[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Anne Strainchamps.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm Steve Paulson.
[SPEAKER_00]: Has anything ever happened to you that fundamentally changed your understanding of what's real?
[SPEAKER_01]: An experience that rocked your core beliefs, like maybe a spiritual awakening or a mystical breakthrough?
[SPEAKER_00]: We heard a story like this recently.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was at a small gathering of scientists and philosophers at what seemed like a pretty normal kind of science talk.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, good morning, everyone.
[SPEAKER_02]: Today we'll talk about consciousness, pure and simple.
[SPEAKER_02]: Consciousness, awareness, I take them to be identical.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Christof Koch, a renowned neuroscientist, beginning one of his standard lectures on the science of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then midway through his talk, he suddenly switches gears.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm going to talk about two experiences and their possible implications.
[SPEAKER_03]: So one is I had an experience of this.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was breathing something.
[SPEAKER_00]: The something was a powerful psychedelic.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then within six seconds, the entire world disappears.
[SPEAKER_03]: I had a psychiatrist there and the guide and my wife were there.
[SPEAKER_03]: They observed me.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was just sitting there, rigid, moaning quietly or whining with eyes wide open.
[SPEAKER_03]: But what I experienced objectively was just this bright light that people talk about.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was no time.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was this entire universe that I felt becoming identical to, and there was no will.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was just awareness of everything.
[SPEAKER_03]: I know it sounds woo-woo, but that's what I experienced.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it left me completely discombobulated.
[SPEAKER_03]: There wasn't anything, you know, physiologically wrong with me, but it left me profoundly shaken.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, at the time I was 65, so by the time you get to 65, you have a pretty firmly established metaphysical view of what exists and what doesn't exist.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it totally shifted the, sort of, was like an earthquake in shifting the tectonic plates of my ontology.
[SPEAKER_03]: An experience lasting under an hour that can permanently mark you.
[SPEAKER_03]: You wake into a different reality.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really quite remarkable.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a distinct before and after.
[SPEAKER_00]: Christof was talking at the Island of Knowledge, the small think tank in Tuscany where scientists and philosophers and writers come together to talk about big questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been recording interviews there for the past couple of years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the topic this time is there purpose in the cosmos.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Christof had come with some answers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Steve, you've followed Christof's work for years.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've interviewed him a bunch of times.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was different this time?
[SPEAKER_01]: It was really surprising.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the thing to know about Christof is that he helped launch the modern science of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was back in the 1990s when he and his mentor, the famous biologist Francis Crick, really made consciousness a respectable scientific discipline.
[SPEAKER_01]: They studied what are called the neural correlates of consciousness, essentially pinpointing those brain functions that correspond to specific mental activities.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he was, at that time at least, what we'd call a scientific materialist, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Meaning his assumption was that all conscious experience, thoughts, feelings, awareness, is produced by and manufactured in the brain.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is the standard neuroscience model today.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for years, Christof was the president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, where hundreds of scientists are doing this very fine-grained research into neural circuits.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then a few years ago, Christof had his first psychedelic experience, and then he had a few more, and his entire worldview turned upside down.
[SPEAKER_00]: This must be incredibly rare.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I can't think of another major scientist today who's undergone this kind of transformation in basic beliefs.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Christof has always had this yearning to understand the fundamental nature of reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: He grew up a devout Christian in Germany and then rejected those religious beliefs.
[SPEAKER_01]: but he never lost his hunger for more meaning in his life, for what you might call ultimate truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wanted to understand what happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, this is a great story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's listen.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Christof, for years, you have been at the cutting edge of the science of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And back in the 1990s, of course, you and Francis Crick really pioneered the study of the neural correlates of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for decades, this has been your life work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then more recently, you have become fascinated by certain life-changing transformative experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm wondering what took you in that direction.
[SPEAKER_03]: Curiosity.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've read my entire life about people, so-called mystics, including some of the foundational figures in Western science.
[SPEAKER_03]: Pascal, for example, the French physicist in the 17th century who co-invented probability theory.
[SPEAKER_03]: People who had extraordinary experiences that were transformative.
[SPEAKER_03]: What I mean by that is there's a distinct before and after this event.
[SPEAKER_03]: And after the event, many of these people change their lives or change their goals or change their attitude in some fundamental way.
[SPEAKER_03]: We all know change is difficult, but here a brief episode of something you experience can profoundly and radically transform you.
[SPEAKER_03]: We now know also this can happen during so-called near-death experiences.
