Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality | Lex Fridman Podcast #326
when we use the term free will we're talking about this feeling that Consciousness that that we have a self that this there's this concrete thing that's separate from brain processing that somehow swoops in and is the the cause of our decision or the cause of our next action and that is in large part if not in its entirety and illusion the following is a conversation with Annika Harris author of conscious a brief Guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind and is someone who writes and thinks a lot about the nature of Consciousness and of reality especially from the perspectives of physics and Neuroscience this is the Lux reading podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Annika Harris in your book conscious you described evidence that Free Will is an illusion and that Consciousness is used to construct this illusion and convince ourselves that we are in fact deciding our actions uh can you can you explain this I think this is chapter three first of all I I really think it's important to make a distinction between Free Will and conscious will and we'll get into that in a moment so free will in terms of our brain as a system in nature making complex decisions and doing all the complex processing it does there is a decision-making process in nature that our brains undergo that we can call Free Will that's that's fine to use that shorthand for that although once once we get into the details I I might um convince you that it's not so free but that the decision-making process is a process in nature the feeling our conscious experience of feeling like Consciousness is the thing that is driving the behavior that is I would say in most cases an illusion and usually when we talk about Free Will that's the thing we're talking about I mean sometimes it's in conjunction with the decision-making process but for the most part when we use the term free will we're talking about this feeling that Consciousness that that we have a self that this there's this concrete thing that's separate from brain processing that somehow swoops in and is the the cause of our decision or the cause of our next action and that is um in large part if not in its entirety and illusion so conscious will is an illusion and then we can try to Free Will I would say is a good shorthand for a process in nature which is a decision-making process of of the brain but decisions are still being made so there's a uh if you ran the universe over again hmm is there would it turn out the same way I mean maybe I'm trying to sneak up to like what does it mean to make a decision in a way that's almost uh that means something so right so this is where our intuitions get challenged I've been thinking about some new examples for this just because I talk about it a lot and and the truth is most of the things I write about and talk about and think about are so counter-intuitive I mean that that's really what my game is is breaking intuitions shaking up intuitions in order to get a deeper understanding of reality I'm often even though I've thought about this for 20 years and think about it all the time it's an obsession of mine really I have to get back into that mind frame to be able to think clearly about it because it is so counter-intuitive how long does that take how hard is that depends on if there are kids around or if I'm alone or if I've been meditating but what I was going to say actually I felt like we need to just take one step back and talk a little bit just because I think the the importance of shaking up intuitions for scientific and advancement is such an important piece of the scientific process um and I think we've reached a point in Consciousness studies where it's very difficult to move forward and usually that's a sign that we need to start shaking up our intuition so you know throughout history the the huge breakthroughs the things that have really shifted our view of the universe and and our place in the universe and all of that those almost always if not always require that we at the very least shift our intuitions um update our intuitions but many of them we just have to let go of intuitions that are feeding us false information about the way the world works well the weirdest thing here is that here we're looking at our own mind yeah you have to uh let go of your intuitions about your own intuitions yeah right exactly it's very meta and makes it hard and it's part of the reason why doing interviews for me feels so difficult aside from the fact that I just have social anxiety in general what's good because I took mushrooms just before you started so it worked we're on this journey together let's go uh so what what where do we take a step backwards well I was I was going to say I mean this leads into the point I was going to make but what I was going to say is I mean also just for me I feel like I I'm not as good at speaking as I am at writing that I'm clear in my writing and because these topics are so difficult to get our minds around um it's hard to kind of get to any real conclusion in real time it's actually how I started writing my book um was just writing for myself I decided that I needed to spend some time writing down all of my thoughts in order to get clear about how I think about them so you write down a sentence and you think he's in the in the silence paragraphs and yeah and you just and then I see if that makes sense and then I check it with my intuitions which is really the scientific process and I really in many ways I feel like I'm a physicist at heart all of my inquiry all of my career everything I'm interested in actually going back to being a child it's just deep curiosity about how the world Works what this place is what it's made of how we got here um just being amazed at the fact that I'm having an experience over here and you're having one over there and we're in this moment of time and you know what does that all mean my interest in Consciousness really came out of originally an interest in physics and I guess that the two were always side by side and I didn't really connect them until I was older but um I've always been really interested in just understanding the nature of reality before I even had language to describe you talked about sort of laying down and looking up at the stars and yeah sort of trying to let go of the intuition that there's a ground below us yeah which is a really interesting exercise and there's many exercises of this sort you can do but that's a really good one well and I think you know scientists and children who are who will become scientists or just kind of scientists at heart really enjoy that feeling of breaking through their intuitions and I remember the first time it happened actually I was um playing with marbles and you know marbles have all these different shapes each one is unique and they're all the it looks like there's liquid inside them and I remember asking my father how they got the liquid inside the glass ball and he said actually it's solid all the way through It's All Glass and I had such a hard time imagine it just didn't seem right to me I was very young when I but he he's a complicated person but he was wonderful in this way and that he would kind of entertain my curiosity and so he's he said let's let's open them up and he got a towel and we put the marbles on the towel and got a hammer and he smashed them all and lo and behold it was all glass and I remember it's like the first time I had that feeling of realizing wow the truth was so different from what I expected and I like that feeling and of course we need to be able to do that to understand that the Earth is flat to understand the germ theory of disease to understand long processes in nature like Evolution I mean we just can never really Intuit that we share genes with ants did you just say the Earth is flat I mean the Earth is not flat did I say that yeah this is great but I actually like to think about see this is why I need to write and not speak well I actually really like uh you know conspiracy theories and so on I really like flat Earth uh people that believe the Earth is flat or yeah not believe but argue for the Earth is flat I well it's interesting because you can see I mean the intuition is so strong I just said it the thing I love about folks who argue for Flat Earth is they are thinking deeply they're questioning actually what has now become intuition are it's it's become the mainstream narrative that the Earth is round where people actually don't you know yeah don't think actually how crazy it is that the Earth is round right we're in a ball yeah yeah and like that's exactly what you're doing you're looking out at the space it's really humbling because I think the basic intuition when you're walking around the ground you kind of there's a underlying belief that Earth is the center of the universe there's a kind of feeling yeah like this is the only world that exists and you kind of know that there's a huge Universe out there but you don't really load that information in right I think right flat earthers are really contending with those idea with those big Ideas yeah no and I think I mean the truth is that when those observations were first made when the celestial observations were made that revealed this fact to us I can't remember how long it took but I think it was close to 100 years before it was actually accepted as common knowledge that we're no longer the center of the universe or of course we never were but and and that's true almost every time we have a breakthrough like that that challenges our intuitions there's usually a period of time um where we have to and and this is an important part of the process because often our intuitions give us good information and so when the science goes against when our scientific observations go against our intuitions it's important for us to let that in and to see you know which side is going to win and once it's clear that the evidence is winning um then there's this period of time where we have to Grapple with our intuitions and shift the way we frame our world view and go through that process but free will Free Will is a hard one so it's a hard one so here we are still you know in Consciousness studies pretty stuck at least in terms of the neuroscience and so that's why I started thinking more deeply about that that's why a lot of scientists right now are actually interested in studying Consciousness um where it was very taboo before and so we're at this really interesting turning point and and it's wonderful but I it will require that we shake up our intuitions a bit and reframe some things and look at what the Neuroscience is telling us and there are a lot of questions we have more questions than answers but I think it's time I think we're going to make progress in Consciousness studies we need to start really looking at the Illusions and false intuitions that are getting in our way do you think studying the brain can give us clues about free like some of these absolutely I think it already has and I think many facts that have come out of Neuroscience are still barely seeping into the culture I mean they're we're I think this is going to be a long process so so part of my work is really just looking at areas where we already know some of our intuitions are wrong and starting to accept them and starting to let them in and starting to ask questions about what does this mean then about the nature of Consciousness let's try to actually get into this at this question of Free Will and conscious will I I have my intuitions here are I mean I'm a human being yeah it's it's really I mean I approached it from two aspects from one is a human being and two from a robotics perspective right right and I wonder how big the gap between the two is um and that's that's a useful from an engineering perspective is another perspective that's useful and helpful to take on this it's like are we really so different you and I the robot and and the human uh you'd like to believe so but you don't exactly see where the differences Research into Ai and just the fact that it's entered our Consciousness at the level of of stories and film and and all of these questions that it's raising um is facing us with that it's almost like the zombie experiment experiment is coming to life for us you know we're we're more and more looking at human-like systems and wondering is there an experience in there and how can we figure that out um when you were talking about your experience of looking at robots it reminds me of how I for many years have been looking at plants um because the plant behavior and actually this is the example maybe we'll just try it out it may not work this is an example I was thinking of recently because I was reading back on the work of Mark Jaffe who did this research with P10 rules I'm sure he did many other plant studies but this is the one I was reading about and I'm hoping this analogy I'll just set it up I'm hoping that this analogy will be something that we can keep coming back to as we move forward because we you know as we shake up our intuitions and get confused and then our in we come back to our intuitions and say no that just can't be I think this analogy might might be helpful but what kind of plant was he working on uh P tendrils so p a p plant has these tendrils you can you can picture them they they um coil so I don't I don't know what year this research was done I'm I'm guessing in the 80s but you know some but P10 just have been around long before that yes of course right P tendrils as a system generally there are a few more things they can do but generally they can behave in two ways they can grow in a straight line slowly or they can grow in this coil form more quickly and what happens is when they are growing in a straight Manner and they encounter a branch or a pole or something else that it can wrap itself around to gain more stability when it senses a branch there that gives it the cue to start growing at a more rapid pace and to start coiling instead of growing straight so it has these two behaviors as a system it's capable of growing straight and it's capable of coiling one interesting thing actually I'll just add this it's not totally relevant but one interesting thing is um Mark jaffe's work so he um cut a P10 drill he was curious to see if it could do this on its own separate from the rest of the plant so he cut a pitendril off the plant um if you keep it in a moist warm environment it will continue to to behave in these ways so it will continue to coil if he he noticed that if he touched one end of it if he rubbed one side of it that gave it enough of a cue that it would start to coil and then he noticed that it needed light to perform this action so in the dark when he rubbed the the edge of the tendril it did not coil um in the light it would and then he recognized this further fact which was that the P tendril that he rubbed in the dark that was still straight if he brought it out into the light and this could be hours later it would start to coil it has a primitive form of memory where it's it's has the sensation and then it holds on to that information and as soon as there's light it acts on that but also in the kind of distributed intelligence because you can separate it from the main right in the main part right like if you chop off a human arm it's not gonna right keep growing even if you keep it in a moist warm environment it's not going to reach out for the cup of coffee when you come in with Starbucks maybe maybe in the correct environment maybe we just haven't found the environment but anyway that's pretty amazing so that's the separate fact but anyway so so if you just use the analogy of a p tendril and if you imagine which is something I like to do a lot if you imagine um this plant has some kind of conscious experience of course it doesn't have complex thought it doesn't have anything like a human experience but if it were possible for a plant to have some felt experience you can imagine that when it comes into contact with a branch and starts to coil that that feeling could be one of deciding to do that or that it feels good to do that or kind of wanting I mean it's that's too complex that's that's anthropomorphizing but there's a way in which you could imagine this P tendril under those circumstances suddenly wants to start coiling so you're saying you try to meditate potato what it's like to be a p tendril a plant like that's what's required here it's like you have to empathize with a plant or with another organism that's not human yeah and you don't actually need that for this analogy that have the larger analogy that I'm getting at but I think that's an interesting piece to keep in mind that you could imagine that in nature