What does consciousness have to do with anything really?

My title here on LinkedIn includes "Applied Consciousness Thinking," but I've noticed that I've never published anything about consciousness on LinkedIn. So, I thought this was a good time to explain why I claim to do some consciousness-related applied thinking and how that relates to my work.

I should start by saying that my fascination for the subject of consciousness has driven me throughout my entire career. It was for the will to understand consciousness that I dropped the electrical engineering school in the 90's to start medical school (already intending to do neuroscience). Medical school in Brazil is an undergrad course, so I could not really pursue both engineering and medicine at the same time. Thus, it was because of my passion for consciousness that I made the shift and pursued a career as a neuroscientist, eventually becoming a postdoc in brain mapping at Harvard's Brigham & Women's.

By the end of my postdoc, when I had a job offer from and was almost becoming a faculty of neuroradiology at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, I came to the realization that there was nothing for me to learn about consciousness in academia. At the time, I was starting to entertain the idea that consciousness was more fundamental to reality than the brain, meaning the brain is not the source or the producer of consciousness, but rather more like a filter that selects only a very narrow set of senses with very narrow bandwidths to allow consciousness to have a human experience (surely an idea with very little academic acceptance, particularly at that time). That realization made me decide to drop academia and move to a career in business. I figured it'd be more exciting learning about life by experiencing it rather than trying to understand it from a scientific perspective. Therefore, even my career shift to business, in 2006, when I started my MBA at Wharton, was motivated by the subject of consciousness.

But how and why do I claim to being an "applied" consciousness thinker?

Consciousness is everywhere, from the placebo effect to the experience of a patient making use of a digital health solution

It's just a matter of fact that we need a body to experience the world. If we embrace the classic understanding that spacetime is more fundamental than consciousness (i.e., third-person [or scientific] reality is more real than our first-person, experiential realities), then the body, with its brain, is what produces consciousness. In that case, the body (and essentially we ourselves) are just machines. Perhaps machines with lots of unsolved mysteries and for which we lack the blueprints, but machines nonetheless (deterministic systems that could, supposedly, be cured of any disease if only we knew exactly what biochemical or genetic pathways to tweak). If all we are made of is matter structured around a body-and-brain complex, then we have no free-will and we're incapable of experiencing life, for there's no scientifically known mechanism for matter to have experiences or will (free or otherwise). In that case, our will to strive or to get cured of disease is completely meaningless or simply inexistent.

It turns out that, while the prevalent view continues to be that we are indeed machines, a whole body of evidence from Physics is starting to suggest that there's more to reality than spacetime, and that there could be more fundamental realities to matter than we're capable of probing today. It is not the intent of this article to delve into the transformational views that are emerging in Physics, Neuroscience and Philosophy of Consciousness, but you can refer to UC Irvine's Donald Hoffman to dig further, if you're interested. The point here is that consciousness and first-person realities seem to factually bear more impact in our physical lives in this material world than we usually give it credit for. And that has a direct impact on an individual's health and on the entire health system, including the development of new drugs, medical devices and health technologies at large.

And this is where the "applied consciousness thinking" comes in. For over twenty years now, I've been working devising and developing patient-facing technologies. It might have been something as simple as a Q&A website to connect doctors and patients (something that I actually launched in 1999, helping over 100,000 patients before the platform was acquired and eventually transformed into other projects). Or it might be something entirely more complex, such as digital biomarkers and therapeutics that work as adjuvants to traditional pharmacological therapies, which is what I dedicate to today. No matter what it is that you do as a healthcare professional or as a developer of new healthcare products and technologies, when your work is experienced by real patients, it has the potential to positively or negatively impact their believes about their own health, thus also impacting any related health outcomes. By developing digital adjuvants to pharmaceutical treatments, we potentially have the ability to empower patients in using their own consciousness resources (including determination, will, belief and their entire inner realities and abilities) to produce better clinical outcomes.

By developing digital adjuvants to pharmaceutical treatments, we potentially have the ability to empower patients in using their own consciousness resources (including determination, will, belief and their entire inner realities and abilities) to produce better clinical outcomes.

When I was in medical school, some older, less technological professors used to say that medicine is a balance of science and art. I never bought the argument. I used to think that the art component of medicine was just the witchcraft that happens when doctors have no clue (which is actually more common than we would expect, were we simply machines). It took me many years developing patient-facing solutions and technologies, for which UX (User Experience) strategies are so relevant, to realize that, although I was developing scientific and technological solutions, those were rich in art and features specially designed to engage patients. The design and art that we embed in patient-facing solutions is not meant to have an impact on the machine aspect of us. Those things are meant to impact our very core as conscious, human beings who believe in many kinds of beauty and are always capable of believing in a better world and a better health outcome. It is by connecting with that non-deterministic nature of us that we are able to make use of those unknown principles of human consciousness to develop solutions that effectively help patients thrive.

We don't quite understand how humans really work or who we really are, but we surely have an idea, being humans ourselves, of how we perceive the world and the reality around us. It is for actively thinking about those issues when devising and designing those patient-facing processes and solutions that I and my colleagues build that I claim to be an applied consciousness thinker. We understand that patients are conscious beings capable of greatly influencing their own health outcomes, and we use those insights to build solutions that help patients help themselves.