[SPEAKER_03]: And of course, we also know now this can happen during psychedelic, that particular type of psychedelic experiences can also lead to these transformative events.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I was just curious.
[SPEAKER_01]: But why at that point in your life?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we'll get to your personal experiences, but you spent decades studying the brain, studying consciousness, but it seems like at a certain point,
[SPEAKER_01]: you wanted to have some of these life-changing, transformative experiences yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm wondering why.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do this in your 60s?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, so as a student of consciousness, I'm a big believer in the motto of the Royal Society, nullius in verba, take no one's word for it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I grew up at a time when the public message was your brain on drugs, you know, the fried eggs, et cetera, and drugs was drugs was drugs.
[SPEAKER_03]: But then, of course, you realize there are very different types of medicines or drugs.
[SPEAKER_03]: Many people claim that under psychedelics, their consciousness expands.
[SPEAKER_03]: So clearly, it seems to be a way to radically change your conscious experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I mean, if you're a student of consciousness, I mean, this is a legitimate scientific subject to explore.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it true that it changes your consciousness?
[SPEAKER_03]: And then you can, if that's the case, then you can study it scientifically.
[SPEAKER_03]: So as you said, I came to psychedelics rather late in life, and then it's just extraordinary.
[SPEAKER_03]: For me, they were enormously positive, these experiences.
[SPEAKER_03]: These were all psychedelic experiences.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, under the influence of various types of psychedelics and associated ceremonies.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's different from you just take a little white pill and you have it.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's typically these entire ritual ceremonies associated with it, whether that's an ayahuasca or the American Indian ceremonies, or you go to some particular weekend retreat where you sing and dance and all of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's important because it sets your mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all about set and setting.
[SPEAKER_03]: And because my belief in what I will experience profoundly determines what I actually experience, we also call this the placebo effect, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: When I have all my friends who tell me and I read it in the literature that you can have these powerful experiences, then you're much more likely to have a powerful experience compared when you don't know anything about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to put this in perspective, I know this wasn't just a science experiment for you to, oh, let's see how my consciousness works.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you've had this...
[SPEAKER_01]: this yearning for something more, going back to your childhood.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you grew up Catholic — a rather devout Catholic, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I grew up as a Catholic, as you say, and I certainly also grew up with this platonic notion of truth with a capital T. And that's what you do as scientists.
[SPEAKER_03]: You explicitly or implicitly, you pursue an ever better description of what you think of as reality.
[SPEAKER_03]: And over time, we believe our description of this reality becomes better and better, and we call that scientific progress.
[SPEAKER_03]: But then, of course, you also keep on asking the question, well, is this all there is?
[SPEAKER_03]: What truly is reality?
[SPEAKER_03]: How is it constructed?
[SPEAKER_03]: This search for final and ultimate answers and truth has never ceased.
[SPEAKER_03]: I still have it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, yes, partially that also drove me to search out these types of experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it looking for the divine?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, maybe going back to your childhood in a way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, what was this larger truth or maybe the truth with a capital T?
[SPEAKER_01]: What were you after, do you think?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, as you look back on your own personal history.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to know the ultimate answers for everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, divine or not?
[SPEAKER_03]: I have lost the belief in a divine, you know, personal God, like, you know, we think of him an old man sitting above the clouds and, you know, do intervening in the universe.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think and I have not had any experience like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't think I'm looking for that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But
[SPEAKER_03]: Like many people, I'm looking for a final answer.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, that may be totally illusory, and of course I know at some cognitive level that I'm going to go to my death without having this, because how would I even know it?
[SPEAKER_03]: However, some types of experiences, really, you believe this is it.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have come to the heart of the universe, and this is it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then you take it back into regular life, and you talk about it, and all of it seems very faint and ineffable is the term that...
[SPEAKER_01]: No people use.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you were after trying to get to the heart of the universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: We should talk about maybe your first big experience, your first big psychedelic experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell me about that, and how close did you get to the heart of the universe?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I mean, there are different experiences I've had.
[SPEAKER_03]: The first one was just, you know, suddenly you find yourself there, typically outdoor, you know, in forests, et cetera, and you find yourself in the Garden of Eden.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the best way to describe it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's just amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, you cry very often.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just this transcendent feeling of beauty in the natural world.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you can just get totally lost in the canopy of a tree or a blade or, you know, you look at a bee or mesmerized by a bee flying around and you just think it's the most beautiful thing ever.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you hear this pounding, you know, you feel sort of this is the sound that, you know, it's the heart of the beating universe.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just this near ecstatic experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was on psilocybin.
