311 | Annaka Harris on Whether Consciousness Is Fundamental

0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Special treat for Mindscape listeners. Today we're going to finally figure out this consciousness thing once and for all. No, we're not actually. Sorry about that. That was false advertising. We're going to talk about consciousness yet again. It's not something that we're going to ever, in the course of a one hour long conversation, quite agree that people who have different opinions about this are going to see the light. But we're going to come closer and closer with every episode. That's all I can actually promise. You know, it wasn't that long ago we had Christof Koch, famous neuroscientist, on the show. And we talked a lot about consciousness, in particular the neural correlates of consciousness and integrated information theory. We touched on the idea of panpsychism, which we've talked about before on the podcast, the idea that consciousness is everywhere. But we didn't really give it a full airing out. So I wanted to kind of give that idea, maybe not panpsychism per se, but the idea that consciousness is a fundamental ingredient of reality, rather than just an emergent level, something that we use to describe the collective behavior of matter when it becomes sufficiently complex and self referential and so forth.

0:01:19.6 SC: Rather than that, what if consciousness is the starting point for thinking about the fundamental nature of reality? I'm very, very honest that I don't think that that is idea, but I do think that it's useful to think about that kind of idea. And I wanted to sort of give it a fair hearing. So today's guest, Annaka Harris, is the author of New York Times bestseller Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of Mind. And more recently she's done in this sort of exploratory fashion. She came up with an audio series, AKA a podcast called Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe, where she talks to a bunch of people. I'm included, actually. There's a bunch of people who are former Mindscape guests who are included. And she gets a lot of different opinions from physicists, from neuroscientists, from psychologists about what consciousness really is. And she talks about how she has made the journey from someone who was closer to my own point of view about these things with consciousness being emergent, to someone who is very sympathetic to the idea of consciousness being fundamental. And we talk about why anyone would believe such a thing.

0:02:33.2 SC: And what is the benefit of doing it? What is the motivation for doing it? From both thought experiments and Real experiments and things like that. So we had fun with it in the sense that we knew we weren't going to convince each other either way. But that's okay. We can still talk about it. We can discuss the ideas. That's what we're all about here. So, as usual, I want you to listen and decide for yourself what it is that you think, which perspective you think is the most convincing, the way forward. Never, ever putting a credence of 100% or 0% on anything but keeping an open mind. And with that, let's go. Annaka Harris, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:03:27.5 Annaka Harris: Thank you so much for having me. I'm. I'm honored, truly.

0:03:30.8 SC: Well, especially thank you. Because you know that you're walking into enemy territory here. Right? Like, we all know that we've talked about these things before. We come out of opposite sides, but I really appreciated your new series and how you try to talk to a whole bunch of different people with different points of view. So why don't you just, before we forget, mention the series and what caused you to think of this particular medium.

0:03:58.5 AH: Yeah, so it's called Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe. And I didn't even know what I was making when I started out creating this project. I had finished publishing and promoting my book called Conscious, that came out in 2019. And I just realized that I was left with so many questions, and I wasn't quite ready to move on to a new topic yet. And actually, a film producer friend of mine came to me with this idea, loose idea for a film. And I suddenly... It's like all I needed was permission to start recording the interviews I wanted to record. I had no faith, really, that a movie would ever get made. I mean, I don't know that world, but I know it takes forever to do those things. But I thought, oh, he just gave me my dream project, which is talk to all the scientists and philosophers I want to talk to, ask all these questions, keep thinking about these things that I can't stop thinking about. And the idea was to record the conversations and then use the transcripts as templates for dialogue for this potential film.

0:05:11.6 AH: And what he realized when I was a few weeks into this process was that we would have all this audio, and it's much easier to make a podcast than a film. So maybe we'll make the film down the line, but I'm creating a podcast. And so then it became clear that I was kind of on this journey. And I was narrating my own story of my process of thinking and my evolving thoughts. And so I realized it was more like a documentary of kind of my story of trying to understand these concepts. And so we were calling it a podcast documentary. But then, lo and behold, McMillan, the publisher from my publishing world that I'm so comfortable in and understand, were interested in doing this as an audiobook. So, yeah, I mean, the format doesn't really matter. It could have really been called anything, or it could have been called a lot of different things, but I knew I was making an audio documentary. And so, yeah, the content didn't change over time, but the format that we put it in did.

0:06:12.8 SC: Well, it's interesting because people have different ways of communicating their ideas, and there are books, there's writing where we're very careful. I just got an interesting question, my own AMA the other day, about why does your voice, or at least your way of talking sound different in the AMA than when you're reading your own audiobooks?

0:06:34.9 AH: Interesting.

0:06:36.0 SC: And of course, I attribute it to the writing being different. Right?

0:06:39.8 AH: Yeah.

0:06:40.3 SC: But I think this is one of the nice things about podcasts, my form of interview podcast. But also you have a much more polished production here, but you're getting people's viewpoints a little bit more viscerally. Right. A little bit closer to their informal way of thinking.

0:06:56.6 AH: Yeah. I think that's right. And actually it's funny because I'm much more comfortable writing. I'm a nervous wreck right now because I don't trust myself to communicate my ideas well in the moment through speech. I end up doing an okay enough job of it, but I'm really comfortable writing. And so... But I wanted to have these conversations and I was recording them, and so I ended up being able to write the narration, which kind of explains more in book form, what thoughts I was having, what questions I was having, where the answers were leading me. And then use this audio that... Yes, it does... It's interesting because there were times when we needed to rerecord things, and I really had a hard time rerecording something that had happened in real time because it's not reading voice. And yeah, it is different.

0:07:50.8 SC: And did you find through the course of talking to various people with different attitudes, like, do you think that, are we making progress on this whole consciousness thing? Do you see a consensus coming or?

0:08:00.0 AH: I hope so. I would say yes, I think so. You know, I think there's a lot more progress to be made. And I think it's one of those topics that is really hard to say whether we can ever make the kind of progress we want to make. But I mean there's progress just in the sense that when I started writing my book Conscious, I was afraid to share my questions with other scientists. That's where we were. So we're definitely at a place now where many scientists are open to having this conversation realize that even if it doesn't seem as mysterious to them as it does to some other philosophers, that there really is something here that we haven't explained that would be nice to explain. And yeah, and I would say and it's true for myself. So I've been in the sciences for over 20 years now. I did not start out with the view that I have now. It really transformed a lot over the last 20 years and more. And I'm now meeting other scientists. Brian Greene was one a total surprise actually who I think he basically feels the same way you do about it, but he's able to appreciate the mysterious nature of consciousness in a way that he wasn't earlier in his career.

