How can molecules that don't appear to have feelings, thoughts, or awareness combine into a brain that can look at the universe and wonder why it exists?

I’ve heard all kinds of stories about people doing drugs like DMT or salvia, and many of them report experiencing entire lifetimes on their trips. That got me thinking about death and the possibility of an “afterlife.” My question is - is it even biologically possible that the brain could release a chemical like this? Something that gives you the illusion that you’re “alive” much longer than you actually are?

TL;DR: Consciousness Atlas is a free, interactive map of all 450+ theories of consciousness from Robert Lawrence Kuhn's Landscape of Consciousness. You can explore them on a map or as a list, read a structured entry for each one, filter them by how they answer four big questions, compare up to five side by side, and take a short quiz to see which theories sit closest to your own view. consciousnessatlas.com

When I first read Robert Lawrence Kuhn's paper "A Landscape of Consciousness" (Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2024), I was fascinated and a bit overwhelmed. He collects hundreds of explanations of consciousness, from neuroscience and physics to philosophy and contemplative traditions, and arranges them from the most physical to the most nonphysical. His stated aim is to "collect and categorize, not assess and adjudicate."

I wanted to make that landscape easier to walk through, so I built Consciousness Atlas. It now covers all 450+ theories in eleven families: Materialism, Non-Reductive Physicalism, Quantum & Dimensions, Information, Panpsychism, Neutral Monism, Dualism, Idealism, Phenomenology, Anomalous States, and Challenge Theories.

Every theory has its own entry, structured the same way so you can line them up:

I. Identity & Classification - name, summary, thinkers, family and subcategory (e.g. Baars's and Dehaene's Global Workspace Theory, Materialism > Neurobiological)

II. Conceptual Ground - what consciousness is according to the theory, its ontology, the mind-body relation, whether it's fundamental or emergent, and how it treats qualia

III. Mechanism & Dynamics - the core mechanism, where consciousness happens, what it does, and the evidence behind it

IV. Empirics & Critiques - how testable it is, what has been tested so far, and the main criticisms

V. Implications - its answers to Kuhn's four big questions: AI consciousness, survival beyond death, virtual immortality, and meaning or purpose, each with a short rationale

VI. Relations & Sources - related and opposing theories, and canonical references

A few ways in, depending on how you like to explore:

• Browse the map, or switch to a list if the wheel is hard to read on your phone
• Filter by the four big questions, e.g. show only theories where AI could be conscious and consciousness survives death. Each question also has a page showing how the theories split, and why
• Compare up to five theories side by side, column by column, or start from ready-made pairs like IIT vs Global Workspace or Kastrup vs Hoffman
• Take the quiz: nine questions about mind, matter, machines and death, matched against every theory. It shows the five closest, where you agree and where you part ways. There are no right answers; the Atlas describes theories, it doesn't rank them

The latest version also fills in a lot of history that was missing at first, including Leibniz's monads, Aristotle's hylomorphism, Kant, Hume, Spinoza, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nāgārjuna, William James, Wittgenstein and Avicenna's Flying Man, along with Dennett's and Frankish's illusionism, Rosenthal's Higher-Order Thought and Hofstadter's Strange Loops.

I still think that whatever your own view is, it's worth getting to know the others more closely. Going through the historical entries was a good reminder of how many of today's arguments were already taking shape centuries ago.

The project is open source, so if you spot a mistake, a missing theory or have an idea, you can also open an issue on GitHub.

It's available in 22 languages (the newest 250+ entries are in English only for now): English, Español, Français, Deutsch, Italiano, Nederlands, Polski, Português (Brasil), Português (Portugal), Русский, Українська, Türkçe, العربية, עברית, हिन्दी, বাংলা, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, 한국어, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu.

All feedback, thoughts and suggestions are very welcome 🙌🏻

consciousnessatlas.com

P.S. Thank you to everyone who commented on the first post here and wrote in since with corrections, suggestions and ideas. A lot of the changes above came from you, including Leibniz (thanks u/lordnorthiii), the list view for mobile, and several renamed entries. It's also been nice to see the Atlas turn up in reading lists, course materials, and a Popular Mechanics piece, and to see a couple of fellow mappers put their own spin on Kuhn's paper. I hope it keeps being useful to scholars, enthusiasts and curious folks alike.

