WEBVTT

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[Music]

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Rick Archer - Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.

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Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people.

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My name is Rick Archer.

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We've done nearly 700 of these now.

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If this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones, go to www.BATGAP.com and

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look under the past interviews menu.

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This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers.

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So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every

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page of the site and a page offering alternatives to PayPal.

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Also we have a team of volunteers doing a number of different things, proofreading transcripts

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of the interviews.

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Lately, people have been picking out shorts, which is like a little 60-second clips.

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So as you're listening to this interview or any other of the interviews, if you hear something

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that really piques your interest and you think it would make a good short, note down the timing

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of it. When it starts, when it ends, it has to be less than 60 seconds, and let me know,

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and we'll make a short out of it. Also, some people are making chapters, which is a thing

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that is very useful, I won't go into explaining it now, but if you'd like to volunteer in

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any of these respects, get in touch.

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My guest today is Ruth E. Kastner. Ruth is a physicist, she earned her MS in physics

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and PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Maryland.

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Since that time, she has taught widely and conducted research in foundations of physics,

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particularly in interpretations of quantum theory.

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She was one of three winners of the 2001 Alumni Research Award at the University of Maryland

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College Park, and she's the author of three books, The Transactional Interpretation of

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Quantum Theory, the Reality of Possibility, Understanding Our Unseen Reality, Solving

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Quantum Riddles, and Adventures in Quantum Land, Exploring Our Unseen Reality. She has

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presented talks and interviews throughout the world and in video recordings on the

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interpretational challenges of quantum theory and has a blog at transactionalinterpretation.org,

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which I'll link to from her Batgap page. She's also a dedicated yoga practitioner and received

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her 200-hour Yoga Alliance Instructor Certification in February 2020. So, welcome Ruth.

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Ruthie Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

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David It's good to have you. Now, you actually typify

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the reason I wanted to do this interview with you, which is that a lot of people are interested in

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both spirituality and physics. Now, unlike most of them, you really understand physics.

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And you know, your books are very interesting, but a lot of the material is way over my head.

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I have no training in physics, but I'm well aware, and I've done it myself and still do

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it, that people who are interested in spirituality often make reference to quantum mechanics or

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some other principle in physics to illustrate and hopefully substantiate some spiritual

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concept. So, I have a whole list of such spiritual concepts that I want to talk about with you,

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but before we get into that, let's just talk about you a little bit more. Have you been

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practicing yoga a long time and been interested in such things for a long time?

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Actually, I was into gymnastics early in my life. So, physical fitness is important to

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me and being kind of comfortable with my body, feeling like a unified being, both body and

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mind has always been really important to me. When I did the yoga training, it was kind of

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from a position of ignorance. So, I, you know, I'm kind of later in life, I thought, I think

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This is just something I want to...

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I was doing a little yoga and I had taken some yoga classes, so I wasn't a complete beginner,

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but I wasn't really, you know, the advanced level that you usually think of, a yoga teacher.

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But I thought, you know, it was a very welcoming course.

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I was living in upstate New York near Saratoga Springs at the time, and there was a studio

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that was very welcoming and they offered a teacher training course that didn't have formal

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prerequisites, and they just let you know, "Look, you know, this is going to be fairly

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demanding.

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broaden your yoga understanding, whatever we suggest. If you're not really a seasoned

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yoga practitioner, get into it. And it was very challenging for me and I really enjoyed

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it and learned a lot. And I got a little bit of a shoulder injury from overdoing it. So

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in a sense, I didn't quite have the prerequisites, but for me, it was a crash course and really

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fascinating fun. I learned a lot about the yoga philosophy, the Tanjali Sutras and so

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So it was a very good well-rounded course and just kind of fit into my general interests that way.

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Good. I was going to ask you actually if you had gotten into the philosophical

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dimensions of it and read Patanjali and all, so you just answered that.

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And I should say actually I was a long time TM practitioner. I'm a TM City, although I'm fairly

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lapsed in that regard. So that's one reason I was also interested in yoga and had been exposed to

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the yoga sutras through that program. Okay, yeah, I was a TM teacher. In fact, I used to teach all

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over New York State back in '72, '73. Interesting. I said it wrong, I said "ha." I'm not a "sid-he."

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I'm a "sid-ha." Yeah, I know what you mean. Me too.

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Okay, why don't you, keeping in mind the general educational level of our audience with regard to

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of physics, which is probably something like mine, pretty meager. Why don't you give us

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an overview of what your work has been all about and how you feel it dovetails with spirituality,

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if you feel it does?

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Okay, sure. Well, I actually got into physics, not a spiritual angle at all. My family was

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very agnostic and you might even say physicalist, materialist, scientist. So, my father was a

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solar physicist. Well, what I got from him was a fascination with light. He very kindly would

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expose his kids to things like he'd bring a spectroscope home. This is a little device

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that has a prism in it, it breaks up the light into the colors of the rainbow. And of course,

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that just grabbed me and I thought that was magical. So that was kind of my motivation

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in a sense for getting into physics. I did some other things, I did art and music, but

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I came back to physics, you know, I guess it's a family thing.

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But that was my motivation.

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I just thought light was fascinating.

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It grabbed me and I wanted to learn about electromagnetism, which is the field that underlies light.

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So in the course of doing my physics degree, I came across these quantum paradox, the non-locality

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and these kinds of issues.

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And then that sort of grabbed me.

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By the time I finished up my master's, I really wanted to learn more about that.

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And I discovered that in the philosophy department, they had this program called the Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science.

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And in that group, they were really studying what's called foundations of physics.

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So they were really focusing in on kind of what are the philosophical implications of quantum theory and these strange phenomena.

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phenomena, whereas the physics department was much more, you know, we want to do predictions,

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we want to test theories, and they weren't so much interested in the philosophical implications.

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So that's why I ended up in that area.

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It was in doing my PhD in that program that I came across the transactional interpretation

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that was originally proposed by John Kramer, and that grabbed me because I think that it

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It had this sort of intriguing backward in time character that seems very counterintuitive

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and yet seems to be very effective in deriving certain things like the rule for the probability

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of outcomes.

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In quantum theory, basically you have, it's called the Born rule, it's named after Max

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Born who was one of the founders of quantum theory.

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And it tells you, well, what is the probability that if you do a measurement of something you

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want to observe, it's called an observable, like momentum or spin or something like that,

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what is the probability that I'm going to get any particular result?

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So this rule is kind of ad hoc in the usual theory.

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Again, it's a thing that works, but people are not really sure where it came from, why

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do we have this rule, and so on.

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And the transactional interpretation had the advantage of explaining that rule in a theoretically

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substantive way. So even though it had what seems like, and I'm going to say what seems

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like backward in time effects, I thought, okay, well, look, if this is what it takes

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to make this theory make more sense and not be so ad hoc, maybe nature's trying to tell

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us something. That was kind of my feeling. So that's why I started to explore this transactional

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picture. So, with that as a kind of a place to start, maybe you have other questions?

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Rick Crammond Okay. And also the audience, we have about

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100 people on now, there'll probably be more. You can feel free to send in questions too

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about any of this. You know, you mentioned you were in the TM movement. Are you aware

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of John Hagelin?

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Dr. Deborah Taft Oh, yes, we've met. He participated in a

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conference in Los Angeles at, what is the name of the college, where a group of physicists at...

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Pete: The San Diego area? Manasseh Capital?

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Mary: No, it was LA, Chapman College.

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Pete: Chapman, yeah, that's where Manasseh Capital is.

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Mary: Manasseh, yes, he's a lovely guy and he, thank you, he organized a conference and John

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Hagelin was there and I was there, we, you know, a number of us presented some things. And I think

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your original question was, you know, what is the connection with spirituality, possibly? If you

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want, I can kind of try to... Well, yeah, I was going to ask him. First of all, I was John Hagelin's

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TM teacher when he was in high school and lying in a body cast in the school infirmary, but that's a

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whole other story. Oh my goodness! But he wrote an article years ago called, "Is Consciousness the

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Unified Field?" And he argued that he felt that there was an equivalence between the unified field

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those physics attempts to understand it, and consciousness as it's been traditionally understood

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in Eastern spirituality. So, you could use that as a springboard if you want.

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DG The issue of consciousness, I mean, ultimately, on a very ultimate level, one could certainly

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propose that, and I think it would be consistent with physical theory, so-called physical theory,

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you know, quantum theory. The connection, I think, with, I'm going to call it TI, transactional

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interpretation for short, as I've been developing it, is that properly understood TI, and actually

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standard quantum theory in a sense, really implies if we want to take a realist approach

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to the theory. In other words, if we want to say, well, this theory is describing the

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world. Okay. Quantum theory itself has this very strange mathematical structure, this

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abstract, complex, it's called Hilbert space. And it's clearly not a space-time kind of structure.

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So if we want to be realist about that, meaning if we want to say this theory is referring to

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something in the world, then that to which it refers is not three plus one real valued space

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time. That's just kind of a straightforward inference. So what we have then is the picture

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in which quantum theory is saying to us, like a finger pointing at the moon, it's like saying,

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"Okay, here's what I'm pointing to. You can either say I'm..." The theory's talking now.

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"You can either say I'm just an instrument for predicting what you're going to experience,

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or you could say that I'm reflecting the structure of reality. And if I'm doing that, then it's got

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a very strange sort of abstract structure that I view as possibilities, potent possibilities

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that truly exist at a level that goes beyond the space-time phenomenal level. So that you

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can kind of see an opening for spiritual pursuits in that, you know, people who are doing spiritual

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inquiry are entertaining concepts and experiences that clearly transcend our usual concrete,

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mundane space-time world. So, there's a parallel there.

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Rick Right, and so, you know, in the, let's say

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the Vedanta tradition, the idea is that consciousness is fundamental, and some would say the world

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arises from it. Vedanta would actually be a bit more radical and say the world doesn't

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to rise, it just appears to arise. They use the analogy of perceiving a rope on the ground

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and thinking it's a snake, and then you eventually realize it was only a rope. So, where did

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the snake go? It didn't go anywhere. There never was a snake. So, the understanding is

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that the universe is sort of a fabrication, which is ultimately illusory, and that it's

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actually all consciousness. This microphone, our bodies, everything else is just consciousness

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through some kind of perhaps self-interacting mechanism, appearing as concrete stuff.

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Symmetry breaking to the point where we have all this huge diversity out of total unity.

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Right, and that is exactly the picture that you get in the transactional formulation.

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I'll elaborate on that in a minute, but another issue that I'm dealing with is that

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the standard formulation of quantum theory actually is flawed in that it does not have

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this transactional character and that there's kind of a long story that goes with that that

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gets into some technical issues but if you want to put it in terms of yin and yang just

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to kind of get an overview of what's the deal here. Standard quantum theory inherits this

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Yang picture of the sort of Western autonomous Yang thing, you know, where Yang is like the

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initiating, creating process, whereas Yin is a receiving, responding kind of process.

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And the Western metaphysical approach does not know about Yin, does not see Yin. It sees

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only Yang. So its field theories are Yang theories. And in the Yang theory of field,

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formal quantum fields, you can never get this, what you just called, symmetry-breaking, crystallization,

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manifestation at the phenomenal level, which I would say is not illusory. It's just simply

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a different form of being. I'm kind of going off in a number of different directions here,

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but in the short answer there would be, there was a rope, something happened to transform

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that rope into a snake, perhaps, at a phenomenal level, but it could also transform back into

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a rope. So you have this sort of dance of quantum possibilities that really do manifest,

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create space-time events, create a phenomenon that's really there, in a sense. It has a

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physical counterpart, so it's not wholly subjective, but it's not the whole story, and it's not

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as concrete as we think. Right. We always hear that, "Oh, well, that which appears to be

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concrete is really 99.999999% empty space." In fact, I heard about some physicist who got

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a little bit mentally unbalanced, and he was afraid to walk across his living room floor

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because he was afraid he might fall through because he realized how empty everything actually

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is. Yeah, if you start thinking of the quantum

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possibilities, then the concreteness seems to vanish, and yet, paradoxically, and I make

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this point in my book, Understanding Our Unseen Reality, paradoxically, possibility is the

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strongest thing in the world because it's what keeps atoms stable. If we didn't have

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quantum possibility, everything would just collapse in on itself, there'd be no structure

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at all. So, it's an ironic thing, and if, you know, in an atom, the more you try to compress

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the electron so-called cloud, because this is the non-locality, this is the indeterminacy.

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The more you try to localize it, the harder it's going to push back on you. So, the physicists

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needn't have been worried. Possibilities will support you.

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Interesting. Let me understand a little bit better what you mean by possibility. I've

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often heard the idea of consciousness being an infinite unbounded field, which is a field

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of all possibilities, a kind of like an ocean of anything goes, all possibilities, and that

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as it manifests, the possibilities diminish, the more concrete or manifest the creation

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becomes, and eventually become very isolated and localized. Anything can happen in the

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field of consciousness, but a rock can only do so much.

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Right, right. Yeah, and one part of this issue then is that quantum theory, I would say, really can only address perhaps a subset of what we would consider this field of all possibilities.

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Quantum theory is not addressing my particular thoughts running through my head at any given time, like what should I have for dinner or something.

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As far as I know, there's nothing that quantum theory can tell us about that.

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So it's more of a restricted, I mean, what we would say is that Hilbert space,

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which is the structure of the quantum possibilities,

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refers to a subset of all possible processes.

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It just refers to specific things like the elementary particles with which we're familiar in physics.

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physics. So I think it would be kind of overstating physical theory. It would be overstating the

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parallel to say, well, physical theory refers to the field of consciousness and so on, because

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we don't really know that. I mean, it might, but there are very specific quantum fields.

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There are, you know, the fields that correspond to the electron and so on. So an electron

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isn't my thought of a purple rhinoceros. So there are many more conceptual possibilities

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in that totality than quantum theory can really address.

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A couple of questions came in from Elizabeth in Colorado. Let me just hit you with those

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and then we'll continue on. She's asking, regarding using quantum theory not only to

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predict experimental results but also to describe reality, what is your definition of reality?

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Well, insofar as physical theory is concerned, what I feel I've learned from studying quantum

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theory is that reality is, yeah, again, I use this image of an iceberg. There's a lot

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of it that's submerged, and then there's just the little tip sticking out. So in terms of

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physical theory, I think of it that way, that the whole iceberg is real, ontologically, meaning

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the term means, what exists, what really exists. I think that the tip of that iceberg represents

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that space-time phenomenal concrete realm of mundane reality, and the submerged portion

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represents these quantum possibilities, and those are completely real. They're just as real as,

00:20:13.980 --> 00:20:19.500
if not more so, than the phenomenal level. So that's kind of a physical term.

