 I thought I'd just start this talk by reassuring comrades that you don't actually need to change the world at all, because reality doesn't actually exist. Not my thought, but the thought of some popular science journalists this past couple of weeks writing about the latest Nobel Prize winners in physics, who they claim have disproved reality. Now what these scientists have actually shown is something astonishing enough, but it's a little bit more humble than disproving the idea that reality exists. They have practically demonstrated theoretical ideas about how we think of cause and effect as being something that operates on a local basis, but at the quantum level, what we call quantum entanglement cause and effect is capable of operating over very long distances. Certainly it violates common sense, but the Nobel Prize committee themselves actually garbled this a little bit in their explanation of what these scientists have discovered, to the effect of explaining that these scientists had in fact proven that cause and effect does not really exist, and therefore presumably the world merely exists as a haze of probabilities until, well until we observe it, presumably, at which point you can see how the idea that there is no cause and effect opens the door to philosophical idealism and mysticism. This was the conclusion precisely drawn by some of the popular science blogs such as The Big Think, who took this Nobel Prize committee, this Nobel Prize announcement and took from it that an objective reality devoid of the actions of an observer does not appear to exist in any sort of fundamental way. This is the conclusion that they've drawn, so imagine that. You know, by experimentation in a material laboratory, using a material apparatus, scientists have disproven that there is such a thing as cause and effect at the quantum level, and they've in fact disproven that there is even an objective material world independent of the observer. So, you know, these are, suffice it to say, I'll come back to quantum mechanics in a bit, but this is a misrepresentation in fact of the science, and in actual fact it's complete and utter mysticism. These are reactionary philosophical ideas, ideas that belong in the pre-scientific age in actual fact that are being dressed up in what Lenin referred to as the tinsel of modern science. This has been used to smuggle these ideas in, and it's not just amongst popular science journalists that you see these ideas being repeated. You see serious scientists actually repeating these sort of ideas as I'll come on to explain, and I think the fact that you see this mysticism, and this is what we're talking about basically, mysticism, seeping even into the sciences is a morbid symptom of the decay of culture under a decaying capitalist system. Now, comrades, we often, and many times over this weekend where you would have heard the phrase crisis of capitalism, the decay of capitalism, but do we fully appreciate what it means for a system under which we live every hour of our waking lives to be in a crisis basically? What does that mean for ordinary people? Well, I just wanted to tell you a start with a brief story of a comrades that had an interaction with over Zoom in 2020, like most interactions at that time, who's a molecular biologist. And this comrades was explaining to me how them and their research team were trying to find the genes in certain species of cows in Africa that allow them to generate milk at high ambient temperatures. And when they identified those genes, they wanted to find a way to splice them into the genetic code of the cows that are used in the majority of the dairy industry. Why? In order to prevent us losing the dairy industry as a result of the catastrophic climate destruction that capitalism is wreaking on the world. The reason I mention this is because basically the most brilliant minds, you know, scientists with with degrees and everything are not being used are not using their minds to advance human culture. They're using their best of their intelligence to prevent us from being thrown back not hundreds of years, but to a time before the even dairy farming goes back 10,000 years. It's a discovery that belongs to the early Neolithic. And it's on the train in large parts of the world because of because of capitalism. I raise this story because people take meaning in their daily lives from contributing to the community, to the society around us, to in some small way, personally, professionally, whatever, advancing society. But this system in its decay threatens to not just wipe out the the the the contributions of this generation, but even long dead generations are threatened by the the throwback to barbarism that this puts on the on the order of the day. And therefore the only way, in my opinion, to achieve a meaningful purposeful existence under this decaying capitalist system is to fight tooth and nail for its destruction, to fight for its overthrow. There is no other way. But the the ruling class, of course, they completely and they completely 100% identify themselves with this system. But they too can sense that it is in a crisis, that it has no future. But unable to to conceive of any other alternative system, they are increasingly inclined to turn away from reality, and they therefore become the source of all kinds of mysticism and moods of despair that trickle down into society through the media, through the universities. And we see this in in philosophy departments in universities, for example, there's other talks this weekend, I'm sure that have touched upon it, of the rise of postmodernism, which fundamentally denies the no ability of the world, grand, grand narratives, overarching explanations of an objective reality. We only have the subjective reality in our heads, so to speak. It denies precisely the possibility of reason unlocking the explanation about the world. But we see the same thing also in the science departments universities. The contradiction here is that the very purpose of science is precisely to uphold the claims of reason to be able to