Latest / Lucid Interval Podcast / The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religion, Sleep, and Dreams - Patrick McNamara, PhD

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The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religion, Sleep, and Dreams - Patrick McNamara, PhD · Lucid Interval Podcast

• speaker-0: So there are two abysses in you. One is infinitely deep and one is infinitely high, you might say. You know, transcendence and eminence. A a person is a is a is a mystery, but is an entity with fundamental dignity and value. That's something that's, you know, not accounted for in any theory of the universe. Now whether or not persons are new or have all always been there, but they're they're they're sort of outside of time. So we can't use temporal categories to understand personhood. But my my two main interests are sleep and dreams and psychology of religion, I suppose. speaker-1: Do you see those ⁓ subjects as tied together? speaker-0: Yeah, I think scholars would w who have studied the issue would agree that some religious ideas and beliefs are rooted in dreams. ⁓ if you if you go if you look at everything from Paleolithic cave art representations to you know r rock art, petroglyphs, if you look at the ethnograph ethnographies of small scale societies that were documented at you know at the turn of the last century before they all started to disappear. Dreams were abst absolutely central to these societies and they were considered as portals into a sort of spirit what we would call a spirit realm. And in this spirit realm you would encounter the spirits, the ghosts, the deities, what cognitive science of religion calls supernatural agents. speaker-1: Okay, Patrick, thank you for joining us. speaker-0: My pleasure. It's great to meet you. Great to talk to you. speaker-1: It's great to talk to you too. so when you meet people like at an academic conference and they ask you what your background is or what do you do, how do you answer that question? speaker-0: ⁓ good. I was trained in ⁓ behavioral neuroscience, but you know, that's basically human neuropsychology study of how the the brain relates to cognitive performance, but I very rapidly got into sleep medicine topics. And then ⁓ I got very interested in religion. And because my background was neuroscience, I, you know, immediately asked how does the brain mediate religious experiences and religious cognitions and religious beliefs and religious behaviors? And I found to my amazement, ⁓ this was way back in the late eighties, early nineties, that not much had been done on that. So I, you know, I started to apply standard ⁓ experimental neuropsych protocols to study of topics and religion and so my what I tell people at academic conferences is I ⁓ I'm both a sleep medicine guy and ⁓ psychology or neuropsychology of religion guy. But I also do, you know, typical studies and neuroscience, neuro psychology, you know, like what do the frontal lobes do? What you know. So ⁓ I I but my my two main interests are sleeping dreams and ⁓ psychology of religion, I suppose. speaker-1: Do you see those ⁓ subjects as tied together, as related? Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ can you tell me more? speaker-0: Yeah, for ⁓ I think scholars would who have studied the issue would agree that some religious ideas and beliefs are rooted in dreams. ⁓ if you if you go if you look at everything from Paleolithic cave art representations to you know r rock art petroglyphs, if you look at the ethnograph ethnographies of small scale societies ⁓ that were documented ⁓ you know at the turn of the last century before they all started to disappear, dreams were abst absolutely central to these societies and ⁓ they they were considered as portals into a sort of spirit what we would call a spirit realm. And in this spirit realm you would encounter the spirits, the ghosts, the deities, what cognitive science of religion calls supernatural agents. So my point is that up until the modern era, most human beings encountered the spirit realm through dreams. And I think that's still the case today. And so dreams are absolutely central to religious experiences and beliefs, in my opinion. speaker-1: Do you think that ⁓ I mean, I guess there's probably some cross pollination happening there too, because if you're in a culture where there's all kinds of I guess you should call them supernatural agents, that would be represented through art, right? Or culture or story, they probably show up in our dreams as well. but ⁓ I mean, do you have a sense that do you think dreams are kind of where religious experience began in human evolution? speaker-0: I don't know. ⁓ speaker-1: I love that answer. That's my favorite answer. speaker-0: I think there's there's absolutely no doubt that there's some deep connections there between what we call religious experiences and beliefs and what we call dream experiences. You know, there's a and scientists and me in particular have are now documenting those connections you know, in in relatively rigorous ways. But what are you know, what are the origins of religious beliefs and experience. That's a much deeper, more difficult question, and you know, for which there are lots of answers. But you know, some anthropologists have said yes, the the origins of religion are in dreams. Yeah, there there are many very good scientists who believe that. I mean very good scholars that believe that. And when you look at r religious traditions, ⁓ You certainly you know, they're they're littered with ⁓ accounts of dreams and at the beginning of most religious cults you'll find dream experiences. So I don't know what the origins of religion are. ⁓ I personally I think they're we can trace it back to Neanderthal ⁓ tribal practices and burial practices. but you know, that's very controversial position. speaker-1: Yeah, so I ⁓ I'm curious to know more about that. The Neanderthals, I they buried their dead. and can you tell us more about like why that would suggest a belief in something like an afterlife or what their practices are? I mean, how are we how are we methodologically intuiting that? speaker-0: the ⁓ the Neanderthal burials were not as elaborate as anatomically modern humans who were alive around the same time. You know, we're talking about fifty to a hundred thousand years ago, you know. So but they but the kinds of burials that have been well documented among the Neanderthals suggests belief in an afterlife because of the way the burials occurred. You know, like the ⁓ bones were found to be in like fetal positions, for example, you know, like ⁓ rather than just r randomly assorted or in in the burials. And and sometimes there were ⁓ burial goods with the interns, you know, individual. They weren't as elaborate as ⁓ you know anatomically modern humans burials were, but but they were there, you know, like beads and t ⁓ various types of tools with symbolic inscriptions on them and stuff like that. But in addition to that, there have been really well documented ⁓ Neanderthal sites that were associated with various c cults of worship of various types of animals, most particularly the bear. You know, because the Neanderthals populated northern latitudes for the most part. at least the you know the ones in the what we call Europe today and ⁓ northern Eurasia. And so they frequently encountered ⁓ bears and bears were you and when you look at ethnographies of modern hunter gatherers ⁓ in the northern latitudes, bears were considered ⁓ to be very much like human beings and and kinf kin to human beings. They could stand upright, they could manipulate things with their limbs, and they were, you know, master of the animals. They know, they were predators and were not preyed upon. so the bears were considered ⁓ special animals. And when when you look at Neanderthal sites, not often, but ⁓ v very frequently you will find shrines created to ⁓ bear skulls and bear paws. And so that indicates a kind of religious sensibility as well among the Neanderthals. speaker-1: Sure, yeah. I mean it's I mean one wonders, I wonder, if they thought of the bears as a deity in the sense that we would understand, or if it was just a figure that that maintained some sort of power or agency, like a supernatural agent, I suppose, is how we would we would think of it. That's that's how you said modern neuroscience thinks of deities. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well there's lots of controversy about that, but I mean, who knows what the Neanderthals thought of you know, but I my my own view is that they they saw it as a ki they saw it as other than human agent with supernormal powers. And, you know, w if you want to call that a deity, okay. but that's you know, the The ⁓ the be the bear also died and was resurrected because of their hibernation patterns. you know, so ⁓ Neanderthals ha ⁓ venerated the bear. You know, there's pretty good evidence for that. Now, whether or not that's the beginnings of religion, or whether or not they saw that as a deity, the modern ethnography suggests that they they probably did because ⁓ Modern or near modern hunter-gatherer societies venerated the bear and basically worshipped it, you know, like they they petitioned it for special favors, they had feasts in honor of it. there were s ⁓ special secret societies dedicated to the bear among many Native American tribes, for example. and all the sites that ⁓ where we find remains of ⁓ bear shrines suggests that they were visited repeatedly and offerings were made to bear skulls and you know, just the whole pin you know it it it makes sense that they were considered a special kind of agent. that we would today recognize as a kind of deity. speaker-1: So you have this symbol of this bear. And you know, it's interesting. I've been listening to this. I have a bear's tooth that was given to me by a medicine man out in the American Southwest and two years ago. ⁓ and that what's interesting is that bears mean something, I think, to pretty much every culture that knows what a bear is. That bear means something because it's a powerful animal. what I've always been fascinated by is I've been learning more about religion is There's kind of a universality to how we relate to these symbols, even when they mean slightly different things across cultures. do you think that speaks to something like more fundamental about the way that the human mind works? That that we have these symbols that are just kind of out there the way that like Carl Young thought of archetypes? speaker-0: Hmm. yeah, I I that's a really good question. I don't I don't know why there is this fundamental need, I mean the the standard explanation among cognitive science of religion people and psychology of religion people for why there is this fundamental need to petition supernormal agents for help. It's because life is hard. You know, li life is really hard and you know, it's it's scary and there's a lot of anxiety and you know, so ⁓ there are lots of experiments that show that when you increase mortality salience in an individual, they're much more open to believing in supernormal deities. You know. This is an old Freudian idea. Yeah, yeah. Old Freudian idea too, you know, but speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: religion comes out of sort o O C D type symptoms. And O C D ⁓ obsessive compulsive disorder is fundamentally an anxiety disorder. Yeah, like something's wrong with the current situation or with my world and so if I could only arrange things correctly, I could reduce the anxiety I'm feeling and some and you know, make things right with the world. So this this free floating anxiety creates the need to petition, you know, powers that be for help. You know, so I mean, that's a sort of common sense explanation for for ⁓ religion and religious ideas, but I you know, I don't think it explains everything. But it's certainly, you know, operative, I think. speaker-1: Yeah, the I mean it makes sense with the petitioning, but you have like a preliminary thing that you need, which is the belief that these agents are there. Like you have to be you have to be able you have to recognize agency, which I think speaks to something that just probably relates to our evolution, right? It's deeply adaptive for us to find agency in everything. Each other, I suppose. one of the things that I always struggle to explain to people, ⁓ we were talking a little bit before this, we started About when people ask about my own religious beliefs, and I say like, you know, I don't think beliefs all matter all that much to me. I'm interested in where belief comes from. but the idea of a supernatural agent that would be an agent as I would recognize it, to me seems unlikely. because that that's what a human would think. You know, like ⁓ the Neanderthals that were venerating a bear or bears probably thought that those bears were basically like them. I assume that they wanted the things that they wanted, like that you would offer make an offering to a deity. You have to assume that this is a being that would care about offerings. Yeah. You know, like there's just kind of a fundamental assumption that I think is sort of in our source code of how we operate as people that there's an agent there that wants things. and so that that is really, really fascinating to me that you know, I've heard that r people say the first religious practices were animistic. ⁓ can you explain what that like what that is? speaker-0: It's just the view that there's you know, mind and agency everywhere. Yeah. speaker-1: Mind and agency everywhere. So that kind of gets to the heart of what you study, right? I mean, ⁓ this idea of like there's a self and that I have a self and myself is talking to yourself and that somehow I assume burial rights kind of suggest that there's a belief that well, that self continues on outside of the body. ⁓ and it it's intuitive now. I mean, I think if you had a g a young child who ⁓ was burying a pet goldfish or something of that nature, would want whatever the goldfish's little house was they lived in to to be there so they would have it wherever they went. We just we understand it. ⁓ and it's there's there's something for me that seems very fundamentally human about this idea that the self lives on beyond the body. speaker-0: And to assume that there's mines everywhere. speaker-1: Yeah, in the trees and the rocks and the wind. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. And on other planets, other universes, you know. i and you know, I I think that that assumption is very anthropomorphic, of course, as you indicate. You know, and there's there's there's no reason to make that you know, make that assumption that the rest of the universe is going to be structured like our minds are structured. You know, our minds are s so sh socially constructed in many ways. And so we make the assumption that ⁓ when we interact with other powers that they're gonna behave like minds. You know, but that may not be the case at all for the rest You know, if there's life on other planets that they may not have a you know, kind of agentic like minds that we have. On the other hand, there's no reason to suppose that they won't. You know, we need to keep both possibilities active. You know, but science tells us that for most of the time it when we anthropomorphize, it's usually a mistake. You know, so w we we we s probably shouldn't assume that if there's life on other planets, they w they may not be constructed with the kinds of minds that we have. On the other hand, if ⁓ evolutionary laws operate throughout the universe, well there's ⁓ there's there's some reason to believe that evolutionary laws eventuate in the kinds of machines or quote unquote beings like animals and human beings. And animals and human beings have ⁓ strategic interests. And those strategic interests are what we call agency. So ⁓ maybe, you know, if if the rest of the universe operates according to what we understand as the you know the laws of natural selection, then you're gonna see ⁓ life evolved in terms of vehicles that carries information like genes that have strategic interests and therefore will be something like human beings. speaker-1: Well we'll have I guess that that's a really brilliant way to conceive of agency as just a strategic interest that of course relates to reproduction. and yet like also we have so many species on this earth now. there are very few that are that are relatively like us in the in the ways that we're talking about. Although there are some. I there I I wonder if you're aware of any of any studies or discussions around other mammal species that that appear to engage in religious behavior. Like I've heard things like elephants. ⁓ are you aware of any of these that you could share with us? speaker-0: Yeah, and I think that you know that elephants do seem to gather together at places of extreme natural beauty like waterfalls and engage in a kind of chorus of you know musical chorus of ⁓ i ⁓ they emit these sounds that it's almost o almost musical. But I don't you know, who knows if that's anything like what we're calling religion. Same with ⁓ chimpanzees, they they do they have similar behaviors and chimpanzees ⁓ also tend to mourn the w when they lose somebody you know, when one of their troop dies, sometimes you'll see evidence of grief and even sometimes burial. But you know whether or not that is due to belief in an afterlife or that it's just, you know, to keep the bugs down or, you know, keep right pestilence away or, you know, whatever, or predators away. Who knows? and I'm sure there's other examples, but I'm j I you know, I d I don't know speaker-1: Yeah. I I've I've thought I mean I've seen videos of elephants mourning their dead or appearing to mourn their dead. They bow. ⁓ it's an it's an interesting thing. And it's one of these questions is well if they're not if that's not what they're doing, what are they doing? Like what's the purpose? If not, then to mourn or at least to understand that this member of their family is is gone. Yeah. ⁓ and it does it it's kind of cool to think about like the foundations of what makes us religious kind of scaffolding themselves through mammalian evolution. speaker-0: You mentioned music. speaker-1: And that's one thing also that seems to me ubiquitous throughout religious ⁓ ceremonies and experiences, ⁓ at least in modern times. And I wonder if ⁓ there's something fundamentally there about music. 'Cause I think about harmony. To me, harmony is sound seem divine. You know, and maybe that's c a cultural thing because of choir music and Gregorian chants and things like that. But To me, even when I'm in a like a yoga class and we all do the ohm at the beginning and the end, there's a ⁓ moment there where it's kind of dysphonic, but then everybody's voice waves kind of in train. And my best explanation for that is and if you feel something, it's like wow. And my best explanation is it's when kind of an ego merges into a superego. Like you you're becoming part of something bigger and that seems to be blissful. And I've thought about also whales. Whales do this for like hours. They'll sing for like 30 hours and we They we don't really other than that maybe they think it's beautiful, we don't really seem to know why. speaker-0: Well, I you know I I have this new book just published ⁓ just a couple of weeks ago called From Groups to Gods. And the idea there is that ⁓ it's it's basically a study of the evolution of collective cognition and how ⁓ collectives can produce weak group minds or strong group minds. And w one of the things that religion does is it creates groups, you know, and enhances groups. There's a groupish quality to religion. And ⁓ one of the things music does in groups is enhance the group mind. Yeah, you know, the per perfect example of a group mind is if you have a if you have a musical group. Let's you know, let's take popular music, you know, like a like a jazz group or a you know, just a popular group like maybe a rock group or something. And if if all the let's say there's four members of this jazz ensemble or whatever and they're all f firing on all cylinders, they're improvising, but suddenly ⁓ the music takes on a life of its own and it's and it's basically producing itself. And the musicians, you if you ask them afterwards, if you say, Wow, that was that That was an amazing performance. How'd you guys do that? And they they'll s they'll say ⁓ I was just a vehicle. You know, the music just flowed through me. I I wasn't producing you know, I was producing it, but something else was inspired and it and I claim in this this new book that one possibility is that the group mu the group mind was formed and the group mind uses the musicians as vehicles to express something more than the sum of the individual parts. speaker-1: Is is there a way that we could measure that? Yeah. Or or or study it? Can you tell me? speaker-0: I go over I have a whole chapter on how to yeah how how group minds have been measured. y you can measure it in many different ways. ⁓ one of the emerging ways is hyperscanning, where you you scan you scan individuals who are in a musical group all at the same time while they're performing the same piece of music. And then you you you find that certain brain waves when certain brain waves entrain at the same time and certain ⁓ brain activation patterns coalesce at the same time, you get the group mind effect. speaker-1: Yeah. When they're they're basically vibrating in the same frequency. Literally. That sounds so you know, it sounds so woo woo, but that that's literally what we're talking about. Yeah. And you're just you can do that with EEG? speaker-0: It's been measured. It's not woo woo. You can do it with EEG, ⁓ R I, and it's been ⁓ groups have been found to have ⁓ personalities. There's ⁓ there's a very standardized measure called group cohesion, comes out of group psychology. You know, there's just just a it's it's been measured over and over and over again. So it's a real phenomenon. How to understand it is a different matter. You know. But but it's one possibility for why music has this ability to make us feel part of something larger. And religion exploits that to create stronger groups. speaker-1: And so I guess from an evolutionary perspective, group cohesion is adaptive. It's good. And I mean, I I've I've really begun to think of it as I think the average person would think when they h understand here or hear about evolution, they think it's like whichever organism is the strongest is gonna have offspring, but it really favors the gene. And it seems like in our species, the group, the tribe is what is what's speaker-0: Hell yeah. speaker-1: best vehicle for carrying the gene for not any one individual. So it makes a lot of sense that this, you know, our group, which would have been, what do we know, like a hundred people maybe, that that's we want to we want that to be very tight knit and and ⁓ have a lot of solidarity. But that also as you increase that, it also increases like antipathy towards out like members that are not members of the group, right? They those two things kind of go together. speaker-0: Absolutely. Yeah, we we we evolved in groups. That's why we have s social brains. Our our brains are you know, like ⁓ they our brains expect to be in a group, you know. We're and there's no understanding individual human beings without understanding the group context within which we evolved. ⁓ in that group context, you know, what you know in Paleolithic times it was probably you know tribal, what we would call tribal. And and and then it became larger ethnicities in the upper Paleolithic and then in the Neolithic transition, became small villages, you know, with the rise of agriculture. So that the the polities grew in size. But it always remained ⁓ intensely social. And you as an individual did better if you could develop a theory of group mind capacities. That is, if you could intuit or figure out what your group, your local group, was gonna do next, you could pass your genes better. Pass your dream genes along to the next generation better than somebody who could not and figure out what their group was going to do. And if in addition you could figure out what the rival group was going to do, particularly militarily, for example, you would do better. You could pass, you know. So the people who passed their genes along to us were the ones who were in involved in very strong what we call highly intuitative groups. That is groups that are have r ⁓ really strict boundaries to joining them. And if you were in the group, you directed your altruistic acts to other group members, and as you just pointed out, you directed your hostility to out groups. And so it was the competition between these groups that drove human evolution. speaker-1: Yeah. It it at the group level rather than the individual level. Yeah. And so from there you get things like division of labor eventually. And you know, there's some people who are better at some things. We're also we're sexually dimorphic. So the males and females would be doing doing different things to s to serve the group. Yep. and from there, I mean, you mentioned we've kind of had this ⁓ this evolution of the polity too. Like our our cities we've become cities, get gotten bigger. Do you think that what we would recognize now, I think most people who might be listening to this conversation are thinking when we talk about religion, they're thinking about something like Christianity. 