The mystery at the heart of consciousness

If you think about it, consciousness is really everything

Consciousness is everything we know, everything we experience. But the mystery at the heart of consciousness is why in this universe that seems to be

teeming with non-conscious matter somehow gets configured in such a way where suddenly it's having a felt experience from the inside. Suddenly

there's something that it's like to be that matter. And there's a lot that's happened in

modern neuroscience that suggests that our intuitions about consciousness are wrong. And so if it's possible that we've been thinking about consciousness the wrong way

that it's not something that arises out of complex processing in brains

is it possible that consciousness is a much more basic phenomenon in nature

and is essentially pervading everything, so is much more like gravity? Then we can imagine that all types of processing in nature

could include some type of felt experience. I'm Annika Harris, and I write about the science and philosophy of consciousness

I have a book called Conscious, A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

And I have a docuseries titled Lights On. There's no perfect definition for consciousness in the way that I'm using it here in the most fundamental sense

And so it's useful to use Thomas Nagel's description from his essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat

he illustrates a bat that is moving through the world using sonar so it's making sounds the sounds

are bouncing off the walls and the trees and it gets a picture of its external world in the same

way that we get a picture of the external world through vision but you can imagine that the actual

felt experience of that is very different from our experience of using vision so when i use the

word consciousness, I'm not talking about higher order thinking or complex thought or things that

we think of in terms of human consciousness. But when I use the word consciousness, I'm talking

about awareness, felt experience, sentience, interchangeably to talk about this more fundamental

sense of consciousness And this can exist without thought It could exist in a very simple organism that is not capable of thought But even in our human experience we think of a very young child or an infant we know that there are still felt experiences

feeling pressure against the skin, hearing sounds in the room, the experience of heat or cold

And there's clearly consciousness there, and it doesn't necessarily entail thought. so the study of consciousness has largely if not entirely been relegated to neuroscience

which makes a lot of sense because we have assumed that the organisms that are conscious

are the ones that are most like us and we're complex systems the brain is the most complex

system in the universe that we know of and so we assume that consciousness arises out of that

complex processing. But some of these intuitions that we're relying on to make that assumption

have been overturned by modern neuroscience and have been shown to be illusions

So when we're trying to think more clearly and more creatively about consciousness

there are two questions that I think really get at the heart of where these intuitions are

is leading us. Number one, is there any evidence we can find from outside an organism or outside a

system that will conclusively tell us that that organism entails conscious experiences

And the second question is, is consciousness doing something? Does it serve a function

Is it driving our behavior in the way that we feel it is? And our intuitive answer to both of

these questions is a resounding yes, but surprisingly, it's easier to puncture these

intuitions or to shake them up than you might think. Number one, if I go pick up my friend at

the airport who I haven't seen in years and I see a big smile on her face and she's running toward me

everything I see in her behavior in that moment are very good clues that she's conscious

But we know it's possible for there to be no behavior coming out of a system

nothing to detect from the outside when there's a full human conscious experience present

There was a writer for French L. His name was Jean-Dominique Boby

and he had a condition called locked-in syndrome. And this occurs when someone experiences brain damage

either due to a stroke or to an external injury, and the entire body becomes paralyzed so that someone is no longer able to move any part of their body yet they still retain a full conscious experience And he was in this state although he had one point of

mobility, he was able to move his left eyelid. And over time, they developed this technique for

him spelling out words with certain patterns of blinks. And he ended up writing a beautiful

memoir titled The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and it took him 200,000 blinks to write that memoir

It's a great example of a person, an organism, a system in nature that is having such a full

conscious experience, as full as I am having right now, with the ability to write and experience

the world, but with no ability to move or communicate or exhibit any behavior that would

tell us that this person is conscious. And so we can wonder if it's possible that there are other

systems in nature that simply aren't able to communicate or exhibit behavior that convinces

us that consciousness is present in them. And our intuition regarding the second question

is that obviously, of course, our conscious experiences are affecting things. If we encounter a bear or a lion in the wild

that the feeling of fear is the thing that gets us to move so quickly out of the way

to act quickly, to save our lives. But what we now understand about the brain is that the experience of feeling fear

is actually something that happens at the tail end of a sequence of processing

and that our bodies begin responding and moving to a dangerous situation

much more quickly than we become aware of it. This is what neuroscientists refer to as binding processes

Binding processes take in all of our perceptions, all of the information that comes in through our eyes and ears

through touch, and give us an experience of a present moment. So I often give the example of playing the piano

If you press down on a piano key, you'll have the experience of feeling the key move down

at the same moment that you see the key move down and in the same moment that you hear the tone

When in actuality, all of these signals move through the world at different amounts of time to get to your brain

they each take different amounts of time to be processed by the brain The brain is taking in all of these inputs that are taking different amounts of time to reach the brain and be processed by the brain and then deliver them

to your conscious experience as one single moment. And so those intuitions that consciousness

is driving that type of behavior, we now know to be incorrect

So if the intuitions that led us to assume that consciousness arises out of complex processing

namely in brains, are misleading us, we really have only two options for a starting place

Some of these systems are conscious that consciousness arises out of complex processing

or all of these systems are conscious, that consciousness is fundamental, what would that mean and what kinds of questions would we ask

and how could we even study something like this scientifically? We might wonder if experiences can be shared between systems

If you think about Albert Einstein and the fact that he had intuitions for space-time

that no other human being had, And it took him more than a decade to explain this intuition through mathematics and language

and to be able to communicate what he was talking about to other scientists

let alone start to make scientific progress with it. Is there some future science where you might be able to actually share that intuition

We might wonder which types of systems entail suffering in terms of ethics

This is something we obviously care a lot about. We know now that when dogs cry out in pain, they're feeling something very similar to what we feel

And so it'd be interesting to learn what other types of systems might experience pain or suffering

Recently, when I was doing plant research, I went for a jog on this hiking trail

and I actually ran this little thought experiment for myself, imagining that all the plants along the trail were not plants

but were some type of creature feeling the world, moving through the world

And just that little exercise gave me a sense of how different we might feel in the world if we understood that there were many more conscious systems around us than we realize