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+--- Thread: Article Annaka Harris: Consciousness is fundamental (/thread-17780.html)
Annaka Harris: Consciousness is fundamental - C C - Apr 12, 2025
https://iai.tv/articles/annaka-harris-consciousness-is-fundamental-auid-3136?_auid=2020
INTRO: For decades, our best intuitions have told us that consciousness is a product of complex brain processes, creating the taste of coffee or the smell of a rose. However, New York Times bestselling author, Annaka Harris, argues this view has been shattered by modern neuroscience. In this exclusive, in-depth article Harris draws from her recent documentary, Lights On, taking inspiration from the work of leading physicists, like Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin, and explains why consciousness is the most fundamental thing in the universe.
EXCERPTS: . . . These conclusions are very hard to parse if we’re trying to understand the universe in terms of nonconscious objects and events. But if felt experience is the intrinsic nature of everything in the universe (what matter is at bottom), then conscious experiences are the only things that are “real”— that exist. And everything we perceive “out there” is a representation of other conscious experiences arising in the universe—which are, in turn, shaping our own experiences.
If felt experience underlies everything, then obtaining a truly outside, or objective, view of anything in the universe should be impossible. The only thing that can exist in its own right—that can be known in and of itself, from the inside—is a felt experience. Is consciousness. And rather than being a confusing sticking point for all our current attempts to understand quantum mechanics, this intrinsically relational quality of everything would be the natural outcome of a universe in which consciousness goes all the way down.
[...] The view I’m attempting to construct has significant crossover with panpsychism and idealism, but it doesn’t fit squarely into either of those schools of thought. The most notable difference is that my view does not include “subjects,” which I take to be a manifestation of the “illusion of self” and which causes much confusion when attempting to imagine a universe where consciousness is Fundamental.
If consciousness is Fundamental, we can explain the phenomenon of human minds and of “self” even more deeply—as different moments of conscious experience in the universe that are woven together through the structure of memory. That is, what the entire universe ultimately consists of is fleeting conscious experiences coming in and out of existence—content, or qualia, taking shape in the “space” that is consciousness. Even the body of a single human being would represent countless experiences arising in each moment, only some of which would enter the stream of memory that constitutes the “self.” (MORE - missing details)
RE: Annaka Harris: Consciousness is fundamental - Magical Realist - Apr 12, 2025
Quote:If consciousness is Fundamental with a capital F (The Fundamental Reality, not one of a number of fundamental properties), the view of every object or phenomenon in the universe is by definition perspective-dependent, because no conscious experience can ever be described (or experienced) from another perspective. That “other perspective” would not be a different perspective on the same experience, but a different experience altogether. That’s how consciousness works. Our perceptions (the sights, sounds, and so forth that give us the impression of “matter” out there in the world) would in reality be the accessible bits of the other conscious experiences in the world from one conscious experience’s “perspective” rather than the concrete objects and phenomena we perceive them to be.
“There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo
The scientific myth of perfect objectivity then, as an escape from perspectivism or as an absolute "correct" view from nowhere, really all about the fusion of many perspectives towards a more complete kind of knowing.