Summary
Blackmore regards her book as an "attempt to see whether looking directly into one's own mind can contribute to a science of consciousness."
Blackmore practices Zen, although she is not a Buddhist herself. Rather, "I am someone with a questioning mind who has stumbled upon Zen and found it immensely helpful." Some of Blackmore's questions are not strictly Zen but rather come from Mahamudra traditions, though she got them from a Zen instructor, John Crook. [2]
Blackmore's discussion revolves around ten questions, discussed in the following sections. [3]
1. Am I conscious now?
Blackmore asks herself, "Am I conscious now?" and answers "Of course I am. Yes, I am conscious now." But she feels as though by asking the question, she has in a sense "awakened" herself, which leads her to wonder if she was conscious just before asking. She repeatedly asks herself the question, each time saying "yes". As she continues asking it over the years, the "waking up" experience becomes more gradual. Likewise, asking the question all the time becomes easier, and eventually, "The words aren't really necessary any more. Rather, there just seems to be a questioning attitude, an openness of mind."
2. What was I conscious of a moment ago?
Blackmore tries to figure out what she was conscious of just beforehand. When she asks, she can remember many sensations—for instance, the wood floor and the cat's purr. It seems as though she had been aware of them for a while back in time, yet she only seemed to "notice" them when she thought about the question. Likewise, Blackmore thinks about her breath, which "is always there", but she's not sure if she was watching it prior to asking the question.
Blackmore is skeptical of current efforts to find neural correlates of consciousness because "if I don't know which sights and sounds I was conscious of, and which I was not, then this whole line of scientific research must be entirely misguided."
3. Who is asking the question?
Blackmore probes who "she" is. One approach is to find "a boundary, or edge, or divide" between what she's looking at and the person doing the looking. For instance, noticing a twist of her hair, she asks, "Am I this side of the hair and the experiences the other? No. That’s silly." She tries to trace a path from the external world through to herself, but she can never find herself. "Look for the viewing self and find only the view. I am, it seems, the world I see."
4. Where is this?
Blackmore observes flowers and asks where resides the experience of them—e.g., their yellowness. Clearly it's not in the flowers themselves because, for instance, what looks yellow to Blackmore would look different to a bee with a very different visual system. Another option is that the color is represented by a pattern of neural firing in her visual cortex, but it's not clear why that neural activity is "yellow itself".
5. How does thought arise?
Blackmore reflects on the nature of "abiding in tranquillity and moving in thought." She notices that her thoughts can seem to take on "parallel threads". Some thoughts "happen right here, in the midst of tranquillity" while others are more active. The latter "drag part of the mind away" and split it in two. Blackmore envisions this "as a theory about what is happening in the brain, with groups of neurons organising themselves in different places, their patterns arising and falling away, though with no experiencing self."
6. There is no time. What is memory?
Blackmore asks whether time exists. She thinks about the present, past, future, and imaginary things. She realizes that "Although I can label them differently, and they vary in vividness and how much confidence I have in their details, they all seemed to be made of the same kind of stuff."
7. When are you?
Blackmore recounts experiences during mindfulness when she felt as though she could "leap off into nothingness" and briefly not exist. She feels as though events in the world arise from nothingness, "springing up out of no-place and no-time".
8. Are you here now?
Blackmore considers the metaphor of "life as a string of beads" and rejects it because her mind seems to contain "many streams" of experience that "arise and fall away, their observers coming and going with them." Her reflection leads her to agree with Daniel Dennett's critique of the Cartesian theater. Instead her experience is closer to Dennett's multiple-drafts model. She also feels how to be her own thoughts, reminiscent of William James's view that "thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond".
9. What am I doing?
Blackmore explores the absence of free will in a causally closed universe. After having pondered the problem for a long time, Blackmore's sense of free will faded:
This seems to be all that happens; decisions are made because of countless interacting events, and afterwards a little voice inside says "I did that", "I decided to do that".
Still, Blackmore learned during a Zen retreat that she could take responsibility. Once a decision was made, "That's what happened, these are the consequences. Things just are the way they are."
10. What next?
Blackmore explores questions of reincarnation, self-continuity, and "the timeless, emptiness, or void, or whatever it is, out of which phenomena appear."
