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........

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