Just the Music

the kinds of ripples that emanated from Anna's brain as one might test a body of water to see if it had frozen over. A measure of the complexity of these ripples as they spread could tell us whether Anna was fully, minimally, or not-at-all conscious. If she were unconscious, the pond would be frozen over and everything slowed down. If she were dead, the water would be filled in and all the fish encased, belly-up. The stranger the ripples and the more they changed as they spread, the more conscious, in some sense, Anna would be. A magnetic pulse dropped into a conscious brain will, like a rock dropped into water, make ripples as the activity spreads outward toward the skull's shoreline.

If she were in some way unconscious, dropping the "rock" would cause no new ripples as it bounced off the surface, languid, until it, too, came to rest. A lot is still happening beneath the surface, even if Anna was unconscious or anesthetized. All the fish working their hardest not just to keep time, but to sharpen their ability to keep kinds of time at different speeds, like the signatures in sheet music that guide the speed of the ripples through the air that we interpret ultimately as being a conscious self in control of our own actions but that really are just the music while the music lasts.

I used to have a poetic metaphor about life being a dance that I played with a long time ago, but consciousness being a network of ripples in a pond is really amazing.

House, P. (2022). Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness. St. Martin’s Press. p. 50