0:09:19.3 AH: And so I think that that is huge progress. Just those of us who wouldn't have even considered it really something interesting to think about or ask about, noticing that there's science has some work to do here and it's an interesting problem that's different from every other scientific problem problem we have faced.

0:09:42.1 SC: So what is your favorite definition of consciousness?

0:09:45.4 AH: Yeah, I was actually, I was thinking about this with you because I was going over some of the, I was going to say arguments but they're fun always our debates and I realized that we might be defining it differently and that may might be part of where we have diverged in the past. And so yeah, so when I talk about consciousness and the truth is we could even change the terminology because the way some people use consciousness is not the way I'm using it. So most people when they use the word consciousness, they're thinking about complex thought, complex life, self awareness often and ability to self reflect. I think part of that may be, well, we'll get into it but I was thinking about some of our conversations and wondering if when you were saying consciousness you were pointing more to those features. And the thing that I think it is really mysterious and that most of the time when I'm talking about consciousness I'm using this other definition or more basic definition which is just the fact of felt experience. So it could be something that is not self aware, that is not a complex thought.

0:10:55.6 AH: It could be if we imagine, I often give worms or snails or some type of simple insect as an example. You know, if there is consciousness there, there's... Neuroscientists are kind of split on this. But if a bee is conscious or a fly is conscious and that they have a brain and a central nervous system. I would not imagine that a fly is self aware or has thoughts or language, but could maybe even I think simpler than a fly would be something like a worm where maybe if I had to guess what the conscious experience is, it would be of pressure, maybe of temperature change, maybe even of something more complex like hunger or fear depending on the circumstance, if it needs to look for food or get away from something that could cause it harm. But yeah, so, so, so my definition and the I'm interested in whatever we call it is really just the fact of felt experience. Why is it that some systems in nature feel like something from the inside? Kind of have this perspective where the feeling itself cannot be directly observed apart from the feeling itself.

0:12:01.3 SC: So I think I would have said, if you just give me that definition, I would have said, sure, I understand. At least we can debate over what, what's the best definition. But I think I understand what you mean. Yeah, but somewhere in there you're drawing a distinction between that and awareness. Like how can I be the worm feeling pressure or fear without being aware of it?

0:12:20.4 AH: Yeah, well, I guess it, I mean awareness is a tricky term also. So you can mean different things by being aware. You could, I tend to use it synonymous with consciousness. I, when I say awareness, I'm usually meaning a felt experience of awareness. So I could talk about my computer being aware of the audio input and the visual input and you know, whatever processing is taking place. But I'm not imagining that there's a conscious experience associated with that processing in the computer. So awareness could be talked about in non-conscious processing where you know, it's just a combining of information or a form of digital memory or something like that. I feel like now I'm not answering your question. You were saying how could a worm be conscious without being aware, is that what you were asking?

0:13:10.4 SC: Yeah, well, it sounded like you were trying to put awareness at like a slightly higher level of complexity or sophistication than mere consciousness.

0:13:19.5 AH: No. I may have said self awareness. So being aware of oneself, which is usually how people think about consciousness. Consciousness happens in very complex life forms like human beings. There's even this test that we do with other mammals. You know, are they aware of themselves? Can they see themselves in the mirror, that sort of thing. But I'm talking about something much more basic than that.

0:13:42.5 SC: Got it. That's very, very helpful. Okay, thanks. And we do, like you say, we feel it from the inside. So you mentioned how science is making progress, and we're going to get to some scientific progress. But is there... Are there whole bunches of progress to be made kind of without doing neuroscience? You know, can we make progress by thinking that?

0:14:01.3 AH: Oh, yes. I mean, I think it really, as far as my imagination can go, it has to be informed by neuroscience. But no, I think if we are led to believe that consciousness, felt experience, if it goes much deeper in nature than even insects and worms or to plants or even deeper than that, we start crossing over into other realms of science. And it's why I talk to so many physicists for my audio documentary, because I wanted to know where this might be headed. If we actually start to think it makes sense to assume that consciousness goes kind of beyond what we categorize as life. And what would that mean for physics? And how would... What would physicists have to say about that? And is there any way in which this can actually affect the physics we do, or are we kind of just always going to be limited by observation and experiment the way we traditionally have? But I do... I try to let my imagination go wild in the very last chapter of my documentary, and it's called the Future of Science. And I suggest some ways this might go if we're convinced again that it's rational to...

0:15:14.4 AH: Well, let me take one step back, because I think kind of where my starting point is is realizing with working with neuroscientists over the course of about 20 years, realizing that we have actually assumed that consciousness arises in complex life forms and that we don't have as good evidence for that as we think we do. And kind of pulling apart those intuitions that lead us to assume that. Now, as I've said, I also made those assumptions. I still think it may be correct, but we're not really on as solid ground as I thought we were in making that assumption. And that I realized we kind of are forced because we don't know our starting point. We're really forced to either assume that it arises at some point, it emerges at some point in nature, or it's fundamental to nature. It's either in all systems or some. Because we know the answer isn't none. Right. And so because we have evidence of at least our own conscious experiences. And so the more convinced I became that we could be very wrong in this starting assumption we've used so far, that it arises out of complexity.

0:16:36.7 AH: What would happen if we, still, we could say we don't know. We don't have to believe that it's fundamental. But what if we just assumed? How would that shape the phenomena we observe, the phenomenon we observe? How would that shape science going forward? And so I just kind of let my imagination run wild and then started to come up with new questions for neuroscientists and physicists, which is what my documentary is about. But so it kind of became this question for me, if consciousness is fundamental and then dot, dot, dot, so how might we interpret this phenomenon in nature?

0:17:17.2 SC: Right. So in this picture, which you know, offends me to the very core, but that's okay.

0:17:22.3 AH: I'm sorry.

0:17:24.4 SC: That's cool. But I...

0:17:25.2 AH: I will say that I was completely with you for most of my life.