understand the world, to push back the frontiers of our ignorance. And consciously or unconsciously, all science is fundamentally incompatible with mysticism. It premises itself on the idea that there is a material world that exists objectively out there, that it can be known, and that we will know more about it tomorrow than we do today. And therefore, where we see this creeping mysticism within the sciences, it goes under a false banner of actually defending science, of even being genuine science. And we should therefore, it's all the more pernicious for precisely that reason. Before I go on to talk a little bit more about quantum mechanics, I should say a couple of things about philosophy. Since, well, for millennia, since its inception, philosophy has fundamentally been divided into two antagonistic camps. There is the materialist camp, and we as Marxists belong to the camp of the materialists. And we materialists simply state that matter exists independently of mind. It was uncreated. It is its own cause. Whereas mind, on the contrary, is not independent of matter, but rather is one of the qualities of matter organized in a certain way in the human brain, the result, the product of billions of years of evolution of matter. Now, you can idealists on the other hand, and that's the other great camp within philosophy, state that on the contrary, it's mind that be at the mind of man or the mind of God, which is primary and independent. And matter, if it exists, and there are idealists who deny that there is a material world out there, is merely secondary and dependence upon minds. I think it's quite clear to see how idealism forms the starting point of all mysticism, and religious conceptions. Whereas materialism is the necessary philosophical starting point of good science, fundamentally. But since the since the early 20th century, in particular, a philosophical trend, which referred to as positivism has tried to subvert the very essence of what it means to do science, rather than science discovering unlocking the natural laws of the material world that exists out there, the positivists, and there are many shades of positivism, and I don't wish to go to sort of have a fine tooth code and go through them. But generally, they are united by the idea that rather than trying to find out anything about the world out there, the goal of science is to organize our experience to bring order to our experience, which fundamentally means experience means that the sense impressions within our heads to describe them lawfully, you know, the to give them a mathematical description or whatever else what we see here and and and so on. In other words, experience consciousness becomes a key part of that science is about organizing consciousness fundamentally and says nothing about the material world. In fact, it opens the door to denying that the material world exists, or doubt or at the very least, doubting that the material world exists as many positivists, in fact, do. And I think it's very easy to see this. This is clearly belongs either in the idealist camp or in the sort of inconsistent camp of waivers between materialism and idealism. Now the the trailblazer of positivism in in modern science was the late 19th and early 20th century physicist philosopher by the name of Ernst Mack. You will almost certainly have heard of Ernst Mack. If a supersonic jet is going at two or three times the speed of sound, they talk about it going at Mach two or Mach three. And I enjoy the irony of the fact that therefore indirectly, Mack has given his name to the the Gillette razor blade series, a very fast sounding words, the Mac series of razor blades. The irony being, of course, that Mac like most Austrian and German gentlemen of the late 19th century had a big beard. So probably never saw a razor blade in his life. But more seriously, if you've read the writings of Lenin and his philosophical writings, you will have certainly heard of Mac. Because particularly if you've read materialism and imperial criticism, Lenin really lays into the students that also should I say the followers of Max ideas in Russia, which numbered members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in the Bolshevik faction were influenced by this anti materialist trends within philosophy. In the wake of the defeat of the 1905 revolution, he thought it he regarded it as a matter of life or death for the existence of the of the Marxist tendency in Russia to fight against this these Macist ideas basically in their penetration into the ranks of the of the Marxists. This at a time after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, when you had all sorts of despair, mysticism, interest in religious cults and the church reviving because of the pessimism that sort of swept the country in the wake of counterrevolution. So you will you may well have heard these these ideas already from there. But these these ideas actually were really invoking the early 20th century amongst bourgeois intellectual circles, particularly in the German speaking world. And there's a reason for that. Quite simply, they were a reaction to the growing popularity of Marxist materialism within the the Labour movement within the workers movement, particularly in the German speaking world. This was a philosophical reaction effectively. The bourgeois were extremely alarmed. And and this was the this was the other side of that equation. And these ideas, they had a big impact. You had the the rise of the the Vienna School of intellectuals inspired by positivists inspired by Ernst Mac at the University of Vienna, but also leading leading physicist scientists who were involved in that great revolution in science in the early 20th century in quantum mechanics and in relativity. Einstein was even influenced by these ideas for a period. Although to his credit, he turned his back on them in favor of a kind of spinosist materialism later in his life. But two leading physicists whose names are intimately bound up with the quantum revolution were very influenced by these ideas. Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. And in fact, Bohr even hosted a conference of these Vienna positivists at his Copenhagen mansion in 1935, where they presented their views and he was very sympathetic. And there was one physicist who attended that conference that I want to talk about a little bit about his observations of that of that conference later on. But Bohr and Heisenberg essentially believed that quantum mechanics proved the proved their philosophy, this philosophy correct, that it was precisely the observer is key to understanding the reality of the world. That effectively the observer is the one that brings reality into existence. They were effectively idealists. And they had their own interpretation called the Copenhagen interpretation of which there are many interpretations in turn exactly what they meant. But the reason for this effectively what they were hooking onto was the fact that quantum mechanics brings to light some very contradictory behavior of matter that we are not used to on this macroscopic level of existence. I've talked about quantum entanglement. The idea of action at distance is very counterintuitive at this level of reality where that's certainly not what we observe. And in particular we see at the quantum level a very contradictory behavior referred to as wave particle duality. Just to explain a bit about why that is so contradictory or so counterintuitive, well think about a particle. Think of a particle as a marble. If you take a marble and you throw it you can trace that you can track where that marble goes through the air and it only hits one object at a time. It's discrete. It's in a single place. That's what we mean by it behaves like a particle. It's in a single place at a single time. Now take that particle and throw it into a still pond and the ripples will spread out continuously. A wave doesn't just exist in a single place. It spreads out. It's like the waves in the ocean. And yet at the quantum level things behave both like waves and particles. And this is a little bit of a head scratcher because it leads to some interesting results such as for the fact that in the famous double slit experiment an electron will arrive at a single place. You only see the electron in a single place when it arrives at a detector. But it arrives in a position which suggests that on its way there it has behaved in some ways like a wave which is continuous in space. So how did it get from A to B? Did it spread out? Did it go via two trajectories? Did it go via one trajectory? This is the sort of question that has left people interpreting quantum mechanics in various ways. It's not a trivial problem of course to solve whatsoever. But the the manner in which it was solved by the Copenhagen interpretation was to say that actually the particle has no position, it has no momentum, and it has no other properties until the moment that we observe it. Which, i.e. what does it mean to make an observation? Well that is much debated, but of course it brings in the role of a conscious observer basically bringing reality into existence. And it's not actually a solution that says that solves anything because it doesn't actually tell us anything more about what's going on at any deeper level than what quantum mechanics already tells us. In fact it actually draws a line in the sand and says there is no deeper level to reality. There is nothing further and deeper to investigate and therefore science must stop here. But it really tallies with this positivist idea that in fact the role of science is not at all to describe the material reality of the universe, but rather to merely give a description, a mathematical description, to our observations, to our experience which is what the positivists were talking about. So you can see this influence. And it should be said from the beginning there were those physicists who opposed this idealist drift within the sciences and put forward alternative theories. Einstein, De Broglie, Schrodinger, later people like David Bohm and Bell. And yeah, so this has always been contended but the reason that this idealist trend has gained the upper hand is it really goes with the flow of where bourgeois philosophy and thinking is going in general within society in this decaying capitalist system. Now when I say that these ideas, these positivist ideas, were directly inspired by a fear of Marxism. I meant that quite literally and I now want to go back to that 1935 conference, Bohr's mansion in Copenhagen, where there was another pioneering quantum mechanics called Pasquale Jordana, I believe his name is pronounced, who was a defender of positivism, pioneer of quantum mechanics and a member of the Nazi party and an open reactionary. And he attended this conference and he wrote a report for the Nazi party describing what went on. And I just want to quote that because this is a class-conscious reactionary. He said the modern scientific development and the uneasiness and concern it aroused in the materialistic camp deserves careful observation from a political point of view as well. Of course the defeat of Bolshevism, which is now threateningly raising its head among various neighbouring peoples, is primarily a matter of political decision-making and ideological and blood-based fighting power which cannot be replaced by scientific evidence. Nevertheless, it seems to be a significant sign of the times that the materialistic worldview viewed as a scientific theory is being exposed as untenable and contrary to scientific knowledge precisely in those areas of science which since the Renaissance have been considered its safest domain. So in other words he saw science as a philosophical battleground against Bolshevism, against Marxism and we should see as likewise a philosophical battleground for Bolshevism, for Marxism. And we should ignore those individuals who claim that Marxist should leave philosophical questions in the science to the scientists. Scientists for the most part don't have a conscious philosophy and they will pick up the bits and bobs of philosophy that exist in society like