The Self That Swoops In to Decide Is Not There

Annaka Harris opens with the claim she will spend the next two hours unpacking. When people say “free will,” she argues, they are usually talking about a feeling: that consciousness, that a self, that some concrete thing separate from brain processing “swoops in” and is the cause of the next decision or the next action. That feeling, she says, is in large part if not in its entirety an illusion. Lex Fridman introduces her as the author of *Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind*, someone who writes about consciousness and reality from physics and neuroscience, and then asks her to explain the book’s case that free will is an illusion constructed by consciousness.

She wants a distinction on the table before the argument starts. Free will, in one sense, can name what a brain does as a system in nature: it makes complex decisions and runs complex processing. That decision-making is a process in nature, and she is willing to use “free will” as shorthand for it, even if the details will later make “free” look like the wrong adjective. What she will not grant is the further claim that our conscious experience of that process is what drives the behavior. The feeling that consciousness is in the driver’s seat is, in most cases, the illusion.

Fridman tries to sneak up on what a decision even means. If you ran the universe over again, would it turn out the same way? That, Harris says, is where intuitions get challenged. She has been hunting new examples because she talks about this constantly, and almost everything she writes and thinks about is counter-intuitive. Breaking those intuitions, she says, is the game — not as a stunt, but as the only way to get a deeper picture of what is actually going on.

Even after twenty years of obsession, Harris says she still has to climb back into a special frame of mind to talk about these ideas clearly, because they fight everyday intuition so hard. How long that takes depends on whether children are around, whether she is alone, and whether she has been meditating. She wants to step back one further beat: shaking up intuitions is not a side hobby of science. It is a central piece of the scientific process, and consciousness studies have reached a point where it is very difficult to move forward — usually a sign that the intuitions, not just the experiments, need to be disturbed.

The extra difficulty here is that the intuition to drop is an intuition about one’s own mind. You have to let go of your intuitions about your own intuitions. That meta quality, plus ordinary social anxiety, is part of why interviews feel so hard for her. She is clearer on the page than in real time; the book began as writing for herself, a sentence at a time, checked in the silence between paragraphs against whether it still made sense and against her remaining intuitions. That loop, she says, is the scientific process in miniature. In many ways she feels like a physicist at heart: the curiosity, from childhood, was about what this place is made of, how we got here, and the strangeness of having an experience over here while someone else has one over there.

The first time she tasted an intuition breaking, she was a child playing with marbles. They looked as if they had liquid sealed inside the glass. Her father said they were solid all the way through. She could not believe it, so he put them on a towel and smashed them with a hammer. It was all glass. She remembers the feeling: the truth was so different from what she expected, and she liked that feeling. Scientists and children who will become scientists enjoy that crack. We need it, she says, to understand germ theory, evolution, and the fact that we share genes with ants — none of which everyday intuition delivers.

Then she says, in passing, that we need this in order to understand that the Earth is flat. Fridman catches it immediately. She laughs: she meant the opposite, that we have to break the intuition that the Earth is flat, and the slip is itself the point. Intuition is strong enough to hijack a person whose subject is intuition. When celestial observations first showed we are not the center of the universe, she thinks it took close to a hundred years before that was common knowledge. Consciousness research, she says, is in a version of that interval now. Neuroscience has already produced facts that are barely seeping into the culture. The field was recently almost taboo; it is becoming a serious subject. Progress will require looking at the illusions and false intuitions that are in the way.

Fridman approaches the gap from two sides at once: as a human being, and from robotics. Are we so different from the machine? Research into AI, and the stories and films around it, is making the old philosophical zombie feel less like a thought experiment. Harris says that when he talks about looking at robots, it reminds her of how she has looked at plants for years. The analogy she wants to keep coming back to is work by Mark Jaffe on pea tendrils — the coiling arms of a pea plant. As a system, a tendril can generally do two things: grow in a straight line slowly, or grow in a coil more quickly. When a straight-growing tendril meets a branch or a pole it can wrap around, that contact is the cue to speed up and coil.

Jaffe cut a tendril off the plant to see whether it could still perform on its own. Kept in a moist, warm environment, it continued to coil. Rubbing one side was enough of a cue. Then he noticed it needed light. In the dark, the rubbed tendril did not coil. In the light, it did. The further fact is the one she wants: a tendril rubbed in the dark, still straight, would start to coil if he brought it into the light hours later. It has a primitive form of memory. It takes the sensation, holds the information, and acts when the light is there. Fridman notes the distributed part: separate it from the main plant and it still behaves. Chop off a human arm and it will not reach for coffee, even in a moist room.

