Consciousness All the Way Down:
The Next Scientific Revolution?
*The following article was adapted from the script of Harris’s audio documentary LIGHTS ON, and an abridged version was published in IAI Magazine under the title “Consciousness Is Fundamental”
Consciousness All the Way Down: The Next Scientific Revolution?
by Annaka Harris
Almost a century after the paradigm shift caused by Nicolas Copernicus’s radical suggestion that the Earth orbits the Sun, our scientific grasp of the universe was once again revolutionized when the proverbial apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head. Newton opened our eyes to a deeper reality when he described gravity as a pervasive force with laws that govern the attraction of objects in motion. Albert Einstein then came along and ignited yet another mind-blowing paradigm shift for humanity to grapple with. Einstein described gravity not as a force, but as a warping of four-dimensional spacetime where spacetime is the fabric of the universe. Once more, humanity was afforded a slightly more accurate window onto the universe.
Driven by relentless curiosity, scientists have arrived at an even deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of reality through the discovery of quantum mechanics, and another paradigm shift is now underway. Regardless of which interpretation of quantum mechanics, or theory of quantum gravity, physicists subscribe to, one thing physicists seem to agree on at this point is that space itself (in any number of dimensions) cannot be fundamental and must emerge out of a deeper structure. Just as the color green doesn’t exist “out there” but is how our brains represent a light wavelength perceived by the retina, our perception of space probably isn’t “out there” either (at least not in the way we have been led to believe).
The three-dimensional space we experience is yet another way our brains create a map of the underlying reality, but again, our experience often gives us a very different sense of what the structure in nature we’re perceiving actually is. So there are some fascinating questions fundamental physics currently faces. If space isn’t a fundamental aspect of the universe, what is giving rise to this domain we call space in the first place? And will understanding a more fundamental layer of reality help us explain not only what space is, but why we detect the apparent paradoxes of superposition, non-locality, and entanglement at the quantum scale in spacetime?
Strangely, and to my surprise, this is where I found my work in consciousness studies overlapping with fundamental physics; although, my investigations began twenty years ago working with neuroscientists and addressing very different questions than the ones above. My work in the field of consciousness studies led me to believe that consciousness is potentially generated further down in nature than the sciences have assumed—deeper than brain processing or even biology, and possibly crossing into the realm of fundamental properties. I’m still not convinced this is the case, but it was a shock for me to reach the point where I concluded that the following is a legitimate scientific question: Is consciousness fundamental? I had unintentionally meandered into a place where two distinct areas of scientific inquiry might overlap, and I discovered a whole new category of questions: Could treating consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe help us make progress on any of the current theories of quantum gravity? Or, alternately, do any of the established understandings in fundamental physics rule out the possibility that consciousness is fundamental? These are questions I’ve now spent years posing to scientists for my audio documentary, Lights On. And after interviewing physicists who work on the Many Worlds interpretation, M Theory, and newer theories of quantum gravity, I’ve concluded that treating consciousness as fundamental might, in fact, help us make sense of some of the apparent explanatory roadblocks and paradoxes these theories inevitably run into.
This is not to say that the findings of quantum mechanics should necessarily lead us to believe that consciousness is fundamental—that would require a very different argument from the one I’m making. I want my starting point to be very clear. It’s through my work with neuroscientists, biologists, and philosophers in consciousness studies —having nothing to do with fundamental physics or the quantum realm—that I became convinced that placing consciousness at a fundamental level is the most promising solution to the hard problem of consciousness. [1] As it turns out, the conclusion I arrived at is not in conflict with the physics, and may in fact help us better understand some findings in quantum mechanics.
I made the case in my book, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, that a consequential assumption we have made about consciousness is likely false: that consciousness arises out of complex processing in the brain. And the reality may be that consciousness runs deeper in nature than the sciences have previously assumed. I believe the reason for such widespread confusion about the emergence of consciousness is in large part due to powerful intuitions we have about the mind and brain that give us an incorrect picture of the underlying reality. These false intuitions have been revealed to us time and again through modern neuroscience, but the culture has barely begun to grapple with their implications, both inside and outside the sciences.
One central problem the science of consciousness faces is that we can only locate conscious processes in nature through high levels of report and communication. This is one of the reasons we have assumed consciousness only arises in complex systems, rather than being something much more basic in nature, as it’s only in systems that are similar to us that we can find evidence (reports) of consciousness. But at the very least, the work with split-brain and locked-in patients should have radically shifted our reliance on reportability at this point. Ask split-brain patient Julie what she’s experiencing, and you’ll get the impression that none of the input to her right hemisphere is consciously experienced (which we now know is not the case). How could we even begin to guess whether there is a felt experience associated with a strolling snail, or the processing of the kidneys, for that matter? All we have to go on is an analogy to where we find reports of conscious experience, even within in a human brain. Yes, I feel that—okay that processing is conscious. No, I don’t feel that—okay, no felt experience associated with that processing. We’re on very shaky ground here.
