Conscious by Annaka Harris

Author:Annaka Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Christof Koch is one neuroscientist who is willing to consider the panpsychic interpretation, telling an interviewer:

If you take a more conceptual approach to consciousness, the evidence suggests there are many more systems that have consciousness—possibly all animals, all unicellular bacteria, and at some level maybe even individual cells that have an autonomous existence. We might be surrounded by consciousness everywhere and find it in places where we don’t expect it because our intuition says we’ll only see it in people and maybe monkeys and also dogs and cats. But we know our intuition is fallible, which is why we need science to tell us what the actual state of the universe is.15

I follow him here wholeheartedly, but he then goes on to say things like, “We know that most organs in your body do not give rise to consciousness. Your liver, for example, is very complicated, but it doesn’t seem to have any feelings.”16 If one can imagine that a worm has some level of consciousness (and that it would maintain its consciousness while residing in a human body), whether it’s contributing to the scope of consciousness that “I” am experiencing right now is irrelevant to the question of whether the worm is experiencing something. So these separate lines of investigation (what contributes to “my” consciousness versus what is conscious) end up confusing the larger question about what consciousness is in the first place and where in the universe we will find it.

By entertaining the notion that bacteria or individual cells could have some level of consciousness, Koch seems open to a modern version of panpsychism, yet in the same conversation he asserts that the cerebellum, with its sixty-nine billion neurons, “does not give rise to consciousness.” But just because the cerebellum is not responsible for the part of my brain that governs language or for the flow of consciousness that I consider to be “me,” we can still wonder whether it’s another region (or regions) of consciousness, just as we can speculate that a worm or a bacterium might be conscious. Although Koch is here addressing consciousness in two different contexts—considering a panpsychic view in one instance, and pointing to specific processes in the body that aren’t included in the typical experience of consciousness in the other—the overall thinking on this subject in neuroscience and philosophy tends to be inconsistent; or at the very least, a piece of the conversation is often missing.

And even though, as mentioned earlier, Thomas Nagel’s definition of the word “consciousness” (i.e., being like something) is the most accurate way to talk about subjective experience, there are a variety of ways people use the word (the capacity for self-reflection, wakefulness, alertness, etc.), which causes additional confusion. But we can continue to pose questions about whether consciousness exists outside systems that can report back about it—we just have to do so on another level of conversation. When I am unconscious during a period of deep sleep, for instance, all we know is that the part of

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