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Going Beyond Einstein: Linking Time And Consciousness

This is day 2 of Essentia’s Time and Mind conference, our scientific discussion of the profound mystery of the passage of time and how it relates to consciousness. Many physicists maintain that the passage of time is purely a feature of mind, beyond physics itself, while others argue that it points to some new physical paradigm, perhaps associated with the marriage of relativity theory and quantum theory. Certainly, the status of time in any final theory of physics remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that a theory that encompasses time and mind will have to go beyond Einstein’s Block Universe. The possibility that physics may eventually accommodate and elucidate the nature of consciousness and associated experience suggests the need to address issues that are currently viewed as being on the borders of physics and philosophy. It also impinges on developments in neurophysics, cognitive science and psychology. So this is an interdisciplinary problem and this conference brings together experts in all the relevant fields. There are contributions from the physicists Bernard Carr, Paul Davies, George Ellis and Lee Smolin, the neurophysicist Alex Gomez-Marin, the cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, and the psychologists Jonathan Schooler and Marc Wittmann. Although the conference is organized by Essentia Foundation—which is associated with the philosophical tradition of Idealism—it covered a wide range of approaches. Our vision is to cover topics that are relevant to Idealism, but not to exclude alternative views from the conference. Timestamps: 00:00 General introduction 06:11 Bernard Carr- Conference introduction 17:15 Marc Wittmann - Subjective time during ordinary and altered states of consciousness 53:17 Alex Gómez-Marin - The consciousness of neuroscience 1:34:15 Paul Davies - The muddlescape of time 2:15:03 Julia Mossbridge - How do precognition and other perceptual anomalies shed light on models of consciousness, unconsciousness and time? 2:54:04 Panel discussion and wrap up Bernard J. Carr PhD, is the host and co-organiser of this conference. He is Professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) Marc Wittmann PhD, is a research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg. Alex Gómez-Marin PhD, is researcher at the Human Cognition and Behavior Scientific Program at the Instituto de Neurociencias (CSIC-UMH) in Alicante. Paul Davies PhD, is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist and director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. Julia Mossbridge PhD, is visiting scholar in the Psychology Department at Northwestern University and Associated Professor in Integral and Transpersonal Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Copyright © 2023 by Essentia Foundation. With the exception of archival footage under fair-use policy, all rights are reserved.

Essentia Foundation

6 days ago
The passage of time is a mystery we like to marvel at. And in our storytelling, we often do so with bullets. One of these bullets is like us to lean forwards through time. The other one's going backward. We like to fantasize about freezing, inverting and traveling time. And we do so because we know that ever since Einstein physics tells us that time is relative. Well, every hour we spend on that planet will be seven years back on Earth. That's relativity, folks. Now, the conundrum is that Einste
in’s theory of relativity perfectly describes how time is observer dependent. But what it does not describe is one of the most fundamental human experiences, namely the passage of time. Could it be that Einstein did not have a clear answer here because he did not take into account mind consciousness? I'm not claiming the time doesn't exist. I'm I'm simply saying that time does not flow. This is physicist Paul Davies, winner of the Templeton Prize. In his view, the passage of time and the arrow o
f time are an illusion. The arrow of time is not an arrow of time. It's an arrow of directionality, of sequences of physical states in time. To grasp this idea that there might not be an arrow of time that somewhat transports us from the past via the present to the future. It helps to take a look at a model. Neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge presented during our conference. We know that it feels like the top where people land on the moon and you don't know what's going to happen next. And then at
some point 911 happens and then you don't know what's going to happen next. And then COVID happens. And then, of course, flying cars. You expect that. We don't know if actually that will happen. We have another model, which is the sort of model of, I think, similar to what Paul was talking about, where all the events are there Like a landscape of time and human experience is moving across it. Okay. So if the passage of time is actually an illusion of mind, that would mean that consciousness is n
ot in time, but time is a construct in consciousness. Because the question is, is consciousness fundamental? From the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, quarks nucleons atoms, biomolecules cells, organisms eventually produce brains which produce consciousness. That's if you like. It's the culmination of complexity and that's the standard view. But there is another view which says that underlying everything there is consciousness with a big C. If indeed our brains located in spacetime do not produce
consciousness, what then is the relationship between our brains and consciousness? Because there clearly is a relationship. There's no doubt that thought depends on the brain. The question is the nature of that dependance. Now. 99.9999% of neuroscientists just don't know about that. There's only one option. The brain is productive, but there's another option, which is the brain is permissive. And this makes a whole different empirical and metaphysical route. This is Alex Gomez Marin, a theoretic
al physicist who became a neuroscientist, and he studies the so-called edge cases of consciousness. So I'm working with a blind man who can see Right, so what is that? What is that nonsense? Alex why don’t you do this on Sunday evening, you know. Well, so apparently some people can perceive information that doesn't come through the five senses. To account for edge phenomena like precognition, remote viewing, or something as strange as extra ocular vision that Marin is studying. It makes more sen
se to view the brain as a filter instead of a producer of consciousness. You can wonder if what's going on is that as your brain is becoming less irrigated, sometimes damaged, sometimes doesn't have enough oxygen supply or nutrients, whatever is going on instead of being a broken computer. Because when computers break, they don't create systematic, beautiful, rich, amazing experiences. So instead of being that, perhaps is that because the filter is being damaged now, more mind can flow through.
To see if a filter hypothesis off the brain and consciousness holds any water and how it might relate to our experience of time. It is interesting to take a look at altered states of consciousness. During the conference, neuroscientist Mark Whitman presented his research with a Buddhist monk. And we did actually fMRI study with him and where he got into such a peak experience while in fMRI. And we could show that during this peak state, he had a maximally decreased there was maximal decreased fu
nctional connectivity in the postural default mode network picture, which is very much related to the narrative self. So we interpret this as a loss of the narrative self during that peak state. In altered states of consciousness. There is a very interesting correlation between the experience of self and the experience of the passage of time. And in peak experiences, what people report again is no time, no self. This is day two of the Essentia Foundation Time and Mind Conference, during which so
me of the brightest neuroscientists, philosophers and physicists present their latest ideas on perhaps that most mysterious relationship in our universe, namely between time and mind. Now it's time to hand you over to the hosts of our conference, Professor Bernhard Ga, who did a wonderful job in navigating this big mystery of time and mind. Welcome to the second day of the Time and Mind conference. I am Bernard Carr and I will be hosting the meeting again. I will start off by giving a 10 minutes
introduction and I will not be giving exactly the same introduction as I did yesterday, even though, well, presumably the audience is not exactly the same. Today we've got four more talks and I'll be introducing the speakers before their their talks. I would also like to start off by thanking the essential foundation who who are hosting this meeting, Bex. In particular, Lisa and Kirsten, who have been in contact with the speakers and organizing the logistics of it. I also want to thank PJ P, wh
ich is the group which is actually supervising the, the videoing and actual recording, without which none of this would happen. And also I would like once again to thank Bernardo Castro, who is a friend, but he also invited me to to host and organize this meeting. And it's given me a wonderful opportunity to invite not only great experts on the topic, but also personal friends. So here is the program which you've already seen from the website. Obviously, we're today focusing on a lower panel. I
started off yesterday by stressing that time is an interdisciplinary subject which involves physics, philosophy, neuroscience and psychology and indeed parapsychology. And that's really what makes it so interesting because we brought together people who have expertise in all these different fields. Yesterday, we the focus was mainly on physics. We had three physicists, the philosopher, a psychologist. Today we're going to have a physicist, two psychologists, and at one neuroscientist. Now, I sho
uldn't give the impression that those are the only four areas which have relevance to time. I'm also quite interested in the insights into time that come from literature. We're not going to talk about that in this meeting, but I'd just like to highlight a wonderful article by Saul Codina on Time and Writers, and he talks about a variety of concepts sequential, time, disjointed, time suspended, time, anticipated time, circular time reversed time, alternate time, internal time and of time. I'm not
going to explain what all those different terms mean. I just want to indicate that literature can also give great insights into the topic because all of those concepts arise in literature. He gave his talk, incidentally, in a wonderful meeting on The Mystery of Time, which was hosted by the Bell Foundation just over a year ago. And actually, that meeting was important because that's why I met two of today's speakers, Now, I want to also emphasize that there are other topics which we are not cov
ering in this in this conference, because we only have two days. But I just thought it might be useful to to highlight these so you can investigate them further on your own if it's of interest. First of all, there's a whole link between physics and consciousness. There was a meeting on neuroscience needs a revolution to understand consciousness. That was just last August. All those talks were recorded. In particular, we heard a lot about the ideas of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hamer. Of that quant
um processes in the brain may relate to consciousness. There's also a lot of interest within the field in what is called integrated information theory, which is one model of consciousness. But another model is the go global neuronal workspace theory and Christof Kosh and Guido tannery of the people associated with those theories. And we're not going to be focusing on this possibly. Alex What about speakers who mentioned this? But but it's worth stressing though, because it is an important develo
pment if we're thinking about consciousness. In fact, this project, there was a project funded by the Templeton Foundation $20 Million Project, which was basically funding a comparison of these two theories by scanning the brains of participants during cleverly designed tests. Again, I'm not going to go into the details, but I think it's important to know about that. And also there's a whole link with information theory and consciousness. And I want to highlight the work of Federico Fajon on the
hard problem and free will. But again, we're not talking about that today, but it is areas that people in the audience can explore on their own if they so wish. Now, a lot of the discussion today is going to be on consciousness. Remember, the theme is the meeting is time in mind. So the causal emphasis on mind today. And it's worth saying that there are three views of consciousness among the scientific community. And when I say consciousness, of course, we heard yesterday how consciousness is v
ery much relates to mental time. So this is also, if you like, three views of time. The first view is that in fact consciousness is in some sense just an illusion generated by the brain. I think we heard about Daniel Dennett philosophy, where the consciousness is, where zombies. The second view is that it's real, but it simply isn't part of physics or science itself. Physics being a small part of science, if you like. So in other words, is physicists should not attempt to to expand physics or ac
commodate it. But there is a third view, and that is that in some sense physics can be extended so that it does accommodate consciousness. And I have to say, as you may have gathered yesterday, that's my own view, but it's probably not the majority view among physicists. And in particular, I want to highlight I think I showed this slide yesterday. This is the Galileo Commission report, which is advocating a sort of post material science where you're using the the approach of science, but you're
not actually you're going beyond the normal material world. You're considering the mental domain as well. And I myself, I shouldn't be plugging my own approach, but I myself yesterday talked about how you might do that. We know we amalgamate space and time into a space. Time is relativity theory. We amalgamate matter of mind through observation, which relates to quantum theory. So the question is whether you can have some unification of matter mind in space and time, which with bring everything
together. And that's my own personal dream and the dream of many other people. But of course, it's important to realize that if you go to do that, it will certainly involve an extended notion of space and time. In fact, myself and also Jonathan spoke about that explicitly yesterday. Now, I'd like to say a bit about consciousness, because the question is, is consciousness fundamental? Some people think it is. David Chalmers I propose that conscious experience be considered a fundamental feature i
rreducible to anything more basic. Is it relevant to physics? It may not be relevant to physics fundamental, but some physicists think it is. It's not possible to formulate the laws of physics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness of the observer. Eugene Vigna Is consciousness produced by the brain. 90% of 99% of neuroscientists obviously think it is. But here Stuart Kauffman, a biologist, nobody has a faintest idea what consciousness is. I don't have any idea, nor doe
s anybody else, including the philosophers of mind. Well, I want to stress a possibility which may not be mainstream, but we have heard references to it. Is there such a thing as consciousness with a big C, which is different from consciousness with the little C? The evidence for this comes from various phenomena which we don't have time to go through, but these are some nice quotes. Emerson There is one mind common to all individual and many universal minds. David Boehm, Physicist Deep down, th
e consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty. And if we don't see this, it's because we are binding ourselves to it. There's a nice book, actually, by Larry Dorsey which summarizes all the arguments. But if that's the case, if there is one mind, we have the question, Well, what's the relation? What's the point of the brain? And in this view, the brain is a filter of consciousness rather than the producer of consciousness. So here's a quote from Aldous Huxley. Each one of us is
potentially mind at large. But in so far as we are animals, our businesses all cost us to survive, to make biological survival possible. Mind it, knowledge has to be funneled through the reducible of the brain and nervous system. Now, this, of course, is at odds with the mainstream view, which is that the brain produces consciousness. But I think there is some evidence that is some sense. The brain is a filter. People have near-death experiences where they their brains are flatline, but they're
still very conscious and even experiencing more vivid reality psychedelic experiences. Savant syndrome. Terminal lucidity where people who've suffered from Alzheimer's suddenly become lucid before they die. So this is controversial, but it's. But it's very important. But I just that's the question. Does the brain produce or filter consciousness? And I want to focus on that question. I think it will arise today. And this is a picture I sometimes show the pyramid of complexity, showing how complex
ity builds up from the Big Bang 14 billion years ago Quarks, nucleotides, atoms, biomolecules cells, organisms eventually produce brains, which produce consciousness. That's, if you like, is the culmination of complexity. And that's the standard view. But there is another view which says that underlying everything there is consciousness with a big scene, the one eye. And in that case, that's when you have to invoke the filter theory, saying that consciousness actually is is the consciousness we
experience is just a fragment of that bigger consciousness. And I think that is now run out of time. So that's when I'm going to end my my introduction. And without any further ado, I now want to introduce the first speaker. And, Mark, can I have you have you in the screen? Wonderful. Mark, welcome. And also, you were here yesterday. So welcome again. Mark studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Freiburg, so you can see how he's bringing together two of our, our circles in my init
ial slide and at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, he received his Ph.D. and his habilitation at the Institute of Medical Psychology and AMU. And between 2004 and 2009, he was a research fellow at the Department of Psychiatry in the University of California at San Diego. Since 2009, he's employed at the Institute of Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg. He is the author of two books, Felt Time and Altered States of Consciousness. So is obviously very well qualifie
d to talk and I think I already mentioned that I was delighted to be seen for the first time at this meeting in Portugal last year. So, Mark, I'm delighted to invite you to give you a talk. Subjective time during ordinary and altered states of consciousness. Over to you. Okay. Thank you, Bernard, do you hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay, good. Okay. So that's what I want to be talking about today. And it's all about time. And first of all, some I will talk about time as the missing link in understan
ding phenomena of consciousness. And I will talk about some research on the extended present moment experience, which I think is very important in the context of this conference. And then I will talk about the embodied sense of time passage, giving my theory of how body signals inform us about the passage of time and duration. So the first two things basically relate to If we want to ask and understand consciousness, we need the time dimension and we need the body a source for informing us about
subject of time. And it will show how bodily self, the bodily self and time, a cool modulated, up and down modulated. And in the last chapter I will talk about timelessness and selflessness of altered states of consciousness where time and self might even nearly disappear in peak states. And I would talk a little bit about meditation, floatation, rest and psychedelics. So first of all, I'll talk about ideas. And Thomas Metzinger has really perfectly summarized and about consciousness, the body
on time. And this is basically the theme I will compliment empirically. And so he writes in this book being No. One but the bodily self, the continuous visceral proprioceptive input from the body, which is the basis for our mental self, is the functional anchor of phenomenal experience. And then Phantom of the Consciousness consists of an island of presence in the continuous passage of time related to what is happening right now. So we have the two aspects of freedom and of consciousness I just
referred to. It's now oneness, the feeling of knowingness I experience in the present moment is what Thomas Metzinger called ions of presence. So the psychological moment is extended, and I also experience this as a second part, the passage of time. And if you put A and B together of these statements by Metzinger, one could say the bodily self is the functional anchor of time consciousness. And I will first not talk about this present moment, this and how one could actually work on these or this
concept. So the meaning of presence, first of all, is just that the contents of consciousness are phenomenally present. Now our now ness is inherent in all our experiences. I see here feel and think at the present moment now, and also remember the past. And I anticipate the future within this extended window of presence. So the question is why is the experience present extended? So philosophers have dealt with this a lot and one could just say that experience of movement change, temporal order
are only possible in and temporal extended presence. So what's a shooting star of the night sky? If we perceive a melody, is the motive of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? Everybody knows or spoken language complement comprehension is all integrated into a whole for being able to understand or even the duration of the spoken word. Now, just even this has duration of 200 to 300 milliseconds. And so you have these extension models in philosophy. I just name some philosophers who work with these and mea
ning that acts and contents of consciousness of temporally extended. And I can refer to one paper I wrote as an empirical psychologist together with Moldau Alto from Rome, who is a philosopher. We try to juxtapose empirical research with these philosophical concepts. So this goes back, of course, a lot to Edmund Husserl, where who says in present moment experience as extended has traces of what has just happened he calls retention and what is anticipated, which he calls pretension. But this is a
ll within this window of presence. And a philosopher, Julian Cueva Stein know in Amsterdam, linked this time and self very nicely together that through this temporal structure of consciousness, the realization of a self emerges. I become aware of myself through memory of what happened to me and anticipation of what might happen to me. It's always time and self. And Husserl, interestingly, writes in his phenomenological phenomenology of inner time consciousness, but the temporal field is obviousl
y bounded, just as in perception. By and large, one can perhaps dare to state that the temporal field has always the same extension. And he even says, But this is not my interest. This which extension this field has. That's actually of interest for psychologists like me. So present experience is stressed over time and we as empirical researchers have to quantify this extension and ask how long is actually now what and nor to often limit two very important neuroscientists actually have a very nic
