A Conscious Universe? – Dr Rupert Sheldrake

I am going to talk about Consciousness starting from a completely different point of view. I won't start with the brain. I will not begin with a cerebrocentric view of Consciousness, but with the bigger picture that almost all civilizations have taken for granted. and traditional society that there are many forms of Consciousness in the

universe

, not just us and not just those of animals, other animals, so it has often been assumed that the entire

universe

is

conscious

and this view of Consciousness does not attempt link it. it all comes down to particular regions of the brain or interactions or electrical impulses that go from one bit to another um, it's your Consciousness in a completely different way and the reason why people in all these cultures think that there are many forms of Consciousness more beyond ours it is because they experience them through mystical experiences through altered states of

conscious

ness through spiritual practices through psychedelics traditionally taken in various cultures around the world people have the experience of being in contact with a higher consciousness than his when Sir Alice to Hardy began in the 1960s.

At the Religious Experiences Research Unit at Oxford, he was asking people in Britain whether they had had experiences that seemed to involve a conscious presence greater than their own mystical experiences. He was amazed by the thousands of reports that came in. It turned out that these are much more common than anyone had previously thought that most people don't talk about them because they are shy to do so, so they are afraid of being classified as mentally ill or something, but recent surveys have shown that up to 50 percent of the population have had experiences of other types of reality, near-death experiences, spontaneous mystical experiences, including those that occur in childhood, and other types of altered states of consciousness that suggest that their consciousness is part of something bigger than themselves.

Now in ancient Greece they had the Ellucine Mysteries um most of the culture there was influenced by this type of mystery. Cult that involved an initiation in a cave that involved taking psychoactive substances, we don't know what they were, um, but this was a widespread feature of Greek. Philosophy and Plato in their book The Years of Time talk about the conscious universe hmm what she says is that this world became in truth a living creature with a soul and reason, a single visible living creature that contains within itself all the living beings whose nature is of the In the same order, this is a vision of the entire Cosmos as a living being, a living organism, and this type of vision was inherited by medieval philosophers in Europe, in the universities and in the cathedral schools, and they were also greatly influenced by philosophy. of Aristotle who thought that all living beings have a soul the soul is the form of the body it is what gives shape to the body and it is what attracts a being towards its final point in Acorn when it germinates in an oak seedling it is dragged towards the mature form of an oak by the soul of the oak then plants have soul animals have soil planets have soil stars have soul according to this point of view in fact the Greeks, including Plato, called the stars, the planets and the Sun the visible gods and, in fact, we still call them the planets by the names of the gods and goddesses penis Mars Mercury and so on in medieval Europe This was the standard view of the world.

Theologians such as Saint Thomas Aquinas integrated this Greek view, particularly Aristotle's zoo, with Christian theology to produce an animistic view of nature: nature is alive, the Earth is alive, the planets and stars are alive, they are conscious beings, all the universe is a conscious being animals and plants have souls and the human rational mind is embedded in a level of the human soul that relates us to the plants we are shaping our body the vegetative soil shapes our bodies and is the basis of regeneration and healing of wounds the animal soul that we have and that we share with animals gives us our animal instincts and emotions such as fear, hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc., but the rational mind is that. which is specifically human and has to do with conscious thought, language and reason and that was the standard view in the Middle Ages.

Now the reason I say all this is because it is important to realize the completely radical break that the mechanistic revolution represented in 17th century science. It was with everything that had happened before in our own culture and in all others in the 17th century, the Scientific Revolution was a revolution precisely because it denied these traditional views for the founders of modern science, nature was not an organism alive, it was a machine, um animals. and plants were not living organisms, they were machines, automata, unconscious inanimate automata, the human body was a machine and, in the vision of René Descartes, who founded this mechanistic philosophy more explicitly, the entire universe is made of inanimate matter that works mechanically by pushing, being pushed from the past through mechanical physical causes the stars and the planets and the mechanical objects made of unconscious matter the Earth is an unconscious object our body is animal bodies are plants are the only things that do not They were mechanical and unconscious in the universe where God, angels and humans Minds, basically what Descartes did was despirit all of nature, drain the soul of all of nature, so that all that was left in nature was inanimate matter , but outside of nature were God, angels and human minds, and God was supposed to have created the world machine in First of all, being a brilliant engineer and mathematician, I pressed the start button and then it was supposed to everything would continue more or less automatically from then on, so we have an idea of ​​a completely autonomous unconscious Mechanical Universe with the only role left for God to begin with. disconnect it and interact with human Minds, which were the only non-material things left in the universe.

This is Cartesian dualism and it dominated science for the first two or three centuries of its existence and created three divisions, actually a division between religion and science. religion got God, angels, human minds and morality, science got the entire physical universe including the human body, created a mind-body split in ourselves so our minds were somehow completely separate from our bodies and interacted with them in a way that was deeply mysterious, thought it happened in the pineal gland, modern Cartesians think it happens in the cerebral cortex, it's basically the same theory, it just moved a couple of inches and also created a division between man and animals, we have rational, animal conscious minds and purposes.

Aren't they just machines? Therefore, we can treat them as cruelly as we want in vivisection experiments. We can grow them in factories for industrial agriculture. They are just mechanisms. That is the view that dominated science until the 20th century, but it was another movement within science in 19th century science and philosophy in which people attempted to go beyond this dualistic view, many people felt that having two completely different types of things does not make sense, there should be only one reality, so one school of thought idealists said that the only reality is consciousness, everything is ultimately conscious, consciousness underlies everything, matter is made , mind, this is the school of idealism in philosophy, idealism here means the primacy of consciousness, it does not mean being idealistic about helping others or making the world a better place it means that focus on Consciousness is the main and only reality that the school of thought is experiencing.

Resurgence today, the best-known exponent is Bernardo Castrapp, a philosopher of mind, but the other school is the other. uh the 19th century school of thought that finally came and became dominant and became the dominant philosophy of science was materialism, the materialist said there is no such thing as this realm of immaterial spirit does nothing, you can't measure, you can't. weigh it, you can't see it, therefore it doesn't exist, the gods and angels don't exist, they are just a figment of the imagination, so in one fell swoop God and the angels disappear from this Mechanical Universe and that's all that's left.

