Skeptiko – Science at the Tipping Point

159. Stanton Friedman on Extended Human Consciousness and Mind Control

UFO researcher sees evidence of telepathy in the accounts of UFO witnesses.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Stanton Friedman, author of Science Was Wrong.  During the interview Friedman discusses the implications of his research for human consciousness:

Alex Tsakiris: I want to talk about extended consciousness in terms of the research you’ve done because there’s this whole controversy within the field that wants to push everything into the psycho-social explanation. But at the same time we do have to acknowledge, as you did in your work with the famous abduction case of Betty and Barney Hill that we do have reports of telepathy, mind control, psychokinesis, and all the rest. I’m wondering what that evidence tells us about ourselves and our human capabilities that extend beyond what we normally think of as our conscious experience.

Stanton Friedman: Well, it’s a very important point because I’m convinced that any advanced civilization will know about telepathy and mind control and communication at a distance. It really came home to me when I was standing at the exact location where Barney Hill was standing when the saucer was over their car and he’s looking through binoculars at the crew on board.

For no good reason, they jumped back in the car, very frightened, and they get off the main road, Route 3, and they go onto a secondary road. Then they go onto a dirt road –which Barney would never have done. And he winds up alongside the only place in the area where you could land a, let’s say 80-foot in diameter, flying saucer. It was a sandy area, there were trees all over the place, but this area was big enough to get a saucer like the one they described down. It was clear proof to me that these guys were directing his actions.

It seems to me eminently clear that these guys have capabilities—as the only simple term I know—to do things that we don’t look upon as being respectable. Such as mind-reading, mind control, and getting people to forget.

Stanton Friedman’s Website

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Alex Tsakiris: Today’s guest was a nuclear physicist before becoming one of the best known and most well informed UFO researchers. I’m talking about Stanton Friedman and Stan, it’s a great pleasure and an honor to welcome you here today on Skeptiko.

Stanton Friedman: I appreciate that. I always like doing it. I grew up with radio. I’m one of the old guys, you know. Put the pictures in my head instead of on a tube.

Alex Tsakiris: So Stan, you’re recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on UFOs. You’ve written numerous books, countless articles. You’ve lectured all over the world, including a very high-faluting Riyadh shindig that you did last year that maybe we’ll have a chance to talk about. So there are really just an unlimited number of UFO topics that we could talk about.

But what I really want to do is take you in a slightly different direction, if you will, because what we talk about most on this show is science research, particularly as it pertains to consciousness research. I think there’s a lot of interesting parallels between your extensive work in UFOs and some of the things that are going on in consciousness research. That’s what I was hoping we could dive into.

Stanton Friedman: Well, I won’t pretend to be an expert on that. I will pretend to be an expert on flying saucers. You know, all fields of science I think have certain things in common. One of them is that there’s a resistance by people who don’t know much about that field by people who are smart in other areas but who presume if there was anything to this field they would already know about it. So they figure there must not be and it must be baloney.

I’ve often pointed out that the four basic rules for debunkers, no matter what the subject, are the same. That is, 1) Don’t bother me with the facts. My mind’s made up. 2) What the public doesn’t know I’m not going to tell them. 3) If you can’t attack the data, attack the people. And 4) Do your research by proclamation. Investigation is too much trouble.

So whether you’re talking about consciousness research, the role of the mind if you will, and the world of the flying saucer, you run into the same problems with smart people saying stupid things. I’ve got a book out with Kathleen Marden called Science was Wrong and only a couple of chapters deal with flying saucers. There are 14 chapters. Kathleen did a fine on the world of the mind. Paranormal if you want to call it that, psychic phenomena, and the fact that if you look hard enough there are a lot of darned good scientific articles.

But as you might expect, the debunkers don’t refer to them. It’s as if they didn’t exist. It’s the same as with flying saucers. I have a particular feeling toward the SETI people—I call them cultists. You know SETI, Silly Effort To Investigate. They absolutely refuse to look at the UFO evidence even though they claim they’re looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. They’re not; they’re looking for a limited category of radio signals.

They’ll say there’s no data to support notions about UFOs when they’ve never referenced the large-scale scientific studies. They’re in a vacuum. And I’m sure you run into that with regard to consciousness research. Everybody knows that baloney, is kind of the attitude with some of the debunkers.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, I think the outline that you did of the four common factors in debunking, if you will, that you listed is excellent and I think we could spend a show going over those and talking about how they apply in different areas. Let me back up for a minute and do a couple of very high level true/false questions just to let people know exactly where you stand because there’s a lot of subtleties when we start talking about UFOs.

Question #1, True or False: There’s overwhelming evidence that we have been visited by intelligently-controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Stanton Friedman: True. Yes.

Alex Tsakiris: True or False: Some top government officials have known about this for at least 60 years.

Stanton Friedman: Yes, I suppose the early guys are mostly dead but some people in government, some important people have been knowledgeable for at least that long—actually longer. Roswell was ’47 so 65 years now. I assume 65 years. So yes, definitely yes. The Cosmic Watergate is real.

Alex Tsakiris: The Cosmic Watergate, which is the term that you coined. That’s the first area that I really wanted to focus on because one of the most troubling down-to-earth, I guess, implications of the UFO phenomena to me is what it reveals about what our government really thinks about us. About their total disregard for our ability to find this stuff out. For our smarts, but also a disregard for fairness, truth, democracy, all that stuff. I think that sometimes gets lost in this discussion because we just go ahead and assume that of course they’re going to deceive us about this stuff.

Can you speak to that a little bit? About what that really means?

Stanton Friedman: Yeah. And remember, my background is I’ve spent 14 years in the industry working on classified advanced nuclear and space systems programs. I’ve been to 20 archives. I’ve written classified reports. I have a pretty good understanding of how national security stuff works.

I hear a lot of baloney about that too, from people who think, “Oh well, Dr. Tyson, head of the Hayden Planetarium, said governments can’t keep secrets. The proof of that is look how much we know about President Clinton’s genitalia,” as if that was relevant somehow. And Seth Shostak said, “Governments can’t keep secrets. Look, it’s the same government that FEMA and Katrina got fouled up. They run the post office.” I didn’t hear NSA, OSI, NRO, any of those alphabet soup agencies in there. So I am absolutely certain governments can keep secrets.

And one of the strangest secrets seems to be that the academic guys seem not to understand that there’s a bigger world of research and development outside of academia than inside. The three nuclear weapons labs alone—I checked this several years ago—that’s Livermore and Los Alamos and Sandia Corporation, their total budget that year was more than $3 billion and was more than the total budget of the National Science Foundation.

Alex Tsakiris: Here’s the thing. There seems to be a certain numbness that we all have when we encounter this stuff. So you can reveal these facts like you just did, which are very out there in the open and people can go research them.

But then we can jump over and look at the deception, the denial, and the misinformation that goes on with UFOs. I think it kind of lessens the impact of it and I wonder, maybe because I’m more-or-less coming into the UFO field without the depth that you do, I just step back and go, “Wow. Everything that I thought I knew about my government, about my country, about their desire to serve my best interests I have to deeply re-examine.”

I wonder if we get away from that a little bit. I mean, I guess you can only stand up on the rooftop or like the old Network movie, stick your head out the window and say, “I’m mad as hell, I’m not going to take that anymore.!”

I mean, that only lasts for so long and then you just kind of pick yourself up and have to move on. But what about the outrage that this could even happen?

Stanton Friedman: Well, part of the problem is the result of the inactivity of two major groups in our society, the scientific community and the journalistic one. There’s an arrogance that says—David Susskind told me he reads the New York Times. He didn’t see anything in there that says flying saucers are real. So I’ve dubbed it the “Susskind Syndrome.”

I’m a man who takes great pride in knowing about what’s important in the world and if aliens were visiting and the government was covering up, that would be important. But if it were true, I would know about it and I don’t so it must not be true. And I’m not going to waste any time finding out anything about this obviously impossible area.

And this applies to a whole bunch of things, not just flying saucers, obviously. I should throw a caveat in here. I am not opposed to the notion of national security. I’ve shocked some people by saying I don’t want everything out on the table if there are some military systems applications here or implications. I don’t see why we should share data if the Russians and Chinese aren’t sharing their data.

That’s different from saying I think they should not tell us that the planet is being visited. That I think they should tell us, but simultaneously on a world-wide basis. These are the conferences that are being planned to deal with the psychological, religious, economic aspects of the fact that we’re being visited. And the time is getting ripe for that.

Do you realize that in the last year or so we’ve jumped from Frank Drake saying there might as many as 8,000 planets in the galaxy that have civilizations that could send out radio signals that we could pick up with our primitive technology. He didn’t add that last part. Now after Kepler and the back-up data by other space telescopes we are now saying not 9,000, not 8 million, but 100 billion planets in the galaxy.

And suddenly that takes us out of the center of things, off the top of the peak. It changes everything and one of the major arguments they make today is we can’t possibly be the only life out there. It’s a big place and who would waste so much when we know there are so many places where there could be life? And so I think the time is right. The younger generation, in other words, is not growing up with the notion, “Gee, we’re it.” The Copernican view is gone that the sun is the center of the universe. Now we know it isn’t. It’s not the center of the galaxy, either. It’s the center of our solar system, one of a hundred billion or so in the galaxy. So the times are changing.

But what I’m saying is that see, I remember WWII. “Loose lips sink ships.” All that sort of stuff. And I am convinced that loose lips do sink ships and we should be careful but I don’t think the government has a right to withhold such important information as the simple fact that the planet’s being visited. Now admittedly, one of the reasons for the cover-up, I believe, is people in power don’t want to give up power.

If somebody talked about alien visitations and you get these silly questions about when would they land on the White House lawn. “It’s a no-fly zone and the President of the United States doesn’t speak for 7 billion Earthlings, folks. He has trouble speaking for 310 million Americans.” It’s a dumb question. But the kicker is, who does speak for Planet Earth? And I’ve had people say, “Well, hold an election, Stan.” Oh sure, India’s got a billion people, China’s got 1.3 billion, the United States has 310 million, they’re not going to hold an election.

So the basic point here, people in power—and knowledge is power—don’t like to give up any power. And we’ve allowed our representatives to avoid dealing with the issue. That’s the terrible part.

