BI 192 Àlex Gómez-Marín: The Edges of Consciousness

[00:00:04] Alex: That’s why I think consciousness science today is at a crossroads, where we could start a new kind of science, which is the science that Galileo left for the second round.

What if it’s really only in the brain?

[00:00:19] Paul: But isn’t that an awesome thought? Also? Like, to me, that’s like, it would be astounding if it was in the.

[00:00:26] Alex: Brain, but you see, it would be astounding if that’s where the evidence leads us. But I think it’s so sad if that’s where you begin with, forget it. I’m really going to study what I want to study, and I don’t care what people call me.

[00:00:47] Paul: This is brain inspired. Hey, everyone, I’m Paul. Alex Gomez Marin heads the behavior of organisms laboratory at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain, and he’s one of those theoretical physicists turned neuroscientists, and he studied a wide range of topics over his career. And actually, Alex has been on the podcast multiple times before. Most recently, he’s become interested in what he calls the edges of consciousness, which encompasses trying to explain what may be happening when we have experiences outside our normal, everyday experiences, for example, when we’re under the influence of hallucinogens, when we have near death experiences, as Alex has, as you’ll hear when we have paranormal experiences, and so on. So we discuss what led up to his interests in these edges of consciousness, how he now thinks about consciousness and doing science in general, how important it is to make room for all possible explanations of phenomena, and to leave our metaphysics open all the while. As always, I link to a few relevant things that we talk about in the show notes at Braininspired co podcast 192 thank you as always to my Patreon supporters. If you’d like to support brain inspired, go to Braininspired co to learn how where you can also join our discord community and get access to all the full episodes. Okay, thanks for being here. Here’s Alex.

Alex, how are the daughters? How’s the family?

[00:02:16] Alex: Nice. Yeah, sweet. It’s a sweet time. They’re going to be five and eight, so five and eight.

[00:02:23] Paul: Mine are eleven and nine, so five and eight is right when. Oh, this is terrible to open up with this, but that’s right when things start getting easier.

[00:02:30] Alex: All right, well, they are always kind of complicated, but yes, a little bit easier and totally enjoyable. So I used to feel like I wanted things to speed up, but now I start to feel like I want them to slow down because I realized, seeing all the kids in school, that my older daughter soon he’s gonna start behaving like a preteenage, and this freaks me out.

[00:02:53] Paul: It’s like, ah, that’s what’s happening.

My daughter. So I have an older daughter and younger son, and she can do an excellent, do you know, valley girl accent from the United States.

[00:03:03] Alex: How is it?

[00:03:04] Paul: Like, totally.

[00:03:06] Alex: Oh, yeah, I see.

[00:03:07] Paul: She can do that very well now. And I’m worried that that’s gonna become her vernacular with the way she speaks. Yeah. Anyway. All right. Good to hear it. How’s the internal bleeding?

[00:03:15] Alex: Oh, fuck.

Question number two. Boom. I mean, I don’t know what you mean by that, but, you know, I had a stomach leak and that brought me to hospital. That’s what you mean?

[00:03:27] Paul: Yes.

[00:03:28] Alex: All right. No, no, it’s been fixed three years ago. So how did they fix it?

Well, they go in the stomach and they. What’s the technical name? They kind of stitch burn it.

[00:03:41] Paul: Oh, they cauterized it.

[00:03:42] Alex: Yeah, yeah, that’s the word. Cauterize it.

[00:03:45] Paul: Okay, good. That’s pretty cool.

[00:03:48] Alex: And then they stitch the entire stomach after having opened it. So you see?

[00:03:52] Paul: Yes. Okay.

[00:03:53] Alex: Yeah, I have a good reminder. I have a reminder from here to here. But it’s good. I’ve been lucky because that hasn’t affected my physical life. It has affected my emotional and intellectual and even spiritual life. But I don’t suffer from.

From it after it was fixed.

[00:04:11] Paul: Physically, yes. Nor mentally, because you do what I guess Jeffrey Kripel calls. You’ve flipped.

[00:04:20] Alex: Yes. Well, maybe I had already flipped, but that just pressed the turbo button. It’s a good point whether that flipped me or not, but, yes, see, this.

[00:04:31] Paul: Is interesting to me because I try to, you know, you reflect on your previous, like, what did I used to think?

And we’re all evolving and changing. And I have thought, you know, going into. Because I’ve evolved, you know, and now I’m sort of anti mechanistic viewpoint on how brains work.

But I don’t know that I had a stance before or a viewpoint. So when someone asks me, well, how is it? How has your viewpoint changed? Which is a terrible question that I like to ask people. I don’t have a good answer for it because I’m not sure I had a viewpoint before.

And do you think that that is true of yourself as well?

[00:05:18] Alex: Yeah. And that’s why people, when they ask me, well, Alex, you’re kind of good at pointing out the flaws of the system. So what’s the replacement? And I said, I don’t know what the replacement is, but I can sense, feel, think, maybe articulate. That operating system really sucks at many levels. So far, or that far. Then I was trying to express that sense of unease I had about this unholy trinity of mechanism, reductionism and physicalism. I didn’t have a replacement. But then you find dead friends, all these books of great people who wrote stuff, and then you find living friends because there’s a community out there that it took me some time to discover. And they all have their own alternatives, and they’re obviously not the final say, they’re not the truth. But there are ways forward in this adventure.

[00:06:13] Paul: Is it forward?

[00:06:14] Alex: Yeah. Yeah, it’s forward. At least it’s a way. Let’s put it this way. It’s a way. It’s a ways. Ways away from the familiar, from what we’ve been taught, even indoctrinated, taken for granted. And I mean, this. I’m more calm now, Paul. I used to be more like a teenager, you know? But it’s like, I get it. I get it. Like, you know, I don’t fight against these things. Sometimes I do. And maybe we’ll get into that when it’s necessary.

[00:06:40] Paul: Oh, yeah. You’re a fighter. You’re.

[00:06:42] Alex: I am a fighter. I’m a fighter. But there’s when you start realizing the kind of the beauty of other worldviews and the excitement, the curiosity.

Then I realized I spent less time in bitching about what’s wrong and just more time trying to appreciate what seems to be better, more appropriate to my own worldview that is changing at the same time.

[00:07:15] Paul: Okay, so going back to the evolution of one’s thoughts and perspective, and I mentioned before that I don’t know, that I had a view, but the default view is what we’re taught.

And so I think my view was just sort of accepting what I was taught about how to approach any scientific question.

Do you think that that could be at the heart or at the root of your own beginnings?

[00:07:49] Alex: Yes, but there are many levels, and maybe we also start from different places because we belong to different tribes. You see, like, I was. I used to be a theoretical physicist. I mean, I don’t think I am anymore. I’m trying to re. Well, I’m trying to renew my physics license after 20 years, since I finished my PhD, because it’s like, what do I know about physics, really, despite people introducing me as a theoretical physicist? But anyways, physicists are taught certain things, and then neurobiologists are taught others, and geneticists and psychologists. So there’s some things we share like, as if we were species, animal species, right? You could find subtle differences that matter and also invariance. And then there are many layers. Sorry, many layers beneath. Because I realized it’s not just reductionism, which can be a good strategy. It’s not just this obsession for mechanisms that I never had when I studied physics. And I still wonder that for them, my colleagues or my former colleagues, it’s their holy grail. It’s not even physicalism. There are morphisms beneath and I’m discovering them. It’s literalism, the belief that reality is either something happened, it is real or it isn’t. And by real, people mean there was some sort of a factual happening and then everything else is fiction. But then some of these phenomena I’m studying lay in this kind of synapse in between fact and fiction, right? So I’m going back to the humanities to discover that. That I also had other demons, other demons to exorcise, like literalism, right? Another one is secularism. Like, even if you’re not a physicalist anymore, we have inherited all these habits from the church and religion, whether you’re protestant or Catholic. So it’s like I’m discovering not just what my parents, but my grandparents and my grand grandparents used to believe. And I’m realizing that I’ve been carrying many of those items in my bag with me. Some are heavy and I don’t need them and others are still valuable. So it’s like, I think there’s no end to realize all these familiar habits.

[00:09:58] Paul: Well, there is no. There’s no end to science. There’s no end, apparently, to anything.

So can I describe your near death experience? So because we haven’t referred to it specifically, are you sick of referring to it or talking about it? Okay.

[00:10:16] Alex: No, no. Once I told it in a spanish newspaper and I realized it was the most read thing of that Sunday, it’s like, wow, people want to know about that. So I’m gonna. I’m gonna play with it in a very first was more intuitive, spontaneous way, and now it’s more deliberate. It’s like, all right, they wanna hear the physicist neuroscientist who almost dies, right? Okay. So I use it to tell my story so we can talk about it.

[00:10:40] Paul: Sure, we can talk about it. We’ll talk also about why stories like this and why topics like these are so popular. Because they sound.

Cause people like car wrecks and things that don’t seem normal and stuff. Anyway, so let me describe your near death experience and then you can correct me. Okay. So that you don’t have to describe it again.

[00:11:03] Alex: Nobody has done this for me before. Thank you.

[00:11:05] Paul: All right, so you had had some internal bleeding that you didn’t realize, and it had been maybe a week or so, and you went to the hospital, and you were going to get it surgically fixed. But before the surgery, even a couple days before the surgery, you started flickering in and out of consciousness. And at one point, you flickered so out of consciousness that you had a. A near death experience, which you call either a light one or a not as brilliant one or something.

