The Nested Observer Window Model Explained.

The mind, rather than simply being a single train of consciousness, may actually be a constellation of multiple windows of consciousness, each processing their own separate element.

If we're willing to postulate that an amoeba could be conscious, I don't see why my gut or my kidney couldn't be conscious.

Jonathan Skooler is distinguished professor of psychological and brain sciences with over 200 publications and more than 45,000 citations. He's renowned for pioneering research on meta awareness, mind wandering, and memory. I sat down with Skooler to discuss his theory of consciousness.

The nested observer window model uses as its fundamental metaphor a mosaic photograph. When you're looking out, your experience is basically of the experience of all the lower-level windows. Those windows are synchronized, and that produces a combined experience. You and me, we could all be pixels in a higher-level window, but that window shouldn't get too full of itself, 'cause it could be a pixel for a higher-level window as well.

In Skooler's model, consciousness has a fractal-like quality in which the self we experience is actually a combination of selves, each with their own consciousness. But even though all these levels of consciousness are nested, he does assume free will. Each one of us, in our own way, is able to help to guide the kite and expand that understanding by engaging in curiosity and openness.

And you just mentioned briefly, like, synchronicities. How would synchronicities fit in?

But you're good. Um, thank you for watching. And if you haven't yet subscribed to our channel and you like the content we are putting out, may I ask you to subscribe? It really helps us to create more videos like these.

Good to know is that my conversation with Jonathan Skooler consists of four parts. In the first part, we touch upon the work he is mostly known for on mind wandering and meta-awareness. In the second bit, Skooler explains how we need to extend our physics to account for consciousness. And the way he wants to do so is to add extra dimensions of time to the Einsteinian block universe. In the third bit, Skooler unpacks his nested observer window model. And finally, we talk about what the nested observer window model can tell us about the meaning of life. Because if we are indeed pixels that form a higher-level consciousness, what freedom do we have to influence that higher-level picture, that window of consciousness? Or to use Skooler's own words, how can we steer the kite of consciousness?

I hope you enjoy the conversation. Here we go.

>> Welcome, Jonathan.

>> Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Could you share a bit, um, about your work at the meta lab, what you are researching on, and, um, for instance, you work on something called meta-awareness. What that is, and maybe some of the other topics you're researching?

>> Sure. So the meta-meta lab stands for Memory, Emotion, Thought, and Awareness. So you can see right there, it's a very broad, uh, stance, but also we're very interested in the meta-level aspects of a lot of these different, um, domains. So let's talk about meta-awareness. That's been an area that I've been interested in for some time. And to give you an intuition of it, uh, imagine the following scenario. You're reading a document, and it's an important document. It's one that you really want to try to get a handle on. And at some point, you realize that your eyes have been moving across the page, but your mind has been fundamentally elsewhere. Are you familiar with this experience?

>> Absolutely. Absolutely. Multiple times a day. Sometimes.

>> It is a very familiar experience. But if you think about it, it really doesn't make a lot of sense because you know that you can't simultaneously read and be thinking about something completely unrelated. You, if and when you catch yourself doing it, you're like, "Oh, right." And then you have to go back. So it, what it tells you is that while you were mind-wandering, you hadn't realized that you were mind-wandering. You essentially lost track of the contents of your own mind, uh, and then you gained an awareness. And that gaining awareness of the contents of your mind after having lost it is what we call meta-awareness.

>> And do, do we know what, what the, what the function, I'm curious, sort of mind-wandering surely must have a function, and meta-awareness also. And what do we then call, sort of, a healthy balance? Or I mean, what are your thoughts here, and what do we know scientifically?

>> Sure. So, uh, let's start with meta-awareness. I mean, I think meta-awareness is, you know, a major accomplishment, uh, for for humans in our capacity to engage in self-regulation, in emotional regulation, in regulating mind-wandering, and all sorts of other things. By checking in, we can take stock of whether or not we're sort of on track, or whether or not we are, uh, off, and we need to correct in some way. It can also be problematic if you're always in that meta-aware state. Uh, you're not really fully in the moment. Um, but now, after concerning meta-awareness, let's talk about mind-wandering.

>> Yeah.

>> So mind-wandering, uh, is hugely problematic in all sorts of contexts. So if you're mind-wandering while you're reading, it interferes with your reading performance. If you're mind-wandering, uh, while you're engaging in really any demanding activity, you're not going to do the demanding activity, uh, as well. There's even evidence that mind-wandering while driving causes accidents. So it's, it's problematic in all sorts of ways. At the same time, there's evidence that people mind-wander somewhere between 25 and, some people have estimated, I think it's an overestimate, 50% of the time. So if mind-wandering is so problematic, you know, why do we do it, uh, so often? You know, it's an interesting question, and we found a number of different areas in which mind-wandering seems to be helpful. Uh, one thing seems to be when you are, uh, in a not especially demanding situation, say, taking a walk, taking a shower is a wonderful example of mind-wandering, and you're thinking about just interesting, uh, ideas. U, and we find that creative individuals, about 20% or more of the ideas that they have happen while they're mind-wandering. So mind-wandering seems to be, uh, a very valuable activity for allowing, uh, different ideas to sort of come together. So it's helpful for creativity. It's also helpful for planning. Uh, if you're in the shower and it's not a very demanding situation, you don't really have to pay that much attention to what you're doing. You think about how you're going to spend, uh, your day. Uh, and so it may be very useful in that way. It may be useful, um, if you're in a boring situation. And if you're in that really boring lecture, mind-wandering really may be a better alternative, right? You can at least, you know, think about, entertain yourself, think about other things. So, it actually can help to relieve boredom. And one final thing is it may lead to dishabituation. So, if you, uh, say anything, uh, repeatedly, so if I say "cup, cup," it, it stops, sound. It stops having any meaning. We, we habituate to things and we, we lose meaning. And so what mind-wandering may do is to provide, sort of, a, a mental break which allows us to return to the situation refreshed. In fact, we, we did a study where we had people repeat words and then, uh, either, uh, measured their mind-wandering or not, and the semantic impact of the word was refreshed if they'd engaged in, in mind-wandering. So mind-wandering seems to have a host of, uh, benefits as well as the obvious costs.

>> Very interesting stuff. I, I do recognize it, sort of, being creative that I, I think I do it very often also while driving. Like, I can drive, like, sometimes it really scares me that, "How did I get home?" I'm, I'm, I'm done. Then I am home and like, "Whoa, I like 40 minutes or so, you know?" And but, but I've been driving. So it also shows that we can do, because I did consciously did conscious actions, right? I mean, I had to have some form of consciousness to, to be able to drive. And I think I would have been like, like, if something happened, I would have snapped out of the mind-wandering. Do you know how, how fast you can snap back, if necessary for survival, out of mind-wandering and be like, completely present again?

>> Well, so, um, and I think we're going to want to come back to this. So we'll do, do a little foreshadowing here, but one of the ideas that, uh, I and my collaborator Justin Riddle have been thinking about is the idea that the mind, rather than simply being a single train of consciousness, may actually be a constellation of multiple windows of consciousness, each processing their own separate element. And I think the case of driving and mind-wandering is a really sort of compelling, uh, example of this possibility. So when you're driving and, uh, you're mind-wandering, there's one, we would argue, window which is focusing on the driving.

>> Yeah.

>> And then there's another window which is doing the mind-wandering. And then the apex is kind of toggling back and forth between one window, the mind-wandering window, and the other window, the driving window. Uh, and so, and, and we have the experience, uh, routinely of turning our, uh, window towards the, u, mind-wandering and still seeing our hands, you know, acting very consciously. It, it really seems like the whole system is, is paying attention while this other system, while we're still doing this other thing. And so that, I think, is really illustrates the, the sort of autonomy of these different windows. But then it's what we think about less, but I think it's a really intriguing possibility. Is now the road gets, uh, demanding, and we, I think, can quite quickly shift to the, um, to the driving window. But what happens to the mind-wandering window? The, the, the standard thought is that it just shuts down. But, but we speculate that actually the mind-wandering may still be continuing. Uh, we're just, we're just focusing on this. And so then when we come back here, we may actually discover that there's been progress. And this may be how incubation effects work and other types of things where, uh, things that we thought are being done entirely unconsciously may be doing being processed in a certain sort of conscious way by the mind-wandering window when we're not paying attention to it.

