Know Thyself - E104 - Annaka Harris: Reality Is Stranger Than You Think, Consciousness, Perception, Free Will, AI & Love

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Annaka Harris dives deep into some of the most profound and perplexing questions about the nature of consciousness, perception, free will, AI, and the underlying meaning of love and existence. Annaka begins by defining consciousness and exploring the "hard problem". She discusses neuroscientific insights into how the brain processes conscious experiences, and how our intuitions about the nature of the self and decision-making can often mislead us. The conversation then ventures into the realms of plant consciousness, the criteria for discerning whether something is truly conscious and capable of suffering, and the idea that consciousness may be a fundamental feature of the universe. She shares her personal experience with using meditation to transcend the illusory nature of the self. Red light therapy: Go to https://BonCharge.com/KnowThyself and use code KNOWTHYSELF to save 15%  André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro  2:20 Defining Consciousness 6:25 Why the 'Hard Problem' is Hard 14:48 How the Brain Processes Conscious Experiences 19:30 You’re Not Crazy, You’re Waking Up  25:37 How Your Intuitions May Lead You Astray 29:12 Are Plants Conscious? 39:28 Discerning What Makes Something Conscious or Able to Suffer 47:51 Boncharge: Red Lights 15% Off 49:01 Pan-psychism & Consciousness as Fundamental 1:02:27 Consciousness at a Molecular Level 1:15:35 Illusory Nature of Self 1:21:57 Transcending the Self Through Meditation  1:32:31 Decision Making & The Readiness potential  1:43:10 Free Will vs Conscious Will 1:44:52 The Love Underneath it All 1:50:46 Experimental Science & the Language Barrier to Describing This 1:53:58 Annaka's Personal Path to Studying Consciousness  2:01:40 Life's Inherent Intelligence & Meaning 2:08:51 Artificial Intelligence 2:14:16 Do Aliens Exist? 2:18:40 Seeing the Bigger Picture 2:23:05 Conclusion  ___________ Annaka Harris is the New York Times bestselling author of CONSCIOUS: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Nautilus Magazine, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and IAI Magazine. She is also an editor and consultant for science writers, specializing in neuroscience and physics. Annaka is the author of the children’s book I Wonder, coauthor of the Mindful Games Activity Cards, and a volunteer mindfulness teacher for the organization Inner Kids. Website: https://annakaharris.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annakaharrisprojects/ ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

We have assumed that consciousness somehow is entailed in the experience of having a brain. It's very possible that there are all kinds of conscious experiences happening all over the place, and there'd be no way for us to know. There are a lot of truths that can be found just in investigating your internal experience. When I first learned how to meditate, it really struck me as a scientific tool. The first time I had the experience was when I was doing walking meditation, that it just suddenly became very clear to me that there was no me doing the walking. I don't know how to say it any clearer than that.

The punchline of all of that is that most psychological suffering comes out of or is related to an experience of feeling separate. This realization, it shows you about the truth of reality, is the intertwined nature of things. But it also just naturally leads me to this question of, is there something that is playing out with some kind of, purpose or intent. Hey everyone, welcome back to know thyself. Today, I'm excited to be sitting down with a really important voice exploring the intersection around neuroscience, meditation,

the philosophy of mind and consciousness. She is a New York Times bestselling author of the book Conscious, which is a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind. And also at Children's Book as well. And this conversation, this is like one of my favorite topics to explore on this podcast because I think probably like many of you, you start to go on the path of self-development and self-realization, and you come to

explore the nature of who we are at our core. And this whole conversation is going to be diving into many very interesting, trippy at times aspects about consciousness and its implications of our talk today in the world. So, Anika Harris, thank you for being here. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's an honor. I know you don't do too many. I loved reading your book, which is a short guide. It's like 100 pages and really digestible. And, And also your upcoming podcast documentary series called Lights On, which is incredible. So before we dive into all the nuance that we are going to in this conversation, I'd love to lay the framework and foundation and definition really for how we use different terms, consciousness being the first. So when you say and when we use a term consciousness, how are we framing that in this conversation?

Yeah, I'm so glad you started there because usually I think to do that half an hour in. It's really important to do it right away. So people use the word consciousness in a variety of ways, but often people think of more complex thought, self-awareness, things that are more specific to human beings. But what I mean when I use the word and what I'm interested in and what I think is so mysterious and what's so difficult for scientists to study is something much more fundamental. So consciousness in the most basic sense, which I usually, like to just call felt experience. I think that's the best way of getting out what it is that I'm

talking about. So if a B has some minimal level of consciousness, if a worm has some level, a minimal level of consciousness and neuroscientists do not have a consensus on these things yet, we think it's likely that they have some conscious experience because they have brains and central nervous systems. But if they do, it's a very minimal experience, you know, something like a worm or a slug might just feel pressure against their skin, maybe some internal kind of desire, like we have a feeling of hunger, something like that when they need to go towards food, maybe some minimal element of fear or even just an impulse to move away from something dangerous or something that wouldn't be good for their system.

And so when I use the word consciousness in this context and talking about the mystery of consciousness, I'm talking about consciousness in its most basic form, simply the fact of felt experience. The fact that I'm not just processing light waves that are bouncing off all the objects in this room. I'm seeing yellow. I'm seeing green. I'm seeing shapes. I'm having an experience from the inside in a way that we imagine computers don't.

You know, computers and cameras can process light waves. And we don't imagine that they see green or that there's any kind of experience of color or anything like that, even though they're processing similar inputs from the environment. the question is, and the really mysterious thing is, why does some processing, why do some organisms in nature, have an experience of being the organism, have the experience of being that collection of atoms that's doing that processing?

So sentience is also a great term, although it's not used that often in our culture, and most people equate it with life, so I don't use it that much, but the definition of sentience is really actually what I'm getting at here. susceptibility to sensation, consciousness in its most basic form. So I use experience, I use awareness, felt experience, and sentience interchangeably. But that is what I mean by consciousness.

There's something that it is to like to be that organism or life. Yes. Yes. So that phrasing comes from Thomas Nagel, the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a famous article, at least within the world of philosophy. called What is it like to be a bat? And he basically, you know, discusses what I was just explaining,

but in a more philosophical and detailed sense in terms of what different types of organisms might experience in the world having vastly different sensory modalities, inputs, brains, that type of thing. And there's a great German word, umwelt to describe, and that kind of covers all of the types

of conscious experiences a given organism has. So we have a human umwelt and bats would experience a different umwelt because they're experiencing sonar and navigating the world through a different sense than vision. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited to explore the variance or degrees of sentience. But, you know, we come to this philosophical understanding

and trying to answer the seemingly impossible question of why any organization of matter would have an experience of itself. Yeah. which is famously kind of noted as the hard problem. And so why is the hard problem especially hard as opposed to easy problems? Yeah. And that phrase comes from David Chalmers, the philosopher. Although the hard problem, you know, as a problem has been expressed many, many times throughout history.

He kind of coined this great term and now we have this shorthand. So the quote unquote easy problems of the brain and neuroscience and consciousness are what we're really at the beginning state. of now in neuroscience, which is understanding and learning which brain states correlate with which types of conscious experiences. The hard problem is why there would be any felt experience of any processing, brain processing or otherwise at all. And this is very intuitive for some people, for other people, it's not. Seeing how mysterious this actually is.

But when you start to compare things that human beings do to things that other systems, do, whether they're artificial intelligence systems or plant systems or insect systems, it's easy for us to see how other systems, or we intuit that other systems may not have a felt experience associated with processing. And it seems natural that human beings and maybe mammals do. But when you look more closely at what that entails and what differences there are or that there really are a lack of to point to why some systems or some processing would not entail an experience from the inside, from the inside and others would. It's actually very hard to come up with a reason for it. It's also, in terms of the sciences, science studies everything from the outside.

And this is true beyond science. This is true in our daily lives, just our understanding of the world of each other, we are only able to study, observe, try to understand, experience other things in the world from the outside, from their behavior, from their physical characteristics. And so, you know, luckily human beings can communicate so well that we can get a pretty good sense of what we're each experiencing because we have this high level of communication and we're similar enough that we can we can talk about how we're feeling but i can never have direct contact with your experience i can't know your experience from the inside and so this is a real challenge for the sciences and for just us as curious creatures how to better understand something that

you can only know firsthand in terms of the experience itself the experience itself exists for itself and can't be really received or penetrated from any other place. Yeah, so you would say then it's impossible to have conclusive evidence that an organism or life would have consciousness looking from the outside. Yes, so this is, there are two questions that I raise in my book, and this is one of them, and I pose it that way because I think it gets at our deepest intuitions about what consciousness is. And it shows us how counterintuitive

a lot of the answers to these two questions are. And the first one is essentially how you phrased it. Can we find conclusive evidence from the outside of any system that consciousness is present in that system? And while we feel that the answer is yes, and I think we're correct in our assumptions about other human beings and mammals,

the truth is it's actually... impossible at this point in neuroscience and in our path as human beings to actually be able to conclusively say because the only evidence we can get is through communication. As I said, I can't jump into another experience and have that experience myself. And this is actually very interesting. I've been thinking a lot lately as I've been working on my documentary series about how important communication is for our ability really to talk about any experience at all. And we can't communicate if we don't share the same experiences. And so there's this limit.

You know, if I were talking to someone who were born blind and I was trying to explain something about my experience of seeing, it's extremely limiting. I mean, I could give some analogies, but there would be no way for me to explain to someone who doesn't have vision what my world of sights is like. The more different an organism is from us, the less ability we have to communicate. And so it's easier for us to kind of assume we have evidence from organisms that are similar to us.

It gets much more difficult when there's an inability to communicate. And this is true with human beings as well. So in the case of someone who's experiencing locked in syndrome, which can happen from damage to the brain, either by stroke or an injury, that leaves the patient completely paralyzed, but their consciousness is still fully intact. And so that's a situation that puts us closer to where we are

in terms of looking at other organisms, other life forms, and not being able to know whether there's consciousness presence of someone in a locked in state looks like they're completely unconscious. They're totally paralyzed. They can't move. yet we now know based on some interesting stories we can talk about if you want that many of these patients are actually having a full conscious experience. They can see everything in the room.

They can hear everything in the room. They have thoughts. They have their as having as full of conscious experience as you and I are having right now with no ability to communicate. So then what is the second question that you posed? Yeah. So the second question is related and very similar, but it kind of gets at this intuition from a different angle.

The second question is, is consciousness doing something? It's about the causality of consciousness. Is it driving our behavior in the way that we feel it is? Is it informing our behavior in the way that we feel it is? And so our intuitive answer to this is a resounding yes, also to the first question. Both of our, we feel very strongly that the answer is yes to both of these questions I pose. And what's interesting is to start to shake up your intuitions and realize that we don't have great evidence for answering, yes to either. And the answer may be yes to one or both. But it's surprising to dig a little deeper and

realize we actually just don't know. So we feel very strongly that, you know, my experience of anger, my experience of fear, even my experience of thinking through my day and my planning, that I couldn't really do any of those things without the internal felt experience. I couldn't do those things without consciousness. If I said, you know, I woke up this morning and spent an hour prepping for this interview, but I was unconscious the whole time. It doesn't really make sense to us. So we have this intuition that consciousness is causal, that it's doing something. But there are ways to kind of break through that intuition and get you to question whether

that's the case. Yeah, it's so fascinating to just contemplate what the inner experience of something like a dolphin, a blue whale, a snow leopard, an owl. Like, what is that like? But again, when we're using consciousness here, we're not pointing towards the contents of consciousness or the use of echolocation, but the very fundamental aspect of there's an experience at baseline.

Yes. And so, yeah, we're going to be exploring the different theories and possibilities of where consciousness is in terms of it, if it's an emergent property or more fundamental. But before we do so, I think it's so fascinating to explore how our intuitions around these things can really lead us astray

because our perceptive capacities that give us, that stitch this reality to us and give us a display of experience that allows us to navigate it. Yeah. But in so many ways, it's objectively, literally detached from what's happening in actuality.

