Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

Cast aside every ancient mythology, religion and superstition you’ve been taught, and just follow the science. To date the only argument that explains everything is consciousness being fundamental. And it sure feels fundamental, so much so that we typically ignore it and completely forget that it’s always present. Our brains are enclosed systems that process information coming from our senses and our thoughts, and the complexity and nuance of the human brain allows for our experience of awareness. A spider is also an enclosed system of information processing, and will therefore experience all the awareness being a spider can produce. And the same with a plant. Maybe even the same with a Star. What would it be like to be a star?I don’t think these are outrageous or radical questions or claims whatsoever. Scientists who accept the “Many Worlds” quantum theory find that to be completely plausible, but it is far more implausible and complex than the idea that consciousness is fundamental.This book helped me refine my own thoughts on “panpsychism“. It largely begins where I began in my own investigations and ends up pretty much the same place I have come to.It addresses many of the criticisms by pointing out fundamental misunderstandings of this particular version of panpsychism.In plain and simple terms, this book presents the easiest and least complex explanation for what we see in nature and in quantum mechanics, and without the influence of mythologies or religions, or new age ramblings.It also does so in a logical easy to read flow that takes complex concepts, and through the art of conversation makes them simple to understand.

I really enjoyed Annaka Harris' book on consciousness, especially the section on panpsychism, which provides one of the clearest expositions of what panpsychism actually is. The writing is very clear, engaging, and conversational, making the subject very lucid--I wish my own consciousness was like this for only five minutes a day.With that said, one major branch of research into consciousness is missing, omitting some 2,000 years of scientific exploration of the mind, conducted and elucidated by practitioners all over the world, but mainly in Asia (namely, India). Harris does allude to he practice of meditation a few times and also cites her friend, the renowned meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, on one occasion, but overall the pivotal role of introspection and meditative practice to get at the properties of consciousness from a first-person perspective isn't much mentioned, let alone championed, at all.Given Harris' own practice and that her husband, Sam Harris, wrote a whole book about meditative practice as a way to see reality (and consciousness) more clearly, this seems rather odd. A section under the theme of "consciousness in philosophy and religion" would have made less of a glaring omission. One can only guess that Harris or her publisher were overly cautious in trying to avoid the whiff of New Age or kookery.As such, the book does a good job at highlighting what knowledge has been gained through materialist/physicalist perspectives, which are however severely hampered by the fact that they're trying to use a scalpel to cut that very scalpel--an endeavour that's inherently bound to fail. Which probably explains why this approach hasn't yielded many notable results when it comes to unravelling the etiology of consciousness.This (over)reliance on a materialistic framework may have been the reason for Harris to propose in the book that consciousness is just along for the ride, a classical materialistic view that's already been dissolved by philosophers like Thomas Nagel (in "Mind & Cosmos) and Thomas Metzinger (in "The Ego Tunnel") and by meditation practitioners and scholars like B. Alan Wallace (for example, in "Hidden Dimensions"). It's much more likely that consciousness is either fundamental to materialism (a thesis laudably but only briefly discussed in the book) or that it serves as a means by which (sub)conscious agents interact to monitor or effect outcomes (a model of consciousness developed, for example, in the excellent meditation manual "The Mind Illuminated" by John Yates).As someone who does practise meditation, it just pained me to see contemplative practices given fairly short shrift in the book. It's becoming more and more obvious that at the root of a lot of suffering in this world are very mistaken assumptions of what "the world" actually is. This causes so many of us to live well at arm's length from first-person experience, forced to be ignorant of the sources of desires that often lead to distraction, destruction, and a lot of hurt. Seeing consciousness as the fabric that creates and holds the world together could change that. At least this book represents a step towards that, for which I'm very grateful to its author.

I enjoyed this book, though it wasn't exactly what I expected. I thought it would simply be a review of the current thinking around consciousness- what it is, what causes it, etc. It definitely had some of that, but it also had an agenda, to provide evidence that consciousness is not something that is separate and unique to each individual life-form (human or possibly otherwise), and that consciousness and the mind/brain are two separate systems coexisting. I was not disappointed by the sort of bait-and-switch, and might have purchased the book knowing more clearly what I was getting. Some of her examples really knocked my thinking for a loop, and I enjoyed that. I definitely had to chew on some of it. In the end, she convinced me to believe something I'd been butting heads with for a long time, but couldn't quite get settled about.I wished it were a bit longer; it was like being given a taste of icing but not being allowed to have any cake. I wanted more, or at least more time engaging with the subject, and it kind of felt like she introduced another line of thought at the end, then quickly wrapped things up and ran. I hope she'll write a sequel and spend more time fleshing things out, and go further with it. But make it clearer what the book is about so people can choose more appropriately.