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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods; to the podcast where we still believe that another world is possible, and that if we all work together there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we're exploring some of the absolutely core questions of our existence. Why are we here? How do we think? What's the nature of life? And what are the boundaries between ourselves and the rest of the living web, between ourselves and the rest of the universe, across space and through time, and in the timeless, formless place from which everything arises. These are the absolute foundational questions of our existence, and how we answer them shapes how we see ourselves and our relationship to everything around us. If we work in a human supremacist frame, then we have no qualms about destroying the rest of the living web. If we know ourselves to be integral to that hyper complex, amazing, magical web of life, if we can prove this at a scientific level, then perhaps we can shift the way that we behave. And while the basis of our civilisation rests on the reductive scientific model that says we are the supreme beings, that we do have a right to dominion over the rest of the world, this becomes quite a fundamental issue.
Manda: So that's what we're going to explore this week. Our guest is Dr James Cooke. He's an author, a researcher and host of the rather wonderful Living Mirrors podcast, which is how I got to know him. James has three degrees from Oxford, starting off with experimental psychology and then finally with a PhD in neuroscience. Since then, he's been conducting research into the brain basis of consciousness at the University of London, and he's achieved a theoretical breakthrough that links philosophy, the latest in cognitive neuroscience and modern secular mysticism, which is pretty impressive. And he has written about it in his book the Dawn of Mind; How Matter Became Conscious and Alive, which synthesises science and contemplative insight to offer a radical solution to the hard problem of consciousness and the question of our place in existence. Which is pretty huge. And given that the first seven chapters of this book look at the philosophy of consciousness, and then the next seven look at the neuroscience of consciousness, I was an extremely happy consciousness geeking bunny when I was reading it. When he's not being an academic, James directs the Inner Space Institute for Non-dual Naturalism, which is a centre for education and participation in the topics at the intersection of science and spirituality.
Manda: On the website, it says it's here to help you engage in spiritual development in a way that is scientifically grounded, which feels to me really crucial for our times. Huge numbers of people who've been brought up in a rationalist, reductivist mindset, who think that our head minds rule our heart minds and our body minds, want and need a scientific basis for spiritual development. Almost everybody yearns for that sense of being and belonging and becoming. And while standardised religions tend to offer social constraint and rationalised hierarchies, a way of accessing what James calls secular spirituality feels increasingly urgent. So that's what we're going to explore today. James quite clearly has a brain the size of a planet, but we endeavoured to keep this grounded in language that everybody will understand. And in the places where we stepped over that line, we've gone back and filled in the gaps. So here we go. People of the podcast, please do welcome Dr James Cooke, host of the Living Mirrors podcast and author of the Dawn of Mind.
Manda: James Cooke, PHD. Welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this amazing summer's day?
James: Thank you Manda, great to be here. I'm in Portugal right now, it's a very hot summer's day, which is where I live these days. And I'm very well. There's probably a lot more I could say about that, but we'll go with very well.
Manda: You're at home and you have a very small human at home with you who might turn up and join us at some point. So we're just warning people that a small person may join us, and we will continue unless it becomes impossible so to do. What's the small person's name and how old are they?
James: Leo. And he's three years old.
Manda: Okay. Very small. Hello Leo, in the background! And Portugal because your wife is Californian and Portugal is like California, but a lot safer at the moment. Not heading towards fascism as we speak?
James: Well, the far right party actually just emerged in recent years. And Portugal's constitution actually commits it to socialism, but it isn't in practice. It was the left who kind of led the revolution in the 70s against the fascist government. When we first moved here six ish years ago, it felt like a kind of island of sanity in Europe politically and it seems like that's slipping away.
Manda: Steve Bannon committed 50% of his time to Europe. And much as I don't like his ideology, I don't think he's stupid. And he knew what he was doing. And he saw Europe as heading further right than the US at that point. He thought he would get Europe flipped before he got the US flipped, because they didn't have Elon Musk on board to put a thumb on the scales at that point. Anyway, let's let all that go. You are the person who's written The Dawn of Mind, which is the philosophy of consciousness and the science of consciousness. And I have to say, the combination of those two together, written by somebody who's really looked into both, reading that felt like all my Christmases had come at once. Having said which, I still had to read most of it many, many times to get it to sink in, and I'm not sure it has. So we probably won't go into all of the depth, because we might risk losing people. But we're going to go into the basics of what it is, why you wrote it, how you wrote it, and where it might take us. So your introduction to it on the website says it synthesises science and contemplative insight to offer a radical solution to the hard problem of consciousness and the question of our place in existence, which is pretty darned fundamental. Tell us first what the hard problem of consciousness is, and why we might care about it and how you came to care about it.
James: Yeah. So we won't be going into all the technical details, because to me, these broad strokes of what is our place in existence, what is consciousness, where does it fit into our picture? This is what I'm interested in. This is why I wrote the book. And when you've got a kind of a misconception or false assumptions, your whole kind of arrangement of how you're seeing reality blocks insight, and it just needs to be rearranged. So really, what I'm interested in is that big rearrangement of okay, here's where we are, here's what consciousness is. And then the book really tries to do justice to that, by showing how you go from all the assumptions for where we currently are to how I see things adding up. So the details are all there if people are interested in the philosophy and the science, but I think the big message is exactly what you're pointing to. So the hard problem of consciousness. The reason I zoomed in on that is I'm interested in existential situations, as humans who suffer and can be deluded and can have insight. And often certain kinds of insight into our situation can lead to relief from suffering. So this is kind of what motivates me. And then the hard problem is really the gap in our current picture of what's going on in reality. When I say our current picture, I mean the kind of mainstream scientific picture of what's going on.
James: And I think that gap is between experience and the physical world, the world that science studies, the objective space that seems to be in between us. And it's an issue of how do those two things fit together, really. And it's called a hard problem because with all the assumptions of the current view, it can't be solved. It just doesn't add up. So that's really the starting point, is something's not adding up in our picture of reality. And that's why I focus on the hard problem of consciousness. Because that's the articulation of what's not adding up. So then I present a different way of framing reality and then say from this perspective, as far as I can see, I don't see a hard problem. I don't see a gap. Things seem to add up. And so that's really the point of the book, is trying to show a picture of reality that's holistic, where things line up. And that gives me a signal that there might be some validity to it, as opposed to the glaring error of the hard problem, that's basically saying you've got something wrong, go back and do your working out again.
Manda: Right. And so I'm still kind of interested, can we synthesise the hard problem? Because the nature of the gap seems to me an expression of our separation from the web of life. It's the intellectual excuse on which the whole of our culture surfs, and is in the process of tipping us over the edge of the sixth mass extinction if we don't change it. And it hasn't necessarily been expressed like this for the past 12,000 years, but the basic concept that says we are separate and we have dominion over all the earth, is the basis on which we operate. And by expressing it as the heart consciousness, and I can't remember the name of the person who did, you'll tell us, they kind of synthesised this is where we think we're at. And the breakthrough that you've made is, is walking a step by very careful philosophical and cognitive neuroscience step, to okay guys, you made a fundamental error there. So I would like to, if we can without losing people, walk us through the concepts. But we need to start where the gap is. So have you got an elevator pitch of what the gap is other than we are separate and we deserve to be separate.
