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Allowed. Conversations

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on the leading edge of

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knowledge and discovery with

0:41

psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello

0:49

and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove.

0:51

Today, I am going to

0:54

have an open -ended conversation with

0:56

one of the leading lights

0:58

in parapsychology, psychical research, and

1:00

consciousness studies. Professor Ed

1:02

Kelly, who is recently

1:05

the recipient of the

1:07

Frederick Myers Memorial Medal

1:09

awarded by the Society

1:11

for Psychical Research in

1:13

England for outstanding lifetime

1:15

contributions to the field.

1:18

That award originally established

1:20

in 1995 has only been

1:22

given out nine times

1:25

since then. Ed Kelly

1:27

is Professor of Research

1:29

in the Division of Perceptual

1:31

Studies at the University

1:33

of Virginia Health System. This

1:35

program is perhaps the

1:38

primary research center in the

1:40

world looking at cases

1:42

of the reincarnation type. cases

1:45

of possession, near

1:47

-death experiences, and the

1:49

nature of consciousness. He

1:52

is an editor and

1:54

contributor to three very

1:56

important anthologies. Irreducible

1:59

Mind Toward a

2:01

Psychology for the 21st

2:03

Century. Beyond

2:06

Physicalism Toward

2:09

Reconciliation of Science

2:11

and Spirituality. consciousness

2:15

unbound, liberating

2:17

mind from the

2:19

tyranny of materialism." I

2:21

first met Ed

2:23

when I attended the

2:26

1973 Parapsychological Association

2:28

Conference at the University

2:30

of Virginia in

2:32

Charlottesville, which is where

2:34

he is currently

2:36

located. Now, I will

2:38

switch over to the Internet

2:40

video. Welcome, Ed. It

2:42

is a pleasure to be with you

2:44

today. Thank you. Finally

2:47

here. I'm very grateful

2:49

for your time. Congratulations,

2:51

of course, on the

2:54

Meyers Award. Let's

2:57

start by talking about

3:00

your early years as

3:02

a psychologist. I understand

3:04

that You've done

3:06

a lot of work

3:08

actually and in fact received

3:10

some substantial grants for

3:12

looking at physiological correlates of

3:15

psychic functioning of ESP

3:17

and I'm under the impression

3:19

that most people working

3:21

in that field, in the

3:23

field of neurophysiology, are

3:25

by and large materialists. So

3:27

you were deeply embedded

3:29

in a materialistic culture and

3:31

at the same time

3:33

studying Psi

3:35

phenomena. Would that be

3:37

correct? I wasn't working

3:39

with material scientists when studying

3:41

Psi. Those were kind of

3:43

separate parts of my career,

3:46

but I also did spend

3:48

a big middle chunk of

3:50

my career working with a

3:52

somatosensory neuroscience group at the

3:54

University of North Carolina in

3:56

Chapel Hill studying touch and

3:59

responses of human brains to

4:01

tactile stimuli, like vibrations applied

4:03

to fingertips, stuff like that. And

4:06

yes, they were all good

4:08

materialists, but some very good

4:10

scientists too. Well, it

4:12

almost sounds as if you're

4:14

suggesting that in order to

4:16

be a parapsychologist, you cannot

4:18

be a materialist like with

4:20

the people you worked with

4:22

in North Carolina. Is

4:25

that your position? No,

4:27

not at all. Actually, And

4:30

we're kind of getting ahead of ourselves a little

4:32

bit here, I think. You

4:35

one could do the

4:37

kind of work that I've

4:40

done in parapsychology without

4:42

any kind of metaphysical commitments

4:44

at all, whether to

4:46

materialism or something else. My

4:49

personal journey has been

4:51

from being a young

4:54

apprentice scientist, certainly

4:56

a physicalist of some

4:58

sort to what

5:00

amounts to almost the opposite

5:02

end of the metaphysical spectrum, but

5:05

driven there, I think, by data and

5:07

by things I've learned along the way.

5:11

So that's what we'll talk about, I'm sure.

5:15

latest book in the

5:17

series of three anthologies

5:19

talks about the tyranny

5:21

of materialism in the

5:23

subtitle, so that definitely

5:25

suggests a particular attitude

5:27

about materialism. I'm

5:30

very sympathetic to that

5:32

point of view. I

5:35

lean towards Bernardo Kastrup's

5:37

analytical idealism, but at the

5:39

same time I have

5:41

to say speaking for myself,

5:43

I'm not convinced that

5:45

materialism is incapable of addressing

5:47

the problem. For example,

5:49

the problem of life after

5:51

death, it seems to

5:53

me there may be materialistic

5:55

ways of looking at

5:57

that. Well, that

5:59

certainly gets into these poorly

6:02

explored subjects such as

6:04

subtle energies and subtle bodies

6:06

and esoteric anatomies and

6:08

that sort of stuff. Very

6:11

little has really been done

6:14

in that area, but I think

6:16

it's it's clearly possible to

6:18

approach it all from a scientific

6:20

point of view. And maybe

6:22

maybe the answer really is what

6:24

the Dutch guy Portman called

6:26

hyalic pluralism. That is that there

6:28

are different types of matter.

6:30

We've mainly dealt with the sort

6:32

of grossest type and maybe

6:34

there are subtle types that explain

6:37

some of these things. For

6:39

example, birthmarks

6:41

and birth defects in cases

6:43

of the reincarnation type where

6:45

a kid is born with

6:47

a very unusual birthmark or

6:49

birth defect that corresponds to

6:51

wounds that killed the previous

6:53

personality, things of that sort.

6:55

That's entirely up for grabs

6:57

at this point. There

6:59

at the University of Virginia

7:01

where you are, Ian Stevenson

7:03

has published extensively on these

7:05

birthmarks. Yeah, he

7:08

was especially interested in that

7:10

large subset of his

7:12

cases. Something on

7:14

the order of 2 ,500 cases

7:16

have been studied and a

7:18

couple hundred of them, 230

7:20

or 40, I

7:23

think, have this feature of

7:25

very unusual birth marks

7:27

or birth defects corresponding to

7:29

fatal wounds on the

7:31

previous personality. So

7:33

they're certainly challenging. set

7:36

of cases. Yeah, it would

7:38

appear that at some level

7:40

something physical is going on

7:42

there. I wasn't even thinking

7:44

of subtle energy though when

7:46

I brought up the possibility

7:48

that materialism will sustain itself.

7:50

I was actually thinking about

7:52

a lot of the mathematical

7:54

work going on in hyperspace.

7:58

You're thinking of burning a car

8:00

and people like that? Yes. Yeah.

8:05

That's one of the approaches. Yeah,

8:07

let me just say

8:09

that certainly when I started

8:11

out, I was intrigued

8:13

by the phenomena so that

8:15

they conflicted with conventional

8:18

beliefs about the nature of

8:20

reality were therefore important,

8:22

not terrifying, challenging,

8:24

exciting. And like

8:26

most people who come at

8:28

the subject from the scientific

8:30

side, I really hoped that

8:32

some small adjustment in our

8:35

hard -won picture of reality would

8:37

allow us to explain these

8:39

additional things. And

8:41

it's only over a period of

8:43

decades that I've gradually become

8:45

convinced that once you give up

8:47

classical physicalism there's no safe

8:49

place to stop short of something

8:51

like its exact opposite in

8:53

which some sort of mind or

8:55

consciousness lies at the basis

8:57

of everything and everything else comes

9:00

from that. Talk

9:02

about that, I'm sure, later on at some

9:05

point. You also did

9:07

quite a bit of work

9:09

in J .B. Ryan's Institute in

9:11

Durham, as I recall.

9:14

Yeah, well, that's where I

9:16

started out, actually, against the

9:18

advice of a number of

9:20

people. I chose to

9:22

go directly to work in a

9:25

parapsychology laboratory right out of graduate

9:27

school, followed by a one -year

9:29

postdoc. I have to

9:31

confess I spent most of

9:33

my postdoc year where I

9:35

was supposed to be doing

9:37

computational linguistics instead reading parapsychology

9:39

literature and began a conversation

9:41

with J .B. Ryan during that

9:43

period and was eventually invited

9:45

to start up at his

9:47

new institute. This is outside

9:49

Duke University sort of across

9:51

town. near the east

9:53

campus of Duke University. He

9:55

had a clapboard house on

9:57

Buchanan Boulevard. That was

10:00

the Institute for Parapsychology,

10:02

the only division of the

10:04

Foundation for Research on

10:06

the Nature of Man. That

10:09

was JB's organization. Yeah,

10:12

and at the time I went

10:14

there, I was not committed to the

10:16

field. I was curious about

10:18

it. And I hadn't

10:20

been there more than about

10:22

a month when I made the

10:25

acquaintance of a guy who

10:27

was referred down to Durham by

10:29

one of my former psychology

10:31

professors at Yale, Irv Child. This

10:35

guy was a second

10:37

year law student at Yale.

10:39

Had become very unhappy with

10:42

his courses in law school. gradually

10:45

worked his way through various

10:47

persons found this earth child who

10:50

had developed himself an interest

10:52

in parapsychology who knew that I

10:54

was now working for Ryan

10:56

and referred this person Bill Delmore

10:58

down to us and I

11:01

actually had him living in my

11:03

house for this first visit

11:05

was about six weeks long during

11:07

which we gave him a

11:09

lot of things to do and

11:11

he could do practically all

11:14

of them, often at extreme levels

11:16

of statistical success, and he

11:18

pretty much erased any doubts I

11:20

still entertain as to the

11:22

reality of the phenomena. If

11:25

I remember correctly, Bill

11:27

Delmore is the person

11:29

who got all 25

11:31

cards correct in a deck

11:33

of Xenar cards? No,

11:36

that was Hubert

11:38

Pierce, actually. with

11:41

Ryan as the experimenter. Yeah, that was

11:43

an old time event, but Bill did

11:45

things that were rather like that. For

11:48

example, well, let me just

11:50

say that after this first

11:52

six -week visit, we published

11:55

a paper about him and

11:57

then found a way to

11:59

pay him to spend a

12:01

whole bunch more time with

12:03

us the following year. And

12:06

we did a bunch of card experiments,

12:08

for example, not Xenar cards, although we did

12:10

a little bit of that in the

12:12

beginning. We used playing cards. Paranthetically,

12:15

he would have preferred to use

12:17

tarot cards, of which there are 73,

12:19

I guess, and that would

12:22

have been even better from my point

12:24

of view, but we wanted to

12:26

kind of stay away from the kind

12:28

of woo -woo connotations, shall we say,

12:30

of tarot cards. Playing cards are

12:32

less controversial. And in

12:34

a long series of trials

12:37

with playing cards, he got

12:39

exact hits at about three

12:41

times chance expectation. This is

12:43

over thousands of trials. Probably

12:46

doing that well by

12:48

chance is essentially zero.

12:52

And in the course of it,

12:54

there were exactly 20 occasions

12:57

on which he felt very confident

12:59

and told us so before

13:01

we reveal the answer to him.

