By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
When I was five, not long after the night I sat on my father’s shoulders among the thousands of people on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian Parliament singing protest songs to take down the Communist dictatorship, my parents got us a hamster. I would say got me a hamster, but they were still in their twenties and delighted in him just as much — a handsome caramel fellow with a confident curiosity about his tiny world.
Resentful that I had to answer to a name I had not chosen, I refused to perpetrate the same injustice on the hamster. So he became The Hamster.
The way I remember it, one day the anonymous hamster vanished. After conducting an Interpol-level search around our small sublet, we looked at each other bewildered, then turned in unison to the only unexamined area — the open computer my father was assembling from parts in a corner of the living room. And there was The Hamster, tucked behind the motherboard, dead. (I would later learn that rodents seek out snug warm places to die in.) I wished that we could disassemble him and put him back together in working order. But although I had no notion of consciousness, I intuitively understood that a creature was fundamentally different from a computer — that although the computer could do math and The Hamster could not, The Hamster had an experience of hamsterness for which the computer had no analogue; that although both were now inanimate, The Hamster had been and had ceased to be in a way the tenseless computer never would — one a system of feeling in time, the other untouched by time and devoid of any internal felt experience of being a system.
Wassily Kandinsky: Sketch for Several Circles, 1926. (Available as a print.)
And yet the better metaphor for consciousness may have been sitting on the other side of the living room: my mother’s piano — atoms arranged into a certain configuration of matter that has reached a certain degree of complexity to become a piano so that humankind can send Bach into the cosmos and a five-year-old can madden the neighbors with endless renditions of the Moonlight Sonata. You can run the process backwards: Remove an atom from the piano and it remains a piano; keep going long enough, atom by atom, and it will eventually cease being a piano — but no particular atom marks the boundary of its unbecoming.
This is the currently accepted emergence model of consciousness — matter configured to such a degree of complexity that it becomes capable of experiencing itself.
But perhaps our entire model is broken.
Perhaps consciousness is not the instrument assembled atom by atom to play the music of being.
Perhaps it is the music itself.
Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s, inspired by the artist’s experience of listening to a symphony. (Available as a print.)
That possibility — that consciousness is not emergent but fundamental, that it was always there in the universe even before gravity compacted the first atoms into the first star — is what Annaka Harris reckons with in her superb audio documentary Lights On.
Defying both the unsound mysticism and the unimaginative materialism into which most current views of consciousness fall, she invites a new dimension of thought to this Flatland of perspectives, tessellating ideas from cognitive science and quantum physics, string theory and assembly theory, mycorrhizal networks and AI. Drawing on two decades of working with neuroscientists and more than thirty hours of interviews with physicists, she picks up where her 2021 book Conscious left off to explore how our starting assumptions shape the questions we ask, which in turn shape the answers we constellate into reality: We have assumed that consciousness is complex and emergent because we are conscious and our complex brains took eons to evolve, but rather than something arising once non-conscious matter is configured in a particular way, consciousness might turn out to be an intrinsic property of matter that has existed for as long as the universe.
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Defining consciousness as “just the pure fact of felt experience,” she reflects in the introduction:
The mystery, as I see it, is why any collection of matter in the universe — even brain processing — would feel like anything at all, why when a certain light wavelength enters the retina and is processed by the brain, an experience of blue materializes. We don’t think that a camera or a computer has an experience of seeing blue, even though they also process lightwaves and can distinguish between blue an other wavelengths of light… without having a felt experience.
The mystery she examines is why some systems of matter have a felt experience of their internal processing — those incommunicables of what it is like to be me and what it is like to be you known as qualia, which cleave open the abyss between us. An epoch before neuroscience, Emily Dickinson — who marveled at “how an atom fell and yet the Heavens held… blue and solid” — grappled with the mystery of qualia:
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?And since We’re mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication —
Me — of Me?
Perhaps the hardest concession we have to make is that an abdication of the self is necessary for apprehending the fundamental. The self, after all, is a piano composing experience out of feeling and time — but with one being subjective and the other relative (possibly even emergent rather than fundamental, as half the physicists in the documentary believe time to be), a self is an instrument of interpretation whose readings are continually warped by the interpretation of experience that we call intuition, pocked with the “common pitfalls of common sense” Carl Sagan warned us against. Throughout the history of our species, our creaturely intuitions have repeatedly led us to miss or misperceive entire regions of reality. With an eye to such counterintuitive and disorienting discoveries as the sphericity of the Earth and the germ basis of disease — the ground so flat beneath our feet discovered to be curved, organisms we cannot perceive discovered to be deadly — Annaka looks back on the vector of knowledge to trace it forward toward a new model of reality:
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse
In a chapter of the documentary exploring the new science of plant intelligence, Annaka — a longtime meditator and meditation teacher — recalls going for a run up a steep nature trail, entering a type of meditation where “your body can take on the hard work and your mind can just observe the experience.” From this pulsating center of her own felt experience, she observes the locus of other consciousnesses and qualia around her:
Art from Thomas Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750. (Available as a print.)
She looks at the dogs on the trail and wonders about the qualia of creatures living in an olfactory universe. She thinks about the unseen “rabbits and mice and ants and spiders,” each with a different umwelt. At the top of the hill, she contemplates the leaves of the trees with their intricate photoreceptors and root hair cells conferring upon them their own kind of experience of reality.
And the glowing dots densen in the darkness of non-being, leaving her with “a visceral sense that the world is just teeming with felt experience.” (I am reminded of the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd describing her transcendent experience of the mountain as “a glow in the consciousness.”)
These flickers of experience, Annaka argues across the sweep of the documentary, may be all there is.
If the self is a “controlled hallucination,” in the words of one scientist she interviews, and even space is emergent rather than fundamental, as most physicists now agree, perhaps Marie Howe captured the fundamental fundament in her splendid poem “Singularity” — perhaps there is “No I, no We, no one. No was… only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is.”
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.
If experience is the ultimate substratum of reality, then we need what Annaka calls “experiential science” to better probe the nature of the universe — scientific theories and tools that would expand the human unwelt to allow us to experience “other systems and forces we don’t naturally perceive.” (Imagine seeing with the tetrachromacy of a hummingbird or navigating with the quantum magnetorception of a warbler.) We may then find ourselves gaining new intuitions about other ways of being and perhaps even find ways of communicating with other systems. (Imagine sensing the needs of a willow or understanding how a mushroom experiences sound.)
At the heart of Lights On — some of the finest listening hours of a lifetime — is a revelation as simple and beautiful as an equation. Annaka reflects:
A century ago, at the dawn of relativity and quantum mechanics, Virginia Woolf arrived at the same elemental truth via a different route — the garden path along which she reckoned with the meaning of life, parting “the cotton wool of daily life” to conclude:
