Annaka Harris: Is Consciousness Fundamental?

Posted on by

Annaka Harris is a writer who’s best known for her book, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (2019), which discusses issues such as free will, panpsychism and the hard problem of consciousness. In this interview with Alex O’Connor, she defends the idea that consciousness goes “all the way down” to the level of fundamental particles – although she takes pains to emphasize that this consciousness is pretty minimal: it’s a fleeting, evanescent consciousness without a self, memories or thoughts. She also defends the idea that the entire universe is one vast collection of conscious experiences, and she maintains that the self is an illusion. Viewers are invited to watch the interview and leave their comments on the thread. Enjoy!

My own comments are below:

1. Annaka Harris contends that the belief that consciousness emerges at some level of complexity is tantamount to dualism. I don’t think this follows. The claim that a critical level of complexity is required for consciousness to emerge is no more dualistic than the claim that a critical mass of uranium-235 is required for a chain reaction to occur.

2. Harris claims that “consciousness is what matter is, at bottom” (53:59). At the same times, she insists that for subatomic particles having conscious experiences, there is “no sense of memory, or self, or thoughts” (59:10), and that their consciousness is “extraordinarily minimal” (59:37). I have to ask: what remains of her claim that matter is conscious, if it has no memory? Practically speaking, is there any difference between an experience at instant t that is completely forgotten one trillionth of a second later, and no experience at all? It appears to me that in the end, Harris’s bold claim that “consciousness is what matter is” dies the death of a thousand qualifications, as the philosopher Anthony Flew would put it.

3. Harris makes no effort to address scientific findings that seem to run contrary to her claim that all matter is conscious. How, for instance, would she respond to the discovery that we are completely unaware of much of the activity occurring even in our own brains? Dr. James Rose sums up the neurological evidence admirably in his essay, “The Neurobehavioral Nature of Fishes” (Reviews in Fisheries Science, 10:1, 1—38 (2002)) [bolding is mine – VJT]:

A critical point in this analysis is the fact that a large part of the activity occurring in our brain is unavailable to our conscious awareness (Dolan, 2000; Edelman and Tononi, 2000; Koch and Crick, 2000; Libet, 1999; Merikel and Daneman, 2000). This is true of some types of cortical activity and is true for all brainstem and spinal cord activity. We are unaware of activity confined to primary sensory cortex (Koch and Crick, 2000; Lamme and Roelfsma, 2000; Laureys et al., 2000c; Libet, 1999; Rees et al., 2000). We also have no conscious contact with the massive numbers of neurons in our cerebellum, despite the fact that these neurons are intensely active, controlling many aspects of movement and posture. Likewise, we are unaware of the activity of neurons in our hypothalamus, whose firing regulates our heart rate, blood pressure, and neuroendocrine function. (2002, 15)

What’s more, when we examine the cortical activity that is amenable to consciousness, we find that it exhibits a high degree of co-ordination and complexity:

It is becoming clear that the existence of consciousness requires widely distributed brain activity that is simultaneously diverse, temporally coordinated, and of high informational complexity (Edelman and Tononi, 1999; Iacoboni, 2000; Koch and Crick, 1999; 2000; Libet, 1999). Human neocortex satisfies these functional criteria because of its unique structural features: (1) exceptionally high interconnectivity within the neocortex and between the cortex and thalamus and (2) enough mass and local functional diversification to permit regionally specialized, differentiated activity patterns (Edelman and Tononi, 1999). These structural and functional features are not present in subcortical regions of the brain, which is probably the main reason that activity confined to subcortical brain systems can’t support consciousness. (2002, 7)

I am of course well aware that in the 23 years since Dr. Rose composed his essay, there have been numerous claims in the scientific literature (notably by Jaak Panksepp, Alan Shewmon, Bjorn Merker and Mark Solms) that humans and other animals possess a rudimentary affective consciousness, which is capable of occurring even in the subcortical regions of the brain – in particular, the limbic system and the periaqueductal gray (PAG). Nevertheless, when we examine the regions of the brain that are said to be associated with affective consciousness, we find that these, too, exhibit a high degree of complexity (see also here), albeit of a much lower degree than that typically found in the neocortex. In short: the attempt to divorce consciousness from complexity is fruitless. The discussion taking place among neuroscientists today is hard-nosed and practical: what degree of complexity is required for what kind of consciousness, and where in the brain is it located?

