Within Reason - #104 Annaka Harris - Is Consciousness Fundamental?

Episode Date: May 4, 2025

Annaka Harris is an American writer. Her work touches on neuroscience, meditation, philosophy of mind and consciousness. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Get Annaka Harris’ documentary Lights On here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anika Harris, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. You've just released a long audio documentary. How many episodes is it in total? 10, 10 chapters, yes. 10 episodes on 10 chapters on consciousness. Obviously, this is a topic that you can discuss for 10 hours without hesitation.

But why this? Why now? Why are 10-part documentary on consciousness? Yeah. Yeah. You know, it really just came together organically. I published a book about consciousness that came out in 2019 called Conscious. And by the end of my researching and writing that book, I really became convinced to my own surprise that this question about whether consciousness might go deeper in nature than the sciences have previously assumed was actually. actually, you know, not just a legitimate question, but possibly a really important question to be asking. And so I published that book and was thinking about what I wanted to work on next and what became very clear to me was that I just wasn't finished asking questions about

this topic. And so actually, a film producer friend of mine came to me with an idea for a film and gave me kind of a project, which was, why don't you just record, you know, conversation with everyone you want to talk to. You have this long list of experts and scientists you really want to talk to. Just start recording and maybe this will become dialogue for a film or, you know, we didn't quite know where it would go. But given that project, I knew this was exactly what I wanted to do. I was very, very relieved to have someone tell me that this is what I should do. And so what I learned through that process was that I wasn't just recording for interesting dialogue, but that I was kind of on this journey.

And each conversation, you know, I had a list of people I wanted to talk to, but I didn't end up going in the order. I thought I would. Each conversation kind of led to the next conversation. And the whole process ended up taking about four years. And so my thinking evolved during that time. I started to get more of a concrete sense of what I thought might be going on if consciousness goes deeper in nature. I published articles along the way. I spoke at conferences.

And so we include all of this. And so I ended up using the audio to create a documentary in which I narrate my story and kind of where I began and all the people I spoke to and drop in all of these conversations. and you follow me to the conference and, you know, it really is a true documentary, even though it's only audio, but we use sound effects and music to give you the sense that you're kind of coming along with me over the course of these four years. I ended up actually talking to about 35 people. We only included, I think, 14 or 15 in the series. But, yeah, it was my full-time project.

Yeah. And a lot of these people that you've spoken to will be familiar to listeners. of my show you've had featuring in this documentary, Philip Goff, who's been on my show, Annel Seth has been on my show. I think Brian Green makes an appearance at some point. Yes, that's right. And so it's familiar territory. And so will hopefully be the subject of consciousness. I imagine that basically everybody who interviews you at the moment begins with the question, how do you define consciousness? And I do kind of want to get there, but because that's the obvious question, I want to start somewhere slightly differently, which is,

Okay. You just talked about how consciousness might go deeper than the science is originally allowed for, and you talked about a sort of journey from one position to another. So what I want to ask is, is how would you describe where your worldview was on consciousness and where is it now? Okay. Well, I would say originally, I made the assumption that most scientists make, certainly most neuroscientists. At the time, I was working with neuroscientists, primarily. that consciousness emerges at some level of complex processing, namely in brains, that you would only find consciousness in, you know, living creatures that have a brain and a central nervous system, you know, which, how simple the creature could be, we're not sure, there's a lot to learn, we don't quite understand how this comes into being, but the assumption was that that is where consciousness arises in the universe, and, And at some point, we will understand why that is the case.

So in my about 20 years working with neuroscientists, what I kept bumping up against was this realization that this assumption we've made about consciousness being connected to complexity and arising at this very high level of information processing, that the intuitions we have for me, making those assumptions are actually false intuitions. And there are intuitions that we know to be false based on modern neuroscience. And so the more I was recognizing that the more we learn about the brain, the less firm the ground is that we're standing on when we try to assume that consciousness is emergent and complex and only arises in brains. And so I noticed this kind of chipping a way of what I thought was evidence that we had for making this assumption and realize we actually don't. And so we can get, we can get into those details if you want. But I, by the end of my writing my book, Conscious, I had become convinced that we, well, I'll put it

this way, so that we can make one or two, one of two assumptions when we, when we want to try to understand what consciousness is. And we really, because we, because we, don't know the answer, we're kind of forced to start with one or another assumption. So when we look out at the universe, at all of the matter and all the configurations of matter and everything that comes into being, we can look out at all of that and say, okay, which configurations of matter contain consciousness or give rise to conscious experiences? And the answer is either all or some. We know the answer isn't none because we have evidence of at least our own conscious experiences. And so we've led with the assumption that the answer is some. Not all of them

are. Some of them are. And so where, which ones and how does it come into being? And I realize that the reasons for making that assumption that we have actually fall apart pretty quickly upon closer inspection and that it logically actually makes more sense to assume that all of them do. And I know that sounds crazy. And it still sounds crazy even to me. And, um, This is part of my journey and part of why I wanted to talk to all of these scientists. I actually wanted to be talked out of this position by smart people if I was in fact wrong. But I couldn't shake the fact that when I looked at modern neuroscience, what I looked at what we do know and don't know, it actually makes slightly more sense to assume consciousness is a much more fundamental feature of the universe. is something that is, you know, not, it's obviously fascinating, mysterious, and interesting, but

perhaps not complex. So perhaps something more like gravity and less like high levels of computation. Yeah, I think a lot of people have an inbuilt assumption that, firstly, consciousness is a question for the scientist, maybe more so, or as much at least as for the philosopher, That is, with enough looking down a microscope and equations on the blackboard, we will explain what consciousness is and how it comes about. And also the assumption that consciousness is kind of the sole inhabitant of, or is solely inhabited by, in like brains, you know, so maybe in some animals, maybe most animals, maybe not insects. We're not really entirely sure how it works, but we'll get there eventually. There is this talk, though, that consciousness is something more foundational built into the universe that isn't so neatly attached to biological organisms. The first question that might arise here, just to clear up any conclusion, confusion, are you a materialist?

Because when it comes to consciousness, believing that consciousness is something more than just this scientific product of the brain, for a lot of people, that means that they believe that the soul exists or that there's some immaterial mind or something, but you're still a materialist. No, I'm absolutely a materialist, a physicalist, and I actually believe, so this is one, maybe the only place that Philip Goff and I disagree, I think it should be approached through science. And I think our scientific methods have proven to be adaptable and expandable and to evolve over time and that it just will take some creativity in finding ways to look at this differently and finding different ways to interrogate consciousness. experiences. And that's actually what the last chapter of the documentary is about. It's called the future of science. And I get into where I think, you know, different scientific experiments might lead in the future if we kind of follow this assumption that consciousness is a more foundational aspect. Oh, I was going to say something else and I forgot what my, oh, you asked if I was a physicalist. Yes. So I think if consciousness

is fundamental. And even if it's not, I think the physical world that is clearly there that we can measure in all sorts of ways that we learn more and more about every year, if consciousness is fundamental, it simply means that there is another element to the physical world that we don't yet understand or understand how it's connected. I mean, this is kind of taking you to the to the punchline of all of my searching. But the idea is that if consciousness is kind of the fundamental thing, it is actually what the math and the physics is describing at bottom. And it's why we have such a hard time grappling with the results of quantum mechanics. Because if at bottom what everything is made of is felt experience, there's a very different way to

interpret what we see at the level of the quantum. And so I'm not saying that matter, you know, it doesn't exist or something else or is created by the mind or anything else, but that matter at bottom what it actually is is felt experience. It's describing felt experience. And one thing that's very interesting to me is that clearly, if consciousness is fundamental, there is a structure to it. I mean, we see nothing but structure and the laws of nature are the laws of nature. And so, yeah, that's something that I've become very interested in. The kind of the end of the documentary starts to deal with is, you know, why, why does consciousness have a structure? How is the structure related to what's experienced?

