Annaka Harris || On the Mysteries of Consciousness

Why don't we wonder about consciousness together today? How about it? Okay, yes, sounds good. It looked like there are a lot of interesting questions that came in on your Twitter feed when you were and you were consulting your crowd. Well, you have a lot of fans, you have a lot of fans and uh, and lot of people on my uh, you know, my followers who are very interested in consciousness

and surrounding issues, which we'll cover today. You know, when it comes to consciousness, there really are a lot of mysteries, right, I mean, we're we're not talking about like cheese, you know, where it's like, okay, we kind of get the molecular structure of cheese, like you can get the molecular structure of conscious and still not understand what the consciousness is, right, And actually at this point you can't get the molecular structure.

I mean, you know, hopefully at some point will that's right, but we don't. Yeah, we don't have any of it.

We don't not even there yet. Yeah, we're well, maybe that would be a good starting point in the just talking about a little difference between the soft the hard problem of consciousness versus the soft problem conscious Can you kind of just describe them to Yeah, I think it's usually put more in terms of the hard problem versus the easy problems, which is a bit of a joke, you know, it's a sarcastic comment that they are easy

problems at all in neuroscience. But so, the idea is that the so called easy problems are understanding which brain processes and which areas of the brain are responsible for different types of experiences, different types of behaviors. You know, when I'm looking at red square, what you know, what is the correlating state of my brain for that experience? The hard problem is why there is any felt experience

associated with any collection of matter in the universe. And so a lot of people, I should say this upfront, use consciousness in different ways, and so I should say that the way I'm using the word is in the

most fundamental sense. So a lot of people use the word consciousness to talk about self awareness, to talk about complex thought, to talk about things that, in my mind, are much further down the line than just the fundamental, basic sense in which there is a felt experience in which there happens to be felt experience in the universe.

And I've actually been using the word sentience lately. I'm doing an audio series now on consciousness, and I decided to use that definition because it actually gets at the heart of what I mean by consciousness and what's so mysterious about consciousness. And the Oxford English Dictionary just defines it as susceptibility to sensation, and so it's almost like prior to any content, even just just felt experience at all.

And then you can, you know, put in as much minimal content as you want, you know, just seeing the color blue, you know, feeling pressure on your hand, even you know, creatures that are much less complex than us, say, if worms are conscious, which we you know, at this point there's no consensus, but if if they were, we could imagine them having a very very minimal experience. But we can imagine a felt experience versus there being absolutely no experience at all, versus you know, what we imagine

a robot would be or a rock. Right, If a worm has any consciousness, there's a felt experience there of something of pressure, of a physical sensation of moving through the dirt, maybe some sense of moving toward food or you know, desire in some very minimal form. So so, yeah, so I'm using the word consciousness to point to that very fundamental sense, simply a felt experience. Yeah. A. Nagel described it so beautifully in this book. You know, its

like to be a b Yeah, it really. I was starting to rain essay with my philosopher friend and then we didn't know it was too It turned out to be too tricky, which is what is it like to be human? What we're trying to think, what is what is human consciousness? Well in terms of a playoff that understanding, and we sat down we tried to like figure it out, and it's just it's too complicated question. We started that humans. Yeah, yeah, you know, one of the what are the necessary conditions?

You know, these sorts of things. Yeah, yeah, an El Seth actually has a book coming out with a similar title called Being You, which is one of the Yeah, it's a great title, and it's one of the best books on the subject, and he deals with what we do know about consciousness and human perception in a way that I haven't heard any other neuroscientists described quite as well. And he's also giving us kind of the most up

to date neuroscience. So I highly recommend that book. It's out in the UK right now, and I think it's coming out in the fall in the US. Oh well, maybe I'll get them on my podcast. Yeah, And as we're talking about I've actually been using examples from his book all the time, so I'm sure come up again as we as we get into it. Wonderful. Yeah, you do say in your book that if you had to pick two, it would be to listen to it'ld be Anasath and Julio Tononi. Right, Did I say that in

my book? You said that? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, you said you said, well, if I had to pick that's fine. Cool, both great, not Sam Harris not joking, joking, Okay, so what was your what was your goal in writing the book conscious Like, what was what was the kind of motivating force there? You know, it kind of changed and evolved as I was writing the book. It began really just for a way. I mean, it's almost like what

you're talking about this project with your friend. It was a way for me to sort through all of my thoughts about consciousness as they were evolving. So this was something I'd been really fixated on for at least twenty years. I mean in many ways throughout my life, but since I started working with neuroscientists about twenty years ago, it's just something that is constantly in my thoughts, and I

was constantly shifting my view. And it was at the point where I started to really ask the question, be willing to ask the question, is it possible that consciousness is actually a more fundamental feature of the universe than we previously thought, or that than we've assumed. And that was it was surprising to me that I was becoming open to that because I would have rolled my eyes at that question, you know, up until that point. And I would say that was probably maybe eight to ten

years ago. And so I just started writing because I wanted to sort through my own thought, you know, as a philosopher, as a self taught philosopher, very interested in the stuff. I just started taking notes, I started writing for myself. It was funny at that point, as I, you know, I would talk to Sam about my thoughts, and I really kept saying, you know, I really feel like it's not as crazy as it sounds. It's possible that this is kind of the next real revelation in science,

