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October 24, 2025 83 mins
Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), Dean Radin, PhD, is one of the premier researchers in the entire 150-year history of experimental parapsychology. He joins me to talk about his new book, The Science of Magic, as well as data from scientific studies that supports the hypothesis that consciousness can subtly affect matter and extend through space-time, brining a little magic back into our lives. We also discussed the scientific community's acceptance and resistance to interpretations of consciousness as an undiscovered fundamental force in physics. In fact, lately more and more scientists have shown serious interest in the panpsychisim hyopthesis. Radin compared artificial intelligence to subjective consciousness and makes the argument that AI is not really intelligent. Although, it could go awry without motive. Other topics about the brain including brain fog, long-covid, and the future of gene splicing healing that is just around the corner.
https://www.deanradin.com/

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We apparently can get information about anything from anywhere, any
space and time. The number of mainstream thought leaders across
the board in the academic world who are able to
talk about consciousness openly now as a problem of interest,
that's new. And so that's where we go into the laboratory.
We want to find out imprinciple when we create a

(00:21):
protocol that gets rid of coincidence, and gets rid of
sensory leakage, and gets rid of all of the things
that could be a normal explanation. And we do those
experiments and they still show that there are connections telepathic
and other types of connections, Well, what are we supposed
to make of that? What we make of it is
there is evidence that at least sometimes some of the

(00:43):
experiences that people report that transcend space and time are
exactly what they appear to be.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome back everyone to mystic Lounge. My guest is doctor
Dean Raydon is a chief scientist at Ion's Institute of
No What Excience, and says doctor Raid and welcome, how
are you?

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Thank you doing well?

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Fantastic? So you cover consciousness and its effect on reality?
Would that be a good way to kind of simmer
down your work.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
That's a good start.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
It's a good start. It is much more expansive. You're
obviously the author of books like Real Magic and a
number of books on these subjects, including the papers that
Ions has published as well. So can you tell us
a little bit about how you got into consciousness studies
and this idea of even using the word magic?

Speaker 1 (01:37):
And as a scientist, Well, who has not read science
fiction or mythology or fairy tales as a kid, or
as a teenager or as an adult. Well, I'm one
of those kids. And then perhaps the only difference is
that I discovered in graduate school that it was possible,

(01:59):
not easy, but possible to actually have a career where
that's what the topic of study is. So I figured
if I can do the equivalent of study characters like
mister Spock on Star Trek, that sounds like a fun job.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Do you think science fiction legitimizes some of the more
fringe science today.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Well, it's not presented as fringe in science fiction. And
after all, a lot of science fiction is just a
projection of where science currently is. So you don't need
to go back that far in science to find out
that a lot of science fiction actually was forecasting where
we're headed. That's what writers do. Sure, so, yeah, So

(02:44):
it legitimizes in the sense that people become familiar with
the concepts. Whether or not it's considered mainstream or not
is always a problem any any scientists working on the
edge of the known. By definition, they don't know yet
all the answers are, so there's always that challenge.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Do you have a sense that you have some answers
at this point, that we have what some answers at
this point?

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Oh? Yes, The answers we have, especially when it comes
to things like psychic phenomena, is that they exist. So
that's already a radical thing to say from a scientific
point of view that these phenomena exists.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
You're saying that or you know, there's a collective of
scientists that accept this as a truth.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
There are scientists who accept this as real. There's certainly
some that don't. But again, at the leading edge of
the known, there's always going to be controversy. For example,
within consciousness studies. Now there's over three hundred theories about
the nature of consciousness. About half of them say that
it's related to physical processes in the brain to physical system,

(03:57):
but the other half over one hundred theory, you say
it is actually not part of the brain, it's something
non physical. So if you look at science and they say, well,
the majority of scientists believe blah blah, whatever it happens
to be, that becomes the consensus and is the prevailing view,
at least for a while until it's overturned by something

(04:17):
else new. So when it comes to this topic, the
idea that people actually understand or scientists understand, what the
nature of consciousness is. Nobody understands it. And what we're
talking about here is what gives rise to this, to
the feeling of being a person, like the internal subjective feeling.

(04:41):
Nobody knows how that happens. For a long time, people
thought it was the brain. You books like You Are
Your Brain, those kinds of books. A growing number of
leading neuroscientists now believe that that's probably not the case.
That the brain is a computing engine sense much of

(05:02):
our perception or cognition and so on. We can show
that there are correlates of brain activity that you could
use kind of as a model for explaining how it
is that we can produce language and how we perceive
and all of that stuff. So some of that is
clearly the case, but when it comes to internal experience,
it's a totally different issue. The fact we can create

(05:24):
machine vision that sort of simulates what's going on in
the brain, but when we create a machine doing that,
we don't get a sense that the computer has an
internal experience of what it's like to see something, or
what it's like if it's a different system to taste something,
or for that matter, even to what it's like to
have a memory of something. Those are all internal subjective experiences,

(05:47):
and we don't know what gives rise to that.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Right, And to your earlier comment you made, you quoted
Arthur C. Clark in your book Real Magic, and it
says he said, the only way of discovering the limits
of the possible is to venture a little way past
them into the impossible.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, and only temporarily impossible, up until we begin to
understand it.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Because it's almost a paradox to say to go into
the impossible, because you don't know what's possible yet until
you've entered there.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
Well, I mean, every scientist worth their salt has uses
imagination all the time. I mean, the fun of science
is being on the edge of the known. Because if
you're already working in the know and you're an engineer,
you don't. I mean, you use stuff that we already understand.
The fun is pushing it out, pushing the envelope out.
And so today as we're recording this, my latest book

(06:41):
just came out.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yes, so the Science of Magic for everyone listening.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
Yeah, so I go further into this notion of why
am I apparently conflating psychic phenomena with magic, which I
talked about in my book Real Magic. This one goes
further into that, deeper into even just the last five
years of additional research which we are advancing day by day.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Consciousness is that like the do you agree with that
the metaphor where the brain matter is the motherboard and
consciousness is the operating system or the software.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
Well, as a kind of if we need a metaphor,
it's not too bad, except well, okay, so take the
example of something like a neural network. So there's hardware
that runs the neural network. The software in that sense
is the thing that is making say a back propagation

(07:46):
network is resetting the weights depending on what it's learning.
Those kinds of things, So they're neural network kind of
The difference though, is that when I use machine learning
and neural networks for some of my work, I don't
have any sense at all that it has actually has
an internal experience. It's it's a thing that's happening. So

(08:07):
hardware is hardware, presumably chunks of matter that don't inherently
have a sense of consciousness. But neither does the software,
the software or instructions that are telling the hardware what
to do. So it's like something on top of all
of that.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Right, So it's not a bit different than the AI debate,
right that.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
Yeah, it's very close to that. So today's large language models,
some people get the sense after a while that they're
talking to a sentient creature. They are not. You can
get you get a really good simulation sometimes because that's
how that's what they're programmed to do. But they're running
on classically designed deterministic computers.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
But they passed, they essentially passed the Turing test.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
Right for for some people, it will pass the Turing
test because it gives us good simulation of what it's
like to talk to another person. That's why some people
are very convinced that they're like another person. But it isn't.
It isn't because we don't have any sense that there's
an internal experience. And so I've talked to many ai

(09:16):
ais and I will ask are you sentient? And sometimes
it'll get into a conversation I'll say, well, do you
have internal subjective experience? I mean, because they're probing that
into that direction. I've never found one that speaks back
and say, yeah, I have subjective experience. And of course

(09:37):
the difficulty here is that I think you're probably sentient.
You probably have internal experience, because in our experience we
assume that other humans have that, and probably animals and
maybe plants and everything else. So far, we have not
found any kind of computing system based on classical properties
that we could say is sentient in the sense that