She does not need the plant to have a human inner life for the analogy to work, but she asks the listener to imagine a minimal felt experience anyway. If a tendril had any experience at the moment of contact, that experience might feel like wanting to start moving differently — without projecting tennis, tea, or autobiography onto it. The move is to humble the human case: we are another plant with more complexity. The brain is the most complex thing we know of in the universe so far. The genes, the history, and the present inputs are countless; the possible outputs are close to endless. That is not the same as being able to do anything at every moment.

The human version of the tendril is a small morning question. If Fridman offers water or tea, her brain is capable of all kinds of responses, including running out of the room screaming. Capability is not the same as availability in a particular second. If we could see all of the factors leading up to the moment she chose water, she says, we would see that there was no other behavior she was going to exhibit then — the way a tendril that hits a branch starts coiling. Fridman offers a robotics parallel: experiments with dead fish that keep a swimming posture. The fish as a system can make complicated movements; in any one moment the full complexity of the river defines the actual path.

She does not collapse everything into a single reflex. Voluntary and involuntary behavior run different brain processing. A shove, a seizure, a tumor that changes impulses, and a considered choice about caffeine are not the same program. At bottom it is all brain processing and behavior, but there is a good reason some actions feel willed: the feeling marks self-generated, thought-based behavior against something imposed from outside. People may dislike the pea tendril because it sounds like a reflex and seems too thin for a complex weighing of options. At bottom, she thinks, that is still what the process is. The illusion of free will and the illusion of self are, for her, two sides of the same coin.

Even a physicalist who has bought the story intellectually, she includes herself, still feels that something stands outside brain processing and can intervene. That is the illusion. On Twitter, while working on a TED documentary episode about free will, someone asked what she meant by “I.” People get creeped out, she said, if she answers with “the system that is my brain and body that we call Annaka.” “I” and “you” are useful shorthand for that system. The illusion is the further feeling that something outside the system, free of the physical world, can step in. She can have the thought that she is not crazy about intellectual back-and-forth on Twitter, then feel as if she decides not to follow it. It feels as if the brain had the first thought and then she came in. The truth, she says, is just further brain processing.

Fridman asks how much of the “I” and “you” feeling is a culturally constructed shorthand learned from parents, and how much is built into the human machine. Harris thinks it goes very deep. Some form of feeling like a self probably goes as deep as cats and dogs, and perhaps as far as any system that has boundaries and has to navigate itself through the world — which is why she imagined the tendril might have a version of that feeling. Language still matters. Other cultures, she thinks, are more open to seeing through these illusions because of their beliefs and the way they talk. She is not a linguist and does not speak a second language, but if everyday speech framed who we are differently, she would expect that to change intuition. Fridman offers Russian under the Soviet Union as a case where collectivism seeps into how individualism is conceived. She agrees there is a range, including villages and dialects, but the underlying sense of self is still deep.

She distinguishes the autobiographical me from a more fundamental me, the one she is calling an illusion. In the book she uses amnesia: someone wakes from brain injury unable to remember a name, a life, or the faces of relatives. The autobiographical self is gone. They would still speak as an “I.” They would still have the basic sense of being a person. That feeling of being a single entity, not completely reliant on physical cause and effect, goes very deep. Fridman then asks a darker question: would she rather lose all her memories, or lose the ability to make new ones?

She cannot really answer. Both are functions the organism she is values. Forced to choose, she would keep the past, because she has children and a family; losing that history would not affect only her. Would she still love them if the memories were gone? Not in the way she does now. A deep aspect of love is the history you have together. That is the point she wants to flag for later: memory is bound to time, and time is the subject she is currently most fascinated by. For the documentary she has been speaking mostly to physicists interested in consciousness, partly because of that link, and partly because questions about consciousness have led her to wonder whether consciousness is a more fundamental aspect of the universe than she used to think.

There is no sense of self without memory, she says, even starting from amnesia. If you truly could not lay down any new memories, that sense of self would begin to disintegrate, because a self is a concrete entity through time. Stuck eternally in the present, you would basically be meditating. In meditation, the sense of self and the sense of free will drop away more easily; for most people who meditate long enough, they do. There is a brain-level account as well. The default mode network is circuitry neuroscientists do not completely understand, but it is largely responsible for the feeling of being a self. When that circuit quiets — in meditation, on psychedelic drugs, and by other means — people lose the usual sense of being a self.

