B (113:28)
Yeah, well, I think consciousness is, it's the, you know, it's always the problem of, you know, Dave Chalmers would say it's like the, the hard problem of consciousness. It's like, you can't tell me I'm not a P zombie or whatever. Like, you know, I could be like some computer algorithm. Like I interviewed the Google whistleblower for Lambda around the AI stuff and he was like convinced that lambda was conscious. And I was like, I think it's just math on steroids. I think it's statistics on steroids. He was like, no, it's conscious. But it turns into this theological debate where there is no way to ultimately say whether something is conscious or not. But it's the most interesting thing about physics itself. Is it comporting itself to. Or do we have an Interface and math and physics and all of the observable universe is sort of moving through this computational interface, you know, or is do you live in this perfectly Cartesian dualist universe where you are this measurement sensor and then you have, you know, the world around you as this kind of hard coded, you know, you know, kind of fully fundamentally real thing. So like, you know, this is a table and like this is me and like there's like no relationship outside of, of, you know, like I'm just a measurement sensor of this like objective world. And there's no one on the conventional citadel physics side who can say for sure that this debate has been, you know, fully put to rest. There's no way to put it to rest. And if you look at a lot of the early quantum field theorists, guys like, you know, von Neumann, who was known as the smartest guy at his time, he invented the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics, but was a total polymath a lot of modern computational principles. He and his colleague Jonathan Vigner had a model of wave function collapse that involved the mind being part of wave function collapse. And just for the audience, for context, a wave function which is governed basically. Schrodinger is this mid century scientist who basically came up with this equation that involves a wave function probability for where a subatomic particle might show up in some sort of eigenstate and it's the square of the amplitude we'll define what eigenstate it collapses into. So all subatomic particles kind of exist probabilistically. They don't exist in these sort of discrete, you know, forms until particles, until you observe them. And so it's this sort of, you know, particle wave duality or whatever. And so Vigner and von Neumann were like, actually the mind might have to do with wave function collapse at a certain point in their careers. Pauli flirted with this Heisenberg, you know, who is, you know, again, in charge of a lot of or responsible for a lot of quantum mechanics and ran the entire, you know, Nazi, you know, nuke program, flirted with this. He has a great book called Life and Physics where he sort of talks about these kind of more metaphysical discussions around how the mind might, you know, be involved in this. Schrodinger himself was sort of against this. But if you look at like he, he had this lecture series called what is life? In 1944 and it was all around, you know, consciousnesses, disproportionate impact on biology and how consciousness is sort of fundamental. He had A dog that he called Atman, you know, based on the, the, the, you know, he had Atman and Brahman and, you know, kind of Hindu mythology, was extremely interested in the Upanishads. And so a lot of these early quantum field theorists or quantum mechanics theorists would flirt with the idea that the mind collapsed the wave function. And now if you were to talk to a modern physicist, they would say, no, it's a quantum. You know, in the double slit experiment, for example, it's the quantum detector. That's just the quantum detector doesn't matter whether an observer is present. They have no way to prove that, like the quantum detector might be holding a superposition of, you know, measurements itself that the observer is then, you know, measuring. There's literally no way to prove it. And while physics has went into this, like, cul de sac a la string theory and a lot of the discussions we're having, you have these really interesting fields of study that have popped up at pretty much every elite university in the US Or a lot of them. At Duke, they had the Ryan Institute, Stanford Research Institute, ucla, Princeton Engineering and Anomalous Research Lab. All of these guys, in one form or another, studied what's known as parapsychology, which is in its most rudimentary form, that the mind affects wave function collapse. None of the scientists that engaged in these sorts of experiments came out thinking that the mind didn't affect it and there wasn't some sort of interface. It's really interesting. Like, the guy who ran the Princeton Engineering and Anomalous Research Lab is in charge of, you know, he's responsible for some modern plasma propulsion that are still used in satellites today. He was dean of the Princeton Engineering School. His name is Bob John, and he wrote a whole book called. I think it was Marginal Realities or something. And it was about how, like, there's some mental interface with the wave function. And he came up with a whole model, a physicalist model around how this might occur in conventional physics. It's pretty much Roger Penrose is like sitting out on a. He's like the only guy like completely, you know, out on a limb saying that there's this thing called orchestrated objective reduction. Maybe the microtubules collapse the wave function. But you have all these elite universities mid century that said we got weak but very real and statistically significant effects around the mind, you know, affecting the wave function. In this experiment known as random event generators, where you have a super rudimentary computer. So it's a computer that produces ones and zeros. You tie it to Something that's conventionally thought of as random in quantum mechanics or something like radioactive isotope decay or a double slit experiment where you expect the same, you know, 50, 50 distribution of, you know, both slits or whatever. And you have an observer come in, walk into the room, and you're seeing one and ones and zeros being produced on a graphical interface that's tied to this provably random thing. So it's literally the perfect digital coin flip, right? You'd expect over a long enough timescale with some standard deviation, expected standard deviation, the same amount of ones and zeros. All of these people got a statistically significant standard deviation with this experiment. And this is where it gets really crazy. The CIA had this sort of remote viewing program from again the 70s to the 90s where they were using remote viewing as a really important intelligence modality. In fact, the top remote viewer is a guy named Joseph McMonagle. And he won what's known as the Legion of merit for over 200 instances in which he helped aid American intel with his insights that were drawn up psychically. Jimmy Carter, at the end of his presidency said the craziest thing he'd ever experienced in his presidency. He's on record saying this. You can hear the audio. He says, a woman named Rosemary Smith, they were looking for a TU22 Russian spy plane, or cargo plane rather, that had fallen below the treetop somewhere in Africa. And this woman circled a three square mile radius in Zaire and they found the plane. So this was studied at the highest levels of the government. The CIA then contracted a woman who's still alive today, Jessica Utz, to do a meta statistical analysis, Huberman style meta study, you know, on this sort of stuff. She went on to become the president of the American statistical association in 2016. So you can go argue with the American Statistical association president. I'm not going to. And she came out being like, if this methodology and this level of skepticism and scrutiny were applied to any other field of science, it would be accepted immediately. Like the other field would be accepted immediately because of the stigma. This field is not accepted.