>> And what a way to think about this. I've heard, sort of, Bernardo Kastrup, the director of our foundation, um, talking about, sort of, four forms of consciousness that, that do not report. They do not, sort of, report to this higher, higher form of conscious, but levels of conscious that do not report. And then I've heard of people who don't buy that. I'm, I'm Christoph, he said, "Okay, if we go that way, then then my kidney could be conscious but not reporting anything." Would go, you know? So what are your thoughts here, sort of, on?

>> Yeah, so this is, I have, uh, speculated, and, uh, this is a speculation which I would put in the category of what I call "entertaining without endorsing." What that means is, I, I think this is a conjecture that's worthy of entertaining, but I'm certainly not saying that this is something that, uh, is necessarily, uh, the case. And a lot of the things that I'm interested in and that I've talked about have that quality. In our model, we acknowledge the various different way levels down at which consciousness might go, but I lean towards thinking that these, that your kidney really might be conscious, and we're just not able to really, uh, touch into it. I think a really, uh, compelling.

>> Let's hold that one as a cliffhanger for.

>> Yeah.

>> One other point I want to mention while you got me on this topic is, uh, consider one, m, one window that I think is really sort of intriguing in this regard is the tongue. Okay, the tongue. If you think about it, it's really got a mind of its own, right? It, it, it's dodging your teeth, it's cleaning food out of your mouth, it's doing all sorts.

>> Now I'm coming to be aware of it. Now you are right.

>> Um, but it's totally really able to operate on its own. Uh, or you can turn your apex to it and go, "Darn, that tongue has got a lot going on there. It's really doing everything." So I think thinking about the tongue, and of course, it's, it's a, it'd be a circuit between the tongue and the brain. The tongue gives you sort of an example of the kind of consciousness that your kidney may have, but you're just able, you're able to zoom in on the tongue sometimes, where you're never able to zoom in on your kidney.

>> Yeah. And indeed, I get sort of critics that say, because we know of no mechanism of tuning into the consciousness of of an an an organ that we truly cannot sense, like our intestines, that, okay, then it's far-fetched to assume that.

>> Well, I mean, I think this is a, I think if you think about it, um, we're willing to imagine the consciousness of say, a fly, or even possibly a worm. Or I think it's not unreasonable to imagine that an amoeba, uh, could have a consciousness, uh, even though it doesn't have a nervous system, engages in all sorts of complex behaviors, mating behaviors, eating behaviors, avoidance, and so on. So if, if we're willing to postulate, uh, that an amoeba could be, uh, conscious, and, uh, France, uh, Kristoff Caulk postulates that an organoid, uh, might be conscious, if an organoid could be conscious, I don't see why my, why my gut or my kidney couldn't be conscious.

>> Just briefly, I think, nice to sketcher, because you've, you've had a rich career and, and when you, sort of, started out in academia, how the thoughts were on what Christoph, I think, very nicely says, "No, no, no brain, never mind," sort of, as a, sort of, paradigm. And where we are now, like, openly discussing the possibility of, of, conscious kidneys. And, and, and I think it's been a tremendous shift, right? In happened in your career. I mean, if you just had to give a bird's-eye view of how things developed, also in your own thinking.

>> Sure. Well, I organized a meeting with Jonathan Cohen at Carnegie Mellon University in 1993, uh, which was before the Tucson conference, even. Uh, and when we organized that meeting on consciousness, uh, consciousness was really kind of a taboo topic. It was, uh, really one that, uh, people were a little bit nervous to admit even, even talking about. And, and there was one quote which said, uh, "Consciousness is an interesting domain that no one's really had anything intelligent to say about." But a lot has happened in the field of, uh, consciousness, uh, since that time. It's been increasingly appreciated that the tools of science can be directed to what was previously, sort of, thought of as the black box.

>> And what would you, sort of, what do you think was at the root of calling it that it was a taboo, sort of, an?

>> Uh, researchers, uh, focused, uh, very heavily on introspection, and they didn't really have rigorous introspection where you're attending, trying to, sort of, reflect on your inner experience, and they didn't really have, uh, a good rigorous approach for doing introspective, uh, science. And so it was kind of a mess. One person would introspect one way, another person would introspect another way. It didn't seem like a solid, hard science basing it on introspection. And so, uh, the behaviorists, particularly led by B.F. Skinner, but, but others, uh, Thorndike, Pavlov, they all, uh, really argued that, uh, we need to, uh, ignore all the speculation, and that we can really understand the mind much more systematically just by looking at behavior. And they made a lot of progress just looking at behavior. They were able to look at rats and train them and, and, and ma- develop some very, sort of, lawful principles of reinforcement going that route. But that focus on just behavior gave consciousness, uh, really made it more taboo. And then gradually, there was the cognitive psychology revolution where it was, uh, Chomsky and others made it very clear that meaning, you can't understand people's behavior without understanding how they're interpreting, how they're making sense of things. So gradually, internal cognition came in, but consciousness, the, the, sort of, the airy-fairy, the qualities of things that still seemed to be, uh, remained to be. It was a grad, the cognitive psychology gradually went from just thinking about, uh, specific thought contents, uh, as, as measured by, say, testing memory, to more, uh, exotic measures of phenomenal experience. One of the things that, u, I'm, uh, like to, uh, reflect on is, is mind-wandering, how mind-wandering came back into the, uh, to the fore. There were a, a few people who were studying mind-wandering, uh, before, uh, the 2000s, but relatively few, and that's because mind-wandering is this very private, uh, experience, and it was just thought there was sort of beyond the can of investigation. But researchers such as myself and Jonathan Smallwood, uh, developed, uh, techniques for, uh, probing people at specific times and asking them whether or not they were mind-wandering, and then showing that their reports of mind-wandering corresponded in very systematic ways with various other, uh, behaviors, and you could predict their performance based on whether or not they said they were mind-wandering versus not. And it became increasingly clear that for certain kinds of internal self-report, such as mind-wandering, you can actually, uh, get, uh, relatively, uh, precise, uh, insights into what's going on. And, and the trick is to triangulate, to use a combination of phenomenological reports, uh, behavior, and neurocognitive measures.

>> And Jonathan, what led you into physics? Because you had, you presented at a conference of ours, uh, hosted by Professor Bernard Carr, um, who's a cosmologist, and among quantum physicists, and you gave us a very interesting lecture, which I'd love to dive into. But I'm curious, sort of, what led you to, to studying physics and, sort of, entering this field.

>> Well, I mean, I have to admit that I'm, uh, I have just a lay understanding of, uh, of physics, and that, um, there are all sorts of aspects of physics that are just beyond my, uh, capacity. And I recognize that that is a liability, which, um, leads physicists to be able to just sort of dismiss my reflections, um, off the bat. But when I looked at the claims of what, what physicists were saying, I was startled by the things which they were, uh, entirely, uh, sweeping under the rug. The things that I was, uh, most interested in somehow seemed to be, uh, just considered to be either illusions or not worthy of, um, investigation. So, if I can, let me, uh, jump into, uh, some of these things. And I think the way to think about it is, imagine engaging in an exercise, uh, that Descartes did, uh, long ago, where he just tried to decide, "What are the self-evident aspects of existence? What are the things that just seem to be, uh, even if demons were playing tricks on you, would still have to be the case?" And he came up with, uh, with one, and I think there may be, uh, three others. Uh, although I want to emphasize that I, I think these are self-evident axioms of experience, although the degree to which I entirely endorse them declines a little bit as I, as I go through them. So the first one, I'm like, 100% sure of. The second one, 99, 95. All right. So here we go. So the first one is the same one that, uh, Descartes came up with, which is, "Experience happens." So he, he said, "I think, therefore I am," but from my perspective, I'm having, and I don't even know about the "I." We can leave that. "Experience is happening." So I could be a brain in a vat, could this, could all be a simulation.

>> Boltzmann brain stuff, like.

