This is a retrospective of week 48, 2024 (2024-11-25–2024-12-01).
I have listened to the following podcasts this week:
- Remote Viewing & Testing with Curt Jaimungal & Jeffrey Mishlove.1
- The Blind Spot with Matthew Segall & Evan Thompson.2
- What 73 LSD Trips Did To This Professor with Luc Briede-Cooper & Christopher Bache.3
- Empowering Our Joy For Life Through Honoring Our Pain for the World with James Jesso & John Seed.4
Jeffrey Mishlove said:
Limits of Science
Science itself is incapable of addressing first principles. … Why was the universe created in the first place is not a question that science can answer. … What are the limits of the scientific method? … Are there limits…to our understanding of knowledge itself?
—Jeffrey Misholve https://youtu.be/VFpHk9WqCrY?t=6526
What does it mean to be human? Why are we here at all in the first place? Why is there a universe? You will never answer those questions from within a logical scientific framework. … It’s as if the universe does speak to us, …but it speaks to us in riddles. … And so to have a sensitivity to that is a way of acknowledging your connection to the absolute.
—Jeffrey Misholve https://youtu.be/VFpHk9WqCrY?t=6878
Limits of Words
The real truth of the Diamond Sutra, for example, can’t be expressed in words. It’s not a simple teaching. It’s a teaching that you only can experience directly in your heart. It can never be transmitted through words, or through words alone. There are other teachings that go beyond words, that go beyond philosophy. … You have in Buddhism, what’s known as the Prajnaparamita, which means the wisdom of going beyond. … You need to go further.
—Jeffrey Misholve https://youtu.be/VFpHk9WqCrY?t=7462
Unconditional Love
Love yourself unconditionally. … Unconditionally means no matter what you do, no matter what you say, no matter what you think, no matter what you feel, and no matter what anybody else says, thinks, does, or feels with regard to you. … To the best of my knowledge, ego traps emerge when we don’t love ourselves, when we hate ourselves or dislike ourselves at some level… So, therefore, we need to feel important in some way or other, and it’s that need that causes us to separate ourselves from the oneness which is at the very core of our being.
—Jeffrey Misholve https://youtu.be/VFpHk9WqCrY?t=8144
Evan Thompson said:
Life
You need … the experience of being alive yourself, being a living being, in order to be able to recognize the systems that are the living ones. The German philosopher Hans Jonas said … life can be known only by life. And his example was the disembodied mathematical intelligence, the mathematical God—today, you might say the disembodied AI system—…doesn’t really have the means to recognize the beings that have this way of self-individuating…
—Evan Thompson https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=2194
Living is sense-making, or being alive is sense-making. And that’s true already for … the so-called simplest living organisms that we know on Earth, which are the bacteria. So bacteria, they make environments, and they make sense of the world in the sense that they swim in oriented directed ways…
—Evan Thompson https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=2307
The way that I’m inclined to think is that with living as sense-making, you already have sentience… It seems to me reasonable to assume that all life involves the feeling of being living, the feeling of being alive. … So I would use sentience to mean this feeling of being, or feeling of being alive.
—Evan Thompson https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=2419
I would say that the difference between, say a tornado, or a hurricane, and a cell, or a wildfire and a cell, is that the hurricane, [or] tornado, doesn’t really have agency. That is, it doesn’t seek to alter its conditions in order to keep itself going, and all life does that.
—Evan Thompson https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=2483
The kind of pattern formation that happens with life is a kind of self-individuating pattern. And that is something distinctive. … It’s a qualitative difference.
—Evan Thompson https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=2561
Life depends on physics, but is beyond physics. … The idea here, really, is that life is constant change. It’s constant change and transformation.
—Evan Thompson https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=2675
It’s as if you had a billiard ball and you were trying to calculate the movement the trajectories of the balls while the table was constantly changing its shape, the balls were reproducing, they were changing in size and texture.
—Evan Thompson https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=2764
Life requires different kinds of explanation. It requires strongly path dependent historical explanations. What life can do in any given moment depends on how it got there through a contingent history, and we don’t really have a well developed mathematics for that. … It wouldn’t be described in the law determined, or law entailing, way that you would have in…physics as we know [it].
—Evan Thompson https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=2782
Matthew Segall and Evan Thompson said:
Artificial Intelligence
One of the points you [Evan Thompson et al.] bring up in the book [The Blind Spot] is that rather than these machines [AI] becoming more intelligent, what’s actually happening is that we’re degrading our life worlds to allow the machines to navigate more efficiently. And, indeed, it seems like human interactions are increasingly being degraded to suit the capability of these machines.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=2974
I think worries about AI consciousness and sentience are basically hype. I think that deep learning systems are incredibly powerful statistical prediction tools. … So, ChatGPT predicts the next most likely token in a way that very much matches our expectations, but ChatGPT knows nothing about words. It knows nothing about meaning. It doesn’t know what it’s doing. It’s a statistical prediction model. It’s a large language model, right? It’s a statistical prediction tool. That’s not an agent. It doesn’t even have rudimentarily any of the features of a living system that makes its environment, that exhibits agency, that exhibits self-production. … I mean, to be very provocative about it, computers don’t actually do anything. … We use them to do all sorts of things, but the meaning, the relevance, the semantics, all has to loop through us. The mapping for the relationship between the number crunching, if you want to put it that way, and the meaning, has to go through us and our agency.
