Bernardo Kastrup on the Nature of Reality: Materialism, Idealism, or Skepticism

welcome to the michael shermer show i'm your host michael shermer my guest today is bernardo costrup he is the executive director of essentia foundation his work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism the notion that reality is essentially mental is a phd in philosophy in the subjects of ontology and philosophy of mind and another phd in computer engineering reconfiguring computing and artificial intelligence as a scientist bernardo has worked for the european organization for nuclear research cern and the philips research laboratories where the kasmir effect of quantum field theory was discovered formulated in detail in many academic papers and books his ideas have been featured on scientific american the institute of arts and ideas the blog of the american philosophical association and big think among others bernardo's most recent work is the idea of the world a multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality he's also the author of why materialism is baloney how true skeptics know there is no death and fathom life and fathom answers to life the universe and everything for more information freely downloadable papers and videos etc please visit bernardocastrup.com okay well it sounds like a real jargony kind of conversation we're gonna have but it wasn't it was uh um it was quite clear and lucid that you didn't you don't have to know anything about any of these philosophical topics to understand um what he's talking about and since i'm not a philosopher it's easy to keep the conversation uh practical so we deal with all the subjects i just listed and lots of very specific things like altered states of consciousness and uh hallucinogenic trips ayahuasca and lsd and so forth and the subject of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences and anomalous neurological experiences we talked about even alexander who had a trip that he went to heaven and uh and oliver sax's many works in this area of anomalous neurological experiences that people have that they experience as very real um and so we talk about to what extent these open the doors of perception to some other reality or not uh and then we wrap up talking about free will and where agency comes from and then suffering and the meaning and purpose of life at the very end so it was quite the conversation much much better than i thought it would be and and uh and super interesting so i hope you enjoy the conversation bernardo how are you where are you i am in the south of the netherlands uh very close to the border with germany and belgium very close to jennifer's place uh close to cologne yeah that's right my wife's from cologne yes well we we love that area we haven't been there since the shutdown and it was probably a year before that that we had visited so now it's been over two years so that's pretty crazy so um well uh as you know i usually have guests with with a new book out you have um you have several books the the latest one on schopenhauer i didn't get a chance to read i did read through your uh cheekily named why materialism is baloney how true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life the universe and everything okay with that bold title uh why don't you give us a little bit of background who are you where you from where'd you go to school and i i see you had two phds very impressive so give us a little bit of background how you got into this whole field of study oh originally by education i am a computer scientist computer engineer very early in my professional life my first job actually was at cern in switzerland the big accelerator and from then on i worked a lot in ai and of course you know when you're designing something that they suppose is supposed to supposed to be intelligent you ask yourself the question could it be conscious too and if yes what what would i have to do to make it conscious in other words to not only process information but to have experience accompany that processing of information uh and that sort of uh led me back to philosophy which has been a passion of mine now lifelong since i was a kid thinking about you know the nature of consciousness the nature of reality eventually i got a second phd my first phd is from the eindhoven technology university very close to where i am my second one is from radboud university both in the netherlands top schools in the netherlands worldwide not that tough but for us here top schools um and since then i have been writing a whole lot of books uh about philosophy especially and also the intersection with ai and computer science uh the one you mentioned uh is unsurprisingly my best seller perhaps because of that cheeky title i have other books that are very academic in orientation they actually sell surprisingly well the idea of the world which is a collection of peer-reviewed academic papers sells surprisingly well with uh well above my expectations because it was not meant for the general readership and and still it seems to be resonating there so yeah that's where i come from right so the connection with ai and and uh philosophy of mine is interesting i'll intersect it with it this way i once met um david ferrucci the ibm uh computer scientist who led the team that designed watson the computer that won jeopardy you know we have this big game show here called jeopardy and uh he watson the computer played against the two greatest champions of all time including ken jennings who is the the all-time earner and uh you know and it just cleaned the computer just cleaning their clocks anyway so what i asked him was is does jeopardy does watson know that he won jeopardy i mean was he like excited oh my god i beat ken jennings no one's ever beat ken jennings that's incredible and of course the answer is well no well actually he said yes and i said what and he said well i programmed him to to you know say yay or whatever but of course we don't know that you know what in inside the computer that the computer is experiencing the joy of victory or you know the agony of defeat or or whatever it's not experiencing anything it doesn't even know it's playing a game it doesn't even know it's on television it doesn't know anything right it's just an algorithm grinding through wikipedia pages to try to answer trivial questions yes and even if you know what some computer scientists would say is that well but if you give the computer uh internal representations of itself including of its own internal states in other words to try to build some form of metacognition in the algorithms of the machine they would claim well then you would know that you won but of course this this begs the question because no amount of data processing is necessarily accompanied by experience unless you already presuppose some form of pancythism which is what most people who who entertain this idea of artificial consciousness and silicon seem to be assuming but our readiness to believe that we can create private conscious in their life in silicon reflects an amazing capacity to ignore our sense of plausibility when it comes to consciousness for for instance if i could run a molecularly accurate simulation of kidney function on my computer but everybody would love if i would then claim my computer can urinate on my desk just because i have a completely accurate down to the atomic level simulation of kidney function but when it comes to consciousness we don't laugh we think it's plausible but it's the same categorical error it's the error of completely eliminating the substrate and believing that abstractions alone are the whole reality so if you programmed into watson that if you hit this particular score and the other two players are lower you win and then you program it into it it cheers like yeah it makes a little voice sound okay that's not going to do it and then you have a program that's aware that it's cheering and you would say well that's not consciousness and then we have a program that's aware of the program that's aware of the cheering and winning and so on and and i presume you you could just take this out infinitely and you'd still never at some point reach a number in which you'd say there that's where conscious awareness begins is that your point correct and and the reason the reason for this is that we have one instance in nature where we know with a very high degree of confidence that there is conscious in their life private conscious in their life and that is for biological organisms that metabolize biological organisms can be functionally and structurally completely different but they have this common element which is metabolism which which is what characterizes biology so metabolism is what nature is telling us is consistently correlated with conscious in their life if you go to silicon it's a completely different substrate so the question is not can we be sure that the computer is not conscious in and of itself no we cannot be sure the question is do we have any reason to believe that it is and then i would say no we don't because what nature is showing us is that the instances of conscious inner life that we know are correlated with metabolism so programming information processing in a computer and believing that it will be conscious is exactly a akin to programming kidney function in a computer and believing that it can urinate on your desk the simulation is not the thing simulated and we never make this mistake unless it comes to consciousness it's really peculiar well it's because it's something we do i guess and we have an intuitive sense that there's something floating around up there it feels like i have thoughts in my head i don't feel any neurons firing i feel no neural activity at all i just have thoughts and that feels like they could just float off my brain when i die and i go off into you know heaven or whatever that's i think that's kind of an intuitive basis for belief in in the continuation of the self after death whatever version you want of that because it's not possible to conceive of what it's like to not be conscious because to conceive of anything you have to be conscious so there's kind of a a contradictory state of conditions there and and yet if we define it by the way you just did as you know the association with metabolism then single cell organisms they metabolize you know they have chemical processes they they move along chemical gradients toward food toward light away from toxic chemicals or whatever so would you say then that's like a really super basic level of consciousness and then you scale up from there based on the amount of metabolism or complexity of the number of neurons or whatever i think single-celled organisms do have private consciousness in their life because i think life is what a certain dissociative process in consciousness looks like that's what i think life is we can get into the details of that but if you look at the paramecium under a microscope it runs from from danger it goes after food i mean this thing doesn't have a nervous system it's a single cell it's basically just gelatin inside a lipid membrane so yes i think private consciousness in your life is entirely correlated with life and metabolism life or an individual organism is what a dissociative process in a field of subjectivity looks like when it's observed that's why brain activity correlates with inner experience brain activity is what inner experience looks like from across a dissociative boundary but normally when i talk about consciousness i'm not talking about an instance like a particular organism with private conscious in your life usually i talk about consciousness as a ontological category which the greek the greeks called lucia it's a type of existence so if as an idealist if i say the whole universe is in consciousness i don't mean by it that it's in a specific instance of consciousness like my consciousness or your consciousness or even the combined consciousnesses of all living beings what i mean is that the type of existence existent that underlies the universe is the type we call consciousness it's like saying that the universe is wood and instead of wooden tables if you know what i mean so then how are you defining consciousness i mean this is usually described as you know what it's like to be something so i assume my dog is conscious because he knows what it feels like to be a dog even though i i can't know what it's like to be him but i have a sense of what it's like to be him and but but uh but but i can kind of reflect on my own consciousness i don't think my dog can reflect on his consciousness he's just conscious and he responds to heat and cold and the bouncing ball or food the sound of food going into his dish whatever and but he i don't think he thinks about that or thinks about thinking about food or whatever he just responds in a more basic way so i think our intuition is that consciousness is some higher order state and therefore the paramecium or the dog doesn't really have it like we have it it feels like there's a a leap a gap between us and pretty much all other organisms except maybe dolphins and the you know the citations let's say in the great apes something like that you're precisely right i mean this subtlety of understanding is what misses in most people even surprisingly scholars and specialists you're completely right when i say consciousness i'm i am alluding to phenomenal consciousness so for someone to be phenomenally conscious there just needs to be something it is like to be this someone that doesn't require any higher level mental function like self-reflection metacognition explicit introspection things that are called meta consciousness they were called meta consciousness by jonathan schooler in 2002 i think it's a very good name it makes things simpler so when the idealist says the universe is in consciousness what the idealist means is that there is a transpersonal field of phenomenal consciousness of pure subjectivity and the the mental processes unfolding in that field present themselves to us as the physical world that doesn't entail or imply that this field is meta conscious that it has a plan that it's deliberate that it's doing things on purpose if you if you want to describe it as close as possible to what an idealist would mean is to say it is instinctive and entirely spontaneous it's it's an instance of naturalism i'm a naturalist and a reductionist i know that not everybody who may be right is a naturalist and a reductionist i happen to be one so my naturalist view of this field of subjectivity is one that has no higher level mental functions at all it reacts in a predictable way because of what it is and those patterns of behavior are what we call the laws of physics which seem to be very stable very reliable they are not changing from day to day which suggests that if if idealism is correct then this universal mind if you want to call it is a purely instinctive spontaneous mind and higher level mental functions evolve through evolution by natural selection in the context of a competitive ecosystem okay back to my analogy with watson and you're stating that no matter how many programs and programs of programs and meta meta meta programs i built in there there's not there's no way to know that it's ever going to be conscious and it probably won't be in the way you've just described it and yet i do picture in the other analogy i just made scaling up from parameciums to dogs to chimps cetaceans dolphins and so on up to us there's a field a sense that we have that if you pack on enough cortex layers and layers and layers of cortex or neural networks that are aware of the neural networks that are aware of the maps that are aware of the boundary between self and non-self and so on at some point like in the sydney harris cartoon that you've used that i've used you know and then a miracle happens you know you have