speaker-0: being that can conceive of eternity should be able to attain eternity. Why would the universe create a being unless it were overtly malevolent? Make beings that can conceive of eternity and deny them.

speaker-1: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people and about spiritual topics. We've done over 750 of them now. And if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones, ⁓ you can explore it on YouTube. But if you go to pathgap.com, we have better systems of organizing all the interviews and search functions and so on. So you might find that more useful. But if you are on YouTube, please like the show if you like it and subscribe if you would like to subscribe. That helps with YouTube's algorithm. This whole thing is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website. My guest today is Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn and I'm really excited about this interview because I've been a big fan of his for many years. He is the creator, writer, and host of Closer to Truth, which was a long running PBS television series and is now a podcast and YouTube channel. Are you still on PBS, Robert, or no?

speaker-0: Sure, this will be our finishing our 26th season on PBS stations.

speaker-1: I'm going to see if I can find it on there. So Rubber Show, in case you're not familiar with it, covers a lot of the topics that Batgap covers, but many others, which also fascinate me. For instance, discussions about the cosmos, cosmology, physics, philosophy of science, life, philosophy of biology, mind, consciousness, brain mind, philosophy of mind, and meaning, theism, atheism, agnosticism, global philosophy of religion, critical thinking. things like that. And if you're a Batgap fan, you know that I'm very fascinated with the interface between science and spirituality. And a lot of his topics address that. Dr. Kuhn has, I think, packed about four lifetimes into this one. Well, he's the author of a comprehensive review article on the theories of consciousness called The Landscape of Consciousness, toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications, which I just... converted to audio and listened to in its entirety. It covers over 350 theories of consciousness and it's now up to 400 theories and there's a website dedicated to it. He's written or edited over 30 books, including The Mystery of Existence, Why Is There Anything at All? with John Leslie, Closer to Truth, Challenging Current Belief, Closer to Truth, Science Meaning and the Future. He was an investment banker and wrote a book about that. He is an expert on China and has written books about how Chinese leaders think. He is the chairman of the Kuhn Foundation. What is the Kuhn Foundation?

speaker-0: It's a small family foundation that I founded in order to do contributions to areas that are very important to us, closer to truth being the most important that we were able to fund. It's very small by international standards, but still enables us to do that. We've also done work in classical music. My wife is a classical music performer and we've sponsored some concerts around the world.

speaker-1: Great. And your academic background, you have a BA in biology from Johns Hopkins, a PhD in anatomy and brain research from UCLA, and an MBA in management. And to top it all off, you are an expert and avid table tennis player. play about six hours a week.

speaker-0: That's right, I-I-I-Avott is correct, I'm not sure Expert is a good designation, but I'm trying.

speaker-1: And you told me before we started that you have limitations in your right eye and so you really don't have any depth perception and despite that you have become a very good table tennis player. I'm sure you could beat me.

speaker-0: It's a tribute to the plasticity of the human brain. I've been legally blind in my right eye. It's severe keratoconus, which means the cornea is completely misshapen. Whereas my left eye, which is not terrific, but at least I can see, I see one point of light in my right eye. I'd see a hundred points of light and it's very distorting, but the brain filters that out. And so I don't see, but effectively I have zero vision in my right eye. So when I play table tennis, You just get used to other cues, a sound, a relative speed, how the other person hits. And because of that, my back hand is better than my forehead or more consistent because the back hand you hit in front of you. So my left eye, which I can see, I can see it. The forehead you hit on the right. So my right eye can't see that. So my left eye has to look at that. So it's more difficult. you that's only one of my many problems.

speaker-1: My backhand in pickleball is better than my forehand too for some reason. I know what you mean because one time I remember some guy hit a shot and it was like instantaneous because we were so close. I got it right where I wanted it. He said, how'd you do that? I said, I could see by your body language what you were going to do.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to know that and you don't even think about it. And oftentimes I play better when it's faster because you don't have time to think. If you have time to think, you lose the thread.

speaker-1: Yeah. All right. Well, I'm going to start with a terrifying experience of nothingness that you had when you were 12. You were away at summer camp or something like that. And you had this experience that frightened you. Describe that a little bit. And then I have some questions about it.

speaker-0: Sure, it was a lifetime impact. I was sleeping in a bed, I think I was 12, between seventh and eighth grade. And suddenly I had a thought that scared me. And it scared me so much that I did my best to repress it. And I did repress it. And then decades later, I was trying to remember what that was and I couldn't. And then sometime later, maybe beginning close to truth, I finally remembered what it was. And that is what if there were nothing and it was the, the old question Leibniz Heidegger have asked, why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there anything at all? And that concept has become a deep obsession. And ⁓ the thought of what nothing is, is, very, very important because it's Important to understand what nothing means. I've written a paper where there are nine levels of nothing, which we can discuss. But the question of existence, raw existence, has been one of the two major driving factors that led me to Closer to Truth, that has been a critical catalyst in my intellectual life. The other, of course, being mind and consciousness. So between those two, between raw existence and human sentience, These have been the two drivers of what I've done with Closer to Truth and intellectually broadly.

speaker-1: Yeah, that's the impression I got when I heard you describe the experience that it kick-started your quest, which couldn't merely be a scientific quest because you're more open-minded than that than science usually is. You ponder things that science usually doesn't want to touch because you want to get closer to truth and you want to expand the periphery of your investigation as widely as possible.

speaker-0: Yeah, I want to understand the totality of best thinking that human beings have about the nature of reality and the nature of mind. I can tell you a brief backup story because I think it's relevant to your question. When I did that article that you referred to, which was a critical thing for me, ⁓

speaker-1: Summarizing the 350s theories or the one about levels of nothing

speaker-0: No, the landscape of consciousness. And this is the product of a lifetime in one sense. But let me tell you the specific story because it directly addresses your question about the boundaries of science when dealing with what many people think is a purely scientific question, which is the nature of brain, mind, consciousness. So I've been focused on consciousness my entire life. That's why I did a PhD in neuroscience at that time. It's called brain research at UCLA. I had been motivated by this desire to understand reality, the nature of existence. And I originally thought I would study physics or philosophy or philosophy and physics, the various programs. And then one time I was still a teenager, I had the realization the only way we know anything. The only way we know physics, only way we know philosophy is through our brains. And so maybe if I studied the brain, I can have more insight into these derivative things that we use the brain for in physics, philosophy, religion, et cetera. And so that led me to brain research and consciousness was the critical question. And I always had an intuition that there was more to consciousness than just the physical world that science could. address at the time I had interest in parapsychology and had actually been invited to do a PhD in parapsychology by JB Ryan at Duke to show you how old I am. So I was way back at a good correspondence with him, but ultimately I decided to do a neurophysiology, which bode me very well to have a very strong, very strong scientific background. throughout my four years of doctoral program, was zero about consciousness. I mean, it never even came up. was not even something that even was mused about at that time. Of course, things are different today. That was in the mid-1960s when I did my doctorate. But that was a motivation. And then when I began Closer to Truth, mind, brain, consciousness was a prime feature of it. And that was begun in the late 1990s. The first broadcast was in the year 2000. So we're in our 26th year right now and have done... literally thousands of interviews and 360 television programs on PBS stations, etc. ⁓ And so, and conscience has been a major factor. So one day, ⁓ somebody who knew about Closer to Truth and Consciousness wrote to me that he was on the editorial board of a major scientific magazine called Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. And he said they were planning a special issue on quantum consciousness, scientific approach to it. And he asked me if I could write the introductory article to sort of give an overview of the field and then they would deal with their scientific articles. And I said no. And I said no, because they didn't have the time. ⁓ And more than no time, I was worried that it would become an obsession. And how could I do it really well? ⁓ And he asked me two or three more times. And by the third or fourth time after about three or four months, I realized something and I said, this is something I should do in my life. I started with a doctorate when I was still a teenager. And then I've had 25 years on Close to the Truth. I've done this my whole life. This is something I should do. And if I'm not going to do it now, I'm never going to do it. So I agreed, recognizing the huge amount of work it would be. But the truth, is that the amount of work that went into it was about 5 % of what I feared it would be. It was literally 20 times more than I expected and it became a real obsession. For about 15 months, I would write literally every night from nine or 10 in the night till three, four in the morning. I responsibilities during the day, family responsibilities health-wise and I have to take care of. So there are other things I do. it was an absolute obsession during this time. So, and it continued. mean, I had a deadline and I got an extension and because I just had more and more theories. Then I submitted the first draft and of course, it's a peer review journal. So it went into peer review. So I had a couple of months and while I was in peer review, I still continued to increase it. And at that time it was... And peer review was like 55,000 words. Ultimately, it became 170,000, 175,000 words a year later. But that's another story. So when it got to peer review back, was a terrific peer review, anonymous reviewer. So I don't know who she or he was. ⁓ And the review said, look, this is important stuff. It's very, very good stuff in terms of the scientific approach. ⁓ He mentioned one or two theories I left out. And so he was right or she was right. included that, that was very helpful. But then the reviewer said, look, you have a lot of philosophical and theological ⁓ theories of consciousness and, you know, that's okay, but that's not relevant to the readers of progress in biophysics and molecular biology. They're not going to be interested in that. So, better that you take that out and then improve this, the scientific theories we discussed, and it's good to go. And I got that and I wrote back very appreciative, saying, I appreciate your liking what I've done. The suggestions you made are excellent. I'll put those in. When I was a little unsure of, in terms of the nature of language, I had rejected language as a theory of consciousness because I thought it was a derivative of consciousness, not a generator of consciousness. He thought it was important. I was on the fence on that. So I put it back in and have sections by Noam Chomsky, John Searle, others. about the nature of language. Okay, so that's it. But I said, look, I understand why you want me to take out the philosophical theories on a proto-panpsychism or a cosmo-psychism and all the theological views from the Abrahamic religions to Hinduism and Buddhism and folk religions, which I had African religions, Chinese religions, everybody has an opinion. I understand why you want that taken out. And if I were you, if I was reviewing this, I would reject the paper because that's it. That's it. I'd reject it and I understand that. said, but I'm going to do this once in my life. it wasn't my idea, but now that I've done it, I'm going to do this once in my life. I'm going to do it to the best of my ability. And I have to put into this paper. what I believe to be the best and total thinking that humanity has thought about consciousness and the philosophy and the theology of all these different areas must be in there. And if you don't want to publish it, that's fine. I understand it. I would reject it. I said again, but if you don't want to publish it, that's fine. I'll find another publisher or worse comes to worse. I'll publish it myself. And to their credit, they said, we understand you publish what you want. and not a single word was cut.