13:03

This is with playing cards

13:05

now, probability 1 and 52. And

13:08

in those 20 trials, 14

13:11

were exact hits. The

13:13

other six were all partial hits. Five

13:15

were number hits where he got the suit

13:18

wrong, and the last one was a

13:20

suit hit where he got the number wrong

13:22

by one. So on those 20 trials

13:24

with playing cards, he was right around him

13:26

every single time, basically. That's

13:29

a lot better than

13:31

25 for 25 with zener

13:33

cards. probability equals 0 .2.

13:35

You were looking at

13:37

visual perception using a tachistoscope

13:39

flashing the playing cards

13:41

for a fraction of a

13:43

second to see how

13:45

his responses to those targets

13:47

compared with the ESP

13:49

tests in which there was

13:51

no possibility of any

13:53

sort of visual perception. Yeah,

13:56

that's exactly right Jeff. Now

13:58

this a well often used technique

14:01

in cognitive psychology to study the

14:03

kinds of errors made in a task,

14:05

basically for what they will tell

14:07

you about the way the task is

14:09

carried out. And so

14:11

we did that with Bill, not

14:13

really expecting very much. So

14:15

we ran a parallel series

14:17

where he was actually seeing

14:19

the cards, but only briefly

14:22

and consequently made plenty of

14:24

errors. And the

14:26

errors had a kind of structure that

14:28

You might expect, for example, face cards would

14:30

get mixed up, especially if they're the

14:32

same color and that sort of thing. And

14:35

the astonishing thing was that

14:37

in the ESP condition where

14:39

he's strictly deprived of access

14:41

to the cards, visual access,

14:44

he made astonishingly

14:46

similar mistakes. Again,

14:48

mixing up face cards, especially if they're

14:50

the same color and so on. And

14:53

we interpreted that

14:55

as demonstrating that

14:58

involuntary visual imagery was,

15:00

in fact, as he

15:03

had told us, a

15:05

big part of whatever

15:07

internal process governed the

15:09

responses. So

15:11

when a trial began,

15:13

he would close his eyes,

15:16

and after a little while, he would

15:18

open his eyes and make a

15:20

report. And in the meantime,

15:22

he told us what he

15:25

was doing was observing his

15:27

internal visual landscape, waiting for

15:29

images to appear. And

15:31

they could appear anywhere. They

15:33

could be big or little, you

15:35

know, brightly colored or vivid

15:37

or dull and move fast or

15:40

slowly and that sort of

15:42

thing. So he would naturally make

15:44

visual -like errors of identification. But

15:47

this was actually, it was

15:49

that experiment. that for

15:52

the first time in my life

15:54

made me interested in EEG,

15:56

electroencephalography, as a way of, you

15:58

know, put electrodes on his

16:00

head, measure what's going on in

16:02

his brain just prior to

16:04

his announcement of his response, maybe

16:07

we could identify something in

16:09

the brain activity that would predict

16:11

success of the response. That

16:13

would be a big deal in parapsychology

16:15

for a bunch of reasons. Yeah,

16:18

let me state a few of them. This

16:21

is important because a lot

16:23

of the early work in particular

16:25

in parapsychology was directed only

16:27

to showing that something unexplainable was

16:30

going on. That is, there's

16:32

a statistical anomaly in this person's

16:34

ability to guess cards of

16:36

whatever sort at levels beyond chance

16:38

expectation. That's good, but

16:40

it's much better if you can

16:42

correlate that with something else independent

16:44

of the ESP task. and

16:47

in the present day and

16:49

age correlating with physiological stuff

16:51

is really ideal because of

16:53

the tremendous concentration of psychology

16:55

now on cognitive neuroscience attempts

16:58

to study brains and how

17:00

they relate to whatever mental

17:02

is going on. Furthermore,

17:06

if we could find some

17:08

correlative success in Bill Delmore,

17:10

we already have a statistical

17:12

leg up in the sense

17:14

that We

17:16

could do another experiment, look

17:18

for trials that have that

17:20

characteristic with the expectation that

17:22

the scoring on those trials

17:24

would be better than the

17:26

whole lot. And

17:28

so if that worked, we would

17:30

already have a certain degree of

17:32

statistical control of the phenomenon. Furthermore,

17:35

if the characteristics of brain

17:37

activity are of a sort

17:39

that we could induce or

17:41

stabilize, we would

17:43

be approaching experimental control, which of

17:45

course is the sort of

17:48

high ideal of experimental science. I

17:51

could have other

17:53

useful applications. For

17:55

example, my favorite

17:57

is Helmut Schmidt's

18:00

retrocausal PK studies,

18:02

in which on day one

18:05

he runs his random number

18:07

generator at the Institute for

18:09

Parapsychology. records what happens but

18:11

doesn't look at it. On

18:14

day two he brings in

18:16

a subject to do the task.

18:18

It's this using a device

18:20

that's kind of a random coin

18:22

flipper producing ones or zeros

18:24

or zeros and ones, ones and

18:26

twos, whatever. Two possible

18:28

outcomes. The subject's task is to make

18:30

one of those kinds of outcome

18:32

occur more often than it would by

18:34

chance. Now, If the

18:37

person succeeds on day two,

18:39

Helmut would like to say

18:41

that he is retrocausally changing

18:43

what happened yesterday. As

18:45

a poor old psychologist, I find

18:48

that extremely hard to swallow. And

18:50

I'm immediately suspicious that

18:53

it was Helmut yesterday who

18:55

caused the beyond chance

18:57

result. So it would

18:59

be wonderful if we could put

19:01

electrodes on Helmut yesterday and

19:03

the subject today and actually determine.

19:06

possibly, which one was the real

19:08

subject in the experiment. This

19:11

has a big history now

19:13

in parapsychology, the difficulty of

19:15

so -called experimenter effects. That

19:18

is, that you call

19:20

one person the subject and the

19:22

other the experimenter doesn't mean

19:24

that that's really how it is

19:26

and it's known to be

19:28

a difficult problem, particularly in work

19:30

with unselected subjects, and particularly

19:32

if the experimenters are known independently

19:34

to be good Psi sources,

19:36

gets harder and harder to tell

19:38

who's really the source of

19:40

whatever happens in the experiment. I

19:43

think the answer to that

19:45

is to have poor Psi

19:47

subjects such as myself studying

19:49

gifted Psi subjects such as

19:51

Bill Delmore. the best

19:53

way in my opinion of getting

19:55

around this difficulty. As

19:57

I recall JB Ryan rejected

19:59

the retro PK studies. When

20:01

I proposed to him that

20:03

we should get interested in

20:05

studying the physiology of Bill

20:07

Delmore for these reasons. He

20:10

refused to let me do it,

20:12

and that's why I left the Institute

20:14

of Parapsychology after about a year

20:16

and a half and moved over to

20:18

the electrical engineering department at Duke,

20:20

where there were already some people who

20:22

were interested in that possibility. Did

20:25

Ryan give you reasons? Well,

20:29

I want to be a

20:31

little careful here in what

20:33

I say about JB. He

20:36

was really the right person in

20:38

the right place at the right time.

20:41

This was still the heyday of,

20:43

well, the latter part of the heyday

20:45

of behaviorism. He built

20:47

and structured the field

20:49

of experimental parapsychology in

20:51

the U .S. during

20:53

a period when it

20:55

was under constant attack,

20:58

really, from particularly psychologists, also

21:00

some statisticians. And

21:03

JB did a great

21:05

deal to iron out both

21:07

the experimental and the

21:09

statistical procedures that became routine

21:11

in his lab. And

21:15

using those procedures, I mean working

21:17

them to death really, they

21:19

discovered a lot of very important stuff.

21:21

They discovered things like terminal salience effects

21:23

that scores are better at the beginning

21:25

and ends of runs than in the

21:28

middle. SI

21:30

missing, where a target is

21:32

systematically avoided. Consistent

21:35

missing, where persons give

21:38

consistent but wrong responses to

21:40

particular targets. This

21:43

would be like Bill Delmore, for example, choosing

21:45

the jack of diamonds when the target was

21:47

the jack of clubs or something of that

21:49

sort. Other

21:51

things of that sort. The

21:55

sheep goat stuff was part

21:57

of that early. period. So a

21:59

lot of good work was

22:01

done. But JB had very fixed

22:03

ideas about what was worth

22:06

doing in parapsychology. And we argued

22:08

about this. We had a

22:10

series of several private meetings in

22:12

which I tried to convince

22:14

him of the value of what

22:16

I had done and was

22:18

hoping to do in terms of

22:20

physiology, could never convince him.

22:22

He basically told me that I

22:24

would either stop doing that

22:26

or he would fire me. And

22:29

that was when I moved. But

22:31

you found rather quickly a compatible

22:33

group of people to pursue that line

22:36

of research with. Yeah, I had

22:38

already met these people during my year

22:40

and a half. John

22:42

Artley was a professor of

22:44

electrical engineering at Duke. And

22:47

Fritz Klein was a

22:49

PhD student working under

22:51

John. He was actually

22:53

working up in the

22:55

anesthesiology department in Duke

22:57

Hospital, developing means

22:59

for telemetering two channels

23:01

of EEG during surgical

23:03

procedures in order to

23:05

try to follow depth

23:07

of anesthesia using EEG

23:09

methods. So he was

23:11

working on stuff right

23:13

up my alley. And

23:15

John had constructed a

23:18

shielded room in the

23:20

basement of the main

23:22

EE building. It

23:24

was an

23:26

old high -power

23:28

engineering facility down

23:30

there. was

23:32

a real bunker

23:34

down in

23:36

the basement. Lots

23:39

of space, though, and a good

23:41

place for us to be. So

23:44

we pursued that actually

23:46

for the next almost 10

23:49

years and had developed

23:51

an elegant, small but elegant

23:53

system for constructing experiments

23:55

and analyzing EEG data. We

23:58

began to use it. We

24:00

found several indications that the

24:02

path we were following could

24:04

be productive. During

24:06

that period, I

24:08

even, well, on

24:10

an occasion where

24:13

my main engineering support

24:15

was away. He

24:17

was accompanying a geological

24:19

expedition in Africa

24:22

with a Duke geology

24:24

professor. He was surveying

24:26

the place for oil, I think, for

24:28

oil company. Anyway, while Ross

24:30

Dunceith was away doing that, I analyzed

24:32

a bunch of datasets that I

24:34

had collected, mainly with the help of

24:36

Gaither Pratt. These

24:38

are high -scoring ESP datasets.

24:42

And in looking at those, intensively,

24:44

I was able to

24:46

show that in addition

24:48

to the high scoring,

24:50

which had always been

24:52

the main focus of

24:54

inquiry, I could

24:57

show that the pattern of

24:59

distribution of hits was itself

25:01

independently highly significant. That is, you

25:04

can quantify the tendency

25:06

toward grouping of hits

25:09

and analyze that statistically independent of

25:11

the number of hits there

25:13

actually are. And it

25:15

turned out that in most of

25:17

these gifted subjects, including in particular

25:19

Bill Delmore and Sean Haribans, two

25:22

guys that I was involved with, that

25:24

they had very strong tendency for

25:26

their hits to occur in batches. And

25:29

what they both told us

25:31

and several other subjects echoed was

25:33

that, well, Most

25:35

of the time, they'd just be going

25:37

along like you and me, not having much

25:40

luck. And they would

25:42

then begin to home

25:44

in on the right

25:46

state for today's effort.

