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

by Annaka Harris

An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism.1

After all, an infant is composed of particles indistinguishable from those swirling around in the sun. The particles that compose your body were once the ingredients of countless stars in our universe’s past.

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.

Your perception of reality is the end result of fancy editing tricks: the brain hides the difference in arrival times. How? What it serves up as reality is actually a delayed version. Your brain collects up all the information from the senses before it decides upon a story of what happens. . . . The strange consequence of all this is that you live in the past. By the time you think the moment occurs, it’s already long gone. To synchronize the incoming information from the senses, the cost is that our conscious awareness lags behind the physical world.1

Consequently, findings about how decisions are made at the level of the brain—and the milliseconds of delay in our conscious awareness of sensory input and even of our own thoughts—have caused many neuroscientists, Gazzaniga included, to describe the feeling of conscious will as an illusion.

So what role does consciousness play if it’s not creating the will to move but merely watching the movement play out, all the while under the illusion that it is involved? We can see how the feeling of free will, as we typically experience it, is not as straightforward as it seems. And if we dispel this common notion, we can begin to question the idea that consciousness plays an integral role in guiding human behavior.

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. It’s easy to see how human beings across the globe, generation after generation, have effortlessly constructed various notions of a “soul” and descriptions of life after death that bear a striking resemblance to life before death.

Similarly, understanding the intentions behind violent behavior gives us relevant information about what kind of “software” someone’s brain is running. A person who plots multiple murders has a brain that is operating very differently from someone who has a stroke while driving and accidentally kills a number of people.

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

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.

We can have a full awareness of the usual sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts, absent the sense of being a self who is the receiver of the sounds and the thinker of the thoughts. 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

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.

If we can’t point to anything that distinguishes which collections of atoms in the universe are conscious from those that aren’t, where can we possibly hope to draw the line? Perhaps a more interesting question is why we should draw a line at all.