Jeff Beck, "Consciousness and Dual Aspect (or Dialectical) Monism"

Jeff Beck

So this is it, I’m new slightly. My name’s Jeff Beck, if you didn’t hear me the first time. And I farm I think about consciousness apparently.

Jeff Beck

So I’ve sort of outlined what my thought process going through a presentation I’m working on. So what’s how do we encode meaning in our brain? I mean, that’s a big question most people don’t have good answers for mostly. The just of the words dual aspect monism or high-level construction that we’ve made, that most people Don’t aren’t familiar with, but we might be more in the future.

Jeff Beck

It’s built With language, which is an object system, which is not the continuum from which we arise. It’s an abstraction, it’s a discrete version of reality. It’s not It’s not what’s really real, it’s a level removed from what’s real, essentially, through language.

Jeff Beck

We have experiences that are very hard to put into words sometimes. And all of consciousness is mostly outside of words. There’s a little and we have our language and a lot of people who do philosophy like to talk a lot. Use lots of words, and I sort of zone out a lot of times when I hear lots of words because it all starts to sound the same after a while. But what’s the reality underneath those words? But anyway, and so.

Jeff Beck

But the so the words do have meaning that we construct from our context of a continuum of experience. That’s my story going on this, if that makes any sense at all for you.

Jeff Beck

So my background and why I’m interested in this and why I’m interested in transhumanism stems from I worked as a research engineer for Conoco doing coal slurry and horizontal drilling and whatever they brought to us that nobody else could figure out, they’d have us brainstorm about. Is there some way to deal with this problem? It’s outside the box basically, nobody’s been able to figure out yet.

Jeff Beck

It was really quite a bit of fun because we were always trying to deal with things other people considered to be impossible. So I sort of got fixated in my twenties on really liking impossible problems. So that’s why I like this one so well.

Jeff Beck

And I got really interested. We were building pilot plants that had feedback loops and different kinds of control systems to make them run on autopilot. So I got really interested in in how you set up self-regulating systems and you know, was putting it together on a on a daily basis at work.

Jeff Beck

And some of them worked on air because we some of our work was in the refinery setting and everything had to be explosive proof. So for safety considerations, you can do this with air. or hydraulics or digital computers are a lot friendlier other than the electrical part. Which if you’re doing it in a coal mine underground and two percent methane Figure out some way to do it. It doesn’t involve electricity, it’s better. Anyway.

Jeff Beck

And the thing that really got me interested in consciousness was I was just walking along one day and all of a sudden Just in one waveform, whatever, it was different. I I did a master’s degree in system dynamics and controls, and so I learned how to do abstractions of control systems pretty thoroughly. The only I mean, it really got my attention because all of a sudden it was just for some reason everything was different and I couldn’t explain it And the best I could I came across an explanation called non-duality, which sort of looks like that.

Jeff Beck

I mean, it gets tangled up with lots of words from our language system. Mysticism, there’s lots of Eastern religions have ideas that In Mormonism, they don’t talk about it a lot from what I’ve ever encountered in my life growing up. But surely Joseph Smith knew it well. Because otherwise he wouldn’t have had the experiences and the motivation to do what he did.

Jeff Beck

But it’s a It’s a different modality of consciousness can somehow take place. What what the heck is this? You know?

Jeff Beck

Because for me it was it wasn’t There were things that were precursors and there were things that happened at that moment and then lots of other stuff that I’ve noticed. Okay, now this is different, this is different, this is different than what it was before.

Jeff Beck

And so really got me curious about You know, with science we should be able to make up better stories than we made up two thousand years ago, four thousand years ago. I mean the history of the these kinds of experiences go back through shamanic traditions and I mean our whole society has been organized by something coming forth into our consciousness that’s driving evolution in our social systems.

Jeff Beck

But I don’t think it’s accidental. So but for most people who experience it, it’s very accidental. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t something that could be more thoroughly understood. It just, whenever you start to talk about what is consciousness, people have a really hard time defining that. And as a controls engineer, I felt it has a particular place in a dynamic system.

Jeff Beck

So what that experience did is it really got me interested in consciousness and I’ve kind of covered a lot of this territory, but what I was involved in leading up to that triggering that was trying to under I was trying to understand individuation processes, I was trying to understand inhibitory and drive systems that enter into consciousness and and tweak consciousness. Stir us one way or another because obviously within consciousness we have likes, dislikes, and they’re all subjective things.

Jeff Beck

They’re not There are some logical people out there where it’s objective, but for the most part it’s the objective stuff is created by the left brain to Make up a good story about what the right brain wants to do that has nothing to do with logic and the normal logic pathways, what we consider logic. And so I did a lot of reading for a couple of years.

