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- [00:01]
Jeffrey Mishlove
New Thinking Allowed is a non profit endeavor. Your contributions to the New Thinking Allowed foundation make a meaningful difference in our ability to produce new videos. Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring consciousness and neuroscience. My guest is Dr. Alex Gomez Marin, who is a physicist and is currently employed by the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain. Alex is also a near death experiencer and furthermore he is the director of the Peri center in Italy, something of a growth center and human consciousness think tank. Furthermore, Alex's research proposal, Seeing Without Eyes received an award in The Linda G. O'Brien Research Competition sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Alex has published many scientific papers. We'll be talking about some of them today. He lives in Spain and now I'll switch over to the Internet video. Welcome Alex. It's a pleasure to be with you once again.
- [01:41]
Alex Gomez Marin
Thank you, Jeff. I'm really glad to be talking to you again.
- [01:45]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, we're going to talk about neuroscience, which is your profession. The intriguing tensions that exist within the field of neuroscience. But I thought a good starting point for this would be the fact of your near death experience, which happened relatively recently and I'm under the impression led to something of a change for you in terms of your life and your outlook.
- [02:15]
Alex Gomez Marin
Yes, indeed it did as it as it should. Although it wasn't a very spectacular one if you compare it to others. It was really brief. I was basically, I was in the tunnel. It wasn't really a tunnel actually. It was more a well. So I was looking upwards and I would see that yellow light in this case and there were three figures, three people waiting for me. I know who they are. I usually don't say who they are. They weren't family members. They were, let's put it this way, guides or avatars, like spiritual beings that I hold dear. And I knew, I didn't think or I didn't feel, I knew they were there coming. And they seemed to be offering help to get out of the well. And I politely declined, without speaking, you could even say telepathically. I felt like, well, I'd rather not to, not now. And that was really it. That was really it. And when I had it and I came back, I wasn't particularly concerned about the experience. It was a bit later that I realized what had happened. And also I had had before that experience some really incredible dreams with weird animals with fire in their heads and they were bending over Me and putting their fire on head. And that was also pretty remarkable as a dream. I usually don't remember my dreams. I fall asleep and just knocked unconscious. So that was shocking and beautiful. But I was in hospital and so I was concerned with other things at the time.
- [04:03]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I presume from your description that maybe you were undergoing surgery when this happened.
- [04:10]
Alex Gomez Marin
I wasn't. I underwent surgery four days later. So that's also weird. In the usual scheme of near death experiences, what had happened, I mean, and we don't need to get very into the details, but I'm happy to share. I was losing blood. I was, you know, there was blood leaking out of my stomach. And it happened during eight days. And about the fifth or sixth day I was really weak. I had been replenished with probably 4 liters, not in one go, of course. So I was fading, I was flickering. I felt my consciousness. Actually I got scared because I felt when I was falling asleep that as if somebody was turning off and on the light. And so that happened during that evening. I was alone in my room and nothing really special in terms of doctors. And it was only later that. That I had surgery. And who knows what happened then. I don't remember what happened during surgery. So it wasn't a typical one or a very strong one. And also let me say, because when people ask me, I didn't come from it with a proof of anything. I wasn't in total bliss. I didn't feel like that was heaven, or however you want to call it. It just was a very significant experience later. And one more thing to add here, because I've been asked several times, because I. Because I told it once. And then people ask me, of course, and I think it's good to talk about these things. I felt with the months and years after that, that I had been sprinkled, sprinkled with golden dust. That would be my description of what happened to me there. Golden dust. And so I come back. I'm the same Alex. But there's something nice about what happened in my life after that. And I attribute it to this image of being there at the threshold and being sprinkled with some golden dust.
- [06:11]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I know, for example, recently you told me that your affiliation with the Peri center in Italy, of which you are now the director, happened relatively recently, and I presume relatively quickly. Was that in some way related to the near death experience?
