Beauty At Work
Beauty at Work expands our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. Sociologist Brandon Vaidyanathan interviews scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders across diverse fields to reveal new insights into how beauty shapes our brains, behaviors, organizations, and societies--for good and for ill. Learn how to harness the power of beauty in your life and work, while avoiding its pitfalls.
Beauty At Work
Science Meets Spirituality: Bridging Worlds in the Search for Meaning
How can science speak to our deepest spiritual yearnings? In this captivating panel discussion held at NeueHouse Manhattan, five prominent scientists and thinkers explore how different ways of knowing—from physics to medicine, from spirituality to ethics—can build meaningful bridges between worlds often seen as separate.
The panelists are:
Dr. Alan Lightman (physicist and Professor of the Practice of the humanities at MIT, and author of numerous books including most recently, the The Miraculous from the Material) - he was a guest on Season 3
Dr. Neil Theise (professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, pioneer of adult stem stell plasticity and the interstitium, and author of "Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being,”)
Dr. Scarlet Soriano, Executive Director at Duke Health & Well-Being, whose work focuses on the development of equity-based and community-grounded health and well-being interventions;
and Dr. Katy Hinman is the Director of Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER) program at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),
The panel was moderated by Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, who is the creator, writer, host and executive producer of Closer To Truth, the long-running public television series and leading global resource on Cosmos, Life, Mind, and Meaning.
Together, they discuss: Can spirituality coexist with scientific rationality? How do love, consciousness, and our connection to the universe shape our understanding of life's purpose?
This event, sponsored by The John Templeton Foundation and produced by Rohan Routroy and Thirty Eight, explores and debates diverse approaches to consciousness and spirituality in an age of science.
Watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iaUV4QWbZcI
#ScienceAndSpirituality #ScienceAndReligion #MeaningOfLife #CloserToTruth #Consciousness #AlanLightman #NeilTheise
Hey everybody, welcome to Beauty at Work. Season 3 of the podcast was on the theme of yearning, and I recently had the pleasure of helping to organize an event in New York City on this theme. The event was titled A Bridge Between Worlds, Science, Spirituality, and the Search for Meaning. The focus of the event was to think about how science might be relevant for our deeper spiritual quest, and how we might build bridges between different ways of knowing. The event was a panel discussion between five prominent scientists, each coming at this issue from a different perspective. Dr. Alan Leitman, physicist and professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT, and author of numerous books, including most recently, The Miraculous from the Material, who was a guest on season three, Dr. Neal Thies, professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and the interstitium, and author of Notes on Complexity, a scientific theory of connection, consciousness, and being. Dr. Scarlett Soriano, executive director at Duke Health and Wellbeing, whose work focuses on the development of equity-based and community-grounded health and well-being interventions. Dr. Katie Hinman, the director of the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, or DOSER program at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. And finally, the moderator for the panel, Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, who's the creator, writer, host, and executive producer of Closer to Truth, a long-running public television series and leading global resource on cosmos, life, mind, and meaning. The event was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, and produced by my friend Rohan Ratroy, who led brand strategy and growth at Twitter for eight years before founding 38, a firm that exists to give language to unspoken and complex problems, curate encounters that build bridges across communities, and bring attention and capital to unheard stories. Here's Rohan
SPEAKER_01:to introduce our event. Thank you so much for being here. This means a lot to us. I want to start by sharing something personal. I called my parents this morning to tell them that the event is sold out. My mom looked very puzzled. That reminded me of the oldest challenge I have faced in my life. I left home when I was super young. And the further I went away from my parents, I thought that if I could find the right words, I could bridge that gap between me and my parents. But I was wrong. It took me a while to realize that. It took me a while to realize that language is not the problem. It's sense making itself. Because for me, sold out means something. My mom, sold out means nothing. Because from the part of India we come from, 1,000 extra people show up at a wedding. It's a true story. We had to order more chicken. And that made us wonder, what if we could have a room designed to tackle the oldest sense-making challenge in the world, between science and spirituality? Science seeks truth, spirituality seeks meaning. And to do that, we have invited five profound scientists to build a shared sense-making and a bridge between these two worlds. We hope by the end of this evening, you can walk with us on this bridge and bring these two worlds closer together. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_07:So what I want to start with, which is a quote from somebody that I've interviewed that Alan has worked on as well, and that is a wonderful man, a great scientist, Nobel Prize winner, Steven Weinberg, who died recently, in his early book made the comment, which has had a great life of its own, and he said, the more the universe becomes comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. And this is third-grade controversy. So I want to start with Alan, who's interviewed and talked to people about this. What do people say about that comment? Do you find general agreement?
SPEAKER_06:Well, scientists, even scientists, have different views about the meaning of that. So some scientists think that, agree with Weinberg, that there's no point to the universe that's an anthropomorphic concept and other things. scientists, and there's some religious scientists, people of faith who think that God gives the universe meaning. And there are other scientists who think that just the appreciation of beauty, for example, gives the universe meaning. So a range of responses.
SPEAKER_07:Neil, from your perspective as an idealist who believes in the foundational importance of consciousness, How do you look at the question of the pointlessness of the universe as it becomes comprehensible? I wonder if he ever meditated. People tell me to take psychedelics so I can really get to the truth, but I haven't done it. Why not? Because I don't trust it. I wouldn't trust my own judgment if I had it. Then why not try meditating? I can try. I play table tennis. Not the same.
