Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Tue, 08 Apr 2025
In a time of seemingly growing division on the planet, what if the most unifying truth is one both sages and scientists agree on: that we’re inseparable on the most fundamental level?In today’s special compilation episode, we weave together the voices of some of the world’s most thoughtful explorers of consciousness: from neuroscientists and physicists to mystics and sages, to examine the illusion of the separate self, the mystery of awareness, and what becomes possible when we remember our true nature.Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro2:26 Annaka Harris - Defining the Hard Problem of Consciousness18:04 Donald Hoffman - Seeing the Truth of Reality 30:05 Federico Faggin - Why Computers Will Never Be Conscious39:33 Sam Harris - The Illusion of the Separate Self47:36 Dr. Lisa Miller - Science of the Awakened Brain53:23 Dr Joe Dispenza - Phenomenon of Emergence & Collective Healing1:02:06 Rupert Spira - Love is the Basis of Our Existence 1:10:42 Deepak Chopra - Waking Up to Your True Nature1:21:17 Mooji - A Guide to Expanding Your Awareness1:42:29 Conclusion___________Watch the Full Episodes:Annaka Harris: https://youtu.be/Kabwgbq9Fhg?si=QVzirSwJ0w17uiHlDonald Hoffman: https://youtu.be/ffgzkHCGZGE?si=ymkJyaAAV4Ftb2hRFederico Faggin: https://youtu.be/d6NHRB5V1eE?si=FBVSfLghu464cncSSam Harris: https://youtu.be/gqA-ZRpl1jQ?si=MvZChSaW4_JZtNVODr. Lisa Miller: https://youtu.be/DUe0oaH7GtQ?si=0JB6W6V_5HEEKGWMDr Joe Dispenza: https://youtu.be/QQIwZ41Ro1w?si=PnPK9nnMn2RCEw1DRupert Spira: https://youtu.be/Smqgkab8HZI?si=kZml0JSJX77Cxy1dDeepak Chopra: https://youtu.be/ZhIQ5bzv-0w?si=53WtiTaIluYdB_h3Mooji: https://youtu.be/RIjTlEBwrHQ?si=8iZVNv5eU0wLzUwzhttps://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyself.oneListen to the show:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9lApple: https://apple.co/4iATICX
Chapter 1: What is the unifying truth about consciousness?
In a time of seemingly growing division on the planet, what if the most unifying truth is one both sages and scientists agree on, that we're inseparable on the most fundamental level?
Consciousness is the capacity of one to know itself.
Chapter 2: What is the hard problem of consciousness?
The conventional sense of self that people are walking around with is an illusion. Virtually everyone feels like they are a thinker of thoughts, an experiencer of experience, looking out at a world that is not them.
This paradigm, it leads to sorrow on the inside and conflict on the outside. To know the truth about oneself must therefore be the greatest service one could render humanity.
Do you feel that there's any interconnection between consciousness being fundamental and love?
Oh, that's an interesting question. I'll say a few things.
One is... If you want to not be trapped in the trivial world of concepts, then spend time in meditation.
It feels as though we have an investment in who we have been. How do you support people in letting go of that perceived investment in personhood?
They have to have a taste of that which is beyond everything you have possessed so far. At a certain point you want more knowledge, but I bring you fire. It takes you beyond everything.
In a time where division and disconnection seem to dominate the planet, it's easy to believe that separation is the default state of human existence, that that's just the way things are. But what if this sense of fragmentation between self and other, mind and body, science and spirit, is the very illusion that's keeping us bound in a state of fear, confusion, and suffering?
Across ancient wisdom traditions and the leading edge of modern science, a profound truth is beginning to reemerge. That consciousness is not something we possess, but something that we are. That beneath the surface of our individual identities and the roles we play in the world, we are expressions of one unified field, intimately connected, inseparable, and whole.
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Chapter 3: Why do computers lack consciousness?
This is true in our daily lives, just our understanding of the world, of each other. We are only able to study, observe, try to understand, experience other things in the world from the outside, from their behavior, from their physical characteristics.
And so, you know, luckily human beings can communicate so well that we can get a pretty good sense of what we're each experiencing because we have this high level of communication and we're similar enough that we can talk about how we're feeling. But I can never have direct contact with your experience. I can't know your experience from the inside.
And so this is a real challenge for the sciences and for just us as curious creatures, how to better understand something that you can only know firsthand in terms of the experience itself. The experience itself exists for itself and can't be really received or penetrated from any other place.
Yeah, so you would say then it's impossible to have conclusive evidence that an organism or life would have consciousness looking from the outside.