[00:11:45] Alex: It’s not a super nd. It’s kind of a mild one. A humble, modest.

[00:11:51] Paul: A modest one. Yeah. Non super.

[00:11:53] Alex: Look, I wasn’t in heaven, you see. I was in a pretty spectacular place. But it wasn’t like one week of experiences with angels and beautiful beaches.

[00:12:03] Paul: Yeah.

[00:12:04] Alex: And they’re scales. I’m joking. But they’re also scales. The Grayson scale.

[00:12:08] Paul: Yes. Which is interesting.

[00:12:08] Alex: No, to answer, and gives you a ranking of how intense that was.

[00:12:14] Paul: You were two out of ten, actually.

[00:12:18] Alex: I haven’t done it. I haven’t done it. It’s fine. It’s fine. Sometimes I joke, as I always do. Seriously. And I say, well, it was a near. Near death experience. I’m happy with that, too. You know, it was close.

[00:12:29] Paul: Anyway, you saw the light, but you were not going through a tunnel so much as a. Well, you’re in a. Well. There are three figures who are dear to you, whom, you know, who are not family, who are dear entities, I guess, to you. And you recognize them up on. At the top with a yellow light, not bright, brilliant white. Near, near, near white.

[00:12:52] Alex: Yeah.

[00:12:53] Paul: And they said. And they basically communicated with you telepathically, or so, you know. Do you want to come? You declined, and that was about it.

[00:13:02] Alex: Yeah.

[00:13:02] Paul: Okay. Did I get that right?

[00:13:04] Alex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was it.

[00:13:06] Paul: And then it’s not like you just woke up and you’re like, oh, I’m changed. It took weeks and months. Right. To reflect on it and to think about it. Because at the time. And I understand that you don’t remember your dreams much either.

[00:13:20] Alex: No, I don’t dream that much, or I don’t remember them.

I fall deep into unconsciousness when I sleep very quickly. So anything that I remember is remarkable. But that was very remarkable. One way to explain it is often, of course, put it into the box of I had a dream.

But come on, that wasn’t a usual dream. And by the way, Paul, I had a dream, quote unquote, again, before and I don’t think. I don’t know if it was the same. That same evening. It was Easter. And symbolically, there were all interesting things going on. It was Easter, and I came back Catholic by. No, but I’m from Spain and I. So it’s a catholic country. And so all of those things, even if you don’t practice them, they’re in the air, right? So you notice if it’s Easter. And basically because there weren’t doctors around, you know, the hospital was pretty empty because it was the Easter holiday. No, but there are other things that are at least interesting about when that happened. And when I went to hospital.

I don’t want to get into astrology in your channel, but it was full moon. I mean, all of that was going on. Let’s say no. Let’s say no. Let’s say symbolically. Come on, relax, relax.

Well, I had another dream. I had a dream where I was crossing.

A dream before the ND. I was crossing the street. There was a lot of people. There were a lot of people. There were firemen. A fireman truck was ready. And then all of those people disappear. And I’m this old town with kind of stone houses and the ground as well. Very similar to the Parry center where I ended up going a year after. I’m not saying that’s a precognitive anything, but just another curiosity. Anyways. And then there were all these huge animals. Huge. Imagine an elephant that has the head of a bear or a lion that has the other half of the body belonging to a different animal. They were huge, and they had fire in their heads. And they were walking past on top of me. And then they were bending their heads with a fire that wouldn’t burn and put it in my head one by one. And then they all came, as in a parade. And then they became flying carpets. And then they went and. And they disappear in the mountain. So I also had that dream before, but as you were saying, after that I got surgery. I was really weak because I lost about four liters of blood slowly leaking, because I remember these bags that they were bringing me, you know?

And then I had surgery, and I was in the ICU for a night. One sleeps really well there.

And then I had. It took me many months, really, to recover physically. Like I’m always. You can see me, I’m always active, thinking, reading. And I couldn’t even read for two months, right? So it’s like my physical energy. I don’t know what they do when you’re in surgery, but I have a couple of friends who are doctors and they say, oof, if you knew what’s going on, of course they’re trying to make sure that they can do what they need to do. So that’s to say that it wasn’t like I had my nd and then I was already reflecting on it and writing, talking. I just needed to be able to. Even walking. That’s really weird. I was about to become 40. I mean, I’m a kind of a, you know, healthy, strong man. It took me. It took me a few days to actually be able to walk properly. I was walking like an old man. It’s like, what is this? It’s just. It’s just a stomach surgery, you see. So it took me a long time.

[00:16:57] Paul: Well, yeah, you use your core with almost everything you do. I’m not using mine right now. Mine’s getting bigger and bigger, actually, as we speak. But. But, yeah, I mean, even just to, like, you know, your posture, you’re using your core. So. Of course. But what you were saying is, like, you’re. That they give you. Were you alluding to them giving you lots of drugs that put you. Wayne or.

[00:17:16] Alex: I don’t, that’s for sure. But I think they. They put you upside down. I mean, they just. If there’s surgeons out there, I think they don’t care, and they shouldn’t. They don’t care about how you will feel the next morning or the next two months. They just go there and fix it with. With as much safety they have, because they don’t want to lose you. I’m just saying this because I had forgotten that as well. But it’s remarkable that you can spend, like. I spent, like, what, two weeks in hospital. I lost 13 kilos and I couldn’t walk after it. It’s not that I’ve been in war for six months, it’s just that. But it just drained all my vital and physical energy. So it took me many months to go back. And it was only later that I started realizing, oh, what was that? And I don’t recall. I had been following the NDE literature. I didn’t even know there was a literature about that. No. No. So that came up later on.

[00:18:11] Paul: You knew what an indian is?

[00:18:14] Alex: Probably. Probably. I had heard of it. But look, many of those things that I really interested in now, I wasn’t. I didn’t even care. I didn’t even know there were scientists studying them. Most of them. That was unknown to me, I would say.

[00:18:30] Paul: And now. So you’re still interested in neuroscience. You’re still interested? So when I say neuroscience, I mean mechanistic, computational, basically approaches, which is the vast, vast majority of what neuroscience is and does. And you’re still interested in that. But what percentage would you say, or have you really just let.

It’s not fair to say that, you know, because you’re doing neuroscience.

[00:18:59] Alex: Go ahead.

[00:18:59] Paul: Yeah.

[00:19:00] Alex: Now I’m dropping. I’ve dropped many things.

[00:19:04] Paul: How much have you dropped?

[00:19:07] Alex: I’ve sacrificed things. I mean, not like, as in a sacrifice, like, sacrificial. Just. I.

Look, I got. I had gotten tenure. What is it, four months, five months before I had my NDE. So I thought how ironic and sad it would have been to, you know, just. I got it, and then I died.

[00:19:29] Paul: I pause on tenure for a moment. So I didn’t even know what tenure was. I think I was late in graduate school when I learned what tenure was.

[00:19:37] Alex: You don’t know what tenure is?

[00:19:38] Paul: I do know what it is now.

[00:19:39] Alex: Spanish.

[00:19:39] Paul: Well, I don’t know if Spanish is different, but I hate the concept. I’m not sure how you feel about it.

[00:19:45] Alex: Well, I feel great.

It’s wonderful if you use it. If you use it. Another segue, we may want to go, because that’s why the sacrifices are important. Because if you want to study certain things, there are some tolls to pay, and it’s not enough, which is a great thing to say. My salary is secured for fucking life. You know, you need to consider grandstanding and political correctness, scientific correctness, students, all of that. But spanish tenure was described in this biography of Santiago Ramonica Hall. I forgot the author, but I wrote a review of that beautiful biography for science, and in this book, spanish tenure, because it explains how Cajal got tenure and so on. Said spanish tenure is a mix of the holy inquisition, bullfighting, and the National Lottery. It’s the best description I’ve read about what? Spanish tenure. So you’re in front of this jury. They all ask difficult, mean spirited questions to test your body. Then you need to be. Well, yeah, and then you need to be very lucky. And I’ve experienced it, because sometimes you think you’re gonna get it, and you don’t, and sometimes you don’t think you’re gonna get it, and you get it. And the bullfighting is. You need to appear there like the macho man that, you know, knows everything and can dance with all these bulls. So I got this on my third attempt, and a few months later, I almost died. And it’s like, come on. I’ve been given like this ticket that says you can use it. You can live for 40 more years, let’s say.

And so that because you were asking about what flipped me. Well, it didn’t flip me, but it was like all these things together. It was post pandemic. And the pandemic did many things for each of us in different ways. Right. Post pandemic, post tenure, post NDE. It’s like all these three things together. I said, forget it. I’m really going to study what I want to study. And I don’t care what people call me or even if they could.

[00:21:46] Paul: You made that choice pre tenure because. So this is why. No, so people get tenure, and then. Then they can just do whatever they want, which is crazy.

[00:21:55] Alex: They don’t either.

[00:21:56] Paul: Well, usually don’t, but you can.

[00:21:58] Alex: In theory, yeah.

[00:22:01] Paul: And people do.

I mean, it alters what you do.

