Philosophy – Auxiliary Memory

How Aware or Conscious Was I At 5 Years Old?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/8/26

In the first chapter of Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, he makes a good case that consciousness evolved alongside biology, probably beginning in cells. For most of history, humans separated themselves from the animal world by claiming we had a soul, a divine spark, that animals lacked. Scientific studies of the mind are showing that’s not true.

Pollan found scientists who showed that plants could form and retain memories, anticipate, decide, and act on their goals. Their tiny bit of consciousness is nothing like ours, but it shows that consciousness is on a spectrum. There are profound implications if consciousness coevolved with biology, from the virus to the human brain. Research into consciousness and artificial intelligence is revealing a flood of new insights.

If life itself represents a spectrum of conscious development, I’m also assuming that any individual animal also shows a spectrum of conscious development over its lifetime.

I’m saying who I was at five is far different from who I am at seventy-four. The difference won’t be as big as between me and my cat, Ozzy, but I believe it’s huge. I’m not sure, but in some ways, five-year-old Ozzy might have been more aware than 5-year-old Jimmy. If we were both abandoned in the woods, Ozzy would have far better survival awareness.

I also believe my awareness/consciousness evolved significantly from 5 years 0 months to 5 years 12 months. I started the 1st grade when I was 5 years and 8 months old. School accelerated the evolution of my conscious mind.

I only have fleeting memories of life before turning five. I can remember only a few interactions with people. I have a few memories from Kindergarten. I had no knowledge of numbers, words, or letters. I had extremely limited spatial and temporal awareness.

I did what I was told, but I would have preferred to play on my own. I loved my toy truck, a little metal front-loader. I loved to climb trees. I loved TV, but we’re talking Captain Kangaroo and Kukla, Fran and Ollie. I had no idea what books and magazines were. I had no idea where I lived.

I’m not sure I had any particular self-awareness. Looking back, I think I was mostly unconscious of reality. If a stranger had walked up to me and pointed a gun at my head, I don’t think I would have been frightened or even known what a gun was. If my parents had left me alone in the house, I’m not sure I could have gotten my own food. I knew my father, mother, sister, and grandmother, but I was indifferent or clueless about everyone else. I don’t remember my Kindergarten teacher or any of my classmates.

My friend Linda has told many stories about her childhood, and she was far more aware than I was at the same ages. Girls mature sooner, but I think Linda was even exceptional for being a girl.

My point is, everyone evolves differently. The question is, how broad is the range of consciousness in humans? We know the range of intelligence is great, but what about awareness of reality? How many people are closer to a collie dog than to Einstein?

Nor is consciousness one thing. Elon Musk might be at the height of money-making consciousness, but fairly low at empathy for people.

Looking back at Jimmy at 5, I feel he was essentially unconscious compared to Jim at 74. I also sense that there are countless areas where I’m essentially unconscious at 74 compared to others at any age.

We say humans have five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Well, what lets me feel my heartbeat? What sense organ lets me feel cold? What sense organ lets me discern the passing of time? What sense organ does my wife have that lets her remember melodies that I lack?

How many levels of awareness are humans capable of achieving? How many aspects of reality can we discern? Science fiction, mysticism, spiritualists, and users of psychedelic drugs claim there are many levels of higher consciousness we could attain if we tried. Most sound like fantasies, but what if some are possible?

Over the centuries, there have been stories about supermen. Often, they have psychic abilities and other superpowers. Just consider Greek myths and Marvel Comics.

What are some truly possible higher states of consciousness? Compared to Jimmy at 5, I have a higher consciousness. What levels could I have achieved if I had known they existed and I had tried to attain them?

Artificial intelligence is a big topic right now. Computer scientists want to create AIs that are smarter than people. But what other things might AI become aware of that we can’t perceive?

We only perceive in a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum. AIs could be built to perceive far more of the whole spectrum. What if they discover things we never could with our senses and even scientific instruments? Will we believe them?

If I could travel back in time to talk to Jimmy at 5, could I make him understand anything about being Jim at 74? I doubt it. He could not even conceive the concepts of time travel, aging, or growth.

In recent months, I’ve been contemplating the evolution of my own consciousness. I think that evolution accelerated between 5 and 12. But then it exploded around 13. Most conceptual expansions peaked in my twenties. And most of my conceptual abilities have been declining since then. However, I feel my ability to generalize is still growing. That might be wisdom, or it might be a delusion.

