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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 Ongoing Enigma of Consciousness

Are We Back To Square One?

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Few philosophical questions have proved as enduring and elusive as the nature of consciousness. Whether framed as the “hard problem” of subjective experience or as the metaphysical riddle of mind and matter, this issue has outlived centuries of speculation.

Each major position—materialism, dualism, and the various forms of monism—has had its moments of triumph and its own crises of coherence. Despite neuroscientific progress, theoretical sophistication, and imaginative detours through quantum or panpsychic speculation, it increasingly feels as if we are circling the same paradox from different directions.

Are we back to square one? Perhaps—but the square itself has become vastly more detailed. What used to be a binary between mind and matter has evolved into a multidimensional philosophical battlefield where new terms proliferate—emergence, information, process, interiority, qualia—but the central riddle remains:

How can something that feels like something arise from, or coexist with, a world that appears to feel like nothing?

The Limits of Materialism

The materialist worldview, dominant since the Scientific Revolution, holds that consciousness arises from matter organized in certain ways—most notably in the human brain. In this view, subjective awareness is an emergent feature of neural complexity.

Neuroscience has made spectacular progress in mapping the brain's activity, identifying correlates of perception, thought, and emotion. Functional MRI scans can show which brain regions light up when we experience pain, recognize a face, or recall a memory. Predictive coding theories describe the brain as a statistical inference machine, perpetually updating its internal models of the world.

Yet none of these frameworks tells us why there is something it is like to be such a machine. Correlation is not explanation. To move from neurons firing to experiences of red, joy, or self-awareness is to leap an unbridgeable gap—from quantitative mechanism to qualitative feeling.

This is the “hard problem” in David Chalmers' sense. It suggests that materialism, however refined, operates within an ontology that excludes the very phenomenon it seeks to explain. Matter, as physics defines it, has no inner dimension. It consists of fields and forces, not of feelings.

Some materialists have tried to redefine matter itself as having proto-experiential properties—a move that slides quietly toward panpsychism. Others, like Daniel Dennett, deny the existence of qualia altogether, claiming consciousness is a kind of cognitive illusion. But this intellectual austerity is self-defeating: the very act of denying consciousness presupposes consciousness.

Materialism thus either eliminates the phenomenon or smuggles it back in disguise.

The Persistence of Dualism

Dualism, by contrast, begins where materialism balks: it takes our lived experience seriously. Mind and matter, it insists, are categorically different kinds of being. Consciousness is private, first-person, qualitative; matter is public, third-person, quantitative. To collapse one into the other is to deny the evidence of our most immediate reality.

But dualism's intuitive strength is also its theoretical weakness. Two substances invite the question of interaction: how do they meet? If mind is immaterial, how can it move neurons, muscles, or molecules? Descartes' pineal gland proposal now looks quaint, but the underlying issue remains unresolved.

Modern “property dualisms” have tried to soften the divide. They argue that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality, alongside mass or charge. David Chalmers' “naturalistic dualism” is the best-known example. Yet positing consciousness as a brute fact solves nothing—it only elevates mystery to the status of ontology.

Dualism also violates the unity of science. It introduces a metaphysical bifurcation that leaves us with two incompatible realms: one describable by physics, another accessible only to introspection. How they fit together is anyone's guess.

Dualism thus preserves the phenomenon of consciousness but at the cost of explanatory coherence.

Monism's Mysterious Third

Enter monism, the perennial attempt to heal the Cartesian rift. In one form or another, monism claims that there is ultimately only one kind of reality, which we perceive as either mental or physical depending on our standpoint.

The modern variants—neutral monism and dual-aspect monism—have attracted many philosophers who reject both eliminative materialism and metaphysical dualism. Thinkers like William James, Bertrand Russell, Baruch Spinoza (in retrospect), and more recently Thomas Nagel and Galen Strawson have all proposed that mind and matter are two faces of a deeper, neutral substance or process.

Yet this “neutral” ground is notoriously elusive. If it is not physical or mental, what could it be? “Information,” “energy,” or “process” are often invoked as candidates, but these words are slippery placeholders. Information, for example, always presupposes a context of interpretation—someone or something for whom it is information about something. It is not a metaphysical primitive.

This is where Ken Wilber's “tetra-aspect” model enters the discussion as an ambitious synthesis.