[SPEAKER_03]: This was on magic mushrooms.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's truly, I mean, I can see why people called it magic mushroom because it was, you take a world like we all experienced and suddenly it becomes, you realize the miracle of existence.
[SPEAKER_03]: Why is this?
[SPEAKER_03]: It makes you open to these obvious things.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, how often do you think about the fact that actually just sheer bloody existence is miraculous and nothing in science explains why there's something rather than nothing.
[SPEAKER_03]: or the astounding beauty of the world, in particular the natural world.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you reacquaint yourself with old truths that somehow you know abstractly, but now it's really very viscerally.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then another experience I've had, because people told me this is sort of a very powerful tool and you want to try it, and I did.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there I had an utterly terrifying experience that I will never, that I have no desire whatsoever to repeat, where you just come to something very close to near-death experience, where the entire world disappears, your body disappears.
[SPEAKER_03]: Although you're there with eyes wide open, as reported by people who saw me, you don't see anything, you don't hear anything, you don't feel anything.
[SPEAKER_03]: The only thing that I perceived was this point of icy bright light.
[SPEAKER_03]: There wasn't a left or right, up and down.
[SPEAKER_03]: All space had collapsed into this one point.
[SPEAKER_03]: There wasn't even time, in the sense that this moment wasn't too long, it wasn't too short, it simply was.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the river of time, to use Jamesian language, that we always are immersed in, just at that point, simply stopped.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was in the ever-present now.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then no self, no Christof, no voice, no body, nothing.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it wasn't me.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was just experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was a very powerful experience, but it was just three things.
[SPEAKER_03]: This bright light, terror, and ecstasy.
[SPEAKER_03]: This strange combination of terror and ecstasy.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the only thing there was.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nothing else.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, you know, I didn't relive lives.
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't, you know, no scenes from my life came back.
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't encounter any spirit or anything.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was just this.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this was on 5-MeO-DMT.
[SPEAKER_03]: This was on a different substance, yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, what's remarkable that you inhale whatever you inhale, and then within three or four breaths, whatever remains of you, you encounter some sort of void.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then an hour later, you're back to tell the tale.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, first, of course, you're totally confused.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I cried, I stripped, I went into fetus position, all of that, because it's this profound, terrifying experience where you lose all.
[SPEAKER_03]: What it teaches you as a student of consciousness, space and time are optional.
[SPEAKER_03]: As Immanuel Kant, the German transcendental idealist philosopher, argued already 250 years ago, purely based on reason, we believe it's a given that things always occur somewhere and at some time.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, that's a construct of our brain.
[SPEAKER_03]: And under certain conditions, your brain doesn't have those constructs anymore.
[SPEAKER_03]: Same thing with the notion of self.
[SPEAKER_03]: The notion of self is a construct that's very stable.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I need this to survive and to evolve and to be successful.
[SPEAKER_03]: But under other conditions, there is no more self.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you say space and time is optional, I mean, I get it that you had no sense of space and time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it sounds like maybe that's just this weird experience you're having on this very powerful drug.
[SPEAKER_01]: But can we really say space and time disappears there?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, the only reality I'm acquainted with is the reality of my experiences.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything else is inferential, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And at that point, my experience, there was no more, I mean, space had collapsed into this singularity and time had stopped flowing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, of course, we know perfectly well, no, we live in a four-dimensional space-time continuum, as described by relativity in my own experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the question is, is that just a good...
[SPEAKER_03]: practical operational model that allows me to, you know, to predict where the planets are and build, you know, interplanetary rockets?
[SPEAKER_03]: Or is it actually the ultimate truth of the matter?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is space and time actually out there?
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is a question, of course, that goes back, you know, this is ancient philosophy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in quantum mechanics, that question becomes much more difficult.
[SPEAKER_03]: But also you can argue that ultimately that is a construct of all of our minds, not just my mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's absolutely necessary for things to be here at a particular place and at a particular time, but that may not reflect the actual matter of the fact.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the other interpretation of this is you had this very powerful hallucination, and then you came out of it an hour later.
[SPEAKER_01]: You sort of came back to, you know, everyday reality, but it was...
[SPEAKER_03]: I came back to everyday hallucinatory so-called reality.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a common sense where we can agree.
