Speaker 1: Welcome to the Gods I View podcast. I am your host,
Trevor Beck. Back home from my thirty six hour vacation
to Joshua Tree National Park. Not even the park, really,
we just stayed out of airbnb, swam in a pool.
Kids loved it. It was very nice. Although I don't
know how I feel about this airbnb situation. Everywhere I
looked there was like a sign or a plaque up
in the house reminding me of the various things I
needed to do. You know, put the towels in the shower,
put the sheets in the washer, put the pool chairs
in the corner. Put the cover Ooh, now I say it.
I think I forgot to put the fireplace cover back on. Oops,
the outdoor fireplace, put the jacuzzi couplelah blah blah, blah blah.
And after a while I was like, Man, a hotel
wouldn't have this level of audacity, you know, A hotel
would just be like, I hope you had a nice stay. Oh,
you stole our towels and stuffed a bunch of stuff
in the trash and made a huge mess of the room.
No problem, sir. You know, I think these airbnb people
are getting a little cocky anyway, I joke. It was fun,
very fun, and I'm back and on the drive out there.
In the drive back, I listened to four hours of
Thomas Campbell and his interview with aj Genteel Gentile on
the WI file, So it's pretty good. We listened to
like just a few minutes of it on the last
show and then my app froze up. So we're gonna
I think we should go through most of that because
his ideas are, you know, his ideas about basically matter
being rendered and his ideas on the double slit experiments
and all this stuff. They're pretty interesting. They kind of
mirror my own, which is interesting because I sort of
came to these conclusions without really knowing his ideas. But
he does have some wild ideas too. You know, he
has some wild ideas about astral projection and reincarnation, and
I don't know, it gets a little weird. It starts
to feel a little grifty, but who knows. I mean,
that doesn't mean he isn't right about his other ideas
that seem super reasonable to me. I think we just
kind of come to different conclusions anyway. So we'll get
back to that eventually. But instead. Tonight, we're going to
talk some more about consciousness interacting in some interesting way
with microtubules, particularly neuronal microtubules, these sort of cellular skeletal
structures in the neurons or in every cell, but in
the neurons that perhaps oscillate in some interesting way and
somehow bring about consciousness. It's I don't know, it's still
kind of handwavy. I want to try to get my
hands my head wrapped around it. Because I think I'm
still planning to speak with Michael Weis tomorrow. I should
probably send him an email anyway, so I would like
to sort of know what I'm talking about. And again
just you know, putting out the bat signal again. If
you have any questions you'd like me to ask him,
please email them to God's I view book at gmail
dot com. But first we got to talk about some news.
We don't talk about political news here. We talk about funny, ironic, existential, scientific, philosophical,
theological types of news. In this news. I wasn't going
to bring this up until I saw this Instagram post.
This is about Brian Johnson. Are you all familiar? He
is the billionaire guy who's sort of made waves for
receiving blood transfusions from his son. This is like a
known thing, you know. Blood has all sorts of goodies
in it if you're trying to live forever, especially if
it comes from a younger, you know, a younger version
of your species, ideally one with a very close genetic relationships.
There's no agglutination I mean, certainly of the same blood type,
but ideally the same uh, you know, very similar genetics.
So he received transfusions from his son and his father, Brian.
Johnson's father received transfusions from Brian. So sort of this
draining of the life force of the grandson. And of
course there's this this is not like, this is evidence based.
I mean this this does things, reverses biological agent things.
And then he's basically made his whole life about living
forever by optimizing his diet. I mean, he has teams
of physicians and nutritionists and scientists. He's he's put together
a whole infrastructure that is geared towards making him live forever.
And he looks good. I mean, he looks younger now,
he looks very lean, he looks very healthy, you know.
So it's like it's kind of like more power to him.
I guess now. My doctoral research was in the transcriptomics
of aging. I was really into biological aging. So before
we get to the news, maybe just a quick educational
session on what that means. I mean, we have all
these different fancy ways of measuring how old someone is.
Biologically we can figure out your chronological age pretty easily.
All we need is your birth date, right, But we
we all clearly sort of age at different rates. The
consequences of aging happen to us on the outside like
our appearance, and also on the inside in at different rates.