25:49

With Bill Domo, it amounted to

25:51

trying to detect what properties

25:53

of imagery were most reliable today.

25:55

So the fact that hits occurred

25:58

only railroad was a big

26:00

help to him in doing that.

26:02

With the ESP card he

26:04

didn't like him because he got

26:06

too many hits by chance

26:08

and couldn't sort your internal cues

26:10

So here in what really

26:13

must be the most hostile of

26:15

all possible environments for such

26:17

a thing to appear I found

26:19

traces of what we hypothesize

26:21

was a general connection between strong

26:23

ESP performance and some sort

26:26

of unusual state of consciousness Actually,

26:30

Raphael Locke and I,

26:32

he was a cultural

26:34

anthropologist from Australia who

26:36

had an encyclopedic knowledge

26:38

of the worldwide topic

26:41

of shamanism. We

26:43

published a kind of pep

26:46

talk for parapsychologists. It was a

26:48

parapsychology monograph. 1980,

26:52

I guess it was 1980,

26:54

it was originally published, then reissued

26:56

in 2009 with a new

26:58

preface, but it's called Altered States

27:00

of Consciousness and Psy. I

27:03

can't remember my own

27:05

subtitle, but anyway, it

27:07

surveyed the main classes

27:09

of such phenomena, which

27:11

include things like, in

27:14

addition to shamanic trances of

27:16

various kinds that Ralph knew

27:18

a lot about. Hypnotic

27:21

trance, deep meditation,

27:23

as described in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras,

27:25

for example, that sort of

27:27

thing. Mediumship,

27:29

which in the historical period

27:31

was usually involved with

27:33

some sort of unusual state

27:35

of consciousness. I

27:38

mean, Mrs. Piper, for example, would

27:40

wouldn't react if an open bottle

27:42

of ammonia was stuck beneath her

27:44

nose. Anybody

27:46

who has tried that will know that you

27:48

must have been in a very unusual state for

27:50

that to be the case. So,

27:53

and OBEs, another point

27:56

of interest, we're still extremely

27:58

interested in out -of -body

28:00

experiences. And yeah, let

28:02

me just mention jumping ahead here

28:04

about 50 years. When

28:07

I finished my

28:09

middle mainstream science period

28:11

and moved to

28:13

Virginia, having married Emily,

28:17

who at the time was working with Ian

28:19

up here in Virginia. My

28:21

main goal was to create

28:23

a laboratory facility in which we

28:25

could continue the work that

28:27

we had started at Duke. We

28:30

ran out of steam there, ran

28:32

out of money, and plus we got

28:34

a new dean in the School

28:36

of Engineering. This is for

28:38

those who know some of this

28:40

history, this will be an interesting

28:42

point. We got as

28:44

our new dean at Duke,

28:47

the guy who had been an assistant dean

28:49

to Bob John at Princeton and the

28:52

Pear Lab. And this

28:54

man was at Duke less than a

28:56

week before it became perfectly evident that there

28:58

was not going to be any of

29:00

this kind of stuff going on in his

29:02

school of engineering. So

29:06

that's the kind of background

29:08

for all that. So we ran

29:10

out of cash in about

29:12

mid 80s. And that was when

29:14

I had to make a

29:16

turn into various kinds of mainstream

29:18

activities. But when

29:20

I got to UVA,

29:22

we were in fact able

29:25

to get some funding. begin

29:28

working on parapsychology again

29:30

physiologically and in fact in

29:32

2007 we in a

29:34

complicated process got a quite

29:36

large donation that allowed

29:38

us to acquire the space

29:40

that DOPS is now

29:42

in and to build within

29:44

that space a really

29:46

state -of -the -art EEG lab

29:48

and I'm happy to say

29:50

that although I myself

29:52

was not able to do

29:54

as much with that

29:56

lab as I had hoped,

29:58

in which it could

30:00

certainly service. We

30:03

now have a new director, my

30:06

self -appointed director

30:08

of the EEJ,

30:10

the Neuroimaging Lab,

30:12

really, at UVA,

30:14

David Akonzo. So

30:16

the lab is now in better hands

30:18

than mine going forward, and I think

30:20

you can expect to see a lot

30:23

of Good stuff coming out of it

30:25

in the coming years. If

30:27

I understand correctly what

30:29

you're getting at, that

30:31

there seem to be

30:33

particular altered states of

30:35

consciousness in general, trance

30:38

states, states of relaxation

30:40

that correlate with high

30:42

scoring. Yeah. And

30:44

what you want to

30:46

determine is if there

30:49

are also specific physiological

30:51

states that correlate

30:53

with these altered states of

30:55

consciousness? Correct.

30:57

In fact, I think that

31:00

the prospects are much

31:02

better for identifying physiological correlates

31:04

of these altered states

31:06

than they are for describing

31:08

physiological correlates of trial

31:11

by trial psi success. And

31:13

if that's the case, then

31:15

I think we would have

31:17

the possibility of Again,

31:20

helping to induce and stabilize

31:22

these kinds of conditions with the

31:24

expectation that unusually good side

31:27

performance would come along for the

31:29

ride. That was the central

31:31

thesis of the monograph, which I

31:33

think is still a sound

31:35

today. And the

31:37

main focus of our lab

31:39

going forward is that kind

31:42

of work. intensive longitudinal study

31:44

with persons carefully selected either

31:46

for Psy performance that they're

31:48

already able to do or

31:51

for entering what we believe

31:53

to be Psy conducive states. So

31:56

anybody who happens to listen

31:58

to this talk who either

32:00

as a potential subject or as

32:03

a potential helper we'd love to

32:05

hear from. My understanding

32:07

is that the field

32:09

of physiological measurements has

32:11

advanced very rapidly in

32:13

recent years with the

32:15

development of new forms

32:17

of measuring and as

32:19

well as new forms

32:21

of analysis, more sophisticated

32:24

mathematics, more sophisticated

32:26

ways of displaying visually

32:28

the activity of the brain

32:30

and so on, that

32:32

it's almost impossible to keep

32:34

up with these advances. Absolutely.

32:39

And we're still really on a

32:41

rapid learning curve, I would say. But

32:45

in general, electroencephalography

32:47

was the earliest

32:49

neuroimaging technique. And

32:51

it's been widely

32:53

disparaged in modern

32:55

times until recently when

32:58

it's kind of

33:00

reemerged as having

33:02

some extremely desirable properties.

33:04

For example, with

33:07

magnetoencephalography, which looks

33:09

at magnetic fields instead

33:11

of electric fields

33:13

on the scalp, it

33:17

has very high temporal

33:19

resolution, at

33:21

least adequate for correlating

33:24

with processes of human

33:26

thought and perception

33:28

and so on. In

33:30

that respect, it's way

33:32

ahead of its competitors

33:34

like functional

33:37

MRI, and

33:39

functional near -infrared spectroscopy, which

33:41

is sort of a poor

33:43

man's fMRI, which we now

33:46

have, by the way, in

33:48

our lab. We have a

33:50

beginner's kit for that. And

33:52

it's interesting because it

33:54

directly measures the oxygenation

33:56

status of blood flow

33:59

in superficial cortex. But

34:01

it's complementary to EEG. And

34:04

yes, in general, I mean, this

34:06

is a new era in cognitive

34:08

neuroscience where we have the means,

34:10

not perfected yet by any means,

34:13

of observing what's going on the

34:15

brain in close correspondence with

34:17

things that are happening in the

34:19

mind. In fact,

34:21

probably an even bigger obstacle

34:23

to progress at this

34:26

point is the poor quality

34:28

of our means for

34:30

following subjective experience. But

34:32

lots of people are

34:34

aware of this and there's

34:36

now increased interest and

34:38

emphasis on neuro phenomenology, meaning

34:41

trying to develop ways

34:43

of detecting subtle shifts in

34:45

people's experience during the

34:47

course of neuro imaging procedures.

34:49

And David Acunzo, my

34:51

successor as director of our

34:53

lab, has already

34:56

taken an advanced course in

34:58

this from the people who

35:00

have developed micro phenomenology in

35:02

France. So,

35:05

yeah, that's a growing edge of the

35:07

whole subject. Now, EEG

35:09

is, I mean, it's so interesting. And

35:14

of course, the

35:16

great majority of neuroscientists subscribe

35:21

implicitly or explicitly to

35:23

the idea that everything

35:25

in our minds and

35:27

consciousness is manufactured by

35:29

neurophysiological processes going on

35:32

in our brains. I've,

35:36

along with a bunch of other people

35:38

in our field, have come to doubt

35:40

that very strongly. I think it's incorrect.

35:43

But at the same time, there is

35:45

no doubt that brain

35:47

activity is important. It somehow

35:49

is involved with the

35:51

expression of conscious capacities that

35:54

may originate elsewhere than

35:56

the brain itself. So

35:59

the business of measuring brain

36:01

activity in relationship to side

36:03

performance, for example, is

36:06

a well -founded business, whichever

36:08

kind of psychological and or

36:10

metaphysical view one happens to

36:12

hold about the Ultimate relation

36:14

between mind and brain But

36:16

that's what I really want

36:19

to talk more about is

36:21

that whole subject because it's

36:23

wonderful emers Wonderful and I

36:25

know you think very highly

36:27

of the work William James

36:29

be initiated over a century

36:31

ago in that regard Thank

36:34

you for saying that yes,

36:36

let me put it as

36:38

bluntly as I can I

36:40

think that a high point

36:42

in consciousness research was

36:45

achieved by F .W .H.

36:47

Myers, one of the founders

36:49

of the Society for

36:51

Psychological Research, and his colleague

36:53

and friend William James

36:55

by the turn of the

36:57

19th into the 20th

37:00

century. And that we're just

37:02

getting back now to a place

37:04

where we can appreciate what they

37:06

had already accomplished and go on

37:08

from there. That's

37:10

really been the main

37:13

outcome of my work for

37:15

the last couple of decades

37:17

on these three books. Let's

37:19

characterize William James model. Some

37:22

people describe it as a

37:24

filter theory, but I think

37:26

you have a different word

37:28

that you use to characterize

37:30

James approach. Yeah.