It is human consciousness. The only thing left out of this Cartesian dualism is that materialists have the problem that they have not been able to get rid of human consciousness, they have gotten rid of God and the angels, but this human consciousness persists in an annoying way and this is where philosophers materialists have such a terrible job trying to explain it as Daniel says you know Daniel Dennis book consciousness explained Israeli an attempt to explain Consciousness as a kind of illusion the problem is that saying that Consciousness is an illusion does not explain it because the illusion It is in itself a mode of consciousness and for those who say that Consciousness is simply an Epi phenomenon, in reality it does nothing and Consciousness has no activity, we can experience it but it does nothing, it is like a shadow of the activity of the nervous system. it has no agency it cannot interfere with physical causality we do not have free will this is standard materialist stuff um but the problem is that it is a difficult problem because all attempts to explain it ultimately run into intolerable problems John sells the philosopher of Mind described The debate within the philosophy of Mind Over the last 50 years as follows: a philosopher advances the materialist theory of mind, then encounters difficulties, criticism generally takes a more or less technical form, but in fact, behind technical objections there is a much deeper objection: The theory in question leaves out some essential characteristic of the mind and this leads to increasingly frantic attempts to adhere to the materialist thesis.

Well, some philosophers have decided to abandon the task of trying to adhere to the materialist thesis and that is really one of the origins. Of modern versions of panpsychism, the idea of ​​those forms of Consciousness at many different levels of nature, Gallon Strawson is one of the leaders of this new panpsychus movement and argues that if we assume that some type of level of mentality experiences or Consciousness even in atoms and electrons, then the emergence of Consciousness, the emergence of Consciousness in humans is no longer something completely different that arises from completely unconscious matter, it is not a difference of type, it is a difference of degree and that's why many contemporary philosophers are now saying Let's move on to panpsychism, another whose book recently appeared like Philip Goff, his book The Age of Galileo is a clear and I think forceful and well-argued statement of the position of panpsychus and its motive is mainly deal with the difficult problem of human consciousness. because if Consciousness is not limited only to human or animal brains, then it is easier to understand why we are conscious because Consciousness is no longer something special just for us, it is something much more widely distributed in nature, a version is integrated more sophisticated and mathematical than this.

Information theory by Julio Tonnone who points out that Consciousness has an integrative capacity, it does not work unless there is a high degree of complexity that must be integrated and Consciousness works by integration, um and that is its defining characteristic, there is a lot of technical literature . about this, but I'm just giving an overview, as soon as we start discussing panpsychism we realize that this is not a new philosophy at all, as I already mentioned, this is more or less what practically everyone in the old Greece thought and also what uh, in animistic forms is found in practically all traditional cultures around the world, um, but in 17th century European philosophy, in response to Descartes, there was already a kind of panpsychist reaction, two philosophers Prominent then were panpsyches, one was Spinoza, the Dutch Jew. philosopher who argued that God and nature are the same, that nature is like the body of God, God is like the mind of nature, so it was a panpsychist and even pantheist philosophy.

God and nature were identical, only they were seen from different points of view, another. and a very interesting philosophy of the 17th century was Leibniz, a German philosopher who argued that the entire universe was made up of monads, self-organizing units and that each self-organizing unit, including atoms, consciously reflected the universe from its own point of view, he said that the universe was filled with all kinds of individual beings with Minds that each reflected it from their final point of view and each one Deserves it differently because each monad was in a different place just like everyone in this room is reflecting this room seeing this room from a different point of view from their own point of view, but everyone sees it differently because you can't have two people in the sameplace at the same time, is what I Leibniz called the identity of the indiscernibles um, so, um, he was saying that the entire universe is full of Minds that reflect the universe from all different points of view.

The most interesting pancyclist of the 20th century was Alfred North Whitehead, a British philosopher who was also a mathematician and wrote a seminal book in 20th-century mathematics called Principia Mathematica with his student Bertrand. Russell, when they were both at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Alfred North Whitehead, because he was a mathematician, was the first philosopher to understand quantum theory correctly in the 1920s, when quantum theory was just being born, white people understood it correctly. Immediately, most philosophers were not mathematicians. He couldn't follow it, but Whitehead instantly realized what a radical breakthrough quantum theory was. He showed that in quantum theory which treats light and matter as wave entities, quanta are wave-like, and because they are wave-like, Einstein Whitehead realized that you couldn't have a wave at an instant, you couldn't have an instantaneous wave. think about the waves in the sea you can't take an instantaneous portion of a wave and say Here it is here there is a wave in an instant a wave takes time to appear and it takes space to wave, so it spreads in time and space , cannot be defined at a particular time or place and that is the fundamental reason for the so-called uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics that fundamental particles are wavelike. in fact, it is like a wave and the atoms are wave patterns of the nucleus is also a wave pattern and the electrons in their different orbitals are resonant waves of activity, so what Whitehead showed is that matter is not a matter.

Nineteenth-century physics had treated stellar matter as things. little billiard balls, atoms were like little billiard balls, something hard and impenetrable that just persisted. He showed that actually what modern quantum physics has shown is that matter is a process and it is a process because it is a wave, everything shakes like even the smallest particles, even the smallest particles. smaller subatomic particles found at the Large Hadron Collider, a wave-like wave, and if it is a process then it takes place in time and if it takes place in time it has a polarity in time, the past and the future. and what Whitehead argued was that this completely transforms our view of the nature of matter.

His most original idea about it. I think the one that I find most exciting and interesting is that it gives us a way of thinking about the relationship between the mind and the body in In terms of time rather than space, we are used to the idea that the mind is the inside, the body is the outside, there is the outside world, the inner world, we use these metaphors all the time, there are spatial metaphors, my inner life, the inner world, the inner consciousness and in fact, from a materialist point of view, the brain is literally an internal unit, your thoughts are supposed to be nothing more than the activity of your brain, they are inside your head, they are inside and the external world is outside and the bodies outside the brain for the most part. um, so um, we're used to that spatial metaphor that goes into ordinary language and we're also less used to the temporal version that Whitehead was proposing and what he was suggesting is that the mental pole, the pole of the mind, is the The future pole, the physical pole, the body pole, is the past pole.

He pointed out that even in quantum theory, when you solve the equations of quantum theory, the wave equation, for example, is the equation that allows you to predict all possible things. What an electron or other particle could do, you shoot an electron from a cathode ray tube into a cathode ray tube and crunching a wave equation describes all the possible things it could do now, these are possibilities, they are not physical facts , they are part of physics, but they are not physical, they coexist as possibilities, but as soon as the electron interacts with something, a measuring device or with another atom, then all these possibilities collapse until you have a measurable fact that is now a In fact physical, now it is the body, so to speak, the body of that electron has a definite place, you can measure it at a particular place and sometimes it is called the collapse of the wave function.