e summary on the different theories of consciousness. So I just highlight here that the three most cited, perhaps the predictive coding theory, the integrative information theory and the global neural workspace theory were not just talked about the introduction. And what I did with Lachlan came from Australia is that we did a summary of all these different consciousness theories and our conclusion was that the most dominant theories of consciousness only refer to brief static and discrete moment
s in time, and very few refer to extended dynamic and continuous time, which is actually associated with conscious experience. So time in this sense we conclude, is the missing link for actually understanding consciousness. So I won't go too deep into different facets of how to assess the present moment. Experience actions are quite difficult thing and there's not so much evidence, but it just highlights some things. But I think one could look into and there is some empirical evidence. So on the
right to see the Nicole Cube, which was actually prominently highlighted yesterday and in a few cases and what happens with the Naked You Tube with these ambiguous figures is that it switches between two aspects every two three, 4 seconds. So naturally it just happens to you. And there was interpretation, for example, by Pablo that this could reflect some sort of our present moment awareness. So so to say the brain asks every two or 3 seconds what's new, And then there's a change. And this coul
d basically reflect this temporal integration level, this present moment awareness. But I think the metronome is actually quite interesting paradigm. So if you just think about the metronome giving beats, regular beats. One, two, three, one, two, three. These, these integrated into which we listen to this one, two, three, one, two, three. Isn't there actually physically it's what our brain produces because the it's the, the intervals between the, the beats are always the same. But still we sort
of put into this physical input, this integration of two 3 seconds y two, 3 seconds because let's say if you if the is I between these beats of something like 1 seconds, you can really still hear one, two, one two and integrate them two into a whole over 3 seconds some so it starts to break down and from one we cannot integrate to a second beat and it still is like 111. So the integration capacity breaks together to two. It breaks down after 2 to 3 seconds. So these are some indications of how o
ne could access or empirically assess the present moment awareness. Okay. So this was just like giving an aspect of how one actually has to deal with the present moment experience. And it is inherently in our perception. But now I want to focus on the second part on passage of time and this embodiment of the passage of time where it said that the bodily self is the functional anchor of time consciousness. So first of all, just like textbook knowledge, we if we talk about time perception, we have
to differentiate between retrospective time perception. Looking back, and it's quite clear that it's all about memory contents and the amount of changing experiences. So the more activities we have stored in memory over a certain time span, when we look back, the longer it feels so routine, for example, is into total time killer because as much not much to memorize and for over a certain time span and then time passes very quickly. So that's fairly well understood. But what is more interesting,
I think, is the prospect of time perspective, meaning experiencing time at the present moment. And there some sort of attention is a crucial mediator. So classically, we all know this in waiting time, boredom we have attending to time. Time passes very slowly in distraction and pleasurable activities. When we're not attending to time, time passes very quickly. But this is some sort of the mystery of subject of time, because you could ask, so what actually do we attend to if we attend to time? B
ecause it's not a feature of the outside world and I will give you the answer to this is of course the bodily. So so first a little textbook knowledge again. So there is this cognitive model of time perception that maybe there's something like a pacemaker ascending or pulse pulses which accumulate in this accumulator. And the more pulses that accumulate, the longer subjective duration. That's why 8 seconds feels longer than 4 seconds before because more impulses accumulate, but only if we attend
to time. These pulses accumulate so classically. So if you attend to time waiting for the bus, it time stretches. If you're in a interesting conversation, we are not attending to time. And time passes more slowly because less pulses accumulate. A second modulator is the arousal level, so this pacemaker does not send out the pulses of always at the same pace, but could be dependent on our level. So if you're more aroused positively or negative pulses come out quicker, accumulate quicker. And thi
s also then extends duration. So then next question be on how in the brain. And I will give you my answers on when the brain and how in the brain that time is processed. And I refer to my FMLA studies I conducted in San Diego when I was there for five years and we had this temporal paradigm, I would just shortly reverted because I would take it and use it later again. In the second study, we presented a stimulus with a certain duration, and the pause in the second stimulus appears and the subjec
ts are requested to press the set, press a button when they think that the second tone is as long as the first tone. So classic duration, reproduction paradigm, and we use three, nine and 18 seconds tones. And what we found in the analysis of brain activity was that this certain region of the insular cortex and I will tell you more about this in the second that we have this increasing activity over time in the insular cortex, which only ends at the end of the time interval to be reproduced. This
was for the nine second interval here, the same thing for the 18 seconds as we have this increase in activity over time, which breaks down only around the 18 seconds interval when the tone stops. So increasing activity in the insular cortex seems to be decoding time. And the question, of course, then is what is the internal insula cortex? What is it for? And it's the primary intercept of area. So that's again textbook knowledge, which represents physiologic conditions of the body. So if you fee
l thirst, hunger, temperature, pain, that's all signals from the body which arrive in the insular cortex. And the interpretation of physiological states is also the basis for complex human emotions at the work, especially by But Craig And also very well though, of course Antonio Damasio and we have a lot of neuro imaging and these are lesion studies where we just shown how the insula cortex is involved in emotions in complex decision making to think about the proverbial gut feeling in music perc
eption, which has temporal structure in motion and also in meditative strip states where there's a concentration of the self and the body. So so my working hypothesis was then that the insula is important for the encoding of duration, and when we had beforehand this more abstract model of of time perception with pulses, these abstract pulses, now it could be the body signals as interpreted which basically accumulate in an accumulator. And it's all about body signals which define our subject of d
uration. So time is not perceived in the outside world by it, but through interception by the material self. And this is very much reflected by the phenomenology of Maurice Melo, Ponty, where he also voiced this idea from a philosophical point. So again, our my model or this general model well known, and now I just add to or replace the pulses with these body signals. So it's not just attention to time, but attention to bodily states and increased bodily arousal, which are the two modulators of
subjective time. And here again, just looking of this is the body. So what if we assess peripheral physiology in the body? Do we also get similar results? So this is the same duration reproduction task I just showed you. But now with 814 and 22nd intervals and what you see here, these slopes increasing slopes are just the intervals of this duration reproduction task. And what we could show show is that the heartbeat slows down during the interval timing of multiple seconds intervals. So there wa
s even a linear trend that positively correlated with reproduction performance. So this the steeper the slope, the longer duration, the longer reproduction. So that's really fantastic. That means we can just look at the heart rate and the steepness of the slower becoming slower heart rate predicts temporal reproduction. So we don't even have to look into the brain. But just looking at the heart, we already can predict time behavior. So it's all about the body. And so you could say, well, this is
this guy, Mark Whitman, and he has this theory. But now 2023, I didn't do anything, but I now get this positive results from two independent meta analysis with over 100 F.M. right studies and time perception. These two different separate groups showed the same thing. There's only two brain areas left which are related to time perception. One is the supplement to more to area, which is very much important for sensorimotor timing. If we tap, if we move the timing of other movements and the bilate
ral insula which is an important for intercept of time perception or embodied consciousness, and also actually the insula showed to be related to time perception across all time scales. So this is basically showing complementing my results. So this shows also in emotions, body and time are very much related. Now along with this concept, we can understand a lot of hundreds of many hundreds of studies showing that stimuli with emotional content, a judge to last longer, individuals with body temper
ature fever over estimated time time passes more slowly when smokers have a physical urge to for nicotine. This was a mean study with smokers that they did that took them the nicotine away and then had them to judge duration surprise effortful self-regulation leads to overestimation of duration and also during body focused mindfulness meditation. When we attend to our self at the beginning, at least a subject of time expense. So the hypothesis know this relation that self consciousness, body con
sciousness and time consciousness are both up and down, regulated and which they showed already in boredom and waiting times on everyday time, everyday life. We find this this overrepresentation of time and self during waiting and in flow states. When we are absorbed in activity, we find this under-representation of time and self. We lose our sense of self and time. And so basically time passes very quickly. So we did a small study trying to quantify what. Michael You mean highly had conceptuali
zed as the flow experience. And his concept was that intense and focused concentration on the present moment happens. There's a loss of reflective self-consciousness and the distortion of temporal experience, and the peak stays even a loss of the sense of time. And we did this with the game, thumper, and we clearly showed that the more flow was experienced as assessed with a questionnaire, the faster time passed. For those playing this quite dynamic video game. So I would delve now a little into
also says of consciousness. I would talk about meditation or floatation tank mode mostly, and a little bit about psychedelics because why? Because they are you have at the beginning this intensified self experience related to a slowing down of time. But at some point a switch happens and what you find is then or people report later is that they had this ego dissolution and a dissolution of time. I could have could talk about many, many other things too. I talked about right write about this in
my book, in my depressed book on all two sets of consciousness. But I will focus now on meditation, on floatation tank. So here just a report by a very experienced Buddhist meditation teacher Tilman Lundberg, and actually whom we work with in Fribourg a lot because he is a medical doctor by profession, but stopped this profession to become a Buddhist monk and he studied 35 years in a monastery in France. And just imagine what he did for ten years. He meditated 12 hours per day. So this is quite
some experience. And I just tried to calculate how many hours of meditation you had across his life. And we interviewed him and I just read now what he tells about the peak experience during meditation. So the time is awareness. During meditation is an awakening. It has no beginning and no end. The time this time is an immersion into a being where no comparing happens. When we are comparing, they are always relations between a before and an after. It is timeless presence without the sense of an
eye, without observer perception of perceive a one so non dual, a non dual state, no sense of self and time. And we did actually from I study with him and where he got into such a peak experience while in fMRI and we could show that during this peak state he had a maximally decreased there was maximum a decreased function of connectivity in the postural default mode mode network, the PCC, which is very much related to the narrative self. So we interpret this as a loss of the narrative self durin
g that peak stage. So just I just go over a couple of slides very quickly. So in a study with also experienced meditators, can we more can we show again this downregulation of self on time in experience meditators you see here they had something like 19 years of practice, lifetime on average, 33000 hours for 4 hours per week. They meditated and they had a self guided meditation in our coming to our lab and we compared this with the control condition. You always need a controlled condition. Readi
ng a relaxing passage from a novel in the body posture of meditation. And I skipped these slides just to show you what happened with subjective scales. But in meditation, these these very experienced meditators said that they attended much less to time. They experienced a much faster time passage, and they also experienced weaker body boundaries. So I was just talking now always about these very experienced meditators. But luckily there's a method where we actually can also experience similar st
ates like the experienced meditators, and that is through the floatation tank, the flotation rest technique, restricted environmental stimulus technique, and you float in the water as body skin temperature, 35 degrees, supersaturated with Epsom salt and there's no stimulation from external senses light to shut down. You don't hear anything or anything. And the initial experience is that you have an increased awareness of time of through increased interception. But later after a while and they re
fer to the switch, you get this loss of sense of self and time during that float and that's why I like to call it instant meditation, because you have this total relaxation and a decreased mind wandering, even if you don't, if you're a little meditative. A Just being in this immersive environment that we just have published now, a preprint where you can see all the results in detail. And they basically what I just summarize here and there's also a control condition we had to have. So a water bed
also in a room, dark room, no noise, and they just lie comfortably on this water bed for the same duration is 60 minutes. And what we showed was that is a stronger time distortion in floatation rest as compared to bedrest. And the body boundaries, again, are much weaker than in the bed condition. Again, cell phone time totally changed. And we also asked the people to estimate duration. What you see here now is in floatation rest for the 60 minutes. They seem to be very precise as related to bed
rest, where they had 60 minutes in flotation rest and 49 minutes in bed rest. But this is an artificial mean what I'm showing you, because people either over estimated or they underestimated. So basically complementing this time distortion and only an artificial meaning happens in of 60 minutes but still you could say time distortion in flotation resting and here this just shows that the correlations of time distortion on body boundaries with an altered experience and other state questionnaire a
ssessing other states of consciousness are positively related. So body boundaries and time distortions of features of altered states of consciousness. Here to close this chapter and coming actually to an earlier close of my my talk is the time distortions on ayahuasca. So if you look at this table is this by Ben Shannon from Israel, who was studied a lot. Are you Oscar ceremonies and the effect. So you see the on the left, the parameters and then the temporality in the center. So this is all wha
t we see in everyday life, how we in everyday life experience time and now you see on the right side of this table the modified temporality and you see what all happen can happen in experience under the influence of ayahuasca. So the time is totally distorted during this, this experience of this psychedelic and in peak experiences. What people report again is no time, no self. Okay, so wrapping up. So first of all, I talked about time as a missing link for understanding phenomena consciousness,
and I talked about the extended present moment experience, and then I talked about my line of research on embodied time passage. So it's all about the embodiment, body signals and full of information about the passage of time and duration and that time and self, a bodily self up and down, regulate it. And this especially so in other states of consciousness where we have can even have the peak experiences of no time, no self. And I want to end my talk with Friedrich Schelling, German idealist, ph
ilosopher, and it's very difficult to read his work, but I did it and have found some individual pearls I want to report here and one thing that Martin Heidegger nicely rephrased from Schelling, I took over. He said, Night nature opens her eyes and humankind and notices that she is there. So my paraphrase of this is that when a human being becomes aware of herself, nature becomes aware of itself. So this could be something like this dual aspect monism. You could say we have dual aspects of natur
e sees itself from inside, and that is our consciousness with small C And as Bernard said, maybe this also refers to the big C of nature. And the next thing more related to time is that this quote time is not something that runs independently of the eye, but the eye is time conceived in extended activity. This is basically what it wants to talk about in this in my presentation. So time and self are one self arises through proactive and temporally extended activity. That is basically what I wante
d to say. And thank you for listening. Mark many thanks. You've you ended almost exactly on time to within a few seconds your thought was beautifully clear and I love the way you you amalgamate it. Psychology, philosophy and biology. Biology which is part of the purpose of this this meeting I was particularly fascinated because of course, in my talk yesterday I was talking about the species present and you give them such a more comprehensive and clear discussion of that concept. But I wanted to
ask you, because I in my introductory remarks, I made this distinction between the filter theory and the production theory of consciousness. So the brain being a filter or producer of consciousness, and most of your talk was putting the emphasis on the myth, on the body, on the material, which sort of suggested that you would that you would view everything as being explained in terms brain processes. On the other hand, I also refer to some phenomena. In fact, so did you, which might conceivably
suggest that there's an element of consciousness that goes beyond the brain. So could I just ask you explicitly where you stand on that? And that's a tricky question. So the first easy answer that I actually already, let's say, transcend the brain in the sense of embodiment. I think that's a very important first step that not too many scientists are doing, but more and more are doing, because as I showed, is that is not about the little computer in our head. But it's important that still some th
ought that the metaphor that people use, but is all about the whole whole money or the whole body is involved. And it's not that it will be the embodied part and not only the embodiment part, but even this activist part is that we are basically walking and we in a world and we're interacting with this world and this game goes even a step further. Yeah. That we as a as individual bodies interact with the whole environment around us the next and then we have at least when weather showed with the o
ther sets of consciousness is that we have that say this way of when it talked about body boundaries dissolving this is which is of course just one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is, of course, you could also say that what people experience when the body boundaries dissolve is that they get one with the world. This goes in the interpretation, in the direction of the big sea, because what you then have is also can have more compassion with other people. But there's one step or you c
ould get get further. And I mean, you mentioned it a lot in the last two days go into this direction of anomalous experiences the paranormal and Julie most of us will talk about this at the end of this afternoon. But even there you could talk about people getting connected through an anomalous way if you want. There's, of course, a very controversial topic, but this is something like a consequence. That is, of course, what we one one should study. Okay. Thank you. I shouldn't monopolize the conv
ersation, but that's a very clear answer. And thank you. So we shouldn't talk about the brain filter. It's the body filter in some sense. Now, what I would like to do, I know there are some speakers present, so before letting members of the audience ask questions, are there any speakers present? George, I think you have a question. So. George. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Thank you. It was a beautiful. I can't talk and I think it fits in very well with what I said yesterday. And I want to ask something which
I think know the answer. But you were be aware and proper. Sapolsky has recently been make a bit of a stir saying we don't have agency. I believe that your view implies we do have agency. I wondered if you'd like to comment on that. I mean, of course we talked about this yesterday also. Of course, we have a sense of free will. So we also whether there is free will is a different question, but at least we have a sense of free will. The same thing is, of course, you also have a sense of agency, a
nd that's very most important for our self-identification, your agency. So I would go further and say, Yes, of course we have a sales sense of agency, and that's part actually of defining the self. It's not only the embodied self, but it's also the self as agency that is important for self-referential processing of knowing who I am now that that works all through agency. Thank you. Now I would like to allow time for at least some comments from the floor. Well, sorry, Paul. Paul, you have a quest
ion? I believe. It. Just very briefly then molecule, your very final comment seems to be an advert for my talk because the quote was the time does not run independently of the I or the self. That's what I'm going to be arguing in my talk a little later. Okay. Thank you, Paul. We look forward to that. Now, I do want to give a little bit of time for question from the the floor, so to speak. This is a question I'm afraid it relates to me, too. How does Mark met Singer's island? A presence conceptio
n of the present moment comport with Bernard Specious present. So I'm sorry. It's just me again, sister to you? Yeah. So I presented the Metzinger conceptualization. Now you can fit it into your notebook. Presumably the phrase spacious presences is not a common phrase. Now, though, in the professional field. Is that right? everybody knows from William James. Everyone knows it. John. Yeah, but in the introduction one uses the phrase specialist present, but then one uses other terms to thank you.
