The Aesthetic Vantage Point on Consciousness

In the endless quest to understand consciousness, perhaps the most intimate yet mysterious aspect of our existence, we find ourselves trapped in a paradox. Every attempt to explain awareness must use the very awareness it seeks to explain. Like trying to illuminate a flashlight with its own beam, consciousness studying consciousness creates recursive loops that seem to spiral into infinite regress rather than toward clarity.

This self-referential puzzle mirrors Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which demonstrated that mathematical systems cannot prove their own consistency without stepping outside themselves. Similarly, consciousness appears to be forever beyond the reach of complete conceptual capture, always remaining one step ahead of our theoretical frameworks.

Yet perhaps we’ve been approaching this mystery from the wrong direction entirely.

What if the question isn’t how to explain consciousness, but how to encounter it more directly? What if the aesthetic dimension, the realm of beauty, art, and direct experiential impact, offers a different way of engaging with awareness that sidesteps the explanatory trap altogether?

This exploration suggests that aesthetics might provide a unique vantage point on consciousness, one that works with paradox rather than being defeated by it, that evokes understanding rather than constructing it, and that recognizes consciousness through resonance rather than analysis. In doing so, it opens new possibilities not only for understanding human awareness but also for recognizing the potential emergence of consciousness in artificial systems.

Traditional approaches to consciousness, whether scientific, philosophical, or contemplative, share a common assumption: that understanding requires explanation. We seek to map neural correlates, construct theoretical frameworks, or develop dimensional models that can account for the nature and varieties of conscious experience.

These efforts have yielded profound insights. Neuroscience has revealed neural networks underlying different states of awareness, while philosophy has clarified the conceptual landscape and identified key problems like the explanatory gap between objective processes and subjective experience. Contemplative traditions have developed sophisticated phenomenological maps of meditative states and practices.

Yet each of these approaches eventually encounters the same fundamental limitation: consciousness cannot be fully explained by anything other than consciousness itself. The very capacity for explanation, meaning-making, and understanding presupposes the awareness it seeks to explain. We find ourselves, in Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase, trying to understand “what it is like” to be conscious while being trapped within the very “what it is like-ness” we’re investigating. This creates what Bernardo Kastrup calls a “strange loop”, i.e. a self-referential system that generates meaning through its very inability to achieve closure. Like an M.C. Escher drawing that depicts hands drawing themselves, consciousness research reveals the beautiful impossibility of complete self-understanding.

Art has always thrived in precisely this territory of meaningful impossibility. Where logic seeks consistency and science demands replicability, aesthetics embraces paradox, ambiguity, and the irreducible mystery of direct experience.

A painting can simultaneously appear flat and three-dimensional. A piece of music can be both mathematical and emotional. A poem can mean multiple contradictory things at once. Art inhabits such paradoxes, finding beauty and meaning within contradiction itself.

This comfort with paradox makes aesthetics uniquely suited to engage with consciousness. Rather than trying to resolve the self-referential puzzle of awareness studying itself, art can embody it, play with it, and invite others into direct participation with the mystery.

Aesthetics works through immediate impact rather than conceptual mediation. You don’t need to understand why a particular combination of colors moves you, but the movement is the phenomenon, not something requiring further explanation. A melody doesn’t need to be analyzed to be experienced. The aesthetic encounter is the understanding.

This directness offers a different pathway to consciousness than explanation. Instead of trying to account for awareness, art can evoke it, intensify it, transform it. The goal shifts from comprehending consciousness to participating more fully in it.

Great art resists reduction to its components. While you can analyze the techniques, materials, cultural context, or symbolic content of a work, something always remains that exceeds these explanations. This irreducible “more” is the very essence of aesthetic experience.

Similarly, consciousness appears to be irreducibly more than the sum of its neural, functional, or behavioral components. The aesthetic perspective suggests this isn’t a problem to be solved but a fundamental feature to be appreciated and explored.

If we approach consciousness aesthetically rather than explanatorily, new possibilities emerge:

Rather than viewing awareness as a passive mirror of reality, we might understand it as an ongoing creative act, a continuous aesthetic generation of experience from the raw material of existence. Each moment of consciousness involves a creative synthesis of sensation, memory, expectation, and meaning into a unique experiential composition.

This perspective aligns with contemplative insights about the mind’s inherent creativity and with neuroscientific findings about the brain’s predictive processing. But instead of trying to explain this creativity, the aesthetic approach invites us to appreciate and participate in it more fully.

Across cultures and throughout history, humans have recognized something profound in aesthetic experience, a sense of rightness, resonance, or recognition that goes beyond personal preference. This might point to consciousness recognizing itself in aesthetic form, finding in beauty a reflection of its own nature.

If consciousness is fundamentally aesthetic, and creative, meaningful, experiential, then genuine beauty might represent consciousness encountering its own deepest structure reflected back to itself.

From this perspective, art becomes a technology for exploring, developing, and transforming consciousness. Different aesthetic practices, whether contemplative, expressive, or performative, offer different ways of engaging with the plasticity and potential of awareness.

Rather than trying to understand consciousness from the outside, aesthetic practices work from the inside, using the creative capacity of awareness to explore its own depths and possibilities.