>> Boltzmann brain, all those things. But an experience is happening right now. There are illusionists who suggest that, uh, uh, that even the experience is just an illusion. But.

>> That's that, even that, even the experience of the illusion seems to me to be an experience.

>> So to me, experience is just a, a fundamental axiom, and any theory which isn't able to at least allow for it, I think, is a bit problematic.

>> Yep.

>> Okay. So the next thing is the quality of experience. Experience is intrinsically dynamic. It's always moving from moment to moment to moment to moment. Even if the experience is of just entire non-dual, contentless experience, it's still now to now to now to now. It's always in flow. The flow is an intrinsic. You can't even imagine experience without some sort of flow of time. I think of it that, that experience is to time as matter is to space. You can't have matter without some space to extend in. And you can't have experience without some movement in time to, uh, to extend in. So, so there's an intrinsic sort of thickness to "now." The "now" is, uh, is, is, is, is got a thickness. It's, it's constantly dynamic. And so that brings us to "now," which is the, the third, uh, axiom, which is that we're always in the "now." Right? We can, uh, remember the past, we can imagine the future, but we're always doing that in this sort of window of "now." So there's something very privileged, something very special about the present.

>> Yeah.

>> And then the final one, this is the one that I admit, um, it doesn't have the same sort of ontological certainty to me as the others, but it certainly seems to be a self-evident aspect of experience, and that is that we have some agency. I can direct my attention here. I can direct my attention there. It is the fundamental aspect of of existence is that consciousness seems to be able to sort of control itself in some way. So there seems to be at least some sort of delimited capacity for personal agency, for free will. And so the interesting thing is that mainstream physics either has no explanation for, or characterizes as an illusion, all the, all of these four axiomatic aspects of existence. So, uh, the experience, that's the hard problem of consciousness, no explanation for it whatsoever. The flow of time is, uh, considered to be, uh, an illusion. That, uh, they have a vision of something called the block universe, where the past, the present, and the future all exist simultaneously. Uh, and so you're in every, your, your consciousness is in everyone simultaneously. So, so at what rate would you be moving through time? A second per second doesn't even make sense. So there's, there's not a degree of freedom to move through the block universe. So the flow of time is, uh, considered an illusion. And then similarly, there's nothing privileged about "now." Your, uh, being right here, you're just a location in the block universe, but you're in the past, you're in the f, or you're in the past, you're in the future, uh, in the, uh, in the very same, uh, same way. And then finally, of course, free will is an illusion. That's considered to be a big problem as well. So, so my feeling is, is that the, the current mainstream view just doesn't have, uh, it's just not addressing these things that I feel are absolutely, uh, self-evident aspects of existence. And for me, that suggests that we should maybe, that should be humbling, and maybe recognize that that there needs to be more to the picture. And, and critically, that subjectivity needs to be, we need to develop an ontology. We need to develop an understanding of reality in which subjectivity is included as a, instead of being swept under the rug.

>> And I, I fully agree with you. And I think those, I can agree, I think with most, yeah, all of those evidential truths you're you're postulating. What fascinates me is, I think you quoted in your presentation here, and also at the Essential, you quote Einstein who said that the flow of time is, is an, is an illusion, "nothing but an illusion." I don't know the exact wording. You have Neil deGrasse Tyson saying that, "We're a prisoner of that free will doesn't exist. We're a prisoner of the now." I think a quote like that. What fascinates me is how easily it seems as if some physicists seem to step over it. They, they do see, yeah, that's fun. Okay, but let's go on, just do physics. And that attitude sometimes I find just like, how, how can you just not, you know what I'm getting at?

>> So, I, I attended a, a brilliant lecture by Brian Greene, who I'm a, I, he's a true hero of mine. I think he's just, uh, so good at, at, at capturing ideas and describing them in ways that I find accessible. And indeed, many of my, uh, discoveries of the problems that I have trouble with come from his very clear articulation of the current view in physics. And so he gave this lecture, and I asked him, uh, during the lecture, or when, during the question period, uh, "How does he reconcile this the dynamic quality of experience with physics' claim that it basically, we exist in this static, uh, universe, that there is no flow of time?" And he said, "I see a psychiatrist. Consciousness is capable of all sorts of illusions, and the flow of time is just another illusion." So they basically seem to compartmentalize. And of course, the same thing happens with free will. For, for many individuals, of course, they experience it, but they just compartmentalize it. And from their vantage, uh, there's the experience world, and then there's the true world, and they're just at odds with each other. It, it's, it's funny. I do think there is now a generation of physicists who are sort of opening up, but then have to sort of do a sort of a painful exercise by sort of seeing physics for what it truly is. For instance, we have had now, yeah, I think Chris Fuchs with cubism. I don't know, we don't have to go into deeply in quantum mechanics, but who says like, "It's just a handbook." He says, "The theory is just a handbook observers use to make bets on the universe." So he acknowledges as a fact, it's just a map of reality. We don't know what reality is, and I don't know what the observer is. I just know this little thing we have here, this mathematical object, quantum mechanics helps me to predict what I will see next. I think that's pretty fair in a sense, because it's very humble. But still, what we would like physics to explain is say something about fundamental reality out there, or say something about who I truly as an observer am, right?

>> Yeah.

>> I think there's expressions really, "Shut up and calculate." Yeah. Right. And so it's all about, uh, description. But the, the fundamental ontology, the fundamental way in which these really very remarkable discoveries, the observer effect and entanglement, the way in which what they tell us about the nature of reality, uh, tends to be, uh, ignored by the, by the physicists. And so I think that's why even those of us who, uh, don't, uh, necessarily have, or in my case, definitely don't have the mathematical acumen to come at it from that angle, can still step back and try to take a, a big picture perspective and try to offer some alternative ways of trying to get at some of these issues. And one of the goals that I've had in thinking about these issues is trying to develop toy models, uh, that are visualizable in nature, because I think that if we can, if we can sort of get a picture of it, the, the mind just really benefits from getting pictures of things. So if we can get a picture of something that, that can really help us to, uh, play with the ideas. So, and even if the pictures that I've been developing are completely off the mark, I'm hoping that it will sort of inspire others to take a more visual approach to representing their theories about the nature of consciousness and its relationship to reality. So, we have that static block universe, which is like a 3D, is like a static thing of four dimensions, of the three dimensions of space and, and time, and everything that can happens, happens, and it's this static block, right?

>> Right.

>> And then we have all these slices, and we're in all those slices at the same time.

>> That's the, that's the view.

>> So there's no way Einstein could account for the fact that I somehow move between these slices, that there's a flow of time I'm, I'm experiencing. So that's, that's the real problem.

>> That's the real problem.

>> Yeah.

>> And I, I never, I just couldn't get my head around it. And it, it, it helped me when you, in your visual, um, sort of flatten the, the, let's say, okay, let's flatten the, the block universe to this like 2D thing, and then we add another dimension, which is sort of another dimension of time, right? But please explain here how you do that, and what freedom this gives then to account for how we experience reality.

>> Sure. So in the standard block universe, they take the three dimensions of space and compress it into two. So every moment is a, a single slice.

>> Yeah.

