Giants Shoulder

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Donald Hoffman is the cognitive scientist whose own maths told him reality isn't what it seems. Around 1986, after seven years modelling perception, the equations said we render the world on the fly, and he has been recovering ever since. Now Professor Emeritus at UC Irvine, he has founded the Trace Institute to rebuild physics from conscious observers, starting outside spacetime. Its first collaboration, with Andrew Gallimore, asks whether DMT entities are glimpses beyond the headset.

Expect to learn:

- The Trace: the 121-year-old maths behind every observer window

- Zero For Trillions: why no theory of consciousness explains a single experience

- The Nose Test: why seeing your own nose shows how restricted your headset is

- The DMT Experiment: passing information through an entity under controlled conditions

- Mach 40: what UFOs might look like to someone with the headset's source code

SPONSORS

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA

Michael Graziano - Is This Greatest Consciousness Theory You’ve Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/ZnasmLpY5_8

David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o

Karl Friston - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://youtu.be/R-IZOFs4qmY

GUEST LINKS

Trace Institute Profile: https://traceinstitute.org/people/donald-hoffman/

Trace Institute Website: https://www.traceinstitute.org/

Trace Institute YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TraceInstitute

X: https://x.com/donalddhoffman

UC Irvine: https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/

The Case Against Reality (2019): https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393254693

Trace × Andrew Gallimore (DMT research): https://traceinstitute.org/collaborations/gallimore/

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/dOAo04b6jCQ

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

FOLLOW EVAN

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:45 The Biggest Unsolved Problem In Science

0:05:38 Physicists Say Spacetime Is Doomed

0:11:03 Dennett, Graziano And The Illusion Of Consciousness

0:14:35 What Is A Trace? Markov Chains Made Simple

0:22:23 The Discovery That Founded The Trace Institute

0:26:10 Recursive Trace Logic: How Observers Become Agents

0:31:27 The CCTV Metaphor For Reality

0:37:01 Why There's Always A Nose In Your Vision

0:41:08 How Big Is Reality Beyond The Interface?

0:43:10 What "Consciousness Is Fundamental" Actually Means

0:52:43 Consciousness Science Has Explained Zero Experiences

0:58:03 Does Your Consciousness Belong To You?

1:01:57 If Consciousness Is One, Why Isn't Telepathy Common?

1:08:16 "I Have No Neurons"

1:11:13 The Maths That Slapped Him In 1986

1:20:04 Andrew Gallimore And The DMT Entity Experiment

1:26:34 The Swami Who Showed Zero Powers

1:32:08 The DMT Mantis And Why Reports Are So Consistent

1:37:28 Are DMT Entities Real, Or Just Icons?

1:46:35 Nine Conjectures To Rebuild All Of Physics

1:49:29 UFOs At Mach 40

1:50:19 Neuroscience As Headset Engineering

1:57:13 Hacking The Source Code Of Reality

2:04:28 AI Is "Dumber Than Cucumbers"

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

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Michael Masters is the biological anthropologist who thinks the grey aliens might be us. A professor at Montana Technological University, he studies how the human skull, face and eyes evolved over six million years, and has excavated at a 3.5-million-year-old hominin site in South Africa. His extratempestrial hypothesis argues that the beings described in UFO encounters are our own descendants, travelling back in time to study their evolutionary past. He says it's falsifiable, just not in his lifetime.

Expect to learn:

- The Brazilian Farmer: the 1950s abduction that ended in sex with a near-human woman

- The Earlier Cases: the abduction reports that predate Betty and Barney Hill

- Brain Up, Face Back: why six million years of skull evolution point towards the greys

- The Gamete Problem: why our descendants might come back for our sperm and eggs

- Falsifiable By Time: why he'll be "long dead" before anyone knows if he's right

SPONSORS

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA

Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc

GUEST LINKS

Montana Tech Faculty Profile: https://mtech.edu/arts-sciences/faculty/michael-masters/index.html

X: https://x.com/MorphoTime

Website: https://idflyobj.com/

Identified Flying Objects (2019): https://www.leighbureau.com/books/identified-flying-objects

The Extratempestrial Model (2022): https://www.leighbureau.com/books/the-extratempestrial-model

Lomas, Case & Masters (2024), The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis: https://doi.org/10.29202/phil-cosm/33/3

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/FRFT3PeiWwk

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:26 The Skull Scientist Who Studies UFOs

0:03:46 "They Could Be Us From The Future"

0:07:21 The Book On The Shelf That Started It All

0:09:10 Whitley Strieber And Communion

0:10:49 Abductees Who Never Told Their Own Families

0:17:13 The Archetypal Abduction Story

0:19:38 The Nimitz: 80,000ft In Under Two Seconds

0:20:37 The Farmer Who Had Sex With An Alien

0:22:22 "I Just Floated Right Through The Ceiling"

0:24:06 Did Sci-Fi Invent Alien Abductions?

