Making Sense with Sam Harris - #159 — Conscious

Episode Date: June 6, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with his wife, Annaka Harris, about her new book, "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind." If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, not much housekeeping today. Just a reminder that Enterprise accounts are available on the Waking Up app. If you're interested in that, or work for a company that might be interested,

you can send an email to enterprise at wakingup.com. And also, new features are rolling out on the app soon. You'll be able to sit in groups with friends and colleagues. There are notifications and reminders that you can turn on in the app, which many people find useful. You can set a time to meditate each day with a reminder, and notifications will tell you when new lessons or new features are hitting the app. Anyway, things are rolling along on that front. Okay, so today I have an unusual podcast. My wife Annika is joining me. She's never been on the podcast before. Many of you have asked to have her on, and as luck would have it, she has a book that we were eager to talk about. The book is Conscious, A Brief Guide to the

Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. And let me see her bio. Annika Harris is an author, editor, and consultant for science writers. She's the author of the children's book, I Wonder, and a collaborator on Susan Kaiser Greenland's Mindful Games activity cards. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, and she lives with her husband, the neuroscientist, author, and podcaster Sam Harris, and their two children. I can confirm all of those facts. The thing that's not here, though implicit in her being an editor and consultant for science writers, Annika has edited all of my written work since my first book, The End of Faith, that book included.

And once I discovered her talents as an editor, I recommended that she do it professionally. So she's collaborated with other scientists, neuroscientists and physicists mainly. And she wrote the children's book, I Wonder, which many of you liked. But this is the first book that she's written for grown-ups. And the focus of the book is the nature of consciousness and why it is so inscrutable. This is something that not everyone recognizes. And she does that remarkably well.

I read some of the blurbs in a previous housekeeping, but Marco Iacoboni, neuroscientist, says, I've read many, many great books on consciousness in myoboni, neuroscientist, says, I've read many, many great books on consciousness in my life as a neuroscientist. Conscious tops them all, hands down. Tim Urban, the author of the Wait But Why blog, writes, one of those books that fundamentally shifts the way you think about reality. Annika Harris is a masterful explainer. Max Tegmark, physicist at MIT, writes, in this gem of a book, Annika Harris tackles consciousness controversies with incisive rigor and clarity in a style that's accessible and captivating. Anyway, it's a great look at the problem of consciousness. We get into

some of this over the next hour. We talk about a few other things. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the conversation. I certainly did. And, I hope you enjoyed the conversation. I certainly did. And now I bring you Annika Harris. Okay, I got Annika Harris in the studio. My own wife. Welcome. Thank you. You ready for this? We should really have other people here, I think. No, to save us from ourselves?

Yeah. I already can tell I have a hostile witness here. Okay, well, you have a new book coming out for grown-ups that we're going to talk about. Let's talk about how overjoyed you are to be doing this podcast. Why are you reluctant to do this? I don't think we should start with that. Why not? I don't know, because part of it is just that this is a totally awkward thing to do,

which is why I think it might be better if we had- Get that mic a little closer to you. Okay. And point it more toward you. There you go. Like that? Yeah. First, the reality is, I just realized this, our first date was filled with a conversation about this topic. We basically spoke about consciousness and free will and the other topics in your book. Now, it may be a bad sign that that was followed by you avoiding me for six months and not returning my emails. for six months and not returning my emails. No, but I mean, the thing I thought about also before we did this is that the friend who sat us up had said to me that she didn't know, of course, whether there'd be a romantic connection,

but that she knew that we would be great friends because we talk about and think about all of the same things. And it's true. We've been thinking about a lot of the same things. And it's true. We've been thinking about a lot of the same things for most of our lives. And this was the topic of, I think, mostly what we talked about that the first time we met was philosophy and consciousness. Not to give a false impression, we don't spend a lot of time talking about these things now. So happily, your book is an excuse

to get into it. And your book is Conscious, A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. You wanted a different title, I recall. I think you lucked out in being overruled on your title. But what was the first title? Lights On. Right. Conscious, I think, is a better title. Yeah. They were right. So thank you, dear publisher. So what's the book about?

