Timestamps:
0:00: The mystery of consciousness
1:31: What is consciousness?
3:31: Ask these 2 questions
8:37: Which systems entail suffering?
Transcript:
The mystery of consciousness
If you think about it, consciousness is really everything. Consciousness is everything we know, everything we experience. But the mystery at the heart of consciousness is why in this universe that seems to be teeming with non-conscious matters somehow gets configured in such a way where suddenly it's having a felt experience from the inside? Suddenly, there's something that it's like to be that matter. And there's a lot that's happened in modern neuroscience that suggests that our intuitions about consciousness are wrong.
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 in brains, is it possible that consciousness is a much more basic phenomenon in nature and is essentially pervading everything? So is much more like gravity, then we can imagine that all types of processing in nature could include some type of felt experience. I'm Annaka 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."
What is consciousness?
There's no perfect definition for consciousness in the way that I'm using it here, in the most fundamental sense. And so it's useful to use Thomas Nagel's description from his essay "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" He illustrates a bat that is moving through the world using sonar. So it's making sounds, the sounds are bouncing off the walls and the trees, 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. So 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 awareness, felt experience, sentience interchangeably, to talk about this more fundamental sense of consciousness. And this can exist without thought.
It could exist in a very simple organism that is not capable of thought. But even in our human experience, we think of a very young child or an infant, we know that there's still felt experiences - feeling pressure against the skin, hearing sounds in the room, the experience of heat or cold. And there's clearly consciousness there, and it doesn't necessarily entail thought. So the study of consciousness has largely, if not entirely, been relegated to neuroscience, which makes a lot of sense because we have assumed that the organisms that 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 out of that complex processing. But 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.
Ask these 2 questions
So when we're trying to think more clearly and more creatively about consciousness, 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? 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. But, surprisingly, it's easier to puncture these intuitions, or to shake them up, than you might think. Number one, if I go pick up my friend at the airport who I haven't seen in years, and I see a big smile on her face and she's running toward me, everything I see in her behavior in that moment are very good clues that she's conscious. But 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.
There was a writer for French Elle, his name was Jean-Dominique Bauby, and he had a condition called locked-in syndrome. And this occurs when someone experiences brain damage, either due to a stroke or to an external injury, and the entire body becomes paralyzed so that someone is no longer able to move any part of their body, yet they still retain a full conscious experience. And he was in this state, although he had one point of mobility, he was able 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 "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," and it took him 200,000 blinks to write that memoir.
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. And our intuition regarding the second question is that, obviously, of course, our conscious experiences are affecting things.
If we encounter a bear or a lion in the wild, 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.
This is what neuroscientists refer to as binding processes. 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. 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 move through the world at different amounts of time to get to your brain. They each take different amounts of time to be processed by the brain. The brain is taking in all of these inputs that are taking different amounts of time to reach the brain and be processed by the brain, and then deliver them to your conscious experience as one single moment. And so those intuitions that consciousness is driving that type of behavior, we now know to be incorrect.
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. Some of these systems are conscious, that consciousness arises out of complex processing. Or 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?
Which systems entail suffering?
We might wonder if experiences can be shared between systems. 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, is there some future science where you might be able to actually share that intuition? We might wonder which types of systems entail suffering.
In terms of ethics, this is something we obviously care a lot about. 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. 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 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 realized.
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