0:29:15 DMT Entities, Machine Elves And UFOs

0:37:32 The 2017 Story That Broke UFOs Open

0:42:08 "The Disc-Shaped Craft Are The Time Machine"

0:44:39 Why The Greys Are Built Like Hominins

0:47:26 Can You Really Fast-Forward Evolution?

0:49:30 Brain Up, Face Back: 6 Million Years Of Skulls

0:56:04 Are We Just Projecting Human Faces?

1:00:13 How Far In The Future Are They From?

1:03:23 Why Would We Evolve To Look Like That?

1:06:51 Falling Sperm Counts And The Gamete Mystery

1:15:01 How Do You Falsify Time-Travelling Aliens?

1:22:27 Teaching A University Class On UFOs

1:30:13 Is The US Government Hiding Something Huge?

1:32:40 Keeping UFOs Quiet Through Grad School

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

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Janice Holden is a near-death-experience researcher who designed the first hospital experiment to catch consciousness outside the body, edits the Journal of Near-Death Studies and spent 31 years on the University of North Texas faculty. For nearly 40 years she has tested one claim: that patients whose hearts have stopped can see the room from above. Surgeons have corroborated some of those details. No controlled study has caught one yet.

Expect to learn:

- The Leg In The Yellow Bag: an anaesthetised patient described an amputation in the next operating room

- The Post-it Notes: a heart patient saw a detail only his surgeon would know

- The Hidden-Target Experiment: pictures hidden near hospital ceilings, visible only from above

- The Life Review: reliving every moment of your life as the people you affected

- DMT Vs Near-Death: why the brain may interpret reality rather than create it

SPONSORS

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc

Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o

Karl Friston - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://youtu.be/R-IZOFs4qmY

Marjorie Woollacott - Neuroscientist: "Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness" — NDEs, Telepathy and Terminal Lucidity: https://youtu.be/mDWtmfmIUHA

GUEST LINKS

Website: https://www.janholden.com

The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0313358648

Journal of Near-Death Studies: https://www.janholden.com/jnds

IANDS: https://iands.org

Articles: https://www.janholden.com/copy-of-articles

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/RAXr5ZavLk4

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:15 From Doctoral Student To 40 Years Of Near-Death Research

0:03:38 How Resuscitation Created The Near-Death Experience

0:09:06 What Actually Happens During A Near-Death Experience

0:11:03 Moving At The Speed Of Thought

0:11:41 The Tunnel And The City Of Light

0:13:18 The Life Review: Feeling What Everyone Else Felt

0:14:55 "It's Not Your Time": Why People Come Back

0:19:27 Why Near-Death Experiences Aren't Just Dreams

0:21:09 The Woman Who Watched Her Own Surgery

0:27:11 The Post-it Notes A Dead Patient Saw

0:32:31 The Doctors Who Corroborated These Cases

0:33:39 The Harvard Neurosurgeon Who Changed His Mind

0:37:38 Why "False Memory" Doesn't Explain It

0:40:08 The Patient Who Floated Into The CPR Training Room

0:45:05 Hiding Pictures On Hospital Ceilings

0:49:35 Seven Studies, No Hits Yet

0:53:32 Is Humanity Ready For Proof?

0:58:08 DMT Vs Near-Death Experiences

1:06:35 Does The Brain Create Reality Or Interpret It?

1:10:27 Consciousness Before Birth And After Death

1:14:47 Why Don't We See This All The Time?

1:17:30 Karma And The Afterlife In Southeast Asia

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Carlos Sonnenschein is Professor of Integrative Physiology and Pathobiology at Tufts University School of Medicine. With Ana Soto, he developed the tissue organisation field theory of cancer: the idea that a tumour begins not in a rogue cell, but in the breakdown of the tissue around it. For fifty years he has argued that cancer research has been looking one level too low. Here he explains why the mutations we find in tumours may be the wreckage, not the cause.

