 in a society where we fundamentally think that we are separate from other people, that we are sort of isolated minds that exist in isolated bodies that are fundamentally distinct from the other minds and bodies that we see in the world. And I don't want to get too philosophical, but I think that a lot of this does have its roots in the sort of western philosophical tradition, starting with Descartes positing that the eye is fundamentally separate from the world, that eye and the world are two completely distinct categories that cannot be unified with each other. So I think a psychedelics can really help to promote a sort of mindset in which that apparent boundary breaks down, where we really do see ourselves as a part of the world, rather than as separate from it. Boom, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Don Sockin. We are still in Cambridge in Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about psychedelics, consciousness, and the cosmos. We have Kenneth Shinazuka and JJ Andrade joining us on the show. Hello, guys. Hey, thanks so much for having us. It's great to be here. I'm super pumped to talk to you both. I'm really excited. We have a lot to unpack about these three topics and so much more. For those that don't know, Kenneth Shinazuka and JJ Andrade are co-founders of Harvard Undergraduate Science of Psychedelics Club, which is dedicated to an interdisciplinary, philosophically motivated and scientifically rigorous study of psychedelics and more broadly, consciousness. And you can find all of their links in the bio below and you can join their mailing list as well. All right, guys, let's start things off with our favorite question that we like asking. We love asking people. We find ourselves as stewards of Earth. What is your current take on the state of humanity? Yeah, so I think it's great to situate this question in the context of this Alan Watts quotation that I once heard, which is something like, and I'm paraphrasing here, that the universe is becoming aware of itself through our own eyes. I can't speak as much about the state of humanity in terms of society, culture, and politics, but I think that this is a good place to start for me. And the reason is that I think that we're in the rare point of human history where we really are becoming aware of both ourselves and also the universe. And the universe truly is, I think, becoming aware of itself through our own consciousness. We're at a rare point where we can really understand the past of humanity, the history of humanity, and also the past of the cosmos and where it might be heading. And I think probably the place where we're making the most progress, at least, on our awareness of ourselves is perhaps through neuroscience. We're becoming incredibly aware of how our own brains function, and therefore I think we're really at a point where we're becoming very, very aware of ourselves in a way that humanity wasn't thousands of years ago when we didn't have the tools to understand our own brains. Yeah, very exciting point in the saga of humanity. It's a great synthesis. I'm perhaps a little bit more nervous, I think, than Kenneth, about the current state of humanity. I think globally we're seeing skyrocketing inequality, a decline in political liberalism and an increase in political authoritarianism and reactionary beliefs. So those are some of the destruction of the environment. Those are some things that I'm very nervous about for the future of humanity, but I do think there are reasons to be optimistic that those might be a local minima instead of the end of our civilization. The psychedelic renaissance that's going on right now in scientific research I think is, as we're going to be talking about later, a huge development that could meaningfully change a lot of those things I was just talking about. I think breakthroughs in a lot of fields of science from anti-aging to neuroscience are going to change the way that we understand ourselves and the way that we understand how human societies should function. So I think we are definitely at a critical moment in our history and it is up to us to decide whether that's going to be positive or critically negative. Yeah, this is good on both your ends. You went really deep into the current state of things and you went on this really big scale of things with a really deep awakening of the universe becoming aware of itself. That was good. You guys are kind of yin and yang in that a little bit. That was good. Let's get to the journeys. Kenneth, your background is very interesting. Kenneth has a powerful three-minute video online of him at CES from 2016 where he founded a company called Safe Wander and interestingly enough it's due to one of his family members having dementia. That got you interested in neuroscience and consciousness and so I want you to unpack a little bit of that for us and then we'll do JJ's afterward. Yeah, absolutely. I grew up in a three-generation household so I was very close to my grandparents when I was growing up. My grandfather got dementia when I was four years old and growing up with him I was constantly exposed to the challenges of taking care of him. My family decided to take care of my grandfather at our home and as his condition progressed he started wandering out of bed at night when my mother and I moved to New York City in the summer of 2012. My grandfather was wandering out of bed at least once per night and this put a lot of stress on my aunt who was taking care of him at the time because she had to stay awake all night to keep an eye on him and even then often failed to catch him leaving the bed. So I invented this device in high school called Safe Wander which would notify caregivers whenever dementia patients got up out of the bed at night and eventually ended up commercializing the product that is now currently selling online and we've been able to help over a thousand dementia patients with our device. So when I was applying to college I was thinking that I was going to study neuroscience so that I could tackle the problem of dementia. Alzheimer's is I think the only major disease at least in the United States that has no cure treatment or prevention. So it's a huge, huge enigma. We really don't have that much of an idea of how to tackle it. Then I underwent a pretty major shift. The summer before I went to college I had this period of great existential uncertainty and it was during this time that I found this book