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Coleman Hughes interviews Curt on Consciousness, UFOs, and the Philosophy of Probability
July 13, 2022
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
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Coleman Hughes is an accomplished writer, a philosophy graduate, and the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman, a link to which is in the description. Coleman sat down with me for a podcast on consciousness, UAPs, and theoretical physics. Though, because of certain technical issues, this is being released on the Toe podcast instead of on his platform.
A much longer follow-up is going to be conducted over Zoom for his channel. Comment with any questions that you feel were left unanswered or areas that you would like to be explored more, and Coleman will try to address them for the follow-up. Next week on the Toe Channel will be Professor Abhay Ashtakar, who is a prestigious and acclaimed physicist who paved the way for modern quantum gravity approaches like loop quantum gravity and loop quantum cosmology.
He talks about what occurred prior to the Big Bang. I'm sure you heard that nothing existed prior to the Big Bang. Well, that's only true in certain models. There are cyclical models where that's not true. In loop quantum cosmology, there is no singularity, but instead a repulsive force that breeds another universe under certain conditions. Achtekar is the physicist referenced numerously
in a positive light by Salvatore Pius. In fact, Sal sent in a question for Achtekar on the superforce. Expect that in about a week's time. As mentioned before, this is a brand new season for the Theories of Everything project or channel, where I'm going to explore different kinds of content. So, for example, new guests that aren't
repeatedly interviewed on the standard podcast Rolodex like Ashtakar for example. There will be more theolo-cutions such as one that's coming up is Bernardo Kastrup and Chris Langan. There will be other explainer type videos so for example how does one go about learning a new theory of everything and some ancillary content like an inventorying video about new creators up-and-coming creators in the UAP physics math consciousness space
As tiny creators tend to get overlooked despite toiling just as hard, and given the modest following on this channel, it would be great to shine some light their way, as I know I wish someone larger had done that for me when I was struggling. No sponsor for today's podcast. If you'd like to contribute, then do consider going to patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal, that is C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L, as this is what I'm able to do full time now, thanks to your generous support.
Enjoy Coleman Hughes interviewing Kurt Jaimungal. All right, Kurt, thanks so much for coming on my show. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. So I've been listening to your podcast theories of everything, right? Right. And we're going to get into the topics you cover. But before we do that, can you give a little summary of who you are, where you're from, you know, your background, how you came to care about topics like
My name is Kurt Jaimungal and I've been interested in what are called theories of everything since I was a child, since I learned about them. I'm sure you've heard there's quantum mechanics, technically it should be quantum field theory and then general relativity. Some people say it's the theory of the small with the theory of the large.
Elephants are quantum mechanical, so it's a bit strange to relegate quantum mechanics to just the small. So if we did enough experiments and we took an elephant and we threw it through a double slit, it should, in theory, split. Regardless, when I was small, I heard about this. It's a contradiction or it's a difficulty in putting these two pieces together, and one needs to in order to be able to describe black holes and what happened at the origin of the universe. So there are various mysteries in physics.
And I've been interested in that since as far as I can remember. Then I did my undergraduate in something called mathematical physics. Then I went into filmmaking and somewhat abandoned that, though I kept the same state of mind when I approached filmmaking. And then since the pandemic started, I thought, you know what? Why not just go back to these roots? I'm super interested in. I think about it almost all the time. It unhinges me to some degree. But anyway, I think about it.
almost every minute or so. So I started interviewing people about their theory of everything, so their combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Then I found out that there's more than just that because there's the mystery of, well, what the heck is consciousness and what role does it play fundamentally? Does it emerge from what we think of as material, so dead matter? And somehow it became successful and that's now I'm super lucky, much like yourself. I'm sure you're like, holy moly.
I get to talk to awesome people that I wouldn't otherwise get to talk to. And I get to think about stuff that I think about, you know, regardless. It's almost like we're researchers in a university, except we're not being paid by the university, and we don't have to conform to whatever the university wants us to do. Good, because universities at Columbia, I struggle to get the kind of
deep and free thought that I actually wanted to live by in a classroom setting. It was a rare professor that would set the culture of the class freely enough that we could really, really pursue the deepest consequences of the ideas in the room with no fear, with no social fear. So that is basically, I think the places
that actually allow for truly free thought, which is supposed to be what a university is, have shifted in some ways to places like, you know, my podcast, your podcast and other places in the culture have sort of filled that vacuum. Yeah, yeah, it's wonderful. Well, it's wonderful for us. It's not wonderful for
the universities though they I think they think it is it's it's for their net benefit right at least they claim to and I'm also from Toronto so that's the reason why there's a background we'd switched backgrounds earlier oh yeah yeah no I was there and I say that's your domain America yeah New York is much like it so this is my first time in New York and Toronto kind of look like each other yes yeah New York is far greater I've only been to Toronto for like two hours three hours but I remember thinking
This is eerily similar to New York. It's a moderately cleaner New York and a drastically smaller New York. I guess the two major topics I want to talk to you about are UFOs or UAPs as they're now called and consciousness. Sure. So which order do you want to take these in? Maybe let's start with UFOs. Sure, sure.
And this is a, you know, for anyone interested in this topic, your podcast is a major resource because you've talked to so many different people about this topic. And I don't think I've ever talked about this on my podcast, but basically what I believe has happened is three to four years ago, UFOs were a topic that marked you as crazy.
and really anyone interested in them would be dismissed and the reason they would be dismissed is because people like me who weren't deeply into the topic you know I'd seen the videos of things that looked essentially like flying saucers caught on cameras on YouTube and elsewhere but because the US government had never
Given a rubber stamp to these videos, what I think many people assumed was that there must be some other explanation that folks high up believe such as, for example, that the camera was glitching out
or that it wasn't actually an aircraft. It was something else that just looks like an aircraft. Some atmospheric effects. Some atmosphere. Yeah, exactly. Like a rare event of ball lightning. Right. Ball lightning or whatever. Or it's a U.S. military device that the government is keeping secret. It was a military test or it was Russian or Chinese.
And we just, I just assumed whatever the explanation is, you know, the people at the Pentagon have it and they haven't talked about it because it's, it's a state secret. And, um, and on the tin foil hat crowd on the internet is, is reading into it. Uh, and then, you know, in the past two years, that whole, uh, type of dismissal is no longer really possible to make because
The videos, especially the ones from the Navy, there are at least three different videos I've seen that have been released that were taken by Navy pilots, aircrafts, where they're seeing something that looks exactly like our stereotype of a UFO, and they're saying, what the fuck is this?
You know, our folks at the US government have looked at it every which way, and their conclusion is, what the fuck is this? Right? They are as confused and interested as people I would have dismissed three years ago as the conspiracy theorists and the alien obsessives, right?
So that's basically, that's sort of the C-shift as I see it. Is that how you see it? Yeah, except I wouldn't say that the shift is such that if you were to talk about it, you're not deemed to be a loon of some sort. There are still people like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michael Shermer who either explicitly state that if you're jumping to the conclusion that this isn't a terrestrial phenomenon, then you're insensate and you should be following only where the evidence leads you.
So and there's compilations of this. So for example, I recently requested someone to come up with a compilation of this because I didn't see the exact words for a while. I've just heard that people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, et cetera, have disprised the UFO community. Anyway, there's this Twitter account named Tupac Cabra.
There's one question, which is, are UFOs real?
unidentified flying objects. Are they really UFOs? Are they really, you know, now they call them unidentified aerial phenomena precisely because they are real and don't want to give them the sort of stigma of the phrase UFO. So there's that. We know they're real at this point, essentially. I mean, the evidence points that way. Everyone
seems to think that very credible people from Barack Obama to right you know John Brennan think this that they're real and then there's the the further question of what they are right where they're from and that seems to me still unanswered but the the likelihood that it is they they are extraterrestrial epistemically I think that's gone up for me in the past two years I I wouldn't venture to say it's anything close to a certainty or anything
like that, but it becomes harder and harder to believe that these are made on Earth and less and less crazy to put into the ring the hypothesis that they are from extraterrestrials. How convinced are you at this point that the UFOs that we've seen from the Navy videos and so forth
are extraterrestrial in origin? No one piece of evidence that someone may say well what evidence exists and well that's a tough question no one piece of evidence is what convinces me and I'm also in a similar position where I'm I remain unconvinced as to any specific explanation is it something that's related to a being or beings from other places coming toward earth that aren't originated on earth some hypothesis some hypotheses are that
There are future humans coming back for some reason, so they're closed timelike curves, in physics you may call it that, and I don't know about that because there are some contradictions with closed timelike curves, but it seems like the standard response is, hey, we see some object in the sky, it's called UFO or UAP for a reason it's unidentified, to make the leap that therefore aliens is a large leap and that's true. However,
And that's what I hear Neil deGrasse Tyson, et cetera. And I keep picking on him, but it's a bit unfair for me to do so. He's the poster child of this. So let me just use him as a scapegoat for now. So people like Neil deGrasse Tyson would say that, yeah, that's a unscientific leap.
However, it's not simply that we see some objects in the sky and then we say it's aliens. It's that there's a variety of correlations with them. So they're correlated. You see some object in the sky, then you see cattle mutilations directly afterward. And no single person, see for crop circles, there have been people who have been caught and there are hundreds, if not thousands of cattle mutilations, which where cows are drained of blood and investigated with surgeon like precision with lasers and so on. It seems like laser cuts. Certain organs are removed.
in a manner that vets don't know how the heck that could be explained and that's the scene close to before or after or during these cattle mutilation the the objects in the sky so that's one correlation another one is that then there's also people who report being spoken to by these means or seeing them then there's also the correlation that and these are also disparate people so people who could not have come in contact with one another someone let's say
thinks they were abducted and someone else from far away also saw a craft and these two people have not communicated so you can't simply say it's mass hallucination and by the way this term mass hallucination it's not a scientific term because in order for it to be a scientific construct it needs to be a reliable one that can be repeated but the mass hallucinations aren't in fact I was speaking to someone not on the podcast over email about this term someone who studies mass hallucinations he doesn't think it actually happens he thinks that
Well, we can get into that later. Yeah. So I just want to, so I know less. I haven't looked deeply into the phenomenon you're talking about. I've looked into UFOs and UADs and I've heard, sorry, UOP, yeah, UFO and UAPs, but the, the cattle mutilations and the, you know, the injuries that people think couldn't, can't be manmade injuries.
This is something, it's very hard for me to know what to think about this because I'm just aware of how many hoaxes there are in the world and I'm also aware of the phenomenon of social contagion, which you're talking about mass hallucinations, which I think I actually
do believe in mass hallucinations in the sense of, you know, we know that there are many examples throughout history and in the present of social contagion phenomenon where, you know, an idea sort of just travels from one person to the next without real basis, right? It's like the school that where everyone, you know, like half the school got hiccups a few years ago.
