Alex O’Connor
Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).
For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.
To donate to my PayPal (thank you): http://www.paypal.me/cosmicskeptic.
– VIDEO NOTES
Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus of theoretical philosophy at the University of Mainz. His primary research areas include philosophy of mind, philosophy of neuroscience, and applied ethics, particularly focusing on neurotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
– LINKS
The Elephant and the Blind – https://thomasmetzinger.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Metzinger_MIT_Press_2024-1.pdf
– TIMESTAMPS
0:00 – The Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project
11:34 – Is MPE New Age Meditation?
17:07 – Collecting Reports of Pure Consciousness
25:48 – Lucid Deep Sleep – Thomas’ Experience
32:19 – Does Consciousness Require Complexity?
39:29 – The Power of Meditation
45:32 – Is Meditation Always a Positive Experience?
53:13 – Is a MPE Actually an Experience?
01:11:21 – Your Brain is Not Telling You the Truth
01:20:08 – Analysing Minimal Conscious Experiences
01:27:26 – Is Meditative Enlightenment Unethical?
01:32:37 – Western Ignorance of Eastern Tradition
01:40:13 – “Coming Home”
01:44:29 – The Political Implications of MPE
01:52:40 – Should Ketamine Be Legalised?
– CONNECT
My Website: https://www.alexoconnor.com
SOCIAL LINKS:
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskeptic
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskeptic
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskeptic
TikTok: @CosmicSkeptic
The Within Reason Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/within-reason/id1458675168
– CONTACT
Business email: contact@alexoconnor.com
Brand enquiries: David@modernstoa.co
——————————————
Source
G.K. Chesterton famously stated that when people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing; rather, they believe in anything.
Such is the truth, demonstrated daily on this site.
Very interesting video and great chemistry between you two! I have really enjoyed it
Vipassana is not about observing thoughts as they arise, its about observing body sensation and the thoughts/feelings that arise with them and then taking on a certain relation to those arisings e.g. equanimity. However in many Vipassana schools you will be taught Anapanna before Vipassana to improve focus and concentration and this is very much as vipassana is described in this video. Try to keep mind on the breath and observe how thoughts arise independently. However it also a training exercise to get better at not having so many thoughts arise independently so you can focus on mediation and observing, ergo you can have directed attention without interruption from busy mind.
The Dalai Lama promised Carl Spackler total consciousness when he died. “Total consciousness beats pure consciousness.” Carl
You're sheltering enemies of the state are you not
Having Narcolepsy sure screws up my desired meditation practice, when I close my eyes, as soon I feel relaxed, I'm out like a light. I'm more determined now that I'm hearing confirmation, that I have it all throughout my day when I'm practicing gratitude and doing the next right thing
Hello Alex, been watching you for years now. I'm currently doing a NCL Level 3 dementia course.. pretty please would it be possible for you to do a video about dementia? I think it would tie into the consciousness videos you do. I watched the what is a brain episode and it really got me thinking about my experience with my aunt who had alzheimers. Where does the consciousness go before the dementia kills you? Is it gone? Does the brain just move it bury it somewhere to protect it?
Thank u for the content x
TL;DR: One of pan-psychisms most compelling reasons of potentially being true is the experience of nothing in wakeful sleep. But this could be theoretically explained by some strange glitch of accidentally generated memory of a moment when you were actually not conscious. If this is the case, then might that mean that what pan-psychism is actually chasing is literal nothingness? This smallest, most simplest experience without substance? Can't consciousness just be the network of consolidated distribution and re-evaluation of physical substrates which can act as abstracted information which gives consciousness substance, similarly to how 1+1 and 2 are necessarily identical?
————————————————————————————
I love the idea of pan-psychism, but I am honestly torn between that and emergence. My problem with pan-psychism is that it seems reasonable to feel like it's almost identical to the God of the gaps fallacy. After all, is it not just taking what is possibly the most mysterious, unexplained thing we know of (consciousness) and just imagines it at the bottom of the ontological chain of the universe seemingly arbitrarily? And we just accept it? Why? Is it just that conceptually inconceivable for there to be no consciousness at the bottom? Surely not… well, technically yes, I suppose it is by definition, but I digress.
Why does 1+1=2? Because the only way to consceive of any alternative logical answer is to imagine that we may not be able to trust our most basic logical intuitions. So of course we are left with no practical choice but to conclude that there simply is no other way for it to be. Can we imagine true non-consciousness? No. Because we are necessarily observing when we imagine. And you cannot observe true nothing because you imagining it would be something which makes the nothing actually something. Just like how 1+1 cannot equal anything other than 2, consciousness cannot experience anything thats not consciousness out of logical necessity. In other words, if the presence of 1+1 necessitates 2 by definition, then couldn't these physical, psychological substances of consciousness (memory, model of space and time, imagination, etc) necessitate the experience of these things also as a mere matter of definition?
A pan-psychist would probably say, if I was to guess, that consciousness is probably just inconceivably simple, especially compared to how we have come to know it. Wakeful sleep could very well be evidence of it too. I dont dispute that wakeful sleep is real. The question for me is what is it? It seems to point almost perfectly at this
"fundamental experience". Experienci g presence when nothing, not even you, are present seems to show rather concretely that ultimately there truly is something rather than nothing.
But something about this just doesnt seem exactly right to me. Think about what we are actually saying. Consciousness is experience itself. If someone has no sensory input, no concept or context of there ever being anything, no internal self, no time, no space, no memory, then isn't this just a description of nothingness? Wouldn't experience, if somehow perfectly measurable, just collapse into absolute zero without any kind of active network to consolidate and organize some kind of structure from something rather than nothing?
