Chasing Consciousness

What evidence is there for quantum effects in biological systems? What are the implications for life in general?

Today we’ve got the relatively new field of quantum biology to assess. For years the idea of quantum effects in biological cells was dismissed because live cells were ‘too warm and wet’ to host these sensitive quantum phenomena. But new research into quantum coherence in avian navigation, quantum tunnelling in DNA mutations, in enzymes, even in smell - has brought new interest and study to the field of Quantum Biology.

One biochemist, saw all this coming and wrote a book about it 20 years ago called, ‘Quantum Evolution’. He is none other that than Professor of Molecular Genetics at Surrey university, JohnJoe McFadden.

His mainstream research is in microbial genetics, particularly in developing new systems biology approaches to infectious diseases. He is a keen promoter of public understanding of science and has given many popular science talks on subjects as varied as evolution and GM food. He also writes popular science articles, particularly for the Guardian newspaper. His specialties are broad including: systems biology, microbiology, evolutionary genetics, infectious diseases, tuberculosis, meningitis, and bionanotechnology.

He’s written many books but in this episode we’ll be focussing on material from his newer books, ‘Life on the Edge: the coming age of Quantum Biology’ with physicist Jim Al-Khalili, and ‘Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Unlocked the Universe’.

What we discuss:

00:00 Intro

04:30 ‘Too Warm and Wet’ Dismissing quantum consciousness in microtubules

08:40 Roger Penrose: Consciousness may be a field

14:28 The macro universe must be quantum in some way

17:30 Nobody understands the cut-off point between classical large and quantum small

20:20 Quantum coherence in Photosynthesis, enzymes, DNA mutations and avian navigation

23:00 Life ‘amplifies’ the dynamics of stuff going on at the quantum level a to classical level

49:30 University of Surrey ‘Quantum Biology’ PHD graduate program

54:30 Science is becoming more and more interdisciplinary

57:00 Biologists sometimes need to go to quantum mechanics to understand their phenomena

01:12:00 The brain is a receiver and a transmitter: Conscious Electromagnetic information theory

01:16:00 William of Occam’s ‘Razor’ explained

01:22:00 Any sufficiently advanced science would look like metaphysics

01:27:00 Simple models aren’t an ontological claim about the world being simple

01:28:30 Bayesian likelihood reasoning makes sharper predictions

References:

‘The Emperor’s New Mind’ Roger Penrose

Greg Engel, Quantum Coherence in Photosynthesis paper (2011)

Judith Klinman, Quantum Tunneling in Enzymes paper (2006)

Thorston Ritz, Avian navigation paper (2004)

Johnjoe McFadden, Consciousness: Matter or EMF paper  (2022) 

What are the implications of Jung’s theories about the Collective Unconscious, Archetypes, Synchronicity and Individuation? What can they suggest about the nature of reality and the anomalies of modern science?

In this episode we have the fascinating topic of the metaphysics implied by Carl Jung’s theories to discuss. Jung is one of the great hero’s of this podcast, we covered the collective unconscious in episode #6 and synchronicity in episode #14 for listeners who want to go into detail about that. And the topic of The Shadow is coming up too, so look out for that. But to understand the metaphysical implications of his theories we need a special guest.

He is philosopher and author Bernardo Kastrup. Bernardo is the executive director of Essentia Foundation and his work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental (he has a PHD in philosophy). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (he also has a PHD in Computer science!). He has written many academic papers and books, has appeared on many media outlets and writes regularly for the Scientific American. 

Today we’ll be mostly speaking about one of his most recent books “Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, the archetypal semantics of an experiential universe”. But we do take time first to talk about his scientific and philosophical worldview, as it related directly to Jung’s.

What we discuss:

00:00 Intro

06:40 Materialism VS the church: The history of Idealism

14:20 The dissociative boundary between us and the mind at large

22:20 Neural correlates + interacting across the dissociative boundary

25:50 Anaesthesia: Mistaking unresponsiveness for unconsciousness

29:45 Jung’s Metaphysics

31:20 The unconscious is active and creative, not a passive container

38:40 Archetypes are primordial templates of manifestation

39:40 ‘The ego is a little boat floating on a raging ocean of psychic activity that it cannot control’

43:20 Was Jung an idealist?