Jeff Beck

Was in the context of the end of 2008 through 2009, 2010, when the economy was in the toilet. Lots of people were bummed out. There was lots of I mean, I have a hard time focusing on the farm work because what’s the point if it’s not going to make any money anyway? And those weeks

Jeff Beck

The changes that take place in those experiences really tear down your drive system. Most people are driven by fear, shame, guilt, stuff like that. It’s the wolf at the back side of you that’s keeping you going forward and getting you out of bed in the morning. And so, if all of a sudden

Jeff Beck

You know, three days after that experience, I realized I really wasn’t afraid of dying anymore. I mean, I could just drive into that apartment right now, that would be bliss. So that was part of what happened. I mean, it gets characterized as ego death. And so if I’m not afraid of dying anymore, what can the wolves do to me but heavenly mill, you know? So what’s the point of anything either?

Jeff Beck

I have a hard time. Looking at a particular thing because I mean, there was a motivation that came with that experience, which was basically understanding what those inhibitory forces were doing to people to cause pain and suffering. And some of it is good for socialization probably, but a lot of it is unnecessary.

Jeff Beck

And you know, just basically experiencing a new motivational structure that had to do with what can we do to alleviate suffering. basically bring about a different kind of society ordered in a different way than the one I had grown up in.

Jeff Beck

I kind of grew up in with the attitude towards the world of what have I done to deserve to be born into this place, you know. It must have been really bad.

Jeff Beck

If you from that motivational shift that kept me going, I really was just eating everything up once you Lots of different books. I mean, basically, psychology, philosophy, physics, and religion are all tangled up in one kind of a knot that are all interconnected with each other. And we It’s a wiring Christmas light maze not partly, but how do we untangle it and understand it rather than just saying, no, this is outside our ability to deal with.

Jeff Beck

And in that in reading that material, I wanted to A person that I’d been interacting with online before I had that sudden change was somebody who would Been involved with the man who wrote a book on synchronicity. Plus, this is the person I’d never met, but who were online from a support group. She recommended that I agree. She said she had an experience like this through a Sufi tradition when she was like 18, so she could relate to what I was explaining to her. He’s like asking her, Could you just suddenly be bipolar, you know, or something extreme like that? And she said, Well, it’s this other thing

Jeff Beck

Anyway, she recommended I read Carl Jung and his ideas on individualization, which I did. And I had to stop after a while because I started having like all these number synchronicities jumping out at me. And I had some really strange dreams tied in with 555 on the clock when I woke up.

Jeff Beck

That were like archetypal. One was about self-acceptance, and the other one was about basically the creation of the universe from God’s perspective. Which was at that point I said, who makes up these stories? And I’ve got to start reading Carl Jung for a while, because this is bizarre. I don’t believe in this stuff.

Jeff Beck

I’m pretty materialistic and don’t believe anyway, Carl Jung talks a lot about the collective unconscious and archetypal things. He definitely convinced me.

Jeff Beck

But at one point, a simple example was at one point I was dealing with facing surgery for prostate cancer, and I was kind of stressed about it. Trying to get everything done prior to that and caught up. And I had a just a big 333 came into my dream while I was asleep. to the point where it startled me awake. And then I turned over and I looked at the clock and it was three through three on my digital clock. It’s pretty either I’ve got a really good internal clock or that’s that’s pretty strange synchronicity.

Jeff Beck

So somehow we have to be able to integrate that kind of weird experience with our normal materialist perspective of the world. And it’s kept me motivated to keep pushing that way because I think there’s something better that we can do.

Jeff Beck

It falls in the realm of transhumanism. And one of the people I got into trying to understand was Alan Turing and his work with decidability. And computing machinery and universal computing machinery, because I know he was interested in consciousness, and the more I tried to understand where he was coming from, the more I really got interested in the notion of Bill Huel. Could there be conscious machinery built? You know, something what’s the defin what’s the essential requirements for even basic consciousness, not just this word stuff I was trying to figure out, but The underlying what is consciousness

Jeff Beck

I’ve been to since about 2012 I started going to science of consciousness down in Tucson. I’ve been to there’s something called Science and Non-Duality, where it’s safe to talk about word stuff like this and not get locked up in the funny farm. Whereas all sorts of other people who’ve had similar experiences.

Jeff Beck

And actually just talking to people in my own family that say, yeah, something weird happened to your cousin and he was trying to give all of his stuff away. So that sounds a lot like this kind of experience because you once you lose your sense of self, then everything just belongs to everybody. It’s a communal kind of consciousness. You’re looking out for the collective.

Jeff Beck

Near as I can tell, it’s a fairly natural evolution of consciousness towards Through an individuation path. But Carl Rogers and others have reported that was just a natural stage in development. If you get to a certain point, you’ll have a kind of shift like that where you just naturally shift into a kind of consciousness that’s more concerned with the collective than the individual self.

Jeff Beck

you know, if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, as we pass child humans live past child period years quite a bit by now. So that was the purpose of those people in the mendering but But hopefully they’re the ones who’ve evolved to the point where they can give guidance to give the people and be selfless in that giving.

Jeff Beck

And they can do a better job of my feeling is that the individuation and developing a strong sense of self is really important for a robust distributed system, where there’s lots of individuals. There needs to be a good horizontal foundation of strong individuals to create the kind of society that we want to move towards for A free society. It’s the foundation of the American dream.

