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Coming up, I'm going to offer some thoughts about the big election in Chile and a very favorable result. And then the rest of this podcast. Today is a special episode. I'm going to talk in detail about the issue of life after death, drawing from my book of that title. And so buckle up. Hey, if you're watching on x rumble or YouTube, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe. Subscribe. I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh d' Souza podcast.
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America needs this voice.
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The times are crazy.
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In a time of confusion, division and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth.
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This is the Dinesh d' Souza podcast. Today is a special episode of the podcast focused on themes out of my book called Life After Death the Evidence. We're going to really kind of get into it because I've got the full podcast to do it. And some of this will seem a little bit mind bending, but I think in a very good way, it'll stretch your mind, it'll put some new thoughts in there, it'll give you a fresh perspective. Some of it may seem a little outrageous, but in a provocative and interesting way. And this also may be a podcast you want to, at some point, listen to a second time. Just to get a full grasp of some of the themes that I'm going to be covering. Before I dive into it, I want to say a few words about the recent election result in Chile. Very good result. The people of Chile rejected the leftist, the socialist candidate. Some people are calling her a communist, but let's just go with socialist and that's good enough. She was decisively voted down, basically a 60, 40 election. So a big win for Cast Kast. This is the guy who is the conservative. Now, I notice in the BBC and some other places, far right candidate wins in Chile, basically, if you defeat the communists, the BBC calls you far right. And what does it mean to use these idiotic terms? I mean, the Chilean people decide who they want to represent them. If 60% of them pick this guy caste, he's by definition mainstream. How can he be, quote, far right? Are you using some kind of objective definition of far right that is detached from the actual values and aspirations of the Chilean people? That makes absolutely no sense. This candidate who gets 60% of the vote of his country is by definition someone who is close to the center. He represents the mainstream, which is to say the center of the body politic. Now what's going on in Latin America, by the way, and this can be almost directly traced back to Javier Milei's astounding and landmark win in Argentina is that the whole southern part of the continent has turned our way. Now, Milei himself put out a post in which he really shows a map with the red and the blue. And he shows a blue tide sweeping across the bottom of South America. The top of South America looks red, mainly because Brazil, the largest country in the continent, is leftist. It's run by Lula da Silva. But notice that for Milei, blue is actually the right wing and red is the left, which makes more sense. Right, because red is a color associated with communism. But somehow in our twisted upside down nomenclature, we consider the red states to be right wing. So we got to keep these things in mind. It's a little bit like with the word liberal. Liberal to us means the left, but in other parts of Europe, Australia, Canada, liberal means the right. And the Labour Party or the left is different from the, from the, from the liberals. In any event, with Bukele now in El Salvador cast in Chile, and Milei of course in Argentina doing by the way, very well there. And there's a big election coming up in Argentina next year. Now Chile used to be a very prosperous country, kind of the way Venezuela used to be in at one time. And Chile's prosperity goes back rather surprisingly to the days of Pinochet. Pinochet, although he was an autocratic thug and a military man, realized I need some good ideas which I don't have, about how to run my country. And he brought in the students of Milton Friedman, if you can believe it, and he said, set up a system for me here, a free market system which will bring prosperity to my country. And not only did the so called Friedman boys go down to Chile, they devised an economic free market apparatus. They also devised a Social Security system for Chile based upon putting money in private accounts, in other words, in retirement accounts and stock markets, kind of like an expanded IRA system. But they did this instead of a Social Security system run by the government. And it worked. And it worked across the board, not just in the retirement accounts, but for the Chilean economy. And then I think Chile got a little bit fat and happy and decided, well, you know, maybe we should try some redistribution, maybe we should try some socialism. And so they pivoted away from the conservative candidates who had been winning by the way. The Pinochet dictatorship gave way to democracy. So you've had right wing governments in Chile until they decided to experiment with socialism. But no surprise, that experiment turned out to be a total disaster. And so Chile has seen the light and swung back to the right. I don't know. That's a