What is consciousness?
In the 21st century, as scientists build an intricate understanding of the nature of the world around us, there is an elephant in the room. Today we’re still grappling with the origin of consciousness. Neuroscientists have painstakingly mapped the brain, yet have been unable to isolate a source of consciousness. So where does it come from?
Described as ‘the hard problem’, Stefan and I discuss ancient accounts of consciousness and how they could supplement modern neuroscientific studies. We then explore the colliding course of the human mind with quantum physics and the very nature of the universe.
Here’s the full transcript of this podcast episode:
Steven: [0:00:03] Hey, Stefan, how are you, man?
Stefan: [0:00:04] I’m good. Just woke up to a beautiful sunrise here on the Central Coast. It’s getting into winter, but we’ve still got a few nice last days of summer, which is pretty sweet. How are you doing?
Steven: [0:00:15] Yeah, it’s been pretty warm. But next week is the winter solstice, so we’re kind of approaching the shortest day of the year, and they say that’s when go into the process of renewal and new beginnings. So that’s exciting. We’ve been working on a lot of different topics and projects for HOP, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. I’ve just been thinking about how much has happened in the last six months to a year. It’s just mind-boggling to think what will happen next.
Stefan: [0:00:51] Yeah, for sure. That’s my biggest problem as well. I buy books, books just arrive at my door nonstop and I don’t get the chance to read them because I either get too lazy or do other things. But yeah, it’s an exciting time. And today, we’re going to be chatting about consciousness and just going over the strangeness of it, and the fact that there’s not a real definition of consciousness in itself.
Steven: [0:01:19] Consciousness is a topic that I came on to probably pretty recently, but it’s a very old one in terms of how people have been thinking about it. We’ve actually been grappling with this topic for a while, we tried to record on this and then we had a recording issue. It’s a difficult one to overarch. It’s one we’re going to be talking about a lot, we’ll becoming at it from a lot of different angles. But the purpose of this show is to try and give people an overarching idea of how we understand consciousness and what the actual problem is, and a lot of the different ways that people are trying to explain it.
Stefan [0:01:58] Definitely. I think David Chalmers, who’s one of the leading researchers looking into consciousness coined the phrase, ‘the hard problem of consciousness’, which is, how do we have a subjective view on the world and where does that arise? We can explain what he calls ‘the easy problem’, which is reactions and instincts and things like that, that all animals have. But then ‘the hard problem’ becomes trying to explain the subjective nature of our consciousness and our reality. We only view the world from our own perspective, and no one can explain where that comes from.
It’s a big topic because the more that we think about it, the more it’s hard to not think about. It’s a pretty strange concept when you start thinking deeply.
Steven: [0:02:49] It is definitely strange. I remember probably the first person that brought this onto my radar was Eckhart Tolle, he’s someone like a modern-day philosopher that has really talked about how the mind has an essence that really doesn’t relate to the physical brain. When we think about the human body, once you strip away the skin, the bones, and then the brain, and there is still something there, if you break it down to states of consciousness, whether it’s being calm or dreaming. When you are interacting in the real world, there is something driving it and there’s something still there, even when you take all of that away. And what is that?
Consciousness is an underlying factor that seems to be associated, but that’s not how we’ve really looked at it, that’s not how I thought of it until I began to see people talking about it in this manner. And a lot of ancient philosophies have looked at this for a very long time and explained it in different ways.
Stefan: [0:03:56] Definitely. And I think there’s a lot of scientists trying to explain consciousness, but science itself is objective, and consciousness can only be subjective. So it’s very difficult to bridge that gap. And we may never get there, but it’s really interesting, looking at ancient ideas about consciousness and, now, modern ideas and there’s kind of this strange melding of the two, that it’s kind of halfway between science and superstition in a bizarre way.
Steven: [0:04:30] Going back to David Chalmers the philosopher, he’s really kind of looked at this from a broad arching way, which is why that hard problem, and he really sums it up very well. He says we don’t have a scientific definition for consciousness when you really boil it down. Some people will say we do but if you really look at it, there isn’t any hard explanation exactly what consciousness is, and that’s a problem.
