Consciousness is the great poem of matter. But consciousness isn’t really a response to the world, it’s more of an opinion about it. As miscellaneous as our brain is, with many separate domains, we feel continuous, one mind, one life. How is that possible if the brain’s a congress of specialists? The brain is a gifted illusionist. Here’s one of its best tricks: I seem to perceive the winter woods today in lavish detail, because whatever I pay attention to looms, furiously present, and saturates my awareness. An ice storm has turned a Japanese maple into a glass figurine. As I caress it with my eyes, the rest of the scene blurs, unless I shift my focus to something else, when that leaps into view─a female cardinal with taupe breast feathers and beak orange as candy corn sitting atop a starry fence. I don’t feel like I’m looking through a periscope, but glancing outside at nature in the round. A subtle sense of all that’s lurking in the rest of the scene lulls me into thinking I’m seeing the yard in a single eye-gulp. That bestows a sense of richness, but my awareness isn’t really panoramic. We’re more like a pair of binoculars with legs. Many things register in memory’s lodging house, whether I checked them in or not. Tomorrow I may recall the geometry of bare limbs against the sky, even though I wasn’t attuned to it…until now.

The streaming of consciousness is yet another sleight of mind. Afloat somewhere between done and undone, we ride a fluid present from moment to moment. Life feels continuous, immediate, ever unfolding. In truth, we’re always late to the party. There’s a time lag of half a second between perceiving something and becoming conscious of it. I don’t just mean the sort of reflex that makes a hand recoil from a stove before the mind says too hot! No, all our conscious acts are afterthoughts. Part of that delay the brain spends primping the order of events, so that the world will feel logical and not jar the senses. It takes time for a perception to reach the brain, for the brain to circulate the news, and the sight or tingle finally to hit conscious awareness. It feels like we sense things and know about them at once, but we don’t. Brain time isn’t world time. A little offbeat by design, we’re willing fools, who would otherwise be late for our date with life. We’d feel like we were constantly trailing half a second behind the world instead of keeping up with it. So there’s a butler in the pantry who backdates events. In famous experiments…the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet discovered that the brain processes an action before a person decides to act. If we really do have free will, shouldn’t the decision to act come first?

For years, Libet’s experiments have ignited controversy. Our legal system assumes that adults can choose how to behave, but can they? Or does the brain justify its choices by fooling us into thinking we’re free agents? Our days percolate a thick brew of choices obeyed, vetoed, or postponed. Some decisions require arduous thought. That’s how it feels, anyway. It doesn’t feel like an illusion produced by a brain that, for efficiency or to quash rebellion, lets us believe we’re in charge. What’s being decided probably determines who’s in charge, because a monarch isn’t always needed; sometimes a shop boss will do, or just a loud veto. Some days, and in some circumstances, we’ll have more or less free will, depending on what’s at stake. It was William James who observed that our first act of free will is choosing to believe in free will. We like life to be predictable, so we assume our brain is. Might not be. It might be far more flexible than we imagine, and have a full repertoire of ways to handle problems, depending on their severity or urgency.

All that happens offstage. It’s too fussy, too confusing a task to impose on consciousness, which has other chores to do, other fish to fry. We don’t like to rouse our slugabed mind unless we need to act or react. Pulling on a sock probably wouldn’t require veto power, whereas the impulse to call your boss “a half ounce of insufficiently mobilized prick dust” might. Still, we feel like we make all the big and little decisions, as we sail through the narrows of a day, choosing comforts, weighing risks, hatching ideas, generating feelings, adding new plot twists and characters to our life story.

There are many other sleights of mind, involving all the senses, including the carnival of optical illusions favored by brain scientists and magicians alike. Our bodies con us perpetually in a host of intriguing ways. One instance: pain in the heart or other organs is referred elsewhere because there aren’t nerves linking organs directly to the brain. As a result, our image of our organs is abstract, and the self one feels so sure of is really the possibility of self, phantom limbs filled with actual limbs, a body image partly imaginary, which often extends to include the family one belongs to, the car in which one drives, the carapace of a house in which one lives.

