Modern Wisdom - #927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness

Episode Date: April 12, 2025

Annaka Harris is an author, editor, and speaker focused on neuroscience and consciousness. What does it mean to be conscious? What is consciousness? These questions have puzzled humanity for millennia. Despite our greatest scientific breakthroughs and philosophical efforts, are we any closer to understanding the origins and true nature of consciousness? Expect to learn the most unsettling idea about consciousness that keeps Annaka up at night, if consciousness is behind our eyes, if love is a 3-dimensional construct, if consciousness is just a malfunction of the brain, rather than an essential feature, if AI is conscious or not, if neuroscience has been useful in unraveling the deep questions of consciousness, the illusions that dominate our brains, If we are living in a world where 99% of people are philosophical zombies and we just don’t know and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Find Kettle & Fire Maui Nui Venison Bone Broth at Whole Foods stores nationwide. Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do you think is the most unsettling idea about consciousness that keeps you up at night? Hmm, I wouldn't call it unsettling. I would call it exciting and mysterious and I'm a bit obsessed thinking about how it is that all of this non-conscious matter in the universe, this universe that is apparently made of all this non-conscious matter, in some instances gets configured in such a way that there's an experience of being that matter from the inside and how that process takes place, how it could be. Let me go back.

So what it's like actually to jump on that spectrum. So clearly there's a range of conscious experiences that a living being or system can have. Some very, very minimal experiences, maybe if snails are conscious, there's very minimal experience of being a snail, maybe pressure, a sense of heat and cold, maybe some very rudimentary experience of hunger, desire to move toward food, that type of thing, then all the way up to human beings and all the things that we experience. But the question for me and the thing that does keep me up at night is what is that

transition from no consciousness to consciousness? And how is that anything but a completely unexplained mystery? There doesn't seem to be anything. I've worked with neuroscientists for more than 20 years now and studied the science of consciousness. And, you know, we have not made any progress in the sciences and understanding how consciousness comes to be. That was a long answer to your question. Why is that the case? Why has it been such a dead end? I think it's a categorically different thing than anything else science has studied before. And actually, Philip Goff has a wonderful book that explains this very well called Galileo's

Error. And it is because we have these fantastic tools in science for studying behavior from the outside. And the thing that's unique about consciousness and the reason why I find it so fascinating and why it keeps me up at night is because it's a different property that we're trying to get at which is experience from the inside. It can only be felt from the inside. So you know you and I are very similar beings, we're similar systems and so we experience a lot of the same things

and we develop language so that we can talk about those experiences. But what's interesting actually to me about communication and language is that it only works between systems that have similar conscious experiences. Because if, you know, the only reason you and I can talk about anything or share ideas

is because we share so much of the same conscious content. You know, if you try to explain to someone who's born deaf what, you know, middle C sounds like or any sound for that matter, there are a lot of analogies you can make, but there's no way you can actually deliver that experience of sound to someone who's never had it before. And so to talk about it adequately and to be able to understand, you know, the way I understand that you are conscious is because you're saying things that lead me to believe you're experiencing very similar things to things I'm experiencing. And so the trick is there is no way to get true evidence of a conscious experience, but from the inside,

but from having it yourself. And as I said, we have all these ways of communicating that can give us a fair amount of non-direct evidence that other systems besides ourselves are conscious, but we can't get direct evidence. And that's different from anything else that we study scientifically. I think there may be changes in the last chapter of my documentary.

I talk a little bit about how there might be changes to the science in the future that might enable us to kind of get around this issue. But I mean, it is still a pretty solid issue that it is only from the inside that consciousness can be known and then conscious content can be carried through time by memories. And so we kind of have access. It's always a different experience in a new moment, but we can have access to content from previous experiences through memory. I've heard people say before that if we didn't experience it,

the universe would give us no indication that consciousness exists. How true do you think that is? Well, sure. Yeah. That's even true on a more tangible level, which is that in my documentary, I talk about locked-in syndrome, which is a very terrifying circumstance. But that's a circumstance where someone has had brain damage either due to a stroke or injury where they've become completely paralyzed, yet their conscious experience is completely intact.

So they can hear, they can see, they can think, but they literally have no form of any kind of movement, let alone communication. And so that's a circumstance where there is no, you can't get any clues about the conscious experience that's happening on the inside from the outside. And it's these types of conditions in neuroscience that started me down this path of wondering, is it possible there are other systems that are just so unfamiliar to us where even very minimal conscious experiences are actually arising in those systems, we would have no way of knowing in the same way we have no way of knowing in a person who's in a locked-in state. What are some of the other interesting examples, experiments, insights from

neuroscience that sort of reveal how unintuitive consciousness is? I would say most of them. And it's kind of what led me down this path because I spent so much time working with neuroscientists and learning about the most recent research. And there are so many intuition-shattering facts that come out of our current understanding of the brain. I talk a lot about priming processes. This is something that David Eagleman, the neuroscientist writes a lot about

and writes beautifully about actually, I recommend all of his books. And I speak to him in my documentary series. So, sorry, I said priming, which is also another example, but I meant binding. So yes. You were primed to say priming. Yeah, that's right.

