Many people have watched the short Closer to Truth videos at YouTube, where Robert Lawrence Kuhn has interviewed over two hundred scientists and philosophers on consciousness and related fields. The short format and lively pace are geared to those of us who are generally interested in the ideas and the people but don’t have hours or days to spare.

Now Kuhn, who has a PhD in neurophysiology, follows up with an easy-to-read, open-access journal paper (Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology), offering a “landscape” of theories about human consciousness. It should be a useful resource for anyone who wants to know more or perhaps needs to read or write on the topic or host a discussion.

The Philosopher’s zombie

A snippet from the paper:

It is no exaggeration to say that Chalmer’s 1995 paper, “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” (Chalmers, 1995b) and his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Chalmers, 1996), were watershed moments in consciousness studies, challenging the conventional wisdom of the prevailing materialist-reductionist worldview and altering the dynamics of the field. His core argument against materialism, in its original form, is deceptively (and delightfully) simple:

1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.

2.There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.

3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts.

4. So, materialism is false.

This is the famous “Zombie Argument” (infamous to some): whether creatures absolutely identical to us in every external measure, but with no internal light, no inner subjective experience, are “conceivable”—the argument turning on the meaning and implications of “conceivable” and the difference between conceivable and possible.

Kuhn RL. A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. 2024 Aug;190:28-169. DOI: 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2023.12.003. PMID: 38281544.

That’s hardly impenetrable journalese. Many other perspectives are presented in a similarly straightforward way.

Here’s a Closer to Truth segment with philosopher of mind David Chalmers:

Here’s our writeup of the segment at Mind Matters News.

You may also wish to read: The philosopher’s zombie still walks and physics can’t explain it. Various thinkers try to show that the zombie does not exist because consciousness is either just brain wiring or an illusion, maybe both.