There’s no scientific evidence that consciousness exists.

Evidence, in a scientific age, is usually thought of in a very specific way. We tend to assume evidence means empirical measurement: can I record this on a camera, or on some kind of detector? Can I transform what I observe—signals, data—from something tangible in the world into a mathematical model? Can I make predictions, and then go see whether those predictions are confirmed by the next observation? That whole complex of measurement and modeling is a really powerful set of methods. I’m not trying to diminish it. But I do want to insist that there is more to what might count as evidence than just what can be measured.

This becomes obvious as soon as we start talking about consciousness. Consciousness seems to be entirely intangible. It doesn’t weigh anything. You can’t see it. And yet, on the other hand, it’s pervasive. There is nothing we could measure or observe that doesn’t presuppose its presence. We have to be conscious before we can observe anything else. So it’s nowhere to be found from the point of view of empirical measurement, and yet there’s nothing else to be found that doesn’t already require it. 

This is also why the way we phrase the question matters. When panpsychists or idealists ask whether consciousness is a “fundamental property,” that already frames the issue in a certain abstract way, as though consciousness were a property like mass or charge. Even calling it a “phenomenon” is not quite adequate, because consciousness is really on both sides of the phenomenal/noumenal dichotomy for reasons already stated. It’s on the side of what appears, and it’s also the condition of appearing. It’s on the side of what is known (without light there is nothing to be seen), and also on the side of knowing. So if we’re asking what counts as evidence for consciousness, the primary evidence we have is first-person experience—our own awareness. And that immediately places us in a different domain than what the third-person methods of measurement and modeling can register.

There’s a whole tradition of philosophical reflection that understands consciousness, in this sense, as transcendental. Not “transcendent” as a vague spiritual compliment, but transcendental as a condition for the possibility of knowledge of nature. If Kant were alive today to look at many neuroscientific research programs that set out to explain consciousness as though it were a brain mechanism, he’d be slamming his head against the table—not because neuroscience is worthless, but because it’s metaphysically confused to treat consciousness as just another object in nature when it is the condition that makes the scientific study of nature possible in the first place.

So if I’m going to start anywhere with the question of evidence for consciousness, it’s here: consciousness is the condition for the possibility not only of scientific knowledge but of moral freedom and ethical action. If scientific knowledge of nature is possible, if moral responsibility is to be taken seriously, that tells us something important about what consciousness is. It tells us consciousness is imbued with a kind of intelligence and agency. Because doing science is a purposeful activity. You’re taking an interest in truth. That already presupposes a whole bunch of stuff that science itself can’t prove, can’t measure, can’t model. Measurement and modeling are possible because of consciousness. Science presupposes consciousness. It cannot ground its own presuppositions without stepping outside of its usual domain of application.

In this sense, consciousness is not a “scientific question” if by science we mean the restricted method of measuring and modeling natural phenomena. Consciousness is a philosophical question. And if science wants to understand itself—its own conditions of possibility—we need to engage in philosophy. We could talk about phenomenology. We could talk about speculative metaphysics. We could talk about meditation and spiritual practices. There are different ways of inquiring into what this mystery called consciousness is, but they are not reducible to the standard third-person experimental posture.

It may also be annoying for me to say this, but I think it’s true: because traditional religion is, at least in the academic world, not taken very seriously, we end up needing new words for what traditional religions would refer to as God. And I actually think “consciousness” is a decent candidate—at least as a way of starting a different kind of conversation—because consciousness is not just another object out in nature that science can study. It is that within and by which nature is disclosed. It is that without which no “evidence,” in the scientific sense, would even be possible.

But once you make that move, you also have to recognize: the way we relate to consciousness is always already a self-relation. The evidence we have for consciousness is our own first-person experience—our own awareness—and also our experience of sharing a horizon of experience with others. It’s not just my private experience. It’s experience attuned to others, participating in an intersubjective field. When you study that, you’re not studying third-person objects “out there.” You’re studying your own intentionality, your own will, your own beliefs, and the process by which you become more or less aware of yourself—your frustrations, your sense of guilt for not having behaved as you wish you had behaved, your questions about what you want to do with your life. These are existential issues. They usually get bracketed in the natural sciences. You don’t need to ask “am I a good person?” to measure a particle. You don’t need to ask “who am I?” to calibrate a detector. But those questions arise the moment consciousness itself becomes the topic of inquiry.

