The Hard Problem of Consciousness | Annaka Harris

So the mystery at the heart of consciousness is why in this universe that seems to be teeming with non-conscious matter, with atoms and electrons and stars and solar systems and all these things that we assume don't entail a felt experience from the inside, they're non-conscious, how non-conscious matter somehow gets configured in such a way as to create a situation where suddenly it's having a felt experience from the inside. Suddenly there's something that it's like to be that matter and that is often referred to as the hard problem of consciousness. Defining consciousness. We all have an experience of consciousness and not only do we all have an experience of it, it is central to everything we know and care about. We can't even quite understand what it would mean to live our lives without it. Everything that we care about, everything we experience, everything we know, we know it through our conscious awareness of it. It is our immediate contact with the universe, with the rest of reality. You can see this just by imagining something that's important to you or even something that's not important to you. Anything that happened to you today, anything you're thinking about, any decision you're trying to make. Try to think about that or try to make that decision and imagine doing that when you're not conscious. You immediately realize that this is where our lives play out. In some sense, this is everything. Our conscious awareness is everything. The fact that it's still so mysterious to scientists and to all of humanity, the fact that it's still one of the great unsolved mysteries makes it something that everyone can be excited about and that inspires awe in everyone. Awe is this feeling that we all enjoy basking in. This is one of those mysteries that is still unsolved and so can still inspire awe in most people who start to think about it and discover how mysterious it actually is. I guess the question for me is, and this is the question that I was left with when I finished writing my book, is, is it possible that consciousness is a much more basic phenomenon in nature and is essentially pervading everything? It's much more like gravity. Not that it's less special than we assumed because gravity is something that's obviously very special in our universe, but it affects everything. The question that I'm still very interested in and think I'll probably always be interested in is, does consciousness go deeper in nature than the scientists previously assumed? Rather than arising out of complex processing in brains, namely, is it possible that it's a much more basic property of the universe? There are felt experiences arising in more systems and organisms than we previously realized. The mystery at the heart of consciousness, and when I use the word consciousness, I'm not talking about higher order thinking or complex thought or things that we think of in terms of human consciousness, but when I use the word consciousness, I'm talking about consciousness in the most fundamental sense, this bare fact of felt experience. If a worm is conscious, if there's something that it's like to be a worm, if there's a felt experience, if there's sentience associated with a worm, and there's no consensus on this in the sciences, but if there is something it's like to be a worm, it obviously isn't planning its day, it's not having complex thoughts. Maybe it's experiencing a very subtle sensation against its skin as it moves through the dirt. We can imagine that that is a possibility. It's possible there's some kind of internal desire to move toward food or away from danger. So when I use the word consciousness in this context, when talking about it as a mystery, it's really in this most basic sense as the fundamental felt experience that we know comes into being in the universe from our own experience and can extrapolate from that. There's no perfect definition for consciousness in the way that I'm using it here in the most fundamental sense. And so the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay titled, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And I recommend this article and I think it's extremely useful here because rather than give a definition, he illustrates a picture of a totally different type of experience than a human experience. There's a German term for this, umwelt, and umwelt is the word for describing the types of feelings and sensations a certain type of organism has. So a bat uses sonar rather than vision, and we can't imagine what that's like. We can maybe get close to it or draw analogies, but a bat is moving through the world using sonar. So it's making sounds, the sounds are bouncing off the walls and the trees and the world, and it gets a picture of its external world in the same way that we get a picture of the external world through vision. But you can imagine that the actual felt experience of that is very different from our experience of using vision. And so when you think about what certain experiences are like, what it's like to be a bat, what it's like to be a bee, um, this gets at the, I think, I think this gets at our intuition for what consciousness is in a more direct way than some of the language does. Making a distinction between consciousness and thought is important because consciousness in the sense that I'm interested in, in the sense that it's a mystery, can exist without thought. It can exist in a pure felt experience. It could exist in a very simple organism that is not capable of thought. But even in our human experience, we know that there can be moments that are without thought, especially if you think of a very young child or an infant, feeling pressure against the skin, hearing sounds in the room before the brain is even able to distinguish sounds and be able to process them and understand the meaning behind them, or what they might represent. The experience itself, the sound of a bell, the experience of seeing green, the experience of heat or cold, those are experiences that are the most minimal ones we can imagine. And there's clearly an experience there. There's clearly consciousness there, and it doesn't necessarily entail thought. So one of the things we feel we need consciousness for is our decision-making process. There's a sense in which we feel like a solid self making decisions, and we don't really get the feeling that those decisions are essentially a bottom brain process that's playing out in nature. I recently became very fascinated by a couple of plant behavior studies. One was of a pea seedling, which in the lab, they planted in a Y maze. So the pea seedling is planted at the top, and then the roots need to grow down. And then at a certain point, it branches off. And so the root actually needs to decide which direction to grow, which will be more beneficial for it to grow in. And they run different scenarios. One is where they have a dish of water at the end of one tube and nothing at the end of the other. And the root can sense that there is water at one end. And so at that decision point, it senses the water, and it kind of makes a decision, for lack of a better term, to move toward the water. And they do this experiment in many interesting ways. There's one where they actually just play the sound of running water, and the root actually grows toward that. And so the plants are, while much simpler than human processing, the plants are running through a significant level of processing to perceive its environment through sound, through moisture, through chemicals. And so there's this kind of just simple decision of which way the roots need to go. And then you can go up one level with this example of the daughter vine, which is a parasitic vine. And if you plant a daughter vine between two plants, one which is more conducive to its thriving than the other, it will move toward the plant that is better suited for its needs. And so the daughter vine is a parasitic plant that needs to wrap itself around another plant in order to survive. One thing that's very interesting about this is scientists have recently discovered that the daughter vine is detecting the light waves that are traveling through the leaves. And so the reason we see green when we look at a leaf is because green is the frequency that is bouncing off of the leaf, and the other light waves are traveling through. And so the daughter vine actually has a way to measure the type of light that is coming out on the other side of the leaves, and can measure and determine the shape, the distance from the daughter vine, and determine which plant it is better suited for, and grow in that direction in order to get to that plant. And so if you think about human behavior, it's kind of a few levels more complicated, but it's very similar, and it's part of the same category, if you will, of decision making. And of course, the brain is a very different system from plants and from roots and these other systems. But when you look at these types of behaviors, it's not impossible to imagine that there might be a felt sense, however basic, however fundamental, of perceiving light waves, of hearing the sound of running water. Of course, not in our human way, but again, in a way that we couldn't imagine, but still has a felt experience associated with it. And so if it's possible that we've been thinking about consciousness the wrong way, that it's not something that arises out of complex processing, and is something more basic, something analogous to gravity, where it's more like a field, something that's pervasive, then we can imagine that all types of processing in nature could include some type of felt experience. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think member's community where you get access to videos early, ad free.