if there's a conscious experience associated with a p tendril that at that moment what that feels like is a want to start moving in a different way so you you want to imagine that without anthropomorphizing so without projecting The Human Experience but rather sort of humbling yourself that we're just another plant with more complexity yes like trying to see where exactly so that yeah that's where I'm going with this sure so and and when you start making that connection you can see where there are a few points at which there's room for an illusion to come in for our own feelings of will so when we move from the P tendril to human decision making obviously human decision making human brains are many many many times more complex than whatever is going on in a p tendril I mean it is the brain is actually the most complex thing we know of in the universe thus far so there is the genes that help develop the brain into any particular brain into what it is they're all the inputs they're they're countless factors that we could never I mean it may as well be an infinite number of factors and then in that particular moment whatever the inputs are to a brain the brain is capable of almost an infinite number of outputs right so if you if I walked in here this morning and you said um would you like water or tea um and that's you know simple decision for me massive aggressive way of telling me I should have offered some tea but yes go on no I wanted water okay all right I actually asked for water okay all right and you didn't have any free will anyway so it doesn't matter I don't I don't hope you're responsible for any of it exactly I was just running an algorithm so deterministically you can you give me this decision right to make water or tea go back to the pizza for a second a p tendril is capable of growing in a straight line slowly or in a coil quickly um my brain is capable of all kinds of responses to that question even though you've given me you know two options you could offer me water or tea and I could just run out of the room screaming if I wanted to right happens to me all the time never mind I don't want to do this yes the fact that the brain is capable that there's so many inputs and then the brain is capable of so many outputs as a system what it's hard for us to get our minds around is that it may not be capable of any behavior in every moment in time so as a system it's capable of doing all kinds of things and the points I'm making is that if we could see all of the factors leading up to the moment where I chose water or where I ran screaming from the room um we could in fact see that there's there was no other Behavior I was going to or could have exhibited in that moment in the same way that when the P tendril hits the branch it starts coiling there's a parallel which is very interesting in robotics with with fish and water so you could see they've experienced with like dead fish and they keep swimming so the fish is capable of all kinds of complicated movements as a system but in any one moment the river the full complexity of the River defines the actual movement of the fish that's sufficient well and I I should also I mean this brings up another point which is that there is a difference between voluntary and involuntary Behavior so of course we have reflexes and it is a different there's different brain processing in action when I make a decision about water or tea then there is you know if my behavior is forced from the outside or if I have a brain tumor that's causing me to make certain decisions or feel certain feelings and so um the point is that at bottom it's all brain processing and behavior but the reason why certain actions feel willed there's a good reason why it feels that way and it's to distinguish our own self-generated behavior based on thinking and you know possibly weighing the different results of different things I already had caffeine today I don't want more you know they're all these um processes things that we can point to and things that we can't things I'm affected by at a subconscious level um and that is very different from an unwilled action or reflex or something like that and so some some people I can imagine I haven't used the P tendril example but I can imagine they wouldn't like that because the p tendril um sounds more to them like a reflex and that doesn't address the question of a much more complex decision-making process but I think at bottom um that is that is what it is and that's really where the illusion of Free Will and the illusion of self which I think is they're kind of two sides of the same coin come from so even when we intellectually understand that everything we're feeling everything we're doing is is based on our brain processing and brain Behavior if you're a physicalist you you've bought into that um even when you intellectually understand that we and I could include myself in this we still have this feeling that there's something that stands outside of the brain processing that can intervene and that's the illusion I was tweeting with someone recently which I almost never do but we're working in the Ted documentary that I'm making right now we're working on the episode on free will so I was allowing myself to go back and forth in a way that I don't usually on Twitter like argue without free will it was it was a friendly debate gonna go into the reasons why I'm not crazy about Twitter but let's leave that for another time I mean talk about how hard it is to have this conversation when we have as many hours as as we like you know trying to do it in sound bites over Twitter see I like how you made the decision now not to talk about Twitter that's uh well my brain Road Less Traveled that was one of the things I I said to this person was um because someone someone chimed in and said you said I what do you mean by I and and so actually that's another point I could make which is um first my response to that was well people tend to get creeped out when I say the system that is my brain and body that we call Annika recommends you know why do you get freaked out Oh you mean like in your personal life instead of like never saying I yeah always well you're just being I always refer to you as the brain and body we call Lex yes um well I don't know that's kind of that's kind of charming in a way alleged brain so I and you are very useful shorthand even though at some level they're Illusions um they're very useful shorthand for the the system of my brain really and you know and my body the the whole system that I is useful for that but the illusion is when we feel like there's something outside of that system that can intervene that is free that's somehow free from the physical world um I can have the thought um yeah I really not crazy about having intellectual back and forth on Twitter and then feel like I decide to not follow that thought right and the feeling that's that that's the feeling um where the illusion comes in because it really feels as if sure my brain had that original thought and then I came in and made a different decision but of course the truth is it was just further brain processing that got me to decide not to go down that path how much is that feeling of conscious will is culturally constructed shorthand so like uh I and you is a is a you could say a culturally constructed shorthand how much of that affects how we think so our parents say I and you I and you and then we start to believe in I in you and is that or are we is that fundamental to the human brain machine yeah that we I think I think it goes very deep I think it's fundamental and I think it probably some form of feeling like a self goes as deep as cats and dogs and it's possible I mean if consciousness does go down to the level of cells or however far down you want to take it worms or I think any any system that's navigating um itself that kind of has boundaries and is navigating itself in the world um my guess is that it's it's an intrinsic part of that's why I imagined that the P tendril would have this feeling um and so you know we use the word I I think you're right first of all that the way we talk about things affects our intuitions about them and how we feel about them and so there are other cultures who are more open to breaking through these Illusions than others for sure just because of their um their belief sets the way they talk I mean I'm sure I don't I don't I'm not a linguist and I don't even speak a second language so I can't I can't speak to it but I you know if if there were a language that um that framed who we are differently in everyday language I mean in our everyday communication I would think that would have an effect yeah language does affect things I mean just knowing Uh Russian in the history of the Soviet Union in the 20th century obviously it lived under communism for a long time so your conception of individualism is different and that reflects itself from the language yeah um you could probably have this similar kind of thing within the language in terms of how we talk about I and we and so on yeah and I yeah I'm sure there's like um certain countries or maybe even villages with certain dialects that uh like let go of the individualism that's inherent yeah I mean there there must be a range but I do think that it's pretty deep and I think um there's also a difference between the autobiographical me and then this more fundamental me that we're talking about where that I'm pointing to is the illusion so in my book I talk about if someone um wakes up with amnesia if they have brain injury and suddenly have amnesia and can't remember anything about their lives can't remember their name don't recognize people they're related to um they would have lost their autobiographical self but they would still feel like an eye they would still have that basic sense of I'm a person I mean they'd be speaking that way I don't remember my name I don't know where I live um you still it goes very deep this feeling that I am a single entity um that is somehow not completely Reliant upon the cause and effect of the physical world can I ask you a pothead question yeah um would you would you rather lose all your memories or not be able to make new ones you get to now I'm asking you as a human yeah in terms of happiness and preference I can't answer that you like both you like both features of the organism that you embody well one is intellectual and one is psychological really I mean I would have to choose the memories only because I mean memories of the past yeah um only because I have children and a family and it would just be it wouldn't just be affecting me it would be affecting them it would just be too horrible no but you would make new ones right if I lost my memory of the 13th are you think would you you think you would lose this is a dark question oh wait wasn't that the question maybe I missed no no no no you understood it perfectly but yeah you you know sorry for the dark question but the people you love in your life if you lost all your memory of everything do you think you would still love them like you show up you don't know I don't know to roll the die I mean it would not in the way that I do right just some deep aspect of Love is the history you have together oh absolutely well and this gets to an interesting point actually which I think a lot about which is memory um and we won't go into this yet but I'll just plant a flag here memory is yeah memories um obviously related to time and time is something that I'm fascinated with and and for this project I'm working on now I've mostly been speaking to physicists who are interested in Consciousness um and it's partly because of this link between memory and time and you know all of these new fascinating um theories and thoughts around the different interpretations of quantum mechanics and looking at you know the thing that I've always been looking for is is really the fundamental nature of reality and why my questions about Consciousness lead me to wonder if Consciousness is a more fundamental aspect of the universe than than we previously thought and certainly I previously thought um and so memory but memory is is tied to so many things I mean even basic functions in nature actually so so the the pitendril as I mentioned memory comes into play there and that's so fascinating um and there is no sense of self without memory even if you're starting from scratch as you said with amnesia um if you truly couldn't lay down any new memories I think you would then that sense of self would begin to disintegrate because the sense of self is one of a concrete entity Through Time and if each moment if you really were stuck in the present moment eternally you'd be basically be meditating and in meditation is a very common experience is losing that sense of self that sense of free will that those Illusions um more easily drop away in meditation and I would say for most people who meditate long enough they do drop away and there's actually an explanation of the level of the brain as well the default mode network is circuitry in the brain that neuroscientists don't completely understand but no is is largely largely responsible for this feeling of being a self and when that circuit gets quieted down which it does in meditation and also does um with the use of psychedelic drugs um and there are other ways to quiet down the default mode Network um people have this experience of losing this this illusion of being a self they no longer feel that they're self in the way that they usually do so there's uh the autobiographical self is connected to the the sense of self oh absolutely through the memory and then you're thinking that the solution to that lies in physics not just Neuroscience like ultimately Consciousness and the experience the conscious will is uh a question of physics I may have said something misleading because I was connecting too many dots um that's the things I say are misleading um let us mislead each other I just got I got excited when memory came up because I love talking about time so you mentioned a project you working on a couple times what what's that about uh I think you said Ted is involved you're interviewing a bunch of people what's going on what's the topic um so I'm working on an audio documentary about Consciousness um and it picks up where my book left off um so all of the questions that were still lingering for me um and research that I still wanted to do I just started conducting so I've done about 30 interviews so far um and I it's not totally clear what the end result will be I'm currently collaborating with Ted and I'm having a lot of fun creating a pilot with them um and so we'll we'll see where it goes but the idea is that it's a narrated um documentary it's like a series a series it'll be a 10 part series it's an unclear oh you already know the number of Parts uh sorry in my mind it's a 10-part series Amanda being 8 or 11 or 12. I don't know why listen I'm very comforted by the number zero and one as well about ten I like the confidence of 10. um so and you're not sure what the title like not the title but the topic it will there be Consciousness or something bigger or something smaller yeah I mean it's mine so at the end of my book I I kind of get to the place where I've convinced myself at least that this question about whether Consciousness is fundamental is a legitimate one and then I just start spending a lot of time thinking about what that would mean if it's even possible to study scientifically um so I mostly talk to physicists actually um because I really think ultimately this is a question for for physics if Consciousness is fundamental I think it needs to be strongly informed by Neuroscience but um it's yeah if it's part of the fabric of reality it is a question for a physicist so I speak to different physicists about different interpretations of quantum mechanics so getting at the fundamentals so string theory in many worlds I spoke to Sean Carroll had a great conversation with Sean Carroll he's so generous because he clearly doesn't agree with me about many things but he has a curious mind and he's willing to have these conversations and I was really interested in understanding many worlds better and if Consciousness is fundamental what the implications are um so I that was where I started actually was with many worlds and then uh we had conversations about string theory and the holographic principle I spoke to Lee smullen and um Brian Greene and Jan 11 and Carlo rivelli actually have you had Carlo on no no he's he's great also and fun to talk to because he's just endlessly curious yeah are you doing audio it's all audio Yeah but it's in the format of a documentary so I'm narrating it and kind of telling the story of what questions came up for me what I was interested in exploring and then you