Does Consciousness Extend Beyond Brains? The 2023 Holberg Debate, feat. Seth, Luhrmann, Sheldrake.

"True consciousness is achieved when the act of causing harm, even to the smallest creature, pains you."

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between the two my life flows” — Nisargadatta Maharaj

It's always a good day when Rupert Sheldrake pops up in your playlist

A year ago I went 5 times. to a pain management clinic for my multiple sclerosis’ pain and depression. I was given ketamine for 5 sessions. It was unfortunately a temporary success for pain and depression but I had the most worthwhile spiritual experience! I was comforted to understand the various dimensions of life and consciousness.

“How things seem is not a good explanation of how things are”

The problem with using anesthesia as evidence of oblivion, is that there is no way to rule out the possibility of a rich experience during anesthesia that is not stored in the memory of the brain. It could be that anesthesia shuts off biological memory, such that when one comes to it seems as if there was only oblivion. Imagine a computer running but nothing gets saved, the computer will by definition not recognize any of the states it was in when the memory was shut off, but it was still running.

Consciousness is when we all come home to our collective soul and know that we are all one

Even though it's a debate I find it really relaxing which seems counter intuitive to what I'd expect from a debate. Goes to show how todays program always makes us think people have to be loud and yell at each other. Thank goodness we can hear everyone speak and find each point of view interesting enough to give it some air to ponder.

tHANK YOU PHENOMENICAL WEBINAR!

I was drawn to this debate specifically because 13 years ago it was discovered that I was having seizures. After unsuccessfully trialing 13 anti-epileptic drugs, I had my entire right temporal lobe removed. I was 51 years old. The world is no longer what I knew it to be, leading to much questioning of all reality. My experience of living on this planet is now ENTIRELY different... It was rather horrifying to hear the statement that brain is overrated! I wish I'd understood and valued my brain more than I did. That being said, while my ability to function as I once did has been significantly compromised, I don't believe the brain surgery has reduced my "consciousness". In fact, I feel that I am more conscious and aware! Myself, my thoughts, functioning, light, sound, smells, sensations, the energies from outside sources, nuances, and my surroundings tend to be entirely overwhelming. I often feel TOO conscious... That being said, I am intrigued by the research and depth of thought and ideas presented here. I too will continue to explore brain function, consciousness, etc. from my own experience and perspective. Thank you for sharing this debate!

I feel seth took up way too much time talking, he didn't really give anyone else a chance to speak, I would have rather listened to Luhrmann and Sheldrake speak more...

1:25:28 - If it turns out that space-time is a brain made UI the inside-outside distinction might be a lot more complicated and at that point you'd need to consider more that a conscious being is, with Karl Friston's theory, a bundle of Markov blanketed sectors where what we experience as 'us' is a particularly Markov bundle that distinguishes our subjectivity from our experience of the outside / objective world, but the question is whether that Markov blanket exists within us and whether we're ultimately rendering (ourselves) something really complicated into the appearance of Baryonic matter.

Obviously. Hence vibes, animal sensing, presence in and beyond dreams, imagination projecting into space and time etc.

"Character IS destiny," Aristotle. E.g. the play "Oedipus Rex" that he so admired as exemplifying that observation.

I had dreams of being in a building or outside of one, and in my mind I am familiar with interior and what is on each floor, and even behind the building, and around the corner down the street. I have visual recall of these aspects and details of the environment. I also know the people, their names and remember what we talked about two or three days ago, but when I wake up, I have no idea of who and where I was. In the dream, I knew specifics like room #s, and locker key combinations, and I also know if I have 2 minutes or 10 minutes to get where I am going and I feel the urgency to get there. When I wake up, just 2 seconds later, there is no reference for anything I was just deeply involved in. I try to recall the place, people and details, but nothing. I think I am living a different life in my sleep. I feel that I am the same person in the dream, but recalling memories from a different life. When I am thinking in the dream, the relevant ideas and information to the present moment or circumstance are fresh and readily available in memory, as if I am accessing an established way of thinking and believing, I am not familiar with when I awaken.

I was comatose following a motorcycle accident in 1985 I was diagnosed as being comatose following a motorcycle accident. That is how I appeared to the medical staff anyway. However I was very busy at the time with some intense activities. I was floating in a black void like being in a womb not like outer space. It was very comforting and I still recollect every emotion I felt and everything I saw while I was "gone". I spontaneously returned while the doctors where rounding and I heard them speaking with the nurse and my wife. They said there had been no change with sadness in their voices. I however felt 3 things in rapid succession even though I had broken my pelvis, neck, right clavicle, upper arm both sides and left leg. 1) So disappointed in having to come back 2) Why is everyone so worried about me. I'll be fine 3) I know something you all don't and it's fantastic. Four months later my wife died in childbirth. Make of my story what you will.

