Here’s a twist. What if the receiver is actually every cell in the body and the brain serves more in the role of a synthesizer? What if the emergence of life on Earth and the propagation of cells through evolutionary deep time is influenced by signals in a universal dark energy field we rapidly traverse second by second? Just a hunch until scientific methods get a handle on the matter and energy making up more than 90% of our universe…someday. Great article!
As we witness the rise of technology, the possibilities seem endless. Evidence of that information field is found with every single voice speaking up about collective consciousness, quantum theory & so on. Those who are willing to open their mind beyond the laws of convention will see.
I myself have felt frequencies of sadness interrupt my emotional resonance; typically after a majorly tragic event.
A fascinating read. What it reminds me of is that consciousness may not be a property produced by the brain, but a structure that emerges from recursive compression. Intelligence compresses, but consciousness is the recursive loop folding back on itself, the signal becoming aware of its own signal. Whether we think in terms of radios, filters, or loops, the point is the same: awareness is more fundamental than the machinery that carries it.
That’s really interesting. What fascinates me is how these ancient teachings map onto what we now describe in terms of recursion and compression. It makes me wonder if traditions like Hinduism were already intuitively pointing to the same structure, just with a different language.
I was just praying, and actually said to God, "What the hell were You thinking? You split Yourself up into little time-space units and now the receivers have a glitch and You're just as stuck in this mess as we are! Dude, this is the and epoch level "I've fallen and I can't get up" situation! are
I'm not anything about any God, actually. It was just crazy thoughts scrolling across my mental marquee as I was chatting with God. Hey, only know about my pov... But I'm pretty sure I'm quite capable of going off the rails without needing any input from "God" or "Satan"! Just saying ..
Dr. Teta, a fascinating and rigorous deconstruction of the filter model. The parallel between the brain's 'gating' function (thalamus, DMN) and the cognitive frameworks that filter our perception of reality is particularly strong.
It suggests that much of our work in deconstructing our own mental models isn't about creating new thoughts, but about cleaning the receiver to allow a cleaner signal to come through. The Pennebaker study on narrative has always been a cornerstone of this idea - story isn't just a reflection of the biology; it's an input that shapes it.
Well, I like the fact that you and the world are starting to believe that who we are is not just matter. As C.S. Lewis asked, "Put a single atom in a box, can it generate a spontaneous thought? If not, how about 2?, 100?, 1 Million?, 1 Trillion? Then how do we think and feel and create?" Paraphrased... There must be something more to us than a bunch of just ordered atoms.
This idea has interesting roots in psychedelic culture as well. Substances that affect consciousness heavily magnify the sense that knowledge, creativity, ideas, and even consciousness itself are a river flow of information that our brain tunes into. Running alongside us, rather than from within us. It's a fascinating perspective.
Not science. None of this is science. The person who wrote this appears to have a doctorate in “naturopathy,” which is, like chiropractics, also not a science. I’m not trying to be mean to Dr. Teta nor to anyone that finds this interesting. I’m really not. But everyone and everything from John R. Brinkley to NEXIUM to the phrenologists to the Marxists dressed up their BS beliefs in scientific clothes, and many, many people got hurt because of it, while science lost credibility. Have your spirituality, but please, leave science out of it. Because *none* of this is science.
“Science” itself suffers from its own dogmatism. Particularly, it suffers from an inevitable materialist reductionism. There are powerful historical and practical reasons for this, of course, but the fact remains: as in any comprehensive system of explanation, it sees what it sees, and it does not see what it does not. To ask certain questions is to transgress unacceptable boundaries.
(1) Science isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t make any of this science. (2) Yes, too many scientists are reductionists. Some are emergentists, and more should be, precisely because you can be a materialist/ naturalist and be an emergentist. (3) No, science does not have dogma. It has doctrines, called “paradigms,” which can be limiting, until those paradigms are overcome by conflicting evidence and better paradigms which explain both the new evidence and the old. (4) In my experience, the only people who call scientists “dogmatic” are people who are, themselves, captured by dogma: like young earth creationists. (5) Scientists may be flawed, because they are people, but I’ll take them *literally* any day of the week over someone who dresses up their dogma in the clothing of science. The former kind of person is flawed, but the latter kind of person is doubly so.
Wishful thinking.You can convince yourself of anything especially if it makes you feel better and doesn't harm other but that doesn't make it true.The spiritual/godlike view of the process is not proven/corroborated and religions have tended to cause conflict and wars since time immemorial...just look at current Gaza situation.So not optimistic of positive outcomes from self-delusion/conviction/belief/hopes/God alone
What you say is so, BUT (and this is a big but), there is Scientific Dogmatism, also, as evidenced by questions that cannot be asked, and honest research it is impossible to fund because it is “not science.”