SPEAKER_04:To me it is. But it's sort of... Watching the movie, I was wondering, Alan, have you tried meditating to replicate that experience you had? Oh, I'm a meditator. Oh, okay. And so how do you integrate that into how you see things?
SPEAKER_06:Well, I would rather let other panelists talk,
SPEAKER_07:if that's okay with you.
SPEAKER_06:I've talked a lot here.
SPEAKER_07:Okay, so you haven't answered my question, Neil. I'm going to get back at you. So as a meditator, and you have that over me, I don't have that. As someone who believes in idealism, consciousness is the only fundamental, how do you look at the point that the more the universe looks, it becomes comprehensible, the more it's pointless? If consciousness is fundamental in the universe, is it pointless?
SPEAKER_04:I think the... presence of what appears to be a material universe arises from a fundamental awareness trying to understand what it is, which is partly what you were talking about in the movie and other people were talking about in the movie. I think if I would say precisely that question arising within a non-dual awareness where there is no subject and object, there are no differences between that you can describe mathematically or poetically or linguistically, if there's an urge within that to understand itself, out of that urge comes, this is a Kashmiri Shaivist idea, but this urge to look at itself and subject-object split develops as that happens and has at the point to understand itself. I think that's it. The world wants to understand what it is. And the fundamental nature of the world is just awareness that seeks to understand itself. Yeah, I think that's the point.
SPEAKER_07:So it seeks to understand means it didn't understand itself to begin with, but now it has to see.
SPEAKER_04:Well, but in the non-dual, there is no time. So there's no first and after, and there's no distance. So there's no eternity. There's no infinity. So those are our limited possibilities. ideas that we try to impose down, and that gets puzzled of, well, what came first? There is no first if there's no time. It's the nature of fundamental awareness to seek to understand itself in human terms. It's hard to do that, to tell that story, because that's what humans do. We turn everything into
SPEAKER_07:stories. Let me go to Katie. Katie, from your background, which is quite fascinating, both as a scientist and biological scientist, and as someone in the faith tradition who is indeed a pastor. How do you look at this question of a point to the physical universe and the relationship between science and spirituality?
SPEAKER_09:Well, I think my immediate question is, what do you mean by pointless? Does it mean it has no meaning at all, or does it mean it doesn't have a direction? This is something that comes up a lot in discussions of evolution. Is evolution directed in a particular way? Could you predict an end point or where evolution would go next?
SPEAKER_07:So the vast majority of scientists say no. You run the movie a second time, you get a completely different picture.
SPEAKER_09:Exactly. But does that mean that it's pointless, that evolution doesn't have a meaning in terms of, understandable function and an understandable way of working just because it doesn't have a predictable end point. So I guess I'm curious if you have insight into kind of what the meaning of pointless is there, because I think for some people, it would be very discouraging to think that there isn't a given direction and predictable end to experience but for many people that would not not having such an end point would not equate to meaningless in that aspect of pointless so I'm curious what at least your interpretation of this
SPEAKER_07:I'm asking the questions
SPEAKER_00:I
SPEAKER_07:have a lot of answers but we're going to hold those Scarlett you have a totally orthogonal point of view and experience from the rest of us in different ways. Very much an intellectual, a scholar, a scientist, a doctor, and have focused your life on health-needing communities that are underserved. A radically different perspective, which I highly respect. As you hear these kinds of abstract kinds of questions, which you understand and appreciate, and yet you see the needs of the real world. How do you react to these conversations?
SPEAKER_02:Thank you for that. And I think that's a phenomenal place and a phenomenal question for me. As I make meaning in my own life and as I think about this issue of what is pointless and not, there are a couple of things that come immediately to my mind. And one of them is harmony. I keep coming back to harmony. If there's a point, I think of harmony and balance as the parent and through the lived experience. So there's a way in which these more abstract physical cosmological principles can find their way into harmony sort of the lived experience of a being. And of course, we have the human perspective. I can only hold that. But what I have seen is that different stories about where it began and how it began and how it works can support an experience in which the mind connects with an inner sense of being that encompasses a self larger than the finite sort of limits of the one body. And we think about it as an opening of the heart, but an opening of self, a larger sense of oneness through which a more balanced state of mind, physiology, and emotions can emerge. And that actually then finds itself into the world, relationships and what we build and how we create.
