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 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 Freedom 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.
Can you explain this?
I think this is chapter three.
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.
And that is, in large part, if not in its entirety, an illusion.
So conscious will is an illusion, and then we can try to free will, I would say, is good
shorthand for a process in nature, which is a decision-making process of the brain.
But decisions are still being made.
So there's a, if you ran the universe over again, is there, would it turn out the same
way?
I mean, maybe 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.
How long does that take?
How hard is that?
It 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 importance of shaking up intuitions for scientific
and 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 intuitions.
So 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.
Yeah.
So you have to let go of your intuitions about your own intuitions.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
And that 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 I started, so we're in this journey
together.
Let's go.
So where do we take a step backwards?
Well, I was just, 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 clear 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 in the silence.
Paragraphs.
Quiet paragraphs.
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 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 one 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 two were always side by side and I didn't really connect them until
I was older.
I've always been really interested in just understanding the nature of reality before
I even had the 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 the sort you can do, but that's a really good
one.
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 one is unique and 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'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 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, you mean the earth is not flat?
Did I say that?
Yeah, this is great.
I actually like to think about- Exactly, see, this is why I need to write and not speak.
Well, I actually really like 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.
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 not become intuition or 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, we're in a ball and like that's exactly what you're
doing.
It's a space, it's really humbling 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.
But, 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 going to 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.
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, 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.
And there are a lot of questions.
We have more questions than answers, 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?
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, there were, 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, well, 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 have my intuitions here are, I mean, I'm a human being, it's really, I mean, I approach
it from two aspects from one is a human being and two from a robotics perspective.
And I wonder how big the gap between the two 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, 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
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.
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 p-tendrils.
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, you know, 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.
I think this analogy might be helpful.
But what kind of plant was he working on?
P-tendrils.
So a p-plant has these tendrils, you can picture them, they coil.
So I don't know what year this research was done.
I'm guessing in the 80s.
But p-tendrils have been around long before that.
Yes, of course.
And the research may have happened long before the 80s.
In fact, they might be doing the research on the humans, but that's another story.
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 Mark Jaffe's work, so he cut a p-tendril.
He was curious to see if it could do this on its own separate from the rest of the plant.
So he cut a p-tendril off the plant.
If you keep it in a moist, warm environment, it will continue to behave in these ways, so
it will continue to coil.
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 edge of the tendril, it did not coil.
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 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 the kind of distributed intelligence, because you can separate it from the main
part.
Right.
Like if you chop off a human arm, it's not going to 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 in the correct environment, maybe we just haven't found the environment.
But anyway, that's pretty amazing.
So that's a separate fact.
But anyway, 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 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, that's too complex, 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 on 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 I'm 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 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-
In a way.
Exactly.
So that's where I'm going with this.
Sure.
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, 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 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.
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.
It's a passive aggressive way of telling me I should have offered you some tea.
But yes, go on.
No, I wanted water.
Okay.
All right.
I actually asked for water.
All right, correct.
And you didn't have any free will anyway, so it doesn't matter.
I don't hope you're responsible for any of it.
Exactly.
I was just running an algorithm deterministically.
You give me this decision to make water or tea.
Go back to the p-tendril for a second.
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 two options.
You could offer me water or tea and I could just run out of the room screaming if I wanted
to.
Happens to me all the time.
Never mind.
I don't want to do this.
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 and water.
So you could see that they've experienced with dead fish and they keep swimming.
So the fish is capable of all kinds of complicated movements as a system.
So in any one moment, the river, the full complexity of the river defines the actual
movement of the fish.
Right.
Well, and 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 there's different brain processing in action when I make a decision about water
or tea, then 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, 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 a reflex or something like that.
And so 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 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 two 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.
Like arguing.
About free will.
It was a friendly debate.
I'm going to 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, 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.
It's a road less travel.
That was one 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 onica recommends, you know, why did it get freaked out?
Oh, you mean like in your personal life, like never saying, I, yeah, always, you know,
I always refer to you as the brain and body we call Lex.
Yes.
Well, I don't know.
It's kind of, that's kind of charming in a way.
Alleged brain.
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, you know, 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 really am 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 and you 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 and you.
And is that, or are we, is that fundamental to the human brain machine that we?
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 itself that kind of has
boundaries and is navigating itself in the world.
My guess is that it's, it's an intrinsic part of that's why I imagined that the p-tendrel
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, 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.
I can't speak to it, but I, you know, if, if there were a language that, that framed
who we are differently in everyday language, I mean, in our, in our everyday communication,
I would think that would have an effect.
Yeah.
Language does affect things.
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, yeah, 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.
Yeah, 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, that we're talking about where that I'm pointing to as the illusion.
So in my book, I talk about if someone wakes up with amnesia, if they have a 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.
Can I ask you a pothead question?
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.
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.
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 13 past years or something.
You think you would lose, this is a dark question.
Oh wait, wasn't that the question?
Maybe I misunderstood.
No, no, no, you understood it perfectly, but you don't, 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.
It's the role of the dark.
I mean, it would not in the way that I do.
Right.
So 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.
And we won't go into this yet, but I'll just plant a flag here that memory is, yeah.
These obviously related to time, and time is something that I'm fascinated with.
And for this project I'm working on now, I've mostly been speaking to physicists who are
interested in consciousness.
And it's partly because of this link between memory and time and all of these new fascinating
theories and thoughts around the different interpretations of quantum mechanics and looking
at the thing that I've always been looking for 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 we previously thought and certainly I previously thought.
And so memory, but memory is tied to so many things.
I mean, even basic functions in nature.
