#147 What is PURE Consciousness? - Thomas Metzinger

36:26Famous traditions say it is not even something that has to be achieved by meditation. It is just something that has to be recognized. It is there right now. I know you have been guilty of panpsychism. It is a certain way, it is a certain sense in which that, after which you are, permeates everything. And I wanted to ask you a second question. So many people think this pure awareness thing is something mystical and wild and I've never had it. But I think everybody knows it. Also non-meditators. And here's one or two examples. So sometimes maybe you've taken an afternoon nap and you went much deeper than you wanted to and you woke up and you were seriously disoriented.

37:21You didn't know for maybe for 500 milliseconds or maybe even for two whole seconds, you didn't know who you were and where you were and what time it was yeah these wide awake um this is pure awareness yeah interesting yeah yeah i mean i i had that experience this morning when my when my editor knocked on the door and woke me up and i was like uh and i i forgot i was like i feel like it wasn't quite it wasn't quite that because i feel like sometimes when i wake up to an alarm and I haven't had quite enough sleep as I, you know, no one, it's never good to wake up to an alarm. You should strive to wake up before it, you know, but when you do, sometimes I've woken up and the reason it happens is because I've got something important on and that's why I've set an alarm.

38:10And it'll take me a second to sort of be like, what is it? What is it today? I've got, there's something I'm, there's something, oh yeah, that's right. You know, my, my, my editor is, is here or something. And so I don't know if, I mean, this morning I didn't, I might've sort of been aware that there was something but but you're right at that moment of sort of like people often say you know give me a minute to come to come to from from where yeah so it's super simple you know i don't know if psychiatrists do that in england in germany they would ask about a patient is the patient oriented to place is the patient oriented to time yeah and is the patient oriented to person that is can he or she say who she is yeah and there are situations where we are wide awake and we aren't i'll give you a second example there's always one day in the year when you sleep as good you sleep really really well and often you get up early even a quarter to five because you're so well rested.

39:20And if you then don't make two mistakes, you don't look into your phone and you don't talk to anybody. But imagine you just walked out to the terrace in this super well rested, well slept, wide awake stay, and sat there with the first cup of coffee or tea and the birds were singing. And then there was one thought arising and disappearing. And then there was another thought arising and disappearing. There's something in between. That is it. Everybody knows this. Children who are in flow states when they are not disturbed and play, if they're left alone and nobody molests them, they sometimes, the quality of awareness itself becomes explicit.

40:19And so I think, don't think you have to meditate at all to experience this. I think everybody knows it. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with Kayak and get your trip right. Bad advice? You talking to me? Kayak. Got that right. There's nothing like your first Mac. Here's what people online are sharing. At Dr. Rain says, everything is just so smooth and fast I still can't get over it.

41:04Sinking stuff between my phone and this is just chef's kiss. At Mr. Incredible 488 says, Apple Silicon basically cures low battery trauma. That's how they felt with their first Mac. How will you? Introducing the all-new MacBook Neo. An amazing Mac at a surprising price. Find out more on apple.com slash Mac. Yeah, and people often talk about creative flow states as well. If you are a musician, freestyle rappers talk about this. People make up rhymes on the spot because if you're thinking about it, you're like what what rhymes with microphone uh you know hippodrome uh yeah but then you really get into the music and and the words just sort of start coming a bit like when you're speaking yeah you don't really think of every word that you're saying and they just they just sort of flow out and they say you know people say things like oh i i sort of got lost in it you know as if you sort of it's almost like waking up from a dream afterwards you're like well you know what what was that i just sort of became consumed by this thing and yeah again it feels like we're getting a clue here as to the kind of thing we might be talking about where you know time and awareness of self kind of at least full to the background for a moment such that even when you come to and you're like no no no i am a self and the self was there i didn't i wasn't like aware of it for five minutes when i was when i was in that in that flow state i guess that's the kind of thing we're talking about i did want to ask you just because i'm interested you say you meditate twice a day every day for how many years?

42:37Almost 49. And how long do you typically meditate for? You know, it's a long life. It varies. Now it's like 45, 40 minutes twice. But after a certain time, this starts, you know, the distinction to what you do during the life. This starts to blur a little bit. Things will also happen. when the good thing is when you don't meditate, but the system has learned this and you just silently, I like to be in nature all by myself a lot, just silently sit in the forest on a bench. And if you don't ruin everything by meditating, sometimes something happens by itself, so it changes over a lifetime. but I wanted to connect to something you just said.

43:31One of the simple things, you know, the most prominent meditation technique in the West right now is Vipassana, where people just non-judgmentally observe their own thoughts as they arise and disappear. Just be aware of them, don't judge them, don't suppress them, but don't also follow them. And one thing that teaches you is you don't know what your next thought will be. I mean, this rapper is inside. The rapper is called the default mode network. Yes. And it speeds up this stuff. The first thought that interrupts the silence is always a complete surprise. It's like being ambushed. And then the brain, that's at least my theory, has to explain away that surprise.

44:30And it does this by creating a cognitive agent. By, yeah, I had a thought. You know, I remembered something. And then it creates a little self-model of an entity that actually was in control all the time and did that. And I remembered that. But that's a confabulation. Yeah, when if you pay attention, and for some people it can be difficult to meditate. I mean, I've never seriously given it a try and I think that's to my shame and to my fault. But if people are on a boat of being like, no, I don't feel like, I feel like I'm having my thoughts. I don't know what you mean. I would say pay attention the next time you're speaking in your native language.

45:13Like when I'm saying these words, I'm not, if I'm trying to speak, you know, French or German, I might think about every word, you know, ich bin ein or einer man something like that you know i'll think about but not that in my in my language you know i'm just like it the words are just coming out i i didn't know that i was about to say i didn't know i'm roughly aware of the thing i'm trying to say and then the words just flow and when i when i pay attention to what it was like a second ago for the these words to just just appear they are as mysterious to me as the words that appear in my consciousness when you speak i don't know what you're about to say next very good observation but i also don't know what i'm about to say next And if you just pay attention while you're speaking, I'm doing it now.

45:56That's why I'm going on. I'm trying to really feel what it's like for these words to just appear. It's only retrospectively that I'll say, you know, yeah, I said those words, but I didn't plan on it. What does the first person pronoun I refer to in these cases? It refers to a certain what I call partition of the phenomenal self-model you have of yourself. But that's, of course, as our common friend Daniel would say, it's virtual. It's itself a control hallucination, that selfiness. And it was, you know, super efficient, parsimonious for the organism in which it happens. It had an evolutionary advantage.

46:37It made the emergence of large societies possible. because if I have a model of myself as mostly living within reason and I recognize you as somebody who probably also mostly lives within reason, we can, how do you say, mutually acknowledge each other as persons. Personhood emerges, you know, rational subjects. And that made an explosion possible that wasn't possible in animal societies. So it's like a scaffold for a lot of cultural stuff that comes later. So it's not something bad in that sense. It was very useful, but it also created a lot of suffering. That's the downside of it. But yeah, the closer you look, just by guiding attention, or as your very own Carverist might say, by precision deployment, you can penetrate into the construction process and your model of reality changes.