Expect to learn:

- The default state: why every cell's natural tendency is to proliferate

- Growth factors: why he argued they don't exist, and why people laughed

- Mutations without cancer: why he says no gene has been shown to cause a cancer

- Targeted therapy: why he believes the target was never really there

- Cellular agency: how life, proliferation and motility fit together

SPONSORS

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

GUEST LINKS

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VmTCfroAAAAJ

IEA Nantes Fellow Profile: https://www.iea-nantes.fr/en/fellows/carlos-sonnenschein

Biological Purpose Project: https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/people/carlos-sonnenschein

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos-Sonnenschein

An Integrative Approach Toward Biology, Organisms, and Cancer (2018): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29119499

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/AypMhvhWwjg

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:26 From Paediatrics to Cancer Research

0:05:23 The Oestrogen Paradox

0:08:43 Proliferation Is the Default State of Every Cell

0:12:27 Inhibitors of Inhibitors

0:14:06 "Growth Factors Don't Exist"

0:15:31 The Somatic Mutation Theory

0:17:41 The Society of Cells and the Tissue Theory of Cancer

0:21:44 Stars and Dogs: Funding a Minority View

0:23:49 Teaching Cancer Through Genetics

0:25:01 How Does Tissue Keep Cells in Check?

0:26:04 Metastasis

0:28:34 Prostate Cancer and Spontaneous Regression

0:30:38 The Cost of Cancer Treatment

0:31:49 Melanoma, UV and the Standard Model

0:32:24 Mutations Without Cancer

0:35:17 No Gene Causes Cancer: BRCA1, p53 and RAS

0:37:00 Why Targeted Therapy Isn't Targeted

0:38:03 When Treatment Causes Cancer

0:40:39 What Does Genome Sequencing Tell You?

0:42:24 Why Does Cancer Run in Families?

0:45:41 Trauma, Healing and Tissue Robustness

0:47:59 A Theory of Organisms

0:50:59 What Is Life?

0:52:18 Economics Is a Branch of Biology

0:53:36 Cellular Agency

0:58:36 Defining Life: Proliferation and Motility

1:01:36 When Did Cells Become Agents?

1:04:49 The Future of Cancer Research

1:09:52 Final Thoughts

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Alexander Beiner is the writer who volunteered as a guinea pig for the world's first extended-state DMT trial. At Imperial College London, he was one of eleven people kept on a continuous DMT drip for thirty minutes. He is a co-Executive Director of Breaking Convention, Europe's largest psychedelic conference, and the author of The Bigger Picture.

Expect to learn

- The Chinchillas: hyperdimensional beings he had never seen in real life, speaking a visible language

- The Reply: he sent a symbol back, they went ballistic, then got bored and left

- The Pharmacology Problem: why tolerance to LSD and psilocybin does nothing to DMT

- The Synchronicity: the stranger across a London road, and what he learned that night

- The Spider Queen: a planet-sized entity that wrapped him in a web

SPONSORS

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc

Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk

David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o

GUEST LINKS

X: https://x.com/AlexanderBeiner

Kainos (Substack): https://beiner.substack.com/

Personal Site: https://www.alexanderbeiner.com/

Breaking Convention: https://breakingconvention.co.uk/performers/alexander-beiner

The Bigger Picture - Author Page: https://www.penguin.com.au/authors/alexander-beiner

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/aZnvPt9X3Dc

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

FOLLOW EVAN

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:01:59 Why Changing Minds Isn't Enough

0:02:54 A Magic Mushroom Homecoming In Holland

0:05:33 Joining Europe's Largest Psychedelic Conference

0:06:44 Why He Signed Up To Be A DMT Guinea Pig

0:08:03 Half Of DMT Users Meet Autonomous Entities

0:10:38 Meeting The Hyperdimensional Chinchillas

0:14:25 He'd Never Seen A Chinchilla In Real Life

0:15:14 "They Were Speaking A Visible Language"

0:17:47 Why Priming Can't Explain The Chinchillas

0:21:33 The Metaphysical Shift After 100 Episodes

0:26:21 DMT Immunity And The Cross-Tolerance Mystery

0:28:07 Why Psychedelics Make Avoiding Pain Harder

0:29:28 The Placebo Dose And The Prank Paranoia

0:32:24 Three Heartbeats To The Deepest Trip

0:35:06 Wired Up: The Hidden Rituals Of The Lab

0:39:29 Would He Ever Come Back?

0:40:22 Psychedelic PTSD And The Fear Of Madness

0:41:31 The Synchronicity He Still Can't Explain

0:46:37 If Everything's Conscious, Where's The Telepathy?

