This is Going to Hurt. Everything You Know is False. | Annaka Harris on Impact Theory

[Music] when people first encounter these the the science that we have and also just the idea of messing with these intuitions it can be uncomfortable and some people don't like going down this path like like like to make a little disclaimer or or to say that I think people can feel very out of control and I mean there's there's something jarring about learning that everything the things that feel most true to you about reality are possibly not that not structured that way wait till you explain delayed measurement and people really lose their [ __ ] like that's where it's gonna get interesting we're not even in the crazy stuff yet [Music] everyone this episode is brought to you by our sponsor better help an online counseling company with the mission to make professional counseling accessible affordable and convenient I hope you enjoy hey everyone welcome to impact theory today's guest is a New York Times bestselling author who is challenging some of our most fundamental notions of what it means to be a conscious being she is an editor and consultant for many esteemed science writers and she specializes in making the notoriously difficult to comprehend topics of neuroscience and physics accessible to the masses her writing has not only appeared on bookshelves far and wide but it has also been featured by some of the most prestigious outlets in the world including the New York Times from best-selling author Adam grant to theoretical physicist Shana Carroll some of the brightest minds on the planet have publicly championed her work her ideas and her uncanny ability to explain hard things well so well in fact that in addition to her groundbreaking work for adults she's written a very well-received children's book called I wonder and collaborated with Susan Kaiser Greenland on mindful games activity cards she also teaches mindfulness to students in the inner kids organization and has taught her techniques to children as a young as four and a half years old talk about making things accessible so please help me in welcoming the author of conscious a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind Annika Harris good to see you as well thank you so much for coming on the show yeah absolutely I am as inspired by the topics that you cover as you are what is would you say your most sort of ah inspiring insight into the human mind hmm you know I think I think we just the simple insight that consciousness is as mysterious as it turns out to be is to me the most awe-inspiring piece and it's really the reason I wrote the and there are many reasons but but the main reason was really to share this sense of inspiration and ah at just how mysterious consciousness is and many people actually don't realize that it's one of the great enduring mysteries so we're all kind of familiar with looking out into the cosmos and wondering about black holes in the beginning of the universe and is there life you know on other planets and and these things are naturally awe-inspiring and many people don't realize actually that that consciousness is on in some ways on equal footing with these other great mysteries but the difference is it's here with us in every moment and so there's actually this this great mystery this great inspiring mystery that's with us in every moment kind of to be to be rebel that and to why do you think so many people miss it hmm I think part of the reason is that neuroscience has made so much progress that I think most people think some scientist understands it or if they don't quite understand it they'll understand it soon and I think part of it is just that it's it's kind of something we take for granted I think we have always assumed I think you know in modern times since we've had modern science we've always assumed that consciousness is analogous to something like a light bulb where it seems miraculous to flip a switch and and suddenly a room is flooded with light but but once you understand the details once you understand electricity and the mechanics of a light bulb it's something you can understand it's not it's not really mysterious and I think people a lot of people have assumed that consciousness is analogous to that and there I think there are many reasons why that analogy actually doesn't hold so if the analogy of it being like a light bulb doesn't hold well where do you go from there and you've always been very careful to define consciousness and well yeah probably should yeah yeah no I'm glad you brought that up so the way I'm using the word consciousness the people use the word in a variety of ways and often it makes it a confusing term and actually the the best term I think is is experience to really point to the most fundamental sense of consciousness that I'm talking about and then my book is about and that I think is mysterious so consciousness simply being experience whether there is something that it's like to be a collection of atoms in the universe so we often forget that that it's literally true that we are Stardust we are made of the same ingredients of everything else in the universe and there's this magical fact that when matter gets configured in a certain way it lights up from the inside that suddenly there's something that it's like to be that matter and so many people use the word consciousness to kind of talk about higher order reasoning self-awareness things like that but I'm using it in the most in the most fundamental sense simply having an experience simply there's something it's like to use Thomas navels definition he he wrote a famous essay called what is it like to be a bat and in that essay he he says an organism is conscious if there's something that it's like to be that organism and some people have a hard time with that terminology but for me that really kind of gets gets to the core of this simple definition of consciousness and why why it's mysterious one thing year you've been very careful to talk about as well and this is where I first went so I dive into the book I'm super interested I'm yeah I'm with you like let's talk about it yeah and as you started explaining it I found myself conflating the notion of being conscious with high level cognition right and I saw I was like like how as you got into the some of the more like esoteric pen psychism that maybe this is all a feel the like gravity that consciousness just sort of is it exists and from that thing spring forward which is [ __ ] fascinating and we will for sure talk about that but I would emphasize maybe - yeah no and I'm completely open to it but I like to be clear that we really don't know and I'm not advocating that view I just think it's actually it's worth if it's worth exploring and we should be open to it but no question and one thing I hope that we get to at some point is the very fact that that it shouldn't be off-limits to talk about these crazy ideas and the fact that this is like career suicide for so many people just so weird me yes but before we derail on that so teasing out the two concepts I think is super important because people will not be able to get into the joys of this mystery if they think what they're being asked to contemplate is that a rock has high level cognition because they can't separate because my my biggest argument is always when someone starts talking in a way that makes it sound like you're saying there's essentially a soul or whatever I'm like Phineas Gage homie yeah like and I'm assuming you know well the story of Phineas Gage I actually don't know that so this is this is so interesting this is one of my favorite you talk about so many examples in the book it it'll immediately be familiar is just another one of those yes but Phineas Gage was a railroad worker who hit a tamping