Speaker 1: Welcome back to thrilling Threads. If you are driving right now,
keep your eyes on the road. But I want you
to prepare yourself because today we are pulling on a
thread that might just unravel the entire fabric of your reality.
Speaker 2: Hey, no small claim.
Speaker 1: I know, I know every podcast says this will change
your life. But today we are not talking about productivity
hacks or diet tips. We are talking about an existential
thriller that is playing out right now inside your own head.
Speaker 2: It is good to be back, and you are right
to set the stakes that high. Usually we look at
things in the world, you know, history, tech, biology. Today
we are turning the camera around. We are looking directly
at the thing that is doing the looking exactly.
Speaker 1: And to kick this off, I want to start with
a hook that has been well, it's been haunting me
since I started prepping for this deep dive.
Speaker 2: Oh I'm intrigued.
Speaker 1: I want you, the listener, to imagine for a second
that you are a worm. You are inching through the cool,
damp dirt in a garden.
Speaker 2: Okay with you so far?
Speaker 1: Or if you prefer, imagine you are a vine twisting
around a trellis hunting for sunlight. Now here's the question.
Is there something it feels like to be you?
Speaker 2: Ah? That is the fundamental question, as the philosopher Thomas
Nagel would put it. Is the light on inside the
house or is it just an empty building with automatic sensors?
Speaker 1: Right? Are you just a biological robot input dart on,
skin output, wiggle muscle? Is it just data processing without
a movie playing inside your head?
Speaker 2: Or is there a tiny, dim, primitive spark of experience?
Is there a you in the worm?
Speaker 1: This brings us to the gateway of what is known
as the hard problem of consciousness. Why does a specific
arrangement of atoms carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen result in.
Speaker 2: A feeling why anything at all? Theoretically we could be zombies.
We could walk, talk, eat, and sleep without actually feeling
any of it, but we do feel. The question is why?
Speaker 1: And to help us navigate this absolute mindfield without losing
our minds, or maybe while losing them intentionally, we are
digging into a fascinating stack of material. Today.
Speaker 2: We have some great guides.
Speaker 1: Our primary guide is an in depth interview with Annika Harris.
She's the author of the New York Times bestseller Conscious,
A brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind.
And she's the creator of the docuseries lights On.
Speaker 2: We are also pulling heavily from the video titled Science's
Difficult Journey to Try to Understand Consciousness, which was released
by Big Think.
Speaker 1: And what I appreciate about Annika Harris and why I
think she's perfect for this, is that she sits at
this very specific, very difficult intersection.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, she is working with neuroscience, philosophy, and physics
trying to get these disciplines which usually hate talking to
each other, to collaborate on the mystery of the mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They don't play well in the sandbox together, do they?
Not at all? And that is our mission today. We're
going to try to dismantle your most basic intuitions about reality.
We are going to question if you actually have a
self spoiler alert you might not.
Speaker 2: We're also going to ask if you have free will
spoiler alert. It's very complicated, and we.
Speaker 1: Are going to ask if consciousness is actually everywhere like gravity,
rather than just something your brain cooks up.
Speaker 2: And I know that sounds radical, right, It sounds almost
like mysticism.
Speaker 1: It does.
Speaker 2: But as we unpack the source material, you might find
that the radical explanation is actually the most logical one scientifically.
Speaker 1: So let's get into it. Section one. What the heck
are we even talking about? Because when I say consciousness,
I feel like most people imagine complex stuff.
Speaker 2: For sure. They think of Hamlet, or solving a math problem,
or worrying about their taxes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the internal monologue, the voice in.
Speaker 2: Your head, That is the most common misconception. And Harris
clears us up immediately in the interview. She makes a
very very sharp distinction.
Speaker 1: Okay, when she talks.
Speaker 2: About consciousness, she is not talking about intellect. She is
not talking about linguistic thought or complex planning.
Speaker 1: So it's not the smart stuff. I mean, my calculator
is smart in a way, but we aren't asking if
it's conscious.
Speaker 2: Precisely, your calculator can do calculus facts than any human,
but we're pretty sure there's nothing it's like to be
that calculator.
Speaker 1: It's dark inside the ship, right.
Speaker 2: So Harris defines consciousness as the bare fact of felt experience.
Speaker 1: Well, let's unpack this felt experience. I want to make
sure we really nail this definition, because everything else, I
mean everything hangs on it.
Speaker 2: It does, so think back to that worm example, you
started with. A worm is obviously not writing poetry. Obviously
it isn't contemplating its mortality or wondering if it left
the obanon. But as it moves through the soil, does
it feel the friction of the dirt against its skin?