Jeff Beck

So I two years ago I was preparing for a talk down in San Diego, or Santa, or ended up being in La Jolla. I came across the idea of dual aspect monism, which put into words something that I’d sort of been trying to figure out how to Express.

Jeff Beck

And if you look at the I mean, scientists measure brain waves and what’s going on in the brain with electrical signals typically. or there’s chemical transmit neurotransmitters involved in the process.

Jeff Beck

But the question comes up of causality. What’s the So is that are those brain waves in any way driven by consciousness, or are they producing consciousness? Or what’s the causality between which is one primary and the other one secondary?

Jeff Beck

Or most physical the people who are into the materialist perspective tend to take the electrical activity as consciousness and a lot of the theories are based on interpreting that and like integrated information theory is based on that, which is one of the more well-proven approaches to detecting whether lock-in cases conscious or not. tell by now pretty well if that’s true. If even given people the ability to communicate by using that technology who were locked in, which is Or you can’t move anything or communicate in any way whatsoever. And you’re just there in a vegetative state, or are they? And so

Jeff Beck

In taking the point of view that we are partly Matter, and there’s this other thing that we all experience called consciousness. Nobody has a really good concept of habit. There aren’t very many really good explanations out there that are generally accepted as to how this works.

Jeff Beck

And it ends up being a kind of complementarity. If you look at it from dual aspect modism, there’s consciousness in the processes that we feel experientially. And then there’s these electrical neurotransmitter signals in the brain or the nerve path brain. And somehow they are different manifestations of something that’s unitary at some deeper level, if we could ever get to that deeper level, which may or may not be possible. But just whether it’s possible or not to get to that level, there might be something that we can do to move forward with that assumption.

Jeff Beck

So at the Science of Consciousness meetings, they they have a taxonomy that they use, and there’s about ten, pretty well accepted caps into consciousness debate. Using like global workspace theory by Renard Barris was integrated information theory. Are the two main ones I’ve paid attention to.

Jeff Beck

This next meeting is coming up. They’re going to have a whole subsection on dual aspect monism, which is why I’m liking this. talk I mean, go into this meeting in Switzerland, it seems like a good idea to talk about this more because I haven’t seen that as a separate item when I’ve gone to the meetings of the past.

Jeff Beck

The first meeting I went to, I d I went and they asked me why I was going. I said because I w well conscious robots from the future are trying to convince me to invent them I decided if I should go along with your plans. And that was partly a joke and partly serious.

Jeff Beck

But at that point in time, the taxonomy had no place for machine consciousness. The last of them the last couple they’ve held actually have machine consciousness as a significant part of the program. So we’ve come that far since twenty twelve. And people

Jeff Beck

Yeah, well anyway, I haven’t been impressed with the stuff that they’ve covered so far. It’s not that it’s we’ve had some pretty good pooling mechanics presentations about it.

Jeff Beck

And the one theory of consciousness that the organizers of the science of consciousness put forward is the ORCOR idea that this has to be some sort of Objective reduction of a quantum process is what defines consciousness. And I tend to agree with that to some extent, but it’s not very popular. Lots of people

Jeff Beck

like Max Tech Mark hate it badly, and they just want to like Max wants to have this other particle that comes along with the rest of the matter that we don’t understand yet to bring scratches into the system. works for Max, it doesn’t work for me, but whatever.

Jeff Beck

It may how we objectify things determines what we find. And so it’s important to take lots of different perspectives into view. And if they’re very well thought out, there’s probably truth in each one of them in the tangled knots of whatever is going on. is the way I look at it. So I really don’t like discounting any perspective because from one point of view, that’s probably correct.

Jeff Beck

Yeah, I mean as a controls engineer, I have to ask myself, why is there consciousness? I mean, I was thinking about this all the time I was doing grad school on that subject. So where does consciousness fit in the machine? Because I kind of view this as machines.

Jeff Beck

I mean, a lot of us most of what goes on in our bodies is pretty mechanistic. and doesn’t require any consciousness whatsoever. There’s a really amazingly complex endocrine system that’s all about feedback and most of us really don’t have a clue what’s going on down there.

Jeff Beck

The the autonomic nervous system, I think, played a big role in the the shift that I experienced. I mean, it it’s like something so primitive it has the ability to override whatever consciousness is supposed to be there. I mean, you can make you just pass that off, you know, it’s freeze, play dead, whatever. It’s got the override button. We can just shut everything down, so no, you’re not playing this game anymore. So in how do you try to override the override button?

Jeff Beck

So I guess the question comes in. What exactly is consciousness? How does it come into the system? How does it interact? It obviously controls the evolution of the neural system and the brain from what I see it as especially experiencing that subjective shift. I mean, I was conditioned in a certain fear, shame, guilt environment up to a certain point, and then that shut off, which was really good.