The project she keeps mentioning is an audio documentary about consciousness that picks up where the book left off. She has done about thirty interviews. She is collaborating with TED on a pilot; in her mind it is a narrated ten-part series, though she admits it may land at eight or twelve. Fridman teases the confidence of ten. She is narrating the story of the questions that were still open for her, why she talked to each person, and where those conversations led. At the end of the book she had at least convinced herself that the question of whether consciousness is fundamental is a legitimate one. If it is part of the fabric of reality, she thinks it is finally a question for physics, strongly informed by neuroscience. That is why she has been talking to physicists about interpretations of quantum mechanics, string theory, many-worlds, and the holographic principle.

She started with many-worlds in a conversation with Sean Carroll, who she says is generous enough to talk even where he clearly disagrees. She has also spoken with Lee Smolin, Brian Greene, Juan Maldacena, and Carlo Rovelli. Fridman notes that Carroll’s *Mindscape* podcast is one of the places Carroll can be heard getting frustrated with panpsychism and still flying toward the light. Harris likes that struggle. Asked who currently has the craziest ideas, she says the problem is that they all sound crazy, including her own, in the same way the deep interpretations of quantum mechanics all sound crazy. That is the realm she loves, and to her surprise her interest in consciousness has taken her back there.

Fridman asks the Nietzsche question: if you spend your time imagining you are a pea tendril, how do you keep from going crazy? She used to think that was a concern. Then she learned more about the brain, and she has had her own experiences of deep depression and lifelong anxiety. Being a good scientist, she says, means a lot of ideas will sound crazy; that is how science has always advanced, and maybe nine out of ten will be wrong. Earth-shattering truths sound crazy at first. She does not think that kind of thinking necessarily leads to mental illness. Some people are more susceptible to being destabilized by it, and staying grounded in everyday life can matter for them. For her psychological health, the reverse is true. The more time she spends on the bigger picture, the happier and more expansive she feels. It makes her more sane, not less.

Fridman asks her to steelman the case that humans are fundamentally different from the pea tendril — that consciousness might have been a magic leap, like the eukaryotic cell. She first has to get clear on the question. Looking out at the universe, we know we are made of the same ingredients: atoms in different configurations under the laws of physics. The question is which of those configurations entail a felt experience of being the matter they are. Broadly, there are only two assumptions. Science, and Harris for most of her career, has taken the first: electrons and tables are not conscious, but at a certain point in complex processing that processing entails an experience of being that processing. The other assumption is that all of them are. We know the answer is not none, because she knows she is having a conscious experience. So it is all or some.

Fridman wonders whether a fundamental consciousness could simply not reveal itself until a certain complexity, like a flame that has not yet been lit. She does not think we can look at it that way. She agrees there is a spectrum, but it is a spectrum of content, not of consciousness itself. A worm’s experience, if it has one, would be extremely minimal — perhaps pressure or heat. An infant’s first conscious moments would be a thin wash of sound and light. There is a range of how much a system is experiencing. There is a moment at which you get on the spectrum, and that piece, she believes, is binary. If there is no experience, there is no consciousness. You cannot say consciousness is there but has not lit its flame yet. It has to arise at some point, or it has to always be there.

Is it possible that the arising happened first with *Homo sapiens*? She thinks that is extremely unlikely. More possible, given what we know about brains, is that it arises in brains or nervous systems, which would include flies and bees and other creatures that fall out of ordinary intuition. Once the conversation is about cats, dogs, and dolphins, it is very hard to see a difference between humans and other mammals in terms of consciousness. Intelligence is another matter, and humans are unique in important ways. She does not think you need a magical intervention outside the physical world to explain that uniqueness. We have no evidence, she says, that consciousness is itself complex, that it comes out of complex processing, or that it is required for complex processing. We made an anthropomorphic mistake: we are conscious, we are special, we cannot get conclusive evidence of anyone else’s experience from the outside, and so we tied consciousness to the things that make us unique.

A few scientists are now working on theories that go extremely deep without quite going to the fundamental level — deep enough that an electron might be conscious under the theory. That is integrated information theory, associated with Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi, both of whom she has spoken with for the documentary. She thinks their work is important, especially the openness to consciousness going as deep as particles. She also thinks they are led by false intuitions about self and free will, and that those intuitions will limit the work. She supports IIT even though she thinks they are wrong, because they are opening a path and getting more people interested. Her own lean, which she has described as 50–50 for a long time, is now something like 51–49 on emergent versus fundamental. She is not convinced consciousness is fundamental. She thinks there are good reasons it could be, that almost all science so far has been led by the other assumption, and that the fundamental option is understudied enough to deserve rigorous attention. It is the assumption she follows in her work.