James: Right. Yeah. So you're absolutely right that separation is the issue. So what I'll do is I'll explain how I see it, where there isn't a problem, and then explain what the delusion is that leads to the problem. And I apologise if this is a slightly convoluted way, but I think it will offer more clarity. So from where I stand, you're absolutely right that the core insight is we're not separate. And one way you could unpack that metaphysically would be to say there is only relationship; interdependence, relationality, Indra's net. And existence is a single tapestry, a single web of connection, of relationship. And it seems to me that this cashes out in terms of physics, in terms of current work in what's called relational quantum mechanics, that sees the physical world as a tapestry of relationship. And then to me, what the mind is, what experiences is, is a relationship. Technically, you might call it an epistemic relationship, which just means a relationship of knowing. So it's a stance of kind of knowingness to the world. And to me, that's what I argue in the book, is that exists because of life. That's not because of brains; brains help with that in us, but fundamentally it's a way of the embodied organism relating to the world is what mindedness is.
James: So in that picture, there's no there's no separation, there's no issue, there's no hard problem. You just have relationality. And what we call matter is a certain kind of relationship. And what we call mind or experience or consciousness is another kind of relationship, particularly one to do with this knowingness, this epistemic quality in philosophical jargon. So that's what I'm saying, is I think it's a simple picture where there's no problem. But then the way the hard problem is articulated, people are not seeing it that way. So the way the mind typically works is there is this sense of separation, of being a separate self in a world that's made of separate objects. So not only are you separate, but the world is made of separate stuff. It's like a kind of a pile of junk floating around instead of an interwoven tapestry.
Manda: Yeah.
James: And so in that view, you start to study the physical world or these objects, and they seem very real and they seem very foundational and solid. Because I can pick up this glass and say, hey, look, this is a glass, I can measure it and you can measure it. Okay, well, if anything's real, that measurement of that glass is real, right? And then we get into subjectivity and well, you said you think this, but I see it this way; that seems less reliable, less concrete. So then we're left in this space of, okay, we have this seemingly quantitative physical world, that's the most real thing out here. The stuff studied by physics, by science, and so let's call that matter. And then you have this qualitative, feely experiential, you know, the blue of the sky can't be quantified in the same way that the length of the glass can be. So you have a qualitative as opposed to a quantitative world of experience. And the issue is, well, if that solid material, quantitative real stuff is what's real, then why is there this weird ghost in the machine? Why is there love and the blue of the sky and how did how did this mechanical robot of a body that's made out of solid, real matter, that's separate from the world around it, how does the computer in its head, that's the brain, how does it conjure up feelings? Like, what are feelings like? How does that fit into this, this view?
James: And so in that view, you're kind of taking for granted that the brain is a separate object inside, or at least the organism is separate from the world. So you do have an issue there, like, how are you going to cram in that ghost into the machine? Or how are you going to explain how the machine makes the ghost? Because then if you describe it in machine terms, you say, okay, we're going to build an AI based on brain principles, well then does that have the ghost in the machine? And you just get into all these problems. Whereas if you take the relational view that I'm advocating and you see consciousness as a relational process of knowingness, the gap doesn't arise.
Manda: And yet there are people in our reality who will look me in the eye and argue quite seriously that person X is not depressed, it's just that their lithium levels are a bit low, and if we put their lithium levels up, they will cease to be depressed. Which doesn't fit in my reality, which says, you know, they need agency. They live in a world in which it's depriving them of agency, and therefore their entire energetic being is feeling crushed. But the person with the lithium narrative can cite a whole bunch of papers going no, no, we give them lithium and look, they cease to be depressed. And what I found in your book was that you were able to walk your way through that one quite cleverly. Can you walk us through that in ways that might not lose everybody if they haven't got PhDs in cognitive neuroscience? Because I think that's quite important. We live in a world where everybody feels beholden to the scientific model, unless they've flipped so far to the other side that they are on other weird conspiracy theories, as far as I can tell. What you've done and what I really think and feel is important, is you've brought us to a grounded place where we don't have to believe that everything is just the molecules in our brain slightly misfiring because we haven't got enough lithium or whatever.
James: Yeah. The interesting with the depression example, antidepressants, you know, typically increase serotonin and so you have this simple toy model of what depression is, is just where your body's not producing enough serotonin. But the interesting thing about the way you put that was okay, they can cite all these papers. In that case, they actually can't cite papers because the science doesn't back it. For the entire time that's been hypothesis it just doesn't add up, like the data just isn't there. And I was told this as an undergraduate, that we still tell this story but the academics know it's not true. But we don't know a better story.
Manda: Oh, really? Can you unpack that a little bit? Because I've got friends who've taken selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and felt better.
James: Oh, no they can help you feel better, but it's not because you have a serotonin deficiency syndrome, which is kind of how it's presented. There's some really interesting work about certain serotonin receptors that help with active coping, which really fits with your narrative which I resonate with, about agency, where it's like, okay, if you're being crushed and you've got to keep showing up to work and keep going, if there's a system in your brain that can just boost that a little bit chemically. It can kind of help you keep struggling through. So it's not that serotonin is a happy molecule that you're lacking and that it makes you happy.
Manda: Right. Interesting. Okay.
James: But what's really interesting is the sociology of that. That, you know, because the pharmaceutical companies have this simple story, they can tell people to buy their drugs. Then the story gets told, even if the science doesn't back it. And the true story, as you say, the kind of rich, relational, interdependent conception we would need of what flourishing versus suffering is, is so rich and systemic in its kind of picture that I think people prefer the simple, reductionist, isolated stories of, okay, well, I might just have a brain disorder. Because it's hard to wrangle, you know, you'd have to do what you and I are trying to do, which is just to wrangle multidisciplinary kind of takes on what's wrong with the world. And that's the way out of depression, you know, the mental health crisis.
Manda: Yeah. And then you get to the point where we need total systemic change. And pharmaceutical companies are not in the business of advocating for total systemic change. So, all right, we'll get to the total systemic change in a while. So what we've got to is that the model of our brains that says basically we're just a very, very, very complicated computer, which is fundamentally we're Douglas Adams got to. Ask it the right question it'll tell you the answer to life, the universe and everything, but it needs to be really complex, and in this case they designed a complex computer that was actually the world. Which I thought was rather clever on very many levels. But you talked to the guy, this is taking a bit of a jump; you did the first long form interview with the Google employee who came out in 2022 and was sacked for saying that he believed they were creating sentient life. And I've heard a number of quite smart people, including Asa Ruskin, recently saying they might not have created sentient life, but they have created something capable of evolution. If evolution is a plastic response to environmental stimuli and a self upgrading capacity. And I would be quite interested at some point in unpicking the distinction between that and consciousness. However, there is a lot of fear about AGI and ASI, and I'd be really interested in whether you think silicon consciousness can be a thing, and if not, why not?
