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Letter: A hunch about human consciousness

Published 10 December 2025

From Ben Hespe, Manchester, UK

As an agnostic on such matters, but a fellow subscriber to Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s hunch that the ultimate nature of consciousness is the key data point to understand humanity’s existence – be it physical and accidental or something more profound – I found it disheartening that the previous letters published about his feature uniformly exhibited an insistence that the materialist game is the only one in town, or even that the whole field of study should just be abandoned!

Perhaps we should consider the end of his published paper on the landscape of consciousness, where he states: “Me, I just don’t know … My own hunch, right here, right now—if I’m coerced to disclose it and for what little it’s worth—might be something of a Dualism-Idealism mashup (25 October, p 36). (I can describe; I dare not defend.)”

Issue no. 3573 published 13 December 2025

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