Chapter 2: The Varieties of Conscious Experience

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Welcome to The Deep Dive.

Today we're inviting you to journey into the most intimate universe you inhabit, your own mind.

We navigate our lives day in and day out, but how often do we truly pause to understand the vast, intricate landscape of our inner experiences?

It's astonishing, isn't it?

We just live it.

And that's precisely our mission today.

We're embarking on a comprehensive tour through the varieties of conscious experience.

We're drawing extensively from chapter two of the book, Then I Am Myself, The World.

Right.

And the goal?

The goal is to unravel what it truly means to be conscious.

We'll explore the diverse forms of human experience, you know, from the everyday stuff to the really extraordinary.

We're focusing on what's known as phenomenology, which is basically just that which appears or maybe more simply what it feels like.

Ah, like that M &M line.

I can't tell you what it really is.

I can only tell you what it feels like.

Exactly.

That captures it perfectly.

It's about the subjective quality.

Okay.

So to set the stage, we're looking at what?

Two broad kinds of experiences.

That's right.

Percepts.

So sensations and thoughts and feelings which have that emotional flavor.

And it's important to remember that our experience, human experience, is shaped by our specific senses and abilities.

Yeah.

Very different from, say, a bat or a dog.

Absolutely.

Our reality is uniquely human.

So our journey really begins with the foundation, how we perceive the world.

Okay, let's dive into that.

We start with the familiar ones.

Sight, touch, sound, odor, taste.

Our brains are like these incredible translators, right?

Totally.

They take physical signals, photons, pressure waves, molecules, and boom.

They turn into conscious percepts, like, you know, seeing a friend's face, feeling your shoes are maybe a bit tight, hearing that da -da -da -dium of Beethoven's fifth, or smelling and tasting your morning coffee.

It's amazing how immediate it feels.

And what's fascinating is how structured these sensory spaces are.

Take color vision.

For most of us, it's along three dimensions, think green, red, blue intensity.

That's because of three specific photo pigments in our eyes.

But everyone's the same.

Not at all.

Most mammals.

Only two.

Their color world is much flatter than ours.

And then you get something like the mantis shrimp 11 or more photo pigments.

11.

Wow.

Yeah.

It means the colors you see are totally specific to our species.

A mantis shrimp's reality, color -wise, is something we literally can't imagine.

That really puts our own senses in perspective.

Okay, what about taste?

Taste?

We generally talk about five basic flavors.

Sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness,

and umami.

Umami, that's the savory one, right?

Took a while to be recognized.

It did, thanks to Kikuna Ikeda in early 20th century Japan.

It's that meaty, brothy taste.

And these flavors come from receptors all over the mouth and throat, not just the tongue.

And tying back to that structure idea,

seeing, hearing, touching, they usually feel like they're somewhere, right?

In a specific place.

Exactly.

There's a spatial quality.

You see something over there.

You hear a sound coming from the left.

Okay, then there's imagination.

The mind's eye or ear.

Oh, imagination is incredible.

Conjuring images, scenes, voices, music pulling from memory or just making it up.

Like, picture the Statue of Liberty.

Which arm holds the torch?

What's in the other hand?

Is it holding, I don't know, a laptop?

Probably not a laptop.

But yeah, that ability to visualize, to mentally simulate, it's key to how we plan and even if imagine things are usually a bit fainter, less vivid than the real deal.

So that's the world out there.

What about the world in here, inside our bodies?

Right.

Let's turn inward to what are called interoceptive perceptions.

Sensations from sensors scattered all through your body.

Things like knowing where your arms are without looking.

Precisely.

Proprioception, knowing your limb position.

And balance, your head orientation.

Think about dribbling a basketball or typing.

You're not consciously tracking every finger, are you?

No way.

It just happens.

These senses are crucial for moving smoothly through the world.

We totally take them for granted until maybe something goes wrong.

And there are other internal feelings too.

Definitely.

Sensations from organs.

Feeling hungry or nauseous.

Your heart racing.

Your lungs canting after a run.

The need to pee.

