Consciousness: The Ghost in the Laboratory

The proliferation of theories reflects
persistence to find an explanation
for the one reality that refuses to be
mechanized: the human self

The Ghost in the Laboratory
What 350 Theories of Consciousness Really Reveal

by John D. Wise, PhD

The Endless Quest for Mind

In a recent New Scientist feature, “What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality,” 22 October 2025, the writer surveys an astonishing landscape: more than 350 separate theories, each competing for attention.

Neuroscientists, philosophers, computer scientists, and physicists all claim partial insight into the mystery of “how awareness arises.” One school speaks of information integration, another of global neural workspaces; still others turn to quantum fields or self-organizing systems. The diversity is dazzling—and bewildering. After a century and a half of study, the one phenomenon most familiar to every human being remains the least understood.

The article’s tone oscillates between confidence and awe. The author praises the creativity of researchers but admits that every new model seems to multiply the possible answers rather than narrow them. Hope persists that, “somewhere, somehow, some way,” the key to consciousness will be found. It is a striking admission: the vocabulary of science giving way, at the edge of explanation, to the language of hope.

That tension—between methodical unity and conceptual proliferation—is the real story. Science, whose strength lies in the universality of its method, encounters a peculiar crisis when it turns its gaze upon the mind that invented that method. The closer it approaches the subject, the more its findings diverge, the more contradictory the whole venture appears. Why should a discipline founded on shared procedure yield such irreducible plurality when the topic is consciousness?

This question frames what follows. The New Scientist survey is not merely a catalog of competing hypotheses; it is an X-ray of the modern imagination at work, revealing both the reach and the limits of the empirical dream. The proliferation of theories may not signal discovery at all, but the persistence of an older uncertainty—an effort to find, within the mechanisms of the world, an explanation for the one reality that refuses to be mechanized: the human self.

The Form That Survived

Beneath the multiplicity of theories runs a shared assumption rarely questioned. Each new model—whether framed in biology, computation, or physics—begins with the conviction that consciousness must somehow arise from within the system it studies. The mind, it is thought, can be accounted for by the same forces that govern matter: complexity, feedback, evolution, emergence. The form of the reasoning is always the same: start with the simple, and let time and organization do the rest.

The movement itself becomes the meaning: progress is measured not by resolution, but by activity.

It is a confident (even arrogant) logic, and a restless one. Theories built on this pattern do not converge; they proliferate. Every contradiction generates not a crisis but another synthesis, another variation on the theme. The movement itself becomes the meaning: progress is measured not by resolution, but by activity. A method born to unify knowledge produces, in this field, a constant branching of perspectives that cannot be reconciled.

What survives beneath the surface is a certain grammar of thought—a conviction that understanding advances through contradiction, that explanations need not close but merely evolve. It is a powerful and productive method, but when turned upon the question of consciousness, it yields a paradox. The method that presumes unity through natural law meets the phenomenon that exposes its insufficiency. Consciousness seems irreducibly other.

Thought, examining itself, cannot find its origin in or with the tools it made.

This isn’t a failure of science; it is the exposure of its limit.

To ask what consciousness is, and to insist that the answer must come from within the empirical frame, is to confine inquiry to a circle drawn by the very subject under investigation. The result is not unity but an elegant kind of restlessness—an order without closure, an endless deferral of meaning.

The New Scientist article unintentionally captures this. Its catalog of competing theories is less a sign of ignorance than of a deep metaphysical inheritance: the belief that knowledge, given enough time, can complete itself. It is the modern dream of self-explaining reason—a vision at once grand and fragile, forever chasing the mind that made it.[1]

Emergence and the New Theurgy[2] of Time

Among the many explanations for consciousness, one motif dominates the contemporary literature: emergence. The word promises what no mechanism can show—that awareness “somehow” arises when matter is arranged in the right way. Neurons fire, networks form, and from their collective motion, experience emerges. To this, some add mathematical precision—information thresholds, feedback loops, self-organization—but the story remains the same:

What cannot be seen in the parts will appear in the whole.

The New Scientist survey presents this idea as the unifying hope behind otherwise conflicting theories. Where mere mechanism falters, emergence steps in as a kind of conceptual solvent, turning contradiction into genesis. It reassures researchers that the leap from chemistry to consciousness is not an impossibility,[3] only a matter of scale and time. The more intricate the system, the closer it must come to awareness.

Yet the promise is always in the futureware. Each model gestures toward a promised proof—a coming experiment, a more powerful simulation, a deeper theory that will finally close the gap.

Time itself becomes the medium of salvation: what cannot be explained now will be explained later. The vocabulary of discovery (what science is supposed to be about) shades quietly into that of expectation.

The evolutionary mythos, here as elsewhere, survives not by coherence but by temporal extension.

The pattern is familiar. New frameworks appear with the confidence of novelty, their equations fresh, their diagrams intricate. Each promises to capture the moment when matter begins to think. But the explanations all share a single shape: a deferral of the question itself. They show how complexity increases, but never how consciousness begins. Even the most persuasive models—some published, some satirical—depend on the same grammar of expectation. They do not so much answer the mystery as postpone it.

