PREVIEW: CHAPTER 1: The Mystery, An Introduction

Lights on Chapter 1, an introduction, the mystery. We are all composed of particles indistinguishable from those swirling around in the sun, and the atoms that compose your body were in fact the ingredients of many stars in our universe's past. These particles traveled for billions of years and have landed here in this particular configuration that is you, and are now experiencing the sound of my voice, along with the ideas carried in those sounds through language. Imagine following the life of these atoms from their first appearance in spacetime to the very moment they became arranged in such a way as to start experiencing something. This is the mystery we face at the heart of consciousness. Why do certain configurations of matter cause that matter to light up from the inside with felt experience? Let's just take a step back here and get clear about the definition of consciousness and how I'm using the term in this context. The word consciousness is used in a variety of ways. People often use it to refer to higher-order functions like self-awareness or thought, but I'm interested in something much more basic, consciousness in the most fundamental sense, which I think is actually better described by the word "experience", just the pure fact of felt experience. Other words people use are awareness or sentience, and I actually think sentience is the most accurate term. It's not used that often in our culture, and I think many people equate it with the word "life", so it doesn't land for people as well as the word "experience" does, but when you read the definition of sentience, it's actually the most accurate term for the mystery of consciousness that I'm pointing to. The Merriam Webster definition of sentience makes the distinction that I think is really important. It says "feeling or sensation" as distinguished from perception and thought, and the Oxford English Jictionary uses in its definition "susceptibility to sensation". I think these definitions more precisely point to the fundamental aspect of consciousness and what I and others are talking about when we talk about the mysterious nature of consciousness. But I'm using all of these words "consciousness", "experience" and "sentience" interchangeably in this context. I always like to refer to the philosopher Thomas Nagle's description from his famous essay "What is it like to be a bat?" which goes, "An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism." And when people have a hard time grasping what he meant by that, I like to take them through a little exercise. I'll ask them, "Is there something that it's like to be you right now? Are you having an experience of being you?" And of course the answer is yes. And then I'll ask, "Do you think there's something it's like to be your shoe?" And I think I can safely say that we all have the intuition that the answer there is no. So even if this language isn't as accurate as we like it to be, and whether we're even right or wrong about the consciousness of shoes, we've admitted that we can make a distinction between two states of matter, one that is having an experience and another where that's not the case. So we can definitely distinguish between the two. We know what we're talking about when we point to that difference, whether the lights are on, whether there's an experience present or not. And so the mystery, as I see it, is why any collection of matter in the universe, even brain processing, would feel like anything at all. Why when a certain light wavelength enters the retina and is processed by the brain, an experience of blue materializes. We don't think that a camera or a computer has an experience of seeing blue, even though they also process light waves and can distinguish between blue and other wavelengths of light. And the same goes for plants, of course. Plants distinguish between different wavelengths of light, and the further processing of these distinctions affects their subsequent behavior. But we assume that plants and cameras and computers can do all of this without having a felt experience. And so the mystery is again, why do some organisms have a felt experience of that processing? I often use a worm as an example because we don't know if worms are conscious. They have brains and central nervous systems, but it's not at all clear whether the lights are on for a worm, whether it feels like something to be a worm. But if it does, it's obviously very minimal, and nothing like our human experience. You can listen to the full audio documentary Lights on How Understanding Consciousness helps us understand the universe, wherever you get your audiobooks, or visit LightsOnDocumentary.com to learn more.