Understanding Consciousness | Full Debate | Rupert Sheldrake, George Ellis, Amie Thomasson

[Music] or all of our panelists are under the impression that there is something rather than nothing so the question is why or indeed whether or not we should ask that question so I'm delighted to welcome them all to discuss it Rupert Sheldrake is well known biologist author of a number of books proponent of the theory of morphic resonance and a famously his latest book is called science and spiritual practices George Ellis is a very distinguished theoretical physicist he wrote the book on the large scale structure of space-time with Stephen Hawking and Amy Thomason is a metaphysician and her latest book is ontology made easy ontology for those of you don't know is the the theory of what there is the theory of existence and Amy is well known among meta positions for her work she from University of Dartmouth so very pleased to welcome them all and we'll begin with each of them making a kind of position statement of their view on this question why is there something rather than nothing so should we start with you Rupa oh all right and I was expecting to go last but we'll shall we start with Amy that okay by me yes all right so I'm gonna try to make this question easier to like I try to make ontology easy so as the representative philosopher up here what I think philosophy has to contribute to a question like this or most any question is to try to clarify the question what can it mean what are we asking anyway and so any good philosopher starts by defining her terms right so let's start here with something and this is a term that I've written something about in my second book ordinary objects so something is a slippery term there's at least a couple of different uses we have of it in everyday English there's one use in which we use it as what philosophers would call a sortal term roughly to pick out independently movable unified lumps of stuff bottles and it's of paper and so on right this is the sense in which you say the tables wobbly can you please give me something to put under the leg right but then we also use something that's what I've called a covering term or some people talk about a dumb ol dummy sortal and that is a sense in which from the application of any other count noun we're entitled to infer there's something right so if there's a rock in my shoe I can say there's something in my shoe if there's broccoli in the fridge I can say there's something in the fridge if there's a protest on Main Street I can say there's something happening on Main Street if I'm worrying about my future I can say there's something on my mind but it doesn't have to be a physical object here right so what are we asking about when we ask why is there something rather than nothing maybe we'll talk a little bit uh thing later I'll start with something well it can't be the sortal sense right if we want to know why there are bottles and tables and rocks right then presumably physics gave the answer to us a long time ago we could explain that in terms of particles and their ways of unifying and bonding in certain ways that makes them more tightly bonded to each other than to the surrounding stuff that's not what we're asking about but if we're using the term in the covering sense then what we really have to be asking is some more explicit specific question right but if we resolve it into some of these other sortal terms why are there rocks or cats or cars right then at that stage I think there's no serious feeling anymore this is an intractable mysterious question that the sciences couldn't possibly answer in fact the most plausible candidate once you start putting in substituting in specific terms for something would be something like why are there particles right and my understanding is that as scientists continue to develop that physicists have gotten pretty good plausible explanations of why there are particles and how these might emerge from quantum vacuums right in which case it looks like maybe we could get a scientific explanation of that too so as just kind of a brief introduction to my angle on this I think we need to refine the question but once we refine it and I've started by talking about something that I think what we get is a series of more scientifically tractable questions the apparently intractable old question that Lydon exposed and Heidegger reiterated thank you very much that's very clear thank you George okay I've got really two things I want to say the first is about physics and nothingness and in physics terms many way many people use it nothing is a vacuum so you take everything out that you can and you use the highest pressure thank you pump you care then you've got nothing no in fact this because of quantum physics this is not nothing it's a very very complex structure and it's now a pretty well agreed feature of quantum field theory that when you try to extract energy all the energy till nothing is there because of the uncertainty principle virtual particles are both buzzing into existence and out of existence all the time look at the quantum vacuum is a highly dynamic structure and there's a huge amount written about that it exists as it does because of the underlying physical laws namely the nature of quantum physics and so if you say to yourself if you say could the universe come into existence out of nothing and your starting point is this kind of vacuum the response to this is this is not nothing it's a very very complex very highly structure why does it exist because of the nature of the laws of physics and nothing which could have a whole defect in terms of ontology what although there was a physics wider the laws of physics exist which is a very complex structure discussion because there are one view of the laws of physics that they are descriptive in another view of the laws of physics that they are prescriptive and in neither case do we know why the laws of physics exist or why they have the form they