The Rebirth of Trans-Materialist Science

A conversation with neuroscientist Alex Gomez-Marin

Image: psychicschool.com

Video

Àlex Gómez-Marín is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. Combining experimental, computational and theoretical neuro-physics, his current research deals with human minds in the real world, concentrating on what he calls “the edges of consciousness”

Transcript

Adam Jacobs: How are things in Spain today?

Alex Gomez-Marin: Not good. As you know, we had these massive floods.

Adam Jacobs: Yes.

Alex Gomez-Marin: It's catastrophic at many levels, ecologically and politically, probably this kind of question as to how things are going here. Maybe it has a lot to do with what we may be talking about because there's something weird going on at the level of consciousness. I would say kind of a war on consciousness. This also makes reality really hard to understand. I don't get the things that are happening. I don't get the responses at many different levels that governments and people have. The media doesn't seem to help because you don't know what to believe anymore.

I was having dinner every night the other night with my wife and two daughters, and we were talking about this, and I said, well, look, maybe the only thing I can really be sure of is that we are now having dinner, the four of us here and that we're actually eating food. Because once you get out of the proximate physicality of things, I don't know what to believe and what's going on. It's an era of confusion, and navigating it scientifically or otherwise seems to be the challenge we need to learn.

Adam Jacobs: Very well said. I couldn't agree with you more, and I think there's both a danger and an opportunity and confusion, right? And I'm sure you feel that as a scientist as well when you're stumped, it is sometimes right before a breakthrough. So maybe, societally, we're on the verge of something, but who knows? But that actually is one of the questions I wanted to open up and ask you. I read an essay between you and Dr. Bernard Carr, who I actually am going to be speaking with within about an hour as it happens.

It was a fascinating back and forth, but I want to just read you a quote that you said to him: “The physical world is not a second class in order to emphasize the other worlds. And you guys define the three worlds as mind, matter, and spirit; there is a kind of paradox, even a tragedy, where we end up diminishing the value of the material world.” That's very interesting. I think that your average person would think the material world is pretty much what there is to talk about. And so, how are you supposed to diminish its value? But in your opinion, let's maybe start like this. How did these worlds relate to each other and also what do you see as the function of the physical world, if that's one of this triad of worlds, what's it for and how are they all connected these three? And it's a big question, I understand, but let's see where we can go with that.

Alex Gomez-Marin: Yes. Well, thank you for mentioning that; as you were saying it, an image came to mind, and I apologize if I interject anecdotes or stories or images, but I was doing one that Camino de Santiago, this pilgrimage route, very famous in the north of Spain towards Santiago. And there was a couple coming the other way, a couple of old Frenchmen. And as they were approaching, we were thinking, oh poor guys, they may have lost the way. How are we going to be polite and tell them that it's the other way? And so, as they were getting closer, we were saying hi. And then we stop and are kind of gesturing, saying, well, how's it going? Try to be elliptic about it. And it's like, well, so we're going to Santiago and pointing that way. And they look at it and say, sure, we're coming back, and we're walking back all the way to France.

Why am I saying this? Because a lot of our efforts today are to kind of push the paradigm and I don't like to use this word a lot, but anyways, to push the paradigm beyond physicalism. And that's something I love ranting about how physicalism, and its terminal lucidity state, has given us a lot, but it's dying, and it's time we move on. But looking ahead as if we were imagining we are those guys who are coming back, we should not kind of discard matter because there's something very sacred about matter. There's something very spiritual even about what matter is, very mysterious. We take it for granted because what we feel is what we can touch and what we are made of. But the same happens when you do neuroscience, and you try to study certain abilities that seem to go, and I would say they go beyond the brain, but you cannot forget the brain.

So I say beyond the brain and back to the brain, I think the mystery is in the interface as you were alluding, there seem to be different worlds and you don't need to be a dualist or substance dualist. We want to get technical about it to say that there are other ways of thinking about other worlds. So the question is, how are they connected? One other thing I can add to your remark or question is I often describe science as this 400-year meta-experiment on the Western mind. Where we decided, and when I say we, Galileo and other founding fathers decided to make a temporary sleet, a pragmatic programmatic approach and say, look, we want to do science. And at that time, they didn't know that that was science. But we want to find an approach to knowing reality. And it's going to require measurement, it's going to require mathematics, it's going to require something akin to objectivity.

