A Dialogue on Consciousness | Swami Sarvapriyananda and Bernardo Kastrup

[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've already heard Swamiji talk this morning, but I will again give a short introduction of him and also be in Ardo, but before I do so, let me first say Thank you to the organizers that is to say Inzig Magazine, Inside Magazine, and some Saturday books for organizing this wonderful event And also for inviting me to moderate this dialogue.
[SPEAKER_02]: I feel honored to be in the presence of these two brilliant spiritual and intellectual minds
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, let me tell you what we're going to do for the next hour and a half or two hours if we include the Q&A, so you're primed a little bit and know what to expect.
[SPEAKER_02]: So these two gentlemen will go into the dialogue with regards to the theme of mysticism, science and non-Jewality and more specifically.
[SPEAKER_02]: I will hope to steer them a little bit in the direction of, well first, their own respective traditions.
[SPEAKER_02]: I will ask them to summarize briefly their tradition of analytic idealism in Manadvaitavadanta.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we'll zoom in on the meaning of consciousness and the role of consciousness in these traditions and maybe also look for similarities between the two traditions.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we'll ask you, there may be something such as the unconscious, does that exist in these traditions?
[SPEAKER_02]: And what is phenomenal reality in these traditions?
[SPEAKER_02]: Then we'll move to the heart problem of consciousness as it is called.
[SPEAKER_02]: We will first explain what that is.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, is there actually a problem?
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's see in the discussion.
[SPEAKER_02]: And after the hard problem of consciousness will turn to artificial intelligence, how does consciousness relate to artificial intelligence?
[SPEAKER_02]: And if they are time, and we have 90 minutes, which sounds like a lot of time, but time flies in these discussions, if they are time, I would also like to address the contemporary meaning crisis.
[SPEAKER_02]: The fact that more people nowadays seem to have lost the source of meaning purpose, and I'm looking for alternative sources of meaning purpose, among others' spirituality.
[SPEAKER_02]: But let's see if we get there.
[SPEAKER_02]: First, let me introduce both speakers, starting with Benardo Castro.
[SPEAKER_02]: Benardo is a double PhD philosopher and a computer engineer, a PhD in both domains.
[SPEAKER_02]: He is also the Director Executive Director of the Essential Foundation, and in his books, and also online interviews, he engages the connection between consciousness and reality.
[SPEAKER_02]: and through his many books he's a prolific author and arguably his most famous book is why materialism is baloney.
[SPEAKER_02]: Through his many famous books and interviews he reaches a global audience and inspires global audience.
[SPEAKER_02]: The approaching non-duality from in many ways a secular and scientific perspective.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome Bernardo, thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Swamiji, Swami Sarva Priya Nanda, we've already been introduced to Swamiji this morning.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've had a wonderful lecture.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me briefly summarize again his background.
[SPEAKER_02]: Swamiji is a monk in the Ramakrishna order and the head of the Vedanta society of New York and the spiritual leader of the Vedanta society.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he gives many lectures on Advaita Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's also very well informed about Hindu and Indian philosophy in general, Western philosophy.
[SPEAKER_02]: very, very well informed.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's arguably one of the most eloquent speakers of representatives of Advaita Vadanta today, and he too inspires audiences worldwide through his lectures, which are also freely available online.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, without further ado, let me stop talking and give the words to you.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, starting with the first question, gentlemen, could you briefly summarize your own philosophy?
[SPEAKER_02]: Starting with you, Bernardo, and Elytic, I'd be always pleased.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, Elytic idealism is an idealist philosophy that the main idea is that all reality is of an experiential nature.
[SPEAKER_03]: It does not deny the existence of an external world.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is an external world out there that would still be there, even if I were not here as an individuated form.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that world out there too is made of mental states, experiential states, conscious states, if you wish.
[SPEAKER_03]: Which appear to us when we observe them in the form that we refer to colloquially as the physical world, the material world.
[SPEAKER_03]: So from that perspective, the physical world is a kind of dashboard representation of the real world that is out there.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like if we were airplanes with sensors and a dashboard, the sensors measure the states of the sky and present those measurements to us in the form of dashboard indications.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the physical world.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a dashboard indication we create by interacting with the real world.
[SPEAKER_03]: which is then a world of mental states, experiential states, conscious states, if you wish.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in that context of, say, one field of subjectivity that reality is, if you postulate many, you're running to all kinds of insoluble problems, it has to be only one.
[SPEAKER_03]: What are we in that context of this one field of subjectivity, one field of consciousness?
[SPEAKER_03]: One way to understand this is to leverage the concept of dissociation in psychiatry.
[SPEAKER_03]: We all dissociate, not pathologically, some people dissociate pathologically and they get what is used to be called multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder.
[SPEAKER_03]: But even if you're not pathologically, every time you dream, you dissociate.
[SPEAKER_03]: you think you are the avatar in your dream and not the rest of the dream.
[SPEAKER_03]: When you wake up, your dream avatar is gone and you realize that you were the whole dream you were doing the whole thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, under an analytic idealism, that's what's happening right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are dissociated, complex, dissociated altars of this one-field of subjectivity and what this dissociation looks like on a dashboard is biology, metabolism.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's pretty much a summary of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Bernardo.
[SPEAKER_02]: Swamiji, could you again summarize advice of Adanza?
[SPEAKER_02]: But then very shortly because we already had a lecture of you this morning, and then maybe look for overlap with what Bernardo just said, with analytic idealism.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, summarizing Advaita Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just going to say, what he said, okay, the next one, it's pretty, it can be done in a very elegant way.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are these sentences called Mahavarky, profound sentences, identity sentences, you are that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what Advaita wants to say is that there is one limitless consciousness
[SPEAKER_00]: And it appears as mind, body, and word.
[SPEAKER_00]: Very much like our dream, the dream metaphor is used again and again in a dyta Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, in one of the commentaries on the Manduq Upanishad, Gaudapa, the uses, one whole chapter based on the dream metaphor as an argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just as in the dream, we are there.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a word.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are also there.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can see, we have a body and personality.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet when we wake up, I, the dreamer, the dreaming mind was the subject and the object and everything in that world.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the same way, here we don't wake up from one state to another state, but we realize that there is one underlying reality which is appearing as all of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a sense, we are that underlying reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: That diplomacy or you are that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the way, it's wonderful to be here with Bernard because when you see someone on screen and you read his books, you feel you know them already, but we really haven't met until then right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, we have always known each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've always known each other.
[SPEAKER_02]: So basically, the underlying foundation of each of your philosophies or traditions are very, very similar.
[SPEAKER_02]: Basically, consciousness is all there is.
[SPEAKER_02]: explore that a bit further.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what is consciousness then in your philosophy and analytic idealism, Bernardo?
[SPEAKER_03]: I have to scrutinize the question first.
[SPEAKER_03]: Please, when we ask, what is that?
[SPEAKER_03]: What we are asking for is a reduction.
[SPEAKER_03]: We want to explain that in terms of some things else.
[SPEAKER_03]: The problem is we can't play this game forever.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can't keep on explaining one thing in terms of another forever,
[SPEAKER_03]: it becomes circular and that's fallacious.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there has to be a primitive.
[SPEAKER_03]: There has to be at least one thing that you cannot explain in terms of anything else.
[SPEAKER_03]: It just is.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then, you perhaps can explain everything else in terms of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you need that starting point.
[SPEAKER_03]: Consciousness is that, not to your personal consciousness, or my personal consciousness, but consciousness is a few that's objective that I would claim, is that in terms of which you can explain everything else.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything else are excitations of consciousness, configurations, topologies of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: Consciousness itself is that whose excitations are everything else.
[SPEAKER_02]: Consciousness is that whose excitations is everything else.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's explore that even further.
[SPEAKER_02]: But before we do, let me ask Swamiji, do you have anything to add from the perspectives of Advaita Vedanta or is this also what he said?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, primarily what he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just thinking, same to Augustine.
[SPEAKER_00]: He writes famously, when I asked what is time, I cannot say what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I'm not asked, I know what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, a fundamental reality, we all know this, but we can't express it when we are asked to express it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't explain it when we are asked to explain it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why not?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because, as Bernard said, explanation is of something complex in terms of something more fundamental.
