The Hard Problem of Consciousness | Annaka Harris

So the mystery at the heart of consciousness is why in this universe that seems to be

teeming with non-conscious matter, with atoms and electrons and stars and solar systems and

all these things that we assume don't entail a felt experience from the inside, or they're

non-conscious, how non-conscious matter somehow gets configured in such a way as to create

a situation where suddenly it's having a felt experience from the inside. Suddenly

there's something that it's like to be that matter. And that is often referred to as the

hard problem of consciousness. Defining consciousness. We all have an experience of consciousness. And not only do we all have an experience of it

it is central to everything we know and care about. We can't even quite understand what it

would mean to live our lives without it. Everything that we care about, everything we experience

everything we know, we know it through our conscious awareness of it. It is our immediate

contact with the universe, with the rest of reality. And you can see this just by imagining

something that's important to you or something that's not important to you. Anything that

happened to you today, anything you're thinking about, any decision you're trying to make

Okay, try to think about that or try to make that decision and imagine doing that when you're not

conscious. You immediately realize that this is where our lives play out. In some sense

this is everything. Our conscious awareness is everything. And the fact that it's still so

mysterious to scientists and to all of humanity, the fact that it's still one of the great

unsolved mysteries makes it something that everyone can be excited about and that inspires

awe in everyone. And awe is this feeling that we all enjoy kind of basking in. And this is one of

those mysteries that is still unsolved and so can still inspire awe in most people who start to

think about it and discover how mysterious it actually is. I guess that the question for me is

And this is the question that I was left with when I finished writing my book

Is it possible that consciousness is a much more basic phenomenon in nature and is essentially pervading everything

So it's much more like gravity. And so not that it less special than we assumed because you know gravity is something that obviously very special in our universe But it affects everything And the question that I still very interested in and think I probably always be interested

in is, does consciousness go deeper in nature than the sciences previously assumed

So rather than arising out of complex processing in brains, namely, is it possible that it's

a much more basic property of the universe? And so there are felt experiences arising in more systems and organisms than we previously realized

So the mystery at the heart of consciousness, and when I use the word consciousness

I'm not talking about higher order thinking or complex thought or things that we think of in terms of human consciousness

But when I use the word consciousness, I'm talking about consciousness in the most fundamental sense

this bare fact of felt experience. So if a worm is conscious, if there's something that it's like

to be a worm, if there's a felt experience, if there's sentience associated with a worm

and there's no consensus on this in the sciences, but if there is something it's like to be a worm

it obviously isn't planning its day, it's not having complex thoughts. Maybe it's experiencing

a very subtle sensation against its skin as it moves through the dirt. We can imagine

that that is a possibility. It's possible there's some kind of internal desire to move toward food

or away from danger. So when I use the word consciousness in this context when talking

about it as a mystery, it's really in this most basic sense as the fundamental felt experience

that we know comes into being in the universe from our own experience and can extrapolate from that

There's no perfect definition for consciousness in the way that I'm using it here in the most

fundamental sense. And so the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay titled, What Is It Like to Be

a Bat? And I recommend this article, and I think it's extremely useful here because rather than

give a definition, he illustrates a picture of a totally different type of experience than

a human experience. There's a German term for this, umwelt. And it's the umwelt is the word for describing the types of feelings and sensations a certain

type of organism has. So a bat uses sonar rather than vision

And we can't imagine what that's like. We can maybe get close to it or draw ogies

But a bat is moving through the world using sonar. So it's making sounds

the sounds are bouncing off the walls and the trees and the world

and it gets a picture of its external world in the same way that we get a picture of the external world through vision But you can imagine that the actual felt experience of that is very different from our experience of using vision

And so when you think about what certain experiences are like, what it's like to be a bat, what it's like to be a bee, this gets at the, I think, I think this gets at our intuition for what consciousness is in a more direct way than some of the language does

Making a distinction between consciousness and thought is important because consciousness, in the sense that I'm interested in, in the sense that it's a mystery, can exist without thought

It can exist in a pure felt experience. It could exist in a very simple organism that is not

capable of thought. But even in our human experience, we know that there can be moments

that are without thought, especially if you think of a very young child or an infant feeling pressure

against the skin, hearing sounds in the room before the brain is even able to distinguish

sounds and be able to process them and understand the meaning behind them or what they might

represent, the experience itself, the sound of a bell, the experience of seeing green

the experience of heat or cold, those are experiences that are the most minimal ones

we can imagine. And there's clearly an experience there. There's clearly consciousness there

and it doesn't necessarily entail thought. So one of the things we feel we need consciousness for

is our decision-making process. And there's a sense in which we feel like a solid self

making decisions. And we don't really get the feeling that those decisions are essentially a

bottom brain process he's playing out in nature. And I recently became very fascinated by a couple

of plant behavior studies. One was of a pea seedling, which in the lab they planted in a Y

maze. So the pea seedling is planted at the top and then the roots need to grow down. And then at

a certain point, it branches off. And so the root actually needs to decide which direction to grow

which will be more beneficial for it to grow in. And they run different scenarios. One is where

they have a dish of water at the end of one tube and nothing at the end of the other. And the root

can sense that there is water at one end. And so at that decision point, it senses the water and

it kind of makes a decision for lack of a better term to move toward the water And they do this experiment in many interesting ways There one where they actually just play the sound of running water and the root actually grows toward that And so the plants are while much simpler than human processing the plants are running

through a significant level of processing to perceive its environment through sound

through moisture, through chemicals. And so there's this kind of just simple decision of

which way the roots need to go. And then you can go up one level with this example of the daughter

vine, which is a parasitic vine. And if you plant a daughter vine between two plants, one which is

more conducive to its thriving than the other, it will move toward the plant that is better suited

for its needs. And so the daughter vine is a parasitic plant that needs to wrap itself around

another plant in order to survive. One thing that's very interesting about this is scientists

have recently discovered that the daughter vine is detecting the light waves that are traveling

through the leaves. And so the reason we see green when we look at a leaf is because green is the

frequency that is bouncing off of the leaf and the other light waves are traveling through

And so the daughter vine actually has a way to measure the type of light that is coming out on the other side of the leaves

and can measure and determine the shape, the distance from the daughter vine

and determine which plant it is better suited for and grow in that direction in order to get to that plant

And so if you think about human behavior, it's kind of a few levels more complicated

but it's very similar and it's part of the same category, if you will, of decision-making. And of

course, the brain is a very different system from plants and from roots and these other systems

But when you look at these types of behaviors, it's not impossible to imagine that there might

be a felt sense, however basic, however fundamental, of perceiving light waves

of hearing the sound of running water, of course not in our human way

but again in a way that we couldn't imagine, but still has a felt experience associated with it

And so if it's possible that we've been thinking about consciousness the wrong way

that it's not something that arises out of complex processing and is something more basic, something ogous to gravity

where it's more like a field, something that's pervasive, then we can imagine that all types of processing in nature could include some type of felt experience