>> And in this figure, what I do is I now compress it one further. So now we just have space as a single, uh, dimension, and then time as a second dimension. And then you basically sort of have this, this pancake. And then you can see the observer is just this pancake line that's in the entire thing everywhere, uh, simultaneously. And you can see why in that model, there's just no room for, uh, for the observer to move through, through time. And so what I, uh, suggest is, well, if we add a second dimension of, uh, time, a subjective dimension of time, so that you're moving through objective time relative to subjective time. Now, boom, all of a sudden, you've now got that third dimension. And now you have a step. You can move up and up and up and up. And in every step, you have a essentially a location in objective time relative to subjective time. So by adding a subjective dimension, it gives you the degree of freedom to move through, uh, objective time, and it also gives you a "now," because "now" is where you are in subjective time relative to objective time. And the notion, it may seem, I mean, we don't want to postulate additional dimensions of reality lightly, right? Although it's certainly done. If you take string theory, they've added seven, I can't, I've lost track, they've added, they've postulated many additional dimensions, and that seems to be, um, a reasonable move under some circumstances. So the question is, is it, is it reasonable to postulate a subjective dimension to time? And I would argue that it really is. And, and you can take this from from multiple stances. One is that we certainly experience time, subjective time, and objective time as being related but distinct things. You know, sometimes time, subjective time seems to go very slowly relative to, um, objective time, uh, and other times it seems to go very fast. If you're in a, a car accident, it seems as if you could sort of think of it as your frame rate, right? When you're in a car accident, it's like you have a very fast frame rate, and you're taking a lot of subjective moments per objective moment, whereas you're having a, a deep conversation like the one we're having right now, time can just zip by, uh, and, uh, seems, seems to go very, very quickly. So the frame rate in that case would be, uh, much slower. One postulation is, is that in the car accident, you're having a fast frame rate, but you don't have a whole lot of, as much information in every moment. Whereas when you're having a conversation like this, we've got this sort of big chunks of ideas. So, we're going, "kachchunk, kachchunk, chunk." So, um, the intuition of a subjective dimension and an objective dimension of time really intuitively lands, uh, for me. And then ontologically speaking, subjective time is at least as real as objective time. Like, like what matters is really not how much time actually passed. What matters is how much time you experienced, right? I would rather, I would rather live a day that felt like a lifetime than a lifetime that felt like a day. It's, it really, and then much time can I could live forever, but if I'm not having subjective time to experience it, what's the point? So I really think this subjective time has the same, if not more, ontological reality than does objective time.

>> Very interesting stuff. Yeah. And to help our audience understand, we will show the images. But, um, in your model, sort of, the, the block universe would be, if it's this table, it's sort of flat land, right? It's flat land. And then your extra dimension gives us a way to sort of draw a line like this. So I can, and walk up a stair and watch down. And then that would give me the freedom to move through the block universe. Right? So that's, but that still is like a linear, uh, so it doesn't really give me freedom. It just has to go this line, and then still it's, it's quite deterministic. And then you say, "Okay, if we want to account for for free will, um, then I need another dimension, right? Need another dimension still." Which is convenient because that thing then gives us three dimensions of time, which is kind of catchy. But, um, but I think it's, it's not just to try to get, you know, to match the temporal dimensions with the, uh, spatial dimensions.

>> Yeah. I mean, the block universe, another real pain with the block universe is it limits us. We're just on one track. We are inexorably driven to one possible next moment. It's all written in stone, the past, the present. We're just, we're like on an amusement park ride where you think you're steering, but you're going to end up in the same place. And so the, the, the speculation is that, uh, there, at every moment, there may be, uh, a possible branching. There may be, so you can sort of imagine yourself as a, as a window, and that you're able to turn your window a little bit to the left, and realize one, uh, possible next step, or a little bit to the right. And it's going to be, of course, you know, very constrained. There are only a few different things that I can do in this next moment. But even though you're constrained highly at any particular moment, even just a little change at one moment, if you sort of think about it spatially, if you're, uh, sailing, and I actually think sailing is a, is a really good metaphor for thinking about free will, because when you're sailing, you can't control the current, you can't control the weather, uh, you don't even have a motor. You're just entirely reliant on the wind, but you can control your rudder and the, the pitch of the sail. And that, uh, even though it just changes things a little bit in the moment, long-term can have, uh, big, big effects. So the idea is that there may be a third dimension of, uh, time, what I'm calling "alternative time," and that at every next moment, and consciousness may have some capacity to choose between, or possibly even just through interpretation, it's, it may happen. Various things may control, sort of, how consciousness navigates in this third dimension, but there may be a third dimension of time which, uh, leads to different outcomes.

>> It's super interesting. And it, it helps me to, um, what rang with me is that you say, "What we, we in our thinking about time have this idea that that time really passes and that we're like in it." But you, at a certain point, say, "It's more plausible to think that time passes through us." So we are sitting here, and that block universe passed through us, which is sort of like, you can do that, but it's mind-boggling. Please, please explain here why you take that move. Why we aren't moving through time, but time is moving through us.

>> Okay. So, um, at some level, it's just a, um, it's just a sort of a figure-ground kind of a thing. Like, if, what are you calling the, what are you calling the ground, and what are you calling the, uh, the figure? Um, but you can imagine, uh, a window moving through the three dimensions of time like this, or you can imagine a window where the window is fixed, and time is moving through, uh, through the window. And the part of what, uh, attracts me to, uh, this, um, alternative, uh, framework, gets back to this other model that I mentioned to you before, uh, where the idea that we're actually a constellation of multiple windows. This model we call the nested observer window model. And let me just unpack that a little bit, and then I'll bring it back to, uh, time moving through, uh, through us. So the nested observer window model uses as its sort of, uh, fundamental, uh, metaphor, a mosaic photograph. So in a mosaic photograph, every pixel of the photograph is itself a photograph, right? And you can imagine every pixel of those smaller photographs being photographs. So you sort of have windows upon windows. It's a very fractal kind of a kind of an idea. And, and the model that we have is the possibility that every one of those windows, or maybe some subset of them, actually are loci of, uh, experience, that they're all having, uh, an experience. So, so essentially, they're all moving through subjective time, uh, uh, together. Um, and if they're all moving through subjective time, uh, together, and one way to think about this is that you can sort of think of them as this giant kite. They're all sort of tethered together, and then time is moving through them as, as in the same way that the wind would sort of blow past, um, uh, past a kite. Um, and so one of the, uh, nice things about this alternative view is that it allows you to sort of visualize the kite of consciousness. It's just sort of, you know, being tethered together and time passing through it. But the other thing is that if you had, if we're moving through time, then each one of those individual windows, when it turns in alternative time, it's, it's going to go off on its different direction, and the whole thing sort of falls apart. But if you have time moving through it, and each one of those individual windows actually has its own sort of dimension in an alternative time, then the different windows can basically stay together, even though each one of them is able to make its own movement in, uh, in sort of its own dimension of alternative time.

>> But it is sort of tethered, right? And that they're all tethered. We have degrees of freedom, but we, but we cannot like go in totally different directions.

>> That's right. It, it keeps everyone all, all tethered together. It also raises the possibility, uh, which you're likely anticipating, that if, uh, we, in our model, we imagine that the, the experience you is the, is the apex, but you and me, we could all be pixels in a higher-level window. But that window shouldn't get too full of itself, because it could be a pixel for a higher-level window, uh, as well. And so it also, uh, we're all, it gives us sort of this vision that we're all part of this humanity, and all of conscious may be part of this giant kite of consciousness that's that's moving through, uh, the three dimensions of time, and each one of us has a little bit of, um, of of movement contribution to the, the, the vector of the whole thing. So it also sort of, at the same time, shows the degree to which we're, we're tethered to and dependent on each other, but also the way in which each one of us may be able to contribute to the action of the whole thing, and how if we can, if we can get ourselves in a line, if we can, you know, all sort of move in a particular direction, that we may be able to sort of help move the kite of consciousness in, in a more productive direction.

>> I think it's a great visual model, and I'm just super curious metaphysically, because when thinking about it, I thought, you could very well in this model be so dualistic. You could say, "We have that conscious kite, and then we just have that block universe, or we have all this, and it's going through us. We have some degree of freedom." And that you have those two ontological categories. Um, where are you metaphysically? Um, what is your, what do you think is most plausible?

>> You know, I have to say that, um, I, I feel more aligned with the kite of consciousness moving through these, the subjective dimension, u, these three dimensions of time, uh, than I do with respect to, uh, how to categorize it within the, you know, is it idealism? Is it dualism? It's clearly not material reductionism. We can, it's, it's very clear that, um, I'm giving consciousness, I, it's, uh, putting it on equal footing with, um, with a subject, with reality. I think that in many ways, it's sort of best characterized as a panpsychist, panpsychist model, because basically every individual, uh, window is, has some, uh, consciousness and is, is steering, uh, in some way. And, and notice, when you have the, uh, when you have these, the window, the window metaphor, that when you're looking out, your experience is basically of the experience of all the lower-level windows. So really, sort of, reality, the reality that you're experiencing is the sort of the filtered reality experiences of these lower-level pixel windows, which are then lower-level pixel windows. So there's kind of, it's almost idealist in the sense that all of reality that you're experiencing is corresponding to these lower-level windows of experience and lower-level windows of experience. So I think it's sort of a nuanced. It also has a dualist element too, because each window has got some control in terms of how it shifts, uh, as, um, uh, as objective time is moving past it. So it's got a dualist component, it's got an idealist component, it's got a panpsychist component. Uh, and it's grounded in, uh, imagining how, for example, these windows might be, uh, instantiated in, in neural circuitries in the brain. So it, it, it relates to some of the materialistic, uh, models, and hopefully has, uh, elements that could be, uh, tested, but it gives subjectivity an ontological reality that is not in the material reductionist views.