Alex Tsakiris: As you’re alluding to, the information embargo isn’t democratic either, right? So not every government, not every world leader is sharing the same amount of information.

Stanton Friedman: Oh no. You’re right.

Alex Tsakiris: When we step back though, does this system that we’re a part of—I love the way you have this moderate view that incorporates in your work with the defense industry and your work in science in general, and just kind of take a reasoned approach. But the more radical approach says, “Hey, this system of deception that we have, at some point, reaches a level that we can’t undo it.”

So have we reached that level of secrecy, of a culture of deception, that we can’t right the ship? We can’t get everyone onboard. How could there possibly be disclosure? Or a bigger question is how would we ever know if the disclosure was true given that the deception machine is so complete at this point?

Stanton Friedman: Well, that’s where the scientific and especially the journalistic communities come into play. We had Woodward and Bernstein dealing with the political Watergate and it took a lot of money and a lot of time and some secrecy. It was many years later that we found out who Deep Throat was. But somebody at the Washington Post was willing to put some effort into digging out the truth about something important to the public, and a President had to resign because of that.

I think we have a Cosmic Watergate and if we could get a younger generation Woodward and Bernstein going here, they could do it in six months. The kicker here is that many people think that, “There isn’t any data, Stan, you’re just saying all that stuff.” I get a great reaction when I show blacked-out CIA UFO documents where you can read eight words. I get a good reaction when I show the National Security Agency UFO documents. There are 156 of them that we have where you can read one sentence per page and everything else is whited out. So it’s easy to establish. The evidence is there in front of your face.

But then we could also go a little more historically and one of my favorite characters is General Carl Bolander who was an Air Force General who was asked in 1969 after we landed on the moon, he was an engineer in charge of the lunar excursion module.  He was asked to see what the Air Force should do about Project Blue Book because the University of Colorado study earlier that year had concluded it should be canceled.

It wasn’t contributing anything to national security or new technology. I tend to agree with that. Blue Book wasn’t contributing much to anything.

Anyway, General Bolander came at this from a completely independent viewpoint. He wrote a memo that we didn’t see for more than ten years. In this memo in October of 1969, and as a result of this memo, Blue Book was closed. He said, “Reports of UFOs which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP (Joint Army, Navy, Air Force Publication) #146 or Air Force Manual 55-11 and are not part of the Blue Book system.” This was a shocking statement.

Furthermore, two paragraphs later he says, “If we close Project Blue Book the public won’t have a place to report UFO sightings. However, as previously noted, reports of UFOs which could affect national security will continue to be investigated using the procedures established for that purpose.”

Now this is important for a couple of reasons. Since that memo went into effect in 1969, the Air Force says, “We’re not doing anything about UFOs. We canceled the project. No UFO report evaluated, collected, categorized by the United States Air Force gives any evidence of being a threat to the security of the United States.” That’s total baloney because obviously somebody else was deciding that some of them were a threat to the security of the United States because as General Bolinger said, reports which could affect national security are not part of the Blue Book system and will continue to be investigated.

Funny story. Within the past five months, Lee Speigel, who writes for Huffington Post, a good man. He’s the one who helped set up the United Nations hearings on UFOs way back in the ‘70s. I was part of that. He went after some documents which were on the Black Vault, which is a great source of government information about UFOs—or disinformation, however you want to put it. Anyway, he found a document which instructs our pilots of our latest aircraft to report observations of unidentified surface ships, unidentified submarines, unidentified aircraft, or unidentified flying objects.

So he wrote the government people and said, “How come you’re saying you’re not doing anything when these regulations are still in effect?” And suddenly within a couple of weeks they were gone. They were not on the Internet. So what I’m saying is that here we have a document that as far as I know, no major press group has ever reported on.

Incidentally, I talked to General Bolinger. He’s dead now but he was very much alive when I spoke with him. He agreed that there are two separate reporting channels—the dum-dum stuff and the stuff which could affect national security. I mean, suppose a saucer goes down the runway at a strategic air command base where nuclear weapons are stored? That’s a national security problem.

If you and I go outside and spot a flying saucer flying overhead, what’s the big deal? It happens all over the place. So what I’m saying is, if there’s a gutsy newsman out there who wants to blow the lid off, he can do it. The data is there.

Alex Tsakiris: Really. The data is there but is it really about the data? You know, that relates back to maybe the work we do…

Stanton Friedman: Probably it isn’t.

Alex Tsakiris: I don’t think it is. I rather naively started this show four years ago, interested in extended consciousness and are we more than these biological robots we’re told to be? And my kind of dictum was follow the data wherever it leads, right?

Stanton Friedman: Right.

Alex Tsakiris: And about three years into it I realized it’s not about the data. It’s about everything else. It’s about our ability, as you said, the ability to deny anything that isn’t in our current worldview, to protect our worldview with an almost subconscious instinctive reaction  of “Hey, that would really change my world in a way that I’m not totally comfortable with.”

And then I guess that gets me into another topic I wanted to talk to you about which is the whole skeptic community and the skeptic movement. I think you’ve touched on it already but in general, you have to be admired if for nothing else but standing up for so many years to those guys with a target on your back, Public Enemy #1 among the skeptics. I’ve just got to ask you how you’ve done it. That’s a really nasty crowd in some respects.

Stanton Friedman: Part of it is because look, I’ve given over 700 lectures in all 50 states, 10 Canadian provinces, 18 other countries. So I’ve had a lot of practice, done hundreds of radio and television shows, loads of classrooms. So I’ve had a lot of practice facing up to the slings and arrows of outraged debunkers, you know. First of all I know that the public is on my side. I’ve only had 11 hecklers in all those lectures and two of them were drunk. And I come on very strong.

Secondly, I learned—I guess in fifth grade—Rose Gutkin told our class in Lindon, New Jersey that the sun stands still and the planets in the solar system move around the sun. Now I’d just read the day before, and I think it was a 49-cent a volume encyclopedia you bought at the grocery store that the solar system moves around the center of the galaxy at 12 miles per second, which seemed tremendously fast to me.

So I popped up and said, “No, Miss Gutkin. The encyclopedia said…” Well, she gave me a hard time. I wasn’t accustomed to getting a hard time. I was a good student. So the next day I brought in the encyclopedia and she very reluctantly agreed, “Well, maybe that was the case.”

But it taught me a lesson. If you’re going to take on authority figures, have facts in hand before putting mouth in gear. And in high school I was on a debating team. Several debating teams. We won a state championship playing the area of Lindon, New Jersey. And there it’s the same thing. You’ve got to know both sides of the argument. You’ve got to have facts in hand. And you’ve got to be sure you’ve got your facts straight because you’ll be skewered if you don’t. So that’s one of the things I’ve been able to do. I’ve yet to find good arguments for the anti-guys. I keep punching holes in them.

I’ve taken them on in head-to-head debates, if you will. Seth Shostak and I debated on Coast-to-Coast radio and I got 57% of the vote. He got 33%. And 10% said, “I don’t know.”

Dr. Michael Shermer, Skeptics Society, we debated on Coast-to-Coast for three hours. I got 80% of the vote because he didn’t know anything. It was clear from what he said and I could trump all his aces. So I can take these guys on.

Alex Tsakiris: But why doesn’t that penetrate more deeply into the culture?

Stanton Friedman: That’s a good question.

Alex Tsakiris: And that’s the disappointing part. I mean, you mentioned the Cosmic Watergate, which is a nice term but we’re living in a cosmic Iran Contra, if you will. If you really look at the details of the Iran Contra it’s just despicable, right? And yet if you look at the key players involved, they are still fixtures in our National Security Organization. Colonels, Generals, all that. So that to me seems like the more common result, right?

Stanton Friedman: Nobody cares about truth is what you’re saying.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s what I’m saying.

Stanton Friedman: I tend to think that’s right but I feel it is my job to do care about truth.

Alex Tsakiris: So it is your job to care about truth and I guess you’re saying that you do see progress. But in the bigger picture is it really possible/likely that we can see the paradigm shift? We can see a radical change? Or will the power structure, as it has done so many times, find another way, find another bullet in the gun, just to kind of defeat that and move things in their direction continuously?

Stanton Friedman: I’m still an optimist, frankly. I mean, I’m an old guy and I’ve been around a long time but I’m still healthy. I’ve never spent an overnight in the hospital since I was born and I’m 77 which is quite a feat. The older I get the more I realize, as my friends go into hospitals. I think that things will change and I’m hoping. I mean, isn’t it strange that the White House suddenly sets up a procedure for submitting petitions to get action from them?

I didn’t sign the first one, the people wanting the government to disclose everything and have all government agencies disclose everything they have about UFOs. I didn’t sign that because as I said, I think national security is a legitimate concern about some of the reports they must have. And I worked under security. I respect it.

But I think the very fact that you can submit a petition—now admittedly they’ve raised the number of votes you need from 5,000 to 25,000. In today’s Internet world aren’t there things on the Internet that get 1 million hits viral because there’s a lot of ways to gather names on petitions. But the very fact they’re doing it is a ray of hope, I think.

Alex Tsakiris: A very small ray.

Stanton Friedman: Well, I’m not promising anything but I am optimistic primarily because of the response that I get out on the hostings. When I’m out there, that Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that you mentioned, I mean the Global Competitiveness Forum is what it was. And they only have movers-and-shakers there.

It costs $4,000 to attend this thing. Their first keynote speaker was Bill Gates. The one last year was Bill Clinton. And yet they had a 5-member panel; I was one of the five, talking about contact with outer space. Now these guys, presidents of corporations, the head of Google, Bolling’s chief test pilot, all kind of people. The guy at lunch was in the capital investment business. I said, “How much money does your company control?” “Oh, about $150 billion.” What am I doing here?

But the very fact that that could happen at such an ultra-respectable organization. I was there for a couple of days after our panel and I was very pleased with the discussions with people. Nobody said, “Oh, that was a bunch of baloney.”

