ملاحظات
الفصل الأول: لغز مختفٍ في وضح النهار
(1)
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to
Be a Bat?,” The
Philosophical Review 83, no. 4
(1974): 435–50.
(2)
Rebecca Goldstein, “The Hard
Problem of Consciousness and the Solitude of the
Poet,” Tin
House 13, no. 3 (2012):
3.
(3)
The great mystery is usually phrased, “Why
is there something rather than nothing?” But the more
interesting question to me (and the question that is
analogous to the hard problem) is: How could something come out of
nothing? In other words, does it even make sense to ask
the question? How do we even conceive of a process by
which something is born out of
nothing?
(4)
David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem
of Consciousness,” Journal of
Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995):
200–19. See also Galen Strawson, chapter 4, Mental Reality (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1994): 93–96.
الفصل الثاني: الأحكام الحَدْسية والأوهام
(1)
Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran F. Nordgren, “A
Theory of Unconscious Thought,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1,
no. 2 (June 2006): 95–109; Erik Dane, Kevin W. Rockmann,
and Michael G. Pratt, “When Should I Trust My Gut?,”
Organizational Behavior and
Human Decision Processes 119, no. 2
(November 2012): 187–94,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2012.07.009.
(2)
Liz Fields, “What Are the Odds of Surviving
a Plane Crash?,” ABC News, 12 March 2014,
https://abcnews.go.com/International/odds-surviving-plane-crash/story?id=22886654.
(3)
Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Sense
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2012), 68-69.
(4)
Gareth Cook, “Do Plants Think?,”
Scientific
American, 5 June 2012,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-plants-think-daniel-chamovitz/.
(5)
Suzanne Simard, “How Trees Talk to Each
Other,” TED talk, June 2016,
www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other.
(6)
Nic Fleming, “Plants Talk to Each Other
Using an Internet of Fungus,” BBC News, 11 November
2014,
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet;
Paul Stamets, “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World,” TED
talk, March 2008,
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.
(7)
Lauren Goode, “How Google’s Eerie Robot
Phone Calls Hint at AI’s Future,” Wired, 8 May 2018,
https://www.wired.com/story/google-duplex-phone-calls-ai-future;
Bahar Gholipour, “New AI Tech Can Mimic Any Voice,”
Scientific
American, 2 May 2017,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-ai-tech-can-mimic-any-voice.
(8)
In other words, if consciousness comes at
the end of a stream of information processing, does the
fact that there is an experience make a difference to
the brain processing that follows? Does consciousness
affect the brain? See also Max Velmans, How Could Conscious Experiences Affect
Brains? (Charlottesville, VA: Imprint
Academic, 2002), 8–20.
(9)
Masao Migita, Etsuo Mizukami, and
Yukio-Pegio Gunji, “Flexibility in Starfish Behavior by
Multi-Layered Mechanism of Self-Organization,” Biosystems 82, no. 2
(November 2005): 107–15,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2005.05.012.
الفصل الثالث: هل الوعي حرٌّ؟
(1)
David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of
You (New York: Pantheon, 2015),
53.
(2)
Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a noninvasive
method of recording electrical activity in the brain
through electrodes placed on the
scalp.
(3)
See, for example, Itzhak Fried, Roy
Mukamel, and Gabriel Kreiman, “Internally Generated
Preactivation of Single Neurons in Human Medial Frontal
Cortex Predicts Volition,” Neuron 69, no. 3 (February 2011):
548–62,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2010.11.045;
Aaron Schurger, Myrto Mylopoulos, and David Rosenthal,
“Neural Antecedents of Spontaneous Voluntary Movement: A
New Perspective,” Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 20, no. 2 (February
2016): 77–79,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.11.003.
(4)
Quoted in Susan Blackmore,
Conversations on
Consciousness (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 252-53; see also Daniel
Wegner and Thalia Wheatley, “Apparent Mental
Causation: Sources of the Experience of Will,”
American
Psychologist 54, no. 7 (July
1999): 480–92.
(5)
See, for instance, Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious
Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003),
3–15.
(6)
For a fuller analysis of this issue, see,
for instance, Sam Harris, Free
Will (New York: Free Press,
2012).
الفصل الرابع: رفيقٌ في الرحلة
(1)
Kathleen McAuliffe, This Is Your Brain on Parasites (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016),
57–82.
(2)
McAuliffe, 79.
(3)
McAuliffe, 25–31.
(4)
Natalie Angier, “In Parasite Survival,
Ploys to Get Help from a Host,” New York Times, 26 June 2007,
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26angi.html.