>> Yeah, I think it's very interesting. And we had, for instance, we had Stuart Hameroff at this conference, referencing your model, suggesting that microtubules or neurons might have some level of consciousness, and then more if we zoom out, sort of, in this nested observer winners, as we get to our apex or our our ego consciousness. But of course, in panpsychism, you have what is called the combination problem. How exactly, by what mechanism, uh, do those consciousnesses build up? What's their boundary? And, um, why does my consciousness stop here, and why not there? What are your thoughts there?

>> Yeah, so I have a, a paper with Tam Hunt, which we call "The Easy Part of the Hard Problem," which addresses this combination problem. And the, the solution that seems to be very intuitive to me is synchrony. So basically, the idea is that the, uh, lower-level, uh, windows, uh, each individual window, it's having its experience by, it, it combines by having resonance, where all the parts are happening at at the same time. And so those lower-level, those windows are having, are synchronized, and they, that produces a combined experience. And then as you move up, the other windows are now able to sort of synchronize the rhythms of the lower-level windows. And so the apex is basically, as we build up these, uh, in the same way that if you can imagine the lower-level windows combining into larger, larger windows, combining into larger windows. Each one of those windows has its own frequency. And so the frequency of an individual window creates the binding of for that window. And that then basically enables for a sort of compression of information at that level, which presents it to the next level. And so the apex then is having a, uh, bound experience, which is the due to synchrony of the lower-level windows and lower-level windows and lower-level windows. And the way that the windows, um, communicate, uh, with each other, the way these, the sort of the rhythms move their way up and down, is, and this is in the "Now" model with Justin Riddle, is through cross-frequency coupling. So there's sort of harmonies between the lower-level windows and windows up, and that allows for the conveying of information up and down the, um, the system. So I think that essentially, uh, resonance and the coupling between different resonance systems allow the low-level elements to integrate into larger and larger elements.

>> Very interesting stuff. It just associatively, I link it to sort of having previously interviewed this week, Ana Bandio Pajay, who who has done, sort of, measurements on, who's now been able to, sort of, measure frequencies in microtubules, they are in the megahertz, if I can remember correctly, whereas with EEG, we have lot much lower frequencies.

All to say that the the the idea of resonance and even music, like that's the metaphor to understand it, right? Like high frequencies we might not hear, but they resonate with lower frequencies, giving us the sound of that we can distinguish between a cello and a double bass when they're the the how we that's just so fascinating.

You can also think about it too, like, um, so the, um, individual, um, atoms, you know, there's a resonance, uh, in them, and then they form into molecules, and and those have a resonance also. Even sort of in physical reality, you've got you you build up structures with resonances upon resonances upon, uh, upon resonances. Um, and I I I do very much like, um, the idea, uh, that, uh, that Honorbon, um, suggests that we may, that there really may sort of this fractal, uh, levels of resonance upon resonance upon resonance upon resonance. I will say, and this is just u >> time crystals, he calls them. >> Yeah, time crystals. I will say, and this is just a uh, a wild speculation, but it's it's an aesthetic, and I feel like it's not unreasonable to build some aesthetics into your, uh, judgments. I feel like there's windows go way way down, you know, possibly all the way down to the Planck constant. And I feel like they easily could go beyond us, uh, to to larger windows and larger windows. But I feel, and this is just, uh, an aesthetic, that there's a top and there's a bottom. It's it's turtles all the way down, but there's there's a bottom. And I there may be turtles all the way up, but I I feel like there's a top. And and my intuition is that the sort of resonance just goes all the way up and all the way down and all the way up. Uh, but but it can't go up or it could, but I I'm feeling like it doesn't go up or down forever.

>> You ended your your presentation with, I think, an a brain image of a neuron and then a galaxies, right? Is is that sort of that's the image that comes to mind?

Yeah, I mean, it's it definitely goes beyond a galaxy. But however, however large the, um, the the physical universe is, I feel like there's a there's an extent to it.

>> Okay, let's continue a bit on sort of entertaining ideas that we don't necessarily have to endorse. People can relate to. Can I get from one window to another one? Can I get to a lower level or a higher level?

Well, so, um, the idea is that the apex is able to turn, uh, and focus on different sub-windows, um, and also that it's, uh, in so doing, it's going to u resonate more with some windows and not with others. So back to the driving example, right? When you're u attending to the road, you're resonating with the external perceptual system, uh, and when you're, um, resonating more with the mind wandering, you're resonating with the default mode network and more, uh, internal systems. And so the, uh, the apex is able to, uh, uh, focus in more on some versus others. And it's also presumably able to sort of zoom. So it can sort of make a very narrow thing. If you're perceptually, you can focus, if you're threading a needle, you can focus, you know, very, very narrowly like that. Or you can sort of see the big picture. And if you're thinking, you can maybe have a just a m kind of an expansive internal thing, or you can focus very tightly on a a particular idea. Now, it's possible that, uh, that there may be circumstances in which individuals can somehow join yet a larger window, uh, between the two of them. So, uh, in certain kinds of of group experiences, uh, it may be that everyone is sort of somehow bumping up to this, uh, to to a larger window, and that certain kinds of, uh, contemplative experiences where people have mystical experiences. They're they've they've managed to to maybe turn their w their apex up so it's seeing the larger one, but they're they're somehow connecting with that, uh, with that larger window. And, uh, we imagine that the windows themselves, uh, say there's something called internal family systems, uh, where you basically sort of imagine there these different sort of agents within us, and that, uh, these different windows within us are essentially, uh, doing what we call is coherence, where they do a back and forth kind of thing, very much like, uh, conversations. And so one way that you and I are, uh, uh, connecting our windows may be the very similar way in which the windows inside our minds are with coherence, which is sort of a back and forth, and conversation is really sort of a, a beautiful example of of a coherence.

>> Very interesting stuff. And you mentioned sort of in internal family, what what was >> Internal family systems.

>> Exactly. And I think a lot of there's no sort of renaissance also in in in psychedelic research. Um, people of course, um, making claims, uh, often anecdotally, but that will be like just experiences of oneness, of higher levels of consciousness, or or sometimes smaller, like I was like this or that. What are your thoughts there, and and do you think it's an interesting avenue to, I mean, does it inform your work?

