Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.

Kat Johnson: Hi, listeners. This is Audible Editor Kat Johnson, and my guest today is Annaka Harris, bestselling author of Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. She's also an editor and consultant for science writers, the author of the children's book I Wonder, and the creator of wonderful guided meditations for both kids and adults. Today, we are discussing her exciting new audio documentary, Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe. Welcome to Audible, Annaka. I'm so happy that you're here.

Annaka Harris: Thank you, Kat. I'm happy to be here, and it's great to meet you.

KJ: You too. I have to say that listening to Lights On has put me in a very trippy headspace.

AH: [Laughs] That's great. That's the idea.

KJ: Yes. This is my happy place. Just so you know, I don't come at this from a very scientific background, but I definitely relate to the “trippy kid” label that you embrace in the project. So, I'm really excited to dig into all of this with you today.

AH: That's exciting. The idea was really to make it accessible to nonscientists, so I'm glad to hear that.

KJ: Thank you. Like many people, I was a big fan of your 2019 book Conscious, which was a bestseller. It's so good in audio. You narrated it yourself. It was nominated for an Audie Award. It's been a big hit with our listeners. I want to know, first off, how you got so interested in consciousness in the first place and how your specific background informs your perspective.

AH: So, there are a lot of different ways I can answer this. I've been interested both in consciousness and in fundamental physics for as long as I can remember, and fundamental physics being, when I was very young, I, of course, didn't even have that term, but you alluded to my use of this term trippy kids, which many of us were, who thought about deep questions and wondered how the universe got here, and about concepts like nothing and something, and how does something come out of nothing, and what's beyond everything we can see in the universe. All those big questions. A lot of children think about those at quite a young age. I was one of those kids, and I also was very interested in what it means to be aware and what it means to be aware from different perspectives.

So, I thought a lot about what it's like to be other people. I think I was also just naturally an empath, so that's probably part of my background that's relevant. But I really was very interested and thought a lot about what it would be like to be not only other people but other creatures, you know, my cat, and I would look at them and know they were conscious, or there was some level of awareness, and what was that like for them?

Then I started a career about 25 years ago working as an editor and ghostwriter for scientists. I primarily worked with neuroscientists, so I learned a lot about the brain doing that work, and that just sparked my curiosity even more. This work created an overlap between fundamental physics and consciousness and what's happening at the level of the brain in a way that I never expected. I never saw those two fields as really being related at all.

KJ: Then when you finished Conscious, it sounds like you weren't done and you wanted to explore this connection further. Specifically, this theory that I think almost in spite of yourself you were really drawn to.

AH: Yes. That's a good way to describe it. Yes.

KJ: Tell me a little bit about that journey from Conscious to Lights On. How did that become Lights On?

AH: I finished my book and was aware that I was left with more questions, and I think always an author feels sad when a project comes to an end. I had that sadness, but it felt deeper than that. It felt like I wasn't finished. I had my agent and my friends and people asking me, “What are you going to write about next?” And I just kept feeling like, “I want to keep going with this. I'm not done with this.”

I didn't know what that meant or where it would lead, but a friend of mine came to me with an idea for a film project based on my book, and we didn't know exactly what that would look like. I wasn't interested in making a documentary about consciousness, mostly because the things I'm interested in are things we don't yet understand. It's about the mysterious nature. I think a documentary is generally more useful for explaining things that we understand. I wanted to do something a little more artistic, a little more exploratory.

"Why would any collection of matter in the universe get configured in such a way that it begins to entail an experience of being that matter from the inside?"

So, I loved the idea of a film, but I didn't know how that would look. I thought, “Okay, if I'm going to create a film, the first thing I need to do is talk to all of the scientists and philosophers I want to talk to,” because that, in my mind, would be the spine of the film. And it just kind of started taking shape for me as I was imagining what kind of film I could make.

Suddenly, what happened for me was I realized I didn't know what I was creating or where this would lead, but I knew exactly what I wanted to be doing. And that's always kind of the spark for me of my next project. I got so excited about this idea of following all these questions that came up for me through the process of writing my book and then generating a list of—it started with 10, it ended up being 35 people who I was just so excited to talk to, and now I had a reason.

