Is consciousness an illusion? 5 experts explain

- In those quiet moments when we find ourselves struggling to understand the nature of our existence, it is natural to turn to the observable world for answers. We look at the cosmos to try to figure out how the Universe came to be or consider the rules that govern the smallest particles of matter: everything that makes you and me and everything else. But there is something else that is fundamental to our existence. What makes us, us. That, in a word, is

consciousness

. But what exactly is

consciousness

? - It seems to me that a lot of the conversations about consciousness and existence can be incredibly esoteric, but you are a person who is actually doing scientific research on questions of consciousness.

How do you make it cohesive and turn it into something you can actually encompass when it seems so huge? - How did that feel? - It felt like something, the quality of a handshake. - That is what consciousness is, it is not esoteric. It's the most basic thing there is. - Well. -When someone steps on your toe or I'm thinking if I should step on your toe to make my point, it hurts. - Yes. - That's what consciousness is, it's as basic as that. Is what you see. It's what you hear. They are the pains you have.

It's the love you have. Fear, passion, that's all awareness. - So it is experience and consciousness. - It's really the same thing, with different names for experience, consciousness, subjectivity, phenomenology, qualia, all these different words that philosophers and other people have invented. It is the experience of anything. If I am dead, if I am deeply anesthetized or deeply asleep, there is no one there. There is no one at home, there are no experiences. So that's the difference. What I feel is a central aspect of my life. You know it is the most famous deduction in Western thought, 'cogito, ergo sum', which literally means "I am conscious, therefore I know that I am." The only way I know I exist is because I am conscious.

Do you remember Neo in "The Matrix"? - MMM. -You know that at one point he wakes up in the real world or in the machine world, but he never has any doubts that he exists. Because? Because he experiences things. - Humanity has made enormous strides in our understanding of the world, and yet there is no widely accepted explanation of what consciousness is. It remains a tantalizing mystery to scientists and philosophers alike. This is, as philosopher David Chalmers coined it, “The Hard Problem of Consciousness.” In this episode we will visit neuroscientists, spiritual leaders, entrepreneurs, artificial intelligence

experts

and even a Nobel Prize winner as we attempt to unravel the mystery of consciousness and continue humanity's eternal search for meaning and purpose in our vast, miraculously complicated, world. rapid expansion and incomparably mysterious cosmos.

These are "Dispatches from the Well." "I think, therefore I am." This was the fundamental thing that the philosopher and scientist René Descartes believed he could say about the world. I think, therefore I am. No matter what anyone may do or say, that fundamental truth appears to be inviolable. In short, I am something. Bye bye. There is an experience of being me and presumably there is an experience of being you. So when we seek to understand the Universe in which we all live, all our investigations must begin from this same subjective point of view: the self. We're here in New York, at the New York Academy of Sciences Conference on Consciousness, and I'm certainly someone who has thought a lot about the difficult problem of consciousness, how it arises and what the hell it is and how to talk about it. about it in a reflective way.

There is the question of existence and directly related to it is the question of our experience of existence. I'm not sure if these are two separate questions or one question, but taken together, it's certainly something that feels really profound. In fact, it feels, it's kind of crazy. The feeling of life itself. This is how Christof Koch describes consciousness. It is also the title of his most recent book on the subject in which he argues that consciousness is probably more widespread than previously assumed. For more than 30 years, Christof has worked to better understand how the brain generates subjective experience and self-awareness.

So who better to help us understand the contours of this debate and help define some of the key terms? - If you go to graduate school, they tell you that physics is fundamental studies, all there is. And you learn about the theory of relativity and you learn about quantum mechanics and electrodynamics, but nowhere is there anything about consciousness. But here I am, I am conscious, so how do I go from these wonderful theories, which are not conscious at all, to a conscious being? That's the mystery. - What is the reason for this lack of interest in the question of conscience?

Is it lack of interest that informs that? - No, I think many scientists would say: "I don't doubt that I am conscious, but I don't know how to study it empirically. It's something we should leave to philosophers." But I always felt that it was an evasion, because if science claims to understand everything, how can it not describe the central fact of my existence? - Good. - That I am aware and that you are also aware, then you have to account for it. - The main instrument that we use along with other tools... - Yes, yes. - Try to understand. - Yes, without consciousness there is nothing.

