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2. A Solution to the Combination Problem: http://annakaharris.com/the-future-of-panpsychism
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:53 - Free will
54:10 - Consciousness
1:24:42 - Depression
1:37:59 - Psychedelics
1:45:58 - Meditation
1:50:22 - Ideas
2:14:08 - AI sentience
2:31:30 - Suffering
2:34:26 - Meaning of life

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When we use the term free will, we're talking about this feeling that consciousness, that we have a self, that there's this concrete thing that's separate from brain processing that somehow swoops in and is the cause of our decision or the cause of our next action.

And that is in large part, if not in its entirety, an illusion.

The following is a conversation with Anika Harris, author of Conscious, a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind.

And as someone who writes and thinks a lot about the nature of consciousness and of reality, especially from the perspectives of physics and neuroscience.

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.

First of all, 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 of 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 fine to use that shorthand for that.

Although once we get into the details, I might convince you that it's not so free, but 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 we have a self, that there's this concrete thing that's separate from brain processing that somehow swoops in and is the cause of our decision or the cause of our next action.

So conscious will is an illusion and then we can try to figure out.

Free will, I would say, is good shorthand for a process in nature, which is a decision-making process of the brain.

So there's, if you ran the universe over again, 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, 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 the truth is, most of the things I write about and talk about and think about are so counterintuitive.

I mean, 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 counterintuitive.

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 needed to just take 1 step back and talk a little bit, just because I think the importance of shaking up intuitions for scientific advancement is such an important piece of the scientific process.

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 huge breakthroughs, the things that have really shifted our view of the universe 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, 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.

So You have to let go of your intuitions about your own intuitions.

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 is I took mushrooms just before we started.

We're on this journey together, let's go.

Well, 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'm not as good at speaking as I am at writing, that I'm clearer in my writing.

And because these topics are so difficult to get our minds around, It's hard to kind of get to any real conclusion in real time.

It's actually how I started writing my book, 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, you're in the silence,

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, is just deep curiosity about how the world works, what this place is, what it's made of, how we got here, just being amazed at the fact that I'm having an experience over here and you're having 1 over there and we're in this moment of time and what does that all mean?

My interest in consciousness really came out of originally an interest in physics.

And I guess that the 2 were always side by side and I didn't really connect them until I was older, but I've always been really interested in just understanding the nature of reality, before I even had language to describe it.

You talked about sort of laying down and looking up at the stars, and sort of trying to let go of the intuition that there's a ground below us.

Which is a really interesting exercise, and there's many exercises of this sort you can do, but that's a really good 1.

Well, and I think scientists and children 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 playing with marbles and marbles have all these different shapes.

Each 1 is unique and they're all these...

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.

And I had such a hard time imagining, 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 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 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.

this is why I need to write and not speak.

Well I actually really like, so conspiracy theories and so on.

I really like flat Earth, people that believe the Earth is flat, or not believe but argue for the Earth is flat.

I think- 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.

It's become the mainstream narrative that the Earth is round, where people actually don't, yeah, don't think actually how crazy it is that the Earth is round.

And that's exactly what you're doing, you're looking out at the space.

Because I think the basic intuition, when you're walking on the ground, you kind of, there's a underlying belief that Earth is the center of the universe.

There's a kind of feeling 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.

And I think flat earthers are really contending 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.

And that's true almost every time we have a breakthrough like that, that challenges our intuitions.

There's usually a period of time where we have to, 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 which side is gonna win.

And once it's clear that the evidence is winning, then there's this period of time where we have to grapple with our intuitions and shift the way we frame our worldview and go through that process.

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, where it was very taboo before.

And so we're at this really interesting turning point and it's wonderful, but it will require that we shake up our intuitions a bit and reframe some things and look at what the neuroscience is telling us.

But I think it's time, I think if 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 will, like some of these questions?

Oh yeah, 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, I think this is gonna be a long process.

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, well, what does this mean then about the nature of consciousness?

Let's try to actually get into this question of free will and conscious will.

I have, my intuitions here are, I mean, I'm a human being.

It's really, I mean, I approach it from 2 aspects.

1 is a human being, and 2, from a robotics perspective.

And I wonder how big the gap between the 2 is.

And 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 the human?

We'd like to believe so, but you don't exactly see where the difference is.

Research into AI and just the fact that it's entered our consciousness at the level of stories and film and all of these questions that it's raising is facing us with that, It's almost like the zombie experiment is coming to life for us.

You know, 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?

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.

Because the plant behavior, and actually, this is the example, Maybe we'll just try it out.

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 pea tendrils.

I'm sure he did many other plant studies, but This is the 1 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 as we shake up our intuitions and get confused and then we come back to our intuitions and say no, that just can't be.

So a pea plant has these tendrils, you can picture them, they coil.

So I don't know what year this research was done.

But pea tendrils have been around long before that.

And the research may have happened long before

In fact, they might be doing the research on the humans, but that's another story.

Pea tendrils, as a system, generally, there are a few more things they can do, but generally they can behave in 2 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.

