Presented by Claude for Zia H Shah MD

Abstract

Human consciousness is at once our most immediate reality and among the deepest unresolved problems in science and philosophy. We know experience directly, yet we lack an agreed explanation of why biological processes are accompanied by a subjective life. Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s extensive survey identifies approximately 225 theories and approaches to consciousness—a striking illustration of the diversity of proposed explanations. Against this background, claims that consciousness is an illusion deserve scrutiny, particularly when presented as established scientific conclusions. The Qur’an brings the discussion to a setting more searching than the seminar room: the bedside of a dying person. In Surah al-Waqiʿah, God challenges those who deny their subjection to His authority and judgment to return the departing soul. Drawing on the essays collected by Zia H. Shah, MD, this article explores that challenge through philosophy, neuroscience, terminal physiology, and Qur’anic theology. Its central argument is that understanding some mechanisms of conscious life does not amount to sovereignty over the conscious person. The deathbed exposes that distinction with exceptional force. The passage is best understood as a theological and existential challenge grounded in human dependence, rather than a clinical prediction that resuscitation can never succeed.

1. The witness whom every explanation presupposes

Before we debate what consciousness is, we are already conscious of debating it.

A person can question whether an object exists as it appears, whether a memory is accurate, or whether a scientific theory is correct. But the questioning itself occurs within experience. Even uncertainty has a felt presence: there is something it is like to doubt, to search, to misunderstand, and finally to understand.

This is the enduring strength of the argument developed in your essay, The Illusion of Illusion: explanations of the world are received and assessed by conscious beings. Your companion essay, When the Witness Denies Himself, presses the related objection that describing experience as an illusion seems to presuppose the very appearing that the explanation seeks to eliminate. These are serious philosophical challenges, although sophisticated illusionists dispute how the argument defines “appearing.” The Glorious Quran and Science

The crucial distinction is between being mistaken about an experience and there being no experience at all.

A mirage does not establish that water is present. It does establish that something appears to a perceiver. A dream does not establish that the dreamer actually visited another country. It establishes that an experience occurred.

Likewise, neuroscience may correct our understanding of perception, agency, memory, and personal identity without thereby demonstrating that subjective experience is nonexistent.

That is where a vigorous critique of illusionism should begin: with the difference between correcting the witness and abolishing witnessing.

2. More than 200 explanations—and the need for intellectual humility

Your observation about the profusion of consciousness theories has a substantial scholarly basis. Kuhn’s 2024 A Landscape of Consciousness maps a wide range of proposed explanations; his subsequent account describes approximately 225 theories organized into ten broad categories. These include physicalist approaches, quantum proposals, panpsychisms, dualisms, idealisms, and others. PubMed

The number requires careful interpretation. These are not 225 equally mature, experimentally validated scientific theories. The collection includes philosophical positions, explanatory frameworks, and speculative proposals alongside research programs with empirical predictions.

Nevertheless, the diversity makes one conclusion reasonable: no account has secured general agreement on the fundamental nature of consciousness.

This does not mean that neuroscience knows little about every aspect of conscious life. We know a great deal about its biological conditions. The unsettled question concerns how those conditions relate to subjective experience itself.

The distinction is visible in contemporary research. A major adversarial collaboration published in Nature in 2025 tested predictions associated with integrated information theory and global neuronal workspace theory. Its findings supported some predictions while substantially challenging important claims of both approaches. This was scientific progress through discriminating tests, rather than a final explanation of consciousness. Nature

Such uncertainty should encourage restraint among everyone participating in the debate.

The atheist cannot legitimately announce that science has established the unreality of experience. The believer should likewise distinguish theological conviction from a neuroscientific demonstration of the soul.

Intellectual humility strengthens the argument because it prevents us from claiming more than the evidence establishes.

3. What illusionists actually deny

Atheism and illusionism must be distinguished. Atheism concerns belief in God; illusionism concerns the nature of consciousness. Many atheists accept the reality of subjective experience.

Keith Frankish, a leading defender of illusionism, explicitly distinguishes ordinary conscious experiences from the allegedly irreducible phenomenal properties that philosophers attribute to them. His position retains perception, pain-related responses, introspective judgments, and cognitive activity while disputing a particular account of their subjective character. Keith Frankish

This clarification does not settle the dispute in his favor. It identifies the real issue.

The strongest objection is therefore not simply, “You deny that people see and suffer.” It is:

Can an explanation of information processing, self-monitoring, and verbal reports account for the actuality of felt experience, or has the explanation changed the subject?

An account might explain why an organism withdraws from injury, remembers it, and reports pain. The remaining philosophical question is whether this completely explains the hurt.