00:20:19.500 --> 00:20:28.500
Sometimes when I hear people say, "Well, the world is an illusion," the way I come to terms with that is that it doesn't mean that there's nothing there.

00:20:28.500 --> 00:20:40.500
It just means that we really don't interpret it properly, or we only, like your iceberg analogy, we're only sort of seeing the tip of it, and there's so much more reality to it that we don't comprehend or apprehend.

00:20:40.500 --> 00:20:47.420
Yeah, and here I think the online role-playing games, the MMORPGs, and I know about these

00:20:47.420 --> 00:20:54.180
because my daughters are both gamers, that's a wonderful analogy. And the analogy goes like

00:20:54.180 --> 00:20:58.620
this. The users are sitting in their houses with their, you know, computers and they've

00:20:58.620 --> 00:21:03.460
got their computer screen and that's their point of view, their POV. And they have an

00:21:03.460 --> 00:21:09.860
avatar that runs around in some environment in the game. But they are not their avatar.

00:21:09.860 --> 00:21:18.580
playing this game. Now the game POV is analogous to space-time. So it's important in that if

00:21:18.580 --> 00:21:23.420
your avatar is running around in some zone and you fall off a cliff, you know, your avatar

00:21:23.420 --> 00:21:27.180
is going to incur damage. And if you want to, if you have some goal you want to achieve,

00:21:27.180 --> 00:21:32.100
you know, you're going to be held back in your goal or in or so on. So it's kind of a

00:21:32.100 --> 00:21:39.500
user interface that allows you to get around and do stuff, but you don't really live there.

00:21:39.500 --> 00:21:43.100
I think of the space-time realm is the same way. It's a POV.

00:21:43.100 --> 00:21:46.540
Our brain kind of has a user interface with

00:21:46.540 --> 00:21:50.700
what we call space-time. And it's not that space-time

00:21:50.700 --> 00:21:55.260
is totally illusory. It's important. It's consequential.

00:21:55.260 --> 00:22:00.300
And it's a form of reality, but it's only representational.

00:22:00.300 --> 00:22:04.460
And it's a map. So it has the limitations of any map.

00:22:04.460 --> 00:22:08.700
It cannot show you the full territory. Yeah.

00:22:08.700 --> 00:22:13.820
You know how some people say that, well, the world gets created because we perceive it.

00:22:13.820 --> 00:22:21.340
And I think, well, wait a minute, let's say there's a tree. Now, a cow, a bat, a snake, a human,

00:22:21.340 --> 00:22:26.140
a dog, all these beings could be perceiving the very same tree. And obviously, they perceive it

00:22:26.140 --> 00:22:31.180
each very differently. But there's something there that doesn't depend upon their perceiving it to

00:22:31.180 --> 00:22:37.500
exist. Right, that's anti-realism and the fallacy in that. Now, somebody can be anti-realist if they

00:22:37.500 --> 00:22:43.240
want. But it's an option. It's not forced upon us. And a good way to see this is in

00:22:43.240 --> 00:22:48.260
terms of the allegory of the blind men and the elephant. And many times this is

00:22:48.260 --> 00:22:53.020
kind of what's driving that the anti-realist narrative is the idea that

00:22:53.020 --> 00:22:57.940
each of the blind men has a different theory about what they're dealing with

00:22:57.940 --> 00:23:02.660
and they erroneously conclude from that that there's no elephant. But I'm sorry

00:23:02.660 --> 00:23:06.820
there's actually an elephant there. You know, it's just that the nature of the

00:23:06.820 --> 00:23:14.840
elephant is such that it cannot fit into any particular map corresponding to the abilities

00:23:14.840 --> 00:23:20.200
of each of those blind men. So, in order to develop a theory about something, we need

00:23:20.200 --> 00:23:27.060
to perceive it, and our perceptions and our knowledge and our conceptual toolbox is perhaps

00:23:27.060 --> 00:23:32.520
limited. It doesn't follow that there's no elephant there. So that's a mistake. It's

00:23:32.520 --> 00:23:36.220
certainly there. The elephant doesn't need any of the blind men. It doesn't need any

00:23:36.220 --> 00:23:40.060
of their theories, it's perfectly fine. Yeah, sometimes I think with regard to this argument,

00:23:40.060 --> 00:23:44.060
I think, okay, does the moon exist because there are people around the world perceiving it? All

00:23:44.060 --> 00:23:48.140
right, well, what if everybody in the world suddenly went blind for some reason? Would the

00:23:48.140 --> 00:23:52.780
moon disappear? Oh, but you could still go to the ocean and stick your toes and feel the tide coming

00:23:52.780 --> 00:23:57.500
in. Are your toes creating the moon because you feel the tide coming in? Yeah. That's absurd.

00:23:57.500 --> 00:24:05.420
Now, the reason we got into that kind of silliness is because the standard theory cannot explain

00:24:06.060 --> 00:24:12.940
what a measurement is. It cannot explain the transformation of quantum possibilities into

00:24:12.940 --> 00:24:19.580
actualities. And again, that's where the transactional formulation helps, because it feels that, it

00:24:19.580 --> 00:24:24.900
says, fields are behaving in a different way. They're actually mutually responding. There's

00:24:24.900 --> 00:24:30.580
a response that's crucial. The yin element of field activity is crucial. And when you

00:24:30.580 --> 00:24:38.080
have that theory of fields, then the phenomenon of the moon is always there. It's like the

00:24:38.080 --> 00:24:44.420
elephant. The moon is always there. And the standard theory to kind of use this elephant

00:24:44.420 --> 00:24:52.480
metaphor cannot explain why anyone ever can see a moon. It can't really account for that.

00:24:52.480 --> 00:24:57.380
So it's just, oh, we have to have an observer. That's what we have to have an observer. And

00:24:57.380 --> 00:25:03.560
then we'll be able to get a result. We'll be able to say that the moon exists. But again,

00:25:03.560 --> 00:25:10.100
that's also to kind of conflate existence with the tip of the iceberg level. And so it's

00:25:10.100 --> 00:25:17.000
just this idea that Bohr fell into also. It's because the standard theory could not tell

00:25:17.000 --> 00:25:25.660
you what is it at the quantum level that gives a specific result at the space-time level corresponding

00:25:25.660 --> 00:25:31.740
to there's a moon there. That's probably kind of glossing over some technical things.

00:25:31.740 --> 00:25:34.300
But we got we got a gloss if we got too technical.

00:25:34.300 --> 00:25:41.420
Are you alluding to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle with a two-slit experiment where

00:25:41.420 --> 00:25:48.940
it becomes a particle once it's observed, which a lot of spiritual people interpret to mean that

00:25:48.940 --> 00:25:52.380
the world becomes concrete because we're observing it. I'm not sure that they're

00:25:52.380 --> 00:25:58.380
correct in making that assumption? Kind of, yes. I guess the better analogy here is the Schrödinger

00:25:58.380 --> 00:26:03.740
cat experiment, that the standard theory, that's actually an anomaly for the standard theory,

00:26:03.740 --> 00:26:10.940
because it's got this deterministic Yang only character that you get these superpositions at

00:26:10.940 --> 00:26:17.980
the quantum level, and if you don't have any specific process that tells you where your

00:26:17.980 --> 00:26:24.980
superposition ended, why you got one or the other, then the superposition propagates endlessly

00:26:24.980 --> 00:26:30.380
out to the macroscopic level and it's absurd. And then someone has to kind of go, "Okay,

00:26:30.380 --> 00:26:35.340
when a conscious observer comes along and opens the box, then that they collapse, that's quantum

00:26:35.340 --> 00:26:42.780
state." So that's just a band-aid. Resorting to the idea of a conscious observer is kind

00:26:42.780 --> 00:26:46.940
of a band-aid and it doesn't work because then you get this infinite regress of like,

00:26:46.940 --> 00:26:51.740
what counts as a conscious observer. Yeah, and how did we get a universe to begin

00:26:51.740 --> 00:26:54.340
with when it was probably billions of years before there could actually be

00:26:54.340 --> 00:27:00.260
sentient life? Right, exactly. This is the measurement problem, and so the

00:27:00.260 --> 00:27:06.140
measurement problem is sort of arriving at spirituality and consciousness

00:27:06.140 --> 00:27:11.660
through the measurement problem, I would say, is not the right way to get an

00:27:11.660 --> 00:27:15.740
implication from quantum theory, because that's like the defective form of the

00:27:15.740 --> 00:27:27.740
And in fact, I've written about and published papers on how the transactional picture very specifically and quantitatively tells you how a so-called measurement happens.

00:27:27.740 --> 00:27:36.740
The symmetry breaking, the crystallization, the transformation of possibility to actuality really happens in the proper formulation of the theory.

00:27:36.740 --> 00:27:43.740
So the hand wave to consciousness, it doesn't really work anyway because you can't define what counts as a conscious system.

00:27:43.740 --> 00:27:51.220
system. And, you know, you get into inconsistencies and flagrant failure if you do that. So, I

00:27:51.220 --> 00:27:57.460
think that the legitimate parallel is again to this idea that there are these two levels

00:27:57.460 --> 00:28:05.140
of reality. One is the more phenomenal level, and the other is the subtle level of possibilities.

00:28:05.140 --> 00:28:09.020
Now, let's break that down a little bit, and we do have another question from Elizabeth

00:28:09.020 --> 00:28:14.860
that I'm going to ask, but it seems to me that it's not either/or, it's more like a spectrum

00:28:14.860 --> 00:28:20.540
where there are subtler and subtler and subtler levels, which at least in terms of the consciousness

00:28:20.540 --> 00:28:25.020
model, I'm not sure how that would translate into physics, and then there's an unmanifest

00:28:25.020 --> 00:28:31.180
level which is beyond the subtlest. It's said in spiritual circles that in these subtle realms,

00:28:31.180 --> 00:28:38.300
we have astral and celestial phenomena, you know, ghosts or celestial beings or stuff that you can't

00:28:38.300 --> 00:28:42.220
see with the ordinary surface level of perception.

00:28:42.220 --> 00:28:46.140
And then there's the whole idea of, I don't know if this relates, I might be jumping here,

00:28:46.140 --> 00:28:50.580
but there's a whole idea of dark matter and dark energy which comprises most of the universe,

00:28:50.580 --> 00:28:53.240
which physics doesn't understand what that is.

00:28:53.240 --> 00:28:57.300
So I mean, I wonder if there's some corollary between the fact that our perception is just

00:28:57.300 --> 00:29:01.860
on the very surface of life most of the time, for most people, and there's so much more

00:29:01.860 --> 00:29:07.720
that we don't perceive, and in terms of the universe itself, we can only perceive a small

00:29:07.720 --> 00:29:11.920
fraction of what we know exists because we can't perceive dark matter or dark energy.

00:29:11.920 --> 00:29:17.120
We can only infer their existence from, you know, certain mathematical calculations.

00:29:17.120 --> 00:29:22.360
From the TM tradition, I remember, you know, the bubble diagram. Yeah, the bubble diagram.

00:29:22.360 --> 00:29:28.760
There we go. And I guess I would have to say that physical theory probably deals only with

00:29:28.760 --> 00:29:34.960
the very upper part of that bubble diagram. I would sort of take quantum theory. And again,

00:29:34.960 --> 00:29:41.420
I'm kind of not sure about this, but my sense is that that's a more manifest form of reality

00:29:41.420 --> 00:29:48.240
already so that I don't think that physical theory is even getting at these, what one

00:29:48.240 --> 00:29:51.600
might call the astral level or these much more subtler levels.

00:29:51.600 --> 00:29:58.040
So there may be this subtle gradation that you talked about, but once you get to the

00:29:58.040 --> 00:30:03.360
kind of systems described by quantum theory, there's a lot more structure there, even though

00:30:03.360 --> 00:30:09.360
know they're possibilities, they're not space-time objects. And at that point, what we have, at

00:30:09.360 --> 00:30:15.200
least what the theory seems to say, the transactional formulation seems to say, is that these are

00:30:15.200 --> 00:30:22.040
well-defined possibilities that exist, like the elephant exists, okay? They cannot all

00:30:22.040 --> 00:30:29.080
be phenomenally experienced by the five senses, but there's a specific process that transforms

00:30:29.080 --> 00:30:35.680
some of them into, again to use the game analogy, into something you might see in your POV.

00:30:35.680 --> 00:30:38.560
You know, "Oh, I just ran into that tree."

00:30:38.560 --> 00:30:43.560
Okay, well a particular possibility in the game program just got actualized for you.

00:30:43.560 --> 00:30:46.120
So that's really what we're dealing with here.

00:30:46.120 --> 00:30:51.320
I should say, as far as dark matter and dark energy, I have a publication with a colleague

00:30:51.320 --> 00:30:57.920
of mine where we argue that the positing of these substances, dark matter and dark energy,

00:30:57.920 --> 00:31:07.080
actually ad hoc devices that are based on weaknesses in the standard theory, the non-transactional

00:31:07.080 --> 00:31:13.680
standard cosmological theory that cannot explain, you know, certain things like galaxy rotation

00:31:13.680 --> 00:31:20.760
rates. And actually, if you take into account this actualization process that happens in

00:31:20.760 --> 00:31:28.160
in TI, you actually get a formulation of general relativity where you don't need to posit

00:31:28.160 --> 00:31:30.200
dark matter and dark energy.

00:31:30.200 --> 00:31:33.400
You get the phenomena that you see.

00:31:33.400 --> 00:31:38.440
It predicts these rotation curves that are deviating from the standard theory.

00:31:38.440 --> 00:31:43.360
So I just kind of need to point out there that the orthodox position is, yeah, dark

00:31:43.360 --> 00:31:47.400
matter and dark energy exist, but that's just a theory and it's just kind of those are ad

00:31:47.400 --> 00:31:51.960
ad hoc substances that are put out there because of anomalies in the standard theory.

00:31:51.960 --> 00:31:57.880
Rick: Very interesting. Wow. In my next life I want to be a physicist. Okay, let's get

00:31:57.880 --> 00:32:02.120
Elizabeth's second question in here and then we'll go on to other things. So, her question

00:32:02.120 --> 00:32:08.280
is, "How does non-locality coexist with Newtonian causal mechanisms? Is it related

00:32:08.280 --> 00:32:14.080
somehow to what we might consider miraculous events? Amit Goswami refers to two levels

00:32:14.080 --> 00:32:18.920
of causation, upward causation which aligns with materialist assumptions and moves from

00:32:18.920 --> 00:32:23.880
atoms to molecules to cells, and downward causation in which consciousness is seen as

00:32:23.880 --> 00:32:24.880
foundational.