I generally do not prefer to do others’ homework for them, but I will say this: pretty much any serious non-materialist, non-reductionist view of our relationship with the cosmos is unwelcome (and I do not refer to new-age, woo-woo crap here, nor to xian-friendly “entelligint duh-sign”). Or this: any hint at all of teleos within pretty much any area of biology or neuroscience remains anathema.
In saying this, I make no claims as to what is, or is not so. I simply point out that Scientism-based dogma of specific kind remains unquestionable by anyone who expects to be seriously taken as a scientist, particularly outside the realm of physics.
You lost me at “I generally do not prefer to do others’ homework for them.” I have no homework to do. I asked you an earnest question in good faith, and if you don’t want to explain yourself, then that’s fine. But you’re not my teacher, and I’m not your student. If you want to persuade me of anything—and maybe you don’t, which would be fine—then condescending to me is not the way to do it.
I’d love to know more about what you think so that I can actually engage with it and find out if you have a point, so if you ever feel like filling me in, feel free! And if not, that’s okay too! Best of luck to you! 👋😄
(Also, for the record, I’ve read a lot of critiques of scientism, have found parts of those arguments compelling, and some not. I used to find them a lot more compelling, but have largely, but not completely, changed my feelings in the opposite direction. And I am also *somewhat* critical of reductionism. I just don’t see reductionism as “dogma” but rather as both a paradigm that is already starting to loosen in the light of complex systems science and a relatively useful epistemological heuristic. I am, on the other hand, very sympathetic to materialism, but even this is a subject that I have some nuanced thoughts about. I am not approaching this subject uncritically, and have already done quite a lot of “homework.” I wanted to hear what you had to say to find out if there was anything I was missing or any points I may have overlooked, but c’est la vie!)
But again, as I say, some questions are simply, dogmatically unacceptable to contemporary “Science.”
As a very strong partisan of the scientific method (one of the important human tools toward not fooling ourselves), I stand against dogmatism in every form, even that which is dressed in a white lab coat.
Sweet! I stand against all kinds of dogmatism also! Especially that kind of dogmatism which thinks that science needs to be able to address and answer all questions! (And also the kind of dogmatism that says that all forms of dogmatism are bad! I’m dogmatically anti-dogmatic, which means that I have to accept that a few, rare kinds of dogmatism are good!)
It sees what it believes to be there. That’s the observer effect as demonstrated over and over again by the double-slit experiment. Explains a bunch of phenomena including confirmation bias, the echo chamber, the snowball effect and lastly, good old projection.
The double-slit experiment absolutely does not, in any way, demonstrate the observer effect. Yes, confirmation bias is real. Yes, it’s a problem for doing good science. But if you take the double-slit experiment or anything else about quantum mechanics to prove that consciousness or observation is, itself, a physical or material property that exists independent of the minds that create it, then, well, keep on reading Deepak Chopra, I guess.
Likewise, if you think that science “only” sees what it wants to be there, then how do you explain (1) the fact that science, medicine, and technology have completely transformed the world, (2) the fact that many, many people, before the scientific method was developed, tried and failed to understand the nature of reality—in other words, if the “observer effect” explains all of science, then shouldn’t that apply equally to everyone throughout history who tried and failed to understand and manipulate reality but failed to do so? why did the alchemists fail to turn lead into gold if all science is is the observer effect? why did doctors fail to cure disease when they believed that “bad air” caused it, rather than germs? etc. etc., and (3) the many, many studies that are conducted each year which do not confirm the researchers’ hypotheses?
The scientific method is great precisely because good, high-powered, well-controlled experiments guard against confirmation biases and observer effects (however imperfectly). Science has transformed the world precisely because we learned how to overcome, to a certain extent and in some domains more than others, confirmation bias and observer’s effects. Before the scientific method was developed, all we had was that, and yeah, very little scientific progress was made, and people suffered and died from preventable diseases all the time, etc. etc. Scientists are subject to confirmation biases and observers effects, but in reality, science is actually a method for overcoming these cognitive and emotional flaws, not the flaws themselves.
Hi C Connor, I appreciate the dialogue. I have never read any Deepak Chopra before but thanks for recommendation. How I would explain (1) the fact that science, medicine, and technology have completely transformed the world (in your stated opinion) Is that you see what you believe. I don’t believe that statement myself so I can’t have this conversation with that as an assumed premise. I do think those things have transformed the world we see, but I don’t believe the world we see is reality. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist who wrote the book “The Case Against Reality” gives us tons of evidence that this is true. As for your statement that many people tried and failed to understand and manipulate reality, I both agree and disagree with that statement. Yes, many did fail, but the mystics did not, and Jesus certainly did manage to manipulate what we know as reality quite successfully on many ocassions.