- [06:30]
Alex Gomez Marin
I think so. Or at least. And if we want to talk about personal details, but the synchronicities, if you interpret them as that, are of course, very meaningful. They're not just coincidences. So this is the story. I mean, a few things happen. If we go back. The pandemic, this happened to everyone. But then very after the pandemic, I got tenure, which is something that one wishes for. And Spanish tenure, by the way. Somebody said it's like the Holy Inquisition, winning the national lottery and bull fighting, right? So I went through that process. I got tenure when I was driving back from Madrid, when I got tenure, I stopped to fill in the tank, and I wrote an email to Rupert Sheldrake for the first time ever. And I say, Dr. Sheldrake, I'm a physicist and a neuroscientist, and basically, I don't know how I phrase it, but the feeling was, well, now I have this. Let's put it this way, free ticket to really do whatever I want. I'd rather use it, right? So this happened. And then I wrote a piece because it was my 40th birthday and also the 40th birthday of the publication of A New Science of Life, and I felt like honoring that. And I'm telling you this because at the end of this brief piece I wrote about Rupert Sheldrakes and other heretics, I thought, okay, what other heretics are out there? And David Bohm came to mind. And I had watched this documentary during the pandemic called Infinite Potential, which was about the life and work of David Bohm. And so I thought, okay, so this seemed to come from this Italian place. Oh, the Paris Center. And so I wrote to the Paris center and I sent my piece, but then I went to hospital, right? So then all this medical incident happened, and it took me weeks and months to just go back to normal again, if one ever goes back to it. And so, again, by chance, I felt old when I was catching up with Imagine months without sending emails or anything. Oh, there was this email I had sent. And so I had received an answer from the Paris center from Maureen, who's the co founder, together with David Peat, who was David Bohm's friend, colleague, and biographer, by the way. And so I slowly start to pull that thread. Follow that thread. Okay, so they thank me. And so they invited me to give an online webinar, by the way, which was called. Oh, I didn't. It was called the Consciousness of Neuroscience then. That was more than two years ago, which is the piece I published recently. So that started rolling as well, and I started talking with Rupert, and then very quickly, this whole psychical research community open up the doors for me. And I started to meet, started meeting everyone, including you, and so on. And this happened, happened in. In months, right? And also I was invited to the Paris Center. And then at some point, quite quickly, it felt like you meet somebody, you spend a week together, and they say, would you marry me? You see? So that's how it felt because they asked me, would you be the director? And I said, of course. And so, yes, this happened in months.
- [09:37]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I can imagine how it must have felt. But I gather even before the near death experience, you were probably not a conventional materialistic neuroscientist.
- [09:51]
Alex Gomez Marin
I don't think I was. But perhaps I didn't know it so well. Right. I describe it like this traffic light. I've spent many years in green, like doing the orthodox science as a physicist and then as a neurobiologist when I swapped pen and paper for the study of the fruit fly nervous system. But then I started. I've always been perhaps eclectic, curious, maybe a lone wolf and so on. So I became heterodox. So that's the orange line light of the traffic light, curious about questions. And of course you start swimming waters that are not your own. Because if you leave theoretical physics and you are now in biology, molecular biology, neurobiology, you always feel a foreigner. At least I always felt foreigners from then on. So it's like, well, whatever. It's like I really don't belong here, but I'm learning interesting stuff. So then I became more and more heterodox. And I suppose at some point, and one never knows when the line is crossed, I became like the traffic light turn red. So now I'm doing things that it's not just for instance, to be concrete. I was studying how fruit flies orient in olfactory gradients and what their olfactory sensory neurons code for, and so on. I was doing it from a cybernetic point of view, which had into account also the feedback loops that the animal has. Then I became very interested in the extended mind and the so called four E's of cognition. Extended, enacted, embedded, and so on. Cognition. And that was being a heterodox. But then of course, when I had my near death experience, well, what was that? Right. What does the physicist in me say that was? And what does the neuroscientist in me says that was? And why did I feel and knowing these people and realizing that I could be, let's put it this way, that I could be a practicing scientist beyond materialism, but not just philosophically. I've always loved philosophy. I love reading when I was studying physics many years ago in university. I used to go to philosophy classes. I just nick in the philosophy faculty. I could have been a philosopher, that's fine. But I discovered really recently that one can actually practice science as if one wasn't a materialist. And that's terribly fascinating, right? It's not just theoretically. They're experiments, they're phenomena. There's a community, there are journals, there are meetings, there's a history. So again, I insist, I'm a newcomer and here I am talking to you again. I'm a newcomer and if you see. Well, I have piles of papers here and book. I'm catching up, I'm catching up. It's fascinating because as you very well known because you've done it for decades, there's a lot of material, there's a lot of. I mean this wasn't born yesterday, although it's a young science. And so yeah, there's this sense of a kid that just enters this place and it's like, wow, what is going on here? I didn't know the others existed.