4. Harris denies the existence of a self, holding that the human experience of a “self” merely reflects the continuity of our memories, and that it ultimately boils down to “one conscious experience coming after another” (1:11:05). More boldly, she contends that “all the universe is, is conscious experiences coming into and out of being, one after the other” (1:10:53). That leaves us with the puzzle of why most of these streams of experience that are said to occur in nature are not accompanied by a feeling of there being a self. A tree, for instance, has no ego. Harris herself suggests (1:16:00) that all consciousness has a structure, and that there is a certain structure of consciousness that can generate a sense of self. She acknowledges that the structure which generates the illusion of a self would have to be extraordinarily rich and complex, as well as being able to stretch across time so as to give rise to what we call memories. Nevertheless, she denies the existence of what she calls “a receiver or a generator of thoughts” (1:22:59), maintaining that there’s no “you” giving rise to these thoughts. What I would suggest is that her notion of the self is defective. More than seventy years ago, the Scottish existentialist philosopher John Macmurray argued in his 1953-1954 Gifford Lectures (delivered at the University of Glasgow) that the Cartesian notion of the self as a thinker of thoughts is a radically mistaken one, and that the self is primarily an agent engaging in practical activities directed at other personal agents, rather than an isolated subject theorizing about what it perceives in the world “out there.” In other words, I would suggest that Harris is attacking a straw man. What is more, there is no reason to suppose that if there is a self, it has to be unchanging. For one of the most fundamental features of our experience is the fact that we undergo moral development as human beings. Selves change over time: if they didn’t, we could not grow as persons.

5. At 1:13:00, Harris proposes an interesting thought experiment. It seems possible in principle (and may well be feasible in the future) that I could somehow have access to the experiences that I had when I was a two-year-old child, even though the child who had these experiences is very different from the “me” I am today. It is even possible that a stream of someone else’s memories could be implanted in my brain, enabling me to remember being someone else! Harris contends that this demonstrates the incoherence of the notion of a self. To my mind, however, what it demonstrates is that merely having access to certain experiences is not the same as remembering them. There has to be the right kind of chain of causality, for something to qualify as a memory. (Similar problems arise when philosophers try to specify what kind of justified belief counts as knowledge, in the proper sense of the word, as anyone who is familiar with the Gettier problem will be aware.) Even today, we are familiar with the phenomenon of “false memory,” which can be implanted in people’s minds by certain mentalist techniques. If neurologists of the future succeed in implanting someone else’s memories in my brain, we should be equally dismissive of these “memories.” The fact that people may at times be unable to distinguish true from false memories does not establish that the notion of the self is a myth, but rather, that the self is not the actual memories we have, but what organizes these memories into a coherent autobiographical narrative. The ability to organize memories does not entail being infallible right about their content. As far as we know, autobiographical memory (unlike episodic memory, which is found in many animals) is a uniquely human trait – a point which was not discussed in the interview.

72 thoughts on “Annaka Harris: Is Consciousness Fundamental?”

  1. I just read Harris’s paper (A Solution to the Combination Problem and the Future of Panpsychism) quite carefully, and I still have absolutely no idea why she thinks she’s identified a solution to the combination problem.

    In the abstract, she writes:

    I argue for a new way of thinking about consciousness in which consciousness is not viewed in reference to subjects, and that the concept of a ‘subject’ is borne of the illusion of self. Therefore, we don’t face a combination problem if the notion of a subject is superfluous and consciousness itself is pervasive in the form of a field.

    If consciousness is a pervasive field, what lends it its structure? Why does it become so rich in the vicinity of a human brain if it is so simple and dull elsewhere? Why do so many aspects of consciousness map onto the information processing that goes on in brains?

