Making Sense - Sam Harris - #159 — Conscious

Annika Harris is an author, editor, and consultant for Science Writers. She s the author of the children s book I Wonder, and a collaborator on Susan Kaiser Greenland s Mindful Games activity cards. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, and she lives with her husband, the neuroscientist, author, and podcaster, Sam Harris, and their two children. In this episode, we talk about Annika s new book, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, and why it s so important to have a conversation about consciousness with someone who s written a book about it. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, we re made possible by becoming one. So if you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a member of the M.I.S. community. And if you re not a subscriber, you ll need to subscribe to the Making Sense Podcast to keep up to date with the latest episodes of the podcast. You ll get access to all sorts of great resources, including the latest podcasts, books, and events happening around the world, including The Huffington Post, Slate, and more! Thanks for listening, and Happy Listening! Sam Harris - The Making Sense Team to quote: "I don t know why this is a bad thing." - Emily Poe - "It's a totally awkward thing to do." - "Why not do this?" - "Let me know what you think it is?" - "We should really do this? "It might be better than that" - "That's a good thing?" - What do you think I don't do? - "A bad thing? I don t do it? -- "A good thing? " - "a bad thing?" - "A sign that I do not do that? " That's a sign that it may be a bad sign by me was not a bad one? " -- "I do not have a good one??" What do I do that I think I do better than this than that? -- "That was not that? ? -- that I would like to do this, right? I think that I have a bad m a good sign by you do that by that I'm not not a sign by that ...

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

00:00:10.880 Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber

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00:00:46.800 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:48.880 This is Sam Harris.

00:00:51.420 Okay, not much housekeeping today.

00:00:54.080 Just a reminder that enterprise accounts are available on the Waking Up app.

00:00:58.360 If you're interested in that, or work for a company that might be interested, you can

00:01:02.640 send an email to enterprise at wakingup.com.

00:01:06.100 And also, new features are rolling out on the app soon.

00:01:10.960 You'll be able to sit in groups with friends and colleagues.

00:01:14.740 There are notifications and reminders that you can turn on in the app, which many people

00:01:19.320 find useful.

00:01:19.900 You can set a time to meditate each day with a reminder, and notifications will tell you

00:01:25.340 when new lessons or new features are hitting the app.

00:01:29.640 Anyway, things are rolling along on that front.

00:01:32.880 Okay, so today I have an unusual podcast.

00:01:36.880 My wife, Annika, is joining me.

00:01:39.520 She's never been on the podcast before.

00:01:41.020 Many of you have asked to have her on.

00:01:42.480 And as luck would have it, she has a book that we were eager to talk about.

00:01:48.940 The book is Conscious, A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind.

00:01:53.300 And let me see her bio.

00:01:56.580 Annika Harris is an author, editor, and consultant for Science Writers. 0.96

00:02:01.160 She's the author of the children's book, I Wonder, and a collaborator on Susan Kaiser Greenland's

00:02:05.360 Mindful Games activity cards.

00:02:06.820 Her work has appeared in the New York Times, and she lives with her husband, the neuroscientist,

00:02:12.260 author, and podcaster, Sam Harris, and their two children.

00:02:15.520 I can confirm all of those facts.

00:02:17.920 The thing that's not here, though implicit in her being an editor and consultant for Science

00:02:23.140 Writers, Annika has edited all my written work since my first book, The End of Faith,

00:02:29.100 that book included.

00:02:30.680 And once I discovered her talents as an editor, I recommended that she do it professionally,

00:02:35.260 so she's collaborated with other scientists, neuroscientists and physicists mainly.

00:02:39.840 And she wrote the children's book, I Wonder, which many of you liked.

00:02:43.540 But this is the first book that she's written for grown-ups.

00:02:47.040 And the focus of the book is the nature of consciousness and why it is so inscrutable.

00:02:53.020 This is something that not everyone recognizes.

00:02:55.880 And she does that remarkably well.

