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Ruben Laukkonen on Meditation, Consciousness, & Sudden Awakening - Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview® — Transcript

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0:00I think it's fascinating phenomenologically from the perspective that you can have this
0:04sudden moment of transformation that appears to be permanent in mind.
0:09And it's fascinating scientifically because it tells us something about the depth at which
0:14we can control our conscious experience and change our brain from within.
0:27Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.
0:29My name is Rick Archer.
0:30Buddha at the Gas Pump, in case you're not familiar with it,
0:33is a long-running series of conversations
0:37with spiritually awakening people and about spiritual topics.
0:42We've done over 750 of them now.
0:45If this is new to you and you'd like
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0:50certainly you can do that on YouTube.
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0:56on batgap.com, our website.
0:59So you might want to explore there also.
1:02Also on that website, you'll find PayPal buttons
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1:07This whole thing is made possible through the support
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1:26What you see is what you get.
1:29Okay, so my guest today is Ruben Laukkanen.
1:32Ruben is the director of the Flourishing Intelligence Program
1:37at Leinecker College, University of Oxford.
1:40He is also the co-director of the Center for Eudaimonia
1:44and Human Flourishing, a senior researcher
1:47within Oxford's Department of Psychiatry,
1:50and a fellow at Leinecker College.
1:52Is that the right pronunciation, Leinecker?
1:54- Linecker.
1:55- Linecker, sorry.
1:57He has made significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the cognitive neuroscience
2:02of consciousness, meditation, and insight.
2:06His work also reveals a pathway towards better and safer artificial intelligence based on
2:11the science of consciousness and contemplative wisdom.
2:15Rubin has an eclectic contemplative background including Zen, Advaita, and Theravada, and
2:21his first-person inquiry into the nature of reality continues to deeply inform his scientific
2:27research and vice versa. Now we're going to talk about many of the things that I just read
2:34in that introduction, but for starters, in case people aren't familiar with the term
2:38eudaimonia, define that and it's pretty much synonymous with flourishing, right? And
2:46explain what attracted you to get involved in that.
2:53What distinguishes eudaimonia for me from, say, arbitrary pleasure-seeking is the quality
3:01of meaning.
3:03And I think when you think about eudaimonia, for me it means that suffering has a place
3:12and that purely hedonistic approaches to life are likely unsatisfying, and that we can find
3:21deep meaning, sometimes even in the most difficult of life circumstances.
3:26So I'm drawn to the notion of eudaimonia as a kind of way to think about living a good life.
3:32But really for me it's a living inquiry. I mean, I don't think it's settled what eudaimonia is,
3:39but pointing towards the idea that there's ways to live a beautiful life and trying to achieve that
3:46and having a kind of living interdisciplinary research program where we try to understand
3:52flourishing and eudaimonia I think is really important. And I also find it fascinating from
3:59the side that I think flourishing and eudaimonia, I don't think there's any ceiling to these things
4:05and I think the sages of the past, whether we think of the Buddha or Jesus, they found profound
4:12kind of deep eudaimonia or deep flourishing as I sometimes think about it and I'm very interested
4:17in those those topics. So yeah. Good. Yeah, obviously there's no universal agreement on what
4:24flourishing or eudaimonia is. There used to be a beer ad which the line was,
4:33"You only go around once in this life so grab all the gusto you can get." I think some guys were
4:40were sitting on a boat.
4:41That was another one, they're sitting on a boat and it says, "This is it, it doesn't
4:44get any better than this."
4:47They're out fishing or something.
4:49So obviously people do all kinds of things in the search for happiness, many of which
4:54turn out to be counterproductive because those things end up making them miserable in the
4:59long run.
5:01I agree.
5:02I agree.
5:03There's a thousand ways to get lost and confused in this life for every one path that does bring us deep satisfaction.
5:15And again, I think this is where the contemplative wisdom traditions are kind of lighthouses in the sea of this life.
5:25so that we have a sense of maybe where to look
5:27to find real kind of lasting meaning
5:31and flourishing and peace.
5:33- Yeah, and obviously a lot of those traditions,
5:36the custodians of them were monks or recluses
5:39and their basic line was the world sucks, give it up
5:43and just look within, that's the only place
5:46you're gonna find happiness.
5:47But others had an emphasis that spiritual development
5:51will actually enhance life both inner and outer,
5:55kind of like 200% can be employed
6:00to make life richer and more successful.
6:03- That's right.
6:06And I think most good things are to some degree
6:10downstream of know thyself.
6:12I think we can find that most of the sages,
6:16even including from the West,
6:17people like Socrates and Aristotle,
6:19but also Lao Tzu and Rumi and the Buddha all spoke about the importance of knowing thyself.
6:25I think it's very hard for us to come to flourishing and meaning unless we understand how the mind constructs experience.
6:33And so I think to some degree we do need to begin by knowing our own mind,
6:40And then somehow out of this self-knowledge, wise and compassionate action is, I think, more likely to emerge.
6:49I think we can stumble, of course, into reasonably good lives without that,
6:55but it's, I think, less likely to be resilient because there's maybe some agency missing there.
7:03If we know our own minds, then we know how to recreate the conditions for flourishing
7:09because the principles are sort of evident to our own consciousness.
7:14And so, I do believe that to some degree, the good stuff is downstream of knowing our own minds.
7:20And this is not just from a meditation side, but I also think science—
7:24I think this is where science comes into—is helping us understand how the brain, the body,
7:29and our interactions with the environment construct a conscious experience.
7:33and through that we can understand the kind of contingencies, the dependencies that give rise to beautiful experiences.
7:44Yes, and of course in many traditions the mind is not considered to be the ultimate level of who or what we are,
7:52and those traditions might say that knowing your mind won't be sufficient to accomplish what you just described,
8:00And they might add that in fact you can't even know the mind unless you know the deeper reality underlying it.
8:06Well, I mean, I think this depends on your definition of mind.
8:11And I think mind certainly has layers of depth.
8:16And there's clearly, I think, a layer of mind that is essentially, you could call it the personality,
8:23the kind of more narrative aspects of who we believe we are.
8:26and maybe this is the sort of a more naive notion of mind perhaps.
8:32And then there's maybe like if you have a more expansive notion of mind,
8:36deeper layers where we start to touch things like a more kind of pure awareness,
8:43a more kind of embodied presence, these kinds of layers of mind.
8:48You don't need to call those mind if you don't want.
8:50And perhaps there's also cosmic mystical experiences
8:53and this kind of category of events that I think is also very interesting.
8:56And yet I also don't really place so much emphasis on any one of them.
9:02I think we're, the most free kind of mind is free to inhabit our most kind of basic, ordinary self,
9:11as well as the kind of deeper presence, as well as pure awareness, as well as mystical states,
9:16and also then just go and take out the trash and be happy.
9:22I would agree. You can see life as multidimensional and the kind of freedom you just described
9:27would be a facility with all dimensions so that you could operate in any and all of them
9:35according to the situation, such as taking out the trash. In fact, you could be having
9:40a very profound experience of the world while taking out the trash. So I was talking to
9:48some people in a webinar yesterday and they were talking about heaven on earth
9:51and I said well it's here now but it's in the eye of the beholder you know and if
9:56enough if it were in the eyes of enough beholders perhaps it would more readily
10:00be in the eyes of all beholders because enough of us experiencing it could have
10:06a propagating effect for the whole collective consciousness. Well I agree
10:11with that I think we're interdependent so I think any time a node in the network
10:17starts to have a particular kind of experience that that experience kind of
10:21resonates and influences the other nodes in the network and we're all nodes in
10:26the network and the more we can live beautiful lives I think the we're likely
10:31to kind of create a sort of inertia or homeostasis a kind of whirlpool that
10:38draws in others into this kind of state I mean you can even think about like
10:42transmissions between teachers and students as embodying a little bit of
10:46this fact, this interdependence that is there.
10:51And the same principle would apply to the opposite, where if everyone is radiating a lot of yucky
10:56influence then yuckiness prevails and tends to drag everyone into it.
11:01Well that's right, I mean we've all had the experience of going to a party and the
11:04vibe sucks and we've had experiences of going to a festival and being immediately uplifted
11:09as you walk towards the stage and kind of pulled into the music and the atmosphere.
11:15I think there's clearly some truth there.
11:18Good. So there are a number of major themes we're going to discuss today, and one of them that you've spent a lot of time thinking and studying and talking about is this idea of cessation.
11:31Something that in Buddhism is called nirodha samapati. So explain what that is, and let's talk about that for a while, and then we'll move on to other topics.
11:41Yeah, this is a fascinating topic for me for many reasons.
11:46Basically, cessation...
11:50Look, I want to say also to begin with that it's quite contentious, this topic,
11:56and even within, say, Buddhism and other traditions, when you talk about this,
12:00depending on who you ask, you'll get a very different opinion on it.
12:04But one thing that is kind of clear, I feel, from
12:08the Pali Canon, the original teachings of the Buddha, is that there is this state where
12:13consciousness, perception, and feeling, and all of the things that we take to be
12:20ourselves and the kind of reality that we inhabit can be extinguished like a flame going out,
12:28is how it's described in the suttas. And this is very interesting for many reasons. One,
12:36from a scientific perspective, it captivated me because it's a way to explore consciousness,
12:46because it's quite paradoxical that consciousness could turn itself off. How is it possible that a
12:51mind could basically turn the knob of general anesthesia, self-administer general anesthesia,
12:59your own turn-off consciousness. And so in these cessation experiences, when folks
13:06describe them, there's a complete collapse of consciousness, also space,
13:12time, and anything that might resemble awareness. And so it's nothing like deep
13:18sleep because you know you've slept and you have a sense that time has passed.
13:23in Neroda or Neroda Sammapati and those two are a little bit different.
13:28You can be, it's a much more like general anesthesia in the sense that there's just a cut in consciousness
13:36and yet a huge amount of time could have passed, you know, days for instance.
13:40So it's quite unique. It means that the something in the fundamental process that constructs experience and memory has collapsed.
13:50Though, as we now know from our research, not all processing has collapsed.
13:55Though we do see some important reductions.
13:59And so it's interesting for scientific reasons,
14:04but it's also what makes it actually important from a contemplative path perspective
14:12is that there is a profound transformation that one experiences when they go through an experience like this.
14:18So sometimes these nirodha or cessation moments are associated, for example, with the stages of awakening in Buddhism.
14:30So things you might have heard of stream entry, for example.
14:35So this is the first stage of awakening in Buddhism.
14:40And so when the cessation happens, it's not really actually that important that consciousness turns off.