And I came on very strong. I said, “The planet’s being visited. We’re dealing with a Cosmic Watergate. That something was innovation.” I said, “Look, if you want to get innovative ideas you look at somebody who’s already solved the problem that you’re trying to solve.” The Russians knew you could build an atomic bomb at the end of WWII because we’d already tested some. Hitler didn’t know you could build one so he spent his money on rockets, most of it, instead of on atomic bombs. So let’s look at flying saucers and say, “How do they do that? How do they go so fast with a round blunt body instead of a highly streamlined craft,” as we used to think was required.

So the very fact that such an illustrious group would have a discussion with no competing session. Most of the time there were two sessions going on at once, but no competition. Of five people from the United States, England, Saudi Arabia, on such a topic, contact with extraterrestrials, is some kind of an indicator of something going on. These guys don’t play games.

Alex Tsakiris: Don’t you think it’s also an indicator of what we were talking about before that the information embargo isn’t uniform? It isn’t democratic. Maybe the folks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia are a little more open-minded because they’re not in the newsletter in terms of the folks who say, “We already know about this. This is how we’re controlling the information.”

If I can, let me shift topics because I want to take as best use of the time that I have with you. I want to talk about extended consciousness a little bit. And I want to talk about it in terms of the research that you’ve done because you’ve contributed a lot. As a physicist you’ve focused on really more of the nuts and bolts aspect of the UFO phenomena, which I think is very important because there’s this whole controversy within the field that wants to push everything into the psycho-social explanation for it.

You, I think, bring us back sometimes and say, “Wait. We do have to deal with the physical evidence, however we’re going to deal with that.” But at the same time we do have to acknowledge, as you did in your work with Betty and Barney Hill and other places, that we do come across telepathy, mind control, psychokinesis, and all the rest. I’m wondering what that evidence tells us, not only about the others but about ourselves and our human capabilities that extend beyond what we normally think of as our conscious experience.

Stanton Friedman: Well, it’s a very important point because I’m convinced that any advanced civilization will know about telepathy and mind control and communication at a distance. It really came home to me when I was standing at the exact location where Barney Hill was standing when the saucer was over their car and he’s looking through binoculars at the crew on board.

For no good reason, they jumped back in the car, very frightened, and they get off the main road, Route 3, and they go onto a secondary road. Then they go onto a dirt road which Barney would never have done. And he winds up alongside the only place in the area where you could land an let’s say 80-foot diameter flying saucer. It was a sandy area. Trees all over the place but this area was big enough to get a saucer down. And it was clear proof to me that these guys were directing his actions.

And also, remember as part of that story and so many stories like this, that they were directed to forget what happened and they didn’t consciously recall their time onboard the saucer until the very crafty, talented psychiatrist named Dr. Ben Simon used the same techniques with them as he had used with shell-shocked war veterans after WWII. You know, a guy’s buddy’s head gets blown off next to him. How do you incorporate that into your world? It’s pretty tough. And we’re still getting plenty of shell-shocked war veterans coming back from Afghanistan and so forth.

Alex Tsakiris: Absolutely.

Stanton Friedman: The point is that it seems to me eminently clear that these guys have capabilities—as the only simple term I know—to do things that we don’t look upon as being respectable. And one of them is mind-reading. Mind control. Getting people to forget.

Now I once had a little medical procedure in the hospital—I wasn’t there overnight—and they have you count down from 100 and they drip in some kind of anesthetic into your arm. I started off and by the time I got to 90 I didn’t remember anything more and then I woke up. With no recollection whatsoever of anything in between. Seamless, as what Bud Hopkins used to call it.

Now these guys are able to do that without dripping a chemical into your veins. That’s pretty far out when you stop to think about it. But most of the modern technology is pretty far out if you go back 50 years and looked at it.

Alex Tsakiris: It’s pretty far out but then again, maybe it isn’t that far out because when we look at the broader accounts of these conscious experiences that we can reach out and touch in our family. At the fringe we see the same things. We see out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences. Dramatic hallucinogenic experience that are even done by researchers in controlled experiments.

We had Dr. Rick Strassman on from the University of New Mexico who has injected folks with DMT voluntarily. The same drug that’s used by the Amazonian Indians called Iowaska. And they have these encounters with UFO-like beings and they also have encounters with other kinds of beings.

So there’s a lot of evidence out there, and we can say it’s on the fringe but it’s really not that far on the fringe, that suggests that these capabilities are not that far out of our reach.

Stanton Friedman: That’s right. And remember that we are an ignorant society. I often say we’re a primitive society. Our major activity is tribal warfare. But we are also a new society.

You know, it wasn’t very long ago that people thought that the universe was created in 4004 BC, Thursday evening at 6 o’clock. I think it was October 25^th. And Pat Robertson is still teaching that kind of thing. That was Bishop Usher who came up with that in the 1600s. But if you say he left out six zeroes, it was 4 billion years ago. That changes the picture and you have to say, “How much do we know about those 4 billion?” Darn little, folks.

So I leave plenty of room for there to be investigations of what some people would say are esoteric—consciousness is a good part of that. I think it would benefit mankind a great deal. It’s kind of like recently there’s been a lot of work done on the placebo effect in drugs. You don’t know who’s getting the real drug and who’s getting the placebo, sugar pills or whatever. And it seems to be real. Do we understand that? No. Can we take advantage of it? Sure.

I would expect our visiting friends to know a great deal about such things. The mind is not just a bunch of nerve endings and wires in a computer. I think there’s a lot more to it. So consciousness is one area that I would love to see looked at and the nexus between UFOs and consciousness, I think is an important area. Not too many people are doing that, you understand.

I mean, it’s back enough to think about doing research on UFOs, but research on UFOs and research on mind control, uh-oh! That’s a double whammy to some people.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s an interesting segueway into the last topic I was hoping we could talk about because during that conference in Riyadh you shared the stage with Jacque Vallee, and anyone who’s researched his look into the UFO phenomena knows that it—I don’t want to say crosses the border—but it certainly blurs this line between consciousness, the extended consciousness and the UFO phenomena. Now I think there’s an interesting inter-play there and I’m very interested to get our sorting out of that.

Stanton Friedman: I’ve known Jacque for a long time and I like him. I would call us friends. We don’t see each other very often but we haven’t had violent arguments about any aspect of this. The problem, at least early on, especially with the astronomical community with Hynek, Jacque, others, is that they hadn’t done their homework on the whole question of interstellar travel.

Hynek was always using the comparison if the distance from the Earth to the moon is the thickness of one playing card, the next star over is 16 miles of playing card. That’s treating the subject linearly—twice as far takes twice as long, twice as much energy, etc. But the subject isn’t linear. If you increase your speed just before you turn off the rocket when you go to the moon by a small percentage you get there 20 times faster, not 5% faster.

Alex Tsakiris: But the intriguing thing to me about Jacque Vallee, John Mack, and a bunch of other folks in that camp, if you will, is they come to the conclusion I guess partly from the physics of it and the space of it, but also from the data that’s coming back from the accounts. They say, “Wait a minute, guys. This isn’t what you think it is. You’re looking for little green men and what I see is a connection to fairies and gods and religion and we can only understand it from this perspective of psycho-socio-spiritual understanding of it. And the phenomena is not what you think it is.”

Stanton Friedman: I would turn it around and say the fairies and all the other stuff might very well be a manifestation of other visitations in past days. You know, graduate students doing their thesis work on a primitive society or whatever. In other words, I think they’ve got it backwards and I’ve shared a stage with John Mack—when he was alive, not since then. John did seem to be quite surprised that I was saying we’re dealing with physical visitations.

To get an idea of how far off “modern astronomy” can be, there was a paper written in 1941 by Dr. Campbell asking—he was sick and tired of all this science fiction junk about going to the moon, how absurd! So he did a scientific paper, published it, in which he calculated the required initial launch weight of a rocket able to get a man to the moon and back. Pages of equations. Bottom line, it would have to weight a million million tons.

Well, less than 30 years later we got three guys to the moon and back. The initial launch weight of still a dumb old chemical rocket was 3,000 tons. He was off by a factor 300 million. Not a factor of 3 or 30 or 300 but 300 million because he made all the wrong assumptions. A single stage rocket, a limit of 1G acceleration. The rocket’s got to provide all the energy instead of using cosmic freeloading, which we use on all our deep space probes.

Why do you think there’s a launch window to go to the moon? Because if they launch at the right time you let the moon help you. It’s got a nice gravitational field and you know where it’s going to be when. Take advantage. All our deep space probes do that.

The Cassini spacecraft out at Saturn are having a little communication problem right now, but it was sent past Venus which is closer to the sun than we are. Got a free-kick, came back past the Earth, got another free-kick, went out past Jupiter to get another free-kick, and it’s been sitting around out there near Saturn for years now.

So what I’m saying is it’s not just little differences by not doing things right. It’s enormous differences and there are lots of examples of that. Some of them are in that book that I mentioned, Science Was Wrong. People said some pretty dumb things. British astronomer Royal, “Space travel is utter bilge,” a year before Sputnik went up.

Alex Tsakiris: It really is a fascinating book. I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing and I do plan on doing it. Stan, I know you are a busy guy and you like to stay busy. Tell us a little bit about what’s coming up for you in the near future.

Stanton Friedman: One thing that I’m hoping comes up is sort of escorting a tour of New Mexico in April. This is on my website at www.stantonfriedman.com and they can write me about it if the phone number doesn’t work. We’ll be stopping in Roswell; I’ll give a talk there. We’ll stop in Los Alamos. We’ll stop at White Sands Missile Range. We’ll stop at the museum over that way. It’ll be fun. I’ve done one of these before and it was great fun. So that’s an escorted tour, if you will.

Another thing that’s really exciting but I don’t know when it’s going to happen is Stellar Productions in Hollywood, Bryce Zabel’s outfit, he did Dark Skies a number of years ago on NBC. They’ve bought the rights to my book, Top Secret Magic, about the Majestic-12 documents and to my life and memoirs and everything, and the book by Don Schmitt and Tom Carey called, Witness to Roswell.

They’re working on a movie called, Majic Man, because the documents were Top Secret magic. And the screenplay’s been written and has had some very good comments from some big-shot Hollywood people. It’ll be a combination of All the President’s Men and JFK and Richard Dryfus going to play me, he says.

Alex Tsakiris: That would be fantastic.

