Bobby Azarian Discusses The Romance of Reality Part 2 Episode #254

Episode Transcript
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(00:07):
Welcome back to Mike and Maurice's might Escape.
Let us help you escape your mind.

(00:39):
All right, folks. Welcome back to Mike and
Maurice's mind Escape. We have episode number 250 for
today, we are joined again, for part two with our guest.
Bobby is Aryan, Bobby is a neuroscientist who recently
wrote the book, The Romance of reality and he just had a recent

(01:00):
interview, I think we'll a couple months ago.
I'm Joe Rogan, I recommend checking that out.
It was a great interview as welland yeah, we're gonna part part
one. Kind of got messed up with some
tech issue. Amaya.
And I switched Studios. We just recently moved and I had
to figure some stuff out, but weshould be back in business and
Maurice is still out sick. Shout out to Maurice.

(01:20):
Love you bro. Feel better.
We're also battling something over here at my house so working
on getting through that as well.But we're still here.
We're still doing it. We're still moving along so you
can check out Bobby's book. I have the link down below and
yeah we're going to get to some other stuff.
R. But I'm not going to go through
the whole Spiel. If you want to support our show,

(01:42):
all you have to do is click on the link tree and yeah, we've
got merch, we've got patreon whole bunch of stuff.
So maybe we can do a short patreon segment with Bobby here
at the end of this episode 2. I think people would enjoy that.
So and one more thing if you want to support the show and you
don't want to do any of those things just please just go to
Apple podcast or Spotify and leave us a nice review.

(02:04):
We really appreciate that so butwithout further Ado, welcome
back on the show Bobby Are you? I'm good excited to be here.
Excited, have you back? I was a little disappointed last
time, one of my connection kept dropping the signal.
So last time we discussed abiogenesis a lot of the science

(02:27):
and precursor to life and we discussed entropy and, you know,
all that great stuff. I thought this time around we
get to some of the more fun stuff Consciousness, psychedelic
say, aye. All that kind of wonderful Jazz.
But why don't we talk about Consciousness first since
everything is predicated on Consciousness?

(02:49):
That's how we observe things. That's how we interpret things.
So, why don't you give us a little bit of a look into how
you view Consciousness, or at least how you, you know,
describe in your book. All right, um Let me give a
couple sentences just kind of summarizing what you just said,
describing last episode because it kind of creates a context

(03:12):
that Consciousness can fit in. So, basically, the argument I
made was that and this is kind of the new thinking in origin of
Life, research, and its really been illuminated, by findings
from the field of thermodynamics.
So the idea is that life emergesInevitably wherever the

(03:33):
conditions are right, so, that life is not this Cosmic
accident. It's actually something that the
Universe Cooks up, where the conditions are right.
So, it's not like we're this freak accident.
It's actually, we're a part of the cosmos and we're natural
manifestation of physical laws and The evolutionary dynamics

(03:54):
that emerge from those laws. And to me, this has spiritual
implications because it means that, you know, the universe and
some sense. It's has parameters that make it
such that it must produce life, the laws of physics, necessitate
the emergence of life and that'skind of cool.

(04:14):
The other thing to mention is that the story through which we
can understand life and understand reality.
More generally. Is that there is this tendency
towards Decay. That's associated with the
second law of Thermodynamics, that inanimate systems Abide by
or closed system systems that aren't open to the flow of

(04:38):
energy from the outside and systems that are able to capture
energy from the outside can sustain themselves against this
tide of entropic Decay. And so you can see the the
there's really a story, a cosmicstory here and that story is

(04:59):
what I think really. The title of a true theory of
everything. And it's this story of order
versus disorder or life versus entropy and knowledge versus
ignorance. And so life emerges because
evolution is basically this counter tendency to this
tendency towards Decay describedby the second law of

(05:21):
Thermodynamics. And it seems like this is a
dynamic, this kind of yin-yang order versus disorder Dynamic
that creates life. Life and through Evolution,
basically life becomes increasingly intelligent and
complex necessarily. So this was kind of baked into

(05:45):
the recipe of the universe. So Consciousness, what is
consciousness? Consciousness is part of that
story. Consciousness is what allows
life to circumvent this second law of Thermodynamics and it's
really important. Aspect of intelligence.
I think we're seeing this, you know, these great breakthroughs

(06:07):
in artificial intelligence but they're still not really
intelligent like when we ask Siri like a difficult question
that it doesn't have a store to answer for.
It'll give us an answer. That's not really like
impressive, we can tell that it's not sentient, it's not
conscious computer programmers and you know, robotics engineers

(06:29):
have not cracked that code yet. Neither ER, have neuro
scientists but neuroscientist, our start, starting to get a
more complete picture of what gives rise to Consciousness,
what gives rise to this phenomenon, that gives meaning
to all of reality because it's the mode by which we experience
everything. And so there are some exciting

(06:52):
theories that are emerging explaining Consciousness as a
result of integrated information.
So, there's a specific type of computation that Allows the
system to make these mental simulations of the world and
then there's a philosophical aspect, like why should anything
be conscious? And I think that can be only
understood in this context of this larger story, this larger

(07:15):
Cosmic story that I mentioned and you can see that story as
one of Life emerging necessarilyand then taking over the
universe. So it's as if Consciousness, you
know this, this building plan that I mentioned this like Baked
in recipe for life. I'm necessarily gives rise to

(07:35):
Consciousness, so it seems as ifthe universe or at least the you
could say, the matter in the universe is starting to wake up
through the evolutionary processand nature is starting to be
able to experience itself. Yeah, interesting.
And I think we all have gotten maybe a little lit up and

(07:56):
discussed the idea of possibly the universe that being the case
that it's experiencing itself or, you know, created us so that
it can be aware of itself something along those lines.
So I definitely find that interesting and I think we can
all relate to that. I think we've all pondered that
at one point or the other, you know, I hope so.

(08:18):
I didn't know that. I mean, I'm not sure.
I think, you know, people like you have pondered that or other
people, maybe even up as you said it.
But I think, I think some peopleeven physicists, it just hasn't
occurred to them or they haven'ttaken it seriously, because it
might sound a bit new-agey or unscientific to talk in those

(08:39):
terms about the universe becoming conscious.
That's really what's going on? If you look at the mechanistic
story, that's what's happening and we gotta you know, take that
seriously. So I'm really glad You know,
people like you and I'm sure your listeners have thought
about it and you know, writing the book.
I knew there'd be people out there that would resonate with
so it's really happy. No.
Absolutely. I mean there could be this thing

(09:01):
to wear. Maybe I'm just assuming that as
well. I have talked with that are
talked about that with a lot of people but yeah.
I mean there probably is a decent amount of people because
I mean with all these topics, one thing I found from doing
this podcast is people don't really talk about this kind of
stuff in the people that do are the ones that really Really do
it, right? They have podcasts or they do

(09:21):
these Twitter spaces, or whatever the case may be.
But people that don't, you know,there will be an article will be
like, oh, you AP or UFOs are real and then people will just
go about their day. Like that didn't just happen or.
Yeah. Or did it mean anything slightly
was yeah. Or psychedelic breakthroughs
Health, mental health and peoplejust move along with their day
or whatever the case may be, youknow, so yeah.

(09:44):
That's really interesting, too, because, you know, we're just
hit with so much information. Nation people just aren't sure
what the serious stuff is and mainstream news is really bad at
being able to pick out what's important to like why in CNN,
you know, you're saying seeing the same stuff all day, you're

(10:05):
not seeing them announce or at least they're not doing like a
big segment on breakthroughs in psychedelics other things that
are going on and you see these stories from time to time.
I mean, Michael pollan's HBO special, I had to change your
mind. That's pretty.
A exciting that that's out therebut overall like, yeah,
mainstream news leaves out a lotof the really interesting and

(10:29):
cool stuff but I guess that's what podcasts are for, right?
That's what guys like you are. That's why it's so popular and
when regard because I think people are sick of these like
sound bites. And these little segments that
only lasts a couple minutes longand you can't really get any
information from that. So, yeah, I mean, I'm being able
to fully flush out a thought or whatever I think.

(10:49):
Gives important because you knowyou're having important
conversations you want to have the time and the space to make
adjustments or connect with somebody on that level.
So I think that that's importantwhen you look at.
So last time I mentioned I was trying to come up with the term
I said polymath but actually theterm is for what we're
discussing in what you are. Pretty much as complexity

(11:12):
science or a complexity scientist somebody that maybe
has one specific or two, a couple Main Fields.
But then you're looking at a lotof scientific disciplines from
like a bird's eye view and kind of putting pieces together.
Would that be a correct statement on that?
Yeah. And I would say a lot of the
founders of this field were probably mass and you know

(11:33):
because it's not even clear how many fields complexity science
involves, I mean you can name the the obvious ones sort of
scientists. They would probably say things
like chaos theory and we mentioned non-equilibrium.
Thermodynamics last time, information, Theory, cybernetics

(11:55):
evolutionary theory, those are definitely, you know, kind of
core to what complexity science is.
But then you have like this new science of networks, you have
what, you know, every so all thehigher Sciences to like
psychology economics, sociology,if you view a society as a
complex, adaptive system or a superorganism then, Sociology

(12:20):
becomes the domain of complexityscience as well economic
networks. Are these complex adaptive
systems. So that's part of complexity
science as well. But now, you know, if we want to
answer these big questions aboutConsciousness, which complexity
science must do because, you know, Consciousness is a feature
of complex systems, then you need to start getting into

(12:43):
philosophy of mind. You need to start talking about
some metaphysical. Six, I mean that's really
unavoidable and you. Yeah, yeah.
There there's really no limit towhat complexity science is
because if it's, you know, everything is systems and trying
to describe all complex systems than it really touches on

(13:06):
everything. What would you say?
So like you, so you're a neuroscientist.
So you're aware of cognitive bias.
Pareidolia all these different things that, you know, we're all
subject to, I mean. So when you look at science and
the scientific method, isn't it fair to say that?

(13:27):
Like I think people put scientists up on a pedestal,
right? I mean, just because they have
certain amount of data or information, especially now you
see a lot of scientists I'm out there.
But in reality, this is just an ever-evolving Paradigm that
we're just constantly again, I'll bring it up at like we're
all Sisyphus pushing this boulder up the mountain.