37:35

The basic idea that

37:38

Myers and James shared, along with

37:40

a number of other people at

37:42

that period of time, like

37:44

FCS Schiller, Oxford

37:47

philosopher, Henri Berksone, French

37:49

philosopher, numerous others, picked

37:52

up later by the

37:54

discoverer of LSD, by

37:57

Aldous Huxley, by so

37:59

many other people, is

38:01

that mind and

38:04

brain, although closely

38:06

correlated under normal

38:09

conditions are not identical,

38:12

as many people, many scientists

38:14

have argued and philosophers during

38:16

the 20th century. Rather,

38:19

the picture developed in

38:21

particular by Myers is

38:24

that every day consciousness

38:26

is not all of

38:28

the consciousness associated with

38:30

each of us individual

38:32

humans. The

38:35

prevailing picture, you know, is that

38:37

that's all the consciousness there

38:39

is supported by unconscious brain stuff.

38:42

And of course, if that picture is

38:44

true, then when you die, there's

38:46

no possibility of anything going on. There

38:48

can be no such thing as

38:51

postmortem survival or rebirth. And

38:59

the way James

39:01

explicitly pictured this

39:03

was initially in a

39:05

kind of dualistic framework where

39:08

the mind is as

39:10

many dualists believe in some

39:12

sense functionally if not

39:14

ontologically independent of the brain

39:16

and expresses itself through

39:19

the workings of the brain.

39:22

The brain is conceived as a kind

39:24

of sensory motor organ that allows

39:26

you to take stuff in about the

39:29

environment and do stuff to it. and

39:32

James used various metaphors for

39:35

that, one of which was transmission,

39:37

another of which I prefer is

39:40

permission, where the

39:42

conditions in the

39:44

brain allow this larger,

39:46

normally hidden consciousness

39:48

to express itself in

39:50

everyday life. The

39:53

word filter came in later on,

39:56

I'm not sure even who first used

39:58

it, but it's unsatisfactory

40:00

really in several respects. It's

40:03

not as though everything's sitting out there

40:05

ready made and you just let that through

40:07

and block everything else. I

40:09

guess Huxley was one of the

40:11

first people. He thought of it

40:13

as almost like a water filter

40:15

where there's just a valve and

40:18

you know all you control is

40:20

the amount of what comes through

40:22

by opening the valve different amounts

40:24

that kind of thing. That's too

40:26

simplistic for sure. permission, I think,

40:28

is much more appropriate metaphor for

40:31

the actual relationship there. Anyway,

40:33

now James, you

40:36

know, James wrote two

40:38

reviews, really, of Myers's

40:40

work. James

40:42

himself never was convinced of

40:44

survival, at least not

40:46

enough to write about it

40:48

in his public professional

40:50

capacity. Although David Ray Griffin,

40:52

by the way, a Whitehead specialist

40:54

has recently, well, just

40:57

before he died, published

40:59

a book in which he

41:01

argued that both William

41:03

James and Alfred North Whitehead

41:05

were actually convinced of

41:07

the reality of survival. I'm

41:10

not convinced about James, I

41:12

know nothing about Whitehead. In

41:14

his late work, his latest

41:16

work really, James, between about

41:20

1905 say in his

41:22

death he began to, well

41:25

it was even earlier than

41:27

that really, the first hint of

41:29

where he's going occurs at

41:31

the very end of varieties of

41:33

religious experience. He

41:35

makes clear first of all in

41:38

several places in that book

41:40

that throughout he is using the

41:42

psychological model of F .W .H.

41:44

Myers. That part of

41:46

VRE is often forgotten these days, but

41:48

it is absolutely explicit in that

41:50

book. Well, in his

41:52

last book, A Pluralistic Universe, what

41:55

he does essentially is to

41:57

take Myers's model, which

42:00

holds that there is

42:02

a, you know, a supraliminal

42:04

self or egoic self, but

42:06

that there is also

42:08

associated with each person a

42:10

subliminal self, capital S,

42:12

capital S. which

42:15

is the supraliminal self

42:17

is totally embedded within

42:19

that larger self which

42:21

has various kinds of

42:24

capacities of its own

42:26

that exceed those of

42:28

the everyday self and

42:30

that include in particular

42:33

capacities for Psi phenomena, mystical

42:36

experience, and creative

42:38

genius. That's the

42:40

source that Myers and

42:42

James agreed of these higher

42:44

capacities of human beings,

42:46

which have largely been ignored

42:48

by modern science. What

42:52

James does in that last

42:54

book is he proposes to expand

42:56

on that and conceive, with

42:58

vector in particular, the

43:00

possibility that there

43:02

are higher levels

43:04

of integration, still

43:07

higher consciousnesses, independent

43:09

of us, and

43:11

ultimately a highest consciousness

43:13

of some sort and

43:15

James is He hedges

43:18

his bets right in

43:20

there he's talking in

43:22

in 1909 in England

43:24

to a bunch of

43:27

idealists idealism was still

43:29

a very prominent metaphysical

43:31

position at that time

43:33

and a lot of

43:36

their descriptions of the

43:38

highest consciousness were repulsive

43:41

to James. He

43:43

speaks of things like

43:46

the the unintelligible

43:48

pantheistic monster. This

43:50

was Bradley's conception and several

43:52

other idealists of the time.

43:54

He wants something that is

43:56

way bigger than us, but

43:58

not that big. Something that's

44:01

like us enough for us

44:03

to relate to it. James

44:05

is clearly struggling to form

44:07

his own conception of some

44:09

kind of highest being. That

44:11

we can relate to as

44:13

though to a God, but

44:15

that's more scientifically plausible Now

44:17

I've talked about this at

44:20

some length in chapter 14

44:22

of our middle book beyond

44:24

physicalism anybody who wants to

44:26

look into that that's a

44:28

good place to get it

44:30

So that's where they were

44:32

and of course Myers

44:34

died in 1900

44:37

and James in 1910

44:39

and James's body

44:41

was barely cool when

44:44

John B. Watson

44:46

published his famous behaviorist

44:48

manifesto 1913. Psychology

44:51

is a behaviorist views

44:53

it or something of that

44:55

sort which is in

44:57

retrospect the most astonishing horrifying

45:00

document Every psychologist,

45:02

every philosopher, should be required

45:04

to read it, I think. Because

45:07

it basically said, let's have

45:09

no more talk about things like

45:11

consciousness, or mental imagery, or

45:13

emotions, or anything, any kind of

45:15

internal experience. Psychology is

45:17

to concern itself, henceforth, only

45:20

with correlations between stimuli

45:22

and responses. Period.

45:26

And, I mean, to read this

45:28

stuff now, it's shockingly primitive.

45:30

And yet, Possibly

45:33

propelled by kind of

45:35

envy of German science in

45:37

particular, psychometrics,

45:40

that sort of stuff. It

45:42

really had a kind of

45:44

death grip on the field

45:47

of psychology for the next

45:49

50 years. I suppose the

45:51

logical positivist movement had something to

45:53

do with it. Oh sure, these

45:55

things all sort of blended together.

45:58

And even when I was

46:00

a graduate student at

46:02

Harvard in the 1960s, a

46:04

guy as sophisticated as

46:06

W. V. Quine in the

46:08

philosophy department was most

46:10

closely associated with B. F.

46:13

Skinner in psychology and

46:15

saw that as the proper

46:17

kind of metaphysically austere

46:19

approach to psychology. On

46:22

the other hand, There

46:24

was Noam Chomsky over in

46:26

the linguistics department at

46:28

MIT. And like many

46:30

other people, I sat in on a

46:32

couple of his courses. One was on

46:34

what he called Cartesian linguistics. He published

46:37

a book about it around 1964. And,

46:40

well, the scene. Here's

46:42

this Quonset hut. There are about 200

46:44

people in there. and of whom

46:46

literally about 10 were taking the course. The

46:48

rest of us were just there to

46:50

sit at the feet of Noam Chomsky. At

46:53

some point early in the

46:55

course, somebody asked him, I forget

46:57

the context, what he thought

47:00

of experimental psychology. And

47:02

his response was that, I mean,

47:04

he waited a moment. He sort of

47:06

chucked his chin a little bit

47:08

and said, I think

47:10

the first half century of American experimental

47:12

psychology will end up as a

47:14

footnote in the history of science. I

47:17

mean, there was shock throughout the

47:19

room. People literally gassed when he

47:21

said that. But I think we

47:23

now know that he was, he

47:25

was pretty much right about that.

47:28

I mean, it's of interest to

47:30

historians of psychology, but so long,

47:32

long since disappeared from the psychological

47:34

mainstream. And

47:36

that's the environment in

47:38

which I entered graduate

47:40

school where cognitive psychology

47:42

was just coming over

47:44

the horizon. Something

47:47

new, finally, and

47:49

that certainly on the surface seemed

47:51

a whole lot better than what

47:53

had preceded it. This was the

47:55

computational theory of the mind, basically,

47:58

analogizing digital computers to

48:00

brains and minds

48:02

to programs that ran

48:04

on those machines. And

48:09

there was a lot of there's

48:11

a lot of deep theory behind

48:14

that picture of things Which not

48:16

many people have looked into I

48:18

spent a lot of time in

48:20

it in those early days goes

48:22

into touring machines Come theory of

48:24

computability and a lot sort of

48:26

thing provides a very strong justification

48:28

for that general approach and a

48:31

lot was done and it's still

48:33

going on today in fact we

48:35

we are now in the middle

48:37

of the fruition

48:39

after what 70 years

48:41

or so of

48:43

work on artificial intelligence.

48:46

Let me just say I

48:48

think we are now

48:51

seeing the first really serious

48:53

experimental test of artificial

48:55

intelligence and that there is

48:57

no such thing as

48:59

yet as artificial general intelligence

49:01

nor will there ever

49:03

be. And that's not

49:05

just my view you can see similar attitudes

49:09

expressed from different points of

49:11

view by people like Noam Chomsky,

49:14

Roger Penrose, most

49:16

importantly right now Federico Fajin, who

49:18

we should talk about at some

49:20

point later on, who invented

49:22

the silicon gate junction and

49:24

cannot be dismissed as an

49:26

outsider to the subject of

49:28

computers and artificial intelligence and

49:31

who feels very strongly that

49:33

they understand nothing. They

49:36

can do a credible job

49:38

of imitating people who understand

49:40

something, but they themselves understand

49:42

nothing. You mean the

49:44

computer understands nothing. Correct. Not

49:46

the researchers who are studying

49:49

the computer. Right. I

49:51

should have made that clearer.

49:53

Yeah. And I personally

49:56

believe, well, let

49:58

me go back. Let's

50:00

go back to my

50:02

passage through graduate school. I

50:05

did my dissertation research on

50:07

a system of automated content

50:09

analysis called the General Enquirer.

50:11

Phil Stone was my advisor.

50:14

And this was a system to

50:17

do various kinds of social

50:19

science -y tasks like, you know,

50:21

analyze published documents for such -and -such

50:23

characteristics that might predict something

50:25

about what some country would do

50:27

in some situation or whatever. And

50:30

it, you know, had

50:32

some moderately useful applications

50:34

of that sort. Everybody

50:37

realized that it would do

50:39

a lot better if the system

50:41

could distinguish the main senses

50:43

of high frequency words in English.

