Cosmic Consciousness and the Truth Beyond Simulation Theory | Bobby Azarian

I wrote an article for big think about the universe potentially being a giant neural network a lot of that's based on the work of this physicist named Vitali vuran he seems to think that everything is connected through these non-local connections and you could potentially be accessing information when you go into these sort of psychedelic or meditative states that aren't accessible otherwise you mentioned being a fan of Donald Hoffman he has all these ideas about reality so much of it being hidden from us when certain brain areas are suppressed in function you do become aware of this interconnectivity that can lead to insights welcome back to the transmission my friends and I am absolutely busting with mirth and quintessence to bring you this one because we are back in multidisiplinary psychospiritual scientific brain melting territory this week we have the brilliant neuroscientist and author Dr Bobby aarian back in the mind meld he's the author of the romance of reality How the Universe organizes itself to create life Consciousness and Cosmic complexity it's a fairly Deep dive into complexity Theory Consciousness uh Cosmic Evolution and what Bobby calls poetic metan naturalism essentially that nature is not evolving through random adaptation but rather a kind of gold directed even artistic iterative kind of expression and that nature and that we are destined to become more connected more conscious and eventually Even build Global and Cosmic Minds that will be indistinguishable from gods and honestly this is just scratching the clear coat of both this transmission and Bobby's work so yeah I love this stuff we get into all of the above the philosophical and spiritual implications of it all and much more all of the portals that you will require for Bobby aarion are in the description same for third ey drops on that note do presently tickle that algorithm with a like a sub a comment a share if you're enjoying this content uh it really is of the utmost importance if this channel is to grow my friends we've got a massive back catalog of Audio Only podcast with brilliant beings including one with Bobby aarion that one is actually up on YouTube now so that's not a good example but many many more uh episodes with Donald Hoffman Bernardo castrop the greats but you can only hear them wherever you listen to podcast so do subscribe to third ey drops on your podcast platform of choice and my friend if you are thinking to yourself uh all this is wonderful but I too would like to riff I too would like to be part of a community well you can if you join us over at patreon.com sl3d drop uh not only do you get to join a community it's the best way to support these mind melds and we do have a patron only Discord server uh monthly Zoom hangs a book club you get physical rewards and more at patreon.com thir ey drops I would truly love to meld mines with you there but presently let's meld mines with Bobby aarion I'm always pleasantly surprised when these and I don't want to curse this one by saying this off the bat but I'm always pleasantly surprised when I have incredibly intelligent people on the podcast and I I almost worry like is this going to be too much is this going to be just such a torrent of information that it's going to you know go over everyone's head but inevitably those episodes do really well and for that reason I think and hope that this one is going to be the same because I think you know what you're presenting or at least what you were presenting in your first book is really ambitious it's fairly technical there's a lot of ideas but it's very rich it's very exciting like like philosophically very exciting um and scientifically exciting too so one I'm excited to Riff on all of that again and two really excited to hear what you're working on now because you said something like I don't know that you're you're trying to go further even than you were before and you're willing to make statements now that you weren't willing to make then so I'm excited for that excited for this in general well thanks for having me back on Michael I love your show uh yeah I'll try to be a little bit less technical I I want to go bigger and that yeah strangely means being less technical because you can spend a whole podcast talking about the details of the origin of life for example yeah um so if you want to go bigger and Beyond you have to uh kind of zoom out and speak in simpler terms so hopefully um this time will'll be a little bit less technical than our last talk and maybe cover more ground I'm I'm okay with all the above man BR bring it on but but first I think maybe just to set the stage I think people broadly you know think about if when they think about these big questions they fall broadly into one or two camps some version of the universe was made by a benevolent Creator um that's how the universe came to be with you know whatever metaphysical variations on that scenario or we're lucky to be here we're a product of Randomness the universe doesn't care the universe has no goal there is no teleological purpose whatsoever you're lucky to be here enjoy it then you're gone that's it like that that's sort of like broadly the two camps it seems like people fall into but what you present in your first book and what I think you're you're still arguing for is a standpoint that is kind of both and neither in some kind of like paradoxical uh way and I know you largely like to call it poetic metan naturalism but what does that what does that mean to you poetic metan naturalism so it's a spin off Shan Carroll's poetic naturalism um but it's kind of the opposite idea in a way so just to explain Sean Carroll's View he thinks uh it's okay to speak poetically about the universe but that these descriptions are really just describing a meaningless universe and what I'm saying is that the universe itself is like a poem and that it's giving rise to emergences like life and Consciousness and civilization and that it's actively creating meaning and that meaning is fundamental to the universe uh the reason I use the term metan naturalism is because and this goes uh back to that dichotomy you were talking about where people either believe in design or they believe everything's an accident and uh what I'm saying is something that's a bit different than either position maybe transitions uh I mean transcends those positions or unites those positions uh but metan naturalism is a a term that means what we consider to be natural is always going to be changing so someone might see the idea of naturalism being equivalent to atheism this kind of accidental picture that you were talking about everything's random and that we're just here by luck where you could actually see naturalism as something that's always evolving so there's the idea of the simulation Theory and I'm not saying I support the simulation Theory we get into this it starts the the theory I'm proposing starts to blur the lines between design simulation Theory and and traditional naturalism but uh if you do uh believe that we can create realities inside our simulations or that we ourselves are a product of some intelligent agent that created this simulated reality then you realize that reality can have all of these levels and that our universe could be created by an intelligent agent but that doesn't go beyond naturalism you just have to extend yes the definition of naturalism to now create um include these levels of reality right and so how large is the onion how many shells are there and if you look at it that way then there's not really this clear distinction between a design Theory and a naturalist Theory um we start realizing that we don't even know how to define naturalism right it depends on how deep things go and the fine-tuning problem which we'll talk about later um and which Philip Goff has written a lot about in his new book why uh we start to see that there's good reasons to think that reality may be larger than our universe and So Meta natural just leaves open room for whatever we consider natural at this point in time uh they're being things that um are outside of that definition that get subsumed by naturalism and science as well because anything that exists we can study right right yeah and it's I what's funny is I actually I spoke with Goff a couple months ago maybe three months ago I can't remember now but I don't remember if I asked him this on the air but I definitely asked him if he had read your book because I it really like a lot of what he was writing about really reminded me of arguing a very similar Point using a lot of similar evidence yet of course he's coming maybe not to a conclusion but he is more warm toward the sort of pans psychist hypothesis if if nothing's changed I I think you you differ from that in that you're more um in line with this notion of Consciousness needs to emerge like Consciousness is not some fundamental property in the universe it's something that emerges in physical beings have your thoughts yeah no no I think okay that that's great um what did he say by the way did he say it already I I think he said he hadn't and I was kind of surprised and I was like you should you should check that out but yeah I'm not going to throw any shade at golf but I sent him the book and he said he was too busy to read it and that's too bad his book basically makes the same claim like I imagine when he pitched the book uh when you have to uh list uh comparative titles like my book would probably need to be on that list because I argue the same thing in a lot of detail but you know what I'm not even mad because more people who are are supporting this idea and kind of broadcasting this idea of a universe that's fundamentally purposeful uh that's great and yeah he's a great guy hopefully um we'll be able to chat about it in the future uh because he does focus on fine-tuning which I just spend like maybe half a chapter on at the very end of the book where I argue for more of this um idea that evolution is Progressive and leading to greater and greater complex that's ultimately going to lead to this final goal state where the universe is this fully integrated computational mind and I think he barely hints at that and um I think is probably kind of scared to go there because if you're a philosopher uh for the last 100 years we've been told that like that's off limits that that idea has been disproven and it's funny the only reason there's that mentality is because that was really one of the biggest ideas is in the 18th and 19th century among scientists and philosophers but it was associated with religion so there was just this backlash that was so strongly against that um especially the ideas of uh de shardan in his book The phenomenon of man um that it became like taboo for people to talk about and so I think Philip's book is kind of uh like a prerequisite for that he's like understanding that there's some design and fine-tuning where um we can't explain what we see in the universe and the complexity in organization with just this accidental view this this normal traditional reductionist view uh but ultimately I think the picture is much more interesting than that it's not just a universe that gives rise to life it's a universe that gives rise to uh forever increasing complexity so like life is just a seed that's going to spread and lead to these emergencies that we can't even fathom so uh what was the what was the question again um I I think we were just talking about the difference the potential difference between take even though you're coming to very similar conclusions But ultimately kind of settling in different views of what Consciousness is we should say that that you're you are a neuroscientist by education so so I think you some technical chops there that are going to go beyond the kind of arguments that go is is going to offer yeah so I do think that people like Golf and anakah Harris Sam Harris's wife yeah uh have taken this panus position and I think one reason they felt comfortable doing that was because of integrated information theory in Neuroscience which basically said any system that integrates information would have this minimal amount of Consciousness measured by this uh measure that they call Fi and even atoms uh would be integrating minimal amounts of Consciousness but such a little amount that it would be kind of negligible but still the idea was that you have Consciousness at a level far below brains and organisms and I think that made the philosophers feel like that was an accept stance to take even if