Priming actually is less well understood than binding, but binding processes are the processes that the brain uses, and there are many different types of bringing in different types of perceptions, different types of information from the outside, and then consolidating them into a present moment experience. So I'll give the example sometimes of playing the piano or playing tennis, where you can be aware of the fact that, use the example of piano, in your conscious experience, you feel that you push the key down in the same moment that you hear the note, in the same

moment that you see the key go down. But all of these signals, the light waves, the sound waves, the feeling of touch, these all move through space at different speeds. They get to our brains at different times because they're different distances away. And then they get processed in different speeds by the brain. And so we are left with this experience that all of this happens in one moment when there's actually all of this subconscious brain processing that's taking place, leading up to those moments. And then there are countless examples of ways that we feel the universe is structured because of the way we experience them, that when you look underneath the hood, you realize things are happening in a way that kind of give you this illusion.

Actually, Anil Seth, the neuroscientist, uses the term controlled hallucinations to describe how the brain is mapping out the external world for us by giving, by creating these conscious experiences that are extremely useful for navigating the world and evolutionarily advantageous, of course, but that actually don't give us clear insight into the underlying reality. Well, I guess we don't really need to know the underlying reality, right? We just need to be effective within the environment. I want to know it. But yes, of course, evolutionarily speaking, yes. Adaptively, if we just spend all of our time contemplating whether or not this is really the way that a tree looks, we might not have got as much done.

Well, yes, absolutely. And Donald Hoffman, I don't know if you've ever spoken to him, but he makes a very strong case for the fact that evolution actually serves the purpose of hiding reality from us. To like obfuscate it. Yeah. Yes. Okay. So, if we don't ever...

So, binding is this sequential processing and time delay adjustment in order to be able to make things feel to us like they're happening in sequence and that other things get moved around in a way that helps us to feel them happening cohesively. If that's the case, what does it mean to say live in the present moment as a sentence. Yeah. Well, that's obviously a term from meditation training and also this kind of science of well-being. And I really think that in most cases is referring to our conscious experience. And so there is a present moment conscious experience, however delusional we are about the underlying

reality. The only thing actually we all can know for sure is the experience that we're having. So whatever the circumstances happen to be, if I'm a brain in a vat or under some other circumstance I can't imagine, it is still true that whatever it feels like to touch this table, that feeling of touch is a felt experience that is arising in the universe and so you can be with your present moment experience being completely you know oblivious to the underlying reality. I mean even if you look at something like sight you know if I see the color blue you know even now that I'm science I'm

aware of the science I don't usually think about the fact that there isn't actually blue out there in the world, right? There are these light waves that enter the retina and get processed by the brain, and then this experience of seeing blue is kind of materializing. That is a real experience. That's a real thing that happens in the universe, but the experience gives me the impression that there's blue out in the universe, but the experience gives me the impression that there is blue out in the universe. And so it's that impression that that's not right. Is it right to say that consciousness is behind our eyes?

If it seems like it's in our head, right? And our eyes are a bit of our brain that gets extruded out through the front of our skull during gestation. you follow the eyes back and then it's in here, right? Somewhere in here. Well, we don't know. And we don't know. I mean, obviously, you know, people who are blind have consciousness without being able to see. It does certainly to most of us feel like our consciousness is in this area. It's where all of the inputs from the outside world are coming. They're all getting processed by the brain. They're all linked up through the nervous system to the brain. And so it makes sense that that's

what we feel. And so part of the way we have a sense of being kind of a solid self and I is through this stream of memories that are connected, that are threaded through time. There could be an experience I have that I don't remember, but we don't know the difference between there not being an experience that was had at all or just not remembering it. And so if there are other experiences happening in my system, you know, if there are some experiences of liver processing or, you know, other types of processing that happen in my body that never enter this stream of awareness, my conclusion is that they're not conscious. But we just don't know.

We only know what enters the stream of memory and then what can be reported on. This is where I often talk about, and I get into this in the documentary series as well, the work on split brain patients. Because this is a very real world example of a suggestion of what I'm talking about which is that there's a surgical procedure called a calisotomy that is not performed very often anymore, but was used to be used as a treatment for epilepsy for people whose lives were severely disrupted by grand mal seizures. And when the seizure spreads from one side of the brain to the other, that's a much more serious condition

and people can get injured and fall and die from this condition. So sometimes they would perform a callus otomy, which actually splits the connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. I don't know how much you want me to go into this research or if you're familiar with it, but one fascinating thing about this research is that they were able to find a way to probe and interrogate the right hemisphere of the brain, which is in most people, not all people, but in most people, the non-speaking side of the brain. So it's the left hemisphere that's verbal.

And so when these patients were being studied, the doctor would ask them a question and they would answer, if it was an opinion related question, what's your favorite color? Only the left hemisphere was answering because the left hemisphere is in control of the speech. And so they might say blue, but if they then they realized that something interesting was going on

and that perhaps the right hemisphere was having a different experience. The right hemisphere is controlled by the left hand. And so they would ask the person the same question and have them write the answer with their left hand. And often the answer would be different. And then there's a series of fascinating studies that were done that you can look up. I refer to many of them in my documentary series and they're all in the notes for the documentary. So you can look at patients being interrogated in this way. It's incredibly fascinating.

But the takeaway there, at least for me, is it's possible to even have a human-like mind that has no ability to communicate inside the same body of a mind that is able to communicate, right? And so we already know of an example where consciousness in one living system can be split in that way, such that they're having their different conscious experiences arising and some can be reported on and some can't.