And the way he talks and writes about it is quite interesting because it explains the progression of science as well. Because if you think about 20th century science, we spent a lot of time developing techniques and technologies to understand the material world –chemistry, biology, and physics and how these things interact, and understanding it; if we take the human body, for instance, different organ systems and how they release certain hormones and control certain processes. But in reality, all of these things work together, and as a human, we interact with our environment.
But then the idea that we explain something like consciousness, which is this presence, or ability of the brain – that’s what a material scientific view would look at, that it’s a consequence of the brain, but there are other explanations. And this hard problem of ‘we can’t explain it in a scientific way’ and, like you said, maybe we never will.
Stefan: [0:06:09] I’ve found that really interesting, looking at the kind of reductionist view on consciousness that if you can pick apart the brain and look at each individual piece, then suddenly, you’ll find the exact aspect of it that gives rise to consciousness. But the fact that that hasn’t been found yet, and may never be found within the brain, starts getting you thinking down the lines of, “maybe we’re looking in the wrong place”, or although the brain is a huge function of consciousness, maybe there’s other aspects to it that we’ve kind of missed or looked past or forgotten about.
Steven: [0:06:48] Yeah. And in our approach to this, we’ll look at what scientists, neuroscientists, for instance, have done in order to explain the problem. But it does go back to what people thought about this a long time ago. Descartes was probably one of the first philosophers to really talk about this in a way. He said, “I think, therefore, I am”. So what he basically is saying is that the thought is potentially underlying and to have consciousness is actually the essence of a person rather than the physical body.
Stefan: [0:07:30] The fact that you can think, at all, means that there’s something more going on. You see your reflection in the mirror and it’s not just a reflection, there’s something else that is happening there. He’s really interesting because he really dived into the idea that internal dialogues and inquiry into yourself was fundamental in all aspects of life, whether it be warfare or keeping societies on track. When things start going wrong was when he believed that it was a problem with the mind rather than a physical problem.
There’s a nice explanation by a man called Thomas Nagel, who wrote “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” which I found really interesting, because his explanation of consciousness is, if it’s like something to be a bat at all, that is consciousness. So if you or I would just switch places with a bat, within that system of a bat, within that organism, it would be like something. The lights wouldn’t just turn out and we wouldn’t just become a machine without thought. We would still be something, which I find a really nice description of it because that something is the thing that we can’t explain, but we know it’s there.
Steven: [0:08:56] Interesting too with the bat example is, think of how we react with our environment – so our brain takes all of our sensory inputs and then interprets it to how we see the world. So for instance, we see light as the yellow color or spectrum, but the full electromagnetic spectrum and color scheme is there but we don’t see it because our brain doesn’t interpret it or our eyes don’t interpret it that way. And bats, for instance, see the world in sonar so their interpretation of all the consciousness is taking a lot of different types of information from the environment and they see things in a different way. So basically, what he’s saying there is that there’s still something there they are interpreting, and what is that? That’s the whole ‘hard problem’.
Descartes was a philosopher, but he was the first person to really try to present things… we call it scientific because we want things explainable rather than being more kind of describing things in myths and these kinds of ways of talking about concepts. But he was trying to bring things to a physical understanding. He tried to explain consciousness as coming from the pineal gland, which is really interesting. We covered that in our episode on that.
Stefan: [0:10:28] What did he call it? The seat of the soul?
Steven: [0:10:30] The seat of the soul, yeah. So he thought that it came from that area. We’re only really just beginning to unlock the pineal gland and there’s a long article and series on our website about that and an episode on it. But there’s a lot more about the brain and pineal gland that potentially says that there could be some kind of tapping into a field of conscious or a realm, it’s hard to say, right?
Stefan: [0:11:05] Yeah, it’s hard. We’re limited by the kind of vocabulary that’s been assigned to these things where consciousness is in itself, as we’ve seen, it’s inexplicable, in a way. But that idea of that unified field or that ocean of pure consciousness is something that is talked about in ancient Buddhist philosophies and Hinduism, even as far back as ancient Egypt and beyond. It’s hard once you go before written writing because all that’s left is stories and myths and legends. So it’s hard to sift through to get an idea of what these people really believed in.