So we have different aging trajectories, and the trajectory of
aging tends to correlate pretty strongly with your health span
and your lifespan. And so it's kind of cool because
if you can measure biological age, and if biological age
is very impermanent, meaning like it can fluctuate based on
your diet and your lifestyle and medicines you take, it's
kind of a cool research outcome, right, because if all
you have to do is spit in a tube or
draw a little bit of blood, and I could say, Hey,
I know you fifty a year ago before we started
this new diet. Your biological age was sixty, so your
trajectory is not good. You're aging faster than you should.
But now after a year of this diet of you know,
walnuts and blueberries and salmon or whatever, you're back down
to fifty five. You're actually getting biologically younger. And then
now you know. So it's cool. It's a cool research outcome.
It used to be very popular, still is very popular.
But I was going through my doctoral program in the
midst of all of this, and I emailed a few
of the big guys in this space, like Steve Horvath
and stuff, and they were super generous with their time.
So I did a study on it. And one of
the studies I did was I looked at the transcriptome.
So you have a genome, right, this is your DNA
and related structures. Now, every cell in your body is
the same gene. So what makes selles different is which
genes they express, which genes get converted to proteins in
other words, And you can take little snapshots of your
of your overall physiology by looking at what we might
call like a transcriptomic snapshot or fingerprint or landscape at
any given time, right, So I did that with a
bunch of older folks put half of them through this
like really intense like rowing and cycling and running program,
and fortunately no one had any adverse events. And we
checked in over just four weeks, but really short sessions,
like like eight minutes of exercise, but really intense three
times a week. They got about four years younger, you know,
quote unquote younger. Their biological age reverse by four years.
And so I wrote this up. It was a it
was a pretty cool page. And while I was doing that,
I was looking at some huge data sets like the
Rotterdamn study, these huge data sets, and I can't decide
if I like data set or data set. What do
you like? Anyway? So I said, hey, I'm this new
guy with nothing but time and motivation. Let me see
if I can just figure out, like what are the
main processes associated with just getting older? You know, because
clearly if you're gonna solve mortality and live forever, you
would need to target those key areas, right, And so
I dug into it and just this, like bright Neon
signed said, his stone acetylation, and there are some other
things too, there's some other methylation things, but his stone
ascetilation just was like this shining star. The p value
is absurd, and so I'm like, well, that's interesting. So
I email this guy I knew about it at Stanford,
I believe, and he said, congratulations on rediscovering something we've
known for thirty years. And I said, ah, figures, you know,
but still kind of made me feel good that I
figured that out on my own, you know, I was
able to do the code and run the analysis and anyway.
So yeah, we kind of know what causes people to
get older, we just don't know how to make it
stop happening. So his stone sutilation is a big part
of that. And just so you guys know, your DNA
isn't just floating around in your cells. It's tightly wrapped
around these beats called histone proteins, and through a series
of chemical reactions, the DNA gets unwound from the bead
in order to be expressed, in order for an MR
and a transcript to be produced from the DNA template,
which will eventually get turned into a peptide and used
for some purpose. Anyway, these histones, they they pick up
a setyl groups and methyl groups as you age, and
this interferes with the ability for the genes to be
appropriately expressed. Sometimes it increases or expression decreases. It's very complicated.
I don't even fully understand it. And so anyway, so
it's this kind of stuff. Sorry for the detour, but
it's this kind of stuff that Brian Johnson is really into.
I have since lost interest in it for two major reasons.
The history of this field of study is just fraught
with hyperbolic claims like that we're going to cure aging,
or the first person who's going to live to be
two hundred years old has already been born, you know.
But the claims like this have been made forever, you know,
since the Philosopher's Stone with the alchemists during the Enlightenedment.
You know, this has been the search for the elixir
of life, because back to Gilgamesh, and so I just
don't think this is a problem that can be solved
by humans. And I could be wrong. I'm open to
the fact that I could be wrong, but the evidence
would kind of point to the contrary. I mean, lifespan
is not going up, if anything, that's going down. And
maybe there are some hyper wealthy individuals who through you know,
sheer will and force and millions and millions of dollars
in capital can extend their lifespan some trivial amount. You know.