Well, what Whitehead really showed was that this is a general principle about the way minds work our own minds are realms of possibilities our own Conscious Mind Our Consciousness is a realm in which we hold together a range of possibilities, if not We have many possibilities, we don't need to be aware of it and most of our habits do not involve considering possibilities, we just do it the same way we have done it before. Habits are generally unconscious, they are mental but they are unconscious. Conscious minds worry about possibilities and choose between, say, all of them.

We all chose to come here today. We could have done all kinds of things this afternoon, but we chose to come here and among the many possibilities we chose this one and made it happen. We realized that it is now a physical fact. We can be measured and photographed. Heavy in this room is a physical fact that we are here and our mind is now open to new possibilities, so it is a constant interplay of possibilities that become physical, but as soon as it is physical, it is left in the past and then they open up. new possibilities in the future, so this is Whitehead's conception of the work of his mind and gives us a way of thinking about Consciousness as something that deals with possibility is where I find a very useful way of thinking about nature of Consciousness and since the possibilities are not physical, they are virtual.

Regarding the virtual futures between which we choose, it helps us understand that Consciousness is part of nature, but it is not something that you can physically measure, nor can you measure all the possibilities that an electron has, you can only measure physical facts. when the wave function collapses and you can say that crushing a wave equation only gives us the probability distribution of what could happen, not what will happen, so Whitehead was also a very important part of the birth of the holistic or organismic philosophy of nature. The old mechanistic materialist view was that we should explain everything in terms of the smallest things, atoms are the ultimate physical reality and therefore reducing chemistry to atoms is the way chemistry should go, reducing life to molecules is the way biology should reduce it to the smallest things in the molecules of living organisms, so it is a matter of reducing them to the smallest because the smallest is the best and that is why molecular biology has an enormously high status within biology because it deals with the smallest parts of living organisms, genes, proteins, etc., but what Whitehead pointed out is that um atoms are not the fundamental particles atoms themselves are structures of activity with a nucleus and electron orbitals and they are all processes atoms are processes molecules are processes and that molecules are like organisms an atom is like a microscopic organism a the molecule is an organism composed of atoms whose everything has a totality that it goes beyond the sum of the parts um in the same way in organisms a cell is self-organizing it has its own membrane its own limits its own structure and activity but cells can be organized in tissues where there is a whole that is more than some of the parts that are in organs in organisms in societies of organisms such as flocks of birds or schools of fish in ecosystems on planets and planets within solar systems that in turn have a whole that is more than some of the parts and solar systems within of galaxies, so we have organisms at all levels of complexity and they cannot all be reduced to definitive particles and the bottom of the atom fell out a long time ago and helped explain everything in terms of the fundamental particle is no longer the way how science works and it has never worked that way.

You don't try to explain the facts of sociology or the facts of physiology in terms of hadrons or electrons, etc., and you explain them in terms of The science of physiological processes is in effect, although not in theory, actually holistic. Things that are at their level are studied well. If we take this view, we see that this holistic view of nature suggests that self-organizing systems have a type of mind or consciousness. uh or a capacity for organization of its own purposes, its own objectives which in modern dynamics are called attractors um and it also shows that certain types of things do not self-organize and are not likely to be conscious an atom a molecule a cell a tissue a organ, a flock of birds, a galaxy, a solar system, have a whole that is more than some of their parts and may have some kind of mind that deals with their possible future actions, but things that are mere compounds are conscious in this way. a point that tanoni makes in his Integrated Information Theory a table, a chair, a computer, a car, a stone that just rolled through a mansion and not self-organizing holes, if they were, we wouldn't need factories, instead, we would grow them on farms. of manufacturing them in factories by putting components together, so the worst possible model for nature is a machine, because a machine is made of parts that are assembled in factories according to a design, an intelligent design that is outside the machinery and that fulfills human purposes that are also outside of the Machinery, organisms have their own organizational capacity within them, they are self-organizing their own purposes and therefore this type of panpsychism is not what some people assume, when people They scorn pansicism with contempt, they say oh, you.

I'm saying there are conscious chairs haha, you know you get that kind of mocking contempt that many of you will have encountered there, do you know well that this stone is this? They always choose cups, stones, socks, chairs, computers as examples and no one says that they are not serious. Pan psychics claim that these are conscious, they may be made of conscious or low level conscious crystal or atoms, but the sock, chair or computer is not a conscious being and self-organizing systems have their own ends or objectives. um and again you get the contrast with if you're trying to get somewhere you get in a car the car doesn't have any goal of its own where it wants to go it will go wherever you want if you get to a horse the horse may well have its own idea about where you want to go.

It happened to me in Ireland once when I rented a horse with some friends and two. I am not an expert rider. I found myself going down paths I didn't know. I don't think we were part of the standard route until I found myself pulling into a stable the horse had just gone home he didn't want to do this long ride with me on his back um so um this gives us a glimpse of how Mentes could work and also shows that if we're talking about plants, our plants are conscious, I mean, there's a whole conference every year in London called Plant Consciousness, now there are whole books on plant intelligence and the secret life of trees, etc., um.

If plants are conscious, they are likely to be conscious of things in which they have a choice, they are not likely to be conscious of things that are purely habitual, just as we are not conscious of most of our activity. mental most of our lives. We are creatures of habit, most of our mental life is Habitual. We only use our Consciousness when we think about possible actions that we have to choose between. I think the interesting point about this panpsychist argument in the current climate is. that most of the panpsychists around today are Strawsen golf tononi Koch, the neuroscientist who used to work with Francis Crick, who used to be an absolutely hardline reductionist materialist, has recently moved into written psychism and this is a movement to large scale within philosophy and Neuroscience, but the main reason why they have adopted panpsychism is to try to explain the difficult problem of human consciousness, so they talk about electrons, atoms, molecules, perhaps cells and tissues, but They stop when you get to humans.

I think this debate is more It's interesting when you continue, you know, flocks of animals or social groups, ecosystems around the planet. I mean, we already have a holistic view of Gaia, the planet, in the Gaia hypothesis, which tells us that the entire planet is like a living organism, um, and then if we continue to the solar system and particularly to the Sun. I'm particularly interested in this question of whether it is unconscious and as soon as you ask that question you realize that you are breaking a taboo that you know as a modern educated person.