Please don’t read Deepak Chopra. I bring him up as someone who has taken certain findings and theories from quantum mechanics and applied a spiritual/ power-of-positive thinking perspective on them in order to argue something very similar to what you’re arguing, and it’s all extremely silly and not at all scientifically justified.
I can totally see a cognitive scientist writing a book like the one you described—I am, myself, working on a dissertation that is in the tradition of the cognitive sciences—and, without reading the book, I suspect that (1) the book is far more speculative than you might realize and (2) the book is also more metaphorical than you might realize. I could be wrong, but as someone with an very strong background in the cognitive sciences, I can say with a lot of certainty that most cognitive scientists would not at all ascribe to the belief that your mind *literally* changes reality. Rather, a cognitive scientist would always be quick to point out that we never experience reality as such but only reality as our mind represents it mentally. The cognitive sciences are, basically, the study of how our mind unconsciously and in a mostly unmotivated way develops and presents a representation of reality to the mind in the form of “consciousness.” How the mind builds these representations affects our behavior and, therefore, affects reality. But it only does so through the mechanism—which is entirely materialistic and naturalistic—of behavior. The mind does not *directly* affect any mind-independent reality. Ever. It only indirectly affects reality.
The same is true of Jesus and the mystics. They did not *directly* affect reality. Rather, they (and Jesus is a particularly good example of this) affected the world indirectly: through the creation of traditions, institutions, and social codes. Miracles aren’t real. Neither are spells or witchcraft.
Again, ultimately, my problem is people using science as a way to “prove” their baseline spiritual beliefs. Have your spiritual beliefs—please, be as spiritual as you want—but please don’t try to use the supposed authority of science in order to justify them. Science has never and will never corroborate any “spiritual” claims about the material world nor any mind-independent reality, because spiritual beliefs are an invention of the human mind. Science has only ever overthrown religious/ spiritual beliefs. For a long time, for example, before and during the beginning of the scientific revolution, the prevailing assumption among most learned people was that the world was created by God and was literally, as the Bible suggests, only about 6000 years old. Once the scientific revolution came around, it took about 200 years of geological and astro-physical work to show that the world is actually around 4.5 billion years old. This is just one example, but other examples are myriad. Spiritual beliefs about the nature of reality only have the power to mislead us because, ultimately, they are based on the tendency for people to try to understand reality using the concepts that they have available to them, and these concepts will always have a strong tendency to be based on human life, since it is human life that all humans have in common and from where most of our concepts develop. Science and scientific progress is the process of disabusing people from the belief that reality and the universe are human-like. They are not human-like. Reality exists independently of the human mind (even if no human mind will ever have direct access to the mind-independent reality), and follows tendencies that are not human-like. Which is precisely why we need science: to develop concepts that describe reality much better than any of our human-based concepts ever could. This will always be inherently and intrinsically anti-spiritual, and I will never support any attempt by spiritual people to muddy these waters.
I’m grateful for this conversation and especially for the tone of it. My first impulse is to say “can you prove this to me?” And of course, we both know you can’t , at least not to my satisfaction. And we both know the same is true in the reverse. I also feel moved to say, what’s wrong with discourse as long as it’s polite, and I do want to speak my beliefs, because I understand how they lead to a greater sense of peace. I would urge you to watch one of Donald Hoffman’s videos, you can judge for yourself if he means it metaphorically and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on his perspective on the scientific method. It was very eye opening for me. I would also recommend Nima Arkani-Hamed, the high energy physicist who Hoffman often points to.
He works in Einstein’s old department at Princeton. I also feel very validated spiritually by the Nobel prizes given out to researchers in quantum entanglement and now quantum tunneling. Quantum tunneling might be very helpful for building super computers but, as interpreted by spiritually minded people like myself, it is an explanation of miracles. Forget about magic and witchcraft, miracles are quite a natural occurrence. I would also say to you that unless you understand all the rest of the spiritual logic and reason (Yes, the spirituality that I subscribe to is both of those things) you don’t really know for a fact if it is dangerous to spread. I wish people wouldn’t judge it by its cover. What it implies is that we share a mind, and that means we share a purpose and an intelligence, and that implies that hating others is the same as hating ourself. If we got over the idea that we are all separate beings with separate agendas, which all spiritual traditions (before they were seized by religion at least) say is an illusion, we would be giving up on fear as a necessary or helpful emotion, and then, I could see us getting to someplace much more peaceful than where we are now. I’ve learned I can eliminate fearful emotions by learning not to hook onto fearful thoughts and ruminate about them. So, I am going to keep speaking my truth, Connor. I am curious to know what your dissertation is about. I was with you in your reply, as you were talking about cognitive science, right up until you said it’s all happening independently of our minds. It was like watching you fumble the ball right before you reached the goal line, you were saying all the same things that Hoffman says about cognitive perception and then you suddenly shift something that conflicts with what you had been saying up to that point without giving any logical explanation. I think our minds along with our sensory organs, are reducers of information, so that we don’t get overwhelmed, so that we can focus our attention on the fitness payoffs alone as natural selection guides us to do. So, I do believe there is a world around us, I just don’t think it resembles what we perceive and neither does this tenured professor of cognitive science named Donald Hoffman. And he is an extremely humble scientist, who doesn’t overly legitimize science. That’s refreshing to me since I do see so many scientists disagree with one another all the time and he’s willing to acknowledge that fact and actually willing to say why. I respect science a lot as a method of truth-seeking, but due to its limitations, it doesn’t know the truth, it can only give educated guesses. There are about three hundred theories of consciousness drifting around in the ethers nowadays and I believe that two hundred of them state that consciousness does not emerge from physical substrates or mechanical processes. Leibniz’s mill explains why you will never be able to prove that it does. You can keep looking. David Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness, which still has not been solved, is another good indication that looking for a physical or mechanical explanation for consciousness is like looking for your keys in the kitchen when they’re really in the living room. As Donald Hoffman says, that’s job security for you, but maybe don’t be upset if other scientists go ahead and look in other places.