So the p-tendril, as I mentioned, memory comes into play there, and that's so fascinating.
And there is no sense of self without memory.
Even if you're starting from scratch, as you said with amnesia, 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 basically
be meditating.
And in meditation, this is a very common experience is losing that sense of self, that sense of
free will, that those illusions 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 at the level of the brain as well.
The default mode network is circuitry in the brain that neuroscientists don't completely
understand but know is largely responsible for this feeling of being a self.
And when that circuit gets quieted down, which it does in meditation and also does with the
use of psychedelic drugs and there are other ways to quiet down the default mode network,
people have this experience of losing this illusion of being a self.
They no longer feel that they're a self in the way that they usually do.
So there's the autobiographical self is connected to the sense of self 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 a question of physics.
I may have said something misleading because I was connecting too many dots.
I have to say I'm misleading.
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're working on a couple of times.
What's that about?
I think you said Ted is involved, you're interviewing a bunch of people.
What's going on?
What's the topic?
So I'm working on an audio documentary about consciousness and it picks up where my book
left off.
So all of the questions that were still lingering for me and research that I still wanted to
do.
I just started conducting so I've done about 30 interviews so far and 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.
And so we'll see where it goes.
But the idea is that it's a narrated documentary, it's like a series, a series, it'll be ten
part series.
It's an unclear or you already know the number of parts, sorry, in my mind, it's a ten part
series, it may end up being eight or eleven or twelve, I don't know why.
Listen, I'm very confident with number zero and one as well.
About ten.
I like the confidence of ten.
So and you're not sure what the title, like not the title, but the topic, will there be
consciousness or something bigger or something smaller?
Yeah, I mean, it's my, so at the end of my book, 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.
So I mostly talk to physicists, actually, because I really think ultimately this is
a question for physics, if consciousness is fundamental, I think it needs to be strongly
informed by neuroscience, but 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.
So that was where I started, actually, was with many worlds.
And then we had conversations about string theory and the holographic principle.
I spoke to Lee Smolin and Brian Green and Jan Eleven and Carlo Revelli, actually, have
you had Carlo on?
No, no.
Okay, he's great also and fun to talk to because he's just endlessly curious, yeah.
I need to do an 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 why
I talk to each person I talk to.
By the way, I highly recommend Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast, I think it's called.
It's amazing.
One of my favorite things, well, when he interviews physicists, it's great, but any topic his
aim is, but one of my favorite things is how fresh he gets with panpsychism.
But he's still like, it's like a fly towards the light, for some reason he can't make sense
of it, but he still struggles with it, and I think that's the sign of a good scientist
who's struggling with these ideas.
I totally agree, and yes, that's what I appreciate in him and many scientists like that.
Who has the craziest, most radical ideas that you talk with currently?
So you can go either direction.
You can go like, panpsychism, consciousness, permeates everything.
Yeah.
I don't know how far you can go down that direction.
Or you could say that, what would be the other direction that there's a-
Well, there isn't real.
The problem is they're all crazy.
They're all crazy.
Each one is crazier than the next.
And my own, I mean, my own thoughts.
Now, I have to be very careful about the words I choose because, I mean, it's just like talking
about the different interpretations of quantum mechanics.
It's what once you get deep enough, it's so counterintuitive, and it's so beyond anything
we understand that they all sound crazy.
Many worlds sounds crazy.
String theory.
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?
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, 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 collective intelligence 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.
I've learned so much about the brain.
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, let's say, 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 9 out of 10 ideas are crazy, and crazy meaning they're actually not correct.
But all of, I mean, as I said, all of the big scientific breakthroughs, all of the truths
we've uncovered that are the 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 am, the more expansive I feel.
I mean, 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, you can be happy and completely...
I guess I don't see mental illness necessarily being linked to truth or not truth.
So we were talking about minimizing mental illness.
But also, truth is a different dimension.
You can go crazy in both directions.
You could be extremely happy, and they are, flat earthers.
You can believe the earth is flat, because 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 figured out the thing that everybody else hasn't figured
out.
I think that's what conspiracy theories always provide people.
Why is it so fun?
It's so fun.
It's...
Except when it's dangerous, but even then, it's probably fun, but then you shouldn't
do it because it's unethical.
Anyway, so...
That's not true.
I'm not a fan of following...
Well, that makes one of us.
No, I don't know.
There is probably a fascinating story to why conspiracy theories are so compelling to us
human beings, as 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 we'll be able to discover.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because some people are just not susceptible to them and some people are really 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, something that seems like crazy.
I see it the opposite way.
Really?
Yeah.
So, you don't see the connection between thinking that Earth is flat and coming up with special
relativity?
Thinking the Earth is flat is following your intuitions and not being open to counterintuitive
ideas.
It's a very closed way of viewing things, saying it's actually not the way you feel
there's information that tells us that there's something else going on.
And that type of person will say, no, it's the way it feels to me.
No, no, no.
But wait a minute.
There's a mainstream narrative of science that says the Earth is round.
And I think a flat Earth, I admire the very first step of a flat Earth.
I don't admire the full journey.
But the first step is...
I 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.
The Earth looks flat, so I'm going to look around here and I...
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?
That's crazy.
Yes.
The truth is often crazier than what the situation feels to be.
A good step is to question what everyone is saying and then you...
I know what you mean, to be skeptical about the...
It's the authority factor.
Yeah.
But I think that...
And the authority is not in some kind of weird currents where everyone questions institutions,
but more like the authority of the senior scientists, the junior scientists coming up...
Wait a minute.
Why have we been doing things this way?