[SPEAKER_00]: you can explain this pillar in terms of the bricks constituting the pillar, but there is a limit to that game you can play, you can make it more and more finite, but you must come to a fundamental reality which you cannot explain in terms of a more fundamental reality because there is no other more fundamental reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what science also does, science is also trying to find the most foundational reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: In Advaita Vedanta, consciousness is that fundamental reality, which appears as allets are expressed as allets.
[SPEAKER_00]: What would I say is peculiar to consciousness?
[SPEAKER_00]: It is that which enables us to have
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the essence of what the Atman is, our first person experiencing self.
[SPEAKER_00]: Combine it with what Bernardo Castro said, that it is that of which everything else is an excitation.
[SPEAKER_00]: That would be
[SPEAKER_00]: a new way of putting what Brahman is and Advaita says both are the same thing that which gives you the first person experience to self right now and all the time and that which is the fundamental reality of the entire universe they are one and the same.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, Brahman consciousness is the foundation of reality, and it relates to experience as Thomas Nejor would probably say, the feeling of being me, so what it's like to be something bad.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that begs the question about unconsciousness, because in Western psychology, we tend to talk a lot about unconscious drives, feelings, emotions, etc.,
[SPEAKER_02]: Then the same question for both of you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there such a thing as the unconscious or unconsciousness?
[SPEAKER_02]: And let's start with you, Swamiji.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, this is a good point to make a distinction between consciousness and knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are things which are known and there are lots of things that we do not know.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, you right now know what's behind me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now, okay, I now, I now know.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, there is enormous amounts of things in the world, which we do not know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this is all your narrow band, which we know.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we see here, what we have understood through our science and all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, what Vedanta wants to say is, all that we know or can know, and all that is unknown to us, all of those are appearances in consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: to understand this very easily, take the example of a dream.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're walking in a dream, I imagine I'm walking through central park in a dream and I can see people and places and, you know, and I also have this vague sense of New York beyond what I can see.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a whole world beyond that, galaxies and stars, or maybe atoms and protons, which I cannot see, all of that is in the range of the unknown for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I wake up, I will see from the perspective of the dreaming mind, the entirety of the known and the unknown in the dream was a product of the dreaming mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Similarly here is one underlying reality called it being call it consciousness that appears to us in all these ways and as modes of that being as individualizations of that being be no particular part of it through our instruments of knowledge, we particularize it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the rest of it remains apparently unknown to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that also goes for the so-called division between the conscious and the unconscious.
[SPEAKER_00]: In this particular form, there might be parts of this biological being and our minds, which we know directly now, and there might be layers which are not known to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet all of those could be in the claim is they all are appearances, or I like that word, excitations in consciousness.
[SPEAKER_02]: If we relate that to analytic idealism, Bernardo, could you elaborate on this?
[SPEAKER_02]: But then use the concept of disassociation that you introduced earlier.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was about to say, it's what he said by me.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, you asked that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's going to be a very short dial.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what he said.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then I run out of questions.
[SPEAKER_03]: I can try to use sort of scientific metaphors.
[SPEAKER_03]: Under physicalism, a physicalist would say, all there is is unconsciousness, consciousness is an illusion.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, this implodes immediately.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a self-contradictory statement, because the illusions must exist in consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: You cannot have an illusion if there is no consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the other way around is coherent.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything can be consciousness, and the unconscious can be in any illusion.
[SPEAKER_03]: The parts of consciousness that you don't know of.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, what does that mean to know of a modern metaphors?
[SPEAKER_03]: Take your breathing.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're breathing all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: you are experiencing the inflation of your ribcage, they are flowing through your nostrils all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: But only now, because I brought your attention to it, do you know that you are breathing?
[SPEAKER_03]: But you were conscious of your breathing all along.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are some people alive today who would say, no, no, unless I place my attention on it, I'm not conscious of it, I'm breathing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that is easily contradicted by direct experience because you can remember before you place the irritation in it, you can remember what it felt like to breathe.
[SPEAKER_03]: So knowledge of something is the explicit awareness of it in psychiatric language.
[SPEAKER_03]: It entails a re-representation.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we have an original experience, A.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then when you tell yourself, I am having the experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: A, that is the re-representation of A.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's usually the outcome of attention.
[SPEAKER_03]: When you place your attention on something, you re-represent it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then now you know of the experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you have been having the experience all along.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am very good at not knowing the time and pain.
[SPEAKER_03]: Very, very good at this.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then two days later, I'm well.
[SPEAKER_03]: It occurs to me that I've been paying for two days, so that's one way in which things are conscious but not known.
[SPEAKER_03]: They are not metacognitive, which is the technical word.
[SPEAKER_03]: Another way in which they can be conscious and not accessible to your knowledge is because there are no cognitive associative links that can bring you there through a chain of associations.
[SPEAKER_03]: When you are dreaming, and you think you are a dream avatar, there is no chain of associations that can bring you to the knowledge that you are in fact doing the rest of the dream as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a dissociative state.
[SPEAKER_03]: We always have dissociative state.
[SPEAKER_03]: When you are dreaming, when we forget something, we know that we know when we deal with trauma.
[SPEAKER_03]: when we go to work and park our problems in order to be effective at work.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a dissociative state.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those problems, those feelings, the anxiety, the worry, you're still experiencing them, but you've parked them.
[SPEAKER_03]: So now you do not have an associative chain that brings you to that.
[SPEAKER_03]: that dissociation, both mainly what we call the unconscious, is just a mixture of these two things, lack of metacognition, lack of associative links, it is not a conscious at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I can add, I just reminded of Professor Garfield, who's an expert on Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, he said, fish are the wrong people to ask about water.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the same way, we conscious beings are the wrong people to ask about consciousness, because we have so much immersed in consciousness all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very difficult for us to recognize what it is.
[SPEAKER_02]: So to summarize, basically, what we call unconsciousness are simply elements of consciousness that are not immediately accessible to us.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're not aware of it, but it's not actually unconscious.
[SPEAKER_02]: OK, now if consciousness is so fundamental, if it's the fundamental aspect of our reality and then part of my phrasing here, what then is material reality.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are phenomenally experienced reality, so I'm in G.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the way Vedanta looks at this and it's something borrowed from another philosophy sang here.
[SPEAKER_00]: It defines consciousness as not this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So whatever in our experience and it's a very first person we have looking at things, whatever in our experience you can label as this is not consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: this breath, this thought, this emotion, this idea, so we have come to areas which are we normally take to be consciousness, but these are also, you can label them as this
[SPEAKER_00]: And that, to which all these, this, this, this appears, that is consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now we have made a clean analytic division between the object and the subject.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the definition of the object in Vedanta, the, what is material nature?
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of material nature, what Vedanta says, just stick to your own experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: In your own experience, it's just things appearing to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are consciousness and to use things appear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever appears is called object or in Sanskrit, Jada which is the word for material nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: So material nature would then include not only the physical nature of the universe, but also the biological body, also the mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ideas, these are also part of material nature according to Sankhya.
[SPEAKER_00]: What a writer, so this is the division between material nature and consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now what a writer does is go one step further and ask, what is the relationship of this material nature to consciousness?
[SPEAKER_00]: and finds that remarkable shocking realization that what appears to us as other than us is nothing but us.
[SPEAKER_00]: What appears to us as an object is actually the subject itself appearing as the object.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a non-duality of consciousness, but appearing as a duality of subject and object.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bernardo, same question, and please don't say what he said.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, I will not say that, but I'll make a disclaimer.
[SPEAKER_03]: I will say things in a way that you may think is more direct, more accessible, but it's flattens what he said.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you'll be missing out on new ones and subtlety.
[SPEAKER_03]: So now if you're comfortable to try to articulate it in a different way, it's essentially the same thing just flattened.
[SPEAKER_03]: Matter is what conscious processes look like when observed from the outside, in other words, when observed from across the dissociative boundary.
[SPEAKER_03]: What do you consider to be the material world are contents of perception?
[SPEAKER_03]: In other words, they are experiential state.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's your experience of color.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's your experience shape, your experience melodies, flavors, smells, textures.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all experiential.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all conscious stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: But in the case of the material world, it's conscious states that represent other conscious states.