Similar to what neuroscience has been doing this whole time, but it applies it to everything rather than just the brain. You know, we understand when the brain is in certain states, it causes certain experiences to arise. We have a general sense of why an experience of green materializes when I look at a leaf. You know, we can understand the light waves bouncing off the leaf, entering the retina, being processed by the brain, and then the brain generates this experience of seeing green. You know, the green is not out there in the world, but the experience of green is generated based on this structure and how I'm interacting with the outside world. And so the question would really just kind of move from neuroscience to the rest of the world. You know, what is it about the structure that we perceive? How is that related to the experiences that arise and, you know, what is the range of experiences that arise? We'll get back to Arnika in just a moment, but first, do you struggle to focus? I know I do quite a lot of the time, and especially given my line of work, it can be incredibly frustrating when my brain just doesn't allow me to get on with what I'm trying to get on with. Luckily, people like me are exactly who today's sponsor, Brain FM, was created to help.

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that is basic stuff down here consciousness sitting above it you're talking in a language which kind of does the opposite it says that the material stuff the zeros and ones the material sits above this more fundamental thing called consciousness but what does it mean what's the clearest way you found of explaining to people what it means to say that consciousness is fundamental in a way that doesn't just sound like some hippie-dippy LSD trip type thing you know what I mean

So I have not found a way except to create an 11-hour documentary that leads you there. Yes, available in the description. It is very hard to do in a few sentences. It's hard to do even in a two-hour interview. But we can walk back a little bit if you think it would be helpful to discuss why it is that our assumptions about what we've always thought consciousness is are likely wrong. Yeah, because maybe we can get to where we want to go. Yeah. What's wrong with the initial picture?

Yeah. So, I mean, there are many places I can start for right now. I'm just, I tend, well, let me, actually, I'll start. I'll give two starting places. So one place I often start and where I start in my book is with these two questions that I think are really useful for shaking up our intuitions. And they're questions that kind of expose the strong intuitions we have about what consciousness is, what it's doing. And the first question is, can we get conclusive evidence that a system, that a living system, or any other system, is having conscious experiences from the outside, from behaviors. There are any behavior that we can say, okay, if we see A, B, and C, we know there are conscious experiences arising in that system. I would say that for the most part, our intuitions very strongly tell us, yes. And there are countless examples of this. I usually go to the example of my daughter skinning her knee or, you know, seeing a friend I haven't seen in a long time.

She's running towards me with a smile on her face. all of this behavior is pretty much conclusive evidence to me that there is a conscious experience there of love, excitement, of seeing me, of, you know, whatever. There's a world of conscious experiences for her in the same way there is for me. That intuition can be chipped away at, and not to say that when we assume other people are conscious, we're wrong, but that... it is very hard, if not, I think impossible really, to point to any behaviors where we could conclusively say. And so this kind of points to one of the problems with scientifically studying consciousness is that it's the only phenomenon that we know of that does not have an observable from the outside.

It's not something you can measure from the outside. The only way to have direct evidence of it is to be. Right. So, I mean, as much as I think it's totally safe to assume that you're having a conscious experience right now, I can't have your conscious experience. I can't witness it. I can't feel the, you know, I can sit where you're sitting, but my feeling of the table is not going to be the same feeling you have when you're touching the table. And so that makes it extraordinarily challenging to study scientifically. But it also means we completely rely on two things. Reportability. when it comes to consciousness. So we have assumed that consciousness exists in places where we know it exists for us. And there are a couple of tricky things about this. One is we are the most complex systems we know of in the universe. The human brain is the most complex system we know of in the universe. We are experiencing all of the conscious things we're experiencing and we can only get evidence of other conscious experiences from systems that are almost identical to us or similar to us.

We have no way of communicating with other systems to get feedback about whether there are conscious experiences there or not. And so it's kind of the circular system where we're complex systems, we're conscious, the only place we seem to get evidence of other conscious experiences is from other complex systems that are similar to us. And so therefore, you know, we assume those are the only things that are conscious. One thing that's very interesting here is the split brain research. And actually, I'll give another example first, which is in a couple of different states of the human brain. One is called anesthesia awareness. And the other is locked in syndrome. I don't know if your audience would be familiar with these things.

But essentially, it's a state where the body is completely parallel. but the brain is still very much alive and working and fully conscious. And in this case, there's kind of the opposite of what I described in the first question, which is zero behavior. There's no way to get feedback or evidence or reporting that this system is conscious. You're looking at a person who looks like they're in a coma, yet they're hearing, they're seeing if their eyes are open, they're feeling, they're having as full of conscious experiences as you or I are. And so there's one interesting thing there, which is that it's possible to have as full of conscious experience as you and I have with zero behavior on the outside.

Then there's kind of this in-between example that I talk a lot about in my book and also in this documentary is the interesting research done on split-brain patients. And unless you want me to, I won't go through the whole explanation and just kind of get to the punchline, which is that through, research of people who have surgically had the two hemispheres of their brain severed so that there are no longer connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. It seems that the result of this is that you end up getting something like conjoined twins where you have two islands of consciousness, two sets of experiences of, in many cases of opinions, of thoughts, of preferences in the same body. What's interesting about that, this is that in most people, the left hemisphere is the speaking hemisphere is the hemisphere that is

capable of speech. And so whatever the right hemisphere experiences is, is mute. It's kind of like a locked in patient in the right hemisphere. Now, scientists have figured out ways to talk to the right hemisphere by asking them to point to cards. So the left hand is controlled by the right hemisphere. So you can ask questions of the right hemisphere in a split brain patient by asking them to point to things, to draw things with their left hand. Similarly, the right and left visual fields are projected onto the opposite hemisphere. So you can project something that only the right hemisphere sees and then ask both hemispheres questions about, you know, what was flashed on the screen. And so what you get is without the scientific research, you have a human

being sitting in front of you, who seems perfectly normal, you don't notice in a split brain patient, there are very few side effects that anyone would notice. You ask them a question, what do you feel like having for lunch? And they'll say a turkey sandwich. And there is yet another experience of a self in there saying, I don't want a turkey sandwich. I want tomato soup. Yeah. This is, I mean, I had an episode with Ian McGilchrist about the, Oh, okay, yes, yes, he's wonderful, and I reference his work. Yeah. And it is just phenomenal to think that there might sort of currently right now be sad inside you, kind of two centers of consciousness. It's just that usually they're communicating with each other.

I actually think people would be really interested in at least one of these examples of a study. You're talking about people who've undergone a corpus callosotomy, where the two halves of the brain are separated. They can't communicate. And there was a really interesting study done communicating with words and images proving that they kind of weren't aware of what was going on in each other's hemisphere, right? That's right, yeah. I saw yeah I'll get into those details I just wanted to kind of get to the end of this point which is that so much of our assumptions about what is conscious and what isn't is based on someone's reporting and so you know I will say yeah no I don't I'm completely unaware of my liver's functioning that is unconscious or you might you know flash something that's not fast enough for me to register You'll say, did you see that picture of the pig? And I'll say, no, I didn't see it. What's interesting is that lots of things could be experienced consciously. One, that don't enter my stream of memory. So I have a chapter on memory for this reason. So we rely on reportability, as I was describing. But then we also rely on memory. If I have a thought, I don't know, I feel like going to get some flowers today. But that doesn't enter my stream of memory, or I'm giving.

