very short, but good book. nice overview of consciousness and the different philosophical and scientific developments in the field. I was familiar with a lot of the concepts already, but it was a clarifying refresher (especially on split-brain experiments, philosophical zombies, the combination problem) and I also learned some new ideas (like perceptual binding and its interruption, the panpsychist take on "conscious atoms", how "emergence" is not enough to explain consciousness, and the ostensible "hard problem of matter").
(from Roam)
Lying there, I could sense that I was in fact looking out at the sky, rather than up. The delight I experienced came from temporarily silencing a false intuition and glimpsing a deeper truth: being on the earth doesn't separate us from the rest of the universe; indeed, we are and have always been in outer space. (4)
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. (19)
The brain, as a system, does have a type of free will, however—in that it makes decisions and choices on the basis of outside information, internal goals, and complex reasoning. But when I discuss the illusion of conscious will here, I'm speaking of the illusion that consciousness is the will itself. The concept of a conscious will that is free seems to be incoherent—it suggests that one's will is separate and isolated from the rest of its environment, yet paradoxically able to influence its environment by making choices within it. (30)
It seems clear that we can't decide what to think or feel, any more than we can decide what to see or hear. A highly complicated convergence of factors and past events—including our genes, our personal life history, our immediate environment, and the state of our brain—is responsible for each next thought. Did you decide to remember your high school band when that song started playing on the radio? Did I decide to write this book? In some sense, the answer is yes, but the "I" in question is not my conscious experience. In actuality, my brain, in conjunction with its history and the outside world, decided. I (my consciousness) simply witness decisions unfolding. (34)
We have what feels like a unified experience, with events in the world unfolding to us in an integrated way. But, as we have seen, binding processes are partly responsible for this, presenting us with the illusion that physical occurrences are perfectly synchronized with our conscious experience of them in the present moment. Binding also helps solidify other percepts in time and space, such as the color, shape, and texture of an object—all of which are processed by the brain separately and melded together before arriving in our consciousness as a whole. Sometimes binding processes become interrupted, however, due to neurological disease or injury, leaving the sufferer in a confusing world where sights and sounds are no longer synced (disjunctive agnosia), or familiar objects are seen for their parts but are unrecognizable (visual agnosia). (47)
A few months ago, I was walking to get a glass of water in the middle of the night when I heard a loud crash outside. For some reason, perhaps having to do with the fact that I was half-asleep, I experienced the moment in an unusual way: I noticed my body's startle response before heard the sound of the crash. For a brief instant, I felt myself responding to something that "I" had not yet heard. (48)
If the distinctness of the bodily self can be tampered with via such mechanical means [i.e., psychedelic drugs, a stroke, or a neurological disorder], then we must begin to accept that the bodily self—that feeling we are whole, inviolate beings—is not due to some special soul, or "I," resident behind our eyes. [quote from Michael Harris] (51)