hopeful sign for places like Massachusetts and California and Mamdani's New York. Is it possible that people in this country would be like, look, socialism or socialist type policies are a complete disaster and we need to resoundingly vote them out? We haven't seen really that happen in this country yet, but maybe the example of Chile is a reason for some hope. Imagine exploring Israel where thousands of years of history are on display and embarking on a journey that changes the way you see the world. I'm Dinesh d' Souza inviting you to join me and New York Times best selling author Jonathan Cahn for our Dragon's Prophecy Tour December 7th through 16th, 2026. So it's a year away, but it's time to move on it now. Early for 10 unforgettable days, you'll discover the best of Israel. You'll walk the stone streets of Jerusalem, pray at the Western Wall, sail the Sea of Galilee, stand on the Mount of Olives and visit ancient sites that confirm the biblical prophecies and the Jewish people's deep history in this land. Jonathan Cahn and I will open the scriptures in the very places you've read about for years and connecting the archaeological record with biblical prophecy and also what's happening in our world today. Come see for yourself what history, archaeology and prophecy reveal in Israel. It's the trip of a lifetime. Join us call 800-247-1899 that's 800-247-1899 or visit inspirationtravel.com Dinesh inspirationtravel.com Dinesh to get information about the Dragon's Prophecy Tour today. Incorporating a wide variety of whole food ingredients into my daily routine. That's key for me and I get it from these guys. This is Balance of Nature Fruits and Veggies in a capsule really easy to take. These fruit and veggie supplements make it simple. They give me the fruits and veggies I need and that I just simply don't have the time or energy to eat. These harvested ingredients are freeze dried into a fine powder using an advanced vacuum cold process to better preserve nutritional value. I can say with total confidence I'm getting 31 ingredients from fruits and veggies and hey, if you don't like taking pills, no problem. Open the fruit and veggie supplements, mix the powder into a smoothie, sprinkle it over food. You're good. Join me in taking Balance of nature every day. 50% off the whole health system for life with this Limited time offer. Go to balanceofnature.com to claim the offer. New and existing customers can lock in the whole health system at $79.99 per order for life. If they cancel in the future, they will lose this price. Again, go to balanceofnature.com that said, we're going to pick it up where I left off and talk about life after death. We're going to talk first about a topic that we are already in the middle of, which is the the mind and the brain. And we're going to talk about those in some detail. Why is this important or relevant to life after death? Well, for the simple reason that the mind is immaterial. The brain is physical. The physical part of you dies. We know that. But does the mental part of you? Does consciousness live on? That's the question we're kind of exploring here. And we're getting to my first real proof of life after death. I'm going to try in the book to give three or four, like rock solid proofs. And my point being that even if you don't accept all of them, I think you will. But even if you don't, any one of the four is enough to establish good reason to believe in life after death. You don't need all four to work, you only need one to work. But taken together, they are, in my view, a very persuasive or convincing case for, for the proposition I'm trying to establish here. Now, when we left off last time, we were talking about the difference between the mind and the brain, and I was answering the argument from functionalism. Functionalism is simply this idea that the mind is the function of the brain. The mind is what the brain does. The mind is just a term for the actions carried out by the brain. In the same way that a mousetrap is simply what a mousetrap does. If a mousetrap catches mice, well, that's what you call a mousetrap. And this functional problem, or this functional argument I want to suggest, can be refuted by really showing that the inner quality of the mind, the internal experience of the mind, is totally different than the physical state of the brain. And even if you describe the activities that are carried out by the brain or by the human person at the direction of the brain, those do not capture at all this inner mental state. That is what the mind is. The mind is ultimately a collection of these inner mental states. So let's look at how this works by examining what philosopher Frank Jackson, this is now going back to the 1980s. He envisions a scenario that he calls the Mary Problem, involving a hypothetical person called Mary. And here's the point. Mary is, like, locked in a room, and it's a black and white room, and she investigates the world through a black and white TV monitor. And she has been doing this for her whole life. She has never been outside the room. And she's a specialist in neurophysiology. And so she knows a lot about color. She knows about wavelength. She knows about light. She knows about how the retina gets stimulated by light. She knows how those stimuli are channeled at different parts of the brain. She knows how the. How certain parts of the brain light up and cause people to say things like the