Stanton Friedman: Really, I hate to admit it as the author of five books and they’re all listed at that website, but more people watch movies than read books. They’re also in the midst of buying the rights to Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience by myself and Kathleen Marden. And that could be very exciting, too.

Alex Tsakiris: That would make a great movie, yeah.

Stanton Friedman: It’s an important story.

Alex Tsakiris: It really is. Especially with all the controversy that has sprung up in the last couple of years about the abduction phenomena. I think it’s tremendously important work. It’s kind of a grounding work to bring us back to well, there is a reality here that we have to deal with while we’re sorting out what the proper methods, protocols, and procedures are.

Stanton Friedman: I should mention Kathleen Marden is Betty Hill’s niece, so she’s got all of the original tapes and all the correspondence. She’s trustee of Betty’s estate. So the book could be a real eye-opener if it’s done properly, which I expect it would be. These are exciting things for this year. Also I’ll be speaking at the Roswell Festival the first week of July. I seem to be a perennial visitor there. There will be a lot of good speakers. Kathleen’s speaking there, too.

Also the MUFON Conference. Mutual UFO Network has had an annual symposium for 42 years. This year’s will be Cincinnati, actually in Kentucky, right across the river, in the first week in August. I will be speaking there. The theme of the conference this year is “UFOS: Friend or Foe?” That gives us a lot of room for what the heck is going on and what does it mean to us and all that sort of stuff.

Alex Tsakiris: It sounds trite but it really is the ultimate question in a lot of ways, you know?

Stanton Friedman: Yeah, sure. Incidentally, MUFON just announced this past week that they will be moving to Cincinnati. The current international director has family responsibilities and other things that he has to concentrate on. The new one is a guy name Dave McDonald who teaches pilots how to fly and has high visibility in the pilot community. I’m looking forward to that conference.

The Betty and Barney Hill 50^th Anniversary, Second Time Around, will be held in September in Indian Head Resort in New Hampshire. We had a 50^th Anniversary last year and it was so successful and filled to capacity. A bus tour of where things happened, speeches by several of us. They already announced right afterward that they were going to do it again this year.

So these are things that I know are going on. If it’s like last year there will be a lot more added in. Last year I spoke in Saudi Arabia and San Paulo, Brazil, in Newfoundland, many different states, and Warsaw, Poland, would you believe? A great crowd, the Polish UFO Society. And three different talks in New Hampshire and stuff out in California and Arizona and Georgia and Minnesota and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. I don’t know where they’re all coming from but there’s a lot of curiosity out there and I’m happy to try to meet those needs. Again, the website is www.stantonfriedman.com.

So I’m excited. No new book on the line but I do my monthly column for the MUFON Journal, which is fun.

Alex Tsakiris: I think as you’ve demonstrated in this interview here that you’ve so graciously done and in so many of the other works that you’ve done, it’s really no surprise to anyone why you are so popular. We just want you to keep going and keep spreading the word out there. You have so many great ideas and it’s always interesting to catch up with you and hear what’s going on. Thanks, Stan, so much for joining us today on Skeptiko.

Stanton Friedman: It’s been fun.

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158. Bernardo Kastrup’s Controversial View of Consciousness Research

Author and scientist sees pattern of decreased brain activity during peak experiences.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, author of Meaning in Absurdity.  During the interview Kastrup discusses his beliefs about human consciousness:

Alex Tsakiris: You make some interesting connections between the “fainting game”, erotic asphyxiation  and some new research with psychedelic mushrooms. You suggest that when we really look at what’s going on in the brain we actually see a dampening down of brain areas – the opposite of what we would expect. So what are the implications of this in terms of this idea of filtering of consciousness?

Bernardo Kastrup: The current paradigm says that conscious experience is an epiphenomenon, a by-product, of brain activity. So you should always be able to find a tight correlation between conscious states as reported by the subject and measurable brain states as measured, for instance, with an FMRI scanner. Usually this correlation is there, but there are instances, like this study you mentioned, where this correlation is not there in a very spectacular and repeatable way. What it suggests is that we have to find another model of reality, if you will, to accommodate this. A model that accommodates both the fact that normally, ordinarily, conscious experience is modulated by brain states, but also sometimes there is a lack of correlation in a spectacular way.

Alex Tsakiris: So these anomalies you’re talking about, for example, with psilocybin and reduced brain functioning, or brain injuries that lead to increased consciousness, these have to be explained. We can’t just sweep them off the table and say, “well, materialism seems to work pretty well in the general sense,” right?

Bernardo Kastrup: These anomalies are major anomalies. They are gigantic anomalies. The only way we can get away with them and still honestly believe in the materialistic paradigm as many of us do is because that paradigm embodies an approach of looking upon the world that is a third-person perspective. In other words, it’s not through personal experience but through reports and measurements.

Metaphysical Speculations Website

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Alex Tsakiris: Today’s guest is an author, blogger, an entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in computer engineering and all-around fascinating guy, Bernardo Kastrup. Welcome to Skeptiko.

Bernardo Kastrup: Thanks, Alex. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Alex Tsakiris: So Bernardo, a lot of folks might have come across you in the Skeptiko forum. I read a terrific blog post of yours in your blog, Metaphysical Speculations. I thought it was really great. A lot of folks on the Skeptiko forum reacted very positively to it. We had a really interesting conversation going there.

Then I delved in further and I heard from your publicist and I found out you have a brand new book and it’s your third in a series of what looks like tremendous books. So we really have a lot to talk about today and I’m looking forward to it.

Bernardo Kastrup: Sure. I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a while, Alex.

Alex Tsakiris: So where I thought we might start, since there are probably a lot of folks who aren’t familiar with your work, tell us a little bit about your background, your blog, and of course your books.

Bernardo Kastrup: Well, I have a quite ‘scientistic’ background even, and if you will, a very rationalistic background. I have a degree in computer engineering. I’ve worked as a scientist in different places, including CERN in Switzerland. I’ve lived alongside materialistic scientists and I used to think like that. In a way that was not only who I am but in a way who I feel I represent today.

But over time, working in that environment, one becomes slowly cognizant of the hidden assumptions of the scientific paradigm. The hidden subjective value system, the hidden assumptions about the nature of reality that we all make without knowing we are making them.

And once you become aware of that, you can’t avoid but start pursuing different avenues of thought, different avenues of investigation, either empirical and scientific, when it’s possible, and, when it’s not possible, a philosophical approach to understanding the nature of reality. That’s the part I have been pursuing over the last few years.

Alex Tsakiris: Awesome. And I think that might not sound like something that a lot of folks can wrap their arms around but once they read some of your writing I think they’ll appreciate more of what you’re saying. What I get from reading your work is that there is this philosophical bent but it’s not a purely philosophical approach. It seems to be very grounded in not only science but kind of reason and logic.

With that in mind, I guess I’d like to kind of direct this into one of these blog posts that relates back to your books. I hope you’ll tell us how it does tie into your books. But the blog post was on consciousness and memory. Let me give you just a little quote here and we can bounce off of that and see where we go.

“Consciousness may never be absent,” you say. “What we refer to as periods of unconsciousness, be they sleep, anesthesia, or fainting may be reinterpreted as periods in which memory formation is impaired.”

There isn’t anything super-controversial there but it’s really deep in terms of its implications. Can you expound on that a little bit and maybe tell us some examples of how that comes into play?

Bernardo Kastrup: Sure. I’ve been thinking about consciousness for quite a while now because it is the sore spot in the materialistic paradigm, in the current scientific paradigm; the one thing that we cannot explain, even in principle; that we cannot deduce from anything that we know empirically in science today. The assumption we make usually is that consciousness somehow is generated by the brain. Nobody knows how, but that’s the assumption we make.

Therefore, if the brain’s impaired because you are asleep and you are not in a dream state, or because you fainted, or you’re under anesthesia, consciousness then disappears. But one cannot tell the difference, of course, between the absence of an experience or the absence of a memory of an experience. It is impossible for us empirically, from a first-person perspective, to tell the difference.

So the absence of consciousness, or the assumption that consciousness may be absent, when we interfere with the brain in certain ways, natural or unnatural, is considered an empirical reason to believe that consciousness is generated by the brain.

But it may be different. It may be that interference with the brain interferes with memory formation; that consciousness perhaps was there all along. Maybe you were in amazing dream worlds while you were undergoing surgery under anesthesia. It’s known world-wide that, for instance, teenagers play a very dangerous game called, “The Fainting Game,” in which they on purpose choke themselves to have a mystical experience and hopefully return. That is something that is not recommended for anyone to do.

But all these things are suggestive that consciousness goes on during periods in which we are assumed to be unconscious and the only thing that gets impaired is the formation of the memory that gives you later access to that experience.

Alex Tsakiris: Again, if we just compare that to what we do know scientifically, it really becomes rather obvious, right? So what you’re saying is we can hook you up and monitor your brain activity while you’re sleeping and moreover monitor your eyes. We can say, “Ah, you’re in REM state. You’re having a dream.”

We can compare that pattern to other people who remember having a dream and then you might wake up and say, “God, I didn’t have any dream. I didn’t have anything.” And then from that first-person account and for everything that you can say about it, you have not had that experience. And yet we have this other empirical evidence that suggests you did have a conscious experience.

Bernardo Kastrup: You’ve pointed out one asymmetry, which is: you have no memory of a conscious experience while through, say, an fMRI, people can make a measurement of your brain states and empirically derive that probably you had an experience, but you just don’t remember it. That’s one asymmetry.

The other asymmetry, which I find much more interesting, is: when you do have a memory of a conscious experience but there is no measureable brain activity. There are many examples of that. Some of them repeatable now through the use of psychoactive substances, as has been done in the U.K. recently.

Alex Tsakiris: Fascinating. Let’s talk about filtering of consciousness. You make some really interesting connections in this blog post, and I assume in your books as well, about the relationship, for example, between the Fainting Game you just mentioned or erotic asphyxiation and also some of this new research with psychedelic mushrooms.

It suggests that when we really look at what’s going on in the brain as opposed to what we would expect of an excitation of certain brain areas, we actually see a dampening down of brain areas. So what would be the implications of that, the way you see it, in terms of this idea of filtering of consciousness?

