 Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host Alex Tecaris and today we're joined by Matthew Alper, who a few years ago wrote a book, The God Part of the Brain. A book that received a tremendous amount of praise, was very well received and a lot of people liked it, especially a lot of really smart people like the ones that I'm shown up here on the screen. I was doing a radio the interview the other day. Here's how this interview came about. There's the show Midnight in the Desert and I'm talking to the producer beforehand and she's telling me about this guy who came on the show and the host was so frustrated. The guy's an atheist and he's a skeptic and he's so frustrated that they didn't even finish the interview and I was like, man this is my kind of guy. I need to talk to this guy. Well that's actually a nice way of saying that they hung up on me. It's that it's the first time I'm like what are you hanging up on somebody for? So as you know from listening to the show, folks have listened to it. I love exchanging a lot of ideas, open to especially hashing out things with people who are coming at things from this kind of materialistic perspective which is the dominant view within science and this God part of the brain thing is something we've certainly talked about a ton on this show so I thought it'd be great you know to have you on and to kind of hash this out and to go over this. So Matthew thanks so much for coming on and can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about more about the book the God part of the brain? Well I'm not that interesting. So you know, born raised in Brooklyn, did some schooling in London, had a bunch of jobs. I was a fifth grade teacher. I worked as a sculptor at a claymation studio, made monsters for living then I went back to teaching taught high school history then I bought a book how to write a screenplay, wrote a screenplay, met a producer from Europe at a party, ended up living in Munich while my movie got produced. It was a dystopic science fiction and then while I was in Germany I sort of a light bulb went off in my head and I came up with the concept, the foundation for the God part of the brain and I decided that's going to be my next thing. I studied philosophy in college. I've been reading a lot of science and philosophy since I was young. I was since I came to terms with my mortality I think I was driven to try to get to the bottom of you know, is there a spiritual reality? It seemed like most the world believed there was one, you know, people talked about us all being reunited in heaven and all of that and um I know wasn't buying it turned out Santa wasn't real and a whole bunch of other stuff so I said I'm gonna look a little deeper into this I want to get to the bottom of this particular question and I thought that the answer would eventually come in some one of the sciences so I was reading from cosmology down to molecular biology thinking leave no stone unturned I was also experimenting with drugs and meditation thinking you know there were a lot of people writing about how different psychedelics were a portal to the other side that didn't really get me anywhere just sort of altered states of consciousness so I kind of felt like if there was going to be an answer it was going to be in the sciences but then after I I don't know 22 years of I well I was 22 at the time and I was like you know what I've read all the books and I'm getting nowhere and I just have to accept the fact like everyone else that it's just one of those unanswerables and I guess I'll know when I die or I won't know when I die so while in Germany I they have they offered me a job there and I was like all right I guess you know I was going to work on other screenplays living in Munich it was a beautiful city and I thought to myself all right I guess I've got a job I've got a career I kind of lamented for a moment the fact that like you know I used to be philosophically driven I had this quest I wanted to know deeper things and you know I guess I'm just going to be a guy with a job and I said you know what I haven't even thought about really anything philosophical in years and again when I was in high school and then college and after college I was you know reading all of the you know as much as I could of the great thinkers in history the philosophers thinking maybe somewhere someone kind of opened the gateway to an idea in one of their thoughts let me just jump in with a quick question Matthew at this point where would you consider yourself like spiritually would you identify yourself at this point as an atheist or was that not even you you just were like somebody who just was going along with trying to figure this stuff out no I would say that I'm probably the most fundamental atheist you can come across and now you are I guess I'm trying to say back then would you have identified if someone would yeah if someone asked me then I would have said I'm an atheist but I but I was but I was but I was a frustrated atheist frustrated in that I didn't believe but I didn't feel I had a grounding for my disbelief other than it just didn't it didn't add up yeah this is a bunch of crap no is arc this stuff I'm definitely not well that's religion that's even religion I you know I you know I felt just by learning all the world's mythologies I didn't have to debunk each one individually you know that Zeus was as likely to be as real as was Jesus or Moses or Muhammad or any of that so that was easy religion was easy but that doesn't just even if you know the religions got it wrong that doesn't mean there's necessarily no spiritual reality you know something that we haven't even come across yet so that was what I wanted to get to the bottom of because basically you know the question was I'm either one of two things I'm either a physical being which means ashes to ashes dust to dust or I'm a spiritual being which means that even though my body will die there's a chance that some aspect of myself my conscious experience will live on in which case I'm immortal so I don't have to be as nervous about it um so but but I considered myself you know an atheist but I you know again like I said I was frustrated in that it felt it felt