 Today we welcome Dr. Bernardo Castro to Skeptico. Bernardo is quite an amazing guy. You may have heard him on Skeptico before, one of my favorite guests, who has become a leading voice in this ongoing philosophical and scientific debate over the nature of consciousness. And this is one of the things that I hope we're gonna talk about maybe from the ground up with Bernardo and retrace some of the questions that come before all the cool inside baseball stuff we love to talk about. But the other thing I wanted to just do is wave an introduction of Bernardo. And actually while I do that, let me pull up some of his great books here. And he kind of said, you know, don't worry about the books, but I have to kind of bring up there all the fantastic books that he's written about consciousness. But one of the things I think is really terrific about Bernardo is as you'll hear, he's someone who's grounded in the common sense of someone who has a real job, which he does. And in this case, Bernardo has a very serious senior position with the distinguished global high tech company. So I think that's something that really comes through in Bernardo's work, is that he's a real guy in the real world at a very high level, not somebody who's pontificating from a academic chair that doesn't really interact with anyone other than 18 to 21 year olds. So with that as a part of a reintroduction, Bernardo, welcome back to Skeptico. Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. It was great to talk to you. It was great to be here. So what's going on with you? We're talking a little bit, but we're gonna talk about a lot of great stuff, but give people a little bit more of a sense of your background, who you are, what's going on with you, and do talk about these books one more time. It's a lot going on. I mean, I still have that job you alluded to, still working in the corporate world. It's been quite some years now, it does ground me. I mean, you mentioned it as a half joke, but it does ground me in reality, in the corporate people are sort of trained not to deceive themselves and to reject nonsense, and then that is helpful. Next to that, a lot going on in philosophy, a lot going on around my articles, my books, events happening to the point that you asked me earlier, how are you doing? I couldn't even answer, I don't know how I'm doing. I mean, I'm just going through the emotions, going through the hurricane that is below, and this year will be a special year. There's a lot coming this year in terms of more articles, a new book, lots of events, more media attention, and I have had before, even mainstream, which is sort of a bit of a surprise to me to some extent. And I don't know where it's going to end up. I'm just going with the flow and we see where it's going to end up. Well, let's talk a little bit about the media attention. One place that people might have seen you pop up recently is this very excellent article that you wrote for Scientific American, got a lot of tread, a lot of traction, a lot of people heard about it. There's also, of course, your blog that many of us are familiar with, Metaphysical Speculations, but do tell us, you've kind of hinted at it, what's coming up in the near term for you that we should be looking for? By the time this episode comes out, probably everybody will know it already. There will be another Scientific American article coming, the third one, and it goes much further than the previous two articles. I was surprised that Siam actually decided to publish What's Coming Now because it's a direct argument for this notion that consciousness is at the root, the basis of reality, an argument based on physics. It took them four months to decide to publish it, but I heard the news last week that they wanted to publish it. So that's one thing. Over the past year, I have published several academic papers and academic journals which was an experiment, something new. I always tried to speak directly to the public and for the last 18 months or so, I've been trying to also speak to academia and mixed results. Sometimes what I have to say is welcome. Sometimes it is attacked in ways that are not always fair, but all in all, the experience has been gratifying because grudgingly or not, they did publish so far 11 of my articles and hopefully there will be article 12 coming up soon. Well, I think the real indication of your impact is that you're certainly not being ignored. That I am not, no, maybe I'm being ignored by the highest tiers of the media industry. I haven't reached those levels yet. I'm not even sure if I want to be there ever, but at the level where I'm playing, I'm not ignored now. Well, that's great. And I think the impact that you've had is really significant in trying to kind of understand what is going on a number of different levels. And I told you at the beginning that I have somewhat of a new format for this Skeptico episode and for future Skeptico episodes to come because I've always had in mind this idea of threading these discussions and introducing you to other guests that I have on the show and then having a threaded debate discussion along some well-defined ideas. And in this case, and I shared a little bit about this with you, but it's this kind of idea that I've been kicking around for a while. It's become kind of the Skeptico process and that's this idea that we follow the data, we use science, we use sound logic, in your case philosophy, the way that you constructed of course is extremely rigorous, extremely logical intellectual. So follow the data and then kind of the one that throws a lot of people for a loop and we'll have some fun talking about this, but it's become part of my process and that's look for the conspiracy. There's always people out there that are trying to throw us off the trail and to me that is the conspiracy and then finally find the deep spirituality. We have had, you and I in the past, have had some wonderful discussions about where all this stuff leads ultimately. And I think in the broadest sense, it leads to something approaching what we would call spirituality, somewhat of a defining of who we are, why we're here, what is the meaning behind all this. So I appreciate you playing along with me a little bit as we go on this journey. And this is what I thought we would talk about. So you know where I thought we would begin with this? And it's something that I think so many times when you and I talk, we maybe rush over this in a way that leaves a lot of people just kind of out in the cold from the very beginning. And that's this idea of what is consciousness? And I wanna be very careful. I wanna see if we can define consciousness. This is like, you know, doing something with your blindfolded and one arm tied behind your back. So without using the term materialism or idealism, panpsychism, any of those, but without being too simple-minded about it, what are we talking about when we talk about consciousness? What is consciousness to the average person who's intellectually oriented, but maybe is a little bit fuzzy about what the debate is about all this? Consciousness is that which experiences is the ground of experience. Is that whose excitations are the experiences of daily life? If we weren't conscious, we would experience nothing. There would be nothing to talk about. There would be no emotions. There would be no perceptions. There would be no blue and reds. There would be no regret, disappointment, happiness, the warmth of love. None of that would exist because all of these are experiences or excitations of consciousness, so to say. So as far as we can know for sure, consciousness is all there is. It is the canvas of life. You know the way I sometimes put it, and this is how I put it in the book that I wrote, is that it's an oversimplification, but nonetheless, it's the voice inside your head. It's the voice inside your head that listens because the problem with consciousness as we talk about it, of course, is that if consciousness is everything, like you said, then if it is fundamental, like you're alluding to, but all of a sudden we're throwing people off a little bit, then we can never really get