The Mystery of Consciousness with Richard Smoley #GJWMotivation #GJWpsychology #GJWhealth #GJWscienc

Thinking Allowed Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove Hello and welcome, I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today, we'll be exploring the mystery of consciousness. With me is Richard Smalley, who is author of The Dice Game of Shiva, How Consciousness Creates the Universe. He is also editor of Quest, the journal of the Theosophical Society in America. He is the past editor of Gnosis Magazine and author of many other books, including How God Became God, what scholars are really saying about God and the Bible, and Hidden Wisdom, the Guide to the Western Inner Traditions, and Inner Christianity, the Guide to the Esoteric Tradition. Welcome, Richard. Thank you. Glad to be here. It's a pleasure to be with you. You know, philosophers sometimes ask, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, did it really happen? I think there's a sense in which you can say it didn't if there's no experience of it. What do you think? Well, I'm saying something rather like that in my book, The Dice Game of Shiva. For one thing, consciousness is very, very hard to define. It tends to be defined in very circular ways. What is consciousness? Well, it's awareness. What is awareness? Well, it's consciousness. Round and round we go. I tried to break that log jam by posing another slightly different picture of consciousness, which is to say it is the capacity to relate self and other. That is to say, consciousness as we usually experience it, and there are a lot of ifs, and buts here that we can't go into, but consciousness in its prime form always is of a self and an other. What happens when you're unconscious? Let's say you're in deep, dreamless sleep. Well, you're not really aware of a you that's differentiated from your surroundings. That just goes into abeyance. So, I mean, there are layers and layers of all this, again, but there's something about consciousness that does seem to be a self and an other. Of course, there are the mystical traditions that talk about cosmic consciousness in which you're one with everything. Yes, and that's a couple of steps ahead. But what I'm kind of saying about this in terms of the mystical traditions, many meditative practices will have you do something like this. That is to say, you quiet your mind. At a state of stillness, you start to realize that there are sensations coming to your body. Then you realize that there are thoughts and emotions that are coming across the screen of your mind. And there's a certain point at which you can see all of this as if they belong to somebody else, as if they're images on a screen. Projections in the mind's eye. Right. So, then you can't be these things because you're watching them as if from a distance. So, who is the I that is watching? I'm sure you know that Sri Ramana Maharshi said that who am I is a question that asked deeply enough could lead one to enlightenment. Yes. But there is this silent witness, this I that is, shall we say, truly you. In a sense, it doesn't do anything other than witness. But without it, experience does not happen. So, that is consciousness in a, I think, in a primordial sense. Now, what I'm saying is that this sense of a self and other exists in many layers and many gradients in the universe. And this does not only include us. It does not only include animals or plants or even organic life as a whole. It must somehow be a characteristic of the entire universe. Now, you'll hear, for example, scientists speak purely matter-of-factly about a chemical reaction. Yes. Nothing is more scientific than that, I guess. Well, what I'm saying is that for there to be a reaction, there has to be a recognition. In a sense, the hydrogen atom has to be able to recognize an oxygen atom in order to react to it to form water and so on. I could do that, though, without any awareness. Well, it's not an awareness that we have. I'm not suggesting that a hydrogen atom has the introspective consciousness of, say, a Woody Allen character. But I'm saying that this capacity to recognize and respond is in everything and that our human consciousness is one kind of gradient in it. It's one stratum in an enormous spectrum of gradients of consciousness. And in that sense, consciousness is organic to the universe and creates the universe. So rocks have a degree of consciousness? Well, for the molecules to adhere, there must be a point at which it draws the line that the molecules will recognize certain other molecules and bind with them and recognize certain other molecules and not bind them. And that's why there is a rock that is a distinct thing from the non-rock around it. Well, physicists would say this could be electromagnetic. You know, positive-charged particles are attracted to negative-charged particles and so on, that the hypothesis of consciousness is not necessary. No, but I would say that the hypothesis of recognition and reaction is necessary and that our consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon of all of this, but is organic to it and is simply one level of it. Because by the standard view, and this is a thing that no one has answered, although they're always about to answer it, just we'll get back to you real soon about this, is, you know, the fact that how did our consciousness, in some sort of rare, privileged way, arise out of all of this mindlessness? And I'm saying that, well, mind has many different levels, even things that we would not customarily or conventionally call mind. All the way down. So to