they don't site integrated information uh Theory so uh I think it's a problem of language and I think that we need to start using more specific language to um really specify what we're talking about when we talk about Consciousness and it being fundamental so what I believe is that Consciousness emerges from a system that models the world and then creates a self model and that self model is the model uh looking back on itself and that creates The Observer that creates the first person perspective and I think without that mechanism you don't get an observer so you need a system that can encode information about the world and store information and I think you need an Adaptive system to be able to do that you need an organism at least and I think really to get self modeling at the level needed to create an observer you probably need a brain now it may be the most basic nervous system but I think that's a necessity for self-modeling some people will disagree with that uh Michael Levan uh amazing wanted to bring him up I wanted to bring him up yeah yeah he would say that uh even at the cellular level you get some simple self-modeling uh but I think what the brain allows uh is for us to record the consequences of our actions so the causal consequences of what we do are being recorded at every moment and that allows us to build up a model of ourselves as agents when you have single cells with no brains um there's no uh recording of the consequences of each individual action so I think that uh self-modeling is required for conscious experience the way we normally talk about the word the word like when we when we say someone's conscious yeah uh you know we talk about people going into surgery and getting anesthesia and then you just drop out and if you've ever had anesthesia um and you don't go into a dream state uh it's it's it's like you're suddenly back it's like there was no passage of time it wasn't like there was minimal Consciousness it seems like Consciousness just completely faded and that time didn't even exist for that time when you were out so when I use the word Consciousness I'm using it to mean that specifically and I think that emerges with life but I'm also saying there is this design this programming this structure and organization to the universe that is evidence of some intelligence and then how you define that as like a Creator God or maybe it's just a continual process of self-organization that leads to agents that then create uh realities nested inside the reality in which they exist um we can get into that so you see there's all of these different ways where language starts to get blurry and the and the ways we traditionally broke these things up don't seem to apply anymore um but so in that sense I do think there's an intelligence that's intrinsic to the ierse and something like mind some sort of computation that's going on at this Cosmic level and if you consider that to be Consciousness if your definition of Consciousness is really talking about some sort of agency then maybe I'm a pan psychist but I like to talk about the picture that I'm describing as being emergent pan psychism so the universe is inanimate when it starts off and as life emerges and spreads uh and starts to convert the an animate matter into its computational structure the universe starts to wake up and I believe that's going to culminate in some Cosmic scale intelligence um so the universe doesn't start off as conscious but it becomes conscious yeah yeah conscious in in a way that's meaningful and actually has some I guess what what we would consider to be an amount of agency that allows them to interact and change things on the plane of reality in which we exist right because whatever that is whether it's you know some kind of logos that we we just can't peer into you know and it was set set in motion by who knows what you know um it seems whatever that is seems to be there right the laws of physics are there fine tuning is a real phenomenon we've talked about that a few times now maybe we should Define fine tuning but you know mathematics work there's there there's no plane of reality we've yet discovered in which mathematics don't work sometimes we need to change our theories but there there's never anything that just is full-blown chaos or doesn't make sense or has some kind of law behind it that we can eventually ascertain and interact with and and measure or learn things about and that structure is very troubling for anyone who's not open to the idea that there is some level of teeology or directedness in the universe right and and that's a pretty big part of your argument in the first book um so I think this might be a good time to get into fine-tuning um let me mention this yeah it's it's something that I'm about to explore for an article um I've known known about for over a decade now but my professor at George Mason uh who I formed a club with uh while I was getting my PhD and it was a club that would discuss all these topics with neuroscientists and physicists and philosophers um that would that would all meet in the the Neuroscience building um his name was Harold morwitz and he was one of the one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute and he wrote a book called The emergence of everything and he was a biochemist and he sort of saw I I guess you would say like the mind of God in the periodic table wow and he was very interested in the poly Exclusion Principle which basically is this principle that that determines the behavior of electrons and and how they fill up uh the shells uh the the veilance shells around the the nucleus of atoms and so with the poly Exclusion Principle you get this weird Behavior where when the electrons uh go into the shells um basically it doesn't follow the order you'd expect like one electron will kind of jump into the next uh shell and I don't remember the exact specifics but it basically implies that they're aware of their neighbor like what their neighbor doing there's like this social aspect to electrons and the PO Exclusion Principle and if if you Google his name you can find uh a paper on this published in the the journal complexity and so even at this smallest level there seems to be some sort of agency that's not accounted for in the normal forces of nature and um he thought maybe that agency sort of you know is what gets built upon and not that it's responsible for Consciousness but in some way that's sort of um evidence of it at this smaller scale so at this larger scale you see this um self-organizing property where uh just to lay that out before we go into the fine tuning because I think this teleological view makes the fine-tuning problem a lot more interesting because the fine-tuning um argument is generally that the universe is friendly for life but the argument I'm making is not just that it allows life but that it uh necessitates that life continues to spread and transform the universe into this uh sentient uh system so yeah um atoms come together to make molecules which where the conditions are right come together to make cells which come together to make complex organisms which come together to make societies and ecosystems which then come together to make this plan planetary scale system that is a superorganism it it mirrors the sort of functional structure of a biological organism at this planetary level and people have used the term Gaia for that there's the guia hypothesis which was a very scientific hypothesis put out by James Lovelock uh also uh biochemist uh about the biosphere being this cybernetic self-regulating system and then that idea got sort of adopted by the new age community and maybe got a little woo and some people maybe worshiping guy and stuff like that but but the concept what what did he mean by cybernetic in that uh that it's self-regulating so for example um it and it's really amazing because it does it just like your body but it keeps the the the the the gas composition is regulated in a way to keep the atmosphere um uh breathable for complex life and uh the temperature at habitable conditions and um there has to be a lot of feedback for it to maintain those conditions we know if we go on any other planet you know it's just we immediately can't survive so NASA hired him uh to try to think of Bio signatures and one uh bio signature would be uh that the atmosphere of the planet would be in this you know far from equilibrium State this dynamic equilibrium that's not at all natural you need like a system with like lots of like feedback loops to be able to self-regulate um especially you know there all these natural disasters all these things going on that if there was no design really it's going to go back to the fine tuning that things would just fall apart so the fine-tuning is not just something that allows for life it's something that allows for these complex adaptive systems to emerge and be robust and be resilient to the external conditions and then to continuously spread by kind of searching the possibility space life is always searching the space of possible configurations so it doesn't even end with Gaia or a conscious superorganism on the planetary scale um I'm arguing that basically uh the next level would be biospheres self-replicating so the superorganism when when we terraform a planet like Mars and make that habitable for life then you could see the actual uh planetary scale organism replicating with variation and then the evolutionary process um would repeat on this planetary scale and that's uh Universal Darwinism kind of recognizes that that these darwinian processes happen at all of these scales and there's multi- level selection and this is in my view um I'm combining that with this kind of cosmic tileology that the process just goes on and on forever so yeah there's there's nothing Supernatural involved in this description where you have intelligent design theorists who are saying okay right now God had to intervene because he information couldn't have Arisen on its own and there has to be super natural intervention there and Supernatural intervention maybe to get life off the planet all this stuff I'm arguing that um the way it's set up this happens naturally but that doesn't get rid of the idea of a god it just places him at you know basically being the the the programmer or the Constructor of of these laws and constants that then lead to a self-organizing system yeah two two things one just zoom out and reiterate why this fine-tuning conversation is really important and and and off of this it's also interesting because you usually when you hear fine tuning it's focused on this Cosmic scale like that's really what um you know in goff's book he really focuses on um like cosmological constant and speed of light and gravity and all these things that are cosmic forces that really need to exist in a very very narrow relationship to one another or or the universe would have never formed like we couldn't have developed life let alone complex life but what you're so you just defined it if you change it if you change one of those constant of hair you don't get anything it's not that you just don't get life you don't get structure yeah and what you're pointing out is this is also true on the planetary level that there is seemingly fine-tuning in all of the forces on the planetary level that are allowing like a breathable atmosphere self-regulating ecosystems and all these things and then you know it was occurring to me same fine-tuning it's the same constants that goer talking about I'm just arguing that what they give rise to is way more intricate than just planets uh and a little bit of biology on the top of one that that th that combination of the values of those constants give rise to continual self-organization yes yes and it seems like no matter what scale of reality you go to you can if you look you see it in action and this is one of the things like admittedly I must do a deeper dive into uh Michael Len's work but we we mentioned him briefly and he's a biologist who I guess he focuses on this like bioelectric layer of intelligence that exists in organisms and they do things to purposely try to intervene in like let's say how a like a flat worm is forming you know due to its natural genetics like they'll move around eyeballs and do all this stuff and there's some kind of like self-correcting intelligence that like comes in and either fixes what they've broke or they or makes it work somehow like as if there is some kind of extant scaffolding that it has to fit into and I've actually heard him say in an interview um because he was very much walking