Will we ever understand the nature of consciousness?
NEWS | 27 February 2026
Let’s swing for the fences with this one, shall we? Some questions are timeless because they’re so fundamental that everyone ponders them at some point in life (often—for me at least—in the shower). Others are timeless because, regardless of how many times they’re asked, no definitive answer may exist. This one seems to fall in both categories. Consciousness—the awareness of yourself, your mind and body and its surroundings—is intrinsic to what may be called “the human experience.” And yet despite being something we all viscerally know, it’s also one of the hardest things to pin down and study in any objective, empirical manner. Leaving aside whether or not insights from something like string theory (or any other area of knowledge) can offer real advances in this domain by better explaining basic neurophysiology, the deeper quandary is whether the question itself is tractable. Asking whether we’ll ever understand the nature of consciousness may well be in the same quasi-nonsensical realm as wondering what’s north of up, or what occurred before the beginning of time. Perhaps, if an answer ever comes, it will arise less through studying and more through making; already there’s no shortage of speculation about glimmers of consciousness in various instantiations of artificial intelligence. Then again, the query itself may miss the mark here, too: what we consider “consciousness” may be more an anthropomorphic quirk of our evolutionary biology than some reflection of deeper, universal truths. We’re unlikely to find certitude here, of course. But it’s still fun to talk about. What do you think?
Author: Lee Billings.
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