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It seems much more accurate to say that consciousness is along for the ride—watching the show, rather than creating or controlling it.
Without binding processes, you might not even feel yourself to be a self at all. Your consciousness would be more like a flow of experiences in a particular location in space—which
perhaps consciousness is another property of matter, or of the universe itself, that we have yet to discover.
Francis Crick and Christof Koch among them, have even speculated that it is the frequency at which neurons fire that causes them to give rise to consciousness.
the false conclusions drawn from a misunderstanding of panpsychism—that individual atoms, cells, or plants possess an experience comparable to that of a human mind, for instance—are often the very thing used to argue against it. Unfortunately, it seems quite hard for us to drop the intuition that consciousness equals complex thought.
He argues that consciousness is in fact the only thing in the universe that is not a mystery—in the sense that it is the only thing we truly understand firsthand. According to Strawson, it is matter that’s utterly mysterious, because we have no understanding of its intrinsic nature.
As if these results weren’t strange enough, Wheeler introduced the element of time and made the prediction that even if we perform such a measurement after a photon has passed through one of the slits, we would still get the same effect, causing the photon to act like a particle retroactively.3 In other words, he predicted that a measurement in the present would mysteriously influence the past. This is the delayed-choice experiment, and it was finally conducted in 2007, confirming Wheeler’s prediction.
How much time does a moment of consciousness take? Is consciousness continuous or does it somehow flicker in and out (and how would we know the difference)? What is the present moment; is it some sort of illusion? Is time itself an illusion?