- [13:05]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I think it's very strange that the field of neuroscience in some senses purports to study consciousness. I think it's the case today that some neuroscientists at least believe that the study of consciousness is within their domain. However, they're wedded to a physicalist interpretation. From their point of view, the goal here is to come up with a physical basis for consciousness. They can't imagine doing it any other way. Yet at the same time, during my lifetime over the last half century, there have probably been a thousand articles published on meditation and altered states of consciousness and the power of advanced yogis to control their physiology. Of course, near death experience. I think researchers now believe a million people have had the near death experience and it points to an afterlife. I don't think there's any question that people who research the near death experience seriously also hold the hypothesis of postmortem survival very seriously. But mainstream neuroscientists seem to behave as if none of that research exists.
- [14:35]
Alex Gomez Marin
Yes, most of them do. This is due to many reasons and one needs to go back in history, I think, to understand. And I enjoy doing it. So I do, when I speak about these things, I try to do my 400 year. Your summary of what has happened, because science as we know it, science, Western Science, is a 400 year meta experiment and it was started by Galileo. And recently we celebrated the 400th anniversary of the publication of this wonderful book called the Assayer by Galileo. And in it, there's a long story. There are many jewels in it. One is like this famous phrase that nature is a book and it is written in the language of mathematics. It's something that us physicists love, right? But there are other jewels. And one is when Galileo, and I think it was a strategic move, not a dogmatic ontological move of saying, this is what reality is. But he says, look, here we have movement, matter, velocity, position, right? The objective world. And also here we have the subjective world of pain and smell. And, you know, and so he said, well, why don't we just set aside the inner world and just concentrate? Like, let's do our homework. And our homework first is going to be the objective world. And this just kicked. This launched. Kicked off science. And then we had astronomy and mechanics and then chemistry and then biology and then psychology. But then what happened is that, as you know, as you very well know, psychology started, well, also with the. With the impulse to say, okay, now we're going to study the psyche. But then behaviorists came and they say, no, no, no, no. We want to be like the big brother or the big cousin, like the physicists, and we want to have everything measured and objective. So if we cannot measure it, it doesn't exist. Let's not talk about it. So we had another hundred years or more of the thing under the carpet again. And so we had to wait for the other c. So we had comportment, behavior. We had to wait for the other C, cognition and another C cybernetics and another C computation and the world wars and the interest in, you know, information theory and so on, for psychology, neuroscience to start becoming interested in kind of an upgraded sea of comportment to cognition. But still they weren't studying consciousness. I mean, when we say day is the hegemony, right? Because many people were studying it again under the radar, and the sages have done it forever. So we had to wait until the 90s, the 1990s, when two Nobel laureates, Edelman and Crick, different fields they did like the Pope would have done with Galileo. They said, all right, now I sanctioned the study of consciousness, and we're going to do it the way we're going to do it. And they took a very pragmatic, a metaphysical approach, reductionistic and so on, and this launched it. And we've had 30 years of this. So you see, it's really nothing. It's really nothing. And it's surprising because when. Well, I didn't study NeuroScience As a PhD student, I went in later but if I would ask students, when they come the first year, what's the promise? I asked them, right? Like, well, why did you. Why did you choose neuroscience? Well, there's a promise there lurking. And the promise is, either I learned something so that I can help fix the brain and mental disease, or if you're not into this camp of fixing, which is great, well, I'll understand what the brain does. But what's the brain for? Well, to produce complex behavior, but ultimately it's where somehow consciousness takes place. And so. But these. These promises are soon forgotten. And we study brain slices and really reduced behaviors. But this is the big opportunity that neuroscience has now, like 100 years after the physicists crashed into what is matter and they discovered it's made of mind as well. Now, 100 years later, I think neuroscience can just enjoy this earthquake, this shock of really addressing consciousness. But we've had 400 years since Galileo having chosen, and I think it was a good move to study first with the objective. One other thing here. I think I can say this because I'm a physicist. Maybe I think it was easier to start with matter, and it's incredible. Matter, energy, space, time, it's fantastic. But it was easier to start with that than to start with mind. But neuroscience is just getting closer and closer to this edge, and we cannot pretend. I don't think we can pretend much longer than, well, this is business as usual. Let's just figure out what these neural circuits do and how they produce cognition or comportment. And actually, there are many orthodox neuroscientists that are interested in consciousness, but they're still materialists. You know, they won't let go. It's still nothing but matter. And so I asked them, because I'm a physicist again, so I can play this masks game, right? So if everything is matter, you tell me, what is matter? Well, I. We don't. I mean matter. Well, what everything is made of. So we don't even know what's mattered to some extent. So we should all just maybe put our weapons on the ground and say, hey, this is fascinating. Let's study it together.
