266 - Annaka Harris: The Fundamentality of Consciousness

32:46And each moment is being generated anew by this flux of electricity, information, all the things that are happening. So even when we say, you know, I heard the sound of the bird, we get into tricky territory because one, we don't know how many other conscious experiences may have been arising in your brain at the same time. And so even in our own case, when we think I'm conscious of this and I'm not conscious of that. So, you know, you may flash something that is actually so quick, my brain doesn't have time to process it consciously. But the only way, the only evidence we have for that is that you're going to hear me report, no, I didn't see that.

33:36But we don't know that there wasn't a sight of that that came into and out of existence that didn't enter my stream of memory. And some of the interesting research in neuroscience that kind of gets you to ask these questions are out of the split brain research that was done by Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry. Where when I don't know how much you want me to describe the details. I don't know if your audience is familiar. Oh, please go for it. There's such interesting experiments. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So split brain patients are patients who had their right and left hemispheres of their brain surgically split.

34:10And this was a treatment for epilepsy and actually a successful treatment for epilepsy and didn't have as many side effects as they feared or that you would imagine. And actually, people behave quite normally after having the surgery. But what they discovered through some very interesting experiments, and a lot of them are online, and I present them in my book and my documentary series. What they discovered was in most people, it's different. It's not always, but in either case, the speech centers of the brain, the ability to communicate resides in the left hemisphere. Sometimes it's not, but in either case, it's in one hemisphere or another.

34:52So in most cases, and in most of the split brain patients they studied, the left hemisphere was capable of responding through speech. And that's where the speech centers were. They found ways eventually of interrogating the right hemisphere. And so they were able to ask the same question of both the left and right hemisphere. And what you realize is, and I should say they're usually different answers. They can be different opinions. They can be different preferences. but that when you surgically split the brain, it seems to create two different people in a sense, almost like conjoined twins who are sharing a body and separate islands of consciousness.

35:31And so what you realize, suddenly you have evidence for a situation where you can ask a split brain patient a question and they give you an answer the same way anyone else would give you an answer. But what we now understand is that in that very circumstance, there's actually another center of consciousness who has a different opinion about the question you just asked, but has no way to communicate it to the outside world. And so we're kind of left to wonder how often are we in that experience without knowing it? And how much have we relied upon report, even in our own cases, for what we even consider to be conscious or not conscious?

36:12you know one other thing that I think is interesting to think about here is just the fact that we don't really have a way to differentiate between loss of memory and loss of consciousness and memory I think is fascinating I'm spending a lot of time thinking about memory and time right now because the only way for anyone to ever report on a conscious experience is for it to last long enough in time or in memory to be able to report on it. You know, if there were a thousand mini micro-conscious experiences arising in my brain of, you know, we'd have to come up with what they might be, but the most simple things you can imagine may be a feeling of itch or a slight smell of something or, you know, any, if they come in and out of being and never enter my stream of memory, the thing that I'm calling me, we have no access to any of those conscious experiences to know whether or not they're happening.

37:12And all we can rely on is to ask the person, you know, what are you experiencing right now? And we have always assumed that anything they can't report on or aren't reporting on is not conscious, is unconscious. And I think that's where a lot of our false assumptions have come from. It's not clear to me, though, how this connects to the question about what fundamental consciousness would be like. Is the idea that without getting reports from an electron or a string, we just can't ever know what it's like? Maybe, but I think there's actually a lot of interesting science that could be done if we assume that consciousness is fundamental.

38:01And so I think it just it begins with starting with this new framework. I think it also begins with an understanding of something we already know and have accepted, which is at the fundamental level, we really don't understand what's going on. We have not yet resolved these issues and paradoxes and conflicting theories about what happens at the most fundamental level. You know, most physicists at this point are talking about space being something that's emergent and space is not even part of the fundamental story. There are some physicists who don't think time is even part of the fundamental story.

38:39Nima Arkani-Hamed is a physicist whose work I've been following. And it's fascinating to hear him talk about how space and time seem to emerge actually from something more fundamental. And so when I switch to the fundamental realm and say, OK, what would it mean if consciousness were part of this story? You start to look at the phenomena that we know about and others that we still have questions about differently. And it's actually not as dramatic as it seems to say, what if consciousness is not something complex at all? We experience it because we're complex creatures, but maybe it's something much more, we also experience gravity.

39:23You know, it could be something that's actually much more fundamental. And we're confused by the fact that we can only get reports from it, of it from so few places that we just didn't realize it's actually this not complex at all. It takes complexity and similarity to be able to communicate. But maybe it's something like gravity. Maybe it's something, you know, like any other fundamental force that is actually affecting everything. And so, of course, everything that we're our brains are doing, we're aware of. But it turns out, you know, everything electrons are doing, there's there's a felt experience there, too.