0:49:16 Why The East Talks Openly About Ghosts

0:53:45 The Planet-Sized Spider Queen

0:58:51 "This Is So Similar To What McKenna Described"

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Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic is a physicist turned cognitive scientist and Professor Emeritus at Chalmers University of Technology, with doctorates in both physics and computer science. Across three careers she built info-computationalism: the idea that nature is information and computation at every level, from particles to minds. Her conclusion puts her at odds with much of her own field. Cognition arrives with life itself, which puts consciousness in a single bacterium and nowhere in today's AI.

Expect to learn:

- Info-computationalism: why nature is information and computation all the way down

- Cell consciousness: why a single cell is already sensing, deciding and minimally aware

- The Levin divide: where she draws the line Michael Levin won't

- Anaesthetised bacteria: why ether switches off organisms with no brain

- Machines that can't feel: why today's AI has intelligence but no goals of its own

SPONSORS

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Platonic Space of Minds, Bioelectricity, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA

William B. Miller Jr. - Meet The Scientist Proving Your Cells Are Conscious and Intelligent: https://youtu.be/xrV5oGyyKSI

Mark Solms - Meet the Scientist Proving Dreams Hold the Key to Consciousness! Dr Mark Solms: https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc

GUEST LINKS

Chalmers Profile: https://www.chalmers.se/en/persons/dodig/

X: https://x.com/DodigGordana

Chalmers Research Publications: https://research.chalmers.se/en/person/dodig

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bvc5bBsAAAAJ

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9881-400X

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordana-dodig-crnkovic/

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/D4jBgWV8BoY

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

FOLLOW EVAN

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:44 Physicist, Computer Scientist, Cognitive Scientist

0:08:05 What Is Information, Really?

0:13:16 You Can't Observe Without Changing The System

0:16:14 Are Conscious Agents The Most Fundamental Thing?

0:20:06 A Single Cell Is Already Conscious

0:27:16 Where She Parts Ways With Michael Levin

0:28:41 Can We Build A Machine That Creates Itself?

0:33:38 Why A Book Is Just Food To An Insect

0:39:40 You Are Trillions Of Information Agents

0:44:09 Science's Obsession With Measurement

0:46:40 Xenobots And The Cells Nobody Programmed

0:51:02 Agency Or Just Complicated Chemistry?

0:55:58 Why No Experiment Can Settle This

0:57:22 Where Computation Ends And Cognition Begins

1:01:08 Would Levin Say Gene Networks Think?

1:03:37 Why Survival Might Be Essential For Consciousness

1:07:07 You Can Anaesthetise A Bacterium

1:11:08 Can Consciousness Be Written Down As Maths?

1:19:31 How AI Could Help Us Understand Minds

1:22:35 Should We Ever Build Conscious AI?

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

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John Vervaeke is an award-winning cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Cognitive Science programme and the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He helped pioneer relevance realisation — the claim that underneath your intelligence, your attention and your consciousness sits a single process, and that every living thing is doing it. He has argued since 1997 that this process cannot be a computation, and his field is only now conceding the point: even predictive processing, its dominant framework, is increasingly admitted to presuppose the thing he named. A cell decides what matters to it. So does a bacterium. Possibly everything that has ever been alive, long before there was a brain to think with.

Expect to learn:

- Relevance realisation: how you ignore almost everything in front of you and still land on what matters

- Cognition all the way down: why a single cell is doing the same thing your mind is, only smaller

- The line at life: why a tornado self-organises but never cares, and what that rules out

- Why computation can't do it: the reason large language models collapse on open-ended problems and always will

- Mind as the between: the case that consciousness isn't inside your head but in the coupling with your world

SPONSORS

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA

Philip Ball - Philip Ball: Why Quantum Mechanics is NOT What you think, Consciousness, Brain Organoids, AI & Life!: https://youtu.be/nNbG5lnp51E

Philip Ball - Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://youtu.be/9SseGx0R0fY

Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE

Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o

GUEST LINKS

University of Toronto Faculty Profile: https://www.psych.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/john-vervaeke

Website: https://johnvervaeke.com/

X: https://x.com/vervaeke_john

YouTube (Awakening from the Meaning Crisis): https://www.youtube.com/user/johnvervaeke

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (book): https://johnvervaeke.com/books/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/jcMtjjeUV98

SKOOL

Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:54 The Meaning Crisis, Explained by a Cognitive Scientist

0:04:16 The Patterns in This Room Outnumber the Particles in the Universe

0:06:45 How Your Mind Ignores Almost Everything

0:09:09 "Dad, It's Relevance Realisation All The Way Down"

0:10:24 Noise Is Just Information Nobody Needs

0:15:33 Comparing a Human Mind to a Single Cell

0:18:01 Michael Levin's Cognitive Light Cone

0:19:49 The Cone of Caring

0:23:20 How Far Down Does Mind Actually Go?

