Bernardo Kastrup and Rupert Sheldrake: The Nature of the Cosmic Mind, with Jonas Atlas

[Music] hello everyone I'm Jonas Atlas and today I find myself in the Exquisite company of Bernardo castr and rert sheldrick but Rupert I'm very pleased that I could invite you both to have this conversation because I was a bit surprised to find out that there wasn't any video or podcast episode somewhere where the two of you met and talked about certain things because personally I find that you have a lot of overlap in certain idees and at the same time some of your IDs tend to go in a different direction so I thought this might be become a very nuanced and interesting conversation if I got the two of you together in one room okay it's a virtual room online but that will do as well but before we delve in uh into the topic of today uh I perhaps have to explain to the people who are listening or who are watching this afterwards that we're not going to talk about the basics so we're going to suppose that people who are watching or listening already know some stuff that you write about or that you have talked about if they don't they can always go and find some of those YouTubes and podcasts and read your books obviously and so uh we'll consider this a bit of a master class that gets us deeper into certain things that are most not talked about because we stick to the basics so without any further Ado let me start and I'd like to begin with rert because both of you of course have been critics of mechanical materialism or physicalism or call it the way you want uh for a long time and when Bernardo speaks about it or presents his criticisms on materialism he immediately Chuck opposes it to his philosophical idealism and I've heard people say that rert you are an idealist as well I can imagine where they come from your IDs of let's say morphic resonance which has memory ingrained uh or embedded within nature kind of gives the idea that there's Consciousness that drives everything in nature but at the same time I kind of remember I couldn't find it back again but I kind of remember having watched a a YouTube recording of your one of your lectures at the end there's a Q&A and in the Q&A you say well I'm not a complete idealist and I think you even mentioned Bernardo castr as a as someone who is but you didn't really go into it so just to clarify that bit how do you position yourself you you see yourself as an idealist or not and where do you think are some of the differences there well I don't think of myself as an idealist actually I don't think of myself as as a dualist um and I certainly don't think of myself as a physicalist in terms of philosophy of nature I think in terms of a holistic philosophy of nature in which nature is organized in a series of levels at which the whole is more than some of the parts so subatomic particles within atoms where the wholeness of the atom is more than the particles within molecules where the wholeness of the molecule is more than the constituent atoms crystals um cells um organisms societies of organisms like flocks of Starlings or schools of fish ecosystems planets entire planets like Gaia our own planet solar systems uh galaxies and ultimately the whole Cosmos at each level um the wholeness includes lower level holes like a molecule includes atoms which are autonomous whole have autonomous wholeness so um what I'm suggesting is that in each of these levels they're organized by morphic fields which are fields which give them shape form structure and that these fields have the shape form and structure they do because of a memory of previous similar systems given by morphic resonance across time and space now this hypothesis of nature um doesn't necessarily um say very much about the underlying basis of this the wholeness of all these things I suggest that morphic resonance is normally the basis of habits that most things in nature are habitual most of our own behavior is Habitual um which involves a kind of memory but not necessarily a conscious memory um in fact when things become habits they usually stop being conscious they just happen almost automatically if I get an onto a bicycle and start riding it it's unconscious I don't have to think about it if I'm trying to master some new piece of technology um I have to think about it quite a lot so um a lot of it's to do with habit now when we come to the very basis of the whole of all of this then I'm not a physicalist in the sense I think there's much more going on than just matter and that matter involves organizing fields and memory it's certainly not matter as usually conceived in mechanistic materialism um and I think also that these levels of wholeness have also awareness or experience to some degree but most of the time they're functioning habitually and probably unconsciously like we do most of the time with most of our actions so then when we come to the larger framework of what is the basis of all of this um My ultimate position I suppose is panentheism panentheism the doctrine that God is in nature and Natures in God and that all things are sustained by uh the Divine Consciousness that there's ultimately Consciousness underlying all things but I don't call this idealism because idealism can come in various forms but one of the forms would be a kind of ultimate Consciousness which is the basis of everything uh without saying very much about its structure um I'm a trinitarian I I think that the Ultimate Reality or Consciousness has a trinitarian structure um in other words it has a ground of Consciousness itself a ground of conscious being which in the Hindu model is sat as in sat chit andand there's a ground of being which is basis of everything then chit is about Consciousness and the contents of Consciousness names and forms uh which uh within the Consciousness there has to be a knower in order to have what's known so there's a differentiation between the know and the known uh within ultimate Consciousness and um then there has to be a dynamical principle which in the Christian version of the trinitarian model is the Holy Spirit which is the ultimate source of energy movement change actuality which we find in nature and so just to summarize how I see this ultimate Consciousness reflected in nature I think that the ground of conscious being supports all things and maintains the universe if it ceased to exist everything would vanish it's a God in a sense is the prime cause of all things not in the sense of starting everything off in a big bang like pushing a start button having designed the laws and constants of nature but rather sustaining the universe from moment to moment underlying or being and that the logos principle in the Holy Trinity in the chrisan model is the principle of forms names and forms um and that gives rise to the shapes and structures the morphic fields of nature which give rise to shape form structure and the energy in nature which I think is derived from the Holy Spirit as its ultimate source uh gives change actuality uh movement and so on so everything in nature according to Modern physics is made up of energy underlying energy within it and it's organized into form by Fields so the fundamental principles of modern physics and understanding of nature energy and Fields field Fields give form energy gives movement change and um actuality to things um so and I think the source of that is is a trinitarian form of Consciousness which is not just Consciousness in the sense of a knower and the known but also a principle of energy uh which is what underlies the changing realities of the world so it's a rather long answer but um that's how I see it and it may be elapse in all