40:00And so, you know, our imagines or our imaginations are fairly limited in what those types of experiences might be. And I spend a lot of time trying to think about these things and maybe get, you know, broad guesses to give us somewhat of a map for for thinking about things at a fundamental level with conscious experiences being. the stuff of the universe, what everything actually is at bottom, that it doesn't actually make sense to talk about matter and molecules, that that is kind of the map that we have been given or the map that our brains use to help us navigate the external world, but that it's false to almost in the same way that we already know that our perceptions kind of give us a false sense of what's out there.

40:51I mean, simply in colors, as I mentioned, you know, we have these really strong intuitions because it really does seem like the colors are out there, right? But the experience of color is being generated by my brain. But we can have all our friends come around and say, yes, I see the green too. The green is really out there. And we think that's evidence that the green itself is out there. It's a wonderful map of what's out there, but it's not actually the thing that's out there. And so I think about this in relationship to space too, especially because most physicists are on the same page about this, that space is not fundamental.

41:25And I wonder sometimes, you know, our brains do such a good job of mapping the external world for us by giving us these pictures and these sounds and these things that it generates as a map of the incoming information. And what would it be like to imagine that space is not space in the way yellow is not yellow, right? Space, the way we experience space is a map. It's more like an interface than it is an actual thing that is in reality. And I'm not even sure what question I was answering. But I guess just, you know, what it means for consciousness to be fundamental. And so, So, yeah, I mean, we can we can shift into that and some of the thought experiments I've been running and things that I'm that I think about when I imagine that consciousness is is fundamental and how those things might interact and what it means.

42:23You know, it's obviously ridiculous to look at this glass of water and say, OK, this glass of water is conscious. But if consciousness is fundamental and this is kind of my new starting point with everything is that's the beginning of every question. If consciousness is fundamental, what does it mean that I'm the system over here? There's this glass here that looks like a glass and feels like a glass. But, you know, at the fundamental level, when we talk about quantum mechanics, what is happening between that glass and me? And if consciousness is fundamental, what is happening there? And I have some half-baked ideas that, you know, may or may not lead anywhere.

42:58But I do think science could go in a very interesting direction. direction. I think we'd have many new questions that we hadn't thought about asking before if we put it in this new framework.

43:12And many things to think about and new experiments to run if we become curious and interested in how we might be able to gain information consciously rather than, well, it would be a combination of experiment and consciously. I've and calling it experiential science in my documentary series. It's not the greatest name, but the idea is that neuroscience is developing to a point where we might actually be able to experience new forces, I mean, come up with all kinds of new ideas for how we might get an experiential experience and therefore intuitions for things that we don't normally perceive. And so there's this combination of things at the level of fundamental physics and at the level of neuroscience that I think we might come up with really new and creative ways of studying the universe if we assume consciousness is fundamental and see what comes out of that framework.

44:13Yeah, I'm very curious to hear about your thoughts on consciousness and quantum mechanics. You mentioned M-theory a couple of times, or at least once, consciousness and quantum gravity, because I know you've also been speaking to people like Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli and Nima Arkani-Hamed. I don't know if he still works. I'm not Nima, but I follow his work. Yeah, I'm a little afraid. I don't know if he still is a string theorist, but I know he wasn't. I don't think so. Although I don't know what category he falls under or if he even falls under a category at this point. But it's always dangerous to put words in another person's mouth, especially when they're much more articulate than I am.

44:58And Sean Carroll is one of those people. Yeah. I he made this point in a conversation with me but I think he also made it in other places you were at you were you participated in the the conference where he debated with Philip Goff yes yeah well I think he might have there's a good portion of that conference that's included in the final chapter of my series we brought oh cool we brought cameras and and uh mics with us So that's awesome. But I think you might have made this point there. But and I think in my conversation, he made it with regard to ESP, where he said something to the effect that we understand our quantum mechanics has been or quantum theory.

45:46The standard model of particle physics has been verified to something like 14 decimal places. we understand it very well and it is perfectly adequate to explain everything in our macroscopic world i mean gravity i guess is a a bit of a different situation but for instance with esp he said i mean there's only we we would know if there was some other force because there would be a lot that would be unexplained and so i'm just wondering yeah i'm curious to hear where it is that consciousness will come in to explain various problems or it could it could help with various problems in either i mean unfortunately or i find it unfortunate um the line of inquiry that i you know that i'm now involved in um sometimes too often for me bumps up against a lot of new age philosophy and ideas that i do not subscribe to that i don't think make any sense that are talking about consciousness being fundamental in a very different sense than the sense that I'm talking about.

46:53I don't believe in ESP, at least to, you know, in the way that it is described by proponents of it. Right. And I hope that it didn't come off as me suggesting that you were. Yeah. No, no, it didn't. I just, but I, you know, this is something that I have to be very careful about the language I use because I am not suggesting any of those things. I'm not suggesting that, yeah, I think I made some joke in my book that, you know, the trees could think or talk to us or, and actually, I should say in the plant world, the evidence shows that they do not hear our singing or our music. They actually, they do, plants actually do have a version of hearing, you know, it's a mechanical stimulus as vibration.

