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Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by [Annaka Harris]

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

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"If you’ve ever wondered how you have the capacity to wonder, some fascinating insights await you in these pages.” --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals

As concise and enlightening as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, this mind-expanding dive into the mystery of consciousness is an illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience.

What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take our experience of being in the world for granted. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we?

In this wonderfully accessible book, Annaka Harris guides us through the evolving definitions, philosophies, and scientific findings that probe our limited understanding of consciousness. Where does it reside, and what gives rise to it? Could it be an illusion, or a universal property of all matter? As we try to understand consciousness, we must grapple with how to define it and, in the age of artificial intelligence, who or what might possess it.

Conscious offers lively and challenging arguments that alter our ideas about consciousness—allowing us to think freely about it for ourselves, if indeed we can.

Length: 105 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Conscious offers the clearest, most compelling explanation that I’ve seen of consciousness. If you’ve ever wondered how you have the capacity to wonder, some fascinating insights await you in these pages.” (Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals, Give and Take, and Option B)

“Wild ideas are on the table--you’ll come away with an appreciation of the major conflicts and the high stakes that come with any attempt to understand how consciousness really works.” (Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and author of The Big Picture)

“A fascinating book that literally illuminates the enduring mystery of consciousness. Harris makes the journey direct, clear, entertaining, and above all accessible--even to someone like me, who’d never before gotten my head around this complex topic.” (Gavin de Becker, author of The Gift of Fear)

“Harris holds a mirror up to ourselves and the reflection she casts is wondrously unfamiliar. In salient prose that intertwines science and philosophy, Harris turns her joyful curiosity on the nature of awareness. Every sentence of this book works upon the next, delving the reader deeper into an exploration of consciousness. While most books that contemplate the mysteries of the universe make one feel small in comparison, Conscious gives the reader an undeniable sense of presence.”
(Nathalia Holt, author of New York Times bestseller Rise of the Rocket Girls)

“A user’s guide to the scientific thinking on consciousness—delivering an assumption-shattering take on how we think about our mind, our self, and this very moment.” (Daniel Goleman, author of NYT bestseller Emotional Intelligence)

“The AI quest for artificial minds has transformed the mystery of consciousness into philosophy with a deadline. In this gem of a book, Annaka Harris tackles consciousness controversies with incisive rigor and clarity, in a style that’s accessible and captivating, yet never dumbed down.” (Prof. Max Tegmark, MIT, author of Life 3.0: Being Human in the age of AI)

“A remarkably focused, concise and provocative overview of the ‘problem of Mind.’ Written with great clarity, she gives readers unfamiliar with the debate a chance to see the fault lines defining modern discussions about the nature of consciousness.” (Adam Frank, astrophysicist and author of About Time and Light of the Stars)

“I have read many, many great books on consciousness in my life as a neuroscientist. Conscious tops them all, hands down. It deals with unsolved questions and dizzying concepts with a graciousness and clarity that leaves the reader deeply satisfied.” (Marco Iacoboni, neuroscientist and author of Mirroring People)

“A delectable introduction to a fundamental mystery that science has been struggling with since antiquity.” (Christof Koch, neuroscientist and author of The Quest for Consciousness)

“One of those books that fundamentally shifts the way you think about reality. Consciousness is among the hardest concepts for humans to wrap their heads around, but Annaka Harris is a masterful explainer—she started by breaking my existing beliefs about the nature of consciousness and then she rebuilt them into a more nuanced, more complete, and more mind-bending understanding of what’s really going on behind my eyes.” (Tim Urban, author of the blog Wait But Why) --This text refers to the paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist?

We take for granted our experience of being in the world. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we?

In this wonderfully accessible book, Annaka Harris guides us through the evolving definitions, philosophies, and scientific findings that probe our limited understanding of consciousness. Where does it reside, and what gives rise to it? Could it be an illusion, or is it a universal property of all matter? As we try to understand consciousness, we must grapple with how to define it and, in the age of artificial intelligence, who or what may possess it.

An illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience, Conscious offers lively and challenging arguments that alter our ideas about consciousness--allowing us to think freely about it for ourselves, if indeed we can.

--Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals, Give and Take, and Option B --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

File size : 5968 KB
Publication date : June 4, 2019
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 105 pages
Publisher : Harper (June 4, 2019)
ASIN : B07G13W75M
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Language: : English
Lending : Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #53,712 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #9 in Free Will & Determinism
- #43 in Free Will & Determinism Philosophy
- #78 in New Age Meditation

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Lloyd Dewolf

Conscious fails to meet the lofty goal of accessibility

Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2019

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The failure of Annaka Harris’s Conscious to meet the lofty goal of accessibility is apparent in the first chapter.

_Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind_ by Annaka Harris is promised to be as “concise and enlightening as _Seven Brief Lessons on Physics_ and _Astrophysics for People in a Hurry_". This is such a brave and ambitious undertaking as consciousness truly is an enigma.

 Let me jump to the beginning of Chapter Two: Intuitions and Illusions to confirm what the author was trying to accomplish in the first chapter: “Now that we have a working definition of consciousness and the mystery it entails, we can start chipping away at some common intuitions.” So did chapter one give us that accessible, working definition of conscience? No, the author seems to give us sciency riddles, “An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism.”

That quoted definition is followed by a paragraph that is the author’s own definition and the meat of this first chapter:

“In other words, consciousness is what we’re referring to when we talk about experience in its most basic form. Is it like something to be you in this moment? Presumably your answer is yes. Is it like something to be the chair you’re sitting on? Your answer will (most likely) be an equally definitive no. It’s this simple difference—whether there is an experience present or not—which we can all use as a reference point, that constitutes what I mean by the word “consciousness.” Is it like something to be a grain of sand, a bacterium, an oak tree, a worm, an ant, a mouse, a dog? At some point along the spectrum the answer is yes, and the great mystery lies in why the “lights turn on” for some collections of matter in the universe.”

Yes, the difference is simple when considering such dissimilar entities, but that only confirms we can intuitively identify a difference between extremes. Before considering the mystery of why the lights turn on, I want to understand what the properties are of this light and what phenomena you consider distinct and related or not. I’m left feeling that this book is too sophisticated for me and unsure who is the target audience of this book.

The conversation has to start from where the audience is. This book doesn’t meet me at the beginning of my understanding on this topic. There is an assumption that I’m ready to play a hard puzzle. If this is really meant to be accessible the chapter would at least start with what the human experience feels like.

A successful introduction starting from the shared human experience would use language like “subjective experience”, “a perspective of experience”, an “I experience”, or “my body and my environment”. How does this relate to “a sense of being”, “inner feeling”, “an emotional life”, “inner voice”, “a sense of self”, “self-awareness” or “feeling like an observer”? Or explain why this is the wrong path or inappropriate.

We are not told if “reflection” or “deep thought” is beyond this concept. Instead we’re left to parse and re-parse the cohesive, but terse “something that it is like to be that organism”, which depends on appreciating that “it is like to be” is the inner presence’s experience and not experiences like the physical sensation of the stimulus of the air current across a bat’s wing.

I was also counting on the author elaborating on “experience in its most basic form” and say whether there are any indications, observations, or methods of measuring consciousness.

Instead, we see the author setting up the “matter” panpsychism experiment from the start and heightening at the chapter ending with another overly witty “wonderful clear and playful portrait of the mystery” quote which starts: “Sure, consciousness is a matter of matter — what else could it be, since that’s what we are— but still, the fact that some hunks of matter have an inner life… “

I really wanted an onramp to the topic. The author’s expertise in consciousness seems to have made her blind to the needs of those unfamiliar [1]. She accidentally pushed us readers in to these deep waters from a cliff.

I put down the book to capture my first impressions. I came for a “wonderfully accessible book” by an author known for being able to introduce topics to diverse audiences including children, but that isn’t what I’ve found. I see little likelihood that the book will enable new well-reasoned conversations on this new subject for me. These deep, cold waters leave my anxious to what would be asked for me to wrap my mind around next.

I finished the book and it is a fascinating book inspiring awe, but I was correct in my fears. I’m left struggling to come up with my own foundation to consider these ideas from. The book provided no stable structure to build on, but definitely surfaces great thought experiments and questions. It contributes to my interesting in further exploration in this area. Unfortunately, the author, her team, and her supporters’ intuitions on this being a general guidebook are incorrect. The promise wasn’t kept.

1. The lack of a good introduction is more puzzling considering the author acknowledges the “linguistically issue” on the Making Sense podcast #159 - Conscious 12:50. “It’s partly a linguistically issue … it’s not as accurate as we’d like it to be. I actually like the word experience better even though that can be misunderstood too.“ The author goes on to describe how she solves the problem with a back and forth, but I’d argue her solution is insufficient. After reading the book, I also listened to 10% Happier with Dan Harris podcast #190: The Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, Annaka Harris. Here too I got the sense the author believes she did have the feedback that the definition wasn’t working for some readers and she thought she had addressed the issue.