sorts of ways with bernardo's kind of idealism uh but I hope we'll find out where we overlap and where we don't in the course of this conversation yeah your uh trinitarian Dynamic structure really gets us to the essence of the thing and Bernardo sometimes I have the feeling when I listen to you that you go for a more what I would call classical non-dualist view where Consciousness is the real reality and everything else which we perceive as matter is nothing but illusion the the dashboard as you often say the way we read the reality or the way we perceive it but not reality in itself so that doesn't really contain such a trinitarian dynamic it seems more like there's a monistic hole and then we perceive it differently but or am I miscomprehension well not a ontological trinity in the sense of three completely different Essences or substances or or types of existence um but there is a very high risk that we can get too focused on Words and and Miss how much overlap there is I I I'm not going to to try to get the word idealism out of Rupert's mouth because it it doesn't matter so long as we understand understand where we are coming from and and see the overlaps but I am very comfortable with just about everything rer just said let me try to reward my own views in a way that will highlight what I see as the commonalities when I when I use the word Consciousness what I mean is phenomenal Consciousness not entailing any higher level function like the ability to explicitly introspect into its own content metacognitively in other words phenomenal Consciousness can experience without knowing that it is experiencing without an internal metacognitive re- representation of its own contents without being able to turn in upon itself and and and investigate and evaluate its own contents of Consciousness in other words it's raw experience and when rert talked about habits become automatic U that excludes matter Consciousness and automatism is prec precisely that which no longer requires the supervision of metacognitive awareness but it can very well stay in Consciousness we breathe as an automatism but it's hard to say that we don't experience your breathing it's just that sometimes when we pay attention then we bring the experience of breathing now the inflation of the rib cage the air flowing through our nostrils we bring that under the field of metacognition and then it becomes cognitively re-presented and accessible introspectively but even when we are not thinking of it arguably we are experiencing our breathing all the time so habit could be said to be phenomenal in the sense of being experiential but um without being in the field of metaconsciousness or metacognitive awareness so when I say that everything is consciousness I don't mean that everything is metac conscious the vast majority of nature is not clearly not the vast majority of Nature and folds spontaneously instinctively you could say through you know the expression of habits formed over time I completely with rert uh in that regard uh but that could still unfold um in a field of subjectivity pure subjectivity in other words phenomenal Consciousness not metaconsciousness now if even if that is the only ontic structure there is say one specially Unbound field of subje ity across all nature you can still have properties to be is to have properties and those properties can be such that we can speak of a trinity even if it's not an ontological Trinity fundamentally different substances we can speak of a trinity for instance um to to continue to pursue the line that rert opened the Holy Spirit the thing that that provides impetus for nature to do something something for there to be changes of states in nature schopenhauer called it the will the will a a a intrinsic property of Desiring or fearing which is just Desiring with a minus in front of it that's a property of this fi of subjectivity um but it fits with that impetus uh rert um was talking about so you could have trinitarian Properties or aspects that expr themselves in three different ways and still there are properties of one and the same underlying substance what I am guilty of that Rupert is not is um I know it's sort of more or less arbitrary there is nothing etched in nature saying that you know reductionism should always be valid but I I I am a reductionist I I have a natural you know implicit tendency to try to explain complex things in terms of simpler things the difference between my form of reductionism and and physicalism is that physicalism reduces to the infinitely small and I tend to reduce it to one broad field um and by the way physics is going that way as well we have 17 Quantum Fields now maybe we get down to one with the grand unification theories um but if we can make sense of the whole of nature the variety the diversity of nature in terms of different patterns of excitation of one underlying field in other words if there is only one field of subjectivity only one subject and everything else are the expressions or movements or excitations of the subject just like ripples are excitations of the lake there being nothing to Repose but the lake we could account for the unfathomable diversity and complexity of nature in terms of only one thing and that to me is intellectually and even spiritually very very satisfying I think Bernardo with well there two points first I'm not suggesting that these are three ontological separate substances I'm saying in some sense they're aspects of an underlying unity and in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity which I take seriously because I'm a Christian but also because I think it's a a fundamental marel of reality that's a a really good one the metaphor the underlying metaphor is not of separate substances the underlying metaphor is of speech um when I'm speaking now um I'm the speaker and the words I'm speaking have shape structure form pattern meaning connection and so on um that's the logos aspect but in order if I just thought them they'd be silent in my mind in order to appear a speech they have to be carried on the outflow of the breath and the breath which is the spirit or the spirit literally Numa in Greek and R in Hebrew means wind breath U as well as Spirit um that the flow of the breath is essential if I had just the flow of the breath there' be white noise and no words if I had just the words they wouldn't manifest they'd be silent in my mind and the two are unified by both coming from me as the speaker so when in a spoken word it's it's not exactly there are two ontologically different substances the two are combined now I think you're actually using the very same metaphor um because when you speak of ripples on the lake the the ripples involve a dynamical principle if it was just a still static lake with a static Consciousness there' be no movement and in fact the ripples on the lake uh you know verse two of the book of gen genis and the spirit of God moved on the face of the deep is the very first aspect of the creation story and the spirit or the wind of God moving on the face of the deep on the face of the water creates exactly your metaphor namely ripples on the lake so I think that the um the the the metaphor you see involves a distinction between the lake as a surface or the water as a surface and the moving reppel on it and so in that sense you seem to be saying the same thing that I'm saying I have been reading and listening to you for 25 years so I'm closer to you I think than the public would uh would imagine because of my choice of words and the kind of analytic language I speak I'm I'm not surprised at all that I'm very close to you I Haven known that for 25 years