called The Power of Now which very radically transformed my views on life and my place in the universe as well. Through The Power of Now I got very interested in questions about consciousness which are also inextricably linked to psychedelics and after reading the book I decided that I wanted to study consciousness not only in college but also for the rest of my life. So I am still doing research on Alzheimer's currently at the Massachusetts General Hospital which is affiliated with the Harvard Medical School. My ultimate passion though is to study consciousness which I think is the greatest enigma in the universe. Oh and I should also say that I've also been documenting sort of my progress and my thinking through this blog that I started back in the fall of 2017 which is called Blank Horizons which you can find at BlankHorizons.com So epic. I love the story and there's just so much cool. The ability for us to be able to see how you came to where you did today through your journey I think is quite evident and sometimes it can be hard to find that but you it's very clear and that's really beautiful and I'm your hardest enigma in the universe that's so interesting with consciousness. Wow alright and then JJ's background fascinating with science and religion from a young age and now is super fascinating with biophysics which is taking him really deep into consciousness and psychedelics. So yeah give us that. Sure yeah so probably my first major interest was religion. From the time I was very young I was originally very fascinated with Eastern religions you know like yogic philosophies, Buddhism, Taoism especially as I mentioned for a while and then overtime that also became an interest in Western religions the monastic traditions and Christianity and the mystical traditions like Orthodoxy and Catholicism and Sufism in Islam, things like that, Kabbalism and Judaism and then as I grew older I also developed a very intense interest in science especially biology and physics because to me physics answered you know somewhat similar questions to what religion was trying to answer what is the underlying order and structure to what's going on around us and I found that physics could answer those questions in ways that were testable and studyable and that was really very appealing to me so I decided when I went to college that I was going to study physics and a quote of Einstein that really resonates with me sort of in that way is I want to know the mind of God and the rest are just details and as I sort of went through my, well for that reason when people would ask me like oh but what do you want to do with that I would say like oh I just want to study the extremely abstract theoretical stuff and I don't care if it ever helps the world that was very naive take that I used to have I don't believe that anymore and that's partially why as I've grown older I've switched my focus more towards biophysics both because one biology is a subject that I've loved for a very long time and two I think it's an area that is more able to have a positive impact on the human condition and that's something that's been increasingly important to me and yeah so I'm still very interested in religion I still take a lot of religious studies classes at Harvard and I still spend a good chunk of my time studying very mystical traditions and stuff like that and practicing myself but as far as career goes I have decided to go in the scientific direction because I think that's the better way to make an impact on the world yeah the passing time studying on what's been around thousands of years finding meaning in life and then taking it on a scientific trying to probate the code of the world around us is yeah it's interesting you guys co-founding this work together I want before we get there I want to know your thoughts you guys worked really really hard to get into Harvard it's very difficult to get into Harvard Harvard is also a very prominent academic institution with a lot of smart people here around you at the same time it's also an undergraduate zoo in many ways it's just the same type of behaviors as we see at other collegiate campuses what is how do you feel about you know we spent some time talking to Julia Shea about the architecture of the dormitories and how it's you know that that and the amount of there's not really the one-on-one apprenticeship in the Bloom 2 Sigma how you can perform two standard deviations above the control if you have an apprentice right all this type of type of stuff if you have a mentor and you're an apprentice so it's just like what are your current thoughts on the state of your experiences at Harvard I have really I'm graduating in May so this is a very timely question for me so this month and I've really really loved my time at Harvard I think I'm so fortunate to be able to have a group of friends and a community of people who no matter what my interests were no matter if I want to talk about policy economics physics biology there was always someone who I could find who would be willing to talk about those things with me for you know hours upon hours without ever growing sick of it and I think that's a very rare thing to find in a lifetime and that's something I'm extremely grateful for of course like a lot of people probably have the concept of Harvard that is filled with you know rich elitist people those people are there I just don't you know associate myself with them very much and there are a lot of extremely passionate extremely driven people and that's the best part of Harvard it's not the classes although those are great it is the community of people that you find yourself in yeah yeah so I had a pretty different experience from JJ at least for the first two years that I was at Harvard so I'm a junior now I'm at the end of my third year I was initially actually very dissatisfied with Harvard I was pretty confident that I was going to take a leave of absence for about two years or maybe even drop out after my sophomore year ended and I think that dissatisfaction largely stemmed from the fact that I really had a lot of difficulty finding people who were interested in the same topics that I was namely consciousness spirituality and the sort of intersection of that and neuroscience and physics and philosophy and ultimately though through co-founding the Science of Psychedelic Club I was able to find a really great community of people, JJ included, who are interested in these topics and