And that first step, I feel like that rebelliousness or that open-mindedness or maybe like resistance
to...
Or maybe curiosity 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, there's very little money in science and so everyone is fighting for that
money and they become more and more arrogant and siloed.
I don't know why.
I will say that the scientists I know and some of them are very well-known, very famous
scientists for the least arrogant people I've ever met, that scientists in general, their
personalities are more open, more humble, more likely to 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, 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.
It's going to take five years.
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, they want this 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 taken a strange
change, you've met some incredible people, you work with some incredible people.
So that's the crazy topic of free will.
I mean, I just, we have to link this because I can't.
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
pethandril, 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
this?
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.
At this point in, in our scientific understanding, we know that essentially 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.
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 they're really only to, broadly speaking, they're really only two assumptions to make
here.
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 caught.
There's no felt experience there.
But at a certain point in complex processing, that processing entails an experience of being
that processing.
And 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, 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 that conscious experiences exist in the universe.
And so the answer isn't none.
So the answer has to be all or some.
And this is a starting assumption that you're really kind of forced 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 the flame of consciousness does not start burning until a certain complexity of organism
is able to reveal it.
So I don't think we can look at consciousness that way.
I don't think.
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, but it's a spectrum of content, not of consciousness
itself.
If a worm has some level of conscious experience, it is extremely minimal, something we could
never imagine having the complex experience you and I have, maybe some felt sensation
of pressure or heat or something super basic.
So there's this range, or even if you just think of an infant, like the moment an infant
becomes conscious, there's a very minimal experience of inputs of sound and light and
whatever it is.
And so there's a spectrum of content.
There's a spectrum of how much 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, 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.
And so then we're talking about flies and bees and all kinds of things that fall out
of 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, it's very hard to see how there
would be a difference between humans and other mammals in terms of consciousness.
Was there a difference in terms of intelligence between humans and other mammals?
Sure.
Not by 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 we're confused
about what consciousness is.
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 get evidence, and 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.
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 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 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 other atoms and forms of life even, but
especially not inanimate objects, 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 about this for
my series.
He's not interested in actually the conversation I would have with him would be very brief
because he's just not that interested in this topic.
But let's go back to the Richard Dawkins piece because I feel like there's a lot to talk
about here in terms of our intuitions about consciousness and what it's doing, why in
my book and 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 consciousness.
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 consciousness 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.
That felt experience 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 then 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 in the through our reason alone, like we're going to 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.
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.
And then continue to break through these intuitions systematically so that we can really think
more clearly about consciousness.
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 so that something
like an electron might be conscious under their theory.
This is integrated information theory, IIT with Kristoff Koch and Giulio Tononi.
I've spoken to both of them.
I spoke to Kristoff Koch once or twice for this project I'm working on now.
What they're working on is incredibly interesting to me and I think very important work.
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.
Let's go.
Kristoff Koch.
Let me just go with my thought, 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.
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, is because they're opening this path.
And I think they're getting more people interested and I think, yeah, it'll be, it'll be, it's
hard for me to imagine what the science will actually look like.
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, time, all those kinds
of things emerge from that.
I will say that what I believe at this point, I've been saying 50-50 for a long time, I
would say now it's like 50-149 in terms of consciousness being emergent versus fundamental.
So 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 shouldn't give the idea that
I actually have crossed over into believing this is the case.
But 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, there's a subjective experience.
Do we, if consciousness permeates all matter, it's fundamental, is that going to be somehow,
is our current intuition about consciousness like the very tiny subset of what consciousness
actually is?
So we have our intuitions about personal experiences, like what it feels like, what it tastes to
eat at cookie or something like that.
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?
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 is actually work being done by people like David Eagleman.
He's a neuroscientist.
I don't know if you know him.
Yeah.
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 current project too.
So he's done, this is 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 interesting directions and maybe partly answers your question,
which is giving humans qualia, sensory experiences that we're not wired for, that human means
have never had before.
You let me know what you're most interested in hearing about.
We could talk about things like the brain port.
There was 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 sense 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 get around and it's an intuitive sense.
So I spoke to someone who was in this part of this experiment 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.
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 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 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.
I don't know what it's like to be you.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess that's what empathy is about.
That's what I tried to exercise is try to imagine what it's like to be other people.
And then you're doing that even farther with p-tendrils, 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'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, understanding things like binding processes, understanding just a little bit
about how the brain works and as far as we understand, and there's just a ton of evidence
now to support that our conscious experience is at the tail end of a lot of brain processing.
So she tells a story.
Yeah.
So just a little bit, I mean, I give, in the example in my book, 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 rates, it takes the sound waves and the
light waves and 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 the brain.
And so we can get back into this.
I can answer your bigger question first, but I feel like for a lot of people to understand
some of the 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?
I mean, this connects to conscious will too, our experience of free will.
Yeah.
I mean, there is this period of time and it's, depending on the situation and the behavior,
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 syncing film and sound.
I don't know if you know this data.
Yeah, unfortunately, I know this very well.
You do?
The film and sound?
Yeah.
Yes.
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 silence of it.
There's been so much pain on this one point.
Sorry.
So much suffering.
I had no idea.
So, I mean, yeah, I did a lot of algorithms on automatic synchronization of audio and
video and all these kinds of things.
I know this well.
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 and it, you can go nuts trying to see if something is in sync or not.
Is it in sync or not?
Well, also, you know.
Am I out of sync right now?
Your brain is constantly making adjustments and so it can shift for you while you're
doing that, which is probably part of the thing that's driving you crazy.
Okay.
