#927 - Annaka Harris - Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness

30:12And the universe is structured in a different way. And there's usually a period of time. Sometimes decades or more before the evidence really encroaches in on our intuitions and gets us to start to think creatively and shift the way we feel. The same was true for discovering the germ theory of disease. Eventually, we developed tools or we could see the microscopic things. But first it was a theory and it was very hard for people to believe and to get their minds around because it just sounded crazy that there are these things we can't see or smell or taste or touch. We can't perceive them, but they that's what's making us sick and they can kill us.

30:51And so there are all of these paradigm shifts in science and all these scientific breakthroughs that entail kind of new evidence coming in and shifting the way we thought things worked. And so I think we're at a place like that with consciousness now. And this is some of the ways we can see through, at the very least, the way our intuitions tell us things are, or not are off. If we can get to the stage where AI is able to outthink us, does that suggest that consciousness is overrated?

31:26I'm not sure how those two are related. Well, whether or not, if AI can outthink us and it's not conscious, So if it's functionally... If it's not conscious. Yes. And it's functionally able to do... Well, I do think consciousness is overrated in the sense that we think, you know, like a lot of things, we think we're special and we're the only ones that have it. And I do think human beings are special and obviously we do all kinds of things that know other living systems we know of can do. But I'm not sure that consciousness is even a result of complex processing at this point. So a lot of my work has just been breaking through all of these assumptions.

32:07And so at this point, I don't think we have any evidence to believe that high level of intelligence or complexity is required for consciousness. And so I think consciousness still holds this very magical position in the universe because the experience, the felt experience, the sentience, I think is magical in and of itself. But I don't know that it's unique, I don't think it's unique to human beings. And I don't think we have any reason to think that it is responsible for all of the things that we value in ourselves. And so I think much less simple systems have them. If we develop more complex systems, they will likely have it.

32:57But whether or not they do, I think the things we value in human beings, in our intelligence, in our thinking skills, creativity skills, ability to create new things and build new things that never existed and imagine new things and then generate them and make them real. All of that may not really have anything to do with consciousness. Any more than a p -tendrel needs consciousness to do all of the things in a much simpler way, but some more miraculous than you would have realized until you start studying plant behavior.

33:36We don't know any reason why you would need consciousness for either of those things. So I mean, I think AI is interesting and it will be a very interesting development either way, conscious or not, but I don't think it changes the status of conscious. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do back -end inventory management. Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Shopify powers 10 % of all e -commerce companies in the US.

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34:44Do you think that it, how likely do you think it is that progress in AI will unveil some interesting insight about consciousness? I think that's probably unlikely. But I don't, I mean, that's a big question mark for me. I don't know. I can't imagine a way that it would, the type of science, you know, the last chapter of my doggy series is called The Future of Science. And I'm imagining a science that re -thinks our ability to experience other systems than the ones we experience. So, you know, we experience light waves and sound waves, but there are many, we don't experience the Earth's magnetic field and many animals do.

35:35There are lots of things that we actually have a head start studying scientifically because we perceive them, and so we have developed these intuitions for them. In my series in one chapter, I interview someone who was part of a study where they actually gave participants an experience of magnetic north. Fascinating study, I can tell you more about those details. Yeah, how do you experience magnetic north? Yeah, so maybe I'll finish that point and then come back. But the idea is that if we want to understand consciousness better, we're going to have to find a way to expand our experiences. And also, well, I can give more examples, but that's kind of the way I think it's had it.

36:21I'm not sure how AI could be helpful there, although I guess, you know, any kind of intelligent system might give us ways to experiment and ideas for things we might do, but it will it will entail a human participation because it will have to entail experience as in sharing experiences and being able to talk about them. And, you know, of course, maybe AI will develop to that point and they'll just be way beyond us in all these ways and they'll figure it out. So I guess the issue will be if AI is not able to or uninterested in communicating with us, we just won't know. If they kind of move forward in the way I talk about science progressing in my docu series, if they're able to do that before we are in some way and they actually figure something out, we won't be able to just know because they tell us there has to be a sufficient level of communication for us to understand and believe what they're saying.