(13:48):
There is no like in the moment, there might be, you know, a
better picture or we have like some answers, but then that's
going to get replaced or debunked or whatever in the
future. So why is it that you see so
many scientists? So dogmatic about what is and
what is not. And do you think that when
people look into Metaphysics andmetaphysical things that maybe

(14:10):
they understand that there's more out there and that we're
just beating given, you know, the dogma of the day or whatever
at the time. So like they're just looking for
something more than that, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, extremely important point in chapter 6 of the book, I
really talk about this because it gets into this field of

(14:32):
philosophy that again, is important to complexity science
called epistemology and epistemology.
Is basically the study of knowledge or the theory or
philosophy of knowledge, how we acquire knowledge about the
world around us and how we can be certain that that knowledge
is valid. I mean, everybody has their own

(14:54):
beliefs and they assume that their beliefs are true and a lot
of these beliefs can flick. So a lot of these beliefs can't
be true, scientists of the present time.
Like, whatever time you're in, when you're a scientist.
Missed you have this tendency tohave this bias, where you think
that the current model kind of explains everything that it's

(15:16):
the correct model that, you know, we didn't know things in
the past. But then we got science.
And now we know, you know, almost everything and in the 90s
before we started finding out a lot of shocking.
Things that you know we realize her Cosmic Mysteries now like
dark matter and dark energy. The the rate of expansion of the

(15:38):
universe Our seems to change itsnot constant.
Are there? Multiverses are there?
Many worlds you have all these you know questions that.
Oh very cool one that is you know is somewhat new.
They found that galaxies spread across the universe and like
these distances were it's too far for Gravity to be

(16:00):
interacting and synchronizing these things.
Have this harmonious movement there seems to be some Larger
superstructure that these galaxies in separate parts of
the universe are connected by our are embedded in that for
some reason, synchronize their movements and that's really
weird. But in the 90s we were starting

(16:23):
to think that we had solved all of the problems.
And this science journalist named John Horgan.
Who was a journalist for Scientific, American wrote a
book, called the end of science,because it seemed like we had
explained Almost everything likethe big bang black holes thought

(16:44):
that the end of the universe it would it would in a heat death.
Now, you know that it's turning out that that's, you know, maybe
not necessarily the case. There are a lot of things that
we thought we understood completely that now we already
see. And, you know, physicists will
admit at least some of those things I mentioned they will

(17:06):
readily admit that. You know, we don't understand
what's going on in. It's been said that there's kind
of this crisis in cosmology to explain some of these things.
And so the point you made about like paradigms being incomplete,
this is super important that we understand because, you know,

(17:28):
Newtonian mechanics seem to likeexplain a lot of stuff.
Like we could predict the Motions of the planets.
We could predict, you know, the Motions of things.
Earth, if you throw a ball, where would go all these things
about forces, but then Einstein came along and showed that those
things were approximations. And that general relativity

(17:50):
describe, you know, things in a deeper way.
And that there wasn't this gravitational force pulling an
apple from a tree down to the Earth.
There was, there's actually a mass causes distortions in
space-time and it causes space-time to bend and that's
why the Apple falls to the Earth.

(18:10):
And then we had quantum mechanics when you think, like,
birds were look lighter, right? But we know now that they're
pushing, you know, they are withtheir wings, but back, then it
was like, they thought. Some matter was less dense than
other matter and that's why, youknow, I didn't even know that
but that that sounds totally like something.
That would be the case. You know, you would see, you can
understand why they might think that.

(18:33):
So yeah, it's just it's just that I do like Newtonian physics
and how far we've come even though that was Revolutionary at
the time, you know and then yeahthen quantum mechanics it and
then shit hit the fan and like you know, it's like at the
smallest scale things can be in multiple places.
At once, you have entanglement, what Einstein called spooky

(18:53):
action at a distance, I just want to point out was talking
about Newtonian physics. Not Einstein's theory of
relativity because obviously that's very different.
Yeah. So um, so it's it's it's wrong.
If you think that you your, yourscientific model, your Paradigm,
your theory is the correct Theory and everything's correct

(19:15):
about it. You're going to be proved wrong.
We can't make that assumption. Certainty is dangerous and I see
a lot of famous physicists doingthis.
I won't name any names, but there's a lot of physicists who
are just sit well, so well. So I mentioned this in my book.
Brian Greene, wrote a book, I don't know if it's called, Of

(19:38):
time. But he just came out with a
book, like a year ago and he just, you know, nonchalant says
that life is a transient phenomena life, you know, it's
going to come and go when there's absolutely no reason to
think that. Definitely, no reason to think
that that is a like, with, with full certainty.

(20:01):
Because what, we understand fromthis picture that I was
describing, is that life can continue to pursue Assist.
As long as it can figure out ways to unlock the energy and
its environment. That's that allows it to sustain
itself. So every star in the sky, in the
sky is a big battery waiting to be exploited by life and

(20:23):
physicist, like Freeman, Dyson, people like Paul Davies.
A lot of people have, you know, described how life could expand
throughout the entire Cosmos. David Deutsch stew, Kaufman's of
complexity scientists there. A lot of people that think this
It's vacation process continues,this knowledge, creation process
and that gives you a wildly different picture of the

(20:46):
universe. Something like a biophilic
university universe that, you know, must be understood in the
context of the fact that it gives rise to life.
Yeah, very interesting. So back to Consciousness.
So is it the complexity of the vessel meaning that our

(21:07):
biological causal line has led us to this point, where there is
now enough, complexity, where wecan house this Consciousness or
is, is it primary, or is it something that comes through the
biological evolutionary process?Yeah, that that's a great
question. That's at the million dollar
question in, like, philosophy ofmind is Basically is

(21:31):
consciousness fundamental or is consciousness emergent and I'm
going to give an answer. That's basically none of those
things because I'm going to say it's both.
And by that I mean that so let me just explain I guess both
sides. The idea that's emergent says

(21:52):
that basically Consciousness, isn't there, it isn't anywhere
in the universe until life emerges and then sometime after
life emerges maybe with the It'sof Life.
Maybe with the emergence of brains, I tend to think that
Consciousness comes with the emergence of brains, but the
idea is that at some point in the evolutionary history of

(22:12):
Life, Consciousness comes into the picture.
And that's kind of mysterious two people.
Or it seemed kind of mysterious because it's like, how does it
suddenly poof into existence andartificial intelligence
researchers who are trying to create conscious systems, don't
know either, and they think thatit might Emerge with just enough
complexity of that artificial computational system.

(22:36):
I don't think that's true either.
I think it takes a very specifickind of architecture that, you
know, biological Machinery has found through billions of years
of The evolutionary process, butI do think it emerges.
So before you know, explaining why I think both those answers
are true, just to get to the fundamental Camp.

(22:58):
So the idea that Consciousness is fundamental is called Pan,
psychism and the idea is that because It seemed so strange
that Consciousness suddenly Poof's into existence like what
magically gives rise to this, you know, subjective awareness.
The idea is that Consciousness is fundamental the way.
Like Mass would be fundamental, or charge would be fundamental

(23:23):
and that, every unit of matter that exists in the world, has
some modicum of Consciousness, such that even subatomic
particles, have a little bit of Consciousness.
And the idea is that when These units come together in a larger
integrated unit, like a brain that all of these little bits of

(23:45):
Consciousness, add up to create this kind of robust Rich
conscious experience that we feel.
So that was the reason that's become more attractive recently
is because the problem of explaining how it emerges is
seem so hard. And the idea, there's also this

(24:05):
idea that Ever, there's like information processing or
information integration, you have Consciousness and then you
know, people have described the universe and, you know, in these
computational terms, you can describe any physical system in
these informational terms. So you know, that that that idea

(24:27):
pan psychism that everything is consciousness is trendy and
popular and I won't say it's themajority view but it's you know,
it's It's a big Contender. A lot of respected people take
that seriously kind of the same way.
People are taking the many-worlds interpretation of
quantum mechanics, seriously, which is another very strange
thing, and it's okay though, right?

(24:48):
I mean, it goes back to ancient Greece, even Aristotle, had his
theory of Consciousness in whichyou had plant Consciousness,
animal Consciousness, and human consciousness.
And animal Consciousness was itsown, or a plant catches, this
was kind of its own thing. Then animal Consciousness,
housed, plant Consciousness, andits own Version of
Consciousness. And then it's kind of like a
step up and then human consciousness and housed the

(25:11):
plant and the animal. And we had our own variation.
If that makes sense, at least that was my yeah, understanding
of Aristotle's, understanding ofit.
Yeah, I think that's right. And and I think it goes back
even farther. This idea that even like non
organic matters conscious in like Eastern religion.
So yeah, it's a very old idea. And it's been A chelated in like

(25:37):
modern terms by people like the philosopher, Philip golf him,
who wrote a book called Galileo's are and he's kind of
like riding this. Wave that was created by
integration integrated information Theory giulio,
tononi Theory, which basically says that any any amount of
integrate information, should have some sort of conscious
experience associated with that.I don't think.

(25:58):
That's right. I think conscious emerges with
brains, because they are basically systems that can
construct Mental model of the world around it.
It's actually this kind of simulation that the system is
doing. And then the really to the, the
magic ingredient to have a conscious Observer is that the

(26:18):
system starts to model itself. It starts to, you know, create
an understanding of it of itselfand that's what creates an
observer with a point of view. It's not good enough to just
have a model. Like, you know, you can make a
computer simulation on your computer and that compute that
Little simulation residing inside that that little virtual

(26:39):
world in your laptop is not conscious.
I don't think so it requires youknow integrate information which
is a special type of informationprocessing.
And that's described by this Theory, I mentioned giulio,
tononi, he's in a great information Theory but I think
it takes this other step of selfmodeling.
So I do believe Consciousness, probably emerges with brains.

(27:02):
It could emerge with life but I don't think anything in It has
any bit of Consciousness at all and I think the universe is
becoming conscious through life,but outside of life, there's no
subjective awareness that's not to say there's not intelligence
to this Universal process of evolution.

(27:24):
So, you know, sometimes I might say something that makes it
sound like the universe has its Consciousness.
So sometimes I would say that ithas mind when I'm talking about
mind. I'm just talking about that.
It's an information. Nation processing system.
So I think it's important to draw a distinction between
Consciousness is subjective awareness.
And this information processing that, you know, your brain is

(27:47):
doing information processing. When you fall asleep before you
enter a dream, there's a period where Consciousness just ceases
to exist. And so, I do think Consciousness
emerged, but I do think it's fundamental in the sense that it
had to emerge. So the laws are such that It was
baked into this process so the way I see The evolutionary

(28:10):
process is that it's giving riseto these things and those things
are associated with the goal states of the process.
So it's fundamental in the sensethat everything kind of exists
such that Consciousness can arise but it's not there from
the beginning and it's not fundamental in that sense.
What about the idea of our brains kind of being like a

(28:34):
receiver, in a way I know that'skind of a popular.
Yeah, this is us you know like maybe that like the complexity
leads us to a certain point where then were able to receive
these frequencies or vibrations or perceive the stuff around us.
You know, it's popular with whata lot of the woo stuff.
But I mean, it is kind of a romantic.
We're talking about the romance of reality.