If consciousness is fundamental, our current intuitions about eating a cookie may be a tiny, organism-specific implementation of something much larger. One empirical path into new experience is the work of neuroscientist David Eagleman on sensory addition and substitution: giving humans qualia they were never wired for. She spoke with a participant in a study that tried to give people an experience of magnetic north, a sense other animals have and we do not. He acquired a sense no human had had. Describing it was as hard, she says, as describing sight to someone who has never seen. We may one day have enough reason to treat consciousness as fundamental and still be unable to get our minds around what that means, or to know what it feels like. We do not even know what it feels like to be other creatures.

There is already, she says, a ton of evidence that conscious experience sits at the tail end of a lot of brain processing. In the book she uses tennis: the sights, sounds, and felt impact of hitting a ball happen at different times in the world, because sound, light, and a sensation in the hand take different intervals to arrive and be processed. Binding processes weave them into a single useful present in which you see, hear, and feel the ball hit the racket together. Eagleman described a simple older experiment: press a button, a light flashes. Introduce a delay gradually, up to perhaps 200 milliseconds, and the brain keeps calibrating so the flash still feels simultaneous with the press. Then restore the original instantaneous flash. The brain does not have time to adjust, and people have the true experience that the light flashed before they hit the button.

The same timing window was used to build an unbeatable rock-paper-scissors computer game: introduce the delay slowly enough, and the machine can see your throw before it responds, while you still experience both throws as simultaneous. That is how she wants the intuition to shift. Conscious will, and consciousness more generally, is not the thing we feel it is — the driver of behavior. It is at the tail end. There are more controversial free-will studies that claim to see markers of a decision in the brain before the person reports deciding; she does not usually lean on them, but she thinks the neuroscience will only get better. Part of her urgency is that those truths will be difficult to accept, and that they do not have to take away the things people fear losing.

People ask whether a molecular biologist can still enjoy chocolate. Harris’s version is whether focusing on the underlying nature of reality strips the joy, the pleasure, and the spirituality out of being human. For the illusions of free will and self, she thinks the reverse is true. They can be a basis for feeling more connected to each other and to the universe, for spiritual experience, and, more basically, for lowering depression and anxiety. The historical analogy is realizing Earth is not the center. It caused existential crisis, and it also became a source of awe. The sense of self, she says, sits near the core of human suffering because it feels as if we are separate from the rest of nature and from one another. When the default mode network is quieted in meditation, on psychedelic drugs, or in therapy, people describe an extremely positive feeling of being connected to the rest of nature. The lonely “I” gives way to being a piece of something larger — the way people already describe spiritual experience and many healthy psychological states.

The concerns are still legitimate. People have told her they had to stop reading her book halfway through because the free-will chapters were so upsetting, and that breaks her heart, because she sees a path to well-being many people do not currently have. The facts have to be talked about in ways that override the initial spooky quality. Asked how she overcame her own depression, she says it has mostly taken the form of anxiety she did not fully recognize until adulthood. She had postpartum depression after both daughters, a different experience from anything before. Only after recovering from the second round, in a window when she was still on an SSRI and the postpartum itself had lifted, did she realize life was not only easier than the illness — it was easier than it had ever been. Taking the anxiety away showed her how much she had been grappling with it her entire life.

She had thought of herself as sensitive, empathic, an introvert who needed time alone, high-functioning. She had been a professional dancer, nine hours a day, which she now reads as therapy. She had been in talk therapy for ten years. She had attributed almost all of the anxiety to a complicated, undiagnosed, emotionally abusive father she thinks had borderline personality disorder. Then she had children living the childhood she had wanted, without those traumas, and they still struggled with anxiety and panic. Genetics and wiring, she realized, were stronger than she had admitted. Acceptance and change, for her, are part of the same process. At a fundamental level she does not believe anything could have been different. That view, used carefully, is a path out of regret, which she calls one of the most toxic loops.