empty in that I didn't have so someone who reveres science I wanted proof of my belief in some form other than just basic doubt so I'll tell you you might find this interesting so when I was in Germany you know I kind of like you know what I given up the philosophical life but before I take this job I'm going to ask the question one more time I should probably go back to it I thought every five years five years will go by and I'm just going to readdress the question have I learned anything have I come across anything new that has given me any indication one way or the other to believe that I might have some certain knowledge of God and I was like you know no I haven't seen any miracles and even if I did I would have questioned my own perception of them have I learned anything that's opened or closed the door one way or the other I was like no I'm back at square one there's nothing I can say with certain knowledge of God and then I had my Eureka moment I was like wait there is there's one thing I can say with certain knowledge of God it was a odd kernel it's not what I was expecting but I was like it's sitting on the computer screen because I typed out this sentence I was like it's sitting on the computer screen in front of me there's an empirical fact God is a word I can see it in Braille I can touch it if someone says it I can hear it so what can I say with certainty of God that it's a word okay well what does science say about words well it's a human construction something we evolved to have the capacity for more over it's a word that seems to exist or some version of it in every single culture from the beginning of humankind my next question is what the science say about universal behavioral patterns which takes me to sociobiology and the answer is it's because it's inherited it's wired into the animal there it's instinct and at that moment I came up with this idea holy crap it's coming from inside our heads it's a perception we're wired with it and I wrote on a piece of paper the God part of the brain and I stuck it on the wall and I was like that's gonna be my next thing and it was and you wrote this book it's a well written book and the book is well received so what was that whole process like real quickly sure um I used to be the worst writer alive as a student I felt discouraged as far back as elementary school when I was all excited about the creativity of my ideas and the teacher would put red marks all over thing you know you didn't capitalize the first letter you the punctuation's wrong so I was like you know what screw writing I'm good at math and science and all the other stuff I have a good memory I won't be a writer whatever and I really I took to that so the time I was in high school and having to write papers I was like oh man I screwed myself this is getting difficult like and my writing was horrible it really was horrible um and then when I was teaching when I was a high school history teacher I was like I've tried photography I worked as a sculptor I've done these different things I felt I wanted to do something creative but I was like it started up dawn on me like the thing that I had always been bad at and felt that I didn't need to know I'm starting to feel like might be the most powerful artistic medium which is words like I think I overlooked like the big picture here and missed the bus but I'm not old and dead so maybe I should get back on the bus and see if I can learn to write so I started reading the classics and reading vocabulary and studying language really and punctuation and then when I came up with the idea like maybe I'll write a movie when I was teaching high school and bought that book had to write a screenplay um I thought well it's a screenplay I mean it's mostly like you know Steve and Lisa sitting on a park bench dialogue Lisa hi how was your day you know I was like well that I don't really need to be a great writer I need to be a great storyteller so I was like maybe I'll find out but I think I can pull it off as far as the writing goes and then I all of a sudden was like wait now I'm writing a philosophy tome so whatever you read was after about a thousand edits from beginning to end starting over starting over I self-published my book was first universally rejected because I have no credentials in neuroscience so I opened road press and then I had boxes of books sitting around my apartment and someone's like well you got to market it and I was like I don't like that stuff and they're like well here's a phone number send them a press release maybe they'll put you on their show and that was art bell and I guess given the show you do you're familiar with art bell so 20 minutes later I get a call this guy with like the most perfect deep voice and he's like we're gonna have yawn I was like okay he's like so how's this date work I was like okay he's like so you know the drill right I'm like uh yeah and I'm like what what important art bell guy I'm like what millions of listeners honestly when I first got on art bell um admittedly I had a few puffs of weed before I went on but that didn't help I almost went into a full-blown panic attack and at one point I was deep into the theory and I was talking about the anxiety function and I have an anxiety attack but it's on the phone so no one can see me so I just sort of like held the phone and he's like hello are you are you still there and for like 20 seconds I was just like I was just about to hang up the phone like I am over my head I don't know what I'm doing and I was like come on pull it together man this could work out and I got back on the phone and honestly like he was talking and it was all just like a blur like wall war and I was so nervous and finally I got my bearings and I started talking and then it went really well he was only gonna have me on for like an hour and he had me on for the rest of the night and then he replayed that show like a week later and all of a sudden I'm seeing orders coming in like by the tens of thousands and my I was ranked for uh one day I was ranked on Amazon I was like the 17th top selling book in the world I was between Angela's ashes and girl interrupted at the time this was like 98 when I first wrote this and I was pretty