it. So a simple test I always say is, say hello silently in your head. And what heard that hello is consciousness. Consciousness is always there, always present for the voice inside your head and everything that's going on. Now, you can tear that apart philosophically and in a number of ways, but I always felt like that little simple experiment that anyone can do can at least get us to that first step of realizing there's something more. There's something to talk about here because of course the real challenge in all this is what does science have to say about what consciousness is? And I have for you a clip that's gonna be so fun to play. I really can't wait. I'm excited to play you this clip. So I wanna play this clip from you from some very, very esteemed mainstream scientists. And I wanna make it clear that this is a clip from these people will be recognized by people in my community as skeptics or as materialists, but I think we have to acknowledge as you were talking about at the very beginning in terms of where you're going and in terms of mainstream acceptance, these people are just generally regarded as scientists as the mainstream scientists. We're talking about Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Cross, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson, whether we like it or not, is the face of science for many, many, many Americans. So let's see what mainstream science has to say about consciousness. Here we go. I'm gonna play this clip. You can see it there. I'm gonna play it. But you can say something about the question which you really would wish to know the answer to. And I mean, for me, it would be what's consciousness? Oh, yeah. Because that's totally battling. That's Richard. You know what I think? I agree. Not that you ask, but what I think on this is, consciousness has kind of baffled us for a while, okay? And evidence that we haven't a clue about what consciousness is, is drawn from the fact of how many books are published on the topic, right? We're not really continuing to publish books, not really on like Newtonian physics. It's done, all right? So the fact that people keep publishing books on consciousness is the evidence we don't know anything about it. Because if we knew all about it, you wouldn't have to keep publishing. So, so, what I wonder, what I wonder, Richard, is, whether there really is no such thing as consciousness at all. And that there's some other understanding of the functioning of the human brain that renders that question obsolete. To that, I've gotta say like, oh wow. Okay. And I'm laughing, I'm laughing like you're laughing. I was laughing. What is so funny about that? Of course that last voice was Bill Nye, the science guy who was up there with him too. He was astonished, Bill was astonished. Well, it doesn't take much. I mean, the idea that maybe consciousness is not there, is probably the weirdest, stupidest idea ever conceived by human thought. I mean, where does thought take place? It takes place in consciousness. So here we have consciousness speculating about the possibility that consciousness does not exist and it may not be there. I mean, the very thought is that in your face contradiction and the fact that something like this is not only seriously entertained but even verbalized by a person with the public exposure of the gentleman we just saw is a worrying sign of cultural sickness. A very serious one. The other thing that got me in, I hope you just comment on because you are a philosopher and expert in logic and you've your books, you do a wonderful job of deconstructing the silliness down to a level that is extremely comprehensive and well thought out. But I love just kind of a book thing. I thought was just stunning, you know? I mean, what kind of logic is that? They're not writing any books about physics. They're not writing, and he's saying Newtonian physics. I mean, I think, first of all, books, you mean papers, don't you? You mean peer reviewed published papers and aren't they doing a lot of work on gravity and, you know, it's just in physics that are central to just preposterous at so many levels. And it just, again, it's just really, really funny. But to his credit, he did say the Newtonian laws. So classical Newtonian physics. But given that, I mean, this is, I guess, kind of interesting in that we build on these laws, right? So no one has said that the laws of Newtonian physics are, quote unquote, wrong. They're just incomplete. They just describe a certain aspect of what we observe. And the same could be said for this insistence that consciousness is physical, biological, a brain-based. All those things are not wrong, per se. They're just incomplete in terms of our understanding of consciousness. If consciousness is, as we'll talk about, somehow fundamental, then everything gets turned on its head. Does it mean that there aren't some neural correlates to consciousness and brain function? So that's where I think it's just, it just shows a deep misunderstanding, I guess, would be generous of what they're really talking about when he talks about consciousness. I think what motivates even the question, because you see how they formulated the question, how Richard Dawkins formulated the question. He said, what is consciousness? What they're trying to get at is a reduction. What they're trying to answer, the form of the answer they are looking for is consciousness is just this, this, and that, operating in this, that way, under this and that condition. In other words, they're trying to explain consciousness in terms of something else, in terms of something that isn't consciousness. That would be the answer to the question, what is consciousness? And that is indeed a baffling question, because you see, who is trying to answer? It is consciousness that is trying to answer. So you get the self-reference there that makes the question indeed very baffling if you're framing it that way, if you're trying to reduce consciousness, and that's where it goes wrong. Nobody, well, very few people have stopped to think that maybe we shouldn't formulate the question that way. Maybe what we have to ask is, how can we explain everything else in terms of consciousness, which is the given of reality? It's the basis of knowledge. It's that within which we know and inquire. You know what, I'd almost suggest that that's step two. Step one is to properly frame the borderline between science and philosophy, which is, again, something you just wonderfully do and will give people a sense for how you process this stuff in your books. Let me share a quote, and if you would be so kind as to read this for us, a quote from one of your books. Do you wanna take a minute and look that over and see if it's okay to read that? Yeah, capturing observable patterns and regularities of elements of reality relative to each other is an empirical and scientific question. But pondering the fundamental nature of these elements is not, it is a philosophical question. This is not mine, and this is a realization that, I mean, Russell said something like that over 100 years ago, that this is well known. It's not something that I came up with. It is quintessentially yours. I don't care if somebody said it 100 years ago. You have five books that so eloquently deconstructed and reintroduced it to the discussion that is ongoing that what's like we just saw are fumbling over that I think it is completely yours. I don't care who else, but please, tell us about that divide between why science can't reach that. Well, the scientific method is largely an empirical method. It's based on observation. And when we observe nature, what we are observing is the behavior of nature. When we see a billard ball hit another, that's a behavior of matter. And what science then does, it analyzes these observations and tries to extract the patterns and regularities of the behavior of physical nature as it presents itself on the screen of perception, conscious perception. So at the end, we end up with predictive models of nature's behavior. We know that if we put things together this and that way, we will get this and that effect. And these predictive