0:24:15 Why a Tornado Isn't Alive

0:25:34 Pressing Michael Levin to Admit He's a Platonist

0:34:01 The Water Bottle Experiment

0:40:34 Where Levin Leaps From Patterns to Minds

0:48:12 The Problem With Symmetry Theories of Consciousness

0:55:03 Why LLMs Fall Apart on Open-Ended Problems

1:00:16 Obviousness Is Not a Physical Property

1:05:11 The Shark That Dies in the Sahara

1:10:49 What Consciousness Is Actually Doing

1:15:12 Are Neural Correlates a Dead End?

1:22:07 "We Should Stop Funding It"

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Richard Watson is a professor of artificial intelligence and theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Southampton and the author of Compositional Evolution. He argues that adaptation does not require natural selection at all, and that biology has spent a century mistaking one for the other. With Michael Levin he published Natural Induction, which shows that any network whose connections give way under stress will begin to learn on its own. Ecosystems. Gene networks. Possibly the chemistry of the early Earth, long before anything was alive to be selected.

Expect to learn:

- Cognition before selection: why learning came first and natural selection came second

- The spring mechanism: how falling masses solve hard puzzles with no brain, no genes and no designer

- Ecosystems that compute: the model where an ecosystem solves a Sudoku without reproducing or inheriting

- The limits of the genome: why no amount of sequencing will explain what a cell is actually doing

- Medicine as persuasion: treating tissues as cognitive systems to negotiate with, not machines to fix

SPONSORS

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

GUEST LINKS

University of Southampton Profile: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5x27lw/professor-richard-watson

Personal Website: https://www.richardawatson.com

Natural Induction (Entropy, 2024, with Michael Levin): https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/9/765

Publications: https://www.richardawatson.com/publications-1

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Watson-10

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/wAGFE2S6qXg

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:43 The Assumptions Every Biologist Knows Are Wrong

0:03:53 "All of Life Is Cognitive"

0:06:58 Survival Is a Consequence, Not the Driver

0:09:32 How Cognition Could Come Before Natural Selection

0:14:03 Adaptation Isn't What Natural Selection Does

0:17:57 What a Sudoku Puzzle Teaches About Life

0:20:41 Masses, Springs and the Physics of Learning

0:23:45 When Springs Start to Remember

0:26:18 Learning as "Second-Order Falling"

0:28:56 No Selection, No Neural Nets, No Design

0:31:03 What "Memory" Actually Means

0:35:59 Gene Networks That Learn

0:38:13 An Ecosystem Solving Sudoku

0:43:22 Natural Selection "Isn't Doing Anything Clever"

0:52:08 No Amount of Sequencing Will Answer This

0:57:23 Will We Ever Model a Cell? "Bottom Up, Never"

1:01:23 Rethinking Medicine: Persuadable Systems

1:08:01 Agency, or Just Complex Biochemistry?

1:20:47 "I Don't Do Consciousness"

1:23:30 Three Things That Changed His Mind

1:25:39 Analytic Idealism and the Dream Argument

1:33:31 Why Doesn't Your Consciousness Blur Into the Chair?

1:35:47 McGilchrist and Why We're Blind to It

1:38:47 It Was Never About Survival

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Richard Brown is a philosopher of mind who built one of the leading cognitive theories of consciousness, co-authored the paper with Joseph LeDoux that moved the feeling of fear out of the amygdala, and has just published the full book-length case for it with Oxford University Press. He also cannot picture a chicken. Brown has aphantasia — no voluntary mental imagery whatsoever — and he didn't find out until a graduate seminar, when he realised that everyone around him had been speaking literally all along about seeing things in their heads. This is a man building a theory of inner experience from inside a mind with no pictures in it.

