The Water of Consciousness

The most familiar parts of your mind are the hardest to see

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One afternoon, I was talking to a couple of friends about brain surgery (as you do). I mentioned that it's generally done while the patient is fully awake without anesthesia because it doesn't hurt when someone slices your brain. Once you're past the surrounding tissues, you can poke and slice the brain without causing any pain (you might cause other problems, like permanent brain damage, so don't try that at home).

One friend asked the obvious question: why doesn't the brain feel pain?

The other friend offered this explanation: it would hurt too much, so the brain doesn't let you feel that.

That friend doesn't read this newsletter, so I can be blunt—that explanation makes no sense.

I get the idea behind it. When any other part of our body is hurt, we feel pain roughly proportional to how serious the harm is. And there are stories of people experiencing serious harms, like losing a limb or being shot, and the body goes into shock and shuts off the pain. It's as if the body switches to "no pain mode" beyond a certain threshold. So maybe, if the brain is damaged, it's beyond the threshold and the brain just shuts off the pain.

But that's not how pain works. Pain isn't the feeling of the damage itself. For damage to result in pain requires receptors that send signals to the brain.

The reason you don't feel pain when your brain is sliced into is because there aren't any pain receptors in there to track that there is damage happening.

There are tragic stories of people who lack the mechanisms to feel pain and end up with untreated broken bones and vision loss because they don't have the mechanisms to tell them "something's wrong" or "stop scratching out your eyeballs".

Pain doesn't come for free—we need mechanisms to take care of the job of generating that signal.

The Water We Swim In

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

—David Foster Wallace

Like the fish, we don't generally notice the things we're immersed in.

The problem is, when something is always there, we may not realize how much it makes possible. A fish knows how to swim, but might not wonder why moving its tail propels it forward—that's just what moving the tail does. The idea of looking for a deeper explanation—that the tail is pushing against a substance, which generates force to propel the fish forward—might not be on their fishy minds.

We're so used to feeling pain when we're hurt that we rarely stop to ask how it happens. It isn't a surprise my friend took it as a brute fact that "damaged body" means pain. But we've forgotten the "water" of receptors throughout our bodies that make feeling pain possible.

There's nothing we're more immersed in than the workings of our own brains.

If you hold your arm behind you out of sight, you maintain a good idea of where it is. It might seem obvious that you do—you're the one that put it there! But similar to our experience of pain, there's "water" that makes proprioception possible: mechanisms in our joints signal the brain on how our body is currently positioned.

Similarly, when we move our eyes, we shift the image we are seeing, but we never get confused and think the world itself has shifted. This might seem trivial—we're the ones doing the moving, so of course we wouldn't think the world is moving. But again, we're forgetting the "water": there are explicit mechanisms in the brain for "subtracting out" the movement caused by our own bodies so that we can keep vision stable and differentiate a shift out in the world from a shift of our eyeballs.

It feels natural that we would remember events around us—we were there, after all. But even remembering simple events taking place around us depends on "water" for memory: elaborate mechanisms in the brain, involving molecular mechanisms for changing synaptic connections between neurons, that allow us to remember things.

It's easy to think we just get all of these things "for free" by virtue of being a mind. Familiarity hides the machinery. And the more familiar something is, the less we notice the water.

Familiar Doesn't Mean Fundamental

What could be more familiar than consciousness?

Every experience we have is a conscious one—that's what we mean by consciousness.

It's easy to think that this seamless experience is just the way things are. That it comes for free in some sense—perhaps from some fundamental force of the universe, like a soul or a panpsychic force.

I suspect a lot of the appeal of these ideas is because of the familiarity of consciousness. It's hard to wrap one's head around breaking it down into pieces, because each of those pieces wouldn't feel like this intimate, familiar experience we all have.

We look around a room, and we don't feel all of the intensive processing in our visual cortex, the attentional mechanisms pulling out features relevant to us, the memory mechanisms encoding the information for us to effortlessly retrieve in the moment or later. We don't feel how our conceptual knowledge of the world helps us parse and make sense of what we're seeing, or the rich tapestry of relationships between those concepts and sensations. But all of that is water. We just see the room in the familiar way we've seen every room our entire lives.

I suspect this familiarity is part of what makes consciousness feel like a mystery—and why the hard problem of consciousness appeals to so many people. It's not that there isn't an explanation, but we mistake the ease of experience for simplicity. We think the "swimming" just happens because we don't see the water.

Swimming has mechanics, and so does the mind. Just because something feels fundamental doesn't mean it is—it might just mean we've never noticed the water that makes it possible.

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