47:49You see that it's not like we're all talking in everyday discourse. I had this thought. It's more like the thought had you. yeah i know i know exactly what you mean yeah i don't think i i have ever reached like a an experiential state of like um like just intuitively realizing that of just knowing that like on the whole and that's what i think people are referring to when they when they really reach these deep states of meditation or high doses of psychedelics and they really just feel intuitively the truth of what's being said there but it's a common thread throughout all kinds of traditions i am interested if you stopped meditating like if you just were never allowed to meditate again for the rest of your life how do you think your life would change maybe it would get much better it was because i I was forced to end a silly pursuit.

48:51I mean, one problem is, you see it all over in spiritual movements, the human self model adapts. And so somebody, for some reason, decides to meditate. And then they develop a practitioner personality. They are disciplined. They have had glimpses of something. And they thought that was relevant. and they have seen things other people haven't seen. And if it gets really, really bad, they may begin to teach, you know. And then you suddenly have sexual abuse in monasteries. You know, that's, you know, in religious spiritual movement, that's how it happens. That is not the answer I was expecting, I must say.

49:39What would you rather like to hear? Well, no, I think that's interesting. But I think most, I was expecting, you know, to say, if I couldn't meditate, you know, my life would fall apart and I'd be, you know, anxious and unsettled all the time and whatnot. No, in The Elephant, there is a small chapter called meditation and non-meditation. Right. And of course, ultimately, the problem is that idiot that sits on the cushion and wants to achieve something because they have read books or heard crazy stuff from some new age freak that is i mean you can come and you can become clear but then there's still this entity that is reward seeking in a certain sense or which also has maybe sometimes maybe every few time a few days, had a beautiful meditation experience, and says, oh, I want that, I want, that feels just right, and I want to have it again.

50:44Of course, this has to all be seen too. And many of the deeper traditions, of course, say, at the end, if you've looked into this for a few years, don't meditate. um so they say things like non-distracted non-meditation that's the real thing right whatever that is yeah you know that yeah that is that is interesting because i mean i don't know much about the science of meditation but i have heard people reference the fact that sometimes like an obsession with meditation or attempting meditation can actually be kind of a negative experience depending on the depending on the context or who's doing it or what their reasons are or what it brings to their sort of psychological attention.

51:30It's not for all people. I mean, it's much more sustainable and much more safer than psychedelics. Right. But I have sat on a cushion and cried, and I've had psychological crises. It's not for everybody. I remember a paper that if you're a narcissist regular meditation practice actually makes it worse it's not good for everything so one has to be careful but maybe there's a kind of a realization that meditation is actually something that is going on all the time that is happening namely a state of observation without an observer that is normally automatically contracted into you, contracted into that first-person perspective, but which can be deconstructed, but it's already there.

52:38So I think there are stages. You have to dabble in this for a few years and then maybe you will realize... I'll tell you an example, typical example. So I'm this neurotic control freak, right? An experience I've had hundreds of times is I would sit and meditate. And then a bell rings. It's over. The time is over. And then it gets really nice. the moment i have this prediction the meditation period is over now yeah then something very nice happens hard to describe may go on for a few minutes which shows me that there was something else all the time you know so waiting for that bell no no no no no trying to bring attention back to the present moment or something like that.

53:40This automatism, that kind of resistance also. Yeah, that's interesting. And I suppose, I mean, people keep telling me that I need to meditate and meditate more. No, but why should you? If you don't feel naturally drawn to it, why should you do that? Because other people say it? Yeah, I don't know. Well, I suppose people, when I talk about consciousness and my interest in, you know, minimal phenomenal experience and stuff, people might say to me, well, like, you know, if you really want to know, here's how you find out. But then again, I feel like that that's echoing this kind of, you've got this goal that you want to achieve by sitting down and being quiet for a while.

54:25Almost like I've got my pen and paper next to me ready that when I have it, I can pick it up and write down, you know, my. And boast about it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly. So, So, you know, I don't know. I feel like it would be useful to try. But yeah, I think you have to be careful about motivation. What is that called? There's a term for it. Discourse competence. I don't know if that exists in English. So that you can also participate in conversations about meditation. Discourse competence. I'm not sure if that's a phrase in the UK, but it ought to be. Because that's a useful concept, yeah.

55:02This is bizarre nonsense. I mean, the real question is, can you suffer less? Is this something that in real life, with all the real problems you have, would make you suffer a little bit less? or enable you to be a little more compassionate than you normally are or not. And it might not. I don't know. There may be people for whom extreme sports or really good diet might do the same job, you know, if they wanted it. What? Because we're suffering people. We're suffering beings. I mean, that's the origin of it, to understand the roots of suffering and not to talk about it or form organizations or have teachers, but to understand the deeper defined structure of your own suffering.

55:58Why do I do this to myself? How do I always do this to myself? And not theoretically, not in psychotherapy, not with talking to somebody, but maybe seeing this. And you've written about how, by the way, we've been talking about this book the elephant and the blind yes which is this grouping together of different reports from the this survey and a sort of discussion on the on the various themes that they bring out and you you sort of continually quote people and then sort of group them together into into sort of rough rough themes um and it's called the elephant and the blind after that famous sort of story of the the blind people all being sent to feel an elephant and one of them feels the you know the the foot and one fills the trunk and one fills the tail and they all have a totally different idea of what an elephant is and they're sort of grasping at one small part of a much larger larger entity and maybe something like that's going on you know experientially with these meditators they're kind of some people are getting at one thing some people are getting in another and you need to zoom out and look at the big picture and the way to do that is by looking at these people who've had these minimal phenomenal experiences but there is some consideration given to the view that some people have that this minimal this mpe minimal phenomenal experience is not really an experience being kind of devoid of content it's maybe sort of something else like can you say something about those people who think it doesn't really count as an experience.

57:35Yes, that's very interesting and a bit difficult. So I'm an old-fashioned guy. So in the self-model theory, I have asked, in obviously selfless systems like you and me, what would happen to happen on a representation level in the brain that the system have a robust experience of being someone. Now, one could ask, what kind of representational content, phenomenal content, would make the large majority of people say this is a contentless experience? Because that's what most people say. Pure awareness is contentless. Maybe it's reflexive, it's awareness knowing itself, but there is no content. So the question is, I think that is a content.

58:28I'm the party pooper there, the old-fashioned philosopher. I think it is actually something that is a form of representational content. But then we have some reports of apparently also advanced people who say that the whole thing is that this is not an experience. and I must say I take them very seriously and one day I have the feeling I understand what they mean and another day I think no I don't understand what they mean maybe there because that's what you were interested in at the beginning of our conversation is there something I'll just tell you my speculative theory you know global workspace theory no the first model of consciousness bernard bars the cognitive theory of consciousness in 1988 was the idea the content of consciousness is the content of a global workspace that makes information globally available by broadcasting it to concept formation to the motor system everything that is in that global workspace is my situation right now is the content of consciousness.