37:35Well, we'll have to hope that they care enough about us to explain it. Please, mom, don't forget me. Don't leave me on the school bus. Magnetic North, how do you experience it? So there's an area of science of neuroscience. science. It started with something called sensory substitution. David Eagleman again, the neuroscientist was very involved in this work at Stanford and some others. And sensory substitution, you may have heard of some of these devices that have been developed for people who are blind or deaf. For the blind originally they created something called a brain port and this was like a popsicle -like thing that sits on the tongue and delivers electro -tactile signals based on a camera that's worn like on a headband.

38:21So it's receiving the visual input and then it translates that into electro -tactile signals on the tongue. What's so interesting about the brain is, you know, at first the participants, they use these and they're just getting a buzzing sensation. They means nothing to them. I think over a little bit of time they start to notice patterns and it starts to feel like they Oh, like when I'm getting close to a wall, I kind of feel this on my tongue. But eventually it's usually about six to eight weeks in, of using a device like this. The brain converts to intuitive way of experiencing. And so people are able to use something like a brain port over time.

39:03And they're no longer feeling electro -tactyl signals on the tongue. It's no longer about the tongue. Their brain is actually giving them a map of their external world based on this information. So they can shoot hoops. They can walk through me. So away. Yeah. David Eagleman gives a great TED Talk on this if anyone in your audience wants to check it out. And he actually then goes on to talk about sensory addition in that talk, which is kind of the natural progression of this. So once they realize they could give these tools to people who couldn't see, they realize maybe we can tap into other things that, you know, why just lightwaves, why not?

39:43Other things in our environment that we don't perceive, and maybe the brain can interpret those signals as well. And so one of these studies was to try to give participants an experience of the Earth's magnetic field. This was a belt they devised. So it was a belt that went all the way around the body and had electro -tactyl signals all around, and I don't totally understand the science or the technology of how it worked, but it was, perceiving the Earth's magnetic field. And again, this is something that other animals can do, so they thought they'd start with something that other brains that we know about are able to interpret.

40:17It's just that human brains aren't set up that way. So it was such fun talking to Dr. Sasha Fink, he's a neuroscientist and he was one of the participants in this study, and the way he talks about that experience is really interesting. It's like the way he was talking to me was like someone trying to explain to a blind person what it's like to see. So he would kind of try to compare it to other senses, but he got, he had this intuitive feel after six or eight weeks of where he was oriented. He said a few very funny things. One was I noticed all the toilets in my life face north. And it's just because he was like, he's at the main toilet, my toilet at home, my toilet at the office, my toilet, you know, wherever, my friend's house, that he noticed they all face the same direction because he said it's like noticing a color or noticing you walk into a room and you're both wearing the same shirt and you say, oh, we're both wearing the same shirt, like you just know it because it's intuitive and because you see in your brain works that way and so it was just a feel like he knows which way he's facing all the time.

41:28And so he'd make these connections and associations like, oh, this face is that way. He could kind of, he had a better sense of like the map of the world really. He said it also completely through off his intuitions for, you know, the streets where he lived because he realized, you know, that none of the streets are actually facing the way they say they are. And I'm trying to think some other, he described this very interesting sensation. He said just like with sight or sound or anything else, there are pleasant versions of it and unpleasant versions. So there are things we like to look at that bring us joy and things that we find repulsive with taste and sound and you know music on all of these things.

42:11We don't ever even think about this. But the same is true with the earth's magnetic field. So there were circumstances he would find himself in where he didn't like the position he was facing in that certain place. And then he He described this thing that I just think is so beautiful where he said he went up a spiral staircase once and it was so enjoyable. There was something about I don't know orienting around a center that way that he just found himself like seeking out spiral staircases. Be careful. It felt so good. Yeah. He said it was like hula hooping, but you're the hula hooper. So something like that.