speak. So, in effect, your perspective is very much akin to that of a panpsychist. Yes. Although one area in which I differ from panpsychism is simply that panpsychism often, you know, it sounds very fuzzy and its chief objection that arises is that it's sort of fuzzy. There's always like this psyche that's kind of floating around somewhere, like a kind of an impalpable mist. But I'm saying, no, it's this thing that enables anything to draw the line. And without it, you know, the universe doesn't exist. Because the conventional view is that consciousness, as we know it, at least requires a nervous system. Yes. But that's only one type of consciousness. That is only one level of organization of consciousness. Even in what you're suggesting is even molecules or atoms have some property relating to self and other. Yes. And this point was made by none other than Thomas Edison in an 1890 interview. He said, look at all these chemical interactions. Look at the way they combine with each other to form all sorts of materials. Do you think they do this without some kind of consciousness? Alice Bailey, who was an esotericist of the early 20th century, summed up this idea in a little book she wrote called The Consciousness of the Atom. Well, in a sense, in the subtitle of your book, How Consciousness Creates the Universe, what you're saying is that every slice of the universe from the very largest to the very smallest has some measure of what Martin Buber maybe called I-thou-ness. Or, if you're going to go to Martin Buber, there's a capacity for an I-it. As well as an I-thou. I mean, you can take this, the thou part, I think Buber himself would say, the thou always implies the existence of the I in the other. The it does not. And I'd say that's one difference between those two stances. I know Martin Buber really was suggesting a kind of higher form of love, even a sacred relationship, an I and thou. Sacred relationships only make sense if there are also relationships that are not sacred. Right. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, in a lot of ways, what I'm saying is very close to what Buber is saying. And in a way, you would hope so, in that if I were the only person who ever had thought of this in human history, well, that would sound strange. And why would I have been the first person who thought of it anyway? But if this idea is resurfacing in the Sankhya, as I said, the most ancient of all philosophical schools, in Buber, in Edison, in all sorts of places, in people who call themselves panpsychists, this may reflect an insight into something that is actually there. Now, if we talk about the witness state, the self, the pure witness, it would seem as if you're talking about consciousness without an object. Well, there's always going to be an object in one sense. And does consciousness presuppose an object? Kind of, sort of. And what do I mean by that? Well, notice this consciousness without an object, which is a term very often used, and it refers to a state and meditative experience that actually does exist. But notice that when you're using that term, it starts to sound paradoxical. Right? So that must mean that without that object part is subtly contradicting the consciousness part, meaning that the object, if we're going to get really philosophical about it, is somehow implied in the consciousness part. Now, the state exists. I'm not denying that. I'm just saying in most cases, what we think of as consciousness does imply this object or object. In most cases, very few people, I suppose, attain pure consciousness without an object. It's considered, I guess, a high state of meditation, but might it not even be just contemplating consciousness itself? Consciousness contemplating consciousness. Yeah, I guess it gets subtle, of course, because then you're contemplating your own consciousness as an object. And guess what? Does it start to look like a hall of mirrors? Yes, it does. And the mystical literature talks about this. I'm particularly reminded of the ancient Jewish mystical doctrine of the Hekalot, or the palaces. You know, there are these different levels. Those are kind of levels or mansions, as it says in the New Testament, that you go through. It may be that doing the kind of exercise or practice that you're talking about is a way of stepping through these various things. Of course, very soon it starts to get very weird, but that's kind of why you started doing these practices anyway, isn't it? Well, there's another paradox. We could look at it from the other point of view, which is the objects of consciousness. I mean, take this beautiful stone sculpture. Many of the viewers have commented on it over time. It appears to be an object outside of my consciousness, and yet, actually, it's not. This is something in my mind. Well, our consciousness, the objects of consciousness, come, shall we say, in two flavors. One is the purely subjective, the purely internal. That is to say, I close my eyes and imagine a green lion, or I close my eyes and imagine my childhood home, or that's something that's present usually only subjectively. Again, this is all radically simplistic for the sake of time, but okay, there's that. That's, to a large extent, private. Then there are the objects of sensory consciousness, which are physical, and which are public, or at least look a lot more public than that. Now, the fact that we have kind of similar structures, bodily and psychological, means that we are seeing something more or less the same when we look at an object like that. I assume it's external because other people comment on it. Yes, and