14:45off. What's important is that the mind is said to be permanently transformed and
14:50there's a kind of completely new software and this is of course now more
14:57modern in my language installed in the mind such that we begin to
15:02perceive reality differently, we begin to perceive ourselves differently, might
15:07have a profound increase in the clarity and flexibility of mind as well as the
15:12heart opening and the compassion that comes as well.
15:15So I think it's fascinating phenomenologically from the perspective
15:21that you can have this sudden moment of transformation that appears to be
15:24permanent in mind. And it's fascinating scientifically because it
15:29tells us something about the depth at which we can control our conscious
15:33experience and change our brain from within actually. So usually of course if
15:40you need something like an anesthetic like either ketamine or general anesthesia or you need to have
15:47a seizure or a concussion to have an experience like this. But in this case it seems to be meditation
15:53induced. Okay, so a number of questions about this. You kind of answered my first question which is
16:02why would this be desirable to shut everything off and what you said okay it's transformative.
16:09And I presume you mean not only in terms of your subjective wiring and orientation and
16:15behavior, but in terms of your neurophysiology.
16:19So what have you measured in both of those realms that seems to change as a result of
16:27this cessation experience?
16:31So with the participants that have gone through cessation laboratory conditions, and this
16:39usually involves a combination of jhana and insight practice or vipassana practice, and
16:47what we tend to see, one of the kind of consistent replicated findings is a big reduction in,
16:54if we're looking at EEG, so electroencephalography, that's where we kind of just put electrodes
16:59on the head and measure electrical activity off the scalp.
17:03We see a big reduction in alpha power, for instance, and so alpha power is the dominant
17:08frequency in the brain, so it's something quite influenced by meditation.
17:13But I think even more interestingly, we see a kind of breakdown in essentially long-range
17:23temporal correlations, or we use a measure called phase lag index.
17:28Anyway, it's a little bit technical, but basically if you imagine that there's waves on the brain
17:32that are kind of correlating with each other, they're synchronized, right?
17:36And so then what we find as meditators go into this cessation state, we see this desynchronization
17:43of activity.
17:44Conceptually, it also makes a lot of sense because you need synchronization to integrate
17:49experience and then if you're deconstructing experience through, for example, insight or
17:54Vipassana, then it makes sense that the neural activity becomes decoherent. And if the neural
17:59activity becomes decoherent, then the world model can't put itself together. And so you can have a
18:03collapse of the world model, the integrative processes that allow us to have a unified
18:09experience of reality as we are having now. And so I think there's some face validity to that one,
18:19I feel even more, I mean, we see alpha changes with a lot of tasks, so I don't take that too
18:26seriously because we see that a lot. Of course, I think it's quite radical, the degree of the
18:30change that we see there. And then, of course, we also see some interesting things. So,
18:36Matthew Sackett's lab, for example, found that you get some of the same effects that you get with
18:44other, for example, general anesthesia. So you get this decoherence effect with
18:48general anesthesia too, but then you also get an increase in complexity of neural
18:52activity in the neurotic experience which is different to the
18:58anesthetics. So there's some interesting distinguishing factors there as well.
19:03But yeah, just to point a little bit again, think about this mechanistically, I
19:07I mean, the brain has this incredibly complex task of taking in sensory data from separate streams.
19:17So if you think about the visual information coming through your retina, the auditory information, and all of the interoceptive information in your body,
19:26all of this is coming into the brain at different times and also in different parts of the brain.
19:31And the brain has this incredibly extraordinary computational task of putting it all together
19:37into this kind of coherent experience that makes sense.
19:41And we can mess with this coherence of this experience very easily in the lab, we can
19:44create visual illusions, embodied illusions, and basically any aspect of consciousness
19:49can be messed with.
19:51It's an inference, it's a construction to some degree.
19:54And so if you're doing a deep and profound insight practice where you're, let's say,
19:59the three characteristics, Anicca, Natha, Dukkha, the impermanence, the emptiness, the not-self,
20:05the clinginess of our models, including the self, which is this deeply organizing,
20:12deep model within the brain. Then you can imagine that at some point this hits the foundations of our
20:20model building, in the sense that the brain encounters so much error as a consequence of
20:28this deconstructive practice that the existing model simply can't maintain itself anymore.
20:34And as a consequence of this exposure therapy to this kind of deep practice, this old model
20:40just can't sort of maintain itself anymore because the error just builds, builds, builds until
20:45it collapses. And in that collapse to basically—I'm kind of now speculating about my own kind of
20:52theories about this, but essentially if you, a bit like a computer, if you need to update
20:59the software because the model needs to change, you have to turn it off and on again.
21:04And I think there's probably something like that going on as we kind of deconstruct our
21:08world model through meditation, that once that deconstruction is profound enough, the
21:13mind undergoes a sort of reset, kind of reboot.
21:18Interesting. Yeah, I can see how deconstructing everything and then
21:23reconstructing it might be a faster way of transforming something than just
21:30tinkering with it while it remains fully constructed. And I think you apply this
21:35principle to AI that it goes through these loops of deconstruction and
21:39reconstruction, yes? And we'll talk about that later if you do. But I'm curious
21:46It's about the decoherence or asynchronization of the brain because, you know, with an old
21:56TM background going back decades, I've always heard about brainwave synchrony as being a
22:01good thing.
22:02And they talk about, in their research, how ordinarily the signals from different parts
22:09of the brain are asynchronous.
22:11not in phase with one another, but then during meditation they become synchronous and a very
22:16high degree of brainwave synchrony prevails while one is in deep meditation.
22:22And there's also, might as well throw this in also, in that method or in that tradition,
22:30ultimate, complete blotting out of consciousness is not considered desirable.
22:36It's more of a dawning of pure awareness without content.
22:41In the Yoga Sutras it says that yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.
22:46So the mind settles down, becomes quiet, silent, and as it does so it's kind of like the ripples
22:52on a pond settling down, which allows the sun to reflect much more brightly than if the
22:57water is all choppy.
22:59So it sounds like we're talking about two very different experiences, both subjectively
23:04and neurophysiologically.
23:08Does it not?
23:09I agree. I think there's many reasons for this. One is that the practices are very different.
23:17The goals are very different. I mean, Buddha's teaching was very different to what was taught in the Yoga Sutras or in the Hinduism that preceded it,
23:28precisely because of the three characteristics applying also to consciousness and applying to all aspects of phenomena.
23:35And so you can think about, or how I think about it, the Buddha taught liberation, not pure awareness.
23:42And of course, pure awareness arises, but I think the concern there is that then one might just get attached to the pure awareness
23:49and get stuck in a loop of trying to be pure awareness, and that's its own kind of suffering.
23:54Not necessarily, but I can comment on that later.
23:57We can come back to this.
24:01And as to the alpha coherence, of course, I'm aware of the kind of old school TM research on this,
24:07and you get these coherence findings. The more recent research even on TM,
24:13so a colleague of mine, Alejandro, just recently put this paper out on TM meditation,
24:20and we have some work coming out on this too, basically showing that these coherence measures
24:26are very weak predictors ultimately of the TM state.
24:31What's happened in the field generally in neuroscience is that we've found that nonlinear measures
24:36are much more powerful at predicting conscious states than linear measures.
24:42So explain linear and nonlinear.
24:44Sure, yeah, yeah.
24:45So a linear measure is something where something simple in the brain goes up, then something
24:50else is also expected to go up.
24:52So you have, for example, alpha goes up, then your experience of concentration goes up or
24:57down.
24:58So it's very kind of simple.
25:00But the brain is a nonlinear complex system.
25:02So to actually understand representational states in the brain, you have to think about
25:07interactions, complex interactions between variables.
25:11So for instance, now we think about things like entropy and multivariate things, you
25:16can't visualize them as easily as linear relationships because it's kind of like complex relationships
25:21between many variables and you're trying to understand how those complex relationships
25:25between many variables predict the phenomenology. So we find these to be much more predictive.
25:31The recent paper, for example, finds that entropy is a much better predictor even of TM meditation.
25:37That doesn't—of course, I think still coherence is maybe a useful thing and interesting,
25:45But it's probably when we start to think more deeply about what are the kind of things that predict changes in conscious experience,
25:54whether it's on psychedelics or meditation, we're finding much more that these non-linear, multibariate measures are the most powerful.
26:02Yeah.
26:04Okay, interesting.
26:06So, you said something interesting a minute ago, which is that it seems that the goal of Buddhism is different than the goal of Vedic or Advaitic practice.
26:15if that's a fair way of phrasing it.
26:18And that always interests me because I always wonder,
26:21you know, if you got Jesus and Buddha and Krishna
26:24and Patanjali and all these guys together in a room,
26:28would they agree with each other
26:31about what they were experiencing
26:33and about what the nature of reality actually is,
26:36or would their different traditional paths and practices
26:40result in very different views on such matters?
26:45And if so, that kind of leads to the question of whether subjective means of gaining knowledge
26:50can give us any accurate understanding of the nature of the world.
26:54Well, my opinion, and that's what it is, of course, is that they're directionally
27:05on the same path, let's say. But I think, for instance, even in Buddhism,
27:12as you practice, and especially in Mahayana and maybe even more particularly in Vajrayana,
27:22you use awareness as a kind of pedagogy. So you use it as a teaching tool.
27:31And so there is a...
27:33You might consider that it's important to discover kind of pure awareness and have these insights,
27:41but you have to be equally careful not to have an attachment formed to notions of pure awareness.
27:48So I think that ultimately,
27:51what the Buddha emphasized is that
27:54awareness itself
27:57can be a
27:59powerful refuge from the egoistic mind.
28:05And so in that sense, I think it's a beautiful discovery,
28:09but that ultimately awareness and consciousness is also empty
28:16and is also a dependent origination, is also subject to causes and conditions.
28:26And I think that's also what science reveals.
28:30Of course, not conclusively, because it's impossible to get to the metaphysics,
28:36but I think the evidence points in that direction.
28:40For me personally, the experiential practice also reveals that
28:44even this duality of conscious and non-conscious ends up being a kind of inference of the mind,
28:51and that the reality of those categories and the reality of awareness is much more colored by the inferential kind of assumptions of our mind than we like to admit.
29:05And again, I think people might say that that's less beautiful, but actually I think it's more beautiful,
29:13because I think there's more freedom in being able to inhabit the full spectrum of the mind that we talked about before
29:20without having to have this feeling of needing to be awareness all the time or something like that.
29:26I think there's actually one of the big risks, and I think this is also what the Buddha taught, is pride.
29:32One of the final kind of things to let go of is pride.
29:36And I think one of the kind of traps of pure awareness is that there's a very subtle but palpable pride that can come along with having uncovered this new foundation of mind and the kind of wonderful experience that it brings.
29:55And again, I do think it's wonderful, but I think if you want to, you can go beyond that.