that consciousness. It's almost like all of these other huge discoveries that these ego shattering discoveries of you know, our planet is not at the center of the Solar System, and life does not require some injection of some magical substance, right that that actually, all the stuff in the universe is made of the same ingredients, and it's just getting reconfigured and reconfigured. And we're not that special, and the Earth is not that. I mean, it's special in the

ways that it's interesting and unique. But each scientific discovery kind of shows us that we are part. We are part of the universe and not necessarily the center of it or the ego of it. And so I started wondering if consciousness is the same thing where it's actually pervasive, where not in a magical sense, but in a very ordinary sense, where it is a feature or a I've lost the word property, thank you. Yes, yes, that's the

word I was looking for. So yeah, so just a property of matter or even something deeper, you know, in the form of the field. And it's an open question. This is not something that I necessarily believe in, but there are many more reasons to ask this question than I realized. So when I first started writing about this and thinking about it, Sam what kind of jokingly, but not really as a joke, say don't mention this to the neuroscientists you're working with, and you know, don't say

this at a work dinner. Basically people will think you're crazy, and it's true. And so then my motivation started shifting and I thought, Okay, what makes a legitimate scientific question impossible to talk about? And I'm now convinced this is a legitimate scientific question, and so my motivation became to be to help explain in very simple terms, why this is legitimate science and why we don't know the answer,

but it is a good question to ask. And we've been making a lot of assumptions that the more we know about the brain, the more these assumptions are starting to be broken down and kind of torn apart. And all of these assumptions about things like the self about conscious will, they all inform our thinking about consciousness, the

inform our intuitions about consciousness, excuse me. And so it really feels like it's time for us to rethink some of these things and to go back and say, Okay, what is the latest neuroscience actually telling us about these intuitions that we're trusting in order to make assumptions about consciousness. So I really I did want to kind of shift

the conversation and eliminate the taboo if possible. I would say though, that the largest reason was once my writing became an article, and then the article became a book, excuse me. Once the article became a book and I was writing this book, I was talking you know what. I have friends who are artists and all kinds of different people that I hang out with, and I noticed that it was the first time I was working on a scientific subject that everyone was interested in, and it

really surprised me. I'm used to talking about a physics experiment or a neuroscientist I'm working with on their new book, and kind of you know, they are the certain people who are interested in that. But a lot of people's eyes glaze over and you realize, okay, we ought to move on to something else. And consciousness without fail, everyone had really interesting questions and the question started driving the

book really too. So I just loved that this was a scientific topic that so many people were interested in, and there was not really a single book that I could hand over to a friend who wasn't a scientists that wouldn't be really difficult to read. And so I think this book, Yeah, you did a you did a

really great service by writing your book. You're upsetre right, I mean, you know, to to the late person, if they pick up like David Chalmers book and Consciousness, their eyes are going to glaze over quite frankly, or or even it's hard to get through, right, or even you know you you touched on that. I should say that David Chalmers is the one person I recommend because eily enough. I mean, if you're if you're into it and you want to go through the academic arguments, it's accessible enough

that you know it's it's readable but it's work. Yeah, thank you for that courication. I mean, he's a he's a good friend of mine, and I want to be very queer. I'm not saying saying that, like you know, everyone's eyes would just glaze over like in a way, in a way that they'd be they'd be boring. That's not what I mean. But it's very rigorous. It's a rigorous idea. Yeah, it's academic. He's awesome. He actually has a new book out on whether or not he we're

living in a simulation. I'm excited. Yeah, so that's interesting. He puts it as a as a higher percentage than you would think, a probability, higher probability than one would think. But it sounds like the idea that you're touching on there is what's referred to as pan psychism, right, And I've had Philip Goff on my show and uh uh and we we had a great chat about it. And you know, his works are are are i'd say, semi accessible to the general public on this as well as

his new one, his new one. Yeah, but I I just I do think your book did a great service as a way of even just stimulating people to want to learn more about the topic and kind of get into the debates and and you and you lay out a bunch of complexities around these topics, and I thought we could just go through some of these things that make it very difficult to study. Some people might not even be aware of why it's difficult. So why is it so hard to just figure out that? Is there

cost serve word? You know? Yeah, well, yes it is. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard to find out. Yeah, well something you know when some people are trying to do that, trying to figure out, you know, how to do five phi right, is it? Yes, yes, it's the integrated information theory I t that's Julia and Christoff Cooper working on that. Yeah. Yeah, so he may have that someday. But one thing that's really tricky is, you know, kind

of going back to Chalmers, this idea of zombies. You know, it's hard one can have a really rich inner consciousness and and for no one to have any idea that that's the case from the outside. I felt that was my early child that was my whole early childhood is I was in special head as a kid for an auditory disability had so I was actually zipped up in a cloud people. But but I had a rich imagination and and even dare I say intellect I was curious, curious,

and there extreme version of that. Yeah, No, there's the extreme version of that which you're alluding to, which I talk about in my book. To two cases that we know of. One is called locked in syndrome, which which some people are familiar with but not a lot, which is essentially just a brain injury or disease that causes paralysis, complete paralysis of the body, but where the person's consciousness is as fully alive and present as you, yours and

mine are in this moment. And in my in my book, I talk about this memoir that was written by Jean Dominique Bobi, who had this condition, I believe it. In his case, it was due to a stroke and they assumed that he was in a coma. He was completely paralyzed, and one of his nurses noticed that he had mobility, he had the ability to move one of his eyelids, and that it seemed that he was doing it intentionally.