Without consciousness I can't even look at any meter. I can't do science. I can not do anything. So I have to understand the tools I use to understand the world. - How did you become interested in these types of questions? - I had a very bad toothache. - Well. - Because it hurts? Because it hurts? Well, the conventional explanation, which is true as far as it goes, you know that your tooth is inflamed, it sends electrical energy up the trigeminal nerve that goes into the spinal cord and it switches to a double relay up to the cortex.

And now, in your brain, you have some neurons that fire. What does that mean? Well, that means some potassium chloride ions splash around. So what? Well, I mean, why does it hurt? There are ions splashing in my liver and I have no conscience or my heart. Hell, things happen all the time in my body, but I don't feel them. But somehow here it is felt. So there is this explanatory gap, that's what philosophers call them. On the one hand, you have physics, you have the brain, the heart and other organs, and on the other, you have conscious experience and it is not very clear how you get from one to the other.

Well, this is the beating heart of the mind-body problem. And I was a physicist and a budding neuroscientist, so I said, "Damn, neuroscience should be able to address this, right? Because after all, it's not the heart that generates pain, it's the brain. So I'm a scientist." of the brain, so we should be able to use modern scientific techniques to understand the link between the brain and consciousness. At the time he was working with Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate who discovered the double helix structure of DNA. And then he and I popularized this notion of the neural imprint of consciousness called NCC, the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, using scientific tools to track where the imprints are in the brain.

Are they throughout the brain or just in a particular part of the brain? Are they in your spinal cord? When do we see them for the first time? - According to this theory, there are specific mechanisms in the brain that are necessary and sufficient for a conscious experience to occur. If this could be measured enough, scientists could at least identify where consciousness occurs in the brain, even if we couldn't

explain

how. Despite more than three decades of study since Koch and Crick put forward this theory, it remains just that, a theory. Is consciousness simply an attribute of the material world?

Or does it exist somewhere else on some other plane? Do we have any way of knowing? - I would say that the shoe is on the other foot. Essentially, the philosophy of mind is organized around two poles: the physical and the mental. Materialism says, "All there is is matter and consciousness; you are really confused about it. It doesn't really exist." That's what a modern analytical philosopher would say. An idealist would say, "Well, the only thing that really exists is the mental, and this whole world, ultimately, is a manifestation of the mental." And there are some people who say, "Well, they both exist simultaneously and it's like the inside and the outside." From the outside, there is this physical thing: you, including your brain.

But then from within you feel. This is exactly what this physical system feels like from within. So both exist simultaneously, which is known as panpsychism. - Panpsychism suggests that consciousness, the subjective experience of being conscious, is not just something that humans and some animals have. Rather, according to the theory, consciousness may be an inherent characteristic of all matter. Imagine that every little thing in the Universe has a hint of consciousness. Whether you buy it or not, it's an intriguing theory. So what is the difference between dualism and panpsychism? - So dualism says that there are actually two different domains.

That's how I grew up. I grew up Catholic and that's why they teach you, 'Okay, there's your brain and then there's your true self.' This is like the spirit floating on the water and that is a soul. And the soul forces you to do something, you know the soul ultimately decides as a free will and of course once you die the soul disconnects from the body and maybe resurrects at the end of time to live in the eschaton and all. of that.' But then the problem has always been what is the connection between the brain, the physical, and the mental, the soul?

Because if the soul is a really creepy thing, how does the soul make my brain do things? And then there is no evidence of such a soul, you know, because it has to exchange energy. We have never measured a soul like this. So we got rid of him. Panpsychism is different. Panpsychism actually says, "Basically, everything in the universe has two aspects: it has an internal aspect and it has an external aspect." It is not something additional that you have to presuppose, but rather it is inherent to the object, to things. Complex things have complex minds associated with them.

Simple things like maybe a fly or protozoa have very, very, very simple minds associated with them. - So there are degrees of consciousness? - Yes. - And we can imagine this consciousness evolving in different ways. - That's right. We have a lot but of course there could be creatures that have more. And like a baby has little and a dog has less. Like my dog ​​doesn't know about the weekend, but my dog ​​is clearly aware. You know that he can have pain and pleasure and can be happy and sad. And the mice, presumably, have less and the bees, presumably, have less and somewhere down there it gets so dark at the root of life.