Okay, So, well, I cannot see actually any more questions from the, from the floor. So and in fact, it was now just 20 seconds to go. So we've come to the end of this session very nicely. Thank you so much, Mark. And obviously, we hope that you can take part in the discussion later on at the end of the day when there will be a general. I will be wonderful and thank you for attending yesterday as well. So now I am delighted to introduce another good friend of mine who's who's a neuroscientist. So
now we're going to fill in one of those other circles. In my introduction, Alex Gomez Marin, he has a degree originally in physics and he has a he did a master's degree in biophysics and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, but he's he conducted post-doctoral research at the Center for Genomic Regulation and the Champlin Mild Center for the Unknown in Lisbon since 2016, he's been the director of the Organism Behavior Laboratory at the Institute of Neuroscience and in L.A. Cancer. So he's making the l
ink between physics and neuroscience. Currently, he is an associate professor, Spanish National Research Council and director of the Paris Center in Italy. And in fact, that's where I actually met Alex just a year ago at a conference in Paris that was founded by the physicist David Peet. His work encompasses the microscopic origin of the arrow of time, animal neuropathology and different species and artificial intelligence applied to human stupidity. Well, that's very topical. His current resear
ch focuses on the scientific study of consciousness in the real world. He is recipients of the first annual Linda O Broad Noetic Science Research Prize. So, Alex, I'm delighted to ask you to give you a talk. The consciousness of neuroscience. Thank you very much. I won't be using slides, so first of all, my gratitude and admiration both to a sense of foundation and also to you. Bernard First for the foundation, because being currently the director of the Paris Center, I realized how how difficul
t and how necessary this work is because universities often are not doing it. So I'm really appreciative of the of the efforts that the Essential Foundation is doing and championing when it comes to thinking about these difficult matters. And also to you, Bernard, their friend of mine, and also a theoretical physicist colleague, and also one more thing that we have in common, and that's been apparent from yesterday and today I'll make it more, more bluntly open, is that we are coming out of the
closet, coming out of the closet of themes that really interest us, that not only are interesting to us, but we believe are important. And and we need to fight for these for these freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Okay, so this is my gratitude. Second, my my apologies, because I'm probably the youngest of the presenters and also the least distinguished speaker. But my my path is rather eclectic. So I'm a theoretical physicist by training, actually, my PD, I studied the you could
say the message copied to microscopic origin of the arrow of time. That was fascinating. Stochastic thermodynamics out of equilibrium and theorems. And this was basically pen and paper. So I am a theoretical physicist by training, but then I am I become a neuroscience neuroscientist by chance and I studied all these little creatures for long, but I didn't stay there. And I'm also a philosopher at heart. And lastly, I become I'm still pronouncing the para war. We're about to become a parapsychol
ogist by necessity. So out of all these intersecting circles that you were presenting at the introduction, well, I'm not expecting any of them anymore, But but, but I work in all of them. I decide to be at this tiny bit at the intersection. So that's my disclaimer to begin with. Now, I recall yesterday when I heard humanity analyst talk that we coincided in a meeting actually in April last year when we were celebrating the exact 100 year anniversary of this clash, these encounter between Bergson
and Einstein. And I had read him in his wonderful book, The Physicist and the Philosopher. And my talk then a year ago was entitled As With Time, so with Mind. And so when I realized that I had a feeling of pessimism because I think we're not moving forward, I tried to make my case. And when we speak about mine, by the way of course, mine is not the same as consciousness, and consciousness is not the same as awareness, and that's not the same as psyche, and it's not the same as soul or even spi
rit. And we could spend time disentangling all these subtleties. But when I when we say time or when I say time, I mean I mean I will mean consciousness and also subjective experience in this thinking. Okay. So I took note from again, from what came in I said yesterday and she said, the physicist as the spokesperson on questions of time. I mean, when it's so interesting because of my parts in physics and in neuroscience that one can swap words and the same formula applies because one can say tha
t the neuroscientist is usually the spokesperson on questions of mind. So you see you just change time for mind and physicist for neuroscientist and the mantra works. But how dare to say that? We want to say we physicists, neuroscientists, we have hardly anything to say about time, and that's perhaps too strong to say in such a conference. But I think we have hardly anything to say about time because because when we when we talk about time, we're not talking about duration. And I must disclose m
y Nixonian roots here. And when we're talking about great minds, we usually mean what brains do. So. So also from yesterday, you know, humans said from Einstein that, well, what a clever move to say. Well, time is what is time? What clocks measure and what is mind. Again, we can substitute what brain scans measure. But again the question is black box, as she said. So so we need to do all these and boxing and it's tedious work, but we need to unbox all that and stop pretending that we're studying
time, at least subjective time, or stop pretending that mind is nothing else but what brainstorms now? Bergson said it very clearly more than 100 years ago, and if you had to summarize his wonderful work will be time is not space. So this specialization of time betrays the whole issue. And then magic happens that when you when you do that, time changes in nature. And we're not talking about time anymore. We're talking about Chronos. And I'll come back to these in a moment. And also in neuroscie
nce, the same thing is happening. So let me continue with these parallels. I've been I've been and I agree, I've been listening to this proposals of extending physics and perhaps that can come back into this discussion. What do we mean by extending physics? And also in the neuroscience, we're living it because we're working on the extended mind, extending the mind, and the previous thought was a good example of it. You know, it's not just brain, it's the rest of the nervous system. It's not just
the nervous system, it's what the stomach there's it's interaction. Great. Let's bring in, for instance, the lungs, wonderful flesh, bones, embodiment. Okay. So then we start talking about the four E's, which is this kind of kind of heterodox branch of neuroscience. A functional is never neuroscience, which is well, the mind is embodied and enacted, embedded and so on. But I'm one. Wondering. If that's enough. And to borrow that expression from Santayana saying, Well, it seems like we are, we a
re spreading it spreading here like, like butter on bread. We are extending the mind, you know, after this division of risk, all events and dress extension, which is which is our foundational wound, they would say, well, what can we do? Well, we can take this dance and we can extend it. So now it's a kind of a risk rise is extensive, Right. But that's not enough. So we can go back a hundred years and we should and we should think deeply with help of women about what happened after this clash. Th
e good news and also the really bad news. But also, I proposed to you. Now, I want to briefly make you travel 400 years in time, because as it turns out, just a month ago, it was the exact fourth hundredth anniversary of the publication of Galileo's, the ACLU. This is a this is an incredible book, is a bedrock of science. As a physicist, we don't we need, of course, because we're not taught history of science well, we have that. We have an optional subject and university. I took it, luckily, but
going with Galileo going to be Galileo. And this is a letter he wrote more than 200 page letter. And there's so many jewels in them. And I want to mention three jewels. The first one is that in that book written exactly 400 years ago or published exactly 400 years ago, let us hide the controversy with the pope and the fact that ten years after approximately of the publication, he was sentenced to house arrest, not to death, but to house arrest. And he actually spent the rest of his life there a
nd all the all the the issues that have to do not just with with the church, but actually with his own peers and blocking him. In fact, Galileo wrote the first his first book I've seen a couple of books in Latin, but then because of the horrible response from academics, we could say, and he decided to write in Italian from then on. All right, so I'm not a historian, so I'll stop here. And I just mentioned the three jewels. The first one is that in that book, there's that famous sentence, Nature
is this book written in the language of mathematics, which we physicists absolutely love, and it's quite likely true, but perhaps not the truth, not the entire truth. And it's this master, you know, we can now decode those secrets if we speak the sacred language of mathematics. And that's fantastic. I'll come back to this in a moment. The second jewel is that in this book, Galileo tells to charity, by the way, to respond to charity, who is a pseudonym of a just Jesuit who had critiqued Galileo a
bout the nature of some comments that had been seen in 1618. So it's like a long Twitter thread, actually, because Galileo saying, well, they're just saying what I didn't say and they're not doing it rightly. And I don't care if a thousand if a thousand philosophers or physicist combined before I don't care if they just appeal to authority of Aristotle or their own authority, what counts is the experiment. And we can all tested and that's the end. So no authority and no opinion. We can do a diff
erent and that's actually another bedrock. Now, the third jewel and that's the most important for today, is that towards the end of the book, nearly in passing, Galileo makes a distinction between motion and touch, and this will be what, later? And I think he's there. Perhaps you can somebody can correct me later, but I think he is actually the first one to articulate that certain things in the universe travel in first class matter, contact, velocity, the objective world and other things travel
in second class. And he says, well, senses and tastes and all of that have no real existence safe in us, right? That's the that's the Drake direct in my translation. So what Galileo did then was to programmatically set aside this objective. So that we could progress with the objective. And that's what I would be proposing. At the end of these few minutes. We need to go back to that moment and redo it differently. Okay, So let's go back to the maths. Yes. Successful and I by training, I enjoy all
these attempts to unification and all these theories of everything and so on. But that's a view from nowhere. And if you're a fan of monologist, you cannot accept that the ultimate truth about the life, the universe and everything about from being 42, it's going to be a view from nowhere because actually consciousness is the opposite. It's a view from somewhere. So here we have a big problem. Despite the great success of physics, despite the great envy of everyone who came after the big brother
or the big cousin, which was physics, you know, molecular biology and psychology, and we all pretend we're so objective. And even mathematics has the uncomfortable realization that most scientist beyond physics does not know mathematics, beyond Excel sheets. So and also very interesting. They think they speak their own languages because the secret of life is not written in mathematics, it's DNA code. And then for the neuroscientist is written in spikes, right? So everybody has their own preferr
ed language. Now these view from in a way, what it's doing is conflating time with space or duration is gone. And that's what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. So all this abstraction is unnecessary. But the problem is that if we don't go back to concrete experience who treated the second class, then we're betraying the whole endeavor. I would I would argue. And therefore that's why we're here as we time. So we've made so the passage of time illusion free. We're illusion at
best as we have a sense of free will, right subjective experience. You know, there's even people, very respectable philosophers that say that it's an illusion. You know, it's to me again, with with all my, my, my, my humble arrogance. This is nonsense. Second point I wrote this article called The Consciousness of Neuroscience very recently, replying to more than 100 really prominent philosophers of mine and neuroscientists who wrote this piece called it Integrated Information Theory as pseudosc
ience. Right? And somebody pointed to me that Feyerabend, the famous philosopher of science, the relative peace 25 years ago, 50 years ago, about the same thing, a letter that many people wrote against astrology. And he just came up to say, well, perhaps you're not getting it right. You're not speaking in the name of science. So this is a long story to unpack. But the point here is that the study, the scientific study of Consciousness West rule for many, many years, of course, people were doing
it under the radar in their own way. But it was only in the nineties where Greeks sanctioned the study, which together with court, with its very pragmatic and mechanistic and reductionistic approach of neural collective consciousness. So we've had 30 years after these winter. This is a, this is a these consciousness wing, this expression that coined, I recall recently after this consciousness of this consciousness winter we've had throughout the 20th century with all these seas, comportment, cog
nition and later consciousness. But now, because of all these internal struggles, using the word pseudoscience within the orthodoxy, this is remarkable. Well, perhaps we have another consciousness. We and that would be so unfortunate. And there is I mean, that piece, it's quite I would say I would say it's it's deep, it's caustic and it's fun. And you you'll read what I think is going on with all this rage against panpsychism and idealism and Google aspect. Monism. It's like all these materials
are revolving, noticing that they're reaching kind of this terminal phase. Okay, Now the third point back to science 100 years ago and Galileo, most of these theories we're discussing here, to my mind, I still would be still classified as Galileo. And they are not posed Galileo. They still embrace, consciously or not, this separation. And whether it's an approach, whether it's an experiment, whether it's a theory on mind and time, it's usually under the idea that the objective has primary over t
he subjective and that in some sense the objective will explain this objective. Maybe you can see that water is H2O. I don't think so, but definitely I think you cannot say that subjective experience. It's something that somehow and here's the magic trick emerges from the brain. Okay, Now I just mentioned human theories of consciousness, and there's time. I'd say more about that. And lately, despite the perhaps approaching consciousness winter, lately there's so many theories of consciousness, l
ike this is the Wild West, which is good. But at the same time there was a quote in a paper I forgot the author. So apologies that said that theories of consciousness are like toothbrushes. Everybody has their own and nobody wants to use one and not each other, right? Unfortunately or fortunately that's true. But most of them and 99% of them regardless of the ism and most of them are materialist, normally they fall within the extrinsic perspective and very few and maybe integrated information is
one of the only ones that falls with within the intrinsic perspective and start with phenomenology property. Okay, now let me mention this quote by Feynman, who said that we should prove ourselves wrong as fast as possible, proof ourselves, not the other person ourselves. Wrong and as fast as possible. Otherwise we cannot achieve progress. So which are ways forward? So I point out to some distinctions. Now then I'll mention the empirical word because after all. I mean, look, I'm a theoretical p
hysicist, but after all, we need to do experiments to test things. And then I end up with some reflections. So distinctions I haven't heard much about Cronos versus Kyros so far, and this is a. Very is. A very interesting tension, even when you speak about Big Bang and what happened, you know, in the physical or if you speak about evolution and what happened in the biological world, and then you play the tape and then humans and here we are. And if if we have consciousness, whatever that is or w
here it comes, the kind of the chronological approach says, well, there was a time when there wasn't. Therefore it must have come out of some magic, and that's what we need to figure it out. But if you take the phenomenological approach, you realize that you can only speak about physics or biology or life or human life or life for human life and so on, from phenomenology, from here now, from your own experience, right? So these two approaches need to be put in context and to realize. So basicall
y what I'm saying is we need to go back to phenomenology. And also and that's something I would propose now for all physicists and philosophers working on sorry, physicist, a neuroscientist working on these matters, and then the rest of scientists, we need to disclosure our metaphysical conflicts of interest. You know, you need to disclosure your your money, your financial conflict of interest, of your metaphysical, because otherwise we're tied to what else? What often is the cases that we're pu
tting under the carpet Are metaphysical ideology, and we're presenting it as data that's not as fair as it would be. Now. Intuitions about kronor versus Kairos. Well, Bergson said that, and White had said it as well. There is no nature at an instant. So these amazing trick of the delta t made as small as possible, or the fact that 12 might make my physics training these these letter T was everywhere and bracketed. But but that's not that doesn't look like nature. That doesn't look like nature. R
ight. I'm also and so so time has wit and our experience tells us that now we can say, well, whatever, we'll explain it with objective time, but I'm proposing we should also go from the other way around and also time can be leaky. So it if it has width, it means it's stepping on the past and it's stepping on the future. So therefore, perhaps then the future a part of future can leak in the present. And I think that's very interesting, connecting it to neuroscience that you can think about what m
emories are. And Bergson reminded us that memory is not just weakened perception. And also he said and he wrote this book 126 years ago, matter and memory, which understand you should read, because we've been looking for memories in the brain. We never find them. They always changing. They're here now. They're not here. Well, Bergson says memories are not in the brain. Memories are not in space. Memories are in time. Therefore, nothing is lost. Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost. And so, for ins
tance, we could ask when when do those who study Alzheimer? What's lost is in the memory who is in the retrieval mechanism. So these are samples for possible and for the common type. We're making memories. But but this is and also for perception. When we speak about non-local perception. Okay. Another distinction and I'm so glad that Bernard alluded to it, the distinction between productive and permissive brains. Right. And this was by William James, again, 120 something years ago in 1896, he wr
ote this paper on human immortality. And he said, there's no doubt that the thought depends like like that quote over there, over the holder depends on the brain. The question is the nature of that dependance. Now 99.9999% of neuroscientist doesn't know about that. There's only one option. The brain is productive, but there's another option, which is the brain is permissive. And this makes a whole different empirical and metaphysical world. Finally. So I made this distinction. Colonel. Psychiatr
ist Productive, permissive. Let me indulge in a couple of metaphysical and positions here. Too often, scientists conflate reality with what can be measured. This is scientism. This is horrible. And a more subtle one is that we often complete conflict, conflate existence which actual actuality with things in actuality. But I think and I'm not an expert in quantum stuff, but the virtual is also another mode of experience. So I think the virtual and the actual can help us. We understand also time,
mind, perception and so on, and not to just make it all collapse into, well, if it's not measurable and actual, then it doesn't exist. No empirical work because all of that has empirical correlate. So and I call them the edges of consciousness. And just because they're edges of knowledge, they are frontiers of knowledge, but also edges because they're marginalized. And this is important to say, because I didn't really about theory and data. It's a tool and it needs to stand. And the third leg is
the social and social political aspects. And and as you'll as you'll notice in a moment when I mentioned some of these edges of consciousness, they're systematically canceled with all these ugly prefixes, parapsychology, supernatural. Right. And TD's and paranormal and so on. So there's this joke. He comes the parapsychologist and says, Here's the data. And then somebody says, Well It's nice, it works. But that's his working theory. So what does that mean? He's the data one, but it doesn't work
in theory, so out. But then there's another jolt, which is, well, here's the theory now. Is it testable? Who cares? It's a cool, cool theory. So another caveat here. And the third one is, well you can present the great theory of great piece of data. And it's difficult. I know. And here they are. And then the joke is, well, you cannot say that it's not it's not accepted in our social discourse. But so this these three legs need to be on equal footing. And I think that's where the hand of physics
and the handle of neuroscience can kind of help each other. Okay. Some edges of consciousness just mentioned because I don't have time. Well, near-death experiences is a big one. And I actually had a near-death experience myself. Two and a half years ago. And that was actually what further pushed me from physics to biology and then biology neurobiology, to be concerned and say, Well, what did I see? Here's the neuroscientist having one of those hallucinations about how much of a hallucination w
as that. And then if you go back to the productive versus permissive idea of range, well, you could you can wonder if what's going on is that as your brain is becoming less irrigated, sometimes damage sometimes doesn't have enough oxygen supply or nutrients, whatever is going on instead of being a broken computer. Because when computers break, they don't create systematic, beautiful, rich, amazing experiences. Actually, instead of being that perhaps is that because the filter is being damaged no
w, more mine can flow through that. And there's a huge literature of and yet I didn't know and I started studying it and I'm pursuing some projects with some with some groups that I can I can detect later. So by the way, when talking about mind and time, death is the elephant in the room. Now I live that. I live the elephant there. If you want to come back more, more of these edges of consciousness. But there are mentioned lucid dreaming on the first day yesterday. Yeah, some people are amazing
lucid dreamers. What if these lucid dreaming can have some sort of sense of intersubjective subjectivity? What do we do then, if you can, you know, pass anomalous information or, you know, that's that's what if that can be done scientifically. Well, maybe it's a big back into solving these problems related to lucid dreaming. We have out-of-body experiences and so on, by the way, is related to near-death experiences. We have the phenomenon of terminal lucidity and shared death experiences. There'
s a lot going on there. Psychedelics is another is another. Now, the big field now popular because they found a way to make money out of it. And that's why we can study it in universities. Right. But they've it for millennia. And if you had if you had had one of those experiences, well, again, that display doesn't look like my brain is not working. Well, actually, it looks like my when my brain is working better than any than ever, just letting in so much mind. Another one is mystical experience
s, and the Saints have had them forever. More edges of consciousness. Well, mind matter. We know these distinctions are rather artificial. Well, mind to mind interactions also called telepathy, which if you say somewhat as they look at, well, what are you saying? Are you a scientist? Well, yes. What about telepathy? What about non-local perception, clairvoyance? Right. What about remote viewing or a phenomenon that I'm studying that's called extra ocular vision. So these are all fascinating edge
s of consciousness and of the mind. And I think we need more people. I always joke that perhaps there's more money and more people studying the formation of the wing of the fruit fly than studying all of those edges of consciousness together. It's preposterous Now. So final comments. And as you see, my topic is kind of a manifesto. I'm sorry. You know, I, I get energized. We need pluralism. And that's what I was saying. Thank you to a central foundation for what you're doing. We need pluralism,
not just epistemic, but ontological pluralism. We need to be able to discuss these isms beyond the two alternative fourth choice between physical ism and Dualism for Dummies, which is why we are presented. No, no, no, no, no. There are many more. And actually materialism often, of course, if you want to take take note of these edges, often these edges present big, big challenges. Not to say that they're about refuted. So that's one pluralism. So enough of the dogmatic monotheism of reductive, re
ductive, mechanistic material ism. Enough. We've had enough. Or at least please set aside, we need more room for other approaches. Another one is, as I said, freedom of speech. And third, in academia. And we need to end this cancel culture and this kind of censorship. And the IT as pseudoscience letter is is a is an incredible example. But this has been going on forever. And well, that's not how science progresses, actually, it is how science is prevented from progressing. Now, these are this is
now I come from my my, my, my, my final recommendation, if I may. So I know because I'm a physicist and we often seen as being at the top of the food chain and that's good. And maybe we these are because physics has done incredible things, right. And all these theories of everything, they're wonderful, but they're also kind of risible because when I see, like the most intelligent people trying to unify quantum mechanics and relativity and you ask them all, but what will that tell us about larva
l locomotion or love? Nothing, Nothing. So it doesn't derive, even in biology, by the notion of complexity, even physics is that static complexity, not classical, not quantum complexity, No. That you cannot derive this complexity from, you know, the little building blocks. All right. So This is a recommendation I think I'll end in time because it is one more minute. Do not ask what neuroscience can do for consciousness, nor what physics can do for neuroscience and everyone else, but instead ask
what consciousness can do for science. And so I think what quantum mechanics did a hundred years ago is about to happen in the neuroscience of consciousness. But for it to allow for progress, we need to go beyond Galileo. We need to say thank you, Galileo, and now it's time to go to oppose Galileo. So with this, I'd like to thank all my fellow fellow explorers that I'm discovering when I came out of the closet and also all of you for the invitation and your attention. Thank you very much. Alex.
