Consciousness, Part Three: What Is It Like to Be a Smoke Detector? What Is It Like to Be a Zombie? What Is It Like to Be?

The point of the bat exercise is two-fold: first, to show the difficulty of accessing the consciousness of other sentient beings, but more importantly, to demonstrate that there are other forms of consciousness beyond those available to us humans, namely touch consciousness, taste consciousness, smell consciousness, hearing consciousness, sight consciousness, and mind consciousness. Since it is used to visualize it’s surroundings, the bat’s echolocution consciousness is not quite hearing consciousness, even though it involves the ears. But then it’s not quite sight consciousness either. It’s something completely different, something to which we have no means of access, but by contemplating it, we become more aware of the limits of our own consciousnesses, just as travel to exotic locales gives us insights into the nature of our homeland.

Trying to understand consciousness is like the hand trying to grasp itself. According to Australian philosopher David Chalmers, “Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.”

Chalmers argues that consciousness isn’t physical. He notes that when we think and perceive, there is the neural activity of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. This subjective aspect is experience. Conscious experience is the phenomenon that is so difficult to grasp.

When we smell smoke, for example, we experience the sensation of smelling smoke, both the sensory experience of aroma and awareness of the mental activity of deciphering the data. We are thus different from a smoke detector, which detects smoke but does not (as far as we can tell) experience the sensation of detecting smoke. And then there are mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is some quality of what it is like to be in them. All of these are states of experience.

Imagine a zombie, Chalmers argues – a creature physically identical to a human, functioning in all the right ways, having conversations, sitting on park benches, playing the flute, and so on, but simply lacking all conscious experience. In his book The Conscious Mind, Chalmers notes that since such a zombie is logically possible, then it would seem that consciousness could not be a physical thing – mind is not the same as brain.

Maybe consciousness is actually another sort of thing altogether – a fundamental entity in the universe, a primitive, like mass, time, or space. This theory is not mysticism; it is compatible with physical science because it does not alter the sciences – it is an addition to the physical sciences. If consciousness is a primitive like mass or space, then perhaps it is as universal as mass and space. If that were the case, then smoke detectors might be conscious after all, in some extremely basic way. Consciousness may exist, is some very basic form, in all matter, even at the level of the atom. In this view, humans are continuous with the rest of the world, even the inanimate parts of it, even stones and rivers – consciousness penetrates very deep, perhaps all the way down into the natural order of things.

Yogācāra is an influential school of philosophy and psychology that developed in Indian Mahayana Buddhism starting sometime in the fourth to fifth centuries, and is commonly known as Consciousness-Only Buddhism (Sanskrit: Cittamatra). This school maintains that all existence is nothing but consciousness, and that there is therefore nothing that lies outside of the mind. This means that conscious experience is nothing but imagination and false discrimination (the vi dividing the jnana), a provisional antidote; thus, the notion of Consciousness-Only is an indictment of the problems engendered by the activities of consciousness. Yogācāra has also been called Subjective Realism, since it acknowledges that individual factors including karma contribute to an experience of reality that must be different for every being.

So there you have it, a perfect little paradox - it is consciousness (perhaps, could be) that ties everything together, that makes humans continuous with the rest of the world, and it is consciousness that divides humans from the rest of the world and creates the illusion of separation. Of course, a Zen Master would laugh at this apparent paradox. Both sides of this supposed paradox, the Master would say, are nothing but concepts, constructs of the mind, mental agitations. Go beyond these word games and thoughts, stop trying to grasp the mind with mind, and directly experience consciousness.

Nansen said, "Ordinary Mind is the Way. The Way does not belong to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion. Not knowing is blank consciousness. When you have really reached the Way beyond all doubt, you will find it is as vast and boundless as the great empty sky. How can it be talked about on the level of right and wrong?"

At these words, Joshu was suddenly enlightened.