James: Right, yeah. So in the picture that I describe, where, as I mentioned, I think of consciousness as a kind of relationship of knowing, or attempting to know rather than actually knowing. To me, because we're not separate, this phenomenon emerges out of the natural world with a deep continuity. And so it really is existence knowing itself through itself, through living systems. And so if you build a driverless car and you're building that based on some vague approximation of what it is to be a living thing; it has sensors, like we have sensors like eyes. It can move, you know, by turning its wheels in the way that we can move using our muscles. And then you give it an AI brain based on how the brain works, to some extent. But then you can say, well, what's different about us versus that driverless car? Why isn't that sentient or is it sentient? And the way that I think about that is I don't think AI or any of these systems are sentient, or have experience I mean by that, or are Conscious. So the way I think about that is that they are fundamentally artefacts or models of what we are.
James: So life has to pull itself up by its bootstraps, and that's why it needs to anchor to the world around it through consciousness. When you create an artefact, you're using your own intelligence and your own consciousness to do that, it doesn't then need to do that same process of kind of keeping itself together. So if I wrote down on a napkin all the equations that describe these kinds of processes I'm talking about in living systems and brains, no one would think the ink on that napkin was conscious or the napkin as a whole, just because it's got the equations written on it. Now, if you put those equations into transistors turning on and off, and then it becomes an AI, exactly the same thing is true. You've just got a fancy napkin. You've not suddenly got the same thing. So the same is true with the driverless car. It's a bit like, I can't remember who said this, but someone made this point about, it would be like thinking that a simulation of a hurricane on a computer will get the inside of a computer wet. It's just a simulation, or a model; it's just something different to the phenomenon itself.
Manda: And you had in the book a metaphor that I thought was quite interesting of the person in a room who's getting instructions in Chinese. Do you want to unpick that? Because I realise I'm taking us down a rabbit hole and actually I do want to go back to life and consciousness, but this feels really interesting. Tell us about the Chinese model and then I have another question.
James: Yes. This was John Searle's Chinese room thought experiment. And he was a very important philosopher in consciousness. So he was making the point that computation, in terms of the kind of machines that we have, deal with symbols and they shuffle around this information in response to an input, to give an output. But the system itself, the machine doesn't know what the symbols mean. Computation is something we use for problem solving that we frame. So if I have a spreadsheet and it's got a bunch of numbers in it and I'm looking at it and I know those numbers say for example, it is rainfall in a particular location. I can add up all the numbers and then it will give me the total rainfall over that week. But as far as the computer knows, there's just seven numbers and then an eighth one of them being added. Like it doesn't know that's anything to do with rainfall. So if the brain is a computer, who or what is giving it meaning? Who or what is deciding what anything means? Why isn't it all just random structure, just numbers and quantities? So the Chinese room thought experiment makes this point that you can't get minds from computation in that way. Consciousness can't be the result of the brain being a computer.
James: So to make the same point, he says, imagine you're trapped in a room and you're given this task where say you're a native English speaker who doesn't speak Chinese, and then you're given sheets of paper with Chinese characters on them through one window, and you're given a big instruction manual in English that tells you, well, when you're given this character, you give these ones in response through another window. And you just do this all day and you have no idea what any of this means, but it turns out what that manual is, is a manual for translating... I can't remember in the experiment what it is, but the point is it's like a question and answer thing. They're giving you questions and then you're giving the correct answers based on this manual. So from outside, the system is working. It's a question and answer machine. But the machine itself, you in this situation, doing the shuffling or I guess it's you plus the manual plus all the symbols; there's no knowledge, there's no understanding from within the machine.
Manda: Yeah, you don't understand Chinese, but you're getting in questions and you're giving out answers, and it looks like you understand Chinese, but what you're doing is just matching with the book. Why did the individual inside Google believe that they had created sentient AI? What was the glitch in their human thinking that allowed them to believe in sentience?
James: So with that thought experiment, the idea is to say, okay, yeah, nothing about those structural relationships of you're giving these things in and out, gives you semantics, gives you meaning, gives you significance. But not everyone agrees with that. Some people just dismiss that as a thought experiment. Maybe it's wrong, or maybe the whole system as a whole somehow knows. And so people who believe that the mind, consciousness, is a kind of computational system, thinking of the brain as like a computer, that's called computational functionalism. Like the function of being a computer is kind of what the mind is. So he was basically, I think, coming from that perspective. Where it's like, well, if the brain's a computer and it can do these intelligent things and experiences, and my computer is now intelligent and it tells me it's having experiences. I would look at that and say, well, it's a large language model that's trained on the kind of things humans say. So if you say what happens when you open your eyes? It's going to say, oh, I see the blue of the sky or whatever. It's not going to say no data detected, because that's not what humans say. So to me, it's an illusion. It's that thing of it being a kind of a mimicry of what we are. But I can see why if you have those assumptions in the background, you would say, well, why not? Like we've created an artificial brain, my brain can do experience so why wouldn't this do experience?
Manda: Right. So it's predicated on the concept that the brain is basically just a quantum, almost quantum computer. Or it's a very, very advanced computer. And your proof in your book is that this is not the case. So let's go back, because I am beginning to ask questions predicated on the fact that I read your book and the listeners haven't. So we have your concept, which is non-dual naturalism. I think maybe we need to unpick that. But the fundamental basis from a philosophical and a cognitive neuroscience point of view is that life is relational. Consciousness is a product of being alive. So in your world, not mine, rocks are not conscious. I think rocks are highly sentient, but I couldn't prove it. I can prove that I can build a relationship with a rock, which is a slightly different thing. So how does consciousness emerge out of life?
James: Yeah. So I'm fundamentally open minded with this stuff, I don't claim that this is the final word to be said on these topics. And the kind of the mission of the book was really to say to the mainstream view of, you know, this is something to do with brains, basically dumb machines, which I think we both agree is a big part of what's wrong with the world; our disconnection from the web of life and not seeing our kin as kin, but seeing them as resources. And so the big battle I wanted to fight was to say, look, at least we need to bring this to all of life. We need to at least see that consciousness is part of all of life. From there, I'm very interested in having conversations around idealism and panpsychism and where do these things shade into each other? And actually, could it be true that physical particles somehow also show these kinds of dynamics? So I'm not closed to anything really. But the point I make in the book is that the kind of processes that happen in brains that are correlated to the contents of consciousness, are processes that are required for life. Descartes was wrong basically.
Manda: Yeah, Descartes was wrong. Descartes tortured dogs were fun. Descartes was wrong. Those two sentences run in parallel for me. But yes. Go on. Descartes was wrong when he said... Cogito ergo sum.
James: The sense that non nonhuman animals are just robots, basically. That they're just stimulus response machines. And as he was torturing his wife's dog, the observation was, well, it looks like it's in pain, but you can see that actually it's just the lungs pushing air over the vocal cords and that makes that sound. And so if you're a hyper reductionist and you just look at the parts, you're going to ignore the dynamics of the whole. And I'm saying consciousness emerges with the dynamics of the whole. It's to do with being a whole living thing. So the empathic recognition we have of no, no, that's a pain state, that animal is in pain. He was just overlooking that, he was turning away from that when he was doing his experiments and thinking through this stuff and developing reductionism. So I'm bringing that back in. That sense of consciousness is a systems level property of how we interface with the world. At least for us I think that's what it seems to be, not something that's restricted to brains.