uh your your output has influenced that a lot for instance I talk about this one field of subjectivity and I mentioned the will as one of the aspects of it the impetus to towards self excitation the impetus of the lake to Ripple to excite itself so the outward breath another another way to talk about it would be to say if this Feud of subjectivity is a mind because that's what subjectivity is then it stands to reason that it would have archetypes and in the metaphor of excitation archetypes would be the resonant frequencies of the field the the frequencies at which the field naturally tends to excite in which it puts its energy into maximum uh amplitude of oscillations because it's just the right Rhythm the right e and flow of energy um so that would be your platonic forms that would be um yeah the ideal the ideal forms um and a field of sub subjectivity is mental and habit is a fundamentally seems to be a fundamentally mental thing Minds form habits once they find a cognitive path in a field of possibilities they tend to stick to it a little more now all the way back to your biology you know neurons who who um how is that neurons who fire together uh was fire together together well that's the slogan for memory traces yes so I have this inner impression that um when you talk I understand you in a way that is completely consistent with my own view uh of things you speak a different language you speak a much richer nuanced language which in my view is the best language to speak I it's not the language I speak for two reasons one I'm not as good at it and two I'm aiming at a particular intellectual disposition the analytic disposition um and that disposition needs to have things laid out very explicitly literally almost uh without the the multi layers of meaning that are always entailed when you open your mouth and speak there multiple layers of meaning in what you say uh I I I go for a group of people who does not prefer that if you know what I mean it's a kind of mental handicap uh which I'm I also suffer from and I cater to people with the same kind of thing we live in a culture today where people mistake nuanced layers of meaning for vagueness and imprecision um and I only attempted to do something like that myself in one book more than allegory um but the people I come across which are the people who sort of traffic in more or less the same world I do they want it spelled out very precisely and unambiguously very clearly in a conceptually clear uh manner almost mathematics and and I sympathize with it because I also have a tendency to require that and once that is place then I then then I relax and then and then the doors open to somebody like you who can then add another 10 layers of mini on top of that you know go up the spiral several turns more but I need that that door open and so I sympathize with people who need the same and I try to cater to that and in our culture that group of people tends to be in power positions now um in Academia and the culture at large handicapped people are in power positions now well that's very very interesting that you put it like that I get your point that some people like everything spelled out in in detail I'm not one of them um I mean I don't need to have everything spelled out in almost mathematical detail um because I'm more empirically oriented I'm more oriented towards what experiments can one do to move this whole discussion forward so my focus is always to try and find experiments that will shift the argument because I think philosophical arguments you know can go on for decades or even Millennia um without necessarily moving the whole thing forwards and as you say some of these ideas well they're present in eastern philosophy but also in Western philosophy shophow who I think is one of the clearest of philosophical writers in the world as will and idea is saying something rather similar to what I'm saying you know that this will is the the the dynamical principle and idea is the form principle and something similar to what you're saying I get how the both of you are very close to each other but there's one aspect and I actually have to return to the idea of archetypes that I think might be a slight difference there Bernardo when you speak of the archetypes then it seems a bit like a like a primordial dissociated alar or something like that the the subjective no that's not what you mean it's not something that exists within the universal Cosmic mind no which expresses itself within Society that's not what you mean no in the in yungan language an archetype is empty an archetype is just a template you could visualize it as the natural the natural harmonics of something the frequencies at which something naturally wants to vibrate like a child than a swing if you push the child with the natural frequency of the Swing the child will go higher and higher but if you push it at the wrong time at the wrong frequency the whole movement stops energy is lost so an archetype would be a multi-dimensional natural frequency of mind the the the types of expression that mind naturally favors because of its own inherent properties the archetypes are what they are because mind is what it is as opposed to something else so the archetype is not an entity but entities can embody archetypes so those would be the yungan diamonds a diamond is a kind of a more or less lose island of internally connected cognition that follows an archetypal template but um The Diamond would then be already a manifestation of this empty template it would be already the diamond and not the crystalline abstract cryst in structure of the diamond um that we're talking about you need to clothe an archetype before you can see it so in the same way the the archetypes of the mind of nature uh for you to be able to see them you have to see how they express themselves concretely and that's exactly what I wanted to ask you about is there also a return from the the clothing let's say the way it expresses itself back to the archetype because that's how I have always understood morphic resonance yes there's memory there but the way it expresses itself will recreate the memory and slightly adapt the morphic field in a certain sense so my question is there is the expression of the Divine mind does it alter the Divine mind itself as well or not you want to take that one Robert well um in this discussion there are there are two fundamental ways of interpreting them one is the straightforward platonic idea um I mean the archetypes in Plato's philosophy are Eternal forms or Eternal ideas beyond space and time and Beyond change now as I understand Yung his use of archetypes was much more embedded in the collective unconscious and in some sense a kind of collective memory now that's how I think of them in in terms of a kind of collective memory where the um question becomes tricky is in the question of creativity so I'm suggesting that once a new pattern of thinking a new pattern of action or a new form of flow for example has come into being in nature through repetition it becomes increasingly habitual by morphic resonance that's what morphic resonance does it sort of makes things more probable the more often they've happened before but what it doesn't explain is creativity in the first place where does the first flower of the Rose type occur of where does the first eye come from where does the first feather come from where does the first flying animal come into being once they've come into being morphic resonance can help reinforce these patterns um so the the question of creativity is one that I leave open because I think it's a philosophical or metaphysical question question and you