Wilber's Tetra-Aspect Monism

Wilber's Integral Theory generalizes the mind–matter debate into what might be called tetra-aspect monism. Every phenomenon, he argues, possesses four irreducible dimensions or “quadrants”:

Interior-Individual (Upper-Left) – subjective experience or consciousness (“I”).

Exterior-Individual (Upper-Right) – physical embodiment or behavior (“It”).

Interior-Collective (Lower-Left) – shared meaning or culture (“We”).

Exterior-Collective (Lower-Right) – social systems or environments (“Its”).

In this view, consciousness does not exist in isolation, nor is it reducible to brain processes alone. Every event in the universe—a cell, a thought, a culture—co-arises in all four quadrants simultaneously. The physical and the mental, the individual and the collective, are co-implicated expressions of the same unfolding reality.

This “tetra-aspect” monism elegantly extends Spinoza's and Whitehead's intuitions into a more relational ontology. It avoids the reductionism of materialism and the bifurcation of dualism by embedding both in a network of mutually arising perspectives.

However, the model's elegance may conceal a conceptual ambiguity. If all phenomena already possess these four aspects, does this explain why there is something it is like to experience them? Or does it merely restate that experience has many correlated dimensions?

In practice, Wilber's quadrants function as an epistemological map rather than an ontological account. They tell us how to organize the phenomena of consciousness—not what consciousness is. The model brilliantly integrates knowledge domains but risks leaving the “hard problem” untouched, as if reclassified out of existence.

Wilber's framework could thus be seen as a cosmogram of the mind–matter relation, not an explanation of it: it mirrors the structure of our understanding but may not penetrate the essence of being.

The Expanding Landscape

If Wilber's fourfold symmetry marks one ambitious attempt to go beyond dualism, other currents in contemporary philosophy of mind point in diverse directions:

Panpsychism suggests that consciousness is an intrinsic property of all matter, though perhaps in infinitesimal degrees. This restores ontological continuity but risks triviality: if everything is conscious, consciousness loses explanatory value.

Emergentism insists that consciousness appears only when complexity crosses a certain threshold, but “emergence” without mechanism remains a metaphor, not a theory.

Functionalism defines consciousness through causal roles and computational patterns, yet this substitutes structure for subjectivity: it explains what consciousness does, not what it feels like.

Process metaphysics, from Whitehead to modern “relational ontologists,” posits that reality consists of events rather than substances. This elegantly merges interiority and exteriority but often dissolves into metaphysical abstraction.

Across all these views, the same circle persists: we trade explanatory coherence for descriptive richness, or vice versa. We can model behavior, map correlations, or describe perspectives—but the felt quality of consciousness remains the recalcitrant residue that no model absorbs.

Beyond the Circle

Perhaps the root of the impasse lies not in the world but in our conceptual apparatus. The very categories of subject and object, inner and outer, mind and matter may reflect a structure of cognition, not of being. If so, philosophy may be facing a kind of cognitive closure: consciousness cannot fully explain itself because it constitutes the very space of explanation.

Wilber's tetra-aspect model hints at this meta-perspective: every act of knowing already involves all four dimensions. But recognizing this may lead not to a final synthesis, but to intellectual humility. Consciousness is not one quadrant among others—it is the field within which all quadrants arise.

To acknowledge that may be to accept that no ontological map—materialist, dualist, or integral—can exhaust the mystery of experience. Consciousness might not be in the world; the world might be in consciousness, at least phenomenologically.

A Modest Conclusion

To say we are “back to square one” is not to despair, but to acknowledge how persistent and transformative this question has been. Consciousness has resisted reduction not because philosophy has failed, but because it exposes the limits of philosophy's very tools.

Materialism disenchants the world but cannot account for experience. Dualism preserves experience but fractures reality. Monism heals the fracture but at the price of invoking an ineffable “third.” Even Wilber's tetra-aspect synthesis—perhaps the most sophisticated of them all—turns out to be a multidimensional mirror of the same puzzle.

And yet, this may be progress. We are no longer asking which side is real, mind or matter. We are beginning to ask whether the question itself may rest on an inherited metaphysical grammar that no longer fits the depth of our experience.

So perhaps we are not back to square one after all. The board has changed, even if the game continues. Consciousness remains both the question and the condition for questioning—a riddle that reflects us to ourselves, forever reminding philosophy that its greatest mystery is the light by which it thinks.