A Radically Empirical Approach to the Exploration of Consciousness, Alan Wallace

how to approach the study of consciousness how to understand it that which is most intimate to our very existence itself what do we more no more intimately more directly than the sheer experience of being conscious and yet there it is that which there's nothing more intimate than this and yet remains such a mystery in many ways to modern science how could that possibly be that we know more about the Big Bang we know more about the first five hundred million years of evolution of consciousness than we know about the evolution of our own minds of consciousness itself it's quite strange isn't it so let's see how this might occur I'd like to sweep through the last 400 years of science very written very briefly - starting with Galileo who I think really deserves the credit of launching the first true revolution in science Copernicus that came up with a brilliant mathematical theory but they didn't prove it and it was just a matter of opinion really those who thought that earth was in the center of the Sun was the center there was no resolution but Galileo did something that no one else had done before and that easy took a pre-existing technology namely the telescope he refined it and then he used it in unprecedented ways he used it as a scientific instrument to rigorously precisely observe the phenomena that he was seeking to understand I see this as a bit spotty here I don't know that how that looked like a rat got to it and kind of chewed away the first slide Galileo rigorously observing physical and celestial phenomena using telescope and other instruments and it was that T he was also a brilliant mathematician there's no question he did experiments he was the first full fledged scientist Copernicus was an outstanding mathematician but the point I'd like to emphasize here briefly is that he introduced the theme of rigorously precisely observing the phenomena he was seeking to understand that went both for celestial phenomena the Sun Moon planets and stars but also for tourists phenomena he did in fact drug a large and a small entity off the pitar of Pisa any observed whether one hit the ground earlier than earlier than the other and so that really was the catalyst and in fact he came up with the first empirical evidence by observing the phases of Venus they clearly demonstrated the first time that the earlier theory that had been embraced almost without question for something like 1400 years that the earth is in the center of the universe he definitively proved that that theory was wrong with telescope not with metallics that was not enough that's what started it and that is the rigorous observation before him for thousands of years people in the east and the west were very interested in the Stars this fellow here seems quite interested and when you look with the naked eye you see about three thousand cute little dots up there little sparkly things with the naked eye it's not a whole lot to work with and so until Galileo those who were interested in celestial phenomena they were primarily focused on the terrestrial correlates the tides but of course astrology Kepler himself was employed as an astrologer so they were really looking at Quora let's call it scoreless until Galileo came along and found a way to rigorously observe the phenomena themselves and we've seen history from Galileo's 8th power telescope to the Hubble telescope and now later generations coming along well the same thing is true 250 years later Galileo published his first work in 1609 the story messenger sound very new agey and Darwin to fit 1859 published his Origin of Species and his revolutionary breakthrough which he Co discovered or formulated with Alfred Russel Wallace for both of these great individuals outstanding biologists their great theory of evolution was based upon decades a very rigorous observation of the phenomena they're seeking to understand they didn't just think hard or come up with great ideas but their brilliant ideas were based upon a great deal of meticulous observation of the phenomena they see understand hence the first and only revolution in the life sciences so Galileo started one in the physical sciences Darwin and Wallace in the life sciences and then comes along comes William James and company but William James are quite prominent in the birthing of modern the modern empirical science of the mind William James bill heme phoned in a few others but William James is mournfulness because he's so articulate so clear and William James again he's the person that in the bottom I don't know what happened to this but he suggested William James the great empiricist a radical empiricist he suggested that what was good for physics and what was good for the life sciences this should also be good for the mind sciences to be truly scientific you should be radically empirical which means if you truly want to understand the mind and that is by mind he met what we meant what we mean subjective experience your thoughts desires emotions mental states your dreams your memories your reasoning and so forth you know what we talk about is our immediately experienced subjective mental states and processes he said if you want to scientifically understand this and not simply have more philosophical speculations which were frankly a dime a dozen at that time then you should adopt methods that it worked for the life sciences and the physical sciences and that you should you should observe closely with great sophistication the mental phenomena themselves and if you look around probably the only ones you're gonna see are yours unless you're clairvoyant which is and congratulate you for that but if you're not then the phenomenon of the mental phenomena states of consciousness that you can directly observe are only your own so he suggested that first foremost and always we should rely on introspection as the cutting edge of scientific research exploration of the nature of mind and consciousness that lasted about Oh 35 years and then it was killed it was killed 1910 was pretty much the date the rise behaviorism John Watson said no in fact let's stop talking about subjective experience let's not use any terminology of subjective experience and by the way introspection out out because that's subjective we will look objectively we're going to look at the objective the physical the quantifiable because that's what scientists do