Consciousness matters

One day in November 2003, esteemed philosopher and psychologist Nicholas Humphrey opened up his e-mail and found the following message, from an American musician named Joe King:

Hello, my name is Joe King. I am severely disabled, 20 years old. I am 33 inches tall, 40 lbs, 47 broken bones and 6 surgeries. I have been concerned lately that when I die this crippled body might be all I have. My question is. Do u believe consciousness can survive the death of the brain? Is there good scientific evidence for this?

Humphrey wrote back:

Dear Joe,

You ask whether I think consciousness can survive the death of the brain. It's the most natural of all questions to ask. I think we human beings are made to ask it. I even think that in asking it we become better people. But my straight answer, as a scientist, is: not a chance. Consciousness is something we do with our brains.

This is both good news and bad news. The bad news is obvious. The good news is that each moment of consciousness is, as you already know it is, amazingly precious. Albert Camus wrote, "The present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man." But Camus' "absurd man" is both heroic and wise. He recognizes that when we cannot travel the wide sea of eternity, the more significant is the island that we stand on now.

I shall be giving some lectures in Harvard in the Spring, called Seeing Red. I wish you could be there. I think you, as a musician, would appreciate the analogy I draw between conscious sensation and a work of art.

"Consciousness is something we do with our brains"--this is a straightforward enough statement. But when we become "conscious" of something, what exactly are we "doing" with our brains?

That question is the subject of Humphrey's book Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness. The book serves as an extension of the lectures Humphrey gave at Harvard during the spring of 2004.

He began the lectures provocatively, darkening the room and projecting an enormous red square (like the one to the left) onto the screen at the front of the hall. He then asked everyone what they were doing. They were, of course, "seeing red." But in order to "see red," quite a few things have to come together. One, the "red" has to be there to be seen--this is the purpose of the giant screen. But secondly, and more interestingly, a number of things have to occur in the seer's brain to achieve the state of "seeing red." A further remarkable fact is that everyone in the room (excepting, perhaps, the severely color-blind) can agree that they are in fact "seeing red." Consciousness thus ties us together, despite the fact that it occurs separately in each individual brain.

Indeed, Humphrey argues that even if we can't quite explain what consciousness is, we can all agree that it's crucial to our sense of ourselves as human beings. In this sense, it plays an important role for the way in which it "taps straight into people's sense of their own metaphysical importance." Consciousness makes us humans feel like we matter--what other animal can function at the level we can? Monkeys might well be able to see red, but they sure as heck can't talk about it. Consciousness, in short, sets us apart.

Seeing Red is somewhat unusual for a science book in that it celebrates the mystery of consciousness, delighting in what we don't know about how our brains work. For Humphrey, this aspect of consciousness is what makes it worth studying:

... I admit that, although I have been engaged in "consciousness studies" for thirty years, I too feel some perverse pride in the fact that consciousness has held out so far against all attempts to treat it as just one more biological phenomenon. I take comfort in the thought that if and when we do finally get a scientific explanation, it will have at least to be an explanation unlike any other.

This sense of joy and wonder pervades the whole of Seeing Red. It's the perfect science book for non-scientists interested in how we got to be the way we are. We're not the only ones who think so--the South China Morning Post called it "ruminative, fluent and daring," while reviews in the Guardian, Nature, New Scientist and the Los Angeles Times express similar sentiment.

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||| Read an excerpt in pdf format.