But the ancient thought that consciousness itself is this field, almost like a huge iCloud, that every single conscious being on the planet draws its consciousness from this huge field that’s sort of everywhere. It’s just a way of the universe seeing itself from multiple different perspectives, rather than our idea of coming into existence and dying and everything turning off. It’s more of a flow and this endless pool of energy that comes and goes. It’s something very different to what most people think about in the West, but this was like the overarching theory of consciousness for thousands of years before modern civilization rose.
Steven: [0:12:40] There’s a lot of concepts in defining consciousness that we don’t actually really think of being consciousness per se, for instance, dreams versus reality. So when you dream, what are you experiencing? Is it just your brain playing tricks on you or are you experiencing some kind of input from a certain place or whatever that maybe? The unconscious versus conscious brain, that’s something that psychological sciences have confirmed. We know that people compute things unconsciously. So what is that unconscious part? There seems to be two aspects of the mind, so disconnecting the brain and mind, that discuss or take input and then result in our actions, and thoughts, and feelings.
The Romans and Greeks, they were all very focused on dreams. If their wives or themselves had certain dreams, it would be very, very important to them as to how that would manifest into the world. We don’t really talk about that, but the psychological sciences do. Freud was big into this – how the subconscious guards our life and how people are affected by that. But it’s talking about this unknown part of us that is doing something. You talk about energies – we can measure this in brain frequencies and brain waves, and we know that certain frequencies and environmental factors can change the brain that way. So it’s like a field that we’re participating in.
What’s interesting as well is, the Mayans, for instance, they talked about the levels of consciousness and how the earth will go through different frequencies of universal energy. And we do this now, we’ve detected them, we know we have an electromagnetic field, we know that we take energies from other planets, and you can think of it straight up from gravity, but there are other forces going on too. But they said that we will go through different levels of consciousness, and they described it in these different cycles that you would experience different levels of consciousness as we go through them.
And it kind of relates to maybe, you could say, there’s frequencies of music that have different wavelengths of energies coming in from the universe affects our minds. And we know that happens now. And so it gives a really funny perspective as to what consciousness is. Are we interacting, like the Buddhists or Hindus perspective says, in a universal field? They talk about a singularity of consciousness or one consciousness. A lot of the scientific understanding is walking us further and further toward this idea that we are potentially participating in this.
Stefan: [0:16:02] I find it fascinating, looking back to old cultures’ beliefs, because I find that there’s so much thought that has gone into these ideas, and it’s been built upon so many different generations of people thinking about this. And I feel like when you are living a life before cities, and before electricity, and all that sort of thing, these questions become a lot more fundamental. Because you’re watching the stars each night, you’re looking at the moon as it goes through its phases, your mind is open to the fact that there is a lot more going on, that we may be missing, or that we might not even think about.
I feel like since before doing the Human Origin Project, I would never really think about this sort of thing. But it’s interesting how it’s with you. You’re conscious every day of your life and it’s hard now thinking back to a time that I didn’t really acknowledge that. But now, the fact that no one can explain it is making me even more interested, because it’s like, “what’s happening? where does it come from? ” It’s really interesting having these conversations because everyone’s got their own idea about it and it’s quite fascinating.
Steven: [0:17:19] Absolutely. And you track how neuroscientists and the purely method-based perspective, which scientific research is set in that perspective and you really look at how neuroscientists have tried to break the brain down. And this is a really recent thing – it’s the last couple of decades that we’ve been able to understand the brain enough to be able to break it down into functional parts and areas that operate for different areas. The frontal lobe is very important for high human thought, and the brain cells are important for much deeper things like breathing and heart rate and these very fundamental processes. You can break the brain down into these areas, but when you manipulate the brain or if the brain is interrupted, we haven’t been able to find a place that “oh, this is the consciousness area”.
You take the spinal cord, there’s some of the highest concentrations of neurons, so scientists thought if you find the part that’s mostly [inaudible 0:18:33], then that should be the area where consciousness can be. But people who are paralyzed they are still fully conscious. People who have their cerebellum cut have balance issues and they perceive things a bit differently, but they are still very much conscious. The cerebellum is a huge bundle of neurons and axons that help us to make complex movements like a tennis serve, but it doesn’t generate consciousness. We haven’t found a part of the brain that does.