You're not supposed to ask that question, you're supposed to scoff if someone says the sun isconsciously, you have to dismiss it as absurd, ridiculous or childish and the reason it is so easily dismissed as childish and ridiculous is that virtually all humans except us have taken it for granted, so the idea is that we are better than them because we are smarter, more educated, more scientific and everyone wallows in ridiculous superstitions. Also children think that the sun is conscious, that's why they draw it with a smiling face again proof that it is a childhood superstition um well, in most cultures people think that the sun is conscious and they generally think of it as a god or a goddess the Greeks thought the sun was a god Apollo the Romans thought of the sun as a god Alma um but some people think it is the Hindus Syria but some people think of the Sun as a goddess the Japanese for the Japanese the sun is a goddess very important in all their cosmology in the cosmologies of northern Europe the sun was a goddess and that is Why um in German and in the Germanic language the sun is feminine disgrace and the Moon is masculine der Mont while in the Romance languages It's the other way around Le Soleil in French is male son and La Lun la Luna is female so sometimes people think oh? the moon is feminine the sun is masculine Etc.

It depends on the mythical system you are working with and um, I personally believe that this view of the Sun and similar aspects of the natural world is one of the reasons for the evolution of the English language as we know . you know in parentheses you know think about the evolution of our language um the people who lived in England at the time of the Norman conquest spoke Anglo-Saxon Germanic languages ​​and other Germanic languages ​​in which the sun is feminine, the Norman invaders spoke French and the The The court language in England for several centuries was French and the English language as we know it is a kind of hybrid of French and German or French-type and German-type languages ​​and what did our ancestors do when they were trying to deal with with the gender of the sun, you know, one Lord says it is feminine, the other Lord says masculine, the moon again, the other way around, how do you handle it?

With that, well, what they did was expand the neuter gender that in languages Germanic there is masculine feminine and neuter expanded neuter to include pretty much everything except people and ships um so um and and then we neutralize the whole world in English um and I think this These conflicting mythologies and genders are actually probably one of the main reasons why this happened, but other than that, my point here is that traditional cultures have thought that the Sun is alive and conscious and actually, um, in India, I lived in India for seven years and In India, the Hindus, For example, they assume that the sun is a conscious being and they relate to it.

There is a yoga exercise that many of you could do. I've done it every morning for over 40 years. The Surya Namaskar. The sun salutation, which is done facing the sun in the morning, saluting the sun and this is not just for physical health and stretching and stuff like that. I mean, yoga has been secularized in the West, but in India it is about prostrating before the sun, which is the great The power of the sun is on which all our lives depend and perhaps the most fundamental Mantra in Hinduism, the Gayatri Mantra, it is a bit like the Lord's Prayer in Christianity, it is something that is very, very known as fundamental Mantra. a prayer to the Glorious Splendor of the sun to illuminate our meditation the Divine and glorious Splendor of the Sun um so devout Hindus every morning make this prayer to the son asking for his blessings on our lives implicitly uh there is a thought of the Sun as a conscious being that can respond to sentences no, of course, as soon as you look at the physics textbook, you realize that physics is not like that, it is just some kind of giant hydrogen bomb with physical processes going on that are totally unconscious, but It's not as if scientists have ever proven that the Sun or the other stars are unconscious, they have simply assumed it because Descartes said so in the 17th century he defined all matter as unconscious by definition, not by proof, empirical research, rational discussion. , a simple prejudice and taboo have been established on these questions. where they are not valid topics for discussion except perhaps on weekends at the University and in most educational institutions this would not be something that could be talked about, so I think the question is an open question is the awareness of the sun and then If we think about that a little more carefully, we would first have to immediately recognize that if the sun is conscious, then all the other stars are probably conscious too, so you can't just limit it to the sun because it's the closest. for us this must be a general argument so it was the question of your consciousness so what is the interface between your mind and your body eh well what is the interface between our brains and our minds our bodies and our minds most people would think that that interface is to have to do with the electrical patterns of activity in the brain, that is what is related to our Consciousness, you know, the eegu algorithms, theta waves, Delta rhythms, etc., depend on your State of Mind.

Consciousness, in some way the electrical activity of the brain is what underlies mental activity. it's the electrochemical activity because of course there are neurotransmitters, but it's mainly the electrical activity that people are interested in and neurophysiologists measure and neuroscientists measure this activity through all kinds of electrical devices, not just electroencephalograms, uh, well Does the Sun have electrical activity? Yes, the Sun has immensely complex patterns of electrical activity. It has all its surfaces covered with granulations. Millions of them. Each side of the Sun has at least a million of these granulations that are like convection cells that are made of electrically charged plasma.

They increase electrical currents through their movements, then you have 11-year annual cycles of solar activity, the sunspot cycle, where you get more and more sunspots and each sunspot is dark because such intense magnetic fields come out of it that They form huge loops with other sunspots and sort of push everything else aside and those sunspots those magnetic fields interact and underlie the heat in the solar caron the corona of the sun is about 5 million degrees Celsius the photosphere the part What you see when you look at the sun is only around 5000 degrees Celsius so a lot of heat is generated and it is believed to happen through the interaction of these magnetic fields and this is completely unpredictable the behavior of the sun, that is why the NASA, the American Space Administration, issues solar weather forecasts because the sun's activity is very variable, even these 11-year cycles are quite variable every 11 years, about half of the sunspot cycle, the Magnetic polarity of the sun is reversed, it says that the magnetic north pole becomes the south pole, so the entire polarity of the sun changes, but sometimes it doesn't.

Don't change so much, although these cycles are quite weak recently, we have had a very weak solar cycle, so the sun is full of highly differentiated, immensely active electrical activity and magnetic activity, and this integrates instantaneously through the electric fields and magnetic of the sun. that permeate the entire solar system the solar wind leaves the sun and reaches the end the entire solar system has a kind of membrane around it called the heliopause where the solar wind meets the galactic wind of charged particles that move through the Galaxy and where they interact forms a kind of membrane around the solar system we are all enclosed in a kind of bubble and inside that bubble everything is dominated by the electromagnetic field of the sun, its radiation and the solar wind of charged particles that are coming out of the sun all time sometimes there are more than others there are coronal mass ejections when enormous billions of tons of matter are expelled from the sun there is also a set of flowers that send intense pulses of charged particles if one of them hits the Earth Eliminate our radiation systems power transmission and if a really powerful one were to hit the earth it would affect our entire civilization because a national grid and other electrical transmission systems act as antennas for this and would absorb this energy and blow up all the transformers.

It would take months. to make enough new Transformers to restore the National Grid um so that the sun can have enormous effects here on Earth it's 11 years The cycles affect the climate the climate um and uh it could if shown eliminate civilization as we know it um at any time. moment um so the sun can have all kinds of possibilities in its mind if it's conscious and those possibilities would include deciding where and when to fire solar flares or coronal mass ejections maybe we haven't had any recently or maybe we've had relatively few and in its Most of them didn't touch the Earth, but if one hits, it's supposed to be totally random within regular science, but you know, the Hindus who do their daily prayer with the Gayatri Mantra think that the sun is being kind to us because it they ask. kind to us and you know we may despise what they are doing, say, oh ridiculous superstition, but it may be that we are all benefiting without realizing it and certainly the average physics department is not going to do much in terms of making The Sun he is fine with us treating him as a completely inanimate object that is nothing more than the realization of some equations in physics textbooks.

