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.

subjects felt they were making a freely willed action that, in actuality, had already been set in motion before they felt they made the decision to move.

The argument that conscious will is an illusion is further strengthened by the fact that this illusion can be intentionally triggered and manipulated. Experimenters have been able to cause a feeling of will in subjects when the subjects in fact had no control. It seems that, under the right conditions, it’s possible to convince people that they have consciously initiated an action that was actually controlled by someone else.

I have the absurd tendency to regard “my body” (including “my head” and “my brain”) as something my conscious will inhabits—when in fact everything I think of as “me” is dependent on the functioning of my brain.

What does it mean to have a will that is free from the cause-and-effect relationships of the universe?

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.

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.”

There are a variety of hypotheses proposing that certain areas of the brain, or types of neural processing, create a conscious experience; some scientists, Francis Crick and Christof Koch among them, have even speculated that it is the frequency at which neurons fire that causes them to give rise to consciousness.