Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

This is the question considered by Annaka Harris’ recent book Conscious, a brief guide to the mystery of experience and humanity’s best working explanations. While she mentions some of the above ideas, she spends many pages on a theory I hadn’t previously encountered: panpsychism. The idea is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like mass or charge. This sounds like mysticism, but Harris reveals that several prominent theoretical physicists have reluctantly and quietly endorsed panpsychism as the “least unlikely” explanation of consciousness. Extraordinary phenomena require extraordinary explanations.

(MM - 07/26/2019)