so I'm incredibly grateful to have found those people on campus to speak a little more to your point Alan about how Harvard much like other colleges is very much a zoo there are truly some crazy opportunities that you get to have through Harvard so I am part of this acapella group called the Crocodillos which I joined my sophomore year every year the Crocodillos crocs for short embark on this summer tour where we travel all around the world usually to Asia, Australia, Europe and maybe a couple of other continents and the tour is entirely paid for through the revenue that we make with concerts and so it's basically an all expenses paid tour for us we get to travel around the world being young people and all that we have to do is sing it's an incredible, incredible opportunity and I'm really grateful that I was able to have that through Harvard and you are right that Harvard, I think a lot of people assume that the people at Harvard don't really party that they aren't really as social as say people at other colleges and I think while it's true that Harvard certainly doesn't have as much of a party culture as other schools people do get crazy at this institution without a doubt and you know I mean like 18 to 22 year olds are going to be 18 to 22 year olds, yeah, yeah Interesting, it's cool how both of you found the community here to be such a valuable thing and it is in very many ways a funnel towards some of the smartest people in the world and so it makes a lot of sense, yeah and it's crazy thinking about your ability to be able to go from finding such little meaning Kenneth the first two years to being able to be like I found what I was looking for So if we can get more of the doors open for young people to be able to find that meaning at young ages so that they don't you know drop out but that they keep going and find the right people to surround themselves with that they find interest in So you two found each other and the co-founders as the Harvard undergraduate science of psychedelics club short for we'll do psychedelics club for short or science of psychedelics club for short, yes, yes and the big why here let's get to this big why it makes sense with biophysics and neuroscience and consciousness you guys both are obviously in the melting pot of those fields so give us the big why on the club Yeah so I guess first I'll give a little bit of history about the club there were sort of two independent streams of thought that coincided with each other so a friend of mine Andrew Zuckerman and I wanted to create the Harvard consciousness club this was sort of around the time this was last semester my fall semester my junior year when I realized that I wanted to create my own social group on campus to really be able to delve deeply into these questions about consciousness and so Andrew and I were thinking about starting this Harvard consciousness club around the same time JJ was filing filing for official approval for the Harvard science of psychedelics club JJ Zuck, Andrew goes for Zuck for short JJ Zuck and I realized that we had a lot of mutual shared interests in the sort of intersection of psychedelics and consciousness so we decided to merge into the Harvard undergraduate science of psychedelics club and we've been hosting meetings since February of this year so we're only less than three months old right now the big why, phenomenal question I mean for me I'm principally interested in this vast enigma of what consciousness is I think psychedelics right now are the primary tool that we have for readily and I suppose easily accessing altered states of consciousness we also have deep meditative practices that can lead to altered states but often times a great deal of training and practice is necessary in order to in order to access those states of consciousness through meditation I think psychedelics are an easy and also I guess accessible tool for accessing those states yeah quick disclaimer the we're not encouraging the responsible use of any of these psychedelic substances at all because they're very strong substances they are contraindicated for certain groups of people like people with schizophrenia and other bipolar for instance it's not understood how they interact with these things until it is understood it's probably good idea to be risk averse in that way also traditionally these substances when they've been used in indigenous communities for instance like ayahuasca and peyote and stuff like that they are used with a very conscientious vehicle they're used in ritual fashion they are used with a guide with them and that has always been considered a very important aspect of their usage so do not just kind of go crazy like off the wall with these powerful substances so I'll give also just a bit of history about what happened sort of before the two clubs became one I've always been very interested in the 60s in the counterculture and the values that people were trying to spread at those times and the music very close to my heart the music from that time and so I was reading a book called the Harvard Psychedelics Club about the sort of counterculture crew at Harvard in the 60s that really helped launch the psychedelics involvement in the counterculture who were Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert who would later become Ram Das after going to India and pursuing spirituality in that way so I was reading that book and I found it very interesting it made me want to get more into sort of the history and at this point I didn't really realize how important psychedelics in my opinion now are I saw that there was a conference in New York called the Horizons Science of Psychedelics Conference they do this every year I thought that's interesting I'll go see what that's about so I went to that and it's essentially a conference where they present all of the modern clinical research going on at psychedelics because if your viewers aren't familiar after the 60s psychedelics were banned because of the craziness that occurred although it's probably not so much because of the craziness that occurred as it was because of the threat to the power structures that the counterculture and the anti-war movement was causing so they were banned completely not just for consumption but for study even though they were being studied for a wide variety of illnesses with incredible effectiveness alcoholism, depression, all sorts of, all addictions really, nicotine addiction so in the early 