we're going to look at behavior because that's scientific and looking at your own thoughts and so forth and that's subjective that's subjective and so the radical empiricism that worked so well for Galileo that works so well for Darwin worked so well for Max Planck and Einstein in the second revolution in the physical sciences that was scuttled that was discarded and it's never coming back intersection still plays at best in marginal role in the modern cognitive sciences mainstream academic psychology so what happened here well the scientific study of the mind was brought under the umbrella of scientism this was clearly advocated by a man that was mentioned earlier by Donald Hofmann Thomas H Huxley the bold Darwin's bulldog a very hardcore materialist and a true evangelist for science being the only way and there are certain articles of faith that's exactly what they are because you can read them scientific inquiry must confine itself to investigating objective physical quantifiable phenomena if it's not doing that it's not science that's not a scientific statement that's simply a preference that's not a scientifically testable statement it is a preference it's an injunction it's command and the mind sciences have pretty much been obedient ever since so there's one there's one of the articles of faith if you don't accept that well then out you go but then what comes out of that if all of your investigations are solely focused methodologically on the outer the physical the quantifiable the objective then what will you conclude that the universe consists only of mass energy and space-time and their emergent properties and functions you'll naturally conclude if you're only looking at the physical and if you're assuming that you have the only way then you will assume that the world consists were only the type of phenomena that you're able to measure and there we have materialism it's a methodological collusion it's not a scientific conclusion it's a preference and then we have the coup d'etat V V the final beheading of any other method science is the only way to understand human nature in the universe at large there many people believe that the only way I remember that I think that's called religious fundamentalism ISM one religion after another after another saying we have the only way the only come ye faithful except for now this is looking an awful lot in a very creepy way like religion at its worst and it's dominated the mind science has ever since so what happened from that well consciousness consciousness it fell through the cracks what is more subjective more intimate more not physical not quantifiable and not objective than consciousness well finally after about 400 years of ignoring consciousness not even talking about it really is only this century pretty much not even the 20th century was consciousness something that you could speak about in the laboratory Francisco Varela very good friend of mine world-class neuroscientist said the only time we as neuroscientists could talk about consciousness was over tea you know it's kind of like hey what do you think about consciousness but not in a laboratory is it not scientific it's subjective what do you do with that so what's happened with consciousness now we have many many books about it but right now on this date on October 2015 I think these statements still hold there is no scientific definition of consciousness they're about 50 of them which means there are none in the sense of any kind of consensus at all so if you can't define it it's kind of hard to study isn't it there are no men meet objective means of detecting consciousness or any mental phenomena as we subjectively experience them not even pain let alone dreams thoughts and so forth the behavioral expressions sure the neural correlates definitely but scientifically objectively technologically measuring a state of consciousness it's never happened not even close so you can't define it you can't measure it what are the neural correlates of consciousness the NCC assuming that the brain is generating consciousness which is widely held it's a belief because nobody actually knows that but assuming the brain is generating consciousness what's the minimal amount of neuronal activity needed to generate subjective experience consciousness good question here the answer is they don't know I've spoken with the world expert Christopher Koch he felt he thought he made some progress but the answer is do have they found that the answer's no what other necessary and sufficient causes of consciousness we had this wonderful talk but just yesterday from Stuart Hameroff right going back to the single-celled organisms and the worm and so forth and so on exactly where in evolution did the first conscious beings come that actually feel YUM when they eat or when they yee-ha when they mate you know when did that happen when did they start feeling pleasure feeling anything at all when did that happen the answers don't have a clue I mean literally not a clue not a clue of a clue but here's something I'm very interested in from the point of conception at some point at or following conception in a mother's womb it's not a body part as a passenger right it's not a body part it's a passenger when does that occur the Roman Catholics a conception but where's the evidence is it a month after is it three months is the final trimester when does this biological entity in the womb when is it a passenger wind does it have its own perspective its own consciousness and gosh I wish I knew and there's no scientific answer for that at all none what are the necessary and sufficient causes the consciousness what's needed to bring forth consciousness whether in a computer if you think computers might be conscious or robots or artificial intelligence and so forth the answer is don't know don't know and then finally how does the brain generate or even influence mental phenomena if you drink a quart of tequila it's probably going to alter your message your mental state right but how do you go from alcohol to sing how I am an making yourself a total fool you know how does that happen you go from simply a chemical to being silly or falling over and you know stupid drunk and the answer is don't know how does see what effect work that's a weird one that you merely have faith belief trust confidence that something will happen and it may be something very subtle and having that uninformed belief in many cases