these positivist ideas which were attached to a directly reactionary political agenda of these conscious reactionaries at this time as I say. Now the struggle for these ideas of different interpretations goes on to the present day there's as many interpretations as there are philosophers of science out there and you see the same idealist nonsense being revived in different guises time after time. One very famous example in the 1980s there was a physicist called John Wheeler who proposed the idea that it's not matter which is the fundamental building block of reality in fact it's information which sounds you know very appealing in the age of artificial intelligence and you know computers and all of this sort of stuff but like the idea that it's observation or experience what does it mean to say that it's information which is the fundamental building block of reality. Well just like the idea that experience is fundamental well you can't separate experience from that which you're experiencing and the subjective individual that's doing the experiencing and it's the same with information you can't separate information from that which is doing the informing and the conscious one that's being informed in other words it surreptitiously brings the conscious observer in as a key component of reality it sort of brings these mystical ideas in very objective sounding language I'm sure you'll agree you know information it doesn't get much more objective than that but it makes consciousness a fundamental part of reality opening the door to idealism and mysticism. The mysticism really thrive at the frontier of our ignorance that's what it's the god of the gaps that they talked about you know in quantum mechanics it's the frontier at the scale of the very small but we also see it on the on the frontier which is the the scale of the immeasurably vast I'm talking about cosmology of course now a key difference between materialism and idealism is that for us as materialists matter being primary and independent can have no creator or act of creation that doesn't go for idealists for idealists who suppose that mind or spirit is primary and prior it quite logically flows that the material universe had some sort of act of world creation and therefore of course some sort of world creator some sort of god and I think it's a stark expression of the crisis the philosophical crisis in science that cosmology has arrived at a fully fledged creation myth and I'm of course referring to big bang cosmology now at this point I didn't hear any gasps of shock but it's sometimes regarded as somewhat of a heresy to to disagree with the prevailing cosmology because it's the consensus the scientific consensus to which I have to simply say that scientific truth is not established by consensus many things have been the consensus within the scientific establishment that are now no longer regarded as regarded as very erroneous like the idea that the earth was the center of the universe or that heat is caused by a substance called caloric which flows through everything some sort of fluid in the 1920s it was even the consensus amongst astronomers and I think this is very significant that the Milky Way is the only galaxy in the universe that right up until the 1920s and the reason for that is because astronomers could not conceive of a universe so massive as to contain numerous galaxies and yeah in fact the idea of an infinite universe has been something that has always fill us it contains a philosophical challenge that astronomers have struggled with time and time again now a little bit about how the specifics of big-band cosmology how it came about well when astronomers look into space and they observe light coming from distant galaxies the the further that light has traveled to us the longer it has traveled and therefore the older we are the further back in time are effectively seeing that galaxy cosmologists talk about a look back time it's a billion light years away you see it as it was a billion years ago and in the 1920s looking back at these distant galaxies an astronomer by the name of Edwin Hubble made an empirical observation about these galaxies he noted that the further they are away from us the redder they appear and this can be physically explained and this is the prevailing physical explanation at the moment if these galaxies are regarded as receding from each other at speed it's almost as if we're in the midst of some sort of cosmic explosion effectively now that was that was Hubble's observation but take an idea such as this and push it to its extreme and it turns into an absurdity and that's precisely what a Belgian astronomer by the name of George Lemaître did in the 1920s he's supposed if all galaxies are moving away from each other at speed rewinds the tape and what do you arrive at you arrive at a single point what he called a primeval atom at which all matter and time and space itself simply came into existence when everything was concentrated at that one point physicists today call it a singularity everything came from nothing you have a moment of creation and we're forbidden from asking what came before fundamentally Lemaître was in no doubt what came before because he was an ordained Catholic priest it was God which created the universe now some at this point may object to me that actually it's a straw man to claim that most cosmologists regard the universe as having come into existence with a singularity 13.8 billion years ago and actually all the big bang says is that universe used to be hot and dense well I would respond to that that many leading physicists do literally believe that the universe came into existence 13.8 billion years ago Stephen Hawking certainly believed that time started with a singularity and many other he was a pretty you know he was a pretty well respected man in his field and many continue to to this day now yeah what the big bang as I mentioned what the big bang confronts astronomers with is that age old problem of the question of infinity now even our most powerful telescopes can only observe a finite