59:50Now that's a functional analysis of consciousness. It doesn't work. And I think my idea is one has to add one thing. In nervous systems like ours, we are embodied epistemic spaces. They open epistemic spaces. But when that epistemic space has a model of itself, if a model of the space emerges in the space that's when you get consciousness and that has nothing to do with content um the all the colors and sounds and interest anneal the interceptive self model and all that so i think there's a way that this whole model right now actually knows itself impersonally and that is not an experience in the sense that it is a content of the model but there is maybe a quality you can tune into like a self-knowingness of the whole situation which you normally just think this is the world and the self-knowingness is transparent as G.E.

1:01:09Moore would have said in 1903. You look through it, but you can make it opaque that there is a global reflexivity in it or something like that the space as a whole represents itself somehow, becomes self-similar. And that creates phenomenality. It's super simple, but it has nothing to do with the content that is active in that space. And that's crazy speculative, right, the idea. But maybe that is something some meditators become aware of, is that the awareness of it all, the knowingness of it all, is actually reflexive. there's a global reflexive quality in it all but that isn't an experience um that's what makes it all is this intelligible or is it just bizarre okay no no i i'm trying to think how to say it's like i i think i think it makes sense but it's really hard to get a like a grasp i i think i'm quite like a visual thinker like when you when you were describing you know a sort of self-reflexive awareness.

1:02:25I'm almost like picturing this amorphous sort of glass jar of sorts. And it's difficult to get the right sort of imagery in my head. But yeah, it might not be that it's an experience itself. It's like the thing which experiences kind of happen to. But let us go to good British philosophy then, as we are here in England. G.E. Moore, The predecessor of Ludwig Wittgenstein on that chair, he said something all those Buddhists aren't aware of. And he had a visual metaphor. He said consciousness is that element what is common to an experience of, say, blue and green. What is that? And then he said two words, two English words, diaphanousness or transparency.

1:03:17He said it is normally transparent so that we have the feeling we are directly in contact with the content. But, and then he says, and something amazing, he says, if you look properly, there is something to be seen in the transparency. just think of a like a window pane and you're just looking out in the garden you see the garden but you can sometimes see the window pane and the garden simultaneously and the the wild thing is in that original paper he even says it is as if you had before yourself a mere emptiness and it has these visual metaphors transparency and diaphanousness and then the question is what would happen if that became opaque if it lost its transparency and my prediction is everything you now experience as this room and ourselves would suddenly be experienced like a thought or as virtual Taco Bell is rolling out the new Chicken Bacon Ranch Street Chalupas.

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1:05:13We're talking to you, waitress. Check, please. Slash pet sitter. Slash influencer. Just$149 or less. Want your refund to work as hard as you? Hurry. Don't wait. File with Jackson Hewitt today. Limited time offer for new clients on federal returns. Participating locations only. Terms at jacksonhewitt.com slash 149. yeah when you say transparency you're talking about the fact that like you know when i look at my hand or something it's like i just see the hand right and i i want to sort of intellectually recognize that i'm actually sort of perceiving this like dashboard there's a world that's sort of going in through my senses and my brain is sort of constructing an image and redness and yellowness are not really like in the world it's like my brain but i feel as though actually, no, I'm just like this clear window into the world.

1:06:02And that's this transparency. When I look at yellow, I'm just seeing yellow. But for that to become translucent means that you now also see the mechanism by which you're seeing that yellow. Yes. Translucency is another fantastic word. And it's in the title of one of the chapters actually there. So, when, say, people like Anil or Carfristen or so speak of a controlled online hallucination or something like this, what is left unexplained is this total naive realism. I mean, why is this so real? Why do I have the feeling it's not a hallucination? Why, It's part of my phenomenology that there's an immediacy of contact.

1:06:51It's not mediated. You are unaware of the medium in which all this is. And consciousness is that medium. And in that sense, it's not an experience. And I think meditation can opacify the medium. That's very confusing to people who are not philosophers. like make it untransparent, make you suddenly become aware that all of this happens in some kind of medium.

1:07:30Another angle one could go, you know, in English it's so nice, the Latin precursor to consciousness is conscientia. And in English you have both of these words, consciousness and conscience, the moral consciousness, higher order moral representation. And an idea many thinkers have had over centuries, long before us, is that there's a first order process of knowing. You see the objects you hear. And then there is a knowing with, the conscientia. There's an accompanying process of knowing with that knowing. And that generates an additional quality. Like, if it becomes experienced, it permeates everything with knowingness.

1:08:26Normally, you just think, oh, there's this microphone here and there are these shoes. You are a naive realist. but i think that naive real is have you had situations and do you know situations in your own life where that translucency you've just mentioned what has actually happened well i'm not sure because it depends on exactly what you mean like i i feel like i whenever i sort of try to pay attention to it i begin to maybe once or twice i've really like I've been able to feel like I understand what it means that I don't have direct access to the world. Like I've really... When was that? How did that happen?

1:09:06Just as like an intellectual exercise, you know, I speak to philosophers who are trying to give me some imagery. Because again, I'm quite an imagistic thinker. So, you know, the metaphor recently that it was actually Bernardo Kastrup who sort of first thrust this particular image into my mind of the pilot in the cockpit, you know, and how you've got this representational dashboard of the air pressure and the velocity and the, you know, the altitude and stuff. But that what you're looking at is a representation. You're not looking at air pressure. You're not looking at altitude. You're looking at a mathematical representation on a screen.

1:09:46And that when I see the physical world, when I see extension and weight and you know velocity and things like that i'm actually seeing a representation of something else you only ever know the world exactly and that's this is you know this is emmanuel kant this is this is nothing new but that particular imagery was really helpful and then i was thinking about that and i can't explain it but i really felt like i just i suddenly felt as though i was like it was almost like that scene from the matrix where neo like becomes the zeros and ones like and the world just suddenly becomes like this green series of numbers i i suddenly just sort of felt like i was this sort of amorphous entity moving through a world that was like bumping up against things and that it was sort of being translated into this image right and that's not to say that wasn't like a an experience where i was like whoa like i've experienced the truth of the world it was it was just like the imagery worked i was like oh i think i see what he's getting at i think i see the worldview that he's getting at you know what i mean right so so it wasn't like a sort of like whoa i see the world for what it really is it was like oh i i see what you're saying yeah you know and and yeah it just it just felt very much like yeah i suddenly just became aware that everything i was seeing is um not not not i wasn't like confident that it was all false i was just aware that it didn't have to be the way it was presenting itself to me let's put it that way but yeah exactly for instance you become to represent something as a representation means that it could be true or false and in normal phenomenal consciousness you don't have that option it could be true or false it's just reality yeah it's common sense uh reality ages ago i wrote a popular paper that was called the total flight simulator and the little red arrow it's trying to explain the self-model theory to normal people where i said now imagine that cockpit uh you were talking about and imagine that was an empty like a self-driving car an empty plane which would also simulate the pilot and not only the cockpit and i think that is what the true story is the epistemic agent is itself a model.

