Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind
By Annaka Harris July 22, 2023 ⋅ 5 min read ⋅ Books
Chapter 1: A Mystery Hiding in Plain Sight
Consciousness is experience itself.
Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious?
The most basic definition of consciousness is given by Thomas Nagel.
Consciousness: an organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism.
Is there like something to be you in this moment? Is there like something to be a rock?
It’s the difference between whether there’s an experienced present or not.
At some point in the development of a baby’s brain, your intuition tells you that the baby now has an experience, the mystery lies in the transition.
The moment matter becomes conscious is as mysterious as the moment matter and energy were created.
Why do certain configurations of matter cause it to light up with awareness?
Chapter 2: Intuitions and Illusions
Our intuitions can be helpful but deceiving.
E.g. Some of our intuitions don’t match science and statistics.
Intuition: a powerful sense that something is true without our awareness or understanding.
Two questions that appear deceptively simple
In a system that we know has conscious experience, what evidence of consciousness can we detect from the outside?
Is consciousness essential to our behavior?
Let’s consider that it’s possible for conscious experience to exist without an outward expression of it in the brain; cases of a conscious mind lacking a mode of expression.
E.g. Locked-in syndrome and anesthesia awareness.
But it could also be the case that we lack the tools necessary to detect that expression from the outside.
We normally determine whether an organism is conscious or not by examining their behavior.
E.g. People are conscious but plants aren’t conscious.
We assume that consciousness doesn’t exist in the absence of a brain or central nervous system, but what evidence or behavior can we observe to support this claim?
Some behaviors of people and plants are so alike that this challenges our belief of using behavior as evidence of consciousness.
However, these behaviors may also be confounded by the processes required to support life and evolution.
We can explore our intuitions about behavior and consciousness by instead asking “Does a system need consciousness to exhibit certain behaviors?”
It seems that both conscious and nonconscious states are both compatible with any behavior, so a behavior itself doesn’t necessarily signal the presence of consciousness.
Chapter 3: Is Consciousness Free?
As we’re conscious, we experience a continuous stream of present-moment events and yet, we actually become conscious of physical events slightly after they’ve occurred.
Visual, auditory, and other sensory information moves through the world at different rates.
E.g. The light and sound of a gun shot don’t arrive at your eyes and ears simultaneously, and yet both are experienced simultaneously.
The brain hides the difference in sensory signal arrival times.
To synchronize the incoming information from the senses, the cost is that our conscious awareness lags behind reality.
Our intuition that consciousness is behind certain behaviors is informed by our experience of freely making choices in the world.
Consciousness isn’t necessarily controlling the system, but we know that consciousness is experiencing the system.
It seems clear that we can’t decide what to think or feel any more than we can decide what to see or hear.
Chapter 4: Along for the Ride
No notes on behavioral changes caused by parasites and bacterial infections.
These examples show how blind we are to the complex array of forces influencing and controlling the behaviors around us.
It seems that consciousness is along for the ride, watching the show rather than creating or controlling it.
An interesting exception is when we think about consciousness.
Consciousness plays a role in behavior when we think and talk about the mystery of consciousness.
It doesn’t make sense for an unconscious entity (or philosophical zombie) to contemplate conscious experience without having it in the first place.
Without having experienced consciousness, there’s no difference that a unconscious entity could be referring to because it doesn’t know and can’t know.
It seems impossible for a system to make a distinction between a conscious and unconscious experience without having an actual conscious experience as a reference point.
Presumably, the brain can only think about consciousness after experiencing it.
Chapter 5: Who Are We?
The conscious self is the subject of everything we experience.
All that we’re aware of happens to or around this self in what feels like a unified experience.
That experience appears simultaneous because of binding processes.
There’s binding across space and time.
E.g. Binding color to objects or sounds to movements.
Imagine if binding didn’t take place at all.
E.g. Hearing your voice after your mouth moved.
Without binding processes, you might not even feel yourself to be a self at all.
Consciousness would be more like a flow of disconnected experiences.
The self we seem to inhabit, localized in space and time, unchanging, a solid center of consciousness, is an illusion that can be short-circuited with meditation, disorders, and drugs.
We assume that consciousness and the sense of self are the same, but it’s clear that they’re different.
E.g. A person can experience the world but also experience their sense of self dissolving and floating in space.
Since the bodily self can be tampered with using psychedelic drugs, stroke, or a neurological disorder, then it follows that the bodily self isn’t special and no soul exists.
When Thomas Nagel asks us to imagine what it’s like to be a bat, he’s pointing out that we already know there are modes of consciousness vastly different from our own.
Umwelt: the experience a particular animal has based on the senses and muscles used by that organism to navigate its environment.
Chapter 6: Is Consciousness Everywhere?
Panpsychism: the view that all matter is imbued with consciousness.
E.g. Consciousness is embedded in the reaction of plants to light, the spin of electrons, or black holes.
One modern panpsychism proposal is that consciousness is intrinsic to all forms of information processing.
The author argues that the simplest explanation of consciousness is a panpsychism one, but I don’t agree that the simplest is the most accurate or useful explanation.
Consciousness can’t be an illusion because an illusion can only appear within consciousness. You are either experiencing something or you’re not.
It’s hard for us to drop the intuition that consciousness equals complex thought.
Chapter 7: Beyond Panpsychism
Imagine being a brain without any sense organs connected.
Then imagine your senses being connected one at a time.
E.g. First vision, then sound, then touch.
We’re trying to imagine a simple flow of first experiences and we realize that something like this is possible.
An experience of consciousness doesn’t need to be accompanied by thoughts.
It seems possible to be aware of one’s subjective experience in the absence of thoughts, sights, sounds, or any other perception.
Would two brains wired together produce a new integrated mind? This is analogous to the corpus callosum for the two brain hemispheres but for two entire brains instead.
Is it possible that alongside the conscious experience of “me”, there’s a much dimmer experience of each individual neuron, or a collection of neurons?
Chapter 8: Consciousness and Time
Review of time ideas from Dean Buonomano’s book “Your Brain Is a Time Machine”.