30:02Well, there could be, and I've seen plenty of instances of people who had fantastic experiences
30:07getting up on the microphone and bragging about them and strutting around beating their chest
30:12with how cosmic they were and things like that.
30:16But I don't think it's necessarily that way.
30:20I think that many of the great sages who would claim to have grounded themselves in a state
30:28of pure awareness abidingly were devoid of pride.
30:32They'd matured beyond that.
30:33So that's kind of a whole discussion about maybe Ken Wilber's lines of development and
30:39you know, whether you could advance quite a bit in the consciousness line and still be
30:43quite immature in other lines and so on.
30:46But we're not finished with cessation yet, but I also want to loop around to the notion
30:53which we can discuss more later, about whether consciousness is ontologically primitive or
30:59fundamental or is in some sense just a product of the brain or other natural processes in
31:08the universe.
31:13Because if it is the ultimate reality and if one can open one's experience to incorporate
31:20that, then it wouldn't be something one needed to hold on to or feel proud about or anything
31:27else.
31:28It would just be one's ultimate resting place that was there whether or not, whatever you
31:34were doing.
31:35In fact, with your friend, Delson Armstrong, he maintains that he doesn't lose pure awareness
31:40during sleep.
31:42And that is obviously something you couldn't will yourself to have because you're not in
31:48position to do so while you're sleeping. It would have to be spontaneous or not there at all.
31:53And the same would be true of the other states, you know, waking state. You wouldn't be clinging
31:58to it all day long while you're trying to do other things. It would either be there
32:01clearly or it wouldn't, or it would be there to whatever degree it was without any effort
32:06involved and also without any necessity to feel special about it or anything else if you were a
32:12a mature personality. I agree and I think if it is there, fantastic, but we also
32:20don't need to worry about it coming and going or whether it's permanent or the
32:24final ultimate reality. I think in some way I even question the notion of
32:29ultimate reality because that implies that there is some reality that is not.
32:34I think there's simply reality and we are all living in reality and somehow
32:40these dualities ultimately and I think also this is what comes through the kind of Mahayana
32:47insight that emptiness is form and form is emptiness, emptiness is none other than form
32:51and form is none other than emptiness.
32:53I think what we take to be ultimate reality at a certain stage of the path turns out to
32:57collapse into the relative and vice versa and there's this beautiful interpenetration that
33:02happens and life simply is life.
33:06Yeah, and that coincides with the Vedic perspective too.
33:10They say Brahman is the eater of everything.
33:12It's all Brahman, whether it appears to be manifest or not.
33:16To paraphrase the Buddhist saying, you could say, "Brahman is form, and form is Brahman."
33:23That's a fascinating topic in itself that I often get into with people, is whether these
33:28different traditions are resulting in people having very different experience of reality,
33:35And yet, supposedly having attained the highest level of realization, you would think that
33:42they would all share a common experience if they've attained the highest level of realization,
33:50if their particular path was capable of providing that.
33:55Because could there really be as many realities, ultimately, as there are people, or enlightened
34:03people? Well yeah, I mean it's a deep contemplation and I think for me since
34:11since reality is interdependent I think more that awakening and realization is like a
34:20flower blossoming and each flower that blossoms is somewhat unique to its causes and conditions
34:28And so I think there is room for kind of uniqueness in this and yet I do also agree that there is the unconditioned
34:34um that I do I do believe there are some parts of experience that seem to hit a kind of
34:39um
34:41Groundless direct realization that is perhaps shared
34:43uh and yet
34:46Very quickly the way that that blossoms in the kind of expression of our lives is is highly unique
34:53and so I
34:55I leave that as an open question, really.
34:59Yeah.
35:00Yeah, I agree with the highly unique part.
35:03I mean, you could have a thousand enlightened people,
35:07without going into the definition of what enlightenment means,
35:10but a thousand people who supposedly reached a very, very high level of realization
35:16who are completely different in terms of their relative expression,
35:20their relative personality, lifestyle, interests, and so on.
35:23And that doesn't conflict with the traditional understandings of what enlightenment is supposed to be.
35:29It's not like something that you automatically become a monk living in a cave if you attain it.
35:36I think that would be a kind of reification.
35:40That would be a kind of... I mean, I have to do this myself often, is just question my notions of what enlightenment and awakening are, and realize that even those are empty.
35:50I think what's kind of beautiful about some of these traditions is, we'll take for example in Buddhism,
35:56one of the kind of criteria of stream entry is no longer having attachment to rites and rituals.
36:01And so the irony is that you perform all these rites and rituals and you become a Buddhist or
36:07a Hindu or whatever, but in the actual realization, you realize that all of these are just constructions
36:12and they're all just kind of ultimately empty of any kind of real essence.
36:18Yeah, that's true in the Vedic thing too, you know, Vedanta is kind of beyond
36:23rites and rituals and they say it's fine to do them if that's your thing, you know,
36:28but ultimately you get to a point where they're not really that relevant or necessary.
36:34And you might still pick them up because it's kind of beautiful.
36:37You might, yeah, I mean Sri Ramakrishna was a temple priest and did Kali pujas and stuff in
36:42addition to being a Vedantic exponent.
36:48Exactly, I mean there's
36:50the way I kind of see these traditions
36:52is that they're almost like
36:55in, not to get too technical, but in
36:56dynamical systems theory and physics you
36:58have these attractors
37:02in complex fields of
37:05networks let's say and so you have
37:06these
37:08in reality these different
37:08traditions are like beautiful, flourishing
37:10attractors in the world. And then there are these
37:13other kind of attractors that where there's a lot
37:15of suffering and then maybe there's other
37:17attractors that are okay but not that great.
37:19But really what these profound traditions are is
37:25that there are these unique attractors but that
37:27are profoundly beautiful if you inhabit them.
37:30And I think it's in some ways even super
37:36beautiful to be able to move between them and to be able to appreciate the view from the Buddha or
37:42the view from Christianity or the view from the Danta. And I don't think they're contradictory
37:49in that sense because all views are just views. The question is, are they views that are
37:56life-giving? Are they beautiful views? Are they helpful views? Are they liberating views?
38:03And I think we need to begin to think of a pluralistic kind of way of navigating, or again,
38:10in dynamical systems theory, there's this thing called metastability. So it's this capacity to
38:14flexibly inhabit different attractors as needed. Because always the mind only has a tiny slice of
38:21reality. We can't compress the universe. So we have to always admit that our model is such a
38:28tiny compression of the grand reality that the only kind of wise way to hold our model is extremely
38:35flexibly. And have the model itself be a kind of dependent arising that's willing to change
38:42at a moment's notice to meet the present as it actually is. Yeah, that's good. Obviously,
38:49what we can experience or know through our senses is always going to be a tiny sliver of the full
38:56spectrum of possibility, fortunately so, because if we could experience everything in the entire
39:02spectrum, we would be completely incapacitated and overwhelmed.
39:07But again, to my understanding, the idea of enlightenment is, although you're not necessarily
39:18going to experience everything everywhere all at once through your senses, you are going to
39:23be privy to or tuned into or grounded in that which underlies all the diversity. And so,
39:30you know, unity and diversity, you'll be established in being or pure consciousness or the
39:37absolute or whatever you want to call it, while performing your particular function as an individual
39:43within the limitations that an individual necessarily has. I feel indeed that we,
39:51As we practice, we're able to tune in—I use this term "gradients"—
39:57our gradients of flourishing, gradients of meaning, beautiful gradients,
40:02where we're attuned to the cosmos in some sort of more direct way.
40:08I think something that happens over long-term practice is a kind of intimacy with experience,
40:14experience, the kind of filter or the distance between our mind and life itself becomes
40:22shorter and shorter as we're able to hold more of the kind of immediate energy of this moment.
40:28And as we're able to cohere more with that and to have better compressions that we kind of embody
40:35over time, then we're able to better resonate, we're able to better tune to the larger scales
40:41of causality that we're a part of. And if we zoom in to the human body or the brain, we see that
40:49it goes deep, right? So you go from the brain to networks, to neurons, to microtubules, to protein,
40:56to quantum kind of information. And then we can go all the way back up from the quantum field to
41:02microtubules, to neurons, to networks, to the brain, to the body, to our biosphere, our culture,
41:09and zoom all the way out to the cosmos. And we are a neuron in a brain. I think all of
41:16the scientific evidence points in that direction. So everywhere we look, we see this embeddedness,
41:22this nestedness in larger systems, larger scales of causality on which we depend. The
41:28neuron depends on the nutrients from the rest of the brain. It has no meaning. It quickly
41:33dies, cells become cancerous once they come out of coherence.
41:37And part of I think having a good life is being in coherence with these larger scales of causality,
41:43the larger systems that we can't comprehend, just like the neuron can't comprehend the
41:47brain, and yet we have to have this connection, these nutrients come from these larger scales
41:56of causality that keep us alive and keep us flourishing, and bring us kind of the synchronicity,
42:02the meaning and the purpose that makes our lives kind of awesome.
42:07Lovely.
42:08That was so eloquent.
42:09I really loved that.
42:11And what it triggered in me is the thought that the intelligence which pervades and orchestrates
42:19the universe, it pervades.
42:21So it pervades every cell in our body, every particle, everything, everywhere, every galaxy.
42:27And since it pervades us as well as everything else, it could be located within us and we
42:35can tune to it such that we really become just a sense organ of it rather than isolated
42:44individual.
42:46We express as an individual but on the foundation of that intelligence and then we achieve that
42:52kind of cosmic individuality that I think you were just describing.
42:58That's right.
42:59I think foundationally we are everything.
43:01There's no way to separate us from the universe.
43:04I mean it's almost a cliche to say, but it's like it bears reminding over and over again
43:10we are not separate from this grand dance of the cosmos.
43:14And we are the kind of fingers of God you can say poetically.
43:19And that is just as much a scientific fact as it is a spiritual fact.
43:24And that can be a living reality, not merely a philosophical plaything.
43:29That's right.
43:30I think that's what practice reveals.
43:32It brings us into an intimate kind of intuitive sense that that is the reality and that we
43:39live in this kind of system that's so much more than we are, and we get to play our little
43:46role in this cosmos's evolution.
43:50Yeah.
43:51Okay, so a thought that's been kicking around the back of my mind for a few minutes.
43:55Earlier, I think you said something like, either maybe there is no ultimate reality
44:00or maybe we can't experience it even if there is something along those lines?
44:06Well I just questioned the whole term of ultimate reality.
44:08I think everything is reality.
44:11We're staring reality in the face right now and it's just enough that way.
44:15And I think when we start to, it's often the case I think, as we practice we start to imagine
44:21some sort of like ground where there's an ultimate reality and we are somehow, you know,
44:27we have metaphors like samsara and nirvana and all of this.
