Implications for philosophy of mind

Resolving the pseudo problems of consciousness

The philosophy of mind is in a state of acknowledged chaos. Over 29 distinct theories of consciousness currently compete for explanatory adequacy, none commanding consensus, none falsifiable, none capable of bridging the explanatory gap between physical process and subjective experience.^[1] This is not a field approaching resolution; it is a field trapped in a paradigm of proliferating failure.^[2]

The CoD framework locates the source of this chaos with historical precision: every one of the 29 theories accepts, as its starting axiom, the privatized definition of consciousness. They all agree that consciousness is intrinsic to the individual—a private, internal, subjective state. But this definition was not always the meaning of the word. It was imposed, by choice, in the early modern period.

The privatization of consciousness: a contingent history

The problem emerges via Descartes, Locke, and Kant, each of whom made an arbitrary decision to redefine consciousness as an internal, private possession of the individual. Descartes required it for his epistemological project; Locke required it for his political-legal framework; Kant required it for his transcendental idealism. Each had their own reasons, but the common thread is this: in each case, the redefinition was a choice—a theoretical convenience, a model requirement, a solution to a local problem—not an empirical discovery or a logical necessity. There was nothing in the word itself, nor in the phenomena it named, that compelled these redefinitions. They could have chosen otherwise; they did not.^[3]

Descartes: consciousness as epistemological foundation

Descartes needed a foundation for certainty. In the Meditations, he sought an indubitable ground upon which knowledge could be securely built. He found it in the cogito—the private, immediate awareness of one's own existence and thought. "I think, therefore I am" became the Archimedean point of modern philosophy.^[4] Consciousness, in this framing, became the guarantor of truth—but only by being privatized. The cogito is accessible only to itself; it is locked inside the individual, opaque to all others. Descartes' choice was a solution to the problem of skepticism, not a discovery about the nature of mind. He could have chosen a relational foundation—knowing with others as the ground of certainty—but he did not. The consequences of this choice echo through the entire subsequent tradition.

Locke: consciousness as political-legal individual

Locke required a basis for political and legal personhood. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he argued that personal identity consists in the continuity of consciousness—the self that persists through time, remembers its past, and thereby bears responsibility for its actions.^[5] Consciousness became the anchor of identity, the ground of moral accountability, and the foundation of property in one's own person. But this was achieved only by privatizing consciousness: the self-owning individual, whose consciousness is their possession, becomes the basic unit of political and legal order. This was a solution to a political problem—rights, ownership, and accountability—not a discovery about the nature of mind. Locke could have chosen a social foundation, locating identity in recognition and mutual accountability; he did not.

Kant: consciousness as transcendental condition

Kant required a framework for objective knowledge. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he argued that experience is possible only through the transcendental unity of apperception—the "I think" that must be able to accompany all my representations.^[6] Consciousness, in this framing, is the condition of possibility for experience itself—the subjective ground upon which the objective world is constituted. But this was achieved only by privatizing consciousness: the transcendental subject, the solitary synthesizer of experience, becomes the source of all meaning. This was a solution to an epistemological problem—how is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?—not a discovery about the nature of mind. Kant could have chosen an intersubjective foundation, locating the conditions of knowledge in shared practices and mutual recognition; he did not.

The contemporary field: axiom, not choice

The contemporary field of consciousness studies has not treated these redefinitions as what they were—contingent choices, temporary assumptions made to serve specific philosophical projects. Instead, it has elevated them to the status of axioms: fundamental, self-evident truths that require no proof and admit no challenge. An assumption can be set aside if it fails; an axiom cannot. By treating a contingent historical choice as an unassailable axiom, the field has rendered its foundational premise immune to empirical critique.

The resulting chaos—29 incommensurable theories, none falsifiable, none verifiable—is not a sign that the problem is hard; it is a sign that the field has mistaken what was an arbitrary decision four hundred years ago for a necessary one. All 29 models disagree on how private consciousness arises—whether through integration, broadcasting, prediction, higher-order thought, or some other mechanism—but they all agree that consciousness is a private, internal, subjective state belonging to an individual. This shared axiom is not a neutral starting point; it is the engine of the chaos. By defining consciousness as inaccessible to third-person science, the field has guaranteed that no theory can ever be definitively confirmed or refuted. The chaos is not a temporary difficulty; it is a structural necessity of the privatized reframing.