Additionally, the sciences have always assumed that consciousness (feeling fear, pain, and all the rest) provides an advantage to living systems, giving us reason to think consciousness evolved in complex life forms. But modern neuroscience continues to give us pause here as well. Our increasing understanding of unconscious brain processes that take place “in the dark” expose the illusory nature of the feeling that our conscious experiences are the proximate cause of our behavior in many instances. In reality, our response to perceived danger, for example—the sight of a bear or the sound of a rattlesnake—is well underway before we become conscious of it, so the feeling of fear does not trigger the response in the way we assume it does. The conscious awareness of the bear, as well as the related emotions, come at the tail end of a stream of brain processing and physical response of the body. (Many people notice in emergencies that they have begun running for their life before they are conscious of what they’re running from.) [2]
The feeling of being a “self” is another contributing factor to our intuitions about consciousness and is something that we understand well at the level of the brain. I discuss the “illusion of self” at length in my work, but it warrants a brief review here. First, I’ll make clear what I’m not referring to when addressing the illusion of self. Insofar as each of us is a phenomenon in nature that can be labeled—in the same way that we can label a cat, a tree, or an ocean wave—we can happily refer to the complex processes that generate a human mind as a “self.” In other words, what is not an illusion is the phenomenon of human minds, or the healthy development and maintaining of what can be referred to as a “self,” along with each person’s autobiographical story. But the truth is that the activity of the brain and its related experience is much more analogous to an ocean wave than to a static object. When we look out at the ocean, we can perceive the waves—and agree to call them “waves”—while understanding that there is no static thing that is a wave. The concept is useful shorthand for a dynamic phenomenon that occurs in nature. The same is true of the human brain, with its 86 billion neurons firing five to fifty times per second. We know that our conscious experiences are, in fact, being generated by dynamic neuronal activity in every moment. The process is analogous to an ocean wave in that the “self” is an endlessly fluctuating process, rather than a static thing.
The “self” I’m referring to that is an illusion is the experience we all have of feeling like a single, concrete entity that has a precise center or location somewhere in the head, the core of which is stable across time. It seems to be a static entity that can even claim ownership of everything that constitutes it in actuality—my body, my brain, my thoughts. The illusion is contained in the feeling that the self somehow stands outside all of those things. And it creates the impression that a solid entity has experiences and thinks thoughts—that the self is the subject of all experiences. But we know that our conscious experiences are being generated anew in every moment and that part of this process includes a “change blindness” by which we fail to notice just how different we feel from one moment to the next, especially across long periods of time.
My realization that most, if not all, of our scientific investigations of consciousness are unwittingly rooted in a blind assumption (that consciousness arises out of complex processing) led me to take seriously the hypothesis that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. And I wanted to understand if the science of fundamental physics had already progressed far enough to rule out consciousness as a fundamental property (and I was wasting my time) or if there was any way in which viewing consciousness as fundamental actually helps us move forward with some of the new theories at the forefront of modern physics, so I began interviewing physicists about the different interpretations of quantum mechanics and the latest theories of quantum gravity.
What I found, to my surprise, was that these vastly different starting points—on the one hand, the discoveries in neuroscience that undermine our assumption that consciousness arises in complex systems in brains; and physics on the other, in its attempts to explain the fundamental nature of the universe—generate similar landscapes. They both lead to a universe that is at bottom relational.
In physics, the paradoxes we find in quantum mechanics and those we face in the observed phenomena of non-locality, superposition, and entanglement point to a description of a relational universe. [3] It may, in fact, be impossible to talk about any aspect of the universe objectively, because the universe is ultimately defined by different perspectives on itself.
The science journalist George Musser investigates some of the most basic paradoxes that arise in quantum mechanics in his book, Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation. He writes about the difficulty of even conceiving of particles in the quantum realm, which led to the development of quantum field theory, whereby fields are more fundamental than particles:
Quantum particles have so little individual identity that you can swap two of them and absolutely nothing changes. Even to call them particles puts a picture in your head that isn’t entirely justified. Two or more of them can also bind together in such a way that they lose whatever innate properties they had and exist only in relation to one another.
Consider, for example, the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s description of the fundamental nature of the universe under his theory of quantum gravity [4]:
The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions. Instead of seeing the physical world as a collection of objects with definite properties, quantum theory invites us to see the physical world as a net of relations. Objects are its nodes. The first radical consequence is that to attribute properties to something when it does not interact is superfluous and may be misleading. It is talking about something that has no meaning, for there are no properties outside of interactions…
If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no “outside” to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it. The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives.