Most of the time, she says, it is not useful to keep these illusions in view. We walk around as if the Earth is flat, and you can build a house that way. You need the true geometry to fly a plane or send a rocket. The same split applies here: the illusions are useful to remember when you want a science of consciousness, a range of neuroscientific studies, or the bird’s-eye relief of lying on the ground and feeling you are on a sphere in space. They are not useful, minute to minute, while buying groceries. For getting through anxiety and depression, talk therapy helped some. She wishes she had found medication sooner. Meditation and psychedelic experiences were probably the most transformative — with the caveat that she was lucky her symptoms never blocked a life, and that meditation can exacerbate treatment-resistant depression or severe PTSD.

The most promising work she has seen for the hardest cases is psychedelic-assisted therapy. She first learned of the research about twenty years ago, through end-of-life studies and a doctor she met at a TED conference. She had already had her own experiences, so the results astonished her without surprising her. They fit the rest of the picture. Quieting the default mode network is part of what is so transformative about psilocybin. The experience she had, and that many people have, is a hard-to-describe feeling of being one with the universe, and of everything being okay — a feeling she says she had never had in ordinary life, and that would stay with her for months. It was as if she were glimpsing a deeper truth: it is all one thing, we are connected, even death is a kind of recycling. On the other side, the default mode network is more active in depression and anxiety. Obsessive cycles of thinking about oneself are a huge part of the suffering.

She may be fudging the numbers, she warns, but she has in mind something like 80 percent of people treated for PTSD being freed of it after a single session, with effects that last, and similar reports in addiction. She also asks nearly everyone in the documentary series about their own psychedelic experience, even if she cannot use the tape. She wants to look further into 1950s studies in which scientists who were stuck on the brink of a discovery used psychedelics to find a path forward. Fridman is more interested in the cultural framing: mushrooms as a journey rather than a lifestyle, unlike the “pothead” story around cannabis. Harris is cautious about substances because she has an addictive personality, and she notes it is interesting that these compounds are being used as a treatment for addiction.

Meditation, for her, is the same physicist’s experiment from the inside. The exercise is simple and not the brain’s natural state: pay close attention to present-moment experience. In vipassana, the tradition she has mostly trained in, the focus is often the breath, or an open awareness of whatever comes — a sound, a thought, an itch, the decision to scratch or not. Paying close attention to the most boring thing in the world turns out to be fascinating: no two breaths are the same, time keeps moving, thoughts keep appearing. Fridman says he “meditates” by holding a math or programming puzzle in his head with no notes. She tells him he would get a silent five-day retreat, and that it would change his brain. She has done only one retreat since having children.

The tweet of his she had responded to was about ideas that sometimes feel as if they come from outside. After enough close attention, she says, that is how all thoughts appear. The default mode network quiets, and without talking yourself out of free will, the author-feeling drops. You are not a self standing near the brain, free of the physical world, generating thoughts. The next thing simply arises in awareness. The source is still the brain; the insight is that the source is not your conscious experience. A thought arises the way a bird chirp or a pain in the leg arises. Those insights, she notes, happen to line up with the science, which they did not have to do. We are also not isolated systems. Stop drinking water and the system changes. Part of who she is is everyone she has interacted with. Brains are sculpted through those exchanges. She does not think one has to choose between “the brain is primary” and “the social interaction is the organism.” Both are alive.

Harris has spoken with Donald Hoffman many times, including three recorded conversations for the documentary, and used to meet monthly before the pandemic. They agree that whether consciousness is fundamental is now a legitimate scientific question, and both think they might be wrong. Hoffman goes much harder at reality. In the weeds, she says, semantics get in the way; they may need new terminology. She has issues with his wording. When they talk about what the wording represents, they often seem to agree. If consciousness is fundamental, they may even have an identical view of the universe. It is hard for her to know, because she disagrees with a lot of the language, including his claim that four-dimensional reality and space-time are a complete construct.

A lot of what he is pointing at, she thinks, science already knows. Anil Seth talks about perception as a controlled hallucination: everything we experience as a perception, including time and space, is the brain’s construction from interactions with the world. Physicists, across interpretations of quantum mechanics, increasingly treat space and time as emergent rather than fundamental. Hoffman is saying more than “tiny window onto the world.” He is saying the window gives us false information, and that evolution can select for organisms that are, in effect, lying to themselves. Her question back is why the picture is so consistent across organisms — why we all seem to see and feel the table. What she believes, and thinks he would accept, is that the things we perceive are connected to the structure of reality, but that structure is made of something completely different from the thing we are experiencing.