47:36And so plants actually respond to sound, but the idea that they understand what we're saying or even hear our voices is, you know, not supporting. so as far as Sean Carroll I guess I don't know exactly what the Sean Carroll question is but it wasn't about it wasn't so much of a question as just we understand the fundamentalia so well assuming I mean the standard model of particle physics is the fundamentalia that I'm wondering where consciousness is going to fit in or why we need new physics to explain consciousness I don't necessarily think we need new physics to explain consciousness. I think it's a matter of how we interpret the physics we have.

48:23And yes, someone like Sean Carroll, I mean, I don't want to put words in his mouth either, and I'm a little bit making fun of him, but basically thinks we're done, you know. And so for what he's working on and interested in, it doesn't really matter. Although I did speak to him recently, and he asked me this question. He said, you know, let's say we could never know one way or the other. You know, how does it change anything? And one answer I had, I think there are many, but one answer I had that seemed to land for him that he would accept that he said, you know, any other proponents of other types of theories that place consciousness at a fundamental level don't say things like this.

49:04is that even shifting our framework and our worldview just naturally changes the way we think about things, the types of questions we ask. And so I often will make these analogies like, you know, understanding going from a flat earth universe where we are at the center to the data that we get, the interpretations we make, and suddenly where, you know, the universe hasn't change, but human beings are living in a very different universe where we're now on a planet orbiting a sun. And there are all these things that are different about our circumstance.

49:42That doesn't necessarily change our everyday lives, but I would say it actually even does reach that level where we walk around most of the time acting like the earth is flat, but knowing that it's not. And so I do think it actually changes the way we feel in the world. A lot of the neuroscience that I point to and that I bring up, I think has yet to actually permeate the culture to the degree it hasn't even permeated the scientists who are doing it. So I I think when we discover new intuition-shattering facts about the universe, it's too bad this is the case. But for human beings, it seems to take us a very long time, sometimes decades, sometimes longer, to shift our intuitions to kind of accept the new data and realize, okay, that universe I thought I was in, that's not right.

50:40This is a better picture of what it is. And so I think... we would just feel very different. If someone could actually give us evidence, you know, somehow sort this out, someone from the future could come and tell us, yes, it's actually the fundamental nature of everything is consciousness. So what everything, everything you're perceiving out there at bottom are felt experiences arising and passing away in the universe. I mean, I've already started to run this experiment myself for the past five years, just trying to put myself in that place so I can come up with different explanations, different ways of thinking about things.

51:16it definitely changes the way we feel in the world. And I think it will definitely get scientists to ask new kinds of questions. So in terms of the physics, you know, one thing that I found really interesting when I spoke to people like Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli and Sean Carroll also, is that when you look at what they're saying about the fundamental nature of the universe through the lens of assuming consciousness is fundamental, there are a few cases where it actually is easier to digest and get your minds around these things that they're saying that sound paradoxical and so much of what comes out of quantum mechanics sounds paradoxical and we just kind of throw our hands up and say there's no way to even understand what we're saying even though we know it's true i actually think placing consciousness in a fundamental role makes it a lot easier to accept lots of descriptions of the universe that are relational.

52:18And I've written a lot about this recently, about how a relationalist universe doesn't actually make sense if we're talking about physical objects and things the way we think about them, but it actually makes perfect sense when you're talking about consciousness, because that is actually what consciousness is. It is the perspective itself. And there's no way to have a different perspective on the conscious experience itself, because if you change it, you change the experience. You know, it's really the only thing in the universe we know of that it is what it is. Whatever is creating it, we may never know.

52:57I think we'll get closer and closer to understanding, but it has a unique... property is not quite the right word, but it has

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55:05There's no other place you can stand or write an equation to give you that very experience. It is what it is. I hesitate to say that most people are familiar with quantum entanglement because I don't want to say that most people understand it I certainly don't but most people are at least aware of the idea of quantum entanglement I'm wondering if that would be a good example or if there are other good examples of how taking consciousness as fundamental might make it easier to wrap our minds around a difficult quantum mechanical concept? I haven't thought about that in particular, but I think it's a great one for me to spend some time on.

55:53Actually, I can say a little bit about where it might be related to some things I'm thinking about. But if you have any example... Yeah, but even more generally, the fact that space isn't fundamental. I mean, that's a very basic and general one, that if we start to get our minds around what that means in terms of our perception of space, what are we perceiving? And I think you then enter into generating or honing intuitions for fundamental physics. Because when we're relying on our human intuitions of how we interact with the world, space seems obvious. But when we think about space as a perception and the conscious experience of space being a map of the external reality, that starts to give us new intuitions for what the universe even is.

56:54I mean, the universe without space, I think, is very hard to intuit from our perspective. So one thing, and I definitely want to be careful about talking about Sarah. I was thinking about Sarah Walker's work and how her work has influenced me a lot lately. But part of the way it's been helpful to learn about her work is she has language for things. She and I often wonder if we're talking about the same thing, if what she's calling life, I'm calling consciousness. And we're kind of getting at a similar mysterious structure or phenomenon in the universe. objects in time. That's her phrase, but it describes something that I never quite had the right language for.

