A Map of Every Theory of Consciousness
A Map of Every Theory of Consciousness
Field Notes · 2026-07-27
What if, beneath the noise of the world, there is something within us that has never been lost?
Closer to Truth — the long-running PBS series on cosmology, philosophy, and the nature of reality — has launched the Landscape of Consciousness, an interactive map that visualises the major theories of consciousness and how they relate to each other.
Materialism. Panpsychism. Idealism. Integrated Information Theory. Global Workspace Theory. Predictive Processing. The map does not pick a winner. It places each theory in relation to the others, showing where they agree, where they diverge, and where the open questions still are.
On TikTok this month, a creator called alignmentcodes posted a video that has been watched over a million times. The caption: "Consciousness isn't something we each own — it's something we all participate in. We're individual expressions of one greater consciousness, experiencing life through different perspectives."
Over 350,000 people liked it. That is not a small number. That is a signal that a certain kind of question — the kind that philosophers have been asking for two thousand years — is suddenly finding a mainstream audience that does not use the word philosophy.
The Landscape of Consciousness map is a different kind of intervention. It is organised, structured, academic. It names names and cites sources. It is the kind of thing a PhD student would build. But it is also the kind of thing a curious person could spend an hour on and come away with a better map of the territory than most philosophy undergraduates have.
Two ways of approaching the same question: one through the structure of knowledge, one through the structure of feeling. Both are valid. Both are happening right now.
Until the next transmission.