the two mathematicians at the chalkboard with equations and then the middle step there and then a miracle happens it's it feels like like something like magic happens if you just get enough cortical activity going but that's i'm assuming that's an incorrect way to think about it i think it is incorrect that the best case that has ever been made along these lines uh was made by douglas hofstadter in godot that enormous volume of his from the 70s i think um which is a fantastic book but if you if if you read it carefully if it's at all possible to read it to the end but if it is and you read it carefully you see that what's happening there is that the crucial point the crucial transition is just being hidden and buried underneath layer and layer and layering layers of complexity and and sometimes that obfuscation may give us the feeling that we are hitting on something important but we aren't i mean we know since the enlightenment that correct reasoning needs to be explicit it needs to be all the steps need to be explicit and and reasonable um and and there are many instances today in which we sort of try to hide ignorance of all things try to hide behind that which we do not know or cannot understand because it's so complex another instance of it is the so-called heart problem of consciousness and the notion that if organisms if nervous systems are complex enough at some point magic happens and something that was purely quantitative before like a set of microscopic switches opening and closing suddenly becomes qualitative and has inner experience there is no reason to think that this is an appeal to magic and you're just hiding that being underneath layers and layers and layers of complexity you know as a computer scientist i know full well that anything any computer in the world or which has ever existed does can be done with pipes pressure valves and water it's just that you would need something the size of a planet to do that but at the end of the day it's just current electric current but you can think of it as water tension which is just just different pressures and pressure valves it can open and close depending on the pressures now if you is it coherent to say that if you add enough pipes water and pressure valves at some point something that consists only of pipes water and pressure valve will become conscious instead of just being a mechanical contraption no you have no reason to think that and people who think we do are appealing at some level to some form of magic it's an argument by ignorance ultimately yeah so um where that then extra step comes from you're arguing can't be a purely mechanical physical system because no matter how many layers of complexity you you pile on neural networks or mechanical or electrical systems you're never going to get to the and then the leap happens the miracle happens and then consciousness arises yes so then therefore your posture there's something else there's something else that's in there in my skull besides synaptic connections and proteins swapping across you know neural neurotransmitter substances swapping across gaps there's something else in there is that what you mean no no but i know why you're saying this and i try to help you uh follow along with what i think which doesn't mean that i am right i just want to be understood not necessarily agreed with i don't think there is anything else in your head i think your head is just you know elementary subatomic particles forming atoms molecules and their respective feuds that's all there is but i think we think about it in the wrong way um you know when you face a so-called problem like the heart problem of consciousness it's not a problem at all to be solved it's just an internal contradiction in a certain way of thinking so the the right approach is once you face that you backtrack enough steps that you avoid that problem by implication and you try another direction and what i would submit to you is that what is inside your head or your whole body it is not the cause of consciousness it is what a certain state of consciousness looks like from a certain perspective and that's why there is this tight correlation between how you feel within within and your brain activity or even your facial expressions i mean if you if you look in the mirror and you see tears running down your face that's what your inner sadness looks like when observed from a certain perspective so what i would say is that at its bottom very naturalistic level there is only a spatially unbound field of subjectivity which has no higher level mental functions it just means phenomenality and that sometimes that feud can dissociate and form what's technically called alters and i would submit to you that our living body metabolizing living body is what those dissociative processes look like when observed from a cross a dissociative boundary so the idea is we stop thinking about the brain as the cause and start thinking about the brain as the appearance as the image as what the process looks like and not as the cause of the process you would still have all the correlations there you would still be a a reductionist naturalist but you start from a very fundamentally different assumption about the essence of reality so you avoid the heart problem altogether yeah interesting yeah because i think of the hard problem as a conceptual problem but not a scientific problem namely it's a problem with our concepts that is to say we have this sense that there's a homunculus inside my head that can then go over into your head to see if the red looks like on your screen what it looks like on my screen or i can go into the bat and see what it feels like to be a bat and what's on his screen of course this is all ridiculous can't do any of that and even if i bolted on uh you know some kind of sensory apparatus system that was based on sound so i used echolocation to walk around the house blindfolded let's say then i'd have a sense yeah i kind of feel like this is what a bad experience is um so but your point is that this this is kind of game playing with words conceptually scientifically you can't do this and if you did if you did it all the way you'd just be a bat or a dolphin you wouldn't be a human asking what it's like to be a bat or a dolphin you would just change identities yeah i think you're correct in everything you said the the heart problem doesn't necessarily require there to be a homunculus it's it's even a more basic problem the heart problem just says that it's a recognition it says that there is nothing about physical parameters in terms of which we could deduce at least in principle the qualities of experience so even if there are no higher level mental functions no homunculus you would still have the hard problem because you cannot deduce quality from quantity that bridges is a is conceptually arbitrary and and for me that is a very very big hint that somewhere we took the wrong turn in our conceptual reasoning so i think the effort is not to solve a fundamentally insoluble problem that's just reduce your absurdum of a certain line of thinking you don't insist on it thinking that new technologies will help you so what is a conceptual problem you backtrack until the last safe step and then you try different directions and then you see things add up if you do that and i think they do yeah i had philip gough on the podcast last year and he pinpoints that turn at galileo in history of science that turned around galileo's time of of you know this kind of reductionistic materialistic and uh i forget the details something like you know how you would analyze colors uh you know are the colors actually out there somewhere or but you know they're up here in our heads and so on uh but but for him anyway i don't want to articulate his argument because it's been a while since i saw that but um that you know that turn in the history of science to in that direction has led us to this hard problem of consciousness that really is kind of misconfigured we're never going to solve it it's not like one more neuroscience experiment or theory is going to have the answer there is no answer because it's the wrong question it's the wrong way to conceive of it i agree with the conclusion i i would take exception with beating reductionism i think 400 years of science have shown us that things can be reduced in other words they can be explained in terms of other things i don't think there is any empirical or or analytic reason to reject reductionism although there are people in academia who do reject it and and i think god's way of trying to solve the problem is physically incoherent constitutive pensacism i think is physically incoherent because it makes this naive assumption that subatomic particles or elementary subatomic particles are actually little bodies delineated in space but that's just a metaphor we know that that's not what subatomic particles are and if you really understand what subatomic particles are then then constitutive psychism becomes incoherent it doesn't work then the other thing i was going to bring up on this since we're starting to get into the kind of jargon how do you make the distinction between consciousness and mind we use these words brain and mind interchangeably i tend to think of the mind as just it's just a word we use to describe what the brain does the problem is is if you use the the word mind if you reify it into something that exists in it then we think of it as floating around up there between the neurons or whatever which you say is not the case or when we die we think of well the pattern of information my connectome my mind floats off the brain out of my skull somehow through the quantum field or something ends up in some quantum state or heaven or whatever the version that you have of that is i i assume you would reject that idea but how do you think of mind and consciousness look i think words they are okay so long as we all understand what we mean by them in in the in the history of western philosophy mind and consciousness have historically been used interchangeably mind comes from the from the greek psyche which is also the same word that gave birth to the notions of spirit and soul so mind in a sense is what we today at least historically it would be better described as what we today call phenomenal consciousness mind as the product of the brain is more of a positivistic take on the word on the word more of an early 20th century thing so i personally tend to use mind and phenomenal consciousness interchangeably um under the assumption that people know what i mean by that i would not describe the function of the brain as mind i would just call it brain activity patterns of brain metabolism i think now a descriptive label is sufficient there for that so here's how i conceived of it since you had an endorsement by deepak chopra in fact you and i met at deepak's sages and scientists conference a few years ago and and since then deepak and i have become pretty good friends even though we disagree fundamentally in our world views i describe myself as a materialist monist and he describes himself as a spiritualist monist or a consciousness monist so here's his quote from you are the universe uh his book with uh minos cafatos consciousness is fundamental and without cause it is the ground state of existence as conscious beings humans cannot experience measure or conceive of a reality devoid of consciousness and then i say this is from my book heavens on earth well yes that's true by definition you have to be conscious to experience anything so when deepak proposes that consciousness in the universe are equivalent in the sense that it is quote from deepak an undeniable fact that any universe is only knowable through the human mind's ability to perceive reality close quote he is stating the obvious i call this the weak consciousness principle you have to be conscious to be experienced consciousness but deepak goes further than this when he says quote if all human knowledge is rooted in consciousness perhaps we are viewing not the real universe based on limitations of the brain and that the apparent evolution of the cosmos since the big bang has been totally dependent upon human consciousness close quote from deepak and i write that's reversing the causal arrow from perception to determinism from being consciously aware of the universe and trying to understand it to our own consciousness bringing about the universe then i call this the strong consciousness principle uh how does your position on this deal differ from what i just described with deepak and there is a lot to unpack yeah you know what i've just read unpacking we have to make it we have yeah we have to make a differentiation between an epistemic claim about the primacy of consciousness and an ontake plane the epistemic claim is what you described i am sort of cooped up within consciousness so as far as my knowledge of the world is concerned it of course depends on consciousness and it wouldn't exist outside consciousness the ontic claim is regardless of what you know the world is in essence essence in the sense of the greek usea uh that which has standalone existence the the substance of all that is perceived that is consciousness too as a type of existence that's the anti-claim i agree with deepak's ontake conclusion and i agree with your statement that the epistemic approach is not enough to make a case for the antic conclusion in other words it's not enough to say that i can only know what is in my consciousness and derive from that the anticlaim that the universe is only in consciousness now you have to create your case to establish a case using more than that you can establish your case empirically you can establish a case based on reasoning conceptual reasoning and you can establish your case based on parsimony you can say consciousness stuff is the only only given of nature it's where we start theorizing we start from consciousness so if i can't make sense of all empirical observations based on consciousness stuff alone then i don't need matter defined as something outside an independent of consciousness because of parsimony considerations in other words for the same reason that i reject the flying spaghetti monster i would reject matter conceptually defined under physicalism if i can make do with nature's only given which is the antic category we call consciousness so i agree with deepak's conclusion but i think we need more than just the epistemic argument to be able to derive that conclusion with any confidence we need parsimony we need empiricism and we need proper analytic reasoning which exists outside of any single skull no one brain can actually put all this together so we need the social process of science to arrive at something close to objective knowledge what jonathan rausch calls the constitution of knowledge um and you know i very much endorse that because none of us can get it right all the time so we need uh you know to push back and test each other's hypotheses and so on um but so now let me continue on with with what i wrote why i uh come down the position i have as far as i can tell the hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness has vastly more evidence for it than the hypothesis that consciousness creates brain damage to the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe for example causes face blindness and stimulation of the same area causes people to see faces spontaneously stroke cause damage to the visual cortex region called v1 leads to loss of conscious visual perception changes in conscious experience can be directly measured by fmri eeg and single neuron recordings neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain scan activity before the subject is even consciously aware of the decisions made using brain scans alone neuroscientists have even been able to reconstruct on a computer screen what someone is seeing in other