Thank you so much. Again, you've ended exactly on time. I think you're the first speaker who hasn't used slides, but that's actually a blessing because it's been it's been actually wonderful to listen to your words and you and you had so many memorable phrases which are so sticking in my mind. The view from nowhere, I suppose the view of from somewhere as opposed to the view from nowhere, the edge of consciousness. And I loved your last quote about. Think what consciousness can do for us sort ne
uroscience rather than the other way round reminiscence, of course, of President Kennedy's famous speech and, we had the 60th anniversary of his of his assassination only a few days ago. I also love the way in which you brought together history and physics and and philosophy and lots of all. I would like to say thank you for having the courage to mention some of these taboo topics, which I myself to. I mean, the P word, parapsychology and near-death experiences. I did refer to this myself, but i
n a rather hesitating way because I was a bit nervous about talking of these things in front of my physics colleagues. But I'm retired now, so I presume I had it by the parapet. But you're you're very young, so it's wonderful that you're doing this even though you're just at the start of your career. Anyway, that's enough for me. And I would like to ask, first of all that the this the other presenters, if they would like to ask comments, ask questions or make comments. Well, I see no hands raise
d at the moment, but. were you scratching your chin or asking you a question? You made it. scratching your chin. Okay, so we'll go to the floor and then if any of you have questions, just let me know. But here's the first question from the floor. Can we envision theories of consciousness that's an operational, i.e., descriptive predictive as opposed to reductive? So they remain metaphysically neutral and strictly scientific are. All right. Well, metaphysically neutral. Impossible, I would say. I
would say that's why the person who's asking this question should disclose the metaphysical conflict of interest. I don't think it's possible, but I understand that one can take a very pragmatic approach, not a pragmatic approach in the sense of the pragmatist, but say, well, look. And the same happened in neuroscience, by the way, not talking about consciousness, about cognition or even motor control. You know, you can say, I don't want to understand how the brain works. I just want to treat i
t. I just want to figure out like an engineer, an intervention that if I'm lucky and clever enough, we'll just treat cure, the symptom will eliminate it. And so interventions can give us a lot of benefits. But these are more on the engineering side. So. Sure. And by the way, the Egyptians knew already that, you know, if a bar just crosses your skull, well, there'll be some problems in model coordination. Right. So there must be a distinction between intervening and understanding. Now, if if our
goal is not to be like an engineer slash scientist, but more like a scientist last philosopher, and we want to understand what what is subjective experience, then know this this pragmatic approach will be like cranking the wheels forever. And that's why solve a problem. Neuroscientist that I admire and respect like to water down the hard problem, which, by the way, the heart problem is only a heart problem for materialists, which is amazing, right? Because they then they make money out of their
own heart problem, but they want to water down into the real problem, which means just problems, just more money, more years. We'll crank out, we'll figure out more things. And they will. But they want they want deliver the promise. And actually, that's what I realized in myself and the students here. When they come as neuroscientists, they think they will either help treat disease that will help cure, which is what they've seen in their grandparents or understand the brain. After one year and a
half of they know none of these will happen. They just need to just produce papers, get grants and get in the system. And I know this is the sociological leg of the stool, but back to the theory. Yes, the pragmatic approach is good, but it does what it does. So no, let's not promise more than that. It can do. And it has happened again. I'm not a historian in the Human brain project. Ten years. It just finished. These years it is this year, 20, ten years, Thousands, many know billions. It's asto
unding, right? What did they do? What did they promise? Well, a human genome project. We will grow a weighing wings in our bags and so on. We will discover what it means to be human. No, science was done. Yes, the understanding promised no. So it depends what we want to know. I stopped some myself. Thank you, Alex. But we have now a more personal question. You said you are not a quantum physicist. What was your area of expertise in physics? Yeah, it was stochastic thermodynamics. So the question
of if you have the laws of thermodynamics and you have you think about how heat engines work, what happened when you go to smaller scales in which energy fluctuations are of the order of committee and therefore, well, you don't have just one measure. You have a distribution of heat, productive or entropy production. And how can we these let these two levels between the measures and the microscopic thermodynamics. So that's why I mentioned it was kind of trying to figure out the origins of the a
rrow of time in that regard. I think that's an interesting question too, because some of us talk about extending physics to accommodate consciousness and things, but physics itself covers many different subfields, and I think those different subfields can elucidate the problem in different ways. Yep. Yes. And let me just add, I am very aware that as as a condensed matter physicist or condensed matter physics physicist, I'm on the third rank because, because quantum physicist and and high energy
physicist are both above even or even above the intellectual pyramid. Right. So and this is very interesting too, like the problems that you see in places in material sciences and physics and perhaps the stagnation that we've seen in, in high energy physics. Now since the what, seventies, eighties. But nevertheless, there are different categories, like in neuroscience, like, well, the neurosurgeon is here and the person doing the kind of social prosocial behavioral work. Well, second or third ra
te we need must be we must be aware of that because, well, again, going back to human analysis inside of the book and of the target is here every time every time I hear how it's like amazing, it's like it's not so crucial what time is, but who has the authority to say what it is and who doesn't. Right? And so within and without the sciences, that is different. And even within the sciences, we have kind of a ranking. Okay, So you need to you need to invite to say what mind or time is. And you say
, well, these these other opinion, despite being an expert, it's second or third grade. Thank you. Now we have here a question. Can you tell us bit about your research on extra ocular vision? And I think this relates to the Linda O'Brien prize that you won. So obviously you don't have so much time, but could you say a little bit about extra ocular vision work? Yeah, Yeah, I said straight away. So it sounds preposterous. So I'm working with a blind man who can see, right. So what is that? What is
that nonsense? Alex, why didn't you do these on Sunday evening? You know? Well, so apparently some people can perceive information that doesn't come through the five senses. One, it's do really well experiments, lots of controls. And even that this one has a data. When the data is presented, somebody will say that doesn't work in theory. And then you'll say, well, what are you talking about? So the research is about non-local perception, the ability to perceive. And of course you can do these k
ind of experiments with with a sighted person. But of course, if the person cannot see, well, you have as a job, you have a triple blind control here. So I could tell more about this. But that's essentially and you could think of it as in the edges of consciousness. If you think of an archipelago and there's islands out there in the north, well, a big island is remote viewing. And Julia, who comes later, knows a lot about that. It's been studied for many years with some remarkable results, but w
e don't hear about them. So imagine a small island next to the big island of remote viewing. I think extra ocular vision is a phenomenon that's related to that. This ability to perceive something that according to let me say this according to a very particular kind of empiricism within this think about empiricism, which Whitehead had called sense it empiricism not radical empiricism like like William James, for instance. But since it increases in well, if it's not coming, so impacts to molecular
impacts, right. Could have impact in my my eyes or my, my my skin. It cannot happen. But if it does, then what do we do? What do we do? Do we change the frame of the we cut the picture so that it fits in the frame? And Alex, a related question. So very quickly, please, to a people who work in gently blind from birth, can they do they dream? Do they have visual experiences in dreams? I don't know about congenitally blind but I know about people who became blind and the again, the phenomenology.
It's beautiful and incredible because they for they start, they start forgetting colors and and they in their dreams being told directly by this black man they might. I know I'm working with. He started dreaming in black and white and this is his loss. And then he did some courses on intuitive styles and remote viewing and, lucid dreaming, and then colors came back to the dreams. Right? So the phenomenology that the own felt the world from the perspective again, not a view from nowhere. The worl
d from the perspective of these of these subjects is is are the looks door to study again consciousness opposed to an anomaly. One final question because we're running out of time. Could you elaborate on your statement that memory is stored in time? yes. It's the no, I cannot in 20 seconds. But the question of where memories, where memories? Well, there should be in the in the brain. There was a recent article by a neuroscientist who made a lot of the and course, I don't remember. It was like we
still don't know where memories are stored in the brain. And I would change how by whether we don't know whether they're stored in the brain. But of course, to most neuroscientists it is unthinkable because of what Bergson told us, that we still haven't grasp that time is not space. So memory is by nature a phenomenon in space. Now, if we if we try to find it in time, of course we can find correlates. If you keep my head strong enough, I'll forget things. But the question is, where did this mem
ories go? Did I raise them or do I remember them? I just to mention one more age of consciousness in 10 seconds. Reincarnation studies. Yes, there have been lots of them. How can these people remember a previous life? It sounds again, impossible. So we need to deal with this. Impossible with impossible theories, impossible data and impossible social pressure, so that if we wanted to progress as pie. Indeed. But I'm we will have to address these impossible questions at another time, Alex, because
we've now run out of time. But thank you so much for a most stimulating and if I may say, passionate talk. Yes, I'm Spanish. So. Well, now I would like to ask Paul to takes the stand. Paul, thank you very much. Because, of course, we welcomed you yesterday, but we're now especially pleased because you're going to talk to us a few words of introduction. Paul is the Regents professor of physics and director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental in Science at Arizona State University. He's a cosmol
ogist, indeed. I've known Paul in his professional capacity as a friend for many, many decades and astrobiologist and a bestselling author. His research has been mostly in quantum gravity, with applications to the early universe and black holes and the nature of time. More recently, he has worked on the origin of life, the search for life beyond Earth, and the deep evolutionary roots of cancer. He held academic appointments in the UK and Australia before moving to Arizona 2006. He's written over
30 books, including The Physics of Time Asymmetry About Time and How to Build a Time Machine. So he's superbly qualified to address this. The most recent book is What's Eating the Universe and Other Cosmic Questions. There's a lot of quirky facts about Paul, which I've unearthed, but I'm not going to read through them all just to say, for example, he was propelled into science when Margaret Thatcher gave him a star at the age of 16. Well, not everybody is a supporter of Margaret Thatcher, but i
t's good to hear that something came out of it. He's he's also has an asteroid named after him. And that's most appropriate. Paul, I won't carry on listing other quirky facts about you, but I'm delighted to ask you to give you a talk, the muddled shape of time. Well, thank you, Ballard. And it's a great pleasure to be taking part in this two day meeting. I've enjoyed the other talks immensely. I'm going to take a slightly different tack. I should mention that I'm not today talking to you from Ar
izona, which is where I mostly live and work. I'm actually in a place called Jacksonville in Florida. And the reason I'm here is I've been taking part in a meeting very different from this one I'm working with commercial organization here, trying to design some equipment to detect life on Mars. And so that's the reason that I'm in a hotel room and mention that simply because I hope we won't have too much extraneous noise. And if I look a little bit ghostly, it's because I'm sitting with just the
balcony in front of me and the rather peculiar light filtering in. But I can assure you I am perfectly healthy, far as I know that my computer is standing on top of the balcony table, which is standing on top of the balcony chair. But that's okay, I think, with the right height. So I hope the whole lot doesn't come crashing down. So with that little introduction, I will of course, try and share my screen because I do, I'm going to revert back to a PowerPoint presentation and the slide, I should
say. I hope everybody can see that. Yes, perfectly. To the applause stress. That is not me. That so the notion I think I've given plenty of precursory warnings that I should be talking about the fact that I don't think time does flow, that the flow of time is something like an allusion or I don't like the word illusion. I think a metaphor which is sometimes misused is a better way of putting it. But of course this idea of the river of time or the flow of time or time passing is so deeply embedd
ed in our culture that to make the claim that this is somehow wrong headed is always a challenge. And here I've just plucked a couple of quotes, one from a poet and one from a scientist penned at about same time. But at my back I always hear times when you chariot hurrying near. That's Andrew novel and Newton was explicit, absolute time flowing equitably without relation to anything external. So this is, as it were, the default position for most people. The time is something that passes or flows
or runs, and all of these words have been much in use in the talks that we've heard yesterday and today. And I get to say the point of view that this is really a very bad way of trying to analyze time, although that rather to jump to the conclusion that this is an aspect of time that more properly belongs to neuroscience and psychology and not to physics. That's going to be my position. So time does not pass. The flow of time is an illusion is one central position. But of course this is not a n
ew position for philosophers have long had a tradition of questioning this. This is a famous paper by Donald Williams, the of passage. I really learned most of what I understand about the nature of time reading as a balanced book, and also from Jack Smart, Jesse Smart, The Australian philosopher. He was very explicit and also admonish people. He would not make a distinction between time asymmetry and the flow of time, and I want to unpack those two happen. I was kind enough to mention my book, T
he Physics of Time by Symmetry. My first book, which was written in the mid 1970s, it emerged from really from my Ph.D. work. So I've been in this time game since actually the late 1960s, so 55 years or something, which is itself rather depressing effect of that. So I just went to the title of my talk is The Muddled Shape of Time. And part of the reason that people get confused and dispute patience on this subject is the model of the terminology, of the model of the concept. So it's called a mud
dle escape in time because I'm trying to separate it out. Very different things that you will see occasionally. Popular science articles like this one here Do time might not exist. I'm not claiming the time doesn't exist. So people often leap to this conclusion. I'm I'm simply saying that time does not flow or our past. That's not the same as saying the time itself is an illusion. And this came out briefly yesterday with the mention of the work of Julian Barber, who does indeed claim that time d
oes not exist. And so there is a strand of thought that comes out of the field of quantum cosmology where the time parameter drops out. If you believe in a quantum description of the whole universe, I'm not. I do, but some people do. And that's a separate topic. That's an interesting topic. I'm not talking about that. I'm not saying time does not exist. Time it does exist. So that's not what I'm talking about. Various definitions. My favorite one is time. It's just one damn thing after another.