speaker-1: Nice. Well, this is a very relevant point, I think, because there's a certain hubris in scientific circles that our way is the only way, you as a fundamentalism kind of, and all this other stuff is woo-woo, it's nonsense, and ⁓ it's primitive. ⁓ whereas I feel that these ancients actually had the answer to what consciousness is, ⁓ because... they developed methodologies to experience it directly. And we can get into, we can unpack that in terms of how science functions and, you know, trying to remove the observer, then any subjectivity from the process. Whereas in the case of consciousness, ultimately you have to refine your mind-body system to become an adequate research tool, so to speak. to experience pure subjectivity or pure consciousness devoid of any coloration or alteration or distortion. And once that happens, as the traditions say, you know not only who you are, you know what the ultimate reality is, experientially, not just conceptually.

speaker-0: Yeah. And I deeply appreciate that view. Uh, but it's not a view that I would, uh, espouse myself. I keep an open mind to all the different approaches. Uh, and I, and I really mean that. And when I have done these theories, uh, in the original paper, there were about 225, then the website, by the time the website started with 350, it's now over 400. When I do each theory, I. fool myself or pretend that that's my theory and I want to explicate that as best as I can. want the whole world to believe this because this is the truth. know, closer to truth is not closer to the truth. Anybody who calls it closer to the truth, we shut them down, say, no, this is closer to truth. It's a present progressive approach. We don't have the truth. When viewers say, you you left us hanging, I said, too bad. That's that's my best thinking right now. And the same is true for for for consciousness. But when I do each individual one, I I pretend that that is the real truth and I want to get it out. And so each theory I treat at the same level. Now, you can then judge the theories by their relative powers or consistency, a whole bunch of criteria. But I did not take that approach. I took the approach that any theory that we allow, and of course there many we don't, they're bizarre or absurd. And so you have to have some standard, but my standard is a lot broader, shall we say, than the typical, certainly the typical scientific approach. There are many, there are some papers that give different neurobiological theories, 22, 26, different numbers of those theories, and that's... When they look at the world, that's the only way to explain consciousness. I don't do that. I take a very very broad approach ⁓ and ⁓ That I expected a lot of criticism from that from the scientific community. I've actually gotten very little ⁓ By that because of the the approach that I've had I I approach ⁓ each theory epistemologically and ontologically at the same level of of ⁓ intensity to the best of my ability. And what we also try to do, we haven't done it with every theory, but I send it after I finish it, I send it to the theorists, assuming they're alive themselves, and ask for feedback. I would say about a third, I've now done that and I've gotten feedback in a few cases. It's most cases very minor and appreciative in some cases. a very handful of cases it was a significant change. I said, oh, sorry, I got it wrong. And they said, no, no, you got it right from how I thought five years ago. You read my old papers, but now I have a new paper, so it's changed. And that's fine. And that's why our website, Landscape of Consciousness, is constantly updated by the theorists themselves. We want to keep very much updated. to keep at this point, I have two major theses. that I have taken to encapsulate everything I've done on consciousness, which is not only the paper that you saw, a new scientist had a ⁓ big feature on it, ⁓ and several other scientific papers have come out thereafter, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Cart Neurology, and Neuroscience. I've written much more about it. But all together, there are two big points that I try to make. Number one is that this Well, there's an overarching view that I should stay first and that is the whole concept of consciousness to me is the most significant existential question that humanity can ask because if we're looking at the nature of reality which you know, we a lot of Many of your interviewees love to talk about that drive our lives. It's driven you has driven me so the nature of reality to me consciousness is the closest we can get to a way to understand that now that goes either direction if Consciousness is indeed all physical that is a lot of points for that the world is all physical and there is no non-physical reality as many scientists of course would would espouse ⁓ if consciousness Isn't something beyond the physical that we know today or beyond even any physical whatsoever? then that is a big statement about the nature of reality. So consciousness is the existential question of humanity and how it goes physical, non-physical, the nature of the physical, nature of the non-physical, the world or all reality turns on that question. Given that importance, there are two thesis that I have, ⁓ that I feel strongly about. Number one is that this time in our knowledge systems, understanding each of the areas, the silos to deal with consciousness. Certainly experiential from the ancient traditions and modern spirituality as you've wonderfully presented over the years is one major. The scientific is another approach to it where the scientific method has to do it. And there are other kinds of many different philosophical approaches which differ significantly from the scientific and the experiential. And what I'm saying at this time, it is a big mistake to force an understanding of consciousness using any particular kind of knowing or way of knowing or approach to knowing. so whether it's the experiential, the purely third-person observational experimentation, repeating science, whether it's philosophical a priori thinking, whatever it is, ancient tradition, monetary, whatever it is, it's too soon to to close off any way of thinking. that's number one. We want to have each way of thinking and explore them in depth. That's number one. Number two is that once you have a theory of consciousness, lots of other things that you are interested in that are critical big questions for humanity are derived from it. So questions like life after death, ⁓ free will, personal identity. ⁓ Meaning, purpose in life or in the universe, value, the nature of value, absolute relative, cetera. AI consciousness hot in today's world. Virtual immortality, which many Silicon Valley types think is just a few years or decades away where you can upload your first person experience to the cloud and live virtually forever or least until the sun burns out. ⁓ all of those different questions which people deal with. There's this whole subcultures that deal only with free will or only with personal identity. These are big areas. My point, and AI consciousness of course is the big one today in today's world, my point is that each of those questions, and we can discuss AI consciousness in particular, is directly the result of your theory of consciousness, and nobody talks about that. Because if your theory of consciousness is one way and you're dealing with free will, they don't articulate. And so you have to have a theory of Now what happens, particularly in the scientific community, is that there is a theory of consciousness that is assumed and that everybody agrees upon. And for the people who are absolutely sure that AI consciousness is something that will be attained at some point, artificial AI and does Consciousness come with artificial general intelligence. Those are very separate kinds of questions But assume it does then they think that that's certain again Some people would say it's five years some people say 20 years. It's a matter of time But they're assuming a particular theory of consciousness, which in general is called computational functionalism computation means that the brain works on a Basically a digital kind of system parallel. I mean very complicated and functionalism being it's a question of the function not the substrate. So it's what it does, it doesn't matter where it is. And so it's multiply realizable. So the same function can be in silicon or in gallium arsenide as well as in neural tissue. But that's the assumption that they're making when they deal with the question. So I want to dig below that. So that's the second big point. First big point is we We are open to all different kinds of knowings. We're not shutting anything off. Second is that the big questions that we ask are directly ⁓ determined by your theory of consciousness.

speaker-1: That's great. There's a lot of points in there that I want to unpack with you. I've always, as I said, been fascinated by the interface or relationship between science and spirituality. And I think that they both can contribute to one another and that either without the other has got some gaps or some limitations. And we can explore that topic.

speaker-0: I would just comment that it's not reciprocal in a balanced way because people who accept the spiritual as reality as you do and your guests do ⁓ must accept the science. ⁓ The science does not have to accept the spirituality. So it's not reciprocal. You may believe, I may believe that there are things to understand the totality, which is why I put it in my book. scientific article in the Journal of Biophysics and Molecular Biology, these are the ways of thinking because I think they're relevant. I'm not saying I think they're right. I just think I think they need a seat at the table at this time. But it's not symmetrical. In other words, many of the science say, you need us because anything you say that contradicts science is just internally inconsistent and just it must be rejected, but we don't need you. That's what many would say.

speaker-1: They say that, and it's not reciprocal, but I'm suggesting that it should be and that science would be better off if it were. Because I think that what they are doing is putting on the horses blinders and excluding a whole spectrum of reality that is very much real, but that their current methodologies and tools are not capable of exploring. And there are people who have learned how to use those tools to explore those regions. And I think their knowledge is just as valid as anything science comes up with, but science is limiting itself by excluding it.

speaker-0: Some are trying to bridge that gap. ⁓ There's one aspect that we deal with called ⁓ neurophenomenology. Phenomenology is the study by Hercel originally that it takes experience to be a category, not to be dissected away, but to really understand as a whole. It's related to continental philosophy versus analytic Anglo-American philosophy. that phenomenology is an approach to understanding the kind of collective understanding of human sentience as opposed to dividing it into little parts and splitting it up as analytics would do. Now, neurophenomenology is a desire to subject phenomenology to scientific endeavors. It was started by Francisco Viella early like 30 years ago. ⁓ And ⁓ individuals today have taken that up in different fashions. ⁓ Michel Bitbol in France, Evan Thompson in Canada have approached ⁓ phenomenology and neurophenomenology as a way to take ⁓ consciousness seriously, but still subject to scientific analysis. ⁓ I would say that that's a very good approach. I don't think the results have ⁓ fulfill the promise. are also the ones that the prominent ones are physicalists in the sense that they believe there is nothing but the physical world even though their work seems to indicate otherwise they take pains to maintain just a physicalist views. These are complicated ⁓ questions and I try to you know deal with that in the theories of consciousness there are ⁓ approaches to consciousness which get away from materialism and physicalism but still maintain its ⁓ one substance view ⁓ such as non-reductive physicalism which still is physical but its mental states are not reducible to physical states. Something called property dualism which is a dualism but still only one substance. That's substance dualism with two substances. property dooms that the properties are real, they're ontologically real, even though there's only one substance. there are ways that people try to deal with it. You know, I've made the, you know, the half serious joke that I said, people say, wow, you have 400 theories, that's ridiculous, I have so many. I said, that's, the problem is not that I have 400 theories, the problem is I have one too few.

speaker-1: or the one you're looking for might be hidden among those 400.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, I'm, yeah, I've this, it's a similar comment. my point is I'm not willing to, you know, every time I give speeches or talk to groups, it's generally a group with a position, scientific or philosophical, and in that group, I usually take the other side in each group. So, if your view has a wonderful, expansive approach to spirituality, you're find me in this conversation showing more on the physical, physicalist and materialist side. And when I'm in the reverse of talking to scientists, I'm then explaining why I include these ancient traditions and theology and philosophical with them. So I'm always in the minority and people are always mischaracterizing me as supporting the other side.

speaker-1: So you're a ⁓ very dexterous gadfly who just poses whatever thing you're in. I want to compliment you on something you said earlier about how as you're writing the paper, you dove into each theory. Because that's the impression I got as I was listening to it. And incidentally, if you convert your whole paper to audio, it takes about 19 hours to listen to, which I did. ⁓

speaker-0: Wow, I'm impressed.

speaker-1: Yeah, a lot of it was walking in the woods and stuff. I was impressed that you had, I I spaced out on a lot of them. thought, well, I don't understand that, but I'm going on to the next one. But you obviously dove into each one and really nailed it and in your own understanding. So you must actually at this point have a better overview of the many theories of consciousness than anyone else on earth.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah You know, people have said that I kind of don't accept that. I accept that, you know, it's like each time I did it, I felt I understood that theory. But when I finished that theory, you know, it was pushed aside. Yeah. And so it's not like I, you know, have access to all of this as, you know, as AI would. you know, I have I have greatly enjoyed the process. It's been very long, very hard, a great deal of work and continues. Yeah. But I have, it's been an exciting process and a very exhilarating one to me. I'll tell you another story, which is relevant because people think how smart I am to find all these theories, because almost everybody, even professionals in the field, are seeing theories they never saw before.