And so the question for me is, you know, once I got really deep into this research and deep into once I accepted the fact that I was actually willing to ask this question, which was very taboo for a long time and not something that neuroscientists were really open to discussing, you know, 10, 20 years ago. But once I kind of allowed myself to go down this path and realized that, you know, not only is this a legitimate scientific question, but I think it's a really important scientific question, is their consciousness in other systems and much simpler systems than we've assumed. And if so, it's possible that there are all kinds of conscious experiences happening within my brain and body that I'm not

aware of, that I'm not aware of, that I can't report on, but that are arising and passing away all the time. It is very counterintuitive because there's nothing more real. Very. There's nothing more real to me than the sense. I still feel like I sound crazy when I say these things. A little. But there's nothing more real to me or anybody that's listening than the sense

of being me. You know, the sort of, I think, therefore I am, am I a brain in a vat? Well, at least I know that I am this thing. You go, oh, fucking hell, is that gone as well? Like I don't even know if I am this thing. Well, you could say, you know, these feelings are happening. You are feeling it. It's a much less sexy sentence.

The conscious experiences are happening. It's a much less sexy sentence though, unfortunately. And yeah, if split brain studies suggest that we've got multiple consciousnesses, the idea of a single self ends up being pretty broken. Yes. I mean, we only know that that's true in a split brain patient, which was a very unusual type of brain to have. But if you were to do it temporally, right? Like you're not the same person that you were 10 years ago.

Even though you're not the same person now than you were when we started this conversation. That's what it really comes down to. Yeah. So one thing that I had in my head was some states of human conscious experience feel more or less than others. It's like love feels more conscious than boredom, let's say. Heartbreak or grief feels more conscious than relaxation in some ways. You wouldn't just say it's a stronger or more vivid conscious experience? Maybe.

I just, I don't know whether there is something about how much our attention is forced to attend to the thing that's going on and the kind of volume of it. Sure. Oh, absolutely. Yes. Yes. I don't know, but the question is- I just wouldn't talk about it as the consciousness being-

Is it more conscious, less conscious? I don't think so. I don't think that's the right way, is it more conscious? I just wouldn't talk about it as the consciousness being... Less conscious? I don't think so. I don't think that's the right way to think about it. That's interesting. I think the contents, the things that are being experienced can be more powerful, can be stronger, can be more vivid, but I think consciousness is consciousness. If it's being experienced, that's consciousness. And I don't know, I mean, you know, a lot of people would disagree with me, even people who are kind of in this world of wondering of consciousness

goes deeper in nature. I've written a couple of articles on this subject of why I think that particular way of seeing things doesn't really make sense. But yeah, I tend to think of consciousness as even though there's a spectrum of content, consciousness itself is really binary. It's either there or it's not. This episode is brought to you by Nomadic. Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing, which is why I've partnered with Nomadic.

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slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. So there's an interesting question there, which is what is the lowest possible amount of consciousness that you can have before one step of consciousness eroding would mean that consciousness no longer exists. This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. Exactly. I suppose there's, you know, if we've got this Overton window of consciousness, you would ask yourself, okay, well, what's the maximum amount of consciousness? Because there's no reason to assume.

If we think that there's a gradation, right, between a bat or a flower. I just don't think there's a gradation of consciousness. I think there's a gradation of content, the types of things that are experienced. So I think even the most minimal experience we could imagine, just a low humming noise and nothing else. I wouldn't say that's less consciousness than what I'm experiencing now. I would say that's less content. Okay. But if you were an amoeba and you have that level or a bat or a flower or a

mycelium network or a blue dolphin or us, would you say that the range of consciousness is greater? No. Okay. So across the board. Oh, that's interesting. Well, even then, if we're just talking about contents, then the ability for our consciousness to experience more, more depth, more breadth or whatever, or at

least for us to be able to detect more signal, let's say, there's no reason to assume that we are the ceiling of that. Oh, no, absolutely not. No, I think there are likely more complex things to be experienced than the things we experience. I also, part of why I've come to this conclusion is because of another area of neuroscience which you know more or less proves that this feeling of being a self that we have is

is an illusion and I can I can explain more about that but but the way you just referenced you know a dolphin or a human or as if that's a solid entity that has experiences. The way I think is a more accurate way to think of it is that conscious experiences take place in the universe. And so, you know, a lot of things have to happen for any particular conscious experience to take place. I don't think it's accurate to think of me as a human, as some kind of solid self somewhere

here inside my head that these conscious experiences happen to. It's that there are these systems that get configured by the unfolding of the universe, however that happens that we don't yet understand or may never understand, that cause certain experiences to arise and some are incredibly complex and some are very simple, but there's no self that moves through time that is the vehicle of those experiences in any form. So an example I've been giving lately is the vehicle of those experiences in any form. So an example I've been giving lately is the experience of self is more, and the experience of human mind and any mind really, is analogous to an ocean wave. So

we call an ocean wave a wave and we use that term and we talk about it like it's a thing. And in many senses we can point to an ocean wave, we can talk about the dynamics of an ocean wave, there are lots of things we can say about it, but we all understand intuitively that an ocean wave is not a thing, a static thing that moves through time. It is a dynamic process in nature. And so the human brain is just a constant dance of electrical firing, much more like an ocean wave than a static thing. And so this experience we have of being something that's static and kind of unchanging at its core, moving from one moment to the next is what the illusion of self entails. And we fail to see that it's much more like an ocean wave, where it's an ever

evolving changing process. It never sits still. It never is one thing. As I said, you're a different system now than you were when we started this conversation. And so that doesn't mean we can't have a word for it. But the way we think about it because of the way we experience the world, I think gives us a false sense of there being these solid entities in the world rather than dynamic processes unfolding over time. I've heard some theories that consciousness might just be a malfunction of the brain rather than an essential feature. Or like it could be just a side effect of energy efficiency in the same way that a light