57:37And so this idea, you know, the self would, in some sense, would be an object in time where conscious experiences are linked through time with memory. And memory is also a concept that we don't really understand or can be used in a lot of different ways. But this idea that if consciousness is fundamental,

58:04And the universe is relational, which I think it inevitably is if consciousness is fundamental. Every conscious experience is affecting every other conscious experience. And there's a structure that is being revealed through physics and mathematics and all the tools that we have so far that causes some to interact more than others. And so I often think about if conscious is fundamental, how are the different ways that conscious experiences are interrelated and affect one another? And one is through time via memory. That's one example of the fact that I have some memory of something I did a month ago, went for a walk a month ago, and I have a memory of that.

58:51the actual experience that I had cannot be duplicated. I'm now, you know, in terms of my physical quality and everything else, I'm now kind of a new person. And actually, it works better if you think of me as a child. You know, let's say the five-year-old me. I have some memories of being five. I, in this point in space and time, am a very different person than I was as a five-year-old. But there are conscious experiences that were generated in the universe when in my five-year-old brain that are affecting the conscious experiences I'm having now. And that effect is through memory, just my ability to think about something that happened when I was that age.

59:30But in reality, my brain is actually more different from my five-year-old self than it is from yours. But there are these connections to other conscious experiences through time. And so rather than thinking of memories as like these carbon copies, which we already know is false, they're being generated new in every moment. It is a generated conscious experience that is affected by a conscious experience that happened years and years ago. And similarly, you know, we are conscious experiences are affecting one another through space in this moment, in all kinds of in all kinds of ways. So I think sometimes about this concept of objects in time.

1:00:14And one thing that Sarah says I'm spending a lot of time thinking about now how it might relate to to to a universe in which consciousness is fundamental is that only I may not get this right. You might know her work better than I do, so maybe you can help me describe this. But the idea is that systems with a shared causal history, evolutionary history, can interact better than or actually I think she would say that systems or objects that don't share a causal history have no way to interact at all. or that that's a possibility. And so I think about all of the ways in which conscious experiences are clearly affecting one another in the obvious cases, like in human beings.

1:01:12But then I think about, you know, if there's some conscious experience that's happening at this desk that I'm sitting at, you know, one, the desk is not an integrated system like my brain. And so I wouldn't expect, you know, one stream of experience with memory in the way that I'm experiencing things, but it would be thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of little conscious experiences coming into and out of being. But is it possible that this is actually part of a larger structure that I don't share a causal history with, where I'm only seeing a fraction of the entire system? And so for me and the way that my system interacts with the world and the degree to which, you know, it's useful to me as a system, the desk, you know, plays the part that it plays.

1:02:02It was very pretty minimal. But that it's possible it's interacting. It's part of a larger system that we can't we can only see a fraction of. I definitely see how this could connect to many worlds of quantum mechanics or other cosmological questions where the universe is just so big and there are different pocket universes popping into existence where we're not causally connected to them at all. Yes, right. But maybe that might not be exactly what you have in mind, but I see it connecting. No, and actually what was interesting to me, and I've been writing about this a little bit, is it was something that was counterintuitive to me.

1:02:40And also, I mean, I'm resisting the conclusion, but I keep coming to the same conclusion, which is that if consciousness is fundamental, the types of things that I think you would expect to see in the fundamental structure of reality are best explained by many worlds. That's what Sean and Sean would love to hear because we argue about everything else. And there's so many ways that many worlds I think is an inaccurate and insufficient way to talk about quantum mechanics and describe the happenings in the universe. But when I look at the different interpretations and I look at the types of qualities I think a universe in which consciousness is fundamental would have, many worlds actually maps onto it better than anything else that I found.

1:03:28And I think you just kind of tuned into why. I can talk a little bit more about why I think that is. Sure. No, I'd love to hear. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, one issue that comes up and it's really a conceptual issue and it may just be an issue for human beings wrapping their minds around quantum mechanics. But one issue that comes up is illustrated in the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment. So the idea that something can exist and not exist at the same time, or that a system can be in a state and not in that state at the same time, or not be in either state at the same time.

1:04:12Physically, I think we don't necessarily have a problem with that, but you do have a problem with it when you bring in conscious experiences. And this is true whether or not consciousness is fundamental. So, you know, in the case of the cat, I don't think there's any way I'm stepping up, taking a couple of steps back. I don't think there's any way we can say that a conscious experience both exists and doesn't exist in the universe. I mean, there could be something to say about the duration of time it exists for, you know, there are all these variables that we may not understand because we just don't understand the fundamental nature of the universe.

1:04:46But to say, you know, I touch my fingers together, there's this experience of pressure, you know, whatever that is, at the level of experience, that experience happened in the universe, whether we're brains in a vat or in a simulation or kind of doesn't matter what the physical world is. the thing that I know that I'm feeling right now that I can say happened, happened in the universe. There's no point at which you should be able to stand and say that conscious experience of pressure doesn't exist. Somewhere in the universe that exists, right? And so a cat, assuming we agree cats are conscious, you could put a human in the situation instead if you doubt it.

