The “living mirror” theory: Why all living organisms may have consciousness

What are you? According to science, you are a collection of material particles, a complex machine, completely devoid of any inherent meaning. According to certain religions, you are a divine, conscious soul with the capacity to feel and love, imbued with meaning and cosmic significance. How did we arrive at such seemingly opposite conclusions on what it is to be a human being? The answer lies, in part, in the fact that a human being can be understood from two perspectives: the inner and the outer. From the inside, it feels a certain way to be you. Whatever you might be physically, mentally you are a conscious, feeling thing. You smell the scent of the earth after it rains; you see the glory of a sunrise; you experience feelings of great variety and depth. This is the way of knowing ourselves through direct experience, the way that mystics have explored for millennia, long before we had scientific instruments with which to study the mind. Sitting in meditation, lost in ecstatic dance, or fasting and praying for days, these explorers of inner space received profound insights into our nature and our relationship to the rest of reality.

Looking from the outside, science tells us we are physical bodies made of molecules that themselves are made of atoms, which in turn are made of subatomic particles. The material substance that forms our bodies obeys laws of physics that cannot be broken, seeming to make us clockwork automatons that merely act out the desires programmed into us by evolution. It may be awe inspiring that many of the elements of our bodies were cooked up in exploding stars or that we exist through the combined riot of billions of subatomic particles, but science has no way of accounting for this feeling of awe; consciousness and feeling do not fit into our current scientific picture of the world. The scientific method has done an incredible job of helping us to understand the outer world, but the very existence of your inner world remains a mystery to science.

When we speak of consciousness, we are speaking of the very fact of experience. Consciousness is not the voice in your head or your ability to be self-aware, although these do depend on consciousness. It is the capacity to be aware of anything at all. Imagine the taste of a ripe strawberry, the warmth of sunlight on your skin, or deep pangs of longing. These experiences, so vivid and intimate, are all manifestations of consciousness. Consciousness does not require thought or the ability to self-reflect; where there is feeling of any kind, from the experience of seeing the blue of the sky to imagining what your life will be like a decade from now, there is consciousness.

An influential definition of consciousness comes from philosopher Thomas Nagel, who suggests that we consider something to be conscious if there is “something it is like” to be that thing. For example, if I rearranged your atoms to change you into a rock, then we might presume that there would be “nothing it is like” to be the rock, which is another way of saying that rocks are not conscious. As I mixed up your atoms to turn you into a mineral object, at some point in the transition, consciousness would be extinguished, and the light of experience would go out. What about an ape or a squirrel, a termite or a bacterium? Is there “something it is like” to be them. That is, are they conscious? The challenge science faces is in understanding how our objective description of the arrangement of such physical phenomena as atoms connects to the subjective qualitative experience of consciousness, of it being like something to be that thing—of experiential feeling itself.

We can think of consciousness as being like a simulation. When you have the experience of seeing a rainbow, the rainbow exists in your simulation of the world, your consciousness, not in the physical world itself. We know there is no colorful arched physical structure in the objective description of the world in such moments. You experience certain things in your simulation of the world around you, and I experience something different. To understand consciousness, we must explain why you and I simulate the world around us and what leads to the content of our simulations being different. Computers are capable of simulating things, however, yet we do not necessarily think that this makes them conscious, which takes us to the core of the mystery of consciousness. Why isn’t our simulation just a physical procedure that occurs in the dark? Why do our brains not simply function like a computer and physically process the necessary information without the added experience? A computer can analyze the same visual signals that give you the conscious experience of seeing a rainbow with no need for the experience. Why, in our case, are the lights on? Why is your simulation illuminated, and what is the source of this illumination?

This quality of illumination is known as awareness, and it lies at the core of consciousness. Another way to think about awareness is as knowingness. When there is an experience of the taste of banana, there is the knowing of that taste. When you perform an act unconsciously, there is no experiential knowing of that act having occurred. To fully explain this inner simulation that we call consciousness, we must account for this mysterious quality of awareness that results in the simulation actually being experienced rather than merely operating in the dark through blind, unconscious mechanism.

Though there is no shortage of speculation regarding the origin and nature of consciousness, there is no consensus on where consciousness fits into the modern scientific story of the natural world. In fact, we have no generally accepted explanation of why consciousness should exist at all. Is it the product of complex animal brains like our own? Is it the fundamental nature of our reality? Could it be an illusion? Every proposal in this array of mutually contradictory positions is held by multiple prominent philosophers and scientists today. To say there’s no consensus on the issue of consciousness is an understatement.

