This is a short book on the nature on consciousness. Harris begins by stating that “consciousness is experience itself.” She refines her definition by quoting Thomas Nagel, “An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism.” Consciousness is an internal phenomenon. Harris reveals that “it’s possible for conscious experience to exist without any outward expression at all.” People with “locked-in” syndrome and people who suffered through “anesthesia awareness” have attested to that. Consciousness also is experienced only after the human body has first experienced sensory stimuli. “Only after all the relevant input has been received by the brain do the signals get synchronized and enter your conscious experience through a process called “binding”…. Binding also helps solidify other percepts in time and space, such as the color, shape, and texture of an object—all of which are processed by the brain separately and melded together before arriving in our consciousness as a whole.”
Harris questions whether any aspects of human experience require consciousness. Does our consciousness control our bodies or does it just come along for the ride? “We can go so far as to say that few (if any) of our behaviors need consciousness in order to be carried out. But at an intuitive level, we assume that because human beings act in certain ways and are conscious—and because experiences such as fear, love, and pain feel like such powerful motivators within consciousness—our behaviors are driven by our awareness of them and otherwise would not occur.” Interestingly, the only exception she sees is that “consciousness seems to play a role in behavior when we think and talk about the mystery of consciousness…. How could an unconscious robot (or a philosophical zombie) contemplate conscious experience itself without having it in the first place?” The knowledge of consciousness itself is based solely on one’s own immediate subjective experience. Harris reiterates, “the qualitative experience is the entire subject, and without it, I can have no knowledge of it whatsoever.”
Harris explains why the idea of consciousness is so wrapped up in human beings’ conception of the Self. She states, “When we talk about consciousness, we usually refer to a “self” that is the subject of everything we experience…. We have what feels like a unified experience.” Binding helps create this illusion of the cohesive Self. “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.”
Harris seems receptive to the probability of panpsychism, though not willing to endorse it with certainty. She states, “One branch of modern panpsychism proposes that consciousness is intrinsic to all forms of information processing, even inanimate forms such as technological devices; another goes so far as to suggest that consciousness stands alongside the other fundamental forces and fields that physics has revealed to us.” She continues by quoting Galen Strawson, “panpsychism is the most plausible theoretical view to adopt if one is an out-and-out naturalist…. who holds that physicalism is true…. [that] everything that concretely exists is physical…. [and that] all physical phenomena are forms of energy…. [because] panpsychism is simply a hypothesis about the ultimate intrinsic nature of this energy, the hypothesis that the intrinsic nature of energy is experience…. Physics is untouched by this hypothesis. Everything true in physics remains true.”
Finally, Harris rebuts the “combination problem” inherent in conceptions of panpsychism— the idea of smaller conscious units having to combine into larger ones. She states, “perhaps it’s wrong to talk about a subject of consciousness, and it’s more accurate to instead talk about the content available to conscious experience at any given location in space-time, determined by the matter present there…. Considering consciousness to be fundamental allows for matter to have a certain internal character everywhere, in all its different forms. And in this view, consciousness is not interacting with itself, as it would be in the act of “combining.”” She continues, “The solution to the combination problem is that there is really no “combining” going on at all with respect to consciousness itself. Consciousness could persist as is, while the character and content change, depending on the arrangement of the specific matter in question.” This, again, relates to the illusion of a unified Self. “Experiences of consciousness need not be continuous or maintained as individual selves or subjects…. 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.”
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