So, I'll start with binding processes and then I'll just give a couple of examples.
So yes, there's this window where your brain is essentially putting all of the information
together to deliver you a present moment experience that is most useful for you to navigate the
world.
So as I said, I use this example of tennis in my book.
So the sights and sounds are coming at us at different rates.
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 signals are coming in at different times.
Our brains go through this process of binding to basically weave it all together so that
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 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 and David Eagleman
was involved in this research where they had participants hit a button and that button
caused a flash of light.
So our brains through binding, the brain it notices 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 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 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 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 participants are suddenly saying oh wait that was so weird the light flashed
before I hit the button and so these types of crazy they built a 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.
Conscious will.
Conscious will.
Yeah and just in general 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 there are studies that are more controversial and I don't usually
like to cite them although if you want to talk about them we can they're super interesting
and intuition shattering but there are 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 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 and nature which is kind of my my primary passion 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 I you know I've heard people say as talked about 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 it's in a molecular biologist that would be the one
who would understand how we experience chocolate yeah but anyway if the point stands 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 for these illusions like free will and self the reverse
is true I actually think they can give us there are reasons and bases for feeling more
connected to each other and to the universe for spiritual experiences for 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 actually think these realizations can be extremely
helpful to people well it's like realizing that the universe doesn't rotate around earth
the earth is not the center the universe is a really challenging thought well and 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 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 response to inspire creativity and curiosity and awe and all of these things
that are so useful for human well-being where's the source of meaning when you're not the
center of the universe when the you doesn't even exist that even you doesn't 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
you know 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 in some sense
it goes so deep that it's as if the eye is separate from the physical world and that
separation 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 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 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 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 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 many positive psychological states are framed and so there's that piece of it.
There is something so there's one giant hug with the universe everything in it but there
is some sense in which we attach the search for meaning with the eye, with the ego and
almost seem like life is meaningless. Our existence, my existence is meaningless.
I think you can go there under any worldview really 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 with the right framing
and the right context 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. 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
that kind of breaks my heart. I don't because I see this potential for these realizations
bringing levels of well-being that many people don't have access to. I think it's important
to talk about them in ways that override what can be an initial fear or kind of spooky quality
that can come out of these realizations. So at the end of that journey 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've just gotten through the four books if you want to read upsetting.
So my audible is hilarious so it has Conscious in it and then your book and then it has The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder probably the most upsetting
book I've ever read if you want to because it's not just Stalin or Hitler it's Stalin
and Hitler it's the worst hits the opposite of the best hits it's really really really
well written really difficult. I read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and what else Red Famine
which is and Applebaum? Is that hurt? Yeah anyway so those are truly upsetting and those
are a lot of times the results of hiding the truth versus pursuing the truth. So truth
in the short term might hurt but it did ultimately set this free. I believe that and I also think
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
you 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 has struck you how were you able to overcome it? Yeah I mean 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. I think
you know all the positive sides of suffering in that way. I think I'm a little OCD as you
can tell. Hey this whole conversation is hilarious because we're both suffered to some level
of anxiety. Psychology is just laid out in front of us. It's a giant mess. It's great.
It's great. Just trying to organize. Just hold on like the Tom Lee song. But then I
suffered from postpartum depression after both of my daughters after both pregnancies.
That was a very different experience from anything I've ever experienced but clearly
I had a predisposition towards you know suffering from something like that. 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 thought of myself as a very sensitive person and empathic person. I mean I've been in therapy
for 10 years. 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 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 and was going to start tapering
off the medication and in this window where I no longer had postpartum depression 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. It took taking all of that anxiety
away to recognize how much I had been grappling with it my entire life. It first started coming
in the form of realizations like, oh, is this how other people feel? Is this how other people
feel? Is this how that? The things that I just always thought of myself, I'm really
sensitive. I'm introvert. I need a lot of time to myself and all of these things that
I felt like, I mean, it's always very high functioning. In some ways, I was a professional
dancer and I think that was the type of therapy for me. There was the obsessing over the training
and dancing nine hours a day and all of that. I now look back on and see how much that was
therapeutic for me and that I was kind of treating something. It was just this experience
of 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. I became very interested in, I mean, I was
already working with neuroscientists. I was already interested in consciousness in the
brain and this kind of rattled other intuitions for me in terms of how our childhoods shape
who we become. Because I had been convinced my father was a complicated person as you
said before.
That's what I was just going to say again. He was not diagnosed. I think he had borderline
personality disorder and was emotionally abusive. I thought that all of the ways I experienced
the world and all of my anxiety and my sensitivities, 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. Obviously, those things play a part. What I realized after going through postpartum
and then the thing that was extremely informative to me was having my own children because they
were basically living my dream childhood. None of the things that I thought were the
cause of the psychological suffering that I experienced. There was none of that and
they struggle with a lot of the same anxiety and panic attacks. What I realized was how
much we're kind of born into the world with these things that we struggle with and with
our strengths and with all of that. Of course, then if you have an abusive childhood, if
you're someone who tends to be anxious and sensitive and empathic and then you're born
into an abusive situation, that's obvious, terrible combination. I'd never acknowledged
or realized how strong just 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 thoughts
and patterns you tend toward in order to make whatever changes can be made. I do think it's
kind of part of the same process.
Could life have been any different? Do you regret certain aspects of the decisions made
not by you?
It depends on what level we're talking. I think at a fundamental level, I don't believe
anything could be different.
Are you able to think at that level about your own life?