Speaker 1: Right? Is there a sensation? Is there a qualia? As
the philosophers say, exactly?
Speaker 2: Does it have an internal drive? A feeling of hunger
that pushes it toward food or a feeling of bad
that pulls it away from a sharp rock?
Speaker 1: So it doesn't need to have the word for hunger.
It just needs the raw feeling.
Speaker 2: The raw feeling. If the answer is yes, if there
is any experience happening there, no matter how dim, no
matter how alien to us, then the worm is conscious.
Speaker 1: I love that it lowers the bar in a way
that makes the universe feel a lot more crowded.
Speaker 2: It does, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: It really reminds me of that famous essay by Thomas Nagel,
What is it Like to Be a bat? Harris brings
this up as a cornerstone at the discussion.
Speaker 2: Yes, Nagel's bat is iconic in philosophy. He published that
back in nineteen seventy four, and it is still the
gold standard for explaining the gap between knowing how something
works and knowing what it feels like.
Speaker 1: It's such a perfect example because we can describe a
bat perfectly. We know it's a mammal, we know it flies,
we know it uses sonar. We can dissect it and
map every single nerve.
Speaker 2: We can understand the physics of echolocation perfectly. We can
explain how the sound waves bounce off the cave wall,
hit the bat's ears and get processed by the auditory cortex.
We can map the neurons firing.
Speaker 1: We can have all the data, all of it.
Speaker 2: But Nagel's point, and Harris emphasizes this, is that even
if you have all that data, you still have zero
idea what it feels like to perceive a room through sound.
Speaker 1: None. What is the texture of a chair when perceived
through echoes? What is the color of a moth's fluttering
wings and sound?
Speaker 2: We can't even begin to imagine it. And that's the
umweald right, Yes, the.
Speaker 1: German term umwaldt. It refers to the self centered world
of an organism, the specific sensory bubble they live in.
Speaker 2: It's such a useful concept. The bat's umwald is built
of sound, textures, and echoes. Our umwaldt is built largely
of color and light. A dog's is built on a
universe of smells we can't even.
Speaker 1: Detect, and you just can't translate between them. You can't
explain the experience of the color red to someone who
has been blind from birth. No matter how much you
talk about wavelengths and photon frequencies.
Speaker 2: It's impossible. You can give them all the objective facts,
but you can't transmit the subjective experience.
Speaker 1: It really highlights that experience is primary. It's the foundation.
You can't engage with the world without it. Harris makes
this point that we can't even imagine living without consciousness
because it's the medium for everything we know.
Speaker 2: It's like a fish trying to imagine not being in
water exactly. She challenges us to imagine moments without that
internal monologue, you know, to get closer to what this
pure consciousness is.
Speaker 1: I tried this earlier today while I was making coffee.
It's actually really hard because my brain just wants to
chatter constantly.
Speaker 2: Oh it, shut up.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting there trying to have a pure experience of
the steam rising, and my brain is like, am I
doing it? I think of doing it. I'm hungry. Don't
forget to buy milk.
Speaker 2: The narrator is very persistent, but Harris suggests thinking about
an infant, think of a newborn baby. Okay, they feel
pressure on their skin. They don't know the word skin,
they don't know the word of pressure. They don't know
where their body ends. And the blanket begins. But the
feeling is there. That raw sensation is there.
Speaker 1: Or hearing a bell ring before your brain slaps the
label bell on it, there is just the raw sound,
the vibration in the air.
Speaker 2: Or seeing the color grain, just the raw greenness of
it before you think that's the color of grass.
Speaker 1: Exactly. That raw sensation is consciousness. Thought is just an
add on. Thought is secondary. The experience is the foundation.
Speaker 2: And once you strip away the complex thoughts, you realize
that consciousness might be a lot more common than we think.
It might not be this exclusive club for big brained mammals.
Speaker 1: Which brings us directly to the hard problem. This is
the term coined by the philosopher David Chalmers, and it
seems to be the wall that science keeps banging its
head against.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: But to understand why it's hard, we have to understand
what the so called easy problems are.
Speaker 2: Right, and easy is a bit of a joke here
in neuroscience. The easy problems are things like how does
the eye focus light? How does a neuron fire? How
does the brain distinguish a cat from a dog?
Speaker 1: Those don't sound easy to me. That sounds like a
PhD thesis.
Speaker 2: They are incredibly complex, but they are solvable through engineering.
They're problems of mechanism. We can, in theory, build a
machine to do them right.