It was a social, they didn't all get chronic hiccups. There was just this kind of brain worm that leapt from person to person. Recently there was an Atlantic article about people on TikTok getting Tourette's, especially girls. Did you see this? I heard about that. Their Tourette's is caused by the psychology of
you know subconsciously admiring other Tourette's TikTok influencers and you know without really consciously trying to adopting the symptomology of Tourette's without the actual underlying sort of typical Tourette's condition and when
It's really no stranger than the placebo effect. Why do we actually have symptoms when we take a sugar pill? That's actually deeply strange. How much psychology and suggestion can actually influence your real experience.
very interested in social contagion phenomena. I'm less skeptical than you are of the possibility that many of these sightings are people that have seen movies or they've heard things about UFO and
It gets sort of reproduced for them in what they see. I'm not saying that is what it is. I'm saying I don't dismiss that possibility. Yeah. Yeah. So that can exist for... I don't like to put numbers on it, but let's imagine it's 90%. And then I don't like to say that, well, who knows? Well, then the remaining 10%, well, that's still extraordinary. Well, that remaining 10% can still be explained with...
I don't know if it could still be explained because like I mentioned there's independent verification. So someone saw a craft from far away and then someone else saw another craft and they are extremely similar in their descriptions and this happens with people who we would consider to be highly credible in any other situation in such a manner that if we were to have a court of law and sentence someone to sometimes even death for murdering someone because you had a set of witnesses but without any
physical evidence, I don't think that would be the case in capital punishment, but for putting someone to prison. A variety of corroborating witnesses of a certain credibility would be sufficient to send someone to the jailhouse for an indeterminate amount of time. We then don't believe these people who study crafts, people are pilots themselves, who have seen them maneuver in the same way. That's another correlation. It's not like they just maneuver
in a variable manner there's some uncertainty to how they move but it's also still correlated like they move in a in such a manner that you would say okay that's like a UFO where is one that goes in I guess in a figure eight you would say that's odd I wouldn't classify that you mentioned earlier what's behind the UFOs are real that's interesting what makes something real is it when see in physics if you had an unknown particle an unidentified particle
So we don't know what this particle is, but then you see how it behaves with other particles. You see its correlation. You would need six sigma, so it's an extreme amount of data in order for you to call it a particle anyway, for you to give it a name. But the general idea is that you have a variety of correlations, then you classify it as quote unquote real or a construct. In the social sciences, that bar is much lower. I believe it's something like five percent uncertainty.
And what I'm telling you about here is that there's the correlation of also certain damage to people who are close to the craft that are all similar, the hitchhiker effect, which means that certain quote unquote paranormal phenomenon follow these people afterward and not these aren't people who are necessarily spiritual or religious. So that's like absolutely freaky. That's why I've had to take a break from studying this
Phenomenon that by the way, it's called the phenomenon because it's not just relegated to alien life. It seems to be blurred in some manner I've had to take a break from studying consciousness in this and this phenomenon because it's it's it's extremely destabilizing I have such uncertainty in my world view that that I'm somewhat adrift whenever I study these topics and
And it's not a pleasant place at all. It's extremely not pleasant. You might need to change a profession. Or change a topic on your podcast. So mathematics and physics calms me to such a large degree because it's so analytical. And so I've been studying math and physics
It's about theories of everything, which is a physics terminology. But then I'm interested in consciousness because it may have a constitutive role to play in reality. So there's something called idealism. Most scientists think of themselves as materialists. I'm sure you've heard this term. I'm sure your audience has heard of this term.
And then someone to the opposite end of materialism. So materialism says that it's something like dead matter that makes up the world. And then consciousness is an epiphenomenon that occurs atop from information processing. It seems to be information processing. That's the consensus. The other side is idealism, which says that consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness is actually what is at the root. It's not consciousness that needs to be explained. It's material that needs to be explained.
And if so, then all of these phenomena that you mentioned, like the placebo effect, make sense. And this is another reason why I don't condescend or despise people who are religious. I used to, man, I used to be a militant atheist up until about three years ago or so. I'm so much more open to God and to religious stories as having an element of literal truth to them, not just metaphorical truth. I don't see it as so strange that
there's some being that out of love maybe and maybe that's a bit quote unquote woo but some being that created this world created us i don't see that as being so far-fetched as much as i used to and so i also don't know this is another odd aspect i don't also don't know how much of
God becomes true because we believe in God. That the fact that we believe in something makes it exist because consciousness and our beliefs have a constitutive role to play in what we call reality. I don't see that as being as far-fetched as it's so difficult because the question is well what is reality and how do you make sense of that without making a further assumption? So physicalists which are on par with materialists will say that
Well, what's the evidence that consciousness is fundamental? Well, firstly, what's the evidence that material is fundamental? Science as an enterprise is agnostic philosophically. People like to think that it's a materialistic base, that it has materialism at its base, but it's more instrumental. It's more like if-then statements.
we measure this if you do this you then see this it doesn't say that what's at the bottom is dead matter because in order for you to say what's dead you'd have to say what's alive and what's life and what's consciousness is also a bleary category and so you can't make an a bleary category and pretend that that's a valid construct almost like yeah okay i'm afraid we're gonna lose people i'll go back to the sort of root problem of consciousness um and and try to convey it
How I see it in simple terms and maybe you can tell me if you see it the same way. Basically, we have every reason to believe that the atoms in our brain are no different than the atoms in this chair or in my appendix or in the oxygen in this room and yet
We know that there's something it's like to be this brain, right? Like there's a first-person experience to be had, you know, when atoms are assembled in such a way as to create a human brain. And we're not so sure that there's something it's like when atoms are comprised so as to make this chair. Maybe there is, but we tend to think that there isn't.
And so the question is, how come when you put atoms together in this way, suddenly there's something it's like to be that entity versus when you put the same atoms together in a different configuration, there's nothing it's like to be that entity. Now the question might be framed the wrong way, but that to me is like the basic puzzle. How come my appendix doesn't have an
I mean, identity might be too strong a word, but an experience, right? From its point of view, the way that might work. What's special about the meat in the skull? It's just meat, right? Yeah. Well, I don't know. Do you see it that way or no? No. I don't know if an appendix has a point of view. It may have some low level point of view. If one was to believe the majority of these
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Theories on consciousness, which you mentioned the word first person and third person we can get to them.
which try to study consciousness from a third-person point of view, it seems as though they're, if you follow them and you take them seriously, they're panpsychic. Because in some sense, this is interacting with this chair. What's interacting with this chair? The atoms here interacting with the chair. So firstly, our atoms are not separate. They're overlapping in quantum mechanically, they're overlapping. So to say that there's a difference between this chair and this chair, that's a human construct.
And when I say human construct, I sound like a postmodernist. But what I mean is these words that we're using, like first person, third person, what it's like to be, quote unquote. Firstly, that's another synonym for consciousness, which we're trying to define. So we then define consciousness in terms of something else which we don't understand. So we say there's an experience of what it's like. What does it mean what it's like? And then we get into a circular definition of consciousness. And maybe just that our words are not developed enough to capture what consciousness is.
it may be that again consciousness is fundamental so trying to place it in terms of something that's immaterial like you mentioned atoms and a kidney and so on is a wrong frame to begin with much like asking how can one make gold out of silver or or silver out of gold before understanding about nuclear reactions it's a you just can't do it it's a chemical reaction can't do it so it may be that that's the wrong frame and we keep thinking that it's the right frame and then we get into paradoxes or antinomies like the
Hard problem of consciousness. It's a hard problem if one starts with thinking of the world comprising dead matter. And it's unclear to me whether or not our kidneys have some low-grade consciousness. So there's the integrated information theory of intelligence, sorry, of consciousness. There's global neuronal workspace. There's spatio-temporal theories of consciousness, adverbial consciousness theories.
All of these are about matter interacting with one another and so there's matter interacting with itself in our kidney and so that would mean that in some sense the universe has some low-level consciousness and the developers of IIT like Tanoni have conceded in a sense that yes this is rational panpsychism. So is panpsychism
Is that everything has some element of a psychic quality, some element of consciousness? Correct, right. So panpsychism is not really testable, is it? Nor are almost any theories about the origin of consciousness. Nor is materialism. Right, so I'm like totally agnostic between materialist explanations of consciousness and panpsychist
Explanations and and in fact I'm pretty convinced of Colin McGinn's idea the philosopher Colin McGinn Which is some kind sometimes called Mysterian Mysterianism Chomsky's as well. Oh is that is that right? Yeah. Yeah, which is um You know which you've had Chomsky on so I'm sure you know but for the audience essentially hear that sound
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The point is human beings were not evolved to understand everything in the world. It's like we were evolved to survive and reproduce on the African savanna. So we're very good at predicting
You know, when an object is thrown in the air that it's going to fall in a parabolic shape, right? Because that's very useful to us. There's all kinds of things we're quite good at. We're fairly good at understanding someone else's intentions. Like I see a guy with an angry face who's going to hit me. I can tell that apart from a guy with a friendly face. Our brains are built to solve
All and only problems that relate are optimized for that goal of survival and reproduction in a particular environment. And just like every other animal in the animal kingdom has limits to what it can understand. It's like we understand, I can do algebra, but I can see that a chimp could never
in principle even understand really algebra at all what does it stand to reason that just because we happen to be the smartest animals that we know about that there isn't a whole landscape of problems that we stand in relation to the way a chimpanzee stands in relation to algebra or I mean that the example I I like to use is more like an animal that can't understand that its reflection in a mirror is
itself rather than another animal. It's like a chicken is never in a million years going to understand that light can come back at you. The concept of reflection is just permanently, yeah, it's just like, it's never gonna get that. If it could speak, if we could hear its thoughts when it's looking at itself in the mirror, it would just be
Yeah, and it would be like, wait a minute, how come this chicken, every time I move, it moves? And then it would come up with a whole bunch of theories, much like we do about consciousness, that none of which actually deeply makes sense or are satisfying to the chicken. And it would just have to sort of throw its hands up in a deep way, which is to say there's lots of mysteries that we've solved. Like it's a mystery for a hundred years and then we figure it out.