I mean, but even physicists, of course, recognize that the sun is highly dynamic and there's still a lot we don't know. If the Sun is a conscious being, what about the entire galaxy that contains the solar systems inside it, like cells inside a body? The entire galaxy can have a galactic mind and can communicate with other galaxies. The Sun can communicate with other stars. mainly because Consciousness, I suppose, is directed towards your solar system body and the sun itself, but it also has a peer group, other stars within the galaxy, and we know very little about galactic thoughts or the transference of galactic thoughts, It is unlikely, I think that if galaxies communicate with each other and they do it only by electromagnetic radiation because some of them are separated by a thousand light years, which means that it would take a thousand years for a light impulse or electromagnetic magnetic impulses to go from one galaxy to another um and then to another. thousand years now well the hundreds of thousands are billion years old some of them are a billion years apart they take a billion years to send a message to a distant galaxy another billion years to get a response even if it were by return mail so two billion years is a long time, so if they communicate then I think there must be some kind of intergalactic telepathy, but obviously this is entering the realm of speculation that, um, it's much longer. beyond everything we really know, um, but, um, and then.

If all galaxies have some kind of Consciousness, then what about the entire universe? The entire universe can have a mind, a mind of the universe, which is exactly what Plato was suggesting in the years that the entire Cosmos can have a mind and what would its sensory system work well. There are some neuroscientists who think that the interface between the mind and the brain is not just electromagnetic fields acting as the interface, but they think that the electromagnetic fields in the brain are actually aware that that is the basis of consciousness. John Joe McFadden, for example, has proposed the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness and Todd Murphy, a Canadian neuroscientist, has proposed the magnetic field theory of consciousness, that these fields are the basis of consciousness.

If we take those theories seriously and apply them to the entire universe, the universe is permeated by the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field and therefore a mind could interact with that it would know everything in the universe because it would be the basis of where everything is and what their activity is like, there would be an instantaneous method for omniscience throughout the Universe, so I know where I'm piling speculation upon speculation, but you know, I just want to address one additional point: If we say that the entire universe is conscious, then are we saying that that is the maximum limit of Consciousness if it is a form of pantheism like Spinoza um, but all traditional religions have said that the universe is alive and conscious in some way, but there is a Consciousness that transcends even the universe, that there is a mind beyond the universe, as well as Mind within the universe. as if our own minds are concerned with the well-being of our bodies and our social behavior, etc., but they can also transcend all our immediate concerns that we can think about as we are doing now the nature of the universe the nature of other Minds in the universe things that have nothing to do with taking the subway hometonight or what we have for dinner, our immediate concerns, but with the fact that our minds can totally transcend the immediate concerns of our bodies and our social lives, etc.

There has always been the idea that there is a mind that goes beyond the universe, so when we come to the question of what that ultimate mind might be, then we have to turn not to the philosophy of mind, which generally deals with much smaller problems. but to theology, because theology is the subject that deals with the nature of ultimate consciousness and there is a surprisingly, surprisingly, surprisingly lively activity in theology right now, partly because different world systems, like the Hindu worldview , the Buddhist worldview, the Sufi worldview. The Christian worldview is now accessible to academics and in a very brilliant book written by a theologian called David Bentley Hart h-a-r-t, an American theologian, a recent book called The Experience of God Being Consciousness and Bliss and What He does is take this threefold analysis of Supreme Consciousness from the Hindu sat chit system Ananda being Consciousness Bliss is how Hindus think the supreme mind works the basis of being is conscious there is a conscious basis on which everything rests and your being and your Consciousness , which is its primary quality, its conscious being is undermined in the present or at all times also um chip, names are consciousness itself so you can know names and forms as the Nama Rupa Indians say names and forms all the time. universe is made of shapes plants animals planets Stars cells atoms molecules these are all shapes forms of organization and we have names for them, which are shapes in our minds that allow us to relate to what is in the world, so namaroopa are names and shapes , these are within the conscious mind, they are not the conscious mind itself, that is like the basis through which you know each other think of a screen on your computer, the screen is there, whatever you look at on the computer , but there is a basis for everything you see there, you can see all kinds of different things, read all kinds of different texts, but there is something underlying all of them and the idea is that there is a conscious mind, the knower, which is that that knows everything that can be known, the contents of Consciousness are not the same as Consciousness itself, so there is a dynamic principle that is the principle of energetic breathing.

The change of movement is also part of Consciousness and being in the flow of that change is joyful, that is why Ananda satchit Ananda Joy is part of the supreme Divine mind, so we have a very similar model in the Christian Holy Trinity, the official definition of God. in the Creeds the various Christian Creeds are actually statements of this triple nature of God God the father is the basis of being in the Old Testament when God announced himself to Moses he says I am that I am conscious of being in the present um called the sun is logos the principle of name and form through which all things were made um is like the platonic realm of forms or ideas or archetypes of all things in nature and spirit is breath the principle of change of energy and movement the main metaphor in the Holy Trinity is speaking, I mean, all of these things are metaphorical, obviously, the ultimate mind is beyond our conception, but we can have metaphors that help us think about it and in many ways.

Traditions, Hindu also has a particular role as a metaphor when I'm speaking now um, on the one hand there is me, the speaker, uh, and there are two other things involved like the speaker, there are the words that have structure, form, meaning, connection , etc., patterns, definable patterns, are different from each one. Also, there are many different possible words, um, and there is also the breathing in which the words are transmitted. If I wasn't exhaling while I was talking, you wouldn't hear anything if I didn't breathe properly. I think thoughts or have words in my mind, they are just silent in my mind, if I just breathe without words, there is a flow of air but there is no particular structure or pattern, so you must have both the flow of energy and the form that gives meaning to the structure, pattern and base. of both and that is the basic model um in the Christian tradition and in the Hindu tradition and there is a very similar model in the Islamic tradition as the heart of David Bentley chose there are parallels in Buddhist cosmology as well um and so what is this ? is a basic archetype of Consciousness that underlies all things is reflected throughout the universe the entire universe has forms and has energy forms are given by fields and Fields in standard science are governed by the laws of nature in my opinion their habits that have a type of memory, then, everything in nature has a combination of form and energy, and the electron, an atom has a form given by the principles of quantum field theory and energy, if it did not have the energy , it would not exist if if it had not had the form, it would not be a definable entity, it would even be light, which has undifferentiated energies and is differentiated as it can be, it still has a wavelength, it still has some formal pattern where light has different wavelengths. wave, then everything has been formed and has energy and an underlying conscious being and that same model would apply to our own Consciousness we have, of course, we need energy, we have eaten food, we have electrical energy in our nerves, we have formed that our bodies absorb during embryology, there are patterns of activity in In our brains there is energy flowing through our brains and some of these energy patterns and some of these forms become conscious and our conscious Minds are filled with all kinds of shapes, names and shapes , we can form images in our dreams, we can see images of things. that are not actually in front of us, there is always a dynamic principle that moves in our dreams, so I think that when we ask the question if the universe is conscious, then it is possible to say that yes, it could be conscious and, furthermore, The Consciousness could tell us something about the ultimate source of all Consciousness.

