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

by Annaka Harris

Lying there, I could sense that I was in fact looking out at the sky, rather than up. The delight I experienced came from temporarily silencing a false intuition and glimpsing a deeper truth: being on the earth doesn’t separate us from the rest of the universe; indeed, we are and have always been in outer space.

An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism.1 In other words, consciousness is what we’re referring to when we talk about experience in its most basic form. Is it like something to be you in this moment? Presumably your answer is yes. Is it like something to be the chair you’re sitting on? Your answer will (most likely) be an equally definitive no. It’s this simple difference—whether there is an experience present or not—which we can all use as a reference point, that constitutes what I mean by the word “consciousness.” Is it like something to be a grain of sand, a bacterium, an oak tree, a worm, an ant, a mouse, a dog? At some point along the spectrum the answer is yes, and the great mystery lies in why the “lights turn on” for some collections of matter in the universe.

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

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.

In an interview with Scientific American, Chamovitz describes how different types of memory play a role in plant behavior: If memory entails forming the memory (encoding information), retaining the memory (storing information), and recalling the memory (retrieving information), then plants definitely remember. For example a Venus Fly Trap needs to have two of the hairs on its leaves touched by a bug in order to shut, so it remembers that the first one has been touched. . . . Wheat seedlings remember that they’ve gone through winter before they start to flower and make seeds. And some stressed plants give rise to progeny that are more resistant to the same stress, a type of transgenerational memory that’s also been recently shown also in animals.

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. 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.

Surprisingly, our consciousness also doesn’t appear to be involved in much of our own behavior, apart from bearing witness to it.

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.

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.

There are also instances of bacterial infections causing behavioral changes in people, and scientists are continuing to discover links between infections and human psychological disorders.7 Streptococci bacteria, for instance, have evolved a defense mechanism enabling them to hide successfully from the immune system of children for some period. Molecules on the walls of their cells make them indistinguishable from tissues in a child’s heart, joints, skin, and brain. Eventually the child’s immune system recognizes the strep as foreign to the body, but when it launches its attack, it may mistakenly target healthy tissues in the body as well. According to studies at the National Institute of Mental Health, in these cases “some cross-reactive ‘anti-brain’ antibodies [may] target the brain, causing OCD, tics, and the other neuropsychiatric symptoms of PANDAS [Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections].”

Imagine for a moment that David Chalmers himself is a zombie, completely lacking internal experience, and then consider the types of things he says in his book The Conscious Mind when explaining the concept of a zombie: Because my zombie twin lacks experiences, he is in a very different epistemic situation from me, and his judgments lack the corresponding justification. . . . I know I am conscious, and the knowledge is based solely on my immediate experience. . . . From the first-person point of view, my zombie twin and I are very different: I have experiences, and he does not.

When we talk about consciousness, we usually refer to a “self” that is the subject of everything we experience—all that we are aware of seems to be happening to or around this self.

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. Is it possible to simply be aware of events, actions, feelings, thoughts, and sounds—all coming in a stream of awareness? Such an experience is not uncommon in meditation, and many people, myself included, can attest to it. The self we seem to inhabit most (if not all) of the time—a localized, unchanging, solid center of consciousness—is an illusion that can be short-circuited, without changing our experience of the world in any other way.

We can have a full awareness of the usual sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts, absent the sense of being a self who is the receiver of the sounds and the thinker of the thoughts. This is not at all at odds with modern neuroscience: an area of the brain known as the default mode network, which scientists believe contributes to our sense of self, has been found to be suppressed during meditation.

As Michael Pollan explains in his book How to Change Your Mind, on the scientific research of psychedelics: The more precipitous the drop-off in blood flow and oxygen consumption in the default mode network, the more likely a volunteer was to report the loss of a sense of self. . . . The psychedelic experience of “non-duality” suggests that consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we—and it—like to think.

Pollan points out that “our sense of individuality and separateness hinges on a bounded self and a clear demarcation between subject and object. But all that may be a mental construction, a kind of illusion.”

The journalist and author Michael Harris points out that it is partly because of this ability to interfere with one’s sense of self that we know it is a construction: If the distinctness of the bodily self can be tampered with via such mechanical means [i.e., psychedelic drugs, a stroke, or a neurological disorder], then we must begin to accept that the bodily self—that feeling we are whole, inviolate beings—is not due to some special soul, or “I,” resident behind our eyes.

