Strange but true neurological oddities

Notes on Second Person, Present Tense

This story is about a weird neurological fact that has bothered me for years: experiments since the 70's have proved that "consciousness" is largely a post-decision phenomena. Before you decide to, say, lift a finger, your unconscious brain has not only already decided to move that finger, but sent the command to the muscle, up to a half second before "you" decide to move it.

Weird, eh?

So, if consciousness is an add-on, what would a brain and body look like without consciousness? (This is a thought experiment that philosophy of consciousness guys call The Zombie problem—what, exactly, do we need consciousness for?)

A lot of the recent neurological research suggests that consciousness is exactly this kind of bottom-up process: there is no little man at the controls inside your head, only a little man being told what to think. Some folks, like Roger Penrose, argue that even if sometimes conscious awareness occurs after the action, perhaps this is only for actions that require quick reactions, and that there must still be a role for a consciousness (and free will) in more contemplative modes, when deeper thought is required and the "I" has to choose what to think about, choose what to do.

This argument, to me, is overly complicated. Why two completely different modes of brain action?  Why inject an impossible-to-define line between "higher" thought and reflexive thought? Your brain is just as smart as "you" are.  If the feeling that "you" are in charge is an illusion, so what?

But let's look for this "I" that directs your thinking, that chooses whether to think about the color red or what's for dinner tonight. This "I" has to use some physical process to work, some combination of neurons and firing synapses, etc. Even if you invoke quantum weirdness or the presence of a soul, there's no thought without some physical structure to think it. So before any consciousness can happen, at least one synapse must fire. More likely, you need many synapses, whole groups of neurons firing, perhaps across multiple sections of the brain. And then we're right back where we started: other parts of the brain having a thought, like "let's think about the color red." Then other neuronal structures related to redness start firing, before the parts of the brain required for consciousness are updated.

Anyway, those are the ideas that started me on this story. From there I started wondering about other things. Would a zombie—a person with a perfectly functioning brain, except that it wasn't conscious—look like from the outside and feel like from the inside (if anything)? If the old consciousness died, and a new one arose in its place, what would it feel like to be that new person? And how would loving, anxious parents react to this new person?  And so on down the merry road of speculation.

Enough for now. I haven't even gotten to other things that influenced the story, like the children's picture book Runaway Bunny, the conversion therapy "debate", the recovered memory movement, Buddhist and Christian beliefs about the self, and the comedian Emo Phillips.

Sources

Never trust a science fiction writer to represent the science accurately. If you're interested in consciousness, here are some of the sources I found useful in writing the story, and some I found afterward.

lI first read about the time-delay problem in a book on consciousness years ago (the title escapes me), then ran across it again in Scientific American, in the Sept. 2002 special issue about time (you can purchase a pdf). The article, "Remembering When" by Antonio R. Damasio, describes the experiment about deciding to flex a finger and attributes it to Benjamin Libet of University of California at San Francisco "in the 70's".  Damasio has written a couple of neuro books for laymen worth checking out. I especially liked The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.

Roger Penrose discusses the time-delay problem in Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness.  My notes say p. 387, but your mileage may vary.

A treasure-trove of SF-worthy ideas is in V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee's  Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind. The book includes dozens of examples of neurological oddities. Especially worth checking out is the phenomena of "blind sight," which Peter Watts recent novel of the same name takes the concept to its logical extreme.

One of the best surveys of the latest theories of consciousness (which I found, unfortunately, after writing "Second Person") is Exploring Consciousness, by Rita Carter. She's a science journalist who seems to have talked to everybody in the field.