I got out the recording equipment and just started actually recording conversations I wanted to have, as a way to get transcripts that I could rewrite for conversations, for dialogue for a film. That was kind of the idea. But once I started creating all of this audio, it took on a life of its own, and it morphed into this audio documentary.

KJ: That's so fascinating because, to me, the structure is such a perfect reflection, in a way, of the topic, because I didn't really realize how little consensus there was in the scientific community on consciousness. There's so much disagreement and mystery, and this format of having conversations where people are kind of grappling with these ideas in real time is so perfect for this.

AH: That's great to hear.

KJ: I think you referred to it as a documentary within the piece, so it's kind of an audio documentary, you would say?

AH: Yes. What ended up happening was my process of talking to the scientists and philosophers I wanted to speak to and ask questions of, each conversation ended up leading to the next conversation. And many of them ended up leading to new research that I did, new articles that I wrote, and I realized that my journey was the story, and that anyone else who might be interested in the topic in the way that I am would just want to come with me on this journey. It almost kind of revealed itself to be an audio documentary as I just took on this process. I didn't have an intention of what the end result would be.

But it became clear that I was on this journey, and there was a path, and that each conversation let to the next. And ultimately, it was a three-and-a-half-year journey. But I started to develop ideas about how the universe might look if consciousness were fundamental. And that was kind of the question that kept driving me. You know, if consciousness is fundamental, how might we explain phenomenon A, B, or C? And throughout those conversations and those years of thinking and writing and doing research, the listener can kind of follow where I land with all of that.

KJ: Then you also have a co-host, Jay Shapiro, who's a documentary filmmaker. How did he get involved and how did his role help shape the series?

AH: It's great, it's kind of similar to how the project unfolded to begin with. At some point I brought him on board. I had been working with a different producer and we had different visions and it wasn't working, so I kept working on my own. And then someone introduced me to Jay Shapiro. It was clear from our very first conversation that he was going to be a great collaborator for me. At that point, I really was stuck because I had I don't know how many hours of audio, but I'd done 35 interviews, many of which were three or four hours long.

KJ: Wow.

AH: I had a sense of where it had all taken me, but I really needed a collaborator at that point. I needed someone who understood the work to come in and help me figure this out. He was just the perfect person, as you can hear in the documentary. The intention was not for him to be a part of it, actually, but what ended up happening was we began our process by him listening to all 35 of those conversations, which is a feat in and of itself. And then he went back and started listening from the beginning and realized he had all these questions for me. So, we started having weekly meetings on Zoom because he was living in Europe and I was in the States.

Luckily, we recorded those conversations, because about halfway through that process, we realized that the way he was asking me questions was serving a purpose for the audience, and that he was essentially playing the role of the audience and what they might be asking. So, we ended up taking those conversations that we recorded and kind of rewriting and re-recording them as the spine of the documentary.

KJ: Wow. That's cool. I think it's important for a project like this, too, because it's so easy to go off the rails on this topic. Even just getting ready for this interview, I had so many questions for you. My producer was like, "Let's narrow these down" [laughs]. “Keep it contained.” So, I can appreciate consciousness as a subject can very easily become quite unwieldy.

AH: Yeah, and at that point for me, I had been in it on my own for so many years, I really needed someone to come in and help me just tell the story, which he did. Beautifully.

KJ: So, I want to get into the content of it a little bit. We are going to go a little bit into the inner cosmos. Tell us, I think to start, just how you define consciousness and why it's such a mystery and why it's this, quote, unquote, "hard problem" for us to solve.

AH: Yeah, that's a great first question. Because a lot of people think about consciousness, when they hear the word, they think about very complex forms of consciousness—human consciousness, self-awareness, complex thinking, and decision making. That's, of course, all part of our conscious experience, but the thing I'm interested in, and the thing that I think is very mysterious and that scientists still can't explain, is just the simple fact of felt experience. So, maybe not containing that much content. Certainly not necessarily having to do with complex thought or self-awareness.

If we imagine a snail has some level of consciousness, has some level of felt experience, if a snail feels the ground it's moving on, if the snail feels something like hunger, of course it's not like human hunger, but when it needs to eat food, is there some sort of felt experience associated with that? The jury is still out on that. As far as the neuroscientists, we don't know if snails are conscious, but we can imagine that they are. And if they are, that they have a much more minimal experience than the one we have.