That’s part of why I think there’s a spiritual side to the inquiry, or at least a psychological side. When you study consciousness earnestly, you can’t help but be intimately involved, implicated, in what you’re trying to understand. In natural science, you leave yourself out by design. You can’t do that anymore when you study consciousness—at least not if you’re doing it seriously, directly, in the sense I’m talking about.

This is where I also want to draw a distinction that easily gets lost. Neuroscientists do great work. I’m not anti-neuroscience. We can study the brain to understand the physiological conditions of consciousness. We can study how brain states correlate with mental states. We can learn how to manipulate consciousness by manipulating the brain. But that’s not the same thing as explaining consciousness. It’s not the same thing as explaining where consciousness comes from. And I think there’s confusion—metaphysical confusion—when people imagine that some as yet undiscovered brain mechanism is going to explain consciousness.

My own view is that the brain is a condition for consciousness, but not a producer of it. Or said slightly differently: the brain conditions consciousness, but does not create consciousness out of nothing. And I say that because so many of the standard options in philosophy of mind seem to me to fail for different reasons.

Take the epiphenomenalist position: consciousness exists but has no causal power. It’s just along for the ride. But if consciousness has no causal power, then I immediately wonder how it could ever have evolved, because there’s no way for it to get selected for. It would make no difference. It would be evolutionarily inert. So why would it exist at all?

Then take the emergentist position: consciousness emerges bottom-up from neurophysiological activity, and then perhaps has some “downward causal” effect on the body—decisions matter, consciousness affects behavior. Metaphysically, I have a lot of questions about how that is possible, and what is meant by “causality” here. But even before we get into the technicalities, I want to know: where is the actual explanation? I’ve seen a lot of category errors from my perspective as a philosopher. I haven’t seen a good account of how you go from matter, construed as devoid of purposiveness, agency, interiority, and feeling, to inner awareness, affect, and emotion. That seems like an ontological difference, not just a difference of degree. It’s not like you can just arrange matter in a more complicated way and suddenly—magically—something like consciousness pops out. I don’t see it. How is any arrangement of matter, no matter how complex, anything more than a complicated arrangement of matter? How does it become aware of itself? I’ve never seen a convincing story about how to leap that gap.

Then there’s eliminativism: the claim that we’re not actually conscious, that we have words that we think refer to consciousness but we’re just confused. It can be a sophisticated position, but it seems experientially inadequate. Radically so. Sorry, but, no, we are really aware. Something is happening inside. Someone is home. There is a mystery here. You can’t just dismiss it.

So when I look at all these usual frames—eliminativist, epiphenomenalist, emergentist—I see major problems. And that’s part of why I’ve found myself in some sense backed into panpsychism, or perhaps better, panexperientialism. There are many kinds of panpsychism; I don’t agree with all of them. But there’s a process philosophical tradition—Whitehead in the 20th century, and we can go back to Schelling in the 19th century—that offers a different way of thinking about the extent of experience in nature.

The basic move is to stop imagining that experience is produced by certain arrangements of matter, as though by magic. Instead, experience is understood as what is going on inside material processes at every scale. Wherever there is energetic transmission, there is also experiential transmission—some kind of “vector-feeling” in Whitehead’s terms, some kind of “what it is like” for that process to be what it is. Whitehead calls these vector feelings prehensions. There is a flow of feeling through the world. When we talk about causality and measure it in terms of energy, that is our objective external description of what on the inside is more like feeling.

