Science’s difficult journey to try to understand consciousness | Annaka Harris: Full Interview

I'm Annika Harris and I write about the science and philosophy of consciousness. I have a book called Conscious A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind and I have a docuseries titled Lights On. Challenging the Illusions of Consciousness with Annika Harris Part One Defining Consciousness What does your work in consciousness entail? My work focuses on what makes consciousness such a deeply perplexing phenomenon and a mysterious phenomenon, why it's so difficult for scientists to study it. And because it's such a mysterious phenomenon still within neuroscience, part of my work has also been to connect different disciplines that aren't usually in dialogue. With consciousness studies, if we're interested in asking the question about whether consciousness goes deeper in nature than the sciences have previously assumed, we start to come out of neuroscience and meander into biology, plant sciences, and depending on how far down we want to look, ultimately physics. Part of my work is helping the different disciplines communicate with one another so that they're all informed about the same types of mystery that we're facing in consciousness studies. Why did you write your book? So one of the reasons I wrote my book, Conscious, was because I noticed that when I was discussing my work at dinner parties and with friends, I noticed that everyone I spoke to became very interested and had a lot of questions. And that makes sense because we all have an experience of consciousness. And not only do we all have an experience of it, it is central to everything we know and care about. We can't even quite understand what it would mean to live our lives without it. Everything that we care about, everything we experience, everything we know, we know it through our conscious awareness of it. It is our immediate contact with the universe, with the rest of reality. And you can see this just by imagining something that's important to you or something that's not important to you. Anything that happened to you today, anything you're thinking about, any decision you're trying to make. Okay, try to think about that or try to make that decision and imagine doing that when you're not conscious. You immediately realize that this is where our lives play out. This is, in some sense, this is everything. Our conscious awareness is everything. And the fact that it's still so mysterious to scientists and to all of humanity, the fact that it's still one of the great unsolved mysteries, makes it something that everyone can be excited about and that inspires awe in everyone. And awe is this feeling that we all enjoy kind of basking in. And this is one of those mysteries that is still unsolved and so can still inspire awe in most people who start to think about it and discover how mysterious it actually is. How do you define consciousness? So the mystery at the heart of consciousness, and when I use the word consciousness, I'm not talking about higher order thinking or complex thought or things that we think of in terms of human consciousness. But when I use the word consciousness, I'm talking about consciousness in the most fundamental sense. This bare fact of felt experience. So if a worm is conscious, if there's something that it's like to be a worm, if there's a felt experience, if there's sentience associated with a worm, and there's no consensus on this in the sciences. But if there is something it's like to be a worm, it obviously isn't planning its day, it's not having complex thoughts. Maybe it's experiencing a very subtle sensation against its skin as it moves through the dirt. We can imagine that that is a possibility. It's possible there's some kind of internal desire to move toward food or away from danger. So when I use the word consciousness in this context, when talking about it as a mystery, it's really in this most basic sense as the fundamental felt experience that we know comes into being in the universe from our own experience and can extrapolate from that. There's no perfect definition for consciousness in the way that I'm using it here in the most fundamental sense. And so the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay titled, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And I recommend this article and I think it's extremely useful here because rather than give a definition, he illustrates a picture of a totally different type of experience than a human experience. There's a German term for this, umwelt, and umwelt is the word for describing the types of feelings and sensations a certain type of organism has. So a bat uses sonar rather than vision and we can't imagine what that's like. We can maybe get close to it or draw analogies, but a bat is moving through the world using sonar. So it's making sounds, the sounds are bouncing off the walls and the trees and the world, and it gets a picture of its external world in the same way that we get a picture of the external world through vision. But you can imagine that the actual felt experience of that is very different from our experience of using vision. And so when you think about what certain experiences are like, what it's like to be a bat, what it's like to be a bee, this gets at the, I think, I think this gets at our intuition for what consciousness is in a more direct way than some of the language does. What is the hard problem of consciousness? So the mystery at the heart of consciousness is why in this universe that seems to be teeming with non-conscious matter, with atoms and electrons and stars and solar systems and all these things that we assume don't entail a felt