2000s that ice finally melted and the first new research on psychedelics started and I didn't know any of this until I went to this conference and the conference showed just such remarkable results for treating PTSD and so many of these diseases that are not improving in the modern world mental illness, our treatments for mental illnesses are not getting much better SSRIs are only somewhat better than placebo's and treating depression for instance and that immediately made me recognize that this was going to be a very important an important thing to get rid of the stigma around these medicines and let people engage with them rationally and scientifically also I came across a study showing that use of psychedelics is correlated with increased politically liberal attitudes increased anti-thoritarian attitudes increased concern or sense of stewardship toward the environment and really importantly an increase in trait openness with the personality trait of openness which they've never discovered other substances being able to alter these personality traits after the age of 20 or something like that and when I saw that I realized that all of these problems I listed in the beginning ultimately in my opinion can be drawn back to the fact that people are not open enough and so that was the real trigger for me to be like okay I need to create an official body to get this going and after a lot of effort trying to find advisors of the club people were very hesitant to be official advisors for this club at the college I was able to formally start the Science of Psychedelics Club then during that process I connected with Kenneth and Zuck and that has sort of led to where we are now so that's the back story there, yeah Whoa, yeah, yeah, there's a lot there Alright, on a very deeply spiritual and consciousness side of things we have the consciousness being this massive enigma we have on a spiritual oneness, unity side there's a lot of geopolitical pressures and power pressures preventing since the 60s this type of a movement from coming to fruition hit us on a little bit on that or I want to hear your thoughts on that on just like why that has happened why there was this kind of backlash and stuff like that Yeah, and also actually here let me clarify give us an idea of both why from why since the 60s was there the view of the influence of psychedelics causing openness and that potentially causing some of the more openness in geopolitics and that type of thing and then let's lead that up until 2020 really until around now and where we see openness and geopolitics heading in the future So I think a lot of people don't understand the degree to which the psychedelic psychedelics leaving the laboratory and entering into recreational consumption with the youth of that time contributed to the movements that were happening that time you can see it in the music, you can see it in the clothes people were wearing you can see it in the spiritual traditions people were embracing much to their parents' chagrin the total transformation of values from their parents' generation and the sense of unity that they tend to cultivate during these experiences the sense of oneness with other human beings the sense of transcending yourself and your national ties and so on that was a huge spark for the anti-war movement and the anti-war movement was a huge thorn in Richard Nixon's side and one of the ways that they found that they could interrupt these movements was by tackling these substances so they passed laws too I mean this is more or less on record now Richard Nixon an aide of Richard Nixon has provided a quote saying that they started the initial ban of these drugs so that they could not just psychedelics but also heroin and cannabis and others so that they could interrupt specifically the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement so the political implications of these substances are not small I think that they were a large driver in sort of the unrest in a positive way there needed to be unrest at that time because we were fighting an unethical war we were not thinking about the real impact of our actions on the global future and so these things were cultivating unrest that powers at that time were not comfortable with and that was a large reason why they were cracked down in 2020 now and then in 2020 now I think the... 2020 now is not going to be too different from the 60s then I don't think I mean obviously we're in a different culture now that's somewhat less repressive it is somewhat less hostile towards new ideas and openness which is good but it is not obviously a perfectly open society or a perfectly loving society or a perfectly unified society so those same things when those ideas try to force their way into a world that has not embraced them yet there will be repercussions to that especially because they make people skeptical of hierarchy they make people... I mean I shouldn't say they make people but they tend to make people more skeptical of hierarchy they tend to make people more concerned with the environment which of course is now an even more pressing issue than it was in the 60s so I think the... I don't think there is going to be another sort of widespread use of them amongst like a counterculture for a number of reasons but even just the therapeutic use of them which is what will probably be legalized in the near future will help transform people's attitudes on all of these topics because they will help people I think be more open-minded which is the crucial part of it I don't know if you have anything to... I can't speak as much to the current geopolitical situation of the world as JJ can just because of my lack of knowledge in that department but what I will say is that I think that there are three aspects of psychedelic experience that are worth noting in relation to JJ's comment about openness number one is ego death so a sort of sense of dissolution of self number two is a sense of oneness with other people and with the world generally and also humanity and third I think is just a sense of awe, wonder and compassion and those three are all linked to each other they aren't really three separate aspects of psychedelic experiences if you have a really profound psychedelic experience all three of those things could happen to you in one trip what I will say about society right now is that I think that we still live in a society where we fundamentally think that we are separate from