know why I talked to each person I I talk to by the way I highly recommend Sean Carroll's mindscape podcast I think it's called yeah um it's amazing one of my favorite things when he interviews physicists it's great but any topic his aim is but one of my favorite things is how frustrated he gets with pan psychism but he's still like it's like a fly towards the light for some reason he can't like make sense of it but like he still struggles with it and I think that's the that's the sign of a good scientist really struggling uh struggling with these ideas and yes that's what I appreciate in him and and many scientists like that who has the craziest most radical ideas who you talk with currently so you can go either direction you can go like pan psychism Consciousness permeates everything yeah I I don't know how far you can go down that direction or you could uh say that you know what's the what would be the other direction that there's a there isn't real the problem is they're all crazy they're all crazy and my own I mean my own thoughts now I I have to be um very careful about the words I choose because I mean it's it's just like talking about um the different interpretations of quantum mechanics it's once you get deep enough um it's so counter-intuitive and it's so beyond anything we understand that they all sound crazy many worlds sounds crazy string theory I mean these are things we just cannot get our minds around really and so that's kind of that's the realm I love to live in and love to explore in and the realm that to my surprise my interest in Consciousness has taken me back to can I ask you a question on that yeah uh just a side tangent how do you prevent when you're imagining yourself to be a p tendril how do you prevent from going crazy I mean this is kind of the Nietzsche question of like uh you have to be very careful thinking outside the Norms of society because you might fall off like mentally you're so connected as a human to the the collective intelligence yeah that in order to question intuitions you have to step aside step outside of it for a brief moment how do you prevent yourself from going crazy I think I used to think that was a concern um and then you can learn so much about the brain no and I've and I've had and I've had experiences of deep depression and I struggled with anxiety my whole life I think in order to be a good scientist and in order to be a truthfully you know let's say um to allow yourself to be curious and honest in your curiosity I think it's inevitable that lots of ideas and theories and hypotheses will just sound crazy and that is always how we've Advanced science and maybe you know nine out of ten ideas are crazy and you crazy meaning they're actually not correct um but all of I mean it's as I said all of the big scientific breakthroughs all of the truths we've uncovered that are the um earth-shattering truths that we uncover they really do sound crazy at first so I don't think one necessarily leads to a type of mental illness I see mental illness in a very different category and I think some people are more susceptible to being destabilized by this type of thinking and that might be a legitimate concern for some people that kind of being grounded in everyday life is important for my psychological health the more time I spend thinking about the bigger picture and outside of everyday life the more happy I I am the more expansive I feel um I mean it feels it feels nourishing to me it feels like it makes me more sane not less well that's a happiness but in terms of your ability to see the truth that you can be happy and uh guess I don't see mental illness necessarily being linked to Truth Or Not truth so we were talking about minimizing mental illness yeah but also truth is a different dimension so you have to you can go crazy in both directions you can uh like you know you could be extremely happy and they are uh flat earthers you can believe the Earth is flat right because there actually I mean I'm sure there's good books on this but it's somehow really comforting it's fun and comforting to believe you've figured out the thing that everybody else hasn't figured out I think that's what conspiracy theories always provide people why is this so fun is so fun it's it's except when it's dangerous uh you know yeah but even then it's probably fun but then you shouldn't do it because it's unethical uh anyway so it's not true I'm not a fan of following well that makes one of us I don't know I there's probably a fascinating story to what why conspiracy theories are so um so compelling to us human beings that's deeper than just fun internet stuff yeah I'm very interested in why they're so compelling to some people and not others I feel like there must be some difference that at some point will be able to discover um yeah yeah and because some people are just not susceptible to them and some people are and I wonder really correlation drawn to them because I feel like the kind of thinking that allows for you to be open to conspiracy theories is also the kind of thinking that leads to brilliant breakthroughs in science sort of willingness to go to Crazy Land really yeah see you don't see the connection between thinking the Earth is flat and um coming up with this flat is following your intuitions and not being open to counter-intuitive ideas it's like it's a close it's a very closed way of viewing things saying it's actually it's not the way you feel there's a there's there's information that tells us this is there's something else going on and that type of person will say no it's exact it's the way it feels to me no no but wait a minute there's a mainstream Narrative of science that says the Earth is round right like and I think a flat Earth see I admire the very first step of a flatter I don't I don't admire the the full Journey but the first step is think if you're open to evidence then the evidence clearly takes you in One Direction right but you have to ask the question you have to ask to me this is like first principles thinking yeah the earth looks flat so I'm gonna look around here and I I like how crazy is it that the Earth is round and there's a thing called gravity that operates between objects that's related to the mass of the object right that's crazy yes the truth is often crazier than what what the situation feels it could be a good step is to question what everyone is saying and then I know what you mean to be skeptical about the it's the authority yeah but I think that the and the authority in not in some kind of weird uh current where everyone questions institutions but more like the authority of the senior scientists the the junior scientists coming up wait a minute why have we been doing things this way and that that first step I feel like that rebelliousness or that open-mindedness or maybe like resistance to or maybe curiosity that's uh uh that is not affected by whatever the mainstream science says of today yes I feel like mainstream science has never been mainstream and it's always a struggle for science to become mainstream it's part of the reason why I started doing the work I did actually helping scientists make their work more accessible is that it's usually not yeah it's usually not here's advice for scientists be more interesting and much more important be less arrogant so arrogance uh there's a there's a uh there's very little money in science and so everyone is fighting for that money and they become more and more arrogant and siled I don't know why I will say that the scientists I know and some of them are very well known very famous scientists are the least arrogant people I've ever met that scientists in general their personalities are more open more humble more likely to say they say they just don't know because I've been involved a lot in the science writing and how the media portrays so one of scientists the scientific community's greatest frustration is how their work gets presented in the media and a lot of the time that is the for I would say that's the main frustration is there's some new breakthrough there's something and the scientists will be saying we're not sure where you know it's going to take five years and the me you know no one likes to write a story about something that may or may not be true they think it's true they're going to take five years testing it and so the headline will be neuroscientists discovered you know they want The Sensational and so I think the public often gets the false impression that the scientists are arrogant and I really don't find that to be the case and I've worked with all kinds of people artists and my life path has has taken a strange you've met some incredible people you work with some incredible people so let's the the crazy topic of free will I mean I just we have to link up on this because okay uh so the plant all right can you can you try to steal man the case that there's something really special about humans that there is a fundamental difference between us and the the P tendril you know humans are clearly very special in the evolution of organisms on Earth absolutely yeah could that have been the magic leap could Consciousness been like the invention of the the eukaryotic cell or something like that well then I mean so I have to get clear on what you're asking so so are you are you coming from a place of wondering if we are the only conscious mammals yes do you really think that's a question can you make a case for it do you really think that's a question take one step back we look out at the universe um at this point in in our scientific understanding we know that essentially if we're all made of the same ingredients right they're they're atoms in the universe doing their thing they find themselves in different configurations based on the laws of physics um and then the question is if we look out at all of the configurations of atoms in the universe and ask which of these entail conscious experiences which of these have a felt experience of being the matter they are and there are really only two broadly speaking they're really only two um assumptions to make here and the first one is the one that science has has taken and that I have for most of my career as well and that in many ways makes the most sense which is electrons aren't conscious tables aren't there's no felt experience there but at a certain point in complex processing um that processing entails an experience of being that processing now that that's just a fascinating fact all on its own and I love to spend time thinking about that but the so the question is does Consciousness Arise at some point are some of these collections of atoms conscious um or are all of them because we know the answer isn't none you know I know that I'm at least having a conscious experience I know the conscious experiences exist in the universe um and so the answer isn't none so so the answer has to be all or some and this is a starting assumption that you're really kind of forced to to make and that it's all or some all or some I would say one is some also we either need an explanation for why there's non-conscious matter in the universe and then something happens for Consciousness to come into being or it's part of the fundamental nature of reality it's also if Consciousness is a fundamental property of reality it could also choose to not reveal itself until a certain complexity of organism I'm not sure what that means I'm not sure what that means either like like the flame of Consciousness does not start burning on until um a certain complexity of organisms able to reveal I don't think we can look at Consciousness that way I don't think um I mean many people like to try to make that argument that it's a spectrum why do we have to say all or nothing maybe and I agree that I actually think it is a spectrum um but it's a spectrum of content not of Consciousness itself so um you know if a worm has some level of conscious experience it is extremely minimal something we could never imagine being having the complex experience you and I have um maybe some felt sensation of pressure or heat or something super basic right so there's there's this range or even if you just think of an infant you know like the first the moment an infant becomes conscious what that there's a very very minimal experience of inputs of sound and light and whatever it is um and so there's a spectrum of content there's a spectrum of how much um a system is consciously experiencing but there's a moment at which you get on the Spectrum and that's and I truly believe that that piece of it is binary so if there's no conscious experience there is no consciousness you can't say Consciousness is there it just hasn't lit its flame yet if Consciousness is there there's an experience there by definition it has to Arise at some point or it has to always be there is it possible to make the case that that arising happens first for the first time ever with homo sapiens I think that is extremely unlikely what I think is more possible based on what we understand about the brain is that it arises in brains or nervous systems um and so then we're talking about flies and bees and all kinds of things that kind of fall out of our our intuitions for whether they could be conscious or not but I think especially once you talk about more complex brains with many many more neurons when you're talking about cats and dogs and dolphins um it's very hard to see how there would be a difference between humans and other mammals in terms of Consciousness was there difference in terms of intelligence between humans and other mammals sure not but like a fundamental leap in intelligence it's hard to say definitively I mean it depends on you know how you define intelligence and all kinds of things but obviously humans are unique and capable of all kinds of things that no other mammals are capable of and there are important differences and I don't think you need any magical intervention of something outside of the physical world to explain it and the way I think about consciousness I actually think it's part of the reason we're mistaken about consciousness is because we are special in the ways that we're special and because we're complex creatures we have these complex brains so I think we should probably get into some of the details of why I think um we're confused about what Consciousness is yes but just to finish this point I think that we don't actually have any evidence that consciousness is complex that it comes out of complex processing that it's required for complex processing and I think we've made this anthropomorphic mistake because we are conscious and it's very hard to to get evidence it's one of the things that makes Consciousness unique and mysterious and why I'm fascinated with it is it's the one thing in nature that we can't get conclusive evidence of from the outside we can buy analogy you know you're behaving basically the same way I behave more or less um you talk about your conscious experiences and therefore I just extrapolate from that that you're having a felt experience in the way I am and and we can do that throughout nature well there's no physical evidence there's nothing we can observe from the outside that will give us conclusive proof that Consciousness is there and so I think we've made this leap to because we're conscious and because we're unique and special and um complex and intelligent in the way that we are and because we don't have an intuition that anything else is conscious or we have no feedback about it we've made this assumption that Consciousness that those things aren't conscious and felt experience does not exist out there in in other atoms and and forms of life even but especially not inanimate objects um and therefore consciousness is somehow tied to these other things that make us unique that consciousness arises when there is this complex processing when there is and there's we can talk about the evolution argument too which I think is super interesting to get into and I'm hoping to talk to Richard Dawkins um about this verse why do you think about consciousness he's not interested he's not interested in actually the conversation I would have with him would be very brief because he's he's just not that interested in this topic but let's go back to the Richard Dawkins piece because there's I feel like there's a lot to talk about here in terms of our intuitions about Consciousness what it's doing why in my book and you know everywhere I talk about Consciousness I bring it back to these two questions that I think are at the heart of our intuitions about Consciousness and so your questions about whether human beings are unique and special and all of that I think are interesting questions and something we could talk about I see them as separate questions from the Consciousness question