[SPEAKER_03]: In other words,
[SPEAKER_03]: matter is watchiness from the outside as opposed from a direct first person perspective.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, this has a lot less nuance than what he said, and I can't go as deep as what he's hinting at.
[SPEAKER_03]: I can smell what he's hinting at, but I can't go there.
[SPEAKER_02]: Many people will say, but there is a material reality, could you explain why we have this particularly in Western culture, but nowadays I would argue globally, why we have this persistent notion of external material reality, can you start with use, why I mean to you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, good, you know, these questions, the reminded me of this debate which goes on, what
[SPEAKER_00]: We clearly intuitively feel waking reality, this is real and what I was dreaming is not real.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a dream, this is reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when we are pushed to tell us, give us the reasons, why?
[SPEAKER_00]: And we have, we can have a series of reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: None of them really work.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, he used the word persisted.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, one of the argument says, well, waking reality is real because it persists.
[SPEAKER_00]: I go to sleep in the same bed and I dream dreams and I come back and it's the same bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it is there from waking reality to waking reality and waking reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was there in the dream disappears?
[SPEAKER_00]: It does not come back.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, the dreams are individual, private, personal projections and really waking reality is reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the dream, if the answer to that is, in the dream, it does not seem like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the dream, it seems it has been a persistent reality when we go into a dream and we forget that we are sleeping.
[SPEAKER_00]: It does not feel like, oh, so it's a dream, it's just been created now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't feel like that at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like it is a world we are inhabiting, just like the waking world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Other people there would also seem to persist.
[SPEAKER_00]: And similarly, multiple arguments, for example, another argument is, no, no, no, this is reality because it's a public shared reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are all sharing, we are all seeing each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here is the hall, here are the people, same people, we all agree on this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it is real and quite apart from subjects like us.
[SPEAKER_00]: It exists by itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a dream, it's only in your mind, or in my mind, nobody else sees it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So those are dreams.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, that doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a dream, when we're going to a dream, suppose you're having a cup of tea with a friend sitting by the canal and having a cup of tea.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your friend will not say, I can't see the tea, it must be a dream.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can't see the can, it's all in your head, I can't see.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, in a dream, it's again a shared reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nowadays, we understand it better with virtual realities, but that makes it no less a dream, it's still a projection.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like this, I have at least an inventory of 10 to 12 objections, which separate dreams from waking, which speaks to, it's a persistent reality outside.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it not a persistent reality in your consciousness?
[SPEAKER_00]: I've told so many times, our senior most member in Belanza society in New York with Bill Conrad, he's a physicist, he's 100 years old last month, and he is a committed materialist and a spiritualist.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how, but he is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It says, Swami, the world is not in consciousness, you, the world is there and we come into it as conscious beings.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will prove it to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: It says, we will leave this room, I will put on a camera and we will leave this room, there will be no conscious being in the room.
[SPEAKER_00]: We will come back into the room, I will show you the picture in the camera, empty room, nobody was there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it is not in your consciousness and my consciousness, the room exists.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we come into it as conscious being.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the common sense view of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said to him, Bill, in your consciousness you designed this experiment, in your consciousness you put up a camera, in your consciousness you told me to come out of the room, in your consciousness we went back into the room, in your consciousness you opened the picture in the camera, and in your consciousness you saw an empty room, where did you step outside consciousness, can you even step outside consciousness in that sense, difference between
[SPEAKER_00]: you can't jump out of your skin.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I could give a different more nuanced answer to this, but it's, I would be quoting word forward from why materialism is better, but what is the logical problem with realism, what it claims the four points.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the bills experiment is fundamentally dependent on an assumption that somebody denies and the whole advice of a done tradition denies, which is that consciousness is restricted to us to individual living beings.
[SPEAKER_03]: Only under that assumption, there's the thought experiment sort of gained some mild coherence.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, something holds the state of the room when no living being is there.
[SPEAKER_03]: That doesn't mean that it's not being held in consciousness, not your consciousness or my consciousness, but the field of subjectivity that nature is.
[SPEAKER_03]: The next question is, does the room exist as a room?
[SPEAKER_03]: when no individual consciousness is looking at it or I can translate that into a more appealing question.
[SPEAKER_03]: Does the moon exist when nobody's looking at it?
[SPEAKER_03]: The analytic idealist answer would be, if what you call the moon is that shiny silver disc that you experience, no, it does not exist.
[SPEAKER_03]: If nobody's looking at it because nobody's having that experience of a shiny, lit disc in the night sky.
[SPEAKER_03]: but does the mental process or the conscious process that modulates your perception, leading to the perception of the moon?
[SPEAKER_03]: Does the conscious process that underlies what we call the moon?
[SPEAKER_03]: Exist when we are not looking at the moon, I would say yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, there is a fundamental reality that does not depend on the particular dissociative processes of consciousness, but that fundamental reality does not look like a shiny disk in the night sky.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's something we cannot articulate in concepts because language evolved to describe this and not what lies underneath or beyond.
[SPEAKER_03]: That which is imminent in this, that we can't describe.
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't have the language for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And to me, and I'm pretty sure many of these audience, this sounds very convincing, and very appealing and compelling.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet, and that's what I started with, many people still believe there is a material reality outside.
[SPEAKER_02]: And why is that idea so persistent when they are confronted with alternatives, like Advait of Adonta and Analytic Idealism?
[SPEAKER_02]: Bernardo.
[SPEAKER_03]: Most people who consider themselves, well, many people who consider themselves materialists do not know what materialism actually is.
[SPEAKER_03]: They think that according to materialism, my thoughts and my emotions on your side, my head, but the colors, the melodies, the flavors, the smells, the textures are really out there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, that's not physicalism.
[SPEAKER_03]: Physicalism says, all of experiential states are inside your head.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the church that you perceive right now as you perceive it is inside your head.
[SPEAKER_03]: The inner surface of your skull is outside this church.
[SPEAKER_03]: on the physicalism.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the only way for physicalism to be coherent because thoughts and emotions are experiential states and seeing the church is also an experiential state.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if experiential states are magically created by your brain, side your skull, then the world, as you perceive, is entirely inside your head.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's physicalism.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, if you describe it consistently like I just did, I think.
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of the people who identify as materialists go like, oh, I didn't know that's what I was believing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Materialism is also in coherent, in the sense that it makes a claim, the brain creates mental states or experiential states.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it doesn't tell you how.
[SPEAKER_03]: not even in principle, and absurdly in our culture that is a strength of materialism, because you cannot refute that which you can't pin down.
[SPEAKER_03]: If materialism doesn't tell us how brain state creates experiential states, you can't defeat it, because you can't pin it down.
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't know what it's saying.
[SPEAKER_03]: If there is one neuroactive somewhere in your brain, oh look, you know whatever experience you have is explained.
[SPEAKER_03]: Why did we do this?
[SPEAKER_03]: Why did we bark and dizzy sanity?
[SPEAKER_03]: And we now think that this is the only solid intellectually valid alternative.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is the most intellectually ridiculous alternative that has ever been on the table.
[SPEAKER_03]: How did this happen?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a studying history in sociology in the West.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the early days of science, the church could burn you at this state like the burned Bruno in the year 1600.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the church had domain over psyche, the Greek word that translates into mind, but also functionalism, also spirit, so even, so scientists felt that in order to not threaten the church, they had to carve out a sort of antique domain that isn't psychic.
[SPEAKER_03]: That isn't mind, isn't consciousness, isn't experiential.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the move was very smart.
[SPEAKER_03]: We always had numbers to describe the world, 50 kilograms, 10 kilometers.
[SPEAKER_03]: These are descriptions of experiential states, what it feels like to lift 50 kilograms.
[SPEAKER_03]: What it feels like to walk 10 kilometers.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we said, oh, no, no, no, they are not the descriptions anymore.
[SPEAKER_03]: These numbers are no longer descriptions.
[SPEAKER_03]: They are the thing in itself.
[SPEAKER_03]: The 50 kilograms exist prior to consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: The map exists prior to the territory.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the new it was absurd.