00:02:58.500 I read some of the blurbs in a previous housekeeping, but Marco Iacoboni, neuroscientist, says,

00:03:04.880 I've read many, many great books on consciousness in my life as a neuroscientist.

00:03:08.680 Conscious tops them all, hands down.

00:03:11.200 Tim Urban, the author of the Wait But Why blog, writes,

00:03:15.660 One of those books that fundamentally shifts the way you think about reality.

00:03:19.240 Annika Harris is a masterful explainer.

00:03:21.980 Max Tegmark, physicist at MIT, writes,

00:03:25.900 In this gem of a book, Annika Harris tackles consciousness controversies with incisive rigor

00:03:30.340 and clarity, in a style that's accessible and captivating.

00:03:34.300 Anyway, it's a great look at the problem of consciousness.

00:03:37.540 We get into some of this over the next hour.

00:03:40.980 We talk about a few other things.

00:03:43.420 Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the conversation.

00:03:45.480 I certainly did.

00:03:47.000 And now I bring you Annika Harris.

00:03:49.120 Okay, I got Annika Harris in the studio. 1.00

00:03:57.760 My own wife.

00:03:59.080 Welcome.

00:03:59.940 Thank you.

00:04:02.780 You ready for this?

00:04:03.800 We should really have other people here, I think.

00:04:06.120 No, to save us from ourselves?

00:04:08.120 Yeah.

00:04:09.460 I already can tell I have a hostile witness here.

00:04:12.280 Okay, well, you have a new book coming out for grown-ups that we're going to talk about.

00:04:16.720 So let's talk about how overjoyed you are to be doing this podcast.

00:04:21.500 Why are you reluctant to do this?

00:04:23.320 I don't think we should start with that.

00:04:24.740 Why not?

00:04:25.360 I don't know, because part of it is just that this is a totally awkward thing to do,

00:04:30.080 which is why I think it might be better if we had...

00:04:32.040 Get that mic a little closer to you.

00:04:33.440 Okay.

00:04:34.700 Point it more toward you.

00:04:37.120 There you go.

00:04:37.900 Like that?

00:04:38.460 Yeah.

00:04:38.680 First, the reality is, I just realized this, our first date was filled with a conversation

00:04:47.880 about this topic.

00:04:49.520 That's true.

00:04:49.960 We basically spoke about consciousness and free will and the other topics in your book.

00:04:56.480 Now, it may be a bad sign that that was followed by you avoiding me for six months

00:05:00.700 and not returning my emails.

00:05:01.700 No, but I mean, the thing I thought about also before we did this is that the friend

00:05:09.240 who sat us up had said to me that she didn't know, of course, whether there'd be a romantic

00:05:15.860 connection, but that she knew that we would be great friends because we talk about and think

00:05:20.980 about all of the same things.

00:05:23.440 And it's true. 0.56

00:05:24.380 We've been thinking about a lot of the same things for most of our lives.

00:05:28.480 And this was the topic of, I think, mostly what we talked about that the first time we

00:05:33.520 met was philosophy and consciousness.

00:05:36.880 Not to give a false impression, we don't spend a lot of time talking about these things

00:05:40.720 now.

00:05:41.440 So, happily, your book is an excuse to get into it.

00:05:46.280 And your book is Conscious, A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind.

00:05:50.460 You wanted a different title, I recall.

00:05:52.880 I think you lucked out in being overruled on your title.

00:05:56.600 But what was the first title?

00:05:57.400 Lights On.

00:05:59.140 Right.

00:05:59.680 Conscious, I think, is a better title.

00:06:01.060 Yeah.

00:06:02.040 They were right.

00:06:03.600 So, thank you, dear publisher.

00:06:06.320 So, what's the book about?

00:06:09.400 Really?

00:06:10.340 See, this is weird.

00:06:11.880 I don't...

00:06:12.440 Why did you write a book on consciousness?

00:06:18.540 I think we can go back to what's the book about.

00:06:21.080 Say, you know, I obviously know what the book is about, but why don't you say something

00:06:23.920 about what the book is about?