At this point it helps to be more fine-grained with words. “Consciousness” in the reflective, self-aware sense probably requires a complicated nervous system—maybe even language, symbolic capacity, some degree of integration of the perceptual and the symbolic. But “experience” or “feeling” or “affect” might not be conscious in that sense. Most experience appears not to be self-reflective. And yet, there is still awareness. There is still, as Whitehead would say, self-enjoyment at every level of physical organization. That’s a different thesis than saying rocks have human-like consciousness. It’s saying subjectivity is pervasive, while self-reflective consciousness is a higher-grade organization of subjectivity.

From this perspective, consciousness isn’t produced in the brain. Consciousness and matter are two sides of the same coin. And that is why I think we need to go back to Descartes, where the dualism happened. Because it’s at that point that what we thought of as nature was severed from our inner experience of being alive. We then went about trying to model the half of reality we had severed ourselves from as though that half could produce us—when we had already left ourselves out from the beginning.

A lot of neuroscientists will say, “Of course Descartes was wrong. There’s no dualism. I’m a materialist.” But their materialism often begins after the Cartesian split. It accepts Descartes’ definition of nature: nature is what is measurable, external, objective, devoid of interiority. So even as they reject dualism, they keep the Cartesian picture of matter. What we need is a different philosophy of nature underlying and informing science—something non-dualistic, or better, something that thinks in terms of polarities rather than divisions.

There’s another respectable position that some call “biospychism”: the idea that consciousness and life are coextensive in some sense. Instead of looking only at complex nervous systems for the origin story of consciousness, we should be looking at single cells—not brains, membranes.

I think that’s a positive direction for consciousness studies to move in. While I have come to appreciate some of the limitations of the approach, I’m deeply influenced by Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson, et al., by the autopoietic/enactive approach more broadly. Thompson speaks of a mind–life continuity thesis. As soon as you have a living cell that is self-producing, you have “operational closure”: a system whose parts produce themselves for the sake of a whole. And as soon as you have that kind of operational closure, you have an interior horizon of experience. You have hedonic gradients: a sense of “yum and yuck.” There is significance. There is valuation. There is a perspective.

But I also want to emphasize that this doesn’t dissolve the hard problem; it relocates it. The same basic problem you see in neuroscience—how does the physical brain give rise to experience?—shows up in the origin of life. You have physics and chemistry, construed mechanistically, as lacking experience, agency, purpose. Then all of a sudden, because some bilipid membranes glom onto each other and you get some interesting chemistry going on inside, now there’s feeling? I haven’t seen a convincing causal story for that, and I don’t even know how I might begin to imagine one if the starting point is a picture of matter as wholly devoid of interiority.

The origin of life is another “hard problem.” Nature seems to organize itself in leaps: the mineral realm, the plant realm, the animal realm—these are general categories, not strictly scientific ones, but they point to real thresholds. Plants and animals seem to involve different orders of interiority. Animals, clearly, have a vastly richer interiority than plants. I still think plants are sentient; I’m not saying they’re not. But there are thresholds and leaps.

And I think the deeper question is: what do these leaps presuppose? I suspect all of them presuppose some degree of agency, aim, feeling, subjectivity. Even the first leap to a hydrogen atom is relevant here. A hydrogen atom is a complex self-organizing system compared to plasma and free electrons and protons. In a way, what we call electrons and protons after the emergence of atoms are changed by that symbiosis—the relational field is transformed. The universe was changed when atoms emerged, just as the Earth was changed by life.

And on Earth, what we think of as “dead matter” near the surface is actually the result of life over billions of years: the composition of the atmosphere, the cycling of carbon, even geological and tectonic processes are shaped by biological activity. So the picture of a dead, inert material substrate, with life as a late add-on, is historically and conceptually suspect. There are levels of organization in nature, yes. But what do they all presuppose? I think they presuppose some degree of aim and feeling.

This is why I say subjectivity is just as fundamental as objectivity. Which becomes obvious once you start to think in a non-dualistic way, or again, in terms of polarities: how could you have objects without subjects? How could you have an external material world without a mind there to know it?

This is also where “information” becomes a useful, but dangerous, concept.

