Full transcript of the episode (it gives away every surprise)
One last experiment. It only takes a few seconds.
Try it yourself
- Close your eyes.
- Ask yourself: who is thinking, right here, right now?
- Look for them. Where are they?
Did you find them?
- I found them
- There is nobody there
- I don’t know
Nobody has ever found them.
Not the philosophers, not the neuroscientists. There is no little person inside the brain, no center where everything comes together.
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.”
Who Is There?
The last mystery lies a few inches behind your eyes. And the last subject of this journey is you.
The Scottish philosopher concluded that the “self” is nothing but a bundle of perceptions, following one another with inconceivable speed. Nearly three centuries later, neuroscience has not proved him wrong.
Inside your skull: 86 billion neurons, each connected to thousands of others. None of them knows that it thinks. None of them gives orders to the others.
And yet out of their electrical exchanges come the red of a strawberry, the taste of coffee, and the voice you hear in your head as you read these words.
We now know which regions of the brain light up when you see red, when you are afraid, when you recognize a face. But why does all of this come with lived experience? Why does it feel like something to be you?
In 1995, the philosopher David Chalmers called this the “hard problem” of consciousness.
In 1998, in a bar in Bremen, the neuroscientist Christof Koch bet Chalmers a case of fine wine: within twenty-five years, the signature of consciousness would be found in the brain.
In June 2023, in New York, in front of a conference of researchers, Koch conceded defeat. He paid up. In Portuguese wine.
Science doesn’t yet know what you are.
Every day, anesthesiologists switch off the consciousness of hundreds of thousands of patients, then switch it back on. They don’t know exactly how.
During this journey, you were the guinea pig in dozens of experiments. Here is what they revealed.
Interactive experiment
Your dossier
Everything your brain did during the journey, without telling you.
A summary of the reader’s results throughout the journey: what their eyes, their memory, their choices and other people led them to believe.
Interactive experiment
One last test
Do you remember the ten objects you stored in your home, many episodes ago? Walk through it one last time.
The reader finds, place by place, the ten objects left in their memory palace at the start of the journey.
Your memory is a storyteller.
It invents, it rewrites, it forgets. But guided well, it keeps what you entrust to it. Like the rest of your brain: an illusion machine, capable of wonders.
Your brain invents what you see, rewrites what you remember, justifies what you didn’t choose, cries over triangles, obeys strangers, believes in stones at the bottom of the sea, and loses track of time.
And yet it is with this very brain that humanity measured infinity, heard black holes, understood that it was wrong, and corrected its mistakes.
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
You are the universe looking at itself.
Listen
Credits
Turn up the sound.
The end credits of the journey roll, over music computed by the browser: the people you met, the sources of the images, and the reader, in the starring role.
Sources
- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739.
- David Chalmers, “Facing up to the problem of consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995.
- Mariana Lenharo, “Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0,” Nature, 2023.
- Anil Seth, Being You, 2021; Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980.