gives off heat and light and you to look at it and say, when it comes to the more sort of adaptive explanation, is it just us being able to model the thoughts of our Dunbar number 150 tribe and I need to know that Annika and John are no longer friends, but that John and Joe actually have become friends now. What's your- No, so I think this is really a false assumption. It's a very strong intuition, one that I had my whole life and through

most of my career working with scientists as well. But it goes back to one of your first questions about, how did the neuroscience get me to start questioning whether consciousness goes deeper in nature? So we have this strong intuition that consciousness is causal, that it's doing something, that it evolves. You know, the reason why we believe it evolved is because we believe it affects behavior. But what most of the neuroscience and science in general is continuing to unveil is the fact that none of these things that we think we need consciousness for, we don't actually have

any evidence to believe that. And so in my book, Conscious, and also in this documentary series, I go through these two questions. I kind of frame this investigation through these two questions. And the first one is, can we find evidence of consciousness from outside the system? Is there any way to ever say, you know, these are the list of things, if you see them on the outside, there is consciousness on the inside? And the second question is, is consciousness doing something? Is it driving our behavior in the way that we feel it is and we feel it must be? And so yes, as you just described, we think, you know, well, I have this experience of putting all these things together and then,

you know, I can act very quickly. The truth is that when you drill down on the processes in the brain and this intuition, you come up completely empty handed. There's no reason to think that having an experience of that processing gives you an advantage at all. Everything that we can point to, we can imagine a computer doing those things. Actually, if you just, again, take sight as an example. My retina, my brain process light waves, process different wavelengths, are able to distinguish between the different wavelengths of light.

My subsequent behavior is based on that processing. All of these things happen, yet for some reason, that processing for me entails an experience of seeing things, right, of the colors of the texture of all these things. But we can imagine a computer, a camera, lots of other systems, plants, I talk a lot about plants in my documentary because they're fascinating even on this specific issue of sensing light waves, sensing different frequencies of light, their behavior being adjusted based on the frequencies of light. But we imagine that cameras and computers and plants can do all of that without, we don't think they

must need to see, they must need to have the experience of the conscious experience to be able to do any of those things, but for some reason we do. And the closer you look at the brain processing, the less there is a place to find where, oh yes, it's because the system experienced that thing that enabled it to behave this way and in such a more advantageous way than it could if it weren't conscious.

There's no place to find that. And in fact, we find the opposite. We find that many things that we've evolved to do, like get out of a dangerous situation quickly, run fast, a startled response, all the things, all the places we try to find where we could point to and say, okay, if this must have to be consciously experienced,

otherwise we wouldn't be as good at it. In a lot of those cases, we're now aware of what modern neuroscience considers to be unconscious brain processing, being the thing that drives the behavior before we're even aware, before it becomes a conscious experience. So you're saying that consciousness

is largely surplus to requirements for us? It's largely mysterious. We don't have any idea. The things that we think we know about it, it turns out we have no evidence to believe those things. And so, you know, a lot of my work is about just getting us to square one, getting us to kind of shake some of our intuitions, um, to shake them up so that we can think more creatively about it.

You know, maybe do different types of science than we've been doing, because this is how all scientific breakthroughs happen. You know, each time we are kind of faced with evidence from whatever type of probing we do of the universe. We make celestial observations, you know, taking us way back, and suddenly it doesn't quite make sense that the universe revolves around us. It makes more sense to see us as revolving around the sun. And that changes our intuitions about what our perceptions tell us,

the circumstance we're in. And so it takes some kind of evidence coming towards us and then also human beings who are incredibly curious and willing to just look who are incredibly curious and willing to just look and look and look and look and seek and say, actually, the way we feel things are is wrong and the universe is structured in a different way. And there's usually a period of time, sometimes decades or more, before the evidence really encroaches in on our intuitions and gets us to start to think creatively and

shift the way we feel. The same was true for discovering the germ theory of disease. Eventually we developed tools where we could see the microscopic things, but first it was a theory and it was very hard for people to believe and to get their minds around because it just sounded crazy that there are these things we can't see or smell or taste or touch, we can't perceive them, but that's what's making us sick and that they can kill us. And so there are all of these paradigm shifts in science,

all these scientific breakthroughs that entail kind of new evidence coming in and shifting the way we thought things worked. And so I think we're at a place like that with consciousness now. And this is some of the ways we can see through, at the very least, the way our intuitions tell us things are off. If we can get to the stage where AI is able to outthink us, does that suggest that consciousness is overrated?

I'm not sure how those two are related. Well, whether or not, if AI can outthink us and it's not conscious, so if it's functionally- If it's not conscious. Yes, and it's functionally able to do- Well, I do think consciousness is overrated in the sense that we think, like a lot of things, we think we're special and we're the only ones that have it. And I do think human beings are special and obviously we do all kinds of things

that no other living systems we know of can do. But I'm not sure that consciousness is even a result of complex processing at this point. So a lot of my work has just been breaking through all of these assumptions. And so at this point, I don't think we have any evidence to believe that high level of intelligence or complexity is required for consciousness. And so I think consciousness still holds this very magical position in the universe because the experience, the felt experience, the sentience, I think is magical in and of itself.