(28:55):
Yeah. A romantic idea that maybe, you
know, we're tapping into something.
And the, the complexity and the individuality of our brains is
what allows To color the experience and how it's
different than other people if that makes sense.
Absolutely. Yeah.
So I think that's an interestingidea and people like Bernardo

(29:16):
cash-strapped have talked about that.
And so I think that's still consistent with the the model.
I just described where the brainconstructs the world and then
suddenly Consciousness comes into existence because you have
the simulation that's looking atitself.
But if If you want to see, you know, if Consciousness is part

(29:39):
of this fundamental story, whereit gives rise to that, then I
don't think that's any differentthan saying that, you know,
basically life discovers this configuration of matter that we
see in brains that unlocks this signal, or unlocks this ability
to have conscious experience. So yeah, I think that's a fine

(29:59):
way to look at it. As long as you realize that you
need this. The you need this configuration,
this special configuration in this kind of architecture and
information processing that we see with brains to unlock that
signal. I don't think, you know, it's
just out there everywhere, but the book argues that, you know,

(30:20):
life, because it is adaptive andit's always learning, it's
overcoming, its challenges, Shore, tons of organisms, die in
this process, but the network oflife itself has continued since
it emerged for Billion years agoand it's only gotten better at
manipulating the world around it.
So I think that process will continue to go on until you

(30:42):
know, intelligence spreads through the solar system and
then through the Galaxy and thenother galaxies and this could
possibly have already happened elsewhere in the universe.
So if the universe itself is becoming more conscious because
life spreading. Yeah, it kind of makes that
signal story, interesting. Because it does seem like
everything's assembling to Kind of, you know, have this

(31:07):
structure that allows for this resonant, you know, frequency
that underlies Consciousness. And it's funny because when
people talked in those terms, like, resonant frequency, like
10 years ago, people like, woo. Oh, that's what sick.
No, we absolutely know that Consciousness emerges with
certain types of global synchronized activity.

(31:30):
So you have like neurons oscillating around 50 hertz, you
have adaptive resonance Theory, which is a new Trinity Theory,
and it's showing that like, actually you have all of these
systems within the brain, all these different computational
modules and their they're doing things that these similar

(31:52):
frequencies, but they're nested inside, like other systems that
are doing things at other frequencies but the magic of
Consciousness when this, what's called a global workspace,
emerges? In, you know, the frontal area
of the brain. And then it starts to
synchronize everything else, andinformation gets broadcast to
other parts of the brain. We're seeing this kind of

(32:15):
synchronous activity. So earlier I mentioned this
cosmological finding where there's this synchrony between
movements between galaxies. I think, you know, I mean if the
book Is Right, basically what it's saying and you know, these
aren't my original ideas. These are based on ideas of are
people that have been synthesized into this one

(32:37):
cohesive narrative. Then maybe the weird
cosmological stuff that we're seeing is just signs that the
universe is a self-organizing system.
It's something like a adaptive system itself.
Something like an organism and its evolving towards some larger
goal State, some larger, what's called an attractor and again,

(33:01):
you know, some people might hearthat and think whoo, because New
Age Community was very much inspired by like complexity
science and cybernetics so that language bled into those
communities but an attractor, isa term from condensed matter
physics and complexity scientists have applied that
term to higher levels. So if you have a stable State

(33:23):
and Society, that's an attractor.
But yeah. So the idea is, if life is
spreading, there's possibly some, you know, goal state in
the future, And maybe there's nofinal State, maybe it's just
always a series of such States, but it would be a cosmic,
attractor that would emerge whenlife, spreads through the cosmos

(33:44):
and becomes this unified informational Network.
Terrence Deacon, psychedelic philosopher talked about this
strange, Cosmic attractor? Yeah, no.
I think when people mention the,the whole brain is a, Everything

(34:04):
I think there's this idea that maybe either the universe is
conscious itself, or there's this constant stream throughout
the Universe and as you mentioned maybe the compressed
complexity of our brains arise to a point where we're then able
to you know tap into that kind of like a you know a radio or an
antenna or something like that. But I guess my question would be

(34:29):
so when you look at that whole thing, what would be like the
mechanism? Because there's a paper. /.
And this came up in a couple of our psychedelic episodes, but
there's a paper by, I forget thescientist, but they were
basically, they were doing, theywere doing a study and they
found crystals in the pineal gland, they're finding similar

(34:53):
to what akhada Konya is, which are the little bones, you know,
in our ear that pick up vibration.
Could that be something that's happening in our brain to like
something like a Piezo Electric System.
We're picking up vibrations and things like that.
If you thought about something like that, or a possible
mechanism, or anything like that, since you are a
neuroscientist, As far as underlying Consciousness.

(35:15):
Yeah. So like, what would the function
B of having crystals different types of crystals shaped
crystals in the pineal gland? You know, like, in terms of what
would the functionality be of something like that.
Okay? Because at first I thought you
were talking about like the mechanism of the entire process
which would go back to like thisfine, tuning a sparrow, no more
of laborers because that's that's very interesting to, but

(35:38):
as far as like Consciousness goes so, Yeah.
They're you know, I mentioned adaptive resonance Theory and so
you have this harmonized activity, you have actually
what's called a neural attractor.
And so this comes from Global workspace, Theory and Global

(35:59):
workspace. Theory basically says that there
are these things called Ignitionevents and those are phase
transitions. Like we talked about phase
transitions from Um, in basic physics or chemistry class.
So when water freezes, it goes through a phase change and the

(36:20):
the molecules in the liquid become more ordered.
So the same concept applies to these dynamical systems like
brains and you have these ignition events where you have
these what are called fronto-parietal Loops.
So, to break that down, you havethe frontal cortex.
And then you have the parietal cortex up here.
And there seems to be some Specific types of activity,

(36:44):
where the the firing of the neurons becomes in trained or
harmonized collectively by thesefeedback loops.
So, basically information embedded in electrical signals
is becoming harmonized and, you know, the current moment what

(37:04):
you're experiencing gets fed back to lower levels and this
allows you to have this cohesivefield of experience.
And it's also what Allows you tosort of update your model of the
world, you're getting in new information and you're learning
from that information. Your brain is forming synaptic
connections. So, these feedback loops are
important to intelligence, but it's also thought that, you

(37:26):
know, these feedback loops are crucial for Consciousness
because they do create this harmonized, state that gives
rise to what's called a global workspace.
A kind of mental work space in your mind where you solve
problems, where you store, Phonenumbers when you're trying to,
you know, hold a number in mind,just momentarily.

(37:46):
This is called access Consciousness.
So yeah, as far as how Consciousness is created, I
think it emerges from harmonizedactivity and we can describe
that as a neural attractor, but as far as the crystals, you're
speaking of in the pineal gland,I'm not sure if they're related

(38:07):
but yeah, I'd have to look at that work.
Specifically Des garcons Julie. I'll send you the scientific
paper. Okay?
Yeah. Descartes thought that the
pineal gland had something to dowith Consciousness and, you
know, he's often brought up as just like, you know, being wrong
because of that thought. But the pineal gland is

(38:28):
interesting. I mean, it's responsible for
like secretion of melatonin which helps you get to sleep
serotonins convert into melatonin.
But it's also I think when people have natural psychedelic
experiences it, The molecule that is the same molecular
structure as DMT. Yeah.

(38:50):
So so a little background on that.
We've had Rick Strassman on the podcast, a couple times.
He got into the whole DMT, The Spirit Molecule thing.
Through his study in the pineal gland.
He was studying melatonin and the function of the pineal gland
and he, you know, he is aware ofall this stuff.
But so since what you're talkingabout they've now the University

(39:11):
of Higgins done, more studies and they found that DMT is not
just synthesized in the pineal gland but the entire brain and
cerebral spinal fluid as well. So there might be some
connection to that and the nature of reality, if that is
the case because it is the most powerful psychedelic that we
know. So far, you know, in terms of

(39:33):
the tryptamine and 5-ht to a receptors and all that stuff
because there is other stuff. There's the Kappa, opioid
there's other stuff happening that, you know, saw Be as a
pretty potent psychedelic as well.
But I just wanted to ask you to so like since we're talking
about this stuff you mentioned thought Loops.

(39:54):
Anyway, listen to show knows I have severe OCD.
It's I've got it controlled now but it's been, you know, a
debilitating at times in my life, you mentioned these
feedback loops and I was always told, oh it's a chemical males.
I'm like, no, that's that's not.I know what's going on with
myself. Not a chemical.
And now they just came out with that whole thing about how
depressions not caused by chemical.
And Balance. And I've thought for a long time

(40:15):
that like OCD is like these embedded thought, patterns of
thought Loops that you become more and more aware of.
And I know you're not like a psychiatrist or anything like
that, but I just wanted to make that connection because that's
what I feel like what's happening in those moments.
They are thought Loops that justkeep looping over your mind
keeps like stumbling over the same thought as opposed to being

(40:37):
able to move on to the next thing.
So I thought that was kind of relevant.
Yeah. Think, you know, part of what's
behind that is kind of the theseLoops create a pathway or
circuit and that's a circuit that's not adaptable.
It's this rigid circuit and you do get stuck in that and it's

(41:01):
possible that psychedelics couldbe a good treatment for that
because what psychedelics are thought to do is to relax these
belief structures and it does that by what What how I think
psychedelics work is basically you have the mind is
hierarchical. Meaning, there's levels.
So you have this kind of automatic subconscious mind.

(41:23):
And then you have this consciousmind associated with the
prefrontal cortex and the conscious mind, the higher
Consciousness, I would say, basically monitors the lower
mind and there could be even more levels, there could be
mines but you know, we know it'shierarchical.
And it's supposed to, you know, kind of kick in and override

(41:47):
some of these, you know, patternbehaviors, that might not be
adaptive. And when those networks get
inhibited, which can be caused by a chemical imbalance, but it
might not be a chemical imbalance.
Then you see, for example, this,you know, Global workspace,
associated with the prefrontal cortex that I'm talking about,

(42:09):
kind of dissolve like that integrated activities.
Tivity is disrupted. And then basically, you're left
with more of this automatic mindthat that might have these
patterns in and you basically aren't able to adapt as easily.
It's not mine, it's not as flexible so.

(42:30):
Um, so yeah, I think, you know, when people take psychedelics,
they talk about the self dissolving and then, you know,
experiencing this interconnectedness, which I
think is this wonderful You know, probably everybody should
have and Sam Harris talks about the importance of this and that
the self is an illusion, but I think it's wrong to think the

(42:51):
self is an illusion because it'ssomething that's there that this
then gets dissolved. So it's not an illusion,
something that's emergent and it's there and it's this high
level controller. And we have to think of the Mind
as this kind of cybernetic controller.
When I say cybernetics, cybernetics is kind of the
study, the science of systems that use Feedback loops to be

(43:13):
adaptive. So yeah I think psychedelics can
maybe work wonders for some of these types of things and I also
think they allow you to kind of break down that self and
experience you know things not from this higher perspective
that you know may serve us well and day-to-day operations.