46:00 Causality + synchronicity: Wolfgang Pauli and Jung

47:10 Individual quantum events are not causal, so they are governed by synchronicities

48:00 Causality itself is an aggregate effect of microscopic level synchronistic effects

01:04:40 Bernardo’s midlife crisis - the first and second half of life

01:06:20 Individuation explained

01:09:20 ‘The freedom of the Slave’: The impersonal flow of nature channeled through you

01:20:50 Etiology: spontaneous VS deliberate purpose

01:26:20 Interpreting quantum phenomena through an idealist, Jungian lens

01:34:20 Physical quantities only exist if you look, if you measure

01:35:20 Entanglement and materialism’s difficulty

01:40:20 The states of the world are not physical but probabilistic states, physical states arise from measurement

01:48:20 Primordial truth beyond space time, is projected into space-time

01:51:50 Evolution is a spatio-temporal projection

01:53:30 Are Psi phenomena and military UAP experiencers manifestations of the unconscious?

02:03:40 Humility in the face of the unknown about the nature of reality

References:

“Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, the archetypal semantics of an experiential universe” Bernardo Kastrup 

“Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” Carl Jung 

What exactly are time and space? What are the implications of them not being as they seem? What is the relational interpretation of Quantum Mechanics? What are the implications of its leading to no universal laws of nature?  

In this Episode we have the non-linearity of space and time to get our heads around. In Episode #28 with physicist Paul Davies we talked about the implications of Einstein’s work in general, and in this episode we delve deeper into the implications of relativity, particularly of time, but also of space and extension. A subject that our guest has worked on extensively.  

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who works mainly in quantum gravity research, heading up the Quantum Gravity Group at the Centre de physique Theorique in Aix-Marseille in France. He is also passionate about the philosophy and history of science, so a perfect guest for this show.  Rovelli has written many popular science books, including the bestseller ‘The order of Time’ which we’ll be focussing on today. We’re also going to discuss today the release the his new book ‘Helgoland’, which champions his favourite Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Being such a philosophical scientist I’m also going to ask him about Intuition, Buddhist philosophy and psychedelics.   

What we discuss: 

00:00 Intro 

08:05 Time is local not universal 

12:32 ‘Block time’ is a bad analogy 

13:20 The apparent ‘flow’ of time from the past to the future 

18:00 Entropy’s relationship to time 

21:15 Is time an illusion? 

26:00 Matter and its extension is also relative 

27:00 Space is curved 

28:00 Back holes are full of space 

30:35 Our most obvious intuitions may not be correct 

31:00 Quantum Mechanics: Nature is radically and violently different from our intuition 

36:00 Probability Matrices and margins of uncertainty 

38:00 The wave particle duality and probability distributions 

39:00 Why the relational interpretation is the best 

46:00 Science is how you think about reality, not just maths 

53:00 Our obsession with final truth is illusory, a silly dream 

57:00 Buddha’s Dependent Origination + Nagarjuna’s emptiness 

01:02:00 Intuition and altered states of consciousness 

01:06:00 Psychedelics, insights and jumps of imagination 

01:17:00 A scientific theory of meaning  

01:26:00 An intro to Loop Quantum Gravity theory  

References: 

‘Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics’ , Carlo Rovelli 

'The Order of Time’ , Carlo Rovelli 

‘The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika’ , Nagarjuna 

Empedocles - Greek philosopher 

7 Brief Lessons in Physics’ , Carlo Rovelli 

‘Reality is not what it seems’ , Carlo Rovelli 

What theory of reality could accommodate a phenomena of remote viewing? What are the implications of its success?