00:06:24.920 Let me, you already asked the question.

00:06:31.320 Let me just try to answer.

00:06:39.480 Let me just try to answer.

00:06:40.360 Oh, my God.

00:06:41.740 Let me just try to answer.

00:06:42.520 All right.

00:06:44.500 That is staying in the interview.

00:06:46.640 That is awesome.

00:06:47.860 I have veto bound.

00:06:49.080 Listen.

00:06:50.060 No.

00:06:50.940 Yes, I do.

00:06:52.100 Listen to me.

00:06:53.120 Okay.

00:06:53.520 I'm going to answer.

00:06:54.240 Let me answer your question.

00:06:55.540 You asked a question.

00:06:56.540 Let me answer it.

00:06:57.740 Let me answer.

00:07:00.360 This is my podcast.

00:07:02.340 All right.

00:07:02.680 So, you asked a question.

00:07:03.820 Let me answer.

00:07:04.580 Okay.

00:07:06.500 All right.

00:07:08.260 So, my book is about the science and philosophy of consciousness, and it focuses on why consciousness

00:07:14.860 is so deeply mysterious.

00:07:16.720 But one of the things that it does that has always been interesting to me, and that, of

00:07:22.800 course, you and I have talked a lot about, is breaking through false intuitions.

00:07:27.940 And it's something that I find incredibly interesting to do, and interesting that we often reach

00:07:37.120 deeper truths, more fundamental truths, a better picture of the reality around us when

00:07:44.300 we can break through intuitions that are misleading us or that are giving us false information about

00:07:50.360 the world around us, even if they're helpful for us at the time.

00:07:53.160 I was thinking earlier about the fact that even as a child, this was an interesting exercise

00:07:59.740 to me.

00:08:00.260 This was something, and I actually begin the book this way.

00:08:02.840 So, I talk about just my experience of breaking through the intuition, basically that the earth

00:08:09.080 is flat and that we're on it underneath the sky rather than on a sphere in the way that we are.

00:08:16.280 But I remember being a child and trying to think of paradoxes or make up paradoxes just to create

00:08:24.700 this feeling of kind of breaking out of this day-to-day experience that I knew in some ways

00:08:29.940 was misguiding me or keeping me apart from the deeper mysteries.

00:08:35.260 So, what are some of the intuitions that are so off around consciousness?

00:08:40.320 So, just to give some context, you and I both have this experience of being in dialogue

00:08:44.540 with some very smart people who seem not to get, the most charitable thing to say is they

00:08:51.540 have fundamentally different intuitions about consciousness and what could be plausible to

00:08:57.780 think about it, what's interesting about it, what is mysterious about it.

00:09:02.520 This is true of free will, too.

00:09:04.040 I mean, this is true of the nature of the self or its illusory nature.

00:09:08.640 And those are the two big ones.

00:09:10.100 Those are the big ones that I think are misleading us in terms of being able to understand consciousness.

00:09:16.140 Right.

00:09:16.300 Well, so free will and the self are really two sides of the same coin.

00:09:20.460 Yeah.

00:09:20.860 And then there's the hard problem of consciousness, which is more the focus of your book, although

00:09:25.600 free will and the self come up.

00:09:27.140 So, you and I are almost the worst people to diagnose this problem because we're really,

00:09:34.620 we're totally aligned on our intuitions here and we're fairly mystified by the responses

00:09:40.380 we get from some people on these topics.

00:09:43.000 Right.

00:09:43.380 We've been in some funny circumstances, too, where we cannot let go of our side.

00:09:47.780 We happen to be in the same place at an event or dinner where we've encountered someone who

00:09:52.540 has a very different intuition and neither of us can let this debate go.

00:09:56.800 And so we'll sit there for two hours until everyone else is left trying to get the other

00:10:02.680 person to understand what we're talking about.

00:10:04.900 Yeah.

00:10:04.960 We basically try to perform an exorcism on this person.

00:10:07.900 Yeah.

