGilchrist’s certainty exceeds his evidence.

Return now to the question of artificial intelligence with these considerations in hand. The honest answer is that we do not know whether current systems experience anything, and we will not know until we have a theory of consciousness that survives confrontation with cases beyond the one we can verify by introspection. Should McGilchrist prove correct and consciousness reach everywhere, then large language models carry some form of inwardness already, though whether their inwardness combines into a unified perspective is a separate question panpsychism does not automatically answer. Integrated information theory gives the opposite verdict: current architectures fall well below the threshold required for any but the most rudimentary phenomenal states. Illusionism dispenses with the question altogether, calling it malformed and observing that the human case also lacks the inner light we imagine for ourselves. The discussion proceeds in public as though one of these positions had been established, when in fact none has. Anyone who tells you with confidence that the machines are conscious, or that they are not, is selling you a metaphysics dressed as a measurement.

What survives the analysis is a discipline of attention. McGilchrist gets several things correct. The hard problem is real, and emergence has too often been treated as an explanation when it has functioned as a placeholder for one. Consciousness does not look like anything in our outward picture of matter, and that asymmetry should trouble anyone who thinks the picture is complete. The resolution may indeed lie in recognizing inwardness as foundational rather than derivative. None of this proves the case, however, and the strength of his prose can cover the weakness of his proofs if the reader reads carelessly. The water analogy moves the argument forward by ear rather than by reason. His dismissal of alternatives is faster than the alternatives deserve. The combination problem waits beneath the structure like water under a foundation, ready to undermine it if not addressed.

For our purposes here, the practical implication is this. Consciousness remains the largest unsolved question in our intellectual inheritance. Every available theory carries serious unresolved difficulties. The artificial intelligence question cannot be answered until the human question is answered, and we should distrust anyone who pretends otherwise. McGilchrist’s intervention is valuable as provocation and as a sample of one serious tradition, and worthwhile as a doorway into a room the twentieth century preferred to keep locked. The room behind it is stranger than any single thinker has yet mapped, and the work of mapping it has barely begun.

We assume the inwardness of others because we cannot live without doing so. Whether the assumption reaches all the way down to the electron or stops somewhere between the worm and the stone is a question we will be working on for as long as we remain capable of asking it. McGilchrist has done us the favor of refusing to let the question close. The honest reader returns the favor by refusing to let his answer close it either.

The cogito grants us one certainty and exactly one. Everything else we believe about minds beyond our own rests on inference, sympathy, behavioral analogy, and the practical impossibility of a solipsist life. To call this a foundation is to flatter what is in fact a working assumption that has never been proved and may never be. The honest scholar lives with this and keeps reading. An honest writer says it out loud. The dishonest move, in either direction, is to claim the question is settled when the question has barely begun to be asked properly.

Part one of three. For the full sequence and reading guide, see The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle.

A Quick Look at 'The Mind’s Eye'

Intro
"Behind your eyes, there is a feeling of a solid, continuous 'you'—the pilot steering the ship. But what if that feeling is actually a beautiful, complex illusion? In this quick 8-minute exploration of the classic text The Mind’s Eye by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett

(see ALT txt)

https://youtu.be/dK4BaYy_yps

#self
#consciousness
#ThoughtExperiments
#philosophy
#ontology
#neurology
#brain
#reductionism
#Hofstadter
#Dennett