We’ve looked at the corpus callosum, which is the bridge between the left and right hemisphere. There’s other parts – the claustrum, for instance, (which is the home of the gray matter and the outer surface), the cerebral cortex, all of these parts, they’re really not explaining where consciousness is coming from.
Stefan: [0:19:35] It’s good to use them to explain the effects of consciousness – which areas light up when you do certain things, or when you think about a certain person – but there’s definitely something behind all that. It kind of reminds me of an old-school television set with the antennas. You can tune into any channel you want, but the television isn’t generating the images. It shows them, but it’s just reacting to the waves that are coming into it. And so when a TV show ends, nothing really ends. If you think of it as consciousness, the show ends but nothing really ends, the waves are still coming in, the waves still going out. So I find that a really interesting idea.
And, as you were saying before, people who are paralyzed, or people who have brain injuries, even people who are in a coma, have minimal brain activity. People who have even been braindead wake up from these comas and they talk about these profound experiences they’ve had, or they can explain really specific details, or they wake up with new information or insights that they have acquired from this state that they were in, where the brain was not active, yet, the way we think of it, it was as if the brain was working overtime.
Steven: [0:21:02] There are a lot of discoveries that are accredited to dreams, like the periodic table. A lot of people, they’ve reported them come out of, like you said, coma and had inventions. It’s quite known that people do have experiences whilst technically unconscious.
And in terms of the human brain, our evolution really saw the growth of the cerebral cortex, the frontal lobe, and when you have lesions in the frontal lobe, you see loss of very human traits like memory, morality, intelligence, language, emphatic reasoning, but with the properties of consciousness, you wouldn’t classify these people as being unconscious. When you see people with lesions to, for instance, one side of the brain and they’re showing pictures of a house, and the left side of the house is on fire, someone with a right-side brain lesion, they’ll look at two pictures of a house – one on fire on the left side, and one without any fire at all – and without being actually able to process the part of the house on fire, they’ll always point to the house that is not on fire as being safe or their preferred option out of the two.
So they’re detecting something even though we scientifically would say they can’t. There’s something they’re detecting, that there is something going on in the other part of the house, yet their brain can’t do that. That suggests that maybe consciousness isn’t formed in the brain or there’s another mechanism or…
Stefan: [0:22:46] I think that’s the most interesting thing about this whole thing, that there is another mechanism going on that we haven’t really come to terms with yet or haven’t really been able to explain. I’m reading a [inaudible 0:23:02] book at the moment about hallucinations and it’s fascinating. He was a neurologist, and it’s fascinating hearing the accounts of his patients that had hallucinations and often describing very bizarre things, but yet, hearing about different injuries or people who are blind starting to see landscapes more beautiful than they’d seen with their eyes before they were blind, and things like that. Different parts of the brain are lighting up when this is happening, but at the same time, it’s coming from somewhere more real. A lot of people explain it as being more real than things that they have experienced.
Steven: [0:23:46] And kind of where we’re at now with the scientific explanation, because we can’t identify one part of the brain – the claustrum doesn’t, the cerebral cortex doesn’t – so there’s two main theories that are mostly accepted. Both aren’t proven or really comprehensive in terms of explaining consciousness, but they are; the integrated information theory, which explains a collation of a great amount of information into the brain. And what it’s saying is that all of this information sums up to create consciousness. And so consciousness is this gathering of further complexity of the brain, which then results in finally this high light turning on and being conscious. But there are a lot of examples that we talked about showing that when there’s lowering, there’s still this presence. So that’s not really proven, but it does, potentially, explain why such a complex brain like a human might experience consciousness.
Then there’s the global workspace theory that says that consciousness is the act of broadcasting information around the brain from a memory bank. That kind of talks about this multi-station system that is integrating, discussing, and sending information around, and then that collation of movement then results in this consciousness. Both aren’t proven but –
Stefan: [0:25:27] They’re kind of the leading, the latest we’ve got at the moment from a purely scientific perspective. And there are people like Roger Penrose, who thinks that we’re going to find it. He’s looking at it from a materialist point of view, but he thinks that the further into existence we look – looking into quantum mechanics, or looking into the way electrons react with other molecules in the body – he doesn’t think it’s going to be that hard to find it, it’s just that we need to keep digging.