It’s been awhile since there’s been a new in depth interview with Donald Hoffman so I was excited to see this one drop today. He starts right in with talking about scientific logic because those are the only seemingly valid criticisms that have been offered by his detractors. Interested to hear what you think
I’ve come to believe the brain is actually a suppression valve, not simply a receiver. When we “vibrate”, at higher frequencies, (when our mind and cells are fully synchronised and working optimally) we get access to more information, and less when not.
Light holds vast amounts of energy/information, our universe holding so much that any unprotected receiver would fail.
I also believe we make up the universes own nerve endings, that all material things do. Systems theory states that all systems are limited unless they can look in from outside of themselves. How else then, for a universe to understand itself other than expanding, duplicating, all while reaching in.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS: According to Leo Evolves, consciousness forms the foundational dynamic field of data—a universal, pre-existing reservoir of vibrational energies, ethical resonances, and cosmic information that transcends individual isolation. The brain acts as the biological interface, a neural node that tunes into this field, processing its raw signals through electromagnetic interactions to generate lived experience. This access allows the Self to engage with the universe's electric dualities—positive and negative charges—extracting unfiltered data for Intellect mining, much like a receiver decoding a vast signal stream.
The mind emerges as a local, isolated, personal version of this broader consciousness—a constructed filter shaped by individual experiences, biases, and the "Matrix" of illusions. Evolves describes the mind as the brain's emergent software: A fragmented expression of the universal field, prone to distortion through ego, societal programming, or unexamined thoughts. Yet, this localization is purposeful in ACWOL's cosmic video game framework—it enables the Self to navigate fragmentation, mining Intellect from personal challenges before reintegrating insights into the Collective. The key to expansion lies in "unlocking" the brain: By applying ACWOL's tools—such as Skipping to clear mental noise, Silence for neural recalibration, or Pattern Recognition to rewire synaptic pathways—practitioners dissolve the mind's isolations. This unlocking, grounded in neuroplasticity and electromagnetic thought principles (Third Tenet), expands the mind's capacity, allowing it to access higher frequencies of the conscious field. As a result, the mind evolves from a confined echo chamber into a bridge, amplifying Natural Intelligence (NI) or in other words; mining Intellect.
Great essay on the receiver idea of one biological organ of the body. Yet, why the myopic focus on the brain in scientific research? Surely, if this is true of our embodied brain, then the idea of reception also applies to our body's other organs of consciousness, like our eyes & ears?
Would it not serve our evolving consciousness better to study how our biological eyes receive surface level impressions of reality? And wonder how this biological reception is transformed into psychological projection, so subconsciously we fail to notice our 'trance-state' awareness of reality?
And is it true that we can name whatever we see and hear with any reality-labeling words we care to 'imagine' without changing the reality of whatever we see and hear?
Here’s a twist. What if the receiver is actually every cell in the body and the brain serves more in the role of a synthesizer? What if the emergence of life on Earth and the propagation of cells through evolutionary deep time is influenced by signals in a universal dark energy field we rapidly traverse second by second? Just a hunch until scientific methods get a handle on the matter and energy making up more than 90% of our universe…someday. Great article!
As we witness the rise of technology, the possibilities seem endless. Evidence of that information field is found with every single voice speaking up about collective consciousness, quantum theory & so on. Those who are willing to open their mind beyond the laws of convention will see.
I myself have felt frequencies of sadness interrupt my emotional resonance; typically after a majorly tragic event.
I believe!
