Annaka Harris's Conscious (O5)
Annaka Harris, a writer on the philosophy of mind, wrote Conscious as a short, sharp guide to the one question science cannot yet touch. She states it plainly, on its quotes page: "Consciousness is experience itself, and it is therefore easy to miss the profound question staring us in the face." The pull to chase a question like that is, in the Big Five, one facet above all.
Chasing the deepest question is Intellect
That facet is Intellect (O5), under Openness, the hunger to think hard about abstract, unresolved problems for their own sake. Harris keeps the reader on the edge of the mystery, on the same page: "Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious?" A high scorer is pulled toward exactly that kind of unanswerable question and enjoys the vertigo. A lower scorer wants a usable takeaway and finds an open mystery unsatisfying rather than thrilling.
What makes the book more than a puzzle is that Harris is willing to follow the logic somewhere uncomfortable, entertaining the idea that consciousness may be a basic feature of matter rather than a late arrival. That readiness to hold a strange, unproven possibility seriously is high O5 in action, close to the inner openness that lets you picture what has not been shown. For a lower-O5 reader the usable move is to sit with one genuinely open question for a while without demanding that it resolve.
Read your O5 to know how Conscious lands. If it runs high, Harris hands you a rigorous, humbling walk to the edge of what anyone knows about the mind. If it runs low, the book may feel like a lot of questions and few answers, which is exactly its point. Consciousness is the thing we know best and understand least. Harris keeps you standing in that gap.
Read the book: Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris.
See Where You Fall
Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test
Research Citations
Harris, A. (2019). Conscious: A brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind. Harper.
DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880-896.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.