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

“To breaking through these illusions than others for sure, just because of their belief sets, the way they talk. I mean, I'm sure I'm not a linguist and I don't even speak a second language, so I can't speak to it. But if there were a language that... Framed who we are differently in everyday language, I mean in our everyday communication, I would think that would have an effect.”
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 goes very deep. I think it's fundamental, and I think it probably some form of feeling like a self goes as deep as cats and dogs. And it's possible. I mean, of consciousness does go down to the level of cells or however far down you want to take it worms. Or I think any system that's navigating itself that kind of has boundaries and is navigating itself in the world. My guess is that it's an intrinsic part of that's why I imagined that the P tendril would have this feeling. And so, you know, We use the word. I think you're right, first of all, that the way we talk about things affects our intuitions about them and how we feel about them. And so there are other cultures who are more open.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I and you are very useful shorthand, even though at some level they're illusions. They're very useful shorthand for the system of my brain, really and, you know, and my body, the whole system that I as useful for that. But the illusion is when we feel like there's something outside of that system that can intervene, that is free, that somehow free from the physical world. I can have the thought. Yeah, I really not crazy about having intellectual back and forth on Twitter. And then feel like I decide to not follow that thought, right? And the feeling, that's the feeling where the illusion comes in because it really feels as if, sure, my brain had that original thought and then I came in and made a different decision. But of course the truth is it was just further brain processing that got me to decide not to go down that path.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My brain That was one of the things I said to this person because someone chimed in and said, you said I, what do you mean by I? And so actually that's another point I could make, which is First, my response to that was Will people tend to get creeped out when I say the system that is my brain and body that we call Anica. Recommends”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stands outside of the brain processing that can intervene. And that's the illusion. I was tweeting with someone recently, which I almost never do, but we're working in the TED documentary that I'm making right now. We're working on the episode on free will. So I was allowing myself to go back and forth in a way that I don't usually on Twitter. Going to go into the reasons why I'm not crazy about Twitter, but let's leave that for another time. I mean, talk about how hard it is to have this conversation when we have as many hours as we like, you know, trying to do it in soundbites over Twitter.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Already had caffeine today. I don't want more. You know, there are all these processes, things that we can point to and things that we can't, things I'm affected by at a subconscious level. And that is very different from an unwilled action or a reflex or something like that. And so some people, I can imagine, haven't used the P tendril example, but I can imagine they wouldn't like that because the P tendril sounds more to them like a reflex and that doesn't address the question of a much more complex decision-making process. But I think at bottom is what it is. And that's really where the illusion of free will and the illusion of self, which I think is kind of two sides of the same coin, come from. So even when we intellectually understand that everything we're feeling, everything we're doing is based on our brain processing and brain behavior. If you're a physicalist, you've bought into that. Even when you intellectually understand that, we, and include myself in this, we still have this feeling that there's something that's”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and I should also, I mean, this brings up another point, which is that there is a difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior. So, of course, we have reflexes. And it is a different, there's different brain processing in action when I make a decision about water or tea, then there is, you know, if my behavior is forced from the outside or if I have a brain tumor that's causing me to make certain decisions or feel certain feelings. And so the point is at bottom it's all brain processing and behavior. But the reason why certain actions feel willed, there's a good reason why it feels that way. And it's to distinguish our own self-generated behavior based on thinking and possibly weighing the different results of different things.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never mind. I don't want to do this. The fact that the brain is capable, that there's so many inputs and then the brain is capable of so many outputs as a system, what it's hard for us to get our minds around is that it may not be capable of any behavior in every moment in time. So as a system, it's capable of doing all kinds of things. And the point I'm making is that If we could see all of the factors leading up to the moment where I chose water or where I ran screaming from the room, we could, in fact, see that there was no other behavior I was going to or could have exhibited in that moment in the same way that when the P tendril hits the branch, it starts coiling.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You give me this decision, right, to make water or tea. Go back to the P tendril for a second. A p tendril is capable of growing in a straight line slowly or in a coil quickly My brain is capable of all kinds of responses to that question, even though you've given me two options. You could offer me water or tea and I could just run out of the room screaming if I wanted to, right?”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I wanted water. I actually asked for water. You didn't have any free will anyway, so it doesn't matter. I don't hold you're responsible for any of it.