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

by Annaka Harris

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 ...