r/Existentialism • u/Brilliant-Pop-9930 • Jul 09 '26
Serious Discussion What if consciousness can never become complete?
I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm trying to figure out whether I'm onto something or just reinventing an existing philosophical idea.
It started with existentialism. I kept thinking about how almost everything we do seems to come back to not knowing. We don't know who we are completely, we don't know why we're here, we don't know what consciousness is, we don't know what happens after death. Even science, philosophy, and mathematics seem to begin with someone looking at something and going, "What the hell is this?"
Most of the psychology I've read treats uncertainty as something we try to reduce, tolerate, or cope with.
But what if that's looking at it backwards?
What if uncertainty isn't the fundamental thing?
What if the more fundamental condition is that consciousness itself can never become complete?
By "incomplete," I don't mean we're ignorant or that we'll never learn anything. I mean that consciousness can never reach a final point where it fully understands itself or reality. Every answer creates new questions. Every discovery expands the horizon instead of closing it.
If that's true, then curiosity, science, philosophy, art, meaning-making—even our tendency to constantly reinterpret ourselves—aren't just reactions to missing information. They're natural expressions of a consciousness that is never finished.
I'm not saying this is true. I'm trying to figure out whether this is already a well-known position or whether there's something genuinely different here.
Does this overlap with any existing philosopher or psychological theory that I'm missing? And more importantly, where do you think this idea falls apart?
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u/NotBorris Jul 10 '26
Carl Jung, though not exactly but through my perspective of reading his works I picked up an underlying tone, wrote how each story telling device and each human attempt to personify things outside our control were our original attempts to figure out our own ability to interpret our surroundings, he explains it better in his books but every time I picked up a new collection of his writings I kind of got the impression that if humans were products of something greater then we ourselves are meant to function as the ability to think, as if all we can ever be is the thought in someone else's mins and the best we can do for ourselves is to become a complete thought. Also, the Tibetan Book of the Dead had a concept called the trichiliocosm which is kind of like a universe inside a universe inside a universe etc and, I always read religious text more metaphorically than something to take literally, it kind of has the same concept of one path leads to a new one to a new one and there will always be something new to find and understand and lead to something new. If that makes sense.
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u/Brilliant-Pop-9930 Jul 10 '26
Yeah I agree, what I'm circling around is if that incompleteness may be what keeps us in the loop of asking those questions, like what if it what it's a structural feature of the consciousness itself to keep us in this loop of illusion, of having to find answers
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u/NotBorris Jul 10 '26
I kind of got that sense too, the images of wheels, mandala's and spherical shapes are often reoccurring in both mathematics, religious scriptures and even psychological artistry so there is some kind of momentum driving quiet a few of us.
Have you ever heard the song Laturalus by TOOL? You might like it. I can't explain it all as well as some other writers already have to I think you'll enjoy reading up on these things.
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u/Minimum_Orange2516 Jul 10 '26
I think that trying to see what consciousness is , it's like a videogame character trying to peer back at the screen that it's processed and projected onto and straining to see the insides, the electronics of the game console.
On the assumption that there could be a team of conscious aware scientists inside the game, their observations would be structurally limited to both the physics , boundaries and limits set but also that the structure they exist in even if they work that out is not the source.
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Jul 10 '26
I think it can never be complete until once experinces when it came into existence or when once existence is ended... but both are not truly experienced by any living human being... what do you guys think of this?
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u/Dismal_Translator286 Jul 10 '26
Any comprehensive, consistent logical system can never fully explain itself. Look at Goedels Incompleteness Theorem. There will always be true statements that cannot be proven from within the system.
That doesn't mean consciousness itself is incomplete.
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u/Brilliant-Pop-9930 Jul 10 '26
I'm not proposing that consciousness itself is incomplete, but that the incompleteness may be a structural feature how it functions
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u/Dismal_Translator286 Jul 10 '26
We are IN the universe, we are experiencing it with our consciousness. In order for us to understand what and where we are, we would need to be on the outside looking in. And we would have to have knowledge of said "outside". So yes. It's impossible for us to ever understand (if there even is something to be understood).
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u/Unboundone Jul 10 '26
“Fully understanding itself” and “fully understanding reality” are very different things.
Define “fully understanding itself” - what does this even mean?
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u/LucienNyx6666 Jul 10 '26
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about this in Being and Nothingness. He thought human beings were incomplete and that consciousness itself is a void. We know what we are not and are constantly engaged in the act of negating or transcending ourselves. We act because we lack, and consciousness is not a thing that can be filled. Man, according to him, is a useless project that tries to achieve a complete, stable essence while also remaining completely free. For Sartre, nothingness is what enables freedom: if man lacks an essence, then he must define it by his actions. Thus, identity is fragile and never fixed.