1:12:06The knowing self that sometimes even can have the experience that this is representational content is itself part of the modeling process. I've called that the total flight simulator and the little red arrow is like the mouse pointer on a user surface that tells you I am here. I can causally click influence something here and the self is like a multimodal mouse pointer in this model. But let me ask you something else. I have situations of global opacity in completely different situations. For instance, if somebody rings your doorbell and you open the door and says, Peter is dead. And you say, the first thing you say is, no, that's not true.

1:12:59And situations of shock or existential fear when you learn a friend has died are often also situations where suddenly everything becomes unreal for a few seconds yeah and you and you literally say this is not true yeah it's you sort of detach yourself from from reality and they they represent that in films with like the vertigo effect where the background sort of goes like that yeah or like and it's almost like something's truly shocking, a person might not react at all. They might hear that something truly tragic has happened. And instead of bursting into tears, they just sort of go, like their face just stays basically plain.

1:13:42In a car accident, they get out of the car and they just stare at it. Because it's almost as if they're suddenly watching a film or something. It's like, this isn't the world. I've forgotten this. I was in a car accident where a guy flipped around a number of times on the highway and then bounced out and i was the first person running there i slammed the brakes there was a young guy and you don't know what you find to see dead is he seriously and the seconds when i went there as the the first person to go to the victim that was when everything became virtual and unreal And also, it also becomes a little slow motion.

1:14:28Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? Right? It's a time dilatation is the scientific term for it. Yeah, so I also think there may be some people who will have this as a permanent state and will experience it or react to it as something that is frightening and unpleasant. and they may be diagnosed as derealization or depersonalization patients. And there will other people who have a very similar global phenomenology and experience it as relief and as improving well-being and who are in a spiritual tradition and start to describe it as stages of enlightenment or something like this. so I think there's an overlap there there's also a third area where this is relevant perhaps that comes to mind is optical illusions so like I absolutely love the image of the Rubik's Cube and we'll put it on screen right now for people who are watching at home and there are like two squares and one of the sides is bright and one of the sides is in shadow and there are two squares in the middle of each and they're the same color like the the image on screen if if you're watching this at home um those two squares that we're pointing out they are the same color and it's just impossible to see them as the same color but if you remove the rest of the cube you can see clearly they're the same color because your mind is constructing an illusion based on like contextual data exactly and and the funny thing is that when you put the rubik's cube back and you know they're the same color now you still can't see it for what it is and it's a good there's another version of this which is the uh the cylinder and it casts a shadow on a checkerboard that's a screen and we'll put that on screen as well and that there are two sort of squares square a and square b promise you ladies and gentlemen these squares are the same color but obviously the reason they they look different is because your brain is going well one of them's in a shadow and one of them's in the light and yet they they are literally the same color but if one of them's in the shadow but it's the same color then it must actually be brighter to appear the same and so rather than seeing the world as it is your brain is basically telling you a story yes and this won't give you the same revelatory wow you know the world is an illusion but it will at least intellectually i suppose allow you to realize that that the way that you interpret the world and the way that things look and the way things are is not necessarily tied to the actual content of the world but rather how it represents itself to your mind.

1:17:10That is right. So one important technical term here is cognitive impenetrability. Some of these low-level mechanisms you have just described, I mean, you can try as often as you want to. They are robust. And you see that's also, so to speak, it's a lack of autonomy. The low-level mechanisms that construct your reality model, you cannot penetrate them or destroy them they're automatic an interesting question would be show such um illusions to long-term meditators or to people under the influence of psilocybin and see how that changes quite yeah so many must have done that with some of these some of these illusions right and i yeah i don't know what i don't know what they will have found right but i i would love to i I would love to experience that myself.

1:18:06You know, I'd love to take a psychedelic drug and then look at this Rubik's Cube and see if I see them as the same. Or, you know, the dress, which is either blue and black or white and gold. Did you see that years ago? It was super viral. I don't know if you came across it, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's this huge debate. And clearly, the reason this has happened is because the image of the dress doesn't have any context. It's like so zoomed in that you can't quite tell what the white balance of the camera is. And it's basically a white balance issue as to how you interpret it. But there's just no context.

1:18:40You know what my empirical prediction is if you do that? It's hysterical laughter. You will get absolutely hysterical if you play with this under the influence of a classic hallucinogen. But the question is, of course, people have thought. So states of consciousness are reality models. And the question is, of course, can we have better reality models? For instance, where we suffer less, that would be a practical question. And very obviously, some of these things like this Ruben Cube or so are really robust and we embody them. And they have a long evolutionary history and they're kind of rigid.

1:19:26Almost nobody can change these mechanisms. And then maybe the mechanism that creates the sense of self is also something super robust. Yes. That is not easy to deconstruct. Yeah. I mean, it's very difficult. When we're talking about the illusion of the self or the non-existence of the self, it's like so impossible to wrap your head around. It's like, what do you mean? I literally can't even understand how you could think the self. How can you say the self doesn't exist? But I guess, yeah, compare it to that feeling of seeing the Rubik's Cube where because you've seen the illusion without the cube, you know that it's an illusion.

1:20:10Intellectually, you know it's an illusion. It doesn't help. And yet when you switch that Rubik's Cube back on, you can be like, no, no, I swear, like 10 seconds ago, they were the same. And now they're not. But I know that they are, even though it makes no sense to me that they're not. I imagine that's a bit similar to switching off the self in meditation. It's like removing the Rubik's Cube and going like, oh, and then the Rubik's Cube comes back and you're like, okay, it's back, but I'm sure that something funny is going on here. Do you know what the fridge light fallacy is? The fridge? Oh, no, I can take a guess.

1:20:41You have the firm belief that when you close the fridge, the lights turn off. And then you very carefully open it to see if the light is really still off. and our mind for instance for selfie stuff has that kind of structure you cannot know that you are now in a non-dual state where there is no subject object distinction because in the moment you try to know this as a self it's destroyed the first person perspective is immediately reintroduced and I think there's a this also relates to theoretical intuitions of philosophers I have once written a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Self-Consciousness called The No-Self Alternative.

1:21:31And I've tackled the question, why do so many philosophers have this very deep-seated intuition? There is no conscious experience without some kind of selfiness or subject or perspectivalness. it's sometimes even called the ubiquity thesis there is no phenomenology without self it's natural because the attempt if you claimed to me oh there is a state of consciousness without self to try to understand your sentence i must make a model of the truth conditions of that sentence in my mind. I must try to understand, try to simulate a situation where I was not present. And that is impossible because the mental act of trying to simulate a selfless reality has an element of effort in it, a sense of effort.

1:22:33There's an agent who does it. So it's never the selfiness, the sense of effort is always there, the sense of mental effort. And that gives many philosophers the false intuition that the self is metaphysically necessary or logically necessary because it is inconceivable that there should be a situation where there is consciousness without self. Of course, you cannot conceive of this, but this doesn't mean that we shouldn't take such reports. very seriously. Yeah. And importantly, you talk about this concept of concurrent ineffability, which is to say, because people might be thinking, well, hold on, if what you've just said is true, then how can anybody report having such an experience?

