In this episode, Dr. Carl Sagan joins us to talk about his new audiobook series, Waking Up, and why he believes that consciousness is fundamental in nature. Dr. Sagan is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the founder of the Consciousness Project. He is also the author of Conscious: The Search for the Bigger Mind, a book about consciousness and the search for the truth about the nature of consciousness.
00:17:53.040And I think if more people get on board with believing that this is a legitimate path forward, I think we're, you know, we're just at the very beginning of what the implications are.
00:18:03.340And I think this will go in directions that no one can yet imagine, really, which is kind of how science works.
00:18:08.620It will be the next paradigm shift, I think, if we become as convinced that consciousness could be fundamental as we are convinced at this point that it emerges, because then that will lead all of the new questions.
00:18:22.720Before I answer that, though, I'm aware, I've been talking about this so much that I'm aware that I've made my case in many other contexts, but I'm certainly aware of how insane, no, to you I have, but to your audience, this may be the first time they're hearing about this, and I don't want to sound too crazy.
00:18:44.260And so I just wonder if we should backtrack a little bit or if I should just say that I spend my crazy wife that I spend much of the documentary and have spent much of my work explaining and making an argument for how I have come to the belief that this is a legitimate and important scientific question to ask.
00:19:05.120And my argument is based in neuroscience.
00:19:07.620It was working with neuroscientists for 20 years and learning more and more about how the brain works that convinced me that our assumptions about what we think consciousness is, how it's causal, all the rest.
00:19:18.940Actually, many of them have already been proven to be illusions of sorts.
00:19:23.260And so we don't need to get into the details there, but if anyone has read my book Conscious, there are two questions that I raise in that book that I think are interesting, intuition-shattering questions once you start to look closely at the details of how we try to answer them, because they feel like questions we know we have the answer to and we feel confident that our answers are right.
00:19:46.920And the first question is, can you find evidence of consciousness from outside a system?
00:19:52.180And we feel the answer is obviously yes.
00:19:55.080You know, when you see it, if I see my friend coming toward me with her arms outstretched, I have a very strong belief that she is conscious and feeling love and excitement.
00:20:05.740And, you know, I think we're very likely right about that.
00:20:08.640But the idea that we can always be sure that the behavior of a system, or that we could list behavior in a system, that is conclusive evidence that consciousness is present.
00:20:20.440I think, one, we're starting to already get confused with the advancements in AI, because as you mentioned, there could soon be a system that looks like my friend running toward me with its arms outstretched, and we won't know whether there's a conscious experience on the other side of that.
00:20:35.280And so it turns out, the answer to that question, is there conclusive evidence we can find from outside a system?
00:20:42.120The answer there is, you know, at the very least, maybe, but very likely no.
00:20:46.340I would say that if your friend has a credit card reader on her face...
00:21:05.120And this is where a lot of the neuroscience disproves our strong intuitions that consciousness, that our felt experience of certain brain processing, is the thing that causes us to then act.
00:21:18.340And there's now a ton of research, I'm sure you've talked to many neuroscientists on the podcast about binding processes, you know, almost every process in the brain actually kind of is a clue that our feeling, our conscious feeling of making a decision of trying to think of another example.
00:21:39.680Being the actual authors of our thoughts and actions.
00:21:43.340As if there's kind of this conscious lever.
00:21:45.560The consciousness initiates the thing that happens.
00:21:48.220And the truth is that most processes in the brain that we know about, the conscious experience, at least the one that we can report on, is at the tail end of all of that and that all of the processing kind of happens.
00:21:57.800But doesn't the second point cut the other way?
00:22:00.680Because if you knew that about the mind, which in fact we do, or it certainly seems to be the case, that much of what's going on is going on in the dark.
00:22:11.520Then what is the motivation to imagine that consciousness might go all the way down?
00:22:16.140If it seems like even mental processing is going on in the dark.
00:22:20.400Well, if consciousness is fundamental, then whatever seems to be in the dark to us is just other conscious experiences arising that don't enter our stream of memory.
00:22:31.840And so, yes, there's another way to talk about all of that if we're assuming that consciousness is fundamental.
00:22:36.340But speaking straight from the neuroscience, so there's a lot of self-contradiction here in the neuroscience in terms of assuming that consciousness is causal and assuming it evolved.
00:22:47.740But then all of the research showing that it isn't consciousness, actually, that is behind all of these things.
00:22:54.700So, yeah, there are two ways to talk about it here.
00:22:57.460Another point I was going to make about that, because I think it's interesting that if, again, if we shift our perspective and we start looking at these things and we ask the question, if consciousness is fundamental, what does it mean that a person seems to be unconscious when they're under anesthesia or when we're in deep sleep?