00:10:08.200 And I guess those people should go nameless.

00:10:10.420 But so, but we'll start with the hard problem and the intuition that some people have that

00:10:17.280 it either doesn't exist or it's not hard or there's no mystery around consciousness that

00:10:22.880 is different from any other thing we don't yet understand scientifically.

00:10:26.800 How do you raise this subject?

00:10:29.080 I do.

00:10:29.300 I understand it in a sense because, so the hard problem, I believe that the term was

00:10:36.240 coined by David Chalmers.

00:10:39.120 But this is obviously, this is a problem that people have encountered for much longer than

00:10:44.680 David Chalmers used the term in 1995.

00:10:47.300 So it's, it's a concept that has been around for a very long time.

00:10:51.560 And he gave us this shorthand, which is great and very useful in conversation.

00:10:56.040 But the problem is, is essentially, why is it that any configuration of non-conscious material,

00:11:04.160 since we obviously know that everything in the universe is, is made of the same things,

00:11:09.140 the, the, the ingredients are the same for everything.

00:11:12.340 And, but that particles get configured in such a way that suddenly the matter itself entails

00:11:18.300 an experience of being that matter.

00:11:20.300 And so there's almost no explanation or there's really no explanation we could think of that

00:11:26.780 we could ever give that would make it less mysterious because it's always non-conscious matter

00:11:33.140 getting arranged in a very specific way so that it suddenly lights up from the inside.

00:11:39.400 And so it seems that no matter how much we know about the brain, there's nothing that

00:11:44.880 will, that will ever make this less mysterious.

00:11:49.760 And so that, so Chalmers was contrasting this problem, this mystery to the quote unquote easier

00:11:56.760 problems, which are more about how the brain processes, which parts of the brain are responsible

00:12:02.380 for which functions and the more complex understanding that we now have, since we have a science of

00:12:08.680 the brain, of which experiences and which behaviors are correlated with which brain states.

00:12:15.020 Right.

00:12:15.080 So an easy problem of consciousness would be something like, why is vision the way it is?

00:12:20.300 Why is there a one-to-one mapping, say, of the visual field onto the visual cortex?

00:12:25.440 But the hard problem is, why is it like something to see?

00:12:28.680 Right.

00:12:28.860 Why is there an experience there at all?

00:12:30.540 Yeah.

00:12:31.120 As you said, it seems like, you know, you have complex systems doing complex things.

00:12:36.420 At no point should it be necessary, or it's certainly not obvious why it would be necessary,

00:12:41.940 that it be like something from the inside to be that system.

00:12:46.680 Because we know so much of this can happen unconsciously, even in our own case, or it certainly

00:12:51.060 seems, well, we'll get to that actually.

00:12:53.240 We may not know that as much as we think we do.

00:12:55.160 But so now I've just used this phrase a few times, like something to be a system, and

00:13:01.100 that comes from Thomas Nagel's essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, where he defined consciousness

00:13:06.180 in these terms.

00:13:07.780 If it is like something to be a bat, that's what we mean by consciousness in the case of

00:13:13.200 a bat, whether we can ever understand what it's like to be a bat or not.

00:13:16.720 Now, this phrase trips off our tongues without any problem, and yet I notice that it confuses

00:13:27.080 many people.

00:13:28.080 Again, people who have the opposite intuition about consciousness.

00:13:31.580 They either think, well, it's like something to be anything.

00:13:35.460 It's like something to be that couch you're sitting on, right?

00:13:38.400 Well, but it's partly a linguistic issue, that it doesn't actually mean anything.

00:13:43.100 It's not as accurate as we'd like it to be.

00:13:46.720 I actually like the word experience better, even though that can be misunderstood too.

00:13:51.900 But it confuses people on two levels.

00:13:53.760 One, there are people who actually don't see consciousness and experience as being something

00:14:00.180 unique, I guess is the right word.

00:14:02.640 But there's another group of people who actually get the hard problem, but they still have a

00:14:08.240 hard time getting their minds around this language.

