Consciousness, continued: Babel in the Brain
Until science recovers that sense that
some things are truly right and others
truly wrong — it will continue, like Babel,
to speak in many tongues while
never reaching unto the heavens.
Babel in the Brain
When Neuroscience Seeks a Unified Theory of Consciousness
by John D. Wise, PhD
In our previous feature, The Ghost in the Laboratory, we surveyed the 350 competing theories of consciousness and the metaphysical crisis that attends them. Each tried to explain how mind “arises” from matter, yet the diversity itself became the message: the more we studied consciousness, the less unified our understanding became.
A week later, Popular Mechanics, in an article entitled “A Unified Theory of Consciousness Could Be on the Cusp,” 27 October, 2025, announced that the tide may finally be turning. The headline promised what philosophers and scientists alike have long awaited: an answer to the “hard problem” of consciousness. A collection of neuroscientists have joined forces across Europe to combine their partial insights into one grand synthesis:
A full baseball team worth of neuroscientists from around Europe have combined their theories … By breaking theories into pieces and comparing like with like, the scientists realized that certain kinds of experimentation can answer several questions at once across the different theories.
The news article celebrates cooperation where rivalry once reigned. “Historically,” the researchers write (in Neuron, “An integrative, multiscale view on neural theories of consciousness,” 15 May 2024):
… most researchers have emphasized the development and validation of their preferred theoretical framework in relative isolation. … Here, we consider unifying, integration-oriented approaches that have so far been largely neglected, seeking to combine valuable elements from various theories.
It is a heart-warming picture of scientific collegiality — and a revealing one. For beneath the optimism lies a familiar modern assumption: that from plurality and process, unity will emerge.
The All-of-the-Above Reflex
As a professor of philosophy, I have seen this epistemological reflex many times before — not in neuroscience but in the ethics classroom. When teaching Ethics at the University of Arizona Global Campus, I introduce students to three classic moral frameworks: Utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, and Aristotelian virtue ethics. Almost without fail, their first instinct is to say, “All three combined would offer the best solution.”
It sounds mature — inclusive, integrative, balanced. But it is also evasive and noncommital. It refuses to face the central question: Which of these theories provides the best foundational understanding of ethics? Which of them is true?
When I press that point, the “room” grows uneasy, because asking it implies that some theories might simply be wrong. And that word — wrong — is foreign to the modern intellectual ear. We have been trained to prefer synthesis to judgment, pluralism to truth.
The same move animates today’s “integrative neuroscience.” Like my students, the Neuron authors want to combine frameworks: the Global Neuronal Workspace, Integrated Information Theory, Higher-Order Thought, Recurrent Processing, Predictive Coding — each a partial account of consciousness. But instead of deciding which one provides the right foundation, they seek an emergent harmony of them all.
That is not a scientific method; it is a Hegelian mood — the conviction that all contradictions will ultimately be reconciled in a higher unity. Yet reconciliation without reference to transcendence is only aggregation. It produces not truth but consensus, revealing the relativism of modern thinking and, I would argue, its cowardice.
From Ethics to Epistemology
In my ethics classes I argue that Kant’s Categorical Imperative — the claim that human beings are ethically obligated as a fact of existence — offers the proper foundation. Aristotle accepts that premise, building virtue atop duty; Utilitarianism rejects it, reducing morality to arithmetical pleasure and pain.
The rejection is wrong. Not evil, but wrong in a precise sense: it mis-orders what is good, treating consequence as cause, part as whole. The good remains good, but displaced. Likewise with Hegel: he is my intellectual nemesis, yet not discardable, because what he misuses is itself something good — the human hunger for unity.
That hunger, though, cannot be satisfied by collecting fragments. It requires what the Bible calls the “fear of the Lord” — acknowledgment of a standard above and beyond us. Without that transcendent boundary, ethics dissolves into preference, and epistemology into pluralism.
The same holds for consciousness studies. The desire to merge 350 competing theories into a single multiscale model is not progress toward truth but flight from the claims of truth. It is the secular mind’s way of saying, “Since we cannot agree on which is right, let us declare them all right in part.”
The New Babel
Neuron’s authors are candid about their ambition. They seek to move beyond isolated research toward an “integrative, multiscale view on neural theories of consciousness.” They write:
The mind-brain problem … has been debated by philosophers for centuries and remains one of the deepest unsolved problems in science.
That admission — that the “mind-brain problem” remains unsolved — should be humbling. Yet the rhetorical framing turns it triumphal: the unsolved problem becomes the frontier of unity. In this respect, the new “unified theory” movement resembles the Tower of Babel. Nations, languages, and disciplines convene to build an edifice of understanding that will reach the heavens. They are not wrong to seek understanding; what is wrong is the assumption that the summit lies within the material itself. They raise their ambitions to the heavens while denying their reality.
The result is a glittering confusion: the language of neurons substitutes for the language of meaning, the integration of mechanisms for the reconciliation of mind and truth.
What We Learn from the Attempt
None of this is to disparage the effort. The yearning for unity, coherence, and purpose runs deep in the human soul because it was placed there by the Creator. Hegel saw that impulse clearly, more clearly indeed than his intellectual heirs. The immanence of Spirit is at least a rationally coherent solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness, unlike materialist “emergence.”
By turning transcendence inward, Hegel made Spirit the self-unfolding of history and thought. Consciousness grounds in consciousness. Modern neuroscience repeats the pattern, but with matter, and consciousness becomes the self-unfolding of complexity and feedback – pure mechanism. But consciousness by its own witness does not find its ground in mechanism.
There is another way to read the data.
Each partial theory of consciousness — the integrationist, the workspace, the recurrent, the predictive — may capture a fragment of the mind’s functional structure, just as each ethical theory captures a fragment of the moral law.
Fragments cannot bear the weight of foundations.
In years of teaching ethics I have learned that when you mistake a subsidiary idea for the foundational one, you don’t just go slightly astray — you lose the whole structure. The foundation is the one thing that must be right. To build ethics on Utilitarianism, for instance, is not to build a tilted house but to lose the ground on which ethics can stand. A part has been mistaken for the whole. So too here: to call fragments “complementary” without ordering them to their source is to repeat Babel’s error — to build without blueprint, to seek the One without building on the Principal of Unity – The Logos.
Conclusion: The Necessary Boundary
The Neuron collaboration will no doubt yield useful models, perhaps even a more coherent map of neural processes. But if the field forgets that consciousness is not merely a thing to be unified but a unity that already is — given, not constructed — it will only build towers that fail to reach the goal.
Truth, like goodness, does not emerge from the crowd. It speaks from beyond it. The same God who said “Let there be light” also said of His creation, “It was very good.” That declaration remains the first and final foundation of both mind and morality.
Until science recovers that sense of givenness — that some things are truly right and others truly wrong — it will continue, like Babel, to speak in many tongues while never reaching unto the heavens.
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.