- [20:13]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I'm still puzzled, Alex, because I know a little bit about neuroscience, and that is that there's some famous neuroscientists who were not materialists. When I attended my very first convention of the Parapsychological association in 1976, the guest speaker was Sir John Eccles, a very Nobel laureate neuroscientist. And he was a dualist, and he was very outspoken about it. Dualists, meaning that mind and matter are sort of two fundamental, not economic, metaphysical, ontological principles. And of course there's Wilder Penfield, the great neurosurgeon, who was also a dualist and very outspoken about it. And these people achieved enormous prominence in the field of neuroscience. Yet I get the impression, in spite of their prominence, in spite of their prominence, their ideas are being largely ignored.
- [21:24]
Alex Gomez Marin
Yes, yes, they are. They were minority reports in that sense. Not then, but maybe now. And didn't they coin this expression promissory materialism, which is just genius, right? The idea that materialists always say, well, everything is very complicated and difficult, but basically we have it, solved it, and just give us more time and more money and more students and more technology and will figure it out. They always kick the ball. I think what's happening now, perhaps due to the renaissance in psychedelics, and one never knows why these things turn up again. And also, yes, near death studies and other edges of consciousness. I think we talked about this the other time. What's happening is that other isms are on the table. So before a few years ago, maybe not so many, I would say people knew. They made you choose, I joke seriously, they made you choose between. It's like a two alternative force choice. Either you choose materialism, which they rebranded as physicalism, but anyways, you choose their view or dualism, and they quickly go and dismiss. And of course dualism. Who embraces dualism today, which perhaps could be made respectable, but sure, I mean, two substances and there's no way we can make them talk to each other. And so they made you choose between these two options. And we need to say, no, no, no, I won't choose your dilemma, I will turn it into a trilemma or quatrilemma. There are many more options. There's dual aspect monism, there's panpsychism within panpsychism, there's pan experientialism, there's idealism and other isms. And these are not just fancy rhetorical philosophical games, which they can become often in academic philosophy, by the way. But these are other conceptions about the nature of reality. And we can use those as a substrate to say, well, okay, what if we frame our science, if we design our experiments, not just interpret the data, if we design our experiments, if we conceive what we do as scientists in the lab, under this frame or under this frame, and then thoughts that seem impossible or phenomena that seem impossible or anomalous again, they have a home there. And so it's so interesting that there's a resurgence not just of studying some of these phenomena, but also the philosophical positions. And yes, materialists feel, I would say, quite threatened. That's why it takes some naughty pleasure in reading their books and offering my, my review of their views. And I say yes, but look, don't pretend there's no other game in town and don't pretend that the brain somehow, somewhere, for some reason just emits consciousness. And don't question, let's not question that and just answer the question, where is it located? Right. And so we need to, we need to go back at least until William James and say, wait, wait, there are other ways of conceiving this and it's not just a mental exercise. The data feel comfortable if you give them these new suits, other isms. And this is happening as we speak.
- [24:52]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, back in the 1980s, I actually interviewed Francis Crick. For viewers who may not know, he's the co discoverer of the double helix nature of the DNA molecule, basic discoveries in all of biology. And he had just published his book called the Astonishing Hypothesis. And it was his goal at the time to launch a scientific investigation of consciousness in order to prove that consciousness had a physical basis. He was very frank with me. I admired him because he said the astonishing hypothesis is only hypothesis. It hasn't yet been established. In fact, he went on to say it could very well be the case that the religious perspective is correct, that consciousness survives the death of the body. So that might be true. I think most neuroscientists don't have his courage to even acknowledge the possibility of postmortem survival.
- [26:03]
Alex Gomez Marin
I agree, I agree. And this is really the big elephant survival. And perhaps we can talk a bit more but about Crick. So I had the honor really recently to have a conversation with Christoph Koch, who was in a way, Crick's. Well, not really student, but younger collaborator and pioneering this revival or this un tabooing of consciousness studies.
- [26:30]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I would call him a protege.
