What, Even, Is This? — Mapping a Pre-Categorical Theory of Consciousness
What I’m going to try to do here is create a sort of map of theories of consciousness that are adjacent to mine. Having a picture like this, I find, helps me to have a sense of direction as far as what are the explanatory gaps that I’m trying to address when I set out to produce an explanation for consciousness or anything else for that matter. It’s important to know why existing explanations aren’t getting the job done as context for proposing alternative explanations in general.
I have been thinking a lot about panpsychism recently. My relationship with panpsychism is complicated. “I’d be a panpsychist but for [the binding problem]” is one way to put it. But I have come to find out that there are approaches to panpsychism that could yield solutions for the binding problem.
My framework-theory summarized:
At this stage, my working view is that consciousness and physics are not fundamental constituents of reality but are co-arising expressions within a deeper, unified framework. This framework is not meant to introduce a new substance or ontological category, but to gesture toward whatever must be presupposed for mind, matter, and subject–object structure to appear at all.
In earlier iterations I described this in the language of neutral monism; however, that label should be taken as a rough orientation rather than a commitment to a “third thing” underlying mind and matter. What is fundamental on this view is not a substance but a pre-categorical substrate from which familiar ontological distinctions differentiate.
Consciousness and physics are not reduced to one another, nor is one treated as more basic than the other. Instead, they occupy the same ontological layer while being unified by a deeper explanatory framework. Any appeal to informational or computational structure is intended to characterize patterns of differentiation and constraint, not to reify the substrate itself.
Nino Kadić, whose masters thesis was supervised by Philip Goff [1], considers himself a monadic panpsychist. In a discussion with another Substack user he described information in a way that basically answered a question I have been trying to answer myself. I have been scratching my head over this question about the nature of information at the substrate level. By my vague recollection of his comment (which I’m unable to locate at the moment) he described information as having a structural aspect and a semantic aspect. This insight resonates strongly with my own thinking. If it reflects his thesis accurately, it suggests our approaches to consciousness share significant conceptual ground. And that could mean that my theory is low key a panpsychist theory.
In another Substack post the poster said something along the lines “I’m not a physicalist, substance dualist, panpsychist, or any of that. I don’t believe in the mind-body problem.” And this was a “they had us in the first half” moment for me (a meme referencing unexpected plot twists). I mean I didn’t expect the second sentence to follow the first because that’s not what I usually see. Usually, it’s the physicalist that doesn’t believe in the mind-body problem.
Which reminds me that I encountered another Substack user who also disavowed physicalism and plainly stated that the hard problem “is a problem for you but not for me” (dare I say, as Chalmers intended). I love the attitude. But ultimately, I disagree with the conclusion.
In the strictest sense, they are right. There is no mind-body problem or hard problem in the sense that reality is originally complete. Physics and consciousness, mind and matter seem to interact seamlessly and in ways that we’re still trying to understand. What we experience is a complete gestalt ... a fully functioning “model” if I can call it that. We just haven’t uncovered the theory that describes it completely yet. When we talk about a mind-body problem or a hard problem of consciousness, what we’re really saying is that there is an explanatory gap in our (the collective effort to study and map reality conceptually as a form of instrument [2]) theory of everything.
And yet, if you were to have unmediated phenomenal access to the substrate, the essential nature of reality and its experiencer would become apparent in such a way that nothing remains that needs explaining. It really do be like that. There are modes of perception where certain insights about the nature of this substrate (which I call the fabric of reality) can be had. It’s not unusual for an advanced practitioner of contemplative practices to dismiss the hard problem of consciousness, for instance. But phenomenological resolution does not equate theoretical resolution. That is why when someone dismisses the mind-body problem, says they are not a physicalist, and they have a PhD in philosophy I am very confused and intrigued.
There is also Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, co-founder of Qualia Research Institute, a non-profit that is doing very exciting consciousness research (they are also doing this: ClusterFree). Andrés considers himself a panpsychist (qualia are fundamental) but did not put himself in a category. I’m only somewhat familiar with his work (it’s a lot to digest) but his grasp of the contemplative/meditative/psychedelic side of consciousness studies gives me a lot of confidence that he is doing a bunch of things right.
My intuition is that those of us who have contemplative/meditative phenomenal insights are going to produce theories of consciousness that share some vital common ground. Our theories most likely gravitate toward a certain form of expression—one that must explain how all that weird stuff happens. That will probably be a follow up post here.
So it turns out that panpsychism is a lot busier than I imagined it was. And maybe, just maybe, I became a panpsychist without realizing it. At this very moment I honestly don’t know.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy. For its proponents panpsychism offers an attractive middle way between physicalism on the one hand and dualism on the other.
Based on this definition alone, it would seem that my theory might be a panpsychist one. I clearly state that mind and matter are not fundamental—they occupy the same ontological layer in the reality cake but they are not the foundation. However, this wording is debatable because ultimately, mind and matter are something that the substrate is doing. One could argue that they are in fact the substrate and that makes them foundational.