Speaker 1: Your smartphone can focus light, you can process data. It
can even use AI to identif that there's a cat
in your photo. It draws a little box around it
and says cat exactly.
Speaker 2: Your phone can label it as a cat. But, and
this is the crux of the hard problem. Does your
phone know it is looking at a cat?
Speaker 1: Is there a movie playing inside the microchip?
Speaker 2: Does the phone enjoy the cuteness of the cat? Does
it feel anything at all?
Speaker 1: I certainly hope not. That would make deleting photos really
really awkward.
Speaker 2: It would we assume the phone is dark inside, it's
processing without feeling. The hard problem as Chalmers defined it
is why aren't we like the phone? Why does our
processing feel like anything?
Speaker 1: It is so weird when you stop and think about it.
The universe is mostly dead stuff, right, Yeah, atoms, rocks, stars, vacuum.
It's all just physics playing out correct.
Speaker 2: It's non conscious matter obeying physical laws.
Speaker 1: So how do you take a bunch of dead, non
conscious atoms, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, arrange them into a brain
and suddenly, poof the lights turn on? Where does the
feeling come from?
Speaker 2: That is a mystery. It's what some philosophers call the
explanatory gap. How does matter get configured to create a subject,
to create a point of view?
Speaker 1: And Harris poses a very provocative question here in the
Big Think video. She asks, what if we are looking
at it the wrong way? What if the whole premise
is wrong exactly? What if consciousness isn't something the brain makes?
What if it goes deeper than biology?
Speaker 2: This is where it gets really sci fi, and I
absolutely love it. She uses the analogy of gravity.
Speaker 1: It's a great analogy.
Speaker 2: Yes, think about gravity. It's a fundamental property of the universe.
It's a field. It pervades everything.
Speaker 1: It's not like the Earth decides to have gravity.
Speaker 2: No mass warps space time, and we call that gravity.
We don't say that a planet creates gravity out of nowhere.
We say the planet interacts with the fundamental field of
gravity that is already there, inherent in the fabric of
the cosmos.
Speaker 1: So she's suggesting consciousness might be like that, a fundamental
field that's just part of reality precisely.
Speaker 2: It's a view often linked to a philosophical position called panpsychism,
the idea that consciousness in some extremely basic, primitive form
might be a fundamental property of matter itself.
Speaker 1: So wait, let me get this straight. Are you saying
an electron has a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of experience.
Speaker 2: Not thoughts, An electron isn't worrying about the stock market
or its place in the universe. Okay, good, But maybe
there is a tiny spark of being a minuscule proto
conscious field associated with it. If this is true, the
brain isn't a magical generator of consciousness.
Speaker 1: It because more like a receiver then, or an antennae.
Speaker 2: A receiver or a concentrator or an amplifier. It takes
this fundamental property that's everywhere and organizes it, structures it
into the rich three D high definition movie of human life.
Speaker 1: That completely shifts the whole picture. It goes from being
a magic trick of the brain abricadabra, here's a feeling,
to a fundamental force of nature.
Speaker 2: It reframes the question instead of how does dead matter
create consciousness, the question becomes how does consciousness organize itself
into complex forms like us?
Speaker 1: And if that's true, if consciousness is fundamental, then it's
not just in brains.
Speaker 2: And that leads us to one of the most surprising
and frankly controversial parts of the source material. We need
to talk about plants.
Speaker 1: Yes, vegetable intelligence. And this is where I started looking
at my salad very very differently. It's hard not to,
but I have to be the skeptic here for a second.
We are talking about plants, no brain, no central nervous system,
just you know, cellulose and water. How can we possibly
talk about them being conscious?
Speaker 2: And I am glad you are skeptical. You should be.
This is a very counterintuitive idea, But Harris discusses some
incredible experiments that challenge the idea that you need a
brain to process information or make decisions.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, let's talk about the p seed links. This
experiment just it blew my mind. Yeah, walk us through
the setup.
Speaker 2: So this is the Y maze experiment. It's a classic
setup in animal behavior, but applied to plants. Scientists took
pea seedlings and planted their roots in a maze shaped
like the letter Y.
Speaker 1: So the root grows down in hits a fork in
the road.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it hits a fork in the road that has
to decide whether to grow left or right.
Speaker 1: Okay, So normally that would just be random chance right,
fifty to fifty, yeah, or maybe following gravity.
Speaker 2: You would think. But then they added a stimulus. In
the first part of the experiment. They put a water
source at one end of the Y and the roots,
the roots obviously grew toward the water.