have so there's a whole discussion about that from the physics side but I want to now complicated the picture by saying that as someone who is a physicist but also thinks in more philosophical terms what exists is not only physical if you want to say what exists it is a big mistake to say that only physical things exist and so what does any we do not be intimidated by reductionist into agreeing the it's only particles and forces that exist because that isn't true ideas exist and so alright you may say this involves the brain and it's a complex thing so instead let me to say the following example algorithms exist an algorithm is a procedure which is used in computers in order to create things for instance most of the motor cars that you drive around and today are created in factories because an algorithmic directing what happens in the factory and that is the reason that the motor car exists now what is an algorithm made of is it made of wood or concrete or particles of some kind the answer is an algorithm is an abstract entity it is realized in various ways in these computers and then through that realization it causes motorcars to come into existence because they wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the album but the algorithm itself is an abstract entity so if you want to describe why things exist not only do you have to think about why particles exist and forces because you also gotta think about why abstract entities exists and I can give you many other examples with my concrete immediate example as algorithms which undoubtedly exist they undoubtedly have causal power in the real world as it exists today okay thank you well when I was thinking about this discussion I read Lawrence Krauss whose book something from nothing because that's the most popular visual version of this debate from the cosmological point of view at the moment and what struck me about it and what struck me about most arguments is how conservative they are if you look at traditional discussions of why there's something rather than nothing the traditional ones are theological discussions they start from the assumption that there's a source of all things which is threefold in Kashmir Shaivism it's called para shiva the unified source of all things with shiva which represents the principle of form or order and Shakti which represents the principle of energy or power in the Christian version of the Holy Trinity you have guard the ground of all being you have the Lagos which is the mind of God the form the source of all form and you have the spirit which is the source of energy movement in power well in lawrence krauss you have a source which he doesn't discuss but it has two manifestations one the laws of nature which may be the field of all possible laws of nature that may apply to all universes but that's taken for granted as pre-existing and then you have the quantum vacuum which is the source of all potential energy and power for this and all other universes in other words it's exactly like Shakti and his role of the laws of nature is exactly like Shiva or all the law casts on the spirit so the the this seemingly radical atheistic view is extraordinarily conservative in philosophical and theological terms it just rephrases them and with a few kind of polemical jabs against sort of old-fashioned theologians he's basically restated the ancient case for the existence of God he goes even further he says in that the it's the nature of the quantum vacuum is so unstable that it almost inevitably would give rise to a universe through a kind of fluctuation say okay let's look at Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 the earth was without form at the world without form and void and the Spirit of God moved on the face of the deep all the face of the waters well the quantum vacuum is pretty well a modern version of the face of the deep and if the Spirit of God the wind moves on the face of the deep it creates waves and the waves presumably follow a law like structure so what struck me about all this was that the debate is essentially a theological debate that's been reframed in these modern physical terms and the really interesting question for me about it is that in the theological debate the ground of all this is conscious where as for Lawrence Krauss and materialists an atheist the ground of all this is unconscious no it's a matter of faith either way I suppose but as far as I can see the advantage of the ultimate ground of being being conscious has first of all you don't you're there's a basis for these rational laws instead of the laws of nature being free-floating mathematical abstractions that are outside space and time that apply to all possible universes that are ultimately metaphysical in the ultimate sense of metaphysics as being beyond physics that there you got free-floating laws which have no ontological basis whatever and then you have human minds that appear mysteriously in an unconscious universe and can actually understand these laws are though we've evolved by evolutionary psychology of sort of using stone tools and primitive campfire type techniques our minds are somehow able to comprehend the entire universe so that there can be someone like Krauss putting forward theories about the ultimate nature of reality well if there's a conscious basis for both reality and for human minds the traditional view this makes a lot more sense take that away and we're left with a kind of unconscious version of traditional theology and a lack of explanation for the existence of minds of any kind including those of physicists which in philosophy of mind is called the hard problem um it's curious cuz there are lots of debates which were had in a theological setting and and now had not in a theological setting but that doesn't mean we should think that what we're debating is the theological debate I mean it just means that there's a debate that we were able to articulate in theological terms we've got a way of