What lends itself when you look at reality is what lends itself better to this mode of approaching the real. So it’s movement, its contact, and I think that's why physics started. That's why science started with physics because it lends itself to that. And then chemistry and then biology and then psychology. With psychology, we already have problems. Even in biology, I wouldn't claim that life is solved. And so here we are 400 years later, and we have to say yes, thank you for having mastered most of the mysteries of the objective world. Already our quantum physicists a hundred years ago realized that it's not that easy when you go and look at little bricks of matter, you realize it's also made of something akin to mind. So from a scientific, historical point of view, we've started with the easiest of the problems, even if that sounds incredible.

As a scientist and physicist, I could say physics is fascinating, but I suppose it's the easiest part because then it comes to life and mind. Now, I could also try to answer your question from an evolutionary point of view. If the game is about surviving so that we can thrive, I don't think survival is the only part of the equation. It's also creativity. Well, to survive, we need to be in contact with the tangible world. And by the way, this fits back with the idea that I promote based on William James and others of course, that the brain is a filter. So there's so much reality out there and in here, but we need to just leave it out so that we can drive our cars and not have an accident. We can cook our food and not have it burned.

But when we relax that attention to the immediate survival aspects, then we get into other worlds. And you can speak about dreaming or you can speak about having sacred plants and other experiences that have to do with this relaxation. At the end of the day, it's a mystery. But maybe now, if I answer in a theological or even spiritual manner, I would say it seems that this is a kind of trip like the one I was alluding to at the beginning of this long rumbling where we're incarnated to kind of contribute to the creative unfolding of the universe.

And so, back to the quote from my conversation with Bernard Carr, materialism is written with a T with one T, but I realize if you write it with double T, matter is also earth and mother. So my prediction is once we, it's like teenagers, once we reject the family and we get to the new post-material, post-materialist tribe, I think we will look back and say, wow, but the matter was already as mysterious as spirit. And so that's kind of what I was alluding to. Matter is really fascinating once you think about it, maybe we need to get some distance because we've had enough of all these isms, materialism, reductionism and so on so that we can re-appreciate it back and maybe spiritualize it. Sorry for the Long tour.

Adam Jacobs: No, no, no. That was very interesting and makes a lot of sense to me. But let me drill down for one more second on physicality. When a layman like myself looks into at least the popular science that's available to me, I read a book like Carlo Rovelli's book on Time, and he basically seems to conclude that there's no ultimate such thing as time. I've read things from Heisenberg that said particles, when you look at them very carefully, particles don't really exist. Heinrich Pas has talked about how everything is ultimately one. And so when I put all these things together when you scratch down on the surface of matter, it seems to be less and less there. And therefore, yes, mysterious, like you said, but the Buddhists have a term for this: Maya, which means illusion. Would you say that the material world has an actual existence despite its mystery, or is it just not really even there, and there's something underlying it, but we don't yet know what that is?

Alex Gomez-Marin: So I'm confessing maybe a personal bias. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of illusion. I also acknowledge that it's not that easy to translate this Eastern concept into the Western operating system. Some great scientists have been inspired by those. So I think it's a good thing that there's this cross-fertilization. But I would say maybe when we say illusion, it also means other things that maybe they don't mean.

Now, what do we see here in relation to your previous remark? We are, in a way, I'll put it bluntly, sick of materialism, some of us. And then in order to kind of emphasize that you say, look, there's only mind and matter is an illusion and blah blah blah. And they're very intelligent people I admire that make that case. But I'd like to again find a virtuous middle, not a stupid kind of agreement between both parties. But look back to real life. When I'm putting my daughters to bed, I feel, think, and probably know that they are pretty real. I don't think there's some sort of graphic user interface; otherwise, this is a kind of a scam reality.

Now there are many aspects of reality that we don't grasp and maybe that we will never grasp. Does this allude to Maya? Maybe. But I'm willing to let go of something very important that, as a great follower, I would say of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, I think we have immediate contact with reality. So I'm not willing to give up that in service of healing matter to emphasize the other points. Now, you were mentioning very interesting tensions, and this is another kind of recurring theme of my own work, struggle and enjoyment, even how to balance these two extremes. For instance, you mentioned the world is one, right? Yes. But the world is many at the same time.

It is like I used to play in a band, so you want to tune the amp a little bit, but if you tilt it too much to where the world is one and we are all one, but I'm Alex, and you are you. And so what about the many? Also the polarity between mind and matter that we were talking about. And another one very important to your question I think is the concrete and the abstract. So Whitehead warned us of what he called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which is we have access, I would say to these minute particulars that's perhaps what the artists and the poets and so on are able to express. We scientists seem to play a different game. We crave universals. Universality is the game in town. I mean, as a physicist, when you write the equation on the whiteboard, it's like that thing just applies.