well yes yes like some crazy amount like a tea cups tea cups worth of brain matter but he never loses consciousness yes but forever is different and he they say he went from like the most likable guy ever to like a total [ __ ] he could not hold a job yes and it's just like yeah is it the same guy like the only thing that happened was damage to the brain yes it's fascinating that we have this intuition somehow that this isn't the case but of course we know that our experience our conscious experience in this moment and all over the content that's flooding in through this experience as a result of brain processing and if you change the brain the experience changes the thoughts change the feelings change it's it's it's all correlated I feel like you you had um a question that you were getting at then you brought that example up that I wanted to answer I felt like it was a good question so what I want to when whenever somebody starts talking about hey there there's there is something inside of me that isn't my body and there's great comfort in that for them and as somebody who literally my mission in life is to get people to get control of their conscious thoughts okay maybe even reprogram some of the default mode Network we should talk about that as well but like so my mission in life if I'm gonna put it in like sort of deep biological terms is to get people to rewire their default mode network so they're very sense of self is more productive right so that their identity their beliefs their value systems neurological level so that they're getting like this neuro chemical response that drives them towards something effective right so you can get a neurological response that drives you towards destructive behavior or you can retrain things and and be going in a positive direction okay so right yeah if I realize yeah sorry I just realized now that the distinction you wanted to make was between consciousness in this very fundamental sense that I'm using it in the book and complex thought correct and that we have to be very careful to not conflate them that that we must distinguish between the two for many reasons even in a human sense we know that babies at some point people can argue about where it comes in but at some point a baby that does not have language and two is not having the types of thoughts you and I are having or thinking through anything complicated at all is having a conscious experience and then of course you can go through the animal kingdom and people tend to agree and disagree the the more simple the creature gets but at a pretty simple level even you know a mouse something like that most of us and most neuroscientists would say yes a mouse is having some kind of experience it is it's not an unconscious zombie or robot you know we know that their brains are similar enough to ours that they're having some type of experience and then in in some of this work we can start to postulate how far down an experience actually goes and so when we do that is very important to distinguish consciousness just the fact of experience from complex thought or mind or or anything like that that it's it's certainly possible to imagine and feasible to postulate a scientific understanding of experience in a very very minimal form yes that notion of experience how much of that do you feel requires a recognised experience so my recognized experience I mean so you you've said very clearly that they looked this whole notion of Pan psychism where essentially consciousness may be a field like gravity and that things bring up through it if that is real then there are maybe this is like sort of little minds coming together and and I'll let you explain that far better than I can and that we we can get these collaborations between these which will change the nature of the consciousness but what I want to tease out is like ok if there isn't a light switch moment where something either is or isn't conscious there definitely seems to be the quality of that experience changes dramatically and so when I think about if so I'll stay in in terms maybe I understand a little bit better so if I think I just want to ask the question to see if you're getting at something that that comes up a lot which i think is an interesting question which is more kind of the meta level like an awareness of being aware in a sense part of what consciousness is yes so I would say no I think that there's a pure and more basic form of consciousness that does not necessarily entail an awareness of consciousness itself and I think even within you know life as we know it in the animal kingdom I think it's very likely that there are creatures certain insects things like that where where the brain processing is just not complex enough for that type of thinking to take place but that doesn't mean there's no experience present and I think some scientists would argue with this but there they're definitely enough of them that would agree with me that there is the fact of experience needing to entail anything more than just whether there's there's something it's like so I I often will use the example of a worm we don't know if worms are conscious or not this is not something neuroscientists have a have a consensus on but you can imagine it's not that hard for us to imagine that you know worms living across the ground has this very very minimal experience and it either is or it isn't right so there is something about consciousness where you and say it's it is binary in a sense even though there's this spectrum once you get on the spectrum where there the content can grow and get more and more complex but as soon as you get to the end of that spectrum at its most simple form and then drop off of it you're talking about no experience at all so when we talk about rocks whether or not we're right we most most of us assume there's nothing that it's like to be Iraq there's no experience present there at all but we could imagine that a worm has some felt experience of the its skin against the ground of cold and warm a you know temperature changing pressure changing something incredibly minimal and so it's not at all easy to rule out in a case like that and in that case you wouldn't have this kind of meta awareness so now getting into that there's one question that I want to explore which I'm not even sure how to think of this so at some point where does it go from just it's fascinating to think about to this really matters and is that is there a line in there where you're drawn to this because you really think that it matters like say I and things like that or is it just pure fascination it's definitely both so I would just start with a the simple fact and this is really my my reasons behind wanting to write a book about this are kind of split down the middle between these two things as well so first it's a little bit like what I was talking about before just the fact that being aware having more understanding of not just how mysterious consciousness is but the specific ways that it's mysterious I actually think can bring a lot of joy to our lives just in the form of awe and inspiration of that kind but I know I am a scientist at heart even though I'm not a trained scientist and I really believe we can get a better understanding of consciousness I think it's possible we'll never really be able where it's you know human brain is not designed to under but the fundamental nature of reality and we may not be able to get there but I'm optimistic that we can and I think in order for this work to get done one we have to be willing to have the conversation that touches a little bit on on what you wanted to talk about with it being kind of a taboo subject once you start postulating some some more far-out ideas so this this actually brings me to the focus of my book which