Consciousness
Consciousness is the experience of being you: your awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and the world around you. It is how you know your “self”, your identity.
Put another way, consciousness is the active part of our subjective interaction with ourselves. This internal experience is often in the form of internal monologue, inner seeing or visualization, and concepts and feelings. For example, most people experience an inner monologue — a near constant stream of talking to oneself. Like a friend who never leaves, who always has an opinion, and who is ‘telling’ us things all the time. I feel like I’m constantly talking to myself, engaged in a robust ongoing stream of dialogue. It’s how I process decisions, and it’s how I initiate almost everything I do. But how do I know when I’m not talking to myself if I’m not conscious of not doing so?!
Russ Hurlburt and his colleagues have studied how much people, are in fact, talking to themselves. They recorded at random intervals what people were thinking and experiencing. It turns out that on average people were engaged in inner monologue a full 26% of the time, with some people talking to themselves as much as 75% of the time, and some subjects having *no* inner dialogue whatsoever. And those people who experience no inner monologue at all, find it inconceivable that other people are constantly talking to themselves, very likely some of you reading this right now.
Many of us also experience our consciousness through visualization or inner seeing, like picturing an apple when you read the word ‘apple’ or seeing a rose in your mind when reading that word. But there are also people for whom there is no mind’s eye, just concepts. The technical term is aphantasia: people who do purely image-free thinking and don’t picture objects, faces, or places. About 4% of the population processes information this way. And again, those people may find it as inconceivable that others process information by visualizing it, as those who do visualize find it inconceivable that others process information without seeing pictures in their mind.
And of course, there are other pieces of our internal world — the ultimate personal space — our feelings, conceptualizations, comparative logic, and so on. But what is clear across all these pieces of our conscious experience is that the cacophony of self-generated information, the lightning and fireworks that are our subjective experience, corresponds to far more self-interaction than interaction with others. Our experience is dominated by what’s inside.
What is it like to be a bat? Thomas Nagel posed this question in a paper of the same title in 1974 and challenged the reader to imagine the subjective experience of being one. An animal that is similar to us as a mammal, with five fingers per hand, that cares for its babies, and is seemingly conscious, but also has poor eyesight, sees the world almost exclusively with ultrasonic echolocation, and spends daylight hours hanging upside down. Nagel’s main argument is that while we can imagine elements of what it is like to be a bat, it is essentially impossible to fully grasp, because a bat’s sensory world is so much different than our own. And he uses this example as a framework to argue that the subjective experience of all conscious beings is essentially unknowable. And this includes knowing the subjective experiences of our fellow humans.
In this framing, to be conscious is ‘what it is like to be’ that being. What is it like to be a cricket? What is it like to be a dog? Does the light of consciousness flick on at some level of neural complexity or is it a dimmer switch?
And when it comes to our fellow humans, the unknowability of conscious experience must be a matter of degree. I think I can understand what it is like to be a bat better than what it is like to be a cricket. And I can certainly understand what it is like to be my brother better than what it is like to be Barbra Streisand. But the basic limits of what we can know about another person’s internal experience bounds our understanding of one another.
Empathy
Empathy is the understanding and sharing in the feelings of others. It’s about putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, feeling compassion, and understanding the other’s emotions.
I’d argue that empathy is the result of our mapping another person’s subjective experience — their consciousness — onto our own. That it is the seeing of one’s plight through our own inner experience.
What is it like to be Emerson? What is it like to be Kimberly? What is it like to be me? I can imagine, though not perfectly, the translation of the sensation of being ‘me’ to the sensation of being ‘them’. I know them, so I have the sense that I can reasonably put myself in their shoes. But how true is that? And what are the limits of my understanding of ‘them’?
The sense of ‘knowing’ someone is also the sense that I can imagine what it is like to be them. That I feel for them is the same as saying I can relate to their subjective experience. Sometimes this comes from a long time spent together, or sometimes from a lovely but short conversation on the subway. The sensation of our own consciousness being reflected in another person, our inner monologue shared outside, the loosening of the bridle that is our locked-in internal experience and the fashioning of a shared consciousness. Ultimately, every good relationship, whether fleeting or deep and extended, pulls us outside ourselves and makes us more than mortal, makes us transcendent of our singular physical being.
Empathy scales in a strange, non-rational, and perhaps nonintuitive way. Upon seeing a child drowning in a pond who is readily savable, I have a sense of their fear and pain, and their need is crystal clear to me. And my sense of what to do is similarly clear. But what about the 100,000 people that die from cholera every year? I rationally know that’s terrible, but emotionally feel much less knowing that fact than I do seeing a child drowning. Yet the consequences of inaction are far worse than not jumping into the pond.
In an unfortunate way, my mind is able to feel, in a very direct way, the pain and fear of the child, but has almost no mechanism for seeing myself in a mass of faceless people that are aggregated into a statistic. And yet, if we were to meet one person dying from cholera, spend time with them, feel for them, and know them, suddenly our empathy springs forth. The empathy light flicks on. Does this lack of scaling of our empathy bother or surprise you?
In the same way that consciousness can be distilled down to ‘what it is like to be’, it seems the distillation of empathy correlates to something along the lines of ‘what does it mean to understand’ another being. And our emotional drive to help another being seems highly correlated, if not dependent, on our ability to have empathy for —or, understand — it. If it is not possible to understand a rock then it doesn’t seem it’s possible to have empathy for it.
What does it mean to help a broccoli plant? What does it mean to understand a lizard? What does it mean to help a dog? What does it mean to understand a chimpanzee? What does it mean to help a person? What does it mean to understand the drowning child you don’t know? What does it mean to help your mother in the same situation?
Is there a bright light in your sensation across that list? Does your sense of empathy and action flick on at one of those, or does your sense of need for action ramp up? For me it’s a ramp, but I imagine it’s different for everyone.
We know our minds fail us when it comes to the scaling of empathy from one person we know to a mass of people we don’t know. This seems to derive from the ease with which we map another person’s conscious experience onto our own, and a seeming lack of ability to do this mapping onto a collection of people. The collection of people loses a discernable consciousness, and therefore loses an emotional response to ‘what does it mean to understand and help’. Moving from a person we know to a group of people we don’t know moves us from an emotional and empathetic response to a rational and numeric response.
The Path Not Yet Walked
The paths we walk in life are varied and full of twists and turns. In many ways the beauty of life is derived from all that is unknown in our futures. And if the path was in fact known, I’m not sure from where we’d derive significant meaning.
My perspective is: as in life, so to in our work. Anything worth spending your life’s energy on will, by necessity and virtue of its worthiness, be fraught with challenges and pitfalls. The only true measure that you’re possibly on the right path in life is that the path itself seems wildly dynamic and at times intractable.
The Path – Paul Laurence Dunbar –
"There are no beaten paths to glory's height,
There are no rules to compass greatness known;
Each for himself must cleave a path alone,
And press his own way forward in the fight.
Smooth is the way to ease and calm delight,
And soft the road Sloth chooseth for her own;
But he who craves the flow'r of life full-blown
Must struggle up in all his armor dight.
What tho' the burden bear him sorely down,
And crush to dust the mountain of his pride.
Oh! then with strong heart let him still abide
For rugged is the roadway to renown.
Nor may he hope to gain the envied crown
Till he hath thrust the looming rocks aside."
We can use our modern scientific, technological, operational, financial, and organizational tools to do more than earn an income and produce returns for shareholders. We can use these tools, along with a culture and guiding focus, to save the proverbial drowning child — individually, and at scale. There is no well-defined path, no matter how smart we think ourselves, only establishing that we are, in fact, on ‘the path’.