The question and the mystery is, why would any collection of matter, no matter how complex or simple, why would any collection of matter in the universe get configured in such a way that it begins to entail an experience of being that matter from the inside? I always like to give an example of sight because I think this really helps clarify. So, we have an experience of seeing blue in the world, and we now know, of course, through our scientific advancements that there is no blue. The blue that we see is not actually out there in the world. What's out there are light waves and they bounce off our retina and our brain processes these signals in a certain way, and then this experience from the inside, the felt experience of seeing blue, comes into being.

We can think about other systems that we imagine are not conscious, like a camera or a computer that also processes light waves and does so differently but basically serves the same function, can distinguish between different wavelengths of light, can alter its behavior based on what it's supposed to do with the different light waves. But we don't imagine that there's an experience of seeing blue or anything like that in a computer or a camera.

So, the question is, why do some systems have this other property, have this property of feeling something from the inside, not just having external behavior? As the title of my documentary is called, the lights come on from the inside. And that is something that scientists do not know how to explain yet. We thought we'd be much further along with this question by now in neuroscience. We've learned a lot about how our experiences are correlated with brain states, but we don't know why any brain state would ever be associated with an experience to begin with. It's that first appearance of consciousness we don't understand.

KJ: Right. And we don't even know what purpose it serves.

AH: That's right. We have some strong assumptions about the purpose it serves, but these are things that I get into in my audio documentary, is tearing apart these assumptions, finding the false illusions, finding the intuitions that may be misleading us when it comes to what our intuitions tell us consciousness is.

KJ: I think that's really powerful, because the intuitions are very helpful for us in moving through the world. We need these intuitions. But, as you explain in Lights On, they can really lead us astray when we assume things about consciousness that would quickly fall apart under scrutiny. That's part of the reason that you are led to this theory that consciousness might be fundamental. It's counterintuitive, but that's kind of where you go, right?

AH: Yes. It's very counterintuitive for me. But I couldn't stop myself from going there. It's where all the arrows were pointing once I started investigating.

KJ: Let's talk about some of the guests that you have, because there's an incredible wealth of them. I'm just going to name-check some of them. Anil Seth, David Eagleman, Carlo Rovelli, Brian Greene, Donald Hoffman, Sean Carroll, Susan Blackmore, Philip Goff, the list goes on. I think your research led you to these people, then you probably talked to someone and they're like, "Oh, you gotta speak to someone else." But they're all so illustrious, and a lot of them are scientists—it's their job to question the world and question other people's beliefs. How scary was it to talk to all these people?

AH: That's a great question. I haven't been asked that, but it's a great question because I was petrified. What's funny is, most of them, if not all of them, no, most of them, I knew already through my work. It took me a couple of years to write my book Conscious, but the truth is, it had been in process for something like 20 years. Because, as I said, these things that I'm curious about, the thoughts that I've had, go all the way back to my childhood. And then when I started working with scientists, I kept notes. These are things that I just could never stop thinking about. I never thought I would end up writing about them. But I had notebooks full of notes that I had taken over the years in my learning about how the brain works and connecting with all of these brilliant minds.

"What I'm focused on is how far down in nature consciousness runs."

I've attended many neuroscientific conferences and I was in this world for about 20 years working with scientists to help them make their work more accessible to the general public through editing and ghostwriting and coaching for talks and that sort of thing, primarily working with neuroscientists and physicists. I knew who I wanted to reach out to initially, because they were either scientists I'd worked with before or had met at a conference and there was some topic that came up in a conversation; we were having coffee and I thought, “Oh, I never got to ask David that question...” So then I had this excuse to go back and really thoroughly address a lot of questions that had come up over at least 20 years of my working with them.

So, I knew which scientists I wanted to talk to, but once I got started, each conversation really led to the next. You hear that in the documentary, you hear that I speak to Philip Goff and then I realize I need to talk to a physicist right away to check some ideas. And the first physicist I go to is Adam Frank, because I know he's open to this idea and that we could have some sort of conversation about what this means and whether it makes sense and if I should be talking to other physicists or if everyone's going to think I'm crazy. So, we kind of had that conversation. It kind of moves from one conversation to the next.