But I don't know that it's unique. I don't think it's unique to human beings. And I don't think we have any reason to think that it is responsible for all of the things that we value in ourselves. And so I think much less simple systems have them. If we develop more complex systems they will likely have it but whether or not they do, I think the things we value in human beings, in our intelligence, in our thinking skills, creativity skills, ability to create new things and build new things that never existed and imagine new things and then generate them and make them real, all of that may not really

have anything to do with consciousness any more than a pea tendril needs consciousness to do all of the things in a much simpler way, but some more miraculous than you would have realized until you start studying plant behavior. We don't know any reason why you would need consciousness for either of those things. So, I mean, I think AI is interesting and it will be a very interesting development either way, conscious or not, but I don't think it changes the status of consciousness. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to

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up for a $1 per month trial period, or by heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom or lowercase that shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade just selling today. Do you think that it, how likely do you think it is that progress in lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade just selling today. How likely do you think it is that progress in AI will unveil some interesting insight about consciousness? I think that's probably unlikely. But I don't, I mean that's a big question mark for me. I don't know. I can't imagine a way that it would. The type of science, you know, the last chapter of my docuseries is called the future of science. And I'm imagining a science that rethinks our ability to experience other systems than the ones we experience. So, you know, we experience light waves and sound waves and but there are many, we don't

experience the Earth's magnetic field and many animals do. There are lots of things that we actually have a kind of have a head start studying scientifically because we perceive them and so we have developed these intuitions for them. Um, in my series, in one chapter, I interviewed someone who was part of a study where they actually gave participants an experience of magnetic North. Um, it's fascinating study. I can tell you more about those details.

Yeah. How do you experience magnetic North? Yeah. So maybe I'll finish that point and then come back. north. Yeah, so maybe I'll finish that point and then come back. But the idea is that if we want to understand consciousness better, we're going to have to find a way to expand our experiences and also, well, I can give more examples, but that's kind of the way I think it's headed. I'm not sure that AI, I'm not sure how AI could be helpful there, although I guess any kind of intelligent system might give us ways to experiment and ideas for

things we might do, but it will entail a human participation because it will have to entail experiences and sharing experiences and being able to talk about them. And you know, of course, maybe AI will develop to that point and they'll just be way beyond us in all these ways and they'll figure it out. So, you know, I guess the issue will be if AI is not able to or uninterested in communicating with us, we just won't know. If they do, if they kind of move forward in the way I talk about science progressing in my docu-series, if they're able to do that before we are in some way and they actually figure something out, we won't be able to just know because they tell us

There has to be a sufficient level of communication for us to understand and believe what they're saying and you know Well, we'll have to hope that they care enough about us to explain it. Please mom. Don't forget me. Don't leave me on this school bus Magnetic North. So do you experience it? So there's an area of science, of neuroscience. It started with something called sensory substitution. David Eagleman, again, the neuroscientist, was very involved in this work at Stanford and some others. And sensory substitution, you may

have heard of some of these devices that have been developed for people who are blind or deaf. For the blind, originally, they created something called a brain port. And this was like a popsicle-like thing that sits on the tongue and delivers electro-tactile signals based on a camera that's worn like on a headband. So it's receiving the visual input, and then it translates that into electro-tactile signals on the tongue. What's so interesting about the brain is, you know, at first the participants, they use these and they're just getting a buzzing sensation. It means nothing to them. I think over a little bit of time, they start to notice

patterns and it starts to feel like they, oh oh like when I'm getting close to a wall I kind of feel this on my tongue. But eventually it's usually about six to eight weeks in of using a device like this. The brain converts to intuitive way of experiencing and so people are able to use something like a brain port over time. And they're no longer feeling electro-tactile signals on the tongue. It's no longer about the tongue. Their brain is actually giving them a map of their external world based on this information.

So they can shoot hoops, they can walk through mazes. No way. Yeah. David Eagleman gives a great TED Talk on this, if anyone in your audience wants to check it out. And he actually then goes on to talk about sensory addition in that talk, which is kind of the natural progression of this. So once they realized they could give these tools to people who couldn't see, they realized

maybe we can tap into other things that, you know, why just light waves? Why not other things in our environment that we don't perceive? And maybe the brain can interpret those signals as well. And so one of the studies was to try to give participants an experience of the Earth's magnetic field. This was a belt they devised. So it was a belt that went all the way around the body and had electro-tactile signals all around. And I don't totally understand the science or the technology of how it worked, but it was, you know, perceiving the Earth's magnetic field. And again, this is something that other animals can do. So they thought they'd start with something that other brains that we know about are able

to interpret, just that human brains aren't set up that way. So it was such fun talking to Dr. Sasha Fink. He's a neuroscientist and he was one of the participants in this study. And the way he talks about that experience is really interesting. It's like the way he was talking to me was like someone trying to explain to a blind person what it's like to see. So he would kind of try to compare it to other senses, but he got, he had this intuitive feel after six or eight weeks of where he was oriented. He said a few very funny things. One was, I noticed all the toilets in my life face north.

And it's just because he was like, he's at the main toilets, my toilet at home, my toilet at the office, my toilet, you know, wherever my friend's house because he was like, he's at the main toilets, my toilet at home, my toilet at the office, my toilet, you know, wherever, my friend's house, that he noticed they all faced the same direction because he said it's like noticing a color or noticing you walk into a room and you're both wearing the same shirt and you say, oh, we're both wearing the same shirt.