experience from the inside, or they're non-conscious, how non-conscious matter somehow gets configured in such a way as to create a situation where suddenly it's having a felt experience from the inside. Suddenly there's something that it's like to be that matter. And that is often referred to as the hard problem of consciousness. And that term comes from David Chalmers, the philosopher. And it's called the hard problem because in a sense it's a joke. It's in comparison to what are the easy problems, which aren't truly easy in neuroscience, but the easy problems are more associating which brain states are associated with which feeling states. The hard problem entails why there is a felt experience of any processing, even brain processing at all. Is consciousness different from thought? Making a distinction between consciousness and thought is important because consciousness in the sense that I'm interested in, in the sense that it's a mystery, can exist without thought. It can exist in a pure felt experience. It could exist in a very simple organism that is not capable of thought. But even in our human experience, we know that there can be moments that are without thought, especially if you think of a very young child or an infant, feeling pressure against the skin, hearing sounds in the room before the brain is even able to distinguish sounds and be able to process them and understand the meaning behind them or what they might represent. The experience itself, the sound of a bell, the experience of seeing green, the experience of heat or cold, those are experiences that are the most minimal ones we can imagine. And there's clearly an experience there. There's clearly consciousness there. And it doesn't necessarily entail thought. What is your biggest unanswered question? I guess that the question for me is, and this is the question that I was left with when I finished writing my book, is, is it possible that consciousness is a much more basic phenomenon in nature and is essentially pervading everything? So it's much more like gravity. And so not, not that it's less special than, than we assumed because, you know, gravity is something that's obviously very special in our universe, but it affects everything. And the question that, that I'm still very interested in and think I'll probably always be interested in is, does consciousness go deeper in nature than the scientists previously assumed? So rather than arising out of complex processing in brains, namely, is it possible that it's a much more basic property of the universe? And so there are felt experiences arising in more systems and organisms than we previously realized. Could consciousness be fundamental? So one of the things we feel we need consciousness for is our decision-making process. And there's a sense in which we feel like a solid self making decisions, and we don't really get the feeling that those decisions are essentially a bottom brain process is playing out in nature. And I recently became very fascinated by a couple of plant behavior studies. One was of a pea seedling, which in the lab, they planted in a Y maze. So the, the pea seedling is planted at the top, and then the roots need to grow down. And then at a certain point, it branches off. And so the root actually needs to decide which direction to grow, which will be more beneficial for it to grow in. And they run different scenarios. One is where they have a dish of water at the end of one tube and nothing at the end of the other. And the root can sense that there is water at one end. And so at that decision point, it senses the water and it kind of makes a decision for lack of a better term to move toward the water. And they do this experiment in many interesting ways. There's one where they actually just play the sound of running water and the root actually grows toward that. And so the plants are, while much simpler than human processing, the plants are running through a significant level of processing to perceive its environment through sound, through moisture, through chemicals. And so there's this kind of just simple decision of which way the roots need to go. And then you can go up one level with this example of the daughter vine, which is a parasitic vine. And if you plant a daughter vine between two plants, one which is more conducive to its thriving than the other, it will move toward the plant that is better suited for its needs. And so the daughter vine is a parasitic plant that needs to wrap itself around another plant in order to survive. One thing that's very interesting about this is scientists have recently discovered that the daughter vine is detecting the light waves that are traveling through the leaves. And so the reason we see green when we look at a leaf is because green is the frequency that is bouncing off of the leaf and the other light waves are traveling through. And so the daughter vine actually has a way to measure the type of light that is coming out on the other side of the leaves and can measure and determine the shape, the distance from the daughter vine, and determine which plant it is better suited for and grow in that direction in order to get to that plant. And so if you think about human behavior, it's kind of, you know, a few levels more complicated, but it's very similar. And it's part of the same category, if you will, of decision making. And of course, the brain is very different system from plants and from roots and these other systems. But when you look at these types of behaviors, it's not impossible to imagine that there might be a felt sense, however basic, however fundamental, of perceiving light waves, of hearing the sound of running water, of course, not in our human