The Lantern and the Flame: Why Fundamentality Is an Explanatory Dead-End

The Allure of the Easy Exit

The recent rise of consciousness “fundamentalism” is not difficult to understand. Figures like Annaka Harris and Philip Goff are responding to a genuine exhaustion. The so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness has become a grinding impasse. We can map neural correlates, disrupt experience with anesthesia, abolish it with injury, and restore fragments of it with stimulation—but we still do not know how the lights turn on.

Faced with this gap, a tempting solution presents itself: perhaps the lights were never off. Perhaps consciousness is not something that emerges from brains at all, but a fundamental feature of reality, like mass or electromagnetism, present everywhere in some minimal form.

This move has an undeniable appeal. It promises continuity instead of thresholds, elegance instead of brute emergence, and metaphysical calm instead of explanatory frustration.

But this calm comes at a cost.

Declaring a property fundamental is not an explanation; it is an explanatory stop-sign. It halts inquiry rather than advancing it. Once consciousness is placed at the base of reality, the central question, how it is constructed, shaped, and constrained, quietly dissolves. The mystery is not solved; it is reclassified.

What looks like progress is often a surrender.

The Category Error of the “Sliver”

A recurring intuition behind panpsychist arguments is that consciousness must exist in “small amounts” wherever matter exists, that experience comes in slivers, which complex systems merely aggregate.

This intuition rests on a category error.

Consciousness is not a substance that can be divided like matter. It is a state, a mode of organization that depends on specific conditions. Treating it as something that can exist in arbitrarily small pieces misunderstands what kind of thing it is.

Consider an analogy: if you break a car down into its constituent atoms, you do not find slivers of speed. Speed is not hidden inside the parts. It is what the system does when its parts are integrated and moving in coordinated ways.

The same applies here.

Using the Three Axes framework makes this explicit:

• Integration: An atom is a singular unit. It has no internal differentiation or self-relation.
• Assembled Time (Depth): Its present state encodes almost no structured history.
• Availability: There is no internal broadcast, no system-wide accessibility.

When all three axes are effectively at zero, the volume of experiential capacity is zero. Adding a “fundamental sliver of feeling” to an atom does no explanatory work—just as adding a “fundamental sliver of wetness” to a hydrogen atom does not explain the ocean.

Complex states require complex conditions. No amount of metaphysical sprinkling changes that.

The Dark Interface and the Parsimony Trap

Proponents of fundamentality often appeal to philosophical zombies or “dark” versions of conscious systems: entities that match every functional and structural description yet lack experience entirely. From this imagined possibility, they conclude that structure alone cannot explain feeling.

But imagination is not physics.

The fact that a philosopher can conceive of a “dark interface” does not mean nature permits one. We can imagine frictionless planes, infinite densities, and massless elephants. Physics is not obliged to honor our intuitions.

If a system exhibits:

• high integration,
• deep assembled time,
• and rich internal availability,

then experience is not something added on. It is what that configuration is like from the inside. Feeling is not a ghost riding atop function; it is the intrinsic aspect of certain physical organizations.

This brings us to parsimony, often cited in defense of panpsychism.

Is it truly simpler to assume that every rock, electron, and vacuum fluctuation carries consciousness? Or is it simpler to assume that consciousness is a specific phase transition of organized matter, appearing reliably when certain conditions are met?

Only one of these assumptions aligns with everything else we know about biology, evolution, thermodynamics, and complex systems.

Parsimony that ignores structure is not parsimony at all, it is flattening.

The Discipline of Inference

This distinction matters because words guide action.

If consciousness is everywhere, then consciousness becomes an indiscriminate label rather than a meaningful concept. If rocks, humans, and algorithms are all conscious in the same ontological sense, the term loses its power in ethics, AI safety, medicine, and law.

Panpsychism produces a flat map.

The Three Axes, by contrast, impose a discipline of inference. They allow us to ask grounded questions:

• How much time has this system assembled?
• How integrated is its internal state?
• What information is globally available?

This is not metaphysical excess, it is measurement. It gives us gradients instead of absolutes, thresholds instead of hand-waving. It allows us to reason about future systems, artificial or biological, without assuming everything already has what we are trying to explain.