[SPEAKER_03]: We all see there's this glass of water, you know, this glass of grape juice.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, of course, as evolved creature, we had to do that.
[SPEAKER_03]: If we all, you know, have different views of reality, you know, we wouldn't have evolved.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but the question to ask here as a scientist and as a philosopher, you know, is it really true that one is a hallucination and the other one is sort of reality?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's one way of viewing it.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's sort of the common physicalist material interpretation.
[SPEAKER_03]: But a different interpretation might be, no, ultimately everything is mental.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything is phenomenal.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything is experiences.
[SPEAKER_03]: And out of this mental, we construct reality.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the physical, ultimately, that might also be a construct.
[SPEAKER_03]: This metaphysical view is known as idealism and, of course, has a long and storied history in Western philosophy and in other people's philosophy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds like you have moved in that direction as you're trying to make sense of these incredibly powerful experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: The old view, the physicalist view that, yeah, it's just a hallucination, that really doesn't cut it with you anymore, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, so after this first experience, I was still sort of, you know, it didn't radically change my metaphysical view.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then more recently, two years ago, I had a more straightforward mystical experience where, you know, again, the self, you leave the gravitational field.
[SPEAKER_03]: I left the gravitational field of planet ego.
[SPEAKER_03]: We all live on this planet ego.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's always about me, me, me, me, me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not you, but me.
[SPEAKER_03]: In my better moments, I can think about you, but ultimately it's always with respect to me as a subject.
[SPEAKER_03]: But just like astronauts can leave the planet and become weightless, we can become selfless.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can lose the sense of self.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so this was another experience like that, selfless.
[SPEAKER_03]: But in addition, I felt myself, I don't want to describe it in detail, but I became identical with the universe.
[SPEAKER_03]: I know it sounds terrible woo-woo.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's what my experience was like.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I saw in my purview whatever remained of me apprehended the entire universe.
[SPEAKER_03]: It became identical to it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, this leaves you, certainly left me profoundly, profoundly discombobulated and confused.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I was walking around late at night.
[SPEAKER_03]: My wife, you know, she was there.
[SPEAKER_03]: She, you know, tried to talk me down.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then every day, literally every day since then, I think about it and about the metaphysical interpretations.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, yes, my experience was that ultimately everything is possible.
[SPEAKER_03]: The only stuff that I'm familiar with, which is sights and sounds and feelings of boredom, of seeing, of dreading, of imagining, of consciousness, of the mental.
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is the view of the universe that says ultimately what exists only is this...
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, there are different names.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the German idealist Arthur Schopenhauer calls it the will.
[SPEAKER_03]: Other people call it cosmic consciousness or universal consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's sort of only this singular mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the question is, the mystery is, most of the time we are not in that state, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Right now, I don't access your mind, you don't access my mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to ask me a question.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so under certain conditions, Huxley, the person who's... Aldous Huxley, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Aldous Huxley, whose book, The Doors of Perception, sort of kicked off the age of Aquarius, he talks at the reducing valve, which I always thought somewhat silly, naive.
[SPEAKER_03]: The brain isn't just a reducing valve, but I think there's a deep truth in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And just to clarify, I mean, by the reducing valve, he was saying that in ordinary life, we have too much input.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the brain has to kind of shut out most of that stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it sort of shuts out these extraordinary experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then with a psychedelic, you suddenly have access to...
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it has to do with the loss of self, which is always about me, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Ultimately, with me as subject and everything this chairs with respect to me, and you have a certain relationship to me, etc.,
[SPEAKER_03]: And when you lose that, no matter what technique, whether you're meditating or whether you're doing long distance running or you're in a trance, like in certain types of Christian sects or in other tradition or using psychedelic medicine or being a dancing Sufi, you know, these dancing dervishes, I think people have invented an amazing variety of techniques to reduce the sense of self, to become sort of selfless
[SPEAKER_03]: and thereby apprehend this larger reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, hold that thought for a moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we come back, Christof will talk about what science can and cannot explain about mystical experiences.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, it's Anne.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am so glad you're joining us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm really excited about them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's a tip.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope you like it.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is Wonder Cabinet.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Steve Paulson speaking with the neuroscientist Christof Koch at the Island of Knowledge, the small think tank in Tuscany, and we're talking about the metaphysical insights from his psychedelic experiences.
[SPEAKER_03]: Why do you think you had these extraordinary experiences?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you've talked about the intention going into it, the set and setting, because some people take these psychedelics and
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe they have a big experience, but their life doesn't get turned upside down.