Do you know that a fly really has a conscience? Right now, it's very difficult to address experimentally. But it may well seem like something to be a bee, to be alive, to have drunk a little golden nectar. - On the other side of Central Park there is a simple house where the Vedanta Society of New York is located. Hey. - Namaste, namaste. - Namaste. - And good morning. - Nice to meet you. It is a place where consciousness has been an issue for over 100 years. Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk, is their minister and spiritual leader. You are in a profession that, almost by definition, is interested in these questions at the perimeter of what we can know for sure. - Yes. - That traffics in things that I think all of us struggle with to different degrees: Who am I?

Because I am here? What am I supposed to do? - I think that human beings, wherever we are and whatever time we live in, have always been fascinated by these great questions. Like you said, who am I really? What am I doing here? What is the meaning of all this and what is our destiny? What is this? -How is consciousness defined? - That is a great question and, I would say, the central theme of what we teach in the philosophy of Vedanta is consciousness. - Hmm. - The reason Vedanta and other Indian philosophies, in general, have been interested in consciousness is that the common project in ancient India was how to go beyond suffering.

How to achieve fulfillment in human life and that concerns the human being. And when you get to the human self, to us, to me, the first thing that strikes you is that what is central for us is consciousness. And then they became very interested in what this consciousness was. The way we look at consciousness is from the inside out. If you ask Christof Koch or some of the brain scientists, they will try to look at it from the outside in. You know they're going to study the brain and then the electrical activity in the brain and try to understand what consciousness is.

What we do is look at our own experience. I mean that the evidence of consciousness is available to all of us. That is the first experience we have in our entire life. First we are aware and then we are aware of something else. Consciousness itself needs no evidence because it is self-evident. It is what we in Vedanta call "self-luminous." Light is a good example. In a dark room, when you turn on a light, everything in that room, the people, the tables and the chairs, are all revealed by that light.You don't need another light to see that light.

Consciousness is the light of lights, in Sanskrit (speaking in a foreign language). Everything here is illuminated by its light. When we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think, speak, do things, all the time there is a common thread throughout: we are conscious. These are all activities, experiences in consciousness. And if you define life as a series of experiences, then what we would say is that an experience is consciousness plus an object. You are aware and then you are aware of something. - Good. - And the things we are aware of keep changing. So we have a series of experiences.

And consciousness plus object one is an experience. Consciousness plus object two is another experience and so on. And awareness is constant. In Western thought, the person who came closest to this, I would say, was the philosopher, mathematician and scientist Descartes, who about 300 years ago set out to discover an absolutely certain basis for knowledge. And he questioned everything that could be questioned, doubted, could be doubted, but he discovered that you cannot doubt your own existence. "I think, therefore I am." Vedanta would say exactly that, but it is necessary to go a step further. Even when I don't think, I am still aware of not thinking. - Hmm. - So... - Yes, that's... - Consciousness is primary.

Whether thinking or not thinking, seeing. I think that's probably what Descartes was referring to. In Descartes' "Meditations," there is a very moving place where he says, "How strange it is that I can doubt everything I know in this world. I am not sure of it. We can doubt that any of this exists." I could be in the Matrix, you could be dreaming. But of which I am absolutely sure of my own existence, I know nothing of that consciousness. - Do you think that different approaches to understanding the world and consciousness, say spiritual and materialistic approaches, necessarily lead to different conclusions about meaning and purpose? - I am a conscious being, above all.

Before even being a body or a human being, I am first a conscious being. And if that consciousness itself is denied, as an

illusion

or as nothing more than activities in matter, in your life in the brain, in that case, the things that consciousness uniquely does, like meaning and purpose, also They will be denied. They will also be reduced to any matter or discarded as an

illusion

. Inevitably you will have a vision of the world lacking meaning, purpose. So now we have this deeply disconnected culture in the world today. There is science, hard science, and it claims absolute possession of the truth.

And there's religion, the humanities, all of which science would say is kind of derivative. You know that reality is matter, space, time, energy and from there life has evolved. And then life emerges with these little illusions of purpose, meaning, value, beauty and goodness. I think an interesting place is here, where right now with ChatGPT and everything AI related, we notice something very interesting happening. Everything that human beings are capable of doing and we thought that our highest capacities are like intelligence, like memory or creativity, like decision making. Now these machines, the AI-powered machines are capable of doing all of that except one thing and that thing is that they are not conscious.