a drug that that kind of wipes that from my memory, I wouldn't be able to report on it if it never enters my stream of my, if a thought comes into being and then disappears and never enters the stream of memory, I will say that was not consciously experienced. And so memory is a very interesting thing here. And I think there are a lot of, we have a lot of counterintuitive assumptions we make about consciousness based on this as well. And so when we talk about, you know, the split brain patient. That's a much clear thing to see. But at the same time, there could be conscious experiences, and I think very likely are in nature, that are not associated with memory. And so they come in and out of being very quickly. And there would be no way for me, the reporter in

my left hemisphere, or even just the processing in my brain, to ever have access to those experiences, let alone report on them. And so this idea that we think we can rely on each individual person to say, yes, I'm conscious now. No, I'm not. not conscious of that and that there is no conscious experience of it anywhere, I think is really, is really problematic. Yeah, because so much of our. Often people, often people will say, well, we know that not everything is conscious because when I'm under anesthesia, I'm not conscious. But that's simply your memory, you're reporting. You, you know, we can't even tell the difference between loss of memory and loss of consciousness. You would expect the same result. Sure,

you would expect the same result after a surgical procedure if you wiped out the person's memory of that period of time or if they were unconscious, their experience would be the same. They'd come out saying, yeah, I wasn't conscious. I don't, I have no memory of any. Yeah, there is the horrifying existential consideration that for all we know, anesthesia might just make you immobilized and then wipe your memory. It may be that you experience the pain throughout the entire procedure and then you just forget about it. Yeah, but that is, that points to a very important piece here, which is that we are relying both on memory and reportability. And we know that the brain is not completely interconnected in that way. And so, yes, the idea that

there may be systems in the brain or even systems, you know, much simpler systems in our body that give rise to very minor conscious experiences. You know, even I give the example in my book of some of being pregnant, which I thought about a lot when I was pregnant, right? I mean, eventually a brain has developed in your body, you wouldn't expect to, if the, you know, at some point very late in gestation, there's an experience of sight or sound or whatever those things are, I wouldn't expect those to be shared with me, right? That's a separate conscious experience. And there could be all kinds of systems like that. And so this idea that we think we can rely on what I, Onica, can tell you is conscious or not, is really not something that's reliable. But I'm happy to go back and explain some of these experiments. So much of our conscious or understanding of consciousness subtly relies on something like memory.

Like if I, even for me to say to you, well, right now I can see a microphone, those words coming out of my mouth necessarily have to be after the experience that I'm reporting of having seen it. And so if I could somehow see it in a way that didn't enter into my memory, I would be incapable of ever communicating that I'm conscious. I wouldn't remember that conscious experience, but the conscious experience still happened. And if that's the case, then it opens the door to so many more things having these conscious experiences. And I think one really interesting way to demonstrate this is with these split brain patients.

Can you tell me specifically about the case in which a person would stand up and walk to the other side of the room and be a little bit unclear on why they did it? Yeah. Well, so that gets into even a second point that can be made with split brain. research. I wonder if I should go back a little bit. And actually, just so your listeners know, I play a video, obviously it's only audio, but I play a video that was recorded of one of these experiments being done. And I kind of narrate over it to talk to talk the listener through so they can understand what you're seeing when you watch the video. But there, yeah, there's an actual experiment that I play in the documentary. And so I guess, you know, a simple, a simple exercise that has been done in many different forms

is flashing, as I said, though, at the right and left visual fields, get projected onto the opposite hemisphere. And so you can flash something that just get seen by, let's, I'm trying to think, which would be more useful. It just gets flashed to the right hemisphere. So something in the left visual field is shown to the right to the right hemisphere. Right hemisphere. That's right. And so the left hemisphere has not seen this object. Let's say it's a bell. The left hemisphere has not seen this object. When you ask the person, did you see anything? Did we flash anything? She will say no. I saw nothing. And then you ask the person to pick up their left hand and draw what they saw and they will draw a bell. Or,

Similarly, they'll put out cards. They'll put out, you know, a bell, a cat, a pencil, you know, many different cards and say, pick the card of the thing that you saw. I just want to, I just really want to, like, pause for a second. Just in case anyone's like doing the washing up, not really paying attention, somebody has shown an image of a bell is asked. What did you see? I didn't say anything. I've got no idea. And yet, when asked who draw what they saw, can draw it. It, like, the implications for consciousness here, because that's what we're talking about, the idea that... The left hemisphere will be surprised. When the person looks at it and you ask them, why did you draw a bell? They will not know why. And crucially here, the left hemisphere is also sort of responsible for the speech stuff going on. So, like, the reporting that's actually coming out of one's mouth is left hemisphere.

And for me, this is... This is, this is terrifying because it sort of implies that there is this conscious experience. somewhere inside of me that, like, there's some part of me that isn't aware of it, and the only part of me that can communicate is somehow disconnected from it. I mean, that is absolutely fascinating. But so what happens when? I mean, the chances that anything like that is happening in a brain that is connected is very low. So, you know, I should say that that's a very unique type of brain in which the hemisphere,

there's no communication. And even in some of these surgeries, they don't completely surgically split them because it's unnecessary and you know um so i don't think i don't think this is the case for for healthy brains um that are intact but i think what is possible is there are other systems um that are giving rise to conscious experiences um sure you know very different from the ones that that we report on that we consider to be ours you know the brain is structured in such a way that it makes sense that we have memory of this that certain things enter memory stream other things don't um the reason we feel like a self, we can get into that a little bit if you're interested.

One of the chapters of my documentary is about how the feeling of being a self gets constructed. But yes, just to not terrify everyone too much. I think it's actually a way to see this that's actually quite beautiful and less scary. Although I take your point. And I've been creeped out by many of these. Yeah. Well, at the very least, it's exciting, whether you're, scared or you can kind of

romanticize it. It's very exciting. It's clearly we don't, we have not been thinking about things the right way. And we've been following intuitions that have very likely been misleading us about what consciousness is and where we might find it in the universe. In particular about the

unity of the brain as the product of a singular consciousness that sort of comes about as the result of atoms arrange in the right way inside of cranium somewhere. But I did really want to just detail this example. It's a similar kind of study,

but yeah, the interpreter thing. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so they do studies like this. Then in some of them, they would ask the participant to perform some sort of action, and they would ask only the right hemisphere. So they wanted to make sure

that the left hemisphere, the speaking, reporting hemisphere, was not aware of the command. I should also say these people have enrolled in this study, they're interested in understanding their own brains, you know, they're not doing any of this against their will, they're happy to participate, they go willingly, they understand all the implications and everything that's being studied. And so they will communicate just to the right hemisphere of the brain, something to the effect of, I've read so many of these, I mix them up, but I'll give a general, they'll say, you know, please stand up and go walk to the window at the other side of the room. And so the right hemisphere understands this command and is happy to comply with the experimenters. We'll get up and start walking across the room. Then the experimental will ask the subject, why did you walk to the other side of the room? Now, the only conscious, you know, being capable of answering out loud is the left hemisphere. And this is something that's very

strange that Ian McGilchrist has done a lot of research on that I find fascinating. What happens in that case is the left hemisphere seems to almost instantaneously generate a reason that the person believes for why they got up and started walking. And it doesn't seem to be that they're confabulating or that they're confused or, you know, this has done many, many, many times repeated endlessly. And so a person in this situation might say, oh, I was thirsty, I was going to get some water. And time and time again, they truly seem to believe this. They somehow their brain generated a reason, you know, based on survival or whatever, however our brains have evolved, that their needs to, or cooperation between the two hemispheres, who knows, but. And so time and again, you give the person a command through the right hemisphere. We, you know, the experimenters know exactly why the person picked up that pencil, walked across the room, went to the elevator,

whatever it was, they were commanded to do. The left hemisphere has no idea and we'll say, oh, I needed to use the restroom. Oh, I thought I left my jacket in here. And so Michael Gazzaniga, the neuroscientist, the main neuroscientist who was involved in this research, calls this phenomenon the interpreter. And there's a lot of interesting neuroscience suggesting that there is some type of process like this that takes place in a healthy brain. And the truth is we can we can see this taking place a lot. I mean, we're very story-oriented animals. We can make lots of connections very easily, and we often think we have reasons for our behavior that we know to be incorrect. Yeah. So, I mean, the crucial observation in that, I think, is that when you walk

someone through the split brain patient stuff and you say, okay, you tell the right hemisphere of the brain to get up and walk, and when you ask the person, and it's only the left hemisphere that can respond, you expect that they'll say, oh, I don't know why I did that. I've got no idea, because they're confused by it because they don't have any conscious experience. And they have no reason to lie in that situation either. They should be happy to, I mean, in other circumstances where they're being, they're being interrogated about things, they will say, I don't know, or I didn't see it. You know, those are people who are not, yeah. But in this case, weirdly, they don't say, I don't know. They do know, but they're wrong.

