One thing that might interest you is my result with Clark Barwick which gives an axiomatiation + uniqueness result for the homotopy theory of higher categories:
arXiv:1112.0040
(i.e. $(\infty,n)$-categories).
This axiomatization includes several variants of $(\infty,n)$-category for finite n, such as what you mention in your question. In particular, when also taken in context with the comparison results of Bergner-Rezk (which you mentioned) and Lurie arXiv:0905.0462, I would say that there is a clear consensus for what the homotopy theory of $(\infty,n)$-categories should be, and that it is fairly rigid (few automorphisms). It is at least fair to say that such a consensus is forming.
Once you pin down the theories of $(\infty,n)$-categories, I would say that there are two distinct reasonable choices for what the (homotopy) theory of $(\infty,\infty)$-categories should be. So in that sense the answer to your question is no, there is not a single theory of $(\infty,\infty)$-categories; there are exactly two. But this "no" is a far cry from saying that there is a vast uncharted landscape of possibilities.
What are these theories? As Charles Rezk mentions, the inclusion of $(\infty,n)$-categories into $(\infty, n+1)$-categories has both a left and right adjoint and this gives rise to two towers of homotopy theories of higher categories. The limits of these towers give the two potential models of $(\infty,\infty)$-categories. They are not equivalent. Let's call the limit using right adjoints $Cat_{(\infty,\infty)}$ and the limit using left adjoints $LCat_{(\infty,\infty)} $.
One consequence of the unicity result is that these towers are essentially uniquely defined and are essentially model independent (provided the models satisfy our axioms). So in that sense there are these two canonical (established?) choices for the homotopy theory of $(\infty,\infty)$-categories. I know Clark and I have discussed this idea with many people, but the idea is certainly not new.
I think one of the important parts of this story is Eugenia Cheng's theorem from her paper "An omega-category with all duals is an omega groupoid". Her result applies in the tower using the left adjoints, $LCat_{(\infty,\infty)} $, the "coinductive" version. There an $(\infty, \infty)$-category can be tought of as a sequences of $(\infty, n)$-categories, where each truncates to the previous theory. Cheng's result implies that in such a higher category if you have all duals you are an $\infty$-groupoid.
I prefer the other limit, the limit of right adjoints. There an $(\infty,\infty)$-category is a sequence of $(\infty,n)$-categories where the previous is the maximal $(\infty,n-1)$-category. For some reason this seems more natural to me, though I know of others who disagree. This version includes one of my favorite examples: the infinite cobordism category. There are cobordisms and cobordisms between cobordisms and cobordisms between these and so on forever. This is an object in the tower of right adjoints which has duals for all objects, but which is not an $\infty$-groupoid. The limit of right adjoints fails Cheng's theorem. It also has a sort of inductive notion of equivalence, rather than coinductive.
Your idea of taking the union of the theories of $(\infty,n)$-categories is actually not as far off as you might think. One problem with the naive union is that it is not cocomplete. There are diagrams which increase category number and have no colimits, or at least not the colimit which should exist. One way out of this is to note that you probably want the homotopy theory of $(\infty, \infty)$-categories to be presentable. So instead of taking the colimit naively you should take the colimit in presentable $(\infty,1)$-categories. Now since the inclusion functors preserve both limits and colimits, you can take this colimit in either $Pr^L$ or $Pr^R$. In either case you can use the equivalence $Pr^R \simeq (Pr^L)^{op}$ and Higher Topos Theory 5.5.7.6 or 5.5.3.13 to compute these colimits. In short you compute the colimit by taking adjoints and computing the limit naively. Thus you find:
Taken in $Pr^L$:
$$ \mathrm{colim} \; Cat_{(\infty,n)} = Cat_{(\infty,\infty)} $$
taken in $Pr^R$:
$$ \mathrm{colim} \; Cat_{(\infty,n)} = LCat_{(\infty,\infty)} $$
Which is the "right" notion of $(\infty,\infty)$-category probably depends on taste and what you want to do with the notion. Both are useful. The above descriptions gives you a variety of universal properties for these two theories. I would also love to know if there are any theories in between these two. I also strongly believe that $LCat_{(\infty,\infty)} $ is a localization of $Cat_{(\infty,\infty)} $, but I haven't written down a proof. Perhaps it is easy to see this from the above description?
You can be more explicit about these models too. Dominic Verity has a model of higher categories based on "weak complicial sets". There are $(\infty,n)$-versions of this and also $(\infty, \infty)$-versions.
One of the conjectures that Clark and I made at the end our paper is that some variant of Dominic's $(\infty,n)$-theory satisfies our axioms (Dominic, Emily Riehl, and I have a partial sketch of this, so hopefully the truth of this conjecture will be known... soon?). If that is true, then it is straighforward to show that the Dominic's $(\infty,\infty)$-version of weak complicial sets is a model of the tower of right adjoints, the one which includes the infinite bordism category. So there are also concrete models of these theories.
There are also others whose work will yield explicit models of this. Rune Haugseng's work was already mentioned. Jeremy Hahn's (upcoming?) work will provide nice model of both limits. I am sure there are many ways to model these two theories.