—Evan Thompson https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=3046
I think this is just either hype or deep confusion, and it needs to be called out. And there needs to be a kind of wakeup call.
—Evan Thompson https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ?t=3220
John Seed said:
It’s not over till it’s over
We’ve had it… The destruction that’s taken place of climate and species and biosphere… There’s absolutely no way that anything on the horizon multiplied a hundredfold is going to actually deal with this. … It’s only a matter of…watching exactly how the crumbling and the collapse takes place. … On the other hand, …when I think that my ancestors have survived…six previous extinction spasms, …it just seems it’d be a little bit early to throw in the towel. And, you know, it’s not over till it’s over, and I’ve got nothing better to do than to throw myself into it as if we still had a chance.
—John Seed https://youtu.be/dN4DHhSIbqE?t=592
We’re not going to be able to think our way out of the mess.
—John Seed https://youtu.be/dN4DHhSIbqE?t=1129
What we found is that whenever a group of people gets together to spend a couple of days with the shared intention to heal that illusion of separation, it hardly matters what you do after that, that anything will work, that the experience of incredible opening up and connection both first to each other, to the other people that we’re experiencing this with, and then this feeling of our rootedness in the living earth and the ability to receive inspiration and vision and empowerment from the earth, all of these things come very, very easily.
—John Seed https://youtu.be/dN4DHhSIbqE?t=1558
I used to think we had just had to create awareness and things would improve. Everybody’s now aware and nothing’s improved. It’s like we’re helpless without the passion that these feelings bring that we can know what’s going on. We can know what needs to be done. But without that passion that the feelings provide, that knowledge is sterile.
—John Seed https://youtu.be/dN4DHhSIbqE?t=2309
It’s like the feelings aren’t there to disable me, they’re there to enable me. And once I have acknowledged the feelings sufficiently so that the feelings understand that that intelligence has been accepted, …that the message has got through, then they don’t need to wake me up at 3 a.m.
—John Seed https://youtu.be/dN4DHhSIbqE?t=2602
Christopher Bache said:
Humanity represents the greatest danger to life on this planet. We are the life destroyers. We are the driving force of the sixth extinction. If we can heal humanity, then all the other animals, all the other mammals and life forms on the planet will be safe.
—Christopher Bache https://youtu.be/cvhWP8xzwiY?t=2169
What I experienced was humanity came to a point where we basically lost control of our lives. … We basically were on an extinction trajectory, and just when it reached its peak we went through a threshold and the danger began to subside. And we began to, as it were, pick ourselves up on the other side of this decades-long series of crises. And when we picked ourselves up, and when we began to reorganize ourselves after this crisis, we found that we had been profoundly and deeply and permanently changed by this crisis. … We were changed at the core level of our essential psyche, of our collective psyche. This crisis opened up our heart to one another, and opened up our mind to the universe, in a way that was collectively unprecedented. And as we began to interact in this post-crisis reality, there was a synergistic feeding off of patterns and trends, and feeding back and forth, all circulating around new values, new perceptions of the good, new understandings of life, new understandings of ourselves, new understandings of the universe, new capacities that were opening within the human heart in the human mind.
—Christopher Bache https://youtu.be/cvhWP8xzwiY?t=4269
Notes:
1. Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal, “Jeffrey Mishlove: Remote Viewing & Testing the Paranormal”, Premiered: 20230908, YouTube Video, 3:07:30, https://youtu.be/VFpHk9WqCrY. Retrieved: 20241126.
2. PCC: Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, “Dialogue with Evan Thompson about The Blind Spot”. Premiered: 20241128, YouTube Video, 1:00:44, https://youtu.be/bpkYtVOCgDQ. Retrieved: 20241127.
3. Luc Briede-Cooper, “What 73 LSD Trips Did To This Professor”, Premiered: 20230105, YouTube Video, 1:59:55, https://youtu.be/cvhWP8xzwiY. Retrieved: 20241130.
4. Adventures Through The Mind, “Empowering Our Joy For Life Through Honoring Our Pain for the World | John Seed ~ ATTMind 191”, Premiered: 20240906, YouTube Video, 1:36:25, https://youtu.be/dN4DHhSIbqE. Retrieved: 20241201.
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