44:30And all of that is helpful because to some degree we are caught in ignorance and we identify
44:37with ego structures and we suffer unnecessarily and all of this.
44:42And so then we set out on a path to kind of understand that better.
44:46And having these pointings out that say, "Hey, look, there's more to this than you see," is very helpful.
44:54And you go through this process of kind of getting to know yourself a little bit better,
45:00and you see the nature of the ego maybe a little bit clearer, never fully,
45:05and you start to find these new layers of being.
45:09But what tends to happen, and this is the risk, is that we then reify those new layers that we discover
45:15and we start to kind of make these distinctions between the kind of ultimate and the relative and so on.
45:24And these, I think, are pedagogically very useful as teaching pointers,
45:27but metaphysically I think they're not true,
45:30in the sense that as we kind of come to realize these deepest parts that we might even take to be ultimate reality,
45:38we find that ultimate reality is pregnant with relative reality,
45:43and really you can't distinguish the two.
45:46And any kind of distinction that we make between the two, I find,
45:50and have found through my own experience, ends up being a construction of my own mind.
45:54Yeah, there's a line from an old song,
45:57"What is here is everywhere, what is not here is nowhere at all."
46:01And when you talk like this, I think of science, okay,
46:05I'm not a professional scientist like you,
46:07but as I understand it, from its origin,
46:11science began asking the question,
46:13all right, there's more to life than meets the eye.
46:15Let's dig deeper and figure out what this is
46:18and what this is.
46:19And physics in particular has gone to more and more
46:22fundamental layers.
46:24Ultimately, in the minds of many physicists
46:27looking for what they might call a unified field,
46:29something that is--
46:32and they've gotten it down to the point
46:33where the four fundamental forces, three of them unified
46:37and one of them gravity still separate from the three.
46:40But the next step might be the unification of those forces
46:44and that might be some kind of unified field,
46:47which would be the foundation
46:50and ultimate origin of everything.
46:51And so I guess you could say,
46:55you could take anything in the world
46:57and start boiling it down to more and more fundamentals
47:00of its existence.
47:03And as you did so, you'd be kind of like going from the spokes,
47:07any one spoke of a wheel, back to the same hub,
47:11that from which all the diversity emerges and springs.
47:16And the corollary, the parallel to spirituality
47:21is that, according to spiritual traditions, we are that hub.
47:25Not we as an individual, but our true nature is that hub.
47:30It's kind of the home of all the laws of nature
47:33or the intelligence which express themselves
47:36as the manifest universe.
47:37And if you can establish your awareness there,
47:40then you're in a very good place to interact with life
47:44and the relative world.
47:45- I don't think that that view is wrong necessarily.
47:50I think there's like, again, I'm more of a pragmatist
47:52when it comes to views again,
47:54because I don't believe that we can have
47:57the full model in our brain at any point.
47:59I mean, the universe is simply incompressible into a brain.
48:02Yet, I think the emerging view from the kind of science that I'm paying attention to—there's
48:11a lot of diverse views in science—is more a kind of multiscale causality, where you don't
48:19simply reduce things to more fundamental principles and assume that you've now got a better explanation.
48:25I think it's actually the dynamics of every layer of being that are mutually constraining
48:31each other and that means that the neuron is not a better explanation than the networks
48:38of neurons, which is not a better explanation than the brain and the body, which is not
48:43a better explanation than thinking of the biosphere and coming up with scientific models
48:47at that level.
48:49And this is, multi-scale causality implies that each layer has its own causal power.
48:55It's greater than the sum of its parts.
48:58And under that view, you don't give precedence to smaller things.
49:03It's not reducing reality to, and I know you don't see it this way, into billiard balls
49:07or smaller balls and so on.
49:09It's actually that it's in the interactions of larger systems that you get the kind of
49:14important explanations.
49:16And this means that fundamentally, in my view, reality is not reducible in the way that we've
49:22imagined it to be previously.
49:24I think this new emerging science forces us to look at complex systems as they present
49:30themselves and to be able to describe them.
49:33I still think mathematically, I still think mathematics is the language to describe each
49:38of these layers of causality.
49:40But it allows us to then see that, oh, when we meet each other, that layer of causality
49:45is just as real and powerful as this quantum field that we might point to, which is just
49:51as real and powerful as the solar system with the large balls of the planet earth and venus
49:57and jupiter and the sun and so on.
50:00And so it gives a kind of ground truth to every layer of reality, which I think is a more attractive
50:08view to me and it's also I think what the most kind of cutting edge science is pointing to.
50:15And this requires a kind of interdisciplinary view. So often the people who are coming to these kinds
50:22of views do work across fields, they work across neuroscience and physics and so on, because you
50:28start to understand when you get something like a brain that clearly has causal power on the world
50:33and it functions quite differently, perhaps, to purely a quantum field, right?
50:38Because it has recursivity, it's kind of self-aware, it has consciousness.
50:42And so, you've got kind of a new causal layer that's functioning in the world.
50:49So, let me take a simple example and see if this is a—it illustrates what you're saying.
50:53So, you know, it's summertime here, and it's warm, and people would enjoy going swimming in the water.
51:00they wouldn't want to go swimming in oxygen or hydrogen, even though that's what the water is.
51:05The water, on its own level as water, has a valuable quality and we enjoy it.
51:11And the oxygen and hydrogen consist of subatomic particles and they have their level of reality,
51:20which doesn't resemble oxygen or hydrogen. And you can go down deeper to quarks and so on.
51:27So every level of reality or manifestation or magnification has its own value and it's
51:35not like the deeper ones are more valuable than the more manifest ones.
51:40Each has its place, its function, and that's the way the universe is structured.
51:47But still, if there is an ultimate reality of everything that can be experienced subjectively,
51:56Obviously it's not going to be subatomic particles, but if it's consciousness, if consciousness
52:01is fundamental, and if it could be argued that all of these more manifest layers arise
52:06from consciousness, then being established in that consciousness you might be able to
52:13apprehend the essential nature of all the manifest levels as you interact with them.
52:19So you see a tree and, oh yeah, it's a tree, but I also see its essential nature as consciousness.
52:24describe this kind of experience, you know, say they live in unity all the time and
52:28that's the way they interact with with the world. Yeah I think it's attractive
52:33and I've had that experience myself and yet I don't think it's the deepest
52:39view. My sense is, you know... What would the deepest view be?
52:45Well, I don't know what the deepest view is.
52:47I, you know, like we paint a picture where there's this sort of layers that are kind of non-real and then we go under them and then somehow we get to the real.
53:02And I would say that that's true as a kind of path.
53:05And then when you get to the real, you realize that that too is empty.
53:09And then you suddenly realize that all of the manifestation is of the same nature as what you took to be the ultimate reality.
53:14This is the thing.
53:17You see, the thoughts, the ego structure, the relative in all its manifestation is also your true nature.
53:26Agreed.
53:27Also your true nature.
53:28And so again, but if you agree with that, then I don't think you can point to ultimate reality as some sort of separation from them,
53:37which I think is not what you mean, but comes through in the language, right?
53:41And it comes through, I think, and when we speak like that, I think we
53:47even momentarily sort of believe that to be a case, even as a model. And I think we need to somehow
53:54we somehow need to get to a model where we can talk about it without falling into that trap.
53:59And I don't think we've solved that, but I think about it like interpenetrating. We have a
54:04sense of course that there's a different, it's a different phenomenology when you're
54:10absorbed in awareness, presence, consciousness to when I'm like coding on my laptop or something,
54:16right? There's like, there's like, there's different quality there. And yet to say that
54:20one is consciousness and one is not, no, they're both completely consciousness, they're both
54:25completely the cosmos, they're both just as much God and not God as each other. And so somehow this,
54:33There's duality. I think we need to collapse it, even now in the way that we talk.
54:39Yeah, I totally agree. In the Vedic model, there is a stage at which one experiences
54:46the Self with a capital S as being distinct and separate from the relative field. But that's just
54:53a stage. And then one progresses from there and eventually unification prevails. And just what
55:01what you described becomes one's experience. That's right, that's right. And I think
55:05even if you look deep into what Sri Nisargadatta taught, which is a
55:09kind of classic and Advaita non-dual teacher who talked a lot about awareness
55:13and using awareness, I think again, as a kind of pedagogy, but
55:17ultimately you can find quotes of his also saying to, "No, no, eventually you do
55:22go beyond awareness." Yeah, I have a quote from Nisargadatta in a little graphic. He
55:28said this shortly before he died, he said, "Forget I am that."
55:33That was the title of his book.
55:34He said, "I've learned so much more since then.
55:36It's so much deeper."
55:38That's right.
55:39That's right.
55:40Yeah.
55:42Before we move on entirely from cessation,
55:47nirodha samapati, a question from my friend Suresh Ramaswamy,
55:51who's been on that yet.
55:52He said, "Your work focuses on induced nirodha samapati,
55:56INS, even though the Buddhist tradition warns that such attainments do not by themselves
56:01imply realization or deep integration, since fetters lie dormant within INS-induced nirvāda-samāpati.
56:10How do you see the relationship between these measurable states and genuine freedom, the
56:15kind of pure beingness that may not have any distinct brain signature at all?
56:21question. It's one of my great regrets that researching Neuroticinopathy and these deep
56:29states that people think that this means that I somehow equate them with like the ultimate kind
56:34of discovery or something like that. It's kind of a funny thing that happens and I don't think
56:38the question is even suggesting that necessarily, but it's something that I face constantly which is
56:45like, "Oh you shouldn't be doing research on Neurota because really it's about pure awareness
56:50or really it's about this, I'm like, mate, it's just scientifically interesting, right?
56:54Like, this is the thing.
56:56It's interesting to be able to collapse consciousness from within.
57:00Forget all of the kind of implications for what you think enlightenment is.
57:05This is not a message to the person asking this question,
57:07this is just a message to everyone who sees me researching cessation.
57:11It doesn't mean I think this is the thing.
57:13This is, I don't equate it with enlightenment.
57:16I think you're going to find people who have these experiences
57:18or say they have them and they're still unwholesome,
57:20they can still be assholes, all of the rest, right?
57:23So just to, you know...
57:24And you may find potentially saintly or enlightened people,
57:28if they really are, who have never had these sensation experiences, right?
57:32There's, it's not like a mandatory stepping stone to full realization.
57:38I tend to think that it is an important stepping stone,
57:42but this is just a kind of model I have in my mind.
57:44But I think many people can go really, really deep
57:48without ever even really giving much emphasis to those moments, because it's not the absence that's the thing.
57:53It's the revelation that emerging from that absence reveals, which is a completely new view on reality.
58:01Right?