fraction of the universe to understand the infinite and to to understand the relationship between the finite and the infinite we have to bring in philosophy and we have and we understand as Marxist that take into their extreme things turn into their opposite quantity transforms into quality and any physical law can only approximate to the workings of matter at some finite scale before it breaks down but in big bang cosmology what we see here is this this finite empirical observation is applied to the entire infinite cosmos the expansion that we see in this moment in this corner of the universe is taken as the last word in the whole history of the you know this infinite cosmos there are then sweeping mathematical simplifications are made to how we understand this cosmos in order to fit everything into a singular equation just to make the maths calculable not on the basis that we observe these simplifying factors like the idea that the universe is smooth and not lumpy I mean all of our all of our experience says the universe is very lumpy but they assume it's it's it's actually it's entirely smooth because otherwise you can't do the maths to find out what the how the universe has evolved we should note at this point that this this maths and and the the kind of construction of the big bang theory as it exists today is not the big what is now called the lambda cold dark matter model is certainly not the big bang theory that existed in La Matra's day because quite simply the big bang theory has not has repeatedly failed to fit in with observations and therefore all sorts of mathematical constructs have been added onto it to force it to shoehorn it into the observations rather than actually completely reevaluating the theory so for example the idea that 95% of the stuff in reality is is dark matter and dark energy we've never observed it but we know it must be there because otherwise the theory doesn't fit the facts but probably the most egregious and the one I love of all of these is inflation the idea of an inflation field which says that the universe very shortly after the soak this this big bang the universe went through a growth spur in which each nanometer which is roughly the size of an atom expanded within a little more than the instant to be 10 light years wide which is a distance kind of between stars it just went whoosh just like that not like that just like that just went just expanded at it's completely unphysical there's no evidence for it but they know it must have happened and all cosmologists swear blind it did happen because otherwise the our observations simply contradict that the facts take basically look at one side look at the cosmic microwave background radiation it's a certain temperature it's 2.5 degrees Kelvin or whatever on that side of the universe and it's the same temperature on that side of the universe they're the same temperature which would suggest in most physics that they were in causal contact with each other they've been in communication they know that each other are at that temperature there's no way they could have communicated there's no they've unless you invent stuff like the inflation field and this sort of thing to make it happen it's mathematical idealism on the most absurd scale the problem however that big bang cosmology faces is the the further you look back in space the further you look back in time and presumably you see a universe which existed in its its kind of like infancy in its cradle but and what we know what we what what astronomers suppose the universe looked like at that early time is that the earliest galaxies would have been very small they would have been largely free of dust and heavy metals which are produced by generations of star formation and only over time would they have agglomerated into large mature galaxies and yet now of course the James Webb telescope is able to bring back images of some of these galaxies which if we accept the established cosmology are only three or four hundred million years old which sounds like a lot but in cosmological terms is a mere blink of an eye and what they find are giant mature galaxies rich in dust and metals the kind of galaxies that could never have formed in the allotted time now for some I've no doubt there will be astronomers and cosmologists who are already in fact beginning to question the big bang paradigm but for many others there are a lot of careers at stake there's millions of pounds in research grants and they are already trying to come up with mechanisms by which galaxies can form in an instant like that they're trying to find some way of making the fact sustain this unsustainable theory and there is a historical precedent for this in the 17th century scientists were starting to look at the the Earth's history and they were noticing Strata that suggested very different climates and a lot of different a lot of change in the Earth's history fossils at lower levels that don't exist at high levels suggesting mass extinctions and yet everyone knew that the universe was only 6,000 years old and they had to invent some way to the first British catastrophists it was later taken up by some very talented individuals in France this idea of catastrophism but the earliest catastrophists invoked all kinds of floods and meteors to try and make those facts fit in with the creation myth now obviously the real solution was that the universe the Earth was actually four and a half billion years old and I'm sure in time this will become unsustainable for the established cosmology now to come back come back down to Earth I want to talk about as briefly as I can I want to address a third place where I think that particularly actually more recently you've seen a real penetration of idealism into a field of the sciences and that is particularly in the last 30 years a real drift in this direction and that is in the sciences that deal with the relationship between the thinking brain and the body and the origins of consciousness the question of course really goes to the root of the clash between materialism and idealism as