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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Map Is Not the Territory

On Kuhn's Taxonomy of Consciousness and the Possibility That None of It Is Right

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

When Robert Lawrence Kuhn set out to catalogue theories of consciousness in "A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications", he undertook a project that is at once exhaustive and disarmingly restrained.[1] Rather than advancing yet another theory, he assembled a structured overview of more than two hundred existing ones, organizing them into a conceptual taxonomy. His aim was explicitly descriptive rather than evaluative: to map the terrain without adjudicating its competing claims. That methodological modesty turns out to be philosophically revealing. By refusing to decide, Kuhn exposes the full extent of our indecision.

The Landscape: A Taxonomy Without a Verdict

Kuhn's taxonomy stretches across the full ontological spectrum, from strict physicalism to forms of radical idealism. At one end, materialist theories attempt to explain consciousness entirely in terms of physical processes, often grounded in neuroscience or computation. Slightly more accommodating positions accept that consciousness is physical but resist reducing it to lower-level descriptions. Elsewhere, quantum approaches suggest that classical physics is insufficient, while informational frameworks such as Integrated Information Theory treat consciousness as a property of structured complexity.

Beyond these lie more philosophically adventurous positions. Panpsychism attributes some form of proto-consciousness to all matter, monistic frameworks attempt to dissolve the distinction between mind and matter altogether, and dualist accounts maintain their fundamental separation. Idealist theories invert the usual hierarchy by treating mind as primary and the physical world as derivative. There are also approaches that focus less on ontology and more on altered states or on critiquing the very project of explaining consciousness.

The important point is not the content of any single theory but the sheer diversity of incompatible starting points. Kuhn's taxonomy does not present a debate within a shared framework; it presents a fragmentation of frameworks themselves.

What These Theories Actually Disagree About

What initially appears to be a disagreement about mechanisms turns out, under closer inspection, to be a disagreement about first principles. Theories diverge on what kinds of things exist at all, whether consciousness is fundamental or derivative, and what kind of explanation would even count as adequate.

Some approaches treat consciousness as an illusion generated by cognitive processes, while others regard it as the most indubitable feature of reality. Some attempt to model it in functional or computational terms, others in biological or informational terms, and still others in explicitly metaphysical language. Even the standards of evidence vary, ranging from strictly empirical to introspective or philosophical.

This is not a situation comparable to competing models in established sciences. In physics, disagreements unfold within a shared ontological and methodological background. In consciousness studies, that background itself is contested.

The Proliferation Problem

The most striking feature of Kuhn's survey is not just diversity but proliferation. Instead of converging on a smaller number of increasingly refined theories, the field continues to generate new ones. This persistent expansion suggests that something about the problem resists stabilization.

One reason is that empirical data underdetermines theory choice. Brain imaging, behavioral studies, and subjective reports can often be accommodated by multiple, even incompatible, frameworks. Another reason lies in the peculiar difficulty of measurement. Any attempt to test a theory of consciousness must rely on indirect indicators of subjective experience, creating a loop in which the criteria for validation depend on the very phenomenon under investigation.

The result is a field in which decisive falsification is rare and theoretical creativity is effectively unconstrained.

The Deeper Puzzle: What If None of Them Is Right?

At this point, a more unsettling possibility emerges. Given the multiplicity of theories, their mutual incompatibility, and the absence of decisive empirical resolution, it becomes plausible that the correct account of consciousness is not represented in the current landscape at all.

This would not be unprecedented. Before Darwin, theories of biological diversity failed to anticipate natural selection in anything like its modern form. Before Einstein, competing accounts of space and time did not converge toward relativity but were superseded by it. In such cases, progress did not come from choosing among existing options but from reframing the problem.

If consciousness is a problem of similar depth, then Kuhn's taxonomy may represent not a set of candidates awaiting selection but a pre-paradigmatic field awaiting transformation.

Is It “Anybody's Guess”?