(43:36):
But may not be revealing the true nature of reality like the
interconnectedness that Said, I do think the self is real and
that it is this higher level mind is the source of what I
would describe as free will. I do think Free Will is real.
We have agency using Consciousness.

(43:58):
We got to get into this here because yeah.
Okay. But so like the Psychedelic
thing I will speak from my own experience and I've mentioned
this many times psilocybin at one of my darkest days was a lot
and I already had A relationshipwith the died.
My younger years, I had definitely done these things a
lot and it was definitely part of them, you know, the culture

(44:19):
in which, you know, we were intowith everything and art and
music and stuff like that. So that being said, you know,
midnight, my mid-20s is when my OCD came out, which is kind of,
I think a natural thing for men in there, you know, mid-20s
usually develop these anxiety disorders.
That's when you're mentioned your frontal cortex, that's when

(44:41):
it's fully. Tour becomes fully developed.
So in that in there, I had some dark days and I used psilocybin
to break free of these thought, patterns in these thought loops
and look at myself outside of myself and say, what are we
doing here? What can we fix it?
Or how can we fix it? And to be honest, you know, I

(45:02):
know I'm going to live with thisthe rest of my life, but at
least now, you know, having all these different tools.
Look some people, you know, ssris might work for you.
Some people, maybe psychedelic therapy sometimes.
Times CBT therapy, sometimes talk therapy.
Whatever it is. I think there should be, as many
options out on the table as possible.
We are all different beings, experiencing different things.
Some people might not want to try them, you know, and that's

(45:24):
okay. And now they're even doing
science to test some of these compounds where they don't have
any psychedelic, their their, their, their derivatives of
psychedelics. But they don't have any of the
actual psychedelic component in there.
So, you know, that is important.So I just wanted to speak to
that really quick and just more options.
The better is my policy All that.
Yeah, that's interesting. And I think that's so cool that

(45:47):
you are, you know, willing to experiment with that.
And and it did help. Did you think or oh yeah I might
look I mean I haven't been shy about it.
My younger years. I did psilocybin a lot.
I've been on Hiatus, the last couple years but I don't need it
anymore. I meditation, I have other
things going on my life that occupy that space, But you know,

(46:07):
cannabis is always there now, it's fully legal here and
everything so that's great. Great added Edibles are helpful,
things like that. But but yeah, psilocybin was
huge and and there is a certain element, I think in what gets
lost to is we look at psychedelics is like, oh, you
know, the compounds doing it. But in reality, I have a
different take on that too, because I know that's where

(46:29):
science is going with that. And I will still follow it, but
it was the mystical experience aspect of these, you know, these
trips or whatever these These experiences, it was the mystical
side of it. That is what I felt was most
helpful to me to say, it's okay.You know, there's more going on

(46:50):
here, you know, you don't need to be so tied up in this my new
show of the day to day or whatever is really bothering you
and and there's just a bigger picture thing happening.
Whether you want to believe in aCreator, non Creator.
You want to believe in the universe or Universal energy,
whatever it is, there's something greater going on, you
know, like we're, what is life? We're here having this

(47:11):
conversation right now. This is, this is bizarre, you
know, like the fact that more people don't talk about this in
at least stop at once during their day and say, what's going
on here? Why are we doing this?
Like what's the purpose of this?I think is we should all do
that. And I think it puts things into
perspective too and I might evenput you in a different state of
mind if you're in a weird place.But so yeah.

(47:33):
So it helped me do that and it was the mystical side of it and
then, you know, that led to moreof the knowledge and that's why
we're discussing this, that's why.
You can books like yours and philosophy books, and all sorts
of stuff. So, yeah, I think people should
be more vocal about their personal experiences and I see
more people coming out about it too.
But yeah, I mean it is what it is more tools.

(47:55):
The better that's just where I stand on it.
II love it the way you talk about it as an it as an
additional tool. It might not work for everybody.
I think probably even if you don't think it works, it
probably does kind of You know, if it relax, relax has belief
structures, it could be working in ways that you're not

(48:17):
realizing. Like, you may just be become
less dogmatic or ideological yourself.
But I do think, you know, the mystical component is huge and I
hope neuro scientists out there who are doing this research.
And I have some friends who are involved in this research like
Adam saffron. He's Neuroscience neuroscientist

(48:39):
at the Johns Hopkins. Lab for Psychedelic and
Consciousness studies and I knowthat you know he you know really
cares about this mystical component.
The reason I bring it up is because it's not just about the
show. Tom, tell him, get on the show
we've had a yeah we've had behaved Johnson from there on
the show, I don't okay, yeah I know I know Roland Griffiths

(49:03):
runs the lab but I don't know Matthew Johnson but yeah, I know
he'd be a great guest to talk about like Free Will and all
this stuff. Consciousness.
He actually has a very interesting Theory called
integrated World, modeling theory that kind of integrates
all the Consciousness theories. And I do mention that in chapter
12 of my book because it's kind of you know, something that

(49:25):
brings those theories together under this larger evolutionary
picture. But yeah you know some
neuroscientist they might think like yeah we can we can recreate
this, you know, chemical structure may be in a slightly
different way where it doesn't have that mystical component.
And think it's going to work. And it might not because the
mystical component for some people is really everything.

(49:48):
And I think, you know, that's what it does.
It basically it, relaxes your, you know, system of beliefs and
allows you to see that everything is connected and that
we are part of this larger process.
If what I'm arguing in the book is true, it's a process like
life, really matters to the universe.
Life is cosmically significant. It's the driver of cosmic sell

(50:11):
for Organization. And if that's true, then that's
I mean that already. So.
Freemason Freeman Dyson had a quote that said something like
God is just mind that has becomeyou know, so powerful that it's
beyond the scale of our comprehension.
So if this process is real then and it leads to this you know,

(50:34):
Cosmic mind, that's something like a god that emerges out of
this process, something with Godlike powers and I mean we are
Evolving, you know, technologically to be able to
create like the metaverse, like,we're starting to create
realities whether we can create conscious agents in these
realities. That's a known.
You know, people have argued like based on integrating

(50:55):
information theory that if you have the right kind of Hardware,
it's called neuromorphic Hardware that duplicates,
biological architecture then youcould have Consciousness.
So then I see no reason why thatyou can't have conscious agents
in these worlds. So, yeah, I think basically,
when you talk about like God vs,simulation theory, that will,

(51:20):
you know, this universe is the creation of some intelligent
agents that have created this digital reality.
Those ideas are kind of the same.
So I think it's time that we kind of like reassess like you
know all of you know religions and religious knowledge because
for one it seems like the peoplewho wrote those books were kind

(51:41):
of Seeing you know, fundamental truths that were there and they
can be informative for that reason.
And I also think those books arekind of comprehensive books that
recorded down information about what worked in the past and
that's really the scientific method is trying something out

(52:04):
and testing that idea and seeingif it works.
So, a lot of things that like religious practices, my Might,
you know, have you do like rituals those are things that
people tried and they found themto be adaptive and to improve
their life. And it's a really terrible idea
for like just us to understand. Like for us to think, like oh we

(52:25):
understand everything through science to throw the baby out
with the bathwater. Those ritual practices have
cognitive benefits at least for some people there another tool
like you said and even if it's to make them eat all these
tools, even if it's to make Feelbetter I can do I have OCD,
there's a ritual that I guess, it depends on what kind of OCD

(52:46):
you have. But with OCD comes rituals for
the most part, unless you're pure 0, which is just the
thought aspect of it. So there's that for sure.
I do want to get to the Free Will and determinism a little
bit and then I want to get to like UFO alien, you know,
extraterrestrial life, that kindof stuff, but real quick, you

(53:08):
mentioned, you believe in free will.
Let me just lay something out there.
You can tell me. Where I'm wrong.
Where you think I'm wrong, wherever will go from that,
okay? So I thought this is when it
really interesting but you know you look at peer Simone, LaPlace
who is a 17th century, French mathematician philosopher, and

(53:29):
he's talking about that. There's a billiards table, okay?
And if you were given all the physics, all the mathematics,
all the everything you would need to calculate everything,
you could figure out where all the balls are going to Land on
the brake, right? So he applied this to the
universe and so maybe somebody at the top, like a god, or the
Creator, the universe creator ofthe simulation, simulation,

(53:51):
whatever this maybe would have all of those tools to calculate
your life, basically, or our lives, or this universe or
whatever. So therefore everything there is
no free will. It's maybe subject subjectively.
We believe we have free. Well, so that's kind of where

(54:12):
I'm at like subjectively we believe that we have free will
because we don't have the tools to quantify this trajectory that
we're on, right? Like we don't have the ability
to project where we're going or where we've been or whatever.
So we just have subjective Free Will and then objectively and
you can go into like the whole Donald Hoffman case against
reality and all that kind of stuff but objectively, we don't

(54:36):
meaning that there's something else going on that.
We just can't fathom if that makes sense.
So am I right? Am I wrong?
Could both of those things. Yeah, so that's a great place to
start. I think that's where everybody
should start. For example, Sam Harris, you
know, it's written a book saying, we don't have free will
he talks about a lot, very articulate, but he just is
missing lot, you know, a big part of the story and a lot of

(54:57):
its with neuroscience. And I don't think he's kept up
with modern Neuroscience as far as how it relates to free.
Will we have integrated information Theory, which I said
is kind of I mentioned before asbeing like one of these Kind of
like trendiest theories in Neuroscience created by giulio
tononi, but the whole theory is about the brain and mind having

(55:23):
what's called cause-effect power, and that the brain
generates a mind and that mind cannot cause Ali in the world.
So, it's not just, the, the atoms pushing things around.
It's actually the system as a whole, the configurational as a
whole encodes, this Saturn in the patterns, actually start to

(55:44):
have this ability to effect to be a cause and to create an
effect. So we call that causal power and
now the mathematics of causal power is being understood Judea
Pearl is statistician and AI researcher and he's kind of
created this whole new field of mathematics and statistics

(56:07):
called causal inference and you can actually look at how the
brain is doing. Doing stuff.
And it is clear that how things are being pushed around is
determined by these. These networks of of not just
neurons but like these modules, he's like collections of neurons

(56:30):
that are working together, you know, and this is what the Mind
emerges from this this higher level activity not it's not
important. What the atoms are doing?
I mean the At the lowest level make up all of this stuff.
But basically the atoms become part of this larger information
processing system and its the system as a whole that starts

(56:52):
guiding the behavior of those low-level particles.
So yeah. So so Sam Harris, make some
arguments that are supposed to, you know, show that Free Will is
not real but you really need to start where you did with with
LaPlace and LaPlace has Eamonn. Which you alluded to this idea

(57:14):
that the universe is just made of all these atoms, which you
could see, like, pool balls and pool balls following the
Newtonian trajectories, and if you knew the initial state of
the universe are, if you knew the universe that any state you
could use that information to predict what would happen in the
future and what would happen in the past and this would seem to

(57:37):
suggest that time isn't real that everything already exists.
It's already set in Stone. The problem with LaPlace is
demon is quantum mechanics. So when quantum mechanics came
out, it showed that there at theat that level at this Quantum
scale, subatomic particles are in one place or another an
electron doesn't have a defined position until you try to

(58:00):
measure it and you interact withit in some with some physical
system. So, and we also see that there's
this probabilistic aspect to Nature.
So it's not the case that that one particle must be in the next
in some defined position in the next state.