And if you say that, okay, make the machines aware, they won't know where to start. That is why they ask what consciousness is and how artificial programs can be known, machines become conscious. That is a big problem. - Some people say, "Well, I was texting with the chatbot and I asked it if it was conscious. - Yes. - And it said it was conscious. So, it is conscious." - Good. - And you say: "Okay, by the way, here I am, I sit here as a human being in front of you, I tell you that I am God." Well?

Good? I mean, not that, you know there's more than one answer like that. - There are some conflicting statements. - Yes. - We'll have to solve that. - Yes. - Reid Hoffman is one of the best-known technology investors and entrepreneurs in the world. Perhaps best known for his role as co-founder of LinkedIn, he is also an accomplished writer and student of philosophy. Reid was an early investor and advisor to OpenAI, the startup responsible for creating what is probably the best-known artificial intelligence tool in the world, ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a large language model that answers questions you ask in natural language.

For example, what are the challenges in trying to understand the nature of consciousness? Reid explored the ins and outs of this emerging technology by co-authoring his most recent book, "Impromptu" with GPT-4. We wanted to talk to Reid about how artificial intelligence could help us better understand human intelligence and what it means to be conscious. When was the first time you remember thinking about artificial intelligence? - Well, my university specialty, Symbolic Systems, is basically artificial intelligence and cognitive science. So I was interested in how we think, how we speak, how we understand ourselves, how we understand each other, and how we do it both individually and collaboratively.

And Stanford had a great artificial intelligence department, and part of why it ended up being computing and cognition was that my specific suggestion was something like, "Okay, these cognitive abilities of these machines help us understand our own, they help us amplify ours. It might even create something really amazing and understand what intelligence is because we're so anthropocentric. So it's like, well, thinking is what we humans do." - Yes. - And you say, "Well, we are certainly a very good example of thinking beings and creatures. But think about all the other thinking creatures." We are generally very negative about how other animals think.

And as if they think much more than we believe. I mean they bond, they mate for life. They coordinate in packs and groups. I mean there are all kinds of things. And we say, "Well, they don't really think like we do." Well, of course they don't think like we do, but they do think, right? Well, now we also have another thought pattern. How do these machines think? Because, by the way, today they are also thinking. They don't think like we do. They may not be thinking at our level of ability in some way, but it's a pattern of thinking, right?

And then you think, okay, how do we understand all these different thought patterns and how are they similar and how are they different? - Well, Descartes says: "I think, therefore I am." - Yes. - Right, and in general with respect to philosophy, there is no uniformity of agreement that I can really know that you are having a conscious experience in the same way that I am having a conscious experience. Is that true or not or do you disagree? - Well, it's complicated. - Well. - So part of what I think Wittgenstein and other philosophers did to improve on Descartes, to put it in fairly simple terms: So he says, "I think, therefore I am," because I go through this doubt and realize that I must exist. to doubt that I exist.

Well, I am formulating a thought about: I think, therefore I am. How do I formulate that thought? How is it coherent? How is it communicable to me or to you? And when you start to analyze the language, you start to realize that in its pattern there may be some kind of, so to speak, transcendental observations about the nature of reality that arise if you believe... Aha, I think I understand what ends up to say, but you may need to

explain

it in more detail. But go ahead. - Yes, if you think we are actually managing to communicate instead of making random noises. - Well. - So you start to wonder, what do the words mean and how do we apply a word like conscious?

And I say: "I am conscious and you are conscious" and we learn Wittgenstein's phrases, we are a way of life and we play a language game. And Wittgenstein's argument would be that because of the way the word consciousness works in our form of language, we actually share some experience that is objective and shared even though it is each of our subjective consciousnesses. - Well. - Now, that doesn't mean that our consciousness is exactly the same. Like when I smell something different when I smell apricot and you smell something else... - Good, good, good. - When you smell like apricot... - The quality of... - Yes, the quality of it.