Right, but there are mysteries that I believe there are mysteries that are in principle unsolvable by beings like us, by apes like ourselves because they're beyond our ken in the same way that reflection is beyond the kind of many animals and it consciousness strikes me as as precisely this kind of mystery. Yeah, I oscillate between that view and also the view of some people like
So, Joshua Bach likes to say, mysteriousism is the philosophical view that unless you're, that someone as smart as Noam Chomsky can't figure it out, therefore we can't all figure it out. I think he likes to denigrate Chomsky, poke and jab him a bit. I'm trying to set up a talk between them two, between the two of them on the Toe channel. Toe is for theories of everything. Regardless, I oscillate between, between thinking it's completely out of our comprehension just because we're such limited beings and also
They oscillate between that, and then there's some remarks from Wittgenstein. I think they're called his clarificatory remarks. At least Simon Christianly calls them that, where he said that there are aspects of life, and he was referring to consciousness, I believe, that are most important but hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity, much like a fish doesn't think about water. But if it could, it would realize it's right there. There's John Wheeler, who also said, behind this all
Maybe an idea that's so beautiful and simple that when we finally comprehended a decade, a century, millennia from now, we will all look at one another and think, how could it have been any other way and how could we have been so foolish not to see it? So I don't know. And some of the people who are on the more Eastern end think that it
is what needs the least explaining. Consciousness is what's closest to us. It's every single thing else that needs explaining. What does that actually mean though? How does that actually answer the question of why the meat in my head is conscious and other collections of atoms aren't? The way that one does that is by
Questioning that assumption that one starts with all that you know is of consciousness. Actually, that's your fundamental That you're that's at the fundament that's at the base is consciousness. And so when we say well, we're trying to explain consciousness What is consciousness? It's that no what is anything else? Everything starts with consciousness. I mean, I understand the concept of just reversing the question But that doesn't it doesn't strike me as any That explanation doesn't strike me as any
more satisfying than the the materialist explanation which is well it's just information processing and but we're also kind of not sure why computers aren't conscious even though they process information is like that those two leave me equally unsatisfied I think because
simply reversing the question without giving me a reason to accept that framework over others when it's not obvious. It also just doesn't really quench my thirst on the questions, if that makes sense. Yeah. Bernardo Kastrup is someone who is a proponent of what's called analytic idealism, and he would say that materialists have developed
what's called an ontological category, which ontology just means what is, and then category is, hopefully we're familiar with what a category is, by saying that there's material. Because what we do is we start with consciousness as our first-person experience. That is not what needs explaining. And then what we've done as materialists is say that there exists something else. When there's no need for that, science can exist in its exact same form.
without having to posit an entirely new quote-unquote ontological category of dead, I'm just going to say dead matter, unconscious matter. So it's strange that that was the leap that was made. Now I'll give you another, I understand what you're saying because I also do oscillate between whether it's a satisfying explanation. That's a great question. What the heck is an explanation? At what point do we say, okay, so-and-so has been explained?
I'll give you, I'll give you a quick, but to go back on that is like when, when you see somebody die or, or, you know, you fall into a dreamless sleep, you experience the lights going out, at least in the second case. And it, and it very much looks like the lights going out when somebody dies. Right. And, and so our intuition that,
There is conscious matter and unconscious matter is not crazy. We are trying to make sense of the fact that sometimes the lights go out for us when we have a dreamless sleep and it certainly looks like the lights are going out for people and animals when they die. It does seem like the universe has
two things, two states, like conscious matter and what you're calling dead matter. So why is it wrong to view that data as the total phenomenon to be explained? I'm not saying it's wrong. I don't know. But another point of view is that when we have sleep, we don't experience the lights going out. By definition, because there's no experience. We don't know.
This is something else. This is something that we project onto the experience of sleep. So here's something to think about. Can you ever experience non-experience? No, again by definition. Right, so then we think that there's this gap in our consciousness. What we've done is we've seen other people and we've come up with this category of non-consciousness and then we confabulate that back to ourselves but as a matter of experience. We never experience quote-unquote the lights going out because by definition you can't. So it should be. I don't see why
It isn't a continuous, a continuum between sleep and wake.
Well, yes, but then you're projecting some notion of time and so on but as a matter of experience or remember the ideal is start with experience as a matter of experience. There's no gap in your experience because there can't be because as because by definition, okay, so you understand that so then when we say well so-and-so died, we don't know in a strange sense. It's like in a strange sense.
Life is not what needs explaining because that's what comes, that's what we see first. It's death. And this is actually extremely freaky because I don't want to, part of me doesn't want to believe in life after death, life after what we think of as death, because it was disconcerting to me. I find the materialist's point of view to be much more comforting personally.
But regardless, we don't know what the heck happened to that person. And then we start to project some of what we think is happening back to ourselves. But as a matter of experience, we don't experience death nor life, sorry, nor sleep. There's no gap in experience. So as a matter of experience, death is something we don't know. We're just making some category up and then we're saying it applies. But we don't have any data points for that.
We don't have any observations of what it's like to not have an observation. Right. I get that. That has to be true by definition. So it's like when I see someone go to sleep, I see that all of their behavior stops essentially except for breathing.
I assume for the most part maybe they're having a dream experience because I've had and remembered many dream experiences but I don't have that every night. Presumably it's possible I've had many dreams that I just don't remember and this goes to your point of having an experience but not remembering it feels the same in retrospect as not having had an experience at all. If for some reason I just was like fully blackout drunk
last night, like perfectly blackout drunk for an hour, then remembering last night to me, it's the same as if I was having no experience at all, as if I was in a dreamless sleep for that hour. And I would have no way of really telling those apart other than the sort of context clues of the rest of the day, like, oh, I went out last night, I must have gotten blackout drunk.
I understand what you're saying. There's no difference between having an experience with no memory and not having an experience when you're looking back on it for sure. I guess we make inferences on what's likely to be true from not only from our first person, from adding our first person experience to our observations of others and patterns in the world. One pattern or imperfect
but frequently found correlation in the world is that when people are exhibiting behaviors like talking and standing and walking and so forth they also tend to be experiencing something and we find this in our own lives and it seems to be true of others that there's a connection between
behavior and doing things and having blood flow to your brain and feeling things from the inside. So we assume when all the behavior stops and the blood stops flowing and all of the mechanics just grind to a halt, that that's the end of experience.
Because those two variables tend to be correlated. Now the problem with that is we have examples where they're totally not correlated such as locked-in syndrome which is where you know a person is in a hospital bed totally pretty much totally immobile, comatose for all we can tell and only when they wake up from the coma do we discover
They were hearing and seeing the whole time, right? It's like the sort of, I guess, was Kill Bill sort of like this, like Uma Thurman and Kill Bill. I could be misremembering that movie, but my memory is she was in a coma and the doctor basically raped her.
And she but she was actually conscious the whole time Yeah, and then she fucked him up when she got out out of the coma is just this great moment but like the fact that that's possible means that there isn't actually an a hundred percent connection between Behavior and consciousness. It's like you can be conscious and look and be comatose and
And not only that, but you can get complex behavior without what seems to be consciousness. I talked to Anika Harris about this and in her book she gave these examples of extraordinarily complex behavior by networks of trees communicating underground and stuff. Wait a minute, so they're communicating.
They're communicating. That's a behavior we would normally associate with consciousness. They're not built, they're natural. They're communicating, but we assume that they're not conscious. You can get behavior without consciousness, consciousness without complex behavior, even though those two things tend to be correlated most of the time.
And what's more, it doesn't seem like there's a logical reason why consciousness would have to accompany complex behavior, right? Like from the point of view of Darwinian evolution, why does it matter that there's something it's like to be one of these survival machines? It's like my appendix doesn't, you know, wouldn't need to feel what it's doing. I mean, that's a bad example since the appendix is pointless. My kidneys
wouldn't need to feel what it's doing in order to serve their purpose for my survival. How come certain aspects of my body I'm conscious of, but others I'm just not? What's the evolutionary rationale for some of these things being accompanied by my experiencing them?
And others just being totally is like I wouldn't even know I had half the organs in my body if I if I didn't take a biology class. So that's part of the mystery too. I understand there's a couple of terms you use there which is third person a couple others that I can't recall and you which is another one. So firstly the category of you so someone else.
Oh, this is where it gets extremely tricky for me psychologically. But anyway, we can talk about that another time. One has to think about what constitutes evidence.
When you say, sorry, I don't mean to say you like I'm accusing you, but when one says, let's say, when one says, I watched someone sleep and the lights went out for them, it's as if they're, well, firstly, that's a bit creepy. One should periodically watch people sleep. It's as if they're projecting, and I keep using this word projecting because I don't have another term to use, some God's eye view where we have this
Where we imagine time ticking in this fashion and then we imagine that they're not experiencing anything. Well, we can ask them afterward, do you remember so and so? And then we say there was a gap. And so we imagine that that gap occurs for us. But as a matter of evidence for us, we don't have that. And so from their point of view, there was no gap. And from our point of view, we never have a gap.
And so what I'm saying is that we then project what we think of as a gap from them onto us because we imagine we're so great at doing this because of the development of science, of thinking of the world from a third person point of view, like a God's eye view, that this is all just ticking clocks and billiard balls bouncing off one another. And yes, there's some complexities with
QFT and so on quantum mechanics and so on so it's already making a leap and I'm saying that the people who are idealists Say there's no need to make that leap Continue with the first person that's where you start and that's where you can end you start to develop other points of view, but then Well then paradoxes come in well well So I guess the first person doesn't answer
the question either way. So it's like I fall asleep and then I wake up. If I'm solely going by my first person experience, I've got no idea what happened. I don't know whether I blacked out and actually had an experience that I'm simply now not remembering.
Sort of like the show Severance. I don't know if you've checked now. It's a great show. Amazing. Really, really worth watching and maybe even worth talking about on your podcast where people undergo a sci-fi. They don't explain how the procedure is done, but they undergo a procedure where their memory is spatially bound, which means they go to work
When they enter the door to work, they no longer remember anything about their life outside of that building. They only remember memories that they have made in this space. They exit, now they only remember memories they have made in the outside world. It's a way of completely psychologically severing your work life and your home life.
And what's interesting about it is the moment, you know, what they've essentially done is created two different people. I mean, in some ways, in some ways they have created two different people and in some ways they're the same person because they're basically, you know, what the home life person experiences is going to work today, going to work,
The moment they walk through the door, they walk out, right? It's like going to sleep and waking up. And the work version of them experiences the same thing. They're just at work. This person feels like he is at work his whole life, right? Because the second he goes home, he's walking through the door again, like waking up. And so there's essentially two people that feel like they're living their entire lives on opposite ends of this thing. And from their first person experience,
They have no idea what's happening when they walk through that door. For all they know, nothing happens at all. Or for all they know, they've been outside for a year. And all they have to go by is how their body feels when they walk back through the door. If they're exhausted, they assume something must have happened out there. Or if they've got a cut,
They assume that they had to have gotten that cut at work. Are they aware that they're losing, like in Memento, the guy is aware that he has memory lapses? Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're aware. They signed up for this procedure. Okay, the reason why I was saying, don't mean to interrupt, but the reason why I was saying there are a couple of delusive concepts there. So the third person, like I mentioned, well, if we're idealists, let's just abandon that. It doesn't mean that other minds don't exist. It just means
in terms of evidence stick with yourself okay then there's also the well my reaction was that does that doesn't answer the questions necessarily okay well we'll get back to that because there's also the concept of you which implies a continuous identity and that's a delusive concept because it's not clear so are you the same you as you were yesterday and so on and so on and then can you experience without having memory so when you go to sleep is it the case that
people are experiencing something somewhere maybe this nullity void that the Buddhist say is a place of nothingness and then you come back but you have no recollection of it I imagine in the same way that I don't know because one would have to say that that is the same person across the rooms across home and across work so one would have to say that's the same person and if we can say that then we could say so the question is
Does one experience when one is dead in some other realm or when one is sleeping? And I would say that the answer is we don't know. One could just not have memory to it. It's like there's this bucket of memory that we pull into that when we're talking to one another we luckily have access to this. Some have access to it better than others, but luckily we can, luckily when we're talking right now it's like we're injecting into this bucket and later we can pull out some of it.