1:05:27being alive and being dead, there are a whole set of conscious experiences that we know an alive cat or an alive human has, that there should be no place from the universe where you can say they don't exist. It's not the same when you're talking about physical components, physical properties, things you can measure. There are ways where it's still hard for us to get our minds around, but it's not impossible to say. And I could be wrong, but I feel that it is actually impossible to say this conscious experience existed and didn't exist. And this comes, so many worlds is interesting because it actually resolves that in that every, the cat is both alive and dead in separate universes, right?

1:06:21Like both outcomes play out. And so it preserves all the conscious experiences that, you know, other interpretations of quantum mechanics say can somehow just not exist or exist and not exist at the same time. There is a little bit of a glitch with many worlds, which is incredibly interesting, but I think I'll let you interject first. but that is that is why i think many worlds makes the most sense is that when a quantum event happens in the universe both both events both outcomes actually are realized well i'll actually i'd actually like to hear what you think the glitches because then i'd like to talk a little bit about the whether the cat is conscious or not okay um so i'm gonna do my best to explain this um according to many worlds um it gets a little bit confusing when you bring in relativity um so according to many worlds if you know one quantum event happens that world splits in two but if two quantum events happen simultaneously that world splits in four so what i found interesting when i was talking to sean and asking him questions about this was, well, according to relativity, something that happens simultaneously from my perspective will happen in succession from another perspective.

1:07:49So like what perspective determines how many worlds it splits in two? And he said that there actually are a different number of worlds, a different number of branches, depending on perspective. So there isn't a set number of branches to the universe. It actually does depend on your perspective how many branches there are, which, again, I mean, it's similar to other outcomes of quantum mechanics where depending on your perspective, the universe can be described one way or another way. I actually don't see a problem with that when we're not talking about consciousness. We're just talking about physical things because we're just talking about the properties we observe from whatever perspective we have.

1:08:38And so in the same way that, you know, if you're talking about four, you can talk, you can describe it as two things plus two things, or you can talk about it as three things plus one thing, but you're still talking about four. You don't lose the four items if you talk about them differently or break them up in different ways. however if you're talking about a universe where four world where one world just split into four and if there are conscious beings on any of the in any of those four worlds that you start to get the schrodinger's cat problem because then there will be conscious experiences that you will say from another perspective do not exist um and you know sean in many worlds whatever perspective you have, however many branches, it still describes the entire universe as a whole.

1:09:28And so it doesn't matter how many branches are from any particular perspective. Each perspective does actually contain everything in the universe. And so you run into this problem with consciousness, again, where you're negating conscious experiences that if they happen in any unfolding of the universe, I don't see, I think it's just too big a paradox to, or it's something we'll just never actually be able to understand, that you could say a conscious experience that is experienced doesn't exist in the wholeness of the universe. So he actually talked about how there are physicists who have dealt with this issue, who arrived at it from a different angle than I did where you can maintain relativity and the speed of light in many worlds and then rather than worlds splitting apart all at once there's kind of the zipper effect where they're actually splitting over time which I now have I'm now in a realm that I'm not educated enough to quite understand the implications of that or what that means but it gave me hope that that actually would preserve conscious experiences.

1:10:48As long as they're not actually becoming two all in the same moment of time, if there's kind of a splitting like a, like a zipper, whatever those conscious experiences are that I'm, you know, that I'm saying happen on branch three and four, that from this other perspective, there is no branch three and four, that somehow those experiences happen, but in some other, some other location, or I don't know what you would call it without space but you get the idea okay great i i would like to get back to the cat though okay to the cat and by extension maybe people and yeah just terminologically since we're assuming that all fundamental things are conscious would you call a the consciousness of a unified thing like a cat or me like an emergent consciousness or how would you think that's an illusion so i think it's part of the illusion of self and that in real i mean i think this is in reality whether or not consciousness is fundamental um conscious experiences are coming in and out of being one after the other and they're being generated anew in each new moment um and so the idea that there's a solid entity carried across time, I think is an illusion.

1:12:08And I think if consciousness is fundamental, it's the language is tricky here, because you wouldn't ask, is an atom conscious is because you're kind of sneaking in self there. I, I prefer to think of it as what types of conscious experiences are generated by this type of system? Or, you know, what would you expect this system or these collections, the collection of atoms, what types of experiences would you expect to produce in that area of space-time, rather than talking about things as objects that are conscious. I mean, I think it's even incorrect to talk about human beings that way, because then you're kind of sneaking in the illusion of self, where you have this idea that there's this concrete entity that is having the experiences, when that's not a correct view of reality.

1:12:59What's happening is a dynamic thing. These new experiences are being generated. And even memories are not carbon copies that then get generated again. It's a new experience that contains information from an old experience, but it's always still a new experience. Then maybe you can help me formulate my question. But what I would want to ask in my own language is what distinguishes um something that is very complex like me or the cat that has a sort of consciousness from from the glass of water you mentioned earlier where yeah we don't want to attribute to it the sorts of experiences that i or a cat might have okay so if consciousness is fundamental, there's clearly a structure to it.