The fact remains, we're all going to die. You know,
there's only one guy who beat death. That's the theme
of this show. And I think that's how it's always
going to be. And I tend to think if that
ever were to change, that would mark basically the end
of the world. This is a very popular sort of
apocalyptic trope, which is the over man, like the transcendent.
That's when we lose our humanity basically, and the covenant
that Jesus made would no longer apply to these people
because they're no longer human. Essentially. This is like the fun,
the fun theological take on this stuff. But really that's
not the reason. I mean, the reason is. I just
think it's I think it's just this desperate clutching to life,
which is unseemly, you know. I just I think you
we just have to memento moriy, like, we just have
to remember that we are here for a brief time.
It's an incredible gift, and you just need to cherish
the ones you love and maybe not just deploy and
dedicate your entire life to living longer. Maybe there's some balance,
you know, of trying to just be as healthy as
you can versus h getting out of control becoming obsessed. Anyway,
the reason for this long preamble is because this guy,
Brian Johnson was recently Oopstart was recently here's the post,
diagnosed with a disease with the chronic disease, which he
I think blames on eating too much sugary cereal as
a child. This is like, okay, like maybe so bud,
you know. Anyway, So I had a brief moment when
that happened. It's like, yeah, I was kind of like curious,
like am I going to be around long enough to
see this guy's downfall? And what and what is that
going to mean for this type of research? You know,
because he is gonna die, I mean, no offense, like
it's it's gonna happen, you know, and but you know,
he's very healthy, probably live a very long time. I
was just, you know, I was curious, like it is
something going to happen to this guy that's going to
derail the sort of movement which he which he is
calling don't die. I mean I think it's a good goal,
right But anyway, so he was diagnosed with this chronic
autom immune disease where his white blood cells attack a
certain type of selfs in his stomach, which makes it
so he can't absorb certain nutrients and he has to
take these big doses of iron and things. As far
as diseases go, I mean, it's not the end of
the world, you know, anyway, So I was just going
to move on, but he posted this post which is
just absurd. Parts of it are absurd, parts of it
are reasonable. So I'm just going to start reading it.
It's fourteen pages long. You know, I have to swipe
on Instagram. So here we go. The world wants me
to die. My incurable disease diagnosis became global news. It
was omnipresent on social media and nineteen hundred articles were
written in a matter of days. Use of the word
omnipresent bothers me for some reason. Many were saddened. However,
I dominated the commentary. People point it. People pointed to
Shade and Vreuda. I've always said it like Schroyd and Vroda,
but it's not spelled that way. So you know the
word it means you you relish in other people's misfortune.
The pleasure of another's failure is what he wrote. Yes,
there's that. This is a special place. There is a
special place in people's hearts that loves to see others fail,
especially when that person's presence threatens their own psychological stability
in some way or helps them feel better about themselves. Now,
quick quick break here. I do kind of agree with that,
right you know, there is there is this element of you.
You see the person on Instagram going on vacation after vacation,
and maybe you kind of think they're a dirt bag
or whatever, and it kind of bothers you, like you're
kind of rooting for their demise. Right now, there's I
can't there's no one in particular that I feel that
way about, but I can just I understand the impulse, right,
But I I am. I think people maybe take this
too far, like this, like what he's saying, and I
almost feel like it says more about him than us.
But I could be wrong. There is a guy I
know who's constantly posting like these long like diatribes about
being the man in the arena. You know, He's like,
until you're the man in the arena, you'll never understand
and it's like, bro, you like you like have a
social media you run like a social media influencer account,
and we're we're like next door neighbors, you know what
I mean. Like, it's not you're not You're not like
the president of the United States, you know. And but
he's always a guy. I'm the man in the arena,
and he has stuff like you know, ah, I don't
even remember. It's like the devil or the devil whispered
in my ear, you're not strong enough to survive the storm,
and I whispered back, I am the storm. And it's like,
all right, bro, I mean whatever, different strokes for different folks,
but it's like it's like a little dramatic, you know. Anyway,
he's always making he's always making comments like that, liking
in himself to like Tom Brady. You know, I'm the
man in the area. You can judge me, but it's
only because you're rooting on my downfall. But I won't
give up, you know anyway, So I kind of see
a bit of that in here. Okay, moving on, but
this is Brian Johnson talking again. But if you look
over the social media commentary about me, you'll see the
pattern He deserved it. I deserved it because I challenged death.