other people that we are sort of isolated minds that exist in isolated bodies that are fundamentally distinct from the other minds and bodies that we see in the world and I don't want to get too philosophical but I think that a lot of this does have its roots in the sort of western philosophical tradition starting with Descartes positing that the I is fundamentally separate from the world that I and the world are two completely distinct categories that cannot be unified with each other so I think psychedelics can really help to promote a sort of mindset in which that apparent boundary breaks down where we really do see ourselves as a part of the world rather than as separate from it Yes, just quick on both your points there that were so good we had both the importance of actually today hopefully having the widespread use of technology that is in our pockets now can hopefully catalyze the oneness revolution faster hopefully now I think it's quite possible that we could get there plus all of the transit that we're making towards the legalization and the medicinal use so hopefully we can get there and then yes, the ego death, the feelings of oneness these are so critical and then the separation, the illusion of separation so this is a very interesting balance because we have to keep ourselves there has to be some ego to function and then there also has to be some ego to dissolve otherwise too much of the ego can drive us to a point of losing touch with the ecosystems of other humans and the planet that we live in so JJ, you wanted to say some stuff I was just going to add one kind of amusing anecdote about how powerful politically people involved in the counterculture movement in the 60s thought these substances were I learned this in the documentary The Sunshine Makers which is about Nick Sands and Tim Scully who were two of the chemists and synthesizing the vast majority of the LSD during the counterculture movement in the 60s and they had a very concerted effort to synthesize first of all they produced a lot of this for free because they felt that they were doing it as a way to change the world not as a way to make money, which is an interesting fact but they very much wanted to get their product behind the iron wall the wall, the USSR essentially they wanted to get as much of their psychedelics that they were producing because they felt that it could cultivate an anti-authoritarian perspective that would lead to the crumbling of these authoritarian regimes and end the Cold War and they believed that that was a very crucial political objective that their work was moving towards How crazy would that be to drop a bunch of LSD in the Middle East drop a bunch of LSD in North Korea it's hard to say though because there's so many issues with the geopolitics you can't just drop it into Venezuela and be like it's going to sort itself out but at the same time it's funny when you think about the United Nations and when you think about working with them on a little micro-dose at the General Assembly what would happen, right? what would happen with a little meditation plus a micro-dose and some Tibetan singing bowls and some, yeah, yeah, Xie, are you okay? I mean one idea that I've thought about facetiously is what would happen if you got Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Bashar al-Assad and other leaders of the world to all trip acid at the same time I mean, and have it on video I mean it's never going to happen, right? but just imagine, just imagine yeah, yeah, we're going to make that happen that's going to happen we're going to get there you think 2020 is crazy, right? but just wait couple more years down the line Gen Z are going to be roaring with their technology and they're going to be relentless with their pushes towards this oneness in their kid and it's just going to keep man, the kids that are born that have only known the internet is some crazy stuff and just their ability to communicate about things that matter to them I think could potentially catalyze that political oneness that we so desperately need but then we have to balance in the competition the innovation and the competition you still want people to be able to compete for the edge of science, yeah I was just going to say we of course aren't the first people to have thought of what if all the world leaders had this experience of oneness Alan Ginsberg, the beat poet the first time he was administered LSD by Timothy Leary he said, oh my god, this is before the hippie movement we're going to start a movement, it's going to be based on love and peace and unity and then he tried to get Timothy Leary to get Mao on the phone he said call up Mao, I'm going to tell him that we're doing peace now so yeah, that's a very funny story about Alan Ginsberg's take away from it which really did foreshadow the years that were just about to follow those early 60s people did not know what was going to happen in the late 60s yet I really just I have a strong desire to want to talk about this in terms of breaking down hierarchies there's a lot of competence in hierarchies you can even make a hierarchy of spirituality and say that who are the spiritual leaders they've practiced the most, meditation, connection, all that is, whatever but then there's also competence hierarchies those that I've brought forth may be the most reductions of suffering you can frame competence in different ways but then you can also talk about it money right there's 1500 billionaires and they're at the top right so to be able to take yeah, Davos or the UN or whoever is at the top of this power hierarchy and be able to get a change in unity but keep competition roaring and innovation at the edge of science is something that is really crucial to catalyze you guys have done nine events now in just the last three months everything from a zen monk and a psychonaut speaking and that was about 150 people were there all the way to Rick Doblin talking from maps all the way to holotropic breath work so teach us about kind of what the road map is like building this community and what the experience has been with it sure, yeah I think I speak for all the founders Andrew is not here when I say that we were surprised very pleasantly surprised that we had such a big community turnout for our first event like you said about 150 we were very pleased to see that we didn't realize that there was that much interest on campus and in the Boston area so I think the road map