00:32:24.880 --> 00:32:31.520
Well, non-locality really applies to that part of reality, the submerged portion of

00:32:31.520 --> 00:32:33.000
the iceberg.

00:32:33.000 --> 00:32:39.080
So you have in the possibilities, in the realm of possibilities, they are not limited by space-time

00:32:39.080 --> 00:32:45.120
because once again, that realm of possibilities is like the user playing the game in their

00:32:45.120 --> 00:32:46.860
house.

00:32:46.860 --> 00:32:53.800
They can put the game on pause, they can go get a cup of coffee and come back and then

00:32:53.800 --> 00:32:59.520
start interacting again as their avatar and do things that show up in the POV.

00:32:59.520 --> 00:33:02.760
So that's kind of how non-locality plays in.

00:33:02.760 --> 00:33:05.240
Give us an example of non-locality.

00:33:05.240 --> 00:33:10.380
that the thing where you could have two particles on the opposite sides of the galaxy and...

00:33:10.380 --> 00:33:16.500
So there's no actual space-time distance in quantum land, what I call quantum land. So

00:33:16.500 --> 00:33:21.400
you can have sets of what we call particles, they're not localized necessarily, so I don't

00:33:21.400 --> 00:33:25.360
like to call them particles, but just like quantum systems that are correlated, that

00:33:25.360 --> 00:33:30.880
are in a particular collective state, such that whatever sort of measurement is done

00:33:30.880 --> 00:33:37.280
on one of them has consequences as far as the kinds of probabilities of outcomes you're

00:33:37.280 --> 00:33:39.640
going to get on its partner.

00:33:39.640 --> 00:33:44.320
So you can have an experiment where you send these guys off to opposite ends of the galaxy

00:33:44.320 --> 00:33:48.680
and one experimentalist measures one of them and the other one measures the other one and

00:33:48.680 --> 00:33:55.360
they find these correlations that can't be explained in the usual local manner about what

00:33:55.360 --> 00:33:57.820
she called the Newtonian manner.

00:33:57.820 --> 00:34:03.780
So no, Newtonian physics cannot explain that. It cannot explain that at all, because it does

00:34:03.780 --> 00:34:12.300
not allow for really this level of possibility in which you have connections ongoing that

00:34:12.300 --> 00:34:17.460
seem to violate relativity theory that governs space-time phenomena, but they don't really

00:34:17.460 --> 00:34:23.540
because they're going on in the submerged portion. Only the tip of the iceberg, metaphorically

00:34:23.540 --> 00:34:25.500
speaking, is subject to relativity.

00:34:25.500 --> 00:34:31.000
Okay, so you're saying that the tip of the iceberg is limited by, let's say, the speed

00:34:31.000 --> 00:34:34.920
of light, and so there's no way that particles on opposite sides of galaxies are going to

00:34:34.920 --> 00:34:39.340
respond to one another in anything under a hundred thousand years time, but that there

00:34:39.340 --> 00:34:46.400
is a manifest or submerged reality which is not constrained by the laws of physics that

00:34:46.400 --> 00:34:49.840
operate on more superficial levels, such as the speed of light.

00:34:49.840 --> 00:34:55.200
Right, and in fact, the subtle point here is that these quantum systems are actually always

00:34:55.200 --> 00:35:03.640
in the submerged portion. Anything that has rest mass never actually comes out of this

00:35:03.640 --> 00:35:10.760
portion. What happens is you have specific interactions that give rise to events. The

00:35:10.760 --> 00:35:17.120
events are in the tip of the iceberg. So once again, it's like your cup of coffee remains

00:35:17.120 --> 00:35:23.280
in your house and your hands manipulating your mouse while you play your game. They never

00:35:23.280 --> 00:35:29.620
are actually in the game, they're not in the game environment. That's the parallel here.

00:35:29.620 --> 00:35:36.040
So what we call space-time is the structured set of happenings that happen in your user

00:35:36.040 --> 00:35:40.800
interface only. They're not happening in your house. There's nothing in your house corresponding

00:35:40.800 --> 00:35:47.280
to you running into a tree. There are phenomena. That's the only thing that's in space-time.

00:35:47.280 --> 00:35:54.280
Events. So there are events, but events are not the systems themselves. We usually think,

00:35:54.280 --> 00:36:00.040
"Oh yeah, everything's in a space-time container." But actually, no, nothing's really in a space-time

00:36:00.040 --> 00:36:07.600
container. Phenomena, events, phenomenal events, and they need not be seen by any particular

00:36:07.600 --> 00:36:10.880
entity, but they are still events.

00:36:10.880 --> 00:36:15.120
So they are events, but they are beyond space-time.

00:36:15.120 --> 00:36:20.680
That's the only thing space-time is, and again, ironically, what we call space-time has neither

00:36:20.680 --> 00:36:22.920
space nor time in it.

00:36:22.920 --> 00:36:26.760
It's just a set of events connected by photons.

00:36:26.760 --> 00:36:31.920
It's like a bunch of tinker toys, if you will, connected by light, and it's just a map.

00:36:31.920 --> 00:36:35.720
Some people could say, well, maybe it doesn't really exist in a sense.

00:36:35.720 --> 00:36:38.040
One could interpret it that way.

00:36:38.040 --> 00:36:42.120
I think of it as, yeah, there's a structured set of events, and that is what space-time

00:36:42.120 --> 00:36:43.120
is.

00:36:43.120 --> 00:36:51.720
only invariant thing about the space-time manifold, and Einstein said that himself. He said space-time

00:36:51.720 --> 00:36:58.080
is what he called point coincidences. That's all I mean when I say event. And the term

00:36:58.080 --> 00:37:04.520
space and time refer to our maps that we bring with us, they're like reference frames that

00:37:04.520 --> 00:37:09.600
we bring with us, like if I'm in my house, I'm like, I got my watch, okay. So in a sense,

00:37:09.600 --> 00:37:14.600
kind of a form of time that applies at the quantum level, and that corresponds to what

00:37:14.600 --> 00:37:20.000
we call proper time in relativity. But technically, I know I'm kind of throwing a lot at you,

00:37:20.000 --> 00:37:25.920
it's all in my books. What I'm talking about right now is discussed in Chapter 8 of my

00:37:25.920 --> 00:37:33.320
second edition, 2022 of my Cambridge University Press book. Chapter 8 discusses this, that

00:37:33.320 --> 00:37:39.480
the ironic thing is that what we call space-time, it's not a container, stuff doesn't exist

00:37:39.480 --> 00:37:45.800
in it, it's a set of events that's the only thing that's invariant about space-time. It's like it's

00:37:45.800 --> 00:37:50.760
almost not there. Just like your user interface, their attention is on it. Like all the players

00:37:50.760 --> 00:37:55.240
are like, "Oh my god, look, I gotta get that scarab beetle, I gotta do this, I gotta do that."

00:37:55.240 --> 00:38:00.040
And they're really into it. They're like, "But actually, no, none of your objects really exist

00:38:00.040 --> 00:38:06.680
there." Right. Which is reminiscent of the way some supposedly enlightened people have described

00:38:06.680 --> 00:38:14.600
their experience. The world is just this ephemeral sheen of faint remains of ignorance on the surface

00:38:14.600 --> 00:38:20.840
of a vast totality of consciousness. In fact, in Vedanta, they sometimes use the analogy that

00:38:20.840 --> 00:38:25.960
when you're totally ensconced in the world and not enlightened, it's like you have a big wad of

00:38:25.960 --> 00:38:30.280
butter in your hands. And then eventually you get enlightened and you throw off the butter,

00:38:30.280 --> 00:38:34.520
but there's still a greasy surface on your palms because you were holding the butter.

00:38:34.520 --> 00:38:39.560
and that's called "leisure video" which is said to mean "faint remains of ignorance" which is said to

00:38:39.560 --> 00:38:44.200
be necessary if you're going to live in the world. You have to sort of take the world somewhat

00:38:44.200 --> 00:38:50.520
seriously. Sure, it's consequential. Right, and you know, obviously it's more painful to

00:38:50.520 --> 00:38:56.760
go wrong in our reality than in a game, but it's a good analogy. If you think of enlightenment,

00:38:56.760 --> 00:39:01.640
and I don't know that this is, you know, I'm not enlightened, much as I'd like to be. I've had a

00:39:01.640 --> 00:39:06.640
a rough year and I'm dealing with a lot of challenges, but my particular user interface has really

00:39:06.640 --> 00:39:11.040
been a pain in the neck lately and I'm like, I'm really in there, I'm like, oh no, now this

00:39:11.040 --> 00:39:17.000
happened, oh my god, what do I, you know. Those events are consequential if you're playing

00:39:17.000 --> 00:39:21.860
the game. And now maybe we have a reason to play the game. Maybe we need to be involved

00:39:21.860 --> 00:39:25.980
in this particular game. But again, if you kind of notice, oh wait a second, I can put

00:39:25.980 --> 00:39:31.120
this game on pause and get a cup of coffee or whatever, that it's not the totality of

00:39:31.120 --> 00:39:36.600
reality. Yeah, I think when we put the game on pause and go get a cup of coffee is when

00:39:36.600 --> 00:39:38.600
we die and then get a...

00:39:38.600 --> 00:39:40.200
Or just meditate.

00:39:40.200 --> 00:39:47.240
Come back to your body. Yeah, meditate. In a way death because you transcend individuality.

00:39:47.240 --> 00:39:52.640
So you studied philosophy of science, which you know I find very interesting. I took a

00:39:52.640 --> 00:39:57.920
course in which we studied Thomas Kuhn's book for a month, was it the structure of scientific

00:39:57.920 --> 00:40:01.640
revolutions and paradigm shifts and all that.

00:40:01.640 --> 00:40:05.720
You said at one point in your book that the assumption that space-time encompasses all

00:40:05.720 --> 00:40:12.280
of reality is a stumbling block to the acceptance of the new scientific revolution or new paradigm,

00:40:12.280 --> 00:40:16.380
just as the experience that the sun and everything else orbits the earth was a stumbling block

00:40:16.380 --> 00:40:19.920
to the acceptance of the heliocentric model of astronomy.

00:40:19.920 --> 00:40:27.260
So a lot of people feel that the world is a mess because we have a fundamentally upside

00:40:27.260 --> 00:40:30.160
down understanding of reality.

00:40:30.160 --> 00:40:34.240
In fact, there's a guy I interviewed named Mark Gober who wrote a book called The End

00:40:34.240 --> 00:40:36.440
to Upside Down Thinking.

00:40:36.440 --> 00:40:42.560
And he basically presented all the arguments in favor of consciousness being fundamental

00:40:42.560 --> 00:40:47.400
and everything else being more epiphenomenon of consciousness rather than consciousness

00:40:47.400 --> 00:40:49.680
being an epiphenomenon of the brain.

00:40:49.680 --> 00:40:56.320
And I think you can extrapolate from this upside-down thinking to understand why the world has so

00:40:56.320 --> 00:40:57.840
many problems.

00:40:57.840 --> 00:41:01.660
We view the world as inert material stuff.

00:41:01.660 --> 00:41:08.080
We view people as being these transitory things and once the body dies, that's the end of

00:41:08.080 --> 00:41:10.460
it, you don't exist anymore.

00:41:10.460 --> 00:41:16.200
We don't see the intelligence that's shimmering in every little particle of creation.

00:41:16.200 --> 00:41:23.240
We think we can do anything to the environment as if it were just dead matter and not a living

00:41:23.240 --> 00:41:25.560
reality and so on and so forth.

00:41:25.560 --> 00:41:27.880
So that's the world we structure.

00:41:27.880 --> 00:41:30.440
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.

00:41:30.440 --> 00:41:35.800
And I think that a consciousness first philosophy or God first, if you want to put it that way,

00:41:35.800 --> 00:41:40.840
if you want to think of pure consciousness as being divine intelligence, if that were

00:41:40.840 --> 00:41:47.840
our orientation or perspective, we would structure all of our political, economic, business,

00:41:47.840 --> 00:41:52.320
environmental, agricultural, etc. systems completely differently.

00:41:52.320 --> 00:41:59.280
Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, clearly, you know, as you've laid out, our Western materialist worldview

00:41:59.280 --> 00:42:06.720
has dire social consequences, and in particular, you know, the Cartesian dead matter paradigm

00:42:06.720 --> 00:42:11.760
and Democritan atoms in the void just clunking around, you know, and that obviously there's

00:42:11.760 --> 00:42:18.120
no meaning in that. Obviously, if you want to have any sort of meaning in a metaphysical

00:42:18.120 --> 00:42:23.040
picture like that, you got to be ad hoc about it, you know, because your ontology doesn't

00:42:23.040 --> 00:42:30.080
support meaning. So yes, I definitely agree with that. And I think the other toxic element

00:42:30.080 --> 00:42:37.460
of that dead matter picture is again this Yang only, you know, along with the dead matter

00:42:37.460 --> 00:42:43.820
goes this Yang only idea where the only thing that's real, the only thing that counts, the

00:42:43.820 --> 00:42:50.500
only thing that's seen and the only thing that's significant is the tennis serve, the

00:42:50.500 --> 00:42:56.900
unilateral metaphorically speaking tennis serve, that one entity can unilaterally put

00:42:56.900 --> 00:43:03.100
stuff out there and do stuff in this autonomous way. And that's why we have the measurement

00:43:03.100 --> 00:43:08.740
problem in the standard theory that still isn't fixed because that's part of one of the core

00:43:08.740 --> 00:43:16.660
beliefs. If you have a picture of field interaction that involves yin, that sees yin, that makes

00:43:16.660 --> 00:43:23.060
yin, that allows yin to be in there, and it can be very easily be in there in the mathematics,

00:43:23.060 --> 00:43:27.240
And that's actually the most general natural approach to field theory.

00:43:27.240 --> 00:43:32.060
It's actually eliminated in an ad hoc way.

00:43:32.060 --> 00:43:35.920
Richard Feynman was one of the ones who did this, brilliant guy, but what he did was he

00:43:35.920 --> 00:43:41.440
said we're going to take these fields, I don't like this non-local character.