camps within philosophy that relationship between mind and matter is at the centre of that antagonism within philosophy and we know of course that it is the brain is the seat of conscious thought and we know what the brain is it's you know it's roughly 1.3 kilograms a little more a little less for some people it's no one in particular but just you know some people the scientists maybe even a little more some of these philosophers certainly a lot less it consists of 80 billion neurons a similar number of glial cells and perhaps I was astonished by this number a thousand trillion synapses that's the connections between the neurons it's by far the most complex object that we are familiar with in the universe and it poses a question how from this you know this pink massive very complex matter does the mind and conscious thoughts and these sort of phenomena that we associate with conscious thought how does it emerge how does it how does it occur that this this takes place in addressing this question and in fact actually in really posing the question correctly we see how important it is to have a philosophy and where you can end up if you don't have a conscious philosophy as well now difficulties in solving this question really go back to the dawn of the Enlightenment this is a very old question the relationship between mind and body you know Descartes for example regarded nature as fundamentally mechanical everything is merely a mechanism the animals humans and mechanisms are merely you know with this mechanistic view of the universe everything is merely the sum of its parts interlocking one thing pushes into another like a piece of clockwork and there's no real space if you just see the whole there's nothing more than the sum of its parts there's no space for consciousness within that model and therefore Descartes solved this problem if you can call it a solution by supposing that the spiritual the conscious psychical phenomena and physical the physical world and matter exists on two fundamentally different planes it was a dualistic solution in which the two how did the two interact while there was some sort of God organ within the brain for him and that was that was the pineal gland it was a rather arbitrary point right in the center of the brain and that's how that's how consciousness gets into the brain through the pineal gland now the problems with the mechanistic view of the universe and how that relates to mind and consciousness didn't really stop with Descartes that view prevailed to a large extent in the 19th century and Engels was very critical of this view you had a mechanical materialist in the 19th century arguing that consciousness was something that was produced by the brain in a similar way that the liver produces bile and yeah this is this is how you know consciousness is like some sort of liquid just emitted by the brain you know like an endocrine organ or whatever it was an explanation in fact that explains precisely nothing it's similar to what I talked about before the old theory that heat is caused by this substance that flows throughout the through matter called caloric it doesn't really tell you anything about what heat is it just transfers the problem to a new substance called caloric which which is doesn't really exist and therefore you've actually mystified the problem it transfers it to this new invented substance and so it still remains a problem basically in which you know explanations from the outside were invoked because they couldn't find it within the brain itself now since then of course in the 20th century in particular we've delved deep into the brain literally and metaphorically we've uncovered a great deal about its workings but by and large this has taken the form of analyzing the parts or aspects of of the brain itself now Engels actually talks in socialism utopian and scientific this is a very important part of science is to break things down before we can put it together you know we have to see we have the anatomist has to break things up down see things in their death and put them back together and see how things would have developed in their life but yeah we've analyzed all sorts of things you know the role of chemistry of neurotransmitters of hormones in the brain's functioning electrical signals the structures of neurons how synapses form how synapses are broken how the brain develops from the embryo through to the fully conscious thinking human adults all of these things that we've made advances in but the question of consciousness has been rather neglected a point that was made by a guy called Francis Crick in the 1990s he was he pointed out that consciousness has been essentially neglected within neuroscience and within the sciences generally and at that point Crick in particular who you may know he's the co-discoverer of DNA him and others believed the new technologies like I'm going to get to say this wrong magnetoencephalography and MRI were on the cusp of basically solving the problem of consciousness by finding correlations between the activity of the magnetic activity of the human brain these brain waves and specific conscious thoughts obviously he was involved in decoding the human genome well finding the structure of DNA which led to the decoding of the genome and just like each gene encodes a certain protein he thought each brain wave would be able to tell us something about a specific conscious thought and in particular there was a lot of hope placed upon the 40 hertz wave that passes through the brain what we call the gamma wave which this engendered a lot of hope because it tends to be suppressed when we're asleep or under anaesthetic and therefore this was seen as a marker of consciousness basically but all of those hopes inevitably ended in disappointment and the problem the reason is because his approach is dogged by the same problem that the question of consciousness has been dogged with throughout the history of this this is a reductionist kind of mechanical materialist view reducing consciousness to one thing this particular brain wave and but the