 In order to exist as a living system in order to have form and to like to have some kind of structure that's relatively separate from the world around, you need to be, you need to attempt to know what's going on around you. Otherwise, you're just going to get demolished by all the forces in the world that, you know, that demolished all the things that are alive, right? And this, this is not currently the kind of way that most people think about consciousness in the kind of scientific and philosophical mainstream. We have this like hangover from, well, it's the kind of whole lineage of Western thought where we kind of assume that single-celled organisms are just little mechanisms. They're like little clockwork things that just kind of do that thing. And it's a very kind of, it's a view that really takes away any of the kind of awe at what a like vast universe of complexity like a single cell is, you know, so you'll hear scientists on the one hand almost dismiss plants and single cells as these boring little mechanisms. And yet, on the other hand, we like life is the kind of one of the greatest mysteries in the world and we're talking about life when we talk about a bacteria or a single cell, right? So, so yeah, the simple way of saying the theory is exactly as you said that it's really as simple as every living system, which is a system that actively keeps itself together, actively perpetuates its form. It has to attempt to know what's going on in its environment. It needs to know of itself and its environment. And this is just another way of saying consciousness. It kind of, yeah, it constructs beliefs about what's going on in like in existence in kind of qualitative picture of the world. And this is, we're talking now at a kind of conceptual level, but which is how it first came to me. But then it turns out if you dig into the kind of hard like physics and like statistical physics and maths behind the thermodynamics of life, it's there. The same stuff is there. You can unpack it at that level as well. And it was it was that when I saw that I was like, okay, like this is this. This isn't just hand waving, you know, saying, oh, maybe, maybe that's how we're consciousnesses. I'm I'm utterly convinced now that this is someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? What's up, everyone? Welcome to simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. Very pumped for this episode. We are going to be talking about the living mere theory of consciousness. We have Dr. James Cook joining us on the show. Hi, James. Hey there. It's great to be here. Thanks for coming on the program. I'm very pumped for this episode for those that don't know James's background. He's a neuroscientist, writer and speaker focusing on consciousness, meditation, psychedelic states, reconciling science and spirituality. He posits the living mere theory of consciousness that all living things need to know their world. He splits his time between London and the mountains of Portugal where he's building a retreat center, the surrender homesteading and find his links in the bio below drjamescook.com. Also, his YouTube page is having great interviews right now and great content. Check that out and he's writing on reality sandwich. All those links are in the bio below. James, let's start things off with obviously you and I are both extremely passionate about the synthesis of science and spirituality, metaphysics, understanding the nature of reality, the nature of consciousness. We're taking at it from such similar and also slightly different perspectives, which is, this is going to be an epic back and forth on that. I loved the learning about the living mere theory of consciousness and especially the understanding from what I understood from your video. I liked the fact that you went all the way back to what you could say is a biogenesis and just the idea that you can't divide the cell from the cell's understanding of its environment. Those two things are coupled together. If you don't divide those things, you understand the unity of everything, but that's this general idea is that the living system needs to understand its world. Will you take us through that process and elaborate a bit? Yeah, definitely. The way you said it is perfect, the fact that in order to exist as a living system, in order to have some kind of structure that's relatively separate from the world around, you need to attempt to know what's going on around you. Otherwise you're just going to get demolished by all the forces in the world that demolish all the things that aren't alive. This is not currently the kind of way that most people think about consciousness in the scientific and philosophical mainstream. We have this hangover from, well, it's the whole lineage of western thought where we assume that single celled organisms are just little mechanisms. They're little clockwork things that just do that thing. It's a view that really takes away any of the kind of awe at what a vast universe of complexity a single cell is. You'll hear scientists on the one hand almost dismiss plants and single cells as these boring little mechanisms. On the other hand, life is one of the greatest mysteries in the world. We're talking about life when we talk about a bacteria or a single cell. The simple way of saying the theory is exactly as you said that it's really as simple as every living system, which is a system that actively keeps itself together, actively perpetuates its form, it has to attempt to know what's going on. It's environment. It needs to know of itself and its environment. And this is just another way of saying consciousness. It kind of constructs beliefs about what's going on in existence in kind of a qualitative picture of the world. And this is, we're talking now at a kind of conceptual level, which is how it first came to me. But then it turns out if you dig into the kind of hard physics and statistical physics and maths behind the thermodynamics of life, it's there. The same stuff is there. You can unpack it at that level as well. And when I saw that, I was like, okay, this isn't just hand-waving saying maybe that's how consciousness is. I'm utterly convinced now that this is the, as you say, a-biogenesis, the moment that life pops into existence, that is the moment that consciousness pops into existence because then you have a system that can be aware. Before then, everything is just truly one system where everything is dissolving into everything else. And you can't really point to an object and say, is that conscious? Because we can label a rock in the ocean as a rock in the ocean, but really there's no boundary there. It's just being dissolved and everything's just kind of melting into each other in this kind of single thing we call physical reality. And so you can't even say it's a rock conscious, but you can point to the pattern of life and say, is that conscious? So there's also, I think that's something I've not spoken about in public, but I think it's quite a powerful way of thinking about this. Life forms, with life forms you can even, you can ask if they're conscious, but everything else you can't even really ask if it's conscious. In the ultimate nature of this infinite consciousness, this God, this source, this implicate, whatever the, that we want to use as that, as the main metaphysical truth that within that ocean is that infinite is a whirlpool. And we've been using this whirlpool analogy that there's this whirlpool, which is the abiogenesis for the whole planet. And then there are these whirlpools for all eight billion human creatures as well. And that the whirlpool itself is the formation of the, the, the coupling of the, the, the, the single celled organism at the first time to its environment, the coupling of that. There needs to be a ledger mechanism in a sense. Like I really like using a ledger idea because the cell itself has a ledger. When we've had a Dr. Chow Tong on the show and he is extremely obsessed with these, these, these, the mathematics of understanding cells, because they do have a cycle. They have a schedule for mitosis. They, they, they must know they have a protein buildup that signals to them at which point it's safe to divide, given their memory and their history. And so they're without a doubt, the same idea applies to us. Do I have enough resources right now for me to procreate? If the answer is no, I'm, I'm not going to procreate. There will not be mating and, and further the recursive function of making more humans. And so this, this idea that your life is, is inextricably connected to the, to, to your environment. And now, did you choose the word mirror because of how it's all, in a sense, we talk about this so much in, in spiritual world where if it is just this one consciousness that is having the, the symphonic experience through all eight billion artists and that there's that we're all in a sense mirrors of the same source. And so is that the idea that both the mirror of the individual and their environment like that, there's that coupling together of the, of the ledger of the person and their environment, but also the mirroring of all eight billion of us of that source. Yeah, so, so I would say that the word mirror is referring to a kind of property of the living system, but the consciousness itself is like a reflection. So if you want to understand a reflection, you know, the analogy would be for neuroscientists trying to understand consciousness by just looking at the brain in isolation. It would be like studying the surface of a mirror and trying to figure out what all these patterns are. Like you can't, if you refuse to think about photons and you refuse to think about how they reflect off of other surfaces that then get reflected in the mirror, then you're not going to understand what, what a reflection is. It's, it's something that can only be understood as a process arising in this, in this very zoomed out picture where you're considering the photons, you're considering the surface properties of the mirror and so similarly with, with living systems, when you zoom out and you see living systems as, as you say, a kind of whirlpool as a pattern in reality that perpetuates itself, a feature of those patterns is that there's this kind of informational reflection of the structure of the world around the system inside it. And this is kind of what consciousness is, I would say. And I think it's to go back to, you were, you were saying the kind of the source or the kind of, you know, I might call it the kind of the ground of being, right? If we get into this kind of these metaphysical questions, part of the reason people have found it hard to think about the place of consciousness in nature is kind of articulated by something called the hard problem of consciousness, which can be thought of in a few different ways, but one way of thinking about it is as a metaphysical problem that you've got the kind of hard matter that makes up the world. And then that's a kind of substance that exists. And then you've got mind, which is kind of another substance, and then somehow you've got a map between the two. If you look at, you know, prior