models are the heart of technology, where we use these models to develop technology because we know how nature behaves. And then we can put that behavior to use to our advantage. And because of the success of technology, science has acquired enormous cachet in our culture as the enabler of the technologies that extend and improve our lives. And this is all fair enough. But science says nothing about the intrinsic nature of the physical. It only analyzes behavior in differential terms in terms of patterns of differences, bare differences. For instance, what is a positive electric charge? It is that which is not a negative electric charge because it behaves in a symmetrical opposite way. That's all science does. But what is a charge? Intrinsically, what is the nature of a charge? Science has nothing to say about it. It's fundamentally outside the scope of the scientific method. The intrinsic nature of being, of existence, is a question of ontology, a question of philosophy, which has a broader, less precise, but a broader method that's not based only on perceptual observation. It's based on logic, also based on empirical consistency. It's based on certain values, like parsimony. You try to make sense of things with the least number of postulates. And it requires a certain way of thinking and a basic level of acquaintance with the literature that lots of scientists don't have. Some do have, but lots of them, especially the very vocal ones on the media, lots of them don't have. They're not even aware of this fundamental distinction. So they end up thinking that science itself is a philosophy. Why, it has nothing to say about the intrinsic nature of things. And then they spill out nonsense. Bullshit, if you forgive my English. Some of these gentlemen we just saw on that video are guilty of this, of being very ignorant of the issues of philosophy. And then doing pseudo philosophy. You know what I think is particularly relevant in this case, is that we have a growing body and it's been growing for the last 100 years, ever since our quantum physics really ran up against the problem of consciousness, the question of consciousness. And that's the idea that consciousness is somehow fundamental. That everything is arising out of consciousness rather than everything can be reduced to how consciousness is being produced. Given that that's a valid, reasonable, alternative philosophical outlook, it makes it particularly troublesome to not understand those differences. If it was just some wacky philosophical idea, that would be one thing. But the idea that consciousness is fundamental and we therefore can't get there from here is, if you get what I mean, is particularly troubling. I am totally with you. Science historically has grown around this, has been developed around this idea of separation between subject and object. And materialism enforces that separation very dramatically because the subject is something generated by your nervous system inside your skull and the objects are out there and there's a major ontological distinction between these two things that allows science to feel, or at least scientists, to feel grounded in the separation in order to be neutral observers of nature. And the moment you say, well, but everything is mind, then there is no insulator between the mind of the observer and what is observed because it's all mind anyway. And it becomes difficult for many scientists to make sense of their role as observers if it is all mind anyway. It's very counter-intuitive to them. Ultimately, there is no problem behind it at all. This notion that consciousness is fundamental, that the world of there is also fundamentally in consciousness does not contradict the neutrality of the observer under certain conditions. And there are other conditions it does because we know that experimentally. But because they are not fluent with the issues at hand, they misinterpret, misunderstand it, feel threatened by it and reject it ultimately. So that really does, I think, maybe get to the heart of this dilemma and this challenge that we're facing of the original question, what is consciousness? And I think when people fly into this thing and they're going like, well, what's the debate? Maybe now they have a grounding for how difficult it is for science to come off of a position that when it's really exposed is just doesn't add up. It's very exposed in terms of being intellectually sound, philosophically sound. The idea just doesn't hold water very well as we've explored so many times on this show. Now, let me kind of switch gears for a minute here because one of the things that I did in preparation for this show was go to my very excellent, and I mean that in all sincerity, Skeptico Community, folks at the Skeptico Forum, I put up a post and I said, hey, I need your help. I have this interview with Bernardo and I got a fantastic response. I have to tell everyone your answers and responses were terrific. So many of them have been incorporated into these ideas. I hope you hear them as this interview flows. I couldn't use them all, but there is one post that I wanted to pull out because I thought it really got to some of the deeper inside baseball kind of stuff that we like to talk about you and I like to talk about. And I thought it could kind of propel us into that deeper discussion of the conspiracy and deep spirituality angle of it. So DP Don South wrote, for a question for Bernardo, while I do love full blown idealism, I think we know what he means, it does fail to get to grips with the whole range of unusual human experience, i.e. spirits, aliens, NDEs, reincarnation, et cetera. Let's talk about that for a minute because I do know where he's coming from. It's one thing to say that consciousness is fundamental. It's another thing to say, okay, what does that mean for these extended consciousness realms that we keep bumping into? And how does that ontological shift allow us to better explain what we seem to be observing there? I will answer this directly, but can you give me like 10 seconds just to make an observation before I sink my teeth into the question? I think before we even get to extraordinary experiences and the paranormal, there is a challenge here to explain the normal, the ordinary, because the ordinary and the normal are not explained under mainstream physicalism or mainstream materialism. There is no explanation for why we feel the qualities of experience, why we see red, why we feel warmth, why we feel disappointment. There is nothing about mass, momentum, charge, spin, in terms of which we could deduce phenomenal properties, what we experience in consciousness. So there's an enormous gap for explaining the normal. That's why I focus on the normal since the paranormal is the next step. We haven't explained even the normal yet. I'm totally with you up to the last part that you said, I might take issue with that, but I take it one step further and point out something like memory because we really don't understand memory, right? We don't understand what's going on. And memory is a tricky one because it's one that all the neurology folks, all the mind equals brain materialistic sciences. No, no, we really have a handle on memory. We just need to drill down a little bit further. So if you can speak to memory being another one. So yeah, we don't understand how we experience red or how we experience love, but even this thing that memory, they think they have nailed, they don't understand. No, if you look at the literature coming out, claiming to explain memory, it's all self-contradictory. Some explain memory in terms of, you know, large networks of neurons, others explain memory, try to explain that memory in terms of intra-neurone processes. Things are all over the place. I can mention one concrete example. There was a study published a couple of years ago claiming to have found the key to memory based on experiments with mice. They expose the mice to a certain experience in one environment. They move the mouse to another environment. And then the mouse would trigger that memory artificially and the mouse would behave as if it were in the first environment. And