And so it's a long story, but they ended up developing a method for him to communicate through choosing letters in the alphabet, through a pattern of blinks, and he wrote an entire memoir in this condition with somebody interpreting the blinks and writing down what he was saying. But what he described it was obvious that it would be the experience you or I would have right now if

we just became completely paralyzed. He could see everything, he could hear everything, he could think, He was completely himself in every other way. And so there's also this condition of anesthesia awareness, which is my worst nightmare, where you're put under anesthesia for a procedure and the paralyzing drugs take effect, but the drugs that are meant to make you unconscious for whatever reason don't work or wear off too quickly, and so the person is there undergoing a

medical procedure, a surgery, and they are fully aware. They can feel everything, they can hear everything, see everything, they just can't signal that they're conscious. And so at the very least we know that it's possible for a system to have as much consciousness and as much conscious content as any human being does without any behavior indicating it from the outside. And there's this wonderful I'll send it to you. There's this wonderful image that I forget where

it originated. Someone tweeted it and anil actually retweeted it, which is why I saw it. But it was from one of those science exhibits where they showed different parts of the body. I don't know if you ever saw. I think it was called Inner Worlds or something like

this for Body Worlds. They took people who donated it there. Yeah, it was fascinating, kind of disturbing, but really interesting, so people that donated their bodies to science, and I think it was it was originated in Germany somewhere in Europe, and they showed different systems in the human body, one of which was the nervous system, by injecting it with some solution that had a color to it, so it would, you know, harden and then they would have these displays

out on these tables. You could see, you know, a human who had passed their nervous system and everything else stripped away. So someone had taken a picture of this and said, if this were alive, it would be conscious. And it's really interesting because it looks like it looks more like a tree than it does a human being.

It's you know, it has branches and fibers and it twists all around, but it's basically the brain and the central nervous system, and so not that trees are conscious then, you know, we don't know, but it's interesting to contemplate the fact that that is true. This object on the

table would be conscious if it were alive. And so my book and my thinking has largely been around challenging our intuitions and challenging our assumptions about what we think consciousness is so that we can think more creatively about it. You were talking about why it's so difficult to study, and one thing actually that came a lot in your Twitter thread when people were asking, is you know how

if anything else is conscious in my body? You know, if my fingernails, If there's consciousness in my fingernails, why doesn't it hurt when I cut them? Or you know, how is it that i'm or when I go to sleep, or when I'm under anesthesia when it works? You know, then how can you say there's consciousness there? I'm clearly not conscious and then I become conscious again. And so this is a really good example of how confused we are by the illusions that the brain delivers to us.

And this is partly a function of self largely a function of self. And so there are a few different ways I can answer this, And I think it also gets at this question of why it's so difficult to study but so simple example you can imagine, Actually I was thinking of a parasite, but I have a better example. It's a little bit like a parasite. But when I was pregnant, right, I had another human being in my body.

Most neuroscientists would agree that, at least at the you know, the day before she was born, she was basically the same outside of the body as inside the body. She had consciousness, She could hear my voice. There are all kinds of things that are happening in the brain at that point. So you could say, well, if if the baby's conscious, why why aren't I hearing the sound she's hearing? Why? You know, why isn't that a part of my consciousness?

And then the answer becomes very simple. Of course, there can be another center of consciousness within my body that I am not aware of. Right so, and you know, parasites are another example. If I had a tapeworm, and maybe tapeworms are unconscious, But if they are, which isn't hard to imagine there clearly can be systems within the body where they don't show up in this stream that you know that I refer to as me, which is essentially memory, and it's largely memory, but it's also a

sense it almost gets too complicated to get into. This is what Onill's book is about. But all the different perceptions that give me the sense that there's a that there's a me, that there's kind of this solid me in here that is somehow separate from brain processing, That it's not just that I'm experiencing brain processing, but that

there's this kind of solid me. But the truth is all anyone has access to is for one thing that can communicate, right, So the fact that the speaking part of my brain is also carrying memory, these like trails of memory of all you know, short term and long

term memory that is me. If let's say two seconds ago, or let's say you deliver some type of amnesia drug where I now can't remember the last five minutes, we wouldn't be tempted to say I wasn't There was no consciousness presence in those five minutes, even though now I can say no, it's the same, the same experience for me as if I had just woken up from a surgery,

like I wasn't conscious and now I am so. So all we have is self report, and we have self report from the experience of the stream that is containing all their the brain processing that contains all the memories. But what we don't know is whether there's all kinds of other conscious processes happening within my body that are just not part of this stream that can report. And so another great example. Sorry I'm rambling on for a long time. I was going to bring up split brain research,

but you look like you have a question. Did you want to bring up like I was bringing up multiple personalities disorder? Where is that in to all this? I mean, they have multiple streams of consciousness that that'll like they alternate between which one they do and they identify with be aware. Yeah. Yeah, and split brain research again is like the most extreme version of that where they actually physically I don't know how much your audience will be

aware of. I don't want to repeat things that you've spoken a lot about on your podcast already, but let me know if you want me to go into detail. This is good stuff, please go with Yeah. So there's a procedure where they actually cut the corpus colossum, the connection between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

They have better interventions now, so it's almost not done anymore, but it's done for a long period of time, very effective at helping with epileptic seizures that were destroying people's

lives and putting their lives at risk. So the biggest risk in a seizure is when it spreads to the entire brain, and so cutting that connection makes it impossible for the left and right hemispheres to communicate and for any of the electrical firing to pass across, and so the seizure would be contained to one to one side and therefore really increase the quality of life of the patient. Surprisingly with almost no side effects. You really could barely tell.