0:17:29.6 SC: I know. Yeah.

0:17:30.5 AH: Well, there's a way to see this. I believe there's a way to see this that's not offensive, even though it still sounds crazy to me coming out of my own mouth.

0:17:37.3 SC: You're more advanced than I am. I'm still trying to catch up, but that's okay. But I still I'm very interested in understanding it. So I think that the interesting thing you're saying here is that if we take forget about whether we should, but if we take the view that consciousness is fundamental, then rather it being an outgrowth of some complex information processing system, blah, blah, blah, it manifests itself in certain ways when the complexity is there to let that happen. But it's kind of always there.

0:18:06.6 AH: Yeah. Yeah. Which again, I know that sounds crazy and I kind of can't believe I'm even suggesting it. But the deeper you get into the neuroscience and what we've learned about the brain so far, the more you realize our intuitions for that starting assumption really break apart pretty quickly. So one thing that is kind of obvious, but we don't really think about, and I think is interesting in the context of all of these other intuition shattering, I think results of modern neuroscience is that we are the most complex systems we know of in the universe. Right. And we also know that we can't tell the difference between loss of memory and loss of consciousness, that we're completely dependent on this stream of memories to think all the thoughts we think to be human beings. Right. And so we have this sense that because we're conscious and we're the most complex systems we know of in the universe. And you know, let's say if there's a felt experience associated with my... The processing in my liver, let's say, but that never enters my stream of memory. I'll never be able to report on.

0:19:26.0 AH: It's not part of the I I'm referring to as I. Right? And so we're kind of left in this situation where it makes sense that we would assume that consciousness is part of this complex processing. But the truth is we have... It's the only thing we have access to and the only thing we can communicate to other systems like us about. We have no way of getting information from a system that is too different from us. Because the communication completely breaks down. And so there's no way to report, this is even true in a single brain. Which was one of the pieces of neuroscience that I found most interesting and most intuition shattering was the split brain research. And so you can even have a circumstance, I don't know how familiar you are with this research.

0:20:14.1 SC: Let's assume the audience is not.

0:20:15.5 AH: Okay, okay, so do you want me to kind of explain from the beginning? Yeah. Because this to me is where my intuition started to really break down and I started having interesting thoughts about where else in nature we might find consciousness. So split brain patients, it's less used now. I don't think there are very many of them now, but a few decades ago it was a wonderful actually treatment for epilepsy. So for people who were experiencing ground mouth seizures that would, sorry, would spread from one hemisphere of the brain to the other, if they can be contained. If the seizure can be contained to one hemisphere, it's much less dangerous, much less life threatening. And so they develop this procedure by which they would actually disconnect the left and right hemispheres. They would sever the corpus callosum, the center where the information between the left and right hemispheres is shared. And what they discovered through a series of experiments, and I can describe one or two if you'd like, but what they discovered was that it seems as if when those connections are completely severed, there are now two islands of consciousness, two kind of centers of processing that seem to feel like a self.

0:21:37.9 AH: And so there's kind of... It's almost like the person is split into conjoined twins or something, where the left hemisphere is one person and the right hemisphere is another. What's interesting is that in most people, the left hemisphere is where the language center is responsible for speech. It's interesting. These patients after the surgery seem actually to be very normal. It's why it was so successful and such a wonderful tool for people who were being threatened by these seizures. When you talk to the person, they can speak normally, they can have a conversation with you. They can tell you how they feel, what they want for lunch. What's interesting is when they figured out they were able to actually interrogate the right hemisphere by other means. Using cue cards, having the person point with their left hand because the left hand is controlled by the right hemisphere. They discovered that the right hemisphere had different answers, different opinions, different tastes than the right hemisphere. Now, we can't know for sure whether there was consciousness associated with that. But the truth is, in the same way that I can't know whether there's conscious experience associated with you, I mean, I assume there are enough arrows pointing in the right direction for me to assume that's the case.

0:22:54.8 AH: And so even in a single human body and brain, you can have a circumstance where you're talking to someone, they're telling you, oh, yes, I feel that. No, I don't feel that. Yes, I saw that. I did not see that. I want granola for breakfast and all the rest. And there's actually another part of that body, of that brain that is seeing things the left hemisphere isn't seeing. That is having thoughts, having opinions, all of that, but never can get communicated to the outside world except through these experiments, they were able to figure out ways to interrogate. But again, if we wanted to understand if there's any felt experience at all associated with the Venus fly trap, we have yet to find ways to communicate anything sufficient to even be able to guess whether something like that is conscious. And so...

0:23:51.8 SC: So if there was some.

0:23:52.6 AH: I've been rambling. You go ahead.

0:23:53.6 SC: If there was a tribe of human beings that only ever heard music come out of stereo speakers, they might naturally think that music was a feature of stereo speakers, not that it was just medium by which it was being communicated.

0:24:08.1 AH: Sure, sure. Yeah. I never thought about that.

0:24:10.7 SC: And... Okay, so...

0:24:12.9 AH: I mean, I'd have to think about that more. It's probably not such a direct analogy, but yes, it's... Consciousness is something different from everything else that we study in science as I said, because it can only be known from the experience itself. So we're completely reliant on report. An ability to report, but then also an ability to communicate.

0:24:36.0 SC: And the split brain patients.

0:24:37.9 AH: Yeah.

0:24:38.4 SC: Didn't even themselves know that there was another conscious creature.

0:24:43.6 AH: Well, I mean, they became aware of it when they were part of these studies.

0:24:46.9 SC: And they could see that internal dialogue.

0:24:49.3 AH: Yeah, I mean, they could see that their left hand was answering questions correctly. Yeah. But no, in terms of their conscious awareness, it does not enter that hemisphere of the brain. And so it's just not part of that stream of memory. And so for them if you ask them, are you conscious of I just flashed a picture of a card, are you conscious of it? They would say, I didn't see any card. There's no picture at all. Yet there is another part of their brain that did see it. And so it's tricky when we try to interrogate even different systems in the body. You know, when, when we say or when we undergo anesthesia, when we go to sleep I'll say, I wasn't conscious, but was there consciousness present that just didn't enter my stream of memory that enables me... The, I call me to report on it. Okay, so that's, that was the big. That was the beginning of my starting to wonder if our intuitions about what consciousness is and where we'd find it are maybe throwing us off.