1:23:30And the answer is that they don't report it while it's happening. I think maybe we haven't made that totally clear, is that these reports of people who've had this kind of experience, they're not sat there having the experience telling someone what it's like it's afterwards it's a retrospective um reporting and in effort to say something is ineffable is to say you can't put it into words and so concurrent ineffability means that while it's happening you can't put it into words because if you start using words and describing a thing and placing it in that explanatory context it disappears yeah that's right so i think that's that's just worth sort of making clear although interestingly we sort of we've spoken for so long now about the the nature of sort of minimal phenomenal experience without actually talking about its nature because of course in the elephant and the blind you you sort of categorize the common threads of all of these different experiences and i think it's worth just briefly telling people like some of what you found right so you split up i mean i think the i can't remember what the very first one is it's really yeah like relaxation So I started in the beginning.

1:24:39So just to explain to people what I did first is I looked in the history of philosophy. What concepts have there been? And there are these concepts like the Dharmakaya and Samadhi or Yeshe in Tibetan Buddhism. There are a number of concepts where people have tried to speak about pure awareness. And I'm not saying they all mean the same. And I'm also not saying they meant the same over centuries in different philosophical schools. But there are concepts. That was number one of my investigation. Then step two was that psychometric study, which gives you numbers and quantities. and the third major phase was to take the verbal reports and do something like an unsystematic qualitative analysis of these reports there are brilliant young people here in london actually who will now try to do this with ai a topic modeling from my reports and see if they come to different results.

1:25:47But then you see common things. So relaxation, okay, it often happens in deeply relaxed states. But then there's silence, there's clarity, and there's wakefulness at the beginning. These are three things that almost everybody will understand. And they already pick out, you know, I think main phenomenological dimensions. A silent and crystal clear experience of wakefulness. Nothing mystical, nothing wild, nothing trippy, nothing special, but just a very precise and calm experience of wakefulness. actually you know one of the best meditation manuals i know is called clarifying the natural state 15th 16th century and the whole idea is there is a natural state and the whole point is not to make this state of meditation but just to clarify it's just how do you call these things in english where you shake a little uh device and a lot of snowflakes oh yeah the snow globe a snow globe yeah it's just like um sitting in a snow globe and letting them go down and then realize that's the second thing you are the water

1:27:25yeah there's a natural state i think it's really there are a few of these and they're essentially like chapter headings right so like relaxation and calm and and clarity and silence and there are a few of these that really kind of jumped out at me as like like what well i wrote some of them down um for example one of them is a phrase there's nothing left to do which i thought was really cool because you're quoting these people as basically saying that in this moment of clarity of pure experience or whatever, they afterwards report sort of feeling in that moment like it's all done, like everything is all right, everything's okay, everything's complete, there's nothing more that I need to do, which sounds really nice and also sounds philosophically relevant in that so many, especially ethical philosophers, are obsessed with what is the sort of end goal of human striving what are we here for what are we doing it for how can we you know better our lives and be ethical people and this insight might help us to realize that if you achieve this state of minimal experience you're done there's nothing more to do and then if you realize that that that kind of experience is there all of the time yes that you are always there's always to you accessible score more with the college branded venmo debit card and earn up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash.

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1:29:24But Ultra is a whole line up now. You've got Strawberry Dreams, Blue Hawaiian, Sunrise and Vice Guava. And they all bring the monster energy punch. So if you've been living in the white can, branch out. Ultra's got a flavor for every vibe. And every single one is zero sugar. Tap the banner to learn more. It's not like that for me, by the way. I mean, it's certainly not for me either, but I wondered what these people afterwards, whether that essentially can solve them. Because they're like, oh, well, I'm not experiencing that right now, but I remember feeling like there was nothing left to do. Do they come away from that being like, oh, I guess I don't have to file my taxes now, you know?

1:30:05Well, I can radicalize it a bit for you. what if one would say one would take a very strong meta-ethical point of view and say normative sentences have no truth values so there are no moral facts in this world really and that's the whole problem of ethics that we don't really have objective knowledge about values If that is true, if we just accept it, most people will hate it. But if that is true, all preferences might actually be hallucinations, right? Misrepresentations. So a system in the state of pure awareness might be a system that has stopped to hallucinate goals. I don't know if the idea has ever occurred to you that all goal representations that occur in your mind are actually misrepresentations.

1:31:10That's a very radical thesis. I don't know how far we should go there, but most human beings are being driven by hallucinating goals. It would be great to have tenure. It would be, you know, great to have a little more money or something like this. And then strive. That's what drives the system. You could also explain this technically in terms of active inference, that the system has to represent a state of the world that is not the case. And then try to change the world in a way to make the world like this internal state. And if it's really true that this is actually a hallucinatory activity, striving for something, then the end of all striving might also mean the end of all agency, right?

1:32:07And there is nothing left to do. That's where you started. That's a possible phenomenal state. There is nothing left to do. I understand that very well. I know this experience very well. But there is something, I'd be interested in your opinion about it, that needs to be discussed. You know, I'm older than you. The old leftists of my generation, they would say that is politically enormously dangerous. us right yeah yeah of course do you have any thoughts about this like i think i think yeah i think that makes sense of course it is because like i you know i was thinking about this like this morning or yesterday or something you know i'm opening up the news and i'm seeing some horrible things are happening and then everyone's got a take and everyone's saying stuff and then i'm worried about you know if i have kids one day are they going to be safe and all this kind of And I think to myself, you know, maybe I should just give this all up and go and live in a cabin in the woods and just enjoy the rest of my life.

1:33:18And in one sense, people will totally understand that intuition. They'll go, yeah, man, just forget the world even exists. Just go and live. But then there's another sense in which I'm like, well, hold on. Don't I kind of have a responsibility to the other people who I'd be leaving behind? Don't I sort of need to stay here and try to help change those negative conditions. And I feel like kind of both of these are true at once, that it is actually like better and more enjoyable and a higher quality of life for me to sort of live in the forest in nature and forget all of my troubles. But at the same time, it feels like, although that would be better for me, it feels almost like immoral to try to achieve it if it would mean leaving behind a bunch of problems to solve.

1:33:59But I mean, anecdote, when I was 18, I was exactly like this. I wanted to go to Canada. I did go to Canada, actually, twice, and build a law cabin and burn my passport. I had exactly that vision. But what many people don't understand is, really, you do not meditate for yourself. Really, you meditate for everybody else. really this is the most subversive political activity you can actually have although many people will not believe this but you could go into a cabin or a monastery for a few years or decades until you think you can re-enter the world and you have something to give you have the compassion or you have the stability that you might be able to help people in that turmoil, to teach in a way without getting lost yourself.