to this kind of the scientific narrative that the world is made of little material building blocks, most kind of spiritual traditions have this idea that the ground of being is something utterly beyond our concepts. You can call it matter, you can call it consciousness, you can call it whatever you want, but it's utterly, it's the ground, like the territory is so much greater and faster than the map. These little words we say are nothing in the face of the kind of the source of existence. Dan Fajal likes saying that we're crickets imagining the big game. Yeah. Exactly, right. And so that's why God is actually, you know, coming from a kind of scientist who's not a kind of a theist or anything, like the word God is useful because it points to the fact that, well, what does God mean? It's another word, but it points to something utterly beyond words, right? Utterly transcend and imminent and everything. And so I actually have a kind of pet peeve, I think, in the kind of spiritual communities when we use the word consciousness for the kind of, for this ground of being, because we're now just, instead of say, instead of really sitting with the fact that the ground of being is truly beyond words, if we say it's consciousness, then we're kind of, it feels like it's tempting to give it a label, right? But I think it can get confusing because I would say, if you think the ground of being is consciousness, then you would think in that perspective that, and at the Big Bang, there was some experience. I'm saying the kind of ground of being is some mysterious process and the Big Bang was not a conscious event. It was unconscious kind of things happening and consciousness exists in these kind of reflections of living systems. So it's not that everything is in consciousness in my worldview, but it's important to understand that the world isn't divided fundamentally into matter and mind. Everything is process. Everything is just this kind of strange creative thing unfolding, which is what we see in quantum mechanics. If you try and say, where is that subatomic particle? Good luck, it's nowhere. It doesn't have a pre-existing location because you're part of this kind of web of co-creation, you know, and what we call matter is not this pre-existing stage, it's this kind of, yeah, this process that gets co-created. And consciousness is also a process. And so I think that's why you can author scientific theories of consciousness because all sciences is another map. It's a map of the territory and we can come up with a map that describes how matter behaves. I can come up with a map that describes how consciousness behaves and how they fit together and I see no problem there. Yeah, beautiful. So we are constantly trying to make better and better maps of the reality, yet the most simple way to say it is that there is an indescribable, this ineffable, and then there is a creative likely, an eternal creative unfolding and that the unfolding has a feedback mechanism and that feedback mechanism is this co-creative ability for us to out of all of the infinite potential that you have as an artist that you get to pick what you want to unfold out of the infinite potential, what you want to collapse, what you want to become. Okay, so an eternal creative process. Now, the reason why it's tempting I think to put to subsume cosmogony in consciousness or infinite consciousness is because there is no in a sense nothing else besides this experience that we are having and that in a sense consciousness is the tool that we use as from whatever perspective of that God or source or whatever you want to call that from that indescribable we use consciousness as the tool to experience ourselves. I think my take on this is that maybe because I'm a scientist that I want the problem for me of consciousness and also just as an individual who meditates and other stuff the problem for me is accounting for this particular thing that is it's private, it's this qualitative space of awareness that's here right now and you have it, right? And we're going to give that the label consciousness and we're going to face this as a problem like where does that emerge in nature, right? So that's one thing if all of existence is in consciousness or it has consciousness or it is conscious that's it could be a similar kind of thing but I think it won't have exactly the same properties. It doesn't have like a boundary and inside and outside privacy. Oh yeah. It could be something related but we we could come up with a speculative or metaphysical idea of the infinite consciousness but then there's organism consciousness and we can talk about those differently, right? Oh, interesting. So as Rupert Spira talks about this and Bernardo Castro does as well, there's the screen, the infinite screen of consciousness or awareness and then on it is all of these little perforated like dissociative private consciousnesses and that organism consciousness as you said and I kind of like that, you know, if we were to make some sort of a division of this one into two, it would be interesting to do it like a metaphysical consciousness that's indescribable and then like a little private or organisms consciousness in the world pools. That's kind of interesting. Yeah. Okay. And that kind of takes it from a scientific side as well. And I yeah, yeah, which is very important. I agree with this process. I totally agree. I've lived too much in San Francisco and the Bay Area is like spiritual as community where there's a very strong tendency to kind of just go with whatever new age impulse arises and that it's it's very important to it both embody whatever that intuition is, but also embody the science that comes along with it. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think for me it's again, it may be yeah, you know, if it's my whole life in science this might be just an interesting difference between you know, putting our environmental factors might be what's what's kind of bringing up our differences. Yeah, our differences on this on this topic. And I do think there's a kind of fundamentally like I I guess I've always been fascinated by kind of describing these things as part of nature. Nature is this like it's one like Spinoza had this idea like nature is God effectively like it doesn't need to be a personal God with like nothing like that, but it's this it's just this lawful beautiful like thing that's far bigger than us. And so that's my kind of my scientific perspective is like when it comes to this kind of speculative metaphysical consciousness that might be bigger than my own consciousness. I guess I kind of have to you know, I don't I guess I just draw the line there for myself is and saying my job as the kind of spiritually engaged neuroscientists is to think about this consciousness, but I can't I can't speculate about about that stuff as much, but also it's because of my spiritual world view is also like I you know in like something like the Dao Di Ching like you know it's it's all about how you know the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao. It's like the if you're going to try and describe this thing by calling it anything if you think you've got a handle on it you're fooling yourself it's so utterly beyond you know we can calling it metaphysical consciousness or absolute infinite consciousness this this is starting to get a vibe that it sounds very big it sounds very ground it sounds like it's the right kind of word but then you have to realize that it's going to be utterly it cannot encapsulate the ground of being like so I quite like the spiritual side of me just likes to kind of come up against this mystery and say like yeah like I don't I can't know what this thing is I think it's unknowable in its in its essence and then the scientist in me is like okay do I think there's a reason to think the Big Bang was conscious of itself I can't see any kind of mechanism by which that would happen so I'm going to suspect no and that's when you start to get into the these kind of fascinating questions of like what we might call organism level consciousness which I guess I'm just calling consciousness and yeah this is so beautiful because it's so extremely important to embody the truth of mysterianism and the idea of the eternal now that can be named as the Dow that can be named as not the eternal Dow the idea that the more that you both truly surrender to the essence of the nature of reality both very important but also simultaneously balancing that with the true scientific spiritual inquiry into what actually that is and like you know Eric Weinstein calls it you know the source code and you know really uncovering what that is and you know Hilbert talked about the importance of uncovering that like we must know and you know whatever Bohm was so focused on uncovering whatever the implicate is and like we must know and so it's like this balance between we must know and probing at it with the mysterianism yeah I think I'm a big advocate for kind of reigning science in putting it in its place when it comes to you know I think that you know fundamentally we're humans we're here we're having a weird experience of existence and you know all of the kind of the feelings of awe and meaning and stuff that's the first stuff that you experience then a scientist might come along and say okay let's try and do some clever tricks to come up with good stories that fit the world and we do that game you know it clearly is it works very well it's what's allowing us to talk so it clearly gives us some kind of knowledge but it doesn't eradicate just this immediate felt conscious sense of here we are and spiritual experience right this is for me is like the spiritual experience of meaning and awe and just existence comes first and then science is this quite should be this humble storyteller it should be something that you know and I guess I'm describing science here as I would say science and philosophy like if you're going to make claims about the world try to do it as carefully and rigorously and and honestly yeah possible yeah and I think and I think that's why I actually am very happy to stop very stop short and say what is the nature of the kind of ground of being I don't have any tools for that I haven't got a microscope to look at it I haven't got philosophical tools to think about it and so I think I maybe stop short further shorter than other people would in what it could be and and yeah that's that's just the place of it's recognizing our limits as these kind of naked apes that came up with these funny ways to figure out the world I would also plug here Shria Bindo and the mother Miral Fawcett talk a lot about the super irrational enigma that that it truly is and that it really does require a when you use the body itself as the mechanism to intuitively tap into the nature of reality there is going to be better and better ways to scientifically analyze the biometric correlates of these sort of awakened states and that's going to be a very interesting way for example when someone has imperturbable peace and causeless joy and that's a sign of living in the infinite that's a sign of being God or the