Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality | Lex Fridman Podcast #326

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://bl

when we use the term free will we’re talking about this feeling that Consciousness that that we have a self that this there’s this concrete thing that’s separate from brain processing that somehow swoops in and is the the cause of our decision or the cause of our next action and that is in large part if not in its entirety and illusion 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 this is the Lux reading podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here’s Annika Harris in your book conscious you described evidence that Free Will is an illusion and that Consciousness is used to construct this illusion and convince ourselves that we are in fact deciding our actions uh can you can you explain this I think this is chapter three first of all I I really think it’s important to make a distinction between Free Will and conscious will and we’ll get into that in a moment so free will in terms of our brain as a system in nature making complex decisions and doing all the complex processing it does there is a decision-making process in nature that our brains undergo that we can call Free Will that’s that’s fine to use that shorthand for that although once once we get into the details I I might um convince you that it’s not so free but that the decision-making process is a process in nature the feeling our conscious experience of feeling like Consciousness is the thing that is driving the behavior that is I would say in most cases an illusion and usually when we talk about Free Will that’s the thing we’re talking about I mean sometimes it’s in conjunction with the decision-making process but for the most part when we use the term free will we’re talking about this feeling that Consciousness that that we have a self that this there’s this concrete thing that’s separate from brain processing that somehow swoops in and is the the cause of our decision or the cause of our next action and that is um in large part if not in its entirety and illusion so conscious will is an illusion and then we can try to Free Will I would say is a good shorthand for a process in nature which is a decision-making process of of the brain but decisions are still being made so there’s a uh if you ran the universe over again hmm is there would it turn out the same way I mean maybe I’m trying to sneak up to like what does it mean to make a decision in a way that’s almost uh that means something so right so this is where our intuitions get challenged I’ve been thinking about some new examples for this just because I talk about it a lot and and the truth is most of the things I write about and talk about and think about are so counter-intuitive I mean that that’s really what my game is is breaking intuitions shaking up intuitions in order to get a deeper understanding of reality I’m often even though I’ve thought about this for 20 years and think about it all the time it’s an obsession of mine really I have to get back into that mind frame to be able to think clearly about it because it is so counter-intuitive how long does that take how hard is that depends on if there are kids around or if I’m alone or if I’ve been meditating but what I was going to say actually I felt like we need to just take one step back and talk a little bit just because I think the the importance of shaking up intuitions for scientific and advancement is such an important piece of the scientific process um and I think we’ve reached a point in Consciousness studies where it’s very difficult to move forward and usually that’s a sign that we need to start shaking up our intuition so you know throughout history the the huge breakthroughs the things that have really shifted our view of the universe and and our place in the universe and all of that those almost always if not always require that we at the very least shift our intuitions um update our intuitions but many of them we just have to let go of intuitions that are feeding us false information about the way the world works well the weirdest thing here is that here we’re looking at our own mind yeah you have to uh let go of your intuitions about your own intuitions yeah right exactly it’s very meta and makes it hard and it’s part of the reason why doing interviews for me feels so difficult aside from the fact that I just have social anxiety in general what’s good because I took mushrooms just before you started so it worked we’re on this journey together let’s go uh so what what where do we take a step backwards well I was I was going to say I mean this leads into the point I was going to make but what I was going to say is I mean also just for me I feel like I I’m not as good at speaking as I am at writing that I’m clear in my writing and because these topics are so difficult to get our minds around um it’s hard to kind of get to any real conclusion in real time it’s actually how I started writing my book um was just writing for myself I decided that I needed to spend some time writing down all of my thoughts in order to get clear about how I think about them so you write down a sentence and you think he’s in the in the silence paragraphs and yeah and you just and then I see if that makes sense and then I check it with my intuitions which is really the scientific process and I really in many ways I feel like I’m a physicist at heart all of my inquiry all of my career everything I’m interested in actually going back to being a child it’s just deep curiosity about how the world Works what this place is what it’s made of how we got here um just being amazed at the fact that I’m having an experience over here and you’re having one over there and we’re in this moment of time and you know what does that all mean my interest in Consciousness really came out of originally an interest in physics and I guess that the two were always side by side and I didn’t really connect them until I was older but um I’ve always been really interested in just understanding the nature of reality before I even had language to describe you talked about sort of laying down and looking up at the stars and yeah sort of trying to let go of the intuition that there’s a ground below us yeah which is a really interesting exercise and there’s many exercises of this sort you can do but that’s a really good one well and I think you know scientists and children who are who will become scientists or just kind of scientists at heart really enjoy that feeling of breaking through their intuitions and I remember the first time it happened actually I was um playing with marbles and you know marbles have all these different shapes each one is unique and they’re all the it looks like there’s liquid inside them and I remember asking my father how they got the liquid inside the glass ball and he said actually it’s solid all the way through It’s All Glass and I had such a hard time imagine it just didn’t seem right to me I was very young when I but he he’s a complicated person but he was wonderful in this way and that he would kind of entertain my curiosity and so he’s he said let’s let’s open them up and he got a towel and we put the marbles on the towel and got a hammer and he smashed them all and lo and behold it was all glass and I remember it’s like the first time I had that feeling of realizing wow the truth was so different from what I expected