is its core challenging our intuitions and challenging intuitions is a very important part of a scientific process so the short answer to your question is I think it's wonderful for human beings to contemplate in the same way that it's good for us to contemplate all of the mysteries I also think that mysteries are really uniting when all of humanity is facing something that they don't understand I actually think there's something really beautiful about that and it really connects us in a way and on the other side I actually think we have a lot to learn and I even think in some ways we've learned a lot through modern neuroscience that is so counterintuitive that we have not yet absorbed the implications of what we've already learned and again this is about challenging intuitions and how important this is in the scientific process so this is true in any time we gain new knowledge that's that's groundbreaking there always seems to be this period of time where we're wrestling with our intuitions in everything from when we finally understood that the earth is a sphere and not flat to understanding the germ theory of disease to understanding that space and time are warped by gravity these are all things that when we discover them when we encounter them they're so counterintuitive but there's always this period of time when scientists are kind of wrestling with their intuitions before they can make progress because when things are so counter to our intuitions we have a hard time accepting them and so you kind of have to be faced the same evidence over and over again and then kind of reshape your intuitions in order to think about the world in this new way so that the science can progress and so I think we're at a place like that with consciousness right now so I think it's really important for to be challenging our intuitions about consciousness and that's really what what my book does and it begins with two questions that I think we have very strong intuitive answers for that then I spend the rest of the book kind of picking apart to see to see where it takes us what are those two so they're related but they're they're slightly different questions the first one is is there evidence of consciousness in any system on the outside in the form of behavior or something else so in a human brain and in a human and a cat in a dog is there something we can point to from the outside such as behavior that will tell us conclusively that consciousness is present in that system and most of us myself included have a very strong intuitive response to that which is yes I'm you know I'm not sure what they what all of them are what that list is but I can come up with an easy example if I'm leaving for work in the morning and my daughter doesn't want me to go and she's crying and saying mommy don't go I think that behavior to me is absolutely evidence that she's having an internal experience that she's conscious of her emotions and what she's going through and grief and you know all of that in that moment and so we all have this and and I think this gets to the core of our intuitions about conscious system what we think it is and where we actually could be wrong and I think while that's likely a good way to test it if consciousness is present I actually think there's a deeper sense in which that is actually not evidence at all and we can we can kind of pick that apart through looking at different areas of neuroscience and the second question is similar which is is consciousness doing anything is it serving a function is it driving our behavior and again all of us think yes of course absolutely I couldn't there's so many things I couldn't do just you know in my daily life today I think thinking through certain choices when we have a fear response to something you know running away from a dangerous situation my car catches on fire and I run in the other direction we feel that consciousness is is truly motivating so much of our behavior and that that's the one that I think is we now have have modern neuroscience telling us that intuition is at least off if not completely wrong and so you need to go into that one examples you give the book right I should say also that when people first encounter these the the science that we have and also just the idea of messing with these intuitions it can be uncomfortable and some people don't like going down this path like like to make a little disclaimer or or to say that I think people can feel very out of control and I mean there's there's something jarring about learning that everything the things that feel most true to you about reality are possibly not that not structured that way wait wait till you explain delayed measurement and people really lose their [ __ ] like that's where it's gonna get interesting we're not even in the crazy stuff yet okay well I guess that's why I'm saying this now are you dragging me to Depot's yeah but what I've what I've learned is that most people if they're not excited about it to begin with spending a little time thinking about it that there there's a way to kind of come around to the other side where this actually is very freeing that looking that that that up ending some of these intuitions is actually for lack of a better word kind of similar to a spiritual experience there's a positive way to to view all of this I should say that okay so this this part is really interesting for me so what is some of the science that we can look at that says hey our intuitions about how we think we are in control probably don't make sense yeah and because what I want to put you and your idea in context because yeah Washington's probably don't realize you wrote a book of heresy like if you were an academic you'd be lighting your career on fire and the fact that you're talking about this you've privately had people who just can absolutely not come out and talk about what you're talking about publicly saying thank God somebody is talking about this because like you said and this is this is why I find your work so interesting is we have to explore this whether or not it's real right it's kind of irrelevant and you have to get outside of the box of our intuition which the while I don't want to start here the ultimate example of that to me is the delayed measurement experience in physics which freaks me out I cannot tell you how many hours I've spent thinking about the double slit experiment like it's insane and it that is a deeply spiritual moment for me right now whoa my faces the chills right now yeah I don't understand something yes so profoundly fundamental that everything that I'm looking at the world is not what I think I don't know what anything is anymore a thousand percent right so I should say also just for for your listeners and viewers that there are now some wonderful animations online that explain the double slit experiment if they if they don't know what that is and they want to spend their life wondering about it that it's it's a hard one to explain it's a hard one to grasp and now that we have YouTube videos it actually makes it a lot easier yes all right before we get there there are some sort of double slit type things with your mind right we're binding comes into play the conscious mind taking ownership of something that it actually didn't even know about until the very end walk people through some of that binding is actually a great place to start just in understanding how the content of our conscious experience is really created by the brain in ways that that are behind our intuitions where we wouldn't necessarily know it and binding is a phenomenon talked about in in neuroscience and David Eagleman is actually wonderful on this subject and he's written and and given talks on the subject that are fascinating but simply binding is really our brains