0:25:51.8 SC: Right, good. Yeah, that's very helpful in make helping me make those connections there. So, because ordinarily we would use people who were under an anesthetic, a general anesthetic, as an example of not being conscious.

0:26:06.7 AH: Yes.

0:26:07.2 SC: And you're saying, well, how do you know?

0:26:10.1 AH: Right. This is the problem with consciousness is we just can't really ever know. I mean, we can make better and worse guesses, I think. But even with anesthesia there's this fascinating phenomenon that I talk about in my book and in my audio documentary, something called anesthesia awareness, where the paralyzing drugs take effect, but the drugs that are meant to make the person unconscious do not. And so the person is completely paralyzed. They have no way to communicate that they're fully conscious. This is my worst, everyone's worst nightmare. Many people come out of this situation with severe PTSD for understandable reasons, because they then experience the operation or whatever they've been given anesthesia for. They have the Full experience the pain, the sights, the sound. Well, if usually their eyes would not be open, but yes, they're just as. As awake as you or I are right now, but completely paralyzed and unable to communicate. And so that's another good example. There are also examples of something called locked in patients where they have certain brain damage. The same situation they're in where they are completely paralyzed.

0:27:26.3 AH: There's no way for them to report on these conscious things. They have the communication skills, but they're not able to report. And so it's this combination of communication and report that we really rely on and noticing becoming, like coming face to face with these circumstances where there's a human mind that I can relate to that is just like me, but on the outside there's zero behavior. If there's any behavior we could put them in an FMRI machine. We could see electricity, essentially, and... Which reminded me of plant biology. And I do not have an intuition that the plants are conscious. It does actually sound crazy to me. But I had to let myself challenge my intuitions and say, okay essentially what's happening in the brain is similar to what's happening in a plant, and it is the transfer of information through electrical signals. And is it possible that consciousness, the felt experience, is associated with that rather than the more complex?

0:28:31.9 SC: So where did you come down. Where do you currently come down on the plant question? It's a provocative one obviously.

0:28:36.5 AH: I will just say I don't know about all of it. Honestly, I am continuing to ask these questions and investigate. I am open to everything, every system being conscious, all the way down to the most fundamental. And so that's kind of where I let myself go in this documentary until the last two chapters, where I just really go with it and say, okay, if consciousness truly goes all the way down, what does this mean for the future of science? And how might we be able to get more clarity on this.

0:29:11.9 SC: We've gotten this far in the podcast without using the P word panpsychism. But that is... That's where you're...

0:29:16.2 AH: I never use it anymore.

0:29:20.1 SC: You never use it anymore?

0:29:20.2 AH: People have been, I never use it anymore because I don't like it and I don't think it's useful.

0:29:23.8 SC: I see. Okay.

0:29:25.1 AH: Actually, I don't even know if you remember, but it's probably something that didn't catch your eye, but philosophers in the room caught it, which was at that conference that you and I attended together. I gave a talk and one of the slides was actually panpsychism with the word crossed out. You know, it was like a panpsychism circle sign with it.

0:29:41.6 SC: Right. Okay, good to know.

0:29:43.1 AH: And I tried to convince them. I'm sure I didn't convince a single person, but that it's not so, it's not such a useful framework for thinking about these things.

0:29:51.7 SC: But I mean, I guess we'll get...

0:29:54.0 AH: We can still talk about it.

0:29:54.7 SC: We'll get to there later. But you do... So panpsychism literally means consciousness is everywhere or mind is everywhere. I suppose? Yes. And that does sound pretty close to what you were...

0:30:05.3 AH: It does.

0:30:05.7 SC: Okay.

0:30:06.0 AH: And I'm not really opposed to it.

0:30:07.8 SC: It's the word.

0:30:08.9 AH: Yeah. And the truth is I think idealism, panpsychism technically my view certainly has crossover, if not falls into. Part of my issue with these frameworks is they were developed so long ago, before we understood anything about how the universe works. And so the types of conclusions they tend to draw just don't sound realistic and scientific to me. And I'm very much a science minded person and I would like this topic to stay within the sciences and I'd like, if it's possible that consciousness goes deeper in nature, I would like to have our best tools and our best minds trying to under... I think this will affect the future of science. And so it's something we need to keep in that realm. So yes. So some of the conclusions that are drawn in those domains sound too new agey to me. I don't, I wouldn't make those assumptions about how the universe is structured. I also honestly just have an issue aesthetically with the word panpsychism because it sounds like a new age word.

0:31:16.1 SC: It does.

0:31:16.8 AH: And it's also, it's a word that was developed, I think that the 16th century it's just... Yeah. I also think that if, no, if those views had never existed, if no one had ever had this thought before, I truly believe that many people in neuroscience and physics at this point in history would be asking this question. And so I always just try to make the case that it's a legitimate question to ask, is consciousness? Does consciousness go deeper in nature than we've assumed? And is consciousness fundamental? And those can be scientific questions and I think we'd be running up against them anyway and we clearly don't know. So something like panpsychism also, it kind of suggests that there's already a solution figured out, and I think we so clearly don't know that I wouldn't like to use an -ism to explain this line of questioning. I think they're questions.

0:32:08.7 SC: Got it. That makes perfect sense. So the plants you're not sure about. What about computers?

0:32:14.2 AH: Yeah.

0:32:14.8 SC: Could they be conscious or is there going to be some point at which they can report the consciousness that they may or may not be experiencing?

0:32:22.4 AH: I know. I mean, this is a really bizarre situation we are very likely going to be in soon. You know, however far down consciousness goes, we're going to be very confused when the behavior of a system matches our behavior or the behavior of a dog or some living system that we believe is conscious. And how we will know. I mean, that's a big question mark for me. I don't know. But the truth is I've really kind of crossed over into believing that if consciousness goes deeper in nature, it actually makes the most sense for it to go all the way down. So I have kind of my list of questions quickly became about what...

0:33:05.5 AH: How do we interpret the physics we have, the science we have, if consciousness actually goes all the way down, is the most fundamental feature? And so that's where all of my thought experiments and kind of where I've been living. And so I would ask. So I ask myself this question. If consciousness is fundamental, if every matter that we perceive everything that we perceive, all the light and the everything and all the things we don't perceive, if our perceptions are really a representation or a mapping of essentially other conscious experiences coming in and out of existence in the universe.

