 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 mirror theory of consciousness and especially the understanding from, 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 cells 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. And so the way you said it is perfect, like the fact that 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, 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 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, 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. And scientists do attempt to know what's going on in its environment. It needs to know of itself in its environment. And this is just another way of saying consciousness. It kind of, it constructs beliefs about what's going on in like in existence in kind of a 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 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 isn't just hand waving, you know, saying, Oh, maybe, maybe that's how we're consciousness is it. I'm utterly convinced now that this is the, as you say, a biogenesis the moment the life pops into existence, that is the moment the 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, you know, 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, you know, melting into each other in this kind of, in this kind of single thing we call physical reality. And so you can't even say is 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. So within the ultimate nature of this infinite consciousness this God the 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. I've been using this whirlpool analogy that there's this whirlpool which is the a biogenesis for the whole planet. And then there are these whirlpools for all 8 billion human creatures as well, and that the whirlpool itself is the combination of 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. And 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. 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 not going to procreate. There will not be mating 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 8 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 8 billion of us of that source. Yeah, so, so I would say that the, 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 the 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, you need 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. The 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 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 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. 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.