The crowd was running a deeply rooted psychological script that
represents the oldest, most deeply embedded stories of human culture.
This was the first story ever written down. Four thousand
years ago. Gilgamesh saw it in Eternal Life, after losing
someone he loved, only to the only to have the
plant of youth stolen by a serpent as he bathed,
leaving him to accept his mortality. We'll need to get
into Gilgamesh one of these days, because it's pretty cool
and it's the Bible is clearly written with knowledge of
this story. Abraham, who's a key figure in the Bible,
I mean, he lived in sumer his parents were wealthy Sumerians,
so very very clear that that there is something going
on here. Now, I think the Bible kind of offers
like a different perspective, like like most of the gods
of antiquity are evil, and so the Bible was kind
of like the first story to say, like, no, there
is a benevolent father who made you and cares about you.
Speaker 2: That kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, uh, next page, I don't know how to say this.
Accept Asclepius became so skilled at rejuvenation that he raised
the dead. As punishment, Zeus struck him down with a
thunderbolt to enforce life and death authority. This is the
story of Jesus. Conscious pilot offered a choice between a
thief and the immortalist. In the crowd demanded the execution, Like, okay,
where are we going with this? Where are we going
with this? People need this story conclusion to keep themselves sane.
The challenger must lose, and the loss must appear deserved.
It's a shield of self preservation. I just man, I
think it's funny when millionaires are like, you know what,
I'm rich. I must be a genius, right, Why else
would I be rich if I'm not a genius? People
need to know my thoughts. Okay. It continues, for if
death is inevitable, their existence and that of their loved
ones is justified, unavoidable. If death is not inevitable, nothing
about the reality is safe. Okay, I occupy here, here's
where we get. Here's where we get a little bit
off the rail. Like I kinda it's like I don't
agree fully, but yeah, I kind of get what he's saying, right, right.
If there was something I could do to achieve immortality
like in this life, Like, yeah, I would kind of
have like a responsibility to do that, you know, for
my family. So I kind of I get, I sort
of understand what he's saying. But this is to me
where it kind of goes off the rails. Here we go.
We're in slide ten of fourteen. I this is this
is wild Brian Johnson. Here we go. I occupy the
same philosophical and archetypal position as Gilgamesh, Asclepius, and Jesus.
This state will draw outrage and accusations of blasphemy, hubriis,
and narcissism. So he's aware that's good. Nevertheless, it's the
pattern that has repeated itself for thousands of years. It
is just kind of fight because I was waiting for
like this really effective refutation of the of the claim
that he's kind of being a douchebag, but he just
goes Nevertheless, this is just the pattern that repeats itself.
And I am the next incarnation of Jesus Christ. Clearly,
he just restates his opinion rather than like a an argument.
Next slide, death has been the omnipresent. Here we go
with omnipresent again, was it omnipotent before? Death has been
the omnipresent concern of the human race. It encapsulates our
greatest fears, joy and curiosities. The discourse around it changes
over time, however, the fundamentals remain unchanged. Okay, that all
makes sense. What it's different about this moment that is
unlike any other moment is that physical death may no
longer be inevitable. Click the link below to buy my
vitamin powder. No, I'm just kidding in say that, but
he does have vitamin powder available if you're interested. Okay,
what makes this moment different is that physical death may
no longer be inevitable. What if I didn't deserve it?
And what if I am your ally and not a threat? Friends,
no need to be sad about this amidst the noise.
So many of you have been supportive and kind to me.
I deeply appreciate your messages post to public support and
private acts of kindness. I feel emboldened by the diagnosis.
I want this challenge and I'm hungry for it. No
amount of optimism can fully capture what awaits us, and
I'm glad to be on the same journey. For those
of you who believe the same use code do not
die for twenty percent. Again just joking, you know. I
guess maybe I'm falling into it because I'm just reading
it and I'm thinking about it. But it is like, man,
some people just like lose the plot. Like some people
just lose a plot. Like we're just as individuals, We're
just not that important, you know, like we're very important
to the ones we love, I hope, but in the
cosmic scale, you know, like we're just not that important.