Everything within the universe could be like fractal versions of this Universal Consciousness with a Unity of the given of any system, it is the basis of the being of that system along with the forms and energy. that make it up and we can see this as underlying our own mental activity. Now, of course, this leads to all kinds of detailed changes in our brains that neuroscientists can study, but we're never going to understand the nature of Consciousness simply by studying brains because then we're back to the hard problem: you can't just explain Consciousness. In terms of brain activity, more and more details about the activity can be discovered, one may believe, as some materialists believe that if we continue to study the brain for long enough, sooner or later the response to Consciousness will simply appear, but I think philosophically that's just not going to happen and what we're at right now is this fascinating transition point between mechanistic materialism that works very well for physics and works very well for making machines. iPhones, televisions, jet planes, etc., but it works very poorly at explaining consciousness and spiritual experiences that many people access through a wide range of spiritual practices and there is a revival of spiritual practices.

Today I talked about seven in each of my two recent books, Science and Spiritual. Practices and ways to go further and why they work. These spiritual practices are ways in which we can have a closer direct experience with these forms of Consciousness beyond the human level. Meditation is widely practiced by many people as a way to de-stress. after a busy day or to counteract anxiety and depression, it is now practiced as a secular wellness exercise in the cultures where contemplative Christianity comes from, monks and nuns in monasteries, Hindu meditators, Buddhist meditators, Sufi meditators, people that they have done traditionally.

In a religious context they have done it not only to be less stressed and to be able to cope with the tensions of modern life, they have done it because they think that by reaching the very foundation of Consciousness itself, when you overcome the When reflecting you leave By identifying with the constant flow of thoughts that pass through your mind, you can reach states in which you are in the state of consciousness, simply aware of being, that this conscious being puts us in contact with the basis of being conscious of all things. . Hindus like to use an analogy, they say: "Think of many buckets of water at night with the Moon and you can look into each bucket of water and you will see a reflection of the Moon.

It seems like there are hundreds of moons, but in reality there is only one Moon reflected in all these cubes and there is one supreme mind reflected in all the conscious beings of the universe in each of us in each conscious animal and in each conscious being of all kinds Stars galaxies in the entire universe um, so the Meditation is a practice to get to the core of other spiritual practices such as music, dance and sports, which I believe is the most common spiritual practice in the modern world that leads people to altered states of consciousness, especially in the present, works faster and more effectively than Meditation You Can't When you're 50 feet up on a rock face, you start worrying and pondering whether or not you've paid your gas bill and whether you're in the middle of a game football and someone is passing the ball to you in the crowd. you're cheering, you can't think of some comment your girlfriend made that made you angry the day before, you're totally in the present and sports are the principle that I think in the modern world where people come completely into the present. , meditation is a slower process but sports and moving spiritual practices like sacred dance music, but I believe it connects us from the dimension of spirit, the moving principle of the Supreme Reality and I believe that aesthetic enjoyment, enjoying the beauty of Flowers, a beautiful architecture of art, connect more with logos or beauty. aspect of spiritual reality, so these spiritual practices connect us in different ways with different aspects of this ultimate consciousness.

I personally think this is a better way to experience it, so I think about it myself. I mean, I've spent years as a card carrier. materialist and atheist, so I am very familiar with that worldview, but if you want to stick to a materialist worldview and discard all these experiences as fantasies, then what you have to do is discard your own experience of Consciousness, especially if you have had mystical experiences or senses of connection through spiritual practices, including psychedelics, which can provide spiritual openings. You have if you are going to discard your own experience in favor of a theory, the theory that is nothing more than the activity of the brain that is Consciousness.

You're not really doing anything, you're putting a theory before your own experience, but since Consciousness is experience and since we are meant to be empirical, if we are going to be scientists, empiricism is experience, that's what empirical means experiential in Greek. . It has to do with experience, you have to make a personal choice, so each of us must take into account our own personal experience of these things, pay more attention to that, especially when it gives us a sense of forms of Consciousness beyond ours or maintain them. Returning to the Materialist Theory, it is nothing more than the brain.

The Material Theory, as I say, is brilliant for machines, it is not brilliant for understanding Consciousness, it leads to the difficult problem and therefore is not really the best theory in the world for explaining Consciousness. It's probably the worst theory in the world to explain it, otherwise it wouldn't lead to a difficult problem, but this is a question that we all have before us today, because we are on a cusp, I think between a paradigm shift from mechanistic materialism that has dominated academic life. in our society for decades to a richer view of nature as a more panpsychist or animistic view of the world and what a view of the world in which Consciousness is more than just an activity in the human brain and is an activity in We can actually access greater forms of Consciousness through our own direct experience.

The choice depends on each of us and we will have to use both our rational mind and our experience to try to decide between these different possibilities. Thank you. now we are going to have a short break of five to seven minutes is what Neil said um and then we will have a session where there may be questions, answers, comments Rupa hi um, I have I don't know where to start really um my I I guess, in First of all, an observation and that is that I thought you were going to postulate your theory of Consciousness around morphic resonance around the feeling that Consciousness is out there in the universe and that, in a certain sense, if I understand it correctly , you think. what could you saythat our brain is a little bit more like a kind of radio, they kind of pick up a portion of that Consciousness that is unique to us, so I was eager for you to explain that to me and explain to us where the evidence is where your evidence is for that and in particular why you haven't published why there isn't a published paper with this idea that has been peer reviewed you know by scientists because let's be really honest and I'm really not trying to be cruel here I'm trying to be honest um your ideas have been widely rejected in the scientific community and I was wondering what your reaction was to that and my second question is really asking you about your personal beliefs. one thing I understand is that you are a Christian and I completely respect and understand the human need for spirituality.

