How does self-awareness connect us to others, society, and the universe? 4 experts explain.

Christof Koch, PhD, Daniel Dennett, PhD, Sam Harris, PhD, and Deepak Chopra, MD—four thinkers from neuroscience, philosophy, biology, and medicine—each share their own interpretation of consciousness, combining their ideas to paint one massive, mysterious picture of what it means to be an awakened being.

We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.

CHRISTOF KOCH: How is it that a piece of matter, no matter how complex, ultimately the brain is a piece of furniture, but it can love and it can hate and it can fear and it can dread, well, how can a piece of matter love? There's nothing in the foundational equations of physics. There's nothing in quantum mechanics and relativity. There's nothing in the periodic table of chemistry that talks about love or hate or dreaming or feeling. So where does conscious experience come into the world?

Consciousness is any subjective experience, seeing, hearing, loving, dreading, imagining. If it feels like something, then you're conscious.

SAM HARRIS: But we don't know how consciousness arises out of the unconscious complexity of the universe.

DANIEL DENNETT: ] You have to really look hard at the question of how evolution could have gotten the mind, the human mind, consciousness, up and running.

DEEPAK CHOPRA: We exist in relationship. Without that, there is no existence.

SAM HARRIS: What really can't be debated is that from your point of view as a being in this universe, consciousness is the one thing that can't be an illusion. It's the one thing to which you, moment to moment, are identical. The fact that it's like something to be you is what we mean by consciousness.

DANIEL DENNETT: For a millennia, people had it in mind that all the wonderful things they saw in the world, all the beautiful design of the animals and plants and living things must be due to a fabulously intelligent creator. So it was until Darwin came along and turned that upside down and realized that in principle, there could be a process that would just inexorably grind out better and better and better designs and create the living world where there had been just lifeless matter before. But that only gets us to animal minds. If we wanna look at human minds, we have to add another source of evolutionary power, and that's cultural evolution. And what it permits is for cultural evolution to become ever less Darwinian, ever more intelligent. Then eventually, you get comprehension and consciousness.

CHRISTOF KOCH: From a medical point of view, consciousness is defined as awareness of self and others and arousal, so what that means, there are basic mechanisms in my brainstem, sort of at the bottom of the brain, that are absolutely necessary for me to be conscious. But it doesn't provide any of the content of consciousness. You don't love with your or dream or fear or dread with your brainstem. That really seems to be in us the outmost layer of the brain, which is the neocortex, and that's the physical substrate of our conscious experience of the world, including notions of self. Who am I? My memories, my traits, my characterization. All of that seems to be instantiated by the most excitable piece of active matter in the known universe, the neocortex.

SAM HARRIS: For most of us, we wake up each morning and we are chased out of bed by our thoughts and we think, think, think, think, think, until we struggle to fall asleep later that night. And our lives are largely determined by the quality of those thoughts, the quality of the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. And these stories can be incredibly powerful and negative stories can be profoundly enervating and dispiriting. But they're not the most fundamental layer of our experience. I mean, there's just something deeper to our being, moment to moment, than our thoughts and our reactions. Can you let your attention fully sink into the present moment so that you can discover what is beautiful there? What is sacred there? What is self-transcending there?

CHRISTOF KOCH: Expanded consciousness, alternate consciousness, they're very different from ordinary states of consciousness. We all live in what I call in the gravitational field of planet ego. We always live in this gravitational field, just like we always live in the gravitational field of the planet Earth, right? Now, there are certain conditions when we can begin, just like an astronaut becomes weightless and floats, when we can lose ourself, literally we become selfless. So for instance, when you go into state of flow, for example, some people do it when they fly fish, long distance running or rowing. When you do meditation under certain types of psychedelics, we can have either reduced or maybe no self altogether. And it's a wonderful experience to expand the walls of your Perception Box where you realize now suddenly I understand something about the world or I've noticed for the first time that the world is beautiful and transcendent without the self necessarily getting in the way.

DEEPAK CHOPRA: Self-awareness means awareness of experience through the five senses. It means awareness of my body. It means awareness of mental space, thoughts, memories, sensations, images, imagination. And finally, it means awareness of relationship, of me in relationship to friends and family, to community, to society, to the Earth, to the stars, to the galaxies. The more you experience this kind of self-awareness, you see that you are an activity of the total universe. And that is a mystery. No one knows why there is the universe and no one knows why there is existence. But what it does do, ultimately, it leads to what I call epistemological humility, not knowing which is actually the basis of all creativity. If you knew everything, there wouldn't be any creativity.

SAM HARRIS: The most satisfying way of engaging life is not to be endlessly thinking about it or in telling yourself some story about your past or future. It's not in understanding yourself conceptually, but can you arrive in the present moment in such a way that you can most fully engage what it's like to be you?

CHRISTOF KOCH: I'm conscious, the therefore I am. Because if I'm not conscious, I don't exist for myself. So it's everything to us.