And in his new theory of quantum gravity, the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin reveals a similar picture [5]:
The universe consists of nothing but views of itself, each from an event in its history, and the laws act to make these views as diverse as possible…. Hypothesize that all that the universe consists of is these skies—each one the view of some event. Rather than construct the views from the causal relations, reverse things and derive the causal relations and everything else from the views.
These conclusions are very hard to parse if we’re trying to understand the universe in terms of nonconscious objects and events. But if felt experience is the intrinsic nature of everything in the universe (what matter is at bottom), then conscious experiences are the only things that are “real”— that exist. [6] And everything we perceive “out there” is a representation of other conscious experiences arising in the universe—which are, in turn, shaping our own experiences. If felt experience underlies everything, then obtaining a truly outside, or objective, view of anything in the universe should be impossible. The only thing that can exist in its own right—that can be known in and of itself, from the inside—is a felt experience. Is consciousness. And rather than being a confusing sticking point for all our current attempts to understand quantum mechanics, this intrinsically relational quality of everything would be the natural outcome of a universe in which consciousness goes all the way down.
If consciousness is Fundamental with a capital F (The Fundamental Reality, not one of a number of fundamental properties), the view of every object or phenomenon in the universe is by definition perspective-dependent, because no conscious experience can ever be described (or experienced) from another perspective. That “other perspective” would not be a different perspective on the same experience, but a different experience altogether. That’s how consciousness works. Our perceptions (the sights, sounds, and so forth that give us the impression of “matter” out there in the world) would in reality be the accessible bits of the other conscious experiences in the world from one conscious experience’s “perspective” rather than the concrete objects and phenomena we perceive them to be.
In addition, all conscious experiences are different from one another and are uniquely their own by definition, because the intrinsic nature of each is known from the inside, and nowhere else. The experience of seeing the color yellow, or feeling a breeze on one’s face, can’t be broken down any further. And this would be true for the entirety of the universe if consciousness is Fundamental. The universe would be described simply as conscious experiences arising, and the content of each experience would be dependent, at least in part, on the other experiences in its “proximity,” according to its structure. It seems to me that this could easily apply to different experiences in “space” as well as in “time.” [7] The way the chirp of a bird is experienced in the form of sound is an example of interaction in space, and the way one moment relates to future moments for a single human mind through memory is an example of interaction in time. And we could describe the universe as an infinite (or near infinite) flux of conscious experiences arising, all unique, and all giving shape to one another, like a single piece of fabric that when pulled taut at one point, causes ripples at another. [8]
The view I’m attempting to construct has significant crossover with panpsychism and idealism, but it doesn’t fit squarely into either of those schools of thought. The most notable difference is that my view does not include “subjects,” which I take to be a manifestation of the “illusion of self” and which causes much confusion when attempting to imagine a universe where consciousness is Fundamental. [9] If consciousness is Fundamental, we can explain the phenomenon of human minds and of “self” even more deeply—as different moments of conscious experience in the universe that are woven together through the structure of memory. [10] That is, what the entire universe ultimately consists of is fleeting conscious experiences coming in and out of existence—content, or qualia, taking shape in the “space” that is consciousness. Even the body of a single human being would represent countless experiences arising in each moment, only some of which would enter the stream of memory that constitutes the “self.”
Remember, we do not yet have a way to distinguish between loss of memory and loss of consciousness. When patients undergo anesthesia for a medical procedure, for example, their experience upon waking is the same as if the anesthesia wiped out their memory, rather than making them unconscious for a period of time. We currently have no way of knowing the difference. Consider the experience of Clive Wearing—a man with one of the worst cases of amnesia ever documented. After a virus left him with brain damage, his memory spanned only seven seconds at a time. Perhaps not surprisingly, he continually described his experience as becoming unconscious (or dying), and then suddenly becoming conscious again. In the documentary about his condition, The Man With the Seven Second Memory, Clive often says, “I haven’t been conscious since I’ve been ill.”
