No account of the world, no vision of knowledge, no single scale will ever be fully adequate to the world’s complexity and all possible points of view. Tsing and others suggest that reality is instead best understood by embracing an archipelago of related, but not necessarily consistent, formulations of object, experience, meaning, and impact.
— Julia Adeney Thomas, Mark Williams, and Jan Zalasiewicz, The Anthropocene
The Impasse
Contemporary philosophy of mind has reached an impasse. On one side stand the mysterians—those who, following David Chalmers, insist that consciousness presents a hard problem that no amount of functional or computational explanation can dissolve. On the other stand the eliminativists—those who, following Daniel Dennett, argue that consciousness as commonly conceived is a kind of illusion, a story we tell ourselves, a centre of narrative gravity rather than a thing requiring explanation.
Dennett, who died in April 2024, spent his career arguing that consciousness could be explained—which for him meant explained away. His Multiple Drafts Model proposed that there is no Cartesian theatre where experience comes together, no central witness, no privileged moment when unconscious processing becomes conscious. What we call consciousness is just the narrative our brains construct from parallel processes, none of which is more conscious than any other.
His critics responded that this explains everything except the thing that needs explaining: why there is something it is like to be a conscious creature at all. Chalmers’s philosophical zombie thought experiment—imagining a being functionally identical to a human but with no inner experience—was designed to show that function and experience are logically separable, that no amount of information about what the brain does can tell us why it feels like anything.
The debate has generated enormous philosophical literature and remarkably little progress. Each side accuses the other of missing the point. The mysterians say the eliminativists are changing the subject. The eliminativists say the mysterians are protecting a confused intuition from legitimate scientific scrutiny.
What if both sides are missing something? What if the very framing of the debate—consciousness as either a deep metaphysical mystery or an illusion to be dispelled—is itself an instance of the phenomenon it attempts to describe?
A Necessary Distinction
Before proceeding, I need to distinguish two things that the consciousness debate habitually conflates.
The first I will call participatory awareness. This is prior, foundational—the bare fact of there being experience at all. It is what remains when the sense of being a separate observer relaxes. Contemplatives across traditions have reported moments when boundaries dissolve, when the feeling of standing over against the world falls away, yet awareness does not disappear. If anything, it intensifies. There is experience, but no experiencer claiming it as “mine.”
The second I will call consciousness-as-phenomenon: the awareness of being aware, the feeling of feeling what happens. This is what Antonio Damasio described in The Feeling of What Happens—the organism mapping its own states, generating the sense of being a knower who stands in relationship to the known. This is real, but it is generated. It arises within participatory awareness; it does not constitute it.
The philosophy of mind debate concerns consciousness-as-phenomenon while assuming it is foundational. My argument is that it is generated—and that participatory awareness is what precedes and exceeds it.
Integrated Information Theory: Progress and Limits
Into this impasse has come Integrated Information Theory (IIT), developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and championed by Christof Koch. IIT makes a radical methodological move: rather than starting with brain processes and asking how consciousness might emerge from them, it starts with the undeniable fact of conscious experience and asks what physical structures could possibly support it.
The theory proposes that consciousness is not computation but integration—the capacity of a system to exist as a unified whole that is more than the sum of its parts. This integration can be measured (at least in principle) through a metric called phi (Φ). Systems with high phi are conscious; systems with zero phi are not, regardless of their computational sophistication.
This is progress. IIT takes consciousness seriously as a real phenomenon whilst remaining committed to scientific methodology. It has generated testable predictions, some of which have been empirically supported. It has practical applications in diagnosing consciousness in unresponsive patients.
Yet IIT faces a challenge that Raymond Tallis articulates in Circling Round Explicitness: information presupposes consciousness, not the other way around. For anything to count as information, there must already be awareness for which it is informative. You cannot synthesise consciousness from information because consciousness is necessary for events to count as information at all.