Sure. That's actually part of what I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about the levels
of usefulness of being aware of these different illusions because I would say most of the
time in our daily lives, the types of illusions that I'm interested 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 often use the analogy of living on a sphere. It still feels to
most of us most of the time. Our intuitive sense, we're not thinking about whether the
earth is flat or a sphere but we behave as if it's flat and that makes the most sense.
It would be exhausting to keep reminding ourselves as we walk down the street, it feels flat
but it's not flat. There's just no reason to do it. It's not useful in that moment.
If you're building a house, you can build it as if the world is flat. There are psychological
reasons to bring it into view and maybe even spiritual reasons to bring it into view and
then there's just usefulness. If you're building a rocket to the moon, you better understand
the geometry of the earth. Even if you're flying an airplane, if you're an airplane
pilot, you have to be aware of the truth of our situation. Then I think there are other
places where it's interesting to remind ourselves, it's where I start out my book, just as a
way to inspire awe and to get yourself out of your everyday life and see the big picture
which can be just a relief but also helps you feel more connected to the universe and
to something larger than ourselves. I see these intuitions 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. There are so many levels to it but if I'm thinking about difficult
things that I've experienced, different traumas in my life, when I take a step back and kind
of get this bird's eye view of the mystery of this unfolding of the universe and the
fact that it happened the way it happened and whether it could have happened another
way, there's no going back. That's the way it unfolded. Being able to surrender to that
I think is very psychologically healthy and prevents us from. I think regret is one of
the most toxic loops we can get into. So this is a path to acceptance? Oh, absolutely.
Yeah. Because free will, I think part of the function of the experience of it is learning.
I think we can still learn without being under the illusion that we have free will. So for
some people, depression can destroy them. So how can you think about avoiding that?
Yeah. So I didn't totally answer your question. First is therapy, ways that I have worked
through anxiety and depression. So you're an introvert and a deeply intellectual person
that therapy works for you? To a point. It was very helpful. I mean, I think talk therapy
is one tool and can be helpful for, I mean, it depends on the therapist, depends on the
type of therapy, but I found it to be one piece and probably not the biggest piece actually.
But I think 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. There's another state my brain can be in where I don't have to work so hard to
be okay. Meditation was probably the most, meditation and psychedelic experiences were
probably the most transformative. But a lot of these things, I'm lucky that I didn't,
my anxiety and depression never really gotten the way of my living my life, of enjoying
my life. I mean, there were struggles that made life harder for me. But something like
treatment-resistant depression or severe PTSD, these are things that at this point in time,
based on my understanding, I think once you've tried and the truth is that meditation is often
not helpful for those things, it can actually exacerbate them. 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
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 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 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 of 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 is, again, hard to put into words, but there's this feeling that everything is okay.
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
it was as if I was glimpsing a deeper truth of the world that it's all one thing, we're all connected.
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, that the universe, in a sense, 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,
when people are experiencing those things, the default mode network is more active. And so it's
this cycling and this kind of obsessive cycles of thinking about oneself 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 I may be fudging the data, but it's something like 80% of people who are treated for PTSD
after only one session are cured of their PTSD.
Yeah, the effect stays for prolonged periods of time. That's really interesting.
And addiction as well, which is interesting. That's not something I'm 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
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, many of them, I won't be able to use that audio for a lot of them.
Oh, ask them if they don't have psychedelics?
Yes. And what their experience was, and if that's informed. 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, 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 the nice thing about psychedelics, from my perception,
is that they don't currently suffer from the taboo that weed does. I don't think. So like,
for example, there's some kind of cultural construct about a pod head 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. That's a surprise to me.
Because 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 like
going to Burning Man. It's like an experience that stays with you for a long time.
I didn't realize that understanding had permeated into the culture.
Yeah, that's a good question. If it has or not, because maybe I have a very narrow perspective
of 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 has had its effect, which is hilarious given the effects of weed versus alcohol.
But that's a whole other story.
Have you taken psychedelics?
Yes.
And you've spoken about it on your podcast?
Yeah, yeah. Not a lot. I really want to do a lot more. I've taken mushrooms.
Vaspirations.
Yeah, I mean, because it was such a lot.
And I 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 thing.
It is a treatment for addictions, so.
Interesting.
But I'm almost nervous because every time I've taken mushrooms, I've had a really pleasant
experience. I mean, it's already the thing I feel anyway, but I feel it more intensely.
The thing I feel anyway is 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 that's usually what I'll tweet.
It's like everything is awesome.
And I remember those feelings because sometimes when I feel really down and all those kinds
of things, you remember that 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.
When you feel great, when you're focused, all that kind of stuff, use them well
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,
thinking about consciousness, even meditation. I mean, I got into meditation.
To me, it's interesting. To me, I think a lot of meditators feel this way about it,
but 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
who was drawn to meditation because the experience is one of getting closer to your experience and
asking similarly deep questions. What is time? What does that even mean? What do I mean by time?
What does it feel like? What is a thought is one of the most interesting questions to me.
I mean, how do you meditate? Let's talk about this. What do you let go of time?
Well, I'm not really doing anything. I mean, the exercise is really so simple. It's just
paying attention to your present moment experience. It's an extremely challenging thing to do. It's
not the natural state of the brain. It's an exercise in concentration, which is why athletes
and other people who spend a lot of time needing to focus intensely find it so useful.
I mean, it's really a focus, a concentration practice, 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,
in vipassana, which is what I've mostly been trained in, 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 comes into your experience. And part
of that is the mind, part of it is the external world. So you hear a sound, you think a thought,
you feel a feeling, your cheek is itching, am I going to scratch it? Am I not going to scratch it?
