The Fundamental Mystery of Consciousness Explained

Consciousness may be a fundamental phenomenon in nature, pervading all systems, not just complex brains.

### The Fundamental Mystery of Consciousness: A New Perspective
* 🧠 "Consciousness is everything we know, everything we experience," yet its origin in a universe filled with **non-conscious matter** remains a **profound mystery**.
* 🔍 Modern neuroscience challenges our traditional intuitions about consciousness, suggesting it may not arise solely from **complex brain processing** but could be a **more fundamental aspect of nature**, akin to **gravity**.
* 📚 Annaka Harris, author of "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind," emphasizes that **consciousness encompasses awareness and felt experience**, existing even in simple organisms **without thought**.
* 👶 For instance, infants exhibit consciousness through basic sensations like **pressure and temperature**, indicating that consciousness is present even in the absence of **complex thought**.
* 🛑 The case of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who wrote "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" while experiencing **locked-in syndrome**, illustrates that **conscious experience can exist without observable behavior**.
* ⚠ Neuroscience reveals that our conscious experiences do not necessarily drive our actions, as evidenced by the brain's **binding processes that integrate sensory information** before we consciously react.
* ❓ If our intuitions about consciousness are flawed, we must reconsider whether consciousness arises from **complex systems** or is an **inherent quality of all systems**, prompting new scientific inquiries into **shared experiences** and ethical considerations regarding **suffering**.
* 🌱 Harris invites us to imagine the world differently, contemplating the possibility that **many more conscious systems exist around us** than we currently acknowledge.

- If you think about it,
consciousness is really everything. Consciousness is everything we know, everything we experience. But the mystery at the
heart of consciousness is why in this universe
that seems to be teeming with non-conscious matter
somehow gets configured

in such a way where suddenly it's having a felt experience from the inside? Suddenly, there's something that it's like to be that matter. And there's a lot that's
happened in modern neuroscience that suggests that our intuitions

about consciousness are wrong. 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 in brains, is it possible that consciousness is a much more basic phenomenon in nature

and is essentially pervading everything? So is much more like gravity, then we can imagine that all
types of processing in nature could include some type
of felt experience. I'm Annaka Harris, and I
write about the science and philosophy of consciousness.

I have a book called
"Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind." And I have a docuseries
titled "Lights On." There's no perfect definition
for consciousness in the way that I'm using it here, in
the most fundamental sense.

And so it's useful to use
Thomas Nagel's description from his essay "What is
it Like to Be a Bat?" He illustrates a bat that is moving through the world using sonar. So it's making sounds, the sounds are bouncing off
the walls and the trees,

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.

So 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 awareness,
felt experience, sentience

interchangeably, to talk about this more fundamental
sense of consciousness. And this can exist without thought. It could exist in a very simple organism that is not capable of thought. But even in our human experience, we think of a very young
child or an infant,

we know that there's
still felt experiences - feeling pressure against the skin, hearing sounds in the room, the experience of heat or cold. And there's clearly consciousness there, and it doesn't necessarily entail thought. So the study of consciousness has largely,

if not entirely, been
relegated to neuroscience, which makes a lot of sense because we have assumed that the organisms that are conscious are the
ones that are most like us. And we're complex systems. The brain is the most complex
system in the universe,

that we know of. And so we assume that consciousness arises out of that complex processing. But some of these intuitions
that we're relying on to make that assumption
have been overturned by modern neuroscience and have
been shown to be illusions.

So when we're trying to think more clearly and more creatively about consciousness, there are two questions
that I think really get at the heart of where these
intuitions are misleading us. Number one, is there
any evidence we can find

from outside an organism,
or outside a system, that will conclusively tell us that that organism entails
conscious experiences? And the second question is, is consciousness doing something? Does it serve a function? Is it driving our behavior in
the way that we feel it is?

And our intuitive answer
to both of these questions is a resounding yes. But, surprisingly, it's easier to puncture these intuitions,
or to shake them up, than you might think. Number one, if I go pick
up my friend at the airport

who I haven't seen in years, and I see a big smile on her face and she's running toward me, everything I see in her
behavior in that moment are very good clues that she's conscious. But we know it's possible
for there to be no behavior

coming out of a system, nothing
to detect from the outside when there's a full human
conscious experience present. There was a writer for French Elle, his name was Jean-Dominique Bauby, and he had a condition
called locked-in syndrome.

And this occurs when someone
experiences brain damage, either due to a stroke
or to an external injury, and the entire body becomes paralyzed so that someone is no longer able to move any part of their body,
yet they still retain a full conscious experience.