[SPEAKER_03]: It sounds like your life almost got shattered, kind of in a good way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Metaphysically, yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Metaphysically, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: So why do you think that happened to you?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't think I'm much different from anyone else.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it depends on your, again, on the set and setting, your mindset.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you sort of consciously or unconsciously looking for something like this?
[SPEAKER_01]: And given my history and you brought up my religious upbringing, it may have been more likely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, it was completely unexpected.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've tried once or twice to repeat this experience, but now my self always gets in the way because my self doesn't want my brain to lose itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The self doesn't like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: The self is this very powerful mode of the operating system.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can think of the mind being an operating system running on the brain, and it fiercely resists that by doing all sorts of cognitive tricks so you don't go there, so you don't lose yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: In this case, it was totally spontaneous, unexpected behavior.
[SPEAKER_01]: Suddenly it happened, boom, which is, of course, a character.
[SPEAKER_01]: So William James, one of the best writers, you know, the American sort of father of American psychology, wrote this beautiful book in 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experiences, which is essentially a large part of that has to do with these, what he called religious experiences, although he already alludes to certain similar experiences under nitrous oxide, which at his time was, of course, was already a thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So...
[SPEAKER_01]: Huxley, again, talks about this act of unearned grace.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because he also asks, why now?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an act of unearned grace that I don't feel responsible for.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's a fantastic thing, because you do bring almost universal.
[SPEAKER_01]: They come with an extraordinary sort of emotional benefit.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the very opposite of nihilism.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it's interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: A recent philosopher made this remark that typically these experiences
[SPEAKER_01]: make people lean towards idealism.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, away from being cynic, away from sort of being nihilistic, but now perceiving purpose in the universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: In some way, we don't apprehend this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Quite remarkable.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I find your story absolutely fascinating.
[SPEAKER_03]: And my little armchair psychoanalysis here, let me try this out on you, and you can tell me how I get it wrong here.
[SPEAKER_03]: So
[SPEAKER_03]: you've had this incredibly successful career, top of your profession, you know, in terms of the study of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you're at all the major conferences talking about this.
[SPEAKER_03]: You and Francis Crick pioneered this whole new way of studying the brain and sort of isolating the neural correlates of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then you have these experiences
[SPEAKER_03]: And maybe, here's my attempt at psychologizing you, maybe you felt like, you know, doing sort of that kind of science that you've been doing for decades, maybe you hit a wall.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe you sort of felt like you weren't really breaking new ground.
[SPEAKER_03]: And for whatever reason, you wanted to take this in a more personal direction.
[SPEAKER_03]: You wanted to have these profound, direct experiences.
[SPEAKER_03]: And maybe because you realized that, oh, the science that you had been doing can't really take you there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable explanation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because as you said, the neural correlates of consciousness, what are the mechanisms in your brain that ultimately give rise to any one conscious experience, that's a purely empirical operational problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: At some point we'll know the answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be these neurons doing this thing or these molecules or this microtubuli or whatever that does this thing that gives rise to love and hate and desire and dread.
[SPEAKER_01]: But of course, you want to know more.
[SPEAKER_01]: You want, you know, okay, so what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you have other type of experiences?
[SPEAKER_01]: And ultimately, the thing with consciousness is you never know it from the outside.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to experience this yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, as Viktor Frankl spoke, the man's search for meaning, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like most of us, I look...
[SPEAKER_01]: for meaning.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, as you get older, the question, given my finite horizon that I have, the time that I've left to look for meaning becomes shorter.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you begin to explore other avenues.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: So obviously this kind of experience, and given your whole background as the scientist of consciousness, it raises profound questions, philosophical questions, scientific questions about the nature of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: And as you know, the
[SPEAKER_03]: the dominant model among most neuroscientists for decades has been consciousness is generated by the brain, you know, by various brain states, and that induces whatever's happening in the mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: Have you changed your thinking about this?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so certainly operational is no question.
[SPEAKER_01]: I continue to be a neuroscientist.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, we're doing experiments in mice on psychedelics because we can study the mechanism.