sky is blue, tomatoes are red, my pants are green, and so on. And here's the question that Jackson is asking. So Mary knows everything that there is to know about color. However, she has never actually seen these colors. She lives in a black and white world. That's the only world that she has actually experienced. Now, let's say Mary is, for the first time in her life, taken out of this room, the black and white room, and she's put into the normal world, the outside world. And now she sees a blue sky, and now she sees a red tomato. And now she sees Dinesh wearing his green pants. And philosopher Frank Jackson asked this question, does Mary now learn something new about color that she previously didn't know? Now, what are we getting at here? What we're getting at is this. Yes, Mary experiences something new. She experiences what it is like to see the color red, what it is like to see the color blue in the sky, what it is like to see green pants. Before that, she could have all the knowledge in the world about red, about blue, about green, about color. And yet it is that all of that would not prepare her in any way, would give her no preparation, no experience of what it is actually like to see red and see blue and see green. So this is a way of saying that the inner quality of an experience, the way that you experience it on the inside, is completely different from the mental states that seem to correlate with or even produce this inner quality. We're talking about two different things. Now. Faced with all of this, these refutations of I identity theory, which I referred to earlier, or functionalism, which I've referred to now, the refuge of the materialist, the refuge of the Daniel Dennets of the world, is always to point to computers and to say, in effect, hey, listen, if you're saying that material objects cannot function Like a mind? Well, what about a computer? What about a supercomputer? What about AI? Isn't AI functioning like a human mind? And I want to talk a little bit about this because it's interesting in its own right, but it also has a certain bearing on life after death. And the question I want to ask, which we're going to get into, is, can computers think? Or to put somewhat differently, can AI think? Is AI doing any kind of thinking at all? I'm going to argue, believe it or not, no. No. But this is not to deny that AI produces valuable information. It's not to deny that AI can generate results that even the human mind is incapable of doing. But let's notice that this is not unique to AI. Calculators can do thinking that you and I couldn't possibly do. They can multiply giant numbers with nine digits apiece and give you the result in two seconds. But does that mean that the calculator is thinking? No, it isn't. The calculator is performing a certain type of operation, and we'll get into what that is. But thinking is one thing that the calculator is not doing. But this idea that computers can think, AI can think. It all started, really, when a computer, Deep Blue, was able to beat the world champion Garry Kasparov chess. And that suddenly created this whole issue about, yes, computers can think and computers can pass the Turing Test. What's the Frank Turing Test? Well, it goes back to the. Not Frank Turing, but, sorry, Alan Turing. The. The test proposed many, many years ago, where Alan Turing basically said, listen, here's a way to figure out if a computer is thinking or not. Let's give a bunch of questions to human beings, and the human beings will give their answers, and those answers can be recorded. Let's pose the same questions to a bunch of computers. And if the computers can give answers that are indistinguishable from the human answers, well, then, there you go. The computer is obviously doing what humans do. The computer is obviously thinking. Now, notice that what Alan Turing is doing here is he's giving a functional definition of what it means to think. To me, thinking is something that occurs in your mind. Thinking is something that occurs behind a screen. Thinking is something that occurs inside of me. But Turing is saying, no, well, let's not look at it that way. Let's look at thinking that makes you answer a question a certain way. If I give you an equation, Dinesh, you're going to solve the equation. That's your thinking. And if the computer can solve the equation the same way. Well, the computer is obviously doing what you do. And so looked at through function, you can see that there's a kind of similarity, if not identity, between what the computer is doing and what you're doing. So I don't want to deny that computers can pass the Turing Test. I agree that artificial intelligence, for example, cannot only pass a Turing Test in which you can't tell if it's a human being or artificial intelligence. In fact, some people would say artificial intelligence is so good that it synthesizes so much information, it's better than humans. You can identify it as not only similar to human thinking, but superior to human thinking, and we're likely to see the superiority increase. I saw an interesting report recently that the IQ of AI, very good AI today is something like 120. And since there are many human beings who have IQs higher than that, they're smarter than AI. As of now, they don't have more information than AI, but they're smarter than AI in terms of the cogency of their reasoning and the creativity of it. But I will keep getting better, and