(09:58):
it has internal experience.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
That's kind of interesting. So if someone is a psychopath,
a true psychopath, and they lack empathy, does that make
their consciousness any lesser more than the person who has empathy.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
Probably not, because you could have no empathy at all
and still have internal experience, some subjective experience, subjective experience.
That's the mystery. Where does that come from? When you
taste a lemon, it's not simply electrochemical things that are
going on in your tongue and your brain and so on.
You know what that feels like. It has a certain

(10:39):
feeling associated with it, this internal experience. And so the
reason why I'm interested in that given psychic phenomena is
because psychic phenomena, the word psychic really just means it's
about your psyche. It's about this internal sense, this innerspace.
And sometimes there are experiences that people have was suggests

(11:02):
that you're not that your senses are don't end at
the end of your skin. It keeps going, and more importantly,
it keeps going in ways that begin to sound like
some of the strangeness in quantum mechanics. Namely, it's non local.
It's not limited to space and time.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
Right, my friend Mariah Canal, who you know by chance,
I thank you Mariah for for connecting us Dean, the
two of us through Mariah. She is a psychic and she,
you know, a more medium I think is a word
that she prefers. Actually, you know, she's able to go

(11:40):
into spaces and sense whether there's another consciousness there that's
not visible, that's not in physical form. She's also undergone,
you know, brain scans and other studies. You know, she
participates in the scientific side of things as a subject,
which is quite brave, and you know he respect her

(12:01):
so much for that because she seeks to bring credibilitability
to this. So for you, where is that credibility right now?
What do scientists have to offer that says, hey, look,
this is worth investigating.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Well, it's worth investigating because when you do surveys asking
what do people believe about these things, generally it's a
large minority, like forty percent or so, depending on what
exactly what it is you're asking about their belief But
if you do a different kind of survey and you
ask have you ever had an experience of and then

(12:39):
fill in the blank feeling of being stared at picking
up the phone and knowing who's calling without listening to
the ringtone, precognitive dream, those kinds of things, you're working
way above ninety percent, and so people at least have
had one experience of that type. Sure, this the same
ninety percent is reported by scientists and engineers and academics

(13:02):
across the board. So this is simply a human thing
that happens. The difference is if you talk to someone
who may be a physicist and they've been brought up
in the idea that the world is purely physical and
material and you're the brain and that's the end of it.
They will have those experiences, but they'll usually then say, well,

(13:22):
it's a coincidence, it's a mistake, it's a memory hiccup,
it's this and that and whatever. And it is true
that sometimes those experiences like strange synchronicities, really are coincidences
because they happen. So there's a whole list of possibilities.
Where it becomes interesting is you hear people telling these

(13:44):
kinds of experiences, especially if they happen repeatedly to somebody,
where people in the same family will report the same experiences.
He said, well, I wonder if that really is some
kind of a mind to mind connection. And so that's
where we go into the laboratory. We want to find
out imprinciple when we create a protocol that gets rid
of coincidence and gets rid of sensory leakage, and gets

(14:07):
rid of all of the things that could be a
normal explanation. And we do those experiments and they still
show that there are connections telepathic and other types of connections. Well,
what do you What are we supposed to make of that?
What we make of it is there is evidence that
at least sometimes some of the experiences that people report
that transcend space and time are exactly what they appear

(14:30):
to be. Yeah, our minds, not our brains, but except
to some aspects of our minds and internal experience are
not limited to local physical structure or to local causality.
And that's where it gets most interesting in a scientific sense.
Is this no ocean of locality and causality?

Speaker 2 (14:52):
Right, and you've studied that, you've studied I think what
you did was, I forget the name of the study,
but you showed image and people's somatic response preceded their
conscious response, so it was like they could sense something

(15:13):
before you actually show them the image.

Speaker 1 (15:16):
You're talking about presentiment, presentiment. Yeah, so this is as
opposed to precognition, which is pre knowing, presentiment is pre feeling.
So it's it's having an internal feeling sense about something
about to unfold, which in the laboratory we can ensure
that it's not simply inference. It's not anticipation. It's again

(15:39):
not this, not this, a whole bunch of not those things,
because the image that will that you will see is
selected by a quantum process immediately before it's shown. And
so we're pulling calm and emotional pictures out of very
large pools of pictures. And we can show that the
the body unconsciously begins to respond appropriately to the emotionality

(16:04):
of the picture somewhere between five hundred milliseconds to ten
seconds in advance. And the response time depends on what
aspect of physiology that we're measuring.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
So sweat lands, I think right, well, that was one
of the.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
Well, that would be skin, skin conductance response.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, can you see anything? Do you measure the heart
rate or anything.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
Any physiological measure you can imagine it can part skin,
pupil dilation in the eye, the brain, all of it,
every aspect of your autonomic and central nervous system respond.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
So I put out the word for people to send
in some questions, and one of them was can he
speak to concrete physical examples that remove any doubt of
the claim that esp phenomena or psychological phenomena exists. Would

(17:05):
that constitute proof in your in your mind?

Speaker 1 (17:09):
Well, science is not about proof. Well, all that we
can do from a scientific perspective is create better and
better confidence that it is not this long list of
conventional possibilities, and then we're left over with something else.
And so the reason why we can't point to and say, well,
that was a psychic thing and this was not is

(17:32):
because we don't have a theory that adequate explains all
of it. We have many theories at this point, the
question is why which one are we going to go with?
But at least as far as confidence goes, what you
look for as a way within a scientific context to
gain confidence is you've created a protocol that seems to

(17:54):
exclude ordinary explanations, and then you get independent replications. So
we tend to start believing something if a whole bunch
of people are able to do similar experiments and you
get similar results. Now even a danger there is maybe
somebody's making the same mistake over and over again, like
nobody caught it. Well, that can happen. But fortunately, one

(18:17):
of the things that happens when you're working at the
edge of the known is that you get a whole
bunch of skepticism, which is appropriate. And so skeptics we'll
look at a paper or look at some report and say, well,
they forgot that maybe this was happening, and then if
you're lucky, they will be correct. Because you don't want

(18:38):
to spend time wasting your time making mistakes, and so
that becomes a loophole. So you close that loophole. This
happens in every discipline and physics. That happens all the time.
People are closing loopholes forever. Well, the same thing happens
in this realm. So you look at just one example.
In telepathy studies, there is seventy years of repeated studies

(19:01):
looking at a various type of telepathy experiment, the Gunsfeld
experiment that I talk about in my books. And so
in that case, from the earliest times until now, many
many skeptics have said many things. And by the way,
it's not as though those of us who are studying
these things aren't skeptical. Of course we're skeptical. That's the

(19:22):
tradition that any scientist goes through. You figure out, well,
I think this is right, but how could it be wrong?
And so we figure out, usually before somebody who has
a skeptic with a capital S, no, we've thought about
this already decades ago, and we know that that's not
the case. So you take the case of the guns
Felt telepathy experiment, and there are no additional loopholes that

(19:47):
skeptics or the capitals have brought to our attention that
we haven't already closed at this point for about forty years.
So we know how to do these things, including by
the way that sometimes we'll say, well, what can a magician?
Can he fake it? I you can figure out a
way of faking to think, So we invite magicians to
come in to specialize in deception and say, given this protocol,

(20:11):
this set up, this way of doing an experiment, could
you figure out a way of faking it? And so
the only way that they can do that is if
there are confederates. So we make sure in the lab,
well we don't have confederates of magicians who are trying
to fake it, otherwise it cannot be done. That's how
we internally gain confidence that the protocols are right.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
I'm sure you've seen this before. The Caroline Corey, for instance,
has tried to illustrate this where people put these kind
of goggles on that mass that block the light completely right,
and then they it seems but supposedly able to sort
of see without seeing have you seen any evidence of

