YouSaid · the spoken record

Annaka Harris

lines on the record: 184
first: 2022-10-05
most recent: 2022-10-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Calibrating all the time, but then the participants are suddenly saying, oh, wait, that was so weird. The light flashed before I hit the button. And so these”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Initially, which is that the light flashes right when you push the button. In your experience, nothing is changing. But then they gradually give a delay You've acclimated to that because it was done gradually. If they then go back to the original instantaneous flash, your brain doesn't have time to make the adjustment and you have the experience that the light flashed before you hit the button. And that is your true experience. It's not like you're confused, but that is your brain didn't have time to make that adjustment. You think you're in the same environment. You're pushing the button. It makes the light flash. It's kind of...”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, our brains through binding, the brain notices is able to kind of calibrate the experience you have because the brain is aware that it is its own hand that is causing the light to flash, that there's this cause and effect going on. And so you have this experience of pushing the button that causes the flash of light, which is true and the light flashes. You can start to introduce longer pauses starting with 20 milliseconds, 30 milliseconds going up to, I think, 100 maybe even 200 milliseconds, where if you do it gradually since your brain is making the adjustment, you can introduce a delay. I think it's up to 200 milliseconds. If you do it gradually, you will still have the experience, even though there's now a delay between when you hit the button and the light flashes, you will still have the exact same experience you had.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be about other things, but I was just talking to David Eagleman, who was talking about a very simple experiment, actually, and this kind of shows how your brain is basically always interacting with the outside world and always making adjustments to make its best guess about the most useful present moment experience to deliver. So this is a very simple experiment. This is from many, many years ago. And David Eagleman was involved in this research where they had participants hit a button and that button caused a flash of light.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, putting all the information together to deliver you a present moment experience that is most useful for you to navigate the world. So as I said, I use this example of tennis in my book. So the sights and sounds are coming at us at different rates. It takes longer for a sensation in my hand when I hit the ball with the racket to travel to my brain than it does for the light waves to hit my retina and get processed by the brain. So all these signals are coming in at different times. Our brains go through this process of binding to basically weave it all together so that our conscious experience of that is of seeing, hearing, and feeling the ball hit the racket all at the same time. That's obviously most useful to us. Binding is mostly about timing.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can shift for you while you're doing that, which is probably part of the thing that's driving you crazy. Okay, so I'll start with binding processes and then I'll just give a couple examples. So yes, there's this window where your brain is.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is this period of time and it's depending on the situation and the behavior, it can be anywhere from, it's essentially half a second. There's 200 milliseconds. I actually don't know. I was going to compare it to the timing of syncing film and sound. I don't know if you know this.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are these binding processes. That happened prior to the conscious experience that we're essentially delivered to us by the brain. And so we can get back into this. I can answer your bigger question first, but I feel like for a lot of people to understand some of the science that already is shattering some of our intuitions about the role consciousness plays, I think is a helpful in terms of being able to be open to thinking about these other ideas.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the intuitions I talked about, I mean, I just kind of, I'm taking them for granted that you and everyone knows what I'm talking about, but in terms of the science, in terms of the studies, understanding things like binding processes, understanding just a little bit about how the brain works and as far as we understand, and there's just a ton of evidence now to support that our conscious experience is at the tail end of a lot of brain processing so she tells a story. Yeah, so just a little bit, I mean, I give in the example in my book, I talk about tennis and the binding of the sites and sounds and felt experience of hitting a tennis ball, which in the world are happening at different times. The rates it takes, the sound waves and the light waves and the felt sensation to travel to. Brain are different that”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience things we've never experienced before. But I do think that at some level, yes, we're limited as human beings. We may be able to find some proof or enough proof to at least assume that consciousness is fundamental or who knows one day actually believe that that's the correct scientific view of things and not really be able to get our minds around that or to understand what it means and certainly not to know what it feels like. I mean, we can't we don't even know what it feels like to be other creatures”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many animals use a sense of magnetic north to get around, and it's an intuitive sense. So I spoke to someone who was in this part of this experiment, and it was fascinating to hear him acquire a sense not only that he had never had, but that no human being had ever had. So when I asked him to describe the experience, it was challenging for him and understandably so because it would be like you describing sight to someone who's never seen. But this is clearly possible and scientists like David Eelman and others are working on these. And so I do think it's possible that this line, that this These scientific advancements may actually start to dovetail with. The consciousness research in terms of being able to”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He does work with sensory addition, sensory substitution, and this is going in some very interesting directions and maybe partly answers your question, which is giving humans qualia sensory experiences that we're not wired for, that human beings have never had before. You let me know what you're most interested in hearing about. We could talk about things like the brain port. There was actually a study done. I just talked to one of the participants in the study where they were seeing if they could give human beings an experience of magnetic north. So other animals have this sense that we don't have where they can feel intuitively the way that our eyes work to give us an intuitive sense of our environment. We don't have to translate the information coming in through our eyes. We just have a map of the external world and we can navigate it.