42:50Anyway, I think if we're able to get a better sense of what consciousness is, it will keep moving in this direction of broadening our experiences, potentially sharing experiences, the fact that I have so many memories throughout my life of other conscious experiences that existed in the universe and other times and places, that's through memory. And when I remember a situation that I was in, it's never exactly the situation I was in. I'm in a new moment, but I have enough of the residual of those memories that I can kind of, you know, I have this experience knowing what that situation was like.

43:30There may be some future technology where we can do that rather than between people through time, you know, myself as a three -year -old and myself now. Very different systems, very different brains, very different places in time and space. There might be a future technology where I can have a memory of yours placed in my stream of memories and then I'll remember all the things that I did. You do not want that. I will be very dangerous. Maybe I'll choose someone else or my first memory. Very dangerous. The experience you're having right now of looking at me and having your buds in your ears and just simple everyday experience that I could have a similar one from my day yesterday but I could have a memory of being over there looking this way and that would just kind of be in my stream of memories in the same way that all of my memories are there and I think that's the type of thing that will help us better understand.

44:26You've mentioned plants a couple of times today. What have you learned about plants? Plants? Well, first of all, the science is really speeding up now. There was quite a taboo around studying these things for a while. There's a new book, and I interview the author for my series. Her name is Zoe Schlinger, and she wrote a book called The Light Eaters, which is so poetic and beautiful because plants eat light. And she gives so many examples of relatively new findings, you know, starting in 2014. Again, with light, plants have more photo receptors than we do. They can see, see is, you know, probably not the right word to use, but everyone's starting to get confused.

45:18Because it's hard to know how to talk about these things. There's an example of trying to think, oh, there's a parasitic plant called the Dautervine D -O -D -D -E -R, not Dauter, isn't Dauter and Sun, but Dauter. A Dautervine can sense when the seedling is sprouting, it kind of moves around in the air, like you've seen other plants do in time lapse photography. It'll kind of move around and it seems to be sensing, you know, where it can find something to parasitize. And there are certain plants that they can live off of and there are certain plants. It can't. And so scientists for a long time wondered, is it chemicals?

46:03Like, how do they know that in this direction, they shouldn't go that direction, they should go in this direction? And they started running all of these studies and it turns out that at least part of the way they do this is through sensing light. And so they can sense the shape of a plant because you know the reason we see green when we look at a green leaf is because the other light wave lengths are passing through but the green ones are bouncing off the leaf and that's why we're perceiving the green. And so the daughter vine can apparently tell I forget there's a long list of things it can tell but essentially you know the type of plant it is it won't grow towards grasses, it's very hard to get itself attached to a grass, it can't really survive that way.

46:48So if their grass is planted, you know, over here it'll sense the shape and how much nutritional content is there, all this whole list of things that they've now studied, it can tell by the light that is getting filtered through the leaves and branches of these plants. And the final study that they did to prove this was they used LED lights and they set up different shapes of different plants, the types of plants, some being the types of plants that they would be interested in attaching to and others like grasses. But they were just LED lights in the shape of grass and LED lights and the shape of plants that would be the type of plants it would enjoy and it went toward, it went made the right choice.

47:35So all of this I find fascinating, I think just because it is fascinating, but in terms of the level of complexity that we think is required for consciousness, I think this is all very intuition -shaking, and that's kind of where I like to live and where I like to do my work. And so, you know, you can kind of fall on either side of it. I don't know if plants are conscious. That's not actually why I became interested in them. The breeze, and I started doing a deep dive into this, is because my intuition is that plants aren't conscious. like most people. And so the question is when we started unveiling some of these much more complex behaviors that kind of fall into the categories of human behaviors.