young at the time so anyway the reason I'm saying so then I started selling books and one of the things people were like this is amazing these original ideas I love it however like did you get into did you have an editor it was still but poorly written I still had a lot to go uh and then I then all of a sudden I was like oh my god I've been sending out this messed up book like I better get in gear and then I edited and edited I spent like six months editing non-stop went over the book from beginning to end like 50 times and cleaned it up and basically I've been cleaning up it up since it got sold to source books and then went into numerous languages went into hardcover but by that edition the 2008 edition um I haven't touched it since honestly I'm terrified to open it I'll have a panic attack because I'm a better writer now probably and I'll see a million flaws I can't even look at it I'll never open that book again but um but I was told enough times that it was well written so I was like and then at one point people like great book you know they want to talk about the ideas I'm like yeah yeah okay great book but what do you think of the writing like all I wanted to hear is people say like oh it's so well wow that's that's amazing for a guy who starts out saying hey I'm not very interesting there's not much to talk about me you got some amazing stories I mean just your whole background and then that art bell and your writing thing for any frustrated writers out there that's just fantastic stuff so persevere frustrated writers and read classics and study the way that the that the greats punctuate and string together their thoughts and if you persevere maybe you'll some of it will rub off on you yeah but buddy that's not exactly your story your story is you just go do it and just do what's next kind of thing and I think there's some magic in in that too so I tell you what let's let's jump off of that yeah and so let's talk about all this stuff I'm obviously coming at this from a very different perspective you know my history is I was really just a a business guy who got interested kind of like you and the big picture questions who are we why are we here and I kind of felt coming from the opposite perspective I didn't know for sure but I felt science maybe has something to offer here but these science guys seem to be missing the boat given the other science guys that I'm listening to and talking to so I was kind of like what gifts who's right here and that was 10 years ago when I started this podcast and the podcast you know eventually and then I wrote a book along the way why science is wrong about almost everything which is kind of like the opposite of your book which is kind of interesting and the premise of my book is that if you get science if you get consciousness wrong then you really can't get anything in science right and that consciousness as I don't know if you know or not because I just flashed up on the screen you know one of things that kind of threw me for a loop is I went and did first of all the first thing I did when I was going to set up this interview just so people know there's no sandbagging here I went and created a thread on my forum this is like two weeks ago and I invited you there to look at everyone's posts and stuff like that but let me play you this quote about consciousness from an interview I did with a very very smart guy I think philosopher Bernardo Castro but these are all people you'd recognize kind of coming from your camp and maybe that will launch us into a discussion about consciousness these people are just generally regarded as scientists as the mainstream scientists and we're talking about Richard Dawkins Lawrence Cross Neil deGrasse Tyson I mean Neil deGrasse 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 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 what's consciousness because because that's that's totally baffling 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 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 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 got to say like oh wow okay 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 I mean the idea that maybe consciousness is not there it's 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 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 is a a worrying sign of cultural sickness a very serious one okay okay maybe I didn't tee that up right but you get the idea consciousness kind of the fundamental question this what do you think okay so first of all I don't know why a room full of supposedly important scientists are so confused about what I think is a pretty simple question that I believe has been answered not to its full extent because we do not know the brain fully and probably never will within our lifetimes as however uh and I write in the book I have like a sub chapter I think called the neurophysiology of the soul and basically you know to me the question comes down to one of two things consciousness same thing with life spiritual or physical physiological is it is it the manifestation of some soulful entity some ghost in the machine some transcendental factor that resides within us or again is it a strictly physical entity my take and again I never went to school for neuroscience I'm not an md but I've read a hell of a lot almost an encyclopedia amount worth of um science and philosophy and my take away is that there's all the reason to believe that consciousness is a physiological experience that basically neuroscience slash cognitive science slash neurobiology if it's taught us anything it's taught us that all of that all of that makes up what we consider ourselves to be our conscious experience so we've got sensation at the simplest level we feel things we hear things uh we have perception we absorb the information and make conclusions based on it and then cognition and emotion etc so that's the makeup of our being and then we have memory so it solidifies gives us a sense of identity all of these elements of consciousness can be reduced to various parts of the brain and what's been shown is when you damage those parts people suffer aphasia some debility or deficiency to that aspect of their conscious