then, oh, we figured out how memories are created. And then if you go through the details, what they did was they grew some cellular switches in the brain of the mice that they could then identify which neurons fired up when the mouse was exposed to a first experience in environment A. So they had the map of all the neurons that activated at that moment in environment A. And they moved the mouse to environment B. And with a specific technique using light, they could artificially reactivate the same neurons as the mouse was in environment B. And guess what? The mouse behaved as if it were in environment A. Now, who recorded and recalled the memory? The scientists, through these cellular techniques, through exposing the neurons to light, creating these cellular switches in the neurons and recording which neurons were activated in the first situation and then reactivating them artificially in the second situation, that doesn't show at all how memory works. To show how memory works, we would have to figure out where the mouse stores the pattern of activated neurons without these artificial cellular switches and exposure to light the scientists created. So what you see being claimed in the science press about we having understood memory, it's extremely exaggerated. We don't understand memory. And let's give for people maybe a counter potential explanation for how that might work. And it could also relate to if anyone is familiar with epigenetics, which in the similar way kind of blows all this craziness about brain-based consciousness and consciousness being 100% brain-based. Our modern understanding of epigenetics blows that away. But in your mice example, we could take something like Sheldrick's morphogenetic fields, morphogenetic fields if you wanted to and say there's or any other understanding we have of consciousness in the cloud, right? And then that some certain pattern, some certain arrangement of physical neurons is then able to re-access that would be a potential beginning of an explanation. Am I getting kind of where you're coming from there? Perhaps, I don't really have a firm opinion on this. It doesn't matter. There just is some other ways that we could get there, right? Absolutely, and it may have to do with the nature of time itself. But to guess here what memory might be, I would just be speculating. I don't really have an intelligent answer to that question. Fair enough. And I think it's important to say that maybe one of the reasons you don't is because once we jump into that consciousness is fundamental mindset, everything we're gonna say back about explaining this winds up being this kind of backdoor materialism as I call it, where we wind up coming back to using some kind of mechanical materialist explanation for things that we want to get away from the first place, but we don't have the language to really make that leap and we're confined by our language and our shared experience to explain what's going on. So I really like that you pulled up in terms of not jumping to a definitive answer and hopefully people will get a sense for two things. One, how difficult it is and how hamstrung scientists are. That's why they wind up saying all these silly things because it's hard to say anything that can't be contradicted once you make this paradigm, this ontological shift. Do you have any thoughts on that? I wanted to make a comment on something you said because I think you were very correct. Once we are sort of addicted to a certain pattern of thinking that sort of grows out of materialist assumptions, it's very difficult to kick the habit. Even if you conceptually convince yourself that, hey, materialism just doesn't cut the mustard, maybe idealism, this consciousness as fundamental thing, maybe that's the best avenue to make sense of nature. Even if you're conceptually convinced of that, we end up falling back into old patterns of thinking that have been inculcated in us through education, through the media, everywhere. It's a habit, it's very difficult to kick. You have to be very alert to your own patterns of thought to see when you're falling into that trap again. Okay, so I have to bring you back to the question. To endies. To the question at hand, though, because I do think the fringes offer us some clues, some insights in terms of testing our ideas and our theories. So in this case, I would take issue with you. I think the extraordinary experiences, the paranormal experiences do two things. One, they test the theory at its edges, but it also challenges our idea of what normal is. I mean, if there is an extended realm where near-death experiencers go and people who use psychedelics go and when they go there, they see, they say ET was there and he said, why did it take you so long? If people in reincarnation scenarios, either between lives or in past lives, are accessing these extended consciousness realms which we don't understand, we can't begin to map out, we can't even map out our own, let alone theirs, then maybe there's something there that will add to this discussion. And I also think the second part of this, which we didn't talk about is important too, in that there are a lot of wisdom traditions who have told us exactly this and they've gone one step further and they've said what you need to do is kind of look past that. Don't look past, don't look too far, don't get too hung up on the spirits, the spirits, the aliens, the extended consciousness realms which are out there because they're just another middle ground to someplace else that you want to get to which introduces a whole bunch of other questions about purpose, direction, why? But there's a lot on the table there. I'll go ahead and have at it. Well, if you look at the extraordinary things that are mentioned in the list, and the ease, spirits, I think with the exception perhaps of aliens, they all have one thing in common which is that consciousness doesn't stop upon physical death, the death of the body. And that is something that is inherent indeed to idealism. If consciousness is fundamental, if it's not just an epiphenomenon or something generated or constituted by particular arrangements of matter in the form of a brain, and if those arrangements then dissolve, then consciousness dissolves as well, if instead consciousness is fundamental, then it cannot disappear because it's what there is. It has nowhere to go, it has nowhere to disappear into. It's death out of which everything arises. So consciousness itself cannot disappear. But then the question becomes, but what is the form of that consciousness? Because clearly my own personal consciousness is not all in compassing. I'm not aware of what's going on on the other side of the galaxy. I'm not aware even of your thoughts just across the globe. I'm not aware of what my girlfriend's thinking downstairs. And I know what the neighbors are watching on television. So clearly my personal consciousness is very restricted and yet I'm saying that consciousness is the ground of all existence. So I think what's important for people to understand is that idealism is not solipsism. The claim is not that all nature happens as my own personal dream. The claim is that nature itself unfolds in consciousness, but consciousness is transpersonal. It extends beyond my personal consciousness and my or yours personal consciousness is a dissociated complex of universal consciousness if we could call it that way. And if life is what these dissociated complexes of universal consciousness look like, what is death? Death would be the end of the dissociation. It would be the reintegration of what we consider to be our personal consciousness into a broader, more basic matrix of experience that corresponds to the universe at large. And in that sense, what I'm positing here does support the idea that consciousness continues. To what degree of dissociation it continues? Is it still personal consciousness? Is it individualized in some form? I don't know, perhaps if it is, then there is grounds to talk about what people refer to as spirits. But in one way or another, it validates this idea that consciousness continues. Okay, I think that might bring us