we have a very real historical part of our human history where people who express this were killed in very violent and horrible ways. And so why would I want to out myself as being able to read other people's minds? If there's this kind of historical ear that I'm gonna be called crazy or heretical or a witch and be burned at the stake, obviously the burning at the stake now is a little bit different, especially in academia. It's just your career is done, right?
So we may not be physically burned at the stake, but there are often severe negative consequences to declaring yourself in this. Now, I will say I really feel that this is shifting and it's shifting quickly because more and more people are outing themselves and people are feeling safer to express this, communicate this every time I talk about this subject, I get emails when it used to be in person, I'd have lines of people and they'd come up to me and whisper, I've had this experience too, but I can't tell anybody about it. And so more that we can actually bring this transparently out in the open, I think the more it will help with that aspect of it. Because it is, I think, so incredibly important and a part of who we are as humans.
Greetings, future fossils and welcome to episode 224, the podcast that explores our place in time. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, since long before the legendary debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Percetain on the nature of time and indeed, since long before the ancient Greeks codified a dual-natured definition of time in their concepts of coronos and chyros, consciousness has always played a central part in how we think about this puzzling physical phenomenon. But is consciousness physical? I can't claim that this show is a rigorous investigation of time without striving for a fundamental definition of the most mysterious and vexing object process in our cosmos, the subject, the who that is observing it.
Future fossils regularly dips into these starry waters. Starting with the first three episodes, I also recommend you prime yourself with archived conversations such as those with Joanna Hartcourt-Smith, Miles Heckman, Rach Rosam, Michelangelo, Kerri Welch, Shane Moss, Tim Freek, Archon Nair, Dennis McKenna, Eric Davis, Eric Wargone, Norman Katz, Corey Allen, Jessica Nielsen, Link Swanson, Stuart Davis, Sophie Strand, Richard Doyle, Sam Gandy, Scott, Wylie, Neil These, and Andres Gilmes-Emelson. And if that was overwhelming worry, not, because I made a playlist for you that you can dig up in the show notes. But today marks a significant milestone in this program's inquiry because we're finally linked up with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an epicenter of rigorous consciousness research.
I reached out to Ions in April, and they put me in touch with their director of research, Helen Nawabe, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon Health and Science University, and the author of over 90 peer-reviewed publications, as well as the book, The Science of Channeling. When we connected in April, she had just led a new review published in Frontiers of Psychology entitled, What If Consciousness Is Not An Emergent Property of the Brain? Observational and Empirical Challenges to Materialistic Models. This paper is incredibly thorough and replete.
It attacks on me of both the standard brain-based models of consciousness as well as a whole panoply of other alternatives worth your consideration. In this conversation, we take a 30,000 foot view of the history and future of the science of consciousness, which stops along the way to consider contributions by people like Ken Wilbur, the Mind and Life Institute, Jeffrey Criple, Julia Mossbridge, Donald Hoffman, Jonathan Schuller, Dean Radon, obviously, and many others. But before we do, I want to thank the few hundred committed listeners that are helping me keep the lights on while I produce a show exploring the very fringes of fundable inquiry. You know it ain't easy, standing out here on the very edge of a long peninsula, far away from the epicenters of funding.
And that is one thing that Ions and I find solidarity in, the fact that truly interesting questions, the ones that stand to upset the apple cart of our current paradigm tend to be the least legible to the mechanisms whereby allocation of research attention is decided. So, those of you who are chipping in every month at microgarfield.substack.com or patreon.com slash microgarfield, thank you so very much. And if you haven't been doing this, and you have a few bucks a month to contribute, please do, it makes an enormous difference to my own material wellbeing and mental health, as well as the constant rolling chaos that is my family. Thank you to new patrons, Moses Silburger, Emma Alberie, Garrett, or Mike Pace, Camila, Katarino, and Mike Steely, as well as, to those agencies funding applied future fossils, my new project, Humans on the Loop, an exploration of agency in the age of automation and the responsible wise use of magical technologies.
