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

by Annaka Harris

mycorrhizal

what the zombie thought experiment makes vivid to me is that the conclusion we draw from this intuition has no real

foundation. Like a 3-D image, it collapses the moment we take our glasses off.

Gazzaniga included, to describe the feeling of conscious will as an illusion.

For example, like everyone else, I have the absurd tendency to regard “my body” (including “my head” and “my brain”) as something my conscious will inhabits—when in fact everything I think of as “me” is dependent on the functioning of my brain. Even the slightest neural changes, via intoxication, disease, or injury, could render “me” unrecognizable.

With the proper guidance, we eventually stop collapsing onto the floor and pounding our fists when we don’t get our way.

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

In actuality, my brain, in conjunction with its history and the outside world, decided. I (my consciousness) simply witness decisions unfolding.

It seems much more accurate to say that consciousness is along for the ride—watching the show, rather than creating or controlling it.

epistemic

Everything we hope to uncover through consciousness studies—from determining whether or not a given person is in a conscious state, to pinpointing where in the evolution of life consciousness first emerged, to understanding the exact physical process that gives birth to conscious experience—is informed by our intuitions about the function of consciousness.

This is not at all at odds with modern neuroscience: an area of the brain known as the default mode network, which scientists believe contributes to our sense of self, has been found to be suppressed during meditation.1

He describes the brain as a “prediction engine” and explains that “what we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.” In a sense, he says, “we predict ourselves into existence.”14

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.19

panpsychism.

The fact remains, however, that the majority of scientists believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon resulting from neuronal processing.