Yeah, I read Conscious by Annaka Harris and it asks those questions and...then it gets into panpsychism which is hard for me to get behind but was still a very interesting read. Would definitely recommend.
I thought Conscious by Annika Harris was quite good, but it's been a few years since I read it, I don't totally remember how much she goes in to evolution and neurology.
I would recommend the book Consciousness by Annaka Harris (Sam Harris's wife). It's a very high level overview of many different theories around consciousness. She spends a little too much time with panpsychism IMO, but otherwise it's a fantastic read.
There are parts of it that go into the study of "self" and "ego death" through the use of psychedlics (and other means like meditation).
It’s only mystical sounding because we don’t know much about it, thats what makes it interesting! I highly recommend this book on the subject, its a quick read and a good summary of what we do know about the topic.
https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Brief-Guide-Fundamental-Mystery/dp/0062906712
Haha, oh man. Thank you! I remember checking out Erowid reports in HS 18 years ago and use to journal my reports when I was younger. I lost my journals, so this is technically my first trip report.
This is probably the first time I ever really felt prepared mentally and physically, all my previous trips when I was younger were more spontaneous and during a phase where I was experimenting a lot, so the delta between my default state and peak trip was considerably noticeable.
re: Panpsychism - I highly recommend Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris, definitely opened my mind and made me consider it as a legitimate possibility.
Submission Statement: In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with his wife, Annaka Harris, about her new book, <em>CONSCIOUS: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind</em>. And yes they are adorable together.
>I think it does need an explanation since so many people claim to experience it, but I don't see it as any more difficult to explain from a material basis than intelligence or emotions.
Are you familiar with the hard problem of consciousness and do you understand why it's considered separate from the soft problem?
We can explain how qualia / subjective experience emerges within a physical conscious system, but nobody really knows why it emerges. Clearly, consciousness is intimately tied to physical reality, to correlates in the brain, but subjective experience requires an additional quality that seemingly cannot be explained in purely physical terms. Philosopher David Chalmers uses the following analogy to get the point across.
What is it like to be a bat? Think about it. You may imagine what it might be like to use echolocation to navigate the world or what it's like to fly. Whatever the answer is, we all agree that there is an answer, there is something that it's like to be a bat. Presumably, a system is conscious when there is something that it's like to be that system.
We can understand the biological and neurological mechanisms that allowed consciousness to emerge within the bat's mind (the soft problem of consciousness), but we don't yet know how to answer the question of why subjective experience exists (the hard problem of consciousness). Why is there something that it's like to be a bat? Subjective experience is not a necessary component of intelligent behavior. A clump of matter arranged into a brain and that behaves intelligently, for all intents and purposes, should still just be a clump of matter without subjective experience.
The logical conclusion that many scientists and philosophers have reached is that qualia / subjective experience must either be fundamental to the universe, universal (meaning it exists everywhere within everything), or both.
In fact, the leading theory of consciousness (and the only one that attempts to explain the hard problem) suggests both of these things could be true. Based on my understanding, Integrated Information Theory (IIT) attempts to explain consciousness purely in terms of information independent of any physical substrates. Information needs to be taken in and integrated together to create a singular, irreducible experience. Without integration, consciousness would be unrecognizable and would have no character to its experience.
However, IIT also rests upon the assumption that information itself has something to do with conscious awareness and that all information may be conscious (or be synonymous with conscious awareness) in some fundamental way. It just doesn't obtain a character and is unrecognizable to us without integration. IIT is a form of panpsychism in this sense. IIT is still in development, but it is testable in that we can measure degrees of information integration within a system, and this does appear to consistently describe consciousness in human brains (areas with more integration are more strongly associated with conscious experience).
If you want to look into this more, then I highly recommend the book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris. This book does a great job at breaking down the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" in a way that's understandable for a layperson and it does so in a completely secular way with no religious or "new age" woo thrown in. You can also listen to it on Audible narrated by the author herself. Annaka Harris was also on the Lex Friedman podcast earlier this year. Here's a link.
I always recommend the book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris. This book does a great job at breaking down the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" in a way that's understandable for a layperson and it does so in a completely secular way with no religious or "new age" woo thrown in. You can also listen to it on Audible narrated by the author herself.
