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.

First, as far as consciousness is concerned, there is nothing, and then suddenly, magically, at just the right moment . . . something.

Really?? Why?? Why not a slow fade in rather than on/off?

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

Substitute "life" for consciousness: surely there is no longer a "hard problem of life"?

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.

But one thing is certain: it’s possible for a vivid experience of consciousness to exist undetected from the outside.

The problem is that both conscious and nonconscious states seem to be compatible with any behavior, even those associated with emotion, so a behavior itself doesn’t necessarily signal the presence of consciousness.

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.

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.

I was once at an event where my friend and meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein was 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.

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.

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 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.

When I contemplate “what it’s like” to be something, that experience of consciousness presumably affects the subsequent processing taking place in my brain.

Not if you were a Chalmers zombie: you would act and speak exactly like this.

One thing we can confidently state, no matter what is being perceived, is that either consciousness is present or it isn’t.

How does this square with different intensities of consciousness or speeds of processing?

“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.”

Regardless, relegating consciousness to the status of an illusion misses the point, in my view. In effect, it is simply redefining consciousness as “the illusion of consciousness.” Even if we agreed to call consciousness an illusion, which seems absurd, we would still wonder how deep this illusion goes. Are other complex processes, or other collections of matter, experiencing this “illusion”?

“panpsychism is the most plausible theoretical view to adopt if one is an out-and-out naturalist . . . who holds that physicalism is true,” that “everything that concretely exists is physical,” and that “all physical phenomena are forms of energy.”

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

Wheeler also proposed a related thought experiment in which he imagined measuring a single photon from the light emitted by a quasar billions of light-years away passing by a black hole on its way to a telescope on Earth.