And it just happens instantly. And so you said that this can happen in the sort of conjecture, at least, that this can happen in healthy brains too. What kind of examples might that kind of thinking manifest in? How would the interpreter work in a healthy brain? So there's one relevant study. So one place here that we know human beings are at least sometimes or often wrong is in the process of decision making. And this is actually one of the intuitions that I like to. shake up in all of my writing, and I do this in my documentary, this intuition that we have

a conscious will. And so I always like to distinguish between what I call free will and conscious will. Because free will, I think when most people use it, we're talking about like a decision-making process that is in nature. And clearly there are decision-making processes in nature, and the more complex the organism, the more complex the decision-making process is what I'm terming conscious will is the sense that it is our consciousness. It is the conscious thought, the conscious experience, the conscious feeling that is the will itself. And what's interesting about what modern neuroscience tells us is that our conscious awareness of making the decision is at the tail end of a lot of other processing. And so one more recent study that was done

that I find so fascinating, I believe it was 2013 or 2000. 14, they put participants in an fMRI machine and showed them a screen with two numbers. And they were given the instructions that with these two numbers, you can either add or subtract them. There's a, there's a kind of a clock with a second hand. I mean, it's not a clock with a second hand. I actually forget the name of the device, but it's so that the person and the participant in the scanner can mark the moment they make the decision. So it's, you know, for all intents and purposes a second hand going around. They look at two numbers. They know they're going to decide whether to add or subtract the two numbers. They mark the moment where they make the decision.

And all the while, their brains are being scanned functionally in an MRI machine. And the researchers can tell up to four seconds not only which they were going to decide whether to add or subtract. But at what Sorry, not just when, but what they were going to do, whether they were going to add or subtract. So up to four seconds prior, they know when the decision is going to be made and what decision will be made. There are kind of countless examples of this. I talk a lot about priming, priming processes in the brain in my book and in my documentary series, which again shows lots of processes that feel to us, that we are consciously in the present moment with them

when in fact all of these things are taking place before we have any conscious awareness of them. So, sorry, did I say priming? I didn't mean priming. David Eagleman talks about this a lot in his work where all of the signals that are kind of coming in through our senses come in at different times. Binding.

These are binding. Binding, right. Yes. So putting together different sort of sensory inputs, light, sound, all that kind of stuff. So sound waves travel at different speeds than light waves, our touch receptors, and then all of these things need to be communicated to the brain. They all take different amounts of time to be received by the brain and then processed by the brain. All of that happens in about 500

milliseconds before we have the experience of whatever it is hitting a key on the piano or playing tennis. We have the experience of seeing the ball hits. the racket, hearing the ball hit the racket, and feeling it hit the racket all in the same moment when the signals are actually traveling at different speeds and get processed by the brain at different speeds. And so these are all called binding processes. Again, it shows how our conscious experience kind of lags behind the physical world, where all of these things are taking place that feel that, you know, we are receiving them in the exact moment that they're taking place when in fact our conscious awareness is often, I would say most often at the tail end

of a lot of processing, including decision making. And so we have this experience. I think it's another reason why we've assumed the consciousness is complex. We have this experience that making a decision happens in the conscious, in the present moment of the conscious experience when in fact almost everything is put into place before you have the experience. And this is related to the interpreter where you can have an experience saying, oh, yes, I'm thirsty and that's why when you're kind of unaware of all the behind the scenes processing that's taking place before you have the conscious experience. Yeah. Of course, we are knocking quite loudly at the door here of the free will discussion. But I think that, of course, is sort of its own thing.

The question that springs to mind for me right now is like, you mentioned before this idea of the self. And you're talking there about different inputs coming in. I mean, if you see a cargo pass and you experience the maybe the sort of feeling of fear and you see the visual of the car and you hear it coming towards you. Maybe you even feel vibrations in the air, like the wind or something. And that all gets kind of put together into one experience. It feels like that is, I feel like I've sort of got a self as me, that here, and all of these things approach the self, are taken in by the self, and then the self puts them all together. Yeah.

But you could also think of my conscious experience, not as something which receives those inputs, but just those inputs sort of all just put together. How do you best think of, like, the recipient of these sensory inputs? Yeah, I mean, it's tricky because there's, you know, I, I'm often thinking about what does A, B, or C mean if consciousness is fundamental. And so there's kind of different ways to look at this, whether we're talking about consciousness being fundamental or not. Let's start with just what we already know about the self. So memory is largely responsible for this experience of, and what I refer to as the illusion of a feeling like a self.

is the sense that we are this concrete entity, kind of as you described as the receiver, that we kind of move through time and we receive all of these moments, we experience all of these different things, but that there's some kind of solid entity that is moving through time. When, in fact, I think, you know,

the experience of being a self is better described as a kind of endlessly fluctuating phenomenon in nature. I often use the analogy of a wave. You know, we say wave as if it's a single thing, but if we're looking at ocean waves, if we're talking about waves, we understand that what it is is an endlessly changing process in nature. It's not a static thing. And that is clearly what the brain is doing. That is what our experiences. Every new experience we have is generated anew by neuronal activity in each new moment. And so the self, the illusion, the illusory piece is that we're not that, that it's not in every,

changing process, but that there's something solid moving through time. And I think that is created by a couple of things, memory being one of the main ones, but the other one is something you talked about, too, which is our perceptions. And so, yes, there's this illusory effect of things happening in nature simultaneously or of having a conscious thought that lead us to kind of, kind of create this sense or this illusion of being a solid self when that that doesn't really accurately describe the underlying reality. And so you mentioned, you know, fear and having this experience of the fear being the thing, the experience of fear being the thing that's driving us. And this is often an example that people use when they try to make an evolutionary argument for consciousness

evolving and affecting our behavior in that way. But again, again, it's another case of this same phenomenon where our bodies and brains actually respond very quickly. If we see a car coming at us or if we encounter a bear on a hike, any of these things that we have this intuition that, oh, it's the fact that I'm feeling the fear that gets me to respond so quickly. That's actually not the case. Our bodies respond much faster and our brains are responding before we actually have the conscious awareness of what the situation that we're even in is. This reminds me of a really interesting story that one of the neuroscientists I interviewed told

me, so Patrick House is a neuroscientist, I interview who's in the documentary, he studied toxoplasma, toxoplasmosis, this parasite that affects the behavior of rats, which is incredibly interesting. That led him into this area of free will because the parasite affects the rats' likes and dislikes, actually changes their behavior, affects the neurotransmitters. And so it's very interesting to then start to think about where is the self, where is the free will, you know, in this system if the desires and preferences can be changed by a parasite that enters the brain. So he was actually working on a story.

He was interviewing Eric Hazeltine, who is in the U.S. intelligence agency. and they were doing a patrol of an area in Afghanistan. And this neuroscientist friend of mine, Patrick House, was just there, you know, along for the right and doing interviews. Eric Hazeltine also had studied neuroscience, so they were having a lot of conversations about the brain. And that was part of the reason why Patrick was doing this research. So they were, you know, in an armored car doing a patrol. They're moving in one direction, traveling at a normal speed, and suddenly he turns the car around as quickly as he can and just hits the gas and they're going, you know, however fast, this thing can travel back to base. You know, my friend Patrick didn't want to ask any questions in the moment, but then they get back and they're apparently safe.