This is science’s modern theurgy of time.

Where earlier ages invoked spirit to bridge matter and mind, we now invoke duration. “Given enough time,” we say, “anything can happen.” It is a formula of faith recast as method. But the arithmetic of centuries and millennia does not answer the question of origin; it only delays it. If consciousness is genuinely new, we must explain how novelty itself is possible. If it is not, we must ask what in the universe was conscious all along. Emergence, invoked too freely, conceals the very mystery it claims to resolve.

The New Scientist article does not overstate the claim, yet the pattern is unmistakable. In place of purpose, it installs process; in place of meaning, time. The substitution is elegant—and evasive. It grants the modern imagination its favorite miracle: creation by accumulation.

The Confession in the Data

After pages of theoretical architecture—models of computation, hierarchies of integration, the mathematics of awareness—the New Scientist writer, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, ends not with a summary of findings, but with a personal admission, and an ethical question:

Finally, a confession: my lifelong pursuit of consciousness hasn’t been entirely motivated by hard-nosed science or cool-coated philosophy. Ever since I was a teenager I have been haunted by a less than rational thought: “Should a being who can conceive eternity be denied it?”

But I won’t fool myself.

The question, poised between wonder and resignation, lingers longer than any of the technical details that precede it.

It is a rare moment of academic transparency. The voice that has surveyed laboratories and conferences suddenly speaks in the singular: I. What began as an impersonal report ends as an invocation. The question of consciousness, pursued through experiment, has circled back to the one asking it. What the equations could not reveal, the author feels—an unease that knowledge alone cannot quiet.

That closing thought exposes more than sentiment; it completes the logic already implicit in the article. For all the talk of emergence, feedback, and self-organization, the quest for consciousness has never been purely empirical. It is driven by a deeper intuition: that awareness cannot be accidental, that the capacity to imagine eternity must correspond to something real. The researcher who speaks of neurons and networks ends by confessing a metaphysical hunger more real than any dataset.

The language of science gives way to the language of longing.

Here the data themselves fall silent, and the human voice remains. The proliferation of theories, the deferral of answers, the invocation of time—all of it converges on this point: the mystery of consciousness is not only unsolved; it is personal. The mind that studies itself cannot help asking questions that exceed its instruments. “What am I?” becomes “Why am I?” and finally “Shall I endure?” At that juncture, method yields to meaning.

… “he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” —Solomon

The article does not name that threshold, but it reaches it. The confession is gentle, almost embarrassed, yet it is the most phenomenologically precise line in the piece. It shows what the data cannot measure—the inward knowledge that to conceive eternity is already to stand in relation to it. The reader is left where the scientist stands: at the edge of explanation, aware that the search has revealed something more enduring than the theories themselves.

Toward True Infinity

Every scientific venture assumes that explanation reaches toward completion—that the last variable will fall into place and the circle of knowledge will close. Yet in the study of consciousness, the circle never quite meets itself. The further inquiry proceeds, the more it exposes the difference between explaining an experience and having one. To describe thought is not to think; to map awareness is not to be aware. The act of knowing always surpasses the model that tries to contain it.

That surplus should not be an embarrassment to science; it is what makes science possible. The very capacity to reflect, to imagine, to hope, presupposes an order that precedes experiment. No system of neurons, however complex, can account for the fact that there is someone to whom the system appears. The question of consciousness is not an unfinished puzzle within physics—it is the boundary that reveals the contingency of physics itself.

This is what the New Scientist essay inadvertently demonstrates. Its inventory of theories becomes, in the end, a mirror held up to the mind that made them. What the author calls “hope” and “haunting” are not defects of reason but the signs of its origin: the awareness that meaning is not manufactured, but discovered. The longing for eternity is not an error in the data; it is the datum that makes all others intelligible.

To recognize that is not to renounce science, but to situate it. True infinity—the kind that does not defer itself endlessly in time—belongs not to mechanism but to purpose. It is completion, not extension; fulfillment, not accumulation. When the researcher stands at the edge of explanation and feels the question turn inward, the pursuit of consciousness has already reached its natural limit. Beyond that limit lies not ignorance, but invitation.

“If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him” —Jesus

The mind, it seems, was never meant to explain itself. Its capacity to seek the infinite is the most empirical evidence we possess that it was made in relation to it.

Footnotes

[1]I must point out the perfect ambiguity of the language here. The mind being sought is both the mind that forged the vision, and the Mind that formed that mind, whether those who ask the question allow themselves to see that reality, or not.

[2] “Theurgy” comes from the Greek theourgia, meaning divine work. In late-classical philosophy it referred to rituals intended to unite the human and the divine—an act of “making the gods act.” Here we use the term figuratively to describe the modern habit of attributing creative power to impersonal forces. When scientists speak of complexity or time as if these could generate consciousness, they are engaging in a kind of secular theurgy: invoking natural processes to perform what earlier ages would have recognized as the work of a creator.

[3] I must add that this happens “in the face of the evidence.”

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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.