So to summarize:
- There are now a variety of uniqueness and comparison results which pin down the theory of $(\infty,n)$-categories as well as it is pinned down for $(\infty,1)$-categories.
- It actually is clear how to send $n \to \infty$; there are two ways to do it, giving two such infinite theories.
- We can describe and study these theories explicitly and they have interesting properties and possess interesting examples.
- Does this constitute a "consensus"? Of course not, but I hope it goes a little towards answering the real question.
Best Answer
Using Street's "one type" definition of strict $\infty$-category one can see that the concept of "strict $P$-category" makes sense not justs for any ordinals $P$ but in fact for any posets $P$ (though I expect the definition below is not right when $P$ is not totally ordered, see the remark at the end)
Definition : a $P$-category is a set $X$ endowed with:
(source and target) For each $p \in P$, two functions $\pi_p^+$ and $\pi_p^{-}$ from $X$ to $X$.
(composition) For each $p \in P$ a partially defined composition operation $\#_p : X \times X \rightarrow X$.
Satisfying the following conditions:
(globularity relations) For any $q \leqslant p$ one has $ \pi_p^{\mu} \pi_q^{\epsilon} = \pi_q^{\epsilon}$ and if $q>p$ one has $ \pi_p^{\mu} \pi_q^{\epsilon} = \pi_p^{\mu}$.
(dimension axiom) For any $x \in X$, there exists $p \in P$ such that $\pi^+_p(x)=x$.
(domain of composition) $x \#_p y$ is defined if and only if $\pi^+_p x= \pi^-_p y$.
(boundaries of compositions) $\pi_p^+(x \#_p y)=\pi_p^+ y$ ; $\pi_p^-(x \#_p y)=\pi_p^- x$ and $\pi^{\epsilon}_q(x \#_p y) = \pi^{\epsilon}_q(x) \#_p \pi^{\epsilon}_q(y)$ if $q>p$.
(unit law) For any $x \in X$ and any $n$ one has $x \#_n \pi_n^+ x= x = \pi^-_n x \#_n x$.
(associativity of compositions) $(x \#_p y )\#_p z = x \#_p (y \#_p z)$ when either side is defined.
(exchange law) for $p< q$, $(w \#_q x) \#_p (y \#_q z) = (w \#_p y) \#_q (x \#_p z)$ when the left hand side is defined.
(where $\epsilon$ and $\mu$ denotes arbitrary signs)
Saying that a cell is ``invertible'' makes sense exactly as in strict $\infty$-category, so you can talk about $(\alpha,\beta)$ categories for any ordinals $\alpha$ and $\beta$.
Now:
So far we are lacking motivation (interesting examples) to develop such a theory.
weak version of this notion have not been defined. Moving from strict $\infty$-categories to weak $\infty$-categories is a difficult jump, so there might be a lot of work to came up with such a notion. And as I said we don't really have a motivation to do so.
Even in the strict case, the "homotopy theory" of such object has not been developed (I'm talking about an analogue of the Folk model structure). This is probably easier than the point above, but still would need to be done.
As I said we are lacking examples, so it is not clear this notion has any interest at all, but I don't think the notion is trivial in any sense, and actually we do have a few notable examples beyond $\infty$-categories:
For example a $2 \omega$-category with only one cell of dimension $<\omega$ is exactly the same as a strict $\infty$-category with a commutative monoide structure, and I expect that the weak version should be a $E_{\infty}$-monoidal $\infty$-category in the same way that a weak $\infty$-category with only one cell of dimension $<k$ is the same as a $E_{k}$-monoidal $\infty$-category
As mentioned by Mike above, $\mathbb{Z}$-groupoids are closely connected to spectra. I believe using a similar argument to the Dold-Kan equivalence for strict $\infty$-category one can show that a strict $\mathbb{Z}$-groupoids is the same as an unbounded chain complexes (not quite sure about this... maybe there are problems in $-\infty$ and only a special type of $\mathbb{Z}$-groupoids needs to be considered). If true this is definitely a good indicator that a weak $\mathbb{Z}$-groupoids should be a spectra.
(In fact I remember seeing an arxiv preprint using $\mathbb{Z}$-categories to model spectra or something in this spirit... but I did not really read it and I havn't been able to find it back.)
To me the observation about infinite dimensional sphere is not really relevant here: to me what it says is that spaces don't have information past $\omega$, but this is just the fact that spaces up to homotopy are $\omega$-groupoids and not $\omega^+$-groupoids or anything like this.
Also if I'm correct the $\omega^+$-category freely generated by an arrows $\theta$ of dimension $\omega$ has for arrows $\theta$ and all the $\pi^{\epsilon}_n \theta$ for $ n < \omega$ and $\epsilon=+/-$ and that they are all different, so the type of collapse Harry mentioned in his answer do not seem to happen, at least with this definition.
Finally, I believe the definition given here is only right when $P$ is totally ordered, but I suspect that there is a modification of this definition, which is equivalent for totally ordered set, and such that for example a $\mathcal{P}(\{1,\dots,n\})$-category is the same as an $n$-fold category.