Sam Harris and Roger Penrose discuss the mysteries of consciousness and selfhood.
Is the Self merely an illusion?
Many have sought to divide the self into separate parts. From Aristotle's distinction between the rational and irrational self to Freud's separation of the conscious and unconscious mind, from Kahneman's fast and slow self to McGilchrist's selves of the left and right brain. But critics argue it makes no sense to see the self as divided. From Descartes to Sartre, many philosophers have concluded that to be conscious is to be conscious of something and there can be no further self hiding within consciousness. After all, if there are two aspects of the self does it not require a third to oversee or combine them? Meanwhile, neuroscience has been unable to identify a self at all let alone multiple selves.
Should we give up the idea of distinct selves as simply incoherent? Should we conclude that a single self is necessary to account for conscious experience and to enable responsibility for action? Or are multiple selves a better way to explain the wildly divergent thoughts and contradictory behaviours that we can sometimes exhibit?
Joining us live from the US via Zoom, neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose and director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience Sophie Scott discuss whether the self is divided.
00:00 Introduction 00:33 Sam Harris on the illusion of Self 03:45 Roger Penrose on quantum mechanics and consciousness
And I decided, well, look, if this is a dream, I can walk on the ceiling.
So what I did is walk on the ceiling.
So I said, yeah, it's a dream.
I don't know the relevance of it.
Maybe it wasn't a dream.
Maybe you're in New York and there's some pretty crazy CCTV footage out there of you.
I wouldn't put it past you, Roger.
We have laws against that in America.
Where is that conscious experience happening, if not mine and myself now and yours and yourself
now?
Where is this theater of experience on your view?
Well, we should distinguish consciousness from the self.
In my view, consciousness is the one thing in this universe that actually can't be an
illusion.
Right?
I mean, even if we're in the Matrix, this is just a simulation.
If we're confused about everything, if our physics is fake physics because we're not
in touch with the base layer of reality, if this is all a dream, you know, if you're the
only person who exists and we're all in your dream, no matter how confused you could be
about the nature of reality, one thing you can't be confused about is that something
seems to be happening.
And that seeming is the fact of consciousness.
So I'm quite convinced that consciousness as a concept and as a starting point to just
epistemologically to know anything is foundational.
But that doesn't answer the question how it relates to the physics of things.
Right?
So I think the jury is still out on just how to solve the so-called mind-body problem.
You know, everyone starts there.
If you really try to interrogate this contemplatively, if you learn to meditate or, you know, you're
have some other mode of introspection, you do start as this sense of being a subject
in the head that is now trying to figure out what's real about this sense of self.
It is that sense that is illusory and it's that sense that you connect with what Roger
said about the split brain procedure.
It's that sense that I think very clearly can be divided.
I think when you cut the corpus callosum, which is the series of white matter tracks
that connect the two hemispheres of the brain that occasionally get severed in a surgery
to mitigate grand mal seizures.
When you cut all of those fibers, you are certainly dividing the access that each half
of the brain has to certain phenomenal states, you know, sight, sound, sensations, and also
motor control.
And you do almost certainly produce two separate fields of experience, which are no longer
integrated.
And so as a matter of consciousness, those are now separate, you know, conscious access
to contents.
But I would say as a matter of a felt sense that there's a subject to, I think the question
is probably open whether or not both hemispheres of the brain would form that to precisely
the same degree.
But they're almost different people in the two hemispheres.
I mean, they have different beliefs.
They have different desires.
They can fight.
They can get into a tug-of-war over objects with, you know, the right and left hand.
You know, one subject was embracing his wife while the other with one hand and trying to
strangle her with another.
In any case, yeah, I think the sense that there's nothing lost at the level of consciousness
really if you lose the sense of self, except you lose the sense of self.
And that should give you some indication that it is a, it is itself an object of consciousness.
It is an appearance of some kind, otherwise you could never feel that it could change
or be lost.
Roger, the consciousness is the, if we're going to have a self, it seems like it needs
to like what the fundamental thing is that makes us selves.
You say it's consciousness.
Is that right?
Do you think the consciousness is more fundamental, let's say, than the things described by physics?
Whatever consciousness is, is that it's something beyond the sort of current view we have of
physics.
But it does connect directly with this really ill-understood phenomenon of the collapse
of the wave function.
So there is something which bridges quantum scale to classical scale.
And you wouldn't get a classical world out of quantum mechanics if it weren't for this
collapse of the wave function.
Some people think of it as a sort of fictional thing which comes about because of some conscious
observer looking at the system.
I don't believe that at all.
I think it's a physical process which goes on quite irrespective of whether there are
conscious beings around or not.
Nevertheless, I do think that consciousness is somehow exploiting that aspect of physical
laws that we don't fully understand yet.
And that has to do with the collapse of the wave function, because only there can we see
something beyond a computable behavior.
And so my argument was that understanding things is not a computation, despite what
people who do AI and stuff these days, that there's something other than things you can
put on a computer.
When I say computation, I mean something you can put on a computer.
But there is a limit to what can be achieved by such things.
And what you can do beyond that is what you use your conscious understanding for, which
tells me that there is something beyond the computable picture that we have of most of
physics these days.
And we actually harness that for consciousness.
Now to what extent that answers the problem of the self.
I think from what you just pointed out to me, and I agree, it has something to do with
sewing together on a bead, each one's a bead, and then you have it all strung together on
a string of beads.
And is that whole thing an entity in itself, which is the self in a certain sense, rather
than the individual beads, which would be our conscious experiences any one moment.
Of course that changes from one moment to the next.