experience so like I have people say like you know oh i'm gonna you know when i die i'm gonna be in heaven with my family so i'll say like okay you'll be in heaven let's even assume that's true you're gonna go to heaven who you are is going to live forever you joe is going to be around for eternity but then i say but let me ask what if what if joe gets dementia alzheimer's tomorrow and then you die a year into it where your last self you know didn't know whether to you know go to the bathroom or eat an apple you didn't know the difference between the two you didn't remember the names of your own children your wife let alone your own self so is joe the demented going to be floating around in this eternal headspace for eternity or do you have this idealized version that it's you joe now as you're talking to me or maybe is it going to be joe 10 years ago or joe when you were five we're all chameleons we go through we're a thousand different people in our lifetimes based on our periods of life so to me let's let's pull this apart because we're okay let's pull it apart yeah we're stacking a lot of different things together and i understand where you're going in terms of the limitations in terms of how people talk about the afterlife and all the rest of that what the reason i kind of deconstructed my thing the way that i did is that when you start to me when you start asking these questions you keep going further and further into this physicalist kind of question other people call it materialism and so the first thing you know because you kind of studied the philosophy this is the oldest question kind of in the world so there's Plato out there saying hey there's no physicalism right it's all thoughts it's all ideas and then you had this other thing it's like no we can break it all down into atoms and that discussion argument ongoing debate continues on to the modern day right so if you really look at physics as we currently understand it is this battle from a hundred years ago between einstein and neils bohr right and einstein is saying hey uh neils bohr you're kind of coming at me with this spooky action at a distance stuff which is consciousness is fundamental that's what neils bohr is saying and einstein saying no way i'm still holding on into e equals mc squared and that m it could stand for materialism it stands for mass but it could just as well stand for materialism because i think there is matter is fundamental so the question then is is matter fundamental or is consciousness fundamental and even einstein at the end of his life finally has to agree that every experiment that has ever been done in quantum physics has confirmed the reality of the observer effect has confirmed the reality of spooky action at a distance of entangled particles and all that stuff and i'm going to play one more clip to kind of reinforce that point because i just interviewed a guy i think he's a brilliant guy his name is don hoffman dr donnell hoffman and he's a physicist and as at uc ervine and we talked about this very topic so let me play another clip into you and then well i'll get your get your view on the whole thing of what i just laid out there how can science science as we know it be so wrong about consciousness i mean we're talking about a situation where pole after pole shows that 90 percent of people in the united states completely disagree with this biological robot meaningless universe brain centered idea that we have about consciousness so the real question i guess i have is how can we really trust science going forward you're a great advocate of science you speak eloquently about the scientific method about how beautiful science is done properly but i guess i'd turn it around can we really trust science when they drop the ball so badly already i agree that the current theories of consciousness among my scientific colleagues really do drop the ball they they really start with an unconscious objective reality of spacetime and matter and they try to boot up consciousness from that and and i you know i of course i disagree with them i think that that's not the right way to go about it and and many scientists still have a feeling that you know if that's what spirituality means that all that i will have none of it and the other aspect to it is they feel like look science made great strides in the using the assumption that spacetime and unconscious matter are the foundations and it's it's truly stunning what's happened in the last three three and a half centuries it's it is completely revolutionized our understanding of the universe the technology that's come out has been stunning and it's raised humanity's level of life dramatically so so there's this feeling among the scientists that look the physicalist framework was our our way of getting away from the the weirdness of the spiritual traditions and and breaking free look what it's look what it's done and it has been dramatically successful so that's part of where they're coming from so if i can add just one little piece because i don't know if i'm making myself clear and all this or not physicalism materialism is just dead it's a non-issue experimentally it fails over and over again and this idea that consciousness is fundamental is what wins the day in experiment after experiment so mind equals brain mind brain is generating consciousness is just kind of no longer at the table so what Don Hoffman is saying he's kind of trying to feel some compassion for Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins and the rest of these guys who are still tied to this old model that fails over and over again experimentally so how are you processing all that okay couple comments so first of all one of the comments you made during that show was that like 90 percent of Americans disagree with the biological robot model so first of all the the the opinions of the masses the mostly uneducated masses the uneducated masses that gave us the government we have today don't represent to me a valid or viable if i wanted to put together a new technology some new type of nuclear missile i would not say hey masses let's let's let's think tank on this i would look for the 0.001 percent who are diligently spending their life