 My mind went some really weird places when I imagined Gandalf writing Mr. Ed instead of Shadow Facts. Don't switch horses midstream of consciousness. What is consciousness? Well, according to this, it's the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings. That was easy. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to- Okay, okay. Come on back. The term consciousness is used to refer to a large constellation of related phenomena that all have something to do with minds. Medically, it's a checkbox that you can tick off on your diagnostic criteria if your patient appears to be awake and able to parse the world around them in some way. However, it's also used to refer to a number of important and seemingly related aspects of the mind and its operation. Science has provided a lot of mechanical insight into many mental processes, but the ones that get lumped together under consciousness tend to be very high level and very complex in ways that we haven't even come close to explaining yet. Unfortunately, whenever science hasn't completely answered an interesting question, you can be certain that some crazy people somewhere are going to fill that space with whatever they can imagine. Air quotes consciousness has been a staple of many hand-wavy versions of mysticism or spirituality, often used as a buzzword to lend an air of sophistication to largely incoherent ideas about souls, or spiritual energy, or really just about anything. Even when more rigorously minded people get around to discussing it, it's notoriously difficult to get them to agree on a definition of what it actually is. Despite that confusion, there is definitely something interesting happening in conscious minds that isn't happening in unconscious ones, or rocks. Let's try to get a broad sense of what that is, and what is so fascinating for people who are interested in figuring out how minds work and why they're special. When you're in a dreamless sleep, by most external measures there are a few physical differences in your body compared to when you're awake. Your muscles are more relaxed, your eyes might be darting back and forth, maybe you drool a little bit on your pillow. But there's literally a world of difference in what you experience. Your senses are still operating as per usual. Your eardrums will vibrate if there's noise, the temperature receptors in your skin that can detect heat will still report the ambient temperature of the room, but you don't feel any of that. Those senses can fire continuously for hours on end, but their signals won't be registered or received the way they usually are, because nobody's home. For six hours, eight if you're lucky, you have no subjective first-person experience of the world whatsoever. That's interesting. In his 1974 paper What Is It Like to Be a Bet, philosopher Thomas Nagel suggests that we think of consciousness as the feeling of what it is like to be something. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to ask, what does it feel like to be asleep or under anesthesia or a rock? But if you're conscious, you experience the world as a subject. The problems only really start cropping up when we try to think of the objective qualities of that phenomena. We can recognize outward signs of wakefulness and alertness pretty easily, but the subjective experience of what it is like to be someone else or a bat or any of the other creatures that we would normally think of as being conscious, I don't have any way to access that internal state for any entity but myself. And for something that's so crucial to my experience of the world, that's a little bit bonkers. Like imagine a person who has all outward appearances of being awake and alert, but from their perspective has the same mental state that you have when you're asleep. A philosophical zombie, whose body seems to be parsing the world around them, but nobody's actually home. That may or may not be physically possible, but it illustrates the difficulty of the problem. Without a complete map of which brain states correspond to which mental states, how could we ever tell the difference between a philosophical zombie and a conscious person? Even if we could build such a map, even if we could somehow scan every single neuron in someone's brain and translate that into a meaningful interpretation of what it was like to be them in that moment, we'd still be a long ways from explaining just how that configuration of neurons gave rise to the sensation of drinking a cup of coffee. This explanatory gap between objective measurable stuff and what that stuff feels like from inside a conscious mind is part of the mystery and mystique that surrounds consciousness and partially what causes people to hang weird or absurd ideas on the concept. In some ways, it's the most obvious and intimate thing in the world, the only data that we have continuous access to throughout our waking lives. In other ways, it's the most distant and alien thing imaginable, something that's totally inaccessible even with the most sophisticated analytical tools and badass science that we have available. One might be inclined to dismiss the problem out of hand just to acquaint thought experiment for ivory tower types, but there are numerous legal, ethical and practical considerations that revolve around the subjective experience of others, like how exactly does a fetus experience pain or what is it like to be a chicken raised for poultry? Scientists have discovered potentially useful data in neuroscience and psychology on covering important landmarks in the very slow process of trying to bridge the gap between the two, but we still don't have any real substantial answers to those questions. But it's right here. I mean, I have a consciousness. Why should I wait around for scientists to figure it out? Can't I just, you know, think about it and figure out how it works? Well, there are some broad characteristics of being conscious that we can probably infer from our own experiences, but there are good reasons to be intensely suspicious of introspection as a reliable source of information here. Admittedly, it is a psychology paper from the 70s, but this review by Richard Nisbet and Timothy Wilson summarizes some key points from a series of studies which examine people's ability to accurately describe their own mental processes. The paper provides decent evidence that even when test subjects experience large changes in cognition over the course of an experiment, when asked to reflect carefully and describe those changes, they're often totally unaware that anything is different, let alone how exactly their mental landscape has changed or what caused that. That's at least suggestive. Here we are thinking that we can figure this thing out from the inside, yet even when people are prompted to examine something that has changed in a significant way, they can still be totally blind to it. Also, at first blush, there's no real reason to expect that what we experience of consciousness will give us meaningful clues about its fundamental nature or operation in the first place. Even if we're diligent and do a lot of careful reflection, we might have a feeling that our mind is like this or like that, but it's just a feeling. The fact that it's a feeling about feeling doesn't make it any more valid than if it were a feeling about who's going to win the World Series, or which is the best PBS Idea Channel episode. Thanks, guys. Nonetheless, consciousness is interesting to think about. Numerous philosophers and scientists have found many interesting ways to dissect and analyze the phenomena involved, and even to suggest some answers to the big questions surrounding it, like what it is, how it is, or where it comes from. Personally, I think it's pretty much indisputable that it has something important to do with coffee. I'm going to be up until 3am editing this, I just know it. What's your preferred definition for what consciousness is? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and don't stop thunking.