words brain activity equals conscious experience thousands of lab experiments in conjunction with naturally occurring experiments in the form of brain tumors strokes accidents and injuries confirm the hypothesis that neural chemical processes produce subjective experiences neural activity equals qualia or the qualitative state which is this hard problem of consciousness the fact that neuroscientists are not in agreement over which physicalist theory best accounts for mind does not mean that the hypothesis that consciousness creates matter holds equal standing let's say you i think i understand where you're coming from but i think you're making a very fundamental mistake and that mistake is what philosophers call to beg the question let me try to to make it more visible when you say if i shoot someone in the head then that physical action will have a cause in consciousness something will happen in the head of in the conscious in their life of somebody else or if i drink alcohol a material physical substance something happens in how i experience myself in my conscious in your life therefore there is not only a correlation but you can derive an arrow of causation from the physical to the mental that that's your argument the error here is that you are assuming some form of dualism you are assuming a distinction between the physical and the mental while the fundamental claim of the idealist is that there is no such distinction so for the idealist that physical glass of alcohol that you physically drink and put in your stomach that too is what a mental process a transpersonal one looks like when observed across a dissociative at a dissociative boundary idealism is a monistic ontology it's not a dualistic one so all physicality is the appearance of a mental process so if a surgeon is holding a scalpel and starts cutting you into your brain while you are awake and you start having visions and feeling things only for the ideal is that entirely coherent because that scalpel is what a transpersonal mental process outside the boundaries of my dissociation look like and that the mental process influences another is trivial your thoughts inflammatory influence your emotions every day and the other way around different qualitative processes influencing one another so it's not surprising that a transpersonal mental process that looks like a scalpel in the hand of an of a neurosurgeon influences the personal mental processes in my consciousness now you may disagree with this but to to properly be able to judge idealism you have to be able to evaluate based on its own set of premises and and how it works otherwise you're creating straw men of it and burning this drama and then you succeed in burning this strawman but you did nothing against idealism you understand what i mean so this argument that the the arrow the empirical error of causation from the physical to the mental that dismisses idealism is is just begging the question it doesn't touch idealism because for the idealist there is no physical as separate from the mental optically speaking there are only transpersonal mental processes that look like scalpels and pills and glasses of alcohol which then have an effect on personal mental processes across a dissociative boundary and there is no heart problem involved in that that qualities influence other qualities is not a big deal there is no heart problem there interesting let me ask you what question i asked uh deepak i think this was as a result of the conference you and i are at where is aunt millie's mind when her brain dies of alzheimer's and you know in other words her memories are just disappearing neuron by neuron and they fade over the course of six months a year two years whatever so deepak's answer was aunt milly was an impermanent pattern of behavior in the universe and returned to the potential she emerged from in the philosophic framework of eastern traditions ego identity is an illusion and the goal of enlightenment is to transcend to a more universal non-local non-material identity so again you know this is i think just the difference in world views between deepak and i and maybe between you and i or maybe between you and deepak and i uh that is to say using something like an alzheimer's victim uh and her memory is gone well the memory was encoded in these neural networks which die and the memory is gone you can't get it back where did it go um and in the same way i guess i would ask you you know when i'm i just went under surgery i had a total hip replacement so they put me under it's third fourth of time i've had this in my life you know it's just count backwards 99 98 boom lights out and then they wake me up a couple hours later well where was it where did where did my consciousness go and i'm one of those obnoxious patients when you know the anesthesiologist comes in and says all right do you have any questions and i said yeah where does my consciousness go when you put me under he goes ah you're one of those guys i'm yeah but it's a but it's a it's a serious question right under general anesthesia where does my consciousness go after i die where does my consciousness go where does aunt milly's mind go with alzheimer's these are two different questions uh where where um do the memories of the person go with alzheimer's or with death and then the question of consciousness was i unconscious where did my consciousness go so memories are contents of consciousness but they are not consciousness if you know what i mean for the same reason that ripples are not water memories are not consciousness um i would say that most if not all the instances of unconsciousness that we tend to name like syncope anesthesia dreamless sleep they have now been shown by science increasingly to not correspond to unconsciousness at all they correspond to irresponsiveness and to a lack of memory of consciousness not to the lack of consciousness itself think of it when you wake up in the morning and you think well i had no dreams last night it was eight hours of unconsciousness and then later in the day suddenly you remember you had a massively intense dream so what you didn't have when you woke up was the memory of being conscious you can never state categorically that you were not conscious we can only state that you don't remember being conscious and science is now showing for instance and this is a very recent result when you dream sorry when you were asleep and you are not dreaming and that can be determined through eegs you are having other types of sleep experiences if you wake up subject that are asleep but not dreaming they always report something and the three different types have been now recorded sleep thinking non-immersive sleep imagery selfless date and even subtle sleep perception anesthesia is now known for a while to correlate with some experiences not of pain not the experience of being cut but you do have subliminal perceptions and other things going on we had them in the foundation i lead we had the dutch anesthesiologist um dr uh gerard herrod voulez write an article on our website making precisely this point that basic consciousness phenomenal consciousness may not be gone at all during general anesthesia and he is a skeptic materialist anesthesiologist um syncope we know we are not unconscious and unconscious during syncope teenagers worldwide have figured this out and they play this terribly dangerous game called the choking game which is partial strangulation that makes you seemingly pass out you become unresponsive but you have a psychedelic trip without a drug and sometimes they accidentally die if they are doing this alone so or hyperventilation techniques to lead to what is claimed to be transcendent uh experiences you also pass out but you're not unconscious you are just unresponsive so the notion that we are ever unconscious is on shaky grounds and piracy let's let's put it that way memories you made a statement memories are encoded in the brain well we haven't found that yet and then and although there are all kinds of claims about people having found memories in the brain they're all mutually contradictory some people say memories are in microtubules other people say oh it's in the hippocampus or it's in the patterns of firings across neurons and not inside the neuron and and their universities all put up put out uh press releases making decisive claims that we have found it but even the best claims when you go and dig a little bit deeper there was a claim made a few years ago that okay they found the the secret of memory they know exactly where memory is encoded and then i started reading the experiment and the experiment was as follows we have somebody see watch a video a short video uh and taking readings of brain activity and then later on they asked the person to remember watching that video and the person is still instrumented and then they figured out that the patterns of brain activation are the same in the recollection and in the original experience of watching the video now does this solve the memory problem at all of course not of course the same neurons fire because recollecting experience is analogous to having the experience the question is where in the brain is the information that allows you to fire up the same neurons later on and that article didn't answer this question at all and yet it was put out as okay we've solved the problem of memory so you know as good skeptics we have to be very cautious against university pr department headlines they need funding so they need to put out these spectacular claims as far as memory is concerned it's a understatement i think to say that the jury is out there it's a massive confusion of contradictory claims what's happening right now but anyway finally to get to the spirit of your question i am with the deepak the ego is an illusion is a narrative we tell if i were to become completely amnesic to next second would i still be me and if i managed to transfer all of my memories episodic skill memories everything to you would you be me well you would feel like you were me because you would have all my memories even my tastes you would arguably have because you know it made the test the brussels sprouts i love brussel sprouts but if you had the memories of my pleasure eating brussels sprouts arguably you could develop a taste for brussels sprouts i like them at the same time where is bernardo garlic butter that makes it and when they're barbecued then i like okay bernardo are you you see what i mean what you mean let me ask you something are you talking about this 2015 paper i wrote about this in heavens on earth i have a whole chapter on um cryonics and and mind uploading and all that stuff so the guys that were telling me about this um that that are part of this brain preservation program um to you know essentially freeze all memories at a certain point when you're about to die or whatever for cryonics or for mind uploading scanning the you know the frozen um connect dome and and and converting it into a digital file and uploading it so that their argument to me was that this is ken a neuroscientist named named ken hayworth so he cited this 2015 paper titled memory engram storage and retrieval by the neuroscientist susumu sorry sorry tongawa and his colleagues uh in which quote memory may be stored in a specific pattern of connectivity between engram cell and symbols ensembles distributed in multiple brain regions and this connectivity pattern is established during encoding and retained during consolidation based on these integrative findings we propose that enhanced engram cell specific synaptic strength is crucial for the retrievability of particular memory engrams while the memory information content itself is encoded in a pattern of n-gram cell ensemble connectivity now that's a that's a mouthful but their argument was that the moment the memory gets laid down and it's there for a few hours or days or whatever it's there and so if you freeze somebody or you you solidify the cortex and you scan every single detail every synaptic connection you would essentially have the memory and and they say that under certain surgeries where they like cardiovascular surgery or heart replacement uh where they bring the temperature down of the of the of the core body you know to like 34 degrees there's no neural activity there's no molecular activity at all in those neurons and yet when you wake the person up the memories are still there so their argument is that the memories are permanently stored and therefore they could be recovered either synaptically through you know this this digitally scanned connectome or if you were chronically frozen and woken up somehow a thousand years from now those memories would come back on board because they're in there permanently your thoughts this is not the study i was referring to the study i referred to as an american study not a japanese look from a metaphysical point of view when and i'm pursuing a metaphysical hypothesis here um it is irrelevant whether memories are encoded in the brain or not because you know from my point of view um the brain and your whole body is what the configuration of your dissociated mental processes look like and if you consider memory part of your mental processes which obviously they are it there would be no surprise in finding a physiological correlate for memory in the brain because it's what memory looks like you are supposed to find the phenomenal in the image of the phenomena at least part of it so from that perspective it doesn't matter to me but what i would say is it's tricky to to take a conclusion based on one study because i could mention a whole of a whole lot of other studies that contradict this alt-right there is a there was a study recently done on planaria and planaria have some rudimentary nervous system in their heads but the the nice thing about planaria is that you can decapitate them and they don't die they just grow and you had new neurons and they managed to train those planaria to find food in a certain way then they decapitated the planaria the planaria grew new heads and guess what they still remembered how to find food in that exact same way without the heroines that learned it in the first place you mean yes somehow the pattern was preserved and it doesn't seem to have been locally stored in those neurons there seemed to have been a more yeah a distribution through the physiology of the of the animal enough that it could be recalled again um there have been studies in mammals i think i believe rats but those are older studies they sliced up the brains of of rats i think uh trying to figure out at what point the rat becomes in unable to navigate uh a maze that he knew how to navigate so he remembered how to navigate and you need to cut out a lot of the brain uh to the point that the rat becomes functionally dysfunctional um and and recent claims about very specific locations for memories on specific neural networks or in specific structures inside the neuron there was a recent claim about some rna mediated memory mechanism that had to do with traffic between uh um the nucleus of the cell through uh messenger rna and the rest of the of of the cell the neuron in that case and all of these things are published with big claims behind them and the only certainty we have is that they cannot be all true i'm not a neuroscientist they cannot evaluate yeah yeah but medical but physically speaking i think it's it's irrelevant i was going to say metaphysically speaking these guys are are uh physicalist materialist monis for them they want to escape the the inevitability of death being the death of everything yourself your memory if it's all gone by by somehow preserving it either chronically freezing it or scanning it in a you know electron micro micro electron scanner and then converting it to a digital file uploading it to the cloud and turning it on there and so on so you