it actually triggers those precise biological phenomena within the body in the brain to fulfill your aspiration how on earth is that possible it sounds like magic väri every bit as much of magic is that genie coming out of the lamp right answers don't know but I call this the blind spot you know about the blind spot it's where the optic nerve taps it touches the retina and so on both sides of our visual field about here we're actually getting no signal like with a cellphone we're getting a lot of signals I'm seeing a lot of blue beautiful blue here but in the left and right hemispheres of my visual field here they're actually two little areas that I'm getting no signal at all but when you look around you don't see little black spots there and you know what them the mind brain does it fills it in and it fills it in with a background it photoshop's but really it photoshop's and so you see everything if the blood if the blind spot has blue behind it it fills in with blue if the background is pink or Paisley it fills in with pink or Paisley in other words you get the impression that you know something where you know nothing at all you're getting no signal but you say oh what the heck and this is done unconsciously of course well nowadays you read the media I read the media look at it the words mind and brain now are being used interchangeably as if there was some discovery some time a some time back that's in fact the mind is the brain I would love to know when that happened cuz it never happened it's very widely believed that the mind is simply what the brain does that's a slogan the mind is what the brain does in other words they're implying the mind brain correlates the Donald Hoffman's buckle to spoke about and said so rightly they don't have a clue they don't even have any good ideas they know that there are correlations the neuroscientist have done a great service there but what's the nature of the correlations don't have a clue don't have a clue to a clue that means that's good healthy ignorance hold that ignorant we don't know at all and yet it's covered over in the same way we photoshop it by pretending as if we know which we do not sow mark twain said 'it ain't what you get ain't what you don't know that gets you into our trouble it's what you do know but just ain't so or daniel Burstyn about standing his story and said illusions of knowledge historically have proven the greatest impediment to scientific discovery because you have the illusion of knowledge oh we've already got it figured out the mind is what the brain does it's you know all your thoughts are in the brain and so forth and so on if you think you already know then you want to ask the question anymore and that means you're really screwed yeah so this is the blind spot so I love this phrase by Sigmund Freud back in 1927 pretty smart guy everybody knows that and he said the problem of a world Constitution that takes no account of the mental apparatus by which we perceive it is an empty abstraction of no practical interest well a scientific worldview a vision of the whole of reality that takes no account of the mind no account of consciousness he's saying that's an empty abstraction that's what we have I mean I City cosmology as an undergraduate you can read the whole history of the universe well that's 3.7 3.8 billion years from then and tell now interestingly there's no reference to consciousness anywhere it's a make-believe conscious and make-believe universe a universe that exists only in your imagination that's the great irony is you've envisioned a universe in which there's no such thing as consciousness and mind has no role whatsoever and where does that universe exist in your mind and nowhere else because the only universe that does exist is one in which consciousness is present did emerge somehow in which the mind is making taking an active role somehow but that's not even mentioned so it sound like Freud looks like he's just kind of eviscerated the scientific and very much the materialistic view of reality which simply leaves out the mind and very deaf he leaves our consciousness so one might think well you mean you mean science is illusion when you say the future of an illusion are you talking about science and then he he might have said oh what did I just say and he said no our science is not an illusion why it seems like it should be an empty abstraction of no practical interest what would be an illusion would be to think that we might obtain elsewhere that which science cannot give us in other words we prefer to be ignorant then learn anything from outside the domain of our church I've heard that one before to th actually called that the church scientific the church scientific use very explicit about it and is his vision was the church scientific would gain global domination and basically some plant all religions because they're just a bunch of hooey and what would come in and said is the church scientific and its Creed was what I just showed you the creative scientism so Freud it seems like he's bought into that the scientific worldview then and now really does not have a place for mind or consciousness which means the university subscribing doesn't exist anywhere again the only universe we know is when the in which consciousness is present but then he's saying don't look outside of science and that's words better to the ignorant than to learn something from outside your church that gives me the creeps out with the old out with the old in with the new this is quite recent Stanford physicists just up just just up the road andele Linda very very fine scientist distinguished scientist so here's what he says breath of fresh air will it not turn out with a further development of science the study of the universe and the study of consciousness will be inseparably linked and that ultimate progress in the one will be impossible without progress in the other after the development of a unified geometrical description of the weak strong electromagnetic and gravitational interactions will the next important step not be the development of a unified approach to our entire world including the world of consciousness welcome to the 21st century yeah yeap I you know and he's not flaky he's not you know he's not fringy he's kind of actually very solid and so I love that it's coming from Stanford you know one of the great Citadel's of modern science so I think he's pointing Freud pointed the way to the