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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).

Consciousness Without a Subject?

On the Persistent Mystery of Experience

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Consciousness remains one of philosophy's most recalcitrant problems. Despite centuries of inquiry and decades of neuroscientific progress, it resists clean explanation. The persistence of the mystery has led many thinkers—ancient and modern alike—to postulate consciousness as a thing: a self, a soul, a mental substance, or, more recently, a universal field or cosmic principle. Yet this strategy, while intuitively appealing, does remarkably little explanatory work. Naming consciousness as an entity does not tell us how experience arises, how it relates to the physical world, or why it has the structure it does. At best, such postulates relocate the mystery; at worst, they reify ignorance.

What we reliably know about consciousness is far more modest, yet also more secure: we are conscious of things and of thoughts. Consciousness, as given, is intentional—it is always consciousness of something. This apparently simple fact already places severe constraints on what a satisfactory account can look like.

The Temptation to Reify Consciousness

Historically, consciousness has often been treated as a kind of inner object or entity. Descartes' res cogitans, the Christian soul, the Hindu atman, Kant's transcendental ego, and contemporary notions of a “witness consciousness” all exemplify this tendency. Even secular philosophy has not escaped it: the idea of a mental “subject” that owns experiences remains deeply ingrained.

The motivation is understandable. Experience feels unified, continuous, and private. There seems to be a “someone” to whom experiences happen. However, turning this felt unity into a metaphysical entity quickly leads to difficulties. If consciousness is a thing, what kind of thing is it? Is it material or immaterial? Extended or unextended? Located in space or not? Causally efficacious or epiphenomenal? Each answer generates new problems without resolving the original one.

More importantly, reification explains nothing. To say that experiences occur because a self or soul exists is to redescribe the phenomenon, not to analyze it. The explanatory gap remains intact.

Universalizing the Mystery: Panpsychism and Idealism

In response to the failures of substance dualism, some contemporary philosophers and spiritual thinkers expand consciousness rather than abandon reification. Panpsychism distributes consciousness throughout matter; idealism elevates it to the fundamental constituent of reality itself.

While these approaches avoid certain interaction problems, they introduce others. If everything is conscious, what distinguishes human experience from that of rocks or electrons? If the universe is consciousness, how do we account for the structured, law-governed regularities described by physics? Above all, universalizing consciousness does not clarify its nature. Declaring consciousness fundamental merely places it beyond explanation by fiat.

In this sense, cosmic consciousness functions much like the traditional soul: a metaphysical placeholder where analysis stops.

Consciousness as Activity, Not Entity

A more promising approach is to resist the urge to treat consciousness as a thing at all. Phenomenology, particularly in the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, emphasizes that consciousness is not an object among objects but an activity or process. It is the ongoing disclosure of a world.

From this perspective, consciousness is defined by its structure rather than its substance. It is characterized by intentionality (aboutness), temporality (the flow of experience), embodiment, and perspectival limitation. There is no need to posit a metaphysical subject behind experience; the sense of self may itself be a construction within experience.

This view aligns with a growing body of cognitive science suggesting that the self is not a unitary entity but a dynamic model generated by the brain to integrate perception, memory, and action. The “I” is not the owner of consciousness but one of its contents.

The Hard Problem Reconsidered

The so-called “hard problem” of consciousness asks why physical processes should give rise to subjective experience at all. This formulation presupposes that consciousness is something over and above functional or informational processes. But this assumption may already bias the inquiry.

If consciousness is understood as the capacity of certain systems to be aware of and responsive to their own states and environments, the mystery shifts. The question becomes not “How does matter produce consciousness?” but “Under what conditions do systems exhibit conscious access?” This reframing does not dissolve the mystery, but it places it within a naturalistic research program rather than a metaphysical dead end.

Crucially, refusing to reify consciousness does not entail reductionism in the crude sense. One can acknowledge the irreducibility of first-person experience while rejecting the need for a metaphysical subject to host it.

Knowing Without a Knower?

The most unsettling implication of this line of thought is that consciousness may not require a knower in the traditional sense. There is seeing, but no inner seer; thinking, but no thinker over and above the thought. This idea, found in both Western philosophy (e.g., Hume, Dennett) and certain strands of Buddhist thought, runs counter to common sense but fits surprisingly well with empirical findings.

What persists through time may not be a self but a narrative—a continually updated story that gives coherence to experience. Consciousness, then, is not something we have but something that happens.

Conclusion: Living With an Uncomfortable Modesty

Consciousness remains mysterious, but not all mysteries invite metaphysical inflation. Postulating selves, souls, or cosmic minds may satisfy existential or spiritual longings, yet they do little to illuminate how experience actually works. The one thing we know with confidence—that we are conscious of things and thoughts—points toward a relational, process-oriented understanding rather than an ontological one.

Philosophical progress may require a certain restraint: resisting the urge to turn the unknown into an entity and accepting that explanation sometimes advances by subtraction rather than addition. Consciousness may not be the deepest thing in the universe, but it remains the most intimate—and perhaps that is mystery enough.