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This proved to be a frustrating read. The advantage being that it managed to illuminate many of my disagreements with Annaka and her husband, Sam Harris.

"Conscious" is supposed to be a 'brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind' but all too often ends in up simplifying complex problems. To start off her definition of what is conscious leaves one unfulfilled. She uses Thomas Nagels definition from his essay "what is it like to be a bat" wherein Nagel famously asserts that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." So for example a rock doesn't have a subjective experience, whereas being a bat would give one a quite unique experience of the world. I don't mind that definition but I don't think its perhaps a strong enough definition to lend itself to deeper philosophical and scientific discussion.

Annaka then uses David Chalmers famous zombie argument to further explore what consciousness is. Chalmers says that we can imagine a world where humans do everything as we normally do but where we don't have any subjective (that is to say conscious) experience of the world. Humans in this world are philosophical zombies. Even though Annaka admits that this just a hypothetical situation, she still uses it to prove her somewhat murky views of the universe. She thinks (and uses some scientific research to prove this) that consciousness doesn't have a function: we are merely under the illusion that our subjective "I" is doing really anything at all. So why are we conscious?
I must say I find this line of reasoning a tad absurd as it might well be reasonable to think that consciousness is a consequence of our evolution. As living organisms develop instincts in order to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, their brains and therefore their consciousness also increases. This seems perfectly reasonable to me. And yet, to mrs. Harris consciousness is this mysterious thing which seems to be unexplainable. I would also add that I believe that we don't really need to like the explanation for consciousness for it to be a sound and scientific one. Our brains and instincts are not adapted to understand (intuitively) the explanations which science gives us.

The author then proceeds to panpsychism. As consciousness isn't doing anything in this world and as it remains a mystery, perhaps all things have some kind of consciousness built into them. If consciousness is just complex handling of information, then surely you can argue that even tiny bacteria are conscious in some sense of the word?
The author usually singles out something in the universe and then extrapolates to the nth degree. To better understand my critique of her reasoning I will use an analogy. If I build a car, then it is the sum of all the parts that is the car. The parts of the car don't have any intrinsic car-nature to them. They only become a car because I organize different parts in a specific way. Consciousness can be similar to this as it cannot be explained by reducing it to a mere microbe. Mrs. Harris has a hard time accepting that the car analogy or strong emergence (as it is called in the scientific literature) is believable. Why would something suddenly spring into existence which was not there to begin with? I am not sure have an answer to that specific question but my spontaneous answer is that this is how humans work. We see the world this way as it makes common sense. If I sit on a chair, I am not worried that I will fall through it because of what quantum mechanics tell me about the world. Is there a chair nature to the different atoms in the chair? The Swedish author Lena Andersson has written about this specific problem and her explanation of the phenomenon is that we humans use abstract ideas to elucidate reality. There is no perfect chair, but there is an idea of the chair. That doesn't make the chair any less real. (This is based on her quite interesting reading of Plato).

Another question which pops up is in what way a tiny unicellular organism has an experience? Aren't we changing the definition of the word experience in order to make panpsychism theory more sound?