for this club really because we didn't just do this because we wanted to talk to other people about this thing I think we all had goals that largely overlap but weren't identical but at least for me one of the large goals is to get the science that people are studying take more seriously and Harvard since it was one of the first places where these things really left the lab and Timothy Leary and Ram Dass were both fired from their positions at Harvard their professors there I think symbolically getting it taken seriously again at Harvard getting ideally scientific research on the topic jump-started again at Harvard would be a huge victory if that's what comes from the club that would be something that I am very proud of Yeah, totally completely second everything that JJ said I think it would be wonderful if we could get more psychedelic research in academia Psychedelics are such an understudied topic given the tremendous amount of potential that they have I mean I very strongly believe that there is so much that we can learn about the brain from a more advanced study of psychedelics I mean we've really only just even begun to scratch the surface and this is primarily due to the many decades in which psychedelics were accessible to the public but just were not researched primarily due to the stigma associated with it many universities were not willing to fund research on psychedelics so we're just now starting to see research on psychedelics being done at institutions like Yale, Johns Hopkins there's a lot of promising research going on in the UK I believe the Center for Psychedelic Research was just established last week at the Imperial College London To my knowledge Harvard still doesn't really have any ongoing research on at least the scientific effects of psychedelics so it would be wonderful to see more researchers here at Harvard doing work on psychedelics Yeah I see your roadmap is a lot of just really wanting to push not only the edge of psychedelics but also get the public more engaged in how the importance of it for consciousness, for neuroscience for spirituality, for oneness I love that a lot about you guys I can really feel that from you in the way that you communicate it and build I want to have you guys tackle a question that is very similar but both of you tackling it from a different way for Kenneth from an edge of the enigma that is consciousness what are some of your best guesses and for JJ what makes matter living versus not living? This is a huge question and one that I'm not sure that I can do sufficient justice to in the span of a short interview What I will say is that the debate about consciousness at least in philosophical circles has primarily boiled down to two competing world views There are the materialists who argue that consciousness is a product of brain activity There are some philosophers who will even venture so far as to say that consciousness is just an illusion sometimes they use the word epiphenomenon which means that it is sort of just like a secondary byproduct of brain activity that doesn't really have any sort of causal influence and then on the other hand you have idealists who argue that really everything is just sort of a projection of your own consciousness that there is no external world that is indivisible from your own consciousness I suppose implicitly having grown up in a community of pretty materialist scientists both of my parents were civil engineers I guess I implicitly subscribed to the materialist world view although I didn't really think much about it and then after reading the power of now and exposing myself to a lot of ideas in eastern spirituality I became much more receptive to the idealist view and these are deep philosophical questions for which it's hard to find much of a resolution I guess right now I'm attracted to big views the first is panpsychism which holds that everything is conscious so there is this sort of huge chasm I think between the material physical activity that is happening in the brain and subjective conscious experience for me at least it's incredibly difficult to see how you could get subjective experience from the activity of neurons no matter how complex and highly organized they are I think one of the ways of resolving this issue is to believe that everything has a conscious experience at some fundamental level how exactly that's the case it's very hard to work out and it's certainly a very controversial view the second major view that I'm attracted to is this idea called dual aspect monism and this basically tries to say well maybe it's misguided to try to boil down the universe to either purely physical things or purely mental things maybe the physical and the mental are just two opposite sides of the same coin and you ask what is that one coin it's also another big question for me I'm sort of inclined to believe that there is something akin to a universal consciousness that everything is participating in that the universe is one vast intelligence or consciousness that we really can't quite comprehend except perhaps through mystical and spiritual experiences that can be accessed through meditation, psychedelics and yeah so I guess those are the questions that I'm thinking about primarily right now so your question was what distinguishes living matter from non-living matter that is a big open question in the area of biophysics that I'm most interested in doing research in after I graduate it's not understood we don't know the answer to why are some systems living because I mean when we say why are they living we mean that these living systems have very unique properties you know these complex systems have self-organizations spontaneous self-organization they have coherent energy transfer over long distances in ways that we have been able to create synthetically and so there's a lot of open questions about what physical and mathematical principles underlie these systems that we call living and how do they work how can we take advantage of that can we use them to make our own living things without actually needing it to come from other living things and that would have a lot of repercussions on like our understanding of how life started for instance if we understand what life is we have a much clearer idea of where we can narrow down for its origins so I'll give you an example of some of the different ways people think about living matter in terms of as physics when you have say water and you