articulating it that it isn't theological so I don't know what's the significance of the fact I mean Krauss has written a popular book about why there's something rather than nothing I mean it's kind of unsurprising that he's going to be echoing old debates about that topic I mean that's why I wrote the book and and you know that no no work of professional physics attempts to ask up question I mean the reason you ask that question is you want to sell books to people it's not really a scientific project to write a book like that I don't think I mean it's he claims it is correct about that and Lawrence Krauss is one example of a number of my physics colleagues who are rather confused about the boundary between physics and metaphysics oh there's this debate about whether nothing is sort of something in virtue of being nothing or whether it's just the absence of something and that also echoes a theological debate about evil evil on the one hand could be just the absence of God on the other hand evil could be a kind of active principle something substantial so similarly in debates about nothing we get you know nothing being really important and nothing just being no it's just not something so when I comment on the nature of nothing sure yeah so I'm thinking about that too I mean so think back to what I was saying about something and now think about nothing so how do we use the term nothing right and again in our ordinary business of life where our terms get their meaning right well use it as a way of suggesting there's no things of a particular kind right the magician says nothing up my sleeve pointing out to him that there's air or skin it's not a contradiction of what he's saying you might go home and open the fridge and say there's nothing in the fridge even if there's some dead bugs in the corner like he knows nothing that you would want to eat or prepare for dinner in the fridge so you might think you could use nothing to mean the negation of any sort all but that won't do for this debate right here's a couple of really bad answers to the question wise or something rather than nothing oh well if there were nothing then it would be the absence of anything but that's something right or no because if there were nothing then there'd be the fact that there is nothing and that's something right those clearly aren't satisfying answers so that shows that you can't just mean by nothingness the negation of absolutely any sortal account now right so what did we have in mind originally when we asked this question when somebody like Leibniz asked this question or when we tend to worry about it well there's a pretty plausible case to be made that what we had in mind is something more like not why are there abstract entities or facts or absences but rather why are there concrete entities the sort of concrete causal things we interact with right or that make them up and if that's the case then again I think we have a plausible case to be made for thinking that the root of the question is something like why are there particles or why is there matter in which case again I think we have hopes of getting an answer from physics although I totally agree with what George said that any time you give an answer like that right any kind of at least standard form of deductive hypothetical explanation as the philosopher Karl Hempel called them right involves you explain why something by appealing to initial conditions and a law of nature that explains what you've observed why did my tomato plant die because it was outside unprotected and the temperatures dropped below 32 degrees Fahrenheit right here's a law that says plants of that sort die in those conditions therefore it died right but any kind of explanation we give like this if that's the form of explanation you're looking for if you're looking for something like a causal explanation and I think the question why is there something rather than nothing is put forward as if looking for something like a causal explanation akin to why do my tomato plant die right then you're always going to have to presuppose initial conditions and laws then you can always turn the question back and say why that initial condition and why those laws and our Y questions can keep on going but the hope is that each of them will remain having the feeling at least of tractability and approachability in the way that this totally generic form of the question doesn't oh yeah so from the physics viewpoint if there is really nothing then there's no space there's no space-time there's no laws of physics they actually is really nothing and that is not what physicists have in mind so but because if the laws of physics don't exist if space-time doesn't exist you don't have physics so there's simply the existence of physics implies that something exists and this is a problem for physics because if we now come to try to explain the origin of the universe out of nothing we have the problem that before the universe exists the laws of physics didn't existence that we don't have any handle to get on it in fact it's much worse than that because if I say before the laws of physics existed I'm using a phraseology which assumed that times existed before the universe exists and that doesn't even make sense of the phrase before the universe exists it doesn't even make sense as a phrase okay but but nevertheless if you then relating to Ruppert stuff there are ultimately four fundamental reasons why something should exist rather than nothing and the first is it was inevitable it a'dreea existence somehow there is some pre-existing condition which made it absolutely inevitable now that the physicists try to create an inevitability structure through string theory as a unified theory of all forces and that funk miserably failed and created a structure where there isn't one theory there's a hundred thousand million theories and the idea to prove only one physics only one universe could exist failed the second is the high probability one to