Just like, sounds like the most boring thing in the world. And what's interesting is the
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. It's there. Yeah, I mean, it's a spiritual practice for
a reason. You notice more and more beautiful things about the simpler, simpler things. Yeah,
it's great. I like to do that. I don't meditate. I've tried it a few times.
And I will. But I meditate, I do meditate, but not, I meditate by thinking about a thing
and like holding onto that thing. And just like, it's not, it'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 solve the little puzzle of it, especially any kind of programming or math stuff,
you're holding stuff in your head and you, but don't, don't look stuff up, don't take notes.
You're only allowed to have your mind and that's it. 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 meditation retreat? Is it usually silent
or? It is 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, I've covered five days a long time. It's a long time. Dude, 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.
You should do it. I was the children. Oh, the children. Leaving them for five days and not
speaking and impossible. I've, I've only done one retreat since I had kids doing another one
soon, but only two nights. 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. Yeah. No, I love, I love that. Yeah. Obviously.
I love that. Yeah. I love that. You know, fast, fast for three days. I want to fast for longer.
That's also in a different way perhaps, but it brings you, makes you more sensitive to the
world around you somehow. I'm not exactly sure what the, the chemistry of that is, but obviously
you're, actually it's not obvious because you're not always that hungry, but you're more time slows
down and you feel things. You feel a breeze, all this kind of stuff. It's very interesting.
You've, I think I tweeted something about ideas coming out from, sometimes feeling about
coming, 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, 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. 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 default mode network. And without necessarily intellectually thinking
yourself out of free will, it naturally 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 the thing generating the thoughts.
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 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. 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.
And so 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 of 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, maybe your leg starts to hurt, 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 it all unfold. And there's something really beautiful about that.
Yeah. The perspective you could take on as 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 universe. I'm part of the universe. Yeah. And 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? How much of it is me training my neural network and the ideas of
tens of thousands of other people? And how much is it myself?
You're talking in terms of psychic phenomena, or you're talking in terms of just absorbing
the information of the past and education, and just kind of our collective human projects
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 does feel like intelligence is stored in some kind of distributed
fashion across humans. Like if you take one out, 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 these intuitions that I think get in the way of clearly thinking about what consciousness
is, is that we are the systems in nature that are not at all isolated. And there are the obvious
ways, like if I just stop drinking water, that's going to change the system very drastically.
So there's just the energy consumption, but the fact that we exchange ideas is part of who I am
is everyone I've interacted with. And of course, the people I interact more with have sculpted
me more, but 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 saying you're still making the brain the primary. There could be like
that the brain is what it is because of the social interactions and the social interactions
are the living organism. That's a weird perspective because I don't actually think it's one or the
other. They're both living like cats and dogs. Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit like I have
two children and a lot of people with two children will say like 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 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
Don Hoffman a few times. Yes. In his book, Case Against Reality. Yeah. Many more than a few.
There's a lot of fun ones. Was there one with Sam was involved? 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 on the wall of those discussions, but he wrote a book, Case Against
Reality, makes the case that our perception is completely detached from objective reality.
Can you explain his perspective and let us know? 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
about the consciousness or about reality. About it being fundamental. I think we're both just,
we both agree that this is a legitimate 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. And it's interesting because 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 will really get in the way. When you get into the weeds in these conversations,
it's almost like we need some new terminology because it's hard to know sometimes whether
we're talking about the same thing. 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 Fortimental Reality, he says that's like a complete 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 really good on this subject, 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. I'm sorry. I think he says that he got that term from someone else,
but that's the term he uses. We got every term from somewhere else.
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 based
on these interactions with the outside world. It is in some sense all a controlled hallucination.
And someone like Anil Seth, from the neuroscientific point of view, I actually have a quote here
somewhere if you have any interest in hearing the quote. 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, where physics 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's
some ways in which Don is saying things that- Is he being too poetic about it? Is that the
right way to phrase it? Because he says, it's not that our perception is just a controlled
hallucination. Well- No, it's not. He's saying something more than that.
More than that. That's true. But my point is that a lot of what he's already saying,
on some level, science is already there and could agree with.
Yeah. But not all the way. Because he's saying that the evolutionary process
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. If any version of string theory
is correct, and of course we don't know yet, it's all up for grabs, but the truth is each theory
is weirder than the last. If there are 15 dimensions of space, we're just not wired to be able to
understand the fundamental reality. But I think we have a consistent abstraction that seems to be
reliable, 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 true. It's not just an abstraction. It's false. Because he's saying
there's no reason it needs to be true. It's not required to be true. And in fact,
there's through natural selection, it's very possible to 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.
But the question there is, if that's the case, it's a really interesting thing to think about.
I think the rigor with which he approaches it is really admirable. I do think it's scientific,
but the question for me is, why is it so consistent across all of these organisms?
We all seem to see the table and run into the table.
So what I would say to that, and when I've posed this to him, I really don't want to speak for him,
but 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 holographic principle,
loosely, and actually the holographic principle applies to black holes only.
So there's ADS-CFT duality, anti-decider space and conformal field theory.
Am I getting all these terms right? The terms are right,
but I can't believe we're going there. Well, I mean, this is where I've gone in all of my
conversations with physicists because the idea is, if we just have the basic principle that
reality and all of the information can be contained or 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 actually freaking out because, yes, any theory of modern physics
gives inkling that reality is very weird. Right. And completely from how we experience.
That's one example. So this is an intuition that, for whatever reason, has always felt true to me.
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, too.
