Conscious (Kindle highlights)

An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism. (p. 5)
The great mystery lies in why the “lights turn on” for some collections of matter in the universe. (p. 6)
The moment matter becomes conscious seems at least as mysterious as the moment matter and energy sprang into existence in the first place. (p. 7)
Chamovitz explains how the stimulation of a plant cell causes cellular changes that result in an electrical signal—similar to the reaction caused by the stimulation of nerve cells in animals—and “just like in animals, this signal can propagate from cell to cell, and it involves the coordinated function of ion channels including potassium, calcium, calmodulin, and other plant components.” (p. 16)
Because of the vast interconnections and functions of these mycorrhizal networks, they have been referred to as “earth’s natural Internet.” (p. 18)
The problem is that both conscious and nonconscious states seem to be compatible with any behavior, even those associated with emotion, so a behavior itself doesn’t necessarily signal the presence of consciousness. (p. 19)
We have a deeply ingrained intuition, and therefore a strongly held belief, that systems that act like us are conscious, and those that don’t are not. But what the zombie thought experiment makes vivid to me is that the conclusion we draw from this intuition has no real foundation. (p. 21)
We now have reason to believe that with access to certain activity inside your brain, another person can know what you’re going to do before you do. (p. 27)
Note that in such experiments, the subjects felt they were making a freely willed action that, in actuality, had already been set in motion before they felt they made the decision to move. (p. 28)
Even though we are talking about modifying a conscious experience, consciousness itself isn’t necessarily controlling the system; all we know is that consciousness is experiencing the system. (p. 33)
It is no contradiction to say that consciousness is essential to ethical concerns, yet irrelevant when it comes to will. (p. 33)
It seems clear that we can’t decide what to think or feel, any more than we can decide what to see or hear. (p. 34)
It’s hard to see how conscious experience plays a role in behavior. That’s not to say it doesn’t, but it’s almost impossible to point to specific ways in which it does. (p. 42)
And when I turn these ideas over in my mind, the fact that my thoughts are about the experience of consciousness suggests that there is a feedback loop of sorts and that consciousness is affecting my brain processing. After all, my brain can think about consciousness only after experiencing it (one would presume). (p. 43)
He describes the brain as a “prediction engine” and explains that “what we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.” In a sense, he says, “we predict ourselves into existence.” (p. 45)
To the surprise of the first neuroscientists to conduct such experiments (and to the rest of us!), it seems that the same person can have two different answers to a question, along with completely different desires and opinions in general. And even more astonishing is the discovery that the feelings and opinions of each hemisphere seem to be privately experienced and unknown to the other. (p. 45)
It’s because of the value of simplicity that I tend to favor the branch of panpsychism that describes consciousness as fundamental to matter—as opposed to requiring a certain level of information processing for consciousness to exist. (p. 67)
The natural tendency of scientific exploration is to arrive at as simple an explanation as possible, and the concept of consciousness emerging out of nonconscious material represents a kind of failure of the typical goal of scientific explanation. (p. 68)
Strawson posits that “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.” (p. 72)
How can consciousness increase the likelihood of survival if it doesn’t affect our behavior in the typical sense? (p. 79)
It’s only because we experience consciousness so readily, and ascribe it to other life-forms by analogy so easily, that it seems like an obvious capacity (and that we’re not continually shocked to be experiencing something in every waking moment). We should be as surprised by the reality of our own consciousness as we would be to learn that the latest smartphone is conscious. (p. 80)
In actuality, if a version of panpsychism is correct, everything will still appear to us and behave exactly as it already does. (p. 84)
Galen Strawson makes a similar point by turning the mystery of consciousness on its head. He argues that consciousness is in fact the only thing in the universe that is not a mystery—in the sense that it is the only thing we truly understand firsthand. According to Strawson, it is matter that’s utterly mysterious, because we have no understanding of its intrinsic nature. And he has dubbed this “the hard problem of matter”. (p. 89)
If two human brains were connected, both people might feel as if the content of their consciousness had simply expanded, with each person feeling a continuous transformation from the content of one person to the whole of the two, until the connection was more or less complete. It’s only when you insert the concepts of “him,” “her,” “you,” and “me” as discrete entities that the expanding of content for any area of consciousness (or even multiple areas merging) becomes a combination problem. (p. 94)
It seems probable that only complex minds are capable of great happiness and great suffering. In that case, even if a version of panpsychism were true, not all islands of consciousness would be equal, or equally important to understand. (p. 99)
This experiment tells us that light acts differently depending on whether or not it is being measured. Without a measurement, light acts like a wave; and when it is measured, it takes on the characteristics of individual particles. Some have made the claim that in order for light to behave like particles, not only does a measurement have to be made but that measurement has to be consciously observed. I’m not sure how anyone can definitively state that consciousness is implicated in the strangeness of the double-slit experiment, and here I follow the overwhelming consensus among scientists, including Wheeler: that photons exist in many possible states at once until interacting with something, but the something needn’t be a conscious something. (This would change, of course, if we were to discover that consciousness is fundamental to matter, as consciousness would then be associated with all measurement, by definition.) As if these results weren’t strange enough, Wheeler introduced the element of time and made the prediction that even if we perform such a measurement after a photon has passed through one of the slits, we would still get the same effect, causing the photon to act like a particle retroactively. In other words, he predicted that a measurement in the present would mysteriously influence the past. This is the delayed-choice experiment, and it was finally conducted in 2007, confirming Wheeler’s prediction. (p. 106)
This experiment tells us that light acts differently depending on whether or not it is being measured. Without a measurement, light acts like a wave; and when it is measured, it takes on the characteristics of individual particles. (p. 106)
I’m not sure how anyone can definitively state that consciousness is implicated in the strangeness of the double-slit experiment, and here I follow the overwhelming consensus among scientists, including Wheeler: that photons exist in many possible states at once until interacting with something, but the something needn’t be a conscious something. (p. 107)
Wheeler introduced the element of time and made the prediction that even if we perform such a measurement after a photon has passed through one of the slits, we would still get the same effect, causing the photon to act like a particle retroactively. In other words, he predicted that a measurement in the present would mysteriously influence the past. This is the delayed-choice experiment, and it was finally conducted in 2007, confirming Wheeler’s prediction. (p. 107)
As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand. (p. 110)