Speaker 1: Sure, that makes sense, that's just mechanics, right, they can
physically sense the moisture gradient in the soil. Gamp soil
feels different to the root tip.
Speaker 2: Right, that's tropism, it's a known mechanism. But then, and
this is the kicker, they removed the water instead, they
just played the sound of running water through a speaker
at one end of the maze.
Speaker 1: Wait, what the plants could hear the water?
Speaker 2: The roots grew toward the sound. Get out, seriously, seriously,
They perceived the vibration of the water and made a
decision to grow in that direction to ensure their survival.
Speaker 1: Okay, but hearing, isn't that just feeling vibrations, like when
you stand next to a big speaker at a concert
and feel the base in your chin.
Speaker 2: It is exactly like that. They have mechana receptors that
are sensitive to vibration. But here's the thing. They utilize
that sensory data to make a prediction.
Speaker 1: Prediction.
Speaker 2: Yes, they bet their energy on the idea that sound
of water equals water. That is information processing. That is
a choice based on sensory input.
Speaker 1: That is wild, no ears, no brain, but they're listening
and choosing.
Speaker 2: And it gets even creepier with the daughter vine.
Speaker 1: The vampire plant.
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, the daughter vine is a parasite. It looks
like a bunch of orange spaghetti. It has no roots
of its own. It can't survive on its own. It
needs to attach to a host plant and suck out
its nutrients. Okay, but it's picky. It has preferences. It
prefers tomato plants over wheat, for example, because tomatoes are
a better source of nutrients.
Speaker 1: So how does a vine without eyes or a nose
find a tomato plant from across the garden.
Speaker 2: Smell is part of it. They can sense chemical volatiles
in the air. That's been known for a while, but
hair is Eng's recent research showing they can also detect
light waves passing through leaves.
Speaker 1: Whoa explain that? How does that work?
Speaker 2: Think about it. When we see a green leaf, we
are seeing the green wavelengths of light that are bouncing
off it.
Speaker 1: Right. The other colors are absorbed exactly.
Speaker 2: But other wavelengths pass through the leaf. The quality of
that light changes depending on the leaf's shape. It's chemistry,
how healthy it is. The daughter vine analyzes the light
that passes through potential hosts.
Speaker 1: It's doing spectroscopy.
Speaker 2: It's doing complex trigonometry with light waves. It can determine
the shape and distance of the plant based on how
the light is altered. It can tell a good host
from a bad one.
Speaker 1: That is calculation. It is analyzing the quality of the host,
and then it grows toward the good host and ignores
the bad one.
Speaker 2: It makes a choice.
Speaker 1: So here's the implication, And I want to ask you
this because you're the expert here. If a plant can
process data, perceive the environment through sound and light, and
make decisions growing left versus growing right, is there a
felt sense there?
Speaker 2: That is the million dollar question. If we go back
to our definition of consciousness as Baar felt experience, and
we see an organism reacting to sound and light in
a way that looks like desire for water or food,
can we confidently say it's dark inside.
Speaker 1: It sounds crazy to say a salad has feelings. My
brain just rebels against that. But Harris argues that we
only think it's crazy because of our intuition exactly.
Speaker 2: And this brings us to a major theme of the interview,
the trap of intuition.
Speaker 1: We love our intuition, We love our gut feelings. Trust
your gut, right, That's what everyone.
Speaker 2: Tells you, and evolutionarily, intuition is fantastic. It keeps you alive.
If you are walking down a dark alley and the
hair on the back of your neck stands up, that's
your intuition processing subtle cues, maybe a shadow, a sound
you didn't consciously register, dilated pupils in a stranger's eyes.
It tells you danger. Long before you can logically explain
why it's a survival mechanism.
Speaker 1: It's great for avoiding tigers in the tall grass, perfect
for that.
Speaker 2: But Harris points out that intuition is terrible at physics.
It is terrible at understanding the true nature of reality
when you go beyond the scale of everyday survival.
Speaker 1: Give us some examples of where it just completely fails.
Speaker 2: The classic one. The Earth feels flat.
Speaker 1: It absolutely doesn't looks flat. If I drop a ball,
it falls down, not towards the center of a giant's
spinning sphere. My whole experience.
Speaker 2: Screams flat exactly. Our intuition screams flat plane. But reality
is a sphere spinning at one thousand miles an hour
in a vacuum. Intuition fails spectacularly.
Speaker 1: Okay, what's another one?
