Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered

Think of consciousness like spacetime—a fundamental field that’s everywhere.

The great mystery of consciousness is why matter lights up with felt experience. After all, we are composed of particles indistinguishable from those swirling around in the sun; the atoms that compose your body were once the ingredients of countless stars in our universe’s past. They traveled for billions of years to land here—in this particular configuration that is you—and are now reading these words. Imagine following the life of those atoms from their first appearance in spacetime to the very moment they became arranged in such a way as to start experiencing something.

When discussing the combination problem, philosophers and scientists tend to speak in terms of a “subject” of consciousness, which is just another way of pointing to the experience of self in its most basic form. Therefore, rather than speak in these terms, it may be more accurate to instead talk about the content and quality of conscious experience at any given location in spacetime, determined by the matter present there.

If consciousness is fundamental, then the questions that prompt the combination problem are potentially the same as all the other questions we might ask about spacetime in which we don’t anticipate this problem. All matter would entail consciousness, and complex systems, such as human brains, would give rise to certain types of content in those locations in spacetime. Even if each individual atom has its own experience, consciousness itself is not necessarily isolated. The matter might be isolated, and therefore the content associated with the consciousness at that location is isolated. But consciousness itself would not be said to be isolated. Again, we can think of consciousness as analogous to spacetime: How it’s affected by matter depends on the matter in question (its mass, in the case of spacetime). Similarly, a consciousness field might be “shaped” by matter in terms of experiential quality or content. And this line of thinking yields interesting questions. How does the content that appears in an area of consciousness depend on the configuration of matter present in that location in spacetime? Are there experiences of overlapping or merging content?

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