And then Augustine often quoted, What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. But if we wish to explain it to someone, then he doesn't know. I think that reflects our own confusion. That time is something which we feel internally, but it's really difficult to articulate. So it's a bit like trying to explain what is it like to be made to somebody else, but I get to take this austere physicist's definition of the time. This situation between events is what clocks measure. So it certainly exists b
ecause clocks exist that they measure durations. And so I'm doing what a previous speaker admonished against, which is I'm really specializing in time. I'm saying that clocks measure durations between events and rulers, measure distances between points in space, and they are very closely related. Indeed, they are unified in Einstein's theory of relativity, where we talk about space time, the four dimensions of space time, and that that gives us this sort of specialized picture. Now, this will be
familiar to people from earlier talks. This is the the attempt to describe the unification of space time within the theory of special relativity. And what you're seeing here is the so-called light carrying. It's got a cone like structure. If we suppress one dimensional space. And as George Ellis discussed yesterday, that if you try to define simultaneously what's happening at the same moment as as now, say, on Mars, that the event on Mars that is simultaneous with that now this moment will diff
er by up to 20 minutes by depending on exactly how the observer is moving. So time, as we say, is relative. Now, George argued that in of that which is true of local physics, that when we come to cosmology there is a sort of privileged reference frame. And that reference frame, incidentally, is very easily thought of the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8 billion years ago, filled the universe with heat, radiation. That fading afterglow is around us everywhere. It's it's isotropic. It's tha
t it is uniform across the sky. This temperature is the same over there as over there. And and so that defines particular reference writing. So if you say the privileged observer sees the heat radiation from the big bang to be the same in every direction, that is a particular reference, right? Turns out that our planet, the Earth, is not actually sitting in that reference frame. It's moving relative to it, but it's moving fairly close, fairly slowly compared to the speed of light. And so that's
the reason that we can talk about the age of the universe in this precise way. It's the age as told by a clock sitting in this privileged reference frame. And so it gives us a type of sort of privilege time. And that's fine, that's good for cosmology, but I don't think it's good for local physics. So, for example, a proton in the large Hadron Collider whizzing very close to the speed of light. If you ask that approach on what's the age of the universe, it would give you a very different answer f
rom the 13.8 billion that I just gave. So that's just really a passing comment because I have other things I'd like to say. And so these quotes have been given many times, and so I'm going not going to waste too much time on it, but it does lead to this notion of what's called block time. I prefer to think of that as the time to escape. That is just as we have a map that you've got. And so the represents the landscape and it's all there at once so we can unfurl a map between them of all moments
of time. We call that the time scape and we have a four dimensional view then that is the space time scape. So that's the way I prefer to think of time. But nevertheless we get, we continue to get these confusing claims like could time run backwards, which is nonsensical at many levels, but in particular the point I'm trying to make at the moment is that it doesn't run at all. So this is an abuse of language or if you simply ask, came up yesterday. Well, if you think time passes, what is the spe
ed of time we can talk about? I'm looking out of the river here in Jacksonville. The speed of the river is probably about half a meter per second. Taking a careful look at it, what the speed of time? Well, of course, it's one second per second. It doesn't tell us anything, anything at all. We've had some discussion about the species and the width of the present moment. And what is it? I mentioned yesterday that I met once. Met Miroslav Hullaballoo. Right. So the dimension of the present moment w
ho claimed that music. We have to really take into account is sort of sliver of time, which might be longer than a second. But that's this amazing quote that I always like to use. Harold Macmillan, the former prime minister in the UK, spoke to Foster Dulles, the US secretary of State. His speech was slow, but it easily kept pace with his thoughts. So of course, we cannot separate the understanding of time from what's going on in our brains. It's so to cut to the chase. What I'm arguing here is t
hat this myth of Time's passage comes about because of a fundamental confusion the people feel that they have a fixed personal identity. You know, I am Paul DAVIES. I always was Paul DAVIES and will be, I hope, till till I die that I'm a fixed person. And so, of course, the world appears to be changing around me all the time. I think there's something back to front that the time is all laid out there. What is changing is me. It's the eye of personal awareness. I'm not the same person moment to m
oment. Of course, I'm very similar. So Paul DAVIES today, Paul DAVIES yesterday, as a lot of what physicists would call mutual information. But to assume that that means I am the same person is the source, I think of this confusion, and it's was nicely summarized in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I could tell you my adventures, beginning from this morning, set out as timidly and a little timidly. But it there is I going to have to actually read this because I've got to try and get the off the
screen. Well, look, you can read it yourselves. I think here we are. But it's no escape back to yesterday because I was a different person then. So that summarizes it very well. What I'm trying to say now, I think that there's an analogy here with with giddiness or dizziness so if you stand up and swirl around quickly like a ballerina and then stop, you have this overwhelming impression that the universe is rotating. It seems to be moving, but of course it's not the universe, it's rotating, it'
s fluid in your inner ear. So it's a loser in that sense mean it's a real phenomenon. So illusion is not a good time, but it's it's it's it's getting things back to front. It's what's the impression of motion? Something in your head, not something in the external world. And I think the same is true of the passage of time. And now some people again get confused. They say, Well, am I claiming that there's no arrow of time in the world, that the past and the future are not distinct? And that's abso
lutely not true and the world is asymmetric in time. My book, The Physics of Time, is all about that. The physical processes have this directionality towards usually described as towards greater entropy disorder. Very easy to give examples. This is the second law of thermodynamics, the Great Book of Nature, and it's right near the front. The basically order tends to give way to disorder. This picture tells it all. We don't often see the wreckage from from earthquakes reassembling itself. These a
re all the structures or another favorite example, the egg in the kitchen rolls off, breaks on the floor. We don't see eggs spontaneously reassembling themselves. And these things. another another example that if you put the name and we have to call it so personal, I suppose now near to the fire, then you would expect that this no person would diminish, would heat up and melt and it wouldn't go the other way. You wouldn't find that the fire would be raging even more strongly and the snow would a
ccumulate on the figure that. So these are all examples of the directionality of physical processes, but this is real. And I think, you know, so connected with this idea of the flow of time, but it means you can assign an arrow of time. That's fine. But the arrow metaphor that's got really muddled because they it's an arrow of the error time. It's not an arrow of time. It's an arrow of directionality of sequences of physical states. In time. It's not an arrow of time. It's off time. It's just si
tting there. It's the way in which we order a sequence of events. Let me just give you another example. Suppose you take a movie film of an everyday scene and then you play it backwards. Well, everybody laughs. It looks so preposterous. And that's because we're familiar with this idea of a directionality and intrinsic directionality of events. But now if you take the movie, if it's old fashioned movie and you chop it up into frames and you shuffle the frames, give it to somebody and say, put tho
se back into order, then most people would have no difficulty in doing that. And you'd a stack of frames like this. And that stack has an inbuilt directionality and inbuilt asymmetry. There's a frame corresponds to the beginning of the sequence frame towards the end of the sequence, and that is something which is takes statically in that stack. You don't have to rejoin the frame, so run the movie to make the point. It's a structural property of that step. Don't have to run the movie. So this is
where I'd like to clarify the distinction between the two nations of the Orient. So when people talk about the arrow of time, a lot of people are thinking that this is like an arrow flying through the air. That's one one use of an arrow. So the arrow is flying, but we also use the arrow metaphor or a symbol in other contexts. For example, when you have a compass needle, a compass needle is an arrow points note that doesn't mean you're moving north. It's indicating a an asymmetry in space between
north and south due to the spin of the Earth. It's an asymmetry in space and in same way, the arrow of time reversal asymmetry in time. A lot of time we don't say space is flowing, not for anything about solar. Same thing with a weathervane. It's a punch. The direction of the wind, not the velocity of a wind. That's you need an anemometer for that. And in case you're not still not convinced, let me just put this to you. How would you know when you wake up tomorrow morning? You expect it to be t
omorrow. But supposing you woke up and you were five years old, complete with all of your memories of five years and with everything subsequently wiped out, you simply are returned to where you were at the age of five. How would how would the world be any different now then? Supposing if we go the other way, suppose you fall asleep tonight and you wake up one year from now, How would you know? You've got all the memories of the intervening years and supposing you're time experience hopped around
like this maybe ten times a day, back and forth randomly across your world in your extended life, how would anything be different? And I think you wouldn't. And so that's another good way of seeing why time itself is not, as it were, conveying you into the future and talking about time itself. One of the great the defects about Zen is that I've never found a way of keeping a clock on the on the screen so that I know how when I'm doing the time. Well, that's the trouble to prop up my iPhone here
. But by the computer, I'll put the stopwatch on and look what's happened. You see, the screen has just gone blank. And I checked earlier on with I went to the Internet to see is there a way of keeping the screen alive? And now the answer is not on my. So I've now restored it. I see. I've been talking for 22 minutes and so I have a little little bit to go, but not too much. You have 60 Minutes, including the Question Time pool. Yes, I realize that we should allow time for questions. And so I'd l
ike to summarize in this chart what I'm saying there's an arrow of time and this is, as it were, an hour of entropy that we can imagine that a human being like me, I extended a through time. So that's the vertical hours on the left. And each moment I have a mental state and then I'm one, two and, three, a sequence of mental states. And these mental states correspond to states of the world. I see mental state of me at this time is corresponding to being here and in the Jacksonville in Florida. Bu
t a mental state to me tomorrow because functionally I hope if I get back right in Arizona and so on, I think you can see the point that mental states, I think correlated with that brain states. But just briefly, how mental states correlate with the states of the world and each mental state and each state of the world, we could say now, but we're just labeling the times T1, T2, T3. Nothing's moving or flowing. It's just that later brain states later versions of this self caught Paul Davis correl
ates he would later state to the world and later points on the clock and that's all there is It's a mapping from the states of the world into into mental states and M three is slightly different from M1 as I've explained not very much. So they have memories which connect in three to a lot of mutual information, but slightly different. And the world is slightly different and the times slightly different, but nothing's flowing or moving. It's just such a complete description of what we experience.
But of course it would be very cumbersome to go through life without making reference to this psychological and mental phenomenon. Time is flowing and we use it just like we use notions of free will and agency, which also can also be contested as to what whether they are property of the world or property of the mind. So I'm not decrying what the previous speakers have said in connection with our experience of time, but think property belongs in neuroscience. I'm not an expert, but I assume that
there are aspects of neuroscience having to do with the laying down of memories and so on. That would would go some way to explain. That's why we have this sense of temporal flux. But in the same way that I would look to neuroscience to explain as some sort of temporal rotation when we feel dizzy. I don't have enough time to properly deal with the source of this time. As images come up in some of the earlier talks, I believe I told about the cosmological phenomenon we see very clearly. This is
good example of the second law of thermodynamics. The sun won't go on burning forever. It's using up. I took the trouble to compute the in dollars what the sun is squandering, so to speak, every day, every second. And of course, eventually, if you were on that end, it would die. And so we live as a as has been known since the 19th century. And in a dying universe, those famous words of old Kelvin have. So when we look out in space, we see stars being born, stars dying. But it will go on forever.
The whole universe is on a one way slide to a state of maximum entropy, all the final heat death of the universe as it used to be called this entire field of cosmological eschatology. I should say, about exactly how the universe might end. I don't have time to get into it except to share a human story. I was once giving a lecture in New Delhi on the end of the universe. They asked me to do that, and by a strange coincidence, the lecture took place in exactly when the Mayan calendar was going to
. Well, it was being predicted that this meant the end of the world. And so I was able to say, Well, I don't believe that this in this prediction, but before the end of my lecture, we should know the answers. So all of this is a roundabout way of saying that the universe began at a low entropy state. And we and I'm going to skip over this because I just want to make a final point. I'm going to skip over my explanation. So the gravitational of the early universe, it's a fascinating topic. It coul
d come up in Question Time, but because I want to make a final comment, skipping a roll is, I wanted to make a final comment about the nature of consciousness, because that's been a feature of the discussion so far. I'm arguing that I am that it's wrong to think I am fixed in time changes, it's the time is fixed and that I change what it is I what is this sense of self? And I want to just make contact because it's come up a few times with Roger Penrose. His idea of quantum mechanics and consciou
sness that may be consciousness causes the so-called collapse of the Wavefunction, it turns out, put an amalgam of possible worlds into a concrete actual world through some processes the brain. I don't personally believe that, but I should mention that it's it's possible that quantum mechanics breaks down at some level of complexity. And that's what I would like to argue, that the quantum mechanics is fine for atoms and molecules, not so good for cats and human and somewhere between atom and cat
that something else kicks in. And it is entirely likely that also if we are thinking about the nature of consciousness, that that has something to do with complexity. And so what we might have is that there's some underlying mechanism, I'm just calling it X, which explains consciousness, but also explains the collapse of the Wavefunction. So consciousness explaining the way function collapse X is explaining what is X? Well, one contender is integrating information theory, which has been mention
ed already, but which has to do not just with the amounts of complexity, but with the number of feedback loops and so on. I don't think that is the right theory, but it's a good try, good first drive. And so the last word I'm going to leave you with is of course, what we want is is to know what it says. I'm saying quantum mechanics is really just an effective theory that breaks down on this level of complexity. And there's this true theory of consciousness. So we want to know if X explains consc
iousness that explains the illusion of a flying time. What is X? We need some clever student who is going to tell us that. And I can't with George, whose paper came out the same day as he gave his talk. My paper came out a few days ago, the model scope of time. So if you want to know more this be found in the journal Timing and Time Perception and I run 30 seconds over time. I think my little clock here so I'll stop there. Thank you. Paul. Thank you so much. And you are welcome to have the extra
30 seconds. I'm glad you and whether you showed your last slide because of course, there is a distinction between saying consciousness collapse as the wave function and saying that it's the collapse of the wave function which makes consciousness, and that's Penrose's view, the latter one. So the way you merge them I think is rather nice. And the many comments one can make about your talk I have to say I love your initial definition of time. Time is one damn thing after another because it brings
in the mind element, you know, irritation being feature of mind. I wanted you, I maybe shouldn't ask this question, but I was fascinated because of course, you take the view that time is okay for neuroscience and psychology, but it's not part of physics, right? Were you swayed even a little bit by the sort of idea that I presented yesterday that you do need some extra dimension to describe mental time? And I sort of relate to that to brain cosmology, which is at least an attempt to use physical
language to explain it. So when you you can be as rude as you like. But I mean, were you swayed a little bit by that? Yes, I think I said yesterday that I take my word seriously of mental and seriously, and I'm open to the idea that we should extend physics to incorporate mental events. And I've also spent a lot of time talking to Don Page, who I'm sure you know. Yes. A former head stuck of Stephen Hawking and your career so overlapped a lot. And Don has his own particular view about the nature
of quantum mechanics, the many worlds formulation and how you fit mental dimensions of that. And so I'm very open to those ideas. So I suppose I've I've tried to be a little bit controversial, what I'm saying, and I think I'm saying that within our current understanding of physics, the time doesn't pass or flow or move. The era of time is not an arrow of time is an arrow in time, and that's as far as we go. But if we but I'm certainly open. I've always been to the idea that if we extend physics
to incorporate the mind in some more comprehensive way, then sure enough we may actually find that there is something that defines this this player. I'm completely open to that idea. I just think we're a long way from it. It's time. Well, thank you. That's that's a that's great to hear. So now again, I will offer, first of all, a chance for a comment to to the other. and I can see Julia there too. Hello, Julia. Welcome. Thank a special welcome to Julia, because in California it must be some ver
y ungodly hour. So what is your question, Julia Yeah. Paul I'm a huge fan, especially of this idea that it's not time. That's and whenever I've read your work, I keep coming up against this and maybe just misunderstand it, but you say that the AI is that much the AI is what? Changing, right? I am changing. How do you do change without How do you do change without time moving? How do you how do you conceive of that right? So I was a great pains to point out I'm not denying the existence of time.
There are earlier moments and later moments and later versions of my mental state. You remember the diagram with you and I am one interim three hour difference, I think, from earlier versions. And and so we would describe that I mean, if I say I changed my mind, what it means is that my mental state at a later time is slightly different from that earlier time. And I'm just saying. When I would talk about that, it feels like you're switching between sort of without saying you're switching between
a personal view of time. It's sort of a God's eye view of time so that you could say, look, I see the change. Remember? And three at that you're looking from a God's I view sort of. Right. So that's what physicists do. You know, they we say so and so the second next to God, we take our God here. But it feels like if you don't acknowledge that switch, then there's something missing about the explanation. I don't think you get to go, even if you're a physicist from this personal experience to thi
s God's eye view without explaining that in the physical reality you're trying to explain think. Well, I'm just swapping the two positions. I'm not denying that that there is a change. I'm saying that the changes in personal identity, which correlates with the world and it's not. It's it if you think that you are a fixed or conserved entity, you as a self, then of course it seems like the world is changing around you and there's just sort of temporal flux. But I just think that's back to France.