So there’s a lot of people saying that it’s still yet to be found, but it’s still to be found within the brain. But then there are people who are saying there is no use looking there because it’s something completely different.
Steven: [0:26:13] This is where consciousness begins to cross over into a problem that physicists are grappling with, and that’s the very nature of matter itself, in that when you zoom very closely into matter, we find atoms and then you zoom into atoms, you find that they behave more like energies in quanta or particles. Quantum mechanics shows us that the world we live in is an energy-based system, so the problem that they have is that they haven’t been able to integrate the laws of what happens at these very small areas to what we see in the physical world and the larger universe. For instance, Newtonian physics looks at the body of astronomical movements and very pure force and momentum and acceleration. But quantum mechanics describes the world as a very strange place.
Stefan: [0:27:15] There’s a famous experiment called the double-slit experiment, there’s a lot of really amazing videos on YouTube explaining it. It’s kind of hard to explain without visuals, but basically, there’s a device shooting single particles, say protons or electrons through a slit onto a board at the back and the board recognizes where these particles hit. So as you’re shooting these little balls through one slit, you can see a very clear line where these particles are landing, you know exactly where they have hit, and you know why they’ve hit there because you’ve shot them straight.
It starts to get weird when you add a second slit. You still shoot the particles through one of the slits, but on the board behind, instead of getting a single line of particles kind of smashing into it, it becomes as if it’s been a wave of particles that have been hitting it. So you can’t determine which particle has hit. It’s almost as if the particle has gone through both slits at the same time, or somehow interacted with itself. It’s almost as if it acts like a wave and a particle at the same time, which is so bizarre to wrap your head around because that’s the very basis of our reality and it’s acting like that. So how do we explain how we’re acting if the very smallest scale can’t even be explained?
Steven: [0:28:36] What’s interesting about the double-slit experiment is that when you put a detector, the interference pattern actually removes itself, so you find that one real-world outcome. This has been a big problem in physics in interpreting why this is the case. So the way some people looked at it was, consciousness actually manifests a material outcome. And so that’s how some people have interpreted it.
But quantum physics has since explained that these particles do behave in ways which does give an explanation, but then there does seem to be this other interaction of consciousness within these very fundamental particles and how they manifest in the world. It does potentially give a bridge between the material world and consciousness at these very fundamental levels and how they interact. And maybe one comes from the other. It brings this very strange paradox.
Stefan: [0:29:44] Yeah, it’s so weird to think about. It’s almost as if every single outcome is possible for the particle until you look at it, and then it decides at last minute, like, “well, this is going to be the reality for now”. But before that, anything’s possible. It just depends on your interpretation of it.
But there’s a lot of ancient cultures that have an explanation for this. They flatly say that it’s an act of perception that draws a particle up from being a wave, so what material reality is, is due to our consciousness. So what was initially a massless wave, as everything is, essentially, it only can be interpreted after someone perceives it, after consciousness is put on to that and you see it through that lens, that it does then manifest into something that we perceive as reality.
Steven: [0:30:41] Schrodinger talked about this as well. He’s famous for the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment that talks about a dual universe where you put a cat into a box with a radioactive isotope and at any one point, the cat is either alive or dead, depending on what happens on the breakdown of that particle. And so in that case, he’s saying that the observer then impacts that scenario in the way they consciously open the box and find if the cat’s alive or dead. And that people kind of grapple with this idea of “is it existing in both forms?” But it blends into this idea of how the quantum world behaves, because particles do behave like this. They exist in two forms at any one time.
Stefan: [0:31:35] So when you think of that cat metaphor, obviously it’s either one or the other. But then when you look at particles and waves, it’s not one or the other. That’s the bizarre thing about it. Because obviously, we think, if the cat’s in there we can’t say, “well, there’s still fleas on the cat, there’s still microbes on the fleas, there’s still all this stuff going on”. That doesn’t need our human consciousness to create it or dissolve it or whatever. But yeah, it’s an interesting idea when you go down to the quantum level that that is happening. It’s hard to wrap your head around.
