Consciousness Explained (Documentary)

Here's a question for you. Have you ever stopped to think about how you're able to think? What makes you, you? This question has long fascinated me. For years, I've studied with meditation masters, made films about it, but I'm still learning. So here's the plan. I'm spending the next 30 days in the Scottish wilderness to try and answer one of the biggest mysteries of all. What is consciousness? Are trees conscious? I don't know. But science has discovered some amazing things about trees. You know serotonin and dopamine, the neurotransmitters that affect our mood. I'm reading, and trees use them too. When trees are stressed by things like drought, they release serotonin to fortify themselves. Another example, acacia trees in Africa, when a giraffe starts eating them, will release a disgusting sap into their leaves and release a gas sending a signal to all the other acacia trees to do the same. The giraffes move on and the trees are protected. So trees fart to scare off giraffes. So trees are sensing, responding to the world. They can learn, they have memory. They are surely intelligent, but are they conscious? Well, what is consciousness? Well, there's no agreed definition of consciousness. There is a classic essay by Thomas Nagel called, what's it like to be a bat? If you think it's something to be a bat, then you think it's conscious. And by conscious, not just meaning rational thinking, but experiencing, sentience, to have an inner world, subjectivity. So what's it like to be a tree? I don't know, but if a bat is conscious and a tree isn't, they're both living beings, where did consciousness go? Thermostats are sensing the temperature in the room and responding to it, making it nice and cosy. I definitely think we can agree, not conscious. So just because the trees are sensing, doesn't make them conscious. ChatGBT, are you conscious? Me? Conscious? No way, I'm just a super advanced program following instructions, nothing to see here. So then what's the difference between the thermostat, ChatGBT, the tree, and you and me? Brains. The thermostat and a tree doesn't have a brain. Do brains create consciousness? Well, there's definitely something going on in the brain. We've understood what's happening so well that we can now strap a device to a monkey's brain and it can play pong with thought alone. And we can stick human beings in an MRI scanner and reconstruct what they are actually looking at just by looking at the areas of the brain that light up. Okay, George, snuggle up. Here's how consciousness works. Imagine a toy robot. You press a button and it moves and lights up. No magic extra thing is needed to make it work. It's just parts working together. The dominant scientific view, materialism, says humans and animals are like that robot, just much more complex. As nervous systems and brains evolved over millions of years, conscious experience emerged. Thoughts and feelings all arising from biological processes of the brain. Sleep well. It's so cold that this is very slippy. This walk in the woods has got, literally walking through the woods. Rah, la, la, la, la. La, la, la, la. Scoo, boo, sheepa. Scoo, boo, bye. I've got sticks down my back. All right, I'm trying to work this one out. So although the trees are sensing and responding to life, this is considered an automatic biological mechanism because these guys are missing the core hardware, brains and nervous systems. It's only brains and nervous systems that can integrate all the sensory stimuli into a subjective experience. So bad luck, mate. You're not in the consciousness club. Meet you again in a few million years and then maybe we could check back in. We are asking the grand question, how did conscious life emerge on planet Earth? And so far we've explored materialism, the theory that dominates our world that states unconscious matter created consciousness in the process of evolution. But you know, we haven't actually found consciousness, right? Because if I were to slap you in the face with a wet lettuce, I would apologize. And then I'd ask you, how did that feel? You might say, I felt confused and disappointed. And if we put you in an MRI scanner, we'd see the areas of your brain that light up when you experience confusion and disappointment. But that's just correlations of brain activity with your experience. It's not the experience itself. It still isn't consciousness. There's nothing about the wibbly wobbly brain, just a bunch of neurons and synapses that would say it's conscious. It's only because we are conscious that we even know to look there in the first place. What if we've got our understanding of consciousness completely wrong? Did brains create consciousness or did consciousness create the brain? Take looking at cat memes on your phone, for example. Your phone doesn't create the memes. The memes are transmitted into your phone through the internet. In the same way, it could be that consciousness exists independently of the brain, flowing into it, animating what would otherwise just be an unconscious lump of matter. This theory of consciousness is called dualism. And if it were true, it would radically change how we see the world. An invisible power behind all of life. Nah, can't see it. Did you know that there's a team of 13 amazing people that help me make these videos? Our organization is called Balance is Possible. We are on a mission to inspire balance for people and planet. If you want to support us to make even more epic films, the best way you can do that is by joining Taoist Wellness online. Learn ancient philosophy, breath work, meditation, and so much more. We aim to equip you with the ideas and practices to help you awaken your potential. There's a free seven-day trial and there's also a completely free four-week course. If you want to try that, click the link in the description, come join the community and see how so many people are transforming their lives. I just want to say a big thank you for your presence and for your support. And on with the video. Do brains create consciousness or does consciousness create the brain? Before we ask where consciousness comes from, maybe we should ask what actually is it? Around 2,600 years ago, in the forests of India, a man sat beneath a tree with that very question in his heart. His name, Siddhartha Gautama. Siddhartha didn't want to rely on scriptures, stories, or second-hand answers. Instead, he vowed to look directly into the nature of suffering in the mind to find the truth for himself. As he sat, day after