to the second part of the process that I want to talk about, the conspiracy thing. And I wanna talk about it. I mean, that word is gonna throw a lot of people for a loop, but I wanna talk about it in a new way that maybe does add something to the conversation. Because the first conspiracy I'd say surrounding consciousness is the God conspiracy. Because we got all on those scientists, the Neil deGrasse Tyson and the rest for their just silliness. I think one of the things that lies behind that is they're worried about the God thing. They're worried about a discussion of consciousness is going to lead back to a discussion about God. And you know what, they're kind of right. Because ultimately it does, once we move past the scientific materialism that did defeat Catholicism and the church and brought the power over to the science gods, the move away from that to ideal, even the idealism that you're talking about is a move that brings up all these questions of God again. So I have some specific questions for you about what you think about the God question, whether you agree with this idea of the way I usually sneak it into people is by calling it the hierarchy of consciousness. If there's a hierarchy, there's something at the top. And then I wanna understand how you think idealism fits into that. But what I thought would be kind of a fun way to do it is through this interview that I did with the very excellent near-death experience researcher, Dr. Jeff Long, who recently wrote a book about what near-death experiencers have to say about God. So I've teed up the questions, but let me, if you will, go ahead and play this clip and then we can talk about the God conspiracy as it relates to consciousness. In the book, God and the Afterlife, you asked during your experience, did you encounter any specific information or awareness that God or a supreme being either does or does not exist? And then you said, you broke it down and said, what did they believe before their experience and what did they believe currently as they're answering the survey? And the choices you gave them were God definitely exists, God probably exists. I was uncertain if God exists, God probably doesn't exist or God definitely doesn't exist. What did you find out? I was astounded when I crunched the numbers on that. I was amazed at, especially among people that encountered God, the unbelievable shift from how they would have responded to their thoughts about reality of God at the time they had their near-death experience to later at the time they were sharing their near-death experience and average of 20 years later, virtually everybody that had a near-death experience and encountered God shifted to believing that God absolutely is real and it responded to that survey question as such. And that's not a surprise now, is it? They were convinced that what they saw was really God, God as with whatever evidence they needed, however they wanted to have had years to think about it, they had plenty of time to consider, is this really God or is this really not God? And yet by the hundreds, overwhelming majority of near-death experiences that encounter God come away believing, hey, based on my personal experience, I now know beyond a doubt, not on faith, not because somebody told me to believe this, but my own personal experience that God is real. We lost the last word there, but you get the idea. Oh, absolutely. Do you want me to comment on that? Yes. From a strict philosophical perspective, the word God is tricky because it's not clearly defined. I mean, do we mean the personal God of the Abrahamic religions? Is it a sort of universal ego or is it the Brahman of Hinduism, consciousness itself, but not necessarily a personal God? So it's difficult from that perspective, yet as we just saw Dr. Long talk about, when people are confronted with a certain experience, the conceptual minutiae become unimportant. They know what they mean by the word God at the core of it and they come back and they say, yes, God exists. So they are alluding to some core characteristic, to some core essence that is always present when somebody uses the word God. And what could that be? Well, in the West, we religious people tend to associate the word God with omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence. What is omniscience? It's basically alludes to the presence of consciousness. Omniscience is sentience everywhere. And that's a direct allusion to consciousness. And omnipresence, presence everywhere, it just means that consciousness is everywhere. And that comes very close to the idealist view that at the root of nature, at the highest level of this hierarchy you alluded to, what you have is consciousness that is present everywhere and is aware of all that's playing out in the universe. And it's very easy to associate the word God with that in a very honest and genuine way. Fair enough. I'm gonna pick up on that last point you made, though, because hierarchy does suggest more than that. And I would throw out there, because I've had this discussion with some really great people who I respected very much in the parapsychology community and in the scientific community like real science people, not like the ones we saw when we were talking to there. And they seem to stumble over this thing too because they want there to be this blob of consciousness. They don't want there to be a shape to it. And the shape seems to be from all accounts that I can see is there is a hierarchy. I mean, that's what these people are saying. They're experiencing that I'm at one level and there's another level I could get to. And there's yet another level beyond that. And there's yet another level beyond that. So it's difficult for us in this position to even presume that we could map these extended consciousness realms. But it does seem to me that that's the game, that's the only game we have. I mean, we can just kind of give up and say, well, we have the shared experience, we'll never know. But if we are gonna use the data that we are getting back, that's what the data is telling me, Bernardo, is there is a shape to it and the shape is hierarchy. There's a moral imperative. It's driving towards some things that we think are fundamentally true or not fundamentally, but true. They're just truths, moral truths. Do you have any thoughts on that? Lots. I think the key is to partition the task in such a way that by addressing one part of the task, we don't invalidate or delegitimize another part of the task that may not depend on the first one. And what I mean by that is the following. We can conclude, I believe, very firmly on the basis of the logic of the situation, on the basis of the empirical evidence we have that is undisputed, on the basis of parsimony and the key values of philosophical thought that consciousness is fundamental and it is the only fundamental thing. And we can conclude that irrespective of discussions about hierarchy and realms of consciousness and all that. If we have that foundation established, we can in parallel or afterwards address the other problems. And what are the other problems? The other problems is that if you're talking about consciousness as fundamental, you immediately legitimize first person experience as data. Because it's consciousness we are talking about. So how do we, how do you explore consciousness through experience? That's how you explore consciousness. So I think this talk about hierarchies of consciousness is valid. It should not be conflated with the ontological question about what is the ontological primitive. I think that can be dealt with independent of it. But it is a valid question to talk about the hierarchy of consciousness. And what we have to go with to discuss that are the experiences people have. And these experiences could be spontaneous. It could be caused by physiological stress like near death experiences. They could be triggered by spiritual practice, meditation, yoga, prayer. They could be triggered by substances such as psychedelics. As it turns out, they all seem to have at the high level of abstraction a similar mechanism of operation. They all seem to imply reduced activity