Lex Fridman Podcast
#326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality
05 Oct 2022
Annaka Harris is the author of Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Wealthfront: https://wealthfront.com/lex to get $50 sign-up bonus - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex to get 25% off premium - Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off - Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit EPISODE LINKS: Annaka's Twitter: http://twitter.com/annakaharris Annaka's Website: http://annakaharris.com Annaka's Facebook: http://facebook.com/annakaharrisprojects Annaka's Books: 1. Conscious: https://amzn.to/3SFLLPE 2. I Wonder: https://amzn.to/3UPQTTm Annaka's Articles: 1. What Is Time?: http://nautil.us/what-is-time-238478 2. A Solution to the Combination Problem: http://annakaharris.com/the-future-of-panpsychism 3. Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered: http://nautil.us/consciousness-isnt-self_centered-237720 Books: 1. The Case Against Reality: https://amzn.to/3MhW4Wt 2. Being You: https://amzn.to/3RsxdBQ 3. Livewired: https://amzn.to/3Cn9BKS 4. Spooky Action at a Distance: https://amzn.to/3y27N7a 5. The Order of Time: https://amzn.to/3Stqn0u PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (07:20) - Free will (1:00:37) - Consciousness (1:31:09) - Depression (1:44:26) - Psychedelics (1:52:25) - Meditation (1:56:49) - Ideas (2:20:35) - AI sentience (2:37:56) - Suffering (2:40:53) - Meaning of life
Chapter 1: What is the fundamental mystery of consciousness?
The following is a conversation with Annika Harris, author of Conscious, a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind, and is someone who writes and thinks a lot about the nature of consciousness and of reality, especially from the perspectives of physics and neuroscience. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Wealthfront for investing, BetterHelp for mental health, Blinkist for nonfiction, Onnit for supplements, and Indeed for hiring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff.
Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Wealthfront, savings and automated investing accounts to help you build wealth and save for the future. I'm a sucker for good design, and so one of the things that make me love Wealthfront is that they have a beautifully designed and streamlined interface for the investing process.
As a quick side note, there's a very loud lawnmower outside of where I'm recording, and that lawnmower It's not only outside, but it's also inside my mind. And it's playing all kinds of games with my mind. And I wonder if you hear it at all. And I wonder if it's even real. I just wanted to acknowledge the obvious in case you do hear it.
And also acknowledge the obvious psychological complexity of talking into a microphone while you're sitting alone with all the world boiling up all around you in this beautiful chaotic turmoil that defines our reality.
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Chapter 2: How do sponsors support this podcast?
given that turmoil, you may want to invest in your future. And that's what Wealthfront is good at. Nearly half a million people are using it. I should mention in a feigned attempt at expertise that federal interest rates have been going up this year. So the 2.55% API savings account is quite an impressive feat, which is exactly what Wealthfront offers.
You can check them out by going to wealthfront.com slash legs. you'll get a $50 bonus with a $500 deposit. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. Speaking of the lawnmower that's outside of my house, clearly the problem is not with the lawnmower. The problem is with my mind. And that problem can be solved through many methods.
But one of the most powerful is talk therapy. And if you care to try that kind of thing, you should make it super easy. You should make it private, obviously. And it should be affordable and available to you wherever you are. So it should be remote. And that's exactly what BetterHelp does.
offers an exploration of the demons that live inside your mind, all of our minds, inside the shadow, in the Junging shadow of our mind. You should explore them with a licensed professional at BetterHelp, betterhelp.com. And if you go there to that specific website, you will save on your first month. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things.
Blinkist takes key ideas from thousands of non-fiction books and condenses them down into 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I am going on a run now because I'm doing a long 12 plus hour run. On that run, I will be listening to a non-fiction book. In fact, the book I will be listening to was picked by me by first checking out the summary of that book on Blinkist.
And again, it's not just a summary, you know, like a cliff note summary. It's a condensation of the key ideas, which is fundamentally different to me than a shallow summary. It somehow feels deep, even though it takes a very short amount of time to consume it. Like I said, 15 minutes. It's an excellent way to choose a book that you want to read in full.
First, get the key insights, read in full, and again, return to the insights time and time again to remind yourself to refresh the lessons that you learned from the book when you first read it. You can claim a special offer for savings by going to Blinkist.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Onnit, which is a nutrition supplement and fitness company.
They make Alpha Brain, a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus. Obviously, all of those things are things I care about as I'm going through a difficult deep work session. Deep work is something that one of the people I really admire, a friend, Cal Newport, talks a lot about, and these are sessions when you're really putting your mind to the test.
in terms of the focus, in terms of the depth of the chain of thoughts, unbroken, that you take yourself on. And for me, that happens when I'm doing any kind of programming. For me, that happens when I'm doing design type of thinking, so thinking through the early steps of a programming project of how to solve a particular problem.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of free will being an illusion?
If I lost my memory of the 13 past years.
You think you would lose? This is a dark question.
Oh, wait, wasn't that the question? Maybe I misunderstood.
No, no, no, no. You understood it perfectly.
Yeah.
Sorry for the dark question. But the people you love in your life, if you lost all your memory of everything, do you think you would still love them? Like you show up, you don't know. I don't know. It's a roll of the dice.
I mean, not in the way that I do.
Right. Some deep aspect of love is the history you have together.
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... 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.
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Chapter 4: How does consciousness relate to decision-making?