[SPEAKER_03]: The new idea of one of the authors of the Linesy Clopy did a founding document of the Enlightenment.
[SPEAKER_03]: He is on record saying, yeah, no, it doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_03]: But we have to use it against the church.
[SPEAKER_03]: He is on the written record saying that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was a political move.
[SPEAKER_03]: But as we, as the Enlightenment, gave way to the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century and the bourgeoisie became a socially dominant class because before it was the peasants and the clergy.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now there was the bourgeoisie in between and they were vying for social influence and economic influence against the clergy.
[SPEAKER_03]: So around beginning to the middle of the 19th century, starting at the July Revolution of 1830, it's a continuum.
[SPEAKER_03]: been down and that 1830s are good dates to say here there is a clear transition.
[SPEAKER_03]: What was just a convenient story, so scientists wouldn't be burned at the stake, became something that
[SPEAKER_03]: and why because that would rob the clergy of any social-reconomic influence.
[SPEAKER_03]: If the psyche is derivative from matter and it's the bourgeois scientists that understand the matter, now, why do we need the church?
[SPEAKER_03]: The problem is towards the end of the 19th century, where you completely forgot this entire history and we started drinking our own snake oil when we started believing the nonsense, Nietzsche recorded that point in the history of Western culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: When we started believing that kind of nonsense, and he understood what the implications would be, which is the meaning crisis, which I'm going to talk about later.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there are social, economic, political, and psychological reasons why we find ourselves in this dilemma today.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is very temporary, it's been going on for 400 years and deep, deep belief in materialism, less than 200 years, maybe 200 years.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is nothing.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a page in an epic.
[SPEAKER_03]: We would turn that page quickly.
[SPEAKER_03]: The problem is that we have very short lives.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're like May flies.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we may leave our entire lives on a dis-non-sensical ethos that we will get rid of very quickly.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if I come back to that then, so on this page, this brief moment in history, when we are convinced by the material is narrative, reliving that right now in many ways, and, for instance, in neuroscience.
[SPEAKER_02]: So making a link to the heart problem of consciousness that starts from a premise that we just addressed from a materialist premise.
[SPEAKER_02]: But before we unravel that, let's start with identifying what the heart problem of consciousness is.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would like to ask you, Bernardo, to explain it in your own words.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then Swamiji, I would like you to respond from the perspective of the times Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_02]: So
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'll just define the problem and I'm not going to argue yet, and then I'll pass it on to something else.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's first make clear what the problem, the hard problem of consciousness entails.
[SPEAKER_03]: So in one sentence, the problem is the following.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is nothing about physical properties.
[SPEAKER_03]: In terms of which we could deduce, in principle, the qualities of experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I can elaborate a little bit to just to get people time to let it sink in.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is nothing about charge, momentum, spin, mass, speed, direction.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is nothing in terms of, there's nothing about physical properties, kilograms, cool-ons, jewels, nothing about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: In terms of which we could say, these kilograms,
[SPEAKER_03]: is red, or is falling in love, or is having a belly ache?
[SPEAKER_03]: Nothing, it's an impossible cause between the two.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Bernardo.
[SPEAKER_02]: So just to summarize, again, just to make sure this is crystal clear before we respond and both of you, I will also allow you to respond because we're eager to jump in there already.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because on its own terms, the heart problem basically says then, well, it states that how can you explain that from matter something qualitatively different emerges that we identify as consciousness?
[SPEAKER_02]: How is that possible?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm just basically repeating what you said.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the heart problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now let's approach it from your respective traditions, swam and g. What does respond from a divide of a delta towards the heart problem?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, we start with the basic sanghian intuition that the subject and the object are very different.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shankaras, commentary on the Brahmasutras, he starts with the subject and the object.
[SPEAKER_00]: He uses the word, the wee idea and this idea or the you idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are as different from each other as light and darkness.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he will retract all of this later on, but first of all he starts with this clear distinction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, to say that from the object you will produce the subject, makes no sense at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember this argument I had with a biologist who was also a philosopher in New York.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, look, consciousness is a product of the living brain.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am convinced of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why I am convinced of this?
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't tell you now, but I am convinced of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And give us some time and we will demonstrate.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is called promissory materialism.
[SPEAKER_00]: That means out of, and then you give the example that life used to be considered a mystery.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now we understand life down to its molecular levels and that's a good enough understanding.
[SPEAKER_00]: Similarly, I promise you that in 50 years or 100 years we will understand the whole of this phenomenon of consciousness down to its absolutely, you know, molecular level of brain activity or neuronal activity.
[SPEAKER_00]: How we have no idea right now, but it will happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, my answer to that from another way that
[SPEAKER_00]: Why not?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a technological problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a problem in principle and that becomes very clear when you take the sunken position.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't even have to go to Advaita.
[SPEAKER_00]: So sunken position, whatever you can label as this is an object to consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: So can you label the brain as this brain?
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course you can and then to say that the brain will produce consciousness does not work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why not?
[SPEAKER_00]: the example of lies does not apply here.
[SPEAKER_00]: life from an Advaitaic perspective or sank in perspective, life is also this life.
[SPEAKER_00]: This bad series of processes is called life and if you are able to explain life in terms of more fundamental molecular processes, good for you, you have explained something complex in terms of something fundamental, you have explained a complex objective phenomenon in terms
[SPEAKER_00]: But now you are saying like that, I will explain this entirely this pure subject, consciousness itself, in terms of objective phenomena, you can see the jump you are making, you are explaining this in terms of that, but now you are saying that you will explain this in terms of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean the awareness itself to which both of them are appearing as this.
[SPEAKER_00]: This life, these molecular phenomena, good, no problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Advaits does not see any problem or science, it does not see any problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you say this awareness, which objectifies the whole universe and in which science religion, everything is possible, that awareness you are going to find out from one bit of the universe, there is the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: So did that impress the biologist, not one bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think he saw from an other I think perspective or some can perspective, the matter is very clear, it's very dramatic, it can't be done, it's like you are wearing the chest pieces and now from the chest pieces you will say the chest man the player will be produced or the explained.
[SPEAKER_00]: No way, you can make an even more complex arrangement of the chest pieces on the board, that will still not explain the player of the chest game.
[SPEAKER_02]: before you respond, please do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I remember reading this, I've quoted this again and again, but very nice half humorous, half serious piece by Galen Strassen, who is not an idealist by any stretch, but still.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says there is no hard problem of consciousness because he says that we have convinced ourselves that the brain produces consciousness, then we can't figure out how and hence hard problem.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the biologists, and I love him, but you're right.
[SPEAKER_02]: The biologist whom you refer to as whamaging, he would equate easy problems with hard problems and saying that in the long run, we can answer the neural correlations between the brain and specific functions, like memory, and speech, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the same will apply to the hard problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: At some point, we'll be able to figure out how the brain produces consciousness this biologist would say then.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, come to you, Bernardo.
[SPEAKER_02]: How would you respond?
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's what he said.
[SPEAKER_03]: What he said, okay, I'll ask you.
[SPEAKER_03]: I use my own words because you would get to your two cents worth.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not going to be saying more than what he said, just in my own words.
[SPEAKER_03]: The hard problem is not the problem to be so it's an internal contradiction of a silly line of thought.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the people who adopt a silly line of thought are the not one to admit.
[SPEAKER_03]: that it's an incoherent line of thought that brought them to a wall.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they called the wall a problem.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they promised themselves that one day they will address it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm trying to do that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like a dog chasing its own tail at light speeds and saying that next century, how catch my tail.
[SPEAKER_03]: Look, here is the brief history of why we speak of a hard problem of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the early days of science, early science was not materialist, early science was religious.
[SPEAKER_03]: At best, the dualist, we realized that it's very useful to describe the world in terms of numbers and relationships between numbers.
[SPEAKER_03]: mathematical equations, physics, so they're useful to do that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It allows us to predict the future states of the world and it allows us to account for the present states of the world and even past states.
[SPEAKER_03]: Extremely useful, numbers as descriptions of the experience we call the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then at some point we said, none of the numbers are not descriptions, they are the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the real world and the world of perception that's created by the brain somehow inside our head.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the numbers precede the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: The problem is that the meaning of the numbers.
