How Is Consciousness Related to the Brain?
Seth J. Gillihan Ph.D.
Seth J. Gillihan Ph.D.
Quote:So if our experience of consciousness doesn’t arise from the brain, where does it come from? According to Alexander, “We truly live in a mindful universe, with top-down causal principles that are very powerful in determining the events of human lives.” He posits that these causal principles “are not the simple, predicted result of a kind of bottom-up causation looking at the subatomic particles and cells.” Instead, consciousness is the building block of the universe and gives rise to everything we experience—including ourselves.
Quote:A number of months ago I happened to be following a guided meditation from Harris’s popular meditation app (Waking Up) in which he suggested that our experience of consciousness as being located in the head (somewhere behind the eyeballs) was an illusion. Rather, I should consider that my head is actually located in consciousness. I was having a “medi-date” with my wife at the time, and afterward, we both expressed the mind-blowing quality of that suggestion. My head is in consciousness?
As Harris states in this video, “If you lose your sense of a unitary self—that there’s a permanent, unchanging center to consciousness—your experience of the world actually becomes more faithful to the facts. It’s not a distortion of the way we think things are at the level of the brain. It actually brings your experience into closer register with how we think things are.” And in a recent podcast episode with his wife, the author Annaka Harris, he entertains the possibility of “panpsychism,” which holds that consciousness is an inherent property of all matter.