know there are some people yans on the whole tend to think of creativity as coming from the bottom up emerging from lower levels whereas platonists tend to think of it as coming from the top down from higher levels uh coming down into and its more traditional theory of creativity certainly in relation to human creativity uh because in many cultures the idea is that human creativity is inspired by beings or spirits that are more conscious than we are like Angels or U Muses I mean the Greeks thought that each art was inspired by a muse and the Muse was this inspirational figure and the Romans thought in terms of the inspiring genius or spirit that inspired people of course in the modern materialist world people don't think that creativity is inspired by a spirit of uh a higher and disembodied form of Consciousness they don't say Einstein had a genius they say Einstein was a genius so the inspiration is crammed inside Einstein's brain which is why in a jar of formalin in some universi somewhere they still got Einstein's brain because they were trying to find out what bit of it it was where the genius resided or functioned um so there the bottom up and the top down theories of creativity the top down ones you could have a top- down platonic theory of creativity that all possible forms of life all possible forms of ideas Etc exist in a platonic realm then when the moment is right they manifest in the world if they are successful they get repeated and become morphic fields and morphic archetypes as it were uh by natural selection if they're not repeated then they go back to just being potentialities um so that would say that creativity actually is only the manifestation of pre-existing um potential archetypes other people like the philosopher bergson who I'm very keen on emphasized that creativity in evolution is made up as it goes along that there's an ongoing imagination ongoing creation of new forms in a kind of virtual world which is then manifested rather than having them all in a platonic World there all the time now I don't know how this relates to your own thinking about archetypes but it does in so far as you have a young ear approach it suggests that they are can be shaped or molded by memory I personally think habit forming is intrinsic to the very nature of mind and Consciousness so it will always be there there could be yion and I will name myself as one of them who could say that um the distinction between whether the inspiration comes from from outside and high up or from the inside and low down it's it's there just in the metaphor because a union who really went through you know the 20 volumes of the collected works at least two three times you notice that for Yung the collective unconscious is not confined in US U by going inwards paradoxically we expand outwards because we surrounded by the collective unconscious the idea of synchronicities says that um the physical World At Large that surrounds us also plays itself out along archetyp of templates that's why there are synchronicities and um if you really explore for instance the correspondence between Yung and Pa when Yung was being particularly careful in his usage of words because he was looking up to a Nobel Prize winner um it becomes fairly clear that for Yung we both surround and are surrounded by the collective unconscious the world itself is a manifestation of the collective unconscious which we perceive just like our archetypal dreams are a manifestation of the collective unconscious unconscious that we also perceive we see the figures you know playing their doing their thing uh in the screen of a dream just like we see the world doing its thing uh on the screen of perception so these two things may be may not actually be really two different approaches it's a it's a choice of metaphor whether the metaphor goes outwards or go inwards they always end up in a place that is much bigger and surrounds us uh ultimately and the creativity for a yungan would be how the archetypes combine and interfere with one another to lead to the emergence of something that is bigger uh more nuanced and more complex than the archetypes themselves like how colog Cathedral is bigger than its bricks if you know what I mean um but the building blocks are are fated to see archetypes the fundamental frequencies that come and interfere constructively or destructively to give shape to other things they are perforce than archetypal because yeah they are the natural frequencies of the thing within which our arises if if I can ask a technical question if archetypes and and morphic resonance and so on and and basically also a a Consciousness essence of reality drives or or is being expressed where do you see a difference between a conscious being or a being that's alive an organic being and an nonorganic being in the sense that basically what's the difference between a rock and a human being and so on how do you explain if you come from an idealist perspective or even a pist perspective how do you explain basically the existence of non-conscious stuff because materialism is very good at giving an explanation of cons of non-conscious things and it has a problem explaining the the consciousness in humans but I sometimes have the feeling that the problem also arises in within idealism that it has to explain why there is stuff which is seemingly at least non-conscious so I'm really wondering what both of your answers would be to that a mistake we commonly make is to take the epistemic structure of our language for the antic structure of the world we project the categories of language the nouns we come up with we project them outward as if they were true proper parts of the world and that can go terribly wrong in some cases it's obvious like this is a fist where did the fist go did the fist disappear no the fist was never there as an entity the fist was a configuration of nature it was something nature was doing but it wasn't an entity unto itself in other in other cases it's much more difficult to see this projection when we talk every time we talk about a car or a table we are nominally in other words only in language carving out a subset of nature for which we have no atic grounds to say this is a separate entity and some people would say well the car is everything you need for the thing to move if you don't need it then it's not part of the car like if you take the spark plugs out the car doesn't move so the spark plugs are integral to the car well on that account um without fuel the car doesn't run without tires the car doesn't run but also without the road that the tires grip the car doesn't run without the gravity that pulls the tires to the road the car doesn't run without the air that cools the engine and allows for combustion the car doesn't run so if you think consequently about it the inanimate Universe has no proper part there is good reason physically to think that if Big Bang Theory is correct um then everything in the universe is ultimately untangled and what we take to be collapsed States physical States or classical physical states are a kind of Illusion because of the coherence so before we ask which entities are conscious we we have to ask what are the entities that we are questioning whether they are conscious or not is a table an entity is it conscious if if a penist says yes what happens when I remove one of one of the four legs of the table does the removed the leg now have a conscious of its consciousness of its own separate from the rest of the table or if I nail it back does it combine with the rest and the answer to that is there is no table there is no car there is there are no objects the only thing we