speaker-1: and way you categorize them was brilliant too. mean, you know, point 10 and point 10.1, point two, they're all sort of like outlined in this slide.

speaker-0: ⁓ I definitely try to do that. but but so categorization is a second point but the point is is where where all these series come from am I that smart or am I that knowledgeable of the world literature and the answer is no the answer is I had a core and Then I sent it to a couple of people early on and who I trusted and ⁓ they sent me back theories I hadn't included so I included those but the biggest thing happened was the publisher ⁓ ⁓ The magazine is published by Elsevier and Science Director is their website. It's the first to second biggest in the world. when the paper went through ⁓ three peer reviews, because I kept increasing it so much that they had to keep peer reviewing it because it changed so much. And at the third peer review, ⁓ they published it like two days later and I was still working on it.

speaker-1: Yeah, you didn't expect them to publish it. They kind of let the cat out of the bag.

speaker-0: And I panicked because people are to think this is the final version. At that point, 125,000 words and it was still one third not finished yet. I didn't know that at the time, but I knew it wasn't finished. And I panicked. said, please take it down. It's a mistake. People are going to get the wrong first impression. They're not going to read this paper twice. so please take it down. said, we can't do that. The rule is we publish it as peer reviewed and done. And said, you've got to take this. And the only time we take papers down is when there's questions of plagiarism or fraud. We take it down. People are going to think you plagiarize that. I don't care. Take it down. You can explain later. So they, after about two weeks, they took it down. They put a note that we hope to publish it again. If we don't, we'll explain why that that was it. So it was mysterious. But what happened during that two weeks is that there were many people around the world who were either ⁓ using keywords or whatever read the paper and i got maybe twenty emails ⁓ from people who most of them would say boy but you did is great but how stupid you are you forgot this theory and ⁓ you know and in some cases i had never heard of this theory but it was really interesting theory and in some cases i had heard of it And I rejected it because it seems so bizarre and so absurd. didn't want to be embarrassed to put that theory in there. But now I find that there are very smart people and groups who think that is the main theory. So I had to reconsider and put that and put it, put that theory in. So as a result of this feedback, I probably had a 20 or 30 theories that I had either had rejected or hadn't heard of. And that process continued and continues today. ⁓ In fact, I have a backlog of about 50 theories that are mostly modest, but three or four important that will be put into the website over the next ⁓ couple of months.

speaker-1: Can you think of any other phenomenon about which there are so many diverse theories?

speaker-0: That's a great point. And consciousness seems to be, as we say, sui generis, one of a kind. For example, there's a great debate about the nature of emergence. ⁓ Emergence is an important theory of scientific structure, how the world works. ⁓ Simple examples are the wetness of water. One molecule is not wet. And you put zillions together, and you can have wetness. ⁓ hydrogen to use continuous water, hydrogen and oxygen are two gases that you don't that

speaker-1: Not water like at all.

speaker-0: you can't drink them and mean that you swim in them take a shower

speaker-1: created ice explosion.

speaker-0: Yeah, you put a couple of H's with an oxygen, put them together, and now you have water. So that's an emergence, but, and it seems miraculous, it seems non-physical how that happened, but you can show how that happens. It has to do with the bonding angles between the molecules and get them together so you can come up with a rigorous scientific theory why the two hydrogens and one oxygen becomes water and why multiple ⁓ molecules of water become wet. And so that's called weak emergence because it's an emergence but it is scientifically discernible. Maybe we don't know today, which we didn't originally, but now we know in that case and other cases are very similar. Consciousness is the one example that might be called strong emergence. And strong emergence is the concept that it is emergent to the property but we not only do not know how, we cannot know how. So strong emergence means that there's something in that that prevents knowledge from understanding how the emergent works. Now, strong emergence is controversial. Some people say it's self-contradictory, it doesn't exist. ⁓ And I think there are valid points about that. It's used strong emergence as an example of how physicalism can still explain consciousness with strong emergence, but how is that happening without some non-physical thing? And so it's a complex process ⁓ to understand. So to answer your question, I framed it in terms of strong emergence. Consciousness seems to be the only topic that we now can ⁓ specify that is potentially a strong emergent. ⁓ And so it does seem to be a unique feature. ⁓ Now, some would deny that. We have a whole category. We can go through the categories that we have in consciousness. But under materialism, there's a subcategory of eliminativism and illusionism. which ⁓ deals with the question by discarding it, by saying consciousness ⁓ is an illusion or it doesn't really exist the way we think it does. It's very easy to ridicule this position, very easy to ridicule it. ⁓ One philosopher, ⁓ he's written publicly, Gengel and Strassen, has said this is the silliest idea that anybody in humanity has ever had, not just philosophers, anybody. It's the most absurd idea and many people say that. It's eliminativism or illusionism that what we think is consciousness is a brain trick and it's nothing. Strauss and said that ⁓ that idea that consciousness doesn't exist is the silliest idea that humanity has ever come because if the

speaker-1: that Julius again? But Galen Strossen is saying that it's just a-

speaker-0: If there's anything that we know for sure it is that consciousness exists ⁓ His view of course is a panpsychic view where he calls panpsychism the real materialism, which is a fascinating idea ⁓ in its own ⁓ but Consciousness to me does seem to be unique in in the universe ⁓ in existence as as we know it that's why I I have said that the nature of existence kind of turns on what consciousness really is. And ⁓ that's why it goes beyond any scientific interest or anything else but is fundamental to our understanding.

speaker-1: Yeah, you know, through my 58 years of meditation and studying the theories and philosophies associated with it, I'm pretty solidly in the camp that consciousness is a ubiquitous field, that it's the sort of the rock bottom foundation of creation. And in fact, ultimately the essential constituent of everything, there's nothing other than it. ⁓ But I'll just get that out there in case you're wondering. But I often use it as many others do the analogy of a radio, ⁓ obviously, or a cell phone. There's the electromagnetic field and then there's this device that interacts with it and enables it to communicate information to us. And if you deny the existence of the electromagnetic field, if you didn't know it existed and you found this radio and maybe some future civilization finds a radio, what'd they do with this thing or a cell phone? You could take it apart. You could study it. You might eventually find all these transistors or whatever they would call them There's this do Hickey and all these different things But without understanding the existence of the electromagnetic field you wouldn't have a clue ⁓ or and if you thought that you know this radio thing Let's say you had a working radio and it was playing Beethoven and you thought ⁓ you know This beautiful music is coming out of this thing and then somebody comes along and smashes it with a hammer You think, ⁓ that's the end of that. That doesn't exist anymore. But the radio station is still transmitting Beethoven just as well as it ever did. I actually heard you mention ⁓ in some interview, I don't know if you, I think you were just seeing one of, wearing one of your particular theory hats that without the brain, there can't be consciousness. And when you said that, I thought, well, that's like saying without the radio, there can't be the electromagnetic field. But the electromagnetic field has been getting along just fine. throughout the history of the universe, with or without radios or cell phones.

speaker-0: Yes, certainly the view that has either ⁓ idealism where consciousness is the entire reality or panpsychism where it's part of fundamental existence ⁓ has been a view that has been gaining prominence among a broader group than just pure ⁓ spiritual or religious ancient tradition people that have had that view forever.

speaker-1: Yeah, who was it you said that started you said you start as a materialist and then you go this this this this and you end up

speaker-0: I this is a common expression David Trommel has put it out to you. You start out as a materialist, as a scientist, which he did and I did, and then you realize that's not going to work for consciousness. So you immediately go to become a dualist and then you kind of deal with dualism and how does the mental interact with the physical, know, Descartes says the pineal gland, that's ridiculous. How can you have non-physical things, operating against physical things, ⁓ because there's the closure of the physical world, the laws of physics. So dualism then doesn't work, so you become panpsychist, and where consciousness is built into fundamental reality with everything else, and then ultimately you go to idealism where consciousness is the fundamental, and everything else is derivative of that in some way. ⁓ You know, I think there's a lot of fun in that. Some people have made that transition. Most recently, one of the great scientists, Christophe Koch, the originator with Francis Crick in modern times of the neural correlates of consciousness. When I first met Christophe, was representing that point of view in 1990, so 35, 36 years now, put forth that view. Crick's famous book was it the astonishing hypothesis that you are your neurons and so a very strong materialist position. ⁓ Kristoff has moved ⁓ and now he's entertained seriously idealism of consciousness is fundamental, but that's quite rare. ⁓

speaker-1: He's not gonna lose any more cases of champagne to David Chalmers. They had a bet.

speaker-0: Yeah. Right, right, right. 25 years whether we'll be able to show the neural correlates of consciousness. You know, you'll show neural correlates of consciousness. Of course you do.

speaker-1: Sure, just so you can take it by the radio and see what its bits are.

speaker-0: Yeah, I mean there are certain parts of the brain that if you lose those parts of the brain, you won't be conscious. And the problem with consciousness is that it's Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer, called consciousness a suitcase term, suitcase. And the reason he said that is people throw into the suitcase whatever they want, know, underwear, ties, shoes, whatever they want. And that's mistake. And so I'm very clear when I deal with consciousness. I'm dealing with phenomenal consciousness, this sort of inner movie that we feel, the experience of what it's like, you know, the smell of garlic cooking in olive oil, the sound of Marla's Second Symphony. I mean, the feel of all of that, because everything else, perception, attention, wakefulness, intelligence, all of this may relate to consciousness, but that's not the fundamental aspect of consciousness. It's the... It's this pure awareness that we have that needs the explication because everything else, the perception, the wakefulness, ⁓ has to be teased apart because it's part of consciousness and not. Ned Block, the philosopher, talks about phenomenal consciousness, the feeling, and access consciousness, which is the content of consciousness, to differentiate between the two. So you can find parts in the reticular activating system which causes sleep and wakefulness. if that's destroyed or has some kind of trauma, you're unconscious and you can't be brought back. On the other hand, you can lose half your brain in other parts and still, you you'll lose functions or things, but you'll still be totally conscious and feel that you're you. you know, there's a lot to deal with. ⁓ And that's why it's such an enduring question and such an important question.

speaker-1: What I would suggest here is that just as the movie screen exists, whether there are movies playing on it or whatever movies are playing on it, it's the underlying screen by virtue of which the movies can be seen. And if there's no movies playing, the screen is still there. I would say that consciousness in and of itself, what it actually is, exists just as much whether you are half asleep, totally asleep, dead. whatever may happen to you, fully awake. ⁓ And the examples you just ⁓ cited, like the taste of garlic or Mahler's symphony, those are things of which you are conscious. By virtue of by virtue of consciousness, you can be conscious of, but those aren't consciousness. Right. Those are sort of objects of consciousness. Yeah, you know, you've heard this a million times. I'm just stating it for the sake of the conversation.