Endnote: The praise in the author blurbs also have the theme of “clarity”, but they all also look to be experts in related subjects. Was this prose tested on people new to the subject? Was constructive feedback received? Was it incorporated into introducing the topics? Or was the test audience intimidated by how brilliant the author and her writing are?

122 people found this helpful

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A Kelley

Great introduction to panpsychism

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2019

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I see the book as being in two parts, the first part being a general overview of consciousness and the second being about panpsychism. The first part had some frustrations for me, with some outdated references to both toxoplasmosis and Benjamin Libet's research. The second part was exciting for me.

With toxoplasmosis, a 2017 study brings into question the idea that contact with cats causes psychosis. I am dismayed that old "evidence" against cats continues to be reinforced.

Re Libet, his research was conducted in the 1980's and has been called into question. Some of the articles referenced in the footnotes are interesting and more contemporary (the ones not behind a paywall anyway) but still, the idea that our brain knows what we are going to do before our conscious self does is complex, insufficiently understood, and IMO risky to generalize or take to heart especially if one is going to use the information to conclude that we have no free will.

Having said all that I very much enjoyed the second part of the book. Panpsychism is a new concept for me, and I like the idea of consciousness as a fundamental property of matter. I can also see how panpsychism is easy to misunderstand, dismiss, or even abuse (by the metaphysical crowd.) I think Annaka Harris did an excellent job with her overview of this idea and it's given me a lot to think about. I recommend this book.

57 people found this helpful

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A Useful Introduction

Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2019

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Conscious makes for a good read if you keep in mind the limitation of having to introduce a complicated subject in some one hundred pages. Demanding no background from readers, Harris first explains why consciousness is a scientific and philosophical problem. Briefly, why do some particular conglomerations of matter have an inner life of experiences while other gobs do not?

She then begins to problematize our intuitions. Are we sure that plants and trees aren’t conscious? Can we be confident that free will is a fundamental part of consciousness? Do we think that our actions depend on consciousness in any way whatsoever?

Having sufficiently shaken the reader up and awoken them to the problem of consciousness, Harris then offers a version of panpsychism as a tentative theory. Distinguishing her account from the straw man theories often debated (a rock can’t think!) she argues that panpsychism offers a coherent explanation for why some matter is able to be conscious—because all matter is in some sense conscious.

Unfortunately, a slim volume allows other approaches little more than a similar straw man treatment. Since all relations between matter in the universe are governed by the laws of physics no such thing as a distinct free will can exist. The fact that physical determinism is incompatible with many interpretations of quantum physics and is itself a controversial stance is not acknowledged. Similarly, the explanation that consciousness is an evolutionary product that maximizes animal adaptivity is similarly dismissed since she’s “shown” that consciousness cannot have an effect on action.

But to engage the reader in clear and non-simplistic prose on a question that admits of lots of jargon, to give readers a sense of the depth of this simultaneously scientific and philosophic phenomena...that in itself is an incredible accomplishment. If the author had devoted more space to a deeper exploration of the science and philosophy around consciousness she would have risked turning it into another unreadable tome. Even if you disagree with her perspective, it’s hard not to welcome this as a useful popular introduction to the subject.