00:23:14.840Or that there are all these unconscious brain processes that go on that we are completely unaware of or seem to be unaware of?
00:23:21.780You know, what does that mean if consciousness is fundamental?
00:23:23.860And so I've been thinking a lot about this.
00:23:25.720And one of the last chapters where I talked to Sarah Walker, the astrophysicist, really focuses on this.
00:23:32.540She really is willing to go there with me on this idea of, you know, what does it mean to be a human mind and have a self and how much memory comes into play?
00:23:44.840And so the truth is, there could be countless conscious experiences happening in my brain and maybe elsewhere in my body that don't enter the stream of memory that I call me, right?
00:23:58.880And so the split brain research is really interesting to look at here.
00:24:02.720I think just kind of to break open your creativity to think about other things that might be happening besides if I report on it, if I can feel it and talk about it, that means it's conscious.
00:24:12.880And if I don't remember it or don't feel it, it means it's not conscious.
00:24:16.980Even a simple example of a pregnant woman, which I thought a lot about when I was pregnant, you know, even conjoined twins is another example.
00:24:24.360Split brain research gives the best, the cleanest examples, but just go back to pregnant woman, you know, we don't know when human babies become conscious, but it's not that hard to imagine that it happens at some point in utero in some late stage.
00:24:38.840And so, you know, babies could be experiencing sound and light and very minimal experiences of consciousness that you would never expect the mother to be feeling, right?
00:24:49.000It's a separate system. And so there are many ways we might imagine that there are countless systems within the human brain and the human body that just don't get shared with what I'm calling me.
00:24:59.980You know, and in the case of a split brain patient, it really seems that you've basically just split these streams of memory that you would call I, that we're always referring to as I.
00:25:10.740And there's a whole half of the brain that the left hemisphere, which is the speaking hemisphere in a split brain patient who can report about things, will not be aware of or doesn't seem to be aware of and can't answer questions that have been posed to the other hemisphere.
00:25:25.480And so that, you know, there's already evidence that there can be many different streams of consciousness.
00:25:35.100And I actually think that's probably the wrong way to think about it.
00:25:37.580I think it's more useful to think about memory and how different experiences get tied through time in the form of memory.
00:25:44.800Lately, I've been thinking about the fact that, you know, even my own memories of a week ago, 10 years ago, each moment is a new moment.
00:25:53.340And so I have this memory and I have this kind of false sense that I'm this concrete entity that moves through time and kind of touches on all these conscious experiences.
00:26:03.140But the truth is this new conscious experience is being generated a new now.
00:26:08.720And it's been affected by previous experiences through memory.
00:26:14.660So I have some relationship to, you know, even though I was a completely different person with a very different brain when I was four years old, there's some continuity there.
00:26:25.460There's some way that this conscious experience in this moment is being affected by a conscious experience that happened in that my four-year-old self.
00:26:35.040And there's a way in which I've been thinking more about how conscious experiences affect one another in time and in space.
00:26:44.840And so there's a way in which also everything in this room with me, especially you, is affecting my conscious experience right now.
00:26:53.960So you're having conscious experiences and the look on your face or the sounds that you make or in those ways, they shape the conscious experiences that are arising over here.
00:27:03.180And so conscious experiences kind of affect each other through space in the moment and through time, through memory.
00:27:27.100I should also say, just for listeners who want to go deep, I also have chapter notes for every chapter.
00:27:32.880So on my website, yeah, it's clear when you're listening.
00:27:36.440But all of this research, people can go deep if they want to.
00:27:40.340Although, so your reference to a few of these phenomena, split brain, conjoined twins, pregnant mother, invites a discussion.
00:27:51.620Of what is called in this literature, the combination problem.
00:27:56.180If consciousness goes deeper than most people think, if it goes down to the level of cells or even further still, if there's an interior experiential dimension to everything, including electrons, it still leaves it mysterious how any of these parts combine to produce specific, seemingly independent islands of consciousness.
00:28:23.960So that, you know, there's something that it's like to be some considerable portion of your cerebral cortex functioning properly.
00:28:30.440But it doesn't seem like there's something that it's like to be your liver.
00:28:34.860But maybe every cell in your liver has some conscious or proto-conscious quality to it.
00:28:42.260So why doesn't the liver have an independent point of view on the universe, et cetera?
00:28:46.880So how physical structures that are, wherein the lights are on in some sense, combine to create a more hierarchical, more complex point of view that is the result of those structures combining?
00:29:05.980First, I think it's more useful to think of conscious experiences arising and passing away in the universe.