48:18I spoke to a plant biologist, Danny Shamovitz, Daniel Shamovitz, and I spoke a lot about how he wasn't sure which terms to use. He would say, you know, can you say a plant can hear? Can you say a plant can see? And without consciousness, how do you describe the same phenomenon and then of course, you know, is it possible that there is some conscious level of conscious awareness there? But my interest was less than that and more in, how is it that we can look at some behaviors that are quite human -like and not think consciousness is necessary for them, but somehow when we exhibit similar behaviors, we think it couldn't be done without consciousness.

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50:10Well actually, where have you come to land on the where consciousness comes from question? All of the different schools of thought. Are you a... are you a neo -pancykist now? like what is this? Do you fit into some broad bucket? I do not fit into a bucket. Where I have landed with all of this is that I think I have been convinced that it's a legitimate and very important scientific question to be asking. Does conscious two questions, I would say, does consciousness go deeper in nature than the sciences have previously assumed? And the one I'm most interested in now is consciousness fundamental.

50:55So is it actually a fundamental property of the universe? Something that is much more basic, you know, no less magical or interesting, but something more more basic in terms of a fundamental layer, more akin to gravity than to, you know, something that arises out of complex processing and behavior. And so I think all that I'm a very science -minded person and I've worked with scientists for decades and that's really where where my heart is and I think that's how we that's our best method for discovering truth and for breaking through all of these these false intuitions that we have and giving us a reason to do that.

51:40And so I think it's truly a question. We just don't know. And I think it's fine for us to say we don't know, but to say that we have always assumed that conscious of the sciences have always assumed that consciousness arises out of complex processing. And it's time to realize the evidence is not supporting that. And it's possible that consciousness is actually fundamental. And it's not serving the purpose we feel it is, but is actually kind of a part of every process in nature. Are we asking the wrong people? But that's a question. Well, are we asking the wrong people about consciousness? Should we be asking mystics and meditation experts instead of scientists?

52:21Well, my issue with that is that it's not a reliable, those don't tend to be reliable methods. So I think we showed and we do. I think especially people who have taken meditation very seriously because that is the only tool we have. And I really see it as a tool, as a scientific tool. We have for investigating our own personal experience, for investigating consciousness directly. And what's interesting too about meditation is that it serves the same function. It gets us to actually drop some of these false intuitions. It has that effect because when we use our attention in that way, we can actually see through some of these illusions that the brain creates for us.

53:11So, the illusion of self -controlp away, the illusion of conscious will -controlp away. Even in one of the chapters of my series on space and time, I talked to physicists, to physicists about space and time and one thing that I found interesting there. And again, this is just interesting. I don't know how much weight we need to put in it, but physicists are basically an agreement at this point that space is an emergent property. That space is not part of the fundamental story. And what's interesting about meditation practice is that usually comes as an insight as well to people who have been meditating for many years or experienced meditators.

53:52And there's a way in which it actually makes sense that the brain could be mapping something out for us, you know, something that is part of the external reality that makes us feel that there is space directly in the way that we experience it where we may be perceiving something, you know, fundamental, a fundamental structure of the universe that is not really about space and the way that we perceive it. And now I'm remembering that's when I had that conversation with Jan 11 about love, where we were talking about, we were talking about something completely different. We were talking about string theory and different interpretations of quantum mechanics and different dimensions of space.

54:36And could there be 10, 11, 12 or more dimensions of space? And I was talking about how, you know, we have no intuitions as human beings for anything like that, we just like, where would that space be? We can't do that. Not only can we not go in higher dimensions, but we actually can't conceive of two -dimensional space, even though we kind of feel like we can, because we can imagine a plane, like a very thin plane, but the truth is, if you make that plane thinner and thinner, we can't imagine a plane with truly no depth. That's not something that's imaginable to us. And so in that little video clip that my publisher beautifully captured in a kind of sidebar conversation, I was explaining to someone on our team about this conversation.