SPEAKER_07:That is unquestionably true in terms of its applicability and the importance of harmony. But to my mind, to be a little provocative, it has no relationship to truth. It is good and right to do, but it is no data point that we can use to discern what is absolutely true. You disagree? Yeah, yeah. So
SPEAKER_04:this is where the complexity theory stuff comes in for me. Yes. This is where the complexity comes in. And this is sort of how I got into complexity theory. I was studying stem cells and it was pointed out to me by this artist who was familiar with complexity theory named Jane Crawford that the way I talked about cells moving around the body and turning into tissues was similar to the way complexity theorists talked about slime molds forming or ants forming colonies. Smaller scale things interacting with each other according to certain rules that are described in complexity theory to give rise to larger scale structures, the emergence that was being talked about in the film. From that standpoint, at this level of scale, our bodies are separate beings. We're all separate in the room. At the cellular level, where I spend a lot of my day looking in a microscope, we're shedding cells all over the place, including microbiome, which we're exchanging. 50% of our human bodies, to be alive, we have to be that microbiome. And everything we touch, we shook hands before, we're exchanging microbiome. At the cellular level, where are our boundaries? At least all the people we come in contact with in the spaces we inhabit. At the molecular level, you go down lower in scale, the boundaries extend out because we're exchanging molecules with the entire biomass of the planet. At the atomic level, there's no atom in our bodies. There are a couple of exceptions, but there are no atoms in the body that we didn't eat, breathe, or drink from the planet. So are we anxious, lonely creatures walking around on top of a rock? Or are we the planet that has evolved over four and a half billion years to think of itself as separate? And all of these are true views. If you select one, you're going to miss things that are important of the other scale. At the quantum scale, non-locality and entanglement, there is only one seamless universe. So depending on your point of view, we are either separate. And when you talk about harmony and this particular body, then it's hard to say that that's nothing but poetry. But at other levels of scale, we are so intimately interconnected. And that's a scientific computational thing. That's not just poetry. It is equally true that we're separate and that we're one seamless universe that is expressing itself as living beings that often, unfortunately, have the mistaken idea that we're separate. And both are true.
SPEAKER_07:So let me move on to one of the core questions is the relationship between science or knowledge and spirituality. So let's define what we mean by spirituality, because spirituality could just mean a good feeling of harmony among each other. It could mean I meditate, but I don't believe in anything. It could mean I'm a deep believer in God, various specific religions. So very quickly, each of you give your sense of the word spirituality, and then maybe I'll give you mine. Well,
SPEAKER_06:I have a non-theist view of spirituality. It's feeling connections, connected to things larger than myself, appreciation of beauty, the experience of awe with nature, my relationships with people.
SPEAKER_07:And that's a purely neurophysiological, evolutionary-produced capability that a human being, or at least we know human beings have, that is in no way even hint at a non-material reality in any sense whatsoever. Yes. Good. Okay, good.
UNKNOWN:Scott?
SPEAKER_02:Okay, well, I'll take it to the other side. And well, not really just to the other side, but I'll say just very quickly two things. I think that spirituality is that meaning making at a deep, deep level. between the dimensions of the self or within the self across our dimensions from the very material to those things that just like you were saying in the documentary cannot be captured by the magnetoencephalogram or by the MRI and I will say this one of the I've had experiences I've had the opportunity to study with different streams of teachers across backgrounds and I've been, there's a particular teacher I was mentioning to Brandon before in India who's considered an awakened person. And I will say just this from a non-scientific perspective, but this is, I think, really significant. Lifelong, I mean, the meditator to the max, but awake, just coming close to this person physically, it's a completely different experience. It was an experience of feeling an expression of love that was non-personal and transcendent and I'd never met, you know, the first hug that I received. But also, this person is sponsoring nanotechnology for humanitarian reasons, and schools and orphanages and cleaning up mountainsides, and an advisor to the United Nations. So you have this way in which the mind can enter, the mind and heart or the inner self can enter expansiveness and come back into form and manifest that, manifest what I would say is an extension of again, harmony for lack of better words, you can call it love, you can call it balance, interconnection, whatever you might, but where there is an outpouring of that which is found internal. I
SPEAKER_09:think at its core, I think of spirituality as the way that we think about ourselves in relation to the world and what that means for how we live and how we behave. I think For me, there is a lot of resonance with what both Alan and Scarlett have talked about, but I don't think that necessarily spirituality has to include that sense of harmony or connectedness. I might hope that people's spirituality would all take some form of that, but I think at its heart, it's how we understand our our relationship to the world.
SPEAKER_07:But as a theist, I assume you are a theist, that adds a radically different dimension to the story. I mean, and that differentiates you certainly from Alan. I don't want to get too personal here. Maybe I do. Well,
SPEAKER_09:I mean, that would be part of the way we see ourselves in relation to the world is what else are we in relation to? Are we just in relation to other people? Are we in relation to the physical world, to the rest of the biotic world, to the abiotic world, to the universe and the stars, to something beyond that as a supernatural entity, whether that's a god or some other expression of that? All of that plays into our sense of spirituality, whatever it is. And even, I would argue that even folks who would see themselves as not having a spirituality do have a spirituality. It is one that sees their relation to the world as being completely material. Without this...
SPEAKER_07:So everybody has a spiritual view, even if you don't believe in it, that is a spiritual view. It's a... strictly material point of view, which is a spiritual, it's in the spiritual category. Neil?
SPEAKER_03:What they said.
SPEAKER_07:So, I would say what we're hearing are two different kinds of spirituality. One is a human being sense of awe, transcendence, getting beyond yourself that you can see through beauty that Brendan works on, that Alan's documentary wonderfully presents. It could be music that you hear. I once heard Mahler's Fifth Symphony with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with my friend. We were both at Johns Hopkins Medical School. And I was enraptured and he thought it was just noise. So, you know, then we have reversing. So we have that outside of ourselves. And that's what we're talking about. It's easy to talk about. But I really think we're underplaying the ontological reality of what spirituality means to a lot of people. And it comes closest to what Alan said, because he's taking a very, what I would say, in that aspect of spirituality, an anti-spiritual position, that spiritual is fine in the transcendent human sense, but it is erroneous. to look at it in a non-material way. So any sort of spirituality that implies a non-material existence is a fable and a myth. And Alan is a very nice person, so he's not gonna be criticizing. But in reality, that's what he would believe. That's what a materialist would believe. And I would also contradict the harmony that Scarlett and Alan had Because if materialism is correct, my thesis would be that ultimately it is 100% sure that neuroscience in some form will be able to explain it. Because if you say that it can't, it's beyond that, then you're going to a non-material point of view. You can't have it both ways. Anybody disagree with that?