You want to apply everywhere, every when, and for all instances. So we have tension, a balance between concrete and abstract, and we say that time does not exist. I wonder what they mean by time. Maybe they mean an abstraction. And I think that's part of the truth in that. But at the same time, I can also feel my own, as Bergson would say, kind of flowing. So, back to phenomenology, if we want to talk about consciousness, we must disclose that, acknowledge that we can only say, for instance, time does not exist from our own subjective speaking about time in the same manner that we say, well, what is this pen? And we could start making abstractions about, well, sure, it has solidity, and it's made of atoms.

And we look at textbooks that have these 19th-century drawings of blue balls and red balls going around as if that's what they were made of. Well, these are all very helpful abstractions, and we scientists build on them. But the primary reality of the situation is that I have an experience that's very concrete, and that's what the true phenomenologist, I would say, works so hard to let us know. So, we need to incorporate that into science. So it's a bit of a mess.

We also need Eastern thought to inform us because they've been studying the mind from their own mind for millennia. We have 400 years of experience doing really cool stuff technologically and scientifically. How do we mix it all? But avoiding that's now a confusion of ideas, topics, and so on.

Adam Jacobs: And that's okay, that's moving hopefully moving forward. But okay, speaking of science and spirituality, there's a quote from Rumi, which I think you've heard, “Silence is the language of God. All else is poor translation.” Okay, again, here's a quote from your discussion with Dr. Carr, which I liked. You say, “You and I are working to extend science to see how much it can stretch to cover these worlds. However, I don't know in advance how much it can be stretched without breaking down. We should acknowledge that at some point, science may reach its limits.”

Okay, well, that's very honest for a scientist. But I'm curious, why do you think that science has limits? I would say it seems to me that your colleagues don't think that they think that it can conquer all of knowledge in totality, eventually. It's very fascinating that you think it might break down. Why is that?

Alex Gomez-Marin: Wonderful. Because there are two capital scenes if I can speak like this, in being a scientist. One is to the left, the other is to the right. That's not political, it's just a way of saying it. You can err on the side of pseudoscience and it's a danger. We must run, by the way, if we really want to get into the unknown and pseudoscience the pre pseudo and many other prefixes are just conversation stoppers most of the time.

Adam Jacobs: Totally.

Alex Gomez-Marin: We can talk more about that. I have a lot to say about this, but the other error will be scientism. This is kind of a headline. I say scientism is arguably more dangerous than pseudoscience because it's an inside job. And what is scientism? Well, one way of defining it is the idea that science is the best and maybe the only way of truly knowing reality. This is so absolutely ignorant of the history of science, of the philosophy of science, and of the practice of actual scientists. It's really, I would even say, an abomination of rationality to conclude that we need the humanities but not like furniture. We really need the humanities, and we need the mystery, which is different than an enigma.

And so I think science works at its best as anything, as a family, as a relationship of any other sort, or as a nation where we know where the limits are. If we don't know a cell that doesn't know the limits, it is a cancer of the cell. A country that doesn't know or things that have no limits generates and collapses. Now, interesting limits need to be tested and probed. Like doing sports, you need to overreach a little bit, and that's how you grow, right? That's that's how you progress. So we need to play with those limits. But the idea that with science, we'll figure it all out. I mean, I dunno where to begin. It's just so stupid and dangerous because experts say “blah, blah, blah,” or “in the name of science.” That leads easily to authoritarian impulses.

Yes, because science is also political, and we must acknowledge that. And then there's another way to address your point: this conqueror’s attitude. And I'm a Spaniard. And when I get into the, you see what I mean? Colonialism, because I don't see that I'm responsible for what my grand grandparents may have done. But I will also add that science was founded. I mentioned Galileo, but it was also founded by a very colonialist or, if you wish, controlling domination attitude, and Francis Bacon, so we need to be grateful for what he did. But also say, all right, up to this point, he said, that's how you're going to do science. And he put together synthesized how you do science with Galileo, we have these kind of ideas.

And it's fascinating to realize that science is a little bit of that. It's a little bit of dissecting or some specimen with the jury and evidence, and devil's advocate, and also kind of alchemical workings. But then he said another thing he said, and we should follow nature and make her, I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but I once went and found the quote, and he's essentially saying that he says something like pursue her to all her corners and make her spill her secrets. So, the dominant mode with which science approaches reality has been interrogation mode in the lab, as if nature was some sort of captive that we must force to tell us the secrets. Now, there are other ways of doing science that are different and have more of a whispering quality or a conversational quality, or participation quality. So maybe these are the ones we need now.