way, but again, in a way that we couldn't imagine, but still has a felt experience associated with it. And so if it's possible that we've been thinking about consciousness the wrong way, that it's not something that arises out of complex processing and is something more basic, something analogous to gravity, where it's more like a field, something that's pervasive, then we can imagine that all types of processing in nature could include some type of felt experience. Part two, challenging our intuitions on consciousness. What are intuitions? So an intuition is simply the strong feeling that something is true, but it may or may not represent something accurate about the world. And we have many intuitions that were sculpted by evolution that are extremely useful. If we're in a dangerous situation, we can notice all kinds of clues unconsciously, that a door was left ajar, that an item is out of place, that someone we're close to who we don't know, if their pupils are dilated, if their skin is flushed. These can be signs that someone is adrenalized and about to act violently. We may not notice any of these elements subconsciously. We just might be left with this intuition that we feel like we're in an unsafe situation or that we shouldn't trust the person who's standing next to us. And those are extremely useful tools that we use all the time. We use them in making decisions. There's studies that show that our gut instincts are often better guides to making decisions about which apartment to move into, which job to take, than deliberate logical reasoning. But also intuitions can fail us, and they also fail us all the time. And so in the sciences, there are many examples of this where there's just no reason for evolution to have sculpted an intuition, again, for being on an earth that is a sphere. It's not relevant to our everyday lives, and we feel like we're on a flat earth. And so that's what our intuition leads us to believe. Einstein's theories of general relativity and special relativity gave us a whole new sense of the structure of the universe, that space-time is a field that can be warped, and that warping is gravity. And so rather than gravity being a force like other forces, what it actually is is a warping of space-time. And these are things we do not have intuitions for. And when we learn them, they help us form a truer view of what the universe actually is. How do intuitions impact our grasp of consciousness? So the study of consciousness has largely, if not entirely, been relegated to neuroscience, which makes a lot of sense because we have assumed in the sciences, and most modern people have assumed, that the organisms in the world that are conscious, that we are aware of, and that we can kind of confirm are conscious, are the ones that are most like us. And we're complex systems, the brain is the most complex system in the universe that we know of. And so we assume that consciousness arises somehow out of that complex processing. But we have discovered a few things that have actually flipped upside down the assumptions that we began with. So our assumption that we understand what consciousness is based on our intuitions, some of these intuitions that we're relying on to make that assumption have been overturned by modern neuroscience and have been shown to be illusions. And so in many cases, we're being led by illusions. And this is something that's very interesting, and that has not yet really sunk into the larger scientific culture. And so if we want to ask this question about whether consciousness goes deeper in nature than we have previously assumed, the sciences that this will pertain to, to biology perhaps, perhaps plant behavior, even though that sounds crazy, we may find that there are some minimal felt experiences in the complex behavior of plants. Or even deeper, these other sciences, the science of physics and botany and biology, need to be better informed of the neuroscience and what we've learned about the brain so far, so that they can have a better grasp of the way certain illusions might be misleading them. And so that if they have intuitions about consciousness, this is something that was really taboo to think about or talk about not that long ago. But it's useful for any scientist who is interested in studying consciousness in a new and creative and different way or thinking about consciousness in a different way. It's important for them to be aware of some of the neuroscience that helps support that view, and that can give many scientists good reason to start thinking a little bit differently about consciousness, a little more creatively about consciousness. And this is really how paradigm shifts happen in science. And the truth is, this is a huge part of the scientific process in almost every regard, when we challenge our intuitions, because we're facing new evidence that is counterintuitive, which is most often the case, especially, as I said, for these paradigm shifts, for groundbreaking theories, they get us to see the world that we live in in a significantly different way. So if you think about all of the major scientific breakthroughs, all of the major paradigm shifts, so understanding that the earth is a sphere and not flat, as our intuitions originally led us to believe, people forget how counterintuitive this discovery was. And it was made based on celestial observations. And this is how science works. So we get this evidence that it's not the way we felt it was or the way we thought it was. And then there's a period of time where we're wrestling with our intuitions. And this is an important part of the scientific process, because our intuitions are often very good guides. And so it's good that