Our intuitions about consciousness may be deeply wrong 

The study of consciousness has largely, if not entirely, been relegated to neuroscience

which makes a lot of sense because we have assumed the organisms in the world that are

conscious that we are aware of and that we can kind of confirm are conscious are the ones that

are most like us. And we're complex systems. The brain is the most complex system in the universe

that we know of. And so we assume that consciousness arises somehow out of that complex processing

But we have discovered a few things that have actually flipped upside down the assumptions that we began with and have been shown to be illusions

Challenging our intuitions on consciousness. So an intuition is simply the strong feeling that something is true, but it may or may not represent something accurate about the world

And we have many intuitions that were sculpted by evolution that are extremely useful

If we're in a dangerous situation, we can notice all kinds of clues unconsciously, that

a door was left ajar, that an item is out of place, that someone we're close to who

we don't know, if their pupils are dilated, if their skin is flushed, these can be signs

that someone is adrenalized and about to act violently, we may not notice any of these

elements subconsciously. We just might be left with this intuition that we feel like we're in an unsafe situation

or that we shouldn't trust the person who's standing next to us. And those are extremely useful tools that we use all the time

We use them in making decisions. There are studies that show that our gut instincts are often better guides to making decisions about which apartment to move into which job to take than deliberate logical reasoning But also intuitions can fail us and they also fail us

all the time. And so in the sciences, there are many examples of this where there's just no reason

for evolution to have sculpted an intuition, again, for being on an earth that is a sphere

It's not relevant to our everyday lives, and we feel like we're on a flat earth. And so that's

what our intuition leads us to believe. Einstein's theories of general relativity and special

relativity gave us a whole new sense of the structure of the universe, that space-time

is a field that can be warped and that warping is gravity. And so rather than gravity being a force

like other forces, what it actually is is a warping of space-time. And these are things we

do not have intuitions for. And when we learn them, they help us form a truer view of what the

universe actually is. So our assumption that we understand what consciousness is based on our

intuitions, some of these intuitions that we're relying on to make that assumption have been

overturned by modern neuroscience and have been shown to be illusions. And so in many cases

we're being led by illusions. And this is something that's very interesting and that has not yet really

sunk into the larger scientific culture. And so if we want to ask this question about whether

consciousness goes deeper in nature than we have previously assumed, the sciences that this will

pertain to, to biology perhaps, perhaps plant behavior, even though that sounds crazy, we may

find that there are some minimal felt experiences in the complex behavior of plants or even deeper these other sciences the science of physics and botany and biology need to be better informed of the neuroscience and what we learned

about the brain so far so that they can have a better grasp of the way certain illusions

might be misleading them. And so that if they have intuitions about consciousness, this is something that was really taboo to

think about or talk about not that long ago. But it's useful for any scientist who is interested

in studying consciousness in a new and creative and different way or thinking about consciousness

in a different way. It's important for them to be aware of some of the neuroscience that

helps support that view and that can give many scientists good reason to start thinking a little

bit differently about consciousness, a little more creatively about consciousness. And this is

really how paradigm shifts happen in science. And the truth is, this is a huge part of the

scientific process in almost every regard. When we challenge our intuitions, because we're facing

new evidence that is counterintuitive, which is most often the case, especially, as I said

for these paradigm shifts, for groundbreaking theories, they get us to see the world that we

live in in a significantly different way. So if you think about all of the major scientific

breakthroughs, all of the major paradigm shifts, so understanding that the earth is a sphere and

not flat as our intuitions originally led us to believe, people forget how counterintuitive

this discovery was. And it was made based on celestial observations. And this is how science

So we get this evidence that it not the way we felt it was or the way we thought it was And then there a period of time where we wrestling with our intuitions And this is an important part of the scientific process

because our intuitions are often very good guides. And so it's good that we keep checking

to see, you know, is this new information actually accurate? And then when the scientific evidence

is overwhelming, we're then in a process of shifting our intuitions, of starting to feel

that we live on a sphere in a solar system, orbiting the sun rather than the other way around

And it starts to shift the way we feel in the world. It shifts our concepts of our everyday

experience. But then, of course, it also then shapes the science that is to come

And there are other examples of this, discovering the microscopic world and the germ theory of

disease, understanding that microscopic things that we have no intuition for, we can't touch or

taste or feel or experience them in any way, but we've now discovered they're real and they cause

disease and they can kill you. And so I think there's a lot that's happened in modern neuroscience

that suggests that our intuitions about consciousness are wrong. And they give us

tools for shaking our intuitions and playing around with this question of whether are the

intuitions that have driven our assumptions about consciousness, whether they are not entirely

accurate and whether we need to spend more time shifting intuitions and challenging intuitions

in order to think more creatively and maybe come up with some new theories about what

consciousness might be and how far down in nature it might go. Want to support the channel

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