50:46

It turns out that something

50:49

like 2000 dictionary entries

50:51

account for over 90 %

50:53

of all the actually occurring

50:55

words in any average

50:57

kind of text as a

51:00

general rule. So if

51:02

we could develop routines for

51:04

those words that would

51:06

identify their main senses, we

51:09

could possibly make a big improvement in

51:11

the quality of content announced. So

51:13

we set out to do that. We

51:15

created a corpus of about a half a

51:17

million words. I mean,

51:19

this is kid stuff now, but

51:22

at the time that was

51:24

a huge undertaking, generated a keyword

51:26

in context listing of the

51:28

whole thing. That means every single

51:30

occurrence of each word occurred

51:33

together along with about or a

51:35

dozen words or so of

51:37

context on either side in these

51:39

printouts that collectively fill the

51:41

small office. A

51:43

huge amount of paper. And

51:46

from those, I mean, we

51:48

knew which words occurred and

51:50

what frequency order, and we proceeded

51:52

to work our way down

51:54

from the most frequent to as

51:56

far as we could get, creating

51:59

little computer routines to scan

52:01

the context based upon this

52:03

corpus of data and try

52:05

to guess which sense was

52:07

actually there. And

52:09

from a practical point of view, I'd

52:11

say it was a reasonably productive exercise.

52:13

It went on for years. I was

52:16

the director of that project. But

52:19

for me, the main

52:21

outcome was to convince

52:23

me that the computational

52:25

theory of the mind

52:27

was fundamentally flawed in

52:29

that what became evident

52:32

Through this corpus, from

52:34

looking at thousands and

52:37

thousands of uses of

52:39

ordinary words by ordinary

52:41

citizens for ordinary purposes, it

52:44

became clear that what

52:46

really underlies the use

52:48

of language is the

52:50

capacity of human speakers

52:52

to grasp concepts and

52:54

to apply them in

52:56

novel but appropriate circumstances.

53:00

including, in the limit, in the

53:02

extreme case, metaphorical

53:04

circumstances where the application

53:06

is literally wrong but

53:08

metaphorically correct and conveys

53:11

understanding of some novel

53:13

situation. So I

53:15

wrote a book based on my

53:17

dissertation chapter four of which is

53:19

called Some Problems of Word Meaning,

53:22

which focuses primarily on

53:24

this, which I

53:26

saw then and continue to

53:28

see today as a fatal

53:31

flaw in the computational theory

53:33

of the mind, and that

53:35

this ability to grasp and

53:37

use concepts is intimately connected

53:39

with the possession of consciousness,

53:41

which machines do not have,

53:44

period. So,

53:48

well, when I was in graduate school,

53:50

I had expected to go on with

53:53

this computational theory of the mind

53:55

stuff, and here I was

53:57

kind of devastated by this discovery

54:00

and it was right about that time that

54:02

I got a call one day from my mother

54:04

telling me that my sister had become a

54:06

medium. This was a call on

54:08

a weekday afternoon which is something my

54:11

mother never would do. It

54:13

was clear right away she was

54:15

very concerned about this and

54:17

hoped that as a graduate student

54:19

in psychology I'd know all

54:21

about it and could reassure her.

54:24

Well I had to tell her I really didn't

54:26

know anything about it and it was at

54:28

that point really that I went off to the

54:30

library and for the first time I mean

54:32

I vaguely knew that these things existed but I'd

54:34

never looked at any of it. I

54:37

discovered that William James had spent a

54:39

big part of his adult life involved

54:41

in the area and so on. mean

54:44

I'd read most of the principles

54:46

and I'd seen him you know allude

54:48

to it a little bit and

54:50

paid not much attention to that aspect.

54:53

Anyway, so it was really

54:55

at that point that I

54:57

became interested in parapsychology and

54:59

began to read I mean

55:01

here were a whole bookshelf

55:03

full of journals referee journals

55:06

in which people were reporting

55:08

results Obtained by the same

55:10

kinds of methods that I've

55:12

been taught to study ordinary

55:14

subjects in psychology Showing that

55:16

things that the prevailing pictures

55:18

said shouldn't happen were in

55:20

fact happening. You know, I

55:22

Found that to be exciting

55:24

and interesting. That's that's why

55:26

I contacted JB Ryan That's

55:28

how I ended up at

55:31

the Institute for Parapsychology in

55:33

the first week of 1972

55:35

so there you were at

55:37

Harvard University and even though

55:39

it was relatively hidden from

55:41

the psychology students at the

55:43

time Harvard had a history

55:45

of Looking into this phenomenon

55:47

going back almost a hundred

55:49

years. That's right in fact

55:51

I was living at the

55:53

time in William James Hall,

55:56

built in his honor. And

55:58

I'll bet there are many hundreds

56:00

of people worked in that building.

56:02

I bet there were 10 that

56:04

actually knew anything about James's involvement

56:06

with psychical research or about psychical

56:08

research. And most of the people

56:11

who did know something about it

56:13

were quite hostile. In

56:15

particular, Fred Mosteller, who was

56:17

the chair of the statistics

56:19

department, who I learned most

56:21

of my statistics from early on. And

56:25

he had a student postdoc

56:27

at the time named Percy Diaconis,

56:29

you may recall, from parapsychology.

56:31

He's one of the main early

56:33

skeptics. He wrote

56:36

a and invited

56:38

paper for science at a time

56:40

when Fred Mosteller was the

56:42

president of the AAAS, and

56:44

invited paper on statistical

56:46

problems in ESP research,

56:48

including my research with

56:50

Bill Delmore, in

56:53

which he never said a word

56:55

about the actual experiments and

56:57

the reports of those experiments, except

56:59

to say that the reported

57:01

experiments seemed beyond reproach. And

57:03

then Proclaim to know that

57:06

something different must really have

57:08

happened. Ryan faced that sort

57:10

of opposition constantly and I

57:12

can say speaking for myself

57:14

as a graduate student in

57:17

Berkeley at the time there

57:19

was a statistician who invited

57:21

himself to join my committee

57:23

and then informed me that

57:25

his role was to be

57:28

a hatchet man to make

57:30

sure I never received a

57:32

degree in parapsychology. Wow.

57:34

But he was very explicit.

57:36

He said, I'm here as

57:38

a hatchet man, you're not

57:40

getting through. I

57:42

reported that to the dean of

57:44

the graduate division because what

57:46

every time I turned in some

57:48

experimental work he would simply

57:51

say it's incompetent and I don't

57:53

have to say why. It's

57:55

just totally incompetent and it got

57:57

me and the rest of

57:59

the committee so frustrated that We

58:01

went to the dean and

58:03

the dean issued a ruling that

58:05

if he critiques your work

58:07

and statistics and he won't say

58:09

why he believes your work

58:11

is incompetent, then I'll remove him

58:13

from your committee. And that's

58:15

what happened. Or

58:17

I never would have graduated. Wow.

58:22

What an experience. Yeah. That's

58:24

possibly the worst I've ever heard

58:26

actually. Certainly up there

58:28

with the worst. Yeah. Yeah,

58:31

but the field

58:33

has has faced that

58:35

kind of intense

58:37

opposition Really from the

58:39

beginning William James

58:41

complained about it bitterly.

58:43

Mm -hmm. Yeah, let's

58:45

run with the

58:47

world away Yeah, and

58:49

now we have

58:51

the astonishing spectacle In

58:53

2018 Etzel Cardena

58:56

published in American psychologists

58:58

the flagship journal

59:00

of the American Psychological

59:02

Association, an excellent

59:04

survey, meta -analyses of what

59:06

10 or 11 different

59:08

areas of psi research, showing

59:11

clearly to anybody who

59:13

has the slightest degree

59:15

of openness to the

59:17

subject that, hey, a

59:19

lot has been accomplished

59:22

over the decades in

59:24

parapsychology. The very

59:26

next issue, at

59:28

the beginning of the next

59:30

year, Supposedly, coincidentally, an

59:33

article appears by two

59:35

psychologists, Rieber

59:37

and Alcock. Alcock

59:40

is a well -known long

59:42

-time psi -denier. I

59:45

won't say any more

59:47

about it, but...

59:49

He's been interviewed twice on

59:51

this channel, and I

59:54

will say we had

59:56

a cordial relationship. Anyway, these

59:58

two psychologists first do

1:00:00

what many people do, blame

1:00:02

us for not having

1:00:05

a convincing theory of our

1:00:07

phenomena. But

1:00:09

they then went on,

1:00:11

as psychologists mind you, to

1:00:14

declare that not only do we not

1:00:16

have such a theory, but we can

1:00:18

never get one because the phenomena are

1:00:20

ruled out by the laws of physics.

1:00:24

impossible and therefore nobody needs to pay

1:00:26

any attention to any of this

1:00:28

in evidence. I mean that

1:00:30

is truly astonishing in this day and

1:00:32

age that anybody could get away with

1:00:34

that sort of behavior. I

1:00:37

mean they don't even acknowledge the

1:00:39

fact that a large number of physicists

1:00:41

including some Nobel Prize winners have

1:00:43

taken a great interest in the subject

1:00:45

for the same sort of reasons

1:00:47

that it challenges our conventional understanding. I

1:00:51

mean it's just Well,

1:00:53

this is one of

1:00:55

the reasons why I

1:00:57

have come to believe

1:00:59

that finding a theory

1:01:01

that can potentially explain,

1:01:03

in some sense, yet

1:01:05

to be determined, psi

1:01:09

phenomena, and that

1:01:11

is not demonstrably inconsistent

1:01:13

or might even incorporate

1:01:15

in some way leading

1:01:18

-edge physics, foundations of

1:01:20

physics, Would

1:01:22

do more to advance the

1:01:24

subject of cycle research than

1:01:26

any amount of additional evidence

1:01:28

collecting We can disagree about

1:01:30

that but there's no doubt

1:01:32

that having a finding a

1:01:34

good theory would go a

1:01:36

long way toward strengthening our

1:01:38

position Scientifically and that's really

1:01:40

what my work has been

1:01:42

mainly involved with now for

1:01:44

the last couple of decades

1:01:46

and Yeah, let me just

1:01:48

say We're not there yet

1:01:50

for sure But I believe

1:01:52

we have found an opening. Yeah,

1:01:56

let me say a little bit more about

1:01:58

how this came to pass. A

1:02:00

book was published around

1:02:03

2020, I think 2021, maybe

1:02:05

by a man named

1:02:07

Tim Eastman. Timothy

1:02:09

Eastman is a space

1:02:11

plasma physicist. That's

1:02:14

his background. But

1:02:16

he's also been a very prominent

1:02:18

figure in the world of process

1:02:20

studies. stemming from

1:02:22

Alfred North Whitehead. a

1:02:25

mob of books and papers in that

1:02:27

area. And what his

1:02:29

new book does, it's called

1:02:31

Unsnarling the Gordian Knot. Untying

1:02:33

the Gordian Knot. I mixed

1:02:35

it up with a book

1:02:37

by David Ray Griffin of

1:02:39

almost the same title. Untying

1:02:42

the Gordian Knot. What

1:02:44

he does in that book

1:02:46

is to sketch an

1:02:49

enlargement of the

1:02:51

customary framework of

1:02:53

scientific activity, taking

1:02:55

into account improved

1:02:58

versions of Alfred North

1:03:00

Whitehead's process philosophy,

1:03:02

plus more modern developments

1:03:05

in physics, logic,

1:03:08

math, biosemiotics,

1:03:10

several other subjects.