Really? See, this is weird. I don't... Why did you write a book on consciousness? I think we can go back to what's the book about. Say, you know, I obviously know what the book is about, but why don't you say something about what the book is about? Say, you know, I obviously know what the book is about, but why don't you say something about what the book is about? You already asked the question. Let me just try to answer. Oh my God. All right. That is staying in the interview.

That is awesome. Listen. I have veto power. Listen. Yes, I do. Listen to me. Okay. I'm going to answer.

Let me answer your question. You asked a question. Let me answer it. Let me answer. This is my podcast. So you asked a question. Let me answer. Okay.

All right. So my book is about the science and philosophy of consciousness, and it focuses on why consciousness is so deeply mysterious. But one of the things that it does that has always been interesting to me and that, of course, you and I have talked a lot about is breaking through false intuitions. And it's something that I find incredibly interesting to do and interesting that we often reach deeper truths, more fundamental truths, a better picture of the reality around us when we can break through intuitions that are misleading us or that are giving us false information about the world around us, even if they're helpful for us at the time. I was thinking earlier about the fact that even as a child, this was an interesting exercise to me. This was something, and I actually begin the book this way.

So I talk about just my experience of breaking through the intuition, basically that the earth is flat and that we're on it underneath the sky rather than on a sphere in the way that we are. But I remember being a child and trying to think of paradoxes or make up paradoxes just to create this feeling of kind of breaking out of this day-to-day experience that I knew in some ways was misguiding me or keeping me apart from the deeper mysteries. So what are some of the intuitions that are so off around consciousness? So just to give some context, you and I both have this experience of being in dialogue with some very smart people who seem not to get. The most charitable thing to say is they have fundamentally different intuitions about consciousness and what could be plausible to think about it, what's interesting about it, what is mysterious about it. This is true of free will, too.

This is true of the nature of the self or its illusory nature. And those are the two big ones. Those are the big ones that I think are misleading us in terms of being able to understand consciousness. Right. So free will and the self are really two sides of the same coin. And then there's the hard problem of consciousness, which is more the focus of your book, although free will and the self come up. So you and I are almost the worst people to diagnose this problem because we're totally aligned on our intuitions here and we're fairly mystified by the responses we get from some people on these topics. Right. We've been in some funny circumstances too where we cannot let go of our side.

We happen to be in the same place at an event or dinner where we've encountered someone who has a very different intuition and neither of us can let this debate go. And so we'll sit there for two hours until everyone else is left trying to get the other person to understand what we're talking about. Yeah, we basically try to perform an exorcism on this person. Yeah. And I guess those people should go nameless. But we'll start with the hard problem and the intuition that some people have that it

either doesn't exist or it's not hard or there's no mystery around consciousness that is different from any other thing we don't yet understand scientifically. How do you raise this subject? I understand it in a sense because, so the hard problem, I believe the term was coined by David Chalmers. But this is obviously, this is a problem that people have encountered for much longer than David Chalmers used the term in 1995. So it's a concept that has been around for a very long time. And he gave us this shorthand, which is great and very useful in conversation. But the problem is essentially, why is it that any configuration of non-conscious material, since we obviously know that everything in the

universe is made of the same things, that the ingredients are the same for everything, but that particles get configured in such a way that suddenly the matter itself entails an experience of being that matter. And so there's almost no explanation or there's really no explanation we could think of that we could ever give that would make it less mysterious because it's always non-conscious matter getting arranged in a very specific way so that it suddenly lights up from the inside. And so it seems that no matter how much we know about the brain, there's nothing that will ever make this less mysterious. And so Chalmers was contrasting this problem, this mystery, to the quote-unquote easier problems, which are more about how the brain processes, which parts of the brain

are responsible for which functions, and the more complex understanding that we now have, since we have a science of the brain, of which experiences and which behaviors are correlated with which brain states. Right. So an easy problem of consciousness would be something like, why is vision the way it is? Why is there a one-to-one mapping, say, of the visual field onto the visual cortex? But the hard problem is why is it like something to see?