SPEAKER_06:Well, I somewhat disagree with that.
SPEAKER_07:Good, good, good.
SPEAKER_06:If we didn't have any disagreement, it wouldn't
SPEAKER_07:be fun, right? Your claim, if you disagree, that you think it could be forever impossible for science, given a million years of science, to be able to explain a transcendent experience.
SPEAKER_06:Well, I wouldn't say forever, because I don't know what science will be like a thousand years from now. But I think that neuroscientists, most neuroscientists, maybe all neuroscientists believe that all mental sensations, including consciousness and including feelings of connection to things larger than ourselves, all mental experiences are rooted in the material brain. But to get from there to the feeling of consciousness, and consciousness is a feeling, it's a name we give to a certain sensation. And I would say spirituality is also a name that we give to a certain feeling that to get from the material neurons to that feeling is a leap that we don't understand. And we may it may be a very, very long time before we understand that. So that's the sense in which I. disagree with you.
SPEAKER_07:Now, I agree with your disagreement with me at this point. And the reason I do is that you're giving an answer in practice rather than in principle. And in practice, I certainly agree with you. I think the techno-optimists who say in 20 or 30 years we can upload the human brain is just absolute, in a purely material world, is absolute nonsense. It's impossible. Maybe in 100,000 years. But the question is in principle. And if you are a materialist, you have to say in principle that it ultimately will be explained. You can't explain any transcendent feeling.
SPEAKER_06:It depends on what you mean by the word explain.
SPEAKER_07:Well, so now what we're doing, and I was trying to avoid it a little bit because we're getting into the nature of what is consciousness. And this is a subject I have a bit of an obsession on. So I'm going to limit my own comments by saying one thing. And that is what I really believe is that the entire discussion of science and spirituality and all of this is dependent upon your theory of consciousness. And that is the fundamental question that all of these things relate to, except the question of why is there something rather than nothing. That's a different one. That's for another session, Brendan. We'll have to organize that. But your theory of consciousness, and there are vast numbers. Neil has the most... shall we say, well, Alan, too, in terms of the materialistic point of view, is a clear view on it. Neil has a clear view on it. I have lots of fuzzy views on it, which we won't talk about. But what I do claim very strongly is that all of these questions depend upon your theory of consciousness. And if your theory of consciousness is materialistic, it's one thing. If it's based on quantum theory, is it based on an immortal soul? Is it based on pure idealism, panpsychism? Each one of these has... many ramifications. But that in no way affects what Scarlett in particular was saying in terms of the importance of communication. I've had to learn that. That was not my initial sort of natural way. I've come to appreciate that in terms of the harmony, in terms of the integration of human nature. So, Again, the theory of consciousness is, when you hear all this talk about AI consciousness, will AI be consciousness, and can we upload our brains in the future, and you see this all over, and nobody talks about the theory of consciousness that they are assuming. They are actually assuming what's called computational functionalism. And what that means, the word functionalism in the theory of consciousness means that you can duplicate any function in any medium if you could duplicate the right reactions. Computational means that in one way it can be algorithmic or digital or some expression. If you eliminate either one of those two, computational or the functionalism, everything you hear about AI consciousness disappears. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but the arguments are built on sand. And so my position is that the fundamental question is the nature of consciousness. I'm not gonna solve it, we're not gonna solve it, but it's important to recognize it.
SPEAKER_04:Yep. I wanna go back to the word explain them. When we talk about explaining things in our culture, we're talking about explaining them through scientific empiricism or through formal mathematics and logic. Both of those we think give you objective data regarding the world out there as I'm seeing it as the person investigating it. But we know, certainly at the quantum level, that there's no separation, no clear separation of subject and object. I think that people who talk about alternate possibilities understandings of quantum theory are trying to get away from that because it makes them deeply uncomfortable. The fact that no one can decide between them is another set of complementarities. But then you can turn to formal logic, but then you come up against Kurt Gödel and the incompleteness theorems, where he demonstrated that mathematically speaking, there are statements that we can know to be true, but we cannot prove them to be true. Or if we manage to explain everything consistently, there will necessarily be contradictions and the system will fail as a formal system. What he brought back in to the debate is that there's a role for intuition. How can you know something's true and not be able to prove it to be true? Through intuition. If we're talking about consciousness and you want to explain it, these are our two approaches, but the only way for us to actually examine consciousness is to turn inward and examine your consciousness. There's no subject-object split there. So scientific empiricism can't work.
SPEAKER_07:You're ignoring all the fallacies we make up or our visions that we have, artificial things that take a drug.