1:03:13

There are eight chapters in

1:03:15

this book and in chapter

1:03:18

eight he explicitly states that

1:03:20

he hopes that The framework

1:03:22

the expanded framework for science

1:03:24

that he has set forth

1:03:26

in his book will ultimately

1:03:28

allow us even to explain

1:03:30

Phenomena of the sort cataloged

1:03:33

in the book by Ed

1:03:35

Kelly and company called irreducible

1:03:37

mind And on that basis

1:03:39

I was then invited to

1:03:41

be a discussant of Tim's

1:03:43

book. He had a

1:03:45

series chapter by chapter discussions

1:03:47

and I was a discussant

1:03:49

for chapter 8 and 7

1:03:52

just because of this possible

1:03:54

connection. And that began a

1:03:56

collaboration that is ongoing. It's

1:03:58

gone through a couple stages

1:04:00

already and is going to

1:04:02

undergo a much bigger one

1:04:04

this summer in which we

1:04:06

are attempting to find ways

1:04:08

of grinding down the space

1:04:11

between his very abstract conceptual

1:04:13

framework for science and

1:04:15

the kind of picture scientific

1:04:17

and metaphysical picture that

1:04:19

we have developed in the

1:04:21

course of our three

1:04:23

books coming mainly from the

1:04:26

side of psychology and

1:04:28

neuroscience. And

1:04:30

I think we have found

1:04:32

an opening and without trying to

1:04:35

get into it in too

1:04:37

far down into the weeds, the

1:04:39

opening is provided really by

1:04:41

a subset of quantum theorists, that

1:04:43

is people who are actively

1:04:45

involved in exploring the foundations of

1:04:48

physics, who want

1:04:50

to build on

1:04:52

the ideas of Werner

1:04:54

Heisenberg, in particular, by

1:04:58

elevating a realm

1:05:00

of potentiae to ontological

1:05:02

parity with the

1:05:04

actual. Most

1:05:06

other interpretations of

1:05:08

quantum theory unconsciously import

1:05:11

a lot of

1:05:13

essentially metaphysical assumptions about

1:05:15

how things are,

1:05:17

in particular actualism, the

1:05:19

idea that reality

1:05:21

is what we experience

1:05:23

and that's all

1:05:25

there is. And

1:05:28

it's in this realm

1:05:30

of potentiae now elevated to

1:05:32

ontological parity with the

1:05:34

actual that Tim Eastman and

1:05:36

several other persons, some

1:05:39

of whom you know already,

1:05:41

I'm sure, Bernard

1:05:43

Carr, for example, Ruth

1:05:46

Kastner, maybe?

1:05:50

She's a transactional interpretation,

1:05:52

now the relativistic transactional

1:05:54

interpretation of quantum theory.

1:05:56

She has been interviewed

1:05:58

several times on this

1:06:00

channel. Wow. It's really

1:06:02

a wonderful thing that you've put

1:06:04

together, Jeff. It's astonishing. I've not

1:06:06

made as much use of it as I

1:06:08

should. I would love to spend, you know,

1:06:10

six months, which is probably what it would

1:06:12

take to just watch them all. It

1:06:15

probably take a lot longer.

1:06:18

I think we have 2000

1:06:20

videos at this point. 2000.

1:06:23

Oh, wow. That's

1:06:27

a real accomplishment. Congratulations. Anyway,

1:06:30

where was it? Okay, so This

1:06:32

is the path that we

1:06:34

see opening and now we're

1:06:37

trying to Actually Trot that

1:06:39

path and start to flesh

1:06:41

out some of the details

1:06:43

of how this could be

1:06:45

done And by the way,

1:06:47

there are there are some

1:06:50

other things Well Yeah, let

1:06:52

me say first The kind

1:06:54

of picture that we came

1:06:56

to first through irreducible mind

1:06:58

then beyond physicalism where we

1:07:00

actually looked

1:07:03

at a bunch of systems, old

1:07:05

and new, that take

1:07:07

Psi phenomena seriously and attempt

1:07:09

to provide a conceptual structure

1:07:11

that might permit them to

1:07:13

occur, and that to

1:07:15

see if we could discern the

1:07:17

kind of characteristics held in common

1:07:19

by these dozen or so pictures. And

1:07:22

what we arrived at,

1:07:24

described in chapter 14

1:07:26

of Beyond Physicalism, is

1:07:29

something called evolutionary panentheism.

1:07:32

And again, without getting too far

1:07:34

into the weeds of these things,

1:07:36

pantheism is a kind of theological

1:07:38

position in between traditional theism as

1:07:40

in the monotheistic traditions of a

1:07:42

God who's sort of independent of

1:07:45

creation gets it all going and

1:07:47

may or may not have anything

1:07:49

to do with it thereafter. Pantheism

1:07:52

in which God is identified

1:07:54

with actuality and there's nothing

1:07:57

left over. Pantheism is kind

1:07:59

of in between in

1:08:01

that it posits a God

1:08:03

who is within everything and yet

1:08:05

there's something left over just

1:08:07

as our minds are something left

1:08:09

over from our bodies which

1:08:11

we occupy as minds. So

1:08:14

there's that analogy at

1:08:16

the base of it and

1:08:19

a highest consciousness which,

1:08:21

you know, Kant talked about

1:08:23

a numinal realm that

1:08:25

is inaccessible to us Schopenhauer

1:08:28

argued that and later German

1:08:30

idealists that maybe we can

1:08:32

access it through mystical experiences

1:08:34

and that sort of thing.

1:08:38

One of the main things

1:08:40

coming out of all the

1:08:42

work that I've done for

1:08:44

the last couple of decades

1:08:46

is the realization that our

1:08:48

modern western civilization is unique

1:08:51

in world history in the

1:08:53

degree to which it has

1:08:55

systematically ignored, particularly in its

1:08:57

modern form, things like

1:08:59

not only parapsychology, sci

1:09:01

phenomena, and so on, but

1:09:03

mystical states of consciousness

1:09:05

which I now believe do

1:09:08

in fact provide windows

1:09:10

into normally inaccessible parts of

1:09:12

the real. And

1:09:14

it's only when we begin reabsorbing

1:09:17

that into our way of

1:09:19

thinking about reality that we're

1:09:21

going to arrive at a

1:09:24

proper metaphysical understanding. But

1:09:26

to the extent we've arrived at

1:09:28

any conclusions, it goes in

1:09:30

that general direction, that there

1:09:32

is some kind of a

1:09:34

highest consciousness which lies at

1:09:36

the base of everything out

1:09:39

of which everything else is

1:09:41

manufactured, including the reality that

1:09:43

we experience ourselves as occupying.

1:09:46

That's a big mouthful and it

1:09:48

remains to be fleshed out

1:09:50

but it's this kind of a

1:09:52

realist idealism that I think

1:09:54

we're being driven to which is

1:09:57

essentially the metaphysical opposite of

1:09:59

what prevails today and what has

1:10:01

I think not only arguably

1:10:03

but definitely led us where we

1:10:05

are to the edge of

1:10:07

a precipice where we're going to

1:10:10

kill ourselves if we don't

1:10:12

change our ways fundamentally. and

1:10:14

come to grips with things like

1:10:16

the climate problem, like the threat of

1:10:18

nuclear, holocaust, all the rest of

1:10:20

it. All the prevailing

1:10:22

characteristics of modern civilization

1:10:24

are commodification of anything, the

1:10:27

driving of everything that

1:10:29

happens by money, the

1:10:31

internet, taking over the

1:10:33

internet by advertisers. I mean,

1:10:35

God, we all know

1:10:37

what we face. and

1:10:39

I think it's clear that the

1:10:41

prevailing physicalism has a lot to

1:10:43

do with that and that part of

1:10:46

my hope for finding a way

1:10:48

forward is to overthrow that pernicious

1:10:50

doctrine in favor of something that

1:10:52

is just a lot better for us

1:10:54

as human beings both individually and

1:10:56

collectively. So that

1:10:58

is my sermon for today and

1:11:00

I'll not say any more

1:11:02

about that. Well, I am under

1:11:04

the impression that something happened

1:11:06

in about the century

1:11:09

or so in which

1:11:11

the My friend

1:11:13

Stefan Schwartz says it all

1:11:15

started at the Council of

1:11:18

Trent where a decision was

1:11:20

made that the church would

1:11:22

be responsible for realms of

1:11:24

the spirit and as long

1:11:26

as scientists strictly maintained a

1:11:29

Galilean approach and looked at

1:11:31

physical matter and nothing having

1:11:33

to do with consciousness, then

1:11:35

the two domains could get

1:11:38

along with each other. Well,

1:11:41

I'm not sure about that Council

1:11:43

of Trent Business, but that's basically

1:11:45

what happened with the founders, Galileo

1:11:48

to Newton and so on. It

1:11:50

was kind of a methodological decision

1:11:52

to, okay, let's put

1:11:54

all that mental stuff over

1:11:56

here for now and concentrate

1:11:58

on things we can measure.

1:12:00

And that was tremendously productive

1:12:03

and led to the rapid

1:12:05

advance of physicalist science, which

1:12:07

by the way, I mean, Well,

1:12:09

let's not pretend it hasn't been

1:12:11

a huge success in many

1:12:13

ways. It's an extraordinary achievement. And

1:12:17

yet, what had

1:12:19

started out as a

1:12:21

helpful methodological decision

1:12:23

somehow metastasized into a

1:12:25

very pernicious metaphysical

1:12:27

doctrine. It's philosophy,

1:12:29

not science. It's

1:12:31

physicalism stuff. It's an

1:12:33

austere philosophical descendant

1:12:35

of the some

1:12:37

looser materialism of earlier centuries.

1:12:39

Certainly, most of the

1:12:41

founders of modern science were

1:12:43

very religious people themselves

1:12:46

and saw no fundamental conflict

1:12:48

between science and religion. In

1:12:52

fact, if anything, Newton was

1:12:54

a bit over the top in

1:12:56

terms of his occult interest,

1:12:58

right? He'd be interested in

1:13:01

alchemy, we now know. Sure.