The person really seemed and reported that they felt the same what they noticed when they started studying these patients. And there and there's a ton of written sorry research that's that's been written about. And Michael Gazanaga is one neuroscientist who's very involved in this research and he's written a lot about it. I recommend his books on this

and Roger Sperry as well. So so they conducted many experiments on the split brain patients, and what they discovered was that essentially they had it had almost become or in reality, had become two people. It's almost like conjoined twins where they're sharing a body, but one hemisphere did not have access to what the other hemisphere was experiencing, and in fact, the two hemispheres end up having different preferences,

different opinions. There's some really interesting cases. I think it was Ian McGilchrist who writes about the patient who one hemisphere was an atheist and the other was a zine evangelical Christian, and that's very extreme. Most were not that extreme, but they were able to in these situations. They can test each hemisphere separately, asking the same question and you get different answers, and then they're bizarre things that they witnessed.

Something called hemispheric rivalry, where one hemisphere would be interested in wearing a blue sweater and putting the blue sweater on, and apparently the other hemisphere did not want to wear that sweater, and you see the person actually fighting with themselves because the the right hemisphere controls the left part of the body, the left hemisphere controls the right and so you can actually see a physical fight in some rare cases take place, mister Hyde. You know, like, so

clearly we don't. We can't rule out that there's other conscious content and other parts of my body, other parts of my brain, other other systems that entail conscious experience within my body, even though it's not entering the stream that that is me that has the memories and preferences that that happen to go along with this particular brain processing. Absolutely, and and the really interesting thing is when these kind of brain networks that are usually coupled start to become

decoupled through meditation practices. I don't really so I say like that practices, practices, practices, could it be practices anyway we're talking science. Did I say it like that? But anyway, you know, but I'm really interested in the way they can be decoupled through practices like meditation or other, uh more spiritual practices. I guess one could call them or self transcendent experiences, including even drugs. Dare I say, but yeah, uh,

in early experience? Sorry ahead, yeah, So for instance, It's what's really interesting is when we can, uh we can be fully conscious and piercingly conscious of the contents of our consciousness but not have our brain areas like in the default mode network active that are more tied to a self related processing. And that's a that's a cool that's kind of a cool state sometimes to play with.

I don't know if I always one hundred percent want to be in that, you know, but but but but but through meditation practice you kind of get to this state of of of of witness consciousness, right, yes, yes, absolutely, And those are definitely the things that the those are where the intuitions I have for breaking apart some of the assumptions that we tend to come in with. And it is it's kind of the typical experience of when

you take something apart. You take a toaster apart, and you put it back together and you understand how the toaster works now, right. It's when you can take when you can have an experience without feeling at all like a self, when you can have experience of even even different types of agnosia. So so agnosia, there's a variety of different types of agnosia. That's when brain processing goes awry. These are diseases. Essentially, you can be in a state

where sounds and sites are no longer synced. This is something our brain does for us. Sound like travel at different speeds. These information from the outside world come in through our senses. We perceive them at different times. They take different You know, it takes a longer time for a sense from my fingertips to reach my brain and get processed than it does for say the sound if I'm if I hit the table, the signal from the touch actually takes longer than the signal of the sound.

But our brain through what are called binding processes and weave that together so that in my experience, they seem to happen at the same time. So agnosia is when these processes aren't working properly. But you can have so. So some people have this experience where something goes wrong with their brain processing and those sites and sounds are not synced, and it's obviously a very disorienting experience and a difficult way to live. But this can happen. You

can have finger agnosia. You cannot be able to tell the difference between your fingers. All kinds of things can go awry with the brain. But under psychedelic under the influence of some psychedelic substances, these types of agnosia can can come on for short periods of time, and so through meditation and some experimenting with psychedelic substances, it's been my way of taking the toaster apart and putting it

back together. When you drop the sense of self, when color and sound and physical sensation all start to bleed together, and you have these experiences while you're conscious of a very different type of experience than the one we tend to have, you realize that your brain is just doing something different right when it's when it's when you're experiencing a sense of self, the brain is creating that The sense of self is a perception in the same way

that the color red is a perception. When I see the color red, I have no information about the light waves or you know, about the molecules and what's happening at a fundamental level. I just have this felt experience of red. And so the felt experience of self in the same way is not giving us good information about the underlying reality. And so that's what I'm incredibly interested in now, and that's what my audio series is about.