himself in the corner of there's like a design and you can tell that it's that something is coming in and fixing the design and he says something to the effect of it makes you think that the plists and the pans were onto something and off of that I have to ask you have you read Plato's tomus ever no I haven't you mentioned that to me and uh yeah no um since you know my education was in science I spent all my time reading stuff that I could site and that scientists would go okay that makes your argu stronger that point of view so a lot of the classics I I read I read the cave in undergraduate uh philosophy but that's the only work yeah no tell me about it a little bit so so I I think you would really find this interesting I'm sure there would be things that would cause you to scratch your head but other things that you would think how the did they understand this because so it's the story of a Pythagorean philosopher coming to the platonic Academy to tell the the story basically of how the quote unquote Craftsman created the cosmos and it is this very much like this notion of a deist Creator who's like a who is tapping into pre-existing mathematical geometrical um ideas that like exist in some kind of transcendent way and it's using these Concepts to create a a physical world and universe but it's a but what's interesting that that I think really dovetails into what a lot of the things we saying especially like Universal Darwinism and this idea that the universe itself is kind of this meta creature that that is evolving and complexifying they actually call it the the either the universal animal or the cosmic animal and then they talk about how there's like you know there's the cosmic animal and then essentially you get this um relationship of Correspondence that is self-similar all the way down like in a sort of As Above So Below way where you you're getting these same laws and um things that give rise to life on the cosmic level also on the micro down to the human level yes and it's very technical and very like long and uh just it's it's kind of brutal to read but it's like there's a lot of very very interesting nuggets in there there's again a lot of head scratching stuff that I think was probably just you know as much as I want to believe there's yeah there's some like esoteric hidden wisdom in there which there absolutely is I think some of it is also just like we can sort of we can maybe brush that off but um but like one of the things they specifically mention is that human beings are made of of Stardust and this was something written like 500 plus years ago you know like how in the how could they know that you know and so so yeah there there's just and there's there seems to be this idea that the N the nature in and of itself is a sacred thing and it it I think it fits into this idea of like extended naturalism that you're talking about and that these things that seem quote unquote Supernatural that must be done via magic are actually done by the very same mechanisms that we can discover through rational rigor through math through science through these methods and that when we get Advanced enough with those things we will be akin to that Divine mind using these Transcendent um yes mathematical Concepts and it may sound out there but this is also essentially what like if you read um I think it's Shadows of the Mind by uh Penrose yeah like he he's he's really putting forth a a very similar idea that that we that our minds somehow exist in a dimension is Con connected to essentially and he calls it the platonic realm of forms and we're already tapped into yeah he he was kind of my introduction to Plato's ideas when I read the emperor's new mind uh you know now it's been over 20 years and Shadows of the Mind was a followup to that um a Aristotle uh see now I want to go back and read Plato because Aristotle is kind of always cited as the person who sort of came up with this idea of tileology and he equated it with nature too yes um the Persians uh going back uh to zor asianism the first uh monotheistic um theory of a Creator um they viewed magic not as something Supernatural but something uh from nature that that we just had to unlock and so that going back to Poetic metan naturalism that's the idea too that um what we consider naturalism will always be changing and when we just had classical Newtonian mechanics um a lot of things that we understand today uh entanglement quantum entanglement yeah uh so you can have uh two particles that are connected in this Eerie way where you measure one and you get um defined properties for it then you'll that will collapse uh the the others position as well and give it a a defined uh give it defined properties so you have uh non-local interaction right there that would completely be seen as magic from the classical mechanics Viewpoint there's no room in the picture for anything like that and so had that idea not been uh uh forced on us through experimental evidence and someone just came up with that idea then uh it would have been woo it would have just been called just complete you know um New Age rubbish and uh just the idea of superp position all of these things would have been considered magic or Supernatural ideas from the Viewpoint of classical mechanics so we've already had a revolution where we had to accept things that seem to be supernal and I think that's always just going to continue we're going to unlock um abilities that uh now people would consider Supernatural and then we'll understand those things and we'll understand the mechanisms underlying them and it will just get incorporated into our scientific a natural worldview I don't know what those are I don't know if s phenomena is real um but I'm I I would say like almost completely certain that if those things aren't real we're going to find out about things that are even crazier right in the future because that's how it's always been uh every Paradigm we've had uh has just been proven wrong in some way and we find out reality is a lot weirder uh than we previously conceived yeah yeah could you imagine trying to explain superp position to Isaac Newton you know just just not even having the the requisite con and that's what's this is something that I think is really interesting is that I think we often mistakenly think that we're nullifying a previous Paradigm by discovering a new one but it it but at the same time you could have never discovered that new Paradigm without the previous one like we needed relativity to see what we didn't know and we needed to develop quantum theory to explain that and of course people are still trying to reconcile these two theories Etc but it's like there's this piece of the puzzle that we find and then we demonstrate it's true like Newton physics works until it doesn't and then and then we needed relativity and then we needed quantum theory and you know there's so much speculation on what this next thing is going to be on what the next you know School of trying to explain reality on a deeper level is going to be um one of the ones I'm really drawn to is this work being done by Dr Donald Hoffman I know you said you recently checked out some of his stuff curious about your thoughts on him in general and I'm guessing a lot of people are because he's just he's become so popular he's captured a lot of curiosity but also I want to know what your thoughts are in terms of where do we go from here you know I I think there's a scientific rational answer and then there's probably a um philosophical one and it seems like you're working on knitting those two things together so that they don't feel disperate so that science isn't telling us one thing and our own lived experience is is telling us another um so first what what is your feeling on where our understanding of the Universe on a deeper level is headed yeah so the thing that is different about the you could call it a unifying theory of reality that I'm proposing which is this theory of recursive emergence that each emergence Builds on the previous emergence and that this is this process of knowledge that's being accumulated that allows life complex adaptive systems to manipulate the world to to spread further and to assist the universe in this process of waking up uh that that process uh our awareness of it uh gives us uh a purpose um a purpose at our individual level and a collective purpose so unlike other theories of everything which you learn about and you're like oh that's really interesting uh and maybe even you know mind-blowing like uh Donald Hoffman's Theory like makes you question uh everything you know about reality this uh gives us a goal it says um there are these transitions these phase transitions that lead to these higher emergencies and that life has a responsibility to bring about the next emergence and that would be this globally unified State um so we want to push for a global superorganism where uh you don't get rid of the Nations and have this One World Government in this hive mind when I bring up this idea a lot of people are scared of this idea of a hive mind but it's not that it's completely the opposite of that you want to have this nested hierarchical structure with all these feedback loops people are also scared of hierarchy because they think you know people at the top are exploiting the people at the bottom uh which postmodernism pointed out but with this there would be fluid movement so there would be constant feedback and there would be no like uh you know rigid upper class just always constantly be shifting and changing but there would be hierarchy because you need this nested hierarchical structure uh because it makes the system more robust and resilient to breakdown because you have all these levels if the the top level falls apart falls into chaos you have all these lower level systems so if the global government you know goes into disarray then you still have Nations and then you still have cities and you have these structures at each level uh doing all of these uh interesting things where there's this distribution of uh of of work um so we need to be uh pushing for Global coordination though because we want to minimize the conflict between all of those individual Nations which are basically uh super organisms as well and if we don't have this globally unified State uh there's this principle of competitive excl usion in biology where uh if you have two species competing over the same uh resources existing in the same Niche uh one will drive the other to Extinction and so with the situation uh with Israel and Palestine we're seeing that right now we're seeing um uh basically the products of two superorganisms that have incompatible worldviews uh so basically we need a unifying worldview and I think that's what this unifying theory of reality can provide is basically this picture of a purposeful existence so it appeals to spiritual people but it's also very scientific so it appears to the rational minded communities as well um but it really says the the way we're going to solve our existential challenges so we have you know potentially World War III we have all these you know this uh culture war going on in the US really around the world there are these populist movements um and so in addition to that there's climate change there's existential concerns about AI now to solve problems we really need the computational power of the global superorganism like we can't do it alone so that necessitates a worldview where we align interest and minimize conflict um so that should be something everyone should be thinking about but right now there's this kind of ideological war between the globalist uh you hear conservatives and people like Al Jones talking about the globalist and some of these people do want a One World Government or they they actually want it's more of like the corporations like the billionaires are people make the decisions and there is a big concern about that I think that's a terrible idea and then you have these isolationist which just want to be cut off from everybody else and I don't think you can have that either so what this worldview allows is for something where you do uh keep the Nations uh intact and you have all the things that isolationists are pushing for that are actually good for these you know super National level super organisms but you also have this globally unified state where we aren't trying to to kill each other yeah um so it's a theory that has practical consequences it's this big you know philosophical idea of this self-organizing universe but every level every stage in this process is important