speaker-0: Yeah, sure. And that's a very important distinction. when I deal with theories of consciousness, I try to take out all the peripheral stuff. It's not intelligence, perception, wakefulness, none of that. Just this ⁓ fundamental ⁓ awareness, not the content of it. The content of it makes us understand, gives us initial appreciation of what the awareness means. uh... but it's not the awareness itself the awareness itself is pure and fundamental i agree with that uh... i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i

speaker-1: i think that's a great attitude by the way so i have my my druthers you know but i am not

speaker-0: Well, I have druthers

speaker-1: careful more than a hundred percent of the unit

speaker-0: No, everybody does and I respect that. I respect that totally. It's just that I have avoided that. ⁓ so let me, I can recount people that I know, very, very smart physicists and scientists. Christoph Koch I've mentioned, there are others ⁓ that are really ⁓ first-rate scientists, thinkers. ⁓ I worked with in the Conscious article Alex Gomez Marin, who was one of the early people I worked with in writing it and he gave me lots of theories I didn't know, he very sophisticated ⁓ and created a beautiful diagram which we worked together on and has been a ⁓ major factor. ⁓ He was ⁓ trained as a theoretical physicist, doctorate, became a neuroscientist and then had a near-death experience which changed his orientation. And I respect that. don't necessarily agree with that, but I respect that. I mentioned Christoph Koch, who is now moving towards idealism. ⁓ Psychedelics had an impact on him and how he saw the world. Everybody has an impact. Now, what I want to push back on is I, have had an experience. So, you know, I say don't deal with experience. I say I don't claim to be a consciousness practitioner. I don't meditate. I've never taken psychedelics.

speaker-1: I'll you about that in a few minutes.

speaker-0: No, that's fine. Everybody does. I say I play ping pong intensely for two hours, my critics say it doesn't. Focus, me that is. It's focus and it's flow. And I don't worry about anything else. I'm just trying to get my forehand right. ⁓

speaker-1: Practice The player in the world was once a very great table tennis player and that's how he got his skill. Yeah, that's very That's a tangent.

speaker-0: Anyway, so I have had an experience in recent years that has slightly changed my orientation about consciousness. And ⁓ the unusual thing about my experience is I intuitively believe that there is more to reality than the physical world, more to reality than science can access in principle, and that consciousness has some kind of non-physical aspect or component to it. That has been my intuition, which I don't give much credence to. I take that as one of 400 different hypotheses and don't give any special reason to my own, but that's the way I have felt. But I've had an experience recently that has slightly changed that worldview to more physicalism than non-physicalism. So let me tell you a So it seems impossible that it seems very likely to have an experience to take you from being a physicalist to a non-physicalist. I said I have friends who who've had that and I respect that and every experience that people have move them to having appreciate that there may be non-physical realities. How can you have an experience where you think there are non-physical realities but to move you to where the physical reality may be all there is. Not by much, but by a little bit. And it's a story about my daughter who has given me full permission to tell the story publicly. So she didn't get married until she was ⁓ older, 44, 45, her husband's younger. ⁓ They tried to have a baby naturally. She ⁓ conceived and had a... ⁓ Going to have a baby, but it was severely genetically deformed and it had to have an abortion very very unpleasant and very difficult a time when she was 46 or so, but she had frozen her eggs ⁓ When she was like 34 10 years before 11 years before and so they were frozen in New York and they defrosted them tested them and a couple Most of them were bad couple were called mosaics. They might have a chance. So her husband flew to New York, fertilized it in vitro and they waited and see what happened and it grew to what's called a blastula, which is 128 cells. And so, and they did a small genetic test, seemed okay at that point. And so then they refroze the blastula, the ⁓ initial embryo, they refroze it for two years because she wanted to carry it herself. so Her body was ⁓ prepared at 47, 48 with hormones, all hormones to get the right balance so she could carry it, which my wife and I were not happy about because that could affect her health. But anyway, she did, it was her choice. ⁓ And when her body was deemed ready for prepared after two years, they flew, or we had a hand carry ⁓ courier to take the frozen embryo The 128 Blastula had been frozen for two years from New York to Los Angeles where they unfroze it, implanted. And to make a long, long story short, ⁓ my grandson is now six years old, plays, he's extremely social, plays table tennis, chess, and the piano. And, you know, with a doctorate in the biological sciences, I am still flabbergasted that that whole process could occur. And to me, it showed that there is so much potential in the physical world that it slightly moved me away from a dominant non-physical position, but not very much. I'm still a believer that there's more to consciousness than the physical world can access, but just a little less so than I had been.

speaker-1: Okay, so when I heard you tell that story ⁓ last week or something, my initial thought, my immediate thought was and still is that this is an excellent example of the fact that consciousness is not only, well, it doesn't really say much about whether consciousness is universal or not, but what it does say is that there is incredible intelligence. orchestrating every little bit of the physical universe. Anything we look at, mean, a single cell, they say, is more complex than the city of Tokyo and we ⁓ don't fully understand what's going on in there. ⁓ So to my mind, I mean, put it in religious terminology, I feel like God is hiding in plain sight. And if you look closely enough anywhere, there you see it. If you go out to intergalactic space, there would be gamma rays and photons and things flying through, which are in perfect accordance with orderly laws of nature. and suggesting an intelligent orchestration of the universe, which is so far from random billiard balls hitting each other. You can't even, know, such theories that it's all random seem absurd to me. But anyway, so that in a way imbues me with greater and greater awe and reverence for the intelligence of nature rather than shifting me toward thinking, ⁓ this material stuff is pretty cool. It's cool because of the intelligence. ⁓ Orbs grading and and animating it

speaker-0: Yeah, and that's a very valid position. It's one that I would still be more sympathetic to. But the view that, I mean, this brings us into articulation between the two subjects. We started with the nature of consciousness and the nature of reality, the nature of existence per se. Because what is the reality behind it? If consciousness is the underlying field ⁓ and then you're talking about God, that slightly, that's different. There's two different kinds of...

speaker-1: I'm saying that consciousness is more than just plain vanilla consciousness. It actually is a ⁓ field of infinite intelligence, creativity, what we would refer to as God. But the word God is so weighted with strange ideas that I don't like to use it.

speaker-0: God is weighted, consciousness is weighted, we need to come up with new language. You know, but there are, and we deal with this on Closer to Truth, know, significant tensions between pure consciousness or conscious being fundamental and God being fundamental because classical definitions of God and certainly in the Abrahamic religions ⁓ have, you know, God being the totality. ⁓ ⁓ and as say a tea God exists in its own presence and that that any consciousness would be derivative of God in some of the Eastern traditions Consciousness is more fundamental and if there is a God which there's not necessarily a God but God would be derivative of that of the fundamental consciousness so that that is a ⁓ That is a distinction with a big difference Although both are allied in the sense that it is they're both non-physical that there is a reality beyond the physical. Both, they're equal on that, but how they describe that non-physical is radically different.

speaker-1: Swami Muktananda used to say, dwells within you as you. And he didn't mean there's a little God inside each of us. He meant that God is omnipresent. And if you look deeply enough within yourself, you'll find him there because he's everywhere. But easiest place to find him is right here. know, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has made a similar comment. He said, God may be omnipotent, but the one thing he can't do is remove himself from your heart because he's also omnipresent. And... ⁓ And there again, that's where you're going to find them for starters. And then eventually you find them everywhere. I say him, it's ⁓ misappropriated term, you find it or her or idiot or her everywhere because it's the essential constituent of everything.

speaker-0: Yeah, I mean look, these are massive topics each in their own right that can be teased apart and looked at in their complexity because under traditional concepts of God ⁓ there are certain characteristics, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipotent, all good, all free, ⁓ and then goes further that God is simple and since God has no parts, how can you have parts if your ultimates have no parts? Does God change? or is God impassable? I mean, there's many other kinds of questions that you push forward on. yeah, yeah, for sure. And they're fun. that's what we do on Closer to Truth. But I think it's very probative as well. mean, really, ⁓ people ask me, maybe you would later, that, ⁓ you know, after...

speaker-1: to hold into discussion of for two

speaker-0: 25 plus years are you, meaning me, any closer to truth after all this stuff? When I'm asked that question, I say this, said, well, let me start by giving you my wife's answer. My wife and I met 62 years ago. I was getting my PhD. She was a pianist performing at a fairly modest level, local level. ⁓ started going together and lived together and ⁓ got married and during that time she knew I had all these questions and she wasn't interested in that at all. She was interested in the home and the family and her piano career and she's performed. She performed at Carnegie Hall. You can see her on YouTube, Dora Kuhn, her performances and she said she's never thought about these questions at all in our 60 plus years together. I've thought about them every day in every way and she says we're still at the same place. Even though I've done 5,000 interviews and she's done none and has never thought about it, we're still at the same place we were when we met when I was 19. But so my answer to that is that I don't claim to have the answers, but I can tell you this, that I really deeply, deeply understand the questions and the options and the alternatives.

speaker-1: Compatible so it must work

speaker-0: with a ⁓ pleasure and a confidence ⁓ that is just to me very enriching and fulfilling to understand it very deeply. We're talking about fundamental reality and the nature of consciousness and the nature of God. Well, to me to understand the articulation between consciousness and God is a very probative and rich subject. also to understand the relationship between time and God, which we do in our cosmos sections and the meaning sections, ⁓ is very probate. Even if you don't believe in God, it's a stress test for what time is and how does God deal with time. these are very deep questions. And again, I don't claim to have an answer, but I do know the different alternatives that people give. And I can, in a sense, argue on any side of any of these issues. And that's not because I don't care about the answer. It's because I really try to understand the depth of how smart, articulate, ⁓ passionate people have these strongly different views. I don't claim that I know the answer, everybody else is stupid. I ask, know, theists, how come our friends here we're all atheists, scientists are atheists. And I do the same with the the... We have, you know, here are some scientists who are theists. How does the atheist scientist explain that? And the, you know, both are...can't understand. I speak to some philosophers who are materialists and ask them about the increasing interest among philosophers in idealism and panpsychism and they're baffled. I can't understand it. It makes no sense. ⁓ John Searle told me when I asked him about panpsychism, said, he said, if you're into panpsychism or, and this is, you know, arguably one of the most ⁓ astute persons on the nature of consciousness, he was definitely a physicalist, biological naturalism was his approach, but very thoughtful on the true nature of consciousness. And he characterized panpsychism as if you're spreading a thin layer of jam on the whole universe. That's what panpsych, how we carry, it was incredulous to him that people were, there were some philosophers moving towards panpsychism. And so each side has this incredulous approach to the others. I think there's richness in understanding the way of thinking of each side.

