Is Consciousness Fundamental? – Annaka Harris

1. 

   @oKammyy

   September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

   i hold the belief that consciousness IS god, hear me out. All human religions took thought (consciousness) assuming there is an omnipotent god that designed the universe he had to have conscious thought of what would be good and bad, this theory would side step the common problems of evil and hiddeness as it’s not hidden as everybody has internal dialogue and you can have evil intrusive thoughts meaning it’s not all loving. I truly believe consciousness is the root of everything and is divine , this also opens doors to an afterlife considering your conscious is divine and has no limits if you let it

2. 

   @jameslockwood5113

   September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

   So close, but giving humans too much credit as being intentionally advanced

3. 

   @jameslockwood5113

   September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

   I agree that both scientists and psychologists should being working together to embrace the magnitude of the issue, however, i believe excluding capable representation from a spiritual angle is a mistake. Not a religious angle but spiritual. Hard for me to explain my theory in a comment box.

4. 

   @ThomasDRobinson

   September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

   I love those drawers. From pure awareness they are no different to any thing else but I still love them.

5. 

   @WillRegister-k5i

   September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

   I wish I could share this impossible effect I experience. I can project thoughts and things, and the video replies. I swear, I think of a word and the people on the video or around me matching my thinking. It is strange and isolating.

6. 

   @kevinpatrickfield

   September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

   Alex you’ve got to bring on Nicholas Humphrey – would be a brilliant conversation!

7. 

   @arjparth80

   September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

   Not just Buddhism, but earlier Hindu and Jain philosophy that Buddhism built on.

   Just because Westerners find their version of Neo-Buddhism/ New Ageism is trendy, doesn’t mean their version of non-duality consciousness (purusha) is something only they could have figured out and they can pat themselves on the back.

   Even when they talk about consciousness they keep being judgmental and apologetic for sounding ‘woo-woo’ or ‘new-agey’ which are just secular terms for Dharmic religions.

   Western scientists still think in either/ or (otherising) mentality based on their Abrahamic religions. They keep talking amongst themselves and think they are the first to come up either these ideas, when they have previously in the past rejected them and/ or repackaged and appropriated them by calling them transcendentalism, new-age spirituality, etc.

   Descartes’s duality thesis was one of the worst ‘scientific’ western philosophies that has persisted.

8. 

   @kylelhunt

   September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

   Why is it that if I get hit hard enough in the head to interrupt the complex system that is my brain, I will lose consciousness? Why does a reconfiguration of my brain state cause me to lose the thing that allegedly tables have?

9. 

   @johntalker223

   September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

   From my limited observations, several thought experiments, and gut feel, it appears to me that "everything" has some level of consciousness. Otherwise, for example, a rock wouldn't move when pushed, instead the pusher would go right through the rock as if the rock did not exist. Moreover, nothing cannot exist, therefore "everything" does exist with consciousness at some level.

10. 

    @jaywood8296

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    I think of it as things going from un-manifest to manifest so before there is a thing, there is an idea of the thing. For example a house is built to a plan (idea), & if it burns down, it may be rebuilt to the same plan. The idea of the house is fundamental to the physical structure. Is an idea material? Where do ideas come from? In the same way that physical structure is the manifestation of underlying ideas, ideas are manifestations of underlying consciousness, so consciousness is inherent in everything.

11. 

    @epicbehavior

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    Is this Sam Harris’s wife?

12. 

    @epicbehavior

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    Of course consciousness is at the base – that’s why the question of why there is something rather than nothing can be answered… consciousness = nothing = infinity

13. 

    @epicbehavior

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    Nothing is happening inside of a brain – if you carry that model to its conclusion it makes no sense.

14. 

    @buggyface

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    If you can be structurally formed from a wave of probability, why can't conciousness be the vice versa

15. 

    @mrtnhnlo

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    Polarity is the key

16. 

    @ankurantil6137

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    This what Advait vedanta in Hinduism says , all eastern religion say

17. 

    @frankjspencejr

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    Making sense of MY experience alone (since consciousness is inherently private and first person):
    Consciousness is the one thing that must exist; Consciousness can contain illusions but cannot BE an illusion.

    Materialism has no use nor explanation for consciousness.

    Matter can be an illusion.

    The most efficient answer is that experience is the stuff of reality, and experience creates the illusion of a material world, self, others.

    Materialism is in this scenario simply an explanatory construct for experience. It is the most efficient way to describe and make sense of experience.

    My biggest concern with this model is: experience is inherently passive input: sensations, thoughts, and feelings, with no obvious mechanism for output. Thus, combined with the private, singular nature of consciousness, suggests that there are no actual separate consciousness beings interacting, but rather a single consciousness. I find this both logical and seriously depressing.

18. 

    @raphaeldamato6679

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    I’ve always intuitively known that every single “thing” here was conscious. Different than ours, but no doubt conscious.
    Rocks probably see us like nats; fast and gone in an instant. And Nats probably see us like rocks; moving almost imperceptibly slow and lacking any consciousness that they can identify.
    Just my instinctual take on things (in a very simple analogy).

19. 

    @apparentbeing

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    People who believe that insects are not conscious beings, tell me what you can do when you are unconscious in a deep sleep? Nothing can be done without consciousness.

20. 

    @maatwerkengineering3398

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    So the “integrator” that create coherent experiences can end up being split over both hemispheres? Does this also lead to 2 split identities?

21. 

    @paulsgalleria

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    In some documantary about Native americans they said " spirit is everywhere, in trees in stones in water in mountains " I like that idea. I think fundamental conciousness could feel like that too.