1:13:51And there are systems that get built, that the universe builds or that come into being. Some are more complex than others. And if consciousness is fundamental, conscious experience is actually all there is. So there's only felt experience arising in the universe and it's taking different forms right so like the feeling of pressure is very different from the sound of a bell qualitatively and so I feel like I'm not doing the best job of answering your question but I think it's better to think about what types of experiences are generated and I think more complex systems or areas of the universe generate more.

1:14:42And actually, you know, one way to think about it is content. So neuroscientists often talk about the contents of consciousness. And so if you imagine consciousness as fundamental, there's kind of like this field. And one thing I think a lot about is whether it's possible to have consciousness with no content. There's no shape to it at all. There's no sound of a bell. There's no pressure. There's no nothing. It's just this kind of bare awareness, whether or not that that's the case. Clearly, there are even in our own experience, more and less complex content that can be experienced. You know, when you're first waking up in the morning or coming out of anesthesia, there may be very minimal, you know, you might see light, you might have no sense of who you are yet, you know, there may only be a few things that are entering your conscious awareness that are the contents of consciousness.

1:15:33And then, you know, you could be at a party talking to 20 people and there's, you know, you're just, there's a buzz of a million different types of content. And so I think it is useful to separate those things, kind of consciousness, and then the contents of consciousness. When people talk about a spectrum of consciousness too, a lot of people have an intuition for this spectrum, which I actually think doesn't make sense in the end, But what I do think there is a spectrum of is content. That makes sense to me. That's a useful distinction to draw. And so where I was heading toward because. Some follow the noise.

1:16:14Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. I've been having a lot of conversations about AI on the show lately. And I wanted to ask how panpsychism and questions about combination and complexity have led you to think about the content of consciousness of AI systems and what it's like. and if there's anything really interesting that it's like or how we would know. I'm not sure I have anything so interesting to say on it, but I have some peripheral things to say and then I'll give you what I think about AI.

1:17:08Wait, let me go back to my train of thought because you asked a many layered question.

1:17:18um so first i just want to distinguish um so panpsychism is kind of this category of thought that is where i initially landed when i first started thinking about whether consciousness could be fundamental i've moved away from that line of thinking um and so when i talk about consciousness being fundamental, it's usually in a pretty different sense than a panpsychist would talk about it because a panpsychist is usually talking about another property of matter so that we have the material universe and then there's this additional property. That I ended up, what's the word? I mean, I ended up the kind of that whole, I ended up leaving the whole framework work behind because my thought, because it just didn't logically work for me when I started thinking about the fundamentals.

1:18:15And the more physicists I talked to, the more I just thought, okay, we're still trying to understand what matter is. And it makes more sense. And actually, to me, any place you put consciousness because of what consciousness is, any place you put it in the physical universe, actually, you end up with paradoxes. It just doesn't make sense. And so I think either it's emergent and we just will never be able to understand that at some level or it's fundamental. And by fundamental, I mean what everything actually is, what matter is at bottom, what the intrinsic nature of everything is. So panpsychism is not something I really subscribe to.

1:18:57And I've tried to kind of talk out of that framework. work. I've also joked before that it has a bad name and it sounds like something new age. And so I just think it's not a useful, it's not a useful term. Is there a term that you prefer to use to describe? No, no. I was wondering if you might like idealism. I mean, well, I think my view is closer to idealism if you put it in a box. But it's different from idealism in a variety of ways too. And two of the things I think are problematic with both of these terms is they were conceived of so long ago. I mean, the thing that I'm really interested in doing is starting from every, including everything we understand about the universe now.

1:19:38And also using the tools of science and any ways that we might be able to expand science to actually get more information about the things we don't understand about the universe. So panpsychism and idealism are really, they're from another time. They were thought up by humans who didn't understand a lot about the universe that we understand. And I think there's a totally legitimate starting place. If no one had ever had those ideas and those concepts had never been raised before, I actually believe that many philosophers and scientists at this point in history, there are a lot of reasons why this question is naturally coming up now.

1:20:16And that, I think, is a more useful starting place, at least for science and for modern thinkers. And I think it's mostly unhelpful to tie it to older philosophies where we didn't actually understand. I mean, we understood so much less about the physics. So, yeah, that's my wrap on panpsychism and idealism. And, you know, the main way my view at this point differs from idealism is that the way at least it's talked about and written about, it's framed as if, you know, mind is what the universe is and matter emerges out of mind. And that is not at all the way I would describe things. I'm really saying that matter is consciousness, that we're not generating, we're not thinking things up and then they appear in the universe.

1:21:06And a serious idealist wouldn't describe it that way either. But I just think it's even the wrong framework, the wrong way to think about it. I'm interested in all the things we can observe and feel and touch and study and understand what is, as you were saying, you're interested in breaking things apart until you can't break them apart anymore. And this is kind of the question I've come to is, is looking at things in this physical way the wrong way to look at them and that actually what is at bottom? Is this the experiential side of things?