Manda: Yeah. And it seems to me stepping back and lifting up a level, I don't know what Descartes's childhood was like, but Descartes, if we shifted from dogs don't feel anything, to the actions of, say, Jesuit priests burning Inca people alive and saying, no, they're not screaming in pain it's the devil screaming through them. It's the same kind of projection of internal trauma. I need to say that X is not real and is not feeling real pain, because then I can justify having fun doing whatever it is that I'm doing. And we're seeing a recurrence of this, we were talking earlier about the US, is they're heading very fast into white supremacy, which is The colour of your skin defines not just your intellect, but your right to a certain degree of safety. And I had, in the days when I was a veterinary anaesthetist, I had papers from the 1970s, so not beyond the bounds of modernity, by a professor in Edinburgh saying that babies didn't feel pain because they had no capacity to articulate it. What? And therefore we don't need to give them analgesia. The analgesics that they had at the time, which was largely morphine based, might well decide to make them stop breathing, so it's much safer not to so I'm giving you a reason not to do something that might be anaesthetically dangerous. And I read Lucy Cooke's book (I'm guessing no relationship) called bitch recently, which was just an amazing unpicking of sexism being justified by science. Of a straight white Oxford man in the 1800s had decided that, I don't know, Dunnocks are definitely shy, well-behaved little girls who are totally monogamous and the dunnock is the model for human women. And it took until people were able to do the DNA examination of the eggs to prove that the dunnock was heading out and would basically have sex with anything that would stand still long enough, and the male dunnock was thereby raising a whole bunch of eggs that were not his own. People were losing their careers by saying, our observation is that the dunnock is polyamorous, and they were sacked until DNA proved that they were right. And it's like, this is not science. This is the justification of our internal brokenness dressed up as science. And it does very bad things to my wish to have science as a fundamental thing. And reading through your book there seems to me both in the cognitive neuroscience and in the philosophy, quite a lot of people resting their entire careers on what seems to me, quite evidently, to be the same kind of projection as Descartes, dressed up prettily and given a name. And I wonder where you end up? How do you find a clean way through this? Because then I would worry that everything I believe is just a projection that I wish to believe and now I'm finding good cognitive reasons why this number of angels dances on the head of a pin instead of your number.
James: Yeah, that's an excellent question. So, the current kind of leading understanding of of how perception works, how we experience the world is called the predictive processing framework. And we don't need to get into the details, but suffice to say that a key part of it is instead of just data being received by the brain and it being processed in kind of a straightforward way, um, we're always bringing to bear interpretations, stories, kind of motivated reasoning, what we want to be true, how we want to look at things. And then we filter what comes in through that.
Manda: To prove that we were right.
James: Exactly, things like confirmation bias can totally come out of this. But it also serves a role of emotional repression, or it can do. Where if you're fully in your stories, it's an inside out mode of anchoring to your identity, to your narratives, as a mode of separation. It's a mode of of pushing away the world instead of being fundamentally open and receptive to the incoming flow of data from the world. So I think whatever you call it, spiritual development, contemplative development, awakening, is I think, a neurobiological correlate of it is a shifting away from that top down conceptual separation mode into a fundamentally open, connected and bottom up mode. Which is partly why I emphasised before that I'm fundamentally open; I'm not saying my concepts, my stories are perfectly right and are definitely the right way to look at things. They are a sincere contribution, and I hope to be of help. But I think that's how I stay on track with this, is that level of non-negotiable anchoring to the world, as opposed to what I want to be true. So I'm fundamentally open to the data, but you know why I love science is because of the spirit of science. And actually the mechanisms of relying on data are beautiful corrective to this fundamental fallibility of humans. But it's not a perfect one. In the same way that in spiritual communities you get huge egos, in science you get people who are very unscientific in how they see what they want to see instead of what the data is telling them. It's just our fallibility as humans. But doing that internal, emotional, contemplative, integrative work, in my experience, has been the thing that's allowed me to be a better thinker, a better scientist, by just being more open to what's actually the case rather than what I want to be the case.
Manda: Right. Right. Because your Inner Space Institute for Non-dual Naturalism is about bringing together cognitive neuroscience and modern secular mysticism and spirituality, and that this, I think, really crosses boundaries. We have so much baggage in our world, where people confuse spirituality with religion, and religion is an organised social construct designed to control people. And spirituality is a felt sense experience of a world that is bigger than the reductionist world that some science would give us. Let's talk a little bit then, about your actual lived experience of spiritual worlds and of what I would consider to be mystical experiences. And we can define the difference at some point. So you started when you were very young. You started when you were 13. Let's go back to that and then build outwards from there.
James: Yeah. And I'll just say, since you've mentioned naturalism a couple of times, that term is just a way of languaging what I said at the beginning about non-duality being non-separation. And naturalism is a kind of, instead of dismissing the world and saying, oh, science is entirely BS, it's like, well, no, we can think through this stuff and study the world, and we should attempt to have everything cohere so that we're not just turning our back on certain aspects of reality. So it's really a way of languaging how I think about science and spirituality. Just wanted to say that to bring people along.
Manda: Okay. For sure.
James: So everything started for me when I was 13, as you say. So I was raised Catholic and I was a very conscientious kid, and I guess I was always metaphysically oriented in some sense, because it seemed of huge importance to me to reckon with what I was being told about the nature of reality through this religion. And in particular its relevance to, I guess, to my own suffering. Because what troubled me was the message that I needed to have blind faith. And if I did, then I would be in God's good books and everything would be fine. If I couldn't find that blind faith, then I was going to be punished for eternity in the most awful way imaginable. And it would never, ever, ever end because it was eternity. So that conception of hell and the fact that I was pretty sure I was going there, because through no decision of my own, I just didn't have blind faith. I was empirically minded, and I could not find the logic, because there isn't a logic to jump from no evidence to a belief. So my system couldn't do it, despite really wanting to, and being sufficiently intimidated, it just couldn't do it. And so I was wrestling with this one day, totally absorbed in this inquiry. And I was actually on the bus ride in Colchester where I was going to school, outside the castle there. And I mention because of your Boudica books, that we didn't get a chance when we spoke previously, that she loomed large in my education at school, as a figure, because of the area I grew up.
Manda: I was wondering about that, right. And for those listening who don't know, Colchester was the first of the three Roman cities that was destroyed by the Boudican revolt. So it's a big thing. There's a whole layer of ash beneath everywhere in Colchester, where everything was just burned to the ground. So yeah, it's quite big in Colchester.
James: And my parents house actually was on a road where, it's a Roman road that's long and straight and it has a dyke I used to walk down. Like a pathway, which was one of the dykes the Romans built to deter her (Boudicca) and others. So that was literally just outside the back garden was this Roman defence against her. Anyway, I was on this bus ride and my entire being was kind of sunk into this inquiry, because I just needed to figure it out. I couldn't just go okay, well, I haven't figured that one out. I guess I'll go to the shops and then burn in hellfire for eternity. I needed to figure it out, but I couldn't figure it out because I was trying to figure it out through thoughts, and there wasn't a logical answer to the question. And the closest you can get is Pascal's Wager, where he said, for the same issue well, just believe and then you haven't lost anything. If you're wrong and if you're right, you get to go to heaven. But what that misses is the nature of blind faith; that you can't just choose.