Dow that's a sign of being truth and butterfly affecting it out and that's a very you know spiritual statement and scientists would be like what do you mean by that let's do that more and I'm like yeah we can we can totally play that that's that's very important we must plant flags beyond the edge of the knowledge and we must and this is what you know Richard Feynman so many other scientists have been doing this forever is planting flags beyond what's known and then in a sense hypothesis and then testing it which we are we are going to do now but the Vedic Rishis 5000 years ago Parmenides and Heraclitus we're talking about guys that knew and girls that knew the nature of being at its most fundamental level by leveraging what is just existence phenomenological awareness as what they believe to be that true nature of who we are and I think that we must realize that science is that incredible toolset that is very important to making a map and to understanding enabling incredible things like this and then to also enable the other tool to help which is in a sense this spirituality this like we like we can't we can't choke the God in man along the way we have to enable the God in man to flourish at the same time I want to ask this question this has been a great back and forth there I really liked how we talked about some sort of a if we were to break it into two this like metaphysical first principle consciousness with this organism consciousness I think that's a very interesting way to break that down let's have you explain this so we have a living mere theory of consciousness we have a something that can absolutely not be decoupled we the way that the way that the individual consciousness the private consciousness the organism consciousness the way that that becomes exists is literally through the fact that it must understand its world it must understand its environment and it has it has an ongoing feedback loop where it's air food water fitness functions always fitness functions reproduction ideas ideas ideas what are the ideas at the top of the fitness landscape how can I consume those ideas to make me as smart as possible so I could etc so is this kind of your general reasoning over those billions of years and how that is slowly what had been happening yeah I mean that that's an excellent description of it and but what I would say is that you're right that it can't be decoupled so the moment that life comes into existence there's full blown consciousness there's full blown awareness of an environment and it wouldn't be as complex as ours you know if you don't have a retina made up of loads of cells and all this other complexity the contents are not going to be as complex as ours but the fact of experiences is the fact of experience and to me this is so there's no change in consciousness over the course of evolution if you could trade if you could have your atoms rearranged into a single celled organism you would be experiencing the world as vividly as you are now it'd be a very different experience but there'd still be an experience of that and I think something that's in this picture because consciousness is this kind of absolute pristine perfect kind of space in which all experiences arise it even though it seems to be separated you know there are these different islands of consciousness right now there's at least one over here and there's one where you are the character of consciousness itself is the same it can only ever be the same so it's like if you imagine you know as these creatures engaging in survival dynamics we become very concerned with our separation I become very concerned to differentiate myself from you and you know in order to survive and so the separation becomes the really important thing but if you try and kind of zoom out and look objectively you can kind of imagine if we're all like soap bubbles like we're made out of the same liquid the dynamics of evolution and survival would make us obsessed with our separation but we're all made of the same liquid this consciousness is the same consciousness it's a feature of the universe it's not James' consciousness the concept of James in my head does not possess consciousness the organism doesn't even possess consciousness because it's arising through the interaction with the environment so it's more like you have a single universe with a sprinkling of islands of consciousness it's like a bunch of eyes opening in one organism think of the universe as this organism and where each of us is like an eye getting in it and in that way you can see why in this picture consciousness is still this unified thing and you can still you can feel yourself to be identified with that rather than your own personal consciousness and if you imagine once you have that kind of experience of realising that you know this is usually described as the self being an illusion in spiritual circles when you realise that and you recognise this character of consciousness then the moment you die another eye will open in the universe somewhere and in parallel there are now these multiple eyes opening and when you identify with that process then you realise okay I really am that ground of being I really am that just the unfolding of the world and these eyes opening in it which I think when I read texts like the Vedas and the Dao and things like this to me it fits with the wardrobe I'm describing there are some that are quite explicit about kind of mind only consciousness existing but to me I get the feeling that the authors of these texts were seeing the same world view where a rock doesn't have to be conscious the big bang didn't have to be conscious if they were aware of the big bang but it describes these principles even reincarnation right if you take the Buddhist idea of reincarnation with the idea you know the central one of the central doctrines of Buddhism is that the self is an illusion that the realms is reincarnated but when you have this recognition of the selflessness of consciousness then it's like well what's really happening is you know to use Rupert Spira's term of the screen of perception or of consciousness it's like there's this movie of James happening and then there might be a movie of a frog happening in parallel and then after I die as well and then a plant and the screen is always the same I absolutely agree with that the character of consciousness is identical and I think to really grasp you need to be familiar with that and that's why you know you can see it as this binary event that as soon as you have these enclosed living systems you have consciousness instead of a lot of scientific thinking gets kind of confused with wakefulness and sleeping and then things of levels of consciousness and that's where people start to think well maybe it gradually evolved but then the philosophers are like no there's no way it could have gradually evolved that can't possibly have happened so I think the kind of spiritual perspective would be crucial in understanding the place of the scientific picture of where consciousness fits in nature Wow okay so there's there's a coexistence that it's always so important like Shiro Bindo talked about this so much just the utter refusal to cut life in two and to divide it in two and that if you always keep it at that one in no matter how you perceive always at the one it'll always help and especially in this sense like I think that the idea of an evolution just exists it just plainly is true but also at the same time again simultaneity being key where it's like obviously we didn't have a way to structure meaning we couldn't structure order out of the chaos as well as we do now that's just fact we just didn't have that ability to do it and now we're structuring order significantly more out of the chaos so there has been some sort of an evolution of this this neg entropy and now we have this and it's excellent okay great so there's that it's like the whirlpool has the eternal spiral but we're here but then at the same time we're holding that perspective at the same time as we're holding the infinite screen of consciousness that itself is never changing Parmenidus and Heraclitus really had from what I understand this first like 2500 years ago the first realization of both of those things coexisting at the same time that eternal becoming and the eternal being at the same time and like if you never divide into then you get to that yeah and that's exactly so the way I would say in my picture of the world is that in order to be an island of consciousness in order to have this kind of this perfect peaceful perch of awareness from which you can just kind of sit and observe the world in the kind of in the best kind of meditative states if you can achieve that peaceful consciousness in order to have that privilege of being able to look out at the world and have the lights turn on you need to struggle you need to struggle to keep yourself together there needs to be this controlling and trying to make order happen that's just the price of admission that's the bind we find ourselves in and it's better to kind of come to terms with that sooner rather later and it's also why I actually don't why I don't tend to think about being some kind of consciousness outside of this process because if there was not to be too dark but there would be no point in me continuing to live if I could live not as an organism that didn't have to feel pain and didn't have to feel hunger and all this stuff and I could still be conscious and at that I could be part of an infinite blissful kind of unified consciousness and that seems better like I don't see this seems to be a mistake this this evolution thing this life thing it seems like a silly like you know we're going to return to the one and then be like why did we do that stupid game that that was that game what was sucked it just introduced suffering and whereas in my picture the world it's like yeah this this this funny situation we find ourselves in that it's amazing privilege to be alive but it's not free it's not trivial it's a it's a truly kind of interesting place to find ourselves in I think yeah sure bindo says that becoming is the only being and and I think that's this is a very interesting way to put it is that it whatever the the the infinite is is only becoming in infinite amount of ways and and that that exactly could be and this is kind of where I'm honing in on the logic of the infinite I'm trying again the cricket trying to imagine the big game but I do think that the logic of the infinite is that it must validate the fact that it is infinite and that it does so by creating an infinite amount of illusory affinity and that we are that you know talk to mom I see we are that I and my father are one the more that you realize and embody the fact that if this is true that we are the publishers of this and and the more that you realize that we are the publishers and the players and that here we are playing I think the more you live from truth the more you live from and when you and like you described earlier as well when you realize that the one I the one I one I that is experiencing it itself from through all through all of