Finding Consciousness at the Heart of it All with Neil Theise (Part 2)

Finding Consciousness at the Heart of it All with Neil Theise (Part 2)

Episode Description

In part two, Ilia Delio and Neil Theise unpack the implications of complexity theory for human life, especially consciousness, our technology and the relationship between them. Can AI become “conscious?” Neil tells us more about his journey as a practicing Zen Buddhist, its impact on his research and thought, and the value our wisdom traditions can still offer to science.

ABOUT NEIL THEISE

 “The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime.”

Neil Theise, MD, is a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Through his scientific research, he has been a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and the anatomy of the human interstitium. Dr. Theise’s studies in complexity theory have led to interdisciplinary collaborations in fields such as integrative medicine, consciousness studies, and science-religion dialogue. His recent book, Notes on Complexity: The Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being explores all of these topics and more. He comes from a spiritual background of devotional Jewish practices and is a Senior Student at the Village Zendo in NYC. 

Transcript

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. Let's pick up where we left off with Ilia and Neil Theise, discussing how complex systems at the base of the cosmos slowly emerge into human life. How does our consciousness and our technology relate to the order emerging at the quantum level? And later, Neil tells us about how his Buddhist practice informs his scientific investigations of the mind.

Ilia: I was reading and giving a talk in a few weeks on astro-theology, an MIT lecture. And what's so interesting is that this article spoke about complexity as one of the fundamental drivers of life. In other words, a non-living system. You used the word frozen. I thought that was interesting. So if we are, like you're saying like we're complexifying here, but then, well, two things I want to maybe straighten out. We're not complexifying biologically anymore. We're complexifying in terms of like the way the internet is really reshaping.

Neil: Sure. It's another complex system. But, okay, here's another piece to the puzzle, one of the causes of some mass extinction events. There were rules I mentioned that Technosphere Jane's virtual animals in her virtual world, turned out they had programmed these rules and they were the rules of how a complex system interacts. One of those rules is that low level random can't be too much, can't be too low. Another one is that there have to be a predominance of negative feedback loops. And by negative feedback loop, I don't mean bad, I realize some people misunderstand. There are positive feedback loops and there are negative feedback loops. And negative feedback loops are like an air conditioner, which turns off and on to keep the state of the environment in a nice oscillating homeostatic rain. And that oscillation, all living things oscillate. If anything is static, it's dead. So, there have to be negative feedback loops.

Now, positive feedback loop would be like, if a room gets warm, the heater turns on and the warmer it gets, the higher the heater goes. So you can have positive feedback loops in a system. Think about when we get a fever in the face of an infection, we suddenly have a positive feedback loop revving up our body temperature. And what that accomplishes in part is upregulating the metabolism of the immune system, so the immune system has a better chance of fighting off the infection. But when the infection is fought off, the negative feedback loops that control temperature bring it back under control. So negative feedback loops have to predominate. If positive feedback loops predominate, then you can get emergence, you can get self-organization, but instead of being creative and adaptive, it's energy expending and self-limiting. So think economic bubbles, think someone who has a fever who's not going to get better and their temperature just goes up and up and up. So these are some of the ways—or cancer, when cells have eliminated the negative feedback loops that keep them from invading. And what happens in all of these things, you get rapid growth, but it's energy expending and the whole thing will collapse. So that potential is always there. Or life and complexity. We know life is tenuous,. No one lives forever. Things happen. No matter how hard you try, no matter how well you "live", no matter how well you "eat", your system will collapse eventually. Yeah. 'cause that's what bodies do. But

Ilia: In a sense, in that sense, on a human level, then death is part of the complexifying ongoing complexity.

Neil: Exactly.

Ilia: In that sense, a computer itself cannot complexify. In other words if we start building robots, they complexify, I mean, what would you say to that?

Neil: Well, technosphere complexified, so this brings us back to the consciousness question.

Ilia: Yes, it does.

Neil: So exactly as you said before on its face, this immediately suggests that maybe the mind is the emergent property of the cells of the brain, the chemicals of the brain, and the electrical signaling of the brain, and out of their interactions as a complex system mind arise. And to me, I mean, that seems sort of plainly obvious, and I thought kind of cool when I first learned about complexity, that was 20 years ago. But you run into what's called the hard problem of consciousness. David Chalmers coined the term, and the hard problem, and it's hard because it seems like it's not solvable in this way, is that whenever we find correlates of the conscious experience in the brain, we can only ever find correlates; we can never prove causation. So with all the FMRI imaging and all the sophisticated EEG stuff and various other ways of looking into the brain, all these cognitive neuroscientists, most of whom are basically materialists and say, the brain is making your mind, they can't prove causation. They always have to say in their papers, this is a neural correlate of consciousness. They can't say consciousness happens because of this.