Everybody else is crazy, except us. 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 as if I feel like, and this is more how I was thinking of how I felt
as a child. But I feel this way a lot as an adult, too. The image is one of a snow globe
that I'm confined to this snow globe based on my human perceptions, and the truth of reality
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 a moment. It's like
smashing the marbles and seeing, oh, it's not liquid in there like I thought. It's getting this
glimpse of something truer than what we typically experience. I feel like 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 gives us clues to it. So one image I came up with recently,
I actually wrote about this. I have an article in Nautilus about time. Because I was, as I spend
time thinking about what it would mean for consciousness to be fundamental. And at the
same time, I'm talking to physicists about different interpretations of quantum mechanics and the
fact that the ones I'm talking to believe that space and time are emergent and are not part of
the fundamental story. I was thinking about what could time be if it's not the way we experience
it? What could it be pointing to? I'm not the first person to think like this. Many people have
developed different thought experiments around this. I'm not saying this is the way things are,
but this is just one solution is that time and causality 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 where 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 that single pinprick of light that we happen to be inhabiting or that we can
perceive. But the rest of it is there. And so that even though time would be an illusion and
the causality in the way we experience it is an illusion, 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 enough conversations with Don, I think,
to know that he would agree with that, that our perceptions
map onto something. It's just not the experience of it that we're having. So to go back to
the idea that all of reality could be contained in two dimensions and there's something about the
interaction between different points that cause this holograph so that it seems like there's
a three-dimensional world when in fact it's a projection of this two-dimensional surface.
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 posted an excerpt
George Musser wrote a great book, Bookie Action at a Distance. He's a great science writer and he
talks about ways to kind of absorb what this would mean, this ADS-CFT duality. He gives an example
of 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. I don't know if that's... I don't speak as well
as I write. I've written about this in a way that I think is easier to absorb than the way I just
described it. But I think causality is the trickiest one, trickier one. Time is the trick you want to
like. 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 time being emergent is a really trip you want to think about. Also, I wonder if it's possible
at which point the experience of time start becoming a part of the conscious experience
of living organisms. So, is it something that evolved on earth 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. Although not that this is scientific evidence of anything,
but I and many others have had the experience, a timeless, spaceless experience
in certain states of meditation and under the... And that's a still 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 said an experience of being a self is due to memory.
It seems that consciousness and time are inextricably linked, but I think that may be an illusion also.
And when I think about consciousness being fundamental and someone like Max Tegmark,
I don't know 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 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. 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, it makes sense if we're talking about a conscious experience of some sort.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, oh, first of all, Max is great. Man, this is really
interesting to think about how, what is fundamental? It's a good exercise to do in general.
To really think through it. I mean, ultimately, it's a very humbling process because we're probably
in the very early days of... We can't know currently, right? Right, currently. I mean,
maybe permanently, but I remain optimistic. Right. Well, to jump around a little bit,
to jump around a little bit, the Google AI engineer, I'm using the terms from the press,
it's kind of hilarious. Why is this a friend of yours? No, it's not, no, no. But just,
the term AI is really not used amongst machine learning people. Oh, I see. Okay. So, I'm using
kind of Google AI engineer and this is like sentience and chatbot and none of those words
are really used by the people that actually build them. You're much more likely to use language model
versus chatbot or natural language dialogue versus chatbot or whatever and certainly not sentience.
But that's the point. 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 believes that the Lambda One
language, natural language system, achieved sentience. I don't know if you paid attention to
that. I didn't. You didn't. No. But 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 since I've just chosen to stay on the fundamental
channel. I mean, then it's kind of a silly answer because if consciousness is fundamental in the
way I currently think about it, the only way I imagine it working, every physical thing we
perceive is a representation of a conscious experience. So, I mean, yes, that's true of
everything in the world. 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 is it capable of suffering? Is suffering connected to
consciousness? I mean, obviously it is. It's the only way you can suffer is
in a conscious way. Or maybe it's not. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's more connected to self
than consciousness. 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 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 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. I'm definitely interested in ethical questions
for human beings. But I have spent very little time thinking about the implications for other
types of intelligence. I will say that I think the capacity for suffering of a conscious system
goes up with memory and with a sense of self. So, 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 nightmarish as that 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.
There's different measures of suffering. So, having one traumatic event may,
if you erase that one traumatic event, that potentially might have negative
unnet consequences for the growth of a human being.
Yeah, so then 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. Actually, sorry,
I take that back. I actually think you can have a really primitive sense of self without memory.
But an AI that is conscious, that has memory and a sense of self, yeah, that's capable
of suffering, absolutely.
Well, one of the things, because you said you haven't really looked into this area,
because there's so many interesting things to look into, and you're really focused on the
physics side. To me, the neuroscience experiments that you mentioned, where there's a difference
between the timing of things that kind of reveal there's something here. To me, working with robots,
I have robots that are moving around my home in Austin. It's a very good embodied thought
experiment. Here's the thing that looks like it has a free will. It looks like it has conscious
experiences. Then I know how it's programmed. I have to go back and forth. You lay on the
ground looking up at the stars thinking about plants, and I look at a robot like...
Well, you can do this with plants too. There's some complex enough behavior
that looks like free will from a certain angle. It makes you wonder two things. One,
one, is there consciousness associated with that processing? Two, if there isn't,
what does that say about our experience and our circumstance and nature? What does that say?
But yeah, I do that with plants all the time. I go back and forth. But the zombie thought
experiment now, at least for me, is often presented as AI because now that's easier as a robot because
that's easier. I don't know if it's just because it's in pop culture now in the form of films and
television shows, but it's easier to get to that point of 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 joyful experience.