attempt and successful attempt at taking things that are happening in the real world at different times and syncing them so that our present moment experience is of things in the world happening at the same time where those signals to us are actually coming in a different time so the example in my book I gave is a playing tennis so if you're playing tennis and you hit the ball with the racket it seems like this is all happening in one moment but the truth is the sound waves from the sound of the ball hitting the racket are traveling at a different speed than the light waves of the light bouncing off the ball and hitting our retina and then being processed by the brain and same with the sensory experience in your hand of feeling the ball hit the racket that's a much slower process than we're talking about the your your nervous system actually receiving signal through your arm and and our experience is that that all happens at the same time but the truth is the sight came more quickly than the sound and the sound came more quickly than the physical sensation and so there's a process that we call binding whereby all of these signals kind of get woven together in the present moment experience that gets delivered to your conscious experience there are unconscious processes that then cause you to have to have this experience there are brain disorders that can interrupt these processes too so there's something called agnosia there are many different types of that noda but it's it's a kind of a failure of the brain to do this type of binding for us there's finger agnosia where you cannot tell the difference between two of your fingers sights and sounds can get confused or not arrive at the same time there you very much about barroso Begg nausea that's like it's where the person can I see your eyes oh god your eyes are so familiar your nose but it's not coming together as a face for them yes I haven't teased my wife that she has bro so beg no joke she can never recognize famous people but like to me is that specifically for recognizing faces the face yeah so brothel is a Greek word for face right so yeah and I just that was one of the first times where I began to realize okay whoa whoa whoa the brain has a lot of different regions like people I don't know what this disease is called but certain brain trauma will lead leave somebody where they can't detect motion so they see completely normally but everything is a snapshot yes so if they're pouring thing it just looks like frozen liquid and then all of a sudden the cup is overflowing and there's like the essentially refresh rate on their eyes is so slow yeah that everything is just these like static still images right no we're taking a ton of unconscious brain processes for granted that we don't realize all of these things are being woven together for us there there's something called disjunctive agnosia it's similar to what you're talking about with the face but these are you know objects in space you can recognize all of the different parts you can recognize the color the shape but you can't see it as an object you can't recognize something as a cup they're even you know minor things that can happen where you can recognize something as a tool for eating with but you don't know whether it's a spoon or a fork anyway so yes so that we could go on and on forever with let's go there are more yeah on the book that I think are super important because where I want to get people like my my whole like thesis in life is to get people to understand your brain is creating a virtual world for you you have a mistake in this virtual world for the real world yes and once you understand we're talking about moon belts here homie we're talking about you take the world in in a certain way just why the article by Nagel on what it's like to be a bat is so fascinating it's asking you to step outside your own envelop into something else's and say how fundamentally different would this whole experience be but what I really want people to understand this this was a huge breakthrough for me when I went from having a totally fixed mindset and I just thought life is hopeless and I can't go where I want to go cuz I'm only so intelligent I'm just not that bright and so I'm stuck here and I spent a lot of time there and then began to realize wait a second I started reading about the brain I was like whoa like the brain is cobbling [ __ ] together yeah it's keeping me from bumping into too much stuff right and for that I am grateful but ultimately like there's a lot of lies being told to me by this evolutionary machine and once I could begin to think through them and go oh whoa like it's it's interpreting this it's interpreting that what is it interpreting that's creating an emotion for me that isn't helpful I think people also experience a lot of relief from this idea that they are responsible for all of that processing - and so this gets into when I when I talk about these examples in my book I'm specifically talking about two allusions that I think inform our view of consciousness which is why I spend a lot of time on them and one is this illusion of conscious will and one is the illusion of being a self and I think that that's one place that that relates to a lot of the work that you do because this false sense of a self is actually where a lot of human suffering comes from and part of it is is what I was just getting at which is that we have this idea that you know even though we understand that were brain processing you know at bottom somehow we have a very strong intuition that there is a me that is separate from the brain processing and there can be a lot of guilt and regret and and things like this that come about because of kind of a false way of viewing what in fact we are and what our conscious experience is so the the notion of this this self that somehow can override whatever the brain is doing or you know make make decisions somehow mean it's fun it's an incoherent idea but we all have it very strongly I'm going to assume it's there it's related to the notion of conscious well and I like to distinguish a free-will well I was just gonna say I like to distinguish conscious will from free well only because free will by my definition is a much more complex thing and I we could actually talk for a long time and I could explain why I think there's not much freedom and free well but the free will is is something that in some sense I can agree that the brain has it's a complex processing system it's responding to all kinds of stimuli and ideas and can can change and mutate and and make decisions as a processing device for lack of a better word conscious will is the idea that consciousness is the thing that is that is the well that consciousness is the will so we have again it's related to these questions that I asked in the beginning of my book is consciousness doing something and we feel that consciousness is behind our willed actions when in fact there's a lot of neuroscience to suggest that it's actually the reverse that it's that it's at the end that all this processing happens the decision gets made and then we're kind of the last to know I have a chapter in my book called along for the ride which can also be distressing - I get it - actually but and ultimately I actually think it's very freeing and it doesn't mean you can't so the brain is not in any way a closed system just because our conscious experience is of what the brain is doing doesn't mean at all that the brain is not influenced by ideas and you know and even in physical terms as you said you can you can have a brain tumor that will dramatically alter what your conscious experiences but more importantly for this type of discussion you know if I yelled and said oh that that beam is about to fall on you that's an idea