Before examining how consciousness manifests across species, we need to acknowledge that many of the terms we are using do not have an historical precedent. Terms like ‘psychophysical continuum,’ ‘manifestation,’ and ‘differentiation’ sound strange not because the concepts are confused but because four centuries of mechanistic thinking shaped our vocabulary. We’re trying to describe participatory wholeness using language built for mechanical parts.
You’ve probably experienced this difficulty yourself—trying to articulate moments of recognizing consciousness in another being, or why the mechanistic account feels inadequate, and finding that ordinary language fails. The words sound either too mystical or too vague. This isn’t your failure; it’s a limitation of our language.
The problem runs deeper than you might expect. We cannot adequately define even the most basic terms. What is “matter”? Physics describes its structure, relations, and behavior with extraordinary precision—Russell’s “causal skeleton of the world”—but remains silent about its intrinsic nature. Although we know with certainty that matter exists, we cannot say what it is, only what it does. “Fundamental particle” reduces to what? Describes what? The question “what is matter?” hits language limits before it reaches conceptual ones.
The definitional problem of “consciousness” is even more acute. Any definition proves circular. “What it’s like from inside” presumes consciousness to understand the definition. “Subjective experience” defines one mystery with another. “Phenomenal awareness” uses synonyms without explaining. The hard problem is partly a language problem: we’re trying to describe from outside what only exists from inside, like asking what red looks like using only words. Some even say that because we cannot define it, consciousness doesn’t really exist. As Daniel Dennett argues in “Consciousness Defined.”
Even the terminology used for continuum frameworks is imperfect. We use “psycho-” (mental) and “-physical” to describe something supposedly prior to that distinction. The word “continuum” suggests a line with poles, but that spatial metaphor may itself distort. We use this terminology as the least problematic available, not because it perfectly captures what we mean.
It’s a problem that can be complicated by the structure of English grammar itself. Subject-verb-object construction, for example, embeds a particular metaphysics: things (nouns) that do actions (verbs) to other things (objects). This structure makes it nearly impossible to discuss consciousness without treating it as either a thing that exists, a process that happens, or a property that things have. But what if consciousness is none of these? What if, as continuum frameworks suggest, both mental and physical features differentiate from something that the subject-object grammar simply cannot express? Our fundamental grammatical categories themselves may foreclose certain possibilities.
This grammatical constraint is not universal. In Chinese, 心 (xīn)—often translated as “heart-mind”—functions as both noun and verb, allowing more fluid expression of consciousness as activity rather than substance. The Blackfoot language, as physicist F. David Peat documented, structures reality primarily through verbs rather than nouns, enabling speakers to express process and relationship more naturally than English allows. The difficulty we face discussing continuum frameworks may reflect not the framework’s inadequacy but English grammar’s particular metaphysical commitments.
As the philosopher Anthony O’Hear has observed, language is not just a “reading-off” of reality but instead actively shapes the picture we have of the world and our place within it. Anthony O’Hear, “Beyond Evolution”, p. 39 We are not discovering labels for pre-existing categories; we are creating categories through the act of labeling. And once created, those categories constrain what we can think—often below our conscious awareness.
A Simple Example: Flatland
Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland offers a useful illustration. In Abbott’s imagined world, beings live in a two-dimensional plane, possessing length and width but no height. For these creatures, three-dimensional space is literally inconceivable—not merely unknown, but impossible to think about using their available conceptual resources.
When a three-dimensional sphere passes through Flatland, its inhabitants perceive only a circle that mysteriously grows and then shrinks, as that is the appearance of sphere moving through a two-dimensional space. A three-dimensional object cannot be described with a two-dimensional vocabulary. But it’s not only the ability to describe that is lacking, it’s the capacity to imagine.
Linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed that language not only reflects thought but shapes it. We do not merely describe the world in language; we perceive the world through the structures our language makes available. Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (1956). In Hopi, for example, time is not broken into past, present, and future in the way English demands. Instead, it is experienced as a continuum of becoming. Such differences are not just semantic—they can shape cognition, memory, and intuition. John A. Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Abbott’s parable suggests something important: when concepts genuinely outrun our conceptual machinery, new vocabulary helps only at the margins. We may need different modes of engagement altogether. But at minimum, we need to recognize the limits of the language we’re using.
The Quantum Precedent
The history of quantum mechanics (QM) provides a real-world case where exactly this situation arose. In the early twentieth century, physicists discovered phenomena that could not be captured in ordinary language. Electrons and photons behaved in ways that violated not only classical physics, but also basic assumptions embedded in our vocabulary. Werner Heisenberg observed that words like ‘position’ and ‘velocity’ did not carry the same meaning in the realm of atoms, as atomic ’things’ can be a particle and a wave at the same time. Arthur Miller, 137, p 100
The problem went deeper than ambiguity. Certain quantum mechanical concepts, Heisenberg noted, were “derivable neither from our laws of thought nor from experiment.” The very categories available in ordinary language—derived from macroscopic experience and classical physics—simply did not apply at the quantum scale.
The physicists who founded QM were in a situation analogous to Flatlanders encountering a sphere: they could track measurable effects, but the conceptual categories available to them could not capture what they were actually observing. There was, however, a crucial difference. The physicists could conceptualize a phenomenon and describe it mathematically, even if they couldn’t visualize or describe it in ordinary language. Flatlanders could not even conceptualize a third dimension.