[SPEAKER_03]: is anchored on perceptual experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: What is the meaning of 50 kilograms?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's lifting a bag that weighs 50 kilograms.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's looking at the needle of a balance move when you put the bag on a balance.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's watching an object sink in water or in a viscous fluid that weighs 50 kilograms.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the meaning of 50 kilograms.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the output of an instrument.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: We perceive experience, the output of instruments.
[SPEAKER_03]: The meaning of one kilometer is a geometric relationship between perceptual states, the length of a ruler, the meaning of the numbers.
[SPEAKER_03]: is a resides on the mentoring experiential state.
[SPEAKER_03]: But when we say the nun's experiential state, they lose their semantic reference.
[SPEAKER_03]: They lose what grounds they're meaning.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now they mean nothing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, you cannot deduce the qualities of experience from something that means nothing.
[SPEAKER_03]: We made a mistake in our thought line.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's all there is to it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not a problem to be solved.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a silly mistake that we resist acknowledging.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just reminded of it's actually a challenge which was there in 1999 David Charmers and Christopher Yeah, they had a debate in which finally this kind of debate in which it came to a head There was none of that what he said just opposite of what he said so so finally it came to a very precise challenge
[SPEAKER_00]: Christophe code said, the way neuroscience is proceeding within 25 years, we will solve the hard problem of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: We will show you exactly how which part of the brain which activities produce consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: We will show it.
[SPEAKER_00]: 25 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: David Thomas said, you can't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why, in principle, it's impossible.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I was trying to hint at from a sunken perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't use the word sunken, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a principle, it's impossible because you're trying to reduce, you're trying to discover the subjective, in purely objective processes.
[SPEAKER_00]: In principle, you can't.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: cut to 2024, they're all forgotten about the challenge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody pointed out to them, it's 25 years now.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the state of the art, what's the state of the debate, the challenge?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they decided to meet again and end by you last year and Christopher and David Chamas.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Christopher, straightforward, he admitted neuroscience is that once there's a lot, but we are nowhere close to solving the hard problem of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: We haven't been able to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he handed over a great of champagne
[SPEAKER_03]: Good wine, very expensive wine, expensive wine.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he said, give me 25 more years, same problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will live at least 25 more years maybe.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will try to solve it in next 25 years.
[SPEAKER_02]: So basically, from the perspective of advanced evidence, the share perspective of advanced evidence, an idealistic idealism, the hard problem of consciousness is based on a false premise, the fact that there is a material reality, and then we have to explain how does material reality create consciousness?
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's a mistake in thinking, in conceptual or an error, in principle, as you said, swamaging.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's move on to the next topic, something that's emerging nowadays.
[SPEAKER_02]: AI artificial intelligence, with things like chatchipity, swamiji already mentioned, or referred to it in passing in his lecture.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, before we discuss this, let's first
[SPEAKER_02]: define or explain what we mean by AI.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bernardo, could I ask you to bear a phrase in your own words?
[SPEAKER_02]: What is artificial intelligence?
[SPEAKER_03]: There is a soft and hard definition in the heart.
[SPEAKER_03]: The definition is what we call AGI or artificial general intelligence.
[SPEAKER_03]: The soft definition is AI is a clever way of processing information and making decisions that is analogous to how humans process information and make decisions.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's nothing wrong about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a perfectly harmless thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a tool, like any other, and AI is a tool, like a nuclear power station.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a very useful tool, but it can be dangerous, so we have to take safety measures.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's all there is to it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there is ADA, artificial general intelligence, which tends in some corners to come with the extra claim that not only does this thing process data like humans do, it is sentient in the sense of having a private subjective point of view of its own like we do.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's data processing is accompanied by experience like our data processing.
[SPEAKER_03]: That I think is a very diluted idea based on false premises and lazy logic.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll come back to you momentarily, Swamiji.
[SPEAKER_02]: Could you explain the relation between consciousness and artificial intelligence?
[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe else bring it in human intelligence?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's first look at the relationship between consciousness and intelligence in our own case.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in a writer, that part of the mind, which processes information, that's called actually called the mind in Sanskrit Manas.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's another part, in fact, what we call the mind's very ambiguous cloudy term, you know, in Sanskrit, there's a precise term, it's called untapped Karana, inner instrument.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like an internal processor, inner instrument, because there are external instruments eyes and ears, that which contact sense objects, they're called external instruments, but the mind is the inner instrument, and the mind has these multiple capacities.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is intelligence, intelligence is
[SPEAKER_00]: called the determinative faculty, so that part of the inner instrument which processes information comes to some understanding, some conclusion, some clarity about what reality is about itself and all the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: But my point is that's also an object, it's something that you can be aware of.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just as we are aware of the body, of the table, of the body, of the breath, of the mind, you are aware of the intellect too.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the intellect is also entirely objective.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although at a very subtle and sophisticated level, it's still objective.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is, it is, it is an appearance to consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Consciousness gives you the first person experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you're struggling with an intellectual problem and you get the feeling, I get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That conclusion you reach is intellect, but that feeling of I get it, that's because of consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Consciousness gives you that burst of acceleration or, you know, the first person experience of getting it of understanding.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that,
[SPEAKER_00]: Intellect is objective, in principle, sanghi or adwaita will not have any objections to say a machine duplicating or replicating, let's be clear, machines are not doing what's going on here, the way the machines do it, they imitate what's going on here, they imitate our processes, they're algorithms, they are not working the way our minds are actually working,
[SPEAKER_00]: the delivers similar results.
[SPEAKER_00]: And from an authentic perspective, there's no problem at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just intellect is a set of objective processes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, an artificial intelligence is entirely within the realms of possibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: But was that your question?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's move to Bernardo, because you already hinted at something before I asked why I'm going to respond.
[SPEAKER_02]: You said, some people say that AI, at some point,
[SPEAKER_02]: might become conscious or attain consciousness, then you said, I doubt that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Feeling elaborate.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, when they make the claim or when they raise the hypothesis that AI might become consciousness, they are not only saying that it generates consciousness, but it generates private consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: Dissociated consciousness, if you will, like you and me.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they mean these two things, other idealism and if you don't, some people misinterpret both philosophies by saying, well, if other idealism and other of it don't, there is always one consciousness, then everything is conscious, every object is conscious.
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
[SPEAKER_03]: To say that everything is zinc consciousness is not to say that everything has a private, subjective point of view of its goal.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not to say that the glass is consciousness, that my shoes are conscious.
[SPEAKER_03]: There aren't even shoes in glasses.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can mistake the world, the structure of the world for the structure of our language.
[SPEAKER_03]: We think that everything we have a name for is a separate thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, it's just our own epistemic construction that has evolved for convenience.
[SPEAKER_03]: You want to buy a car, you need to have a name for that subset, that segment of the world, that we call a car.
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't mean that a car exists.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is no car, there is no glass, there is no shoes, there is just the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything else is nominal.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the structure of language that we mistake for the structure of reality.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there are no computers.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there is nothing there to have a consciousness of its own.
[SPEAKER_03]: The argument for AI is for sentient AI is ludicrous in a way that we all understand if we talk about anything else.
[SPEAKER_03]: But when it comes to consciousness, we get very confused, and we become lousy, our logic becomes very loose.
[SPEAKER_03]: like a duck, and swings like a duck, then it is a duck.
[SPEAKER_03]: On that account, a shock window mannequin is conscious.
[SPEAKER_03]: It looks like a human.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's human.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's conscious like a human.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, why?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it was made to look like a human by construction.
[SPEAKER_03]: So now you cannot use that that which you constructed is evidence for something totally else.
[SPEAKER_03]: Simulates the patterns of information processing in a human brain by construction.
[SPEAKER_03]: Therefore, chatGPT talks like a human, it was trained on human data.
[SPEAKER_03]: Does it mean that it's sentient like a human?
[SPEAKER_03]: No, for the same reason that we have no reason to think that a shopman akin is sentient like a human, even though it looks like a human.
[SPEAKER_03]: Another mistake people make is conflating the simulation with the thing simulated.
[SPEAKER_03]: We never make this mistake anywhere else.