and it becomes a goal for Humanity to fill fulfill this idea of the universe waking up through the uh progress of Life yeah yeah I think this is one of those ideas that I think is so common sense that if you ever sat down one onone with anyone they they would agree with this idea like everything you said sort of balancing all of these other than religious extremists probably who are extremely dedicated to some kind of like monolithic medieval militant view of religion where they need to either you know destroy all people who don't agree um or convert them but I think almost everyone would agree with everything you just said that we we need to unify the world in a way that's good for everyone that recognizes the I I mean in my mind it would be the the fundamental sort of spiritual ground from which we all sprung up and and relate to one another on on that basis what whatever it is whatever you're you're you're underlying a sort of ontological proposition is I think in a one-on-one situation everyone agrees but then there's like this these these hierarchical commitments that people have to their social groups and their identity that they're unwilling to allow this new way of thinking to usurp that you know what I'm saying yeah people are motivated by anger and uh and identity and they want to be on a team yeah it's it's totally about identity and so it is a problem because when you hear what I'm saying it makes it sound like okay then there's you know what team am I supposed to be on it's team humanity and then there's nothing to fight for and then it just seems like kind of a demotivating idea when it should be seen as the opposite keep all of your you know causes the things that you care about like people you know if you're this um you know liberal person who thinks climate change is the biggest issue fight for that but do it within this larger context that sees the need to have this globally coordinated State um and recognize that you know you might have people concerned about immigration in the US they might say you know talk about how uh I think it's something it's just like 10 times the amount of immigrants are coming in to the country and when I talk about this I'm I'm the son of an Iranian immigrant and uh so um I have tons of sympathy for them but there are also certain uh rules that uh superorganism you know boundaries that have to be kept intact for the super organism to be stable so you have to recognize that if there's another side and they're talking about an issue that is getting lots of um you know support from even your enemy there's something there that needs to be corrected and right now we're in such divided times that uh if you're a liberal you have to be completely against everything that a conservative stands for where you're like oh just open up the borders like you just and then you're a complete you know nut you're not thinking critically yeah you're you're you're you're just destabilizing the superorganism uh in the worst way possible and the same thing goes for the other side the other side if you're talking about climate change at all like you're they they think it's completely crazy yeah it's a hoax yeah it's a hoax and so but but that's what drives them too like they they're on this team and they have this identity and then they go out in the streets and protest because they're so motivated by that identity so what I think we need to forge is this new type of progressive uh that really is pushing for evolutionary progress like if you think about the word progress like that's exactly what this theory that I'm describing is about it's about the idea that and and and it's been considered like to be debunked like an evolutionary theory because of that culture war going against this you know tiic idea see as religious where a lot of people try to argue that uh Evolution wasn't Progressive and directed towards this more complex and more harmonious State and I think that's completely wrong um so when we recognize that we understand that to make progress we have to look at these principles for optimizing systems that come from evolutionary theory and from cybernetics and when you do that you see the conservative points of view you see the liberal points of view uh you see how those can can be unified and how new points of view from for example like crypto economics yeah uh you kind of pull from everything you also pull from every religion because then you start to see how uh religious doctrines start to map on to this Cosmic Tey this story of purpose and unification um yeah and so you could actually form something like a meta religion uh that unifies these religions and Maps them on to concepts of emergence in complex system science and that's a topic for another time but you can do it in ways that are are really interesting because I mean you get doctrines like Christianity's compatibility between Free Will and Destiny and you get them in complete precise scientific terms with this View and uh I think um if we could create this sort of new political Wing that are these new progressives that that aren't against conservative knowledge which is really knowledge that's been encoded uh through the evolutionary process like those principles that have stuck around those are memes that have proven uh to be helpful in stabilizing Society then there's no reason for division anymore yeah yeah this idea that there is a goal of evolution and that we as individuals and as communities can either Aid in that or really provide a weight to that like you know provide probably more if if not a weit an engine toward de Evolution because I think that that's seems to be a real risk maybe not on a cosmic level but at least on a planetary level and if we give into that temptation of partisan politics and tribes and all of this stuff like I do think we're barreling head first toward idiocracy at worst complete Annihilation probably and I do think that that is potentially a psychospiritual kind of Revelation as well that it's not just you know Evolution or nature is this thing that we are kind of just Thrust out of due to things totally beyond our control circumstances that are really just nihilistic completely physical circumstances right but if we can get behind this idea that no you're not here due to complete Randomness you're not here due to complete uh completely uncaring random Universe you're here because there is Cosmic purpose and the cosmic purpose is to evolve toward higher Consciousness essentially it sounds really new age when you put it like that but it's it's kind of what you're saying right and it's exactly I'm saying comes from this yeah right and it requires personal participation in a sort of like process theology or process Evolution participatory Evolution kind of way like to toward the end of yung's life he talked a lot about this idea of coming to the realization that he was carrying a fire forward and he was very protective of the fire and the like and essentially his point was to say that in his terminology the person who finds a way to individuate like become who who they are as an like you know Acorn becoming an oak tree kind of way on a personal level you're actually doing the precise kind of work that I think you're alluding to which is you're aiding in this project of Consciousness you you are participating in God goding or the universe evolving and if you do the opposite you're really detracting from that effort or you're really de evolving on a on at least an individual atom kind of level yeah totally so uh complexity is a function of uh how many parts a system has and how many connections between those parts but also uh the diversity of those parts so uh human is the most complex organism and we have the most uh different cell types so you could imagine something that doesn't have all of these organs not being as functional um so when people become self-actualized you're creating more diversity among the component parts uh and then when there's more connections between those parts which is another important thing so we need to open up information channels we need to have like you know free and open internet across the world we need to be able to connect with people from other cultures then you're exchanging more information because you have different types of people with different philosophies and different cultures sharing all that information so this is about coming together at the collective level and becoming more connected but becoming more individual uh a at at the level of of of each person like becoming self-actualized um uh you could think of a culture that only has like 10 different um careers for example if everybody's like a doctor an engineer and this and this and there are no artists or musicians you could imagine that culture um not evolving uh uh to be you know as as resilient of this Collective organism as one where you have all these different forms of individuality uh because you're creating more knowledge that way so unlike other theories this theory of recursive emergence in multi-level self-organization really informs everything about how we need to live at the collective level and the individual level and so where the first book was explaining uh things like the origin of life and the emergence of Consciousness um the next book I'm writing uh is going to be more focused on um the the practice iCal implications and applications of this yeah you mentioned a couple things in the the opening chapter or the the pitch for your new book that I wrote down that I'm really curious about um I I could just pick some of them out that you you sort of introduce but don't go into a lot of detail I know you you bring up things like this this thing you call the game stance um but there's some there's something else in particular that I'm really curious where where you're headed with I I guess I'll just call it out and you can you can choose which direction you want to go the god proof and the magic proof really curious what what those are and how that fits into all of this yeah so we we've we've kind of talked about those uh a little bit so I'll I'll hint at it but I will say um I'll be writing more about this uh in in the next book but also at my substack which is called road to Omega and the the meaning of that name is uh Omega is short for uh the French philosopher dearden's idea of this Omega point so he believed that humans were forming this sort of cognitive layer on top of the biological layer on this planet and that we are forming This Global mind that he called the neosphere and that the neosphere um would culminate in this um fully conscious harmonious State uh that he called the Omega point and then other people have extended that to be this uh cosm scale Omega Point uh which is basically um the kind of in goal of this self-organization process that I've been describing that the universe itself wakes up and becomes this fully unified organism that some people could equ equate with with God emerging uh so um the game stance is basically saying if Nature has this purpose and this goal and that life is part of a goal that applies to you as an individual and how you fit in to the collective and your your your kind of worldview and that's that worldview that we've just described that has all these you know philosophical implications but also these these practical ones and the game stance says is if if you have a goal then that gives you a challenge and your challenge is to to survive to to flourish and to become self-actualized and so if you are always seeing your life as having this goal that fits into this uh larger process it immediately turns your life into a game of sorts because what is a game other than something where you have challenges that you have to overcome to achieve goals and so it's just taking life and turning it into this sort of competitive thing but you're not necessarily competing with others you're competing with yourself to be the best version of yourself and actually new levels to reach the next level in The Game of Life you actually have to bring about this phase transition where you form this larger Collective superorganism yeah and I've talked about wanting to form this planetary scale superorganism where we have this globally unified state where we've minimized conflict and uh maximize cooperation you could imagine the whole world demilitarizing and putting all that money into um solving poverty um and uh health and medicine and trying to radically extend life it's just insane that we haven't already I know decided to do that because uh no one would potentially have to die I