Living With an Unsolved Mystery: Consciousness

Closing a series on mind, body, and consciousness

In 1995, the philosopher, David Chalmers, gave the deepest problem in this series a name that has stuck: the hard problem of consciousness. The easy problems, by comparison, are the ones that neuroscience is making genuine progress on: how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information, produces reportable behaviour.

The hard problem is different in kind, not merely in difficulty. It is the question of why any of that physical processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all, why there is something it is like to see red or feel pain, rather than the entire elaborate system running in the dark, producing behaviour with no one home to experience any of it.

Thirty years on, the hard problem has not been solved. It has barely been narrowed. This series has walked through why: consciousness may or may not end when the brain does, mind and body may be one thing or two in ways the evidence still cannot decisively settle, free will may be largely conditioned yet not therefore illusory, the body seems to know things before the reasoning mind catches up to them, and altered states appear to access something ordinary waking consciousness cannot reach on its own. At the end of five posts examining all of this closely, I do not have a unified theory to hand you. I do not think anyone does, whatever confidence they project.

Consciousness

The temptation this creates

There is a real risk in sitting this long with genuine uncertainty about something as central as what you are. It can produce a kind of intellectual vertigo, where every possible answer starts to feel equally unearned, and the honest response to that vertigo is not more certainty manufactured to make the discomfort stop. Premature certainty in either direction, confident materialism that treats every anomaly as a problem still awaiting a physical explanation, or confident mysticism that treats every anomaly as proof of what one already wanted to believe, is a way of ending the inquiry rather than honouring it.

Fallibilism, applied to the consciousness question

The concept I closed the previous series with belongs here, too. Fallibilism, developed within the pragmatist tradition by Charles Sanders Peirce, holds that a person can act on their beliefs with genuine confidence while remaining open, in principle, to revising them in light of better evidence. Applied to consciousness specifically, this means something like: hold a working view, (mine leans toward the possibility that consciousness is not simply generated by the brain but filtered through it), act and think from that view with real conviction, and keep the door open, honestly, for the evidence that might eventually close it or reshape it entirely.

That is a harder discipline than it sounds, because the question of what you are is not a detached, academic curiosity the way most philosophical puzzles are. It touches directly on what happens to you when you die, what your suffering and joy actually are, whether the self doing the wondering is a fixed thing or something more provisional than it feels. Holding uncertainty about a question this close to the bone, without collapsing into false comfort in either direction, is genuinely difficult work.

Where the shamanic path completes the philosophical one

This is where I think direct practice offers something that philosophy, on its own, is not well equipped to provide. Philosophy trains the mind to hold a question open, to resist premature closure, to keep examining. It is less naturally suited to training the rest of a person to actually live inside that openness without it becoming a source of constant low-grade dread.

Contemplative and shamanic practice, in my own experience across four decades, offers exactly this: a way of being present with mystery, including the largest mystery there is, without needing to resolve it before you can rest, work, love, or grieve well.

The examined life, as I argued at the close of the last series, was never meant to leave a person more anxious than when they started. It was meant to leave them more grounded, capable of holding real convictions while remaining genuinely open to revising them, and at peace enough inside the not knowing to keep living fully while the question stays open. Nowhere does that discipline matter more than here, at the question of what you fundamentally are.

A closing thought

We may never fully answer whether consciousness ends with the brain, whether mind and body are one thing or two, or what altered states are actually revealing. I have come to think that is not a failure of the inquiry. It may be closer to an accurate description of the size of the question relative to the tools, philosophical and neuroscientific alike, that we currently have for answering it. The task, then, is not to manufacture false certainty to escape that scale. It is to keep asking, honestly, and to build a life that can hold the asking without needing it to end.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, a researcher of consciousness and a seventh-level shaman. You can contact her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit her website at www.magicinharmony.com.