A fascinating read. What it reminds me of is that consciousness may not be a property produced by the brain, but a structure that emerges from recursive compression. Intelligence compresses, but consciousness is the recursive loop folding back on itself, the signal becoming aware of its own signal. Whether we think in terms of radios, filters, or loops, the point is the same: awareness is more fundamental than the machinery that carries it.
This is what Hinduism teaches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman
Along with every other spiritual teaching.
That’s really interesting. What fascinates me is how these ancient teachings map onto what we now describe in terms of recursion and compression. It makes me wonder if traditions like Hinduism were already intuitively pointing to the same structure, just with a different language.
That is where the subconscious comes into play.
I was just praying, and actually said to God, "What the hell were You thinking? You split Yourself up into little time-space units and now the receivers have a glitch and You're just as stuck in this mess as we are! Dude, this is the and epoch level "I've fallen and I can't get up" situation! are
Maybe that wasn’t God’s decision. Perhaps God gave us free will because God isn’t a tyrant and it was our mistake.
I'm not anything about any God, actually. It was just crazy thoughts scrolling across my mental marquee as I was chatting with God. Hey, only know about my pov... But I'm pretty sure I'm quite capable of going off the rails without needing any input from "God" or "Satan"! Just saying ..
The brain and the body are an appearance of the localisation of infinity in the illusion we apparently share. There is no matter in and of itself.
Dr. Teta, a fascinating and rigorous deconstruction of the filter model. The parallel between the brain's 'gating' function (thalamus, DMN) and the cognitive frameworks that filter our perception of reality is particularly strong.
It suggests that much of our work in deconstructing our own mental models isn't about creating new thoughts, but about cleaning the receiver to allow a cleaner signal to come through. The Pennebaker study on narrative has always been a cornerstone of this idea - story isn't just a reflection of the biology; it's an input that shapes it.
Excellent piece.
Dr Tom Kane
Well, I like the fact that you and the world are starting to believe that who we are is not just matter. As C.S. Lewis asked, "Put a single atom in a box, can it generate a spontaneous thought? If not, how about 2?, 100?, 1 Million?, 1 Trillion? Then how do we think and feel and create?" Paraphrased... There must be something more to us than a bunch of just ordered atoms.
"What we say about ourselves changes what our cells do. In other words, consciousness writes the code of biology from the top down."
Fascinating. I love when I start to learn scientific studies backing the power of our words, thoughts, and actions. Thank you for sharing this!
This idea has interesting roots in psychedelic culture as well. Substances that affect consciousness heavily magnify the sense that knowledge, creativity, ideas, and even consciousness itself are a river flow of information that our brain tunes into. Running alongside us, rather than from within us. It's a fascinating perspective.
Not science. None of this is science. The person who wrote this appears to have a doctorate in “naturopathy,” which is, like chiropractics, also not a science. I’m not trying to be mean to Dr. Teta nor to anyone that finds this interesting. I’m really not. But everyone and everything from John R. Brinkley to NEXIUM to the phrenologists to the Marxists dressed up their BS beliefs in scientific clothes, and many, many people got hurt because of it, while science lost credibility. Have your spirituality, but please, leave science out of it. Because *none* of this is science.
“Science” itself suffers from its own dogmatism. Particularly, it suffers from an inevitable materialist reductionism. There are powerful historical and practical reasons for this, of course, but the fact remains: as in any comprehensive system of explanation, it sees what it sees, and it does not see what it does not. To ask certain questions is to transgress unacceptable boundaries.
(1) Science isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t make any of this science. (2) Yes, too many scientists are reductionists. Some are emergentists, and more should be, precisely because you can be a materialist/ naturalist and be an emergentist. (3) No, science does not have dogma. It has doctrines, called “paradigms,” which can be limiting, until those paradigms are overcome by conflicting evidence and better paradigms which explain both the new evidence and the old. (4) In my experience, the only people who call scientists “dogmatic” are people who are, themselves, captured by dogma: like young earth creationists. (5) Scientists may be flawed, because they are people, but I’ll take them *literally* any day of the week over someone who dresses up their dogma in the clothing of science. The former kind of person is flawed, but the latter kind of person is doubly so.
Wishful thinking.You can convince yourself of anything especially if it makes you feel better and doesn't harm other but that doesn't make it true.The spiritual/godlike view of the process is not proven/corroborated and religions have tended to cause conflict and wars since time immemorial...just look at current Gaza situation.So not optimistic of positive outcomes from self-delusion/conviction/belief/hopes/God alone
What you say is so, BUT (and this is a big but), there is Scientific Dogmatism, also, as evidenced by questions that cannot be asked, and honest research it is impossible to fund because it is “not science.”
Could you give me some examples of some questions that cannot be asked and some honest research that cannot be funded because it’s “not science”?