Like, you just know it because it's intuitive and because you see and your brain works that way. And so it was just a feel like he knows which way he's facing all the time. And so he would make these connections and associations like, oh, this faces that way. He could kind of, he had a better sense of like the map of the world really. He said it also completely threw off his intuitions for, you know, the streets where he lived because he realized, you know, the, none of the streets where he lived because he realized, none of the streets are actually facing the way they say they are.

I'm trying to think of some other. He described this very interesting sensation. He said, just like with sight or sound or anything else, there are pleasant versions of it and unpleasant versions. There are things we like to look at that bring us joy and things that we find repulsive with taste and sound and music and all of these things. We don't ever even think about this,

but the same is true with the Earth's magnetic field. So there were circumstances he would find himself in where he didn't like the position he was facing in that certain place. And then he described this thing that I just think is so beautiful where he said, he went up a spiral staircase once and it was so enjoyable. There was something about, I don't know, orienting around a center that way that he just found himself seeking out spiral staircases.

Be careful. It felt so good. He said it was like hula hooping, but you're the hula hoop or something like that. Anyway, I think if we're able to get a better sense of what consciousness is, it will keep moving in this direction of broadening our experiences, potentially sharing experiences. The fact that I have so many memories throughout my life of other conscious experiences that existed in the universe and other, you know, times and places. That's through memory.

And when I remember a situation that I was in, it's never exactly the situation I was in. I'm in a new moment, but I have enough of the residual of those memories that I can kind of, you know, I have this experience knowing what that situation was like. There may be some future technology where we can do that rather than between people through time, you know, myself as a three-year-old and myself now. Very different systems, very different brains, very different places in time and space. There might be a future

technology where I can have a memory of yours placed in my stream of memories and then I'll remember all the things that I did. You do not want that. That would be very dangerous. Maybe I'll choose someone else for my first memory just the experience you're having right now of looking at me and, you know, having earbuds in your ears and just simple everyday experience that, you know, I could have a similar one from my day yesterday, but I could have a memory of being over there, looking this way, and that would just kind of be

in my stream of memories in the same way that all of my memories are there. And I think that's the type of thing that will help us better understand. You've mentioned plants a couple of times memories are there. And I think that's the type of thing that will help us better understand. You've mentioned plants a couple of times today. What have you learned about plants? Um, plants? Well, first of all, the science is really speeding up now. There was quite a taboo around studying these things for a while. There's a new book, and I interview the author for

my series. Her name is Zoe Schlanger, and she wrote a book called The Light Eaters, which is so poetic and beautiful because plants eat light. And she gives so many examples of relatively new findings, you know, starting in 2014. Again, with light, plants have more photoreceptors than we do. They can see, see is, you know, probably not the right word to use, but everyone's starting to get confused because it's hard to know how to talk about these things. There's an example of trying to think, oh, there's a parasitic plant called the daughter vine, D-O-D-D-E-R, not daughter as in daughter and son, but daughter. A daughter vine can sense when the seedling is sprouting, it kind of moves around in the air like you've seen other plants do in time-lapse

photography. It'll kind of move around and it seems to be sensing where it can find something to parasitize. There are certain plants that they can live off of and there are certain plants it can't. So scientists for a long time wondered, is it chemicals? How do they know that in this direction they shouldn't go that direction, they should go in this direction? And they started running all of these studies. And it turns out that at least part of the way they do this is through sensing light. And so they can sense the shape of a plant

because, you know, the reason we see green when we look at a green leaf is because the other light wavelengths are passing through, but the green ones are bouncing off the leaf and that's why we're perceiving the green. And so the daughter vine can apparently tell, I forget there's a long list of things it can tell, but essentially, you know, the type of plant it is, it won't grow towards grasses. It's very hard to get itself attached to a grass. It can't really survive that way. So if there are grasses planted, you know, over here, it'll sense the shape and how much nutritional content is there. All this whole list of things that

they've now studied. It can tell by the light that is getting filtered through the leaves and branches of these plants. And the final study that they did to prove this was they used LED lights and they set up different shapes of different plants, the types of plants, some being the types of plants that they would be interested in attaching to and others like grasses. But they were just LED lights in the shape of grass and LED lights in the shape of plants that would be the type of plants it would enjoy. And it went toward, it went, made the right choice. So all of this I find fascinating, I think just because it is fascinating,

but in terms of the level of complexity that we think is required for consciousness, I think this is all very intuition shaking. And that's kind of where I like to live and where I like to do my work. And so, you know, you can kind of fall on either side of it. I don't know if plants are conscious. That's not actually why I became interested in them. The reason I started doing a deep dive into this

is because my intuition is that plants aren't conscious like most people. And so the question is when we started unveiling some of these much more complex behaviors that kind of fall into the categories of human behaviors. I spoke to a plant biologist, Danny Shamovitz, Daniel Shamovitz, and he and I spoke a lot about how he wasn't sure which terms to use. He would say, you know, can you say a plant can hear? Can you say a plant can see? And without consciousness, how do you describe the same phenomenon? And then, of course, you know, is it possible that there is some conscious level of conscious awareness there, but my interest was less in that and more in

how is it that we can look at some behaviors that are quite human-like and not think consciousness is necessary for them, but somehow when we exhibit similar behaviors, we think it couldn't be done without consciousness and what is, where, where are we mistaken? Yeah, that's humbling. Yeah. Wild harvested venison bone broth wasn't on my shopping list, but it's here. And it's ridiculous how good it is.