Jeff Beck

And then I felt, because of my nature being fairly parallel processor, parallel worker. But then I felt, Oh yeah, this feels just good, just think of all the pain and suffering everybody’s feeling. It isn’t me now. And is all that justified? I mean, how why are people killing themselves? Why are people using pa I mean the massing? Epidemic of people trying to numb themselves to this pain is caused by these systems.

Jeff Beck

And if we could understand how The material side of the system connects with the conscious experience. It will give us some pretty powerful tools My guess is how we could take control better of that dynamic. Nothing else in pain control, but

Jeff Beck

And if we understood it better, we might not be so judgmental and harmful to other people in our society and realize, yet they’re just doing what They were they’re reacting to the world in a way that’s mostly outside their control. I mean, you get into debates about free will and accountability and And it all gets tangled up in should we be shaming and harming people for being how they were born and raised to be? even though it doesn’t conform with our picture of how we think they might should be.

Jeff Beck

And you can take that to extremes and usually it gets to the point where everybody agrees that we don’t want those kind of people in our society. because they’re harming other people. But within certain limits, I think it’s really important to accept diversity because it it enriches the system.

Jeff Beck

If you look at nature, nature loves diversity. It doesn’t I mean and we as humans trying to build efficient systems like monocultures and everything in uniform because it’s more efficient and it’s fast. It gives you reliable you don’t have to worry about getting water in your tank at the gas station maybe. There’s you know, people don’t like those random quality control issues, so they want uniformity But when it’s uniformity in people and minds and perspectives, then it can be very harmful to the society

Jeff Beck

So the reason I really am enthused about dual aspect monism is to be it gives me a way to Start dissecting down into the deeper levels of the problem. And one thing that I didn’t have a clue about going in when I went to start going to science and coaches was meetings.

Jeff Beck

had to do with qualia. I mean, this Dave Chalmers was there looking strung out and weird. He’s famous for having this hard problem with consciousness, which I’m not saying that dual aspect monism would necessarily answer the hard question of consciousness, but it might be possible Some make some headway with the right framework.

Jeff Beck

So from the perspective of a conscious agent navigating the world that I’m here and I’m seeing Images of failing internal. And I heard my own voice who I had. I filled my body All of that has to be somehow interfaced from a physical thing into my conscious experience, or it’s not conscious.

Jeff Beck

So everything I’ve got in my conscious History, recall, everything has somehow been converted from something physical into something that’s not. That can be called a qualia space feature. I mean it And maybe you have to maybe there’s a periodic chart that defines all the different versions of qualia. I don’t know. I just know that whatever I have experienced and has been stored in my memories was experienced through this other language. That came, I assume, genetically encoded into my body that maps the physical into the subjective.

Jeff Beck

And from a scientific perspective, if you start with that assumption, or you know, from that point of view, then there really should be a way to map something in our physic At some level in our body, whether it’s at the subatomic, atomic, religious Kwan process, whether it’s a molecular scale thing. I’ve got that on the next slide.

Jeff Beck

Which I call this and this is like there’s a reductionist side to this process, which is a scientific reductionist tip your typical science processes. break things into small parts and see how they fit together to make the whole. But mostly it’s about tearing things into little tiny pieces and analyzing the little tiny pieces. It’s like Yeah, if you could just get down to the basic fundamentalist little piece of the atom, you would understand everything, which is where the theory of everything people like to go. But

Jeff Beck

There’s got to be some level where there is a correlation between what we have as subjective experience and what Is going on in the physical version of the body. And it’s like an almond puzzle at this point, as far as I’m concerned. Figure out what’s the right level to find that correlation. with modern improving scientific methods, it seems like there’s significant potential to actually break that puzzle and figure out what is

Jeff Beck

I mean, that’s what I want to push in this discussion that’s coming up this summer is we really should be looking at how we could solve that reductionist puzzle. What’s the correlation between the subjective and the and what’s going on at some level, whether it’s network or molecular. Molecular seems like the most probable level to find an answer to it.

Jeff Beck

Because I mean that’s the level where the D where you get DNA encoding and transmission and it it seems pretty likely that at the very least it can be stored at that level, even if it requires more something to do with protein structures or I think it could be in the topological you might have to solve the problem in the network or a topological space or Anyway.

Jeff Beck

But what I’m I’m not saying that that would solve the hard problem of consciousness. Because you still wouldn’t know where the qualia are coming from. You would just have a correlation between these are the subjective experiences and these are the physical traits in the body that are triggering those experiences. And it still wouldn’t tell you where the heck yellow came from or red came from. And that gets into metaphysics, and I don’t think you’re going to solve metaphysics with scientific Analysis correct. So, but aside from that, there’s another

Jeff Beck

What I would say, hard problem, and that is There’s a integration side to things the How is it that our brains put together this coherent, consistent story moment by moment, day by day? And how consistent is it really?

Speaker 2

As I said, we don’t.

Jeff Beck

Yeah, it’s not so consistent. But anyway, there’s you know, and the people

Jeff Beck

from the transhumanist movement to talk about mind uploading and mapping the connecto and they do presentations that I’ve been sort of to do so. And I really have a hard time taking that serious because I don’t think it solves the problem of what’s conscious of it. It could very easily have something to do with how it’s assembled and as how things synchronize across the brain to create the whole experience. It’s a unified experience is a unified experience.