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So that, yeah, that's where I'm going with this And when you start making that connection, you can see where there are a few points at which there's room for an illusion to come in for our own feelings of will. So when we move from a p tendril to human decision making, obviously human decision making, human brains are many, many, many times more complex than whatever is going on in a p tendril. I mean, it is the brain is actually the most complex thing we know of in the universe thus far. So there is the genes that help develop the brain into any particular brain, into what it is. They're all the inputs. They're countless factors that we could never. I mean, it may as well be an infinite number of factors. And then in that particular moment, whatever the inputs are to a brain. The brain is capable of almost an infinite number of outputs, right? So if I want to...”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you don't actually need that for this analogy that I'm the larger analogy that I'm getting at, but I think that's an interesting piece to keep in mind that you could imagine that. In nature, if there's a conscious experience associated with a p tendril that at that moment, what that feels like is To start moving in a different way”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a separate fact. But anyway, so if you just use the analogy of a p tendril and if you imagine, which is something I like to do a lot, if you imagine this plant has some kind of conscious experience, of course it doesn't have complex thought. It doesn't have anything like a human experience. But if it were possible for a plant to have some felt experience, you can imagine that when it comes into contact with a branch and starts to coil that that feeling could be one of deciding to do that or that it feels good to do that or kind of wanting. I mean, that's too complex. That's anthropomorphizing, but there's a way in which you could imagine this p tendril under those circumstances suddenly wants to start coiling.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if you keep it in a moist, warm environment, it's not going to reach out for the cup of coffee when you come in with Starbucks.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has a primitive form of memory where it has the sensation and then it holds on to that information. And as soon as there's light, it acts on that information.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One interesting thing, actually, I'll just add this it's not totally relevant, but one interesting thing is Mark Jaffe's work. So he cut a p tendril. He was curious to see if it could do this on its own separate from the rest of the plant. So he cut a p tendril off the plant. If you keep it in a moist, warm environment, it will continue to behave in these ways. So it will continue to coil. He noticed that if he touched one end of it, if he rubbed one side of it, that gave it enough of a cue that it would start to coil. And then he noticed that it needed light to perform this action. So in the dark, when he rubbed the edge of the tendril, it did not coil. In the light it would, and then he recognized this further fact, which was that the P tendril that he rubbed in the dark that was still straight, if he brought it out into the light, and this could be hours later, it would start to coil.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right He tendrils as a system generally there are a few more things they can do but generally they can behave in two ways they can grow in a straight line slowly or they can grow in this coil form more quickly and what happens is when they are growing in a straight manner and they encounter a branch or a pole or something else that it can wrap itself around to gain more stability when it senses a branch there that gives it the cue to start growing at a more rapid pace and to start coiling instead of growing straight. So it has these two behaviors as a system. It's capable of growing straight and it's capable of coiling.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“P tendrils. So a pea plant has these tendrils. You can picture them. They coil. I don't know what year this research was done. I'm guessing in the 80s, but some.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure he did many other plant studies, but this is the one I was reading about. I'm hoping this analogy, I'll just set it up. I'm hoping that this analogy will be something that we can keep coming back to as we move forward because You know, as we shake up our intuitions and get confused, and then we come back to our intuitions and say, no, that just can't be. I think this analogy might be helpful.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Research into AI and just the fact that it's entered our consciousness at the level of stories and film and all of these questions that it's raising is facing us with that it's almost like the zombie experiment is coming to life for us you know we're we're more and more looking at human-like systems and wondering is there an experience in there and how can we figure that out when you were talking about your experience of looking at at robots it reminds me of how i for many years have been looking at plants because the plant behavior and actually this is the example maybe we'll just try it out it may not work this is an example i was thinking of recently because i was reading back on the work of mark jaffe who did this research with p tendrils”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think it already has. And I think many facts that have come out of neuroscience are still barely seeping into the culture. I mean, I think this is going to be a long process. So part of my work is really just looking at areas where we already know some of our intuitions are wrong. Starting to accept them and starting to let them in and starting to ask questions about well, what does this mean then about the nature of consciousness?”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here we are still in consciousness studies pretty stuck, at least in terms of the neuroscience. And so that's why I started thinking more deeply about that. That's why a lot of scientists right now are actually interested in studying consciousness, where it was very taboo before. And so we're at this really interesting turning point. And it's wonderful, but it will require that we shake up our intuitions a bit and reframe some things and look at what the neuroscience is telling us. And there are a lot of questions. We have more questions than answers. But I think it's time, I think if we're going to make progress in consciousness studies, we need to start really looking at the illusions and false intuitions that are getting in our way.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then there's this period of time where we have to grapple with our intuitions and shift the way we frame our worldview and go through that process.