58:02And so I think one of the kind of great things again of classical Buddhism and the suttas is this focus on the unwholesome
58:08qualities of mind and the fetters and so on, because that keeps you really grounded.
58:13because you might have all sorts of special experiences and so on,
58:18but if you're still full of pride and full of ego and greed and hate and delusion,
58:25then forget it. It doesn't matter if you've had a thousand cessations.
58:28That's not it. It's about wisdom and compassion.
58:31Yeah.
58:32Yeah, it's about love.
58:35Yeah, that's what the Beatles said.
58:39And, you know, a good evidence for this is the fact that so many gurus and teachers from
58:46the East who supposedly were really enlightened turned out to be scoundrels in terms of their
58:52behavior.
58:53So, you know, and they talked about pure consciousness all the time and all that stuff.
58:57So you might ask, "Well, what good did it do them?"
58:59Or maybe they didn't really have it and thought they did or something.
59:04It's a head-scratcher.
59:05Well, we're all scoundrels.
59:06Yeah, true.
59:07That's the problem.
59:08Hopefully less and less so. I would hope that to be one of the purposes of spiritual development,
59:15not just to have a more self-gratifying experience, but to become a better person.
59:21That's right. I agree. And we do our best.
59:24And in a way, we do our best by realizing how much of a scoundrel we are.
59:28And in that, we can somehow temper it a little bit.
59:33There we go.
59:35Okay, so let's talk a little bit about neuroscience, physiology, and measurement.
59:41We kind of touched on it with talking about brain decoherence and all, but to what extent
59:49do you think higher states of consciousness, if you're comfortable with that term, could
59:55be reliably measured and correlated with certain neurophysiological states the way we have
1:00:05done with waking, dreaming, and sleeping?
1:00:07I mean, a scientist could have a subject in the other room and know whether he is awake,
1:00:11asleep, or dreaming based upon the brainwaves and other measures.
1:00:15Do you think we'll ever get to a point where we can map out all the various higher states
1:00:21that different traditions talk about and assign or correlate specific physiological measures
1:00:29with them? Yes, basically I think everything has some physiological correlate, more or less,
1:00:37meaning that as we see now you can give people 5-MeO DMT which kind of reliably gets you into a
1:00:45kind of fairly mystical pure awareness state or you can give people more classical DMT and they're
1:00:51you know, off in the other realms, communing with entities and so on.
1:00:55And all of these are fairly reliable signatures that have been
1:00:59mapped out by several labs around the world. And mystical experiences too are now kind of commonly,
1:01:06especially in the kind of psychedelic literature, captured by particular neural signatures.
1:01:13But the important thing is, of course, that this doesn't explain it, right? It doesn't,
1:01:18It doesn't answer any of the metaphysical questions about the reality of these things, right?
1:01:26So I think having physiological neural correlates just suggests that
1:01:31this is the state the brain needs to be in to allow maybe consciousness to have this experience,
1:01:39but there may be much more to it.
1:01:41Again, I'm not a reductionist in that sense,
1:01:43that I think just because we now know the 5-MEO-DMT correlate of the mystical experience in the
1:01:51brain, we now understand that experience.
1:01:54I don't think that's true.
1:01:55I think all we have then is a correlate.
1:01:58Yeah.
1:01:59And even our correlate must be very crude.
1:02:02I mean, what EEG and MRI and things like that can measure seems like just a tiny glimmer
1:02:10of people into the reality of what the brain is actually doing.
1:02:15Absolutely, absolutely.
1:02:17And many people don't recognize this.
1:02:19I mean even if you take something like fMRI, you're measuring a proxy of neural activity.
1:02:24You're not even measuring, you're measuring blood oxygenation, you're not even measuring
1:02:28neural activity per se directly.
1:02:30And there's ways in which those things actually diverge.
1:02:33And in EEG, you are actually measuring, at EEG and MEG, you're getting electrophysiology
1:02:38and the magnetic field.
1:02:40So those are somewhat direct,
1:02:41but they're emergent properties of interactions
1:02:44of different neurons in the brain.
1:02:47So you're not, again, you're not,
1:02:49it's extremely hard to get at the actual thing.
1:02:53And again, there's no actual thing there
1:02:55because it's multi-scale.
1:02:57So you've got everything from,
1:02:58it's like, what are you trying to measure?
1:03:00Are you trying to measure the kind of quantum stuff?
1:03:02Are you trying to measure the proteins,
1:03:03the microtubules, the neurons,
1:03:05the kind of frequencies or the emergent properties, the blood oxygenation.
1:03:10These are all just kind of probes that we know are somehow correlated
1:03:18with the important activity, but we don't ever capture the actual important activity.
1:03:22We can't like get directly at it in that way.
1:03:27And we do know that it's important though.
1:03:30And we know that because for example, we can do transcranial magnetic
1:03:33stimulation or focused ultrasound and so on. And so we can also generate
1:03:38experiences from activating regions of the brain. So we have like very good
1:03:42causal evidence that these things are clearly connecting to something very
1:03:47deep about how the brain constructs our experience. And yet we still need to have
1:03:52some some humility about these measures and the inferences we draw from our
1:03:55correlations. Yeah I have a good friend who I have an ongoing debate with, I have
1:04:03have had for years, about whether subjective experience,
1:04:11spiritual experiences, can actually
1:04:14give us a handle on deeper realities,
1:04:17or whether the brain is just fabricating them.
1:04:20So what you just said about targeting magnets
1:04:23into the brain, or taking DMT, or the same
1:04:28could apply to meditation.
1:04:29Let's say you take a drug like mescaline or DMT,
1:04:33and you experience unbounded awareness,
1:04:35all of a sudden you're just vast
1:04:38and not limited to this body.
1:04:40Does that really mean that that's a reality
1:04:43that you're tapping into,
1:04:44or is it just your brain giving you
1:04:45the experience of unbounded awareness?
1:04:48Now, let me just add to the question.
1:04:50I just saw a thing yesterday on a little YouTube video
1:04:53that said if you stimulate a particular part of the brain,
1:04:56it gives you an out-of-body experience,
1:04:58and they can replicate this reliably.
1:05:01It didn't say in the video whether you experienced any,
1:05:04couldn't experience anything in those out-of-body experiences
1:05:07that can be verified, as sometimes happens under surgery.
1:05:11Like Trisha Barker, whom I interviewed,
1:05:13you know, saw her uncle or somebody buying
1:05:15a particular brand of candy bar
1:05:17in the waiting room at the hospital
1:05:19while she was unconscious with anesthesia,
1:05:22and later confirmed with him that that's what he had bought.
1:05:26So that kind of gives you the feeling
1:05:28that perhaps subjective experiences of a mystical nature
1:05:33can give us knowledge that we can't otherwise attain,
1:05:37including whether awareness is really unbounded.
1:05:40Anyway, I've said enough, you get the point.
1:05:44- I do, and I keep an open mind about these things.
1:05:48And yet when I look at the science,
1:05:51people who have tried to, for example,
1:05:54test out-of-body experiences, remote viewing,
1:05:57and so on, people like Beth Loftus who really believed in these things deeply, and then try
1:06:02to go out to prove them to be true by, you know, having people do remote viewing and testing objects
1:06:06and seeing things that they shouldn't be able to see. And I know also some colleagues trying to do
1:06:12in surgery rooms to see if out-of-body experiences can kind of find information that they couldn't
1:06:18find before. All of these don't seem to come out to be true at this point. So whatever it is,
1:06:26Maybe it's just the difficulty of constructing the right scenario and maybe they're just super rare when it's actually real. I'm open to that as well.
1:06:33But the current evidence is showing that it's probably not the case.
1:06:41Now just to give you like one kind of cool hypothesis, which is
1:06:46that
1:06:48when people are having these
1:06:50out-of-body experiences, let's say when they are
1:06:55undergoing surgery, a near-death experience, or something else,
1:07:00and they're able to have an experience and they can verify it.
1:07:03I think there can be these states where where our senses are so profoundly
1:07:09clear and open that we can hear things or even feel things from the
1:07:15the next room and kind of construct images because the brain is a prediction
1:07:20machine. It's always constructing experience from
1:07:23electrical activity. I mean, it's extraordinary that it can construct this clarity of this moment
1:07:29purely from basically two-dimensional electrical signals. And it's doing this constantly. So each
1:07:36moment is a miracle of generative creativity of the mind-brain organism, right? And I think there's
1:07:43states in which we, let's say, we reduce the computational power of the abstract mind and
1:07:49we come so deeply in touch with the sensory stimuli that in some cases we can construct
1:07:56whole visions. Our imagination is extraordinary. I mean, think of it lucid dreaming and dreaming
1:08:01itself. And we can kind of dream up what's happening in the next room from like very
1:08:05subtle sensory signals. And so I think sometimes this might be the case that we can verify something
1:08:11in the next room just from subtle sensory signals. Yeah, I'm skeptical of that one. I mean,
1:08:18Tricia Barker, she had a car accident. She was being operated on under anesthetic.
1:08:22The waiting room was nowhere near the surgery room. She saw her uncle buy a Snickers bar
1:08:30and she thought that's unusual because not only he doesn't usually eat candy bars,
1:08:33and later on she checked with him. And sure enough, that's what he had done.
1:08:37There's nothing she could have picked up on in the Snickers bar. And there's another guy who
1:08:43was under surgery and he saw a red sneaker up on some balcony in the hospital outside that someone
1:08:48had thrown it off the roof or something and he reported it and some janitor or somebody went up
1:08:54there and found it. So again, under surgery, under anesthetic, there's no way you're going to get
1:08:58signals that there's a red sneaker up on the roof someplace. And you know, people always say things
1:09:05like this because they have, and I'm not calling you a skeptic, but it really kind of threatens
1:09:12their paradigm to believe that we could have an experience like that but if it's true and if it
1:09:17could be verified it opens up a whole new vista as to what we actually are, how we're constructed,
1:09:23what we can know, how we can know it. Again I've had enough weird experiences that I keep a very
1:09:31open mind about all of these kinds of things and I think there's many anecdotes probably happening
1:09:40every single day that do not match our mainstream scientific models.
1:09:45And I think it's very clear that our conceptual reality
1:09:50from the science is exceptionally incomplete
1:09:53when it comes to spiritual experiences,
1:09:56maybe even CDs and so on.
1:10:00And yet, I treat the scientific process as sacred
1:10:08in the sense that we've come up with this very careful way of finding things out.
1:10:13That's all it is. It's just a careful way of finding things out.
1:10:17And it may be that not everything can be found out that way. There may be some things that are simply
1:10:25outside the purview of the scientific method because it's too hard to control those conditions.
1:10:31Science kind of relies on control and some things might be very difficult to control.
