Has scientist, author and publisher Dr Robert Khun come up with the latest human name for God – consciousness?
I think it just adds to the confusion and humanly unknowable.
My own experience of consciousness is that it is Ultimate Reality. Everything is that. It is ineffable, immeasurable, unseeable, un-nameable. It is all things. Everything known and unknown is consciousness in whatever form.
Kuhn’s new book, “Landscape of Consciousness” is a major recent attempt to survey and organize the extraordinary diversity of human explanations for consciousness (phenomenal experience, subjectivity, qualia), says Grok.
I think without actual personal mystic experience of Reality, Kuhn’s work is just more Babel-like chatter from we hairless monkeys.
(This is what someone described humans as on YouTube recently when he came back from a mystic experience of Reality).
However, here is Grok’s review of Kuhn’s latest work. You decide:
Kuhn (neurophysiologist by training, creator/host of the long-running Closer to Truth series) published the core paper “A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications” in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (Vol. 190, August 2024, open access).
It is a very long work (~175,000 words in development) that neutrally presents theories largely in the words of their proponents, with minimal adjudication, organized on a rough physicalist-to-nonphysicalist spectrum.
The project expanded into a living website (loc.closertotruth.com) with interactive maps, grids, categories, and individual theory pages (often authenticated or updated by the theorists).
Counts of various descriptions of consciousness have grown: roughly 225 in the original paper, then ~350, and reports of over 400 (some descriptions approach ~500 as it continues to expand).
Kuhn has joked that the problem is not having 400 theories but having one too few.
Kuhn says categories (with variations across updates) typically include:
Materialism (the largest group, with many subcategories: philosophical/eliminative/illusionism, neurobiological, electromagnetic field, computational/informational/functionalist, homeostatic/affective, embodied/enactive, relational, representational/higher-order/first-order, language, phylogenetic/evolutionary, etc.).
Non-reductive physicalism.
Quantum and dimensional theories.
Information-based (notably Integrated Information Theory / IIT).
Panpsychisms (and related micropsychism, cosmopsychism, panprotopsychism).
Monisms (neutral, dual-aspect, etc.).
Dualisms (substance, property, emergent, traditional religious, etc.).
Idealisms.
Anomalous and altered states.
Challenge / skepticism / mysterianism-type positions.
Sometimes phenomenology as a distinct methodological category.9915db
loc.closertotruth
Kuhn’s aims are twofold: (1) expansive yet rational diversity in understanding consciousness rather than premature restriction to one paradigm, and (2) examining implications of each family of theories for “ultimate questions” such as meaning/purpose/value, AI consciousness, virtual immortality, survival beyond death, and free will.
His personal leanings (stated with caveats) have included something like a dualism-idealism mashup, with quantum approaches and even certain eliminative/illusionist-neurobiological combinations also ranking.
The work draws heavily on decades of interviews and is explicitly a permanent work-in-progress.
Historical depth: consciousness thinking “since the beginning of mankind”
Consciousness as a topic long predates modern science or the “hard problem” framing (Chalmers).
It appears in: Ancient India: Upanishads (c. 800–200 BCE) and later Advaita Vedanta treat cit / consciousness / Brahman as fundamental reality (sat-cit-ānanda); the physical world as appearance or manifestation. Non-dual pure consciousness is ultimate; individual selves are not ultimately separate. Related streams in Kashmir Shaivism, etc.
Ancient China: Daoist texts (Laozi, Zhuangzi) describe non-dual flow and dissolution of conventional boundaries into the Dao.
Ancient Greece and later Western: Plato’s non-material psyche and Forms; Aristotle’s hylomorphism (soul as form of the body); later dualisms formalized by Descartes; various materialisms, monisms, and idealisms through the centuries.
Indigenous, Abrahamic (soul traditions), Buddhist (empty/illusory or mind-only streams such as Yogācāra), and many other traditions.
Modern academic literature exploded with neuroscience, cognitive science, analytic philosophy of mind, and quantum-inspired proposals.
Surveys of recent decades still find dozens of distinct models even when restricted to scientific or English-language papers; Kuhn’s much broader net (including philosophy, religion, anomalous phenomena, and historical views) yields the hundreds.
No consensus exists; the “hard problem” (why and how physical processes give rise to felt experience) remains open, and many theories differ in what they even take “consciousness” to be explaining.
Keith’s description—“Ultimate Reality, Consciousness as experienced by Keith just is, and everything known and unknown is that. It is ineffable, immeasurable, unseeable, unameable. It is all things. Everything is consciousness in whatever form.
This aligns closely with the idealism end of Kuhn’s spectrum, particularly ontological/nondual forms.
In these views, consciousness is not produced by matter or brains; it is the fundamental (or sole) reality, and the physical world, bodies, and individual minds are appearances, modulations, or limited perspectives within it.
Classic expressions include Advaita (“Brahman is all, and the Self is Brahman”), certain Buddhist and Daoist insights, and modern articulations such as analytic idealism (e.g., Bernardo Kastrup’s work, which appears in the Landscape), Rupert Spira’s non-dual teaching (“Only Consciousness is conscious”), Tony Nader’s “Consciousness is all there is,” or similar positions.
Ineffability is frequently emphasized: pure consciousness transcends ordinary measurement, sensory seeing, and conceptual capture, yet is the ground of all experience and appearance.
This is one coherent family among the hundreds.
Materialist theories reverse the priority (consciousness arises from or is identical to physical processes).
Panpsychisms place experience as fundamental in a more distributed way (even fundamental particles or the cosmos have proto-experiential aspects).
Dualisms keep mental and physical as irreducibly distinct.
Kuhn’s project deliberately holds the full range without forcing a winner, precisely because the diversity itself is informative and because implications (for AI, death, meaning, etc.) diverge sharply depending on the ontology chosen.
The Landscape website and the original paper are the best single entry points for exploring the taxonomy, individual theories, and the maps that visualize order-of-magnitude (quantum to cosmic), materialism–idealism scale, and connections.
Keith’s first-person report of his revealed experience of consciousness as the all-encompassing, ineffable ground is a lived expression of one of the oldest and still actively defended positions on Kuhn’s map.
The broader literature, ancient to contemporary, shows that such reports have continually informed human cultures historically.