so you see Consciousness as giving a felt experience to our uniqueness as opposed to the uniqueness giving birth to gosh yes and that potentially there is felt experience even though it sounds crazy even to me that there is felt experience in all matter and at this point in my thinking and after a few conversations with some physicists I think if conscious business is fundamental the only thing that actually makes sense is that it is part of the most fundamental that space-time and everything else emerges out of out of Consciousness felt experience is is just part of the fabric of reality so is it possible to Intuit this can we start by thinking about dogs and cats go to the plants and going all the way to matter or is this going to be like modern physics where it's just going to be impossible to even uh in in the through our reason alone like we're gonna have to have tools of some kind I think it'll be a little bit of both I mean I think the science has a very long way to go and the truth is I don't even think we can get to the science yet because we have to do this work and this is why I'm so passionate about this work um and it's really it's really taking hold I mean there are scientists neuroscientists and physicists interested in Consciousness and kind of having gotten over the initial Obstacle of wrestling with these intuitions so that it's now being talked about in a serious way which was the first huge hurdle but I think a lot more of that has to happen a lot more of the intuition breaking from the science we already have I mean I think we almost need to catch our intuitions up to what we we already know um and then continue to break through these intuitions systematically so that we can really think more clearly about Consciousness um there are a couple of scientists now working on theories of Consciousness which do go they don't quite go to the fundamental level but they go extremely deep um so that something like an electron might be conscious under their Theory this is um integrated information Theory IIT with Christoph Coke and Julio tanoni um I've spoken to to both of them I spoke to Christoph coke uh once or twice for this project I'm working on now um what they're working on is incredibly interesting to me and I think very important work um however I think they are also really led by some false intuitions about self and Free Will and I think that will be a limit to their work so we can get into that but um let's go it's awesome which is that what they're working on I think is the most important next step forward which is just even being open to the fact that Consciousness goes as deep as particles and being rigorous but even their Theory isn't going as deep as I think we need to go um and it's hard to say how we could actually study this scientifically but that's part of the reason why I'm such a supporter of IIT and why I'm so interested in what they're doing even though I think they're wrong um is because they're they're opening this path there and I think they're getting more people interested and I think um yeah it'll be it'll be it's hard for me to imagine what the science will actually look like but okay so your Intuition or at least the direction which you're pushing is that consciousness is the only fundamental thing in the universe that everything else like time all those kinds of things emerge from that I will say that what I believe at this point I I've been saying 50 50 for a long time I'd say now it's like 51.49 in terms of Consciousness being emergent versus fundamental so I I am not convinced of this at all I'm not convinced that Consciousness is fundamental what I think is there are very good reasons to think it could be and essentially all of science up to this point has been led by the other assumption by the first assumption that Consciousness arises at some point namely in brains and that's where all the science has gone and I think that's wonderful and I think it should keep on going and I actually think that was a more important place to start but I think there's a possibility that the correct assumption is that it's fundamental and so that's the science I support that's the thing I spend a lot of my time thinking about and talking to scientists and philosophers about and so I I shouldn't give the idea that I actually have crossed over into believing this is the case but it is it's the Assumption I follow in my work at this point it's a possibility an understudied possibility so it deserves serious rigorous attention and there are good reasons to start with that assumption versus the other that I think we're just now starting to realize so just to clarify when we're talking about Consciousness we're talking about the hard problem of Consciousness that it feels like something to you know there's a subjective experience do we you know if Consciousness permeates all matter is fundamental is that going to be somehow is our current intuition about Consciousness like the very tiny subset of what cautiousness actually is so like we have our intuitions about personal experiences like what it feels like what it takes to eat a cookie or something like that um but that seems like a very specific implementation of Consciousness in an organism so how can we even reason about something that's if Consciousness is fundamental how can we reason about that like I'm not sure I'm understanding the connection between those two things but when you think about what it's like to be a plant to experience a thing okay we can kind of get that we can kind of understand that there are a lot of places we could go with this one is there's actually work being done by people like David Eagleman he's a neuroscientist I don't know if you know him you should talk to him for your podcast if you haven't he's wonderful great science Communicator he's someone I interviewed for my my current project too um so he he's done this actually okay there are many places we can go one is he does work with sensory addition sensory substitution and this is going in some very interest interesting directions and and maybe partly answers your question which is giving humans qualia sensory experiences that we're not wired for that human beings have never had before you let me know what you're most interested in hearing about but we could talk about things like the brain Port um there's actually a study done I just talked to one of the participants in the study where they were seeing if they could give human beings an experience of magnetic north so other animals have this um this sense that that we don't have where they can feel intuitively the way that our eyes work to give us an intuitive sense of our environment we don't have to translate the information coming in through our eyes we just have a map of the external world and we can navigate it so many animals use a sense of magnetic north to to get around and it's an intuitive sense so I spoke to someone who was in this part of this experiment um and it was fascinating to hear him acquire a sense not only that he had never had but that no human being had ever had so when I asked him to describe the experience it was challenging for him and understandably so because it would be like you describing sight to someone who's never seen um but this is clearly possible and scientists like David Eagleman and others are working on these and so I do think it's possible that this line that this these scientific advancements may actually start to dovetail with the Consciousness research in terms of being able to experience things we've never experienced before but I do think that at some level yes we're limited as human beings we may be able to find some proof or enough proof to at least assume that Consciousness is fundamental or you know who knows one day actually believe that that's the correct scientific view of things and not really be able to get our minds around that or to understand what it means and and certainly not to know what it feels like I mean we can't we don't even know what it feels like to be other creatures maybe what it's like to be you um yeah I mean I mean that's I guess that's what empathy is about that's why I tried to exercise is try to imagine what it's like to be other people and then you you're doing that even farther with P10 but perhaps perhaps we can do that thing more rigorously by connecting different sensory mechanisms to the brain to do that for all kinds of organisms on Earth but they're similar to us in scale and the time at which they function to time scale and the spatial scale perhaps it's much more difficult to do for electrons and so on some of the intuitions I talked about I mean I just kind of I I'm taking them for granted that you and everyone knows what I'm talking about but in terms of the science in terms of the studies um understanding things like binding processes understanding just a little bit about how the brain works and as far as we understand and then there's just a ton of evidence now to support that our conscious experience is at the tail end of a lot of um brain processing yeah so it's just a little bit I mean I give in the example in my book I I talk about tennis and The Binding of the sights and sounds and felt experience of hitting a tennis ball which in the world are happening at different times the the rates um it takes the sound waves and the light waves and the the felt sensation to travel to my brain are different that there are these binding processes that happen prior to the conscious experience that were essentially delivered to us by by the brain um and so we can get we can get back in into this I can answer your your bigger question first but I I feel like for for a lot of people to understand some of these science that already is shattering some of our intuitions about the role Consciousness plays I think is helpful in terms of being able to be open to thinking about these other ideas let's go there where the heck does Consciousness happen in what we understand about the brain timing wise uh I mean this connects to the conscious will to our experience of free will yeah there is this period of time and it's depending on the situation and the behavior um it can be anywhere from it's essentially half a second there's 200 milliseconds I actually don't know I was going to compare it to the timing of thinking film and sound I don't know if you know this yeah and I know this very well you do the the the film and sound yeah like yes what how the time how the timing has to work so that we conscious so that our experiences of it happening at the same time let me just let me just sit in the in the Silence of it there's been so much pain on this one point so much we have no idea so I mean I yeah I did a lot of algorithms on automatic synchronization of audio and video and all these kinds of things no I know this well uh there's a lot of Science and there's a lot of differences but it's about and people claim it's about 100 milliseconds you can't tell the difference but it's much more like 30 to 50 milliseconds okay and it it Dr you can go nuts trying to see if something is in sync or not yes is it in sync or not well also am I out of sync right now brain is constantly making adjustments yeah and so it can shift for you while you're doing that which is probably part of the thing that's driving you crazy um okay so I'll start with binding processes and then I'll just give a couple examples um so yes there's this window um where your brain is essentially putting all the information together to deliver you a present moment experience that is most useful for you to navigate the world um so as I said and you know I use this example of tennis in my book so the sights and sounds are coming at us at different rates um it takes longer for a sensation in my hand when I hit the ball with the racket to travel to my brain than it does for the light waves to hit my retina and get processed by the brain so all these these signals are coming in at different times our brains go through this process of binding to basically weave it all together so that our our conscious experience of that is of seeing hearing and feeling the ball hit the racket all at the same time that's obviously most useful to us binding is is mostly about timing it can be about other things but I was just talking to David Eagleman who was talking about a very simple experiment actually and this kind of shows how your brain is basically always interacting with the outside world and always making adjustments to make its best guess about the most useful present moment experience to deliver so this is a very simple experiment this is from many many years ago um and David David Eagleman was was involved in this research where they had participants hit a button and that button caused a flash of light and so our brains through binding the brain it notices is is able to kind of calibrate the experience you have because the brain is aware that it is its own hand that is causing the light to flash that there's this cause and effect going on and so you have this experience of pushing the button that causes the flash of Light which is true and the light flashes you can start to introduce longer pauses starting with 20 milliseconds 30 milliseconds going up to I think 100 maybe even 200 milliseconds where if you do it gradually since your brain is making the adjustment um you can introduce a delay I think it's up to 200 milliseconds if you do it gradually you will still have the experience even though there's now a delay between when you hit the button and the light flashes you will still have the exact same experience you had initially which is that the light flashes right when you push the button in your experience nothing is changing but then so they they gradually give a delay you've acclimated to that because it was done gradually if they then go back to the original instantaneous flash your brain doesn't have time to make the adjustment and you have the experience that the light flashed before you hit the button and that is your true experience it's not like you're confused but that is your brain didn't have time to to make that adjustment you think you're in the same environment you're pushing the button it makes the light flash it's kind of calibrating all the time but then the the participants are suddenly saying oh wait that was so weird the light flashed before I hit the button and so these types that's crazy they built a um Rochambeau rock paper scissors computer game that was unbeatable based on this glitch that you can present in in binding by training someone if you introduce a delay slowly enough then the computer can get the information before it responds but you still have the experience that you're both throwing out your rock or paper scissors at the same time but in actuality the computer saw your choice before it makes its choice and it's in this window of milliseconds where you don't notice it so that starts to help you build up an intuition that this conscious experience is an illusion constructed by the brain after uh conscious will conscious will yeah and and just in general that that Consciousness is not the thing that we feel it is which is driving the behavior that is actually at the tail end of it and so a lot of decision-making processes and they're studies that are more controversial and I don't usually um like to cite them although if you want to talk about them we can they're super interesting and into intuition shattering but they're they're now studies specifically about free will to see if there are markers at the level of the brain they can see what decision you're going to make and when you make that decision and I think this the Neuroscience inevitably is just going to get better and so part of the reason I'm so passionate about this I mean there's there's the science and there's just the Curiosity that that drives me of wanting to understand how the universe works but I actually see a lot of the Neuroscience presenting us with truths that are going to be difficult for us to accept and I actually think there are really positive ways to view these truths that we're uncovering and even though they can be initially kind of jarring and even destabilizing and creepy I think ultimately there's actually a lot it can have a positive effect on human psychology and a whole range of things that I and others have have experienced and that I think it's important for us to talk about because you can't hide from the truth especially in science right like it just it will reveal itself and if this is true I think not only for better understanding the universe than nature which is kind of my my primary passion um it's important for us to absorb these facts and realize that they don't it doesn't necessarily take away the things from us that we fear um I you know I've heard