So then if I was to go into a place, or you were to go into a place, or one was to go into a place where they didn't have access to this bucket, does that mean that they weren't there? Well, we have no evidence. It's actually just, we don't know. And we assume, well, no. But we don't know. So, I mean, what's your bar for knowledge? It's like, we don't know perfectly, maybe to 100% certainty, but
I think my bar for saying I know something is not that it's known with perfect confidence. To know something with 99% confidence is to me maybe the best we can ever get about almost anything.
Unless you're Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson who says they believe with 99.999% certainty that so-and-so are not anything more than a Tareen explanation for the UAPs. Oh, for the UAPs. Yeah, well... And by the way, my remark to them is, all right, hey, do you want to play that game? I will put down $1,000 then, then you can put down
9 million dollars and that'll still be a great bet for you. You feel like the odds are still in your favor. That UAPs are not extra-terrestrial. So they're that certain that they are terrestrial. Or something that's mundane. Or something mundane. So I also want to ask them. That's very strange. Exactly. And there's some tweets about that. Bill Nye and Tyson
I know Neil a little bit. I'm surprised he would be that certain that they are from Earth. Yeah, it also depends on, well, it depends on quite, when one assigns probability that's actually, it's difficult to assign a probability to almost anything. My brother is a professor of statistics and even assigning probabilities in a paper that has to do with
Medicine so something that's extremely objective where we have replicable data is actually it's not it's extremely difficult let alone something where we don't know because then one has to set up what's called a reference class and It's still an unknown problem in statistics. What should be one's reference class. I spoke about this with Gary Nolan So I can ask you I heard that yeah, yeah, right that one I can say to the audience as a question like when what's the probability you're going to die tomorrow you may say well maybe 0.02
And then I say, no, it's actually 99.999 because if you take as the reference class, all the beings on earth, the majority of them are dying in the next few minutes because they're bacterial. Right. No, I mean, you didn't go too deep into that problem on the podcast, but I thought it was really interesting points. Like, so is my what's my probability of dying today? Do I take the probability of all New Yorkers and take that? Or is it, you know, let's say
Black men that are 25 years old or Americans in general, who do I leave out of the reference? I mean, it's an extremely difficult problem, which is why people who are in risk management get paid so much, because insurance depends on it. Right. It's not as if it's easy at all. An interesting question that insurers can discriminate against.
you based on certain characteristics, but not other. Like they can charge you higher premiums if you're a young man, right? As opposed to, but they can't, you know, if there were some racial differences in car accidents that were material enough to like get differential premiums, you couldn't charge people different premiums based on, based on race and ethnicity. And I always thought that's a little kind of underexplored, you know,
Phenomenal like where are the people complaining that? They are being discriminated against by insurance companies because Insurance insurance companies understand that You know young people get in far more car accidents, right? It's like well shit. I didn't I can't control being young It's like that's a characteristic. I have no control over how come you're discriminating against me based on the statistical
average behavior of people with my characteristics. It's like we generally understand that to be unethical. Except in the universities, but yeah. Oh, what do you mean? What do you mean by that? With the diversity and inclusion. Oh, yeah, no, sure. Yeah, but, but anyway, yeah, that's, there's also a problem of like, what actually is probability? What's a probability claim? When you say there's an 80% likelihood of X happening, what actually does that mean?
Well, I think, I mean, I tend to think probability claims are like epistemic claims. It's like, for all we know, it seems like there's an 80 out of 100 times we run this in theory.
That would happen, but it's like, what does that mean actually? It's an unsolved problem. What's the probability the sun will come up tomorrow? Because one has to then assume a philosophical framework for probability, and they're broadly speaking four. So for the people who are interested, there's frequentist, which means this is what is done in physics, is you look at the frequency, you just take a slew of data.
And then there are some pros and cons of each one of these cases. So one wants to know, can you make a probability for a single case? Is there such a thing as a probability for a single case? A frequentist can't. A classicalist can. And a classicalist also signs uniform probability among
Different options, which is to me. That's not entirely clear What's the classical if you don't know if this weight if this die is weighted? You just assume that it's one out of six that could just an assumption. You don't know it could be weighted You have no other data, so they just assume it is until more data comes in then there's the Bayesian which you referenced which I believe is also called the subjective because it deals with a
one's own degree of certainty and then there's the metaphysical which is what most people think probability is and i think that probability is something in here yes yes yes yeah so a particle just has this chance of decaying at a certain time sorry or yes yes yes a particle has this chance but then you get into
So what do you mean it has this chance? What is the ontological claim here? So each one of them has some pros and cons. And with the metaphysical, yes, you can make a single case because it just inherently has this probability. Frequentist, no. Classical, yes. Regardless, then one has to say, well, which probability are you referring to when you say 99.999% sure that UAPs are so-and-so? It's so dubious that I don't know how they can be so certain. And the reason I say they're certain is that there's a
Level of condescension and derision that come from the skeptics still to this day, though it's tempered. And I think it's tempered because of the revelations of the past year or so. I think NASA themselves say this is not any known government that we know of. So then you're like, what the heck, you raise your eyebrow there. So is the government lying to us? To me, it's very unlikely that Russia or China is holding on to the kind of technology
that would have an aircraft that moves in the way that these aircrafts do. Especially since these have been seen since the 40s. So you would have to say that someone has had this technology since the 40s because there's a uniform set of observables. I can only speak to the videos I've seen which are all from the past
17 years or so. I think the earliest one I saw is like from 2005 or 2004. But like, why would Russia or China invent technology that's clearly, you know, very advanced in terms of how it flies? I mean, it flies like nothing else we've created. And then just fly it over the like Eastern seaboard frequently, for no reason.
get filmed by a Navy pilot and then not do anything to us that hurts us, right? And then also not use that technology to win the war in Ukraine. Whenever they have a war. It doesn't make, it makes very little sense that it would be a different state actor and our government has strongly implied that it's not
a you know American technology so it's such a strain and obviously is like there's nothing I mean life on another planet is actually no it's no crazier a belief then there being life on this planet if one chooses as a reference yeah then we can say well look with some large degree of certainty
We got to wrap up. This has been really good.
Where can my listeners go if they want to hear more about UFOs, consciousness, theories of everything, etc.? Sure. You can search theories of everything on YouTube. My name should come up, Kurt Jaimungal. And if you're interested in, like Coleman mentioned, physics, mathematics, free will, God as well, which we didn't get to talk much about, and consciousness as well as UFOs and how they relate to that, then check it out and hopefully you enjoy it.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Kurt. Thank you, man.
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
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"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
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"text": " Coleman Hughes is an accomplished writer, a philosophy graduate, and the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman, a link to which is in the description. Coleman sat down with me for a podcast on consciousness, UAPs, and theoretical physics. Though, because of certain technical issues, this is being released on the Toe podcast instead of on his platform."
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"text": " A much longer follow-up is going to be conducted over Zoom for his channel. Comment with any questions that you feel were left unanswered or areas that you would like to be explored more, and Coleman will try to address them for the follow-up. Next week on the Toe Channel will be Professor Abhay Ashtakar, who is a prestigious and acclaimed physicist who paved the way for modern quantum gravity approaches like loop quantum gravity and loop quantum cosmology."
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"text": " He talks about what occurred prior to the Big Bang. I'm sure you heard that nothing existed prior to the Big Bang. Well, that's only true in certain models. There are cyclical models where that's not true. In loop quantum cosmology, there is no singularity, but instead a repulsive force that breeds another universe under certain conditions. Achtekar is the physicist referenced numerously"
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"text": " in a positive light by Salvatore Pius. In fact, Sal sent in a question for Achtekar on the superforce. Expect that in about a week's time. As mentioned before, this is a brand new season for the Theories of Everything project or channel, where I'm going to explore different kinds of content. So, for example, new guests that aren't"
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"text": " repeatedly interviewed on the standard podcast Rolodex like Ashtakar for example. There will be more theolo-cutions such as one that's coming up is Bernardo Kastrup and Chris Langan. There will be other explainer type videos so for example how does one go about learning a new theory of everything and some ancillary content like an inventorying video about new creators up-and-coming creators in the UAP physics math consciousness space"
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"text": " As tiny creators tend to get overlooked despite toiling just as hard, and given the modest following on this channel, it would be great to shine some light their way, as I know I wish someone larger had done that for me when I was struggling. No sponsor for today's podcast. If you'd like to contribute, then do consider going to patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal, that is C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L, as this is what I'm able to do full time now, thanks to your generous support."
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"text": " Enjoy Coleman Hughes interviewing Kurt Jaimungal. All right, Kurt, thanks so much for coming on my show. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. So I've been listening to your podcast theories of everything, right? Right. And we're going to get into the topics you cover. But before we do that, can you give a little summary of who you are, where you're from, you know, your background, how you came to care about topics like"
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"text": " My name is Kurt Jaimungal and I've been interested in what are called theories of everything since I was a child, since I learned about them. I'm sure you've heard there's quantum mechanics, technically it should be quantum field theory and then general relativity. Some people say it's the theory of the small with the theory of the large."
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"text": " Elephants are quantum mechanical, so it's a bit strange to relegate quantum mechanics to just the small. So if we did enough experiments and we took an elephant and we threw it through a double slit, it should, in theory, split. Regardless, when I was small, I heard about this. It's a contradiction or it's a difficulty in putting these two pieces together, and one needs to in order to be able to describe black holes and what happened at the origin of the universe. So there are various mysteries in physics."
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"text": " And I've been interested in that since as far as I can remember. Then I did my undergraduate in something called mathematical physics. Then I went into filmmaking and somewhat abandoned that, though I kept the same state of mind when I approached filmmaking. And then since the pandemic started, I thought, you know what? Why not just go back to these roots? I'm super interested in. I think about it almost all the time. It unhinges me to some degree. But anyway, I think about it."
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"text": " almost every minute or so. So I started interviewing people about their theory of everything, so their combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Then I found out that there's more than just that because there's the mystery of, well, what the heck is consciousness and what role does it play fundamentally? Does it emerge from what we think of as material, so dead matter? And somehow it became successful and that's now I'm super lucky, much like yourself. I'm sure you're like, holy moly."