In this episode we have the extraordinary phenomenon of Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) to get our heads around. Thanks to declassification of US government documents and several freedom of information act requests, enough official paperwork and declassified accounts about the top secret Stargate remote-viewing program has been gathered to give credibility to a book Phenomena by Pulitzer Prize finalist and military journalist Annie Jacobson, and a documentary film about this controversial psychic phenomena. The film ‘Third Eye Spies’ follows laser physicist Russel Targ, who along with Hal Puthoff, was employed by the Defence Intelligence Agency to do some tests on allegedly ‘psychic’ test subjects at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1970’s. This was at the height of the Cold War, when intelligence was coming out of Russia that the military were doing psychic research successfully. To cut a long story short, the experiments were successful and the program went top secret shortly after the scientists published their first results. A protocol for ‘viewing’ distant times and places in the minds eye was developed by their first talented subject, Ingo Swann. The program ran for over 20 years costing over 5 million dollars of military funding, which is actually very little for military projects. The technique was used for intelligence work for the CIA, DIA, NSA, the army, and the navy, including assisting the finding of lost aircraft and profiling of Russian bases, before being declassified in the mid 1990’s after a CIA report determined the technique wasn’t accurate enough, despite getting some good, statistically significant results.

After it was declassified, the instructors went over to the private sector and began teaching the technique to members of the general public. Two such instructors were Lyn Buchanan and Mel Riley, who met my guest today Lori Williams; and became her mentors. In 2001 Lori became the first non-military certified instructor. Her experience includes not only teaching the technique but working with law enforcement to assist in missing person cases, conducting professional sessions for corporations that have had a direct effect on profit margins, and working on archeological mysteries.

She is also the author of two books about the subject Boundless: Your How to Guide to Practical Remote Viewing, and Monitoring: A Guide for Remote Viewing and Professional Intuitive Teams for anyone who wants to learn more before doing an actual course with an instructor.

What we discuss:

00:00 Intro

07:20 Controlled Remote Viewing explained

11:20 Being ‘blind’ to the target

14:00 No need to be in a theta or meditative state

29:00 Viewing the future: some things in the future seem to be set

32:00 Anyone can do remote viewing

01:14:30 Fear of demonic possession and extra-dimensional viewings

01:25:30 Remote viewing structures on Mars and other dimensions

References:

Lori Williams. Boundless: Your How to Guide to Practical Remote Viewing

Free introductory remote viewing course from Lori’s school

Annie Jacobson ‘Phenomena’

Watch ‘3rd Eye Spies’ documentary

1995 CIA Report that led to the cancelation of the US govt Stargate program. Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman

In this episode we have the fascinating proposition that what we call reality is in fact a hallucination we all agree on, to consider. We’ve already heard in this second series in Episode #28 from physicist Paul Davies on ‘The implications of Einstein’, that indeed matter is energy and as such the world we see as solid objects with space between them, isn’t truly like that. We’ve also heard from cognitive scientist Don Hoffman that we see the world optimised for ‘fitness’ in the evolutionary sense, and not for truth i.e not to see it as it actually is. So in the same vein in this episode we’re going to find out from a brilliant neuroscientist that we are in what he calls a ‘controlled hallucination’. That neuroscientist is none other than Anil Seth.

Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex. He is also the co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He has published over 100 scientific papers and is the editor-in-chief of the Oxford University Press publication ‘Neuroscience of Consciousness’. His TED talk ‘Your brain hallucinates your Conscious reality’ has more than 11 million views.

His new book ‘Being You: a new science of consciousness’, which expands on most of what we’ll discuss today, is a Sunday times top 10 best seller, and a New statesmen, Economist and Bloomberg book of the year.

I’ve wanted to speak with Anil since I heard about his theory, as it seemed to match some of my worries about the disconnect between what we perceive and what is actually there, and how much of what we see is coming from our own mental and biological state, and our biases at the time.

What we discuss:

00:00 Intro

05:41 A ‘prediction machine’ perceiving from the inside-out, as well as perceiving sensory info outside-in.

