Mind and Consciousness

Is consciousness within us or between us?

Caption: A surreal retro-futurist scene of people reading copies of the same newspaper, each plugged into the ceiling by cables—the paradox of solitary minds in a shared circuit. (courtesy of ChatGPT 5 & DALL.E)

Is consciousness a flame flickering in the singular mind, or the collective glow of a thousand fires? For centuries, philosophers have stared into that flame, unsure whether it burns alone or always in company. In the hushed groves of ancient India, sages spoke of mind as a spark of the universal fire.^[1] Meanwhile, in a quiet Dutch study, Descartes imagined a solitary candle hidden behind the forehead, casting light on a private theater of thought.^[2] Today, neuroscientists trace electrical storms across the brain,^[3] while mystics and meditators insist that consciousness stretches beyond the skull, shimmering between beings like fire passed from torch to torch.

What exactly are we experiencing when we experience? Is mind the most intimate of possessions—or the most shared of gifts? The answer may decide not only how we explain thought, but how we understand what it means to be together at all.

Classical Positions: A Timeline of Theories of Consciousness

The story of consciousness has been told in many voices, each insisting the flame burns in a different place.

1. Dualism (Descartes, 17th c.)
In the Dutch Republic, René Descartes divided the world in two: res cogitans, the thinking substance, and res extensa, the extended matter. Consciousness, he claimed, was private, irreducible, and without spatial location—the one certainty shining through doubt.^[4] Later versions, like David Chalmers’ property dualism, softened the line: perhaps mental properties emerge from matter but remain non-physical, resisting reduction to the grey folds of the brain.^[5]

2. Materialism / Physicalism (Hobbes; Churchland, Dennett, 20th–21st c.)
In contrast, Thomas Hobbes called thought nothing more than motion in the body.^[6] Later physicalists sharpened this view: consciousness is brain activity, nothing over and above. Variations abound: the identity theory equates mental states with neural states,^[7] while eliminativists like Paul Churchland dismiss 'consciousness' as a folk illusion.^[8] Yet the 'hard problem', raised by Chalmers, shadows this reduction—why should electrical firings feel like anything at all?

3. Idealism (Berkeley, Hegel, 18th–19th c.)
Others turned the world inside out. For Bishop Berkeley, 'to be is to be perceived'—matter depends on mind.^[9] Hegel expanded this into a grand historical drama: consciousness unfolding through Spirit, recognizing itself in history, art, and community.^[10] Modern cosmopsychists such as Bernardo Kastrup echo this voice: consciousness is not derivative but the very ground of reality.^[11]

4. Phenomenology & Existentialism (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, 20th c.)
At the turn of the 20th century, Edmund Husserl redirected attention to lived experience. Consciousness, he argued, is intentional—always 'of' something^[12]. Heidegger and Sartre radicalized this, tying awareness to embodiment, freedom, and anguish.^[13] The body is not a vessel for consciousness but its stage and partner. Later, thinkers like Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson expanded this into embodied cognition: the mind lives in the handshake between organism and world.^[14]

5. Panpsychism & Process Traditions (Spinoza, Whitehead, contemporary panpsychists)
Long before neuroscience, Baruch Spinoza sketched a monism where thought and extension were two aspects of one substance.^[15] Alfred North Whitehead, centuries later, reimagined reality itself as made of 'actual occasions'—tiny moments of experience.^[16] Today, philosophers like Philip Goff revive panpsychism: perhaps consciousness is fundamental, present even in the smallest particles, flickering faintly like sparks in the grain of reality.^[17] Variants such as Russellian monism propose a neutral basis from which both matter and mind arise, suggesting that inner experience is woven into the fabric of being.

6. Functionalism (Putnam, 20th c.)
By the mid-20th century, another voice emerged: consciousness as functional organization. Hilary Putnam and others argued that what matters is the role, not the material.^[18] Just as software can run on silicon or carbon, so too could mental states be realized in different substrates, provided the causal pattern is preserved. This view opened the way to thinking of artificial systems as potential bearers of consciousness.