And so when we look at how our experience is kind of the last to know in this binding process, I'd love for you to break that down because this starts to really, I think for some be kind of destabilizing and like nauseating a little bit, a little bit, but to me, it's like, I'm on the pursuit of truth. Like, I think you are so much of our listeners. And ultimately, I think, yeah, so this is a very interesting insight. So let's

start diving down the rubber hole here. So yeah, so a little bit of the neuroscience that starts to chip away at these intuitions or at least get us to question them. I'll start with a simple thing, like the experience of fear. That's something that many people give as an answer to that question is consciousness causal, is the experience causing the behavior? And we feel, you know, yes, if we encounter a bear in the wilder, you know, some scary creature and our heart jumps and we're scared and we run and there must be some reason that that experience of feeling fear evolved to help us, you know, get away from danger more quickly.

What's interesting is that at the level of the brain, the conscious experience of that fear is actually the last processing to take place and your body takes action much sooner than you become aware of the fact that you're even feeling fear or anything else. It's about 300 to 500 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds is half a second for most of the processing of perception

of information we're gathering from the outside to kind of get woven together to then be delivered to our conscious awareness. So even that simple experience of feeling, fear, and running for your life, that is an automatic process. It's an automatic physiological response. Your body moves into action much more quickly than your brain has time to actually deliver the conscious experience. There's a great neuroscientist David Eagleman who talks a lot about binding processes, and I actually highly recommend his work for anyone who's interested. I have a quote from him, actually.

Oh, wonderful. Oh, great. Yeah. Your brain collects up all the information from the senses before it decides upon a story of what happens. The strange consequence of all this is that you live in the past. Yeah. That's great because I never would have remembered that. But that's the quote I was thinking of actually. Yeah. And so when he talks about binding processes, these are processes that integrate all of the incoming sensory information we're getting. Because they come to us at different paces, right?

That's right. Sound and light, travel at different speeds, etc. Yes, that's right. So they travel at different speeds through the air, but they also take different amounts of time to be processed by the brain. Some end up deep inside the brain and take longer to be processed before they're delivered to our conscious awareness. So David Eagleman also talks about this example in his work of why we use sound rather than light at starting blocks and races. because we know that light travels faster than sound, you'd think that would be the quicker way to our nervous system.

But it actually takes longer, even though the light gets to our eyes faster than the sound arrives at our ears, it takes longer to process the light waves than it does the sound waves. And so when we hear a sound, we react much more quickly than if we see a light flash. And so in my book, I give the example of the experience of playing tennis, just hitting a ball with a racket. So in our experience of the present moment, we see the ball hit the racket. We feel the impact of the ball on the racket.

And we hear the sound of the ball hitting the racket all in the same moment. When all of these signals take different times to get to the brain and then take different amounts of time to be processed by the brain. And then through binding processes, we are delivered this experience of all of that happening in the same moment. Because evolutionarily speaking, that's the most useful way to deliver that information so that we can interact. in the world in a useful way. Yeah, it'd be so strange to actually process things coming in at different speeds. Yeah, and there are people who have disorders where that's the case. And yeah, that's a hard way to get through the world.

But it also shows you what our brain is doing all the time when it's healthy and when it's, you know, being useful. And the punchline of all of that is that all of these unconscious processes are happening milliseconds, sometimes even seconds before our conscious experience. So our neurology is bonding these sensory inputs, which gives us and stitches together this experience of reality, which is very useful. How is that like changed how you actually operate in your life? I'm curious that it has it all. Because it is a, it's very... It can be destabilizing. Yeah. And I've had that experience as well. But I'm glad you brought

this up actually because I think it's important. There are some really one of wonderfully positive psychological effects of having this realization as well. So it's important to talk through that and get to that point. Yes, I mean, it's disconcerting because we have this intuition and this belief that, I don't know if you want to get into this topic so soon, but the experience of a freely willing an action and being a solid self. And I think this is something you've talked about on your podcast before, this illusion of a feeling like a solid self.

Many times with Donald Hoffman, with Sam, and many other days. Yeah. That's right. You spoke to Donald Hoffman. Okay. Yeah. So he and I think about things very similarly. And so that component of it of feeling like there's a me in here, you know, which the truth

is once we understand how the brain works and some other things just about physiology and also you can have these experiences, insights and meditation, any way of realizing that your normal, the way you normally walk around feeling like a solid, unchanging self over time is actually an illusion. There can be something disconcerting about that. But ultimately, I actually think it's a very beautiful and freeing. And I don't usually use the word spiritual, but I think, you know, when I'm at a loss for a word for that experience of feeling more at one with the union, more at one with nature, that dropping of the illusion of self is essential to that, to that experience. And so, yeah, ultimately, I think it's a very positive thing. Yeah, I think to our lowercase

s self that has an identity that could be very destabilizing for because you're like a prisoner of this illusory reality. But it also invites, like you're saying, a deeper sense of freedom to taste what is a more fundamental aspect of self with the capital S. Yes. And that is very freeing. Yes. Because you're coming to know deeper in the true nature of who you actually are, which is ultimately a good thing.

Yes. Yes. No, I agree. And I also think there's another component to it, which is feeling like a self that controls and is responsible for all of my characteristics, all of my personality traits. So there's one piece of it that can be psychologically unhealthy, which is feeling responsible for something that I'm not responsible for

in the way that I typically feel. There's something freeing about that, but I think the most important piece is most psychological suffering comes out of or is related to an experience of feeling separate, feeling alone, feeling different from, feeling other than. And this realization of the way the brain works, the way the mind works shows you what, it shows you about the truth of reality is the intertwined nature of things and the way in which we are not separate. And we are in constant dialogue with not only other human beings, but with our environment. This reminds me of something that came up recently when I was talking to a science writer who wrote a book about plant behavior.

And I was saying, I always wish that there were a better visual representation of the way that we're interconnected with our environment. If we could see the sound waves my voice is creating and watch how they impact your brain and then how those thoughts change the chemistry. of your brain, if we could see the air going in and out of my mouth even and, you know, be aware of the water I'm drinking and how that's feeding my cells. And if we had a better visual representation of all of these things, I think we'd feel less like a separate self and see us more embedded in nature in the way that we are. And actually, I shouldn't even say embedded in nature. We are nature, right? We're a part of, we're a part of this larger thing. Yeah. Yeah. I hope. And I'm sure there were.

in the coming years and decades where there will be technology that enables us to really experience that. Because how right would it be if we could really perceive our interconnectedness, which can be a felt experience in moments of stillness for sure. And is so beautiful and transformative. But like, yeah, to see the air that we breathe is the same and the sound waves and the light. And it would I feel like really dissolve a lot of the illusoryness of that the human mind creates of separation, which like you're saying so much where the suffering comes from. Yes.

And I really do feel like it is the human mind that is like one of the only things that we know of that believes it's separate from everything else. Yeah. And so I'd love to explore how plant the plant kingdom and fungi, like when we look at consciousness, I've had the intuitive felt sense that like trees are conscious. Like I just feel that, you know. That's interesting. But also I don't know. my intuitions about a lot of things are completely wrong.

Right. Yeah. But at the same time, they're clearly intelligence. There's clearly intelligence there. They're clearly communicating. They're clearly as a large network of the mycelium that's connected and communicating with each other, whether or not it's something to be like that. I don't know.

But when we start to explore the plant kingdom and fungi and the trees, like how do you see consciousness plays into their experience. My intuitions are evolving here for sure because I've recently done a deep dive into the latest research on plant behavior. I kind of want to pick up though on what you said about intuitions because I feel like this is an important piece. An intuition is simply the feeling that something is true, but it may not, it may or may not represent accurate information about the world.

Just like our intuition that this is how reality actually works, it seems to be. Seems real, but it's not at all. Right, right. So Sarah Walker is an astrophysicist and working on a theory called Assembly Theory with another scientist, Lee Kronin. And she wrote something on Twitter recently, like intuitions are our best guide as scientists.

And my response was, that's true, but unfortunately they're also our worst guide. Yeah. And it's true because ultimately, we're left with our intuitions. I mean, even just understanding the simple mathematical phrase, 2 plus 2 equals 4, if we didn't have an intuition for that,

it wouldn't actually land. And so, yeah, so a lot of scientific exploration is constantly checking in with intuitions, but willing to let the false ones go, the ones that are misguiding us go, to let some of them be reshaped. So I often will talk about you know, every major paradigm shift, scientific discovery, almost always, every example I can think of,

challenges our previous intuitions in a pretty drastic way. So just understanding that the Earth is a sphere and not flat as it seems it is. Understanding that there's a microscopic world of things we can't see or feel or taste or touch and some of them are microbes that can kill us, you know, these are things that we don't realize this far along in history. But with many of these discoveries, it took decades or longer for people to accept the evidence because their intuitions didn't map on. But what's interesting is our intuitions then shift

when we get new information and we're faced with evidence that's persistent. At some point we accepted. And then we kind of shift our intuitions. And that becomes part of the way we feel ourselves to be in the world. So normally we walk around, you know, basically treating the earth as flat. But if you think about it or you see the sunrise or you just want to have a moment of

appreciating nature and our circumstance in the universe, you can feel that we're on a sphere and that the horizon disappears. And there's something beautiful about that. So keeping in mind that intuitions are useful guides, but they're sometimes giving us good information about the world and sometimes they're not. And so a lot of science is just challenging intuitions, reshaping intuitions, but also using them to guide us. Yeah. So. Yeah. And also the, like, I love the intellectual pursuit and understanding of what we're talking about here. And of course, it doesn't, you don't need to understand intellectually how we're interconnected to have the felt experience of oneness. And I love this quote from Sri Nasargetata.

Maharaj was a non-dual teacher that says the search for reality is the dangerous of all undertakings for it destroys the world in which you live. But again, we're opening up to a grander horizon here. And so, yeah, when we start to explore the plant and kingdom and fungi life, I love for you to explore how complex behavior doesn't necessarily denote an experience of consciousness. Yes. So it's interesting. My intuitions always ran the opposite of yours. I never had an intuition for plants having consciousness. And I would say that's still the way I tend to intuit it, although my research in this area has now not only gotten me to question, but feel pretty confident that there probably is some level of conscious awareness. But I originally started

researching plants because I found it very interesting that there are much more complex behaviors involved in plants than I previously knew about. And then I came to understand that most people, even many scientists. And actually it's interesting that the history is that there was a lot of pseudoscience that was presented that harmed the science. And so it was very hard for people to get funding to do plant research. That has shifted in recent years. So there's a lot of interesting work being done. So I originally was interested in exploring plant behavior because I had an intuition that plants were not conscious. And I found it interesting when I found behaviors that were similar enough that you could kind of place them into the same category of caring for your young

and maybe not necessarily love because that implies consciousness, but the types of behaviors that I would want to give as an answer, as I said, to that first question, okay, if I see this behavior in a human being, that seems pretty clearly, that seems pretty clear evidence that consciousness is present there. If I see my daughter fall down in skin her knee and she starts crying, you know, she's probably conscious, right? Probably. Although we can't fully verify, but we can't verify by experience. Could be a small human-a-robot zombie.

Exactly. We can talk about that too and the strangeness of what we'll be facing soon with AI. But yeah, so I thought, okay, if there's a category that I can kind of claim when that category is expressed in behavior, there is consciousness present. Almost everything you point to,

there is an analogous behavior in plants. And it's usually much. more simple and plants don't have brains and they're very different, but the output, the actual behavior is not only very similar, but sometimes the mechanism behind the behavior is actually the same. And so I learned from Daniel Shamovitz, the plant biologist that, you know, we all know at this point that we share a lot of our DNA with plants, but some of them are actually the same precursors to a lot of the same types of behavior. So the genes that are responsible for plants ability to detect light and variation in light. We have those same genes and they're related

to the same processes. They get more complex in human beings and affect our circadian rhythms and all of that. But down to the level of the DNA, this behavior has similarities. And so what I thought was interesting was that I could look at other behaviors that fell into those categories and have no intuition that there's a conscious experience there. And already this started to shift things for me a little bit. So the main reason I've always been interested in plants is because I assume they're not conscious and that shifts my feeling about when I deem certain behaviors to be evidence of consciousness.