And uh, maybe you just kind of are being sort
of a douchebag, you know, like maybe likening saying I
am the archetypal Jesus, I don't under no one understands
what it's like to be the man in the arena.
I'm actually your ally because I am taking the burden
immortality on my shoulders and I'm going to win. You'll
all see. It's like a villain. It's like a Lex
Luthor speech. Anyway, I just kind of got to kick
out of that, So moving on. Hopefully that didn't feel
like a waste of time. Moving on, We're going back
to the microtubule stuff. I'm going to play about ten
minutes fifteen minutes see where it goes called a night.
Speaker 2: This is the end of my abstract of our experimental
rat paper, and we say this finding is predicted by
models that posit consciousness as a property of a quantum
physical state of neural microtubules. So I know you're interested
in the experimental evidence, and I definitely want to tell
you about that, but I kind of want to emphasize
the motivation for this idea in the first place, because
you know, you hear from hammer Off and Penrose, and
Hammeroff will emphasize his expertise about the biology of microtubules,
and Penrose will emphasize his expertise and his contribution in
terms of the Girdle theorem argument about how human understanding
can't be algorithmic. It's somewhat subtle and contentious, but in
my view, there's a much more straightforward motivation and essentially
a way to see that a classical model cannot work
to explain consciousness and we have to go to a
quantum model. And that's the binding problem. What's called the
binding problem in cognitive neuroscience. So here's a way it's
expressed in a neuroscience textbook. In my talk, I said,
you know there's a chair over there. It has a
gray color and a certain shape. The color might be
represented by neurons in one place and the shape by
neurons in another place. But I experienced that and my
whole visual field as one unified experience. How can we
account for that? And moreover, how can we understand that
that unified experience could be causally efficacious. That's the second thing,
Because it seems like these states evolved. This is an
argument due to William James. Because fire hurts and ripe
fruit tastes good. My conscious states are giving me good
advice about what to do, like take your hand out
of the fire. So it really seems like they must
have evolved. But in order to evolve, they must have
some effect on my behavior. That seems like a paradox
or an insoluble problem. But I think we've got a
solution to that problem too. But on the way, we
have to solve this binding problem, which is accounting for
this irreducibly unified experience we have in terms of physics
that is usually pretty reducible, at least classic. These slides
are different ways of expressing this binding problem. So here's
William James example of ten men, you give them eat
your word from a sentence and tell them to think
it really hard. And even if you jam them together
really close in a bunch, nowhere is their consciousness of
the whole sentence.
Speaker 1: Commercial YouTube needs its pound of flesh. Okay, back to
the binding problem.
Speaker 2: So his point already in eighteen ninety was neurons have
the same problem. And they're not even touching each other.
We know now. So that's the binding problem expressed in
one way. And the suggestion is that a quantum physical
state will avoid or will solve that problem by being
an irreducible whole. I think I need to unpack that
a little more. The inconvenient truth is that classical models
are ruled out if we want to account for the
evolution of biological consciousness. And this is why all classical
physics is locally deterministic. Emphasis on the local here. So
in other words, everything, and this is what Leibniz said
before quantum physics parts pushing on their neighbors. Only you know,
if you go into the if you imagine the brain
blown up like a mill that you could walk into,
Leibniz said, you go inside. All you're going to see
our parts pushing on each other, You're not going to
see a perception anywhere in there. And so my point
here with pointing this out about classical physics is that, sure,
we talk about big things in classical physics, we talk
about waves, we talk about vortices like a tornado. But
in classical physics all those those names for big things
like a tornado are in principle only for convenience, because
in principle we could completely describe that thing in terms
of the molecules of air bouncing off each of only
their neighbors. Okay, so it seems hard for people to
accept this, but I'm saying categorically that any big thing
in a classical model, this goes for classical electromagnetic fields
just as much as so called matter particles and everything else.