[SPEAKER_01]: Science is a fantastic tool.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a practical, operational, pragmatic tool to understand and manipulate our environment.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we have to be extremely skeptical to take its metaphysical view at face value.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yes, the brain and the mind have this very close, you know, like two sides of the coin relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe consciousness is just the way how complex
[SPEAKER_01]: pieces of matter like my brain that's a piece of furniture like any other field from the inside or maybe we are all part of a larger reality that's ultimately mental something that science cannot study because its tools don't work there and that's okay with me I'm sort of I'm an empiricist
[SPEAKER_01]: And whatever you experience, you have to include into your full view of reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we may have to, at the end of the day, revise the naive, commonsensical, realist view of reality that science gives us.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you're talking about the phenomenology of the experience, the actual experience itself.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I guess the question is, can science take us there?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you've said that brain science will keep advancing, will be able to probably isolate particular neural connections that might lead to these experiences you've had.
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, can it actually explain these?
[SPEAKER_03]: Or could it possibly explain these experiences?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't rule out anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Science, you know, it's very rash to say science can't do this and that.
[SPEAKER_01]: People have said that over the last 300 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we can never explain what life is.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can never explain what other stars are made out of.
[SPEAKER_01]: People have made career out of arguing these positions, and then science can.
[SPEAKER_01]: So right now, I think the view that most scientists have
[SPEAKER_01]: explicit, implicitly articulate this so-called materialism or physicalism, I think is inadequate, at least, and it's very likely to be wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: But of course, it works spectacular.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I want to emphasize that science just, you know, works within its domain.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the most powerful technique that humanity has developed to build things like mRNA vaccines, quantum computers, but of course, also, you know, nuclear bombs and other things.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just really good
[SPEAKER_01]: at predicting things in the material environment.
[SPEAKER_01]: But let's not take it too seriously.
[SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't necessarily mean that only the material exists, or maybe the material itself is an expression of something mental.
[SPEAKER_01]: And science right now is unable to tell us that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you've had these extraordinary experiences and you've said your worldview has changed in some ways.
[SPEAKER_03]: You said you lost your fear of death with this powerful 5M.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's a psychological fact.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not a metaphysical fact.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I'm coming back to your personal psychology here.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you live any differently now because of these experiences?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, has this changed you kind of in a, I don't know, practical way?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I feel, in general, I just feel much more hopeful, much more positive about life in the universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I understand there are lots of problems on the planet.
[SPEAKER_01]: I get all of that and I'm worried about some of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: But somehow I just have this even more unshakable belief.
[SPEAKER_01]: We all live differently.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's almost like, you know, Candide in Voltaire's book, we live in the best of all possible worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I know people make fun of that attitude.
[SPEAKER_01]: But and just the sheer, as I said, that the miracle of existence and we should appreciate this and be expressed grateful and compassion for all suffering, for all conscious creatures, people and beings.
[SPEAKER_01]: and animals.
[SPEAKER_03]: So one final question, because I know you've got to go in a couple of minutes here.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mentioned the other night that my radio partner and I are starting this new podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're calling it Wonder Cabinet.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're coming up with sort of this exercise, like if there was an imaginary wonder cabinet.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, wonder cabinet obviously is drawing on the history of the cabinet of curiosities, you know, going back centuries.
[SPEAKER_03]: But
[SPEAKER_03]: For the modern wonder cabinet, if you were to put something in that cabinet, you, you, Christof, it could be an object, it could be an experience, it could be an idea, a concept, anything.
[SPEAKER_03]: What would you want to put in the wonder cabinet now?
[SPEAKER_02]: A toad.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, what do you mean, a toad?
[SPEAKER_02]: A toad.
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll figure it out.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm serious.
[SPEAKER_02]: Look it up.
[SPEAKER_02]: A toad.
[SPEAKER_03]: A toad as in, like, the toad venom of 5-MeO-DMT?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, that would be the obvious thing that I would... A toad.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's Christof Koch.
[SPEAKER_03]: He is the former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and he's now the chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation.
[SPEAKER_03]: His most recent book is called Then I Am Myself in the World.
[SPEAKER_00]: Christof joined us at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, where scientists and philosophers come together to talk about some of the big ideas of our time.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll bring you more of those conversations and discussions in the coming months.
[SPEAKER_03]: Support for Wonder Cabinet's Island of Knowledge episodes comes from Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, and our digital producer, Mark Riechers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wonder Cabinet is based in Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Anne Strainchamps.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm Steve Paulson.
[SPEAKER_03]: We would love to hear from you.
[SPEAKER_03]: So send us questions or comments at wondercabinetproductions.com and sign up for the newsletter while you're there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Be well.
[SPEAKER_00]: See you next time.