But it also, the deeper you get into this, the more you start to wonder if there is some minimal felt experience. If I can consider there's possibly a minimal felt experience in a worm moving through dirt, plants exhibit very complex behaviors. I can give a few examples of recent ones that I just learned about. Yeah, with communication, memory. Yeah, right, all of these things. So in there's a parasitic vine called a daughter vine, D-O-D-D-E-R, daughter vine. This was research that was done in 2023.

They were aware, scientists were already aware that daughter vines, the seedlings, when they start to grow, because they don't photosynthesize, they're a parasitic plant. They need to be latched onto another plant in order to survive. So the minute the seedling starts to grow, it starts to sense its environment to find the best plant for it to latch itself onto. There are certain types of plants like grasses, it can't latch onto at all. They're totally useless. certain plants are better than others for it to live a long life. And so scientists didn't know that you can watch, you can watch time-lapse photography of these vines starting to grow,

and they kind of move around. And you can tell they're sensing something, and scientists originally thought there was some kind of chemical being emitted by certain plants that they might be able to sense. But it turns out in this case, and plants do detect chemicals, and there's lots of behavior associated with that. but in this case of the daughter vine,

one scientist suspected that it had to do with light, that it was actually sensing light, that it had photoreceptors of some kind. So when we look at leaves on a plant, they look green to us because the green light waves are bouncing off. They're not being absorbed or not as much of them are being absorbed. And that's why we see them as green. But if you could detect the light waves that were going through

or see all the variation of the light waves that were being blocked and bouncing off and those that were going through, which it turns out the daughter vine is able to do, you can see the shape, or maybe C is the wrong word, but you could detect, you could sense the shape of the leaves

and of the entire plant. And so they were finally able to study this in 2023. The assumption was that these daughter vines can detect the types of light waves moving through the plant and therefore be able to detect the size, distance location type of plant it is and to choose the best plant to latch on to.

The experiment just used LED lights and it mimicked the type of light that would be going through the leaves of a plant that it would be beneficial to attach to and then a different type of plant like grasses and it made shapes just with LED lights in the room and lo and behold, the daughter vine would go toward the LED lights, you know, and these are not plants that are not picking up on chemicals. there's nothing else that they're able to perceive that we know of except for the light. And they move in the direction of the lights that are shaped like the types of plants that would be beneficial to them. Yeah.

Is there any other example with in regards to memory that you can think of? There are many examples of memory. You know, even simple things like being able to know what season, you know, we, we all experience spring. And the reason, it's not just that the temperature has to be a certain, way, but a certain number, depending on the plant, but there are certain plants where a certain number of cold days have to be registered before it will start to switch into this new season of blossoming. I might not have this right, but I believe it's tulips. Is it tulip bulbs? You need to put, if you put them in the freezer, I think they need to be put in the free. They need to have some experience of, I think 30 days or something like that of cold temperature before they will bloom. And so, There's a way in which all plants really, in some sense, are using memory to keep track of, even in a single day of the sun rising and setting.

There are plants, you know, there are house plants that you might notice they're in a slightly different position at a different time of day. They will orient their leaves toward where they're expecting the light to be. And so that, you know, it's a simple form of memory, but then something like the Venus fly trap is actually doing a form of counting. The Venus flytrap has a few hairs on the inside, and it has to be touched. More than one of the hairs has to be touched in succession within a certain time frame to trigger the leaves to close and grab the insect. And so it's keeping track of time and number of hairs being touched, and that is a very simple form of memory.

There are also these evolved methods of communication, not just between plants, but between plants and insects. And so there's this whole culture, if you will, of the environment. And there are many examples of this, but one example is a tomato plant. If it's being devoured by caterpillars, first it can sense the caterpillars by the frequency of the chomp. So there's some sense of hearing is maybe not the right way to describe it, but they can detect the frequency. They know the caterpillars have arrived. They release a chemical that signals to the nearby wasps, parasitic wasps, that the caterpillars have arrived.

And the wasps come in droves and inject the caterpillars. Oh, plant cartel. Exactly. Yes, and there are many examples of plants summoning insects to help them when they're in trouble. Plants warning other plants of dangerous pathogens that are in the area. and they will use different signals if they're talking to the same species. I'm trying to remember which plant this is that I was just reading about. It might come to me, but there's a plant that sends one chemical

if it's trying to let the local same species plant know that there's some kind of invader. It will send a different signal if it wants to let the entire plant community. No. Sounds great. I feel like I'm speaking pseudoscience, but this is, you can look this up. It's real. Yeah. It's so, so fascinating that there, I mean, and you look at densely biodiverse, like the

Amazon jungle or places that have so much variety of plant, bug, animal life. There's just, in ways we're barely scratching the surface to understand such large amount of communication, collaboration, supporting defense that are happening continually. Yes. And so how do you, how can we best discern whether or not an intelligent life form might possibly have a conscious experience. Yeah. I know we kind of established that as kind of impossible to, but how would we get to?

That's, I think that, you know, that's why this work is so important and that's why yeah, consciousness studies are so important because, first of all, neuroscience is really in its infancy. So we're just really getting a handle on, barely getting a handle of how the brain works. But no, there's this obstacle and this is what all my work is about. there's this obstacle to studying consciousness in the way that we have studied other elements, other problems. And it's not clear that we can study it the way we've studied everything else.

And I think there is very likely some kind of shift coming in the sciences similar to when we had these other paradigm shifts. And it's hard to know what that will look like. have some ideas, but humans in general are not great at foreseeing the future and great at having good enough imaginations to picture what, you know, a hundred years from now will look like. But I really think that there is some shift coming with the sciences because I don't see how we can truly understand or study consciousness in the ways that we have studied everything else from the outside. Yeah.

Yeah. I also wonder what ethical implications this has as, I mean, we already know the horrors of like animal agriculture and how billions of what life we pretty are sure of has incredible amounts of intelligence and sentience consciousness. Yeah. That we murder and shove into these small little boxes and exploit and artificially inseminate. And I mean, we already know those are conscious. But I feel like I'd be curious to see what would happen if we actually were able to come to deeply understand conscious being. more fundamental and how that would change, you know, pillaging the resources in biosphere. This will be one area of the science and the research is actually, I think, getting a better understanding of suffering and what causes suffering and where we find suffering in nature. Just because there's conscious experience, I think doesn't necessarily mean there's suffering. And I think we don't understand the relationship between those two things yet.

We understand them at the human level, the animal. level, but if consciousness goes much deeper in nature than the sciences have previously assumed, I think this will be one of the first questions we'll want to ask is where do we find suffering? And we clearly, the way life and nature works, I think of it often as entropy fighting machines, right? We're fighting entropy and that takes energy and resources. and by definition, you are in competition with other life forms. And there's this inevitability of at the animal level suffering.

I mean, we have to destroy other things in order to keep going ourselves. But every living thing will die. And when you're not getting enough nutrients, it's suffering to feel hunger. There's competition for resources, competition for sex partners. and, you know, this goes all the way down to the level of insects and plants. And so it becomes kind of an overwhelming question of where we will find suffering in the universe and what our role will be in helping to mitigate it to the extent that we can and how much control we will or won't.

There was one example in this book, I should mention actually, and I brought you a copy because I think that's great. Yeah. Thank you. Zoe Schlinger just came out with a book called The Light Eaters, and it's about plant behavior. And there's this diabolical example she gives, again, about caterpillars. And this is interesting. This is an instance of the plant releasing a chemical that interacts with the neurochemistry of the caterpillars.

And it causes them to stop eating the leaves and to start eating each other. They literally become cannibal caterpillars. And this is just, you know, this is a horror movie. But the plants, if the plants, you know, hadn't found some way to deal with the caterpillars, the caterpillars would devour the plants and they would, you know. And so there's this constant fight that is disconcerting to contemplate.

But yes, I think, you know, in terms of my interest in ethics and morality and avoiding some of the, when we can and are aware that it's taking place. To me, that's a very interesting question. And one of the first questions I think we should be asking. Yeah. I know you've given also in your book and documentary series, also different examples of parasites and viruses and how that,

you know, we could explore this for hours. It could be a whole podcast series, you know? Yes. But I do think it is very fascinating because I've, you know, in my own meditative journey and just like going on walks, the more I feel like I've become sensitive to like life around me, the more I experience things around me

as a part of self, the less, the more I'll try to minimize any suffering. You don't have to teach me ethics and morality if I experience you as myself. There's no right or wrong. It's just like, why would I hurt you? It's like hurting myself. Yes.

And call it woo-woo, call it whatever you want. I like going on my morning walks or to varying degrees at periods of my life, I feel like a deep connection to the trees and feel there's a sensitivity and communication energetically going back and forth that they noticed me and I noticed them. So there is that felt sense.

And I think there's a large group, which we could, this is a whole side note we could go into, you know, the yogic system has kind of four levels of mind. The first being just budi, which is like the intellect, which is kind of the rationale capacity to break things down into smaller parts and understand which we've largely become overly identified with and has buried a lot of fruits and incredible things. But there's deeper aspects of the mind like Manas and Chitah,

which is like the deeper level of intelligence that can inherently have like a nosis or an experience of self and the interconnectedness and it's a cognition that goes beyond the intellect. And so yeah, I just think that as we dive deeper into meditation, as I know you've been on your meditation journey

for a while in different things, this becomes an interesting point of reflection. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And our intuitions get shifted as you said. And actually my intuitions are starting.

to become more like yours in that sense in terms of plants. There's also a Buddhist term that just now came to me, which is the non-conceptual valid cognition, which is this kind of intuitive or nosis that can be born through the body's intelligence. Yes. This just reminded me of the more open I became to consciousness being fundamental,

the more that intuition started to solidify for me. And the more I started to have new questions about consciousness because, you know, shaking up intuitions gets you to see the world differently. And then you suddenly have new questions because you're kind of sitting in a new world and you become curious about it. And having the right questions is probably the most important part of, an endeavor of seeking truth, of a scientific endeavor, or any other is having the right questions. And so I love that shaking up intuitions gets us to feel like the place we have been inhabiting

actually seems different and new now. And now we have these new questions about. Yeah. Yeah. So I was actually going to go here perfectly. I can always tell the flow of a conversation is going well when the guest brings up where I was going next. And so I'm excited. to just let's keep diving deeper here. And so you and many others kind of pose the traditional, I guess conventional view has been thought that consciousness is an emergent property out of unconscious complexity building,

you know, for example, in the human brain and the alternative exploration, which is becoming more and more, I think partly also because of your dedication to this work is exploring the notion that consciousness could be a more fundamental constituent of the universe. And so can you break those two, down why you don't love the term panpsychism.

Yeah. And yeah, explore the possibility of consciousness being fundamental, which would open up a lot of other doors for exploration. Yeah. So I can start with panpsychism, which is kind of traditionally the category of thought. There are many different versions of it, but philosophers for a very long time have thought about the idea that consciousness might be part of matter. a feature of matter, a property of matter that we just haven't understood yet.

So in the same way that there are all these fundamental forces that physics has revealed to us, that possibly consciousness is one of them. And this kind of falls under the umbrella term of panpsychism. I don't love the term panpsychism for a few reasons, although I will say that I'm happy that there's been a category of thought that philosophers have been able to do a lot of work in. I think a lot of interesting work has been done here. Some of the writings, the writings about panpsychism have influenced my thinking.

There's some very brilliant work there. The term itself was coined in the 16th century. And so I think it's problematic to use that term now when our sense of the universe and of scientific phenomenon has developed so much. It's from a time when human beings were very confused about the nature of the universe and the nature of matter and we're still very confused, but we know a lot more than we did then. And I think that even if no one had had this thought before in the history of humanity, I actually think there are many reasons why at this point in time in neuroscience and in physics, this is a question that would naturally be coming up. And the question

is simply is consciousness more fundamental than the sciences have previously assumed. And I think that is a very legitimate, very interesting, very important scientific question to be asking right now. So to discuss that question, the context of panpsychism doesn't totally seem appropriate to me. The other reason I don't love the term is just because it's an ism. And I really do believe we have no idea. And it's this exciting new question that we can explore. But I, I see it as really a question at this point. A legitimate one, and I can talk about the reasons why I think it's actually, in some sense, makes more sense with everything we understand about the physics and the neuroscience.