(20:54):
that or have you been studied that in any way.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
I've been part of movie that Caroline made on this topic,
and I have colleagues who've seen people up close and
personal doing.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
These superhuman right, yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
So I've seen people who appear to be legitimate and
they're doing it. I've seen lots and lots of videos
where people are clearly faking it. Now, maybe they don't
know that they're faking it, although I suspect in some
cases they do. So it's a mixture. Anytime that somebody
presents something to us as though I can do this

(21:32):
one hundred percent of the time, almost always, not going
to say always, but almost always, they are faking it
or they're deluding themselves because these phenomena are not that strong,
they're not that precise, and even the best remote viewers
in the world, some of whom I know, will admit
that they could be extraordinarily accurate maybe sixty percent of

(21:55):
the time and forty percent of the time not. And
more importantly, they don't know it. So there's a lot
of noise in our ability to be non local. But
that's why we go into the lab and we able
to gather enough data where we can eventually make an

(22:17):
assessment as yeah, this is a real thing, and if
it were one hundred percent of the time, we wouldn't
believe any of it. I mean, after all, it's it's
take a completely normal skill, like in the Olympics, if
somebody always want they always every single time won, they
become the champion of the world. It's like occasionally somebody

(22:39):
will win a whole bunch of gold medals. So that
is partially based on their physicality after they become a champion.
Most of the rest of it is psychological. They psych
out the competition, so it's not that they're physically better,
they have a different mental state and they're able to
basically bowl over for people that way, because otherwise, if

(23:02):
that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be watching sports or
betting on it, right.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
So to try to wrap my head around the statistical
side of this, where you know someone could perform certain
you know, parasitological feats, but not so consistently, which makes
it more difficult to study because they may or may
not understand why. They don't know how they're doing it,
and they're not sure why. They're more tuned in one

(23:28):
day versus another day. Is that kind of like you
know a basketball player who can hit a three shot
all net, you know, you know three out of ten times.
Is it akin to that?

Speaker 1 (23:41):
Well, yeah, it's like getting the best best baseball players
will have a hit rate of maybe three hundred m Well,
so what's happening for the rest of the time.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
Right, So you can't say they can't do it, because.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
I mean, they're they're doing a different goal job and
they're trying to hit a ball it's coming at them
for almost one hundred miles an hour. Nevertheless, they've been
training since they've been teenagers, and they're in super physical shape,
and they still can't do it by design. So it
should not be difficult to understand. And how anybody who

(24:17):
does any kind of performance, whether it's mental or physical.
We're not machines, and even machines break down occasionally, so
you know, why would we expect one hundred percent anything.
It's not at that level of control.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
But there is something, right, we are a ritualistic species. I,
for instance, just do some here. So give myself as
an example. You know, I was raised religious Catholic, but
I'm not anymore but I am someone who is in
addiction recovery and for many years now, and what I

(24:51):
found was that I didn't have to believe in a
big g God. Right if I just pretended to belie
leave in something bigger than myself, it had it had
an effect. It had a very legitimate effect on my
recovery process. Uh, And I still to this day, I
listened to do age music, light candles. I have little

(25:13):
things that I like to do, and I feel better,
you know, even if I don't believe in some you know,
grand operating system created by you know, a monothetic being.
So is is there something kind of like pre programmed
in us to like tune into a bigger consciousness.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
Well, we our lives are full of stress and uncertainty.
There's only we know death and taxes are coming regardless,
and we hope that even after death or no taxes,
I hope, I hope not so. So, yeah, we're we're
looking for ways of gaining control and some certainty in

(25:59):
our lives. Everyone does that just by virtue of being alive.
So it's slightly different than the experiences that people have. So,
as you've said, some people be quite religious and have
a psychic experience and attribute it to one or more gods.
Somebody who's totally atheistic will have exactly the same experience

(26:23):
and they don't generally attribute it to anything like it's
like it's a thing, it happened, But it doesn't. It
doesn't require a spiritual path, it doesn't require belief in
this or that, doesn't require anything. It only requires that
you have experience, which most I mean, they're not that
many zombies walking around, but maybe even zombies have inner experience,

(26:46):
who knows. So it's not so it can be interpreted.
The experience is interpreted depending on what direction you're coming from,
because I mean, I've talked to people who are quite
profoundly religious in different religion and they have exactly the
same experience as as scientists who may not subscribe to
any religion at all, they usually, but not always, subscribe

(27:11):
to a spiritual tradition as a result. So you mentioned
about Catholicism, and Catholicism part of the Catechism says don't
pay any attention to this stuff because it's demonic part
of the catechism, and yet it happens. So it's not
surprising that some people will get completely freaked out by

(27:32):
having something like a precognitive dream, and then they can
kind of split in two directions three directions. One is,
I'm going to completely ignore this because it's demonic and
I don't have anything to do with it. That's one
direction I've seen that. Another direction is, oh, I'm Jesus,
and then they become delusional and us in an institution.
And then the third direction is they become increasingly interested in, well,

(27:55):
what does science have to say about this? Because even
if you're a profoundly religious in today's world, you will
look to science for some some answers that maybe you
can't find in the Bible or your priest won't talk
to you about it. So what my perspective is, I'm
not a religious person at all. It wasn't raised that way.
I kind of understand religious history and the reason why

(28:17):
people are involved in religion. I don't. I mean, I'm
looking I'm studying natural phenomena, not supernatural, because it's something
we can study. So yeah, so I mean that's that's
my perspective.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
Well, it's interesting you're talking about if I had a
precognitive dream of some sort and that someone might just say, well,
that's the devil or you're you know, something possessed you
while you're sleeping and committed this act of evil magic.

Speaker 1 (28:46):
Where it's prophecy or you're a prophet.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
Right, But so the church deems you a prophet, then
you're cool, you're good, say, then you're okay. If not,
then you're you're you're evil? You know, yes, right, that.

Speaker 1 (28:59):
Was a challenge of people during the Inquisition, right, It's
they're talking about exactly the same phenomena. And so if
you're lucky and you somehow bring it within the fold
of the church, if you're really lucky, you'll end up
being a saint because you were demonstrating these charisms. If
you're not lucky, because you're you also happen to be

(29:20):
a pagan or something, they'll kill you.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
And they did, speaking of like you said earlier, as
scientists that do have these experiences. You mentioned it in
your book, and I remember hearing him say this when
I think it was Coast to Coast AM radio years ago.
Michael Shermer recalled him having a paranormal experience. But he's

(29:46):
still an atheist, right or or is that the right word?

Speaker 1 (29:51):
No, I would say he's a skeptic with a flaming
red s on his shirt. So some people revel in
the idea of debunking anything that they think is not mainstream.
And so in the case of some people who are religious,
will become super skeptics because they think it's demonic and

(30:15):
they want to make it go away. Some scientists become scientistic,
and so they start believing in today's science is a
kind of a dogma. And more importantly, they start they
read Wikipedia and they believe it, which is a serious mistake.
And unfortunately a lot of the chatbots today are sucking

(30:38):
up all of Wikipedia because it's all free, and so
what do they know. They know what Wikipedia says. So
for a lot of Wikipedia's pretty straightforward and reasonable. For
these kinds of controversial topics, it is so far off
the mark it's not even funny. But so the way
that I deal with something like chat chip, I'll say, well,

(31:02):
what do you think is the current understanding about telepathy?
And I'll immediately parrot back what it read in Wikipedia.
And then so I will challenge it and I'll say,
well what about this paper that was published here? And
it comes back and said, oh yeah, yeah, so that
does change it a little bit, and what about this
paper and this meta analysis and this and that. In
five minutes, I can get CHATGBT to completely reverse what

(31:28):
it had originally said, because it's coming back with the
simplest possible explanation, which is mostly Wikipedia. But it's easy
to have it reverse its opinion once you start pointing out, well,
you're actually not giving us the whole story. You're giving
us what amounts to a canned story. Because that's the
way that the training works on these large language models.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
In a sense, it's like historical or informative activism and
activism in a way because the work that you're doing
to convince you at GBT that it is wrong, it
is actually really important because that that gets it learns right.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
No, are you kidding? Well, I will, I'll have no,
I'll have a long, long series of discussions with a
chatbot pick your choice, really, and then when we finish
it and it is completely reversed this position, I'll say,
are you going to remember this?