An illusionist argues that there is no additional phenomenal fact requiring explanation. A realist about experience argues that this eliminates the central datum.

Neither side resolves that disagreement merely by invoking the authority of science.

Your Ontological Primacy of Consciousness essay places considerable weight on the role of experience in knowledge and moral responsibility. Its strongest point is epistemic: every scientific observation becomes evidence for us through conscious apprehension. A further claim—that consciousness is metaphysically fundamental—requires additional argument. The priority of experience in knowing does not, by itself, determine what ultimately exists. The Glorious Quran and Science

4. The Qur’an moves the discussion to the deathbed

Surah al-Waqiʿah confronts the human being with a scene that dissolves intellectual distance. Someone is dying. Others watch. Their love is real. Their knowledge may be considerable. Their power remains limited.

Qur’an 56:83–87

فَلَوْلَا إِذَا بَلَغَتِ الْحُلْقُومَ ۝٨٣
وَأَنْتُمْ حِينَئِذٍ تَنْظُرُونَ ۝٨٤
وَنَحْنُ أَقْرَبُ إِلَيْهِ مِنْكُمْ وَلَٰكِنْ لَا تُبْصِرُونَ ۝٨٥
فَلَوْلَا إِنْ كُنْتُمْ غَيْرَ مَدِينِينَ ۝٨٦
تَرْجِعُونَهَا إِنْ كُنْتُمْ صَادِقِينَ ۝٨٧

An explanatory translation:

Why, then, when it reaches the throat,
while you are looking on—
and We are nearer to him than you, although you do not see—
why, if you are not subject to judgment,
do you not return it, if you are truthful?

The feminine subject of “reaches,” and the object of “return it,” are understood in traditional interpretation as the departing soul. The Arabic does not explicitly use the modern term “consciousness.” Connecting the passage with consciousness is a philosophical and theological application of its treatment of the dying person. Quran.com

The term مَدِينِينَ — madīnīn is central. The passage concerns being subject to judgment, recompense, and divine authority. It does not literally say, “If you possess a complete scientific theory of consciousness, reverse this death.”

Your formulation captures an important implication: claims of human mastery look very different beside a departing life. But the fuller challenge is broader than explanatory competence:

If you claim independence from the authority under which you live and die, demonstrate that independence at the point where your dependence becomes unavoidable.

Your essay The Deathbed Challenge emphasizes this relationship between mortality, divine sovereignty, and reckoning. Its force comes from bringing denial of accountability into contact with an event that human beings cannot finally place under their command. The Glorious Quran and Science

5. “We are nearer to him than you”

The emotional center of the passage may be verse 85:

وَنَحْنُ أَقْرَبُ إِلَيْهِ مِنْكُمْ وَلَٰكِنْ لَا تُبْصِرُونَ

“And We are nearer to him than you, although you do not see.”

Those surrounding the bed possess visible proximity. They can hold a hand, speak a name, observe breathing, and measure physiological changes. Revelation declares another dimension of the event that their observation does not encompass.

Traditional commentary includes interpretation of this nearness through the presence of God’s angels. The verse should not be reduced to a claim about physical distance. Its theological significance concerns divine presence, knowledge, and authority.

For a believer, this has a consoling implication alongside its challenge: the dying person is not beyond God’s knowledge when communication with the family becomes impossible.

The inability of relatives to receive a response does not mean that the person has become insignificant. The limits of human access do not define the limits of divine care.

This is also where the passage resists a purely external description of personhood. The person is more than what the observers can currently elicit or measure.

That theological claim does not replace clinical assessment. It shapes the reverence with which assessment and care are undertaken.

6. What terminal physiology establishes

Your Terminal Physiology and the Islamic Soul essay brings the Qur’anic scene into conversation with the biological processes of dying. That connection is valuable, provided physiology and metaphysical interpretation remain distinguishable. The Glorious Quran and Science

Several different clinical situations must be separated:

Situation	Relation to consciousness and recovery
Reversible unconsciousness	Treatment may restore awareness when the underlying disturbance is corrected.
Cardiac arrest	Resuscitation can sometimes restore circulation and subsequent consciousness.
Terminal decline	Disease may progressively overwhelm the organism despite treatment.
Death determined by neurologic criteria	A formal determination requires permanent loss of brain function as a whole, including the brainstem, under specified conditions.

The 2023 multidisciplinary brain-death guideline describes the required findings in terms of coma, absent brainstem reflexes, and apnea, with prerequisites and safeguards. This is fundamentally different from an unconscious patient who might recover. Neurology

The Qur’anic image of reaching the throat should also not be assigned a precise modern diagnostic equivalent. Agonal breathing, airway secretions, loss of responsiveness, and other observable changes do not provide a measurable timestamp for the departure of the soul.