people say this is talked about the common common point to make or question to ask a scientist can you still you know enjoy chocolate if you're a molecular biologist and um is in a molecular biologist that would be the one who would understand how we experience chocolate yeah but anyway if you get the point stance if you're focused on the the details of the you know the underlying nature of reality does that take the joy and the pleasure and for lack of a better word spirituality out of our experience as human beings and I actually think um for these Illusions like Free Will and self the reverse is true I actually think they can give us their reasons and bases for feeling more connected to each other and to the universe for Spiritual experiences for um even just on a more basic level for increasing our well-being just in terms of our psychology of lowering rates of depression and anxiety and um actually I think these realizations can be extremely helpful to people well it's like uh realizing that the universe doesn't rotate around Earth that the Earth is not the center the universe is a really challenging thought well people were worried about how that would affect society well yes that's like long-term but short-term I bet you the number of people who had an existential crisis as it got integrated into society that thought is huge it's like um it's a hard one and you're saying but it can't but it's also a source of awe and I mean so many people now use that fact to inspire a positive um response to inspire creativity and curiosity and awe and all of these things that are so um useful for human well-being where's the source of meaning when you're not the center of the universe when the U doesn't even exist that even you the the the sense of self and this and the sense of decision making is an illusion the truth is that for the most part the sense of self is kind of at the core of human suffering because it feels as if we are separate from the rest of nature we're separate from each other we're separate from um you know the the illusion that I that I referenced of feeling like you know we have these thoughts that are brain based thoughts but then the eye swoops in to make a decision um in some sense it goes so deep that it's as if the eye is separate from the physical world and that separation um plays a part in depression plays a part in anxiety even plays a part in addiction so at the level of the brain I think stop me if I'm repeating myself but we started talking about the default mode Network um and so we actually know that when the default mode network is quieted down when people lose a sense of self in meditation and on psychedelic drugs in in therapy there is a feeling that people describe of an extremely positive feeling of being connected to the rest of Nature and so that's a piece of it that I think if you haven't had the experience um you wouldn't necessarily know that would be a part of it but truly having that Insight that you're not the self you feel you are immediately your experiences are embedded in the universe and you are a piece of everything and you see that everything is interconnected and so rather than feeling like a lonely eye in this bigger Universe there's a sense of being a part of something larger than yourself and this is intrinsically positive for human beings um and even just in our everyday lives and choices and what we do for work feeling part of something larger than yourself is the way people describe spiritual experiences in the way um many positive psychological states are framed and so there there's that piece of it there is something there's a one giant hug with the universe uh everything in it but there is some sense in which we attach the search for meaning with um the eye with the ego and uh you you it could almost seem like life is meaningless our existence our eye my existence is meaningless it doesn't kind of go there under any world view right really right um and the truth is we want to find a truth out of that downward spiral and not a story that we have to tell ourselves that isn't true and the fact is we have these facts available to us that in with the right Framing and the right context um looking at the truth actually provides us with that psychological feeling we're searching for and I think that's important to point out I think humans are fascinatingly good at finding Beauty In Truth No matter how painful the truth is so yes I totally agree yes but in this case I think there are the concerns are legitimate concerns and I have them myself for how people respond I've actually had people tell me they had to stop reading my book halfway through because the parts on Free Will were so upsetting to them and this is something I think about a lot because of that kind of breaks my heart um I don't because I see this potential for these realizations bringing levels of well-being that many people don't have access to um I think it's important to talk about them in ways that override what can be an initial um fear or kind of spooky spooky quality that can come out of these realizations so at the end of that Journey there's there's a Clarity and an appreciation of beauty that if you just write it out by the way if you want to read upsetting I just gotten through the boy the the four books if you want to read upsetting so my my audible is hilarious so there's conscious in it and then so your book and then and then it has the rise and fall of the Third Reich uh bloodlands but by Timothy Snyder probably the most upsetting book I've ever read if you wanna because it's not just Stalin or Hitler it's Stalin and Hitler it's the worst the worst hits the opposite of the best hits It's really really well written really difficult um I read uh sojunitsen's um go like archipelago and what else red famine which is um um and applebum is that that hurt yeah anyway so those are truly upsetting and that's yeah and those are a lot of times the results of um hiding the truth versus pursuing the truth so truth in the short term might hurt but it did ultimately uh sets us free I believe that and I also think um whatever the truth is we have to find a way to maintain civil society and love and all the things that are important to us if you can jump around a little bit can I just ask on a personal note because you said you've suffered from depression and there's a lot of people that see guidance on this topic because it's such a difficult one how were you able to when it was when it has struck you how were you able to overcome it yeah I mean that's maybe too long an answer so I've experienced it in different forms so it was my I would say my depression has almost always mostly taken the form of anxiety I didn't realize how anxious I was I think until I was an adult so I was always very functional um I think you know all the positive sides of suffering in that way um I think I'm a little OCD as soon as this whole conversation is hilarious because we're both suffering to some level of anxiety psychology is just laid out in front of us here it's a giant mess it's kind of human it's great is trying trying to organize hold on like the Tom Waits song um but then I I suffered from postpartum depression after both of my daughters after both pregnancies um that was a very different experience from anything I've ever experienced but clearly it had a predisposition towards you know suffering from something like that um anyway it really wasn't until I fully recovered from the second experience of postpartum depression that I realized that I had been suffering on some level my whole life and I think I always knew I I thought of myself as a very sensitive person an empathic person um I mean I've been in therapy for 10 years um I knew I had a lot of anxiety I would never have denied that I had a lot of anxiety I just didn't realize it crossed over into a disorder really until I was an adult and ended up taking um Prozac I took an SSRI for postpartum and it was fascinating to me I ended up interviewing my psychiatrist because I was so fascinated in the whole thing once I was on the other side of it just what I had been through how different I felt during that period of time and then how quickly the medication made me feel like myself again I had come out the other side of the experience of postpartum um and was going to start tapering off the medication and in this window where I no longer had postpartum depression um and hadn't yet gone off the SSRI I realized that life was not only a lot easier than when I had postpartum but it was easier than it had ever been and it took taking all of that anxiety away to recognize how much I had been grappling with it my entire life and it first started coming in the form of realizations like oh is this how other people yeah is this how other people feel is this how that like the things that I just always thought of myself I'm really sensitive I I'm an introvert I need a lot of time to myself and all of these things that I felt like um I mean it's always very high functioning um and in some ways you know I was a professional dancer and I think that was the type of therapy for me there was the obsessing over um the training and dancing nine hours a day and all of that I now look back on and see how much that was um therapeutic for me um and then I was kind of treating something but uh yeah it was so it was just this experience of um treating an anxiety disorder that caused me to realize that I had one I didn't know I could feel the way I felt after taking Prozac and I became very interested in I mean I I was already working with neuroscientists I was always already interested in Consciousness in the brain and um it just you know this kind of rattled other intuitions for me in terms of how our child how our childhoods shape who we become um because I had been convinced my my father was my my father was a complicated person as you said before that's what I was just gonna say again I mean so he he was not diagnosed I think he was born I think he had borderline personality disorder and was emotionally abusive and I thought that all of the ways I experienced the world and all of my anxiety and my sensitivities um I thought almost all of that if not all of that was because of these experiences I had growing up and Trauma that I experienced as a child and obviously those things play a part but what I realized um after going through postpartum and then the thing that was extremely informative to me was having my own children um because they were basically living my dream childhood they had none of the things that I thought were the cause of the psychological suffering that I experienced um there was none of that and they have a lot of the same um they struggle with a lot of the same anxiety and panic attacks and what I realized was how much were kind of Born Into the world with these things that we that we struggle with and with our strengths and with all of that and of course then if you have an abusive childhood if you're if you're someone who tends to be anxious and sensitive and empathic and then you're you're born into an abusive situation that's obvious terrible combination but I'd never acknowledged or realized how strong just the the genetics and the wiring played where's the line between you kind of accepting the challenges you're born with and this is what life will be versus then figuring out that life can be somehow different I think they're part of the same process and I think it's kind of necessary to accept what you're experiencing and what the situation is and how you feel and the types of um thoughts and patterns you tend toward in order to make whatever changes can be made so I do think it's kind of part of the same process could life have been any different I do regret certain aspects of the decisions made not by you I mean you know it depends depends on what level we're talking I think you know at a fundamental level I I don't believe anything could be different are you able to think about at that level about your own life sure and that's actually that's part of what I was when I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about the um levels of usefulness of being aware of these different Illusions because I would say most of the time in our daily lives um the types of illusions that I'm interested in in shaking up are not useful to remind ourselves of most of the time I really think there are different levels of usefulness to thinking about and reminding ourselves of the places where we have false intuitions and so I I often use um the analogy of living on a sphere um so it still feels to most of us most of the time I mean in our intuitive sense we're not thinking about whether the the Earth is flat or a sphere but we behave as if it's flat and that makes the most sense and um it would be exhausting to keep reminding ourselves as we walk down the street like it feels flat but it's not flat like there's just no reason to do it's not useful in in that moment um if you're building a house you can build it as if the world is flat um and but you know of course so that so their psychological reasons to bring it into view and maybe even spiritual reasons to bring an interview and then there's just like usefulness so if you're building a rocket to the moon you better understand the geometry of the earth um even if you're flying an airplane if you're an airplane pilot you have you have to be aware of the truth of our situation um and then I think there are other places where it's interesting to remind ourselves is where I I start out my book um just as a way to inspire awe and to get yourself out of your everyday life and see the big picture which can be um just a relief but also helps you feel more connected to the universe into something larger than ourselves and so I see these intuitions um reminding ourselves that these intuitions are Illusions in the same way that most of the time they're not useful they are useful if we want to think about a science of Consciousness they're useful for a whole range of neuroscientific studies and I think they can be incredibly useful in the same way that lying on the ground and feeling the gravity pushing you against a sphere and realizing you're floating in the middle of outer space it gives me the same feeling to realize and so I have I mean there's so many levels to it but if I'm thinking about difficult things that I've experienced um different traumas in my life when I take a step back and kind of get this bird's eye view of kind of the mystery of this unfolding of the universe and the fact that um it happened the way it happened and whether it could have happened another way or there's no going back that is that's the way it unfolded and being able to surrender to that I think um is very psychologically healthy and and prevents us from I mean I think regret is one of the most toxic Loops we can get into so this is this is a path to acceptance oh absolutely yeah because Free Will I mean I think part of what is the function of the experience of it is is learning um I mean I think we can still learn without being under the illusion that we that we have free will so for some people depression can destroy them so how did how how can you think about avoiding that yeah so one so I didn't totally answer your question first is um therapy ways that I have have worked through anxiety and depression so you like you're uh uh an introvert and a deeply intellectual person therapy works for you to a point it was very helpful um I mean I think talk therapy is one tool and can be helpful for I mean it depends on the therapist it depends on the type of therapy but I I found it to be one piece and probably not the biggest piece actually um but I think Medicare I wish I had discovered medication sooner that would have made a big difference in my life even just intellectually to realize that oh like I'm not life was a lot harder than it needed to be yeah and it wasn't about keeping everything just so um you know there's another state my brain can be in where I don't have to work so hard to be okay um meditation was probably the most meditation and psychedelic experiences were probably the most transformative um but you know a lot of these things don't you know I'm I'm lucky that I didn't my my anxiety and depression never really got in the way of my living my life of enjoying my life I mean there were struggles that made life harder for me um but you know something like treatment resistant depression or severe PTSD um these are things that you know at this point in time you know based on my understanding I think once you've tried and and the truth is that meditation is not is often not helpful for those things it can actually exacerbate them um and the most promising thing that I have seen is this Research into psychedelic therapy assisted psychedelic