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I wonder whether, well actually, where have you come to land on the where consciousness comes from question, all of the different schools of thought? Are you a neo panpsychist now? Like what, what is this? Do you fit into some broad bucket? I do not fit into a bucket. Um, where I have landed with all of this is that I think I have been convinced that it's a legitimate and very important scientific question to be asking.

Um, does conscious, two questions I would say. Does consciousness go deeper in nature than the sciences have previously assumed? And the one I'm most interested in now is, is consciousness fundamental? So is it actually a fundamental property of the universe? Something that is much more basic, you know, no less magical or interesting, but something more basic in terms of a fundamental layer, more akin to gravity than to, you know, something that arises out of complex processing and behavior. And so I think all that – I'm a very science-minded person and I've worked with scientists for

decades and that's really where my heart is and I think that's how we, that's our best method for discovering truth and for breaking through all of these false intuitions that we have and giving us a reason to do that. And so I think it's truly a question. We just don't know. And I think it's fine for us to say we don't know, but to say that we have always assumed that consciousness arises out of complex processing and it's time to realize the evidence is not supporting that and it's possible that consciousness is actually fundamental and it's not serving the purpose we feel it is, but is actually kind of a part of every process in nature.

Are we asking the wrong people? But that's a question. Well, are we asking the wrong people about consciousness? Should we be asking mystics and meditation experts instead of scientists? Well, my issue with that is that it's not a reliable, those don't tend to be reliable methods. So I think we should and we do. I think especially people who have taken meditation very seriously because that is the only tool

we have, and I really see it as a tool, as a scientific tool, we have for investigating our own personal experience, for investigating consciousness directly. And what's interesting too about meditation is that it serves the same function. It gets us to actually drop some of these false intuitions. It has that effect because when we use our attention in that way, we can actually see through some of these illusions that the brain creates for us. The illusion of self can drop away,

the illusion of conscious will can drop away. Even in one of the chapters of my series on space and time, I talked to physicists about space and time. One thing that I found interesting there, and again, this is just interesting. I don't know how much weight we need to put in it, but physicists are basically in agreement at this point that space is an emergent property, that space is not part of the fundamental story. And what's interesting about meditation practice is that usually comes as an insight as well to

people who have been meditating for many years or experienced meditators. And there's a way in which it actually makes sense that the brain could be mapping something out for us, you know, something that is part of the external reality that makes us feel that there is space directly in the way that we experience it where we may be perceiving something fundamental, a fundamental structure of the universe that is not really about space in the way that we perceive it. And now I'm remembering that's when I had that conversation with Jan 11 about love where we were talking about something completely

different. We were talking about string theory and different interpretations of quantum mechanics and different dimensions of space and could there be 10, 11, 12 or more dimensions of space. I was talking about how we have no intuitions as human beings for anything like that. We're just like, where would thations as human beings for anything like that. We're just like, where would that space be? We can't do that. Not only can we not go in higher dimensions, but we actually can't conceive of two-dimensional

space even though we kind of feel like we can because we can imagine a plane, like a very thin plane. But the truth is, if you make that plane thinner and thinner, we can't imagine a plane with truly no depth. That's not something that's imaginable to us. And so in that little video clip that my publisher beautifully captured in a kind of sidebar conversation,

I was explaining to someone on our team about this conversation I had with Jan 11, where we really are kind of stuck in three dimensions of space we can't imagine any more or any less and she mentioned love and said well you know how many dimensions is love and she actually got me to realize that there are many many conscious experiences we have that are not necessarily in space and that kind of led me down this path that I get into towards the end of the series, thinking about whether space is like color, where until we reached

the science that told us there isn't green out there in the world, that's being generated by the brain. There are light waves out there, to the extent that we can understand even what light waves are. But the thing we experience is not out there in the way that we feel it is. And is it possible that space is like color, where we only perceive a certain part of the spectrum and the spectrum is larger than we perceive. And that it's giving us information about something about the structure of the universe, but that space is actually not what it really is in the way that we experience it. You mentioned quantum physics.

There's kind of a God of the gaps, quantum of the gaps, entanglement, down at the quark level, etc. Thing that goes on. Have you got, there is, it's like these words just get fucking snuck in. Like where people don't really understand what's going on. They act like it's normal. Yeah, and they say, oh yeah,

it's the quantum fluctuations and we can't explain about it. We don't understand any of that. Before you know it, you're reading the three body problem. Yes. That's a great book. Have you got any sense of whether quantum physics, I mean, quantum physics is playing an important role in everything in that it's a part of physics. But is there something extra special, extra salient about quantum physics when it comes to consciousness?

I don't think so. I think in the same way that modern neuroscience is showing us that our intuitions about consciousness have been wrong in a lot of areas. I think it's a clue. Well, it's not just a clue. There is a lot we don't understand about the physical world, right? And we've hit the quantum level and we are deeply perplexed and there are many efforts to try to understand the types of things we see in quantum mechanics.