55:22I had a Jan 11 where we really are kind of stuck in three dimensions of space. We can't imagine any more or any less. And she mentioned love and said, well, you know, how many dimensions is love? And she actually got me to realize that there are many, many conscious experiences we have that are not necessarily in space. And that kind of led me down this path that I get into towards the end of the series, thinking about whether space is light color, where until we reached the science that told us there isn't green out there in the world, that's being generated by the brain. There are light waves out there and what out, you know, to the extent that we can understand even what light waves are.

56:09But the thing we experience is not out there in the way that we feel it is. And is it possible that space is like color where we only perceive a certain part of the spectrum and the spectrum is larger than we perceive? And that it's giving us information about something about the structure of the universe, but that space is actually not what it really is. In the way that we experience it. You mentioned quantum physics. There's kind of a god of the gaps, quantum of the gaps, entanglements down at the quark level, etc. Thing that goes on. What there is, it's like, you know, these words just get fucking snuck in.

56:55Like, like, when people don't really understand what's going on. Like, it's normal. They say, oh, yeah, we do. It's the quantum fluctuations and we can't explain about it. We don't understand any of that before you know it. You're reading the three -body problem. Yes. That's a great book. Have you got any sense of whether quantum physics, I mean quantum physics is playing an important role in everything in that it's a part of physics? But is there something extra special, extra So salient about quantum physics when it comes to consciousness? I don't think so. I think in the same way that modern neuroscience is showing us that our intuitions about consciousness have been wrong in a lot of areas.

57:40I think it's a clue. Well, it's not just a clue. There is a lot we don't understand about the physical world, right? And we've hit the quantum level and we are deeply perplexed. and there are many efforts to try to understand the types of things we see in quantum mechanics. And a lot of people I should say try to kind of make this connection that we still don't understand consciousness and that's mysterious and we don't understand quantum mechanics and so maybe it's part of the same thing. And I think that's not a good reason for putting them together. But my path, it's interesting, my path brought me to fundamental physics from neuroscience because my work in neuroscience led me to believe that consciousness very well might go deeper in nature and led me to believe if it does go deeper in nature, it could go all the way down to the fundamental.

58:35So then I kind of, you know, had to start working with physicists to understand what that meant or if that made no sense at all or if you know something we already understand about physics that would rule that out. But what I found is, if consciousness is fundamental, it actually helps us make sense of some of the things that we're seeing in quantum mechanics. That doesn't mean it's true. But it's interesting to me that it's helpful in terms of interpreting those things. And I think whether or not consciousness is fundamental, thinking of it that way, And the same way that we have assumed consciousness arises out of complexity.

59:15We've actually made a ton of progress in neuroscience based on that assumption. I think we could start with the, we have this, you know, just as many reasons to start with the opposite assumption that it's fundamental and take the science from that starting point and see where it goes. And I actually think we will make a lot of interesting progress and think about things in a very different way and kind of open up our creativity to the way we think about things. whether or not it turns out to be true or not, because we still haven't figured out that consciousness is due to complexity in the way we started out with that assumption, we haven't gotten any closer to believing that's true.

59:55And I think we could start with this other assumption and do some really interesting work there. But yes, I do think that if we think about consciousness as being fundamental, that it is actually what everything physical that we perceive and measure and see is actually a representation of other conscious experiences arising in the universe, suddenly lots of things that seem impossible for us to understand seem a little easier to get our minds around. This is usually just the first example that I start with, but there are some physicists who talk about objects that come out of the math, a 10 -dimensional object, a decarect is a geometric object that exists because the math says it exists.

1:00:48Most mathematicians wouldn't say there are decaracts in the universe, it's just that that shape is a possible shape, a 10 -dimensional shape. There are some physicists who actually believe that if it comes out of the math, it actually does exist. It must exist. And Max Teigmark is one and there are other well -known, well -respected physicists who will say this, who have this intuition that if the math, if we can, these shapes get created by the math, they actually do exist in the universe. If consciousness is fundamental and you know, change our intuitions about space and realize we're picking up on something about the structure that we're a part of.

