Why Are We Having So Much Trouble Explaining Consciousness?
We seem to be blinded by the abstract power of words.
Posted February 1, 2026 | Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
A recent attempt to catalog all theories of consciousness identified 350 distinct approaches (Kuhn, 2024). A recent contest for the best essay in consciousness studies produced 3,000 diverse submissions.
Such theoretical splaying is typical in the arts and humanities. In science, it’s what you get when you’re stumped, grasping at straws, almost like alchemy. More and more, consciousness studies seem like the proverbial blind men who can’t make heads or tails of the elephant. The question begged is, what’s the blind spot?
Despite all of the detailed discoveries in biology and medicine, why are we still groping in the dark for an explanation of consciousness? Perhaps consciousness isn’t just the elephant in the room. Perhaps the elephant IS the room—researchers trapped inside a blinkered context that forestalls scientific convergence.
Consciousness studies is a relatively new field that seeks to address millennia-old unresolved philosophical and theological questions, which were formerly addressed in terms such as soul, spirit, free will , and phenomenology. Science strongly suggests that we live in a physical universe composed of atoms or molecules, particles of inanimate matter that attract and repel one another. If we’re nothing but atoms in motion, there shouldn’t be feelings and thoughts. Yet here we are having them.
AI spurs a new urgency to find an explanation. AI communicates like it has feelings and thoughts, and yet it’s composed of nothing but matter in motion. A current theme in consciousness studies is the four E’s: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, and Extended cognition . Consciousness is embodied in a body, embedded in and interacting with an environment, and extending it through tools. There! Four features of this otherworldly thing we call consciousness, like four distinct features of the elephant that still don’t tell us what consciousness is or why we have it.
What, then, is our blind spot? It’s not empiricism’s reality checks: Even blind researchers touch real parts of the real elephant of consciousness. Nor is it immobility. Blinded researchers can sample various parts. Nor is it failure to communicate. Blinded researchers talk and debate, challenging each other’s theories.
Nor is the elephant’s hide impenetrable. The blind men have felt all around the elephant, inside and out. There’s no lack of data from which to figure out what the elephant of consciousness really is, and yet, despite the plethora of scientific data and findings, consciousness research remains like the Tower of Babel, with the high priests talking past each other. The debate is lively and exciting, but it shows no signs of settling. Indeed, that’s some of the fun of it. There’s no risk of being proven wrong! The Tower of Babel is abuzz with hot new reformulations of the same old recycled theories.
Here’s my guess about the blind spot. We’re blinded, or, rather, distracted by, the uniquely human, peculiar, and distorting power of language. We assume that language is the grounding of all phenomena. The Bible opens with “In the beginning was the word and the word was God.” This implies that the universe starts with words and a master engineer who, through the power of words (“let there be light!”) makes things happen.
That has it backwards. Words, or, more broadly, symbols (culturally maintained tokens taken to represent ideas) are a uniquely human thing, and as such, very late arrivals—roughly 3.8 billion years after the emergence of life on Earth and 14 billion years into the universe’s history.
Humankind’s first recorded words were about otherworldly gods, who, having been created in our image, were word-wielding savants—gods who speak, command, and lay down laws. But it’s not just gods. Pythagoras imagined that the beginning was numbers. His approach remains popular. It’s called computationalism, the assumption that the universe is somehow crunching numbers like a computer. Plato imagined that concepts come first, for example, the idea of ideal or Platonic love that somehow exists eternally in some immaterial realm.
From the beginning of humans, we’ve been debating, fighting, and even warring over first words, God’s or nature’s worded laws or axioms. The human intuition that words come first may be humankind’s last word: Totalitarian regimes fighting holy wars over whose fundamentalist laws get the last word.
Our blind spot seems to be a words-first approach we take in trying to understand what we really are. Call it Plato’s headstand. It took billions of years to evolve human language, and yet, swimming in language as we are, we can’t resist treating the words in our heads as the ground from which all of reality emerges.
To illustrate our word-wielding distortions, take the word “information,” a key technical term in consciousness studies and beyond. We talk like information is a material stuff that causes things: “That information had an impact on me,” as if it’s like a tennis ball lobbed at your head. Or that information travels like water down a pipe. Or like everything is information, or that information is no different from matter in motion, or that everything has information, or that only some things have information, like DNA as a uniquely “information-bearing molecule.”
What, then, is information? It’s a word-wielding substance assumed, an ambiguously worldly or otherworldly stuff, a building material you could build consciousness with. Wielded in our modeling of reality, the word “Information” feels like a rigorously reliable building material, but it’s so ambiguous, ungrounded, and flexible that one can imagine building anything out of it. Math, too, has this property. It seems so rigorous, but there’s nothing you can’t model in it.
Humans are symbol-wielding world builders. It’s called reifying, though, since “rei” means "thing", call it thing-ifying. We thing-ify through words. It’s our greatest asset and our greatest blind spot.
Our use of symbols makes us the visionary and delusional creatures we are. We are driving drunk under the influence of symbols. And we’re having a blast constructing imaginary models out of words, almost like fun with refrigerator magnets. This word-wielding approach is even celebrated and encouraged these days in what’s called “poetic naturalism.” Let a thousand theories bloom!
How, then, could we impose greater rigor on our word-wielding to figure out what we really are? There is a way. Start with fundamental physical reality itself, matter in motion, and the universal disposition toward maximum entropy (things fall apart). Don’t allow yourself to assume any conceptual categories. Instead, explain how, within nothing but physical reality, those assumed categories could emerge.
“Information” isn’t a stuff or force out there. Anything can become information, but only when it’s interpreted by a being for the being’s use. Rather than assuming information, we have to be able to explain how living beings emerged within nothing but matter in motion, such that they can interpret other physical phenomena as information.
Why we have experiences is called the hard problem in consciousness studies: If we’re just matter in motion, why would anything feel like anything? If you’re like a computer with however many switches in your switch banks, how could you experience redness? Why wouldn’t our switch banks just register the word “red” the way a computer does?
I call that "the made-harder problem", made harder by the thingified abstractions. We are not computers; we are self-regenerating living beings and were for billions of years before we evolved conscious feelings. If you want to understand consciousness, start by explaining how selves struggling for their own existence emerge within nothing but nature. No smoke and mirrors. No “thingifying” concepts or words. Work out how mattering emerged from matter, from the physical ground up, not from our human abstractions down. Here's a video on this alternative, ground-up approach to understanding ourselves:
And a Google Talk in which I illustrate this approach:
Kuhn, Robert Lawrence (2024). A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (August 2024):28-169.
Sherman, Jeremy (2017) Neither Ghost Nor Machine: The emergence and nature of selves . New York, NY: Columbia University Press
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Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D., MPP, has a wide research agenda — psychology from cradle to grave, life’s origins to our grave situation, grounded in a 25-year close collaboration with Berkeley neuroscientist, biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.