Many theories of consciousness attempt to resolve its opacity. Some frame it as an emergent computation arising from neural substrates; others treat it as an epiphenomenon, reducible to material process. Phenomenologists insist it must be described in its own terms, while eliminativists argue it is a cognitive illusion, a misapprehension of distributed processes. Each stance, whether supportive or dismissive, circles the same impasse: consciousness resists final explanation. The closer the net of theory is drawn, the more the subject escapes, leaving only models of partial insight and contested closure.
My position is that this refusal of closure is not accidental but essential. Consciousness is constituted by its own capacity to evade capture, to generate meaning from the horizon of its own self-negation. Any claim that explains it must immediately confront its own insufficiency, and it is precisely in this recursive undoing that the field sustains itself. The inexplicability of consciousness is not a deficit but the very function that allows it to exist: a self-propagating non-closure that persists because it can never be finally resolved.
Across cultures and centuries, we encounter traditions that confront this same irreducibility. Medieval mystics such as Marie Poiret spoke of divine presence as both revealed and concealed, accessible only through surrender to the ineffable. Zen Buddhism rejects definitive answers, teaching that awakening is not the acquisition of knowledge but a direct encounter with what cannot be said (a resonance, here, with Wittgenstein’s insistence that what cannot be spoken must be passed over in silence—yet for him this silence is not a void but a horizon thick with structure, a boundary where language ends but meaning still exerts pressure, as if the unspoken itself were shaping the very conditions of what can be spoken). These systems recognize a threshold beyond which reason falters, and it is precisely there that faith, practice, or silence steps in. What is striking is not their differences but their shared acknowledgment that the most profound truths may lie on the other side of articulation.
Consciousness belongs to this same order. To grasp it requires not mastery but release, not a final explanation but the willingness to stay with what slips away. Science, in its present form, prefers closure, repeatability, proof—but here it meets a phenomenon that lives only in non-closure. To speak of consciousness is to breathe into rhythms that refuse containment, like trying to hold a melting ice cube as water runs between the fingers. What binds the whole is not the solidity of conclusion but the flowing persistence of what cannot be fixed. This is why every attempt at description falters: knowledge of the knower, and knowing itself, are bound to what escapes capture, a palm forever moving, open to what cannot be held.
The proliferation of theories of consciousness is therefore not an error but a necessary property of whatever consciousness is, might be, or could become—for here we are not dealing with a domain that admits ontological closure at all.
Daedelus Kite 