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are a lot of places we could go with this? One is there's actually work being done by people like David Eagleman. He's a neuroscientist. I don't know if you know him. You should talk to him for your podcast if you haven't. He's wonderful. Great science communicator. He's someone I interviewed for my current project too. So he's done, this actually, okay, there are many places we can go. One is...”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will say that what I believe at this point, I've been saying 50-50 for a long time, I'd say now it's like 5149 in terms of consciousness being emergent versus fundamental. So I am not convinced of this at all. I'm not convinced that consciousness is fundamental. What I think is there are very good reasons to think it could be. Essentially all of science up to this point has been led by the other assumption, by the first assumption that consciousness arises at some point, namely in brains. And that's where all the science has gone. And I think that's wonderful. And I think it should keep on going. And I actually think that was a more important place to start. I shouldn't give the idea that I actually have crossed over into believing this is the case, but it is the assumption I follow in my work at this point.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But even their theory isn't going as deep as I think we need to go. And it's hard to say how we could actually study this scientifically, but that's part of the reason why I'm such a supporter of IIT and why I'm so interested in what they're doing, even though I think they're wrong, is because they're opening this path. And I think they're getting more people interested. And I think, yeah, it's hard for me to imagine what the science will actually look like”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is What they're working on, I think, is the most important next step forward, which is just even being open to the fact that consciousness goes as deep as particles.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've spoken to both of them. I spoke to Christoph Koch once or twice for this project. I'm working on now. What they're working on is incredibly interesting to me, and I think very important work. However, I think they are also really led by some false intuitions about self and free will. And I think that will be a limit to their work. So we can get into that.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obstacle of wrestling with these intuitions so that it's now being talked about in a serious way, which was the first huge hurdle. But I think a lot more of that has to happen, a lot more of the intuition breaking from the science we already have. I mean, I think we almost need to catch our intuitions up to what we already know and then continue to break through these intuitions systematically so that we can really think more clearly about consciousness. There are a couple of scientists now working on theories of consciousness which do go, they don't quite go to the fundamental level, but they go extremely deep so that something like an electron might be conscious under their theory. This is integrated information theory, IIT with Christoph Koch and Julio Tononi.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it'll be a little bit of both. I mean, I think the science has a very long way to go. And the truth is, I don't even think we can get to the science yet because we have to do this work. And this is why I'm so passionate about this work. And it's really taking hold. I mean, there are scientists, neuroscientists and physicists interested in consciousness and kind of having gotten over the initial”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and that potentially there is felt experience, even though it sounds crazy even to me, that there is felt experience in all matter. And at this point in my thinking and after a few conversations with some physicists, I think if consciousness is fundamental, the only thing that actually makes sense is that it is part of the most fundamental that space time and everything else emerges out of.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's not interested. He's not interested in actually the conversation I would have with him would be very brief because he's just not that interested in this topic. But let's go back to the Richard Dawkins piece because I feel like there's a lot to talk about here in terms of our intuitions about consciousness, what it's doing, why in my book and everywhere I talk about consciousness, I bring it back to these two questions that I think are at the heart of our intuitions about consciousness. And so your questions about whether human beings are unique and special and all of that, I think are interesting questions and something we could talk about. I see them as separate questions from the consciousness questions.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there. And so I think we've made this leap to because we're conscious and because we're unique and special and complex and intelligent in the way that we are and because we don't have an intuition that anything else is conscious or we have no feedback about it, we've made this assumption that consciousness that those things aren't conscious and felt experience does not exist out there in other atoms and forms of life even, but especially not inanimate objects. And therefore consciousness Is somehow tied to these other things that make us unique. That consciousness is. Arises when there is this complex processing, when there is, and there's, we can talk about the evolution argument too, which I think is super interesting to get into, and I'm hoping to talk to Richard Dawkins about this for my theory.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that we don't actually have any evidence that consciousness is complex, that it comes out of complex processing, that it's required for complex processing. And I think we've made this anthropomorphic mistake because we are conscious and it's very hard to get evidence. It's one of the things that makes consciousness unique and mysterious and why I'm fascinated with it is it's the one thing in nature that we can't get conclusive evidence of from the outside. We can by analogy. You know, you're behaving basically the same way I behave more or less. You talk about your conscious experiences and therefore I just extrapolate from that that you're having a felt experience in the way I am and we can do that throughout nature. Well, there's no physical evidence. There's nothing we can observe from the outside that will give us conclusive proof that consciousness.