6 questions about consciousness with Annaka Harris

Growing up, Annaka Harris had a restless, inquisitive mind — and terrible migraines. Which is how she developed an interest in the subject that would captivate her for most of her career: consciousness. “I was really focused on space and time and the distorted perceptions of things,” she says. “I started doing a kind of meditative practice on pain, like trying to get closer to it, and I realized I couldn’t really locate it in space.”

It was around this time that she became interested in math and physics as well. Her father was mentally ill, and the two had a difficult relationship. But they connected by watching lectures together and reading popular science books. “That,” she says, “was something beautiful he gave me.”

Today, Harris doesn’t just read popular science books. She’s the author of the New York Times bestselling book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (2019). And she recently released the acclaimed documentary Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe. In both, Harris explores the frontiers of neuroscience, physics, and other fields and tries to answer some of the same perplexing questions about the mind that have nagged at her since she was a girl. 

I sat down with Harris for a conversation about shared perception, experimental science, and why our intuition about consciousness is wrong.

I know you’ve been interested in consciousness since you were a child, but how did you start writing about it?

I ran a photography business, and before that, I was a professional dancer. Then I started working with neuroscientists. I spent about 20 years helping them make their work more accessible through ghostwriting and coaching for talks and that kind of thing. That really happened because of my relationship with my husband, Sam Harris, who was getting his PhD in neuroscience when we met. 

Through my work with scientists, it became clear how much this kind of research connected to my own questions. But I noticed that neuroscientists and physicists weren’t sharing ideas. I found myself often serving as a bridge between the two fields. That brought me over into formally wanting to start thinking about and writing about consciousness.

Many researchers believe that consciousness is nothing more than the complexity of neural computations. But in your writing, you’ve tried to go beyond that standard way of thinking. Why? 

We already have science that shows our intuitions about consciousness are wrong, but scientists continue to operate as if those intuitions are correct. It’s like continuing to work with the assumption that the Sun revolves around the Earth, even after we’ve discovered otherwise, because it seems that way. We still do our science based on outdated assumptions — ones based on false intuitions that lead us to believe consciousness arises only from complexity. We have no direct evidence that consciousness arises from complexity. We assume it because it seems that way to us, based on what we now understand to be illusions created by the brain.

You have argued that consciousness may be fundamental — what do you mean by that?

I don’t believe the mind creates matter, as it’s often described under idealism. It’s not that consciousness comes first and creates the world. It’s that matter is consciousness at bottom. That’s what it is intrinsically.

Panpsychism, on the other hand, doesn’t go far enough for me. It describes consciousness as a property of matter. But I argue that we will encounter the “hard problem of consciousness” — the question of how and why this subjective experience arises — wherever we place the emergence of consciousness in the physical world. So it makes more sense to place consciousness at the most fundamental level. These terms and frameworks — materialism, idealism — they’re centuries old and don’t map cleanly onto our updated understanding of the world through centuries of scientific learning and discovery.

What do you think is the most exciting development right now in terms of the scientific study of consciousness? 

We’re limited by communication — by language and mathematics. But what if we could learn and communicate through entirely new kinds of conscious experiences? 

For example, a study gave participants a belt that vibrated to indicate magnetic north. One participant said he felt like he’s developed a totally new sense of direction. He acquired an intuitive feel for where he was in space, and he described the perception of direction as being similar to the way we recognize color — you can’t help but notice that you’re wearing the same color shirt as someone else. He also said movements through space took on a new quality that might feel positive or negative, like a pleasant versus unpleasant sound or scent. He now loved the feeling of walking up spiral staircases.

This kind of research shows that we can develop entirely new senses. Imagine if we could do that with other kinds of information. If scientists could share Einstein’s intuition about general relativity as an experience rather than being limited to the language of mathematics and physics.

How do you think this kind of research changes our ideas about consciousness?

We’ve done all our science with the assumption that consciousness emerges at a certain level of information processing. But what if we started from the opposite assumption — that consciousness is fundamental and everywhere? Instead of treating conscious experience as a byproduct [of configurations of nonconscious matter], we’d treat it as the foundation. That might help us understand phenomena we’ve struggled with.

It’s not necessarily about having evidence that a Venus flytrap or a biofilm is conscious. If we could tap into those systems at the level of experience, we might simply develop new intuitions that shift our entire framework.

No matter what the next steps are, you seem committed to science as a means for getting new kinds of answers to these questions. Why? 

The scientific method is the only self-correcting system we have for expanding our understanding. It has its flaws, but it’s also humble. It expects to be proven wrong as part of the method for uncovering truths. That’s what makes it so powerful.

There’s something exciting about realizing that something you felt 99% sure about wasn’t quite right — or was entirely wrong. It paves the way for new questions and better understanding. If we’re willing to admit we have made incorrect assumptions and apply our tools more creatively, we might finally get somewhere. We might start seeing the Universe for what it is — maybe even as conscious.