The more I study my own mind and read books by scientists who study minds in general, the more I’m convinced that our consciousness coevolved with physics, chemistry, and biology. Thus, when my physical body dissolves with entropy, so will my mind.

There are even some scientists who still hold out that part of our awareness is metaphysical, and it will survive physical existence. Those scientists say artificial intelligence will never have that metaphysical spark they call the soul. I wonder something different.

What if the total gestalt of body, mind, awareness, sentience, and consciousness can be called our soul? But what if that soul is mortal? That collectively, all life on Earth has a kind of soul. too, but also mortal. Obviously, all life is evolving. But how much can we evolve as individuals?

Life and evolution are anti-entropic. Death is entropy. Is there a metaphysical existence that is not entropic?

JWH

Notes on the “Introduction” to A WORLD APPEARS by Michael Pollan

by James Wallace Harris, 6/3/26

When I was little, I pondered two philosophical questions that would make my head ache. The first was, “Why am I here?” The second, “Why isn’t there ‘nothing’ instead of something?” I don’t think the second question can ever be answered. Although I concluded as a kid that “nothing” can’t exist. If it could, we wouldn’t exist.

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan is resonating with me more than anything else I’ve read that tries to answer the first question. I’m reading the hardback while also listening to the audiobook. This forces me to go slow. But I’ve also decided to start over and take notes chapter by chapter.

This is my fourth attempt to take notes. I tried underlining in the Kindle edition. I tried using Obsidian. And I tried putting my notes into HTML. I want to be able to cut and paste text and to hyperlink to sources on the web. Using Obsidian or writing HTML code in a text editor was hindering me. So I decided to try collecting my notes in WordPress.

I find reading the Wikipedia entries for all the terms and people Pollan mentions helps me understand what I’m reading. I also feel I’ll eventually need to read the books mentioned, too.

Introduction: The Wager (pp. xiii-xxxv)

Christof Koch

With Koch at his side, Crick set out to explain how it is that a particular piece of brain tissue generates the feeling of being alive—the sense of a self in possession of subjective experience.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (p. xiv). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

David Chalmers

The hard problem of consciousness

First, there were what he called the “easy problems” of consciousness, which included figuring out the workings of mental operations like learning, memory, discrimination, and perception. Not all that easy, but at least we had a proven scientific method for approaching such behavioral and cognitive functions in terms of specific measures of brain activity. And then there was what he memorably called the “hard problem” of consciousness: the puzzle of why any of these mental operations are accompanied by any conscious experience whatsoever. “Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on ‘in the dark,’ free of any inner feel?” he asked in a subsequent paper.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (p. xv). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The wager:

When the scientist and the philosopher met in Bremen in 1998, drinking together late into the night, Chalmers expressed doubt that the search for neural correlates would succeed in the foreseeable future, much less solve the hard problem even if it did. Koch, with the brashness of a young man backed by one of the most brilliant scientists of his time, proposed a wager: Within twenty-five years, we would find the physical footprint of consciousness in the brain, which he predicted would comprise a small set of specialized neurons responsible for subjective experience. The loser would deliver to the winner a case of fine wine.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (p. xvi). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Galileo’s Error by Philip Goth (Amz)

Ever since Galileo’s time, and at his urging, science has cordoned off the mind—or the soul, as it was then known—leaving it to the exclusive jurisdiction of the priests and poets. This was both a political move and a practical one—political because it would (Galileo hoped) avoid bringing the hammer of the Church down on the scientific enterprise, and practical because (as Galileo foresaw) more progress could be made in the investigation of nature by focusing on objective qualities that could be measured rather than on subjective qualities that could not. With a few notable exceptions along the way (I’m thinking of Sigmund Freud and American philosopher-psychologist William James), this approach toward the science of the mind endured well into the twentieth century. Take, for example, behaviorism, the school of thought that dominated psychology for most of the twentieth century; it refused to deal with interiority or, really, anything but measurable outward behaviors. In light of this history, Christof Koch and David Chalmers stand out as pioneers.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (pp. xvi-xvii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The fact that consciousness can be altered by chemicals does not necessarily prove that consciousness is, at its core, a material phenomenon, but it would seem to lend at least some credence to the idea.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (p. xx). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Who won the wager?