[SPEAKER_03]: For instance, I can simulate kidney function on my Apple iMac at home down to the molecular level.
[SPEAKER_03]: Very accurately.
[SPEAKER_03]: That doesn't mean that my eye mag will pee on my desk because a simulation of kidney function isn't kidney function.
[SPEAKER_03]: But when we simulate the human brain, oh, now the simulation is sentient.
[SPEAKER_03]: You see, we,
[SPEAKER_03]: And the most dangerous kind of nonsense is that which comes from authority.
[SPEAKER_03]: And unfortunately, authorities sometimes get so deep into their own sort of ton of view that nonsense comes out and the culture at large latches onto it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: No other questions about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll maybe I do.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to ask a question, tongue in cheek to swarmagey.
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's say that chatGPT, a large language model that's increasingly becoming better at mimicking human communication.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's say that 10, 15 years from now, it's so good.
[SPEAKER_02]: It can mimic spiritual teacher like yourself.
[SPEAKER_02]: And people, spiritual seekers, in particular, could go to chatGPT and have a spiritual conversation about advice of Adanta.
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you think about that?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's already happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact, in the University of Texas, in the U.T.
[SPEAKER_00]: Austin, there's this computer post graduate computer science group, a particular student.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what they did was they fed a large language model, it's not public, it's building the university.
[SPEAKER_00]: They fed it with 1,000 hours of my videos.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then they call it the server pre-unone AI.
[SPEAKER_00]: And also it has access to the internet at large up to 2021 eventually and it's just something, all information is there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they demonstrate it to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it asks it any question, they don't the question.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it will give you an answer, a beautiful answer, and not only that, unlike the
[SPEAKER_00]: a freely available chatGPT model.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what this does is it will give you its sources.
[SPEAKER_00]: It will say you said this in this lecture at this time step.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I can't say it's wrong, I said it, and it pulls together from different sources immediately within seconds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Plus, it accesses the internet at large and supplements that answer and gives a very rich answer every time you ask it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder if I could ever match that level of third.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's a several period of the year.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: is it, is it, am I out of a job?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, yes, and no, I'm reminded of this news article I saw.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very cute and sad at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Buddhist temple, somewhere in Taiwan, I think, where they don't have monks anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the last monk recorded his lectures into a little toy robot.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the temple is there, there are no monks, they all died, and the robot rolls around.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you feed it up any, it will play back one of those sermons to you, of those dead, normal-rooted monks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that's what it's like.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why I'm saying it's not entirely useful, it is useful in a certain way, you can, it's always available to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I may not be always available to you and it can sometimes give you much more detailed answers than I can give you.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, there is something that happens in the presence of a living teacher.
[SPEAKER_00]: We go to that teacher,
[SPEAKER_00]: We have read a lot, we have read all the books, we have understood all the arguments.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to listen to that teacher, give the same teaching to us attentively.
[SPEAKER_00]: We will attentively notice something else is happening which just playing back those things cannot do and that's why the ancient masters always record.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, Upanishad,
[SPEAKER_00]: The word Upanishad from which Vedanta has come, the etymology of that is very interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Upam means to sit near, it literally means sitting near the teacher.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the deeper, more isoteric meaning of sitting near the teacher, is not just physically sitting near the teacher, sit where the teacher is sitting.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is, I am Brahman, I am that limitless awareness, sit there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that has to be a direct conscious experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can't be words played back by a computer.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have to sit near the teacher, physically.
[SPEAKER_00]: had that physical expression of a body language, the tone of the voice.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember my against-time teacher at Harvard University.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a senior, most of philosophy-professor at Harvard University.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of the philosophy-professors and out-professors have their websites and handouts and tests.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything is non-internet.
[SPEAKER_00]: He not so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, come to class.
[SPEAKER_00]: come to class, sit there, look at me.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I talk, listen to me, watch me.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it's something very subtle, I'm telling you, that will not come by reading a handout.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what the ancient teachers were pointing towards.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was sitting near a teacher, absorb it, and
[SPEAKER_00]: And, in a deeper sense, what is meant by sitting near the teachers, not even just even physical presence with the teacher, it is the first person conscious realization of the teacher, that's where you must sit.
[SPEAKER_02]: So AI tools like JetChiputee will probably never put you out of a job in the end.
[SPEAKER_02]: But a lot of people, that's a good thing, I would say.
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people nowadays, and this is moving to the next topic, the meaning crisis.
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people nowadays turn to physical spiritual teachers, sit in their vicinity, for meaning, purpose, wisdom.
[SPEAKER_02]: But there, and that is because a lot of people have lost a source of meaning and purpose.
[SPEAKER_02]: And these callers say the same, but in popular culture, this is also a widespread notion.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, how do you think binardo, this happened?
[SPEAKER_02]: What has contributed?
[SPEAKER_02]: So causal connections are always hard.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what do you think contributed to this contemporary meaning crisis?
[SPEAKER_03]: I began the story already, science began and how the enlightenment went into the industrial revolution and how in the 19th century we started believing stuff that had only social, political and psychological reasons to be put forward at around the middle of the 19th century with diving.
[SPEAKER_03]: The bourgeoisie thought that the coup de Grasse against the church because they still had a domain over the origin of life, and now no longer.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, okay, now we got rid of them, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And in the early 20th century, we saw the reflections of that logical positivism.
[SPEAKER_03]: The notion that the only reality is that which we can directly access through experiment or through observation, which is incredibly arrogant, why would monkeys be able to perceive everything that is salient about the world, about reality, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we saw that in behaviorism towards the middle of the 20th century, behaviorism is one of those fantastic dilemmas that only the depth of nonsense can arise, which is, we can't explain consciousness, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: We can't explain, so we would say that it doesn't exist.
[SPEAKER_03]: Consciousness is behavior.
[SPEAKER_03]: All there is is behavior.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything else doesn't exist.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, when you can't explain something in order to not lose face, you have to say it doesn't exist.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even though the thing saying that it doesn't exist, is the very thing that the supposed not to exist.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is a reason for that trajectory.
[SPEAKER_03]: It still holds momentum.
[SPEAKER_03]: We collected a hand some payoff because of that in terms of economic prosperity, you could say.
[SPEAKER_03]: And also, psychologically, we've ripped the biggest psychological payoff in the history of humanity, which is we got rid of the fear of what we were experienced after we are dead.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is the single greatest fear humanity has always had.
[SPEAKER_03]: The church used it for 1,000 years to have complete control over the West, since the fall of Rome all the way into the beginning of the Renaissance.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's from 400 to 1400.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's 1,000 years in which an institution without an army, well, they had the Templars for a little while.
[SPEAKER_03]: But an institution without an army controlled an entire continent, on the back of these one greatest fear.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, we got rid of it, because you're not going to be there after you die.
[SPEAKER_03]: There will be no other conscious state.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's nothing to fear, all of your problems, all of your regrets, all of your anxieties, are guaranteed to come to an end at the moment of your death, whether you believe it or not.
[SPEAKER_03]: And Lord, behold, we do believe it today.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, the problem is it's been long enough that we not take it for granted.
[SPEAKER_03]: We no longer realize that we purchased this at a great price.
[SPEAKER_03]: We no longer see what we purchased.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, we only see the price.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the price is, you got rid of that anxiety, but your life has become meaningless.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now, we only see that because the other one, we think, we cash that in.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, we take it for granted.
[SPEAKER_03]: The price is too high.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is an unsustainable state of affairs.
[SPEAKER_03]: In any culture, it's not going to last 300 years.
[SPEAKER_03]: Something is going to give, because it contradicts reality.
[SPEAKER_03]: It flies in the face of reality.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is based on a set of incoherent assumptions.
[SPEAKER_03]: and inquire into their revisions from inquire into assumptions.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not going to leave long.
[SPEAKER_03]: Very short, in fact, the problem is we live even shorter.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we don't feel the ab and flow of cultural history.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's already changing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Eminent neuroscientists are a longer physicalist.
[SPEAKER_03]: Eminent physicists are no longer physicalists.