The encyclopedia elaborates further:
The word “panpsychism” literally means that everything has a mind. However, in contemporary debates it is generally understood as the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. Thus, in conjunction with the widely held assumption (which will be reconsidered below) that fundamental things exist only at the micro-level, panpsychism entails that at least some kinds of micro-level entities have mentality, and that instances of those kinds are found in all things throughout the material universe. So whilst the panpsychist holds that mentality is distributed throughout the natural world—in the sense that all material objects have parts with mental properties—she needn’t hold that literally everything has a mind, e.g., she needn’t hold that a rock has mental properties (just that the rock’s fundamental parts do).
This is where my theory seems to truly begin to diverge from panpsychism. My theory doesn’t feature a micro-level account of mind or proto-consciousness. But it does feature “emergence”, which I’m coming to find out carries certain connotations that I might want to draw clear distinctions against. I have seen this word being used in ways that amount to a deus ex machina ... a convenient but inexplicable plot device swooping in to explain the hitherto unexplainable.
This doesn’t produce a real explanation. The burden of proof shifts from the thing that needed explaining to the deus ex machina. LLMs especially have an affinity for words like this. It gives them maximum equivocative freedom to validate any theory that could use a little bit of unexplainable magic to bridge explanatory gaps.
By “co-emergence” I do not mean strong ontological emergence in which novel properties appear without principled explanation. Rather, I mean the appearance of stable, irreducible descriptive regimes arising from patterns of differentiation and constraint within the substrate—analogous to how classical computation emerges as a special case of quantum computation without introducing new fundamental entities.
I also learned that panpsychism has branches. I’m not sure why I just learned this. I mean, why wouldn’t it? Panpsychists are a diverse bunch. I guess I just never took panpsychism seriously because, in my ignorance, it seemed low effort. But in my defense, I invested the equivalent of a college education in time spent having debates in philosophy and spirituality Discord servers and that’s where most of my knowledge of panpsychism came from. In those settings, it was often a refuge for contemplative and psychonaut types who didn’t want to go to the trouble of hashing out the ontology of consciousness.
In reality panpsychism seems (at least to me) to be harboring a disproportionate number of the most promising thinkers as far as the people who just might solve the hard problem of consciousness. And I admit I am biased because my theory has a very panpsychist vibe to it; one thing that we have in common is that we are dialectically opposed to physicalism.
One way to talk about the types of panpsychism is in terms of direction (and most of these are ideal types rather than mutually exclusive historical positions):
Bottom-up (micro→macro): emergentist, combinatory, monadic panpsychism
Top-down (cosmic→individual): cosmopsychism (cosmic consciousness), theo-psychism (divine mind)
For bottom-up approaches, there’s a further question about mechanism:
Emergentist (causal interactions produce something new)
Combinatory (arrangement/constitution: smaller bits add up, perhaps spectrally, i.e., low to high)
Monadic/Leibnizian (relational mirroring: no fusion, no new emergence)
At a glance, it might seem like my theory could be emergentist. I describe mind and matter as co-emergent. But the reason why it isn’t emergentist is that in panpsychism mind and matter are co-fundamental, whereas in my theory their apparent co-emergence is secondary rather than foundational.
I’m not even sure that it belongs in neutral monism, which proposes a “mysterious third thing”. The fundamental nature of the substrate is universally neutral—it eludes categorization and description irrevocably.
The substrate isn’t a “third thing” alongside mind and matter. It’s not a kind of substance at all. It’s that from which any possible substance-category could emerge. Mind, matter, and whatever else you might conceive—ectoplasm, information, spirit, whatever ontological category you want to invent—all would be differentiations of the substrate. The substrate is the condition for the possibility of any ontological category, but is not itself an ontological category. The substrate is, to us, the fabric of reality. Reality is not a totality of beings—it is the pre-categorical enabling field of being-as-such.
For theoretical purposes, I think it will suffice to ascribe a Hilbert-space-like (boundaryless and infinite-dimensional) geometry to the unified field that emanates the substrate. Not as an ontological scaffold but as a theoretical representation of constraint, continuity, and differentiation-capacity.
Finally, a word on computation. I align closely with a Deutsch-ian account. David Deutsch argues that computation is not an abstract formal game but a physical process—that the physical world itself realizes computations. According to this view, the laws of physics determine what transformations of information are possible, and systems (like quantum systems) perform computations as part of their lawful behavior. Classical computation is then seen as a special case of a broader, physically grounded notion of computation, rather than something separate from or merely implemented by physical systems.
This should not be mistaken for computationalism or functionalism. I am not claiming that mind is computation, nor that consciousness reduces to information processing. Rather, computation names a fundamental capacity of the unified field: the lawful transformation of states under constraint.
In this sense, computation is not something that happens within the substrate, but one way of characterizing how differentiation, persistence, and novelty are possible at all. It is a dynamical description, not an ontological reduction.
Footnotes:
In Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019), Philip Goff argues that the traditional scientific worldview—rooted in Galileo’s decision to treat only mathematically quantifiable properties as legitimate objects of inquiry—systematically sidelines consciousness. According to Goff, this “error” has shaped the way philosophers and scientists frame the mind–body problem and contributes to the persistence of explanatory gaps.
As David Deutsch puts it, our ability to generate and refine knowledge, opening up endless possibilities is the “beginning of infinity” (The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, 2011). This is a neat complement to the idea that our collective mapping of reality is an ongoing, unbounded project.