that just gets communicated through language that suddenly changes your brain so your brain is as a physical system but my words my ideas get in and it completely changes the structure of your brain so much that you're gonna jump up like I could get you to jump up just by transferring that information the thing that I think is is a true illusion is that consciousness comes first and consciousness is again wrapped up in this idea of a self so that there's this self that's kind of floating free from the material world somehow and is initiating everything that happens and I think that is a false for you and so we could talk about some of those studies the earlier ones are more controversial the most recent ones are less and I think are the most interesting actually the most recent study that I read about came out of Germany and so so most of these studies I should say basically show that at the level of the brain scientists can see markers or activity that can that that reveal to them you are about to make a decision or make a movement and before you have become conscious of it so the most recent study was subjects we're in an fMRI so an fMRI is an MRI with the tracks blood flow and the subjects were given two numbers and then given a choice whether to add or subtract the numbers and there's there's a special kind of clock that's almost like a second hand going around a regular clock so that they can mark that what their their job is to have the experience of making a decision I'm going to add or I'm going to subtract and nowhere on the clock that that decision happened and then they actually go go ahead and do the math so through fMRI neuroscientists were able to detect up to four seconds prior when not only so they were able because they could see you know different parts of the brain they were able to detect different types of processing they could tell when that person would make the decision and what whether that their decision was to add or subtract so that gives us a very different sense and the truth is a lot of neuroscience that comes to us is giving us this picture we can tweet we should we should have digested digested this a little bit more than then we have already that there is a sense in which we are kind of just experiencing life play out I don't know if I answered your question you did I mean look this is this is the exploration that I was hoping for what becomes interesting to me in that is I think part of the reason that we haven't digested that more is what are you supposed to do with that it's like some part of it is okay wait it there they're definitely like how how does one make sense of this okay I am literally truly me Tom Dooley I am completely prepared to say that I am simply a chemical processing plant that runs on algorithms I have no problem with that but there does seem to be what I'll call the overwatch mechanism there is some level of awareness I'm sure my prefrontal cortex some level of awareness that is watching things and saying it through and and I'm very fine with give where I was born in the things I've encountered and all of that that it has built these beliefs okay so I have sort of a default setting but now once I have that thing that thing can go in and make changes so I have this sort of overwatch algorithm processing machine that's been built up over my experiences but it also has the ability to self reflect and ask absolute based on my value system which is changeable by the way based on my changeable value system am I thinking about this in the right way or do I want to change something and it has the ability to change now it has the ability to change that's all we're all still talking about the brain the idea and I think even the way you're describing it is partly a shift in the way we tend to think about it which is there's a concrete self that is responsible for those changes rather than it's all brain processing and the brain again is not it's not static it's not walled off from its environment it is an ever-changing ever-evolving very complex system it's the most complex thing we know of in the universe but that just the fact that we can absorb the idea that it is brain processing and that our experience of how that brain processing is functioning is not necessarily accurate I think is useful for letting go of some I think deeply damaging psychological ways and patterns of thought that we can get ourselves into but also just on the science side and on the study of consciousness side it can start to get us to see how human beings and brains in in general are possibly not that different from other processing systems in terms of consciousness and open other animals other animals that and beyond so you know it opens up this window onto yes we'll be on in both directions so beyond as in plants plants there's something that I thought I talked about raising it's crazy children right and so actually the reason I brought up plants in the book was not because I think plants are conscious although this all really makes you wonder it was it was actually too many defining things no question right but it was for me it was actually to make the opposite argument which is that this complex behavior that we see in plans it's much more complex than we realize and all we started studying it is very closer to and more related to human behavior then we also previously realized and now we know this is true mechanistically too so it in terms of the DNA give people some examples okay so so just to go on this this path Daniel Cham of its wrote this book what a plant knows which I highly recommend and he talks about this collection of genes that plants have that evolved so that they can sense whether they're in the light or in the dark the same set of genes that we have for detecting light and dark and then of course in us it's much more complex and it's there related to circadian rhythms and and all kinds of other things but so there are behaviors that are incredibly interesting I can I can talk a little bit about the underground tree communication I just want to make clear that the larger point is in my first question in my book when we're talking about behavior behavior as evidence of consciousness if we see this level of similarity in behavior in other systems and it's very hard to get conclusive evidence of a system being conscious if it's not a human being who can speak and talk to you about it we have to start to really ask the question whether consciousness goes much deeper than than we imagined but actually I brought up plants because I think it makes us it makes a second guess whether all of their behaviors we see in human beings that we say has to exist sorry consciousness has to just for them to be there if we don't need consciousness if plants don't need consciousness to exhibit its similarly complex behaviors then we we've we've we could be thinking about things wrong yeah okay this is interesting and I want to go a little deeper on this so one of the things you talked about in the book is that plants will preferentially send nutrients to seedlings that they know came from them versus other seedlings that they can actually read that somehow yeah this is so these are specifically Douglas fir trees in in Canada Susan Simard has done some fantastic work and has a TED talk explaining some of his work she was studying the underground tree inter tree communication mostly facilitated through Michael Raizel networks which are fungal networks which is also incredibly fascinating where they share carbon with different species of trees and it's at some times of the year you know the Douglas fir needs more carbon at another time of the year another species may need and they actually kind of send signals about when they they're in need of carbon and share carbon but yes then so