Jeff Beck

That seems like a pretty likely level to find answers to that part of the problem. There’s really two separate problems.

Jeff Beck

One is the reduction, but where are these qualities coming from? And then how do they assemble into the big picture? And yeah, metaphysics. Said already.

Jeff Beck

I don’t really think that anything here is going to solve the metaphysical aspects of the problem because And I have ideas about where that might lie.

Jeff Beck

Like I know Giulio Prisco’s gave a presentation at the conference in India and they’re talking about the Kashuk record. And I I pretty well buy it that there’s got to be something like that going on. There’s some there’s some collective non-local

Jeff Beck

aspect of that. And if you’re whenever you figure out if ever that that gets explored further and It almost seems like that’s where the quality has to be coming from, some collective ground.

Jeff Beck

And it also sort of begs the question of where is consciousness. And from a mathematical point of view, I would have to say it’s in the null space of this Space. Which is a pretty vague thing to say, right?

Jeff Beck

So more with that. That’s where it turns into religion pretty fast. What is the space that consciousness occupies? And is there really just one consciousness that puts the ground for all of this? And do quality arise from that ground? Is something that I don’t know if we’ll ever know the answer to.

Jeff Beck

I was agnostic pretty thoroughly before, and I’m still pretty agnostic. Some things are Some things we might know, but not on this level of existence sometime in the future. I don’t have any particular place on self-surviving, death and resurrection and all of that. I don’t have these one or another.

Jeff Beck

I do have strong beliefs that if we understand ourselves better through whatever efforts we can make towards taking our personal evolution, our collective evolution, We can create a better social world for all of us to live in.

Jeff Beck

And there are other ideas on how things might work. That’s off Wikipedia. Some people think that physical should be primaries and metal should be primarily And I guess my dual aspect monoism pretty well falls in with the neutral monoism.

Jeff Beck

As a controls engineer If my consciousness isn’t just a joke, if I can really think that my head should be over here and it goes over there, then there’s got to be two-way communication between the physical and the mental. So that means that some there’s got to be some other more fundamental place where that connection is being made that we’re not conscious of.

Speaker 3

It has an effect both on the physical and on the model.

Speaker 3

Can you walk through each of the words in that dual aspect of monism? In relation to that third substance, I don’t see the connection between those.

Jeff Beck

In this, they first tried to say that the Cartesian duality, the idea was there’s the physical and it’s one thing, and there’s the metal, and that’s another thing. and they’re just separate. There’s the men and the machine.

Jeff Beck

And that sort of gives leads to the notions like that, yeah, there’s just Soul that migrates off someplace else when you die, or one is around the world without a body. It’s like the two are separate entities and can exist individual

Jeff Beck

You can have you can have a physical body that’s functional by itself, solvus, zombies, and you can have Just ghosts walking around with no body, but they’re still intact, functioning, thinking creatures. Physicalism says, I mean, it’s sort of like the max tenmark view of things and pandemic view of things, is it?

Jeff Beck

Consciousness is just a joke. You can show that decisions are made in the brain 30 seconds before a person is aware of them. It’s been improved in the lab. So consciousness is just a big joke.

Jeff Beck

We don’t I mean, we’re conscious, but we don’t really do anything in consciousness other than feel pain and joy and think we make decisions that we don’t really make because we make by unconscious processes.

Speaker 3

Meaning the the physical Decides and then the mind thinks that it decided. Right.

Speaker 2

Something about So like, in some of the tests they’ve done, they’re basically like a silent mind within your mind that makes the decisions on your behalf. So whether it’s the material or, you know, or idealism. Still yet to be decided. All sorts of fun stories.

Speaker 3

Would that be correlated with the third substance, though? Or is that like what’s the third substance? Because that sounds like it could be if you were talking about. The physical, and then there’s another mind.

Speaker 2

Yeah, sure.

Speaker 4

So the Well, this kind of continuum of physicalism to idealism, and the place that most people end up that like to talk about it, they end up in one extreme or the other, where they simply deny the existence of the other. So physicalism goes even beyond like all caps matter is bigger than mind. It says mind isn’t a thing. Y you don’t think, therefore you’re not.

Speaker 4

Like there just isn’t a mind. Your conscious experience doesn’t exist. We say, what does that even mean? I haven’t agreed, we don’t have though Daniel Bennett’s more interesting than some of the times caricaturized.

Speaker 4

And then idealism is there just isn’t physical. stuff. There is just mind. So the neutral monism is entering a really interesting realm of so how does none of this exist?

Jeff Beck

So Deepak Chopra comes and brings a contest people who bleed very strongly one way. On the other side, basically we’re just avatars in the game here. And it’s all in th this this physical realm is just an illusion and and there isn’t really anything physical, it’s all just a constructive thing. It’s all just a whole constructed and artificial Environment so employees are all too thumb.