I will, at some point become better, smarter, if you will, in this sense, than any human being, in the same way that a calculator can do calculations far better than any human being can do. So let's take it for granted that a computer or AI, working at its best, can replicate human discussions, write book reviews, come up with movie plots, and play chess, and in that sense, do all the results of what human beings can do in, quote, thinking. And therefore it appears to be that the computer, like AI, is, in fact, quite thinking. Now, how do we evaluate this to see if computers can actually think? I think it's one way to do this. A very interesting way comes from a philosopher named John Searle, who many years ago came up with what he calls the Chinese Room, the Chinese room experiment. We're going to do the Chinese room experiment, a thought experiment. We don't need to construct the actual room. I will describe to you the experiment, and you can perform it kind of in your head. So here you are. There's a Chinese room, and you, a single individual, let's say Debbie, is sitting in the middle of this room, and she has a whole bunch of these big note cards, big sheets of paper. Each one has a note card, and each note card has a big Chinese ideogram, a kind of Chinese drawing on it. And Debbie doesn't know a word of Chinese, and so she's sitting there with these Chinese ideograms. And she looks through them, and they're totally incomprehensible. They make absolutely no sense to her. She cannot make head nor tail of it. But the people doing the experiments supply Debbie with a code book. And what does this code book do? This code book is actually written in English, and it gives you very detailed instructions which basically say, if you see this kind of symbol, it correlates with this kind of symbol. And when you are given this symbol, look for that symbol. So in other words, the codebook gives you a map for which symbols correlate with other symbols. And what Debbie doesn't know is that the first set of symbols are quote the questions. And the other set of symbols that she's supposed to correlate with using the codebook, those are quote the answers. So it's kind of like I'm asking you a question, ideogram A, and you, using the code book, realize that. That the answer is ideogram F. And so, since you have the code book, you can always correlate symbol to symbol and produce, quote the correct answer because the code book shows you how to do that. So you become so good at this. Debbie becomes so facile, that basically what goes on is that the questioners point to one ideogram. Boom. And Debbie knows, using the code book, boom, boom, boom. She goes, that's the answer. Here you go. And she's so good at this that she is just as good as a Chinese speaker, because the Chinese speaker knows what the questions are, knows what the answers are. Debbie doesn't. But Debbie has the code book, and using the code book, she can go from question here to answer there. And so the question that the philosopher John Searle is asking is, can Debbie speak Chinese? Does she know Chinese? And the answer is no. She has no understanding of Chinese at all. She simply performs a set of programmed operations given from the codebook so she can get the correct answer, but without understanding Chinese at all. And if you think about it, isn't this exactly what a computer does? Isn't this exactly what AI Does? AI Is programmed. Computers are programmed. They perform mechanical operations. The mechanical operations of varying degrees of complexity. They may involve dots and dashes. They may involve ones and zeros. They may involve foraging the entire Internet and scooping up information and synthesizing it again according to programmatic rules. But the computer doesn't have any idea what it's doing. It has no comprehension of the English language. It has no comprehension of history. It has no comprehension of mathematics. It is simply doing what it is programmed to do, and however sophisticated those programs are. And let's remember that. Where does the information in these programs come from? Well, it comes from the ocean of information generated by human beings. So what the computer is doing is ultimately rearranging, synthesizing, pulling out from this body of human generated information using rules that human beings have programmed into the computer and producing the ideogram. Ideogram and going, that's the correct answer. But it takes you and me to know it's the correct answer. The computer is just doing what it's told. So. So the computer isn't thinking. You're thinking, and I'm thinking, and the computer programmers are thinking. But the thinking is being done by us, not by the computer. Now, John Serlin trying to explain this Chinese room experiment, which is admittedly a little complex. It takes you a moment to really get it. He makes a key distinction that's kind of helpful, I think, to understanding. And that is, he says that in language, we have to distinguish between syntax and semantics. So what is syntax? Well, syntax is grammar. It's functional rules. And what is semantics? Semantics actually is content or meaning. So if I were to say, talk about where the vowel or the consonant or the indefinite article goes in a sentence, that's syntax. That's how to arrange the sentence. But if I use the word elephant, it's not the same kind of thing because I'm now referring to something outside the