so seedlings will start to grow and some of them have come from these you know specific trees some of them come from other trees but there are ways that the she calls the mother trees can know which trees have sprouted from her own seedlings which are her kin and she will I shouldn't say she but these mother trees will send more carbon to their own kin they will send stronger defense signals this is another thing that's actually interesting I didn't mention that tree Sun defense signals to each other as well if there's a you know poisonous thing that's growing in the area that they will send chemical signals that warn other trees of dangerous other dangerous species and in the area they will send more of those signals to their own kin they grow their roots differently so they'll actually make more room for the roots of their kin all of these things that to us would be behavior that gets described as psychological behavior and that we assume we need justice for to put it very simply I'm making the point that you can't have it both ways if we're going to use these behaviors and humans to be evidence of consciousness we then have to question how far down it's going and if not which in some ways is a more interesting question if not then what is it that's different about consciousness if we are these systems that are kind of going along in the same way that plants are so IV IV is one thing that's actually very interesting to study it changes its rate of growth and direction depending on something that it can it can grow around and cling to if those types of processes don't require consciousness maybe we're wrong in thinking that all of the complex behavior in humans requires consciousness and that there's there's another explanation for it and what would that other explanation I mean the mo the most likely one to me is that it's actually much more fundamental in that it goes that consciousness itself is a fundamental property of the universe yes okay very well yes and now I want to talk about so if it is a field like gravity how do we test that like how does one like right because it at least breaking through our intuition to get to that insight then opens it up to being tested yes because that's one where it's like okay now I'm I'm so uneducated on this stuff like I can't tell you one way or the other if this is plausible but my limited brain goes yeah that's not possible right no me either which is why I keep saying I'm split 50/50 on it and one reason is I mean my intuitions go so strongly against it it's it's really through breaking through intuitions and following logistical pathways and talking to other scientists so I should also say this idea that that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe could be another in a sense another property of matter that exists in all matter because it's just a fundamental property so it exists and and again to clearly distinguish consciousness from complex the these ideas in no way suggests that atoms or electrons have any kind of thoughts or plans or anything human-like they're nothing like a human I sometimes will say we wouldn't expect a rock to write a novel or to sing opera that's not what Adams configured in that way do and if there is some level of experience associated with the Adams in Iraq we would not expect it to be anything like what we experienced it would be completely unrecognizable to us but all of this thinking falls under the umbrella term of Pan psychism which is a term people should know because historically that's the term that's been used I don't like the term I say I think from a scientific perspective we can just simply work toward it not being taboo to ask these questions so it should just be legitimate to ask the question could we come up with a theory in which consciousness is fundamental because it's been so difficult actually impossible to to date to come up with a theory of how complexity or how processes in the brain give rise to consciousness is it possible it was it was there to begin with well I'm definitely leading you down a garden path so where I want to get to so this is the moment in the book where if you hadn't set me up with something earlier I would have been like peace I'm crazy yeah it was you talking about the delayed measurement experiment and I thought wait a second so is this the first time you encountered that that thought experience yes so I knew about the double slit experiment yay I was so blown away my moment of awe like just unbelievably cool to think that that I could have existed this long and so fundamentally misunderstand the nature of things yeah so that was cool but then you took it to like a whole nother level well by the way physicists feel that way about it - I mean quantum mechanics is something that is deeply mysterious and a tremendous source of awe and mystery for anyone who finds that you know inspiring and and fueling their there's a lot now to read because the in progress is being made but it's still something that that is really dumbfounding to scientists as well so I think if you walk people through what the delayed measurement experiment is then it's been a while hopefully I can do it don't forget cuz I just read your book literally twice so I will fill in any gaps from your own work by the way I might never remember but the what it will do I think for anybody who's really listening is make you go oh there are things I don't understand right and once I'm in the realm of oh there are things I don't understand then it is quite possible well I can't grab it from an intuition standpoint our greatest breakthroughs in science have always been the moment where you can shed your intuition yes and and really see the thing for what it is yes so I think we should probably start with a double slit experiment because many people are not familiar with that and if you do show notes I can I can supply some visuals that might might help because it is actually very difficult to get just through a person one person explained it to another but I'll do my best so light most people know it we are understanding is that it can act like a particle and it can act like a wave so there are photons which are the the individual particles of light which have wave-like properties and particle-like properties so the experiment is set up very basically there they're shooting photons one at a time at a screen and in between the photons that are being shot out and on the screen are two slits and so if you are going to put through a continuous light source you would see a wave pattern on the other side the light is kind of going through both slits and has a wave interference pattern I don't know if I need to explain more of that bad that would be very complicated though so but imagine think of the water in the way that it's normally when you're if you just have the screen there you shoot the light through two slits what you see when it gets recorded if there's photographic material that records these photons you see bar bars where the photons have hit where their weakest or lightest at the edges but there it looks as if you push water through these slits in terms of how it gets recorded so there's there's no clean delineation between what slid it went through there's just a whole pattern along the screen that's not the way that is a wave-like pattern so it has a pattern to it but it's a pattern of a wave so then it turns out that if you shoot one photon at a time and you measure which slit each individual photon went through you have a different pattern on the screen and all of a sudden it looks as if you are shooting individual pellets and some of them go through the right side and some of them go through the left side and there's no interference pattern at all they just form two slits now right now you've already