0:33:42.6 AH: My guess is that what we deem the matter to be made of matters. And so the structure. We're getting some clues about the structure of things in our perceptions of them and in our mappings of them with the tools, the scientific tools we have. And so I think our conscious experiences are dictated by the structure of the matter. And computers are made of very different matter than we are. And so my guess would be if consciousness is fundamental. Yes. I mean, that would mean that there are conscious experiences, however minimal, coming into and out of being all around this room, throughout my body in my clothing, it's all at bottom, what we're describing is conscious experiences. And so, yes, that means that computers and AI and more complex systems would also entail conscious experiences. The question is how similar to our own would they be. And my guess is they'd be so different, they would be unrecognizable to us. And so the weird. So the thing that kind of disturbs me most about AI when I think about consciousness being fundamental, is that we will be building these systems that the behavior of which we usually take to be evidence of our own conscious experiences.

0:35:07.1 AH: When I talk to you about Greene and about the sound of a symphony and about my thoughts, I can I think it's... It's a safe guess that you are mapping that onto a very similar conscious experience on your side. And so we've learned, and our intuitions have evolved to map those things. But if we create systems that actually feel very, very different on the inside but behave the same way we do, I mean, we will just have no intuitions for navigating this situation that we're in. I mean I...

0:35:43.5 SC: Yeah, no, I think that does follow. I mean, the question about whether a computer is conscious is very different if you think that an abacus is conscious or a stick is conscious or at least it participates in consciousness.

0:35:51.9 AH: Yeah. Well, and I think it's not quite right to think of those things as single things the way we think of a human mind as a single thing. Right. You know, there are reasons that we can kind of talk about a human mind and a brain as a system that experiences things. Although ultimately I think that's not quite the right way to think about it. But in abacus we notice that as a single object. But in reality, if consciousness is fundamental and and even so, an abacus itself is really not an integrated system the way that a brain is an integrated system. And so I wouldn't expect the abacus to have an experience, but I would expect there to be countless thousands, millions of experiences coming into and out of being in the point in space and time that that abacus inhabits.

0:36:45.6 SC: I want to ask about some of the implications of the idea that consciousness is fundamental. But first let me make sure that you have said what you want to say about the motivation for thinking that the split brains is definitely a part of it. But what is your best argument for thinking that consciousness is fundamental?

0:37:03.1 AH: Yeah, Well, I take 11 hours to make that argument in my documentary series, but I'll try to give a briefer one actually that reminds me of a couple of neuroscientific discoveries and actually one just anecdotal story that were part of the reason I felt it was really important to question our intuitions about what consciousness is. And so I would say I haven't become convinced that consciousness is fundamental. What I've been definitely convinced of is that our intuitions about what consciousness is, what causal function it serves in the universe, those intuitions come out of illusions. And we're relying on things that we actually, in modern neuroscience, understand to be illusions already. And those have not quite been integrated in, not only into the culture, but into the philosophy of the scientists doing this work. It's very hard for us to integrate the things we have discovered about how the brain works into our... The way that we think about how the world works. So one example, David Eagleman is a scientist I've spent a lot of time talking to. And he's also, in my documentary series.

0:38:19.6 SC: Former mindscape guest.

0:38:22.1 AH: Oh, okay. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm sure you talked about all the fascinating things he works on. You know, there are lots of areas I could go in. In the documentary, we talk about his work on sensory substitution and sensory addition. The story that he shared with me in the documentary is actually a little piece of research that I didn't even realize had been done. And this goes way back to his early work. So this is just in... So he talks a lot about binding processes. He says binding processes in the brain connect the different inputs, the sounds, the sights, the sensations that all kind of come to the brain at different times, then get processed in different parts of the brain at different times, and then kind of get delivered to our conscious experience as a single present moment event. And even just these processes, the fact that this type of thing happens before we're conscious of them is something we haven't quite really grappled with properly, I think so. So he talks about the ability to kind of hack some of these systems. So they did this very simple experiment where the participant pushes a button. And when they push a button, it makes a beeping sound. So their brain very quickly, it's a simple exercise, learns that when they push the button, the beep happens then.

0:39:41.7 AH: And I think that actual. That processing actually takes something like 500 milliseconds for the brain to coordinate those two things and then give you the experience that, okay, I push the button and the beep happens. Because out in the world, those things are actually not happening at the same time.

0:39:56.9 AH: And so his team, David Eagleman's team, started inserting very brief pauses that were too brief for the brain to recognize. And it just kept making adjustments, which is what the brain does all the time to help us integrate all these different signals that are coming in. So it started entering a delay so that you push the button, and there's actually a delay between the time you push the button and the sound happens. And then they introduce more and more and more of a delay. Your brain has adjusted for this, so you still have the experience. You push the button and the sound is created. So then if they remove the delay, they go all the way back, but they don't do it gradually. The brain doesn't have time to adjust. And the person has the experience that the sound was made before they pushed the button.

0:40:46.6 SC: Which it wasn't, but their brain tells them that it was.

0:40:50.6 AH: It wasn't. But that's exactly your experience. And you can't change your experience because your brain is just generating it based on its best guess. And so they created. I love this. They created an unbeatable rock paper, scissors game where they gradually introduce a pause, then they take it away. And so the computer actually knows what your hand is before, so it has time to make the right guess. You get the idea. But this exposes just a small window onto how our conscious experience of the way things are happening is not a direct perception. And it exposes how so many of our intuitions about consciousness come from these limitations of what we're consciously experiencing. And so conscious will is another area that I spend a lot of time talking about in the docuseries because we tend to have this intuition. There are many illusions that are kind of wrapped up into one. And to my mind, they are all related to how we view consciousness. So the idea of conscious will, the idea of being a self that is solid across time, which is also another thing that is basically generated by the brain. There's a change blindness that happens across time.

0:42:25.0 SC: Yeah.

