{"id":10404,"date":"2025-04-05T15:35:04","date_gmt":"2025-04-05T19:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/consciousness-the-mystery-of-felt-experience-and-the-fundamental-music-of-reality-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-04-05T15:35:04","modified_gmt":"2025-04-05T19:35:04","slug":"consciousness-the-mystery-of-felt-experience-and-the-fundamental-music-of-reality-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/consciousness-the-mystery-of-felt-experience-and-the-fundamental-music-of-reality-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Consciousness, the Mystery of Felt Experience, and the Fundamental Music of Reality \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Lights<\/a><\/p>\n

When I was five, not long after the night I sat on my father\u2019s 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 \u2014 a handsome caramel fellow with a confident curiosity about his tiny world. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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 \u2014 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<\/em> and had ceased to be<\/em> in a way the tenseless computer never would \u2014 one a system of feeling in time, the other untouched by time and devoid of any internal felt experience of being a system.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Wassily Kandinsky: Sketch for Several Circles<\/em>, 1926. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And yet the better metaphor for consciousness may have been sitting on the other side of the living room: my mother\u2019s piano \u2014 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<\/em>. 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 \u2014 but no particular atom marks the boundary of its unbecoming. <\/p>\n

This is the currently accepted emergence model of consciousness \u2014 matter configured to such a degree of complexity that it becomes capable of experiencing itself. <\/p>\n

But perhaps our entire model is broken. <\/p>\n

Perhaps consciousness is not the instrument assembled atom by atom to play the music of being. <\/p>\n

Perhaps it is the music itself. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Composition 8<\/em> by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s, inspired by the artist\u2019s experience of listening to a symphony. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That possibility \u2014 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<\/a> \u2014 is what Annaka Harris reckons with in her superb audio documentary Lights On<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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<\/em><\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA \/ Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Defining consciousness as \u201cjust the pure fact of felt experience,\u201d she reflects in the introduction:<\/p>\n

\n

The mystery, as I see it, is why any collection of matter in the universe \u2014 even brain processing \u2014 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\u2019t 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\u2026 without having a felt experience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The mystery she examines is why some systems of matter have a felt experience of their internal processing \u2014 those incommunicables of what it is like to be me and what it is like to be you known as qualia<\/a>, which cleave open the abyss between us<\/a>. An epoch before neuroscience, Emily Dickinson \u2014 who marveled at \u201chow an atom fell and yet the Heavens held\u2026 blue and solid\u201d \u2014 grappled with the mystery of qualia:<\/p>\n

\n

How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?<\/p>\n

And since We\u2019re mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication \u2014
Me \u2014 of Me?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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 \u2014 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 \u201ccommon pitfalls of common sense\u201d Carl Sagan warned us against<\/a>. 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 \u2014 the ground so flat beneath our feet discovered to be curved, organisms we cannot perceive discovered to be deadly \u2014 Annaka looks back on the vector of knowledge to trace it forward toward a new model of reality:<\/p>\n

\n

Much of [the endeavor to understand consciousness] requires challenging some of our most innate intuitions about experience and what we call reality<\/em>. I\u2019ve always been interested in pushing the boundaries of our intuitions, and this is of course what science is largely about \u2014 science forces us to challenge the way we typically view the world to take a new perspective, to look out at the universe with fresh eyes. And every time we make a scientific breakthrough, every time we deepen our understanding significantly \u2014 especially as it relates to the fundamentals of reality \u2014 our intuitions get shaken up or shifted or molded into an entirely new field for the structure of reality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a chapter of the documentary exploring the new science of plant intelligence<\/a>, Annaka \u2014 a longtime meditator and meditation teacher \u2014 recalls going for a run up a steep nature trail, entering a type of meditation where \u201cyour body can take on the hard work and your mind can just observe the experience.\u201d From this pulsating center of her own felt experience, she observes the locus of other consciousnesses and qualia around her:<\/p>\n

\n

As I climbed and turned corners, I noticed the passing faces. It struck me\u2026 the simple and profound acknowledgement that everyone around me is having a full, rich, deep conscious experience \u2014 unique, private, and all-encompassing for each mind. With every passing person, there exists an inner world as undeniable, textured, and layered as I know mine to be. It\u2019s strange that this obvious fact seems to take effort to recognize and requires a reminder. And then I started to think about just how much conscious activity is surrounding us \u2014 there are so many perspectives of the universe \u2014 and an image came to mind: something like illuminated dots across a dim glow, like an image of Earth from the Space Station, and then something more like a dark meadow, becoming dense with fireflies, lighting their way in the darkness, all of these beads of light representing conscious experiences flickering in and out of existence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from Thomas Wright\u2019s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe<\/em><\/a>, 1750. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She looks at the dogs on the trail and wonders about the qualia of creatures living in an olfactory universe<\/a>. She thinks about the unseen \u201crabbits and mice and ants and spiders,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

And the glowing dots densen in the darkness of non-being, leaving her with \u201ca visceral sense that the world is just teeming with felt experience.\u201d (I am reminded of the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd describing her transcendent experience of the mountain as \u201ca glow in the consciousness.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n

These flickers of experience, Annaka argues across the sweep of the documentary, may be all there is. <\/p>\n

If the self is a \u201ccontrolled hallucination,\u201d 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 \u201cSingularity\u201d<\/a> \u2014 perhaps there is \u201cNo I, no We, no one. No was\u2026 only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a>.<\/figure>\n

If experience is the ultimate substratum of reality, then we need what Annaka calls \u201cexperiential science\u201d to better probe the nature of the universe \u2014 scientific theories and tools that would expand the human unwelt to allow us to experience \u201cother systems and forces we don\u2019t naturally perceive.\u201d (Imagine seeing with the tetrachromacy of a hummingbird<\/a> or navigating with the quantum magnetorception of a warbler<\/a>.) 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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

At the heart of Lights On<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2014 some of the finest listening hours of a lifetime \u2014 is a revelation as simple and beautiful as an equation. Annaka reflects: <\/p>\n

\n

We\u2019re not just embedded in nature \u2014 we are nature.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A century ago, at the dawn of relativity and quantum mechanics, Virginia Woolf arrived at the same elemental truth via a different route \u2014 the garden path along which she reckoned with the meaning of life<\/a>, parting \u201cthe cotton wool of daily life\u201d to conclude:<\/p>\n

\n

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern\u2026 We \u2014 I mean all human beings \u2014 are connected with this\u2026 The whole world is a work of art\u2026 We are parts of the work of art. Hamlet<\/em> or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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