David Eagleman is involved in research that explores the possibilities of expanding our human umwelt to include information we don’t currently have access to through our five senses. He explains that the brain “doesn’t care how it gets the information, as long as it gets it.”11 At a 2015 TED conference, Eagleman described the potential future results of sensory substitution, whereby “new senses” are created for people: There’s really no end to the possibilities on the horizon for human expansion. Just imagine an astronaut being able to feel the overall health of the International Space Station, or, for that matter, having you feel the invisible states of your own health, like your blood sugar and the state of your microbiome, or having 360-degree vision or seeing in infrared or ultraviolet.

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.”14

It’s at this point that we must consider the possibility that all matter is imbued with

consciousness in some sense—a view referred to as panpsychism.

After Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was published (1859) and subsequent advances in the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology revealed that human beings were composed of the same elements as other matter, the true mystery of consciousness became apparent. And the new understanding that everything in the universe consisted of the same building blocks led to further support for a scientific and evolutionary perspective entailing some form of panpsychism.

Some philosophers go so far as to suggest that there isn’t a hard problem of consciousness at all, reducing consciousness to an illusion. But as others have pointed out, consciousness is the one thing that can’t be an illusion—by definition. An illusion can appear within consciousness, but you are either experiencing something or you’re not—consciousness is necessary for an illusion to take place. In his essay “The Consciousness Deniers,” the British analytic philosopher Galen Strawson analyzes this view of consciousness-as-illusion and expresses exasperation with the utter incoherence of the idea: “How could anybody have been led to something so silly as to deny the existence of conscious experience, the only general thing we know for certain exists?”

Frank points out a similar double standard that is applied to evaluating the various interpretations of quantum mechanics: “Why does the infinity of parallel universes in the many-worlds interpretation get associated with the sober, hard-nosed position, while including the perceiving subject [consciousness] gets condemned as crossing over to the shores of anti-science at best, or mysticism at worst?”

David Skrbina explains that, at first mention, the idea that the inanimate world possesses consciousness seems so anti-scientific that it incites a reflexive and concerted opposition: Upon laying out a panpsychist position, one is immediately faced with the charge that he believes that “rocks are conscious”—a statement taken as so obviously ludicrous that panpsychism can be safely dismissed out of hand. . . . We may see strong analogies with the human mind in certain animals, and so we apply the concept [consciousness] to them with varying degrees of confidence. We may see no such analogies to plants or inanimate objects, and so to attribute consciousness to them seems ridiculous. This is our human bias. 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 Though all the attacks on panpsychism I’ve read lack substantive, detailed arguments, they have been fierce. From the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edwards, 1967) to the New York Review of Books, panpsychism has been accused of being “unintelligible” and “breathtakingly implausible,” with its adherents likened to “religious fanatics.”

Rebecca Goldstein makes the case that we in fact already know that consciousness is integral to matter because we are made of matter ourselves, and it is the one property we have direct access to: Consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.

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.

If consciousness doesn’t need to combine in the way many have assumed it must for a panpsychic reality to be possible, then we don’t face a combination problem at all. As we have seen, experiences of consciousness need not be continuous or maintained as individual selves or subjects. Nor do they necessarily need to be extinguished when the smaller constituents of matter combine to make more complex systems, like brains. The illusion of being a self, along with an experience of continuity over time through memory, may in fact be a very rare form of consciousness.

I agree with the conclusion that Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, arrives at: To situate human consciousness within a larger space of possibilities strikes me as one of the most profound philosophical projects we can undertake. It is also a neglected one. With no giants upon whose shoulders to stand, the best we can do is cast a few flares into the darkness.

In an interview with the author Rob Reid, Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, explains what would happen if we measured a single photon in Wheeler’s cosmological thought experiment: You can now ask, for each photon that comes to me, whether it came from the left [or the right] side of the gravitational lens. [Let’s say] I decide to measure which side it came from, and I find out that it went on the left side. That means I can say that for the last ten billion years, that photon has been on a path that started from the quasar and went around the left side of the gravitational lens. But if, instead, I had chosen not to make that measurement and just measure the interference pattern, it would not be true that for the last ten billion years that photon had gone [down a path] around the left side. So the choice I make today determines the ten-billion-year-history of that photon.

From our current vantage point, it seems unlikely that we will ever arrive at a true understanding of consciousness. However, we may well be wrong about the absolute boundaries of knowledge. Humanity is young, and we’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand.