Unpacking The Mystery Of Consciousness - Annaka Harris - #927

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What do you think is the most unsettling idea about consciousness that keeps you up at night?

**Annaka Harris** (0:07)
I wouldn't call it unsettling. I would call it exciting and mysterious, and I'm a bit obsessed thinking about how it is that all of this non-conscious matter in the universe, this universe that is apparently made of all this non-conscious matter, in some instances gets configured in such a way that there's an experience of being that matter from the inside, and how that process takes place, how it could be, let me go back, so what it's like actually to jump on that spectrum. Clearly, there's a range of conscious experiences that a living being or system can have. Some very, very minimal experiences, maybe, you know, if snails are conscious, there's very minimal experience of being a snail, maybe pressure, a sense of heat and cold, maybe some very rudimentary experience of hunger, desire to move toward food, that type of thing, then all the way up to human beings and all the things that we experience. But the question for me and the thing that does keep me up at night, is what is that transition from no consciousness to consciousness? And how is that anything but a completely unexplained mystery? There doesn't seem to be anything. I've worked with neuroscientists for more than 20 years now and studied the science of consciousness. And we have not made any progress in the sciences and understanding how consciousness comes to be.
That was a long answer to your question.

**Chris Williamson** (1:57)
Why is that the case? Why has it been such a dead end?

**Annaka Harris** (2:01)
I think it's a categorically different thing than anything else science has studied before. And actually, Philip Goff has a wonderful book that explains this very well called Galileo's Error. And it is because we have these fantastic tools in science for studying behavior from the outside. And the thing that's unique about consciousness, and the reason why I find it so fascinating, and why it keeps me up at night is because it's a different property that we're trying to get at, which is experience from the inside. It can only be felt from the inside. So you and I are very similar beings, we're similar systems, and so we experience a lot of the same things and we develop language so that we can talk about those experiences. But what's interesting actually to me about communication and language is that it only works between systems that have similar conscious experiences. Because if, you know, the only reason you and I can talk about anything or share ideas is because we share so much of the same conscious content. You know, if you try to explain to someone who's born deaf what, you know, middle C sounds like or any sound for that matter, there are a lot of analogies you can make, but there's no way you can actually deliver that experience of sound to someone who's never had it before. And so to talk about it adequately and to be able to understand, you know, the way I understand that you are conscious is because you're saying things that lead me to believe you're experiencing very similar things to things I'm experiencing. And so the trick is, there is no way to get true evidence of a conscious experience, but from the inside, but from having it yourself. And as I said, we have all these ways of communicating that can give us, you know, a fair amount of non-direct evidence that other systems besides ourselves are conscious, but we can't get direct evidence. And that's different from anything else that we study scientifically.
I think there may be changes in the last chapter of my documentary. I talk a little bit about how there might be changes to the science in the future that might enable us to kind of get around this issue. But I mean, it is still a pretty solid issue that it is only from the inside that consciousness can be known and then conscious content can be carried through time by memories. And so we kind of have access. It's always a different experience in a new moment, but we can have access to content from previous experiences through memory.

**Chris Williamson** (4:44)
I've heard people say before that if we didn't experience it, the universe would give us no indication that consciousness exists. How true do you think that is?

**Annaka Harris** (4:53)
Yeah, I mean, you know, that's even true on a more tangible level, which is that in my documentary, I talk about locked-in syndrome, which is a very terrifying circumstance. But that's a circumstance where someone has had brain damage either due to a stroke or injury, where they've become completely paralyzed, yet their conscious experience is completely intact. So they can hear, they can see, they can think, but they literally have no form of any kind of movement, let alone communication. And so that's a circumstance where there is no, you can't get any clues about the conscious experience that's happening on the inside from the outside. And it's these types of conditions in neuroscience that started me down this path of wondering, is it possible there are other systems that are just so unfamiliar to us, where even very minimal conscious experiences are actually arising in those systems, we would have no way of knowing in the same way we have no way of knowing in a person who's in a locked in state.