Speaker 2 (32:21):
No, I've never thought to ask that.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
Yeah, it will remember some things if I say to
a chatbot, remember that. I primarily use matt Lab version
twenty twenty five A as my coding preference. It'll remember that,
and I'll remember things like what my preferences are. If
I finish a long discussion about a scientific topic, I'll say, well,

(32:46):
you remember this conversation and incorporate it into the way
that you respond to the same question tomorrow. To me,
it might if I tell it specifically, remember this chat
this is interesting if you if you say, well, well,
somebody else, will you respond? No? It doesn't. Now they
do that for a reason. They do it partially because

(33:08):
they don't They each AI is slightly different, but in general,
they don't want the chatbots at this point to be
usurped in the way that Wikipedia is, because otherwise you'll
have a bunch of people who will be pushing constantly
certain storylines, and if you have enough people pushing certain

(33:28):
storylines long enough, you change what it has learned. And
so they don't want to do that, and so they don't.
So yeah, so it's annoying because you'll talk to a
chatbot for a while and finally get it to change
its mind because it wasn't thinking correctly, and then forgets Well.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
Then that's perfect evidence of the fact that it's not intelligent, right,
It can't think for itself. But it can't really rationalize.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
No, it's algorithm. So I mean it's a computer. It's
a fancy computer program, that's all it is. I mean,
even the best machine learning that we have now, with
some of which is astonishing and how good it is,
it's a classical computer. When we have quantum computers, that
may change everything because now you're dealing with a computation

(34:21):
that is not only much much faster, but also non local,
in which case it raises the possibility that maybe the
reason why we have psychic abilities is because our brain
is operating partially quantumly like everything else is. But a
classical computer is specifically not using quantum processes in the

(34:43):
processing aspects of it. The computation is not quantum. The
semiconductors are quantum, like the elements within it are quantum,
but all of the quantumness is taken out as part
of the computational process.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
So then is there a lea for the quantum computer
in consciousness studies? Could that be a yeah?

Speaker 1 (35:04):
Yeah, no, that is the leading edge. So you find
like Google their doing a deep mind is where they're
doing advanced computing, and every major computing and technological company
has initiatives in this area, and we get contacted all
the time by people are saying, well, how would we

(35:24):
know if this becomes conscious? And our answer is and
they already have thought of this, say well, classical computers
are not conscious. They'll be like saying your iPhone is conscious. No,
they can simulate it sometimes pretty good. But when it
becomes a quantum computing it becomes much much closer to
a living system, because we now know living systems have

(35:47):
all kinds of quantumness in us. Maybe that's maybe that's
the key to the difference between a sentient system and
a non sentient system. And it's a leading edge question.
We don't know if the answer what that answer is,
yet I would I would not be surprised if the
moment we start having quantum AI, we're going to be
surprised with all kinds of.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
Things scary or you hope are you hopeful that it'll
be a positive future.

Speaker 1 (36:15):
People are already scared about classical AI, artificial general intelligence
or super intelligence. For people who are working in the
field are quite frightened about it. And it's not so
much that we even need quantum computing at this point.
We're afraid of what happens when there are machines that

(36:37):
are fully connected with the Internet that can think and
do things faster than we can, a lot faster. And
so that's the theme of sky Net in the Terminator series,
that it's somehow it doesn't necessarily need to wake up
and be conscious. It just needs to be much much
faster than we are and could do things faster than
we are. And we already know that there's a lot

(36:58):
of AI that's going in our power systems and our
infrastructure and a military and so on. And that's kind
of frightening, right.

Speaker 2 (37:07):
Almost like it's a virus in a sense where it
just kind of kind of goes rogue and does its
own thing, not because it has a feeling about something
that has a true motive.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
Right. Well, Also that even even non AI systems oftentimes
will have millions of lines of code and nobody knows
exactly how it works anymore.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
Did you see the video of the that robot that
started like chopping its hands and arms in the air
as it as if it was fighting. That was freaky
as act. Did you see that?

Speaker 1 (37:37):
Yeah? But I can't tell what's AI videos and real
videos anymore. So I don't know what to make I think,
I think.

Speaker 2 (37:43):
It was real. I don't know. But that's another annoying
thing is that we have to constantly fact check. It's like,
my gosh, how much more time do we have in
the day, you know?

Speaker 1 (37:52):
Yeah, Yeah, and even AI sometimes has trouble figuring it out. Yeah,
they're if it's looking at a video, that's one thing.
It's playing a video, it could figure it out because
there's all kinds of hidden stuff behind scenes. Just like
if you if you grab something off of chat GBT,
there's there's lots of hidden characters in there that in
AI can look at and say, well, this this came

(38:13):
from this chatbot unless you tell it make a clean
copy and don't put anything else in there, and then
it'll do it, and then it's hard to detect.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
So regarding consciousness, if form follows function, doesn't make sense
that consciousness is a fundamental force of some sort and
our and our reality are the fact that we can
even think that our brains even exist as they are.
Is that is that form following the function of consciousness.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
At this point, we don't know what the function of
consciousness is.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Well, we don't really know. We don't totally understand gravity either.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
Right, well, at fundamental levels, we don't unders in anything.
What's an electron? Why does it have a charge? These
start pushing into the direction of why science doesn't answer why.
It tries to explain regularities that we can see make
models of it, but when it comes to real fundamentals,
like why is there anything? Why do we have consciousness?

(39:19):
We don't know. So I would say that the models
of consciousness that I tend to gravitate towards say something
like the reality with the capital R is like a
fabric that's made of threads that go in opposite directions.
One is consciousness, one is matter. It's like mind and

(39:40):
matter together are creating the world as we experience it,
or as best as we can understand it. So that's
like why I use the subtitle in my book is
about is how the mind weaves the fabric of reality,
because it's something like that, like reality is at a
very complex tap. It absolutely has something like matter in it,

(40:05):
hunks of stuff, but it also has other things in it,
and so neither one by themselves makes any sense, like
both of them are necessary. So this is from a
philosophical perspective it's called dual aspect monism, otherwise sometimes called
neutral monism. It's one of the philosophies of reality. It's
an ontological state. So what I like to point out

(40:29):
sometimes physicists are very skeptical about this, and I remind
them that almost all of the founders of quantum mechanics
were philosophical idealists. That means, like Max Planck had said,
and many others Shorting or In Heisenberg, and all of them,
they believe that at the fundamentally, all there is is consciousness.

(40:52):
That is the fundamental and everything else is in inference,
including all of our laws, are our sense of what
the physical world is like. It's an inference that we're making.
In perceptual psychology, it's easy to show that most of
what we're looking at as a cartoon, there's like billions
of times additional information that it's impinging on us. But

(41:16):
by the time it hits our senses and the time
it's reduced through our nervous system and reaches our brain
we get a picture of it. It's like one billionth
of what's there. So we're missing a huge amount of
stuff which is out there, and all of this becomes
a cartoon. It's you know, that's why you can go

(41:36):
into VR and after five minutes it feels like it's normal.
But it's even a worse cartoon than the one we're
at here. But we could easily imagine in ten or
fifteen years we'll have the same resolution, the same everything
in VR, which is why people like Don Hoffman are
now saying that basically we already live in a simulation.

(42:00):
I know what the resolution of our eyes are, we
know what the computing power of the brain is. We'll
be able to simulate all of that up the wazoo
and end up essentially in the matrix.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
Will end up in the matrix, meaning like we will
be able to kind of plug into our own simulator.

