Transcription
If your brain is dead, not operating, but your mind is operating, that clearly indicates that the mind is not the brain. But what is it? I don't know. He doesn't know. You can't answer that question right now. Maybe someday we'll be able to answer it.
[Music] What the mind actually is? If it's not just being like produced by the brain, if the brain is a a sort of controlling factor on the mind, what is the mind? Like what do what do you think is going on there? Well, uh it's a question that nobody has solved and I doubt anybody can ever solve because it's our consciousness. We have no distance from it. And even in physics, they've understood that when you look at something, study something, your mind is actually altering what you study, right? You're aware of that, right? Yeah. Study your own mind because as you study your own mind and consciousness, you're altering it, right? So, you can never see it for exactly what it is.
But, um, the thing is when I'm reading right now a very interesting book on near-death experiences, it's one of it's like the fifth book I've read called After. It's by a a psychiatrist, psychologist, a doctor, psychologist. Anyway, it's fascinating book and he's going into exactly what you're talking about. And so, in these near-death experiences, people are literally brain dead. They're literally declared dead and yet their mind is still going, okay? And they come back from it and they describe these experiences. Now, you might poo poo that and say, "Oh, that's just irrationality." But no, science have demonstrated that they were literally declared dead. Their breathing had stopped, their heart had stopped and he's collected thousands of these stories. So it's not like just one person hallucinating and they have common themes. So if your brain is dead, not operating, but your mind is operating, that clearly indicates that the mind is not the brain, right? But what is it? I don't know. He doesn't know. You can't answer that question right now. Maybe someday we'll be able to answer it.
But your mind is not your brain. And one thing, you know, about this kind of filtering mechanism that fascinated me, a lot of my book has to do with early humans because I believe they were much closer to a lot of these experiences, right? And I have a chapter on paganism and particularly ancient Greek religion because it's something that I've studied very deeply but also other religions. And in the pagan world they were much closer to human consciousness and how weird it is to be a conscious animal to be hearing voices in your head to be hearing yourself telling you things. We take that for granted. But for them, I don't know if you've ever read Julian Jane's book about the bicamal mind. He thought that people thought those were hallucinations, hearing their own thoughts, right? And and then when they finally made the connection that those weren't hallucinations, then western civilization occurred for the good and for the bad. But so they understood that something weird is going on with consciousness and they were very aware of that filtering mechanism going on. And so a lot of ancient religion involved creating rituals that completely messed you up, right? That were like a a a psychedelic experience. They would in initiation rituals, they would literally torture a young man, usually it was men, boys, and put them close to death, right, in very very harsh circumstances and then pull them out. They were like reborn and they had that utterly sublime experience. They completely opened up and all those filtering mechanisms dropped out. And so and of course the use of drugs in the ancient world has now been demonstrated to be extremely widespread. They were using opium. They were using the version of LSD from bry seeds. Um, you know they had hashish. They had all sorts of drugs they were using.
Anyway um so that filtering mechanism you walk around you're not aware of it. You're not aware of it at all. And this one in the book Alive, there was this one woman who had a near-death experience. She had the most fascinating metaphor. She said, "In your daily life, it's like you're inside of a giant warehouse, but all you have is a flashlight or you call it a torch. Um, and you able to look at one thing at a time, right? And what you see, oh, that's that's a box there, that's something there." and you're only able to see what your torch will illuminate. Well, when she had her near-death experience, it was like the whole warehouse was lit up. And she was seeing colors that people don't normally see. She was feeling emotions that you normally don't feel. The whole warehouse, everything inside of it was suddenly illuminated. And she could see reality for what it is, which we don't observe.
I'm sorry. I could go on and on about this, Alex. I've collected so much material. Uh, you have to you have to shut me up at some point. No, I I I hope that you do because I I'm just as interested in this as as you are, I think, but not to the extent that I've actually done all of the research that you have. And so, it's a great opportunity to dive into some of that. I mean, a few things you said jump out at me. I mean, one thing is to say if if the research shows that at least with psychedelics, as the mind opens, the brain activity goes down, the next obvious question is, well, what happens when that brain activity goes down to zero? you know, if if the mental activity is going up and if the mind is opening and opening and opening, you know, I I'll I'll sort of leave that question open in the in in the air. And I think it's right to remain agnostic, but to say the mind is not the brain is is quite a it's quite a radical position to take in what is otherwise quite a materialistic culture. I mean the the scientific age that we that we live in has this optimism about the ability to explain everything in terms of atoms that bump into each other. Are you suspicious of that? And if so, has that been a result of recent uh research or has that been something you've sort of always been thinking about?
Well, I I have a a side of me that's very into the materialistic way of looking at things. Mhm. But as you get older, you know, things shift a little bit. But I don't know if this is related to your question, but one thing that's been on my mind is um the idea of the invisible. So, we're so as an animal, we're so caught up in what we can see, right? And that's our whole world. That's our whole reality. But actually the human experience involves a lot of what is completely invisible. Okay. Are you familiar with the French writer Paul Valerie? Paul Valerie. Uh I don't think so. Maybe. Fantastic writer. He wrote poetry but he also wrote these incredible essays. He wrote one novel that's really good but his essays are what excite me. His poetry is really good as well. Uh he lived in like the 20s and 30s. Mhm. Um anyway, he had a concept called um the French word espri which you know we would just translate as spirit but he takes it into something much bigger and he says that this you can almost like abstract it from an individual and say that the human world is operating under this espree I mean Hegel called it gist so it's similar I suppose in some ways to the hegelian concept but um and So it's like all of the if you took all of the human experience of of like symbols so much of our experience involves symbols and and and and analogies or words are are symbolic. Okay. None of that is actually real or physical. It's simply abstract concepts in our mind we've invented. So you look at a flag and it has all of these emotions and things attached to it. It's just a stupid piece of fabric, right? There's no nothing to it. We add all of these elements to our world, this invisible thing. Ideas, can you reduce an idea to something material? Can you like try and go into the brain and see the actual neurons that are being connected that come up with an idea? know you never will be able to do that. It's an invisible process, right? And so we're surrounded by things that we can't see. And I have the analogy in my book of you look at the city around you and you just see the buildings, the cars, the people, the technology. But if you had a different sense, you could see the invisible. You could see all of the ideas and the struggles and the mental world that went into creating all of this thing, all of the stuff that's around us. So, we're enveloped in things. Communication between humans is not something when I tell you something that moves you, that kicks you in the gut and and we have this kind of connection like some people who have fall in love have, you can't reduce that to a material thing. the communication between people. What what is that? So much of our experience cannot be reduced. It simply cannot be reduced. But we live in a very reductive times where everything has to be reduced to a smaller and smaller and smaller thing. And to the point where if everything becomes an algorithm, it's not that reality is an algorithm. It's that we've transformed our world into something small and algorithmic.