sentence. I'm referring to an actual elephant. And I'm saying that this word elephant designates that thing out there with a big snout and big ears that we call an elephant. So syntax is the grammatical rules and the semantics is the actual content. And then John Searle tells you why he's telling you this. He goes, by and large, what's going on is that a computer or even AI can do syntax, but it can't do semantics. Calculators do not think mathematically. We think mathematically with the aid of calculators. Similarly, computers don't understand anything. They don't think. In that sense, we think, we, with the help of the symbol manipulation that computers and AI can perform. And even the symbol manipulation, as I said a moment ago, is programmed into the computer by human beings. If the computer seems really smart, that's because really smart human beings created it. So in that sense, when you say, let's come back to Deep Blue, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov. Do you realize that Deep Blue was programmed by hundreds of chess grandmasters working together? Many of the best chess players in the world helped to create Deep blue. Their combined knowledge is of course stronger than one guy Kasparov and they were able to program that knowledge into a machine like calculating system. So it's not really, quote, a machine playing against Kasparov. It is all the programmed information, the deep archive of data plus the calculating skill that is also programmed into the computer. That's really what defeated Garry Kasparov. Mike Lindell wants you to know this year has been actually one of the hardest in MyPillow's history. But it's because of you that they are making it through. They want to thank you for your continued support by passing on some Christmas specials to my listeners and viewers. Get the Children's Bible Story Pillow 5 pack for $29.98 My slippers with a free bottle of leather protectant spray for $39.98, blankets, comforters and duvets for as low as $25 and a blowout sale on the standard MyPillows for just $14.98. Call 800-876-0227, that's 800-876-0227 or go to mypillow.com use promo code Dinesh to take advantage of these wholesale prices including the standard size MyPillow originally 49.98, now only 1498 queen size 1899 kings only a dollar more. We know MyPillow products come with a 10 year warranty, but MyPillow has announced they're extending their 60 day money back guarantee. That's right. Orders placed between now and December 25th will have their 60 day money back guarantee extended through March 1st, 2026. Call 800-876-0227 or go to mypillow.com and don't forget the promo code which is D I N E S H Dinesh.
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Where does this really leave us? Where it leaves us ultimately here is simply to make the point that science remains the study of material things that are objective, but what we call the subjective domain, which is by and large the domain of inner experience and feeling and thoughts and emotions. All of that is kind of outside the grasp, or at least the full grasp of science. The scientific argument against the soul. Remember, we began this chapter by talking about is there a soul? And if there is a soul, can science understand it or refute it? And what we're saying is that science cannot refute it because science has no grasp, not just of the soul, but the entire inner subjective human being. The scientific quest for the soul becomes like one of these pathetic cases of looking for the car keys only where the light is good. And my point in this chapter here, and I'm bringing it to a close, although the next chapter is very closely connected, we're going to continue talking about the mind and the brain and we're going to come to a very startling idea. And that is the idea that the mind, far from being just a product of the brain, the mind has the ability to physically change the brain. So this is what we're going into. The chapter is called the Immaterial Self. And I begin by noting that dualism. Dualism is the idea that the mind and the brain are like two separate things. We have a dual experience. We have physical things which includes our body and our brain. And then we have minds. Those are. That's the immaterial part of ourselves. And that this immaterial part of ourself. Here's the key point. Is not only in a way independent of your body. It doesn't is not subject to the laws of your body, but your brain. But it's also independent of the laws of nature that govern material bodies. This is a very arresting thought, that your mind does not operate according to any scientific laws. Why? Because it's not material. And the material is all that science has the ability to comprehend. Now, in this chapter, we're going to talk about two proofs of this. One is consciousness and the other one is free will. And I'm going to show that neither one is reducible to any material component at all. And your consciousness and your free will operate outside the laws of science and outside the laws of nature. And by and large, the scientific understanding of both is close to zero. We are in the same darkness about consciousness and free will as were the ancient Greeks who lived in the 5th century BC and the reason is not a criticism of science. It shows the limitation of science. Science is very good at doing what it does. It is very good at studying the world in its material dimension. It is not good