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, and I think, I mean, the truth is that when those observations were first made, when the celestial observations were made that revealed this fact to us, I can't remember how long it took, but I think it was close to 100 years before it was actually accepted as common knowledge that we're no longer the center of the universe. Or of course we never were. And that's true almost every time we have a breakthrough like that that challenges our intuitions. There's usually a period of time where we have to, and this is an important part of the process because often our intuitions give us good information. And so when the science goes against, when our scientific observations go against our intuitions, it's important for us to let that in and to see which side is going to win. And once it's clear that the evidence is win,”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I remember it's like the first time I had that feeling of realizing, wow, the truth was so different from what I expected. And I like that feeling. And of course, we need to be able to do that to understand that the earth is flat, to understand the germ theory of disease, to understand long processes in nature like evolution. I mean, we just can never really intuit that we share genes with ants.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and I think scientists and children who will become scientists or just kind of scientists at heart really enjoy that feeling of breaking through their intuitions. And I remember the first time it happened, actually, I was playing with marbles. Marbles have all these different shapes. Each one is unique and it looks like there's liquid inside them. And I remember asking my father how they got the liquid inside the glass ball. And he said, actually it's solid all the way through. It's all glass. And I had such a hard time imagining. It just didn't seem right to me. I was very young when I, but he's a complicated person, but he was wonderful in this way in that he would kind of entertain my curiosity. And so he said, let's open them up. And he got a towel and we put the marbles on the towel and got a hammer and he smashed them all. And lo and behold, it was all.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I see if that makes sense. And then I check it with my intuitions, which is really the scientific process. And I really, in many ways, I feel like I'm a physicist at heart. All of my inquiry, all of my career, everything I'm interested in, actually going back to being a child, is just deep curiosity about how the world works, what this place is, what it's made of, how we got here, just being amazed at the fact that I'm having an experience over here and you're having one over there and we're in this moment of time and what does that all mean? My interest in consciousness really came out of originally an interest in physics. And I guess that the two were always side by side and I didn't really connect them until I was older. But I've always been really interested in just understanding the nature of reality before I even had length.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was going to say, I mean, this leads into the point I was going to make, but what I was going to say is, I mean, also just for me, I feel like I. I'm not as good at speaking as I am at writing, that I'm clear in my writing. And because these topics are so difficult to get our minds around, it's hard to kind of. Get to any real conclusion in real time. It's actually how I started writing my book, was just writing for myself. I decided that I needed to spend some time writing down all of my thoughts in order to get clear about how I think about them.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great, exactly. It's very meta and makes it hard. And it's part of the reason why doing interviews for me feels so difficult aside from the fact that I just have social anxiety in general.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And talk a little bit just because I think the importance of shaking up intuitions for scientific advancement is such an important piece of the scientific process. And I think we've reached a point in consciousness studies where It's very difficult to move forward. And usually that's a sign that we need to start shaking up our intuition. So, you know, throughout history, the huge breakthroughs, the things that have really shifted our view of the universe and our place in the universe and all of that, those almost always, if not always require that we at the very least shift our intuitions, update our intuitions, but many of them we just have to let go of intuitions that are feeding us false information about the way the world works.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How hard is that? Depends on if there are kids around or if I'm alone or if I've been meditating. But what I was going to say actually, I felt like we need to just take one step back.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, right. So, this is where our intuitions get challenged. I've been thinking about some new examples for this just because I talk about it a lot. And the truth is, most of the things I write about and talk about and think about are so counterintuitive. I mean, that's really what my game is, is breaking intuitions, shaking up intuitions in order to get a deeper understanding of reality. I'm often, even though I've thought about this for 20 years and think about it all the time, it's an obsession of mine, really. I have to get back into that mind frame Be able to think clearly about it because it is so counterintuitive.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Convince you that it's not so free, but the decision making process is a process in nature. The feeling our conscious experience of feeling like consciousness is the thing that is driving the behavior. That is, I would say in most cases an illusion. And usually when we talk about free will, that's the thing we're talking about. I mean, sometimes it's in conjunction with the decision-making process, but for the most part, when we use the term free will, we're talking about this feeling that consciousness that we have a self, that there's this concrete thing that's separate from brain processing that somehow swoops in and is the cause of our decision or the cause of our next action. And that is, in large part, if not in its entirety an illusion.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I really think it's important to make a distinction between free will and conscious will. And we'll get into that in a moment. So free will in terms of our brain as a system in nature, making complex decisions and doing all of the complex processing it does. There is a decision-making process in nature that our brains undergo that we can call free will. That's fine.”
2022-10-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source