mean you could imagine extending life little by little and if we could extend it you know 10 years by like you know 2040 or something and then by the time we get to that point we've figured out how to extend it 20 years and you just get this moving window that you know potentially leads to technological breakthroughs in 100 years where life is extended indefinitely um the fact that that's something that's potentially possible you talk to people like Aubrey degy like you know experts in this area it's just completely insane that we're not doing it so you really do need this worldview um because it has all these political um applications that you know when when we come together under a worldview of this sort we're going to look back and just think we were so uncivilized and barbaric right now for you know all the wars going on and still you know new one's breaking out it's just crazy to me but um so this this game stance is basically um applying these principles from cybernetics and evolution Ary Theory looking at life as having this possibility space where um you just have a different mindset uh in in this you know there's an article on this on my substack but there are two mental systems and you could think of them as mind one and mind two so you have this automatic mind which is more of this primitive mind and you have this self-reflective mind and when you engage the self-reflective mind you're basically engaging your potential for free will so you're considering all of the possibilities when you have to make a decision you're looking at the full possibility space and then you're selecting the decision that leads to the outcome that's most consistent with your long-term goals and those long-term goals for you as individual should also um be consistent with the goals of a healthy Collective uh the goals of the the larger superorganism so basically there are these principles that you can follow where you're just not making the same errors over and over you're self-correcting and adapting and that can give you uh strategies uh for optimizing your life and for reaching self-actualization yeah and this it seems like you could use this game stance lens and really apply it to Nature at large as well and that it seems to be in this almost playful iterative process you know it it sounds very Alan wattsy I I think I think Watts has some kind of quote to the effect of you know must everything be an adaptation for like um Fitness and survival or could it just be an expression of a joyous cosmology or or some something like that and maybe that's overly Rosy but I I do think that you could look at the totality of what you're proposing and really what nature seems to be doing and it seems to be in this expressive game of differentiation and iteration and change and complexity and you really could almost view Evolution itself as more of a game than some kind of just I don't know like dark you know self cannibalizing mechanistic thing that's eating itself and you know just unaware and doesn't like uncaring yeah so and there is evolutionary Game Theory so people have written about this in formalize it but the difference in this is it's not so focused on the individual and that focus on the individual that that selfish perspective is what leads to the idea of you know people could have criticisms of a game stance where it's like selfishly motivated but what's specific about this and I started to get to that point and maybe I uh went around it is that um in this game it's better to cooperate than compete because when you cooperate you form a collective mind and then you're extending the computational power of uh that system you belong to so for example just something as simple let's say you're writing a book and you pull all your friends into the process and you ask them to be beta readers to read every chapter and give you feedback that book's going to come out a lot better it's going to probably sell more copies and influence more people than if you did it alone yeah uh you could do something where you bring in all of those readers and you create a token and you give those readers incentives to help you because then when the book comes out it's created to um uh a crypto token where they get monetarily rewarded for the help in that and so we could create all of these Cooperative systems uh everyone benefits um so in this game uh the the the best strategy is not just to compete it's not just to be selfish it's to think about what optimizes the well-being of the collective and so when you think that way then these other practices and um just being um mentally preoccupied with um spiritual things and um expressions of awe and and Cosmic Wonder those are things that are binding us together as a collective so it's increasing the fitness of the collective superorganism so all of these things that might consider be considered to be good strategies from this kind of selfish gene or selfish individual perspective are you know then shown to not really be congruent with this larger multiscale evolutionary theory this theory of progress and uh it leads to this game stance that's kind of psychedelic in nature because it's all about connecting with uh the collective yeah that that's that's an interesting curveball I didn't expect you to throw in right there but it was something that I wanted to work into the conversation at some point but because I think one of the things that is particular psychedelic to me and I mean this that in that psychedelics seem to literally put you in a mind State that's able to either literally perceive elements of reality that are normally you don't have access to or they allow you to think in such a novel way that the Universe becomes bigger and the possibilities become greater than you could have ever possibly you know thought of and and and many of the things that seem important you know societal things monetary things uh physical things that that you've purchased just seem to have this absolutely almost laughably paper thin lack of significance and you're you begin to reflect on you know re really sink deep into those states of awe that you were describing earlier and when your mind is oriented toward those things your priorities shift radically like what's important to you shifts radically if you become less interested in material stuff and more interested in Cosmic wonder and just reveling in that it has a tremendous impact on your psychology and um I would say your spiritual state but given that that is a major element of the Zeitgeist now you know like the reemergence of being able to access these mind States more easily through legalization through medicalization therapy how do you think if at all that plays into the solid potentially like solidifying a vision closer to what you're describing do you think it could have a significant impact yeah I think psychedelics meditation anything like that just becoming self-aware or metaware as a term I use a lot to basically describe becoming aware that you're an agent in a larger interconnected system which itself is a superorganism it just opens up the the space of possibilities for how you live life and how you make decisions and I don't think it means becoming a monk and giving up all of your material possessions but I think it means I do think you realize what's important so for example I might not care about having like three cars that are like the most fancy cars that show off my status to my neighbors but I might care about completely redesigning my living space uh to have an aesthetic that that matches My Vibe and maybe that will make you know be the decision about the car I drive it's something that when I get in it kind of amplifies the aesthetic that is the one that allows me to to have new thoughts to think outside the box and then so for example when I'm you know writing my book I'm looking for ideas that I normally wouldn't think of so for me then it becomes very important I'm thinking oh maybe I'll burn some Sage or some other um natural herb that I don't even know about maybe I'll look for that maybe I'll have a room with lighting the way yours looks ambient maybe I'll have some crystals up all these things that are associated with like new age culture they're there for a reason so um maybe I'll think about connecting with like-minded people like writers and and and forming a little Collective mind where I have a community where I'm bouncing ideas off of them and then maybe I'll meet with that club and then we'll talk about okay uh now we have this similar mindset how can we amplify all of our ideas maybe we'll create an Art Collective and then life suddenly becomes a lot more interesting and it doesn't mean that you've given up on all the things that you thought uh were important before but it means you start to design your Niche uh that's that's optimally conducive to accomplishing your goals and those goals should always be nested uh in in in societal goals totally yeah it reminds me of uh one of McKenna's riffs about like making your own symbols wearing your own symbols creating your own art you know like the in his fix he had almost fixation on this idea that the artists and the creatives would be the ones who would save Humanity not the you know not the the scientists or the um like corporations or whatever but the people who are willing to go into whatever that space is that psychological or psychospiritual space sometimes he called it um platonic hyperspace um which I'm a big fan of but but then bring something back from there and there interestingly there was a time where he and Dennis his brother actually thought that they might be able to if they go deep enough actually bring some kind of Relic back from the Visionary space but what's so funny about that is even though of course that was the failure in many ways their entire lives were that object right yeah like had they not had those experiences we wouldn't know about Terence McKenna Dennis McKenna wouldn't be a ethn pharmacologist that's like working on you know changing uh drug scheduling and uh helping to rehabilitate shamanistic cultures in the rainforest like he's doing now and in some ways that's I think what we all need to be aiming for is is going to the absolute threshold of what we think is possible and seeing what kind of inspiration we find there because when you when you go to the spes it's not it's not like you may have some kind of of an epiphany where it feels like oh suddenly everything kind of makes sense but it makes more sense the more time passes like you you slowly start to realize more about what and who you are and how you fit into this superorganism that you're describing I I think and if you're able to realize that to a significant extent in your own life everything changes just like but but it changes in a way just like how you're alluding to you make new friends you do new things you have new ideas you make new art or make new things whatever it is and that's the stuff of a good life of a transformative life and and I think this psycho mystical scientific worldview is like a perfect compliment to that yeah you don't just want to go into the Psychedelic States and get lost in them and just stay there you want to come back out and you want to take those visions that that you've arrived at all those new ideas and see how they can be used to help your life and to help Society uh so I think you know I was going to say everyone should be like a psychonaut I won't say everyone but if if you have the that desire like fully explored and that could be with psychedelics uh if that's not your thing you could explore these meditative States yeah I think you could probably reach the same sort of insights but what you do when you go into those States you sort of dissolve the self and you see this inter connectivity uh between everything um but then it's healthy to have the self reemerge again and understand that you are a conscious agent with goals I think it's very good to have a um a healthy sense of self um but it's also healthy to dissolve that self and see the truth in uh the interconnectedness of everything um so I think what this paradigm does is it gives people who explore those psychedelics uh a reference frame where they can come out they can make sense of it and then see how to use those insights to be productive yeah I really want to ask you too as as a neuroscientist how do you explain the high weirdness of those experiences do you see things that from like the studies that have been done where they're doing like fmis on people who have taken you know psoc or whatever it is do you look at that