Full disclosure. I heard of this little book by listening to the podcasts of the author’s husband, Sam Harris, whom I used to support financially, before tiring of his promotion of his particular kind of mindfulness and meditation and his endorsement of the use of psychedelic drugs. As someone who enjoys keeping up with modern neuroscience developments, much of the information concisely reviewed here was not new to me. The findings that our brains ‘decide’ a full second before we ‘decide’ on an action, that Toxoplasma gondii infection makes rats fatally fond of cats and that one side of the brain of people with a severed corpus callosum will tell elaborate lies to explain what the other side of it is doing are hardly new. The awareness of surroundings of people with the locked in syndrome is more expansively analyzed in Adrian Owen’s Into The Gray Zone.
But there is also documentation of new (to me) fascinating observations. The Venus fly trap has memory and recall so as to decide when to snap shut. The Doulas fir mother tree selectively nourishes its own seedlings and nearby birches over those of competitors, implying some kind of conscious planning. Such observations have revived the age-old philosophical theory of panpsychism- the belief that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe like time, light, and energy. Although counterintuitive, such a theory leads to the conclusion that stones, thermostats and electrons have consciousness. Harris explores the implications of this with thoughtful musings that clearly show how faulty our intuitions can be. Much of this esoteric philosophic discussion is well beyond my comprehension but may be important as we enter an era of human-like machines.
Following the 14th century principle of Occam’s Razor, some form of panpsychism may be the best explanation for the phenomenon we call consciousness, although such an untestable hypothesis is never going to sit well with modern scientists. But at some point, isn’t arguing about the nature of consciousness, using our reasoning powers and consciousness, a form of circular reductio ad absurdum?
A quick enjoyable read for what is probably a very limited readership.
The Passionate Reader 