In many ways, it actually makes more sense that consciousness is fundamental than not. But panpsychism, being an ism, implies that there's a set of beliefs that has already been figured out, that there's something to believe in. And I think that's also, you know, just an incorrect way to view our current level of understanding. When we start to chip away at our intuitions and when we find that we don't have great answers to these two, or that we don't have real evidence to support our intuitions, that the answer to these questions is a resounding yes. So is consciousness causal? and is there some behavior we can see that we can conclude is evidence of consciousness?

There are a lot of interesting questions that come up there. And one of them is, you know, the sciences have typically viewed consciousness as, as you said, an emergent phenomenon at a very complex level of information processing. And the reason we've made that assumption and scientists have made that assumption, and I include myself in that assumption, until, you know, I started doing this work, is because of our inability to communicate with other organisms that are unlike us, as I was talking about before. So we're really reliant on a report of a conscious experience. And so naturally where we have found that is with other human beings.

And then by analogy, we can kind of compare to other mammals and other creatures that are like us. But what's interesting is we have then assumed that only complex organisms like ourselves, you know, the brain is the most complex thing in the universe that we know of. We have assumed that consciousness somehow is entailed in the experience of having a brain because it's the only place we can get direct confirmation that it exists in other places, you know, besides right here where I am. And so chipping away at those intuitions about what we feel consciousness is and then combining that with the fact that we can only get reports about other conscious experiences from creatures that are extremely similar to us. I mean, again, you know, I couldn't talk to someone who was born blind about the experience of seeing.

I interviewed someone for my documentary series who was part of, he was part of a study where they, They were trying to see if they could add another sense to human beings and they attempted to add the experience of magnetic north. This is something that other mammals have. They're sea creatures. They're, you know, birds have this. And human beings don't. We have no sense of a magnetic field at all. And they were actually successful and they were able to give these participants.

I can explain the study if you want. But the upshot is that they all developed this feeling of, of magnetic north. They had to use a tool and they didn't have it if they weren't using this belt. It was giving them information that they trained with. But one thing that was interesting about talking to one of the participants in this study

is that he found it almost impossible to describe what that experience was like to me because I don't have it. And that's the only way we can talk about conscious experiences is bias of similarity. And we're completely, at a loss when we can't communicate. And he also talked about how much he,

what kinship he felt with the other participants in the study because they were the only human beings in the world who understood this feeling. And so with these limits of communication for the very similar types of conscious experiences we have, shows you that it's very possible that there are all kinds of conscious experiences happening all over the place, and there'd be no way for us to know.

In the same way that there's no way for us to know even in a human, you know, now we can do some types of scans. It's not perfect science, but now we know that something like Lockton Syndrome is a condition someone can be in, but before we knew that was possible, someone in a locked-in state to us seemed unconscious. We had no way to know.

So this opens up avenues for questions about whether consciousness is even a part of a complex system at all, or whether it's something that's much more simple and much more basic. And a lot of our scientific advancements have come out of this realization that we're not special. Of course, human beings are special in the ways that they are, but we're not the center of the universe. And all these things that made us think about life as kind of this hierarchy. With every new scientific breakthrough, we realize how similar we are and how our DNA is all coming from the same place. And even to the level of stardust that we're actually made of the same type of matter as everything else. And so it's actually a legitimate question to ask.

you know, have, is it possible that complexity isn't required for consciousness, that it's a much more basic and that it's not unique to human beings or to mammals? And in the same way that, you know, gravity is certainly a special force in the universe. I mean, we now understand gravity to be a warping of space time even, which is an interesting advancement. But gravity affects everything, right? It affects all matter. And so it is this very powerful, incredible. beautiful, magical thing in the universe, but it is at a much more fundamental level. And there's no reason that we yet know of

that consciousness couldn't be something like that as well. Yeah. That study was so interesting about giving humans new senses. I wonder if it was just really unlocking an already present capacity. I mean, it must have been, right? if we have the capacity to notice, you know, if we're really only perceiving less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum, and there's a continual C of information that's around us, and we have the ability through various practices, techniques to enhance our sensitivity, then I wonder how many different types of senses we could have that could be developed, which is very intriguing.

Yeah, no, and this is David Eagleman's work, and there are other neuroscientists who are working on this, too. It's called sensory addition, sensory substitution, which is for people. who are blind and deaf, who are lacking a human sense and able to gain it back in a different way, but able to gain that back. And then sensory addition naturally comes out of that, because our brains don't really care how the inputs come in. It's just, you know, by accident of evolution that we have eyes and ears, you know, we have these ways of perceiving signals from the outside world, but there are all kinds of signals that move right through us or that, you know, even within the spectrum of light, we don't see ultraviolet light. There are some insects who do.

And that's just because of the design of the tools we have for receiving, for receiving the inputs from the outside world. So yes, in theory and in practice in more and more cases, we can, through tools, bring in other inputs, wider range of light. spectrum and all kinds of other things that we don't normally perceive like a magnetic field. And if that information can get fed to the brain, the brain will find a way to start to make sense of it. And it's pretty interesting for all of these tools. It takes about six weeks.

And it's never within the first few days or first few weeks. It feels like no, whatever the signal is that's coming in, David Eagleman worked on a wristwatch and a vest. These are all things you can look up online. The first version of this was called a brain port, and it was a device that goes on the tongue and gives electro-tactile signals that are based on a camera that the person wears.

And so this was originally designed for people, for blind people. So they're not able to see. The visual input comes in through the camera and then gets transformed into these electro-tactile signals on the tongue. At first, the person just feels this weird buzzing on the tongue, and it doesn't mean anything to them. over time, the brain learns to interpret the signals in the same way it learns to interpret the signals coming in through the eyes. And it actually becomes an intuitive sense.

And there are people who use the brain port. There's a woman who actually lost her vision in her 20s. So she had a memory of what it was like to see. After she was trained with the brain port, she is quoted as saying, I know vision and this is vision. And so the brain actually developed rather than, you know, consciously interpreting all these signals, suddenly it's like a new intuition in the way that we use sight. So people can shoot baskets using a brain port. They can go through complicated mazes.

They can navigate the world in the same way that we navigate vision. So, yeah, I think we don't know. The sky's the limit on how many different types of inputs we could attempt. Yeah. David Eagleman talks about, you know, astronauts getting an intuition for the health of the international space station, that it could be, you know, job dependent. So interesting. Yeah. That work goes deep.

Yeah. I'm excited to dive deeper into that. Yeah. And so, okay, so backing up a little bit into consciousness being fundamental. Yeah. Obviously, it makes sense. Like, we could get the intuition that consciousness would be emergent because we makes very simple alterations to our neurology and settlement. consciousness vastly changes. But you're speaking to the possibility that consciousness is a more

fundamental constituent of the universe similar to something like gravity. Yes. And so then this brings me to the question of why certain collections of atoms would have more self-awareness than others if that was the case. Okay. So I don't have an answer for that. Come on, I like to give us the secrets to the universe. But the idea and this is what we would want to study. This is where this new path of science would lead. I have been developing a way to view the universe and the structure of the universe if consciousness is fundamental. So I have some preliminary answers to this.

And I'm working on an article right now, actually, that will be published in a few months on this topic of what would it mean for... quantum physics for the physics we understand for, you know, I don't think the understanding that consciousness is fundamental would change any theories in the sciences. And actually, I think if they go against any of those theories, they're so well established that we would have a problem. And, you know, that would be a case against consciousness being fundamental. But the more physicists and neuroscientists and philosophers I've interviewed on this subject, the more it seems that scientists are actually becoming more interested in this avenue of questioning. And so if consciousness is fundamental,

the idea is that everything we perceive as physical, at bottom, its intrinsic nature, what it actually is representing is conscious experiences. So in the same way that when I look at you, I can gather there's an experience present, a very complex one. You're hearing sounds and you're seeing sights and feeling things and thinking things and all of that is only coming to me as a physical representation. And so that would kind of just be extended to everything else that we see that at some level all the universe is essentially is conscious experiences arising coming into and out of existence. And so the idea that there's anything truly concrete, I mean, the truth is that physics has kind of already gotten us there anyway, right? We kind of know that there is no stable self in the brain that's stably moving through time unchanged, that there's this kind of unfolding of the universe

taking place through time where things are just continually happening. I mean, even in things that we consider to be static. And so if consciousness is fundamental, not only are there conscious experiences arising, you know, in this rug and the floor and everything that we perceive, that the things we're perceiving are just representations of other conscious experiences,

much more likely, more minimal because the systems themselves are much less complex and there's much less going on. But even within my own body. So this is where memory comes in and it's very interesting. So I have this experience of being a self. And there are many things that, there are many parts of the neuroscience that can explain

how I have that experience. But a big part of it is memory. And without memory, it's really hard to see how there could be any real experience of self. And I mean in the most, like memory in the most minimal sense. So just having a connection from one moment to the next. If there were no memory, if every experience were just coming into being and disappearing, never to be captured again, we would not have an experience of being a sound.

The continuity of experience wouldn't be present, right? That's right. And the illusion of being something solid that moves across time would also not be present. And so if consciousness is fundamental, you wouldn't even necessarily say that me, the body and human being, is more self-aware than anything else because there's no,

there's kind of the string of memories, there's a structure in time that we can talk about as being me. And I may want to give the wave analogy here. I think that might be helpful. But we can talk about, you know, all these memories that are strung along through time over 40 or so years, if consciousness is fundamental,

were millions upon millions of other, experiences that took place within my body during that time that just didn't enter this string of memory. And it's true in this situation. I can report to you about all the experiences I'm having. That doesn't mean that there aren't countless experiences in the processing of my liver or in other parts of my brain that are not entering this stream of memory that I have access to, that I have access to and can report on. Yeah, like we know the heart has these 40,000 narrates that store memory and do different things like that. Sure.

And there could be all kinds of processing related to that with or without memory. You know, if consciousness is fundamental, there are countless experiences arising in my body, you know, in every moment, only a very small fraction of which fall into this threat of memory that then is something I can talk about and think about and all the rest. But the big question I'm left with if consciousness is fundamental is, why does it have a structure and what is that structure? Because clearly it does have a structure. And so whatever we might be able to understand and learn about that

would give us somewhat of an answer to your question. So the ultimate question would be and where science would then be headed is why does it have this structure? And the structure, we already know a lot about the structure through mathematics and physics. Clearly that's what mathematics and physics is describing if consciousness is fundamental is the structure of all these different conscious experiences that come into being in the universe. And so some of those structures are much more complex

and contain memory and persist over time. Sarah Walker, when she's talking about life, talks about structures in time, that if we could see, if we weren't limited to these slices of time, if we could see structures in time, we'd have a better intuition for what life is. And I see consciousness very similarly. that the structure of consciousness, if it's fundamental,

sometimes exists through time. And that, you know, human mind is one example of that. Yeah. And so you'd see it as if consciousness is fundamental, like certain larger celestial bodies would have a larger gravitational field because of the structure, I guess, of the size and density and mass. And then an electron would have a certain level of, consciousness, perhaps.

It would in this theory, but then larger collections of molecules and atoms for whatever reason because of the structure would give rise to more self-awareness and conscious experience. Yes, although at this point I think about it in the reverse almost, that the conscious experiences are the primary thing and that the structure, the thing that we're calling matter is the structure of consciousness. and it's not actually a physical thing in the way we intuit out there in the world. It is what everything actually is. The only thing that actually exists are conscious experiences,

the consciousness and the contents that are arising, and that has a structure to it. But it's not objects in space time the way we perceive them to be. And actually, I've been making this analogy recently where, you know, we used to think in Newtonian physics, we thought of gravity as a force, as another force in nature. And then Einstein showed us this more accurate picture of space time being warped by mass.