He realizes, you know, something scary happened. And he asks Eric, why did we turn around? and Eric says, I don't know. I can't. I'm not sure. And it took him some time before he was able to actually process and remember and put all the pieces together. And later they're hanging out and he says, there were no children on the road. But this is so interesting. It's such a good example of, you know, something that we don't normally notice, but how, you know, his intuitions have been highly trained by the situation that he's in. You know, he has to be. very attuned to danger and to changes in circumstance. And so this was all subconscious for him.

All that happened was his body and his mind was new. We've got to get out of here. Something isn't right. And it was only later that he became aware of the clue that he had that something wasn't right. And there are lots of examples of this. It's very interesting. I talk a lot about Gavin DeBecker's work, who wrote a book called The Gift of Fear, who talks about all of these unconscious signals we pick up on as human beings, as animals, we can tell if someone's adrenalized, we can tell, we can pick up on lots of clues unconsciously that give us a sense that someone isn't safe or that we're in a dangerous situation. Yes, the so-called gut instinct. That's right, yes, and that's why they're so useful. But consciousness, the conscious awareness

of those things is not as we intuit behind those responses and those actions. And so that's That area is very interesting. So I think we've sort of pushed consciousness and hopefully people are following that by consciousness, we don't mean the consciousness that you're like always aware of. We just mean experience as it happens, whether it's remembered, whether it's reported on or not. We sort of pushed it slightly below the level of our general awareness and intuitions into hemispheres of the brain, maybe gut instincts, this kind of thing. but we've still got quite a long way to press it down before it gets to, like, the fundamentals of the universe. So, because when somebody hears you say consciousness is a fundamental, like, thing of the universe, a bit like gravity, I'm going to be looking around and being like my chest of drawers or my microphone, like, is it conscious, is there consciousness in it?

Like, what do we mean here? Like, where is this consciousness thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, first, you, it was good that you brought this back to the definition, because I think it is useful here at some point. to just give a little bit more, which is, yes, when I use the word consciousness and hear what I'm interested in what I think is mysterious, the thing that we haven't solved, is not complex

thought. It's not, you know, all the things human beings do. It is simply just the fact that a collection of matter or a system has a felt experience from the inside. You know, when a camera processes light waves, or I give a different example, a plant processes light waves, and, you know, it's subsequent behavior, the way it turns its leaves, is based on the type of light it's receiving, you know, all of that. We can imagine very easily that happens without seeing green. We don't think that plants are seeing red and green and having an experience. Cameras are not having an experience of green, but, you know, all of these signals get combined in such a way by my brain as to generate an experience of seeing green. There's a felt experience. We can imagine other felt

experiences that are very, very minimal that are, you know, not necessarily human, but maybe insects have them, like pressure, temperature change. But anything that is felt, if there's a felt experience at all, whether it's as minimal as pressure or as elaborate as, you know, hearing a symphony, that is the fact of felt experience, the fact that the lights are on, as my documentary is called. And so, now I've lost your question. Well, it's good to have. So what would it mean for it to be fundamental? Yeah. Yes.

And so the idea is, let me think of a way, a way to get there that sounds less crazy. Part of my argumentation, and it is kind of this, it's an intellectual exercise that I've been doing for so long that I couldn't deny that it continues. to lead me to the same place. And so part of the argument is, does it even make sense for felt experience to arise at some point, at any point? And kind of the conclusion I came to was that that is actually a nonsensical idea. And so, you know, not by my, this is very counterintuitive to me, but just by thinking this through intellectually, it kind of has to be at the fundamental level if it's impossible for it to arise at some point. So that the typical picture is the universe is made of non-conscious stuff.

There's atoms and electrons and then there's planets and eventually life comes into being. And at some point, those, you know, we know we're all made of stard us. We know the ingredients are all the same, but they get molded and configured in such a way that at a certain point that matter has a new dimension to it. There is an experience of being that matter. And there are different ways we can get to this. But the idea is that you kind of have to be a dualist, which I'm not, and have a very hard time subscribing to, to think that consciousness emerges at some level of complexity. Because basically what you're saying is the matter, as far as the behavior and everything we can measure from the outside. Everything's exactly the same. But now there's an

experience present. There, you have to kind of add something new. And so strangely, it's almost a more new age view than placing consciousness at a fundamental level. And so what I started doing once I kind of became convinced that, you know, as, and I kind of did this exercise of like, how far down does it go? David Chalmers, the philosopher, I think he's been on your show, doesn't, doesn't excellent job of explaining how possibly a thermostat or a system like a thermostat might be the first place where consciousness comes into being because there's a determination between, you know, one state and another state. And perhaps it's that that causes it. And so I kind of went down that path and went down, you know, insects, thermostats. And eventually what I came to, I wouldn't say believe,

because I don't believe this, but I think I've convinced myself that it actually makes much more sense that consciousness is what matter is at bottom. And so part of my journey was talking to physicists about this because I know how crazy it sounds. But I had convinced myself that it was a worthwhile endeavor. And I was very curious to see how this idea might fit into current understandings in physics. And so the idea is, I mean, truthfully, when we look at fundamental physics, when we look at what we now understand about the most fundamental things, it is quite perplexing. As many physicists have said, you know, nobody understands quantum mechanics. I don't think that means we won't ever. I think we will. But I think it's possible that part of the

reason we've had trouble making progress is that we're continuing to look for the thing. in the matter and the way we perceive matter to be rather than an understanding that what's underlying it is actually experience. And that what matter is, this is going to sound completely crazy too, but you know, trust me if you listen to 11 hours of my documentary, it sounds less crazy, that what matter is that we're kind of confusing perception with the belief that those things exist out there in the forms that we perceive them. And so it's a lot of actually not that much of a stretch from understanding that green is not something that is out in the universe. Green does not exist. Green exists as an experience, right? And actually now one thing that I talk a lot about in one of the chapters in my documentary is the understanding among most physicists now that space is actually not part of the fundamental story, that space is emergent. And I've been thinking a lot about how we experience space at the level. of the brain. Similar to, I don't think it's a perfect analogy, but similar to how I was just

describing green, where we experience space and our experiences, our perceptions, you know, before we understood light waves and how the brain works, it was clear to everyone that, of course, green is out there. That's, you know, that is a green leaf and we can all confirm it and we have all the evidence we need, like green is out there, that we can now understand that actually the experience is generated by the brain. Similarly, space could be something that I think it's very likely something that is obviously something we perceive that is a part of the structure of reality.

We're getting a glimpse onto something, but our brains give us this map, in the same way we have a map of color and a map of other things, give us this map that feel like space to us. But space itself is actually not a fundamental feature of the universe. It's the way some part of the structure of what we're perceiving is getting mapped for us so that we can navigate it and survive. And so I think we can take this one step further.

And this is kind of how I get there in my searching is we already know that when we look, whenever I perceive, whatever I perceive, whatever object I perceive, I look and see this lamp on my desk. We already know that what's true about those atoms, you know, at the, you know, at the the most fundamental level that we understand is very, very different from how I'm perceiving the lamp to be. And of course, there are all kinds of things I'm not perceiving at all. And so I think it's actually just one step further to think creatively enough to understand that it's possible that this relationalist way of seeing the universe based on quantum

mechanics, which is how many, many physicists now talk about it, that you can't really talk about an individual particle existing on its own, that basically everything is in relationship to everything else. And that's just, you know, straightforward physics. I actually think that makes a lot more sense if what we're talking about at bottom is consciousness. Is consciousness. And so the way one conscious experience is being affected by another conscious experience, comes in the form of perception. And so I certainly don't think this lamp has thoughts. I don't think, I don't even think the lamp is a system in any real way, the way that my brain is a system and can kind of generate an experience of self and memory and all these things, you know.