In a classical model, all the classical laws are expressed
as differential equations. The dx's are telling us things only
interact at infinitesimally separated neighbors, and so again everything can
be reduced to those And so if you you know,
we have a classical brain, and we postulate that such
and such pattern of activity corresponds or it comes with
this conscious experience. What this fact means implies is that
consciousness must be epiphenomenal because we can completely eliminate it
from the description and still have a complete predictive theory
of what that brain does. So if it's a classical brain,
consciousness is doomed to being epiphenomenal and we can never
explain how it could have evolved. That's what I'm calling
the inconvenient truth, because nobody wants to believe that because
everyone's exploring classical models of consciousness.
Speaker 3: That's interesting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you're saying it gets back to the James example.
Just what park Sivian neighbors doesn't does it yield a
unified experience? Is that that is other than resorting to
the epiphenomenal handwave basically.
Speaker 2: Right, I mean, if you want, you're you're not able
to say that my consciousness gives me a selective advantage
and that's why I evolved, or anything like that. It's
a weird dangler with no this is.
Speaker 1: This is a serious problem, you know again, and it
comes back to that thing we mentioned about Todkins a
couple episodes ago. You know, if if we can essentially
get all of the things that we need from an
algorithm like like say take jat ept or or other
language models, and and you know, there's all these claims
that they you know, survival instincts can sort of be programmed.
And if you look at the cloud, what was it
called that that social media thing with all the AI
agents were put on there and they started talking to
each other, and so there's sort of like self awareness,
identity agency, self preservation instinct. Like if all of this
stuff can happen from computation, then how could there possibly
be a selective pressure for consciousness? Like and he's saying
this in a much better way, which is that you know,
if we can make all of the predictions about what
the brain does without there being a conscious experience, then
then how do you how do you explain this through
evolutionary biology? Like if we're not willing to throw that out,
how do we say consciousness is anything other than an epiphenomenon,
meaning it's just this like this other sort of thing,
this emergent property or whatever. The host whose name I
don't know the YouTube is first principles first, but he
kind of describes this as hand waving, you know, like
it's this very common thing in science when you talk
about hard topics like consciousness or or even certain aspects
of evolution, and you use words like a rise and
emerge and burst forth and sprung sprung from you know,
the Big Bang, you know, all matter and energy burst
forth out of a single point in the center of
the universe. And it's like, Okay, what does that really mean,
Like what does it mean for things to emerge? You know,
I get what they mean, right, Like properties, epiphenomenal properties
of an underlying simple I guess what you might call
a differential equation. Like a flock of birds, you know,
forming these complex and amazing patterns, and it's like, no
single bird has any idea what pattern they're forming, but
they're just following some simple rule like stay two inches
to the right of my neighbor to the left, two
inches to the left of the neighbor to my right,
two inches from the neighbor above, neighbor below, and the
result is just this. You know, fancy thanks cellular autonoma.
There's another example of this. You can google that that
is basically what the consensus thinking of consciousness is. The
problem is those same people who hold that consensus view
also believe or subscribe to the consensus view that consciousness evolved.
But those two things are kind of mutually exclusive, and
that's a problem explanation.
Speaker 2: But god, if you want to go that.
Speaker 1: Way, right, right, and hilarious. It is kind of funny
sometimes where it's like, well, the only other thing we
could think of would be God, you know, and it's like, well, well,
I mean maybe you know, but who knows? Who knows?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: I mean I know what I believe. So but we
we continue.
Speaker 2: And yeah, so that's how Spinosa made fun of Descartes.
Speaker 3: That's that's that's really that's nicely said. Yeah that makes
sense to me.
Speaker 2: Yes, good and so but when you try to tell
it to someone else, that's right, they're going to start
saying waves, and they're going to start saying, what about
the electromagnetic field? That seems really unified? But if you
just look at Maxwell's equations, you can see it's not
as unified as you thought. It's just one bit at
a time, just like everything else in a classical.
Speaker 4: Wow, that's that's that's in Maxwell's equations as well.
Speaker 3: Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: You don't have to have the memorize. All you have
to remember is their differential equations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, right, okay, but so.