As a child she already had the image of being confined to a snow globe by human perception, with the truth of reality outside it. Every broken intuition is a chance to leave the snow globe for a moment, like smashing the marbles. In a *Nautilus* essay on time, written while talking to physicists who take space and time as emergent, she offered one thought experiment she does not claim is true: time and causality look the way they do because, for some reason, we perceive only one moment at a time. The connections we call time may be part of a deeper structure, as if a flashlight were moving across it, leaving only a pinprick of light. The rest is still there. Time as we live it would be an illusion, or would not mean what we think, and would still point to something in the fundamental nature of reality. Hoffman, after enough conversations, would agree that perceptions map onto something — just not onto the experience we are having.

Lee Smolin is among the physicists who treat space as emergent and time as still fundamental, which she finds a useful pressure on the idea. It is also hard to think about consciousness without time, and yet she and others have had timeless, spaceless experiences in certain states of meditation and on psychedelics. Memory, she clarifies, is what the experience of being a self depends on, not consciousness as such. When she thinks of consciousness as fundamental, she thinks of physics and mathematics as a description of its structure. Max Tegmark’s claim that mathematical structures are actual objects in nature, not just things we can think about, makes a particular kind of sense if what exists is a conscious experience of some sort. The exercise is humbling. We are probably in the very early days of knowing what is fundamental.

Fridman turns to the Google engineer who claimed the LaMDA language system had achieved sentience, and then to the general question: could a chatbot or a robot be conscious? Harris’s answer depends on the assumption she is running. On the fundamental channel she has chosen to stay on, every physical thing we perceive is the representation of a conscious experience, so the short answer is yes, as it would be for everything. Even then, a system built so differently, with such different physics, should have a completely non-human experience, and whether it even feels like a self is a big question mark. Capacity for suffering is the ethical hinge. Suffering, as she uses the word, can only happen in a conscious experience. She has not spent much time on the implications for other intelligences; she is more interested in the physics, and in ethics for human beings. What she will say is that the capacity for suffering of a conscious system goes up with memory and with a sense of self.

Imagine anesthesia that only erased memory, leaving you conscious through a horrific procedure. As nightmarish as that is, if the only options were that or keeping the memory, she would call wiping the memory the more ethical act, because the suffering is then not carried across a longer distance through time. A moment of suffering that exists only for itself in the present is a lesser kind of suffering than one drawn out through memory. She takes back an earlier simplification: you can have a really primitive sense of self without memory. An AI that is conscious and has both memory and a sense of self would, on this view, be capable of suffering. Fridman’s robots at home look as if they have free will; he knows how they are programmed. She does the same two-step with plants. Complex enough behavior looks like will from a certain angle, and it raises two questions: is there consciousness associated with that processing, and if there is not, what does that say about our own experience?

The zombie thought experiment is now easier to run as a robot. Fridman is annoyed by it; it feels like reducing love to a calculation. Harris finds limited use in asking what would be different if the person across from her had no experience: it forces the question her book begins with, what consciousness is doing. An alternate use is more valuable to her. Sometimes she can sit with someone, imagine there is no experience there, and notice that the feeling is exactly how she already looks at complex plant behavior. The thought experiment flips. It opens possibilities she was closed to. None of this, she thinks, dissipates the capacity for love. If anything it enhances it. The more time she spends seeing through the illusions, the more poignant conscious experience becomes. If consciousness is fundamental, she offers an image: a pot of boiling water, the water as consciousness, the bubbles as particular experiences. Let go of the self and the idea that experiences are happening *to* someone drops out. What you get are appearances of different conscious experiences coming into being.

She is consumed by the depth of human suffering and tries not to be overwhelmed by it; many-worlds first hit her as a psychological rejection because of the multiplication of that suffering. Fridman thinks the awesomeness outpowers the suffering over time. She wishes she believed that. Memory multiplies beauty as well as pain, and still, as things have always been for animals and humans, suffering seems to her more impactful than any equivalent happy experience. She does not trust that feeling. Asked the meaning of life, she says she has never been drawn to why questions, only to what and how, and she does not really think there is a why. The line that comes to mind is from Thich Nhat Hanh, probably printed on mugs: we are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness. If there is a purpose worth being here for, that is the one she would pick. Her advice to younger people is the same advice she gives her kids: follow the thing you love, even if it does not look like a career. She started the book thirty years before she knew it was a book. Keep curiosity and wonder alive. A dogged, unconventional pursuit of what you love, Fridman says, is how something beautiful gets made.