Name: The hard problem of consciousness, in 53 minutes | Annaka Harris: Full Interview
Uploaded: 2026-01-16T18:23:20.000Z
Duration: 53 min 14 s
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I'm Anika Harris, and I write about the science and philosophy of consciousness.

I have a book called A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind.

And I have a docu series titled Lights on Challenging the Illusions of Consciousness with anika Harris.

Part 1 Defining Consciousness what does your work in consciousness entail?

My work focuses on what makes consciousness such a deeply perplexing phenomenon and a mysterious phenomenon, why it's so difficult for scientists to study it, and

because it's such a mysterious phenomenon.

Still within neuroscience, part of my work has also been to connect different disciplines that aren't usually in dialogue with consciousness studies.

If we're interested in asking the question about whether consciousness goes deeper in nature than the sciences have previously assumed, we start to come out of neuroscience and meander into biology, plant sciences, and

depending on how far down we want to look, you know, ultimately physics.

And so part of my work is helping the different disciplines communicate with quantum another so that they're all informed about the same types of mystery that we're facing in consciousness studies.

So one of the reasons I wrote my book Conscious was because I noticed that when I was discussing my work at dinner parties and with friends, I noticed that everyone I spoke to became very interested and had a lot of questions.

And that makes sense because we all have an experience of consciousness.

And not only do we all have an experience of is central to everything we know and care about.

We can't even quite understand what it would mean to live our lives without it.

Everything that we care about, everything we experience, everything we know, we.

We know it through our conscious awareness of it.

It is our immediate contact with the universe, with the rest of reality.

And you can see this just by imagining something that's important to you or even something that's not important to you.

Anything that happened to you today, anything you're thinking about, any decision you're trying to make, okay, try to think about that or try to make that decision and imagine doing that when you're not conscious, you immediately realize that this is where our lives play out in some sense.

And the fact that it's still so mysterious to scientists and to all of humanity, the fact that it's still one of the great unsolved mysteries makes it something that everyone can be excited about.

And awe is this feeling that we all enjoy kind of basking in.

This is one of those mysteries that is still unsolved and so can still inspire awe in most people who start to think about it and discover how mysterious it actually is.

So the mystery at the heart of consciousness.

And when I use the word consciousness, I'm not talking about higher order thinking or complex thought or things that we think of in terms of human consciousness, but

when I use the word consciousness, I'm talking about consciousness in the most fundamental sense.

If a worm is conscious, if there's something that it's like to be a worm, if there's a felt experience, if there's sentience associated with a worm, and

there's no consensus on this in the sciences, but

if there is something it's like to be a worm, it obviously isn't planning its day.

Maybe it's experiencing a very subtle sensation against its skin as it moves through the dirt.

We can imagine that that is a possibility.

It's possible there's some kind of internal desire to move toward food or away from danger.

So when I use the word consciousness in this context, when talking about it as a mystery, it's really in this most basic sense, sense as the fundamental felt experience that we know comes into being in the universe from our own experience and can extrapolate from that.

There's no perfect definition for consciousness in the way that I'm using it here, in the most fundamental sense.

And so the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay titled what is it like to be a bat?

I think it's extremely useful here because rather than give a definition, he illustrates a picture of a totally different type of experience than a human experience.

There's a German term for this umwelt, and it's the.

Umwelt is the word for describing the types of feelings and sensations a certain type of organism has.

So, so a bat uses sonar rather than vision.

We can maybe get close to it or draw analogies, But

a bat is moving through the world using sonar.

The sounds are bouncing off the walls and the trees and the world.

And it gets a picture of its external world in the same way that we get a picture of the external world through vision.

But you can imagine that the actual felt experience of that is very different from our experience of using vis.

And so when you think about what certain experiences are like, what it's like to be a bat, what it's like to be a bee, this gets at The.

I think this gets at our intuition for what consciousness is in a more direct way than some of the language does.

What is the hard problem of consciousness?

So the mystery at the heart of consciousness is why in this universe that seems to be teeming with non conscious matter, with atoms and electrons and stars and solar systems, and

all these things that we assume don't entail a felt experience from the inside, or they're non conscious, how non conscious matter somehow gets configured in such a way as to create a situation where suddenly it's having a felt experience from the inside.

Suddenly there's something that it's like to be that matter.

And that is often referred to as the hard problem of consciousness.

And that term comes from David Chalmers, the philosopher.

And it's called the hard problem because in a sense it's a joke.

It's in comparison to what are the easy problems, which aren't truly easy in neuroscience, but

the easy problems are more associating which brain states are associated with which feeling states.

The hard problem entails why there is a felt experience of any processing, even brain processing at all.

Making a distinction between consciousness and thought is important because consciousness, in the sense that I'm interested in, in the sense that it's a myst, can exist without thought.

It could exist in a very simple organism that is not capable of thought.

But even in our human experience, we know that there can be moments that are without thought, especially if you think of a very young child or an infant feeling pressure against the skin, hearing sounds in the room before the brain is even able to distinguish sounds and be able to process them and understand the meaning behind them or what they might represent.

The experience itself, the sound of a bell, the experience of seeing green, the experience of heat or cold, those are experiences that are the most minimal ones we can imagine.

And there's clearly an experience there, there's clearly consciousness there, and it doesn't necessarily entail thought.

What is your biggest unanswered question?

this is the question that I was left with when I finished writing my book, is is it possible that consciousness is a much more basic phenomenon in nature and is essentially pervading everything?

And so not, not that it's less special than, than we assumed because, you know, gravity is something that's obviously very special in our universe, but

And the question that, that I'm still very interested in and think I'll probably always be interested in is.

Does consciousness go deeper in nature than the sciences have previously assumed?

So rather than arising out of complex processing in brains, namely, is it possible that it's a much more basic property of the universe?

And so there are felt experiences arising in more systems and organisms than we previously realized.

So one of the things we feel we need consciousness for is our decision making process.

And there's a sense in which we feel like a solid self making decisions.

And we don't really get the feeling that those decisions are essentially, at bottom, brain processes playing out in nature.

And I recently became very fascinated by a couple of plant behavior studies.

One was of a pea seedling, which, in the lab, they planted in a Y maze.

So the, the pea seedling is planted at the top, and

then it, the, the roots need to grow down, and

then at a certain point, the, it branches off.

And so the root actually needs to decide which direction to grow, which will be more beneficial for it to grow in.

One is where they have a dish of water at the end of one tube and nothing at the end of the other.

And the root can sense that there is water at one end.

And so at that decision point, it senses the water, and

it kind of makes a decision, for lack of a better term, to move toward the water.

And they do this experiment in many interesting ways.

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The hard problem of consciousness, in 53 minutes | Annaka Harris: Full Interview

assume

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