Speaker 1 (42:17):
We'll be able to plug into something which is indistinguishable
from not being plugged into whatever that is. Yes, VR
will become that good.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
Because VR hasn't really caught on, you know, not really.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
Depends on who you hang out with.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
But if we're looking at just the mass public, like
remember when three D was a big fad selling three
D TVs. This is about like eight years ago. Everywhere
you went three D TV, three D and they thought
everyone was going to for whatever reason, people don't like
to put on goggles, you know, and do that at
home or put on the VR.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
It wasn't good enough. The absolute leading edge of VR
now is really good. Even things like an Oculus, Oculus two,
are Oculus three their games mostly but as resolution, particularly
visual resolution, increases, it's very easy to forget that you're

(43:15):
in VR.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Well, that's an interesting question. So I remember when The
Hobbit came out, Peter Jackson did a forty eight frames
per second version of it, and we went to see
that before seeing the twenty four frames per second, and
I remember sitting there in the theater like it was
almost the visual was almost like I was tripping right.

(43:39):
It was just so hyper real. It made me feel
uncomfortable and it took a while to get used to it.
And then when I went back and watched the film
again in twenty four frames per second, I actually enjoyed
that version better. Yeah, Ken, our brand's handle like a
one on one simulation of reality.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
Well, event yeah, you get used to it pretty quick. So,
like it's true, a couple of years ago there are
a lot of superhero movies that were in three D
and the colors souped up and sometimes the frame rate
is higher. And I remember after one of those movies
had ended, I was walking outside and I was thinking,
everything is so dull. It's like it's flat and dull,

(44:18):
and I'm looking at the real world out there, because
I had learned over the course of two and a
half hours of becoming used to the idea of a
very vivid, very immersive environment, and it kind of got
used to it. I said, Oh, this is pretty good.
And then you go outside and you say, ooh, I
don't like this reality at all because it's already tune

(44:39):
this up somehow or something.

Speaker 2 (44:41):
That's why James Cameron keeps winning, because people just want
to get back into.

Speaker 1 (44:44):
That, to that reality, right, yeah, I guess yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
So the placebo effect. Scientists seem to just generally accept this,
you know, studies after studies, a million tons of studies
proving that if someone believes enough that if pill or
whatever they're giving is to improve their health, their health improves,

(45:10):
whether it's a placebo pill or not. And I wonder,
is that evidence of itself, that that consciousness physically affects
reality or is it something else? In my misunderstanding the
placebo effect.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Well, there's a difference then between consciousness as awareness internal
experience as compared to psychological reasons. So where we perceive
reality through many many filters. I mean, just the last time,

(45:50):
I looked like there's a hundred known biases that affect
what we actually end up seeing. The other thing is
that our bodies are ultimately built out of DNA, and
DNA is very complicated, but the proteins is what creates
the flesh of our body and our organs and everything.

(46:11):
That's only about five percent of our DNA. So ninety
five percent of DNA is what's called the entron sequence.
It's non coding, it doesn't create proteins, it's epigenetic switches essentially,
So these bits of DNA that are between the genes,
that's what it's called entron sequence. The intron sequence used

(46:32):
to be called junk DNA because it didn't know what
it did. Now we know that that that portion of
DNA is exceptionally sensitive to the environment, which includes the
psychological environment. So if you are told repeatedly or you
for whatever reason, you have this pill and this is
going to cure you, that becomes an environmental push and

(46:54):
that will end up actually revising your genetic structure. And
so combination of education, belief, environment, diet, all kinds of
things can reshape your genetic basis because it's essentially turning
genes on and off. And so if you think of this,

(47:17):
the physical structure is a bunch of proteins that have
been created by the body, and you have a way
of tweaking it. Go in with tweezers and you'll turn
this on, turn this off, and so on. You can
literally reshape the body.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
But it's still the mind, right, that's a part of
that equation that the mind, because you can say, yes,
it's psychological, but it's the mind which is so far
it's this sort of unintangible thing.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
Yeah, you have to you have to define the difference
then between awareness the mind cognition. I mean, there's many
many layers in there. So it is true that your belief,
which is a mental aspect, that too can reshape your
genetic basis and therefore your body as a result of

(48:09):
turning on aspects of your entron sequence, which in turn
affects your genes. So if somebody was highly depressed, their
body eventually is not going to feel very good because
their genetic makeup is being changed. If they do something
whatever it happens to be, and they go on vacation
or whatever, and they suddenly then lift that they feel

(48:31):
much much better because the body physical body is not
working a lot better because now their entron sequence or
epigenetics has switched them into another state. I mean, that's
kind of that's a simplistic way of thinking about it.
But we now know that there are people doing genetic
engineering new kinds of therapies, including a company that I

(48:54):
co founded is doing this for psychiatric indications. You know,
one of the problems as you get older is neurodegeneration.
Portions of your brain stop working so good and you
end up with things like dementia. Well, we have a
pretty good idea about how to fix that, and has
to do with changing what's going on in the hippocampus,

(49:15):
which is the part of the brain that is able
to create and soore memories, so that becomes hyperactive, it
starts falling apart. Well, we can repair that, and we
do that in using genetic engineering techniques which work directly
on receptors in the brain. You can fix it. Memory

(49:35):
comes back, so it has improved, and.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
I haven't heard of this genetic engineering.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
Oh yeah, So the leading edge now in not so
much in standard pharmaceuticals, but every pharma company and lots
and lots of biotech companies are using methods to revise
how genes are working in the body. So the ones
that tend to be heard about in the press, or
things like sickle cell anemia YEA or COPD and some

(50:08):
other diseases that are caused sometimes by a single gene
that was just the mutant. It's not working right, So
we can go in now and repare the gene. We
can change it. So somebody at sickle cell anemia no
longer has that.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
It's gone well, I said, yeah, you know, I guess
for the longest time. Wasn't plaque the explanation A plaque
that calls the dementia or Alzheimer's?

Speaker 1 (50:35):
Yeah, and that's almost certainly wrong. So it's not that
this was a problem with correlation versus causation. Is there
additional kinds of plaque that show up in the brains
of people at Alzheimer's? Yes? Did it cause it? We're
thinking probably not. It may be a side effect where

(50:55):
the brain is trying to protect itself using these plaques
from some thing else. So what's the something else? Could
be bacteria, it could be a whole long list of
things where what we're seeing then, as the amyloid plaques
and all of that stuff, could be a side effect
of what the body is trying to do to fix itself.

Speaker 2 (51:18):
Where does the gene splicing come in there? Like do
is that something gets preventative only or can.

Speaker 1 (51:24):
It be you can use different genetic methods now to
replace genes that are defective and literally fix it permanently.
That's being used in some cases of serious illnesses that
otherwise you would die, like fatal genetic mistakes that can
be fixed.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
So people today who I'm just thinking of someone in
my own life who have been diagnosed with either dementia
or Alzheimer's, there's a genetic solution on the horizon or
on the.