can see where they're coming from as physical as they this is the only way to preserve yourself indefinitely going forward for immortality or resurrection of the south but let me tell you about let me get your perspective on this counter argument that i make and maybe we're both wrong from an idealist perspective but it seems to me there's two definitions of self there's your memory self or mem self and then there's point of view self or pov self so the point the memory self is just this idea that these guys have if i have all of your memories click i have a picture of it i have you but for me if if instead of you know wait until you die and legally for cryonics you actually have to be dead and and the cryonics is a form of burial uh and then we freeze you and so on uh hey that's only capturing me at that particular moment not me you know 10 years from now or 10 years earlier or whatever because memories are bleeding but also if instead of doing it that way let's say we had a sophisticated fmri brain scanner and we slid me in there and scanned my connectome converted the whole thing to a digital file uploaded it to the cloud turned it on and then i'm out standing next to the scanner and i'm like i'm right here and they go no no you're up there you're in the cloud you're right there in the camera okay and i'm like no i'm not in there i'm right here so this is the pov cell that you know the looking through my eyes a personally subjective experience of the world from moment to moment to moment that cannot be captured not even in principle unless you want to say well we need a new definition of self there could be more than there could be more bernardos there could be a dozen bernardos we just you know like captain kirk on the enterprise we just you know uh you know beam you down to the to the planet now there's two of you and then there's four of you and you know every time you get beamed you get a copy there would just be multiple use right so but is that whole pre are we just kind of missing it because we're not idealist that you know the point of view self memory self these are both uh flawed in the idealist thinking of what the self is well it depends on what you mean by self i mean there is a narrative of self if you call that the self then then the self exists because there is a narrative of self you know i am this person born that day and i have this profession married to that other person living in this place um i don't think that is the fundamental self in analytic analytic philosophy there is this concept called a core subjectivity it was put forward by it shiny like six years ago but it's just an amalgamation of knowledge that we have had forever and his point is that core subjectivity is what remains of the self if the narratives are gone if the memories are gone episodic or otherwise it's pure subjectivity um if you consider that to be yourself then that self is undifferentiated it's the same self in you and in me because we both are subjective beings capable of subjectivity if you remove the content of subjectivities from you and me and you just have that point of view that opens up to a field of subjectivity but nothing in that field then i and you are identical perhaps not even identical but the same in the sense of not being too unit since space time is a sort of a content of subjectivity so from this perspective if that's what you consider to be yourself and deepak will say the same thing in much more beautiful words than i'm capable of if you identify with your core subjectivity then for an idealist you're never going to die because you are what's going on course objectivity is what's going on it's where everything arises and vanishes it's the framework of nature but we are stuck on these narratives of personal selves and and the religious impulse doesn't spare anyone so we created this religion called singularitarianism in which we turn technology into the promise of a god which will give us control over everything i mean psychologists know very well that the one of the key impetuses behind religion traditional religion is controlled by proxy you can't control your destiny but there is this this being much more powerful than you that sympathizes with you and shares the same values with you and he can control everything that happens so it gives you a sense of control by proxy well segunitarianism singulatarianism promises to eliminate even that layer of indirection now you directly have control i think the psychology of it is precisely the same as the psychology of religion and we will not find peace um because i don't think a personal self has any substantive existence i mean i am not the same person i was 10 years ago my uh or or 20. i think in a completely different way i respond to the world in a completely different different way my memories are different you're not completely single we know personality psychologists know that we have kind of a core set of of personality characteristics that are fairly stable through the lifetime uh openness to experience uh introversion extroversion conscientiousness and so on and and while they change over the life span you know people that tend to be say shy and introverted they're they're mostly that way throughout their lives they can kind of try to overcome it by being a little more social but there are kind of there's sort of a set of fuzzy boundary characteristics that are relatively stable maybe you and i are different on those characteristics based on genes and early environment or whatever so i think maybe if we think of the self as this kind of fluid flexible fuzzy kind of ball that's moving along the timeline within the channels let's say the walls we can kind of bounce around within there but there's still the walls there we can't just become anybody we want okay i i'm totally comfortable granting that that there is some core that remains more or less stable but most of what we consider to be ourselves or at least a lot of it is fuzzy and fluid and it's changing all the time what i would add then is the following if we could do the following experiment right now it's just a thought experiment because we can't do that if i could for 30 seconds be you and take on your point of view not only your point of view towards the external world but your inner point of view to experience what you experience from inside i think we if we could do that we would figure out that even these core characteristics that seem to endure over time are not what we call our true selves we would be entirely comfortable suddenly become extrovert if we are introverts for 30 seconds and experiencing that and come back to being who we are and at no point we would think we are someone else because those are just particular patterns of excitation of subjectivity and what we really are um is pure or core subjectivity as it a uh put it so i think this whole discussion about you know survival postmortem and all that will the igor or my individual self survive it's a red herring i mean when you're dreaming you think you are that dream avatar right you think you are that you are not the mind when you are dissociating from your own mind maybe five minutes after i wake up it kind of becomes clear oh that was a dream that wasn't real and it's a good thing don't mourn the death of your dream avatar but that's the point you you don't proceed to mourn the death of your dream avatar you just realize oh it was me how long and i was not that that was something i was doing and that goes back to deepak's language the individual self is something subjectivity is doing it is so tenuous it has no substantiality it's changing from moment to moment if you ask me will my individual agency survive death no thank goodness thank goodness not because my individual agency is a particular process a dissociative process if life is what this process looks like then the end of life death is the end of the dissociation so it's the end of my personal agency am i worried about that not the least be it for the same reason that i'm not worrying about waking up and realizing that my dream avatar is dead i don't think that's the way to go yeah i'm glad you brought up the singulitarians i went to the singularity university conference a few years ago ray um ray kurzweil gave the keynote address as you know this is kind of he's the man and i swear i felt like i was back in church it was like oh my god this guy is offering you know eternal life all this is going to happen in my generation we are the chosen ones oh my god yeah and he keeps getting put as you know yeah you know 20 30 20 35 20 40 and i'm thinking oh boy i'm going to be 90. let's get there quick you know when i think it's 20 45 now yeah it keeps getting pushed back i'm gonna be a hundred at see i was born at 54 so it's got to be uh 220 20 54 before we make that or else i have no chance but here's my other problem with it this you know as you know as you know i don't know how much you know about ray but and there's a beautiful film about his life called the transcendent man uh where they follow him around for you know quite some time and he's got a whole basement in his house where he keeps all his father's stuff you know his father died at like age 54 or something and his father was a workaholic and ray was a workaholic they didn't know each other he kind of feels like he missed out on his father's relationship with his father and he wants to essentially resurrect him it's it's a very kind of freudian jesus kind of i don't know what you want to call it uh but but even if you did that with almost 100 fidelity um you know you're only capturing a person at a particular moment like if if i had my connectome let's say um scanned at age 36 well i'm now 66. so where are the 30 years of memories that i've had of this rich life or if i you know if i if we do it now i hopefully i'm going to live another decade or two where do those memories go and by the way the memories of you know of being age 10 or 15 that you have now are not the memories when i was 10 or 15. those memories are always changing and being edited and and updated and confabulated with other memories and you know they're not real memories there's no fidelity uh camera in there recording what actually happened and then i play it back and rewind in the theater of my my mind none of that's true so i don't even know even if you could do what ray wants to do with the singularity that's still not going to capture you you're still not going to continue on i am totally with you and even the core traits of our personality that we were talking about before i mean there are instances on record of people who suffered major brain trauma i think there is this instance of this guy who had a spike go under his chin and traverse his brain and he lived with that for years and his personality completely changed he became angrier and his all his character traits changed but i think if you would ask him why you're still the same person he would say i'm still the same person why because he still few feels as the same course objectivity there is a continuity of course objectivity throughout life i still feel like i'm the same person i was when i was five years old but at the same time i miss that five-year-old deeply because he he he interacted with the world or perceived the world in a completely different way so i think the buddhists are right this whole story about personal selves or the buddhists and the hindus it's it's maya it's it's it's a story we tell ourselves it's not in the in the foundations of nature it's not what's going on and by the way i i also argue that you know christians and and those who believe in a religious afterlife they have the same problem the resurrection of the self uh you know if when i die i'm supposed to be you know uplifted up in the clouds and there i'm sitting at the feet of jesus and and god how they could be two people at the same time is beyond me but any case and uh but but who's up there you know with with jesus me that that is to say is it me at age 30 40 50 you know there was this idea of you know there was a debate in christian circles about how old you would be physically because there's one branch of christianity says you're physically resurrected at the end of life others it's just no spiritually resurrected just your soul let's say so those who say it's you're physically resurrected then the question is well how old are you when you're up there and the answer was age 30 because that's how old jesus was you know it's like the perfect age or something like well that's nice but you know here i'm 16. it darn it terrible you know where's the where's that you know 36 years of experience i've had that that's gone if i if i get resurrected at age 30 do i get the memories of 66 years or whatever you know so so the religion and i don't like my thirty-year-old self yeah that's right i'm a much better person now i think i like to think i am you know so the religions have the same problem also you know the idea of the soul adding a soul to it doesn't really solve any mystery it's just another mystery you know how how for example the question i always have for religion to send paranormalists how does the soul or the ghost interact with the physical stuff you know the ghost i woke up i saw the ghost go down the hallway and turn right and it went into the bedroom and jiggled the the picture on the wall and knocked it off how does the soul know to turn right right how does it see stuff and i have the same problem by the way with near-death experiences you know that you know i was under and i almost died lack of oxygen surgery drowning whatever and my self soul floated up to the top of the ceiling and i could look down how does the soul look down how does it look how does it hear oh i heard the doctors telling jokes how does it hear there's no ears or eyes it's just a immaterial substance or non-substance or whatever you want to call it so to me this whole issue is fraught with problems like that there's a lot of comment uh uh there michael um i am usually more patient and and and charitable towards religion because i don't think religious texts or the classical doctrines of religion were ever meant to be interpreted literally because at the time they were written when the jews began writing the old testament in mesopotamia two thousand two and a half thousand years ago the very concept of a literal truth was not part of their of their mental sphere everything was an analogy everything was a metaphor everything was like something else and that that's how you made sense of things by finding this this links disassociative links of forms of similarity and that's how you would account for something through metaphor through simile analogy but of course theologians are most to blame for this stern we've taken with scholasticism to interpret everything literally to have discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pen i mean geez that's not what religion was ever meant to to to originate this type of discussions so i think religious people i would grant that are mostly to blame for trying to interpret everything literally because of i don't know some some need for comfort or control i don't know um but i would not criticize religion per se for the illogical implications of interpreting the the doctrines literally because i think that's not how religion was born i would be more patient for that but i would go totally along with you for instance on the critique that um well let me say it my own words nature has labored for about a billion years to develop a decent eye i think since the yeah was it right you have our thereof um maybe half a billion if this a long time need yeah maybe yeah well i mean a decent eye not not just a light and dark but but anyway uh so if we were able to see and hear and smell without any of the sense organs that nature has labored over billions of years at tremendous