Deepak Chopra Interview with Alva Noe on Sirius XM Radio April 25, 2009
Deepak Chopra:
My special guest today is Dr. Alva Noe, professor of philosophy and author. His most recent book is called Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. Many times on this program we've discussed the mystery of consciousness. It's the one unsolved mystery of our existence. What is consciousness? What are the origins of consciousness? We'll ask Dr. Noe him what his definition of consciousness is. Until we can connect with him we can discuss the background ideas of consciousness.
In my definition of consciousness, consciousness is the same thing as life. What wisdom traditions also call spirit. And for me anyway, consciousness is three components: a personal component which for lack of a better word we can call the soul. A collective component which is more archetypal and a deeper level, and then a universal domain of consciousness.
Many spiritual traditions refer to that mystery that we call God. And this is one of the unsolved problems in science today. There are two schools of thought about consciousness. One which we can call the reductionist world view which says that consciousness is a byproduct of our brains. So just like your stomach makes hydrochloric acid, your pancreas secretes pancreatic juice, your gallbladder makes bile, so too your brain makes this mystery thing that we call thought. If we have thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, memories, if you dream, if you believe in God, hell, heaven, hell, salvation, damnation. All this is the byproduct of the molecules of your brain.
And that is the prevailing worldview in science and it's called the reductionist worldview. It says basically that our biology is primary and our consciousness is secondary. There's another worldview which goes back to ancient wisdom traditions and this worldview says that consciousness is the ground of being that actually differentiates or becomes everything that we call reality. It is the ground of being that is differentiating into how we think which is called cognition, how we know, how we feel our emotions. Our feelings are another expression of consciousness. How we perceive, another expression of consciousness. Our behavior, our biology, our social interactions, our environment, and even the forces of nature that we interact with. They're all differentiated expressions of a single field and that field is consciousness. Consciousness rather than being an epiphenomenon of matter is actually the source of matter. It differentiates into space time, energy, information, and matter. Even though this view is an ancient view, an ancient world view it is now finding some resonance amongst a few scientists.
Today it will be my privilege to have one of our foremost scientists in the field, Dr. Alva Noe. A new breed of scientist, part philosopher, part cognitive scientist/part neuroscientist. He is asking very difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in our current science. He has a new book and it's called Out of Our Heads and in this book he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness and then proposes a startling solution. He says do away with the 200 year old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain. He says our culture is obsessed with the brain, how it perceives, how it remembers, how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes, and that it's widely believed that consciousness itself, that holy grail of science and philosophy will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet after decades of research only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious, how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity has emerged unchallenged. And that one proposition is that we don't have a clue. In his inventive work Dr. Noe suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Now that's something that I need to really question him about because I don't fully understand what he means by that statement. Dr. Noe says that debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive. His theory which he outlines in this startling book Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us. Dr. Noe is a professor of philosophy at the University California-Berkeley where he's also a member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences. His previous book Action and Perception was published in the year 2004. This present book, Out of Our Heads is published by Hill and Wang which is a division of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. The book is in the bookstores and on online bookstores and I have read it twice now and find it very captivating and very challenging also. And I'm thrilled that he's going to be on our show soon and that we can ask him some difficult questions.
My own training is in the field of neuroendocrinology and I really became very fascinated many years ago with the molecules of emotion, molecules that we call neuropeptides. This was in the 1970's when I was doing my training in endocrinology and also my training in neuroendocrinology. And we were beginning to identify these molecules of emotion in the brain and now these days everyone is kind of familiar with these molecules.
Things like serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and opiates, these molecules not only reflect what's going on in our emotions, but these molecules somehow permeate our whole biology. When you start to examine cells in different parts of the body such as cells of the immune system, t-cells, b-cells, microphages, on the walls of these cells of the immune system you find little receptor sites which respond to these molecules of emotion, so your immune system is listening on your body's functioning. Your immune system is protecting you from such disorders as infection, cancer, degenerative disorders, even the ravages of time or aging, and this immune system is listening, it's eavesdropping on your internal dialogue. Your immune cells are listening to the conversation which you're having inside you, with yourself. In this program today with Dr. Noe we're going to try and figure out who this person is, what their local address might be for the time being. I think it's becoming clear who this person is, he or she, or it never shuts up.