And so gravity is not thought of as a force anymore, but is thought of as a warping of space time. And so, you know, it's like a marble being drawn by a heavier object in a fabric rather than the marble being pushed. in the way that we typically, or we used to think of it, it's following a trajectory along this warped space time that now is moving in this direction. And so the question, if consciousness is fundamental, is what does our perception of space time actually represent at the fundamental level? So in the same way that we feel the force of gravity and the force of gravity, that

feeling is pointing to part of the structure of reality, the warping of space time. what does our experience of space time represent? What is it actually representing in the underlying reality? This also reminds me of the way we experience space, which we now are pretty convinced is false. I mean, most physicists now think that space itself is emergent of something more fundamental. Which is a wild concept to try to wrap your futile mind around.

I've been trying to wrap my mind around it for the past five years or so now very seriously. and in this work because I think it relates to how we see consciousness if consciousness is fundamental. And even if it isn't, it's interesting because in the same way that we know green is not a quality out there in the world, green is not a part of the leaf. It is the way it's the quality of my experience. It's the way I experience the light waves that are bouncing off of the leaf and entering my retina. We kind of understand what's happening there. So green is the felt experience of this other thing that's happening.

That's not the way the universe is structured. And so most physicists, I mean, there's practically a consensus now that space is not fundamental. And so we're mapping something that's more fundamental into our experience, and we experience that as space. But whether that's different levels of energy or, you know, we don't quite know how to interpret that finding. But what I think is interesting is that if consciousness is fundamental, that finding makes a lot more sense and is actually easier to digest and get your mind around. Because it's once again another mapping that our brain does for us and gives us this content, this experience of something that's out there. It's the structure of the universe in some sense, but it's not the way we experience it. and the underlying reality is very different.

And so there are many physicists and mathematicians who believe that whatever comes out of the math, whatever geometric shapes and equations come out of the math, that all of those things actually exist in reality. They're not just part of the structure that may or may not come into being, but something like a decoract, a 10-dimensional shape that clearly comes out of the math.

Max Tegmark is a physicist who will say these objects are not just hypothetical and not just possible if they come out of the math, they exist in reality. That is very hard to make sense of in our current understanding of physics, but if consciousness is fundamental and the structure is describing the different types of felt experiences that arise in the universe, a ten-dimensional structure as a description of a conscious experience or many conscious experiences, that is something we can grasp. I just went on a whole tangent. I love that.

Okay, good. Yeah. And that image of the Decorak is quite beautiful. Also, very interesting to look at. Yeah. But also, even more dimensions of space, which are likely the case. I mean, all these interpretations of the results we see in quantum mechanics, most of them, if not all of them, give us many more dimensions of space than three.

That is kind of impossible to make sense of unless the dimensions are not actually about space in the way that we perceive space. Yeah. I'm really interested in the overlap between ancient wisdom traditions, knowledge around this and the emerging science. Yeah. you know, in the yogic philosophy, there's known, this kind of thought of there being 11 dimensions. And I've heard Michi Oku also speak to this. Yes, string theory, M theory. Yeah.

And so it's really interesting when these kind of things come together. And so I want to start to move, you know, how if the possibility, you know, of consciousness being fundamental is real, it really does line up with a lot of Eastern wisdom traditions. around the illusion of free will, self, and that there is a more fundamental aspect of being that is the witness and awareness of any arising and passing away a phenomenon and contents in our experience, that gives rise to a true sense of freedom. And so as the show is the Know They Self podcast,

we really like to explore how this is a, what is the most fundamental aspect in nature of ourselves, which feels as, you know, I have many experiences and I'd love to hear some of yours where you experience and taste such a depth of stillness, whereas there is the absence of experience, but there is still consciousness floating and a void, it seems. Well, and what's interesting is if consciousness is fundamental, it actually makes sense that spending more time investigating that first person experience would give you, would enable you to have some insights or give you some. direct understanding or knowledge in a way that our current way of understanding the world through science has not been able to. And I'm very interested in that crossover as well.

Yeah. So when you say like sense of self, what are you referring to as most people kind of operate with that notion and then we can kind of start to see the illusory nature of it and come back into what's more fundamental? Yeah. Yeah. I do always, when I talk about the illusion of self, I do like to start with what I'm not calling an illusion. Yeah. Because I think it's less confusing that way. In terms of a self, there are human beings, there are animals, there are, you know, all of the things that we see in the world. And we can call them the things we call them, and that's very useful.

There, you know, we can point to a wave and know exactly what we're talking about. And actually, a wave is a much better analogy for the experience of self than something like a chair or a rock. And that's because a wave is a phenomenon in nature that is ever changing. And it's very clear to us and we can see it. That doesn't stop us from labeling waves, waves. We know a wave when we see it. And we can say a lot of things about how waves behave and what they do. And it's a clear phenomenon in nature.

And the same is true of the human mind and the way the brain works is it is an ever-evolving, ever-changing, series of phenomena. And so that obviously exists. We can talk about it. We can talk about our biographical selves and how we went from babies to our current states. You know, all of these things are phenomena in nature that we can talk about.

We can talk about decision making. Also, when I talk about free will being an illusion, there's an element of it being an illusion. But in terms of decision making in nature, that is absolutely a process. that takes place and our brains are very good at executing that process. The illusion comes in the experience we all have and myself included. I have had the experience of dropping this illusion, but most of the time I walk around with this sense that there's a solid self that's not changing. There's

part of me that's not changing. It's the same me when I was two that I'm now and we talk about things that way. And you can see that it's an illusion when you start to, investigate it a little more closely and think, okay, where, where is this unchanging solid self that's moving through time? And you realize that you think of it as kind of being inside your body somewhere. It's not the same as your brain. It's in your brain or maybe near your brain. There's no real way to describe it because it's an inaccurate, it's an inaccurate way of viewing things. But it's this very persistent intuition and sense of being an, unchanging solid entity that moves through time, when in fact what the experience of self is,

is a new experience in every moment. We're constantly changing. Who I was and my experience as a two-year-old are so different from the experiences I have now that you and I are our experiences right now probably more similar than mine were with my two-year-old self. And then the that there are a lot of processes in the brain that make us blind to these changes and to the fact that I'm not in my body. I'm not in my brain. We even use the language, my brain, my body, as if I stand outside of those things. And so it creates this feeling that we are separate from the physical world somehow, that it's not that I am my brain and these experiences are arising. as a result of the physical structure that I am,

but that there's some entity in there that takes ownership of my body and my brain and everything else. And this is where the illusion of free will comes in. It feels that this self can make decisions that are somehow separate from the physical world and separate from the laws of cause and effect. When in actuality, our brains are these waves and the processes keep moving.

and there's no stopping. There's no stopping the river. It's an unfolding through time that consciousness likely is, in some sense, the canvas on which it all plays out rather than the thing driving it or the subject of it. I really love that analogy of the sense of self

being like waves in the ocean, because we can see that they're still connected, and yet there is a more essential nature of ones being, which would be like the ocean. Yes. And we can see under FMRI machines through psychedelic use and advanced meditators, the reduction in activity in the default mode network,

which goes hand in hand with this loss of an experience of a solid self. Yes. So any thoughts you want to share there as well? Yeah. So you're right. I mean, we're still at the infancy of our understanding of what's going on in the brain, but clearly many, many people throughout history have had the experience can train through meditation

to have the experience or through psychedelics. It's a very common experience of this illusion of self dropping away and no longer experiencing it for a period of time. And as someone who has this experience regularly and knows many people who do, it in no way affects your conscious awareness. you are just as conscious as you were before. And so this sense that our consciousness kind of is the self, is kind of the intuition that we come in with.

It is clearly not the case. And so the thing that's interesting about correlating this with something that the brain is doing is one, we can see that the brain in most circumstances is kind of generating this experience of self. And it doesn't necessarily need to be generated. We can have a full experience of being human beings and not have that experience generated. But also that when people have this experience, it's in extremely positive terms for the most part. Feeling a sense of oneness, feeling a visceral sense of the interconnected nature of things, as we were talking about before. That even though there's not a visual representation of it, there's actually a way to be in the world where you feel intimately connected to

the air and the water and other human beings and sound waves and everything else that we're immersed in. I mean, there's almost an experience of feeling like a flexible web, you know, rather than being a self moving around inside something other. And I know you've been like meditating for what over 20 years now. Yeah. And I heard you mention that you had an experience at one of your first five-day silent retreats where you got to experientially taste this. So I'm just curious for you to share a little bit more about your experience firsthand. Yeah. It's a completely different thing talking about it versus experience. It's like reading a menu versus eating a meal, you know? Yes. I know. Well, I was just going to say I always find this really hard to describe. And it's, I think, a little bit

similar to the Magnetic North experience where we don't have language for it because it's not something we experience regularly and probably most people, especially in our culture, have not had the experience. The first time I had the experience was when I was doing walking meditation. And I'm not sure exactly why that was the case. But I suddenly, so walking meditation, I don't know if your viewers are familiar, but it's very, very slow walking back and forth in a straight line. Just paying attention to the movements of your body, the sensations of your feet on the the floor, the sights changing very slowly as you move through space and then turning around.

And it was during this walking meditation that it just suddenly became very clear to me, but not in an intellectual sense, in a visceral sense, that there was no me doing the walking. I don't know how to say it any clearer than that. There was no me doing the walking. There was no me seeing, receiving, the sense. that I normally had of kind of being here with things coming at me, suddenly it felt, actually I use this analogy sometimes of a pot of boiling water. It suddenly felt that the true state of reality was that conscious experiences were arising in and of themselves, for themselves,

not for an observer, not for a self. And so sometimes I describe when I when I talk, talk about the possibility that consciousness is fundamental, I imagine the universe analogous to a pot of boiling water, where water is consciousness, water is what it is all about. And then the bubbles are the shapes that it takes based on the structure. And the bubbles represent every type of content that could come into, so consciousness, the water being no content, just pure awareness. And then, you know, maybe there's pressure, maybe there's heat, maybe there's a blue of, a sight of blue, you know, all of these different types of qualia, of felt sensations that can come into being, even thoughts. And so it was very similar. I think I got that analogy partly from those

types of experiences where it suddenly seems more accurate to view conscious experiences simply as arising and passing away in the universe without there being an observer, a thinker, a subject. Yeah, that feeling, the experience of non-attachment, like you're, when you're witnessing the experience of arising and continually passing away a phenomena that Pali word Anisha, which is like the impermanent kind of nature of reality. Yeah. It's so freeing.

I think maybe from the outside end, you would wrongly think that it would detach you from an experience. Like you're not still involved with reality. Right. But there can be an immense amount of non-attachment and involvement with the world in a more intimate way. I was just going to say a more intimate connection. Yeah. And it feels truer.

It feels like, I mean, it's like the intuition that two plus two equals four. Like you hear it and you know, yes. And that's a very hard thing to describe. But it does come with this feeling of, ah, this is the way things truly are. And it's so beautiful to walk in that realization. because you get to experience other people as they are and as they are phenomena in life and waves on the ocean and not this distorted perception of what we desire

or averse to seeing in others, which allows us to really connect and it's probably a crass kind of analogy, but it's metaphorical to like having a condom on. It's like there's a deeper sensation and connection with other and self, you know, by taking the proverbial condom off in your life. Yeah. I mean, and it reminds me of something you said earlier, which is there's no you

and so, or there's no I. And so it is all one thing and it's kind of all I, even though that's the wrong way to put it because there's no I at all. But this separation kind of breaks away and you do view every phenomenon as another part of yourself in a way. And there's something that sounds very narcissistic about that. And I mean it in the opposite sense, right? Because we don't have language to describe it. But it is, in a sense, seeing other beings and other people, similar to the way you saw your past self. So the way I identify with that two-year-old me, even though she was so unlike who I am now. And I am identified with it because there's this, there's a stream of memory. This is actually a thought experiment I've been doing recently as I think

about kind of the future of science and what I call experiential science. If it's possible, and at some future time to kind of know the state of your brain, because whatever state you're in now, you know, five minutes from now, if you're remembering the five minutes ago that passed, your brain is in a different state than it was in the moment, but it's carried this memory so you have some information about the five minutes that have passed, right? And so that memory has some type of physical form. If there's some way, to share at some point in the future if we figure out some way so that that memory, we could share that memory.