00:43:41.440 --> 00:43:47.080
He initially started with this great theory that would have worked, that is actually transactionally

00:43:47.080 --> 00:43:52.000
the basis of the transactional picture, and that was the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory.

00:43:52.000 --> 00:43:55.180
But then he decided he didn't want to work with that anymore.

00:43:55.180 --> 00:43:59.080
And then he got into this standard approach where he says, "We're going to impose causality."

00:43:59.080 --> 00:44:01.280
And God, I just causality hammer.

00:44:01.280 --> 00:44:05.900
And he said, "Okay, my field theory is now going to be causal because that's what I see

00:44:05.900 --> 00:44:07.400
in my user interface.

00:44:07.400 --> 00:44:10.320
It's going to be causal, darn it."

00:44:10.320 --> 00:44:15.200
And in a very ad hoc way, he created what's called the Feynman propagator that is now

00:44:15.200 --> 00:44:17.600
canon in field theory.

00:44:17.600 --> 00:44:18.760
And this is Yang.

00:44:18.760 --> 00:44:19.760
It's a pure Yang.

00:44:19.760 --> 00:44:25.260
"Okay, I'm just going to, in an ad hoc way, take out my causality stamp and say, 'This is the way fields work.'

00:44:25.260 --> 00:44:29.260
And now you have the measurement problem and, you know, you have stuff that doesn't work."

00:44:29.260 --> 00:44:35.760
So, before Feynman and, you know, people who thought that was a good idea and went along with him,

00:44:35.760 --> 00:44:39.760
and there's something about it that makes sense, but the ad hoc nature of it doesn't.

00:44:39.760 --> 00:44:45.260
But people thought, "Okay, well, we need to have this kind of propagator because we want causality.

00:44:45.260 --> 00:44:46.760
That's what we want."

00:44:46.760 --> 00:44:48.960
Nature's like, "Wait a minute, what about me?"

00:44:48.960 --> 00:44:50.540
And they're like, "Well, we don't care about nature.

00:44:50.540 --> 00:44:52.040
We want what we want."

00:44:52.040 --> 00:44:58.440
But if you look at the math, the most general solution is a non-local one in which charged

00:44:58.440 --> 00:45:02.440
particles are non-locally in communication all the time.

00:45:02.440 --> 00:45:07.120
And it's not causal in the Yang sense, in that autonomous Yang.

00:45:07.120 --> 00:45:09.200
Bucket brigade, I call it sort of a bucket brigade.

00:45:09.200 --> 00:45:10.480
It's not causal.

00:45:10.480 --> 00:45:16.380
But if you allow for that, and that allows this Yin component to enter where fields are

00:45:16.380 --> 00:45:21.740
actively kind of responding to one another and you can quantify that probabilistically.

00:45:21.740 --> 00:45:26.780
And if you allow for that, then you get an account of the transformation from, you know,

00:45:26.780 --> 00:45:32.780
your behind-the-scenes game stuff I'm doing as a user to, I got an outcome, I see an outcome,

00:45:32.780 --> 00:45:37.800
I can see why I got an outcome, I can quantify it, whereas the standard theory can't do that.

00:45:37.800 --> 00:45:46.640
And so the pathology here is wanting to not have yin, wanting to pretend as though reception,

00:45:46.640 --> 00:45:52.960
listening, responding, and annihilating, those are all yin processes.

00:45:52.960 --> 00:45:56.680
The standard theory wants those to not be there.

00:45:56.680 --> 00:46:02.520
If we allow them to be there, then we get all kinds of great solutions to our problems,

00:46:02.520 --> 00:46:09.200
And that's also kind of remedying this conqueror mentality, because what you just laid out

00:46:09.200 --> 00:46:15.760
with your question was this dead matter destructiveness, whoever dies with the most choice wins.

00:46:15.760 --> 00:46:18.760
And part of that is not seeing the other.

00:46:18.760 --> 00:46:20.680
Part of that is, what do I want?

00:46:20.680 --> 00:46:21.680
I'm all that matters.

00:46:21.680 --> 00:46:22.680
I'm autonomous.

00:46:22.680 --> 00:46:26.340
I can do whatever I need to do without anybody's help.

00:46:26.340 --> 00:46:27.720
Nobody needs to respond to me.

00:46:27.720 --> 00:46:29.800
I don't have to listen to anyone.

00:46:29.800 --> 00:46:37.880
this whole pathology and along with this goes misogyny, the sort of female, I hate playing

00:46:37.880 --> 00:46:43.080
a woman card, but I think Betty Kovacs in her books, Merchants of Light and so on, has made

00:46:43.080 --> 00:46:49.180
a good case for, you know, a lot of the pathology being the denial of yin. That, okay, you know,

00:46:49.180 --> 00:46:54.240
we don't have to be receptive, I don't have to listen to anyone, I'm being very yang now

00:46:54.240 --> 00:47:00.280
now kind of but it's just like Yin doesn't exist and now with what we see happening.

00:47:00.280 --> 00:47:04.540
It's kind of the Kali Yuga and Kali is kind of the ultimate Yin warrior.

00:47:04.540 --> 00:47:08.400
She's like, well guys, you tried to pretend like Yin didn't exist.

00:47:08.400 --> 00:47:09.880
Well, she's coming for you.

00:47:09.880 --> 00:47:10.880
Interesting.

00:47:10.880 --> 00:47:11.880
I've interviewed Betty Kovacs.

00:47:11.880 --> 00:47:12.880
I love that interview.

00:47:12.880 --> 00:47:13.880
And it was very popular.

00:47:13.880 --> 00:47:14.880
She got a lot of views.

00:47:14.880 --> 00:47:18.520
Yeah, she's right on target with that.

00:47:18.520 --> 00:47:22.880
It's a pathological neglect of, it's like a fear of Yin because Yin has this sort of

00:47:22.880 --> 00:47:26.240
the night, the darkness, and it's scary, maybe.

00:47:26.240 --> 00:47:32.880
Yeah, and it might seem unusual to people to suggest that these deep philosophical considerations

00:47:32.880 --> 00:47:38.820
could have such real-world consequences as wars and economic upheaval and wealth disparity

00:47:38.820 --> 00:47:42.680
and all these different things, but that's exactly what we're suggesting.

00:47:42.680 --> 00:47:48.280
All these surface problems are symptomatic of deep underlying mind states, really.

00:47:48.280 --> 00:47:51.120
The dysfunction, yeah, it's a dysfunction.

00:47:51.120 --> 00:47:55.000
I'm sure there are problems all over the world and Eastern cultures too.

00:47:55.000 --> 00:48:00.300
But, you know, personally what I see when I go out is the manifestation of the neglect

00:48:00.300 --> 00:48:01.300
of yin.

00:48:01.300 --> 00:48:06.020
I see parents out with their children and the children, you know, they're out in the

00:48:06.020 --> 00:48:10.740
marketplace and they're in the user interface, shopping or whatever, and the children are

00:48:10.740 --> 00:48:13.220
calling to their parents.

00:48:13.220 --> 00:48:15.160
And the parents are in yang mode.

00:48:15.160 --> 00:48:16.160
I want that.

00:48:16.160 --> 00:48:17.160
I'm going to do this.

00:48:17.160 --> 00:48:18.680
I'm going to get this.

00:48:18.680 --> 00:48:20.240
And they have no yin.

00:48:20.240 --> 00:48:24.040
They don't hear their child calling, needing their attention.

00:48:24.040 --> 00:48:27.360
They're not receptive, because we don't have to be receptive.

00:48:27.360 --> 00:48:28.600
That's what our culture tells us.

00:48:28.600 --> 00:48:33.400
We don't have to listen, we don't have to receive, and that creates a lot of subtle

00:48:33.400 --> 00:48:34.400
trauma and...

00:48:34.400 --> 00:48:37.840
So that's, I'm on my little soapbox now.

00:48:37.840 --> 00:48:38.840
That's okay.

00:48:38.840 --> 00:48:43.720
And you mentioned Eastern cultures, I mean, anybody who's been to the East and spent some

00:48:43.720 --> 00:48:49.560
time there realizes perhaps that although some very beautiful philosophies were born in those

00:48:49.560 --> 00:48:59.560
the actuality of what's going on doesn't necessarily reflect that wisdom. It's either been lost or it's never been applied or it's not being applied now or whatever.

00:48:59.560 --> 00:49:18.560
Sure, yes. But I think, you know, in those cultures they at least have some kind of ability to do things like wait and be passive, and it's not so taboo, you know, in Western culture it's sort of more taboo to be passive or to be viewed as passive.

00:49:18.560 --> 00:49:26.700
So, the yin is taken as weak passivity, and that's kind of a distortion that many times

00:49:26.700 --> 00:49:29.840
yin behavior is seen as weak.

00:49:29.840 --> 00:49:34.460
And I think that Eastern cultures generally don't kind of have that handicap that Western

00:49:34.460 --> 00:49:35.460
cultures do.

00:49:35.460 --> 00:49:38.620
They may have their own dysfunctions.

00:49:38.620 --> 00:49:44.680
What may seem like passivity might actually be an appreciation of the intelligence that

00:49:44.680 --> 00:49:50.000
orchestrates the universe and how things are not just arbitrary and random and accidental,

00:49:50.000 --> 00:49:54.160
but there's a wisdom in the way things unfold and you want to flow with that rather than

00:49:54.160 --> 00:49:56.760
just sort of butt your head against it.

00:49:56.760 --> 00:49:58.960
Of course, right.

00:49:58.960 --> 00:50:01.880
Let's talk about free will and determinism a little bit.

00:50:01.880 --> 00:50:06.840
You did a nice critique of Sam Harris's book and one of your books, and you used a term

00:50:06.840 --> 00:50:11.080
that I always use when I refer to this topic, which is wiggle room.

00:50:11.080 --> 00:50:14.500
And that is that we don't have absolute free will.

00:50:14.500 --> 00:50:18.640
I mean, I can't play basketball like LeBron James if my life depends upon it.

00:50:18.640 --> 00:50:22.260
But on the other hand, we don't have zero free will.

00:50:22.260 --> 00:50:25.280
We're somewhere in between with a certain amount of wiggle room.

00:50:25.280 --> 00:50:30.240
And in my opinion, the way we use that wiggle room moves us towards either greater freedom

00:50:30.240 --> 00:50:31.240
or greater bondage.

00:50:31.240 --> 00:50:38.280
Yeah, I definitely think that there is, I would not say, "Oh, I know we have free will."

00:50:38.280 --> 00:50:39.920
Like I wouldn't be dogmatic about it.

00:50:39.920 --> 00:50:45.720
I don't know for sure that we have free will, but what I argue is that the usual arguments

00:50:45.720 --> 00:50:50.040
that claim that we do not have free will are just not tenable.

00:50:50.040 --> 00:50:58.200
That's what I do with my discussion of Paris's comments, and what's unfortunate is that authority

00:50:58.200 --> 00:51:05.200
figures, neuroscientists and physicists and so on, make these categorical statements.

00:51:05.200 --> 00:51:10.760
They make these claims such as physical theory tells us we don't have free will.

00:51:10.760 --> 00:51:12.200
And that's a false statement.

00:51:12.200 --> 00:51:19.000
No, it's just simply whoever's saying that, you know, Professor X, Professor X's metaphysical

00:51:19.000 --> 00:51:24.480
assumptions together with his interpretation of a physical theory result in a conclusion

00:51:24.480 --> 00:51:25.880
of no free will.

00:51:25.880 --> 00:51:30.380
And what Professor X doesn't know is that so many of his assumptions are completely optional

00:51:30.380 --> 00:51:32.880
and almost certainly wrong.

00:51:32.880 --> 00:51:40.800
So it's just a real irresponsible kind of a form of, you know, this may be strong language,

00:51:40.800 --> 00:51:48.880
form of professional malpractice on the part of scientists to say things like that.

00:51:48.880 --> 00:51:52.720
Physical theory tells you you don't have free will, because it's abuse of authority in a

00:51:52.720 --> 00:51:53.720
sense.

00:51:53.720 --> 00:51:54.720
Yeah.

00:51:54.720 --> 00:52:01.000
It could be that people who ascribe to that attitude or that perspective have a vested

00:52:01.000 --> 00:52:08.960
interest because they don't want to believe in the existence of a jiva or a soul or something

00:52:08.960 --> 00:52:10.640
that's independent of the body.

00:52:10.640 --> 00:52:16.620
I was listening for quite a while to Sean Carroll's podcast, I think he's a physicist, and I remember

00:52:16.620 --> 00:52:21.000
hearing one episode where he was having a debate with B. Allen Wallace, who's a Buddhist

00:52:21.000 --> 00:52:22.000
teacher.

00:52:22.000 --> 00:52:26.520
In fact, I remember I was out shoveling snow while I was listening to this, and Sean Carroll

00:52:26.520 --> 00:52:32.360
made some kind of a statement like, just adamant that when you die, that's it, lights out.

00:52:32.360 --> 00:52:37.320
There's nothing after. It wasn't even like, this is my belief or my theory or I don't see

00:52:37.320 --> 00:52:42.440
any evidence for an afterlife. It was just like, boom, that's the fact. And B. Allen Wallace is

00:52:42.440 --> 00:52:45.880
like, what can I say to this? I mean, I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised when you

00:52:45.880 --> 00:52:51.800
die. But it's interesting how unscientific scientists can be. It's so dogmatic and it's

00:52:51.800 --> 00:52:57.020
It's against the spirit of science to be dogmatic in that way.

00:52:57.020 --> 00:53:06.720
The fact is that scientific theory has nothing whatsoever to say about anything that goes

00:53:06.720 --> 00:53:12.720
beyond what can at least be indirectly empirically corroborated.

00:53:12.720 --> 00:53:13.960
Where empirical is...

00:53:13.960 --> 00:53:16.080
Now here's where I go to the Flatland analogy.

00:53:16.080 --> 00:53:18.080
I think this might help us here.

00:53:18.080 --> 00:53:24.880
Flatland story by Edwin Abbott, where we have a bunch of geometric figures whose whole reality

00:53:24.880 --> 00:53:30.080
is a flat plane, a two-dimensional surface. And their sensory organs are, you know, are

00:53:30.080 --> 00:53:36.160
on their periphery. And the idea that there could be three dimensions is just hogwash to them,

00:53:36.160 --> 00:53:42.880
because they can't sense it. And their theories that they've devised seem to work well to

00:53:42.880 --> 00:53:48.080
corroborate their perceptions and predict things on their flatland plane. Well, then one day,

00:53:48.080 --> 00:53:53.920
this sphere comes in, decides to have some fun with flatland, and he does things that are viewed

00:53:53.920 --> 00:54:01.440
as very mysterious and non-local and can't be accounted for by the usual flatland theories.