(5)
Henry Fountain, “Parasitic Butterflies Keep
Options Open with Different Hosts,” New York Times, 8 January
2008,
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08obmimi.html.
(6)
Mary Bates, “Meet 5 ‘Zombie’ Parasites That
Mind-Control Their Hosts,” National Geographic, 2 November 2014,
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141031-zombies-parasites-animals-science-halloween/.
(7)
Melinda Wenner, “Infected with Insanity,”
Scientific American
Mind, May 2008, 40–47,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/infected-with-insanity/.
(8)
“PANDAS—Questions and Answers,” National
Institute of Mental Health, NIH Publication No. OM
16-4309, September 2016,
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/pandas/pandas-qa-508_01272017_154202.pdf.
(9)
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996),
198-99.
الفصل الخامس: من نحن؟
(1)
Kathleen A. Garrison et al., “Meditation
Leads to Reduced Default Mode Network Activity Beyond an
Active Task,” Cognitive,
Affective & Behavioral
Neuroscience 15, no. 3 (September 2015):
712,
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-015-0358-3;
Judson A. Brewer et al., “Meditation Experience Is
Associated with Differences in Default Mode Network
Activity and Connectivity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 108, no. 50 (13 December 2011):
20254–59,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112029108.
(2)
Robin Carhart-Harris et al., “Neural
Correlates of the LSD Experience Revealed by Multimodal
Imaging,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 17
(26 April 2016): 4853–58,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1518377113.
(3)
Ian Sample, “Psychedelic Drugs Induce
‘Heightened State of Consciousness,’ Brain Scans Show,”
Guardian, 19
April 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/19/brain-scans-reveal-mind-opening-response-to-psychedelic-drug-trip-lsd-ketamine-psilocybin.
(4)
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your
Mind (New York: Penguin Press,
2018), 304-5.
(5)
Erin Brodwin, “Why Psychedelics
like Magic Mushrooms Kill the Ego and
Fundamentally Transform the Brain,” Business Insider,
17 January 2017,
https://www.businessinsider.com/psychedelics-depression-anxiety-alcoholism-mental-illness-2017-1.
(6)
Pollan, How to
Change Your Mind,
305.
(7)
Brodwin, “Why Psychedelics like Magic
Mushrooms Kill the Ego and Fundamentally Transform the
Brain.”
(8)
Michael Harris, “How Conjoined
Twins Are Making Scientists Question the Concept
of Self,” The
Walrus, 6 November 2017,
https://thewalrus.ca/how-conjoined-twins-are-making-scientists-question-the-concept-of-self/.
(9)
Andrew Olendzki, Untangling Self
(Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016), 2.
Olendzki goes on to say on page 3: “There is no
intrinsic identity in anything. There are only
the labels we decide upon to refer to things:
clouds, raindrops, puddles. All persons, places,
and things are merely names that we give to
certain patterns we call out from the incessant
flux of interdependent natural events. Why are
human beings any different from this? … Surely
‘Joe’ is just something that occurs when
conditions come together in certain ways, and
Joe no longer occurs when those conditions
change enough … Under some conditions Joe is
living; when the conditions supporting Joe’s
life no longer occur, Joe will no longer be
living. He is not the sort of thing that can
go
somewhere else (to heaven or to another body,
for example), except perhaps in the most
abstract sense of the recycling of his
constituent components. All this is as natural
as a rainstorm in the
summer.”
(10)
The BrainPort invention belongs to a
company called Wicab in
Wisconsin.
(11)
Eagleman, The
Brain: The Story of You,
187.
(12)
David Eagleman, “Can We Create New
Senses for Humans?,” TED talk, March 2015,
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans.
(13)
For more, see Olaf Blankee, “Out-of-Body
Experience: Master of Illusion,” Nature 480, no. 7376 (7 December 2011),
https://www.nature.com/news/out-of-body-experience-master-of-illusion-1.9569 ;
Ye Yuan and Anthony Steed, “Is the Rubber Hand Illusion
Induced by Immersive Virtual Reality?,” in IEEE Virtual Reality 2010
Proceedings, eds. Benjamin Lok, Gudrun
Klinker, and Ryohei Nakatsu (Piscataway, NJ: Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2010),
95–102.
(14)
Anil Seth, “Your Brain Hallucinates Your
Conscious Reality,” TED talk, April 2017,
https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality.
(15)
See, for example, Iain McGilchrist,
The Master and His
Emissary (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2009).