So you could know what it was like to be five minutes ago, but I'd have what my experience would be would be similar to not even what I felt like as a two-year-old, but maybe, you know, memory I have is something I did last week. Even a memory I have is something that is very different from my normal experience. If I took LSD last week, I could have a memory of that, right? and my state would be so different from my normal waking state. But because it's in my stream of memory, I have some access to that experience. And so if we could share memories in that way, I'd have a memory of, you know, five minutes ago, I was Andre.

Right. That's what it would feel like. You know, five years ago, I was five years younger and I was that self having that experience. And five minutes ago, I was sitting over there looking over here, right? And that's not impossible in terms of where the science might take us. And that would give us, I think, a clearer view of the underlying reality of what's going on, whether or not consciousness is fundamental. Because the fact that I feel that my previous self is me and something I care about and have compassion for, hopefully,

we can extend that. Other people are the same as our past selves in that sense. Yeah. There's something so inherently transformational about touching this place intrinsically within your own life. And I know is why you're such a big and I am such a big proponent and advocate for meditation. Yeah. Because who you are being for yourself in the world radically changes the more you experience yourself in that more fundamental way. Yeah.

And I feel like randomly sometimes throughout the day I'll look at myself in the mirror. I'm like, damn, I'm really in this bitch. Yeah. And I think of the variety of experiences that are happening simultaneously in life. Yeah. Like right now a baby is taking their first breath while another is taking their last. Yeah. And someone is in peak orgasm while someone's being violently abused. Someone's tasting their birthday cake while another is in deep silence. The pond is boiling. Yeah. And it's like it's all happening right now.

Yes. Perhaps under this illusion of time. But it invites a curiosity to try to get someone's reality and and bring so much more compassion to the different flavors that are existing in life, just, I think, brings that childlike mentality to view the world and be at one with the surprise and the mystery of the unfolding of the present moment instead of our conceptual top-down processing way of viewing the world. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's well said. Yeah. So interesting. So as we continue to dive a little bit deeper here, I found in looking into the readiness potential, very interesting in how it's connected to our illusion of free will. So I just want to unpack this a little bit more.

when we're studying the brain and you can see how decisions are made before we have up to four seconds before we have the conscious experience of having made the decision. This goes beyond the readiness potential actually, but yes. Okay. So please unpack this a little bit because it's pretty mind-blowing. Okay. So I only hesitate to talk about the readiness potential because it's become kind of controversial. And I don't think it's necessary to prove the point. And there's been more current research, but I'll still give an overview because I think it's interesting and I think it's inevitable that this is what science will continue to show us in more and more sophisticated

ways. So the original research was done by Benjamin Libet. I forget which year, I think it was in the 1970s. And he was looking at motor movements. So he was reading EEG signals from the brains of participants and having them make simple motor decisions whether to move a finger or not. And they would look at a device that's similar to a second hand going around a clock so that the person could mark in their mind where the second hand was on the clock. It's not a second hand, but I forget the name of this tool, where this hand was on the clock when they made the decision to move their finger, say. They did this different motor movements, but we'll stick with the finger. So what he discovered was that there was something readable on EEG called a readiness potential that could be detected some hundreds of milliseconds before the person moved to their finger,

before they made the decision, before they felt they made the decision to move. So this was the first clue that something in our unconscious brain processing, and this is where it gets confusing once we're talking about consciousness is fundamental. I should maybe clarify here that when I talk about unconscious brain processing, brain processing, if consciousness is fundamental, that is simply the processing that takes place outside of this stream of memory that I'm experiencing to be myself.

So yes, this was the first clue that our brains were doing some processing subconsciously before we have this conscious experience of a whole variety of things, including making a decision, which is very counterintuitive for most of us because we feel that that decision gets made in the exact moment that we feel that we made the decision. And it turns out that there is processing

that's already well in place, that's directed right at that decision, before you have the conscious experience of feeling like you willed the decision or made the decision. So there have been more studies since then that are more sophisticated, and there was one that was written up about in 2013. This was a study where they put participants in an fMRI machine, and so they're watching blood flow and recording blood flow in the brain.

They asked participants, oh, sorry, so the participants are in an fMRI machine. They're looking at a screen, and the experimenters flash two numbers on the screen, and the participants are told to choose whether they want to add or subtract these two numbers, and they can do it on their own, and then they go through the process. They're allowed to make this decision at any point, but again, there's a type of clock where they're supposed to mark the moment. They make the decision. Okay, now I've just decided to subtract. I look at the clock and mark that moment and then go through the arithmetic. So it turns out that by seeing the blood flow in the brain through fMRI, the experimenters could tell up to four seconds in this case. not only when the participant was going to make the decision to add or subtract,

but whether they were going to add or subtract, because we know enough about brain processes to know what the brain looks like when it's doing one arithmetic function over another. But of course, the most surprising part is that the processing was in motion before the person made the decision. So with more sophisticated tools, we don't have them yet, but with more sophisticated tools, this would mean that someone could be looking at a readout of your brain, of a scan of your brain,

something in real time, and be able to know before you do that you're going to feel the decision to add two numbers rather than subtract them. It's so interesting and trippy. It's like that the decision is being made up to four seconds in many cases, what I'm going to choose or what I would assert that I chose. So then I'm just so curious of like what in the decision making process, when you look at the capital I illusion of free will and how we feel like we are the self that is making a choice. Yeah.

Whether or not I want chocolate or vanilla ice cream or if I want to move my left hand or my right hand in this moment, that there is a sort of vacuum where this choice arises that we don't really choose to choose. Right. And so this is, this again, like we spoke to earlier, has a lot of implications for kind of a more nihilistic view, but also on the alternate side, on the other side of the coin, a really beautiful freeing perspective. And also, I mean, the truth is, I don't know what else we would have expected. It's like it shouldn't be that surprising because we know that our brains are constantly processing and there's no we or I outside of it controlling it, deciding.

which processing takes place. If I have a stroke or some kind of brain damage that, you know, suddenly paralyzes my right arm, I don't think I chose for that to have, you know, it's where we are our brains, right? And so, I mean, I guess there are other religious beliefs you could have that could get you to believe something very different about how the universe is structured. But if you're scientifically minded and kind of believe that, there's no other way we should expect things to be. And the truth is,

willed actions feel that way for a reason. So we are tapping into something true about the nature of the universe, which is that we, brains are these very complex decision-making machines. And when the brain is using internal processing to weigh certain outcomes or to figure out when, you know,

when it's making a decision, that feels different than a different type of processing that is, you know, you, a force from the outside, you taking my hand and putting it someplace, you know, those are different things that are happening in the world and they should feel different. And so the internal decision-making processes feel a certain way and it makes sense that they feel a certain way. It's just that they give us an incorrect view of the underlying reality in the same way that's seeing green.

You know, we, we don't, if we aren't taught otherwise, it seems like there's green out there in the world. Right? It doesn't seem like my brain is interpreting light waves and then creating an experience of green. It seems like I'm just directly perceiving something that's out there in the world exactly the way I see it. It really is a dance between the external world, the inputs, and then the brain actually creating the experience that I end up having. I'm trying to think of which neuroscientists. I think it's Anil Seth. Yes, Anil Seth says your brain hallucinates your reality.

Controlled hallucination. Yeah, controlled hallucination. And that's what he means. And it's not that it's out of sync with the outside world. It's this direct connection. But the felt experience you have is being generated by the brain. It's also same in my conversation with Donald Hoffman. And he's coming back on it a couple weeks as well.

Oh, cool. Just I really love the understanding how it's similar to like a computer screen where it's designed to actually hide the nature of reality and give you a user interface that allows you to navigate it more effortlessly and not to see all the electrical firing and things, which wouldn't give us the ability to navigate it so effortlessly. Yeah, and I think he's totally right about it. Yeah.

Yeah. And so this is where plant behavior also is helpful to me in seeing these decision-making processes and to feel less creeped out by it. and more just kind of the magic of nature unfolding the way that it does. So there are various experiments with plants. There's a very simple one, decision-making experiments. One is if you put a pea seedling in what they call a Y maze,

so it starts one and then it branches out to two. It's in this Y maze. It's planted there, and the roots need to start growing downward. There are a variety of experiments they've done. they're all very interesting, but the roots know where the water is. It took scientists a long time to figure out how they know. But if you put water, if you put a bowl of water under one side of the Y maze and you put nothing under the other, the roots will grow toward the water.

It turns out even if you just play a sound of running water, they will grow toward the sound of running water. So they have multiple ways of knowing where the water is. But there is a moment. It's kind of the most simple decision you can imagine, but there's a moment where the P, seedling is growing, the roots start to come down, and then it has a decision to make, and it actually has to use its sense, the sensory input and its own genetic programming to actually make a decision. It could go either way, and if you put the water in the other place, it's going to go that

way. It's capable of going in two directions. And based on the sensory input, it decides to go in one direction. That is part of the mechanism of the plant. And there is a sense in which it's making a decision and maybe this doesn't help everyone. But, you know, you can make these decision-making processes more complex. I mean, you can look at more complex ones in plants and then, of course, all the way up to human beings. And there are just so many more inputs, so many more different alternatives for ways we might respond to any given situation. But it's just a more complex version of that. And we are making decisions in that sense. And so, yeah, could you provide a little bit further clarification on the distinction between absolute free will and conscious will. Yeah,

and this is an important distinction. It again gets to kind of what I'm, what is the illusion and what isn't the illusion. So what I really think, what I call the illusion is the illusion of conscious will. So it's not an illusion that a decision making process is taking place. The illusion comes from feeling that it's the consciousness, that it's the awareness, the know, that's the conscious self that is driving the decision that's making the decision. And that, you know, based on the neuroscience is clearly not the case. And so the decision making processes, as I said, still take place. And you can call that free will. I think there, I think when you dig deep enough, there's no real freedom to be found anywhere because we're in this universe with laws and cause and

effect. And it's all playing out the way it plays out. I don't think you can ever reverse the tape and get a different outcome if you play it the same way. But there are complex decisions in nature at the level of the brain and even at lower levels that are clearly free in the only way we can use the word, which is that they're assessing all of the incoming information, all of the different possibilities, and then making a decision based on that. The illusion comes in when we feel like a solid self where it is the consciousness that is the self that is making the decision. And that way of seeing things is an incorrect view of the underlying reality. Do you feel that there is sort of any interconnection between consciousness being fundamental

and love? Oh, that's an interesting question. I think of the scene in Interstellar where Matthew Conhey is like floating this fifth dimensional library space and the there's like this metaphysical property of love that connects him to experience in the world. And it's just an interesting thought experiment. Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of different ways I could answer that, but I've never been asked that specific question. It's a great question. I will, I'll say a few things.

One is that I think when we are able to drop these illusions of self and separation, for some reason, it seems to lend itself, well, not for some reason, for an understandable reason, it lends itself to feelings of compassion and love, I would put in that same category. And I think that is kind of this recognition of being a part of something bigger than yourself, but that is also you, that it is all one thing. And so I think the natural inclination to love your family, love your children, I think that starts extending further and further. I think that's just a natural outcome of being in that state of mind. But I also do wonder, and this is one thing that I asked a few of my guests for my documentary series about,

if consciousness is fundamental, is there kind of a set list, and maybe it's an infinite list of qualia of specific felt experiences? Because I do think, and this is an insight in meditation that many people have had before me, but that I've also experienced. I actually talked to Joseph Goldstein in my series about this. I love his teachings. Yes, yeah. He's very clear in my conversation with Joseph and in my meditation experiences, having a sense

that there are certain qualia, there are certain experiences that can't be broken down any further. And actually, seeing a color is a good example of that. Often people have the experience also in meditation. This is another thing I've spoken to Joseph about, that when you're, when you get very concentrated and you're able to really be in each present moment, there's a realization that we're not actually seeing and feeling and hearing all in the same moment. But there's this kind of weaving that happens through memory and through the brain that gives the illusion that all of those things happen at the same time. But when you're really concentrated and you're really going moment to moment, you see that all these things kind of fluctuate.