Maybe there is something diverse and subjective about it, but we learn in our use of language the pattern by which we say, "Oh, I smell apricot," and we synchronize in our language dances with each other what that is. And so we have some level of quality of shared experience in what that is. And so in life forms, there is a presumption that successful use of language leads to some observations about what the world is like, not just because of science, but because of our ability to communicate to each other about the worlds in which we live. we live mutually. inside. - Okay, then I'm convinced that you are also conscious. - Yes. - But we live in a time where, quite recently, there has been a thunderstorm of excitement and energy with and around AI with ChatGPT and all these great language models.

And it is surprising how quickly events are occurring. And I understand why people would say things like, "He's not conscious." But it seems to me that there is something about the way that these mechanisms, which are being built and from which we largely understand what is happening, how they seem to do things in a way that is somewhat mechanistic. But I guess we do things in a mechanistic way, but we also have a conscious experience. And how will we know if the machines are having any kind of conscious experience, other than the mechanistic thing that's going on?

Is it absurd to think that this could be happening? - It's certainly not crazy, although the way some people say it is. Because I think that at this moment machines are much closer to tools than creatures. Because part of how we make judgments and become aware is like one of us tells ourselves something and then we say, "Oh, that's it, actually, you've shown me something about the experience of that." Or I see your response of delight or pain with this and then I see a reflection of that in how I would do it. And that's part of how we do these things and the devices are not available right now.

There's nothing to say the devices couldn't get there in some version. - Good. - And part of the wonder of this is, well, how can we learn better about ourselves in that too? Like, for example, even playing with GPT-4, which I've been playing with since last August, when I'm like, "Wow, this thing can do a lot of things better than 99% of humans." Okay, what is the role of specialty? What are the things we still do and are much better at than this? So how can we continue using this as an amplifier? I think one of the big questions is how we come to understand other presences, cognitive entities in ourselves and how we have a heightened existence by associating, dancing together, etc.

I don't believe that consciousness is all or nothing. It is clearly a continuum and it is a continuum within an individual. You know I'm more aware when I'm awake. And within a collection of species; You know, I think certain species are more conscious than others and I think the same goes for machines too. You know, maybe, I don't think we still have machines that are conscious in any interesting sense. But I think if we ever do it, they will be part of that spectrum. - Melanie Mitchell is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute who has studied artificial intelligence for decades. - I will say the technical thing tonight.

She-she She is also the author of "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide to Human Thinking." - I've been interested in science all my life, essentially. But I became very interested in the topic of intelligence when I read Doug Hofstadter's book, "Godel, Escher, Bach," when I graduated from college. It was about how intelligence can emerge from this giant collection of non-intelligent things like the body's cells, neurons, and their connections. So a neuron is not intelligent, I think most people would agree with that. But when you put together a large collection of them and they interact in certain ways. What we call intelligence arises along with many other types of mental cognitive qualities, such as emotions, self-awareness, and other things of that nature.

That was incredibly fascinating to me. And I got into AI because I worked with Hofstadter and that's what he was working on. I mean it was kind of a mix of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, because we were interested in understanding human intelligence by trying to develop intelligence in machines. This whole AI controversy about consciousness has put it in the spotlight of the general public thinking about what consciousness is. What is this thing we call self-awareness? How is that different from things that are not aware of themselves? You know things that people don't usually talk about.

But now we have these systems that speak to us in natural language and appear to be self-aware. We know they probably aren't, almost certainly aren't. But how would we know? What type of tests would we do? And then we startRealize that these questions don't just apply to similar AI; They apply to things like when is a baby self-aware? - Sure. - About 30 or 40 years ago, people used to think that babies didn't feel pain. - Hmm. - And they would perform surgeries on newborns without anesthesia. You know it seems crazy now. You know our understanding of how consciousness develops is increasing.

Often, a lot of people don't believe that animals have consciousness and therefore it's okay to use them as farm workers and eat them and all that kind of stuff. But we really have very little understanding of these questions about consciousness. So I think AI has helped us really see that this is an important question, not just for philosophy, but for real life. - Yes. - And to make moral decisions. - Good morning to you. - And good afternoon to you, sir. - Everything we have in our heads that allows us to understand things is not something that can be put into a computer.