cost of life and pain and blood if we could see and hear and do everything without those sense organs then nature would be incredibly superfluous and there is no indication that nature is superfluous at all but at the same time i i don't dismiss this outright because i think there is something else going on here and and it's lost in translation and and the reason is all of our cognitive categories uh um are formed through perception uh um every every time we need to describe something we need to describe it in perceptual language because that's how our inner categories have formed through referencing the contents of perception so if you have an experience that is not registered as purely endogenous there is something about that experience there is some information about the outside in that experience and you were asked to describe it you would only be able to to appeal to your pre-existing categories because that's how language has evolved you don't have anything else to refer to so even when you tell the story to yourself even in your inner storytelling when you tell yourself what happened to you you will appeal to those categories and then that is the birth of contradiction because you cannot possibly have actually seen something if your body was not working and nature wouldn't create a copy of that why would it labor so much to create physical sense organs if it didn't need to have that so i am with you and the criticism but um i don't go all the way to the conclusion this is nonsense uh i i'm more receptive to a different way of regarding this if you know what i mean and the reason i do it is that i don't think all these people can be lying there is something there well my conclusion in heaven's on earth is that nobody knows if that is if there's an afterlife one way or the other we don't know for sure nobody does so you know good to keep an open mind just in case i'm only only too happy when i close my eyes here for the final time that i just wake up somewhere else uh you know whether it's deepak's you know some state of consciousness in some quantum field or whatever that's fine i think it's a little too crude to think well i'd be punished because i was an atheist and therefore i'll be you know suffering miserably how would i suffer if i don't have a physical body um yeah i'm not worried about it um but so this is another related question the latest issue of skeptic magazine the nature of reality we we did a story on um all this kind of resurgence of micro dosing of things like uh psilocybin and ayahuasca and other mind-altering drugs as a form of treatment for things like ptsd and depression and so on but this gets to a deeper question because the majority of people that have these experiences let's just use ayahuasca you know their sense like aldous huxley's the doors of perception is that the drugs themselves open the doors to this other world that's actually out there and that the beings that they see and the colors that they experience the sounds the sense of love and so forth that are pretty intense are not just hallucinations that maybe a neuroscientist would say oh that's just a hallucination no there you're the drugs are opening a doorway that you and i are sitting here drinking our coffee instead of ayahuasca are not going to experience because you got to open the door so what are your thoughts on you know to what extent these kind of mind-altering drugs are just hallucinations just versus actually opening the doors to some other reality at this this is a mine field i can step on a bomb here before even i know so try to navigate it carefully i have had uh um psychedelic uh experiences oh come on ten years ago i felt that i i couldn't yeah i couldn't write about the mind if i didn't include that as part of my background research so i've for a period of two years i have had a number of psychedelic experiences not with ayahuasca but with the psilocybin and solvinarium a both they're very strong psychedelics i did it all safely i live in a country in which it's allowed to do that and i had my doctor's supervision checking my liver and my heart before i did it for the first time everything nicely done and i will acknowledge one thing that i think is the critical point your sense of reality during a psychedelic experience is extremely strong way stronger than the sense of reality i have right now the experience that you have is this is more real than real and that's how people normally report it you hear these words from a lot of trippers it's more real than real now at the same time it is obvious that i was not physically in another dimension i was not physically in another world because if my girlfriend would look on me she would see me lying on my bed with my eyes closed and my ears closed so i didn't physically go anywhere even though it certainly feels like you are somewhere else physical it feels like that it feels like you are in an alien world with different dimensions and different laws of physics and logic not only laws of physics and there is a very very palpable sense of hyper reality to that but it cannot be literal because i was here my body was here so what do i make of it what i make of it is the following it is our sense of reality that we have to be very careful about the psychedelic trip is endogenous you are not literally in another dimension and yet you believed extremely strongly that it was real now you believe that this is real right now that's what you have to take into it that's what you have to be very careful about now it's about your belief in this reality as something outside mind because the psychedelic experience clearly was not outside mind you were in mental space your body were here if you put 10 people around you they would witness that your body never went anywhere and yet you have that sense of reality so it's this sense of reality right now about the world being outside mind that's what we have to question and beyond this one conclusion i would be extremely cautious about what people call psychedelic noses some people come back and say oh i talked to alien in the aliens in the pleiades who told us that we are going to wreck the planet with global warming well be very careful about that because the first the directive of mind is to deceive itself right any opportunity mind gets to deceive itself it will do that because that's the mechanism of reality creation that's how you create reality is mind deceiving itself that there is something outside mind that's my view of it uh michael so psychedelic noses that has taken literally i think is very suspicious what is reliable is the sense of hyper reality but what you make of that is not to say the psychedelic trip was physical no it's to think no this is right now right now this is mental yeah my friend michael gazzaniga lives up here in santa barbara with me and famous neuroscientist that did some of the early split brain experiments uh also talks about some other memory um disorders that people have one of which was he told about this woman that was in a hospital who was convinced she was home and so the doctor took her down to the down the hallway to the bank of elevators and said well what are these here she goes you have no idea how much it cost me to have these installed in my house you know so and so michael michael's story about the reason for telling the story is that we have this what he calls the left brain the narrator or something like that that is we some part in our left brain constructs some problem probable uh explanation for why we did what we just did so in the split brain he would flash this sign thirsty or a coca-cola can or whatever and the other side the brain has no idea that it even saw this thing and all of a sudden the person gets up and says well i'm going to go over and get a coke why well i'm thirsty so the brain is making up a story to explain you know what it why it's doing what it's doing even though you know the doctor just made him do it essentially which has implications for free well but yeah there's plenty of evidence for that even our own sense of self is is defended and protected through this creative narrative making sure the eyes come up even if i think yeah all autobiography is just almost a complete waste of time because you have no idea why you did what you did and you know at this point in your life when you decide to write your autobiography you're just making up to explain why you did what you did when you were 12 and 18 or whatever yeah it's it's it's pretty problematic um but okay so i had another point on this um oh well so um you know talking about these different kinds of trips i wrote about this also um that uh in heavens on earth that you know this idea like even alexander uh who wrote this book proof of heaven and i know him i've met him we've done several shows together i really like him you know he's a harvard trained neurologist he knows everything about the brain that i know and a lot more and and yet because the experience he had when he was in a coma which by the way was an induced coma because of this brain swelling he had from the virus and it looks like the experiences he had his near-death experience happened when the doctor was bringing him out of the induced coma so it was in this kind of fuzzy state between uh induced coma and full waking consciousness but the but what he describes is very much you know along the lines of of what other people experience here's you know he described there he met a young woman with high cheekbones deep blue eyes golden brown tresses framing her face they were on a butterfly in fact millions of butterflies were all around us fast fluttering waves of them dipping down into the woods and coming back around us it was a river of life and color moving through the air the woman's outfit was simple like a peasants but its colors powder blue indigo and pastel orange peach had the same overwhelming super vivid aliveness than everything else had and so on and the message that he got from this experience he had was that you are loved and cherished dearly forever and uh so that made me remember i wrote about this guy in my book the believing brain chick darpina was a just a bricklayer friend of mine that had this experience at four in the morning he was getting divorced separated lost his kids and you know was just miserable and upset and depressed and sad and woke up at four in the morning and heard this voice and the voice told him essentially he wouldn't tell me the exact words but you know you are loved you know we are here we know you're there you are loved and this is the message for humanity and he ended up trying to go he was supposed to deliver this message to the president at the time president johnson and so he actually tried to go there and of course he ended up in a mental hospital because they said you want to see the president why he goes oh i have this message it's a funny story i wrote about he's a he's a really good guy but but again the core message was you know this kind of deep love and then my other example of this was uh sorry hang on one second here um and then writing about you know sam harris and opening pages of waking up he talks about taking mdma or ecstasy and he reports that he was suddenly struck by the knowledge that i loved my friend he and his friend did this sitting on the couch there together not friendship or romantic but this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now sound pedestrian on the page i wanted him to be happy more than this harris says came the insight that irrevocable revocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be i was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends and i suddenly realized that if a total stranger walked through the door at that moment he would have been fully included in this love and then and then i also talked about um oliver sacks you know in his in his uh memoir he talks about drug trips he took same kind of thing you know incredible colors he took one uh in which sitting at a diney uh sitting in the cafe at the table stirring his coffee suddenly it turned green then purple he looked up and noticed that the customers at the cash register had a huge probeskian head like an elephant seal shaken by this image sacks ran out of the diner and across the street to a bus where all the passengers seem to have smooth white heads like giant eggs with huge glittering eyes like the faceted compound eyes of insects at that moment the neurologist realized he was hallucinating but that i could not stop what was happening in my brain and that i had to maintain at least an external control and not panic or scream and and on and on anyway my point of all this was that you know when even alexander talks about this super powerful experience he had to an outsider like me it's like but it's indistinguishable from sam harris's trip my friend darp chick darpina who had this experience when he was sad four in the morning or uh oliver sax's you know hallucinations and so on they're all in this kind of bin of of uh you know these altered states of consciousness that we just don't really understand i mean you and i just talked about the fact we don't have a good explanation for consciousness much less an altered state of consciousness and what that means so then what do you do with that of course even wrote a book about it you know proof of heaven i know it's a proof proof that's a pretty strong word when in fact nobody knows and that the fact that these kinds of powerful experiences are so powerful is revealing but revealing of what you know that's the hard question well he didn't choose the title of the book um by the way his publishers as well as i know that we don't we don't have the right to choose the titles our cover of our books we surrender those rights immediately upon signing a contract um look regarding eben personally i am quite convinced that he is sincere now i could speak for half an hour why but i'll just leave it there i do think the criticism of um that we cannot know exactly when the experience happened and i'm not talking now about even specifically but i think that is a valid question to ask when did the experience happen and in cases of um and ye sometimes it's very difficult to pin that down conclusively because these are not perspective experiments you don't plan when you're going to kill someone and and then take a a brain scan or you know or have some temporal markers to to pin down when the experience happened now luckily for us it's not only in the ease there is a very broad set of instances in which uh regular brain activity reduction or impairment correlates with an enrichment or an intensification of experience at a transpersonal level uh even and these are just one example you don't have a heartbeat anymore so your your your circulation has stopped your blind your brain cannot metabolize at least normally anymore but you have other instances psychedelics are known to now every psychedelic studied and this is a very robust effect that has been replicated multiple times they only reduce brain activity the only thing they increase is a measure that researchers call now entropy and what they mean by it is just noise it's incoherent brain activity um there is a tiny tiny minuscule increase in noise levels in the brain even though brain activity sort of collapses your brain goes to sleep and that increase and i can tell you the exact numbers is 0.005 in a scale of 0 to 100 and in many instances brain noise actually decreases during a psychedelic trip and the person still has the experience so that's not a viable account physiological account for the psychedelic experience all other experiences seem to correlate with brain activation but the psychedelic experience only reduces brain activation quite significantly all psychedelics now for those you can't pin down exactly when the experience is being had and that's what that's how