Susan Blackmore - Does Consciousness Lead to God?

sue the postulate of an immortal soul is very significant for those people who believe in god now that's part of what we call the mind-body problem i'm an old neurophysiologist and so i'm very familiar with how the brain works but help help us understand the issue of that question is there an immortal soul uh in terms of the mind-body problem i think we have to start from how it feels it feels like there's an immortal soul it feels as though what's important about me is that i'm conscious there's things i'm conscious of and there's me and that me is something that feels as though it lives in the body and has free will and can you know make my arms move that sort of thing it just seems to feel that way there are lots of reasons in the evolutionary theory why it should feel that way but you then go and look in a brain and what do you find i mean you know what you'll see in there don't you actually i've never looked in my own brain but you will see a great kind of porridgey mass in there of billions of neurons connected up in billions of ways um how can our soul be there the more we understand about the brain the further neurophysiology and neuroscience progresses the less room there is for our soul or even for a self because all of the jobs that were previously given to the soul being conscious causing actions um thinking um having insight um thinking up new ideas being creative all of those things we we are beginning to see how the brain does them also there's no middle i mean the concept of the soul is very much related to the idea that stuff comes in to me and i'm conscious of it and then i decide what to do as though there's a sort of middle or a top so you know where i am but the brain isn't organized that way it's massive parallel lots and lots of different things all going on at once with no middle so this huge clash between neuroscience and how it feels and so and so that's the genesis of the of the problem the genesis of the problem goes way way back long before people knew anything about um neurophysiology and how the brain works they still could see there was a mind body problem in the sense that you know there's all these physical things and hands and arms that move a bit like machinery and there's also experience so the origin is long before neurophysiology but interestingly neurophysiology seems to make the problem worse not better it's as though it's kind of pushing us and pushing us and pushing us to realize that we've got a completely wrong view we need a massive paradigm shift you know the old-fashioned view is absolutely i'm a spirit or a soul and i'm important and i'll you know i might even live forever that's the kind of starting point for all human cultures and sciences forcing us forcing us and forcing us and forcing us as it forced us to see that the earth is not the center of the universe and uh you know we're not the only reason for life on this planet it's forcing us i think to to to come to that truth we're not we're not a spirit we're not a soul we're not even a little self-inhabiting our brains the more sophisticated arguments today start by saying when i look at your beautiful coat that i'm i'm perceiving the colors and the reds and and yet if you look at my brain at that same time and had had billions of electrodes into billions of neurons you would see a lot of spikes and a lot of activity that would directly relate to it but spikes and and uh evoked potentials and electrical responses in in that description is not in any way the same kind of description of of what i'm seeing the two have are totally different they may be 100 correlate there may be cause and effect but there is absolutely no similarity in the descriptor of of each that's where the argument starts today that's how it seems and that's what that's a wonderful explanation of why it's a mystery so how do we get out of that it's so it's an extraordinary position that we're forced into isn't it how can neuron firings be your experience of this red and yours might be different from mine how do we get out of those traps i think we get it we got into them by thinking about ourselves in completely the wrong way and we've got to get out of that somehow so is it possible to give up the idea that there's a little self in here or that there's free will that the things that that tie us endlessly round in that trap and i think it is i think there are two ways we have to do this one is the science the more the neurophysiology we do the starker the problem comes we just keep doing it and keep doing it until we really know exactly what's happening when you're looking at the red thing the other thing i think we do is work with our own experience so i've been meditating for nearly 25 years now i do a lot of meditation as a way of training the mind to look well what is it like to look at red it's easy enough to just go oh i know what it's like to see red but actually odd things start to happen um take interesting drugs try all kinds of mind-altering techniques do all sorts of things to try and actually say well what is it like to see red or to experience this amazing museum how can we bring those two things together now i think when you let go of the idea that there's a little self in here and let go of the idea that there's free will and that i am a free thing in here that's doing stuff and actually just behave as though it's all just the universe doing its stuff the problem begins to ease a little somehow that's the way we what does that mean the universe doing its stuff there's not separate souls and spirits okay if there aren't that's what the science seems to be telling us let's try and live that way so right now i'm not thinking in here is not thinking going on oh i'm now doing a tv interview rather it's all happening this tv interview is happening there's all just stuff pointlessly going on you don't have to be unkind about tv i mean it's not that pointless it has a little bit of a point what i mean is what i mean is gosh this is taking us a long way in a sense from the mind body problem but it's all tied up with it i think from the science that i know and all these years of studying this stuff that this is a pointless universe we are here for no reason at all we evolved the way we did because of the the happenstance of the way this planet is and it's all just stuff happening everything happens because of what happened before and it's that kind of a universe and you're completely convinced that we can explain everything about our self-consciousness our mental life by what resides exclusively in our heads well i think we will but not as a materialist i mean that's the trouble people so often when they say that i think they mean oh well we'll get rid of consciousness we'll explain it away and it'll all be matter but that won't work somehow we have to see through the duality i don't know how we're going to do it but i know certain things won't work you know inventing spirits and souls that can't be found for goodness sake i spent 25 years as a parapsychologist looking for those things and we loved you for it thank you but i was hit again and again and again with the facts and it's not like that you know i couldn't find any telepathy i couldn't find any clairvoyance i couldn't find any evidence of life after death all the evidence again and again just disappeared the deeper i looked into it so i think you know we are forced to try to understand it without recourse to all those kinds of things without recourse to a soul or a spirit we haven't done it that's what makes science at the moment so absolutely well neuroscience are absolutely gripping and wonderful because it's pushing us up against that most human of questions you know who am i why am i here what is this and we will sometime i'm sure um come to some resolution but it won't be by getting rid of consciousness or getting rid of mata it will be somehow seeing how they're the same thing but having no souls no spirits nothing nothing non-physical as part of the picture no nothing non-physical in that sense of of you know something in another dimension or some sort of waffley little spirits and not that sort of thing but what quite we'll end up with meaning by physical and non-physical fundamental changes are going to be needed to bring together mind and matter to see that they are the same thing they've got to be somehow and i i don't see how i don't think anyone sees how yet but that's the way we have to go

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 10,383

Rating: 4.4223194 out of 5

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, Susan Blackmore, Does Consciousness Lead to God, Consciousness god, Consciousness, susan blackmore, existence of god

Id: _-H9vGB2RsQ

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021