Her main point is that if consciousness is fundamental, then that would be a paradigm shift.
She expects physicists to be experts on what is fundamental, so she interviews a bunch of them for the documentary, including Brian Greene and Sean M. Carroll.
These guys are odd choices, because they do not believe in free will, and one cannot have very much consciousness without free will. To me, the ability to make decisions is at the core of my consciousness.
Here is Greene's view:
Brian Greene, a prominent theoretical physicist known for his work on string theory, does not believe in free will in the traditional sense. He argues that the universe operates under deterministic physical laws, leaving no room for human agency to override them. In his book Until the End of Time (2020), Greene asserts that everything—thoughts, actions, choices—is the result of particles and fields obeying quantum-mechanical and classical rules. During a 2020 Harvard Science Center lecture, he said, “We are made of these exquisitely ordered, wonderfully choreographed particles of nature governed fully by the physical laws, no free will whatsoever.” He sees free will as an illusion, a sensation we experience, but not a reality grounded in physics. In a 2014 blog post (Atheism and the City), he’s quoted saying, “The sensation [of free will] is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.” For Greene, our decisions are just outcomes of particle interactions, not independent acts of will.Carroll is even more extreme in that he fully accepts many-worlds theory, so no decisions are made. Just world-splittings.
Sam Harris is more extreme than that. While Greene and Carroll accept an illusion of free will, Sam Harris denies that, and claims that he has no feeling of free will.
Do not take the Harris's too seriously. While they claim to rely on Physics, nothing they say depends on any physics. Instead it is largely based on their experiences taking psychodelic drugs.
A new paper carefully explains the error in thinking that modern science requires denying free will:
Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not DeterministicThey are correct. If you think modern science requires determinism, then you are a couple of centuries out of date.
Henry D. Potter, George F.R. Ellis, Kevin J. MitchellFree will discourse is primarily centred around the thesis of determinism. Much of the literature takes determinism as its starting premise, assuming it true for the sake of discussion, and then proceeds to present arguments for why, if determinism is true, free will would be either possible or impossible. This is reflected in the theoretical terrain of the debate, with the primary distinction currently being between compatibilists and incompatibilists and not, as one might expect, between free will realists and skeptics. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that there is no reason to accept such a framing. We show that, on the basis of modern physics, there is no good evidence that physical determinism of any variety provides an accurate description of our universe and lots of evidence against such a view.
Of course the determinists, from Einstein to Greene, know all about quantum mechanics and its indeterminacy. But they act as if QM is just classical mechanics with some randomness added in, and say that no one could have agency over randomness, by definition. This misunderstands QM. The above paper addresses this argument, although they refer to forthcoming papers for details. It also address arguments from unitarity, time-reversal, block universe, and causal determinism.