Many people might be familiar with the "soft problem of consciousness" which deals with explaining consciousness on physical, material level. We're fully capable of describing properties of conscious systems (pattern recognition, problem solving, environmental awareness, etc.) and their underlying physical substate (animal brains, complex neural networks, etc.). Available evidence seemingly points to consciousness being an emergent phenomenon from information processing in complex neural networks.
However, the "hard problem of consciousness" has to do with explaining why conscious systems have qualia, or subjectivity. It's entirely conceivable that a complex intelligent system can exist and be capable of everything a human can do but not have the "lights turned on" so to speak. That is to say, it has no subjectivity, no first-person experience behind the curtain of behavior. This is the philosophical zombie thought experiment popularized by philosopher David Chalmers to help describe what the hard problem of consciousness is. Based on what we know, subjectivity doesn't appear to be a necessary component of intelligent behavior. So why do we have subjectivity at all?
Here's a summary of another analogy that David Chalmers uses to describe the hard problem. What is it like to be a bat? Think about it. You may imagine what it might be like to use echolocation to navigate the world or what it's like to fly. Whatever the answer is, we all agree that there is an answer, there is something that it's like to be a bat. Presumably, a system is conscious when there is something that it's like to be that system.
We can understand the physical, biological, and neurological mechanisms that allowed consciousness to emerge within the bat's mind (the soft problem of consciousness), but we don't yet know how to answer the question of why subjective experience exists (the hard problem of consciousness). Why is there something that it's like to be a bat?
Only in very recent history have scientists begun to take this question seriously. Previously, people maintaining a scientific viewpoint would answer the soft problem of consciousness and then stop there. To them, the question was answered sufficiently. But to sufficiently understand the totality of consciousness, we have to explain subjectivity.
Some scientific thinkers are looking to ideas like panpsychism as one possible avenue of exploration which is the idea that all of reality/matter possesses consciousness on some fundamental level. Panpsychism isn't an inherently unscientific idea (as many might suggest), we merely lack the means to investigate it scientifically.
Anyway, the book does a great job at describing how our thoughts about consciousness have evolved over time and how our attempts at understanding the physical properties of consciousness are insufficient for understanding why we have subjective experience. Annaka Harris was also on the Lex Friedman podcast earlier this month. Here's a link.
Consciousness isn't one specific thing, it's a collection of different cognitive capacities all bundled together. Historically, we've never had the tools to examine these cognitive capacities so we've just thrown them in a bucket of mysteries we labeled "consciousness". Now that neuroscience has advanced enough, we are able to examine these different capacities. In animals, pattern recognition and problem solving are some of the core characteristics of consciousness.
This perspective is referred to as the "soft problem of consciousness". It involves understanding the underlying material mechanisms that allows consciousness to emerge. The soft problem is entirely understandable as we learn more and more about the material world and the material properties of things we consider intelligent (animal brains, neural networks, etc.). Available evidence seemingly points to consciousness being an emergent phenomenon from information processing in complex neural networks.
However, there's also the "hard problem of consciousness" which has to do with explaining why conscious systems have qualia, or subjectivity. It's entirely conceivable that a complex intelligent system can exist and be capable of everything a human can do but not have the "lights turned on" so to speak. That is to say, it has no subjectivity, no first-person experience behind the curtain of behavior. This is the philosophical zombie thought experiment popularized by philosopher David Chalmers to help describe what the hard problem of consciousness is. Based on what we know, subjectivity doesn't appear to be a necessary component of intelligent behavior. So why do we have subjectivity at all?
Here's a summary of an analogy that David Chalmers uses to describe the hard problem. What is it like to be a bat? Think about it. We may imagine what it might be like to use echolocation to navigate the world or what it's like to fly. Whatever the answer is, we all agree that there is an answer, there is something that it's like to be a bat. Presumably, a system is conscious when there is something that it's like to be that system.
We can understand the physical, biological, and neurological mechanisms that allowed consciousness to emerge within the bat's mind (the soft problem of consciousness), but we don't yet know how to answer the question of why subjective experience exists (the hard problem of consciousness). Why is there something that it's like to be a bat?
Only in very recent history have scientists begun to take this question seriously. Previously, people maintaining a scientific viewpoint would answer the soft problem of consciousness and then stop there. To them, the question was answered sufficiently. But to sufficiently understand the totality of consciousness, we have to explain subjectivity.
Some scientific thinkers are looking to ideas like panpsychism as one possible avenue of exploration which is the idea that all of reality/matter possesses consciousness on some fundamental level. Panpsychism isn't an inherently unscientific idea (as many might suggest), we merely lack the means to investigate it scientifically.