And I'm surprised although it makes sense, but I'm mostly talking to physicists actually for this project on consciousness because I'm interested in this question about whether it's possible that consciousness is more fundamental than we think. And this actually becomes a question for physics very quickly. It has to be informed by neuroscience, of course, but if it is fundamental, then it is a question for physicists. You talked to

Sean Carroll, Yes, spoken to Sean Carroll. That was a great podcast, and we really we really nerded out about this topic. Will we disagreed about free will as I tend to disagree with a lot of people about free will for some reason. Yeah. No. Actually, one of the things that I that he and I spoke about, and that is, you know, parallel, not not exactly related to these things that we're talking about, but often people's questions about free will and about this sense of you know,

are we making choices? And how is it that we're not making choices if we're not? And one conclusion I always come to, or one it's more like just an interesting thought I think, is what does it even mean to say that something else could have happened? You know, if we jumped forward twenty years, this conversation will have gone however it went and the rest of our you will have moved into your new place, and our lives would have happened. And in what sense can we say, well,

it could have happened another way. And I would argue that we can't. That things are going to happen the way they're going to happen, and there is no two things happening. Interesting about many worlds is all everything happens, basically, And I think it's an interesting conundrum for those of us who are convinced that we do not have free will.

Although I never put it that way, I think there's a way to talk about having free will that our brains as a system, in some sense have I mean, ultimately, I don't think it's free. But it's different to talk about the free will of the system of our brain versus conscious will. And I'm always very careful to separate those because what I think is clearly an illusion is conscious will. And the truth is that's the majority of what people care about, and that is the illusion that

gets in the way of thinking about consciousness. Clearly, so our brain as a system can still have the type of free will that we're interested in, but consciousness it's a totally open question whether consciousness has anything to do with it at all, And most of the neuroscience is pointing in the direction of consciousness kind of being the last to know that everything, including the feeling of will, feeling of having made a decision, is again another perception

of the brain and consciousness that all of the brain processing happens prior to it becoming a conscious experience in the same way that binding does. So there's a way, there's a sense in which all of the decision making is happening behind the scenes, in the same way that the binding of sights and sounds is happening behind the scenes. And then what your experience is is I'm making a decision, I have the feeling of will I want to do this, and now I'm going to do it, and that perception

is kind of the last thing to happen. Well, we can double cook on that. There was a really a good quote who came up the quote where there's not so good think of conscious as like a bird, you know, kind of but more of their roots ian MCA, but their root And and I think that that you're quite right that cognitive science has really shown as well as social psychologists. I should give them some credit to they've shown just how much our behaviors and actions in the

world are are influenced by non conscious processes. My whole dissertation was on implicit learning, which is a topic in the field of cognitive science, where we can learn the probabilistic rule structure of the universe of things, of people, so social skills, but also beauty, nature, you know, aesthetics,

and I linked it to creativity in my dissertation. But I found that people differed wildly in their ability to implicitly soak up knowledge of things, and that wasn't correlated with IQ by the way, So some people do have this kind of intuitive, non conscious intelligence more than others.

So I think that that's quite right. But I think that it might be valuable to distinguis between between the function of consciousness in terms of what you're kind of bringing up, which is, well, what could we have done otherwise if we rewinded the tape and had all the same conditions versus maybe the function of conscious and why it evolved is to help us with error correction in the future, to kind of make some changes to things that so we cannot be so shortsighted that does that

does seem to be something unique about humans. I don't want to go too crazy with the uniqueness of humans, because I really do agree with evolutionary psychologists that once you start looking into it more, you're like, well, actually, you can go pretty far down. It's interesting. The mechanism of choice goes really far down, really to the level of plants and a lot of the genes we share with plants. I mean, obviously in humans that is, it's

much more complex. That always becomes more complex, but the origin of the actual decision make or what we're calling decision making, goes very far back. I'm just going to say something else when you were talking. Oh, yes, so the evolution argument, Yes, that absolutely makes sense if consciousness is serving the function we have always assumed, and it may, but it may not. And that is really what my book is all about and what I spend most of

my time thinking about. And I begin my book with these two questions for that reason, just to get to chip away at the things we most strongly assume about consciousness. And so the two questions are related, but they're different and important to ask separately. The first one is is there any behavior. Is there anything on the outside that we can point to that we can say conclusively is

evidence that there's consciousness present in the system. And we already talked a little bit about locked in syndrome and how you know that's the flip side of it. But at least we know it's possible to not see anything on the outside of a conscious system. But is it possible that we can say, if you see someone crying after they break their arm, you know they are conscious or you know, whatever the formula might be. Is there something we can always say if we see that, we

know there's consciousness. And our reflective answer to that is yes. And the example I gave is like all the examples we would give where we think, if you see that behavior, there is consciousness present. I think that's much more of an assumption than we realize, and not an evidence based assumption. The second question is the one that pertains to evolution, which is is consciousness serving a function? Is it actually doing something? Is it having an effect? And the answer

is clearly, we don't know. We do not know the answer to this, as the sciences have assumed all this time, as have I until ten years ago, and it still may be the case. It's I you know, it's it's an open question, But we don't know if consciousness is

serving the function it is serving. And the truth is anything we want to point to in human beings we can imagine and the truth is very soon there will be an AI version of this to point to where you can imagine an unconscious AI system doing just as good a job as that thing you think we need consciousness for and imagine that it doesn't have consciousness, And

so we don't know. And if consciousness is truly fundamental, if there if there just is felt experience, if it is a property of matter, and wherever there is matter, there is some content appearing in consciousness. Then you know, when we feel pain, that is simply what it is like to that system. It simply has a quality felt quality to it. It's not necessarily helping the system out

in terms of getting it to avoid pain. You can program something to avoid certain things that we categorize, you know, what would cause pain. All we're saying is that's what that brain processing feels like. Yeah, we don't know that

it's helping or that we needed it to evolve. Well, this is an interesting, h important distinction when when you talk about panpsychism is that consciousness is not necessarily equated with complexity, right, And I think that's a common misconception which opens us up to understanding how plans could have a consciousness even though it's not. You're not making the argument it's the same consciousness as a human consciousness, right,

