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

by Annaka Harris

At whatever point in the development of a baby’s brain your intuition tells you, OK, now an experience is being had in there, the mystery lies in the transition. First, as far as consciousness is concerned, there is nothing, and then suddenly, magically, at just the right moment . . . something. However minimal that initial something is, experience apparently ignites in the inanimate world, materializing out of the darkness.

The particles that compose your body were once the ingredients of countless stars in our universe’s past. They traveled for billions of years to land here—in this particular configuration that is you—and are now reading this book. Imagine following the life of these particles from their first appearance in space-time to the very moment they became arranged in such a way as to start experiencing something.

Sure, consciousness is a matter of matter—what else could it be, since that’s what we are—but still, the fact that some hunks of matter have an inner life . . . is unlike any other properties of matter we have yet encountered, much less accounted for. The laws of matter in motion can produce this, all this? Suddenly, matter wakes up and takes in the world?2

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).

In fact, one of the most startling findings in neuroscience has been that consciousness is often “the last to know.”

Imagine what your experience would be like if binding didn’t take place at all—if, when playing the piano, for instance, you first saw your finger hit the key, then heard the note, and later finally felt the key hammer down. Or imagine if the process of binding were tampered with and you found yourself running before you heard the barking of the ferocious dog. Without binding processes, you might not even feel yourself to be a self at all. Your consciousness would be more like a flow of experiences in a particular location in space—which would be much closer to the truth.

panpsychism.

Imagine being a brain without any sense organs connected, floating in empty space or in a vast body of water. Then imagine your senses being connected, one at a time. First vision. The only content available to you is a subtle experience of sight. You can see light perhaps—pulsating light of varying brightness, coming in and out. Try to apprehend this without including the concepts of memory or language, so that there’s no sense of a self thinking, Whoa, it was just dark but now it’s light again! Instead, try to imagine a very simple flow of “first experiences”: light and dark alternating, then brighter light, dimmer light, pulsating light. Next, imagine light that takes on shapes: a circular light, a beam of light, light that extends far into the distance. Adding color perhaps: a reddish light that transforms to orange, then yellow, then blue. Imagine feeling formless and weightless. You’re free-floating in space, with no thoughts or concepts—no words “orange” or “red,” just the pure experience of those colors. Visualize the most basic experience imaginable. Next, bring in sounds, then tastes, then smells—each arriving one at a time in as pure a form as possible. You’re simply experiencing what arrives in your awareness, without words or concepts to describe what the experience is like. And finally, imagine the feeling of touch coming online in the form of pressure or heat—spanning broad areas and in small, pinpoint locations—not in your body, of course, since you don’t h...

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.