Reality Is Stranger Than You Think: Consciousness, Perception, Free Will, AI & Love | Annaka Harris
Added: Jul 10, 2024
In this podcast episode, Annaka Harris, author of "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind", explores consciousness, neuroscience, meditation, and the philosophy of mind. Harris begins by defining consciousness as she uses the term - not complex thought or self-awareness, but the most basic form of felt experience or sentience. She explains that even simple organisms like worms may have some minimal level of consciousness, such as feeling pressure against their skin. The key aspect is that there is something it is like to be that organism, some inner experience.
Harris contrasts this with how computers process information without any inner experience. She notes that the German word "umwelt" describes the totality of an organism's conscious experiences. The fundamental mystery is why any organization of matter would have an inner experience of itself at all. This is known as the "hard problem" of consciousness.
The Hard Problem and Studying Consciousness
Harris explains that the "easy problems" in neuroscience involve correlating brain states with types of conscious experiences. But the hard problem is why there would be any felt experience associated with brain processing at all. She notes that science studies everything from the outside, but consciousness is inherently a first-person, subjective phenomenon that can't be directly observed externally.
This leads to two key questions Harris explores: 1) Can we find conclusive evidence from the outside that consciousness is present in any system? And 2) Is consciousness actually doing anything causally? Our intuitions strongly say yes to both, but Harris argues we don't actually have good evidence for either. She gives the example of locked-in syndrome patients who appear unconscious but have full inner awareness, showing the difficulty of detecting consciousness from the outside.
How Our Brains Construct Reality
Harris discusses how our brains construct our experience of reality in ways that can be misleading. For instance, our conscious experience of events actually lags behind when they occur, as the brain takes time to process and bind together sensory information. She cites neuroscientist David Eagleman's work showing we live slightly in the past.
Harris gives examples like how in tennis, we experience hitting the ball, feeling the impact, and hearing the sound as simultaneous, when they actually reach our brains at different times. The brain creates a coherent experience for us. She notes this shows that unconscious processes happen before our conscious experience, challenging our intuitions about free will and decision-making.
Meditation and the Illusion of Self
The conversation turns to how meditation can provide insights into the nature of consciousness and self. Harris describes her own experience during walking meditation of suddenly realizing there was no "me" doing the walking - it was simply happening. She says this type of insight shows how our normal sense of being a solid, unchanging self is actually an illusion constructed by the brain.
Harris explains that most psychological suffering comes from a sense of separation and feeling like a separate self. Meditation and other practices can reveal the more interconnected nature of reality. She notes that even without a visual representation, we can come to viscerally feel our deep connection to our environment and other beings.
Consciousness in Plants and Other Life Forms
Harris discusses recent research on complex plant behaviors and decision-making, such as how parasitic vines can detect the shape and type of potential host plants using light waves. She notes that while plants don't have brains, they exhibit behaviors analogous to what we consider evidence of consciousness in animals. This raises questions about where to draw the line for consciousness in nature.
The conversation explores how consciousness could potentially be more widespread than we assume, given our limited ability to detect it from the outside. Harris suggests that if consciousness is fundamental, there could be countless conscious experiences happening all around us that we're unaware of.
Theories of Consciousness: Emergent vs Fundamental
She explains the conventional view that consciousness emerges from complex information processing in brains. She contrasts this with the alternative view that consciousness may be a more fundamental constituent of the universe. While she doesn't endorse the term "panpsychism", Harris sees exploring whether consciousness is more fundamental than previously assumed as an important scientific question.
She notes that in some ways, consciousness being fundamental actually makes more sense given what we know about physics and neuroscience. It could potentially explain puzzles like why there's something it's like to be certain collections of matter. Harris emphasizes this is still an open question to be investigated, not a settled belief.
Implications for AI and Ethics
The conversation turns to how these ideas about consciousness relate to artificial intelligence. Harris notes that if consciousness is fundamental, AI systems made of very different physical substrates than brains may have radically different inner experiences than biological entities, even if their outward behavior appears similar. This complicates ethical questions around AI consciousness and suffering.
She emphasizes that behavior alone may not be a reliable guide for inferring consciousness, which will make navigating the development of human-like AI challenging. There may be no way for us to know what the subjective experience of an AI system is like, if it has one at all.
Free Will and Decision-Making
Harris discusses neuroscience research showing that decisions can be predicted from brain activity several seconds before a person feels they've made a conscious choice. She explains this challenges our intuitive sense of conscious free will, where it feels like "we" are the conscious author of our decisions.
However, she clarifies that this doesn't mean decision-making processes don't occur - they do, but they happen through unconscious brain processes before reaching conscious awareness. She suggests viewing the brain more like a river that keeps flowing, rather than a separate self making decisions from outside the physical world.
Experiential Science and the Future of Consciousness Research
Harris proposes that truly understanding consciousness may require new scientific methods that incorporate first-person, experiential approaches alongside third-person observation. She coins the term "experiential science" for this potential future direction.
As an example, she discusses how Einstein's insights about relativity came to him first as intuitions that then took years to formalize mathematically. Harris wonders if future science may find ways to directly share experiential knowledge and intuitions about consciousness, overcoming the current limitations of language in describing subjective experiences.
Personal Journey and Meditation
Harris shares how she's been drawn to these topics since childhood, partly due to experiences with severe migraines that led her to closely investigate her inner experiences of pain. She describes how meditation has been a powerful tool for her in exploring consciousness firsthand.
When she first learned to meditate, she was struck by how it could serve as a kind of scientific tool for investigating reality and one's own mind. She notes that many insights from meditation about the nature of self and consciousness have since been confirmed by neuroscience.
Consciousness, Love, and the Structure of Reality
The conversation explores whether fundamental consciousness could have some kind of intent or purpose driving the evolution of life and the universe. While Harris is hesitant to anthropomorphize in this way, she acknowledges it's a natural question that arises.
She discusses how if consciousness is fundamental, it raises questions about why it has the particular structure it does. She wonders about the relationship between consciousness and time - whether time is part of the fundamental nature of reality or emerges from it. These deep questions connect to issues of meaning, purpose, and the nature of suffering in the universe.
Harris reflects on how the possibility of consciousness being fundamental actually initially horrified her, as it implied the potential for suffering could be vastly more widespread than previously thought. She hopes that time may be fundamental, as that at least implies an end to suffering, rather than it existing eternally.
Practical Implications and Levels of Usefulness
Harris emphasizes that recognizing the illusory nature of the separate self and free will doesn't mean one should try to constantly keep this in mind. Like recognizing the Earth is a sphere rather than flat, it's not useful or practical to focus on in most everyday situations.
However, she notes that understanding these deeper truths about the nature of self and will can be very useful for engineering, science, spiritual reflection, and gaining perspective on one's place in the universe. She encourages finding a balance - not driving oneself crazy trying to constantly see through the illusion, but being able to access that understanding when it's beneficial.
Conclusion
The conversation concludes with Harris expressing excitement about how different scientific disciplines are starting to come together to piece together a deeper understanding of consciousness, reality, and the nature of self. She sees great potential in combining insights from neuroscience, physics, philosophy, and contemplative traditions to make progress on these fundamental questions about the nature of mind and universe.
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