Reactions
Steven Poole said Blackmore writes "in a style that is deliberately fragmentary, a succession of false starts or paths petering out into nothingness (which may also be the point)." He compared some parts to "a surreal existential horror novel". [4]
Jenny Doe noted that Blackmore's prose "is not always up to the job of capturing the profundity and mystery of the Zen experience, and occasionally ends up reminiscent of the ramblings of a stoned student." That said, Doe feels the book is a great starting point for laypeople to explore philosophy of mind. [5]
Anthony Freeman welcomed Blackmore's investigation of conscious experience. He recommended reading the book "slowly and reflectively" because of its dense meditative tone. "The reading becomes a reliving of the experience." [6]
Peter Fenwick noted how Blackmore's views on the self as a construction make sense of her previous work arguing that near-death experiences are also a construction of the mind. He feels the book "should be compulsory reading for anyone in consciousness studies and certainly on every psychology course" and that if more scientists introspected as Blackmore does, "consciousness research would follow an entirely different and more progressive path." [7]
Bodhipaksa calls Blackmore's "an extraordinary book: a sometimes heady but deeply rewarding read." He notes how Blackmore's discussion parallels some classic ideas from Buddhism, including the distinction between awareness and awareness of awareness. Bodhipaksa criticizes Blackmore's inference from becoming aware of sounds that happened in the past to assuming that her consciousness of them is "an attribution made later" because he points out that sounds can persist in echoic memory for 4 seconds: "A lot of Blackmore's descriptions of mindfulness seem to have involved paying attention to what’s in echoic memory rather than what she was currently listening to." Finally, Bodhipaksa notes that some of Blackmore's use of terminology was loose and may reflect "a 'feeling' of significance that hasn't been fully thought out or articulated." [2]
Aaron Sloman found Blackmore's book to be "an excellent read if you have the right kind of interest and the right kind of patience." He found the book valuable as an account of what it feels like to be puzzled "about consciousness, freedom, self, the relationships between mind and brain," but he said it fails to consider the standpoint of designing a thinking system and therefore misses out on useful insights. He feels "the attempt to understand consciousness simply by gazing inwardly at it can have limited success." It might be "like trying to make the trace-printing portion of a debugging package trace itself." Sloman also feels that Blackmore's rejection of "contents of consciousness", "the self", and "free will" are based too much on confused notions of what those things mean, and "she has not considered the right sorts of explanations" for those concepts. Nevertheless, Sloman thinks Zen and the Art of Consciousness "may become a classic because of the unique combination of qualities the author brings to it." [8]
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debate by philosophers, theologians, and all of science. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is a 1976 book by the Princeton psychologist, psychohistorian and consciousness theorist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997). It explores the nature of consciousness – particularly "the ability to introspect" – and its evolution in ancient human history. Jaynes proposes that consciousness is a learned behavior rooted in language and culture rather than being innate. He distinguishes consciousness from sensory awareness and cognition. Jaynes introduces the concept of the "bicameral mind", a non-conscious mentality prevalent in early humans that relied on auditory hallucinations.
Susan Jane Blackmore is a British writer, lecturer, sceptic, broadcaster, and a visiting professor at the University of Plymouth. Her fields of research include memetics, parapsychology, consciousness, and she is best known for her book The Meme Machine. She has written or contributed to over 40 books and 60 scholarly articles and is a contributor to The Guardian newspaper.
Consciousness Explained is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain. Dennett describes consciousness as an account of the various calculations occurring in the brain at close to the same time. He compares consciousness to an academic paper that is being developed or edited in the hands of multiple people at one time, the "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness. In this analogy, "the paper" exists even though there is no single, unified paper. When people report on their inner experiences, Dennett considers their reports to be more like theorizing than like describing. These reports may be informative, he says, but a psychologist is not to take them at face value. Dennett describes several phenomena that show that perception is more limited and less reliable than we perceive it to be.
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In the book, Sartre develops a philosophical account in support of his existentialism, dealing with topics such as consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-deception, the existence of "nothingness", psychoanalysis, and the question of free will.
Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC), synthetic consciousness or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.
Nisargadatta Maharaj was an Indian guru of nondualism, belonging to the Inchagiri Sampradaya, a lineage of teachers from the Navnath Sampradaya.
In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation: that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral, as each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.
A philosophical zombie is a being in a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal person but does not have conscious experience.
Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model of consciousness is a physicalist theory of consciousness based upon cognitivism, which views the mind in terms of information processing. The theory is described in depth in his book, Consciousness Explained, published in 1991. As the title states, the book proposes a high-level explanation of consciousness which is consistent with support for the possibility of strong AI.
In the philosophy of mind, the user illusion is a metaphor for a proposed description of consciousness that argues that conscious experience does not directly expose objective reality, but instead provides a simplified version of reality that allows humans to make decisions and act in their environment, akin to a computer desktop. According to this picture, our experience of the world is not immediate, as all sensation requires processing time. It follows that our conscious experience is less a perfect reflection of what is occurring, and more a simulation produced subconsciously by the brain. Therefore, there may be phenomena that exist beyond our peripheries, beyond what consciousness could create to isolate or reduce them.
Benjamin Libet was an American neuroscientist who was a pioneer in the field of human consciousness. Libet was a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco. In 2003, he was the first recipient of the Virtual Nobel Prize in Psychology from the University of Klagenfurt, "for his pioneering achievements in the experimental investigation of consciousness, initiation of action, and free will".
Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis introduced by Julian Jaynes who argued human ancestors as late as the ancient Greeks did not consider emotions and desires as stemming from their own minds but as the consequences of actions of gods external to themselves. The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans. The term was coined by Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age.
In philosophy of mind, Cartesian materialism is the idea that at some place in the brain, there is some set of information that directly corresponds to our conscious experience. Contrary to its name, Cartesian materialism is not a view that was held by or formulated by René Descartes, who subscribed rather to a form of substance dualism.
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the body and the external world.
"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). The paper presents several difficulties posed by consciousness, including the possible insolubility of the mind–body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing.
Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
In philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in relation to a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple — this particular apple now".
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory was published in 1996, and is the first book written by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher specialising in philosophy of mind. Although the book has been greatly influential, Chalmers maintains that it is "far from perfect", as most of it was written as part of his PhD dissertation after "studying philosophy for only four years".
Buddhist thought and Western philosophy include several parallels.