And so, yes, if consciousness is fundamental, what I imagine something like a lamp to be is electrons and all these other, you know, forces and components of, matter that we understand actually being the way I, I is not quite the right word to use, but the way those conscious experiences that are arising in the universe, in the universe are influencing each other and the conscious experience that is happening over here. And so there's no sense of memory or self or thoughts or anything like that. But, you know, and at this point, this is just, you know, a way of thinking about, things and I don't have any concrete answers, but I would imagine it being much more like millions of tiny little conscious experiences coming into and out of being in every moment,

not entering a stream of memory, not being a part of a larger system, you know, and what those conscious experiences are, I would imagine, would be extraordinarily minimal and something that I couldn't even imagine. But, you know, having to come up with an analogy, maybe, you know, the feeling you have when you walk to cross carpet and you get an electrical shock, you know, just that fleeting experience with, you know, no body, no brain, no thoughts, but just very minimal experiences that come in and out of being. And that is what those things are at bottom. And so our perceptions kind of give us this false view that there are things out there when it's really just other conscious experiences affecting each other. I, one of the first people, one of the first people that you speak to in the documentary is Philip Goff, who I've had on my show. I had him on a few years ago as a proponent of view called panpsychism, which is about sort of consciousness being in and at the basis of everything. And we had to kind of spell out a few of these misconceptions. He believes, in the kind of view you're presenting, that at base, what stuff like is is just consciousness.

And one way that he unpacks that for people, I wanted to basically explain to people who were listening to this thinking, it sounds ridiculous. Why doesn't he have this crazy woman on his podcast? Are you saying that like the atoms are like conscious and they make up lamp somehow? It's like, okay, consider how like other views of whatever is it, the fundamental of reality have been at first received. The idea that everything is made up of the same.

the same stuff, the same kind of thing. That is all atoms, despite something being water and liquids and solids and it's all atoms. That seems crazy. We used to think they needed a new ingredient for life. Yes. There's no way just the, you know, the, you know, the non-conscious material of the world could produce life. Yeah. The idea that atoms are mostly empty space. The idea that string theorists have that everything is just vibrating strings in like 52 million different dimensions. Like, all of these things sound absolutely insane until you start listening. I think maybe there's something to this. So, yeah. One of the things. that Philip Goff does quite helpfully in his book Galileo's error is he points out that if

you try to understand what science deals with, a lot of the time science doesn't tell you what something is, it tells you what it does. You might say, like, what is an electron? And you'll say, oh, well, it's a negatively charged subatomic particle. Well, what does it mean to be negatively charged? Well, it repels other negatively charged, and it's telling you what that thing does. But if you keep asking, but like, what is that thing? Exactly. The question is almost impossible to answer. And so Philip Goff says, the answer to that, what is it question outside of what it does?

If you have to know what it actually is, the answer is consciousness. It's intrinsic quality, yes. Yeah. Yes. Which I agree sounds crazy, but I think actually makes more sense than our assumption that it arises out of complexity. Do you think that would make sense of scientists trying to explain? why fundamental forces are the way that they are,

strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, these kinds of things, because what we're really dealing with that route is something like... Yes, yeah. So one part of my answer is that what I believe is that it requires

a paradigm shift of sorts for people to start shifting their intuitions in order to get answers like that. I don't have answers. for those things, but my hope is that that's where science will go and that it will shed light on things that we don't understand. Yes. So there's, yes. I also, though, think that when we're able to let our creativity break free of the way we normally think about consciousness and just let ourselves assume that it's fundamental, whether or not that's true, but to just let that be the starting assumption and then start to reevaluate some of these other things that we understand in fundamental physics. I have made the case in this article that I'm publishing, actually, that it does help us understand things that are otherwise impossible to understand, starting with many dimensions of space.

And so if, in fact, what we experience to be space and feel so real to us that we're sure it exists in the way that we perceive it, if, in fact, it is our perception of, a structure of consciousness, the idea that there are 10, 11, 12, 50 different dimensions of it are actually easier to grasp now because we cannot, and we just do not, our brains cannot grasp not only any more than three dimensions, but any less than three dimensions. This is something I get into in the series as well. Because of the way our brain maps out space, whatever we're perceiving about the fundamental nature of reality that comes to us in the shape of space. You know, if we think we can imagine two dimensions because there's something within three dimensions we can kind of point to. But the truth is a two-dimensional plane, we can imagine

a piece of paper, but that's not truly two-dimensional. If you get rid of the depth all the way in our ability to understand, it disappears. There's nothing there. And of course, it's even harder to say, you know, where would the fourth dimension be? Like, there's just nowhere for it to be. Yeah, yeah. But I think that's a problem with our map, not a problem with the fact that whatever space is in reality could have many more dimensions to it. Felt experience, just in our limited human way, has many types of flavors and shapes and ineffable qualities to it that when you start to think about, you know, if a Decoract, a tend to, dimensional shape actually exists in reality and is a representation of a conscious experience, that is something that actually just makes a little more sense. That's not to say that that's a

reason to believe that it's true, but it was surprising to me, actually, that there were these areas where if we're asking what matter is and the answer is conscious experiences, suddenly there's a different way to look at a lot of what fundamental physics is telling us. And there are actually, it's very interesting, there are mathematicians, Max Tagmark is one, but there are mathematicians who have this very strong intuition and belief, really, that anything that comes out of the math, any shapes, any geometric shapes, anything that comes out of the math and the physics isn't just an idea or a possibility, it must exist in reality. Now, of course, they may be wrong, but there are a lot of mathematicians and physicists who feel

this way, that if the math dictates it, it actually exists. That makes a lot more sense if what we're talking about are conscious experiences. And if we imagine, you know, the difference between if an ant is conscious, what kinds of minimal experiences it has of, you know, feeling its feet cross, you know, a blade of grass or maybe feeling something like hunger when it needs to eat, you know, that sort of thing. You know, that spectrum all the way to the types of experiences we have. And if you want to put dimensions to it, you can, it's not that hard to see how you could start to map these things out. with dimensions. And then, of course, if there's something that is much more intelligent than we are, you know, in the future or existing someplace else in the universe now, in ways that we can't interact with, you know, one thing that I find really interesting about consciousness

and our ability to communicate is we're actually constrained in our communication by the similar things we experience consciously. So I'll give an example, you know, if I try to explain to someone who was born deaf what, you know, Middle C on a piano sounds like. I can give analogies. I can maybe give it. They can maybe get a sense of it. They will never hear Middle C. There's no, there are no words I can use to communicate the experience. It works when you and I have both heard Middle C, and I can reference it, and you have memory, and you can draw it back. And so suddenly, you know, the more of those similar lollia that we share that you take away, the less you're able to communicate.

And so this is partly where I, oh, sorry, this is partly where I think the future of science could be headed if there are enough scientists who are interested in moving forward with this assumption that consciousness is fundamental. And I think in science, we often move forward with assumptions without having to commit to believing they're true, but just we actually don't know. And so what if we've been wrong with this assumption? Let's start with this assumption. And how do things look?