we keep checking to see, is this new information actually accurate? And then when the scientific evidence is overwhelming, we're then in a process of shifting our intuitions, of starting to feel that we live on a sphere in a solar system, orbiting the sun rather than the other way around. And it starts to shift the way we feel in the world. It shifts our concepts of our everyday experience. But then, of course, it also then shapes the science that is to come. And there are other examples of this discovery in the microscopic world and the germ theory of disease, understanding that microscopic things that we have no intuition for, we can't touch or taste or feel or experience them in any way, but we've now discovered they're real and they cause disease and they can kill you. This was, again, highly counterintuitive to people when the evidence started to arrive. And it was resisted for a long time. And there's this period of shifting intuitions and accepting new evidence and new data, and then eventually forming an entirely new view of the world that we live in. And so I think we're at a point like that in consciousness studies right now. And so I think there's a lot that's happened in modern neuroscience that suggests that our intuitions about consciousness are wrong. And they give us tools for shaking our intuitions and playing around with this question of whether are the intuitions that have driven our assumptions about consciousness, whether they're not entirely accurate, and whether we need to spend more time shifting intuitions and challenging intuitions in order to think more creatively and maybe come up with some new theories about what consciousness might be and how far down in nature it might go. How do we challenge our intuitions on consciousness? So when we're trying to think more clearly and more creatively about consciousness, in order to start to challenge some of these intuitions that could be illusions or ones that we know to be illusions, I always like to start with these two questions. And there are two questions that I think really get at the heart of where these intuitions are misleading us. Number one, is there any evidence we can find from outside an organism or outside a system that will conclusively tell us that that organism entails conscious experiences? Is there anything we can point to where we can definitively say, yes, that organism is conscious? And the second question is related and similar, but it comes at this intuition from a slightly different angle. And the second question is, is consciousness doing something? Does it serve a function? Is it driving our behavior in the way that we feel it is? And our intuitive answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes. I think if I go to pick up my friend at the airport who I haven't seen in years, and I see her running toward me looking excited, those all seem like conclusive evidence to me that consciousness is that she's conscious, of course. And regarding the second question is that obviously, of course, our conscious experiences are affecting things. It seems that even in order to decide what I want for breakfast, I have to consult my conscious desires, and that it's the feeling of what I want that then drives the decision. So our intuitive answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes. But surprisingly, it's easier to puncture these intuitions or to shake them up than you might think. Can consciousness exist without physical signs? One thing that's important to point out is that we know it's possible for there to be no behavior coming out of a system, nothing to detect from the outside, when there's a full human conscious experience present. So already this starts to shift our intuitions. And this can be seen in two conditions. One is called locked-in syndrome, and the other is anesthesia awareness. And they're essentially the same state relative to consciousness. So locked-in syndrome is something that happens to someone whose brain has become injured due to a stroke or physical injury, and they have become completely paralyzed. So they can no longer move any part of their body, yet they still have a full conscious experience. They can see, they can hear, they can think. And there's an interesting and famous example of someone with locked-in syndrome. He was a writer for French Elle. His name was Jean-Dominique Boby. And he was in this state, although he was lucky, he had one point of mobility. He was able to move his left eyelid, and somehow his caretakers were able to notice that he seemed to be trying to move his left eyelid. And over time, they developed this technique for him spelling out words with certain patterns of blinks. And he ended up writing a beautiful memoir titled Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It's a great example of a person, an organism, a system in nature that is having such a full conscious experience, as full as I am having right now, with the ability to write and experience the world, but with no ability to move or communicate or exhibit any behavior that would tell us that this person is conscious. And so we can wonder if it's possible that there are other systems in nature that simply aren't able to communicate or exhibit behavior that convinces us that consciousness is present in them. Is consciousness necessary for behavior? So the second question is whether consciousness is behind our behavior, is driving our behavior, is causal. And here we can use the example of fear. So the fear response is something that we really have a strong intuition is something that is useful and evolved for a purpose. We imagine that if we encounter a bear or a lion in the wild, that the feeling of fear is the thing that gets us to move so quickly out of the way, to act quickly, to save our lives. But what we now understand about the brain is that the experience of feeling fear is actually something that happens at the tail end of a sequence of processing and that our bodies begin responding and moving to a dangerous situation much more quickly than we become aware of it. And so our conscious experience of those types of emotions actually lag behind the physical world. So binding processes take in all of our perceptions, all of the information that comes in through our eyes and ears, through touch, and give us an experience of a present moment. So I often give the example of playing the piano. So if you press down on a piano key, you'll have the experience of feeling the key move down at the same moment that you see the key move down and in the same moment that you hear the tone. When in actuality, all of these signals actually move through the world at different rates. They take different amounts of time to get to your brain. They each take different amounts of time to be processed by the brain. And so what the brain does then is weave all of these signals together. And what your conscious experience is, is of all of these things happening in the same moment, when in actuality, they're happening at different times. And so those intuitions that consciousness is driving that type of behavior, we now know to be incorrect. What might be revealed if we're wrong about consciousness? So if the intuitions that led us to assume that consciousness arises out of complex processing, namely in brains, are misleading us, we really have only two options for a starting place. So when we look out at all of the organisms and structures in the universe, and we ask ourselves, which of these collections of matter contain conscious experiences or give rise to conscious experiences? In the most basic sense, because we don't yet know, in the most basic sense, the answer has to be all or some. We know the answer isn't none, because we have evidence of our own conscious experiences. We know they arise, you know, at least one point in space and time. And so the sciences have assumed so far that the answer is some, and that it's very likely that they only arise in systems that are very similar to ours, and very likely only in systems with brains. And I'm very glad that we did start with that assumption. And it's always been my assumption as well. I think it was the most fruitful path forward, given the knowledge that we have so far. But given the fact that some of these intuitions we now know are misleading us, if we start with this other assumption, that all of these systems are conscious, that consciousness is fundamental, what would that mean? And what kinds of questions would we ask? And how could we even study something like this scientifically? So there are a few questions that come to mind for me that would be so interesting to move forward with. One is, which types of systems entail suffering? That's something we would want to know. In terms of ethics, this is something we obviously care a lot about between human beings. And also, as we have learned that other animals are conscious, it's important for us to extend our ethical intuitions toward them. We know now that when dogs cry out in pain, they're feeling something very similar to what we feel. And so it'd be interesting to learn what other types of systems might experience pain or suffering. I think another interesting avenue of research is, would it be possible to share conscious experiences? And would we be able to learn more about the universe that way? So in some future science that is very hard to imagine, if there would be some way to encode a memory of another system and place it in my brain so that it becomes part of my stream of memory, I could have a memory of being another system, and maybe a system that we want to learn more about or know more about. I've often thought how impactful it would be if scientists could share their intuitions, their very insightful intuitions. If you think about Albert Einstein and the fact that he had intuitions for space-time that no other human being had. And it took him more than a decade to explain this intuition through mathematics and language and to be able to communicate what he was talking about to other scientists, let alone start to make scientific progress with it. From the moment he had that intuition to the moment he was able to share it was many, many years. And I often wonder, is there some future science where you might be able to actually share that intuition? And so I call this potential future science, experiential science. And I think it's one of the places we might go, however crazy it sounds now, if we discover or have good enough reason to believe that consciousness is actually much more pervasive than we thought it was. So like other paradigm shifts, if we could prove that consciousness does in fact run deeper in nature, it's hard to imagine. Human beings have a hard time imagining what the future will look like. But no doubt it will change the way we feel in the world. Recently when I was doing plant research, I went for a jog on this hiking trail and I actually ran this little thought experiment for myself, imagining that all the plants along the trail were not plants, but were creatures. So were small insects and small animals. And I was just doing this to see if I could change my intuition about what might entail conscious experiences. And so I was going on this jog, essentially imagining that plants don't exist, but that all these plants I was seeing were some type of creature feeling the world, moving through the world. And just