'Cause it's just what maybe culturally what we're exposed to, which to me is is to me is a very organized religion. A lot of people will kind of rail against organized religion. Do you think the relative level of organization increased over time as the size of the groups got bigger, just as a as a more standardized way of holding them together? speaker-0: ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's there's some evidence that what we call b moralizing gods ⁓ evolved with the advent of larger organizations and larger polities. So you know, so one hypothesis about why these moralizing gods evolved was because they helped to police behaviors. of your in group. So if you were a member of a r religious group, ⁓ the the the ⁓ one of the main problems for groups is how to ⁓ rule out or get rid of free riders, people who, you know, want all the benefits of being in the group without contributing anything. So you need to get rid of those people. So one way is to have high boundaries to joining a group, you know To to join the group you you you you have to have certain type of hair, wear certain type of clothes, have really strange beliefs, really weird beliefs, ⁓ and you have to study certain scriptures over and over again. You know, you have to do all these things to show that you're a really good member, you know, of the group and that you really believe. But even then, even if you you do all those costly signaling behaviors, they're called. These are s signaling behaviors, saying, I'm a I'm a good member of the group, you know. Look at me, I wear all the right clothes, I have all the right beliefs, I have all the right scriptures. But even after all that, there's still a you know, you you could still be cheating on the side. So what evolution did was then develop these gods who could read your mind and see you at every second of the day. Like big policemen in the sky. You know, they they they had full omniscience. They they could see every individual, see all their sins, whether or not they were cheating. And and and so if you if you had these very ⁓ omniscient, powerful moralizing gods watching you all the time, you're less likely to cheat. That's You know, that's one hypothesis about why these moralizing gods evolved in these larger organizations. speaker-1: Yeah, it I loved everything you said. We were talking about the costly signaling. I've heard of that theory just in terms of like thinking of thinking of religion through an evolutionary lens, as we would with any human behavior. I mean, but just the question of like, well, why do why do we have it? And there are some things I was thinking about as you were talking about costly signaling. There are many religious rituals where people will cut themselves and let blood out. I mean, they'll they'll weaken themselves apparently for that purpose. And so it's it's it you know understandable why someone would be like, well, what the hell's the evolutionary benefit of that? But you know that if someone fasts for a week or or they cut themselves or they they willingly sacrifice their own life as there, you know, there's evidence that people do that. You're it's really obvious that they believe and it's it's like a very c obvious signal like, hey, I'm serious. I'm sincere. And it it relates to I think one of the things that our species has this huge problem with is That we can lie. And then you have the problem of how do you know when someone's telling the truth or not? It it's it's this it's this crazy thing that we just take for granted that we have we have theory of mind, so we know that other people don't know what we know, and so we lie, but they know that we might lie. And ⁓ so we come up with these these rituals, and that's how you justify, I mean, giving a portion of your food to the chief or to the to the to the medicine man ⁓ is just to show that you Because of course if the other people in your tribe don't trust you, ⁓ they might kick you out or just beat you to death. You know, I mean that like either way you're not gonna speaker-0: If you were kicked out of the group, that was one of the worst possible things that could happen. Yeah. I don't know if you ever ⁓ thought about social ostracism. You know, like that it's an extraordinarily painful experience, apparently. And ⁓ and you know, for the longest time ⁓ s scientists thought it was so painful be because y you know, you y in ev you know in Paleolithic times if you were excluded from your group you you would die. Probably. ⁓ but it's but it's also extraordinarily painful because the group mind itself has condemned you. You know, the the group as a whole has said you can't be part of us. And you're therefore you're lesser than human. You know, you're not only should you die, but you you know, you're lesser than human beings and and so your your whole lineage should be destro destroyed. It's something extraordinarily painful for human beings to be ostracized from a group. And it's not just because it means certain death, but it's, you know, it's shameful death, so to speak. And it's shameful because of this group mind phenomena. It's the group mind that does the condemnation, not a particular individual or two. It's the group as as a whole that ex you know, that gets rid of individuals. speaker-1: It makes it makes so much sense the way you're describing it. ⁓ so I know ⁓ I can you know a lot of this podcast involves topics about mental health. And I've had struggles with my mental health in the past and there was a period where I was very, very isolated and it's just horrible. It it's the it's could be catastrophic to anybody's mental health to be isolated. But I've never been ⁓ ostracized. I I am I'm here in Nashville, I'm in the in the American South. I know a lot of people who have been shunned. ⁓ by their religious communities, particularly in religious and and Christian ⁓ denominations. And and I mean, I know a lot of people who have had this experience, ⁓ primarily because of their sexuality or their gender identity, but sometimes just because they were it they asked the wrong questions. And there's something about, I think if you took an experience of someone being shunned by their their family and also the the people in their church, which are kind of one and the same. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: If they had been ⁓ rejected by all of those people as individuals, independent of some broader organization or group, I'm sure it would hurt, but it would in I mean it would hurt a lot, especially if it's your members of your family. But there's just a different level when it's everybody in this one collective that you're in that especially these these groups, and I'm thinking of like f fundamentalist Christian churches, Pentecostal churches, things like that. ⁓ speaker-0: Well, yeah speaker-1: There's very little socializing or connection outside. Like they they really pressure you to stay as part of the group. So when you lose them, you kind of lose everything. Yeah. And yeah, it's it's it must be blindingly painful. I mean, I just know I I'm thinking of a few individuals right now that are going through this. And this relates to something else that, you know, I'm eager to talk with you about, which is this sense of identity and how this relates to this concept of self. Because what I see a lot of these people doing is they'll change their names, like their first names. speaker-0: Okay. speaker-1: They'll j they'll completely take on a new identity. and it's almost as if it's kind of part of their grief process of losing their membership in this group, losing that was detachment that they become a new person. How do you think about the way that because you study the self, how do you think about the inner the intercourse between, you know, the individual self plus like the group identity? speaker-0: Yeah, the ⁓ one one thing I'd say is that ⁓ i if a person gets ostracized or canceled or whatever, ⁓ it it is so it it must be so painful that w ⁓ one way through must be a personal transformation. You know, you you and to become part of a new group, you you basically have to take on the approved identities. of the new group. You know, so if you if you if you get excluded from a small religious cult, you know, because you can no longer flourish in that small world, you get excluded. Well you go through a a crisis, you know, you go through pain I'm sure, but your since your whole identity was bound up in the old cult You've you've gotta undergo a personal transformation, develop a new identity, really. You know, ⁓ and and it just I mean, your question is about t it it seemed to me had a more general flavor to it, like how do groups shape, constrain or create personal identities. Yes. And they do it all the time. You know, and and to to Preserve your interior dignity and freedom from that all-encompassing group power to shape your identity and your choices and your belief structures. You've you've got to fight constantly. Because groups are so powerful for human beings. There y there's no way for you to b have any elbow room or any genuine. freedom un unless you're constantly struggling against whatever group you identify with. You know, so I the the the the optimum is to be a member of a group but not of it. You know, like to be able to transcend it but also be a member of it, to contribute to it. and allow whatever's true in it to enrich your self. But then to preserve that self and to grow, you need to you need to have horizons beyond the group. And most of us are being confronted with that particular choice in the modern world because most religious cults are dying off in the modern world. So, you know, people are searching around for, well, you know, I I no longer find my identity as you know, a a Jew or a Catholic or a Muslim or or you know or a Pentecostal or Charismatic or whatever. So let me look at paganism or let me look at the you know orthodoxy or let me you know the people are searching for new religious roots and they're not finding it. And so we're all being confronted with that question, like, who am I if I'm not rooted in an ethnicity or a you know or s or a family or a religious tradition? Am I just unmoored from all, you know, rootedness? And I'm just like this tiny individual in a you know globalized world facing you know these massive states. or who am I? And so the the question of what the self is, what identity is, how groups shape the self, constrain it, but also allow it to flourish, is at the Top of the agenda of the scientific agenda, in my view. That's one reason why consciousness research is so prevalent these days. speaker-1: Yeah, well so I'm curious to know if you have a like a definition or a working definition for what a self is and is it different from identity? speaker-0: Well that get that gets us r into really deep territory. I mean, f the c ⁓ for me, the c I I prefer scientific de definitions in general. You know, for for a scientist, for a neuroscientist in particular, a s a self is a predictive model of the individual confronting the world. And a what a predictive model is is that the brain p has to produce these simulations that we call expectancies or predictive models of what's going to happen next to them, given what's happened to them in the past. So that's the way the brain works is it's a prediction machine. You know, so it says, given everything I've already been through, or this this organism has already been through, what can we expect to happen next? And that model is essentially the self. It's what we call a self. And it's a combination of all what's happened to the body, all the bodily impulses, as well as what's happened to the individual socially and historically. And so you know, so it's this ensemble of all kinds of determinants and influence from genetics to you know personal to upbringing, you know, the h the whole gamut. And ⁓ but you can sum it all up and it's the self is a predictive model. speaker-1: So the that's a it's a of course that makes sense. Everything's kind of a predictive model. I know I'm even thinking of it. I that would make a lot of sense to me. ⁓ and I've thought of it in those terms with how people treat you. Right. Like just the your expectation of like of what I say, my name's Andrew and like the the identity, the the self that is attached to that idea, to me has almost everything to do with what other people would think of me or treat me the way other people would treat me, maybe. ⁓ but though, you know, you were talking about other things below that. And I'm like, yeah, I I guess it it does also relate to if I eat this particular kind of food, my stomach's gonna do this thing. Like there's, you know, it's kind of be an understanding that it's me eating the food and it's my stomach and not yours. but how much of this relates to like memory? I mean, is that is that kind of like the foundation our memories for all of this? I mean, if you could like take my body and my consciousness but sort of like clear my my hard drive of memory, would I still be me? Do you think? Or like would would it does it necessarily involve all of that? speaker-0: well that's another deep question. So ⁓ you have to first ask what memories are, you know. And from this predictive processing framework, ⁓ memories are social constructions that invest in form and shape the current predictive model. So we you know a whole panoply of stuff occurs to us every day. But only ⁓ a very, very small section of that onslaught of experiences gets selected to be processed as quote unquote memories. And we select those things that will flatter us, flatter our current self-model. You know, and and and also inform that self-model, you know. so what memories are, mem but you know, but yes, personal identity fundamentally is about memories. ⁓ speaker-1: Then there's also, ⁓ you use the word identify whenever we're we were talking about groups. I think there's kind of a triangulation that needs to take place too, because it's also it's not just who am I, it's who am I in relation to this group or that group or just society at large. Yeah. I mean that that's an im that's a really important part of what it is. But then there's also something that's I guess even more basic that when I meditate, and I I'm sort of trying to Tune all of that out, sort of, you know, to deprioritize all of those external things and just focus on my internal conscious experience. There does seem to be something there. And there are these interesting metaphors that like consciousness or your what you know. If I ask the question, what am I of a Buddhist? They might say, You are the awareness in which your experience kind of populates. and there is this sense of like being an I. ⁓ Is ⁓ and there's been a lot of talk that that ⁓ I I've heard that that's sort of an illusion. ⁓ like a lot of neuroscientists are saying that they think that this is like an illusion that there's a self there at all. ⁓ do you agree with any of that or speaker-0: I think ⁓ what they're what they're saying there is that it's By illusion they're saying what we usually have thought of as, you know, this substantive, ongoing, permanent essence is an illusion. You know, be giv given if the self is a predictive model, then it's it's not some essence that is there before you're born and then is there in f in informing the organism as it goes through the stages of life and then goes to heaven or hell after you know after you die. You know, so there's n I think what those neuroscientists are saying and philosophers are saying that that essence we we c we can't find when we look for it. Now there's all kinds of philosophical reasons to believe that such an essence exists. But that's a different matter. speaker-1: Basically. speaker-0: From a scientific point of view, when scientists say the self is an illusion, I think that's all they're saying. They're saying there is there is a construct that we can measure called a self that has some stability across time, but that when you really look at it, is best understood as this predictive model. speaker-1: When you say there's a construct that's stable over time, does that ⁓ are you thinking in terms of things like personality? speaker-0: Yeah, it's stuff that's measurable. Right. That doesn't change, you know, with with every new variable you introduce, you know. So yeah, personality, memories, preferences, habits, ⁓ those sorts of things. speaker-1: And this model can obviously it can and I'm sure does change over time as it's constantly incorporating more information, but it's unlikely that one new data point, you know, if someone who's forty years old like me, one new data point's probably not gonna make that big of a difference. Right. ⁓ and intend I've you know, a lot of what I think about in terms of the mind when it comes to mental health is biased. ⁓ and how the the role the bias plays and how much confirmation bias in particular that you can get all kind of contrary information to your your self concept, but then this one little bit of information which comes in the form of like a a shitty comment on YouTube or of course. You know what I mean? Like it's like that's the one that like I'm really speaker-0: You pay way way much attention way too much attention to that one thing, yeah. But when it's negative. Yeah, our our brains are are biased to overweight or give too much weight to negative instances. Yeah, and that that creates all kinds of anxiety in us. It's a it's an unfortunate you know, ⁓ it was selected for over evolutionary time for obvious reasons, but yeah, in the modern world doesn't do us much good. Right. speaker-1: so I want to go back to something we were talking about with ⁓ ostracism. And you said that, you know, I was talking about people taking on new identities basically and that they need to have like a like a transpersonal experience. This relates a lot to what ⁓ an idea that you proposed that I'm just endlessly fascinated by, which is kind of your model of what a religious experience is. Can you share that with us? speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. at at the w when you look at these ⁓ transformational experiences, particularly when people narrate a religious transformation, like a conversion or rel or ⁓ transformation away from old belief structures to new belief structures. ⁓ that transformation typically involves you know a sequential process that and and when you look at the the cognitive mechanisms involved in that sequential process, ⁓ both both in a single experience ⁓ single experience and then several experiences over time, you you generally see what what I call ⁓ a decentering process. And I think other researchers have now identified this as well. For example, if you look at thousands of ⁓ narratives of personal transformational events or thousands of narratives of ⁓ religious experiences or mystical experiences, you see this decentering thing. So what is decentering? It's essentially letting go of the old self and the emergence of a new self. That's all it is really. But it it when you look at the actual cognitive mechanisms in a s let's take a single transformational experience. It involves a down what we call a downregulation of the brain structures that are involved in upholding this predictive model of the self. So the the self model gets downregulated. And It's experienced as my agency gets downright, you know, I I lose my agency. And then there's a a short period of you feel like you're entering a liminal s space, a kind of dreamy space. ⁓ heightened emotions, heightened possibilities, heightened anxiety, heightened images. ⁓ you know, this this liminal like you're on the the verge of ⁓ of something big. And then the third step is i the brain goes through kind of search and the cognitive system basically searches the the inventory of cultural possibilities for a new self. What's available in my culture You know, if this old self ain't working, what's available in my culture for a new self construct? So it a search goes on. And then some sort of match, some sort of selection of, well that that model of a self is appealing, so I'll download that one into my brain from the group, you know, from the culture. And then there's you know, and then a new self emerges and the the person feels enriched. You know, so the transformation yields this enriched sense of self. And agency comes back online and you're ready to go, you know, until the next transformation. speaker-1: That's amazing. ⁓ the third step you were just saying, ⁓ I had never really fixated on it that much. I thought of it as just like an editing of the self, but the way you're talking about downloading things that are culturally available. God, that's so fascinating. Because of course it's of course you have to be able to imagine this kind of self. I mean, that that idea's got to come from somewhere. And that that would be culturally Pre-selected sort of. ⁓ that's that's amazing. And yet there's also probably cross-culturally, there's some archetypes that you would pull from the archetype of a of a father or a mother, ⁓ a teacher or a magician or something like that. speaker-0: Yeah. Those are cultural models, yeah. Right. And in the ⁓ one one of the good things about the modern world is ⁓ we're we're we we have access to a much wider range of cultural possibilities. You know, what if you're in a an insular group, then the the the range of possibilities they want to give you is just like let's say it's a you know, a Protestant Pentecost, you know, or Charismatic kind of group. The range that they want to give you is, you know, just sort of big biblically constrained. And, you know, ⁓ on the supposition that that's that's what will get you to heaven. You know, it you know, if you if you stray from that, you're gonna ⁓ go go wrong. But in the modern world where all these old religious traditions are dissolving away. the range of cultural possibilities available to you to entertain is much wider. So on the one hand, that's great. On the other hand, it it can be demoralizing because how the hell do you choose? You know, like on what basis. And so people are using more and more conscious methods of choosing from this massive range of cultural possibilities of what life ways do I want to adopt. Therefore, what identities do I want to inhabit? speaker-1: And I imagine, ⁓ I mean, I see this every day. ⁓ the people, my friends, the people in my social network, the community that I'm a part of, they're it I would say it was it would I it's defined by a lack of coherence with with religious and spiritual practices. Like that that's kind of the it's coherently diverse. ⁓ and so you might go to someone's house and they might have altars that they've set up that are And they might have more than one, and one might be pagan, and then the other one will be Hindu. But it even then that suggests that there's like a coherence within those. I mean, really, you might find on one altar a Buddha, ⁓ a a Jesus figure or a Mary. There's a lot of Virgin Mary figures, but that kind of represents a divine feminine or maybe a pre-existent Aztec deity that's the mother of all creation. and there will be yoga symbols, there will be Taoist symbols, there is a yin-yang, there's I mean, and it's almost spiritualism. It's like a more the merrier kind of thing. And when I go home for Christmas to North Louisiana and my family member asks me, What are your religious what religion are you? I have no idea I wouldn't know where to begin ⁓ to explain it to explain this. And and because it's kind of defined by a lack of orthodoxy, which is very confusing to Christians who are yeah, that Christianity is very much defined by orthodoxy. And so I see this search. What I think the is I'm relating with a lot now is that we do have all these symbols that are available. But what we're lacking is a coherent group that's attached to any of them. And that is very anxiety provoking. And there is a lot of almost kind of like an existential despair about who am I and where do I belong. speaker-0: That's it. That's what we're living through right now. That's what everyone and and I I believe all over the globe, you know, everywhere. India, Russia, China, everyone's experiencing this. The old traditions. are n are not working as well as they used to. And so there is this search. And we're going through a new axial age where there's a a ⁓ syncretism of all these different religious traditions and beliefs and philosophies merging. So that you have individuals with, you know, shrines to the Virgin Mary, you know, and they you know, in the next room there's a shrine to yeah a coddle or somebody, you know, there's there's it there's this massive, massive influx of ⁓ challenges to the traditional religious structures. And that's a good thing on the one hand. On the other hand, it's as you very eloquently just said, it's producing this cohort of people who are rootless. and ⁓ are searching for what's authentic for me, you know, like where can I flourish? You know, like what what's what's the truth? You know, like where do I fit in and what's actually true? How do I adjudicate ⁓ amongst all these competing cultural identities and traditions? And ⁓ in the last axial age, what what happened was that some traditions won out in the competition. and, you know, there's all kinds of debates about why that happened, but ⁓ and I presume the same thing will happen in this axial age, but, you know, I don't know. speaker-1: You what you're just saying that some groups kind of want or some ideas went out in the competition. You speak of it ⁓ almost as if religions themselves obey the laws of natural selection. Do you think that they can be conceived of in that way? I mean, is there is there a useful framework to thinking about that and how would that work? speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, I do think that. on the other hand, that's not that that does not mean that there is no truth of the matter. Yeah, there could be simultaneously an absolute truth of ultimate reality. You know, there's a fact of the matter. There's a there is this thing we call truth. And simultaneously there could be all these competing ⁓ traditions that are shaped by the forces of cultural evolution and natural selection. And you know, some some of those went out and some don't. And what what makes some win out is whether or not they help ⁓ a certain group and a certain individual transmit their lineages down the intergenerational lines. You know, so some groups win because they're better at doing that, rather than better reflecting the absolute truth of the matter. But it may also be the case that the groups that won out won out because they had a better grasp of fundamental reality. I'm not entirely sure how to adjudicate those matters. speaker-1: I'm not either. ⁓ I that's one of my favorite things to think about though. ⁓ in y you're you're