[00:22:09] Alex: I think I’ll just speak for myself mostly here. But what I see around is that even when you get tenure, you still want to get big grants. You still have this running business of students and animals and techniques, and so you think you’re free, but you’re not. You’re hooked onto that selection pressure, so therefore you. I mean, look, if you ask people, they’ll say they’re happy doing what they do. I wasn’t. Let’s put it this way. Or I was kind of, but I felt I wanted to go a bit further, and I decided I would just do it. But that required. Yeah. Sacrificing, well, whatever reputation I had, or students. Because some of these themes I study now, I cannot keep this as a prehd project. Right. It’s like. So I have to sacrifice that. The game of having a big lap. Grants. I started writing grants about consciousness and the edges of consciousness and things like that, and I was getting this quasi insulting reveals bag. It’s like, okay, fuck it. I won’t even bother next time. I’ll find the money somewhere else, or I’ll do it cheaply. So, you know, all of those things you need to put out of your bag. At least I had to, so I could put other loads and do other things after that transition. It takes time. It takes time. Oh, I’m doing all sort of.

Yeah, I call it, look, the way I frame it. But it’s just marketing, because I could frame it in a different way. No, it’s like, you need to explain it.

Look, I’m all over the place.

[00:23:43] Paul: I know you got a lot of.

[00:23:45] Alex: But very thinly. Very thinly. That’s why I always express my imposter syndrome. Like, am I doing physics? No. Am I doing neuroscience? No. Sometimes I even doubt whether I’m doing science anymore. It’s like, is that science, right, when you organize a meeting and you invite, like, a historian of religions, right. A psychedelic researcher, a theoretical physicist. And no, that’s not science.

[00:24:10] Paul: So John Krakauer has told me before offline that one of the things that he appreciates about my podcast is that it’s like doing science. And I vehemently disagree with this. We’re just talking. We’re not doing science.

It could contribute and inspire and, you know. But it’s not science. So. Yeah, I mean, but. But I would like to know more about how. Cause learning a little bit about what you’re doing. I wonder if you’re doing science, and I wonder if you. How you feel about science.

[00:24:41] Alex: No, I am, but I do different things, and this sounds like, I don’t know, like comedy asking me, no, I don’t feel like that. But it’s like, okay, let me try to explain.

[00:24:51] Paul: I’m sorry. I’m not trying to put you on the spot.

[00:24:53] Alex: No, no, no. I don’t feel like this.

So I’m doing experiments. Let’s begin like this. I’m doing experiments about human consciousness. And I can tell you about these in a moment. Let’s just make the outline. So, I’m studying crazy shit. I’m studying impossible neuroscience stuff that when some of my colleagues now listen about it, they’ll say, really? Oh, my God. Like, you can tell long hair. He’s, you know, he’s become mad after that. That ND. So I’m studying, for instance, the possibility that minds go beyond brains. Literally not in a kind of theoretical. Let’s play kind of the enactive cognition. And I’ve been an activist. I had an inactivist crisis. I don’t think I am anymore. But I really appreciate the an activist approach. But it went. But it’s like, yeah, really? But can I send you, Paul, some information, mind to mind? And the inactivist would freak out because they are physicalists, I suppose, at the end of the day. So it’s like, no way. No way. They’re like the looks physicalists. They go beyond their reductionist friends.

But I’m doing this out of, like, three stance. One is empirical things that I can see other people doing and things that have happened to me or things that people tell me, because now people tell me a lot of stories because I also explain mine.

So that’s one side. The other one is theoretical. Because I continue to read philosophy and physics and science. Read large and books, lots of books to understand and what’s going on, to give it a frame. Look, the way I explain it when I do, because I do a lot of outreach, but it’s not even outreach anymore. Whatever I do, it’s like, you know, I do it, but it’s not about reach. No, but I don’t think of it as outreach because outreach sounds like me, the scientists telling these lay people the truth or the latest research. And I’m more like telling them, look, we so called experts, we don’t know what’s going on. It’s just more mysterious.

[00:26:53] Paul: Yeah, that’s a dirty, dirty secret that I have known forever. And I tell them.

[00:26:59] Alex: So I say, me as the expert, let me tell you, don’t trust the expert. And so they freak out. But I’m playing this very deliberately, like saying science is also political, and we only tell science kind of front stage. We don’t tell what’s going on at the backstage. People need to know what’s going on at the backstage as well. And, well, I do that. So that’s not the typical outreach. Right? When you say, did you know that memories, you know, are when you perturb this part of the brain, which is very interesting, but, like, people couldn’t care less, really. I’m telling you, people what happens to people.

You were saying. You were alluding to me telling the NDE as something that has this kind of morbid attention. But wait, that’s true. But, Paul, people die. People have ndes. People have old family members who have terminal lucidity. People have partners who die in accidents, and partners, they feel their partners at home, right? So this is all over the place, this weird phenomena, this anomalous, you can call it anomalous cognitive phenomena.

This is all over the place in society.

They don’t talk about it because if they spoke to their physician, they think he or she will think they’re mad. And if they tell it to the physics expert or neuroscience expert, he or she will say, oh, it’s just some hallucination going on in your brain. Poor boy. Let me just. Let me just tell you, there’s nothing after that. Nothing after death. It’s all in your head. And I’m just. I’m trying to deconstruct that. It’s like, wait, wait. I don’t have the answer. But you’re too quick to tell the public that these things aren’t real. Like, what do you know, really? You’ve been studying my vision in a lab for 40 years. What do you know about after death? And do you know that there are people who’ve been studying it scientifically for 50 years? You have an idea. You know there are scientific studies on reincarnation. Does this freak you out? Well, it’s your problem. Science used to be about the unknown, not about getting grants. So, you see, that’s where the fighting in me just gets fired up. But otherwise, I’m relaxed. It’s like, this is very human. This is very human. This happens to everyone one way or another. And we can study it. And if we study it, we can. We can transform ourselves as humans. And also science itself, not just neuroscience. But now I get into telepreaching mode, so I’ll just.

[00:29:19] Paul: Yeah, but that’s okay. I mean, there’s a lot there. Like, what does it matter? Does it. I mean, you know, I think the reason you became interested in neuroscience, and you can correct me if you’re wrong, is because of consciousness, right? And then we start. We get into neuroscience, and then we start studying very particular, nuanced questions that have nothing to do with consciousness, because you can’t study consciousness really, because we have no idea what it means or what it is.

[00:29:47] Alex: Look, it was even less grandiose than that, Paul. I started in neuroscience because I finished my PhD.

PhD. Sorry, my PhD. PhD. No, my physics PhD in physics. And my partner at the time was finishing hers in chemistry. So we had the two body problem. So I flipped a coin and I said, no, I didn’t flip a coin, but I said, like, do I leave? Do I stay? Does she come? Do I wait? Does she wait? And I decided, I’ll wait. And so I looked for a job in Barcelona, and there was this neurobiology lab, and they were offering. So it was. It wasn’t so well planned, actually, I applied. I applied to. I applied to Mattia Louis lab, neurobiology, and Yogi Jagger’s lab, developmental biology. Yes. And Matthia replied and Yogi didn’t. I know, I’ve told this to Yogi, because we were. We were actually neighbors at the CRG. The lab were neighbors. So I could have become the infantry of developmental biology, right? Had Yogi replied. So really, that was it. But then, yes, but then once I started seeing these tiny maggots doing their thing, like, how do they do it? This is fascinating behavior. And then I became interested in other creatures. And then I said, wait a minute. The promise of neuroscientists is always, we study the brain to understand the mind or maybe treat the mind, treat, understand.

[00:31:03] Paul: Is the promise of neuroscience. The actual promise of neuroscience.

[00:31:06] Alex: It’s not happening. So then it’s like, okay, so it makes sense. My physics background, my physics promise. We understand the life, the universe and everything.

[00:31:16] Paul: Yeah. Physicists always think that they are the right ones to study anything.

[00:31:21] Alex: Anything except what matters. You see? It’s like, well, love, life, death, pain. Well, all of that. It’s just applied physics. End times.

No, I used to be like that. I used to come back from university and tell my family, wow, today they told us the secret of the universe. Like, we know, like plain Gordon equation. I mean, this is it. Then you realize it is not. But anyways, neuroscience has a kind of similar vibe a hundred years later, right? It’s like, it’s like, well, we’ll figure it out. All we are, you read it in these great neuroscientists when they write this kind of, I would say, bullshit, popular books, like all we are, it’s in archonic tome. It’s like, come on. I mean, come on, really? The great scientist in you now speaks like, like the most naive philosophy student, right.

Or physicist.

[00:32:09] Paul: Or physicist.

[00:32:10] Alex: So you see, I’m all of those things and none, you know.

[00:32:14] Paul: Right, yeah, but I. I mean, progress is being made on the materialist.

[00:32:20] Alex: Yeah, progress to nowhere. I mean, yes, it’s being made. There’s always progress.

[00:32:24] Paul: What do you mean, nowhere?

[00:32:25] Alex: It’s. It’s. Of course, as Jeff says, fridges work, therefore materialism is true, right?

[00:32:33] Paul: No, yeah, but in the end. But your, your ontological stance might not matter, because you do want a refrigerator. And it doesn’t matter if you’re an endless infinite spirit or a transient mass of flesh that just disappears.

[00:32:49] Alex: That needs a lot of unfolding. Maybe I could agree with you on a kind of one word answer. Yes, but there are many subtleties to talk about that, because the success of technology doesn’t necessarily say that materialism is true. And also, I think what you said, that it doesn’t matter what you believe. I think it matters. Your worldview really matters. And there are worldviews that are. Maybe they’re all wrong, but some are really ugly, and some are really inconsistent with phenomena that we don’t want to look at, and others are. So this needs to be philosophical. Conflict of interests need to be disclosed. I argue not just financial, philosophical, and even temperamental. I’ve realized, like, we are all different. Whatever happened to us. I don’t want to get psychoanalytic here, but if you are betrayed, if you are a happy boy, if you always like playing with toys, if you are more in the clouds, this really shapes how you are and how you will tend to see the world and even be as a scientist, for instance. All of this is in the mix.

