311 | Annaka Harris on Whether Consciousness is Fundamental

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Special treat for Mindscape listeners today. We're gonna finally figure out this consciousness thing once and for all. No, we're not, actually, sorry about that.

That was false advertising. We're gonna talk about consciousness yet again. Uh it's not something that we're gonna ever in the course of a one-hour long conversation quite. agree that people who have different opinions about this are are gonna see the light, but we're gonna come closer and closer with every episode. That's all I can actually promise.

You know, it wasn't that long ago we had Christoph Cook, famous neuroscientist, on the show, and we talked a lot about consciousness, in particular uh the neural con uh corlets of consciousness and integrated information theory. We touched on the idea of panpsychism, which we've talked about before on the podcast, the idea that consciousness is everywhere, but we didn't really give it a full airing out. So I wanted to kind of give that idea, maybe not panpsychism per se, but the idea that consciousness is a fundamental ingredient of reality rather than just an emergent level, something that we use to describe the collective behavior of matter when it becomes sufficiently complex and self-referential and so forth.

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