Absolutely not, because it's not. I mean I often make different drokes, like we wouldn't expect expect a vine to start doing ballet. It's not a human. It's not going to act like a human. It's not going to think like it is. Just whatever consciousness is in that point in space and time, to the extent that that matter

is different, it will feel different. And I think this sense of being a self, if consciousness is pervasive in that way, this sense of being a self that our brain gives us, there are not many things in nature that have that that have that construction, it will be a very rare form of experience. The rest of it

would be much more amorphous and not. The analogy I've been giving lately is like bubbles in a pot of boiling water, where the water is consciousness, where consciousness is some sort of field or a property of matter and the bubbles are these perturbations in the field where it just things arise. You know, there's a feeling of pressure that arises in the universe. There's a feeling of there's a sound of middle c there's a you know whatever. The equality is that it just keeps kind of popping up.

And we happen to have these complex brain systems that give us this sense that we're this solid self that's doing the experiencing, that's moving through time, when in fact that doesn't really describe the fundamental reality while at all. Yeah, like you said, it's still a great mystery, and there are various there's there's well, there's no shortage of different

opinions on this in my field, right. Roy Baumeister wrote a review paper I don't know if you've read it on consciousness does conscious He argues that the role of conscious is it's in making a causal impact on our behavior is actually quite pervasive and extensive, and he lays out the different means in which that's the case. I'll send you the paper. He talks about implementation intentions and in various other things in the field that shows there

is quite a role of consciousness. But yeah, and then that starts baking the question of I don't know I's baking the question in the right phrase, but it starts to yeah, no, no, I don't think. I always get corrected. I always get correct on that. It no, please correct me. It ask the it what the question? What does it does? It just raises, it raises, it raises. So yeah, so that raises No, Okay, I always get corrected on that, so but yeah, yeah, it just raises the question. You

know what extent? You know, how far back do you go in terms of the causal things that caused those those so called conscious prossies that then caused Yeah, it's it's kind of turtles all the way down. How many yes, And there's so many assumptions embedded in all of the ways that we even speak about these things that he's saying consciousness. But all he knows is the conscious systems in the brain that we know are consciousness, Like he's

really talking about the systems. So, yes, those systems are required for that type of learning, and we know those systems have consciousness associated with them. But if everything has consciousness associated with them, then it's something else about those systems that is unique, and that there are many things that are unique about those systems. Yeah, and it's interesting.

I mean, so one of the things that's obviously, you know, glaringly obvious that makes consciousness so difficult is we can't access it from the outside, right, it is this intrinsic quality. And so unless we can have a report, I mean, with these split brain patients, if scientists hadn't figured out a way to communicate with the right hemisphere, because in most people the speaking hemisphere is the left hemisphere, that where the language center of the brain is in the

left hemisphere, and so that's who you're hearing from. Right, if they hadn't figured out a way to ask questions of the right hemisphere by showing written questions in the left visual field or asking them to grab things with their left hand, which is controlled by the right hemisphere, that hemisphere cannot communicate, don't. It's in their conscious and we can't talk to it, and so we really so

we've always assumed, which of course makes perfect sense. We've assumed that unless it's telling us and acting in way we know we're conscious. I know I'm conscious. If you act like me, I can assume you're conscious to you, you're basically doing the same types of things I'm doing. When you hurt, when you fall down and hurt yourself, you act the way I act when I hurt myself. You must be feeling the same thing. And the rest of nature is so foreign to us in terms of

it being different that it just seems impossible. And because everything we experience, by definition, is through consciousness, we assume that all the things we do and are entail consciousnes in a way that other things don't because we have we have no evidence for it, and because they're so different, and we think our experience it has to do with consciousness. So yeah, it's it's difficult to talk about. It's difficult to study, and I have I haven't read this paper

and I will the one that you're referencing. I've heard a lot of arguments like that, and the problem is they're not distinguishing between consciousness itself and conscious processes in the brain. And we only know those are conscious processes in the brain because we have reports from humans they're conscious, or by analogy, we assume that the mouse, you know, when their brain is in a similar state, they are feeling conscious. When you know when the mouse looks like

it's in pain. It's in pain. You know, we can make these analogies to creatures that are similar enough to us. But yeah, humans are unreliable narrators of themselves too. I'm gonna I'm gonna tweet that. I'm gonna that's a tweet right there. That's a tweet rate there. I'm wringing that down of themselves. Okay, but no, look this, this this stuff is it is obviously still mysterious in so many ways.