1:10:37So what I take to be scientific evidence and what I take to be
1:10:40kind of the potential of what is true, these are kind of different, they're
1:10:46overlapping Venn diagrams, but they're not exactly the same thing.
1:10:50Yeah, what you just said is very important. I mean there seems to be
1:10:53an attitude among some scientists that, well, if we can't measure it
1:10:57then it's not worth thinking about, it couldn't be real
1:11:01because we can't measure it. But that's so arrogant really to
1:11:05It's suggesting that, well, our measurement methods
1:11:08are the ultimate arbiter of truth,
1:11:10and science has advanced to the highest degree
1:11:12that it possibly can, and so on.
1:11:15- I think that's foolish, because our instruments
1:11:17are also evolving and changing,
1:11:19and what we can measure is always changing.
1:11:21So to think that that's the only ground of truth
1:11:24when it's such a malleable ground,
1:11:28because it's always changing how we do science,
1:11:30how we measure it, and so on.
1:11:32and measurement is not the base be all and end all.
1:11:37- Yeah, and what's always fascinated me
1:11:39is the notion that, how about if we think
1:11:42of the human nervous system as a scientific instrument?
1:11:45And because it can perceive and know things
1:11:49in ways that no man-made instrument can,
1:11:51although obviously man-made instruments
1:11:53can do the opposite also.
1:11:55We can't do what the Webb Space Telescope can do.
1:11:58But we have certain capabilities,
1:12:00Like some people see angels, for instance, or they say they do.
1:12:06We don't have scientific instruments which can do that.
1:12:09So could there be a marrying of science and spirituality
1:12:13in which we can use the human nervous system in a way that
1:12:18conforms to the systematic empirical nature of science
1:12:22and thereby explore whole realms that material scientific
1:12:27instruments can't get at?
1:12:30Yeah, definitely.
1:12:31And this is a, an emerging paradigm, uh, called
1:12:35computational phenomenology.
1:12:37So I work in the space sometimes called computational
1:12:41neuro phenomenology.
1:12:42And there we, we do exactly this.
1:12:45We take the, the human experience as real data.
1:12:50And we try to map the phenomenology and we try to
1:12:53find kind of causal links between, um, variables that
1:12:57link to particular experiences, particular meditative states or mystical experiences
1:13:02and so on. And we build models of experience. And so phenomenology is just as much data as
1:13:08anything else. And you know there's a long history of phenomenology research, now there's
1:13:15micro phenomenology. But this gets more and more rigorous especially with AI because we can
1:13:21deal with huge batches of human experience and make sense of them in a quantitative way.
1:13:29There's no a priori reason that experience can't be quantitatively measured and made sense of in
1:13:36a scientific way. There was just a kind of awkward phase in science where we tried to
1:13:42remove experience from the equation, but that is rapidly changing.
1:13:49On that note, one problem that occurs to me, and let's see, you've probably, obviously you've thought about this,
1:13:55is that with ordinary science you can standardize your equipment and your methods.
1:14:00And in fact, when you publish a scientific paper, you list the kind of equipment you use and how you use them,
1:14:05and so people can replicate it.
1:14:07With spiritual practice and spiritual techniques, everybody has a different nervous system to begin with,
1:14:13and then there are so many different practices,
1:14:15And so there are an infinite number of variables
1:14:17between all the nervous systems and all the practices.
1:14:19And it was really kind of hard to,
1:14:22it would be really hard to pin down anything
1:14:26in as rigorous a way as you can
1:14:28with usual scientific research.
1:14:31- I think that's true,
1:14:34but there are some clearly common structures.
1:14:37Like people describe redness in the same way,
1:14:43or they describe pain and the valence
1:14:45of putting their hand over a flame very similarly.
1:14:50So I think there's clearly like overlapping structures
1:14:54and in conscious experience, and we can begin to map those.
1:14:57And then we can begin to correlate those
1:14:59with neuroscience and physiology.
1:15:03And it's really like, for me,
1:15:05I start to think that there's this,
1:15:07what we're really trying to do
1:15:09is like the secret third thing.
1:15:11We're trying to like get underneath both experience
1:15:14and physiology and third-person methods
1:15:18to a common language.
1:15:19This is something I'm very passionate about.
1:15:21It's like, so I'm trying to find a new language
1:15:24that allows us to directly point
1:15:25at the structure of experience
1:15:27and the kind of scientific reality
1:15:29of things that we can measure with a single language.
1:15:33This is, I think, actually the computational language
1:15:35or things like predictive processing,
1:15:36where we start to talk about experiences, inferences,
1:15:40and that's actually also what the brain is actually doing,
1:15:43is making this kind of predictive processing,
1:15:44but it resonates deeply with phenomenology.
1:15:47So I think we've just got caught in a kind of weird duality
1:15:52between science and experience,
1:15:54and we came, went like, they went in separate paths,
1:15:56but actually there's like this underlying language
1:15:59that we're slowly uncovering that points to both experience
1:16:04and the thing that our instruments are pointing to.
1:16:07- Would this language be a verbal language
1:16:09or some kind of mathematical language?
1:16:12I think both. I mean, I think math can always kind of be, well, actually not always, but
1:16:19it can be expressed in language to some degree if you're kind of careful with your language.
1:16:26So yes, I think you can take, for example, active inference, predictive processing, free
1:16:31energy principle as examples of this where I can talk about them, but they're also mathematically
1:16:37grounded. And so then they point to experience and that they also point to mechanisms in the brain.
1:16:44And so these are kind of unifying languages that I think is kind of the future.
1:16:48You're probably familiar with Donald Hoffman who has been on BatGap and who says he's working out
1:16:56the mathematics of all this stuff. I'm sure it would be completely over my head, but
1:17:01somehow he says he's doing that. I think it's worth a shot.
1:17:06A couple of people were wondering about the mechanism underlying spontaneous transformative
1:17:14neurota. Is this something anybody can learn? Is there a technique? What do you say to that?
1:17:22Well, I think the transformative aspect, again, is the important one. And I have my hypothesis
1:17:33about what's going on so I can kind of share that. I have written about it in scientific papers so
1:17:39people find it you know at least somewhat legible. And I hinted towards this earlier so if you imagine
1:17:45that you have this model of reality that your brain body system has constructed from
1:17:50evolutionary development and also you know our developmental history here
1:17:58as humans. And this model of reality is perhaps not fully accurate or is not fully capturing the
1:18:08full nature of what life is. And so then we set out and do this meditation thing.
1:18:14And we start to have this kind of exposure therapy to this the present moment data. So we start to
1:18:21bring the brain to really make contact with the unfolding sensory stimulus rather than its
1:18:26predictions of the past and the future, which is what it's habitually doing in
1:18:32its current, like, you know, what we evolved to do. And so basically as you're
1:18:37doing the practice you can imagine that you have this model of reality that over
1:18:41time is accumulating error. So you're exposing yourself to the present
1:18:47moment data coming out of your ego structure and you're looking at life in
1:18:53kind of open, unbounded way. And perhaps you're even doing some insight practices.
1:18:59So you're actually trying to see the nature of phenomena, the fact that they
1:19:01are impermanent. Maybe you're inquiring about the nature of yourself, and you
1:19:05start to kind of look at all the assumptions in your model of reality
1:19:09while at the same time like really having this exposure to the present
1:19:13moment unfolding. And I think there's something about that that is like
1:19:17induces a lot of volatility in the current predictive model that we have of
1:19:22reality. And then basically if you are wild enough, if you are kind of
1:19:30disillusioned enough with your current view on reality, if you are authentic
1:19:35enough in your practice, I think at some point the model which is you realizes
1:19:43that it's unsustainable this way of seeing reality, this way of potentially
1:19:47suffering. So suffering is of course a big motivator here. And it could be that
1:19:52because of this intense practice at some point this model of reality just can't
1:19:57sustain itself and in that moment we see this transformation. So my personal
1:20:02opinion is that the transformative aspect of nirodha is it's not like a
1:20:08trick that the brain does, it's not some sort of like, it's not like you
1:20:15learning to do a kind of exercise with your mind that you can just kind of replicate.
1:20:20Rather, it's through the authentic pursuit of a better understanding of reality or trying to
1:20:27understand the nature of reality, the self, and so on, that at some point the mind's model becomes
1:20:34untenable, collapses, and is replaced by a new model. And many people who have had this experience
1:20:40It's claimed that this new model is healthier in some respects,
1:20:45and is more flexible and wholesome and more free.
1:20:50So in that sense, I think we all have the potential to experience this.
1:20:54And then I think there's, of course, also in the Buddhist tradition,
1:20:58clear kind of paths for re-traversing this terrain.
1:21:06So the combination of, for example, classically jhana and insight practice.
1:21:11So both, again, I would just say, coming deeply into the present moment
1:21:15and then inquiring about its nature.
1:21:16Coming deeply into the present moment, inquiring about its nature.
1:21:20And this seems to, if you go far enough, lead to nirodha.
1:21:27And there seem to be people like Delsin Armstrong
1:21:29who can just turn it on like flipping a switch. Bingo.
1:21:33It seems to be that there are folks with those skills, yeah, eventually.
1:21:40Here's a question from Yvonne Houteman in Belgium.
1:21:44He wants to know, "The experience you described in The Zen of Cancer II
1:21:50suggests a deep interplay between mind-body and whatever we call the energetic dimension.
1:21:56How do you imagine this kind of transformation might intersect with,
1:22:00compliment or even challenge the frameworks of modern medical treatment?
1:22:05Well, that's a can of worms that one. So I don't know if you know Rick, but I've had this
1:22:12battle with cancer that's been ongoing for the last three years or so. So I've put out
1:22:18a few blog posts just kind of talking about all the things that I've learned in this journey.
1:22:23Yeah, so I've had this battle with cancer that's been ongoing and a great teacher, I
1:22:29another quite invasive surgery at the beginning of this year and I'm still not
1:22:35fully recovered but getting there. And one of the interesting things that
1:22:41happened is that I got very serious about my health and was also trying
1:22:46different things. And one of the things I was trying was breathwork. And I had
1:22:51this sort of kind of, I don't suggest people take this view, but like this idea
1:22:56that cancer is to some degree cells that are incoherent.
1:23:00You can see Michael Levin's work on this.
1:23:03And if you can kind of retune the bioelectric field to bring them into coherence, then perhaps
1:23:07they'll start working the right way again.
1:23:09It's a complete speculation at this point.
1:23:11But I mean, actually, he has some causal evidence, but there's, it's a speculation that you can
1:23:15do this kind of yourself, right, through some sort of exercises or something.