00:54:01.440 --> 00:54:08.400
And in a way, that's really what quantum theory has kind of been doing, that if we interpret it

00:54:08.400 --> 00:54:15.840
in a realist way, that quantum theory is referring to, metaphorically speaking, space land, to

00:54:15.840 --> 00:54:23.120
another part of reality that, no, we can't, you know, poke it, no, I'm sorry, but indirectly

00:54:23.120 --> 00:54:29.760
we can manipulate things that seem to behave according to this theory. So, what Sean Carroll

00:54:29.760 --> 00:54:35.800
is basically doing, so if at least one can admit that there is an aspect of reality that

00:54:35.800 --> 00:54:41.000
doesn't fit into what you think of as your space-time container, meaning your flatland

00:54:41.000 --> 00:54:48.440
realm of perception, then we don't know what else might be out there in other areas of

00:54:48.440 --> 00:54:53.960
reality that we can't directly empirically corroborate. And now consider, suppose we

00:54:53.960 --> 00:54:56.600
have your Buddhist teacher, debating...

00:54:56.600 --> 00:54:57.640
- D.L. Wallace.

00:54:57.640 --> 00:55:01.640
- Okay, yeah, who's debating Sean Carroll, who, it's a woman, you said?

00:55:01.640 --> 00:55:02.760
- No, he's a man.

00:55:02.760 --> 00:55:28.760
He's a man. Okay. Suppose Wallace has had a spiritual experience. Well, we could model that. This is just hypothetical, you know, as say a sphere coming down and have Wallace's body be in flatland, perhaps a part of his body, maybe be in flatland and have the sphere coming down and touching him in his interior, then going back out.

00:55:28.760 --> 00:55:34.760
Sean Carroll is out there, he's a square, he's out there in Flatland, he didn't see anything.

00:55:34.760 --> 00:55:39.760
He can't do any experiment that can corroborate that that happened.

00:55:39.760 --> 00:55:45.760
But if our vision encompassed that, then empirically for us, we could say,

00:55:45.760 --> 00:55:49.760
"Yeah, we saw this, you know, I don't know, spirit dragon, whatever it was,

00:55:49.760 --> 00:55:55.760
come down and touch Wallace and go back out again and they can have a little laugh about it."

00:55:55.760 --> 00:56:02.760
about it, and Wallace had an authentic experience, internal, geometrically, you know, internal

00:56:02.760 --> 00:56:06.760
experience, and who is Sean Carroll to say, "No, that never happened"?

00:56:06.760 --> 00:56:07.760
Yeah.

00:56:07.760 --> 00:56:08.760
He can't say that.

00:56:08.760 --> 00:56:11.000
He has nothing to say about it.

00:56:11.000 --> 00:56:12.960
Just to elaborate on the Flatland thing a little bit.

00:56:12.960 --> 00:56:17.080
So Mr. Flatland is sitting in his living room, right, and a sphere comes into his living

00:56:17.080 --> 00:56:22.800
room, and all he sees is a circle, because he's in a two-dimensional world, but he can't

00:56:22.800 --> 00:56:25.040
see anything that has three dimensions like a sphere.

00:56:25.040 --> 00:56:27.360
So he's like, "Oh, look at this interesting circle."

00:56:27.360 --> 00:56:32.320
So he's kind of picking up on something is happening to his living room, but he doesn't

00:56:32.320 --> 00:56:38.640
have the tools, the perceptual tools or understanding to comprehend or perceive a sphere.

00:56:38.640 --> 00:56:43.280
And so it's a good analogy because there could be stuff all around us, angels and all kinds

00:56:43.280 --> 00:56:48.540
of things that are just outside the realm of our perception, and there might be indications

00:56:48.540 --> 00:56:53.660
in our world that they're there, but we ignore or misinterpret those indications because

00:56:53.660 --> 00:56:58.860
we can't perceive them. Right, we can't directly, they're not empirically available to us and

00:56:58.860 --> 00:57:05.300
those kinds of events, and I don't know whether angels exist or not, no angels ever contacted

00:57:05.300 --> 00:57:11.960
me, you know, but the point is, if someone has an experience, okay, suppose someone reports

00:57:11.960 --> 00:57:18.500
this little episode that I just concocted where a real sphere came down and just touched

00:57:18.500 --> 00:57:24.380
a flatland shape in the stomach went back out again so that only that one individual had

00:57:24.380 --> 00:57:27.100
that experience in an internal way.

00:57:27.100 --> 00:57:33.300
Well, it was not an empirical event at the level of flatland, so no one else can say,

00:57:33.300 --> 00:57:36.240
"Okay, that conforms to my scientific theory."

00:57:36.240 --> 00:57:40.660
But they also can't say, like Sean Carroll, "That didn't happen.

00:57:40.660 --> 00:57:42.340
He's overstepping his authority.

00:57:42.340 --> 00:57:43.820
He's speaking from ignorance."

00:57:43.820 --> 00:57:45.820
No, it's possible that someone could...

00:57:45.820 --> 00:57:48.820
I mean, he's a brilliant guy. I like listening to his podcasts, but still...

00:57:48.820 --> 00:57:57.820
But he's got metaphysical presuppositions that he takes as correct and not optional, and he doesn't know what they are.

00:57:57.820 --> 00:57:59.820
So he's not being scientific.

00:57:59.820 --> 00:58:07.820
Exactly. I mean, this is where philosophy is so important to science, and physicists often kind of like to bash philosophers, you know.

00:58:07.820 --> 00:58:14.820
But the fact is that, as I said elsewhere, physics was originally called natural philosophy.

00:58:14.820 --> 00:58:20.820
And you don't do physics without the discipline of philosophy in some form.

00:58:20.820 --> 00:58:27.820
Critical thinking, being aware of what your premises are, not dogmatically stating conclusions

00:58:27.820 --> 00:58:35.820
without taking into account auxiliary hypotheses and assumptions went into arriving at that conclusion.

00:58:35.820 --> 00:58:42.060
conclusion. And so if you do stuff like that, you are not being scientific. Suppose we have

00:58:42.060 --> 00:58:47.140
the statement, "If it is raining, then the grass is wet." Okay, there's a theory. Fine.

00:58:47.140 --> 00:58:52.700
Okay, now I go out and I see the grass is wet. Well, you can't say, "Okay, I know it's

00:58:52.700 --> 00:58:57.140
raining." No, I'm sorry, somebody might have had a water sprinkler on that's affirming a

00:58:57.140 --> 00:59:02.860
consequent. You can't do illogical fallacies and claim that you're doing science. And a

00:59:02.860 --> 00:59:07.860
lot of the time that's what we're getting. We're getting these kinds of careless, dogmatic

00:59:07.860 --> 00:59:08.860
statements.

00:59:08.860 --> 00:59:15.380
Right. And then of course, there's the whole political situation in academia where, I mean,

00:59:15.380 --> 00:59:19.700
it's getting more open now, but there were times where you couldn't barely mention the

00:59:19.700 --> 00:59:24.620
word consciousness without jeopardizing your career. So all that is very unscientific.

00:59:24.620 --> 00:59:31.380
I mean, that kind of attitude. Have you ever spoken to the Galileo Commission or the Scientific

00:59:31.380 --> 00:59:32.380
and Medical Network?

00:59:32.380 --> 00:59:34.380
Oh, Scientific and Medical Network, yes.

00:59:34.380 --> 00:59:36.380
Yes, David Lohmer and Bernard Carr.

00:59:36.380 --> 00:59:38.380
Yes, yes, I know them well.

00:59:38.380 --> 00:59:40.380
Yeah, I met Bernard at the Perry Center.

00:59:40.380 --> 00:59:43.380
They'd love to have you speak to one of their webinars.

00:59:43.380 --> 00:59:46.380
A few questions have come in.

00:59:46.380 --> 00:59:51.380
This one is from Hamza Al-Rashdan.

00:59:51.380 --> 00:59:56.380
What do you think is the role of the observer and observation

00:59:56.380 --> 01:00:03.380
in breaking out of the history and trajectory of an energy in the quantum field.

01:00:03.380 --> 01:00:09.380
The term observer is kind of ill-defined as it's been used in physics.

01:00:09.380 --> 01:00:14.380
And again, it sort of came in as a band-aid to fix the measurement problem.

01:00:14.380 --> 01:00:21.380
So, because the standard theory couldn't tell you what kind of interaction counts as a measurement,

01:00:21.380 --> 01:00:26.740
meaning what kind of interaction counts as something that can give an outcome.

01:00:26.740 --> 01:00:30.520
And so there was an appeal to an outside observer.

01:00:30.520 --> 01:00:35.900
And this is actually, you know, I've argued problematic and not necessary.

01:00:35.900 --> 01:00:41.540
So in a sense, that kind of use of the term observer is sort of neither necessary nor

01:00:41.540 --> 01:00:48.220
sufficient to do what people wanted it to do was to try to say, "Okay, why is Schrodinger's

01:00:48.220 --> 01:00:50.880
cat not in a superposition?"

01:00:50.880 --> 01:00:58.400
So in a sense, rather than observer, we need to sort of come to grips with what kind of

01:00:58.400 --> 01:01:05.400
process is it that crystallizes an event, that brings about an event.

01:01:05.400 --> 01:01:11.400
This is a very subtle issue and it gets into sort of technical issues, but again, the involvement

01:01:11.400 --> 01:01:13.800
of yin is critical.

01:01:13.800 --> 01:01:15.360
So these are processes.

01:01:15.360 --> 01:01:19.820
Now we call them quantum fields, and this might make someone wonder, "Well, what happened

01:01:19.820 --> 01:01:20.820
to consciousness?

01:01:20.820 --> 01:01:27.920
happen to the idea that we don't want to be physicalist and well, we don't have to assume

01:01:27.920 --> 01:01:34.660
dead matter in order to have these processes go on. So these processes are going on and

01:01:34.660 --> 01:01:39.700
they're dynamical, but there's a key element of yin, there's kind of a give and take and

01:01:39.700 --> 01:01:47.380
a mutuality among fields. And again, the theory itself can only say here are the conditions,

01:01:47.380 --> 01:01:53.880
like energy conservation, conservation laws must be satisfied and I have to have

01:01:53.880 --> 01:01:59.560
the right kinds of systems whose properties are compatible and so on. In

01:01:59.560 --> 01:02:04.400
those conditions all you get is a probability that at any particular time

01:02:04.400 --> 01:02:09.880
some kind of energy flow will happen, which means you get a real quantity of

01:02:09.880 --> 01:02:14.880
energy, a photon, going from one system to another. So it's kind of like a handshake,

01:02:14.880 --> 01:02:20.400
kind of like a manifestation occurs. But this is only governed by a probability.

01:02:20.400 --> 01:02:25.220
It's fundamentally indeterministic. So this is where there's room, like Rick said

01:02:25.220 --> 01:02:29.960
earlier, about wiggle room. This is sort of where we have room for volition and

01:02:29.960 --> 01:02:33.960
you know this might address the questioner's intent a little bit, that

01:02:33.960 --> 01:02:39.360
perhaps this is where volition can enter and arguably might even need to enter.

01:02:39.360 --> 01:02:44.520
That at some level nature says, "Okay, I want something to happen. We're going to

01:02:44.520 --> 01:02:50.040
transfer this energy now. So there's this symmetry breaking and that could really call for volition.

01:02:50.040 --> 01:02:55.000
Yeah, you quoted Freeman Dyson in your book as having posited that elementary particles like

01:02:55.000 --> 01:02:59.320
photons and electrons might actually have some rudimentary form of volition.

01:02:59.320 --> 01:03:05.880
Exactly, right, and you know I don't know that, but it's an interesting, and I have a paper on that

01:03:05.880 --> 01:03:11.080
that's fairly technical, you know many times people will say well you can't have volition or you can't

01:03:11.080 --> 01:03:16.640
you can't really have free will because then you'd be a slave to the quantum probabilities,

01:03:16.640 --> 01:03:22.560
even though there's indeterminism. But that isn't really true because the kinds of choices

01:03:22.560 --> 01:03:29.720
that complex organisms make are really not described by quantum states in any kind of

01:03:29.720 --> 01:03:35.680
one-to-one fashion. But anyway, that's a technical point. But indeed, you know, we can say, well,

01:03:35.680 --> 01:03:41.480
these atoms decided, "Okay, now's the time that I'm going to hand a hunk of energy to

01:03:41.480 --> 01:03:42.480
you."

01:03:42.480 --> 01:03:48.000
Those, at the level of the atoms, they are constrained by the probability law, but that

01:03:48.000 --> 01:03:50.960
doesn't mean that there's no volition.

01:03:50.960 --> 01:03:56.800
And in fact, you know, if you think about the idea of the principle of sufficient reason,

01:03:56.800 --> 01:04:01.840
that if you have a number of possibilities but no reason to pick one or the other, that

01:04:01.840 --> 01:04:03.560
nothing's going to happen.

01:04:03.560 --> 01:04:07.040
So then the only possible reason could be volition.

01:04:07.040 --> 01:04:11.840
So you know, under that kind of analysis, then you need volition for anything to happen at

01:04:11.840 --> 01:04:12.840
all.

01:04:12.840 --> 01:04:13.840
Interesting.

01:04:13.840 --> 01:04:17.600
Here's a question from Lydia John in London.

01:04:17.600 --> 01:04:23.400
Please, could Ruth say a bit more about what is meant by the transactional formulation?

01:04:23.400 --> 01:04:31.040
Yes, the transactional formulation is based on this so-called direct action theory of

01:04:31.040 --> 01:04:36.900
fields or the absorber theory of fields that was developed in the early 20th century by

01:04:36.900 --> 01:04:42.840
a number of people, notably Richard Feynman and John Wheeler, although there were others

01:04:42.840 --> 01:04:45.200
that were exploring it before them.