O'Shauna C Ventures and Cosmos Institute have both stepped forward in a big way to offer seed funding to this effort that is now taking the lion's share of my attention. And I've been recording a number of incredible conversations to share with you very soon, as well as constantly warping the manifold of my attention around potential writing projects, live salons, and other interesting things I will announce shortly. But basically that is my apology to Helena and all of the other people who were aware that this particular episode has been sitting on the back burner for four months. There are many other things in the works and it's just taking a lot of time to process everything backstage.
Yes, thanks for your support, all of you, subscribe, rate, and review. Please, it helps me find new listeners and if we're not finding the others, then what are we really doing here? This is about the generative contribution to public discourse. So thanks for helping me connect to other cells in that psychic super organism or whatever.
Anyway, thanks for listening to that and enjoy this fascinating conversation with Helena Wabe of Ions. And when you're done, go dig into the show notes for voluminous research resources on all of the fascinating studies that they've done and the programs they have coming up and obviously support them too. Oh, and one more thing, apologies for the video quality. This episode was recorded before Future Fossils went into a video first show.
So it's a bit of a mess. Anyway, enjoy and more soon. Helena Wabe, thank you for being on Future Fossils. Yeah.
This paper is extraordinary. What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain, observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models? You led this with Dean Radin, Cedric Kanard, and Arnad de Lorm. Why don't you tell me about your own intellectual biography and how you became associated with the Institute of Noetic Sciences and then we'll get into the weeds.
Thank you. I am actually clinically trained as a naturopathic doctor. So I was in general practice for quite a while and became intrigued by getting back into research because I had done research before I went to medical school. And my undergrad was actually in anthropology and pre-med.
So I wanted to get back into research and ended up doing a couple of postdoctoral research fellowships focusing on mind-body medicine, specifically meditation training. And I was gratefully awarded a federal grant by the National Institute of Health to look at mindfulness meditation and how it works, specifically with combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. So here I was, is this academic university doing mindfulness meditation research before it was a thing, before it got on the cover of Time Magazine and just trying to make this work. Obviously now mindfulness is everywhere in executive boardrooms and so many people know about mindfulness meditation.
But my work in that field allowed me to attend a focus group of expert researchers that was hosted at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. And I had briefly heard about them before but I didn't really know a lot about ions. So I was invited to attend this Future of Meditation work group where we were looking at how meditation was studied in the West, which was in a very limited way. We were only allowed in academia to ask very specific questions about meditation.
So this work group put out a paper that was published talking about the various areas that hadn't been looked at in the West and how do we bring that into meditation research. While I was there, I was completely amazed at the courage of ions researchers to ask questions that people were unwilling to ask because they were taboo. And I felt very strongly that I wanted to continue working with them. I was very grateful to be invited to join as a consultant and then as an employee scientist.
And now I incredibly find myself the Director of Research of this incredible multi-disciplinary team. And ions is quite incredible. It's actually just turned 50 years old. And it was founded by Edgar Mitchell, who was an Apollo 14 astronaut and the six person to walk on the moon.
And so he went to the moon, he did his job and he had this incredible transcendent experience on his way home as he was rotating in the capsule and seeing the sun and the moon and the stars. And he felt that he was part of everything and everything was part of him. And this wasn't like a just cognitive knowing, it was just a complete visceral truth that we are all interconnected. And so when he came home, he said, I'm starting the Institute of Noetic Sciences to figure out what is this interconnectedness.
And so ions has been doing that through science, through education, exploring it and currently our mission is revealing this interconnectedness through scientific discovery and personal exploration. Yeah, that brings us up to date. I think it's interesting to see a piece like this in frontiers, it's a provocation. And it's crazy that it has to be a provocation still in 2024, at least as far as I'm concerned, because as you and your colleagues make rather clear, there's an enormous corpus of research that vexes a physicalist, reductionist interpretation.
And yet you do give substantial airtime to the various attempts to formalize physicalist theories of consciousness. And you accept that they're so useful as structures that we can test empirically. So I guess maybe the place to start would be, where did the inspiration to actually produce this specific review come from? Was it frustration that the state of things is still such a mess or what?