1:13:04

Which would imply an openness

1:13:06

to the entire western

1:13:08

esoteric tradition. Yeah, yeah. Which

1:13:11

is still there, still

1:13:13

lurking around the margins of

1:13:15

our civilization. And

1:13:17

basically what I see having happened

1:13:19

was that we threw out the baby

1:13:21

with the bathwater and we are

1:13:23

now in the process of trying to

1:13:25

rescue the baby and help it

1:13:27

grow up in the context of our

1:13:29

modern civilization. A

1:13:31

lot of people who agree

1:13:33

about the pernicious effects of

1:13:36

the rise of scientism and

1:13:38

secular humanism and all that

1:13:40

want to advocate for some

1:13:42

kind of return to something

1:13:44

pre -modern, but I don't agree

1:13:46

with that, certainly. I

1:13:49

don't want to complain about anybody's

1:13:51

religion, but I don't think any

1:13:53

of those are the answer. I

1:13:55

think we have to find some

1:13:57

new system still based in science

1:13:59

which makes room for spiritual experience

1:14:01

and psi and all the rest

1:14:03

of it in a way that

1:14:05

traditional religions did for thousands of

1:14:07

years. And that's

1:14:09

where the philosophical

1:14:11

position you've labeled

1:14:13

evolutionary panentheism comes

1:14:15

in. Yeah. Yeah.

1:14:18

I mean, we don't want to

1:14:20

found a new religion with

1:14:22

our own Bible and churches and

1:14:24

all that kind of stuff,

1:14:27

but that's what we're looking for

1:14:29

is an expanded, still science -based

1:14:31

picture of reality that can

1:14:33

speak to those parts of our

1:14:35

human nature that have been

1:14:38

really suppressed in this modern period

1:14:40

by the disenchantment of the

1:14:42

world through classical science. And

1:14:45

science itself. is driving this,

1:14:47

which is the novelty, which I

1:14:49

think will allow it to

1:14:51

succeed. The kind of

1:14:53

picture of this evolutionary panentheism

1:14:55

stuff, it's come up repeatedly.

1:14:58

Well, it was in the

1:15:00

Oriental traditions mostly from thousands

1:15:02

of years ago. It's come

1:15:04

up in the modern West

1:15:06

repeatedly and always kind of

1:15:09

subsided again. There have

1:15:11

been, I think, one of the

1:15:13

real drivers right now in the

1:15:15

public sphere, by the way, is

1:15:17

the explosion of

1:15:19

interest in near -death

1:15:22

experiences. I

1:15:24

think of deep near -death experiences

1:15:26

as mystical experiences that occur

1:15:28

under suboptimal circumstances where you

1:15:30

almost have to die in

1:15:32

order to have the experience.

1:15:35

But it's the mystical experience aspect.

1:15:38

It was prominent even in

1:15:40

the 60s through psychedelics. Lots

1:15:42

of people had big -time mystical

1:15:44

experiences that changed their lives,

1:15:46

often made them into better

1:15:48

people. I mean, you can

1:15:50

look both within the NDE

1:15:52

literature and the broader literature

1:15:54

of mystical experience to see

1:15:57

that most people who are

1:15:59

fortunate enough to have these

1:16:01

kinds of experiences are made

1:16:03

into better people by having

1:16:05

had them. They

1:16:07

become more human -oriented,

1:16:09

less egoistic. more interested

1:16:11

in things of

1:16:13

real value and less

1:16:15

interested in the

1:16:17

stuff that dominates contemporary

1:16:19

values. So

1:16:21

that's where it's headed. That will certainly be

1:16:23

a part of it. And

1:16:25

by the way, I think

1:16:28

from my point of view

1:16:30

as an experimental neuroscientist, cognitive

1:16:32

neuroscientist, really, that's my home

1:16:34

base, I think we have

1:16:36

the task ahead, which we

1:16:38

could easily share with somebody

1:16:40

who's still a materialist. is

1:16:42

to study and find out

1:16:44

things about these conditions in

1:16:46

the brain that permit the

1:16:48

expression of these normally unseen

1:16:50

capacities, whether we interpret them

1:16:52

metaphysically in the way that

1:16:54

my colleagues and I have

1:16:56

or in some, you know,

1:16:58

expanded physicalist matter, doesn't matter

1:17:00

in the least. That's something

1:17:03

we know how to do

1:17:05

and I feel sure that

1:17:07

the time will soon come

1:17:09

when lots more people will

1:17:11

be able to access these

1:17:13

kinds of experience and probably

1:17:15

should. For example, through

1:17:17

things like meditation, maybe

1:17:19

aided by biofeedback, through

1:17:21

maybe improved forms of

1:17:24

psychedelics, maybe through a

1:17:26

study of, I mean, we can

1:17:28

do a lot more in terms

1:17:30

of scientific study of mystical experiences.

1:17:32

They're still happening all over the

1:17:34

place, probably a few million every

1:17:36

year to people and study them.

1:17:39

learn more about him. Let's

1:17:41

talk about the default mode

1:17:43

network in the brain. Yeah.

1:17:47

Let's see. My first

1:17:49

contact with this

1:17:51

came in the context

1:17:54

of chapter four

1:17:56

of Beyond Physicalism where

1:17:58

we, David Presti,

1:18:01

David Presti is a neurobiologist

1:18:03

at Berkeley, who's also

1:18:05

a world -class expert on

1:18:08

psychedelics. He

1:18:11

and I wrote

1:18:13

this chapter on possible

1:18:15

physiological aspects of

1:18:17

Psy phenomena. Well,

1:18:20

not just Psy, but also creativity

1:18:22

and mystical experience. We put it

1:18:24

in that larger context. And

1:18:27

while nobody has

1:18:29

any very detailed answers

1:18:31

as yet, we

1:18:33

ended up in that

1:18:35

chapter hypothesizing that this

1:18:38

default mode network is

1:18:40

very likely one very

1:18:42

important piece of the

1:18:44

puzzle. What this thing

1:18:46

is, is a system, a

1:18:48

network of

1:18:50

brain regions,

1:18:52

mostly midline,

1:18:55

that collectively seem

1:18:57

to represent

1:19:00

the neurophysiological embodiment

1:19:02

of everyday

1:19:04

consciousness. when you're

1:19:07

just kind of sitting

1:19:09

there resting feeling yourself

1:19:11

maybe idling mind wandering

1:19:13

that sort of thing

1:19:15

and what is becoming

1:19:18

clear that is that

1:19:20

in many of these

1:19:22

kinds of states involving

1:19:24

psychedelics meditation certain kinds

1:19:27

of mediumistic type trance

1:19:29

there is a market

1:19:31

suppression and disruption

1:19:36

of the activity of

1:19:38

that particular network in the

1:19:40

brain. Now that's

1:19:42

only part of the story, we

1:19:45

think, but it may be

1:19:47

an essential ingredient and it

1:19:49

corresponds to what Myers and

1:19:51

James talked about as, well

1:19:55

Myers put it specifically

1:19:57

in terms of the emergence

1:19:59

of the subliminal in

1:20:01

proportion to the abeyance of

1:20:03

the supraliminal. I mean

1:20:05

that's a Myers type analogy to

1:20:07

what you learn about on day

1:20:09

one in meditation which is your

1:20:11

goal is to express all the

1:20:13

customary internal chatter and then allow

1:20:16

something bigger to come in. So

1:20:18

that's I'm sure part

1:20:21

of it and you

1:20:23

know I mean the

1:20:25

first really interesting neuroimaging

1:20:27

study of psilocybin occurred

1:20:29

in 2012 was reported

1:20:32

in 2012. by

1:20:34

Robin Carhart Harris and

1:20:36

his colleagues from England and

1:20:38

it was shown they

1:20:40

did they combined injected psilocybin

1:20:43

with two kinds of

1:20:45

fMRI which had better timer

1:20:47

resolution than imaging methods

1:20:49

that had been applied previously

1:20:51

and the remarkable thing

1:20:54

was that during the period

1:20:56

of intense psychedelic experience

1:20:58

some of which clearly got

1:21:00

into that mystical territory There

1:21:04

was no increase in

1:21:07

neural activity anywhere in

1:21:09

the brain, and the

1:21:11

most prominent thing was,

1:21:13

in fact, this sharp

1:21:15

reduction and disruption of

1:21:17

activity in the default

1:21:19

mode network. And that

1:21:21

basic finding came as a real

1:21:23

shock to a lot of neuroscientists,

1:21:26

including in particular Christoph Koch. KOCH.

1:21:32

the principal student of

1:21:34

Francis Crick, principal

1:21:36

materialist scientist of the

1:21:38

20th century. Now

1:21:43

deceased, if only we

1:21:45

could hear from him again. You

1:21:47

know, I did interview Crick that

1:21:49

when he was alive, when he

1:21:51

published his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis,

1:21:53

and I have to give him

1:21:56

credit because he made a point

1:21:58

of saying that Religious

1:22:00

traditions could be correct. He

1:22:03

says, for all we know,

1:22:05

survival after death might occur.

1:22:07

Really? Yes. I have

1:22:10

it on videotape.

1:22:12

I'll be damned. Well,

1:22:14

let me tell you

1:22:16

something. I don't know if

1:22:18

we should include this

1:22:20

or not, but I mean,

1:22:22

Kristoff Koch has been

1:22:24

vocally, publicly moving in a

1:22:27

direction parallel to

1:22:29

ours for some time now

1:22:31

and I had seen

1:22:33

an email he wrote to

1:22:35

a mutual friend of

1:22:37

ours in which he says

1:22:39

he is moving irrevocably

1:22:41

in the direction of idealism.

1:22:44

I interviewed Kristoff not

1:22:46

long ago and I have

1:22:48

on tape him saying

1:22:50

that he never considered himself

1:22:52

a materialist. Really? Yes,

1:22:54

that he was always at odds with

1:22:56

Crick on that point. Huh.

1:22:59

I must watch this. I actually had

1:23:02

a dialogue going with him a while

1:23:04

ago by email. And

1:23:07

the subject of idealism

1:23:09

had come up, and I

1:23:11

had sent him a

1:23:13

essay review that I wrote

1:23:15

about Harold Ottmann Spocker

1:23:17

and Dean Rickles' book, Dual

1:23:19

Aspect Monism and the Deep

1:23:22

Structure of Meaning. Yeah. And

1:23:24

he wrote back to say

1:23:26

he agreed with pretty much all

1:23:28

I had to say about

1:23:30

that. But why hadn't I said

1:23:32

anything about IIT, Integrated Information

1:23:34

Theory? At which point I sent

1:23:36

him my review of Integrated

1:23:38

Information Theory that I published in

1:23:40

Etzel Cardenas, J -A -E

1:23:42

-X Journal. And

1:23:45

Coke broke off the conversation

1:23:47

at that point. not that he

1:23:49

explicitly broke it off, but

1:23:51

he's never written me since. He's

1:23:53

a strong proponent of that

1:23:56

theory. Boy, it's a hot

1:23:58

potato. You've noticed, I'm

1:24:00

sure, that this extraordinary

1:24:02

event where a hundred

1:24:04

and something scientists got

1:24:07

together and wrote a

1:24:09

letter to Nature, I

1:24:11

guess it was, demanding

1:24:13

excommunication of IIT. from

1:24:16

the academy. Yeah,

1:24:19

that almost is like

1:24:21

the scientists who wrote a

1:24:23

big document. They all signed

1:24:25

against astrology. Exactly.