But then why is there any experience in wakeful sleep at all? And how do we explain that? Well… it really just could be memory. Think about it. If I wiped your entire memory it would appear to you that now is your first moment ever alive. From your perspective, you never once existed before this. Now, replace your old memories with new memories entirely simulated and synthesized into raw, usable, logical information about you living the life of some made up crazy vigilante. From your perspective, would it not seem like those are your true memories? You would have nothing else to go off of. You would be forced into having this experience which informs everything about you and your life. To you, it would seem exactly like you actually lived that life.
Going back to wakeful sleep, could it not just be that same thing? Could it not just be your unconscious memory processes that consolidates information which somehow accidentally creates a memory of your unconscious state as you sleep? Imagine what would happen if that happened. You would wake up and immediately realize that you actually have this strange memory of literally nothing as though it was something. You may think it was something you really experienced, but it was really just a glitch which created this null variable that went entirely unexperienced until you woke up to experience it? This seems like something that could theoretically describe wakeful sleep.
So, if it were the case that our consciousness was entirely emergent from activity of physical things, consolidated into non-linear structures, constantly distributing and recalculating information it retains in a way to generate a kind of output, then I would expect for everything you have just read to be essentially accurate.
I love this ı love this!
Matter/consciousness
32:10
It is simple 🌎August 18,2026,🌎
I….believe I have a new framework, a framework that has great potential to change humanity profoundly.
I need your help. My Name is Nate Akil Harris, 26
Born February 20, 2000
Of Hephzibah GA,
Help "Me" Help "You" Help "Us" Help "Reality"
🌎August 17,2026,🌎
I….believe I have a new framework, a framework that has great potential to change humanity profoundly.
I need your help. My Name is Nate Akil Harris, 26
Born February 20, 2000
Of Hephzibah GA,
Help "Me" Help "You" Help "Us" Help "Reality"
I understand what they are missing.
7:22 This just sounds like a description of the cosmos, one could say holistically before anything we would call life emerged, but since life is already here in the current moment, just the Cosmos minus that.
Otherwise it sounds like some kind of sensor and maybe Michael Levin would be a good person to ask about this.
This dude gives me Dr. Evil vibes
50:49 best moment was seeing alex having a cortisol spike, losing train of thought and the Researcher then clarify with his obvious answer
Emotions and ethics have nothing to do with each other. Philosophy of consciousness is not philosophy. These modern pseudo philosophical topics are nonsense like many other topics in higher education like women's studies and African studies. It's all a ruse to give left-wing phony intellectuals professions and to increase the wealth and status of colleges and their administrators. It has nothing to do with scholarship and knowledge. On YouTube mostly it's just verbal gobbledygook and obfuscation
you can actually go through the process from mon consciousness to
consciousness during sleep
for example. it can be gradual but the transition just happens. Once unconscious then there is obviously no experience anymore from that point and no time passing either.
Beautiful presentation.
37:56 when he said "molests" I'm pretty sure he meant "annoys" cuz in Spanish molestar means to annoy, and maybe it's something like that in German? idk
one time, I was falling into sleep but I guess I didn't make it there and I had my eyes open while in a dream like state. I went to raise my hand which was under the blanket, which gave me the sensation of raising my hand while clearly not having done so, which prompted a loud banging noise in my head and I woke up.
@5:00 i think memory is an essential aspect of consciousness.
it is the space where consciousness models reality.
Metzinger correctly proves that "no one" lives inside the head, the ego is just a virtual UI icon. But then he makes the classic physicalist error: assuming the 3D rendered brain is the machine running the UI.
The brain is an icon inside the interface, not the computer holding it.
https://youtu.be/IfaNX3ssYyo?t=4026, Now imagine this thought from a schizophrenic’s perspective of experiencing the world—maybe they are perceiving some or all dimensions at once and reacting to the wrong one because they got confused with the dimensions.
Him title dropping the podcast's name was funny.
10:35 "ego dissolution" is a bit misleading. It isn't that there isn't a you, but that you become something else. An experience in its totality, and it feels like the universe
Somos corpos físicos podres que fica a consciência continua e não é biológico é quântica
Deixem de ceticismo são sistemas golpistas de crenças mentirosa criada por sistemas como de Roma pra manipular vcs
Pure consciousness is not emptiness but fullness and connectedness to an universal essence the emptiness is a detachment from that same essence … the consciousness doesn’t emanate from the brain but from the heart united to the essence sending signals to the brain simulating a conscious personal ego awareness of self and others…the essence is the trinity… and in regards to human suffering the only way it can be lessened is to make it redemptive…my experience
1:35:00 David Bohm J Krishnamurti mentioned. Alex should read Krishnamurti’s work.
You should speak with Dr. Carl Hart. He's into drugs, so to speak. Though I've never heard his thoughts on the consciousness aspect. Could be an interesting chat.
This guy's obsessed with drugs
Interesringly I find that for the colour illusions, I can see them as the same colour if I let my eyes go out of focus and see double
I wonder how many women are involved in these conversations. I'm reminded of a moment when my daughter was maybe 3 or 4 months old and I was nursing her. She had been a part of my own body not that long ago. Then she had just fallen asleep looking rather angelic after trying for 10 minutes or so to grab my face and hair with her tiny baby hands. She had been part of me, then I had to hold her little hands back from scratching me, and then was drinking milk from my body… our body? I had a whole series of thoughts about what constituted me vs her, and then whether she had the same conclusion. Did she think we were the same entity still? The dissolution of me– my self– and how separate I was from my children was not so distinct.
You should do a 10 day silence vipásana retreat. It's one hell of a ride. 😅