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"text": " I get to talk to awesome people that I wouldn't otherwise get to talk to. And I get to think about stuff that I think about, you know, regardless. It's almost like we're researchers in a university, except we're not being paid by the university, and we don't have to conform to whatever the university wants us to do. Good, because universities at Columbia, I struggle to get the kind of"
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"text": " deep and free thought that I actually wanted to live by in a classroom setting. It was a rare professor that would set the culture of the class freely enough that we could really, really pursue the deepest consequences of the ideas in the room with no fear, with no social fear. So that is basically, I think the places"
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"text": " that actually allow for truly free thought, which is supposed to be what a university is, have shifted in some ways to places like, you know, my podcast, your podcast and other places in the culture have sort of filled that vacuum. Yeah, yeah, it's wonderful. Well, it's wonderful for us. It's not wonderful for"
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"text": " the universities though they I think they think it is it's it's for their net benefit right at least they claim to and I'm also from Toronto so that's the reason why there's a background we'd switched backgrounds earlier oh yeah yeah no I was there and I say that's your domain America yeah New York is much like it so this is my first time in New York and Toronto kind of look like each other yes yeah New York is far greater I've only been to Toronto for like two hours three hours but I remember thinking"
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"text": " This is eerily similar to New York. It's a moderately cleaner New York and a drastically smaller New York. I guess the two major topics I want to talk to you about are UFOs or UAPs as they're now called and consciousness. Sure. So which order do you want to take these in? Maybe let's start with UFOs. Sure, sure."
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"text": " And this is a, you know, for anyone interested in this topic, your podcast is a major resource because you've talked to so many different people about this topic. And I don't think I've ever talked about this on my podcast, but basically what I believe has happened is three to four years ago, UFOs were a topic that marked you as crazy."
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"text": " and really anyone interested in them would be dismissed and the reason they would be dismissed is because people like me who weren't deeply into the topic you know I'd seen the videos of things that looked essentially like flying saucers caught on cameras on YouTube and elsewhere but because the US government had never"
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"text": " Given a rubber stamp to these videos, what I think many people assumed was that there must be some other explanation that folks high up believe such as, for example, that the camera was glitching out"
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"text": " or that it wasn't actually an aircraft. It was something else that just looks like an aircraft. Some atmospheric effects. Some atmosphere. Yeah, exactly. Like a rare event of ball lightning. Right. Ball lightning or whatever. Or it's a U.S. military device that the government is keeping secret. It was a military test or it was Russian or Chinese."
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"end_time": 652.21,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 622.517,
"text": " And we just, I just assumed whatever the explanation is, you know, the people at the Pentagon have it and they haven't talked about it because it's, it's a state secret. And, um, and on the tin foil hat crowd on the internet is, is reading into it. Uh, and then, you know, in the past two years, that whole, uh, type of dismissal is no longer really possible to make because"
},
{
"end_time": 677.432,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 652.978,
"text": " The videos, especially the ones from the Navy, there are at least three different videos I've seen that have been released that were taken by Navy pilots, aircrafts, where they're seeing something that looks exactly like our stereotype of a UFO, and they're saying, what the fuck is this?"
},
{
"end_time": 697.585,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 678.285,
"text": " You know, our folks at the US government have looked at it every which way, and their conclusion is, what the fuck is this? Right? They are as confused and interested as people I would have dismissed three years ago as the conspiracy theorists and the alien obsessives, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 726.749,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 698.046,
"text": " So that's basically, that's sort of the C-shift as I see it. Is that how you see it? Yeah, except I wouldn't say that the shift is such that if you were to talk about it, you're not deemed to be a loon of some sort. There are still people like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michael Shermer who either explicitly state that if you're jumping to the conclusion that this isn't a terrestrial phenomenon, then you're insensate and you should be following only where the evidence leads you."
},
{
"end_time": 745.35,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 727.278,
"text": " So and there's compilations of this. So for example, I recently requested someone to come up with a compilation of this because I didn't see the exact words for a while. I've just heard that people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, et cetera, have disprised the UFO community. Anyway, there's this Twitter account named Tupac Cabra."
},
{
"end_time": 774.241,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 746.084,
"text": " There's one question, which is, are UFOs real?"
},
{
"end_time": 798.2,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 774.548,
"text": " unidentified flying objects. Are they really UFOs? Are they really, you know, now they call them unidentified aerial phenomena precisely because they are real and don't want to give them the sort of stigma of the phrase UFO. So there's that. We know they're real at this point, essentially. I mean, the evidence points that way. Everyone"
},
{
"end_time": 828.285,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 798.78,
"text": " seems to think that very credible people from Barack Obama to right you know John Brennan think this that they're real and then there's the the further question of what they are right where they're from and that seems to me still unanswered but the the likelihood that it is they they are extraterrestrial epistemically I think that's gone up for me in the past two years I I wouldn't venture to say it's anything close to a certainty or anything"
},
{
"end_time": 858.183,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 828.916,
"text": " like that, but it becomes harder and harder to believe that these are made on Earth and less and less crazy to put into the ring the hypothesis that they are from extraterrestrials. How convinced are you at this point that the UFOs that we've seen from the Navy videos and so forth"
},
{
"end_time": 887.807,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 858.746,
"text": " are extraterrestrial in origin? No one piece of evidence that someone may say well what evidence exists and well that's a tough question no one piece of evidence is what convinces me and I'm also in a similar position where I'm I remain unconvinced as to any specific explanation is it something that's related to a being or beings from other places coming toward earth that aren't originated on earth some hypothesis some hypotheses are that"
},
{
"end_time": 914.036,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 888.473,
"text": " There are future humans coming back for some reason, so they're closed timelike curves, in physics you may call it that, and I don't know about that because there are some contradictions with closed timelike curves, but it seems like the standard response is, hey, we see some object in the sky, it's called UFO or UAP for a reason it's unidentified, to make the leap that therefore aliens is a large leap and that's true. However,"
},
{
"end_time": 930.213,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 914.309,
"text": " And that's what I hear Neil deGrasse Tyson, et cetera. And I keep picking on him, but it's a bit unfair for me to do so. He's the poster child of this. So let me just use him as a scapegoat for now. So people like Neil deGrasse Tyson would say that, yeah, that's a unscientific leap."
},
{
"end_time": 959.667,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 930.64,
"text": " However, it's not simply that we see some objects in the sky and then we say it's aliens. It's that there's a variety of correlations with them. So they're correlated. You see some object in the sky, then you see cattle mutilations directly afterward. And no single person, see for crop circles, there have been people who have been caught and there are hundreds, if not thousands of cattle mutilations, which where cows are drained of blood and investigated with surgeon like precision with lasers and so on. It seems like laser cuts. Certain organs are removed."
},
{
"end_time": 990.179,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 961.169,
"text": " in a manner that vets don't know how the heck that could be explained and that's the scene close to before or after or during these cattle mutilation the the objects in the sky so that's one correlation another one is that then there's also people who report being spoken to by these means or seeing them then there's also the correlation that and these are also disparate people so people who could not have come in contact with one another someone let's say"
},
{
"end_time": 1021.305,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 991.305,
"text": " thinks they were abducted and someone else from far away also saw a craft and these two people have not communicated so you can't simply say it's mass hallucination and by the way this term mass hallucination it's not a scientific term because in order for it to be a scientific construct it needs to be a reliable one that can be repeated but the mass hallucinations aren't in fact I was speaking to someone not on the podcast over email about this term someone who studies mass hallucinations he doesn't think it actually happens he thinks that"
},
{
"end_time": 1048.387,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1022.108,
"text": " Well, we can get into that later. Yeah. So I just want to, so I know less. I haven't looked deeply into the phenomenon you're talking about. I've looked into UFOs and UADs and I've heard, sorry, UOP, yeah, UFO and UAPs, but the, the cattle mutilations and the, you know, the injuries that people think couldn't, can't be manmade injuries."
},
{
"end_time": 1073.319,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1049.053,
"text": " This is something, it's very hard for me to know what to think about this because I'm just aware of how many hoaxes there are in the world and I'm also aware of the phenomenon of social contagion, which you're talking about mass hallucinations, which I think I actually"
},
{
"end_time": 1102.21,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1074.121,
"text": " do believe in mass hallucinations in the sense of, you know, we know that there are many examples throughout history and in the present of social contagion phenomenon where, you know, an idea sort of just travels from one person to the next without real basis, right? It's like the school that where everyone, you know, like half the school got hiccups a few years ago."
},
{
"end_time": 1129.019,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1103.029,
"text": " It was a social, they didn't all get chronic hiccups. There was just this kind of brain worm that leapt from person to person. Recently there was an Atlantic article about people on TikTok getting Tourette's, especially girls. Did you see this? I heard about that. Their Tourette's is caused by the psychology of"
},
{
"end_time": 1152.005,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1129.872,
"text": " you know subconsciously admiring other Tourette's TikTok influencers and you know without really consciously trying to adopting the symptomology of Tourette's without the actual underlying sort of typical Tourette's condition and when"
},
{
"end_time": 1177.346,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1152.176,
"text": " It's really no stranger than the placebo effect. Why do we actually have symptoms when we take a sugar pill? That's actually deeply strange. How much psychology and suggestion can actually influence your real experience."
},
{
"end_time": 1204.804,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1178.2,
"text": " very interested in social contagion phenomena. I'm less skeptical than you are of the possibility that many of these sightings are people that have seen movies or they've heard things about UFO and"
},
{
"end_time": 1230.725,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1205.469,
"text": " It gets sort of reproduced for them in what they see. I'm not saying that is what it is. I'm saying I don't dismiss that possibility. Yeah. Yeah. So that can exist for... I don't like to put numbers on it, but let's imagine it's 90%. And then I don't like to say that, well, who knows? Well, then the remaining 10%, well, that's still extraordinary. Well, that remaining 10% can still be explained with..."
},
{
"end_time": 1259.65,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1231.357,
"text": " I don't know if it could still be explained because like I mentioned there's independent verification. So someone saw a craft from far away and then someone else saw another craft and they are extremely similar in their descriptions and this happens with people who we would consider to be highly credible in any other situation in such a manner that if we were to have a court of law and sentence someone to sometimes even death for murdering someone because you had a set of witnesses but without any"
},
{
"end_time": 1289.445,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1260.333,
"text": " physical evidence, I don't think that would be the case in capital punishment, but for putting someone to prison. A variety of corroborating witnesses of a certain credibility would be sufficient to send someone to the jailhouse for an indeterminate amount of time. We then don't believe these people who study crafts, people are pilots themselves, who have seen them maneuver in the same way. That's another correlation. It's not like they just maneuver"
},
{
"end_time": 1318.148,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1290.896,
"text": " in a variable manner there's some uncertainty to how they move but it's also still correlated like they move in a in such a manner that you would say okay that's like a UFO where is one that goes in I guess in a figure eight you would say that's odd I wouldn't classify that you mentioned earlier what's behind the UFOs are real that's interesting what makes something real is it when see in physics if you had an unknown particle an unidentified particle"
},
{
"end_time": 1343.592,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1318.882,
"text": " So we don't know what this particle is, but then you see how it behaves with other particles. You see its correlation. You would need six sigma, so it's an extreme amount of data in order for you to call it a particle anyway, for you to give it a name. But the general idea is that you have a variety of correlations, then you classify it as quote unquote real or a construct. In the social sciences, that bar is much lower. I believe it's something like five percent uncertainty."
