Our intuitions about consciousness may be deeply wrong 

Who's in the Video Annaka Harris Annaka Harris is the New York Times bestselling author of CONSCIOUS: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind and writer and producer of the forthcoming audio documentary[…] Go to Profile Part of the Series The Big Think Interview Explore series

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We tend to trust our intuitions about consciousness because they feel immediate and personal, but feeling convinced is not the same as being right.

Annaka Harris explores what happens when science stops deferring to instinct and starts treating consciousness like other hard problems that once defied common sense.

ANNAKA HARRIS: The study of consciousness has largely, if not entirely been relegated to neuroscience, which makes a lot of sense because we have assumed the organisms in the world that are conscious, that we are aware of and that we can kind of confirm our conscious are the ones that are most like us. And we are complex systems. The brain is the most complex system in the universe that we know of. And so we assume that consciousness arises out somehow out of that complex processing. But we have discovered a few things that have actually flipped upside down the assumptions that we began with and have been shown to be illusions.

- [Narrator] Challenging our intuitions on consciousness.

- So an intuition is simply the strong feeling that something is true, but it may or may not represent something accurate about the world. And we have many intuitions that were sculpted by evolution that are extremely useful. If we're in a dangerous situation, we can notice all kinds of clues unconsciously that a door was left a jar, that item is out of place, that someone we're close to who we don't know if their pupils are dilated, if their skin is flushed. These can be signs that someone is adrenalized and about to act violently. We may not notice any of these elements subconsciously, we just might be left with this intuition that we feel like we're in an unsafe situation or that we shouldn't trust the person who's standing next to us. And those are extremely useful tools that we use all the time. We use them in making decisions. There's studies that show that our gut instincts are often better guides to making decisions about which apartment to move into, which job to take than deliberate logical reasoning. But also intuitions can fail us, and they also fail us all the time. And so in the sciences, there are many examples of this where there's just no reason for evolution to have sculpted an intuition again, for being on an earth that is a sphere. It's not relevant to our everyday lives, and we feel like we're on a flat earth. And so that's what our intuition leads us to believe. Einstein's theories of general relativity and special relativity gave us a whole new sense of the structure of the universe, that space time is a field that can be warped and that warping is gravity. And so rather than gravity being a force like other forces, what it actually is, is a warping of space time. And these are things we do not have intuitions for. And when we learn them, they help us form a truer view of what the universe actually is. So our assumption that we understand what consciousness is based on our intuitions, some of these intuitions that we're relying on to make that assumption have been overturned by modern neuroscience and have been shown to be illusions. And so in many cases, we're being led by illusions. And this is something that's very interesting and that has not yet really sunk into the larger scientific culture. And so if we want to ask this question about whether consciousness goes deeper in nature than we have previously assumed, the sciences that this will pertain to biology perhaps, perhaps plant behavior, even though that sounds crazy, we may find that there are some minimal felt experiences in the complex behavior of plants or even deeper, these other sciences, the science of physics and botany and biology need to be better informed of the neuroscience and what we've learned about the brain so far, so that they can have a better grasp of the way certain illusions might be misleading them. And so if they have intuitions about consciousness, this is something that was really taboo to think about or talk about not that long ago, but it's useful for any scientist who is interested in studying consciousness in a new and creative and different way or thinking about consciousness in a different way. It's important for them to be aware of some of the neuroscience that helps support that view. And that can give many scientists good reason to start thinking a little bit differently about consciousness, a little more creatively about consciousness. And this is really how paradigm shifts happen in science. And the truth is, this is a huge part of the scientific process in almost every regard. When we challenge our intuitions, because we're facing new evidence that is counterintuitive, which is most often the case, especially as I said, for these paradigm shifts, for groundbreaking theories, they get us to see the world that we live in in a significantly different way. So if you think about all of the major scientific breakthroughs, all of the major paradigm shifts, so understanding that the earth is a sphere and not flat as our intuitions originally led us to believe. People forget how counterintuitive this discovery was, and it was made based on celestial observations. And this is how science works. So we get this evidence that it's not the way we felt it was or the way we thought it was. And then there's a period of time where we're wrestling with our intuitions. And this is an important part of the scientific process because our intuitions are often very good guides. And so it's good that we keep checking to see, you know, is this new information actually accurate? And then when the scientific evidence is overwhelming, we're then in a process of shifting our intuitions, of starting to feel that we live on a sphere, in a solar system, orbiting the sun rather than the other way around. And it starts to shift the way we feel in the world. It shifts our concepts of our everyday experience. But then, of course, it also then shapes the science that is to come. So, and there are other examples of this, discovering the microscopic world and the germ theory of disease, understanding that microscopic things that we have no intuition for, we can't touch or taste or feel or experience them in any way, but we've now discovered they're real and they cause disease and they can kill you. And so I think there's a lot that's happened in modern neuroscience that suggests that our intuitions about consciousness are wrong, and they give us tools for shaking our intuitions and playing around with this question of whether are the intuitions that have driven our assumptions about consciousness, whether they're not entirely accurate, and whether we need to spend more time shifting intuitions and challenging intuitions in order to think more creatively and maybe come up with some new theories about what consciousness might be and how far down in nature it it might go.

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