If it’s Fundamental, consciousness is what the universe simply is—what everything that exists, everything we perceive “out there,” is all about. And memory, whatever it ultimately reveals about the structure of the universe, links felt experiences together so that new conscious experiences arise carrying information from past conscious experiences. A new conscious experience in the present moment would then seem to be that of a subject moving through time from one moment to the next (especially when assisted by change-blindness), and this is what we experience within the illusion of self. But every new experience in the present moment is, in fact, simply another fleeting blip of conscious experience that comes in and out of existence (though it may contain information from, and therefore be affected by, a past experience). And, if consciousness is Fundamental, what we classify as “perception” could be explained as one conscious experience influencing another conscious experience (the sight of the table is a conscious experience). Each perception is a relationship to another felt experience (the quale arising where I perceive the table to be). And the content of every experience would be dependent, at least in part, on its relationship to the conscious experiences it’s “in proximity” to. [11]
If the reality underlying everything in the universe is felt experience, we would never expect the perception of one perspective (A) on another (B) to be consistent with any other experience’s perspective (C, D, E, etc.) on experience B. Furthermore, if consciousness is Fundamental, we will never be able to reach a consensus on an objective, bird’s-eye view—not just for the entirety of the universe, but for anything within it, as everything we describe will be a felt experience at bottom and can ultimately be known only from the inside. Yet this is precisely what quantum mechanics reveals about the fundamental nature of reality that we find so impossible to digest. This should give us further motivation for exploring new scientific theories that place consciousness at a fundamental level. Might this be the final piece of the paradigm-shifting puzzle that was kicked off with quantum mechanics, transitioning us, at last, into the next scientific revolution?
This paradigm shift could potentially reach the true bottom of fundamental physics, because we will no longer be asking what the fundamental nature of reality is, what the fundamental stuff is made of. We will need the language of mathematics and physics to describe and probe its structure, and there will be much to discover and understand about the structure of consciousness and how it relates to the types of things that are experienced. But we already know consciousness, because it is the direct line to knowing—not necessarily understanding, but knowing—as intimately as you can know anything. (Whatever is true about the underlying nature of my circumstance—even if it turns out I’m in a simulation or a “brain in a vat”—knowing the experience of seeing yellow is still entirely encapsulated in the vision of yellow itself.) And so, if we become convinced that consciousness is Fundamental, we will realize that we have always been in direct contact with the most fundamental aspect of reality, simply by experiencing it, by being it.
Notes
[1] Definition of “Consciousness”
People use the term consciousness in different ways, and many people use it to reference more complex expressions of it, such as thought or self-awareness. But, when I use the word in this context, as a mystery and as something that may be fundamental, I’m using it in its most basic sense: as simply the fact of felt experience. We don’t know whether worms are conscious, but if they are—if it feels like anything at all to be a worm—we can imagine a sensation of pressure as it moves through the dirt, or a simple impulse to move toward food or away from danger. We would never be inclined to imagine that worms have thoughts or self-awareness, but they could have felt experiences. I tend to use the terms consciousness, awareness, and experience interchangeably, but the most accurate term is probably sentience, which Merriam-Webster defines as “feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought.” I think that distinction is important. And the OED includes “susceptibility to sensation,” which I also like and find appropriate as a definition of consciousness in the most fundamental sense. More on the definition, and “the hard problem,” of consciousness can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
[2] It may be confusing when I bounce back and forth between a more macro level of neuroscience; and talking about the underlying reality and a view in which consciousness is fundamental at that level. So when I give examples of how the brain generates the types of conscious experiences that it clearly does, I’m speaking at another level of analysis or conversation—and there’s no more conflict in that than there would be if a string theorist talked about aerodynamics (while understanding that deeper levels of explanation exist, where Newtonian physics and the rest break down). They are simply two different levels of description. At a macro level, the brain obviously gives rise to a range of conscious experiences (which doesn’t rule out other systems’ giving rise to conscious experiences), but what the brain actually is at the level of the fundamental particles and deeper—what actually makes up the particles—is an entirely different level of description. So it seems unavoidable to have to bounce back and forth between levels of description on this topic.
[3] I use paradox here to mean that we observe something that defies common sense; not that we get different, contradictory answers using logic.
Steinhardt, Allan. Forbes. “What Are the Paradoxes in Quantum Mechanics?”
[4] Rovelli, The Order of Time (pp. 79—82).
[5] Smolin, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (pp. 270–271).
[6] I argue in my book CONSCIOUS that if consciousness is fundamental, it must go all the way down, because we will encounter the hard problem anywhere we attempt to insert consciousness in a non-conscious universe.
[7] Assuming that spacetime is not fundamental, what we experience as space and time would still be (limited) perceptions of a deeper structure. And “proximity” would have a slightly different meaning than it does when applied to space (or time).
[8] All these types of details would be questions for a fuller scientific theory, and ultimately research, going forward.
[9] Harris, A., Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 28, Numbers 9—10. “A Solution to the Combination Problem and the Future of Panpsychism.”
[10] Sara Walker and Lee Cronin use the phrase “objects in time” in their theory of intelligent life, Assembly Theory, which I think is an even more accurate and poetic term.
[11] Perhaps every conscious experience is linked to every other, so all conscious experiences affect one another—as in the example of the blanket. This would largely depend on whether consciousness exists without content, as “pure consciousness.” This remains an open question, and I’m not clear on how we can ever come to a consensus on that point.
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