that little exercise gave me a sense of how different we might feel in the world if we understood that there were many more conscious systems around us than we realize. Part three, debunking the illusion of self. What is the illusion of self? People often think that illusions are evolved for their usefulness, but the truth is that most illusions that we experience are actually glitches. They're ways the brain works so that we can accurately navigate the world we live in. So when I talk about the illusion of self, this is often very hard for people to grasp what that could even mean. I'm obviously a person over here and you're a person over there, and we talk about ourselves all the time and what we do and how we spend our days and our histories and our futures. And so I first like to just be very clear about what I'm not talking about when I talk about the illusion of self. And all of those things that I just included are obviously things we can call a self. We can talk about our autobiographical histories. We can talk about things we tend to do, our likes and dislikes, and all of that is in the description of a self and that makes perfect sense. And that piece of it is not an illusion. And so we can talk about ourselves in the same way that we can talk about a cat as another organism in nature, or we can label a wave as a system in nature. And the truth is that the experience of being a self is actually much more analogous to an ocean wave than to something static in nature like a rock. And so this starts to get at what I am talking about when I talk about the illusion of self. And so in the same way that an ocean wave is a process in nature, it's dynamic, it's ever changing. Even though we can label it a wave and we can call it a wave and talk about the types of things waves do, we all understand that a wave is not a static thing in nature. It's a process. And our brains are very much the same thing. They are processes in nature that are ever changing, ever evolving. And so all of our experiences take place across time and are continually arising. So that if I became unconscious or if something happened to my brain, immediately my experiences would change. And the truth is that our experiences are changing all the time in every moment. And we're in fact in dialogue with the external world in every moment too. So the sense that we are a solid entity, an unchanging entity that exists someplace in our body and takes ownership of our body and even ownership of our brain rather than being identical to our brain, which we know to be the case, that is where the illusion lies. And this illusion confuses us about our place in nature and the state of reality on many different levels. And so on one level, it blinds us to the fact that we are in constant communication with the external world and that the boundaries between ourselves and the world and ourselves and each other are not as solid and firm as they appear to us or that they feel to us to be, especially when we feel like a static cell. And I often wish that these connections were made visual to us. I think we'd have a better sense of how we exist in the world if we could see certain things. So if you could see the sound waves moving from my mouth to your eardrum and the effect that was having on your eardrum and then the subsequent processing in your brain and how that was making you feel. If we could see the air molecules going in and out of my mouth. When you're in a room full of people, you could see the air being shared by everyone in the room and the microorganisms. And there's so many levels to our interconnection and to the ways that we're embedded in nature that would give us a visceral sense that we aren't actually embedded in nature, but we are nature. We are a part of this thing we call the universe. We're not separate from it. And so there are many reasons why it's useful to notice this illusion. There's some psychological reasons. There are psychological benefits to human beings being more in touch with the way in which we are processes in nature, constantly communicating and interacting with the outside world, whether that's through air, water, food, chemicals, or whether that's through ideas with each other. If someone came into this studio right now and said, we all have to get out of here, there's a fire. Just those words, just the sound waves against my eardrum and then the subsequent processing in my brain, there would be an instantaneous physiological change in my body. Just hearing those words, likely even before I consciously process what they were saying, I would probably be moving out of my chair before I even really process the whole meaning of what those words meant. And so there's a way in which there's a psychological benefit to understanding this illusion of self because the illusion of self often contributes to our feeling separate from the world, separate from each other, feeling very isolated. And it's also useful for thinking about consciousness because our intuitions tell us that this feeling of being a solid self is equivalent to consciousness itself. And this is certainly an illusion that's misleading us. What brain processes create the illusion of self? So the neuroscience is really still in its infancy, but we're starting to learn more and more about how this illusion of self gets created. The neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote a book called Being You, which gives a wonderful and thorough description of how this experience of self gets created. Part of it has to do with something called change blindness, which we know about in vision. We have a blind spot in our visual fields that we are not conscious of, that we don't detect. And