- [26:33]
Alex Gomez Marin
Yes, a protege. Yeah. Thanks. And you know, Christoph Koch has changed a lot his views over the years and one needs courage to do that because it's not just a tiny detail. He started being a reductionist with Crick and then became, as he said, a romantic reductionist. And later on he's entertaining other views that are not materialistic, like pansychism and so on. And I was asking Koch about Crick and yes, he conveyed the same feeling that you're describing from your conversation. And of course Koch knew Creek very well and he said, well, he was really open to ideas and he would not be afraid to entertain other views. And perhaps he was betting on this one. But, and there's this playing with words. You know, we often talk about paradigmatic. It's fine to have a paradigm, something paradigmatic, but it's not fine, is to have something that's paradogmatic, you know, so fine, just be a materialist, but don't insult, ridicule or say it's nonsense when other people have other views because they also worthwhile entertaining. And I think great geniuses are open or should be open to these radical alternative views because pluralism can only enrich science. We know it's never final, so why be so attached to a wheel and just die with it? You know, it's like, no, I'm going to drone with it. Come on, come on.
- [28:08]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You published recently an article criticizing a group, I think, of 100 neuroscientists who wrote a letter critiquing one of the prominent theories about the nature of consciousness as being mere pseudoscience. And I understand that the, the reason they thought that Tononi's theory, the integrated information theory, I believe it's known as, was pseudoscience is because it wasn't explicitly materialistic and they felt that anything that deviates has to be bordering on mysticism and bordering on the unprovable and doesn't belong inside the laboratory of science.
- [28:55]
Alex Gomez Marin
Yes, yes, this is a delicious letter. It's like a cake. It has so many layers. And I took a lot of joy in just deconstructing them. And by the way, so I'll talk about this in a moment, but a friend of mine, after I published it said, look, Feyerabend, the philosopher of science, the anarchic philosopher of science, whose a hundred anniversary after his birthday is in a few months, by the way. So he said, look, Fire Event had published one letter against more than a hundred academics, top academics, physicists and philosophers against astrology in that case. So I smiled. Okay, so look, yes, more than a hundred really respectable people, some of them I know, and they're, you know, well known neuroscientists, very well known philosophers. It's really unbelievable. Like they behaved in this mob like fashion and they just signed the letter. I mean, the list of affiliations was longer than the count word of the entire piece, which honestly was really shallow, but so interesting. And the title was that Integrated Information Theory is Pseudoscience. And you know, we could just enjoy this for many, for many hours because look, this is a mainstream, despite the fact that they hate it. And we can talk about why they don't like iit. And this is respectable. You may not like a theory and other things around it, but they use the word pseudoscience. I mean, Jeff, you and I are used to maybe being called pseudoscience pseudoscientists or swimming in the so called pseudoscience waters. We don't think they are. But if you insult some science with the moniker pseudoscience. But to do so on a mainstream view was pretty shocking. And then of course, the layers. There was a matter of funding because there is this Templeton. There's a lot of money, many millions being used for this adversarial collaboration project which takes some of the most prominent, most of them materialistic. So prominent as in the, you know, let's put it this way, what's the, what's the English channel? The mtv? You know, it's not jazz, it's the mtb. So you take the MTV theories of consciousness and okay, you make them fight against each other and you figure out which ones stand and this is progress. That's good. But there's money involved. So there was a question about, you know, money, ego, the usual thing. But then it got more interesting, right, because it's like, well, well, but this theory needs to be falsifiable. Okay, so we go back, this is a good material to study philosophy of science and history of science. So okay, falsifiable, but to what extent? And what about, I don't know, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. And of course I'm a Darwinian, but you know, there was this issue about what do you exactly mean by falsifiable as a whole? And then also theories are growing and they need to be re articulated and we need to find ways. So it was all pretty rushed. But then you get deeper. There are more layers there then there's another layer. I was talking about these three comportment, cognition and consciousness. Well, many of the people critiquing iit they smell like cognitivists and functionalists that they think that consciousness is just some sort of cognitive process looping upon itself. So in a way they are doing the same thing that behaviorists did to cognition. They're killing it by saying, well, actually consciousness is some sort of metacognition. But there is more. I mean, that's why it's so juicy, this shitty letter. Let's put it this way, it's more juicy because then they say, well, and of course, I mean, IIT it has this panpsychist whiff, right? And of course that's not serious science. It's like, wait a minute, this is a metaphysical position that can be reflected in certain scientific approaches. So they say, well, it's not even wrong, you cannot refute it. So well, one would ask them, so why would refute materialism in your case? But there is more, there's another thing, and I think that's really what they don't get. I mean, there's not just bad will, there are many factors. But I think what they don't get, and that's what I think is really valuable about IIT is that integrated information theory, for all its problems, and it may have many and it may prove to be wrong, but Tononi, who's the main architect, Giulio Tononi, decided to build it, to build a theory starting from consciousness itself, starting from phenomenology. And I think that must be something that everyone who's trying. If you're trying to do a theory of how to bend a pen, fine, just start with whatever