absolutely right. I think when I ⁓ I've shared some of your ideas, this this decentering model, which has been pro profoundly influential on the way I think about my own life and about religious like the experience. Religion is an experience in many cases. Like I think that's kind of what the more the more interesting things about it is that there's something happening there when we have these experiences, regardless of this absolute truth. And I I get very focused on kind of the science and the psychology of what's going on. For some people, I think they can be kind of crestfallen to hear that because it it it somehow in their mind means, well, it cannot, none of it's true. And of course we have brains. The brain mediates our experience. And so we can understand what we're experiencing through that. I think there probably there there's got to be an absolute truth to the matter, even if it is that there's nothing there. But I think even if there was something there, there It's just so likely that whatever our perception of it is gonna be is gonna be s you know, would be is going to be filtered through all these mechanisms, these biases. You know, you're I was struck by w the way you s you said memory. The the way that we select for memory is it's the ones that flatter our sense of self. And and that's it sounds so petty, but of course, you know, we have limited resources, you know, like you don't want to hold a bunch of discordant identity memories. ⁓ so I mean it's just would be a waste. speaker-0: Yeah. Those memories flatter the self, but but they're also constrained by, you know, you you can flatter the flatter yourself up until you hit a rub up against reality, you know. Right. You know, like you know so you you can see that happen in in people all the time. speaker-1: Well there are like there if there was a religious group that was that had a model, a predictive model of the world, ⁓ let's ⁓ I think a common one I'm thinking of are like these cults that believe aliens are coming on this date. and they you know they make very, very, very testable, falsifiable predictions and then the aliens don't come. The interesting thing is that sometimes they'll just keep moving the goalposts, and that's fascinating. But in general, there's a reason there's a reason that those cults don't become as ubiquitous as Christianity or Islam. Right. Right. Like, you know, it Christianity and Islam, they kind of have predictive they're predicting things, but not with any kind of specificity that we'll ever know if those predictions were wrong. speaker-0: So it's hard to disconfirm ⁓ yeah. speaker-1: It is. Yeah, I because maybe it just hasn't happened yet. Maybe the second coming hasn't happened yet. Or interestingly, there are some like ⁓ you know, Rastafarians believe the second coming has happened. ⁓ and that that's a whole interesting interesting offshoot. But I have heard it said that Christianity and Islam have succeeded so much because they're very easy to join and they're basically impossible to to quit. and it it's just kind of as simple. I mean it, you know, the the cost of joining the costly signal is very low. You know, with ⁓ with Islam, it's muttering it, you it's it's uttering some some specific words in a specific sequence. And then Christianity, there may be some other things typically you're born into it. and then leaving, you know. I mean, I I have a my grandmother will always tell me that I'll always be Catholic. It's just like no matter what I unless they kick me out, unless I do something to get myself excommunicated. I'm not I'm not interested in trying that. But there is a sense that like there's just there's no way to leave the religion. And so of course there's billions of us. ⁓ there are other And and so that in a sense, like for that religious group, it's adaptive for the group to make it easy to join and and hard to leave. speaker-0: In in the modern era, I think that's where ⁓ most brands of Islam and most brands of Christianity have landed in the modern world. But they've went through phases where it was really hard to join you know, they had really high barriers to y y you y you had to sus subscribe to very strange beliefs like three persons and but they're also one person, you know, f just for example, you know, and and and ⁓ so Every religion goes through a phase where it's really hard to join. The boundaries to getting in are very, very high. But I agree with you. In the modern era that's no longer no longer the case. speaker-1: It's interesting. There's it's like there must there's a necessarily there's a life cycle of a religion 'cause you're right. In the early days when it's just ⁓ people see it as some crackpot cult, you know. I mean the Christians I know, yeah, and there's all these stories they were famously persecuted because you know, I mean, especially the Jews thought the idea that the Messiah got crucified by Rome is ridiculous. That's just not what that is. And I'm thinking also of like the LDS church, the Mormons early on, they were I mean, they were literally chased out of all kinds of places and now I think they're the fastest growing religion on earth. ⁓ they're they're kind of tracking the same numbers as the Christians were. speaker-0: They're still one of the fastest, although they're slowing down because they're they're getting modernized too. But yeah. Yeah. ⁓ speaker-1: What do you think explains I think you hinted there might be a multitude of factors here, but this the end of you mentioned this axial age. There is a lot of talk about this, the age of Aquarius and that people are talking about. that organized religion as we understand it does seem to be breaking down and disintegrating. ⁓ do you think that's just a result of the internet? I mean modernity, or do you do you think it's more ⁓ there's more to it than that? speaker-0: Yeah, it's a host of factors. ⁓ one of the main ones is that ⁓ some ri ri religions k tend to become genocidal, you know, like the a lot of ⁓ you know, like the the religious wars in the ⁓ sixteen hundreds in Europe, you know, just devastated devastated that whole continent. The religious wars occurring in the Middle East now are destroying the Middle East. you know, it's there's just so many examples of religiously infused ⁓ bloodshed. And I'm not saying that religions cause wars or religions are inherently genocidal. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that one of the factors that explains the decline of the traditional religious frameworks is that they they tend to when they tend to w ⁓ infuse our beliefs with a passion that makes makes compromise, you know, like just really difficult. So people everywhere have said, well we gotta we gotta rein in these religio religious traditions. We gotta defang them. You know. That that's part of what the Westphalia Treaty was about, you know. ⁓ so ⁓ and that's really one of the big reasons why liberalism as a political philosophy emerged, you know, and said, we can't have religion in the public arena because it's so it you know, it's inflames passion so much. So let's defang religion. Let's keep it out of the public arena and let's privatize it. You can hold whatever religious beliefs you want. We won't persecute it, persecute you for it, but don't bring it into the public arena. And that worked for a few couple of generations, but you know, people inevitably must bring their passionate beliefs into politics. So so the the liberal settlement around religion is now falling down. So that's another factor. And just the antiquity of the major religious traditions is another factor. But a massive factor is science. You know the the rise of science just makes it impossible to believe any of these old scriptural accounts of ultimate reality. But as you I I I want to make sure I say this before I forget it, and you were alluding to this earlier, to to bring in the decentering account or the or the brain or neuroscience is not to say that religious beliefs and experiences are nothing but brain firings. That's crazy. I'm I'm not saying no neuroscientist is saying that. We're saying we can understand ⁓ religious beliefs and experiences a little bit better if we bring in the brain. You know, it's not saying that religion is nothing but misfirings of the brain. That's crazy. We're saying we're just trying to understand things a bit better by bringing in the brain. You know? So the brain doesn't disprove religion, nor does it support it. It's it it doesn't it doesn't say, you know, because the brain mediates religious experience and we know that and we can we can show it on an MRI scan that proves God exists. We're not saying that either. We're simply saying that this is a new set of data with which to understand a very deep rooted human phenomena. You know, that's all we're saying, you know. So ⁓ I just wanna make sure to say that before I forgot. speaker-1: Yeah, thank you. I I I I couldn't have said that better myself, literally. I mean, I to me it's just a separate question. Like the the you know, you said the fact of the matter, you know, the ap the ultimate reality of things. I wonder about that, but to a large degree, I think it it's arguably unknowable. I think that my chimp brain is not really architected to for me to really understand that. and So it it, you know, to me it's just it's a separate issue entirely of like what's really going on out there or in here. ⁓ I'm just much more fascinated by the fact of human behavior and experience, and that religion is an interesting coalescence of there's beliefs, which are just purely pure cognitions, but then there's all these behaviors that we engage in, which are quite fascinating that are some of them predicated on beliefs, but other ones, I think a lot of religious experience is just ecstatic. It just feels great. You know, you you experience things like awe and wonder. There's like this complex suite of emotions that we can experience that we associate with religious ecstasy that I've had these experiences in from a different variety of different modes. You know, the first time I really experienced it was doing Kundalini yoga. And I didn't believe in I didn't I mean belief definitely doesn't matter for that, for my experience, because I didn't I just was like, sure, I'll try it. It was the first time I tried it. And it was just doing some breathing exercises and I felt something that was you could call it psychedelic or you could call it ecstatic or bliss related. I was in intense discomfort, which I think might have had something to do with it actually, because my body wasn't prepared for it. And so there's a certain sort of I've also experienced it like with a massage that was blindingly painful. In a way, it's kind of like it there's it there at a certain point when there's so much pain, there's not there's like It doesn't leave any resources for anything else. Yeah. So, you know, it there is kind of a decentering of just like I'm gone for a second. Exactly. You know what I mean? And it's weird to think of it like I know, I wouldn't want to repeat it for that purpose. and yeah, so it's like, of course, like I'm having this experience. There's got to be a brain basis for it. But there's all these interesting theories about, well, maybe our brain is just a conduit for what's for for for the ultimate reality, for consciousness, rather than a the producer of it. ⁓ do you have any thoughts on on that kind of debate? I mean like this whole consciousness discussion. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. ⁓ but first ⁓ just what you were just saying, ⁓ there's lots of ways to get to decentering, like you said, like ⁓ one one way is through ⁓ you know th through extreme pain, you know, like ⁓ in ascetical practices. Like a lot of us ascetics ⁓ have have gotten to the decentering experience through that method. You know, if you if you get to such a pain level or discomfort level, the self model dissolves. And you're and once that happens, you're into decentering. You know, and if you're lucky, you you come out the other side with the enriched sense of self. And that's you know, that's why groups and frameworks, cultural frameworks, help. When when you go through a decentering process, it can get derailed. You know, y you you can you can get stuck in the liminal space, you know, and then you're you're vulnerable to psychosis and all kinds of other bad outcomes. So you wanna you wanna be ushered through all the steps safely so that you have the enriched self at the end of it. And that's what culture is supposed to do. It's supposed to help us through these intense experiences. in a in a in a way that we're enriched by them rather than destroy by them. You know, so ⁓ I j I just wanted to say that. ⁓ and then you asked about consciousness, was speaker-1: Yes, but but maybe we could pin consciousness because I wanted to follow up on what you were just saying. so when I ⁓ y I think you you published your your book Cognitive Neuroscience or Religious Experience in in twenty fourteen, is that right? speaker-0: Well, the first edition, there's a been a second edition, yeah. speaker-1: And you and did you change the name on the second edition? Decentering in the self? Yeah, something like that. It's an interesting update. Well, so w ⁓ when I first heard this model, one of my first thoughts was that sounds an awful lot like a psychedelic experience. Yeah. Like from what the research is showing of like what seems to matter seems to seems to be tied to this dissolution of the ego. ⁓ speaker-0: ⁓ very slightly. Something like that. speaker-1: Yep. During your original research on this, was that did that factor in? Was that was this like neuro it wasn't available, right? So can you tell us about speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, in fact the the first book was you know, I wrote the first book I think it was way before two thousand I mean it may have come out around that time. I think it was two thousand nine, wasn't it? I'm not entirely don't entirely remember, but certainly ⁓ the decentring model I developed way before, you know, like ⁓ around nineteen ninety nine maybe or something, somewhere around there. ⁓ but speaker-1: Okay. speaker-0: No, ⁓ but the psychedelic literature I think confirms it big time. And ⁓ the at the extreme ⁓ an extreme decentering process is of course the psychedelic experience, especially on DMT, you know, where you where you're much more likely to get ego dissolution. Now but it's important to point out that the decentering process it Be because it stays in touch with cultural models, it it preserves that subject-object dichotomy, the the the encounter of the the old predictive model with a new predictive model, or the individual with a deity or an i or an inrich self. But if ⁓ the de-centering process ⁓ is extreme, you get mystical states. And in the and in in really intense mystical states, you get an you know, you get the e the dissolution of the self and you enter non-dual territory. So the subject-object dichotom gets dissolved. Now eventually the person has to come out of that you know, complete dissolution of the self. So eventually the culture in the group reasserts itself. and you get an and you you get a new self eventually. But if you l if you study the lives of the mystics, they'll say things like what St. Paul says, it no longer I live, but Christ lives in me. You know, so ⁓ for for mystics and for people who have been through an ego dissolution experience on a psychedelic That's the k you you get this you're you're entering mystical territory, so they go through a non-dual thing where n none of the cultural models work. None. They're blasted to hell. You know, you're gone w you've broken through, you know, and you're on your way to something transcendent and cosmic. But to live in the world, you know, you eventually gotta draw on the available cultural models. So you have accounts of the mystics coming down from the mountain. And you know, they they have to learn to speak the language again. You know, sometimes they can e and and they say things like, What I experience I can't I c I can't articulate. It's you know, it's beyond words, you know. So In every religious tradition you got those kinds of mystics. And but I think that's the way the decentring model helps us to understand those mystical speaker-1: Sure. And when you go to this like non-dual, like where the you know, the old the old predictive model is just annihilated for at some time, I guess. There's also a coming back. Like you said, the coming down off of the mountain is seems to be part of the process where, okay, like and then culture comes back in and things start getting rearranged. and but people are profoundly changed by it and become often quite charismatic. I wanted to ask about speaker-0: Exactly. Right. speaker-1: And I'd like to leave some time for consciousness. We got some. ⁓ yeah, maybe we'll have 10 minutes to talk to talk about consciousness. group religious experiences. ⁓ one thing I've been ⁓ that's things like ⁓ people seeing ⁓ Our Lady of Fatima in in Portugal. ⁓ you have large groups of people having the same religious experience, seeing the same figure. I'm curious to know about how you think about that and and what might explain that. And also, ⁓ Things like again in the Christian context, stigmata, you know, people experiencing that. And and then also where if you think that there might be any kind of like neurological explanation for some of these things like temporal lobe epilepsy. ⁓ so those are just some kind of pinning those with the forty minutes we have left are things that I was hoping we could get to. ⁓ do you have any idea where which one you'd like to start with? Maybe the group the group experiences since we've been talking about speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. ⁓ well the Fatima thing is really fascinating, and I and I don't have a good explanation for it. ⁓ I mean what what the standard scientific account would say is ⁓ that some central individuals to the people who were there that day formed a narrative around how the sun was dancing around. And ⁓ And and because those individuals were charismatic in some way, that narrative became the dominant one and then everybody or most people in the group that day adopted that narrative in that account and that's what became the historical account of that episode. But who the hell knows, you know, I I I I don't know. It's it's too extraordinary an event. I think When you read about independent accounts, you know, like there are quite a few non believers there that day, co you know, avid communists. You know, the at the at the time a co ⁓ a a communist government was in power and they were actively persecuting the Catholic Church and so ⁓ for people to say, No, no, no, I saw it. You know, they had to go they they had to brave, you know, be in jailed for saying stuff like that. speaker-1: It's a costly signal. Yeah, another one. speaker-0: Yeah. So I I don't have a good account of Fatima. I I don't know. I don't think it can I don't I don't know of any ⁓ neurology that could explain that kind I mean scientists would say group hallucinations but th what the hell does that mean? We have no idea what that means. No s how Yeah, I I don't know. And I I and if anyone would know among scientists it would be me, you know, so speaker-1: Yeah, how would that happen? Yeah. I mean speaker-0: I I don't I don't know what how to account for traphetima, I really don't. or for Virgin Mary apparitions in general. ⁓ and I don't think the standard Youngin accounts can do very well either, you know? So speaker-1: What what would those accounts be? Like that do you have any can you kind of articulate what a end explanation for that would be? speaker-0: I think the standard Jungian one is that there's this perennial assertion and yearning for manifestation of, you know, the the maternal archetype. You know, when when we need com comfort of some kind we go to mama and mama appears and apparitions, you know. I I don't think that really explains. You know, when when you study and I I did a little study of a Marian ap apparitions for one of my books. You know, and when I went into the literature studying, you know, like I studied maybe a dozen or so of them. None of the standard accounts could could really explain them. speaker-1: Yeah. I mean I'm very familiar with one that is the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. that one I've been on a pilgrimage to that site for that feast day. My birthday is that feast day. and so it's a it's a beautiful practice to experience. I mean there's ten, twelve million people there. It's kind of like Mardi Gras, but with way more people. you know, I mean it's just it's so many people. It's a it's an enormous festival and event. speaker-0: Lords, you know, l ⁓ where where there's all these healings, you know, and the that and that's the thing, the healings have been documented. Now a a lot of it is placebo, I have no doubt, you know, like ⁓ but but s some of it, you know, can't be explained by standard placebo mechanisms. So I you know, I just don't know. Yeah. speaker-1: ⁓ I think I could see the you know, the you you're saying the Youngin account. I could understand why her. I mean, I could understand that kind of explaining of all the religious archetypes and figures that would repeatedly occur ⁓ appear, that that one, you know, being like a cosmic mother, that kind of I think there there may be some there there, but you're right, there's all these other things about these appearances and I've you I've I've heard of group hallucination and I'm really glad that you've said like if anybody knew what that would be, it would be you and w who knows what that would mean. Yeah. I I I think at that point you're just saying they all saw the same thing. Because I mean it whatever we're seeing is a predictive model anyway. You know, I mean we're we're sort of hallucinating reality anyway. So ⁓ it just basically means like if we were all at the same baseball game and saw the you know, the same pitch, you know, get hit out of the park, then we just hallucinated it together. ⁓ Yeah, it's a fascinating thing that that seems to happen. It has happened a lot with Marian apparitions. I think there's been a ton of this in India too. speaker-0: It's crazy though that that scientists would call it ⁓ a group of hallucination though, because the a at the same time we scientists say hallucination i is totally individual, you know, like what protects you against hallucination is when if others if if others see the same thing then it's no longer a h hallucination. That's by definition reality testing. clinically. You know, do it are other people perceiving it? And if they are, then it's no longer a hallucination. And when scientists can't explain something like phantom, they s they invoke group hallucination. But that by definition goes against the standard definition of a hallucination. speaker-1: I guess if you had a crowd of a thousand people and a hundred people were certain that they saw it and the other nine hundred were like nothing happened, it it could sort of fit that model. But that that isn't Fatima, right? Everybody, like communists who are like you were literally militant atheists. I mean that like if anybody would have a would have a bias against this, it would be a bunch of communists in the thirties. speaker-0: That's not what happened with him. Exactly. And they were they were ready and willing to jail people if those people said no I saw it. And yet people still said no I saw it. You know, so there's something else going on. And I and I and I don't know how to explain it. My bias is that we'll eventually come to a naturalistic explanation. I'm not I'm not saying I favor supernatural explanation. I'm saying I don't know of any good scientific explanation for such stuff. But like you were alluding to I think you were alluding to before, if there are these supernatural realities, you know, like if you know, if there is a god and if ⁓ there are other deities like a virginary or something, you know, like They would manifest. They have to use our brains to manifest among human beings. So it's not it's not like we're a a naturalistic explanation would say Fatima and Lord's miracle cures are nothing but naturalistic beliefs operating in a certain way. Maybe they are, maybe they are. It could still even if it was that. it could still be that the gods are using these vehicles to manifest in the human realm. So what I'm trying to say is that the scientific approach to all of these things doesn't necessarily threaten religion. speaker-1: agree with that completely. I mean, ⁓ there's ⁓ we found some kind of elaborate, ⁓ ⁓ culturally supercharged placebo effect, let's say, and we could find a brain basis for that, it still wouldn't disprove ⁓ existence of God or anything like that. ⁓ mean, because you you could always just say, well, I mean, that because ⁓ a a person knew as a creationist could just say, Well, God created us ⁓ have that as experiences. ⁓ know, I mean, and and it it of course they would be mediated by the brain. I do think that they're one of the things that like you mentioned, science has had an effect on the kind of the disintegration of religious supremacy, because religion often would use this there's this term God of the gaps argument where it would just try to explain natural phenomena that were unknown with through a religious lens. And of course, we eventually discover the natural causes of things and it it kind of undermined the a lot of the validity of what religion had. But again, if you go to the essence of it, I agree. I don't think there's anything because of the nature of what we're talking about, then the natural, like natural methods, science, are never really going to be able to touch the supernatural, whether it exists or doesn't, because by definition it would be unknowable to those methods. speaker-0: Ma maybe not I I would put it a little bit differently. I think what what science at its best does is it ⁓ you might say purify those old ideas. You know, it it frees us from the contradictions in those ideas and the nonsense and the