studying these specific things for my answers so i i i want to just discount the notion that we can say what the majority opinion represents anything indicative of truth or reason my next point is we can't necessarily make comparisons to paradoxes in quantum realities to consciousness so the brain i don't believe is a quantum experience the brain is an atom experience the brain and all things human basically abide by Newtonian principles that's what's given us the mechanics of our day is that they work gravity still works even though quantum realities are real when you're dealing with subatomic particles you have a different set of standards than when you have atomic particles the materialism that comes in atoms that's just not that's you see that's what i guess don hoffman is saying if you drill into it that was the view like 20 years ago but these experiments of like entanglement that you're referring to they've got them bigger and bigger up to the atomic level up to the cellular level they now can even show entanglement that is viewable by the i don't know when you when you say entanglement what do you mean say define entanglement do you understand the idea of quantum entanglement and the observer effect yeah i i mean i'm aware of the observer effect you know schrodinger's cat and all right and einstein his whole thing of spooky out of action at a distance i mean these are the things that these guys were debating right okay so first let me let me premise also so you know whatever whatever debate we have and you're gonna have your beliefs and i'm gonna have mine i can tell you i've like read these books thought this through i am an unyielding materialist i believe that consciousness is a physical reality end of story and i can tell you why i think those things but you don't believe it you just think that's what the science says right because if the science went against you then you'd go with what the science is or do you have some kind of belief that insist no i mean besides just like sort of it adds up it passes the common sense test no it's validated by what i consider grounded scientific principles so and let me just also add this point since we're on the conversation so you're kind of alluding to that these old models of science are burnt to the ground they're discarded we all know better but who knows better i mean to me that's a fringe element the the skeptics the believers in various forms of magical thinking that i've come across doing a lot of these radio shows even someone like art bell to me ufology is a form of magical thinking does that mean i don't believe that aliens exist somewhere in the universe i absolutely do believe they exist do i believe that they've ever visited earth or ever will visit earth no way i don't believe that's possible within our lifetimes the nearest star alphas and terry alone is too far but again these are separate but not to digress because not to get off but but hold on i mean new york times 2000 december 2017 it's on the cover that the department of defense has acknowledged that they've encountered these UFOs right off the coast here of california and they'll show you the videos and they operate at levels beyond anything that is whatever whatever you're alluding to i don't i don't personally i don't believe it's real so hold up but how can you i'm talking about the new york times i'm talking about you can go watch the videos i'm talking about the department of defense i mean this is relevant in the sense that even if the department of defense decided to release some information like that i don't necessarily even believe that their intention is for all i know it's just to like distract people from something else they really want us not to know i don't necessarily until the scientific community at large the people who are like little weevils trying to dig up information all day long they exist in the universities around the planet and that's all they do they're like weevils digging up information trying to uncover some new fact that's all they're interested in and with all these weevils running around trying to unroot the truth i still consider what you're talking about fringe elements because you can't i can go to a university anywhere on earth and i can study biology physics chemistry you name it all of the various fields of science none of these sciences will offer me a course in ufology or reincarnation or transmigration of the soul or the study of the soul let's study the soul i have a phd in the soul i got it from harvard i took 20 courses all about how the soul is real the mere fact to me that is one of the proofs in the pudding in that all of these weevils who are trying to find the truth none of them think it's legitimate or valid enough and not one technology or advancement has come through the belief in what i all of these various forms of again what i call magical thinking and let me just get to the core point of my book the god part of the brain what i'm suggesting is humanity is born we're wired with a lens in our head that basically with self with the advent of self-conscious awareness humans became the most powerful species on earth it enabled us the power of self-modification but that one adaptation at the same time had a drawback it made us aware of our mortalities so in saying i am i exist i don't have to wait a million years for natural selection to give me a thicker coat of fur i can say i am cold and i can sell myself one self-modification most powerful species on earth but by saying i i am cold i also can say i am going to die and humans become the first animal to experience existential angst and i believe that in order to help us survive this unique awareness that we have can you still can you still i believe that i said okay well if i'm gonna suggest that there are actually parts of our brain generating these perceptions i have to have a reason a rationale because nothing evolves for no reason so why would we have evolved this now this is all speculative that but this is what i came up with i made a list what makes humans unique well we have we have language capacities that other animals don't have we have music abilities we have math abilities we have these higher emotions we have