does that make sense to you that psychedelics work so well for such difficult cases what what is it about psychedelics and I've been following This research from the beginning when they were doing end of life yeah they started with end-of-life patients I don't know maybe 20 years ago I met at a Ted conference I met one of the doctors who was who was doing this research it was the first time I became aware that the research was happening and I'd already had my own experiences before that and so it made perfect sense to me that this would work it was still astonishing to see the results to see how successful um the work is so much of the time but it doesn't surprise me it makes sense and it's actually in line with all these other things so quieting down the default mode Network one of the things that's so transformative about taking something like psilocybin and everyone's experience is different it can vary each time you take it even in a single person but the experience I had and the experience that many people have that is so transformative is this feeling that's very hard to describe but it's a feeling of being one with the universe and that comes with it's kind of all one feeling that that is again hard to put into words but there's this feeling that everything is okay um and I'd never had that feeling before in my life and when I took psychedelics that feeling would stay with me for months and I never understood why and it was always fascinating to me but there was it was as if I was glimpsing a deeper truth of the world that it's all one thing we're all connected um there's no sense that there could even be a feeling of loneliness it was just this visceral sense of being one with everything and that everything was okay that all the things I was afraid of even death um that the Universe in a sense is just is is an endless Recycling and I don't know it's hard to describe but we also know on the other side that depression and anxiety in when people are experiencing those things the default mode network is is more active yeah and so it's this this cycling and this kind of obsessive cycles of thinking about one's self that is a huge part of the suffering in the first place and so the one thing that's surprising to me about the research is that um I I may be fudging the the data but it's something like 80 of people who are treated for PTSD after one only one session are cured of their pts yeah the the effect stays for prolonged periods of time yeah that's really interesting an addiction as well which is interesting that's not something I'm like personally personally familiar with so that was a surprise to me but yeah I mean it's just wonderful that we yeah it's incredible I mean of course it's also incredible for people who don't uh suffer to see what psychedelics can do with the mind which is that kind of appreciation well and I think it's actually important for this work it's one of the questions I ask everyone I talk to for this series um many of them you know I won't be able to use that audio or a lot of them yes and what their experience wasn't if that's informed you know actually initially in the 50s I want to do more research on this and look into it but in the 50s there were some studies that were being done with Scientists who there were hundreds of scientists they put into the study where they were on the brink of some kind of Discovery some where they were stuck so they had been doing research and they were stuck and they used psychedelics to come up with an answer to find a path forward and it was extremely useful for that yeah I mean it's fascinating and then the nice thing about psychedelics for my perception is that they don't currently suffer from the taboo that weed does I don't think so like um for example there's some kind of uh cultural construct about a pothead that makes it so that you know like Elon got in trouble for smoking weed right he would have gotten in trouble for taking mushrooms too I don't know really I don't think so oh that's interesting I don't think that's a surprise to me because mushrooms mushrooms to me seem like a journey like there's a perception that you don't take mushrooms all the time it's not an addictive substance it's not a lifestyle it's uh it's like going to burning man it's like a experience that stays with you for a long time didn't realize that understanding had permeated into the culture yeah it's a good question of how uh if it has or not because maybe I have a very narrow perspective these kinds of things but I think what has permeated is through Hollywood ideas of what it means to be a person who smokes weed a lot yeah and that and that has like has it has had its effect which is hilarious given the the effects of weed versus alcohol but that's a whole nother story and you've spoken spoken yeah yeah so well not not a lot I really want to do a lot more I've taken uh mushrooms aspirations yeah I mean because and I didn't didn't have I have a very addictive personality so I'm very nervous about substances but I didn't have any addictive relationship with that yeah I think well every time I it is a treatment for addiction so interesting but uh I you know I'm almost nervous because every time I've I've taken mushrooms I've had a really pleasant experience I mean it was um it's already the thing I feel anyway yeah but I feel it more intensely the thing I feel anyways like appreciation of the moment how beautiful life is the weird thing that I feel not throughout the day but certain moments of the day especially early on that's like life is intensely beautiful like um that's usually when I'll tweet yeah it's like Everything is Everything is awesome and I I remember those feelings because sometimes when I feel really down and all those kinds of things you remember that like it's a roller coaster and you just and then you find the good feelings and it's cool and it does make me a little bit sad that they kind of fade but then as they get older you get to use those moments you realize they don't use them well you know because when you feel great when you're focused all that kind of stuff use them well yeah because the mind is a roller coaster yes that's true that's partly why I do this work I feel like my work is therapy I don't know if you feel that way work is therapy this work not work in general thinking about the Deep questions thinking about the nature of the universe um thinking about Consciousness even meditation I mean I got into meditation to me it's interesting to me I mean I think a lot of meditators feel this way about it but I think just I'm thinking about it from the perspective of someone who hasn't meditated before but it feels like a scientific experiment it feels like it's the same physicist in me um who was drawn to meditation because the experience is one of getting closer to your experience and asking similarly deep questions like what is time what does that even mean what what do I mean by time what does it feel like um what is a thought is one of the most interesting questions to me hey how do you meditate let's talk about this so what you let go of time well I'm not really doing anything I mean the the exercise is really so simple it's just paying attention to your present moment experience and it's an extremely challenging thing to do it's not the natural state of the brain um it's an exercising concentration um which is why you know athletes and and other people who who spend a lot of time needing to focus intensely find it so useful I mean it's really um a focus a concentration practice um but all it is really I mean there are different ways there are different methods but it really is quite simple at its core which is just paying close attention to your present moment experience and so um in vipassana which is what I've mostly been trained in um you're usually paying attention to the breath but there's always some focus of concentration and the focus can even be just an open awareness just watching your mind go just what what comes into your experience and part of that is the Mind part of it is the external World um so you hear a sound you think a thought you feel a feeling you're your cheek is itching am I gonna scratch it am I not gonna scratch it just like sounds like the most boring thing in the world and what's interesting is the mo paying close attention to the most boring thing in the world is incredibly fascinating noticing that each breath no two breaths are the same that time keeps moving that your thoughts keep appearing um it's there yeah I mean it's it's a spiritual practice for notice it's more and more beautiful things about the simpler simpler things yeah it's great I I like to do that I don't meditate I've tried a few times uh and I will but I meditate I do meditate but not I meditate by thinking about a thing uh-huh and like holding on to that thing and just like it's not that's not really I guess technically meditation but it's keeping a focus on an idea and then you you walk with it and you solved a little puzzle of it especially any kind of programming or math stuff you're holding stuff in your head and you and put don't don't look stuff up don't uh take notes you're only allowed to have your mind and that's you would really enjoy a Meditation Retreat I mean you would also not enjoy it it would be hard because it's all you wouldn't go nuts it would be hard but you you would get it what's the commentation tree is it usually silent or it is not always silent or actually at least the one I would recommend you do is a silent Meditation Retreat five five days five days okay we'll talk later but you might be my next victim I've I've con I have five days a long time it's a long time did you just sit it changes your brain it's the type of experience that will change your brain permanently there's been like two three four hour sessions you don't have children I don't have children oh the children uh leaving them for five days and not speaking and impossible I've I've only done one Retreat since I had kids I'm doing another one maybe that's what the thoughts will be coming in my head you should be you should be getting married whatever let the thoughts be I think it's always really good at letting things just be and focusing on the present moment and you might come out with some Epiphany about what you should do next um yeah no I I love the idea obviously uh I love the idea I love that you know I fast I'm faster for three days I want to fast for longer that's also yeah in a different way perhaps but it brings you makes you more sensitive to the world around you smile I'm not exactly sure what the Yeah the chemistry of that is but obviously you're actually it's not obvious because you're not always that hungry uh but you're more time slows down and you feel things you feel a breeze all this kind of stuff right it's very interesting uh you've I think a tweeted something about ideas coming out from sometimes feeling about coming from outside of you sometimes so you mentioned as you meditate you know you notice these ideas come in so thoughts ideas how did that connect consciousness so the thing I was responding to that you wrote um I think I was partly picking up on the part of you that would really get a lot out of a Meditation Retreat that was my way of beginning that conversation um that experience you had of a thought coming from somewhere else when you spend an extended period of time paying close attention to your moment-to-moment experience that's how all of your thoughts appear to you and it's really beautiful because you're letting go just through the practice of meditation meditation you're quieting down your um default mode Network and without necessarily um intellectually thinking yourself out of free will it it naturally kind of drops away and so when you're under the spell of this illusion that you are the author of your thoughts and your conscious experience is driving all of your behavior and there's this eye that stands somewhere near your brain but is not your brain that stands free of the physical world is is the thing generating the thoughts um when you're meditating that quiets down and can kind of quiet down completely so that your experience is just of the next thing arising in your conscious awareness but it's the source of that is still this brain what you realize is the source of it is not your conscious experience and that's the important insight and that's the insight and so there are many insights you can have in meditation that align with the science which is what's really fascinating because it doesn't have to be that way like I can imagine finding a meditation to be extremely useful and helping me with anxiety and all the rest and having all kinds of insights that turn out to not be true but the interesting thing is that these insights actually turn out to be true um and so that that is one of them is the when you're just watching what your conscious experience actually is you realize that it's not doing all the things you usually feel like it's doing and so the thoughts really just arise in much the same way that a sound or a sight or a feeling um you know maybe your leg starts to hurt you when you're just watching Moment by Moment by moment pain arises a bird chirping arises a thought arises a feeling arises you're just kind of watching watching it all unfold and there's something really beautiful about that yeah it's the the the perspective you could take on is there's a connectedness to the entirety of the universe like to Nature in general and that there's something so beautiful about Consciousness about the fact that it's not just a dead Universe with atoms doing their thing that at least in this one instance there is a felt experience of the universe of the University it's not even I'm part of the universe yeah I'm there's a right here in this little point in space and time there is an experience of the universe but it's still interesting to think about where those ideas if those ideas are solely a construction of the brain or is there some kind of mechanism of joint collective intelligence of humans as social organisms where that those like like how much of it is me training when you're on network and the ideas of tens of thousands of other people and how much is it myself talking like in terms of psychic phenomena and you're talking in terms of just absorbing the information of the past and education and well um just kind of our Collective human project that gets in throughout our lives I don't know much about psychic phenomena but I also want to be open-minded in the way we speak about collective intelligence because it's very easy to simplify to it's a neural network trained on knowledge developed over generations and so on it it does feel like intelligence is stored in some kind of distributed fashion across humans like if you take one out I I think that intelligence quickly goes down I don't know how quickly it goes down if you just take one out and depends on which one I think I half agree and half disagree with what you're saying but yeah I mean the other thing you notice when you spend a lot of time in meditation and when you spend a lot of time kind of shaking up the these intuitions that I think get in the way of of clearly okay thinking about what Consciousness is um is that we are these systems in nature that are not at all isolated and there are the obvious ways like if I just stop drinking water you know that's going to change the system very drastically right so there's just you know the the energy consumption but the fact that we exchange ideas is um we part of who I am is everyone I've interacted with and of course the people that interact more with have sculpted me more but we our brains are sculpted through our interactions with each other as well yes but I wonder if it's a more correct and useful perspective to take that those interactions are the organisms like you're you're saying you're still making the brain the primary there could be like uh that the brain is what it is because of the social interactions and the social interactions are the living organism like that's a weird perspective because it's I don't I don't actually think it's one or the other they're both yeah they're both both living yeah it's like cats and dogs yeah I mean it's a little bit like you know I I have two children and a lot of people with two children will say like when when you're preparing to have the second one and soon after you've had the second one that having two is kind of like having three because you are um nourishing and protecting and overseeing each individual life but then there's the sibling relationship which is almost another thing yeah it's weird so you've spoken with uh with Don Hoffman a few times yes uh in his bookcase against reality yeah many more than a few there's a