Tallis is right about this. IIT cannot explain participatory awareness—the prior ground on which all information processing stands. But IIT may still illuminate something important: the structural conditions under which self-referential processing becomes possible. High phi correlates not with awareness itself, but with the substrate complexity required for systems to model themselves. What IIT measures is the physical architecture that enables the generation of consciousness-as-phenomenon—the sense of being an observer. It does not, and cannot, measure the participatory awareness within which that sense arises.
The Consciousness Trap
Here is the move I want to make. Symbolic intelligence—the capacity to create representations, manipulate concepts, construct narratives—has a characteristic feature: it is self-referential. It can think about thinking. It can represent its own representing. This self-referential loop generates, among other things, the sense of a knower standing over against the known, an observer witnessing experience, a self that has experiences.
This is consciousness-as-phenomenon: the feeling of feeling what happens. Damasio’s work traces its neurological basis—increasingly complex organisms require additional integration devices to map their own states. At some threshold of complexity, systems begin modelling themselves, and the sense of being a separate observer emerges.
But here is the crucial point: this felt sense of separate knowing is generated by symbolic processing. It is not a pre-existing entity that symbolic processing discovers or reports on. The observer is not found; it is constructed. And the construction happens so fast, so automatically, so continuously, that we mistake the construct for something foundational.
This is what I call the consciousness trap: symbolic intelligence, in its self-referential operation, naturally generates the sense of a separate observer—and then operates as if that observer were the ground of awareness itself. The consciousness we debate is not a thing to be explained or explained away. It is a feature of how symbolic processing works, mistaken for the bedrock on which everything else rests.
But the bedrock is participatory awareness—prior, uncreated by the self-referential loop, revealed rather than constructed when that loop relaxes.
Why This Isn’t Higher-Order Thought Theory
My position might sound like Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory, which proposes that a mental state becomes conscious when it is the object of a higher-order thought about it. Both accounts locate consciousness-as-phenomenon at the meta-level, arising from self-representation.
But there is a crucial difference. HOT theory predicts that without higher-order representation, there is no consciousness. If the self-referential loop stops, awareness should disappear.
This is not what contemplatives report. In moments when the self-referential structure falls away—when there is no thought about thought, no subject claiming objects, no observer witnessing experience—awareness does not disappear. It becomes fuller, more vivid. The sense of separation dissolves, but something remains that can only be called awareness, peace, presence.
This is empirical evidence against HOT theory. If consciousness were higher-order representation, then the cessation of self-referential processing should produce unconsciousness, not intensified awareness without an observer.
My position distinguishes what HOT theory conflates: participatory awareness is prior; consciousness-as-phenomenon (the sense of being a separate observer) is generated within it by self-referential processing. The trap is mistaking the generated sense for the ground itself.
The Trap Captures Its Own Critique
If this is right, then the entire consciousness debate—Dennett versus Chalmers, eliminativism versus mysterialism, functionalism versus phenomenology—is itself an instance of the trap it purports to analyse.
The mysterians take the felt sense of being a conscious observer as evidence of something deep requiring explanation. They are right that something is happening. They are wrong to treat it as the foundational structure of awareness rather than something generated within awareness.
The eliminativists recognise that consciousness-as-phenomenon, as commonly conceived, doesn’t exist as an independent entity. They are right about this. They are wrong to think that explaining the mechanisms of generation exhausts what needs to be understood—because participatory awareness remains, whether or not we have theories about it.
Both sides assume there is something called consciousness whose existence (or non-existence, or illusory nature) needs explaining. But the word consciousness conflates two quite different things: the prior awareness within which all experience arises, and the sense of being a separate observer generated by self-referential processing. The debate is not about consciousness. It is conducted by consciousness-as-phenomenon—symbolic intelligence operating in its characteristic self-referential mode—whilst the participatory awareness within which the whole performance unfolds goes unexamined.
What Tallis Saw
Raymond Tallis, in Circling Round Explicitness, identified a version of this problem with characteristic precision. He noted that any attempt to make explicitness explicit runs into a structural difficulty: the investigation takes place on the same side of the transition it seeks to examine. We cannot stand outside the process of making things explicit in order to observe how making-explicit works.