Bernardo Kastrup: The current paradigm says that conscious experience is an epi-phenomenon, or a by-product, or in any case generated by brain activity. So you should be able to always find a tight correlation between conscious states as reported by the subject and measurable brain states as measured, for instance, with an fMRI scanner. Usually this correlation is there, which indicates that there is a tight relationship between the brain and consciousness, and that’s something we have to grapple with. We cannot ignore that. That’s empirical evidence.

But there are instances, like this study that you alluded to in the U.K., where this correlation is not there in a very spectacular and repeatable way. In this study in the U.K., subjects were given psilocybin and they had unfathomable conscious experiences beyond anything they had ever experienced before in their lives. The only thing they could measure in the fMRI was a dampening down of brain activity in certain key areas. No excitation anywhere.

Now, this breaks the correlation. The paradigm would require that an unfathomable experience, any experience what-so-ever, actually, should be correlated with brain activity and excitation of the brain, not a dampening down. That is a fundamental break with the paradigm as I see it. There is no way of escaping from this today.

What it suggests, in my view, is what you alluded to: the brain as a filter; that idea. What it suggests is that we have to find another model of reality, if you will, to accommodate this; a model that accommodates both the fact that normally, ordinarily, conscious experience is modulated by brain states. You experience this every time you get drunk, for instance. There is a correlation there. We cannot escape from this. But also sometimes there is a lack of correlation in a spectacular way.

The brain filter model accommodates for both. It suggests that in ordinary states, when our brain is functioning normally, as evolution had it work, you have this correlation because the brain filters conscious experience in such a way that it modulates conscious experience.

So if you interfere with the mechanism of the filtration process of the material brain by, for instance, getting drunk or whatever, you will observe a change in conscious experience, since it’s modulated by the filter. But if you take the filter down in certain ways, then your consciousness should expand to the extent that it’s no longer filtered.

There is plenty of recent empirical evidence about this. Not only this study in the U.K. but studies done with patients that suffered brain damage as a result of surgery. There’s a study published in Neuron, a neuroscience journal, in 2010, that elaborates on these extensively. There are reports from people who have suffered strokes. There’s a famous one, a Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuro-anatomist that reported on her experiences on this, and many other instances. And I think the brain filter theory is much more amenable to the empirical evidence than the current paradigm as it is stated.

Alex Tsakiris: Why don’t you refine for us a little bit, Bernardo, the concept of the filter? I think you make a great point in the most recent post that I read where you point out how, if we take it too literally, that metaphor, it can appear like a contradiction but it doesn’t have to be. We’re in this kind of difficult space when we talk about these things because just the nature of analyzing our brain and the kind of recursive nature of it. But also that we’re struggling for metaphors that don’t always fit. Talk a little bit about that.

Bernardo Kastrup: The brain filter theory is not recent. It’s at least 100 years old. It started even before Henry Bergson, who was the first person to really elaborate on this in the late 1800s. But the idea there is that consciousness is a fundamental property of nature, maybe the one property of nature that’s irreducible, unbound, not subject to space-time limitations. In other words, your true subject, your true ‘I’ would, in principle, be able to be aware of everything that has ever happened, is happening, or will ever happen anywhere in the known and unknown universe.

And the role of the brain and the reason why it has evolved was to localize consciousness in the space-time location of the body because that would obviously give us a survival advantage. It would make you care about your physical body through identifying with it. And it will be less confusing also to survive as an organism if your consciousness is localized in your immediate surroundings in space-time.

What this seems to imply, and that’s what you alluded to, is it seems to imply dualism. It seems to imply that there is such a thing as mind stuff, which is unlimited and unbound, and there is matter, a completely different kind of stuff, which filters down mind stuff. That’s dualism. I’m not necessarily completely opposed to dualism, although I do find it inflationary. It makes two fundamental assumptions as opposed to one, as Materialism would have it or Idealism would have it. Idealism is the philosophy that everything is only mind stuff.

So personally I subscribe more to the philosophy of Idealism, which is that nature is exactly what it seems to be. It’s only what is in the mind. In Materialism you project this abstraction that there is something out there that we do not have direct access to, which stimulates our sense organs and creates our mind-picture of the world. But that thing out there in itself is independent of mind. I think that is also a leap of faith, not skeptical enough leap of faith.

But then if you believe in what I just said, then you have to explain how the brain as a consciousness filter, being part of reality and therefore being consciousness itself, how can it filter consciousness? In other words, how can consciousness filter itself? That seems to be a self-referential contradiction.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. I like in your posts when you bring it down to a concrete example. We can’t have a coffee filter made out of coffee. So there would appear to be a contradiction when we say we have a consciousness filter made out of consciousness. But I’m sorry—go ahead and finish and tell us why that isn’t necessarily a contradiction.

Bernardo Kastrup: In the blog post you refer to, I try to come up with a couple of metaphors. One of them is the metaphor of a whirlpool in a stream of water. If you go to a stream and you see a whirlpool, you can localize it. You can delineate its boundaries; you can point at it and say, “There is a whirlpool.” It is very concrete, it’s very defined. There is no question about how palpable and material it is.

At the same time, there’s nothing to the whirlpool but water. It’s just made of water and yet it localizes water in a sort of loopy trajectory that sort of limits and filters down, if you will, limits the water molecules to a specific circular trajectory. It doesn’t allow those molecules to traverse the entire stream. That’s a kind of localization mechanism, a kind of filtering-down mechanism in which water localizes itself in a whirlpool.

So the hypothesis is: could the brain be exactly such a thing? Could the brain be, as anything else according to Idealism, just a figment in consciousness, just an image in consciousness, and yet, as an image, represent a process through which consciousness localizes itself, just like water localizes itself in a whirlpool? That’s the hypothesis that I bring up.

We need a new language to talk about these things. Materialism has evolved a very sophisticated, very precise language. We need something of that nature for Idealism. We need time to develop that, I think.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. By the same token, we don’t need a new language or additional time in order to point out the problems with Materialism, the problems with Reductionism, which I think you do a great job of doing. So these anomalies that you’re talking about, for example, with the psilocybin, with the reduced brain function, brain injuries that lead to increased consciousness, all those things have to be explained because, as we know in the way that paradigms evolve and change, it’s always these little problems on the border that turn out to be the big problems that overturn the paradigm.

So I really like the way that you push it. We do have to be concerned about these anomalies. We can’t just sweep them off the table and say, “Well, Materialism seems to work pretty good in the general sense,” right?

Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah. This has happened again and again throughout history, as Thomas Kuhn has pointed out already in the 60s. Every time that a generation adopts a certain paradigm, it thinks that it has figured it out–it’s just a matter of fine-tuning—even though it knows that for hundreds of years before, every previous generation has been wrong. But we think finally now we’ve got it right, until the paradigm would change again.

I think these anomalies, they are major anomalies. They are gigantic anomalies. The only way we can get away with them and still honestly believe in the Materialistic paradigm, as many of us do–and I think it’s an honest belief, not a conspiracy of any kind in my opinion– the way we can do that is because that paradigm embodies an approach of looking upon the world that is a third-person perspective. In other words, it’s not through personal experience but through reports and measurements. The anomalies, the nature of the anomalies that we are talking about, is very personal. These are first-person experiences.

It’s very easy for someone who has not had the experience and is just listening to a report or to a metaphor, to come and say, “You know what? It’s just oxygen starvation or it’s just blood flow to the retina being reduced from the outer edges inwards to the center.” It’s very easy to say that in a very reasonable way if you have not had the experience to the extent and to the magnitude that other people have.

But as a person who has had the experience, if I had been one of those people, I would be able to judge those explanations and very easily discard them as inappropriate from a first-person perspective. And people do that, but our culture, our paradigm, does not consider that a valid point because we are too addicted to measurement and a third-person perspective, while the nature of the anomaly is personal. I think that is where we are hitting a roadblock.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. And the other point that you make that I think is really right on on this is that there’s a certain uncomfortableness that we experience when we go to this border between this other worldly experience, this greater consciousness, and coming back. And there’s a certain built-in mechanism that we have in this brain/body thing that we have that makes it very uncomfortable for us to switch back and forth.

I think maybe you want to speak to that a little bit. But I think that’s a great point that there is this balance, this very delicate balancing on a razor’s edge that we must walk to even experience or talk about this stuff.

Bernardo Kastrup: The reality we ordinarily live in is as much perceived as it is constructed through language. This is a fact of neuroscience. This is a fact of the current paradigm. We know this, that much of what we believe we experience we actually infer. We don’t perceive, we infer, and we infer that largely through constructs of language. Our thoughts are co-extensive with the way we speak.

So we live in this ordinary reality that is largely generated by language and if we drift to a less filtered, a less localized state of consciousness, what you may experience could quite easily transcend the constructs of language. Language has not evolved to represent that. We do not have a shared dictionary, if you will, to talk about those kinds of experiences.

Language evolved for practical reasons, to coordinate our activities in the ordinary, empirical world. Not to describe those things. So language breaks down. So when you go there and you come back and you try to articulate that in language, it can be a disaster. It can be a circus of contradictory metaphors. I think that’s one aspect that makes it uncomfortable.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. But let me just interject because another aspect of it beyond the language and beyond all that is I’ve got to get out and pick up the pizza and bring it home in time so that I can help the kids with their homework, get them down to sleep with a good story that’s going to make them feel good, and then get me down to sleep with a good story that makes me feel good. So I can get up and somewhat have a reasonable life and do all this tomorrow and I feel comfortable with that because I know how uncomfortable it is when I stray too far from that. I somehow have to integrate that in, as well.

So on a really practical level—and we’ve spoken on this show to folks who do seem to be challenged with this—this broader conscious experience doesn’t integrate well with the day-to-day life that we all like to live.

Bernardo Kastrup: Carl Jung used to say the human being needs a myth in order to live, and he didn’t mean that it’s a lie, that it’s untrue. All he meant was that we need an image of the world through which we can explain the world to ourselves. We settle into that image once we have it and we become comfortable with it. It gives us reassurance. It gives us some foundation for thinking, deciding on the key questions of our lives and living.

