How ~500 Theories of Consciousness Reduce to One
When Consciousness Speaks for Itself
Abstract
Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s Landscape of Consciousness (2024; expanded 2025–2026) catalogues approximately 500 theories of consciousness across 11 primary categories, representing humanity’s broadest attempts to explain subjective experience.
This paper applies a series of sequential, self-consistent filters to the entire taxonomy, asking a simple question:
what remains when we remove everything that is not consciousness describing itself?
Five filters are applied:
(1) collapsing overlapping variants into distinct positions,
(2) removing
theories rooted in spiritual, religious, or philosophical teaching traditions,
(3) removing theories that deny or fail to account for first-person experience,
(4) removing theories influenced by external interventions, and
(5) removing theories built on scientific, mathematical, or formal frameworks.
The result is a single surviving position: Natural Human Consciousness (Wijn, 2026), which describes consciousness as an intrinsic developmental default accessible through direct, unmediated first-person observation.
The filtering process itself reveals a meta-finding: the very act of theorizing about consciousness from a third-person perspective may be what creates the explanatory gap that all other theories attempt to bridge.
Link to complete paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22749668