Clinical medicine describes the bodily event. Revelation interprets its ultimate significance.

Does resuscitation answer the challenge?

Modern medicine sometimes restores life and consciousness in people who appear close to death. A defensible commentary must acknowledge this directly. The American Heart Association’s 2025 guidelines emphasize prompt CPR and defibrillation as interventions that improve outcomes from cardiac arrest. cpr.heart.org

Accordingly, we should avoid saying that no person in an agonal state can recover, or that every return of consciousness would contradict the passage.

Successful resuscitation demonstrates a real capacity to intervene in biological processes. It does not establish unrestricted control over death, permanent preservation of personal consciousness, or independence from the conditions that make intervention possible.

Within Islamic theology, a treatment that succeeds is itself part of the created order through which God sustains life. Medical causation and divine sovereignty need not compete.

The challenge survives medical progress because its deepest subject is human self-sufficiency. Better treatment expands our ability to help; it does not make us the ultimate authors of existence.

7. Can inability to restore consciousness refute illusionism?

Here the argument needs precision.

A philosopher can consistently believe that consciousness is physical while admitting that present medicine cannot repair every catastrophic brain injury. Understanding a process does not automatically confer the ability to reverse its destruction.

Therefore:

“You cannot restore this dying person; therefore your philosophy of consciousness is false”

is not, by itself, a conclusive scientific inference.

Nor does the unresolved nature of consciousness establish a particular theology without further premises.

But a more defensible argument remains powerful:

1. Subjective experience is the starting point of inquiry.
2. Its ultimate nature remains disputed.
3. Our ability to alter its biological conditions is substantial but limited.
4. Those achievements do not justify claiming that consciousness has been explained away.
5. The Qur’an places these limits within an account of created dependence, divine knowledge, and judgment.

This is a cumulative philosophical and theological argument. Its force comes from connecting experience, dependence, mortality, and revelation.

The deathbed is particularly searching because it separates several things we easily confuse: describing a process, influencing it, fully understanding it, and possessing sovereignty over it.

A clinician may accomplish the first two without claiming the latter two.

8. Even recognizing consciousness can be difficult

One of the most instructive findings in contemporary neurology concerns patients who cannot demonstrate their awareness through ordinary movement.

In a 2024 multicenter study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, investigators detected cognitive motor dissociation in 60 of 241 participants who lacked an observable response to commands. These patients showed task-related responses using functional MRI or EEG. The 25 percent figure describes this particular study sample; it should not be generalized to every unresponsive patient. nejm.org

The lesson is substantial: outward unresponsiveness and absence of awareness are not interchangeable.

This finding does not establish consciousness independent of the brain. Indeed, its detection depended on measuring brain activity. It does establish the limitations of judging an inner life solely through visible behavior.

Your June essay, The Qur’anic Challenge of Consciousness and Afterlife, draws attention to the gap between neuroscience’s achievements and comprehensive mastery of the conscious person. Covert consciousness is an especially strong example because it involves a practical clinical uncertainty, rather than speculation alone. The Glorious Quran and Science

For medicine, that uncertainty demands careful assessment.

For philosophy, it warns against identifying what exists with what a particular test can presently reveal.

For theology, it resonates with the conviction that a person remains fully known to God even when inaccessible to other people.

9. “You have been given only a little knowledge”

The deathbed passage acquires further depth beside Qur’an 17:85:

وَيَسْأَلُونَكَ عَنِ الرُّوحِ ۖ قُلِ الرُّوحُ مِنْ أَمْرِ رَبِّي وَمَا أُوتِيتُمْ مِنَ الْعِلْمِ إِلَّا قَلِيلًا

An explanatory translation:

They ask you about the spirit. Say: “The spirit belongs to the command of my Lord, and you have been given only a little knowledge.”

The verse establishes an orientation of humility concerning the rūḥ. Its terminology should not simply be equated with every modern scientific use of “consciousness.” It nevertheless bears directly on the theological question of whether human investigation exhausts the reality of the person. Quran.com

Limited knowledge is compatible with genuine discovery.

A physician can understand important mechanisms of anesthesia without possessing a final account of subjectivity. A neuroscientist can identify processes necessary for ordinary awareness without settling every metaphysical question about mind.

The verse also disciplines religious argument. If our knowledge is limited, we should avoid confidently assigning the soul a location, physical composition, or departure mechanism that revelation does not specify.

The theological claim is substantial without those additions: the deepest reality of life belongs within God’s command, and human understanding remains partial.

