#E37 Mind Uploading, Consciousness After Death, and Sentient AI With Max Velmans

About Max Velmans

Max Velmnans is a leading psychologist and academic who's been studying consciousness for over 40 years. Max is an Emeritus professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, His main research focus is on integrating work on the philosophy, cognitive psychology and neuropsychology of consciousness. He has over 130 publications on this topic.

Read the HYPERSCALE transcript.

(00:28) Briar: Hi everybody, and welcome to another episode of Hyperscale. It's your host Briar Prestidge. And today I'm joined by Max. I was telling Max before, I come with a lot of questions about consciousness and ready to dive into this fascinating discussion. Welcome to the show.

(01:28) Max: My pleasure.

(01:32) Briar: So Max, you've obviously been exploring consciousness for, I believe over 40 years now, and what is consciousness, maybe that's the best place for us to start? How would you define it?

(01:49) Max: Okay, it's, it's a good place to start. I've actually got an online paper titled How to Define Consciousness and How Not to Define Consciousness. So if you put that into a web browser, you'll get it. The word consciousness has got many different meanings, but for the purposes of what I think we'll be discussing the natural place to start is the simplest place to start. So when I talk about consciousness, or in fact when most philosophers of mine talk about consciousness they're talking about our ordinary experience and the fact of our ordinary experience. We obviously have brains, we have a physical world around us, and we make certain assumptions about the relationship between those. But as a result of our interaction with the physical world, we are able to perceive that. So I can see you, you can see me, and so on.

So we're having a visual conscious experience. Now, any discussion of consciousness that focuses on just what the brain is doing or what the physics are about and so on, but that doesn't make a direct contact with our ordinary experience winds up not being a discussion of consciousness at all. And the reason it's actually necessary for me to say something as obvious as that is that quite a sway of philosophy of mind have tried to treat our ordinary experience of consciousness as if it's a secondary issue. And it's very important also in even getting into this discussion to be very clear about what you mean by the term mind as opposed to the term consciousness. A typical way of talking about the mind, say in modern psychology would be to view it as a form of human information processing. Now, once you get into the mind that way, you have a natural way of also making links to machines.

But it's also obvious to anyone who's got a psychological background, who's been working in this field that most of the operations of the human mind are unconscious. So if you're describing the operations of mind, you won't necessarily be describing anything about consciousness. And that's the big point that is also missed in the discussion of machine intelligence and so on. So before getting into that, deeper topic, which I'm sure you want to get into in a very simple way… that's what I mean. I should also say that there are lively discussions over the last 15 years about the distribution of consciousness, the wider distribution of consciousness, that go all the way to what's called panpsychism. The notion that everything living is conscious or everything existing, if it's an entity that could be a subject of consciousness, might be conscious.

And there's even a serious discussion of something called cosmopsychism, which is the view that the universe in its inherent nature is conscious. And that's true also of eastern philosophies where the notion that the universe is such has a consciousness and that we're expressions of that universe and that we participate at least in principle, in that deeper form of consciousness as well. So I say this only by way of introduction, because in saying that, when I talk about consciousness, starting with everyday experiences, just as we're having them now, I don't want to exclude the many other ways that human beings can be conscious, which have little to do with our everyday perception, deep experiences of many different kinds, which clearly form into this domain of filling our awareness. We experience them, but they're quite unlike perhaps normal conscious experiences that we have.

So that points to, if you like… what I'm talking about, simply picks it out. But then if you ask a question such as what is it? What is consciousness? Then you have to do something else as well. You have to elaborate on the relationships of what you're pointing to, to everything else that you're interested in. So what's the relationship of consciousness to the brain? What's the relationship of consciousness to the physical world and so on? And what are the deeper realms of consciousness and how do they relate to everyday human experience? So yeah, in a few sentences, well, they're always, I'm afraid a few sentences always become a few paragraphs when I have a go at them,

(07:43) Briar: Especially when you're talking about such complex topics such as consciousness. So absolutely, I'm not surprised. Where is consciousness? Have they identified… Is it in the brain where is it?