00:14:10.580 It's like something.

00:14:11.520 Is it like something?

00:14:12.340 And I actually, I noticed that with most of those people, if you just have a little back

00:14:17.860 and forth, they get it.

00:14:19.600 And you've written about this too, just distinguishing between collections of matter or systems that

00:14:26.240 you think are having an experience and those that aren't.

00:14:29.600 And that that difference, that basic difference is what we mean by consciousness, what we're talking

00:14:34.600 about, what is mysterious.

00:14:35.560 So if you just ask the person, you know, is there something that it's like to be you right

00:14:39.700 now?

00:14:40.100 Are you having an experience?

00:14:41.360 And of course, they don't even have to think about it.

00:14:44.160 They're just reflexively answer yes.

00:14:45.960 And then you say, is it like something to be your shoelace or is your chair having an experience

00:14:50.340 right now?

00:14:51.280 Their intuition is immediately no.

00:14:53.360 And so it doesn't even matter what the truth is.

00:14:56.600 Just being able to distinguish between like, OK, yes, there's I have an immediate response to

00:15:00.700 that.

00:15:00.920 And so therefore, I understand what you're talking about.

00:15:04.420 So I guess the confusion that I notice is that people, when you say this phrase, what

00:15:08.980 is it like to be a bat?

00:15:10.980 They take the external view of that.

00:15:14.680 What is it like from the outside to be that thing?

00:15:17.460 Not what it's like from the inside.

00:15:19.600 But then I think experience does the trick there.

00:15:21.620 You can say what kind of experience does that have?

00:15:24.540 Yeah.

00:15:24.620 OK, so why is it not straightforward to judge the consciousness of a system or a thing from

00:15:32.940 the outside?

00:15:33.860 What is the evidence that consciousness exists?

00:15:37.380 Yeah.

00:15:37.640 So this is so listeners know I begin my discussion and my basically the book takes the reader through

00:15:44.880 my own thought processes over the last 15 years or so and what I've arrived at and why I've

00:15:51.720 become open to some of the stranger theories that are out there that postulate that consciousness

00:15:58.100 could be a more fundamental feature of the universe.

00:16:01.500 And so I begin this investigation of breaking through our intuitions and getting as close

00:16:09.020 in my own thoughts as I've been able to at what are intuitions and could they be wrong?

00:16:17.360 And so I think the most primary intuitions we have about consciousness live in these two

00:16:23.000 questions that I like to keep asking myself.

00:16:25.620 And the first one is the one you just named.

00:16:28.720 Is there any behavior on the outside or anything we can witness on the outside of a system that

00:16:33.700 can tell us conclusively that consciousness is present in that system?

00:16:38.360 And my first answer is always yes.

00:16:41.080 And that's something that I then question throughout the book.

00:16:43.540 But I think it's interesting because we feel very strongly that the answer is yes.

00:16:47.920 If I see that my daughter has fallen down and is crying and you ask me, is all this behavior

00:16:55.660 you're seeing right now, evidence that she's conscious, I would say, absolutely.

00:16:59.460 This is-

00:17:00.640 Just to be clear, this is not the normal way I parent with you.

00:17:04.520 But I'm capable of a lot, but not quite that.

00:17:09.040 So, you know, or anything.

00:17:11.300 In the book, I use the example of someone witnessing a car accident, I think, and, you know, being

00:17:17.120 appropriately concerned and calling 911.

00:17:19.660 There's just endless amount of behaviors that we witness that we think, yes, that is absolute

00:17:26.400 evidence that that person is conscious.

00:17:29.400 I mean, we can do it with animals as well.

00:17:31.520 And I think it's interesting to question that, to question whether there is something that

00:17:39.560 by definition gives us evidence that there is consciousness there.

00:17:45.080 Well, so obviously there are counterexamples.

00:17:48.220 We all meet people in dreams, presumably they're not conscious or don't even exist, and they

00:17:53.380 seem to be conscious.

00:17:54.520 We will almost certainly build robots at a certain point which pass the Turing test.