01:04:45.200 --> 01:04:49.000
And it basically involves, I mean, this is where we get a little bit technical and I

01:04:49.000 --> 01:04:55.520
want to kind of do it on a conceptual level, but it involves the idea that a charged particle,

01:04:55.520 --> 01:05:01.720
by a charged particle we just mean a particle that is a possible source of the electromagnetic

01:05:01.720 --> 01:05:08.240
field that underlies light. So that these charged particles are constantly connected

01:05:08.240 --> 01:05:15.440
to one another in this direct action theory by what's called a time-symmetric field. So

01:05:15.440 --> 01:05:20.920
this is very non-local connection. This is where we get the kind of yin component coming

01:05:20.920 --> 01:05:29.480
in, it's not this causal, autonomous Yang picture. It's a very mutual kind of relationship. It's

01:05:29.480 --> 01:05:35.680
very relational in a way, again, that Western metaphysics doesn't like. There's like an

01:05:35.680 --> 01:05:41.920
instantaneous relationality among all charges. So that's one feature of it. Another feature

01:05:41.920 --> 01:05:49.080
is that, you know, like I was mentioning before, under certain circumstances, systems can elevate

01:05:49.080 --> 01:05:57.220
basic relationality to what can be seen as a process of individuation, where there's kind

01:05:57.220 --> 01:05:58.220
of a response.

01:05:58.220 --> 01:06:03.880
So you have one system that has the potential to generate, give off some energy, and another

01:06:03.880 --> 01:06:07.380
system that has the potential to take up, to accept that energy.

01:06:07.380 --> 01:06:09.120
That's the yin component.

01:06:09.120 --> 01:06:16.640
And that this absorbing particle actively responds by generating another field that's

01:06:16.640 --> 01:06:21.240
time symmetric and the fields interact in such a way that they kind of reinforce each other

01:06:21.240 --> 01:06:28.340
in a wave-like way so that energy goes from the emitting quantity to the absorbing quantity

01:06:28.340 --> 01:06:32.240
and this ends up like a causal space-time process.

01:06:32.240 --> 01:06:37.960
So this is the emergence and it comes out of this transactional process and you don't

01:06:37.960 --> 01:06:43.180
get that, you know, in the standard theory of fields it models it as follows, an emitter

01:06:43.180 --> 01:06:45.640
gives off a photon.

01:06:45.640 --> 01:06:52.600
it. So there's no mutuality, there's no handshake, if you will. It's just assumed to be autonomous.

01:06:52.600 --> 01:06:57.320
So that's on a very conceptual level, that's kind of how I can relate what the essence

01:06:57.320 --> 01:07:03.840
is. I think my book, Understanding Our Unseen Reality, has a diagrammatic explanation of

01:07:03.840 --> 01:07:04.840
that process.

01:07:04.840 --> 01:07:10.960
Okay, thank you. Here's a question from Mila now in California. Can you please explain the

01:07:10.960 --> 01:07:17.280
basic significance of the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment and do the outcomes of this

01:07:17.280 --> 01:07:24.480
experiment support your interpretation of quantum mechanics? Well I have a paper on that experiment

01:07:24.480 --> 01:07:32.320
and it's entitled "The delayed choice quantum eraser neither erases nor delays" so unfortunately

01:07:32.320 --> 01:07:38.560
that's a really fun experiment that mainly highlights the non-locality in quantum theory

01:07:39.120 --> 01:07:47.120
But unfortunately, nothing is really erased and it's unfortunately been portrayed misleadingly.

01:07:47.120 --> 01:07:52.480
I don't know if I can get into enough technical detail here, but it's basically

01:07:52.480 --> 01:08:01.040
under the transactional picture, you get a clearer account of why you get certain outcomes.

01:08:01.040 --> 01:08:06.960
It's two correlated particles and one of them can do an interference effect or not,

01:08:06.960 --> 01:08:11.680
or collectively you get a bunch of hits and collectively they will either form an interference

01:08:11.680 --> 01:08:16.640
pattern or not and another particle is that particle's partner and they're correlated.

01:08:16.640 --> 01:08:24.560
And the transactional picture helps you understand why you get outcomes, but it's really standard

01:08:24.560 --> 01:08:32.000
quantum theory explains why you get what looks like erasure if you're not taking into account

01:08:32.000 --> 01:08:38.160
certain things. So that's kind of the best I could do for now. I can definitely provide my paper,

01:08:38.160 --> 01:08:42.160
you know, but it's not erasing anything. Nothing's being erased. There's nothing that's going back

01:08:42.160 --> 01:08:48.800
in time and erasing anything. It's a kind of a misuse of statistics to make that claim. The claim

01:08:48.800 --> 01:08:54.960
that things are being erased is to overlook certain things with the statistics. Let's say that Jesus

01:08:54.960 --> 01:09:01.200
actually walked on water and Saint Joseph of Cupertino and Saint Teresa of Avila and many

01:09:01.200 --> 01:09:06.720
many yogis in India actually flew in the air, and all these different cities that we hear

01:09:06.720 --> 01:09:10.560
about from just about every ancient culture in the world.

01:09:10.560 --> 01:09:14.960
Let's say those things really happened and theoretically could happen in this day and

01:09:14.960 --> 01:09:15.960
age.

01:09:15.960 --> 01:09:22.080
Do you have any idea what the physics underlying that would have to be?

01:09:22.080 --> 01:09:25.160
Not really according to the standard theory.

01:09:25.160 --> 01:09:32.100
I mean, I could say, in terms of our game metaphor, you could say, well, the game has a certain

01:09:32.100 --> 01:09:37.060
program that tells you what kind of zones there are, what the features of the zones

01:09:37.060 --> 01:09:42.200
are, how the avatars interact in those zones, how likely they are to sink into water when

01:09:42.200 --> 01:09:43.380
they fall into it.

01:09:43.380 --> 01:09:44.540
And those are the rules of the game.

01:09:44.540 --> 01:09:46.280
They're written into the software.

01:09:46.280 --> 01:09:52.980
And so I can kind of speculate that a hacker, somebody who is really good at the software,

01:09:52.980 --> 01:09:58.140
go in and say, "Well, my avatar, I can put in a little subroutine here and I can hack that

01:09:58.140 --> 01:10:02.560
and just change just the way the software works and my avatar can do that."

01:10:02.560 --> 01:10:09.500
So it's like from that metaphorical picture, it's kind of simple to see a consistent way

01:10:09.500 --> 01:10:11.260
to create those phenomena.

01:10:11.260 --> 01:10:16.860
However, the standard theory, it seems like they'd probably have to hack the rules, something

01:10:16.860 --> 01:10:20.060
about the probabilities for the standard theory.

01:10:20.060 --> 01:10:25.140
you know, I'm not sure how that would work, but you know, clearly you don't want to

01:10:25.140 --> 01:10:30.740
rule it out from the idea that the phenomenal realm is a statistically

01:10:30.740 --> 01:10:37.300
highly likely result of a lot of possibilities being factored in. And if

01:10:37.300 --> 01:10:42.700
someone is at a level where they have access to and can perceive the source of

01:10:42.700 --> 01:10:47.740
these possibilities, in the analogy being hacking the software, well sure, why not?

01:10:47.740 --> 01:10:52.740
I'm not sure whether the rest of us would see, "Oh my God, you just violated quantum theory."

01:10:52.740 --> 01:10:54.740
That I'm not sure.

01:10:54.740 --> 01:10:56.740
Hmm. Tell me what you think of this argument.

01:10:56.740 --> 01:11:04.740
If consciousness is utterly fundamental, if it is equivalent to the unified field as physics conceptualizes that,

01:11:04.740 --> 01:11:11.740
then in my understanding the unified field would contain in some latent or seed form all the laws of nature

01:11:11.740 --> 01:11:15.740
which eventually manifest and perform their functions.

01:11:15.740 --> 01:11:20.220
Well, if they're equivalent, then consciousness contains all the laws of nature, whatever

01:11:20.220 --> 01:11:21.700
they may be.

01:11:21.700 --> 01:11:26.500
And in terms of consciousness, we might understand them more as impulses of intelligence rather

01:11:26.500 --> 01:11:28.700
than as inanimate laws.

01:11:28.700 --> 01:11:34.660
But in any case, if there is this equivalence and one sort of masters the field of consciousness,

01:11:34.660 --> 01:11:40.100
as it were, knows oneself to be that and learns to function within that, then would it not

01:11:40.100 --> 01:11:45.700
be possible perhaps for that person to, well, as Jesus said when he calmed the waters, "I

01:11:45.700 --> 01:11:50.660
out on the boat. One of the apostles remarked, "Even the winds and sea obey him."

01:11:50.660 --> 01:11:51.660
Pete and Terry: Mm hmm.

01:11:51.660 --> 01:11:54.500
Pete: Because you could say he had mastery over the laws of nature.

01:11:54.500 --> 01:11:55.500
Terry: Mm hmm.

01:11:55.500 --> 01:12:01.460
Pete: And he did that not because he was the son of God, but because he was one with God

01:12:01.460 --> 01:12:06.260
and God contains all the laws of nature and you can function from that level, you can

01:12:06.260 --> 01:12:10.300
do all sorts of things that you can't if you're just off on some little end of the

01:12:10.300 --> 01:12:11.420
spoke of the wheel.

01:12:11.420 --> 01:12:30.420
Yeah, sure, and again, you know, in our analogy that would be like changing the software, the matrix, right? Like changing the matrix, you know, we all know Neo when he was like, "Okay, I see the code, I see the code, I could see the bullet, I don't need to have that bullet there."

01:12:30.420 --> 01:12:43.420
So yeah, I mean, why not? There's nothing that rules it up. I guess a hard-headed physicist would be like, "Okay, would I then have empirical violations of the quantum probability law?"

01:12:43.420 --> 01:12:52.420
Well, would you? I don't know. I mean, it'd be fun to test that, you know? And if you do, then you can say, "Okay, fine."

01:12:52.420 --> 01:12:57.620
then, as you said, what we call these laws are just sort of regularities that

01:12:57.620 --> 01:13:02.700
happen to apply at this sort of collective level. That doesn't

01:13:02.700 --> 01:13:07.220
necessarily mean they're immutable. Quantum theory is multiply confirmed.

01:13:07.220 --> 01:13:13.940
It's a very, very well confirmed theory and it's never been seen to be violated.

01:13:13.940 --> 01:13:18.500
That doesn't mean it's inviolable. I don't even think we have to consider

01:13:18.500 --> 01:13:23.700
violating it, like airplanes and birds might appear to violate the law of gravity, but

01:13:23.700 --> 01:13:27.780
actually they're just utilizing other laws which enable them to fly through the air.

01:13:27.780 --> 01:13:34.740
So it could be that yogis and people like that have mastered laws of nature which don't

01:13:34.740 --> 01:13:40.300
violate the known laws of nature, they're just using laws of nature that we don't commonly

01:13:40.300 --> 01:13:41.300
know yet.

01:13:41.300 --> 01:13:42.300
That could be.

01:13:42.300 --> 01:13:43.780
Yeah, that could be.

01:13:43.780 --> 01:13:44.780
Okay.

01:13:44.780 --> 01:13:48.820
We covered non-locality, we've covered the observer effect I think, and tell me if we

01:13:48.820 --> 01:13:54.060
haven't, then the holographic principle, that's a theory that states that all the information

01:13:54.060 --> 01:13:58.820
about a three-dimensional object can be encoded on a two-dimensional surface, and some spiritual

01:13:58.820 --> 01:14:02.500
people interpret this theory to mean that the entire universe is a hologram and that

01:14:02.500 --> 01:14:06.540
we're all interconnected in some fundamental way, which I believe we are, but I don't

01:14:06.540 --> 01:14:09.860
know if that means that the universe is a hologram.

01:14:09.860 --> 01:14:15.220
Do you think there's any correlation between the holographic principle as a purely mathematical

01:14:15.220 --> 01:14:19.220
theory and our real world experience?

01:14:19.220 --> 01:14:26.820
Well, interestingly, my co-author and I use the holographic principle in our paper on deriving

01:14:26.820 --> 01:14:32.820
a generalized form of general relativity, but we use it in a way that what's sort of

01:14:32.820 --> 01:14:39.300
contained in this inner environment is possibilities. And so the mapping isn't

01:14:39.300 --> 01:14:44.780
maybe the way it's usually thought of in terms of a holograph. It's more

01:14:44.780 --> 01:14:50.180
information about the possibilities can be kind of represented on the surface.

01:14:50.180 --> 01:14:56.420
But then we do get a transformation that's physically significant. It's not

01:14:56.420 --> 01:15:00.660
just an appearance thing, it's not illusory, it's a real transformation from

01:15:00.660 --> 01:15:07.660
the form of possibility to the form of actuality. So I guess in the picture that I'm comfortable

01:15:07.660 --> 01:15:13.420
with or the way I've used it, it wouldn't really be legit to say, well, the universe

01:15:13.420 --> 01:15:20.220
is a hologram, because I think that would take out a crucial aspect of the dynamical process

01:15:20.220 --> 01:15:27.020
where we really do have possibilities being transformed into actualities at the level

01:15:27.020 --> 01:15:32.740
of empirical experience, things that can be empirically corroborated. It's the mechanism

01:15:32.740 --> 01:15:37.460
by which we get a tip of the iceberg. So it has significance, and the tip of the iceberg

01:15:37.460 --> 01:15:43.480
is not a replacement for the submerged portion. They're not the same, they're both there,

01:15:43.480 --> 01:15:46.260
but they have different character, if you will.

01:15:46.260 --> 01:15:48.180
Rick Yeah. Okay, good. Actually, I'm glad you

01:15:48.180 --> 01:15:52.140
mentioned that tip of the iceberg analogy, again, because, you know, when we were just

01:15:52.140 --> 01:15:58.900
talking about siddhis or supernatural powers or abilities. Most people in the world are

01:15:58.900 --> 01:16:04.540
the tips of the iceberg, but a being, a yogi, a saint who could do those kinds of things

01:16:04.540 --> 01:16:09.740
that we've been discussing would be someone who knew the whole iceberg, who is aware of

01:16:09.740 --> 01:16:15.220
the whole iceberg, and who is familiar with all the laws of nature that superficially we

01:16:15.220 --> 01:16:19.780
interact with, all the more fundamental laws. I was going to bring up this analogy when we

01:16:19.780 --> 01:16:24.580
were discussing free will, but it kind of relates to this also. If you wanted to change the course

01:16:24.580 --> 01:16:29.460
of a river, let's say, if you're down at the mouth of the river where it enters the Bay of Bengal or

01:16:29.460 --> 01:16:34.420
whatever, you really can't do much. The whole river has run its course and so you're at the mercy of

01:16:34.420 --> 01:16:42.660
whatever it floats down, probably corpses and things, if it's the Ganges. But if you're up in

01:16:42.660 --> 01:16:47.540
Gangotri, you know, where the river starts, then according to the topography, you might be able to

01:16:47.540 --> 01:16:51.620
send the river off in a completely different direction because the whole river is downstream

01:16:51.620 --> 01:16:53.300
from you. So, it's kind of like that.