And he was in this state, although he had one point of mobility, he was able to move his left eyelid. And over time, they developed this technique for him spelling out words with certain patterns of blinks. And he ended up writing a beautiful memoir

titled "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," and it took him 200,000 blinks to write that memoir. It's a great example of a person, an organism, a system in nature that is having such a full conscious experience,

as full as I am having right now with the ability to write and experience the world, but with no ability to move or communicate or exhibit any behavior that would tell us that this person is conscious. And so we can wonder if it's possible

that there are other systems in nature that simply aren't able to communicate or exhibit behavior that convinces us that consciousness is present in them. And our intuition regarding the second question is that, obviously, of course, our conscious experiences are affecting things.

If we encounter a bear or a lion in the wild, the feeling of fear is the thing that gets us to move so quickly out of the way, to act quickly to save our lives. But what we now understand about the brain

is that the experience of feeling fear is actually something that happens at the tail end of a sequence of processing, and that our bodies begin responding and moving to a dangerous situation much more quickly than we become aware of it. This is what neuroscientists refer to as binding processes.

Binding processes take in all of our perceptions, all of the information that comes in through our eyes and ears, through touch, and give us an experience of a present moment. So I often give the example of playing the piano.

If you press down on a piano key, you'll have the experience of feeling the key move down at the same moment that you see the key move down and in the same moment that you hear the tone. When, in actuality, all of these signals

move through the world at different amounts of time to get to your brain. They each take different amounts of time to be processed by the brain. The brain is taking in all of these inputs that are taking different amounts of time to reach the brain

and be processed by the brain, and then deliver them to your conscious experience as one single moment. And so those intuitions that consciousness is driving that type of behavior, we now know to be incorrect. So if the intuitions that led us to assume

that consciousness arises out of complex processing, namely in brains, are misleading us, we really have only two options for a starting place. Some of these systems are conscious, that consciousness arises out of complex processing. Or all of these systems are conscious

that consciousness is fundamental. What would that mean, and what kinds of questions would we ask, and how could we even study something like this scientifically? We might wonder if experiences can be shared between systems. If you think about Albert Einstein and the fact that he had intuitions for space-time

that no other human being had, and it took him more than a decade to explain this intuition
through mathematics and language, and to be able to communicate
what he was talking about to other scientists, let alone start to make scientific progress with it.

Is there some future science
where you might be able to actually share that intuition? We might wonder which types
of systems entail suffering. In terms of ethics, this is something we obviously care a lot about. We know now that when
dogs cry out in pain, 

they're feeling something
very similar to what we feel. And so it'd be interesting
to learn what other types of systems might experience
pain or suffering. Recently, when I was doing plant research, I went for a jog on this hiking trail, 

and I actually ran this
little thought experiment for myself, imagining that
all the plants along the trail were not plants but were
some type of creature feeling the world,
moving through the world. And just that little
exercise gave me a sense 

of how different we
might feel in the world if we understood that there
were many more conscious systems around us than we realized. - [Announcer] Want to dive deeper? Become a Big Think member and join our members-only community. Watch videos early and
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Science is shattering our intuitions about consciousness | Annaka Harris

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Big Think

The fundamental mystery of consciousness and its potential pervasiveness.

Consciousness is everything we know and experience, but its origin in a seemingly non-conscious universe is a mystery.

Modern neuroscience challenges our intuitions about consciousness, suggesting it might be more fundamental than previously thought.

The possibility of consciousness being a basic phenomenon pervading everything, similar to gravity, is explored.

Introduction of Annaka Harris and her work on the science and philosophy of consciousness.

Clarification that the term 'consciousness' refers to awareness, felt experience, and sentience, not necessarily higher-order thinking.

Challenging assumptions about consciousness and its study.

Consciousness is defined as awareness, felt experience, and sentience, which can exist without thought, even in simple organisms.

The study of consciousness has been largely relegated to neuroscience due to the assumption that conscious organisms are complex, like humans.

Modern neuroscience has shown some intuitions about consciousness arising from complex processing to be illusions.

Two key questions are raised: Is there external evidence of consciousness in an organism, and does consciousness serve a function?

Countering intuitive assumptions about observable behavior and the function of consciousness.

While behavior often indicates consciousness, the case of locked-in syndrome shows that full conscious experience can exist without outward behavior.

The example of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who wrote a memoir despite being almost entirely paralyzed, illustrates this point.

The intuition that conscious experience drives behavior is also challenged; our bodies often respond to danger before we consciously feel fear.

Neuroscience reveals that the feeling of fear occurs after the body has already begun responding to a threat, highlighting the brain's binding processes.

Exploring alternative perspectives on the nature of consciousness.

Two options are presented: either consciousness arises from complex processing in some systems, or it's fundamental to all systems.

The possibility of sharing experiences between systems and the ethical implications of understanding which systems experience suffering are discussed.

The example of dogs experiencing pain similar to humans is given, raising questions about pain and suffering in other systems.

A thought experiment of imagining plants as sentient beings illustrates how our perception of the world might change if we recognized more conscious systems.