1:24:27

Yeah. Alex Gomez -Marin is very

1:24:30

involved in this. And there's apparently

1:24:32

going to be a new

1:24:34

issue may already be out of

1:24:36

nature neuroscience in which the

1:24:38

whole subject is revisited. And

1:24:40

Alex Gomez -Marin and

1:24:43

Anil Seth was a

1:24:45

determined physicalist. a

1:24:47

very smart guy. They've

1:24:49

gotten together and written a

1:24:51

paper talking about how neuroscience and

1:24:53

consciousness science should learn from

1:24:55

this experience what to do and

1:24:58

what not to do and

1:25:00

all that. But it was

1:25:02

perfectly clear right at the

1:25:04

beginning when this happened that

1:25:06

I mean apart from some

1:25:08

sort of obvious personal jealousies

1:25:10

and stuff like that there

1:25:12

were clearly people who were

1:25:14

offended by the whiff of

1:25:16

metaphysical heresy that they detect

1:25:18

in IIT. Daniel Dennett, for

1:25:20

example, was one of the

1:25:22

original signatories. Well, it

1:25:25

shows the strength of this

1:25:27

implicit materialism. I think you

1:25:29

described it as something people

1:25:31

just absorb without even thinking

1:25:33

of it because it's so

1:25:35

dominant in the culture and

1:25:38

I can't help think that

1:25:41

Ethical materialism and metaphysical materialism seem

1:25:43

to be related somehow. I

1:25:45

feel right now more optimistic than

1:25:47

I ever have before in

1:25:49

my career that the winds of

1:25:52

change are really beginning to

1:25:54

blow. And I

1:25:56

have to say it's in large

1:25:58

part I think because of the

1:26:00

difficulties that neuroscience and philosophy are

1:26:02

having with consciousness. You

1:26:04

know it used to be that we were in

1:26:06

this little rowboat trying to steer the Titanic. and

1:26:09

not having very much success but

1:26:11

now there are at least some

1:26:13

other boats some bigger than ours

1:26:15

in the same territory trying to

1:26:18

push in the same direction and

1:26:20

I think that's really fundamentally changing

1:26:22

the dynamics and as we all

1:26:24

know from history things can change

1:26:26

in a hurry once some kind

1:26:28

of a tipping point is realized

1:26:30

we may be closer to that

1:26:32

point than we are currently even

1:26:35

aware it may already be happening

1:26:37

you know they things

1:26:39

in culture changed, not like

1:26:41

mathematical functions all at

1:26:43

once at a exact moment

1:26:46

in time or whatever. You

1:26:48

mentioned earlier the work of

1:26:51

William James and his colleagues was

1:26:53

something of, I think you

1:26:55

used the phrase, high watermark in

1:26:57

the field of psychology and

1:26:59

we're approaching that high watermark again.

1:27:01

Yes. Yeah, I think we're

1:27:03

right about there actually and now

1:27:05

much better equipped really to

1:27:07

carry the subject further. Both

1:27:09

psi research and consciousness

1:27:11

research. In fact, I think

1:27:14

what's going to happen

1:27:16

ultimately is that psychical research

1:27:18

will be reabsorbed into

1:27:20

consciousness research as one element

1:27:22

of that larger subject. And

1:27:25

I think there, the consciousness

1:27:27

researchers, particularly the ones who see

1:27:29

the difficulties, from a

1:27:31

physicalist point of view, are really

1:27:33

helping us. And there are some

1:27:36

other things that are happening that

1:27:38

are feeding into the same development. One,

1:27:41

for example, is the

1:27:43

recent organismic turn in

1:27:45

theoretical biology. For

1:27:47

a long time, people

1:27:49

of biologists have aspired to

1:27:52

explain everything about life

1:27:54

in physicalist terms, particularly

1:27:56

with the rise of molecular biology

1:27:58

and all that. there's

1:28:00

now a real return to

1:28:02

things that were being argued

1:28:05

even by William MacDougall in

1:28:07

1910 and his book, Body

1:28:09

and Mind, that the real

1:28:11

model for what's fundamental is

1:28:13

the single -celled organism. Even

1:28:16

at that level you can

1:28:18

see signs of mentality present

1:28:20

there. Possibly even

1:28:22

some kind of glimmer of consciousness,

1:28:24

who knows. That point

1:28:26

of view is returning. Hans

1:28:29

Driesch was a big advocate of it.

1:28:31

Michael Naum is a guy now in

1:28:33

psycho research who knows a lot of

1:28:35

this history. This organismic

1:28:37

development plugs right into

1:28:39

our general picture of things.

1:28:42

So we're working toward a possible

1:28:44

book four, which will certainly include

1:28:46

that dimension. The other

1:28:48

thing that took me by

1:28:50

surprise is that there has been

1:28:52

a kind of renaissance in

1:28:54

natural theology. You know,

1:28:57

natural theology kind of went

1:28:59

underground or was banished from

1:29:01

most mainstream conversation, you know,

1:29:03

100 years ago at least.

1:29:06

But it's really revived in

1:29:08

the last few decades. And

1:29:11

there are a bunch of

1:29:13

really smart people who are

1:29:15

reviving old arguments or inventing

1:29:17

new ones to support the

1:29:19

idea that there is some

1:29:21

kind of highest being. Now

1:29:23

some of them are very invested

1:29:26

in a particular version of that highest

1:29:28

being. Others are more general and

1:29:30

ecumenical and much closer to where we

1:29:32

would be coming from the scientific

1:29:34

side. So there's that. That's

1:29:36

another thing that's kind of feeding in

1:29:38

the same direction. Yeah, and

1:29:40

let me reiterate one thing here. I really

1:29:42

like to direct people's attention to. Of

1:29:45

all the people that I

1:29:47

have been working with who are

1:29:49

advancing models of the general type,

1:29:51

this evolutionary pantheism

1:29:53

stuff. The one that appeals

1:29:55

to me the most, I

1:29:57

just feel in my gut that

1:29:59

he's on the right track, is Federico

1:30:02

Fagin. He's

1:30:04

got a chapter in our third book,

1:30:06

Consciousness Unbound, which kind of summarizes his

1:30:08

point of view. There's a figure in

1:30:10

that that could have come, except

1:30:12

for the quantum theory aspect,

1:30:14

so it could have come

1:30:16

straight from Myers. He's got

1:30:18

the really essential thing that

1:30:20

we have inserted into the

1:30:22

picture through psychology and neuroscience

1:30:24

of the higher consciousness, possibly

1:30:26

at several levels. There

1:30:28

could be several stages intermediate

1:30:31

between us as individuals and

1:30:33

the highest level of integration.

1:30:35

That's all there in Federico's

1:30:37

picture and he is trying

1:30:39

to do it in a

1:30:41

way that is compatible with

1:30:44

and indeed even incorporates in

1:30:46

some sense the latest

1:30:48

in quantum theory. So he's

1:30:50

one of this group of people that I've

1:30:52

been working with to try and fill in

1:30:54

that space. I

1:30:56

have two interviews with him so

1:30:58

far on New Thinking aloud

1:31:00

and hope to have more. It

1:31:02

turns out that one of Federico's

1:31:05

closest colleagues at the

1:31:07

Xilog corporation building the Z80

1:31:09

computer chip was one

1:31:11

of my best friends when

1:31:13

I lived in San

1:31:15

Francisco. So I feel a

1:31:17

real kinship with him.

1:31:19

How good. Federico is

1:31:21

a force. He

1:31:23

is. And my God, he's

1:31:25

immensely productive. I mean, that

1:31:27

guy, his writing program,

1:31:29

he writes like 12 hours a

1:31:31

day. Seven days a

1:31:33

week, and he's maybe a

1:31:36

year younger than I am,

1:31:38

which is 83. You've

1:31:40

alluded a couple of

1:31:42

times so far to Alfred

1:31:44

North Whitehead, and under

1:31:46

the impression from what little

1:31:48

I can grasp of

1:31:50

his philosophy, it's relatively complex

1:31:52

that it is organismic

1:31:54

in its focus. Definitely.

1:31:57

In fact, it's even called by

1:31:59

that name sometimes. This

1:32:01

was a guy, I

1:32:03

mean he is certainly one of

1:32:05

the monumental intellects of the 20th

1:32:08

century. He's a

1:32:10

guy who understood classical

1:32:12

physics in depth, understood

1:32:14

certainly relativity theory, had a version

1:32:17

of his own. He was certainly

1:32:19

aware of what was going on

1:32:21

in quantum theory, saw

1:32:23

perfectly clearly that these

1:32:25

developments are fatal

1:32:27

to the prevailing physicalist

1:32:29

worldview. and set

1:32:31

out to invent an expanded

1:32:33

conceptual system that would

1:32:36

embrace the new developments in

1:32:38

physics and also provide

1:32:40

for all other aspects of

1:32:42

human experience, including even

1:32:44

stuff like paranormal stuff. He's

1:32:47

very quiet about it. By

1:32:50

the way, I spent some time

1:32:52

trying to find out if he

1:32:54

had any interactions with the Cambridge

1:32:56

Psychological Researchers. They were there at

1:32:58

the same time. He must have

1:33:00

known about them. Apparently he had

1:33:02

a large amount of personal papers

1:33:04

that he instructed to be burned

1:33:07

at his death. And

1:33:09

I would almost bet that somewhere

1:33:11

in there there was stuff about

1:33:13

his connections with people like Sigwick

1:33:15

and Myers and and the physicists

1:33:17

who were members of the SPR

1:33:19

during that early period. Anyway,

1:33:21

so that's what he did and

1:33:23

he I mean he was An

1:33:26

extraordinarily deep thinker. He invented a

1:33:28

lot of new ideas, expressed them

1:33:30

in ways that are often very

1:33:32

hard to understand. I mean, I've

1:33:35

had the same experience that others

1:33:37

have reported that you can go

1:33:39

for pages on end and wonder,

1:33:41

what the hell is this guy

1:33:43

talking about? And then suddenly come

1:33:45

upon a passage that is so

1:33:48

stunningly lucid that you can't help

1:33:50

but think, maybe all those

1:33:52

other passages were equally lucid,

1:33:54

but I just didn't get it.

1:33:56

I mean, he's that kind

1:33:58

of a person, unique. And

1:34:00

he had the great misfortune

1:34:02

to burst upon the scene. I

1:34:05

mean, here's a guy who

1:34:07

spent most of his life in

1:34:09

mathematics and mathematical physics kind

1:34:11

of stuff. You know, co -author

1:34:13

with Russell of the Principia Mathematica.

1:34:17

It said that the first philosophy

1:34:19

lecture he ever heard was the

1:34:21

first lecture that he gave at

1:34:23

Harvard when he was already 65

1:34:26

years old or something like that

1:34:28

So it's in the last part

1:34:30

of his life really that he

1:34:32

develops most of this philosophical thought

1:34:34

and it was at a time

1:34:36

when you know the logical positivists

1:34:38

and all that were Burst upon

1:34:40

the scene Alfred Ayer and language

1:34:42

truth and logic and all the

1:34:44