us that the more that you embody that realization if it can you know like Adiashanti calls it you know the flickering you know you get the light it flickers a little you're like oh and then and then like slowly it does it is in a sense like you said it's it's a death and a rebirth it's a it's a caterpillar into a butterfly if that light when that light and that's what it seems like we're evolving towards is that light permanently staying on that's when the being can the individual artist can no longer ever ever have any violence or even negativity not let a yeah violence is the worst negativity at even the most minuscule malevolence towards another because it's you and then if we can get there as a planet that's I think this main key of the where we're heading and also you said if it's true that we are the publisher as well as the player I would say it's definitely true like there's no way that we are not the same physical stuff of the universe and there's no way that the self is what we think it is to think that you are not the main event of that you are not the same thing as the kind of ground of being that illusion kind of comes about we take this story we tell ourselves as a separation very very seriously right but I think the idea of the infinite as well is really relevant because I think we've touched on it in like two different ways I think and there's the first way in the sense that which also relates to the idea why I'm not I don't believe that consciousness is kind of ground of being is the only way the only kind of speculative way I can think about as to why this is happening right now like why are we why is this going on why are we here would be that the kind of default of reality if you if you have no boundaries nothing going on like nothing to him reality and then it's infinity right like that's kind of just the default it if you're going to make no assumptions you could say that was consciousness in the beginning but then you're like well where did that come from what what gave it that structure but if you just say as if you say nothing effectively there's infinity and infinity everything that can happen will happen all the you know things will start happening patterns will emerge and at some point those patterns become these patterns that open their eyes and go what the hell's going on so that's my picture of the world is it's a lawful unfolding that can be understood and there there is no the infinity is the beginning there is no it's not like there was some some being with structure who thought I'm going to will all this into existence I think it's just happening and it will happen forever because yeah you can't just you can't come up with an end to infinity yeah doesn't make sense yeah and you can also connect with that by kind of sinking into the present moment recognizing your being now you're the nature of your mind you know if you say consciousness is infinite to the to the average person like well you know you might be meaning it in the sense of it is the kind of infinite ground of being but if I say consciousness has this quality of infinity I what I mean is it's not finite it's not actually bounded into concepts in the way we think it is we think it's divided and structured and but it's actually not it's it's maybe it's maybe you should coin a new term like a finite or something as opposed to infinite because infinite has this kind of I guess idea of like spatial extension and stuff but it's just it's not finite and when you recognize that yourself you do connect with with this ground of being and I totally get why you know in the best in the kind of deepest moments of meditation you have this feeling of consciousness just kind of beholding existence and there being this wordless getting you just kind of you get it in a way that you can't with words and it's if you were trying to try putting words is something like oh you're me like but then that's not quite right because there is no me so it's more like it is like is or something like that if you if you wanted to but wasn't and I see why from there because that's happening in consciousness it's tempting to think well maybe this consciousness is me and this consciousness is everything and I think that's where people can kind of differ but we should all be humble I guess is because like I will make claims about what we can't say and what we can say and ultimately we're really way out we're in deep waters here I think you know I'm trying to label this stuff Oh love this love this chase so let's um let's hit what you're going to be releasing do you have the Journal of Consciousness Studies and we have that tell us about what like what is um how do we test that like the hypothesis because we've been you know yeah we've been talking about it so much um living mirror theory so what what do we do for um proper like is there a randomized control trial like yeah yeah and or do we have to use simulation technology to like to yeah yeah yeah go ahead go ahead so yeah I would say computational modeling like simulating and um would be one step but that's going to be I mean you know technology is increasing exponentially right so maybe it's not that far away right now the simulations we can do are so puny we we can't simulate a single cell like it's too complex a single cell um but we can do kind of quite simple simulations with this stuff um so what would be nice would be to be able to simulate a single cell um and then so say you have bacteria and you could effectively simulate based on its statistical physics the patterns in its environment you find out its fitness functions and you model what you think its structure of its consciousness should be like you know what dimensions that have kind of photo you know of like light sensitivity as they have and then you do behavioral experiments where you would you would basically test it flashlights make it respond for nutrients and stuff and just see like does the theory predict the structure of consciousness and that would be the kind of gold standard way of really you know it's not a um I guess yeah in that in that picture you would be able to just see like do does it fall out of the theory does it match up if it doesn't match up the theory is probably not right um but the other kind of more gradual approach which is similar is that the the actual um the kind of mathematical basis of the theory is not some um kind of fringe you know bit of bit of science it's actually the emerging mainstream picture of how the brain works is it's been described it's kind of a hierarchical inference it's like this idea of the Bayesian brain it's also called the free energy principle all of this stuff is about using exactly the same mathematics as applies to the single cell um to understand how the brain works and this this was best fleshed out by a guy called Carl Friston uh his neuroscientist at the same university as me he does wonderful work here and and this is to me is is you know more and more people are lining up to the brain in these terms and so the the living mirror theory just fits perfectly alongside it it just says here whilst you're doing your neuroscience studies on the human brain as well as just saying okay I know a human brain is conscious but I I don't know what to say about any other living system this theory gives you a way of saying well alongside your experiments you can say this is a way of thinking about which systems are conscious why the conscious were you know where in the universe they're conscious and so what I hope is that people will gradually just kind of in the same way with uh the theory of evolution people there was no there was no experiment to test it really but the kind of gradual just seeing how it made sense of everything it just fit with all the data everyone gradually was like oh okay this is the right way of thinking about it that's where I'm at personally with being like okay that's someone who's always been passionate about trying to understand the mystery of consciousness you know I've read the different things on offer and they don't they just don't sit right with me if they had sat right with me you know I would have stuck with those but I mean this isn't controversial no one you know yeah we're not in a situation where we think consciousness is solved right like there is nothing where everyone's like yep this is definitely the answer so that would be my my hope but the problem is that it really hinges on the radical change in humanity in the kind of consciousness of humanity that you described like well you know having more people realize what they really are there's there's a sense in which so we spoke about the idea that there is this evolutionary process there is kind of becoming and and we get more and more ability to create order and control the world and that's what's kind of got us to where we are now but we're living so much in that side of things we're living so much in separation and control that we have these you know societies that are structured around progress progress progress you know use humans as machines to kind of to generate more material stuff and and we're not balanced enough into the kind of being side of things when you when you're in the kind of you know the being side of things that's when you can look at a plan and say oh you're me like we're the same thing I totally get that you would be conscious so I think most humans have this kind of tunnel vision of separation where after generation and generation of going on this kind of progress mode with all of its kind of feelings of trauma and being distant from the rest of the natural world like the punchline of consciousness has to be that we are special that we are different that our separation our felt separation from nature is a good thing ultimately because we are it's what gives us our consciousness it's you know we're these these truly different things but I I think we're just that perspective is one of this kind of stress traumatized association and tunnel vision and if we all come back into just being we recognize our unity with nature we would look at a plant and recognize it as an extension of the same thing that created us and suddenly you're like oh okay I get it plants can be conscious that totally makes sense and we see this in people who engage in spiritual practice or after psychedelics and they really kind of see through the kind of the delusional structures and consciousness for what consciousness really is and they're brought into this being mode more and yeah and I think if so I think actually people widespread if it turns out I'm true my theory is true or I'm correct I think the limiting factor will be that perspective will be people having a kind of knee jerk reaction of like no way is that true because I my feeling of separation is I'm so attached to it same same thing with Darwin and evolution right it's like don't tell me I'm the same as an ape like I don't like to hear that because I have this real feeling of like not being at peace and struggling and being separate and so yeah it's quite a maybe unlike this is why consciousness is such a tricky thing to address I think so close to home