I'm not, I'm not just a materialist, but I wonder how you arrived at the Christian way of explaining the world and why that would be correct and not, for example, the Islamic or the Jew or an atheist or a Hindu or anyone else, like that. that there are two things really why you didn't talk about your real central idea and secondly, what are your personal beliefs? Oh my goodness, these are both huge questions, but I think they are very relevant. Okay, yes, they are, they are very relevant. Well, first of all, I intended to talk about morphic resonance in this talk, but I always talk from notes and there just wasn't time.

If I had mentioned it, I would have had to explain the entire theory, which would take at least 20 minutes, and since the title I was working on is that the universe is conscious rather than there being morphic resonance, that's what I was talking about. I was talking. Well, I mean, I didn't make up the title. Neil, the vice-chancellor of the University at the weekend, gave me this title and you know he wanted to talk about what the advertised title was. It just so happens that I am very interested in this question. conscious of the sun and in fact right now I'm writing a paper called "is this unconscious" for the Journal of Consciousness studies a peer-reviewed journal um, I've written a lot of articles in peer-reviewed journals, I mean, they're including some on morphic resonance on my website there are dozens of, I mean, there are 90 articles in total, probably six or seven on morphic resonance, quite a few on telepathy, quite a few on other aspects of the extended mind, so I publish in peer-reviewed journals, um um.

I mean, I do it out of a sense of duty and so I don't do it because anyone actually reads the articles and almost no one I know has read any of my articles in peer-reviewed journals, um, so it's a way most effective at conveying ideas in the form of books and talks, but they are all there for anyone who is interested, including empirical studies on morphic resonance and many empirical studies on the nature of Mind, particularly the extended mind. Today I haven't talked at all about all my work on telepathy the extended mind animal premonitions unexplainable powers of animals carrier pigeons I mean, I have to concentrate on something, I mean, the entire universe seemed to be enough for one afternoon and hmmm, let's get into it. terms of my own path that I went down like at the age of 14 I became a pretty militant atheist, a pain like Thorn In the Flesh from the chaplain at my Church of England school, um and I was kind of an atheist materialist for quite a long time, you know, until I was 30, then I went to India I traveled through India in 1968 I was working in Malaysia for a year and later, in 1974, I went to live in India, where I had a job there in the Agricultural Research Institute and traveling around Asia opened my mind to all kinds of other ways.

From looking at reality I met perfectly rational Indians who thought in terms of the consciousness of the bag and under uh you know, meditation and what happens in that, so I was greatly influenced by the Hindu tradition. I had Hindu gurus. I did yoga. I did meditation. Then I had a Sufi teacher. I became interested in Sufism. I had some Muslim friends in Hyderabad. I guess that's how it is. where I lived I spoke Urdu and I was attracted to a kind of Sufi world that I found very attractive and interesting and for a while I had Sufi practices and then I thought, well, you know, there's no way I'm going to become a Sufi.

Sufi means you have to become a Muslim first, you know? And I didn't particularly want to have to hold Ramadan and accept the whole Quran and I mean I had been circumcised, so one of the biggest obstacles for people is. The painful aspect was that it was fine, but I seriously considered it for about 10 minutes and then I thought, "Well, I can't really be a Hindu because you know Hindus are not so much about the land of India, the temples of India, the traditions of India um and I went to see a Hindu guru and asked him for advice on the spiritual path.

He said: Well, you come from a Christian background. You should try to be a good Christian. All the past leads you to God and you know that that's the one. that's more natural to you, your own tradition, so I thought, well, I hadn't thought about that, I thought it was cool, so I tried it and it worked really well for me and then I met a wonderful teacher. Christian, Father B Griffis, who lived in an ashram a Benedictine monk in an ashram in South India where I spent some time. I wrote my first book in his ashram and when I returned to England I found that reconnecting with the Christian tradition was really helpful .the great cathedrals the holy places the churches the festivals uh, fasting in Lent, all these things made sense to me, but I'm not an evangelical Christian and I think everyone should be Christians, I don't think they should, um, no, I think that Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are fine. as they are and if I had been born in India I'm sure I would be Hindu or Muslim or whatever but I am English, I was born in England, this is the tradition of my ancestors and the principles of anamorphic resonance are what It works more naturally and easily for me and I totally respect that it works for you and brings you comfort and improves your life.

I understand that the world is true, well, this is another great question. I think that the doctrine of the nature of the Ultimate Consciousness, the Holy Trinity, which is the Christian vision of God, as I talked about before, I think is a very good model, it is a metaphorical model of the Ultimate Reality. Hindus and other religions have pretty similar religions, a trinitarian understanding, I think is probably the best model we can have, whether you call it Snapchat and others or Father, Son and Holy Spirit, so I think in that sense it's true, in the sense that it is a model about the Ultimate Reality, it is probably the best we can obtain, obviously, by definition, a supreme consciousness.

The mind that encompasses the entire universe with billions of galaxies is probably beyond the reach of our very limited Minds that have evolved through millions of years of hunting and gathering and hundreds of thousands of years of making stone axes and things like that. I think it's probably a limited understanding. I think other aspects of Christian history. I think religion is more about practice than truth. Frankly, I mean, I pray, I meditate, I go to religious services, I go on pilgrimages, I sing, these are all spiritual practices. that gives a sense of connection um and in that sense they are true now whether or not Jesus was born on December 25th of the year AD. nothing.

It doesn't bother me much. I'm not very interested in those kinds of details. I'm more interested in the bigger picture and practices, so I don't believe that everything in the Bible is literally true, and in fact, most serious Christians throughout time have never thought that it's just the American fundamentalists who think that, so you know, not me. I think materialism is true, and I think it's actually false, and I think there are various religious approaches that are more appropriate for some people than others, so I'm not saying there is one truth and this is, thank you to all. question uh thank you very much um my question is whether natural laws, the laws of physics, the laws of nature are better understood as most habits than laws and whether natural systems tend to be shaped by these habits or laws natural, um reflecting on the points that you In this talk it was made that natural systems only tend to be conscious of what they can choose between and habits themselves do not tend to be conscious.