and see something that makes that experience like the subjective experience make some level of sense or do you think perhaps like we're gaining temporary insight into into the world that's not just a brain State like we're actually sensing information that is is there like that interconnectivity that you point to is obviously something that almost everyone on a requisite amount of atomine is is going to see like fractal interconnectivity kind of waving geometry that's like all around you and interconnecting um everything in in my experience what what what's your sense do do you yeah I think well so I wrote an article for big think about the universe potentially being a giant neural network and a lot of that's based on the work of this physicist named Vitali vuran and he seems to think that everything is connected through these non-local uh connections and that um you could potentially be accessing information uh when you go into these sort of psychedelic or meditative states that aren't accessible otherwise um and you mentioned being a fan of Hoffman he has all these ideas about reality being so much more complex than we perceive and so much of it being hidden from us so I do think uh that when certain uh brain areas are suppressed in function that are brain areas involved with having a sense of self and being an agent in a precise point in space and time um that are really important for everyday functioning that when you um inhibit those areas you do become aware of this interconnectivity that can lead to insights um whether it's just your brain coming up with insights or whether you're being fed information externally I'm not sure there's even a clear distinction between those two things um but I know when I was writing the romance of reality I definitely entered in to Mystical States and where I saw connections between different concepts and science that I tied together and when I came out of it and I wrote the book and I sent it out to other people to get blurbs and stuff they were some people were really receptive to those ideas um and a lot of these most of them were scientists people like Carl friston or even Skeptics like Michael shurmer um but had I not been trying to tap into m iCal States and making playlists that [Music] were uh and having lighting and and and taking baths baths and showers and long walks through nature um when I do those things uh and try to be receptive to this you know interconnectedness of nature um I see you know an actual like practical advantage to living that way wow and I go through I go through phases of that then I come out and then for like a year don't even you know try to tap into any sort of mystical States and just live like a normal person but there are times when I was calling it like where I would go deep into the the attractor and that that attractor was the the next this the sort of collective mind the state where it's sort of a cognitive ether where there's these ideas floating around what was really interesting was you know I would try to tap into those states with things like weed and playlists like things that are you know not anything like heavy but you know that and just letting my mind be manic for a little bit and um I would come out of it and I would be and also reading other books like and having the books you know talking about designing your your Niche to be conducive to this uh mental state I felt like rather you know I could have all these books is eBooks on my computer but when I have them there they're actually I can see the names I can see the titles yeah and when I'm looking around the room and pacing back and forth trying to think of things I I can actually see things that you know oh that book gives me the idea for this so that's connected to this book and I was really like making connections between things between thoughts that wouldn't be accessible if they weren't physical things that were actually in my room and then I would you know type things things like uh create like a PowerPoint presentation and like well this is post postmodernism which is metamodernism and this is this and coming up with all this terminology that for example would be kind of like influenced by Douglas hoffstad who wrote the book go to user Bach and I a strange Loop and he was there's a lot of meta ideas in his Works he has a book called Meta Meta magical themas I think um but so I arrived at all this terminology and then the book came out and then someone contacted me from a group called metamodern spirituality a guy named Brenan Graham dimsey who is writing a book called emergentism and um I think I might be friends with him on Facebook I don't really know him personally probably yeah he's a really cool guy but what I discovered was these communities were talking about all of these Concepts that I thought I had invented and and that really gave me strong uh strong experience of synchronicity also this sort of basian frisoni community people that follow follow Carl friston and his theory the free energy principle um so I was meeting a lot of people that also felt that there was great importance around certain ideas uh hegel's uh dialectical yeah yeah yeah dialectical dynamic like I saw an evolution there was this um sort of uh these two opposing concepts of order and disorder or life and entropy and it was out of the interaction of these seeming opposites that complexity emerged um you know I I I would basically focus on an idea that I thought was really important then I would discover that some philosopher had already talked about this and then there's this passion people of community who all aggregate around these ideas and they're obsessed with it and it was really interesting because I was feeling like I was tapping into something and it was not just any idea it was ideas that were in the Zeitgeist some of them might have been old ideas that were coming back some of them might be ideas that were emerging now but I think that synchron synchronicity is is is very real and not well understood and I want to explore a lot of yung's work on that but um that when we purposely try to explore these mystical states that there's something that we're tapping into um I don't know if it's these morphogenetic fields that yeah right Rupert sheldrake talks about like we're gonna find out and it'll probably you know a lot of these concepts are consider Ed like pseudoscience but I think a lot of them will turn out to have Merit and then we'll understand that there's a lot of complex mechanisms underlying them and so it'll correct a lot of the ideas that kind of just seem wacky um and I think our our our minds are going to be blown I think in The Next Century we're really going to understand things that um basically dissolve this barrier between the magic and you know what's what's considered magic or Supernatural what's considered natural and you mentioned like the magic proof and the god proof and I don't know if we have time to go into all of those oh yeah I got time yeah it's basically just saying that there isn't a clear distinction between what's considered magic and what's considered science and that you can show if we're Time Travelers and we go back in time and we exist within that scientific paradigm uh and we we think about what there is now um there we basically have proven so much magic like for example with causality when you have just a garage door opener uh you press a button and there's nothing physical that can be observed between pressing that button and the door opening so you're a wizard that that's a wand like you're you're you're making something lift that's you know remote from you they don't know about radio waves yeah they don't know about so many things that if you went back and you told a scientist from that time if there was the word woo I'm sure there was something analogous to the world word woo or Puda they would probably say like sorcery in ancient Greece yeah so um there there's there's there's no distinction uh there's no clear line there's no demarcation point between uh what's science and what's Magic right and you you see that in these like Marvel movies that do great you see um Doctor Strange using some Quantum mechanism next to Thor he's using this Magical Hammer and and you start to see that you know I'm sure I don't know if they've tried to do this but Doctor Strange could explain Thor's Magical Hammer through science uh I think you know there's been books where you know different scientific mechanisms have been used and Harry Potter was Neil degrass Tyson no no I was gonna say Neil degrass Tyson we'll want to tell you why it it doesn't work because it's not scientific but well I think he did write something about I think he explained some Harry Potter stuff how it could be possible okay with science and you know there's ideas like quantum teleportation stuff like that um so everything that you can conceive of is pretty much possible yeah with um science that that hasn't been fully understood and and we've proven that time and time again so basically the idea is that these statements like magic exists or the god proof that God exists I call them God Delian statements uh which is like goal's incompleteness theorem these are true but unprovable statements because when you say the word God or you say the word magic and you say God exists or Magic exist that word refers to something outside of science so it seems like something that can't be proved but when you actually try to say okay if you wanted to prove God what would you see in a physical Universe like Sean Carroll said let's be basian about it let's write down a theory a god Theory and Sean Carroll like a video from like 15 years ago or 10 years ago when he was really pushing the atheist narrative was saying things like well you would expect life to have some sort of cosmic significance and I don't have to tell you life has no Cosmic significance like making these statements that completely go against what I've argued in the book where lots of people have you know co-signed like okay this is u a theory that's definitely scientific I think Sean Carol gave me a quote for an article called is the universe prolife and and and and retweeted it which is really nice saying that you know this is uh um you know a controversial subject but a great article on this and it was arguing that you life had to inevitably emerge in this universe and he recognizes that that it's not an accident uh but then he asks what about other universes so it gets into to the whole Multiverse that's the whole yeah um but here's the thing people are accepting this theological narrative and you can accept that narrative and then you can just like Michael Shermer like people like him were just completely on board with this m but you can leave God out of the story and just not mention like the fine-tuning thing and they'll go oh it's completely mechanistic this is completely consistent with a completely natural conception of the world and it's funny because you can get them to accept things that they had previously said would be proof for God and now suddenly you explain every mechanism behind it right and they accept it but without putting it as for God one other example I'll give you that's in this new book that stepen Hawkins collaborator wrote basically saying the the final ideas of Steven Hawking and he seemed to come to this same evolutionary view that the universe is this participatory Universe he seemed to um take on Wheeler's idea that you know life plays this essential role and collapsing the wave function and bringing reality into existence but that also there's this evolutionary story and that life was inevitable and it the universe is self-organizing and it's this adaptive system it's really interesting I wish you would have written the book himself because it would have changed everything like if you read that like it's not what he was saying before about life being this insignificant chemical scum um but one thing that he focuses on is the the big bang uh before we had the Big Bang Theory uh the idea was that the Universe was eternal and that it existed forever and that's because saying that the Universe had a moment of creation like The Big Bang Theory was considered to be something that would be evidence for a Creator and so Einstein was approached by a priest um George I forget his name but he was the guy who was pushing for The Big Bang Theory and he was seeing it as something that provided evidence for God and Einstein like had first rejected for that reason and most was this shardon I thought it might have been shardon who um he might