[00:33:50] Paul: Can we talk about mind?

I wanted to bring this up earlier because you were speaking earlier about the possibility that mind is outside of brains.

I struggle so with all words.

The meaning of words shifts over time with culture. And so when someone says the word mind, what you could mean operationally is what the brain does. And that is how you define mind.

But you can shift that definition to say, well, mind is.

I’m going to let you fill in the blank, because what do you mean? Like, well, it’s maybe outside the brain, maybe it’s something else, but it’s still the same word, but it can just take on different meanings.

[00:34:36] Alex: Oh, Paul, we need many arguments.

[00:34:37] Paul: Does that make sense?

[00:34:39] Alex: Yes. Language, definitions. Okay. We need to define terms. I agree. But those who insist too much in defining, and they say, what do you mean? I say, what do you mean by what do you mean? And it’s like, of course.

And words are there to show, but also to conceal. Right. Words. Words also hide things that then need to be sought after. Look, we can go back to when the whole thing of modern science began, like when science began 400 years ago. I mean, I like to go back then specifically to Galileo, but you can pick other moments, you know, Galileo 1623, when he published the assayer, you know, this book, it was like a controversy. It was like much like the IIT pseudoscience controversy between Galileo and this Jesuit called Sarsi, whose pseudonym was Sarsi. And they were arguing about these things in the sky, these three objects, like uaps, that they saw 400 years ago and they didn’t know. And some people say it’s just light phenomena in the sky. And other people were saying, no, these are actually physical objects, but because of their understanding of the world. Well, there were strong opinions. Right? So in that book, which is a letter to the pope, actually, Galileo, you know, is very angry about it. You wouldn’t tell because we always taught history of science as if these were kind of super sages who are living. No, no, he was angry as you could be on Twitter, but they didn’t have Twitter. So he wrote this 270 book in Italian. And he wrote it in Italian, by the way, because he had written other books in Latin, right? And the professors were so annoying that he said, forget it, I’m not going to write for this audience anymore. So that’s here’s another mini lesson from Galileo. Anyways, so in this book, Galileo, towards the end, just in passing, that’s the book, by the way, where he, where he says nature is this book whose language is the language of mathematics, which is what we physicists believe when we’re physicists and neurobiologists think it’s in DNA, and that’s the secret of life. And then computer scientists think, you know, and now we believe that the universe is a big simulation. But anyways, I digress. Galileo says, because there’s so much in it, by the way. But another thing that Galileo says, paul, there in that book is, I don’t care what 1000 or 99 people say, they’re like this flock of starlings.

I care about the eagles. Meaning it’s not a matter of opinion, right. It’s a matter of experiment and good reasoning and who’s right. So what we call the scientific method. I don’t think such a thing exists. But that’s a more feyreven. It’s a point that Feyerman would say it’s the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Now, we could speak about Feyerman as well.

Is he life? No, no, no. He died of. I don’t know when he died, but it’s the hundredth anniversary of his birth this year.

[00:37:34] Paul: Oh, he’s as old as my grandmother.

[00:37:36] Alex: Does your grandmother live?

[00:37:38] Paul: She is. My grandfather died at 99 and she made it. She’s still kicking, too.

[00:37:43] Alex: You have good prospects of carrying out this at least 50 more years anyway.

[00:37:52] Paul: Yeah.

[00:37:53] Alex: No, look, mine. No, I’m nothing. I’m not rambling to avoid your really important point, because that’s the crux of everything I believe. So then Galileo says, well, look, we can study. He doesn’t say mind matter, but he says, on the one hand, there are things that we can measure, right? Like movement, and have to do with touch, impact. Like physics is the science of impact in a way. Classical physics, right? So those things we can measure. And what’s more important, he seems to say, well, they seem to be there when I’m. Nothing has to do with death, by the way. Look, I can disappear. I can make this gedanken experiment, or I can just imagine I’m not there. And it seems as if the world outside would still be there. I think there are problems with that. The phenomenologists would disagree, but anyways, and there are other things in the world, like pain and taste, that really depend on my corpo sensibile, right, on my inner feelings about it. And so what Galileo does that’s my reading of the history of science when it started. He makes this split. It’s a strategy. It’s a programmatic split. And he says, look, let’s first study those things that seem to be objective. He’s not using these words. And let’s. And let’s keep. Postpone the subjective. It’s like a forced divorce. You get the car and I get this.

[00:39:14] Paul: Did he actually suggest postponing?

[00:39:16] Alex: No, that’s why I say, that’s more my reading, but because what he’s really said is, well, look, if mathematics is the language of, if we can do experiments, and if those things seem to be out there and others don’t, well, this looks like a perfect plan. And it was a perfect plan, and science thrived. You know, mechanics thrived, and chemistry, and then biology. But then, of course, came psychology, and they said, we’re going to study the psyche, whatever that means. But that was kind of left aside. It’s like we’ve had 400 years of success based on that plan. That’s why I think consciousness, science today is at a crossroads where we could start a new kind of science, which is the science that Galileo left for the second round.

[00:40:05] Paul: I’m with you mostly, and I also am rooting for reductionism. I’m rooting for materialism because it would be so.

So what if consciousness is fundamental? Is that what you have come to look?

[00:40:22] Alex: Favorite I swim the waters often of a community who has that stamped on their t shirt. But at the same time, we need to ask, what do we mean by fundamental? And also what’s then the homework we need to do? What do we need to do? Do we need to explain matter then? That’s the hard problem of matter that we have now.

[00:40:42] Paul: So, yeah, it just reverses it. And it’s the same problem. You have the same problem.

[00:40:48] Alex: Yeah. Maybe it’s just the same thing in a mirror image, or maybe it isn’t. In any case, we haven’t practiced that second way of doing it. So you could say again strategically, even if it’s just the same starting from the other end, and I don’t think it is, let’s try it. Or let us try it. Don’t insult. Don’t, you know, turn down grants. Don’t write pseudoscience letters every time something doesn’t smell like you’re, you know, you’re tiresome. Functionalist physicalism. Right? Like, let’s have some pluralism.

[00:41:20] Paul: Why do you say tiresome?

[00:41:21] Alex: Just let’s have some pluralism, please. Only corn like this. Monotheism of the mind of studying, you know, scientific.

[00:41:31] Paul: Did you say corn?

[00:41:33] Alex: It’s like, you know, it’s like a field where there’s just corn forever. Right? It’s like, can we have. Can we grow some tomatoes, please? And lettuces? I mean, I’m not against corn. I’m just against only corn all the time. That’s not. And that’s the more gracious way of saying it. I can say it more harshly, but it’s like we just want to have a little, you know, a little garden and cultivate other ways of thinking and still be considered respectable scientists. Would you let us. Please. Right.

[00:42:01] Paul: It’s not, would you let us. It’s. Would you fund us?

[00:42:03] Alex: Yes. So let us. Would invite us to the meetings. Let us publish in your journals.

We need funding. Students need to have career options.

Right. That’s pluralism. If we really believe in it, yes.

[00:42:19] Paul: However. Okay, this goes back a little bit to the popularity of anomalies, right? And there’s. I think that there’s a lot of private funding for these things because people are so interested in it, and so maybe that things could be funded privately.

[00:42:35] Alex: Yeah. Go find money somewhere else. Well, that doesn’t look like very inclusive, but I agree there are these options, but who cares?

[00:42:41] Paul: Like it’s inclusive.

[00:42:42] Alex: We care because academia is this castle. And why do you.

[00:42:47] Paul: If you’re rejecting the castle, then don’t try to go to the castle. Right.

[00:42:50] Alex: Yeah, no, but I see what you mean. So some people do. Some people say, fuck it, I’m leaving. But what if some people like to stay? I like to stay. I like to stay in academia. Actually, I am in academia now. I like to have the intellectual freedom to pose my questions as long as I follow their scientific rules. Right.

But then people like you will very kindly invite us to. If you want to look at the world from another ism, just go somewhere else. Like, no, you go. You see, why do I need to. Why do I need to leave? Because I don’t share your ideology. And that’s where things get very heated, you see, because you. And I want to say you. I mean, some people cannot. They cannot even think or conceive, but they cannot stand emotionally. It’s not just mentally. They’re incapable of. Of entertaining other ideas. What a bad way of being a scientist. And they’re incapable of emotionally just bearing with really different radical ways of thinking. Asking the question, even the question. The hard problem, I say, there’s no hard problem, because what I mean is that it’s an ill posed question. If you ask, how does the brain produce consciousness? It’s like one of those journalists who ask you, so how did you, you know, how did you steal the car? It’s like, well, I didn’t steal the car. So your question already, if I try to be a good answerer and I accept the premise hidden in plain sighting, your question, I’m just playing your game. So I’m just saying, well, what if we. What if I’m not saying it is. It has to be different. What if we ask the question differently and William James did it? It’s not like this. Lots of people have. Lots of people have. And james put it in a very elegant way more than 100 years ago. People don’t seem to notice. He says, there’s no doubt that thought, he said, depends on the brain. There’s no doubt that the brain has a key role in thought. You could say emotion, perception, attention, cognition, consciousness, fill in the blank. There’s no doubt. Like, the Egyptians knew that. What a big deal.