We're often oblivious, really, unless they get uncomfortable or we deliberately tune in like in yoga or meditation.

Well, the book mentions sexual sensations too.

Yes, the whole rich experience of arousal and orgasm.

Quite pleasant, but usually fleeting, which is unfortunately a big contrast to chronic pain, which many people suffer from persistently.

So all these bodily sensors together, they kind of build up our sense of having a body being located here.

Exactly.

They anchor us.

They give us that feeling of being a spatially extended mobile self in the physical world.

Okay, let's talk more about pain.

It's a complex.

It really is.

At its core, pain hurts.

It has what psychologists call negative valence or effect.

It feels bad.

And different pains feel different, don't they?

A migraine isn't like a toothache or a twisted ankle.

The quality, the signature is distinct and the intensity can range from just annoying to completely overwhelming.

It's like an alarm system then.

That's a great way to put it.

Interceptive percepts, especially pain, are like your body's dashboard lights, signaling something's wrong.

Dehydration, maybe a blister forming, an infection.

The nervous system alerts you.

Modern medicine has changed things a lot though, hasn't it, with pain?

Massively.

Anesthesia, good painkillers.

They really reduce the burden of acute pain from injury or inflammation.

It doesn't dominate life the way it used to.

But chronic pain and emotional distress, those are still incredibly prevalent, widespread really.

And this leads to that fascinating idea that pain and actual injury aren't always linked.

Exactly.

You can have injury without pain.

Think about athletes hyper -focused during a game, soldiers in battle, climbers on a rock face.

They might not even notice they're hurt.

Right.

Not until later, when the adrenaline wears off or the focus shifts, there's that incredible historical example of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Buc.

Self -immolation in 63.

Yes.

He sat perfectly still, no sound, while engulfed in flames.

It's a stunning, almost unbelievable demonstration of mind over sensation.

Wow.

And the flip side?

Pain without injury.

Absolutely.

Think heartbreak.

That deep emotional pain from loss or rejection.

The band Nazareth wasn't kidding with Love Hurts.

Brain imaging studies actually show activity in areas associated with physical pain during intense social rejection.

So it feels like physical pain almost.

In a way, yes.

And we see the tragic consequences in things like the deaths of despair, chronic emotional anguish, driving self -destructive acts.

The key takeaway here is really profound.

Subjective feeling, the pain itself, and objective tissue damage can be completely separate things.

They often go together, but they don't have to.

Okay.

This seems like a good point to bring in self -awareness.

Our sense of I.

Yes.

Self -consciousness.

The subjective most obvious part of this is that inner voice.

The internal monologue.

Yeah.

That constant chatter, ruminating, judging, worrying, planning, often way faster than spoken words.

The sense of I becomes much more dominant as we grow up.

And then there's being aware that you're aware.

Metaconsciousness.

Exactly.

Becoming conscious of your own experiences.

Like noticing, hmm, my toe hurts.

Maybe those shoes were a bad idea.

It's like consciousness looking at itself.

Is that related to mindfulness?

It is.

Mindfulness is about being aware of the present moment, including those metaconscious thoughts, but without judging them.

Just observing.

Kind of decentering the self, stepping back from the constant stream.

And this sense of self comes with other abilities too, right?

Oh, definitely.

Recalling personal memories, your autobiographical self.

That time you went on that trip or that specific conversation, that's episodic memory.

Crucially, the self wants things.

It forms intentions.

And we experience agency.

I decided to do that.

And ownership, that's my hand moving.

Each of these has its own distinct experiential flavor.

And getting better at noticing these different aspects, that's part of growing up, gaining wisdom.

Absolutely.

Differentiating and understanding your own experiences, your emotions.

That refinement of self -awareness is a huge part of maturity.

What about thoughts themselves?

Do they have a feel?

That's a big debate, actually.

Some argue a lot of thinking is unconscious machinery.

And we only become aware of the

as images or inner speech.

It's not clear if the raw thinking itself have a unique phenomenology.

Interesting.

But we definitely experience mental time travel.

Oh, for sure.

We constantly revisit the past in memories, sometimes fondly, sometimes less so.

