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

by Annaka Harris

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. 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.

asked if he believed we have free will. He answered the question with arresting clarity when he said that he couldn’t even figure out what the term could possibly mean. What does it mean to have a will that is free from the cause-and-effect relationships of the universe?

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.

robot could certainly be programmed to describe specific processes like “seeing yellow” when it detects certain wavelengths of light, or even to talk about “feeling angry” under defined circumstances, without actually consciously seeing or feeling anything. But it seems impossible for a system to make a distinction between a conscious and unconscious experience in general without having an actual conscious experience as a reference point.

It’s because of the value of simplicity that I tend to favor the branch of panpsychism that describes consciousness as fundamental to matter—as opposed to requiring a certain level of information processing for consciousness to exist. This, once again, is a result of the hard problem of consciousness, which crops up anywhere you attempt to draw a line—whether at neuronal processing or at simpler forms of information processing. Although in many ways it’s more difficult to get our minds around, the view that consciousness is intrinsic to matter is a more convincing solution to me, in part because it is a simpler one (albeit only slightly). Consider the Higgs field as an analogy: Physicists knew that the Higgs field had to exist—if it didn’t, the electrons and quarks that make up all of us would be massless and travel at the speed of light. For years before the discovery of its carrier, the Higgs boson, they posited a Higgs field. Although nothing about its confirmation supports (or provides any evidence for) theories about consciousness, it helps us understand the analogous proposition in panpsychism—that perhaps consciousness is another property of matter, or of the universe itself, that we have yet to discover.

The natural tendency of scientific exploration is to arrive at as simple an explanation as possible, and the concept of consciousness emerging out of nonconscious material represents a kind of failure of the typical goal of scientific explanation.

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.

For instance, if all the individual atoms and cells in my brain are conscious, how do those separate spheres of consciousness merge to form the consciousness “I’m” experiencing? What’s more, do all the smaller, individual points of consciousness cease to exist after giving birth to an entirely new point of consciousness? This is referred to as “the combination problem,” which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes as “the hardest problem facing panpsychism,” noting: The problem is that this is very difficult to make sense of: “little” conscious subjects of experience with their micro-experiences coming together to form a “big” conscious subject with its own experiences. . . . The idea of many minds forming some other mind is much harder to get your head around (so to speak).