have inico and atic grounds to carve out of the rest of nature are living beings because if you stick a needle on my arm I feel it if you stick it on the arm of my chair I don't and that's a very empirical Criterium to say okay living beings do have boundaries I would say they are dissociative boundaries in the Nal world but everything else when you ask does a glass of water have cons my question to you would be or my my answer to you would be there is no glass of water there is only the inanimate universe as a whole and it is conscious yeah then I would say yes rert what would be your answer well I would make the distinction between self-organizing systems and non-self organizing systems an atom organizes itself a molecule or Crystal organizes itself cells animals plants organize themselves so the Galaxy and solar systems however tables chairs socks computers and cars don't organize themselves um they're made in factories that's why we have factories if if they organize themselves You' just be able to grow them on farms um you can't grow them because they don't organize themselves and nor do rocks in in the Rock the crystals within the rock are self-organizing but the Assembly of the rock is not so organizing it depends on external forces if a rock breaks off a mountain and falls down bumping uh down the slopes of the mountain colliding with other rocks and breaks into smaller pieces it's in a sense accidental in the finishing product and then if it falls into a river and is worn Away by a river and turned into a smooth round Stone um the this is responding to external forces not organizing itself so I'd make an important distin distinction there between the self-organizing and the not self-organizing and of the self-organizing I definitely include crystals um molecules and atoms and I would expect also that they have some kind of experience or awareness um not necessarily a high level of Consciousness but um as a crystal forms there's a kind of desire in a forming Crystal to for the molecules to come together in particular ordered patterns which we see in snowflakes for example each snowflake has a kind of unity because the six arms of the snowflake are like the other arms of the same snowflake but they're different from the arms of a different snowflake so there's a kind of internal coherence of each snowflake of form um and what kind of feelings and experiences do atoms or electrons have U well one thing we know they have is attractions and repulsions um that we talk about electric attraction electric repulsion or magnetic attraction and repulsion and these seem to be very basic forms of Desire or motivation that we actually experience ourselves as well and where there is a kind of continuity between the most simple physical objects and ourselves where attraction and repulsion become you know I seem to be fundamental aspects of nature which we experience subjectively and I don't see any reason why an atom or a molecule shouldn't experience them subjectively as well I wonder what you think about that Bernardo about the actual experiential life of simple things like atoms or molecules and there which are attracted or repelled um by others I think I share your view that anything any system that self-organizes does so because it is manifesting some form of mentation I actually think the entire physical universe is is is just a dashboard representation of mental processes uh so to say so everything has underly mentation the question is whether something has private underly mation of its own separate from the underly mation of its surroundings or the rest of the universe so that's what I see as as the key question where do the boundaries lie um where can we say okay this system now has a private conscious in their life that is coex coextensive with with the boundaries of its body or its structure um and that's where I I question whether we can speak of private conscious inner life for an inanimate object because those objects tend to be so nominal but regarding the electrons there I depart from you and um not because my core intuitions differ from yours I don't think they do but you know in Quantum Feud Theory which is the relativistic extension of classical quantum theory it we need Quantum Feud Theory to explain nature because it's the only theory that that explain the interactions between particles classical quantum theory has nothing to say about how particles interact according to that theory the only way to account for a great many things including inertia is to regard particles not as things not as entities with spatial boundaries but ripples on the underlying field um there being nothing to the particle but the underlying field just as there is nothing to the Ripple on the lake but the lake you can't fish the Ripple out and carry it home with you it's um it's an expression it's a behavior of the lake it's something the the lake does but the only only thing is the lake not the rippo and in the same way under Quantum Feud Theory and even many physicists particularly solid state Phil physicists don't seem to be explicitly aware of it under qfd there are no particles particles um is shorthand for a transitory FEI excitation it's not a thing it's a doing of the field and without this understanding we couldn't explain for instance Quantum fluctuations they would be magical real things would pop into existence out of nothing and disappear into nothing for no reason well we account for that um by saying particles are just ripples on the lake and sometimes the ripples die down and sometimes they come back up we wouldn't be able to explain particle Decay a hi bosm can Decay into a pair of muons but there are no muons in the hi bosm so it would be magical the hix bosen would disappear into nothingness and two muons would appear out of nothingness um but if you understand that the hick bosen is a ripple in the hick field then that Ripple can Decay and give rise to different sub ripples because in the process of losing energy and finally even inertia we explain inertia through the idea that and this is a metaphor it's not really accurate but it's the best one can do briefly the idea of inertia why does mass resist changes in speed in the direction or or you know the amplitude of speed why does mass resist acceleration it's because there is a hi field that is kind of sticky and and therefore it takes a lot of force to get something to move in that sticky field um without it the hix bosm does not explain inertia um so but the understanding is the hix bosen is just a manifestation of the hix field the bosen itself is irrelevant it doesn't explain Nera it's the underlying field that does and to say that an electron has a private conscious inner life of its own would require that it be a true entity with discrete spatial boundaries while we have a lot of reasons to not think of it that way if you want the electrum to have Consciousness then you need the electromagnetic field to have Consciousness and that is a as large as the hole of existence it doesn't have spatial boundaries the electron is I agree a trickier case if you come to an atom the atom does have a kind of boundary it has the outer shell of electrons which are or orbital waves that um around theide of the atom and the same is true of a molecule a covalently bonded molecule a simple one like water or methane has electrons that whiz around there oxygen hydrogen hydrogen and there are some electrons whizzing around orbitals like a shell of electrons around the whole thing so there is a boundary uh to this form um which helps to protect the Integrity of the form by repelling anything else that tries to come into it so I