neuroscientists are just now starting to understand that there is a change blindness with respect to our experience over time so that we don't notice how different each of our experiences in every moment are from every other. And so that adds to this illusion of being a solid entity that moves through time unchanged. We're also learning a little bit more about what neuroscientists refer to as the default mode network. So we know that when the default mode network is active, we are highly aware of this illusion of self. And it tends to quiet down when we're experiencing what people talk about as a flow state. So when we're very immersed in our work, if we're very immersed in a sport, when we're not so aware of self versus other or self versus world. We also know through some studies using fMRI, functional MRI machines, when people are using various meditation techniques that quiet down the default mode network, they report experiences of feeling more at one with the universe. They report experiences of no longer feeling like a self, no longer feeling the boundary between themselves and the rest of the world. This is also something that happens when people are under the influence of some psychedelic substances. In an fMRI machine, we can see that the default mode network has quieted down and people report very similar experiences. So this experience that people have when the default mode network is quieted down and they've dropped this experience of being a solid self is actually much more in line with what we know the underlying reality to be, which is an endlessly fluctuating process that gives rise to each new present moment we experience and is much more analogous to an ocean wave as a phenomenon in nature rather than a static thing. And we also know that memory plays a role in creating this experience of self as well. There's a sense in which all of the memories that we have access to over time were being experienced by the same subject, by the same self. And you can imagine if your memories weren't strung together and your experience was just of each present moment, there'd be much less of a sense of a self moving through time. And something similar happens in a practice like meditation where one is focusing on experiences arising in the present moment, one after the other, without getting lost in thoughts about the future or thoughts about the past. And we now know also from studies of meditators that have been put in fMRI machines that when someone is in a concentrated state of meditation attempting to stay focused on the present moment, this also quiets the default mode network and people regularly report dropping this illusion of self. Is it useful to recognize the illusion of self? So some people find this idea that the self is an illusion to be somewhat destabilizing or disconcerting, which I completely understand. But the truth is that there really is this positive way to view it. And feeling more in touch with our interconnectedness is one way that it can be framed in a very positive sense and give people a true sense of well-being. And the other thing to keep in mind is that there are certainly levels of usefulness for being aware of illusions. So one example I like to give is that the earth is a sphere. We more or less walk around with the illusion that the earth is flat and we act as though the earth is flat. And that's the best way to go about our everyday lives. If we constantly reminded ourselves that the earth is a sphere and had to keep that in mind and had to feel that way everywhere we went, it would just be an annoying distraction and would get in the way of all kinds of activities and would not be helpful. And the same is true of the illusion of self. Throughout our day, in most of our daily activities, trying to remember that this experience is an illusion is really just a distraction and completely unnecessary. But if we want to think more clearly about consciousness, it's very useful. And especially when we're studying consciousness through science, this is an important illusion to keep in mind. And if we're trying to be more in touch with the interconnected nature of things, or if we're practicing something like meditation, it's extremely useful to be aware of this illusion. Part 4. The illusion of free will. How do you define free will? So I think that free will, for the most part, is an illusion. But when I talk about free will, I like to distinguish between conscious will and free will. Because the illusion is really contained in this feeling that it's the consciousness that is the will. So I use the term free will to talk about decision-making processes in nature, which there clearly are. And I'm happy to call that free will, although in the end, I'm not sure how free those processes are. But there's this decision-making process that humans experience at a very complex level. But you can see simpler versions of this in nature as well. So if you look at something like a pea tendril, when it senses that it's close to a branch, that it can wrap itself around, it starts growing more quickly in that direction. And then it changes the growth so that it wraps itself around a branch. There is a very simple form of decision-making that goes into that process. The pea tendril needs to sense the branch nearby. It also needs to be in the light for this process to take place. So there are many elements to this moment where the pea tendril decides to move in a certain direction, to start growing more quickly, and to start coiling. Most of us wouldn't consider that to be a free decision-making process. It's a cause-and-effect process that occurs in nature. And as you move up in complexity to the level of brains and