And a lot of people, I should say, try to kind of make this connection that, you know, we still don't understand consciousness and that's mysterious and we don't understand quantum mechanics and so maybe it's part of the same thing. And I think that's not the, that's not a good reason for putting them together. But my path, you know, it's interesting, my path brought me to fundamental physics from neuroscience because my work in neuroscience led me to believe that consciousness very well might go deeper in nature and led me to believe if it does go

deeper in nature it could go all the way down to the fundamental. So then I kind of you know had to start working with physicists to understand what that meant or if that made no sense at all or if you know something we already understand about physics that would rule that out. But what I found is if consciousness is fundamental it actually helps us make sense of some of the things that we're seeing in quantum mechanics. That doesn't mean it's true, but it's interesting to me that it's helpful in terms of interpreting those things. And I think whether or not consciousness is fundamental, thinking of it that way in the same way that we've assumed consciousness arises out of complexity, we've actually made a ton of progress in neuroscience based on that assumption. I think we could start with, you know, just as many reasons to start with

the opposite assumption that is fundamental and take the science from that starting point and see where it goes. And I actually think we will make a lot of interesting progress and think about things in a very different way and kind of open up our creativity to the way we think about things, whether or not it turns out to be true or not because we still you know we still haven't figured out that consciousness is due to complexity in the way you know kind of started out with that assumption we haven't gotten any closer to to believing that's true and I think we could start with this other assumption and do some really interesting work there but, I do think that if we think about consciousness as being fundamental,

that it is actually what everything physical that we perceive and measure and see is actually a representation of other conscious experiences arising in the universe. Suddenly lots of things that seem impossible for us to understand seem a little easier to get our minds around. This is usually just the first example that I start with, but there are some physicists who talk about objects that come out of the math. A 10-dimensional object, a decoract, this is just a geometric object that exists because the math says it exists. Most mathematicians wouldn't say there are dechoracs in the universe. It's just that that shape is a possible shape, a ten-dimensional shape. There are some physicists who actually

believe that if it comes out of the math, it actually does exist, it must exist. And Max Tegmark is one, and there are other other well-known well-respected physicists who will say this who have this intuition that if the math if we can these shapes get created by the math they actually do exist in the universe. If consciousness is fundamental and you know kind of go back to that, like, how many dimensions is love, right? If we kind of change our intuitions about space and realize we're picking up on something about the structure that we're a part of, but it's not about space. And so, picturing a fourth dimension, we're kind of thinking about it wrong.

It's a little bit like picturing a color you've never seen before. It doesn't mean the color couldn't be there. It just means we don't perceive it. And so it's not part of our conscious reality. But if a 10-dimensional object exists, if we're just talking about the physical world as we know it, we don't know how to make sense of that sentence, you know, a 10-dimensional object. If a 10-dimensional object represents a very complex type of conscious experience that arises in the universe, still it's beyond something we could picture, but it's not beyond our comprehension. I mean, we can comprehend that there are all kinds of experiences that we don't understand, don't feel, don't know about. We don't

know what it's like to be a bat. We don't know what it's like to be all kinds of creatures that we already know exist. So if the math and the physics tell us that certain structures exist, and every structure that exists in the universe is at bottom a felt experience or many felt experiences arising, then suddenly those types of things make more sense and are easier to talk about. And I think open new avenues for exploration also. What do you think the future of consciousness research looks like, should look like? This is kind of what the last chapter of my documentary is devoted to, and I wish I were

more creative in my thinking. And I actually talk about the fact that as creative as human beings are, for some reason we're very bad at envisioning the future and where new technologies will lead us. But I did spend a lot of time thinking about this and so I don't know how this will manifest and where it will lead exactly, but the things that I can think of and imagine are things like sensory addition. So I imagine that perceiving new forces and systems like magnetic north and all the other things that we don't sense that feeling them intuitively actually give us a lot of

scientific knowledge. You know all not, but most of the physics that we've done comes from the fact that we feel ourselves in the world. We feel a lot of the physics. And we're able to get a tremendous amount of information just from perceiving it. And so I think if we're able to start to perceive other things in our environment with our brains in a way that we can develop intuitions for them. I think that's one avenue. The other one I mentioned is if it's possible to not just share memories across the ages of one person as they evolve over time, but to share them across human beings. So it wouldn't be the same as having the same experience

in the same moment, but just being able to have someone else's experience as part of my memory, I think suddenly gives us a whole new set of intuitions about consciousness and what's happening and how we relate to one another and all of that. I also was thinking when I was reading Sarah Walker's book, and I mentioned this in the series also, she's a astrophysicist who's working on a theory of life. She talks about, she mentions in her book how Einstein, you know, had this

intuition for space-time. He was the first human being we know of to think about gravity not as a force, but to imagine that space and time are somehow part of the same fabric. And when that fabric warps, it affects how objects move, right? So rather than gravity being a force, it's actually the warping of space-time. And he had that intuition, he had that insight. But it took him years and decades to formalize that intuition to be able to express it to others. I mean, again, it's another communication issue where if somebody else doesn't share that experience, it's very difficult to talk about and communicate it.

So it took decades for him to get this out in the mathematics and in language and to communicate it to other scientists so that other people could share this idea and move forward with it. And I had this thought while reading her book, you know, what if that intuition could be shared? You know, that's a conscious experience. That's a felt experience. He has, you know, later, ten years later in his life, he still has the memory of that intuition. The intuition didn't go away for him. Is there some way in which in the future human beings might be able to share and really progress science? I mean, imagine if Einstein, the day he had that intuition, could have shared it with 15 other scientists. And so, yeah, it's in this vein that I imagine,

if it's possible, that this is kind of where things will be headed. Heck yeah. Anika Harris, ladies and gentlemen. Anika, I love the fact that you went and did a necessarily complex audio documentary series, trying to answer these questions after writing a book on it. Where should people go? They want to check out the documentary? For the documentary, there's a website for the documentary. It's just lightsondocumentary.com.

My website, you can find all of my social media links and all of that, and that's anikaharris.com. Thank you, Anika, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or non-fiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting

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