And once you have an experience like that, that transcends the models you previously had or the models that you heard from anyone, and even the structures of language that you can use to explain to yourself what’s going on, it can be very, very uncomfortable; very hard to integrate. I can easily believe that the way some people react to this, on an unconscious level even, is to forget it, is to not hold to the memory. Is to completely ignore and say, “Nothing happened. I don’t remember anything. This is all nonsense.”

Alex Tsakiris: Right. And you know, and then if we broaden that from the individual level to a group level, we can talk about—as you do—how our culture then starts building in more and more systems that prevent us from having those larger experiences because they don’t integrate well with the broader social, cultural, not only norms but goals and directions that we have.

So do you want to speak to that a little bit? You mentioned how we’re less connected to nature. We’re less connected to hard work. We’re less connected to maybe some advanced breathing or meditation techniques. All those things that could connect us to that broader consciousness we are systematically removed from by our culture.

Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah. I think if you look at primitive societies, pre-literary societies, Aboriginals, however you want to call them, these were societies that didn’t have the level of comfort we have today. Today we eat regularly, we treat chronic disease, we work eight hours, maybe ten hours, twelve hours a day. Maybe I and you worked a little bit more in our past. But in general we have a very grounded, comfortable life which allows our brain, the filter of consciousness if the hypothesis holds, to operate very well, consistently, day after day.

That’s good in a way but that takes away our access to what you could call—I don’t like this word very much but I will use it because it communicates the idea well—it cuts our access to the ‘Other World,’ if you will. Primitive cultures, those guys, were exposed to extraneous effort, to malnutrition, chronic disease, and exposure to the elements.

Their bodies were subjected to constant stress that could impair the functioning of the filter and would give them regular access to the other world—this “Other World,” if you will—to the point that they would even induce that themselves through ordeals, through breathing techniques, through initiation rituals, through all kinds of things that today we discard as nonsense, as superstition.

They evolved a language over time that we consider mythical and metaphorical. They evolved a language to articulate and hold to the memories of those experiences and talk about it. When you can talk about something the memory takes hold. It becomes part of your culture. It becomes part of your reality.

When your access to that world as a civilization is so restricted because we are so grounded on this side of the divide, we are so grounded on the filtered consciousness as opposed to the unfiltered one—if the hypothesis holds, again—we lost that language. We completely lost it and if we don’t have a language to talk about it we can’t hold to the experience.

Psychotherapists, psychologists, analysts, what they would tell you is to try to hold to those memories by giving them expression as soon as possible after an experience. Like through drawing. Through writing. Through poetry. Whatever way you can find to give it form so you can hold to those memories. Create a language and talk about them. I think that’s what we miss.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, that’s a great point. It makes you wonder which came first, the three-day sweat lodge followed by the three-day no food hike to the top of the mountain, or the accidental experience of expanded consciousness and then how do we recreate that kind of thing, right? That’s what you’re kind of talking about.

Bernardo Kastrup: I think through being so good at improving our lives we’ve shrunk our reality tunnel to an unprecedentedly narrow point. To the point that we’ve lost the language to talk about anything more, beyond this very narrow band where we live today. And it’s a cruel thing, isn’t it? I mean, we improved our lives in once sense and we’ve lost access in another sense.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. Speaking of language, let’s talk about a couple of words that you used before and try and nail those down. That is “Realism” versus “Idealism” and maybe you can tell us why you’re an Idealist.

Bernardo Kastrup: I declare myself an Idealist to make a point, although my position is a little more subtle than that. I would be comfortable talking about this with you. Just as an intro, Realism is the philosophy, or the worldview, that says that there is an objective world out there independent of mind. Matter, space-time, energy, they exist independent of mind, of consciousness. And they stimulate our sense organs, thereby creating our conscious experiences inside our brains. That’s the philosophy of Realism. The world is objective and that objective world stimulates our sense perception.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s talk about the implications for Realism and what it means practically. The term I like to use I borrowed from our good friend, Richard Dawkins. You are a biological robot. That is the natural conclusion of Realism, right? You are a biological robot. Everything reduces to matter even though we don’t really know what matter is.

We have these problems and we look at matter. Is light a wave or a particle? What about the observer effect? All that is just kind of brushed aside and the idea is everything is reducible. Before we jump into talking about Idealism, what are some of the other problems that we run into when we try to hold onto this notion of Realism?

Bernardo Kastrup: Well, if you look at physics, every branch of science has a tendency to self-negate at some point. It happened with mathematics, for instance. The project of Hilbert with Principia Mathematica to ground all mathematics in very strict and clear axioms, that failed. Gödel has shown that logic is inherently limited or contradictory. So if you pursue any branch of investigation to its ultimate conclusions, to its ultimate implications, it backfires on you.

The same happened with Realism and physics in a way. Through the assumption of Realism we started looking at certain phenomena in physics, namely quantum entanglement, and through a series of experiments, for instance, from 1981 culminating in 2007-2008, we’ve shown that it is untenable to claim that the states of the physical world are independent of mind.

That has been published actually in Nature, I think. Nature, Volume 446, Spring of 2007. It’s a very cryptic technical paper but the conclusion is: Realism is either false or has to be redefined in a very counter-intuitive way, in which case you might ask yourself, “Why continue calling it Realism, anyway?”

So in a way, Realism self-contradicts if you pursue it to its ultimate implications. This is happening already although the repercussions are extremely limited to a narrow group of scientists that understand the esoteric mathematics and the esoteric physics behind it, which is a pity. So it’s a problem. There is a huge problem with Realism today. It’s not considered yet defeated but it’s quite precarious for it.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, I’m sorry. Now go on and tell us about Idealism.

Bernardo Kastrup: So Idealism is a more skeptical philosophy. I think the problem with skeptics today is that they’re not skeptic enough about their own paradigm of thought, their own hidden assumptions. The assumption behind Realism is that, okay, you create a model of the world, namely matter, energy, and space-time; you project an independent reality of that model; and then you try to reconstruct your own primary experience back from that projected model. So there is a forward and a backward movement. It’s not parsimonious at all. There are lots of assumptions being made in that.

Idealism is much simpler. Idealism in a way is the philosophy of a five-year-old kid. A five-year-old kid looks around and what does he or she see? He sees images. Images in consciousness. That’s the primary data of experience. That’s the carrier of reality as far as anyone can ever know. Images in consciousness.

So the Idealists start from that. That is irreducible. I don’t even need to explain that. This is what exists, images in consciousness. Everything else is an abstraction. And then I work with abstractions to try to make sense of my empirical experiences, be it scientific measurements, scientific experiments, or personal experiences. So for Idealism, nature itself isimages in consciousness, everything else is an abstraction that we try to use to make sense of what we experience.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, but as you point out, the problem with Idealism is that we keep getting pulled back into this model of the world that seems to work pretty darn well. We drop the pencil off the desk and it falls down every time. We wake up and without being conscious and everything is still the way that it was. So what are some of the problems with Idealism?

Bernardo Kastrup: You alluded to them. These are the problems with Idealism. One is the continuity of the world: we wake up to where the world has gone, apparently without us being conscious, since we last went to sleep. That’s a problem for Idealism.

The other one is the consistency of experience. If you have 10 people look at waves on a shore, they will all report the same thing, save for minor differences. So there is a consistency in our experience of ordinary reality, which is a problem for Idealism because if it’s all only the mind, how come we are all experiencing the same thing?

The way to get out of these apparent contradictions is to really get away from the hidden assumptions of Realism. We are so contaminated by Realism that we assume that minds are inside brains, and since brains are separate how come we are all experiencing the same thing? These brains are not communicating, right? So that’s where the problem comes from. It’s these hidden assumptions of Realism.

In Idealism, if you’re really consistent with it, the brain is in the mind, not the mind in the brain. The brain is an object of experience. I can hold a brain in my hands and it’s an image. It’s part of the images of consciousness. That is in the mind, not the other way around. Maybe the other way around to some extent, but the starting assumption is that the brain is an object, an image in consciousness.

Nonetheless, the Idealist still has to explain the continuity and the consistency of the world across subjects. There are many ways, I think, to model and to tentatively explain that, many hypotheses that could make sense of that.

One is that reality, and even physics, could be an emergent property of the interactions between localized minds. I speak ‘emergence’ in the technical sense, in systems theory; an emergent property of interactions between minds, just like sand ripples are an emergent property of the interaction between individual grains of sand on a dune.

Another hypothesis is that the mind we ordinarily experience is restricted to the ego, but our true minds are much broader, as depth psychology has empirically already inferred. Maybe these other segments of our minds that we are not ordinarily cognizant of, they have creative power as well, as far as projecting reality. And Jungians consider that there is a part of the mind that is collective:the collective unconscious. That collective part could explain the consistency of experience, if you go that far. That’s something I talk about in my third book.

Now the Realist, in my view, has a much more serious problem to deal with. The Idealist has to explain the continuity and consistency of experience. There are many models to do that. The Realist has to explain how conscious experience can emerge from unconscious matter. That’s a much more fundamental jump. It’s called the “Explanatory Gap,” or the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” It’s much more difficult, much more fundamental.

So whichever philosophy you pick, you have a hard problem to solve. I’d rather solve the problems of Idealism. I think they’re much more amenable to rational thought.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, I’d agree. I think it’s interesting to bounce back and forth between the theory and then the practical applications on a bunch of different levels. The practical applications in science and some of the scientific problems that it might solve, but also the practical applications in culture and how we form things. I can already hear the voices of the other side immediately attacking the theory and “Well, that theory duh, duh, duh,” and it’s like, “Well, wait a minute.”

I love the way you position it and say yes, these theories make us uncomfortable and may seem counter-intuitive but we have to realize just how absurd the theory is that we are living under and the paradigm is that we’re living under. So I want to read another quote from your writing because this point, I think, about the absurdity just cannot be stressed enough. We really have to pound that home because we get exactly the opposite message.

Here’s the quote:

“The fact that our culture as a whole has adopted the assumption that reality is separate from our minds[H1] makes it easy for anyone to adopt the same assumption without looking like a fool. We find ourselves in a cultural context wherein an extraordinary form of self-deception has gained legitimacy. But then again, that we are collectively mad does not make it any less concerning that we are mad.”