(58:20):
In time, there's actually a wavefunction that describes the
probability of where that will go.
And so you can only get a rough sense of where it might be.
Of course, if you repeated the experiment lots of times,
quantum mechanics does have mathematics.
That would kind of describe thisdistribution that you can expect
to see but there's Really just probabilistic aspect and that

(58:44):
means it's not a pool ball table.
Its not pool balls, knocking into each other.
If it were, it would just be like a chain of dominoes that
falls there would just be no surprises.
It would just everything would follow, like, strictly from the
state before in a in this sequence that you could
calculate with a sufficiently Advanced Computer, but quantum
mechanics has shown that there's, you know, nature at the

(59:07):
most fundamental level is probabilistic or stochastic.
And yeah, that just means that there's this aspect quantum
mechanics. It was kind of predicted by the
Greeks epicurus. I think maybe said this but you
know, they even understood that like there was this nihilistic

(59:27):
picture that emerged from this idea that atoms are just like
these, you know, little little balls like interacting and they
had the idea of a swerve like, you know, sometimes they would
swerve. And Would basically for this
Freedom, you had well obviously Democritus, came up with the

(59:49):
idea of Adam is MM. But then, you know, I always
tell the story about their supposedly story.
He was in like a little Shack and it got Dusty and he saw like
a light shaft go through the window and he could see the
particles. And then he came up with the
idea that everything is made up of these tiny particles.
But to we are saying, I don't know if it's the same thing but
it would be built on his work. So it basically was saying okay

(01:00:10):
if we take that position to Be correct.
Then the idea was like okay you just have these atoms and then
they're following this trajectory and actually they
realized that if that was the case that things would just kind
of separate if you really try toimagine this trajectory of like
these pool balls and just becomemore spread out.
It's kind of like the statistical version of the

(01:00:30):
second law of Thermodynamics butso they realized that too.
And I think it was epicurus to keep like everything from like
just, you know, creating this kind - structureless void that
you needed this concept of a swerve.
And so they kind of predicted, quantum mechanics, you know,

(01:00:51):
thousands of years in advance. And so that's what we see and
physicists like George Ellis respected cosmologist was a
co-author with Stephen Hawking on a lot of important work in
the 70s. He says that this basically
introduces what he calls, causalSlack, Into the chain of

(01:01:12):
causation. You have a little bit of
flexibility and that means that when biological organisms emerge
and these organisms are evolvingthrough, you know, variation and
natural selection through mutation and selection and
through this process they're adapting to the environment
around them. So they're acquiring information

(01:01:33):
about the world around them, they're becoming these little
information processing or computational systems that when
they start to work they Start tomove.
You see that organisms? Don't behave, like rocks, they
living systems can't be predicted with Newtonian
mechanics. They you have to understand them
as pursuing survival goals. So a rock will follow a

(01:01:57):
Newtonian trajectory just like apool ball but an organism won't.
It can go in directions that youcan't predict from, you know,
that kind of physics. You need to start talking about
information. You need to start talking about
Evolution and you know how natural selection basically
function as information channel,to create this information in

(01:02:19):
that system and then you can start to predict things.
I'm not even saying that life can't be predicted, can't be
predicted perfectly, but I thinkstatistically, you can get very
close to predicting. What Aggregates of humans will
do and maybe even individual humans to some degree but it's
not this vision of the place where it was like this, you
know, pool ball Universe another.

(01:02:41):
The thing is that just leaves out the fact that things come
together with chemical bonds andform these higher level units.
So you got to imagine the pool balls as coming together,
forming this configuration in that configuration starts doing
things, but evolution is really the Special Sauce because when
things start evolving through this mutation and selection

(01:03:03):
mechanism, or variation and selection, then it starts
basically accumulating information about the world
around it and then matter, starts moving in this special
goal-oriented way. And what I argue in the book is
that this is part of this Cosmic, Evolution process that
that matter is coming together, these particles come together,

(01:03:25):
and they make these larger unitsand the larger units have these
new causal Powers because they're these higher-level
computational systems, there's new Dynamics, and each level,
there's new emergent properties at each level, there's
Consciousness that emerges, suddenly a light comes on In the
physical system can experience the world around it.
And with humans we can even imagine Futures that don't exist

(01:03:50):
and we can do what needs to be done to create to make that
future manifest to create that future.
So you can have an idea for a company and you can actually go
out and raise money and create that company and then influence
the world. So, whatever trajectory that
anyone, you know, might calculate that we're on

(01:04:10):
consciousness. This allows, you know, sentient
beings to imagine all of these alternative scenarios which
phosphorus call counterfactual 's and then we can work to
create those things. So the future isn't determined
in the strict sense. Thought by LaPlace, because it's
not a pool ball Universe. There's this fundamental

(01:04:33):
probabilistic nature at the bottom level, that makes it such
that the future isn't determinedin the sense once thought, but
there does seem to be This sort of logic to it, where there are
these systems that emerge, that then combine to make other
systems, which combine to make other systems.
And so you can see this trajectory of Life emerging and

(01:04:55):
spreading, and conscious being spreading and then linking up
that is statistically predictable, the book argues
that, you know, that, that the old idea of, you know, they're
being just the future set in stone, which was And of
nihilistic is out the window. And now you have this richer

(01:05:15):
picture where you have agency, but this agency is also part of
this story going towards this Cosmic, attractor?
So there does appear to be something like what?
Ray Kurzweil calls, a cosmic, Destiny for life.
And for the universe Great points.
And I will say I was open-mindedcoming in, I'm not set in my

(01:05:37):
ways on that by any means, but Ithink that I do like this idea.
So like if we're going to be talking about like a god or
Universal energy or whatever that thing might have the
knowledge, or maybe were evolving with it too, so then
Free Will does come into. But I did come in with an open
mind. You did temporarily change it,

(01:05:58):
so we'll see if that sticks. But let me let me let me Option
one more thing out of just a slight bit more of nuance to the
Freewill argument. So the point I made is that
things aren't determined at the lowest level by physics.
So, biological organisms do haveagency that agency is a product
of the information in the system, so that allows the

(01:06:18):
organism to freely, do what it wants to do.
But when you have these simple organisms, you have this
biological program that's running.
We're basically input, you know,sensory.
Is converted to Output, the output is the motor, behavior of
the organism. That doesn't seem totally free
either. Because now, it seems like, even

(01:06:39):
though you're not determined by the laws of physics, you're
determined by this biological program.
And so I think that's true and that lower organisms are kind of
these deterministic machines. But basically, with the
emergence of self-awareness there's a higher level self,
that's created. It's the self that we experience

(01:06:59):
the world through and now, Now, we can override our biological
programming, so you might, thereis a Nuance though here though,
to. So, like, I'm very artistic, I'm
very into music and art, I draw pictures.
I play my guitar, I write songs,you know, do research of until
podcasting stuff. But so, there is this thing.

(01:07:22):
Human beings are weird. We're almost like an AI were
people. There is some sort of causal
line of inspiration for things. So like I've We rarely see
somebody where I'm like that super original.
You can tell kind of where theirinfluences or what they studied
to get to that point. There's very rare people and
there aren't they do exist but it's very rare where I'll see an

(01:07:44):
artist or musician or whatever Mike that's crazy, that's
unique. I've never seen anything like
that before and when you see it,you know, it, but for the most
part, most people are just repeating things.
They heard all day. They saw a tweet.
They saw this in and here's an example.
When you see some of these Be like a big influencer, somebody
posts something, the first ten posts, or the first ten comments

(01:08:08):
underneath will usually be roughly.
The same thing. I was first, I said this, or I'm
first. And I saw this person said this
or something, so it's like everybody's responding.
They all pick out the same thingor the same mistake or the same
interesting aspect of it or whatever.
So I just want to point out thatwhile I agree with you based on
your argument of what you're saying.

(01:08:29):
I do also Recognize that there is something very boilerplate
about the way that we reflect off of one another or the way
that we interact with one. Another like like I said, some
sort of causal line or causal chain of information that yes to
our, you know, next destination.Well, that's exactly where I was
going. So yeah, you do have this kind

(01:08:54):
of, you know, higher-level determinism, which could be
called biological determinism where the laplacian kind of
determinism would be physical determined.
ISM. So you have this kind of
automatic Behavior where we do respond to something kind of
based on the things that we've experienced in the past and our
genetics. So this is really important.
I'm saying that not everyone hasFree Will and we don't have free

(01:09:16):
will all the time we can actually lose it.
So what free will is is its associated with the higher mind
of the prefrontal cortex, the eye that experiences the world
and basically, we Sir sighs freewill when so it's called
cognitive control when let's say, someone says something to

(01:09:39):
you and it makes you angry and you suddenly feel like you want
to reach out and choke that person.
So I mean, you know, a situationlike this would be an automatic
reflex if you actually do it, and you shouldn't do that
because you'll go to jail, that's you being controlled by
biological determinism, that's your reflex output.

(01:10:01):
But if you feel that urge but you engage this higher mind,
this mind associated with the prefrontal cortex and you think,
you know, what will be the consequences of me?
You know, if I do that and then you regulate your behavior,
that's what free will is it's this higher level of agency that
allows us to override our biological programming.

(01:10:23):
So it's associated with Consciousness to when people
talk about free, we like we haveto really understand
Consciousness is the Sauce. Sam Harris.
Another people have said, you know, determinism doesn't give
you free will and then Quantum Randomness doesn't give you free
will either because you're not you don't have control over the
randomness that's not the role of quantum mechanics and Free

(01:10:45):
Will, the randomness just means that there's causal slack at
this lowest level. So it's not just like a chain of
falling dominoes, that's all Quantum.
Quantum Randomness does Freewheel emerges from the
information processing system? It's a cybernetic system that
has gained control in that The whole system is this control
unit, which you know fundamentalphysics doesn't recognize is

(01:11:08):
even existing because of reductionism, being the, you
know, overriding philosophy. So free will is our ability.
Okay, so for example, we can useConsciousness, you talked about
some of those, you know, this pattern behavior that you see,
and that's kind of like why we're getting so /.
Like what's going on politicallyby the media.