01:16:53.300 --> 01:16:54.820
Much more powerful at the source.

01:16:54.820 --> 01:16:59.940
Yeah, it's like that with thoughts, it's like that with our actions, if we're functioning

01:16:59.940 --> 01:17:06.500
from a causal or fundamental level, then we have tremendous leeway or leverage that we

01:17:06.500 --> 01:17:10.900
won't have if we're just stuck at the surface at the mercy of whatever bubbles up.

01:17:11.780 --> 01:17:18.060
Yeah, I love that. As a so-called law of nature, quantum theory, I think, is really operating

01:17:18.060 --> 01:17:24.340
very close to the surface. It's very near the mouth of the Ganges, so to speak. It's got

01:17:24.340 --> 01:17:31.740
a lot of statistical force behind it because it is so well corroborated. But again, I think

01:17:31.740 --> 01:17:38.020
it's not the tip, but it's very close to it. That's the way I see the analogy here. Such

01:17:38.020 --> 01:17:39.020
a strong regularity.

01:17:39.020 --> 01:17:47.020
Would it be fair to say that it deals with the world of the very small, but not necessarily the world of the very subtle? Would that be fair?

01:17:47.020 --> 01:17:55.020
Yeah, I mean, yeah, and I'm not quite sure how physically I would define subtle, but again, it does have very specific structure.

01:17:55.020 --> 01:18:07.020
So it's close to the level, you know, here's where Kabbalah might come in. My daughter happens to be very interested in Kabbalah, and she's always telling me about the Tree of Life, and there are like all these different levels of manifestation.

01:18:07.020 --> 01:18:13.540
And it could be that quantum theory is one of the spheres that's just very close to the

01:18:13.540 --> 01:18:15.020
concrete Malkuth Sephiroth.

01:18:15.020 --> 01:18:18.740
So, but I don't know much about that.

01:18:18.740 --> 01:18:23.540
David: By subtle, I would mean, we were talking before, astral and celestial and so on, where

01:18:23.540 --> 01:18:29.220
there could be angels or celestial beings and other things like that, which you wouldn't

01:18:29.220 --> 01:18:34.460
see with a telescope or a microscope or any gross instrument because they exist on a dimension

01:18:34.460 --> 01:18:39.600
which the gross can't necessarily tune into.

01:18:39.600 --> 01:18:41.360
This is an interesting idea.

01:18:41.360 --> 01:18:46.040
Could we think of the human nervous system as a scientific instrument?

01:18:46.040 --> 01:18:50.500
I gave a talk once at one of the Science and Nonduality Conferences about the mutually

01:18:50.500 --> 01:18:54.960
enriching potential relationship between science and spirituality.

01:18:54.960 --> 01:19:00.040
I think spirituality can benefit from science in that it can become more rigorous and empirical

01:19:00.040 --> 01:19:03.320
and less imaginative and fanciful.

01:19:03.320 --> 01:19:08.240
you really sort of want to know what's what, you don't want to go off on imaginal tangents.

01:19:08.240 --> 01:19:11.960
But on the other hand, science can benefit from spirituality in that the human nervous

01:19:11.960 --> 01:19:17.600
system is an investigative instrument, if you will, which possesses capabilities that

01:19:17.600 --> 01:19:24.400
no other man-made instrument has in terms of its ability to experience consciousness

01:19:24.400 --> 01:19:30.960
and also to experience all the subtle realms that exist between the gross world and the

01:19:30.960 --> 01:19:36.720
transcendent or unmanifest world. And I guess the question would be, could the

01:19:36.720 --> 01:19:42.360
human nervous system be used in a systematic way so that everybody's

01:19:42.360 --> 01:19:46.440
subjective experience could be correlated or corroborated in a way and

01:19:46.440 --> 01:19:50.760
not just be subjective experiences that could very well be imaginary and there's

01:19:50.760 --> 01:19:55.520
no way of determining it? I think there are people who are trying to do that. Ed

01:19:55.520 --> 01:20:00.160
and Emily Kelly are people who come to mind. They are interested in the

01:20:00.160 --> 01:20:03.760
paranormal and they are endeavoring to be very scientific.

01:20:03.760 --> 01:20:05.760
See the guy at the University of Virginia?

01:20:05.760 --> 01:20:12.160
Ed Kelly. I met him at Esalen and his wife Emily.

01:20:12.160 --> 01:20:13.560
I'm not sure.

01:20:13.560 --> 01:20:16.860
Could be. He works with Jim Tucker who does reincarnation stuff.

01:20:16.860 --> 01:20:19.660
There's three or four people down there who investigate these.

01:20:19.660 --> 01:20:20.960
Could be. It could be.

01:20:20.960 --> 01:20:24.760
I'm actually not sure about his affiliation and I think that's

01:20:24.760 --> 01:20:25.960
so important.

01:20:26.060 --> 01:20:39.060
But again, I see physical theory, physical science is properly restricted to the empirical realm, and that's both its power and limitation.

01:20:39.060 --> 01:21:02.060
And even if we have, like, to use a flatland analogy, a bunch of squares meditating and contacting spheres and they're all like, "Yes, okay, I got poked, I got poked," it still is not going to be an empirical corroboration because it's not going to correspond to the tip of the iceberg.

01:21:02.060 --> 01:21:18.060
It's tricky. I mean, what it means is that physics is very powerful by being able to predict stuff that happens at the tip of the iceberg, but it needs to be more humble when dealing with what's viewed as anecdotal reports.

01:21:18.060 --> 01:21:25.060
It can't just say, "Well, you said this happened to you and he said this happened to him and so on, but how do I replicate that in the lab?"

01:21:25.060 --> 01:21:32.020
lab. And so instead of being arrogant and smug about that, they need to say, "Okay, that constitutes a

01:21:32.020 --> 01:21:39.140
domain of inquiry that physics is not qualified to address, period." That's my take on it.

01:21:39.140 --> 01:21:45.060
There's a constraint on physical science. It's the empirical constraint. It's an advantage,

01:21:45.060 --> 01:21:50.980
and it's a disadvantage. It could be used like a bludgeon to say, "Look, you didn't give me

01:21:50.980 --> 01:21:56.420
a procedure by which I can corroborate your subjective experience in my lab. Therefore,

01:21:56.420 --> 01:22:00.580
go away, you're stupid, you know, and that's what a lot of physicists want to do and that's

01:22:00.580 --> 01:22:06.500
what they shouldn't be doing. Empirical means it can be experienced, right? No, it means third-party

01:22:06.500 --> 01:22:13.620
corroboration. Okay. It means it's got to be really fully manifest and that's the tricky part. See,

01:22:13.620 --> 01:22:19.780
so the analogy is in Flatland, suppose everyone in the room said, "Gee, I felt something, you felt

01:22:19.780 --> 01:22:27.780
something, but the spheres call the shots. And if they are operating according to some law that

01:22:27.780 --> 01:22:36.740
the Flatland domain doesn't know about, then it's not initiated by those experiencers and they can't

01:22:36.740 --> 01:22:41.380
say to some other squares who maybe wasn't participating, "Okay guys, well tell me what's

01:22:41.380 --> 01:22:47.380
your theory." And they can't. They can't say, "Okay, well stand here, we'll put up a laser."

01:22:47.380 --> 01:22:54.740
it wasn't up to them. Now maybe if they could gain access and say, "Okay, do this, eat this food,

01:22:54.740 --> 01:23:01.460
eat this mushroom, do a prayer to the West, then you'll feel what we felt." Maybe. But you know,

01:23:01.460 --> 01:23:07.300
that's not really a third-party empirical at this stage. But maybe it could be, you know, but

01:23:07.300 --> 01:23:12.260
not quite as concretely as science is accustomed to. But let's say the yogi or the Zen master,

01:23:12.260 --> 01:23:16.820
whoever is sitting there with a couple dozen disciples, and he says, "Okay, here's what I'm

01:23:16.820 --> 01:23:23.060
experiencing and you are not, but we're going to embark on a 10 to 20 year scientific experiment

01:23:23.060 --> 01:23:28.420
here in which I am going to lead you systematically to be able to experience the same thing I am

01:23:28.420 --> 01:23:35.380
experiencing and then we'll have a couple dozen of you who have empirically corroborated my experience.

01:23:35.380 --> 01:23:41.060
So he would be flying or something like that? Or whatever, even just experiencing enlightenment,

01:23:41.060 --> 01:23:44.060
you know, experiencing pure consciousness as its true nature.

01:23:44.060 --> 01:23:49.060
Physical theory would be like, "Okay, I'm glad you're happy."

01:23:49.060 --> 01:23:55.060
If there wasn't some phenomenon, physical science is about phenomena.

01:23:55.060 --> 01:23:58.060
Empirical physical science is about phenomena.

01:23:58.060 --> 01:24:02.060
If there's no phenomenon that can be third-party corroborated,

01:24:02.060 --> 01:24:04.060
then it has nothing to say about it.

01:24:04.060 --> 01:24:07.060
And it doesn't mean that it didn't happen at all.

01:24:07.060 --> 01:24:10.060
It simply means it's outside the domain of physical science.

01:24:10.060 --> 01:24:14.580
science. Now that doesn't mean we can't be scientific about it. We can be rigorous.

01:24:14.580 --> 01:24:19.620
The term scientific means more broadly than just physical science. We can be

01:24:19.620 --> 01:24:24.380
responsible psychologists, we can be responsible sociologists, we can be

01:24:24.380 --> 01:24:29.820
quantitative and document people's experiences, but it wouldn't enter the

01:24:29.820 --> 01:24:35.340
domain of physical science. Well, that's what I mean. Yeah, it is tricky, but it cuts

01:24:35.340 --> 01:24:40.780
both ways. I mean, that's why physical scientists do not have the authority, they do not have the

01:24:40.780 --> 01:24:45.980
standing to say, "No, you didn't have that experience and what you're saying is wrong,

01:24:45.980 --> 01:24:48.780
and it didn't happen." They don't have the standing to say that.

01:24:48.780 --> 01:24:53.820
The folks at the Large Hadron Collider say they've found the Higgs boson, and I believe them. I have

01:24:53.820 --> 01:24:56.140
no idea what the Higgs boson is, and I would have to explain...

01:24:56.140 --> 01:25:02.300
Well, that's also interpretation. Again, you know, they have phenomena, they have some data.

01:25:02.300 --> 01:25:06.860
That's the key. Do you have phenomenal data that everyone can look at? Okay, well, we've got some

01:25:06.860 --> 01:25:12.620
data. Now, by a bunch of auxiliary inferences, we conclude that we saw the Higgs boson. Well,

01:25:12.620 --> 01:25:18.540
are you, I don't know. I'm not going to dispute the data. You know, they've got third party data,

01:25:18.540 --> 01:25:23.740
but then again, the conclusions. But the vast majority of humanity has to sort of take their

01:25:23.740 --> 01:25:27.740
word for it and say, well, if they say there is, they found it, then maybe they found it.

01:25:27.740 --> 01:25:33.260
I don't know what it is. So, like that, I'm suggesting that the materialist scientists,

01:25:33.260 --> 01:25:38.060
if we flip the tables on them, would have to admit, if they were honest and open,

01:25:38.060 --> 01:25:42.860
that all these saints and yogis and spiritual people throughout the ages who say they've been

01:25:42.860 --> 01:25:46.620
experiencing this, that, and the other thing, and there's a lot of commonality between what they all

01:25:46.620 --> 01:25:52.940
describe, might actually be onto something that is as real as anything we study, but beyond our

01:25:52.940 --> 01:26:00.300
methods for studying things. Right, yeah, I agree. They can't just dismiss it. Experiences that

01:26:00.300 --> 01:26:06.540
don't result in third-party data of the kind you get, you know, with the colliders and so on,

01:26:06.540 --> 01:26:13.260
there's no third-party corroborated data. However, there's a preponderance of experiences,

01:26:13.260 --> 01:26:20.700
and that is a kind of data, but it's not physical theory data, but in a broader scientific sense,

01:26:20.700 --> 01:26:25.420
they can't just dismiss it. In other words, they can't dismiss it on the basis of, "Oh, you didn't

01:26:25.420 --> 01:26:31.340
give me any empirical data." They can't say, "Therefore, what you're saying is not a valid

01:26:31.340 --> 01:26:37.420
claim." They can just say, "Well, I don't believe you," but they can't invoke physical science as a

01:26:37.420 --> 01:26:43.180
reason to refute what you're saying. Let's take the example of dreams. Most people dream, and they

01:26:43.180 --> 01:26:47.500
know they dream. I mean, everybody dreams. Most people remember their dreams a little bit, at

01:26:47.500 --> 01:26:51.660
at least when they wake up, and we know that there are certain neurophysiological correlates

01:26:51.660 --> 01:26:55.540
to dreams, you know, rapid eye movement, certain brain waves and so on.

01:26:55.540 --> 01:27:00.500
It's a universal enough phenomenon that everybody accepts it, even though it's an entirely subjective

01:27:00.500 --> 01:27:01.500
thing.

01:27:01.500 --> 01:27:04.180
You know, I've never experienced your dreams, there's no way I could.

01:27:04.180 --> 01:27:05.180
What did Bob Dylan say?

01:27:05.180 --> 01:27:07.900
He said, "I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."

01:27:07.900 --> 01:27:14.820
But anyway, so like that, let's say that enlightenment was nearly as common as dreams are, and there

01:27:14.820 --> 01:27:19.220
certain physiological correlates to enlightenment, which I believe there are, certain brain waves and

01:27:19.220 --> 01:27:26.100
other measures, then it could be part of the zeitgeist, and it could be part of the mainstream

01:27:26.100 --> 01:27:33.140
human endeavor for gaining knowledge, and it's respected just as much as a physical scientist's

01:27:33.140 --> 01:27:38.740
findings are respected on the basis of which we can build bridges or send rockets to the moon,

01:27:38.740 --> 01:27:45.300
and so on. Yeah, it's definitely part of a scientific inquiry and can be and again

01:27:45.300 --> 01:27:50.380
I guess the point here is that physics is really a very limited kind of science.