00:29:13.220And some of those conscious experiences contain much more content than others.
00:29:18.760I will also say that, you know, I still consider myself to be a physicalist.
00:29:22.820And I actually haven't even landed on, you know, believing that consciousness is fundamental.
00:29:27.600All I believe is that it's a legitimate question.
00:29:29.880And I'm interested in exploring the possibility that that's the case.
00:29:34.220But if consciousness is fundamental, I think the physics and math that we have discovered and developed so far explains the structure of consciousness.
00:29:44.120And I'm very curious to know more about what that means.
00:29:49.040But clearly there are more complicated structures than others.
00:30:04.900So I think just because we see a liver as a single system, you know, and I actually, the truth is, as we were talking about, I don't think the brain is even a single system.
00:30:13.620I think if consciousness is fundamental, there are, you know, maybe hundreds, if not thousands of conscious experiences coming in and out of existence right now that I, you know, my stream of memory doesn't have access to.
00:30:24.200And so, you know, I'm not calling that me, but they're coming into being in the universe.
00:30:29.380So if consciousness is fundamental, I would expect a liver to, you know, in that point in space and time where the liver exists, I would expect there to be an incredibly minimal form of experience and nothing that implies memory.
00:30:46.100You know, as much as, as far as we understand memory, there's almost no system that has any sort of hint at memory.
00:30:53.640I mean, you know, a Venus flytrap shows us a system of memory.
00:30:58.000And so I would expect a Venus flytrap, even though I don't think that a Venus flytrap feels like a self, if it feels like anything.
00:31:04.820But wherever there's more memory, there is more chance of an experience of being a self.
00:31:12.220And so a liver doesn't show any signs of having that.
00:31:16.020And so whatever the types of experiences are that get generated by that type of matter, I would expect them to be very, very minimal and very fleeting.
00:31:24.540And so there's no sense of being a liver because there's actually...
00:31:28.320It's not thinking, God, this guy really likes margaritas.
00:31:32.240There's a great, fascinating and sad documentary that is in the notes, I forget which chapter, but of a man, I believe it was a PBS documentary.
00:31:46.640It was a man who had the shortest memory based on brain damage, Clive something.
00:31:51.920I forget which episode that was, but it's crazy.
00:31:53.920And it's so fascinating to hear him talk about his experience.
00:31:57.980So I think his short-term memory is like three seconds long or something.
00:32:01.800So his experience is of just constantly kind of waking up over and over.
00:32:07.880But he seems to have some, I mean, he seems to have some awareness of this, but he will talk about how much he has been, how long he's been unconscious for.
00:32:17.940And he sees the way he experiences it is as going in and out of consciousness because he experiences himself waking up, even though in the last second he was talking.
00:32:30.100So I think, I think it takes a lot of intuition shattering for us to get creative enough to think about what conscious experience means without memory, possibly even without time, but certainly to be very unlike a human being, which I actually think is why psychedelics can be so helpful for these types of insights because it makes you, I see another joke brewing.
00:32:53.480I was just going to ask, are you on psychedelics now?
00:32:57.300No, I would not be speaking this well.
00:33:00.100Sorry, you had a point you wanted to come back to.
00:33:04.040It was just a question about the combination problem, but then when you talked about the brain potentially having many islands of conscious experience, which you, the reporting witness who I'm talking to, don't have access to.
00:33:20.700That sounds really far-fetched on some level until you realize what if there simply is a bottleneck where there's only one system of processing in the brain that is what we mean is in fact what constitutes memory and reportability.
00:33:41.420So it's like, in order for there to be many different verbose islands of consciousness, there would need to be memory and reportability in all these other islands.
00:33:56.540But if there were only one in an intact brain, which seems to be the case, I mean, this is what's so unique about the split-brain case, is that when you divide the corpus callosum and all the other commissures, you have partitioned the brain in such a way that if there is language ability on both sides, which in some cases there is, you can talk to two, effectively two different people.
00:34:20.100And, you know, or at least communicate with them.
00:34:23.000Different opinions and different answers to the same question.
00:34:25.480I mean, so there are these famous cases that where, you know, the left hemisphere is talking with the mouth and the right hemisphere is spelling something out, an alternate answer out with letter cards.
00:34:37.700Now, but it just so happens that in most people, language is heavily segregated in one hemisphere, usually the left.
00:34:43.360And so when each of us introspects and tries to take the measure of what could possibly be the totality of consciousness in our own case, all we have is some version of this memory buffer that's allowing us to integrate our perception and sensation and thought and emotion over a, you know, a narrow time window.
00:35:08.700And without that, I mean, just imagine, take the case you just referred to, and just imagine not remembering anything that proceeded two seconds ago, right?