we have it's not only to do with what we are still the reality is and so we have such emotional investment in what this answer is and whether it satisfies us that I think unlike other problems there's yeah that could be a big boundary to whether or not it's ever accepted as as correct but also it could be wrong two ways to hit the ball back there the first one is yeah super eloquently described with the tunnel vision of separation in that slowly becoming more and more augmented and awakened and harmonized especially between the importance of seeing the the collective symphony at the same time as seeing a unique gift and artistic contribution those two things together are critical and then on the first part that you mentioned let's talk about the mathematics here I think this is very interesting child tongue when we had him on the show in China he was so insightful and visionary about the fact that we are literally going to need new math to understand how life works and I think that's so profoundly interesting because like you described even given such extreme successes with computational capacities how do we actually simulate the inner workings of even a single cell and how it interacts with its environment and then how we can basically prove the idea is that you can prove there's like a mathematics of consciousness of that cell that when it does get a like a light source as an input that it does register that and that it makes an output and that's the idea of a of an attempt a deeper living mirror theory of understanding and how a multi-cell organism has like a slightly more complex mathematical computation of understanding of its environment is that the general trajectory alongside what mainstream is I think where we're currently at the maths is coming along well actually so again this is mainly the work of Carl Friston and what's called the free energy principle and the existing state of it is I mean it is complicated maths and so it's but it's it's not it's not like inventing a whole new branch of mathematics I guess but it's fundamentally the idea is that if it also exists you need to minimize the kind of disorder in your boundary if you don't minimize the disorder in your boundary you're not going to exist you're going to dissolve into it and if you look at that kind of physically the mathematics describe that physically it's the same you can rearrange it and it basically says that it's the same as what's called Bayesian inference which is again this I mentioned the Bayesian brain the idea that this is just a kind of branch of mathematics that's to do with how you build models of the world how you test it against hypotheses how you test your hypotheses against data and in my in my theory what I should actually make clear is that the maths describes the contents of consciousness the structure so in this picture you'd be able to say that primate with its three different types of photoreceptors or colour-sensitive photoreceptors has trichromatic vision it has these kind of three dimensions of colour and we can map out this kind of structure the fact of consciousness is not something that can be that's where you need to zoom out to this kind of to the universe really to the picture of the environment and the organism and like a reflection exists in the interaction between the organism and its environment so the question of to go back to what you said before about can it ever be proven the idea you would never be able to prove this organism has consciousness this organism doesn't have consciousness this is just one of the features of consciousness it's private and I can speculate that you have it because your physiology is so similar to mine it would be really very surprising if you had a similar you're a similar organism without consciousness that would just seem so weird that I'm willing to grant it to you and then with a theory you can start to think okay I'm willing to grant it to these other organisms for these reasons but there can never be I can never prove that you're not a robot you know like a zombie is the kind of philosophical term for being with no with no consciousness and so the mathematics would really be making progress in terms of caching out whether we've got a handle on how the contents are structured but then if the theory manages to pull that off then it's good to assume that it's right in some fundamental way okay so living mere theory is heavily grounded in the mathematics of the structure of consciousness well no so I would say the basic insight is just the conceptual one we said before you can really we could not talk about thermodynamics at all we could just say if you're going to exist you need to know what's going on around you and I think for some people they might think yeah that makes sense that makes more sense than maybe I don't know saying if your brain oscillates at 40 hertz then you're conscious that doesn't seem to hold any intuitive explanation is it then fair to say that it's the mathematics of the living system in the way that it's coupled with its environment yeah so the mathematics only comes in when it's a scientific theory so if you want to test it you want to get precise that's where it comes in but you don't need to worry about the actual kind of that level of granularity to feel you've got a handle on what I'm claiming yeah correct that's kind of where we started is having the handle on it without the math but then I see where because I'm so interested in the actual process of getting people around the world to go okay what we're triangulating on and what 5000 plus years of metaphysical lineages unconsciousness across the world are triangulating on is the exact same thing and that's why I want the math to succeed I want the hypotheses to be proven over time and successfully over and over and over again yeah and that's why I ask about the math and the complicated process of doing the simulations of the coupling of the living system with its environment and then kind of like the idea is that the math you're we're in a sense we're watching the changes of the math we're watching those changes to determine your consciousness you mean yeah yeah yeah that's interesting I mean it gets a bit I need to be careful because if it's like you're watching it's like you're conscious of these other things so I would say I would say the math and the theory are always just maps for the territory right so this is a picture where it's not like consciousness is just information processing it's not like the computer analogy for the brain where you just assume it's this very thin kind of description of what's going on it's really a body it's like you have this real like existence that's happening right now and it's a real process and when you have a system that believes things about the world around it this is what it feels like and the theory and mathematical descriptions are just maps they're just saying here's how it should play out if we've got a really if we've got a lot of what's going on this is what it should look like so the consciousness itself is embodied in the world and the theories are just their descriptions they're a language game ultimately which is why if you if you force me to choose between science and spirituality I would choose to just meditate the rest of my life away instead of the game of trying to put it into words and in other forms of languages is not as it's not as real it's it's a story it's ultimately a story interesting okay alright I think that's a really solid amount on on living mere theory let's let's play a little bit on the telos I just want to play on this for a bit given the fact that we're talking about simulation tech we're given AI VR tech emerging what's being unleashed with quantum computation so ultimately it seems as though the way that a tree drops seeds and those become trees and the way that a zygote makes a human and humans procreate make more humans the same way that a big bang makes a civilization and we make more big bangs do you see the recursion as the telos do you see this as a quine in a sense by telos do you mean some kind of like purpose to the to the whole thing yeah yeah I think I mean I guess my view the recursion comes in the kind of self-referential nature of things comes in with life and with it's crucial for consciousness with you know because we're kind of self-starting creatures we're we're both the puppeteer and the puppet of ourselves but I see I think I see that's actually really interesting prompt because I would say that I see the evolution of the universe starting at the big bang rather than a kind of recursive process a kind of linear process like a kind of like a radial process of like a flower blooming or something where you have a big bang and then you have physics becoming chemistry becoming biology becoming life and just increasing complexity and it's but this is very I don't know aesthetically I like it as well it makes me feel very like reassured that the world is just moving in one direction and it makes the things feel less loopy and complicated than the kind of quaint picture because when you start getting consciousness you really can tumble down you know holes of solipsism and you know not knowing where the kind of floor is a reality but I would say yeah actually when it comes to so when it comes to reality itself there's a sense in which we kind of touched on earlier Newton had this idea that the universe is made of little separate things little separate bricks that are truly separate and then with quantum mechanics we now know it's far more like an interwoven tapestry or like a house of cards where every kind of piece is dependent on all the other pieces and consciousness is like that as well I think this is how you can get consciousness arising out of a physical system because it's not like it introduces a new substance into existence but at the level of information a system can hold that the world is one way as opposed to another way it can hold that it can hold that but then there are correlations with like well hot things tend to be more red and yellow you know there's like long wavelengths of light rather than kind of blues and greens in this kind of self-referential process you build up consciousness you get this kind of house of cards of more this less of that and this is kind of touched on the Buddhist concept of emptiness when you in the west we have ideas of qualia the idea that redness is a thing like the idea of qualia was supposed to be like an atom of consciousness which I think should sound like a kind of nonsense idea red is only red with respect to everything else in consciousness you can't isolate it and have just just read and so this is the Buddhist concept of emptiness if you really look at red for long enough it loses any sense of any intrinsic essence it's all just this kind of mirage of relative change so I'd say in that sense I don't know if that's precisely in the way you mean this kind of self-referential structure but I think everything emerges in this way and it's a feature of a holistic picture of things a holistic nature of consciousness and the holistic nature of the physical world