01:27:50.380 --> 01:27:54.900
It's very powerful but also very tightly constrained in terms of what it can

01:27:54.900 --> 01:27:59.260
count as data and so on. So it's kind of in this tight little box but as a

01:27:59.260 --> 01:28:06.100
specialty science but definitely you can be scientific about these kinds of

01:28:06.100 --> 01:28:11.440
experiences. I totally agree with that. But it sounds like what physics does, or many

01:28:11.440 --> 01:28:16.080
physicists anyway, not all, is they're saying, "Well, if it doesn't fit into our

01:28:16.080 --> 01:28:22.320
box, it can't really exist." And that's a metaphysical choice to say that if

01:28:22.320 --> 01:28:28.440
something doesn't yield third-party corroborated data, then it is not real.

01:28:28.440 --> 01:28:33.720
Which is presumptuous. No, you didn't derive that from any scientific

01:28:33.720 --> 01:28:39.480
finding, you just decided to think it. Right? So it's an optional premise that they want

01:28:39.480 --> 01:28:42.840
to shove on other people, which is again a problem.

01:28:42.840 --> 01:28:49.920
Yeah. Okay. Moving on. Let me just throw a few of these things out and see if you feel

01:28:49.920 --> 01:28:55.960
like commenting on them. There's string theory, which some people who don't understand string

01:28:55.960 --> 01:28:59.600
theory used to argue that everything is interconnected.

01:28:59.600 --> 01:29:05.600
Well I think string theory is one of those theories that was explored to try to come

01:29:05.600 --> 01:29:11.960
up with solutions for problems that aren't problems in the transactional picture.

01:29:11.960 --> 01:29:13.960
I'm not sure we even need it.

01:29:13.960 --> 01:29:20.200
It's one of these things that was explored to try to surmount certain anomalies and weaknesses

01:29:20.200 --> 01:29:22.880
in standard cosmology.

01:29:22.880 --> 01:29:29.200
It's highly speculative and yeah, so I'm, I don't really, you know, beyond that I have

01:29:29.200 --> 01:29:34.760
And I should add that I think everything is interconnected, just from my own spiritual

01:29:34.760 --> 01:29:40.600
explorations, but what I don't want to do is use an example from physics which actually

01:29:40.600 --> 01:29:46.120
doesn't support my belief. I'd rather say, I can't think of an example, there are no

01:29:46.120 --> 01:29:47.360
examples or something.

01:29:47.360 --> 01:29:53.240
Well, quantum theory already does do that at the submerged level, especially in this

01:29:53.240 --> 01:29:59.960
direct action picture of fields, then literally certain kinds of systems, and maybe all systems

01:29:59.960 --> 01:30:06.360
depending on their properties, have a relationality that's intrinsic to them. And there's no definable

01:30:06.360 --> 01:30:12.920
distance or separation. There's no definable identity in a sense. So quantum theory already

01:30:12.920 --> 01:30:18.760
supports that picture. Earlier on you're using the game metaphor to suggest that we're like an

01:30:19.400 --> 01:30:24.280
an interface. Well, it's almost like the graphical user interface of a computer. There aren't

01:30:24.280 --> 01:30:28.880
actually little files on my desktop and all that stuff. It's all just zeros and ones,

01:30:28.880 --> 01:30:33.840
but we have an interface that we can interact with. And some people say they might reference

01:30:33.840 --> 01:30:40.120
Einstein's idea of time dilation to support this idea that time is really malleable and

01:30:40.120 --> 01:30:44.740
that in fact everything is simultaneous. I've heard a number of people say that all of our

01:30:44.740 --> 01:30:51.300
multiple past lives aren't actually past, they're simultaneous, but that we impose a linearity

01:30:51.300 --> 01:30:58.340
on the world and have this concept of time in order to function in this human reality that we

01:30:58.340 --> 01:31:03.140
find ourselves in. Well, I would say that in the transactional picture, and especially in the

01:31:03.140 --> 01:31:10.580
relativistic form, the only sense in which there is a concrete flow of time is at the tip of the

01:31:10.580 --> 01:31:16.300
iceberg. It's a process that happens, but again it's sort of at the level of the

01:31:16.300 --> 01:31:21.740
user interface and at the submerged level, at the level of behind the scenes

01:31:21.740 --> 01:31:27.420
of the users themselves, there's a form of time but it's more of a potential time,

01:31:27.420 --> 01:31:32.500
it's more of a vibration, it's like a pulse. It's actually the de Broglie wave,

01:31:32.500 --> 01:31:37.220
the so-called, you can look it up, but it's a quantum aspect to matter, it's

01:31:37.220 --> 01:31:42.680
the wave nature of matter. It's more of a pulse that it doesn't have a temporal direction,

01:31:42.680 --> 01:31:50.260
it's just a pulse that is the potential to define a temporal separation between possible

01:31:50.260 --> 01:31:55.240
events. So that's kind of where we are in the behind the scenes, quantum land submerged

01:31:55.240 --> 01:32:00.280
portion of the iceberg. So in that sense, it's a kind of an eternal now, but it does

01:32:00.280 --> 01:32:07.080
have this pulse that is the potential to manifest as a transaction and as, if you will, the

01:32:07.080 --> 01:32:14.240
rope turning into a snake. Mix metaphors here a bit. It's the skin of the snake. So the real

01:32:14.240 --> 01:32:19.620
snake is in there and it's changing. Things can change in quantum land. Things can happen.

01:32:19.620 --> 01:32:25.380
It's dynamical. But there's a point where the skin is shed. Those are like the events that

01:32:25.380 --> 01:32:30.060
are realized. Something's really happening. Okay, something happened. A piece of skin went

01:32:30.060 --> 01:32:36.060
off as if you will, there's like a record of a particular stage of the snake's existence,

01:32:36.060 --> 01:32:41.220
if you will. But that's not the snake. It's a phenomenon that the snake gave rise to.

01:32:41.220 --> 01:32:43.300
So I don't know if that addresses the temporal.

01:32:43.300 --> 01:32:48.860
Nathan: So are you saying that time as we experience it is just a concept that we can

01:32:48.860 --> 01:32:55.460
function within, whereas in the ultimate reality of things, what time actually is does really

01:32:55.460 --> 01:32:59.660
not resemble at all what we experience? Like, for instance, I've heard that...

01:32:59.660 --> 01:33:01.220
Dr. Anne: Yeah, at the phenomenal level, yeah.

01:33:01.220 --> 01:33:05.380
Nathan: Yeah, from the perspective of a photon, I've heard that there is really no time. It

01:33:05.380 --> 01:33:10.660
gets transferred from here to the Andromeda Galaxy instantly.

01:33:10.660 --> 01:33:16.940
That's right. Eckhart Tolle talks about now, the power of now. Well, in my picture, that's

01:33:16.940 --> 01:33:25.300
because systems are always in the now. So we're in the now and we experience a flow of time

01:33:25.300 --> 01:33:32.500
in that with our senses and so on, we experience events falling away from us. Events are actualized

01:33:32.500 --> 01:33:37.540
and they fall away from us. So we experience change. We experience change, but we are not

01:33:37.540 --> 01:33:40.740
the change. It's the phenomena that are changing.

01:33:40.740 --> 01:33:41.740
Right.

01:33:41.740 --> 01:33:46.220
You know, and I think that's all consistent with quantum theory. It's just that the standard

01:33:46.220 --> 01:33:51.020
approach doesn't want to go that direction, because they want everything to be kind of

01:33:51.020 --> 01:33:57.940
be Newtonian Yang only. And they also want to live in a space-time container.

01:33:57.940 --> 01:34:04.820
Okay, you know there's a guy, Nassim Haramein and others who talk about zero-point energy

01:34:04.820 --> 01:34:10.820
and you know we could power the whole society if we could come up with zero-point energy

01:34:10.820 --> 01:34:16.140
devices and so on and maybe the space aliens already have them or might give them to us

01:34:16.140 --> 01:34:17.140
and that kind of thing.

01:34:17.140 --> 01:34:19.340
What do you think about all that?

01:34:19.340 --> 01:34:24.280
Well you know zero-point energy is actually an artifact of standard quantum field theory

01:34:24.280 --> 01:34:32.160
and in the transactional formulation you don't have zero-point energy. You have force. Force

01:34:32.160 --> 01:34:37.700
is not the same as energy. This is a technical issue, but because of the way quantum field

01:34:37.700 --> 01:34:43.560
theory was developed, it's the bucket brigade local causal approach, and it has to posit

01:34:43.560 --> 01:34:49.320
certain systems that I think aren't really there. And these systems seem to have energy,

01:34:49.320 --> 01:34:53.280
it's like a mechanical tinker toy apparatus that's created to keep

01:34:53.280 --> 01:34:57.400
everything local. In the transactional picture fields you don't need any of

01:34:57.400 --> 01:35:01.520
that and you actually get all this correct predictions and you don't have

01:35:01.520 --> 01:35:07.120
zero point energy which is actually a problem and an anomaly for the standard

01:35:07.120 --> 01:35:11.480
theory because you know why can't we measure this it's kind of embarrassing

01:35:11.480 --> 01:35:18.120
but still there can be a lot of force so there's definitely something happening

01:35:18.120 --> 01:35:21.120
that's analogous to the zero-point energy.

01:35:21.120 --> 01:35:28.120
There's this continual interaction, this relationality, this direct interaction, but it's force.

01:35:28.120 --> 01:35:34.120
So energy is technically force transferred over a distance, or force acting over a distance.

01:35:34.120 --> 01:35:39.120
But in the direct action picture, there's force acting, but it's not acting over a distance.

01:35:39.120 --> 01:35:42.120
So it's like infinite force.

01:35:42.120 --> 01:35:44.120
So make of that what you will.

01:35:44.120 --> 01:35:46.120
Maybe it's powerful in some way.

01:35:46.120 --> 01:35:52.160
So speaking of space aliens, with your understanding of the sort of unmanifest realm and quantum

01:35:52.160 --> 01:35:58.000
objects within the unmanifest realm, can you conceive of the possibility of some technology

01:35:58.000 --> 01:36:05.600
which would enable beings to create some kind of interdimensional means of travel to cross

01:36:05.600 --> 01:36:09.960
hundreds of light years almost instantly or anything like that?

01:36:09.960 --> 01:36:14.400
You think there could be a physics to those technologies that a society a million years

01:36:14.400 --> 01:36:20.160
more advanced than ours may have mastered? Well, technically there are certain theorems that

01:36:20.160 --> 01:36:27.440
would seem to suggest that you can't exploit the quantum realm in that way, in that you can't,

01:36:27.440 --> 01:36:34.000
you know, there are definitely these non-local connections, but they can't be exploited to

01:36:34.000 --> 01:36:39.840
transmit energy. Now there are theorems to that effect, any theorem has assumptions.

01:36:40.560 --> 01:36:46.320
Now, if some of those assumptions turn out to not hold, then maybe it would be possible.

01:36:46.320 --> 01:36:50.560
I'm not good at imagining technology, so I'm not sure how much more I can offer.

01:36:50.560 --> 01:36:57.120
In principle, under quantum theory, it seems to suggest you can't, but again, it's sort of like,

01:36:57.120 --> 01:37:02.320
well, they said you couldn't fly, and we could, so I would never rule it out personally.

01:37:02.320 --> 01:37:07.600
There may be aspects we haven't thought of, and again, there may be these deeper laws

01:37:07.600 --> 01:37:12.720
that we don't even know about. Yeah, there was a conference down in Mexico some years ago,

01:37:12.720 --> 01:37:20.400
it was moderated by Dan Harris of ABC News and Sam Harris was there and he was debating Deepak

01:37:20.400 --> 01:37:26.640
Chopra and Gene Houston. I saw some of that. Did you see that? Yeah. And Deepak was spouting his

01:37:26.640 --> 01:37:32.240
physics ideas and so on and there was a guy in the audience named Leonard Mladenow. I remember that.

01:37:32.240 --> 01:37:36.640
Who challenged Deepak and they ended up becoming friends and writing a book together

01:37:36.640 --> 01:37:44.080
called "The War of the Worldviews." And I have a few summary points from that book that I want to

01:37:44.080 --> 01:37:49.440
bounce off you. There's five chapters in the book and they each focus on a different topic. One is

01:37:49.440 --> 01:37:55.120
the cosmos in which Deepak argues that the universe is a conscious being, while Maladna argues that the

01:37:55.120 --> 01:38:00.560
universe is a product of chance and necessity. What are your thoughts on that? I don't feel

01:38:00.560 --> 01:38:06.480
qualified to weigh in on that. That's really nice that they are collaborating in that way and having

01:38:06.480 --> 01:38:13.600
having this diversity of views. My sense is that volition is a fundamental part of reality,

01:38:13.600 --> 01:38:20.400
that we can't pretend like volition isn't in there. My own opinion, though, reality is

01:38:20.400 --> 01:38:27.280
fundamentally creative and creativity involves volition. In my opinion, if you don't have that,

01:38:27.280 --> 01:38:33.280
then things are kind of meaningless and we are just a row of dominoes falling down. I'd like to think

01:38:33.280 --> 01:38:39.200
there's intent and volition and creativity at the deepest levels. Yeah, actually Irene just passed

01:38:39.200 --> 01:38:44.400
me a note which is that if we don't wrap it up now the dogs aren't going to get a walk and we've

01:38:44.400 --> 01:38:49.040
been going for two hours. Oh we can't have that and I might get kicked out of this room very soon.

01:38:49.040 --> 01:38:53.520
So like as PT Barnum said we'll leave them wanting more. Okay.

01:38:55.680 --> 01:39:00.240
and take these things up another time. But it's been delightful talking to you, very stimulating

01:39:00.240 --> 01:39:06.800
conversation and it kind of makes me a little bit smarter by osmosis to talk to someone like you.

01:39:06.800 --> 01:39:12.720
Well, thank you. It's always fun. Great questions from you and the listeners and

01:39:12.720 --> 01:39:16.240
really appreciate the opportunity. So enjoy your dog walk.

01:39:16.240 --> 01:39:20.080
Yes, thank you so much Ruth. And thanks to those who've been listening or watching.

01:39:20.080 --> 01:39:25.280
My next interview will be with a fellow named Jem Bendel who has written a book called

01:39:25.280 --> 01:39:29.680
breaking together. I won't go into the details right now, but stay tuned. I think you might

01:39:29.680 --> 01:39:36.960
find it interesting. So, thanks Ruth. Okay, take care. Thank you again. You're welcome. Bye.

01:39:36.960 --> 01:40:00.680
Thank you.