And what type of experiments might we be able to generate to get a better sense of whether or not this is true? Sure. Well, one question that jumps out at me here is one that's familiar to the panpsychists as well, which in that context is known as the combination problem. We were speaking a moment ago about how let's just put on this cap for a moment and say that fundamental, matter is consciousness. Consciousness is kind of what the universe is made up of. If that's the case, then why is it that if I put these little conscious units together to form a lamp or this microphone, although there might be consciousness happening at the fundamental level, the microphones itself not experiencing a unified consciousness. But if I do it into a brain, if that's the

arrangement of these fundamental conscious atoms, I'm not experiencing trillions and trillions of individual conscious, like, entities all at once, I'm experiencing a single unified sort of unit of consciousness. Why does that happen in some cases and not in others? And how would that sort of come together to be unified in such a way? Yeah. I mean, I think to a large degree, the sense you have that it's unified as an illusion. Okay. So that's, that will be my main answer and actually wrote an article for Philip Goff's edition of the Journal of Consciousness Studies on what I call a solution to the combination problem, which is based on this illusion of self. So I think the premise is not quite right. I think the question doesn't

actually make sense. It assumes a unified self, really, that question. That's right. Yes. And so there's clearly something called. memory. And, you know, their ways, their thought experiments I've been kind of coming up with, I'm sure others, others have come up with similar ones, to kind of shake up this sense of being a self. And one is, you know, part of the way I think about the universe, if consciousness is fundamental, is that essentially all the universe is is conscious experiences coming into and out of being, one after the other. And the truth is, even if it's not fundamental, that is essentially what the human experience is. It is one conscious experience coming after the other. And because we're such, our brains are such complex systems and contain such complex memory, you know, conscious experiences. And again, I really like to emphasize if consciousness is fundamental. I don't necessarily believe it, but this is kind of the framework I'm working in now.

if consciousness is fundamental, memory is the way in which conscious experiences affect one another, influence one another through time. And they're clearly affecting each other through space and through time. So, you know, at the very least, I know you're conscious, right? And so the conscious experiences that you are having are affecting that are happening at that area in space time or affecting the experiences happening here in space time. Similarly, experiences that that I had in the past. Now, we have this sense that we can access those experiences as if we're having them again for the same time, which is not the correct way to look at it, right? There were there were conscious experiences that happened in my 10-year-old brain that this person is not having and can never have, right? So there's an influence from that moment to this moment. Those conscious experiences affect these conscious experience. And there's some, like, memory retained, there's some flavor of what was experienced there that is transferred here. But this is a new conscious experience in a new brain, in a new

system, right? And so one thing that I have been thinking a lot about is, you know, who knows if this will ever be possible, but in a future neuroscience, the only reason that I, well, not the only reason, one of the main reasons I feel this continuity of self is because I, I I have those memories, right? But the truth is, at the level of the brain, the new experiences are being generated anew in every moment. And so there's no real reason why I couldn't have all the experiences, all the memories I have of being me, even though I say me, but when I was a two-year-old brain and a two-year-old, it's a very, very different human. The truth is that person, that two-year-old me was much more different from who's sitting here now than you are from who's sitting. You know, we're much more similar than I am to my two-year-old self. And so there's no good reason why I couldn't have access to, you know, falling down and skinning my knee when I was five years old, the first day of fourth grade, and the experience you're having right now, which is in some physical form, being generated where you're looking at a computer screen and I'm on the other side. If there were some way to have that influence my experience in the future, I would then be someone who could say, yeah, I remember when the house I lived in when I was younger. I remember calling my mother yesterday on the phone. And I remember being Alex having this conversation over there. Whatever, like five minute chunk could be inserted into my stream of memory. And I think one thing a thought experiment like that does, because there's really no good logical reason why that could.

couldn't be done and maybe will be done, actually, in the future. It's a little scary to think about, but what it does is it dissolves this idea that I'm a self, that I'm a concrete entity moving through time, rather than a wave of ever-evolving, changing, newly arising conscious experiences. Yeah, I think the way that that sounds to me is that it certainly undermines the idea of, like, the purpose. permanent self moving through time. Yeah. But even if I abandon memory altogether and say I just have no memories whatsoever, sort of an extreme Alzheimer's where, where like every single moment, every time slice is disconnected from the past.

There's a documentary about a man in this state, actually, that I write about in my, this article that's coming out. But go ahead and then I'll... Okay, so we have such... I wasn't sure if there were any such people, but if there are, like, maybe our general language of the self wouldn't apply to such a purpose. However, it still seems to me that, and of course it's biased by the fact that I could communicate with this person, even if just in that moment, it still seems to me that they have something that, you know, this microphone does not, which even if it's unfair of me to say like, well, I, how do I have a unified self? Because, okay, the self is an illusion. There's still something that I, in scare quotes, that this brain in my mind sort of all put together has, that the microphone doesn't. And I guess what I'm asking is like if it's not, if it's not the consciousness is

emergent of complex arrangements, what is it that I have that the microphone doesn't? Yeah. No, that's thank you for clarifying. That's a great question. And, you know, something I think about and something people ask all the time. So, um, if consciousness is fundamental, it clearly has a structure. And this is the thing that, you know, this is where science will be headed. This is the thing that I'm fascinated by. You know, why does it have a structure? And What is that structure? And how is the structure related to the types of experiences that arise? So clearly, the structure that, you know, we call your brain, we perceive to be your brain, you know, we can just tell it like we see it at this level of conversation. There is a structure of consciousness that is producing all of the things that you're experiencing.

There is the structure that, you know, we perceive to be the microphone. It could, in fact, be part of, you know, some other system that we're unaware of. You know, at this point, fundamental physics has so far to go in terms of understanding what's happening in black holes, what's happening with dark matter and dark energy. And, you know, we just, we don't, there are, you know, huge question marks everywhere. And then if consciousness is fundamental, there are all these other avenues of questions we might have. But based on just my limited thinking of it, it's not hard to imagine that certain structures give rise to extraordinarily complex and ones with memory. even I think there could be extraordinary complex and rich and detailed conscious experiences that have almost no memory associated with them. There could be, you know, huge experiences bigger than anything you and I have ever experienced, but they just come in and out of being.

I don't, you know, this would be an interesting question whether by definition the most complex ones have a lot of memory associated with them. That makes sense to me, and maybe that would be the case. but yes so the question is how does the stress if consciousness is fundamental how does the structure in that location and space time for lack of a better map generate that conscious experience in that moment but I think it's false to think of it as one self one thing one entity experiencing things over time. And it's more accurate for us to start looking at things when we're thinking this way and in this new framework as conscious experiences coming into and out of being. And some carry a lot of information from many past conscious experiences. Some carry a lot of information

from interaction in the present moment with other conscious experiences. But that essentially it's more useful to think about the conscious experiences that are generated and how that's related to the structure of the universe. I think it's difficult for me to imagine exactly what your view would be here without intuitively being able to abandon this sense of the self. I mean, I'm all ears to the idea that the self is an illusion.

I think I find it difficult to conceptualize that, which makes it difficult for me to understand everything you're saying from your from your standpoint yes yes but i suppose like the thing that really confuses me is i've thought about this in the context of how like material in my view is kind of just like arranged in various ways i talked about this view called muriological nihilism quite a lot which is essentially this this observation that when this microphone was created there was no new matter we just sort of took some matter that already existed It's a metal and stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, we just sort of arrange it and put it together. And in that sense, like, there is no thing like called the microphone that began to exist. Instead, we've just kind of organized something and put a label around it, right? Yes. And so the microphone, the table, the room that I'm sat in, all of it is just like arrangements. And there's no real, like, distinctions in essence between those things. It's just something that we label.

Although I would also say there's no real you arranging them, that it really, Yeah, so that's quite crucial. It's like it's the universe unfolding, right? These things are happening. They are events that are unfolding in the universe, including you create, like you're not outside the universe coming in and creating things. You're part of, you know what I mean? That's exactly the mystery is that for me, there's a great argument by Peter Van Inwagon,

which basically says, okay, premise one, there are no real distinctions between material objects. premise too, our minds really are distinct from each other, conclusion, our minds are not material things. And that to me is intuitively plausible because it does feel as though the very existence of the concept of this microphone as opposed to the table or whatever, relies on a human mind to put that label around it. Of course, the material would still exist in this arrangement without anyone to observe it. But conceptually, you know, it requires a mind. And so it feels like there is something that the mind is like bringing to the table, you know? And so I think that's one of the reasons why I find it difficult to discard with the idea

that I have a self that is doing that conceptualizing and labeling, you know? Yeah. So you should sit a long meditation retreat. Yeah, yeah, I probably should. I will say. I should. Because having an intuitive insight for dropping the illusion of self is really, really helpful here. And, you know, I can say that as someone who, you know, lived not understanding the illusion for most of my life and then having a many experiences in succession where I was able to drop that and really see it as an illusion.

