Sam Harris on Consciousness

 Consciousness  

Sam Harris describes the properties of consciousness and how mindfulness practices of all stripes can be used to transcend one's ego.

Sam Harris, author of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion recently sat down to discuss the subject of consciousness with Big Think.

Harris defines consciousness as "an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system." Put more simply, consciousness is what it's like and how it feels to be you. Thus, consciousness exists in a realm of irreducible subjectivity with which science isn't always comfortable.

"I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion."

The problem of discussing consciousness scientifically is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. Philosophers from Thomas Nagel, John Searle, David Chalmers have made this point.

Harris says, "If there’s an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system then that is consciousness. And we can’t reduce the experiential side to talk of information processing and neurotransmitters and states of the brain in our case because – and people want to do this."

When you’re trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side.

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As the neuroscientist Harris says, "We have very strong third person “objective measures” of things like anxiety and fear at this moment. You bring someone into the lab, they say they’re feeling fear. You can scan their brains with FMRI and see that their amygdala response is heightened. You can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there’s an increased galvanic skin response. You can check their blood cortisol and see that its spiking."

This is one of many reasons why Harris believes you can't have a reasonable scientific discussion of consciousness if you're going to ignore qualitative internal experiential language. There's so much more to consciousness than the physical and the tangible. The technology and theory does not yet exist for us to scientifically and numerically define what consciousness is.

"The hope that we are going to talk about consciousness short of any kind of qualitative internal experiential language, I think, is a false one," says Harris. "We have to understand both sides of it subjective – classically subjective and objective."

I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. 

Harris explains that what we perceive as self, an unchanging constant experiencer, is really an ever-changing system constructed within the brain. Everything you experience from your thoughts, to your moods, to your impulses, and behavior, manifest themselves within the brain. They are the results emergent properties of billions of synapses interacting and other neurological functions.

The sense that most of us have is of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. "Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads," states Harris. "Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion."

As in his book, Harris argues that there are important truths to be found in the experiences of such contemplation, and that there is more to understanding reality than science and secular culture generally allow, and that at the core, there may be a scientific underpinning to some spirituality.


SOURCE  Big Think

By 33rd Square

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