There are a couple of conversations that trigger deeper research that I do as well. I end up writing an article and I read some of that article, but the listener hears my whole journey through the course of all of those conversations, including the articles I write and the conferences I speak at. You kind of just follow me wherever I go.

KJ: Do you keep the guest list kind of tight because you don't want to go off the rails into this kind of woo-woo territory? Everybody's very credentialed, which is important, but also there's so many interesting people to talk to about consciousness.

AH: Yeah, I believe we included 19 of the 35 that I did. A lot of them, we're actually very sad to not include. It was only because of the way Jay is such a talented storyteller. Some of these conversations just naturally fell away because they weren't relevant to the story that I was telling, necessarily. We are hoping that at some point we'll release a lot of the other audio so that people can hear these conversations, because it's certainly not that some were more interesting than others. It really was just, what is in service to this story I'm trying to tell? But I will say that most of the people I always wanted to talk to and do talk to for this project are academics, usually scientists who've been doing that work for a long time. Even the meditation teachers. I didn't really talk to anyone who wasn't an expert of some sort or another.

KJ: That's fair. That's what I hoped you were going to say, that there could be more, because I think it’s so interesting. I’m excited that there's more material people can explore outside. I'm curious, how would you apply your work in consciousness to the subject of artificial intelligence, which is on everyone's mind these days?

AH: I don't think about it as much as a lot of people assume that I have. Part of the reason is because what I'm focused on is how far down in nature consciousness runs. And if it does, in fact, go much deeper in nature than we've assumed, I'm just as interested in what kinds of experiences, conscious experiences, are arising in plants and grass and mycelium networks and atoms in this table. The questions are kind of endless once you go down that path and once you open up that possibility, that AI isn't necessarily any more interesting to me than the conscious experience of many other things we've always assumed do not entail conscious experiences.

The one thing I'll say that I've thought a lot about is if consciousness is fundamental, I would expect, I think we have good reason to believe, that it is the physical substrate, it is what the objects are made of that shape the types of conscious experiences that that organism or object has, and that it's not necessarily dependent or based on the behavior.

So, because artificial intelligence and robots and computers are going to be built of matter that is so different from a human brain, I would expect the felt experiences that arise in those systems to be so different from a human experience that we couldn't even imagine what that experience is like. Yet, these systems will be behaving very similarly to us, and so we'll be in a very strange situation. I mean, we'll be in a strange situation either way, but if consciousness is fundamental, we'll be in a situation where we know there's a conscious experience associated with this other creature which could be programmed to behave very much like us. So, it could be talking the way we talk, saying, "I feel sad." Saying, "Please don't push me, that hurt my arm" or whatever.

We have these intuitions for when we encounter other beings that talk that way and that communicate those things; they're similar enough to us that I know what you mean when you say those things to me. But if the system is experiencing something vastly different from a human being, but they're saying the same things, not only will we have no intuitions for understanding how to interact with these systems, but our intuitions will really be leading us astray. I mean, our intuitions are there to help us relate to other beings that share the same qualia. So, I just think about how bizarre that is.

KJ: Yeah, I know. Highly bizarre.

AH: The implications for assuming that consciousness is fundamental, which I'm open to assuming at this point, is that yes, AI will be conscious because every other system in the universe is also conscious. And so there's at least that piece. We won't be questioning whether or not there's a conscious experience there, it's just what kind of experience could it be.

KJ: Interesting. Thank you for that. You uncover a lot of really mind-blowing stuff in the series, in your research in general. Not going to call out all of them, but the idea of perception being a controlled hallucination or the way that binding processes are what cause us to have this singular experience of events. My question is, how much does knowing this stuff really impact your day-to-day life? Is it all kind of theoretical or are there tangible ways that this impacts your daily life?

AH: That's a great question, too. I thought you were going to ask how do understanding those things get me to see consciousness differently or get me to ask these questions. I would say that especially because I've always been this type of person, because I'm a trippy kid, anytime I read a book about the brain or learn something new about the brain or about the physical reality, it really does impact me. I don't know how similar this is to how other people are impacted by reading science books or learning more about how things work. It really does change the way I feel in the world.