Speaker 2: It seems like the quantum model is going to fall
to the same problem. And so but in terms of
sticking with the binding problem, so we've got two problems. Now,
well there's three. There's the hard problem, there's the binding problem,
and there's what I'm calling the epiphenomenalism problem. And so
I'm emphasizing the irreducible wholeism of quantum physics as a
solution to the binding problem, so that at least there's
something holistic in the physics that could correspond to this,
this this consciousness that we have. Okay, so you can
tell me if you want more about introducing quantum physics.
But I hear, I'm just saying the evolution, unlike the
classical evolution, which is all part one, it's all locally deterministic,
quantum has this extra part that people want to ignore
because it's ugly and problematic. But you can't ignore it.
That's what my other slide. Okay, So, measurement problem. We
don't know what a measurement is because the textbooks don't
tell us. There are different viewpoints. The objective reduction viewpoint says,
it's something that really happens. It's not just that we're
learning something new, okay, and then it seems everyone brings
us up. But it does require repeating because people take
different lessons from this fable.
Speaker 5: But what Schrodinger was trying to say with the fable
is if you leave out that second part, the measurements,
you get absurd predictions.
Speaker 2: If you leave out the measurements, you get the theory
predicts alive and dead cats at the same time, those
are not observed. That's why you cannot leave out the measurements.
And that's why I'm going with objective reduction. Though it's controversial,
that's really interesting. Objective reduction is the thesis that we're
looking for people forty plus.
Speaker 1: Who want one question I think I might want to ask, Mike,
is what is which waveform is collapsing? Because this stuff.
People say this stuff, and it's very intimidating, and they
are clearly brilliant. So you don't want to ask stupid questions.
Speaker 3: But I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't think this is a stupid question. I think
there is probably an answer that would be helpful. You know,
when you say consciousness comes from or is associated with
the collapse of a wave function within maybe the microtubules,
you know, which what is actually collapsing. So, like my
understanding is if you have a quantum system that could
be a photon, it could be I mean, it could
be electron tunneling. There's all these different things that have
truly random and unpredictable outcomes, like the spin of a
photon or the location of a particle that isn't being measured. Right,
So you have this probabilistic thing. Now you can measure
it and at that moment you sort of take a
draw from all of the probabilistic outcomes of that state.
So let's just keep it really simple, like a binary
outcome like photon spin. It can mean an upspin or
annown spin. So there's a fifty chance it's in an
upspin of fifty percent chance of the douncement. You do
a random draw, you get an answer at that moment,
the wave function has collapsed. And this is the vocabulary
of this is kind of bad because I think what
it comes from is like the double slit experiment, when
you're not measuring the electron, you get an sort of
interference pattern on the film. When you send Let's say
electrons one at a time through a double slit, and
you don't which slit they pass through. You're left with
an interference pattern, which implies that there's a wave that
and I think Thomas Campbell's take on this is pretty interesting,
but we'll save that. You know, it looks like a wave,
so we call that a wave function because we can
sort of, I don't know, we can sort of show
the probabilistic locations based on this wave function. I suppose,
you know, I'm not really I'm not really sure. Actually
I need a pressure look into that. But anyway, but
then if you measure which slid it passes through, that
wave function collapses and you're it just moves through one
slit or the other like a bullet the electron does.
And so the clap. My understanding is the collapse of
a wave function is you suddenly know the outcome of
a random event, and so there is no longer a
probabilistic distribution of potential outcomes. And so what's collapsing. Is
it the orientation of the tubulen subunits that compose the microtubule? Like,
what is it that's collapsing. I'm open to the idea
that quantum collapse in non living matter leads to proto consciousness.
As he says, but what does that mean. I don't know.
Speaker 2: A function collapses really is a real physical process in
this theory of consciousness. The suggestion is that in non
living matter, these collapses happen all the time too, not
just in us. But when it happens in non living matter,
it's it's disconnected little electrons just deciding where they're going
to be at that moment. We call that proto consciousness.
But living organisms have evolved different kinds of structures, like
microtubules and neurons to orchestrate those disconnected moments of collapse
into bigger ones that are somehow representing information that's useful
to us, so that the collapse does a useful computation,
makes a decision about how we're going to interpret what
we're seeing and what we're going to do about it
as in active inference and moreover, the suggestion is that
it's microtubules in particular, are the main substrate of this
macroscopic entangled quantum state. It has to be macroscopic. It
can't just be in one neuron if it's going to
solve this binding problem because different features that I'm experiencing
together are scattered across centimeters, not just microns.
