Personal Experience: What it is and why we have it (a treatise on consciousness)
By Thomas Crown
A non-fiction book that solves some of the hard problems of consciousness
150 pages
Preface
I am not qualified to write this book… on paper. I am not a scientist, do not have the right letters behind my name. There are only two… from the beginning of the alphabet. However, I have been conscious all my life. I have wondered about this since I was a child. I could read at a 12th grade level when I was 8 and since fiction was emotionally outside my ability to grasp, I read books with limited emotional and social content: nonfiction. That is what I have read ever since.
The journey to writing this book began in 2014 when my stepdaughter gave me a copy of Nick Bostrom’s “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.” I have always been interested in science and technology following threads about advances in the study of the brain, artificial intelligence, and how we, the human animal, came out on top. The thing that impressed me most about the book was his insistence on the dangers of a neurotic, conscious, Strong Artificial Intelligence. Why would a manmade AI be neurotic in the first place, let alone neurotic enough to continue, for instance, unabatedly manufacturing paper clips until the world was overwhelmed by the drain on materials and the consumption of living space?1 This made no sense to me, but I did not know why. I followed that book with Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”.
Since then, I have read all the major contributors to the subject of consciousness from panpsychism—consciousness is in everything (The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David J. Chalmers) to brain centric consciousness (The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes by Donald D. Hoffman) to consciousness being an illusion we all share (Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett).
The single difference between the legion of philosophers and scientists that have expounded about consciousness and me is the number of letters behind our names. They have no better clue about consciousness than I do, than any of us do, if we are paying attention. They are so flummoxed by personal, subjective experience they have dubbed it one of the hard problems of consciousness. They have no definition for it, nor any idea why we have it. One of the reasons the scientific community is so perplexed, simply put, is century after century of wondering about consciousness and personal experience, there is no provable scientific evidence that either exists.
I am, however, convinced that those philosophers of consciousness have accurately recorded what they observed. What I do not agree with is how they interpreted their observations.
Because I am a generalist, not a specialist, I have read and still read in many fields of study, spending a great portion of my time on this planet digging into what exactly consciousness is. I have researched the fields of evolution, biology, haptics, epigenetics, and physics because each field addresses consciousness peripherally.
My research has led me to the conclusion that consciousness is a feature of life, that every single living cell on this planet and in this human organism is conscious, that awareness and volition are aspects of consciousness. Those aspects have transformed earth from a barren, poisonous rock without an atmosphere to a biosphere that supports at least one living species capable of questioning its consciousness. Those aspects have driven evolution forward, producing the diversity we see around us and in us. Without consciousness there would be no life and we would not exist.
We are all conscious. We all personally experience consciousness and are mystified. Therein lies the caveat. What we experience is ours alone and cannot be shared no matter how hard we try. Language is not up to the task. When we die, all that experience will leave with us. No one will have really known us or experienced anything in exactly the same way we have.
In the chapters that follow I will set forth a theory of consciousness that allows us to see the exact definition of Personal Experience. Having that definition makes plain why we have it. The what and why solves the hard problem(s) of consciousness as well as most of the easy ones. Along the way we will discover the origin of the 5 senses and the beginnings of the ego and tweak Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
1. Bostrom, Nick, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies; (Oxford; Oxford University Press 2016) 150-153