[00:44:53] Paul: Yeah. By sticking fingers into people’s heads in the battlefield.

[00:44:56] Alex: The question is, what’s the nature of that function? Right? So we have two big options on the table, but one, we put it under the carpet. It’s like one is productive function, the other one is reductive or permissive function.

[00:45:13] Paul: Let’s talk about the permissive. Yes, but I don’t mean to stop you.

[00:45:16] Alex: No, that’s what we need to talk about, other ways of conceiving this relationship, this difficult relationship between brain and mind.

[00:45:24] Paul: So this is like. Is this equivalent to the filter hypothesis?

[00:45:27] Alex: Well, then you can double click on the second options, and then you can use different metaphors, right? So you can imagine it’s radio transmitting. You can imagine, I like the one where it’s a prism and there’s light that’s refracted. And these are just metaphors. And people rush again to critique the metaphors, but they’re using the computer metaphor, for God’s sake. It’s like we’re all using metaphors at this second level of making these two grand options more concrete. And then you also need to appeal to the empirical data that would support one way or the other way. And also you could invoke what theories, not just metaphors, but what mathematics are there, or what mathematical formulations, or even what. What metaphysics would allow you to be in one camp or the other. The moment we’re just talking about these ideas, I think we’re good, and I think we can now start to do it, but with a lot of resistance. Right? Like every. Look, I review all these books because I love it. And all these books that are written by neuro. By physicalists. Neuroscientists, they always have this section where they stroman integrated information theory or where they mock panpsychism. You know, it’s like this one or two kind of flippant paragraphs.

Why do they need to do that? Like, do they really get it? Or just like the usual way of just diminishing what you don’t like? Is that scientific? Just to make fun of what you don’t like or try to understand it?

[00:46:58] Paul: I know you don’t want to call particular books out or whatever, but I don’t. Does that really. Is that your reading of it or is that.

[00:47:07] Alex: No, they do. They do. They say, oh, they think stones are conscious, for God’s sake. How stupid. Well, it’s like.

[00:47:14] Paul: So I would be prone to do that as well.

[00:47:16] Alex: But how sophisticated do we want to get right beyond that kind of pseudo funny quote, right? Like, come on. The idea that psyche is in nature doesn’t mean that the stone just woke up after a bad night craving for coffee, right?

But they won’t spend more than five minutes writing about it or maybe thinking about it.

The same with the empirical stuff, by the way. Like when you mention all these weird experiments that have to do with what looks like evidence. And again, evidence is not proof, but what looks like evidence of minds beyond brains. They’ll say, like, yeah, you’re speaking about, like, what, ghosts? It’s like, okay, can we get more subtle than that? And have you read the literature? And they haven’t the problem? It’s impossible. Why read it? It’s a waste of time.

[00:48:12] Paul: But again, the problem then is like, what is your definition of mind? Right? Because if you have some effect that happens outside the brain, you could call it mind or you could call it consciousness. You could call it anything you want, right?

But when you call it mind, it’s like you’re saying, well, mind isn’t actually in the brain. Mind is this. But then, I don’t know, maybe what you mean by mind. Sorry.

[00:48:39] Alex: Totally. No, no. And we need to spend a lot of time talking about that, too. And we can go back and read William James. And for those academics, I know them and I also admire what they’re doing, who say, forget about psychology, it’s all attractors. It’s like, well, we can go to the east and read this. They did this mental analysis of what mind is. And if you go to the east, they have an infinite number of distinctions about mind, awareness and all these technical words.

So we can get very precise with that. But let me ask you the other way around, because it’s so funny. And we’re not playing passive aggressive here. I’m enjoying it. But it’s so funny. You say, but please, please explain what mind is, because otherwise, why call it mind? So I would say, please, please explain what matter is. Because if everything is made of matter, could you please tell me what you mean by matter? Because matter used to be, you know, that thing that’s mindless, has no purpose, has no intention. Matter is also externally related, philosophically speaking. It doesn’t care about other pieces of matter. The only way it can communicate is by mechanism, by sending signals that propagate in space.

So matter has all these qualities. Basically, everything we feel we are not is what we say matter is. And it’s an abstraction which, by the way, we physicists realize that what we thought about space, it isn’t kind of like the usual space we tend to think about. It bends what we think about time while it stretches, what we think about energy while it converts into matter. So it’s so funny when people ask, define mind with a card carrying materialist banner here, but they don’t even know what matter is or if it is it. Just whatever the universe is made of, and all the rest is emergence, and we’ll figure it out. That seems to be the recipe.

I would like them to explain it to me. It’s like, look, explain to me what’s the deal with matter? How’s matter doing? What’s the matter with matter?

[00:50:44] Paul: Yeah, I completely agree.

Where do we go from here?

[00:50:49] Alex: Let’s go back to I’m a difficult conversant because I just jump back and forth. So maybe. Let’s see. Maybe the point is that we started with this division, which was strategic, and we just took sides, and then we made it so ontological. So, you know, like, this is the basis. We forgot. We forgot it was just a way, a very convenient way of starting to study nature from the more mindless part.

Physics, mechanics, you know. Yeah, but at some point we arrived to what we are, which are experiencing beings.

[00:51:28] Paul: Okay, so on the one hand, let’s take the ontological materialism stance, right? And then you have the problem, well, how does mind emerge? And then if you take the other stance, that mind or consciousness is quote unquote, fundamental, primary, whatever, then you have the problem. How does matter emerge? And then going back to the permissive brain idea, it’s still like a, let’s say consciousness is quote unquote fundamental, and brains are permissive for subjective awareness.

Man, you have just as hard of a problem figuring out how brains work as you do from the other perspective, which is, like, how does mind occur, emerge from material?

And I have pondered this a little bit, and I think it would be so cool. Like what? Like, what is more fun?

So, as a neuroscientist, it’s more fun to figure out how mind could emerge from material than it is to be given mind and then say, oh, okay, well, there’s just mind there. And the brain is like some sort of awesome filter.

[00:52:41] Alex: We have different understanding of fun.

[00:52:44] Paul: Yeah. Yeah. Well, everyone does, right? It’s subjective to me.

[00:52:46] Alex: It’s so much fun, but it’s not even fun. That’s something.

Well, I was gonna say that’s something Americans say very often. Fun. Fun. I don’t even care if it’s funny. It’s just so interesting. Yeah. And even more than interesting, it’s just so humanely profound.

So humanely profound, right? So, so much at stake.

[00:53:08] Paul: Is there?

[00:53:08] Alex: Well, where do we come from? Where do we go when we die? It sounds like this dream theater song. You know, the speed carries on.

[00:53:17] Paul: But I’ve heard you say this before.

It’s gonna happen either way.

[00:53:21] Alex: It’s gonna happen either way. But that’s the kind of things we care about. We don’t care about where memories are located in a rat brain. We care about where does my wife go if she dies first? Right? What’s the future of my children?

Where are my grandfathers, if they exist at all, why am I having pain? I mean, that’s why science sometimes looks so detached from humanity.

And I get it because I’m a physicist and we love to write on the whiteboard the equation for a particle we may never measure. But at the same time, consciousness studies allows us to tackle, I wouldn’t say answer, but tackle. Start tackling some of these questions, you know, like, that have to do with, can we perceive other realities? And look, doesn’t need to be ghosts. Like, there’s this amazing novel, Flatland, a romance of many dimensions, written 140 years ago.

[00:54:20] Paul: Was it that long ago?

[00:54:23] Alex: And he’s just explaining if we were two dimensional creatures and a sphere would just intersect, we would see this line that’s changing, or a fork. Imagine a fork intersect, and we would see these three dots, and then they would merge into one line, and then they would disappear. So you can think of it mathematically, and these are like the big questions of all times as humans. If science could contribute a little bit to that, it would be much more than fun. It would be like, it would be life changing. This is another thing that perhaps my nd and other experiences have brought to my life. I don’t want to have a Monday to Friday life where I studied some problem, and then a Saturday and Sunday where I just enjoy nature and meditate. I don’t meditate, by the way, but you see what I mean? I would love. No, I don’t. No, I can’t because I fall asleep. I’m really bad.

I’m so hooked up on intensity that when I close my eyes, my back hurts. And if I lay horizontally, I fall asleep. I’m a really bad meditator. Unless you count sleeping as meditators, Shannon. I’m a good one. No, but I’m saying this because we could be studying during the week the very human, not problems, the very human aspects that we love practicing during the weekend. Why does, why do we need to live in this kind of dissociated academic state and everybody can do whatever they want. And people, but one more thing, Paul. People want to know. That’s what I wanted to say before, because I’m going in all these directions.

People crave to know.

They want to ask neuroscientists or any expert who may have a clue what happens when my brain is dying. And what happens if I have this precognitive dream and the fucking thing just happened. Exactly.

[00:56:16] Paul: Of course. But that’s. People like car wrecks, people like the anomalous. Of course they want to know the anomalous because everything else.

[00:56:22] Alex: But they want to know it, not just because it’s cool. Like this program where there’s a haunted house. No, it’s very deep into, it’s related to suffering and it’s very authentic. Right. It’s not a curiosity, it impacts their lives. These are the things that they most care about, their lives. And if only science could provide an answer beyond saying, oh, it’s an illusion, move on. It’s like, well, no, that’s your physicalist ideology. That’s not science. So I’m trying to just, just provide this other voice, this other voice that says, well, we really don’t know. We would like to know. And there’s another option on the table. And by the way, this option, when you evaluate it with all these anomalies, because one anomaly doesn’t do anything, but if you have all these different anomalies coming from different realms, we could talk about them today or another day. Psychedelics, near death. Near death experiences or death and dying processes.