I generally do not prefer to do others’ homework for them, but I will say this: pretty much any serious non-materialist, non-reductionist view of our relationship with the cosmos is unwelcome (and I do not refer to new-age, woo-woo crap here, nor to xian-friendly “entelligint duh-sign”). Or this: any hint at all of teleos within pretty much any area of biology or neuroscience remains anathema.
In saying this, I make no claims as to what is, or is not so. I simply point out that Scientism-based dogma of specific kind remains unquestionable by anyone who expects to be seriously taken as a scientist, particularly outside the realm of physics.
You lost me at “I generally do not prefer to do others’ homework for them.” I have no homework to do. I asked you an earnest question in good faith, and if you don’t want to explain yourself, then that’s fine. But you’re not my teacher, and I’m not your student. If you want to persuade me of anything—and maybe you don’t, which would be fine—then condescending to me is not the way to do it.
I’d love to know more about what you think so that I can actually engage with it and find out if you have a point, so if you ever feel like filling me in, feel free! And if not, that’s okay too! Best of luck to you! 👋😄
(Also, for the record, I’ve read a lot of critiques of scientism, have found parts of those arguments compelling, and some not. I used to find them a lot more compelling, but have largely, but not completely, changed my feelings in the opposite direction. And I am also *somewhat* critical of reductionism. I just don’t see reductionism as “dogma” but rather as both a paradigm that is already starting to loosen in the light of complex systems science and a relatively useful epistemological heuristic. I am, on the other hand, very sympathetic to materialism, but even this is a subject that I have some nuanced thoughts about. I am not approaching this subject uncritically, and have already done quite a lot of “homework.” I wanted to hear what you had to say to find out if there was anything I was missing or any points I may have overlooked, but c’est la vie!)
But again, as I say, some questions are simply, dogmatically unacceptable to contemporary “Science.”
As a very strong partisan of the scientific method (one of the important human tools toward not fooling ourselves), I stand against dogmatism in every form, even that which is dressed in a white lab coat.
Sweet! I stand against all kinds of dogmatism also! Especially that kind of dogmatism which thinks that science needs to be able to address and answer all questions! (And also the kind of dogmatism that says that all forms of dogmatism are bad! I’m dogmatically anti-dogmatic, which means that I have to accept that a few, rare kinds of dogmatism are good!)
It sees what it believes to be there. That’s the observer effect as demonstrated over and over again by the double-slit experiment. Explains a bunch of phenomena including confirmation bias, the echo chamber, the snowball effect and lastly, good old projection.
The double-slit experiment absolutely does not, in any way, demonstrate the observer effect. Yes, confirmation bias is real. Yes, it’s a problem for doing good science. But if you take the double-slit experiment or anything else about quantum mechanics to prove that consciousness or observation is, itself, a physical or material property that exists independent of the minds that create it, then, well, keep on reading Deepak Chopra, I guess.
Likewise, if you think that science “only” sees what it wants to be there, then how do you explain (1) the fact that science, medicine, and technology have completely transformed the world, (2) the fact that many, many people, before the scientific method was developed, tried and failed to understand the nature of reality—in other words, if the “observer effect” explains all of science, then shouldn’t that apply equally to everyone throughout history who tried and failed to understand and manipulate reality but failed to do so? why did the alchemists fail to turn lead into gold if all science is is the observer effect? why did doctors fail to cure disease when they believed that “bad air” caused it, rather than germs? etc. etc., and (3) the many, many studies that are conducted each year which do not confirm the researchers’ hypotheses?
The scientific method is great precisely because good, high-powered, well-controlled experiments guard against confirmation biases and observer effects (however imperfectly). Science has transformed the world precisely because we learned how to overcome, to a certain extent and in some domains more than others, confirmation bias and observer’s effects. Before the scientific method was developed, all we had was that, and yeah, very little scientific progress was made, and people suffered and died from preventable diseases all the time, etc. etc. Scientists are subject to confirmation biases and observers effects, but in reality, science is actually a method for overcoming these cognitive and emotional flaws, not the flaws themselves.
Hi C Connor, I appreciate the dialogue. I have never read any Deepak Chopra before but thanks for recommendation. How I would explain (1) the fact that science, medicine, and technology have completely transformed the world (in your stated opinion) Is that you see what you believe. I don’t believe that statement myself so I can’t have this conversation with that as an assumed premise. I do think those things have transformed the world we see, but I don’t believe the world we see is reality. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist who wrote the book “The Case Against Reality” gives us tons of evidence that this is true. As for your statement that many people tried and failed to understand and manipulate reality, I both agree and disagree with that statement. Yes, many did fail, but the mystics did not, and Jesus certainly did manage to manipulate what we know as reality quite successfully on many ocassions.