And I'll add another thing. These certain topics may lend themselves to interrogation. If you want to know how things fall or how things spin, you bring a hundred pens to the lab, and you can just do whatever you want with them. With animals, it's a bit more tricky. They have their own agency. So that's where already biology gets complicated now with things of the mind, psychical things or even things that are at the edges of consciousness. Well those things, I think they're lend themselves even less to this interrogation mode. So, the question for the scientists, and now I realize I go back to one of the things you said, is who's in control of the future of science? As we try to study whatever abilities, supposed abilities, or faculties of the human mind, well, are we really in control? Are we going to just bring them to the lab and force them to elicit them upon our demand?

This idea that we can repeat, for instance, repeatability or reproducibility, we can bring something into the lab and just make it happen over and over and over again upon our command with the same initial conditions. If that starts to vanish, how are we going to do science? So this thing we call the scientific method, that's my sense. I think in the future if we continue forward, we will need to update the software. And I don't know what this is going to look like. And as far as I'm a great fan and, that's what I do. That's what I work on. To push the boundaries of science, I must be humble and say maybe we will reach a point where it says no more because it's not even possible. And then maybe we need to become mystics, or maybe we need to become something else to kind of get into that particular province of reality.

Adam Jacobs: Well, first of all, I love your openness, and I can only say that I wish that all of the scientific community had a similar attitude. But what I find, and thankfully, I've been able to speak to a lot of really accomplished scientists in the last few years, sometimes what I find is that the scientific method seems to be the be-all and end-all of the exploration of any topic. And sometimes, if you bring up a mystical point, they'll say, okay, so prove it in a lab.

Then, I point to labs like the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia or the Institute of Noetic Sciences. And I show them, and I say, well here these are labs, and this is actual research that is occurring, and it's showing things that don't fit into the paradigm as you understand it. What do you make of that? And still I find that there's a very dismissive, almost chuckling like a pat you on the head, oh, that's very cute that you did that research, but when you're ready to play with the big boys, then come and see us. So this is a good way to segue into it; you've done fascinating research into extra-ocular vision, which means seeing without eyes if I had to boil it down. But maybe you can expand upon that a little bit.

What are the implications for normative science of the kind of research that you do? And I'll just add also that I know that IONS just put out a film about the hearts and the concept of the hearts seeing as opposed to the eyes. There's even a segment of it where a young girl with a very thick blindfold appears to be reading words from a dictionary without looking at them. I didn't get the chance to ask them too much about that, but of course, that would strike me as impossible. And these other materialist scientists as impossible. Is the research you guys doing disproving this vision of science?

Alex Gomez-Marin: Yes, no, thank you. Yeah, this documentary, I think it's called The Heart Revolution, directed by Benedict Just and made possible by wonderstruck. We actually had a private premiere at the Pari Center a couple of days ago. So it's very fresh.

So there are great scientists there like Roland Mac and Gal Pollock and others. There is a bit where there's this girl; yes, I am researching all of that. I don't want to be ambiguous or ambivalent, but I always feel in this tight rope. So I think a lot of what's going on there and in other related processes, and perhaps we should define what we're talking about, we're talking about what's also called extrasensory perception, which basically is indicating that we shall be able to perceive information about the world without necessarily it going through our five sanctioned senses. This is another thing that they teach us in school. And I have, as I said, I have daughters going to school and I'm not sure if school is about education or about schooling. I think that's more about that.

But I think that's what scientists should be entitled to ask. What if there are more ways of receiving this information? That's why some people call it anomalous information, right? Anomalous because we don't have a frame or we don't really know where to put it. It's kind of a question mark. And then what's at stake with anomalous stuff, anomalous cognition, anomalous information transfer, and so on, is whether that question mark will end up with a tick that says, oh, back to the normal paradigm. Or if it falls on the other side, it's an exclamation mark. It's like, what is this doing to our paradigm? So I must say that my hope is that studying all of those edges of consciousness, we may bring more evidence that physicalism hold. So that's kind of the metaphysical project there. Use science to see if, indeed, the story we've been told about the universe made of matter is a kind of useful lie that we don't need anymore.

Now I've seen kids and also adults, and in particular, I'm friends with a blind man who can do really impossible things. And I like very much this word. Sometimes, I say I'm doing a kind of impossible science. It's impossible because my colleagues think it's impossible. And also, what does impossible mean? It means it doesn't say much about the data, which is what we should care about, what the data seems to suggest. It says more about our priors as to there's this joke, here's the data. And then the expert looks at it and says, that's very nice in practice, but does it work in theory? So all these phenomena where you present them to people, and I am learning to deal with them with skeptics, and that's a word they've appropriated because it's like we are all skeptics, we all should be skeptics, we should all have healthy doubts.