problem is you can turn over a synapse or a neuron or a piece of brain tissue or interrogate these 40 hertz waves or what have you and your consciousness will be found lacking just to give you an example when we we memorize things what they notice is parts of the brain when we recall a memory sorry parts of the brain that were involved in initially processing that were once more activated so those bits of your brain which are associated with seeing you know a car crash unfold in front of you all of that sort of stuff you recall that memory to mind those same parts of the brain light up you literally re-experience it thereby actually transforming the memory itself and so the way that that memory is stored of course we know there's a difference between short and long-term memory each time it's recalled it is stored in a different way so therefore the idea that there is a a single thought can be corresponded to a single brain wave the brain is actually it's not a hard disk where you can read the magnetic code you know it's not a static thing it's a process it's developing and you need dialectics you need to see the brain precisely in its development in its evolution and the problem with reductionism is that it picks some level of causality within the brain and it reduces consciousness to that it used to be regarded as a bit like a you know a piece of wiring like a computer basically like a hard disk or something like that then you have this idea of brain waves and other things but fundamentally it's it's a problem with this reductionist approach and the failure to find a simple one-to-one correlation between parts of the brain and conscious thinking has actually led the field into a complete descent into a fractured mess in which mysticism has utterly revived in the most absurd ways you have individuals like David Chalmers who's a so-called philosopher who claims that there's no need to there's no way to in fact tell if you are conscious I know that I'm conscious but I can study your psychology I can study your neurons I can study everything else without supposing you're conscious so therefore I can assume he referred to we can assume that you're all zombies and I can continue to analyze your the phenomenon of consciousness anyway it basically dismisses the idea that we even need to address the problem it's an absurd conclusion it's clear that consciousness is an extremely important element in human survival and human culture that the passions the will of human beings that phenomenon of consciousness that qualitative phenomenon deserves scientific investigation that's one approach to the question you have others like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose again a Nobel Prize is no more certain than a PhD on your wall or what have you to guarantee that you've got a good philosophy whatsoever or are not capable of slipping into the most bizarre mysticism this is Roger Penrose his idea what he advocates is a kind of quantum mysticism basically as he effectively attempts to show that formal logic shows that humans are like machines you know they operate on the the Newtonian kind of level and if the brain is regarded as a kind of machine just like a Turing machine it can't be capable of like flashes of creativity and solving it's basically how do you get these flashes of creativity how do you get a free will in this like brain machine type thing and he says well it has to come from some non-deterministic realm he points to specifically these microtubules very thin tubes that give the brain synapses their structure and says that quantum effects will have a quite a big impact over those very small tubes and therefore quantum mechanics kind of inserts itself via the via these quantum tubules and it's complete mystical woo that is invented to basically because just like basically Descartes for Descartes it was the pineal glands for Roger Penrose it's the microtubules in the brain consciousness is this thing that is literally dragged in from another realm basically it's complete mysticism and it fits in with the failure of a mechanical materialism to find this consciousness and finally you have others again if you reduce if the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts right and the whole is conscious then presumably the parts are also conscious right the individual neuron goes around having a little bit of a thought and you know even the individual proteins and neurotransmitters have an even smaller amount of a thought going on in their head this is obviously patent nonsense and it's is highly respected interpretation of of consciousness referred to as integrated information theory again information sounds very objective defer to the experts they know what they're talking about they use complicated language but yeah for the integrated information theory consciousness is reduced to the processing of information and anything that processes information is a little bit conscious so a barometer on the wall is a little bit conscious a stone is presumably a little bit conscious and an even electron would be in an atom would be a little bit conscious again consciousness is brought in as an all permeating part of the fabric of reality it's a descent into mysticism and idealism it's complete madness and it's taken over the field to be honest and in fact biannually since 1994 the University of Arizona has put on a notorious science of consciousness conference that has brought together these Nobel Prize winners and neuroscientists and philosophers to address this question and in 19... sorry in 2016 this guy called John Horgan who is an occasional writer for the Scientific American and a bit of a bit of a cynical popular science journalist he attended this biannual conference in 2016 he'd attended the 1994 one and what he observed when it was there first of all it was now sponsored by the new age quack millionaire called Deepak Chopra you had you had talks on quantum consciousness panpsychism and you also had talks on the paranormal you had talk you had meditations there was also music in the evenings