I highly recommend the book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris. This book does a great job at breaking down the hard problem of consciousness in a way that's understandable for a layperson and it does so in a completely secular way with no religious or "new age" woo thrown in. You can also listen to it on Audible narrated by the author herself.
You're merely describing the soft problem of consciousness. The soft problem of consciousness involves understanding the underlying material mechanisms that allows consciousness to emerge. The soft problem is entirely understandable as we learn more and more about the material world and the material properties of things we consider intelligent (animal brains, neural networks, etc.). Available evidence seemingly points to consciousness being an emergent phenomenon from information processing in complex neural networks.
However, the hard problem of consciousness has to do with explaining why conscious systems have qualia, or subjectivity. It's entirely conceivable that a complex intelligent system can exist and be capable of everything a human can do but not have the "lights turned on" so to speak. That is to say, it has no subjectivity, no first-person experience behind the curtain of behavior. This is the philosophical zombie thought experiment popularized by philosopher David Chalmers to help describe what the hard problem of consciousness is. Based on what we know, subjective experience doesn't appear to be a necessary component of intelligent behavior. So why do we have subjectivity at all?
What is it like to be a bat? Whatever the answer is, we all agree that there is an answer, there is something that it's like to be a bat. We can understand the physical, biological, and neurological mechanisms that allowed consciousness to emerge within the bat's mind (the soft problem of consciousness), but we don't yet know how to answer the question of why subjective experience exists (the hard problem of consciousness). Why is there something that it's like to be a bat?
Only in very recent history have scientists begun to take this question seriously. Previously, people maintaining a scientific viewpoint would answer the soft problem of consciousness and then stop there. To them, the question was answered sufficiently. But to sufficiently understand the totality of consciousness and experience, we have to explain the subjectivity behind experience.
Some scientific thinkers are looking to ideas like panpsychism as one possible avenue of exploration which is the idea that all of reality/matter possesses consciousness on some fundamental level. Panpsychism isn't an inherently unscientific idea (as many might suggest), we merely lack the means to investigate it scientifically.
I would recommend the book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris. This book does a great job at breaking down the hard problem of consciousness in a way that's understandable for a layperson and it does so in a completely secular way with no religious woo thrown in.
The soft problem of consciousness involves understanding the underlying material mechanisms that allows consciousness to emerge. The soft problem is entirely understandable as we learn more and more about the material world and the material properties of things we consider intelligent (animal brains, neural networks, etc.). All available evidence points to the fact that consciousness is an emergent phenomena from information processing in complex neural networks.
The hard problem of consciousness has to do with explaining why conscious systems have qualia, or subjectivity. It's entirely conceivable that a complex intelligent system can exist and be capable of everything a human can do but not have the "lights turned on" so to speak. That is to say, it has no subjectivity, no first-person experience behind the curtain of behavior. Based on what we know, subjective experience doesn't appear to be a necessary component of intelligent behavior.
What is it like to be a bat? Whatever the answer is, we all agree that there is an answer, there is something that it's like to be a bat. We can understand the physical, biological, and neurological mechanisms that allowed consciousness to emerge within the bat's mind (the soft problem of consciousness), but we don't yet know how to answer the question of why subjective experience exists (the hard problem of consciousness). Why is there something that it's like to be a bat?
Nobody really knows how to tackle this question and if anyone says they have an answer they are almost certainly wrong. Only in very recent history have scientists begun to take this question seriously. Previously, people maintaining a scientific viewpoint would answer the soft problem of consciousness and then stop there. To them, the question was answered sufficiently. But to sufficiently understand the totality of consciousness and experience, we have to answer the question of why we truly experience anything at all (to explain subjective experience). Some scientific thinkers are looking to things like panpsychism as one possible avenue of exploration which is the idea that all of reality/matter possesses consciousness on some fundamental level. Panpsychism isn't an inherently unscientific idea, we merely lack the means to investigate it scientifically.
I would recommend the book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris. This book does a great job at breaking down the hard problem of consciousness in a way that's understandable for a layperson and it does so in a completely secular way with no religious woo thrown in.
BEST. CHANNEL. EVER!!!
Also this book is a neat read on the topic:
https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Brief-Guide-Fundamental-Mystery/dp/0062906712
You're probably just making a joke but this is a fun, short read on how there may be some form of consciousness property in everything.