self-conscious awareness i was like okay that one's actually i think the one that's the most unique that makes us stand out the most and it was as a result of self-conscious awareness that humans became the again the first organism to be aware of their own mortalities inevitable death and i believe that the anxiety created by that awareness was so overwhelming because here for billions of years you had life on earth dealing with death simple on a simple mechanism of fight or fling and we have anxiety built into us pain functions to make us avoid those things that jeopardize our existence suddenly an animal comes in the picture that realizes there's nowhere to run and there's nothing to fight i could build the biggest castle in the universe i'm gonna die the anxiety created the insufferable anxiety created by that awareness i believe was so overwhelming that it forced the selection of an evolutionary adaptation mechanisms in the brain that compel us to believe in some form of a spiritual reality some form of magical thinking and it takes place in many different forms which is why when i hear even scientists debate or people say like well this scientist and they're a phd and an md and they won the Nobel prize and they believe in god so as if that in itself is an argument to me that's not the argument at all to me it's like yeah that makes sense because the majority of humans are compelled to perceive to filter all their reality through this spiritual lens and to justify and come up and jump through somersaults to come up with ways to justify to themselves what that these things are real because it's the only way we can survive amidst the mortal experience but matthew that's all good but it's just kind of your story and you keep kind of mixing in i believe this i believe that and i keep telling you i just keep going back to the science so i go back to don hoffman if you want to go back to him and he will tell you and we kind of got off the tracker he will tell you there has never been one experiment that's disconfirmed the reality of this consciousness appears to be fundamental okay let me ask you a question in this in this context consciousness appears to be fundamental paradigm simple question do you believe in ghosts do i believe in ghosts yeah well i don't even know what a ghost is but see okay well then i'll give you i'll hold on let me just let me go i'll play i'll play another clip because you know to me where i went with this is just okay if if there's these really smart people who have reason to believe that consciousness is fundamental and like you said i mean i don't understand your logic when you say i'm a materialist i go well you're just going to follow the data and you go no i'm a materialist i'm just going to believe in the materiality well it's like i mean you're not playing science so when i look at it's not that that's what i was saying earlier is i believe every aspect of consciousness perception sensation emotion cognition you went through all those broken down here's the point here's the point neurophysiological responses maybe but this is that would counter that if consciousness is fundamental there's no debate that there's and how come if we get banged in the head our fundamental conscious that's skewed well that's what i was just going to say no one would argue that there is this relationship between consciousness no matter what it is and the physical instrument that is processing that consciousness okay the brain which is the brain okay that's why i think on that matthew so let me play this clip because where the research then takes me is then you got to go look and it's not my kind of choice it's just where the discussion goes well i'd rather just talk with you referencing other people's supporting what you're saying it's not it's why would we not reference why would we not want to reference the best experts in the world who looked at these questions why did we want to just hear two guys that have opinions and then i thought this and then i thought that no but i want to ask you but i want to know what you're thinking so you're saying there's the brain and you're saying admittedly the brain plays some role unconscious experience i'm just curious what what do you believe is the origin of the other part what is the transcendental quality that you believe resides in humans either in their heads or maybe it's in their toes wherever it's residing what is the unknown element that also plays a role if it's not just the brain what is the ghost in the machine to you well let me answer that question with another question okay when does consciousness begin a bunch of questions when does consciousness end what is necessary and sufficient to cause consciousness who is conscious are you conscious and i conscious how do you know are animals conscious is the cat that's meowing at my door to get in here because she doesn't like getting locked out is she conscious so these are the questions and the best research out there to begin to even answer these questions is the near-death experience research and that's the clip we'll play in a minute but first i'll give a chance to respond to that okay so i'm responding to what you rolled out you rolled out where does consciousness begin where does it end does the cat that meows of consciousness so what do you want me to dress all of it well i think the right yes you actually heard them perfectly because they're all wrapped into one when does consciousness begin when does consciousness end what is necessary and sufficient to cause conscious okay experience so i believe that pretty much i mean i don't know if i would say a plant or an amoeba has consciousness perhaps it's it could be defined by the beginnings of those species that first had a ganglia a collected center for where experiences comes from so does the cat have consciousness yes all of these various animals at least with ganglia and or a brain i would say have consciousness do they have self-conscious awareness as part of the experience no we'll start with the first consciousness are they aware of are they aware of a world around them do they interact with the world around them absolutely do they have feelings do they have sensations can