Steven: [0:32:13] It is. We’re going to dive into quantum physics and mechanics for people that aren’t familiar. There’s lots of different ways you can dive into this, but basically, what it says is that everything is entangled. So quantum entanglement, if you’ve heard of it, means that any particle, say, for instance, in our solar system, has some connection, in one way or another, to a partner on the other side of the universe. This is a strange interaction. And this, potentially, is discussing another kind of these, Einstein said spooky actions from a distance. And these are proven.
Quantum mechanics run a lot of the technology we use today and so the laws are very much proven but we still haven’t explained them. Quantum tunneling – so a particle can move through a solid, for instance in biology, a membrane or a wall, without actually having any kind of transport or anything. We know that things can physically move, that we wouldn’t say, in the material world. So these things happen.
What I think is we’re moving towards is putting all of these things together in terms of how the material world behaves, how our mind behaves and interacts with that, and then how the fundamental laws of the universe, directly or unconsciously, does seem to be involved in that.
And what’s really interesting is that there are scientists that are now bringing this together. There’s a guy named Dirk Meijer who says that our brain is participating in an electromagnetic consciousness field. And this idea is that instead of the brain being the source of consciousness, it’s actually an antenna, and that we participate in the interpretation of this antenna from what it receives (here we go back to how the brain works in frequencies and so forth). So if it’s receiving certain frequencies, it will be projecting those things. And that does explain a little bit how we would have a subconscious, for instance, these information coming in, and perhaps how we have an internal process of bringing that in and manifesting it. And it also starts to explain, potentially, the idea of the cross between classic Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, and quantum mechanics as well. So it’s really interesting where this is going.
He talks about a fourth spatial dimension, saying space-time has another edition, where time is, I think three-dimensional, or you add another dimension for time where consciousness then is this other dimension that we can’t see. There’s a lot of theories, like string theory in physics, that talks about up 9-11 dimensions and that may describe consciousness as one of those things.
Stefan: [0:35:30] There was an experiment where they put two individuals in separate rooms, but deep underground, far away from background radiation, the sun’s rays, Wi-Fi signals and 3G towers, and all that sort of thing. Each individual had a sort of magnet device on their head and they were both sitting in very dark rooms. In one of the rooms, a light was switched on for a second then switched off, and they were both in there for about five minutes each.
Afterwards, they asked each participant what happened, and the one where the light was turned on, explained very clearly, “it was dark, a light was turned on, then it was turned off, and nothing else happened”. And then when they went to the other participant who was just sitting through darkness, he explained the exact same thing. So he was like, “yeah, it was dark, and then there was this flicker of light that came on, and then very quickly went off”.
Steven: [0:36:28] That’s unbelievable, isn’t it? We’ll actually have to do a show on this in terms of all the different research that shows strange behaviors of the brain and how consciousness interacts. [inaudible 0:36:41] talks a lot about the science of psychokinesis, and there’s a lot of research out there that does potentially talk about this field that we’re operating in, and that the brain has this way of accessing it that we can’t explain with a purely materialistic view.
Stefan: [0:37:08] That’s what I love about that experiment I was just talking about. There are ways that we can start to do experiments objectively, where you’re trying to prove these bizarre things that people used to talk about as if it’s remote viewing or telepathy, things that you think of as ridiculous. There’s these little bits and pieces that are coming forth, where it’s “maybe it’s not so bizarre, maybe we’ve been looking at it all from the wrong perspective”.
One example of consciousness that is kind of shared through a lot of ancient cultures is the idea of Plato’s cave. Say you’re sitting in a cave, he explains it as if you’re chained and you can only see one wall, and that wall is a reflection from a light or fire behind you. So all you’re seeing are shadows on a wall, and that’s where most of us are. It’s not until you can break free of your chains and leave the cave, that you find that there is a whole world out there. And it’s not something that you can do for other people. Plato describes it as, he went back into the cave after he had this profound experience about the outside world and beyond, and tried to free everyone else from their chains, but he couldn’t. They had to do it themselves. So it’s kind of this idea that there is this other side to existence, and we’re only seeing a very small piece of it.
Steven: [0:38:39] It’s fascinating. When you think about that in what we know now about physics and what the brain can do in terms of picking up certain electromagnetic frequencies, and what happens with different brain waves, you can see how Plato had very deep levels of meanings in his writings. It starts to hit you in a different way once we begin to flip consciousness as not just a product of the brain, but maybe as a fundamental field that we are a part of. And this really swings right back into what the Buddhists and Hindus thought. Nearly every ancient culture talked about consciousness as being the fundamental or the baseline factor in our existence, and that understanding that is really important.