Speaker 2

But if it’s all an illusion, though, can I just pick a different illusion though? Can I just choose that it’s not an illusion? If it’s all illusion, I mean. We’re just not given that rhythm beetles and a sitar of it.

Jeff Beck

Some of the stuff I’ve got I’ve gone off pretty far off into there’s Alendro Yurgorowski wrote some stuff about shaman treatments in Mexico. And if you were raised in the right environment and believe Hard enough, you can do all these weird things that defy what our logical Western minds believe. And he says he doesn’t understand it, but he’s sane enough to think that there might be something real going on there. You have to keep an open mind in that direction. They respect his perspective.

Speaker 5

I’ve seen his angel.

Speaker 6

Even just like the placebo effect. The placebo effect is your mind having a physical effect on your body. And so there is, like, there is something there.

Jeff Beck

There’s something going on, definitely. And so my feeling is that to highest solution is going to be an integration of both sides of that.

Speaker 3

And it’s good instinct. And is that why it’s called dual aspect monism?

Jeff Beck

Yeah, because you’ve got both sides, you’ve got to respect both sides. Yeah, so but it’s like the wave-particle duality problem. I mean, okay, if you look at it one way you see a particle, if you look at it another way you see a wave But there’s only one thing there, so how does that exactly work? And so there’s sort of that same idea put into the mind-body problem.

Jeff Beck

There’s this complementary. Okay, you’ve got to ex you’ve got to respect the physical processes, you’ve got to respect the subjective processes So how do you integrate from uh and like Schroeder’s cat or something?

Speaker 7

Cats alive and dead at the same time. Sounds a good kind of gamble.

Jeff Beck and Speaker 3

I don’t know if that answered your question. I think it I mean, it explains why it’s called dual aspect monism. That’s my question. But then I guess the second question was how does that Definition correlate with third substance?

Jeff Beck

So they’re saying I mean, the in this case, they’re saying there’s a those are both aspects of something more primary. Which is a third some hypothetical third substance that we don’t understand yet.

Speaker 2

There’s both conscious and material. It’s not a placeholder.

Jeff Beck

It’s a proto-conscious, proto-physical

Speaker 8

Would that be like a rock, paper, scissors type thing where they all interact with another? Or like a I am above everything else and I’m Depends on what kind of guy you believe in.

Jeff Beck

It’s yeah, we’re it’s in the metaphysical realm anyway. Well, I mean physics is trying to deal with this. They’ve got fifteen significant interpretations of quantum mechanics, and they’re all trying to explore the white particle duality problem. So I don’t know that it’ll be any easier.

Speaker 5

It’s like matter, but more refined. There we go.

Speaker 9

So, you know, so You know, I in one of my physics classes that I there was an interesting uh there was an interesting moment where we were We were discussing like the the size of an electron or something. And eventually it landed on this point where the physics professor said In this context, we get to the point of you have to start saying what do we mean by size, because we’re not actually talking about physical particles. Are we talking about their interactional cross intersection with other particles?

Speaker 4

Yeah, it’s terrible. You do this statistical game, and it turns out that the output of it is a distance Say, cool, that’s the diameter, maybe radius. Let’s say radius of the electron, but it’s just that’s what happens to fall out of your equation describing behavior, but it’s not a radius. Emphatically, it can’t be. Yeah. It’s so weird. I’m glad someone else noticed how weird that was. Oh, yeah. It’s just the fact that a number falls out when you do your division. You say, oh, the unit that’s left over is a length. Let’s call it a radius. That looks really good.

Jeff Beck

And where I get to in all of this, trying to make heads or tails out of it, is so you get into that paradoxical situation where you’ve got two things that seem to be impossible. They’re like It doesn’t seem like it’s possible, right? It’s just a it’s a paradox. You’ve got it’s a particle and it’s a wave at the same time somehow, depending on how you look at it. And one of those archetypal dreams I had after I came back from one of these meetings was I woke up the talk.

Jeff Beck

Anyway, I woke up in this paradox really just a little bit paradox. I woke up Before I woke up, I became semi-conscious. You might have to call it lucid dreaming. But there was this. Thing I was noticing were there was just like Stretchy elastic thing that looked like a wave on one side, but you wave for them, and there was this focal point on the other side. And it took effort to stretch them apart. Because and I was waking, I felt like I was waking up and I was stretching them apart. And so I noticed that I backed up and it closed back together. And I did that like three or four times, feeling this tension it took to stretch it apart and pull it back together. And then I

Jeff Beck

Pulled it apart and went through that and woke up and stood up. I was awake. So I went from like a dreaming state to an awake state going through. basically going through the wave-particle duality paradox to be conscious.

Jeff Beck

And that’s a pretty good metaphor for what I consider the fundamental requirement for consciousness, which is both a focal point. and the background within which that focal point occurs. And that’s what I played around with these kind of pictures.

Jeff Beck

idea that there’s two basic aspects to all of reality, whether it be physical, mental, mathematical, that all end up Spanning the space where there’s this it’s indeterminate, it’s it’s the uncomputable Part. The material machines can handle computable functions, which all end up all on one side with this.