And we project into the future, planning, fantasizing.

And again, this mental travel is mostly done through inner sight and inner sound.

You see the memory, you hear the planned conversation, much less common to smell or taste a memory vividly.

Okay, so we've covered percepts, the inner body, the self.

What about the other big category?

Feelings?

Emotions?

Right.

Emotions.

They range from the basics, anger, fear, joy, sadness, to really complex blends, like sodade in Portuguese, that bittersweet longing for something lost mixed with warm memories.

They even have a whole music genre, fado, dedicated to that feeling.

How are emotions different from, say, seeing or hearing something?

A key difference is duration and adaptation.

You notice a smell, but then you adapt.

It fades from awareness.

A loud noise becomes background.

Percepts are often fleeting.

Feelings, emotions, though.

They tend to ebb and flow more slowly.

They can linger, turning into a mood that colors everything for hours or days.

Think of that movie title, In the Mood for Love.

And percepts are kind of neutral, right?

Until they trigger an emotion.

Generally, yes.

Seeing red isn't inherently good or bad.

Hearing a note isn't.

But emotions.

They are defined by their valence.

They feel good or bad.

Positive, like love or joy, or negative, like fear or disgust.

And their intensity varies hugely, from a mild flicker to an overwhelming passion that takes real effort to manage.

So much of human drama is about that struggle, isn't it, when self -control fails?

This brings us back to that idea of the stream of consciousness from William James.

Yes, that powerful metaphor.

Consciousness flowing continuously.

Thoughts and feelings rising and falling like currents in a river.

You see it reflected in art, too.

Think of Wagner's operas, with their endless melody, or those deep dives into characters' minds in novels by Proust, Wolf,

Joyce, their interior monologues.

But you mentioned the metaphor is maybe misleading.

In some ways, yeah.

The chapter raises a few critiques.

First, the idea that experience might not be a continuous stream, but more like discrete snapshots, like frames in a movie film.

Snapshots.

Yeah, each experience now is a distinct moment.

The duration might stretch or shrink depending on attention or arousal.

That could explain things like life flashing before your eyes, maybe you're getting more snapshots per second, or why some moments feel like they last forever.

Okay, what else?

Second, the stream implies time always flows forward at a steady rate.

But some experiences, like those reported with psychedelics, suggest time can slow down, stop, or even feel irrelevant altogether.

The flow can be suspended.

Wow.

And the third critique.

Interruptions.

The stream isn't actually continuous because it's broken up by periods of unconsciousness, primarily sleep.

Ah, sleep.

Trying to notice the exact moment you fall asleep.

It's impossible, right?

It really is.

Like Murakami said, you are there one instant and then no more.

And waking up from deep, dreamless sleep, it feels like you just blinked into existence from nothing.

When researchers wake people from that stage, they usually report no conscious experience just before waking, suggests the lights were truly out.

But sometimes you are conscious, but just don't remember.

Like blackouts.

Exactly.

Alcohol blackouts or sedation, like with propofol for colonoscopy.

You might be somewhat aware during the procedure, but the drug prevents memories from forming.

So awareness and memory encoding are separable.

You can have one without the other.

What about dreams then?

That's consciousness during sleep.

Right.

REM sleep dreams.

They feel incredibly real, very visual and spatial, but usually you lack insight.

You're not surprised you can fly or walk through walls.

You're just in the movie.

Unless you have a lucid dream.

Lucid dreaming, where you know you're dreaming, like in Inception.

Precisely.

You wake up inside the dream, you realize it's a dream and can sometimes even gain some control.

There's research where lucid dreamers actually signal to experimenters using prearranged eye movements while they're still asleep.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

But we still don't really know why we dream?

Nope.

Lots of theories.

But the actual function of dreams remains a bit of a mystery.

They're extraordinary experiences, though.

And speaking of startling things,

mind blanking.

Ah, yes.

A relatively recent discovery.

These are brief periods, maybe seconds, maybe over a minute, where consciousness just seems to switch off, even while you're doing routine stuff like driving or washing dishes.