agree with you that an isolated electron um is depends on the electron field Quantum field Theory um like actually like everything in nature has these two components energy and the field and an electron is a is a is a quantized vibration within an electron field a proton is within a proton field the fields are what give them their characteristic properties um the energy is what gives them their actuality or activity but the point about energy is that it's at least as conceived in modern science promiscuous um the energy in an electric plug um you know can power a computer or a light or a fan or an electric toaster or a haird dryer um it can do all those different things and the energy and photons of light coming from the sun falling on plants in my garden if it falls you know on a rose bu it becomes part of the energy of a rose and if the same Photon had fallen on the grass it would become part of the energy of the grass so there's a sense in which this energy at least as it's conceived in in physics is uh promiscuous can take many forms the form it takes depends on the field within which it's bound and so I mean you seem to be saying the same thing with your ripples on the lake model um but the there is a distinction between the Ripples and the lake in the sense that the energy in of the ripples I mean in wave power you have literal energy of the waves that can be captured and turned into electricity you can there a wave electricity generators um so the energy can the Ripple energy as it were can be taken away transformed into some other kind of energy and one of the great triumphs of 19th century physics was the unification of all forms of energy um seeing that heat mechanical electrical chemical Etc all these different forms of energy are interconvertible that's why you see I think in terms of in the model the trinitarian model where energy is one of the principles and form is another they always work together but they're distinguishable um and it's not so and you have them you have both these principles shophow had them with will and I representation so in a sense it is a trinitarian model that you're putting forward um but the energy um can be separated literally separated uh as in wave power you can take the energy out of the waves and turn it into an electric current and then use it to power an electric toaster um so it is sort of separable it's not always sort of bound together so they're distinguishable I think I can come very close to your position not the least reason for which is that you have influenced mine a lot many years ago previous Century um I think it was in one of your trialogues um but you said could the Sun be conscious because it's Dynamic patterns of you know electromagnetic feuds and and ion ions and plasma uh it's very complex comparably complex if you look to a brain and the patterns of electromagnetic feuds and neuron firings and so on and that intrigued me a lot because it also Dove tals very well with many of the world's Traditions which look up to the Sun as a sort of a male divinity that takes care of us and even science shows us that almost all the energy on Earth certainly all the energy we consume ultimately comes from the sun even if you eat a cow that cow ate the grass which converted the energy from the Sun I think because of what I shared with you about Quantum Feud Theory which works so well that I feel unable to contradict it um but one could go as far as to say the sun could be what a very strong internally Associated complex in in the mind of nature looks like when we look at it when we observe it so it wouldn't be really dissociated from its cognitive surroundings like we seem to be I don't know what's happening in China right now I can't read your thoughts right now presumably you can't read mine we seem to be dissociated from our cognitive surroundings ings I think what this dissociation looks like is life metabolism you know protein folding DNA transcription and so on um the sun doesn't have that so I wouldn't put it in the same category but it could be almost that because as Yung explained you could have incredibly re emotionally charged internally Associated complex sees in the collective unconscious that aren't really dissociated from their surrounding but are so strongly Associated internally and are so charged with psychic energy or emotional energy um that they become semi-autonomous so I would I would regard the Sun as possibly something like that rather than to say it it has a private conscious in a life akin to my own well I've taken that further actually a couple of years ago I published a paper in the Journal of Consciousness studies called is the sunc conscious so I've tried to think it through in the light of recent discussions of psychism integrated information Theory um electromagnetic theories of Consciousness and so on um not that I endorse all those theories but they provide a space in which it's possible to discuss this question in a scientific journal you know and I think a few years ago it wouldn't have been possible to get a paper with that title published in a scientific journal especially since the answer to the question that I give is yes um so in in in this paper on is the sunc conscious I I look at you know first of all the general psychist argument um that as you know quite a number of materialists are now adopting pans psychism because they think it's a way of dissolving the hard problem the hard problem being that if you have an totally unconscious Universe um and the the only thing that exist is matter and it's all unconscious how come we're conscious so of course as you know some of them try to pretend we're not conscious Al others say well we are conscious but it doesn't actually do anything it's an epy phenomenon just a way of speaking um but the pannist materialists like gayen straon um say well let's just say there's a little bit of Consciousness in electron a bit more in an atom a bit more in a molecule so by the time you get to a brain it's only a difference of degree matter itself has some kind of Consciousness but when they get to the brain they stop because their whole aim was to try and dissolve the hard problem so what I'm doing is trying to do rather like in in iido you know they're moving in that direction sort of help them go a bit further um and say well why stop at the brain is the sunc conscious and then there are already theories saying that the interface of mind and brain is the electromagnetic activity um well the sun's got plenty of that and highly complex and then I then integrated information Theory um is impossible and intractable mathematically but I think it strong point is that it's in it says that there in each form of Consciousness there's something integrative there's a wholeness or a Unity to each kind of Consciousness that and that is field likee in nature fields are inherent ly unitive or integrative um you can't take a slice out of an electromagnetic or a gravitational field um if you cut a magnet in two each becomes a whole magnet with a whole field so this is quite a good model for an integrative Consciousness and then I also discuss how if the Sun is conscious how would it know what's going on in the solar system what would be its sense organ and I think that would be the electromagnetic field and I think the Sun May well be have a a form of conscious not just habits and memory which would come through morphic resonance memory comes for free uh with morphic resonance uh but and habits certainly has habits like its 11e cycle but it may also have a conscious mind where as Whitehead points that one of the main functions of Consciousness conscious Minds is