How the Mind Changed by Joseph Jebelli

Author:Joseph Jebelli [JEBELLI, JOSEPH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Illusion of Consciousness

What is it like to be you? To wake up every morning, look at yourself in the mirror, and go about your daily life? What is it like to think all the things you think, to feel all the things you feel? It must be at least somewhat different from being me: whoever you are, you have your own history, your own experiences, your own memories, thoughts and desires. Your own life. Your own sense of being you.

And so we come to arguably the biggest mystery of the human brain: consciousness – our subjective experience of the world and all its perceptual contents, including sights, sounds, thoughts and sensations. A private inner universe that utterly disappears in states such as general anaesthesia or dreamless sleep. And something so mysterious that we still find it notoriously difficult to understand or even define.

Many have tried. In his famous 1974 essay, ‘What is it Like To Be a Bat?’, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel asks us to imagine changing places with a bat. His interest wasn’t in bats but in making the point that an organism can only be considered conscious ‘if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism.’1 We could call this the subjective experience of being a bat; a state of being that is comparable to the bat’s.

Let’s take Nagel up on his challenge and imagine being a bat. A bat’s experience must be starkly different from our own. Most use echolocation to navigate and find food, releasing sound waves from their mouths or noses that bounce off objects and return to their ears, informing them of the object’s shape, size and location. Some bats glide through the air releasing slow and steady pulses of sound, which then rapidly speed up when they swoop down on their prey. Others calculate their speed relative to their prey using the Doppler effect (the change in sound frequency that happens when the source and/or the receiver are moving; the same reason an ambulance siren sounds differently as it passes). Being a bat, I imagine, would be to live in a shadowy, kaleidoscopic world of sound, instinct and twilight flight.

But is this really what it would be like, or have I simply tried to imagine that I am a bat? If there is in fact something that it is like to be a bat, is it merely a sense of bat subjectivity, or something more? It’s hard to say.

In the 1990s, the Australian philosopher David Chalmers took things further, proposing a hypothetical entity called the ‘philosophical zombie’: an exact, atom-for-atom duplicate of a human, indistinguishable from a real person in all its behaviour, only with no conscious experience whatsoever. Spooky, right? I envisage such a being to be a bit like Patrick Bateman, the protagonist villain of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho, who at one point in the story reveals,

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