00:35:20.420Like that just had, what a punctate, you know, slice of conscious reality that would be.
00:35:25.660All that other stuff that happened would be in the dark, right?
00:35:28.140Like it is memory that makes this sense of psychological continuity available to us.
00:35:36.760So if we had multiple versions of that, well, then we would have a sense that, okay, there's a Congress of selves in here that, you know, you can pass the mic around and they can talk.
00:35:47.920The fact that there's a single common pathway of reportability and short-term memory puts us in a situation where, by definition, it's going to seem like there's only one of it, right?
00:36:04.920And you see this, I mean, it's really intuition shaking to see the interviews with split brain patients.
00:36:12.520I have one that I play in one of the chapters.
00:36:15.580But to see a question asked of a split brain patient's right hemisphere, which is the non-speaking hemisphere, which apart from these ways that the neuroscientists found to interrogate, you would have no idea these opinions and feelings were there at all.
00:36:33.220You know, they ask the participant who answers with his left hemisphere, what did you just see on the screen?
00:36:39.320And they flashed it to the right hemisphere.
00:36:41.140So he thinks he didn't see, he'll say, I didn't see anything.
00:36:44.080So his conscious experience is nothing was seen.
00:36:47.200They realized that they can have the right hemisphere answer either by writing with their right hand or by pointing to cards, as you said.
00:36:58.080And the fact, that's already something we know happens.
00:37:04.840And so, yeah, the question is, how often is that happening in our own minds?
00:37:09.920And then throughout the universe, I got very interested in plant behavior at some point.
00:37:14.880I still do not have an intuition that plants are conscious, but some of the behaviors that they exhibit are quite complex and actually new things that have just been discovered as early as 2014 about plants' ability to, vision is not the right word because they don't have eyes, but their ability to perform all kinds of tasks based on detecting light in a way that seems very much like vision.
00:37:40.900And why we would assume that our experience of vision includes a felt experience, again, of seeing yellow and other processing in nature that in many ways is more complex.
00:37:53.180They have many more photoreceptors than we do.
00:37:56.840Why do we assume that that doesn't require consciousness?
00:38:01.040And, you know, I don't have the answer, but I think it's very interesting that we don't have an answer for why we need it and plants don't.
00:38:08.120And we don't have an answer as to whether conscious experience even arises out of complexity at all.
00:38:16.080Okay, so how does the possible fundamental nature of consciousness affect physics?
00:38:23.300Yeah, I mean, I think if enough scientists are willing to move forward with the assumption, not knowing either way, but rather than the assumption that consciousness emerges at any level or at a complex level, that it's actually part of the fundamental story or is in fact the most fundamental thing.
00:38:42.980I'm aware that human beings are generally very bad at predicting where new science will take us and what the future will look like.
00:38:53.800But I did, for this series, spend a lot of time doing my best to imagine what scientists might be exploring and the types of things we might be able to discover.
00:39:03.120And there are kind of three general areas.
00:39:05.440And so the first is actually connected to work that's already being done, which is called sensory substitution and sensory addition.
00:39:12.940I talked to David Eagleman about this work.
00:39:14.660And so this started as something called sensory substitution, which were devices to help blind and deaf people.
00:39:21.600They're devices that they wear that helps them process light waves, you know, in the case of a blind person.
00:39:26.240And very interesting and very successful work, actually, these tools.
00:39:30.780The brain learns to use these other signals, electro-tactile signals usually, that come in through a camera.
00:39:36.780And the people who are blind are then able to do things like shoot hoops and walk through mazes and incredible things once their brains adapt to this new way of getting visual information.
00:39:50.480And so the science then naturally led to something called sensory addition, where we realized there are all these things that we don't perceive in the world, one of them being the Earth's magnetic field.
00:39:59.560And I talked to a participant in a study where they were tried to give participants an experience of feeling magnetic north.
00:40:08.600And so I explained the whole study in the series, but essentially these participants were given a new sense.
00:40:16.000And David Eagleman talks about all of the possible potential for this type of thing.
00:40:20.680And so one way, I imagine, is that we already, a lot of our science is done because we perceive.
00:40:29.080We perceive gravity, we perceive color, we perceive all these things, and we actually have good intuitions for a lot of them.
00:40:36.120And so we have to do science to enhance our understanding of these things that we perceive and feel.
00:40:42.020But it really always begins with a perception of them.
00:40:44.820We can now understand the microscopic world, but it helps to be able to use a microscope to see the microscopic world.
00:40:52.700And we gain intuitions when we can actually experience the things.
00:40:56.620So I think there's incredible potential.