Manda: You can't make it happen.
James: Yeah, it needs to be sincere faith. You can't just turn up to church. And so I was I was wrestling with this. And I think in retrospect, it functioned a bit like a Zen koan, where your mind is banging it's head against something that's insoluble. And then this incident happened where the thinking stopped. In Zen, you would call it Kensho awakening. You could call it mystical experience, but the problem with Languaging it that way is there's a sense of like, James had an experience; and this is waking up to the wholeness of reality, where there isn't a separate James. Sure, there's a body and we can we can refer to that as James, but there is no being inside this body that is separate from the rest of the world. And so it was this profound liberation and just so utterly simple, because it was just existence being present for itself, abiding as itself, just utter simplicity, utter freedom. And then there was a seeing that all of that struggle had been manufactured in thought. It was a hall of mirrors in thought that I was believing. Some priests and other people had put some words in my head, and those words were kind of bouncing around. That was it basically. Once you stop the internal monologue, there's a thing of like, well, none of those words relate to anything in my experience, anything I've ever known. Like, what is this helping? This is clearly an unskilful narrative. Like, why would I go down that road?
James: So it was a total kind of unburdening, liberation from that whole ruminative thought pattern. And also the no self thing is like that anxiety is really predicated on the feeling that there is a being inside the body who will die, and that is really, really bad. And when you see that that being is a thought, not an actual existing thing, then the sense of there being a problem in existence goes away. And there was nothing in this experience, none of this was like popping off to another transcendent realm or interfacing with supernatural entities. It was just like utter presence. And I had this sense of, well, this should be utterly compatible with science, because this is reality. This is seeing clearly. And so I think it was the fact that I guess my life, in a sense, has been almost devoted to that archetype of that kid who's suffering and wants a way out and wasn't being given a way out. I guess I'm on some level trying to fill in that gap, of what young James didn't have, which was adults trying their best sincerely to weave together everything we know, into a map of like, what the hell's going on? And how can we suffer less as a result? And so this book is quite an intellectual one that's really trying to lay an intellectual foundation, but I'm using it as a foundation to go forward into that less heady, more liberatory space of relieving suffering, rather than just staying in the ideas.
Manda: I want to look again at consciousness in a moment, but I'm really curious to know. First of all, I'm very impressed with 13 year old James just having the capacity to think, and to care deeply enough that that was a focus and focus and focus exactly like the Zen koan, until the borders break. Did you take that awareness into your social grouping? First of all, were there other people age 13 around you doing this? And second, what happens when you tell the priests guys this is all bollocks or did you not?
James: Yeah, I didn't tell anyone anything. I think the first time I told someone I was probably at university. It was funny because, I mean, there's nothing to tell, really, because it's just reality being itself, which is always what's happening. And so there's actually no other, it's all the one anyway, so there isn't anyone else to tell. So truly it never even crossed my mind to talk to someone about it, because talking about it would happen through the delusion. Happen through the sense of, well, I'm over here, you're over there, and we're using language to talk about something that's not us. It's just like, what is pure beingness going to say to itself? And also, I guess I knew people just wouldn't, because you're operating through that delusion, they wouldn't understand what I was pointing to. I would just look weird. So it just never occurred to me to talk to anyone about it until adjacent things came up in conversation one day, and I was like, oh, yeah, I had this experience as a teenager. And then I just got this look of like confusion tinged with disgust, in terms of it sounds like you're a bit crazy, like, what's wrong with you?
Manda: Really? This was at Oxford?
James: Yeah. That was maybe just how my system read that expression. It definitely wasn't enthusiasm and curiosity. There was definitely a kind of like, yeah, that's weird, was the reaction.
Manda: That's so sad. But you must have since then met individuals who go, wow, yes, tell me more.
James: Well, my life now is about this. Yeah. And it's wonderful because I mean, what spirituality really is, is an opening I think. So I think that no reaction makes sense because it's a repression. It's a no, I know my stories, I know what's real, this is weird, I don't want to hear this. Because the other option is a yes, curiosity open, which takes you, if you keep going with openness, it takes you into every part of yourself, even the darkest corners. Especially the darkest corners. And so I understand why people would have a gut reaction of no, because if it's not being well held, then, you know, it's scary to to move in that direction of openness. But it's wonderful and it's the best thing ever. So to now my life, yes it's flourishing with these kinds of people who are passionate about this opening, this openness. And that's why I'm bringing this more into how do we hold space for more of this awakening, this opening, in the world. Because, as I say, I don't judge or think it was wrong in any way for people to look at me with disgust, because it serves a functional role if they're not being supported on the path.
Manda: Right. So how do we support people? That's the key question. Now let me take a step back. It feels to me that we're in the bus, heading towards the edge of the cliff of the sixth mass extinction. Turning the bus requires that we step into the non-dual naturalism concepts that you're talking about. That absolute bone deep awareness that we are not separate, that we are integral, that we have consciousness and we have agency and that we could choose to use our agency differently. Which is for me, it's both spiritual and there's that level of learning to heal the internal Civil War that Dick Schwartz talks about, which I don't think happens unless we have a spiritual understanding that the web of life exists and we are an integral part of it. If we continue with our sense of separation, I don't see how we heal. So for me, there's an expanding ripple from understanding that we are not separate, to being able to live as if we are not separate, to that shifting the whole of humanity. And how do we help 8 billion people to understand the non-duality of things? And what you're offering with your book and with the Inner Space Institute is a scientific grounding in spirituality. And it seems to me that for a lot of people, that's going to be a route in that they will be able to step into. And the hurdle then becomes wanting to do that. So I'm really curious to know how your book has landed in the scientific community. And then what are the practical steps that you feel you can help people to take, that will help them to step into this in a way that is held safely, so that it doesn't become something that you resist against.
James: Yeah. I think that's partly why I'm passionate about science, is because it's the opposite of the dogmatic thing of well just believe it because I say so and I'm an authority figure. It's showing you're working out and having some humility and openness to say, here's how it looks to me, and I'll try and piece together all the puzzle pieces. And if you tell me a puzzle piece isn't fitting, then I'll look into it and we can look into it together and it's fundamentally open and collaborative. And so with that kind of spirit of also just showing that it's not, you know, to the average person who dismisses this stuff as crazy, or say there's someone who's got some openness, but all their peers say it's crazy. If there's a scientist who can say no, look, here's how it fits together. And then they can say, well, this guy says it's not crazy. To me, I'm hoping that for some people, that's a route in to follow this stuff.
James: I mean actually the reception within science, I've been astounded by how positively it's been received. Because out of all those negative looks from my peers at Oxford, not all of them, I only said it a few times, but I think I'd internalised a sense that people don't want to hear this. Like, they'll just dismiss it as as woo woo nonsense. But in fact, I've been having very interesting conversations, very interesting proposals for things to come. So I think there'll be some exciting stuff to announce soon. So it looks like this is going forward in a significant way in terms of having an impact within science and philosophy. Rather than just being, I basically just assumed this is my offering to the world, no worries if people don't want to hear it. Like I get it. That was my energy around this. But it seems to have found the right people and the right resonances, which is great.