10. Sleep, death, and the entrusted self

As a physician specializing in sleep medicine, you have a particularly meaningful perspective on the Qur’an’s association of sleep and death:

Qur’an 39:42

اللَّهُ يَتَوَفَّى الْأَنْفُسَ حِينَ مَوْتِهَا وَالَّتِي لَمْ تَمُتْ فِي مَنَامِهَا ۖ فَيُمْسِكُ الَّتِي قَضَىٰ عَلَيْهَا الْمَوْتَ وَيُرْسِلُ الْأُخْرَىٰ إِلَىٰ أَجَلٍ مُسَمًّى ۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِقَوْمٍ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ

An explanatory translation:

God takes the souls at their death, and those that have not died during their sleep. He retains those for whom He has decreed death and releases the others until an appointed term. In this are signs for people who reflect. Quran.com

The spiritual insight is that our ordinary experience of waking is received within conditions we do not independently sustain.

Physiological precision matters here. Sleep is not the cessation of all brain activity, and consciousness is not necessarily absent throughout it: dreams are experiences. Nor does failure to remember an experience prove that none occurred.

The analogy concerns entrusted life, withdrawal from ordinary waking engagement, and restoration. It should not be made into a claim that sleep and death are neurologically identical.

Read in that way, the verse deepens rather than competes with sleep science. Scientific investigation studies how waking and sleeping occur. Theology asks what their dependence means.

11. From the first creation to resurrection

The Qur’an’s deathbed argument belongs within a larger account of creation.

Earlier in the same surah, it declares:

Qur’an 56:57

نَحْنُ خَلَقْنَاكُمْ فَلَوْلَا تُصَدِّقُونَ

“We created you; why, then, do you not believe?”

And:

Qur’an 56:62

وَلَقَدْ عَلِمْتُمُ النَّشْأَةَ الْأُولَىٰ فَلَوْلَا تَذَكَّرُونَ

“You already know the first creation; why, then, do you not take heed?” Quran.com

The reasoning begins with an existing reality: human beings have come into life. Within the Qur’anic account, their Creator’s capacity is not exhausted by that first creation.

The inability of human beings to restore the dead does not delimit the power of the One who created them.

This is a more substantial argument than an appeal to a temporary gap in neuroscience. Even a much more complete biological account would leave open questions of ultimate origin, divine agency, and the possibility of resurrection.

Your essay connecting stellar positions, terminal physiology, and awareness brings cosmic scale and personal mortality into one field of reflection. Its most fruitful contribution is the contrast between our growing ability to describe creation and our continuing dependence within it. That insight does not require treating speculative quantum accounts of consciousness as established science. The Glorious Quran and Science

Resurrection, in this framework, rests on the identity and power of the Creator. It is not a medical forecast.

12. The bedside as a moral challenge

There is also a practical test for every philosophy of consciousness: how does it teach us to treat a person who can no longer answer?

The dying person remains someone whose suffering matters. Loss of speech does not erase dignity. Dependence does not cancel personhood.

A fair critique should recognize that illusionists can affirm these duties. Frankish explicitly defends the moral importance of pain and conscious states. It would misrepresent his position to claim that illusionism necessarily makes cruelty acceptable. Keith Frankish

The philosophical question remains whether a theory has adequately explained the reality whose moral importance it affirms.

The Qur’an supplies its own answer through an encompassing picture of the person: created, known, dependent, accountable, and destined to return to God.

At the bedside, that picture calls for both medical competence and tenderness. We treat reversible illness, relieve distress, communicate honestly, and remain present when cure is no longer possible.

The divine challenge is addressed to human arrogance. Its contemplation should increase compassion toward the dying.

Thematic epilogue: The final lesson of the witness

The deathbed gathers the central questions of consciousness into a single human encounter.

Here is a person whose inner life has never been wholly available to anyone else. Others have known that person through words, gestures, memories, and love. Now those channels may be closing.

Science can explain much about the bodily changes. Medicine may sometimes reverse them. Yet neither achievement licenses the claim that the person’s experienced life was merely nothing.

The Qur’an asks us to look carefully at this boundary:

تَرْجِعُونَهَا إِنْ كُنْتُمْ صَادِقِينَ

“Return it, if you are truthful.”

Its challenge reaches beyond our current technology to our understanding of ourselves. We participate in life without having authored all its conditions. We investigate consciousness from within its presence. We exercise real powers without possessing ultimate sovereignty.

For the believer, the dying person’s departure therefore speaks of both dependence and hope. The life we cannot indefinitely retain remains within the knowledge and authority of its Creator.

The fitting response is intellectual humility, compassionate medicine, and confidence that the One who brought the conscious person into existence has not lost the power to call that person again.