Challenging Our Intuitions: Annaka Harris on the Nature of Consciousness
Introduction
Annaka Harris is an American author who is known for her book, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. In the video, she says that her writing focuses on the science and philosophy of consciousness.
Image by AI
The title and summary of this video caught my attention in my RSS feed because it reminded me of a book I read last year, The Reality Illusion, by Donald Hoffman.
In Hoffman's book, he suggests that reality - as we perceive it - is an abstraction for reality. According to his work with evolutionary game theory, perception agents that try to approximate reality get replaced by agents that make better decisions faster without trying to approximate the actual nature of their ecosystem. So, Hoffman's conclusion is that reality - as we perceive it - doesn't exist. Instead, what we perceive is an abstraction that is created by some form(s) of consciousness who are acting in a "deeper" reality. He compares it to the way that we access information on a computer's hard drive through the abstraction of windows, folders, and files. Of course, the user interface that we use on our computers doesn't approximate the data on the disk in any meaningful way. It just gives us an efficient way to understand it.
So, this is what I was thinking of when I read this in the video summary:
Modern neuroscience suggests that our intuitions about consciousness are incorrect. And so, it's possible that we've been thinking about consciousness the wrong way entirely, says bestselling author Annaka Harris.
If this is true, then consciousness may not be something that arises out of complex processing in brains, says Harris. Consciousness could be a much more basic phenomenon in nature, an all-pervading force, like gravity.
It turns out that Harris didn't run quite as far as Hoffman with the claims she made in the video, but there were some commonalities. You may want to listen to this video before proceeding.
Consciousness defined
In defining consciousness, Harris borrowed from Thomas Nagel in What is it like to be a bat?. In this thought experiment, we imagine a bat flying through a forest using its sonar to develop a mental model of its surroundings. Functionally, this is similar to what humans do with sight and hearing, but we assume that the internal experience is very different.
Thus, Harris' use of the term consciousness has to do with awareness, sentience, and "felt experience". She's not referring to higher orders of thinking.
Historically, she says that consciousness has been assumed to emerge out of complex physical processes that are being carried out in our brains. However, she says that modern neuroscience is calling this model of consciousness into question.
Questions about consciousness
In order to elaborate on the assumptions that are being challenged, she raises two yes or no questions which we would intuitively answer with "yes". However, she delves into both and argues that our intuitions might be incorrect.
Can consciousness be observed from an external vantage point?
"Is there any evidence we can find, from outside organism (or system), that will conclusively tell us if that organism entails conscious experience?
In general, when we encounter other humans, or even higher order animals like pets and livestock, there are clues that suggest to us that the beings are conscious. For example, humans smile, laugh, hug, and speak - all actions that reveal our consciousness.
To counter our intuitions, though, Harris discusses the condition of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French writer who suffered from Locked-In Syndrome. After experiencing a seizure, Bauby awoke to find himself paralyzed, able to move nothing but his left eyelid. Despite this disability, Bauby and his speech therapist devised an encoding scheme so that he could dictate the book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with an amazing effort involving about 200,000 blinks.
According to Harris, this example leads us to wonder if there are other systems in nature that are experiencing full conscious experiences but lacking the ability to communicate about it with us.
Related: Coincidentally, I also saw another interesting video yesterday with the similar case of Lev Zasetsky, a Russian man who lost part of his brain to shrapnel during WWII and survived to write about it. The video is: The Man Who Lived with No Brain.
Is consciousness useful?
"Is consciousness doing something? Does it serve a function? Is it driving our behavior?"
As with the first question, and even moreso, our intuition suggests that our consciousness is useful to us as organisms. Harris gives the example of a bear or lion encounter in the wild. It feels as if we encounter the bear, experience fear, and the fear motivates us to run and escape. Harris argues, though, that this is putting the cart before the horse. Our bodies respond and move before we are consciously aware of the threat. She says that this is referred to as the binding problem. She moves onto a simpler, but more illustrative example of the binding problem, pressing a finger on a piano key.
When we press a finger on a piano key, we feel the pressure, we see the motion, and we hear the sound. In our perception all three of those events occur at the same time. In reality, however, the signals don't arrive in our brain at the same time. Instead, our brain "buffers" them, binds them together, and presents them to us as a singular event.
Importantly, this buffering and combination is not a conscious activity. It's something that happens outside of our consciousness.
As with the first example, Harris argues that this act before awareness phenomenon calls into question our intuition about the immediate usefulness of conscious experience.
As an aside, going back to the second video of Lev Zasetsky, one of the things that he described was the tremendous difficulty of living in a world with no ability to connect fragments of perception into a single, cohesive whole, so it sounds like his impairment affected his brain's ability to bind related events and perceptions.
What does this tell us about consciousness?
Against that backdrop, Harris argues that we're left with two options: (i) consciousness is contained within systems and emerges from complex processes; or (ii) All systems are conscious and consciousness is a fundamental property of nature, something like gravity.
If the second possibility is correct, then she suggests some interesting questions that follow:
- How could we study it?
- Can conscious experiences be shared between organisms or systems?
- Which types of organisms or systems experience suffering?
- How do other types of systems or organisms experience consciousness? Plants? So-called inanimate objects?
Conclusion
In one sense, Harris' concept of consciousness as a fundamental property of nature like gravity is more in line with our intuitions than Hoffman's suggestion that our perception of reality is a mere abstraction. At least Harris leaves room for the existence of the physical reality that we perceive.
In another sense, however, her conception is even more expansive than Hoffman's. Hoffman imagines reality as a user-interface that's filled with non-player characters and that only exists when it's being perceived. In contrast, Harris suggests the possibility of a reality that actually exists and is saturated with pervasive consciousness that is hidden from us. Hoffman imagines a reality where perception is central, Harris suggests a reality where perception may be secondary, or even insignificant.
Thank you for your time and attention.
As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".
Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.
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