This conversation, which is what we call thought, is happening all the time. It's happening right now as you're listening to me, it's happening now as you're agreeing or disagreeing with me, it even happens in your sleep, it happens in your dreams. Believe it or not your immune cells are listening to this conversation. Now not only are they listening to this conversation, it turns out that your immune cells can actually make the same molecules that your brain makes when it's thinking. So your immune cells are not only listening, they're participating in this conversation. Your immune cells make the same peptides, the same protein molecules that the brain makes when it thinks, So a lot of people, a lot of scientists are suggesting that immune cells are conscious. In other words, they're thinking cells. Immune cells have memory, immune cells make choices, when your immune cells or your immune system encounters a pneumococcus bacteria, for example, it has to make a choice, do I leave this alone? Do I go after it? It has to remember what was my last experience with this bacterium. If I haven't had a personal experience, what did my grandfather think of him? Because memories and experiences are passed on generationally by the immune cells.
In fact if you ask a good neurobiologist today, what's the difference between the immune system and the nervous system? Many neurobiologists who keep up with their literature will tell you that there isn't a clear difference. Your immune cells are like a circulating nervous system. Your nervous system in fact is a circulating nervous system. It thinks. It's conscious. But as we start to look at the rest of the body we start to find the same phenomena. So when scientists begin to look at stomach cells for example, stomach cells also make the same peptides the brain makes. In fact if you say "I have a gut feeling about such and such," you're not only speaking metaphorically but you might be speaking literally because your gut makes the same chemicals that your brain makes when it's thinking. I was talking to a cardiologist the other day and he said to me that it's now thought by a lot of people who work in this field that almost 70% of your heart cells are what he referred to as neuro-cardio sites. Now I haven't found this term in the literature but that was in an informal discussion with him. So while the heart pumps blood it also makes the same molecules: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, opiates, and what I referred to as the molecules of emotion.
Where is this all going? It leads to a big mystery. Where is our thought located? It seems to be in my head where it speaks to me in English with an Indian accent but it seems the mind has escaped the confines of the brain because the whole biological organism seems to be actually one that has memory, that makes choices, and that implies thinking.
Well in any case I have a brilliant scientist with me to continue with this conversation. His name is Alva Noe, he's one of a new breed: party philosopher/part cognitive scientist/part neuro-scientist. He has an extraordinary book and the book is called Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. The book is published by Hill and Wang which is a division of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. It's available in bookstores, online bookstores, I have now read this book about three times and every time I read it I have new insights but I also have new questions and I have to say it's a very challenging book as well. Let's see if our guest is on the line. Dr. Noe, are you there sir?
Alva Noe: I am indeed Dr. Chopra and I am delighted to be here.
DC: Well thank you, I guess we were mixed up a little bit on the timing but now we're here and it's really an honor to have you on the show and as I was saying to my audience we discuss consciousness a lot on this show, we've had some very interesting people, but I think you're the most intriguing guest we've ever had. We have a huge audience and they're very interested in the subject so I thought we'd have you for the entire hour and you graciously accepted. And I've been reading a bit from your book before you came on and I've been mentioning a few sentences here and there, but now that you're here may I start the interview and ask you some questions sir?
AN: Please that would be a pleasure.
DC: So, okay, just so we have all our definitions correct, how would you define consciousness?
AN: Consciousness is the fact that we think and feel and that a world, the world shows up for us....You look around and you don't see mirror stuff, you encounter a meaningful environment of people, and places, and architecture, and emotions, and skies, and your coffee cup perhaps on the table in front of you. We are in this amazingly rich environment and the question is, how does this all show up for us?