1:21:39You had more of a question than that. I derailed you again on another, yeah, terminological journey. Oh, AI, you were asking about AI. Okay. So I'm trying to think more about this because AI is becoming, is just becoming more of a reality and I'm becoming more interested in it. I wasn't that interested in it previously because if consciousness, oh yeah, oh, that's interesting. I'd like to know why. if consciousness is fundamental all the questions I'm asking about fundamental physics I find way more fascinating I mean what is happening in the experience again of the desk or the pen and how does how do those things like it's it's plants and all kinds of systems that we assume are not conscious if there's consciousness involved it's almost every system I look at is at least as interesting, if not more interesting, as this new technology we're creating.

1:22:34I mean, it's almost arbitrary when you're coming at it from my perspective, because we already have so many complex systems and intelligent systems, and we assume they're not conscious, but what if they are? You know, it's almost like AI is already everywhere, right? Conscious AI is everywhere, is kind of where my thinking is headed. So it's almost just like it's another type of AI. So what I have, what I do feel about it, and I think is actually not that interesting, is that if the artificial intelligence that we create, if we create systems, especially if we create systems that are human-like, what we will be facing is a very bizarre situation that we are really ill-equipped to deal with, which is there will be systems that behave, that have this external behavior that mimics ours, that looks like a human being, but that is actually made of the system itself is an entirely different system and different in many important ways.

1:23:42And so if consciousness is fundamental, the experiences that I would expect to be generated from an AI, I would expect to be nothing like human experiences. And in particular, this sense of self that we have does not necessarily come with the type of intelligence that we're creating. And so, again, like this idea of thinking of like a cat is a cat conscious is this piece of paper conscious thinking of it as one thing that has a consciousness in the way that we experience being a human self where memory strings along in a particular way that we have this continuity of feeling like a single entity.

1:24:24I think that is very likely not something that would come along in an AI system. And so we'll be relating to these systems like they are other human selves because they'll be acting that way. But what's happening on the inside could be experiences we couldn't even ever imagine. You know, like a bat uses sonar. We have no idea what it's like to navigate the world through sonar. We can kind of get our minds around it a little, but we can't know the experience from the inside of a map of the world that is created through sonar. I think we just it will be nothing like a human being and the way it will be least like it is I think it will be lots of more likely many many many different conscious experiences coming in and out of existence and not one thread of of a experience of I that has one continuous experience I think it would be lots of disconnected experiences so one last thing before we wrap up is i'm curious to hear about how science could be shifting in a way that might actually enable us to better understand with or understand or grapple with not panpsychism but the idea that that consciousness is fundamental because it's still very difficult to wrap one's mind around.

1:25:58And it's hard to imagine what type of science could be done. And I've just kind of cracked a little bit of a window onto this. And part of it is just my hope that human beings are so creative and so curious that this will just evolve in directions we can't even imagine at this point. But so a lot of the science is already happening. It has nothing to do with anyone believing consciousness is fundamental. But the work of the neuroscientist David Eagleman and others are working on a category of experiments called sensory substitution and sensory addition. And sensory substitution are creating devices for people who have lost their sight or who are deaf.

1:26:37And there are tools that can be created. Maybe some of your listeners have seen TED Talks on this where they can be a belt, they can be something that's placed on the tongue where electrotactile signals the brain start, you know, eventually learns to interpret. And, you know, rather than experiencing, so the brain port is a good example of where a camera is actually taking in all the visual stimuli and translating it into electrical stimuli on a person's tongue, a person who can't see. It becomes information on their tongue. When they first start using it, it just seems like noise and it's, you know, irritating and they don't really know how to interpret it.

1:27:17Over the course of about four to eight weeks, the brain actually learns how to translate these signals in the same way it translates signals coming in through the eyes. And it ends up generating a map and creates a kind of qualia for people who are trained on them. So they can, you know, using this brain port, this thing that sits on the tongue as collecting information through a camera, even though they're blind, they can actually navigate the world quite smoothly because their brains have kind of turned this information into an intuition for the map of the space around them in the same way that our eyes do that.

1:27:55And so some scientists are now working on what's called sensory addition, which is having senses, doing that with information that we don't naturally perceive. and magnetic north is one experiment that's been done. I actually spoke to one of the participants in my docuseries where they used a belt with similar technology to train the brains of those participants to generate an experience, an intuitive feel of the Earth's magnetic field. And it's fascinating to hear participants from the study talk about what it was like, but they basically acquired a new sense. And so our brains are so malleable in this way that it's really interesting to think about.

1:28:38And I think if we start with this question of if consciousness is fundamental, I actually think that framework, again, will generate ideas for studies and questions that haven't really come up yet. We might wonder how we can know if a certain system is conscious. So perceiving fields and forces that human beings typically don't feel, spectrums of light, things like that, where we could not just be measuring them with devices, but feeling them, having an internal experience, and then generating intuitions. And of course, all of our science comes from intuitions. It's very interesting. We don't really think about it that way, but without our felt experience of the physical forces, without our interacting with them in the ways we do, we wouldn't even come up with the questions about that, you know, that we're attempting to answer.