Tallis presented this as a problem—perhaps an insoluble one. But what if it is not a problem but a disclosure? What if the impossibility of standing outside explicitness is the insight—not as failure but as revelation of how symbolic intelligence actually operates?
The observer is not outside looking in. The observer is participatory awareness becoming explicit to itself at this location through the apparatus of self-referential processing. The subject/object split is real but secondary—a useful mode within prior participation, not the fundamental structure of things.
This does not explain consciousness. But it dissolves the problem by revealing its hidden presupposition: that there was ever a separate we doing the investigating, rather than participation in reality’s own self-disclosure through the particular instruments we call minds.
Real and Representation
A clarification about language. I have been using map and territory as shorthand for the distinction between symbolic constructs and what they point toward. But as Tallis notes, both maps and territories are entities in ordinary usage. The metaphor may obscure rather than illuminate.
Let me put it differently, following Philip K. Dick: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
What I am calling real in this sense is what persists independent of symbolisers. If all thinkers die, the regulatory patterns of the cosmos continue—galaxies form, cells metabolise, forests regenerate. The pattern that connects does not require us to think about it.
What I am calling representation exists only within symbolic processing. Marks on paper persist when interpreters die, but their status as representations does not. Representation requires a representer. The map is ontologically dependent on map-readers in a way that what it maps is not.
The consciousness trap occurs when symbolic intelligence mistakes its representations for what is real in Dick’s sense—when we treat our constructs as though they would persist without us, as though they have the ontological weight of reality itself.
Neither Autocide Nor Reification
This brings us to the question of the self. Tallis, in Circling Round Explicitness, defends the self against what he calls the “autocides”—Hume, Dennett, and others who would dissolve it into bundles of perceptions or narrative centres of gravity.
I am not an autocide. The self is not mere illusion. Terry Cooke-Davies has written these words, loved one woman for sixty years, influenced students, shaped grandchildren. The self has real effects. It matters.
But the self is not an independent entity that persists in Dick’s sense. It is like Trigger’s broom in the television comedy—seventeen new heads, fourteen new handles, “same broom.” The self maintains continuity through constant change. It is representation, not territory. When the organism dies, the representation does not persist, though relational traces continue in those whose lives were touched.
The self is honoured without being deified. Real as phenomenon, potent while it exists, morally significant—but not independently ontological in ways that would justify its treating itself as separate from and superior to the regulatory patterns within which it arose.
The Practical Stakes
This might seem like philosophical hair-splitting. What difference does it make?
The difference is this: the same self-referential symbolic processing that generates the sense of separate consciousness also generates the sense of separation from the world, from other beings, from the regulatory patterns that sustain life. The observer who stands over against experience also stands over against nature, over against community, over against the future.
The environmental crisis, the fragmentation of social bonds, the incapacity of knowing to produce appropriate action—these are consequences of the consciousness trap operating at civilisational scale. Symbolic intelligence has mistaken its own operations for fundamental reality, severing the feedback loops that would otherwise constrain it.
Dennett was right that we need to understand how symbolic processing generates the sense of a central observer. He was wrong to think that understanding the mechanism dissolves the practical problem. The trap captures its own critique. You can understand the mechanism perfectly and remain caught—because the understanding is itself another operation of the symbolic intelligence that generates the trap.
Why This Path, and Not Others?
One might ask: if self-referential processing generates the consciousness trap, why don’t all intelligent creatures fall into it? Octopuses have sophisticated intelligence—approximately 500 million neurons, problem-solving abilities, individual personalities, what appears to be curiosity. Yet there are no octopus civilisations overriding planetary boundaries.
The answer lies in path dependence. The consciousness trap is not inevitable for intelligent systems. It requires a specific configuration that only humans, so far as we know, have developed:
Neural complexity that allows self-modelling—necessary but not sufficient. Ultra-sociality creating pressure for coordination mechanisms. Ritual and language enabling shared symbolic identity. Transgenerational accumulation of symbolic content. Ecological conditions (the Holocene) rewarding scaled-up coordination.
Only humans had all five converge. Octopuses took a different path: sophisticated individual intelligence, minimal sociality, no transgenerational symbolic accumulation. Intelligence without the collective symbolic infrastructure that generates civilisational overshoot.