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think that that psychedelics, um, has changed the landscape. One of the interesting things that psychedelics has done is to, uh, cause people to be open, onlogically open, in ways, uh, that, um, haven't happened in the past. So Kristoff Cook, for example, was a, you know, hard-nosed material reductionist, and he had a psychedelic experience which just changed his ontology, uh, you know, absolutely fundamentally. And I think this is happening to a lot of people. They're having phenomenological experiences that are realer than real, that are giving them, uh, important information about the nature of their own experience, which they then recognize has to be integrated into our larger understanding of reality. So, you know, maybe if Brian Green, I understand he had a bad cannabis experience, and so it's very unlikely that he's going to, you know, try anything more. But maybe if Brian Green, uh, uh, did psychedelics, he might be not so dismissive of the possibility that that subjective time might have a a reality or a true reality. So I think that that psychedelics are primarily the the number one thing that they're helpful for is for the individual to expand the evidence that they're considering in in formulating their own, uh, ontology. And and one key thing that I think is really interesting, and this is a whole other line of research that I'm very excited about, is that one of the things that psychedelics has been shown to do, this is research headed by Katherine Mlan, is to increase trait openness. Openness is one of the big five personality traits, and you can, uh, formulate the big five personality traits. You can use the acronym OCEAN, which stands for openness, conscientiousness, introversion, extroversion, which gives you the E, agreeableness, and neuroticism. So openness is one of the major ways in which people differ, and openness is associated with a lot of really, really important qualities. It's associated with creativity. It's associated with curiosity. It's associated with intellectual humility. It's associated with conceptual expansiveness. Associated with an appreciation of nature and an appreciation of art. And I think that psychedelics, and it's also associated with an onlogical openness for considering alternative, uh, uh, world views, and also political openness, considering perspectives different from our own politically. So I think that psychedelics, uh, is has had the impact of of fostering openness, but it also has highlighted, I think, the value of openness. And this is something that that my team in the Metal Lab are really, uh, intrigued on, is, uh, to find ways of increasing openness. We're, um, intending to shift the Center for Mindfulness and Human Potential to the Open Center, where OPEN stands for openness, potential, experience, and neurocognition, and to understand how to foster openness, both as a trait, uh, and as a state. Uh, so psychedelics is one way to incre have a state of openness, but exposure to art. We have research which shows that experiencing art increases state openness, and cultivating curiosity, which is sort of the key aspect of openness. And we have an app currently that is able to, uh, increase people's trait of curiosity, and and thereby openness. I think that psychedelics is a window into this, uh, important direction for humanity of, uh, increasing our openness, our openness, uh, to, uh, each other, heart opening, openness to ontologies, openness to political, uh, alternatives, and ultimately openness to thinking about the nature of consciousness itself.

>> Wow. Great. Uh, really great how you related to sort of the the the big five and the O. And I'd say sort of thinking along those lines that that society and and globally we're currently very much on the N side, right? Neurotics.

>> Yeah. Unfortunately.

>> And what fascinates me personally, that sort of my personal experience with with psychedelics, um, and thinking about consciousness, what they sometimes call, I do not know who coined that, but like spotlight awareness versus like like true openness.

>> Whereas we know that that level of openness might not always be functional for survival. And as adults, we tend to develop spotlights, um, awareness, right? I'm focused on you right now, not about. And looking at my children, I see like that just so beautifully open awareness. And, um, when I first, I think that struck me emotionally when I had certain doses of of psychedelics, with higher doses, I would get to what I afterwards would describe as like being an infant again, even to the level of experiencing what it must be like to be a baby seeing the world for the first time. That I could like spend an hour. Yeah. This ring, for instance, I was wearing a ring during one of these experiences, my ring, and I could literally stare at it for an hour with like pure focus on the beauty of it, and seeing it for the first time. And it's easily to later on dismiss that as ah, that's the the the brain on drugs. And that would be too easy for me because it was a profound experience of like newness, open, pure openness. And it fascinates me in how we grow up, like you somehow lose that, and then you want to go back to just, I'm just so curious. But this is me, open speculating how the universe plays out and how we, how our brains develop. How's that for you? I'm just sharing. Well.

>> Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think this is one of the things that that psychedelics does, and I've experienced this personally as well, that it it somehow reinvigorates that childlike wonder, right? It it it causes you to sort of look at the world fresh. It it it it encourages you to sort of experience this, uh, tremendous, uh, curiosity and and awe, really, at the at the nature of existence. And I feel like that fostering this quality of childlike wonder in people is is a very valuable element for fostering human flourishing and and possibly even, uh, the future of of humanity. It's interesting that another quality of openness is concern for the future of humanity and concern for preserving the natural environment. So, um, this this sort of capacity for looking at the world with childlike wonder and then, uh, wanting to preserve it, I think is is is really a, uh, a valuable element that both is associated with psychedelics, but also can be encouraged, uh, in other ways. It's one way of

>> That's right. I think that I think that u that meditation, uh, can be helpful. And, you know, it's interesting in meditation, uh, mindfulness has in in sort of Buddhist philosophy, there's sort of these two elements. There's, uh, mindfulness or or presence, and then there's also what's sort of known as emptiness, but it's also associated with open monitoring, uh, and the mindfulness has taken off as this huge thing that everyone, uh, talks about that aspect, the being present, you know, being being here, here now. But the openness part sort of got lost in the mix. I people do open monitoring, but but the quality of openness as a as a quality that can be, uh, cultivated has not been, uh, recognized in the same way as mindfulness. So our goal is to cultivate openness in the same way that mindfulness has been, uh, cultivated. And and the view is that you can, one of the things you can, one of the ways to do that also is through a particular kind of contemplative practice of of open monitoring, where you just sort of let things in. But you really can do it every taking a walk, just stopping and really inquisitively, curiously, like a child, like you were doing with your ring. You don't you don't have to limit that to the psychedelics. There's at any time is an opportunity for engaging in a childlike wonder. And also with mind wandering, oftentimes unfortunately, people are mind they're worrying, they're thinking about things, but they can also be doing what I've referred to as mind wondering, right? We're just playfully thinking about, uh, ideas, thinking about all the ideas that came up in this podcast or in any other podcast. So so spending time to just reflect on the curiosities of life, engaging in that sort of stance of childlike wonder.

>> Very beautiful. And would it be, how would it exactly defer from mindfulness practices, um, some of which have to do like just letting ideas come and let them go again? And you'd say you don't have to let go, you can engage then in an open way. Would that be a way to understand it?

>> Yeah. So what what I would say is that, um, the that the mindfulness practice of open monitoring, where you are, uh, being receptive to, uh, experience, is a way of, uh, and mind you, that's not the standard. The standard practice in mindfulness is the very focused attention kind, where you're focusing on your breath. That is that's sort of the standard meditation.

>> Back to the breath again.

>> Back to the breath, always back to the breath. So the open monitoring is definitely a step towards this openness aspect. It's it's a step to receptivity, to just letting stuff, uh, come in. But but the idea is, in the same way that you can take, uh, mindfulness and bring it to your everyday, uh, life, you can also take the openness and bring it to your everyday life, where you you allow yourself to receive, to entertain, but then you're also allowing yourself to process, to elaborate on, as I mentioned, you know, I have this motto, entertaining without endorsing. So you're just entertaining. You're when people present an idea, rather than like, no, that's not right, you know, and then sort of shutting it down, you try it on. You just listen to it. You just go, "Huh, that's you." You you inquisitively, curiously explore it, as opposed to just trying to fight against it.

>> Very interesting. Again, I think what they, I once heard that say, we try to teach children to to focus, to have attention, right? But then if you turn it around, actually, we are, you have to learn to have to don't have attention because what they do, they have attention for everything. We learn to not have attention, and that we call attention, but it's actually not attention to everything. And I I see it happening when I sort of with the kids in the morning, and we need to go to school. Okay, focus your your shoes, that grab your stuff. And but when I then, my son is now four-year-old, I just know now if he goes to to for his shoes, I know there will be something that grabs his attention, and it could be anything, and he will start playing with it.

>> Yeah. And now I've learned in thinking through all, do not be judgment, but just ah, that's that's beautiful. But now we need to go to school. So that's just funny how those two, how they relate, right? That openness that we need, is so beautiful, and at the same time, we need to balance it, right?

>> Absolutely. I think, uh, that it's it's really important to sort of see to find the balance in in both of these, uh, contracts. I mean, I also like, there's a great expression which goes, be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out, right? And so you want to be open, but you also want to bring discernment. You also want to bring mindfulness and and critical thinking. And so, uh, and and and similarly, you want to, uh, uh, be expansive, but not so expansive that you're constantly distracted by whatever is coming. So you have to sort of learn, and ideally, this is a skill set that people can cultivate, to have both the capacity for focused attention and mindfulness, and really being able to just hold a thought and zoom in on it, and also this receptive, expansive openness, where you're able to, uh, play with stuff and and and allow things coming in from the side. Uh, with Maline Gross, a a colleague in my lab, we've been looking at something called, uh, it's typically called aberrant salience, and in its most extreme, it's associated with schizophrenia, and with, uh, uh, believing things, you know, believing that the CIA is in your brain, and that type of stuff. But in at lesser levels, um, it's associated with, uh, magical thinking, but it's also associated with things seeming significant, noticing synchronicities, for for example, and, uh, individuals who have this level of, uh, what is called aberrant salience, but we prefer to call it

>> Aberrant salience.