show that what exists is highly probable now the problem with that is that rests in some underlying assumptions about what is probable and to show that the universe is what it is because it's highly probable you have to have a definition of what is probable and mechanisms to create probability and that ends you up in another kind of a myth the third explanation if you call it that is that there is no explanation the universe just is and there is nothing further to say and that is a fundamentally logically watertight explanation nobody likes it because it doesn't explain anything it doesn't give you any unification and the final one is what we were hearing from rupert is that the universe exists because in some sense it was meant to be there there is some purpose in some sense there is some reason for its existence that takes you out of physics into metaphysics and that is again a perfectly logical logical explanation if you want to explore that because of the reasons I've said before existence is not any physics you've got to look at things beyond physics and the data that you should take into account isn't only physical data you should also take into account data from ethics art philosophy psychology all of those subjects as well as data from physics if you want to explore that as a real philosophy yes well I quite agree with that and I think that the I think that the the data that we have to take into account include the date the very fact of consciousness as I mentioned earlier I mean all of these things algorithms designs art etcetera products of consciousness of human consciousness and there are probably many other kinds in the universe so then really the question is I suppose the ultimate question is does consciousness come first and or does physical reality come first or do they both come into being together and of course we can't ever know the answer because we couldn't be there at the moment of the Big Bang or before it to see the answer so it's speculative and it's a matter of belief either way what we have at the moment is a dominant philosophy within the Natural Sciences a philosophical materialism which is the assumption matter comes and consciousness emerges from matter in and as yet unexplained way when brains get big enough a kind of lightbulb of consciousness goes on but the consciousness isn't actually anything it's nothing it's either an Fe phenomenon or it's an illusion that's the materialist philosophy of mind so consciousness itself is problematic it ought not to exist we ought not to be conscious it's an embarrassment for materialism that we are so if we take a different view if we take consciousness as primary then we get to a view held by almost all religious traditions that there's a consciousness comes first and gives rise to a universe and this is not just religious philosophical for Plato you have a realm of ideas or forms that comes first the Platonic he calls that reality and then there's a kind of emanation or for Neoplatonism and they kind of emanation from that realm to give the physical universe so that's another way of thinking about it now if it were just a matter of arguing philosophically that would be the end of the matter we wouldn't be able to get anywhere but the reason that religions exist is because people have had mystical experiences over the ages where people through consciousness itself have felt that their consciousness is linked to some vastly greater consciousness than their own which they identify as the ultimate consciousness of the universe or God or whatever name they choose to put to it and now one could say well it doesn't count as science but science as Lawrence Krauss emphasizes is based on empirical facts and consciousness is the ultimate empirical fact empirical means based on experience and consciousness is experience so the exploration of these ultimate realities I think involves mystical experience as well as scientific measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation and suchlike and when we take that into account as well the conscious explanation of reality then some kind of fundamental role for consciousness becomes important and is consciousness of or is it not a thing I mean that's another debate which they may have views on I have used money seems to me that you you you paint a picture of a kind of what you call the dominant philosophy of materialism that makes it absurd I mean the idea of emergence are quite straightforward right rocks aren't alive but when things get complicated you get life so bacteria are alive spiders are alive now when things get really complicated yeah you end up with human beings that are conscious but before that you've got all sorts of levels of perception and sentience and experience and so on and that's part of the world but it didn't arise until there was evolution of life and now how do you know you present your view as a kind of common sense view but your your view really amounts the fact that if every last human being stopped to exist you know kind of tables and chairs would stop existing as well because matter comes after consciousness but it's really no no reason to believe that I mean you're not required to believe that to recognize that consciousness exists and also think you overstate the unanimity and religious traditions I know I'm chairing our shop um but there's another religious tradition that says yeah the explanation for the material universe is it's create by the devil he's not created by a nice good God and because the creation of the universe by a nice good God doesn't explain all the hideous things about it and so there's actually a just as strong a religious tradition of thinking the material universe is a corrupt form of existence that was created by a bad consciousness not a good one well it's not there it's yes we had a deus ex machina oh it's not just as common a tradition I mean devil worship is a minority view but Oh both of them but it also it takes it makes the same point