Please don’t read Deepak Chopra. I bring him up as someone who has taken certain findings and theories from quantum mechanics and applied a spiritual/ power-of-positive thinking perspective on them in order to argue something very similar to what you’re arguing, and it’s all extremely silly and not at all scientifically justified.
I can totally see a cognitive scientist writing a book like the one you described—I am, myself, working on a dissertation that is in the tradition of the cognitive sciences—and, without reading the book, I suspect that (1) the book is far more speculative than you might realize and (2) the book is also more metaphorical than you might realize. I could be wrong, but as someone with an very strong background in the cognitive sciences, I can say with a lot of certainty that most cognitive scientists would not at all ascribe to the belief that your mind *literally* changes reality. Rather, a cognitive scientist would always be quick to point out that we never experience reality as such but only reality as our mind represents it mentally. The cognitive sciences are, basically, the study of how our mind unconsciously and in a mostly unmotivated way develops and presents a representation of reality to the mind in the form of “consciousness.” How the mind builds these representations affects our behavior and, therefore, affects reality. But it only does so through the mechanism—which is entirely materialistic and naturalistic—of behavior. The mind does not *directly* affect any mind-independent reality. Ever. It only indirectly affects reality.
The same is true of Jesus and the mystics. They did not *directly* affect reality. Rather, they (and Jesus is a particularly good example of this) affected the world indirectly: through the creation of traditions, institutions, and social codes. Miracles aren’t real. Neither are spells or witchcraft.
Again, ultimately, my problem is people using science as a way to “prove” their baseline spiritual beliefs. Have your spiritual beliefs—please, be as spiritual as you want—but please don’t try to use the supposed authority of science in order to justify them. Science has never and will never corroborate any “spiritual” claims about the material world nor any mind-independent reality, because spiritual beliefs are an invention of the human mind. Science has only ever overthrown religious/ spiritual beliefs. For a long time, for example, before and during the beginning of the scientific revolution, the prevailing assumption among most learned people was that the world was created by God and was literally, as the Bible suggests, only about 6000 years old. Once the scientific revolution came around, it took about 200 years of geological and astro-physical work to show that the world is actually around 4.5 billion years old. This is just one example, but other examples are myriad. Spiritual beliefs about the nature of reality only have the power to mislead us because, ultimately, they are based on the tendency for people to try to understand reality using the concepts that they have available to them, and these concepts will always have a strong tendency to be based on human life, since it is human life that all humans have in common and from where most of our concepts develop. Science and scientific progress is the process of disabusing people from the belief that reality and the universe are human-like. They are not human-like. Reality exists independently of the human mind (even if no human mind will ever have direct access to the mind-independent reality), and follows tendencies that are not human-like. Which is precisely why we need science: to develop concepts that describe reality much better than any of our human-based concepts ever could. This will always be inherently and intrinsically anti-spiritual, and I will never support any attempt by spiritual people to muddy these waters.
Hi Connor,
I’m grateful for this conversation and especially for the tone of it. My first impulse is to say “can you prove this to me?” And of course, we both know you can’t , at least not to my satisfaction. And we both know the same is true in the reverse. I also feel moved to say, what’s wrong with discourse as long as it’s polite, and I do want to speak my beliefs, because I understand how they lead to a greater sense of peace. I would urge you to watch one of Donald Hoffman’s videos, you can judge for yourself if he means it metaphorically and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on his perspective on the scientific method. It was very eye opening for me. I would also recommend Nima Arkani-Hamed, the high energy physicist who Hoffman often points to.
https://youtu.be/Uz-Ve_1LX8w?si=y4sK5e0qjwJ9Nn3A
He works in Einstein’s old department at Princeton. I also feel very validated spiritually by the Nobel prizes given out to researchers in quantum entanglement and now quantum tunneling. Quantum tunneling might be very helpful for building super computers but, as interpreted by spiritually minded people like myself, it is an explanation of miracles. Forget about magic and witchcraft, miracles are quite a natural occurrence. I would also say to you that unless you understand all the rest of the spiritual logic and reason (Yes, the spirituality that I subscribe to is both of those things) you don’t really know for a fact if it is dangerous to spread. I wish people wouldn’t judge it by its cover. What it implies is that we share a mind, and that means we share a purpose and an intelligence, and that implies that hating others is the same as hating ourself. If we got over the idea that we are all separate beings with separate agendas, which all spiritual traditions (before they were seized by religion at least) say is an illusion, we would be giving up on fear as a necessary or helpful emotion, and then, I could see us getting to someplace much more peaceful than where we are now. I’ve learned I can eliminate fearful emotions by learning not to hook onto fearful thoughts and ruminate about them. So, I am going to keep speaking my truth, Connor. I am curious to know what your dissertation is about. I was with you in your reply, as you were talking about cognitive science, right up until you said it’s all happening independently of our minds. It was like watching you fumble the ball right before you reached the goal line, you were saying all the same things that Hoffman says about cognitive perception and then you suddenly shift something that conflicts with what you had been saying up to that point without giving any logical explanation. I think our minds along with our sensory organs, are reducers of information, so that we don’t get overwhelmed, so that we can focus our attention on the fitness payoffs alone as natural selection guides us to do. So, I do believe there is a world around us, I just don’t think it resembles what we perceive and neither does this tenured professor of cognitive science named Donald Hoffman. And he is an extremely humble scientist, who doesn’t overly legitimize science. That’s refreshing to me since I do see so many scientists disagree with one another all the time and he’s willing to acknowledge that fact and actually willing to say why. I respect science a lot as a method of truth-seeking, but due to its limitations, it doesn’t know the truth, it can only give educated guesses. There are about three hundred theories of consciousness drifting around in the ethers nowadays and I believe that two hundred of them state that consciousness does not emerge from physical substrates or mechanical processes. Leibniz’s mill explains why you will never be able to prove that it does. You can keep looking. David Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness, which still has not been solved, is another good indication that looking for a physical or mechanical explanation for consciousness is like looking for your keys in the kitchen when they’re really in the living room. As Donald Hoffman says, that’s job security for you, but maybe don’t be upset if other scientists go ahead and look in other places.