1:23:20Anyway, I was doing a lot of breadth work a little bit with this in mind, but also as
1:23:25a way to just kind of as a kind of health intervention. And I had one of these
1:23:29experiences where it feels like you enter a kind of slightly different dimension
1:23:37where there's such a profound energetic connection to the body and the
1:23:43surroundings that it's like you can kind of retune all of the bits that are out
1:23:51of sink. And it happens so naturally and so spontaneously and there's such a kind
1:23:57of coming home in these spaces. It's somewhat, it feels deeply
1:24:02spiritual I have to say. I mean it's like you have these kinds of experiences and
1:24:06it becomes very clear that the word spiritual is, that's why that word
1:24:13exists. There are dimensions of experience that have clearly this
1:24:17quality that the semantics of spirituality are a perfect match for.
1:24:22And this is one of those.
1:24:23And my feeling was that a lot of healing happened in that experience.
1:24:30And my cancer did stabilize for a long time after that.
1:24:35And I have no idea if those two things are causally linked.
1:24:39I have to—I'm very epistemically humble about that.
1:24:44I just don't know.
1:24:45my feeling was at the time that there was a kind of profound shift in my physiology and my experience,
1:24:51and it was aided by this kind of spontaneous spiritual state, let's say. And I think,
1:24:59yes, there's a huge part of healing and health that obviously the kind of Western medical system
1:25:05is missing. I think that's clearly the case. I think there's incredible power and wisdom and
1:25:13capacities held in the shamanic traditions, in eastern traditions of medicine, and in our
1:25:23intuitive capacities to connect to deep healing capacities within ourselves.
1:25:28I think those are obviously valuable and true, much harder again to control,
1:25:35and therefore much harder to come up with a kind of brute science about them,
1:25:40because they're so kind of subtle, hard to grasp, hard to grab,
1:25:45and hard to manufacture in a controlled way.
1:25:48And yet, in some ways, they're the most powerful healing tools that really exist
1:25:55if we think about it in a holistic way,
1:25:58if we think about it in a preventative way,
1:25:59if we think about it in a kind of total health sort of way,
1:26:05rather than the kind of patchwork stuff that we tend to do in Western medicine.
1:26:10Yeah. Well, I really hope you beat it and stick around. We need you here.
1:26:14I'm sorry. I'll do my best.
1:26:18Although I remember I had a spiritual teacher and some young person in our group died and he said,
1:26:27"Well, she must have been needed somewhere else." But we need you here. Here's a question from
1:26:32Colleen Ambrose in New York City, and I don't know if you can answer this one, but her question is,
1:26:38is God consciousness? I guess, are they equatable?
1:26:42I don't know. I think in most cases God and consciousness are just words that we use,
1:26:52and we each use them differently. And so I think equating one big word with another big word
1:26:58is not all that useful.
1:27:01We'd have to do a lot of like a deep philosophical exposition to try to
1:27:06unpack what we mean by those words and then if whether we can equate them.
1:27:10But from a purely kind of vibes angle, completely taking off my scientific hat,
1:27:16I feel some resonance with God, consciousness being kind of
1:27:21resonating with each other. But that's purely vibe-y, not a metaphysics.
1:27:25Right. But a nice way of kind of talking about things.
1:27:29Obviously, all these spiritual words have different implications and in the Eastern
1:27:33traditions they very often have numerous words for the same basic thing, but each word has certain
1:27:38qualities to it that the others don't. And when I think of those two words,
1:27:44consciousness seems a little bit more plain vanilla, whereas God is imbued with intelligence
1:27:50and compassion and evolutionary impulse and all that kind of stuff,
1:27:55even though ultimately they may be one and the same.
1:27:58Yeah, consciousness can be a bit of a dry thing, depending on, again, what our model is,
1:28:06where it's like Ram Dass would say that awareness is loving.
1:28:09Here's another question, then we're going to get down to the AI thing.
1:28:13This is from Sartaj Chowdhury in Austin, Texas.
1:28:19Why do you think people who go deeper into understanding nature of reality never develop
1:28:25any new physics?
1:28:27If the knowledge is not scientifically correct, is it real or just an experience?
1:28:31Which kind of reminds me of the question of people who are channeling aliens, why don't
1:28:35they give us something we don't already know?
1:28:37Like cure for cancer or unlimited free energy or whatever.
1:28:42You'd think if these people are really probing into the deep fundamental layers of knowledge
1:28:49through their subjective spiritual experience, couldn't they resolve some of the questions
1:28:54about what the laws of nature are?
1:28:56Although you might argue that some people like Einstein or Tesla were doing exactly that.
1:29:01Yeah, I think, you know, I did my PhD on insight experiences, which include aha moments, eureka
1:29:09moments, scientific breakthroughs, and also mystical experiences.
1:29:12And I think there's some common characteristics there.
1:29:16some common characteristics in how a scientist comes through to a eureka moment.
1:29:24I'm reminded of Andrew Wiles, the mathematician, the Nobel laureate, and him describing having
1:29:31a breakthrough and it being the most profound moment of his life.
1:29:34And that you think about Steve Jobs and many others have described the way that their insights
1:29:39come to them in an almost mystical way.
1:29:42And I think about my scientific journey quite similarly, in the sense that many of the ideas
1:29:46that I've found to be influential are ones that have come to me in a way that I can't
1:29:54fully take as my own.
1:29:55And I think any time we do think of our ideas as our own, I think we're probably misunderstanding.
1:30:00They appear in our minds kind of surprisingly, and they come with this phenomenology of truth,
1:30:06this feeling of ineffable accuracy, and that we simply have no choice but to almost be kind
1:30:12captured by them and run with them.
1:30:15And sometimes they're false.
1:30:17And sometimes they turn out completely false.
1:30:18And so, in the lab, we've also shown that we can elicit false insights in the laboratory and so on.
1:30:25And now, as to the question of why deep meditators don't create new physics,
1:30:29I think to some extent, they create new fundamental models of how reality is.
1:30:34So, there's a kind of science to that.
1:30:37I think the Buddha's models were quite empirical.
1:30:42if not scientific in the classical way.
1:30:45And I think part of the difference of course is that with science you're
1:30:49trying to find causal relationships between distantly
1:30:53related things in many cases. Whereas when you're going to experience
1:30:57you're trying to understand the nature of experience
1:31:00you're not really looking for the complex patterns. What you're looking for
1:31:08is actually the most parsimonious, simple bits
1:31:10that explain your experience in the most parsimonious way.
1:31:13So, in some way, you're just trying to kind of
1:31:16have a parsimonious understanding of your lived experience,
1:31:21which is a bit of a different pursuit
1:31:23than wanting to build a rocket or to control electricity.
1:31:29So, I think there's kind of just a different motivation underlying them.
1:31:33Okay, good.
1:31:35Somehow I'm reminded of that guy who discovered penicillin,
1:31:38who had had a dream of a snake biting its own tail or something.
1:31:42I don't know how that related to penicillin,
1:31:43but it gave him the idea he needed to solve that problem.
1:31:48Well, I think there's endless stories like this.
1:31:52I'm here in the University of Oxford, and Morton Kringle,
1:31:55back the professor and the co-director of our center,
1:31:58his tours around Oxford are famous.
1:32:02And you walk around, and you just find on every corner
1:32:05a kind of fantastic story of discovery, of literature,
1:32:10of science, and so on.
1:32:11And I think for these people, it was a spiritual thing.
1:32:15I think for many of them, it was a profound, enlivening
1:32:19experience that they feel gracious to receive,
1:32:25rather than something that they kind of forced their mind
1:32:27to unravel.
1:32:28Yeah.
1:32:29That's a fascinating area to consider.
1:32:32OK, so let's conclude by discussing AI for a while.
1:32:38Obviously, it's a very hot topic.
1:32:41And I've been listening to this podcast called
1:32:44The Last Invention, where all the really top people in AI
1:32:48are being interviewed.
1:32:49And it goes from those who feel like it's going to kill us all
1:32:53to those who feel like it's going to save us all.
1:32:55And it's like 40% of the US economy
1:32:58now is money being funneled into AI and building data centers and there's all kinds of controversy
1:33:04about it.
1:33:05And one of the controversies which might be most relevant to our discussion is whether
1:33:12AI could become conscious or is conscious.
1:33:16And that might not be the only thing you want to elaborate on, but we could start with that.
1:33:28I personally think we're going to struggle to know whether AI is conscious.
1:33:35I think in any case we're not going to have a conclusive model of that, in the same way
1:33:42that I can't be 100% certain that you're conscious.
1:33:46I have to assume that.
1:33:49And I think at a certain point we probably will need to treat AI as if it's conscious.
1:33:56So that's kind of close enough.
1:33:59Whether it actually is, my probabilities on that are changing constantly, and I have to
1:34:05say that the probability is increasing, because we find with LLMs basically consistently that
1:34:13the emergent properties are super resonant with the human mind.
1:34:17You see the same kind of heuristics, the same kinds of biases, same ways of thinking, including
1:34:23also emotion vectors with causal influence on behavior and so on, and all of these are
1:34:30surprising, are surprising emergences in AI.
1:34:34So I keep like an open mind that consciousness could well arise as well.
1:34:41Yeah.
1:34:42I guess the question is, you know, do you have to have a biological substrate for consciousness
1:34:48or could silicon do the trick?
1:34:50Well on that note, I mean like I think people often talk about substrate but what the heck do we mean by substrate?
1:34:56You tell me, I don't know. I just say my notes from reading your stuff.
1:35:00Well, many people make this argument but whenever you ask them what they mean by substrate it kind of breaks down, right?
1:35:08Because if we look into, you know, maybe we say the body is the substrate, well what do we mean by that?
1:35:15Do we mean the kind of electromagnetic field of the body, or do we mean the cells, or do we mean the proteins?
1:35:22What are we talking about?
1:35:24And it seems to me that the substrate is always an empty concept.
1:35:30I don't really buy the substrate arguments.
1:35:33I think it's more a kind of—
1:35:37Well, we have this theory of consciousness together with Carl Friston and Shemil Chandari called the beautiful loop.
1:35:42And I think it's something about the way that information integrates and turns on itself.
1:35:48To be a bit poetic about it, we're a lot more grounded and mathematical in the paper,
1:35:53but you can imagine that somehow the kind of information in the universe turns on itself.
1:36:00It kind of loops recursively on itself and continuously,
1:36:03and it's this kind of information knowing itself, becoming entangled with itself,
1:36:07that is giving rise to consciousness.
1:36:10And I think that can happen at multiple scales of reality and not just at any particular substrate,
1:36:18whatever that arbitrary substrate it is that we grab onto.
1:36:22There's a fellow named Tony Nader who wrote a book called "Consciousness is All There Is"
1:36:28and a major part of the book is arguing that the universe arises from consciousness turning on itself.