they experience pain yes so if that makes consciousness we're all conscious however um as far as when does consciousness begin and if i'm assuming that it's true for the cat as much as is for me then i would say consciousness begins whenever i guess in the embryonic process when we are developing in our mother's wombs or in an egg or wherever we've evolved from that basically once the stirrings of a brain and the first stirrings of an awareness whatever that might be even maybe maybe most animals their first conscious experiences hearing their mother's heart if they're if they're a mammal yeah but matthew you're just kind of wing you're just kind of winging it here making stuff up let me play there is really the reason i went to near-death experience research is it gets right to this question if we can show that consciousness extends beyond a period when we have normal brain function or i should add if consciousness survives when the brain is severely compromised in a way that neuroscience can't explain how consciousness could exist then we have a whole different scenario we have an answer to your questions and your beliefs that you've said so that's what i went i'm interviewed some of the top near-death experience researchers in the world and real near-death experience again i know they're out there i've i've listened i've been you don't have any of them you don't have any of them in your book so let's play jeff long okay so dr long let me probe a little bit further about the types of near-death experience research that's out there because over the years i've interviewed a lot of near-death experience researchers and for example you know just the other day i interviewed this guy nice enough guy university of california he's doing his postdoctoral fellowship he's part of a team they receive four million dollar foundation to study near-death experiences so i speak to him about his research turns out he didn't really do any original research he didn't go into a hospital into a cardiac arrest ward and talk to patients there he didn't as you did develop a hundred and fifty medical survey and give it to hundreds of near-death experience researchers yet he published his results we talked about his book he concluded that near-death experiences aren't real in the way that we're talking about they don't suggest that consciousness seems to survive bodily death so i guess the question is for the average person who's trying to sort through this idea of near-death experience science research how do they sort through it how do they know what research really holds up out there the key thing is to know a few of the consistently seen elements of near-death experience that are the strongest evidence for their reality for example when you're under general anesthesia it should be impossible to have a lucid organized remembrance at that time in fact under anesthesia you're typically so far under with general anesthesia they often have to breathe for you i mean you're literally brain shut down to the level of the brain stem and at that point in time some people have a cardiac arrest their heart stops and of course that's a very well documented they monitor people very carefully that are having general anesthesia so i have dozens and dozens of near-death experiences that occurred under general anesthesia and at this time it should be if you will doubly impossible to have a conscious remembrance and yet they do have near-death experiences at this time and they're typical near-death experiences they have the same elements and a period of have them in the same order as near-death experiences occurring under all other circumstances in fact a critical survey question i asked was what their level of consciousness and alertness during the experience was well even under general anesthetics under those powerful chemicals to produce sedation if they had a near-death experience under general anesthesia their level of consciousness and alertness was identical to near-death experiences occurring under all other circumstances there's absolutely no way the skeptics can explain that way you can fill a convention center with believers in any religion any alternate science that you quoted in your book okay quoted or not quoted because of the because of the studies that he did not his studies are not supportive of i also i also quote Einstein i quote lots of people who are believers in all sorts of things this guy is still this guy is still alive and he's come out and said that's fine i don't care he can believe what he wants like i said neils bore anyone who wants they can believe half of them were word here in christians half of them were adherent jews they've all believed in their various paradigms but here's the bigger picture you could fill a convention center with all of these people who believe write books showing they're a doctor they can prove near-death experiences and yet and yet of all of the greater picture the millions of scientists who represent scientific organizations you will not find one college one legitimate college that offers you a degree in near-death experiences now if it was a valid science i should be able to major in it like i could geology it's just so are you going to dismiss the you want to dismiss true you just say stuff that you just don't know whether it's true or not so you can go to the university of virginia and dr bruce grayson and there's plenty of people there are getting phd's and the research is primarily in near-death experience and perceptual studies and you go down there saying you're saying that you're you can you name one college even in america just did no no no that offers a major listen you can get a phd in whatever you feel like studying can you name one college in america whatever you're whenever you're pushed back you just kind of just ask a new question i just said university of virginia and i'll give you another one university in north texas janice holen i've interviewed phd candidates phd candidates but you're not answering my question can in any of those schools can i get a major in near-death experiences that's the criteria no i i think i think the way it means it was a validated and accepted validated is when your phd is accepted