Open Access
Article Type
Towards a unified theory of subjective consciousness and the natural universe
Chris King
Author Affiliations
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Abstract
This review examines a unified naturalism or theories of everything that include both the natural universe and subjective consciousness, by applying two critical filters to theories of existence, including those surveyed in Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s (2024) “Landscape of Consciousness”, hereinafter referred to as LoC: (1) The No Supervenience (NS) theorem, which asserts that subjective consciousness is not supervenient on the physical universe, and (2) The Principle of Natural Empiricism critical to experimental scientific discoveries and empirical experiences. (1) is equivalent to accepting that the explanatory gap of the hard problem of consciousness rules out implicitly physicalist and other TOEs that invoke functionalistic processes dependent on physical causality, to explain subjective consciousness. The NS theorem has the same effect as accepting that the Hard Problem of Consciousness is real, or that materialistic physicalism is false. The difficulty of the hard problem, which remains unresolved 26 years later, is also tied to the likewise unresolved problem of assumed causal closure of the universe in brain function at the basis of pure materialistic neuroscience. Until this conjecture is empirically confirmed, causal closure remains simply a matter of opinion, that has grown into a belief system, academically prejudiced against hypotheses not compliant with the physical materialistic worldview.
Keywords
Kuhn’s Landscape of Consciousness, NS theorem, natural empiricism, theories of existence, cosmopsychism
How to cite this article
Kuhn’s Landscape of Consciousness, NS theorem, natural empiricism, theories of existence, cosmopsychism
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Neural Press. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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