past the way to stagnation the way to remaining ignorant about the nature of mind and his role of nature and here 130 Linda's suggesting a way forward so Occam's razor you probably know it here's Occam's razor that the principle is it is vain to do with more assumptions what can be done with fewer assumptions so it worked very well to scrape away that many beliefs assumptions chest biases of the medieval period and come in and say what do we actually know and let's just table everything we're merely believing it's merely opinion not that they're all wrong but let's set it aside and let's get back to what we actually know so he took a shady took out his razor and shaved off and that opened up the way for Galileo for Newton for Darwin shave away the assumptions you can always reassess them you can always get them back but don't conflate your assumptions with your knowledge with your empirical knowledge so it's been used well to free the rise of modern science from the frankly the intellectual the ideological and the methodological tyranny of the media medieval era union of church and state that had the sense gave the impression that we already have answers to all the important questions illusions of knowledge so it's been used once why not use it again let's apply Occam's razor to the insistence that all states of consciousness are emergent properties or functions of the brain if we just throw out that belief that's all it is if we just throw out that assumption what have we lost you can always get it back again if it turns it turns out to be true but why not just show but what have you lost except for you recognize a mere opinion as a mere opinion so let's chuck that and now let's bring in something that has been ignored for 105 years and that is ad rigorous first personally contented of inquiry to the mind science what might you gain is simply a question maybe you'll gain a lot maybe you'll gain very little but at least we should ask the question step outsider since I would emphatically state with great passion and great happiness that there is no one discipline either physics nor neuroscience neither Buddhism or Vedanta that has all the answers Buddhism I'm a Buddhist I love Buddhism is where I live it's my home but it has no neuroscience no neuroscience so when we want to know about my brain correlations we don't go to the Dalai Lama what you take not on we go to the neuroscientist because we learn from them all right so what might we learn well happily it comes as a surprise to some people but euro eccentric civilization is not the only civilization on the planet it's quite remarkable and quite remarkable he'll often that truth is ignored so circa 4000 years ago who knows it could be 5000 years ago a long time ago there are these counterculture holes these summoners ramana's in India they were seeking truth and they were seeking it from a first-person perspective and what was central to them was liberation what was central to them was the nature of mind and consciousness it is so intimate so primary a very existence here in the universe and so these Indians I think this is where the credit is due Indians a long time ago long before Buddha they develop methods effective methods probably through trial and error a developing highly focused stable clear radiant sustained attention it's called Samadhi poor that went too fast and so you must have this if you're going to be focusing in upon your mind itself you can't have a waffling mind you can't be jitterbugging all over the place you have to be focused Gautama took that pre-existing technology of Samadhi he refined it and he applied it in unprecedented ways like Galileo to investigate the nature of mind and multiple dimensions of consciousness and they made this the statement based on his own experience the mind that is established in equipoise come to know reality as it is so now this briefly go we have five minutes to cover three dimensions of consciousness I wish I could slow time but the first dimension is our psyche that which was very familiar with the embodied mind including conscious unconscious mental processes that clearly arise in dependence upon the brain damage the brain severely damaged the brain drink a quart of tequila have brain damage and we know the mind changes changes intimate damage the body the mind the brain excuse me damage the brain sufficiently and your mind goes dormant it studied indirectly by interrogation these are interviews is studied by studying behavior the behavioral expressions of the mind is studied by way of neural correlates but modern science really has marginalize introspection the radically empirical approach of William James the empirical approach of both Buddha and the great contemplatively of India but contemplative conditions around the world introspection but with questions it's not just being mindful it's asking what are the true causes of genuine happiness of genuine flourishing that flows from within what are the causes for that and there's also something I coined to turn genuine unhappiness genuine unhappiness that we can feel malaise distress ill being ill at ease and so forth even though nothing bad is happening to us genuine unhappiness what causes that you know so that's studying the furthest the first dimension with methods that I've spoken of many many times are extremely well known you can actually cut through the psyche to an underlying a deeper simpler dimension of consciousness goes by many many terms here's simply one from the Buddhist tradition the substrate consciousness there's subtle continuum of mental consciousness a dimension of consciousness in which all sensory appearances thoughts and so forth they when you immerse in this they go dormant and you're simply resting in a state of luminous awareness with an absence of appearances this is said to be the ground state of the psyche that from which when you wake up from deep sleep all of your appearances your thoughts emotions memories and so forth arise and when you go into deep they dissolve back into that it is that dimension of consciousness that carries on from lifetime to lifetime and that's one of the most well established empirical facts in the history of humanity Judaism they are great Jewish contemplatives affirm that and Sufi and Christian and Taoist and Hindu and Buddhist and Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato and there's now a very good strong evidence coming in both in