researchers go about it they put you in an fmri with some electronic means of reporting your experience while your brain is being scanned now you could say you know fmri temporal resolution is poor yeah but in the context of a 40-minute trip you know you can have a lot of error moreover experiments have been done with mag an eeg and both are temporarily very very accurately very accurate you can pin down exactly uh the moment in time when you took those readings and the person is reporting what he's feeling while those readings are being taken and the experiences are similar except that under psychedelics you know that they happen when your brain was sort of gone to sleep like presumably would be the case when you have an nde caused by cardiac arrest there is no blood perfusion anymore no oxygen perfusion your brain goes to sleep literally now this there are many more instances there was a neuroimaging study done in brazil they took self-proclaimed mediums in a control group and they put them all under an fmri scanner and they asked them to write in trans or outside trance and turned out that the brain activity of the mediums significantly reduced in all areas of the brain engaged with writing text while they were writing text introns and the text they wrote in trans scored higher on a scale of complexity than text they wrote outside of trans and and that's something you cannot question the timing in which the readings were taken they were instrumented and writing things down a temporal correlation is very precise i could go on and on with this micro but what i mean is there are instances in which we cannot be sure of the temporal the moment when the experience occurred but there are many other instances of very analogous experiences with the same essence so to say in which we can be sure of that and that i think is something we should take seriously um because it also resonates with the entire history of human beings i mean initiatory rituals the world over in pre-literate cultures what do they do to to give young people insight into the true nature of reality they make them exhaust themselves or ingest poison or sweat for three days in a sweat lodge and and dehydrate and not drink and not eat and be punished physically what do you think that does with the brain physiology with the normal operation of the brain so there is a there is a correlation between impairment or reduction of regular brain activity and some forms of transpersonal insight that i think are worth uh studying because the evidence is pretty strong oh for sure and as i said we don't have a good theory of consciousness so how can we have a good theory of altered states of consciousness i'd say the research is pretty early on um i was thinking here i was looking up for oliver sax's comment that i quoted where he said something about if you scan the brains of like a schizophrenic who hears voices the auditory tracks are active the neural tracks are active he the schizophrenic really hears the voice as if it's out there no different than you and i even if there's no sound at all out there so you know that's that you know the problem of of of the self that is how do i know you know the zombie problem how do i know you know that you're conscious like i'm conscious so uh and that you're not all a bunch of zombies and i'm the only one that you know you've written about this well here's my super simple solution this problem yeah it is the copernican principle you know that we're not special i just apply it to myself i'm not special i have the same neurotransmitter substance as you do my synapses and neurons are you know wired up the same way yours are and so on and so on the chances that when i see you with tears and a sad face and i know how that feels it's reasonable for me to assume you actually are experiencing the same kinds of emotions that i'm experiencing as opposed to you're just faking you're like what's in the computer pretending and i'm the real one that seems unreasonable i agree with you i think although strictly speaking in analytic philosophy there there isn't a conclusive refutal of solipsism the notion that you are the only living being that's conscious everything else are images in your own dream um as bertrand russell said not even solipsists act in accordance with what they proclaim they believe right because they try to convince you of solipsism i think the analogy of behavior and structure between us who we know are conscious and other living beings that analogy of behavior and structure means that the simplest account for the facts fact is that other living beings are conscious to you uh you also wrote about and i wrote about two olaf blocks um famous experiment surgery on a 43 year old woman suffering from epileptic seizures olaf blanc and his colleagues electrically stimulated the neural this neural module the right angular gyrus um and found that when they did so the woman now awakened reported that she could see myself lying in bed from above but i only see my legs and lower trunk stimulating an adjacent point in this area induced quote an instantaneous feeling of lightness and floating about two meters above the bed close to the ceiling close quote the scientists found that through the level of electrical stimulation they could even control the height that the patient reported feeling above the bed touching different points in the right angular gyrus produced the sensation that her legs were becoming shorter or moving quickly toward her face causing her to take evasive action the neuroscientist teams team concluded quote these observations indicate that obes out of body experiences and complex somatosensory illusions can be artificially induced by electrical stimulation of the cortex and that it is possible that the experience of disassociation of self from the body is a result of failure to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information i originally wrote about that in scientific american and said you see it's all just you know it's just neurons it's just neurons firing there's nothing going on out there no one's going anywhere you know and and he actually wrote me and said no no that's not the conclusion we're making went oh all right but you know that's that's kind of the implications if there's a physical system but that gets back to where we we were before but how do you think about those kinds of experiments that you know make it seem like you know the neurologist sitting there with the electrode you know with open brain surgery can control what the person is experiencing therefore it's brain there's no mind or anything floating off the brain well the error here we talked about it already is question bagging you're assuming the conclusion that you that you're arriving at in the argument for the conclusion under idealism this electrical stimulation too is just the appearance of a mental process that is interfering with your personal mental process and leading to a certain experience called an obe so it doesn't contradict idealism at all but i understand the intuition and i understand why the vulgar knee-jerk reaction is to say oh that materialism is right if you if you don't actually think it through but uh even in that case i would say well you don't need these sophisticated experiments to convince yourself that stuff we call physical have a direct impact on stuff we call menthol so and i'm being agnostic of philosophy now prove that to yourself by drinking alcohol why do you need somebody putting a probe inside your brain drink enough alcohol and you have an ob in china for all you know um so this is no news if you know what i mean uh the relationship that cause a relationship between things we colloquially call physical and things we colloquially call mental is there all the time uh if you prick your arm with a needle you will feel it hey there you go that's physical to mental causation right now so you you don't need this sophisticated stuff um but in all cases including the trivial ones like the needle prick you just have to guard um with making a hidden assumption in in your line of reasoning that puts you off the path of reason so to say and and that hidden assumption is this very tempting division of the world between the physical and the mental remember what we call physical are just the contents of perception they are qualitative things they're for mental colors are mental smells are mental um so that contents of perception can influence other experiences that are not part of the contents of perception is entirely entirely acceptable or consistent with idealism because under idealism the contents of perception are just the extrinsic appearances of mental processes your body is the extrinsic appearance of your personal mental processes you are dissociated out there so to say but inanimate objects are just parts of this great extrinsic appearance we call the inanimate universe which intrinsically is also mental doesn't mean that it's a higher mind making plans and deciding what to do no no it's the naturalistic mind um and that those transpersonal mental processes can impact uh personal mental processes this is trivial it's just like a thought leading to an emotion or the other way around so it's very tempting sometimes to think shallowly and then have high confidence in a conclusion that is fallacious that you know it may even be right but not for the reasons you think it's right uh if you know what i mean and that's what we have to guard against so back to your book title and granting that maybe your publisher oversold this well you know why materialism is baloney but the subtitle how true skeptics know there is no death okay i assume you you would not you would not say we know that 100 no one knows for sure right so but what what do you think just tell us in your own words what do you think happens when our physical body dies well you know we cannot be certain of anything as you said so when we say we we know something what we mean is we have very good reasons to assume that that is true and there are a number of things that we have very good reasons to assume are true and and the provocative aspect of the subtitle is to is to say that the death of our inner subjectivity we have very good reasons to assume that it's not true that it's not going to happen and and the the rationale and some people may be disappointed with what i'm about to say the rationale is not that your personal agency survives because the body clearly is the image of that which you call your personal agency so if the body disappears then the thing is an image off cannot preserve its integrity right i mean flames are the image of fire if flames stop then oxidation probably stopped too right because it flames are the image of the thing if if the image stops they think they are an image of probably stopped too so i think our personal agencies stop but i also think that if you have developed over time a discipline of introspection um that you are not just very superficial about your notion of self that you have dug deeper um and you realize that what you call yourself actually is a sort of bare poor subjectivity a sort of a field of subjectivity but not necessarily with particular contents over a specific narrative of self if you have come to the point that you realize that that's what you actually are everything else is just stuff happening to you or in you or around you if you come to that realization then that car's objectivity has nowhere to go because i would say it's the bottom level of reality it's the same in you and me we all have the same course objectivity it's the same in the fish and i would say it's the same course objectivity that underlies the inanimate universe as a whole it's not a thinking subjectivity it's not a metacognitive subjectivity it's not sophisticated in a sense it's what the buddhists call empty pure subjectivity without any particular pattern of excitation and modulating it but it's what we really feel as us it may not be what we say to ourselves is us but when it comes to what we feel as us that's what you feel as you so i think death is something that what something that what you really are will witness happening it's something that happens in what you actually are this very foundational level of nature this feud uh undifferentiated field of subjectivity that schopenhauer called the will and and i think from that perspective you will witness your ego dissolution we have that in psychedelic trips we know what it is to die without dying if you ever had a profound psychedelic trip you know what it is to die it feels exactly like dying you may ask how do you know since you never died well i don't know how i know but it is dying and that is dying because your narrative of self is just torn apart you you cannot hold that loop in your in your default mode network that is constantly informing you what you are or at least what you think you are that gets torn apart and what's left is this naked field of subjectivity even in a psychedelic trip and which is the best model for death we have it it destroys your brain activity your brain's your brain goes sort of dead but it's safe you can come back and tell the tale so it's in that sense that i think we have very very good reasons to think that we are not going to die but the we that's not going to die is this undifferentiated field of subjectivity that seems to underline nature so for some people they may say ah bernardo what you're saying is just like physicalism because my personal self as an agent dies or stops existing but my answer is well you just didn't introspect enough to really realize what is actually going on when it comes to the self i think we would after going through the process of death i think the realization would be very similar to the realization we have when we wake up from a dream your dream avatar is dead when you wake up it's dead it's toast it no longer exists but you don't mourn it because you realize oh it was something my mind was doing all along and i think that's exactly what's going to happen well i hope you're right uh i think the part of the problem to be honest i don't like this conclusion you don't why no but you know when i in my 20s i was a sort of materialist by default because i was at cern and you breathe materialism in the air even though nobody really thinks about it you know it's not a structured conclusion it's just sort of default assumption hanging in the air and you breathe it in i was a materialist by default in that sense and i always thought it's very comforting to know that at some point all of your problems all of your suffering everything that you dislike everything that you want to get away with at one point it will all be gone necessarily whether you like it or not it was very comforting and i don't have that anymore um and if a psychedelic trip is a good model for death we all know we can have a bad trip so no i don't like that maybe that's why i'm afraid of that maybe now i have something to be afraid of that's funny maybe hell is a bad acid trip and well again i think the you know for all you know that's it yeah yeah i think but again i think you know the western way of thinking about the afterlife is that you you are still existing and you're going somewhere to this place which is still kind of a physical way of thinking about the cosmos in the world or whatever and you know like woody allen you know i don't want to live on through my work i want to live on in my apartment well you know heaven for christians say that's their apartment i get to continue living on in my apartment with my friends and my loved ones and and you know the roses will smell even better and you know do we eat in heaven how does this work you know no one knows so uh but i i'm gathering from what you're saying just jettison all of that that's all still stuck in this kind of physicalist uh materialist idea that you continue and