When you fall in love with somebody, the other person is a zombie. You don't know
if they're conscious or not. You're just making presumptions and so on. It says philosophers
will do this kind of thing. They might as well be a zombie or there's no such thing as love.
It's just a mutual calculation. Economists will reduce love to some kind of mutual calculation
that minimizes risk and stability over time. All right. What I want to do with each of those
people is 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 see how they're understanding
of how humble they are by how little we understand. That's the point of the zombie
experiment. The zombie thought experiment. I can't speak for any of them. Empathy for zombies?
Is that the point? No. For me, I don't like spending much time on it. I think it has limited use,
for sure, and I understand 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, 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?
It's essentially what the zombie experiment is. He's over there. He has no conscious experience.
He's acting all we see is what there's no experience there. It gets you to ask some
interesting questions. One is, okay, when it seems impossible, I just think, no, that makes no
sense. I can't even imagine that. Okay, what do I think consciousness is responsible for?
What is consciousness doing in that human over there that is Lex that I can't fathom
all of your behavior and everything that you're doing and about without consciousness?
So it gets you to ask this question. These are the questions I begin my book with.
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 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 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 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 anything, I think it enhances it.
But I don't think they, I mean, it kind of goes back to the levels of usefulness.
Sometimes you want to picture your friends as a plant. It's helpful to appreciate the beauty
that they are as an organism. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. For me, the more time I spend
practicing meditation, seeing through these illusions, 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, 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. But like scientific collaborations like this too,
Dany and Kahneman, Tversky, I mean, most people are not able to do that in the scientific realm.
They create, the more successful you become, the more solid.
No, it's rare. And you recognize it when you have it. When you have a great collaboration,
I mean, in science, but also in other areas. In 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 so great to have, I usually work alone
and it's been wonderful to have a partner. So 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 pilot. I love how you have no idea it's going to turn out. This is great.
Well, I just started working without a clear image of the end result. Although it started
with an idea for a film. I don't know. I guess I have a feeling, I was just wondering if I'd
talked about this with you before anywhere, but probably not. Yeah, because you and I have never
spoken before. No, we just met. We just know each other. You mean you didn't see me when I was
listening to that podcast and had that thought? You didn't hear that thought? I mean, we were
mentioning this offline as a small tangent. 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 think, I don't know, that makes me feel
like we're all connected and you're almost like plugging into some kind of weird thing in the
space of ideas. There's so many things I want to say now, but here's one thing. The way I think
about consciousness, if it's fundamental, 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 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, 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 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 thing with different
experiences popping up. And in that boiling pot is a lobster, which represents the human condition.
The devil? Because life is suffering. I don't know if you've read David Foster Wallace's
book, Consider the Lobster. I mean, the stuff that would do to lobsters is fascinatingly whole. Oh, yeah, no. I mean, that was 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 spent a lot of time
thinking about consumed by and trying not to be overwhelmed by the depth of human suffering to imagine many worlds with is just
infinite suffering. 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.
And I think the awesomeness outpowers the suffering over time. That's nice. I wish I believed that. With memory, as you said, the suffering is multiplied. It's an interesting thought. But with memory, 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, or the way things have always been for for animals and humans, and I think any any conscious life form is, 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 its equivalent experience of suffering.
That's certainly how I feel as well. But I have learned not to trust my feelings. Yeah, well, so, you know, the folks who are religious will ask the question, which I think applies whether you're religious or not, why is there suffering in the
world? Why does it just God allow suffering or those kinds of questions? I think I think it does seem that suffering is a deep part of human history. And if to really think about that part of nature, I mean, part of nature, if feeling good is surviving and
thriving, nothing survives and thrives forever. So you just encounter suffering is just built in. Yeah, death meets us all in the end, and only it's kind of hilarious to then think about most of nation, the cruelty and the poverty of nature, like how
horrible the conditions are for animals and plants and war. It's war, but it's mostly yeah, it's war, but it's also just in 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, which I imagine that animals in the woods are all as happy time notes, like, you have to really consider if you really asked an animal, will they like to sit in a boring zoo?
And be fed away from the wild and nature and the freedom and so on. I don't know how many of them would choose the zoo versus like nature. Anyway, but what's the meaning of life? Let me ask the question. Why?
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 onica?
The meaning of life? Yeah. The why? The why? Why? Is there a why?
It's interesting. I've never been drawn to the why questions. I'm interested in the what and the how. What is life? What is this place? What are we doing? How are we here? How is this taking place? You know, but I mean, if I had to answer, I don't, I guess I don't think that's a question.
I don't, I guess I don't think there is a why, really. It's funny, the quote, the thought that comes to mind is really 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.
I'm going to get it wrong, but it's something like 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's how it's framed in his quote.
Because we are here for that purpose. I think if there is a purpose worth being here for, that's kind of the ultimate, I think. Let me ask you for advice. You had a complex and a beautiful journey through life. You're 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 they can be proud of or have a career that can be proud of, you know, how to pave a path and journey that can be happy with and be proud of?
I haven't really 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. I think career is difficult because in so many 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.
There's no such thing as luck with the free will. Luck is an illusion.
There's no such thing as luck when you believe in free will, right?
That's true.
They're all illusions. I really, 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 out of whatever it presents. That's what's happened to me and I've had such an 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.
And I think for a lot of people, their career enables them the time and the space to experience other things that 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 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, Anika, beautiful mind. Thank you so much for doing everything you do and for sharing it with the world.
And thank you so much for talking to me today. That was awesome. Good to finally meet you.
Great to finally meet you.
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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.