But these skeptics become very dogmatic. The moment you bring more data and better data and other labs bring data, and there's a huge literature, they don't bother to discuss it or even read it sometimes because they know it cannot be true. So at some point, I dunno, we should be trying to convince them or say, okay, please leave us to the site you were asking before when you phrase this question, you said, well, I wish all scientists were kind of along the lines of what you're saying. Well, look, maybe we don't need them all. Don't need them all right. No, I'm joking. But I mean, if only they would leave led us like 5%, 3% of us, 10% of us just do this kind of edge research, and they can continue exploiting and mining the things we know because they're an infinite number of details to figure out.

So it's like they can continue, this isn't my more empathic nice way of saying it. I have other more harsh way of saying them, just leave us alone. But it will be like, sure, continue your digging in the same place for 40 years. Enjoy finding all these little details, as they say, the pieces that are missing, and continue doing your puzzle. But we are not solving great sudokus here. We are going for the big prize for the enigma and for the mystery, and so let us do our work. But they wouldn't. They wouldn't. So they ridicule. You don't get the funding. So that's the social politics, we must say. And I was naive. I learned quickly, I think, but I was naive. I thought, oh, if we do some good experiments, they'll take it. No, we also need to work on the theory to make the impossible possible and be able to at least entertain it.

We can talk about that, too. But then there's another level, which is no, we also need to work on the sociopolitical front because these guys will say that we didn't do it right when we did, or at least when we did it to the same standards that other kind of research is approved. And they'll say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. They'll pull out the mantra, have all these, once you've dealt with that, they have all these predictable kind of tricks. They have the 10 command commandments of the dogmatic skeptic, and they'll throw, and one by one you can reply, and then what they say at the end is, whatever, you must be doing fraud, or I don't want to talk to you.

So, at that point, maybe just let us work on that. And there are many people that have been doing it for many decades. And look, I didn't know that when I started diving into these fields, I realized, wow, as you mentioned, people in adopts in Virginia, they've been studying near-death experiences for 50 years. When you look at ESP, extrasensory perception, Dean Raid and Rupert Shel Drake, who are now colleagues, even friends of mine, they've been doing it for 40 years and so on. But it's still a bit underground. It's still a bit underground. Maybe now that consciousness is coming back to science after these 400 years, we have yet another opportunity to say, Hey, this is not so extraordinary. This happens to a lot of people.

For instance, one more thing, when I give talks to academics, maybe it's less frequent, but to lay people, when I finish, they come to me, and they tell me their stories, and they say, look, I drawn 23 years ago, I saw my body from above, and I haven't told this to anyone, even my family members. But now, because the experts have shared their own and have said that maybe we are not stupid or crazy because this is what people fear, that they'll be told stupid or crazy, we can start to talk about this. So that's the work we need to do. Talk about it, do good science, do rigorous experiments. That's what we're trying to do. And think of conceptual ways of making those impossibles possible.

Adam Jacobs: Great. To me, you guys are revolutionaries. Honestly, I think that when the history of the world is written in the future and a small cadre of bold scientific thinkers merged mysticism with science, I think it's going to be one of the greatest moments that humanity has ever seen. I'm waiting anxiously for it, but to me, it's extremely exciting whenever I encounter somebody who's on that journey and is pushing that envelope. So just to put one final point or emphasize one thing that you were just talking about. You say we need to keep doing the experiments and keep building the data, which I agree with. But in your opinion, isn't it, there already isn't the work that Dean Radin has done and Ed Kelly has done and a bunch of people. Isn't it enough what's already present?

Alex Gomez-Marin: I love your questions. I do. I really do. Thank you for asking this. And the answer is yes, and no, I'm afraid. Look, the other day, I was talking to another senior, I mean, I feel blessed because all these people are happy to talk to me. And I asked them for advice. And this senior person who's been in the game for a long time said, Alex, move on. You don't need to redo kind of what you're saying. You don't need to redo this experiment. Again, we and others have shown it's real. You believe it's real, just move on. And I think there's a point they've moved forward and now, I mean, I'm new to this, so now you come and just move a bit more, just try to push the boundary a bit more. But at the same time, I would say that two things, science, the method, and the method need replication.

So it's not enough that one person did it, or even that two people did it. It's never a bad idea to do it again. Because sometimes things, and look, I'm not doubting that. That's well done. And there's a lot done, and there are meta-analyses as well. So, some of these phenomena have effects that are typically small but very robust. So I'm not doubting that that's real, but it's a good habit for a scientist to try to reproduce it. Another thing is that the system doesn't select for that. They want the new thing.