bullshit in those religious ideas. And so it forces us to develop more sophisticated ⁓ religious ideas that that answer to rational criteria but at the same time transcends rationality. You know, because like you said, some religious experiences are just sublime and you and you can't find words. They they transcend linguistic caca categories. They feel good. Or they're transformative or they're shattering. You know, but they're the most important experiences for human beings ever. You know, so they're they're they're fundamental to the human experience. So science science can illuminate them and to some extent free them of the accretions of superstition and bullshit to get at the gold that's really there. speaker-1: Beautifully put. ⁓ so another thing I'm I won ⁓ mentioned I wanted to ask you about was stigmata. same thing. Have you ever looked into this or would you have any idea of how what would explain that? speaker-0: I I haven't personally I I I know that there's at least one or two papers on it. And ⁓ and I don't know they were just correlational, you know, like what for stigmotics and like what what are their personality types or you know, stuff like that. I don't know of any brain studies on it. But I mean the first if if I was to do a study on stigmotics, the the first thing I'd do is look at their ⁓ what is known as interoceptive processing. that's so there's there we the the human organism, the human body has a a a whole other set of a whole other nervous system, you might call it called the interreceptive s system. And it's how all of the nervous impulses in our central nervous system and peripheral nervous system Combined to create a model of the body. And that model of the body constrains and shapes the parameters of the physiology of the body. So if the model is shaky or expansive or open or has certain types of parameters, then it can it can focus things on certain parts of the skin and certain parts of the body and raise the temperature there and you know do all kinds of things you know but so my my point is this interoceptive system can be harnessed and fundamentally alter your physiology in dramatic ways. So you see this in Hindu ascetics. And possibly in stigmatics too. speaker-1: Do you think that would d is it necessarily a product of conscious intention or do you think it could be taking place subconsciously? speaker-0: Subconscious, yeah, it's it's I mean the interoceptive system is by definition subconscious. But you you can use conscious processes to influence it. And we're learning more and more every day about how people do that. And among the ways they do it is through ascetic practices, like meditation. ⁓ decentering influences it. Prayer influences it, ⁓ chanting does, and of course all kinds of drugs do, obviously. speaker-1: Right. ⁓ w one of the things I've thought a lot about of like people that have and I mostly know the stories from Catholic tradition saints, people like Saint Francis, that experience these ecstatic experiences. what they're I think what they're doing, these people are doing is they're cloistered, ⁓ you know, essentially aesthetic, and they'll spend like twelve hours a day saying the rosary. I mean they're saying the same words over and over and over and over again for for like twenty years. And that's an awful lot like what mantra is. Absolutely. Hindu tradition and yoga. ⁓ I've started when I started meditating, I started in a kind of a Buddhist tradition and I've I've really trying to move more towards the yogic tradition because there's a kind of a paradigm shift between Buddhism is kind of about emptiness ⁓ and emptying the mind, and yoga is more about focus. It's it's really it's not emptying, it's an intense focus on an object. And I imagine the more and more resources that you dedicate towards focusing on that object, the more other things kind of fall away. That's been my understanding of like what's happening is eventually the resources for an ego start to have to get deprioritized to make sense for looking at this candle or focusing on this mantra. And that that kind of there is a sort of decentering that happens because you're you're as you're focusing is continuing to increase resources on whatever it is, the mantra of the prayer. speaker-0: Absolutely. speaker-1: Self kind of dissolves a little bit. speaker-0: And and as you were saying earlier, Kundalini yoga, you know, the ⁓ the the Hindu tradition has great traditions of bod you know bodily prac spiritual practices, you know, whereas the Western traditions have lost a lot of those. But the I I I partially see those spiritual traditions that incorporate things like athletics. physical exercises, physical movement, focusing in on different ⁓ centers in the body like Kundalini does, as methods to recruit the interreceptive system, you know, to shape it and constrain it in in in ways that the person wants or the tradition wants. And you know, among those are mant mantras and breathing, you know, breathing exercises. speaker-1: Yeah. So if I focus intensely on my heart chakra and I'm breathing into it, if you know, if it's I think there's some there's a certain kind of person for whom that's gonna make sense, you know, that has had that experience of trying to breathe into their heart or their throat or their sacral chakra. ⁓ that it it can kind of as a way of activating this interoceptive system, right? Yeah. And that that will have these really profound and consequential effects. speaker-0: And a at at the center of the interceptive system is the vagus nerve. And you know, the vagus nerve is absolutely fundamental for all kinds of psychological phenomena, you know, because it's such a massive ⁓ nerve. And it r you know, it runs along those chakras, you know, so there's a physiological story to be told about all this stuff, you know. speaker-1: Yeah, I I mean, I know about the Vegas nerve from just my own mental health journey and learning about trauma psychology. You know, I mean just the fight or flight system. And s there's this book, you might you might be aware of it, the body keeps the score. Yeah. and you know, he he talks a lot about Van Der Kohl talks a lot about these body based practices, bottom up practices for trauma regulation rather than just talking about it. And yoga is one of his favorite things to do because it's just you're you're re you know, it's highly regulating up and down, up and down, up and down on this. on this vagus nerve tract, this central column. ⁓ and I think that you know it goes back to what we were we're sort of talking about, what makes religions sticky, essentially, ⁓ is generally there's the the ones that offer utility, you know, that that that have a predictive model that works. But also, I mean, if your health gets better, if you participate in this religious experience, like with yoga, your your health probably gonna improve unless you're just hypermobile and you mess up your hip. from going too far. But I mean, usually the breathing and the, you know, the diet. And there's a whole system with yoga with diet and and like ⁓ cleansing practices. And so it makes a lot of sense. It's almost like sort of tied with Ayurveda and I know they were all sort of together. Yeah. It was like a healthcare system. You know, as religion. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. yeah. I mean what the religious traditions that ⁓ outcompete the others are the ones that have these ⁓ benefits, you know. Anything that contributes to the ⁓ intergenerational transfer of the lineage, not just the individual genes, but the genes of a certain lineage, those are the ones that are gonna win. speaker-1: Okay, so we're ⁓ kind of running out of time and I've got two huge topics I still want to talk about. So we'll see if we can do them quickly. One of them I want to ask about is what ⁓ the role of psychiatric disorders or neurological disorders are in our understanding historically of religious. I'm thinking of people speculating that like Joan of Arc ⁓ had temporal lobe epilepsy, ⁓ or that certain figures might have been schizophrenic. ⁓ I know there's another researcher I'm trying to get on the podcast, Andy Thompson, who studies kind of evolutionary psychiatry. And and religion in that context. do you have any sense that I mean, temporal lobe epilepsy is associated with like religiosity? do you think that there's ⁓ there might be any kind of evolutionary role there for for mental disorders that might produce religious experiences? speaker-0: Yeah, there's there's some models about that. and there's been several papers on on that. ⁓ but and there are several key disorders involved, you know. So first first of all, with respect to temporal lobe epilepsy, that's quite rare. You know, right off the bat we should just point that out. And you know, when when large scale studies are done on TLE, you don't see, you know, an enhancement of religiosity ⁓ in that group. It occurs among a tiny group of certain types of patients with TLE. You know, that they have a certain syndrome. And one of the symptoms of that syndrome is hyper religiosity or or this tendency to convert over and over again through and undergo religious transformations very frequently, you know. So but that's a very tiny group of people. So it's not exactly a great model for how the brain mediates religious although it it counts, you know. And certainly the medial temporal lobe is really important for a lot of ⁓ religious experiences. And then another disorder is one we mentioned earlier, OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. And when we were talking about it earlier, we linked it to anxiety. And but ⁓ when you juxtapose OC see, the the problem with O C D the fundamental neurological problem is that Their predictive models are always telling the individual that something's off in the world. So you need to make adjustments to make things right. So they're constantly trying to do that. But it never really works, so they're constantly anxiety ⁓ laden, and then they need to develop religious beliefs to handle the anxiety. But an opposite ⁓ neurological disorder called ecstatic seizures. Now ecstatic seizures happen when the seizure focus is in ⁓ mostly it's localized to what we call the insula. And the insula sits at the top of the interoceptive s system and it summates all those internal bodily signals. And it's and and it When it computes an error, it says there's something wrong with the body, you gotta make adjustments. But these seizures stop that error from being computed. So these seizures tell the brain that everything's okay. Everything's right with the world. I'm I'm I'm experiencing bliss And these patients don't want surgery to take away the seizures. So they refuse treatment because the seizures are so blissful. So they're the kind of opposite of the OCD case. But in both cases, you get religious beliefs. So there's something more than va involved than just, you know, a poor predictive model. And then the final ⁓ neurological disorder that's informed a lot of the conversation around brain and religion is schizophrenia. And there you have a lot of evolutionary psychology speculations about the origins of religion and religious beliefs. And that's a massive literature, you know, that's but there's something there that I think is interesting and so schizophrenics are a really interesting group of there's there's several different types of schizophrenics, but one type of schizophrenic is ⁓ you might call schizotypal, right? So they're not like actively delusional all the time. They're on the borderline, but they but they entertain these unusual beliefs. You know, they're they're sort they're sort of in that woo territory a lot, you know, their paranormal beliefs are okay by them. And and it turns out that when when you do evolutionary models, some people have done this, you want some individuals in the in a in a group to think outside the box. And to be able to entertain beliefs that won't be sanctioned by the group. And those individuals become shamans and visionaries. And they're the ones who can lead the group into new ⁓ territory to find new resources. The group won't leave their current territory. And we're talking about Paleolithic time, you know. sixty thousand years ago, you know. So you need to develop schizotypal individuals with paranormal beliefs in order to move beyond the group. And thus ⁓ schizophrenia developed. You know, so it developed specifically for group purposes. And therefore sch schizophrenia is ⁓ integral, at least that type of schizophrenia. to group behaviors and to religion. So those three disorders, OCD, schizophrenia, and ⁓ certain types of epilepsy, repeatedly come up in the conversation around brain basis of religiosity. But you know, I tried to summarize them all to show the limitations of each model, but also how they they do in fact inform. current models of religiosity. speaker-1: Yeah, I mean they're obvious they're part of the story. I can see how some people would like to turn to that to because they want people to they want to say that religion is a mental illness, which it it