    She denies the reality of selves, but then writes things like this:

    If two human brains were connected to each other, both people might feel as if the content of their consciousness had simply expanded, with each person feeling a continuous transformation from the content of one person’s consciousness to the whole of the two, until the connection was more or less complete.

    What are these people, if not selves? How is the coalescence of two consciousnesses into one not a prime example of the combination problem? Why does the character of the consciousness change if no combination is occurring? How do we know whether the consciousnesses will merge at all vs remaining separate?

    Let’s stipulate that Harris is right and that the selves do not exist. Their brains still do, and experiences that are associated with one brain are distinct from those associated with the other. Aren’t distinct brains suitable proxies for the nonexistent distinct selves?

    It’s only when you insert the concepts of ‘him’,
    ‘her’, ‘you’, and ‘me’ as discrete entities that the expanding or
    merging of content becomes a combination problem.

    I just don’t see it. Selves are not the only candidates for loci of experience.

    We would expect that the region of space-time occupied by a rock, say, entails consciousness because matter is present there. We can’t imagine what that region of particles feels like (or even that it has a unified perspective at all, which seems unlikely). What we can be fairly sure of, however, is that it doesn’t contain a human-like experience or even a single ‘point of view’.

    If the atoms making up a brain have a unified perspective, why specifically isn’t that true of the atoms making up a rock? Is the complex structure of the brain somehow warping the consciousness field in its vicinity into something interesting? If so, what is the nature and mechanism of that warping?

    I honestly feel kind of ripped off. The paper didn’t come anywhere near to delivering what the title promised, in my opinion.

  2. vjtorley:

    I might also add that even in chemistry, scientists’ success in deriving the properties of substances such as water from those of their atomic constituents has been very modest indeed.

    True, and that’s why we needn’t conclude, from our current inability to explain consciousness as a weakly emergent phenomenon, that consciousness isn’t in principle predictable from the properties of matter. Practical predictability isn’t the same as in-principle predicability.

    In any case, I have to ask: what’s the philosophical advantage in positing that elementary particles are conscious, as opposed to the position that certain complex structures composed of these particles are conscious? Even at the particle level, we still have this property (consciousness) which is not like the other properties (e.g. a particle’s rest mass and charge), and that still strikes me as odd.

    There are places where she seems to be saying that matter and consciousness are separate…

    In the same way that gravity is a two-way street — matter warps space-time and the shape of space-time determines how matter moves — a consciousness field would imbue matter with another property, giving rise to the range of content experienced. [page 137 of the paper]

    …and other places where she suggests that matter is a manifestation of consciousness rather than simply having the property of being conscious. For instance, you quoted her earlier saying

    …consciousness is what matter is, at bottom.

    Maybe her thought is that if matter simply is consciousness, then there’s nothing strange about matter exhibiting the property of being conscious. On the other hand, it raises the question “how and why does consciousness manifest as matter?”

  3. Severing the corpus callosum does not produce two consciousnesses, I’m pretty sure, even though the two hemispheres don’t share new information.

    I’m betting consciousnesses requires the older brain.

    AI developers are working on agents that talk to other agents.

    I keep thinking of the phrase: Society of Mind.

  4. petrushka:

    Severing the corpus callosum does not produce two consciousnesses, I’m pretty sure, even though the two hemispheres don’t share new information.

    Isn’t conscious knowledge part of consciousness, in your view? If one hemisphere possesses conscious knowledge that the other lacks, in what sense do they form a single consciousness?

    It isn’t just knowledge that is separate. Each hemisphere has its own will, too, and they will struggle against each other at times. I remember reading an account of one hand unbuttoning the patient’s shirt while the other was buttoning it back up. Another account where one hand kept lighting a cigarette while the other kept extinguishing it.

    The hemispheres also have separate beliefs. There is a famous case of a patient whose one hemisphere believed in God while the other hemisphere was an atheist.

    If conscious knowledge, conscious will, and conscious beliefs differ between the hemispheres, in what sense do they possess a unified consciousness?