10:00 Interoception: predictions about the body for self-control/regulation

14:00 The rubber-hand illusion: the prediction machine is not perfect

19:00 The risk of our best predictions being considered truth rather than hypothesis

23:00 Cultural humility about differences in our perceptions and beliefs

24:15 Why we call reality is a ‘controlled hallucination’

31:30 The body has shaped the predictive brain for survival

34:00 Brain body bidirectionally vs reductionism

37:30 Supervenience

38:00 Can different levels of description be primary to each other?

46:00 The self is illusory

References:

Anil Seth's best seller, ‘Being you’

The Perception Census - Call for participants

Immanuel Kant’s idea: Noumenon, ’the world is hidden behind a sensory veil’

Pareidolia - seeing patterns in things

The Dream machine - Interactive flickering light experiment

Is our subjective experience of Free Will, supported by the experimental evidence? If not, how do we take moral responsibility for our actions? Why do meditators, who’re used to watching their thoughts arise and pass without identifying with them, find this data easier to integrate?

In this episode, we have the tough job of evaluating the experimental evidence for the existence of Free Will. The debate has raged for centuries in Philosophy, but now with advances in neuroscience and psychology experiments, we have some actual physical evidence to examine, and its implications to reflect on. We’re going to discuss how most of those who accept this evidence have chosen to carry on as if it they still have Free Will, which sounds contradictory. Do the implications for personal moral responsibility require us to do that? We’re also going to get into meditation and Zen, as our guest today and another famous advocate of the illusion of free will, Sam Harris, are long term practitioners. It seems those who use some kind of mindfulness meditation, and hence are used to watching the way thoughts arise and pass without identifying with them, are less troubled by the idea that they may not have free will. What does all this mean for the reality of a ‘self’?

So who better to explain this mind boggling question than, our first returning guest, psychologist, author and visiting Professor at Plymouth University, Susan Blackmore. Best known for her books The Meme Machine, Consciousness: An Introduction, and Seeing Myself, Sue’s work spans across hundreds of publications in over 20 different languages, making huge contributions in the fields of psychology, memetics, religion, philosophy of mind, supernatural experience, and many other areas.

What we discuss (full show notes on the website)

00:00 Intro

04:24 Previous Interview with Susan - Episode #1 on The Hard Problem of Consciousness

08:30 Experimental evidence refuting Free Will

14:30 Daniel Wegner - Thought suppression experiments

19:30 Who is making the decision if not our consciousness?

29:40 Wegner, ‘I let the decision make itself’ = Zen: Let the universe or practice do it

40:00 Meditation: frustration, Sam Harris and letting go of free will

50:00 Buddha’s ‘dependent origination’ and science’s causation

References:

Susan Blackmore - ‘Living without Free Will’

Benjamin Libet - Testing readiness potential against the time of choice

Daniel Wegner - Thought suppression experiments

Susan Blackmore - ‘Conversations on Consciousness’

Susan Blackmore - ‘Zen and the art of consciousness’

In this episode we explore a User Interface Theory of reality. Since the invention of the computer virtual reality theories have been gaining in popularity, often to explain some difficulties around the hard problem of consciousness; but also to explain other non-local anomalies coming out of physics and psychology, like ‘quantum entanglement’ or ‘out of body experiences’. 

As you will hear today the vast majority of cognitive scientists believe consciousness is an emergent phenomena from matter, and that virtual reality theories are science fiction or ‘Woowoo’ and new age. One of this podcasts jobs is to look at some of these Woowoo claims and separate the wheat from the chaff, so the open minded among us can find the threshold beyond which evidence based thinking, no matter how contrary to the consensus can be considered and separated from wishful thinking.

So who better than hugely respected cognitive scientist and User Interface theorist Don Hoffman to clarify all this.

Donald D Hoffman is a full professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, where he studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and colour, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem. So he is perfectly placed to comment on how we interpret reality.

Hoffman is also the author of ‘The Case Against Reality’, the content of which we’ll be focusing on today; ‘Visual Intelligence’, and the co-author with Bruce Bennett and Chetan Prakash of ‘Observer Mechanics’.