into the broader body of knowledge that is academia that is if someone offered me half a million dollars for a phd i'd say yeah you want to get a phd in two-headed bats with hitler's brain go for it you can't you can't do that you can't get a phd in two-headed bats well but but apparently you can because people you're saying are getting phd's in near-death experiences and to me that's the equivalence of a two-headed bat with hitler's brain well that's that's well said on your part is that to you their equivalence so that is the standard by which you measure it the matthew albert standard of what's real and i i get that and there's certainly a lot of people you know in your camp i just well it's not just there are a lot of people in my camp why don't you when feel free when you get all when we get off the radio to look up let's just say the top 10 schools in america and ask them call call the dean call the registrar say can i get a major can i major in near-death experiences can i major in reincarnation can i major in jesus can i major in zeus can i major in ufo alien technology now you could go to the tv channels and you could watch 50 shows about alien technologies and ghosts but there's nevertheless there's a there's a there's a there's a distinction between what you can watch on tv even with md's and phd's talking about it and what you can study in a valid university go to medical school and say i don't want to be an optometrist or a urologist i want to be a a a a a a a near-death experience and you won't get in because it's not real science okay all right that's i would just want to create a bigger picture than these few specialized voices that anyone can find i could like i said i could find a specialist with a phd and an md to tell me about that they can prove the existence of the virgin mary you name it it's out there again the lockness monster any imaginary thing there's someone out there with a voice behind it and that's because humans the bigger picture is because humans are hardwired to believe in magical thinking we need to believe that even though the body will die that somehow consciousness will persevere because without some version of that belief life is just too freaking painful and devastating for us to get through that's that's me the final word well i am not going to add to it because you should be allowed to have the final word i think these discussions always bring up interesting new points so i i do appreciate you coming on matthew again the god part of the brain he said he hasn't touched it since 2008 but i'm sure you'll find it a good read very well written in a good book and matthew thanks for coming on the show today sure thanks for having me on sorry i i know i frustrated you there but oh you know i've just heard this from skeptics all the time it's like you know whack-a-mole it's the same as arguing fundamentalist christians you know if you're hitting with science then that's not good science if you hit him with something that isn't science then why aren't you doing science so it's like you can't win but that's people who have fixed beliefs i don't have fixed beliefs i go with whatever i change my mind all the time based on the evidence but not everybody's like that all right i gotta run anyway i hope that'll be in any way satisfying to your listeners that's all i can hope so right on man see okay thank you thanks again to matthew helper for joining me today on skeptico the one question i guess i'd have to tee up from this interview and it's kind of outside of this interview because i thought his arguments were so pointless is should we continue to engage with skeptics should i continue engage in skeptics and publish interviews and put them out on the skeptical channel for you to listen to i kind of feel mixed you know on one hand i feel like these people are still out there and still have a lot of credibility with a lot of people even though their arguments are incredibly silly i mean here's someone who i really thought was going to back out of this interview because we did such a thorough job of debunking his nonsense in the skeptical forum before he came on and that was my goal is to kind of drive him away don't bring him on the show don't waste a lot of time but he comes on anyway and then he just fails at all these things that we already hashed out in the skeptical forum like he's quoting dr carl jensen the ketamine guy totally misquoting him and misrepresenting him i mean you just can't do that if you're serious about this but it just all rolls off the back of these true believers and that's frustrating but at the same time it's kind of worth i think putting it out there and maybe there's a different perspective of course there's a different perspective and let's hear your different perspective hey by the way i'd love to get some more traction over there on the skeptical forum it really is a go-to place for me and i love it when you all join me as i said when we were preparing for this interview there were some great comments there that really helped shape this interview so if you haven't been over there for a while please come over to the skeptical forum and join me i'm usually there i'm usually responding to almost every meaningful post that's there and i hope you join me over there also i'm going to be working on some new projects over there that i'd really like some audience participation in in particular this book that i'm working on so richard cox from the deep state consciousness podcast has actually agreed to kind of help me corral some of this in so you'll see him and i posting over there and we really like to have you come over there and join us because this audience this narrow audience that decides to dive deeply into this stuff is really important to this work that i'm doing and trying to move forward so that's my that's my plea there please come over to the skeptical forum and join me by the way you can also of course check out the skeptical website all the past shows are there download them use them share them and stay with me i have a number of i think really good interviews coming up i'm really excited to bring them to you so stay with me for all of that until next time take care and bye for now