0:42:25.4 AH: That causes us to feel like we're this stable entity that's kind of consuming our conscious experiences over time rather than them being generated anew in each moment. And again, because it's the thing we are conscious of and the only thing we can talk about or think about, because it's the only part that enters this stream of memory that we have access to. We're kind of led to believe that all of that is what consciousness is. And so my first question was, really, is it possible that consciousness is much more simple than all of this? And because there are all these neuroscientific studies that show us that what we experience to be our conscious experience is really at the tail end of most of this brain processing. It's not causal in the way we feel it is. We think we've evolved consciousness based on the behavior we think it's associated with, when in reality it's possible that it's simply how these processes feel, but the processes are just playing out, and the conscious experience of them is not necessarily the thing that's driving them.

0:43:39.3 SC: Okay, so I want to, I get all that. I think it's super important and it is probably, like you say, underappreciated. I want to hear, therefore, we should take consciousness as fundamental.

0:43:51.9 AH: Ah, okay, so again, I mean, it takes longer than a podcast interview to get all the way there. But once you've realized the ways in which we could be wrong about our assumptions about what consciousness is, and you start asking, where does it make sense for it to emerge in nature? What I discovered was that you run into paradoxes wherever you try to place that emergence, and that you run into the same arguments for why it doesn't make sense to assume there. And so it's kind of like it just by necessity goes all the way to the bottom. There's no place at which it makes sense to put it. And so I became convinced that the most rational answer was all the way down. And I became convinced of that really against my will.

0:44:42.2 SC: Against your will, as it were.

0:44:45.9 AH: And it's only after kind of marinating in this for the last five years that I've kind of started to develop an intuition for it and can feel how it makes sense. But yeah, it was really just logical thought experiments that brought me there that I had to kind of fight my rational mind and my intuitions on, and that actually I I think I could be wrong about it. And it was, I'm sure I mentioned to you when I called you up to record a conversation for my docuseries. I don't want to waste time, so I'd like to be talked out of this and so I've been attempting also to talk to people who disagree with me so that I can see if there's an error in my thinking, so I can see if it actually, there's a good reason to not actually follow these questions any further.

0:45:36.3 SC: So, good. So I think you've motivated it very, very well, then the question is, can we build up a sensible understanding of what it implies to say this? So of course, my... The constant thing that I've talked about and you've heard me talk about is, look, we understand how atoms behave. We understand those laws of physics very well. And part of that is, part of that behavior of atoms is that I'm made of atoms. And when I'm talking to you here, when I'm reporting my conscious experiences, I am a collection of atoms obeying the laws of physics. So how in this understanding do my conscious experiences affect my behavior, my reporting my physical moving around in the world world?

0:46:22.4 AH: How do your conscious experiences affect those?

0:46:25.0 SC: Yeah, if consciousness is fundamental and you think that consciousness...

0:46:28.3 AH: I don't know, I think consciousness might actually not be causal, but I don't know. This is one of the questions I have, and this is something I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about. You know, if consciousness is fundamental, it clearly has a structure for all of the reasons you just described. Like, we have discovered a lot of the structure already. It clearly is not just a free for all, but if what all the physics and mathematics describes at bottom are this range of conscious experiences that arise in the universe, yes, it has this structure. And one question I have when I really get into the weeds on this, is, is it possible to have conscious experience with no content? Is there something that, you know that consciousness that that thing is, that has a structure to it, or the equation in many worlds for the Schrodinger equation. Yeah, for the... What is it of the universe? The...

0:47:33.7 SC: The wave function of the universe.

0:47:34.9 AH: The wave function of the universe. Thank you. So if the wave function of the universe is not just a mathematical term and an idea and kind of a force that is kind of moving things, but is actually, in actuality, felt experience, and then it generates all of these different forms and things that come into being that in actuality are just different types of conscious experiences coming in and out of being. I'm not sure. I imagine that thinking about things in those terms might change the way theoretical physicists think about things moving forward. And I think that we'll have to be in combination with experimental results. I think we'll have to start doing some very new and interesting science to at least make us as confident as we've been in neuroscience that that consciousness arises out of complexity to take it seriously and see. But it's interesting to me because I actually think it generates a lot of creative thinking. It does kind of open up new avenues for thinking about things at the fundamental level. I have no idea where they will go. I do not claim to have the kind of mind to figure any of this out.

0:49:04.1 AH: But I think it's kind of a paradigm shifting... It's a paradigm shifting framework that could inspire new ways of thinking about quantum mechanics. The findings of quantum mechanics. I don't know if you listen to the whole thing or have heard me say that actually, many worlds, to me is the best way to describe, is the best interpretation of quantum mechanics. If consciousness is fundamental, that it actually resolves a lot of issues that you ran into. You probably don't like that. You're like, leave many worlds out of it.

0:49:46.4 SC: Shameless pandering. But we encourage that here on the Mindscape podcast.

0:49:49.7 AH: No, it was again, against my will. Because many worlds was not something that naturally resonated with me. I followed string theory for a long time. I like, aesthetically, I like string theory better. But I had to admit that many worlds actually fit better with my view of the universe, of consciousness as fundamental.

0:50:11.6 SC: So let me ask it this way. As I said in my talk at that conference that you talked about, organized by Philip Goff, another previous Mindscape guest. To me, the very first question that has to be answered by anyone who wants to talk about the fundamentality of consciousness is do they think that it will manifest in some change of what we understand as the fundamental laws of physics for the... Just the behavior of stuff, or does it leave the behavior of physical stuff completely as we currently understand it?

0:50:46.4 AH: Oh, no, I think it absolutely leaves the behavior of physical stuff the way we understand it. I think, I mean, the way I'm approaching this and the way I think about this is completely from a physicalist perspective. It is... And deferring to the science we have already. So in my mind, if I run some thought experiment or if we go down this path and it's kind of counter to things that are already well established in physics, we rule it out. Whether it can actually help move physics along, I really don't know. I can imagine ways that it might, but I don't know.

0:51:26.6 SC: So then the worry I have is simply, not the worry, but the question I have is simply, if I didn't think that consciousness was fundamental. But I had the same idea of the laws of physics and that I am made of atoms. Everything I do would be exactly the same. Including all the reports I have about how I feel and how I'm experiencing things. And love and pain and all those completely unaltered by whether or not this picture is true or false?