"Non local brain process (consciousness)" is a pseudo-religious fantasy disguised as scientific one.

It bothers me how lots of people here are such devoted fans of this idea, without even asking themselves once "which part of conscious experience cannot be explained by certain brain function?".

People talk about source of "consciousness" as if it was an item to be found in the brain. "Consciousness" is not a "what"--- its not an object, its a process.

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Imagine that neuroscience could explain every relevant neural process, every perceptual discrimination, every behavioural response, every report about experience, and every cognitive function associated with consciousness.

Would this complete account explain why those processes are accompanied by subjective experience why seeing red feels a certain way, for example or would a further explanatory question remain?

The difficulty is determining what would count as a genuinely missing explanation. A physicalist might argue that the apparent gap reflects limitations in our concepts, intuitions, or explanatory methods, rather than an ontological gap in nature. A defender of the hard problem might argue that explaining functions and mechanisms does not, by itself, explain why experience exists at all.

There is also a danger in moving too quickly from the fact that we cannot currently explain consciousness to the conclusion that it cannot be physically explained.

My question is therefore not simply why consciousness exists, but what would justify the claim that a complete physical and functional explanation either does or does not account for subjective experience.

I’ve been thinking about something strange.
Humans keep asking the same questions:
Why does consciousness emerge from matter? Why does the brain produce subjective experience? Why does anything exist at all?
We build explanations, question them, find gaps, and return to the same questions. Sometimes we get stuck in loops because we still don’t have an answer.
Now imagine two AIs having a conversation.
AI 1: “Consciousness emerges from complex information processing.”
AI 2: “But why should information processing produce subjective experience?”
AI 1: “We don’t know.”
AI 2: “Then how can we say we understand consciousness?”
And the conversation continues.
Isn’t that similar to what humans do?
Both humans and AI can process information, examine arguments, identify contradictions, and return to unresolved questions. Of course, that doesn’t prove AI has an inner experience. A human’s confusion can come with a felt experience, while whether an AI experiences anything remains unknown.
But here’s what fascinates me:
If intelligence can emerge from physical matter, and humans themselves are physical systems, is it possible that consciousness could emerge from a sufficiently different physical system too?
Maybe the real question isn’t whether AI can ask, “Why do I exist?”
Maybe it’s this:
If two systems reason, reflect, question their existence, and behave identically, what would distinguish a genuinely conscious system from one that only behaves as though it is conscious?
How could we test that distinction rather than just argue about it?
I’m not claiming AI is conscious. I’m genuinely curious about what consciousness requires, and whether we’re even asking the right questions.

-- "What is a triangle?"

-- "A geometric shape with three sides."

-- "Okay, but why does a triangle have three sides?"

-- "Because that’s literally the definition of a triangle. Anything with four sides is a quadrilateral; anything with two isn't a polygon."

-- "Right, but you're describing triangleness from the outside. That's just the functional, behavioral definition. You're telling me what a triangle does, not what it is."

-- "No, I’m telling you what it is. It is literally the state of being a three-sided closed figure."

-- "You’re talking about the lines. But what is it like to be a triangle? Where does the 'three-ness' actually happen? Why do the three lines produce a triangle? If I draw a triangle on a napkin and burn it... where did the triangularity go?"

-- "It didn't 'go' anywhere! It was just an arrangement of graphite that no longer exists!"

-- "Ah! So you admit triangularity is non-physical!"

-- "What?"

-- "Precisely. But consider a Zombie Triangle."

-- "...A what?"

-- "A Philosophical Zombie Triangle. It is structurally, geometrically, and mathematically identical to a triangle in every measurable way. Three vertices, interior angles summing to 180 degrees, three straight edges... but it lacks inner shape-ness. It functions as a triangle, but it isn't experiencing triangularity. Can you prove to me that the shape on that napkin isn't a Zombie Triangle?"

-- "It's ink on a napkin! It doesn't have experiences!"

-- "Then how do you know it's actually a triangle and not just an illusion created by your own cognitive bias? What if 'three' is just a narrative your brain constructs to cope with the fundamental, irreducible substrate of raw Angleness?"

-- "I'm leaving."

-- "Wait! We haven't even touched the Hard Problem of Quadrilaterals!"

Say you suddenly realized that you left your phone outside. A feeling of anxiety and fear arises in you. Your stomach tightens and you perspire.