Manda: Just a moment. Who are the right kind of people? Because I live in a world where as soon as you open the doors, a lot of people, like easily 75% of people are desperate to be allowed to step through. They just think nobody else wants to go, so they have to maintain this kind of social. And are you finding the same that out there there are a lot of people you've given them the cover to step in.
James: I think that's what I've tapped into, exactly. There's a whole stream of people who are desperate to make things happen in this space, in this direction, and just need it to be worked out. So that's what I'm feeling is there's momentum and energy and there's an emergent field of stuff happening where this isn't going away, this kind of message about non-separation.
Manda: And is this in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy and are there other areas where it's landing also?
James: Mainly in the science side of things. The neuroscience. But the thing is, the way that I do it, the philosophers, you know, the people who I resonate with are already doing amazing work, so it's more about bringing the scientists, opening their mind to those things and piecing together the puzzles. And you mentioned the issue of how do we scale the holding of this stuff for people. And I think that's going to be something I think I'll dedicate perhaps the rest of my life to in terms of how do we how do we do that? Because that's not a trivial issue. And one thing I'll be doing is developing tools just to, on an individual level, to help people access this stuff more reliably. Using science to do that, to make sure it's not just here's what I think will work, but instead checking what works. But then I'm very interested in group community support models for this kind of thing, I mean, spiritual development coming out of suffering. Because I think institutions, there's a good quote from the theologian Paul Tillich which is "institutions are inherently demonic"and he included the church in that.
Manda: Fantastic.
James: And I think that's absolutely true, that on a very structural level, to exist at that tier is to create structures that impede the natural flow of human agency. So I feel like actually there's a there's a parallel with the way concepts work in this top down way. We were saying in the brain, where you create these brutal dividing lines like how Britain carved up places in colonies, just drawing a line on a map and it creates this huge rupture. I think concepts and institutions do the same thing where in this top down way, they chunk things up and then the connected, flowing, breathing like way it is to be a living agent gets disrupted. So I think, doing this through well, my doctor told me I need to do these meditations because it's been scientifically backed, sure that could be helpful for some people. But fundamentally we need to always put the power down to the base, down to people. And if we can build practices, guidelines for community holding of this stuff, I think that would be the truly transformative place that we could start to get into systemic change.
Manda: Why do you think this? Let's unpack this a little. Why is it that community works better than an individual just going off and sitting in a hut for a month and doing silent meditations every day?
James: Yeah. You can do the individual route. I was comparing it more to the kind of medicalized route, where an authority figure tells you to do something. I think, really a huge part of this path is agency, and as you were saying, non-coercion. I think basically that authority dynamic inherently taps into that lack of agency. So I think that's why invitations for people to step into their own empowerment, framing it that way and having decentralised communities that can hold that well just makes a lot more sense to me than prescribing. You know, my doctor told me to do mindfulness based stress reduction. Again, I'm not putting that down, that can be hugely valuable for many people. But I'm interested in what does this look like in its most optimal form? Which then does bleed into systemic change. And that's what it would look like to me. I mean, given the relationality of everything, it's just how we're already totally interwoven and interconnected with each other. And so it's more just being honest and truthful to that and trying to take the kind of the grown up route of owning the challenges that will come with that, because it's not easy, you know, to work in those spaces. But that's that's what I would aspire to for us.
Manda: Sure. I don't know how to frame this, but I'm thinking of Jamie Wheal, who's put quite a lot of his life into finding ways that are wholly accessible. So you don't need the money to go off and do a yoga retreat and that work. And he's come down to rhythm and dance and music, particularly in groups. Certain breathing, again sometimes in groups. And potentially, but with great care, the use of psychedelics, but probably not very often. And I've heard someone in his environment say everyone should do something once and that's it. And yet we live in a culture where people want to drop the tablets and everything will be fixed. And and we're seeing a real upsurge in 'psychedelics will fix everything'. And I know you have explored that route at least once, because you talk about it in the book. What are the cornerstones for you of helping people to open into a spiritual existence that feels authentic?
James: Yeah, so intentional psychedelic use, to access the kind of shadow stuff, that was a huge part of my journey. I used to think of that in terms of, perhaps my kind of male conditioning around autonomy, around independence and doing things myself was leading me to do something suboptimal, in terms of not finding as much of the relational healing as yeah, I guess this narrative thought maybe that would be more optimal. But actually now the way I look at it is I don't think psychedelics are often necessary if there is that relational holding, because people are ready to surrender the struggle and just let go into the present moment, if they feel well held and if they feel the wisdom of that. And it's the holding is rare and takes a lot of skill. And so I think effectively these plant medicines were, there was a relationship there between me and them in terms of they were holding something. I don't mean this in a supernatural way, I just mean in terms of the way I was using them as a an adjunct, as a helper to my process. And so I guess I see it now instead of an isolated individual, doing something by themselves with a tool, that there is some sense of relationality there. And it worked very well for me.
Manda: Yeah, but what they let you do was to let go when otherwise that was going to be hard. Is that what I'm hearing? And that it's possible for people to learn to let go in company. But then you have to trust. I mean, this is back to us being tribal individuals and in a healed and whole culture, the tribe of the human and the more than human world is there to create what Francis Weller calls the container for the encounters with death. And that when you get there, the container will hold and you know it will, so you can let go. And our culture doesn't have any of that trust, that we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable. So what I'm hearing is that the psychedelics were able to crash through the lack of trust into a place where it was possible to be vulnerable. Is that right?
James: Yeah. So I would say fundamentally there's a lot of repression because there's a lot of trauma. And so they allow the repression mechanisms to be disrupted. And there was relational holding of people in particular, supports, and also I arranged things so that I was in safe environments where I knew I was safe. So the kind of logic of this was allowing the challenging stuff to come up so that it could be overwritten with a sense of safety, in terms of like overwriting in the brain and the memories. And it's almost like I was orienting to having a bad trip in order to then come to terms with the fact that actually everything was fine in the present moment. And that was just my trauma history kind of bleeding into the present moment. And again, I'm not recommending or advising people to run off and copy what I'm doing, but there is a lot of information and resources out there about doing this stuff wisely. Yeah. So fundamentally it really felt on a physiological level, like my system was holding so much that it wasn't going to let go without a bit of something to kind of ease off the brakes a little bit, of the repression.
Manda: And do you feel now that with things like the Inner Space Institute, I noticed that you say all institutes are demonic, and yet you have called it the Inner Space Institute, which is kind of cool.
James: Institutions was the phrase, but yeah.
Manda: So were you trying to create it as an institution that is not demonic? Yes.
James: I hadn't made that connection. That's funny. I'll have to rename it!
Manda: I have it on the screen in front of me. Are people going to, do you think, is it an aim to be able to overcome the repression and just be able to find ways to crack the concrete around our hearts, in company with each other as part of how we choose to grow? Or do you think that our culture is such that some kind of plant medicine concrete breaker is an essential part of our evolution?