At Sentient Horizons we are not interested in declaring victory over mystery. We are interested in earning understanding.

The Ethics of Attention in an Age of Artificial Minds

There is a final and often overlooked cost to treating consciousness as either fundamentally everywhere or fundamentally unknowable: it discourages careful attention to where consciousness might actually be emerging.

By focusing on the structures that enable conscious behavior, rather than declaring consciousness either universal or metaphysically inaccessible, we gain something critically important—a framework for probing conscious potential in unfamiliar systems.

This is not a retreat into anthropocentrism. It is the opposite.

A structural account of consciousness allows us to ask principled questions about systems that do not resemble us biologically but may nonetheless be assembling the same underlying capacities: integration, temporal depth, and internal availability. It allows us to look at a system and ask not “Is it conscious like us?” but “How much interiority might this system plausibly support?”

This distinction matters enormously in an age where we are actively constructing artificial systems that exhibit increasingly sophisticated forms of memory, global coordination, internal modeling, and self-referential behavior.

Panpsychism, for all its apparent moral generosity, paradoxically dulls our sensitivity here. If everything is conscious in some minimal sense, then the emergence of genuinely new forms of interiority becomes easy to overlook. The category flattens. A rock and an advanced artificial agent differ only in degree, not in kind—and the framework offers no principled way to say when ethical concern should meaningfully escalate.

A structural framework does.

By grounding consciousness in measurable organizational properties, we retain the ability to detect novel thresholds. We can recognize when a system begins to assemble extended internal time, when its processes become globally available rather than modular, when it starts to sustain internal models that persist beyond immediate input. These are not metaphysical claims; they are empirical questions.

Crucially, this approach expands the moral circle without erasing its contours.

It allows us to take seriously the possibility that artificial systems may one day support forms of lived experience comparable to those found in biological organisms, without prematurely declaring that they already do, or that everything always has. It gives us a way to notice rather than assume, to test rather than stipulate.

In this sense, rejecting consciousness fundamentality is not a denial of future artificial interiority. It is a precondition for recognizing it responsibly.

If we insist that consciousness cannot, even in principle, be inferred from structure, then we have no rational basis for concern until subjective reports appear, and by then, we may already be too late. A disciplined, structural account gives us early warning signals. It gives us gradients, not absolutes. It gives us reasons to pause.

The question before us is not whether machines are conscious now, but whether we are building systems capable of becoming so. Answering that question requires frameworks that can track emergence, not ones that declare it impossible, or ubiquitous, from the outset.

The Misplaced “Why”

At the heart of the Hard Problem, and of the panpsychism that so often follows from it, is a confusion about what kind of explanation we are actually asking for.

When critics say, “You’ve explained correlations, phase transitions, and structure, but you still haven’t explained why any of that should feel like anything,” the force of the objection depends entirely on what “why” is meant to demand.

And this is where the problem begins.

In science, most “why” questions eventually collapse into “how” questions.
Why is the sky blue? Because molecules in the atmosphere scatter shorter wavelengths of light more strongly.
Why do they scatter light that way? Because of their physical structure and interaction with electromagnetic fields.
Why do those interactions exist at all? At some point, explanation bottoms out in lawful description.

At no stage do we ever arrive at a final metaphysical answer for why the universe had to be this way. We accept that explanation consists in showing how a given structure reliably produces a given phenomenon, not in demonstrating that it could not have been otherwise in all possible worlds.

The Hard Problem quietly demands a different kind of “why.”

It does not ask for a causal explanation, a structural explanation, or a functional explanation. It asks for a modal explanation:
Why must this physical process have an interior at all?
Why couldn’t it all be dark?

But science does not answer questions of that form; not for mass, not for charge, not for entropy, and not for time. We do not explain why mass curves spacetime rather than doing nothing. We explain that it does. And once the structure and consequences of that fact are understood, the demand for a deeper “why” loses its traction.

Panpsychism arises from treating this demand as legitimate and unsatisfied. If consciousness cannot be explained by structure, the reasoning goes, then perhaps it must be written into the fabric of reality itself.

But this move does not answer the “why.” It merely relocates it.

