Consciousness Is Probably Not Binary

A common claim, made by Annaka Harris among others: consciousness is all-or-nothing. Either there is something it is like to be a system, or there is not. There is no halfway.

The claim has real appeal — it seems to follow from what consciousness is. Either the lights are on or they are not, and a dimmer switch seems incoherent.

I do not think it survives contact with the one case we have access to.

The Argument From Your Own Development

Consider how you became conscious.

You do not remember your first year. Nobody does. So: were you conscious then?

Presumably yes, in some sense. Dangle something in front of an infant and it reacts, tracks, responds to faces, shows preferences. It is not a stone.

But something is clearly missing. Memory is implicated in consciousness in ways we do not fully understand — you need to retain, to compare, to construct a continuous experiencer out of a series of moments. An infant has almost none of that apparatus.

So were you conscious, or not — or half conscious?

I find the third option far more plausible than either of the first two, and I notice that the binary framing has no way to state it. If consciousness is all-or-nothing, then there was a specific instant at which it switched on, and nothing about development looks like that. Everything about development looks gradual.

Why We Are Biased Toward the Binary

Here is my diagnosis of why the all-or-nothing view feels compelling.

We only ever experience our own consciousness, at its current setting, from inside. We have exactly one sample, we have never observed it varying much, and we take it as the unit.

From that vantage the binary looks obvious. Of course there is something it is like to be me — I can check, right now. And when I try to imagine less consciousness, I imagine nothing, because imagining a diminished version requires the very apparatus I would be diminishing.

That is a limitation of the instrument, not a fact about the phenomenon.

The Argument Runs Upward Too

The same reasoning suggests something people find harder to accept: there are probably higher levels of consciousness than ours.

We cannot conceive them, and the inconceivability feels like evidence against them. It is not. We also cannot conceive being a one-month-old — that state was real, it was ours, and it is entirely inaccessible to us now.

If we cannot reconstruct a state we personally occupied, our inability to imagine states above ours tells us nothing whatever about whether they exist.

What I Am Claiming

Not that consciousness is a simple scalar quantity with a number attached. That may be too crude in the other direction, and the space is probably multidimensional — richness, unity, self-modelling, temporal extent, all potentially varying independently.

The claim is narrower: the assertion that either there is something it is like to experience, or there is not, seems wrong. There may be a limited way it is like something — thinner, less unified, less continuous, present in some respects and absent in others.

Infants, animals, and possibly some artificial systems would then occupy positions rather than fall on one side of a line. That is a messier picture and a harder research programme. It is also the picture that the one developmental trajectory we have actually observed appears to support.