at studying the immaterial because the immaterial is outside the orbit of measurement, of weight, of being able to move in a physical sense. And therefore, science looks at it with a certain type of uncomprehending bewilderment. And scientists come up with very ingenious theories. But you notice that these theories, for the most part, go absolutely nowhere. Now, dualism, to remind you, is kind of our everyday experience, right? We use dualism all the time. I'm going to make up my mind to go to a concert. So here I imply that I have a mind and I can make up my mind, and then it leads to action in which I physically make my way to the concert. Nobody says something like, my brain circuitry caused me to go to the concert. That would be a purely physical explanation. My brain circuitry caused me to go to the concert. I have brain circuitry. Then I go to the concert. But the very fact that I go, well, I made a decision to go. I decided to go, implies that I have consciousness, I have free will, and that is independent of my body. I made a decision to go, and then my body, in a sense, followed and went to the concert. Now, the basic reason that many scientists, even philosophers, kind of turned against the idea of dualism, if you remember, I gave the reason a while ago. And that's really simple. How can we have minds and bodies? And how do they. How do they connect with each other? How does one move the other? Like, how does a mind move a body? How does my mind move? Let's say a billiard ball can't do it. I. I need my finger to do that. I need my hand to push the ball. So minds cannot interact with bodies according to science, because mental things cannot actually move, you know, a physical object. This is kind of what made Houdini such a kind of sensation. He's like, listen, by my mind, I can bend a spoon. So he was, in a sense, saying, I can violate the laws of nature. Now, I don't believe that Houdini could, in fact, bend a spoon with his mind. He was more of an illusionist. But that's the idea we're talking About. So the philosopher would say, a mind cannot bend a spoon, and therefore you can't have this radical separation of minds and bodies. How will the two even interact with each other? But all of this has been, in a sense, called into question by the science of the last 25 years, the neuroscience of the last 25 years, which shows that minds do, in fact, quote, bend bodies all the time. So I want to start by talking about some recent research in the last couple of decades on the phenomenon called ocd. Debbie sometimes tells me she has. Honey, do you claim that you have ocd? Debbie claims she also has ADD and ocd, probably in fairly small quantities, but maybe she does have a little of it. But here's the point. For a long time, the doctors thought that the best way to treat OCD is through giving someone some sort of pill or some sort of medicine. In other words, change your body. Because after all, changing your body is also going to change your brain. And since your brain is your mind, your OCD will be changed or improved in that way. But now there's a whole body of research that shows that you can actually treat OCD and also related types of ailments by working on the mind alone. You don't touch the body at all. In other words, what you do is you cause people, or you get people to refocus their mind from the kind of thing that they're always focused on onto something else. And you notice that through this discipline of refocusing, don't focus on that. Focus on this. Every time you think of that now think of this. And you develop this habitually, you realize not only that you are modifying your thoughts, but this is the bombshell aspect of this research. You are physically modifying your disordered brain. In other words, you are physically modifying the neurons and the neuronal movements in your brain. Now, this seems like a astounding or radical or novel idea. The premise of it is actually not new, right? The idea that your mind can affect your body is not new. Case in point, the placebo effect, which is to say, I'm feeling a little sick. I take a placebo. It's a pill with just a water pill. It doesn't have any medicine, but I think it does. So I think it does, is my mind. I take the pill, and since I think it does, my body begins to feel better. There you go. The mind can reshape the body. There's also something called, you may not have heard of this, the nocebo effect is the opposite of the placebo effect, which is this, and that is you wrongly believe that you have been physically contaminated, like you've been exposed, let's say, to some toxic chemical. Or you think you've taken a pill that gives you nausea. In fact, you haven't. In fact, you've taken a water pill. But because you think that the pill that you've taken is bad and gives you nausea, you start feeling nauseous. There you go. The mind is again affecting the body. So we know from things that have been known for 100 years or more, through the placebo effect and nocebo effect, that the mind does in fact affect the body. But what we're learning is how much the changes in the mind can be used to modify the body, to modify the brain. You can actually reprogram your own brain. There's an interesting book by a psychiatrist, Norman Doidge, it's called the Brain that Changes Itself. And he says the doctors are now using cognitive treatments, mind treatments, to help children overcome learning disabilities, seniors