1:01:35But it's not about space and so picturing a fourth dimension we're kind of thinking about it wrong. It's a little bit like picturing a color you've never seen before. It doesn't mean the color couldn't be there. It just means we don't perceive it and so it's not part of our conscious reality. But if a 10 -dimensional object exists, if we're just talking about the physical world as we know it, we don't know how to make sense of that sentence, you know, a 10 -dimensional object. If a 10 -dimensional object represents a very complex type of conscious experience that arises in the universe, still it's beyond something we could picture, but it's not beyond our comprehension.

1:02:23I mean, we can comprehend that there are all kinds of experiences that we don't understand, don't feel, don't know about. We don't know what it's like to be a bat. We don't know what it's like to be all kinds of creatures that we already know exist. So if the math and the physics tell us that certain structures exist and every structure that exists in the universe is at the bottom of felt experience or many felt experiences arises arising, then suddenly those types of things make more sense and are easier to talk about. And I think open new avenues for exploration also. What do you think the future of consciousness research looks like, should look like?

1:03:10This is kind of what the last chapter of my documentary is devoted to and I wish I were more creative in my thinking. And I actually talk about the fact that as creative as human beings are, for some reason, we're very bad at envisioning the future and where new technologies will lead us. But I did spend a lot of time thinking about this. And so I don't know how this will manifest and where it will lead exactly. But the things that I can think of and imagine are things like sensory addition. So I imagine that perceiving new forces and systems like magnetic north and all the other things that we don't sense, that feeling them intuitively actually give us a lot of scientific knowledge, not all, but most of the physics that we've done comes from the fact that we feel ourselves in the world.

1:04:09We feel a lot of the physics. And we're able to get a tremendous amount of information just from perceiving it. And so I think if we're able to start to perceive other things in our environment with our brains in a way that we can develop intuitions for them, I think that's one avenue. The other one I mentioned is, you know, if it's possible to not just share memories across the ages of one person as they evolve over time, but to share them across human beings. So it wouldn't be the same as having the same experience in the same moment. But just being able to have someone else's experience as part of my memory, I think suddenly gives us a home we set of intuitions about consciousness and what's happening and how So we are relate to one another and all of that.

1:05:04I also was thinking when I was reading Sarah Walker's book, and I mentioned this in the series also, she's an astrophysicist who's working on a theory of life. She talks about, she mentions in her book how Einstein had this intuition for spacetime. He was the first human being we know of to think about gravity not as a force, but to imagine that space and time are somehow part of the same fabric and when that fabric warps it affects how objects move, right? So rather than gravity being a force it's actually the warping of space time and he had that intuition, he had that insight, but it took him years and decades to formalize that intuition to be able to express it to others.

1:05:52I mean again it's another communication issue where if somebody else doesn't share that experience it's very difficult to talk about and communicate it. So, you know, it took decades for him to get this out in the mathematics and in language and to communicate it to other scientists so that other people could share this idea and move forward with it. And I had this thought while reading her book, you know, what if that intuition could be shared? You know, that's a conscious experience, that's a felt experience. He has, you know, later, 10 years later in his life, he still has the memory of that intuition, the intuition didn't go away for him.

1:06:27Is there some way in which in the future human beings might be able to share and really progress science? I mean, imagine if Einstein, the day he had that intuition could have shared it with 15 other scientists. And so, yeah, it's in this vein that I imagine if it's possible that this is kind of where things will be headed. Yeah. Anika Harris, ladies and gentlemen, Anika, I love the fact that you went and did a necessarily complex audio documentary series to try and answer these questions after writing a book on it. Where should people go? Do they want to check out the documentary? For the documentary, there's a website for the documentary.

1:07:07It's just lightsondocumentary .com. My website, you can find all of my social media links and all of that. And that's Anika Harris dot com. Thank you. Anika, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you.