one of the things I talk about in my book is reality, and reality is an interesting subject. Now, what I do in the book is I define reality, not necessarily as it is, but what we think of as real. And I go through a number of things. One of the things is this, to be real, something must be accessible, but publicly accessible. That is to say, if I see that statue in this room and no one else does, the reality of this starts to be called into question, and that's what happens sometimes with ghosts. Oh, by the way, reality has to accord with our preconceptions, which vary wildly from culture to culture. Our culture presupposes that ghosts and spirits simply do not exist. Therefore, if someone sees them, they are not real. Funny you should say that, because yes, the culture, indeed, the guardians of our culture hold that presupposition, but surveys of people show that, well, two-thirds of the population do accept the existence of ghosts. Yes, and that's probably because there's something really there. Even though the orthodoxy of belief, which is now essentially materialistic, 500 years ago in the West, it was dictated by the Catholic Church, it's changed. It's no less doctrinaire. People don't get burned at the stake for it anymore, which I personally consider to be a good thing. But there are these preconceptions. If you go to a country in which the existence of ghosts and spirits is taken for granted universally, while people see them more, people are able to talk about them more intelligibly, almost as public phenomena. But we live in a society where if a child sees a ghost or an imaginary figure, the child is told, no, you don't see it. And because our cognition is, to a certain extent, hypnotically conditioned, if someone keeps telling you as a child that you're not seeing that, eventually you don't see it anymore. You know, you're reminding me of the writings of Rudolf Steiner, the great Austrian mystic, I think he died in 1925, who said that every thought is a spiritual entity. Yes. And this goes back to, well, something similar exists in the Jewish tradition. In a sense, good thought, a performance of a mitzvah, one of the commandments of the Torah, creates an angel. Yes. A sin, however characterized, creates a devil. And then we start to ask ourselves, well, wait a minute, to what extent do these have some kind of objective existence in the kind of soup of consciousness? Indeed, because according to strict materialism, even a thought itself does not have an objective existence. Right, right. Or except as kind of a string of neural events, which, you know, in a sense means nothing. Right. I mean, a string of neural events might be the equivalent of saying, I can look in an oscilloscope and watch the notes in a Bach concerto and understand Bach because of that. Well, you know, one of the most famous and influential articles in the philosophy of mind in recent decades was written by Thomas Nagel. It was called, What's it Like to be a Bat? Oh, wonderful essay. Yeah. And, you know, as you know, it says, well, we can know everything physiologically about how a bat perceives through a type of sonar. Yes. The Navy uses it to sound the depths of the oceans. It has practical uses that we can apply. Sure. Nonetheless, we have no subjective idea of what it is like to perceive, to have one of your senses be bouncing sonar off something. And we never will. The only answer philosophers have ever tried to give to this is, yes, we do. And I don't buy that anyway. But it's a pretty categorical and not very well thought out attempt at refutation. Yeah. But since you bring it up, Richard, there's some interesting new research coming out in the field of neurophysiology where you can take inputs, interfaces to the human body. Like you could take a sonar device and have it interface with the neurons on the back, on your skin, and your brain will eventually figure it out. So in that case, it may not be ultimately impossible. No. But in order for us to be able to do that, it still requires you have to have to some sort of, it turns out that a subjective experience has to get in there somehow. It does. But it seems as if the brain, just talking about the brain now, is like an all purpose computer. And if you give it any kind of an input and any kind of an output device, the brain will eventually, on its own, figure out how to work with it. I mean, the image of the brain as a computer is a powerful one. It's powerful and somewhat misleading, but very powerful. Well, all metaphors are misleading for the simple reason that, you know, a beautiful woman is a flower. Well, that's a nice metaphor. But there are certain respects in which a beautiful woman is like a flower and other certain respects in which a beautiful woman is not like a flower. If they were identical, they would be the same thing and you'd call them the same name. The brain in some ways functions like a computer, but it is not a computer. And let's at least try to keep that clear. Although the temptations to do the other are very, very strong. There is, for example, a researcher in Texas who, he's working on some incredible things where people wear these suits that stimulate the skin in different ways. And one of the inputs might be the stock market. The stock market is just playing on your skin. And eventually, he believes, and he hasn't proven it yet, and that's a hard problem. You and I both know the stock market. But he thinks that people can actually learn to understand the patterns of the stock market by some strange physical inputs on their skin. Well, none of this poses any problem