You hear the sound of the bird. You see your notebook. you, and you're not never really in one moment hearing the sound of the bird and seeing your notebook at the same time. There's this fluctuating. And so this question keeps coming up for me. Are there specific qualia that, you know, the universe is made of? And in some sense, they're universal.

Obviously, you know, the human mind doesn't experience them all. But could we actually just, you know, make a list of all the experiences that have ever happened and will ever happen in the history of the universe. And love seems to me to be one of those qualities that can't be broken down further. I mean, it can kind of blow up into a complex. You can have many thoughts about it and ideas and beliefs. And it can get very complicated, but I think at its core. And, you know, I'm not an expert and it'd be a good question for Joseph, actually.

But where compassion and love, where those intents, intersect if they are, when they're in the purest form, are we actually talking about the same thing? But that type of pure emotion, if consciousness is fundamental, I would expect that to be kind of one of the ones that isn't broken down. Yeah, it's just one of those things where language really does fail us. Yes. And I end up rambling for five minutes and hope that something comes out. I mean, this whole pot. This whole podcast. podcast is us with our limited capacity for language trying to describe the true nature of life and in the world and sometimes in seemingly convincing ways. But it again is just so limited.

And there's all the different flavors and manifestations of love in motion like agape or, you know. But I agree with you and really feel love is this kind of fundamental aspect that draws me to the future self on becoming. that is like metaphysical glue for us in some way. Yeah. I guess I see love in its purest form manifesting as compassion. I'm not sure. I think we can talk about love in our human ways and our relationships. But that seems like a diluted and complicated version of compassion.

But I don't know. I haven't thought enough about this. To me it feels like the baseline perception of like we were speaking to earlier, experiencing and accepting the other as self. Like there's something when the union of two beings and the experience of that comes together. Yeah. Like if truth is the amalgamation of the many different facets and perceptions available,

then like love is the coming together of those different facets it feels like. Yes. I think that's right. Who knows? Who knows? So this reminds me a little bit of this thing that I'm now calling experiential science. that I think, you know, if there's a future of exploring the question about whether consciousness is fundamental in the sciences that it will have to become some type of experiential science,

that it can't just be based on outside observation and that there, you know, this is very hazy for me at this point and I'm trying to get a clear sense of what it would look like, but David Eagleman's work is definitely a part of it where we can have more experiences that give us new types of information about the world and maybe sharing experiences through being able to bring memories that, you know, from one person to another. And language, as you were saying, is really this barrier that I'm hopeful that the science of the future will be able to overcome in some sense. So, I mean, even mathematics is another language. And I was recently thinking about Albert Einstein's brilliant mind and the fact that his theories of general and special

relativity came to him in the form of an intuition. Of course, that intuition came from knowledge and other things, but it initially came in the form of an intuition, that spacetime is kind of the fabric of reality and that it's warped by matter. It took him decades to formalize this in mathematics, to express it to other human beings. And I was thinking recently, you know, how interesting and effective would it have been if he could have just shared that intuition with someone, right? We have to go through this laborious communication because we can't share the experience. And I just wonder if, yeah, if there will be some way that science discovers for us to have an experiential knowledge of things so that we won't have this problem of trying to communicate through language, which is never, it's

always imperfect. Yeah. And sometimes it just feels impossible. Yeah, I mean, we, we are, so we obviously already know we can induce various different states of consciousness exogenously. I felt I've like come to the belief that stages of consciousness in terms of development can only happen indogynously. And that like, it would be really cool if I, I had this really deep experience of stillness or communication with a plant life or something. And I'm like, here, like, check this out. And you just feel it. Yeah.

Which we'll see, I guess, yet to be seen what happens there. But I'm personally really interested as far as my own spiritual and personal developmental journey to come to the stage of consciousness that the cognition or innocent cognition or realization of these fundamental aspects of reality are like baseline consistently throughout my experience of life. and, you know, to varying degrees coming in and out of its potency. Yeah. But goes back and hand in hand with power meditation and everything. I'm curious, what, why do you feel like since young you've been so drawn to these topics? Yeah. And just a compliment, like you have a very soothing voice for something for a topic that can be quite existential.

Hopefully that helps. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really cool to see you and your love and genius for all this. And yeah. Yeah. Just anything you want to share about your personal path. for this exploration.

Yeah, I don't know. I was asked this by my producer for my doc series, so I had to think more about it than I normally do. Yeah, I mean, I can come up with some reasons. I don't know if any of them are accurate. I think, I do think some children come into the world naturally disposed to think about this stuff. And I had that realization when I taught meditation to children in schools

and eventually taught as young as three and four-year-olds, which I didn't think was possible. And for some, it's not. But what was interesting is there were some, you know, in every group of 20 kids, there were always a few who just took to it right away. You could tell, already thought about these things, you know, like anything else. Like, you know, someone who has a talent for music,

who picks up a certain skill very easily, who gravitates, who has certain interests. I think it's like that where some people just come in interested in these types of things. Because I now, when I meet kids like that, when I'm teaching meditation, I can see how I had something similar going on when I was a child. One thing that does always come up for me is I had severe migraines starting at age eight. And I think I actually thought about a lot of this stuff before. then. But that to me is the, some of the memories I have of being in extreme pain as a child

are some of the moments where I became most curious about all of this. And I discovered that curiosity is somewhat of an antidote, you know, however minimal, to pain. And I later made that connection to emotional pain as well when I learned to meditate, you know, eventually as an adult. But, you know, I think it was kind of a forced meditation. And there were, you know, many moments as a child where I spent hours in a dark room unable to move and was in so much pain that it was pretty hard to pay attention to anything else. And so I ended up essentially meditating on pain, which, you know, is not even, you know, even on retreat, that's not something that's advised. If you're in pain, typically they'll advise that you pay attention to something else. But I think just out of, you know, just out of like a coping mechanism that kicked in for me,

there was one time in particular that I, that I remember that I kind of gained this insight. I was in so much pain and so, like, so frustrated by the pain that I wanted, I wanted to see what it was. It was almost like facing your fear or something, you know, where it's like, okay, this thing is just driving me crazy. what how how is it causing so much suffering like what is this thing and it was interesting to me that it was hard to find and it was kind of amorphous and that um i think also just probably sitting in a still state for that long probably had some effect that you know tools and meditation that are used for kind of changing your proprioception and and just you know shaking your general the general way you feel in your body. But I noticed that it was hard to find. And even though it was

in a very specific location in my head, it actually would kind of drift. And when I paid attention to it, it would move a little bit. And it was hard for me to locate in space. And I noticed as I was doing that investigation that I was suffering a little bit less. And that actually became a kind of meditation tool. I mean, I didn't know what meditation was at the time. But it was something that I then used when I was in that state to get some relief. And so that led to your, I mean, first of all, I think it's so cool that you, like, with the children's book and teaching meditation to young kids, I find it also so fascinating to, like, reflect on how our intuitions are valuable and how, like, individuals like Nicola

Tesla would, I think it's him who would, like, hold a Christian. like a crystal ball, like I think a glass ball or something to try to induce the state in between wakefulness and sleep to where it's like a form of meditation. Yes, yeah, it's investigating your first person experience. Right, and how there seems to be

a coherent energy that you can tap into that is more in alignment with whatever you would approximate to objective reality that gives you more insights from the field, if you want to call it that. That could point in the direction of more, explanations. Yes. Yeah, I think that's right. And actually, when I first learned how to meditate and learned about Buddhist philosophy and the practice of meditation, it really struck me as a scientific

tool. I mean, I feel like that's the wrong way to describe it, but it does seem like another way to investigate reality and to investigate our experience. And it's interesting that it's interesting that is, it turns out to be a tool for dropping some of these illusions and getting a clear sense of how the brain works and all of that. It doesn't mean it can't give us false ideas about how the universe works. But there are a lot of truths that science has confirmed for us that can be found just in investigating your internal experience. Yeah.

In terms of your internal experience, how has your research into this topic for the past while changed and transformed your day-to-day experience of life. I'm curious for what comes to mine. Yeah. I was going to say that it doesn't as much as you would think that it would because I still have to live my life and raise my kids and pretend I have a self and all the rest. I would say that in terms of just my psychological state, it has been a kind of therapy for me, actually. It definitely, and a kind of meditation, I think.

It brings me closer to these subjects and to thinking about them and to being curious about the world around me in every moment than I was before. Just this plant research that I've been looking into recently, I noticed that I feel a little different in the world and I think about things differently and I have questions and there's something more engaging. and there's like a closer contact. I would say that it actually has the effect of bringing my meditation practice into my daily life. And that's always a positive thing. Yeah, I love that. And I mean, I think that we kind of become oblivious

into all the different nuances and ways of what we've explored as changes because it's just you are who you are now. But I'm sure comparatively to 10 years ago without your perceptive of both, your perception on both the firsthand meditating, experiences, but then also exploring into the illusory nature of reality and allowing you to embody more kind of non-attachment and clinging on with your identity to things happening in the

physical world because you see a little bit more of its illusoryness and all these different qualities that, you know, kind of change in your experience of life. If consciousness is fundamental, do you think that it's possible that consciousness has a sort of intent of itself that is kind of driving life in a certain way? Because, you know, I kind of see like the spiritual side of things if you want to say where it's like consciousness fractaling out into all of its different parts that give rise to an experience of onakiness or Andreanus in and of itself is like more data collection for the universe in a way. And I'm just curious if you think that consciousness could possibly have and we're just exploring here like an intent driving towards more of that

exploration. I don't tend to think that way. It's a question that comes up a lot for me. I mean, I think because for the most part, my curiosity and my interest in this work is driven by my interest in physics, my interest in the fundamental of what this universe is, what is made of what's happening, what are we not understanding based on our limited human experience. I'm biased towards not thinking that way only because in the science, in the science, anthropomorphizing or trying to find some sort of meaning the way it relates to human beings often leads us down the wrong path. However, this is a question that naturally arises when you're looking at the fundamental

and having questions about the fundamental. And the question for me that I keep getting stuck on that a lot of my series is about is if consciousness is fundamental, why does it have a structure? Because it clearly does. And another piece of my work that is taking a lot of my time and attention right now is whether time is emergent, whether consciousness would come before time or whether they come in together, whether time and consciousness or somehow actually part of the same thing, whether time is the structure of consciousness in some sense. And all of the answer,

whatever the answers are to these questions, actually have an impact on this other meaning question too, because if time is fundamental, meaning things are playing out in reality over time, so that things in the future don't actually yet exist. That is a different picture of reality than one in which time is emergent and not part of the fundamental story

because my interpretation of that is that in some sense everything is and always was. And there's this term the block universe that I don't love, but that's the term that's typically used in physics. I don't love it because I think it's possible that time is not fundamental and that everything kind of does exist always, that doesn't necessarily mean that things are static in the way that a block universe implies. Like I think there's still dynamics, even though it's impossible to talk about dynamics without time.

And so one thing also that I find very disconcerting, you know, a lot of people will ask me, you know, do you like this conclusion that consciousness, is fundamental and is do you think that's part of the reason why you gravitate towards that explanation? And the truth is, wants to believe it. Yeah, the truth is the first time I started seriously considering it, it actually horrified me. And it horrified me for this reason that we got to earlier, which is that if consciousness is fundamental, the potential for suffering becomes so much more vast. And that kind of made my heart sink.

You know, obviously we don't, you know, consciousness is fundamental. That doesn't necessarily mean that every conscious experience entails some kind of well-being or happiness or suffering or anything like that. But suddenly there's clearly much more suffering in the universe than I previously thought. And that is really hard for me to take. And I struggle with this a lot. And I think about what does that mean? And is it possible for them to, there to be some resolution? And one thing that I hope turns out to be true is that time is part of the fundamental story because time gives an end to suffering.