SPEAKER_04:No, I'm not talking about what you experience. I'm just saying if you want to examine consciousness, I can't examine yours, but I can examine mine. And when I do that, I find things. I'm not talking about what I find, but That's not empirical science. It can't be because I'm not a researcher with my consciousness separate. It's necessarily self-referential. And that self-referential, you know the word I'm trying to say, that's core to Gödel's theorems as well. And I think that's core to the nature of existence and to some extent core to the nature of spirituality.
SPEAKER_07:A little asterisk, there'd be certain quantum physicists who would not agree with some of what you said. I'll put that little asterisk. I won't go into who they are, but people like Carlo Rovelli and all of a sudden people don't agree. Murray Gell-Mann called it quantum flapadoodle.
SPEAKER_04:I'll hang with Pauli and Heisenberg and Bohr and be very comfortable with my peers.
SPEAKER_07:Okay. So I'm just saying there are other points of view. I want to invite someone else into this meeting. And I'm going to read a short thing of what he said. This is Bertrand Russell. And this is the middle of a wonderful quote. And he says, all the labors of the ages, all of the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system. And that the whole temple of man's, I'll substitute humanities, he was of a previous age. So that the whole temple of humanity's achievement must be inevitably buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. How do you react to that? Scarlett?
SPEAKER_02:I would say that that is, I think I would have to come right back to you, Neil, and I would say that is deeply colored by a particular perspective. There is a, there is a there is a ground of meaning making through which the science is understood, which is also the very point you just made as to that being the fundamental determiner of sort of where you go, how you answer this question of consciousness. So it says more to me about Russell than about, because you can take any others and look at the very same cosmos. Again, the Bohrs and the Heisenbergs and such have a very different story.
SPEAKER_07:But the fundamental question is, that if a materialist is right and if the entirety of the physical universe will either disappear by, they say, freeze or fry, and the freeze is just the expansion into forever and the dissolution of all bodies in a trillion years, even the black holes dissolve, and in 10 to the 40th or maybe a googolplex, all atomic particles disappear, disintegrate. And so there's absolutely nothing left. And that's the so-called freeze. And dark energy was the theory that's keeping that going. Recently, there's been some possible data that shows that dark energy, maybe they'd be changing, maybe not steady. And therefore, the possibility that the other direction is now, again, maybe right. The data, we're not sure, just announced a few weeks ago. And that would be, but that would be a big crunch and everything would just come back to that single spot that Alan had the documentary at the beginning and everything would disappear. So if everything is destined to disappear either by freeze or fry, is there value for what had previously happened? Of course there is.
SPEAKER_06:What about the moment? I mean, I used to think that only things that were permanent had value, but the moment is important. I mean, what I know is is that I feel pleasure and pain right at this moment. And by pleasure, I don't just mean eating good food. I mean intellectual pleasure. Yeah. So that has value because I feel it moment by moment. And I don't care whether the sun burns out in five billion years or all the black holes and everything else disintegrate. I mean, if you believe that everything is impermanent, which is a strongly Buddhist point of view, then the moment is all that we have. And we really don't appreciate the moment sufficiently.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, but there is in Buddhism, there's no self, but there is a continuity of something that lasts forever, that has always been there. Fundamental awareness.
SPEAKER_04:Non-dual. But what I'd rather talk about is what my mom, I told you what my mom said. This is going in the new book. She lost her short-term memory and lived in a bliss bubble, talking to dead people, traveling the astral plane for about six years, reporting on it verbally. And I said to her, she had been an anxious woman her whole life, and I said to her, you know, you're even smiling when you sleep. How do you stay so happy? And she said, well, I no longer worry about the future and I can't remember the past. So all I have is the now, and when you live in the now, you're happy. She and
SPEAKER_07:Alan would have gotten along pretty well.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and I'm like a couple of little tiny strokes, and I sit on a cushion for how
SPEAKER_00:long?
SPEAKER_07:Okay, well, what we might do is just ask the audience some questions. We've been all yammering here.
SPEAKER_03:Sure, go ahead. Maybe for Alan, I'm going to ask him to pick up the jump pole, but when you were chatting to that biologist for a chat, He said that at every new level of complexity, you had new emergent behavior, new emergent features. Where is that emerging from?
SPEAKER_06:I think what Jack Shostak was talking about was that molecules, different molecules have certain affinities for each other. And so there is automatically organizational structures that form. And I think that he was talking about that tendency to organize as something That's what he meant when he said we're not only atoms and molecules. We're these organized structures. And the organized structures, I mean, as a physicist, ultimately come from the laws of physics because we notice that certain molecules have electrical charges on certain parts of themselves that attract other atoms and make molecules, and we form these organized structures. So I believe that what he was talking about Now, emergent phenomena is the idea that when you have a system of many parts, like fireflies on a summer night coming in the synchronous firing or the hundred billion neurons in our brain, that that system is capable of qualitatively new phenomena that cannot be predicted on the basis of individual parts. And that doesn't mean that there's something supernatural going on. It just means that the complexity of the system leads to behavior that is unpredictable.
