Annaka Harris

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 buy analogy, 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 where there's no physical evidence.

There's nothing we can observe from the outside that will give us conclusive proof that consciousness 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 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

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 series.

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 question.

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 thing.