So, yes, I think about all of these processes. I think about them a lot. It's part of the reason why I created this documentary, was because working with neuroscientists caused me to think about my day-to-day activities differently so much of the time that it kind of took on a life of its own where I then just became more and more curious about consciousness and also became more and more convinced that our intuitions are misleading us, and it's because I was checking these intuitions in my daily life, noticing that I'm having an experience.

When I walk down the street, hearing my foot hit the sidewalk, feeling my foot hit the sidewalk, and seeing it hit the sidewalk all in the same moment, when we know, now that we understand binding processes, these signals travel at different rates, reach the brain at different rates, and they all get put together to deliver this present-moment experience. In the documentary, there are moments where you hear the signal on my car clicker because I'm sitting at the carpool line waiting to pick up my kids and I'm thinking about something like this. And those are all accurate descriptions of where I had those thoughts. So, it really does impact my daily life.

Having said that, I still forget about all these things and I make my kids’ lunches and I go through my life without thinking about these things. In terms of wondering if consciousness is fundamental, there are a lot of great thought experiments that just kept coming to me. It's, for me, very fun and interesting to think about. I walk around assuming that essentially everything around me does not entail a conscious experience and when I encounter another human being there's something special going on. I forget which chapter in the documentary, but there's one chapter where I kind of talk the listener through this, where I'm going for a walk and I realize, “Oh, the ants are probably conscious and the worms and the...” But what if this goes even deeper than that? What if the roots and the plant systems—and then it starts to really change how you feel in the world if you start saying, “Okay, what if this is possible? What would that be like if we understood that almost everything around us is representing a conscious experience of one sort or another?”

KJ: I love that. I love that. I don't want to give any spoilers to anyone because it's at the very end, but the way you describe the universe is like a sea of sentience. I think that's amazing. You have an incredible sense of awe about it that I think is really translated to the listener. So, I appreciate that.

AH: Thank you.

KJ: Speaking of your daily life, we have to talk about meditation because I know that you have a very strong meditation practice and that it kind of feeds into your work on consciousness or perhaps vice versa. If you could give us a little window into your meditation practice.

AH: Yeah, this is like a lot of other things where I never saw this as something that might be related to my work in the sciences. When I first learned to meditate and started meditating, it really was a tool I discovered for helping with my well-being, like so many people discover. I did notice pretty early on in learning how to meditate, how interesting it was to look at one's conscious experience so closely. There's something very scientific about it, actually. Meditation is kind of the only scientific-type tool we have for investigating our moment-to-moment experience very closely. So, it always interested me for that reason as well.

"A lot of my work is challenging intuitions because I think that's how science progresses, ultimately."

But I didn't think there would be crossover into my work. The first time that happened was when I was working with neuroscientists who started studying meditation and what the brain is doing during meditation. That was very fun for me to see these two worlds intersect in that way. It's fascinating to learn what is happening at the level of the brain when people enter different meditative states. We already knew what it did from experience, but now we can see it at the level of the brain why those experiences are being had by people who are meditating.

There was further crossover that happened maybe when I was writing my book, but much more so when I was working on this documentary. The more I talked to physicists about newer theories of quantum gravity and different interpretations of quantum mechanics—I should first say that many people I think falsely put these two mysteries together just because they're both mysterious. I think that's something we have to be very careful not to do. The fact that consciousness is mysterious, and quantum mechanics, we're still trying to understand what it means, that doesn't necessarily mean they have anything to do with one another. But what I did notice was that some of the new ways physicists like Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin talk about the fundamental nature of the universe based on their own theories of quantum gravity sound very similar to the way people experience the world. I should be more specific. These theories, most of them do not include space as a fundamental feature.

KJ: Okay.

AH: Most physicists at this point are in agreement that space is an emergent phenomenon. That space is not actually part of the fundamental—

KJ: That's highly counterintuitive, in my opinion.

AH: Yes, it is [Laughs]. A lot of my work is challenging intuitions because I think that's how science progresses, ultimately. I do a lot of exploring of what that means, that space is not fundamental and how it could be related to the way we see color, like we were talking about earlier, where color is our brain's way of mapping something that's happening outside our brains and interacting with our brains. It's our way of mapping the spectrum of light. We experience blue, we experience green, and then there are all these light waves we don't experience. So, perhaps space is similar to that. In the same way that we used to think, “Of course blue is out there. I see it, you see it, we can all confirm there's all this evidence blue is out there, right?” But it turns out the phenomenon that causes us to experience blue means the blueness is not out there in the universe.