Speaker 2: Or look at solid objects. This table in front of
us feels solid. If I bang my hand on it,
it stops me. My intuition says, this is a continuous
solid block of matter.
Speaker 1: Oach, Yeah, that sounded solid.
Speaker 2: But physics tells us that the atoms making up that
table are ninety nine point nine nine nine percent empty space.
Speaker 1: That number always gets me.
Speaker 2: It's mind boggling. If the nucleus of an atom were
a marble on the fifty yard line of a football state,
the electrons would be tiny specks in the highest bleachers.
The rest is empty space.
Speaker 1: So my coffee cup is technically resting on a force
field of electron shells repelling each other. Not a solid object.
Speaker 2: Correct, But if we trusted our intuition, we would never
have discovered atoms. We would just say it's hard, so
it's solid. End of story.
Speaker 1: Or what about germs? For centuries people didn't believe in
germs because we couldn't see them. Our intuition was, if
I can't see it, it's not there.
Speaker 2: And millions of people died because of that intuition. Doctors
didn't watch their hands. So Harris applies this consistent failure
of intuition to consciousness.
Speaker 1: Okay, so bring it back.
Speaker 2: We have a strong intuition that only things with faces, brains,
and screams are conscious.
Speaker 1: Because they look like us, they behave like us.
Speaker 2: Right, it's a deep seated biological bias. Just as we
had to accept the counterintuitive truth that the Earth is round,
Harris suggests we are in the middle of a paradigm
shift where we may have to accept the counterintuitive truth
that consciousness might exist without a brain.
Speaker 1: It's the next the world is aund moment, it could be.
Speaker 2: And she gives two questions to help break this intuition,
to prove that our gut check on consciousness is totally unreliable.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's hear them. Yes.
Speaker 2: Question one, is there any external evidence that conclusively proves
consciousness in another being, even another human?
Speaker 1: I mean, if I see you smiling, I assume you're happy.
If I pitch you and you scream, I assume you
feel pain. That feels like pretty good evidence, you.
Speaker 2: Assume, But can you prove it? No, you can't. You
can build a robot that smiles, you can program a
character on a screen to scream ouch when you click
on it. That doesn't prove there is a feeling behind it.
Speaker 1: The West World problem, the philosophical zombie exactly.
Speaker 2: So the answer to question one is no, we have
no external proof that anyone else is conscious. You just
assume it because they are like you. It's an inference.
Speaker 1: And question two, this one is even weirder.
Speaker 2: Question two, is consciousness actually doing anything? Is it driving behavior?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, of course course it is. I feel thirsty,
so I reach from my glass of water. The feeling
drives the action. That's my intuition.
Speaker 2: Intuition says yes, absolutely, but neuroscience is starting to say
maybe not. And this is where it gets very strange.
Speaker 1: This is where we get into the illusion of behavior.
And this part really really shook me because we assume
that if something is conscious, it acts conscious, and if
it's acting like a rock, it's not conscious.
Speaker 2: But we know that is false. We have definitive proof that
it's false because of conditions like locked in syndrome.
Speaker 1: She talks about gen Dominique Bobby. He wrote the book
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Speaker 2: An incredible, tragic and beautiful story. Bobby suffered a massive stroke.
He was completely paralyzed. He couldn't speak, couldn't move a finger,
couldn't even breathe on his own.
Speaker 1: So to the outside world, for all intents and purposes,
he looked like a vegetable. He looked lights.
Speaker 2: Out, completely unresponsive, but inside his mind was completely intact.
He was fully conscious. He felt, he thought, he remembered,
he composed sentence, and.
Speaker 1: He wrote his entire memoir. How did he do it?
Speaker 2: By blinking his one working eye, his left eyelid. Someone
would read the alphabet to him over and over, and
he would blink when they got to the right letter.
Letter by Edter, he wrote a masterpiece that.
Speaker 1: Is terrifying and inspiring at the same time. But it
proves the point. You can have a rich, complex inner
world with zero external behavior.
Speaker 2: Exactly so, just because a rock or a plant isn't
writing memoirs or screaming, it doesn't prove a lack of consciousness.
The silence of the outside tells us absolutely nothing about
the experience on the inside.
Speaker 1: She also mentions anesthesia awareness, which is my personal nightmare fuel.
Speaker 2: It is horrific. It's rare, but it happens. People are
given muscle paralytics but not enough anesthetic. They can't move,
they can't speak, but they are awake and feel the surgery.
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate locked in state. They are conscious, but
they cannot behave so the link between consciousness and behavior
is broken.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's move away from the nightmares, please. But I
get the point. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
But then she flips it. What about when we do act?