},
{
"end_time": 1370.162,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1343.968,
"text": " And what I'm telling you about here is that there's the correlation of also certain damage to people who are close to the craft that are all similar, the hitchhiker effect, which means that certain quote unquote paranormal phenomenon follow these people afterward and not these aren't people who are necessarily spiritual or religious. So that's like absolutely freaky. That's why I've had to take a break from studying this"
},
{
"end_time": 1395.418,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1370.708,
"text": " Phenomenon that by the way, it's called the phenomenon because it's not just relegated to alien life. It seems to be blurred in some manner I've had to take a break from studying consciousness in this and this phenomenon because it's it's it's extremely destabilizing I have such uncertainty in my world view that that I'm somewhat adrift whenever I study these topics and"
},
{
"end_time": 1420.06,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1396.459,
"text": " And it's not a pleasant place at all. It's extremely not pleasant. You might need to change a profession. Or change a topic on your podcast. So mathematics and physics calms me to such a large degree because it's so analytical. And so I've been studying math and physics"
},
{
"end_time": 1443.114,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1420.384,
"text": " It's about theories of everything, which is a physics terminology. But then I'm interested in consciousness because it may have a constitutive role to play in reality. So there's something called idealism. Most scientists think of themselves as materialists. I'm sure you've heard this term. I'm sure your audience has heard of this term."
},
{
"end_time": 1472.739,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1445.094,
"text": " And then someone to the opposite end of materialism. So materialism says that it's something like dead matter that makes up the world. And then consciousness is an epiphenomenon that occurs atop from information processing. It seems to be information processing. That's the consensus. The other side is idealism, which says that consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness is actually what is at the root. It's not consciousness that needs to be explained. It's material that needs to be explained."
},
{
"end_time": 1500.725,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1474.155,
"text": " And if so, then all of these phenomena that you mentioned, like the placebo effect, make sense. And this is another reason why I don't condescend or despise people who are religious. I used to, man, I used to be a militant atheist up until about three years ago or so. I'm so much more open to God and to religious stories as having an element of literal truth to them, not just metaphorical truth. I don't see it as so strange that"
},
{
"end_time": 1522.398,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1501.049,
"text": " there's some being that out of love maybe and maybe that's a bit quote unquote woo but some being that created this world created us i don't see that as being so far-fetched as much as i used to and so i also don't know this is another odd aspect i don't also don't know how much of"
},
{
"end_time": 1548.797,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1522.927,
"text": " God becomes true because we believe in God. That the fact that we believe in something makes it exist because consciousness and our beliefs have a constitutive role to play in what we call reality. I don't see that as being as far-fetched as it's so difficult because the question is well what is reality and how do you make sense of that without making a further assumption? So physicalists which are on par with materialists will say that"
},
{
"end_time": 1567.705,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1549.821,
"text": " Well, what's the evidence that consciousness is fundamental? Well, firstly, what's the evidence that material is fundamental? Science as an enterprise is agnostic philosophically. People like to think that it's a materialistic base, that it has materialism at its base, but it's more instrumental. It's more like if-then statements."
},
{
"end_time": 1598.166,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1568.166,
"text": " we measure this if you do this you then see this it doesn't say that what's at the bottom is dead matter because in order for you to say what's dead you'd have to say what's alive and what's life and what's consciousness is also a bleary category and so you can't make an a bleary category and pretend that that's a valid construct almost like yeah okay i'm afraid we're gonna lose people i'll go back to the sort of root problem of consciousness um and and try to convey it"
},
{
"end_time": 1627.995,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1599.309,
"text": " How I see it in simple terms and maybe you can tell me if you see it the same way. Basically, we have every reason to believe that the atoms in our brain are no different than the atoms in this chair or in my appendix or in the oxygen in this room and yet"
},
{
"end_time": 1657.415,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1628.063,
"text": " We know that there's something it's like to be this brain, right? Like there's a first-person experience to be had, you know, when atoms are assembled in such a way as to create a human brain. And we're not so sure that there's something it's like when atoms are comprised so as to make this chair. Maybe there is, but we tend to think that there isn't."
},
{
"end_time": 1687.432,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1658.353,
"text": " And so the question is, how come when you put atoms together in this way, suddenly there's something it's like to be that entity versus when you put the same atoms together in a different configuration, there's nothing it's like to be that entity. Now the question might be framed the wrong way, but that to me is like the basic puzzle. How come my appendix doesn't have an"
},
{
"end_time": 1713.541,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1688.183,
"text": " I mean, identity might be too strong a word, but an experience, right? From its point of view, the way that might work. What's special about the meat in the skull? It's just meat, right? Yeah. Well, I don't know. Do you see it that way or no? No. I don't know if an appendix has a point of view. It may have some low level point of view. If one was to believe the majority of these"
},
{
"end_time": 1732.756,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1714.957,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 1754.565,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1732.756,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business,"
},
{
"end_time": 1774.582,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1754.565,
"text": " So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime."
},
{
"end_time": 1801.51,
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"start_time": 1774.582,
"text": " Theories on consciousness, which you mentioned the word first person and third person we can get to them."
},
{
"end_time": 1829.838,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1802.722,
"text": " which try to study consciousness from a third-person point of view, it seems as though they're, if you follow them and you take them seriously, they're panpsychic. Because in some sense, this is interacting with this chair. What's interacting with this chair? The atoms here interacting with the chair. So firstly, our atoms are not separate. They're overlapping in quantum mechanically, they're overlapping. So to say that there's a difference between this chair and this chair, that's a human construct."
},
{
"end_time": 1858.66,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1830.435,
"text": " And when I say human construct, I sound like a postmodernist. But what I mean is these words that we're using, like first person, third person, what it's like to be, quote unquote. Firstly, that's another synonym for consciousness, which we're trying to define. So we then define consciousness in terms of something else which we don't understand. So we say there's an experience of what it's like. What does it mean what it's like? And then we get into a circular definition of consciousness. And maybe just that our words are not developed enough to capture what consciousness is."
},
{
"end_time": 1887.892,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1858.916,
"text": " it may be that again consciousness is fundamental so trying to place it in terms of something that's immaterial like you mentioned atoms and a kidney and so on is a wrong frame to begin with much like asking how can one make gold out of silver or or silver out of gold before understanding about nuclear reactions it's a you just can't do it it's a chemical reaction can't do it so it may be that that's the wrong frame and we keep thinking that it's the right frame and then we get into paradoxes or antinomies like the"
},
{
"end_time": 1918.183,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1888.66,
"text": " Hard problem of consciousness. It's a hard problem if one starts with thinking of the world comprising dead matter. And it's unclear to me whether or not our kidneys have some low-grade consciousness. So there's the integrated information theory of intelligence, sorry, of consciousness. There's global neuronal workspace. There's spatio-temporal theories of consciousness, adverbial consciousness theories."
},
{
"end_time": 1946.203,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1918.746,
"text": " All of these are about matter interacting with one another and so there's matter interacting with itself in our kidney and so that would mean that in some sense the universe has some low-level consciousness and the developers of IIT like Tanoni have conceded in a sense that yes this is rational panpsychism. So is panpsychism"
},
{
"end_time": 1976.476,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1947.108,
"text": " Is that everything has some element of a psychic quality, some element of consciousness? Correct, right. So panpsychism is not really testable, is it? Nor are almost any theories about the origin of consciousness. Nor is materialism. Right, so I'm like totally agnostic between materialist explanations of consciousness and panpsychist"
},
{
"end_time": 2002.637,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1977.449,
"text": " Explanations and and in fact I'm pretty convinced of Colin McGinn's idea the philosopher Colin McGinn Which is some kind sometimes called Mysterian Mysterianism Chomsky's as well. Oh is that is that right? Yeah. Yeah, which is um You know which you've had Chomsky on so I'm sure you know but for the audience essentially hear that sound"
},
{
"end_time": 2029.667,
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"start_time": 2003.575,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2055.794,
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"start_time": 2029.667,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 2081.578,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2055.794,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 2111.391,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2081.578,
"text": " The point is human beings were not evolved to understand everything in the world. It's like we were evolved to survive and reproduce on the African savanna. So we're very good at predicting"
},
{
"end_time": 2141.34,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2112.466,
"text": " You know, when an object is thrown in the air that it's going to fall in a parabolic shape, right? Because that's very useful to us. There's all kinds of things we're quite good at. We're fairly good at understanding someone else's intentions. Like I see a guy with an angry face who's going to hit me. I can tell that apart from a guy with a friendly face. Our brains are built to solve"
},
{
"end_time": 2170.589,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2142.466,
"text": " All and only problems that relate are optimized for that goal of survival and reproduction in a particular environment. And just like every other animal in the animal kingdom has limits to what it can understand. It's like we understand, I can do algebra, but I can see that a chimp could never"
},
{
"end_time": 2200.776,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2170.947,
"text": " in principle even understand really algebra at all what does it stand to reason that just because we happen to be the smartest animals that we know about that there isn't a whole landscape of problems that we stand in relation to the way a chimpanzee stands in relation to algebra or I mean that the example I I like to use is more like an animal that can't understand that its reflection in a mirror is"
},
{
"end_time": 2224.497,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2200.998,
"text": " itself rather than another animal. It's like a chicken is never in a million years going to understand that light can come back at you. The concept of reflection is just permanently, yeah, it's just like, it's never gonna get that. If it could speak, if we could hear its thoughts when it's looking at itself in the mirror, it would just be"
},
{
"end_time": 2252.346,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2224.804,
"text": " Yeah, and it would be like, wait a minute, how come this chicken, every time I move, it moves? And then it would come up with a whole bunch of theories, much like we do about consciousness, that none of which actually deeply makes sense or are satisfying to the chicken. And it would just have to sort of throw its hands up in a deep way, which is to say there's lots of mysteries that we've solved. Like it's a mystery for a hundred years and then we figure it out."