as well inevitably it's going to happen with the west becoming more and more and even China Japan is a canary in the coal mine in many ways with humans passing I don't know if you've seen the husk but the husk is the contraption now for the ultimate unit where you're literally just you know you got your bed you got your computer you got your controller you know you got your whole setup and soon it's just it's right in it's connected directly in and if you don't put on VR and use it for 30 minutes and then take it off and think to yourself how am I not already in VR then you don't know but if you do have that process you take it off and you make the self-inquiry and you go how is this not already VR then you know and I think that is the essence of where the modernized world is pushing and that the modernized world is going to triangulate on the exact same realization that 5,000 years ago 4,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago from everywhere across the world to perennial spiritual wisdom it has been triangulating on so we'll see and I do think that john smart's transcension hypothesis has a lot of potential as well we've hit on so many awesome things I want to I want to talk about this for a bit I think that you know you've had incredible guests on your show already I highly recommend you guys to go and check out james's podcast he's crushing it check out his youtube channel Christoph cock episode was so good so was you know Donald Huffman both such great episodes I think if we take Hoffman's perspective for a little bit we were talking about this a bit before we started it seems like a multimodal user interface and the video game analogy we were just talking about a moment ago those are basically anyone that has anyone that goes through that process of self inquiry we were just talking about inevitably comes to the realization that they themselves have a a user interface that they are in a reality they have this user interface there are fitness functions you know that if you eat a bucket of ice cream you're going to feel like shit and that you're going to feel like shit the next day and that you're probably shaving could be shaving a day or two or even a week off of your longevity and now versus if you eat a salad you're going to feel great you'll feel great tomorrow you might have an extra week on so there are there are these these understandings of what you do in this reality is going to inevitably make you more peaceful, more happy a better mate more knowledge about truth, more a better mate for procreation I'm also curious where living mirrors theory could potentially synthesis with the multimodal user interface because in a sense that's what the cell does have the cell has a ledger and an understanding of the world and then it's constantly updating that based on this so do you see a synthesis of Hoffman and you in a sense as well I can see your head nodding yeah I think that's a really important point so I would say when I was an undergrad when I first was going to introduce a psychology and neuroscience it was taught that it was kind of a fact or almost a point of definition that colors are not out there in the world things are not objectively colorful objectively beautiful those are qualities that exist in consciousness and this was just like talking about perception let's get our definitions straight leaves are not green you perceive them to be green but that's in consciousness so when I first saw Donald Hoffman's theory it took me a while to understand what he was saying was radical because when he says reality and he was saying the world isn't actually full of these colors well that's a fact basically if you're thinking about the world the right way that's something it turns out he's saying something far more radical that the moon isn't there when you're not looking at it I think there's something even though it doesn't have the same appearance appearance is happening in consciousness I think there's some structure out there in the world that persists when we're not looking at it but yeah so this idea that your consciousness are absolutely and I would say only tied to fitness payoffs is the term that Hoffman uses but like so there's structure in the world and you perceive when you're hungry you perceive certain food to be appetizing and delicious and when you're not hungry if you eat too much chocolate then the same thing can now appear disgusting your conscious perception, the attribute of the thing in the world has changed yet it's not like physicists have to account for some you know some atom that decays from like nice atom to disgusting atom that's not how we think about the kind of disgustingness or appetizingness of the chocolate being out there in the world seems true for color, seems true for all these other things which is that was the way I was thinking about consciousness when I came up with my theory because in my theories it's absolutely entirely tied up with the organism survival and the contents of consciousness are completely tied up with what you might call fitness payoffs and also I think to just get a feeling of this the fact that what you perceive is an interface for the world if you perceive based on your history and your kind of genetics and stuff you might perceive certain foods to be appealing because of that history and because it makes sense for you in the same way imagine if as well as us becoming this intelligent, technologically advanced civilization imagine if slugs had as well and you had slug Hollywood celebrities who all the slugs agreed with the most beautiful, perfect things they thought they were objectively beautiful I don't think I would be agreeing that the slug Hollywood celebrities are objectively beautiful and that's a way of seeing that the perception, the conscious perception of beauty is not out there in the world and as weird as it sounds it's true for all of our senses and we saw this with the hysteria around that dress that went viral I was going to talk to you about it it's a perfect example I was very excited when that came up because I was like this is what I'm interested in and this points to something fascinating about the nature of reality exactly you're poised on understanding something but then the media kind of took it in a far more like no no it's just this this kind of, you know, some more kind of less radical kind of it's like the biggest metaphysical thing exactly exactly and it's what you can do from that point and the same thing was with that sound clip of Yanny versus Laurel people heard it as these two different words right what you can realise there is that what you're seeing is not perception is not like you're looking out of these transparent eyeballs to a freestanding world just one quick thing on that is that you can change your perception on the Laurel Yanny because you can go back and forth like the Rubin vase or the Necker cube but you can go back and forth but on the the dress you can't at least from what I've tested with people they can't go back and forth between golden white and black and blue which that I think is the most profound part of it anyway that's interesting in its own I think it might be to do with the fact that like with the vase face illusion where it kind of changes there's some structure there that you can scan your attention around and you have some model in your head of the two things and you can actively engage with the process same with the Yanny or Laurel you can really try and focus on the high notes that sound like Yanny or the Laurel with the dress I think the thing that seems to account for which way you go is if you think you're discounting blue light or yellow light I read one thing that I don't know if it was actually real data or if it was just speculation but there was this speculation that men would see it as I think it was black and blue sorry yellow and golden white because they played more computer games with blue lights so their brain is used to being like the room's drenched in blue light and this counts in blue and it pushes it in that direction but yeah I mean I don't know if that was actually proven but I think that might be why it moves that way but yeah so what it shows you though is that this is not a pre-given world that looks the way it looks there is a screen of consciousness and there's all these weird appearances inside it and you are just another one of these appearances you know when I'm looking at my hand it feels like this hand is inside me but actually it's appearing in consciousness and it's really continuous with the rest of the background and that's when you can your kind of sense of self can blink out of existence and there can just be this kind of light of consciousness and a bunch of phenomena happening and you can realize that fundamentally that's what's going on and there's a delusion when you you know you take this bundle of perceptions and you say this is me these appearances of hands are me and you know I'm saying there is an organism but the organism is not the same thing as the concept of the self that all of our suffering is fed through this was the kind of Buddha's insight that neuroscience is now kind of showing to be true as well right so it could be fair to say that there is a within the living mirror theory there is a the living system has it's a coupling with the environment and in that process the multimodal user interface is what the living system uses so there's that that's kind of what the synthesis yeah and I would say actually it's kind of important to the interface idea is actually important because consciousness is not like you're being aware of the thing out there what it is is the thing out there is utterly beyond your boundary you know you're here is this kind of bounded physical system photons might fall on your retina but you know your insides your brain everything else is just utterly in the dark and so consciousness is this active creative generative kind of hallucinatory process and when you understand that the world doesn't have an appearance it kind of gives you an appreciation as to why it's possible for consciousness to exist because it's not like there's a thing and I have a symbol for the thing and how does my symbol become conscious that's how a lot of people think about this stuff you know it's the kind of computer analogy it's like there's some symbol over here like say there's a green object and there's a symbol saying green why does this symbol become conscious whereas in a computer it doesn't why doesn't the word green when I write it down why doesn't that become conscious whereas I'm saying no like there is no green thing there's patterns and then consciousness is this fundamentally you're generating like a simulation generating an interface of beliefs about the way the world is that is this kind of house of cards of like saying it's this way as opposed to this way so it's entirely generated within the organism well through interacting with this environment but it's not each percept is only cashed out in reference to all the other percepts this is like a relativistic framework I've really appreciated a way of perceiving