Right. Why is there an experience there at all? Yeah. As you said, it seems like you have complex systems doing complex things. At no point should it be necessary, or it's certainly not obvious why it would be necessary, that it be like something from the inside to be that system, because we know so much of this can happen unconsciously, even in our own case, or it certainly seems. Well, we'll get to that, actually. We may not know that as much as we think we do. But so now I've just used this phrase a few times, like something to be a system. And that comes from Thomas Nagel's essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

system. And that comes from Thomas Nagel's essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, where he defined consciousness in these terms. If it is like something to be a bat, that's what we mean by consciousness in the case of a bat, whether we can ever understand what it's like to be a bat or not. Now, this phrase trips off our tongues without any problem, and yet I notice that it confuses many people again people who have the opposite intuition about consciousness they either think well it's like something to be anything it's like something to be that couch you're sitting on right well but it's part it's partly a linguistic issue that it doesn't actually mean it anything It's not as accurate as we'd like it to be. I actually like the word experience better, even though that can be misunderstood too,

but it confuses people on two levels. One, there are people who actually don't see consciousness and experience as being something unique, I guess is the right word. But there's another group of people who actually get the hard problem, but they still have a hard time getting their minds around this language. It's like something. Is it like something? And I actually, I noticed that with most of those people, if you just have a little back and forth, they get it. And you've written about this too, just distinguishing between collections of matter or systems that you think are having an experience and those that aren't. And that that difference, that basic difference is what we mean by consciousness, what we're talking about, what is mysterious.

So if you just ask the person, you know, is there something that it's like to be you right now? Are you having an experience? And of course, they don't even have to think about it. They just reflexively answer yes. And then you say, is it like something to be your shoelace? Or is your chair having an experience right now? Their intuition is immediately no. And so it doesn't even matter what the truth is, just being able to distinguish between like, okay, yes, there's, I have an immediate response to that. And so therefore, I understand what you're talking about. So I guess the confusion that I noticed is that people, when you say this phrase,

what is it like to be a bat? They take the external view of that. What is it like from the outside to be that thing? Not what it's like from the inside. But then I think experience does the trick there. You can say- What kind of experience does that have? Yeah. Okay. So why is it not straightforward to judge the consciousness of a system or a thing from the outside? What is the evidence that consciousness exists? Yeah. So this is... So listeners know, I begin my discussion and my... Basically, the book takes the reader through my own thought processes over the last 15 years or so. And what I've arrived at and why I've become open to some of the stranger theories that are out there that postulate that consciousness could be a more fundamental feature of the universe. fundamental feature of the universe. And so I begin this investigation of breaking through our intuitions and getting as close in my own thoughts as I've been able to at

what are intuitions and could they be wrong? And so I think the most primary intuitions we have about consciousness live in these two questions that I like to keep asking myself. And the first one is the one you just, you know, the one you just named. Is there any behavior on the outside or anything we can witness on the outside of a system that can tell us conclusively that consciousness is present in that system? And my first answer is always yes. And that's something that I then questioned throughout the book. But I think it's interesting because we feel very strongly that the answer is yes. If I see that my daughter has fallen down and is crying and you ask me, is all this behavior you're seeing right now evidence that she's conscious? I would say, absolutely. This is-