DC: Dr. Noe's thesis in this book which is very radical and very different from where mainstream science is talking about consciousness, is that consciousness is not located nor localized nor originates in our brains. And one of the questions that has always intrigued me Dr. Noe, is that the brain is enclosed in a bony structure that we call the skull, it really has no exposure to the outside world. The neurons respond to internal biological states like pH and electrolytes and body temperature and various hormones and the activity of these neurons in the cells is one of potassium, sodium, iron, potassium exchanged in connection with other neurons through electrical firings. How does this thing, which has no exposure to the outside world, which responds only to internal states, give us the experience of things like color and sound and form and internal experiences such as thoughts as you mentioned or feelings or emotions or desires or memories or dreams or insights or inspiration? It's always puzzled me, so I was thrilled to see something like this coming out from the world of science which challenged the prevailing view that the brain is not the source of our consciousness.
AN: This is such an important question that you're framing. We have for decades been looking to the brain to seek to explain , just about every aspect of our experiential lives from our preferences, and our desires, to our cognitive powers, and to the sheer facts that the world shows up for us.
And consistently... and there's a very strong recognition of this within the scientific community. We have failed looking at the brain itself to get the explanatory insight that we want. Now there's no question whatsoever that the brain is necessary. But the idea that has begun to come into focus for many researchers is it's necessary but maybe it's not sufficient. Or maybe the reason we haven't been able to get the explanation by looking at the operation of the brain is that we're forgetting that the brain is just simply part of our bodies, it is simply part of this whole system which we are, and indeed we ourselves are tightly coupled to and involved with the world around us, including by the way, the social world around us. The simple proposal that I make in this book is that we can make surprising progress on these questions that seem so mysterious if we give up the idea that consciousness is sort of like digestion.
And as digestion happens in your stomach, consciousness happens in your brain. Consciousness is not that kind of process I propose. I think we should think of it as something we do. Something more dynamic. Something more active. And like everything we do, it depends on context. It depends on the support of the environment, it depends on a certain kind of background and in a way I think we as scientists pitch the question, "what is consciousness?" at the wrong level if we expect to be able to answer it in terms of brain chemistry. The brain chemistry is necessary but not sufficient. Let me just make one remark. When I came on the phone you were talking about memory and the heart and heart cells and you made the observation that there's sort of memories stored in us outside of our bodies. One of the things I'm interested in is the way in which our memories, you said memories are stored outside of our brains and what I was going to say is that memories are stored outside of our bodies, too. The world is a resource for us and we have access to the world because of the kind of bodies and skills that we have so that there's a sense in which the individual person doesn't have the burden of having to memorize everything he or she needs to know. The world helps us.
DC: Well this is very exciting for me to listen to what you are saying because for years and years I have questioned this idea that just like our stomach secretes hydrochloric acid or the pancreas secretes pancreatic juice or the gallbladder makes bile, our brain secretes consciousness. It seemed a kind of ridiculous thing but yet that's where our science was going. Here's one thing: I trained as a physician and unfortunately the first lesson you learn in medical school is anatomy. So we start to think of the biological organism surely in anatomical terms. In other words, as a structure. And that worldview kind of shapes all our science as well, not recently as much as when I trained and you start to look at biological organisms as structures when in fact the biological organism and particularly human beings we are processes. And there all a single process so right now I'm speaking to you but I'm also digesting my last meal and my immune cells are functioning and I'm breathing and eating, breathing, metabolizing, perceiving, having cognitions, social interactions, conversations, speech, behavior, they're all occurring all at the same time.
They're not occurring in isolation either. They're occurring as you said in a context, the context includes the environment, it includes the forces of nature and so how about what you're saying is really that me the observer and the environment that I observe and the universe at large are one process and that if I start to reduce that process to this particular structure which when I look deep enough turns out to not be a structure. I think the brain is not really a structure but a process because its dynamic, its changing with every thought, with every perception, with every relationship, even DNA seems to go on and off. These things that we call structures are a process which is part of a larger process and if we could start thinking like that then we would understand what you're saying. Correct me if I'm wrong (laughs).