22. 

    @robheusd

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    If consciousness can be said to be at least the process of information processing, and the change of information requires energy (see Landauer limit), the argument against consciousness being the fundament of reality is that without energy, no consciousness could exist. So materialistically one needs energy to be conscious, so energy and thus matter is more fundamental then consciousness.

23. 

    @sealchan1

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    My answer to the mind-body problem, or hard problem of consciousness, is that our brains produce what we might call truth using more than one cognitive function. The Jungian four functions of consciousness include the two rational functions thinking and feeling as well as the two irrational functions of sensation and intuition. So we have a four-fold basis for coming to experience what is true and all of these naturally contribute to the thoughts we have about the nature of consciousness, existence and free will. However, these four functions DO NOT align in a ultimately rational way. So although their fields of concern overlap, they can naturally produce "truths" which are contradictory. We can learn to understand and accept this by observing how it works in common, practical scenarios.

24. 

    @robheusd

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    The fundamental question of all of philosophy is the question what substance is fundamental for the existence of the world. Historically the way this is answered is either the point of view of philosophcal materialism (matter as the fundamental substance which constitutes the existence of reality, and consiosness as a secondary aspect of reality) and philosophical idealism (consiousness as the basic ingredient of reality, and the material world as secondary phenomena). There is not really a proof for either point of view (as btw in all of science, as only in math rigorous proof exists). Neither one can disproof that for instance the point of view of solipsism (subjective idealism) is incorrect, just that one can argue that such a point of view is absurd as it refutes the existence of other minds.

25. 

    @apparentbeing

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    How can any living being do anything in an unconscious state? Try it yourself when you are in a deep sleep.

26. 

    @peterscarisbrick4813

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    I really enjoyed this interview. Great questions and great answers. so much information. The nature of reality and consciousness is just so fascinating. I have been puzzling and researching about it for over sixty years (I’m 78 next month) So just a few thoughts from me.

    Is consciousness fundamental?
    
    The debate seems to be about whether consciousness is fundamental and that in some unknown way the material universe (reality) is created by consciousness, or the material universe (reality) is fundamental and can, in some unknown way, create consciousness.

    This is in effect what materialists call the hard problem of consciousness. But what if we can cut this Gordian Knot?

    What happens if reality and consciousness are interfunctional? What do I mean by this?

    Well we know that many things rely on each other for their existence. For instance… a circle cannot exist unless it has an inside and an outside, a functioning tree cannot exist without functioning leaves, roots, and a trunk.

    The experience of a car journey cannot exist without a functioning car with a functioning engine. There must be functioning wheels and there must be a functioning human being with functioning senses such as sight and touch etc.. There are in fact a vast number of interfunctions required for this experience.

    So how can reality and consciousness be interfunctional? The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead may come to our rescue. He maintained in his book ‘Process and Reality’ that the Universe might be considered in terms of ‘process’. So if we can find a fundamental Universal process that has reality and consciousness as interfunctions then we have solved our problem. For if this were the case, the material of the Universe and the consciousness of the universe would be totally inseparable from each other.
    
    So is there such a process? We need to be aware that this process has to existent at the smallest conceivable scale of the universe and it must be present everywhere. Any exception to this and the whole Universe fails.

    So what if we propose a process Universe consisting of a fundamental interfunctional processes that consists of a pair of oscillating quantum charges.

    It turns out that such a fundamental process has a whole list of amazing interfunctions. (linked properties) all of which cannot exist unless every one of them exists, these include charge, magnetism, mass, energy, three dimensional space, time, boundaries and awareness.

    It is the last two interfunctions… boundaries and awareness, that interest us here. The material universe (that we observe as all the boundaries that we see and feel around us) can be built up from the incredible number of quantum boundaries that are fundamental interfunctions of the process. At the same time (within the same interfunctional process) complex awareness (consciousness) is built up in the Universe from the fundamental quantum awareness that is interfunctional with the quantum boundaries that build reality. (Quantum awareness is fundamental because every quantum oscillation has two boundaries, and the quantum process has to be aware of those boundaries, otherwise the process could not exist. And the Universe would not exist.)

    So is this a way of breaking the Gordian Knot? I’ve had a go at it. If you would like to know where these ideas took me please have a look at my YouTube channel ‘Reality and Consciousness’.

    I know this has been a bit long, but I don’t think it would have made any sense if I had made it any shorter. (If it didn’t make sense, my channel has a number of well illustrated videos that flesh the basic ideas out.)

    Thank you very much for all your videos that I am looking forward to catching up with, and for taking the time to read this.

27. 

    @MohammmadIssa

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    If consciousness is fundamental, wouldn't that conflict with materialism?

    Because this new "element to the physical world" it is not physical in the classical sense, given it has metaphysical properties (consciousness) no?

    So I assume the definition of materialists either needs to change, or a new world is needed here

    10:14

28. 

    @leeosgamer74

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    i feel like they are circling around a heap of Buddhist reasoning regarding the illusions of the self. I kept waiting for it to be mentioned

29. 

    @JasonWalsh-b4n

    September 19, 2025 at 6:44 am

    HELP ME ANNAKA HARRIS AND K.A.I.S.T. AND SOUTH KOREA!!! I'M BEING TERRORIZED BY PSDO-SCIENTISTS AND MY KIN AND A CASE WORKER AND THEISTS AND SUPPORT SOLUTIONS!!!!! S.O.S.!!!!!

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