So at ions, because we look at this interconnectedness, we deal with non-material aspects of reality. And we study the various ways that people experience them, mind to mind communication, intentions affect on the physical world, being able to gain information about distant locations. These are phenomena that have growing bodies of evidence supporting them. And so when we begin talking about these, we bump up against these taboos.
And it's a taboo to talk about it. And you say, why is it a taboo? One of the main reasons why it is a taboo is that our dominant paradigm in science in academia right now is a physicalist one. So we have this physicalist worldview about the material world and our relationship to it.
And that worldview believes no room for any of these phenomenon to exist. If you talk to a staunch physicalist about these experiences, they'll say, oh, that's just impossible, because it does not fit into our model of how the world works. And yet, here we have all this data showing that model is actually not explaining these experiences. And at this point from my perspective, it's pretty clear that these are verifiable phenomena, that people experience spontaneously, that we can replicate in the lab.
Now each one of those has various levels of evidence and we could argue about that. But that was the main impetus to put this paper out, because we felt like things are shifting. We really are at this moment actually straddling two paradigms, this physicalist model, which we're not saying to get rid of. It functions exceptionally well to explain many aspects of our reality, but it's not the whole picture.
And so now we're straddling that and a post materialist paradigm that leaves room for these phenomenon. And in that, you can entertain these ideas of non-local consciousness, that physical is not all that exists, that there are these non-physical realms of reality, if you will, that we can experience that we can interact with and we're like preschoolers trying to figure out how it all works. So this paper was really meant to explore this paradigm shift, this straddling of these two worldviews. And we very thoughtfully did it in a very conservative way.
We presented the highlights of the physicalist models and they were specifically on consciousness, right? So where does our consciousness come from? And so the physicalists say, it's just emergent from neurons. It's a byproduct of the function of the brain.
And post materialists would say, no, it's not. It's actually fundamental to our physical reality. And so our intention was to gently introduce this concept, highlighting the physicalist models of consciousness, highlighting some of the non-physicalist models and say if these non-physicalist models were true, here are some of the things that we would see. And lo and behold, we find that we see experiences of those reported and studied in the lab, et cetera.
So it was meant to be a kind of foot in the door, just a little crack, a little opening to inspire and excite people to look a little bit more closely at this. And honestly, this is not for the staunch physicalist who no matter how much data I show them, they're never gonna change their worldview. This paper is not for the die-hard believers in these phenomena because they're already sold. It really is for the people in the middle who are open, who are curious, who are willing to learn about the data that already exists about these theories and these phenomena.
And incredibly, that group is growing dramatically and there are other scientific fields that are providing even more evidence for this non-local nature of consciousness. And people are obviously interested, as of today, there's over 60,000 views of this paper. This is our most widely read paper that we've put out. In this paper, you point out, basically, consciousness means a lot of things to a lot of people.
And sometimes people are talking about something else, like metacognition. And I'd like to have you clarify this. But I also wanna say that I come from a background heavily influenced by transpersonal psychology and integral philosophy, Ken Wilbur, Shonnespiern Hargins, and Vaita Vedanta, and Zen Buddhism. And so it seemed plain as day to me for a very long time.
If you look at Mind and Life Institute, we have strong correlates, but to claim that you can somehow conjure subjective experience from insensate matter is a category error between the third person and the first person. He stated very cleanly in this paper, you say, we propose that the hard problem arises because one or more assumptions within a materialistic worldview are either wrong or incomplete. Yeah, the notion that it is not merely emerging in complexity, but that it goes from there being nothing, no consciousness at all to consciousness. Anyway.
You don't preach it to the choir here. Yeah, I know, but should anyone here be listening and scratching their heads about what exactly you mean by consciousness? Let's at least start there. Sure.
So we jokingly talk about little sea consciousness and big sea consciousness. If I look at you now, you're awake, you're alert. So your little sea consciousness is awake and alert. So that's one way to think about consciousness and how it's defined is just our level of alertness.