As a system, it's capable of growing straight and it's capable of coiling.

1 interesting thing, actually, I'll just add this, it's not totally relevant, but 1 interesting thing is Mark Jaffe's work.

So he cut a pea tendril, he was curious to see if it could do this on its own separate from the rest of the plant.

If you keep it in a moist, warm environment, it will continue to behave in these ways.

If he noticed that if he touched 1 end of it, if he rubbed 1 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 edge of the tendril, it did not coil.

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 has the sensation and then it holds onto that information and as soon as there's light, it acts on that information.

But also in a kind of distributed intelligence because you can separate it from the main part.

Like if you chop off a human arm, it's not gonna keep growing.

Even if you keep it in a moist, warm environment, it's not gonna reach out for the cup of coffee when you come in with Starbucks.

Maybe we just haven't found the environment.

But anyway, so if you just use the analogy of a pea tendril, and if you imagine, which is something I like to do a lot, if you imagine 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 1 of deciding to do that or that it feels good to do that or kind of wanting.

I mean, that's too complex, that's anthropomorphizing, but there's a way in which you could imagine this pea tendril under those circumstances suddenly wants to start coiling.

So you're saying you try to meditate on what it's like to be a pea tendril, a plant.

So 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, the larger analogy that I'm getting at, but I think that's an interesting piece to keep in mind.

could imagine that in nature, if there's a conscious experience associated with a pea tendril, that at that moment, what that feels like is a want to start moving in a different way.

So 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.

Exactly, so that's where I'm going with this.

So, 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 a 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, 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.

There are 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 I walked in here this morning and you said, would you like water or tea?

And that's a simple decision for me to make.

I think that's a passive aggressive way of telling me I should have offered you some tea.

And you didn't have any free will anyway, so it doesn't matter.

I was just running an algorithm deterministically.

You give me this decision, right, to make water or tea.

A P tendril is capable of growing in a straight line slowly or in a coil quickly.

My brain is capable of all kinds of responses to that question, even though you've given me 2 options.

You could offer me water or tea and I could just run out of the room screaming if I wanted to, right?

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 point 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, we could in fact see that 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 fish in water.

So you could see, they've experienced with dead fish and they keep swimming.

So the fish is capable of all kinds of complicated movements as a system.

But in any 1 moment, the river, the full complexity of the river defines the actual movement of the fish.

Well, and I should also, I mean, this brings up another point, which is that there is a difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior.

And it is a different, there's different brain processing in action when I make a decision about water or tea than there is 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 the point is 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 possibly weighing the different results of different things.

I already had caffeine today, I don't want more.

You know, there are all these processes, things that we can point to and things that we can't, things I'm affected by at a subconscious level.

And that is very different from an unwilled action or reflex or something like that.

And so some people, I can imagine, I haven't used the pee tendril example, but I can imagine they wouldn't like that because the pee tendril 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, 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 2 sides of the same coin, come from.

So even when we intellectually understand that everything we're feeling, everything we're doing is based on our brain processing and brain behavior, if you're a physicalist, you've bought into that.

Even when you intellectually understand that, we, and I 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.

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 we like, trying to do it in soundbites over Twitter.

See, I like how you made the decision now not to talk about Twitter.

That was 1 of the things I said to this person was, because someone chimed in and said, you said I, what do you mean by I?

And so, actually that's another point I could make, which is, 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.

Always, you know, but I always refer to you as the brain and body we call legs.

So I and you are very useful shorthand, even though at some level they're illusions.

They're very useful shorthand for the system of my brain really and my body, 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.

I can have the thought, yeah, I'm 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 the feeling 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 I in you is a, you could say, a culturally constructed shorthand.

So our parents say I in you, I in you, and then we start to believe in I in you.

And is that, Or is that fundamental to the human brain machine?

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 system that's navigating itself, that kind of has boundaries and is navigating itself in the world, My guess is that it's an intrinsic part of that's why I imagined that the pea tendril would have this feeling.

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 belief sets, the way they talk.

I mean, I'm sure I don't, I'm not a linguist and I don't even speak a second language, so I can't speak to it.

But if there were a language that framed who we are differently in everyday language, I mean in our everyday communication, I would think that would have an effect.

I mean, just knowing Russian and 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 in the language.

You could probably have a similar kind of thing within the language in terms of how we talk about I and we and so on.

And I'm sure there's like certain countries or maybe even villages with certain dialects that like let go of the individualism that's inherent.

Yeah, I mean, there must be a range, but I do think that it's pretty deep, and I think there's also a difference between the autobiographical me and then this more fundamental me that we're talking about, or that I'm pointing to as the illusion.

So in my book I talk about if someone 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, they would have lost their autobiographical self, but they would still feel like an I, 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.

You still, it goes very deep, this feeling that I am a single entity that is somehow not completely reliant upon the cause and effect of the physical world.

Would you, Would you rather lose all your memories or not be able to make new ones?

Now I'm asking you as a human in terms of happiness and preference.

You like both, you like both features of the organism that you embody?

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Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality | Lex Fridman Podcast #326