00:40:58.900And so I call this whole realm experiential science.
00:41:02.000I think there's potential for learning a lot more about the way the world works by directly experiencing other systems and forces.
00:41:10.740This actually got me thinking after I spoke with Sarah Walker.
00:41:15.240She writes in her book about Einstein's intuition that space-time is space-time.
00:41:21.680That they're not two separate things and that actually the fabric of reality is space-time and gravity is not what we thought it was.
00:41:28.000It's not a force, but it's this warping of the fabric of reality.
00:41:31.800It's a warping of space-time and that explains the things that we see gravity affecting.
00:41:36.320And it took him a good decade and longer to really express this initial intuition he had through mathematics, through language.
00:41:47.180And so there's something very interesting I learned along the way that communication is so central to this conversation about consciousness.
00:41:55.920Because we can't really talk about anything that we don't share an experience of.
00:42:01.700So in the same way that you can't explain to a blind person what it's like to see, you can give analogies.
00:42:07.760There's a lot of information you can give, especially if you share other senses.
00:42:11.280But there's no way you're ever going to give them the experience of seeing red.
00:42:16.700And so communication relies on a shared felt experience.
00:42:20.220And actually, the man I spoke with, Sasha Fink, who did the study for Magnetic North, he talked about this kinship he felt with the other participants because they were the only people in the world who had experience, who had this feeling of Magnetic North and could talk about what it felt like and share their experiences with each other.
00:42:38.140So in terms of scientific advancements, I think about, you know, what if Einstein had been able to share the intuition directly?
00:42:46.800Because language and mathematics, while extremely useful, can take a very long time, especially if it's something new that no one else has thought of before.
00:42:55.080Well, the point you're making now actually subsumes this whole conversation on some level because the fact that we're constrained to talk about, think about, try to resolve the contradiction between reality being this two-faced object, the mental and the physical, that on some level could be a constraint that's artificially imposed based on our perceptual systems, the way our neurology just sections reality or seems to.
00:43:32.900Unless we find a way to share experience through memory.
00:43:36.760So I think, you know, as I was talking before about, you know, my memories of when I was younger, I have this sense that I have access to another point in time and space, which is true, but it's more that those points in time and space are informing this moment in time and space.
00:43:53.180And so the idea is that the same way that I have that information available and that that information is available in this moment.
00:44:01.200If Einstein's intuition, that felt experience, whatever created that, if that or at least enough of that could be in my stream of memory so that it's an intuition I can refer back to.
00:44:13.280Suddenly, I mean, yes, this has all kinds of implications for me.
00:44:17.260I think about the scientific implications, but it naturally dissolves the sense of self.
00:44:22.880I think it gives us a better felt experience of how the universe is actually structured.
00:44:27.780The separateness we feel in the experience of being a self, I think, would start to dissolve if not only would the experiences I had when I was 10 affect the experiences I have now, but the experiences you had yesterday could affect the experiences I have now.
00:44:43.840And so I don't know what the future technology looks like.
00:44:46.540And it gets scary if you try to imagine it.
00:44:48.520They do, because I always complain about them.
00:44:50.260But there's no reason, there's no real reason why I could have an experience now of a memory of being myself yesterday making breakfast and not have a memory of being you yesterday making breakfast.
00:45:07.100And so that's kind of the second area that I think is interesting and likely to be explored.
00:45:12.880And then the other thing is a little harder to explain, or maybe a little harder to explain the usefulness of, but I was thinking about this idea of being able to experience other systems.
00:45:25.640Is there some way in which we might be able to feel, I'm trying to think of a good example of a plant or a tree, feel an oak tree?
00:45:35.660And of course, even if we found some way to connect my neurology to an oak tree, and I had some very interesting experience, there'd be no reason to believe that that's what the oak tree feels, right?
00:45:47.480But what I realized in these crazy thought experiments is that we use our conscious experiences as intuition already for so much science and for our guesses about what other systems are conscious.
00:46:04.600And so I have all of the evidence from you that you are conscious, but that's so much of that is based on the shared experiences we're able to communicate to each other.
00:46:15.820You know, my cat to a lesser degree, but it's the way in which I notice the cat behaving in ways that I expect it feels something similar to the things I feel when I behave in similar ways.
00:46:28.500You know, there's pain, there's pleasure, there's hunger, there are all these things that I can relate to.
00:46:33.620So I imagine there's some version of that happening.
00:46:36.040If we were able to start to experience other systems in the way that David Eagleman talks about, he gives this crazy but fascinating example of astronauts being connected to the workings of the International Space Station so that they wouldn't have to be reading numbers all the time, but they could actually intuitively feel, you know, the health of the space station or the things that need to be attended to.