consciousness cut even if you think there's a devil creating things consciousness of the devil comes first so it puts consciousness first I'm not necessarily saying consciousness has to come first and but I am I am saying consciousness may not be confined to brains the cerebro centric view of consciousness seems to me a very limited one many people have considered that stars our conscious the Sun may be conscious Pan psychism is a fashion in the philosophical world at the moment where which attributes some level of mind to many kinds of being so I think is a huge area of debate so I wanted to sort of break in here on a couple of points one is I want to emphasize that in order to think there's something wrong with the traditional question one doesn't have to be narrowly speaking a materialist I'm not someone who thinks that only physical material things is I think abstract entities exist I have spent a lot of my philosophical career arguing for and sharing how to make sense of the existence of abstract entities like theories and novels and and so on we can ask why any of those exists also and then there's a variety of answers to be given the questions about why the laws of physics exist or how to even understand what laws are rich interesting philosophical questions why does consciousness exist another great question and I've written some on consciousness as well I'm with James on this one I mean I think we have at least the beginnings of an understanding that consciousness emerges from certain complex forms of life which emerge from more basic material entities you can look at other certainly one can look at other arguments I teach Berkeley every year right who thought that all of matter well the idea of matter doesn't even make sense and that tables and chairs and the things we see are really just ideas in the mind of God and then implanted in our finite minds Barclays arguments aren't very good I teach them every year I go through and they're not persuasive now there's other arguments out there one has to look at but to me the argument that goes bottom-up explaning consciousness by a matter rather than matter by a consciousness the cases I've seen of both of these I'm taking the consciousness by a matter root as having much more promise of giving us something deserving the title of explanation so I don't want to deny consciousness I don't want to deny abstract entities what I do want to do is to sort of clarify and simplify the question in each of these cases it's fine to ask questions about how consciousness comes into existence or why we should say there are abstract entities but all of these I think are much more clear and tracked and the question simply why is there something rather than nothing yeah a brief brief leap in the debate between you Tom and your side rather than Rupert's on this mystery except for one thing I think you said the tables and chairs didn't require consciousness to exist yes they no he didn't they were designed there wouldn't exist to this they built by human being yeah but don't stay existing if there wasn't any consciousness around so in that sense they don't require consciousness to exist they require constant to exist because they've been designed by the human but they can carry on existing when there's no consciousness ah that I agree I agree too I mean I just want to briefly say in terms of existence and what exists to me the deep underlying nature of the cosmos is possibility spaces now there I could spend a lot of time talking about that but certain things are possible certainly not you can look at the laws of physics in terms of possibility spaces they allow certain possibility they don't allow other possibilities in biology there are certain things that are possible in biology and certain things that aren't and there's a wonderful book about this by person called Andrea's Varg and they're called arrival of the fittest and if you want to see a really beautiful statement about possibility spaces and biology read unreal sparked and the point about these possibility spaces they are the same now as they were at the start of the universe they are independent of the human mind they control what is possible in the context of microbiology and if you want to explain what exists one of the things you have to do if you want to go deep is explain why these possibility spaces exist and then the further level of this is some of these possibility spaces relate to thoughts and the existence of consciousness which then takes you to a very deep level so my view the deep level of understanding what exists is looking at the possibility space is not just of physics of chemistry and biology but of mental processes so what I want to know now is really whether I think I know what Amy thinks about this probably it's not worth asking the general question why is there something rather than nothing and I think I know what Rupert things which is something like we need to ask it in order to realize that the answer is that God explains but what's your view about the question do you think it's a productive question or one that we shouldn't ask I think as a physicist as a cosmology she's worked in cosmology I think it's our duty as a cosmologist to push back as far as you can to try to understand as far as you can and my colleagues are produced all sorts of we can understand the universe back to the time we milk our synthesis back to the time of inflation back and we then run out of physical theories because we cannot test the theories we don't know what the theories are we can make all sorts of hypotheses about what the relevant theories are we can think of string theory loop quantum gravity all sorts of kind of thing there's no way we can test them so the ability of the unit of physicists to predict stops not at the beginning of the universe it stops quite a long way this side of the beginning of the universe and so physics cannot explain the origin of the universe because it doesn't relate toward