222 Theories of Consciousness
A new website describes and tracks the interconnections between 222 “theories” of consciousness across various disciplines.
“The Map of Consciousness” was developed by Ricardo Forcano, the chief technology and operations officer at Creditas, an investment group, along with Claude Cowork, an AI “agent”.
The site lists the various theories, arguments, and ideas, and clicking on any one of them brings up a page that describes the theory, identifies its advocates, the eras and regions its associated with, its strengths and weaknesses, and its connections with other theories.
There is also an interactive “connection map”. Each of the nodes is a different theory, and mousing over any one of them will highlight its connections with other theories. Clicking on a node will take you to the page for that theory.
from Map of Consciousness Theories by Ricardo Forcano with Claude Cowork
The site includes theories of consciousness developed not just in philosophy and cognitive science but neuroscience, psychology, computing, biology, physics, anthropology, theology, “spirituality,” and indigenous traditions. You can create lists of the theories sorted by discipline, historical period, and geography.
Check it out here.
Weird. Many of these 222 “theories” are ideas, thought experiments, or arguments.
Yeah — I should put “theories” in scare quotes. I’ll do that.
Another reminder of just how special the SEP is for philosophers. For any philosophical theory of X, it seems that reading SEP articles about X is still the best theory onboarding.
I feel this ought to be Gödel-able. Is there an SEP article on weaknesses of self-referential articles?
In a similar vein: https://loc.closertotruth.com/map
Are the claims in this map checked by a human expert? There appear to be a BS-style, AI-generated ‘podcast’ and video associated with the project, so I see reason to be suspicious.
In the near future there may well be many similar projects, on philosophical topics, generated by non-philosophers quickly using AI. I urge Daily Nous and philosophers to be wary of publicizing or putting an implicit stamp of approval on ‘philosophy’ projects that human experts haven’t checked.
As Umut noted, this is totally inaccurate as a landscape of theories, just as the “landscape of consciousness” developed by Robert Kuhn (Closer to truth) (linked in a comment below). It counts “Access vs. Phenomenal consciousness”, “Altered states of consciousness”, “Autobiographical memory and self”, “Bohmian mechanics”, “Chinese room”, “Cathars and the perfect” as theories of consciousess. This is just a list of notions vaguely related to consciousness with links drawn between them.
In fairness to Kuhn, his classification is the product of many (recorded) conversations with the experts in question + folks on his website get to confirm that their views are fairly represented.
I’m pretty puzzled why Justin decided to post this
Huh, I’m puzzled why you are puzzled. This is a normal kind of thing for a philosophy blog to draw attention to. Anyone who sees the title will be like “Huh, 222 theories, really, let me check it out”?
It’s puzzling because the linked website sucks.
Ok, it’s a nice collection of ideas. But citing (e.g.) ordinary language philosophy as a theory of consciousness does not inspire much confidence.
“Ideas about the Mind,” more like. Not only are many of them not theories, but many — at least half, I’d say — aren’t much about consciousness (as distinct from other aspects of mind, like cognition).
The proof will be in the pudding, etc etc.