1:35:10So spiritual practice, this mindfulness practice thing without an ethical, and I would even add a political context, isn't going anywhere. I once really liked it. there was this well-known Tibetan teacher and they never say anything nasty about other people and people said, yeah, if I do this and my well-being increases so much and he said yeah, you can do this to increase your well-being and then he chuckled and he said, California style You know, that is what we've made out of it. To have a better career, to be better concentrated, meditate, to have a better sex life or make money, right? But if it is not embedded into an ethical context, it's pretty valueless and it will also be limited.

1:36:18But then the question is, that is where good Western philosophy comes back in. what is a proper ethical context. Yeah. Why should I believe what any Buddhist tells me what the right ethical context is? I mean, I'm very sober there. Most of the countries in which this has happened over centuries are not in a very good shape. I mean, look at these Asian countries where all the Westerners project their own emotional hopes. You know, they go to the New Age bookstore and satisfy their own emotional needs. It's like a kind of colonialism. But in these countries themselves, where this has been done and trained for centuries, things don't look so good.

1:37:06You know, something also didn't work there. So the question is if proper, critical, Western philosophy, ethical theory, in combination with that, could be a good mixture. I don't know if you have any thoughts about this. It's not so impressive how these countries look that have done that for centuries. Yeah, I mean, I think that it can be true that there are philosophical traditions which in the West we kind of have either forgotten or ignored or neglected, which means that if you're going to find them anywhere, you might find them in the tradition of another country. And of course, the past is also a foreign country, so you might find it in ancient Greeks as well.

1:37:56Stoics. Yeah, I was thinking of the Stoics when you were talking about that, because of course, there's a lot of parallel here in how the Stoics think about the nature of the world and stuff. Do you know this book by Pierre Ador, Philosophy as a Way of Life? I don't think I've read it. I know I haven't read it. I mean, I feel like I might have heard of it. Okay, keep going. But yeah, I mean, I feel like that's not the same thing as saying, there is this kind of optimism that like, oh, that's how they live over there. It's like, no, that's kind of like, you know, someone from over there sort of discovering like, I don't know, like Descartes or something and going like, oh, this is how they all live over there.

1:38:45It's not like that. but it could still be true that you can only find certain nuggets of information in one place or in another but I do kind of feel like you know when I've tried to investigate non-western traditions right and I try to sort of read the the Upanishads and I try to get a get a grounding in like Indian philosophy and these concepts are coming up and a lot of the time it is kind of like, oh, we're all kind of getting at the same kind of stuff a lot of the time. And the thing that's useful about seeing it represented by literally like a different word is that it's almost like you have to relearn the concept.

1:39:26And it's like with language, right? I only speak English. And I think it was Goethe who said, he who knows one knows none. If you only know one language, you don't even realize that it's weird and arbitrary that we say a red car instead of saying a car red. Some languages will say the noun and then the descriptor, right? And stuff like that. And you only notice that when you've got something to compare it to, even though in both languages, you're talking about a red car. Similarly, it might be that you've got these different languages that are trying to talk about the nature of selfhood, the foundational limitations of our knowledge, the cogito ergo sun, that kind of stuff.

1:40:04And that we're getting at the same stuff, it's just a different language. And that by turning to Indian philosophy, which will be full of all kinds of terms that you can't even pronounce much less understand when you start trying to learn what they are you are just realizing that there's another way in to the same kinds of problems because we're all humans experiencing roughly the same kind of issues philosophically so i think there's a lot of there's a lot of use but i think yeah we are a bit too too rash and thinking like oh that will solve all of our our problems if we could only just one thing one can start with i think there are actually phenomenological prototypes there's some phenomenology that is highly culturally invariant so in chapter 26 i think of the elephant elephant i've looked at what middle-aged mystics in europe said about pure awareness and i've just covered some striking details like there was this woman begin a hard in the Netherlands, who out of herself developed this term of one taste, of tasting the one nature, which is a central term in Tibetan Buddhism.

1:41:13It's absolutely certain they have never had contact. They were just experiencing things. And then there's this motive, for instance, of a groundless ground that you find in Meister Eckhart, but you also find it in Buddhism, of course. So, something that is the foundation, but which is bottomless at the same time. And the question is, of course, I mean, here at Birkbeck College, there was David Bohm, the famous physicist. And he tried, he was very open to these things. I have only very briefly met him once at the Krishnamurti Talks in Switzerland, and he developed a thing he called a reomodus, that is a grammar, a logical grammar, as you were speaking about different languages, which does away with this subject-object structure that bewitches our minds when we describe our own experiences.

1:42:19So he wouldn't have said things in that grammar like a red car or something, but a red car ring is happening here, you know. So everything would be processuality, but without object and properties or subject-object. Reo from Pantarei, everything flows. and maybe it is also the deep logical grammar of our language that makes us sometimes misdescribe our own conscious minds or makes it so difficult for us to discover that certain things are actually different from how we try to describe them all the time yeah and it wouldn't be surprising if there was some i mean again even as like a as a totally sort of skeptical materialist kind of person who thinks that the actual content of the experiences that people have are kind of nonsense, it is striking that they converge on similar experiences.

1:43:20And it wouldn't be surprising that there's something about our sort of brain architecture because we all come from the same ancestor. It's like when people take DMT and they all report seeing like elves, and it's really, really strange. Like why are different people reporting seeing the same thing? And maybe, and like, you know, the typical, to this strange phenomenon, the typical response from a materialist is just to say like well it's probably because there's just something about our brain chemistry that it's going to do the same thing right and so yeah but that also ties in quite nicely with another one of these sort of chapter titles one of these concurrent themes that comes up which is this feeling of coming home right like people sort of report this feeling that when they were there in that moment of minimal phenomenal experience it was like yeah this is like where I belong.

1:44:08I've come back to where I'm sort of most naturally at home. And yeah, if what we are discovering is the kind of universal inspirational nugget that different people are all sort of trying to get out in their different means, then that wouldn't be a surprise. And to be clear, I'm not trying to do the whole, all religions are the same, man. There are very important doctrinal distinction between, you know. However, I do think that the differences in, let's say, like the religious approach and the fundamental religious instinct, the nature of God and mystical traditions, the difference between those different traditions is sometimes over-exaggerated.

1:44:50You know, oh, Hindus believe in hundreds of gods and Christians believe in the Trinity and Muslims believe in the Tarweed. When like, you know. But that's only the people who came out afterwards. Yeah, exactly. The people who made theories and didn't sit in silence anymore, but developed fancy metaphysics and philosophical schools and wrote books. For instance, I mean, some experiences described in The Elephant of Blind, I don't know what to make of them. I don't know them. But this coming home is very, very natural to me. I have this very often. And then there's also this sense of how absurd is it to get into the Frankfurt airport and take off your belts and shoes and security to go to London?

1:45:45I mean, this is like I'm sacrificing my evening meditation for this conversation and I absolutely like it. It's a good sacrifice. but there's this thing of in between i'm amazed how in between the experience of coming home and a natural state you can completely lose it again get agitated get neurotic it's superimposed you do something crazy thing you can't sit in the forest all the time meditate you must go to london to this conference at least once you have to do and there's i don't know if it would be good. There needs to be a balance between rational activity in the world, I think, and the experience of coming home, for instance.

