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

by Annaka Harris

Many of us are nervous fliers, despite the fact that, statistically, we would need to fly every day for about 55,000 years before being involved in a fatal plane crash (and it’s worth mentioning that although people don’t commonly have panic attacks when getting behind the wheel in preparation for a trip to the grocery store, one’s safety on such trips is actually less secure by many orders of magnitude than while flying).

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.

I’m pointing to the fundamental, day-to-day illusion we all seem to walk around with: that we are distinct and separate “selves,” separate not only from those around us and from the outside world but even from our own bodies, as if our conscious experience somehow floats free of the material world. 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. Yet I can’t seem to shake the false intuition that I could even choose to leave my body (if I could only figure out how) and everything constituting “me” would somehow remain magically intact.

Sit in a quiet place and give yourself a choice—to lift either your arm or your foot—that must be made before a given time (before the second hand on the clock reaches the six, for example). Do this over and over again and observe your moment-to-moment experience closely. Notice how this choice gets made in real time and what it feels like. Where does the decision come from? Do you decide when to decide, or does a decision simply arise in your conscious experience? Does a free-floating conscious will somehow deliver the thought, Move your arm, or is the thought delivered to you? What actually made you choose arm over foot? It may suddenly seem that “you” (meaning your conscious experience) didn’t have any part in it.

It seems clear that we can’t decide what to think or feel, any more than we can decide what to see or hear. A highly complicated convergence of factors and past events—including our genes, our personal life history, our immediate environment, and the state of our brain—is responsible for each next thought. Did you decide to remember your high school band when that song started playing on the radio? Did I decide to write this book? In some sense, the answer is yes, but the “I” in question is not my conscious experience. In actuality, my brain, in conjunction with its history and the outside world, decided. I (my consciousness) simply witness decisions unfolding.

Iain McGilchrist describes his intriguing thesis about the possibility that consciousness originates much deeper in the structures of the brain than scientists typically believe: 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.

I love the title of an article by the philosopher Philip Goff: “Panpsychism Is Crazy, but It’s Also Most Probably True.” His line of thinking follows this path: 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.

Some philosophers go so far as to suggest that there isn’t a hard problem of consciousness at all, reducing consciousness to an illusion. But as others have pointed out, consciousness is the one thing that can’t be an illusion—by definition. An illusion can appear within consciousness, but you are either experiencing something or you’re not—consciousness is necessary for an illusion to take place.

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?

Although some scientists have been led naturally to a panpsychic view in one form or another, the term still carries the stink of the New Age. David Skrbina explains that, at first mention, the idea that the inanimate world possesses consciousness seems so anti-scientific that it incites a reflexive and concerted opposition: Upon laying out a panpsychist position, one is immediately faced with the charge that he believes that “rocks are conscious”—a statement taken as so obviously ludicrous that panpsychism can be safely dismissed out of hand. . . . We may see strong analogies with the human mind in certain animals, and so we apply the concept [consciousness] to them with varying degrees of confidence. We may see no such analogies to plants or inanimate objects, and so to attribute consciousness to them seems ridiculous. This is our human bias. To overcome this anthropocentric perspective, the panpsychist asks us to see the “mentality” of other objects not in terms of human consciousness but as a subset of a certain universal quality of physical things, in which both inanimate mentality and human consciousness are taken as particular manifestations.

Ascribing some level of consciousness to plants or inanimate matter is not the same as ascribing to them human minds with wishes and intentions like our own. Anyone who believes the universe has a plan for us or that he can consult with his “higher self” for medical advice should not feel propped up by the modern view of panpsychism. It supports nothing of the sort. Bacteria with some minimal level of consciousness streaming through their atoms would still be bacteria. They would still lack brains and complex minds, much less human ones.

As the philosopher Gregg Rosenberg points out, when we entertain the notion that a bacterium or an atom possesses some level of conscious experience, “we are obviously not attributing to it the qualities of our own experiences,” but instead we can imagine “a qualitative field that has a character in some very abstract sense like that of our experiences, but specifically unimaginable to us and unlike our own [experience of consciousness].”