improve their memories, and even paralyze stroke victims to move and speak again. And the basic way you do it is you train your mind to change channels. This is a very startling idea. But your mind has all these channels. Channels are different zones in the brain that are connected with certain things you do, like language ability. And so let's say your language ability is impaired in a certain part of your brain. The truth of it is that through your mind, through mental discipline and mental exercises, you can actually teach other areas of your brain to pick up the functions that are now not being done by the language area of your brain. So what are you doing? It's almost like you are re channeling your brain, remaking your brain to a small degree, activating new node centers in your brain. And you're doing all of this not by using a needle, not by putting any chemicals in your brain. You're doing it solely through the operations of your mind. Pretty fascinating stuff. And now let me talk about. And this is probably all I will get a chance to talk about today. Let me talk about consciousness. Something that's like, right in front of us. It's something that is part of us, and yet we need to think about it a little bit because of how mysterious it is. A lot of times with genuine knowledge, you're taking something that you take for granted that is part of your ordinary experience. And you recognize, you look at it with a kind of fresh eye of wonder. So there's nothing more obvious than the fact that we are conscious. We know about being conscious more than we know about anything else. We are, in fact, on such comfortable, like, intimate terms with consciousness that every night we give it up, like, goodbye, consciousness, I'm off to sleep, and you pick it right up in the morning, and it doesn't seem odd to you. It seems very normal. I gave up my consciousness. I got it back. Whoa. And yet, writes the cognitive scientist, psychologist Steven Pinker asked, what is the scientific explanation of consciousness? His answer, quote, we have no scientific explanation. The philosopher John Locke knew that consciousness is a certain type of a mystery. In one of his great books called the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke gives us a thought experiment of a prince and a cobbler, and he says, the two of them are getting ready to retire for the night. But while they're sleeping, the contents of their consciousness get switched. So one gets the consciousness of the other and vice versa. And the question Locke is asking is that when they wake up in the morning, are they the same man? And Locke says, yes, they're the same man. Both of them have the same physical bodies. And quite honestly, from the point of view of science, there is no change at all. Everything about them is exactly the same. But then, says Locke, they might be the same man, but. But are they the same person? And here Locke gives the opposite answer. He says, no, they're not the same person, because each now has the memories and the inner consciousness of the other. So the prince has in fact become the cobbler, and the cobbler has, in fact become the prince. And so here you begin to see Locke wrestling with this issue of whether or not consciousness is the key aspect that establishes our individual identity. Now, consciousness is something that philosophers try to understand. Today, by looking at the example of zombies, we're going to talk about not the zombie of the horror films, but the philosophical zombie. So what is a philosophical zombie? Well, it's a real person, but the real person has no inner life. In other words, the zombie is a material replica of a person. The physical structure is the same. It matches the human being cell by cell. Not only that, but the zombie acts in a manner that's indistinguishable from human beings. The zombie can, at least in our philosophical example, the philosophical zombie can go to a movie. The philosophical zombie can get on a plane, eat a chili dog, cheer at a baseball game, snore at night. And now no one has been able to create such a zombie. But the philosophical question is, are such creatures really possible? And if they are, then it means that we have a creature that is identical to a human being, but yet lacking any human consciousness at all. And the zombie example I'm giving is obviously theoretical. It's just experiment for the mind. But the reason it's an unnerving experiment is that when you put a human being under a microscope or under a scan and you're looking for consciousness, here's what you find. You find nothing. If you ask a brain scientist, am I conscious? The truth of it is the brain scientist doesn't know. They have no way to know unless you tell them. And so there are no physical facts, there are no scientific laws that can lead to a prediction or expectation that there should be consciousness. And consciousness doesn't even have any evolutionary explanation either. The psychologist Nicholas Humphrey in one of his books says, well, yeah, we need consciousness because we need to survive in the world. And consciousness tells us how we can, like, cooperate with other human beings and get food and avoid predators. This turns out to be a completely bogus explanation why? Because countless creatures do this without consciousness. Amoebas, bacteria, insects, bees. Ants cooperate. Think of ants. They are able to form ant