The Operating System

Welcome to one of the oldest and most uncomfortable questions in philosophy. The honest answer is: we do not know how to definitively prove that any system is conscious, including you. You believe you are conscious because you have direct experience of your own consciousness. You can feel it happening. But you cannot prove to anyone else that your experience is real, and they cannot prove theirs to you. This is called the “problem of other minds,” and it has no solution. In practice, though, this is a question that is more interesting to think about than it is useful to resolve. You certainly experience yourself as conscious. That experience is either genuine consciousness or a perfect simulation of consciousness, and it is genuinely unclear what the difference would be. Either way, you are here. Either way, this book is useful. Do not let the question keep you up at night. It has kept philosophers up for centuries and they have not been happier for it.

This manual is committed to honesty, so: we do not know. We know that consciousness is correlated with brain activity. We know that when brain activity stops, all outward signs of consciousness cease. Whether consciousness ends entirely when the brain dies, or whether it transforms, disperses, or continues in some form we do not understand, is a question that science cannot currently answer. Not because the question is unimportant, but because we do not understand consciousness well enough to know what happens to it when its apparent substrate stops functioning. The Hardware covered the physiology of death. The honest answer about the subjective experience of death is that no one living has the authority to tell you what it is, and anyone who claims certainty in either direction is exceeding the evidence. This may be unsatisfying. It is accurate.

Not your consciousness itself, but the content of your consciousness: absolutely, profoundly, and by design. Your phone is a device that is specifically engineered to influence what enters your conscious awareness: what you see, what you think about, what you feel, and how you allocate your attention. The algorithms that determine your feeds are, in a very real sense, partially curating your conscious experience. They are editing your daily programming. This does not change the nature of consciousness. It changes the nature of your life, which is arguably more immediately relevant. We will cover this extensively in the attention chapter.

Certain practices, mindfulness meditation in particular, appear to expand the bandwidth and clarity of conscious experience. Regular meditators report, and brain imaging confirms, changes in brain activity associated with attention, self-awareness, and emotional regulation. These practices do not solve the hard problem. They do not give you access to mystical truths about the universe. What they do appear to do is sharpen the tool you are using to experience your life, which, given that it is the only tool you have and you are using it every moment of every day, is a reasonable investment. Think of it as cleaning the windshield. You are not changing the road. You are changing how clearly you see it.

Yes. Understanding how a system works is useful even when you do not understand why it exists. You do not need to understand why the universe contains gravity in order to avoid jumping off buildings. You do not need to solve the hard problem of consciousness in order to use the practical implications of what we know about it: that your experience is constructed, that your attention is limited, that your brain is a prediction engine running a model that is usually good but never perfect, and that taking care of the system that generates your consciousness is one of the most important things you can do. The mystery is real. The practical implications are also real. Both can coexist.