You asked earlier, if consciousness drives the bus, right.
Speaker 2: The intuition is I see a bear, I feel fear,
and because I feel fear, I run A.
Speaker 1: Then B, then C, cause and effect. The feeling of
fear causes the running.
Speaker 2: But the reality of the biology when they measure it
in the lab is often you see the bear, your
amigdala triggers a response, Your body releases adrenaline, your muscles tense,
you start running, and then your brain registers the conscious
feeling of fear.
Speaker 1: Wait, so the running happens before the feeling or at
the same time.
Speaker 2: The physical reaction often begins before the conscious awareness of
the emotion fully forms. The conscious feeling is a laggy report.
It's the news anchor reading the script after the event
has already happened on the ground.
Speaker 1: So my consciousness isn't the driver, it's the passenger screaming
whoa yeah, after the car has already swerved to avoid
the poddle.
Speaker 2: In many cases of rapid response, Yes, that's a great
way to put it, and Harris talks about the binding
problem to explain this temporal weirdness. She uses the piano example.
Speaker 1: Right, when you play a piano key, I do this,
It feels instantaneous.
Speaker 2: It does. You experience three things simultaneously. It seems you
feel your finger hit the key, you see the key
go down, and you hear the note. It feels like
one single.
Speaker 1: Instant moment, a single now.
Speaker 2: But physics tells us that's impossible. Light travels much much
faster than sound, and the nerve impulses from your finger
travel at a different speed and a different distance up
your arm than the auditory signals from your ear.
Speaker 1: So those three signals arrive at the brain at completely different.
Speaker 2: Times, milliseconds apart, but definitely not at the same time.
Speaker 1: So the brain is editing reality. It's time shifting things.
Speaker 2: It is post production. The brain holds all the data
in a buffer, waits for all the feeds to come in,
syncs them up, and then presents it to your consciousness
as a live event.
Speaker 1: But we are actually living in a slightly delayed, edited
tape delay of reality.
Speaker 2: Correct. You are always living in the very recent past.
Your conscious now is actually a split second ago.
Speaker 1: That is deeply, deeply unsettling.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: Okay, if we can't trust our behavior, and we can't
trust our sense of time, can we at least trust
that we exist. I mean I am here, I am
a self. I am the pilot of this meat suit.
Speaker 2: Now we arrive at the illusion of self, and this
is perhaps the hardest pill for people to swallow.
Speaker 1: Harris is very careful here, which I appreciate. She says,
there are things that aren't illusions. My history, my body,
my personality, my likes, my dislikes, my autobiography. Those are
real patterns.
Speaker 2: Yes, the story of you is real. The collection of
memories and habits is real. But the illusion is the
feeling that there is a static, solid entity, a little
man behind your eyes that is unchanging and separate from the.
Speaker 1: World, the CEO and the control room of your.
Speaker 2: Head exactly that CEO is the illusion.
Speaker 1: She uses the wave analogy, which I found really beautiful
and helpful.
Speaker 2: It is a great analogy. Think of a wave in
the ocean. We look at it, we point to it,
and we say, there is a wave. We can measure
its high, it's speed, it has a name. It's a
distinct thing. But is the wave a solid object.
Speaker 1: No, It's just water moving in a particular pattern.
Speaker 2: Right. It is a process. The water molecules that make
up the wave one second are left behind the next
as the pattern moves on. The wave isn't a thing,
It's a pattern of energy moving through the water.
Speaker 1: And we are the wave.
Speaker 2: We are the wave. We are a process. We are
not static. We are a continuous flow of changing biology,
changing thoughts, changing atoms. You are not the same person
physically or mentally that you were at the start of
this sentence.
Speaker 1: My cells have died and been replaced. My neural connections
have shifted, just from listening to you speak exactly.
Speaker 2: But we suffer from what you could call change blindness.
We don't notice the constant, subtle changes. So we create
a story of a solid, continuous self.
Speaker 1: And there is actual neuroscience behind this. No self idea, right,
it's not just poetry or you know Eastern philosophy.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely. It centers on a brain network called the
default mode network or DMN.
Speaker 1: Okay, what's that.
Speaker 2: This is a network of brain regions that is most
active when we are at rest, not focused on a task.
It's active when we are daydreaming, ruminating, worrying about ourselves,
thinking about the past or future.
Speaker 1: So it's the me network.
Speaker 2: It's the me network. When the DMN is loud, the
self feels very solid. I am worried, I want this.
I regret that that's the DMN talking.