My question is: Is the choice itself necessarily outside the laws of nature if they are habitual? And if so, what might that tell us about the future of choice science? Well, I think all habits tend to become habitual, I mean our own habits, they become unconscious, you know, when you're learning to ride a bike, you're thinking about where to turn the handlebars and which pedal to put your feet on and that kind of thing, but once you know how to learn to ride a bike, you don't think about it, it just happens automatically, thinking about what should probably be a disadvantage, you can go on thinking about something else or have a conversation or listen to music or whatever. whatever, so I think that the habits of nature are largely unconscious, but I think that when any self-organizing system of organs has to make a choice um then there may be an element of Consciousness within it um but then it may return to the unconsciousness and Mayors will almost go to sleep you know, after all we go to sleep we are conscious beings, we are not conscious all the time we go to sleep and when we are asleep unconscious patterns of activity occur in our bodies, you know, the liver grows, our wounds keep healing from everything, our brains stay active, all kinds of things happen unconsciously, um, I don't suppose anything in nature is necessarily more. conscious of who we are and I think most of the time the place where Consciousness would come in is especially when habits are blocked, we continue with our normal habits unless we are prevented, um, if you have an accident and suddenly you can't .

You already walk, you can't see anymore, you have to develop new ways of living in the world and most things, mutations in biology and many environmental changes, organisms suffer a harmful effect, block their habits, make it difficult for them to survive with the old habits. then they have to develop new ones, then you have the exploration of possibilities, new possibilities and creativity. I think in the evolutionary sense and in every sense it really comes from considering new possibilities, what you have to do if the old habits are blocked if the old habits are not blocked, you just continue with them and I think in the whole evolution of the universe there is creativity at all levels.

I mean atoms, molecules, crystals, none of these were there at the time of the Big Bang. Everything in nature has arisen through creativity that establishes itself in habits, you know, in carbon atoms, acquires the habit of being in certain types of molecules, you know, methane and hemoglobin, etc., the glucose, cellulose, but occasionally, very often, chemists invent. completely new organic chemicals and they would be found in a completely new chemical and in a new type of Crystal, these new habits are emerging, you know hundreds of them every year, so I think Consciousness is coming into play. especially when habits are blocked and is particularly important when there is a need for creativity that exists at all levels of nature throughout the evolutionary process.

Hello, I was wondering your opinion on why there is such rejection in the Academy. the idea of ​​animism and why um yes why in the West um why the Western scientific community the scientific community um is so reluctant to unify or think of spirit and matter as different aspects of the same thing well, I think it's a historical result of the way science has developed in Europe, you know, in the 17th century, when the sciences were advancing, there were these terrible wars of religion, the 30-year war between Protestants and Catholics and many people who were in favor of science at that time. said that science was the third way involved a direct view of the mind of God these were not atheists they were Christians or Jews but they thought that science that God was a mathematician who had made the world machine that the mind of God was a mind mathematics and that by discovering the laws of nature such as Newton's law of gravitation, humans had direct access to the Divine mind that science was a spiritual pursuit and, furthermore, it was better than priests and ministers and the things that fought among themselves over interpretations of Scripture, science gained enormous prestige and, by the end of the 18th century, became the standard view of Enlightenment intellectuals.

The way forward is through science, reason and human progress and then technology and religion were seen as an obstacle and many of these uh Pro like in the French Revolution which was based on science and reason the cult in fact in 1793 during the reign of terror they pronounced the cult of reason the religion of the state the cathedrals and churchesmonasteries were closed transferred dissolved many priests were guillotined and um they proclaimed the count of reason as the state religion and so this took this kind of antagonism to tell religion and the idea that the two were in conflict and you If you were going to be a scientist you had to be anti-religious, especially anti-Christian, um again with materialism in the 19th century, you had a father, the best thing about this type of materialism as a philosophy of nature that excluded all religion, made it into something meaningless or useless or a waste of time, uh, while science represented progress and reason and the intellectual atmosphere of universities is really shaped by this kind of Enlightenment rationalism, that's why they have become what they are and is part of the collective ideology, it is anti-religious. specifically anti-Christian and materialist in its general tone, there are many exceptions, of course, and not all scientists believe this;

In fact, recent surveys show that in Britain, France and Germany about 25 percent of scientists are atheists, another 20 are agnostic, 45 percent classify themselves as non-religious but 45 classify themselves as spiritual but not religious or spiritual or religious, so actually, if you look at the actual practicing scientific community, there are many people who are not part of this atheistic materialist worldview, but they don't say So, in public, because they don't want to be attacked, they have afraid that some idiot from Insight will attack them, so they stay silent whenever I give talks at universities about my research on telepathy or morphic resonance, invariably after the talk people come up to me. and I say: you know, I am very interested in what you do, I think, but I am interested in these things, but I can't talk to my colleagues because they are also heterosexual and very materialistic, one after another comes up to me and says the same thing and sometimes I say some, don't you realize that there are at least 10 people in this department who think like you and said no, okay, I said yes, there is because they just told me and so on?

I know science would be very liberated, so my model is that people should discover that science is full of hidden holists or people with hidden ideas about spirituality who have simply had telepathic experiences or whose dogs know when they are coming home. from the laboratory, they simply do not dare to talk to their colleagues about this. This is a sociological phenomenon with historical roots. I think it will surely change in part because these historical biases are built into science as we know it. have emerged throughout European history, but the majority of scientists in the world today are not European, they are Indian, they are Chinese, they are Indonesian, they are Brazilian, etc., and in these cultures they have no reason to accept all this background from European history, you know, when I worked in India as a scientist, I was at an international agricultural institute, most of my colleagues were Indian scientists, they were Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, some Jains, some countries, they came from a variety of different religious origins.

At work, they were all conventional mechanistic biologists, you know, with the so-called conventional mechanists, but as soon as they got home at night, none of them believed it. They knew that meant having to play by the rules at work. you are going to keep your job, but none of them were convinced of being a mechanistic materialist in their private life or in their family life, they just accepted that at work and, in fact, the same thing happens in our society here, most people from nine to five years. Monday to Friday goes hand in hand with a kind of materialist vision of the mechanistic world because that is the official orthodoxy, the media as an educational system all support that, but as soon as the people who are at home at night with their friends and family or on weekends or on vacation, many Many of them have a sense of direct connection with nature.

Many people have mystical experiences. Some people take psychedelics and have a completely altered subconscious state, changing their view of reality, usually towards a more panpsychist view, but they won't talk about this when they come back. working on a monday morning is some kind of division sorry i couldn't hear that's true people adapt to them privately it's a bit like Russia under Brezhnev you know if you didn't pretend to be a dialectical materialist and a marxist . you didn't get it very far or in China today, um, while a lot of people didn't believe it and when communism collapsed in Russia, how many people were true communist believers?

I mean, there were some, but they were a minority and I think the same applies to mechanistic materialism in academia today um and you know, fortunately, on weekends at university you don't have to pretend that this is a much more of an environment. open than most universities, thank you very much, that's fine, that's all we have time for Ripper, thank you very much for a great talk