  7. I followed that link, and the key sentence is

    Psychological tests demonstrated a divided consciousness, and two different cognitive systems.

    That aligns with the points I was making above. I’m curious about why you think consciousness remains undivided in a split-brain patient.

  9. keiths:
    I followed that link, and the key sentence is

    That aligns with the points I was making above. I’m curious about why you think consciousness remains undivided in a split-brain patient.

    It’s complicated, and my statement is both true and untrue.

    An AI generated discussion:

    Despite these specific challenges, split-brain patients often feel and behave normally in social situations. They report feeling unchanged after the operation and can respond accurately to stimuli throughout the entire visual field, even when responding verbally or with the right hand. This suggests that split-brain patients do not experience a split consciousness and can integrate information across hemispheres to a degree, allowing for normal social interactions and self-reported unity of consciousness.

    Some things do not lend themselves to pat answers.

    Personal anecdote: I have some interesting features in my vision. One eye is nearsighted, and the other eye has a slight bulge in the retina that causes the image to appear slightly larger.

    Despite that, I see an integrated image, and my visual acuity is better with both eyes than with either separately.

    My eye surgeon (cataracts) said I have a good corpus callosum.

    Regarding split brain people: this is just my guess, but I’m thinking that in normal interactions with the world, both hemispheres interact simultaneously with the limbic system and evolve in parallel. A bit like a RAID array.

  10. I have nothing serious to contribute to this debate, but I do think there is a joke in here somewhere about a split-pea-brained person.

  11. petrushka,

    What AI did you use to generate that discussion? I ask because whichever AI it is, it is missing some crucial facts about split-brain patients.

    It wrote:

    Despite these specific challenges, split-brain patients often feel and behave normally in social situations.

    That’s what you’d expect, as long as the hemispheres aren’t at cross-purposes. When they are, things can get really weird, as in the cases I mentioned above where patients would do things like unbuttoning and buttoning their shirts at the same time or lighting a cigarette with one hand and then extinguishing it with the other, over and over. I guess one hemisphere needed the nicotine fix and the other wanted to quit smoking. IIRC, there was even a case where a patient was attacked by his/her own arm. Those aren’t normal behaviors.

    They report feeling unchanged after the operation…

    That makes sense. Only one of their hemispheres is doing the reporting (usually the left), because that is the hemisphere that controls speech. Its consciousness feels unified because it is unified. The right hemisphere probably feels that way about its consciousness, too, though it can’t report this. What they don’t have is a shared consciousness.

    …and can respond accurately to stimuli throughout the entire visual field, even when responding verbally or with the right hand.

    That is also expected. Each hemisphere gets visual information from both eyes, but from only half of the visual field. In other words, each eye splits its data in two, sending half to one hemisphere and half to the other. Information from the left half of the visual field goes to the right hemisphere, and information from the right half of the visual field goes to the left hemisphere. But eyes (and heads) aren’t fixed, and if they are allowed to move normally, both hemispheres end up with much the same information.

    Note that in the Gazzaniga/Alda video, they have Joe focus on a cross in the middle of the screen. Then they flash an image on one side or the other. It’s only there for an instant, so Joe doesn’t have a chance to move his eyes. Thus only one hemisphere sees whatever was flashed on the screen.

    This suggests that split-brain patients do not experience a split consciousness and can integrate information across hemispheres to a degree, allowing for normal social interactions and self-reported unity of consciousness.

    Again, the reports are coming from only one hemisphere, which is reporting only its own experience, so it isn’t surprising that it reports a unified consciousness.

    Regarding split brain people: this is just my guess, but I’m thinking that in normal interactions with the world, both hemispheres interact simultaneously with the limbic system and evolve in parallel.

    Yes, and that raises an important point. Both hemispheres interact with the lower brain, so there is an indirect path along which information can potentially flow between the hemispheres. It’s just that the massive “cable” that carries information directly from one hemisphere to the other is severed. Also, the operation doesn’t always completely sever the corpus callosum for various reasons (intentional and unintentional). In those cases there is still some direct communication between the hemispheres. Does consciousness remain unified in those cases? I don’t know.