But we mustn't think of ourselves as because we are evolving the time. And I, I think that just result of the issue. So the, the whole my talk is the mental scape of time and I just think there is this, you know, this model of terminology, it's, it's so talk about time flowing, it's a metaphor, it's an unattractive one. We use it all the time and it's there in literature and arts and we, we I think nothing wrong with using metaphors. You have to understand it is, is a metaphor and it's not a pr
operty of time. Well, Paul, we it may be a metaphor, but we are running out of time now. Do you have a question, Mark? Yeah. Yes. It's just a short question. So first of all, I think you just mentioned in the answer to Julia mentioned that it's not just I change, but everything changes. Yeah, the world is change. But, but I want to ask when, when you were open to ideas of merging physics and consciousness. Yeah. And just to comment on what is the now for physics and perhaps in relation the exper
ience of the present moment. As I said, an experience is an extended present moment, but of course in physics then it's an extension less point in time. Yes. So that would be probably a problem in putting those two together that. Well, not really. We talk about split seconds, so on. We have equipment that couldn't go beyond human senses and measure intervals of time down to about a trillion trillions of a second. So there are physical processes in particle physics terms, the most straightforward
seconds. And as with you, I think Bernard mentioned yesterday that if you go down to the Planck time, it looks like the very nature of space and time break down and that most of the people I talk to in my profession seem to think that both space and time, indeed this unified spacetime is an emergent phenomenon that is not itself primitive and that it's built up out of something else. And so our idea when it comes to time, people talks about chronologies as if, you know, the sequence of events i
n the world might be a little bit like the movie I was talking about frames. I like to think of it as space time being pixelated, and I'm actually working on, you know, to detect that what is there. Is it possible that a photon traveling right across the cosmos might be jiggled around a bit by that pixelation in space and time? And so that's an idea that's possibly testable for checking its senses amongst you. Croutons. Yes. Pull. So I would I'm going to allow an extra minute because you saw it
a minute late. And I want to get at least one question in from the floor. Is it the notion of entropy to ambiguous to ground an objective arrow of time? There are countless conceivable points of view from which what is disorderly for us could in fact be more orderly, e.g. hash tables, how to define order unambiguously. So it's a quite a technical question. It is, and it's a very good question because of course, in top branches of science, where people argue over definitions of of entropy, and th
ere's a famous story about cold channel who developed what we now call information theory. It came up with a quantity that looks very much like entropy. And according to the story of John Von, I remember I've got this thing, what am I going to call it? And he said, Well, why not call it entropy? Because nobody understands what that is anyway. So of course it's a matter of definitions. There are other areas of time. We see radiation and your radio signal arrives after it's sent from the transmitt
er. We see energy flowing out into space from the sun. As I've explained, and we see the universe expanding and so on. And there are a number of attempts to link these different things together. But it would be wrong to suggest that we fully understand the nature of entropy when it comes, particularly when it comes to small numbers of degrees of freedom. So in its very active area of study. Thank you. And I should stress, of course, to the audience that we've got a panel discussion at the end of
the day where some of these topics can be discussed at great length. Paul, thank you so much. You've talked about the model scape of time, and I think we're certainly less muddled now than we were before your talk here. So I have a model of. Thank. You muddied the waters of the river of. Well now it is my great pleasure to introduce, in fact the final talk of the meeting Julia Moss Bridge. Julia has not only got up to give a talk at 7:00, but I think she's actually been here since the beginning
of this meeting. So you must have been up since about 3:00. So thank you so much, Julia, for joining us. I'll say a few words about you to begin with. Julia is the founder and research director of the Must Bridge Institute and a visiting scholar in, the psychology department at Northwestern University, a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the science director of Focus. It Will Labs and an associate professor in Integral and Transpersonal psychology at the California Institute of Integr
al Studies. So she has many strings to her bow. Her focus is on teaching and learning love and time. Love is something we haven't heard about at this meeting so far. So this is appropriate for a leading project's conducting research and coaching technology executives and engineers. She received her Ph.D. in Communications science and disorders from Northwestern University, then did an M.A. in neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. And she's also invented and patented Joyce
Compass and is the author of the calling, as well as coauthor of Transcendent Mind Rethinking the Science of Consciousness and also the Premonition Code. So I'm delighted to be able to welcome you, Julia, to give you your talk. So your talk is is entitled. How do precognition and other perceptual anomalies shed light on models of consciousness, unconsciousness and time over to Julia. So thank you everyone for listening and also for such a foundation and Bernard for inviting me. I'm excited. I lo
ve such a foundation, and this particular issue of time in mind is, of course near and dear to my heart. So Tupperware. I am really interested in what we can learn from what women have done for a long period of time, which is sort of take care of the home. There's a new Apple TV show called Lessons in Chemistry about a chemist who's a woman who starts a TV show about her own experiences making meals, but she does it through a Chemical Lens. And so I was thinking about Tupperware and what that ha
s to do with science. And I realized Tupperware is like an ancient and useful tool for secret baking. Here's what I'm talking about. This is a standard sort of cabinet full of Tupperware. When you look in the cabinet and you're trying to find the right Tupperware for your for your leftovers, you're always asking what is the right container for these leftovers? So in our context as scientists, what is the right theory for these observations? And then the next question is how much can we fit into
this container? How much can we explain by this theory? The problem, of course, with Tupperware, the limiting factor, as everyone knows, who has worked in the kitchen and had to find a container that worked with a lid that fits is what do the available which are really the limiting factor. Really. These are the edge cases of any scientific venture. Tell us about the right container theory. In other words, we have to find the lid first. We have to find the edge cases first to really inform the th
eory. And so, well, there is a lot of taboo around looking at edge cases in science. It's it should be the opposite. We should first attack edge in our understanding so that we can understand what a theory might actually be. So this I believe what happens when you forget to examine the edge cases with respect to your theory and you just keep detailing out sort of how much spaghetti you can fit into a container, how many how many observations you can fit into a given theory that's already sort of
agreed upon. I think you have a decrease in innovation over time. And this is an article from Nature January 20, 23 talking. They had they sort of invented a new measure of scientific innovation, scientific disruption, and they they named it as the seed index. And you can see over time it's dropping. That's the basic point in both papers and patents. You could argue with their index, but I think it's pretty that there are for various reasons that are not well understood. But obviously there's m
ultiple components of this, but there's drop in disruptive technology, disruptive discoveries. I think a piece of it has to do with forgetting that we're supposed to be looking at the that we're afraid to look at. We're supposed to be looking at the edge cases that actually make us question our theories. So here in the situation, we're trying to look at time in the mind, which are two very not well understood or defined areas, at least in the world of science, in the world of psychology and phys
ics, I'm sorry, philosophy of physics, they're they're much better defined. But in the world in which especially neuroscience and a little bit of physics, they're not they're not well defined in their arguments. I think we have to enter into what I want to call edge science, which is looking at the edges. And we just heard from Alex, who referred to edge consciousness research and is exactly the same thing. This is the edge science of consciousness. And I love this footprints of sort of what we'
re trying to do here is look at beyond what the theory, what the current theories can hold to see what we can actually discover. So I think that what that means is we need to ask again some old questions with new eyes. So here are three examples of questions that are really on the edge of our theories of mind. The last one is specifically about time, so can mind directly influence matter? So recently more Friedman of that day Crest wrote his I believe, third paper showing that frontal areas seem
to be a filter for the capacity to use the mind to influence matter remotely. So cytokinesis this thing because like a crisis in this world, very far out, very impressive work by a neurologist who is, as I think, a decent amount of rigor. There's a link to it there. By the end, I'll give you a QR code that has a link to this entire slide deck so you could get all these URLs yourself if you want to explore them. Another question is does consciousness survive death? So in the book that I wrote wi
th Not Stories transplant of Mine that came out from American Psychological Association 2017, we ask that. Well, that's a big part of that book is this question of what's the evidence that consciousness actually survives death? And so that tells us a lot about our theories of mind, body and brain. And then, of course, for the past 15 years or so, I've been focusing on the question longer. At this point, I've been focusing on the question, can we predict future events that should be unpredictable
? And there's a bunch of papers in that at that your outlet. If you really get interested in that, I'm going to be focusing on that. But just keep in mind that these are all edge science questions. These are all edge consciousness questions that really define the answers to which really define our series. And we ought to be looking at all of them and more. Okay, So this is a quote from him in a column from yesterday's talk that I just that struck me. I hadn't heard it before, and it was explaini
ng some more deeply about where Einstein was in his thinking about the now. And to me, it answers this question is what is the edge case? The question of what the edge case when it comes to the relationship between psychological and physical reality. So here's the quote. Einstein said that the problem of the now world in me seriously explained that the experience of the now made something special for people, something a session. It's actually different from the past in the future. But that this
important difference does not. I cannot determine the physics, that this experience cannot be grasped by. Science seem to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation. So I think that what Einstein was seeing was that this question of the now is the edge case when it comes to understanding the relationship between psychological and physical reality. That is the lid of the Tupperware. If you couldn't find this lid, if you can find the understanding of this relationship, you can define a lot
in this theory. So so Einstein, I believe and you know me if I'm right, because this is what I believe based on my much more limited understanding, was struggling with that because he was seeing and others, other philosophers and scientists have also seen this, but he was seeing sort of in the now these questions that we still struggle with, specifically what what is the job of scientists? What was I supposed to do? Are they supposed to describe physical reality? Are they supposed to describe,
perceived or consider or conceived that should ever be reality? Are they supposed to describe how we perceive, conceive, reality with our senses, our imaginations, like like neuroscientists do? Is that what scientists are supposed to do? And you could see the history of science of went through is going through these steps trying to figure out what it's supposed to do. I think physicists would say they're supposed to describe physical reality, but as we just heard from Paul, Paul, when when you t
alk about we don't see that the egg goes from a broken state to a whole state, we don't see that. So it sounds like what you're saying is you want to describe what is perceived rather than physical reality itself. So it's a really it's a tricky question. Then this other question that's related is what does this mismatch between physical and psychological reality, specifically characterized by the now mean? Does it mean physical reality is secondary. We've been talking about that as kind of a for
m of idealism, that psychological reality is secondary, a form of physical ism or that physical psychological realities arise from a third process or substance, some kind of neutral monism. These are, you know, timeworn questions that all seem to come, as other people have pointed out from this mismatch. But the now so what do we know about human experience? We know that it feels like the top where people land on the moon and you don't know what's going to happen next. And then at some point nin
e, 11 happens and then don't know what's going to happen next, and then COVID happens and then, of course, flying cars. We expect that we don't know. Actually, that will happen probably on below. We have another model, which is this sort of model of, I think, similar to what Paul was talking about, where all the events are. There. I mean, it's a model scape, I agree, but it's this idea that all the events are there in time, like a landscape of time and human experience is moving across it. So th
e way I think about time is more like the bottom, but the future is of course there you have, you know, of course, a lot of shared information between the past and the future and human experience moves across it that also allows for potentially, it seems like it would allow for sort of a naive sense getting information from that future if it's already there, feels like there should be a way to get information from it. So what would that be in terms of mental information would be something that i
s called precognition. So precognition in which the answer is known to no one until a future time appears to work quite well. So this is, Jessica, a conclusion of a study. She was hired by Congress to try to understand precognition and extrasensory perception and the series of remote case studies that the US did. She wrote this in 1996. It was the American Statistical Association president. In 2016, she's at UC, she's a collaborator and a friend of mine. And she told me and has told others that
when she gave a talk at her presidential address to this statisticians in 2016, she asked them, Look, I am convinced that the data on precognition are the strongest of any extrasensory perception data. It's very clear that if I tell her, she said, it's very clear if the data for precognition were the data for a new drug, you you would believe that the drug worked. So she says, So I'm going to ask room full of statisticians, What would you like to have to be convinced about? Precognition? Would y
ou like more data? Raise your hands. Okay. Would You like to have a strong personal experience. Raise your hands. The statisticians in a vast majority wanted a personal experience, so they work on statistics, which is about trying to make inferences about the world based on data that occurs to a bunch of different people or a bunch of different data points of which they don't have a personal experience. That's their job. And yet what they require to believe that precognition is real is a strong
personal experience. Super fascinating. Meanwhile, I'm trying to give you a personal experience through, I guess through me to let you know that there are existing applications of precognition. One of the ways we manage personal experiences that can be had by everyone in the moment is to talk about how that experience or mental skill is being applied. So I can tell you all these things are happening because I have a team of people who are skilled precognitive like vetted, who do these things, so
supporting, unbiased and insightful strategic intelligence. So it's unbiased because they don't know actually what they're looking at in the future. Inspiring technical innovations in climate science, addressing complex strategic questions and cryptography, and directing creative, creative engineering and energy research and development. So these things are going on to interesting effect in the sense that they're making teams and people more productive and more accurate about their foresight. S
o I'm going to lead you through a little better understanding of what I'm talking about and put it in the context of helping us understand what this would even tell us about Time in the Mind. So there are many different kinds of precognition and I put them on these axis, these axes. So the x axis is precognition with short lead time on the order of milliseconds, 2 seconds. In other words, the time between knowing about a future event and then the feedback of what that event is very short and a l
ong lead time, like minutes, two years. I predict something that happens minutes, months, years from now. There's also this axis, the y axis of how conscious you are as a person of the contents. Most of the really short time frame stuff you'll notice is unconscious. Most of the longer time frame stuff is conscious. And I'm really focused on precognitive remote viewing these days. Although originally when I started my career in this area, I focused on the other edge, which is presets of the reall
y shortest physiological mission time. So this is, by the way, from a paper that came out in the Journal of Anomalous and Exceptional Experiences this year. Okay, so I'm going to call precognitive remote viewing, indirect precognition and presentiment direct precognition, and I'll explain why, but I'll explain why in a second. But first, I want to go through the differences between them. I think these are edges of a phenomenon. I think there's different mechanisms that that master these kinds of
skills. And I think it could be skilled in what without being skilled in the other. And I know that's the case. So there are these differences between them about first, I already talked about whether they're mostly conscious or not in terms of the time frame I've already talked about that there's clarity that gender does not influence accuracy for what I'm calling indirect precognition or precognitive remote viewing, and it looks like it influences accuracy for pre sentiment. Feedback is requir
ed for pre sentiment, but not for precognitive. Okay, that's a big piece that would come up later. Interesting targets seem to help with precognitive remote meaning there's evidence at least from my work that they're not necessary for pre sentiment and there's a sense of self-transcendence or being able to connect something larger than yourself that at least we know in the expression of self-transcendence called unconditional love. We know that when people are experiencing unconditional love, we
have I have two data sets showing that we have better precognitive smoking and we don't have that, but those data are presenting that. So I don't know what the answers there. So to explain why I'm calling one direct precognition and one indirect admission for direct precogs mission, you can imagine, especially physicists like to imagine, including Daniel Sheehan, who I think has this this model. He's at University of San Diego, and it's a collaborative bunch. You have something called the what
I term the physical time symmetry model. The physical time symmetry model says, you know, direct precognition is just your future self. So there's something physiological about the future state that trickles back in time and you can pick up on in the past state. And that's the interesting feature of the physical time symmetry model is the person who experiences future event has to be the one who predicts it. And they will, they will look, they will predict what they experience, even if that's no
t accurate. Right? So their stories Erik Wargo talks about this model also called the time loop because time loops. So there's stories about people who recognize the incorrect number of people dying in a plane accident. And then the newspaper comes out with the incorrect number of people. And so that seems to explain that, right? That's pretty compelling, at least in that one instance, Right? It's pretty compelling. And there are ways you can play with experiments in terms of controlled, control
led laboratory experiments to test this. So I believe that that kind of precognition exists. And this indirect precognition, which I think is exemplified by precognitive remote viewing, I think is taking place on our different model, which I call the pervasive universal consciousness model. And I'll also I'll give you some nice columns, space time columns in a second to sort of further explain this. But the indirect precognition, you see, I don't know if you could see my arrow, but it's starting
somewhere out here is the experience of the person through the time scape. It's starting outside of that so you don't have to while the person can experience the future event, they don't have to at all to get the information and somehow it's floating around and doing whatever and the information finally comes to the person over here. So This speaks to this this phenomenon not having to have feedback. The person never has to have the future experience to get the information which extremely commo
n in remote viewing applications. So if you're working, for instance, for a law enforcement agency or an intelligence agency who does not want to, nor can they legally give you any feedback about what you have predicted because you don't have a clearance, you don't have a need to know. You can still get the information and therefore it can't be this model, can't be that your future self is telling you because you don't know in the future. So you never have that experience and yet you can get the
information and be accurate. So how is that? So how is that is what I was puzzling over when I came up with these two. The physical time signature model, the purpose of the universe consciousness. This is also with that same paper. And yes, so here's the physical time signature model here. Like now as we just heard from Paul and others. So hopefully don't interview this, but you'll see that this is here and now and this arrow shows the information traveling from the future to past and vice vers
a. So that's easy to understand. You just have to kind of a person around time, some in some kind of way that we don't understand. I'm not saying that's easy, but I'm saying it's easy to understand here we have these different options for information can be coming from completely outside. You're like own on the edges to another edge in a symmetric or way. Notice the way that I think about these, like a physicist might say, Well, if you don't get feedback, but the feedback is possible, what might
be here? And they like if your path is here, it might be over here. You just never get to it. The way I conceive of these light cones is that anything that's in the light cone, because I think conceive of space as and time has already written like everything calculated all at once, sort of like a Lagrangian all at once kind of calculation. I don't see that anything that is going to happen for you is within this time. Cone and I could get into that later. But anyway, that's what that's the way I
