Ed Kelly interviewed by John Cleese @ Science, Skeptics and the Study of Consciousness

all right edge Kenny head and I know each other for 20 years yes it really must be yeah I love this man and he could talk to me for four days without stopping and I wouldn't be able but I want you to tell where we're sitting now in a room in do PS the Department of perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia all right so what's it all about Dobbs is probably the oldest and most productive university based organization in the world devoted exclusively to the study of things that challenge current mainstream orthodoxy about mine brain the possibility of survival and all of that as you know I love it because I got into Cambridge on science and thank God I escaped I escaped by going to the law and I escaped from that too but what I did what I did have formerly armed was a certain skepticism about how much if science was you know a chef and it always seemed to me there were a lot of people around who were pretending that science was not what it was so I'm fascinated you're looking at the sort of stuff that scientists either disapprove of or laugh at or it's a bit crude we're putting hell yeah very much give me the example well anything that pertains to survival or to paranormal stuff attracts lots of hostility from mainstream scientists and particularly I should say psychologists neuroscientists biologists because those guys tend to live in the world of late 19th century physics triaged oh yes and pre quantum theory you know everybody knows all scientists know that those things exist but most of them see them sort of way off in the distance somewhere you know the relativity deals with huge scale things quantum theory deals with little tiny things but here on our scale the old ideas strictly hold right like or quemic know yesterday I can ignore epsilon2 physics now and we can pretend that Newton was 100 cent right there's nothing else for our purposes yeah from there are even arguments in the journal science exactly to that effect we can ignore quantum theory has nothing to do with the brain Harold on sparker yes taught by one of the co-authors of that article for him he's outraged by it so there's the insanity of it is this that the most important single factor in being a human being is our consciousness mm-hmm and these guys claims it's an accidental byproduct of chemical reactions absolutely right yeah well how can you I mean it seems to be so patently absurd how can you put that into words it's really hard to understand and I've said this many times that I think in the not very distant future a lot of historians and sociologists of science are going to make a good living trying to figure out why it's taken science so long to catch on to the fact that this stuff is everywhere well that's again doctors blend people for 2,000 years before they discovered it didn't really work so you don't expect anything too fast to happen them another science because it's Max Planck said he said science progresses one funeral at a time it's very hard to change the mind of scientists but a bit I mean there are many examples in the history of science where scientists are preventing progress of other scientists on things that we now take for granted yeah can you give some of their blood go on tell me or infection Semmelweis our circulation of the blood brother well that's not what I know a great deal about all right tell me about tell me about infection in hospital Semmelweis caught on to the fact that doctors were spreading infections from one little pregnant woman having experiencing childbirth being infected and then her infection going to the next one having a child and they were dying right in the left and he tried to convince his collie so they could stop that from happening and he basically got run out of the hospital that's that's a crude caricature pretty beautiful it's like remember Graham Chapman lovely post it was a doctor telling me about iatrogenic diseases diseases caused by doctors yeah in fact you know going to our hospitals one of the leading causes of death cause of death is medical errors right yeah yeah so we have this kind of attitude towards sound it's not just doctors and scientists in general and the fact is that if they come across something they can't explain mm-hmm they pretend it really doesn't exist mm-hmm you bet I mean the kind of stuff that we study challenges deeply held beliefs of many main mainstream scientists and some can tolerate that and some really can't I mean it's like a religious thing you know it's like it's exactly like it's the same I can like heresy in the in dangers yeah her seeing the temple of science and they take the attitude a bit like Galileo sitting and standing there with his telescope right and scholastics there and he's saying would you please look through my telescope you'll see the craters on the moon and they're saying we don't need to look through the telescope because we know they're not there I mean that's pure insanity but you know you know it's a caricature at all of what you're up against yeah and there is the you know there are people out there who made careers out of being professional skeptics and often very poorly informed but they don't have to read the literature do absolutely they sort of say we don't need to read the richer's be know it's rubbish yeah yeah so when you're doing stuff here you impose your bit famous here for imposing very rigorous scientific procedures we do you do our best talk a little bit about it well I mean I would really probably turn to my own stuff in the lab yeah my background is in experimental psychology and