you're going to this place a place that's maybe not literally physical but it's a place you know it can be some kind of state but that's completely different from what you're talking about well i i get asked similar questions a lot as you can imagine especially after that the provocative subtitle of the book um i have thought about it they are there ways in which what people think are themselves survive are there ways that could happen are there ways to make sense of the so-called reports of reincarnation um i've met a group at the university of virginia that i cannot help but respect i don't think those guys are idiots so at the same time i don't think there is any ghost that floats out of your body and goes nest somewhere else inside the woman of a woman of another woman i i don't think this this holds to scrutiny i don't think it's even coherent let alone holding up the scrutiny so what do i tell myself in order to sort of accommodate this cognitive dissonance well what i can imagine is the following if life is the image of a dissociative process then our memories episodic memories and otherwise our insights that we've accumulated through life these are experiential contents that are within our dissociative boundary in other words they are not accessible to nature at large they are in us not outside us that's the nature of dissociation they create this association creates this cognitive boundaries that prevents uh um it's a kind of inferential isolation um now if death is if life is then what the dissociation looks like then the end of life death is the end of dissociation and what is the end of dissociation what happens to somebody with did dissociative identity disorder upon the cure upon a reintegration of the altars well the host personality then remembers the memories of all the altars as if they were memories of the host personality which in fact they were all along so the host remembers the lives the private lives of all the altars upon reintegration so could it there be that our memories everything that creates this narrative of self is released upon a broader natural context upon the end of the dissociation upon the end of death i think it is i think it's i don't know whether we have solid empirical data to say we have good reasons to believe it is but it doesn't violate the logic of the model it doesn't violate the logic of idealism it's actually quite reasonable maybe even a prediction of the logic of idealism that if the dissociation ends then the contents of the dissociation are sort of released in a broader context from where they conceivably could be accessed so if you and i die both our inner lives are now dispersed in a broader context then maybe they are both accessible to some kind of host uh outer host personality that will remember you and will remember me and in that sense i may see you again see you again upon my death and you may see me again upon my death and as a matter of fact if you look at what um i'm not a student of ndes or any size stuff it's it i'm not saying this because i i don't take it seriously i do take it seriously i just i have some so much to study that that's not what i have studied so i'm not an expert at all but i i have i did some casual readings and anita morgani for instance who i think is one of the sincere people in the story she describes meeting her father but if you read her description of meeting her father she says literally it was as if i became my father and i thought hey that's exactly what you would expect if her father is a dissociative process that ended the contents are now released in a sort of transpersonal context and her near-death experience is a partial obliteration of the of her dissociative boundary maybe the associative boundary became a porous um and and she picked up on that so she picked up from she picked up on the first person perspective of the mental processes that you used to constitute the altar called her father so she met her father not from the outside but from from the inside perspective and i thought hey there this is interesting um i have i know that literature pretty well i've written quite a bit about it i but again now rethinking it in the context of this conversation it could be they're all writing about this from this kind of western materialist perspective that the self lifts off the brain it's still a unit it goes to this other place where the other people that we know and love are there and they greet us and they say hi and we see the colors and so on that's still locked into that kind of western way of thinking if your interpretation is right maybe all these narratives need to be re interpreted in this if that you know just another way of looking at it uh which could be true maybe it's what has always happened historically that's what always has happened in that so-called change of paradigm like thomas kuhn wrote the data is the same you just look at the data from a different perspective and it and it makes a major difference people ask me what about reincarnation bernardo and because i say well your individual self as an agency i think we have every reason in the world to believe it's toast when you die and people go like well what about the evidence for reincarnation and my answer usually is the following if i could transfer all my memories to you right now what you would describe would make everybody very certain that i reincarnated in you everybody would be certain like you could we could only know that uh michael if you were the reincarnation of bernardo because you have all his memories but nothing reincarnated is just information transfer going on bernardo we're coming up on an hour and 45 minutes here it's been a fabulous conversation let me just ask you one last thing another one of these hot button topics that comes up a lot on my podcasts because people seem to care about it a lot free will and determinism so in your world view of idealism or whatever use word you used to describe it uh you know because i remember reading one of your scientific american columns on you're you're defending the free will position but not in the traditional sense uh that you know philosophers usually talk about it so where does our agency come from in in your world view are we really making volitional choices is it really me making that choice of you know the chocolate versus vanilla despite the fact we live in a causal universe with the laws of physics and so on you reserve the most difficult question to answer for the end um i usually say the the the the freewheel question is a red herring because however you go about it your bow bound to be misinterpreted look i think the materialist reason to deny free will is not valid because the materialist reason is um your consciousness is a sort of epiphenomenon of brain activity therefore you're not free to choose because what is actually choosing are the mechanical processes of your neurons and you just register that in consciousness as a choice but it was never free because it has been determined by the laws of physics even though the laws of physics are not really deterministic at the bottom level we know that now they're only statistically deterministic so that reason i think is is false because i don't think the neurons cause your consciousness i think the neurons are what certain conscious processes look like even conscious processes that you cannot access through introspection because they exceed the boundaries of metacognition and we would call them unconscious they're not they're not unconscious phenomenally they're phenomenally conscious is just that you you can't re-represent them cognitively to tell yourself you're having those experiences so all of that appears to observation from across a dissociative boundary as what we call neurons firing so that reason for free will i think we can forget about and it's in that sense that i say there is free will but if you press me i would tell you libertarian free will is an incoherent concept it doesn't mean anything because semantically speaking there are only two options it's either total randomness or it's determinism a choice has to be determined by something otherwise it's totally random but nobody has the intuition of free will associated with randomness they say well no i made the choice it was not random i made it so i'm free to make it so what they mean is when a choice is determined by that which they identify with and they don't identify with their neurons so in that sense i think there is free will at the level of the universal field of subjectivity the universal mind if you want to call it cosmic consciousness if you want to call it that way why because there is no external agency the universal mind is the sum total of everything so whatever happens it's by definition it's freewheeled choice because it's not imposed from the outside it's a product of what it is and there is only it so it's free in that way but it's not free in the sense that whatever happens in the universe is determined by what the universe is the universe cannot abstract from itself it cannot choose to be something that it isn't its inherent potentials it's its inherent being is what determines the choices are they free they are free at that level because they are determined by the universe and there is nothing beyond the universe but they are not free in the sense that it's not libertarian free will it's not random it is determined and then now going back again to our level are we free in that sense and i would say well i would say our free will is very very limited because most of what determines our choices are not related to the executive ego um you don't really choose the person you fall in love with sort of comes from deep inside the so-called unconscious mind that exceeds the the field of metacognitive introspection dissociated even parts of of our own minds um we don't use our thoughts we don't choose our emotions this stuff happens to us maybe you can choose a mortgage package or the best route to work but i i i like to see the i think i like to imagine the ego as a tiny little road boat in the middle of the atlantic during the biggest storm on record and the guy rowing thinks it's going the direction he's trying to go no no no the direction is determined by this impersonal forces in us mental not material because i think matter is just what these forces look like from a certain perspective they are essentially mental but they are determined by mental dynamics that we don't really identify with as jopenhauer said you may be free to act according to your will but you can't will what you will so in that sense you don't have free will literally your will is not free you may be free to act according to it but you are not free to will otherwise we would all be extraordinarily happy even the guy locked up in solitary confinement he would will that what he really wants is to be in solitary confinement for 30 years and he would be the happiest person on earth on earth we don't choose what we will in that sense the will is not free it rises from parts of the mind that we don't identify with so there is no free will in that sense but there is free will at the universal level i think and there is free will in the sense that our choices are not determined by a prior ontologically primary material substrate our choices are made by my mental processes but not the mental processes we are ordinarily metacognitive of very interesting see maybe it's too complicated no no i i'm following it so much of this depends on your starting point like like i end up concluding about my my debates with deepak you know he's starting he has a different worldview starting point than i do and so we end up diverging mainly because we started at different places and i i like to cite this study uh done in 2009 of professional philosophers and philosophy graduate students this phil papers survey that i'm sure you're familiar with where they they surveyed all you know 3 600 philosophers on on the different positions so just a few for example like the one on free will would they ask compatibilism libertarianism or no free will and you know 59 said compatibilism 14.9 said other 13.7 said libertarianism and 12.2 said no free will which i guess would be the determinist position and you know i bring up these you know like uh some of the other ones physic mind physicalism or non-physicalism you know 56 physicalism 27 non-physicalism 16 and a half percent other you know you don't see things like that in science because you know in science at some point we kind of converge to you know at theory of evolution you know 99.9 it's true you know 0.01 that it's not true something like that climate change vaccines whatever and at some point we we converge to some conclusion where there's a consensus in the community of scientists that study this problem this is the probable answer the rest of them are probably not true but with philosophy it feels different to me i'm not a philosopher so from an outside i think why is this different why are you getting these splits you know 50 49 you know it's like politics and but of course it's not politics exactly but but it depends on where your starting point is you're going to end up at different positions and you guys are never going to reach like well 99 of philosophers say determinism is true or physicalism is correct or idealism is the right view that's never going to happen because of these different starting point world views i think you you hitting an air in the head it's it's the biggest problem in philosophy today that every philosopher can stick to his pet views or pet theories ad infinitum because in philosophy experiments are cannot necessarily settle the questions and in science they get very close to settling the question not always i mean we may think that you know when newton came around the french laughed for 50 years uh when with this idea that there is an invisible force that acts instantaneously at the distance between bodies and holds them together it's like mystic and the french loft for 50 years before experiments started telling them hey oh wait a moment there has to be something to this but then einstein came around and there was no such magical force operating at the distance the reality is completely different it's just that the fabric of space-time can bend and twist quite magical in its own way but debunked another type of magic so experiments don't really settle questions of being that's what i'm trying to say experiments allow you to predict nature's behavior but they don't allow you to pin down what nature is and this is a very important distinction that lots of scientists fail to make they think science can settle questions of being but it doesn't science is a set of convenient fictions that allow you to think about nature in a useful way so as to make proper predictions um subatomic particles and quantum fields and let's take the higgs boson we think it's a thing that has been proven to exist it's not nobody ever measured the higgs boson it decays before interrupt before it interacts with the measurement equipment what we see are is the trash the higgs boson leaves behind and we can sort of reconstruct the so-called higgs boson based on certain theoretical models and even that when you look at that did we see the higgs boson did we see the trash no we didn't even see the trash because it's just a histogram on a computer the whole thing is based on models so it's important that we be aware of that that science doesn't tell us what the world is it tells us how the world behaves but science does inform philosophy because if you have a philosophical position that contradicts the scientifically proven behavior of the world then your philosophical mod is just wrong and you have to abandon it because it's not nature that has to conform to philosophy it's philosophy that has to conform to nature so science does inform philosophy but it