Consciousness re-moored: metaphysical principle, not metaphysical substance

The word physical comes from the Greek φῠσῐκός (phŭsĭkós)—'pertaining to the manner of bringing forth.' Physics is the study of how things emerge, undergo, and transform. Metaphysics, in its classical Aristotelian meaning, is what originates after (μετά) observing this manner of bringing forth: the abstract symbolic constructs we derive from having observed some constancy inherent to the physical world.^[7]

This classical meaning has been inverted. The severance is not confined to German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), who treated metaphysics as a project that could proceed prior to or independently of any observation of physics—deriving the structure of reality from pure thought or introspection. Rather, it is a structural feature of post-Kantian philosophy across both Continental and Analytic traditions. Whether through idealism, phenomenology, linguistic analysis, or the uncritical acceptance of privatized consciousness as a given, philosophy has treated metaphysics as a project that can proceed prior to or independently of observing physical process. This is a severance. Once metaphysics is unmoored from empirical observation, its concepts become free-floating, constrained by nothing but internal system-coherence. They become, in the strongest sense, delusional: they claim to describe reality while having severed their only tether to it.

The individualist tradition in philosophy of mind—from Descartes' cogito through Kant's transcendental unity to contemporary consciousness studies—inherits this severance. It treats consciousness as a private, subjective given, derived from introspection or transcendental argument, and then asks how physics could produce it. This is metaphysics before physics, and it generates the hard problem, the problem of other minds, and the chaos of 29 incommensurable theories of consciousness.

The CoD restores the classical meaning. Consciousness is not derived from introspection; it is inferred after observing the physical conditions that reflect some measure of knowing together—symmetry of scoring, coordination, mutual recognition. It is an abstract construct moored to physics because it is grounded in what is observable. This re-mooring terminates the idealist severance and dissolves the pseudo-problems it created.

The deeper error: mistaking the social for the individual

The field of consciousness studies has spent centuries trying to explain the phenomenon and processes of consciousness as intrinsic to the individual. But this framing already concedes the privatization axiom. It assumes that consciousness is a property of the individual—something that happens inside the skull—and that the task of the field is to explain how this internal phenomenon arises.

This is the inverse of the truth. Consciousness is not intrinsic to the individual; it is a measure of knowing together. Language is not a product of private consciousness; it is the medium through which consciousness becomes possible. There is no private thought without the public language that gives it form. Culture is not an expression of individual minds; it is the shared field that individuates minds in the first place. Customs are not patterns of private thought; they are patterns of mutual recognition that bind communities and make coordination possible. The private self is not the origin of language, culture, and custom; it is a derivative effect of the participatory field that makes knowing together possible.

Under CoD, consciousness is not the source of the social; it is the measure of the social. The individual's private experience is not the primary reality; it is a secondary construction—an abstraction generated by the very conference it purports to ground. The field of consciousness studies has spent centuries trying to explain how something intrinsic to the individual could exist. The CoD shows that this project was built on a false premise. Consciousness was never private; it was never internal; it was never a possession. It is, and always was, a measure of knowing together.

The 29 theories: incommensurable because they share a false axiom

The existence of 29 competing theories of consciousness is not a sign that the field is young or that the problem is hard. It is a sign that the field has accepted a definition of consciousness that makes consensus impossible. If consciousness is defined as a private, internal, subjective state, then:

• No theory can be falsified: because the phenomenon is inaccessible to third-party observation.
• No theory can be verified: because the phenomenon cannot be measured directly.
• No theory can be compared: because each theory defines its own criteria for what counts as evidence.
• No theory can be integrated: because each theory starts from a different set of assumptions about what consciousness is.

This is not a scientific field; it is a collection of incommensurable paradigms—a condition that Thomas Kuhn identified as the precursor to a scientific revolution.^[8] The CoD is that revolution.

Consider an analogy. Suppose I postulate the existence of a rainbow unicorn because my theory of mythical creatures requires it. I define it as invisible to all known instruments, detectable only by its subjective effect on true believers. When researchers go looking for it and cannot find it, I do not conclude that my definition was flawed. I declare that we have encountered a "hard problem" of unicorn detection—a phenomenon that resists empirical access by its very nature. The subsequent proliferation of 29 competing theories of unicorn detection does not indicate that unicorns are deep; it indicates that the original postulate was a free-floating construct born of theoretical convenience, not observation. The failure is not empirical; it is axiomatic. The definition guaranteed that no evidence could ever confirm or refute it.

The 29 theories of consciousness are in precisely this position. They are not wrong because they fail to explain consciousness; they are wrong because they accept a false axiom. Each captures a dimension of cognitive organisation—integration (IIT), broadcasting (GWT), prediction error minimisation (PP), recursive self-awareness (HOT)—but mistakes it for consciousness itself. Under CoD, these are not theories of consciousness; they are theories of the infrastructure that supports consciousness. They describe the machinery of cognition; they do not describe the measure of knowing together that gives cognition its social meaning.