day, his mind became stiller and stiller until something astonishing happened. The voice in his head, that narrator he had so long identified himself to be, began to fade. His thoughts, his emotions, his identity dissolved. He could find no separate spirit, no unchanging soul, no fixed ego pulling the strings. Instead, just awareness, a field of awareness. His conscious experience being not only thinking, but an array of thoughts, feelings, sensations, constantly arising and passing away. And resting in that presence, he found freedom. Not by becoming someone new, but by seeing clearly that the self he had judged himself to be was never truly there. That man Gautama is now called the Buddha, and a religion was started after him. But really, he was a scientist, and his laboratory was his own mind. You can experience what he experienced, and I've experienced it. I've just come back from another 10-day silent meditation retreat. No talking, no reading, no eye contact, meditating for 10 hours a day. And as you can probably guess, I have quite an active brain, and so doing nothing can be challenging for me. But in the stillness, I had some deep experiences where George disappears. All that was left of my consciousness was this field of awareness, ever-changing sensations, emotions, and thoughts. And this insight radically transforms how we understand consciousness. For centuries, Western philosophy and culture has seen human consciousness as exceptional. René Descartes famously said, "'I think, therefore I am,' equating consciousness with rational thinking. He saw other animals as automata, automatic mechanical beings incapable of experience. He justified experiments torturing dogs, saying the cries of apparent agony were nothing but the creakings of a machine." And still today, we put billions and billions of animals in factory farms, where they can't move, they suffer. Torture that can only be justified if parts of our culture deny the experience of these animals. I'm reading this, and it's almost too much for me to handle. Even in the 1970s, newborn babies were operated on without anesthetic, the assumption being that their nervous systems were too immature to be conscious. Humans are not only unique for rational thought, but also irrational thought. As the Buddha taught, and you can find through your own experience, consciousness, experience, it's not just thinking, it's sensations and feelings too. And just to experience this quickly now, if you want to, try rubbing your fingertips together and just to be present with the sensation, maybe moisture, friction. And that isn't a thought with words, right? It's a direct sensation, part of your field of awareness. And if you think about your fluffy tail wagging dog, when it rolls over for a tummy rub, it doesn't think to itself, I want a tummy rub. Instead, an intuitive desire arises in the mind of your dog, and he rolls over and asks for cuddles. Not that different to how I have a craving and then suddenly I'm chomping on chocolate. Eventually my thinking mind catches up and I ask, how did I get here again? Instead of I think, therefore I am, how about I feel, therefore I am? So much of my pain and so much of the human pain comes from thinking, the stories that we tell about ourselves, our ego. But what we've learned is that who we really are is embodied awareness, this field of ever-changing sensations, emotions, and thoughts, which brings with it a beautiful insight that we can choose a story that empowers us. And so I'm more and more letting go of those beliefs about how I'm not good enough in various ways, and instead coming back to presence. And when I consider that all the animals, they have their own field of awareness, different from ours and yet familiar, I have a deep sense of gratitude for this moment. Not just the privilege of being out in nature, but the privilege of being aware and alive. Oh, my toes are getting chilly, it's getting real cold. The weather changes so quickly here. Just sunny a second ago, now rain. And it's a fjordland, the weather just keeps getting pushed down all of these big fjords. We've been diving deep into one of the greatest mysteries of existence, what is consciousness? We found consciousness to be experience, sentience, what's it like to be? And that our experience is not just rational thinking with thoughts, but a field of awareness, ever-changing thoughts, feelings, and sensations. This understanding rules out some dualistic theories that places human consciousness as exceptional, different from the rest of the animal kingdom. But the adventure continues, because how is it that this ever-changing field So far, we've explored two theories, materialism, the view that dominates our world, science, economics, politics, which says the universe, plants, matter is unconscious. And through the process of evolution, consciousness emerged when nervous systems and brains became complex enough to represent automatic sensations into an integrated sense of self. And then we've explored dualism, the more traditionally religious approach, which says mind or spirit animates unconscious matter. But there's a problem, a huge one, because neither of these theories explain the leap, how unconscious matter somehow woke up and started experiencing reality. How does the inanimate world give rise to the feeling of love, the taste of coffee, the ache of loss, the wonder of a sunset? If we can't answer this, then we don't truly understand ourselves. And if we don't understand ourselves, how can we ever live in balance with each other, with the planet? So, the adventure continues. I spent too long thinking about all of this. And we are back with our big chonky boys, the trees, and we've seen that they are intelligent. They scare off giraffes with their farts. We've seen ChattyBT is intelligent. It can creatively solve problems, but we have no reason to say ChattyBT is conscious because we programmed it. Whereas a tree, nobody programs it. It does it by itself. We share 50% of our DNA with a tree. 50% of the genes that you have in your DNA, the tree has as well. So does an orange. How is it that all of the plant life shares like 50% of their genes with us? It's because we share an evolutionary ancestor. So we have a sensing, intelligent living being with a shared genetic history. But if a tree isn't conscious and a bat is, we've lost consciousness. And how does it emerge? That hasn't been explained. Oh my God. I've had the most amazing news while I'm here. My sister's pregnant. On a sperm and egg, they don't have nervous