7. Buddhist & Indian Philosophies
Beyond the Western canon, traditions in India traced different lines. Advaita Vedānta spoke of non-dual awareness, the flame that reveals both self and cosmos as one.^[19] Nāgārjuna unraveled consciousness as empty of fixed essence, dependent on relations.^[20] These perspectives remind us that 'mind' has long been seen as neither merely private nor merely physical, but as boundless, illusory, or shared.

Current Flashpoints

If the past offered philosophies of firelight, the present brings laboratories full of sensors, scans, and simulations. Yet the riddle of consciousness burns no less brightly.

1. The Hard Problem Revisited
David Chalmers’ 'hard problem' remains a stumbling block: why does brain activity feel like something from the inside?.^[21] Neuroscience maps correlations—spikes in the visual cortex when we see red, oscillations in prefrontal regions when we choose—but correlation is not explanation. The subjective glow still eludes capture.

2. Competing Models: IIT vs. Global Workspace
Two major theories contest the field. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT) seeks to measure consciousness as informational complexity (Φ).^[22] Bernard Baars and Stanislas Dehaene’s Global Workspace Theory (GWT) pictures consciousness as the broadcasting of information across brain systems.^[23] Each theory garners experimental support, yet neither silences the mystery. Are we closer to quantifying the flame, or simply modeling its shadows?

3. Bioelectric Minds: Michael Levin’s Challenge
Meanwhile, Michael Levin and colleagues uncover a different register: bioelectric networks in cells and tissues that guide regeneration, memory, and collective decision-making in simple organisms.^[24] Planaria that regrow lost heads 'remember' their training; embryonic tissues communicate electrically to shape form. Levin stops short of claiming consciousness, but his work destabilizes brain chauvinism. If cells can share information, coordinate, and even display rudimentary memory, perhaps mind is a spectrum—flickering long before neurons.

4. Expanding the Field: AI & Psychedelics
Two other flashpoints push the conversation outward. First, artificial intelligence: could systems with sufficient complexity or functional organization host consciousness?^[25] The debate turns on whether function alone suffices, or whether biological embodiment is essential. Second, psychedelic research has revived age-old questions of 'shared mind'. Users report dissolving boundaries, entering networks of consciousness beyond the self.^[26] Are these mere illusions of chemistry, or glimpses of participatory awareness?

Together, these flashpoints redraw the map. Consciousness no longer sits neatly in a skull. It hovers between competing theories, flickers in cellular collectives, and pulses in altered states. Each challenge edges us closer to a radical possibility: that the flame of mind is less a candle under glass, more a fire already shared.

The Impasse

A recent scoping review of theoretical models of consciousness concludes what many already suspect: there is no consensus on what consciousness even is. Some models treat it as a brain state, others as a process, still others as a fundamental feature of reality.^[27] The result is not progress but proliferation. Researchers advance ingenious theories, but they begin with different definitions, measure different things, and often talk past one another.

If we cannot agree on what we are looking for, how can we ever agree that we have found it?

This impasse arises because most approaches still treat consciousness as a thing to be located: a property, a substance, or a mechanism. The Conference of Difference (CoD) model begins from another angle: consciousness is not a thing, but a relation. It is not contained in the skull, nor hidden in particles, nor emergent from circuitry. Instead, it is the degree to which beings share knowing.

Consciousness as Shared Knowing

To be conscious, in this view, is to take part in a measure of shared knowing. My awareness is not mine alone; it is a reflection of how I resonate with others, whether people, organisms, or environments. Consciousness is therefore neither private nor universal in the abstract. It is concrete, situational, and graded by the extent of reciprocal attunement.

Knowing as Participatory Power

To know is not to hold a private fact but to enact a shared ability. In older languages this is clearer: the Scots word ken means both to know and to be able—as in 'ya ken?' (you know / you can). Knowing is therefore an act: a way of participating with the world that confers ability.

If all existence is a conference of difference, then knowing is never solitary. The knower and the known meet in relation, each shaping the other. The word consciousness, in this frame, is not a ghostly extra but by definition: the 'measure of knowing together'.

Everyday examples abound:

• I know the path to the river, you know the path; together we are conscious of its direction.
• I hear the melody, you hear the melody; our shared knowing (consciousness) makes the tune something we can sing together.