Yes. So there are two questions that I raise in my book, and this is one of them. And I pose it that way because I think it gets at our deepest intuitions about what consciousness is. And it shows us how counterintuitive a lot of the answers to these two questions are. And the first one is essentially how you phrased it.
can we find conclusive evidence from the outside of any system that consciousness is present in that system? And while we feel that the answer is yes, and I think we're correct in our assumptions about other human beings and mammals, the truth is it's actually...
impossible at this point in neuroscience and in our path as human beings to actually be able to conclusively say because the only evidence we can get is through communication. As I said, I can't jump into another experience and have that experience myself. And this is actually very interesting.
I've been thinking a lot lately as I've been working on my documentary series about how important communication is for our ability really to talk about any experience at all. And we can't communicate if we don't share the same experiences. And so there's this limit. If I were talking to someone who were born blind and I was trying to explain something about my experience of seeing,
it's extremely limiting. I mean, I could give some analogies, but there would be no way for me to explain to someone who doesn't have vision what my world of sights is like. The more different an organism is from us, the less ability we have to communicate. And so it's easier for us to kind of assume we have evidence from organisms that are similar to us. It gets much more difficult
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Chapter 4: What is the illusion of the separate self?
when there's an inability to communicate. And this is true with human beings as well. So in the case of someone who's experiencing locked in syndrome, which can happen from damage to the brain, either by stroke or an injury, that leaves the patient completely paralyzed, but their consciousness is still fully intact.
And so that's a situation that puts us closer to where we are in terms of looking at other organisms, other life forms, and not being able to know whether there's consciousness presence. If someone in a locked-in state looks like they're completely unconscious, they're totally paralyzed, they can't move.
Yet we now know based on some interesting stories we can talk about if you want, that many of these patients are actually having a full conscious experience. They can see everything in the room. They can hear everything in the room. They have thoughts. They're having as full a conscious experience as you and I are having right now with no ability to communicate.
So then what is the second question that you posed?
Yeah, so the second question is related and very similar, but it kind of gets at this intuition from a different angle. The second question is, is consciousness doing something? It's about the causality of consciousness. Is it driving our behavior in the way that we feel it is? Is it informing our behavior in the way that we feel it is? Our intuitive answer to this is a resounding yes.
Also to the first question, both of our, we feel very strongly that the answer is yes to both of these questions I pose. And what's interesting is to start to shake up your intuitions and realize that we don't have great evidence for answering yes to either. And the answer may be yes to one or both, but it's surprising to dig a little deeper and realize we actually just don't know.
So we feel very strongly that you know, my experience of anger, my experience of fear, even my experience of thinking through my day and my planning, that I couldn't really do any of those things without the internal felt experience. I couldn't do those things without consciousness.
If I said, you know, I woke up this morning and spent an hour prepping for this interview, but I was unconscious the whole time. It doesn't really make sense to us. So we have this intuition that, Consciousness is causal that it's doing something, but there are ways to kind of break through that intuition and get you to question whether that's the case.
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Chapter 5: How does the science of the awakened brain work?
Do you feel that there's sort of any interconnection between consciousness being fundamental and love?
Oh, that's an interesting question.
I think of the scene in Interstellar where Matthew Kahne is like floating in this fifth dimensional library space and there's like this metaphysical property of love that connects him to experience in the world. And it's just an interesting thought experiment.
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of different ways I could answer that, but I've never been asked that specific question. It's a great question. I will, I'll say a few things.
One is that I think when we are able to drop these illusions of self and separation, for some reason, it seems to lend itself, well, not for some reason, for an understandable reason, it lends itself to feelings of compassion and love, I would put in that same category. And I think that is kind of this recognition of
being a part of something bigger than yourself, but that is also you, that it is all one thing. And so I think the natural inclination to love your family, love your children, I think that starts extending further and further. I think that's just a natural outcome of being in that state of mind.
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Chapter 6: What is the phenomenon of collective healing?
But I also do wonder, and this is one thing that I asked a few of my guests for my documentary series about, if consciousness is fundamental, is there kind of a set list and maybe it's an infinite list of qualia of specific felt experiences? Because I do think, and this is an insight in meditation that many people have had before me, but that I've also experienced.
I actually talked to Joseph Goldstein in my series about this.
I love his teachings.
Yes. Yeah. He's very, very clear. In my conversation with Joseph and in my meditation experiences, having a sense that there are certain qualia, there are certain experiences that can't be broken down any further. And actually seeing a color is a good example of that. Yeah.
