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

by Annaka Harris

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.

A striking example of this is the neurological condition called locked-in syndrome, in which virtually one’s entire body is paralyzed but consciousness is fully intact.

John Scalzi’s book head on uses this as a premise for his book. It’s a very interesting take on the idea of the mind.

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

Once we imagine human behavior around us existing without consciousness, that behavior begins to look more like many behaviors we see in the natural world that we’ve always assumed were nonconscious, such as the obstacle-avoiding behavior of a starfish, which has no central nervous system.9 In other words, when we trick ourselves into imagining that people lack consciousness, we can begin to wonder if we’re in fact tricking ourselves all the time when we deem other living systems—climbing ivy, say, or stinging sea anemones—to be without it.

How do we truly know animals have no 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. 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.

Poem idea

Knowing why someone has behaved violently, for instance, will always be relevant. There are a range of human behaviors that can be influenced by deterrence, negative consequences, and empathy, along with inculcating the developing brains of children with self-regulation and self-control—and all the other methods civilized societies use to keep human beings (generally) well behaved.

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.

So true

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.

One “self” of a split-brain patient is as puzzled by the opinions and desires of the other as another person in the room would be. Whether or not both points of view in split-brain patients are conscious is difficult if not impossible to answer, but we have no reason to doubt that there is an experience associated with the thoughts and desires of each, and most neuroscientists believe that both hemispheres are in fact conscious.

Poem idea about confusing wants and desires of each brain.

It’s because of the value of simplicity that I tend to favor the branch of panpsychism that describes consciousness as fundamental to matter—as opposed to requiring a certain level of information processing for consciousness to exist.

Interesting notion

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.