Speaker 1: But when does it go quiet in flow states? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Think about when you are an athlete in the zone,
or deeply engast in a video game or playing a
musical instrument. You lose yourself.
Speaker 1: Oh totally, You're just doing there's no internal narrator second
guessing you. You become the action.
Speaker 2: The neuroscience shows that in those moments, the DMN goes quiet.
The same thing happens in deep meditation or with certain psychedelics.
And notice the description people use.
Speaker 1: They say they feel at one with the universe.
Speaker 2: They feel the boundaries between themselves and the world dissolve.
Speaker 1: And Harris argues that this feeling, this oneness, is actually
closer to the physical truth than are normal state of feeling.
Speaker 2: Separate exactly because physically we are continuous with the environment.
The feeling of separation is the illusion.
Speaker 1: She has this amazing visual thought experiment. She says, imagine
if we could see air molecules.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is a great one.
Speaker 1: If you could see the air like a thick, swirling soup,
you would see the molecules flowing out of my lungs.
With my breath and directly into yours. You'd see the
sound waves from my voice physically touching your ear drums.
Speaker 2: You would see that there is no empty space separating us.
We are physically connected to everything around us constantly. The
skin is not a solid wall, It's a permeable membrane,
constantly exchanging matter and energy with the world.
Speaker 1: That is both beautiful and slightly gross about the sharing
breath part, but I totally get it. We aren't isolated,
separate egos. We are part of the soup.
Speaker 2: We're just a local thickening of the soup, a temporary pattern.
Speaker 1: A local thickening of the soup. I'm gonna put that
on my business card. I want to sit with that
idea for a second. If we accept that we are
continuous with the universe, just a process of atoms flowing
through a pattern we call a body that has a
really distinct and scary consequence.
Speaker 2: I think I know where you're going with this.
Speaker 1: Well, if I am just a process of the universe,
like a wave or a weather pattern. Waves don't decide
to crash, Tornadoes don't choose which house to hit. They
just follow the laws of physics.
Speaker 2: And this is the part that makes people really angry,
because if you follow the logic of physics and biology
all the way down, you inevitably run headfirst into the problem.
Speaker 1: Of free will or the illusion of free will. So
let's tackle the final boss.
Speaker 2: Annaka Harris is very gentle about this in her work,
but she's also very firm. She draws a sharp line
between what she calls conscious will and free will.
Speaker 1: What's the difference because to me they sound like the
same thing.
Speaker 2: She acknowledges that choice exists as a process. Humans weigh options,
We deliberate, even the pea plant weighs options in its
own way. Complex decision making is a real biological phenomenon.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I did choose to wear this shirt today.
My brain went through a process, A choice happened.
Speaker 2: But the illusion is that you, that little pilot, that
separate self in your head, swooped in and made that
choice independently of the laws of physics and the prior
state of the universe.
Speaker 1: The illusion is that I could have done otherwise in.
Speaker 2: That exact same atomic configuration, with the exact same brain
chemistry and history leading up to that moment. Yes, the
illusion is that you could have freely chosen.
Speaker 1: Differently, she brings up this twenty thirteen fMRI study that is, frankly, it's.
Speaker 2: Spooky, the outcome prediction study. It's one of many, but
it's a powerful one. They put people in a scanner
and gave them a simple choice, add two numbers or
subtract them.
Speaker 1: A simple binary choice left to right AARB.
Speaker 2: The researchers monitored their brain activity, and they found that
the patterns of activity in the brain predicted the choice
with high accuracy up to four seconds before the participant
felt they had consciously decided four seconds.
Speaker 1: That's an eternity in brain time. One two, three, four.
That's a huge gap.
Speaker 2: It is a massive gap. The brain had already crunched
the data, fired the relevant neurons, and committed to add.
Four seconds later, the conscious mind had the thought, hmm,
I think I'll choose to add.
Speaker 1: So the conscious mind is just taking credit for the
brain's work. It's like the press secretary announcing a decision
the president made an hour ago in a closed room.
Speaker 2: Essentially, the decision bubbles up from the darkness of the unconscious.
You don't make the thought, you witness the thought appearing
in your consciousness.
Speaker 1: She success a little finger lift experiment we can do
right now, and if you're listening, try this. Put your
hand on your lap, decide to lift your index finger
sometime in the next few seconds. Just wait for the impulse,
wait and then lift it.
Speaker 2: And observe closely what happens. Did you command the finger
to move or did the impulse to lift it just
arise on its own. Did you choose when the impulse would.