And I fear the conclusion that the universe, I fear the conclusion of a universe in which time is not fundamental and in some sense, suffering kind of exists in eternity. I find that very hard to stomach and to contemplate, but it also then just naturally leads me to this question of, is there something that is playing out with some kind of purpose or intent? I mean, I think that language for me sounds so self-centric that I don't know, it doesn't seem logical to pose that. question, but I don't know. Yeah. It's an open question. I mean, I understand your hesitation naturally because we as humans really desire to create meaning in our lives. And if we can find it

and kind of in a way that isn't scientifically ground, then we could stop or thwart our actual exploration. It's the true nature of things. And it's also like, if you were in a random grass field and you just stumbled upon like a Taj Mahal, you wouldn't think that the universe, is just like randomly created that, you would think that there is an architect to that building. And similarly, if there is a structure to consciousness, the question begs why. Of course, we could have all types of theories about a creator, about a designer, about... Yeah, except that doesn't ever answer anything. That just kind of pushes the question to a different level.

It's the same question. You just moved it. Right. Yeah. And I tend to think that's not the correct way to look at things. I also think it really does come out of this illusion of self and this illusion of will. You know, it reminds me of the feeling that I have when I think I'm causing things and kind of somehow outside of the rest of nature of the physical structure. So I'm very suspicious of that way of looking at things.

Yeah, as am I. But there's kind of no way around it once you get to the most fundamental because, yeah, you're... Why? Why? Why are things are the way they are? Maybe we'll know one day. Maybe we'll never know. Who knows? But the journey is fun. Yes. When it's fun, it's fun. My last topic question is around artificial intelligence. Because as we've been seeing the past decade beyond such a exponentially evolving industry and technology and what we've been talking today about the possibility of consciousness being fundamental

about me just kind of glibly postulating that your daughter could be a humanoid robot earlier to thinking that we're not too far off no I don't think we are to the reality of something that I mean we can already get there where things just seem conscious out of an artificial structure

intelligence that we made So as you see the advent of AGI, like how does, what are your general thoughts around consciousness at being fundamental, how we relate to it, could it suffer? I mean, if it's fundamental, it could, and all the ethical and tangents that come from this. Yeah. I don't think about this as much as you would think I would. I do. And I think part of the reason is because I think so much about the possibility that consciousness

this is fundamental. No system is kind of intrinsically more interesting to me than any other. And so I'm already in the world of wondering, are plants sensing the direction of light? Is there a felt experience associated with that? And so I'm kind of already asking that AI question about everything in the universe, right? I'm wondering if it's possible that every single thing we, perceive everything that, you know, is matter that is, you know, where we interact with,

that is the physical world is actually a representation of conscious experiences at bottom. So in some sense, that makes AI not as interesting as if you believe that only mammals and humans are conscious, then we might be creating the next conscious thing. However, I think there's something applicable. So if we start to somehow understand or discover that consciousness goes deeper in nature and possibly fundamental, I think there's clearly a, I mean, I think whether or not, but especially if it's fundamental, there's clearly this correlation between the physical structure that we can observe and the conscious experiences that that gives rise to or that are intrinsic to it. AI systems are so different from the human brain in terms of the matter and what they're made of and how they're created and designed. I mean, almost every level.

There's no DNA there. There's no, you know, it's like the physical structure itself is so different that I would expect if there's a conscious experience there, because consciousness is fundamental, for it to be completely different from a human experience. So I would expect that my experience is more similar to an ant or maybe even a rosebush than it would be to an AI whose behavior, the output, looks very similar to mine. But because it's created of some, because the matter is so different, we couldn't even begin to imagine what that experience is like. And so I think about it, I think in slightly different terms than other people do.

but the things I wonder about are, yeah, how will we know if they're suffering? How can we be less confused about behavior mapping on to experience? That seems like a good yardstick now in biological systems. Our behavior is similar and that likely reflects how similar our internal experience. experiences are. But if we create something that exhibits the same behavior but is made of something very different, I think there's going to be some intuition shaking there in terms of trying to understand what the range of possibilities, what the umwelt of AI is or will be. Umwelt. Umvelte. Yeah. So, I mean, we kind of touched on this earlier where the appearance of what seems like

conscious behavior does not denote that another life form is actually conscious. And as we, I mean, it's like carbon versus silica life. It's like a new emerging type of existence or life form, if you want to call it that. Yeah, well, behavior might not be the best guide. And that's all we're going to have with AI. And it's going to be the first time we have behavior that looks human but is not human and yeah what we do with that I don't know it's going to be tricky to navigate yeah it's just going to be very interesting whether a perfectly designed humanoid robot has displays of compassion

and empathy and appears to be conscious yeah how we're going to relate with that yeah what that will do for what will that that do to our perception of what consciousness is and yet to be seen but super fascinating and evolving very fast yes yeah okay do you think aliens exist the last question. Knock that one in there. It depends on what you mean by aliens. I am a huge admirer of Sarah Walker, who I mentioned before. And this is her work, really, of looking.

Actually, her new book is coming out in August, and it's called Life as No One Knows It. So I believe there are other life forms that we have yet to detect. I think there could be a lot of it here on earth. I think there could be a lot, I mean, especially if space is not fundamental. I mean, I think in some sense, we could be parallel to it and not able to interact the way Sarah talks about it. Actually, this relates to something you said about being created by evolution. If you found a structure in nature that had to be created by someone, she would describe that structure in nature as, created by evolution, that it is a system in time and that includes human beings. And so that

structure, part of that structure's causal history is human beings. And if you could see the structure in time, human beings would be part of that structure, which I think is really interesting and really resonates with the way I think about things. And so, yes, I think we are perceiving such a minimal amount of what is entailed in the universe. And if I had to bet there are many, many, many other forms of life and intelligence and consciousness that, I mean, could just, you know, in some sense, be here. And we just don't, there's no way for us to interact or for us to perceive. I mean, there's so many things we know of that we're not perceiving that are in our

environment right now. This plant research is super interesting. to keep coming up with new tools because we're discovering new compounds that we didn't know existed because plants create them and use them to communicate, but we have no use for them. And so we have no way we had no tools in the past to detect them. So I think, yes, I think we are going to discover more and more about the universe. And I will be very surprised if that doesn't entail other life forms. Yeah. Likewise. Yeah. And it just seems like a sheer, lack of instrumentation to be able to pick up. I mean, if there's potential non-visible beings or

extraterrestrial life that don't abate to the same, like, laws of physics or exist in different dimensions, it's just like, you know, I'd really just try to say in the I don't know as much as possible, because as much as I want to believe in this science fiction universe where, you know, there's intergalactic Star Wars happening or whatever, like, you know. I think we're very unlikely to be able to correctly predict what it is. So all of the, you know, beautifully creative accounts of what might be out there, I think those are very likely not what is out there, but there's very likely something. There's more to discover. So Sarah Walker also talks about when she's interested in finding other types of life that we have yet to discover in her theory

called assembly theory, only systems with a shared causal history will be able to interact. And so she thinks it's possible there are these other branches of evolution that we don't share causal history with that would make it impossible for us to interact, at least at this point in time, but there may be some way that there'd be crossover in the future. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I love this conversation so much.

Yeah. This has been really fine. I'm really excited. My favorite stuff to talk about. Yeah. Likewise. You know, just thank you so much again for the way in which you explore these topics. I feel like it's very comforting in a way that can be quite existential or lead us to be more nihilistic.

And, you know, I just also want to leave space for anything, knowing the whole range of topics that we just covered, anything you feel like there would be things that you want to insert or share about what we talked about today. Sometimes it's helpful for people to recognize that it's impossible to do nothing. And when we're thinking about free will and this part of it that's an illusion, the part that gives us the sense that we're somehow outside of the physical world. And people will often say, actually, well, if I don't have free will, then I just won't do anything. And it kind of feeds into that nihilistic. There's this resolution to the nihilistic framing of it because you cannot do nothing. It's a river that keeps flowing.

And that's because your brain is a set of processes that are ongoing that are generating conscious experiences in every moment. You can't help but hear the next sound that happens in the room. And so even just doing nothing is extraordinarily, I'm not just to. extraordinarily difficult, it is impossible. And so as long as we're alive, the brain keeps doing its thing. You know, it's like the waves in the ocean. They'll just keep going. And so, you know, you'll be, you'll be lying in bed or you'll be thinking a thought or you'll be hearing the next sound. But whatever it is, you'll be doing something. It's not going to stop. And I think that helps people kind of see the wave-like or river-like nature to it as more of a process rather than

a static thing. It really feels like there's a possible surrendering to the flow of what is the dynamic natural process of our life and our own individual journey, but then also within our family and society and culture and how we can serve our own unique purpose of how consciousness is expressing itself through us in its unique way, which it does with everyone. And, And, you know, I think there's the voice in the back of the room that would say, like, why does it matter if free will is an illusion or not? Like, I'm still having this real experience where I pay my bills. And, like, you know, it is in some aspects. Some people would say, like, a privileged thought experiment. But at the same time, I just think what you just shared about life being dynamic and this reflection on the illusoryness of decision making and free will, it doesn't put us outside of reality. You can actually allow us to sit more squarely within it. Yes. And actually, I'm glad you said. that that reminds me one other thing that I think is helpful for people. I talk about it as

levels of usefulness. And so there are illusions that even something as simple as the flat earth illusion, you know, we've all learned that the earth is a sphere. But we don't have an intuitive felt sense of it. We treat the world for the most part as if it's flat. If you were constantly reminding yourself, you know, I walked out of the room, like, well, don't forget, you're on a sphere. It's a total waste of time. It's distracting. It'll get in the way of all the things you need to do. It is not something that's useful to keep in mind in most moments. And I think the illusion of self and free will are just like that, where you can drive yourself crazy trying to keep it in mind all the time. And it will be a huge distraction. It'll prevent you

from making all the decisions that you do a better job of making if you weren't keeping this illusion in mind. But similarly to the earth being a sphere, if you're a pilot, if you're engineering a rocket, you know, this is something that's very useful to know. We need to know the truth of our situation. And even in moments of reflection or of, you know, spiritual reflection when we want to kind of experience the bigger picture, these illusions, most of them are useful to bring to mind. So the one of, you know, realizing that the Earth is a sphere is actually one I've used throughout my life that I talk about in the book as being helpful for connecting me to the larger picture. So it's useful psychologically. It's useful for engineering and for understanding the world we live in. But in our everyday lives, it is not something you have to keep in mind and would be problematic, I think, if you attempted to.

And I think the same is true for free will and self. Yeah. don't drive yourself crazy to keep it in mind all the time. Yeah. I think that was a really awesome note to end on and also ties a really nice bow on all of this. And yeah, just thank you so much.

Where can people find you if they want to dive them to your work? Is there a projected date release for the documentary, audio documentary series? And again, like always, we'll leave links for everything down the description for our audience. Yeah, I would say the best place is just my website, Onika Harris.com. You can follow me on social.

I try to give regular updates. We don't yet have a date for the release of my docu-series, but we will be turning it in next month, and it should be just a few months after that when it's released. But I will continue to put regular updates on social media and on my website so people can find it there. So great. I'm excited, and I think people really love it.

I mean, I listened to eight of the ten episodes before in preparation for this. And it's, you had like so many conversations with very, different individuals who are deep in their respective fields and to see the conciliance of how things are starting to come together is really just beautiful dynamic movement of life that is coming together to help us piece together a deeper understanding of reality of nature of self and the world. So thank you so much for the work you're doing.

Yeah, thank you. I'm glad you saw it that way. That was part of the joy of it was connecting these different disciplines in science and philosophy that often don't communicate with each other. And there's more of that happening now, which is a good sign. Yeah. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Know They Self podcast. Onica, thank you so much. And let us know in which ways this podcast has uniquely impacted you. Tag us on socials. Subscribe if you haven't. Reach out to Anika through her website and socials. Everything will be linked on it in the description below. And until next time, be well.