speaker-1: I'm sure you've heard the blind man and the elephant analogy, you know, metaphor that one feels like a rope to one guy, a tree trunk to another, a wall to another. And they're, they're you know, they could be quite adamant about what they believe the elephant to be. And they're all right, actually, partially. They just don't have the total picture. ⁓ I was, I heard that Aldous Huxley once said that the greatest innovation of the scientific revolution was the development of the working hypothesis. And I find that very helpful because I feel like even though again, I have my brothers, I can treat everything as a working hypothesis. And I feel that some hypotheses have a lot more evidence for them and some very little. I'm almost totally positive that the earth isn't flat, but there are people who believe that it is. So they can entertain themselves with that belief until they don't. I think it was very helpful development considering that people were burned at the stake during the Middle Ages, which preceded the Scientific Revolution for believing that the stars might be other suns like our own and they might have planets around them, things like that, which was crazy.

speaker-0: We've definitely made progress and we need to appreciate everything, but that doesn't mean all values are equal. There are people who believe that.

speaker-1: Different hypotheses have different amounts of weight or empirical evidence.

speaker-0: Right, right. And I am very willing to admit as theories, which I do, theories that go beyond the scientific method and way of thinking. But what I like to be sure I do, and this has to do not just with consciousness, but with the questions of God, for example, or ultimate reality, that if you're making a conclusion and have a a jump, ⁓ an aspect of faith or where you're not able to prove something. I just want to specify that and so that everybody understands the steps that we're taking. In science, you can take every step and have one follow the other and you can see the sequence. mean, this is obviously the epitomization is in mathematical proofs that can go on for 500 pages. Every step has to be the right step and it's checked. meticulously and that's the that's the paragon. Nothing else besides mathematics can do it exactly that way but in physics and particle physics you can get very very close to that and then chemistry less so and then biology but at least you can see the steps and when you get into the non-physical and this has to do with all sorts of non-physical things whether it's the nature of consciousness or does God exist or or ⁓ is Parapsychology and psi any any substance of that? could that work any of these questions? You we need to see where you are jumping over a scientific ⁓ way of thinking ⁓ and and that to me is allowed and is perfectly fine But I just want to be sure that we know where we're doing that Because that will give us a better understanding of the of the ⁓ of the way of thinking like we cannot be able to prove in a scientific sense that consciousness is the fundamental reality. ⁓ It may well be, but in a scientific sense, we can prove that one little nucleus in ⁓ the hypothalamus is related to hunger. if ⁓ there's a problem there or if it's stimulated in wrong way, The animal will eat till it dies from bursting. And if it does it another way, it'll never eat it all and die from starvation. And so we know that that little nucleus has to do with the feeding. And we can know that for sure by these kinds of tests. We can't know that for sure and other things that we do, but it still may be true. I just want people to be aware of the steps that are taken that ⁓ ground their beliefs.

speaker-1: Yeah, there's several questions came in from guests. I want to ask them in a minute, but I want to stay on this train of thought for a minute. In your most recent episode that I listened to, which was with the guy who wrote a book about whether aliens would have the same physics that we humans do. At one point he mentioned that in order to ⁓ verify or understand the most fundamental level of creation. might need a particle accelerator. You said the size of the solar system or he did and you said maybe the size of the galaxy, which were never even built. ⁓ And you mentioned a few minutes ago that phenomenon that are outside the realm of the scientific method, ⁓ psychic things or life after death or consciousness itself, all those things. I would say as I did in the beginning that the scientific method has limited itself by excluding subjective technologies of consciousness or methodologies. And those are tricky because let's say there's a single meditation practice, for instance, and you have a thousand people practicing it, even though that thousand people are all gonna have different experiences because they all have a different instrument, so to speak, with which to experience things. And then there are a gazillion other. spiritual practices. There's so many of them. So how can you standardize and systematize ⁓ exploration of consciousness through subjective means the way you can with scientific instruments? It's very difficult.

speaker-0: Yeah, very probing question and I would segregate it into two parts. One, which we can do, is subject people in meditation to FMRI, brain, etc. And you can see brain parts that are shutting down or accelerating during different, ⁓ the famous one of course is different aspects of sleep. You have REM sleep. ⁓ rapid eye movement, which is when you're dreaming, of all, and deep sleep and brain waves are different in different characteristics and in meditative states, which are remarkable, you can show neurophysiologically or, know, by blood flow and, ⁓ in, I mean, you can see how the brain is working and that's, that's legitimate science and you can do that cross culturally. the experience they have may not be.

speaker-1: have coherence in all kinds

speaker-0: May be very different, but the physiological effects are the same. That's that's one ⁓ To go then to the next step in terms of anything that you're trying to prove that is non-physical You know a lot of people try to do that and and and try to expand the scientific method To include aspects that are seemingly non-physical and to me that's a contradiction to me that that's that's in principle not possible and to try to do that is a mistake and gives

speaker-1: Doesn't the scientific methods study all kinds of things that are non-physical? I mean, if you start looking more more microscopically, you get down to the non-physical.

speaker-0: distinguish between two ways we're saying scientific method there are two different approaches to scientific method that I like to distinguish one is the is the process literally of science which is the scientific method generally used and that is a process of observation or experimentation repeat replication and these are very complicated replication has been a big problem in psychology 40 % of the articles Supposedly theories are non-replicable. It's also true in drug testing. So replication is critical. So experimentation, replication, replication in different labs, in different situations. Falsification, have theories that can be falsified. A big controversy in science is there are theories that, like string theory or multiverse theories, which can't be falsified. And are not subject to observation or experimentation therefore they're not science and people say no it is science because it's theoretically the product of mathematical equations etc. So that's a controversy ⁓ But so but the scientific method is that experimentation or observation replication replication in different ways falsification ⁓ That that is a process hypothesis generating falsification etc. That process I I ⁓ argue is susceptible to the physical world. Everything and whatever is physical, known or not known, is subject to that approach. But anything that is not that, which by definition non-physical would be, is not subject to that same approach. It's not replicable. It's not, it can't be ⁓ falsified. But there is.

speaker-1: mean that it doesn't exist it just means

speaker-0: It doesn't know it means that it's not it's not classifiable according to the scientific method. The other I said there were two approaches that I use scientific method one is that which is literally scientific. I use another kind of scientific method which I call the scientific way of thinking which is different than the scientific method in its its pure state scientific way of thinking. says that we can admit. You're telling me that you believe consciousness is fundamental reality. So that to me is a ⁓ hypothesis or an idea. Somebody else believes in God, I want to think about that. Somebody else has views about, you know, the nature of God, whether God is a process-oriented God that kind of becomes more and more, or God is unchangeable, or God is, what does it mean for God to know everything, omniscient? You know, these are very subtle kinds of questions. I can give you an example. What does it mean for God to know everything? God's, it's omniscient. Well, God could know, and this is, I got from philosopher John Leslie, he's a good friend. We wrote a book together on the mystery of existence. So John said that God could know the weight of an infinite number of carrots. so, I mean, God knows infinite amount of things. but god may not know that a rutabaker exists so that's the distinction between knowing an infinite

speaker-1: This is kind of an absurd question, but why wouldn't it?

speaker-0: No, no, no, but it's just trying to distinguish between knowing everything and knowing infinite. In words, you can know infinite amount of things and still not know other things.

speaker-1: in the sense that in like in mathematics you could have an infinity but then you can add stuff to it that's right now

speaker-0: trans-finite infinities. It's just trying to ⁓ explicate the nature of language when we describe things that are beyond us. And so, it's just differentiating infinite knowledge with all knowledge. All knowledge is infinitely, infinitely more than an infinite amount of knowledge. ⁓ that's, so, I mean, so these are the kinds of questions which I call a scientific way of thinking. there's no scientific test whether God can know the infinite weight of every carat in an infinite line or knowing the root of it. Scientific medicine couldn't even begin to just laugh at that. But a scientific way of thinking is able to ⁓ articulate how those two ideas go together to give you a richer understanding of what it means for God to know everything. And another example is, you how can God know the future and we have free will? And there are many different kinds of ways that that supposedly can happen. And that requires, and the way I like to think, in a scientific way of thinking to analyze what it means for God to know the future and for us to have true free will, it can be subject to a rigorous way of thinking in analytic philosophy, et cetera, but it's not, there's no way a scientific method of observation replication can deal with that. That's why, for example, the whole, everything in parapsychology and Psy research, it's, you know, that's an area that both sides are so adamant about. The believers in it are so sure that it's absolutely right and the critics are so sure. It can't possibly be right and dismiss the whole thing. And that's because everything is so statistically and nonreplicable in any way and it's so sophisticatedly weak. ⁓ And why is something that supposedly is so important if that's ⁓ way the world is, that there's psychic phenomena and all of this, why is it so very, very weak? ⁓ attempts to scientifically justify it never satisfy critics, never. And not because the critics are dumb, but because the evidence is so questionable and weak and maybe it's real, you know, I'm uncertain about that. But what I am certain about is that if there is a non-physical aspect to Psy and parapsychology, then it falls outside of the scientific methods. So to force it to be subject to the scientific method would be a contradiction. And so that's the way I like to think ⁓ in terms of things that are outside the physical world ⁓ that you believe that there are, or that might be. You have to really understand where the scientific method as it's traditionally done can work and where it can't.

speaker-1: Yeah, I just want to comment on what you just said, but then I want to jump right to some questions that came in. So we'll have a little bit of an abrupt segue for a few minutes, but, you know, Dean Radin would argue that he has come up with some statistically significant findings on psi phenomenon and that, you know, he'll present them to a scientific journal or something and they'll say, we're not even going to look at this because it couldn't be true. And, know, like that you've probably heard of the Galileo commission with David Boromir. Marjorie Wolcott and people like that. They named it that because the church authorities refused to look through Galileo's telescope to see that there were moons of Jupiter, which for some reason would conflict with church doctrine. So I think there's a certain, you know, rigidity and closed mindedness in the scientific community to these matters. And I like the fact that as you mentioned, people do seem to be opening up more and more. before you get to comment on that, let me just jump into these questions here because I... Okay, question number one. Jane McDonald, ⁓ you've explored consciousness with many guests, also featured on BatGap, Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, Rupert Sheldrake, Ian McIlchrist, Dean Radin, Michael James. Do their very different approaches leave you more or less confident that consciousness can be explained?

speaker-0: I believe that the human capacity of thinking can be able to understand consciousness. There are people who disagree with that, that the human capacity for ⁓ human cognition, human thinking evolved to be free from predators, to reproduce on the African savanna, and therefore there's no reason that that capacity should have anything to do with the nature of physical and non-physical truth and we were only able to get certain amount. I don't agree with that. I think that what we've seen in terms of our understanding of the physical world, in terms of the beginning of the universe where we can be fairly confident that we're back to 10 to the minus 39th second or something in terms of understanding, helping you, we have so much knowledge of how things work and are improving that I don't think there's a limitation. in terms of understanding. Now that said, that if consciousness is indeed non-physical, that puts ⁓ an uncertainty into our capacity to understand it because it leads to a whole other realm of ⁓ world where I can't be sure we can get it. when I see the the examples that you gave of the people, all of whom are ⁓ a bit on Closer to Truth as well as on ⁓ Buddha at the gas pump ⁓ and Everyone who you mentioned is ⁓ either a good friend or a friend. So all of that and I I Luxuriate in the differences that they have and how they how they express kind of conscious each one has a different view of what that ultimate consciousness or reality is and

speaker-1: with plenty of overlap in many cases.

speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, the fundamental overlap is that consciousness is fundamental. And I like that. And I think all of them, you know, have interesting things to say about them, even though there are very distinct differences, you know, between them, for sure. ⁓ I'm not saying that I am convinced that that is the only answer to the question. I think we've gone through that. I think there are many ways to understand the physical world. Let me give you another example, which is very impressive. ⁓ One of my favorite philosophers ⁓ is the philosopher Peter van Inwagen, who is a Christian philosopher, long at Notre Dame, retired of Notre Dame now, Duke, ⁓ and considered one of, if not the leading, metaphysician in terms of metaphysics. He wrote a famous book on introduction to metaphysics and very good. he is, and he's a seriously believe in Christian, ⁓ but he's a materialist. And ⁓ so he is a materialist about the person, but a very strong theist about reality. Now, another philosopher, ⁓ kind of humanist philosopher, one of my intellectual heroes actually, is Raymond Tallis, a British fellow in the UK, a wonderful writer and thinker, was a ⁓ a very good physician, a neurologist, a forensic neurologist for geriatric neurologists and helped build the national education, national healthcare system in the UK in his area of geriatric neurology, but was a real philosopher. since he retired, he's written books and constantly. And he is a complete atheist, does not believe in God, but he believes that the person is not physical. And he won't go further than that, but he criticizes what he calls neuromania, that everything is neurological. He was a neurologist, and he criticized. So here you have two people who have opposite views of the nature of reality. One's a theist, one's an atheist, and opposite from the normal of ⁓ how the relationship to reality affects the nature of the person. Most people who are physicalists believe that consciousness is entirely the product of the brain neurologically, maybe a little quantum here and there, but entirely that. Most theists who believe in spiritual believe in an immortal soul or something. But here you have two of the, to me, most thoughtful people in the world believe the opposite in terms of the relationships, if that's clear. The theist believes that the person is material, The atheist believes the person is non-material. It's exactly the opposite of the vast majority on both sides, and these are two of the best people. how does the theist who believes the person is material handle, you know, the scriptures that show there's an afterlife? How do you get an afterlife if the person is entirely material? And there's a way, and it's through the resurrection and how the resurrection works. There's the philosophical problems that people who are interested can look up. ⁓ But it shows the richness of this conversation in terms of delving into these two big questions, nature of reality and the nature of consciousness.

speaker-1: Yep, blind men and the elephant. Everybody's got a piece of the puzzle and each piece is valid. The elephant is like a snake. It is like a tree trunk. It is like a wall. We've all got a glimpse. Here's a question from Gavin Moffat in Glasgow, Scotland. If the hard problem of consciousness remains unsolved and science cannot reduce subjective experience to purely material processes, Is it intellectually defensible to continue privileging materialism as the default ontology rather than seriously entertaining the possibility that consciousness, not matter, is the primary substrate of reality?

speaker-0: Look, I think that's already occurring. It depends who you ask. ⁓ Yeah, the people who would ⁓ disagree with the premise that ⁓ We we haven't solved the hard problem, but we've made a lot of progress and eventually will ⁓ Would reject would reject the with the premise and therefore would continue material to their other people

speaker-1: You should tell us what the hard problem is, because maybe not all my

speaker-0: Sure, hard problem is very simple. It's existed forever, but David Chalmers coined the hard problem, you know, 30 odd years ago. ⁓ the hard problem is this thing, the easy problem is what in the brain ⁓ relates to different things we do. ⁓ The perception or the eye, you know, our seeing how that works, the back of the brain, when I move my fingers and play the piano like my wife does. ⁓ what part of the brain works that that's the easy problem that he is not easy is very hard hard to do but you can figure it out where in the brain finger motion is and all sorts of things like that so that's either the hard problem is how do you take this ⁓ this ⁓ inner experience that we have this phenomenology the me what it's like to be the inner movie that we seem to see ⁓ in a movie doesn't have to be just visual but ⁓ all nature of of conscious it How can those mental states be reduced or to be explained totally by physical states? That's the hard problem. How can mental states be explained totally by physical states? ⁓ there are anybody who thinks that's not possible in principle are already going to put consciousness as primary, which is the question is approach. They already doing that. The people who think that the premise is wrong, that either the hard problem will be solvable by neuroscience and physics and whatever, or that the hard problem is a mistake. It's a linguistic mistake or it's a ⁓ trick of the brain or ⁓ another approach is that it's an absolute identity. David Papenow ⁓ expresses this most. ⁓ what I would call ⁓ brutally obvious, which I appreciate. may not agree with the conclusion, but I deeply appreciate the philosophical view because it makes it brutally clear. the brutal clarity is, ⁓ David Tromm is famously made with the zombie argument. I can imagine somebody exactly like me doing everything, but no inner experience. You know, I could fool my wife, my kids, my psychiatrist. I don't have one, but if I had one, I could fool my psychiatrist, my doctor, whatever. ⁓ But I have no inner experience. Is that conceivable? Yeah, that's conceivable. And so if it's conceivable, when I have the inner experience, it must be something else.

speaker-1: Yeah, robots can load dishwashers these days, but they probably have

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, and that's the big question may I conscious it so David poppin I would say that the mistake there is assuming it is is a it's a it's a a radical identity theory saying that that the the electrical impulses in your occipital cortex when you're seeing something that is the same thing as that as seeing it the two things are the same And it's like saying, my analogy is the morning star and the evening star. You see a bright light in the evening and the morning and they're two different stars. Well, they're both Venus. They're both planet Venus, but because they're seen at different times, they have had different names. But if you remove one, if you say you destroyed the evening star, the morning star disappears. And he uses the analogy of ⁓ Clark Kent in Superman or ⁓ Marilyn Monroe and whatever her maiden name was, Marianne, whatever it was. She had a maiden name. You couldn't have Marilyn Monroe and not have that early... They are different names for exactly the same thing. And so that's how he would dissolve, if you were, the hard problem. It's conceivable that you could have... the thought without the neuronal activity, you can conceive of that, but you can conceive of a ⁓ ball of spaghetti on Jupiter. That doesn't mean it exists there.

speaker-1: One thing I just want to throw in here, we probably shouldn't launch, I don't want to get to the other questions, but the whole notion of there being a subtle body, which is what is supposedly, know, survives death and results in reincarnation and all that. But we have one while we're alive too. And the subtle body is a mechanism through which we have all kinds of experience and potential experience. And which apparently people who have out-of-body experiences use to have experiences when they're under anesthesia or something that are later verified. Like, you know, my uncle bought a Snickers bar from the candy machine in the hospital waiting room and I came out of anesthesia and told him so and that kind of thing. ⁓ It's obviously, it's one of many things we could discuss at length, but I just think it's worth keeping that in mind. ⁓ Okay, let me just move right now.

speaker-0: Can I comment? I'm not gonna let you get away with something I don't necessarily agree with. you're doing the same to me. So, we're even. Next. So, out of the body experiences and near-death experiences are two of the ⁓ core areas that some people use to

speaker-1: fair to say something about it That's my thought, now okay, thought.

speaker-0: to generate their theories of consciousness. respect that. deal with that in the paper and in the website extensively. ⁓ And there are different theories throughout ⁓ ancient times and modern times, as you're saying, about this ⁓ different ethereal body or something.

speaker-1: They call it in Vedanta Sattelbara.

speaker-0: Yeah, there are, ⁓ we talk about two, know, dualism, a physical and a non-physical soul or whatever, but many ⁓ ways of thinking have three, ⁓ a body, mind and spirit, or a ⁓ body and mind and the form of the body, perception. So there are different theories that have three aspects, and all of this is interesting philosophical thinking, ⁓ but it is to say that there is veridical truth to that, that it's a sign of ultimate reality, to me is ⁓ a huge leap of faith. And if you want to take it, fine, I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm saying it's not justifiable scientifically, ⁓ and it's important to understand the difference. Near-death experiences, there's a neuroscientist in Michigan, think name is Jimmo Borjigan, has shown that in near-death, when ⁓ mice or rats are near-death, they excrete a huge amount more serotonin in their brains. It's early, I don't know how robust the data is, but there are, you know, if that's true, then that would give, if that was true in humans, it would be. like a psychedelic experience that would occur. You I believe very strongly that, know, you get a real experience from psychedelics and, but if I had one, I wouldn't then think it's related to veridical reality. I mean, if I get punched in the eye, I see stars. mean, it's a brain induced situation. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm saying to make the leap from what you see to what is real. ⁓ is is elite too far that i'm i'm not yet well and may never be willing to

speaker-1: Treated as one of those working hypotheses. Personally, I think that every materialist, when he dies, is going to be surprised. Hopefully, pleasantly. But he's going to say, I'll be darned.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, no, I We all have we all have the hope yeah

speaker-1: But I want to re-emphasize that if you engage in some kind of spiritual practice for decades, this stuff becomes much more real. Now, maybe you're just training your brain to believe in an hallucination or something, but it sure doesn't feel like that. It feels like you're actually really beginning to reside in these subtler dimensions in addition to residing in the gross dimension, and that they are as real as the gross dimension, if not more so sometimes. And so it just... The whole thing becomes less and less speculative as you go along, at least in your own subjective experience. Whether you can prove that to anybody is another question.

speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, look, I would use an analogy with a dream. When you're in a dream, you think it's real. ⁓ every dream is completely bizarre and absurd. ⁓ I've had zillions of dreams and none of them ever seemed like any kind of revelation. want to tell you this because ⁓ I've had a residual, a continuing thought throughout my life since I've literally been a teenager that has driven this. And that is this thought that a being as we are who can conceive of eternity of living beyond forever or beyond ⁓ a being that that ⁓ can conceive of eternity should be able to attain eternity. Why is it the case that a being that can conceive of eternity? is it? Why would the universe create a being other than unless it were overtly malevolent? ⁓ that the universe is a malevolent operation. Make beings that can conceive of eternity and deny them that. I've always had that thought as an underlying thought that has driven what I'm thinking, but I also qualify that by saying I will not fool myself because I'd like to fool myself into believing that, ⁓ but I resist fooling myself.

speaker-1: Well, I can conceive of leaping tall buildings in a single bound, know, I won't ever achieve that probably. But on your eternity point, I think that we are capable of achieving or experiencing eternity. But I don't mean that in a linear sense. mean, eternity is right now. There's an eternal field that can be merged with or tapped into. And it's a continuum which is not bound by space or time and that's well within our capacity to experience it can't be intellectualized. ⁓ it can be but that doesn't suffice.