doesn't settle philosophical questions human thinking creativity is so vast that philosophers defending losing propositions can find extremely convoluted ways to keep it in the air i mean look at illusionism and illusionism philosophy of mind today the idea that consciousness doesn't exist it's an illusion it's the most self-defeating proposition conceivable to human thought because an illusion is already an instance of that which you're trying to say doesn't exist um and yet books are written about this grants are given there are entire communities uh working on this um so it's a problem for philosophy philosophy has not devised yet some kind of darwinian mechanism to sort of weed out the crap if you know what i mean um because you know mind minds first directive is to deceive itself so we do to be very honest with you my michael and i'm not saying this to put it in your face or anything i think physicalism is like the most untenable option on the table today and it's still 56 it's still the majority of people i mean physicalism has been debunked i think by straightforward reasoning has been debunked by foundations of physics physicalism depends on physical realism and it's not true we know now after 40 years of repeated experimentations that it's not true unless you believe in the fairy tale of gazillions of universes popping into existence every fraction of a second for which we have zero empirical evidence even the neuroscience of consciousness is now i mean what people are putting forward now to hold on to the physicalist model of the psychedelic state is embarrassing it's literally embarrassing i mean the the the entropic brain model that tries to account for the psychedelic experience with an increase of 0.005 in a scale of 0 to 100 in brain noise is preposterous i mean i would be i would never put something like that forward it's too embarrassing but it gets published in in in scientific reports nature um yeah but here bernardo so yeah how do we say how do you settle that well i mean it's one thing for you to say well shermer if you if you just understood idealism you'd see that realism or physicalism is baloney you could say that about me because i'm not a philosopher but you know presumably these 3 600 professional philosophers half of which say yeah i think the phys you can't say they don't understand the arguments surely they understand the argument oh they they don't no no they don't you'd be surprised you'd be surprised how what percentages of the philosophy community that has no darn clue what idealism is okay i mean some harry's brandishes a a bachelor's degree of philosophy around from stanford and he gave an interview the other day to that russian guy from the mit i forgot his name he has a very famous very popular podcast uh friedman yeah alex friedman yeah yeah yeah yeah and when you see how sam harris tried to argue against idealism we realized that he was not arguing against idealism at all he built like a series of straw men and burned them down now idealism is a foundational topic in philosophy it's philosophy one on one you know i i had it in a philosophy course when i was doing computer engineering you have to to know at least what it is you don't need to agree but you have you don't need to understand the subtleties but you need to know at least what the foundational claims are i didn't i didn't see this interview maybe he was just using the the wrong words but what was the concept he was trying to convey that you disagree with leaving out the words idealism or whatever so the straw man was the following idealists say that reality is only in their own minds and that there is no external world objective world outside our individual minds that's not all what idealism is just like materialism idealists grant that there is a world beyond our individual mind it's just that the categoric categorical basis of that world is mentation it's the type of existence of this external world this meditation in other words transpersonal augmentation that when observed looks like what we call the physical world now no idealist denies that there is a objective world we all share the the dispute is solely about what physicality is is physicality the essence or physique or is physicality just the appearance and idealists would say physicality is the appearance is what shows up on the dashboard of dials of our sense organs it's not the world as it is in itself it's just how it presents itself to observation now some areas attacked idealism as if all idealists in history were saying that there is no objective outside world not even berkeley the the the the subjective idealist perhaps the only one in history not even him denied that there is something beyond our personal minds so he would be surprised michael how few people actually understand idealism in general and analytic idealism in particular because all the the critiques of or criticisms of analytic idealism entail some form of straw manning and and i have seen this over the last past 15 years it's very difficult to get that intuition across so maybe this survey i keep citing i should back off on that maybe a lot of philosophers haven't really thought through a lot of these issues i did think your um yeah your comments on twitter about sam were pretty strongly worded um i think unnecessarily so maybe this is your passion because this is your thing sam seems to piss off a lot of people on a lot of subjects i don't know why i know him pretty well and he's a good guy and you know he's just trying to figure things out like the rest of us but maybe because of his prominence he's an easy target i don't know what it is but you know easy on the language i would say maybe maybe social media is not the best platform for expressing skepticism uh in any case that's just my thoughts on that well you know people don't spare their words when it comes to me so and neither did sam spare his words when he attacked even alexander back in 2012. so i i don't feel like i need to not reciprocate that tone and style as i said maybe so maybe twitter is not the best place to hash out philosophical on scientific ideas all right let's wrap it up bernardo what's up just tell us what's on your what's your next big problem you're working on or or project you're you're working on oh um i'm having a foundation now essentia foundation which is an official dutch charity and it's an educational foundation so we produce a lot of educational material either about idealism or related to idealism in some way and we provide it for free and it's funded by people who think it's very important that um that uh that our culture at least understands what idealism is claiming you you don't need to agree but at least understand before you make up your mind about it being nonsense or otherwise so that's what the foundation tries to do and this is this is the big thing in my life now it has become a lot less about me now about my own books i've published now 10 books number 10 is coming out in august i think science ideated but the focus now is to sort of create some sort of momentum um not about my work but about this this old very old line of thinking in in in the human species i mean idealism is at least three and a half thousand years old it has started arguably uh in the hindus valley you know at the very birth of of philosophical and religious thought uh in the axial age as they call it although there is no single age that is the actual age so we think it's time to sort of bring this to prominence again again in the west because it may be the only way we have to make plausible rational sense of results coming out of foundations of physics and the neuroscience of consciousness and it may help us have a better understanding of what we are what nature is and and and how to have a meaningful productive life i was going to read this to you at the beginning of the podcast but now i'll read it to you at the end from ludwig wittgenstein in his 1921 trick tracticus logico philosophicas the real question is thank you thank you the real the real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists but even if it does what problem this really solves so how would you answer that question for idealism you know whether you're right or not let's say you are what problem does it solve why should we care i'm not too worried about life after death because you know it to either not come or come and there's nothing i can do to change uh um what's going to happen i'm more worried about them now about how we live our lives um and i think we have given undue rational substantiation to the idea that life has no meaning and no purpose i think this is a rushed conclusion if it is true then so be it we have to bite the bullet my commitment is to truth not to a good feeling but i don't think we have good reasons at all to think it is true i think it reflects a a rush to judgment a kind of arrogant um ability to decree something about nature that that we just do not know and the part of the motivation for our thinking that there is no meaning is it's the materialist or physicalist perspective that the world is not the image of something else it's not pointing at anything it doesn't have a meaning in the semantic sense that it that it it's portraying something else behind it from from where we look at it according to physicalism the world is what it is it is its own meaning there is nothing behind it it's not suggesting anything it's not pointing at anything it's just what is and i don't think that's true i don't think physicality is the bottom layer of reality if you if you think it is you run into all kinds of logical problems and empirical problems i think physicality is the appearance of what is underneath and in that sense life in the world has literal semantic meaning again because it's valid for you to ask what does this all mean it it is now a rationally substantiated question to ask it's a valid question and to ask if you're suffering you may ask what this what does this all mean it's valid to say that yeah this is what i i take from deepak's worldview is his answer to this question would be something like the the problem it solves is is suffering or being caught up in the now the you know the the day-to-day trivialities the the thought flooding about things that your boss said or your spouse said or the things you're worried about just drop all that you know this is this uh um eckhart tolle's you know the power of now you know the past has already happened you can't change it the future hasn't happened yet so this is it right now that's it that's all we have and uh you know i remember um leonard maladnow and i the physicist went to a uh an appearance with deepak and eckhart tolle together i mean this was legendary at the shrine auditorium in los angeles like 3 000 people each paid a couple hundred bucks a ticket it was astonishing and these are pretty well off people i mean there were a lot of teslas and lexus is parked in the parking lot right so you know a lot of hollywood people there and it's like all right what are they getting out of this and deepak and eckhart were you know just walking around like in socks and you know casual t-shirt and jeans and just talking about you know the power of now essentially and you know just drop all this materialist stuff and that i gather to be the buddhist perspective you know that that a lot of our suffering comes from the being cut up in the ego which is buried in this materialist worldview in which we look for purpose in you know what happened yesterday or tomorrow and we're missing the bigger picture yeah i i i may defer slightly from that well maybe not even slightly but i i don't think that we need to eradicate suffering i think it would be from a natural perspective counterproductive and i'll tell you why all the good ideas i have had in my life originated in moments of suffering if i'm not suffering i'm not thinking deeply about things i i'm not being stopped by nature and saying okay what now and then you start thinking if you're having fun all the time you sort of glide through nature without really introspecting and thinking about the issues so i don't think suffering is the enemy i think suffering is the engine of insight i think the enemy is nihilism is when you think that you are suffering is for nothing that's the problem um it's this idea that suffering has no meaning it's for nothing you're suffering for nothing i think that is the enemy i think we have to sort of learn to embrace suffering but realizing that it has meaning that this whole game of nature and life is a mental game and in any mental game the goal is always some form of insight because it can't be anything else there's nothing else for it to be but insight as goal is powerful it's not nihilistic at all so yeah i'm okay with suffering i think suffering is an intrinsic part of nature but what i'm not okay is with meaninglessness it's nihilism that i think is i've been reading the literature on the difference between happiness and meaningfulness that is the psych literature people that study this and that there's a difference that is people that uh the goal of life to lead a rich life is not to eliminate all suffering because that's where a lot of meaningfulness and purposefulness comes in it's nice to be happy you know maybe go out with friends with drinks for drinks and dinner and that's fun but you know it's a fleeting experience but um to let's say be a caretaker for an alien parent or spouse or you know some kind of thing that's not fun i've done it twice for two of my four parents two step parents and it's not fun at all i wasn't happy doing it but it was a meaningful purposeful thing made me feel as better as a person and that kind of suffering you know kind of builds character makes you a stronger person and and so forth and jung said if you have meaning you can you can bear anything it's written in his biography i mean you know we had these different wheels too in the course of history you had a the freudian will to pleasure and you have the nietzschean will to power and then you have viktor frankl's will to meaning and i think that takes that takes the cake it wins the super bowl there's nothing beyond that yeah yeah and you can say that if you were at auschwitz because it doesn't get much worse than that indeed indeed yeah that's a guy who found meaning while locked up in a constant concentration camp in auschwitz and being treated as a cockroach i mean if you can't find meaning in that there is meaning perhaps i would even go as far as especially in such situations where you find meaning you find a lot more meaning than i don't know drinking a beer at the beach so that's why i said i think suffering is not the enemy suffering is a tool uh it's nihilism that is the enemy it's an unnecessary assumption right so the kinds of suffering you experience in a concentration camp where they make you dig a hole and move the dirt over there and then back to the hole and then back there just there's no meaning it's just the point is suffering not to get to some higher goal yeah yeah it's the the um the myth of uh sisyphus right you roll the rock up the hill and you let the rock down you roll it up that's nihilism when you think that you're suffering for nothing that's worse than suffering all right bernardo well now well past two hours this was one of the more interesting conversations i've had you're a super interesting guy thanks for coming on and joining us yeah it's been great

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 74,017

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, consciousness, determinism, dualism, free will, idealism, materialism, model dependent realism, monism, out-of-body-experiences, panpsychism, Science Salon, The Michael Shermer Show, ultimate nature of reality

Id: CXVU5RR96ts

Length: 134min 21sec (8061 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021