have talked about there there were people who had this these ideas of the Universe um having a a moment where it came into existence but prior to that it was that it existed eternally and I think that was one reason Einstein put in the cosmological constant to his theory um because it I think if you acknowledge that the Universe was expanding you had to acknowledge a beginning Singularity yeah if you acknowledge that it seemed to point to a a moment of creation it was it was seen as a religious idea at first and proof for God but here's what's strange about it the moment you prove it scientifically then you don't ask about a Creator you just seem to have this self-contained story so what I'm arguing is that we've been proving the god hypothesis over and over again uh first with the the Big Bang theory that there was a moment of creation and second with fine-tuning and third with this teleological story that there's this narrative where there's this purpose to Cosmic Evolution so these are all things that if we were time traveling basian and we went back 300 years after the Newtonian Revolution and every like to someone like llas who believed in determinism we said oh yeah what would you expect to see if there was a god they would say well there would be a moment of creation to the universe there would be uh um some sort of fine-tuning some sort of evidence for design and there would be this Progressive Evolution if you're arguing that the Universe has some function or purpose you would see Evolution has this direction and so the infuriating thing about it is that all these things keep getting like proven or at least they're great arguments that are scientific that exist for them but as soon as you accept those things and you explain it mechanis basically people don't want to just completely take it away from all the things that you prior that previously you listed as evidence for some sort of design or purpose or Consciousness or Intelligence being fundamental um something more than an accidental universe so what I'm arguing is that we have been proving God and we've been proving magic every Century with every new paradigm but because it's a unprovable statement because the way we Define God is something that exists outside of nature magic is something Supernatural that the moment we prove it we seem to disprove it at the same time and we need to understand the Paradox um uh the Paradox um is intrinsic to our language and how we've misdefined things so we need to stop thinking of magic is Supernatural and a intelligent Creator is Supernatural because as soon as we have an explanation for those things if anything exists you can explain them you can start studying them systematically if for example I don't believe in ghost but let's just say we did started to see signs of ghost something would be knocked over and it would happen when someone did a seance something wacky if that thing is observed then you could start building a statistical mechanics of ghost you could start understanding when they come you could start having a causal picture of ghosts the only reason I use that point is that there's nothing that's Supernatural the the word is intrinsically incoherent the moment something exists it can be studied systematically and then it just has to be incorporated to our na into our natural worldview and the simulation theory is interesting because I see no distinction between a simulation Theory yeah and a theory of intelligent design that's a deistic theory where God created the universe and then let it evolve according to those laws sure sure yeah that was a very very meaty riff and there's so there's like multiple things that I was like oh we got to talk about this more we got to talk about that more um and I don't know if we can get to all of them but one of the things I definitely want to return to a little bit is synchronicity and this this feeling like there is some kind of unknown connection between the mind and the physical world that we don't we don't have control over but we feel in like a flash of significance that this is occuring like this is happening and it's it's in a such a statistically unlikely way that it's very difficult to dismiss it's it's almost like trying to dismiss the brute fact of the universe's existence or something when it happens to you it's like that was undeniable like when you get hit with a really unbelievable synchronicity and I have would this be like flashes of insights or would this be something like someone calls you that you were thinking about that you haven't talked to for 10 years I would call I would call the latter one like a almost like a um a simple synchronicity like i' I've had extremely complex like multi-layered weird ones like there's one that I've told multiple times in the podcast but I I can tell you the story if you want to know it but it involves multiple people it involves like one specific symbol and all of it happening at the same time in in across like vast distances when we're when me and this other person are going to the same place so it was like a just really uh mind kind of make all your hairs stand up kind of stuff um but I'll just I'll tell you after um we record but for other people it's the rose synchronicity you can look up Rose synchronicity I have a video specifically about it with the person it happened with but but anyway there was a guy who also is a neuroscientist who made a video um about synchronicity and the idea that using penrose's three World model of reality like the this idea of okay there is this mental world of reality there is this physical world and there is this realm of mathematical forms or of um we would call it like platonic forms a synchronicity this is hugely nutshell it and I also made a video on this by the way and added some additional things um a synchronicity could be like when all three of those worlds kind of harmonize all at once in an individual like where the the physical the the sort of unseen you know platonic realm of order and logos and your um and your mind all at the same time apprehend something in a way that we don't fully have the equipment to to fully appreciate but okay so that that was one tangent that I wanted to quickly return to but you you brought up uh girdle and you brought up the God proof and I know that after he died they discovered that he had done an ontological proof like sort of a proof for God I've tried to digest that and I have mostly failed have you have you done a deep di um no I looked into it and thought it was super interesting but he does have this God proof or an existence proof um I forget the specifics of it but it's not the same as what I was arguing but I wish you were alive because I would like to make that argument which is more like language based it's like you have these true but improvable statements because words are defined as being outside of what's provable so they're inherently unprovable even if you do prove them but um I think his was something mathematical where it was a form like a formal logic statement like I mean he presents it's multi-layered it's like it's like there's AXS he presents and then there are statements and then there's like a logic like a sentential logic kind of component to it where it's all formal formalized yeah I I I I I used to be able to sum it up in a couple sentences but now yeah it's been a couple years so there was just one week where I was just completely obsessed with it um but yeah I forget the argument so in a future time off to come back on and try to explain that but I think it was just something like there's like whatever you conceive of there's something greater there was something that in some abstract way equated to God but where logicians accept the proof as being valid but still don't accept it as being proof for yeah uh a designer but I think it probably then kind of dovet Tales into what I was talking about because there is something that he proved that people actually you know logicians say this proof is legit but again it probably doesn't prove God to them because God is something outside of what can be proved yeah that that's a really just interesting thing to try to wrap your mind around is that to someone who for whatever reason is frozen over to the idea of there being any kind of God or a AG or you know whatever you want to call it you can always turn it back into magic in a way that they refuse to accept after it's been to your point it's sort of been proven like using using the scientific method in some strange way yeah and and and goto was religious and you know Newton was this Mystic that yeah thought there were Secrets hidden in the Bible um but all of that is covered up too like there's a goal biography and I wanted to read about this you know existence Pro because he thought it was really important you don't see it in the auto I mean in the biography at all it's not anywhere mentioned in the book and really his religious views weren't discussed at all and even on I think the Wikipedia page they mention it they're like um yeah he was Christian okay but um there there's something specific I I've seen where it's explained it was like and goto was very concerned because he thought he had prove god um but it made it sound like it was something that he didn't want to prove and it was something that like had come to him but he was a religious person I think there's just in general been a kind of whitewashing of Science History where people want to cover up people's religious beliefs um the founders of the second law of thermody DCS people like Lord Kelvin uh he was religious and he thought the heat death could be prevented by life and he actually said that in lectures like if you read the intro to this book The animate and the inanimate by this guy William ctis who I think had the highest IQ of any child ever born and he was um like considered to be he they thought he was going to be like you know the next genius but it didn't turn out that way but um he wrote a really interesting book called The animate and the inanimate um he talks about Lord Kelvin being religious and thinking that life could prevent heat death and Sir Arthur Edington was another really famous he was one of the most famous science Educators and explainers of the time he was the person that made Einstein's relativity like famous and accepted by the world because he's the one that interpreted and put it into plain language um and he was a Christian as well um and you always he gets quoted about the second law of Thermodynamics being something that you can't violate but he called himself a rational Mystic I think that's the word that he used and a lot of these people would really Einstein himself would would would be considered Mystics by today's standards so um yeah someone should go out there and write a pop article about goal's God prooof and explain it I would I need someone to like walk me through it in a in a explain like I'm five kind of way because I did struggle my way through a sentential logic class in college and it was rough and I I don't think I can re I don't think I can reabsorb everything I would have to to to actually figure out what exactly he's saying I have a sense that it could be an enhancement of already existing ontological proofs like Aristotle's kind of unmoved mover and then aquinus riff off of that and I think his might have been a further [Music] logically rigorous version of that but I I cannot remember for sure I'm sure the way the proof worked is insanely complicated but there was like a simple concept behind it that could be summarized with just like a few sentences um it's kind of like his incompleteness theorem in general because it's like you can sort of get the nut of it in a really simple thing but to really fully appreciate what he's demonstrated you got to go deeper into it yeah he was insane yeah is yeah the the incompleteness theorem he developed this coding scheme where he took the Liars Paradox that I am lying and just basically turned that into mathematical symbols and apparently to do that was like the most rigorous insane thing that like no one would ever just think about doing so um he's really fascinating to me and the fact that he was obsessed with this God prooof um and was religious uh because I feel like we're just given we're fed this story that every scientific mind that's celebrated is just like an atheist and it's completely not true 100% yeah let's get into the sort of weird macro thing that we H have not gotten to yet and we can we can wrap it up with this which is I don't think we have specifically gotten into