The same may be true of space, that space is our brain's way of mapping something about the fundamental nature of reality, but that it's not space in the way that we experience it. It also helps us understand a little bit better how some of these new theories have many, many more dimensions of space than three. We can't conceive of that, but in the same way we can't conceive of colors we've never seen; there's a spectrum and we are only able to perceive a certain level of the spectrum. And so space could be similar. This is not anything that anyone has conclusively discovered, but when all the physicists are in agreement about something, usually they're on to something true.

Then the way this connects to meditation is that many meditators report having an experience of a spaceless and even timeless conscious experience where space doesn't seem to exist in the way that it does in our normal everyday lives. And so, again, we don't know what this means, but I find it interesting that paying closer attention to our conscious experience, to our moment-to-moment experience, definitely reveals some illusions. I talk about the illusion of conscious will and the illusion of being a self in the documentary. These are both things that neuroscience understands now but that was experienced to be true by people who'd spent a lot of time in meditation.

I wonder, it's just a question for me, but I wonder if the same might be true of space and time, that there's some ways we can get a better glimpse of the true underlying reality by investigating our experience more closely and to kind of see through these illusions of what we experience to be direct translations of what's in the world, rather than, as you said, that term comes from Anil Seth, a “controlled hallucination.” Blue is a controlled hallucination that is our brain making sense of a certain wavelength of light.

KJ: Wow. I really think meditation is like the key to everything. It's just so hard.

AH: Oh, yeah.

KJ: It's just so hard to do, unfortunately.

AH: Yeah. It is so hard to do. I know. Well, you kind of have to fight against evolution to do it is something I realized at some point. In one of these conversations with Joseph Goldstein—I don't think that part of the conversation ended up in the series, but we were talking about how, of course, we meditate and then we go back to our lives, but if you just kept meditating, the point is to just pay attention. You don't follow the urge to eat. You basically just stop doing all the things you need to do in order to live, to survive.

KJ: That makes sense. I'm not just a procrastinator. It's hard.

AH: Oh, no. It's difficult for everyone. Yeah.

KJ: I would be remiss not to mention your husband, Sam Harris. He's also a bestselling author. He's also written and thought deeply about neuroscience and meditation and consciousness. I just wanted to know what's it like being married to another writer? How does this work? Are you in one room meditating and like tapping on the keyboard? Is he in the other?

AH: [Laughs] We've gone through different phases. We've been together for so long now, more than half my life, I realized recently. We have always worked very closely together. I actually was the editor on all of his books. When we first moved in together and were young, we actually had one desk with two chairs added, and we just did all of our work together. Then we branched off in different directions and had a family and all of that. But we still have offices at home and they’re side-by-side. So yeah, we share a lot of our work. We talk a lot about our work together and obviously we are interested in so many of the same things, and I think have learned from each other as well.

KJ: And you guys are both big in the audio space. Do you have a studio at home that you share?

AH: Yes. We actually finally had to get an office space outside of the house because when I was working on this project, we started fighting over the recording studio in the house and we realized it wasn't working anymore [laughs].

KJ: Well, you're in the big leagues now, so yeah. Is there anything that you're working on coming up that you could share with our listeners?

AH: I am still very much involved in getting this project out there, but I've had many requests from the people who've interviewed me and friends who have listened to the series about having a print version and maybe turning it into a physical book. I'm very interested in doing something like that and possibly some sort of film or documentary or television series where we could bring this to life and in a fuller way with visuals. So, I don't know where any of that will lead, but those are things I'm thinking about and would be fun to work on.

KJ: Yeah, I love that. I love that this is such an audio-forward project. I think it's incredible in audio, but I also see it could have life in all these other formats, so I'm all for all of those.

AH: Yeah. Thank you.

KJ: Well, Annaka, thank you so much for your time today. And listeners, Lights On by Annaka Harris is available on Audible now. Thank you so much for being here.

AH: Aw, thank you for having me, Kat. It was a pleasure.