Here consciousness is not a hidden substance but the glow of ability that emerges when knowing is enacted in common. Knowing is the act, consciousness the measure—both inseparable from the relational power that makes them possible.

The Gospel of Being Triad

Seen through the Gospel of Being, consciousness unfolds along three ontological currents:

• Power—consciousness as the ability to notice, to attend and to respond together. It is power not as domination, but as shared ability.
• Reciprocity—consciousness as recognition across difference. One flame is kindled by another; consciousness arises not in isolation but in mutuality.
• Equilibrium—consciousness as the sustainable flow of shared awareness, balancing the many with the one. Where reciprocity falters, imbalance follows; where it thrives, consciousness deepens.

Illustrative Examples

A conversation between friends: consciousness flickers not in the individual mind but in the rhythm of turn-taking, the co-creation of meaning.^[28] A flock of birds turning as one: each responds to neighbors, the whole becoming a field of awareness greater than its parts.^[29] Even Levin’s cellular collectives—sheets of tissue coordinating via bioelectric signals—suggest rudimentary forms of shared knowing, not 'conscious' in the human sense, but echoing its logic of participation.^[30]

From Mystery to Measure

Thus, the question is not 'what is consciousness made of?' but 'to what extent do beings share knowing?' Consciousness becomes a measure of participatory difference, the glow that emerges wherever powers meet, recognize, and equilibrate. This definition does not resolve every puzzle, but it dissolves the paralysis of competing definitions. Instead of searching for an essence hidden behind the flame, we can begin to trace the light as it spreads between us.

Convergence & Divergence

The CoD model shares much with earlier theories of consciousness, yet it diverges in crucial ways. With phenomenology, it affirms that consciousness is relational, always 'of' something. But whereas Husserl and Sartre emphasized the subject’s intentional arc, here the emphasis shifts outward: consciousness is not an individual subject’s knowing of the world but the shared knowing that emerges between beings. In this sense, consciousness ensures that knowing is maintained despite the transience of individual beings—distributed knowing.

Panpsychism and process traditions also resonate. Like Spinoza or Whitehead, the CoD model rejects the notion that consciousness is a late accident of evolution, affirming instead that relational awareness pervades reality. Yet it avoids the metaphysical inflation that risks declaring 'minds everywhere'. Consciousness here is not a property hidden in atoms but a measure of knowing enacted through participation. It is not universal mind, but local and situational shared knowing.

Functionalism, too, offers echoes: it sees consciousness in organizational patterns and causal roles. But while functionalism tends toward abstraction—likening the mind to software that could, in principle, run anywhere—the CoD model insists on reciprocity in the concrete. Consciousness is not merely function but relation: the sharing of ability that maintains equilibrium among beings.

Levin’s work on bioelectric collectives provides a more immediate bridge. Just as cells exchange signals to shape memory and form, consciousness extends this principle into higher registers of coordination. Where Levin limits his claim to cellular intelligence, the CoD model generalizes: consciousness is precisely the ongoing measure of such shared ability, whatever the scale.

Even evolutionary accounts of reciprocal altruism find new resonance here. Biologists note that practices endure when individuals pass them on through cooperative exchange. The ontological reading is deeper still: reciprocal altruism defined as: 'to take in and forward the practice of others' functions as the carrier, transmitting knowing beyond the individual so that ability can be sustained, adapted and transformed. In this sense, consciousness is not a glow within but a fire between, keeping alive the knowledge that no being can carry alone.

Summary

Consciousness has too often been treated as a spark hidden in the brain or as a metaphysical mist pervading reality. The CoD model reframes consciousness as neither substance nor mystery but as a measure of shared knowing—the glow that emerges when beings meet, exchange and sustain one another’s abilities. In this view, consciousness is less a solitary possession than a relay, carrying knowing beyond the individual to preserve adaptability, intelligence, and equilibrium.

If consciousness is a fire carried between us, then institutions are the vessels that try to contain and direct its glow. Next week we turn to Social & Institutional Ontology —asking how shared minds become shared rules, and how colocracy might recast the ledger of collective life.^[31]

The Gospel of Being

by John Mackay

A rigorous yet readable exploration of how existence functions—and how that relates to you.

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