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

It seems that, under the right conditions, it’s possible to convince people that they have consciously initiated an action that was actually controlled by someone else.

our awareness is experienced across time and cannot be separated from it.

behavior itself doesn’t necessarily signal the presence of consciousness.

at least in some instances, is sheer illusion.

when we examine the evolution of one life-form to another at the level of microorganisms and cells, the stark division between living and nonliving systems is blurred, and a mistaken distinction likely carries over to the boundaries of conscious experience as well.5

BrainPort—a small grid that sits on the tongue and converts a video feed into minuscule electric shocks—the brain can begin to learn to interpret electrotactile signals to the tongue. Using this technology, blind people can eventually accomplish tasks such as accurately throwing a ball into a basket and navigating an obstacle course.

Everything we hope to uncover through consciousness studies—from determining whether or not a given person is in a conscious state, to pinpointing where in the evolution of life consciousness first emerged, to understanding the exact physical process that gives birth to conscious experience—is informed by our intuitions about the function of consci

Pollan points out that “our sense of individuality and separateness hinges on a bounded self and a clear demarcation between subject and object. But all that may be a mental construction, a kind of illusion.”

Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of.19