isn't. but ⁓ yeah, the thing I was it was kind of smiling as you were s talking about the role of schizophrenia is that I I think if I'm correct me if I'm wrong, we have about a one percent prevalence of schizophrenia in the population. So it's about one out of a hundred people, which would be about speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: the size of the group would have been at that time. Exactly. And you'd have you'd have the one you'd have the one shaman that would be seen as the person that that is is more attuned to speaker-0: And and he or she was a visionary and and guess where they got their visions? From dreams. speaker-1: Dreams. Yeah. Yeah. speaker-0: Which is where we interpret the conversation. speaker-1: Yeah, it is. It is. I can tell you, ⁓ I also I have OCD and it's n nothing religious related, but the idea of ecstatic seizures does sound quite delightful. I mean, I don't want to make one of that. I'm sure that I'm sure that there are there are, you know, there there are reasons why that's not necessarily adaptive for good for the brain to have, but ⁓ it's like, yeah, if there were everything's all right for a minute, that sounds great. Who would want to turn that off? You know? speaker-0: I totally understand it though. A lot of people th think ⁓ Dosievsky had those kinds of seizures. You know, w when he describes his seizures there are he describes them in those blissful terms. Of course Dostoevsky wrote the greatest religious novels of all time. speaker-1: So fa I did not know that he had epilepsy. ⁓ at the the brothers Karamatov. Yeah. I mean that that's that's the goat of that. speaker-0: His whole book on Prince Mishkin was a you know, the main character w had these kinds of seizures. speaker-1: Okay. Yeah. ⁓ well, Patrick, do you think that ⁓ ten minutes is enough to talk about the hard problem of consciousness? speaker-0: Sure, yeah. speaker-1: I mean ⁓ so ⁓ it this question comes up a lot. And again, we've kind of talked about there's a difference between like the questions of ultimate reality versus like what we're perceiving about those questions. I think this consciousness, what it is, gets to gets to a little bit of both. do you have any thoughts that you could share about kind of the the the growing interest in what consciousness is? speaker-0: Hm. Well, I I I guess I come down on the side of the people who think s it's fundamental to ultimate reality. You know, like mo I think most philosophers down through the centuries have thought of ⁓ ultimate reality as composed of both matter and what we might call consciousness. ⁓ you know, substance and qualia. Qual you qualia is the feel of consciousness. You know, so ⁓ every ⁓ all ultimate reality is composed of of those two things. You know, we don't have words for them, but they're generally described as matter in mind or or ⁓ qualia in substance. You know, so That's my basic position, you know, like the ultimate reality has a consciousness component and a material component. ⁓ and that's about as much as we can say, but I I think more satisfying neuroscience versions of consciousness. I again we have to invoke these really sort of philosophical ideas. I I also think the simulation argument has a lot of weight to it. I don't know if you know speaker-1: Yeah, could you could you summarize that argument, Boris? speaker-0: ⁓ the ⁓ the idea is that ⁓ the universe is computational in fundamental respects and therefore we can liken it to a kind of video game, you know ⁓ you know, like we're such that we're living in a video game or a simulation in in in terms of a its computational aspect. So the the video the video game programmers only render those aspects of the game that are necessary in order to save computational power. So when a character moves to the outskirts of the landscape, it doesn't, you know, its consciousness, its characteristics don't get rendered until it moves into the edges. you know, the the areas of the game that haven't yet been rendered, haven't yet been coded for. But but when when the character moves into those edges, then the code jumps in and it codes for the conscious and the you know the character literally downloads its consciousness then. th this and and the idea is the same thing happens, you know We're living in an evolving universe, so there's they there are edges of the universe. And we have consciousness now because we're as characters at the edges of the computational simulation. And so our our content has now to be rendered. And that rendering of the content is what we call qualia. That's a really, really rough explanation. speaker-1: It's just like that we're subjectively experiencing the creation of our own experience and it simultaneously. And it's it's it we're it's being rendered in time now because it's more efficient than just rendering everything that's imp possible, like every possible speaker-0: But also but also but o yes, but also crucially because ⁓ we're at the edges of the of the l literal edges of the universe. So where where the human where human beings are are at the cutting edge of the evolving universe. We're not at the beginnings, we're not in the middle, we're at what's being created right now. speaker-1: Right. Okay. This makes sense. So you're talking about the edges in terms of time. I was thinking in space, but they're kind of the same thing. speaker-0: But those those concepts hardly mean an anything in a simulation, you know. But but yes. speaker-1: Right. Well, I mean but Einstein was saying also saying they're the same thing, you know, basically their their time and space are the end. And we're of course we're at the cutting edge of it because ⁓ the what we're experiencing now is the the next thing that's happening. Everything else that's happened already is further closer to the source. speaker-0: But that's just one theory of consciousness. ⁓ you know, I'm not saying that that's you know, as you probably know, there's all kinds of theory. But but that's one one theory that I that I think works, you know. So speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. ⁓ and then also I think there was another one that you just mentioned previously. ⁓ the the idea that consciousness is fundamental. ⁓ can you explain what you mean by that? speaker-0: Yeah, that ⁓ reality has ultimate constituents from which everything else evolves or emerges from. And what we call qualia is one of those ultimate constituents. Why? It's why it's ultimate, nobody knows. It you know, there science just has to say, well, you gotta start somewhere. Right. Right. ⁓ speaker-1: If it's ultimate it just is, right? It's kinda like grab. speaker-0: It just is. speaker-1: And it's like, well I mean it you know, it's at a certain point, like you're trying to bite your teeth at this point, literally is kind of what you know, asking like why do we have consciousness? And so it's just it's ⁓ essentially irreducible. speaker-0: It's irreducible, exactly. speaker-1: Right. Yeah. ⁓ do you think that ⁓ if consciousness is fundamental, like do you do you think there's any merit to the idea that like inanimate objects possess consciousness? speaker-0: Well they they they possess ⁓ what you might call particles of it. That's the idea, you know, like they Right. They they they have the ⁓ they have something like qualia. ⁓ you know, Aristotle would say they have the potential to develop qualia, which is, you know, absolutely true. You know, matter develops into conscious beings. We just we know that's a fact. You know, we're examples of that. We are. Yeah. but you know, so Aristotle's metaphysics says that substance h has the potential to develop into qualia. speaker-1: Mm. Yeah. So also speaker-0: An and in a way that means it had qualia at the beginning, or it could never have developed into that, according to his philosophy. speaker-1: Right. So it's like saying, like, I've got this microphone here. ⁓ it's not in motion, but it has the potential to go into motion. Mm-hmm. So that like that that that potential is always there. And just by virtue of the fact that what it is, yeah, these particles Yeah. It's just part of what it is. And so when we it's almost like there's a capital C consciousness and lower C consciousness, because there's also the sense that we have whatever it is that's maybe an emergent property of our brain. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: that we're aware that we're having this conversation right now. Presumably that we're aware, you know. and that seems to be kind of like a as as far as we know, like the highest order of like stacking of of these fundaments of consciousness that allows for this thing to emerge. Is that do you think that that that essentially is how would it explain because like I'm somewhat aware. I have a qualia right now of what's going on. It's hard for me to relate to ⁓ a lobster. in that in that respect. ⁓ you know what I mean? Like this I one of my former guests we're gonna have up next week is is Charles Nichols. He's a psychopharmacologist and he studies psychedelic medicines and ⁓ the serotonin system and crustaceans, like lobsters and crawfish, you know, and fruit flies are are where are how he's studying serotonin. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure lobsters don't have a mood. But ⁓ I mean maybe that's just the limitations of my own experience. You know, I can't really imagine There's this essay, What is it like to be a bat? ⁓ that Charles Nagel wrote. And it's kind of a it it's a simple little essay for as confounding as it is to think about, yeah, I I really I'll never really know what it's like to be a bat, but I'm pretty sure there's something that it is like to be a bat. speaker-0: Exactly. Yeah. That's his whole argument, yeah, about qualia. But the the the thing that ⁓ needs to be explained and ⁓ by every theory of consciousness, in my opinion, is novelty and creativity and current theories of consciousness as fundamental to the universe. And theories of emergence in particular do not explain the appearance in the universe of utterly new things. See, th the the emergence theory says everything that we see around us is simply ⁓ reaggregation of the basic components of ultimate reality. You know, and if everything's just a re recombination of what's already there, then nothing new can really occur. But new things occur. So something, you know, we need to we need a theory for how novelty novelty is possible. And the theory of emergence, which is the basic paradigm of science, has no such theory. Because it's wedded to the emergent paradigm. Everything comes from fundamental particles and is built up. through l larger and larger organization of these fundamental particles. All of physics is based on emergence. But it doesn't have a theory of the new. speaker-1: Can you give me an example of like new things that are occurring? speaker-0: Well to me, you, Andrew, are are a person. You are in being a person, you're you have infinite depth and the possibility for infinite transcendence. So there are two abysses in you. One is infinitely deep and one is infinitely high, you might say. You know, transcendence and imminence. A a person is a is a is a mystery but is an entity with fundamental dignity and value. And ⁓ so that's something that's you know not accounted for in any theory of the universe. Now whether or not persons are new or have all always been there, but they're they're they're sort of outside of time. So we can't use temporal categories to understand personhood. You know, ⁓ I y you say you're you're Catholic, and the the Catholic Church has the only account that I know of of the infinite dignity of the person. You know, other religious traditions do as well, but the Catholic Church has made a big deal of that. And I think that's a good in intuition, you know. So that's just one example of something that's utterly new from the point of view of the paradigms we're all living in. But there's many other examples. speaker-1: So as we're winding twenty seconds to two hours. I'm like, ⁓ yeah, that that relates to the whole question of free will, which we absolutely don't have time to talk about. I mean that was when you're saying things that are new, I'm like, I think he's saying that free will is real. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. ⁓ and we don't have time to get there. Maybe I will have to I would love to have you back. ⁓ and maybe we can just talk about that. speaker-0: Yep, yep, yep. Enjoyed our conversation and love to be back sometime. speaker-1: Thank you so much. I have I have enjoyed this so much. This has been y years in the making for me to be able to meet you and to meet people like you. And I'm so thrilled that I have this this show now where I get to just ask these kind of talk about the ultimate questions of reality and your research. And ⁓ I've just enjoyed this immensely. So I just want to say thank you so much for for coming on. speaker-0: Me too, and and thanks for the great questions. It was a real pleasure. All right, Andrew. See you later then. speaker-1: Thank you so much, Patrick.