Jeff Beck

And with the advent of graphical processors, We’re getting a lot more capacity on the parallel side of this diagram. What I’m left feeling is that when we figure out what consciousness is, it will be

Jeff Beck

in between those two opposed to each other. Would give us the mental the right mental situation to be able to handle What we have to handle in consciousness, which is undecidable, irreducible possibilities.

Speaker 3

And is that the dual? Aspect? The focal and non-focal? Is that what you?

Jeff Beck

This is dual and non-dual in one system and so whatever. There’s a unity at one point, and I’m saying that this is this fits into the dual aspect modism. And for the way I look at it, you’ve got to have the two sides and you’ve got to have the unity to get consciousness. In the system.

Speaker 3

You’ve got to have the two sides, focal and not focal? And you’ve got to have the non-dual. Is that what you’re going to do?

Jeff Beck

You’ve got to have the sp you have to have the overlap between them to create the It’s a place diagram between the two.

Speaker 8

Would you say like there’s a Venn diagram of the two and consciousnesses where they overlap?

Jeff Beck

So, yeah, the last one of the last meetings I was at, I guess it’s the last one in Tucson, I think. No. Well, anyway, you have lost one too soon. Roger Penrose was having this brainstorm.

Jeff Beck

He said, Ah, yeah, this is what it really is. And he was saying that What he’s trying to say with the LOR idea is that basically there’s a branching of possibilities with a single outcome Well, there’s branching possibilities within this space that until the point where they’re decided

Jeff Beck

Is what you would handle with a as a quantum process. It’s like it would take a quantum computer to do it. And then At some point, this collapses, and then you’re there’s only one outcome on the collapse of all the possibilities.

Jeff Beck

And he’s saying, but then if you look back on that process, the time when it would say that you decided back before the branching occurred. Which maybe it’s 30 seconds, I don’t know. Maybe you can actually hold the thought for 30 seconds before it can collapse as to the decision at which point It’s going to look like he decided back at the branching point just based on his version of quantum and how he understands quantum mechanics

Jeff Beck

was what he was trying to say about it. So there’s a possibility space, and that gets reduced to a decision. And then it looks like you decided Back when the possible is first were populated.

Jeff Beck

But that’s Roger has lots of ideas that aren’t necessarily all the way thought through to the air. But that’s just something to, you know. I don’t have a really good idea what goes in here, other than somewhere in there you’ve got to find some quality as well to figure out you’ve got to figure out some way that it connects. with conscious experience.

Jeff Beck

And there’s a lot of the molecular structures that we find in neurotransmitters actually have Recursive, they have ring structures and they have linear tails on them. And so they actually fall on both sides of this, which means they’re spanning this space. And we’re talking like all the like all the email transmitters fall into that category. So it may be that somehow they bring quality into the picture or at least

Jeff Beck

motivate consciousness of whatever’s taking place in this. But it’s that third substance that’s the background inside here that’s creating the consciousness It it’s it’s correlating conscious choices with physical actions and physical action or physical processes with conscious experiences.

Speaker 3

And you’re pointing are you pointing to the non-dual?

Jeff Beck

So this this boundary represents the boundary of consciousness. There’s things that fall outside that in the serial processing related anything that can be done with the Turing machines over here outside consciousness in this perspective. Anything that’s known with a graphical massively parallel system is outside consciousness on this, so you better have some overlap between these to get consciousness in this perspective. And that’s just mostly based on considerations that were worked through and decidability by Alan Turin. I know there’s church and I’m missing this Austrian guy, but anyway. Does that make sense?

Speaker 10

Very interesting.

Speaker 10

Is this just like dualism or something? I’m kind of

Speaker 10

I think that something like Kabbalah could explain this. I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you said. I think something like Kabbalah could explain this more. I’m more into the rainbow than like dualism or something. All the colors.

Jeff Beck

Somewhere the colors have to come from the experience, right? And it’s not just black and white.

Jeff Beck

And part of the reason I got interest part of the reason I got went down this whole rabbit hole was trying to understand black and white thinking, for instance, which is very highly Automated thinking coming from reptilian structures that predate modern complex thinking. So very little consciousness involved and very poor decision making. And it’s a factor in our modern society because it’s more

Jeff Beck

Higher media. There’s lots of different sources for this, but there’s lots of control of population through fear tactics and trying to keep people in agitated Tig foxin is. Anyway, they try to keep people in an agitated, fearful, anxious state.

Jeff Beck

Keeps them really close to that lizard brain threshold and they don’t develop critical thinking skills properly when they’re in a highly activated sympathetic state. It impairs development. And once you get past early childhood is really hard to involve that. It has to be smelled plastic. It doesn’t happen in the Decura anymore, so Just what is you know what is black and white thinking, not being able to see the crater?