And then you know, you have Jeffrey Miller over there arguing that consciousness evolved for the function of attracting meats, that it allowed us to woo you know, particularly men wooing women through the course of sexual selection, through that the course of humanity, and that that's he's argued, that's the function of cautious There's, like I said, there's no

shortage of different fears. And if consciousness does arise at the level of the brain, if that is, if that is actually in fact true, which it might be, then that evolution argument makes perfect sense. But we don't we don't know that it's true, and we're not even close to being able to say that it isn't there at this point, there are many reasons two ask the question and to and to rather than assume consciousness arises because of brain processing, there are many reasons to go down

the path of assuming it's fundamental. And then when you go down that path, that evolution argument completely falls apart, and you're just talking about behavior and sensing in the same way that that an AI that were designed to do exactly that thing to attract me to you know, you it's you can It's not obvious when you look at the details that an felt experience of the processing is necessary for the processing to take place. Yeah. No, it's a really excellent point. Just to kind of circle

back on the free will thing for a second. I don't know if you watched my podcast episode with Sam Harris about this. Did you watch an I mean it was it was like four hours, three hours I heard and I mean, this is this is a debate he and I. This is a debate I started getting into when I was twelve. Actually the first time I had a debate but will I was twelve. My mom, Yeah, it's never ending. It's never ending, right, the never ending

you're ending? And yeah, I don't anyway, go ahead. I did not see it, but I can imagine how it went well regardless of you don't need to watch it. You know, his views on the topics are my views. We basically share a brain on this. Yeah. Yeah, So I was going to ask, like, is there anything that you disagree with Sam about in the realm of constiousness and free will where you like or even vehemently disagree with him about or are you both really much on

the same page about this? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, there's no. I mean, the way I described that that we share a brain is basically across the board, and I think given who each of us are, it wouldn't work otherwise. Okay, No, I mean I was his first editor and was able to do that because we Yeah, I mean, we think very similarly, and I think that that's why we connected in the first place. I think that's adorable. If I can use that, if I can use that word, I

think I love you know, that's that's wonderful. Okay. So, uh so, then therefore I can extrapolate that when it comes to the question of free will, you're you're not a You're not a compatilist, compatibilist, You're not a compatibilist. You don't think that sort of a Daniel Dennet's arguments, for instance, are particularly compelling. Uh that you would want to call any of that in any meaningful sense a

free will? That it's worth wanting? No, And I I mean, I yeah, I've had many had hours of debate with Dan Dennett and I and I love him, and I think he's he's wonderful, and I cleared him to be a friend. But we, yeah, we do nothing but debate. I think, I mean, there are a few things I could say about it if you want. I think having having the argument again is probably not worth past time. I just want to hear some of your thoughts about it.

You know, I think you know it. Ultimately, I think it's important to see the truth and be able to grapple with the truth. And you know, as far as I can tell, until someone can can change my mind, it seems very clear to me that free will as a concept doesn't even it's even hard to describe what one means. I don't I don't think it's something that

is operating in the universe. But I can also say that that's often not a useful fact to keep in mind, especially in human psychology when raising children, when you know, talking about behavior and positive psychology and meditation and all

of that. And I sometimes will it's not a perfect, perfect analogy, but I sometimes make the analogy to you know, understanding that the earth is a sphere, you know, if you're if you're building a house, and even just in your everyday life, you do not need to keep reminding yourself that the earth is a sphere to get on with your day. You can basically act like the world is flat and everything's going to be fine, you know,

and in many cases your life will go better. Your daily life is going to go better if you're how better? How better assuming that the world around you is flat? Oh yeah? And so I well, I think it's important to not lie to ourselves and not to not be

afraid of the truth always. I mean, I feel like this is an important value that people like Dan Dennett often are worried that people, you know, the I won't quote him as saying this, but but other philosophers like him will say, well, yes, ultimately that's true, but it's too destabilizing, it's too scary to people. You know, everything is going to fall apart if we if we tell people that, and I actually think one that's not sustainable.

If science is marching toward a truth, it's it's you can't avoid the truth, and so we kind of owe it to ourselves. It can be a destabilizing fact to people, and I think we owe it to ourselves to find a way for it to not be destabilizing. But I also think there is really it's it's not necessarily easy for everyone to find, but there is an available framing of this, which is to me kind of the epitome

of spirituality or of a spiritual experience. Even though I always hesitate to use that word, that there's actually a lot of good that can come out of this realization that it can be freeing. It can be very helpful

to people with mental orders illness like OCD. I actually interviewed a couple of people for this documentary series I'm working on, talking about how understanding the brain processes were responsible for their behavior was so helpful in managing it and also giving themselves a break at feeling like myself is why do I do this? Why do I keep

acting this way? Don't why don't I have you know, why can't I will this thing away when you can in fact realize the universe is kind of unfolding, and we have this magical experience of witnessing it, of having an experience of it unfolding in the way that it is, and that's all we know at this point. There's a lot more to discover. But there's something beautiful in the mystery.

There's something beautiful and not knowing, and there's something freeing and realizing that you don't have as much control as you think you do, and you're not even really a separate all the entity that is apart from the universe. You are of the universe. We're all part of this thing that's unfolding, and we're witnessing it happening. From one point of view, I think that to a large degree that it can be very frank I would all, since

I am a compatibilist, don't hate me. But since I am a compatibilist, I do think I could make a rigorous case for why there's something freeing as well to know that there are certain things that you can do as well, so I could see it both ways. Yeah, And that's where I like, and that's another reason why I like to distinguish conscious will from free will while you're talking about is kind of brain processing. Our brains are not closed systems. So you and I this entire

time have been worth far apart. But our ideas are affecting each other's brain patterns. You know, all of that is, all of that is absolutely true, and when again, this is a place where thinking about conscious will ill being an illusion is not very useful and can just be confusing.