abstraction. But if you're trying to do a theory about experience, well, what a better place to build it than from experience itself. And so they don't get this so called intrinsic perspective. Why? Because I understand. Because we've had 400 years of Galileo and all we've been taught, our parents, grandparents and so on, scientifically speaking, they've sharpened us as a knife. You know, all our training is sharpening a knife that has this objective stance on things. I am studying them from the outside. And it's my bet that theories of consciousness, by the way, materialistic or not, even other theories that you and I may resonate more with. I think they need to take phenomenology seriously. And so you see, all of this is going on and we don't know what's going to happen because this has been a quite ugly blow on the field. And even some people. There was a journalist that I know here from Spain and phoned me and she said, hey Alex, have you seen this? This quarrel on consciousness? And of course, yes, I'm following it. And she said, well, they're saying that consciousness research is pseudoscience. It's like, oh no, now they think the whole thing is pseudoscience. So we just go back or under the carpet again. And as Eric Hoel has put it, we need to wait for another winter of consciousness, consciousness winter to. To just happen and take it again. Anyway, it's fascinating. It's fascinating because it brings together human nature, ego metaphysics, what's a theory, what's falsifiability, the Whole ecosystem.
- [35:55]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I gather that around the time of Galileo there was the Council of Trent. And I may be 100 or 200 years after Galileo, but the point of that council for is that the subjective life of the mind was going to become the domain of religion. That was the responsibility of the church. And science would deal with things that are objective.
- [36:28]
Alex Gomez Marin
Well, you know, I, like, maybe I use too many images or metaphors, some people tell me, but a way I imagine what you just said, or I would redescribe it, is when Galileo made this split, it was like a divorce and it wasn't a pleasant one. Or maybe it was pleasant then, but it turned out not to be pleasant because Galileo and of course Descartes and many others later say, all right, let's split it. There's going to be res cogitans and res extensa, science is going to deal with. And of course science and philosophy was the same thing. But okay, this is going to be for scientists and then religion will still keep. They'll keep in charge of the angels and souls. That's their business. It's like, okay, we split, you keep the house and I keep the car. But then, you know, science grew and got stronger and it's great. And then this separation was being pushed and pushed and pushed because now we conquered life and now, okay, now we're going to conquer the mind. And then of course, other things happen which are fascinating and very difficult to unite, articulate briefly. But then secularism got entangled. So it's like if you want to be a scientist, you need to be a materialist and also you need to be an atheist, you know, so this was pushed to an extreme where there was less and less left on the other side. And I think that's where we are again. But it's proving absurd, I would say, because again, going, let's go back to experience, Jeff. We have experts. I speak about this triangle. This came to me recently, this other image. This is the job we have, you know, this triangle. We have experiences. We all have experiences. And they're not just second class. I mean, this is. We're made of experiences. The world is made of experiences. That's all we have really. Then on top of them we can build abstractions and so on. Then we have another E, which is expert, the so called expert. And then we have another E which could be experiments, right? So here I have a near death experience to tie it up with the beginning of our conversation. What does the expert say? Well, the expert says, well, some neural hallucination you know, maybe not a lot of blood in your brain. And even if the EEG was pretty flat, maybe it wasn't really, really flat. Maybe there was a few, you know, firings there that we couldn't detect. Of course. What else? What else could it be? And this shitty firing somehow create this magnificent experience, by the way, shared with many people. So, okay, it doesn't sound very convincing, but he or she is the expert. And then, well, can we do experiments to see whether my experience was just a hallucination or it was really real? And I think we're still wedging with this, I think, the signs of consciousness, the true battle there is, and maybe it's not even a battle. How are we going to harmonize experience with knowledge and science and the things we can learn objectively without again doing what Galileo did out of goodwill, which is always send experience to travel in second class. And the expert and the objective approach, they fly business, right? No, no. Experience is really all that we have. And on top of it, we've built even the image of a brain when we say the brain as if it was floating in empty space. A brain is an experience. You experience an object, it's an object of experience. And so it's like both hands are drawing each other, and it's a paradox. Perhaps we cannot solve it with our usual logic, our usual habits. And so it's calling for a paradigm shift. Although I don't really like this expression because it seems that it's always going to happen and it never does. And so these are the three E's. And if it was a triangle, you know, maybe it's not an equilateral, it's flattened, and it's all about the expert. But there are hundreds of different kinds of edges of consciousness in terms of experiences that we should take more seriously. And people say, well, I'll take them seriously, but I won't take them literally. Well, this is a game, because what do we mean, you won't take them literally? Should I take literally your metaphors of the brain as a computer, for instance? And also when you say, this is also very interesting, when people say, well, when we die, there's nothing. Well, how do you know? And as opposed to that some people come with their experience, which could be considered somewhat data, and they tell you about things, and so are we going to dismiss those experiences? Why are these experiences second class? And the dogmatic pronouncements of experts first class? So this is the struggle.