Speaker 4: Whoa so, But it's also you see evolutionary. I mean
you say that that microtubules of the early forms the
life evolved in more complex forms over time. I mean,
and and mitosis. I mean, if it's in my toes
is so fundamental.
Speaker 2: But in single cells it looks like they're already integrating
environmental information to decide how to move. And what we
do with our brain is just that on a bigger scale.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it's good.
Speaker 4: But it's also the we'll get this, I guess into
talking about the active inference of the paper, but also
the whole holographic principle that and and and that comes
into that.
Speaker 3: And what the nature of a cell is embodying that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the idea of agents all the way down. Michael
Levin likes to talk about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: We can make contact with that too, uh, in a
pretty wild way if you're.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I'm all ready to go there when
you're right. But but it arises from those I mean,
it's not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well okay, yeah, so let me go ahead while
where they a comment about that. So one of the
sources of experimental evidence that I'm gonna mentioned comes from
on your bottom bondiopadies lab. He's got a lot of
amazing experiments. And what I emphasize here is these two
points that he's able to stimulate resonances, these vibrations that
we were talking about in microtubules and show that they
do interact with membrane voltage. So that's important because we
said membrane voltage is where the action potentials happen. They're
what talks to muscles. So if the mind is really
in the microtubule.
Speaker 1: I would say this is probably the most important part
of the whole thing. And so we'll probably do like
a part two or Part three or whatever, you know,
if microtubules are somehow related to conscious experience, this experience
that you and I are having, seeing things, hearing things,
you're hearing my voice. My voice is not feeding into
an algorithm that you have of understanding that could lead
you to make certain decisions you know, for that would
benefit your survival or reproduction. Right, no experiencing them. You're
an agent. You're listening to them, you're thinking about it,
you're having thoughts, you're associating things you hear with memories.
You know, maybe a biology lesson you had about the cell,
and so you're thinking about memories. You're associating it with
other logical things that you are aware of or familiar
with or able to sort of contend with in your mind.
And so this is like an orchestra of things happening
that you are witnessing. You're witnessing it, and that is like,
that's incredibly important.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: People dismiss that, well, they say it's emergent, it's illusory, okay, whatever,
But the point is you are experiencing it.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: The question I always say is an illusion for whom
you know, But anyway, you are experiencing it. So how
could it be the microtubules? You know, because we know
a lot of these things are driven by electrical signals,
like bringing the sound of my voice into your brain.
This is mediated by action potentials, and so there needs
to be an interaction between microtubules and membrane voltage if
that were the case, And there is, and so that's fascinating.
So I don't know. I mean, I'm super busy. I
should probably watch this whole thing and watch his other
videos if I'm an adopt him tomorrow. But the truth
is I'm beat, spend too much time in the sun,
I'm burnt, I'm tired. Champagne problems, Am I right? First
world problems? Baby? Anyway, I need to cook my kids dinner,
so I think we'll call it a day. So but please,
last minute, last minute, desperate plea. If you have a
question about consciousness? How how how does microtubule quantum resonance
answer a particular question you have about consciousness? Any question
like that you would like me to ask, please email
God's iView book at gmail dot com. So hopefully this
goes down. Tomorrow will be the next episode you see
if so, and then after that we'll do I think
a very extended breakdown of this interview with Thomas Campbell,
my Big Toe author. Kind of a crazy guy. He's
had a wild life, certainly not considered you know, mainstream,
but some of his ideas are quite appealing, quite appealing.
Some of his ideas, to me, are very unappealing. But
we take the good with the bad. You know, we
can't just add hominem people. We can't just decide, hey,
you used to be into astral projection, Therefore everything you
say is inadmissible in the court of my opinion. You know,
I don't see a huge value in that. Personally, I
like to sample the order us. I like to all
a cart take what I like from someone, So we'll
do that anyway. Thanks everybody, I appreciate all your emails.
Stay safe out there, keep the headlights between the ditches.
As my great grandparents would say, Stay safe and God
bless