and this sort of stuff it was it was completely it's absolutely degeneracy to be honest it's like the last days of the Roman Empire this is the state that the field has fallen into and it's the punishment that it's suffered for a lack of philosophy now to understand to jet I'm going to go a little bit over but to understand that the brain and consciousness we have to see the whole in its interconnections we have to see things dialectically to address this question correctly firstly the central nervous system is completely embedded in our body as well as in you know in our organs and in our in our muscles is completely inseparable from them and many of the emotions that we undoubtedly feel in our and we think about are not simply electrical signals but a whole body physiological responses to the world around us you know we talk about feeling butterflies in our stomach or when we're excited or our ears burning with indignation and these are not just terms of phrase these are entire body hormonal responses that we experience throughout our body and our brain is of course embedded within that and it profound and they can profoundly of course affect our mental state and yeah the brain far from being a simple piece of electrical kit is the whole thing is pumped full of blood from the rest of the body is it cannot be separated from it it's bathed in cerebrospinal fluid it has the same hormone receptors that the rest of our body has and the cells behave using evolutionary mechanisms that were previously used by unicellular organisms to go about their daily lives that synapses believe to be kind of like an adaptation of a former property of single-celled organisms that they used to get around that's what the synapses are kind of like reaching out there's no separation of course between the brain and the body it can't be reduced to some sort of piece of electrical kit and in turn that the living human individual cannot be separated from their social environment the brain itself of course co-evolved in human beings precisely with the need for abstract thoughts amongst this social tool-making hominid ancestor of ours and with the brain of course co-evolving with the brain was also co-evolving language which we can hardly of course day-to-day we can hardly separate language with abstract thought that internal monologue we have in our heads but language of course is not and the power of abstraction that accompanies it it's not therefore an individual but it's very much a social phenomenon a babbling baby isn't yet speaking in any particular language but through interaction through socialization with its parents that babbling turns into language as I'm sure many parents have observed with interest and the point I'm making is that to study the brain and the mind we have to understand them as they develop in their context we have to understand things dialectically in evolutionary terms in its historical and cultural and social context and individually how the individual develops from embryology all the way up to the fully developed fully grown human and so yeah I've been told to some of us so I will just say some final words now so further yeah I want to say a few remarks about science in general first of all it's clear from everything that's that's you know that's sort of been gone before that you know idealist trends are worming their way into the sciences and have been for over a century and the general overarching course of this is the decay of capitalism the fact that the ruling class are turning away from reality the despair of that ruling class but there are secondary causes as well the extreme division of labor that capitalism extends into the sciences the separation between experimental and theoretical sciences which you know the division between mental and manual labor has always favored mental labor has elevated it above manual labor and led to idealist trends and thinking but also the general decay within the sciences themselves the fact that you have this publish or perish kind of culture all of this is having is also having its effect and much to the detriment of science but of course most scientists you could take away from this talk that I'm trying to you know down down talk the whole of the scientists the whole of the sciences but in actual fact you know most scientists are very sharp thinkers and do very good excellent science and many of them are of course keenly aware of what is happening within the sciences not all of them subscribe to this nonsense that I've outlined previously and there are amongst them there are those that are grasping towards materialism and there are those that have already arrived at a conscious materialist view of the world and we as Marxists have to make alliances with those scientists I think we have to reach out to them and win them to revolutionary Marxism win them to our ideas so I think the final words I want to leave to Lenin who wrote a very short and very good article which I highly recommend Comrade Reid called On the Significance of Militant Materialism and he said in addition to the in addition to the alliance with consistent materialists who do not belong to the Communist Party of no less and perhaps even of more importance for the work which militant materialism should perform is an alliance with those modern natural scientists who incline towards materialism and are not afraid to defend and preach it against the fashionable philosophical wanderings into idealism and skepticism which are prevalent in so-called educated society so I think that's the that's what we've got to do we can't I think you know like Pascal Yordan we can't just leave we can't just leave things to the con there are conscious reactionaries who are pushing their agenda and I'm sure comrades in some of their contributions can come in on on some of those things but we have to also stand up for materialism stand up for these ideas and we will find that there are scientists that receive what we have to say very warmly and we'll be very interested in our ideas and what we've got to say on the questions