And this is a slightly oversimplified example, but if I hold up this half eaten orange, you see a half-eaten orange, and it's very orange. It's a Sumo orange, and it's really good. So light photons are bouncing off that orange, hitting your retina, causing a chemical cascade, which leads to an electrical cascade along your optic nerve back to your visual cortex, and then it goes from there and complexifies in the mind to give you, you see an orange. But now if I ask you to close your eyes, and ask you to see that orange, you can see that orange in great detail if you really gave it a good look. But there's no orange, there's no photon hitting the retina starting the whole cascade. Where is the experience of seeing that orange? How do we get the experience of it? And that's the hard problem.

There's nothing in cognitive neuroscience that explains how we experience the color red, high sea, depression—the experience of seeing all those books behind you. Yeah, that's the hard problem. Materialists sort of run up against this and have no answer. There are a few long running famous bets about when cognitive neuroscience will solve the hard problem, but they keep extending it out because they can't ever, they don't get it.

Robert: What forces could dampen the out of control feedback loops in our modern society? Do religious practices help or hurt? Next, Neil talks about how his Buddhist practice, as well as other religious traditions, inform his scientific investigations of consciousness. And Ilia asks what this means for AI and whether it will be become unconscious.

Neil: In the last 10 years, people have started to take what's called panpsychism seriously. And panpsychism is the idea that consciousness isn't made by the brain. Consciousness pervades the universe in some fashion. Some people say all living things have consciousness. And from a western perspective, that means all cells have a primitive kind of mind. And when you get a bunch of cells together, they complexified to form a more complex form of life. And so that's kind of the evolutionary view you were talking about. But that doesn't solve the hard problem, it just pushes it down in scale. Some people are now saying that there are quantum entities that are carriers of consciousness that convey consciousness, and it's an unknown part of quantum physics, but that still doesn't solve the hard problem. There are some people who say that space time itself is pervaded by consciousness. And when it emanates the quantum foam, it's emanating a complexifying consciousness that becomes, and the holy universe is conscious, but not like ours—still doesn't solve the hard problem.

The only way I think, and this is where Menas and I, I didn't want to go out on this limb, he had to sort of pull me out. He'd already done this work himself. I now needed to do the work and go through these arguments. I'm a zen student, so I spend a lot of time meditating where my mind is contemplating my mind. He's a Kashmiri Shavist, and so does the same thing. And when the mind in diverse traditions, whether I see echoes of this when I read Merton who almost made me want to become a Catholic. I have a real sympathy for him. Yeah, I've got this strange obsession with Catholic contemplative practices, going back to when I was a kid, and I wonder, who was I in the last life? So Sufis talk about this, Buddhist talk about it, Jewish mysticism. In my book, I discuss Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, a form of Hinduism, Kashmiri Shaivism—Menas brought those two in, from direct experience or from scholarly study, I brought in the Buddhist stuff from direct experience and the Jewish mysticism from a mix of practice and academics. But what they all have in common is when the mind explores the mind, it finds a bigger mind.

So what we've come to realize is borrowing from all these traditions, is that what the mind encounters when it goes deep inside. Some cultures would call that God. Some people would call that the absolute, some people would call that Brahman. In Hebrew, they call it the enso. It doesn't really matter what we call it. And different mystics are asking different questions of it. So, the forms that they use to describe it vary and differ because the questions they're using are different. But ultimately, that's a consciousness that underlies reality. It's non-dual meaning there's no subject object split within it. It's beyond description. Linguistically, mathematically, graphically, one can dip into the experience of it, but then you cease to exist when you do, because there's nothing, no thing in it. So, we can posit that that's what underlies the universe. That's the ground of being.

Ilia: And that's matter.