SPEAKER_07:Let me comment on that because there are two kinds of emergence that are really critical to distinguish between them. One is weak emergence and one is strong emergence. Weak emergence says that in principle you can discover it, but it's just too complicated to understand. I think Alan's representing that view. that you see these behaviors, they're based on the laws of physics and then chemistry and how it happens, but it's so complicated and so random at various levels that you can't predict it. But if you had a strong enough science in the future, you would be able to, like the classic example is the wetness of water. the wetness is an emergent property of water. But if you take hydrogen and oxygen and you put them in bottles, you would have almost no way to think about how that would become wet. But once you understand the chemistry, you can see the bonding structure of the H2O and you can simulate why those things would be wet. That's weak emergence. Strong emergence is the concept that in principle, it is impossible, no matter how strong your science, to be able to explain it from one to the other. But that does not necessarily mean a non-material thing. It just means there's something organized about the material world that in principle it cannot be explained. Many scientists think that strong emergence is impossible, that you can't have that. Consciousness, to some materialists who are non-theists, who want to see the world materialistically, look to strong emergence as a way of explaining consciousness without going to, you know, theistic or woo-woo or idealistic kinds of views. Have I started there?
SPEAKER_09:If
SPEAKER_07:you want to take
SPEAKER_04:that
SPEAKER_07:personally,
SPEAKER_04:you can. Seriously, when I first started thinking about complexity theory, it seemed really obvious. Oh! The brain is so complex, our conscious minds are the emergent property of our brains, and that seemed to be good, except you run into the hard problem of consciousness, which you did a nice way of describing. So I became a panpsychist, and this is a Francisco Varela thing we were talking about before, that Francisco Varela, the Mind and Life organization he founded to have the Dalai Lama speak with scientists, he called it Mind and Life because he thought If you have life, it has mind. If you have mind, it has life. So the cell was the basic thing. But then you can argue, and that's a panpsychist view.
SPEAKER_07:It's called inactivism. Inactivism, that's not necessarily panpsychic. It could be, but it's not. It can be a purely materialistic point of view. But it says that there's a relationship between life and mind that is a very deep relationship. But you don't need... No, and
SPEAKER_04:that's fine. But the problem there is how do those little things become bigger minds. And you still have the hard problem. You just shift it downward. I was kind of dragged, kicking, and screaming into the idealist position by Menas Kefatos, my collaborator, who's the Kashmiri Shaivist, I happen to know. And he was like, why are you resisting taking that possibility, at least? And if you think from a complex system, complexity doesn't arise just from the atomic and molecular level. It's quantum-level structures that are interacting with each other. Where do they come from? They're emanating out of the energetic system substrate of space-time. So initially I thought, well, all of that, fine. But you still have the hard problem, and you still have the assembly problem, and from a Buddhist standpoint, maybe there's awareness down below there. I didn't get there intellectually. I had a moment in the Zendo where those two things snapped together, and it was an experience. And in the experience, kind of like the experience you had on the boat, Al, I was I could no longer separate those two things. And that's where they met. So that's how I became an idealist.
SPEAKER_07:You know, look, I appreciate it. It's just that if I had an experience, I wouldn't trust my own experience. That's the way I
SPEAKER_06:am. I've got more questions. You had a question here. There's a question right here. I
SPEAKER_08:would love to know from Scarlett or Kathy if they could share a direct experience of consciousness or awareness. Eddie. how it
SPEAKER_02:felt to them and all. I've had some experiences that, so thank you for the question. And it's hard to say, I certainly have not had an experience like you had. So I just want to really honor those experiences. But I've had experiences that have made it very clear to me that there is, so again, this is my foundational paradigm, that there is a transcendent, in that transcendent awareness. And love is such a loaded word in our world that I hesitate to use it, but I think about it as, that's why I use harmony and I use balance because it translates in some functional way for me in that way. But really, if I were to speak to you most honestly, it's of love that there's a fundamental ground beneath all of this that we share. that is an experience of what we term often the sort of larger, larger kind of capital letter love. And those, I could speak with you separately, but those experiences have been experiences of literally an experience in which I could feel myself living my life and I could see it was in instant, less than an instant that I was really being held in this bigger circle that, and I was in that there, there, there was a, a larger reality that was literally like, okay, you're moving down your little adventure, but I was being held by something else. And that, that is also holding lots. So again, these are very personal. We're moving completely away from the scientific. I'm going to not look this way. I'm going to start, I'm going to go this way. I have my heart, my science hat and I, and I appreciate and totally interested in the physics as well, just personally. But, and I will just say one other thing, if I may, just from a physician perspective, ultimately in some, you know, we live our moments, we live our day to day, we do the dishes, we have our relationships, we, What we do know from a more medical perspective, especially as medicine is beginning to expand into a more holistic whole person understanding, mind, body, spirit, and community, which is a lot of the work that I do, that when we nurture thoughts, like thought forms that are more, again, harmonious is my word, but you put the word that are more conducive to an elevated or open-hearted state, which we think of often, whatever the road, as sort of the place that spirituality takes us, we know that the body changes. We know that in meditation, when you become present, right, aware in the present moment, paying attention without judgment, which is the operative piece here, and many would also say with compassion, with an attention towards a friendliness towards the self, the brain changes. And there are hundreds of studies now, a number of meta-analysis on the Just looking at what those brain changes are, particularly we move away from the fear aspects, the amygdala and sort of that sort of more fight or flight aspect of the brain towards a much more global and certainly much more of a negative feedback loop on the fear parts from the prefrontal cortex. And we also know that our heart rate changes, our heart rate variability becomes more coherent, right, which has some medical significance. We know that our blood pressure lowers. We know that our ability to attend and to see and to take another person's perspective changes. So when we really think about the functional experience, I would come to this elevated emotions, this open-heartedness, this place of inner harmony as a place that whatever the road takes us can have very real physiological impact.