it regarding when you're when you're at a an event where you're you're at literally just take any sports or music style event in a stadium and you're gonna have a different point of view than somebody sitting across the stadium and when you also register that you're gonna get that at a deeper level that it's not some that that you in when you gotta play game I feel like you gotta if you really dive in like we didn't have the tool of games we had it but we didn't have you know this is the game changer is that when you it's literally the screen like the screen as an analogy the game as an analogy to this is exactly what makes us realize that when I go into the the first person perspective in and I'm playing the game and I'm walking around in the simulated world and I have this the relationship between me as a living system and my environment and my interface and all of the stuff that I have in my parcel that I'm carrying around with me and that I have these quests and these objectives and that the more that you kind of follow that train of thinking the more that you're gonna realize that James is also a player and James also has his little world that that James is playing in as well and James is going to see things like you are you is it is that it is that your girlfriend or is that the fiance or wife what level yeah wife okay wife wife what's her name Rebecca Rebecca so that you know you have a wife you have you know you have a wife you have Rebecca like you have like you have that in your life I don't have like a wife so like my like the fact that we like that you have a wife and I don't like that is like a significant reality changer and so like that's like that's something to like keep in mind like somebody that's living in a completely different country is basically on in a sense their reality has a significantly different like you're you're mostly in London and the mountains of Portugal and so you're you're inevitably going to have a different map than California in the Midwest and stuff like that so but but but there's also there's some there's a synthesis between if we don't break it down into there's a synthesis where it's like in order for us to have this zoom call we have to respect the objectivity of the science that is occurring that is enabling the the the computation the the the electromagnetic communication so you you you you have a synthesis that's going on if we want to agree that the H2O molecule looks a specific way or that the the cellular respiration and and the oxygen cycle on the planet happens a specific way for for every person that inhales the though too I think that that there's going to be a synthesis between those those individual gamers in their worlds with the fact that all of those gamers are inhaling O2 and their hearts are beating 100,000 times a day stuff like that yeah and also the idea of being the kind of gamer with the headset on you you mentioned any of the kind of simulation stuff which obviously is the name of the podcast as well so maybe it's relevant touch on that but yeah I think I think it's interesting that I guess it's not something I've done very much because I think it's the the thing we spoke about before where I was saying like as it's like I'll map out what's within my domain like so the before the Big Bang we might be you know I mentioned earlier ways of thinking about why anything's happening at all and I'm happy to speculate about that but then you know like what happened for the Big Bang is just kind of outside my window what you know what happens in the future is as well so I think like I guess I see science as mapping out this little space we're in now and most people think it's the entire space right they think Big Bang this thing and that's it I suspect there's you know like why wouldn't there be vast amounts of stuff going on outside of our window I see no you know reason why you wouldn't think whether you want to call the multiverses or simulations within simulations within simulations to me that seems absolutely you know if not plausible likely you know that's something weird is happening before I think before it certain psychedelic experiences I would have said there's no reason to speculate like it's just speculation it's like saying am I a solipsist and then you can have experiences where you seem to wake up from the simulation and that that definitely gives you that kind of strange loop idea of like is this some is the simulations all the way down and you know you can kind of tumble through them through in some way but I think I ultimately come back to kind of knowing my place as a scientist and thinking I'm gonna if this is a simulation it's a beautiful pretty complex simulation that's really relevant for our day-to-day living so I'm gonna try and understand this what as best as I can if at the end I wake up take my headset off and go wow I can't believe that was a game I don't think I'll feel like I've wasted my time in trying to trying to understand the game yeah in which plays very beautifully into what we mentioned earlier on infinity making a infinite amount of illusory affinity and that plays into the multiverse perfectly there's just and it also plays perfectly in the sense of if you believe in yourself as infinite potential that there is every single possibility of you and is happening right now and and also every single possibility in a in a non-anthroprecentric way is also happening so when you see all of these designer worlds that the video game artists are making all of those are happening as well and we ourselves are going to become more and more like designers of worlds and we ourselves are going to come to the realization more and more of what infinity truly is I think that that thing you said about nature is infinite possibility like I've been reflecting recently on I'm not trying to put this into words but there's a I don't believe that organism level to use that term libertarian free will the idea that we can really choose exactly what we want to do with no prior causes causing it I think that's an illusion and it's trying to make ourselves feel comfortable in our feeling of separation but if you look at the freedom of the totality of existence and you consider the way that particles interact and anything happens from that perspective everything the way that things interact is the perfect choice given what they are like this is kind of what a scientific picture of the world is it's like a lawful face like given these things and their forces and what they are in themselves they will the universe is utterly free to do exactly what is the most lawful or most appropriate thing for it to do so you can think of when you identify with all of reality as there being this kind of ultimate freedom ultimate creative fulfillment of the process just moving forward in terms of what it is and what's best for what it is which is another way of discriminant determinism which is a weird thing to say is that from one side from the human idea of separation the idea of the universe deciding everything is like oh no that seems scary I don't like that idea but the idea of the universe being ultimately free and therefore manifesting what is most within its own nature is I think is a really to me it gives a scientific way maybe it's the scientific language adding to what you just said about identifying that kind of infinite potential identifying with that and you're spot on too made content again everybody check out James's channel I'm glad that you made content specifically about your entheogenic experiences I think that's extremely important the more that people feel like they are comfortable it's almost like we're having a species coming out of the closet in a sense around the use of unleashing the divine within via these sacred secretions of the planet and it's extremely important I'm glad that you've made content about it you've been vulnerable about I think it's very important and that's also going to triangulate right on that same nature of reality what are you and Rebecca doing with the homestead surrender homestead what are you guys doing with that I know you guys are just starting with it and it sounds so beautiful like literally when I was researching you I went to like I started like Google earthing Portugal and like looking at where like where like and I was looking at like the temperatures and the culture and the GDP and the living standards and like it's beautiful like it's amazing I've been you saw where we chose it yeah yeah yeah so tell us about the surrender homestead yeah so it fits very much with what you just said about how you know like I don't I guess I'm not fundamentally identified as a scientist who's doing this I'm fundamentally just a person who's trying to be honest about what I see as important in the world and when it comes to for me like being open about spiritual stuff was also a kind of taboo in this kind of scientific circles I moved in but I kind of I think it's just within me that I think I've always had just a feeling of if I hold true to what I think is authentic and real and you know like and true and I'm just truthful about it if people don't get it or if culture isn't ready then culture isn't ready like that's not my problem you know if I'm if I take some magic mushrooms and society says that's an illegal activity that's bad you know I can give up I can absolutely give account as to why I do it why I think it's not harmful why I think it's incredibly beneficial right so that's also that same logic and the same with vulnerability you know with trying to you know I want to live in a world where especially for like men can can be more vulnerable emotionally yes it would be it would be a bit rich for me to not then put myself out there and say like look this is this is who I am you know I'm going to try and live from a place of truth and yeah so it makes life a lot easier as well if you just if you just don't hold anything back so then when it comes to the surrender homestead we have a bunch of different ideas of what we want to do we'd love to maybe host retreats like you know maybe ayahuasca retreats stuff like that um we also my wife really wants it to be a kind of artist residency a place people can come and just create and just have like studios and we're just in nature so people can just kind of connect with nature and and all that kind of good stuff but yeah we're in we're in the early stages we kind of renovate we put this big bit of land we're renovating an old an old farmhouse but the fact that we kind of find ourselves here is really because of the same thing we just spoke about and my wife's in the same wavelength of being like well we're humans you know humans are these creatures that are born into nature we're supposed to be in nature we're supposed to create like this is what's good for us to exercise you know being the sunshine and we spent our years you know in London and these places like you know you know working hard to establish ourselves but there was always this feeling of like society is a bit of a crazy it's it's it's sick in many ways I would say so the fact that we find ourselves here is fundamentally