expose certain pressures and certain temperatures and stuff it can convert to ice and that's what we call phase transition and people now are doing research on phase transitions in living matter which would be like what sort of effect of temperatures it's not an actual temperature but some analogy to the physical concept of temperature in a biological system cause it to undergo phase transitions and one would be like there's a certain like phase of the bulk material of the living system that is say homeostatic so nothing's going on and it's just kind of how living tissue normally is and then if it undergoes this bulk phase transition maybe it has to do with the water maybe it has to do with the electronic proteins or something in the cell then that can trigger change in the physical properties of diffusion and stuff throughout that shifts the whole functionality of the system towards maybe inflammation and maybe cellular proliferation and then it might undergo phase transition back after that is no longer necessary so there do seem to be sort of physical principles that biological systems manipulate in order to cause these physical transformations on sort of a small scale that's a very interesting and active area of research and like I said we don't know the answers to how these living systems are different from non-living systems but there's definitely a lot of interesting research going on and once we do understand say this phase transition idea this idea that you can map these physical concepts onto the biological concept that are going on it opens the question of can we use that to treat disease maybe a chronic state of cancer is a chronic state of cellular proliferation maybe we can find ways to modify the bulk like statistical structure and the bulk physics going on in the cells to move away from that which is an area that we is still very speculative and we have no idea about really hmm yeah these are these are great answers at young ages for tackling hard some of the hardest challenges that we face I do have a strong tendency to feel the most connected to all that is and feeling the oneness through meditation through psychedelics and when I do that I think and feel that we need to help more people feel this because then that can get us closer to that unity if the children that are born also dive deeper into that feeling as well and that's a whole another conversation about what age do we think these potentially psychedelic experiences are good to come in at how to titrate things like that how to do it with a psychotherapist all these types of things there's all those questions and also on a on a I wonder just on a quick note on phase change I'm interested to see if there's potentially a way to call a awareness expansion that could be very interesting your thoughts there is some cool I'm a big fan of trying to use like the analogies of statistical mechanics and with biophysics is not exactly an analogy since there is non-equilibrium statistical thermodynamics going on in these systems and we don't understand how that works but in other things it is more of an analogy like trying to understand one example would be like in there are certain bacterial colonies where they've discovered what they can call an effective temperature based on like the back and forth motion of the bacteria and stuff like that just like with particles and through this effective temperature they can predict phase transitions of these bacterial colonies where they'll under a certain effective temperature they'll spontaneously coalesce into spore form which is like ice and above a certain effect of temperature they will melt and become sort of more like a fluid so there are a lot of interesting analogies here and a lot of analogical thinking with statistical mechanics in the brain thinking about the brain as an entropic like the number of novel states that the brain can reach from a given brain state would be considered roughly the entropy of that brain state and so if your brain is in a sort of highly creative a lot of possibilities that the brain can enter into from a given state it's in a highly entropic state and there's a lot of work and they would call that the effect of temperature a low temperature brain would be something that cannot access very many novel states from its current state there's a lot of work trying to talk about psychedelics in terms of how they raise this temperature of the brain or they increase the entropy in the brain and thinking about certain diseases particularly OCD, depression and all manner of addictions as conditions where the brain is not too high entropy but too low entropy it gets fixed into states that cannot reach new states it gets essentially trapped in the current states it is frozen if you want to continue on with that low temperature analogy and psychedelics are sort of able to break up that low entropy state and allow them to reach new experiences that they've been shut out of since they've developed these illnesses and that's actually thought to be one of the central reasons why it's so effective for this specific category of diseases remarkably effective for this specific category of diseases for nicotine in preliminary trials they had an 80% quitting rate which is enormous compared to the quitting rate of people given just placebo depression it's been shown to have remarkably effective results much more than any other medicine that we've really discovered and it's probably because the brain is just stuck and it can't undergo this phase transition out of its current state essentially I'm so so happy that we got to this last part on that that's getting the mind to phase transition to states of awareness that can alleviate suffering that can augment our awareness towards oneness I mean these are some of the most crucial things that we could be studying and we are not doing it enough just scratching for now the surface scratching okay guys two quick questions on the way out are we in a simulation this is also an incredibly difficult question to tackle what I okay so I what I will say is that the universe is very very finely tuned it seems for the conditions of life so in order for the universe to have begun in the smooth arrangement of matter that it consisted of immediately after the big bang I believe the the physicist Roger Penrose once calculated that there was a one in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 chance that the universe was in that