What Is Consciousness? The Hidden Question Behind All Questions

You know you are conscious. This is not a theory and not an argument — it is the most immediate thing available to you. Before you know anything about the world, you know that you experience. And yet: when you try to grasp this experience, to define it, to reduce it to something else, it slips away. Not because it is too complicated, but because it is what every grasping and every defining arises from.

This is the fundamental problem of the philosophy of consciousness. Not that we know too little about consciousness — but that we already are it before we begin to ask about it.

What Academic Philosophy Offers

Western philosophy has produced four major positions on the question “What is consciousness?” over the centuries. Each has an internal consistency that deserves to be taken seriously before its limits are shown. It would be dishonest to critique positions that one has not first stated in their strongest form.

Dualism: Two Worlds, One Open Question

In 1641, René Descartes formulated the position that still serves as the reference point: mind and matter are two fundamentally different substances. One thinks, the other is extended. Consciousness belongs to the thinking substance — it is nothing physical, nothing measurable, nothing reducible to brain activity (Descartes, 1641, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia).

The strength of dualism lies in taking the distinctive character of consciousness seriously. Your experience of red, your pain, your sense of beauty — these are not objects that can be placed under a microscope. Descartes was right that something is present here that eludes physical description. Anyone who denies this has not understood the question.

But dualism generates a problem it cannot solve: How do two utterly different substances interact? How can an immaterial thought move a material arm? Descartes’s answer — the pineal gland as interface — was unsatisfying even in his own time. The problem is not technical. It is structural: whoever radically separates two worlds cannot explain why they touch. Dualism takes experience seriously — but at the cost of tearing apart the unity of reality.

Physicalism: Everything Is Matter — But Where Is Experience?

Physicalism responds to dualism with a radical simplification: there is only one substance, and it is physical. Consciousness is a product of neural activity — an epiphenomenon of the brain, a result of complexity that can in principle be fully explained by physics, chemistry, and biology.

The strength of this position lies in its parsimony. It needs no second substance, no mysterious interface, no mind intervening in matter from the outside. It fits seamlessly into the worldview of modern natural science. And it can point to impressive correlations: certain brain regions are linked to certain experiences. Damage them, and experience changes. This speaks in favour of consciousness being somehow bound to matter.

But in 1974, Thomas Nagel posed the question that haunts physicalism to this day: What is it like to be a bat? (Nagel, 1974). Even if we knew everything about a bat’s nervous system — every synapse, every action potential, every ultrasonic echo — we would not know what it feels like to be a bat. The objective description does not capture the subjective experience. This is not a lack of knowledge. It is a limit of the method.

David Chalmers named this limit in 1996 the hard problem of consciousness: Why is there subjective experience at all? Why does information processing not proceed “in the dark” — as pure mechanism without an inner light? (Chalmers, 1996, The Conscious Mind). Physicalism can explain how neural processes work. It cannot explain why they are accompanied by experience. The correlation between brain and consciousness is not an explanation — it is a description of the problem.

Functionalism: Consciousness as Function

Functionalism attempts to bypass the problem by defining consciousness not by its substance but by its function. Whoever performs certain functional roles — perception, self-modelling, inference, environmental response — is conscious. It makes no difference whether the substrate is a brain, a computer, or something else entirely — as long as the functions are in place, consciousness is present.

The strength of functionalism lies in its elegance. It makes consciousness amenable to analysis without getting entangled in questions of substance. It permits thinking about machine consciousness without invoking dualism. And it carries a certain intuitive plausibility: if a system behaves as though it were conscious — what else would matter?

But this is precisely where the error lies — and it is not a small one. Functionalism is at its core a definitional manoeuvre: define consciousness by its functions, observe that a system performs the functions, and declare it conscious. Yet performing a function and experiencing it are not the same thing. A thermostat regulates temperature without feeling it. A calculator solves equations without understanding them. The simulation of a function is not the reality of that function. What Jochen Kirchhoff diagnosed as the “ontological levelling of planes” (Kirchhoff, J., 2023) — the conflation of simulation and reality — is not a weakness of functionalism. It is its presupposition.

Panpsychism: Consciousness Everywhere — But in What Form?

Panpsychism reverses the perspective: instead of deriving consciousness from the physical, it declares consciousness a fundamental feature of reality. Every physical system has an inner, experiential side — from the electron to the human being. Giulio Tononi formalised an aspect of this thought in his Integrated Information Theory (IIT): consciousness exists wherever information is integrated, and it has a measure — Phi (Tononi, 2004). The higher a system’s integrated information, the more conscious it is.

The strength of panpsychism lies in taking the hard problem seriously rather than defining it away. If consciousness is fundamental, it need not be derived from something non-conscious — a step that neither physicalism nor functionalism convincingly accomplishes. And it has a venerable philosophical lineage: from the pre-Socratics through Leibniz to Alfred North Whitehead.