choosing a possible actions the sun has possible actions does it shoot out a solar flare towards the Earth or towards Mars or between the planets and doesn't hit any of the planets if it shoots out solar flares or coronal mass ejections towards the Earth it could take out our whole electric power grid system and plunge human civilization into chaos the sun could do that to us anytime it wanted um it doesn't want to apparently and lots of people like Indians in in the gri Mantra one of the most fundamental mantras in Hinduism is a a manra directed towards the Divine Splendor of the sun asking it to illuminate our meditation so in many cultures people relate to the sun often as a God sometimes as a goddess like in Japan where the sun is a goddess and if the sun's conscious why know what about other stars and if they're conscious what about the galactic mind and if the galactic mind exists and what about the cosmic mind then we come to something rather similar to the idea of the world Soul which we find in Plato and imp platinos so following this line of reasoning um what I'm not sure about your idealism how it would deal with the idea of the world Soul uh which would be a kind of pantheism if it stops at the world Soul or um How would how would you think of the sun and the stars and the galaxies and their possible Consciousness because they do have boundaries the Sun the whole solar system has The Helio pors which is a kind of magnetic electromagnetic envelope around it um and so there is a kind of boundar on the galaxy has a kind of boundary so they have the right conditions for uh Consciousness it seems to me I think the big question is does the Sun have private conscious inner life of its own that there is underlying mental activity as an idealist that applies to everything the Sun the Galaxy the the entire universe I think the physical universe is is a dashboard representation of the mental activity of this one field of subjectivity that nature is uh ultimately so the question is to what extent is the consciousness of the Sun dissociated from its surroundings or autonomous in some way and these are two different questions you can have a fairly autonomous mental complex that is not dissociated from its surroundings but still has some form of individual identity because it's so strongly Associated within itself it starts taking on an a kind of individual agency even though it's not dissociated my conservative answer you know if I'm putting a wall with a gun to my face and uh and somebody would say you know if you give me the wrong answer I'll will shoot you in the head my answer would be no the sun does not have private conscience in their life the way you and I have and and the reason I would put forward is that um I cannot refute the possibility that the sun might have private conscience in their life I grant that there are indications that are consistent with this hypothesis but the instances in nature of private conscious in their lives that that whose Behavior B betray uh the same kind of inner life we have I would say it's life life forms betray private conscious in their life even an amoeba or a parium if you look in the microscope how they go after food run away from danger or how amibas building build their little vases with particles of mud they pick up from the bottom and then they enter those little vases as a little house their behavior betrays private conscious in their life and although life is so V period um when you look under a microscope everybody's burning ATP everybody's doing transcription everybody's doing mitosis know metabolism underlies all life the most different ones so I would say nature gives us sufficient reason to extrapolate conscious inner life to all life but I would hesitate extrapolating that to the Sun that there I wouldn't I wouldn't go that far but I do think the sun just as everything else in nature is an expression of mental activity and maybe even of a strongly individuated mental complex that's not necessarily dissociated from the rest that's how I would approach it more or less conservatively okay but then what about the whole Cosmos the entire universe I would say the entire universe minus life because as I said I think life is what a dissoci ation in this field of subjectivity looks like I would say the entire universe minus living beings has a conscious inner life of its own a unitary conscious inner life not a metacognitive one because the speed of light limit prevents um re-entrant Loops of information integration at a cosmic scale so you can't have metacognition it would be a rather spontaneous very intelligent but spontaneous instinctive inner life but it would be one inner life I think yes I see good so so that would be somewhat similar to the idea of platinus is World Soul um yes you could you could even call it God well then it would be pantheism um pism because there could be more to God than just what we see yes pantheism would say that the the world Soul would be within in a greater form of Consciousness with the Divine Consciousness but if it's just if it stops at the world Soul then it would be pantheism it would be a bit more like Spinosa it would be like the whole of Nature has a kind of mind or Consciousness but there's nothing Beyond it or transcending it um whereas pantheism would say that nature has all these things the entire universe but there's also it's not doesn't exhaust the possibilities of Consciousness and there's a consciousness underlying all of Nature and from which it arises I think it would be supremely arrogant to deny that there can be more to Nature than what we monkeys running on a rock are able to cognize after 30,000 years of symbolic thinking I'm very comfortable with pantheism I could even say I am a penist to the extent I'm comfortable with the word Divinity I'm comfort with pantheism yeah well gentlemen we've arrived at the cosmic Mind Of God himself or herself um and I'd like to add one final question and that's a bit taking up on the idea of Consciousness being integrative and and kind of going to a Unity you might philosophically think that the unity of the Divine conscious mind stays within itself but we have everything around us what in a religious sense would be called creation and and it's infinite amount of things and beautiful things in life and so why why does it express itself in the multiplicity what would be your answer because I myself I I often think of the the sentence I once came up with We Exist because we matter the pun is intended um and I guess that's my question do do you feel that there's meaning behind the multiplicity that the unity of the Consciousness although it's integrative had to express itself within the multiplicity so maybe rert first well this is obviously a very ancient philosophical question and you know it's still a very difficult one because if you have a model of God or Divine mind as ultimate unity and within itself Blissful within itself you know as in sat chit andand it's being and then chit it's the Consciousness which includes names and forms but the other property is Joy or Bliss that this Divine mind is blissful because it's just Blissful it's not going anywhere it doesn't lack anything um it doesn't have to desire because it is does not to desire if it's the ultimate completion um so then theories of creation have to be as in Plato kind of emanation theory is that there's a kind of overflowing a generous overflowing which gives rise to Creation um there are other theories I suppose that would say God and and the universe are necessarily part of each other if you take the Christian view of the Trinity where the logos the the second