neuroscience and what we want to do is to study things that are going on in the brain and body when people are succeeding at controls side tasks of various kinds guessing ESP cards or playing cards or things of that sort remote viewing yeah that's one of the other examples of this kind of thing and we're also interested in fact I think ultimately more interested in studying certain kinds of altered states of consciousness that we know from historical and some experimental studies are conducive to unusual outbreaks of sight phenomena so for example things like deep meditative States deep hypnotic States out-of-body States things of that sort mediumship and when you give details of this kind of research the skeptics the people were determined that there could be nothing in this as opposed to people who skeptic you in the possible opposites the word which is cautious right right Carol what what would they say to to for example an out-of-body experience when people have come out of that bunny observed very frequently the operation that they're having at the time and then left the operating theatre and are able to report on things that you can check factually later that happen outside the Unrated or things that happen in the operating theatre they couldn't possibly know about because of the anesthetics they were well you know most of the time critics of these kinds of experiences essentially deny that evidence they say this is just anecdotal aren't experiments these are just reports this observation Mis recollection and things of that sort and they'll offer some alternative explanation if they even even a person who accepts the reality of SCI can take the view that maybe the person who was being operated on let's say acquired that information by some kind of a side process and just dramatizes like a dream the experience of leaving the body and going somewhere that didn't really happen so what we have to do if we want to use out-of-body experiences as evidence for survival we really need to get some kind of evidence that something really does leave the body and go somewhere that's a kind of experiment that we'd like to do here we have enough are very good on that we've thought about it we have a half-written proposal I mean the most interesting thing for me in the world is does consciousness get produced by the brain one of 99% of the people say of course well that's good it come from Wow but I'm fascinated by the idea that this this isn't the creator of it this is the transmitter like a television set television set doesn't create the program it makes the program up is being created somewhere else and presents it to you so you can see it and the possibility is that this thing here is picking up stuff from outside and presenting it to us in a way that we can actually see what to do that's really the central argument of our book irreducible mind yes published in 2007 yeah Wow wonderful book which nobody knows on it if there is survival clearly yeah consciousness can exist apart from her brain well when I hear about Oh bees yeah I could talk to a woman 20 years ago bad car accident on the table rose up went down the corridor went into the waiting room observed her parents watching sitting around talking Gilligan's Island on the television mm-hmm the right the sister was there the brother arrived late and of course when she came out of the operation she started talking about this and they all got so upset and worried about it that they hushed it up you know they're actually about a hundred cases of that sort in the literature Oh a hundred yeah Janet uh Janice Holden has in particular looked up a lot of those there's another slant on this too which is really important and Bruce is the one really to race yeah well he's the NDE yes a lot of Indies not just a few a lot occur under conditions that are so extreme physiologically that 99% of all neuroscientists would say you cannot have any experience under those conditions but you don't have to look at this because it didn't happen right no this time I mean this is a different kind of argument to challenge the mainstream view yeah there's a really well a high degree of consensus among neuroscientists about what your brain has to be capable of in order to to express consciousness wherever it comes from and yet those conditions are strictly abolished in deep general anesthesia and cardiac arrest and yet many experiences occur under exactly those circumstances now the way that the way people defend themselves against that is that well you don't really know when the experience occurred Bo you see if the person reports things that were actually happening during the period of unconsciousness it's getting much harder to deny the force of that argument which is why anybody is you know a determined defender of the conventional viewpoint he's going to try to erase all that evidence yeah so that's what's going on that's the state of the debate right now and the state of the debate is there are certain things conventional pre Einstein pre quantum physics can't explain certain things yeah and and they don't want to look at that right because if they looked at that the whole structure would begin to crumble yeah of course a lot of it would stay in place yeah a lot of really important but a key a key bit been completely missing at the precise yeah yeah all right so they're so

Channel: UVA Division of Perceptual Studies

Views: 11,168

Keywords: Division of Perceptual Studies, John Cleese, Edward F. Kelly, Consciousness, Science and Skeptics, Irreducible Mind, Beyond Physicalism, Mind Body

Id: QzM_EWbKqCA

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019