Just to be clear, this is not the normal way I parent. I'm capable of a lot, but not quite that. all there's just endless amount of behaviors that we witness that we think, yes, that, that is absolute evidence that that person is conscious of. We can do it with animals as well. And I think it's interesting to question that, to question whether there is something that by definition gives us evidence that there is,

is consciousness there. Well, so obviously there are counterexamples. We all meet people in dreams. Presumably they're not conscious or don't even exist, and they seem to be conscious. We will almost certainly build robots at a certain point which pass the Turing test. And if we don't understand the material basis of consciousness at the time we produce those robots if we don't understand the material basis of consciousness at the time we produce those robots, we won't know whether or not they're conscious, and yet they may seem to be conscious. And then conversely, there are people who we know, due to neurological injury, are still conscious, but they can give no sign of that. And one example I think you talk about

in the book is locked-in syndrome. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that I actually start there with all of the cases we can give where we don't see that behavior that we would normally give. And there is a full, very complex, as complex as our own experiences right now that are present in people who are completely paralyzed. And we couldn't ever see that evidence from the outside. I think that's an interesting starting place for whether we can ever pinpoint certain behaviors that we can say conclusively are evidence of consciousness. And then the second question is, essentially, is consciousness doing anything? Is it serving a function? And our reflexive answer

with that again is yes. And my intuition goes that way too. But I think these are the kind of the simplest, deepest intuitions we have. And I wanted to start there in terms of challenging our intuitions and trying to break through some of them. So an example of the second question, even though it's very similar to the first, but it's getting at it from a slightly different angle, would be, you know, just deciding to write a book or even the whole writing process. It feels very strongly that consciousness is driving all of that. It feels like every time I make a decision or plan almost anything, consciousness is the thing that's driving it. It clearly has a role in my behavior, and it seems to have a role at the very beginning. And the science actually, as you know and have

talked about and written about, is the opposite. And so that's an intuition that we can start to chip away at pretty quickly. And I think you start to go down very interesting paths of contemplation when you begin with these two questions that challenge our intuitions. Yeah, so it's not clear what consciousness is doing. The concern here in philosophy has been that consciousness is a so-called epiphenomenon, which is to say it's something that stands outside the stream of phenomenon that are causal. And if consciousness is doing anything, it has to be doing it at the level of, in our case, the brain's causal pattern, the neurophysiology. So it's the most well-subscribed view at this

point is that consciousness, whatever it is at the level of experience, it is the fact that the lights are on, the fact that it's like something to be you in this moment. That's how it seems from the first person side, but there's some third person level of description, which is its cash value at the level of causality. So if there's certain, if some things can only be done consciously, that's because whatever consciousness is at the level of neurophysiology in our case, that has to be part of the causal stream, right? But it's a little more mysterious than that. And you just alluded to this, which is that anything we're conscious of, I mean, take your writing process, the decision to write, the decision to sit down precisely at that moment to

write, the decision about where to start relative to what you had written previously, the word choice to start the next sentence, anything you can point to in that process, no matter how deliberative it seems, is preceded by events in your brain of which you're not conscious, of which there's no conscious correlate. And the question is, why does any of that seemingly could all happen on its own, right? And so what is consciousness adding to that process? And the zombie thought experiment has always been instrumental in this. But I actually think at this point, because AI is so in our minds because of pop culture and films, I think it's easy for us to imagine AI doing a lot of the things that we are capable of

without consciousness. Like writing a book. Like writing a book. But even something like vision, it seems very natural to us that we have an experience of seeing things. And we understand that there are processes in the brain and light is bouncing off the objects in the room and hitting our retina and our brain and we're processing this. But we can easily see that a computer, a camera, or very advanced AI could be doing all of the processing, the visual processing that we're doing, without having an experience like the one we're having. It's a very specific feeling, content of consciousness to be seeing the color blue. And that's not necessarily, it doesn't seem to us to be necessary for the processing to take place. So the idea that consciousness might not be doing anything

is problematic or perceived to be problematic from an evolutionary point of view, because people wonder, well, then why would it have evolved? Surely it must be doing something because it must be expensive metabolically on some level, although perhaps not all that expensive. And why would this thing have emerged? Now, again, not everything that's emerged has an evolutionary rationale. There are things that just have come along for free that aren't really selected for but our intuitions are so aligned with that theory also it really feels like you know the love and my desire to protect my child is the thing that will give me that extra power that extra strength that extra will the experiential component of that yeah the fact that it's like something to want to protect your child rather than just blindly coded into an unconscious mechanism.