(16)
Christof Koch, The
Quest for Consciousness (Englewood, CO:
Roberts & Company, 2004),
287–94.
(17)
Koch, 292.
(18)
Michael Gazzaniga, “The Split Brain
Revisited,” Scientific
American, July 1998,
54.
(19)
McGilchrist, Master,
220-21.
الفصل السادس: هل الوعي في كلِّ مكان؟
(1)
The Oxford English
Dictionary defines panpsychism as “the
theory of belief that there is an element of
consciousness in all matter.” See also Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, s.v. “panpsychism,” revised
18 July 2017,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/.
(2)
Philip Goff, “Panpsychism Is Crazy,
but It’s Also Most Probably True,” Aeon, 1 March 2017,
https://aeon.co/ideas/panpsychism-is-crazy-but-its-also-most-probably-true.
Goff makes a strong case for a panpsychic view
in this article and elsewhere, but many part
company with him (myself included) when he
defends the hypothesis set out in his essay on
“cosmopsychism” (“Is the Universe a Conscious
Mind?,” Aeon,
8 February 2018,
https://aeon.co/essays/cosmopsychism-explains-why-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-life)
that “the Universe is conscious, and … the
consciousness of humans and animals is derived
not from the consciousness of fundamental
particles, but from the consciousness of the
Universe itself”—a universe that, Goff
speculates, is an agent “aware of the
consequences of its actions.” The argument seems
flawed to me, and Goff himself has had a change
of heart, which he wrote about in a blog post on
24 April 2018:
https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2018/04/24/a-change-of-heart-on-fine-tuning/.
(3)
David Chalmers, “Strong and Weak
Emergence,” in The Re-Emergence
of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from
Science to Religion, eds. Philip Clayton
and Paul Davies (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008).
(4)
David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the
West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2017), 189-90. Galen Strawson also draws the
conclusion that “there is no radical emergence.”
See “Physicalist panpsychism,” in Susan
Schneider and Max Velmans, eds., The Blackwell Companion to
Consciousness, 2nd ed. (Hoboken,
NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), pp.
384-85.
(5)
Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West,
194-95.
(6)
David Chalmers differentiates between “weak
emergence” and “strong emergence.” Describing weak
emergence, Chalmers writes, “The ‘emergent’ properties
are in fact deducible (perhaps with great difficulty)
from the low-level properties, perhaps in conjunction
with knowledge of initial conditions, so strong
emergence [in the form of consciousness] is not at play
here” (Chalmers, “Strong and
Weak”).
(7)
Galen Strawson, “The Consciousness
Deniers,” NYR Daily
(blog), New York Review of
Books, 13 March 2018,
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/.
(8)
Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness,
28.
(9)
Paradoxically, it seems to me that
declaring consciousness to be an illusion is just one
step away from asserting that everything is potentially
conscious.
(10)
Galen Strawson, “Physicalist panpsychism,”
in Schneider and Velmans, eds., The Blackwell Companion
to Consciousness, pp. 376–84.
(11)
V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011),
248.
(12)
Peter Hankins, “Francis Crick,” Conscious Entities (blog),
9 August 2004,
http://www.consciousentities.com/crick.htm.
See also Francis Crick, The
Astonishing Hypothesis (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1995), chap.
17.
(13)
“Zap and zip” is based on the work of
Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT). See
Giulio Tononi et al., “Integrated Information Theory:
From Consciousness to Its Physical Substrate,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience
17, no. 7 (July 2016): 450–61,
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44.
(14)
Christof Koch, “How to Make a Consciousness
Meter,” Scientific
American, November 2017,
28–30.
(15)
Steve Paulson, “The Spiritual,
Reductionist Consciousness of Christof Koch,”
Nautilus,
6 April 2017,
http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-spiritual-reductionist-consciousness-of-christof-koch.
(16)
Ibid.
(17)
Chalmers, Conscious Mind,
294-95.
(18)
Even if we concede that it makes sense to
view consciousness as an evolved function in aid of
survival, the idea that a physical system could develop
a property that is so un-material-like suggests to me
that consciousness was there all along as a property to
be called on by the physical system—which brings us back
full circle to a version of
panpsychism.
(19)
Adam Frank, “Minding Matter,”
Aeon, 13
March 2017,
https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness.
(20)
Skrbina, Panpsychism, 9,
17.
(21)
Ibid., 235-36.