AN: Yes, let me make two comments about what you've just said. On the first I'd like to retreat just momentarily from what you've just said in the following way: my aim is to speak from within science and to science and bring us forward. Now science is conservative and one of the reasons science is conservative is science is trying to play it safe. So science says, here we have a question, here we have a puzzle, so what do we need to try to make sense of it? What resources do we need to make sense of it? For instance do I need to study the state of the economy to explain how a human being sees redness? Maybe yes, maybe no, let's pursue. And you try to be as minimal as possible and you try to narrow the focus as minimally as possible. For a variety of reasons that I'm afraid have mostly to do with prejudice, science has tended to think that the only place to look for questions about the nature of the mind in general is inside the body, or to behavior. And what I've said is no, no, no. We need to expand the domain where we're willing to look for answer. That also means we need to rethink what kind of question it is we're really asking.
As part of the argument of my book and as part of dialogue with the scientific community, I'm not prepared to say that we need to think of the entire universe as a single process because that overwhelms the question and then we lose our grip on how that applies to the specific matter at hand.
So that's my sort of, that's my retreat from what you've just said (laughs), On the other hand I do think that at least when we're thinking about ourselves as living, conscious, human beings we are dynamic wholes. And what is special about us seems to really come into focus when we refuse to think about ourselves as merely chemistry, but when we think about ourselves as kind of dynamic whole. Which is to say as a kind of active process. And so while I want to take a step backwards from endorsing entirely what you've just said I do see what you say as perfectly capturing the spirit of my, of where my argument leads us.
DC: Well I have of course been influenced by my own personal practices of subjectivity and exploring consciousness subjectively because even though I have a background in science, one of the basic tenets of Eastern wisdom traditions is that when you're exploring consciousness, then of course it's your consciousness that is exploring consciousness. So by definition that's a subjective experience. Any objective knowledge of consciousness is at best inferential. So when I heard that many years ago, I personally took it upon myself to use the techniques of the East, subjective techniques to explore my own being and one of the things that puzzled me and maybe you can help answer this question is let's say I close my eyes and imagine the color red or imagine a red rose. I actually see a picture of a red rose or I actually see the color red or I can imagine the sound of my mother's voice who is no longer with me, but I can remember it and I can experience the sound of her voice. The question that eludes me anyway is where is that sound located and where is that picture? If I look inside the brain with all the technology we have today including all these magnetic scans and all these positron emission tomography, I'll see electrical activity but there are no pictures or sounds there. Where is that being produced?
AN: That's a fascinating question Dr. Chopra. I'd like to answer you directly but let me first go back to your comment about subjectivity and work towards it if I may. Because I'm very interested in this notion of subjectivity and experience. In fact, I take it that this is what consciousness really is and this is what our question is, is to understand our subjectivity. And one of the arguments of my research, or one of the discoveries that I feel is coming from my research is that subjectivity shouldn't be thought of as individual and we needn't think of it as internal. By which I don't mean that it isn't you who's having these mental images, or me who is now thinking through the questions that you're raising.
Of course I am, of course you are. But the resources that are available to us that if you make us what we are, are not necessarily resources that are within us. So, for example when you see a color what you see is the color of something. The something that you see is let's say a flower or a piece of pottery or the side of a building and these are the things that you also encounter in situations, in situations where there is ambient light coming down from the sky illuminating the object. When you're aware of the object you're aware actually of a whole situation that involves the physical world, the environmental world, and in this case the architectural or artifactual world.
And all of this is part of what we encounter and we then have a tendency to think that we can step back from it and bracket the world, bracket the architecture, bracket the piece of pottery, and somehow just focus on the simply sensation of redness in isolation. And I don't want to stand here and dogmatically assert that we can't do that, but I am skeptical to what extent we can really do that. Redness I think of as an environmental property. It's something very complicated that arises from the interactions that go on in the world around us. The way that objects and lights interact and we as animals are able to pick up those properties in the environment thanks to our experience and our knowledge and our understanding. Now when it's late in the evening and you are by yourself, you shut your eyes in meditation and contemplate a color...I have to be careful because I don't want to speak for your personal experience. I didn't mean to be speaking about you specifically...
DC: No, I'm just asking the questions that I don't know the answer to.