Through the memory. And then you're thinking that the solution to that lies in physics, not just neuroscience. Like ultimately consciousness and the experience, the conscious will is a question of physics.
I may have said something misleading because I was connecting too many dots.
Half the things I say are misleading. Let us mislead each other.
I got excited when memory came up because I love talking about time.
So you mentioned a project you're working on a couple of times. What's that about? I think you said Ted is involved. You're interviewing a bunch of people. What's going on? 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 um and so we'll we'll see where it goes but the idea is that it's a narrated um documentary it's like a series a series it'll be a 10 part series it's an unclear oh you already know the number of parts Sorry, in my mind, it's a 10-part series, Amanda, being 8 or 11 or 12. I don't know why.
Listen, I am very comforted by the numbers 0 and 1 as well.
About 10.
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Chapter 5: What role does the sense of self play in human suffering?
And I mean, so many people now use that fact to... inspire a positive response, to inspire creativity and curiosity and awe and all of these things that are so useful for human well-being.
Where's the source of meaning when you're not the center of the universe, when the you doesn't even exist? That even you, the sense of self and the sense of decision-making is an illusion.
The truth is that for the most part, the sense of self is kind of at the core of human suffering because it feels as if we are separate from the rest of nature. We're separate from each other. We're separate from ourselves. You know, the illusion that I referenced of feeling like, you know, we have these thoughts that are brain-based thoughts, but then the eye swoops in to make a decision.
In some sense, it goes so deep that it's as if the eye is separate from the physical world. And that separation plays a part in depression, plays a part in anxiety, even plays a part in addiction. So at the level of the brain, I think, stop me if I'm repeating myself, but we started talking about the default mode network. And so we actually know that
When the default mode network is quieted down, when people lose a sense of self in meditation and on psychedelic drugs in therapy, there is a feeling that people describe of an extremely positive feeling of being connected to the rest of nature.
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Chapter 6: How can meditation and psychedelics influence our perception of reality?
And so that's a piece of it that I think if you haven't had the experience, you wouldn't necessarily know that would be a part of it. But truly having that insight that you're not the self you feel you are, immediately your experiences are embedded in the universe and you are a piece of everything and you see that everything is interconnected.
And so rather than feeling like a lonely I in this bigger universe, there's a sense of being a part of something larger than yourself. And this is intrinsically positive for human beings.
And even just in our everyday lives and choices and what we do for work, feeling part of something larger than yourself is the way people describe spiritual experiences and the way many positive psychological states are framed. And so there's that piece of it.
There is something, there's one giant hug with the universe, everything in it. But there is some sense in which we attach the search for meaning with the I, with the ego. And it could almost seem like life is meaningless. Our existence, our I, my existence is meaningless.
I think you can kind of go there under any worldview, really. And the truth is, we want to find a truth out of that downward spiral and not... a story that we have to tell ourselves that isn't true. And the fact is we have these facts available to us, that with the right framing and the right context, looking at the truth actually provides us with that psychological feeling we're searching for.
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Chapter 7: What insights can we gain from understanding consciousness?
And I think that's important to point out.
And so- I think humans are fascinatingly good at finding beauty in truth, no matter how painful the truth is. So yes.
Yes, I totally agree. Yes. But in this case, I think there are The concerns are legitimate concerns and I have them myself for how people respond. I've actually had people tell me they had to stop reading my book halfway through because the parts on free will were so upsetting to them. And this is something I think about a lot because that kind of breaks my heart. I don't,
because I see this potential for these realizations bringing levels of wellbeing that many people don't have access to, I think it's important to talk about them in ways that override what can be an initial fear or kind of spooky quality that can come out of these realizations.
So at the end of that journey, there's a clarity and an appreciation of beauty that if you just ride it out. By the way, if you wanna read Upsetting, I just gotten through the boy, the four books, if you wanna read Upsetting. So my Audible is hilarious, so there's Conscious in it. And then, so your book. And then it has The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.
Probably the most upsetting book I've ever read.
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Chapter 8: How does Annaka Harris define the meaning of life?
If you want to... Because it's not just Stalin or Hitler. It's Stalin and Hitler. It's the worst hits. The opposite of the best hits. It's really, really, really well written. Really difficult. I read Solzhenitsyn's...
Gulag Archipelago and what else Red Famine which is Ann Applebaum does that hurt yeah anyway so those are truly upsetting and that's yeah and those are a lot of times the results of hiding the truth versus pursuing the truth so truth in the short term might hurt but it did ultimately set this free
I believe that. And I also think whatever the truth is, we have to find a way to maintain civil society and love and all the things that are important to us.
If we can jump around a little bit. Can I just ask you on a personal note, because you said you've suffered from depression and there's a lot of people that see guidance on this topic because it's such a difficult one. How were you able to, when it has struck you, how were you able to overcome it?
Yeah, I mean, this is maybe too long an answer. So I've experienced it in different forms. So it was my I would say my depression has almost always mostly taken the form of anxiety. I didn't realize how anxious I was. think until I was an adult. So I was always very functional. I think, you know, all the positive sides of suffering in that way. I think I'm a little OCD as you can tell.
And this whole conversation is hilarious because we're both suffering to some level of anxiety.
Your psychology is just laid out in front of us here.
It's a giant mess. We're the same kind of human. It's great.
Just trying to organize.
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