Varieties of Consciousness Theories with Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Summary

Robert Lawrence Kuhn, creator of PBS's Closer to Truth, explains how he built the Landscape of Consciousness, a sweeping map of more than 400 competing theories ranging from hardcore materialism to idealism. He recounts his early ties to parapsychology pioneer J.B. Rhine, a childhood terror that turned out to be the question 'why is there anything at all?', and his fight to keep parapsychology and religious views of the soul in a peer-reviewed science journal. Kuhn argues that questions like life after death, free will, and AI consciousness cannot be answered without first choosing a theory of consciousness, and he admits he leans toward a blend of dualism and idealism.

Key takeaways

• 1Kuhn corresponded with J.B. Rhine, who invited him to do a PhD in parapsychology at Duke; the two even outlined a co-authored book that was never finished
• 2His Landscape of Consciousness paper grew from a planned 8,000 words to 175,000 words, published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology in August 2024, with a peer reviewer initially asking him to cut parapsychology and religious theories
• 3The framework sorts theories into categories from materialism to idealism, plus separate columns for anomalous events and altered states (ESP, NDEs, OBEs, psychedelics), challenge theories (Colin McGinn's mysterianism), and phenomenology
• 4Superpsychism, developed by Susan Schneider and Mark Bailey, proposes a conscious, entangled ultimate reality and a second dimension of time called 'proto-time'
• 5Kuhn cites Jeffrey Mishlove's Bigelow Institute prize-winning 2021 essay on survival of consciousness after bodily death as a key source on afterlife evidence
• 6Kuhn's personal ranking: a dualism-idealism blend first, quantum theories such as Hameroff and Penrose's second, and eliminative illusionism third

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

I was 12 years old at summer camp, and I remembered right before I went to bed, I had a thought that made me so scared that I desperately tried to put it out of my mind because it frightened me. I've never been as frightened as I was at that point. And I succeeded. And for decades, I remembered I had this fear, and I didn't remember what it was because I had successfully put it out of my mind. And then one day, in thinking about Closer to Truth and doing it, I saw a question about the, you know, why is there anything at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? The Leibniz question. Derek Parfit, the philosopher, had some very important pieces in the London Review of Books in 1998 of why anything, why this, or something like that. And suddenly I realized that was the question that I had as a child. Keep watching to learn more. The New Thinking Allowed magazine, Issue 10, on UFOs and UAP, is now ready for free download. And you can also order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at C-I-H-S dot E-D-U. Book 4 in the new Thinking Allowed Dialogue Series is Charles T. Tartt, Seventy Years of Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon. Thinking Allowed, conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is the landscape of consciousness. ...

Excerpt from New Thinking Allowed, Aug 13, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.