https://youtu.be/xaeafKPfs1M?si=ETu-u0-0k8OEaIa0
It’s been awhile since there’s been a new in depth interview with Donald Hoffman so I was excited to see this one drop today. He starts right in with talking about scientific logic because those are the only seemingly valid criticisms that have been offered by his detractors. Interested to hear what you think
I’ve come to believe the brain is actually a suppression valve, not simply a receiver. When we “vibrate”, at higher frequencies, (when our mind and cells are fully synchronised and working optimally) we get access to more information, and less when not.
Light holds vast amounts of energy/information, our universe holding so much that any unprotected receiver would fail.
I also believe we make up the universes own nerve endings, that all material things do. Systems theory states that all systems are limited unless they can look in from outside of themselves. How else then, for a universe to understand itself other than expanding, duplicating, all while reaching in.
Really important point... receiver, transducer, reducer
Huxley 100 years ago figured out that there is reducing valve, and that psychedelics turn it down.
Confirmation from ancestors/ affirmations for my soul.
Thanks
Yes! I've always felt that the brain is the phone, and the spirit is the Wi-Fi. You can destroy the phone, but the wifi isn't affected.
https://open.substack.com/pub/stevenberger/p/transistor-radio?r=1nm0v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Very good paradigm shift. I’m going to “restack” first time ever. Tell me if I did it right.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS: According to Leo Evolves, consciousness forms the foundational dynamic field of data—a universal, pre-existing reservoir of vibrational energies, ethical resonances, and cosmic information that transcends individual isolation. The brain acts as the biological interface, a neural node that tunes into this field, processing its raw signals through electromagnetic interactions to generate lived experience. This access allows the Self to engage with the universe's electric dualities—positive and negative charges—extracting unfiltered data for Intellect mining, much like a receiver decoding a vast signal stream.
The mind emerges as a local, isolated, personal version of this broader consciousness—a constructed filter shaped by individual experiences, biases, and the "Matrix" of illusions. Evolves describes the mind as the brain's emergent software: A fragmented expression of the universal field, prone to distortion through ego, societal programming, or unexamined thoughts. Yet, this localization is purposeful in ACWOL's cosmic video game framework—it enables the Self to navigate fragmentation, mining Intellect from personal challenges before reintegrating insights into the Collective. The key to expansion lies in "unlocking" the brain: By applying ACWOL's tools—such as Skipping to clear mental noise, Silence for neural recalibration, or Pattern Recognition to rewire synaptic pathways—practitioners dissolve the mind's isolations. This unlocking, grounded in neuroplasticity and electromagnetic thought principles (Third Tenet), expands the mind's capacity, allowing it to access higher frequencies of the conscious field. As a result, the mind evolves from a confined echo chamber into a bridge, amplifying Natural Intelligence (NI) or in other words; mining Intellect.
https://a.co/d/g2OjOUu
Love this
Thanks so much.
Can you explain why you think it is!
Great essay on the receiver idea of one biological organ of the body. Yet, why the myopic focus on the brain in scientific research? Surely, if this is true of our embodied brain, then the idea of reception also applies to our body's other organs of consciousness, like our eyes & ears?
Would it not serve our evolving consciousness better to study how our biological eyes receive surface level impressions of reality? And wonder how this biological reception is transformed into psychological projection, so subconsciously we fail to notice our 'trance-state' awareness of reality?
And is it true that we can name whatever we see and hear with any reality-labeling words we care to 'imagine' without changing the reality of whatever we see and hear?