The trap is specifically human—not because we are more intelligent than octopuses, but because our path included collective symbolic accumulation across generations. This is our gift and our burden.
Recognition, Not Understanding
What then? If understanding cannot release us from the trap, what can?
The contemplative traditions—Buddhist, Christian, Taoist, and others—have long distinguished between two kinds of knowing. There is knowing-about: the accumulation of information, the construction of models, the elaboration of theories. And there is knowing-from-within: direct participation in what is known, relationship rather than representation.
The first kind of knowing is what symbolic intelligence does. It is immensely powerful. It enables science, technology, civilisation, culture. It is also the trap—because it operates by generating representations and then attending to the representations rather than to what they represent.
The second kind of knowing is harder to name. I call it recognition—to distinguish it from understanding. Recognition is what happens when the pattern you have been studying reveals itself as already present in your own life, already holding you, already teaching you what you thought you were learning from outside. Recognition is participatory. It does not add to your stock of representations. It dissolves the sense of separation between knower and known.
But here is something important: recognition does not come through trying to stop thinking. Contemplative practice may create conditions where recognition becomes more likely, but recognition itself comes unbidden—sometimes in the afterglow of stillness, sometimes as sudden obviousness in the midst of ordinary thought, sometimes under extreme pressure when there is no time to deliberate.
Consider Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who had 208 seconds to decide what to do when both engines of his aircraft failed after bird strikes. He had 42 years of flying experience, extensive training, deep knowledge of that aircraft. All of that was present. But in those seconds, he was not consulting his expertise, running through decision trees, weighing options discursively. His embodied wisdom was available but held lightly—lightly enough that recognition could operate through it. What he recognised: that the Hudson was possible when the runways were not.
And crucially: Sully was in service. He had accepted responsibility for 154 other lives. His recognition was not classification—subject sorting objects into categories. It was subject-to-subject relationship, embodied wisdom serving those to whom he was bound. Recognition in extremis, under pressure, in the midst of action.
This matters because it shows that recognition is not retreat from the world. It is not contemplative withdrawal from active knowing. It is fuller participation—what happens when the self-referential loop relaxes enough that something other than representation can register, even while thought continues.
Recognition happens not when thought stops, but when grasping stops.
Conclusion: Dissolving Rather Than Solving
The consciousness debate will not be solved. It will be dissolved—when we recognise that the very framing of the debate participates in the phenomenon it seeks to explain.
Consciousness-as-phenomenon—the sense of being a separate observer—is generated by self-referential symbolic processing. It is real, but it is not foundational. Beneath and around it is participatory awareness: prior, uncreated by the self-referential loop, revealed when that loop relaxes.
Neither Dennett nor Chalmers was wrong. Both identified real features of how symbolic intelligence operates. But both remained within the frame that their insights called into question. The observer debating consciousness was itself a product of the processes being debated—and this reflexivity was not fully acknowledged.
IIT points toward something important: that integration matters, that complexity creates conditions for self-modelling. But what IIT measures is the substrate for generating consciousness-as-phenomenon, not the participatory awareness within which that phenomenon arises.
The way forward is not better theories of consciousness. It is recognition—the direct apprehension that the observer was never separate from what it observes, that the knower was always already participating in what it sought to know from outside.
This recognition cannot be argued into existence. But perhaps, having seen that the debate itself is an instance of the trap, we might hold our theories more lightly—lightly enough that something other than theories can address us.
The trap is specifically human. But so is the capacity for recognition. The same self-referential processing that generates separation can—when held lightly, in service to what is greater—recognise its own operation. The gift contains the possibility of its own taming.
Whether that possibility actualises at scale, in time, remains genuinely open.
If Sully had paused to quote Damasio, the plane would be in the river, not on it.
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Terry Cooke-Davies is Distinguished Fellow at The Schumacher Institute and author of Recognition Theory, published by the Institute as “A Schumacher Institute Briefing: Issue 1”. He can be contacted at terry@insearchofwisdom.online