[SPEAKER_03]: One came out online the other day, I don't know whether you saw that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a new Iraq, the director emeritus of the perimeter institutes for a theoretical physics in Canada, which is the world's cathedral of theoretical physics like Surnis, the world's cathedral for experimental physics.
[SPEAKER_03]: They came out and said I sympathized with this idealist folk.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not a physicalist.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said that to Court of John Longbow in theories of everything.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I'm going to talk to you a go.
[SPEAKER_03]: And There are more I can tell you because a lot of people still require that certain conversations be held in confidence Which I understand there are careers at stake
[SPEAKER_03]: personality is at stake, but it's not going to last.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thankfully, so the meaning crisis is a temporary illness.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's going to be cured.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you see already maybe a tentative shift emerging towards a new world view away from the world view that that contributed or maybe you've caused the meaning crisis, but at least contributed to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I mean, do you also see people the search of social meaning and purpose because they've lost it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, let's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: perhaps a little more here in the West than in India, but it's becoming a very much a flat society all across the world, similar culture everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here we do have a crisis of meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three Ramakrishna is to say that, if you have a string of zeros, you still have zero.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you put a one before the zeros, then every zero has some value.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even if you don't have any of the zeros, the one still has value.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I remember this young scientist Bengali scientist he had gone for a multi international conference in Japan He came back and he told the story to me that the organizer of the conference was a Japanese scientist
[SPEAKER_00]: So, they were losing up over drinks after the sessions, and this Japanese scientist confided in this youngster that, you know, I'm at the top of my field, I have written all these books, they are recommended in university departments, I organize international conferences, I have the maximum citations, I have a family, good car and place, and then he said, but it's all 0, 0 and he started crying.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then this young man, I don't know what, but I just told him the story of the one and the zeros.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he, this Japanese scientist, said, who said that?
[SPEAKER_00]: I told him that there's this Bengali mystic in the late 19th century.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a smart guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so we are all searching for that one, which will hold all the zeros of our life together.
[SPEAKER_00]: The more sensitive we are, the thing is we also have a word of distraction.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can spend several years being distracted by social media and you know the things which are happening around a fast life, you know, my not New York is said to be the city that never sleeps, so everybody sleeps deprived there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have much time to feel the emptiness of life with it's quickly covered over with this or that distraction.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you can't deny it.
[SPEAKER_00]: forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: It will creep up on you sometime or the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we are all searching for that one which will give value to the zeros which we keep on collecting in life.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for that answer.
[SPEAKER_02]: Many spiritual seekers or many people at large will maybe for some time be able to run away from this feeling of nihilism or avoid, a loss of meaning, but at some point
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe not even my life, but my life in general.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when they do some of them turn to advice of Adanta, and at least in non-Jewler circles, in Western countries, Moksha, the seeing, and realization, and enlightenment as the ultimate source of meaning and purpose, could you explain what is Moksha?
[SPEAKER_00]: Moxia is liberation that there are two ways of putting it.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is, it makes good sense in the Indian context.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the Indian context, multiplicity of lives, life, birth, death, rebirth, and many, many lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is taken as axiomatic.
[SPEAKER_00]: all the Indian traditions, be they as different as Hinduism, various schools of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, or Sikhism, they all believed in this multiple lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is sort of exhumatic.
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't really push that any further, investigate.
[SPEAKER_00]: They took it, that is going to, this is, this is there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is not a satisfactory state of affairs.
[SPEAKER_00]: As one of the Upanishad says this, unless you are enlightened, you will go from death to death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could have said the same thing in a more cheerful term from birth to birth, but no, the chose you go from you, you will be chased from death to death, the one who sees who sees multiplicity here.
[SPEAKER_00]: that's the original, uh, uh, open-ish of the clanguage for the one who sees multiplicity here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, that one will go from death to death.
[SPEAKER_00]: So coming out of the cycle of birth and death and realizing your own infinite nature, uh, then this going from death to death stops.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why does it stop?
[SPEAKER_00]: The logic is that we are,
[SPEAKER_00]: compulsively trying to fulfill ourselves and that is what provides the psychic fuel which makes us keep on taking body after body after body and that will you cannot fill up an infinite vacuum with a finite world.
[SPEAKER_00]: only the infinite can fill up the infinite.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and the infinite is you are already that, that's the great tragedy or the amazing thing about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are already what you are seeking.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, the non-dueless say that when you realize that, this whole apparent, this process of multiple lifetimes and going from depth to depth will seize, or its apparent nature will become clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not an ultimate reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another way of putting the same thing is, if you don't believe in multiple lifetimes
[SPEAKER_00]: just the simple fact of suffering and overcoming suffering.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the option.
[SPEAKER_02]: Could you briefly relate this to Jeevan Mukti and then I'll ask Bernardo afterwards to interpret this from an analytic idealist perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a beautiful question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jeevan Mukthi, Moksha, Liberation from the cycle of birth and death, many, many philosophies in India, multiple schools, not at the way to the way to the way to the way to the way to the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: But many other schools, they believe it's something that's possible at the, you become enlightened and the point of death, then it stops.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's done.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's not something that you have full enlightenment while living.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas Adwaita Vedanta makes Jeevan Mukti the goal of spirituality while you are here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as in this world, in this body, in this personality and yet fully enlightened and fully free, living this
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a possibility according to Advaita Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just read this, I mentioned it earlier today.
[SPEAKER_00]: This phrase used by a medieval non-dualist Shankarabharati.
[SPEAKER_00]: These non-dualists are people with three eyes wide open.
[SPEAKER_00]: This part is a low-channel trace to Vedantina, which is Sanskrit for wide open.
[SPEAKER_00]: This part, which is why it opens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three eyes are wide open, these non-duelists.
[SPEAKER_00]: What are the three eyes?
[SPEAKER_00]: The two eyes are, of course, this.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you had these two eyes open, you're like everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're seeing the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you close these two eyes, well, you are in your inner world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Either you are unhappy or you are meditating or something, but you're shutting out the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: but these non-dualists have both eyes open and they can see the world, but they also have the third eye of knowledge open of knowing what this is for the first time, what am I and what this is, and this frees them.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the midst of all of these limitations, you are limitless and free.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is, Jeevan Lokhti.
[SPEAKER_00]: Non-dualism has this as the cold.
[SPEAKER_02]: Very clear.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you Swamiji, so be not a good you explain.
[SPEAKER_02]: What's one of you just explained, but then in the terms of energy, how do you deal with it?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that possible?
[SPEAKER_03]: I can never do the justice to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: It will always be a pancake cartoon, of course.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the value will be that maybe it's helped, because I'm one of you, it helps you give yourself intellectual permission to open yourself to what he has to say.
[SPEAKER_03]: Another analytical idea is what we call the personal self is not who we really are.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just a dissociated process.
[SPEAKER_03]: In other words, the person is something consciousness is doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not what you are.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's something what you really are is doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're doing this.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's doing Bernardo Pastor.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's doing new.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's doing him.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not a thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's doing a process.
[SPEAKER_03]: What you really are is the whole thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: and there is a doing within the whole thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: So one that doing interfaces with the rest at the journey of self discovery, or sort of dancing with yourself by proxy, you adopt the point of view within yourself and then you traverse yourself.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the journey of life is a journey of self discovery.
[SPEAKER_03]: Whether you want it or not, whether you're enlightened or not, the question is will you know that it is that?
[SPEAKER_03]: It is that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But will you know that it is that?
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think Sami Jailu did to this knowing of what this actually is.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, this brings existence to a whole other level.
[SPEAKER_03]: It sort of recreate the world again, a new at the higher level.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's the simple answer on an analytic idealism.
[SPEAKER_03]: The thing to keep in mind that an analytic idealism
[SPEAKER_03]: unlike a, uh, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a,
[SPEAKER_03]: analytic idealism conceits space time because when an idealist describes existence as the patterns of excitation of a few that's subjectivity, you're conceiting space and time right there.
[SPEAKER_03]: A few that exist in the space, vibrations and folding time.
[SPEAKER_03]: And these are enormous concessions that are completely unjustified.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is no space time out there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Space time are the parameters of the dashboard.
[SPEAKER_03]: Space time is the way our cognitive system organizes information about the world so we don't become overwhelmed.
[SPEAKER_03]: it's like a filing system.