Lucid dreaming, esp.

[00:57:23] Paul: Why are you lumping those altogether?

[00:57:26] Alex: Because I’m saying, yeah, I’m not lumping them as if they were the same thing. I’m just saying these are all different cracks on the wall. And you could.

[00:57:35] Paul: Edges, as you say, edges.

[00:57:37] Alex: And you could fix one and say, no, no, no. Look, the way I explain is we like data that’s like this for those who are not seeing, like a clear rectangular paper. But these anomalies look like that, right? This messed up paper, we don’t know what to do with them. They don’t fit into our rectangular frames. Right, but there are rectangular frames. There’s all these theories. But then you start accumulating data like that and it’s not an anecdote anymore when you have hundreds or thousands of cases and it’s hard to design on them, but you can do it, and they can come from the northeast of the territory, these edges, like people studying near death. But then you can go to psychedelics and as well, what happens to the brain during psychedelics? And what are people seeing? What about the phenomenology? And then you can go to other kind of phenomena that in principle would have nothing to do, you know, lucid dreaming or ESP and so on. And then you realize that all those disconnected groups of anecdotes, which are not anecdotes, they are data.

They all have place in the second model of the brain mind relationship, and they are impossible in the other category.

[00:58:43] Paul: No, I don’t. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s like super interesting. If they are possible in the other.

[00:58:50] Alex: Category, most of them are impossible like that.

[00:58:53] Paul: What do you.

[00:58:53] Alex: Well, like, for instance, that there can be mind when the brain is totally off. Oh, physical.

That could be another definition of physicalism. Right? Like a. More like a shortcut definition. Is that.

[00:59:09] Paul: But, yeah, but, but you could still.

I think it’s super. The I. So I’m not trying to argue with you, but I’m just like grappling with it in my own mind.

You know, let’s say my brain. In my brain and my ear. You’re talking in my ear and I’m.

[00:59:26] Alex: Talking from my mind and we’re not understanding what we’re saying.

[00:59:30] Paul: Right. Because I’m a panpsychist, so my brain plus my ear is a separate.

[00:59:34] Alex: Are you a panpsychist? No.

[00:59:36] Paul: No.

[00:59:36] Alex: You’re joking.

[00:59:37] Paul: No, I’m not, actually, but I’ve come to realize, maybe I don’t know what panpsychism means, but I also think maybe panpsychists don’t know what panpsychism.

[00:59:46] Alex: Let me tell you my take on panpsychism, okay?

[00:59:49] Paul: There’s lots of flavors, apparently.

[00:59:50] Alex: Oh, yeah, like a Starbucks. Yeah, yeah. But what panpsychism is trying to do, I think it’s in a good direction, but it’s in my really humble opinion, because I’m no one. Because you’re saying a boy has no name, you know?

[01:00:05] Paul: Yeah.

[01:00:06] Alex: This idea of saying, well, look, let’s upgrade consciousness to a fundamental property.

If it’s a property. A property of what? Of matter. So, to me, it’s covert physicalism. And I know Philipp Gough doesn’t want to think in this way, but if you say it’s a fundamental property of matter, then you’re just trying to make matter look like what it isn’t by definition. So that’s why I’m not very happy with panpsychism. But they’re flavors, like pan experientialism, a la Alfred North Whitehead. He speaks about this pole, the mental pole. And poles are not substance dualism. I mean, we could call poles poles, they said. Like nature, for Whitehead, is made of events, not of substances. And those events have. They are polar, have, like, you know, like an ellipse. Imagine, like, something that happens, something that happens in the world that gets actualized has a future and a past pole, a mental and a physical pole. And again, you can say that’s dualism, but no, it’s more sophisticated. So I think panpsychism has a possibility. Then there’s idealism. There’s another way of thinking about this. Idealism goes all the way opposite to physicalism and says, really, all there is is mind and then matter. Are some patterns that emerge.

[01:01:27] Paul: Yeah, it’s the same problem.

[01:01:28] Alex: Well, same problem, but it can accommodate empirical data that physicalism can’t. So if we are now wearing our sciences hat, we should care about that. If we’re wearing our philosophical hat, maybe we don’t. And then there are other variants. There’s dual aspect monism. Actually, there are hundreds of them, because Robert Lawrence Kuhn just published this amazing landscape of consciousness and trying to capture mostly everyone alive and some dead people, dead people’s views on you. It’s really nice. It’s like there’s not just two courses to choose, which is physicalism for clever people and dualism for dummies, which is the menu we’ve been served forever. You know, the two alternative fourth choices if we were stupid mice in a cage. No, there are dozens or hundreds of views.

[01:02:16] Paul: You made the. Is it the soul figure in that paper that you’re referring to?

[01:02:20] Alex: Yes, I have. Robert just.

[01:02:22] Paul: Did he ask you to do that, or did you have that?

[01:02:25] Alex: Well, I love doing figures. I spend a lot of time visualizing how things could look like. And he shared with me the draft before it was published, and I was so excited, so I read it. It’s what, 140? So it’s a paper who’s, like more than 100 pages long?

And I gave him.

[01:02:42] Paul: Is it.

[01:02:42] Alex: Yes.

[01:02:43] Paul: No. When you read it.

[01:02:44] Alex: Well, it’s published as a scientific paper.

It’s two columns. I mean, maybe if it’s one column, it’s 140 pages, but it’s tremendously long.

Anyways, I gave him some advice on kind of more minority reports, views that maybe wasn’t there or so. And then I said, this is fantastic, and it’s so huge that it would be nice to have it all visually in one image. And so he said, can you help with that? And I did. So that’s a story. But.

[01:03:17] Paul: I see. Yeah, but it’s basically a list of the various theories of consciousness, from physicalism to idealism.

[01:03:25] Alex: Yeah, there’s quantum stuff. You know, the quantum stuff, it doesn’t get. It doesn’t get venue unless you go to Tucson. You see, it’s like, no quantum.

[01:03:33] Paul: I know.

[01:03:34] Alex: Why not quantum. Because you want to be, you know, you want to. You want to live in the 19th century neuroscience. And I get it. It’s. I’m not saying we should all believe that microtubules do miracles, but, you see, quantum. No, please. Panpsychism. No. Stones don’t like coffee. No, please. Idealism, well, it’s the same thing upside down. It’s like. No, at least Robert captured all this pluralism, all this plurality of approaches, and they’re on the table. They’re on the table.

[01:04:07] Paul: Well, I can tell you. Why not quantum?

[01:04:10] Alex: Why not?

[01:04:10] Paul: I mean, sure. Why? Why not? Because you’re trying to explain something you don’t understand with something you don’t understand. I mean, this is. Happens all the time, right?

[01:04:18] Alex: You mean, like, with, like, dark matter? Because for some things we allow it, and for others we don’t. It’s so easy. Again, Paul, and I appreciate what you’re saying. It’s so easy to say. Oh, when I say, by the way, when I say not. When you say not quantum or when I say not quantum, I mean, why don’t they give a chair on the. On the table for those who want.

[01:04:36] Paul: They do.

[01:04:37] Alex: Well.

[01:04:38] Paul: Well, they made the conference, like, half of the conference makeup.

[01:04:42] Alex: They had to make their own conference, as I understand. Right. So that they could scale.

[01:04:45] Paul: And they’ve been running it for years.

[01:04:46] Alex: They could run their own renegade. Their own renegade conference. Because the citadel, the mainstream, the orthodoxy would not let a. Let them in their parties. Right.

[01:04:58] Paul: Who’s the orthodoxy?

[01:04:59] Alex: Look, well, we know them.

[01:05:07] Paul: You want to cut this out?

[01:05:07] Alex: No, I don’t want to cut anything out. No, we know them. We know them. It’s just like, why do we make fun of quantum?

And then we say, it’s so complicated and there’s so many cliche answers. It’s like explaining one unknown with another one, one mystery with another one. Well, but we allow physicists to say that 90 plus percent of the universe is dark energy and dark matter we don’t know about. What do you mean?

[01:05:31] Paul: We allow them to say it. They just say it.

[01:05:34] Alex: And we’re happy and we venerate them. But then somebody comes and says something similar when it comes to consciousness, and we just make fun of them and say, you know, come on, just go to your own conference and create your own journal. This is preposterous.

[01:05:46] Paul: We don’t say that. They just.

[01:05:47] Alex: We don’t.

[01:05:48] Paul: They just do it.

[01:05:48] Alex: I don’t.

[01:05:49] Paul: I don’t say it. I don’t know who they is. I don’t know who we are.

[01:05:52] Alex: Yeah, it sounds conspiratorial. You’re right. You’re right. It sounds conspiratorial.

[01:05:55] Paul: I have. So I’m just coming off. I got in a huge argument with one of my best friends.

I may have lost him because he’s a. He is a conspiracy theorist writ large. And I question, you know, those beliefs, and it’s very offensive to him.

[01:06:12] Alex: What specific conspiracy theory? Because this is a large umbrella. It would be like saying non physicalist stuff. What? What?

[01:06:20] Paul: Yeah, well, you know that the best predictor of believing in a conspiracy theory is that you believe in another conspiracy theory. Right. So he’s. 911 is an inside job. Fauci, the CDA director is evil.