in key areas of the brain, which is suggestive too. And then the question is, how do you organize the testimonies of people in a way that you can extract the common patterns? Because if you're dealing with first person experience of realms that are not anchored in our shared everyday ordinary reality, language breaks because language has evolved around shared references. I mean, the word rock, we understand that word because we have all seen a rock. And we know what it means because of that shared experience of seeing a rock. But if you're talking about a hierarchy of consciousness, other realms that not everybody has shared, not everybody has had that experience, then words will lack that common grounds that shared experience that grounds them in a shared dictionary, so to say. So people start talking metaphorically. But when they talk metaphorically, they use different metaphors because they have had different educations. They've grown up in different places, different cultural values, different references throughout their lives, so they pick different metaphors. And the challenge is, how do you then distill the underlying commonality of what they're saying? That's one challenge. The other challenge is when people get married to their metaphors as if they were literal. And then you get into religious fundamentalism. And then you have these factions fighting against each other when in fact, the experience that underlies their philosophy is identical. It's the same experience on both factions or across all the factions, but they have been translated according to different metaphors that people then espouse in a literal way and they lose sight of the commonality. So it's very challenging to do that. Okay. Consciousness conspiracy number two, if you will. And this is more, I think, of what most people would identify as a real conspiracy. And I always have to tip my hat to my friend Gordon White at Rinsoup for really pounding this drum so many times, but it's the beautiful point that really escaped me for a long time. And that is that if we look carefully at what's coming through the disclosure process in terms of released documents, classified documents that then become released, come into the public awareness, it's clear that the scientists who our government really counts on, the guys in the know, the guys in the deep state, if you will, those scientists have understood for the longest time that consciousness is non-physical, that consciousness, that materialism, as we've been talking about, fails. So they've been doing MKUltra. They've been doing MK often. They've been talking to, trying to talk to spirits, trying to conjure demons, let's see what we can do. They've been doing Stargate, where we do remote viewing. They've been doing everything they could to look at this consciousness phenomenon with the assumption that it's certainly not physical. It's certainly not Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's not in no books kind of thing. They are completely at, not at odds. They're just using those folks as useful idiots to prop up and keep other people entertained with these other notions. So that split, I think, is a really important conspiracy to understand and to push through if we're really gonna understand consciousness. These guys know some stuff that we don't know. So I tell you what I have teed up for the next one, and this is gonna kind of freak some people out and maybe freak you out a little bit. But my go-to guy on a lot of this stuff is Grant Cameron, who is a UFO researcher and also kind of a deep state political kind of researcher. And he's pulled together in this little discussion that he had with the very excellent folks at Gramerica. They talked about this. And Grant, you gotta listen real carefully, folks, because Grant talks about as fast as anyone I've ever heard. But there's a ton of stuff in here. I wanna put it on the table and then hopefully Bernardo and I can talk about it. Here it goes. His wife suddenly wants to talk about, I'd like to talk about entanglement, particle entanglement. And I'm thinking, why would you ask us? Your husband is a PhD in physics. He's run, he run the parapsychology, what they call the phenomenology desk at the CIA. The weird desk, yeah. The weird desk. And what people have to realize is that when the CIA calls it phenomenology, that is a hint as to what's going on. It is not UFOs. It's remote viewing, ghosts, parapsychology, telepathy. It's the whole ball of wax because it's all consciousness. That's the ground of being. It's consciousness. And they know that. And that's why when the Canadian government document said in 1950 that mental phenomena may be involved, the top secret Canadian government document said, mental phenomena may be involved in flying saucers. That's when they started the MK Ultra stuff. That's when they started all that because they were trying to figure out how does consciousness work? Because they had a live alien in 1947. That's how the Americans knew to tell the Canadians in 1950 that mental phenomena was involved. Nobody was talking to aliens in 1950. Adamson and Williamson would not come forward until a couple of days after the detonation of the hydrogen bomb. Betty and Barney Hill would not become public until the mid-60s. Nobody said they were talking to aliens in public, at least. And so therefore, how did they know that mental phenomena was involved? Because they had a live alien. And they knew that the alien is telepathic and it gets in your head. And they went, wow, man, if we could discover how this worked. And so of course, they threw every dime they had at consciousness, trying to figure out how this thing worked. Because if you can get. Okay. He just threw the whole ball of wax there. I just want people to know because I've investigated this. You know, we say conspiracy theory because that's what we've been taught to say. No, this is just true. I mean, Wilbert Smith is the Canadian at the highest level in the government, whose memo, he didn't disclose the top secret memo. It was revealed in a Freedom of Information Act where he said, here, I've gone to the United States. I've met with these top level people, Vandevar Bush, he names the names because it's a secret memo. And he said their highest priority is this UFO thing. And they've come to understand there's a mental phenomenon associated with it. I mean, all this stuff is not conspiracy. It's just fact. It's the way it is. In terms of MKUltra and remote viewing, it is just like he said, just like I said a minute ago, we can only conclude that that was a direct response to our government saying, hey, we got to get on this consciousness thing. This is where things are really happening. So isn't it interesting that here Grant Cameron is saying, do you know what he's saying? Consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness is fundamental. They've known consciousness is fundamental for the longest time. Where does this take us in terms of the technology that might be associated with this, the deeper understanding in science, we're talking philosophy and all this, what might they know that we don't know in terms of manipulating this at a different level from a different perspective? Any thoughts on any of that? Well, my tendency would be to, you know, people who deal with the national security, they tend to be very pragmatic people, right? I think it's less a matter of they knowing that idealism is true than they not knowing that physicalism is true. In other words, they don't make that bet. They are not married to any specific philosophy, any specific ontology for them. What matters is what works, what is effective and they are open to all possibilities. They are not going to restrict themselves based on a materialistic belief because the other side may not be imposing on themselves that restriction and make progress and be ahead. And they cannot take that risk. So they have to be open and in that openness, they indeed may make advances that ordinary science wouldn't make because in academia, well, of course, physicalism must be true. So why are we going to research remote viewing? Why are we