Our situation with consciousness and continuum frameworks more closely resembles the Flatlanders’ predicament. We’re attempting to discuss something that may outrun not just our vocabulary but our conceptual categories themselves—categories shaped by centuries of assuming matter and mind are fundamentally separate entities. Take quantum field fluctuations, a staple of modern physics. Physicist Sean Carroll points out that this language is essentially poetic:
“Quantum fields don’t really ‘fluctuate’; that’s poetic language, employed to help us connect to our classical intuition. What fluctuates are our observations—we can look at the same field multiple times and measure different values.“ Sean Carrol. “Are Many Worlds and the Multiverse the Same Idea?” Discover, blog, May 26, 2011,
The word “fluctuates” imports classical mechanics concepts into a domain where those concepts do not properly apply. But physicists have no other words.
Niels Bohr emphasized this predicament repeatedly. “We are forced to use the language of classical physics,” he said, “simply because we have no other language in which to express the results.” Even when physicists knew that classical concepts were inadequate, they had no alternative vocabulary for communicating their findings.
But Bohr went further, making the far more radical claim that ‘reality’ was a word which we must learn to use correctly. Petersen, A., 1963, “The Philosophy of Niels Bohr”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sep 1963, 8-14. Bohr was pointing to something pragmatically important: we cannot step outside language to some neutral vantage point from which to evaluate whether our words accurately capture reality. We are always inside language, and “reality” is itself a word whose meaning we negotiate through language. The question is not whether language perfectly mirrors reality—it cannot—but how to use language responsibly given these constraints.
Quantum mechanics found a way forward through mathematical formalisms that could express relationships and structures that words could not capture. But even mathematical formalism required interpretation—at least for some physicists. The mathematics worked spectacularly for predictions, but deep disagreements emerged about what it meant. Niels Bohr insisted we should not ask what quantum mechanics tells us about reality independent of observation. His Copenhagen Interpretation, dominant in quantum mechanics circles for decades, essentially declared such questions meaningless—as David Mermin famously quipped: “Shut up and calculate!.“ Mermin, N. David. 1989. “What’s Wrong with This Pillow?” Physics Today 42 (4): 9–11.
Yet other physicists—Einstein, Bohm, and contemporary researchers exploring quantum foundations—insisted that understanding what the mathematics represents matters. Bohm developed his alternative interpretation precisely because he believed physics should describe reality, not just predict measurements. This tension persists: some say interpretation is philosophy, not physics; others say physics without interpretation is mere calculation.
We face a similar choice with consciousness, though our situation differs in a crucial way. Mathematical formalism won’t help us discuss continuum frameworks—these aren’t mathematical structures. But we can learn from how quantum physicists handled language limits: acknowledge the inadequacy, use terms carefully and often symbolically, and remain explicit about where language breaks down. Even when they disagreed about interpretation, physicists had to communicate using ordinary language, carefully employed despite knowing classical concepts were inadequate.
The Terms We’re Using
Throughout the previous chapter, we employed terminology that requires careful handling:
“Psychophysical continuum” - refers to what Pauli and Jung described as the unus mundus - a unified reality intrinsically neither mental nor physical, from which both differentiate. The spatial metaphor of ‘continuum’ is imperfect but no better alternative exists.
“Consciousness,” “mind,” “awareness” - All defined relative to human experience. We have no neutral terms for discussing non-anthropocentric interiority. Even saying “interiority” or “experiential aspect” carries human-centric assumptions about what experience might be like.
‘Fundamental’ - means what it means in physics: irreducible to something more basic, not simple or fully knowable. Charge and mass are fundamental - explanations start from them rather than arrive at them.
“Matter,” “physical,” “material” - We use these as if they’re clear, but physics describes only structure and behavior, not intrinsic nature. When we say “physical aspect of the continuum,” we’re using “physical” to mean something like “exterior, relational, measurable”—but that’s already an interpretation, not a transparent description.
**‘Manifestation’ and ‘differentiation’, ** - avoid the terms ’emergence’ and ‘causation’ which carry mechanistic implications. They suggest aspects becoming articulated rather than being produced from something unlike themselves.
“Decompositional” versus “compositional” - Harald Atmanspacher formalized this distinction in developing the Pauli-Jung framework, and it proves philosophically crucial: compositional approaches build consciousness from parts (facing the combination problem), while decompositional frameworks understand mental and physical as differentiating aspects of an undivided whole. Yet even these technical terms are cumbersome and metaphorical, using spatial language (“breaking apart” vs “assembling”) that may not fit the reality they’re meant to describe.
These terms are tools, not transparent descriptions. Like quantum physics repurposing classical concepts, we use them carefully while acknowledging their limitations.
Scientific Vocabulary Encodes Framework
The problem of language extends beyond particular words to entire conceptual structures. Consider how biological and neuroscientific terminology embeds physicalist assumptions:
Scientific terminology itself encodes physicalist assumptions. ‘Tropism’ rather than ‘response,’ ‘mechanism’ rather than ‘organized system,’ ‘instinct’ rather than ‘intelligence’—each choice predetermines what interpretations seem reasonable. This is why continuum frameworks sound strange: not because they lack rigor but because we lack vocabulary. Four centuries of mechanistic thinking is widely embedded in our language.
Working Within Constraints
We cannot escape language’s constraints, but we can work responsibly within them. The terms we use—consciousness, manifestation, psychophysical ground—are necessary tools, not perfect descriptions.
At key moments, we’ll ask for something beyond purely linguistic understanding: direct recognition of your own consciousness, intuitive grasping of why mechanistic reduction feels inadequate. This isn’t mysticism or failure of argument—it’s acknowledging that some knowing comes through participation rather than verbal description.
The risk of using unfamiliar language is real. But the greater risk is staying trapped in vocabulary that seems precise only because it’s familiar—mistaking linguistic habit for transparency to reality.
With these limitations acknowledged, we turn to the evidence. The next chapter examines how consciousness manifests across evolution, using imperfect terms carefully and asking you to recognize what words can only approximate.