- [41:26]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Also, the irony is that some of the greatest experts of all have argued very strongly for an idealist position. Max Planck, the founder of quantum physics, said that consciousness is fundamental of the whole universe. He said you can't get underneath consciousness.
- [41:47]
Alex Gomez Marin
Yes, yes, Some great physicists have said it. Of course, you can always find the quote of others who didn't say anything, or even molecular biologists who would say the opposite. But, well, if those physicists were studying matter and they went as far as they could, maybe as far as it's possible, or close as far as it's possible, and they come back and look, it seems that it's made of mind. And by the way, what the Upanishads wrote or said thousands of years ago, that really sounds to be the case. And you see what all the traditions, all the traditions, all the mystic traditions have set forever in different places by different people who didn't have WhatsApp to just tell each other what they just found. They explored their minds with their own minds, and that's what they saw. So perhaps we should pay more attention and not be so arrogant and say whatever we already know. Like my friend Rupert Sheldrake says, we already know the answer. Right. Critiquing them. We already know the answer. We just need to figure in the little details. No, science is not that we don't know the answer. And it can be a big surprise or it can be like what we already know. It's just that doing it scientifically, it's going to take us some while. I often wonder, Jeff, why do we need to do a science of this? I mean, I do it and I like doing it, but in a way, we will die and we'll find out. We'll find out.
- [43:18]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Let me ask you this to shift ground a little bit. I'm sure you're following developments in the field of artificial intelligence. It's very much related to neuroscience, and people are really seriously questioning that. Some of these chatbots, for example, seem so sophisticated, it's hard not to project. And to think they must have a measure of consciousness, even in a computer. They're so realistic these days.
- [43:52]
Alex Gomez Marin
Yes, I think about that. I'm not an expert. Well, I'm not an expert in anything, but I'm not an expert in AI. I think it's just a great imitation game. It's a fantastic imitation game. And I think a keyword you said is we project. We project. I think they're more like mirrors. And when we keep on talking about whether they'll have consciousness or not, and it's probably our own projection of what we have or lack onto those machines, they will certainly rule the world at this space. And perhaps we need to make some sort of deal, and unfortunately, because I'm not a transhumanist, but some sort of deal to integrate with technology. But I don't think that these sophisticated pieces of software will or can be conscious to begin with. They need a body, they need flesh, they need emotions, they need all of that. And even if they had all of that, why are we so obsessed with other consciousness while we are so unconscious? I would say in the sense that we are not aware of. Of being alive. So you see, it's something we need to pay attention to. I think it's a big distraction at the end of the day, destruction. Destruction and distraction. Both things with my Spanish accent, we'll hear about them for the years to come. I'm more interested, for instance, recently in virtual reality, more than AI, because in virtual reality at least the experience of the experiencer is at the center. And you may use an artifact which can be electronic or can be even a mirror. A mirror is like a protoform of virtual reality, right? Whatever you use, it's fine. But still, this intrinsic perspective is respected. But it's gonna be a mess because they'll ask about moral rights of these machines, you know, while we still treat each other as humans so poorly, and we treat our other animals so poorly, now we need to start wondering about this sophisticated microwave needs some rights. It is preposterous. I mean, come on, come on.