lot of fun ones because everyone was Sam was involved well Sam and I interviewed him yeah sorry most of the conversations I've had with him are private they're not public but we used to meet before the pandemic we were meeting about monthly to discuss ideas I would love to be a fly in the wall of those discussions but he wrote a book case against reality yeah makes the case that our perception is completely detached from objective reality can you explain his perspective and let us know well no no maybe not fully but to which degree you agree and don't so this is much more focused I guess you guys have an agreement that Consciousness is somehow fundamental yeah I mean I think we both think we might be wrong um about the Consciousness they're about about it being fundamental but I think we're both just we both agree that this is a legitimate um question to ask at this point in science is consciousness fundamental and I really see it as a question and I think he does too but he goes hard on reality yes I you know especially so I actually now have recorded three conversations with him for this project I'm working on yeah and in every conversation we have we seem to land on the same place but this last conversation we had it seemed to be even more clear that the semantics really get in the way when you get into the weeds in these conversations we it's almost like we need some new terminology because it's hard to know sometimes whether we're talking about the same thing um I have issues with his terminology that when we talk about what his terminology represents it seems like we completely agree but the conclusions you don't it's possible we have a very similar view of the universe if Consciousness is fundamental it may be an identical view it's hard for me to know because I disagree with a lot of his terminology okay but our four-dimension reality he says that's like a complete construct space time is a complete weird construction that yeah well I mean the truth is that I mean if you talk to a neuroscientist like Anil Seth and I would say most neuroscientists but he's he's really good on this subject and and his expertise and his area of focus is in perception so he talks a lot about how our perceptions give us an experience of the world and he calls it a controlled hallucination um I'm sorry he probably got I think he says that he got that term from someone else but that that's the that's the term he used we got every term from somewhere right that's true everything there's no new ideas all right there's a sense in which what Hoffman is saying is already we already know to be the case so our brains are creating this conscious experience um based on these interactions with the outside world it is in some sense all a controlled hallucination and someone like Anil Sessa from the neuroscientific point of view I actually have a quote here somewhere if you if you have any interest in hearing the quote um but he's essentially saying everything we experience as a perception including our experience of time and space so we still don't really know what our experience of space represents out there in the world and then of course when you talk to physicists about the different interpretations of quantum mechanics I mean where physics is is seems to be headed across the board at this point is that space and time are emergent that they're not part of the fundamental fabric of reality and so there are some ways in which Dawn is saying things that is he being too poetic about it is that is that the right way to to phrase it because like no go ahead he says like it's not that our perception is a con just a controlled hallucination well no it's not he's saying something more than that I mean it but my point is that a lot of what he's already saying on some level we kind of science is already there and could agree with yeah but not all the way yeah because he's saying like well that we don't even we've like The evolutionary process yeah has constructed our brain mechanisms in such a way that we're really far from having access to objective reality although I think we already know that as well I mean if any version of string theory is correct and you know of course we don't know yet it's all up for grabs but the truth is each theory is more weirder than the last um if there are 15 dimensions of space we are just not we're not wired but to be able to understand the fundamental reality right but but I think we have a consistent abstraction that seems to be reliable yeah like uh like a blockchain yes and he's not just saying that we really only have this tiny window onto reality he's saying that that window onto reality is giving us a lot of false information it's not just an abstraction it's false yeah because he's saying there's no reason it needs to be true like there's no uh it does it's not required to be true yeah and in fact there's through natural selection it's very possible to uh imagine or it's likely to imagine that organisms will evolve in such a way that you're going to just be lying to yourself completely and but the question there is if that's the case it's a really interesting thing to think about I think yeah the regular which he approaches it is really um admirable I mean I do think it's scientific uh but it's uh the question for me is why is it so consistent across all of these organisms we all seem to see the table like and feel and yeah so what he will agree so what I would say to that and when I post this to him I really don't want to speak for him but I'll I'll answer it myself and say that I believe he agrees with what I'm about to say which is that the things we perceive are connected to the structure of reality it's just that the structure of reality is made of something completely different than the thing we're experiencing so imagine if you just go with the the holographic principle um you know Loosely uh and actually the holographic principle applies to black holes only um so there's ads CFT Duality anti-decider space and conformal field Theory am I getting all these terms right but I can't believe we're going there well I mean this is where I've in all of my conversations but this is this because the idea is so so if we just if we just have the basic principle that reality and all the information can be contained or is is actually in a two-dimensional space that gets projected this is something that you don't buy based on the look on your face no no no I'm I'm actually freaking out because yes any theory of modern physics gives inkling that reality is very weird right and completely different from how we experience that's one example which is so so this is an intuition that for whatever reason has has always felt true to me this is this is the way I thought about things as a child I've met other people that felt this way when I've had experiences in psychedelics and this is where I start to sound crazy to but nope but um everybody else is crazy except it does but that has always seemed right to me and that's always the thing that I feel like I'm looking for that it's funny recently I was thinking that it's it's as if I feel like I'm and it was more how I was thinking of how I felt as a child but um I feel this way a lot as an adult too that the uh the image is one of a snow globe that I that I that I'm confined to the snow globe based on my human perceptions and the truth of reality is is out there and it's actually why I'm so drawn to shaking intuitions I feel like every time we shake up an intuition it's like an opportunity to leave the snow globe for for a moment um you know it's like smashing the marbles and seeing Oh it's not liquid in there like I thought it's it's it's getting this glimpse of something truer than what we typically experience I feel like as though it's for a long time going to be snow globes inside snow globes inside snow globes but the larger point is that yes whatever is true about the fundamental nature of reality is not something we're experiencing however it is linked and give us gives us Clues to it so so one image I've been I came up with recently I actually wrote about this I have an article in Nautilus about time um because I was as I spend time thinking about what it would mean for Consciousness to be fundamental um and at the same time I'm talking to physicists about different interpretations of quantum mechanics and the and the fact that the ones I'm talking to believe that space and time are are emergent and are not part of the fundamental story um I was thinking about what is it what could time be if it's not the way we experience it what could it be pointing to um and you know I'm not the first person to think like this many people have have um you know developed different thought experiments around this but um and this is I'm not saying this is the way things are but this is just one solution is that time and causality um appear to us the way they do because for whatever reason we're only perceiving one moment at a time and these connections between events that we perceive as time are actually just part of the fabric of reality there's some structure to reality at a deeper level um where you know it's like shining a flashlight on the structure of reality where for us for whatever reason everything else disappears and the only thing that exists is is that single pin pinprick of light that we happen to be inhabiting or that we can perceive but that the rest of it is there and so that even though time would be an illusion and and the causality in the way we experience it is an illusion um or it doesn't mean what we think it means it's still pointing to a deeper structure there's something that it corresponds to in the fundamental nature of reality and I've had many enough conversations with Don I think to know that he he would agree with that that our perceptions map onto something it's just not the experience of it that we're having so so to go back to um you uh the idea that all of reality could be contained in two dimensions and there's something about the the interaction between different points um that cause this a holograph so that it seems like there's a three-dimensional world when in fact that it's it's a projection of this two-dimensional surface um what we experience as space still references something at the fundamental level it's just that it's not space and that is something that makes a lot of sense to me I also I posted an excerpt George Musser wrote a great book spooky action at a distance um and he talks about he's he's a great science writer and he talks about ways to kind of absorb what this would mean this ads CFT Duality and he talks about he gives an example of um music as an analogy that two different notes can exist in three dimensions as if the other doesn't exist because of the frequency of the sound waves and that in another way you can think of the sound waves existing in different dimensions thank you I don't know if that's i i i i yeah that's really interesting so I don't speak as well as I write so I've written about this in a way that I think is is easier to absorb than the way I just described it but I think causality is a trickier trickiest one trickier one time it's a trick you want to like yeah oh boy and there are physicists who think that space is emergent but time is still fundamental and Lee smolen is one of those scientists and it's really interesting to talk to him about this but yeah but time being emergent um is a really trip you want to think about yeah also I I wonder if it's possible at which point this the experience of time start becoming a part of the conscious experience of living organisms so is it something that evolved on Earth yeah only or is it it's also very hard to think about Consciousness without time and that's something that's really interesting for me to think about too um although not that this is scientific evidence of anything but I and many others have had the experience a Timeless spaceless experience um in certain states of meditation and on under the internet conscious experience would you say yeah absolutely but didn't you say that some aspect of conscious experience is memory it seems like that too no no so I I said an experience of being a self is due to memory um it seems that Consciousness and time are inextricably linked but I I think that may be an illusion also and when I think about Consciousness being fundamental and you know someone oops someone like Max tegmark I don't know who if there are other mathematicians I'm sure there are he's the only one I know of who will talk about mathematical forms and shapes as not just being he talks about them as being actual objects in nature that that exist that are not just mathematical structures that we can think about but any mathematical structure that comes out of the math actually exists in reality yeah and so when I think about Consciousness being fundamental I think about physics and Mathematics being a description of the structure of it and that when mathematicians say things like that or physicists say things like that um it makes sense if we're talking about a conscious experience of some sort yeah that's really interesting I mean first of all Max is great as man this is really interesting to think about like how what is fundamental yeah it's a good exercise to do in general yeah like that to truly think through it I mean ultimately it's a very humbling process because we're probably in the very early days of uh well we can't no currently right right me I mean maybe permanently but I I remain optimistic right uh well to jump around a little bit the Google AI engineer I'm using the terms from the Press it's kind of hilarious but it's a friend of yours no it's not no no uh but just you know the term AI is really not used amongst machine learning people oh I see okay so like I'm using kind of right Google AI engineer and just like sentience and chatbot and like none of those words are really used in one by the people that actually build them you know you're much more likely to use language model versus chatbot or uh like natural language dialogue versus chatbot or whatever and certainly not sentience but that's the point I mean sometimes the difference between the public discourse and the engineering is actually really important because engineering tends to want to ignore the magic they don't notice the magic anyway the Google AI engineer uh believes that uh the Lambda 1 language natural language system achieved sentience I don't know if you paid attention to that I didn't you didn't but the the general question is do you think a chatbot do you think a robot could be conscious so I mean this answer is slightly different or very different depending on whether I kind of follow the assumption that Consciousness emerges at some point in physical processing or whether it's fundamental um since I've just chosen to stay on the fundamental Channel um I mean then then it's kind of a silly answer because if Consciousness is fundamental in in the way I currently think about it the only way I imagine it working um every physical thing we perceive is the representation of a conscious experience so I mean yes that's true true of everything in the world um however I would say if that's the case even though there's a way in which it's behaving in similar ways to a human being the way it's constructed what it is actually made of and the physics of it is so different that I would expect it to have an entirely completely non-human conscious experience and whether it even feels like a self I think would be a big question mark well there's questions of ethics and yeah is it capable of suffering is suffering connected to Consciousness Consciousness I mean obviously it is it's the it's the only way you can suffer is well maybe maybe it's not maybe it's not maybe it's more connected to self I would say I mean just on my own use of these words suffering is only something that can happen in a conscious experience right so can robots suffer if they have a car anything that has a conscious experience can experience suffering but do plants suffer in the same so is there some level where when we construct our morals and ethics that is there a class of conscious experiences or organisms that are capable of conscious experience that we can anthropomorphize sufficiently such that we give them rights yeah I mean this is not an area that for physics I have spent for me I have not spent a lot of time thinking about this most people expect that I have it's interesting these types of questions are much less interesting to me than the other questions and I think it's because I'm interested in the physics of things sure I'm I'm somewhat interested I'm definitely interested in in ethical questions for human beings but I have spent very little time thinking about the implications for other types