going to research this and that? I mean, we know that it cannot happen. So we're not going to get a grant anyway. So why bother? And these guys are not restricted in that way. They have the money and they cannot marry themselves to a certain belief without being absolutely sure that it's true and nobody can be sure that materialism is true. So I think it's less a matter of really knowing what's going on and it's more a matter of being pragmatic and not closing doors and just exploring. Now, if that did happen for, it has been happening for decades, if they have not been imposing on themselves the limitations that mainstream academia does impose on itself, then who knows where they might be? Yeah. Yeah, that's something to ponder because the other side of this that you touched on there and I'm gonna see if I can pull anything else out of you or any other thoughts that you have is, might we be able to engineer you're an engineer as well as a philosopher as well as a thinker, might we be able to engineer some of these aspects of consciousness that we haven't looked at engineering because we've had our model wrong, you know? Absolutely. Categorically, yes. Some of your thoughts in terms of what might happen could happen, where could that lead us? Not just in the dorky telepathy mind reading stuff, but in terms of time travel, in terms of massive kind of communication with other worlds, other realms, it just is almost limitless in terms of where that could go in its potential. You list concrete applications where this could bring us is to spaces that wouldn't even fit this category of concrete applications in the realm of insights that would render these applications almost like a child's play. So, I mean, the space one is opening here is broader than our implicit philosophy of language allows us to see and contemplate verbally even if it's inside our heads. I published my first article on Scientific American last year, was about this correlation between deep transcendent insight transpersonal experience and reduced brain activity. And you see that correlates to, there's a pattern correlating these two things. It's very widespread. It's not only psychedelics that have been shown since 2012. Can I ask you to break that down a little bit for folks? Break it down in terms of specific examples that they could touch and feel because this is the deep spirituality part that we wanted to talk about in a way. Yeah, many things that people associate with deep spiritual insight come together with a reduction in brain activity. And we have known this mostly recently, for instance, there are some breathing techniques. You breathe very fast. There's some yogic techniques and what that does, it increases the alkalinity level of your blood, causes constriction of blood vessels in your brain, metabolism reduces in your brain to the point that you may pass out if you breathe too fast. That's why when people are hyperventilating, they breathe in a bag to reduce oxygen intake. So there is a reduction in brain activity associated with those yogic practices that are supposed to lead you to greater insight or teenagers worldwide play this very dangerous game called the choking game. They partly strangulate themselves to the point of almost passing out and then they have these transcendent experiences that are considered very pleasurable or very cool, whatever. We know, for instance, for the past few years, that what psychedelics do, they don't light up your brain. They actually significantly reduce brain activity. We have known that since 2012, it has been confirmed multiple times now. The last paper published by the University of Zurich was published late last year. Tell people about that paper, if you would, or the paper that David Nutt published a few years prior, what they did, because I think it's just, that'll just case close, folks. There are several papers published by the Imperial College, the group of David Nutt. They basically take subjects. They measure their brain activity in an FMRI brain scanner. That's the baseline brain activity. They inject folks with a psychedelic substance. It could be psilocybin or DMT or LSD. And they continue to measure the brain activity as the substance takes effect. And then they ask people to report on their experiences as their brain activity is being monitored. So they can correlate the original baseline with the drug taken effect, with the subjective reports of the subjects describing the intensity and the richness of their experience. And what they found is that the richer and more intense the experience they report, the lower is the brain activity that's measured to the point that one can predict the other. You can predict how much lower brain activity is based on how rich and intense the report of the experience is. And this is really basic, but why is that a surprise? What does that FMRI normally look like when we're super excited, super thinking, all that? Well, there have also been a neuroimaging study a few years ago done in Japan. They put people having dreams inside an FMRI. And it turns out that even simple dream experiences like a dreamer watching a statue leads to identifiable activations in brain activity. Brain activity goes up when you experience something to the point that you can even predict what the experience was. And with psychedelics, which are incredibly intense experiences, the opposite seems to happen, which is surprising because before all of this came out, it started in 2012. We thought that psychedelics would light up the brain like a Christmas tree because under materialism, experience is brain activity or at least generated by brain activity. So if you have a richer and intense experience, you would expect more and intense brain activity. Turns out that the opposite is what is observed in a psychedelic trance. And it's not only psychedelics. I already mentioned a couple of other examples. There has also been a study in Brazil of spirit mediums, which is a subject I know you're interested in. They took experienced mediums who were willing to do psychography. In other words, to write down information that supposedly comes from a transcendent source from another spiritual world, whatever it is that the claim is. And they realized that experienced mediums when they are psychographing, brain activity in areas of the brain involved with writing, thinking and writing is reduced. And then they did controls. They put these mediums without psychographing. They asked them just to write text in the same brain scanner. And then the text they write scored lower in a measure of complexity than the text they wrote while they were in a trance. And it should have been the opposite because in the trance, the areas that would activate for you to write complex text were actually deactivated while they were in a trance. So again, you have this correlation of richer, more complex experience associated with the reduction of brain activity in key cognitive regions. I could go on and on. In my Scientific American article, I think I mentioned 10 different examples. You have brain damage correlates with spiritual experience. Vietnam War veterans in a 2016 paper, they found a correlation between propensity towards spiritual experience and brain damage measured by also brain scans. Or there was a 2010 study published in Neuron carried out in Italy. People were studied before and after brain surgery for the removal of tumors, which always causes some collateral damage when they remove a tumor. People were evaluated for propensity towards transpersonal experience before and after surgery. And after surgery that increased, there was more propensity towards transpersonal experience, spiritual experience. So it's a very consistent correlation. So what I'm trying to suggest here is that going back to your question about technologies of consciousness exploration, if we had a technology to dampen activity with a high degree of precision and resolution in chosen brain areas, we could very systematically explore what people could experience under conditions of reduced brain activity. If we could do that systematically in a way that doesn't depend on