>> What we prefer to call atypical salience, although I'd like to, I think maybe expansive salience is an even, uh, better expression, is where you're basically noticing things that other people don't notice, and you find that rewarding. You you, you know, when your son gets distracted by that, whatever it is, that that trinket, uh, they he's really, he's getting a thrill from that. So, so our the nervous system can be sort of set up where you just experience this sort of delight in the the the things that are other other people would just totally miss with, uh, the blinders on. And so I, there's a level of, um, expansive salience that I think may be very, uh, helpful to, uh, to cultivate as well. And this is going to be associated with, uh, sort of gaining delight. One of the things we find is that people who are higher in atypical salience, they tend to, uh, find they have more aha experiences, and they find those aha experiences more rewarding. Their aha experiences may not be any more brilliant, uh, but they they find it more rewarding. So if you, if you take delight in those ahas, then you'll spend more time in the aha, you know, looking for ahas, and that in turn may lead to a greater creativity.

>> Very nice. And you would you would you would need less, right? If I can sort of appreciate, I've heard someone's and I found it annoying when he said it once, a coach, if you could just be joyful about one breath, hunts, you know, when I was like, dissatis, like, come on, I want I want this and that in my life. But now there is truth in there, right? If we can be sort of just satisfied with with the small things, can can experience those aha lipnies in in in in the small things that that yeah, we would need less, deplete the planet less.

>> Yeah. I also, I love the idea of like everyday ahas, right? Like little small epiphies. We we're we're in a in a room without, um, without, uh, air conditioning. There's only, we're in an apartment without air conditioning, and there's only one room that has, uh, air conditioning. Uh, and I had this aha that we could, uh, move the mattresses from another room and just put it on on the couch. And, you know, Nobel Prize for that, but it was, you know, it was an aha that really, uh, really hit home. So I think people have everyday ahas all the time, and if you, if you sort of cultivate those and enjoy them, uh, more of them will come to pass.

>> Beautiful. And and you just mentioned briefly, like synchronicities. How do they, I'm just curious. Uh, is there a way to account for them in your, your kite of consciousness model? How, how would synchronicities fit in?

>> You're good. Um, so I think synchronicities are, uh, really interesting. We actually did a study where we asked people to indicate, um, how often they experience synchronicities. And we found that the more often people experience synchronicities, the the happier, uh, they were. So there seems to be this relationship between noticing synchronicities and, uh, and well-being. Now, this is correlational. So there are all sorts of of things there. So I think that, uh, you know, of course, the mainstream view is just, and there's any synchronicity that happens, there's always a way to explain how it's just a, you know, a coincidence. But I think the idea of being open to, um, to synchronicities, uh, and and to the meaningfulness of them, uh, is, uh, is something worth thinking about. I have another metaphor. I, I, I, I know I've got a lot of metaphors out there.

>> No, they're beautiful, and they they help understand it.

>> Uh, but so the metaphor that I like to think about with respect to synchronicities is the following. So so you've got, you know, sort of time coming at you, and you can sort of think of it as this, uh, as this stream, right? And, uh, in the same way that a stream, you can be on the sides, right? You can be st you can be in the in the whirlpools and the quagmire and the the brush and the brambles on the side of the river, and you know, you can be caught in a jetty doing a whirlpool like that, and we've all found ourselves that way. Or you can kind of move your way towards the middle of the river, where essentially you're going down what's known as the laminar flow. And it, that doesn't, you could still go bang right into a rock. So it doesn't guarantee that bad things will happen. But in in general, things seem to go more smoothly down the middle. And and the intuition that I have is that the more you get into the middle, the more you are going to experience those synchronicities. So the synchronicities are kind of >> again, I know this is metaphysical woo, as we we call it in my, uh, my lab, but it's it's a perspective that kind of resonates with me. The more you sort of get into the middle of the of the flow of time, using, uh, noticing synchronicities as a little bit of a of a sign, uh, the smoother things will go until you run into that big rock. We can easily, of course, fool ourselves with with synchronicities, and I've caught myself doing that as well. The mind wants wants sort of these synchronistic experiences. But what exactly is that middle flow or stream? I mean,

>> Yeah, I, I, I, I wish, wish I could know. I, I, I mean, I spend a lot of time, I'm afraid, in the jetties, uh, on the side. So I'll let you know when I, when I fully hit it. Um, but my my intuition is that it's when you are really, uh, following your purpose, where you've you've figured out what it is that's maximally important to you, and you're making your decisions, uh, in line with that sense of purpose, that sense of meaning. It that sort of following that meaning as your as your north star kind of moves you into the middle. And when you're in flow, you're constantly feeling like you're making advances in in in sort of fulfilling your, um,

>> That's interesting. It just pops to mind relating it back to what we discussed earlier, your toy model of guide consciousness, and the fact that time passes through us, and we have these, we have these degrees of freedom, um, with it passing through us. And it feels to me as if what you're saying also is a fun, like sometimes there's just more friction. Like if it would be like, yeah, just riding a car, it would be like, or I could just go this way. And and life becomes more easy, and you can just relax a bit more. But on the other hand, metaphysically, it's not like that other option was the wrong route or something. Who would say? You know, it just was a different life, different option, but it was one with more friction, and that's just less relaxed, you know, when

>> That's what pops to Absolutely. And you know, I think that, um, and I'm not sure I'll be able to hold all my metaphors together simultaneously, but I do think that of course, a lot of, um, benefits happen, sometimes even more benefits happen when you are in that frict, you know, that friction causes growth in a certain way, that when things are going smooth, uh, sometimes not so much. And it's it's possible. I I don't know if I'm going to make this metaphor work, but, you know, you sort of get in the friction, and then when you release that friction, you kind of jettison you, you know, into, um, a space that you might not have gotten into if you hadn't had that push back, that resistance. So, I think we do need that friction as as part of it. Again, it's sort of a balance of, uh, being able to tolerate the friction, being able to sort of recognize that it may, uh, help to propel us in some other way, but certainly not seeking out unnecessary friction, and and trying to move into the laminar flow when you can.

>> It's like building up tension. Yeah. That then can be released.

>> Exactly.

>> Beautiful stuff. We've entertained a lot of ideas and I appreciate it so much you openly do that. And, um, of course, it would be great if some if some of these ideas could also be endorsed, right? As you say, scientifically.

>> What do you think is the most, what are the most exciting things when you think about research that still can be done that you need funding for, or colleagues need funding for, also thinking about, uh, experiments in physics that could make your toy model like a real model? What are your thoughts there?

>> Yeah. So, um, the term entertaining without endorsing, I, uh, introduced in the context of, uh, parapsychological or or or psi research. And I do think it's the case that if there were some, uh, really, uh, powerful, uh, demonstrations, any, you know, compelling demonstrations of, uh, that consciousness is able to, uh, do things that it shouldn't be able to do, showing for example, that's able to steer, uh, in some way. So that would be some sort of telekinesis kind of thing, that would, uh, really be a huge game changer, uh, in terms of thinking about the relationship between consciousness and physical reality, and the potential causal qualities of consciousness. I also have this suspicion, this hunch, and this relates to the decline effect, which incidentally was defined, uh, in the context of parapsychology. Dean Raiden is the one who introduced me to the term. He, we did a parapsychological effect, and he said, well, have you replicated? And I said, yes, once. He said, we'll keep replicating, it will decline. I go, what decline? And he goes, yeah, that's what happens to all parapsychological effects. They they decline over time. Um, and so at the same time that I think that it's really, uh, valuable and important to keep trying to look for evidence that consciousness plays a role in physical reality beyond the one that it's currently acknowledged to do, I have this hunch. It's maybe pessimism, or maybe it's maybe it's that, uh, as hard as we try, where always, there's always going to be, it's never going to be a conclusive, uh, finding. I had, I, I came up with this, uh, term the other day, uh, the conservation of skepticism, and that somehow the system is set up in such a way that as hard as we try to, um, uh, to demonstrate these kinds of things, there'll always be some kind of, um, other reason why you can dismiss, dismiss the findings, as important as, as they they should be. I think that looking at these kinds of, uh, psi effects from the meta perspective, we may be able to sort of document how these effects maybe historically were there and then and then disappeared. So recognizing that the the scientific observer themselves may be influencing the way these things are unfolding, and that there could be some parapsychological phenomena associated with the observer themselves. Ultimately, it may be that we can come to some sort of understanding, in the same way that we recognize that the, uh, you, that in physics, we can't simultaneously know the location and and velocity of things, and we don't know why that is. Ultimately, it may be that we can come to understand that there is some sort of meta-level at which, uh, the observer is affecting the the outcome of these things that we can't understand, but still seems to be there. Uh, I think, um, may be something that's that's worthy of of of trying to get a handle on, in the sense of documenting, uh, the effect of observation of the of research teams and so on. There are a number of, um, really intriguing, uh, phenomena that have come to the four in the parapsychological domain, uh, in, uh, recently, uh, you may have heard of the telepathy tapes, with the claim that, um, uh, nonverbal, uh, autistic kids are capable of telepathy. And I have to say, I'm very excited by that prospect, but also not entirely, uh, happy about the way it's being unpacked at the moment. I think science should really get a handle on things before promoting things as being real. They shifted to the endorsing space in that series. Quite some quite some charisma on a series.