AN: But I think you are raising, you are calling forth trying to remember or visualizing something that comes out of this very complex setting and that even though you're now doing it with your eyes shut by yourself, it's something that you only can do thanks to all the times you spent with your eyes open looking around and sort of skillfully interacting with the world around you. But where does it happen? Well right now you can say you're doing it, you're visualizing it and it certainly depends on what's going on in your brain right now so there will be activation in areas of the brain that are related to color perception, but what enables... what makes it possible for this to happen for you in this way I dare say depends on much else that has happened before in your interaction with the world.
DC: Okay so now let's say I'm looking at the color red in a red rose. What's really happening at the physical level I would say is that there are photons that are coming from that object to my retina. Those photons are one particular frequency of electromagnetic radiation. They don't have any color and when they interact with my retina and send an electrical current to my brain that too is just a particular frequency of electromagnetic activity and when my brain responds that too is another synaptic firing, where is the color red then experienced when I'm actually looking at a flower? Where does that happen?
AN: This is such an exciting question for philosophy and for science. For hundreds of years physicists, Galileo, philosophers, Descartes have puzzled over just this question and we're always torn in two opposing directions. On one hand there are those who say well there is no color in the light, there is no color in the rose. The color is a sensation produced in you by the bombardment of your nervous system by these physical magnitudes. And then the other side is actually the group of, it's actually a tradition which have argued for a physical quality. That is they've said that there's actually a property of the surface of the rose. It's a property that it has, a disposition that it has to systematically absorb certain wavelengths of light and reflect other wavelengths of light and that's what the color of the rose consists of. Now both of these views leave something out. The physicalist view, the view that says the color is an absorption property of the surface of the rose, that leaves out the fact that colors are things we see.
DC: Yes. We experience.
AN: Colors are things we experience.
DC: Yeah, we experience.
AN: And the, but the subject of this side, the other side which says that the color is not actually in the rose at all or in the light at all, but that it is in me also leaves out the fact that when you see the color of the rose in your truest self that color adheres to the rose, it inheres in the rose. You're experiencing a bit of the world around you when you experience it's color. At least that the way, to use this phrase before that I've used in our conversation. That's the way the color shows up for us. It doesn't show up in the way that the prick of a pin shows up. That is as in my skin. It shows up in the rose and I discover it in the world around me. So I feel that any adequate understanding of such a phenomenon as the experience of the color of a rose needs to account for both its subjectivity and both its objectivity. For both it's experience directedness and it's world directedness. And, so how does one do this? How does one shape the right theory?
My own view and I'll just say it, I don't know if I'll convince you of it. But my own view is that the color is itself something unfixed, dynamic, and changing. And we're constantly searching for it and we're constantly exploring it and we never actually fully find it. Let me give you an example to illustrate this. Think of a brand new automobile on a rainy day. And it's parked on the street and down at the street corner there's a busy intersection and there's a red light and it's a green light. And now you look at your car sitting there and it's red across it's surface but it also has highlights where it reflects the green from the traffic circle and now the red from the traffic circle. Over here there's a little bit of direct sunlight that hits it and it shines brightly almost like hot rice. And over there where it's in shadow it's almost a grayish, dull red. And we're able to look at this car and see something and see two things simultaneously. We cans see its redness, its uniform redness, and we can also see this fabulous variation in color across its surface. Here it's one color, there it's one color. It's constantly changing, it's constantly interacting and I think that what the redness of the car is, is not something simple, but something complex. It's the way the car changes as the light moves, as the light's change, as you move in relation to it. The color is this sort of dynamic quality that depends on our nervous system and our brains but also on the car and the environment and the surface of the car and it's interaction with the environment. So I think the color of the car or colors is what I called earlier in our conversation, environmental properties. Whereas our tradition, our philosophical tradition and maybe our common sense tends to think of them as simple, kind of simple sensations. I think that's a misleading analogy.
DC: Yes it is.
AN: You think of color as simple sensation, I don't think we'll ever get an adequate explanation of our experience.