smooth arrangement of matter immediately after the big bang other conditions in the universe like the constants that mediate a lot of the fundamental forces in the universe are very very finely tuned for life if you had altered them by say 0.001 units then intelligent life could have never emerged we do seem to live in a universe that in some way seems to have been designed for intelligent life now this gets into many questions about you know whether the universe was intelligently designed a lot of people are pretty reluctant to accept that idea so I'm not going to pause it that there was any sort of external force that did sort of that did design life in the way that it did but it seems to be a very curious feature of the initial conditions in which the universe began that they were so so specific and perhaps specific in such a way that they did lead to intelligent life so I think that probably the most compelling argument for the idea that we do live in a simulation is this fact that the universe is so finely tuned for life in the sense that all of our experience is internally generated and that our brain is constantly sampling reality and then making an inference about what it must be like which is highly relevant to psychedelics interestingly because it's thought that maybe those somehow interrupt that process and so there's a lot more sort of the inferences become a lot more less correlated so like your brain for more distant concepts from its current state essentially so in the sense that we are constantly sampling and inferring about reality and that we're not actually looking at reality we're looking at what our brain is filling in the details we are definitely living in a simulation as far as whether the physical world is simulation in the sense that like was it designed by something outside of it that tinkered with it to make it as it is I suspect no I don't think anyone has a great reason to suspecting yes or no I'd say I'd suspect no mostly on spiritual grounds just the the fact that so many mystics throughout the ages have had intense experiences with what they felt with strong conviction was ultimate reality it's obviously not scientific evidence but it's very interesting yeah alright and how about what is the most beautiful thing in the world to be in somewhat basic answer this would be music I spend a lot of time listening to music and it's one of the most sort of aesthetically important things to me in my life yeah can you tell us a little bit more about why sure about why interesting I think music is able to invoke emotion extremely strongly even when those emotions aren't necessarily like what you're feeling in the moment a sad song can really make you sad I think that's a very beautiful thing or a happy song can really make you happy or a song that makes you feel revolutionary can really make you feel revolutionary and that's very cool also hmm yeah I think in large part it's because of the emotionality of it but also there's a more abstract quality to it that is hard to put my finger on but it has to do with the fact that it's very absorbed it can absorb you into it in almost meditative way at least for me I'm sure that's experience some people have and some people don't have but it can make me unconcerned with my current whatever is going on and fully pay attention to it and there are very few other things except maybe like a phenomenal book or something that can really make me pay attention to the details in the way that music can yeah I definitely agree with JJ about the power of music for me the most beautiful thing that there is is the ability to consciously experience the present moment I guess a lot of my appreciation for this comes from having read The Power of Now back when I was 17 but I think that the mind is constantly imposing whether we realize it or not a huge huge filter on our conscious experience we selectively pick out certain stimuli in the environment and we focus on those exclusively at the expense of the sort of broader totality of our conscious experience and I think that a lot of that filter stems from this sort of attachment that we have psychologically to the flow of time we're constantly thinking about the future about planning for things and we're also constantly thinking about the past ruminating, regretting and so on and so forth often times our attention is not completely rooted inside the present moment there is a beautiful beautiful moment when you realize that your entire life has been experienced in the present there is nothing that has occurred for you outside the present even the act of sort of anticipating the future or regretting the past happens in the present and that's a very very deeply liberating feeling it's not something that's easy to communicate through words or intellectually it's really something that you just sort of have to experience for yourself and God it just fills you with the utmost awe and wonder for how beautiful the universe is and how beautiful life is great answers you guys this has been such an awesome episode I've loved talking to you both you guys are young and ambitious and pursuing such a critical field of pushing the edge we're gonna do this together JJ, Kenneth thank you guys so much for coming onto the show huge thank you to both of you thanks so much for having us and we love smart young people let's get more smart young people building around the world everyone let's push them, let's motivate them let's get them executing and making our world a better place let's give them the right mentors the right resources that they need to succeed the right basic physiological needs this is so so critical I want to thank you all for tuning in comments below, let us know your thoughts psychedelics, consciousness, spirituality oneness, neuroscience let's get talking to our families our communities, our coworkers people online about it sharing these messages around the world let's do it everyone check out the links below definitely sign up for the club's mailing list the Harvard undergraduate science of psychedelics club their mailing list link is below it's bit.ly forward psychedelics also all of JJ and Kenneth's links are in the bio below as well check them out, support the artists, entrepreneurs and organizations around the world that you believe in support them, help them grow support simulation our links are below as well so we continue doing cool 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