SPEAKER_09:I think that that also speaks to one of the challenges that we have of in this conversation, it seems like we're trying to come to some agreement on the fundamental foundation. But for most people, myself included, I find connection with people based on the experience. Even if our explanation of that experience may differ, we connect on having these sort of transcendent experiences. For me personally, working out in the deserts of Arizona and, you know, being alone in the middle of the night chasing after bats, but having a chance to just kind of stand there in the middle of nowhere with no light pollution and seeing the stars, but also feeling very connected to all of the living things around me. It was a very transcendent experience. And you can, people can have different views about why that's meaningful. But one of the things that I think grows out of that is that connection that we can make with other people. Maybe that's the emergent property of it, the connections that we can make with other people and the ways that we can then think about how we relate to one another, how we want to build a world together and what that means for our day-to-day lives, even if we're not getting at that fundamental...
SPEAKER_07:These are the two ways of using the term spiritual, and they're both entirely valid. And we can do everything that you're saying without any discussion of what happens fundamentally, certainly.
SPEAKER_04:I'm about to demonstrate self-compassion, so keep talking to yourselves. I'll be right back.
SPEAKER_09:mentioned that the experience of a matter of time has a potential to make the class the first obsolete, but I'm curious to hear what came first, consciousness or life.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, and the answer to that is quite simple, that most scientists, certainly every materialist, would say that obviously life came first, first there was the Big Bang, and then the physics and the gravity brings these together, planets, and then you had the emergence of life that Alan has talked about how it happened. And there are lots of theories how purely physical things can become organized. Stuart Kaufman is very well known for autocatalytic sets, which are chemical things that actually organize themselves. And he's taken that to kind of an extreme level maybe now. But there are ways that do that. So it's a very natural process. But others would say, Neil would say for sure, any idealist would say, that consciousness comes first because consciousness underlies everything. And there are certainly a minority, a significant minority, but a serious minority. One of the most famous cosmologists, Andre Linde, he's wouldn't be upset if I say this, because he said it himself, that he believes consciousness is the underlying theory. He's one of the really founders of the inflation theory, which is how the Big Bang happened. That's the standard model now in inflation theory. But he believes that consciousness came before that. Now, you can argue that that's his belief. So there are some people who believe that. that consciousness came before life and life emerged from consciousness. The vast majority of scientists, certainly every materialist, thinks obviously life came first and consciousness was kind of an accident of evolution. Why did evolution produce the need? Because you can imagine everything that we do behaviorally could be done without any inner experience. And that's one of the deep philosophical arguments.
SPEAKER_09:I'm not quite
SPEAKER_07:getting exactly the question.
SPEAKER_05:She's asking what kind of species would AI be, right? And what would human uniqueness be?
UNKNOWN:Yes.
SPEAKER_07:Okay, I mean...
SPEAKER_06:What kind of species would AI be? And what would make humans unique in relation to that?
SPEAKER_07:And it goes back to what I said. It's what is your theory of consciousness? If your theory of consciousness is computational functionalism, then at some point AI consciousness would be the same as our consciousness, and their theory is that because AI consciousness would have self... self-replicating on an almost literal exponential level, it would exceed human consciousness. I personally am a skeptic of that, but if I were to be a believer in computational functionalism as my theory of consciousness, I'd have no choice but to believe that.
SPEAKER_09:Yeah, that depends on your definition.
SPEAKER_07:It depends on what the real theory of, not my definition of it, it depends on what what is the real theory of the problem of consciousness? Why is there something that feels like to experience rather than just to do a behavioral motion? And whatever the real theory is will be the determinant of what happens with AI. That's what I'm saying. I don't know that answer, but I do know that it's not, that whatever that theory is will determine what AI consciousness is and human differentiation. If computational functionalism is the answer, which is the assumption of most people who are talking about AI consciousness, that's their assumption whether they know it or not, then there's no doubt that AI consciousness will become superior to human consciousness. I'm personally a skeptic of that, but that
SPEAKER_06:really doesn't matter. There's another way of thinking about that question, and that is not to ask whether AI is actually conscious or not, but to ask whether AI will have all of the manifestations of consciousness. That is, there are certain things that we do that we associate with consciousness. For example, self-awareness. We know that dolphins can recognize themselves in the mirror. We know that crows can play with each other. We know that chimpanzees have burial rituals when one of them dies. So You could make a long list of manifestations of consciousness, that is, behaviors that we associate with consciousness, and I have no doubt that at some time in the future, an AI will be able to check all the boxes. Now, whether it's conscious or not is a different question. So this is a slightly different way to look at the question of consciousness and AI. Right. Ray
SPEAKER_07:Kurzweil had a cute remark when I was talking to him. He said exactly what you're saying, and then he said, And if you keep telling them they're not conscious, they're going to get managers. But he said the same thing, that you can never know, just like you can never know whether I'm conscious or not.
