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

by Annaka Harris

In a 2016 TED talk, she described the thrill of uncovering the interdependence of two tree species in her research on mycorrhizal networks—elaborate underground networks of fungi that connect individual plants and transfer water, carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients and minerals. Simard was studying the levels of carbon in two species of tree, the Douglas fir and the paper birch, when she discovered that the two species were engaged “in a lively two-way conversation.” In the summer months, when the fir needed more carbon, the birch sent more carbon to the fir; at other times when the fir was still growing but the birch needed more carbon because it was leafless, the fir sent more carbon to the birch—revealing that the two species were in fact interdependent. Equally surprising were the results of further research led by Simard, showing that Douglas fir “mother trees” were able to distinguish between their own kin and a neighboring stranger’s seedlings. Simard found that the mother trees colonized their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks, sending them more carbon belowground. The mother trees also “reduced their own root competition to make room for their kids,” and, when injured or dying, sent messages through carbon and communicated other defense signals to their kin seedlings, increasing the seedlings’ resistance to local environmental stresses.5

As the neuroscientist David Eagleman puts it: 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.

We now have reason to believe that with access to certain activity inside your brain, another person can know what you’re going to do before you do.

The feeling of agency can be fooled—and yet, we go about our daily lives feeling the opposite.4

Even though we are talking about modifying a conscious experience, consciousness itself isn’t necessarily controlling the system; all we know is that consciousness is experiencing the system. It is no contradiction to say that consciousness is essential to ethical concerns, yet irrelevant when it comes to will.

Humans can become infected with the parasite in the same way other mammals can—by consuming the undercooked meat of infected animals or by coming in direct contact with environments contaminated with cat feces, such as drinking water, garden soil, or litter boxes—and it turns out that Toxoplasma also has an effect on human brains. As the science journalist Kathleen McAuliffe reports on observations made by parasitologists, “Neurons harboring the parasite were making 3.5 times more dopamine. The chemical could actually be seen pooling inside infected brain cells.” Toxoplasma can cause a variety of behavioral changes in humans and is thought to be a trigger for schizophrenia and other mental illnesses in many people. According to McAuliffe’s reporting, “people with schizophrenia are two to three times more likely to test positive for antibodies to the parasite than those who don’t have the disorder.”2

When Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague administered personality tests to two groups of people, one showing immunological signs of a prior Toxoplasma infection and the other not, infected men scored comparatively higher than uninfected men in traits like suspicion of authority and a propensity to break rules, while infected women ranked relatively higher than noninfected women in measures of warmth, self-assurance and chattiness.

When reviewing examples like these, we are immediately struck by how often we are blind to the complex array of forces at play in the behavior taking place all around us. One can’t help but wonder what’s truly driving all our own desires and personality traits—especially ones we tend to strongly identify with.

With so many behind-the-scenes forces at work—from the essential neurological processes we previously examined to bacterial infections and parasites—it’s hard to see how our behavior, preferences, and even choices could be under the control of our conscious will in any real sense. It seems much more accurate to say that consciousness is along for the ride—watching the show, rather than creating or controlling it. In theory, we can go as far as to say that few (if any) of our behaviors need consciousness in order to be carried out. But at an intuitive level, we assume that because human beings act in certain ways and are conscious—and because experiences such as fear, love, and pain feel like such powerful motivators within consciousness—our behaviors are driven by our awareness of them and otherwise would not occur. However, it’s now obvious that many behaviors we usually attribute to consciousness, and think of as proof of consciousness, could actually exist without consciousness, at least in theory.

There is a wonderful term, umwelt, introduced by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909, to describe the given experience of any particular animal, based on the senses used by that organism to navigate its environment. Bats have one umwelt, bees experience another, humans another, and someone using a technology like the BrainPort experiences yet another.

Seth refers to our experiences of ourselves in the world as a kind of “controlled hallucination.” He describes the brain as a “prediction engine” and explains that “what we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.” In a sense, he says, “we predict ourselves into existence.”14

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.19

One branch of modern panpsychism proposes that consciousness is intrinsic to all forms of information processing, even inanimate forms such as technological devices;

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.

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.20

In a recent conversation I had with Christof Koch, we discussed what might result from a hypothetical experiment in which two brains were connected together as successfully as the two hemispheres of an ordinary brain are connected. Since it seems as though the mind and the contents of consciousness can be divided in a split-brain patient, would two brains wired together produce a new, integrated mind? If Christof and I had our brains wired together, for instance, would it create a new Christof-Annaka consciousness—a new single point of view? Would a new mind be produced, with access to all the content that had previously been experienced separately by our brains—all our thoughts, memories, fears, abilities, and so forth—constituting a new “person”?6 Even if the answer is yes, which it probably is, I don’t think we encounter a combination problem in this thought experiment. We run into problems only if we see the conscious experiences of myself and Christof as selves or subjects—permanent structures of consciousness with fixed boundaries. In the instance of connecting two brains, we might simply have an example of consciousness changing its content or character—in the same way that the content of your consciousness changes when you close and open your eyes: the trees and sky are available to your field of view and then they’re not. When you dream, you experience environments quite different from your actual surroundings, maybe even feeling yourself to be a different person ...

whether the flow of time is an illusion or a true insight into the nature of reality depends in part on which of these two opposing views in physics turns out to be correct: Presentism: Time is in fact flowing and only the present moment is “real”; or Eternalism: We live in a “block universe,” where time is more like space—just because you are in one location (or moment) doesn’t mean the others don’t exist simultaneously.