James: Yes. I think the last time we spoke, you said something about, I can't remember the precise language, but it was to do with how we need to be able to trust. But in order to trust, we need to be held. And but in order to be held, we need to have that trust. It's like a kind of a loop. And so I do think the wise holding, if that's there, then if you, if you had to choose one or the other, instead of recklessly throwing yourself into a situation where you're not sure you can trust it. If there's that foundation, I do think that's maybe where I would build out first. And in that situation, I feel like psychedelics may be less less of a necessity compared to a situation where you have individuals who are not supported, who feel fundamentally isolated. And so they need to just do this very contained encounter. But yeah, I guess I'm fundamentally open to it. I used to have a kind of a narrative that psychedelics were definitely the thing that would do it, or the thing that we needed to use. But now I guess I hold those narratives a lot more lightly. So I'm fundamentally unsure and open about the ratios there. But what we do know is we need both, I think. I do think some lubrication of this process through psychedelics is of great utility. And then we'll feel through the ratios wisely would be the way to do it.
Manda: And what else are you using at the Inner Space Institute? Because there seems quite a lot on offer and it isn't sit there and take mushrooms. What other aspects of life are you holding such that people can bring them into the evolutionary space?
James: Yeah. So the main thing that is offered there through the membership is really guidance on the awakening path, the path of surrendering to this present moment, not struggling with it. So I have a lot of guided practices, and as a community there as well. So it's really about kind of shedding the struggle with existence, there are different ways we struggle with existence. For example, even just holding rigid beliefs about, you know, this is the way the world is. That's the way of being closed to the evidence of what's going on. One of those beliefs in particular is the sense of self. That's the kind of the fundamental one that tends to make everything rigid. Emotional repression is another way we try and avoid feeling what's really here. And even distractibility. Just like believing your thoughts reflexively without seeing them as thoughts. This is the palette of what we're dealing with when it comes to kind of skilfully surrendering. Which is to learn how to notice, ah, in this moment I'm mistaking my thoughts for reality, or in this moment I'm repressing an emotion, or in this moment I'm constructing a strong identity. I think there are about six dimensions there, which I don't think there's too many to work with. So I've been fleshing this out into a model at the moment, which I think it's as simple as possible without being too simple, these six dimensions. So that's what I'm kind of building out, a version two now of the program there around this, to help people learn to come out of the struggle with existence and surrender into this present moment, which is what awakening contemplative development is all about to me.
Manda: Beautiful. And given that we're in the middle of a poly crisis, and for me, the felt sense of being an integral part of the web of life, which I think is my translation of what you just said, shifts how we are in the world. It shifts our energetic state in the world, and it shifts our actual behaviour, because you can't keep being part of an extractive, destructive, consumptive process if that's destroying things that are part of us. Are you seeing with the people that you're engaging with who are taking this on board and beginning to do the practices, what are the behavioural changes that are occurring? Are there any behavioural changes, and if so, where are they taking us? I'm really curious to know, ten years down the line, if everybody came and worked with this, can you see us in total systemic change? Is that where it heads?
James: So the kind of awakening stuff that I work with tends to lead people, if they take it on very seriously; the main impediment to this work is the inherently conflicted state of the human condition; that part of us yearns for peace and a lot of us is fearful about what that would look like and what that would involve letting go of. And that's the whole attachment piece. And so people will sometimes say they really want this, but it's clear they don't. Their foot's on the brake. You know, they're telling you they really want to drive forward, but fundamentally their foot's on the brake. So when this is undertaken seriously, what it looks like is relief from suffering for the individual. Ironically, not for the individual, because you're letting go of your sense of self, but it's more of like experience becomes a lot more fluid and free and unbound and your pictures and narratives about reality become less rigid. So that. And I think that extinguishing of the egoic struggle to me is the deepest layer we can work on. The thing that's pouring gasoline on the fire that also creates the fire in the first place, I think, is this egoic struggle, separation energy. So I think if everyone took this work on in a very non-linear way, it would diffuse our situation because it would just be a returning to sanity.
James: It would be a kind of coming out of this psychosis delusion state of just being a fearful, separate self who's alienated from existence. And say that happened tomorrow, and everyone just instantly completed, you know, the path, you would still have too much carbon in the atmosphere, you'd still have these problems, but then I assume we would just get together in sanity and go, all right, well, what should we do about this and start to build systems? So obviously we're not going to just wake up instantly like that, but I feel like the opposite, the gradual path, where because this path is about opening, if we just increase the level of opening instead of closing in the world, on an individual basis, to me that's what we have to be doing. And that's what we said before about the kind of the top down, inside out, no, I'm in my rigid beliefs versus being fundamentally open and responsive. And that takes us into the unity, the harmony, the the flourishing. So for me, that's what the path is, is that movement towards openness. And I think from that everything else flows.
Manda: Magic. Okay. That feels like a really good end place. We could stop there, but I am kind of aware that I didn't really give you space to flesh out your concept that consciousness emerges from life and that life and consciousness are an indivisible whole. Have you got a very brief how we get there?
James: Yeah, I touched into that a few times, but I'll give it a quick summary though, just so people feel they've really got it. The picture I showed before about how the brain works in terms of having beliefs or ideas or models about the world, and then comparing that with incoming data. That's a mainstream view in neuroscience about consciousness. And then really, it's become clear in recent decades that that is true of all living things, that they have to do that process. They have to interface, anticipate, predict, in order to have the agency they have. They need to be they need to be simulating the world around them, so they need to be doing this epistemic interfacing that we call consciousness or experience. And it's on a scientific level, that's the kind of core of the idea, is that the correlations we see between brain activity and experience are secondary to that process. Brain is in service of the living organism, just like every other organ. You know, like, clearly we have a heart. The heart isn't the CEO of the body, right? The heart is helping the body to survive. But we have this weird story about the brain that no, no, no, it's the 'me', it's the CEO of the body.
Manda: It's the computer that takes all the inputs and the outputs and makes sense of them. Yes.
James: And thanks very much, body, for being my power supply, but you're actually not very important. It's utterly the other way around. It's that we are a living process, and the brain is an organ that facilitates that. It facilitates the switchboard that allows the sensation to get mapped to action and to do all this other cool stuff. But it's not running the show. Reality's running the show.
Manda: And from a philosophical point of view, what I found really interesting was the going back and going back to the point where we're outside space and time and doing the kind of thought of if we live in a world where quantum physics is telling us that everything is both particle and a wave and everything is energy, what is energy? What is the consciousness of the energy? And from what does it emerge? And what I found very intricate and quite exciting was the understanding that gradually began to settle, that consciousness and life co emerge. And yet, and I still can't remember how you did it, because consciousness or life for me emerged quite a long time after matter emerged. And you managed to step through that one and I still can't remember how you did it. Can you talk us through the philosophical basis as well as the cognitive neuroscience basis?