When you're talking about the effects of meditation on the brain, the effects of connecting with people, the effects of thought, certain types of thoughts, all of those things are part of the system of the brain that is interacting with the world around it. And there are better and worse ways to feel in the world, and healthier and less healthy ways for your brain to be interacting with itself

and with the outside world. Yeah, I hear you. If you and Sam are judges in a courtroom someday, I would love to present my case for why I think that some of the things that people mean by free you will truly mean by it, and what they really want for as their own autonomous organisms that are cybernetic systems that have goals that they do have those things legitimately, legitimately have those things someday I want to put all my aductions in a row. Is that the right metaphor?

I am terrible metaphors. I mean, I probably don't totally disagree with you. I mean I think the brain, the brain has that. Ultimately, what the fundamental reality is we don't know. And ultimately it's hard to see, you know, where where the actual freedom is because there's a lot of eye in those statements, which is fine when you're talking human psychology, but underneath it all, yeah, yeah, that

I isn't really there. So I really see it as two levels of conversation, and the level of conversation you want to have and that you think is important I totally agree with. And it's a bit of a mess to try to have both conversations at once, I think, but we should try to do it because it's fun, because it's it's just fun. I mean, not not right now, but I'm saying, you know, let's keep up the conversation. We're not going to settle it. We're not going to settle.

But I really appreciate your perspective. I really do. Just the remaining a couple of minutes we have to take. Can we talk about I Wonder, which is your children's book. I loved it, I I got I got chills as I was reading it. I don't know, maybe maybe it's just like we're on a similar frequency there, you know, about the importance of of all and wonder in the world. I mean, I wrote a book called Trends. I'm not trying to pug my book, but I wrote a book

called Trends words. Oh, you've mailed you a copy. But I'm really profoundly interested in the latest science of all. For instance, A W E. And I created an all experienced questionnaire, published the scientific paper on this with my colleague David Aiden. I'll send that to you. No, I mean, I feel like that's my that's my best antidepressant is off. Me too, Me too, me too? And actually I so

I it's funny. I like, I've known you for a while, but I met you, and I've only listened to a couple of your interviews, one of which was one where you where you talked about your childhood. It was with oh my goodness, I'm spacing on his name Andrew Yang. Thank you. Yeah, I can't believe I forgot his name and I know him. Do you like that conversation? I loved that conversation. It was so interesting for me to hear about your childhood. And I'm sure a lot of

your your listeners know know your experience. And although my childhood was very different, there are a lot of similarities really, and so I can see how you would connect with I wonder because it really was a book that I wrote that I wanted to read with my daughter, but because I wished someone had read a book like that to me when I was young, and I wish someone had spoken that way to me when I was young. Me too, Me too. I had all these questions as

a kid, Uh, you know what, what's that? What's that in there? Like they saw me only through the lens of disability, you know. So they're like, you know, you're not allowed to ask questions. You're in special ED. It's like, wait, really, I didn't know that was a rule. But so, can you tell me about how your conversations with your daughter inspired you over the years to want to write such a book. Yeah, so I say this a bit in the author's note that I noticed. So it was something

I had already noticed in my work with scientists. So I had been working at that point, I'd been working for least ten years, about ten years working with scientists who are trying to make their work more accessible to the general public. So mostly editing popular books for the general public on the brain, on physics, and coaching people for accessible talks like ted Talks, things like that. But my passion was really to get as much science accessible

to the rest of the world as possible. And in that work I could see how often people got uncomfortable not knowing something about a subject, and how quickly people would say, oh, I was terrible at math in school like that. Basically they just shut the door immediately because they're so uncomfortable with that feeling they had as a kid and that they have now. And it's really pervasive in our culture that this reaction to the feeling of

not knowing being so negative. We're either ashamed or we're afraid. I mean, those are the two main feelings that come up. And it's interesting when I was interviewing some developmental specialists when I was writing the book, a couple of them I convinced them otherwise, but a couple of them their first reaction to me was, Oh, no, you should never say I don't know too a child. It's too scary.

And I just thought, that's so interesting. It's so deep in the culture that no one has even questioned this. And I say it to my daughter all the time, and she's not scared. We have these big conversations, and I realized we were really just teaching our culture and teaching our children that it's shameful or scary to not

know the answer. And then I saw the other side of it with my daughter when they get to an age where it's just inevitable everywhere you go people ask the way they converse with toddlers as they'll say like, oh, what color is this? And what's your doggie's name? And how many feet do you have? Or you know, they ask them simple questions that they can answer and then say, yah,

you knew the answer. And I noticed that when she got asked a question she didn't know, she started kind of there was an avoidance happening really early, and so it was really a book that I almost was writing

more for the parents than for the kids. I wanted to give parents a language for having these types of conversations with their kids and for fostering and celebrating this feeling of not knowing, of just completely reframing it, especially for parents who know this already intuitively, like parent, you know someone like you. I say this and you totally you know, you get it immediately. But a lot of parents then don't know what to do with that, or are still afraid to talk to their kids. Thanks for

listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, if you'd prefer a completely ad free experience, you can join us at Patreon dot com slash psych Podcast. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.