Speaker 1: Come it just pops up. I didn't say okay on
the cant of three, three to one go, It just happened.
It felt like a hiccup of will.
Speaker 2: That is the illusion of free will in action. You
are not the author of your impulses or your thoughts.
They emerge from a complex system you don't control.
Speaker 1: But this leads to what you called an ethical tornado.
If I'm not the author, I'm just a biological robot
reacting to my genetic programming in my environment. Yeah, how
can you blame me for anything? If there is no
free agent? What happens to justice and responsibility?
Speaker 2: This is where Harris pivots to a very compassionate but
also very logical view. She uses the tornado analogy.
Speaker 1: Right, if a tornado destroys your house. Are you angry
at the tornado?
Speaker 2: You might be devastated, you might grieve the loss of
your home, but you don't hate the tornado. You don't
want to punish the tornado because it's evil.
Speaker 1: You don't think it had a choice.
Speaker 2: You understand it is a weather pattern behaving according to
the laws of physics. It couldn't have done otherwise. Harris
suggests we view humans the same way.
Speaker 1: So if someone commits a crime, they.
Speaker 2: Are like a dangerweather pattern, or a better analogy might
be they are a computer running broken software.
Speaker 1: So we still stop them. We put them in prison
to protect society, just like we build storm shelters to
protect ourselves from tornado.
Speaker 2: Yes, you absolutely contain the tornado. You fix the broken
software if you can through rehabilitation. But you drop the hatred,
You drop the retributive, moralizing desire to make them suffer
just for the sake of suffering.
Speaker 1: It changes the conversation from you are a bad person
who deserves to be punished to you are a person
with bad programming or bad brain chemistry, and you are
a danger that needs to be managed.
Speaker 2: It's a much more clinical, but also a more humane
way to look at human error and harmful behavior. It
removes the ego and the satisfying but ultimately illogical feeling
of blame from the equation of justice.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, we have dismantled pretty much everything self will reality.
Where does this leave us? What do we do with this?
Harris ends with some speculation on the future. She calls
it experiential science.
Speaker 2: This is her wildest, most far out idea, but it
flows logically from everything else. If consciousness is fundamental, and
if the boundaries between us are illusions, could we one
day share subjective experiences like.
Speaker 1: Actually beam a thought or a feeling from my brain
directly to yours, a mind meld.
Speaker 2: Not just the words. Imagine if Einstein could have beamed
his intuition of space time directly into your brain, not
the math, not the equations, the actual feeling of understanding relativity.
Speaker 1: That would change everything, education, communication, empathy. If I could
feel your pain literally, not just sympathize with it, but
actually feel it, wars would end overnight.
Speaker 2: It would be the ultimate dissolution of the self, a
true connection.
Speaker 1: She ends the interview with this lovely simple story about jogging.
She decided to run a thought experiment. While she was
out for a run in the woods. She decided to
imagine that all the plants she passed weren't plants, but
were animals.
Speaker 2: Like insects or strange creatures.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just that mental shift, that change in her
belief about them totally changed how the world felt. Suddenly
the forest wasn't just seen or he was alive, It
was watching her. It was full of other subjects.
Speaker 2: It highlights that our experience of the world is largely
a construct of our beliefs and assumptions. Change the belief
change the experience.
Speaker 1: So we have gone from worms to waves. Yeah, from
the illusion of the self to the reality of the
pea plant. This has been heavy, but in a good way.
Speaker 2: You know, it is a lot to process. But I
think the takeaway, if there is one, is that we
are part of something much larger, much more mysterious, and
much more interconnected than our daily intuition tells us. We're
not just a ghost in a machine. We're part of
the whole system.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. So here is our final provocation for you, the listener.
The next time you feel angry at someone, maybe someone
cuts you off in traffic, or your boss is being
particularly annoying. Stop for just a second, ask yourself, who
is the eye that is angry?
Speaker 2: Where is this eye located?
Speaker 1: And if you stop telling yourself the story of you
being disrespected, if you just observe the raw feeling of anger,
does it change? Does the anger lose his power and
just disappear?
Speaker 2: Is the anger a property of a solid self or
is it just a temporary weather pattern passing through the system.
Speaker 1: Mull on that. Let us know in the comments. Do
you feel like a pilot in your life or a passenger?
Are you a wave or a particle?
Speaker 2: I'm definitely feeling like a wave today.
Speaker 1: I think I'm a pea plant listening for the sound
of water. Thank you for listening to thrilling threads. Keep
pulling at reality and see what unravels.
Speaker 2: Until next time.