- [46:14]
Jeffrey Mishlove
From a theoretical perspective, the idea that we might be able to build a robot, let's say, like Data in Star Trek, a machine that is essentially conscious, that would think in the minds of many, justify the physicalist approach. If it was possible to build a conscious robot, one might therefore assume that consciousness has a physical basis.
- [46:45]
Alex Gomez Marin
And it does. Look, I'm trying to be more harmonious recently, more integrity. Perhaps my teenage attitude of being rebellious is changing. Maybe I'm getting old, Jeff, but sure, it has a physical basis, but it doesn't. I don't think it comes up if you rub physical matter and then there's this smoke, cold consciousness. It's amazing that it's also a mystery what the flesh is, that we have bodies really. I'm not pretending here to be pseudo mystic, but the other day I was looking at my, at my hand and like, well, this is. This is amazing. I can feel it from within and I can see it from without. What is this thing? You know, what is matter? So probably both principles are principle of mind and principle of Matter are necessary and yet, yes, transhumanist. I mean if you're a transhumanist, you need to put all your money, you need to bet on that, you need to bet on digital consciousness and you need to bet on downloading and uploading. Well, that's one route. I think we are entertaining another one which says there's something of us which is immortal, spirit is immortal and the rest of the constitution of man, of humans isn't. And well, when I say they, the theosophist and mystics of all ages have detailed it. We just don't want to read those. And maybe we, well again, maybe we need just to die and just be reborn again and forget it all over and just continue this cycle. I mean, let the transhumanists be happy with their own toys, provided they don't destroy the rest.
- [48:40]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I suppose that's the risk. If humanity as a whole develops a paradigm, a philosophy that propels the human race and it's misguided, sooner or later that could lead to our own destruction simply because we're not being open enough to consider other possibilities that have a lot of weight behind them. The sort of things you've been talking about, the perennial traditions of mysticism.
- [49:16]
Alex Gomez Marin
Yes, yes indeed. Although there's always a chance. I would never attribute probability zero to anything. Look, some people critique Elon Musk for different reasons, but what if he ends up building these rockets and he makes it possible to go to Mars and what if while this is happening, some big asteroid comes and destroys the earth and we're just saved by chance? Just because Elon Musk decided that it's time to be a, you know, a multi planet species so you never know the twists and turns of cosmic evolution. And another thought that maybe it's not too welcoming sometimes is, well, maybe we all, maybe humanity gets extinct. Maybe we all, we all die, you see, well, the universe goes on. Maybe there's life on other planets and we, I mean if that's going to happen and if we believe, and maybe the world is not belief, if we know, if we suspect that there's life or mind in other, what's the word here? Dimensions or levels or planes, well, so be it. I mean we are important and we are not so important at the same time. And it's really. If the universe is being pulled from the future, as our friend, I never met him, as Terence McKenna would say, right, if there's something pulling rather than pushing, well, let's be pulled there and we'll see where we go. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know.
- [50:56]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Alex, what a pleasure it is to converse with you. I thoroughly enjoy these conversations and and hope to have many more of them with you.
- [51:05]
Alex Gomez Marin
Oh, I'd love that. Thank you, Jeff. Really a pleasure.
- [51:08]
Jeffrey Mishlove
This has been a pure delight and I admire your mental flexibility and the rigor of your thought. I think you're a great addition to New Thinking Allowed and I look forward to finding more and more ways to have our audience experience your approach to things.
- [51:31]
Alex Gomez Marin
Well, thanks. I mean this conversation, converse, action. I also talk to people, as you know, and I really appreciate when I can dance with somebody and I think we can dance together and it's beautiful. Thank you.
- [51:44]
Jeffrey Mishlove
It's certainly my pleasure. And thank you for taking the time. I know you have a very busy schedule. I hope that you take care of yourself, Alex, because I'm looking forward to many more years of interacting with you.
- [52:01]
Alex Gomez Marin
I appreciate it so much, really. And I'm eager. I'm willing anytime.
- [52:07]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And for those of you watching or listening, thank you. Because you are the reason that we are here. I imagine that by now many of you already realize that in conjunction with White Crow Books, we've just launched the new Thinking Allowed Dialogues book imprint. And our first title, is There Life After Death? New Thinking Allowed is a non profit endeavor. Your contributions to the New Thinking Allowed foundation make a meaningful difference in our ability to produce new videos.