explain it. The reason I call it the pervasive universal consciousness model is because there can be without your without individual effort, there can be information that arrives to you in the here and now seemingly from a personal universe, like information specifically for you. Like in a dream, you wake up with information. And when I say you, I mean like this has happened to me. This has happened to people I've studied that information that tells you about a future event. Like you don't know
why you have, but now you have it and it wasn't your goal to go get it. So it was like, it feels like feels like it was the intention of the universe. It feels personal to you and now it's your information. So it's very different than. The physical model of the universe and actually different from sort of an informational theoretic model of the universe and yet does relate this attention piece does relate to the human, psychological and the physical. So I haven't figured all that out. It's all
very questionable. But these are this the way I'm thinking of it anyway. So what are the implications for theories of mind of these two models? Well, they're different implications, and I think they're both they are both sets of implications are important. So for direct precognition, I haven't even covered any of the data showing that these exist. So you just either have to trust me or think that I'm lying or you can read those papers. But that you trust me, that this exists. And there's somethi
ng here to explain directly. Cognition suggests that physiological processes are time symmetric or causal causally, and they give us in some way or that end or that mental processes are time symmetric, better causal, costly, ambiguous in some way. So, you know, whatever we're talking about, whether it's physical ism, idealism, some kind of neutral monism to a model and whatever is in there has to be some has to have some kind of rhetoric, causal or ambiguous or time symmetric substrate the or th
at potentially that time loops inform everyday awareness and perception. In other words, there might be unconscious time loops. In other words, if our consciousness might be if we're receiving it like a radio receiver, it might be transmitted from the future. So this is one weird way that precognition could influence thinking about consciousness. Okay, indirect precognition suggest the universe may be personal. That intention has causal influence. So it's my intention of all the events in the wo
rld when I'm doing a remote viewing tasking with my team, that we pick out the information that's appropriate for something that we don't know what it is in the future. So we're just studying the intention to get the correct information from the future, and we don't know what that information is. So the fact that I can actually work suggests that intention has causal influence that we don't understand. There is an informational substrate for all events that underlie time. That's one that's one i
mplication. I happen to think it's true. So I listed it there and that non-local influences on human thought and action have to be accounted for because this this, you know, because I have data showing that this works and I believe my own data and other people have data like Mark Whitman, who did a great study on that feedback, Feedback is not required. There's something that needs to be explained in our series. So some people like to download slides, so there's that QR code in the right hand co
rner will allow you to download all these slides and that will also get you all these links. You can also take a screenshot of this if you are interested. That's me in the upper right hand corner with my generation to a quantum type machine, which I'm sure you'll read about if you're interested. And I just want to thank everyone here, Bernard especially, and the time and mine crew. They were very professional, even though I was sleepy and all the precogs that I've worked with, including the inte
rpretive first casting team, the clients worked with and the experimental participants donors, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Beyond Foundation, the Jim and Christina Hummingbird Fund and Jeff Ozer, and then a of recent coauthors to whom I am grateful and have been grateful and will always remain grateful. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much. Julia. And it's I didn't anticipate that the Tupperware would come into this, but it's a it's a very useful, a very beautiful analogy. And obviously
you haven't had time to describe all the data for precognition, but gave the list of your books. And I can highly recommend people consult. Those have further information. I also have to say, though, I shouldn't be focusing on my own, there is that I like this idea of the time loops because it very much relates my own concept of species present, which I talked about because the idea being the species present is normally, you know, a 10th of a second or whatever, but that it can expand in certai
n circumstances. Or the point is, within the species present, there is no distinction between past, present and future. But anyone you. Take, I mean the music in terms of the extension of the of the moment. And I think that that's an interesting idea. I wonder if you could have better direct precognition if you were playing a piece of music right, all the way through the process. So again. I can't resist following up that comment because I'm fascinated by people like Mozart would hear their own
symphonies. And if one believes in precognition, it's always seemed to me Mozart creates a symphony, is played in the future, and if it is premonition, he can hear his own symphony and that then generates the symphony. So you have a source of creativity being associated with a time loop too. I don't know whether that accords with. This and this octopus that just escaped to the ocean like. Right. How did this octopus figure out that it could get through its cage, go down to the floor, crawl acros
s the floor and get to a pipe that would lead to the ocean maybe its future self in this kind of direct precognition? It was just following its future self. Right. It's just very interesting. I don't know if you read about that. I was well. Actually, I hadn't heard about the octopus, but I'll certainly read about it later. Now, we've already got several hands up, I think I think Paul was first. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Julia. I said earlier that I'm an open minded skeptic for the paranor
mal, but the aspect of the paranormal I most skeptical about is precognition, because I want to know where are all the precognitive billionaires that if you're a day trader, you can trade on the stock market within a fraction of a second. You don't have to see very far ahead and you don't have to get it right every time a 1% advantage, you are very soon become extremely rich. Same if you go to Las Vegas and play roulette, just just to slide by us will make you immensely wealthy immensely quickly
. So are we to really suppose that all these people with precognitive abilities have never thought, well, I'm going to make a buck out of this? Let me turn it around for you, Paul. Why do you assume that the billionaires that have made their money on the stock market aren't precognitive? Well, I told you, we're probably going to say that I have never had any of them came that something paranormal about their. Why would they do that as soon as you one that you have the capacity to make money on t
he stock market. You get bothered a lot by people. And if you have billions of dollars you have no reason to do that. You just make your money and then you go change the world according to the way in which it appears. Fair enough that they're going to hug this. But make another comment. And I think yesterday that you can tell that how old I am because I keep referring back to the people and events from a long time ago. But somebody who's been in this game of the paranormal over many, many years,
Rupert Sheldrake I haven't heard his name up and I mention it only because I'm very fond of Rupert. I've known him his whole career. I don't agree with very much, he says. But I think I enjoyed talking to him a lot. Where I think he is unfairly maligned is that he does propose tests all the time. And the one thing that drives physicists crazy is when people will just talk about this or that in a paranormal phenomenon without saying how we suppose, you know, give me a meter that will measure thi
s and let's try and pin it down. But the group has been very good. So for example, in his claim that people know when they're being stared at, you know, it's easy mouth. You just get a bunch of students in a row and everybody stares at one of them. Actually, his experimental methodology for that was horrible and was I mean, I love Rupert, too, but like, he's started it with that kind of methodology that had a bunch of sensory leakage, and that was in collaboration with some other folks at Instit
ute of Medical Sciences. So I didn't talk about any of my experiments today because I wanted to talk about the ideas, how they shaped the thinking around the mind. But yes, I've given many talks about the experimental evidence for precognition. You can look those papers and you can read about them or you can watch the talks, But. Yeah, I should do that. Thank you. Julia. Just to qualify something, when you talk about billionaires possibly using precognition, you would you be arguing that it's un
conscious, that they wouldn't themselves know they were using precognition. That the conscious could be unconscious on the level of the timing of a day trader? It might be unconscious because it's such a short time frame. Do any claim there was this. Current study and there's a great study intersection of for London day traders who survived basically did well and they had better interception, which I think is really interesting ability to detect the heart rhythm, which suggests that maybe they c
ould make the unconscious conscious. And so I think I think for a lot of people who are skilled at this the dividing line between unconscious and conscious is much more permeable. And so there's a lot of fluidity and that may be the same truth, truth for creative geniuses, artists, musicians, those who let that information bubble up. And then there's the information, and they're not so worried about where it came from. Thank you, Alex. You have your hand up. yes. I had a question related to Paul
's. So? So Julia, it's hard enough to convince ourselves that we're doing the experiment right and that we're finding it is what it seems to be. And I would like to have more comments from you about this. This avenue I haven't explored, which I think you mentioned patenting, right? So rather than trying to convince oneself and then the community, which is hard enough, well, one can say, well, look, I'll make something. And if it works, not only if it's sold because you can sell things that don't
work, but if it works, then it's just it just become viral. It will conquer the world. Then who cares if the grumpy skeptic and doesn't believe me, they will be out there. So. So what can you say about that strategy? Yeah, this is what I call the edge science application strategy. And so because when you're working on that science, the culture right now suggests that it's weird or creepy or taboo rather than like the most important thing you can do to, try to understand what's going on in the u
niverse, which is of course, my advice is to just create applications. And so one of the things I'd like to do is build a national for the United states, build a national edge science institute where we do research and a lot of applications around edge science. So just, you know, for instance, I'm working on a quantum time machine. I worked with Daniel Sheehan and some other physicists on creating a kind of time machine meeting last year in San Diego. We got a bunch of people from around world w
ho are mostly physicists, some philosophers, some neuroscientists working on how to send information back in time and had a bunch of working groups. It was invite meeting is haven't heard of it that's why. So these kind of applications. So of course I'm passionately pursuing that. But there's other applications. I think the folks at Ion's are pursuing a mental switch, so changing it like a a basically a binary switch for the mind, what you need to do to be able to do that. And I think Patrizio T
russardi is working on this are things that I know publicly. I'm saying them are, they're out there in the world. And then there's other things that I hear about that are not public, but there are plenty of people pursuing applications and I think that's just the way to go. It's like people who didn't believe GPUs would work, you know, whatever, Just make chips. Though it's often said that no one will believe in these paranormal powers until someone can make a device which will make someone a bi
llionaire. Marketing it. Yes. And people talk about this as if it hasn't already been done right, because their assumption is that when it gets done, people will want to sell it. So if I were a billionaire and I made a lot of money on one of these devices, but I want to motivate me to sell this device to other people. But could I just interject again, Julia, if you have, you know, your star performer, a student in the lab who is getting slightly above chance with the Zenith card. So, you know, w
hatever is the preferred method these days, you know, just say, right, okay, well, let's see if we can challenge the institute, even though I think science is by using your talents to invest, I mean that. But that would be very convincing if you if you didn't take somebody who was already a proven investor, you took just somebody who you could do control with one of the students who wasn't any previous. Your assumption there, Right? Your assumption there is people who are targets are also going
to be good at investing. I have a team of Precogs who are excellent. We worked with an investor. In fact, we told the investor what to do. He did not listen to our advice. We were right about what happened to the stocks. He was wrong and he didn't make money, so he fired us. We quit. So there's there's all sorts of human factors here. And we don't understand how genius works. We understand how successful prediction works. Among those people called super forecasters. I had a study about super for
ecasters predict future events really well. We don't understand if they're using precognition. In other words, we're not asking these questions and we're making the assumption that if you knew you were precognitive, first of all, if you knew precognitive and it was conscious, second, you would want to tell other people in this culture where people are constantly saying, you're crazy if you say this and in this culture there's competition around money and resources. It's just don't understand wha
t's going to motivate you to tell other people that in that context. What you'll make is not like a conspiracy theory, which is pushing it a notch for me further in the direction of skeptical. Only in the sense that if you consider culture a conspiracy in which, yes, everything's a conspiracy because we're all in culture. Okay. Now I think I'm going to have to end the discussion of Judas presentation. I would just like to thank you once again. Judy, I'm so glad you you emphasize the importance o
f age science, as indeed did Alex, because it's a fact from the whole history of physics that it's it's those phenomena at the edge. It's the it's the little anomalies which ultimately always lead to the paradigm shifts. And so it's, you be talking about a particular type of anomaly. But I think it's it's a message for, you know, science as a whole. So thank you very much indeed, Julia. Thank you. And of I pre I appreciate that we didn't actually have any questions from the floor for this talk,
but we're now going into the general panel discussion. So there will be an opportunity do that. So can I could I have on the screen everybody who is here present because I can see Julia, Mark and Paul and Alex and Jimena is a does that mean that Jorge is not there? Jorge, If you're if you're not there, if there Jorge, could you answer? And if you're not there, you better not answer. Okay. So it's. Not there. That is relevant because of course, in this panel discussion, the audience will be asked
. But my direct questions to the speakers for the whole meeting over the last two days. But bear in mind that actually the only person from yesterday's session presence is Mark and myself. Now they're all going be a combination of comments discussion among yourselves as the speakers are also from the floor. I'm going to start off with a question to mark from the floor, because it comes from Bernardo, who behind the scenes has been playing such an important role in this meeting. So I'm giving him
priority coming in before any of you. But to Mark from Bernardo, you argue that experience requires extended present moment, such as in hearing melodies that the previous notes in a melody exist only in so far as members experience right now. So on your empirical observations telling us precisely the opposite, that extension requires experience, not experience extinction. So that's a quite a difficult question. So I don't know. Actually an answer is no. Of course you can always say that. So Wha
t I want to say is that if you are listening to a melody, I'd say best example perhaps. Dan Lloyd The philosopher's example of the Hey Jude by the Beatles. So of course you could say once we're hearing after the Hey, we hear the Jude, you could say, okay, Hey is already in in the past. But what I would argue from what the phenomenology stuff argued for and what you also partly can show in brain science is that we always hear these extended melodies phrases as chunks, a whole. So even anticipatio
n. So if we know the song, when we hear, when we hear, hey, we are already imagining the Jude. That is of course, from coming up from memory. And then it is anticipation of the Jude. And once we are, let's say, physically hearing Jude, we still have this, Hey, technically speaking, you could say, but that's already physically in the past. But psychologically, experientially we still hear it as a whole. So we have this Hey Jude. So this is so so that's why I would argue that it is some sort of an
experiential extended now. And that's what why I try to define it as an extension of 2 to 3 seconds and not particularly as a memory feature. I hope it's some sort of come came close to an answer to what the question was. I think so, but doubtless you have a chance to discuss it in a greater length later. Judea, there's a question for you from Jonathan. Now, is is is is that is that our own Jonathan? Jonathan Schooler Jonathan, we can't see you in the screen. So of course it is delightful that
you you're here I don't know if you can somehow appear on the screen, but if not, your voice is quite sufficient. It's very early in California. my goodness. You've got early as well. Jonathan. You got up early yesterday as well. So. Okay, we know what I see, Jonathan, is. Yeah. Okay. So if you're in your pajamas, you should stay. Just the voice. Now, the question anyway, to Judea from Jonathan is the only one future timeline or could there be branches? If there are branches, is it possible to h
ave precognition of a future that does not come to pass? And of course, this is relates to what Jonathan himself talked about yesterday. So, Judea, how would you react? Yeah, I'm sorry. It's possible that people do want to see you in your pajamas so I shouldn't. But I'm familiar with your nuts in observers window, as you know, a hypothesis. And I think it's really cool and interesting and I don't of course, I don't know the answer to whether there's a multiverse and you're traveling, you know, i
nto a future alliance. I do think that what in physics, retro causality or the idea, you know, Hugh Price and forget the other guy. Soren Kramer. Yeah. So again. Kramer's Hugh Pressman, The Kramer's transactional interpretation. No, I'm thinking of Hugh Price and his coauthor who talks about whether Kramer Kramer has the transaction interpretation. Then there's. You're right, but I'm separating that out for now. Here. You just sent me his paper with the cold since I was still talking. I'll look
it up. So here. Yeah. So you do the paper. So this now I'm talking to Paul for a second. Yeah. You did a paper on Bell's theorem and how it could be explained and the empirical results, how they could be explained by retro causality. And he did that I think, with someone else. Whose name I forgetting. Well, it's someone else. I'm looking up now. Okay. Right. I know the. Paul, I'm going to ask you to mute yourself just for a second so that I can move forward. But the other answer the question, wh
ich is that's next, which is that that what retro causality or ambiguous causality buys here in physics is you don't have to explain things using a multiverse, so you don't have to use these branching futures. Now, that doesn't mean we don't have the branching futures if there's retro causality, because God knows nature isn't as elegant as I would think that nature would be. But but it doesn't means that we can get away without it. And so I'm agnostic about that. And so what I think about your n
ested observer windows, I think, okay, we're living in a world in which we have these branching futures, we may or may not have natural causality if we have fragile causality and the branching futures, which I think any world description has to contain something like natural causality or ambiguous causality to explain the results already. If we have that, then yes, you could precognition futures that don't happen, on the other hand, and in direct precognition you would only precognition. What ha
ppens to you if you were pretty cognizant of future that didn't happen. You would never call it precognition because it didn't happen, so you wouldn't be able to label it as precognition. So it's almost untestable. This is the idea for indirectly cognition. There might be a label in the future for an event, sort of an intentional label for an event that occurs versus an event that doesn't hurt or an event of more interest versus events of less interest. And I think that's interesting to look int
o. All right. Paul thinks I'm done with it. Okay. Yeah, it's Ken Walter. That's right. I said, Gordon, go. Yes. Thank you so much. They did that paper together. On why retro causality is helpful to explain some. Of course, what it might be interesting to mention that in the sort of the five dimensional model where you have an extra dimension, it does allow you to change the future. You have a future which is fixed at one point, but in your when you get to the next point in the heart I mentioned,
you can change the future and that was part of the I there of the Philosopher's CD. Broad. Yes. When he when he was liberating is right. I am a huge fan of this idea and it just feels esthetically pleasing to me. So I'm not saying there's I don't think anyone could defend their their ideas about time in some sort of empirical sense. Really. You could say what a theory must require based on empirical data. But at this point, I don't think we can differentiate too much in terms of the theory. But
in any case, what esthetically pleasing to me is this all at once type of calculation where nothing, there's no changing the future. Well, there's none of that. And so this is this is book wonderful book called Beyond the Dynamic Universe. It's all about this kind of like an idea. Well, I have a question for here, which again, relates to precognition. If memories are stored in time, why can't we remember the future? That's very low. Well, I don't know. But again, being a big stone in white corr
ected perhaps. But I'd like to think about the future as as creative and novelty as being true novelty, not some sort of psychological novelty that just as you move the dial happens to happen to us. And so there's a huge cemetery in my understanding of the past and memory and perception not being the same thing, but at the same time as as Bernardo was asking before, there has to be some stepping of the past into the present. And I think there's a little bit of, as I mentioned, a little bit of le