(01:11:30):
They're just like pushing our little Fear and anger buttons
and we're responding that way with the comment section in
YouTube. That's a great example.
You kind of see these patterns, it's kind of predictable but
what's important are, the peoplethat break those patterns, you
said it wasn't everyone. So those people that break the
patterns, they're using Consciousness to create this
mental simulation of the possibility, space, the space of

(01:11:53):
possible configurations out there.
The things that you can create that will be part of this living
system. You know, all of our tools are
really extensions of the living network.
So when, when you're really using your Consciousness to
override these program behaviorsinto imagined Futures that don't
exist and then you act in such away to carry those things out,

(01:12:18):
then you're actually creating the future.
And so even if there were a God,God cannot completely predict or
LaPlace has demon the same concept.
They can't completely predict what's going to happen.
And when we create a system, youknow, an artificial life system,
something that really works likelife, where you see this agency,

(01:12:39):
we're not going to be able to predict it completely either.
So we're starting to have the capabilities of God.
It seems we're creating these, you know, potentially like
artificial Consciousness has even if they have to have some
biological basis for still creating them.
So there's nothing to say that we're not creations of some

(01:12:59):
other intelligent being and thatreality has these levels.
So it's really interesting question, we really don't know
how big reality is, but you knowwhat, I think we need to
understand is our fundamental properties of reality are these
ideas of loops and levels that you see with life life, is this

(01:13:20):
kind of like thermodynamic loop,it's taking an energy from the
environment and then metabolism is using that energy in a cycle
and it's dissipating that energy.
Creating entropy a living systems are informational
systems. We're updating our motto of the
world. Every time, we learn something
new, so we're loops, and these Loops are basically nested in

(01:13:44):
levels such that their control systems that create this
hierarchy. And the idea is that, you know,
this, this these cybernetic systems.
He's living systems, are going to expand throughout the
Universe, and this is the mechanism through, which the
Averse, organizes itself and becomes aware.

(01:14:06):
Awesome. Well put Tom listener Tom to the
point of free. Will he do?
We have free? Will he commented?
I'm just going to go ask my wifeif I've got free will hang on.
I thought that was funny. Yeah.
But so a couple things and it's real to I mean we do kind of
defer like most of the time that's kind of how we operate

(01:14:29):
and it's smart. But um so yeah Free Will is
agency. That is Is unique and we need to
be aware when we're using it because it's everything.
It's the only thing that can save us from this trajectory of
division. That seems like we're going
towards. Like something like Civil War
and it's not something that's just local to the United States.

(01:14:50):
There's chaos across the globe. All of us need to understand
that we have free. Will we have agency?
And we need to exercise it because it's the only thing
that's going to take as off the trajectory towards, you know,
our civilization being doomed. And we need to come to an
understanding of love and patience and also whatever
happened to agree to disagree. We need to get back to that.

(01:15:12):
So great points. I want to Circle back though, to
the Psychedelic thing because you mentioned something when you
were talking about superpositionand Free.
Will that kind of I wanted to bring up earlier that I forgot
about. So I and I don't know if this is
true but we've had different psychedelic scientists on and
obviously there's a big difference between Tween doing

(01:15:35):
like a tryptamine based psychedelic like a psilocybin or
DMT versus something that's likea, like a tropane like
Scopolamine or datura or something like that.
And, and tro pains can have adverse biological effects to
wear, tryptamines are usually pretty well, you know, they're
safe biologically, they might have implications on your mental

(01:15:56):
health, if you're not, you know,stable up there, but they all
could also help you to which is a weird dichotomy in that
regard, but so Way, I've been thinking about this and I've
been really pondering this. So when you do, let's say you do
like five grams psilocybin or whatever silent darkness and I

(01:16:17):
had an anecdote. I was going to bring up to which
is that I had one of these experiences a few years ago and
I was shown that this is the realm of imagination and in the
realm of imagination, you can take things ideas original
things and bring them to the realm of reality.
And that's where Some of the best artists are things like

(01:16:38):
that that you see. Again, this is just my
experience. I'm not saying that I believe
it. However, I did experience this.
So it does color. My beliefs that being said, you
mentioned superposition and being able to observe things.
What I find interesting is people that dutroux pains seems
like they're seeing things that aren't really there, like

(01:16:58):
people, it's not just like an entity experience that somebody
might have tryptamine based. It's like they're seeing
hallucinatory. Having real hallucinations of
things that aren't actually there as opposed to a tryptamine
based experience, where if you have your eyes open and it's not
closed eye, you will see the basis of reality.
Like if I if I'm 5 grams a psilocybin, I'm looking at my

(01:17:21):
carpet, I'm still seeing the carpet, it might be flowing in
the patterns, might be flowing around and things.
Yeah and when I look at a tree and trees breathing, does that
mean that you know, we're witnessing superposition or
superposition? Is we're not, we're not as the
Observer were given more of likean option on reality, if that
makes sense. Like we're given more of like

(01:17:45):
we're disabling our built-in evolutionary pareidolia or
pattern recognition and we're allowed to see more of what
might be true. Like this idea that you
mentioned superposition Observer, we're seeing more
options out there for things. Is that.
Does that make sense? Yeah, totally makes sense.
Great question. Hard to answer.
There's, you know, a lot of debate over this.

(01:18:09):
Most people think that, you know, superposition is something
that we see in the quantum realm.
And I tend to believe also that basically, these super
positions, get collapsed and physical systems.
And in the book, I talk about interpretation of quantum
mechanics called Quantum Darwinism, which basically says

(01:18:31):
like, there's kind of a collapseand what I Argue in the book,
which is kind of like an adaptation of quantum.
Darwinism is that this process of increasing complexity
fication and the collapse of that wave function are part of
the same story. So that, you know, there is this
stochastic or probabilistic nature to reality such that,

(01:18:53):
there are, you know, different possible Futures but that
there's this collapse toward themost stable, and most complex
future. And that, you know, life is part
of this process. Says, but so to answer your
question, I think at these higher levels, we don't have
Quantum superposition but there's something analogous

(01:19:14):
going on, with mental phenomena such that you can, you know,
basically that's what Consciousness allows you to do.
Is imagine all these different possibilities.
So what? Okay, yeah, this is important
point. So this probabilistic nature
exists at bottom, you see it in quantum mechanics but Even when

(01:19:36):
you have, you know, this collapse where you have these
you know, physical systems wherethings are indefinite places,
you still have chaotic phenomenawhich is completely
unpredictable. It doesn't matter how big your
supercomputer is you would have to put in the state of a system
to an infinite number of decimalplaces to be able to predict

(01:19:57):
what that system does. So reality is kind of
fluctuating and noisy and And probabilistic even at the higher
levels, even though things aren't in multiple places at
once, there's this flexibility to where the future isn't
perfectly defined and I don't think you're, you know, seeing

(01:20:19):
those possibilities when you're having a psychedelic experience
like that. Exactly.
I think what's going on? Is the mental model that is
encoded in your brain? That's constructed whenever
we're having a conscious experience by these Processes
that I mentioned I talked about this ignition events where you
have these frontal parietal Loops in this you know in

(01:20:41):
trained neural activity. That's you know at this global
scale that that model is like oscillating.
Like the electrical activity is like having like oscillations
which correspond to these perceptual kind of wavy, you
know, experiences. So yeah.

(01:21:04):
I I don't think you're seeing like re actual external reality,
like moving, even though it doeshave that aspect, you know,
nature is like noisy and fluctuating, but I think that
corresponds to like the neural activity fluctuating, but it is
still showing you all the thingsthat you mentioned.
It's still giving you all of those deeper insights that.

(01:21:27):
The future isn't determined in the strict sense and and that
there is possibility. So if you come away having that
Experience. I think that's kind of part of
this story. I do, you know, I guess probably
one of the most speculative things I've said and I said a
few would be that. That psychedelics basically are

(01:21:56):
allowing you to predict this. Future hasn't happened yet,
actually. Train of thought there for a
second. So go ahead and add like right
now like that. I've definitely had weird
experiences that that speak to what you're talking about.
I do think let's pivot. No, let's pivot a little bit to

(01:22:21):
aliens and AI in extraterrestrial life because I
think that some of those things can be kind of grouped in the
same thing in the same way, one of them being I had a weird
thought. Last night we were at sorry.
I let me just Yeah. Yeah.
Go ahead. Yep.
Yeah so the overall idea of thatis that oh sorry.
Yeah. So the biosphere creates these

(01:22:44):
psychedelics and there's this book called Darwin's Pharmacy
which is a wonderful book and itkind of has the idea that
psychedelics are part of this Progressive evolutionary process
and I do think that psychedelicsmay have allowed these
transitions in. This that could have led to

(01:23:06):
self-awareness. So when I said it was one of the
most speculative things that I've said is basically the idea
that the biosphere at as a wholeis this intelligent entity and
that it produces these chemicalsthat allows intelligent systems
to kind of experience. This less, constrained wider

(01:23:28):
space of possibilities. So I think psychedelics also
have this sort of cosmic significance.
Fuckin sand. If there's a biosphere on other
planets with aliens, I guess this will be our segue into like
the alien stuff is that they will have evolved through a very
similar evolutionary trajectory and they will probably have
psychedelics on that planet, which were discovered and would

(01:23:52):
were probably used to you know, have insights like
ritualistically and then you know more formally understood
like why these properties are actually really useful to
people. Yeah absolutely.
So one thing I wanted to I had athought the other night so the

(01:24:13):
idea that maybe our minds are evolving at such a fast pace now
that our biology, our biologicalbodies are just not keeping up
and we subconsciously know that.And so you look at like how fast
things had progressed over the last couple hundred years with
technology and before that it seemed to be kind of like a slow
crawl, right? Maybe we're becoming more and

(01:24:36):
more aware of that through technology because it's
expanding exponentially. Do you think it's possible that
we are creating either AI to take us to the next level?
Obviously, but like to communicate with some sort of
other thing, meaning that maybe we don't have the biological
faculties or senses to interact with alien life.

(01:25:00):
And maybe there's some people that are even say that maybe
people are getting Ideas or downloads to.
That's the way that you would connect with, something like
that, extraterrestrial interdimensional, or something
like that. Would be through some sort of AI
in the sense that we will, we will be evolving our minds so
much that we are already kind ofpassed.