I think, you know, it informs so much of my work. It comes up a lot in the documentary. I still think there's a way to intellectually understand, even though I think it just takes you many steps further once you viscerally understand it, like so many other things. I don't think there is a, I think it's wrong to think of subjects and selves and even minds. And so, you know, and again, there's two ways.

I can kind of play the game either way because I don't necessarily believe that consciousness is fundamental, but I can talk as, you know, I can begin the sentence if consciousness is fundamental and then I can begin the sentence if consciousness emerges in brains. Either way, I don't see room for subjects or minds in the way that you describe them. Of course, there are human minds and I can, you know, talk about them in the same way that you do. but the idea that there's a receiver or a generator of the thoughts and feelings and perceptions, I think, is false. These things are just coming into being. There's no you controlling anything. There's no, it's like, you know, there is a succession of, there's some type of unfolding. Okay. What might help me here, and forgive me if this is a naive question,

but if we're talking about everything sort of having fundamental consciousness, what kind of is the relevance of the brain? Like what does the brain do? Yeah, I mean, this is where all the questions will go, but we can ask this question about everything, because ultimately everything we perceive and can measure, and it is ultimately a representation of conscious experiences in the universe.

I would just say that the brain, you know, is a very complex structure. Whatever structure means without space and time. You know, it's like once you get to the fundamental level, forget about consciousness. It's very hard to use the language. We just don't have good language for it. You know, Sarah Walker, I don't know if you know her work or have had her on the show. She's fascinating. And I spend a lot of time on one of the chapters on her work.

She's working on a theory called assembly theory. She's an astrobiologist, astrophysicist. But she's working on a theory that really has a new way of describing life, and she talks about structures in time. And the reason I talk to her is because the way she thinks about life is very similar to the way I think about consciousness. So there's a ton of crossover between the way we're thinking about the structure of the universe. But I just mention her one, because I think your audience would be very interested in her work, and you would be. But she and I run into a similar problem, which is that we're describing things in a way that they haven't been described before, and we are therefore really at a loss for the right language to use. But my hope is that we will develop it.

You know, my hope is, and actually part of my hope with the future of science in the last chapter of my documentary is that we will actually be able to find ways to share experiences directly. because so much of our knowledge and understanding and knowing comes from, I mean, all of it really comes from the direct experience. And so I'm hopeful that being able to experience new things, new systems, new forces, all of that kind of stuff can actually start to evolve our intuitions for, you know, what the universe actually is and is made of. But I actually think might help progress science further because one example I give in the documentary, it actually was inspired by Sarah's book. Sarah and her work talks about how Einstein had this intuition for space time, being the fabric of reality, which was a completely new way of thinking about the way the universe is structured. He had this intuition before he was able to communicate it to anyone else and to other scientists. And so he spent over a decade formalizing this into language. and math in a way that he could pass along to someone else and share the work, right? But it begins

with an intuition. And I've thought a lot about, you know, what if that intuit? That's a felt experience. It exists in the universe. There's some structure in the universe that gave rise to an intuition for space time. If there's some future science where that could be shared with another human being, I mean, there's no, there's no real reason why his human system could have that intuition and another human system couldn't. If he could have shared that intuition with 10 scientists, that day. I mean, the progress that could be made, we would just, we'd be able to make progress much more quickly. I mean, so much, I think so much of our inability to think and speak and communicate clearly on philosophy and science is a linguistic problem. And I was just thinking before

you mentioned space time. It's an experiential problem too. Yeah, go ahead. I was thinking of how suitably German the phrase space time is and how famously Germans will sometimes just sort of put words together to form new words. And you can kind of imagine how before you have the word space time to describe this four dimensional fabric, which even with the word, it's hard to wrap your head around, but you can imagine just trying to like explain what this thing is when you just don't have the words. And so now luckily, the word space time is common enough that people can use it quite casually and we get what people mean. But that word had to be invented after the concept was thought about in order just to communicate it. And I think so much of that

is what's happening in our miscommunications and inability to express our intuitions. Yes, yes. And so hopefully, as you say, the last chapter of your documentary looks towards the future where we might be slightly better at doing that, and I suppose that is the essence of science. And you do talk briefly as well about the sort of the march of science and how it requires these intuition shifts and how once you get said in your ways, we forget how revolutionary some scientific developments were, not just because they're like cool new ideas, but because they reshape how we think about the method of doing science in the first place.

That's right. They reshape our sense of being in the universe, even. Exactly. Sometimes we'll talk about it's like we're actually in a different universe than the one people lived in 500 years ago. Yeah, yeah, seriously. But our sense of where we are is very different. You talk about laying down as a child looking up to the sky.

and if you spend long enough thinking about it, you can actually shift your intuition to realize that you're on a planet looking outward. I have this experience a number of times. I remember when I was young, I used to, when I was bored in school, I think we were in some kind of class where they made us do meditation or something. I was looking at the ceiling. And I managed occasionally. I remember that I was so young, just able to switch my intuition to feel like that was down and I was up. And suddenly I got really scared of falling, you know, because I felt like I was stuck to the ceiling. And that's, you can do that and that's like made up. But that just shows that whether or not your scientific understanding is correct about the universe,

if you thoroughly enough embedded into your thinking, it can literally change the universe that you inhabit as far as you understand it, right? And it really does feel quite different. The only time I ever am able to comprehend the motion of the planets is something like a lunar eclipse where the moon's motion is like slightly noticeable. And I really begin to realize that I'm looking at a big rock floating around in space. But outside of that, I feel like I'm still stuck in that universe most of the time, the sort of middle-aged image of somebody with a big dome over the top of them looking up at the stars. I still feel that way. And it takes a long time to catch up. Me too, even after a lifetime of being someone who likes to shake those intuitions and try.

And I'm, you know, I also, like you, I'm just so interested in truth and understanding and wanting to understand better and more. But yeah, even after all these years, I still have to use some kind of thought experiment to get myself to feel what's real. Yes. And that revolutionary shifting of perspective throughout the history of science hasn't just stopped. It's not like, oh, we've done it now. Yeah, now we're on the right track. That keeps going, and this might be the next frontier for that kind of revolution. There is a paradigm shift coming, whether it has to do with consciousness or not. I don't know. Yes, there always is. Well, as people should be aware by now, the documentary is called Lights On. A link is, of course, in the description. It's available now. You can get it on, like, Spotify, Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, all of these wonderful sources. So we'll link to that down in the description.

And yeah, I haven't listened to all of it, but I listened to a good chunk while preparing to speak to you. And it is, it's one of those that's worth really sitting down and listening to with attention. So, you know, maybe quit with the washing up and actually listen closely. I might also suggest what I suggested to you before we started recording, which is that anyone who's already pretty well versed in this subject, it's intended to be listened to an order, but you can listen to the documentary out of order. and for someone who's very well-versed, I actually have been recommending to some of my friends and some people to start with Chapter 8, which is kind of where I begin my punchline, where I've been headed the whole time.

You can listen to Chapter 8 through to the end and then go back to the beginning. I think that's actually one valid way to listen to the series. Yes, and like I say, it's featured a host of familiar names Carlo Revelli is in Chapter 8. That's another one I've had on my show, people like Sean Carroll, David Eelman, Donald Hoffman's in there. Yeah, it's quite the cast of characters that you've managed to put together. So congratulations for that. And I hope that people will follow that link and go and give it a listen.

But Anika Harris, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for chatting today. Thank you. That's a great conversation. If you enjoyed that conversation, you might like my previous episode with Ian McGilchrist. You can watch it by clicking the link on your screen. To support my work and get early, add free access to episodes, subscribe to my substack at Alex O'Connor.

Thanks for watching.