aking, because if time has waits, that can be a bit of a leaking from the future. But I think beyond that, the future is completely novel and therefore, I mean otherwise. Otherwise, in what kind of universe do we think we're living? I mean, I would throw the question back afterwards and said, Julia, right. And so everything is, do we have free will, for instance? Right. And is something new really happening at all in the universe, let alone in our perception of it? Well, this also relates to the
question of should. I take that or should. I mean, this relates to the whole question of the block universe, because of course, in the BLOCK universe picture, the future is fixed and so you can't change it. But of course, George Ellis in his talk yesterday was arguing for the evolving block universe, which which says the future isn't determined, or if it is, it could be changed. So go out of the block Universe fits into Julio's picture or widget what Paul was saying. But I think can I just corr
ect. I don't think the blocking universe is the future fixed in the sense that everything that happens in the future is determined by the present stage of the overvotes? Because we do know there's some determinism The future might be there, but not fixed in the sense of predetermined. Yes, but nevertheless it is fixed if you the block universe, maybe. It's again, as it were. Yeah, but the word fixed bothers me a bit because it does sound like a retreat into into determinism or even super determi
nism as being quite often. Well this is precisely why some people. So Julia. I interrupted you the question was to usually I'm not interrupting I'm going to. Me you had a great answer. I think that when people talk about when people are confused confuse the future being there with the future being predetermined. And this is this is a big point of confusion and and the idea of the block universe Minkowski space time, the future is there but predetermined based on. The past is an assumption based
on our idea of the arrow of time. And this is why I'm so into this all at once. Calculation. So when you say fixed, Bernard, it the it sounds it sounds reasonable to you because it's but the problem is that in physics it has been associated with it. You have super determinism, memory determinism. And so I think it is it is more clear to say that that those spacetime events are there. Yes. What. And so but then we get to the question of free will. And that was kind of the question that Alex was t
he kind of universe do we think we live in? I think we live in one in which we are we perceive that we have free will is as Mark. We have the experience of free will. Experiences are real in the sense that we experience them. So we experience that we have free will. In terms of the the free will question, I think the key question is who are we talking about? So when you say do we have free will you're talking about individual. I if you're saying do I have free? Well, now you're postulating that
there's this by entity and you're asking the question that's about a nonphysical, except not my body. Right. You talk about that. What is the relationship between a nonphysical entity and the physical black universe? Hard to know, right? That's hard to know. My guess is that the free will question comes from our desire to think that we can control things, that we can make whatever is in the future, that we can actually determine whatever's in the future based on the present and the past, because
that would be really nice and we would feel like we were in control. And the very fact that we have a bias towards wanting to be in control makes suspicious that that might not be the case. Well, if I could just comment, I mean, I would argue that you can have a concept of free will changing the future if you do have this this extra time dimension. The point I'm making is that you can't even have consciousness without this extra time dimension, because in terms of ordinary four dimensional spac
e time, there is no consciousness and you have to invoke an extra dimension anyway to do that. So once you've got this extra dimension, you could open up the possibility of free will. But that picture in itself is not consistent with the standard book universe of Einstein, etc.. But anyway, we have another question which to Paul which does actually relate to this isn't denying flow of time in some sense equivalent to Barbour's denial of time itself. Can you elaborate more on the differences? Yes
. Well, of course, it's difficult for me to speak for Julian Barbour, who has his own particular take. But is my understanding of how he's arrived at his rather dramatic position that time does not exist, that it's overall a fiction. I first want make a distinction between what I said earlier that time and space might be an emerging phenomenon. In other words, just like the the elastic properties of solids emerge from the molecular substructure. So maybe the elastic properties of spacetime that
we know from general relativity emerge from some microscopic substructure. So that's not what we're talking about. I think that Julian has arrived at his point of view from the subject of quantum cosmology. Now this is where you take Schrodinger's equation, which would be 100 years old and a year or so, and I try to apply it to the universe as a whole in some simplified manner. So you have a wave function which is supposed to describe everything in the universe. And then in trading his equation,
if you applied to an atom or something, time appears as a parameter. So you can talk about how the wave function evolves with time. And if you tried to do that in cosmology, the time parameter drops out. There's a surrogate. You can take the size of the universe second volume of space, and then it's getting bigger all the time. And that can replace time in your equation. And so it's very tempting to say, well, we don't know is this thing called time? We don't need it at all. And that's his posi
tion. That's not my position. My position is that time might be emergent, but in any case, it's a real thing. It's what clocks measure intervals of time and it's absolutely there. It's like space rules measure distance between points, Clocks measure this distance and temporal distance between time. There's the timescale, there's the landscape, the four dimensional version of it all the block universe. And that we need make no reference to time flowing or changing or running or any of these metro
poles that people use except in the realm of human affairs and neuroscience and psychology, where it's perfectly appropriate to say we feel time flying, just like I feel I have free will. Whether I do have free will or not, I don't know. But it's a feeling. And if we think science should encompass feelings, then of course we need a scientific explanation for that. I don't think it comes from fundamental physics unless Bernard is right and that we need to append or extend our idea of space and ti
me to incorporate the mental realm. And then I'm open to the idea that this may change. However, it it's not necessarily obvious that what happens to space and time that the Planck level, that that in itself is going to elucidate the link with consciousness and the passage of time. You know, I mean, there are some people think that that that is indeed the case. I mean, I think Stuart Hamer for some time hinted that, you know, maybe consciousness is to be found down the Planck scale, but I. And i
ndeed don't. Speak for him. I mean Donald Hoffmann likes the idea that consciousness is something to do with the level where space and time superseded. But right, right. Can I ask you a very direct question to on behalf of George, who isn't here, because this is probably a yes or no question, do you in your model, in your in your perception of time, do you agree with the of an of an evolving block, you a growing block universe, or do you want to stick to the block universe? I certainly want to s
tick to the block Universe. That's not to say I'm denying that the universe evolves. CKD does. It expands, for example. And so time is a meaningful thing, a fundamental part of physics. And it's really a question of this myth of passage. And I say called that I don't think time is passing at all, as I've been at pains to point out that I'm denying the existence of time. I'm not denying the fact that the universe evolves, although there's an arrow of time giving the directionality of that evoluti
on, and it's an arrow like the arrow on a compass needle, it's the arrow that flies through the air. It's not motion, it's direction. Okay? I think if George was here, he would disagree. But he's not here. So. So I. Say. Anyway, and by the way, of course, to me, we welcome disagreements. I think discussions are much more interesting when people have a slightly different points of view. Mark, I have another question for you. Could subjective time be a measure of the density of quality of e.g. ane
sthesia? Someone under anesthesia experiences the last moment before becoming unconscious, as if it had immediately preceded the moment of waking up I as if no time had elapsed between the two moments. So how would you react to that? Mark? I don't know if you have to refer to Qualia. That's of course possible, but that's an interpretation. What is quality? There's a big quarrel about all that cool. You are not or something, philosophically speaking. But we can refer to. Yeah, let's say sensory p
erception and memory in it has been shown that especially in an anesthesia, people after the way wake up have no sense of time now. So they wake up and this actually happened once to me. I woke up and asked, Has the procedure yet begun? Because I thought I was just had blacked out or something. But actually it was the hours had passed. And this is explained that through the anesthesia cortical processes are some of downregulated and therefore you have no processing of sensory events. And when yo
u wake up, then there's nothing hue and nothingness and then you think, no time has passed, although many hours have passed. So you could interpret this in the sense of qualia or the sense of events that you have experienced which are stored in memory. And this defines also passage of time in looking back. Yes. Okay. Well, let's go on to another question, which is to you, Paul, again, under your view, the notion of time travel is either incoherent or trivial in the sense of being what is ordinar
ily happening now anyway. Okay. Yes. Sorry, this is under you. This is a question. Is is this correct? We couldn't tell that we time travel to the future if we did so tomorrow. Right? Right. But this depends what we mean. I think there's a distinction here, obviously, between the normal time travel in the sense that you have passage through time and the idea of time travel in the sense of using time machines. If I understand this correctly. What we're back to to model is going because I'm certai
n and I can recommend a really good book on it. It's called How to Build a Time Machine by Somebody. I can recommend that to. So we must distinguish, you know, earlier I played this simple game. Imagine we fell asleep and woke up when we were five years old, but it was with all your memories and everything, the state of the world as it was, how would anything be different? That's a sort of time travel, if you like, or simply just sitting still waiting the future to arrive. If you want to use tha
t terminology, that's a type of time travel. But in physics, well, we often discuss the possibility of reaching future quicker. How would you do that? Well, get into spacecraft travel in case of the speed of light and come back again and have I think you mentioned this of the twins effect. So for you, maybe two years have elapsed in the rocket. When you get back 20 years of elapsed earth. So you reach the future quicker by moving and you can do the same thing by getting close to a black hole. So
in that sense, travel into the future. We know it can happen. A done deal, you can measure it. This is now part of laboratory physics. This is there's no mystery about this. In theory, it's a real effect going back into the past, however, it's a much more problematic thing. There's nothing in Einstein's general theory of relativity to prevent it, and that's our best understanding of the nature of space and time. It may not be the last word, but if you take that as it is, there's nothing to prev
ent you as a particle or an observer traveling on what we would call a closed time like curve, which would in Doctor Who times would mean I climb into the TARDIS and press a few backwards and get out. And it would be yesterday or last week that raises all these fascinating paradoxes. I meet my younger self. And what happens if I kill younger self? And so it makes time travel stories so fascinating. There's nothing in our understanding of space time physics to prevent that. And that doesn't mean
that it will happen. It could be that. So quantum mechanics, the properties of the quantum prevent this happening. So Stephen Hawking introduced what he called the chronology protection hypothesis on the notion that there is a chronology horizon that as as you got a spacetime structure that might permit is looping back into the past that the quantum vacuum will get caught up in nature and it would surged to the point where it would actually wreck that spacetime geometry. I think it's entirely li
kely that that is the case and traveling to the past would not be permitted. I think everything I've just said is consistent with the notion that there's no flow or passage of time, that you simply go back to some earlier. It's weird in the sense that you would be visiting an earlier time that was part of your part of your past. And so then you get into all sorts of discussions about free will. You go back and you can't change anything inconsistent with the future you've come from. But people ha
ve written at length about that. David Deutsch, for example, you if you have parallel universes, you can you could get around that problem. So I'm not sure I've actually answered the question, but I think some of the different views of travel. I think the comments you made a very a very elucidating and incidentally, I was amused. You made a reference to Doctor Who and maybe our American friends don't know about Doctor Who, Doctor who is a famous science fiction character on BBC television. And j
ust by chance, just a few days ago was the 60th anniversary of the first Doctor Who program. So it's it's a timely reference. I know if if George was here, I know he would strongly argue against closed time like hers as of course, to Stephen Hawking by his chronology protection theorem. I have to say, though, I'm enamored with close time like hers, at least on a small on a small scale. I even associate consciousness with with close time like hers. And of course, people have invoked them in the c
ontext of quantum theory, you know, with rhetoric, actually causal effect. So it seems to me a really interesting question. Most physicists are skeptical of closed time like hers, but it's not, as you yourself said, it's not excluded. It's even allowed by on science equations. And I personally think this could be quite an important clue, but I might be wrong. But here comes Julia with a remark. That we can't hear. Julia, We can. We've lost your sound. I have to register a formal complaint just o
n behalf of all Americans who are scientists or philosophers, there's no way we don't all know who Doctor who is. my goodness. Trying to figure out time and mind aspects of doctor. Are you kidding me? Okay, that is my firm. Look, I'm. Sorry. We will delete my reference from the recording. Of course. Yes. I'm delighted to hear that. Doctor who gets to America as well. Different points in time. that was your your comment. Great. I should mention just one thing on this topic that Einstein hated the
idea of to travel into the past, but his colleague at Princeton, Kurt Gödel, was enamored of it, and they produced a solution of Einstein his very own gravitational field equations that has the possibility of traveling from any given point in spacetime to anyhow, they get this. There will be a trajectory. He joined some, but he had to assume that the universe is rotating. And Freeman Dyson told me that he took this very seriously. This wasn't just a little bit of it I found that he was having,
and he would often ask Freeman, you know, have they found it yet? Have they found the rotation of the universe? And it was very much part of Google's own, rather idiosyncratic view of the nature of reality, he being logician, in fact, famous for his work on undesired ability and so on. He had a view of that actually, that would be supported by the notion of traveling to the past. But of course, Paul Einstein disliked quite a lot of ideas, which turned out to be correct, such as black holes and t
he expanding universe and quantum mechanics. Yes, Yes. He certainly had the confidence. Thank you. So let's go on to another question. This is to Alex. Why are materialists so rigidly holding on to a paradigm that fundamentally lacks explanatory with regard to consciousness, intentionality, subjective time, etc.? What motivates them? Well, it works very well. 400 years, right? So to Caesar, what did Caesar so actually say in Spanish? Alban. Daniel We know, we know it worked well and it work well
. I think because of what I said at the beginning, because Galileo made that move and say, Well, let's put this to the side, please. Let's work on these and these been fantastic. Now time goes by and. What do we do with this thing to the side? And here we are finally facing those hard problems. But not and that's that was my proposal which wasn't concrete, not in a Galilean way any more any anymore. We need to change it now. This was successful, but I think then got ingrained and there are many
complex issues here that have to do with theology and secularism. And it's fascinating, like because that was rejected. I mean, the whole story, right? First a dualism, then we have no not dualism, just humanism, monism, but it has to be materialistic. And then what do we do with the other thing? And then there's the issue of rejecting the church and God. But then God always comes back in another way and in the present and glass scientists are social beings. We don't reflect on that. And so we a
re carried away by our own biases and science progresses lo more slowly than one funeral at a time because people create schools of thought. And yeah, and then molecular biology just rocks it in the 20th century, just perhaps betraying everything that the physicists had just understood a few decades before. And then you pour on top of it capitalism and just making machines and yeah it's but it's not it's an anomaly. It is an anomaly. And the science, as we know it, as it's practiced in ten, 11 m
illion, all those truths, experiential truths have been known forever in all, in all traditions except in the West the last few hundred years. Right. So so let's as Julia well, let's put it upside down and I'm not sure who has the burden of proof here. I think it's the materialist and it's still and I call it the terminal lucidity phase of materialism, because in all of these in all of this consciousness books, they always have to have these neuro celebrities. And I say with respect again, but w
ith critique, they always have to kick the stone, you know, kick the stone off all the other isms, that it's not their preferred ism. And there's a lot of, you know, people believe that does. And then there's logical. And then the idea that, no, I'm not doing I don't have a philosophy, I'm only doing science, it's a cocktail, it's all mixed. Then we're trying to just put it out with philosophy, history of science and and all the rest. So it's a long story. But it can be. It can be. It just one m
ore thing to say. It can be integrated as we expand, you know, as we expand in physics. I think materialism has place. It just it needs to be in its proper place and then everything will be fine. So it doesn't need to be a bother where, you know, two men get in and one man gets out like the movie, you know, just find the right place for materialism and we all be fine. Alex I loved your reference to the possible terminal lucidity stage of the materialists, and it sort of brought to mind the idea
that in some sense materialism is the filter through which respectable science so often has to be channeled. But a and also I would like to to say, I mean, I think in my talk I mentioned there is an Academy for the Advancement Post Materials Science, and it's a minority view among scientists. I'm sure most scientists oppose the idea, but it does seem to me that the message of recent developments is that we do need a form of science or even a form of physics, which goes beyond what is normally ca
lled materialism and of course, what we mean by matter is anyway, very old fashioned matter in the classical sense. We know that's not the real view. But beyond physical, current, physical ism at least. So I'm glad that at this meeting we've had an opportunity to do voice to voice that that's not opinion because. I know some people will object to it, but it does seem to me that a post materialist form of science in physics may be necessary But anyway, I think we're going to have to wrap up now.
We've had wear five, but it's over overdue. But I think that is is fine. I was going to ask you if you have any final anyone has any final comments? I think I won't do that because that be quite a long discussion. So I would just like to thank all the speakers, including who aren't present at the moment for such wonderful presentations. What I've so enjoyed about this meeting is that, as I said in my one, my slides is interdisciplinary. It's brought together people from physics, philosophy, neur
oscience and history and biology and psychology. I hope I haven't missed anything out, and I just think that's so important because it's when you it seems to me that it's always when you have disciplines interacting that you, you get a broader perception of reality and that tends to lead to progress. The paradigm shifts and I don't whether there's going to be a post materialist paradigm shift, but there's going to be a paradigm shift because there always has been paradigm shifts. And and I must
confess because I believe in some of these phenomena that I think whatever that new paradigm is, whatever type of toothbrush it is, I do think that it's going to have to accommodate some of these phenomena. But obviously we don't all agree about these issues and that's what's made the discussion so interesting. And and I would like to say that there will the recordings of all our discussions over the past few days, they will be available on YouTube in due course. I'll see if we can extract my re
mark about Americans not knowing about Doctor Who. But but apart from that, I think the recordings will be available in full and. And that's great because it means many people will be able to benefit from from this meeting, even if they weren't able to attend. I suspect there were quite a number of questions which I didn't get to see, but I'm sure in due course we will be able to get give answers to those questions as well. I'm not sure if they will be recorded, but we will see if there's a reco
rd of them so that we can address those later. And so finally, I mean, it just remains for me to to to thank a few people besides obviously the speakers who took Center centerstage. I do want to thank, obviously, the Essentia Foundation who have hosted this meeting that they they hosted a meeting like this every year. I think this maybe the third or fourth meeting. So there will be further ones. But I also want to thank banks, which is the organization which has been arranging all the logistics,
interacting with you in arranging times of talks and things like that. And I would also like to thank p P, which is the organization which is in charge of all the videoing and the recording, because without this, none of this would have been possible. So to everybody involved, thank you so much. And and finally, of course, I would like to thank you, the audience, because without you, there will be no point in talking so we're very grateful that you're here. And we've never it's rather frustrati
ng never being able to see the audience or the expressions on your faces. But I know you are there. I believe there's been at least 100 people there. And as I say, you're welcome to relive the experience by by watching the recordings later on YouTube. So it only remains remains maybe to say bye bye and I'm sure we'll meet again at some future time.

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