what this Omega point is and what this point of both maximal complexity and intelligence in the universe would look like but but this actually is very similar we brought up Hegel recently and Hegel seemed to believe something very similar that the Universe was both complexifying and trending toward I think what he called a state of maximal freedom I think is the word that he used and that you can see throughout history that there's this natural Bend toward Freedom like people are gaining rights people are gaining freedoms and gaining um information and this would just continue basically out into the universe until we reach this very similar kind of endpoint that you're describing and there there may be some differences though I think the differences I thought you and I might have and um you and he might have I don't think are nearly as big as as what I thought but heg seem comfortable to place himself more closely aligned with platonism again in like that there he had his own terminology for um that that he used basically in place of like platonic ideas like the one and like the the ideas and stuff like that but essentially the same idea um and it seems like you're proposing something very similar that the universe is trending toward this point of maximal complexity and maximal intelligence and that whatever that is would be indistinguishable from creating God right yeah so I think the first thing to explain when people hear this view they don't know what we mean but you can draw a parallel between a human society and a human brain because a brain is a collection of neurons that are each basically indivi individual agents and there's 80 billion neurons each neuron is connected to each other by around 10,000 synapses so you think of yourself as one conscious entity but part of what creates that conscious Consciousness or at least makes you a receiver for that Consciousness is these 80 billion neurons interacting and so when you have a civilization with billions of people informationally connected in person exchanging information by talking or connected by telephones now connected by the internet and zoom chats like this one and everybody watching this podcast and talking about it online you have a system that's exchanging information in ways very similar to the brain so then the question is do you have the emergence of something like a global mind and when you bring up that word Global mind then is it like a subconscious mind where it's more just like a computational intelligence that doesn't really have this first-person point of view or will does it have this Consciousness at this higher level or maybe it doesn't have it right now but it'll emerge at a state of higher integration that we're headed towards um so when you understand that Consciousness can emerge at these higher levels because you have a system with the same sort of structural and functional properties mimicking uh you know organisms and brains then you get this idea of being able to have these emergent consciousnesses at this higher level where the computational power of that system is just so much more advanced than one single individual that you have this computational or cognitive system with a Godlike intelligence and so it gets into that sort of God prooof thing again in this point about words having flexible definitions like every every time we Define a word it's it's it's pretty ambiguous yeah um so when you have this idea of this intelligence that could potentially have mental power that we can't fathom and causal power ability to manipulate nature then you know you start to see that how you define it it could be something like a god it could be worthy of being called a god um so then the question is do the individual agents that comprise that entity sort of lose their individual Consciousness and become this one Uber Consciousness or do the individual agent retain their Consciousness while there's this larger collective intelligence that emerges from that and I think it's probably the second um or maybe there's a way to be an individual and with some certain structure where there's some sort of sort of Harmony or resonance between all the the nodes the way you see conscious States emerge and dissolve in the brain where you um when you have this certain um synchrony like at like 50 hertz there's certain neural signatures in the brain where you see conscious States and meditative States being at a state that's more synchronous so maybe it's something that you could sort of plug into and then disconnect from but the idea is that if you have intelligent agents exchanging information and you have life spreading throughout the Universe uh and being informationally connective connected that it's going to create some larger computational mind and just like you're an individual made of cells and in evolutionary history those cells are the descendants of single cell agents which were themselves autonomous agents um you can imagine something like a cosmic scale entity emerging and that being where this complexity growth process is ultimately headed and if so then the evolutionary process is constructing god um and that's not to say there wasn't a designer before um I tend to think that this process is larger than this universe we inhabit and that this universe was designed but that doesn't mean there's some all powerful God that knows exactly what's going to happen it's a self-organizing system so you can see in general outline what's going to happen but there's an element of Randomness too and right now I'm writing an article it'll be out in uh the next few weeks for NOA that shows how you can have determinism and Randomness in this picture of a self-organizing universe that you have this global macr scale determinism but you still have Randomness at the quantum level but also at the classical level it's starting to be understood you could look up the physicist Nicholas uh jyson I think that's how you pronounce his name but he was interviewed recently about this on Kurt gongal uh oh yeah podcast theories of everything but the idea is that even even at the classical scale when you have chaotic processes there's some indeterminism there so um the idea would be that the this emergence what this universe would what this system is creating could potentially build a God that's more powerful than the god that created it just the way we could we're creating Ai and intelligences that you know could potentially um you know be more advanced but yeah so so maybe uh each emergence is more computationally powerful than the intelligent agent or Collective that design that reality and then you get poetic metan naturalism extends outside of this universe and you just get a series of emergences that are creating something more intricate and more computationally powerful than the level that created it um but yeah so the idea is that the evolutionary process could be creating this computational structure there's a great um paper that got a lot of Buzz about the universe potentially being a neural network that I mentioned um I wrote an article for a big think but like a year before that it was like Microsoft researchers think the universe could be um a learning machine so they use that term learning machine which I think is great um because because neural network might have a lot of specific associations that might not apply I just see it as life is this um phenomenon that's encoding knowledge and that yeah is helping the universe wake up so Lee smolen and jiren laner were two authors on that paper but yeah if you take this idea that the universe is a learning machine um you and you extrapolate you can see that as leading to this state where the universe wakes up in Ray K's Singularity is near he also has his diagram where he shows you know from the beginning of the Big Bang to life emerging and spreading he also believes that it's going to culminate in this ultimate process but you're asking about specifics of that you know what are we talking about there right um I think it would be this and hard chardin also equated these emergences it's like aega point with something spiritual and I think it would have to be I think spirituality is going to be forced back into science because whenever we have an emergence that subsumes us and makes us part of a larger collective intelligence that's harmonious there's something spiritual there I Define spirituality is understanding that you're connected to something that's larger than yourself um and I think a lot of people like Carl Sean defined it that way so so I think we're part of a purposeful process that's building something not outside of us we're we're we're fundamentally part of that process we're drivers of that process the process is dependent on us we do gain more agency and more freedom more individuality we're less restricted by our automatic programming we're able to self-reflect uh so using that mind two instead of Mind One when we become more uh self-aware um and meta aware that we're these conscious agents that have the ability to choose our future path and we can consider all possibilities we gain more freedom but we're also constrained by this imperative to survive so every agent is playing the same game every agent has to survive in our individual survival and the survival of our progyny is dependent on a coherent civilization we're going to run out of energy uh Our Stars going to die at some point so that creates a thermodynamic necessity for us to always continually spread um the thermodynamic constraints like really Force life to build this structure that we've called this Cosmic scale God so it's not something that we have a choice to do we're forced into doing it by our imperative to survive but at the same time we're gaining more individual freedom and autonomy as we become more intelligent and less constrained by the laws of physics and by our automatic responses yeah so interesting man and there there's so many stones left unturned because like that we haven't talked a lot about things like free will we haven't talked about um I think it might have been the same two physicists you just mentioned that posit that essentially black holes are the be either the beginnings of other universes or they create baby universes and those baby universes sort of inherit properties from the universe that they're offshoots of like they would inherit the sort of logos or like Cosmic uh genealogy or whatever and then that's the way universes grow or spread like there's so many other way talk abouten yeah he's a physicist that came up with the idea of cosmological Natural Selections which see black holes as big gang events creating new universes which is really logical um and then that baby Universe would inherit the properties of this universe so if there's this fine tuning that leaves leads to life and leads to this teologico uh go towards this Cosmic Omega point so you could imagine that even if the universe is building this computational structure that's this Cosmic mind that would be equivalent to a god be this ultimate spiritual point of culmination perhaps that isn't the end maybe there's this network of universes that are becoming organisms that then come together and merge and form some sort of something equivalent to a multiscale organism but at this Multiverse level so recursive emergence is potentially a process that doesn't end and it goes beyond what we can conceive of even this totally psychedelic crazy idea of the universe waking up that's potentially not the end of the process we could be at the beginning of infinity as David de says love that man that's a great kind of mic drop quote I think and you have sufficiently melted my brain and I'm sure many others in this one uh we should definitely do it again looking forward to uh the next book and uh let me know when you have more articles coming out too I'll be happy to to share those Rifts as well I always love talking to you Michael and uh if anybody wants to read more check out my book The Romance of reality or my substack road to Omega and uh that's where I'm going to be updating you on things relating to uh the next book that's coming out probably out in like a year year and a half fabulous

Channel: THIRD EYE DROPS

Views: 48,497

Keywords: donald hoffman, simulation theory, bobby azarian, cognitive science, complexity science, artificial intelligence, philosophy podcast, quantum physics, donald hoffman bernardo kastrup, bernardo kastrup, donald hoffman reality, noosphere, consciousness

Id: THNVAZEx9UM

Length: 121min 14sec (7274 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024