So talk a little bit about that, Bernardo.

Bernardo Kastrup: Well, it’s part of human nature, right? It’s very easy for us to adopt very counter-intuitive beliefs, beliefs that are not grounded on empirical evidence, if they are shared by our peer group. You just need to look at cultures around the world and see the different things they believe in and from our point of view they all seem crazy.

But everyone of us has a huge blind spot, which is the craziness of our own worldview because we cannot look at it from the outside. We are immersed in it. It’s like asking the fish to explain what water is. We can’t. We are immersed in it. It’s very difficult and I don’t blame anyone if they can’t do that. It’s very difficult to abstract from your own paradigm of thought and realize how mad your views about the world may be.

I personally have arrived at this conclusion that to believe that reality is out there, even if nobody is looking, is extreme madness. It’s an enormous leap of faith. Anyone with a pinch of skepticism should look very critically at that. And yet that’s the paradigm we live in and I don’t think anybody is to blame. It has emerged to become like this as a reaction to what was seen, during the Enlightenment, as a culture of superstition. But the pendulum oscillated very, very far to the other side and today we are living the consequence of that.

You know, you were talking about practical applications. If I can talk a little bit about that for a minute, ultimately Idealism does not depart—on a practical, operational level—it does not depart very much at all from Realism. The predictions could be the same. Physics would still hold. It’s just that matter is something in the mind. It doesn’t exist objectively. So operationally, and in terms of the development of technology, not much would change; at least not in the short term. The consistency would be very large.

But there is one point of departure that is massive and has huge philosophical implications and huge implications for the way we live our lives, which is: according to Realism, if mind is generated by the brain, then it’s over when the brain decomposes when you die.

And according to Idealism, even though the operational consequences are pretty much the same, when the brain decomposes mind is free. It doesn’t end. It’s the opposite. That has enormous implications for how we live every day of our lives. It is a pity that our madness has brought us to this very cynical, negative, almost desperate way of living our lives.

Alex Tsakiris: In the time that we have left, why don’t you take us through briefly your three books? I have not had a chance to read them but they look absolutely amazing. Take us through the books and what we might find in them.

Bernardo Kastrup: The first book is called, Rationalist Spirituality. It was the first book I wrote and the attempt in that book is to look at what we know in science today, to look at what we know in philosophy today, and to try to derive what could be a hypothesis for the meaning of existence. Why is this all going on? Is there one; and if there is, what could it be based on science, based on logic, rationality, and so on.

The second book is more empirical. It’s called, Dreamed Up Reality and it explores the idea of what one might perceive if one can dampen down the filters of consciousness operating inside the brain. What could be that broader reality and how could one try to perhaps model that in a way, develop a language, and talk about it?

That’s the attempt I have made. I even used some computer simulations to try to articulate a model and articulate the implications of that model in a way that one could talk about it. I don’t mean that that model is correct. I don’t even call it a theory; I call it a hypothesis. I just try to start a conversation.

And the third book, that was out in December last year, is called Meaning and Absurdity and the hypothesis there is: could logic itself be an artifact of this narrow tunnel of reality that we’ve come to live in? Could the inherent degrees of freedom of nature be much broader than what is considered acceptable by classical logic? By bivalent logic?

And if that is the case, to what extent could that explain what we call “absurd phenomena?” What people throughout ages have reported as things that are impossible on the face of it because they violate logic, not only physics. Could there be some grounding for that? So that’s what I try to explore in the third book.

Alex Tsakiris: Fascinating. People can also find you on your blog and you reference a lot of the work of your writing in your blog, as well. Is that right? Can you tell us a little bit about the blog and what else you’re doing these days?

Bernardo Kastrup: My writing is actually a parallel life. It’s largely my hobby. I’m still working in high technology marketing. The blog is www.bernardokastrup.com. I basically write down there my most recent thoughts and my most recent ideas.

Participating in the forum of Skeptiko has been very interesting for me because it’s forced me to articulate some of those ideas in a better way than I ever have done before because of the smart people there in the forum. I’m having a lot of fun there, too.

And there are links to the books, links to articles, and links to videos. It’s all in there.

Alex Tsakiris: Great. Well, Bernardo, it’s been just delightful having you on. You have so many stimulating ideas. I think since you like the forum you’re going to get quite a response in our forum from this interview. I look forward to seeing what you have to say.

Bernardo Kastrup: I’m looking forward to that, too.

Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again for joining us.

Bernardo Kastrup: Thanks a lot, Alex. It’s been a pleasure.

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157. Spirit Medium August Goforth Skeptical of Reincarnation

Psychotherapist and Medium claims communication with spirits reveals no reincarnation.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with August Goforth, author of The Risen.  During the interview Goforth discusses his beliefs about reincarnation:

Alex Tsakiris: You said that through your communication with on the other side that reincarnation isn’t a core part of the overall spiritual plan. Could you be wrong?

August Goforth: I have a huge library of books written by mediums and spiritualists that go back almost a couple hundred years. I noticed not a single one mentioned reincarnation.

Alex Tsakiris: I’ve spoken to plenty of mediums and many of them have talked matter-of-factly about reincarnation as being a reality.  And I’m a little bit familiar with some of the medium literature out there, and I think the idea of reincarnation comes up quite a bit.

August Goforth: It does now. It’s only been maybe in the past 10 years. I would also suggest that it’s a function of the ego-mind that invents these ideas about reincarnation because of its fear of losing its own consciousness. I may have these dreams or these feelings about an experience of being someone from the 14^th Century and I get names and I get all kinds of facts and dates and rather than separating myself from it, there’s something about me–the ego-mind will do this, it will grab onto it and sort of put it on like a costume and say, “Okay, this is me. I’m having a past-life experience.”

Me not realizing consciously that I just experienced someone else’s life and they told me about their life in a dream or an astral experience. When I woke up, somehow it became very blurred and I had this desire because I don’t want to die, I want to live on, that if I can convince myself that I had these past lives that gives me a sense of continuity. It gives me a sense of feeling alive and grounded. I feel more expanded.

Alex Tsakiris: For reincarnation the best scientific work—and I’m sure you’re familiar with it—is the work of Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia and now Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia has followed up on this work. They have thousands at this point of cases of well-documented reincarnation accounts. It’s quite a body of research; it’s very impressive to anyone who looks at it. So I can listen to what you’re saying and I can be open to hearing it, but how do we resolve that? How do we resolve that when it brushes against what I think is some good, down-to-earth science that I can really lay my hands on?

August Goforth: I don’t know. These are just suggestions of how I’m interpreting what information has come to me as best as I can. My bias, if any, is that I’m not interested myself in reincarnation and God – no – I don’t want to come back to this place. But there are people who do or have a belief. It’s a core belief in some way or it’s necessary. But it seems more and more to me that everyone’s experience, whatever it is, is ultimately their own final test of what’s true for them.

The Risen Website

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Alex Tsakiris: What Skeptiko is about is really three things. First, it’s about understanding the overwhelming scientific evidence that consciousness survives death. So if you just, from a science standpoint, if you look medically people die. They are brought back to life. And they have these incredible encounters with what happened when they had no brain, which means they were dead.

August Goforth: About the survival of consciousness, yeah.

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151. Science Journalist Ben Radford “Believes” Psychic Detective

How reliable is the reporting of science journalists who are also part of the “Skeptical community”?

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for a review of his work investigating psychic detectives:

Alex Tsakiris: A couple of years ago, I did a fairly lengthy investigation of psychic detective case with Ben Radford.  It’s taken two years, but next week I’m going to have a chance to do an interview with Ben Radford again, and hopefully close the loop on some of that work that we did.

Background on this case:

78. Psychic Detective, Noreen Renier and Skepticality Response

69: Psychic Detective Smackdown, Ben Radford

58. Psychic Detectives and Police

57. The Psychic Detective Challenge

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Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on today’s episode we’re going to look at a topic that I haven’t touched on in quite some time, and that is psychic detective work. The idea, of course, of psychics and law enforcement working together to solve crimes. In particular, we’re going to focus on how that work is reported in the media.

Hey, by the way, what do you think of the title of this episode? The title again is “Science Journalist Ben Radford Believes Psychic Detective.” Let me tell you how I put that together. See, I took the first part, which is true—Ben Radford is a science journalist, so I took that, Ben Radford, science journalist. And then I took the part that I wished was true, “Believes Psychic Detective,” and I added that onto the end and I got a good title. A title that I wanted.

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150. Dream Interpretation a Spiritual Journey Says Lucid Dream Expert Robert Waggoner

Lucid dreaming expert Robert Waggoner explains how to become aware of our dreams while we’re dreaming, and how paranormal dreams can lead to a journey of self-discovery.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with author, and lucid dream expert, Robert Waggoner.  During the interview Waggoner explains how paranormal dreams can reveal future events:

Andrew Paquette: Can you give an example of something like that where you’ve been in a dream and you’ve asked for some kind of future information, you’ve been given it, and later on in a waking state you were able to verify this?

Robert Waggoner: Sure. One time a good friend of mine asked me if I’d ever sought out the lottery numbers while lucid dreaming. That had never occurred to me and I asked him if he had. He said, “Oh yeah,” and he told me what happened. He said he became consciously aware and that he asked for the numbers of the MegaLotto or whatever it was called in his state, to appear when he opened up something. So he opened up a book or something, and he saw six sets of two numbers.

And during the lucid dream he was really excited and he started to memorize them as quickly as he could. So there’s the first number, 26 and the next number is 3 and the next number is 17. And it goes on and on. He said he was really working hard to memorize the set of six two-digit numbers.

When he woke up from the lucid dream he immediately reached for his dream journal and began writing them down as quickly as possible. He says he got the first three exactly right but from then on his memory failed him. He just couldn’t recall the exact order. So a week later when the MegaLotto happened, he said he got the first three exactly right but then the other ones, the order had been goofed up. He’d transposed the numbers as anyone might.

Robert Waggoner’s Website

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Andrew Paquette: Tonight we welcome Robert Waggoner, author of the book, Lucid Dreaming and a frequent speaker on the subject of lucid dreams. Welcome to the Skeptiko program, Mr. Waggoner.