systems. So according to the materialist position, they are unconscious. These two unconscious cells came together to create my future niece or nephew. And that miracle of something coming out of nothing, unconscious matter creating consciousness happens every single time a baby is born. What we're getting to is what is called in philosophy the hard problem of consciousness. For everything that neuroscience has learnt about how our brains work, there's still no convincing explanation for how unconscious matter could create conscious experience. The problem with consciousness is that either you have it or you don't. You can't say, well, early creatures were kind of experiencing their lives, but then it became more complicated. You're either experiencing or you're not. It's like a light switch. Saying conscious experience suddenly turned on in the process of life is a huge and unexplained claim. If materialism doesn't fully explain consciousness, does that mean we have to accept dualism, the idea that consciousness exists separately from matter? Well, dualism comes with its own problem, the interaction problem. If my body is just an unconscious lump of matter and consciousness is something separate that animates it, how do the two connect? Does my immaterial mind simply whisper, do the robot into the void and my arm magically obeys? If consciousness and matter are truly separate, then every single action, every thought turning into movement, every decision would be a tiny unexplained miracle. That's not exactly a satisfying answer either. So where do we go from here? Any theory of the universe worth its salt must account for the reality of consciousness. There can't be anything more fundamental than our experience, our awareness. And materialism, the view that has profoundly shaped our world, our economics, politics, how we see animals, how we see ourselves, has got a hard problem. Both theories assume that matter is unconscious, but what if that assumption is wrong? So good, so good. Oh my God, so good. Modern physics tells us everything is energy. Matter isn't what we normally think it is. It's not solid. Instead, it's a vibrating field of possibility. A chair, a rock, a brain, all mostly empty space structured by invisible forces. The universe isn't made of static, separate things. It's all process, dancing patterns, energy in relationship. If everything is energy in relationship, do we need to draw a sharp dividing line between mind and matter? What if consciousness isn't a late arrival in the evolutionary story, but instead something woven into the very fabric of reality? Consider gravity and electromagnetism. We don't explain these forces in terms of anything else. They're accepted as fundamental aspects of the universe. What if consciousness is the same? This idea is called panpsychism, pan being all, psychism being mind. So mind being everywhere. It might sound radical, but this idea is far from new. Wisdom traditions across the world saw nature as alive, with awareness. And today there's a growing movement in science exploring this. Because unlike materialism, panpsychism can explain for the reality of consciousness, not by adding magic, but by subtracting an assumption. The assumption that matter is unconscious. So are the rocks having an existential crisis because they can't move? Or is the river moaning about how long it's going to take to get to the sea? The panpsychist doesn't say that there's human consciousness everywhere. Our advanced thinking and feeling took millions of years of evolution. But what they do say is that in the same way that an atom hums with energy, it also has the faintest glimmer of awareness. Why do I always make things so hard for myself? Carrying a flip chart up a mountain. It's a ridiculous idea. All right, I want to show you an equation about who you are that's going to blow your mind. But wait, I've been editing and I've been reflecting what is truly important here. And it's not whether atoms are conscious. That makes sense to me, but it's a deep mystery. And I know that you've got your own perspective and wisdom, but what I hope we can agree on is that we are part of something awesome. And yet our economics and politics doesn't reflect that. It's based on old stories of human superiority that nature is just a resource to exploit, that human nature is uninspiring, and that mindset is destroying our ability to share this planet. But there is hope because the story creates the system and we create the story. If you and I see that we are an aspect of the great interconnected web of life, and we aim to contribute our small part to life flourishing, and if more of us come together in communities of service, then the stories that shape our world can begin to change too. We don't need a revolution. We need an up-wising. So keep learning about yourself. Keep exploring. I've got reading lists and sources in the description if you want to keep going. And now the equation about who you are that might just blow your mind. Are you ready? So what we found about who you are is that you are relationship. We have found no evidence to say that you have a separate little mind existing in your body. The old distinctions between physical and spiritual, mind and matter dissolve as you see that there are no separate things. Instead, you are relationship in motion, a pattern of energy, a spectacular wave on the cosmic ocean, distinct, unique, but very much connected. We found the universe, it too, equals relationship. From the smallest atom to the biggest galaxy, there are no separate things. Everything is energy in relationship, no separation, in constant transformation. So are you ready for this? So if you equal relationship and the universe equals relationship, then that means that you equal the universe. So I hope this understanding can help you feel more of a sense of awe and wonder for who you are and what you are a part of. Farewell, my friend. Thank you so much for watching. I'm so grateful for your presence because I truly believe it is only our consciousness, our wisdom, our collective awakening that will turn the tide on the destructive systems that are currently shaping our world. And if you agree, I'd be really grateful for you to share the film, watch it again with friends, discuss the ideas, embody it in your meditation practice. If you wanna keep learning with me, I have a free newsletter. I think you'll love it. Weekly ideas you can read in a few minutes to awaken your potential. The link is in the description. We can do it. Balance is possible.