living from that place of authenticity of being like this is where we would prefer to be and and the thing you said of like potential like we know being here will lead to something good like we may not be able to say next year we're going to hold an ayahuasca retreat or next year we're going to be open to accept artists for residency but we know something's going to happen we know people you know like we're in a beautiful location we have you know intention to share it with people in some capacity so so yeah keep keep an eye on I think the surrender homestead on Instagram is our best place to keep up with us if you want to see us assembling composting toilets and stuff like that as well yeah so so beautifully said we have the economic machinery that is producing so much excellence and also so much deterioration and so to wake up to archiving the codes we're deteriorating and amplifying the codes that are making things better in that machinery and also building cities 2.0 because people love urban centers so time to build those up into the 2.0 category and also especially with our ecology bringing together architecture and ecology but sustainability but also having places where we literally just go no like I don't want to be in city 2.0 I want to be in in extreme I want to be in the most extreme nature setting like sometimes we've envisioned this on the show where you literally can take like could you could you take and build out a beautiful augmented reality creative space in the middle of the redwoods in California or right on the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic in Portugal you know there's there's all of these interesting ways to like embed kind of the like and you can just turn off that augmented reality space whenever you want and you're just back at the Pacific or the Atlantic or the redwoods or whatever so like to be able to instantaneously ebb and flow between the two is going to be very important I'm excited that you guys are building it out I think it's very it's a very important project from the heart to do and you want to share which is very important and you're going to you're going to inspire a lot of people by doing that you already inspired me and many viewers by doing that and hopefully you know follow along on on Instagram and and maybe within you know who knows 2021 it could be some sort of cool opening of of an event or I love our artists and these are going to be very important just briefly on the scientific dogma I think spirituality also has spiritual dogma where there's no interest in science and the scientific method so I think that when you go extreme kairos on spirituality you lose all chronos and when you go extreme chronos on science you lose all kairos of spirituality and so those dogmatic circles need to in a sense realize that they do not represent the essence of the nature of reality which dropped the silos and to more harmoniously merge so that's in essence what the science and spirituality and that's why you're doing what you're doing and why we're doing what we're doing because yeah there is no dividing into two it's it is just the one yeah I think that's also yeah really good point that again all these things are maps you know like the reality has no there is no god's eye view where we can say this is the correct answer turns out science is right or turns out spirituality is right they're different angles different perspectives like you were saying the stadium like you're looking at this this beautiful diamond of existence from all these different angles and I think again I think it's the the pro the process of creation and control and separation is can often be the thing that fuels kind of fear and investment in the identity and tribalism and basically being like I'm a scientist over here because I feel uncomfortable when people talk about woo woo spirituality stuff so I'm gonna just assume it's all nonsense and you know and then we hold on to our world views like these blankets right and we're not and again as we spoke earlier with consciousness and like I think it's going to be a real uphill battle to convince this generation of scientists that that plants might be conscious there are lots of plant scientists who think they are but yeah I think there was a Stephen Hawking quote I'm not going to be able to remember but it was something to do with like scientific revolutions only happen when like each generation dies effectively like when there's a new generation coming up to hear new ideas afresh and you know take them aboard and I think that's because of this emotional attachment and you form quite early I guess to ideas my gosh the blanket analogy is very strong there it is it's a it's the sense of really being warm like it's almost like not wanting to get out of bed in the morning because that that blanket is so warm and if you take the blanket off and you expose yourself to the the the force is the cold in the sense of you're on the you're on the hunt again to try and augment the blankets and try to make a really strong hammock for for you to be able to you know lay in and enjoy it's it's good to think of of yourself as as wanting to and the same thing with the layers of the onion is another way to view is like do you shed each one of those layers and get back to what is the most fundamental of our existence that shared consciousness shared awareness and that also that is the the realization slowly that we have the different maps of science spirituality yeah it's been it's been really solid back and forth on this and I James another thing is I just really appreciate the fact that one of the things with this big synthesis that I am passionate about is just at least whether I'm right or I'm wrong at least I have tried that's what's most important I think because with living mirror theory of consciousness it's the same thing every single person whether they're ultimately you know right or wrong or that they're at least moving the foundation of thinking forward they're ultimately at least trying and in order to break through from being like the fear right like Wayne Gretzky of you're gonna miss every shot you don't take you have to take the shots so you're gonna take the we're gonna take the shots and at least we're going to push further so I just congratulate the fact that you pushed and made this and that you're publishing and that you're going to move forward with it on experientially with proving hypotheses so thank you for inspiring inspiring people to do so thank you but it's interesting because maybe it's because I've been so weighted towards that side of creating like that but where my head is at now is actually kind of on emphasizing the other side of it which is the kind of being you know we were talking about this division between kind of striving becoming like doing and I in the past I would have been I would have very gladly just said like thank you very much you know like that's recognized for that but where I might know is I would say like most people like if we if we had more people who are interested in the experiential side of things like cultivating compassion working through their own traumas and stuff like I could I could happily live in a world without science without you know where we kind of move back to a far simpler way of life you know just like living close to nature you know I so I don't believe in progress for progress's own sake and it's interesting that I see in myself and in a lot of other scientists I think a kind of um we spoke about the kind of emotional currents depending science I think a lot of people interested in kind of science and philosophy of things like consciousness comes out of some quite deep existential or anguish of some kind you know and I think for me there was a kind of very early kind of being physically unsafe as a child was kind of like is what made me just be like okay what's going on I need to figure out what's going on and suddenly you're living up in your head and you're like your mind is racing to figure out what's going on in the world and I think this isn't something I see spoken about the I think a lot of very talented philosophers very talented scientists also like should be when it comes to like psychedelic medicine being made legal they should be like high up on the list of people to tap on the shoulder and go like good work figuring out all that stuff but maybe you want to go and have a bit of psilocybin therapy and see if there might be some some fire that's that's driving you unconsciously and then maybe you might be trying to find racing all the time because for me that's that's kind of what's happened and that's why I'm here really is is moving you know I'm still continuing to communicate and think about this stuff and I'm not just going to you know switch off from the science but I definitely this is coming from someone who I think has always been a bit imbalanced and is finding balance and sees we live in a culture that praises progress so much that I think it's worth saying that like it's not intrinsically valuable it's you know it comes in a because you're not happy I think beautifully beautifully put that yes we're going to have a long-term synthesis of as you can say like the masculine the feminine the science of spirituality the the kairos with the chronos like it's just inevitably going to be a deeper more harmony harmony is always this keyword a harmony harmony okay let's wrap beautiful like man I just I'm just so passionate about the inquiry that you have and that it's inspiring me and I hope other people as well and and also it's balanced with the also the deep the press that you've had to embody from in your in your heart and to explore what has been who are you individually and what has been what has affected you and I think that I think that you are in fact a very beautiful person that you have a very beautiful story that you have a like James I'm very grateful thank you for coming on the program for that I'll say thanks very much no qualification for me on that I'm so grateful that we got this chance to talk and to get to know each other I'm super grateful and same yeah yeah and I would I would highly suggest everybody thank you for tuning in first of all we greatly appreciate you thank you thank you do your best to to to tune into what James is putting out James says so many good links now in his bio go and check those out he's got his website where he's got all of his resources but also he has his YouTube channel excellent conversations check those out also the reality sandwich profile is very good where he has his writings the writings are very short and sweet and they get to the point and I think you have a very strong synthesis ability which I like a lot of compression of key points so check those out everybody also support the artists the entrepreneurs the scientists the spiritual leaders in your communities that you believe in support them you can find all of the links to simulation in the bio below if you'd like to help support us and go and build the future everyone manifests your dreams in the world we love you very much thank you for tuning in we'll see you soon peace