00:18:02.140 And if we don't understand the material basis of consciousness at the time we produce those

00:18:07.640 robots, we won't know whether or not they're conscious, and yet they may seem to be conscious.

00:18:13.040 And then conversely, there are people who we know, due to neurological injury, are still

00:18:19.720 conscious, but they can give no sign of that.

00:18:22.380 And one example I think you talk about in the book is locked-in syndrome.

00:18:25.140 Yeah.

00:18:25.640 Yeah.

00:18:26.160 And I think that I actually start there with all of the cases we can give where we don't

00:18:32.300 see that behavior that we would normally give.

00:18:34.940 And there is a full, very complex, you know, as complex as our own experiences right now

00:18:42.660 that are present in people who are completely paralyzed, and we couldn't ever see that evidence

00:18:47.260 from the outside.

00:18:48.000 I think that's an interesting starting place for whether we can ever pinpoint certain behaviors

00:18:53.480 that we can say conclusively are evidence of consciousness.

00:18:57.480 And then the second question is, essentially, is consciousness doing anything?

00:19:02.840 Is it serving a function?

00:19:05.220 And our reflexive answer with that, again, is yes, and my intuition goes that way, too.

00:19:10.540 But I think these are the kind of the simplest, deepest intuitions we have, and I wanted to start

00:19:15.960 there in terms of challenging our intuitions and trying to break through some of them.

00:19:21.880 So an example of the second question, even though it's very similar to the first, but it's getting

00:19:29.080 at it from a slightly different angle, would be, you know, just deciding to write a book

00:19:33.700 or even the whole writing process.

00:19:35.660 It feels very strongly that consciousness is driving all of that.

00:19:41.260 It feels like every time I make a decision or plan almost anything, consciousness is the

00:19:47.420 thing that's driving it.

00:19:48.500 It clearly has a role in my behavior, and it seems to have a role at the very beginning.

00:19:55.040 And the science, actually, you know, as you know and have talked about and written about,

00:19:58.980 is the opposite.

00:20:00.280 And so that's an intuition that we can start to chip away at pretty quickly.

00:20:05.620 And I think you start to go down very interesting paths of contemplation when you begin with these

00:20:12.100 two questions that challenge our intuitions.

00:20:14.600 Yeah, so it's not clear what consciousness is doing, and the concern here in philosophy

00:20:21.680 has been that consciousness is a so-called epiphenomenon, which is to say it's something

00:20:28.060 that stands outside the stream of phenomenon that are causal.

00:20:33.640 And if consciousness is doing anything, it has to be doing it at the level of, in our case,

00:20:39.640 the brain's causal pattern, you know, the neurophysiology.

00:20:43.540 So it's the most well-subscribed view at this point is that consciousness, whatever it is

00:20:48.180 at the level of experience, it is, you know, the fact that the lights are on, the fact that

00:20:51.780 it's like something to be you in this moment.

00:20:54.200 That's how it seems from the first person side.

00:20:56.500 But there's some third person level of description, which is its cash value at the level of causality.

00:21:04.020 So if there's certain, if some things can only be done consciously, that's because whatever

00:21:09.480 consciousness is at the level of neurophysiology, in our case, that has to be part of the causal

00:21:15.340 stream, right?

00:21:16.140 Yeah.

00:21:16.500 But it's a little more mysterious than that in that, and you just alluded to this, which

00:21:21.300 is that anything we're conscious of, I mean, take your writing process, the decision to write,

00:21:27.240 the decision to sit down precisely at that moment to write, the decision about where to start

00:21:32.080 relative to what you had written previously, the word choice to start the next sentence,

00:21:38.500 anything you can point to in that process, no matter how deliberative it seems, is preceded

00:21:44.980 by events in your brain of which you're not conscious, of which there's no conscious correlate.

00:21:51.020 And the question is, why does any of that, that seemingly could all happen on its own,

00:21:56.260 right?

00:21:56.620 And so what is consciousness adding to that process?