Covid is an inside job. You know, it’s just. You name it.

[01:06:41] Alex: It’s like he knows that he knows the truth. He knows and you know the truth. So both. Both of you.

[01:06:47] Paul: I don’t.

[01:06:48] Alex: You have a problem if that’s the case?

[01:06:50] Paul: No, I tell him that he does not know the truth.

[01:06:52] Alex: And do you tell. And do you tell him that you don’t know the truth?

[01:06:56] Paul: Yeah.

[01:06:56] Alex: All right, good. So that’s good, then.

[01:06:58] Paul: That just makes him angry because he knows the truth.

[01:07:00] Alex: He knows the truth. Yeah, yeah, I see. I see.

[01:07:02] Paul: Anyway, let’s sidetrack.

[01:07:05] Alex: No, but look, the pseudoscience. The next thing they will say about one of these theories is that it’s a conspiracy theory.

The rationality is gone.

The moment we’re in that terrain where we’re just insulting each other with phrases like that, like even the word conspiracy theory, I think historically, and I will sound like there’s a conspiracy theorist, but I think historically, it was created so that you could inject misinformation on something so that they wouldn’t talk about it, because otherwise that would be. Isn’t it. Wasn’t it the CIA or some american?

[01:07:42] Paul: I think the CIA.

[01:07:43] Alex: Right. This is not a term. It is not a conspiracy theory. That the conspiracy theories were originally created so that you would call a conspiracy theory on something so that people wouldn’t think about it. How wonderful. I mean, it’s interesting sociologically that that’s an artifact, you know, an instrument, but think it.

[01:08:00] Paul: But. So, thinking of your own evolution of thought, right? Do you ever flirt with materialism again, or is it just gone?

[01:08:06] Alex: What a lovely question.

I do. I do.

It’s not gone because maybe because of what we’re saying about conspiracy theories. Because if I start believing that what I reject, what’s a risk is wrong, so that what I’m embracing me now is right, this kind of certainty can become the very same problem. Right? Yes.

[01:08:32] Paul: Yep.

[01:08:33] Alex: Yes. And another way I like to think about it differently is, for instance, in physics, we learned that when Einstein came along, Newton’s app. When Einstein came along and his theories. Well, Newton’s apples, if I can put it this way, they continue to fall in the same way. Right? So rather than reductionism, reducing, or, like, one party fights another one and see who wins, there’s this idea in physics which is not often talked too much about, which is expansion and unification. So perhaps materialism has a place in a grander, more unified theory of matter and mind.

[01:09:16] Paul: Oh, this is a modest point of view. I’m sort of honest with poles, I think is where I am these days.

[01:09:24] Alex: I don’t know where you are, so you sound like a Whiteheadian, as I was saying, like, the polarity. You see, I just click all the boxes. I want to be a monist. I want to be a kind of upgraded dualist and maybe a trinitarian, because there’s something about father, son, and holy spirit that if you. No, if you get rid of the religious allergy. It’s very deep theologically. Right.

[01:09:44] Paul: But anyways, it’s a little masculine.

[01:09:50] Alex: Sure, sure. I mean, we all know these histories, but it doesn’t mean there are no deep kernels of insight. I would not say truth about it. Yes. So, yes, it’s a great question. I sometimes think, well, but what if. What if it’s. What if it’s really only in the brain, like some of these phenomena?

[01:10:11] Paul: But isn’t that an awesome thought also? Yes.

[01:10:14] Alex: Yes.

[01:10:14] Paul: Like, to me, that’s like. It would be astounding if it was.

[01:10:18] Alex: But you see, it would be astounding if that’s where the evidence leads us. But I think it’s so sad if that’s where you begin with your presumptions.

[01:10:28] Paul: Yeah.

[01:10:29] Alex: And you’ll never see anything else because that’s your starting point. It would be fantastic as an end point, but as a starting point, it doesn’t turn me on so much.

[01:10:39] Paul: Okay, here’s a question for you that I often feel like a feather blown in the wind, right? And, oh, here’s an idea. Oh, that’s pretty shiny new object. There’s lots of shiny objects. And then I think, man, a lot of the successful scientists have a stance, have a view, have a staunch perspective that they’re coming from, and they actually are productive. And I’m a feather blowing in the wind, and I can’t be productive as a scientist, so maybe I shouldn’t be a scientist. Do you, you know, just react to that thought? Because you seem like a feather in the wind as well.

[01:11:19] Alex: Yeah, I’m worse than that. I’m just like some dusty particles just blown everywhere.

[01:11:23] Paul: Okay, maybe, Paul, I don’t you out metaphor me, man.

[01:11:30] Alex: Maybe I don’t need to be so productive. I just want to be more permissive.

[01:11:34] Paul: We have tenure.

[01:11:35] Alex: No, but I mean, you know, productive, permissive brain. Maybe I don’t need to be productive.

Maybe because I have tenure. No, look, this goes back again to pluralism. I think there’s room from maybe not room for everyone, but we should have some diversity. You know, all these diversity politics. Can we take it seriously and also apply it to science beyond the color of your skin and your gender, also when it comes to ideas. So that’s why it’s important to also study the history of science, because, sure, you need to have a bulk who shuts up and calculates and who just, you know, digs hard, creates new tools, finds more mechanisms, but, like, in any distribution, you also need to have these tales of people who are like this, you know? Yeah. These feathers blown in the wind. They look like a bit nut. And of course it’s just one genius out of a million crazy people.

Meaning one that actually makes it. Yes.

So we need to have that too. We need to have a little bit of space for air to come in and out while everyone else is just hunting their next brain mechanism.

So I don’t need to. That’s why I was saying I don’t need to critique them so much as I used to do necessarily. Because they have a place. As long as. No, I mean, as long as I have a place.

I used to be more vehement. Like, for instance, every. Let me say something a bit provocative. Every talk that had the word plays a role in. I wouldn’t go like I’m.

Plays X plays a role in.

[01:13:16] Paul: Yeah.

[01:13:17] Alex: Like, I’m sick of this. I just can’t do it anymore because nothing. Well, it means something, but I can’t do it. I can do another necessity sufficiency talk where people think they’ve explained. It’s like, yes, biology is infinitely complex. Sure. There are an infinite number of parts that will play a role in an infinite number of holes. Sure. So, you know, I used to be more like aggressive about it. I now say, nice. Just go ahead and do your thing.

[01:13:46] Paul: That’s a better way. That’s a better way.

[01:13:48] Alex: But I also want respect.

I want to be able to do my thing but not my thing in a tent. I. Out there far away from the citadel of orthodoxy. That’s not the kind of respect I’m talking about, you see.

[01:14:02] Paul: Yeah. But you have to assume orthodoxy then. I mean. Yeah. Anyway. Do you care about your legacy?

[01:14:09] Alex: Oh, no, no.

[01:14:11] Paul: So I wouldn’t imagine you do. But I think a lot of. A lot of successful, let’s say, orthodoxy scientists are and, you know them are mostly concerned with their legacy and are productive.

[01:14:26] Alex: I think my legacy are my two daughters, Paul.

[01:14:30] Paul: Okay. I mean, your scientific legacy. I mean, that’s very nice of you to say.

[01:14:33] Alex: No, no. But I’m making this point because if you’re a father and you exercise as such that’s really the most amazing thing to imagine in the future. Now, of course I like my thinking to be at least read if not understood and hopefully remembered. But so far I don’t have my own theory. This is another strategic. No, this is another strategic realization I’ve had.

I refrain from committing first because I don’t have my own thing. Right. Yeah. It makes my life. I don’t have my book to sell I don’t have my triple loop double period theory of metacognition that gives rise to consciousness. Nor I belong to any camp. I don’t belong to any camp, really. So this gives. But not everybody can be like me. That would be horrible, right? We also need devotees of global neuronal workspace, but we need also people that can be in the interstices and can just stand up and say, the emperor has no clothes or the clothes have no emperor. And if we kill those people, then the field is doomed. And, you know, that sounds too grandiose. So that’s really the only job so far that I aspire to have, because I know the moment I have my own theory, I need to promote it.

[01:15:59] Paul: I know I need to defend it.

[01:16:02] Alex: I need to create a school of thought legacy. I need to create a progeny. And so it’s all about that. And again, I appreciate people do their own, but I don’t want this to happen because I want to be very flexible. You see, another metaphor. Like my parents, they just bought this house for the summers, and we would go there all the time, but some people don’t buy a house. They just pick every summer where they want to travel. So I feel like that, as a scientist.

If I now subscribe to pansikism, then maybe I cannot hang out with idealists in a deep way because I’m kind of betraying my own little cult. So it’s like I’m a one man’s cult, and that gives me both kind of insane and sane, and it’s fantastic.

[01:16:51] Paul: Don’t drink the kool aid, man.

All right, so I don’t know. We have 20.

[01:16:58] Alex: We lost it. We lost it.

[01:16:59] Paul: We lost.

I want to ask you. I have specific questions to ask. What do you think about flies these days? Studying flies for nursing fruit flies. Fruit flies, yeah.

[01:17:10] Alex: Oh, it brings me fond memories. I love those creatures.

When we go on holiday and we come back and there’s fruit rotten in our rubbish can, my wife freaks out and I look at those maggots.

[01:17:26] Paul: They’re beautiful.