It's very relevant, of course, to what people are saying now about AI. You see, they seem to say, "Well, these AI systems are so smart, they're going to replace us." But for me that is a mistake. They get pretty smart and can do all kinds of things faster than us, sure, but they don't understand anything. They don't understand what they are doing. Understanding is a quality that needs awareness and they do not have awareness. - Sir Roger Penrose is a mathematician, physicist and philosopher of science. He has won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on black holes and shares the Wolf Prize with Stephen Hawking for his contributions to the theory of general relativity.

In 1988 he published "The Emperor's New Mind", a book that delves into the field of consciousness studies. Most approaches to explaining consciousness using classical physics end up describing something that sounds like a really complicated computer or AI. But some scientists and philosophers have the nagging feeling that there is still something special about consciousness that classical physics cannot capture on its own and, as a result, cannot be reduced to a simple calculation. This is what led Roger to explore whether the weirdness and mystery of quantum physics could help explain the weirdness and mystery of consciousness. - So I started to wonder, "Well, what can we have in our heads that isn't something that can be put into a computer?" Now I am a physicalist, in the sense that I believe that what goes on in our heads is part of the physical world.

And the same thing happens with what happens in this glass or with what happens in this thing, with this light. All of those things are part of the physical world. The argument I would make is that consciousness, if you make a conscious decision, your conscious action is not a calculation, but is something that depends on this mysterious part of physics that is kind of a gap in our understanding, which is the collapse of the wave function. - In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse refers to what happens when you actually try to measure the state of a quantum system at a given moment.

The point is that quantum entities like electrons can exist in multiple states at the same time. Think of it as a roll of the dice. When they are in the air, they are all potential. They do not have any numerical value. But when they land, they collapse into one of the 21 possible combinations for a pair of dice. But the one number you land on is not an accurate description of the dice as they exist when they move through the air, when all the possibilities they could land on still exist. Penrose theorized that perhaps this quantum process could play a role in generating consciousness. - There is a probability of this, a probability of that.

But maybe that's not the whole story. There's more to the story that means that this collapse of the wave function is something that, in our brain, we kind of take advantage of whatever is happening. And this was the point I was trying to make: You asked me about the popular books that I wrote, or I can call them semi-popular, if you want, they are a little more technical than a lot of popular books. And "The Emperor's New Mind" was the book I wrote first. And I was trying to promote this view that, well, there must be something going on in our heads that requires the collapse of the wave function and that that's kind of the cornerstone of whatever consciousness is. - Hmm. - And Stuart Hameroff read my book and grabbed me and said, "Well, you obviously don't know anything else that you should know." He didn't say it like that, but these were microtubules.

And I was completely ignorant of microtubules, I was absolutely right. I didn't know what they were for, I had never heard of them. - Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist who, around the same time, in the 1980s, was trying to understand consciousness by studying the process of turning it off. Together, Roger and Stuart theorized that perhaps these microtubules, small straw-like structures inside us that help shape our cells and act as highways for important information, could be where these quantum processes occur, giving rise to awareness. - Anyway, that's how we got together and the idea started, I don't think anyone really believed us.

I think it's gotten to the point where it's one of the top three or four theories. Then he takes it seriously. And I think it's certainly considered a different angle than most people would think. They tend to think of it as some kind of computer-like action in the brain. And what we're trying to say is, "No, it's something quite different." - Penrose and Hameroff's theory known as "orchestrated objective reduction" remains controversial. But it is not called the difficult problem of consciousness for nothing. There is no shortage of arguments for and against, practically, every proposed explanation of what it does to us.

When we were chatting a little earlier about science and religion, I had some trouble squaring up your perspective. Because in a sense, I think there's a sense that science and religion shouldn't be afraid of each other and should be able to address some of the same questions. But in another respect, we are defining two very different types of approaches. - Yes. - So how do you define religion and how do you define science with each other? - Our definition of religion would be that it is the manifestation of a potential divinity in all of us and the objective is to manifest this divinity within us. - MMM. - You do it through philosophy.

You do it through meditation. You do it through devotional religion. You do it through good works. In all the ways humanity has tried to be better and bigger, it is a manifestation of the divinity within us. And science, as we know it now, is a quest to understand what reality is. Until now it has focused on external reality and, curiously, has ignored ourselves. You know, at most we focus on the body and we have learned a lot about it. But the science of the mind is still in its infancy. I mean, if you ask a materialist reductionist, what is a thought?