1:46:37And if one had the right balance, then one would make the other stronger. So that is also one of the reasons I wonder what you think about. You know, my master's thesis, embarrassing, I would never have allowed any of my students hand in something like that, was called rationalism and mysticism. And that was an early idea I had as a student. If you have a sober, weak form of rationalism that knows, like Karl Popper liked, that the decision for the rational method itself cannot have a final foundation in the rational method, and if you at the same time have a mystical practice or a spiritual practice that is weak, that doesn't commit to belief systems, they both go together really well.

1:47:26And what I'm really interested in, I don't have the final answer, is but if we could develop something like a secular spirituality, I mean, your podcast is called Within Reason. The question is, could all this happen within reason and be equally liberating, deep, beautiful. Or if I had to criticize myself, I would say, no, no, you need a little delusion. You need something to keep up the motivation. Those people who are supposed to meditate for decades or something, most of them need some crazy belief system, some master or some reward. Yeah. Else they will not do it. But the question is if one could be completely clear.

1:48:23If that could happen within reason without losing its depth. Eczema is unpredictable. But you can flare less with Epglyss. A once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking Epglyss achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

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1:49:49Upfront payment of$45 for three month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Yeah, you know, when you choose a name for a podcast, you've got to be conscious of the fact that you don't know what you're going to be doing in five years. So you don't want to call it like maybe, you know, I mean, I started out years ago as like an atheist YouTuber. And I could have started a podcast called like, you know, Atheist Cast. And that wouldn't make any sense anymore. I wouldn't be talking to someone like you on Atheist Cast probably, right?

1:50:21Like, maybe I would, I don't know. But you kind of think, well, how broad can I make this? You can't make it too broad. And I thought, you know, well, it's philosophy and philosophy is super broad. And I love philosophy. And of course, anybody who is interested in philosophy is going to want to try to be reasonable. And so you choose this name that you think is just bulletproof against it. and then you realize that so much of the things worth knowing in life cannot be reduced to reasonable explanation please please don't damn oh no you know i've i've made the mistake again yeah i don't know i mean i i know what you mean and interestingly i think this is where we should mention your most recent book which came out what like a year after the elephant and the blind and was kind of hinted at the end of the elephant and the blind which is like yeah being aware of this kind of stuff and and the elephant the blind is is is awesome it's wonderful you know of course the links and stuff will be in the description uh and it's kind of this sort of overview of these reported sort of uh of this study and you know what what the common themes are and people might read that and go okay cool interesting but as you just said like what does this mean without some kind of political or ethical context in which to use this information or to be inspired by our realization about the nature of consciousness and selfhood and stuff to like change the way that we sort of behave and your most recent book which i won't try to pronounce um but perhaps you can pronounce it and then tell me what it would mean in english speaking of political context the first thing we should say um is that this book the english version of this book, which just appeared, is only now available as an e-book so that people don't get confused.

1:52:08And there's a reason for it. It has to do with political context. I didn't want to give all the audio rights and print rights and everything to a publisher and what I call the Trumpistan shithole. Forgive me if I say that on your podcast, because I was nervous about the political situation. I thought the book came out in German, has caused a lot of discussions, Chinese translation and so forth is finished. But I was nervous. I wanted to have the content in a democratic country with a proper German publisher first. That is why you only have it as an e-book now. You cannot hold it in your hands.

1:52:53And actually, I've spoken about this concept of Bewusstseinskultur, which translates as a culture of consciousness badly, badly translates into English for 30 years on and off. And then now I have the idea I put this into a little book. And the main idea is very simple. A culture of consciousness. Yeah, towards. Towards a culture of consciousness. Because I think that's what we're lacking. We're lacking. And so, So, in ethics, you ask what makes an action a good action. And the first thing I'm saying, Borussianskultur would mean to also ask, what makes a state of consciousness a good state of consciousness?

1:53:42Then, if we have found an answer, step two, and maybe different people come to different answers. You know, there could be your atheist who says there's nothing in this world than intelligent hedonism. And that is my consciousness culture. And leave me alone with all that pseudo-spiritual crap, you know. Different people in a free society could come to different results. But then if we have ideas what valuable states of consciousness, not actions, are, we could cultivate them. And we could, step three, enculturate them. embed them in our culture that was the culture comes from and this is these are a lot of practical questions like what states of consciousness can you force upon animals yeah ai of course what state of consciousness do you want to suffer in uh do you want to die in and um what states of consciousness do we want to show our children in school in the educational system i've worked a bit on that because there is this mental health crisis now with social media and everything.

1:54:50The situation with 14 to 20-year-olds is dramatic, and most of us older folks don't even realize how bad it is. So, this would all be a culture of consciousness. And one question is, of course, should a secular meditation practice be part of our educational system because we lack something in the west we really lack something so there are a lot of applied ethics practical questions drug politics yeah stuff like essentially there's this underlying question of like should there be any states of consciousness which should be illegal yes you know there are psychoactive drugs there are potentially conscious ai systems that we should maybe be careful about creating until we at least know what consciousness is.

1:55:43There are states that could be induced by various meditative practices or states that you might induce as someone's about to die to try to make things better or worse for them, I suppose, in a worse case. And there's a question that then inevitably crops up of regulation. It's not just regulating for the sake of, you might say, well we should criminalize drugs because if you take drugs then you're more likely to commit crime and so yeah okay but what about like just the actual effect on a person's consciousness like that's the kind of stuff that maybe we should be paying a bit of attention to i have endless things to say about all this so tomorrow morning i'll be speaking about synthetic phenomenology briefly in the house of commons that's that's what i'm here because as the European Council and an AI conference.

1:56:34I think the risk of artificial consciousness is totally underrated, has been also suppressed by industrial lobby. We should be very careful what we're doing there. With drugs, I have a bit of experience there, and I've turned into a pretty conservative person. I think there are some states of consciousness which must be illegal, like the heroin, the fentanyl, the cocaine, the crystal meth state of consciousness, simply because these are vehicles by which you can create altered states of consciousness which are controllable by almost no one. Some people can not lose control with that and test it out.

1:57:24And then there are other things which I think are super valuable, like the psilocybin state or the LSD state, but of which I also think that the general population is in no way ready for a legalization or something. Bewusstseinskultur means, and I've been writing about this mostly in Germany, that we need something much more intelligent than make it illegal like it is now and all the kids blow off their heads with unclear dosages and unclear purities in the underground. Just because the politicians have no incentive to touch that topic, they can only ruin their career. And we pay a price plus many accidents in the underground.