The rainbow unicorn was never there. The privatized consciousness was never there either. The chaos of 29 theories is not a sign that we are closing in on the truth; it is a sign that we have been looking for something that exists only in the definition that created it. The CoD does not add a 30th theory to the chaos; it terminates the chaos by recognizing that the target was a construct, not a discovery.

The dissolution of the traditional problems

Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness

Traditional framing: According to Chalmers, "The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience."^[9] "A conscious state is a state that has phenomenal quality... What makes a state conscious is that there is something it is like to be in that state."^[10]

CoD re-framing: Chalmers' Hard Problem rests on a conflation that equates consciousness with experience. By definition, these words have different meanings. Experience is the 'condition of going throughout' and thus having undergone some conference of difference. Consciousness is the 'measure of knowing together' i.e. a metric of sociality: that which is shared, e.g. culture, custom, language that arises through the conference of difference. According to the CoD model, consciousness as the 'measure of knowing together' is the temporary stabilization of familiarity between entities, achieved via the conference of difference. There is no hard problem of consciousness as experience, as neither is synonymous with the other, by definition. Rather, knowing is the familiarity of concepts within an entity, consciousness is the familiarity of concepts between entities and experience is the condition of having gone throughout a physical process.

The problem of other minds

Traditional framing: How can I know another has subjective experience?

CoD reframing: I know other minds not by inference but via the conference of difference with them. The conference is the evidence. Other minds are not hidden; they are manifest in the measure of shared knowing. The problem of other minds is a pseudo-problem generated by the privatization axiom.

The mind-body problem

Descartes' separation of mind from body was not a neutral philosophical position. It was a strategic accommodation to the Church's authority, made urgent by the condemnation of Galileo (1633) and Descartes' subsequent flight from France to the more tolerant Dutch Republic. His dualism was a bargain: give the Church the immortal soul, take the physical world for mechanistic science.

Descartes explicitly stated that a primary goal of his Meditations on First Philosophy was to provide a rational, mathematical proof for the immortality of the soul, a doctrine central to the Catholic Church.^[11] By defining the mind (or soul) as res cogitans (thinking substance) that is fundamentally distinct from res extensa (extended, physical substance), Descartes created an arbitrary firewall. If the mind is a completely different substance from the body, it does not depend on the body for its existence. Consequently, the destruction of the body at death does not necessitate the destruction of the mind.^[12]

To achieve this, Descartes defined the mind as a thinking, non-extended substance. This is not merely an oxymoron; it is a category mistake. By treating the mind as a 'substance' analogous to the body—yet stripping it of extension, the very property that defines substance in the physical realm—Descartes created a conceptual confusion rather than a coherent entity. He erroneously placed the mind in the same logical category as the body (as a 'thing' that exists), simply making it an invisible version of one. But this error was not accidental; it was a theoretical necessity born of theological convenience, required to make the soul immune to physical decay while retaining its status as an independent 'substance'.

Mental causation

Traditional framing: How can private mental states cause physical actions?

CoD reframing: Mental states are not private causes; they are participatory achievements. In a process ontology, 'mental causation' is a pseudo-problem generated by substance-thinking. There are no discrete mental causes that produce physical effects. There is only the continuous process of conferring—the ongoing conference of difference. What we retrospectively label 'the mental' and 'the physical', or 'cause' and 'effect', are simply different temporal moments of that same processual unfolding. The conference of difference does not cause action; the conference of difference is the action, observed from different points along its duration. The so-called 'mental' is the process as it is being negotiated; the so-called 'physical' is the process as it is being enacted. They are not in a causal relation; they are in a constitutive relation—two aspects of one indivisible process.

The field-level implication: the chaos is not accidental

The ultimate implication

The deepest philosophical implication of the CoD model is this: the entire individualist tradition in philosophy of mind—from Descartes to Kant to contemporary cognitive science—is built on an historical error. The privatization of consciousness was a political, theological, and epistemological move, not an empirical discovery. By treating consciousness as intrinsic, the tradition created a series of pseudo-problems that are unsolvable by design.

The moment that metaphysics becomes un-moored from physical observation, our map of existence no longer reflects the terrain. The CoD restores this mooring, re-grounding consciousness in what is observable and dissolving the pseudo-problems that an unmoored metaphysics creates. The chaos of 29 theories of consciousness is not a problem to be solved; it is a symptom of a paradigm that has reached its limits. The CoD does not add a 30th theory to the chaos; it terminates the chaos by re-mooring the map to the terrain. The field can either continue to navigate by a map that no longer reflects the terrain, or it can accept the paradigm shift that the CoD offers and begin the work of building a science of consciousness worthy of the name.

The Gospel of Being

by John Mackay

Discover the first principle of existence in 30 seconds.

Discover the book