00:46:56.840So if there were some version of that and we were able to connect to other systems, would we gain intuitions that would maybe not be full evidence, but maybe as much evidence as I have that my cat is conscious based on the things that are able to get communicated through that?
00:47:13.260Is there some sense in which we might be able to experience other systems that would give us new intuitions for, one, how they work, which is just interesting scientifically, but then, two, whether they're conscious?
00:47:28.400I think we should just introduce the episode here because there's no, there's nothing we're going to say here that's a surrogate for just actually listening to what you've produced here.
00:47:39.920Yeah, so this is chapter eight called Space and Time, and I spoke to two physicists, Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli, and a science writer, George Musser, to try to get as clear of a sense as I could about the different interpretations of quantum mechanics and the new theories of quantum gravity and how they might relate to this possibility that consciousness is fundamental and how these physicists would react.
00:48:09.920So that suggestion, I also, at that point in my journey and in the series, became very interested in whether time is a fundamental property of the universe or not, physicists are generally in agreement that space is emergent and not fundamental, and I talk a lot about that and how actually I think that makes sense at the level of the brain as well and what we're perceiving as space not being out there in the way that green is not out there, but more of a mapping of structure of the universe that we're
00:48:39.920have some access to. And so Lee Smolin believes that time is fundamental and his new theory of quantum gravity places time at a fundamental level, and Carlo Rovelli does not believe time is fundamental, and his theory talks a lot about how time, he wouldn't say time is an illusion, it's something that emerges, but that essentially it's not something that is part of the fabric of the universe.
00:49:15.840When I first began to wonder if my and others' experiences in meditation were providing any hints of deeper truths about the nature of reality, the fact that I was even contemplating this question came as a complete surprise to me.
00:49:33.700I had always considered any type of personal, subjective experience to be more or less useless as a tool for probing scientific truths. Maybe not for psychology and neuroscience, but certainly for fundamental physics.
00:49:47.800Through my work with neuroscientists over the years, I had learned just how indirectly we're in contact with the outside world. In fact, many of the things that seem like the most direct channels to reality, as we've seen, turn out to be what Anil Seth rightly refers to as controlled hallucinations.
00:50:07.660But there's a hitch. Strangely, when you place careful attention on your moment-to-moment experience in a very disciplined way, some of our perceptions, including those of space, time, and self, actually begin to shift or drop out altogether.
00:50:25.100And surprisingly, our window onto reality can be transformed into a more accurate one, at least in some cases.
00:50:32.300So as I followed the advancements in quantum physics, reading about newer theories that suggest space and time are emergent rather than fundamental, I was reminded of some of my and others' meditative experiences of a timeless, spaceless experience of consciousness.
00:50:50.820And much like the experience of self, the suggestion that space-time is not fundamental, though mind-blowing on one level, actually made some intuitive sense to me.
00:51:02.300And this was the beginning of a sort of merging of two areas of interest of mine that I had never dreamed would intersect.
00:51:10.800I had already witnessed the convergence of my interest in meditation with neuroscience earlier in my career,
00:51:17.020even developing into some fascinating scientific studies in which they scanned experienced meditators' brains in fMRI machines.
00:51:24.900But experiences in meditation more naturally lend themselves to neuroscientific interest as a phenomenon for obvious reasons.
00:51:33.160And I was still fairly skeptical that there was any useful connection to be made between meditative insights and fundamental physics.
00:51:45.200I just want to say that I've been immersed in this conversation with you for quite a while now,
00:51:50.420and I'm never really sure how jarring some of these arguments are for newcomers.
00:51:56.200But this is Chapter 8, so hopefully by now the listener hearing a casual suggestion that space and time might not be fundamental is not that crazy anymore.
01:50:11.380So you can, it's unfortunately, apparently coherent to believe that.
01:50:17.840But I think it's much deeper to believe the version that I've been talking about, which is, we can call it, it's something like the presentist or stripped-down presentist.
01:50:32.120And the little manuscript with Kalalia Berti is the furthest I've got towards, kind of lyrically at least, saying what we're trying to do.
01:50:44.880Because we're trying to get rid of the past and the future and just have the presence.
01:50:51.760And the idea, which was Kalalia's idea, which has gotten me, it's changed how I think of this recently, is that what an event is, what a moment is, is a transition from indefiniteness to definiteness.
01:51:07.360I actually just had a question, which is, when you say views, is there any sense of conscious experience being part of these views?
01:51:15.400Or is it just kind of an unknown at this point?
01:51:17.520I guess I have a hard time understanding what a view or perspective would refer to without a conscious experience.