If I gave you anesthesia or you fell asleep, then you're not conscious anymore, right? So that's one layer of thinking about consciousness. And when we talk about big sea consciousness, it is beyond that kind of individual awake alertness. It is a larger, I hate to use the word field, but I will use field, if you will, that is fundamental to reality, to everything.
You can look at it in those different ways. And so a neuroscientist is evaluating little sea consciousness and poking around in the brain. And the point that you brought up, because beyond whether we're awake or alert is this I-ness that is me, this subjective experience that I have, like where is that in the brain? Can we actually target that in the brain?
And they're not finding it. Physicalists believe that, and this is a gross generalization, but that they just need to keep looking. And eventually they'll be able to find that subjective experience in the brain. I don't think that's gonna happen.
The brain is an incredible, amazing tool. And the models that align more clearly for me are like the filter or the transceiver model of the brain, where of course we need it. When it's not working, we're not able to function in this world in the same way. And yet it is a tool that consciousness flows through, if you will.
And another thing that people often ask me about is, how do you get from this huge, big sea consciousness to an individualized, Hellenic consciousness or Michael consciousness? And so one way that I like to talk about it is you imagine the electromagnetic spectrum. And it is one thing, right? It's this one spectrum.
And we can look at it as a whole. But if I take one frequency on that spectrum, like the color red, that has very unique characteristics that is different from a frequency 10 spaces over, right? So my specific consciousness is still part of the whole. And yet it has specific characteristics that are unique to me.
Anyway, that's one way that I like thinking about it, because how can you have this whole consciousness and still have individual consciousness at the same time? Honestly, reading this paper, I was surprised you put various phenomena that challenged physicalism after you put a survey of the possible theoretical frameworks. I would have felt publishing in a journal like this one, I would have had to come out of the gate swinging. And there's an enormous amount.
I wanted to get into some of this stuff with you, because some of these, I just want to list the categories of non-local consciousness implying phenomena. You have perceiving information about distant locations, perceiving information from another person, perceiving the future, apparent cognitive abilities beyond the experience learning or skill of the person exhibiting them. Non-local consciousness experiences are common, and cognitive abilities can be retained when the brain is seriously compromised. This one in particular is interesting.
You talk about terminal lucidity in patients who've undergone extensive brain damage and yet retain function that we are to believe is characteristic of a healthy brain. I myself, as I've talked about on the show, in episodes 117 and 171, I did with Eric Wargo, I don't know if his books on time loops and precognition, but I've had a number of precognitive experiences in my own life. I have felt at various points, as though I had entered the mind of another person. In particular, I remember March 6th of 2006, washing my face in the sink in my old house in Lawrence, Kansas, and then suddenly, fleetingly, sober feeling as though I had slipped into, I don't even know, like a memory of the house or something of my now wife, my then girlfriend washing her face in the same sink, thinking of me, like in the back of her mind, while she was washing her face.
And I saw my kids before they were born and all this stuff, and you call on the Princeton Engineering and I'm always a research lab in some of this work. I would just love to hear you go to town on the preponderance of evidence that we have, that something funky is going on here, that for which this idea that you basically exist as an epiphenomenal of chemical processes in your head is inadequate. Yes, there's a lot to unpack there. Thank you for that.
You've started by saying you were surprised that we put these last, that first we went through the non-local consciousness theories. And we actually on our team went back and forth about that, whether we should lead with the evidence or lead with the theories. And we decided to lead with the theories. And I'm glad we did because the way it's framed is, here are some different approaches to viewing consciousness, specifically non-local consciousness.
And if these theories were true, here are some of the things that we would be able to see in the world. And then we go through each one of those and say, oh, look, we actually do see that. And here's how we see it. Rather than giving all the phenomenon and saying we wanna try to explain these phenomenon with the theories, we decided to give the theories and say if these non-local theories were true, here are the some of the things we would observe.
And we are actually observing them. So perhaps non-local consciousness really is a thing. So thanks for asking about that, because it was definitely a decision that we were struggling with. But I'm glad that we did it the way we did, especially for this audience.
Not to be demeaning in any way, but it's like holding someone's hand and saying, okay, look, let's look at this first. And now we're gonna look at this first. And now we're gonna guide you to this piece. And I'm just happy the way it turned out.
