Epilogue: Silhouettes of the Conscious Mind: Are We Done with the Quest for a Fundamental Theory?

There has been much said about consciousness, but very often the right questions are not asked, or the harder ones. In this epilogue, I set out to press certain “limit questions” that raise both matters of epistemological constraints in the inquiry and issues in metaphysical speculations about this thing called consciousness (and whether it names anything real at all?). Various candidates for a partial or (doubtfully) complete description of consciousness are entertained, before moving on to propose certain basic characteristics that would appear to be basic and in need of further explication. Drawing from critical phenomenology and Indian philosophy as well as the work of J.L. Shaw on cognition and consciousness, these are identified as the surprising traits of intentionality, subjectivity (or deep self-awareing, or attention), and the historicity of consciousness. On the metaphysical side, the chapter concludes by arguing against faith in both the dualism of mind/spirit over matter, and reductionist materialism, leaving open a phenomenalist qualia-based model of decentralized conscious states, which I am calling panenpsychism, distinguished from panpsychism (of the modern kind) due to its intractable combination problem.