having forth it can't even explain what happened for a significant time after the origin of the universe so objection to your view might be that it's satisfying to have an explanation but it's then once you've got it what you do then is alright I'm happy now I know why the universe exists it's God and know why everything happens God wants it to happen I never there's consciousness because God's conscious and so no need to scientifically investigate things not more questioning absolutely I mean this is a caricature of a belief in God I mean I'm used to that I happen to believe in God but I'm used to having my view caricatured so I don't think it means no more question I spend my entire life in scientific research and doing research looking into things one of the things I'm looking into at the moment is you know just what kinds of minds might there be would it make sense to say the son who's conscious now an if it is what difference would it make to the way it behaves now for someone who believes consciousness has only emerged from brains and stuff then it's not a nonsensical question but it seems to me a very interesting one if through another question if through spiritual experiences for example exploring the realm of consciousness through psychedelics and endeavor which is going on today on an unprecedented scale not here no of course no no but it's a there are people exploring with I mean there's no we know more about traditional psychedelics than ever before we know about synthetic ones there's now a new wave of psychedelic research going on showing realms of the mind as realms of possibility which George was talking about this possibility space the ultimate nature of minds is a possibility space one of the traditional views of God's mind is is the space of all possibilities the divine imagination is the space of all possible thoughts and imaginations and images and all possibilities now exploring consciousness itself is not saying oh we've got the answer forget about it that's the end of it it's it's something that people like Lawrence Krauss aren't in the slightest interested in because he thinks he has got the answer I think that the this taking consciousness to be primary or at least not necessary primary I'm not an idealist but taking consciousness is very important area of inquiry which consciousness studies are engaged in at the moment including taking seriously psychedelic experiences mystical experiences near-death experiences and a whole range of other experiences tells us something about the nature of minds that we didn't know before and then it brings up the question of is this just our mind as my friend Terence Mckenna said you know the psychedelic experience is made of mind but it's not my mind so the I think that the the idea that this is just putting a stop to inquiry and is quite wrong I think that it opens up the whole field of inquiry and more much more interesting way than it is opened at the moment that you've responded very well to my my criticism but let me just point out that loads of the things that you advocate could be engaged in by someone who is a materialist I agree I'm not claiming yes oh good I mean so saying it's another false dichotomy between no no I mean Krauss is a popularizer who made a lot of money saying that he knows where something comes from nothing but it's not really very serious intellectually scientifically project it has a huge influence he goes on the road implements that are completely intellectually shallow yes all right good but I mean he goes on road shows with Richard Dawkins the two of them together claiming to have disprove God in biology and in cosmology it has a huge media coverage it influences large numbers of people and for them because that's the authority of science Dawkins was the professor of public understanding of science Krauss claims to be you know this enormous of public intellectual this has an enormous credibility with a lot of people so therefore it's worth discussing their views in a public forum not that we need to go on with and and I think science overreach is really dangerous and because it undermines credible science I mean it's scientists that I mean someone said about religion is like a swimming pool all the noises at the shallow end and it's like that with lots of things right and it undermines serious scientists who wouldn't go out and tell everyone they know everything the people who get the airtime are the ones who do and they thought given misleading representation of what scientists as obvious thing because I agree with them talk to most scientists the main thing they want to tell you is what they don't know not what they know the main thing they want to tell you is the questions that their their address well I talked to a lot of them and actually a lot of them are terribly dogmatic if I won't talk to them about my research on telepathy for example the reaction I get from the majority of scientists is is impossible and we don't want to know about the evidence they don't say we don't know about the mind as so many things we haven't yet researched about animal behavior we're totally open-minded that's not the reaction most scientists have I'm afraid I wish you were right I'm hardly on your side but I do think we should keep a certain open mind about issues like telepathy I don't believe it is possible for what I regard is really good scientific reasons about my understanding of how the brain works nevertheless I think a small amount of if it should be put into the lepre theory fits precisely because if it ever was proved to heaven it would overthrow so much of what we take for granted as I I am not anti telepathy research if it is done properly and you keep out the charlatans and all the risk but nevertheless it should be a very very small budget well they won't open it's a lot more than many others would have anyway that's not really our debate telepathy but my point is that the consciousness can be about half the people who