speaker-0: I'm wanting more than that. the eternity I want is not just a feeling now. I want eternity, you know, which means to live forever. Woody Allen, I think, had a famous line when people said, you want to attain eternity ⁓ in your work? And he said, I want to attain eternity in my apartment.

speaker-1: Right or by not dying. Yeah Yeah, he also said I don't mind dying. I just don't want to be there when it happens Okay, let me get to the next question this also is from Gavin and Glasgow Is it only because of our culture's cradle to grave bias towards the belief system of materialism? That most of us don't feel in our bones that the universe in quotes is animate alive cyclic and conscious at its whole system level

speaker-0: Yeah, right.

speaker-1: Science has nothing to say about what life is, consciousness is, energy is.

speaker-0: Yeah, a lot's packed into that. First of all, I would say that there is a large part of society and thinking that is materialist and physicalist in terms of their belief system. And large part is also religious ⁓ in the Abrahamic religions in the Western world and the Islamic world and then Eastern religions and Hinduism in particular. There are lots of those belief systems as well. So to say everything is people materialist and not not necessarily the case.

speaker-1: sure it was being too general.

speaker-0: Yeah, and where you're situated and none of this really relates to what is really real. ⁓ It reflects a desire to know ⁓ what's real, but the desire and the data that people use ⁓ does not necessarily lead to what is ultimately real. I'm not saying I know how that happens. But I do have a strong sense of knowing when it doesn't happen, the connections people make between what they believe and what is real is not as strong as they think it is.

speaker-1: Isn't that the, Teresa of Avila quote just came to mind, I've often quoted her. said, she said, it appears that God Himself is on the journey. So with regard to your theme of closer to truth, it appears that, you know, if God Himself is on the journey, He hasn't arrived at some terminus point, some ultimate destination. It's like, I think that we're all works in progress and always will be, personally.

speaker-0: Yeah, and look, this is ⁓ a debate within the philosophy of religion, people who are believers, how do they believe the nature of God is? And the question comes down in that sphere is, what is the nature of perfection? The classic definition of perfection in God is that God has always been perfect, and therefore, how can you get better than perfect? How can you change? So God never changes, and God is impassable. God is not in time. God just... exists and then created time. And then others say that growth is a perfection. And you have this great tension between if you're a believer in God and philosophy of religion and philosophical theology is that which is a greater perfection that God is perfect and can never change because you can't get better than perfect or perfection is constantly growing in some sense and some properties or some understanding, ⁓ you know, my preference would be the latter. I would like to believe that if there is a God, that God is constantly growing and growing through experiences with sentient creatures that God created for, you know, a universal and eternal sense of purpose. But that's just my predilection, but I won't fool myself.

speaker-1: Yeah, I agree with you. You know, some say that the very purpose of creation is so, you know, God wanted to become a living reality, a living, breathing, experiencing reality. And so here we are, you and I, sense organs of the infinite and the butterflies and the quails and everything else, all experiencing from our particular perspectives, enriching the totality of experience that ⁓ we refer to as God.

speaker-0: Yeah, well, many different theories. ⁓ The cosmologist physicist Paul Davies' approach, ⁓ he is a believer that consciousness is a very relevant part of understanding reality, which is very different than many of his colleagues, of course, but he's also an atheist. He believes that a quantum understanding of the universe will enable ⁓ conscious beings in the future to through selection of quantum histories of the past have an effect that sounds like backward causation, which would be logically impossible. ⁓ It sounds like that, but it's not because the past was indeterminate until it became specified by the future. It sounds circular and absurd, my point is that it's a view that takes consciousness seriously as this conscious will ultimately fill the universe. but it does it without ⁓ any religious connotation or without ⁓ putting a non-physical ⁓ reality to consciousness. ⁓ It still has everything part of the physical world, but it's through the quantum effects, the seemingly absurd nature of quantum mechanics that enables this. I'm not saying I agree with that, but I'm saying that's another way of thinking that imbues Consciousness with ultimate importance and consciousness filling the universe but achieves it in a radically different way.

speaker-1: Yeah, I like some atheists a lot. I like Sam Harris, I like Michael Shermer, they're really interesting people to listen to. I think if I were to actually speak with one of them, I might say, well, I don't believe in the same God you don't believe in, you know? Because a lot of them sort of like, you know, Sam Harris in his books, cherry picks all the most absurd aspects of various religions and to point out how ridiculous they all are. There are obviously are much more profound understandings of God than those. All right, here's another question. This one is from Julian Julio in Nottingham, UK. I'm appreciating the discussion and this is more of my reckoning than a question. I just think the intellect, that which deals wholly in rationality can never know all this. We can still have the same ultimate attitude as we have towards true science, that is looking to see what is and not wanting to deceive ourselves or others. And if we have the right attitude, we can get insights.

speaker-0: Yeah, I'm... I'm all for it.

speaker-1: Yeah, here's the part where I'm going to pick on you just a little bit. You you mentioned, I've heard you mention many times that people have tried to get you to try meditation or psychedelics. I would recommend meditation over psychedelics, although I've done both, arguing that if you really want to understand consciousness, you have to experience it. Can you think of any other scientific endeavor in which the researcher would not want to empirically experience the thing he is researching if it were possible to do so and would merely be content with intellectual understanding?

speaker-0: Okay, so you're making the assumption that the consciousness that we currently have, that I currently have, is somehow less important than the consciousness in a meditative state or a psychomimetic-induced illusion, and I disagree with that.

speaker-1: No, wait a minute, you're assuming my assumption. Okay, I don't think it's less important. I think it's very important. I just think there are other dimensions which can also be explored, which are also important.

speaker-0: Okay, but those are ⁓ what I would say are I'd start by saying to appreciate and understand the nature of Consciousness as we have it in our ordinary life to me is the most single most strange odd spectacular thing in the universe that we don't appreciate it as much as we should and that That is, that's everything. Now, if you distort that in some way by drinking alcohol or taking a psychedelic or meditating, you'll get a different modulation of that same consciousness. ⁓ And so ⁓ the thing to be explained is the most common thing that we have. And to distort that or modify that in any different way, is fine, ⁓ but it doesn't enhance my sense of the nature of the problem. don't get a richer understanding of the problem by experiencing it in a different way. What I experience now is so fundamentally strange and odd in this universe that it is more than sufficient enough.

speaker-1: Yeah, but the word distort is pejorative here. You know, let's use the analogy of a mirror, which, let's say, you know, reflects the sunlight well enough and, you know, you can shine it on things and so on. But it could be cleaned ⁓ and maybe you reflect even more brightly. And then if you distorted it, that to me would be like putting mud on it or something that that would be alcohol or. certain drugs and so on that are just gonna muddy up the mirror even more and make it reflect less brightly, less clearly, less realistically. the whole spiritual endeavor in many traditions has been to clean the mirror, to refine it, to purify it such that it is capable of reflecting consciousness more fully and clearly than it otherwise would be.

speaker-0: Look, I think that's valid. I that's valid. I've tried a little bit and I can see how if you cleanse your mind of all content, you would be able to appreciate pure awareness.

speaker-1: Wasn't it William Blake who said something about cleaning the mirror of perception or something like that?

speaker-0: Yeah, and I don't know if I'd use the cleaning analogy, but I would say that if you empty the content ⁓ of consciousness, you can get a sense of what a pure awareness would be. And that is the fundamental problem. ⁓ But that's not something that I have to find. That's something I'm intimately aware of that I distinguish between. the pure experience of what I'm seeing. I'm seeing you looking at me very quizzically and pushing back and see the brains in my background and books and I see that content, but I also segregate that there's this experience of being able to do that, that the content is irrelevant. ⁓ And so if meditation can give you a better sense of that independent phenomena, phenomenology or phenomenal consciousness, that's great. But to me, I already have that. I already have that understanding of this, of what pure awareness is devoid of the content. And if I had it even stronger,

speaker-1: Which one or experience? Have you ever experienced pure awareness devoid of content?

speaker-0: I can in my mind distinguish the two.

speaker-1: Yeah, so you have a concept of it.

speaker-0: I have a concept of it. you know, I've, you know, occasionally try to do that if I can't sleep or something and I'm thinking about a million things. I'm thinking about preparing to talk to you and, you know, reviewing my consciousness categories in case you ask me about some obscure things. So I have that in my mind that I can't sleep. So I try to put everything out of my mind and I sort of have a sense of what pure awareness is.

speaker-1: Practiced right there

speaker-0: Yeah, it's a meditative, it's a meditative, but I can't say I'm very good at it. You know, I have a monkey mind, as they say, and monkeys running around all over the place. ⁓ But I can understand what pure consciousness would be. And as I said, I have an understanding of that and a slight experience. you know, once I have that, I'm not going to be better able to make a choice between consciousness theories. ⁓ that that i would know if i had that pure experience you know for for an hour or something as opposed to just seconds i don't think that would make me any more confident that consciousness was the ultimate reality that i do now

speaker-1: Yeah, I think it might. You might begin to feel like, okay, these ones are just too superficial. They're not really getting the big picture. And these ones over here seem much more aligned with what I've now begun to experience. geez, there must have been people for thousands of years going much deeper than I've gone so far. And they've articulated all these beautiful things in the Upanishads and places like that. And maybe they were really onto something. So it might shift your kind of...

speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, look, I take that seriously. That's why, you know, in all my work on consciousness in the last few years, I insisted that that be a major part. And from all the different ancient traditions and modern expressions of that, you know, Hinduism and the Panchads and the ⁓ Vedas are the earliest and most significant texts that deal with consciousness. Abrahamic religions really don't deal with consciousness. ⁓ anywhere near at all. mean, they deal with God and the ultimate nature of God and that consciousness is not really mentioned as a category and it's assumed that just God created it in some sense for animal creatures. ⁓ And so those are very serious traditions and there are similar things in ⁓ diverse traditions, ⁓ in African traditions, Chinese traditions. ⁓ Buddhism is its own characteristic. And all of that I think are valid ways to look at the great human diversity that has considered consciousness. I'm 100 % for that.

speaker-1: Yeah. Well, you you have a very strong and clear intellect. And in the Vedic tradition, at least, the intellectual path to God realization or Jnana yoga, as they call it, is considered a perfectly legitimate path and it's not suited for everybody. ⁓ But it's in some ways considered the highest path. And if you listen to somebody like Swami Sarvapriyananda, he says, yes, but it's good to supplement it with some of these other things, you know. some meditation or something to, because it'll facilitate, it'll expedite the whole unfoldment. But nonetheless, I mean, I'm sure that there have been people who have fully realized the enlightenment, whatever, that's a whole kettle of fish to get into defining, but without ⁓ doing a meditative practice, who have just used the fine, discriminative intellect to parse out the subtle levels of reality and separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and understand the nature of, of, reality.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, again, I'm not saying that I'm able to do that. I am saying that I want to understand the very best thinking that humanity has in all the different categories and to understand that richly and try to organize it in some framework of the different things so you can get some sort of understanding. Any type of organization, of course, ⁓ becomes overly simplistic. ⁓ But to really appreciate the ⁓ the total way of thinking that humanity has thought about consciousness to me is a great endeavor that that gives us great insight into the nature of humanity and the nature of reality.