Chalmers won the bet, by the way. During a ceremony I attended at a consciousness conference in New York City in June 2023, Koch graciously conceded and presented Chalmers with a case of Madeira.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (p. xx). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) – Giulo Tononi

According to IIT, every such moment of consciousness shares the same five specific qualities: It is “intrinsic” (that is, it has an internal perspective); it is “composed” of many distinct phenomenal parts (think of the way the experience combines elements of perception, memory, feeling, imagination, etc.); it is “integrated,” or unified (these elements are joined together in a single experience at a time); it is “definitive” (it is this and not that, in other words); and it is “bounded” (it has an edge beyond which the conscious perception doesn’t go).

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (p. xxii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I don’t pretend to understand all the complexities of IIT, and the math can get pretty abstruse, but it seems to me that the straightforward question posed to Koch in Zurich hasn’t been completely answered: Why should neurons organized and exchanging information in any particular way necessarily feel like something? Koch and Tononi, who teamed up to refine IIT, have offered in reply an application of sheer intellectual brute force: Information integrated in the prescribed manner doesn’t just generate consciousness or correlate with it—no, integrated information is consciousness, full stop. The two are identical. The theory is controversial, to say the least, and no one has yet figured out a way to prove or disprove it.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (pp. xxii-xxiii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Global Workplace Theory (GWT, GNWT)

This theory contends that the brain consists of a great many modules, or networks, that spend most of their time processing information unconsciously—information from the sense organs, from the body, from memory, from emotions, and so on. After all, the overwhelming majority of the work done by our brains takes place completely beneath our notice. So how and why does some of this material bubble up into our conscious awareness?

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (p. xxiii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Chalmers believes that neither IIT nor GWT solves the hard question of consciousness.

Now this is very mind-blowing:

When I asked Koch what the world would look like absent all consciousness, he didn’t hesitate: “Particles and waves, that’s all. Dust! Just dust!” Discrete objects, time, even space—all are constructs, or figments, of consciousness, and all would melt away as soon as it did.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (p. xxvi). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It’s entirely possible to go through life without worrying about the “problem” of consciousness—what it is and how it came to be. In fact, it takes a certain kind of mind for “the problem” to arise—one that is self-conscious, or aware that it is aware, and marvels at this mystery (which is, when you stop to think about it, astounding). It is astounding that in a universe we often assume to be dead and purposeless, there evolved beings who can experience this reality and have feelings and thoughts not only about the appearing world but about the fact that they have feelings and thoughts at all! And it is still more astounding that these beings have minds capable of imagining counterfactuals, such as the possibility of a world without consciousness.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (p. xxix). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Hermann Hesse

Edmund Husserl

Chapters in A World Appears:

Sentience
Feeling
Thought
Self
Coda – The Cave

This, then, is the wager of A World Appears: that by the end of this journey, you will be more conscious than you were before it. Conscious of what? Of the rhythms and workings of your own mind; of the sentience that is all around us in nature; and of the improbable fact—the miracle!—that in this universe of rock and fire and ice and infinite space, we are somehow not only here but aware.

Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (pp. xxxiv-xxxvi). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

JWH

Are You Preparing for the 2030s?

by James Wallace Harris, 3/23/26

The 2030s will cover ages 78 to 88 for me. If you’re a teenager, the 2030s will cover your college and job-seeking years. If you’re in your twenties, the 2030s could be the years you get married and start a family. If I hadn’t started seriously saving in my fifties, I couldn’t have retired in the 2010s.

It is impossible to know the future. Even speculations based on extrapolation about present trends are nearly always wrong. However, it doesn’t hurt to be prepared like good Boy Scouts. In fact, I’ve heard luck defined as merely proper preparation.

For those of us who have orbited the Sun dozens of times, we have lived through constant change. We’ve learned that society never stays the same. People and their behaviors never seem to change, but relentless change churns our lives. Just observe the 14 decades of change in the films presented by TCM.

The iPhone was announced on January 9, 2007. I don’t even think Steve Jobs had any idea what it would do to the world in the 2010s and 2020s. Nor did we imagine what Amazon (1994), Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), Instagram (2010), TikTok (2016), and ChatGPT (2022) would do to society. And how many folks expected the end of Globalism and the return to nationalism in the 2010s?

I believe two technologies will transform society in the 2030s: AI and intelligent general-purpose robots. Ever since the Industrial Age began, Capitalists have resented the cost of Labor. But the reason we’ve always needed capitalism is that it gives most citizens employment. Capital and Labor were always tied together, but AI and robots could disconnect the relationship. What will that mean in the 2030s?

I know AI and robots will transform society in ways that will be judged evil in the coming decade. However, I will consider buying robotic caretakers for my wife and me in the 2030s. For a childless couple in their 80s, robots might be the cheapest and most advantageous solution. We will all find reasons (excuses?) to go along.