terms of past life recall and near-death experiences and post death experiences that suggest this is the case a second dimension a subtle dimension we could spend a week on that one but this is something empirically verified and if we question it good put the experiment put the experiments to the test of experience how by your own first-person experience by the deeper the achievement of Samadhi but also based on verbal reports interviewing people who allegedly have past life recall see whether it's true or not whether it's fantasy and near-death experiences that there's a burgeoning amount of evidence there that I think is very hard to just brush away third dimension when we are moving fast here a third dimension a multi-dimensional vision of consciousness whereas in modern science frankly it looks like flat earth the psyche and when the psyche is gone they say well now you're finished now you're now you're finished now death means oblivion sometimes I wish that were the case but it is hallucination big bummer for the materialist when you finally think you is over and then it's not I think if I were immaterial I would be thinking oh crap why didn't somebody tell me you mean this goes on you mean there's a conservation of consciousness like there is of mass energy and so forth why didn't somebody tell you and yeah we have been you haven't been listening at least you're a Buddhist and if you're wrong you'll never know it you won't know anything so the material isn't right well okay I'm happy third dimension let's move on we got one minute here to deal with ultimate reality breakthrough that substrate consciousness breakthrough it by total surrender by total release releasing all sense of identification grasping clinging and so forth and you're going to freefall freefall with no ground to hit you go into a dimension of consciousness that is beyond one and many beyond subject and object utterly transcendent and if there ever is such a thing as a perennial philosophy this is where the great content of traditions of the world converge it's the deepest one and it's known directly its non-dual from the very ground of being non-dual from kind of a primal energy from which all other types of energy are derivative verified first-person experience do the work do the meditation find out for yourself don't settle with belief it's lame it's too easy it's it's lazy but what about these cases of remote viewing a precognition and so forth this now becomes intelligible if you have access to a dimension of consciousness that is a temporal and non-local this becomes not spooky it's kind of like oh yeah and that would make sense I can read this it's cool it's long but it's good Richard Feynman Nobel laureate we all know it is only through refined measurements and careful experimentation that we can have a wider vision and then we see unexpected things we see things that are far from what we would guess far from what we could have imagined if science is to progress what we need is the ability to experiment honesty in reporting results the results must be reported without somebody saying what they would like the results to have been and one of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law where you feel comfortable within the materialist paradigm but experiments search experimenters search most diligently and with the greatest effort in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong in other words we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible because only in that way can we find progress that is a noble noble ideal and if you follow it in mind Sciences be prepared to be excommunicated like Dean Radin like the researchers of the division of perceptual studies in Virginia like Russell Targ be prepared to be ignored ridiculed and excommunicated from the church scientific and be prepared to get no funding from the federal government so please all of you with deep pockets we need you because we're not going to get it from Uncle Sam he's going to be keep on supporting where the power and the money is in that's materialism so we need to have we need to move forward now towards the first revolution in the mind sciences it's been delayed too long I'm gonna wrap up in 30 seconds but it's been delayed a long time for the same reason that science was hampered in the early 17th century back then it was me nasty church that imprisoned were put under house arrest Galileo dogmatic close-minded stuffy and you know object of ridicule who's taken his place the church scientific that's tragic when something affiliated with science is actually blocking science that's tragic so we need to come out we need to implement I would suggest come if the integration collaboration across cultures across disciplines with the assumption that no one discipline has all the answers combined and integrate rigorous first-person training and Samadhi and other contemporary practices with the marvelous methods of modern science and explore the broadest range of consciousness including altered states integrating methods of psychology neuroscience content ative inquiry physics and so forth bring it all together it's time for collaboration it's time to come together it's time to integrate multiple perspectives and methodology and an only that way I believe can we launch the first revolution in the mind sciences and for that we need contempt of observatories no content no observatories no astronomy no content ative observatories you need to create environments for this that support people are willing to spend 10 15 years in single-pointed full-time practice like neuroscientists like astronomers that's what we need right now something that unifies the sciences and spirituality the multiple contemporary traditions of the world that we come together to address perhaps the most significant feature of our existence what's the nature of consciousness what is potential what happens at conception what happens at death it will change everything it's true let's find out thank you you

Channel: scienceandnonduality

Views: 42,942

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Keywords: Alan Wallace, Buddhism (Religion), William James, Dalai Lama (Religious Leader), consciousness at death, nature of consciousness, nonduality, mind, meditation, compassion, Philosophy (Field Of Study), B. Alan Wallace (Author)

Id: csAjZ1MwhPE

Length: 33min 1sec (1981 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2015