SPEAKER_09:Well, I would just, the idea that we will come to the right theory of consciousness is in itself based on a particular view of how the world works, that there is an end point answer. And it was one of the things that I found really interesting in the movie was when you ask people, you know, would you hit the button to get the end point answer? You know, two people said yes right away. And the other two people were like, no, that's the point is the process and how we get there. And so I noticed in the film that that was also broken down on gender lines. And I don't know if that also has, you know, a relation to our own personal experience and our own biases about what we think about the world and what we think is important. Do we think that the process is important or do we think the ultimate endpoint is important? Bertrand Russell apparently thinks the endpoint is the important part.
SPEAKER_07:Well, all I'm saying is that there is an endpoint, whether we ever know it or not, is not.
SPEAKER_04:The world irreducibly is nested complementarities. Every time you choose a perspective to explain
SPEAKER_07:everything. You are just giving a particular kind of end result.
SPEAKER_04:Fine. Right, but you're excluding other possible end results that also are simultaneously true. It's why you can interview all those people. But
SPEAKER_07:that's your system. That is the end result. The end result can be, it can change, whatever you want. No, no, no. Of course it is. If the universe...
SPEAKER_04:Many things can change. That's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that you're the way. Do you think that there is some way to solve the question irreducibly is light waves or particles? Do you think there's an answer? Is there a button you can push that will answer that question? The answer is
SPEAKER_07:that different experiments show different features. So every single experiment... But that is the answer. Right, and that's what I'm saying is the answer. That's your answer. So you have an end
SPEAKER_04:point. No, no, no, no. I have no end point. No, I'm saying that... No, what I'm saying is that if you choose a perspective, and we're humans, so we have to choose a perspective, you will see some aspects of reality and thereby exclude other aspects of reality. If you move to capture those, like Gödel trying to capture the true but unprovable statement, bring that in, there will still be further things you haven't seen. That's the structure of the nature of existence to the best of Western science now.
SPEAKER_07:Okay. But that is a view. That is one of dozens, if not hundreds, of view of fundamental physics as it relates to consciousness and something else. It's a view. It's an end review. You have an end review that you have very well described. And I like that. I like that. I don't agree with it. But on what basis don't you agree with it? I don't agree because I'm explaining that it's good or not. Because I don't know. I love the questions. I love the process. I love understanding the questions. This is why I
SPEAKER_04:think that you and your show. I don't. Right. I think that your show and what you do and how you speak and how you think are a perfect example of what I'm saying. Because whatever. That sounded like
SPEAKER_07:a criticism,
SPEAKER_04:didn't it? No, no, no. It's admiration. Because you really can, whoever you're talking to, you will point to the points, you will point to the aspects they're excluding.
SPEAKER_06:And
SPEAKER_04:you always have more shows to do. Because whatever view someone comes in with, there will be things outside. That's why I like talking to you. Right? So I don't think there's, that's not an end point. That's an endlessly
SPEAKER_07:changing dynamic. I think you now have talked about two things. You're talking about the kinds of things I do and my limited knowledge and your explanation of what fundamental reality is. You really do have an endpoint of fundamental reality. Except that it's indescribable. You're describing it having different perspectives. If you see this, then you don't see that. That's the
SPEAKER_04:most fundamental reality. The most fundamental thing is the non-dual awareness that is beyond description. Okay, so that's an Eastern Buddhist kind of view that comes from that tradition. And Western and shamanic, and it's sort of present in all
SPEAKER_07:our cultures. You sort of integrate quantum physics with a non-dualistic, which comes from... Don't leave out Gödel.
SPEAKER_00:Everyone
SPEAKER_04:who criticizes me on my understanding of quantum physics, no one ever mentions Gödel. And I think he's more fundamental to this than me.
SPEAKER_07:Okay. But I'll stop talking. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:I was coughing, right? And I just went to get my water. And again, this is back to the simplistic. But I just found it really funny here. You know, the words in my water bottle, one love. And I think that I would... say that there is a transcendent, these experiences literally are called transcendent because there's an expansion of the concept of self. The self expands. There's an awareness of belonging in that desert and with something else and connecting across species, across epistemology, across knowledge. And there's this fundamental intention for good that tends to accompany these kinds of experiences. So I just wanna put that out there.
SPEAKER_05:All right, thank you. Well, let's thank our panelists here. As we close out the evening with some discussion, we're gonna give you some details. Rohan's gonna tell you what to do. I wanna invite you to, we've been talking about process and we've been talking about arriving at answers. But I want to invite you to luxuriate in the questions. That's the one big thing I've learned from Robert, is to stay with the question. The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke cautions us against settling too quickly. A lot of us want to get to the answer and stay there, but rest in the question. And that's one thing I've really appreciated about Alan's work and about the documentary, is it evokes these questions, questions that are very hard to answer. And as you can see, the debates are riveting. But I want to invite you all into those questions and to stay in front of those questions. And I'm going to give you a little bit of a method as to how to do that.
SPEAKER_07:One final comment that triggered. So when my wife and I have been married 60 years, and she was a concert pianist, and you can see she's on YouTube. And she told me that when we first met, she's older than I, we met when I was 19. At that point, I had all these questions and she had no interest in it. We had common interest in music, family, kids, etc. And she said, after 60 years, I've spent all this time on all these questions. She's not thought a second about any of it. And we're still at the same place together.
SPEAKER_05:All right, folks, that's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. also please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already thanks and see you next time