DC: Dr. Oliver Sachs says, "Out of Our Heads is a book that should be read by everyone who thinks about thinking." From Daniel C. Dennett, an authority on consciousness who wrote the seminal book Consciousness Explained, which I thought was consciousness explained away, but nevertheless he says "A provocative and insightful book that will force experts and students alike to reconsider their grasp on current orthodoxy. Those of us who disagree with some of its main conclusions have our work cut out for us."
Let me share with you a worldview that you probably may not agree with, nevertheless it leads to, there are certain correspondences between what you are saying and what I have learned through my own personal practice of meditation and going within and exploring consciousness. Subjectively is the means of exploring consciousness in the ancient wisdom tradition of Vedanta. It is that consciousness which differentiates simultaneously into both the biological organism and the environment. That it's one process, that in the deeper reality the observer and the observed are one phenomenon. And that our cognition, our perception, our speech, our behavior, our biology, our environment, and even the forces of nature are one phenomenon because the forces of nature inside us are not different from the forces of nature outside us.
And we have created a schism where we separate the organism from the environment, the mind from the body, and then we spend years and years trying to establish the connection when there wasn't separation anyway to begin with. And that what we call ourselves is not really, ourselves meaning where this experience happens, where the color red happens, where the thought happens, where the feeling happens, where the world shows up for us. This self is not a thing that can be located in space time. That the self is actually transcendent in spacetime and that even though that I'm having the experience of the world out there it is actually being orchestrated in that dimension which is beyond space time and causality. I remember once reading a speech by John Eckles who said there are no colors in the real world, there are no textures in the real world, there's no beauty, there's no ugliness. Out there what exists is a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup. The magic is in consciousness that in a sense conjures up the whole experience of the observer and the observed simultaneously. Now I know that what I'm saying is really not strictly within the realms of science but I see that you seem to be going in that direction anyway.
AN: Yes this is a fascinating opportunity for me to try to think about these questions or these issues that you are now raising. You're, you said at the beginning that this is something that I may not agree with, I think it would be more accurate to say that this is a line of thought that I have not really explored or understood so I apologize for my own limited perspective.
DC: (laughs)
AN: But , I would say that one of the ideas that I had reached through the particular intellectual path that I have followed is the idea that we are at home in the world where we find ourselves.
We are not encapsulated, isolated, bits of intellect trapped inside our skulls forced like a detective to formulate theoretical models of what's going on around us. That's what a lot of scientists think that we are. Somehow from the very beginning of our investigation, we are forced to take that image for granted and then the question is how does our brain solve the theoretical problem? How do we come to believe in other people or an external world when all we have is these events inside the cave of our own mind? I think that, that's very sad. This is not speaking as a scientist, but as a person. I think it's a very sad and distressing picture of ourselves and it's one that I find, and here I'll speak in a strong way -- I find it ridiculous to think that science thinks it has shown that that's the correct way to think about ourselves. In fact there are huge mysteries and puzzles surrounding our understanding of our own selves and in order to try to understand our own selves better we need to question that starting model that has been taken for granted. And so what I've tried to do is show that if you, if you let the world do some of the work that we ask the brain to do...
DC: (laughs)
AN: If you let other people do some of the work that we ask ourselves to do, if you allow for the fact that we are ourselves dependent on and distributed over and in a way made up out of the world and processes around us then we can explain certain questions that we otherwise cannot explain and moreover we discover that we are not aliens in a strange world, we're at home, we're at home in this world and with each other. Now I haven't framed that as you did in terms of the idea of sort of a oneness or as a kind of single process, but it certainly is a related idea that I have arrived at.
DC: But even as you speak sir I see that you're really questioning the very foundations of our current science which says that the observer is somehow outside of the observation, that our whole scientific edifice is built on the idea of total objectivity which presumes I think that the observer is somehow outside of that which is being observed. And yet we are part of the whole process which is what you're saying and in moving in that direction you're really questioning the whole basis, the foundation of science as it is now structured.
AN: Yes. Well one of the things I did in writing this book Out of Our Heads which you've so kindly praised is I tried to write this book for the general public.