},
{
"end_time": 2280.674,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2253.012,
"text": " Right, but there are mysteries that I believe there are mysteries that are in principle unsolvable by beings like us, by apes like ourselves because they're beyond our ken in the same way that reflection is beyond the kind of many animals and it consciousness strikes me as as precisely this kind of mystery. Yeah, I oscillate between that view and also the view of some people like"
},
{
"end_time": 2311.015,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2281.305,
"text": " So, Joshua Bach likes to say, mysteriousism is the philosophical view that unless you're, that someone as smart as Noam Chomsky can't figure it out, therefore we can't all figure it out. I think he likes to denigrate Chomsky, poke and jab him a bit. I'm trying to set up a talk between them two, between the two of them on the Toe channel. Toe is for theories of everything. Regardless, I oscillate between, between thinking it's completely out of our comprehension just because we're such limited beings and also"
},
{
"end_time": 2341.34,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2312.142,
"text": " They oscillate between that, and then there's some remarks from Wittgenstein. I think they're called his clarificatory remarks. At least Simon Christianly calls them that, where he said that there are aspects of life, and he was referring to consciousness, I believe, that are most important but hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity, much like a fish doesn't think about water. But if it could, it would realize it's right there. There's John Wheeler, who also said, behind this all"
},
{
"end_time": 2365.384,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2341.715,
"text": " Maybe an idea that's so beautiful and simple that when we finally comprehended a decade, a century, millennia from now, we will all look at one another and think, how could it have been any other way and how could we have been so foolish not to see it? So I don't know. And some of the people who are on the more Eastern end think that it"
},
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"index": 90,
"start_time": 2365.828,
"text": " is what needs the least explaining. Consciousness is what's closest to us. It's every single thing else that needs explaining. What does that actually mean though? How does that actually answer the question of why the meat in my head is conscious and other collections of atoms aren't? The way that one does that is by"
},
{
"end_time": 2421.032,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2391.681,
"text": " Questioning that assumption that one starts with all that you know is of consciousness. Actually, that's your fundamental That you're that's at the fundament that's at the base is consciousness. And so when we say well, we're trying to explain consciousness What is consciousness? It's that no what is anything else? Everything starts with consciousness. I mean, I understand the concept of just reversing the question But that doesn't it doesn't strike me as any That explanation doesn't strike me as any"
},
{
"end_time": 2444.616,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2421.834,
"text": " more satisfying than the the materialist explanation which is well it's just information processing and but we're also kind of not sure why computers aren't conscious even though they process information is like that those two leave me equally unsatisfied I think because"
},
{
"end_time": 2473.404,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2445.896,
"text": " simply reversing the question without giving me a reason to accept that framework over others when it's not obvious. It also just doesn't really quench my thirst on the questions, if that makes sense. Yeah. Bernardo Kastrup is someone who is a proponent of what's called analytic idealism, and he would say that materialists have developed"
},
{
"end_time": 2502.807,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2474.002,
"text": " what's called an ontological category, which ontology just means what is, and then category is, hopefully we're familiar with what a category is, by saying that there's material. Because what we do is we start with consciousness as our first-person experience. That is not what needs explaining. And then what we've done as materialists is say that there exists something else. When there's no need for that, science can exist in its exact same form."
},
{
"end_time": 2530.435,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2503.422,
"text": " without having to posit an entirely new quote-unquote ontological category of dead, I'm just going to say dead matter, unconscious matter. So it's strange that that was the leap that was made. Now I'll give you another, I understand what you're saying because I also do oscillate between whether it's a satisfying explanation. That's a great question. What the heck is an explanation? At what point do we say, okay, so-and-so has been explained?"
},
{
"end_time": 2558.285,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2531.067,
"text": " I'll give you, I'll give you a quick, but to go back on that is like when, when you see somebody die or, or, you know, you fall into a dreamless sleep, you experience the lights going out, at least in the second case. And it, and it very much looks like the lights going out when somebody dies. Right. And, and so our intuition that,"
},
{
"end_time": 2584.582,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2559.309,
"text": " There is conscious matter and unconscious matter is not crazy. We are trying to make sense of the fact that sometimes the lights go out for us when we have a dreamless sleep and it certainly looks like the lights are going out for people and animals when they die. It does seem like the universe has"
},
{
"end_time": 2614.053,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2585.128,
"text": " two things, two states, like conscious matter and what you're calling dead matter. So why is it wrong to view that data as the total phenomenon to be explained? I'm not saying it's wrong. I don't know. But another point of view is that when we have sleep, we don't experience the lights going out. By definition, because there's no experience. We don't know."
},
{
"end_time": 2643.541,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2614.753,
"text": " This is something else. This is something that we project onto the experience of sleep. So here's something to think about. Can you ever experience non-experience? No, again by definition. Right, so then we think that there's this gap in our consciousness. What we've done is we've seen other people and we've come up with this category of non-consciousness and then we confabulate that back to ourselves but as a matter of experience. We never experience quote-unquote the lights going out because by definition you can't. So it should be. I don't see why"
},
{
"end_time": 2660.879,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2644.07,
"text": " It isn't a continuous, a continuum between sleep and wake."
},
{
"end_time": 2683.166,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2661.169,
"text": " Well, yes, but then you're projecting some notion of time and so on but as a matter of experience or remember the ideal is start with experience as a matter of experience. There's no gap in your experience because there can't be because as because by definition, okay, so you understand that so then when we say well so-and-so died, we don't know in a strange sense. It's like in a strange sense."
},
{
"end_time": 2705.247,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2683.592,
"text": " Life is not what needs explaining because that's what comes, that's what we see first. It's death. And this is actually extremely freaky because I don't want to, part of me doesn't want to believe in life after death, life after what we think of as death, because it was disconcerting to me. I find the materialist's point of view to be much more comforting personally."
},
{
"end_time": 2735.794,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2706.681,
"text": " But regardless, we don't know what the heck happened to that person. And then we start to project some of what we think is happening back to ourselves. But as a matter of experience, we don't experience death nor life, sorry, nor sleep. There's no gap in experience. So as a matter of experience, death is something we don't know. We're just making some category up and then we're saying it applies. But we don't have any data points for that."
},
{
"end_time": 2757.5,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2736.271,
"text": " We don't have any observations of what it's like to not have an observation. Right. I get that. That has to be true by definition. So it's like when I see someone go to sleep, I see that all of their behavior stops essentially except for breathing."
},
{
"end_time": 2789.514,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2759.667,
"text": " I assume for the most part maybe they're having a dream experience because I've had and remembered many dream experiences but I don't have that every night. Presumably it's possible I've had many dreams that I just don't remember and this goes to your point of having an experience but not remembering it feels the same in retrospect as not having had an experience at all. If for some reason I just was like fully blackout drunk"
},
{
"end_time": 2818.49,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2790.435,
"text": " last night, like perfectly blackout drunk for an hour, then remembering last night to me, it's the same as if I was having no experience at all, as if I was in a dreamless sleep for that hour. And I would have no way of really telling those apart other than the sort of context clues of the rest of the day, like, oh, I went out last night, I must have gotten blackout drunk."
},
{
"end_time": 2847.449,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2818.985,
"text": " I understand what you're saying. There's no difference between having an experience with no memory and not having an experience when you're looking back on it for sure. I guess we make inferences on what's likely to be true from not only from our first person, from adding our first person experience to our observations of others and patterns in the world. One pattern or imperfect"
},
{
"end_time": 2876.544,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2847.824,
"text": " but frequently found correlation in the world is that when people are exhibiting behaviors like talking and standing and walking and so forth they also tend to be experiencing something and we find this in our own lives and it seems to be true of others that there's a connection between"
},
{
"end_time": 2903.131,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2876.92,
"text": " behavior and doing things and having blood flow to your brain and feeling things from the inside. So we assume when all the behavior stops and the blood stops flowing and all of the mechanics just grind to a halt, that that's the end of experience."
},
{
"end_time": 2931.288,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2903.916,
"text": " Because those two variables tend to be correlated. Now the problem with that is we have examples where they're totally not correlated such as locked-in syndrome which is where you know a person is in a hospital bed totally pretty much totally immobile, comatose for all we can tell and only when they wake up from the coma do we discover"
},
{
"end_time": 2955.35,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2931.92,
"text": " They were hearing and seeing the whole time, right? It's like the sort of, I guess, was Kill Bill sort of like this, like Uma Thurman and Kill Bill. I could be misremembering that movie, but my memory is she was in a coma and the doctor basically raped her."
},
{
"end_time": 2981.203,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2955.776,
"text": " And she but she was actually conscious the whole time Yeah, and then she fucked him up when she got out out of the coma is just this great moment but like the fact that that's possible means that there isn't actually an a hundred percent connection between Behavior and consciousness. It's like you can be conscious and look and be comatose and"
},
{
"end_time": 3009.07,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2984.07,
"text": " And not only that, but you can get complex behavior without what seems to be consciousness. I talked to Anika Harris about this and in her book she gave these examples of extraordinarily complex behavior by networks of trees communicating underground and stuff. Wait a minute, so they're communicating."
},
{
"end_time": 3035.964,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3010.213,
"text": " They're communicating. That's a behavior we would normally associate with consciousness. They're not built, they're natural. They're communicating, but we assume that they're not conscious. You can get behavior without consciousness, consciousness without complex behavior, even though those two things tend to be correlated most of the time."
},
{
"end_time": 3067.824,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3037.875,
"text": " And what's more, it doesn't seem like there's a logical reason why consciousness would have to accompany complex behavior, right? Like from the point of view of Darwinian evolution, why does it matter that there's something it's like to be one of these survival machines? It's like my appendix doesn't, you know, wouldn't need to feel what it's doing. I mean, that's a bad example since the appendix is pointless. My kidneys"
},
{
"end_time": 3094.65,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3068.114,
"text": " wouldn't need to feel what it's doing in order to serve their purpose for my survival. How come certain aspects of my body I'm conscious of, but others I'm just not? What's the evolutionary rationale for some of these things being accompanied by my experiencing them?"
},
{
"end_time": 3119.002,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3094.974,
"text": " And others just being totally is like I wouldn't even know I had half the organs in my body if I if I didn't take a biology class. So that's part of the mystery too. I understand there's a couple of terms you use there which is third person a couple others that I can't recall and you which is another one. So firstly the category of you so someone else."
},
{
"end_time": 3134.616,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3120.026,
"text": " Oh, this is where it gets extremely tricky for me psychologically. But anyway, we can talk about that another time. One has to think about what constitutes evidence."
},
{
"end_time": 3171.34,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3145.333,
"text": " When you say, sorry, I don't mean to say you like I'm accusing you, but when one says, let's say, when one says, I watched someone sleep and the lights went out for them, it's as if they're, well, firstly, that's a bit creepy. One should periodically watch people sleep. It's as if they're projecting, and I keep using this word projecting because I don't have another term to use, some God's eye view where we have this"
},
{
"end_time": 3195.145,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3173.029,
"text": " Where we imagine time ticking in this fashion and then we imagine that they're not experiencing anything. Well, we can ask them afterward, do you remember so and so? And then we say there was a gap. And so we imagine that that gap occurs for us. But as a matter of evidence for us, we don't have that. And so from their point of view, there was no gap. And from our point of view, we never have a gap."
},
{
"end_time": 3218.046,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3195.896,
"text": " And so what I'm saying is that we then project what we think of as a gap from them onto us because we imagine we're so great at doing this because of the development of science, of thinking of the world from a third person point of view, like a God's eye view, that this is all just ticking clocks and billiard balls bouncing off one another. And yes, there's some complexities with"
},
{
"end_time": 3245.23,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3218.882,
"text": " QFT and so on quantum mechanics and so on so it's already making a leap and I'm saying that the people who are idealists Say there's no need to make that leap Continue with the first person that's where you start and that's where you can end you start to develop other points of view, but then Well then paradoxes come in well well So I guess the first person doesn't answer"
},
{
"end_time": 3273.08,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3246.169,
"text": " the question either way. So it's like I fall asleep and then I wake up. If I'm solely going by my first person experience, I've got no idea what happened. I don't know whether I blacked out and actually had an experience that I'm simply now not remembering."