Neil: Well, no, matter is duality. Matter is a category for stuff. What the Kashmiri Shavists, their question—so the Buddhist question is, how do you end suffer? The Jewish question was how was the world created in the beginning and how does it come into existence in each moment? I'm curious what you would say the Catholic question or the Christian question, if those two aren't the same. The Kashmir Shaivist’s question is, how does a fundamental mind that is non-dual give rise to a world of duality? And so, through contemplative practice, these weren't stories they were making up, they were experiencing this in fine detail. Within non-dual reality, non-dual mind fundamental awareness. Pure awareness. It's a field of pure awareness in which there's no object to be aware of. There's simply the awareness. If there's an urge within that to understand itself, it has to think about itself. And it has to start moving towards this feeling of there's an eye, a subject, and of that an object.

And at first there's sort of shimming back and forth. They're still the same thing, but it's starting to sort of simmer with this urge to know. And then it finally, then they describe five stages or tattvas of how this happens. And the fifth is separation into subject object. Well, how do you have separation into subject object? You necessarily have to have dimensionality, so when it achieves that separation, there has to be space, there has to be time. There may be other dimensions too. But right then, the moment it sees itself, it gives rise to space time, which is an energy rich field, which produces the quantum foam and subatomic particles, and the entire universe brings into existence. And the two things are not separate. The two things are not different. They're complementarity. And the moment you choose one is the priority, you lose the other and vice versa. So you know, there's an argument between many different sects of Buddhism, is the world real or is it not? Yes, what would be the answer to that? So I thinks the world of his consciousness, I think matter is consciousness. I think energy is consciousness. Everything is the contents of consciousness, the way our ideas and perceptions are within our consciousness during the day and our dreams when we're asleep at night. The universe is the contents of that universal mind that in seeking to know itself, creates us.

Ilia: I wrote a book last year called The Not-Yet God, a little bit along these lines. I'm really interested. So really interesting that you brought up the mystical dimensions. And I'm just reviewing a book by Cynthia Bourgeault on Thomas Keating, the Cistercians Monk who, like another mystic of our time, Bernadette Roberts, came to the know self, self—sort of like what you're talking about. I mean, I have thought about consciousness as well as Michio Kaku who speaks about it as wave, wave overlap. Like within the quantum field, you know, that this...

Neil: Activation states, the universe is an activation state. I would say it's an activation state of fundamental awareness.

Ilia: Yeah, totally with that. And it's this mystical, this amazing, so we have these levels of mind within us. So I would not want to reduce the mind just to what's in the brain. I think that is really sad because it's so much more than that, we know that just through these practices, through these ancient, mystical practices of Buddhism, Christianity or whatever it is. But on the other hand, there's one thing—So we can go into this state of pure awareness. The I and the thou become, in a sense, inseparably the same. So Meister Eckhart might, you know, the eye with which I see God as the same eye with which God sees me, so there's no...

Neil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Ilia: But here's the thing, is that, what I thought about is that, so we have these deep, deep, you could drill all the way down right into the cosmic quantum into consciousness. But something about us that I want to take that in the reverse direction. We're transcendent creatures. So there's something about us that must go beyond that. And that's what I'm really interested in. Here's my next thing why I think AI is sort of the...

Neil: Oh, that's where we're headed.

Ilia: The inverted mystical innerness outward. In other words, it's the same thing, like what the mystic is doing inward, the AI is doing outward, but AI is pulling us onto something more. So what I'm really interested is not so much coming in touch with infinite reality; I'm interested how infinite reality propels us to something more, more infinite, more real, more conscious, and therefore, going back to the direction, like, we're going somewhere.

Neil: Yeah, I'm stammering because there's a lot in there.

Ilia: Yeah.

Neil: So in terms of AI, and I have a footnote about AI in the book, because I wrote it the year before AI came out. And what I wasn't anticipating is that whenever I speak now in front of an audience about the book, there's always an AI question. And I'm like, oh, I don't want to talk about AI. So the problem with saying AI is going to become conscious—I look at AI as much more like a positive feedback loop that runs the risk of destroying the whole thing because it's going to expend all the energy. And it may literally do that because the electrical resources to run all the computers, to have AI do what we expect it to do, we may not have enough of an energy supply to do that. There's this guy who's I think chapter nine of the book who I'm very fond of, named Kurt Gödel.

Ilia: Sure.