of intelligence um I will say that I think the capacity for suffering of con of the capacity for suffering of a of a conscious system um goes up with memory and with a sense of self so if you take if if anesthesia only erased your memory and it didn't actually make you unconscious you actually experienced horrifically experienced some surgical procedure but we could completely wipe out your memory of it as nightmarishes that scenario scenario is and I'm not suggesting we should ever do this I would say if our only option were to erase your memory of it that would be the more ethical thing to do than to have you maintain that memory because the suffering is then carried across a longer distance through time that's presuming that suffering is unethical well isn't that what ethics is all about it's about suffering I mean I think to me ethics is all about suffering and well-being and I don't know what ethics is without that uh there's different measures of suffering so having one traumatic event May if you erase that one traumatic event that potentially might have um negative on net consequences for the growth so that yeah so then it's a different it's a different question but I would say that memory increases suffering globally so that if any moment of suffering only existed for itself in the present moment that is a lesser kind of suffering than a suffering that is drawn out over time through memory so hard to think about and so yeah I mean in terms of AI if they're conscious and there's a sense of self and memory which I think I actually think you need memory to have a sense of self um actually sorry I take that back I actually think you can have a really primitive sense of self without memory um but an AI that is conscious that has memory and a sense of self um yeah that's capable of suffering absolutely well one of the things because you said you haven't really looked into this area um because there's so many interesting things to look into and you're really focused on the physics side to me the the the Neuroscience experiments that you mentioned where there's a difference between the timing of things that kind of reveal there's something here yeah to me working with robots I have robots that are moving around my home in in Austin I know I it's a very good embodied thought experiment but here's the thing that looks like he has a free will it it looks like it has conscious experiences and uh and then I know how it's programmed and so like I have to go back and forth and it's you know this is what I do you lay on the ground looking up at the stars thinking about plants and I and I look at like a robot like well you can do this with plants too I mean there's some complex enough behavior that looks like Free Will from a certain angle and it makes you wonder it makes you wonder two things one is there Consciousness associated with that processing um and two if there isn't what does that say about our experience and both are our circumstance in nature what does that say yeah um but yeah I do I do that with plants all the time I go back and forth but the zombie thought experiment now um at least for me is often presented as AI because now that's easier as a robot because that's easier um I don't know if it's just because it's in it's in pop culture now in the form of films and television shows but it's it's easier to get to that point of um contemplation I think by imagining a robot I don't know why exactly I'm bothered by philosophers talking about zombies because it feels like they're missing it's like talking about it's reducing a a joyful experience so like uh that's like talking about listen when you fall in love with somebody yeah the other person is a zombie you don't you don't know if they're conscious or not you're just making presumptions and so on it's like it says philosophers will do this kind of things they might as well be a zombie or you know there's no such thing as love it's just a mutual Catholic Economist will reduce love to some kind of mutual calculation that minimizes risk and stability over time right it's like all right what I want to do with each of those people yeah is I want to take I want to find every one of those philosophers to talk about zombies and eventually give them one of those robots and watch them fall in love and then and see right how their understanding of how humbled they are by how little we understand that's the point of the zombie experiment I mean sure maybe the zombie God experience that I mean I I can't think of zombies is that the thought is that no so for me I mean I don't like spending much time on it I think it has limited use for sure and I under understand your your annoyance with it but for me what's so useful about it is it gets you to ask the same questions you're asking when you're looking at robots if you just run the experiment and you say okay you know I'm sitting here with Lex what if I try to trick myself what's different about the world if someone tells me actually he's a robot is essentially what the zombie experiment is he's over there he has no conscious experience he's acting officias but there's no experience there so it gets you to ask some interesting questions one is okay when it seems impossible I just think no that's that makes no sense I I can't I can't even imagine that okay what do I think Consciousness is responsible for what is consciousness doing in that in that human over there that is Lex that I can't fathom all of your behavior and everything that you're you're doing and about without Consciousness so it gets you to ask this question and these are this is these are the questions I begin my book with um what is consciousness doing it gets you to ask that question in a deeper way and then I kind of found this alternate I don't know if other people have done this but I found this alternate use for it which is even more useful to me which is I'm able to do it sometimes I'm able to just sit with someone and and you know get my imagination going and imagine there really is no conscious experience there in that person and what happened for me the first few times I was able to do this is it reminded me exactly of how I feel when I look at complex plant behavior and other behaviors in nature where I assume there's no conscious experience and to me it just flips everything it just flips everything on its head it just gets you to be able it gets you to be open to possibilities that you were closed to before and I think that's useful does it enhance or um dissipate your capacity for love of other human beings what role does Love play in The Human Condition I mean in so many ways it's the most important role I don't think any of these realizations I mean if if anything I think it enhances it but I don't think they I mean it's it kind of goes back to the levels of usefulness sometimes you want to picture your friends as a plant it's helpful it's helpful to to appreciate the beauty that they are as an organism yeah I mean I don't know for for me the more time I spend um practicing meditation being seeing through these illusions um the more poignant my conscious experience becomes and love is obviously one of the most powerful and one of the most positive experiences we have and I don't know there's just there's whatever its cause is there's just something miraculous about it in and of itself and for itself I think love romantic love is a beautiful thing connection friendship is a beautiful thing and it's so interesting how people can grow together how interact together disagree together and make each other better like uh scientific collaborations are like this too uh uh Damian caught him in taversky I mean that there's and most people are not able to do that in the in the scientific realm they create the more successful you become the more solid rare and you recognize it when you have it when you have a great collaboration I mean in science but also in other areas and in this this Ted production I'm working on I just happened to be working with this producer where we had this instant connection and the chemistry is great and I have so much fun recording with her it's like it's so great to have I usually work alone and it's been wonderful to have so it's a good it's like a chat it's like a conversation type of thing yes she's taking my conversation we're playing around with it we're just working on the pilots I love how you have no idea I was gonna turn out this is great yeah um um well I just started working without a clear a clear image of the end result although it started with an idea for a film um I don't know I guess I have a feeling I was thinking wondering if I talked about this with you before anywhere but probably not no yeah because you and I have never spoken no we just met we just know each other I mean you didn't see me when I was listening to that podcast yeah of course because I thought you didn't hear that thought that's that's I mean we were mentioning this offline as a small attention there's a cool dynamic in how we get to become really close friends without never having met never having talked one way but it could be one-way friendships that form it's a beautiful thing I I think I don't know that that makes me feel like we're all connected yeah and you're almost like plugging into some kind of weird yeah thing yeah there's so many things I want to say now but here's one thing is the way I think about Consciousness if it's fundamental um is analogous to a pot of boiling water where the water is the Consciousness and the bubbles are the conscious experiences and so it is all one thing and then there are these shapes that take form and they there's a felt experience right it's all felt experience and so when we're able to let go of this sense of self or this illusion of self um the idea that experiences are happening to something or to someone drops out and what you get is just experiences arising so there's the fundamental nature of the universe which obviously has a structure and obeys laws but what you get out of that are appearances of different conscious experiences they're they're just coming into being right and so there is under that view I mean there are different ways to look at the fundamental nature of reality without Consciousness and kind of come up with a similar view but in that view it is just kind of one it's one thing with different experiences and in that Boiling Pot is a lobster which represents the Human Condition the devil because it's because life is suffering I don't know if you've read Pastor Wallace consider the lobster I mean it's no I think the stuff that due to lobsters is fascinatingly but oh yeah no I mean that that was my my first rejection of many worlds just my psychological rejection of it was just imagining the multiplication of all the suffering I just I mean I spend a lot of time um thinking about consumed by and trying not to be overwhelmed by the depth of human suffering to imagine many worlds with his just infinite suffering oh my God yeah what is it about humans I think you spent too much on Twitter is focused on the suffering I mean there's also the awesomeness yeah I think the awesomeness outpowers the suffering over time that's so nice I wish I believed that with memory as you said uh the suffering is Multiplied it's it's uh it's an interesting thought but with memory um beauty is Multiplied as well so it's like yes where I stand with it and I'm for some reason still optimistic that we can get ourselves to a different place but the way things currently are um or the way things have always been for for animals and humans and I think any any conscious life form is um to me the suffering seems so much more impactful and powerful than any happy for lack of a better word experience that no happy experience is worth it's equivalent experience of suffering that's certainly how I feel as well but I I've learned not to trust my feelings yeah well so uh you know the folks who are religious will ask the question which I think applies whether you're religious or not wise they're suffering in the world why does it just God allow suffering or those kinds of questions I think I think um it does seem that suffering is a deep part of human history and uh if the if to really think about that part of nature it means part of nature if feeling good is surviving and thriving nothing survives and thrives forever so you just encounter suffering it's just built in yeah death meets us all in the end and only uh it's kind of hilarious to then think about most of Nature and the cruelty and the poverty of nature like how horrible the conditions are for animals and plants all over the place but it's mostly yeah it's War but it's also just and it's like poverty it's extreme poverty like when people like criticize like farms and so on you also have to consider the Suffering The Animals we try to imagine that animals in the woods are all as happy time notes like you have to really consider if you really asked an animal would they like to sit in a boring zoo and be fed away from the wild the nature and the freedom and so on I don't know how many of them would choose the zoo versus like nature anyway um but what's the meaning of life let me ask the question for me yes there's no you it's the question for whatever you're plugged into is that a question for the body and mind system we call Annika colonica let's see what that the meaning of life yeah the why the why why interesting I've never been drawn to the why questions I'm interested in the what and the how um what is life what is this place what are we doing how are we here how is this how is this taking place you know but I mean if if I had to answer I don't I guess I don't think there is a why really it's funny the the the quote the thought that comes to mind is really uh like a kind of a Cheesy quote that I'm sure is printed on a bunch of mugs and t-shirts but it's tick not Han um I'm gonna get it wrong but it's something like um we're here to awaken from our illusion of separateness and I don't really see that as an answer to the why question although that that's how it's framed in in his quotes we are here for that purpose um I think if there is a purpose worth being here for that's that's kind of the ultimate I think let me ask you for advice you had a um a complex and a beautiful journey through life you exceptionally successful what advice would you give to Young Folks in high school or in college about how to live a life like yours or how to live a life uh they can be proud of or have a career that can be proud of it you know how to pave a path and journey that can be uh happy with and be proud of had this conversation with my kids I mean we have lots of deep conversations and they're all kind of pertaining to each moment or whatever they're facing um I think career is difficult because ways I just feel like I'm lucky that I ended up being able to do for a living the thing I love to do but the difference is look yeah well the Free Will luck is an illusion there's no such thing as luck when you believe in Free Will right right that's true I really start in retrospect started working on my book 30 years ago and had no idea that I was working on a book and this kind of ties into my advice which is I think it's really important to follow your passion and to find things that you love and that you find inspiring and motivating and exciting whether they relate to your career or not and I think many times if you persist just for the pure passion of the thing itself it finds a way into your everyday life the career manifests itself I mean out of whatever person to me and I said you know I've had such a unconventional path it's very hard for me to give advice based on that path but I do believe that it's extraordinarily important to keep your passions alive to keep your curiosity alive to keep your Wonder at Life Alive however you do that and it doesn't necessarily have to be in your career um and I think for a lot of people their career enables them the time and the space to experience other things that you know maybe wouldn't be as enjoyable if they were at their career yeah I mean in general a dogged pursuit of the stuff you love will create some something beautiful and if it's an unconventional path those are the best kinds those are the most beautiful kind and it created in this case I think you're a beautiful person Annika a beautiful mind thank you so much for uh doing everything you do and for sharing with the world and thank you so much for talking with me today that was awesome good to finally meet you great to finally meet you thanks for listening to this conversation with Annika Harris to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Mahatma Gandhi I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet thank you for listening and hope to see you next time