1:58:13all the time we should have beautiful places where people can go who want to say have a psilocybin experience and get a psychiatric pre-screening are they a risk personality do they maybe have a vulnerability and then can go to a protected environment yeah you know and with expert sitters yeah have this in a risk-free environment have this experience with proper preparation that's yeah these are institutions we lack in our society and which we urgently have to build because um you know the accidents that happen with all that these new research chemicals and underground tripping they appear in no statistics you know they you don't even know what the fact is uh because people hide it they don't want to get in trouble with the police if a friend gets in trouble and so forth where do you place uh ketamine is one of the drugs that you didn't say that's quite relevant because it's sort of ketamine kind of sits in the middle of like the sort of party drug that makes you feel like you're a bit drunk and whoo but also can be kind of psychoactive well i've i've done this twice more than 35 years ago mainly because you can see this in the ego tunnel book because i wanted to create out-of-body experiences in the lab and it had been known that in the wake-up phase after a ketamine anesthesia people get obe's out-of-body experiences so i shot myself up and i did that i don't honestly i don't understand all this craze.

1:59:54And in Germany, there are all these semi-legal psychotherapists now who do off-label use with ketamine. So they give people sub-anesthetic doses and then do therapy on top of it. I find it a bizarre, uninteresting state of consciousness characterized by severe disorientation. This is not a psychedelic. I don't see an inside quality but I see for years, I don't know about England, but in Germany, it's the number one thing. It's only because you cannot do legal psilocybin therapy because that is not allowed, people resort to off-label ketamine use. And there are all these shady therapists, people who look half serious yeah and who have privately paying patients and can make a lot of money out of every session and at least 25 places now in germany where you can half legally or off in an off-label setting do ketamine therapy yeah i don't believe it yeah i just don't believe the therapeutic value but that's just my do you mean therapeutic value of those places or of ketamine The ketamine state, the sub-anesthetic ketamine state, I don't see anything particularly valuable or insightful in that.

2:01:30Yeah, interesting. I mean, I wouldn't know. I don't know what the latest research is. I just, you know, you hear people say like, oh, psychedelics are really useful in medical circumstances. And I'm sure I've heard people talk about ketamine in a similar way, but I wouldn't know. I think it's interesting how we… I know many people will disagree with me. There are many people who are absolutely certain that they have had life-changing and also therapeutically helpful experiences with ketamine. But my hunch is you could basically do anything to create a pretty bizarre and interesting state of consciousness and then put a therapy on top that somehow interprets it and helps people.

2:02:15And you think that developing this, as you call it, culture of consciousness will i guess help us to have more clarity on our design of sort of drug policy ai policy yeah we must we must or we we we will get washed away i have numbers in in the book 30 years ago the drug problem consisted of 12 to 15 molecules in the market you could you can name them yeah now we have way over 1 000 uh new synthetic drugs the peak year i guess was 2006 where the police in europe for the first time confiscated more than 100 new molecules in one year that had never been heard of. There's never been any testing. Some underground labs cook it up.

2:03:09No doctor in any emergency ward has ever heard of these molecules when they were studying. And you should go to Berlin. I mean, it breaks my heart exactly because I think psychedelics are very, very valuable of all these kids taking these risks yeah yeah yeah it's a it's a it's a shame and you always have to be careful talking about it because it's easy to say like yeah the psychedelic experience it's so sort of foundational and awesome and that that's that's true but it's not something to play around with like i sometimes sort of hear people say like you know yeah like you know i want to try psychedelics and i just you know you've got to make sure that you're like in a good environment then you've got to make sure you're with someone who's like and i i'm just thinking like that's good but i i don't i don't think you like understand what these things can do it's not it's not just like you know oh well if i'm in a bad environment or if it's raining outside then maybe i'll have like a bad time it's like you know i think we need to have a have a a rational fear that means that we're careful and take it seriously but that also motivates us to to sort of create the right circumstances in which the benefits can be achieved.

2:04:29That is very well put. Very well put. I am deeply grateful for the psychedelic experiences I've had in my life. They have added depth and beautiful, I mean, speaking of ineffability to my life. But I have also cried a lot. I have had enormous anxiety. I've had great fear that I would never be normal again. And I always say, I mean, if you want to have a positive LSD experience of 8 or 12 hours, and you're not ready that part of this experience is that 90 minutes, one and a half hours, you will really sobbing and crying. because something comes up with the death of somebody or so or something you see about in your own personality structure that you were never aware of and that needs to be felt.

2:05:30If you're not ready to cry for one and a half hours, that's normal. That's a good trip. If you think you can just dance your brains out or laugh all the time, that's not how it works. It needs respect. it needs deep respect and most of our it needs a question i mean why are you doing this yes why what for yeah i've also cried on psychedelics and i remember i'd gone away into a into a separate room and i don't know what you're not supposed to do and look at look in the mirror and it's a story for another time perhaps but i i came back into the room where my friend was and he'd also been crying you know we sort of gone off into and it was it's yeah it's it's got to be um and that was that was 2cb that was a more sort of synthetic and that's supposed to have your sort of euphoric element too and it only lasts you know four hours or whatever but yeah you've got a i mean it's it's amazing but it's at the same time you got to know what it's for i do like this one quote by alan watts of all people who said um you know uh when you get the message hang up the phone he was like the scientist does not spend the scientist does not spend his entire life with his eye glued to a microscope he goes away and works on what he's learned my teacher friends in california told me don't want to be like a rat that pushes the same button again all the time but you know sasha schulgen whom i know he came to visit me and i was in his lab he actually said of the 179 phenethylenes, he thought 2CB was the most interesting.

2:07:06And what I personally find, I mean, the difficulty for me, I haven't done this in 25 years or so, is that 18 milligrams is different from 20 milligrams. And 20 milligrams is different from 22. Yeah. And 25 can already be quite wild if my memory serves. And almost nobody has a scale at home to properly dose this. This is part of the problem. Yeah, and it's always, I mean, it's always a risk-taking psychedelics in the sense that you never know what you're going to get. But at the same time, in the current circumstance, it's literally a risk in that you don't even know what you're taking and you don't know how much you're taking and you don't know if it's a dud and you think oh maybe it's a dud because it's been an hour and i don't feel anything so you have another one you know yeah and it's the classic sort of you know you have the weed edible and then two hours later you're like oh this is nothing so you eat the rest and then you're like completely wiped out and like this kind of stuff could be avoided relatively or mitigated let's I have made exactly this mistake so often in my life.

2:08:22I think I have a bit of an impatience. I think this is, come on, this is 90 minutes. Maybe in like a meta sense, that's really what the psychedelic was teaching you, was like to be more patient because otherwise, you know, you're going to have this crazy experience. I mean, just from what we are speaking about now, this really needs deep respect and proper places and some preparation. And it's a shame on Western societies. It's a shame that we go on Mars and send back pictures. But I have this idea we would need something like secular research monasteries, like centers for consciousness culture where you can have long silent retreats where you can learn the major meditation techniques with really good teachers but where people could also have guided experiences in a safe environment yeah uh you know well one day soon come the the kind of experiences we've been talking about are kind of covered i suppose in the elephant and the blind the The more ethical, political dimension is covered in your latest book, which I guess the English translation would be towards a culture of consciousness.

2:09:42We've talked about the ego. You famously wrote The Ego Tunnel, about the nature of the self. All of these books and relevant information will be linked in the description for people to check out. Thomas Metzinger, thank you for your time. Thank you for the invitation. Very interesting conversation.