There is no room for a thought. You have to explain everything in terms of matter, energy, time and space. Where in time, space, matter or energy is there a thought? What they will immediately say is that, of course, a thought is nothing more than activity in the brain. But that is where we run into the difficult problem of consciousness. And that is the most important question in current consciousness studies. Do you know what exactly consciousness is? That cannot be reduced to a brain. So even from a very rigorous and strict scientific perspective, it can no longer be denied that there is something that could be, in principle, impossible to explain by at least our current idea of ​​science. - MMM. - And I'm open, actually, and people might think that you're a monk and committed to religion, which is true, but I'm also open in principle to the idea that I could be completely wrong. - Sure. - And Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett could be absolutely right that it could be an issue.

And therefore, our whole religion, all of it could just be a matter of culture, of practice. Religion is good, but I don't subscribe to it. I subscribe to the heavy metaphysical baggage that there is an ultimate reality, which you can disguise as God, but something like that exists and is somehow deeply connected to our existence as consciousness and as conscious beings. - There are many theologians who have a very different perspective on conscience. And they imagine, perhaps, that there is this kind of supernatural world that exists and maybe is outside of our own world and that our conscious experience, separate from the material world, is something completely different.

That it is not possible to understand it the way you are trying to understand it. Do you have a general feeling regarding the competitive approach? - Well, many times it is not so much about competing because they agree that in this life my brain is fundamental for consciousness. If I lose my brain due to an accident, gunshot or whatever, I will lose consciousness. - Yes. - So in that sense we both agree. They offer a larger narrative that says, “Well, then you will die, but then God will resurrect you in the fulness of times.” - Well well. - I have no evidence of this.

I can't deny that that doesn't happen. But in my case it is not like that, because there is simply no evidence of it. There is another point of view, this idealism, which is somewhat non-religious, which says, "Yes, ultimately everything is a manifestation of the mental." And if you die, yes, your individual consciousness will be absorbed into the greater whole, think of it as an ocean. You are right now an individual drop, with your own ego. But then when you die, you will return to the infinite ocean and be part of the larger consciousness. So, in that sense, the most fundamental thing is not the physical, but the mental. - MMM. - But it is not personal survival.

It is very different from the classic, you know that you will be there in the sky floating on some cloud in paradise. - Good. It's interesting that you can think about everything there is, the kind of mystery that is in it all, and that drop could be descending into a void that will never be heard from again or coming back to become part of everything there is. . And one could have the same thought, essentially, and formulate it in different ways... In two different ways, yes. - Yes. - And the physicalist would say, yes, that drop disappears in a vacuum, as you just said.

Or an idealist would say, no, go back to that liquid or substance where everything came from. It's a very different view, but you know it could be true. - Yes, what if this is simply ineffable? We can get closer to it, but we will always be infinitely far away. - Yes, there is no guarantee that there is a definitive theory of consciousness. But I know there is a guarantee that there will be no such theory if we don't try. - The debate over how consciousness works, where it resides and why it exists, seems unlikely to be resolved in my lifetime.

But as human beings, we tend to fill the gaps in our understanding with speculation and superstition. But I have to say that with something as fundamental to our experience as consciousness, it's hard to imagine that it doesn't have some purpose. - Perhaps there is a teleology towards the elevation of consciousness and being in the Universe, in which we are somehow participants, they can be outstanding examples. That would be a beautiful existence. - Would you like that to be... - That would be great, that would be wonderful. - Well. - You know, I think that the karmic rebirth of Buddhism is one of the most elegant metaphysics, if it really existed.

Look, let's say the world doesn't have a teleology, there's no reason we should treat the world as if it doesn't. We can say, "No, we think it's something elegant, something beautiful, something important about the expansion of consciousness in the Universe." That's the mission that we're on, that we're demonstrating and it doesn't matter if you say, wow, there's only physics and atoms and so on. But let us act in such a way that the nobility of that quest to become our aspirational humanity, to become more conscious, is the goal of life. We can choose that. We can anoint that.

We can say that is where we are going. - Consciousness is a gift. Whatever it is and whether it has a purpose or not, it is present. It is the foundation of all human action: past, present and future. It gives us the power to shape our world, to understand the Universe, and sometimes even to step back and appreciate that feeling of life itself.