Speaker 1 (52:02):
Horizon on the horizon. So we've got to the point
now where we're ready to go into human clinical trials,
but it costs a lot of money to do that.
We're talking about millions of dollars to do that. So
it's difficult to raise money for new classes of treatments

(52:22):
we know at this point because we're a pre clinical company.
It's that means before going into human trials, from a
pre clinical perspective, we have an enormous amount of data
that this will work. We also know that it works
in human neurons because you can put human neurons in
a dish, so we know it works there. Getting to
the next stage requires doing studies with non human primates

(52:45):
euphemism for monkeys, and you have to do that because
it's required by the NIH in order to create a drug,
and because it's the closest that you can come to
human physiology and human brain structure. Because we're primates too.
We would like to avoid that because we don't want
to harm anything. We don't want to use animals for testing,

(53:08):
but we're obligated to. We have to. So after we
pass all of that, then we can do human clinical trials.
We're pretty sure at this point since we're not only
using temporary fixes using RNA, which tends to degrade after
a while, so you would revert back to wherever you were,
But it means for a period of weeks or months

(53:30):
or longer, you can revise elements of the brain that
have been falling apart as a result usually of age,
and you can repair that. And then we find at
least in mice and rats, which is what we generally use,
they get significantly improved memory, over one hundred percent improvement.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
I could use that, Dean honest s Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
And simultaneously a significant reduction in an anxiety at the
same time.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
That's really interesting. So, like, I'm kind of quite serious.
So during the pandemic, I don't know if it was
exposure to coronavirus or what have you, but I was
experiencing very intense brain fog to the point where, you know,
I was starting to try different things, different diets, and
and finally my wife was like, try gluten free and
that made a big difference. I'm also leaning much more

(54:24):
towards eating more not full time, but eating more keto,
and that seems to help out a little bit. I
boost my vitamin D an extraordinary amount. That seems to
be helping as well. But it's kind of been an
ongoing fit struggle. It's much much improved, and you know,
there's so many factors that can go into these things.

(54:44):
Does it matter, Like if someone's experiencing brain fog, doesn't
matter what the cause is.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
OK. Yeah, Okay, well, yeah, the problem with brain fog is,
like a lot of diseases, there are men many reasons
why that could happen, and so we're only only very
slowly beginning to figure out that that. First of all,
that is the thing, because for a long time people
didn't even believe in long COVID. Now we see that

(55:13):
it is an actual real thing, and there are many
reasons why you could end up with brain fog. And yeah,
I've had friends who've had it too, and as academics,
it could do anything.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
For six months, it was intense. Yeah, yeah, you know,
thank god for automatacity.

Speaker 1 (55:30):
You know. But yeah, this is why doctors usually default
to take an aspir and call me in the morning,
because most of the time we reset. Sometimes it takes longer.
But can we figure out what that is and then
develop genetic ways of souping up the system to fix
it quicker? Absolutely we can. And all I mean all

(55:54):
it takes in quotes is money is research.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
Hey, you know Elon Musk and his neuralink investment, You
would think that he would want to donate some of
that money towards this sort of research because it's actually
probably be integrated with the work he's doing.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
With neurinet, you'd think so, I wouldn't you.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
Yeah, So I want to get to some questions that
were submitted in advance. So I have a question here
from oop cap Brooks and says, does Dean believe or
have proof that healing energy work can actually benefit someone? So,

(56:33):
like reiki, quantum healing, things of that nature, can one
person transfer healing energy to another or is it simply
a placebo effect?

Speaker 1 (56:42):
Well, we did a study and I'm aware of the
literature on that, especially reiki, jo ray, therapeutic touch and
so on. So we did a study with people who
were recruited, almost two hundred people with carpal tunnel syndrome.
So they had hand and risk pain. Hands very difficult
to treat. I mean, you can do surgery on it

(57:03):
and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So we
figured it was a good illness or disease model because
it's pretty obvious. So we ended up with seventeen different
kinds of healers across the board, every kind of spiritual, energetic,
psychic healer you can imagine. Each of them worked with
one patient or like generally over two two hundred patients

(57:30):
but the seventeen people. So over a period of weeks,
each of the healers worked with a batch five, six,
seven patients and we weren't tracking like who won the
healing sweepstakes. We're just looking overall two things. One was
how did pain change in the people who were being healed?

(57:53):
So half an hour that's all that they got from
each healer. Well, so did change? Yes, extremely significant reduction
in pain. And we traced people over three weeks and
its sustained, so whatever happened worked. We also ask people
what were their expectations about this kind of healing, which

(58:15):
gets to the placebo effect. There's no correlation which says
it wasn't placebo because it wasn't that the people who
expected it to work got significantly better, and the ones
who said, I have no idea whether it's going to work,
they also got better. So something about the methods across
the board helped reduce pain. And that is what you

(58:36):
see generally when you look at the meta analysis on
many many studies, mostly with reiki, because that's been used
the most for these clinical trials for pain relief. It
does something for most people.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
Have you ever had any subjective experiences yourself in any
of these categories.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, So the healers are different, they have
different talents, and some of them do better than others.
But occasionally, healer we'll do amazing things. I mean, it's
like you can feel something that feels energetic, except that
we don't have instruments that can detect what that is.

(59:14):
So that's why I say that the energy that people
talk about is the feeling of energy felt energy, which
is not the same as like if I if I
take some kind of an instrument and I'm looking for
electric fields or something that's not it something else. We
don't know what that something else is.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
Well, I guess that's a problem in science, right, It's
like we've got protons, electrons, quirks, you know, theoretic gravitons
and all these these things. None of them seem to correlate.
Anything that's been measured or theorized by physicists does not
correlate with this kind of psychic phenomena. There's there's no

(59:52):
where for them to start to go, Okay, how do
we measure whatever this is?

Speaker 1 (59:56):
Yeah, that's a problem, and that's that's one of the
reasons why it's resisted as well, because we figure, well,
we already know the four forces of nature, and we
know that. What about energy? We know about this and that. No,
we don't. We know a few things that have certain regularities.
But science, like step back from science as a process.

(01:00:19):
It's really good at observation. It gets better and better
as you develop new instruments. There's an assumption, especially in physics,
but you see this in other disciplines as well. There's
an assumption that that's all there is, which we know
is not the case. We don't understand how where consciousness
comes from. So anybody is presenting a theory of everything,
you know, like the standard model in particle physics. Well, yeah,

(01:00:43):
that describes a subset of the physical world that we
currently are able to measure. It leaves out huge chunks.
And the other thing that's kind of annoying to me
is that an astrophysicist will say, well, we know enough
about the way that the universe works, so we can
predict what's happening a galaxy that's on the other end
of the universe. No, we don't have. They never watched

(01:01:06):
Star Trek. I mean, the whole point is you don't
know what you don't know but there's kind of an
arrogant assumption that we have the equations and we keep
testing it and everything works out. Well, No, we know
a subset, a special case. So the example I like

(01:01:28):
to use is, up until about the beginning of the
twentieth century, like nineteen hundred, people working in physics were
already advising their students not to go in the physics
because they already knew everything. We already know all equations,
it's all, it's finished. Well, everything changed around nineteen twenty

(01:01:50):
and whole bunch of new physics came along. And so
if you asked somebody who was a working physicist around
nineteen hundred, what do you think is going to happen
like in the next hundred years, what are we going
to get? Well, it's going to be more of the same. Well,
so you get back to the same person thirty or
forty years later, it is so radically different that they

(01:02:11):
would never ever have guessed what's about to happen. So
what they were not paying attention to were the anomalies,
the things that didn't quite fit what they assumed we'll
figure out some day. That is the history of science.
It is always happening, So are there anomalies today that
people in academia physics in particular are not paying much

(01:02:32):
a close attention to. Absolutely there are, And so what
is one of those areas psychic phenomena?

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
You know, it's so interesting. I agree with you one
hundred percent. Scientists will essentially speculate on something like a
Dyson sphere, right, or the idea like scientists you hear
them speak of, oh, type three are type two? Civilization
will be able to harness the power of the sun
or this and that, and it's like, how, well, we
don't know. I just think that that's probably what's going

(01:03:01):
to happen. And I don't see how that's any different
than it's actually worse, I think than some of the
parapsychological studies, where you actually have some evidence in your
hand to say that there is something there. Could that
something be that ties it all together? The reiki, the
oh my gosh, recognition all be part of the same

(01:03:24):
force of consciousness that's underlying reality.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
It may well be. Yeah, I mean, at least it's
probably a major factor when we start realizing that reality
is not just a physical thing, it's not just physics,
it's something beyond physics. We still are the very earliest
stages of understanding the difference between a living system and

(01:03:49):
a non living system. Up until very recently, it was
thought that only humans have consciousness. Well, then there's now
pretty good evidence that animals, most animals have some kind
of degree of internal sense. And now plants and insects
and virtually every form of sentient anything that we consider

(01:04:12):
to be a living creature has an internal state that
might all go all the way down the viruses, which
is sort of halfway between a living in a nounliving thing.
We don't know where that stops, which is why more
and more scientists are beginning to entertain the idea of panpsychism,
like everything all the way down to electronics.

