Conscious

Review

Having heard a few interviews with her, I’ve enjoyed Ms. Harris’ perspectives on consciousness. I became familiar with this work via Sam Harris’ podcast where the Harrises facilitated a discussion with Donald Hoffman.

Both Conscious and Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality suffer a primary problem: what they propose is extremely jarring to our daily experience. They bear the burden of presenting some evidence that reality is not what you think of in daily awareness. Their method is to jar the reader one millimeter so that they can open them to being willing to move 1 kilometer. As a result, the books recount anecdotes and experiments designed to “freak the squares” as the hippies might have said.

The bulk of Conscious is just such a series of “freakings” to challenge our daily experience and scientific orthodoxy. For example, Conscious challenges personal certainties e.g. “the present moment” is real", “I choose whether to my hand.” It challenges procedural scientific certainties as well e.g. “Given that we don’t know what our own consciousness is, isn’t it a bit presumptuous to presume that the majority of matter is not.”

While not without merit, these freakings, in this book, do not integrate into a theory or argument as such. Furthermore, if you’re familiar with some of these classic experiments (split-brain experiments, etc.) much of the ground feels familiar. Nevertheless for someone who wants to engage in topics of free will, self-determinism with those locked in a quotidian or naive modality, the book serves as a useful nudge. Below are my notes recounting the main points.

Summary of Points

1. Why would any arrangement of matter be conscious where conscious means “is having an experience of being itself.” How we move from material things to things having an experience is “the hard problem.”
2. What phenomena, when viewed externally, suggest that a thing is having a conscious experience? It does not seem discernible from behavior. A “philosophical zombie” or a sufficiently capable Turing machine would be indistinguishable.
3. Decision-making seems to be conscious, but we know that split-brain experiments affirm that our conscious mind claims not to know things that our unconscious mind does claim to know.
4. Internally, we are aware we are having an experience. In fact, it might be the only thing we do know (lovely hint of neo-Cartesianism)
5. The experience of consciousness might on a gradient. Perhaps consciousness is satisfied by a drastically lowered standard, but we don’t seem to have a means for describing “conscious-enough.”
6. Is it possible, then, that consciousness, at various positions on the gradient, might be universally distributed, a mere feature of matter? There’s no good prima facie reason to suppose so. Our privileging ourselves seems to be a type of chauvinism. Come to think of if, might this be at the heart of animist belief systems?
7. The supposition that “consciousness is an illusion” is a non-starter. If it is an illusion, we’re still not certain what we’re being deluded about. Similarly to suggest that “consciousness is emergent” says nothing of the quality or degree or mechanism.