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

by Annaka Harris

Why do certain configurations of matter cause that matter to light up with awareness?

research suggests that our “gut feelings” are more reliable in many situations than the fruits of conscious reasoning.

Flying through space using echolocation must feel very different from walking down the sidewalk using vision.

“How could anybody have been led to something so silly as to deny the existence of conscious experience, the only general thing we know for certain exists?”

We should be as surprised by the reality of our own consciousness as we would be to learn that the latest smartphone is conscious.

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.

The illusion of being a self, along with an experience of continuity over time through memory, may in fact be a very rare form of consciousness.

Some have made the claim that in order for light to behave like particles, not only does a measurement have to be made but that measurement has to be consciously observed.

The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (New York: W. W.