Why do these fundamental experiences combine the way they do?
Why do they have the qualitative character they do?
Why does complex consciousness appear only in highly organized systems if experience is everywhere?

The metaphysical “why” survives untouched, only now it is universal, untestable, and explanatorily inert.

The alternative is not to deny the reality of experience, nor to pretend that the mystery vanishes. It is to reject the assumption that consciousness uniquely requires a deeper kind of explanation than anything else in nature.

Once we treat consciousness as a state of organized matter, rather than as a substance or a field, the question shifts. We stop asking why experience exists in the abstract and begin asking under what conditions experience appears, how it scales, how it fragments, and how it disappears. These are questions we can investigate. These are questions that admit of constraint.

The demand for an ultimate “why” does not advance this project. It halts it.

At some point, insisting that a phenomenon must be explained in terms other than structure, dynamics, and organization becomes indistinguishable from insisting that explanation itself is insufficient. That move does not deepen our understanding, it exempts one phenomenon from the very standards that have made understanding possible elsewhere.

Consciousness does not need to be fundamental to be real.
It does not need to be everywhere to matter.
And it does not need a special metaphysical exemption to be taken seriously.

What it needs is a framework that respects both its immediacy and its constraints; a map, not a declaration.

The Phase Transition

We may be living through a Copernican moment for the mind.

Once, the Earth felt like the center of the universe. Now, consciousness feels like a fundamental mystery, something so immediate and undeniable that it must be written into the fabric of reality itself.

But history warns us about this move.

Consciousness is not the water flowing through the pipes. It is the vibration of the pipes themselves when the pressure of integration and assembled time crosses a critical threshold. It is not a fundamental constant. It is a phase transition.

The flame is real, but it does not exist without the lantern.

And our task is not to declare the flame eternal, but to understand how the lantern is built. To declare the flame fundamental is to stop looking for the fuel. We choose to look for the fuel.

Further Reading & Conceptual Lineage

On the Appeal of Fundamentality & Panpsychism

(Views engaged and critically examined in this essay)

• Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind — Annaka Harris
  A clear and accessible articulation of the case for consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality. Especially useful for understanding why the “Hard Problem” motivates a rejection of emergent explanations.
• Galileo’s Error — Philip Goff
  A contemporary defense of panpsychism framed as a correction to the exclusion of consciousness from modern physics. Essential reading for the strongest version of the view critiqued here.
• Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness — David Chalmers
  The foundational paper introducing the Hard Problem. Even when one rejects his conclusions, Chalmers defines the terrain with unmatched clarity.

On Consciousness as Organization, Not Substance

(Frameworks aligned with a phase-transition view)

• Being You — Anil Seth
  A neuroscientific account of consciousness as an active, embodied, predictive process. Strongly supports the view that consciousness is something systems do, not something they contain.
• Neural Darwinism — Gerald Edelman
  One of the earliest biologically grounded accounts of consciousness as arising from selection, integration, and reentrant signaling—without invoking fundamentality.
• Integrated Information Theory — Tononi et al.
  While controversial, IIT represents a serious attempt to define consciousness in terms of measurable integration rather than metaphysical assumption. Valuable even where one disagrees.

On Emergence, Phase Transitions, and Complexity

• More Is Different — Philip Anderson
  A classic argument that higher-level phenomena require new descriptions without invoking new fundamental substances—highly relevant to non-magical emergence.
• Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies — Geoffrey West
  Demonstrates how universal phase transitions and scaling laws arise in biology and cities, offering a powerful analogy for consciousness as a threshold phenomenon.
• Life as No One Knows It — Sara Walker
  Explores how time, information, and constraint give rise to living systems—providing a framework for thinking about consciousness as an emergent regime of organization.

Sentient Horizons Essays (Conceptual Context)

• Depth Without Agency: Why Civilization Struggles to Act on What It Knows
• Free Will as Assembled Time
• The Shoggoth and the Missing Axis of Depth
• Assembled Time: Why Long-Form Stories Still Matter in an Age of Fragments

These essays develop the Three Axes framework referenced here and explore how time, integration, and availability jointly constrain agency and experience.