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard to say definitively. I mean, it depends on How you define intelligence and all kinds of things, but obviously humans are unique and capable of all kinds of things that no other mammals are capable of. And there are important differences. And I don't think you need any magical intervention of something outside of the physical world to explain it. And the way I think about consciousness, I actually think it's part of the reason we're mistaken about consciousness. Is because we are But just to finish this point.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that is extremely unlikely. What I think is more possible based on what we understand about the brain is that it Arises in brains or nervous systems. And so then we're talking about flies and bees and all kinds of things that kind of fall out of our Intuitions for whether they could be conscious or not, but I think, especially once you talk about more complex brains with many, many more neurons, when you're talking about cats and dogs and dolphins, it's very hard to see how there would be a difference. Between humans and other mammals in terms of consciousness.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If a worm has some level of conscious experience, it is extremely minimal, something we could never imagine having the complex experience you and I have. Maybe some felt sensation of pressure or heat or something super basic, right? So there's this range or even if you just think of an infant, you know, like the first, the moment an infant becomes conscious, what that is a very, very minimal experience of inputs of sound and light and whatever it is. And so there's a spectrum of content. There's a spectrum of how much a system is consciously experiencing. But there's a moment at which you get on the spectrum. And that's, and I truly believe that piece of it is binary. So if there's no conscious experience, there is no consciousness. You can't say consciousness is there, it just hasn't lit its flame yet. If consciousness is there, there's an experience there.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Organism is able to reveal. I don't think we can look at consciousness that way. I don't think, I mean, many people like to try to make that argument that it's a spectrum. Why do we have to say all or nothing? Maybe. And I agree that I actually think it is a spectrum, but it's a spectrum of content, not of consciousness itself.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say one is some also. We either need an explanation for why there's non-conscious matter in the universe and then something happens for consciousness to come into being. Or it's part of the fundamental nature of reality.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Answer isn't none, so the answer has to be all worsome. And this is a starting assumption that you're really kind of forced and that it's all worsome.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're really only to broadly speaking, they're really only too assumptions to make here. And the first one is the one that science has taken and that I have for most of my career as well. And that in many ways makes the most sense, which is electrons aren't conscious, tables aren't. There's no felt experience there. But at a certain point in complex processing, that processing entails an experience of being that processing. Now that's just a fascinating fact all on its own, and I love to spend time thinking about that. But so the question is, does consciousness arise at some point? Are some of these collections of atoms conscious? Or are all of them? Because we know the answer isn't none. You know, I know that I'm at least having a conscious experience. I know that conscious experiences exist in the universe. And so the end.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's a question. Take one step back. We look out at the universe. At this point in our scientific understanding, we know that essentially we're all made of the same ingredients, right? Atoms in the universe doing their thing. They find themselves in different configurations based on the laws of physics. And then the question is, if we look out at all of the configurations of atoms in the universe and ask which of these entail conscious experiences, which of these have a felt experience of being the matter they are?”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, then, I mean, so I have to get clear on what you're asking. So, are you Are you coming from a place of wondering if we are the only conscious mammals? You really think that's a question?”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I've been involved a lot in the science writing and how the media portrays. So one of scientists, the scientific community's greatest frustration is how their work gets presented in the media. And a lot of the time, that is the, I would say that's the main frustration is there's some new breakthrough. There's something, and the scientists will be saying, we're not sure. It's going to take five years. And no one likes to write a story about something that may or may not be true. They think it's true. They're going to take five years testing it. And so the headline will be neuroscientists discovered, you know, they want this sensational. And so I think the public often gets the false impression that the scientists are arrogant. And I really don't find that to be the case. And I've worked with all kinds of people. Artists and”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will say that the scientists I know and some of them are very well known, very famous scientists are the least arrogant people I've ever met. That scientists in general. Their personalities are more open, more humble, more likely to say they just”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like mainstream science has never been mainstream, and it's always a struggle for science to become mainstream. It's part of the reason why I started doing the work I did actually, helping scientists make their work more accessible, is that it's usually not. It's usually not.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“counterintuitive ideas it's a it's a close it's a very closed way of viewing things Saying it's actually not the way you feel, there's information that tells us there's something else going on. And that type of person will say, no, it's the way it feels to me.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very interested in why they're so compelling to some people and not others. I feel like there must be some difference that at some point we'll be able to discover.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are more susceptible to being destabilized by this type of thinking. And that might be a legitimate concern for some people that kind of being grounded in everyday life is important. For my psychological health, the more time I spend thinking about the bigger picture and outside of everyday life, the more Happy I am, the more expansive I feel. I mean, it feels nourishing to me. It feels like it makes me more sane, not less.