Everyone thinks they know what consciousness is. It
is a stream of thoughts, ideas, and images that pass, in rapid
succession, through the mind, experienced by a conscious self who
watches them come and go. We know it’s like this because we
experience it all the time.
The trouble is, this cannot be true. There is no room
in the brain for a conscious observer, not enough time for us to act
on our conscious impressions, and no way of explaining why some brain
activity should be conscious while most is not. So perhaps
consciousness is an illusion.
With demonstrations and help from the audience I
shall explore some of the ways in which we misunderstand our own
minds. The phenomenon of change blindness shows that the richness of
our visual world must be an illusion. Inattentional blindness shows
that we can look right at something and not see it at all, and some
odd effects with clocks and rabbits show how wrong we can be about the
timing of consciousness. Finally, experiments on voluntary action cast
doubt on the reality of free will.
Perhaps if we could only see through the illusion
science might begin to make progress with its “greatest mystery”.