Humanity should decide to halt all development in AI and robotics right now. But we won’t. Greed is a dependable predictor of human behavior, and the millionaires and billionaires who see trillions in AI aren’t going to allow their greed to be curtailed.

It’s the same way the owners of trillions in fossil fuels haven’t let the threat of climate change interfere with their greed. But we can’t put all the blame on the rich, because we’ve all continued to consume fossil fuels. The weakness of human nature is also a reliable predictor of the future.

Societies only change during violent upheavals, such as the American, French, and Russian revolutions, the Civil War, WWI, and WWII. Moral upheavals, such as feminism, civil rights, and LGBTQIA+ rights, have been less effective at creating long-term, permanent change. Even the great upheaval created by the Enlightenment might not be permanent.

When thinking about what we might experience in the 2030s, we need to consider Black Swans. Donald Trump was a political black swan in 2016. There’s always a chance we’ll elect an Abraham Lincoln black swan in 2028 that will pull the nation back together. But black swans can’t be predicted.

Predictions for artificial intelligence range from the extinction of humanity to an age of unlimited abundance. Because technology has been a reliable agent of change for many decades, it’s probably safe to assume that trend will continue.

For example, if battery technology improves as much as companies working on battery science promise, expect a huge transformation. If just the Donut Labs battery turns out to be real, no one will want fossil fuels because renewable energy will be so dramatically cheaper.

If Elon Musk keeps his promise to manufacture millions of general-purpose robots with AI-powered minds, what will that do to human employment? Of course, business owners will buy them, but what about you? Could you resist owning your own Jeeves? How many fans of Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age will try to create a cybernetic service class? If you asked people in the 1950s if they’d ever want a computer in their homes, 99.9999% of them would have said no.

We can’t imagine black swans; that’s part of their definition. But most of the spectacular changes in society have come from technology that began its existence decades before transforming society. To imagine the 2030s, look at everything discovered in the last two decades.

As a science fiction fan, this will sound odd, but I think science fiction is a poor weathervane for the future. I believe the best bellwethers for the next decade are always revealed in the current decade.

JWH

Why I Prefer to Use the Word “Reality” to Mean Everything Instead of Using the Word “Universe.”

by James Wallace Harris, 2/4/26

When I was growing up, we used the word “universe” to mean everything in all of existence. However, over the course of my lifetime, scientists have started theorizing that there might be other universes, and we’re part of a multiverse. And who knows, what if there are multiple multiverses? Or even larger structures?

I now prefer to use the word “reality” to mean everything. And when I say reality, I mean all of existence that science has detected, and all of existence beyond that, too.

Since science has never found the largest and smallest aspect of reality, I assume reality is infinite in all directions.

It’s hard to imagine the size of the universe. If the known universe were shrunk to the size of a human body, a galaxy would be the size of a cell. And a human would be smaller than anything science has measured.

We are insignificant to the universe, and even more so to the multiverse, and we have no idea how to convey how small we’d be to reality. We are not the crown of creation.

Yet, of everything we’ve observed in reality, we’re the only aspect of reality that is aware of reality. I’m sure in the vastness of reality, we’re not unique, but in our domain, we are.

I started to write, “We are a miracle of existence,” but the word “miracle” is bogus. Miracles exist in our imagination, but not in reality. We are a byproduct of reality’s constant evolution. On one hand, it feels like our individual existence is akin to a tornado tearing through a forest, leaving a perfect Frank Lloyd Wright house in its wake. As a human, it feels miraculous to exist, but in reality, we’re just part of the evolutionary churn.

Theologians and Philosophers have come up with endless speculations about how we got here, why, and what we should be doing. Science has explained how we got here, but offers no theories about why or what we should be doing.

Reality creates and destroys. We did not choose to exist, and we can’t avoid death. We get a glimpse of eternity and then fall into darkness.

The trouble is that our view of reality is obscured by delusions. First of all, we don’t observe reality directly. Inputs from our senses model reality in the brain, and our sense of self observes that model. We distort that model with our beliefs.

Can we improve our model of reality? By improving, develop a model that more realistically describes reality in our minds?

For most humans, achieving success meant making their desires come true. But if those desires are based on delusions, are they wasting their time in reality?

We’re into The Matrix, choosing between red and blue pills, aren’t we? We’re also somewhere beyond Zen Buddhism and Existentialism.