01:51:25.580Are you talking about the possibility of affecting, or how is it a single, how is a view even a single thing that you can talk about?
01:51:36.540Well, you know, there's this funny thing in which you don't have to find your most fundamental quantities.
01:52:32.100And I can write a mathematical formula for that, and I do in the work.
01:52:39.060But I just have to assume that that's fundamental.
01:52:41.880So, what I'm looking for is the answer to the following question.
01:52:49.760First of all, I don't want to believe in a cheap version of panpsychism where it has no cause, where things being, quote, conscious or having sensations or qualia has no causal consequences.
01:53:08.960I mean, the causal consequences are throughout the universe.
01:53:13.080And so, if consciousness is part of the fundamental story, it's part of the causal story as well.
01:53:17.640My question is just, is the causal story how it appears to us?
01:53:23.180Are we anthropomorphizing what causation actually is?
01:53:26.660And my deep sense is that causation is about a kind of fundamental structure by which different things in the universe are connected and come to be.
01:53:40.660And therefore, I mean, so if consciousness is at a fundamental level, it's not a separate thing that's causing things to happen.
01:54:13.520Second, not most views, but some special views.
01:54:18.600And I want to say, or hypothesize, it could be wrong, it's a scientific hypothesis, that it's important for the laws that I've been playing with at this level that we can distinguish new views from precedented views.
01:54:39.600A precedented view is one that there are the same views in the past.
01:54:48.620And sometimes there are views, most of the time views have precedents, and that's why they know how to evolve.
01:54:57.380And every once in a while there's a view without precedent, and those are the ones that somehow consciousness is associated with.
01:55:07.160That is, the view has not existed in the history of the universe.
01:55:12.880Yes, that, I think, I think a lot about that.
01:55:17.440Even though I have no way of assessing the science myself, of course, I still have a hard time getting on board with the idea that the future does not exist by definition, as Lee describes.
01:55:31.960But I love this image of the universe being made up of views, and much of what he described was more or less something I could grasp and accept.
01:55:41.920And what I really appreciate is the emphasis he places on what he calls relationalism.
01:55:47.540And this is a theme I see popping up in so many theories at the cutting edge of fundamental physics, both in theories in which time plays a fundamental role and those in which it doesn't.
01:55:58.340I often try to imagine analogies for an innately relational universe, like a web or a loom.
01:56:08.900I described a version of my web analogy in an article I wrote for Nautilus in 2022, titled, What is Time?
01:56:17.500And I'll read an excerpt from it here.
01:56:19.380If you were to experience a structure on this web,
01:56:49.380such as node A, node A, node F, you might interpret the experience as two node A's cause a node F,
01:56:59.600when in fact the whole web of nodes already exists in its entirety.
01:57:04.680The implicit causality would not apply at a deeper level.
01:57:09.320Causality through time would still illuminate connections.
01:57:12.540It's just that the underlying reality of these connections would reveal a structure vastly different from the one we intuit.
01:57:20.820That is, a universe with a flow of time where the past is set in stone,
01:57:24.960the future is undetermined, and the present is the only true reality.
01:57:28.940But this analogy is certainly far from perfect and not always appreciated,
01:57:41.040because it can never really be accurate to talk about a web that somehow exists outside of space and time.
01:57:47.580But the picture I'm always attempting to paint is essentially a modern version of what has been referred to as the block universe view in physics,
01:57:56.340where the past, present, and future all exist in some complete way.
01:58:01.360Though not static in the way the image of a block universe implies, but dynamic.
02:00:39.220Because I can understand my brain as a structure that changes in time.
02:00:44.340So there is a clock time, which has nothing to do with my brain.
02:00:47.920I can describe my clock using a notion of time, and my clock has no expectation, no memory, no distinction between past and future, and so on.
02:00:57.400So it's less timey than my perception, but there's still some time.
02:01:00.840But the description of my clock is non-relativistic.
02:01:04.760So if I fold in relativity, I lose another piece.
02:01:07.980And if I fold in quantum gravity, I lose another piece.
02:01:11.240So I think that space and time are layers of concepts which are born in different approximations.
02:01:19.940And if you want to understand them, we have to open them up and say, aha, this comes from that, this comes from that, this comes from that.
02:01:29.020At the bottom level, well, at the bottom level, as far as we know, there is a quantum theory of gravity, of which we have hypotheses, tentative theories,
02:01:36.640where there is no time in the Newtonian sense, there's no direct time, but there are events that happen.
02:01:49.840And the way I sometimes think about it is that our experience of time is kind of this very limited window onto a structure for which we have very little understanding.