(22)
Gregg Rosenberg, “Rethinking Nature: A Hard
Problem within the Hard Problem,” in Explaining Consciousness: The “Hard
Problem,” ed. Jonathan Shear (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1997), 287–300.
الفصل السابع: ما وراء شمولية الوعي
(1)
Rebecca Goldstein, personal
communication with author, 16 March
2018.
(2)
Galen Strawson, “Consciousness
Isn’t a Mystery. It’s Matter,” New York Times, 16
May 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html.
See also Galen Strawson, “Consciousness Never
Left,” in K. Almqvist and A. Haag, eds.,
The Return of
Consciousness: A New Science on Old
Questions (Stockholm: Ax:son
Johnson Foundation, 2017): 87–103. Strawson and
others also prefer to state the mystery in terms
of why
consciousness exists, as opposed to what it is. I have
gone back and forth about how to phrase the
mystery myself. The problem I have with posing
the question in terms of why is its religious undertone.
It also evades the hard problem by inviting the
ready response, “Well, of course the reason
we’re conscious is because our neurons are doing
this special thing that causes us to be
conscious.” When I put it in terms of what, however, I
mean, “What
causes consciousness? What is the overall big-picture
explanation?” The what question also more readily
opens people’s minds to all the follow-up
questions: Is consciousness intrinsic to matter?
Where does it come from? What exactly is it from
top to bottom?
(3)
Skrbina, Panpsychism,
260.
(4)
Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v.
“panpsychism,”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#OtheArguForPanp.
(5)
David Chalmers, “The Combination Problem
for Panpsychism,” in Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives,
eds. Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
(6)
See also William Hirstein, Mindmelding: Consciousness,
Neuroscience, and the Mind’s Privacy (New
York: Oxford University Press,
2012).
(7)
One example that would fall into this
category is a new theory Donald Hoffman is developing
called “conscious realism.” His theory rests on the idea
that while evolution selects for fitness in organisms,
it does not select for perceptions that present us with
the truth about the fundamental nature of reality.
According to Hoffman’s work, in order for evolution by
natural selection to effectively select for fitness, it
must actually select against the perception of reality as it
is. Therefore, everything we perceive, including space
and time, is an incorrect view of the deeper fundamental
reality in which we exist. Hoffman therefore argues that
the fundamental components of reality cannot be
described in terms of physical matter in space-time but
instead must be a form of consciousness with interacting
systems he has termed “conscious agents.” Whether or not
Hoffman’s current theory turns out to be correct, his
work is scientifically rigorous and offers a promising
line of research that may at least help us grab a
foothold where we would otherwise seem to have no hope
of gaining any ground—and, in the meantime, he is,
hopefully, pushing against the limits of our intuitions
and expanding the possibilities of how we are willing to
think about the universe. See Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why
Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019).
(8)
Anil Seth, “Conscious Spoons, Really?
Pushing Back against Panpsychism,” NeuroBanter (blog), 1
February 2018,
https://neurobanter.com/2018/02/01/conscious-spoons-really-pushing-back-against-panpsychism/.
(9)
Rebecca Goldstein, “Reduction,
Realism, and the Mind” (PhD dissertation,
Princeton University, 1977), with an addition
from a personal communication with the author,
16 March 2018.
(10)
Murray Shanahan, “Conscious
Exotica: From Algorithms to Aliens, Could Humans
Ever Understand Minds That Are Radically Unlike
Our Own?,” Aeon, 19 October 2016,
https://aeon.co/essays/beyond-humans-what-other-kinds-of-minds-might-be-out-there.
الفصل الثامن: الوعي والزمن
(1)
I was trained to teach mindfulness
meditation to children by Susan Kaiser Greenland, and I
have been volunteering for Greenland’s Inner Kids
foundation since 2005. See
https://www.susankaisergreenland.com.
(2)
Dean Buonomano, Your Brain Is a Time
Machine (New York: W. W. Norton,
2017), 216.
(3)
John A. Wheeler, “Law Without Law,” in
Quantum Theory and
Measurement, eds. John A. Wheeler and
Wojciech H. Zurek (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1984), 182–213.
(4)
Vincent Jacques et al., “Experimental
Realization of Wheeler’s Delayed-Choice Gedanken
Experiment,” Science
315, no. 5814: 966–68, 16 February 2007,
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1136303.
(5)
Rob Reid and Donald Hoffman, “The
Case against Reality,” After On (podcast), episode 26,
30 April 2018; see also John A. Wheeler, “Law
Without Law,” 190.
(6)
Ramachandran, Tell-Tale Brain,
249.