>> I said, I think that research, careful, rigorous research needs to be done, uh, sensitive research also, because this is a population, you know, that obviously has a particular u challenges. Careful, rigorous, sensitive research needs to be done. Uh, working with, uh, magicians and skeptics and people who can really, uh, clarify all the ways in which more conventional channels may, uh, operate. Um, also, there's, uh, the another paradigm in which people are claiming to be able to see without their eyes, where they're blindfolded. And one of the thing in both of these cases, that people are at sort of remarkable levels of performance, which, uh, helps to, um, deal with the statistical challenges when you have these very, very small effects. So I think that really careful, rigorous research done with, uh, that community of young kids who claim to be, or where there's the claims have been that they're able to, uh, see things when they shouldn't be able to, uh, needs to be done, uh, very, uh, systematically, carefully, working, uh, with, um, uh, very strong documentation, so that we can't dismiss these things. Again, my concern is that somehow, even though it seems like this either is going to work or it isn't, there's going to be some way in which there's going to be some curious middle line where the skeptics will be like, "Ah, this is dismissed." And and the open-minded people will go, "Yeah, but

>> Yeah, I think what's is there isn't there a name for it that you combine in research, you bring in your most fierce skeptic to join the research program? I think that's what ultim is needed to to just to to progress this.

>> Me, I'm looking it from a Sensia Foundation perspective. I think you should always be sort of cautious when you want stuff to be true. And for me personally, I'm I'm interested in things. I think it would be awesome if some of these ideas we're we're discussing about synchronist because it gives me meaning and as a person, I I'd love it to be true. But that that that moment you have to be cautious. And I think, uh, that as I'm a filmmaker, I'm I have a background as a filmmaker, documentary filmm, so I get what they're doing. And also there was this series on Netflix, uh, beyond death, or I don't know what it was called. And, yeah, surviving death.

>> And ah, so often in those series, there's this moment I think, ah, this is then it takes a wrong corner because it indeed wants to just walk away with it, or it just it plays out this story like I I used to be skeptic, and then we did this, and now, but now I believe, and then you you end up sort of

>> Uh, on either on one side of it. And I think you should be

>> Going back and forth like, okay, this is awesome. Okay, now go, ultimately be be like totally skeptic again, right? That's sort of the attitude I think, uh, is needed here.

>> Yeah, I, I think I'm likely to stay in the entertaining without endorsing space on just about everything, but, uh, the existence of subjectivity, uh, for for a long time. But you can sort of have, you can, there's something known as Bayesian, uh, where you have prior, and you can sort of shift your prior. So you know, I'm now leaning more towards thinking that there's something here. Up now, I'm leaning a little bit less, and and always maintaining that that open perspective and willingness to update, uh, your, uh, views in light of new evidence. And critically, as scientists, what oftenimes happens is they become, uh, they personalize whatever the view is, their theory, or their finding. This is, you know, they can't distinguish between them themselves and that particular theory or that particular finding. So if the theory or the finding comes under criticism, it's a they view it as an attack on themselves, as opposed to, uh, recognizing that, well, maybe I need to adjust my view on this, uh, particular perspective in light of, in light of new evidence. I think that that this idea of openness, uh, really needs to be, uh, built into the the scientific fabric, uh, to a greater degree, as well, as we entertain, uh, alternative things, in a, and and doing so with intellectual humility, to not, you know, have to feel like, you know, you're, you're fighting the hard fight for this for the truth, and you know what the truth is.

>> Yeah. Very interesting. As a final question, and I'll I'll give you mine first, sort of your meaning of life, meaning of the universe, sort of answer. And of course, it can be entertaining, but, but, but I hope it also to be heartfelt. I, when you mentioned sort of that uncertainty principle, I, I couldn't agree more. It seems to me like what Alan Watts used to call sort of the hide-and-seek of the universe. And the moment the universe gets found, I should say in English, it it wants to get lost again. It wants to sort of wants you to look again. So I'm very much aware of that. It has to be something like that. And evolution points so strongly to, if there was one consciousness, A1, that it wants to be dissociated in enhanced ego. And it sometimes lets me briefly experience what it might be like to be a larger form consciousness, just to then go back again. And that's such a strong mechanism. Also, if I do Bayesian updates on that one, it's so super likely that will just go on. And some I find that depressing, and I just also want to see the beauty in it. But that to me just feels as the most realistic thing that one wants to know itself, but it also wants to to keep on doing that. It needs to dissociate and and be like this little little little part of itself, and it will keep on going doing that. That's that's my take. Where are you on this?

>> Yeah. So, yeah. Um, yeah, that's rich. There's a lot, lot to go there. So I mean, I, I, when I was, uh, 14, my father gave me a book by Alan Watts called The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. And in that book, he basically sort of introduces sort of the Hindu perspective, uh, that we're all divinity playing hide-and-seek with itself, and that if, if you actually, if you knew it all, that that would be incredibly boring, right? And so you have to like, and that just really resonated with me, and I, I suspect projected me, uh, you know, sort of in in the direction that, um, I, I find myself, uh, uh, today. So I think that that this idea of, uh, that we're all sort of part of divinity playing hide-and-seek with themselves, and that that divinity itself wouldn't want an all-knowing, I, I actually can't imagine any, this maybe heretical, but being an all-knowing God seems awful, right? If there was nothing more to know, if it was all the, if, and you knew the future, the past, oh my God, it would be really, really terrible. So I, I think that this sort of idea of a always constantly unfolding, uh, acquisition of more and more understanding, but never, never getting to the final place. That's, um, that's the one that, uh, I find, uh, much more, uh, aesthetically, aesthetically compelling. I do kind of have this, we talked about the nested observer window idea. So if you imagine all these little windows, and every window has a certain imperative as it moves through information space. It's curious. It wants to experience information compression. It wants to experience some sort of understanding, some sort of aha. Each window is going to have a little bit of a movement towards the part of information space where the universe is is more interesting. And if, if every window is contributing to sort of moving into the most interesting part of information space, and increasingly interesting, and increasingly enabling for the possibility of understanding, or which can also be thought of as information compression, that that that will lead to the kite of consciousness just sort of moving through, or time moving through the kite of consciousness in this ever unfolding, uh, uh, expanding understanding state, and that, uh, you know, may hopefully the the apex at the very back is, you know, really enjoying the ride, but there's still more news, uh, for it to, uh, for it to gather. So the model is kind of like that, where we're a kite moving through information space, and, uh, it's constantly unfolding with with new understanding, and each one of us in our own way is able to help to guide the kite and expand that understanding by engaging in curiosity and openness.

>> Thank you so much, Jonathan. I think that was a very, very well-rounded ending and summary of our beautiful conversation. Thank you so much.

>> It's been a pleasure. It's been quite the ride.

>> Yeah, definitely. [Music]