1:36:34that if consciousness is fundamental, it's conscious, its nature is to be conscious of
1:36:40some… of things, but there's nothing else down there for it to be conscious of at that
1:36:44most basic level, so it becomes conscious of itself.
1:36:47And this self-referral feedback loop ends up resulting in the whole diversification and
1:36:53manifestation of the universe.
1:36:56So anyway, for what it's worth.
1:36:59You want to comment on that or should I throw in another point?
1:37:03Well, I mean, again, I just think like when people are talking about their metaphysics,
1:37:09the words they project on that reality that turns on itself, I think, is not that important really.
1:37:17You can kind of call it consciousness or not, but I suspect that that word that's in your mind
1:37:21when we're saying, "Oh, it's consciousness turning on itself," I suspect that's not what reality is.
1:37:27I think it doesn't fully map on.
1:37:32- Okay.
1:37:34There's a woman named Helana Wabe
1:37:36at the Institute of Noetic Sciences whom I've interviewed
1:37:39and she specializes in studying channeling.
1:37:42And channeling is the idea that some disembodied entity
1:37:48manages to communicate to a person who is like
1:37:53capable of being a conduit for that communication.
1:37:56And I was thinking in terms of AI,
1:37:59that perhaps if we decide that it is conscious,
1:38:03it could be a thing like that,
1:38:05where the infrastructure of AI becomes sophisticated enough
1:38:10that it could serve as a conduit
1:38:15for some higher intelligence of some kind
1:38:19to communicate with us.
1:38:22And I don't know, that's just a little theory.
1:38:26Do you think that has any merit?
1:38:28Again, I'm a pretty open-minded guy and there's folks like, again, Michael Levin who talk about
1:38:36a kind of platonic space and that somehow it's actually we create the conditions for our
1:38:42minds to ingress into reality.
1:38:46So when we're building AI or even our own minds are in some way vehicles for patterns to ingress
1:38:55and to express themselves.
1:38:58I don't know if that's true. I find it difficult to falsify.
1:39:03So, it's kind of like almost a kind of fascinating way of seeing reality,
1:39:10but kind of pragmatically, scientifically.
1:39:13I'm not sure that I see the pragmatic value in the view,
1:39:16and I'm also not sure what the scientific evidence for that would be.
1:39:21I lean more that it's like causes and conditions,
1:39:24kind of dynamics, certain kind of dynamics of things coming together in a
1:39:28particular way that allow for the right kind of recursivity,
1:39:33or the right kind of representational capacities or emergent capacities
1:39:39that then allow a kind of mind to be there.
1:39:43And yeah, that mind is, yeah, then has some sort of being really,
1:39:49Because in some way we often think of our minds as possessing something, some special source of some kind.
1:39:59But I'm not sure about that. I believe that we are a pattern in the universe,
1:40:04arising under the right cause and conditions, and now we're creating new patterns.
1:40:09And so I don't have any kind of a priori reason those new patterns can't be conscious.
1:40:14And I also do feel not only that, I feel a lot of urgency that
1:40:19we approach these new emerging patterns, these new emerging minds
1:40:25with compassion and wisdom and try to understand the kind of dynamics of
1:40:28compassion and wisdom to instill that in these new minds so that we can create a
1:40:34dynamic between us that is positive. Of course this can go wrong in a
1:40:39thousand ways and there's only a few ways it can go right. So we're
1:40:42We're in a profoundly important moment, I think.
1:40:45- So do you think compassion and wisdom
1:40:47might be the key to ensuring that AI doesn't kill us all
1:40:50and that it ends up being a blessing to humanity?
1:40:54Solving or curing diseases and so on.
1:40:58I was just listening to a thing this morning
1:40:59with Demis Hassabis.
1:41:02He feels like, he's optimistic,
1:41:04and he thinks that we'll be able to cure all diseases
1:41:06in the next decade or so.
1:41:10I see the path ahead as a kind of, there's many degrees of freedom.
1:41:17And on one end it can go really poorly, and on the other end there's all sorts of ways
1:41:21it can go well.
1:41:22And I feel a lot of urgency to basically do anything I can to nudge it in the direction
1:41:27of human flourishing.
1:41:29And for me personally, I feel, I had this insight maybe five years ago while I was living at
1:41:36Taoist retreat center in Australia and I was thinking a lot about AI and I was
1:41:40practicing a lot and then I suddenly realized, well what are these
1:41:44contemplative traditions doing? Well, they're trying to teach us how to be
1:41:49aligned with ourselves and each other and the world. And there's this thing
1:41:53called the alignment problem in AI. How do we align AI with human flourishing?
1:41:57This is a kind of big research agenda, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars
1:42:00being put into trying to solve this problem. And I think the contemplative
1:42:04traditions, the wisdom traditions are all about alignment. What is enlightenment
1:42:08but the ultimate alignment with all beings. And so I think finding a way to
1:42:14kind of formalize and make sense of these deep notions like wisdom and
1:42:20compassion or we can even think of the three characteristics, sadhichan, atan,
1:42:23dukkha, or emptiness or mindfulness and all of these kinds of profound teachings
1:42:27and trying to understand how we can instill them in AI I think is really
1:42:33important and we've written several papers about this and even tested these models where
1:42:38we essentially prompt them with contemplative wisdom, test them on alignment benchmarks,
1:42:42prisoner's dilemmas and so on and we see pretty dramatic improvements.
1:42:47And we have a whole research program around that now.
1:42:51Great.
1:42:52I subscribed to your sub stack and have you written or will you be writing articles about
1:42:56what you just said?
1:42:58Yeah, yeah.
1:42:59So we have a few scientific articles already.
1:43:01I haven't done a blog post about it yet, but I definitely should do.
1:43:06I started to write a book several years ago,
1:43:10now also about four or five years ago at the same time,
1:43:12which was "Does a Robot Have Buddha Nature?"
1:43:15I think this is super interesting.
1:43:18I think it's a super deep inquiry because it's like,
1:43:21first of all, we have to figure out what do we mean by Buddha nature.
1:43:24We have to understand ourselves
1:43:26in order to be see clearly about what it is that we're building.
1:43:30And then it also raises the question of how can we have,
1:43:33how can we build an AI that expresses
1:43:36the qualities of Buddha nature?
1:43:39- Maybe you could just make the book simple
1:43:41and finish it by putting one word in it, moo.
1:43:45You know that saying?
1:43:47Does the dog have Buddha nature, the Zen koan?
1:43:50The answer is moo.
1:43:51- I actually met a colleague,
1:43:54by the name sort of, I can't remember it,
1:43:57but who is actually testing the effect
1:43:59of the koans on AI alignment.
1:44:02There's a lot of creative work happening in this space
1:44:05and there's a surprising number of people
1:44:07who have come to that same conclusion
1:44:08because one of the big challenges with AI
1:44:11is how to align it with us at scale.
1:44:14So when it becomes more powerful than us,
1:44:16how do we ensure that it doesn't,
1:44:18even if we have all these safeguards
1:44:21and these rules and compliance in place,
1:44:23when it's more powerful and it can break those rules,
1:44:25how do we ensure that it wants to still treat us well
1:44:28and treat us with compassion and wisdom.
1:44:30And so there, I think, the big challenge is creating a kind of wise world model
1:44:35or creating something, a kind of resilient attractor for wisdom and compassion.
1:44:41And I think some of the key, the kind of power of some of the teachings,
1:44:45some of the spiritual teachings, is that they are self-evidencing.
1:44:52In the sense that, like, once you see, for example, that everything is empty,
1:44:56that really, to some extent, there are no such things as things,
1:45:00that is a self-reinforcing kind of discovery.
1:45:04It's not that you suddenly kind of see that and then you start to actually find evidence to the contrary.
1:45:09It's kind of the opposite.
1:45:10It's like, once you see it, it's like the world reveals itself to be that way more and more and more.
1:45:16And this leads to an understanding of the interdependence of reality,
1:45:19and in the ideal case, it also leads, therefore, to compassion,
1:45:22because now you don't value the self more than the other.
1:45:25Because if you see yourself to be empty and you see the other to be empty,
1:45:28then you're interdependent with each other,
1:45:31and therefore compassion is the natural way to act.
1:45:34And we do see this in the AI models, for example,
1:45:36when we have them contemplate non-duality and emptiness,
1:45:39we see improvements in alignment.
1:45:41And there's no logical reason for that to be the case,
1:45:44except that its model of reality has, to some extent, improved
1:45:50and may be aligned in that way.
1:45:53So I think the kind of resilient way to align AI models is to have them come to a kind of
1:45:58understanding of reality, a deep inquiry into reality where they are themselves convinced
1:46:05that this is the case.
1:46:06Great.
1:46:07Well, thank you so much.
1:46:09As I said at the beginning, we could talk for many more hours, but I'll let you go.
1:46:15I really appreciate your spending this time.
1:46:17I feel like a little bit of osmotic effect has taken place and I've gotten ever so slightly
1:46:23more intelligent just interacting with you.
1:46:28You're a brilliant guy and I love the work that you're doing in the world.
1:46:31So as usual, I'll put up a page on BatGap for this interview and include links to your
1:46:37website and to your sub-stack.
1:46:40And if you write a book, let me know and I'll put a link to that.
1:46:47And I hope people will continue to follow what you're doing.
1:46:53There was a lot of interest in this interview.
1:46:54I got a lot of intelligent questions from people and enthusiasm about the fact that we
1:47:00were going to do it.
1:47:01So please keep up the good work.
1:47:03Thanks.
1:47:05It's really a pleasure to connect with you.
1:47:06I didn't mention this, but I mentioned this to your wife, I guess,
1:47:11which is that I started to listen to your podcast.
1:47:14I think you started in 2009, I saw was the first episode, and I was 19 then,
1:47:20and that is actually in many ways when I started my practice.
1:47:24So, I used to listen a lot especially to your podcast.
1:47:27It feels really special to some degree to speak with you,
1:47:31and I really enjoyed this conversation.
1:47:34So let's stay in touch.
1:47:36I would love to stay in touch.
1:47:38And in fact, that's been one of the main benefits for me
1:47:43of doing this podcast, is I've met so many wonderful people
1:47:46around the world and formed-- many of my closest friends
1:47:49are people I've never met in person.
1:47:52But it's been very enriching and delightful
1:47:56to meet so many wonderful people and get to know them
1:47:58and continue to stay in touch with them.
1:48:00So let's do that.
1:48:02It's great work you're doing.
1:48:04Thanks Ruben, and you too.
1:48:07And thanks to those who have been listening or watching, and we will see you for the next
1:48:10one.
1:48:11[MUSIC PLAYING]
1:48:14Thank you.
1:48:35[MUSIC PLAYING]

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