6 questions about consciousness with Annaka Harris
Big Think 08/20/25
"A conversation with Annaka Harris on shared perception,
experimental science,
and why our intuition
about consciousness is wrong."
(Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Consciousness IS an Electromagnetic Frequency.)
"Annaka Harris is a science writer and author of Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Astronomer Adam Frank recently spoke with Harris about how she got interested in consciousness, whether it’s fundamental, and why our intuitions about it might be all wrong. Harris challenges the belief that consciousness emerges from complexity, instead treating it as a fundamental feature of reality"
(And I 100% agree with that.)
"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."
"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.
(Its what they do yo!)
"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."
( Where is the center of the Universe?
Big think 09/27/25
"Any spot in the Universe can be considered the center,
with equal validity.
Indeed, you may be the center of the Universe."
AND?
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs.[1] This causes the group to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation.[2][3]
Groupthink is a construct of social psychology but has an extensive reach and influences literature in the fields of communication studies, political science, management, and organizational theory,[4]
as well as important aspects
of deviant religious cult behaviour."
If these guys and gals are such brainiacs?
Why cant they figure out
what they are doing to themselves?)
"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."
"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?
(It's in the frequencies man...
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Consciousness IS an Electromagnetic Frequency.)
"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."
"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.
(Not if you don't let it!)
"It has its flaws,
but it’s also humble.
It expects to be proven wrong
as part of the method
for uncovering truths."
(Thats just not
what the cult members believe.)
"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.
(Thats exactly
what the members of the elitist, erroneous,
easily invalidated
belief system of scientism
AVOIDS!)
"It paves the way for new questions and better understanding.
If we’re willing to admit
we have made incorrect assumptions
(Good luck.)
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."
(Yeah..ummmm Naw lol...)
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