Information-based theories may be helpful, but we have to be careful how we define it. Shannon defines information instrumentally—as a measure of uncertainty across a channel, presupposing a sender and a receiver. That definition is operationalizable and it’s part of why we have an Internet. But when people start using “information” in a more metaphysical sense—when they say matter is really information, DNA is information, reality is made of information, etc.—we risk conflating meanings and doing a map-territory mistake. If information is defined as a kind of unit of measurement, and then we say reality is made of information, it’s like saying reality is made of meters or inches. It’s a category error unless we clarify what we mean.

There’s another temptation here, too. Because physics often uses time-symmetric formalisms—aside from thermodynamics—we are tempted to treat probability and entropy epistemologically: as limits of our knowledge. We can’t know the exact initial conditions, so we use statistics. But what if possibilities are ontological? Perhaps nature itself is open-ended and not deterministic, perhaps nature operates in part on the principle of perhaps. The future is not merely unknown to us, but indeterminate in itself.

If we say information is what the physical world is really made of, maybe what we’re really saying is that the world is not only actualities but also tendencies, possibilities, aims. Information implies formal and final causality, not just efficient pushes from behind. And in that thicker sense, information implies intention—something trying to communicate itself, or at least forms trying to realize themselves.

If that’s what is meant by information, then I’m sympathetic. But I think there’s often conflation, so we have to slow down.

This is why I like Gregory Bateson’s definition: information is a difference that makes a difference. And I would add: a difference that makes a difference to somebody. In other words, information is observer-relative. What counts as information depends on a perspective. Enactivists and autopoietic theorists make this point very clearly: there is no “information” sitting ready-made in the environment, independent of a particular organism. The organism determines, when it is perturbed, what counts as meaningful information based on its own self-produced structure and self-producing activities. Most of what’s happening around me right now is irrelevant and ignored. The information that gets taken up into my conscious awareness is a function of what I’m oriented toward, what I’m looking for. For a single cell, certain chemicals become food; others are toxins. But that “information” isn’t free-floating; it’s enacted relative to an organism’s perspective.

You can think about this semiotically, too. C. S. Peirce understands nature as sign exchange and sign interpretation. Whether you go the Peircean route, Bateson’s route, enactivism, or Whitehead, the convergence is the same: information presupposes an interpreter, an observer, a perspective. You don’t get information without perspectives. And so if someone says information is more real than matter, I think they’ve already moved in a panpsychist direction. Information as an ontology implies mind, psyche, experience, or at least some kind of interpretant, all the way down.

That brings us back to the question of other forms of experience, and how to imagine them. One way to begin—just as an experiment in imagination—is to consider that when you dip your hand into water, or drink water, the taste of the water and the feeling of it going down your throat, or the feeling of your hand submerged, might involve some trace of what it is like to be water—mixed in with all the other things it feels like to be you. Or consider sunlight: what does it feel like to be the sun, what does it feel like to be a photon? Maybe when we feel warmth on our cheek, there is some aspect of that feeling that is actually what it’s like to be the sun, or at least what it’s like for that energetic transmission to occur. Not because we “project” feeling onto photons, but because energy transfer and feeling transfer are two sides of one process, described from outside and inside.

At first, that sounds weird. But I think the weirdness is largely the residue of the Cartesian split. Descartes was articulating a way people were coming to experience themselves in the 17th century, and it became culturally dominant. It shaped science. It shaped our self-understanding. I’m trying to rewind the clock, to bring mind and matter back together. And this is where philosophy becomes, in a sense, psychedelic because it’s mind-altering. It can transform perception. We’re not just coming up with new concepts for the sake of talking differently; we’re coming up with new language in the hope of transforming our experience of who and what we are.

This matters for how we interpret, eg, Donald Hoffman and his conscious agents framework. His formalism is interesting and complicated. But I don’t think we need to interpret it as “we hallucinate reality through a VR headset and therefore have no access to truth.” I think that’s using an old Cartesian epistemology—subject here, object there—to interpret what may in fact be a more radical ontology.