no people enough to have their brain leaking out of their ears so I want to say it one more time to make sure people understand you take these double slits you shoot a single photon through it don't measure it you get an interference pattern on the back as if you have pushed a wave through both slits yes now do the exact same thing again but this time put a camera up whatever your measuring device and all the sudden it's a single [ __ ] photon right that that's crazy that's one of those where I'm like what yeah so just watching it changes its properties right that doesn't seem possible right so it's I would say it's measuring it rather than watching it and some people have interpreted this in ways that I think are we just we simply don't know the answer but but some people have said it requires consciousness which I don't think we have any evidence for that at all but clearly some interaction with other matter in the room whether consciousness is present or not absolutely has an effect and this is this is what quantum mechanics who was born out of quantum physics so there are many different interpretations of these strange things that we see many worlds is something that maybe some of your audience has sort of string theory has been around for longer but they're there you know this is just scientists trying to understand what what's going on here so the physicist John wheeler proposed a thought experiment based on on this based on the this experiment and the fact that we know that light so there's a there's a phenomenon where light goes around a quasar and causes an illusion I'm forgetting the term but an illusion of its gravitational lensing yes thank you so if there's a quasar and in between us and the quasar as a black hole the the light will Bend and it will give the illusion to us that there are two quasars rather than than one because the light bends and causes this this illusion to take place his thought was if we were to measure which side an individual photon which side of that black hole the individual photon went around that would change that would essentially change the past because that things been travelling for millions viewers yes so its path right takes place over millions of years just by measuring it will then give it a distinct location in the same way that it gives a distinct location by measuring it when it goes through the slits but millions of years ago and so this was crazy right so in some sense and we don't know how to explain this in terms of the fundamental nature of reality and whether this means they're you know endless copies of the universe and the universe kind of splits every time a quantum event happens whether there are many dimensions of space I mean this gets into string theory which I'm not an expert on any of this I'm explaining it as best I can but I I'm not a physicist and probably shouldn't shouldn't be explaining any of these experiments but the implications and the results so this was a thought experiment and then they actually were able to do the experiment so it was confirmed that's where I literally was taking notes in the book and I was like this was confirmed experimentally what yeah like yeah there's there's something we do not understand mentally do not understand I don't understand about the fundamental nature of matter and what matter is and what light is and things what these are great mysteries so if when I when I really stop and think about like what the experience of consciousness is what it would look like if we if Pan psychism is true and they're sort of consciousness all the way down what it it the question that it begs for me is why is consciousness as an emergent property so problematic why where do people get hung up because in my very limited mind and I'm yeah I'm very prepared to accept this is just ignorance on my part but when I think about basically Pan psychism would postulate something along the lines of hey you're getting all these low levels of consciousness and as they come together they're combinatorial effect is it gives you some unique property and that can manifest as a tree it can manifest as a dolphin as a human it's different you know amounts of and different types of consciousness coming together in different cell types and all that so it's essentially purely a biological explanation how it manifests so differently but why do we have trouble with the postulation that the human brain is right and and that the the the lights coming on really does feel like a grayscale to me yeah does not feel like one moment there is in one moment there isn't like if you've ever seen have you seen a baby do you ever watch blackfish the documentary don't it will hurt your heart in ways I can't explain okay but I will give you one cool punchline when they go to capture baby orcas the pod is insanely intelligent about how they try to hide the babies because they know they want the babies they already understand they get that they like split up and like some swim high and some swim low trying to hide the baby so crazy and then they stay and like scream and cry as they take it was so gut-wrenching I could not [ __ ] believe it so you to your point about what evidence do we need to be like oh my god that's conscious I'm going to say yo that's clearly conscious so now let's slide down all the way we get to ants yeah and I'll be like yeah there was there was never a moment where it was yes no but there's definitely the qualitative estimation of what their experience is like yeah now now is so removed I don't really get it anymore and then sure it slides on into something I can't I can't comprehend right where does it blink out of existence I'm gonna guess at a nervous system because there does seem some need to detect pressure you have to have some kind of cell that sends some kind of signal saying that I'm experiencing pressure and even like the most basic level so to me there it would seem yeah and by all means shut me down at the end no no I mean the truth is that many scientists have that exact intuition and and I would say most scientists think that the explaining it as an emergent phenomenon is the way to explain it and in fact Sean Carroll the physicist who I just recently spoke with that that's the way he would describe it there are there are a few reasons why there are problems with that what we there are many ways I could take this at this point and I know we're lit we're limited on time one issue is just the description of an emergent phenomenon in science and there are two things about it one it is a it is something that is observed from the outside so it's an emergent property is a property that you can you can quantify from the outside consciousness is part partly what makes it so mysterious is that it has this internal character that it's not something that can be viewed from the outside we didn't talk about locked-in syndrome but looking at someone with locked-in syndrome is is a good way it's a kind of jostle your intuitions briefly this is someone who had brain damage so that they're completely paralyzed but it has not affected their their conscious or mental life really at all so they have as full conscious experience as you and I are having right now are able to think clearly perceive everything see things in the room hear everything but they're completely paralyzed so that they're unable to communicate anything and the the neuroscientist on Ilsa actually recently posted this at this picture that's very interesting which is just the human nervous system without the rest of the body and he said something to the effect of this would be conscious if it were alive and it looks like the roots of a tree right and I'm not saying it is it's a very different type of system but the truth is we can't necessarily get information about