then human brains, the number of factors that come into play are so expansive that it would be impossible for us to track them all. So the state of the brain at any given moment, the interaction with the outside world, the set of beliefs that brain has. I mean, this list goes on and on and on. And if you're about a complex decision, there could be a simple decision whether to pick up a glass of water or not, whether to change your position in your chair, or something much more complex about a job you've been offered and you're trying to figure out whether to take it or not. There are so many elements that are taking place in this process in nature that it would be impossible to track. But it is a process, and it's a process by which the brain is interacting with the exterior world and measuring the different outcomes of the different possible futures, and then ultimately making a decision. This is something that I think we can refer to as free will, and that what many people mean by free will. The problem with having free in the title is that it's not free in the way we feel it is. And this is where the illusion comes in. And so we begin with this illusion of self, of being this solid concrete entity that lives somewhere in the head. And even though we better feels as though it's separate from the physical world, and that this self can kind of swoop in and change the course of history or somehow make decisions that are free of the physical world that we're embedded in. And that I think is clearly an illusion. And I call that conscious will, because it is this feeling that my conscious experience is this self and is the thing that has this freedom. How can the illusion of free will be challenged? There was a very interesting study done in 2013, in which they put participants in an fMRI machine and showed them a screen and presented two numbers on that screen. And they gave them the option of either adding or subtracting these two numbers. And they were scanning the activity of these participants' brains while they were doing this calculation. And the result of this study was that based on the information from the MRI, the experimenters could tell up to four seconds, not only when this person was going to make the decision, but whether they decided to add or subtract. So there have been other studies like this that are also interesting. But in my view, these studies aren't actually necessary to prove the point. Based on the neuroscience we currently have, we should expect to get more and more results like this. But even if we didn't, if you pay close attention to your moment-to-moment experience, and you don't have to be a meditator, but watching the mind make a decision, you get the sense viscerally that there's no self or free will making decisions behind the scenes. But that in terms of your conscious experience, a decision really arises. And so you can do this simple exercise, just give yourself the option of moving your big toe or moving your pointer finger. And in the next 30 seconds, decide to either move your toe or your pointer finger. And if you kind of rest in your conscious experience, you will notice that that decision simply arises in your conscious awareness. There's no self who's deciding to make the decision. Is recognizing the illusion of free will beneficial? So many people find this realization to be quite disconcerting, which is understandable. And I think one way to address that is levels of usefulness. And the vast majority of the time, it is not useful or helpful to realize that there's an illusion of sorts taking place. There are places where it's useful. It's useful, obviously, for the sciences and for neuroscience, but it actually can also be useful psychologically in certain circumstances. And again, this isn't something you want to remind yourself of in every moment, but there are moments where realizing that there's an experience of conscious will taking place can be quite liberating. And there are a few examples here. So one is many people get stuck in feeling responsible for their psychological state. And there's a way in which simply being with whatever uncomfortable emotions you're experiencing, whether sadness or frustration or anger, and being aware that those processes are playing out and being with them rather than believing that you're controlling them, can be extremely beneficial for psychological well-being. There are also ways that we can apply this in our relationships with other people. I sometimes talk about the fact that you would never get angry at a tornado. And that doesn't mean anger doesn't have a place in society and culture. But there are times when anger can overcome us and start to rule our lives in a way that is incredibly unhelpful and unhealthy. And there isn't a solid self to every person that is somehow evil or worthy of blame can also be liberating to notice in certain circumstances. This realization certainly doesn't mean that people shouldn't be held responsible for their actions. But it might actually inform wiser ways of dealing with people who act violently or people who cause harm. And sometimes I draw the analogy to AI or something like a self-driving car. If a self-driving car hit someone accidentally, we would want to understand the mechanics of that. We would want to understand whether something had gone wrong with the software or the programming. And so I think there are places in society and in our relationships where blame and anger and punishment aren't necessarily useful. And so being aware of this could potentially inform wiser policymaking. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think Members community where you get access to videos early, ad-free.