[01:17:26] Alex: No, more, seriously, it’s a period of my life that I am grateful for because that allowed me to transition from pen and paper, and the only thing I care is about general principles to. Well, here you have this humble maggot, and you can make no sense as to how it is finding a banana. And also, it was a time where I did my first experiments for the first time, and I was introduced to biology. I’m very grateful to Matthias Louis for hiring me in his lab. In Barcelona and for the times I spent at Dianilla Farm, the Disneyland of fruit flies, remote controlling these little creatures.

It’s just that at some point, I couldn’t imagine, like, decades of my life devoted to your factory system, of the 13 star larvae. But again, I’m happy people continue to work on it.

I just want to understand if there’s something like a jackpot. When people say, well, we’re studying the brain because we’ll understand the human mind.

[01:18:33] Paul: You want to wait. You want to understand if there is something like a jackpot?

[01:18:37] Alex: Yeah, it’s such a great promise.

It’s like the promise we tell students, right? Or I ask them when I teach the masters of neuroscience, and I ask them, well, why are you studying neuroscience? And they say, well, perhaps I want to heal some of these degenerative diseases, or I want to understand how the mind works, how the brain works.

Well, if true, I also want to understand that. And the fruit flies, the mice, even mice. I studied mice for a while when I was at Ricosta’s lab.

They’re all great, but I rather learn something about terminal lucidity, like when all people who don’t remember anything 24 hours before they die, their minds become lucidly aware of everything that’s going on, and then they die. I rather poke into that mystery than figure out another pathway for learning or for, you know, for sensory processing. And I don’t say this sarcastically. I just say it very straightforwardly.

[01:19:47] Paul: All right, two more topics, if you’re game for it.

[01:19:49] Alex: Yes.

[01:19:50] Paul: One.

So this podcast is supposed to be about artificial and natural intelligence, and they’re.

I think the tagline is where AI and neuroscience converge. Or I need to change the tagline. Anyway, have your thoughts about intelligence and or artificial intelligence changed with your changing views of consciousness? Like, do you understand intelligence differently?

[01:20:16] Alex: Yeah, I recently read the singularity is nearer.

[01:20:21] Paul: Well, that’s going to be the second topic, so let’s just merge them, I guess.

Ray Kurzweil, is it called the singularity is near? Is that the.

[01:20:31] Alex: I read it a long time ago. That’s the sequel.

[01:20:34] Paul: Oh. So I have not read.

[01:20:35] Alex: It’s closer. It’s closer.

[01:20:36] Paul: So the exponential graphs are just, like, higher now?

[01:20:38] Alex: Sure, sure. And it makes sense as I wrote a review. I hope it’s going to be published. And as I write there, nearer is a different kind of near when we’re talking about exponential change. Okay, so, yeah, there’s room for a new book.

I was freaked out when I read this book.

[01:20:57] Paul: Oh, really? It affected you?

So did you read, did you read the original back? I don’t know when the original was published.

[01:21:04] Alex: I hadn’t, but I didn’t read it all. But I checked it on the occasion of reading the singularities nearer.

[01:21:11] Paul: Yeah.

[01:21:12] Alex: And I mean, it’s convincing. No, it’s not convincing. Or if it is, if it is convincing, it’s convincing as of a nightmare. I don’t want to have.

[01:21:24] Paul: What is the. Explain the premise, please, for the audience.

[01:21:27] Alex: I want to be fair with his work.

So, yes, there’s a trend that makes technology cheaper and faster. So his famous, you know, exponential curve.

[01:21:42] Paul: He’s been a thousand exponential curves in the first book.

[01:21:46] Alex: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he has this one like kind of the master exponential curve, which is the price per adjusted dollar, and then he’s been updating it since 1930 something, although he says he could go back to the 18th, the 19th century. Anyways, the 18th something. And sure. Tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk.

[01:22:07] Paul: But then, whoosh.

[01:22:08] Alex: Well, no, that’s already exponential. I mean, if it’s exponential. Yes, yes. All right. So there you have his technological economic truth. In a way, there’s this trend. One could question whether this is going to end because resources are finite in this planet. So that could be another critique. One would. But what I’m most worried about is we were speaking at the beginning of this conversation about all these layers.

You can be totally deluded by what technology can do.

That’s fine. But I think if we go, if we skip a lot of steps, we chimed his book, because it’s a long book and we go to. What matters to me the most is that he’s taking another ism, using secularism in a techno religious way. And it’s freaking scary.

[01:23:04] Paul: Can you unfold that?

[01:23:06] Alex: Yes. So not only science became equated with materialism, I don’t want to beat that horse or the terminal horse here of materialism, but also, but also if you wanted to be a scientist, apart from tattooing yourself, I’m a materialist, you also have to say, I’m an atheist. Or, you know, like religion has no place in here. So it’s like this idea of secularism. At last we can be secular. At last we don’t need to rely, we can totally reject religion. We’re over with this. We just left it behind.

But if you read Kurzweil and you for a moment forget that he’s using all this techno language, it’s like a new religion. It’s religion. It’s like he’s promising redemption, liberation from the flesh, the apocalypse, the prophecy.

[01:24:03] Paul: We’re everywhere at all times.

[01:24:04] Alex: It’s absolutely religious. And I have nothing against religion, but if you’re doing that, say it. Don’t pretend it’s techno science plus. And that’s the other thing. I really spooked about it. The future, he says, is inevitable. But not only inevitable as desirable, because one thing is to say, there’s an asteroid coming. It’s inevitable. And you could still say, no, we’ll find a way to divert it. But it’s, like, inevitable. Another thing to say is like, please, asteroid, come, you must. We want it. So he seems he sees kind of a moral virtue in wanting the singularity. Basically, our merging with machines, basically our ceasing to be human, to become that other thing that we cannot even imagine. But that, to me, sounds like invitation for humanity to suicide. It’s like, you know, let’s merge with these machines. Let’s have kind of sex with them in this metaphorical way. Well, metaphorical and literal, because there’s some passages there. He says, no, we’ll just. You’ll keep the memories of your loved ones. Then we will just take some DNA of them, and they will create these, you know, these bots, and they will be identical. You could not tell the difference, which has many philosophical problems there, like, the fact that I cannot tell the difference doesn’t mean it’s my deceased wife, right? Like, come on, are we sick? And then he said, no, we’ll be able to have sex with our deceased people, and we wouldn’t tell the difference. So that’s really spooky. He says, we’ll replace our blood with all these nano machines.

And it’s like, there’s a disgust for nature and her limits. This disgust.

[01:25:46] Paul: I mean, but he’s talking about. He’s projecting. He’s predicting what he sees as inevitable. Right? It’s not like he is.

[01:25:54] Alex: No, both. He said, it’s a moral imperative to realize that. Yes. And that was like when I read that. It’s like, oh, no, that’s what. What? The cult. I’m not saying he’s that, like, disclaimer, but that’s kind of what the cult leader would say. The entire cult. Like, this is our destiny. It’s like, literally, as you would. You would not tell a difference between that technobubble, it’s Christianity, just rehashed into techno scientific progress narrative, leading us to. I would say leading us to the end of humanity. Now, you could ask, what’s the alternative? Because maybe it’s going to happen. I hope it doesn’t.

I don’t want to come back to a world where there’s no electricity. I’m not advocating for that. It’s. Again, it’s the same old thing as, like, when I was critiquing materialism. So you’re saying we should stop doing science altogether? No, I’m trying to imagine the alternative. Maybe the alternative is more spiritual, but just saying it as opposed to pretending it is not. It’s more evolution of consciousness. It’s more working out the latent powers we have or just accepting that we are mortal and we will die, as opposed to promising that we will escape. He uses these phrases. They’re so funny.

Longevity, escape velocity. I wonder if we will reach bullshit escape velocity at some point. So we’ll get so, so old and so healthy, and we’ll get all these prosthetics outside and inside. We’ll upload whatever that means, and we’ll.

[01:27:26] Paul: Be orgasming all the time.

[01:27:29] Alex: Look, if that happens, it’s going to be the end. Can you imagine all. It’s like idiocracy movie, right? Everybody having just orgasms through neuralink and not bothering to just wake up from bed.

[01:27:41] Paul: Press the lever. Press the lever.

[01:27:43] Alex: Press the lever. Yeah, yeah. You can relate. You can relate to basal ganglias, like.

No, look, it’s happening in a way. It is happening, but that’s why we need some humanistic common sense here. Do we want it to happen? Or maybe you can choose to go that way and maybe others, we can choose another way. Don’t force it upon us as the only virtuous thing to do. So, yeah, I think it’s a very important book. Not so much because I agree, of course, but because we need to talk about those things and not just wait until they happen. And we realize that. Yeah.

And in any case, philosophically, this idea of uploading our consciousnesses to machines, I mean, you go first, right? Like, what does that mean? What does that mean?

It’s also fascinating. It’s dualistic in a strange way, because it’s like there’s the body, which we will fix with machines. It’s like hype squared. There’s the nanotechnology and the AI hype square, but at the same time, there’s something spirit like next to the body, which is your consciousness, which can be copied and uploaded somewhere as if kind of this, as if bits were sold now. Right?

It’s a strange mix. It’s a strange mix.

[01:29:04] Paul: I don’t understand it either. But you know, the interesting thing is there are very smart people who believe these things and who are working on them.

[01:29:13] Alex: Yeah, I want to meet wise people, not smart people anymore.

[01:29:16] Paul: Oh, see? Thanks, Alex. Good talking to you. Good catching up.

[01:29:21] Alex: Yes, let’s do it again. If you want.