Expect to learn:

- The blank mind's eye: what a philosopher with no mental imagery reveals about where experience actually happens

- Fear without the amygdala: how he and Joseph LeDoux moved the feeling of fear up into the cortex

- Fake phenomenology: the TMS study where vision gets more vivid without getting any more accurate

- Experience you can't reach: whether you can be having a conscious state and be locked out of it

- The state of the field: why the consciousness chapter in most neuroscience textbooks is a coin flip

SPONSORS

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0

Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE

Alfredo Spagna - Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!: https://youtu.be/k8SBHefDnEk

GUEST LINKS

Personal Site: https://onemorebrown.com

Consciousness Live!: https://onemorebrown.com/consciousness-live/

Consciousness as Representing One's Mind (OUP, 2025): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/consciousness-as-representing-ones-mind-9780197784006

X: https://x.com/onemorebrown

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/onemorebrown.bsky.social

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/RBP-w5Z9t1g

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:10 Why You Can't Do Science Without Philosophy

0:04:54 "You're Doing Bad Philosophy and You Don't Know It"

0:06:26 The Band That Got Him Working With Joseph LeDoux

0:11:53 Why the Consciousness Chapter Is a Coin Flip

0:17:17 What a Higher-Order Theory Actually Says

0:20:43 The Two Kinds of Awareness

0:21:59 The Blurry Book That Taught Him About Experience

0:26:32 Consciousness as Awareness of Your Own Mind

0:27:08 LeDoux, the Amygdala and Where Fear Really Lives

0:33:06 "There Is No Unconscious Fear"

0:39:17 Two Famous Theories That Are Secretly the Same

0:40:15 Aphantasia as Evidence for Higher-Order Theory

0:42:57 The Speckled Hen That Broke the Seminar

0:44:48 Seven Spots, or Black on Black?

0:45:46 What Meditation Showed a Man With No Mind's Eye

0:49:38 You Might Be Having Experiences You Can't Reach

0:52:21 Ned Block's Overflow and the "Placeholder" Problem

0:55:36 India Solved This Before Descartes

1:02:26 Subjective Inflation, or "Fake Phenomenology"

1:03:38 Zapping the Prefrontal Cortex With TMS

1:06:13 The $3 Million Experiment Testing All of This

1:09:56 Quality Space Theory and Mental "Dabs of Paint"

1:22:08 Why You Can't Swap Your Red for My Green

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Dean Buonomano is a UCLA neuroscientist and one of the first researchers to ask how the brain encodes time. His work overturned a century-old assumption — that somewhere in your head sits a central clock — by showing that timing falls out of the dynamics of neural circuits themselves. He wrote the bestseller Your Brain Is a Time Machine, then took the argument to physics, co-authoring a paper with Carlo Rovelli on whether the past still exists. He is a presentist in a field that mostly isn't.

Expect to learn:

- The clockless brain: why there is no central timer anywhere in your head

- Timing in a dish: how isolated brain tissue can be taught intervals

- Death and religion: how foresight forced our ancestors to invent the afterlife

- The ten-second test: the one simple thing no language model can do

- Pause the computer: the thought experiment that breaks state-based theories of consciousness

SPONSORS

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

György Buzsáki - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Waves Produce Memory, Spacetime and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/95FFRTIiLDY

Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/eNi-_2cOVtc

Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o

GUEST LINKS

UCLA Neurobiology Profile: https://neurobio.ucla.edu/people/dean-buonomano-phd

Buonomano Lab: http://www.buonomanolab.com/

X: https://x.com/DeanBuono

Bridging the Neuroscience and Physics of Time (with Carlo Rovelli): https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01976

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/G2LaKtxUng0

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

FOLLOW EVAN

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:01 The Brain Has No Central Clock

0:04:17 How Neural Population Clocks Work

0:05:40 Teaching Brain Tissue To Tell Time

0:06:57 Prediction Is Really About When

0:09:10 Even Bacteria Keep Time

0:10:27 Mental Time Travel Built Civilisation

0:11:39 Realising You'll Die Invented Religion

0:14:57 Squirrels Don't Actually Plan Ahead

0:18:19 Waking Up Before Your Alarm

0:23:29 Why Time Is Central To Consciousness

0:24:01 Block Universe vs Only Now

0:29:24 The Runner Who Lost Time

0:33:18 Why Marathons Destroy Time Perception

0:37:18 The Memories With No Timestamp

0:42:02 Your Brain Runs Many Clocks

0:43:31 AI Cannot Wait Ten Seconds

0:45:38 How Transformers Deleted Time

0:49:29 What If You Paused The Computer?

0:53:05 Could We Ever Build Conscious AI?

0:58:17 Arguing About Time With Carlo Rovelli

1:01:40 A Time Traveller Would Prove Me Wrong

1:07:05 You Can't Measure Time With Time

1:12:25 Which Theory Of Consciousness Is Right?

1:21:55 Why We Invented The Soul

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