Organisms and environments co-evolve. The agent and the arena are not separate. The arena is itself just a network of other agents. There is no environment that exists apart from the relationships composing it. So the representational model of truth—where a separate subject tries to form an internal picture that matches a separate external world—may simply be the wrong model.

If you forget the coupling of agent and arena, you end up thinking truth must be something “behind” appearances, and our perceptions are either accurate pictures or useful illusions. Nietzsche has that famous story of how the true world became a fable. He critiques the appearance/reality split, the longing for a hidden truth behind appearances. If you drop the idea of “truth” beyond appearances, you really have to drop the whole dichotomy. You are not left, without truth, with “only appearances.” It means appearance is not “mere.” It means we need a relational and aesthetic concept of truth.

So I think Hoffman’s model can be, well, truth enough, without implying we have no access to reality (I’d hope so, otherwise he’d be caught in a performative contradiction!). We are in contact with reality, but reality is not a fixed object outside our relationship with it. Reality is the relational field itself—other agencies. And truth becomes something participatory: not a mirror so much as a murmuration, a resonance, a matter of becoming adequate to the relational situation.

This ties into space and time, too. Space-time may be a kind of interface, relative to our neurophysiology and organismic structure, and more deeply than that, relative to the contingent evolutionary path of electrons, atoms, stars, galaxies, etc. It is not some sort of pre-made “container” that physical objects enter into. Even in relativity theory, we often objectify spacetime as though it’s a block out there, and treat our experience of temporal flow as a stubborn illusion. Einstein called it a stubbornly persistent illusion in his famous letter to his best friend’s widow. But there’s no reason to interpret relativity theory that way. Even setting that aside, I think we do need to go beyond metrical space and clock-time to understand reality. And I also think there is an element of our experience—not just extra-ordinary but also plain as day—that already is beyond space and time, but we lack the cultural practices and language to live into it because most of our words are built for spatial and temporal navigation. Still, if we attended to that other mode of experience, we might see: space and time can deceive, but we also have access to reality. We’re not sealed behind VR goggles. We are in direct contact with each other and with the universe. It’s just that the contact is subtler than we’ve imagined when we forget that space and time are interfaces.

As a metaphor for this, instead of thinking of the brain as a local producer of consciousness, what if the brain—the whole nervous system, the whole organism—is more like a receiver, an antenna, a tuning fork that resonates with fields of feeling around it? The body is certainly a condition for my experience of myself, but perhaps it is not the generator of consciousness so much as a limiter of a “mind field” that is far vaster and perhaps less differentiated. Henri Bergson and William James both leaned in this direction. Aldous Huxley spoke of a reducing valve limiting “Mind at Large.” On this view, when I die and my body decays, some form of experiential continuity may persist, but it might not be recognizable as “me” in the way I experience myself as this particular body. The body differentiates and localizes a continuum of experience.

Metaphysics isn’t in the business of performing experiments. It’s in the business of interpreting experiments and trying to bring scientific knowledge into coherence with its rational presuppositions and with lived experience. What materialists take as evidence that the brain produces consciousness, panpsychists can interpret as evidence that the brain is a condition for consciousness. And there’s no single experiment that can decide between “cause” and “condition,” because those are metaphysical interpretations of the same empirical correlations.

It’s also worth admitting there are sociological and temperamental factors when it comes to how scientists and philosophers understand consciousness. We’re social creatures. We want to fit in. We want to be taken seriously by colleagues. Rorty says truth is what your colleagues will let you get away with saying. I don’t agree with that as a definition of truth, but I do think social dynamics affect what people are willing to consider. If you’re a graduate student in certain neuroscience programs, and your professor lectures for two minutes on panpsychism just to scoff and dismiss it, then you learn that taking it seriously would mark you as unserious. But if you’re in a philosophy department where panpsychism is treated respectfully, you might allow yourself to explore it and discover it has intellectual weight independent of sociological permission structures.

