311 | Annaka Harris on Whether Consciousness is Fundamental

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Special treat for Mindscape listeners today. We're gonna finally figure out this consciousness thing once and for all. No. We're not. Actually, sorry about that. That was false advertising. We're gonna talk about consciousness yet again. It's not something that we're gonna ever, in the course of a one hour long conversation, quite agree that people who have different opinions about this, are gonna see the light, but we're gonna come closer and closer with every episode. That's all I can actually promise. You know, it wasn't that long ago. We had Christophe Koch, famous neuroscientist, on the show, and we talked a lot about consciousness, in particular, the neural con correlates of consciousness and integrated information theory. We touched on the idea of panpsychism, which we've talked about before on the podcast, the idea that consciousness is everywhere. But we didn't really give it a full airing out. So I wanted to kind of give that idea, maybe not panpsychism per se, but the idea that consciousness is a fundamental ingredient of reality rather than just an emergent level, something that we use to describe the collective behavior of matter when it becomes sufficiently complex and self referential and so forth. Rather than that, what if consciousness is the starting point for thinking about the fundamental nature of reality? I'm very, very honest that I don't think that that is the right idea, but I do think that it's useful to think about that kind of idea, and I wanted to sort of give it a fair hearing. So today's guest, Annika Harris, is the author of New York Times bestseller, Conscious, a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of mind. And more recently, she's done, you know, in this sort of exploratory fashion, She came up with an audio series, AKA a podcast, called Lights On, How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe, where she talks to a bunch of people. I'm included. Actually, there's a bunch of people who are former Mindscape guests who are included, and she gets a lot of different opinions from physicists, from neuroscientists, from psychologists, about what consciousness really is. And she talks about how she has made the journey from someone who was closer to my own point of view about these things with consciousness being emergent to someone who is very sympathetic to the idea of consciousness being fundamental. And we talk about why anyone would believe such a thing and what is the benefit of doing it, what is the motivation for doing it, from both thought experiments and real experiments and things like that. So we had fun with it in the sense that we knew we weren't gonna convince each other either way, but that's okay. We can still talk about it. We can discuss the ideas. That's what we're all about here. So as usual, I want you to listen, and decide …