0:51:52.5 AH: Well, yes and no. I mean, mostly yes. I think to physicists who are trying to reach a deeper understanding, I think there are possibly places to take this that could take the many worlds interpretation in new directions and potentially give us a better sense of what it's telling us about the structure of the universe. But I also just think as human beings it's like every time there's a paradigm shift, I actually think it inevitably changes everything, including science, in ways that we can't even predict ahead of time. So I often will give the analogy of our intuition that the Earth is flat, and then celestial observations give us a clue that maybe this isn't flat and eventually we have all the evidence we need. And while it doesn't necessarily affect my day-to-day activities, and the truth is, most of the time it's not relevant.

0:53:02.8 AH: I do think there's kind of this background feeling of our place in the universe and how we navigate the universe to know that outer space is out there and we're orbiting the sun and we have a deeper, better understanding of the way the universe is structured with all of these unanswered questions. But at least I feel myself to be living in a different universe than someone lived in when they believed the Earth was flat. Right. And so I think these things have a way of, I don't know, affecting our future thoughts and creativity and help progress science even when we're not necessarily paying attention to them in every moment.

0:53:48.6 SC: No, actually that part of it, I like that very much what you just said, because I've said many times on the podcast that there can be with just within physics two different ways of talking about or mathematically formulating exactly the same theory with all the same predictions, etcetera, but by taking one perspective versus another, extensions or modifications of those theories are naturally suggested to themselves. So what you're saying. So I think that's very clarifying because certain other panpsychists, who names I won't mention, refuse to answer this question that I asked. But you, you answered it...

0:54:25.7 AH: I'm not a panpsychist.

0:54:27.9 SC: You answered it very nicely I mean...

0:54:29.3 AH: Yeah, well, and I also think it actually makes a difference if we at some point down the line have more reason to believe it's fundamental, that consciousness is fundamental than it is emerging in complex life forms. I don't know what kinds of questions that will provoke in the next generation of scientists, but my goodness, that's a very different world. And yeah, I mean, I'd like to know which one is more likely and it will affect my questions going forward.

0:55:02.7 SC: So. Yeah, no, so I get the argument that the reason to sort of take this perspective seriously is that it opens up and suggests new research avenues going forward.

0:55:11.6 AH: Sure. Even new moral questions. You know, it's, I think it's just there's a world of unanswered questions. If it's in fact true that consciousness goes very deep in nature. Right. Then suddenly there's a new dimension to things that we haven't really thought about. Yeah.

0:55:26.4 SC: I don't know if you know the work of Jonathan Birch. He was a recent guest that we had. He's a philosopher.

0:55:32.1 AH: I will listen to that episode.

0:55:33.4 SC: He is the world's leader in animal sentience. So he intentionally doesn't use the word consciousness just because it's fraught, Right?

0:55:43.4 AH: Yes.

0:55:44.0 SC: And he says there are people who won't believe that like you say an earthworm is conscious or whatever, but sentience is maybe a little more sciency sounding and you can...

0:55:52.5 AH: Yeah, that is always the word I choose to use also.

0:55:55.2 SC: Yeah. And so, and he tries to make an argument that again, even if you, I like the idea. I think, I don't know where he comes down personally, but his philosophical argument is even if you think it's okay to kill animals and eat them, that doesn't mean it's okay to hurt them.

0:56:12.2 AH: Yes.

0:56:12.7 SC: To cause them pain. And I think that's again, people can agree or disagree.

0:56:16.6 AH: Oh, I'll have to listen to that in Japan. I know that sounds right up my alley.

0:56:19.5 SC: It's a perfectly logically coherent perspective, which is, I really liked.

0:56:22.4 AH: Yeah. I mean it's similar to the plant biologist I spoke with, Daniel Chamovitz. That's I believe, chapter four. You know, he also really struggled with this because he is a well respected scientist who does good science. And as he discovered these similarities in the types of process when plants are processing light waves or sound waves in the form of like a mechanical stimulus. And he was finding it, he was finding himself using terms like hearing and seeing but not wanting to confuse them with human hearing and seeing. But the truth is there are these sense modalities that again, at the molecular level. He actually is funny. He talked about, I don't think this made it into the documentary, but he and I were talking about how his, he comes from a family of doctors and how he was the rebel and he went out to become a plant biologist. And he realized it's all part of the same thing. He ended up kind of doing the same science in a way, because you can give anesthesia to a Venus fly trap, and it blocks the information flow in the same way that it does in a human brain.

0:57:44.0 AH: And yeah, so, yes. And he had a hard time knowing how to talk about those things. And I think he really was wondering whether there were sentience or felt experience, not consciousness in the way we usually think about it. But the way I talk about it, he really thinks it's likely that plants have some form of that. You know, again, they don't have the same systems that we have. They probably don't have... They have some memory, but not the type of memory we have. So if there is felt sensation, it probably comes in and out of existence very quickly. But, yes.

0:58:18.3 SC: I think just this leads directly into this question of what would be the new research questions and directions that get opened up by this perspective? I mean, if you go back to the abacus, you said something very provocative, that the abacus sort of isn't a coherent self. Right. The abacus, you might have pieces that are made of fundamental consciousness stuff or whatever, but the abacus doesn't cohere into a self, so, what does? Do you have opinions about this? Like, when do we have a self?

0:58:50.1 AH: Yeah, I don't know. I've thought a lot about this. I've written a lot about it. I think it's related to memory. I think highly dependent on memory, although not completely dependent on it. I think if consciousness is fundamental, I think there's something, Adam Frank, the physicist, and I had this conversation about the cell. When a cell comes into being, a single cell, that essentially the cell and the bath of chemicals it's in come into being in the same moment because they're in relationship to run. There's no bath of chemicals if there's no cell and vice versa. And that in order to keep the borders that it has and to let in the things it needs to let in and maintain itself as a system, that that's kind of the beginning of self. And I would say that self without memory. So just distinguishing the system from the bath of chemicals or the outside world. I'm forgetting your specific question. I feel like...

1:00:00.1 SC: At what point does the coherence of the system qualify as being a self?

1:00:03.9 AH: Yeah, yeah. No, so I think. I mean, I think it largely has to do with memory and distinguishing a system from the thing that is keeping the system going. I also think though that at most levels, even the idea of self is an illusion at the level of the human mind too. So I've talked about this a bit in my work where our present moment experience is based on this neuronal firing that's happening in every moment. I have this sense that there's kind of this solid me that moves through time. But the truth is this new experience is being generated afresh, a new now that is obviously influenced by previous moments, but it still has to be brought into being in each moment. And so I make this analogy to an ocean wave that we call ocean waves waves as if it's a single thing. A friend of mine actually just said something very sweet that he was at the beach with his daughter and his, they were looking at the waves and his daughter said, I wish we could take one home. And he joked and he was like, let's get a bucket, let's bring one home.