personal spiritual skill, it could potentially open many doors. And you could do all kinds of experiments is also about remote viewing and telepathy under those conditions of reduced brain activity. I like the way you very carefully walk through that because as we've talked about before in this interview, it's tricky, you know, you don't need the backdoor materialism thing comes in. But I wanna make sure people got that point. How I understood that is to say that if we were able to systematically arrange this brain that we have, because we know there is this very close relationship between brain and consciousness, even though we don't know exactly what consciousness is, we do know that there's this relationship. Maybe if we arrange the brain a certain way, we would be able to access, again, when we say other realms of consciousness, it's just a placeholder for something we don't understand. But if we observe these things happening, like you're saying we do because they are in the collective experience, remote viewing is in the collective experience, medium communication is in the collective experience, alien contact is in the collective experience, get over it, folks, it's just a reality. Too many people are saying it, it's too consistent, no matter how you ask them. If all these things are in the collective experience, you're saying, hey, why don't we take the idea that if you turn down the knob on the chatter in your brain and the brain activity in a certain way, maybe you'll tune into these different parts of consciousness. And then- That's exactly right. And then, but then we don't know, the other part of what we're talking about is from a deep spiritual perspective, whether that even matters, or whether that's just another station along the road of getting to something that transcends yet that again. That would be part of the experiment, right? I mean, maybe you send people off using these technologies that we are fantasizing about here to view what the Russians are doing and they come back with a laugh and say, it doesn't matter what the Russians are doing, you idiots. You haven't figured out what's going on yet. Maybe that's what would happen. We don't know. But just to come back to a comment you made, this backdoor materialism, I think it's a good point and I think we should maybe explore this a bit if I have a minute or so to discuss this, Alex. You see, independent of ontology and philosophy, independent of our interpretation of what might be going on, it is a fact that if you interfere with brain activity, experience is affected. Just drink a beer and you'll see that firsthand. You put alcohol in your brain to physical substance, goes in there and your experience of the world will change. If you're shot in the head, things will look very different from a first person perspective. So that relationship is an empirical fact. The question is, how do we interpret that? And what I'm saying is that the brain is not an object independent and outside of consciousness, which in turn generates consciousness. No, what I'm saying is that the brain is the image of a certain process in consciousness. And that process is a dissociative process. So the brain is the image of a dissociation. Normal brain activity is what you see when universal consciousness is undergoing a dissociative process. When you put people with dissociation in a brain scanner, dissociative processes show up in the scan. That there is something they look like and they can be identified. That's a Dutch study done in 2014 by Jolanda Schlumpf and others. There is something dissociative processes look like. Now, my claim is that a brain is that. It is the image of cosmic dissociation if you want. It looks like something. And what it looks like is a brain with normal brain activity. So if normal brain activity is the image of dissociation, what is reduced brain activity? It's the image of reduced dissociation. And reduced dissociation allows you to reach beyond the confines of your personal self because it's dissociation that defines those confines. It's dissociation that puts you in the cage of the personal self. If you reduce dissociation, you can peek out the window. You can go beyond the cage at least for some time, for temporarily and peek around and see what's going on. And that's my point. Now, that can be induced by so-called physical means. It's entirely coherent with idealism because you see under idealism, what we call physical is a modality of experience. It's perception. So a tool that shoots EM radiation in your brain to disrupt the neuron firings and reduce brain activity. That physical process is the image of a mental process going on in nature that disrupts the dissociative boundary. That a mental process disrupts another is trivial. Your thoughts disrupt your emotions every day or the other way around. Your emotions disrupt your thoughts. That one mental process can disrupt another is no problem. And what we call physical under idealism is a kind of mental process that you can use to disrupt dissociation. So this is not materialism via the back door. Actually, the whole point is precisely that by reducing brain activity, you allow information to come from beyond personal boundaries which would be considered impossible under materialism. Well, now you see what I was talking about at the beginning. Why I love this guy, why Dr. Bernardo Castro is absolutely one of my favorite guests on Skeptico. And I have to tell you, I know he's one of yours too. One of the most shared interviews always is Bernardo's appearance on here. So we've put you through the ringer. I appreciate you playing along. I brought up on the screen some of Bernardo's books. You're definitely gonna wanna check those out if you haven't before. They're so tremendously accessible and at the same time intellectually stimulating. You have to read them to see what I mean. Go on Amazon, do the peek inside thing. And I think you'll see what I mean. Do check them out. And then we did talk about his articles in Scientific American so you can check those out too. What else should people be on the lookout for Bernardo in terms of what's coming up for you? You did mention you have a new book, right? Coming maybe? There will be a new book coming out later this year to be a collection of academic papers that have published recently, but not only the papers. Also, I tried to weave a story around those papers to construct a coherent storyline with one message that sort of elaborate upon throughout the book. It's my most academic book to date. It aims at addressing some critiques I received before that despite what your viewership might think, some academics have accused me of not being rigorous enough. So I've tried to address that. And this year are very rigorous books coming out. What about personal appearances? I know you've done the science and non-duality conference in the past. Do you have any other places where people might come and see or listen to you, any of that on the schedule? I will be in New York in March. I don't have the details yet, but as soon as I have it, I'll put it up on my website or Facebook. There will be an event, a mostly medical event in New York, but I have been invited. I don't know why, but I will be there. And whenever things come up, I will just post it online. I'm not planned out for the whole year. There are some tentative things after the summer, but I can't say it yet. Great, great. Well, we'll look for all of that. And it's been so great reconnecting with you, talking to you is always so much fun. And I think we hit on some great stuff here today. So, Bernardo, thank you so much for joining me on Skeptico. Just great, Alex. It's always great to talk to you. So thanks for watching this video. And if it wasn't really a video, but just an audio stored as a video, I apologize, but there's more videos out there as well. But please check out the Skeptico website. You can see it here. We cover a lot of different stuff you might be interested in relating to controversial science and spirituality. A lot of shows up there, over 350 of them or so, all free, all available for download. So do check it out.