A New Quest for Consciousness

In the 10 minutes before the official start of class, Professor Anne Harrington ’82 somehow managed to cover descriptions of Gilbert Ryle’s classic “category mistake” critique of mind-body dualism, Richard Feynman’s self-experimentation on falling asleep, and the layout of her course’s Canvas site. There was no clear beginning of the class, it seemed, only the seamless transition from casual conversation to formal lecture. Like its subject — consciousness — the boundaries of the class were amorphous.

This class, HISTSCI 1771: Science and the Quest for Consciousness, offered by the History of Science Department, is one of its kind. At the College, courses on consciousness generally explore the subject through a humanities lens, such as in PHIL 156: Philosophy of Mind and ENGLISH 90LV: Consciousness in Fiction from Austen to Woolf. In contrast, HISTSCI 1771 seeks to examine the history of an emerging field: consciousness as a scientific discipline. It was pioneered as a graduate seminar last year, before being officially introduced as an undergraduate course this fall.

As Harrington describes, “Prior to the ’90s, there was a widespread and to a certain extent accurate view that you didn’t study consciousness. Philosophers could, you know, develop their theories about it. But in the sciences, it was intractable.”

In the last 30 years, however, her course description explains that consciousness has found its way into unconventional and “increasingly diverse sites of knowledge-making,” such as ICUs, meditation retreats, and AI Research Labs.

Today, consciousness studies have pierced the mainstream, in large part because of increasing concerns around generative AI. Harrington, however, doesn’t cite contemporary interest as the course’s raison d’être. Even though she’d taught related courses on “mind-body medicine,” she explains, she’s teaching the course now because it took “a long time to figure out” how to teach such an interdisciplinary field in a way that doesn’t “overwhelm” students.

Her solution? Harrington has structured the course’s Canvas page to reflect the journeys into various disciplines consciousness studies has taken: The students start at “base camp,” before embarking on “quests” into the world of, such as “the sleep lab,” “the operating theater,” and “AI spaces.”

HISTSCI 1771 is not just an exercise in historical research, but asks profound questions of our present. How do we measure consciousness in coma patients? How do drugs alter our state of consciousness? How does consciousness change towards end-of-life, especially with the onset of conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s?

Theo W. Tobel ’27, a Crimson editorial editor who is joint-concentrating in Philosophy and Neuroscience, enrolled in the course because he felt that “understanding the historical context and backdrop of how consciousness has been studied” seemed essential for his “study of consciousness from both a scientific and philosophical, humanistic perspective.”

During the first few weeks of the course, to equip students for the applications of consciousness studies they will encounter later in the semester, Harrington takes the students through a decades-long tour of the consciousness research zeitgeist. In the third class, she was careful to focus not just on foundational papers, but on the conferences, which help reveal more about the scientific world.

Harrington honed in on one 1994 University of Arizona conference, where philosopher David Chalmers first proposed the now-discipline-defining dichotomy between “‘easy’ problems of consciousness” — questions like “what brain states are associated with the sensation of pain” or other externally observable physical correlates of consciousness — and the “‘hard problem of consciousness,” or why and how subjective conscious experience exists in the first place.

While explaining this idea, Harrington gestured to my table, pointing to the older man beside me. He stood up and explained — to the shock of everyone in the room — that not only had he worked in the same research lab as Chalmers (both supervised by Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of “Gödel, Escher, Bach”), but that he had actually stayed in the same hotel room with Chalmers the night before he proposed the “hard problem.” It was like hearing in a physics class that the man who sat next to you had been under the apple tree with Newton.

Students of the class are not limited to History and Science concentrators, and have each undertaken the quests for consciousness for different reasons. Some have a particularly personal connection to the subject.

Lillian C. MacArthur ’28 chose to take the class due to her experience with aphantasia, a neurological condition that causes an inability to voluntarily form mental images. She only discovered her condition in high school: “I did not realize that 95 percent of people just hallucinate in their minds as part of thinking and only 5 percent cannot. It got me thinking more about consciousness and how our own experiences of the world are so different,” she says.

For many students, HISTSCI 1711’s broad appeal is that the course sits at the nexus of several existential questions.

“The question about what it is to be human, what it means to be moral, what it means to live a good life — where we fit into the universe — all of these are ultimately touched on in a course of our consciousness. So I hope it will be of interest across any field,” Harrington says.

—Magazine writer Jona P. Liu can be reached at jona.liu@thecrimson.com.

—Magazine writer Henry G. Levenson can be reached at henry.levenson@thecrimson.com.