What if we created a reality-based society? What would its Constitution and laws be like? If reality inspires a religion, it should inspire only one. If it inspired two religions, it would be because they were imperfect models of reality.

People have always wanted to make their religion a theocracy, but all theocracies fail because they can’t create a universal model of reality.

I believe liberal philosophy was slowly moving towards a better model of reality. However, about half of the population doesn’t want that. They want everyone to accept their model of reality, which is based on their preferred delusion.

How do we live in reality when most people want to live in their fantasies?

JWH

Past-Present-Future As It Relates to Fiction-Nonfiction-Fantasy-SF

by James Wallace Harris, 12/12/25

I’ve been contemplating how robot minds could succeed at explaining reality if they didn’t suffer the errors and hallucinations that current AIs do. Current AI minds evolve from training on massive amounts of words and images created by humans stored as digital files. Computer programs can’t tell fiction from fact based on our language. It’s no wonder they hallucinate. And like humans, they feel they must always have an answer, even if it’s wrong.

What if robots were trained on what they see with their own senses without using human language? Would robots develop their own language that described reality with greater accuracy than humans do with our languages?

Animals interact successfully with reality without language. But we doubt they are sentient in the way we are. But just how good is our awareness of reality if we constantly distort it with hallucinations and delusions? What if robots could develop consciousness that is more accurately self-aware of reality?

Even though we feel like a being inside a body, peering out at reality with five senses, we know that’s not true. Our senses recreate a model of reality that we experience. We enhance that experience with language. However, language is the source of all our delusions and hallucinations.

The primary illusion we all experience is time. We think there is a past, present, and future. There is only now. We remember what was, and imagine what will be, but we do that with language. Unfortunately, language is limited, misleading, and confusing.

Take, for instance, events in the New Testament. Thousands, if not millions, of books have been written on specific events that happened over two thousand years ago. It’s endless speculation trying to describe what happened in a now that no longer exists. Even describing an event that occurred just one year ago is impossible to recreate in words. Yet, we never stop trying.

To compound our delusions is fiction. We love fiction. Most of us spend hours a day consuming fiction—novels, television shows, movies, video games, plays, comics, songs, poetry, manga, fake news, lies, etc. Often, fiction is about recreating past events. Because we can’t accurately describe the past, we constantly create new hallucinations about it.

Then there is fantasy and science fiction. More and more, we love to create stories based on imagination and speculation. Fantasy exists outside of time and space, while science fiction attempts to imagine what the future might be like based on extrapolation and speculation.

My guess is that any robot (or being) that perceives reality without delusions will not use language and have a very different concept of time. Is that even possible? We know animals succeed at this, but we doubt how conscious they are of reality.

Because robots will have senses that take in digital data, they could use playback to replace language. Instead of one robot communicating to another robot, “I saw a rabbit,” they could just transmit a recording of what they saw. Like humans, robots will have to model reality in their heads. Their umwelt will create a sensorium they interact with. Their perception of now, like ours, will be slightly delayed.

However, they could recreate the past by playing a recording that filled their sensorium with old data recordings. The conscious experience would be indistinguishable from using current data. And if they wanted, they could generate data that speculated on the future.

Evidently, all beings, biological or cybernetic, must experience reality as a recreation in their minds. In other words, no entity sees reality directly. We all interact with it in a recreation.

Looking at things this way makes me wonder about consuming fiction. We’re already two layers deep in artificial reality. The first is our sensorium/umwelt, which we feel is reality. And the second is language, which we think explains reality, but doesn’t. Fiction just adds another layer of delusion. Mimetic fiction tries to describe reality, but fantasy and science fiction add yet another layer of delusion.

Humans who practice Zen Buddhism try to tune out all the illusions. However, they talk about a higher state of consciousness called enlightenment. Is that just looking at reality without delusion, or is it a new way of perceiving reality?

Humans claim we are the crown of creation because our minds elevate us over the animals, but is intelligence or consciousness really superior?

We apparently exist in a reality that is constantly evolving. Will consciousness be something reality tries and then abandons? Will robots with artificial intelligence become the next stage in this evolutionary process?

If we’re a failure, why copy us? Shouldn’t we build robots that are superior to us? Right now, AI is created by modeling the processes of our brains. Maybe we should rethink that. But if we build robots that have a higher state of consciousness, couldn’t we also reengineer our brains and create Human Mind 2.0?

What would that involve? We’d have to overcome the limitations of language. We’d also have to find ways to eliminate delusions and hallucinations. Can we consciously choose to do those things?

JWH