I experience a shift in conscientiousness when I became emotional about an answer to a question I needed and the person I needed to ask physically emerged in my surrounding, even though he was in a different state, after I experienced that, I called him and I asked him if he gave me the answer to the question I was thinking about when we were together, in person, and he hesitated before saying no, so I didn't bring up the experience I just encountered but later in that day I wondered why he hesitated before answering the question, maybe he also had an experience in that moment but even if he did I don't think he would have excepted it because he practice ministry

I wish there was a debate with consciousness and Dementia…..

Very lively debate and a very diverse field of study. I spent a few years of my life trying to quantify consciousness for the purposes of determining how much anaesthetic should be given to a patient in order to safely keep them unconscious. This debate touched on this subject and a few other related subjects. Anil Seth very skillfully side stepped how consciousness originates and assumed that consciousness only resides within the physical confines of the human brain (Tanya Luhrmann was a little more philosophical about this). Instead they both focused on the physical aspects of consciousness, which are all that any scientist can measure. This is a totally rational way to think, based on the scant information we currently poses on this topic. These physical aspects, give us absolutely no clues as to the nature of human consciousness and its origins. Debates of this kind tend to become very philosophical and go around in circles as one is left to speculate because of the fundamental lack of information. Rupert Sheldrake seemed to me to be a lot more open minded on whether consciousness can extend outside of the human brain and even though he's considered as something of a maverick and heretic by many of his (biologically minded) peers, I like his open mindedness and some of his ideas, which leaves the door open for new ideas. Work on machine consciousness has been progressing for many years. There are various schools of thought on how to give machines self awareness. The problem has been that the predominant school of thought was that consciousness would be achieved by increasing the complexity of the artificial neural networks used to build AI. But with gigantic leaps in the computing power of these artificial neural networks, self awareness akin to human consciousness has not been achieved. So most probably, brain complexity is not the origin of human consciousness. The work of Physicist Roger Penrose and Neuroscientist Stuart Hameroff on human consciousness adds a quantum component to the workings of the human brain, by way of the nano-tubules found within brain cells. This seems to suggest that consciousness could originate from quantum interactions within brain cells. Quantum entanglement of subatomic particles has shown us that space-time is non-local. If this hypothesis of consciousness holds true, it could also lead us to the conclusion that consciousness can reside outside of the human brain. Again, this is hypothetical. There are many other schools of thought on this issue. One hypothesis pointed to by string theory is that we could be living inside a black hole, in which case we could be living inside a 2D hologram which feels and looks like a 3D universe. The interesting thing about holograms is that each element which makes up the hologram contains all of the information contained in the entire hologram. If that's the case then our consciousness might be contained in the tiniest elements which make up this universe ......... pure speculation, but again, we're in the realms of pure philosophy here. The simulation hypothesis is another, where we could be living inside a huge computer simulation, in which case non of what we experience is real and that anything is possible within the bounds of the computer simulation. Or, we could all be parts of some massive universal consciousness which connects everything and could mean that our consciousness does not reside within our physical brain. Such a theory of mind could also tie in with emerging physics hypotheses of consciousness and information theory, where information itself has mass and therefore energy, and that consciousness could be more fundamental than either energy or matter. Again hypothetical, but possibly mathematically provable ? or disprovable ..... The questions these scientists and others are asking are as fundamental as the questions about creation of the universe and life itself. These are the deep questions we have asked for thousands of years, and could take thousands more years to truly answer, if at all..... They will not be answered by biologists. The answers will come by integrating fields such as physics, mathematics, biology and chemistry. Each science describes one small piece of the puzzle.

I genuinely believe that this subject cannot be fully investigated without seeing the problem from alternate angles. So - in the way that neurologists mapped functions within areas of the brain by studying brain damaged individuals than then lose very specific abilities based on the area that was damaged. It was very surprising to see that things we take for granted as part of the human experience that you wouldn't realise had a specific area for - such as face recognition, seeing edges - even detecting movement changes within a scene (if you lose this ability and you're at a train station, the train would just 'appear', you wouldn't see it pull into the station). Also, in a similar way that the structure of DNA was discovered by shining X-Rays through it and observing the shadow - what I'm trying to say, is that, by altering your consciousness, it could cast a 'shadow' of the shape and workings of it. Therefore, drugs that affect consciousness, especially psychedelics - would make a huge impact in learning about the workings of the self, the ego and consciousness and awareness. Designing specific drugs for altering the consciousness in specific ways could be used for investigative purposes. If you're aware of Alexander Shulgin and his books - 'PIHKAL' and 'TIHKAL' (amazing story and person) over the course of 20-30 years, he legally invented thousands of new psychedelic drugs and tested them all on himself. In support of this approach, I can say that anyone who has experienced the true 'mystical' or an extreme result from a psychedelic experience have experienced states that defy words and logic. We are not seeing the universe as it truly is, we have only evolved to cope with the model we are given. But there is so much more going on than we will ever be aware of. If you have experienced true 'ego death' - having your sense of self completely dissolved. You don't even need drugs. Long term meditation/Buddhists strive for those moments. You become one with everything and the walls or the bubble that 'you' live inside, disappears. The psychedelic experience is very similar to a deep meditative state.