Annaka Harris

If consciousness is there, there's an experience there by definition.

It has to arise at some point or it has to always be there.

I 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.

Sure.

it's hard to say definitively.

I mean, it depends on, you know, 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 is,

I actually think it's part of the reason we're mistaken about consciousness is because we are special in the ways that we're special.

And because we're complex creatures, we have these complex brains.

So I think we should probably get into some of the details of why I think we're confused about what consciousness is.

But just to finish this point, I think that we don't actually have any evidence that consciousness exists.

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.