So thanks for asking that question. In terms of the phenomena themselves, we could talk for weeks about each one of these. Let me start with the commonality. We have done numerous surveys now, along with many other people around the world.
These experiences are a very common human experience. That's incredibly clear. And staunch physicalists will just write them off completely. And yet, in my mind, the fact that humans are experiencing these regularly from different cultures all over the world is very meaningful.
And the experiences themselves are meaningful to the people. So you just brought it up yourself with your own, anecdote, and maybe you were asked your girlfriend at the time, hey, were you thinking about me when you were checking the dishes to actually see if you could verify it? And many of these anecdotes are verifiable and we're able to test them out. And I don't wanna get into all of those, but there are thousands and thousands of records of people's experiences, many of which they are able to verify in some way.
That in and of itself, I think is quite incredible. Then you mentioned the terminal lucidity. And this work is continuing. Mihail Nam and Marjorie Willakat are continuing this terminal lucidity work and are actually conducting a study right now on it.
And I find these really incredible. My own father passed from Louis Body Dementia. So I'm very familiar with dementia and it's debilitating. These people can't move, they can't walk, they can't talk, they have no memory, they don't know who they are.
And then within days of their death, they're completely incapacitated. Within days of their death, they pop up, they're able to have a normal conversation with our loved ones, as in essence saying goodbye. And then they're gone. How do you explain that?
How do you explain that if consciousness is dependent on the neurons of our brain? If the brain is basically not functioning. So I think I find those cases incredibly fascinating and it's exciting that they're continuing that work. That leads us to perhaps the more unique and more difficult to explain from a physicalist perspective phenomenon.
The first one we have here is about perceiving information from distant locations. And this is sometimes called clairvoyance historically. It's also can be called remote viewing. And what's fascinating about this phenomenon is the US military actually invested in this for over 20 years.
And trained soldiers how to do this. And they had over 500 operational missions where they would have received some actionable intelligence and were able to do a military action. Imagine a group of soldiers being able to tap into a distant location and be able to get information about what was there, the people there, the buildings there that they would give to their supervisors that they would then implement. To me that in and of itself is incredible.
And for all we know, there are classified programs that are still going on about this. I don't know. But remote viewing has certainly become very popular in the general public. And you can now go sign up to take a remote viewing class and learn how to do this yourself.
And this brings up an interesting point because people often wonder, is this something that only specific talented people can do? And what we see is it's just like any other type of skill where it's on a curve. If I take someone who's completely naive to this and they have no exceptional skill and I teach them how to do remote viewing, they'll be able to do it. But they may not do it as well as someone who has an inherent talent who then is also trained.
They might be like the exceptional one. So like I can take a basketball and dribble on the court and make a shot, but I'm absolutely never gonna be in the NBA, right? So there's just like this normal variation and abilities around that. Remote viewing is now used for predicting winners of sporting events, predicting stock movements, working with police to locate missing persons.
It's been successfully used for finding archaeological sites. There are groups all over the world using the skill to discover information about distant locations that they couldn't possibly know through conventional means. That one's really exciting and it has, I think, some of the strongest evidence. And the strongest practical evidence because it's not based on statistics or probabilistic system.
If a remote viewer finds a missing percent, that is a very real, meaningful, practical result that helps humanity in a very real way. So I'm amazed sometimes that there isn't more attention to the specific skill because it can be used for so many different things to help us. The other one is perceiving information from another person and people may have heard this as telepathy. I don't believe we use the word telepathy in this paper.
We really tried to stay away from those taboo terms, but there have been numerous studies done in the laboratory demonstrating this ability. And just as an example, there's this Gansfeld protocol where you basically get into a state where you have pink noise coming in, you have a red light over your eyes. And the thinking is that if you are not getting any kind of extraneous external input, that you're better able to pick up on impressions that are being directed to you, whether it's in real time from another person or impressions from your future. So there's two ways that you can do this, but in this specific section of the paper, we are talking about protocols where there's paired people, the researchers sitting in another part of the building, the other person is in this Gansfeld relaxed state, and the researcher is directing mental images of a picture towards that person.