When you look at and think about Plato’s cave, it makes a lot of sense in terms of how people have to understand themselves like “okay, my brain is part of this wider field, I’ve got to do A, B, and C to be able to turn on these certain brain waves, and then maybe they can perceive other things”. Maybe you can detect a light in another room or something like that. These things are being detected now. So, it’s fascinating to see this very ancient and modern understanding come together.
Stefan: [0:40:08] A lot of the ancient Greek philosophers got their ideas from ancient Egyptian priests, and the Egyptian priests talk about getting their ideas gifted to them by other people. So it’s hard to know where these arise. But in Egypt, they had this concept of three worlds of existence. So there was the first world of perfect – a perfect world of waves, which is similar to the Buddhist idea of a single singularity of consciousness. And then the second world is the world of disorder where the waves formulate themselves into particles and into matter. And through that disruption, arises the third world, which is our everyday waking consciousness.
It’s all a similar metaphor, talking about the same thing, talking about that there are other levels to this. And it seems like a very bizarre concept, but we know that, as you were saying, brainwaves change throughout the day. Your brain is acting very differently when you’re sleeping compared to when you’re waking. But then broken down even further, there’s different stages of sleep cycles at different vibrations and different resonances within the brain. Even when you’re awake, when you first wake up and the sun rises, there’s a lot of physiological changes within the brain and different hormones being released. There’s all this stuff going on that we’re not aware of, but it’s all part of the conscious experience.
Steven: [0:41:38] Yeah, it’s just fascinating. And there’s lots of ways to kind of dive through; sleep is a big one. Sleep is a real revival in how we understand its importance, its stages, and we’ll go into that in more depth. Dreaming is really important – lucid dreaming, REM sleep, and how you have to go through processes. It’s amazing how all these things are pointing back to what ancient people used to think. But the modern scientific understanding is really beginning to explain it in a way that we today can apply, but also, maybe progress forward about understanding the world around us.
Stefan: [0:42:16] And that’s what I find really interesting. It’s great to talk about this and to think about it, but then applying it practically to your life and starting to ask these questions, and talking to people, and finding practices that help you understand what’s going on within yourself and within the world around you. I find that as a very powerful tool to then start to explore what you think is going on and how this bizarre existence is going on.
Steven: [0:42:48] This really was an overarching kind of exploration. We can jump into this in a lot more detail and there’s so many different ways you can approach exploring consciousness. I think, overall, it’s a mix of both ancient and new understandings, and that’s what’s so exciting about this.
I think, next week, we’re going to talk about sunken civilizations and what we’re uncovering about lost archaeological cities and records that have been buried underwater. Lost civilization is something that really captures the human psyche and –
Stefan: [0:43:39] Yeah, there’s something about those ancient mysteries that just like sparks a lot of interest, for me anyway. I think the fact that sea levels have risen and fallen over the last however long the world’s been revolving around the sun, there is so much underwater and so much yet to discover. Last I heard, it was about 5% of the world’s oceans that have even been explored and I don’t think there’s very much marine archaeology that looks away from shipwrecks and things like that to look for sunken cities. But there have been quite a few discovered in there.
Steven: [0:44:14] A lot discovered. There is way more than what you think.
Stefan: [0:44:18] There’s also a lot of folklore and myth around other sunken cities, which is really interesting. So yeah, looking forward to getting into that.
Steven: [0:44:27] Yeah, definitely. I’ve got to go participate in the material world, so we’ll wrap it up for today. I’m pretty happy with how that went, though.
Stefan: [0:44:37] Yeah.
Steven: [0:44:39] I think we covered it. It was a hard one, right? We grappled for a couple of months on how we would kind of bring this together but I think that –
Stefan: [0:44:45] Yeah, you could talk about this forever. But I’m looking forward to diving into certain aspects of this. And if anyone has any interest in specific areas, please send us an email and let us know what you think and where you’d like us to go with this.
Steven: [0:45:00] Alright Stef, speak next week.
Stefan: [0:45:01] Yeah, see you, man.