speaker-1: Yeah. Now, of course, there are certain scientific principles that are pretty much universally accepted. You know, the nature of gravity or Darwinian evolution and other things like that. Although there are always outliers who disagree with those things. But there is a pretty large consensus about a large number of scientific topics. Do you think that we're ever going to achieve any kind of a consensus on this consciousness thing? Or do you think it's going to remain as diverse and fragmented as it currently is. And what would it take to achieve some kind of consensus? How could that be achieved?

speaker-0: That's a great question. Two neuroscientists and a philosopher, Neil Seth and... ...had a paper on the different neurobiological theories, the 20 some odd theories, but they have very nice comment in there. And they said that in all different areas of science, the more we learn, the more we're able to falsify theories and...

speaker-1: the bar and

speaker-0: and converge theories. That doesn't mean we can prove anything, but we get closer to it. said, Caution seems to be the more we've learned in brain research over the many, many decades since I got my PhD, the more we've learned, the more theories we have, not the less. And to me, that's very telling. And to me, that is a signal that the... that we

speaker-1: Like a thousand years from now or some alien civilization has it all figured out?

speaker-0: Yeah, look, some people say AI will tell us the truth or aliens will tell us the truth. ⁓ You know, I am ⁓ not a believer that either of those things would make much progress ⁓ because of the nature. But I'm not saying that there's no answer. I'm not saying that there's a multiplicity of answers. There's some theories that say that all these different theories is because the Reality is pluralistic that there are different kinds of realities. We all create our own reality. ⁓ and therefore each one of these are, are true in their own world and we create our own worlds. So people, there's some people who say that I don't believe that. I think there is one ultimate reality and that, and that we would be able to understand it if somebody explained it to us. ⁓ but, ⁓ because of. And because I still believe, notwithstanding my story about my daughter, that consciousness does have some non-physical aspect, I believe that it will be impossible for us in our current state to come to a consensus because if there is something non-physical, then the scientific method will not ever be able to ⁓ confirm it, ever, by matter of principle. ⁓ And we don't have the the science any kind of tools to be able to ⁓ adjudicate something in the non-physical sphere. if consciousness I'll answer your question directly this way if consciousness is physical Then I'm a hundred percent sure at some time in the future that we will have a full theory of phenomenal consciousness if it's physical I don't think it's very soon, people say a number of, I would say be hundreds of years if not more, but we will be able to achieve that if conscious is physical. If there's anything about it that's not physical, then we in our current state will never be able to know for sure and come to consensus ever in principle. So it's a very clear bimodal divide between whether conscious is physical or non-physical in terms of our capacity to absolutely understand it. If it's physical, we absolutely will at some point in the future, as will AI become conscious. our consciousness is 100 % physical, then AI will become conscious at some point. Conscious and non-physical, AI becomes a separate question. I've dealt with that extensively. Each theory will have its own way of approaching AI consciousness. But in terms of our coming to a consensus, we won't be able to come to a consensus unless until... We're in that state and if conscious non-physical and there's an afterlife of some kind we're in that state I assume then we will know at that point and you and I'll mate and you'll say I told you so Robert

speaker-1: Reminds me of a line from the Incredible String Band. We'll understand it better in the suite, bye and bye. All will be one, all will be one.

speaker-0: Alright, well you sing better than I do so I won't try that.

speaker-1: ⁓ yeah. And in defense of what you just said, there are, there are people in the East who've been, you know, studying consciousness for thousands of years and they all disagree with each other still. mean, they're even, even within Vedanta, there are a number of branches that have completely different perspectives. So it's, it's elusive. ⁓ it's an elusive.

speaker-0: But that is more than just an anecdotal and curious thing. To me, that's a very telling thing that each of these areas proliferate the more you get into it. It's like religious groups, they split and split and splinter and they argue over what seems to an alien to be the most absurd thing. mean, the nature ⁓ of Jesus' acclaimed incarnation, whether it was fully God and fully human at the same time or half and half. I mean, this split churches and caused wars, that specific issue. And if you go into any, it's not just in Christianity, in every single religious group you have those splits going on because you don't have that scientific certainty. And if indeed the non-physical world is real in any sense, you're never going to have scientific certainty on it. So that's what we're going to live with. ⁓ You know, I would think though that, you know, that's not a permanent condition ⁓ for reality to be. It seems like it's an unstable state that I would, I believe, but with no proof whatsoever and is a non-scientific statement and ⁓ I won't fool myself into believing what I'm now going to say. So with all those caveats in mind, you know, I would believe that it's at some point for some reason, ⁓ we will have some kind of ⁓ a transformation of some kind, universe, life after death, some kind of transformation that ⁓ will clarify things. But I'm not going to fool myself into believing that's true.

speaker-1: that that's one of your mantras. I'm not going to fool myself. I really like that. What you said about the splintering reminded me of the sorcerer's apprentice where he chops up the broom and then he only has all these additional brooms to deal with. But I also think there's going to be some kind of grand unification and ⁓ I think it will involve a somehow emerging or collaboration between traditional spirituality and modern science. not traditional spirituality in a very hocus pocus mythological way, you know, systematic scientific approaches to exploring consciousness through subjective technologies in conjunction with ⁓ objective methodologies for measuring the brain and you know, and also throwing physics in there. I mean, if we had achieved some kind of, you know, unified field theory that really unified all the fundamental forces into one thing, Maybe as some physicists have speculated, we would somehow discover that the unified field and consciousness are one and the same, ⁓ understood or experienced in different ways.

speaker-0: Yeah, and that would be sort of a pan psychic kind of approach. ⁓ What you said makes sense. It's a logical sequence of things. I just think it still falls ⁓ a prey to the distinction between whether ultimately it's all physical or non-physical. And if there's any part of consciousness that's non-physical, the project won't work.

speaker-1: Well you bear with me for another second, know we're going a little long, if you take anything physical like this pen and you look more more finely at what it actually is, you get down to a point at which it's not physical. You know, if you go deep enough, sub sub subatomic.

speaker-0: I am not sure agree with that.

speaker-1: You get down to a quack-

speaker-0: probability fields, but that's physical. Probability fields are physical. It's described in physical terms, can describe it mathematically, so to me that's all physical. It's a different kind of physical, but when I say physical, I mean physical in its completely extended state, which means subject to the scientific method. We know ⁓ probabilities of, you know, ⁓ in quantum mechanics, we know there's this uncertainty, we have predictability to 11 digits or something like that because it is subject to the scientific method. So if it's subject to the scientific method, I agree there will be consensus, but if there's anything that's outside the scientific method being non-physical, it will fail in principle.

speaker-1: Yeah. Okay. Well, like everything you say can get me going again, but I feel like ⁓ I should probably wrap it up out of courtesy for you and appreciation for the time you've spent. really have enjoyed this. ⁓

speaker-0: Great to talk, Rick. think we've achieved a lot. We've explored a lot of stuff. To me, as I said, we have fun in doing it and I appreciate it. We take our subject seriously, but not ourselves. It's really important. Even though we're having fun and everybody's engaged in different ideas, I do think there's a very serious subject that's the most important one that humanity has.

speaker-1: I agree. I think it has implications in terms of our politics, our economics, our survival as a species. And I think that if we really fully understood and utilized the full potential of consciousness, we could in fact eradicate war and famine and all that other stuff.

speaker-0: Yeah, look, I'd like to make one final comment we haven't talked about. ⁓ I developed Closer to Truth purely for its knowledge and access to get the best thinking of humanity on all these different topics that we've talked about. Cosmos, mind, religion, meaning, life. ⁓ But what I found the last four or five years, maybe since the pandemic, as we become more on YouTube and more global, ⁓ that the percentage of viewers have gone from 100 % US to like 40 % US. So we have 60 % around the world. And I found that people from diverse cultures that superficially their countries are opposed to each other, Indian, Pakistan, Iran and Israel, Ukraine and Russia, pick your ones. Each have people writing to Closer to Truth. wanting to understand the nature of consciousness of mind or whatever and nobody mentions politics nobody mentions anything other than their unified interest in these topics and that has given me a ⁓ different level of sense of the world and to see that people without without any any from all kinds of diversity diversity and ethnicity and religion in ⁓ nations, in age, in gender, everything, socioeconomic standing, education level. ⁓ This group, it's a subset of humanity, has this deep desire to understand. And they're all similar, even though they'll say, look, I come from an Islamic tradition, and here's the thing, but ⁓ I really want to learn about these other ways because the concept is so important to us. And to me, you talked about a unification. I have seen a little unification along the importance of asking the questions that are ubiquitous to humanity as a whole and has no relationship whatsoever to national origin, race, none. There's zero correlation between these questions and our superficial designations of each other. To me, that's a very positive sign. I'll tell you one more story that was one of my favorite. It was in early episodes of Closer to Truth, a woman wrote in and she said, I live in Bakersfield, California, kind of rural area. I have a wonderful husband and five terrific sons. One is a truck driver, one's a mechanic, one runs a supermarket. And they all think I'm crazy. My five sons and my husband, I love them all. They love me, but they think I'm crazy because I ask these Questions about consciousness or the universe but what happened is my oldest grandson is 13 years old and he's asking those questions So he and I together secretly watch closer to truth Now you'd never find her on any demographic people ask me what's the demographic of closer to truth, you know PhDs or you know religious people I said Irrelevant it's what what the interest is is something internal

speaker-1: That's great.

speaker-0: that you can't find on a resume.

speaker-1: Yeah. I think there, speaking of the pandemic, I think there's an epidemic of awakening, both of interest in and experience of deeper spiritual values, if you want to call them that, deeper consciousness. People are popping all over the place. I mean, I've interviewed people who were just tying their shoes one morning, going out for a run, and all of sudden they had this big spiritual awakening and didn't know what happened to them. So I think there's something in the air, something in the water perhaps. And that a rising tide lifts all boats and that I think humanity will be 100, 200 years from now, quite indistinguishable from what it is now, not only more technologically advanced, but spiritually advanced in the sense of spirituality that we've been discussing here, you know, making common. That's actually the purpose of the title of my thing, Buddha at the Gas Pump. I'm suggesting that you might be pumping gas and be standing next to a Buddha who looks like an ordinary guy, but who is spiritually awakened and it's becoming, it's proliferating.

speaker-0: That's good. That's a good story. But we're not going to fool ourselves. No.

speaker-1: gone for a bit. All right, Robert. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Let's stay in touch.

speaker-0: Love to Rick, very much enjoyed it and all the best in your continued work.

speaker-1: Yes, and thank you to those who've been listening or watching. And if you'd like to see who we have scheduled in the coming weeks, there's an upcoming IndieNews page on backgap.com. So stay tuned for the next one.