So there have been meta-analyses, which are basically pooling multiple studies that have been done on this and showing very clear above chance results with this protocol. So those two remote viewing and these telepathy protocols are really quite strong. I'll stop there because I've been talking for a lot before we could dive into the precognition to see if you have any questions. Yeah, just to stack on that, obviously I didn't know about the Gansfeld protocol as a kid, but I remember my best friend in grade school, Angela Fleming, and I would go underwater in our pool, our neighbor's yard and try to send messages to each other in the pool.
And so there's something about the sensory damping in that I also wanted to say that I spent a good deal of time reviewing some of this body of work on sci phenomena, although you're, again, you're very careful not to talk about it in that way in this paper in episode 186 on a manifesto for Weird Science, which was my something screed against the socioeconomic barriers to greater resource allocation for this research. As you said it a moment ago, and I was on Danny Jones's podcast recently, and Danny has a knack for getting people who worked in government remote viewing programs and other adjacent areas of research onto his show. And yeah, this is very much out in the open and well documented and practical. Yeah, so it's just strange to me that we still have this, not only a thermocline or something in the culture that Jeffrey Cripell writing the flip talks about in how many scientists have some sort of potent life experience that disabused them of physicalism and had to remain closeted about it for fear of losing their tenure or whatever.
So anyway, it's just like, the obstacles around those taboos can be incredibly intense. And I mentioned this whole piece about, if they're real, how do we explain it? So that's number one. This whole, our current worldview can't explain it, so it must be fake, right?
And then the other piece is around, I think fear. I think many people are afraid of what it would mean if I could receive mental impressions from you, or if my intention actually can affect the physical world. So I think there's a deep fear that we actually do have these capacities because then what does that mean for how I engage in the world and how I engage with other people and how other people might affect me? And I think that there is a kind of personal maturity that we need to have to be able to openly ask these questions and then deal with the responses because there is a, I don't wanna call it like paranoia or nefarious, like not everybody on our planet is looking out for their neighbors.
And so if these are real skills that people can develop, I think that there's fear that they could be used for harm or used not consensually. Oh, certainly that's the case. You look at a shamanic societies talk about constant psychic warfare going on, people putting hexes on each other's eyes on this crap. Yeah.
And then the other piece that I think is a place into the taboo is we have a very real historical part of our human history where people who express this were killed in very violent and horrible ways. And so why would I wanna out myself as being able to read other people's minds? If there is this kind of historical fear that I'm gonna be called crazy or heretical or a witch and be burned at the stake, obviously the burning at the stake now is a little bit different, especially in academia, it's just your career is done, right? So we may not be physically burned at the stake, but there are often severe negative consequences to declaring yourself in this.
Now I will say I really feel that this is shifting and it's shifting quickly because more and more people are outing themselves and people are feeling safer to express this, communicate this. Every time I talk about this subject, I get emails when it used to be in person, I'd have lines of people and they'd come up to me and whisper, I've had this experience too, but I can't tell anybody about it. And so the more that we can actually bring this transparently out in the open, I think the more it will help with that aspect of it. Because it is, I think so incredibly important and a part of who we are as humans.
Certainly I want to be part of some kind of remote viewing stock market startup. Yeah, that's it. In case people happen to be listening, let's go. And when I had Eric Wargo on the show, he almost took it for granted that within a decade, because of quantum computing, we're going to normalize this technoligization and marketization of at least this particular thing, pre-sense or pre-sentiment.
As Dean Raden talks about in another paper from last year that I love, sentiment and pre-sentiment in Twitter, do trends in collective mood feel the future? Yeah, that was a great paper. Here's data analysis. We have all these new tools now that we can use to explore this at scale.
Absolutely. Let's dive into that a little bit. I just wanted to say one more thing about the taboo. So the other way that these experiences are censored and this research is censored is through general publications and funding.