The issue of consciousness is consequential for understanding not only our own minds but also reality itself. Reckoning with the nature of experience forces us to confront what is perhaps the most basic question that science, philosophy, and religion all try to answer: What is going on? Do we find ourselves in a clockwork universe that happened to produce some animal brains that excrete consciousness like a useless gas for no apparent reason? Are we in a matrix or some kind of simulation? Are we a dream in a cosmic mind? Taking a stance on the issue of consciousness necessarily requires us to also commit to a stance on the nature of reality. Consciousness theories and their associated worldviews are a package deal.

In this book, I lay out a way of thinking about consciousness that I previously published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies as the living mirror theory of consciousness. The core claim is that life and consciousness are fundamentally linked—we do not experience primarily because we have brains; we experience because we are alive. The brain is certainly involved in human consciousness but as a secondary player to the life process. The evolution of the brain is not what brought consciousness into existence; the emergence of life did. The brain merely elaborates the contents of experience to admittedly dizzying heights in our species.

The living mirror theory is entirely aligned with the scientific perspective, being influenced by Darwinian theory, thermodynamics, complexity theory, biophysics, and contemporary neuroscience. As is typical when we gain scientific insight, accepting a theory comes with many interesting and sometimes counterintuitive implications. Darwinian evolution tells us that, due to the continuity of the web of life, we share an ancestor with a banana. The Copernican revolution in astrophysics led us to the realization that, rather than being at the center of the universe, “we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people,” as astrophysicist Carl Sagan put it. The living mirror theory comes with its own surprising implications for what we are.

For the theory to make sense, I must frame it within a compelling worldview. The current dominant worldview in science, in which only the material particles of physics are thought to truly exist, has left us facing a dead end when it comes to thinking about consciousness. To make sense of consciousness, we must first examine and dismantle the flawed assumptions in this predominant scientific worldview. Only then can a new understanding of our inner world and its place in reality come into focus, reconciling the scientific and religious perspectives on the question of what we are.

While the domain of spirituality and religion understandably makes some scientifically minded people uncomfortable, I believe there are valuable insights into our existential situation to be found in these traditions. In particular, there appears to be a mystical core to many religions that reflects a fundamental insight that people have found compelling throughout time: that we are not truly separate from the world around us and that we are in fact deeply at home in existence. In religious traditions, this is typically not something that one discovers by studying the world around us but instead through conscious experience itself. It seems to me that a deep understanding of this experience is an antidote to our current assumptions that block us from understanding consciousness.

I use the term nondual naturalism for the secular-spiritual worldview I present. Nondual refers to the insight that reality is not fundamentally split into subject and object, mind and matter, but is instead whole. Naturalism refers to a scientific perspective on reality that does not accept the existence of supernatural phenomena but instead relies on philosophy and science to map out a consistent picture of the universe, one in which the world around us contains its own explanations. The combination of the two perspectives results in a worldview in which a subset of core spiritual experiences that are in alignment with scientific findings are held to be valid. These include feeling oneself to be fully part of nature (as Darwin showed us we are) and discovering that the self is not an entity with its own independent existence; rather, one’s sense of being a separate self is a psychological experience (as modern neuroscience also claims).

Finally, a note on terminology. This book deals with the central fact of our existence, that there is an experience happening. When I use such terms as consciousness, experience, subjectivity, feeling, sentience, or mind, I always refer to this simple and readily apparent fact. The feeling of touch on your skin, experiencing the scent of coffee, your perception of a beautiful landscape scene—these subjective events should not exist according to our current scientific picture of the world, and it is these phenomena that I address when I use the term consciousness, as well as these related terms. The term awareness is reserved for the core characteristic of consciousness by which the content of experience is illuminated in order to differentiate between this and the specific contents of consciousness. This all is unpacked throughout this book. I include a glossary of key terms to help keep track of the different theories and terms of art used in later chapters.

In writing this book, I am driven by more than an intellectual curiosity into the nature of consciousness. It seems to me that, at this moment, our dominant global culture is confused and lost. There is so much unnecessary suffering in the world that is caused by both our relation to ourselves and to the natural world, and it is my hope that, through greater understanding of ourselves and our place in existence, we will be able to navigate more effectively to a world with less suffering. For this reason, I have written this book to be accessible to a general audience, as well as to academics in fields relevant to consciousness. Science, when wielded wisely, can function as a light in the dark in this quest, leading us toward truth. Through greater understanding of ourselves and our situation, I hope we can move collectively in the direction of ever greater peace, both inner and outer. Even if this book fails to move us in this direction, I deeply appreciate your coming on this journey with me.