Abstract

Why the Science of Consciousness Is Stuck — and How to Move Forward For decades, consciousness has been described as one of science’s “last great mysteries.” Despite remarkable advances in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science, we still lack a widely accepted definition of what consciousness actually is. This persistent failure suggests that the problem may not be technological, but conceptual. Modern research has focused heavily on identifying neural correlates of consciousness — patterns of brain activity associated with reported experience. While this approach has yielded valuable data, it has also encouraged a subtle but critical assumption: that consciousness is a single, well-defined phenomenon waiting to be discovered in the brain. Evidence increasingly suggests otherwise. Across development, species, and artificial systems, what we label “consciousness” appears not as a binary property but as a gradual accumulation of cognitive capabilities. Infants do not suddenly become conscious at a particular moment; instead, they acquire sensory integration, memory, self–other distinction, and temporal identity over time. Similar graded patterns appear across animal cognition and in artificial systems designed to model the world and themselves. This creates a fundamental problem. If consciousness has no clear boundary, no single onset, and no unique signature, then the effort to define it as a singular entity may be misguided. The term may function less as a scientific concept and more as a linguistic placeholder — a convenient label for a bundle of processes that we have not yet fully disentangled. History offers instructive parallels. Biology advanced not by refining the concept of “life,” but by replacing it with biochemistry and molecular mechanisms. Thermodynamics progressed by abandoning “heat” as a substance in favor of statistical descriptions of energy transfer. In each case, progress required demoting an intuitive concept rather than perfecting it. A similar transition may be necessary for consciousness. Instead of asking whether a system is conscious, research could focus on which cognitive capacities are present and how they interact. These include sensory integration, internal world modeling, self-representation, memory across time, and reflective abstraction. Each of these components is empirically accessible and measurable, unlike consciousness treated as a single property. This shift would not deny subjective experience or diminish its importance. Rather, it would place experience within a framework that allows comparison across biological and non-biological systems, supports falsifiable predictions, and avoids circular definitions. By replacing a binary question with a graded, component-based approach, consciousness research could move from philosophical debate to cumulative science.