Jeff Beck

It’s got to be this or it’s got to be that. I mean, where you’ve got to be this concrete story about this is the plan of salvation. You got it. You don’t have to worry about anything else. Fear is taken care of, shame’s taken care of, all of that. As long as you follow the set of rigid rules, a lot of people are happy with that. Because they have a hard time looking into the uncertainty of the gray areas. Okay? And part of

Jeff Beck

What we need is to understand in all of understanding countries’ processes is how we’re being affected and manipulated and impaired by things that are accepted as all alright in our society like using Well, just everything that comes out of Madison Avenue is hacking the system. Advertising in general is hacking

Jeff Beck

your system for their benefit and not your benefit. It might sell it as being your benefit somehow, but they also implant lots of images of what what you should be to be a happy person. Lots of things that bypass what we’d consider free will and good judgment. If you just buy this, you’ll be happy today.

Speaker 11

So I don’t like you’re saying I don’t understand like much of this stuff. What is is there hope that we can objectively understand consciousness? And if so, how does that come about? Like more precise tools? Some of it. I mean, really, we’re trying to do things.

Jeff Beck

with primitive instruments. I mean, we’re we’re getting better and better, but if things are happening at the molecular level, then you need instrumentation to study things at the molecular level. And inside a living brain, that’s it’s kind of tricky. I mean, they’ve done quite a bit of work on doing things with animals that wouldn’t be and on people who need surgery that can have something done.

Jeff Beck

most of the technology that’s being used, like we’ve talked about artificial lens and giving sensory perception from an artificial limb and motor control of an artificial limb. They’re basically using whatever creates consciousness in our brain.

Jeff Beck

as a hack. They’re hacking that with something that’s they’re hacking into the sub the unconscious parts to give that interface and still they’re still using they’re still dependent on whatever

Jeff Beck

integrates and interprets in our brain. They’re using the primary system and just doing some add-ons with it. And it’s very similar to how we do use tools in general.

Jeff Beck

I mean Our brain is naturally set up.

Jeff Beck

It’s like it’s a universal adaptive controller from a controls engineering point of view. It just automatically learns whatever you’ve attach it to without any further instruction, very similar to what they’re doing with artificial intelligence, where they’re basically teaching themselves how to play games by lots of practice. Our brain just does that naturally.

Speaker 7

It sits in the gene coding to do that. It’s in the network. Have they ever tried that with an animal?

Speaker 4

Like artificial limb and anka. Yeah, this is where we find out the bizarre universal Decarmer system. So they lightly restrain a monkey, which is a lot nicer than most of the things we do, unfortunately, now in the testing. And they, this is the mean thing, they implant an electrode just smack around where the arm is on the bit of the brain that encodes motor output at the brain level. which is seems to be pretty highly intentional and stuff like that rather than actual this muscle do that. They just drop electrolytic.

Speaker 4

No finesse beyond are we pretty sure that if we zap here it’s our maluke? Yeah, okay. Put it here. They just record. And then they randomly wire those electrodes, they put in like 30 or 40, into a robotic arm. And the robotic art is in the same room as the monkey, and it’s able to reach a bowl of peanuts, joy of joys, and the monkey’s mouth. And you give it

Speaker 4

On the order of hours of practice, and it’s able to get the arm to not fluidly or really, really nicely. There’s a lot of excess movement. which is really interesting. It’s not very, very pruned, but it can repeat itself without failing. Like, you just punk it down in the sort of appropriate area. And I imagine if you’ve implanted it somewhere else that’s associated with output at all, you could do the same thing. But yeah, it just learns how to use another arm.

Speaker 4

Yeah, it’s not part of its bond plan. It’s not getting the normal feedback that it’s expecting, but it can do something with it. And you can train with. on the order of ten seconds of training, you can train a program to read what the brain is doing, and a person can think about moving a cursor across a screen. And we can decode what that means in electrical signals and make a cursor do that. And again, you get a lot of extra movement. You can’t really focus on a spot. Yeah, the brain can just send out useful output with hardly any training at all.

Speaker 2

It’s like telekinetic, right?

Speaker 4

Almost. Yeah, it’s just amazing.

Speaker 2

Now we just need it at Wi-Fi so you don’t have to drill into my brain. That’s what I’m working on in my uh in my lab, yeah.

Jeff Beck

It’s crazy. new things at the last meeting I went to Transcept meeting, they were demoing some system where you could do an EEG from you sitting in the chair. without actually having to have a headset on. The the technology they’re using for things like that are as they evolve it m might get pretty interesting.

Speaker 3

You call it consciousness. And so would you say that that is conscious? And if it is, then isn’t it consciousness the whole way down the evolutionary chain? Where’s the line where we would say it’s not consciousness? If a monkey could do it, then could a rat do it? Could a plant do it? Could a plant do it?

Speaker 5

Yeah, absolutely. I didn’t get my heart to diet anymore.

Jeff Beck

That’s the elephant. A photon could be conscious. Could be. I’m not saying what kind of experience that would be for a full time, but it could be.

Speaker 11

Well, I’m going to stop the recording at this point. And so I’m going to continue discussion. Thanks, Jeff, so much. That was great to hear.