a conscious experience always so we assume because we are complex creatures and we are conscious we assume that it is a complex phenomenon and we assume that the more something is like us the more likely it is to have consciousness I think I think that that is assumption that may or may not be true but it's it's really just an assumption we have no evidence for that being the case and seeing someone in locked-in syndrome tells you definitively I talked about the the writer Jean Dominique Bobby and my and my book he in this condition of locked-in syndrome he was able to figure out a way to write his caretakers notice that he he in fact actually had one point of mobility which was his eyelid he was able to control his eyelid and many people in locked-in syndrome do not have this but he happened to be able to move his eyelid and so they figured out how he could type out the alphabet with certain ways of blinking and he literally wrote this beautiful book that was turned into a film in this state so but without that eye blinking so this is a man who can write a book and can experience everything that's happening in his room and has no ability to communicate so we certainly can't rely on communication and behavior to tell us how possible it is that there's that there's consciousness there but emergence so emergence is a is a physical phenomenon that can be witnessed from the outside and it's a complex phenomena and it comes out of complexity and again we have no evidence that justice is due to complexity it vary way very well maybe and I am really split 50-50 on this and the way you described it I completely my intuitions aligned there and I think it's why we need to spend some time challenging our intuitions because the evidence is actually not there and there are many reasons to think and and and many reasons why explaining this mystery make that there's a better path there seems to be a better path to explaining it if it's a property that already exists in matter I'm not sure how well I answered that question but oh well this whole yes I mean your your intuitions are the intuitions that that most people share and many scientists share and yeah it's the reason I take the time to do as much as I can to undermine them in the book because I think where those intuitions are likely leading us in the wrong direction and at the very least we've gone in that direction all this time and we haven't gotten any closer to understanding how it is that non conscious matter that these atoms in the universe that had had no consciousness all of this time somehow come together in a way it's it's actually when you look at the details it's very hard to see how the addition of an experience associated with that processing come comes into being at any point why that would be Monica I am so glad that you're exploring this topic and that you belong to a rare group of people that are I think entering the public awareness more and more that are capable of writing a New York Times bestseller and that are picking topics that other people just can't for their livelihood they can't touch so so grateful that you wrote this book I really really hope that it in a very enjoyable way jars people out of their some of their intuitions and assumptions because I really think that the base assumptions people make about their life and the way their mind works holds so many people back from living a life that could be far more enjoyable and include far less suffering yeah but yeah thank you really is a wonderful wonderful book where can people find you online where can they give them just my name Annika Harris calm a n n aka Harris calm my book is available everywhere books are but yeah and the best way to find out about my work and other work that I do in addition to my book is it's all on my website it's a nice all right what is the impact that you want to have in the world I think bringing more ah and curiosity I could probably I could stop I could go on but that that that seems like a good one on curiosity I think we can we can always have more oven I will take that all day all right guys trust me when I say that she brings the awe and the curiosity and what a wonderful entrance into that world I cannot recommend her work enough it is really extraordinary and hopefully the success of this first book will get her to do more and more in this vein I guess not first book the first book aimed at adults so very excited by what she's doing she has a children's book like I said earlier I wonder so be sure to check that out as well and if you haven't already subscribed be sure to do so and until next time my friends be legendary everybody it's time to talk about all of our favorite subjects mental health is there something holding you back or preventing you from achieving your goals or even just interfering with your happiness do any of you suffer from depression or anxiety as a lot of you guys know I've suffered from anxiety for years and trying to tackle something like that on your own is not always the optimal strategy but a lot of people are super nervous to try out therapy or they don't really know where to start or they're just plain embarrassed but now there's a service called better help that makes therapy more accessible and affordable better help is professional counselling done securely online using your computer tablet or mobile phone through video calls phone or text messaging with licensed therapists who are certified by their states board to provide therapy and counseling it is not self-help and it's not a crisis line it's an online service available worldwide and it has a massive network of counselors who have a broad and diverse range of specialties so you can get a counselor with the sort of expertise that might not even be available in your local area better help assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed professional therapist within 24 hours you can log into your account anytime to message your counselor and better help also has group in our sessions every 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get 10% off your first month so visit better help.com slash impact and get the help you need today alright guys if you need this one please give it a shot take care and be legendary first you can notice that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant it's so close to excitement in its actual physiology there really the difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just that the frame it's just the story you're telling yourself you know if you felt

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,087,666

Rating: 4.758841 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Annaka Harris, IT, conscious, awe, curiosity, mystery of the mind, panpsychism, brief guide, double slit, delayed measurement, conscious field, Phineas Gage, consciousness of plants, intuition, scientific method, conscious will, sense of self

Id: AL5g-AY3l2E

Length: 67min 24sec (4044 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ANewMythos]

I liked her book. But I am slightly annoyed at how she glosses over centuries of philosophers and mystics who argued for the same position long before modern science.

[u/nathanwhut]

Her book is more like a intro type of narration. Mostly they were quotes and some analysis from reputable scholars. Kinda open up doors for undecided undergrads to explore. To sum her book up a bit, "this position is supported by this experiment and that view is argued with such and such logic."

Which is good enough in itself. Most non-scholars don't have time or the chance to digest Chalmers, Koch, Tononi, Goff, Hoffman, Damacio, Nagel, Searle, Tegmark, Penrose, etc... But her book does seem to lack a central argument other than "panpsychism is cool, why don't guys think about it?"