Yeah, no, it seems to us that the feelings of love and fear, probably primarily, but of course all of the other emotions and desires and intentions, it seems that our experience of them is the thing that gives them their power. Except we know the case of fear is a great example because we know that the startle response has already hit the amygdala before you're aware you've been startled. Yeah. No. So I think we're probably wrong about this. And again, the zombie thought experiment can get you there. But just imagining an AI that's been programmed to, above all else, protect this other robot. You can call it its child, whatever it is, it doesn't seem to us that it would require that it have an experience in order to follow that

programming. So the argument about evolution is one that sends many people, including myself, down the path of, is it possible that consciousness is a fundamental feature of all matter? And it is there in some form. Of course, if we're talking very minimal forms, if we're talking the level of atoms or very minimal information processing, it's important to not confuse consciousness with complex thought. There's no one is postulating that if it's a more fundamental feature, it is anything like a human mind and brain, but... Okay, so let me just understand the move you just made. So the idea that consciousness may not be doing anything seems problematic if you think

that consciousness had to have emerged in the process of evolution. Because by default, we expect those things to have been costly in some way and to have been selected for. And therefore, by definition, they were leading to differential success in breeding and survival. success in breeding and survival. So if consciousness isn't doing any of that, that seems mysterious unless you posit that it is a far more fundamental feature of physical reality than that. And the name for that view, the general family of views in philosophy is panpsychism. So I warned you to tread lightly on panpsychism because it seems... Well, first of all, it's a terrible name. I actually, I kind of opened the question to the world to come up with a better name. It just, it sounds like something very unscientific

or pseudoscientific. And just on the face of it, it sounds like a crazy idea, which it really, I feel like I'm a good proponent of it. And I actually shouldn't say I'm a full proponent of it, because in my book, I say and I'm still in the same place that I'm really just open to it. I think it's it's a it's a category of theories that are very interesting and worth exploring. worth exploring. I think it's just as likely that even though it is as mysterious as it is, it's possible that consciousness requires a brain and that consciousness does not emerge until we have a brain or a nervous system present. But I think this other way of looking at consciousness is very interesting. And I feel like I'm a good person to fight for it or to fight for more people being open to it because I completely dismissed it when I first encountered it. And

like most people, they feel that it's just the idea sounds completely crazy. So I cite in my book, this great title of an article by Philip Goff, which is panpsychism is crazy, but it's also most probably true. And that really gets at for me the point at which I started to take panpsychism more seriously. So it was something that I completely dismissed when I first encountered it and thought it sounded totally crazy. We should define it too. There are different levels at which you could imagine consciousness one is at the level of information processing, which as far as I know, that's where David Chalmers feels that it makes the most sense for it to emerge. He may be more open to a deeper level than that now, but he writes about that. He writes about the possibility

that a thermostat could be conscious. It's very minimal information processing. And then some people postulate that it is a fundamental feature of matter itself. Whether it's processing information or not. Right. So any matter down to the level of individual particles, that consciousness is itself a property of matter. And so it's integral to matter. And there is some level of experience, no matter how minimal and completely unlike. I mean, anyone who proposes these theories acknowledges that it would be unrecognizable to us, the type of experience. So you imagine what it's like to be a bat. That is a very different experience from the one we have as human beings. Navigating the world with sonar, just what that feels like must feel very different. It must be a very different experience from navigating the world using vision. more simple the system if consciousness is present in everything, then we're talking about such a minimal level of experience. It's not something we could ever even try to imagine. There's no memory. In one of the chapters of my book, I actually try to give a sense of what consciousness

could be like in its most minimal form and I kind of talked the reader through this guided imagery but I think if it's possible that that consciousness is present in all matter most experience that exists is nothing like the experience we have as human beings and it's probably a very rare form of consciousness. And it's also not experience that you would expect to show. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast,

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