},
{
"end_time": 3302.773,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3273.558,
"text": " Sort of like the show Severance. I don't know if you've checked now. It's a great show. Amazing. Really, really worth watching and maybe even worth talking about on your podcast where people undergo a sci-fi. They don't explain how the procedure is done, but they undergo a procedure where their memory is spatially bound, which means they go to work"
},
{
"end_time": 3331.971,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3303.439,
"text": " When they enter the door to work, they no longer remember anything about their life outside of that building. They only remember memories that they have made in this space. They exit, now they only remember memories they have made in the outside world. It's a way of completely psychologically severing your work life and your home life."
},
{
"end_time": 3360.759,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3333.029,
"text": " And what's interesting about it is the moment, you know, what they've essentially done is created two different people. I mean, in some ways, in some ways they have created two different people and in some ways they're the same person because they're basically, you know, what the home life person experiences is going to work today, going to work,"
},
{
"end_time": 3390.35,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3361.51,
"text": " The moment they walk through the door, they walk out, right? It's like going to sleep and waking up. And the work version of them experiences the same thing. They're just at work. This person feels like he is at work his whole life, right? Because the second he goes home, he's walking through the door again, like waking up. And so there's essentially two people that feel like they're living their entire lives on opposite ends of this thing. And from their first person experience,"
},
{
"end_time": 3419.548,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3391.92,
"text": " They have no idea what's happening when they walk through that door. For all they know, nothing happens at all. Or for all they know, they've been outside for a year. And all they have to go by is how their body feels when they walk back through the door. If they're exhausted, they assume something must have happened out there. Or if they've got a cut,"
},
{
"end_time": 3448.217,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3419.957,
"text": " They assume that they had to have gotten that cut at work. Are they aware that they're losing, like in Memento, the guy is aware that he has memory lapses? Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're aware. They signed up for this procedure. Okay, the reason why I was saying, don't mean to interrupt, but the reason why I was saying there are a couple of delusive concepts there. So the third person, like I mentioned, well, if we're idealists, let's just abandon that. It doesn't mean that other minds don't exist. It just means"
},
{
"end_time": 3474.787,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3448.78,
"text": " in terms of evidence stick with yourself okay then there's also the well my reaction was that does that doesn't answer the questions necessarily okay well we'll get back to that because there's also the concept of you which implies a continuous identity and that's a delusive concept because it's not clear so are you the same you as you were yesterday and so on and so on and then can you experience without having memory so when you go to sleep is it the case that"
},
{
"end_time": 3502.261,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3475.52,
"text": " people are experiencing something somewhere maybe this nullity void that the Buddhist say is a place of nothingness and then you come back but you have no recollection of it I imagine in the same way that I don't know because one would have to say that that is the same person across the rooms across home and across work so one would have to say that's the same person and if we can say that then we could say so the question is"
},
{
"end_time": 3525.213,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3502.551,
"text": " Does one experience when one is dead in some other realm or when one is sleeping? And I would say that the answer is we don't know. One could just not have memory to it. It's like there's this bucket of memory that we pull into that when we're talking to one another we luckily have access to this. Some have access to it better than others, but luckily we can, luckily when we're talking right now it's like we're injecting into this bucket and later we can pull out some of it."
},
{
"end_time": 3552.329,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3526.459,
"text": " So then if I was to go into a place, or you were to go into a place, or one was to go into a place where they didn't have access to this bucket, does that mean that they weren't there? Well, we have no evidence. It's actually just, we don't know. And we assume, well, no. But we don't know. So, I mean, what's your bar for knowledge? It's like, we don't know perfectly, maybe to 100% certainty, but"
},
{
"end_time": 3577.398,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3553.08,
"text": " I think my bar for saying I know something is not that it's known with perfect confidence. To know something with 99% confidence is to me maybe the best we can ever get about almost anything."
},
{
"end_time": 3599.036,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3578.439,
"text": " Unless you're Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson who says they believe with 99.999% certainty that so-and-so are not anything more than a Tareen explanation for the UAPs. Oh, for the UAPs. Yeah, well... And by the way, my remark to them is, all right, hey, do you want to play that game? I will put down $1,000 then, then you can put down"
},
{
"end_time": 3627.466,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3599.36,
"text": " 9 million dollars and that'll still be a great bet for you. You feel like the odds are still in your favor. That UAPs are not extra-terrestrial. So they're that certain that they are terrestrial. Or something that's mundane. Or something mundane. So I also want to ask them. That's very strange. Exactly. And there's some tweets about that. Bill Nye and Tyson"
},
{
"end_time": 3654.991,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3627.875,
"text": " I know Neil a little bit. I'm surprised he would be that certain that they are from Earth. Yeah, it also depends on, well, it depends on quite, when one assigns probability that's actually, it's difficult to assign a probability to almost anything. My brother is a professor of statistics and even assigning probabilities in a paper that has to do with"
},
{
"end_time": 3681.834,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3655.623,
"text": " Medicine so something that's extremely objective where we have replicable data is actually it's not it's extremely difficult let alone something where we don't know because then one has to set up what's called a reference class and It's still an unknown problem in statistics. What should be one's reference class. I spoke about this with Gary Nolan So I can ask you I heard that yeah, yeah, right that one I can say to the audience as a question like when what's the probability you're going to die tomorrow you may say well maybe 0.02"
},
{
"end_time": 3709.104,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3682.21,
"text": " And then I say, no, it's actually 99.999 because if you take as the reference class, all the beings on earth, the majority of them are dying in the next few minutes because they're bacterial. Right. No, I mean, you didn't go too deep into that problem on the podcast, but I thought it was really interesting points. Like, so is my what's my probability of dying today? Do I take the probability of all New Yorkers and take that? Or is it, you know, let's say"
},
{
"end_time": 3734.855,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3709.684,
"text": " Black men that are 25 years old or Americans in general, who do I leave out of the reference? I mean, it's an extremely difficult problem, which is why people who are in risk management get paid so much, because insurance depends on it. Right. It's not as if it's easy at all. An interesting question that insurers can discriminate against."
},
{
"end_time": 3764.565,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3735.538,
"text": " you based on certain characteristics, but not other. Like they can charge you higher premiums if you're a young man, right? As opposed to, but they can't, you know, if there were some racial differences in car accidents that were material enough to like get differential premiums, you couldn't charge people different premiums based on, based on race and ethnicity. And I always thought that's a little kind of underexplored, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3791.8,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3764.889,
"text": " Phenomenal like where are the people complaining that? They are being discriminated against by insurance companies because Insurance insurance companies understand that You know young people get in far more car accidents, right? It's like well shit. I didn't I can't control being young It's like that's a characteristic. I have no control over how come you're discriminating against me based on the statistical"
},
{
"end_time": 3820.964,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3792.602,
"text": " average behavior of people with my characteristics. It's like we generally understand that to be unethical. Except in the universities, but yeah. Oh, what do you mean? What do you mean by that? With the diversity and inclusion. Oh, yeah, no, sure. Yeah, but, but anyway, yeah, that's, there's also a problem of like, what actually is probability? What's a probability claim? When you say there's an 80% likelihood of X happening, what actually does that mean?"
},
{
"end_time": 3835.418,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3821.732,
"text": " Well, I think, I mean, I tend to think probability claims are like epistemic claims. It's like, for all we know, it seems like there's an 80 out of 100 times we run this in theory."
},
{
"end_time": 3854.957,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3836.323,
"text": " That would happen, but it's like, what does that mean actually? It's an unsolved problem. What's the probability the sun will come up tomorrow? Because one has to then assume a philosophical framework for probability, and they're broadly speaking four. So for the people who are interested, there's frequentist, which means this is what is done in physics, is you look at the frequency, you just take a slew of data."
},
{
"end_time": 3875.469,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3855.794,
"text": " And then there are some pros and cons of each one of these cases. So one wants to know, can you make a probability for a single case? Is there such a thing as a probability for a single case? A frequentist can't. A classicalist can. And a classicalist also signs uniform probability among"
},
{
"end_time": 3897.329,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3876.152,
"text": " Different options, which is to me. That's not entirely clear What's the classical if you don't know if this weight if this die is weighted? You just assume that it's one out of six that could just an assumption. You don't know it could be weighted You have no other data, so they just assume it is until more data comes in then there's the Bayesian which you referenced which I believe is also called the subjective because it deals with a"
},
{
"end_time": 3917.858,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3897.91,
"text": " one's own degree of certainty and then there's the metaphysical which is what most people think probability is and i think that probability is something in here yes yes yes yeah so a particle just has this chance of decaying at a certain time sorry or yes yes yes a particle has this chance but then you get into"
},
{
"end_time": 3947.79,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3918.285,
"text": " So what do you mean it has this chance? What is the ontological claim here? So each one of them has some pros and cons. And with the metaphysical, yes, you can make a single case because it just inherently has this probability. Frequentist, no. Classical, yes. Regardless, then one has to say, well, which probability are you referring to when you say 99.999% sure that UAPs are so-and-so? It's so dubious that I don't know how they can be so certain. And the reason I say they're certain is that there's a"
},
{
"end_time": 3978.217,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3948.592,
"text": " Level of condescension and derision that come from the skeptics still to this day, though it's tempered. And I think it's tempered because of the revelations of the past year or so. I think NASA themselves say this is not any known government that we know of. So then you're like, what the heck, you raise your eyebrow there. So is the government lying to us? To me, it's very unlikely that Russia or China is holding on to the kind of technology"
},
{
"end_time": 4005.879,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3978.712,
"text": " that would have an aircraft that moves in the way that these aircrafts do. Especially since these have been seen since the 40s. So you would have to say that someone has had this technology since the 40s because there's a uniform set of observables. I can only speak to the videos I've seen which are all from the past"
},
{
"end_time": 4035.657,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4006.886,
"text": " 17 years or so. I think the earliest one I saw is like from 2005 or 2004. But like, why would Russia or China invent technology that's clearly, you know, very advanced in terms of how it flies? I mean, it flies like nothing else we've created. And then just fly it over the like Eastern seaboard frequently, for no reason."
},
{
"end_time": 4067.261,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4037.5,
"text": " get filmed by a Navy pilot and then not do anything to us that hurts us, right? And then also not use that technology to win the war in Ukraine. Whenever they have a war. It doesn't make, it makes very little sense that it would be a different state actor and our government has strongly implied that it's not"
},
{
"end_time": 4097.329,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4068.166,
"text": " a you know American technology so it's such a strain and obviously is like there's nothing I mean life on another planet is actually no it's no crazier a belief then there being life on this planet if one chooses as a reference yeah then we can say well look with some large degree of certainty"
},
{
"end_time": 4122.534,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4097.858,
"text": " We got to wrap up. This has been really good."
},
{
"end_time": 4152.415,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4122.927,
"text": " Where can my listeners go if they want to hear more about UFOs, consciousness, theories of everything, etc.? Sure. You can search theories of everything on YouTube. My name should come up, Kurt Jaimungal. And if you're interested in, like Coleman mentioned, physics, mathematics, free will, God as well, which we didn't get to talk much about, and consciousness as well as UFOs and how they relate to that, then check it out and hopefully you enjoy it."
},
{
"end_time": 4178.2,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4153.968,
"text": " Awesome. Thank you so much, Kurt. Thank you, man."
}
]
}No transcript available.