    The key fact for me is that experiments show separate knowledge, separate beliefs, and separate wills for the two hemispheres, and I see no way to reconcile that with a unified consciousness.

  12. petrushka:

    Personal anecdote: I have some interesting features in my vision. One eye is nearsighted, and the other eye has a slight bulge in the retina that causes the image to appear slightly larger.

    Despite that, I see an integrated image, and my visual acuity is better with both eyes than with either separately.

    That actually doesn’t surprise me. Even in people without your retinal bulge, the view through one eye can be vastly different from the view through the other, especially with respect to nearby objects. Yet our brains manage to integrate those views pretty seamlessly.

    An interesting question: How different do the two views have to be in order for integration to fail? I’m sure someone has conducted research on that.

  13. Consciousness must be fundamental or WEF & trans-humanism are dead. It means Klause Schwabs’ empty brain cannot be uploaded to defeat other empty brains of his calibre I don’t have to mention here….

  14. J-Mac:

    Consciousness must be fundamental or WEF & trans-humanism are dead.

    Why? Suppose consciousness is emergent rather than fundamental. How does that undermine trans-humanism?

  15. I have no opinion on the deep mystery of consciousness, but I share with some AI researchers the belief that language fluency does not imply consciousness.

    I guess that means I never really completely bought the Turing test.

    I would not be surprised or shocked, however, if AIs start giving Millennial Man vibes in a few years. Most science fiction gets the future wrong, but this conundrum was foreseen.

    I’ve read that even the AI inventors were shocked by how well LLMs work, and how quickly they became useful.

  16. A new book was released yesterday by (God help us) Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary, titled The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. A relevant excerpt, published at Evolution News and Science Today:

    Editor’s note: The new book The Immortal Mind, by Dr. Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary, is out today. In the late 1980s, early in his neurosurgical career, Dr. Egnor had to split the brain of a young adult patient, Sam, in half (corpus callosotomy). This is a last resort treatment for intractable epilepsy — Sam was having hundreds of seizures per day and splitting his brain would reduce their frequency and severity. But what would it do to him as a person? Would he end up with two different centers of consciousness?

    For centuries, we have believed that the brain is the organ of the mind and that consciousness arises wholly from the brain. With the brain cut in half, how would one hemisphere of the brain know what was going on in the other hemisphere? How could a person really act as a unified individual with the two halves of the brain disconnected?

    Well, I would soon get a chance to find out.

    I was quite apprehensive, but the six-hour operation went smoothly. We opened a window of bone in Sam’s skull, sliced through the membrane that covers the brain, and gently pulled the hemispheres apart, taking great care not to injure the numerous delicate arteries and veins coursing between them or the critical areas on the surface of the brain itself.

    Using an operating microscope to get a brilliantly illuminated and magnified view of the deepest recesses of Sam’s brain, we gently and methodically cut all of the connections of his corpus callosum from the front to the back, confirming with the microscope that his brain hemispheres had been fully disconnected. Six hours later, we replaced the bone on his skull, sutured up his scalp, and brought him to the recovery room. His vital signs were good.

    But Was It Still Sam?

    When I went to see Sam in the intensive care unit the next morning, two small drains channeled bits of bloody fluid from under his scalp, which was bandaged in white gauze. He was drowsy, both from the surgery and from his pain medications.

    “How are you feeling?” I asked cautiously.

    “Kinda sore.”

    I told him the good news. We had succeeded in cutting the bundle in half.

    As we spoke, I glanced at the EEG machine. Still better news: Sam’s brain waves were showing no sign of the seizures that had plagued him daily for most of his life.

    Over the next few days, I spoke with him each morning.

    “Do you feel like . . . yourself?”

    He seemed perplexed by my question.

    “Yes, I do. I feel fine.”