And honestly, I think it’s healthy that we have physicalists and idealists and panpsychists and neutral monists and cosmopsychists all getting a seat at the table now. It would not be a sign of health if physicalism simply dominated everything. The fact that more options are on the table and can get a fair hearing is a sign of progress.

It can be helpful to think of the brain as a predictive processor. But if we’re panpsychists or panexperientialists, then the predictive dimension isn’t unique to brains. Even photons—if we take seriously the way reality at that level is not fully present “at an instant,” but involves tendencies, probabilities, potentialities—are participating in a kind of future-oriented predictive process. Reality is in the making, not just for us, but all the way down. We’re agents of varying powers engaged in the co-creation of reality together. And once you shift into that participatory frame, the question “what’s truth and what’s illusion?” becomes less black-and-white. It’s not a simple representational question anymore.

Which is why I think Hoffman is doing something like using an old Cartesian epistemology to interpret a new ontology. I agree with the ontological direction, but I think we need to update our conception of knowledge and truth so that it becomes participatory rather than representational.

This is also why the question “can panpsychism be falsified?” isn’t very useful. Falsification is Popper’s criterion within philosophy of science, but even there it isn’t a simple gold standard—research programs don’t stop the moment anomalies appear; they adjust parameters, rethink auxiliary assumptions, and continue. But more importantly, in metaphysics, falsification isn’t the relevant test. Panpsychism can’t be falsified. Materialism can’t be falsified. Idealism can’t be falsified. Metaphysics isn’t another hypothesis to be tested in the lab. It’s an interpretation of the scientific evidence we already have, and an attempt to understand the conditions that make scientific inquiry possible in the first place.

So metaphysics uses other criteria: rational coherence, rational consistency, adequacy to experience, and compatibility with the full range of evidence including but beyond quantifiable measurements. If a metaphysical view conflicts with experiments, that’s a problem. But generally, these competing metaphysical systems aim to be consistent with the evidence; they differ in interpretation and in what they can make coherent.

So rather than asking “can it be falsified?”, I would ask: what would progress look like? One way to measure progress would be whether we, as human beings, can come into a different relationship to our technoscientific knowledge and power. Because science gives us predictive power, but it can’t tell us how we should interact with the rest of the community of life. It can’t tell us what our role is here as human beings. It can’t tell us what we owe to rivers, trees, soil, other species, even the atmosphere.

A panpsychist orientation can help us relate to the natural world not as a bunch of dead stuff out there, but as, first of all, an extension of our own living bodies. It can help us recognize that the primary unit of life on this planet is the planet itself—Gaia—and we exist inside this larger superorganism. We can continue doing science exactly as we have—measurements, models, predictions, refinements—but with a different ethos behind it, a different sense of kinship and responsibility in how we apply our power.

I’m not claiming that one’s metaphysics automatically makes someone a better person. There are reductionistic materialists who love nature, care for their families, care for animals, cultivate beautiful gardens. So I’m not saying panpsychism guarantees virtue. But I do think it matters that our civilization’s default worldview is broadly materialist, and that this is not unrelated to ecological disaster. Even evangelical religious believers who think their soul is eternal and will go to heaven when they die still relate to the nonhuman natural world as some kind of clockwork machine. Worldviews shape ethos, and ethos shapes institutions, and in the Anthropocene institutions shape the future of not only of human but of all life.

The goal isn’t just to have panpsychism as a belief. The goal would be to root it in experience, for it to become a mode of attunement. We don’t have an objective way of measuring how conscious a tree is. But we do have a subjective capacity for resonance. In human communication, we can tell when we’re being heard and when we’re not. We can tell when empathic resonance is happening and when it isn’t. We know the difference between connecting with someone and missing each other.

Maybe something like that is possible with the non-human world. Most people have pets, and we obviously communicate with dogs; we can tell when a dog is excited, ashamed, happy. Perhaps we can extend that further. Perhaps we can cultivate modes of attunement so that it isn’t just “I believe in panpsychism,” but “I felt an experiential transmission between me and that tree,” and not simply as projection.