02:02:02.840But there is a structure there, and time gives us a sense of that structure, but it is a very, very small window onto it.
02:02:14.400So in my work, I'm always kind of trying to play both games at once, which sometimes doesn't make sense.
02:02:21.220But to wrap my mind around what we understand about the, you know, as much as we can understand about the fundamental nature of reality,
02:02:31.640and then what that means in terms of our experience and what parts of our experience are useful and are, you know, telling us something about the structure.
02:02:42.260Because the innate curiosity that we, that you and I both have, you know, the answers that we want to arrive at, whether or not, you know, human beings can actually arrive at them.
02:02:53.260I think in my work that often we make the mistake, even scientists make the mistake of being aware that reality is different from what looks at first sight.
02:03:09.240But nevertheless, sort of using introspection, of using intuition, and being very attached and say, okay, that has to be like that because I feel it is like that.
02:03:29.380I think at least morning is making this mistake about times.
02:03:31.940And when I talk with some colleagues, there are technical discussions, there are mathematical discussions, there are discussions about experiments, but often there are conceptual discussions in which I find exactly this difficult.
02:03:45.800I wish to say, come on, how do you know things are like that?
02:03:48.780Why do you trust your intuition so much?
02:03:52.160Allow the possibility that things are not the way you think they are.
02:03:55.920That's basically where I spend all of my time.
02:04:03.060So I think this is important to be able to recognize the things we give for obvious and question them because that's what blocks us in going ahead and understanding.
02:04:17.060Yeah, okay, so I've spent some time just thinking about what it means that time has the character that we now understand and that we, like, what does that mean about our experience?
02:04:34.540And so the only way I could get my, I'm always trying to visualize things.
02:04:37.800And so I started visualizing, like, this web or loom.
02:04:41.240Because one of the interesting things to me about losing time as we generally think of it is that we also lose causality in the way we think of it.
02:04:49.520And so I imagine causality and time being about connections between things and not about the way we experience them moving in one direction where this thing happens and then the next thing happens.
02:05:03.780One big disagreement I had with Lee is the way he describes, you know, reality kind of unfolding through time so that there is all of this potential future and it is not part of the description of reality until it happens and time somehow is magically bringing things into being.
02:05:25.880And I just don't think that's the right way to think about it.
02:05:29.240But I was trying to imagine what this structure is.
02:05:35.540I know you don't like that phrasing, but what this structure is, what our experience of time and causality are telling us about the structure and how different is it from our experience.
02:05:46.140And so I started imagining this web or loom that is kind of the structure of reality and our experience being very limited to, you know, one location isn't quite the right word, but one location at a time.
02:06:04.240And kind of wherever we are, the rest disappears for us.
02:06:08.200It doesn't exist for us, even though that structure is clearly there and is the reason why things are the way they are.
02:06:16.340But I was thinking about causality and thinking that if, you know, if I were on some sort of web that had a structure and I make it very simple, you know, it's like a sort of weaving on a loom where there's a right stitch, right stitch, left stitch, and there's this pattern.
02:06:30.780But the only thing that exists for me is each individual moment that I have access to.
02:06:37.420And so it makes sense that it would seem to me that, you know, right stitch, right stitch causes left stitch, right?
02:06:44.480That those things don't come into being, that one thing being makes the other thing come into being, and that that's kind of a false way of seeing things, but that the structure itself is always there.
02:06:54.180Yeah, yeah, I think the key to this puzzle here is traces.
02:07:02.000So we happen to live in a corner of the universe, right?
02:07:07.100We happen to be here in a corner of the universe.
02:07:11.800I mean, that's the contingency of, it's specific of reality around us that there is a difference between the set of events that we call the past and the future.
02:07:23.020And the difference is that in the present, there are many traces of the past events and little traces of future events.
02:07:32.540It's a contingent fact, I think, of nature.
02:07:35.480So in your mental game, if you were on this web and you happen to have next to you a lot of pictures, photographs of things far away from you, but on the same side and nothing at all of the other side, you would naturally consider one side a fixed and the other side of open.
02:07:55.720And I think that's what happened to us.
02:08:08.420So it is a fact that we only connect with microscopic variables and not microscopic variables.
02:08:15.520So we describe things in terms of microscopic variables thermodynamically.
02:08:19.200And microscopically, because we are in an entropy gradient, because entropy would lower the past and higher in the future, this implies that there are traces of the past.
02:08:30.780Namely, that looking around us, we know the past easily and the future in a more difficult way.
02:08:38.560So the future looks more mysterious to us, because we don't have information about it.
02:08:45.180While nature is arranged so that we have a lot of information about the past.