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

by Annaka Harris

And in some areas of study, such as quantum physics, our intuitions are not only useless but are an outright obstacle to progress. 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.

To complicate matters further, the signals perceived by your hands, eyes, and ears travel different distances through your nervous system to reach your brain (your hands are a lot farther away from your brain than your ears are). Only after all the relevant input has been received by the brain do the signals get synchronized and enter your conscious experience through a process called “binding”—whereby you see, hear, and feel the ball hit the racket all in the same instant. 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.

many behaviors we usually attribute to consciousness, and think of as proof of consciousness, could actually exist without consciousness, at least in theory. This brings us back to our two questions. And, once again, it’s hard to see how conscious experience plays a role in behavior. That’s not to say it doesn’t, but it’s almost impossible to point to specific ways in which it does. However, in my own musings, I have stumbled into what might be an interesting exception: consciousness seems to play a role in behavior when we think and talk about the mystery of consciousness. When I contemplate “what it’s like” to be something, that experience of consciousness presumably affects the subsequent processing taking place in my brain. And almost nothing I think or say when contemplating consciousness would make any sense coming from a system without it.

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.

In his book The Master and His Emissary, about the two hemispheres of the brain, the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes his intriguing thesis about the possibility that consciousness originates much deeper in the structures of the brain than scientists typically believe: 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

The philosopher Ned Block, of NYU’s Center for Neural Science, describes something he’s observed in his students akin to different personality types when he lectures about the hard problem of consciousness. He estimates that about one-third of his students “don’t appreciate phenomenology [felt experience] and the difficult problems it raises,” and he thinks it would be interesting to study the neurological difference between people who are able to intuitively grasp the hard problem and those who aren’t (or who view it as an illusion).

Galen Strawson makes a similar point by turning the mystery of consciousness on its head. He argues that consciousness is in fact the only thing in the universe that is not a mystery—in the sense that it is the only thing we truly understand firsthand. According to Strawson, it is matter that’s utterly mysterious, because we have no understanding of its intrinsic nature. And he has dubbed this “the hard problem of matter”: [Physics] tells us a great many facts about the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, facts that it expresses with numbers and equations . . . but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure. Physics is silent—perfectly and forever silent—on this question. . . . What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality, the stuff that is structured in the way physics reveals? The answer, again, is that we don’t know—except insofar as this stuff takes the form of conscious experience.