From one perspective, the proliferation of theories suggests epistemic anarchy, as if any sufficiently sophisticated speculation could claim legitimacy. Yet this conclusion would be misleading. There are constraints. Any viable theory must cohere with well-established findings about the dependence of consciousness on brain processes. It must also account for the undeniable reality of subjective experience and maintain internal consistency.

Within those constraints, however, vast degrees of freedom remain. The deepest questions—whether consciousness is fundamental, whether physics is complete, whether subjective experience can be reduced—are not settled by existing data. They operate at the level of conceptual frameworks rather than empirical detail.

The situation is therefore not one in which all guesses are equal, but one in which multiple incompatible frameworks remain viable because the criteria for choosing among them are themselves unsettled.

Kuhn's Quiet Insight

Kuhn's project extends beyond classification to an examination of implications. Different theories of consciousness entail different views about meaning, value, artificial intelligence, and even the possibility of survival after death. This is a subtle but important shift. It reveals that theories of consciousness are not merely scientific hypotheses; they are embedded in broader existential and metaphysical outlooks.

That helps explain their persistence. Abandoning a theory of consciousness is often not just a matter of revising a model but of reconfiguring a worldview.

The Real Situation

Stripped to essentials, the situation is stark. We lack a clear account of what consciousness is, a reliable method for testing competing explanations, and even a shared understanding of what would count as a satisfactory explanation. Kuhn's taxonomy does not resolve these difficulties; it renders them explicit.

What appears at first as a map of knowledge increasingly looks like a map of ignorance, albeit a highly structured one.

A More Radical Interpretation

The suspicion that the correct theory lies outside the current catalogue invites a more radical interpretation. It may be that the problem of consciousness is misframed at a fundamental level. Perhaps consciousness is not an object among others to be explained but a condition for the possibility of explanation. Perhaps the traditional division between mind and world is itself a conceptual artifact. Or perhaps future developments will integrate epistemology and ontology in ways that current frameworks cannot anticipate.

In that light, Kuhn's taxonomy resembles other historical catalogues that preceded conceptual breakthroughs. It captures the richness of inquiry at a stage when the right questions have not yet fully crystallized.

Conclusion: The Value of the Map

Kuhn's achievement lies not in bringing us closer to a final answer but in clarifying the scope of the problem. By systematically organizing the diversity of theories, he shows that the difficulty is not merely in choosing among competing explanations but in determining what an explanation of consciousness would even look like.

It is therefore not quite accurate to say that the nature of consciousness is anybody's guess. But it is equally inaccurate to think that the answer will emerge from the current set of options. The more unsettling and more productive conclusion is that the solution may require a conceptual shift that renders much of the existing landscape obsolete.

The map is invaluable. But it may chart a territory that has yet to be properly understood.

NOTES

[1] Ken Wilber's theory of consciousness is listed under "Anomalous and Altered States Theories", together with 20(!) other approaches.

What's the relationship between Wilber's project and this Landscape of theories of (phenomenal) consciousness? It is direct in that if Wilber succeeds, Materialism Theories of consciousness are obviously undermined and likely defeated. Although Wilber does not get much into the consciousness-categories game, his core developmental process begins with a separation of individual consciousness from a transcendental reality, and then his grand course of human development moves toward restoring the primordial unity of human and transcendental consciousness.

However, Integral Psychology - the book is mentioned by Kunn - does contain a chapter specifically dealing with the mind-body problem. Wilber proposes a contemplative "solution" to it. Critics have argued that he has not solved the traditional mind-body problem at all, he has just assigned mind and body to their own quadrant, and declared their mysterious interaction as a fact to be accepted, thus only restating the problem.

To complicates things even further, Wilber even postulates subtle minds and bodies... See: Frank Visser, "What's it like to be a super-nova? Ken Wilber's Cosmic Approach to the Mind-Body Problem", www.integralworld.net, 2017.