Neil: Gödel was a mathematical platonist, which means that in the terms of Plato, he thought that mathematics exists in a realm beyond the human realm, in an ideal realm. Now, people who would disagree with him, generally materialists, say that no humans invented numbers to count bushels of wheat or to count the stars in the sky. But we invented numbers, and we can know them completely, and we can use them to completely understand and describe all of existence with precision. And again, hinting at, oh, this is a machine. And if we had the big equation of the universe, it would all be solved. And in order to have a system that could do that, it has to be, and this comes out of the Vienna Circle and the mathematicians associated with the Vienna circle in the twenties and thirties, that a system that explained everything, that's the definition of being complete. It's complete because it explains everything. But it also has to be consistent. Because if there are contradictions inside, if there are inconsistencies within the system, then you could make a proof of anything.

Ilia: Right.

Neil: So, it has to be complete and consistent. And what Gödel did, and I work hard to try and explain how he did it in the book, but the complicated nature of it, people compare it to the music of Bach and the structure of a gothic cathedral ,that his proof is just so beautiful and elegant. And what he proved, they're called the incompleteness proofs. And what he proved, and there is no mathematician alive today who would disagree with this, is that if you have a system that is complete, it will always contain contradictions and therefore not be explanatory. If you have a system that is consistent, there will always, and this is the big thing, there will always be statements, there will always be aspects, qualities of the system that will be true, but cannot be proven to be true from within the system.

And the implication of that is, how do you know something is true if you can't prove it's true? Well, you can intuit that it's true. And so the people thinking in this way, the Vienna Circle, they wanted to erase metaphysics. And our cultural state of mind is, we want to erase metaphysics, mathematics, and empirical science tells us everything we need to know about the world, except it doesn't work that way. Empirical science sort of fails with the subject object thing in quantum physics and the wave particle duality of light. And now with complexity, what I'm adding in is, yes, your choice of perspective is going to change what you see. Now, Gödel has abolished the idea that math can do all, and so what comes back is intuition, and that includes spiritual traditions.

And oh, this is why I was bringing this up, Roger Penrose, Sir Roger Penrose, the great physicist who thinks a lot about consciousness, he has pointed out, and many other people have pointed out that the nature of Gödel's proof is such that it is not an algorithmic proof. It is not a step-by-step kind of thing, where each statement leads to the next statement. It's a far more extraordinary thing to discover the proof, let alone, to construct the proof. He had to sort of transcend that kind of logic, and computers don't do that. He had to make intuitive leaps to come up with the proof. A computer cannot know, no matter how sophisticated your AI is, cannot know that a statement is true without algorithmically proving that it's true. AI just crunches numbers and information really fast, so it looks kind of magical, but it's all just algorithmic. It can't ever make a leap. And so, it doesn't transform into consciousness because it isn't conscious.

Ilia: It is really, really great. I love your explanations of everything too. It's super good work. I hope you continue. Are you continuing to work in this area, or are you going to write another book or what? What's up?

Neil: I am writing another book. It's actually the book I wanted to write. I didn't actually to write this book. My mom, in her last six years of her life, lost her short term memory, but still knew who everybody was. You know, remembered things, but she couldn't remember five minutes ago, and in the process needed 24 hour home care, et cetera. But she also started having dead people appear to her who would sometimes tell her things that were true that she couldn't possibly have known. And then spur guides from the universe started showing up, and then she started having spontaneous enlightenment experiences. She kind of died in a bliss bubble, and that's the book I want to write. And that's the stuff I couldn't put in notes on complexity.

Ilia: Yeah. And still remain in science.

Neil: Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. But these are the things that can't be explained by empirical science. The only way to write about it or discuss it, I think, is in terms of case studies. And my mom is a case study at this study.

Ilia: Oh, interesting, honestly. Yeah, Science kind of overshoots itself sometimes like it's...

Neil: Yeah. Well, particularly when it forgets what its own limitations are.

Ilia: Exactly.

Neil: You know, that's the problem.

Ilia: I agree.

Robert: Many thanks to Neil Theise for joining us. Find Neil's latest book, Notes on Complexity: The Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being online, or order it from your local bookstore. This episode concludes our current season of Hunger for Wholeness. We'll return this summer with another exciting lineup of interviews, including Rabbi Bradley Artson, futurist Kevin Kelly, spiritual writer and activist Barbara Holmes and many more. To stay up to date, follow Hunger for Wholeness on social media, or visit christogenesis.org for more content and updates from Ilia Delio, and our team at the Center for Christogenesis. A special thanks to our partners at the Fetzer Institute. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.