So from the outside, you look normal.

Totally normal.

But afterwards, the person reports experiencing nothing.

No thoughts, no feelings, just a gap.

It seems to happen more when you're sleep deprived.

Maybe it's like tiny microsleeps or parts of the brain going briefly offline.

So between mind wandering, which happens like half the time, apparently, and mind blanking.

Yeah, it adds up.

A huge chunk of our waking hours might be spent zoned out, daydreaming, or just momentarily offline.

It really highlights how fragile, focused consciousness can be.

That makes me think about just being idle.

We don't do much anymore.

Right.

Langer, boredom, just letting time pass, like that Otis Redding song, sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time.

Our always -on culture pushes us towards constant busyness, constant input.

But maybe we lose something valuable when we lose the art of just being still.

It might even harm our well -being.

Okay, let's shift gears towards the edge cases.

The really unusual experiences.

Yes, the outer fringe.

Experiences that often involve a profound loss of self, losing that sense of eye, and even the sense of having a body.

These were often dismissed by science historically, but they're genuine phenomena.

Like flow spades.

Flow is a great example.

Sixth at Mahali's concept.

You're totally absorbed in an activity, dancing, climbing, coding, playing music.

And your sense of self just dissolves.

Pretty much.

Your attention is fully on the task.

Time can feel distorted.

The inner critic goes silent.

It leads to this deep contentment, this feeling of effortless action.

Athletics, musicians, surgeons,

they often talk about seeking that state for peak performance.

Losing yourself to find peak performance.

But there are even deeper states of self -loss.

Oh yes, much more profound.

Things reported during near -death experiences, sudden religious conversions, deep mystical states, often triggered by meditation or psychedelics.

People describe a lasting feeling of gratitude, of connection, of becoming one with the world or the universe.

And the stream of consciousness,

it changes.

It can feel like it freezes, time stops.

There's often a sense of encountering something vast, numinous, almost impossible to put into words, ineffable.

Schopenhauer called it piercing the veil of Maya, seeing beyond the usual illusions of reality.

These sound like transformative experiences.

They absolutely can be.

Qualitatively different from everyday life.

They often lead to a sense of transcendence, a deep calm or equanimity, a feeling that despite everything, things are fundamentally okay.

By dissolving that ego, that I, which is always wanting or fearing, these experiences can bring this incredible peace of mind.

It's a radical shift.

This ties into ideas from contemplative traditions, right?

Like non -dual states.

Exactly.

Buddhist practices, for instance, talk about non -dual states of consciousness experiences without a central I or sharp subject -object split.

It even raises this mind -bending question.

Can consciousness exist without any content?

No seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking.

Just pure awareness.

Is that even possible?

Some tradition suggests it is.

Samadhi in Buddhist meditation is sometimes described as the complete quieting of all mental activity, consciousness resting in itself, like a luminosity of nothingness or an empty mirror.

It's a profound and challenging idea.

Which brings us to the difficulty of describing any of this, the ineffability.

Absolutely.

How do you describe the taste of pizza to someone who's never had it?

Or the feeling of mystical unity?

Words fail.

That's the whole point of Thomas Nagel's famous essay, What is it like to be a bat?

The very question presupposes subjective experience.

It is the definition of consciousness in a way.

And can something without consciousness, like maybe a super advanced AI,

ever truly get what that question means?

That's the multi -billion dollar question, isn't it?

Can you understand what it's like if there's nothing it's like to be you?

Probably not.

So wrapping this all up, it's just astonishing that we experience anything at all.

Precisely.

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, not how consciousness is mystical, but that it is.

The sheer fact of subjective experience, your intimate acquaintance with what life feels like, that's the fundamental mystery.

So a final thought for you, our listener, as you reflect on this tour, do you and I, can we really feel the same way about things?

Are we experiencing the same reality?

Or are we maybe?

Like unique universes, each experiencing our own distinct world, something to ponder.

Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the vast and mysterious world of conscious experience.

We hope this exploration has offered you some new insights, maybe some moments of understanding.

Thank you for being part of the Deep Dive family.