James: Yeah. So the when it comes to that kind of quantum picture, I do think really what's going on in existence is, I mentioned that it's a kind of interdependent web or a relational unity or whatever you want to call it, but those happenings, those occurrences, those relationships, those interactions, they're not between genuinely separate, existing, substantial material things. You don't have two different particles that interact with each other. When a particle is observed, that interaction, the observation is the thing that weaves existence. Now, this is really hard for the mind to grasp, because we'd like to think of things in terms of separate objects. But this is the relational picture that's emerging. So it's a fundamentally empty relationality. And this points to things in Buddhism and Taoism, where the Dao or the fundamental ground of existence is some empty fullness, some void like potent blossoming, but fundamentally void. It's not a thing. I think that's really what's going on, always. And what we call the world is something of a collective dream within that. I don't mean that in a way to denigrate it or to negate it, but its nature is that it's interwoven from relationships. You know, I'm not a materialist or physicalist in the sense of there is actual solid substance. Reality is some insubstantial, interwoven, shimmering miracle. And I do actually say in the book, I'm a physicist of sorts, because that's to do with whatever the patterns are, we study and we call them matter. Fine. Like that's relevant.
Manda: I doubt if anybody listening knows what a physicalist is. I want to just read you a bit from part of the book that felt for me like on the philosophical side, the crux of everything. So you're quoting Sartre saying nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being. And you say: 'so we begin with truly nothing. At the heart of everything is truly nothing. What is the nature of true nothingness? Limits or boundaries cannot exist within true nothingness, so its nature is unbound, unconstrained, infinite. This is synonymous with pure potential, as in an infinite space anything that can happen will happen. At the bottom of existence, according to this view, is pure, unbound potential, empty of any inherent being in and of itself. What kind of events could happen in this space of empty potential? Given that it is non-finite, anything that could possibly happen will happen. In this way, non-being evokes being. Formlessness evokes form. Solid, stable forms would not be able to persist if they were grounded in non-being. But impermanent, insubstantial events or occurrences could arise in a relational manner.' And I spent quite a lot of time reading that out to Faith and going, okay, I think this is the crux. And the sentence that I thought was both brilliant and either/or a very clever sleight of hand was 'anything that can happen will happen in an infinite space'. I thought, yes, probably. I can't prove that it doesn't. That feels like everything hinges around that, and I'm not sure it's true. But I can't say why I'm not sure it's true, which means that's almost certainly my brain hitting a boundary. We're way over time now, but I'm really curious about this, just because I find the philosophy of this interesting. You've got to 'everything is nothing', basically, and if everything is nothing then anything can happen. Fundamentally that's what that was saying. Yes?
James: Yeah. So we're really in kind of speculative metaphysics here, and these are stories that, you know, um.
Manda: But that's exciting, James. That's the fun place.
James: Oh, no, I love this stuff, but I'm flagging it because this isn't the kind of thing a scientist is supposed to do, but I'm doing it. What I'm doing there, it really does feel to me like if you take seriously the idea that reality is empty fullness, being a non-being, everything and nothing, mutually two sides of the same coin; everything makes sense to me from there.
Manda: Hang on. Stop. Why do we take that seriously? What's the grounding for that?
James: In my phenomenology, that seems to be obvious now. It's just what it looks like. And other people have confirmed the same thing. You go deep on the contemplative path and so if you then take it as a possibility, you don't have to say it's definitely true, but then everything falls into line. And that's the signature of how science works, that's how perception works. It's like you never grasp reality and go, aha, I've got it directly. You vibe with it, you resonate with it, you come up with stories and the stories have cashed out by predictions coming true. So that's how I work with this and that's why you have to hold it lightly, because the story is never going to catch reality and go 'this is definitely the right way to say it'. So your hesitation around the infinite thing is probably really wise, because, you know, I had to use the word space there. And I'm not talking about a space, I'm talking about something that can't be languaged. True infinity.
Manda: We're back to the Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao.
James: Exactly, exactly. So there are limits in it. But what I'm trying to do with that story is say actually, I don't think it needs to be weird or truly inexplicable as to why reality should be the way it is. That I think we are in this empty happening of infinity. So what I'm saying is you start with nothing, but that nothing becomes or just inherently is an outpouring. It feels like love when you connect with it, because it's just utterly unconditional, generative giving. Because it has no way to not give, basically. So this is another way to language, this feeling of the generative potential nature of infinity. I mean, yeah, it's true that scientifically, if you just keep the clock running forever, if something could happen, my point there is like, okay, say something's got a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of happening, and then you run it a million times, then run it another million times and run it like, for infinity. It's going to happen. At some point it's going to happen.
Manda: To it's going to happen. Yes.
James: So that's the point I'm making there, is if it's possible for any flux and this isn't like, okay, you've got nothing and now you've got something. The relational piece is like, well, up is not down, you know, left is not right. Everything is cached against everything else. So you actually don't need an injection of anything else. It's just that I feel like we're in infinity and this empty flux of happening was birthed by this radical, unconstrained nature of nothingness. And it's not anything other than the nothingness, but it is also everything. So that's why all of this is just everything and nothing all the time. The dance of being/non-being, you know, the yin yang symbol; it's a unity and duality of it's not a true duality because it's two sides of the same coin. That story makes sense to me.
Manda: Okay, I have a whole bunch of other questions, but they would take us down rabbit holes that almost certainly nobody else wants to go down. So I think we should stop there because we're also way over time. James, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. I loved reading your book. If there's something else emerging from this that's coming up, then we can definitely have another conversation at some point and explore what that might be. At the moment, people can read your book, they can go to the Inner Space Institute. Is there anywhere else that they should find you to explore what you're doing?
James: Yeah. You can go to youtube.com/drjamescooke and you can find my YouTube channel, which has video versions of my podcast, Living Mirrors with James Cooke.
Manda: Oh yes, of course there's the podcast.
James: Yeah, those are the main things. If I've missed anything, you can go to drjamescooke.com, and that has links to all my stuff.
Manda: Yes. Well I will put up the The Apple Podcast for people who don't want to have to download vast quantities of video in order to listen to some audio. So yes, obviously you are a host of the Living Mirrors podcast, which is amazing and brilliant and wonderful. And yeah, definitely, there's some really exciting conversations worth listening to. Super, right, I will point everybody at those. They will be in the show notes, and we will endeavour to expand the people who have access to these ideas. In the meantime, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.
James: Thank you Manda. It's been amazing talking to you.
Manda: Well, there we go. That's it for another week. Huge thanks to James for everything that he's doing. For a book that is a genuine delight. I loved every page of it. For his podcast, which is well worth a listen, and for the Inner Space Institute for Non-dual Naturalism, which definitely, if you do want something that has that sense of secular spirituality, is well worth exploring. Anything that's grounded in the emerging processes of cognitive neuroscience has to be worth exploring. So there are links to all of this in the show notes. Please do go and explore. And if this speaks to you, then go into it more deeply. Being held, as James says, is what we need. Being offered grounding, being able to let go of the things that we may have held on to for all of our lives. For the things that we may be carrying that are collective and ancestral. This is the time when we are the people and we have to do the work. There is no other way forward. So please explore and see what works for you. And that apart, we will be back next week with another conversation.
Manda: In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website and the tech, and for doing all of the stuff behind the scenes, while preparing the thesis for her master's. Thank you. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to explore that rich, exciting place where science and spirituality and philosophy and mysticism all come together, then please do send them this link. And even if you don't, please do like us and subscribe to us on whatever is the podcast platform of your choice. It definitely helps with the algorithms. And that's us all done for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.