What we discuss:

11:20 Seeing the world for survival VS for knowing reality as it truly is

13:30 Competing strategies to maximise ‘fitness’ in the evolutionary sense

21:30 The payoff functions that govern evolution do not contain information about the structure of the world

29:30 Space-time cannot be fundamental

37:45 A User-Interface network of conscious agents

41:30 A virtual reality computer analogy

53:30 User Interface theory VS Simulation theory

01:08:00 The notion of truth is deeper than the notion of proof and theory

01:17:30 Is nature written in the language of Maths?

01:27:00 Consciousness is like the living being, and maths is like the bones

01:44:00 Being and experiencing being may co-arise

01:48:00 Different analogies for different eras

References:

Donald Hoffman - ‘The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes’

Nima Arkani-Hamed - ‘Space-time is dead’

Nima Arkani-Hamed - 'Reductionism is dead'

Local Realism is false

Noncontextual realism is false

Don Hoffman - Objects of Consciousness paper

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

What are the implications of Einstein’s predictions? Has our understanding of reality integrated the implications of this thinking? His General and Special theories of relativity have completely changed the way we see gravity, energy, mass, space and time, even size - but how? Physicists may find it easy to understand what his ideas mean; like this quote “The distinction between the past, the present and the future is nothing but a stubbornly persistent illusion”. But for us, the general public, just thinking that the the arrow of time is an illusion, is enough to give us a bad headache and leave us wishing that Newton was right after all. But that’s not what we do on Chasing Consciousness, our mission is the same as always, to update our world view to match new theories. Now this sounds like no small feat, but have no fear, all will be be clarified by a man with a skill for presenting complex ideas in a way we can all understand, one of the worlds most published popular science writers, Professor Paul Davies.

Paul Davies is a Cosmologist and Professor of Physics and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. His work has covered topics as far reaching as Cosmology, Quantum Fields and Astrobiology, with a sprinkling of the Search for Extra terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and cancer research to boot. He’s the bestselling author of almost thirty popular science books, his many awards include the Templeton Prize and the Faraday Prize of the Royal Society. He is a Member of the Order of Australia and even has an asteroid named after him! Quite a career!

His new book ‘What’s eating the universe’, that covers many of the topics we’ll touch on today, is out now.

What we discuss in this episode:

00:00 Intro

08:00 ‘The universe is about something’

16:00 The warping of space time

22:00 The implications of gravity slowing time

31:25 Time and Space are relative, and can change and move like matter

36:00 Arrow of time VS Block time - ‘Time is just there’

38:30 Matter is energy or Mass is a form of energy

42:00 The table isn’t solid, its mostly empty space

44:30 Did time start at the Big Bang?

49:00 Time doesn’t flow universally, it’s what clocks measure

52:00 3 big origin problems: the universe, life and consciousness

1:03:00 John Wheeler - the ‘bendy rubber’ analogy of space time

1:05:00 Einstein’s famous quotes explained

1:08:00 Intuition according to Einstein

References:

Paul Davies ‘What’s Eating the Universe: And other cosmic questions’

An Einstein Ring (A warping of space time)

Full Isaac Newton quote, ’Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external’

St Augustine quote ‘The world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time’

Nima Arkani-Hamed ‘Space Time is Dead’ lecture (from 14.20)

John Wheeler ‘Pregeometry’

Mach’s Principle

How can out of body experiences be explained? What theory of reality could accomodate such a phenomenon?

Today we have the extraordinary topic of the science and physics of Out of Body Experiences to get our head around! Many brain scientists have reduced this common experience to a mix of physiological and brain chemical effects, maintaining that no perceiving consciousness actually leaves the body, rather it is a form of hallucination and distortion of body schema. Not knowing when these experiences will spontaneously occur has made them hard to study in the lab.

However, certain researchers have developed a method for inducing the experience, allowing for deeper study. Following that study some new theories of reality have developed that could include such an experience and even others like Near Death Experience or NDE, and Controlled Remote Viewing which we’re evaluating in this second series.

