What is the role of meditation and other first-person evidence in understanding the nature of consciousness and addressing the hard problem of consciousness?
I have been directly exploring the nature of consciousness for over 30 years, primarily through meditation, but also through self-hypnosis, breath work, and psychedelics. About three years ago, I decided to explore in more depth what neuroscientists and philosophers had to say about consciousness, to complement and possibly revise what I had learnt through direct experience. From mid-2022 to present, I have published nine posts on consciousness here summarizing my readings in neuroscience and philosophy, and their impact on my own understanding of consciousness. Links to these are given at the end of this post.
Neuroscientists and first-person evidence
Consciousness is a first-person experience and can only be examined directly by each person individually. My conscious experience cannot be directly observed by anyone else. In contrast, neuroscience and science in general work with third-person objective observations and measures, which can in principle be made by anyone. It can thus only deal with the correlates of conscious experience.
In my previous posts on consciousness, I noted that Annaka Harris, David Chalmers and Anil Seth all had some discussion in their books of the likelihood that machine minds could become conscious . I’ll start with the philosophers.
Daniel Dennett thinks consciousness is an illusion, so has nothing useful to say. David Chalmers on the other hand has a lot to say. In his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory Chalmers argues for a general principle that consciousness is an organizational invariant, i.e., that “functional organization fully determines conscious experience. In other words, if a silicon brain is organized identically to a human brain, it will also be conscious. He argues the case for this principle using a thought experiment in which physical components of the brain are replaced one at a time by silicon components. He claims that it makes no sense to think that the consciousness of the brain would either fade as the process continues or disappear at some point.
Like most people, it seemed obvious to me that we have free will and up until about three years ago, I had not thought about it much or questioned it. Then I read Sam Harris’ small book Free Will (2012, Free Press) which made the case that we do not have free will. In my previous posts on consciousness, I noted that Annaka Harris, David Chalmers and Anil Seth all had some discussion of free will in their books. So I re-read Sam Harris’s book, now with a much deeper understanding of its relationship to consciousness, and came away largely convinced that he is right in seeing free will as an illusion.
Free Will is a very short book, 66 pages of main text amounting to around 15,000 words. It is very well written and jargon-free and makes a very strong case that free will is an illusion. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. Well worth reading, whatever your views on free will.
For most people, consciousness not only involves a sense of self but also the feeling of being in control of your actions, of being the author of your thoughts. In other words, you have free will, the ability to consciously choose among potential decisions or actions. I refer to this as free will in the ordinary sense. This idea of free will emerges from a felt experience, and most people do not question it. That included me until relatively recently.
In my fifth post in this series, I review Anil Seth’s 2021 book Being You. See here, here, here, and here for the previous posts. I read a Guardian review of this book in August 2021 which raved about it, as did various other reviewers. So, I went out and bought it, and when it came, I started to read it. It annoyed me so much (see below) that I put the book aside until recently. Seth is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Surrey, highly cited for his publications, and also a prolific popularizer of his views on consciousness (New Scientist, Scientific American, TED talks etc).
Seth starts well in the Prologue, with the comment that “consciousness is a mystery that matters. For each of us, our conscious experience is all there is. Without it there is nothing at all: no world, no self, no interior and no exterior.” But he continues with “For me, a source of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. The goal of consciousness science should not be ‑‑ at least not primarily ‑‑ to explain why consciousness happens to be part of the universe in the first place.”
In my previous post on consciousness, I noted that the 2019 book Conscious: a guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind, by Annaka Harris, was a superb discussion of the various issues, evidence and theories about consciousness. Of the seven books on consciousness I listed in the previous post, hers is the only one to take into account insights derived from meditation, use of psychedelics, and of altered states of consciousness more generally. It is also the only one to review, fairly honestly as far as I can tell, most of the major approaches to understanding and explaining consciousness and to discuss their pros and cons rather than making a partisan case for one approach.
Harris starts by explaining what she means by the word “consciousness”. She basically takes the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s definition in his famous essay “What is it like to be a Bat?” and posits that an organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism. She says:
“Consciousness is experience itself , and it is therefore easy to miss the profound question staring us in the face in each moment : Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious ? We look right past the mystery as if the existence of consciousness were obvious or an inevitable result of complex life , but when we look more closely , we find that it is one of the strangest aspects of reality.”
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking more and more about the nature of consciousness. My Zen meditation practice basically involves letting go of thoughts, letting go of the self, and simply experiencing consciousness without content. I have direct experiences from my meditation practice, as well as a reasonably wide reading of Zen and Buddhist masters and their experiences and understanding of consciousness, self and reality. At times, I feel like I have had openings to experiences which have “enlightened” me about the nature of self, consciousness etc, but I have not really integrated these tastes of non-self into any sort of stable or mature understanding of reality.
I had read a few articles by philosophers who have explored the nature of consciousness, particularly the so-called hard problem of consciousness and last year read a review of a new book by Anil Seth which led me to think he had made advances from the neuroscience perspective.
Apart from my direct explorations through Zen meditation, breathwork and psychedelics, I also have worked with several Zen teachers and read extensively on consciousness in Buddhist literature and in the works of Ken Wilber, who has explored and mapped states and stages of consciousness in his writings. More recently, I read and reviewed Sam Harris’s book Waking Up, which also discusses the nature of consciousness and self.
So I decided I would read some of the key books and articles on consciousness from the philosophers and neuroscientists, to complement my experience and understanding gained from meditation and psychedelic explorations.
Anil Seth is a neurologist, Peter Godfrey-Smith a biologist and philosopher of science. Annaka Harris is a science writer (fun fact: also the wife of Sam Harris). Lewis-Williams and Pearce are both archaeologists. The final three are all philosophers. I guess the other relevant discipline I am missing is artificial intelligence research. I’ve read a little in this area and have found it mostly irrelevant to the issues relating to consciousness that I am interested in, and tedious reading to boot.
I browsed Chalmers book on consciousness and discovered the entire book ignores the entire knowledge base on states of consciousness, meditation, nondual states, etc. As if it’s irrelevant. So I quickly browsed the books by the other two philosophers, and the book by Anil Seth the neurologist. Not a single mention of meditation, altered states, psychedelics. I had bigger problems with Seth’s ideas, but will leave that to a separate review.
My initial reaction was to dismiss the philosophers as inhabiting a limited sterile corner of academia ignoring large parts of human experience. But then realized if I did that, I would be no better than them.
Ken Wilber has gone down this same path of integrating Western psychology and philosophy with Eastern first-person methods and understanding and has been largely ignored by academia and philosophers. In part, because he does somewhat go over the top, and despite his focus on empirical methods, does seem to uncritically accept aspects of Tibetan Buddhism at more or less face value. Such as rebirth.
Sam Harris seems to get it more right. And his conclusions are very much aligned with mine. And even he gets dismissed by Western commentators as being arrogant. By telling them they cannot just critique from the outside, without trying the methods for themselves. So much for open-mindedness to all the relevant evidence.
For consciousness per se, which is a subjective experience, its clear that the objective methods of science are going to be at best marginally relevant. What is most relevant is the actual massive domain of experiences of consciousness. Particularly those focused not on the contents of consciousness (as the psychologists and neuroscientists like to do) but those focused on the exploration of consciousness per se when the contents are out of the way. The recent book by Anneka Harris is the only other one on my list above which examines what meditation tells us about consciousness. And when I started reading it, I found it a superb discussion of the various issues and theories about consciousness. So my next post will be a closer look at Harris’ book, and then I will dive into the philosophers.
Links to my later posts on consciousness are given below:
Mountains and rivers 