The other thing is that it is emotionally and spiritually important that I see those things with my own eyes, looking about seeing without eyes. Well, I want to see with my own eyes how people see without theirs. A funny way of saying it is because a scientist is not only kind of a detached person doing the stats 3000 kilometers away, we are kind of expert witnesses. If you want back to what I was saying about Bacon, Francis bacon, I want to see it. I want to set up the controls. I want to learn because that's how you play the guitar and watch YouTube videos. No, you need to actually play it, right? You realize, oh, I didn't do this randomization properly, or I shouldn't have said that because that could have, alright, it's by the practice, and I'm a theoretician by training. But by doing that, I kind of understand what it takes to do those experiments.

And then the other thing is that I also learned the good and the bad side of it, which is the, sometimes I've said this before, sometimes I come back home after seeing one of those events, and I have a Golum and a Smegol on my shoulders and says, one says, “It's beautiful. You've seen a scientific miracle, you didn't believe it, but you see now we see it on the other side. It's stupid, stupid. You're cleaning your reputation. That's bullshit. They're tricking you, right?” And I've gone through both, I've done things, and it's like, oh no, it seems like they were cheating or I didn't do this correctly, and that's why. But I've seen things that it's like I see no f way of that having happened. Having a man draw images that we would pick after he drew them with a random number generator, we would just select an image from 23 possible images, and he had no idea what they could be.

He drew them one by one, he did six of them, and you put them side by side. And there's also psychological concerns about how to pair the answer together. There are other technical ways of doing it better with a judge, whatever. But when I saw that this has been one of the highlights of my empirical work just by being a theoretician, this is impossible because that violates sacro principles like causality, which is like you nearly get it tattooed as a physicist. You can give up notions of matter energy, time stretches and space bands and matter turns into energy, alright, causality, he's drawing something that hasn't happened and there could be no way he knew, but I've seen this with my own eyes. So this kind of supercharges me and says, alright, I mean, now I don't care if they call me a pseudo-scientist because I'm actually seeing those things. It's like you're traveling the worlds with your boat, finding new landscapes and you are seeing all of that for the first time with your own eyes. And then you can come back and tell it.

Adam Jacobs: I love the Smegol and Golum image. And I guess you just have to be careful because Smegol did die in the fires of Mount Doom. He couldn't let go of that vision.

Alex Gomez-Marin: But he served a great purpose to the entire plot.

Adam Jacobs: Yeah, well, he enabled the success of the endeavor. Exactly. By sacrificing himself. Yeah, a hundred percent.

Alex Gomez-Marin: Well that's not a joke. That has to do with your previous remark about the future of science. And maybe that's what's required of us, a kind of sacrifice. It's like I don't want to sound like Jordan Peterson here, and I enjoy listening to him sometimes, but what's the kind of sacrifice we are willing to make as scientists, like reputation, funding or even conceptual things like causality. What are you going to place on the altar? And depending on your sacrifices, you'll get certain things. And if you don't want to sacrifice anything, you just want to do business as usual, well you'll get business as usual.

You will predict what you'll get more of the same forever until you die. When I had my new death experience, it is like, okay, I'm not, look, I'm 40 years old, I came back, I'm tenured. Really? What do I have to lose? What do I have to lose? No, I'll go for it. So when you were saying before, I wish all your colleagues could do it. Well, maybe they cannot. I'm starting to think that because I don't like when they oppose me, but I also try to empathize. It is impossible. It's like if you would go to some place where they'd never seen a party tour, a score, they cannot read music, they don't even know that the music exists in written form. And you show them lines and dots, and you say, this is real, and it sounds like this. And they say, I just see lines and dots, just stop it.

So I get it. Maybe people need to have some sort of awakening, which can be very nice but also can be very traumatic. And these awakenings are what allow us to move to the next level. And I know that sounds like we are ahead, we are in the next level. I don't mean to sound like this at all, but there's a little video of that. Let me put it this way, and I think I took this from Jeff Kripel, you need to see your world shattered once, perhaps twice so that you get it. It's like, all right.

Talking about Maya as illusion. That's maybe a better way. I like to think about it. Not that's an illusion, but it's like a video game that's very real. But when you think you get it, there are more levels to it. So if you've had, and I kind of had my world change twice in the sense that I was a physicist that went into biology and my physics was quite useless in that well of living beings. And then I had this other one, my near-death experience and the things I saw. And so it's like, okay, I get it. There's no bottom to this, but that's why we need to keep on moving forward.