So just yesterday, we got a rejection from a paper submission because they said, you're proposing here that psi experiences are valid and replicable and therefore we will not send it out for peer review and your paper is rejected. And nowhere, anywhere in the paper did we say that at all. We're usually very conservative and conscious about doing that, especially for mainstream. That was plus one.
And they just rejected it outright. And this is happening all over the place. And you mentioned the funding. There's limited funding for this because people are afraid to go there.
And again, I do think that's shifting. That was my last piece about the taboos. But this preceding the future is quite incredible. And it comes in a couple of flavors.
So there's precognition, which is more about knowing the future mentally. So you actually have a cognitive awareness of the future and that might show up in your waking life. It might show up in your dreams. But it's a mental experience.
The other flavor is called pre-sentiment. And that's unconsciously knowing it in your body. And just to give you an example of that, we can be in the laboratory. You can be sitting in front of the computer, hooked up to EEG, which is brain waves, EKG heart waves, skin conductance, the resistance in your skin.
And you can be looking at pictures. And your body will actually respond to a picture that you will see in the future. This is totally unconscious. And so Julia Mossbridge, previous ions, scientist and fellow.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to getting her on the show too. Julia is amazing. She now runs the Institute for Love and Time. She's done a lot of work around this.
And don't know meta analysis of numerous studies looking at pre-sentiment. And what's incredible is that not only does the body respond to future stimuli, but it responds in the direction of the stimuli itself. So if the future stimuli is arousing, then the body is aroused. If the stimuli is relaxing, then the body goes into that relaxed state.
So to me, that is just incredible. And the pre-sentiment makes a lot of sense evolutionarily because if my body is able to sense the future, I'm going to be safer from predators. I'm going to be able to be more responsive in that way. So I think people have an easier time understanding how that could have evolved in humanity, the sensing of the future.
There's also a lot of work being done around time in general and what is time and time as a human construct. And does it really just flow in a forward direction? Or can you actually go back and affect your past? So this is a really exciting area of research.
And I think there's going to be a lot more work done on it in the future. Because you and your co-authors were so diligent about detailing various possible theoretical frameworks for explaining all of this. I would love to just do a quick, what do they call it when you're someone's on presidential campaign and they're on the back of a train and they just hit every town. Real fast, that kind of a tour.
We've got triadic dimensional, vertical paradigm, the zero-point field, orchestrated objective reduction, school or hypothesis, double causality, analytic idealism, operational probabilistic theory. I might have missed one or two. But yeah, it's not clear to me in reading this paper that these are all mutually exclusive. So I'd love to hear you go into a bit of detail about some of what you consider to be maybe the most promising or what we might find most easily testable.
That's a wonderful question. And I'll start my answer by saying I'm not a theorist. I'm a clinician. I'm an experimentalist.
And so it takes me a long time to try to understand these theories myself. And rather than going into each one, I'd like to highlight some themes that arise around these non-local consciousness theories. And so one of the themes I mentioned already, but it's that consciousness is fundamental. That consciousness itself is the grounded being of all that is.
And this is described in these theories in different ways. For example, Don Hoffman talks about these conscious agents and that our reality can be explained to the mathematical structure called conscious agents. And the unit of this consciousness is fundamental. Federico Fajean has, I don't want to call it similar, but somewhat similar in that he describes this consciousness unit.
So both of them have this kind of consciousness as fundamental, but there is this smaller unit, if you will, of consciousness. These theories often talk about holographic aspects, where let's say this consciousness unit is a piece of the larger consciousness, but it also reflects within itself the whole. So each aspect, smaller aspect, is a reflection of the larger aspect as well. So that's one set of these non-local consciousness theories.
There are also a number of them that talk about multiple dimensions. So we have this standard four-dimensional model in our current paradigm, three dimensions of space, one of time. And so if we add multiple dimensions beyond that, then some of these non-local consciousness phenomenon are more easily explained. Those are additional themes around that.
Jonathan Schuller has really interesting ideas about time, that it's not linear and that we can actually go forward and backward. He has a new theory that he's developing that takes this even further around time and correlations of experiences within time. I know I'm not doing any of these justice at all. So what's exciting to me about all of these various theories is that we are launching a program right now.