00:22:00.960 And the zombie thought experiment has always been instrumental in this, but I actually think

00:22:05.760 at this point, because AI is so in our minds because of pop culture and films, I think it's easy for

00:22:14.740 us to imagine AI doing a lot of the things that we are capable of without consciousness.

00:22:22.780 Like writing a book.

00:22:23.660 Like writing a book.

00:22:24.560 But even something like vision, it seems very natural to us that we have an experience of seeing

00:22:30.500 things and we understand that there are processes in the brain and light is bouncing off the objects

00:22:35.980 in the room and hitting our retina and our brain and we're processing this.

00:22:40.020 But we can easily see that a computer, a camera, or a very advanced AI could be doing all of the

00:22:48.280 processing, the visual processing that we're doing without having an experience like the one we're

00:22:54.620 having.

00:22:55.120 It's a very specific feeling content of consciousness to be seeing the color blue.

00:23:01.560 And that's not necessarily, or it doesn't seem to us to be necessary for the processing to take place.

00:23:08.380 So the idea that consciousness might not be doing anything is problematic or perceived to

00:23:15.240 be problematic from an evolutionary point of view because people wonder, well, then why

00:23:19.860 would it have evolved?

00:23:21.420 Surely it must be doing something because it must be expensive metabolically on some level,

00:23:27.220 although perhaps not all that expensive.

00:23:29.980 And why would this thing have emerged?

00:23:32.560 Now, again, not everything that's emerged has an evolutionary rationale.

00:23:37.660 Now, there are things that just have come along for free that aren't really selected for.

00:23:43.200 But our intuitions are so aligned with that theory also.

00:23:46.660 It really feels like, you know, the love and my desire to protect my child is the thing that

00:23:53.200 will give me that extra power, that extra strength, that extra will.

00:23:58.540 The experiential component of that.

00:24:00.280 To do, yeah.

00:24:01.220 The fact that it's like something to want to protect your child rather than just blindly coded

00:24:07.400 into an unconscious mechanism.

00:24:09.240 Yeah, no, it seems to us that the feelings of love and fear, probably primarily, but of

00:24:16.160 course, all of the other emotions and desires and intentions, it seems that our experience

00:24:21.480 of them is the thing that gives them their power.

00:24:23.720 Except we know, the case of fear is a great example because we know that the startle response

00:24:28.200 has already hit the amygdala before you're aware you've been startled.

00:24:32.100 Yeah, no, so I think we're probably wrong about this.

00:24:35.120 And again, the zombie thought experiment can get you there.

00:24:38.400 But just imagining an AI that's been programmed to, above all else, protect this other robot,

00:24:44.340 you can call it its child, whatever it is, it doesn't seem to us that it would require

00:24:50.120 that it have an experience in order to follow that programming.

00:24:54.700 So the argument about evolution is one that sends many people, including myself, down the

00:25:03.780 path of, is it possible that consciousness is a fundamental feature of all matter, and

00:25:12.360 it is there in some form?

00:25:15.080 Of course, if we're talking very minimal forms, if we're talking the level of atoms or very

00:25:20.180 minimal information processing, it's important to not confuse consciousness with complex

00:25:25.420 thought.

00:25:26.220 There's no one is postulating that if it's a more fundamental feature, it is anything like

00:25:33.840 a human mind and brain, but...

00:25:36.940 Okay, so let me just understand the move you just made.

00:25:39.140 So the idea that consciousness may not be doing anything seems problematic if you think that

00:25:45.700 consciousness had to have emerged in the process of evolution, because by default we expect those

00:25:52.740 things to have been costly in some way and to have been selected for, and therefore, by

00:25:57.880 definition, they were leading to differential success in breeding and survival.

00:26:02.860 So if consciousness isn't doing any of that, that seems mysterious, unless you posit that it

00:26:09.880 is a far more fundamental feature of physical reality than that.

00:26:13.860 And the name for that view, the general family of views in philosophy, is panpsychism.

00:26:21.060 Right.