Adam Jacobs: I love not only what you're saying but how you're saying it. So thank you. This is a very gratifying conversation for me. I hope other people feel that way when they see it as well. But I am coming towards the end of my allotted time. I have two questions I'd love to get in if possible. One regarding David Bohm and one regarding Ray Kurzwell. Okay, so David Bohm seems to be like from your camp, he's the physicist that's held up as the paragon of a guy who sort of gets it. Although it's interesting to me that he's the least well-known of maybe the major physicists in the last hundred years. But there's a quote from him, which is “deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty, and if we don't see this, it's because we are blinding ourselves to it.” And that was from an article called Bohm’s Unfinished Revolution. And okay, so my question is why did he conclude that it is a virtual certainty?

Alex Gomez-Marin: I dunno why, but the word virtual here is interesting, and not sure if he meant it in a quantum mechanical sense. And I know we need to get two questions, and we need to reach the end. So let's see if I don't go very elliptical here, but Bohm has this idea of the implicate and the explicate order, which we don't have time to explain, but basically, while the explicate, maybe the explicate will be the minute particulars that I was referring to, the things that you seem to encounter in life. And then the implicate is like it's unfolded, right?

So it's there, but it's what gives rise to the explicate, but it's not apparently obviously visible. And that has to do with his efforts to kind of ground also quantum mechanics. And he had this hidden variables theory, then he changed his mind a little bit or substantially he was Einstein's protege in a way was now his life is really important to understand also his thought because he was accused of communism and then he had to flee to Brazil and then he went to Israel and then he went back and went to the UK, didn't come back to the US in that trip. He also had these dialogues with Krishnamurti.

He was really concerned with the nature of thought and dialogue. And also towards the end was the kind of scientific guru as I think his holiness the Dalai Lama said. So what bond was a true seeker, right? Really into the foundations of quantum mechanics. But then he realizes there's much more, it is consciousness, it's the implicate order. And so, on the one hand, there's this absolute certainty, but it's virtual, maybe because it needs to be realized in the same way. And this is analog here where there's the wave function needs to collapse. And I know there are people that say it doesn't collapse. But basically, I would say one way of thinking about the quantum world is that things there live in virtuality. This is super cool. It's like another reality where there are different rules. Now, the key we were speaking about is the mind beyond the brain and how it comes back to the brain.

How does the virtual, ingress into the actual, well, that's the whole issue about the implicate organ explicating itself. And that's one metaphor of putting it right. So maybe that's what he meant. Once you go into this silence you were alluding to or through dialogue with Krishnamurti through meditation like the Buddhist or through science, you realize that there's this kind of realm of absolute, but then I suppose that's not enough. You need to kind of take this virtually and actualize it. Now I must admit, I'm just riffing on a quote that you're asking me to comment on, but that kind of gives a flavor of what B was always after. To me, Bohm represents trans-physics. It's like he was, come on, he was helping Einstein and more than that, but then he was trying also to see how far we can go.

That's why crossing the boundaries from physics and getting into things that have to do with the world with conflict and also relating it back to thought and the problems of how we think. He had this other sentence, he has many, many quotes that are so juicy. He said that one problem we thought is that it's not easily proprioceptive. You see prop percept when you can feel your own and touch yourself but have a problem doing that upon yourself. And that's why I think we don't see the limits. And that's why I think we do all these horrible things. And maybe that ties back to your question about Kurzweil, which you haven't articulated yet. What happens when your thought goes high wire, and you lose all prop deception?

Adam Jacobs: So you talk about Kurtzweil in something called the Stairway to Transhumanist Heaven, which a great title and you say “Kurtzweil stands towards death is key to understanding his entire quest. He yearns to bring his father, Frederick, back to life.” And then, furthermore, it says, “as the UK philosopher John Gray puts it, such unwitting theologians engage in a continuation of monotheism by other means.” Okay, so to me, that is so interesting. And I know that Touring himself and his interest in creating a machine that could function on the same level as a human was because of a relationship that he had that he lost. And he was interested in bringing him back.

So here's my question with this. It's been my subjective perception that even the folks that we've been discussing who hate hearing about these things and want to do it in the most standard, the most materialist way, and the idea of souls or a next world or it's just offensive and silly at the same time, I've noticed that these people behave in a way that is pretty spiritual to me. They believe in morality in an absolute sense often and conduct themselves as if they have free will. And in all the things that they claim not to believe in, they seem to engage in. So I love this term, “unwitting theologians.”

So in your experience, even these people that you don't want to engage with because 97% of them are not going to turn to your research and be interested in, would you say that those people are basically, they're doing this on some level anyway, they're unwitting theologians. The fact that they're engaged in a scientific pursuit to begin with is indicative of the fact that they do believe that there is some kind of higher order, and whether it's subconscious or not, they're engaged in learning about it.