1:01:19.4 AH: And that kind of shows the illusion there, which is that we call it a wave. But it's a system in nature. It's an ever changing, never ending system in nature. And that is true of the electrical firing of the neurons as well. And so I'm not sure that self... And I actually think that the concept of a self, the fact that we feel ourselves to be selves is one of the things that get in the way of our being able to think clearly about consciousness. Because I think we often equate consciousness with self. So yeah, I don't know. That was a weird answer to your question, but I'm basically saying I'm not sure there are selves to begin with.

1:02:01.9 SC: Do we get...

1:02:02.5 AH: Or that the illusion of self is created by a system that carries memory across time. Yeah.

1:02:10.6 SC: Do we get insight into these questions by some combination of meditation, psychedelic things like that? Things that give us a different perspective on our inner workings?

1:02:22.2 AH: I think so. I mean, maybe not as directly as other people might suggest. I think meditation absolutely, because it does something very interesting which is expose a lot of these illusions. You know, in the same way that David Eagleman's work you can run these experiments and expose the way the brain works. Meditation is an interesting thing to do. It's very counter to the way the brain normally is operating. And so I think it has a similar effect of, kind of you're able to catch these illusions in the act of being created. And so the illusion of self is something that regularly drops out for people when they've been practicing meditation for a while. And I think that's the most important one. But there are others as well. And it just, I think it changes our normal everyday experience of being a human being so much that it enables us to be more creative in our thinking and to notice when we've made assumptions that we consider to be fact that are actually assumptions. And psychedelics is a very interesting one too. I have a lot of questions about those experiences.

1:03:35.0 AH: I really don't know. I think the most useful thing about them for myself and people I know who've taken them is again, a similar thing to meditation, but on a much more impactful scale, I think is having an experience that is so different from your typical human everyday experience causes you to realize the range of possible experiences, even for a human brain, that are far beyond anything I had ever known possible and are very hard to describe. And so what experiences might be possible in other systems, I think it enables you to be... To think differently and more creatively.

1:04:18.8 SC: Well, I kind of like that in the sense that it's not suggesting that psychedelics or for that matter, meditation somehow give us some closer data about the fundamental workings of reality so much as they nudge us out of our dogmatic slumbers a little bit.

1:04:34.0 AH: Yes, you said it so much more eloquently than I did, but yes.

1:04:36.8 SC: Well I stole it from [1:04:39.8] ____. So.

1:04:41.4 AH: I would say yes to the first piece, to the second piece, maybe, and I don't know. And I have questions about that. And so I think it's interesting that on psychedelics people have experiences of a spaceless, timeless kind of consciousness, which I think is more in line with what physics is revealing to us than our typical everyday experience of space and time. And so maybe we kind of generate over time as our brains evolve... Our brains don't evolve, but as they develop to operate in our circumstance where we need to survive and survival is the main focus that it's possible we... There is a more direct line to the outside world that kind of gets pruned away into a more useful line into the outside world. And that psychedelics help us kind of access something that is more direct. But that is all. Those are like big question marks. I don't know. But these are things I wonder about and think are possible.

1:05:49.9 SC: I mean, maybe then as a last thing to ask, do you have much of a suggested future research program for how we should be thinking about these things? If it's true that this perspective suggests different questions, how do we go about answering them? Experiments.

1:06:06.2 AH: So I do go into this in the final chapter of my docuseries. I really think the first place to start is kind of where David Eagleman has headed with Sensory Edition. And I talked to participants in a study where they were given an experience of magnetic north. So Eagle Eagleman's work has largely been about helping blind people and deaf people find other ways for their brains to process light waves and sound waves. But this is bringing in a new perception altogether, I think. I also like the idea of scientific endeavors which whether consciousness is fundamental or not will be useful.

1:06:47.2 SC: Of course That'd be nice. Yes.

1:06:48.3 AH: But I think these all kind of will help us get better intuitions for answering questions about how deep in nature consciousness goes. So I think ultimately we only have our intuitions for determining where consciousness is to begin with. You know, I can communicate with you and we can talk about our shared experiences. So one is, was having shared experiences. I can't talk to a person who was born blind about the color red. I mean, there's just no way we're, we're not going to get anywhere. And so having a shared experience is important and then having the language to be able to talk about those experiences. So I think the more things, more human beings are able to perceive and get intuitions for, I think that could be useful to science anyway. You know, we, all of our perceptions give us some clue about the physics of things and then we go on from there. But the more things we can actually process directly, the more intuitions we can develop for them. And I'm hopeful that we might be able to experience systems in nature that give us more of a clue one way or the other if they're conscious.

1:08:02.0 AH: And so we have limited ability to communicate with our pets. But there's enough crossover that we, we make the assumption that there is consciousness there. And so I think if there'd be some way for us to experience and therefore communicate with plant systems or other systems like that, I don't think, I can't imagine how we could ever know conclusively because the truth is I can't even know conclusively that you're conscious. And so we're kind of limited. We seem to always be limited in that sense. But if we could produce tools that give us new intuitions that make me feel as confident that an insect or a much simpler system in nature is conscious in to the extent that I believe you are conscious, I think that would be very interesting.

1:08:56.0 SC: Could virtual reality be any help?

1:08:58.5 AH: Probably. I haven't thought much about it, but yes. And O'Neal Seth is actually working on some things that I think are related. Yes, absolutely.

1:09:08.3 SC: All right, well, I'm looking forward to understanding all this consciousness stuff.

1:09:11.1 AH: No, we have to get the next generation on this because this is going to take a while.

1:09:15.0 SC: I mean, I've had several podcasts and we still don't agree on exactly what consciousness is doing to us, but Annaka Harris, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:09:23.2 AH: I really appreciate your interest in this, especially since you're allergic to my conclusions. It's something I really appreciate and respect about you.

1:09:31.5 SC: Conclusions are never important. It's about the journey. All right, thanks very much.

1:09:33.8 AH: Right. Thank you.