00:26:21.760 Right.

00:26:22.480 So I warned you to tread lightly on panpsychism, because it seems...

00:26:27.060 Well, first of all, it's a terrible name.

00:26:28.400 I actually, I kind of opened the question to the world to come up with a better name.

00:26:33.780 It just, it sounds like something very unscientific or pseudoscientific.

00:26:39.280 And just on the face of it, it sounds like a crazy idea, which it really, I feel like

00:26:45.260 I'm a good proponent of it.

00:26:47.000 And I actually shouldn't say I'm a full proponent of it, because in my book I say, and I'm still

00:26:52.660 in the same place, that I'm really just open to it.

00:26:55.400 I think it's a category of theories that are very interesting and worth exploring.

00:27:00.720 I think it's just as likely that even though it is as mysterious as it is, it's possible

00:27:06.840 that it requires, that consciousness requires a brain and that consciousness does not emerge

00:27:11.640 until we have brain or a nervous system present.

00:27:15.720 But I think this other way of looking at consciousness is very interesting.

00:27:20.980 And I feel like I'm a good person to fight for it or to fight for more people being open

00:27:26.460 to it, because I completely dismissed it when I first encountered it.

00:27:30.800 And like most people, they feel that it's just the idea sounds completely crazy.

00:27:35.620 So I cite in my book this great title of an article by Philip Goff, which is,

00:27:42.060 Panpsychism is Crazy, But It's Also Most Probably True. 1.00

00:27:45.760 And that really gets at, for me, the point at which I started to take panpsychism more seriously.

00:27:53.320 So it was something that I completely dismissed when I first encountered it and thought it

00:27:58.360 sounded totally crazy.

00:28:00.340 We should define it, too.

00:28:01.680 There are different levels at which you could imagine consciousness is integrated with the

00:28:08.780 stuff of things.

00:28:10.080 Well, there are maybe three different levels at which people think consciousness could be

00:28:18.100 appearing under this umbrella term panpsychism.

00:28:21.120 And one is at the level of information processing, which, as far as I know, that's where David

00:28:26.300 Chalmers feels that it makes the most sense for it to emerge.

00:28:30.740 He may be more open to a deeper level than that now.

00:28:34.440 But he writes about that.

00:28:36.140 He writes about the possibility that a thermostat could be conscious.

00:28:39.120 It's very minimal information processing.

00:28:41.640 And then some people postulate that it is a fundamental feature of matter itself.

00:28:48.420 Whether it's processing information or not.

00:28:51.360 Right.

00:28:51.720 So any matter down to the level of individual particles, that consciousness is itself a property

00:29:00.320 of matter.

00:29:01.100 And so it's integral to matter.

00:29:04.260 And there is some level of experience, no matter how minimal and completely unlike.

00:29:11.680 I mean, anyone who proposes these theories acknowledges that it would be unrecognizable to us, the type

00:29:19.400 of experience.

00:29:20.580 So you imagine what it's like to be a bat.

00:29:24.360 That is a very different experience from the one we have as human beings.

00:29:28.940 You know, navigating the world with sonar, just what that feels like must feel very different.

00:29:34.200 It must be a very different experience from navigating the world using vision.

00:29:37.880 And then obviously, the more simple the system, if consciousness is present in everything,

00:29:44.320 then we're talking about such a minimal level of experience.

00:29:47.340 It's not something we could ever even try to imagine.

00:29:51.160 There's no memory.

00:29:53.020 There's...

00:29:54.440 In one of the chapters of my book, I actually try to give a sense of what consciousness could

00:30:01.040 be like in its most minimal form.

00:30:03.060 And I kind of talk the reader through this guided imagery.

00:30:06.600 But I think if it's possible that consciousness is present in all matter, most experience that

00:30:13.580 exists is nothing like the experience we have as human beings.

00:30:17.600 It's probably a very rare form of consciousness.

00:30:20.320 And it's also not experience that you would expect.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - June 06, 2019

#159 — Conscious

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