person of the Trinity um is part of the divine nature then the logos is expressed through incarnation in Jesus in a particular form but more cosmically it's the cosmic Christ or the entire universe is a kind of incarnation of the Divine being then when we actually look at the universe what we see is a fantastic multiplicity I mean vast numbers of galaxies billions of stars within each Galaxy and here on Earth numerable life forms countless species you know million species of Beatles in the Amazon alone and so it seems as if variety or multiplicity or the exploration of possibility is just part of this Divine mind or nature it's hard to see if the entire point of creation as some people suggest is the evolution of human beings and more particularly the evolution of modern science then um and modern scientists it's hard to see why you need all these billions of galaxies or billions of stars and and all these different species of Beatles um which we're rendering extinct before we even classified them um so as Ty Des shardo pointed out that the sheer creativity or multiplicity seems to be part of the this the nature of Nature and of the Divine ground of nature the Hindu idea that God is Leela or play as part of the divine nature is just play or it gives a kind of spontaneous creativity um and kind of overflowing creativity um attributes that to God and I think one has to have some theory of that kind because otherwise it's almost impossible to explain this vastness and variety which we know now is vastly greater than anyone could conceive most Rel were born within a very much smaller cosmology um it's only since the 1920s it's only the last 100 years that we've had the idea of galaxies beyond our own and of a universe that's expanding and evolving um it gives us a completely new cosmological picture for the theological or philosophical imagination so we can't fall back on panus or any of these other authors for an explanation of our modern cosmology because it goes Way Beyond anything they knew about or could have known about so why that should be so I don't know but it just seems to be part of the ultimate nature of things that there a fantastic creativity uh seems to be one of the attributes of God or of Ultimate Reality and not just creativity in the sense of a creation in the beginning old ideas of divine creativity God created the universe and there it was you know seven days of creation in the Book of Genesis and then things went on more or less the same thereafter uh what we now have is the idea of ongoing creativity in every realm in the cosmos in in nature in biology in human culture in human ideas and human Minds that it seems to be inherent uh to the entire Cosmic process lovely B I am a naturalist um I don't think at the foundations of nature there is a deliberate plan there may be a deliberate plan to Nature as we perceive it if you look at the sum total of the evidence available to those willing to look today it's not as implausible an idea as I used to think it was but even if that's the case then the foundations of nature behind that setup are then naturalistic um there clearly is a natural impetus to movement meant in a very generic way to changes of state to to dynamism um in nature nature is going somewhere it's doing something whether it knows what it's doing or not it's definitely not resting it's it's not quiet um it is going somewhere so there is a will as an idealist if nature is a field of subjectivity then there is an imp impetus to action which is best describable as a will but a will to what it's not the Freudian will to pleasure it is not the nian will to power it could be a will to meaning but even the concept of meaning requires higher level mental functions metacognition symbolic reasoning and all that that so it can't be that either I think a raw non metac cognized will to self- knowledge is probably the best guess it U if we could put it in a simple statement and what is going on what is it that's going on what am I well I experience what what's going on I have these experiences and that provides impetus for change and then it so happens whether set up or not that the species evolves on planet Earth and probably countless other planets that has developed higher level mental functions and now through their eyes nature can contemplate itself and can start to get a bit of a grip on what's going on so through our eyes the subjectivity of nature can look around and say oh this is me this this is what's happening this this is what I'm doing and this may be an instinctive um Drive um and therefore it took four billion years on this planet to get there um because there wasn't a map constructed in the beginning and a Clear Vision of where the universe wanted to be you know it was filling its way all along it's getting warmer or is it getting colder and it's not an optimal trajectory and in that process there is tremendous Carnage a lot of blood spilled um that's that's my best guess uh today for what's going on and interestingly and by the way Jung wrote extensively about this in answer to job religion has all the metaphors for this um the god of the Old Testament yah um was uh somewhat unconscious not because he was not phenomenally conscious but because he was not metacognitive um and did to job what what he did um very unfair actions against job and job confronted y with that I was a righteous man I know I lived by the book so why why did you kill my children stole my cattle and now and made me eal why am I being punished and if you read the book of Job God then goes on a tiate like I am the power behind the storms and he doesn't answer the question um although he gave an audience to and the answer then comes in the New Testament when God incarnates and become a man so he can experience what it is to be part of creation and without potential unfairness and and that enlightens God and God becomes the suum bonum so Through The Eyes of humans God evokes that's the message of religion God becomes more metacognitive more self-aware of what's going on through Jesus through the Christ incarnated and um I find that a wonderful metaphor especially when Christ is also God himself and the Holy Spirit holy spirit that permeates the whole of existence I think that is an incredibly sophisticated metaphor for the fourth Century it's um it's a phenomenal human achievement which brings us back to Trinity so rert a last word I think I'm very happy to leave it at that and um well I'd like to say thank you to you join us because Bernardo and I haven't had a conversation like this before we only met once before and talked very briefly and I'm very grateful to you for bringing us together like this and and focusing our discussion and I'm very grateful to Bernardo for taking part and and exploring um where our ideas overlap where they don't and U it's clear we're both going in a similar Direction and it's enormously exciting and exhilarating to find um philosophical and scientific ideas which can help us to make sense of these incredible discoveries of Science and the opening of New Horizons that is given to us well gentlemen it was an absolute Delight to hear you talk about the physics of the cosmic mind I too am very gr grateful both to you yanas and to rert um the the young man inside me it's like what did I just have a conversation with rert shre my mind's going to blow later on lovely but your dinner is waiting I guess so uh I think we're going to leave it at this and uh thank you very [Music] much

Channel: Rupert Sheldrake

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Length: 75min 54sec (4554 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024