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

by Annaka Harris

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.

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.

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.

[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.2

Certainly anything like the human mind requires a human-like memory, but this is relevant only for complex organisms. It is not reasonable to demand that atomic particles have anything like the memory capability of the human being, or even any physical instantiation of something like memory. Minds of atoms may conceivably be, for example, a stream of instantaneous memory-less moments of experience.3