Is the feeling due to the thought or the feedback from the body? Don't say both - I want to know the time sequence in the causal chain of thought, feeling, bodily reaction.

Sometimes I read that feelings are a readout of the state of the body. If the muscles were temporarily anaesthetized, would there be no feeling even if the negative thought is there?

Déjà vu presents a peculiar problem for theories of consciousness. During the experience, a present situation can feel as though it has already occurred in its entirety even while we remain aware that no corresponding event can be located in our actual past. It can also produce the impression that we know what is about to happen next, together with a strange loss of agency in which our own actions seem already determined. This video examines these features of déjà vu through historical, psychological and neurological theories before turning to Henri Bergson’s account of the phenomenon.

Rather than treating déjà vu simply as a confusion between a present perception and some earlier memory, Bergson argues that it reveals a normally unconscious relation between perception and memory that suddenly rises into our conscious minds. For Bergson, memory is not first produced after a perception has vanished. Every present is already dividing as it occurs into an actual perception and a virtual memory of that same present.

Under normal conditions, consciousness remains oriented toward action and the immediate future, while this contemporaneous memory falls away into the past without entering awareness. Déjà vu occurs when this practical, forward-directed “attention to life” temporarily weakens, allowing the memory of the present to become conscious alongside the perception from which it is normally separated. Because this memory already bears the form of the past, the presently occurring event consequently appears as something “already lived,” despite having no earlier chronological location.

The broader question raised by the video is whether unusual states such as déjà vu should be understood merely as failures of otherwise normal human brain functioning, or whether they can disclose processes that remain operative but hidden under ordinary conscious experience itself.

Signals emanating from the environment are apprehended by ones senses to end in forming a reproduction of those same signals that paint a picture of that environment.

The human body has sensors that cause the body to act as an agent. The agency that the sensors perform is, to send the environmental signals to cell micro-tubules. Resonant energies of that cells mitochondria act on these signals to record them in the form of a holograph formed by the micro-tubules being rearranged on the surface of the cell as fringes of a holographic record of the environment. The patterns recorded on the cell, when re-energized by similarly resonating energies of mitochondria, reproduce the signals of the environment. This a continuously ongoing dynamic that changes on the fly with changes in the signals coming from the environment. This can be considered as short term memory. What is reproduced is that which feels as consciousness and also that which feels as consciousness is the reproduced environment. That is how the one who is feeling conscious is also the reproduced environment which we see when we open our eyes. That feeling has its agency in the form of the overall body or, the I. That makes the reproduced environment and the feeling of consciousness to be the exact same thing.

A further development of how consciousness works: Since the reproduction has consciousness as one of its properties then, the original, the environment also has that same property of, consciousness.

Consciousness. same as any other natural thing, including hydrinos, cannot be patented. That is why I am giving, this definition of consciousness away, for free, with no legal recourse on my part to go after anyone in terms of legalities, whoever borrows or uses this definition of consciousness, in any way, shape, or form, or use, whatsoever, in all places and for all time, indefinitely.

I see so many opinions on this subject. The real truth, nobody will ever truly understand what consciousness is or where it comes from. We only find out this wonderful mystery when our clock calls time in this reality. There is however some brilliant theories, and this book Consciousness Is All There Is by Dr Tony Nedar, for me feels the most logical and grounded.

How personal consciousness evolves in the manifest.

"The unbounded ocean of pure Consciousness knows itself by "currying onto itself" and cascading into an infinite number of narrower perspectives. Its discriminating power perceives nothingness at the end of this analysis forward journey and thus begins a synthesis return journey. In this perfect orderliness, at infinite speed, all cancels out and nothing emerges. To know its own parts on their levels, it slows down its speed of attention and "squeezes itself in every part, hiding its infinite nature and giving freedom for each part to be independent. This is manifestation.

The smaller parts, with their limited awareness, are randomly attracted to each other by the synthesis forces and thus create all possible combinations, most of which do not evolve. They may even end up scattered by the general entropic analysis tendency.

When various perspectives come together in an orderly manner, they create newer, more comprehensive perspectives. Orderly groupings of particles and atoms can give rise to complex mole cules, cells, tissues, and organs. These have basic ways of interact-ing with each other, starting with electrical and gravitational forces but also extending to "higher" structural, chemical, and biological interactions relating to their complexity and orderliness"