#291 Snippets of wisdom: Where does your mind come from?

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

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Please note that while an effort is made to provide an accurate transcription, errors and omissions may be present. No part of this transcription can be referenced or reproduced without permission.

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Agi Keramidas  0:05  
welcome to Personal Development mastery podcast episode 291. And this is another snippets of wisdom episode, where I select my favourite, most insightful moments from previous episodes of the podcast. Today's snippet of wisdom comes from my conversation with Mark Gober, the author of the book, an end to upside down thinking, which was awarded the Best independently published science book of 2019. The snippet I chose to play for you is about consciousness. Have you ever stopped to wonder what exactly consciousness is? And where does it come from? Is it really produced in our brain, as many people believe? I hope you find this snippet of wisdom as insightful as I have, here it is.

Mark Gober  1:01  
In the traditional academic world, it is so widely assumed that we are conscious. So consciousness, it means that the capacity for being aware the sense of experiencing life, so anyone who's experiencing the listening of this conversation right now, you're listening to it. That is your consciousness that's having that experience. Because a difficult thing to even describe because it's abstract, like, I can't touch my consciousness, but I can touch my head, I can touch my leg. But consciousness is our capacity to experience it's our awareness. And the reason I think it probably didn't come up much in my studies is that it's so widely assumed that consciousness is just a product of stuff happening inside our skull. We have a brain that has immense complexity, there's electrical activity, there's chemical activity, and it produces our capacity to be aware, that's what science would say. And why would science ever say that? Well, because there's tonnes of evidence that when you change the brain, your consciousness, your state of mind, your awareness will change in a corresponding way. So let's say someone gets in a car accident and has damage to the brain, and then has memory loss, we can easily point to the parts of the brain that have been damaged and say, Okay, well, you have memory loss, maybe you have changed in your vision, we can say, look in here, these are the parts of your brain that have been damaged, and now your consciousness, your experience has changed in a corresponding manner. And here's the key points. This is the critical video of all things I've researched the last few years, if this is the one, this is the one thing to understand. It's not sufficient. Logically speaking, scientifically, speaking to say that well, because there's such a strong relationship between the brain and our states of consciousness, that, therefore must be the case that the brain creates it. I'm gonna pass on that this is a big deal. Now, I'll give an example to explain why this logic doesn't necessarily follow. And it's from a philosopher named Dr. Bernardo kastrup, who I think is a really clean philosopher in this area of consciousness. He says, You imagine you have a fire, and lots of firefighters show up, you have a larger fire, and there are more firefighters that show up, we can show this very tight correlation between the size of the fire and the number of firefighters that appear at the scene. Now, do we assume that the firefighters caused the fires? Not necessarily, most likely no. And so the point is that when you have two things that are related, there can be multiple relationships between them, it could be that one creates the other could be that there's something else going on. And that is the this is the key issue, where I think science has gone astray, mainstream society has gone astray. It's like, and I remember this analogy, when I first started, it's like, you're going on a hike. And if you go one way, you're gonna be on one path. But if you just take a different path, to start, you're gonna be on a completely different path in your life. And you're thinking, and that's where this diversion happens, is it that the brain creates consciousness, that's one path, or is consciousness beyond the brain. And the brain is like a filtering mechanism or like an antenna receiver, tapping into the cloud, like your cell phone tapping into the cloud, or like we say on my podcast, is the brain actually a blindfold. And it's a processing mechanism for something that's way beyond the body. And we're showing a little sliver of it to our brain. It's like playing with playdough, you can stick the playdough through a little machine and squeeze it through and it comes out as spaghetti. Or it comes out of some shape. The playdough in this case could be like consciousness and the Brain Body mechanism is the the way in which that playdough comes out. It comes out in different ways. So this way, thinking would put someone on a totally different path. It would it's a different path to take on the hike because well what is the body? What is the brain what is the human being? What is consciousness in relation to that? And I will say one more thing and pause after that. The broader thesis here Is that to go back to Dr. kastrup, the philosopher, he says that all reality is actually just one consciousness that we're a part of. And we're whirlpools within a stream, an infinite stream of water, or waters like consciousness. So it's this idea that we are individuals, but we're kind of not individuals, or separate, but we're not separate. So when I'm experiencing things as a whirlpool of as the whirlpool of Mark, I'm experiencing one aspect of reality, but there's a much bigger stream out there, and my brain and my body are somehow blocking me from that. And that's the general metaphysical framework that has informed all of the work that I've done this idea, brain consciousness, they're related, but actually, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the brain is this antenna receiver filter. And we are we as our individual identities are much more than our bodies, and we're fundamentally interconnected.

Agi Keramidas  5:58  
Thank you for listening, you can find the full conversation in episodes 132 133. The link is in the show notes. And I also have a free resource to share with you a catalogue of the best 10 episodes of the podcast in three main categories of life. So that's the top 10 podcasts about money, the top 10 about health and the 10 about mastering your personal development. To get this free ebook, go to personal development mastery. podcast.com/top 10 And you can also find the link in the show notes. Until next time, stand out don't fit in