As I think these words, I hold a pen in my right hand, and look to where ink seeps from beneath my fingertips, skywriting loops and squiggles that linger and mean. All the while, I hear these words, which seem to be spoken out loud inside my airy skull. It would take pages to illustrate the hand moves, the ink flow, the pen mechanics, the eyes following that small motion, how the mind communes with itself, why it does so in words. Pages of illustrations? No, it would take the other kind of pages─senatorial assistants or court minions─ages to map the experience to the last detail. Skidding mentally, I think: In the Middle Ages, the sage pages rampaged in stages…on a wise beach. Instead, I write the word instead, am fleetingly reminded of bedstead, inbedstead, but brush that aside as another verbal skid, one faintly erotic, and refocus my thoughts on instead.

We’re not normally aware of such hesitations and detours. The mind feels transparent, an illusion that gives us a sense of control and agency. To think what feels true, little of the backstage action must intrude. Thoughts seem to rise as naturally as bubbles in water. Thank heavens we don’t have to supervise each muscle, dredge each memory, sign off on every transfer and exchange. Thank heavens we don’t have to coordinate the hundred or so muscles in the throat, face, and torso that work together when we speak. Thank heavens we can leave the Krebs cycle (in which oxygen energizes the cells) to the body’s experts, or we’d be fretting over it all day and probably grow so anxious we’d hyperventilate. We thrive on the illusion of spontaneity, of the body working magically, somehow exempt from cause and effect. Truth takes too much time. There’s all that messy analyzing, explaining, and verifying to do. For efficiency, the body just cons us and goes about its business, which, occasionally, we glimpse. At the level of flesh and bone, we all coast on innumerable lies, swim in deceits, thrive on amoral cost-benefit decisions. And yet, as lump sums, as selves, we detest lying in others, punish deceit, strive for compassion, and don’t like being conned. Go figure.

Thus far, no one has defined consciousness in a completely satisfying way, though many have devoted fascinating books to the subject. “Although it is part of my nature,” St. Augustine wrote in the fifth century, “I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How then can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it?” We continue to ask the same questions today. Philosophers, scientists, psychologists, and poets alike have spent lifetimes trying to describe and define consciousness. Other books offer admirable accounts of past theories about it, so I’ll go straight to the current debate.

Here are a few of the main camps. Some people believe that consciousness is an essence given to humans by a deity and includes a supernatural entity like a soul; since it’s not physical, science can’t understand it. Some believe consciousness is completely physical, a mental state emerging from the neurons, and wonder how and why a biological system gives rise to conscious experience. In this second group, there are those who think a host of separate brain systems (vision, taste, hearing, etc.) build our sense of consciousness brick by brick; those who believe synchronized neurons, acting in unison, reach a critical mass that creates consciousness; those who believe consciousness springs from one specific area (a frontal lobe system?) rather than multiple areas; and those who blend approaches. Some people believe it’s a mental state that our sort of brain inevitably creates. Some believe it arises from quantum changes in the structure of the neuron, at the level of subatomic particles, where paradox reigns. Some believe consciousness is physical but that we’ll never understand it because a system can’t observe itself (how can you be objective about subjectivity? and, anyway, which neural activities produce subjective experience?). Some believe consciousness is physical and knowable but that we’re not intelligent enough to figure the brain out, though smarter beings probably could. Separate groups believe consciousness can best be understood through philosophy or psychology or science or literature. Some believe consciousness is physical but we’ll only understand it if we can find a way to blend the truths of science, psychology, philosophy, and subjective experiences such as art.

I may have left out a few camps. Some are open-minded, others vociferous, and the field is quickly becoming as abstract, self-enclosed, jargon-ridden, and contentious as a new movement in literary criticism. Everyone seems determined to invent his or her own terms while pointing out the foolishness of everyone else’s. Or as the physiologist Bernard Katz put it so well: “Certain scientists would no more use another’s terminology than they would use another person’s toothbrush.” Because defining consciousness is part of the puzzle, it’s hard for theorists to agree on the target of their discussion, except perhaps to agree that consciousness is sponsored by the brain. But, generally speaking, there are the consciousness-as-flesh people, the consciousness-as-ghost people, and the consciousness-as-divine people. I suppose there are so many differing views because many are right to some degree.

