Our default intuition when it comes to consciousness is that humans and some other animals have it, whereas plants and trees don’t. But how sure can we be that plants aren’t conscious? And what if what we take to be behavior indicating consciousness can be replicated with no conscious agent involved? Annaka Harris invites us to consider the real possibility that our intuitions about consciousness might be mere illusions.
Our intuitions have been shaped by natural selection to quickly provide life-saving information, and these evolved intuitions can still serve us in modern life. For example, we have the ability to unconsciously perceive elements in our environment in threatening situations that in turn deliver an almost instantaneous assessment of danger — such as the intuition that we shouldn’t get into an elevator with someone, even though we can’t put our finger on why.
But our guts can deceive us as well, and “false intuitions” can arise in any number of ways, especially in domains of understanding — like science and philosophy — that evolution could never have foreseen. An intuition is simply the powerful sense that something is true without having an awareness or understanding of the reasons behind this feeling — it may or may not represent something true about the world.
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It’s possible for a vivid experience of consciousness to exist undetected from the outside
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And when we inspect our intuitions about consciousness itself — how we judge whether or not an organism is conscious — we discover that what once seemed like obvious truths are not so straightforward. I like to begin this exploration with two questions that at first glance appear deceptively simple to answer. Note the responses that first occur to you, and keep them in mind as we explore some typical intuitions and illusions.
1) In a system that we know has conscious experiences — the human brain — what evidence of consciousness can we detect from the outside?
2) Is consciousness essential to our behavior?
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