work on parapsychology or materialists of atheists about half or not and I would say about the same of people who work on psychedelic drugs so your point that you don't require a commitment to one view or the other to do this research I completely agree with but what I think is that it is that the we need an open mind about these questions about something rather than nothing or the nature of consciousness rather than presupposing a materialistic psychedelic drugs that there the issue with psychedelic drugs is that they form a way of exploring the nature of minds and consciousness that takes people beyond their normal consciousness changing things undoubtedly true because you are going to find out about the mind but what people often go a step beyond that or they say something like I took these psychedelic drugs I now have this experience that gave me this insight into the nature of reality and that's a different thing all together don't be some kind of route where I know you know it's like no one thinks that's plausible about alcohol do they know really drunk last night and I really saw the nature of reality no but I do understand a lot about the nature of my mind not through getting drunk right yes I mean this I see how fragile my consciousness is and how easily it can be messed up yes well I think the point about psychedelics is that some people have on the makanda mystical experiences where they feel they're in contact with the greater consciousness than their own some people have mystical experiences completely spontaneously without taking any drugs at all it's what William James called the noetic experience a feeling of certainty that one's in contact with something much greater than oneself no the counter-argument is over that's just an illusion like so many other illusions but for people who have this experience is very important and it changes their lives and so for me it's an open question is this really contacting and vaster greater consciousness than our own which is the simplest explanation or is it some kind of illusion produced by no new serotonin levels in the brain which would be a materialists explanation or is it both I mean it could involve changes in serotonin levels it does involve changes in neurotransmitter levels I would want to question the idea that the ranking of which is the simpler explanation here I mean if you really want to say that the explanation of it is there's this sort of universal consciousness that we're somehow in contact with then you have a huge range of new questions you're positing a new kind of being beyond anything we had understood before at least if this universal consciousness is supposed to be something really important you've got to explain what this mode of contact is but it doesn't seem to be normal perceptual contact whereas the other kind of explanation that goes through understanding how our brains work in the ways in which they can produce experience as some not all of which are vertical about the world and maybe even most of which aren't exactly the way the world is in itself right that goes via known routes I mean it might be complicated but it goes via unknown paths positing known entities so I also just want to push back a little bit I mean I think it is I agree that it's important to be open-minded and not to foreclose anything whether in scientific investigation or follow sfe but just because we don't know with certainty that something doesn't exist that's very different than saying which we cast our belief there even when we don't know things for sure we can often have a pretty good idea and we've got to rely on this pretty good idea as we decide what to put our money into for scientific research what to put our lives into for investigating and so I just I often see in public debates this kind of appeal to oh well we can't know for sure that this radical view whether it's a of you about the sort of universal unconscious or something else it's false yeah okay but what do we have some good reason to believe what can really understand and make sense of and life is short money is short you've got to sort of put your effort somewhere even while remaining open-minded there's still some Taos to pursue I mean the other thing one could add is that there's a middle ground which is you think well I am getting an important insight from this kind of experience which is I'm not very important and my sense of self is a kind of you know kind of fallible construct that can easily dissipate yes and then I'm what am I left I'm left concluding the world is much bigger than me and I don't have that very big important status as an existing thing well that's true which Carl Sagan said but that doesn't say anything about that's true because I'm in commune with some super Minds world spirit or something it's just true that I'm not very important oh yes I hope it's true we're not and none of us are but the thing is so these these experiences for many people are life-changing and they you know you can it when as you as Amy said you know you have to decide where you're going to put your effort where you're going to put your money and you know the way that the vast majority of science funding works at the moment is business as usual and that's a very nice note to end on so I'd like to sincerely thank Oz because I was taking the debate very seriously even if I was making jokes I should say of course it's an important discussion that we're having and thank you all very much for contributing to it and poor people for more debates talks and interviews subscribe today to the Institute of Arts and ideas at IAI TV you

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

Views: 25,323

Rating: 4.647059 out of 5

Keywords: materialism, atoms, particles, physics, philosophy, nothing, something, conciousness, universe, parapsychology, mystic, space, virtual, think, learn, education

Id: c-QOlTD0YHo

Length: 43min 41sec (2621 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019