It's actually in phase two just started, where we are doing a contest for $100,000. People submitted letters of intent to do a review of all of these non-local consciousness theories, specifically ones that are testable. And looking at not just creating an encyclopedia, describing all of the theories, because that can get overwhelming. And even just reading these few that we have in this paper, you see that kind of could overlap with this.
And there's common elements here, and they're really different here. But doing a critical synthesis and using visuals to map them on each other so that we could actually begin testing them and weeding some of them out, and maybe even combining some of them. And not to be overly critical, but you may have experienced this yourself, that there's what I'm calling the my theory phenomenon, where everyone has their theory, oh, I have my theory. And they may or may not know about other people's theories.
They may or may not be critical about how their theory actually lines up with other people's theories or how it's different. But we really want to support the field to stop generating my theories. And to start looking at what we already have, can we collaborate? Can we synergize to come up with our best, thoughtful theory for how non-local consciousness could function that's actually testable and then begin testing it?
There's this great trend in adversarial collaboration, and it's happening in neuroscience. And I think we need to do that in the non-local consciousness field as well, where we pit the various theories against each other and see which one kind of rises to the top. I also want to acknowledge that a lot of these theories are not theories of everything, that they may just explain one aspect, but they may not be comprehensive. And so we may need to create a model that includes multiple layers of theories to be able to describe what we're actually experiencing.
So again, I'm definitely not a theorist, but I hope I've given a little bit of a taste on where ions is going with this. So we just chose three finalists to complete this comprehensive review. They have until September 30 to do those reviews, and then we're going to announce the winners and an event on November 1. So stay tuned for that, because I think those pieces of work are going to be pretty incredible, and we're going to be disseminating those widely, and in the hopes of really moving this forward and being able to test these and demonstrate a little bit more, perhaps, about how non-local consciousness may actually work.
Interesting. Is there anything else that is on the stove right now that's really cooking at ions? Yeah, so we have a conference coming up at the end of May. It's going to have a whole track talking specifically about this, various speakers talking about non-local consciousness.
In terms of experiments, we continue to look at how intention affects the physical world. We are looking at how, what is it about what we call the operator in that relationship of intention and the physical world? What is it about them that allows them to do that successfully? Can we maximize that in some way?
So we just finished a pilot study looking at structural neuroimaging of the brain and how that related to people's experiences and found some really interesting preliminary findings. So we want to raise some funds so we can do a larger study with that. We're also looking at the genetics of people who have these experiences and are quite skilled. So that's another interesting line of research.
And we are looking into altered states of consciousness, like psychedelics, lucid dreaming, of states, trance states, and this pathway to producing these phenomenal in a more effective way is through this altered state of consciousness. Oh, out of body experiences, stuff like that. How can we use those altered state of consciousness pass to amplify and be able to study these experiences as well? So please, come to our website.
We have so many resources there. I mentioned the publications. We have ways to participate in research. We have tons of free programming with our IONS Connect Live.
We have a blog, noetic, N-O-E-T-I-C. Or there's so many ways to get hooked in and learn more about this topic and be with us as we continue to explore. Wonderful. I definitely hope that this is the first rope thrown over the ravine.
Yes. And that I can get much more involved with you all. Thank you. Thank you for your time today.
Thank you. Thanks again for listening. If you enjoyed that, reminder the show notes contain an enormous archive of previous science of consciousness conversations on future fossils, as well as links to the paper we discussed today and tons of other really interesting research. Coming up next week, reason to subscribe.
Alyssa Allegretti will join us on future fossils and making up for last time and busting out a new one right away. Alyssa is a professional organizer, which may seem like real whiplash in the curation of this feed. But she is a profoundly deep, thoughtful, sensitive person who sees the trans mundane in the grit and detritus of our domestic lives. And we have a fascinating conversation about what it is to balance the work of family and the work of philosophy, the domestic and social sphere.
I think pretty much anyone listening to this show should be able to find some meaningful point of reference. There you go. Thanks a lot. Subscribe, rate, review, and have a wonderful week.