1:29:30Another thing I think a lot about that's related to this idea of how conscious experiences affect one another through time. And if consciousness is fundamental, what that means for kind of these objects in time that are clearly these conscious experiences affect one another in the form of memory. And I was thinking about, I was actually reading Sarah Walker's book, I was thinking about Einstein's intuitions and how it took him decades to be able to, from the moment he had the intuitions, to be able to actually put it down on paper in the form of language and mathematics so that he could transfer these ideas that came to him in the form of an intuition to other scientists.

1:30:13You know, we're really limited by our ability to communicate the things that we intuit. And so is it possible that with a future science, scientists could share intuitions? And what does that mean? And how much would we have to understand the level of the brain to be able to do that? But, you know, the intuitions that Einstein had that almost no other human being, if any other human being ever had, are so useful to science. And he is a human being. And is there some way to deliver the experience directly. And how much could our shared knowledge grow if we weren't limited to communication in mathematics and physics and language, but through actual sharing of experience?

1:30:58And so, and I think there's kind of a whole world of things that this might reveal and a way to generate new intuitions that I think give us information about the world in a new way. hmm there's a a paper i haven't read it for a long time by paul churchland where just as an aside he mentions this idea of a possible future in which people are could be like fused together the way i was going to mention that too yeah the two sides of the brain are and just share experiences that way but with regard to the sensory addition i wonder what for instance the uh the participant you spoke to with about the magnetic north yeah experiment i'm wondering if it's just if it's genuinely like a new sort of like a new or really a new kind of sense and not just an overriding or a use of the brain's architecture that's already there so that that somebody is, I don't know, seeing magnetic north or hearing magnetic north or like feeling it in their stomach or something like that are really just fundamentally different.

1:32:16Yeah, I know. And this was a big question that he was actually pretty hesitant to answer with any clarity. And I felt more confident in being able to get answer for him than he could for himself based on some things that he said. and so one he finds it impossible to communicate and that to me is a sign because he could say yeah you know how you see yellow well I see this other thing you know it wasn't wasn't in any other mode that he could describe and so it is it did the way and I asked him I spent at least an hour talking to him I was trying to get as much description as I could out of him and he said some very interesting things a lot of it is is in my documentary series but he seemed the way I would expect to feel if I were trying to explain sight to someone who is blind or doesn't have any other sense.

1:33:08So he struggled so much with not having the language to talk about it. He also talked about this kinship he felt with the other participants in the study because they could talk about it in a way that he couldn't talk about it with anyone else. And to me, that was like another data point of something. He was experiencing something different. He also talked about it. He said he would compare it to other senses. So he would say once his body gained an intuition for it, he was no longer interpreting signals. He would just feel it. And he'd say and things would become immediately clear. And he gave this example.

1:33:44He said, you know, if someone walks into the room and you're wearing the same color shirt, you just automatically recognize it. You say, oh, we're both wearing a blue shirt. He said he would feel that way about directions that he was facing. And he started noticing things that he never would have had information about before, let alone notice. But a very funny example he gave was that he noticed all he called them the important toilets. All the important toilets in his life were all facing the same direction. I forget if it was north or west. But because he had such a strong sense of where he was directed in space, he was like, oh, when when I'm home, when I'm at the office, when I'm at the lab, you know, the important places, the main toilets he used.

1:34:24It's like each and each as if they were all blue. And it was just something you kind of like instantaneously recognize. And then he told this wonderful. I was asking if some had pleasant or unpleasant versions to them. And he said, yes. And again, he compared it to music or, you know, art where there's some things you see that are disturbing and you don't like to look at them. there are some sounds that sound terrible some that sound wonderful and he said there were some directions that felt better than others and some orientations that felt better than others and apparently it felt very fun I guess is the right word to walk up a spiral staircase and he said he just found himself constantly looking for spiral staircases in his life because and again it took a lot of my probing to get him to have any language for it but he ended up saying he said it would be Be like hula hooping if you're the hula hoop.

1:35:22Going up a spiral staircase, that's what that felt like to him. That was the best he could do. Yeah, it does sound very foreign. Right. Right. And you would expect that it would, and you would expect that your brain would actually, I mean, it could go either way, but it's not so surprising that your brain is equipped for taking in a new type of data and creating a map out of it. and you would expect that map. The sound wave map is going to develop a different set of qualia than the light wave map, than the touch map, and it's getting a new, it recognizes it's a new input. So, yeah, I mean, I think we're capable of developing new senses in that way.

1:36:09Well, Annika, this has been super fun, and I'm wondering if, I don't know, maybe when your next book comes out, we would do a joint conversation with someone like Sarah Walker, who you've written about in the book. I always love to talk to Sarah. That would be very interesting. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you again so much. This has been great. Yeah. Thank you. It was really fun.

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