    Despite his severed brain, he moved his arms and legs normally, his vision was normal, and so was his speech. In fact, the only thing different about Sam — aside from the bandage swathing his head — was that he was no longer having major seizures. And he certainly seemed like a single, unified person … He knew that surgery had permanently split his brain into two separate brains, but the only effect he actually noticed was that his seizures were gone…

    Since I operated on Sam, I’ve cared for a number of patients who had split-brain surgery. Like other neurosurgeons, I found no evidence, either from ordinary clinical examination or events in their lives, that indicates their minds were split, even though their brains were.

    * * *

    I am hardly the only specialist interested in the mental effects of split-brain surgery. This surgery led to truly remarkable neuroscience research in the 20th century. Here’s the most radical thing it tells us: Even when the brain is split in half, many important aspects of the mind remain unified. Thus, the mind is something that the brain isn’t.

    That’s pitiful. If Egnor is at all familiar with the split-brain research, he knows that there’s massive evidence that corpus callosotomy can produce two centers of consciousness in the same person. When he asked Sam whether he “felt like himself”, the reply he got was from Sam’s speaking hemisphere. If he really wanted to know whether Sam’s consciousness remained unified, he would have needed to do experiments like Michael Gazzaniga’s, a video of which I linked to in an earlier comment.

    I’m curious about whether he deals with the evidence head-on, but I don’t want to put money into his or O’Leary’s pockets, so I’ll refrain from buying the book. Maybe I’ll borrow it if it shows up in one of my local libraries.

  17. I’m sticking with the hypothesis that the “soul” or seat of consciousness is in the limbic system, in the centers for motion and arousal.

    Way oversimplified, I know. This is not intended as an argument.

    Both hemispheres share the same reinforcement and same emotional stare.

    In ordinary circumstances, they share the same sensory input.

  18. My opinion is just my opinion, but many non-human animals do things that are considered intelligent when done by humans.

    My thought is that consciousness evolved from brain systems that learn by reinforcement. In non technical terms, emotional systems.

    What the “higher systems” add is virtual experience, the ability to playback and simulate experience. A way of rehearsing and testing responses. This allows, for example, learning by watching others, and by noting the consequences of what others do.

    Anecdote: just watched a video of ravens feigning injury after observing that an injured bird was fed and cared for by humans.

    The ability to simulate experience and learn by proxy indicates a level of consciousness.

  19. petrushka:

    I’m still not seeing how you separate conscious knowledge from consciousness. As I asked earlier:

    Isn’t conscious knowledge part of consciousness, in your view? If one hemisphere possesses conscious knowledge that the other lacks, in what sense do they form a single consciousness?

    And:

    If conscious knowledge, conscious will, and conscious beliefs differ between the hemispheres, in what sense do they possess a unified consciousness?

  20. petrushka:

    Anecdote: just watched a video of ravens feigning injury after observing that an injured bird was fed and cared for by humans.

    The ability to simulate experience and learn by proxy indicates a level of consciousness.

    Reminds me of something I ran across yesterday:

    Cockatoos start sipping from Sydney’s drinking fountains after mastering series of complex moves.

    Experts think the clever birds learned the technique by watching people and then trying it themselves

  21. keiths:
    J-Mac:

    Why? Suppose consciousness is emergent rather than fundamental. How does that undermine trans-humanism?

    Do you have at least one piece of evidence for your claim? Suppose is not good enough where Iive…

  22. J-Mac:

    Consciousness must be fundamental or WEF & trans-humanism are dead.

    keiths:

    Why? Suppose consciousness is emergent rather than fundamental. How does that undermine trans-humanism?

    J-Mac:

    Do you have at least one piece of evidence for your claim? Suppose is not good enough where Iive…

    I explained in this thread why I reject panpsychism along with the idea that consciousness is fundamental, and I’ve commented at length over the years (including in a thread or two of yours, I believe) about why I reject the notion of an immaterial soul. That pretty much leaves emergence as the only option. Do I know how consciousness emerges? No, and I don’t think anyone else does either at this point. That’s why consciousness is such an interesting topic both scientifically and philosophically.

    Back to my question for you. Suppose consciousness is emergent rather than fundamental. How does that undermine trans-humanism?

Leave a Reply