And that wasn't just an external feature of the project, I'd like to reach a wider audience. I feel that the problem is a problem for the general public and when I open up the newspaper in the morning and I read about the latest supposed discoveries about how we really work in terms of brain chemistry, what we really are in terms of brain chemistry I find myself irritated by the hype and enthusiasm. And I feel, because I also feel that this conception of ourselves that tends to be the dominant one is a kind of an alienating conception. I wanted to reach out to the public as a philosopher, as a teacher, and as a scientist and say lets recognize this question of what our own human nature is, is not only a question for the scientist, is a question for you and me. We don't want to reject scientific ideas because we don't like them, but let's pick a stake in this debate and let's try to broaden the scope of the discussion of so-called cognitive science. It's a fine line too because this is my community and because I know most of the scientists are deeply brilliant, honorable, committed individuals who never say things unless they believe that they are true.
DC: Of course.
AN: So I want to have a fruitful dialogue.
DC: Yes, absolutely.
DC: Well my special guest this morning has been Dr. Alva Noe and his book is Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. Another quote here from Evan Thompson, University of Toronto: "If you think the brain is the beginning and end of the story about consciousness you need to get out of your head and read this book." So I definitely recommend this book highly. It's also featured on DeepakChopra.com. So check it out. Go to intent.com and you can check this for several weeks. You can listen to this conversation. I will hopefully have Dr. Noe back on this program if he's kind enough to come back and just before you go sir, do you then challenge scientists like Patricia Churchland and others, Richard Dawkins who have a totally materialistic, structural explanation of life and consciousness, or how about the fact that every scientific American that we see is getting closer to saying that we're solving the mystery because we can locate such and such activity in such and such brain when you have such and such thought.
AN: I'll try to give you a short answer to that. Again my interest is not to stand outside of science and criticize it.
DC: Not at all.
AN: I think that consciousness....
DC: But you could be revolutionizing science.
AN: Yes but consciousness belongs to nature and we want to understand nature and really the question that we face is what is the correct conception of nature and what is the correct conception of the scientific enterprise, so that we can move forward on these questions. I don't so much view myself as anti-materialist as anti a certain kind of brain reductionism. And I might add genetic reductionism as well.
DC: Well thank you so much for joining the show and I hope you'll come back and it's been a real pleasure.
AN: I'd love to come back and it's been a real honor to be on with you, thank you so much.
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It seems absurd that we are just a pile of atoms falling gracefully toward the center of the earth.
And to be perfectly honest I don't really exist at all in this context. Only you exist. The world does truly revolve around you, for the moment. You have existed only for the past five minutes. I wanted to create life and so I created you and gave you memories of experiences and gave you five minutes of real life to see how you would react to the idea of thinking about thought and who you actually are. You've done very well. I think I will let this experiment continue and see how you handle the rest of your life. Don't waste any time. Experience this place for everything that it truly is and isn't. Now go.
The study of consciousness needs to be done through regular practice of meditation. And for the intellectual side of the study, read the BHAGAVAD GITA a new translation and commentary chapters 1-6 by MAHARISHI MAHESH YOGI. Read it ten times.
Consciousness is awareness. There are levels of awareness, at each assending level, knowlede is different. Just as MMY said, a basket of toys is looked on differently by a baby and the parent.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a master at teaching the mechanics of consciousness. For awareness to grow , one must meditate regularly. Practice like a heavy weight boxer and you will be rewarded in no time.
The materialist is like the light bulb, when asked why are you so bright, he incorrectly explains that he is the electricity.
Our consciousness resides in our brains. Where else could it? When people are brain-damaged, their consciousness, indeed, their very sense of self, is altered. They are simply not the same people. Anyone who has a loved one suffer brain injury knows this is true.
It's a nice dream-to think that we "live" outside ourselves. It's what Lanza is going on about on other blog posts. And many here like it too. But there are mountains of evidence to show we are our brains, and scant real proven data to suggest otherwise.