(01:25:22):
I guess, you know, like, and I think that's why you see a lot
of the mental health stuff because I think that are we're
just we've got the supercomputerand we don't have the hardware
to kind of interact that if thatmakes sense.
Yeah, I've never heard the theory that AI, you know, is
kind of serving the purpose of allowing us to get into a mental

(01:25:43):
space that would allow us to be receptive to my daily a
castithan. I don't know if it exists like
he came up with that. So so so I will say that.
I do think the evolution of artificial intelligence is part
of this Progressive process in the same way that psychedelics
are part of it. This is an evolutionary

(01:26:03):
trajectory That is predictable not from low level physics but
from this theory that the universe is waking up through
life. So there was a French
philosopher and paleontologist and Jesuit priest named, Keel
hard day, Chardon Pierre, teilhard de chardin, he wrote a
book called The phenomenon of man.

(01:26:24):
And this book was criticized, you know, heavily by atheist and
a lot of scientists because theythought it was Dove like
religious or mystical, but it's funny because at the same time,
he couldn't publish it without getting kicked out of the
church. Like, who knows, what would have
happened to him? But basically it had to be

(01:26:45):
published after death, so I think he wrote it in the 20s or
30s, and then it was published, I think, in the 40s.
But he predicted the emergence of something called a newest
fear, and new is Greek for mine.So basically, he thought that
the planet was in the biosphere was Towards this fully,

(01:27:05):
integrated state where humans kind of coalesce into this
Collective mind and he Associated this Collective mind
with something like a god, like State and he called that an
Omega point. And because he had this theory
of this kind of teal a logical theory that there's this purpose
to the universe in this Cosmic process.

(01:27:27):
That life is a part of, he was able to predict the internet,
many decades of, in advance, I Imean, like I said, I think he
started writing this in the 20s and you know, so this was pre
computer as well. And a lot of, you know, Scholars
philosophers scientists, like myold Professor Harold more wits.

(01:27:47):
He was one of the founding members of the Santa Fe
Institute and he was origin of Life researcher and he was, you
know, not ashamed to kind of champion, the ideas of teal hard
A Shard in. So with this emergence of This
Global Mind this newest fear. He thought that our
technological Creations industry, that it was all part

(01:28:09):
of this process. So there's this, the biosphere
would include the technosphere that sets on top of it.
And so I do think AI is an extension of the intelligence of
the living network and that it will assist us in this kind of
progression towards this higher state where we get to to spread.
And I do think if we find aliens, they will be aliens that

(01:28:33):
started off. Biological.
And then basically merged with their technology, to make
something, that could be more robust to the chaotic nature of
the universe and allow that species to expand.
Because ultimately every life form is playing, this
thermodynamics game even if it'spurely a I still playing this

(01:28:54):
thermodynamics game, the system cannot sustain itself, it can't
do information processing. You can't do computation, it
can't spread. It can't persist in a Yes, it's
always extracting usable forms of energy from the environment,
free energy. So built into life is this Nest
necessity to expand because of this framing that we've

(01:29:17):
explained the second law of Thermodynamics that requires any
living system to always be finding new ways to lock, unlock
the energy around it so that it can sustain itself.
And so the Cook would argue you know, based on this origin of
Life Theory that life is inevitable that life probably

(01:29:40):
emerged on many other planets out there.
If you want to estimate the number of planets it would be
the number of planets with sufficiently Earth-like
conditions. That's kind of a vague word,
sufficiently complicated. Lex Friedman.
Did like an updated version of the Drake equation, which is
kind of what you're talking about which is the yeah yeah

(01:30:02):
that's great and yeah. I mean, we can totally updated
with this Theory and it would itwould definitely change
everything and make it such that, you know, life would be
seen as is more likely and he had Richard Dawkins on an
episode in Richard Dawkins is anatheist.
This might surprise some people,but Richard Dawkins was saying

(01:30:23):
that he thinks that there is life elsewhere.
Otherwise, it would be just incredibly improbable to be
where we are at now, like technologically on this planet.
Like, If life emerging was, you know, highly improbable and then
the transition to multicellular life was improbable and then
language and you know, higher intelligence isn't probable,

(01:30:45):
then we would just find ourselves in the most improbable
State of Affairs imaginable. So Dawkins not only argues that
life emerged elsewhere in the universe, but that it would be
intelligent life that you would see this trajectory that I'm
describing because life elsewhere would also evolve too
dark. Any and evolution by natural

(01:31:06):
selection. Interesting.
Yeah, I'm not a Dawkins fan but I'm not a hater for say either.
I'm just indifferent at this point early on.
I didn't love his stuff, but I just thought it was kind of your
the point of your book is to take away that scientism or that
very cold nature of science and there is more to life.
There is a tilos or a tea, logically logical aspect to all

(01:31:30):
this and I think that he's been the kind of a detractor of that
idea. But yeah, you know my my
thoughts changed about Hands as I was writing the book because,
you know, I always respect him for his contribution to
understanding evolutionary theory and genetics, but I
thought the selfish Gene view had a lot of problems with it
and that he was missing a lot. But the more I read Dawkins, the

(01:31:52):
more I saw that he kind of had this totally illogical
Progressive view of life and intelligence in the universe and
now he's even he's written a paper about he thinks the
simulation Theory could be true which you know I don't you know
that That's a whole other discussion but he talks about
the possibility of like our brains all being connected by

(01:32:14):
this Cloud type thing something way.
You know, people wouldn't think that he'd be the speculative,
but if you Google, Richard Dawkins and simulation Theory,
you'll see this paper just from a couple years ago and you'll
find videos from talking about this, but he does think that
intelligence is kind of built into this biological process and
he opposed, Stephen Jay Gould, who thought it was all

(01:32:35):
accidental, and that intelligence was very unlike So
yeah, you will see Lex Friedman.Be surprised that Dawkins says
that intelligent life, not only life is actually out there, you
know, most likely out there but intelligent life and
technological life and possibly even life that can leave the
planet in, he's written, you know, I think he has, he's

(01:32:59):
talked about spirituality and I there's a book called believing
in Dawkins, that's all about. Like, I think it was real is
written by me. Be a religious person, but
showing the all these statementsthat Dawkins had said that kind
of reveal that he does, have this spiritual view, that's very
different from some of the otheratheists people like Jerry,
Coyne evolutionary theorist. So I think Dawkins was basically

(01:33:23):
and Daniel Dennett to fighting there was an unnecessary culture
war between science and religionwhich we can understand because
religion was trying to get evolutionary theory out of
schools. So naturally science took this
anti-religion position. But I You know, it was an
unnecessary divide and now we'reseeing that the answer is very

(01:33:43):
spiritual and Paul Davies, I even caught him.
I mean, sorry Richard Dawkins I quote him in my book mentioning
that the god of Paul Davies, thegod of the physicists, the god
that led you know, set the initial conditions and laws and
let the universe evolved. According to its own mechanics
is one that you can make a respectable argument for this

(01:34:05):
sort of God of deism, rather than Oh God, that is always like
intervening like a theistic god.So um, yeah, I think his ideas
are evolving. It would be nice for him to come
out and kind of explain that. And be like, hey, I didn't say
that these things could exist, you know, I just think we need
to be careful with our ideas. We needed, you know, maybe I

(01:34:26):
should be testable and it's veryhard to test a lot of these
bigger philosophical ideas, but maybe it's like a Constantine
thing. It's runtimes running down your
starting to grasp at straws and see what's playing.
At the wall, I don't know. Just the thing, ya know I'm in
converted to was on his deathbed.
You were you were talking about these probes and that's what I

(01:34:49):
was thinking about earlier, is the Von Neumann probe hypothesis
that, you know, some civilization arrives at the
point where they're able to makeAI that can self-replicate and
then it starts up self-replicating throughout the
Universe and you know some people speculate maybe that's
what we're seeing in the sky. It was some sort Out of other
civilizations Von Neumann probesor, you know, think about what

(01:35:11):
we do. We send probes out to go look at
Saturn or Mars or you know, whatever.
We're sending these satellites out there.
We're sending probes out there. Why?
But when you said when you said in the sky, what what are the
people? What's where do they think
they're seeing the Von Neumann probes?
Oh, I mean people at see UFOs, are you okay?

(01:35:32):
You okay. Well, I'm just saying.
You know, if you I didn't know if you meant into Mike's, tell
her I can we had earlier I mentioned The synchrony between
galaxies and stuff like that. But the people with the UFO.
Sightings. Yeah, I speculated about that on
Joe Rogan. Actually, it's funny that you
say that because I didn't make that connection between
väinämöinen probes. I knew about that because like

(01:35:54):
one big contribution by no, I mean made, that's not really
recognized. Is that idea of self?
Reproducing automata. So he was really trying to
understand computers, right? I think the instituted Advanced
study built a computer Which waslike kind of beef.
Oh yeah. He's Von Neumann architecture.
He he's, you know, people like touring created this kind of,

(01:36:16):
you know, understanding of like how binary code could work.
But like Von Neumann was responsible for that for
Designing the architecture that we use.
Now it's like a central processing unit and like memory
stores. So like Von Neumann is
definitely I would say like one of the creators of the modern
computer and probably the smartest person that I lived I

(01:36:40):
learned a lot about them. I read this book American
Prometheus about Jay Robert, Robert Oppenheimer.
It's like a biography and I think that's what that movie
Oppenheimer next summer is goingto be based around but a very
cool. I've been wanting a new movie
with Von Neumann like in some dude read this book American
Prometheus because the stuff I learned about the Manhattan
Project and like the ins and theouts and then you learn so much

(01:37:01):
about like you Von Neumann Wolfgang.
Pauli like all these physicists and Enrico Fermi and all these
interesting things that you Don't have learned even from
watching like a documentary on it, so it's, yeah.
The Manhattan Project brought together our greatest physicists
and scientists. All those people.
You mentioned Richard feinman Von Neumann.

(01:37:22):
Einstein, Fair me. And so what I speculate about on
Joe Rogan was that, excuse me, um, that, you know, on John
neumanns, Beth debt deathbed. They Add a federal agent
positioned outside is room, making sure that he didn't spill

(01:37:42):
any secrets. So I think when the Manhattan
Project created the, you know, atomic bomb then after that, you
know, Los Alamos is laboratory today.
That's doing, you know, has someof the greatest, you know,
scientific minds. They are working on stuff for
the government, but I speculate about, you know, the the UFO

(01:38:04):
sightings that, you know, have some of them have been Added
like the, whatever the Nimitz orsomething, whether that, you
know, it could be aliens. But what if it is technology
that was created by the genius of people, like, John Von
Neumann and the other people at Los Alamos.
And I definitely think that we could have technology far beyond

(01:38:26):
what we've ever, you know, what mainstream physics recognizes
because, you know, Von Neumann was supposed to be able to look,
you know, Einstein look slow as far as his ability to do like
mental calculations. I mean, as a child, he was about
both. Oh, what about both?