47 people found this helpful

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Andrew Ross

The problem of consciousness has no better introduction

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 23, 2019

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Introductory books on the philosophical problem of consciousness are easy to find but harder to enjoy. You have to luck out, as I did almost twenty years ago when I read Colin McGinn’s little classic The Mysterious Flame. But that book was far from perfect, as I pointed out in several writings. And now, Annaka Harris has written a better book – shorter, clearer, less laced with jargon – that sets a new standard for consciousness studies. I, for one, am happy to recommend it as the best way into the subject from now on.
The great merit of her book, apart from its being so smoothly readable that I read it in a single unwearied sitting, twice, the second time for sheer pleasure, is that it is both passionate and authoritative. Harris knows her topic both intimately and in scientific detail, and demonstrates a close and critical understanding of all the main ideas and theories, many of them dismayingly implausible and some of them frankly incredible, in this burgeoning field of wannabe science, as well as revealing an acquaintance with all the central actors in the community. The passion is evident from her clearly held opinions, which make eminently good sense and raise all the niggling doubts that have bothered me, too, for the last twenty years or so.
A few details are worth remarking on here. Her sympathy with Thomas Nagel’s idea that an organism X is conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be X is conventional but problematic, for me at least. What this “definition” does is to shift the burden onto the question of being, and with a baldly declarative claim, to boot. Anyone who has struggled with the mess Heidegger made with the great question of being will find this unhelpful, and anyone who likes Quine’s views on questions of ontology and existence will say Nagel’s claim merely begs the question. So already on page 5 of Conscious I’m humming and hawing.
Harris gets a lot of mileage from David Chalmers’ great work on the hard problem of consciousness, and his brilliant play with the concept of philosophical zombies, but she may have missed its main value. David’s argument is almost mathematical in its clarity, and in its logic recalls the diagonal argument Cantor used to prove the uncountability of the real numbers. It stands as a logical critique of any scientific theory of consciousness or experience, or indeed as a gloss on the epistemic predicament of any centered subject in any objective world. As such, it can almost be bracketed out from the scientific enterprise, which faces questions about the reality of the self, panpsychism, or temporal experience independently of the hard problem.
Harris is rightly both critical of the work of researchers like Christof Koch, Giulio Tononi, and Anil Seth on the neuroscience of consciousness, where pragmatic results that converge on clinical praxis are paramount, and sympathetic to that work, which of course has an importance that goes beyond philosophical navel-gazing. Her criticism, rightly in my view, focuses on the extent to which that work engages with consciousness itself, as opposed to cognitive performance and the construction of a functional self from neural activity. Her sympathy is only human, and no one can deny that neuroscience is where public funding should be devoted to advance consciousness studies.
As a meditator (and the wife of a meditator), Harris is rightly critical of the concept of self at play here, which sets up a natural resonance with the views Daniel Dennett espouses. The question of conscious experience arises independently of the existence or the sophistication of the self-image that an organism either builds or does not build. This raises the tricky issue of panpsychism. Here I share the curiosity and interest Harris admits to having for the idea, and I agree that an intriguing interface with fundamental physics looms as an opportunity for breakthrough work.
At this point, Harris comes up against hard limits. As she concedes, the puzzles of quantum physics, where the experimental evidence for Wheeler’s delayed-choice ideas raises the deepest questions about the nature of reality, and the puzzles surrounding the concept of time, both of experienced time and of the eternalized time of Einstein’s block universe, are really beyond the scope of neuroscience. Yet these questions are where consciousness leads us, which suggests the need for a major paradigm shift. As I see it, qualia, the quanta of experience, can only survive scrutiny as, say, the “phenomenal vibrancy” of physically fundamental quanta such as photons, which hints at vast domains of utterly nonhuman phenomenology, which hint in turn at Copernican revolutions yet to come.
A little book that can light up an aging brain as this one has done for me is good. Harris has hit all the right notes and hit no dud ones that I can see. As an introduction to the current state of consciousness studies, it has no equal.

40 people found this helpful

Log of Log

Enjoyable (re)introduction

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 30, 2020

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Whether you are new to the subject of studying consciousness or getting back into it, this books serves as an enjoyable way to ease into it. It's written in a very friendly manner and takes the reader through many of the fundamental elements from a modern point of view.

In many ways, this book reads like a podcast or conversation about consciousness, rather than a rigorous review of the subject. I felt the author spent a little too much time dwelling on panpsychism, I found there to be enough variety, linking and contrasting of views to be interesting enough. If you are already fairly well clued-up on the subject, you may still find something of interest since it's a quick enough read to get good feel for the link between points. I also always enjoy reading another person's take on subjects like this, as it is still very much an open field.

Recommended if you're interested in consciousness. (And let's face it, you really should be!)

4 people found this helpful

amazoncustomer

An assault on materialist assumptions.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 20, 2020

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Very clear thought and discussion. The intuitive logic that the brain produces consciousness turns out to be the same logic of the Earth being flat and stationary. The latter intuition has long been disproved and it seems that the former is undergoing a serious review. As someone who has always accepted materialist perspectives on reality, I enjoyed having my assumptions assaulted!

4 people found this helpful

A. Clough

Perhaps more for homeopaths and crystal healers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 24, 2020

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Have just purchased this on promotion and thought I should post a quick impression for those tempted by the 'dustjacket '.
The anti-rationalist approach is flagged early on with the invocation of Thomas Nagel. It's great to explore anti-deterministic world views, but some humility is appropriate - so many seem to ignore that our current understanding of consciousness (and related fields psychology and psychiatry) is of a level comparable with medieval medicine, when the principles of Galen were being espoused by the most respected minds of the day. Presenting wishful thinking, intuitions and "common sense" in the style of scientific rationalism can tend to the disingenuous.

3 people found this helpful

C SMITH

Must read for any interested in consciousness

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 29, 2019

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Wonderful little book that is a must read for anyone interested in the topic. More books should be this sort of length. Annaka finally managed to do what Sam has tried for years to do - help me understand the theory of the illusion of self and free will :-) . The world seems a different place now!

6 people found this helpful

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