Robert Waggoner: Thanks, Andrew; I’m happy to be here.

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146. Paranormal Podcast Host Jim Harold on the Mainstream Media’s Non-Coverage of the Paranormal

Jim Harold explains why mainstream media outlets stick to conventional “giggle factor” reports of the paranormal.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with author, and host of the Paranormal Podcast, Jim Harold.  During the interview Harold explains how the mainstream media reports on the paranormal:

Alex Tsakiris: You’re covering an area that has a great deal of interest to the general public, but one that still doesn’t get a lot of serious mainstream media coverage. Are you surprised more media outlets haven’t jumped into it just for the numbers?

Jim Harold: I wish I knew the answer to that because that’s my problem with the mainstream media when it comes to something like the paranormal. I can’t tell you why it is. I don’t know that it’s a conspiracy. Maybe it is that people who are in the mainstream media understand this area has a “giggle factor.” They’re almost afraid to treat it seriously because they’ve been trained otherwise.

And I think in some cases it may not be a conspiracy. They just think — this is the way we cover the paranormal. We laugh at it; we giggle at it; we play The X-Files music; we put it as the kicker to end the broadcast and we’re done. So I think it’s more of a convention than anything else.

Alex Tsakiris: I’m not going to jump too quickly on the conspiracy idea, but I do think we have to go there a little bit. We have to go back and ask — who created the template in the first place?

Jim Harold: True.

Jim Harold’s Website

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Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Jim Harold to Skeptiko. As host of the super-successful “The Paranormal Podcast” show, Jim covers all manner of paranormal topics including ghosts, hauntings, UFOs, parapsychology, and many others that we will get into today.

Jim, I’m a long-time fan of your show and I want to welcome you to Skeptiko.

Jim Harold: Well thank you, Alex. That’s very gracious of you to ask me to be on the program and I’m honored.

Alex Tsakiris: You know, you do have a great show, a unique show. I thought we could start just by telling folks who maybe don’t know about it a little bit about The Paranormal Podcast, some of the history to it. What I’m particularly interested in is your overall perspective on covering the paranormal, if you have any thoughts on that.

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134. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake on the Persistence of Richard Wiseman’s Deception

Biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake expresses dismay at latest claims made by Skeptic Richard Wiseman in his recent book, Paranormality.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. A distinguished biologist, Dr. Sheldrake is the author of several books including, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. During the interview Mr. Tsakiris and Dr. Sheldrake discuss the latest claims of Skeptic Richard Wiseman:

Alex Tsakiris: When someone hears you say Richard Wiseman’s portrayal of your research is deceptive, well, it sounds so horrible.  But in this case, the deception is so obvious, the misinformation so outrageous, that it’s hard to understand how he assumed he could get away with it. But then again, of course he’s going to get away with it. He’s gotten away with it for years.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: Yes, it’s outrageous. Wiseman’s research on psychic pets was entirely parasitic on my research. He portrays himself as this kind of heroic debunking figure who goes in and exposes people who fool themselves about their dogs and so forth.  But, in fact, his own tests show an even bigger effect than I’d observed. Incredibly, he then appeared on TV and made press releases, wrote a scientific paper in a scientific journal, claiming to have refuted the effect we both demonstrated.  It is completely outrageous, but as you say, he’s got away with it before. He’s been exposed before, but that seems completely irrelevant to him.

Alex Tsakiris: What is going on here? What do you think is really behind this? Because it’s easy to spin out of control with conspiracies and all sorts of strange ideas.  What’s your best guess, having been in this for as long as you have?

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: Personally, I think it’s just what Wiseman said it is. I think it’s a tendency for people to see what they want to believe, to believe what they want to believe, to only notice evidence that fits their dogmatic point of view or their belief system. He himself is a perfect example of that. He accuses people who are interested in psychic phenomena and do research in an open-minded way of being fooled or of self-deception, but in fact this is the kind of thinking he’s engaged in. Basically, Wiseman is a dogmatic materialist. People who are materialists aren’t people who don’t believe anything; they’re people who have a really strong belief that the mind is nothing but the brain, that the free will doesn’t really exist and we are just robots. He tries to prove that in this book.  I think it’s as simple as that. He’s dogmatically committed to that point of view. He firmly believes it. Therefore, the evidence must be flawed. People must be either deceiving themselves or deceiving others. So I think we have to see that we’re dealing here with a fundamentalist belief system of people who pretend to be scientific but are not.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s website

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Today we welcome back to Skeptiko biologist and author, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Now, many of you know that Dr. Sheldrake has been nice enough to join me on Skeptiko several times in the past. He’s a real hero of mine-not just for his innovative and imaginative ideas and research, but for his clear, straightforward manner of talking about controversial science and those who oppose it. So I’m really delighted, Rupert, that you’ve joined me on Skeptiko today.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: Yes, it’s a pleasure to be back.

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133. Dr. Stuart Hameroff On Quantum Consciousness and Moving Singularity Goal Posts

Human consciousness researcher Dr. Stuart Hameroff describes how discoveries are revealing more brain complexity than artificial intelligence (AI) experts suspected.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Stuart Hameroff. Dr. Hameroff is Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies. During the interview Mr. Tsakiris and Dr. Hameroff discuss whether DMT-based psychedelic experiences provide evidence that our consciousness exists outside of the brain:

Alex Tsakiris: Your understanding of the quantum mechanics of the neuron really stirs up a lot of angst among the AI singularity crowd. Tell us a little bit about that controversy.

Dr. Stuart Hameroff: To look at our brain as 100 billion simple switches — to look at a neuron as a switch or gate — it’s an insult to neurons. It’s just not that simple. If you study biology you realize this.  But a lot of biologists get bogged down with the details and lose the big picture. They see the information processing in the cell as a minestrone soup of chemicals when they’re ignoring the solid state system in the microtubules.

The bit with the AI and the singularity, there’s actually a couple of points of friction here. As I said, I spent 20 years studying microtubule information processing. The AI approach would be, roughly speaking, that a neuron fires or it doesn’t. It’s roughly comparable to a bit, 1 or 0. It’s more complicated than that but roughly speaking.  I was saying no, each neuron has roughly 10-8 tubulins switching at roughly 10-7 per second, getting 10-15 operations per second per neuron. If you multiply that by the number of neurons you get 10 to the 26th operations per second per brain. AI is looking at neurons firing or not firing, 1,000 per second, 1,000 synapses. Something like the 10 to the 15^th operations per second per brain… and that’s without even bringing in the quantum business. So that alone was pushing the goalpost way, way downstream into the future.

Dr. Stuart Hameroff’s website

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Today we welcome Dr. Stuart Hameroff to Skeptiko. Dr. Hameroff is Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies.

Dr. Hameroff, thank you so much for joining me today on Skeptiko.

Dr. Stuart Hameroff: You’re welcome, Alex. It’s nice to be here. Read the rest of this entry »

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132. Deborah Blum On the Taboo of Paranormal Science Reporting

Pulitzer Prize winning author Deborah Blum discusses the challenges of science reporting and the paranormal taboo.

Skeptiko guest host Steve Volk welcomes Deborah Blum author of, Ghost Hunters – William James and the Hunt for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. During the interview Ms. Blum discusses her approach to covering the paranormal:

Steve Volk: This is one of the hardest things. Who do we believe? Who do we trust? I want to see somehow people in the middle pick this stuff up and look at it, but that’s a very, very rare occurrence.

Deborah Blum: I agree. Like I said, I’m a mainstream science journalist and daughter of a chemist. But what was fascinating to me when I started working on Ghost Hunters is that I’d go and give talks at different universities. I mean literally, I was at the University of Florida and they said, ‘Oh, let us tell you about our haunted laboratory.’ Or I was at a meeting with a bunch of animal researchers and I was sitting next to a very respected scientist from Stanford who immediately started telling me about the telepathic experiences she’d had with a friend of hers who is a scientist at Southwestern University. I thought to myself, ‘This whole world exists that really those of us in the skeptic/science community never see because people just don’t tell you about it.

Steve Volks’s website

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Deborah Blum – Ghost Hunters

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Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.

On this episode, as you just heard, there’s a new voice behind the interview so before we get started I thought we’d take a minute and introduce that voice, that being the voice of journalist and author, Steve Volk, who’s joining me right now.

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113. Atheist Ophelia Benson Admires the Pre-Deathbed Denouncement of Christopher Hitchens

Interview with author Ophelia Benson explores how a scientific understanding of life after death might impact an atheistic worldview.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for and interview with the author of, “Does God Hate Woman?”, and “Why Truth Matters”, Ophelia Benson.  During the interview Ms. Benson expresses  her admiration for being an atheist to the very end, “…Christopher Hitchens, as we all know, is admirably insisting that he’s not going to change his opinions about the nature of the world and about whether or not there’s a God just because he’s mortally ill. And if there are any rumors that he’s done a deathbed conversion, he wants it to be on the record right now that that’s not what he considers the real Christopher Hitchens.”

When pressed as to whether one could decide to not have a deathbed conversation prior to having such a conversion Ms Benson replied, “I know, it’s sort of tricky in a way, but on the other hand, I kind of think we all do have a right to do that. If you’ve been a lifelong atheist and are continuing to be an atheist, I think you have a right to say, ‘Well, okay, if at the last minute I mumble something, I want to go on the record right now saying I repudiate that in advance.’ It’s ours, so I think we get to do that.”

Ms. Benson also discusses how advances in near death experience science and other research that suggesting a continuation of consciousness might impact the “new atheist” worldview.

Check out Ophelia Benson’s Website: Butterflies and Wheels

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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko I have an interview with Ophelia Benson, author, Atheist, and editor of the very popular and very well done Butterflies and Wheels website.

Now, this interview didn’t really go the way that I planned, but when I was editing it I realized that maybe it really made the point I was trying to make after all, and that’s just to demonstrate how this new science of consciousness that we’ve been exploring so much on this show in terms of near-death experience, medium communication, and psi phenomena, how that new science is making its way into the marketplace of ideas. So how a public intellectual like Ophelia Benson is processing this. And in that respect I think the interview is quite revealing. So listen in to my interview with Ophelia Benson:

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