[SPEAKER_03]: It has a filing cabinets.
[SPEAKER_03]: Space time coordinates are different drawers in your filing system.
[SPEAKER_03]: You put things in their specific drawers.
[SPEAKER_03]: Your organizing information about that way.
[SPEAKER_03]: What really exists, of course, beyond space time.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is not as long as, of course, the Eastern tradition, which is at least three and a half thousand years old, but since Kant and Schopenhauer, even the West, is saying that now Space Time are derivative.
[SPEAKER_03]: And today, with the looked quantum gravity, at least time is derivative.
[SPEAKER_03]: But we know from relativity that Space Time are only one thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: So Space must be derivative, as well, and not fundamentally.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the question is, what is that, which is beyond Space Time?
[SPEAKER_03]: Whatever it is, it is, we can talk about it coherently because language presupposes space-time, subject and object that's separated in space, past tense, future tense, adopt time.
[SPEAKER_03]: So whatever it is, we can't say, monkeys can't say reality.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, why would they?
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, we have been running around sporting an intellect for maybe 50,000 years?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's nothing.
[SPEAKER_03]: It happened yesterday.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are babies.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, there is a lot we can't say analytical idealism conceits all that in order to say something because all a Western philosopher can do an Eastern philosopher can show it to you.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you get there yourself.
[SPEAKER_03]: A Western philosophy doesn't have that skill.
[SPEAKER_03]: A Western philosopher can just describe and descriptions have limitations.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, the ultimate thing is to go there yourself
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm far from unenlightened being, I did have my moment, you know, I think we all have our moments.
[SPEAKER_03]: I had a moment once I was having dinner with two friends in the restaurant, very noisy place, and then suddenly I realized that nothing and everything are the same thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know where the hell that came from, but suddenly I realized that the past is an
[SPEAKER_03]: When you were in the past, it wasn't present.
[SPEAKER_03]: The future is an expectation in the present.
[SPEAKER_03]: When the future comes, it's the present, so it never comes.
[SPEAKER_03]: The past is a memory of experience now, the future is an expectation of experience now, everything is always now, but how big is the now?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, you can always partition it in past, present, and future.
[SPEAKER_03]: By the time I start saying your word, oh, it's past.
[SPEAKER_03]: By the time I start saying, now, oh, no, it's gone, it's past.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the present is infinitely small, but everything is in it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So everything and nothing are the same thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the only access I have ever had to what is behind space time.
[SPEAKER_00]: One more point in regard to Jeevan Mukti.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is at this point and I can introduce the question of spiritual practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: meditation, devotion, moral perfection, selflessness, what's the point of all of that?
[SPEAKER_00]: All of these spiritual paths, both Eastern and Western, the prescribes spiritual practice and give a lot of importance to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason for that is two-fold.
[SPEAKER_00]: One side of it is in order to prepare us for that moment of enlightenment.
[SPEAKER_00]: that realization.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, this is what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never saw this earlier, but that won't come unless we are prepared to receive it and to hold it to make it a living reality for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's one purpose of spiritual practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they found after post and lightning
[SPEAKER_00]: The job is still not done unless the spiritual practices have been completed to a high level of excellence will still have a problem with G1 Mukti.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these questions are raised.
[SPEAKER_00]: Arjuna raises this question at least twice in Bhagavad-gita and other Advaitaic texts there is this question.
[SPEAKER_00]: the person of the sage of stabilized wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: The words are interesting, stabilize wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many people say, I get it, but I can't live it, or it's fleeting, or it goes away.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you stabilize that wisdom?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the second purpose of all spiritual practices is to stabilize that wisdom, to make it livable, that you can live it in life.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can put it into practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, their moral life, selflessness, devotion, meditation, all of them have a big impact.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, we're almost at the end of this dialogue, but this, what you just mentioned, Swamiji, just brings up one more question, and I'll end with us and then see if you want to add anything and then we're going to wrap up.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the question is, something has emerged, particularly in Western cultures,
[SPEAKER_02]: If I create a caricature here often does a way with what you just said there is no path There's nothing to do, no where to go, not for us.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are at that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So nothing to do, no where to go.
[SPEAKER_02]: What is your thought?
[SPEAKER_02]: What are your thoughts on New York?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's both true and pernicious and bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's bad because it's precisely because it's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is true that you are Brahman.
[SPEAKER_00]: that limitless reality is you right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It always has billion of choice about time.
[SPEAKER_00]: We couldn't be anything else even if you wanted to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's bad because it doesn't solve our problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole reason why we are coming to Advaita or to any tradition to put this to analytic idealism is to understand and to live it to solve our problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if put in this way that you are Brahman and we go and
[SPEAKER_00]: And nothing else?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well nothing happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they'll tell you nothing is supposed to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then still nothing happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the traditional authority what they do is, yes, you are Brahman.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we scratch our heads and say, yeah, but I don't really get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ah, your problem is ignorance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the solution for ignorance is knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the knowledge comes from hearing, reasoning, and meditating.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I've been doing that a tonic lots of Vedanta seminars, but I still don't have that knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ah, your problem is restless mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: And restless mind has to be, the solution is focused mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a whole range of meditative practices in Vedanta, they're called Upasala, which gives you a focused mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we say, yeah, but I've been trying to meditate for decades and just fall asleep or it's very boring.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your problem is impure might, and the solution is pure might.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the method for pure mind is karma yoga, the dark mechanical life style.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now you have the whole matrix of spiritual practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: You said you're Brahman, but I don't get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then knowledge is required.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for that, the knowledge practices,
[SPEAKER_00]: But knowledge is not coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ah, then restless mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then focus mind is necessary.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for focus mindfulness and other practices recommended.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I fall asleep when I try mindfulness.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very boring.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ah, in pure mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then to purify the mind, a whole range of ethical practices and karma yoga is recommended.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you have a whole matrix of things to do, which will ultimately take you to that point that you are drama and you always wear.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what Neo Adwaita seems to skip over and I don't want to apply the label across the board.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are some genuine teachers who point this out also.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you very clear.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, we're coming to the end.
[SPEAKER_02]: But first, is there anything you would like to add a swamaging?
[SPEAKER_00]: I could ask by now to this, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that what has been bothering me for many, many years is in our culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems that science has a monopoly of truth or at least claims a monopoly of truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: What science is talking about is real, it's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the other hand, religion seems to offer something that is meaningful and valuable, at least in its modern spiritual form, meaningful and valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here you have truth, but it often seems meaningless.
[SPEAKER_00]: empty.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there you have something valuable, what aspiring work, but is it true?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can we have both, will analytic idealism, will offer a believable, valuable truth?
[SPEAKER_03]: The laws of physics in general, they are trying to articulate something that at least gets close to truth.
[SPEAKER_03]: science, people who think that science has all the answers, I don't think they understand what science is, which, unfortunately, is the case for some science spokespeople who are actually not doing science.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're just talking about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Science is a method to allow us to predict what nature will do next.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the, it's a,
[SPEAKER_03]: It's theories are models of nature that tell us in advance what will happen next.
[SPEAKER_03]: Predictions that solve scientific theories are validated or disproven.
[SPEAKER_03]: They make predictions and then we check what did nature actually do.
[SPEAKER_03]: If it's the same as the prediction and if theory survives otherwise it's disproven.
[SPEAKER_03]: Science has nothing to say about what nature is.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's fundamentally beyond the scientific method, which is based on setting up an experiment and seeing what nature would do.
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't reach into the depth of ontology of what nature is.
[SPEAKER_03]: Science is a set of convenient pictures.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nature behaves as though there were quantum fields and space-time, these fictions allow us to make predictions that can be validated.
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't mean that nature is that.
[SPEAKER_03]: These are convenient fictions.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't think science can ever replace what the traditions of being used are trying to do to think that science can replace that is a disservice to science.
[SPEAKER_03]: We start projecting something onto the methodology of science that methodology cannot answer and that needs a lot of confusion.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, the truth is what is, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Science has nothing to say about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It leads to a lengthy, open name, yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Swamiji.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a UD.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you very much for being here for this dialogue.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: So please, a hand for the speakers.