Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

by Annaka Harris

The moment matter becomes conscious seems at least as mysterious as the moment matter and energy sprang into existence in the first place.

Why do certain configurations of matter cause that matter to light up with awareness?

An intuition is simply the powerful sense that something is true without our having an awareness or an understanding of the reasons behind this feeling—it may or may not represent something true about the world.

But one thing is certain: it’s possible for a vivid experience of consciousness to exist undetected from the outside.

Chamovitz explains how the stimulation of a plant cell causes cellular changes that result in an electrical signal—similar to the reaction caused by the stimulation of nerve cells in animals—and “just like in animals, this signal can propagate from cell to cell, and it involves the coordinated function of ion channels including potassium, calcium, calmodulin, and other plant components.”3 He also describes some of the shared mechanisms between plants and animals down to the level of DNA. In his research, Chamovitz discovered which genes are responsible for a plant’s ability to determine whether it’s in the dark or the light, and these genes, it turns out, are also part of human DNA. In animals, these same genes regulate responses to light and are involved in “the timing of cell division, the axonal growth of neurons, and the proper functioning of the immune system.” Analogous mechanisms exist in plants for detecting sounds, scents, and location, and even for forming memories.

The ecologist Suzanne Simard conducts research in forest ecology, and her work has produced breakthroughs in our understanding of intertree communication. In a 2016 TED talk, she described the thrill of uncovering the interdependence of two tree species in her research on mycorrhizal networks—elaborate underground networks of fungi that connect individual plants and transfer water, carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients and minerals. Simard was studying the levels of carbon in two species of tree, the Douglas fir and the paper birch, when she discovered that the two species were engaged “in a lively two-way conversation.” In the summer months, when the fir needed more carbon, the birch sent more carbon to the fir; at other times when the fir was still growing but the birch needed more carbon because it was leafless, the fir sent more carbon to the birch—revealing that the two species were in fact interdependent. Equally surprising were the results of further research led by Simard, showing that Douglas fir “mother trees” were able to distinguish between their own kin and a neighboring stranger’s seedlings. Simard found that the mother trees colonized their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks, sending them more carbon belowground. The mother trees also “reduced their own root competition to make room for their kids,” and, when injured or dying, sent messages through carbon and communicated other defense signals to their kin seedlings, increasing the seedlings’ resistance to...

The problem is that both conscious and nonconscious states seem to be compatible with any behavior, even those associated with emotion, so a behavior itself doesn’t necessarily signal the presence of consciousness.

We now have reason to believe that with access to certain activity inside your brain, another person can know what you’re going to do before you do.

It is no contradiction to say that consciousness is essential to ethical concerns, yet irrelevant when it comes to will.

It seems to me more fruitful to think of consciousness not as something with sharp edges that is suddenly arrived at once one reaches the very top of mental functioning, but as a process that is gradual, rather than all-or-nothing, and begins low down in the brain. . . . The problem then becomes not how two wills can become one unified consciousness, but how one field of consciousness can accommodate two wills. . . . Consciousness is not a bird, as it often seems to be in the literature—hovering, detached, coming in at the top level and alighting on the brain somewhere in the frontal lobes—but a tree, its roots deep inside us.

With the revelations brought to us through split-brain research and other advances in modern neuroscience, many have been led to the following question: Is there some version of split consciousness that occurs in brains that aren’t physically split? Are there other centers of consciousness, even what we might think of as other minds, residing closer to us than we think? Perhaps it’s not impossible to imagine that different “centers,” “configurations,” or “flows” of consciousness exist in close proximity to one another or overlap, even in a single human body.

Once we realise that physics tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of the entities it talks about, and indeed that the only thing we know for certain about the intrinsic nature of matter is that at least some material things have experience . . . the theoretical imperative to form as simple and unified a view as is consistent with the data leads us quite straightforwardly in the direction of panpsychism.2

So if it’s plausible that worms or bacteria (or thermostats!) are accompanied by some level of consciousness, however minimal and unlike our own experience, why not follow the same logic when it comes to organs in the body, or the cerebellum (which contains most of the neurons in the brain)? Just because something isn’t appearing in the field of what “I” am experiencing, why rule out the possibility that many forms of consciousness exist simultaneously within the boundaries of my body?

When we look outside the context of animal life, where it’s easier for us to drop our ingrained intuitions, we find that it’s actually hard to intuit the logic that any amount of information processing, no matter how complex, would suddenly cause those processes to become conscious. When your golden retriever runs to greet you at the end of the day, her consciousness seems as obvious to you as any other fact. But as we’ve seen, even when we imagine robots that look and act like human beings, we seem to be unable to determine whether or not they would be conscious. It’s only because we experience consciousness so readily, and ascribe it to other life-forms by analogy so easily, that it seems like an obvious capacity (and that we’re not continually shocked to be experiencing something in every waking moment).18 We should be as surprised by the reality of our own consciousness as we would be to learn that the latest smartphone is conscious.

My own sense of the correct resolution to the mystery of consciousness, whether or not we can ever achieve a true understanding, is still currently split between a brain-based explanation and a panpsychic one. But while I’m not convinced that panpsychism offers the correct answer, I am convinced that it is a valid category of possible solutions that cannot be as easily dismissed as many people seem to think. Unfortunately, it remains difficult for scientists to join the conversation without fear of jeopardizing their credibility. In a 2017 essay titled “Minding Matter,” Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, eloquently expresses both the mystery of consciousness and the reluctance of scientists to propose theories that venture beyond viewing consciousness as a result of processing in the brain: It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself. . . . Rather than trying to sweep away the mystery of mind by attributing it to the mechanisms of matter, we must grapple with the intertwined nature of the two. . . . Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the ...

Though many people wonder: If the most basic constituents of matter have some level of conscious experience, how could it be that when they form a more complex physical object or system, those smaller points of consciousness combine to create a new, more complex sphere of consciousness? For instance, if all the individual atoms and cells in my brain are conscious, how do those separate spheres of consciousness merge to form the consciousness “I’m” experiencing? What’s more, do all the smaller, individual points of consciousness cease to exist after giving birth to an entirely new point of consciousness? This is referred to as “the combination problem,” which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes as “the hardest problem facing panpsychism,” noting: The problem is that this is very difficult to make sense of: “little” conscious subjects of experience with their micro-experiences coming together to form a “big” conscious subject with its own experiences. . . . The idea of many minds forming some other mind is much harder to get your head around (so to speak).4 For many scientists and philosophers, the combination problem presents the biggest obstacle to accepting any description of reality that includes consciousness as a widespread feature. However, the obstacle we face here once again seems to be a case of confusing consciousness with the concept of a self, as philosophers and scientists tend to speak in terms of a “subject” of consciousness. The term “self” is ...

To situate human consciousness within a larger space of possibilities strikes me as one of the most profound philosophical projects we can undertake. It is also a neglected one. With no giants upon whose shoulders to stand, the best we can do is cast a few flares into the darkness.