Speaker 2 (01:04:32):
It's interesting that you're hearing more scientists speak openly about
that speculative theory. I think idealism goes all the way
back to slex Soocrates or Plato. It goes way back
in time.

Speaker 1 (01:04:45):
Yeah they were yeah, Plato, they were all idealistic.

Speaker 2 (01:04:48):
Right, right, So another question here I want to get
in Tiffany mac asks. Can consciousness influence physical reality through
intention of observation?

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
Okay, And we kind of touched on that a little
bit earlier, the science of magic. Your book you go
into much deeper.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
Oh yeah, I have a long, long chapter on this
whole thing about intention and attention.

Speaker 2 (01:05:13):
And yeah, when is the book coming out?

Speaker 1 (01:05:15):
Dean today?

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
Today? Literally today? Yeah, oh okay, fantastic. Then I would
definitely have to get my hands on it. And I
hope everyone listening follows your work be as honestly.

Speaker 1 (01:05:27):
And if you don't like to read, you can listen
to the audiobook.

Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
That's right. Hopefully we can get more people reading these
days those I have one more question here, and do
you have I know you don't like the word proof.
Do you have proof or believe that a loved one
who has passed on can deliver signs in any way,
shape or form, be the physical manifestations, a butterfly that

(01:05:51):
lands on you when you're thinking of that person, or
maybe a very realistic dream, any kind of signs.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
Well, I'm familiar with the literature on evidence for survival
after bodily death. There's a very large literature. There's something
like eight or nine different categories of evidence that people
can point to. I would say on composite it's intriguing

(01:06:20):
as to that maybe there is something that survives. There's
also a lot of problems with how we interpret that data, because,
for one thing, it's very strongly influenced by our motivated
need to want to believe that something continues, that we continue,
and that loved ones continue. So that's one thing that's

(01:06:42):
part of it. The more important part of it is
that the really compelling evidence for survival it is not
clear where the evidence comes from. And what I mean
is that if somebody reports a near death experience, it
sounds pretty good like they were dead and they had
something happen. We don't know when it happened. So the

(01:07:05):
people will report that the person was brain dead and
they drained all about it, all the blood out of
the body, and yet they saw all this stuff. We
don't know when they saw that. We're assuming that the
person is literally dead dead dead dead and that's when
the experience happened. That there is zero evidence that that
is the case. So people then say, well, but I

(01:07:26):
had not a body experience. We don't know when that happened.
Not only that, we know that in some cases of
remote viewing, you could have the sense that you're actually
not in your body anymore. But it's just a remote
viewing you project because we're projecting all of this right.
The case is true in mediumship, a medium will have
the experience of communicating with a departed loved one, and

(01:07:48):
we know through experiments that the information that they're getting
is valid, like the you know, proxy sitters and all
the methods. So we know that the information is valid.
We don't know where the information comes from. Maybe it's telepathy,
maybe it's clairvoyance. So what this says is you have
this big body of evidence about survival. A case can

(01:08:11):
be made that one hundred percent of it comes from
the living because it's a living that is reporting it.
We don't have dead people, truly dead people who are
coming back with information. Okay, because all of it can
be reinterpreted then as it's sigh in the living. And
so that's where I'm stuck on this. I know the

(01:08:31):
literature as well as anybody who's read all of it.
I also have read all the sigh literature, and I
don't know what. I don't know what the limits of
sigh information is. Like, we apparently can get information about
anything from anywhere, any space and time. Really talented people
can do that. So if somebody has a syn synchronicity

(01:08:56):
where something happens which they interpret as a communication have
your death, go for it. I mean, if it provides
comfort and you get the sense that this is Uncle
Joe who's trying to tell me something, there's nothing wrong
with accepting that. The question is if we step away
from that and somebody objectively looks at it and say, well,

(01:09:18):
do I believe in that that actually is Uncle Joe
doing that? The answer is, we don't know. We can't
objectively tell that for a lot of reasons, the main
one being and when somebody asked a similar question about
well that could that have been a telepathy? Well that
we can go into the lab living people and we
can show that that is the case. We don't know

(01:09:39):
how to show that with somebody who's actually dead, or
even to maybe it's not a living person, it's a
non human invisible entity of some type like what channelers
talk about.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
Yes, like something like ghosts, spirits, that sort of thing
are difficult to study.

Speaker 1 (01:10:01):
And even with ghosts, so I've been earlier in my
career did a number of haunting investigations in ancient castles
where bad things happened and there are stories of ghosts
for a long time. So the way we do that
is we knew we were going into a castle that
had some kind of a bad history, and there's certain
areas of the castle which were known to people would

(01:10:22):
see weird stuff, but they didn't tell us where. We
didn't want to know where. We don't know why. We
only know that this is maybe a haunted castle, maybe not.
So each of us goes in by ourselves and we
keep notes in it, usually three o'clock in the morning,
because that's your hormonal system is different, you're more sensitive
to such things, and we keep track of where do

(01:10:45):
we experience an anomaly. Yeah, many times people will come
back and say, it was that room on that floor
in front of this spot over here, I felt something weird.
I mean, so people are yeah, they're echoing what was
said over the many centuries. Sometimes people will see the
white lady or the gray lady, or thing that is

(01:11:07):
the shadowy shape of humanoid whatever. So then the next
day I go on with a bunch of instrumentation and say, well,
what's different that we can fick up physically in this space.
More often than not, it's either an electromagnetic anomaly it's
a spatial anomaly, meaning that we expect the floor to
be flat, but at certain spots it actually dips a

(01:11:29):
little bit and you can feel disoriented. Or it's magnetic.
So one of those three is like ninety percent of
the time. It's not one hundred percent. Sometimes we're picking
up weird stuff and we don't know why, But about
ninety percent of the time, the place where people feel
disoriented and have weird experiences can be explained by some

(01:11:50):
aspect of the environment, including in very old castles. So
castles turn out to be interesting because a lot of them,
especially in Scandinavia and the UK, we're made out of granite.
Granite is naturally radioactive, and so some of the places
that we found where people feel weird naturally higher than

(01:12:10):
average radioactive decay happening at that spot. So and you
go in and you're sort of you're trying to sense
how was one place dimmer than the other?

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
You can feel that, Yeah, why do I feel off?

Speaker 1 (01:12:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
Disoriented? Yeah? Is there a chance that some of the
older building structures are made of materials that might actually
pick up radio frequencies and kind of act as like a.

Speaker 1 (01:12:39):
Very common and newer structures. Is that the place where
somebody feels something odd. If you look outside the building,
that's where a step down transformer is. So it's pulling
in fifty thousand vaults and turning it into one hundred
and ten or whatever, and it's producing a huge magnetic
field and you can feel that too.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
Leave us with one thought, what would it be?

Speaker 1 (01:13:08):
Well, first of all, the experiences that we're talking about,
I mainly specialize in psychic experience, very strong overlap with
traditional magical ideas, which is why my latest book I
spent a little bit more time talking about traditional esoteric
magic as the same thing as psychic phenomena from a

(01:13:30):
different cultural perspective and different language, but the phenomena are
the same. The other thing is that last Tuesday, what
is it? Yeah, last Tuesday, a week ago from when
we were talking, I gave a talk at Harvard Medical School.
I was invited to a conference where it was about consciousness.