societies. They're able to invade, they're able to construct, they're able to build little ant cities. They're able to get food. They're able to drag a grain of rice in which many ants will get around it and drag it all together. And yet, as far as we know, ants are not doing it in any kind of conscious way or through any kind of conscious planning. So the point is, you don't need consciousness to do any of those things. You might say, well, we need consciousness to understand other people. Actually, no, because you don't have access to anybody else's consciousness. If you are trying to make a judgment about somebody else, you're going to have to do it based upon what they say or what they do. You don't have any access to their inner mental state. And so the point here is that consciousness is, from a scientific point of view, extremely elusive. And this is what has caused some people, including the philosopher Daniel Dennett, to argue that consciousness does not exist. What? At first, when I saw this, I thought this is some kind of a philosopher's joke. But I've met Daniel Dennett. This is one of the most serious, in a dull way people you've ever met. No sense of humor at all. He's not joking. He is basically saying that consciousness is an illusion. So what he's really saying is that we are zombies. We are zombies because we have this outer life. We do things, but we don't have any consciousness. And if we think we do, that's the illusion right there. We are under the. The mistaken impression that we are conscious even though we're not. Now this to me is so preposterous that it's preposterous for the simple reason that I am about as sure that I'm conscious as I am of anything else that I know in the world. In fact, I need the consciousness to be aware of anything else. So to tell me that my consciousness is itself an illusion. What does that even mean? How can you, even with a straight face, say that? And I want to argue that Daniel Dennett knows that he's conscious. He doesn't really think it's an illusion. But he's forced into this position because if you take the view that the scientific perspective on reality is the only reality, and then you can't find consciousness. Where is it? Under the microscope? I don't see it. I can't experience it. I can't weigh it. Where is it? I gotta say, well, it doesn't exist. It's an illusion. It's not even there. But here is the problem with that kind of view. And it's this. Our human consciousness, our subjective awareness of ourselves and the world, that's a fact of nature. I mean, that is about as real as planets or rocks or trees. In fact, it is so real that our consciousness is the venue. It is the fact inside of which all the other facts are located. If you think about it, our consciousness is our window to reality. Not just, by the way, the reality of the world out there, but the reality of our own existence. We recognize our consciousness because we're unmistakably aware of it. Not only that, through it, we're aware of everything else. There is kind of no way to understand consciousness from the outside because consciousness operates entirely on the inside. So here's the point. Our consciousness is real. It's a central feature of our identity and our humanity. Yet it operates outside of any recognized or known physical law. Consciousness is clearly not part of our body. It's not even obvious to me. Our consciousness is, quote, in the body, meaning located there. And I say that why? Because with anything else, I can pinpoint where it's located. Where your fingers located, right down here, where your toes located, right down with my feet. Where's your consciousness located? I can't really say. I don't really know. It could very well be that consciousness is just transmitted through the body. It requires the body, but it's not in that sense physically in the body. It could be that the body is a kind of receiver or transmitter of consciousness, maybe even a generator of it. But nevertheless, the consciousness itself is separate from the body. That's interesting. And we're going to set that to the side for a moment and turn to free will again. My goal is to show, and I'm only going to begin to do this here, and I'll pick it up the next time, is that free will, like consciousness, operates outside of any known scientific law. Except with free will, we go beyond consciousness. With consciousness, you can't see it. You can't identify any law that operates on it. Free will, on the other hand, appears to contradict all scientific law. Why? Because scientific laws are based on the idea that the entire universe is a closed system. It's a closed system of material objects that operate in various relationships to each other. The idea of the closed system is that nothing can be found outside the system. And therefore, if we operate in a closed system, how does free will even work? What is the place for free will in this closed scientific system? I'm going to argue there's no place for it. And therefore, the fact that we have free will, and we're going to establish independently why we do, shows that our human existence has an aspect to it. This is the free will aspect that functions not only outside of scientific laws, but in flagrant contradiction to them. And therefore it must come from a place. I don't even mean a physical place, but a source that is outside the bounds of science itself.
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