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To allow yourself to be curious and honest in your curiosity, I think it's inevitable that lots of ideas and theories and hypotheses will just sound crazy. And that is always how we've advanced science. And maybe, you know, nine out of ten ideas are crazy and crazy, meaning they're actually not correct. But all of, I mean, it's, as I said, all of the big scientific breakthroughs, all of the truths we've uncovered that are the earth-shattering truths that we uncover, they really do sound crazy at first. So I don't think one necessarily leads to a type of mental illness. I see mental illness in a very different category. And I think some people”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've learned so much about the brain. No, and I've had experiences of deep depression and I've struggled with anxiety my whole life. I think in order to be a good scientist and in order to be a truthfully, you know, let's say”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And my aunt, I mean, my own thoughts now, I have to be very careful about the words I choose because, I mean, it's just like talking about the different interpretations of quantum mechanics. Once you get deep enough, it's so counterintuitive and it's so beyond anything we understand that they all sound crazy. Many worlds sound crazy. String theory, I mean, these are things we just cannot get our minds around, really. And so that's kind of the realm I love to live in and love to explore in. And the realm that, to my surprise, my interesting consciousness has taken me back to.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but it's in the format of a documentary, so I'm narrating it and kind of telling the story of what questions came up for me, what I was interested in exploring, and then, you know, why I talk to each person I talk to.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he has a curious mind and he's willing to have these conversations. And I was really interested in understanding many worlds better and if consciousness is fundamental, what the implications are. So that was where I started actually was with many worlds. And then we had conversations about string theory and the holographic principle. I spoke to Lee Smolin.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's my, so at the end of my book, I kind of get to the place where I'm convinced myself at least that this question about whether consciousness is fundamental is a legitimate one. And then I just start spending a lot of time thinking about what that would mean if it's even possible to study scientifically. So I'm mostly talk to physicists, actually, because I really think ultimately this is a question for physics, if consciousness is fundamental. I think it needs to be strongly informed by neuroscience, but it's part of the fabric of reality. It is a question for a physicist. So I speak to different physicists about different interpretations of quantum mechanics, so getting at the fundamentals. So string theory in many worlds. I spoke to Sean Carroll, had a great conversation with Sean Carroll. He's so generous because he clearly doesn't agree with me about many things.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the topic? So I'm working on an audio documentary about consciousness. And it picks up where my book left off. So all of the questions that were still lingering for me and research that I still wanted to do, I just started conducting. So I've done about 30 interviews so far. And it's not totally clear what the end result will be. I'm currently collaborating with Ted and I'm having a lot of fun creating a pilot with them. And so we'll see where it goes. But the idea is that it's a narrated documentary.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really were stuck in the present moment eternally, you'd basically be meditating. And in meditation, this is a very common experience, is losing that sense of self, that sense of free will, that those illusions more easily drop away in meditation. And I would say for most people who meditate long enough, they do drop away. And there's actually an explanation at the level of the brain as well. The default mode network is circuitry in the brain that neuroscientists don't completely understand, but know is largely responsible for this feeling of being a self. And when that circuit gets quieted down, which it does in meditation and also does with the use of psychedelic drugs, and there are other ways to quiet down the default mode network, people have this experience.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My questions about consciousness lead me to wonder if consciousness is a more fundamental aspect of the universe than we previously thought and certainly I previously thought. And so memory, but memory is tied to so many things. I mean, even basic functions in nature. Actually, so the P tendril, as I mentioned, memory comes into play there, and that's so fascinating. And there is no sense of self without memory, even if you're starting from scratch, as you said, with amnesia. If you truly couldn't lay down any new memories, I think you would, then that sense of self would begin to disintegrate. The sense of self is one of a concrete entity through time. And if each moment, if you”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely. Well, and this gets to an interesting point, actually, which I think a lot about, which is memory. And we won't go into this yet, but I'll just plant a flag here that... Memory is obviously related to time and time is something that I'm fascinated with. And for this project I'm working on now, I've mostly been speaking to physicists who are interested in consciousness. And it's partly because of this link between memory and time and all of these new fascinating theories and thoughts around the different interpretations of quantum mechanics and looking at, you know, the thing that I've always been looking for is really the fundamental nature of reality and why”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one is intellectual and one is psychological, really. I mean, I would have to choose the memories only because memories of the past. Only because I have children and a family and it would just be, it wouldn't just be affecting me, it would be affecting them. It would just be too horrible.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there must be a range, but I do think that it's pretty deep. And I think. There's also a difference between the autobiographical me and then this more fundamental me that we're talking about that I'm pointing to as the illusion. So in my book, I talk about if someone wakes up with amnesia, if they have brain injury and suddenly have amnesia and can't remember anything about their lives, can't remember their name, don't recognize people they're related to. They would have lost their autobiographical self, but they would still feel like an eye, they would still have that basic sense of I'm a person. I mean, they'd be speaking that way. I don't remember my name. I don't know where I live. It goes very deep, this feeling, that I am a single entity that is somehow”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source