Alex Gomez-Marin: Yes, yes. It's a human impulse. That's why we need the humanities. We need to understand who we are as humans. And that's, I would say, engraved in our hearts, these these fear of death needs of transcendence. You see, it's very funny because I was saying before, when scientists become, it's very dangerous when philosophers or even when scientists say, well, there's no metaphysics. The positivists wanted to do well, they're tricking ourselves and probably fooling themselves too because it's like, oh, I don't have a metaphysics lie. Yeah, good luck with that. You surely have; you either don't know which is dangerous, or you either know and pretend you don't, which means you're lying.

Now the same thing happens here with all these whatever techno guys that say no AI is value-free. This is just a tool. It's like bullshit. I mean, everything is organized in values. And again, if you claim they're none or it's neutral, you are very deluded with a lot of power, which is dangerous, or lying to us, which is worse. And you mentioned the as if it's funny because all of the kind of transhumanist, a way to summarize the intricate theological and metaphysical tricks of transhumanism is the big as if is taking.

So basically, if you can imitate something to a degree that under certain conditions you cannot tell, then that thing, that copy becomes the original or even better because that's what they want to do with as humans kind of copy us and then improve us, which is a very not even spiritual, a very religious impulse. Now where's the danger here? It's a technocratic, pseudo-religious science-based narrative. So it's a horrible confusion of the best that technology can do, pretending sometimes they don't even pretend. I think a way of thinking of it is the kind of agnostic cult that says, sure, God is dead. And then we had secularism running science for many decades, and now we kind of make this secularist sound kind of religious again, but we won't say it. And I would add two more things to this. One is I wonder if there's an element of evil here and it's like, this is a big word, but I don't think it's only misunderstandings.

I sense, I'll just say it here and leave it for everyone to meditate. I sense an element of evil because, as I argue in that article and the title was good because the editors didn't play with it. I know a title is good when it stays because the editors sometimes often choose the title. This stairway to transhumanist heaven is a proposal for suicide at the civilizational and species level. It seems like they have a hidden agenda, and I don't want to be conspiratorial here, but let's just get rid of the human condition. But what the F again, do they know about the human condition? Have you read great literature and so on to really grasp what it is like to be a human? So they want to copy a human into a machine, but they dunno what a human is.

And the end product is going to be our destruction, perhaps. Now let me say one more thing because mentioning death, of course, when you're confronted with the real deal, not just books about philosophy and your grand theory of everything and so on, then this really moves you. And I would like to end by just mentioning two names as paradigmatic of the true roots like the Crossroads, Dawkins and Sheldrake, Richard Dawkins, a very well-known biologist, and Rupert Sheldrake, also a very well-known biologist who I think should be better known. And disclosure, he is a friend of mine.

So you see, in front of the same biological and philosophical and even theological fact you could say or aspects, dockings choose the root of new atheism belligerent and be scientism. And then we have Rupert Sheldrake who despite being stigmatized forever, he continues doing his research. He's a creative researcher. But you see, what's more important, and that's a reflection I want to leave you with, is not so much who has more followers on Twitter or more papers, but look at the two men. Rupert is kind, happy, fulfilled, generous, humble, full of light, humble. Look at the other men, I'm sorry because they're both leaving and I'm making the comparison, but it's like a bitter, bitter. I mean, who would you want to have dinner with? And so that's what taking a more spiritual route turns you into, I would say.

That's why saying now it's just the power of reason and just slamming anything that doesn't fall in my small province. That's what it does to people. And ultimately, we are going to get old, we're going to die. So, we should be careful what our science, metaphysics, and ethics do to our own personalities. So even if we knew nothing about the actual experiment and so on, we could look at the consequences if you take some met or something like this. Okay, what is this going to do to your way of being in the world? So if you have the dockings option and the sherick option, well, again, I'm simplifying, and there are many other aspects to take into consideration, but how do we want to live like a grumpy rationalist who's irrational or kind of a wise, spiritually calm man full of light? I know my option.

Adam Jacobs: Very well said. And Dr. Alex, I hope that your ideas find as great an audience as possible. I hope you're writing a book. I hope you're doing a documentary.

Alex Gomez-Marin: I'm doing all of those things.

Adam Jacobs: Good, good. I'll be the first one to buy them and delve into it. But thank you so much for taking the time. I know it was hard to set up this discussion, but now that we've done it, I think it was really worth it. And thank you and I wish you all the success in the world. Thank you for being here.

Alex Gomez-Marin: Thank you. Really, we need these kinds of conversations, so are really helping. You are part of this process by just having this conversation with us. Thank you.

Adam Jacobs: Thank you.