(01:38:47):
What if Bono they would be working together?
Yeah, they are what those peoplehad it.
But what if those people had access to stuff, let's say
otherworldly or information or data to work with that, maybe
the public doesn't have access to things like that.
I'm not one of these people to. I don't like looking at that
aspect of the phenomena because you Could say this or that or

(01:39:09):
the other? There's really no, but it's
just, it is weird. If you look at our exponential
growth in these topics, I've talked to, like, electrical
engineers and people that reallyknow about like technology and
even they say, there's things that we come up with but not to
take the human Ingenuity like, you know, accolades out of it.
But just, there's things that maybe we couldn't have come up

(01:39:31):
with or things that we weren't there at the time and somebody
hit. So it's like is that some sort
of Genius Breakthrough by like one people?
Group of people or something else going on entirely.
And I like Bob Lazar story. So, like that one idea to
reverse-engineer, I'm not fully sold on anything like that, but
I'm just saying like, we have data, right?

(01:39:51):
There's data, there's radar data, there's these, you
mentioned the Nemitz, you know, encounter the, how many of those
have been recorded? You know, what if there's techno
Siege signatures Left Behind or something like that and then you
gave that to of Von Neumann or Oppenheimer or Or somebody like
that. I could see something crazy
coming out of that. Yeah, so I think a couple things

(01:40:14):
are true, that can kind of explain this and should blow,
you know. Everyone's mind is that yeah,
the technology could be real andwe could have created ourselves
but it's still freaking crazy because it's doing stuff like,
you know, without like normal signatures.
If I jet propulsion, like it's doing sort of mechanical

(01:40:34):
behavior. That can't be explained by the
That we're privy to so yeah thatcould be possible.
It could be this super Advanced System created by the same
people who came together to makethe atomic bomb.
I mean these are brilliant people that you know just have

(01:40:54):
the power to do that at the sametime.
If you buy the argument I'm making in the book and you know
even Richard Dawkins who's you know, the world's famous
Skeptics argue that There shouldbe intelligent life out there on
sufficiently earth-like planets that you know, there's no reason

(01:41:16):
that we shouldn't think that intelligent life is out there
and spreading because it will need to spread because of the
second law of Thermodynamics that whole story.
It needs to find more energy to sustain itself.
But then you have the Fermi Paradox and it just asked, where
are they then? So that's when it gets a little
bit tricky, but I think if therewas this sufficiently advanced

(01:41:38):
Since it's totally conceivable that they might not want to make
themselves aware. I mean, obvious to us, they
wouldn't want to be known or if they were, they would do it in a
gradual way. Simply because if we did find
out there were aliens, we might start directing all of our

(01:42:02):
intellectual efforts and practical efforts towards things
that we would do to for Example defend ourselves in case those
aliens were to attack. Like and if not, we might start
directing all of our resources towards, you know, getting in
contact with those aliens ratherthan doing everything we're

(01:42:23):
doing now to try to get off the planet ourselves rather than,
you know, try to get some, you know, higher being to like share
all their knowledge with us, we're doing so.
If you buy this story that you know, there is this
probabilistic nature. Reality.
And we're discovering these new things.
We're discovering new theories that you know, an alien

(01:42:47):
civilization might not come up with they might not follow that
same trajectory. So maybe an alien civilization
would not want to disturb us because they don't want to
change this intellectual and technological trajectory that
were on, maybe we'll discover things that they didn't
discover. Sure because it's just a

(01:43:08):
different intellectual trajectory and maybe they don't
want to interfere with us because I think if we did learn,
I think all of our efforts wouldchange immediately, like we
would start like worrying about the aliens and not really doing
all the things that we need to to progress.
So they could be out there almost like harvesting ideas in
the sense that maybe were so naive to what their knowledge is

(01:43:32):
that we're coming up with thingsthat they can use that.
That like you said, just a different route of thought that
maybe they're looking upon to see those routes or something
along those lines. Yeah, we learned from ant.
Colonies there ant colonies thatdo things that show, complex
behaviors, that we don't fully understand.
So, I think that the discovery of of, you know, these examples

(01:43:59):
that come to mind are probably not the best ones because I'm
thinking of like, relativity andquantum mechanics, and I do
think aliens would have discovered them, but Like more
exotic sciences that are in the future, maybe, you know, if in
if intelligent species came together and share their
knowledge, they would probably have slightly different theories

(01:44:21):
and understanding understandingsof Nature.
And so I do believe that the future trajectory of the
universe involves intelligences from different biospheres at
some point. Running into each other and it
might not be, you know, Cooperative immediately, you may

(01:44:44):
have some Battle of ideas where they're, you know, might not be
completely friendly. And then basically, you have
what happens with any war that kind of the society kind of
subsumes that other Society intoit.
But I think any really intelligent beings would Would

(01:45:07):
be compassionate simply because we've seen that trajectory with
human life. The more intelligent, we get the
more we can empathize with others.
The more we realize that other things out there can suffer have
the capacity to experience the world to have joy.
The same things that we have when you learn that, you

(01:45:29):
naturally, try to reduce suffering because you don't want
it to happen to you. So I think there is this moral
Arc to evolution That if there is intelligent life out there,
it would probably be compassionate and would probably
try to find some sort of peaceful relationship with our

(01:45:52):
society rather than just destroying us.
I mean, would we travel across the universe to, like, destroy
like an ant colony? On the other side of the world,
just doesn't make sense. I want to wrap it up here.
And if you have time to do, maybe do like a short.
Short patreon thing after. But one thing I've been throwing
around this for a while, so likeas much as I want to believe

(01:46:13):
these things, I don't just believe things.
I try and look into them as muchas possible and develop a
philosophy around it. And one thing I've been thinking
about though on the counter point to me wanting to think
that there's all this life and stuff out there is this idea
that maybe so like the seen UFOsin the sky or being interested

(01:46:35):
in Mysteries and lots of Interested to uncovering
Mysteries and they want to be the person, you know, the
Indiana Jones or the sleuth thatuncovers that what the answer of
the mystery is or whatever. Maybe that's some sort of
built-in. Like, we're dangling.
The carrot in front of ourselves, like, maybe it's some
sort of built-in part of evolution in the sense that

(01:46:58):
subconsciously we're interested in the stuff, but maybe we're
doing it to ourselves in the same time, if that makes sense.
Like we're dangling the carrot but we're subconsciously knowing
that maybe there's nothing there, but we're doing it
anyways, because it pushes us forward through science
technology. Philosophy all these different

(01:47:19):
things. So what do you think about that
idea? Yeah, I think that's right.
I think Consciousness allows us to imagine these counterfactual
Z's, alternative possibilities and our ability to do that is
what allows us to basically avoid trajectories that, you
know, could be to our Doom. So, just this basic ability to

(01:47:45):
imagine to imagine like, you know, fantasy worlds.
Like this is Kind of the the reason for dreaming, there's a
new Theory by a neuroscientist called are coal, which is
basically saying like dreams is a way for us to run all these
different simulations of what wecould possibly encounter in the

(01:48:07):
real world. So that will be prepared for
those things better. And so yeah, I think whether
there are aliens out there or not that there's something
productive about thinking about that possibility and what but
you know living in a world like that would be like and whether
it's specifically leads to progress, you know that very

(01:48:29):
specific thing. I'm not sure.
But I do think if you look at like the totality of how our
civilization thanks and you knowall these different cognitive
things that we're seeing that wesee with, you know.
Yeah, people like just being obsessed with these questions.
I think that it does in some waycontribute to Human.

(01:48:52):
Regress overall. Awesome.
Yeah, I agree. So like my whole thing is is
like I want it to be the real external things, but if it's
not, I think it's still kind of interesting that that's the
level that we're on with our minds and the way we operate and
everything. So if it's not you can program

(01:49:13):
it right? And you can experience in
virtual reality. So everything that yeah we think
of all these fantasies whatever,whether they're real or not
their realities that we could potentially create with
technology and experience. And in that sense, I do think
it's all part of this process. Awesome.
And we'll listen, this was fun. We got to have you back on in

(01:49:34):
the future because there's just so much other stuff that I have.
Like a whole note pad worth of stuff that we could have gotten
into, but I want to wrap it up here, and if you have time, I
want to do a short Patron segment, but your book, The
Romance of real, the romance of reality, I really, really,
really liked it. Everybody go check it out.
I have a link down below. Is there anything else you want

(01:49:54):
to plug before we get out of here?
Yeah, I have a road, a sub stackin a YouTube channel called
Road. Omega and the name is inspired
by. I mentioned too hard day.
Chardon thinking that the biosphere was headed towards the
state of optimal complexity and integration that's called an
Omega point. So basically this future of

(01:50:15):
progress that I've described in this interview, I think we need
to consciously, try to direct human civilization toward that
point. And so the sub stack, and the
channel basically, try to take the Interpol's in the book about
complex adaptive systems about evolutionary theory and apply

(01:50:36):
them to society and to the self.So that we actually start living
in a way that takes us off this trajectory that were on right
now which seems like it's heading towards like the
collapse of our civilization so be mm.
Yeah so I mean that's part of this process to like you will

(01:50:57):
always be on a trajectory Towards that, unless you
consciously try to take yourselfon A New Path.
But that's exactly what Consciousness allows it allows
us to kind of project and see where we're headed.
But also, you know, simulate other possible, Futures these
counterfactual 's and put his onthe track that we need to be on

(01:51:20):
and there's not much content on both.
Those right now, there are definitely some things up there,
but in the next few months, there's going to be a lot.
Lot more content, uploaded interviews, coming.
And yeah, I would like to have you and Maurice on some time to
have a chat. Awesome.
Yeah I'm down. Definitely don't we can be your

(01:51:43):
most Woo episode and guess that there is no but for real man
thank you so much for everythingyou're doing.
I really like the complexity science aspect of it and the
bigger picture and trying to putpieces together and not being
afraid, afraid to put yourself out there and take some some Ask
said and put some things together so I really appreciate
that. Again, check out his book, The

(01:52:05):
Romance of reality, check out his channel, check out a sub
stack. And if you're interested and you
want to support our show, check out our link tree link down
below. We have a merch store, which
I've created all the designs in there.
We have patreon which are were about to do a patreon segments.
There's tons of Patron segments on their exclusive content
that's not available anywhere else and if you want to just

(01:52:26):
leave us a five star review on apodcast or Spotify, we really
appreciate that. That too.
But listen, thank you so much. Bobby will definitely have you
back on look forward to your future stuff that you're doing
and yeah everybody stay safe outthere.
We love you and we'll catch you next time.
Peace. Alright, thanks a lot Mike, this

(01:52:48):
is awesome. Thank you.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Bobby Azarian Discusses The Romance of Reality Part 2 Episode #254

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Bobby Azarian Discusses The Romance of Reality Part 2 Episode #254

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