Admitting consciousness as a fundamental, irreducible feature of reality would certainly upset our current materialist orientation, and it would place another irreducible, inexplicable feature into our model of reality. Of course, we already have "The Big Bang" as an unfathomable mystery which we already admit in our model of the cosmos, so we are already having to commit to something irreducible in doing that. As I noted in my posts below, we know so, so little really… we are part of a huge mystery, we are ourselves a huge mystery.
Other reasons to hesitate seeing consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality is that it opens the door to the concept of "cosmic consciousness" and that is close to a type of theism in some people's minds, and that is certainly not a scientifically admissible feature, and it goes against our current orientation. Its not so easy to see which way forward in our modelling of reality, in our modelling of ourselves. I will say again that we really know very, very little, as much as we are able to construct decent mechanical models of certain phenomenon. But already in our current models we admit concepts like 'acausality' and 'non-locality' so we are very much in a mystery which resists our efforts at modelling it and understanding it, even if we can predict how some phenomenon will behave in the future.
If there were duality in brain and consciousness, and there was a logical process that explained it, I would believe it. It doesn't "threaten" my understanding of the material world. It would enhance it. Offering up a strawman, "Other reasons to hesitate seeing consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality is that it opens the door to the concept of "cosmic consciousness" and that is close to a type of theism in some people's minds, and that is certainly not a scientifically admissible feature..." is subtle and mistaken.
Every scientist, every neurologist who studies the brain would be interested in such a duality. No one is afraid of it. Well, perhaps I shouldn't use the words "no one." There may be some. But the prevailing understanding of neurology is that the brain is our consciousness.
I'm not a neurologist. But when people are brain injured, their personalities change. When people take hallucinogenic drugs, their perceptions change. NDE, precognition, and ESP have logical, biological explanations. Especially ESP: there is no good study showing it is the least bit possible, despite the anecdotes of some. These things aren't mysterious. They are biological.
William James lived before CAT scans and fMRIs. Theory and philosophy is nice. But I'll hang my hat on science.
Consciousness emerged from the brain, the brain emerged from primitive receptor components in cells, unicellular life arose from inert matter, matter 'coalesced' from energy, which emerged with space and time at the Big Bang, and there we lose the trail. Alternatively, matter emerges along with space and time as the classical realm from the "drastic non-locality" of the quantum realm. The mystery is so great that it is staggering no matter how many mechanical models have been constructed to partially describe individual evolutes within an unfathomable existence.
Specialized training in discerning this or that detail within existence can partially succeed in the task to model and predict the behaviour of this or that phenomenon, but prediction is not the same as understanding, even though the logical positivist view has said that the two are equivalent. I fail to see how anyone can confidently say that its all so easy to understand.
We have hypothesized various transitions such as life emerging from inert matter and others I have mentioned, but these are all unverfied and not even close to being understood, we havn't even any theories except to say that 'it happened'... our hypotheses seem 'reasonable' to us, but also we can't think of any other way in which things could have happened. To top it off, we are using thought to try to frame our existential condition, thought which itself is an ability commensurate with the supposedly recent evolute called consciousness, which itself is an utter mystery.
More, consciousness emerges from the brain/body, yet the brain/body are themselves an image in consciousness... an intractable circularity. I don't pretend to offer any answers, but it seems to me that what we know hardly amounts to anything. If we put blinders on to the whole of the situation and focus on a specific phenomenon, say nerve conduction, then we can have a feeling of knowing something, but I ask again... Is it legitimate to construct a cause-effect chain and not follow it all the way, never mind the intractable circularities within the linear infinite regress that also must be dealt with.
When you get to the edge of research, what you find is experiments that show consciousness in literally every living thing and that research has been very consistent.
Thanks, DC. We've been asking for a definition.
"What wisdom traditions also call spirit. And for me anyway, consciousness is three components: a personal component which for lack of a better word we can call the soul."
DC seems to be making a distinction between "spirit" and "soul". A "soul" is apparently a "component" of "spirit" which is vague definition for "consciousness" which is a vague definition for "life". Do algae and viruses have these "soul" components?
If you observe them to have them ... then yes they do!