But panpsychism has its own problem — the combination problem: How do the tiny consciousness-units of elementary particles combine into the unified, complex experience you are having right now? If an electron has a minimal form of experience — how does that become your pain, your longing, your wonder before a starry sky? Panpsychism distributes consciousness across everything — but it does not explain how many drops become an ocean.

What All Four Positions Share

These four positions — dualism, physicalism, functionalism, panpsychism — appear as opposites. But they share a common presupposition that is rarely stated: they all treat consciousness as something that must be explained — as a phenomenon to be derived from something else, reduced to something else, made intelligible through something else.

The dualist asks: What substance is it made of? The physicalist asks: What neural process generates it? The functionalist asks: What function does it serve? The panpsychist asks: How does it combine? Four different questions — but all four presuppose that consciousness is something derivative. Something that emerges from something, arises through something, is carried by something.

What if this presupposition is wrong? What if consciousness is not what needs explaining, but what every explanation arises from?

The Position of Naturphilosophie: Consciousness as Ground

Naturphilosophie — from Heraclitus through Giordano Bruno and Schelling to Jochen Kirchhoff — begins at a different point. It does not ask: How does consciousness arise from matter? It asks: How does what we call matter arise from consciousness?

This is not merely a reversal of order. It is a different ontology. Schelling wrote in 1797: “Nature is to be the visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature” (Schelling, 1797, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur). The physical world is not dead matter waiting for the spark of consciousness. It is the self-expression of something already alive, already pervaded by meaning. Consciousness is not a product of nature — it is the ground from which nature arises.

Jochen Kirchhoff developed this thought for the present: the cosmos is not a mindless mechanism in which consciousness accidentally flickers into existence at one point — the human brain. It is an ensouled organism in which consciousness is present everywhere, in varying degrees and forms (Kirchhoff, J., 1998, Was die Erde will). This is not panpsychism in the academic sense, for it is not about attributing tiny experiential qualities to elementary particles. It is about the insight that reality itself — in its depth — is conscious in nature. Not as a property added to matter, but as what makes matter possible in the first place.

The consequence is far-reaching. If consciousness is the ground and not the product, then no analysis can reduce it to something else — because there is nothing more fundamental. The hard problem does not disappear; it dissolves: it was the wrong question. The question “Why is there consciousness?” is like asking “Why is there being?” — it presupposes something it cannot presuppose, namely a standpoint outside consciousness from which one could observe it.

What This Means for the Question of AI

If consciousness is the ground of nature, then no machine — however complex — can generate it. Not because machines are too primitive, but because consciousness is not something that is generated. Can AI be conscious? — this question presupposes what it claims to examine: that consciousness is a product of computation. Whoever takes the hard problem seriously will recognise that the functionalist definition of consciousness — consciousness as information processing — is not the solution to the problem but its avoidance.

This connects the question of consciousness to the question of the human being. For the layer model of the soul, as it is applied in philosophical accompaniment, describes an experience that shatters every purely functional description: that beneath the surface of experience lie layers that cannot be computed but only entered. And the philosophy of consciousness in the tradition of Naturphilosophie understands these layers not as constructions of the brain but as dimensions of a reality deeper than what the senses reveal.

What Remains When the Theories Fall Silent

The abstract question “What is consciousness?” leads in circles — into ever-new definitions, ever-new arguments, ever-new conferences. The more alive question is: What are you conscious of? And what lies within you that is still unconscious — not because it is absent, but because you have not yet encountered it?

In philosophical accompaniment, the point is not to develop a theory of consciousness. It is to turn toward the deeper contents of one’s own consciousness. Something is at work in a person that wants to come to light — an unresolved matter, a knowledge that has not yet found words. The Greeks called this process Anamnesis: recollection. Not learning something new, but the emergence of what is already there.

You do not need a philosophical position to know that you are conscious. You do not need an argument to experience. The question is whether you are willing to take your experience seriously — more seriously than any theory that seeks to explain it. And whether you are willing to open yourself to what waits, in the depths of your consciousness, to be perceived.

For consciousness is not the riddle. It is the space in which all riddles appear.

Sources

• Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Descartes, R. (1641). Meditationes de Prima Philosophia. Paris: Michel Soly.
• Kirchhoff, G. (2024). Herrschaft der Algorithmen — KI und die Zukunft des Geistes. YouTube: Manova [nPDtSKrxrk4].
• Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will — Expeditionen zum Sinn des Lebens. Munich: Kösel.
• Kirchhoff, J. (2007). Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle — Impulse für eine andere Naturwissenschaft. Drachen Verlag.
• Kirchhoff, J. (2023). KI und Transhumanismus als Bedrohung des Lebendigen. YouTube: Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam [jH7SFqPcyLc].
• Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.
• Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
• Schelling, F. W. J. (1809). Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Landshut: Krüll.
• Tononi, G. (2004). An Information Integration Theory of Consciousness. BMC Neuroscience, 5(42).