We may have to accept that some mysteries will remain because we evolved brains specifically designed to hide their workings from us. In any case, we can’t completely shelve our subjectivity. With us life-long, it pleases and defines us in crucial ways, and colors every attempt at objectivity. We need the revelations of neuroscience, but also those of psychology, philosophy, and the arts, which have much to teach us about the subjective experience our brain produces. We’re unaware of the urgent board meeting of our psyche, always in session, acquiring information from the world and the body, and running cost-benefit analyses, a labor of multitudes of cells, providing steady feedback to the brain. Instead we feel like solo masters of our fate, captains of our souls, the stuff of homily and poetry.

One problem I find with some of the theories about consciousness is their belief that it floats so far beyond the vigor of matter that there must be a luminous bridge we just haven’t discovered yet linking brain processes and phenomenal experience. That seems condescending to matter. We’re an arrogant, self-infatuated species, and whatever we argue to the contrary, we do believe we’re the pinnacle of life on Earth. Just as every parent has the most beautiful child, we have the most dazzling brain. Consciousness, what could be grander? Surely it’s more than a mere brain’s squishy parts? But maybe matter isn’t as mere as we suppose. We live in a rambunctious, dynamic, to us magical-seeming universe full of recombinable stuff. Consciousness is just one form of mischief matter can create. Quartz is another one. As are Jupiter, cactus, bombardier beetles, college students. Matter has legs, and it dazzles even when inert. If one day we venture beyond our solar system, we may discover some of matter’s other nifty tricks.

As much as I treasure our mind’s suppleness and high jinks, I don’t imagine it’s fundamentally much different from what other animals experience in lots of antique ways. Only that it seems starkly other because we’ve adapted to such different habitats, evolved a neocortex that likes ruminate on such things, and our brain provides all we know from birth to death. It seems more complex, and is, because we unfurl elaborate states of being. But that just means our brain is more convoluted, not that there’s a threshold past which neurons conjure up something supernatural. Mere matter can be luminous or licentious. Every animal inhabits a different universe. Senses attuned to its unique lifestyle, it perceives only what it needs to survive. Part of the thrill of being human is that we’re uniquely ordinary. We share most of our past and biology with Earth’s other animals. On the subatomic level, we share our basics with matter throughout the universe, with star hatcheries and space foam. But we’re also fundamentally different.

When male alligators respond emotionally to music, it’s for their own special crocodilian reasons. For example, one evening in 1944 scientists invited a French horn player to serenade an alligator named Oscar. Whenever the musician hit B‑flat, the alligator bellowed, as male alligators do as part of their mating display. The same thing happened when a cellist played B‑flat. Although there’s no report of dancing water surrounding the alligator, that happened, too, because part of a male alligator’s bellow is subsonic and makes the water leap like frying diamonds.

What happened in Oscar’s brain is anyone’s guess. But our own reptilian brain works just as mysteriously and mainly swims below our pond of awareness. Given the right note, it makes us bellow without understanding why. Then our higher brain, the storyteller, devises an explanation. Sometimes it’s an accurate one, sometimes merely convenient.  In the oldest swamps of the brain, we have a reptilian logic we’ve saved for millennia. Why part with functions that work so well? When we needed other parts, we added them. But we never lost the reptile core, inside the brain stem, which responds fast and dirty to any threat, real or imaginary. All it has to do is keep us alive long enough to pass on our genes, and that it does with ferocious and sloppy success.

The brain’s dynamo runs millions of jobs, by mixing chemicals, oscillations, synchronized rhythms, and who knows what else. It is looking at a mosaic or a pointillist painting in motion. Study the whole and the parts disappear; study the parts and the whole disappears. Maybe stronger brains will solve that problem in future days. I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts, which I don’t attribute to a governing god, but simply to the surprising, ecstatic, frightening everyday reality we all know. Ultimately, I find consciousness a fascinating predicament for matter to get into.

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From “An Alchemy of Mind”

Posted by: Diane Ackerman

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