Often people have the experience also in meditation, this is another thing I've spoken to Joseph about, that when you get very concentrated and you're able to really be in each present moment, there's a realization that we're not actually seeing and feeling and hearing all in the same moment, that there's this kind of weaving that happens through memory and through the brain that gives the illusion that all of those things happen at the same time, but when you're really
concentrated and you're really going moment to moment, you see that all these things kind of fluctuate. You hear the sound of the bird, you see your notebook, and you're never really in one moment hearing the sound of the bird and seeing your notebook at the same time. There's this fluctuating. And so this question keeps coming up for me. Are there
specific qualia that, you know, the universe is made of. And in some sense, they're universal. Obviously, you know, the human mind doesn't experience them all. But could we actually just, you know, make a list of all the experiences that have ever happened and will ever happen in the history of the universe? And love seems to me to be one of those things.
qualities that can't be broken down further. I mean, it can kind of blow up into a complex. You can have many thoughts about it and ideas and beliefs and it can get very complicated, but I think at its core and, you know, I'm not an expert and it'd be a good question for Joseph actually, but where compassion and love
where those intersect, if they are, when they're in the purest form, are we actually talking about the same thing? But that type of pure emotion, if consciousness is fundamental, I would expect that to be kind of one of the ones that isn't broken down.
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Chapter 7: How is love the basis of our existence?
I've heard you talk to how, you know, as humans we have three channels of color, with red, green, and blue. The mantis shrimp has 10, 11, or more channels of color. What is that experience like?
Exactly. No, I agree with all the points that you're making here. It's really critical, as you were talking about, the spiritual traditions do tell us that the word is just the word. And the reality transcends the word. The word is just a pointer. And so they often will recommend that you spend time letting go of the words. So that's meditation.
So if you want to not be trapped in the trivial world of concepts, which is trivial compared to reality, Then spend time in meditation where you literally let your mind not dwell on the concepts. You just have no, you let go of any concept. And when you actually look at the, when you walk around in the world, look at trees, look at the ocean,
where you just literally say, my mind can be quiet for a while. Just no thoughts. I'm just going to be here in thoughtless, pure awareness. Then the world comes alive and you begin to realize most of the time, You've killed the world. It's deadened. You see the dead world of your concepts, and you don't see the living world that's around you.
And I can put this, so that's what spiritual tradition, I'll put this in scientific language. Bayes' inference. We talk about our prior understandings, our prior probabilities, as you know, in Bayesian priors. So we have this prior probability of, for example, maybe belief in the standard model of particle physics and the particular laws and those properties. That's my prior.
Before that, maybe with Newton, we had Newton's theory of physics and so forth. That would be our prior. And once you have a prior, once you have the prior probability, any new data that you get, will be interpreted in terms of your prior understanding. And there's this whole Bayesian inference kind of thing. And you get a posterior distribution.
So given that you have this prior belief and you get this new data coming in, then you compute what your posterior distribution will be. Walking around without concepts, letting go of thought, is saying, I need to let go of my prior. If I don't let go of my prior, I'm condemned to only see my posterior. In both funny senses that, right?
You can only see your posterior, both in the technical sense and in this more metaphorical sense. If you don't let go of your priors, you will only see your posterior. And so if you don't want to just be seeing your own posterior, you want to be open up to novelty, then you actually have to spend time.
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Chapter 8: What does waking up to your true nature mean?
I think as a scientist, it's critical for me to actually spend time in, of course, thought and mathematics and hard-nosed, no substitute. Do your hard work. And then let go of it completely. sit there in utter silence. That's where the true new creativity comes from. And then go back and try to translate it, if you can, into the math and symbols that you have. And that way you're not stuck
with your priors. If you want creativity, you actually have to get outside your priors altogether. So I would suggest that, again, there's not some kind of schmistical, nasty, terrible, silly stuff that's going on in spiritual traditions that's anathema to science.
I think there's a way to understand what the spiritual traditions are telling us that makes sense from a Bayesian inference point of view from the scientists. If you don't let go of your priors, you're condemned to only see your posterior. So let go of your priors. What does that mean? Of course, do your homework.
But then at some point, step back and let go of all your concepts for a while and see what comes out.
Yeah, it really seems like the parable of the blind men and the elephant where blind men come and touch the tail of the elephant, think it's a whip. Another touches the leg, thinks it's a tree trunk. Another touches the trunk of the elephant and thinks it's a snake. Another touches the belly, thinks it's the wall.
And they're all experiencing parts of something and not understanding the whole of what it is. I just find it very interesting to explore the overlap and consilience of what the cutting edge science is saying with the ancient wisdom traditions and philosophy and metaphysics.
And if we can touch all the different parts of that metaphorical elephant to see and talk to each other about what our experience is of that thing, that it points us closer to the direction of the experience of what it actually is and what reality actually is.
Yes. I think that the idea of the elephant being looked at from different various perspectives is apt here. And the science gives us rigorous tools to do that palpating of different parts of the elephant with more precision than we might otherwise palpate it. And when I say that there's infinite job security in science, I mean, that's really truly humbling.
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