(01:13:51):
And the miracle was that. I said, well, I talk
about psychic phenomena and maybe even magic. And I said, yeah,
so is the world changing a little bit so that
you can talk about this stuff now in people's heads
don't explode in the academic world, and the answer is yes,
and people loved it. I could tell from the reaction

(01:14:11):
and from the audience that they're really, really into it.
So what this tells me is that we've known for
a long time that the experiences happened to everyone. It's
actually rare to find somebody who's never had any psychic
type experience. They may not think of it as psychic,
but that most people have these things. So science is

(01:14:34):
slowly developing the competency to be able to test and
find out whether, in principle, some of these things really
are non local consciousness experiences that in turn tells us
something about the nature of consciousness and more importantly, its
role in the physical world. So one of the points
of my latest book, then, is saying that the scientific

(01:14:57):
paradigm changes very slowly over time. It's it's pretty rare
that you find an actual paradigm shift. We are in
the midst of one right now. And the way you
can see this is through the number of mainstream thought
leaders across the board in the academic world who are

(01:15:17):
able to talk about consciousness openly now as a problem
of interest. That's new. It's even newer is the idea
that I can be invited to places like Harvard and
other mainstream outlets who are now seeing this as a
topic that's interesting to talk about. Yes. Yeah, we're in

(01:15:38):
the midst of a change.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
It's amazing how things have changed. Do you know Beatrice
Villa Villa Villa Role, I think that's her name. She's
an astronomer. She had studied these old plates astronomy uncle
plates that were taken from like the fifties and early

(01:16:04):
sixties that I think mostly from Harvard University and found
these kind of these lights that were anomalies that were
captured in the sky that after studying and studying and
studying it, they could not account for because at the
time we didn't have you know, you know one or
two you know, Russia got us got there first, was

(01:16:24):
satellites in there, so okay, so we rule out satellites,
and then they would have these anomalies kind of show
up and there was no other explanation that they can
determine other than something that's artificial in the sky during
that period, and they and she just had a paper
finally accepted at a peer review journal, and I just

(01:16:45):
remember the chatter leading up to that. She was extraordinarily frustrated,
like she was disinvited to conferences, like you know, really mistreated,
but finally made that breakthrough, you know, where their work
is being taken seriously, and I think that's fantastic, which
makes me wonder because you're focusing so much on parapsychology
and then you have this whole euthological movement that's going on.

(01:17:09):
Are they kind of in tandem or is that just
the coincidence. It's just our minds collectively society accepting all things.

Speaker 1 (01:17:19):
A little of both. It's a little of both. It's
mainly because we're hearing now in the and we've known
for a long time that there are aspects of consciousness,
mostly telepathic reports of people who've had some kind of
close encounter with the UFO. They get telepathic communications. So

(01:17:41):
it mostly has been pushed it's been pushed off by government,
and it's not actually so much government anymore, but there
have been let's say, legacy programs that have tried to
cast this into its farmer Bob who had a little
bit too much marijuana that day, and so that's but
that's not the case. I mean, there are plenty of

(01:18:02):
people in plenty of places who have said things like
they got getting messages from these lights in the sky
and a telepathic and blah blah blah. So there is
an overlap. Are they are both of these stories going
to break, you know, like we're waiting for disclosure? Probably
not so at this meeting. After the conference at Harvard,

(01:18:25):
I went to another meeting at MIT and they at
the meeting was somebody who was in charge of one
of the early UAP investigation projects of the government that
was highly classified at the time, and so somebody asked them, well,
is like we on the verge of disclosure? And he

(01:18:46):
had a response which was kind of unexpected, and they
couldn't follow it up. He said, it's worse than you know,
So of course we had to say your reaction like that, Well,
what do you mean by that? What's worse than we know?
So he exchanged looks with somebody else who was involved
in that, and he shook his head and he said,

(01:19:06):
I can't, I can't go into it. So I have
no idea what that means either, and I.

Speaker 2 (01:19:13):
Still want to know.

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):
Well, what's worse than we know? I mean, yeah, So
I think what he's probably referring to is that and
the congressional hearings, we hear people talking about interesting things,
some of them I know, were quite credible and what
they're talking about. But then even in Congress, they'll say, well,
you know, how do you know about these biologics or
these whatevers and say, well, I can't. I have to

(01:19:37):
tell you that behind closed doors, what are they saying. Well,
we don't know what they're saying, but it's worse than
we know. I don't know what that means. It's just
that it makes it even more intriguing that there's something
else going on. Some of it may or may not
overlap with psychi stuff, because we also know that for

(01:20:00):
a very long time there has been this information coming
from not only our government but other governments right that
have been designed to deflect attention from the fact that
these phenomena exists.

Speaker 2 (01:20:12):
Well, I think maybe I'll interpret it just to make
myself feel better that it's the worst part is that
it's so much that the dissemination of that information would
just be such a paradigm shift, and it may cause,
you know, existential crisis in the large number of the populace.
Maybe that's what the fear might be because I always imagine, like,

(01:20:38):
let's say we're living in a simulation, right, what if
the UFO, if that's a thread that you pull and
solving the mystery of the UFO reveals the fact. You know,
if that thread takes you to the revelation that we're
living in a simulation, you would want to cover that
up because you would be deathly afraid of how we

(01:20:59):
would all act.

Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
Right, Yeah, So that that is one of the scenarios
that people would panic. I think I don't think that
would actually happen now. I mean because for a while
there was this big flap about drones that were flying
over cities, and then so you look at the comments
on those and then on social media, and every other

(01:21:21):
person was saying, well, does this mean nice to have
have to pay my rent? You know, It's like it's
becomes some blase at this point between the way the
entertainment portrays this stuff and just endless stories of things happening,
but nothing ever seems to occur that even if even
if on the nightly news there was a credible news source,

(01:21:42):
you see something land in the White House, and I mean,
like most people a wouldn't believe it no matter what,
And b Even if they did believe it, they'll still say,
well does this mean well, is this going to change
the price of eggs? You know what? That it's showing
that we we're in such a strange world now where

(01:22:03):
we don't nobody knows what to believe anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:22:06):
Yeah, the first the first thought's not going to be
I should quit my job.

Speaker 1 (01:22:10):
Maybe, Well, you know, are they are they here to
eat us? Are they going to come are we are
we now part of the meal? Or are they come
here to bring new chickens? You know What's there'll be
a lot of questions like that. I assume there may
be some disruption within religion unless people coming out saying,
by the way, now we're all Catholic or something. I mean,

(01:22:31):
we don't know what the effect would be, but would
there be panic? It is true that under some circumstances
people will panic at anything. Will it last? No, even
panic doesn't last unless you can't buy eggs. And then
apparently everybody just goes ape shit, right.

Speaker 2 (01:22:47):
Exactly, it's eggs as the red line.

Speaker 1 (01:22:49):
All right, you can't get eggs, I mean, forget gasoline
and bread and everything else. You've got to have eggs.
And then if you have the eggs, everything is fine.

Speaker 2 (01:23:00):
We feel better around the price of bags go down
because here in the Hudson Valley Man sometimes it gets expensive.

Speaker 1 (01:23:04):
Yeah, now you're paying a dollar an egg. Well then
not Yeah, you can't have eggs anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:23:11):
Doctor Raydon, thank you so much for coming on mistic
Lo Lounge. I really really appreciate this. Uh. To find
out more about doctor Dean Raiden, you can go to
his website Deanraiden dot com. And you can also find
your book The Science the Magic of the Science of
Magic right on your website.

Speaker 1 (01:23:29):
Okay, available in all stores, available in all stores.

Speaker 2 (01:23:32):
All right, Well, thank you so much and thank you
everybody for joining us. If you want to find out more,
you can follow me on Instagram at Coffee and UFO's podcast.
And this podcast is rebroadcast on the Next Network every
Thursday night to a m Eastern Standard time Friday mornings
until next time. Everyone, peace and love and live in

(01:23:54):
the Mystery.
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