One such scientist is our guest today physicist Dr. Tom Campbell! He’s an experimental physicist who’s worked for over 20 years developing US missile systems for the Department of Defence, specialising in developing cutting edge technology, large-system simulation, technology development and integration, and complex system vulnerability and risk analysis.

He began researching altered states of consciousness with Bob Monroe at Monroe Laboratories in the early 1970s. He helped design experiments and develop the Binaural Beats technology for creating specific altered states, and became an experienced test subject and trainer too. After many years studying consciousness, and out of body experiences he wrote the book ‘My Big TOE’, as in ‘Theory of Everything’, which describes his model of existence and reality from both the physical and metaphysical points of view.

PART 1: Testing Out of Body Experiences

00:00 Intro

06:00 Balanced left right brain thinking

09:00 Out of Body Experience is a bad term, but neutral

13:00 Consciousness is not projected from the body

21:30 Testing Bob Monroe’s OBE phenomena

32:00 The experiment that confirmed it was real

36:00 Alpha Numeric information is not the same type as image, pattern or metaphor

46:00 The weirdest stories Tom’s encountered

55:00 Non-embodied consciousnesses encounters

01:05:00 Binaural beats to aid getting out of body explained

01:20:00 Theta brainwave is the state you need to be in to explore your consciousness

PART 2: The physics of Tom’s ‘My Big T.O.E’ (Theory of Everything)

01:25:00 Consciousness evolves by lowering entropy, finding more order and structure

Full show notes at Chasingconsciousness.net

References:

My big TOE book series

Monroe Institute

MBT events (binaural beats)

‘On testing the simulation’ One of Tom's scientific papers

Tom's You tube channel MBT

Why is Panpsychism gaining popularity? Is it coherent to say consciousness emerged out of non-consciousness? What can we deduce from a universe fine tuned for life?

In this episode we have the important job of finding out what Panpsychism is all about, and why the philosophical position is gaining more and more traction in philosophy, but even with physicists and other scientists. The idea that consciousness is the fundamental nature of the physical world is by no means a new one, and it does seem to resolve some of the problems of how consciously experiencing lifeforms could have evolved out of non-conscious non-living material. But most materialists balk at the idea and consider it absolutely bonkers, for reasons we’ll find out as we attempt to pay respect to the criticisms of the position too.

So fortunately, to navigate this tricky philosophical quagmire we have one of the best known and most passionate supporters of panpsychism, author and professor of philosophy at Durham University Philip Goff. Philip’s research focuses on how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview. He argues that the traditional approaches of materialism, that consciousness can be explained in terms of physical processes in the brain; and dualism, that consciousness is separate from the body and brain, face unresolvable difficulties.

His first academic book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality was published in 2017 and his first book aimed at a general audience, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, was published in 2019.

He also has a podcast, Mind Chat, which he rightly hosts with a philosopher of a completely opposite point of view. And he’s involved in a book of essays on consciousness which will be out this year called ‘Is Consciousness Everywhere? Essays on Panpsychism’, which is a collection of essays by scientists and philosophers published in Journal of Consciousness Studies. The contributors include Carlo Rovelli, Sean Carroll, Lee Smolin, Anneke Harris, Christoph Koch, and Anil Seth, several of whom appear in this series of Chasing Consciousness.

What we discuss

00:00 Intro

06:00 The unanswerable questions

09:30 Panpsychism explained

12:30 %32 of philosophers are now opposed to materialism

19:30 Neural correlates don’t describe the subjective contents of experiences

21:10 Arguments for Panpsychism

23:00 Consciousness from Non-consciousness: the evolutionary problem

26:20 Materialist counter arguments

44:45 Public observation and experiment is not the full story

54:30 Block Universe implications for panpsychism

01:06:45 Meaning, value and mystical experiences

References:

Galen Strawon: why he believes Panpsychism

Eric Schwitzgebel ‘Crazyism’ article

Sabine Hosselfeld “Electron’s don’t think” article

David Chalmers on Consciousness might collapse the wave function

Full references and show notes at Chasingconsciousness.net