for the theory that I've given. And in fact, what I've been saying does not exclude artificial intelligence. You know, there's no radical break here. This consciousness, what I'm calling consciousness, is organic to everything. And there's no reason that you can't expand its potentialities, both in the ways you're talking about and the other side where, you know, a machine starts to look like it has something like subjective cognition. Yeah, our viewers may know that in our archive of interviews, there's some interesting discussions about whether robots will experience telepathy or even reincarnation. Yeah, I mean, my view about that is, you know, it is very, very foolish to say that something is completely impossible. You know, like man will never develop a heavier than air flying machine. You know, prophecies like that have been made. I don't feel too comfortable doing that. And I know the potential of the universe and the human universe is far beyond even what we think it is now. So I would prefer not to have a theory that requires you to draw such limits. Well, one of the points you make in your book, which I think is really important, is that as science pushes further and further to understand consciousness, and we can expect breakthroughs in this area, it's likely to change our understanding of everything. Yes, and that's one thing I suspect about artificial intelligence. Let's say it is possible or let's say it will inevitably happen that some kind of consciousness, some sort of humanoid subjective consciousness is created in robots, right? My own view of this is this is possible, but I strongly suspect that whatever we learn about consciousness, human consciousness and others between now and then will radically change. Just as in 1750, if we were talking about whether man could land on the moon or not, yes, he can. But what we know of as science and what they knew of science had to change radically and through many upheavals between, you know, 1750 and 1969. That's an enormously important point because somehow there is a tendency, especially I think in the scientific community, to think we have arrived at a certain set of principles about the way the world works that will remain constant and stable for a million years. Well, the impression I'm getting in this is a little different in that the actual hard, pure scientists are backing away from this kind of statement. They're moving more toward, well, the universe is really strange. If you think you understand quantum mechanics, it means you don't. What is the line? I forget who said it. The universe is a lot stranger, not only than we suppose, but than we can suppose. You're getting more and more statements like this, and it's only kind of the camp followers of science. They're like the eighth graders just discovered Newton's laws of thermodynamics. Oh, yeah, this explains everything. Quasi-religious way. They're more of the problem, I think, than the real scientists. Well, my sense is a little different than yours in this regard. It seems to me that the battle is about 50-50 in this regard. In fact, some years ago I interviewed a Nobel laureate physicist, Murray Galvan, who I happen to have two versions of his book, the first draft and the final draft. He took out a phrase like the one that you mentioned about the mystery of the universe, and his whole point is it's not that mysterious, we really know. All these people who talk about the mysteries of quantum mechanics are misleading you. Well, one metaphor that I find very, very important, and it seems to be useful in lots of different ways, is apparently there's a certain type of crab that fishermen catch. And when the fisherman catches this type of crab, he puts it in a bucket. And then he catches another crab, and he puts it in a bucket, he just drops them all in this bucket. The crabs all have the physiological capacity to crawl out of this bucket at any time. But the fisherman doesn't have to put a lid on the bucket. Why? Because every time a crab tries to crawl out, the others pull it back down. I think that's a metaphor for intellectual history of man. Every time someone's, you know, the other crabs are pulling it back down. Murray Gell-Mann gets there, and some guy, he reviewed the manuscript with, just take that out, Murray. Who do you think he was? You can imagine them talking to each other, right? What a great story. I love that. I've never heard that metaphor before. I find myself thinking about a lot of different contexts. The crabs. Well, we only have a minute left, but I think it might be nice to end with another story, which is the basis of your book, The Dice Game of Shiva. Can you tell that one? Yeah, but I can't explain it in a minute. No, but tell it. Shiva and his wife Parvati start playing a dice game, which is basically kind of a strip Parcheesi. And every time you lose, you have to take something off. And the thing about it is Shiva always loses. He loses everything. He loses even his most innate attributes. But what does he care? He's Shiva. He's the lord of the universe. What difference does it make to him? He goes off to the forest and meditates. I mean, there's a lot in that, which I can't explain, but it is a powerful story. And then Parvati wants him back. Yes. That is, Shiva is the self. It doesn't have any attributes. It all belongs to the world. But this world can't even have any attributes without him. So it has to come back. Richard Smalley, what a wonderful discussion. Thank you so much for being with me. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure. And thank you for being with us.