(08:01) Max:  Okay. It’s a really good question, and I'm going to say something you're going to find a little bit puzzling to start off with because that's the question or the issue that my own work started with. When I first seriously started thinking about it back in 1975, I had actually been interested in consciousness for some years before that, but this is the point in my academic career when I really wanted to focus on that and decide whether I might have something to say about it or not. My presumptions, if you like, my presuppositions about the question that you're asking is, for instance, exemplified in visual perception, which is going on between us now. So the default assumption is that the screen we see out here is a physical thing, light rays are reflected off its surfaces and activate our visual systems, and then that activates the occipital regions of the brain and so on.

And so far we don't have a conscious experience, but then something happens in the brain and we do have a conscious experience. So we have three things. We have the physical world out there in space, we have energies being transmitted to our visual systems, and then something happens to the brain. And consciousness arises… most of western's philosophy of mind, over the 20th century anyway, there were two basic positions about the question you ask. One was dualism, which says, yeah, it's nowhere really. You could represent it in a figure as a cloud or something. It's literally outside of space and outside of the physical universe. That was Descartes’ original idea. 

And then the other position, which was dominant in the 20th century anyway, is that actually it seems to be like, that seems to be nowhere, but it's really just a state of the brain. And that was where I started as well. And I thought, well, maybe if that's true consciousness in the brain, maybe it's like an electromagnetic field in some way that controls the brain's operations in some ways emergent and then activates on the brain itself. Then I thought, well, hang on, there's something wrong with that because I'm not even conscious of having a brain. So how can consciousness be actually altering the brain's operations if I'm not even aware of what the neurons are doing? If it did then it would have to be doing it unconsciously, which is kind of a self-contradiction. And then I was just walking down the street one day and I had an even more disturbing thought, which was, if I'm actually simply accurate about what I'm experiencing the actual phenomenology of my consciousness say now, or you are actually in the same situation. If you give a complete description of your visual experience now, your conscious experience, then your only visual conscious experience is the screen you see out here in space. Whatever you see of your body in the room, the sounds that seem to be emanating from space and so on, and introspectively, you have no access at all to any consciousness in your brain or nowhere.

Those are theoretical constructions. They're not actual descriptions of your experience. And then I thought, well, hang on, there's something wrong with the fundamental presupposition. So in answer to your question, where is my visual experience now? I would say insofar as it has a location, it has the location it appears to have out there in the room, and you seem to be on my computer screen, that's my only Briar visual experience I have. And so what we need to do is alter the basic model a little bit so we can still say, yeah, there's a physical entity which we'll call a screen out there in space. And there indeed are electromagnetic energies being reflected off the screen and so on and operating my visual system in the way that we understand it too. And then the end result of all that interaction, which is pre-conscious, is me seeing a Briar on the screen out there in space. And you see a Max out there in space. And so it's reflexive. So there's an entity in space that sends light rays to your visual system, which results in an experience of an entity somewhere out in there in space. And at close distances, the appearance is roughly where the entity actually is. So that's the beginning of what I call the reflexive model of perception.

The basic rule of thumb, as far as I'm concerned in terms of everything about the phenomenology of consciousness, is simply to try and describe it as accurately as you can without imposing a theory on it, which actually winds up distorting its nature. If what I'm saying is right and what I'm saying is really simple, then this entire debate about whether the visual experience is nowhere, like in a cloud or whether it's really in a state of brain, is simply a debate based on an assumption which has no basis in reality, and that's why they can't resolve it. That's just the starting point for a completely different kind of discussion then, but that's… Interestingly, the question you asked me is precisely where my own thinking started in terms of my own work and so on.

(14:42) Briar: Wow. And what was it like back over 40 years ago when you had this thought and you started doing your work? Because it's a bit like a wild goose chase. I perceive this, this, this consciousness topic to be where, where did it start? Let's talk our audience through your, your career and your research and what you've discovered over the years.

(15:10) Max: Yeah. Okay. It'll have to be a very quick thumbnail. So I suppose my interest in mind and consciousness goes back to teenage years really and had to do with existential questions, existential personal questions. Who am I? What’s the nature of reality? And I was a skeptical youth, rather difficult in school because I asked difficult questions because you didn't understand the answers basically. So I was kind of dabbling with these ideas all the way from teenage years really. And it also fed into a kind of teenage alienation, which made those questions acute for me. So I really needed to know, what is the nature of reality? What could I actually believe in. What's real and all that.

Nevertheless for all sorts of other reasons, when I finished school and had to pick a career, my first choice was electrical engineering because I was excited by what was happening in the American Space program. And I thought, it'd be really cool to be in somewhere involved in all that. And so my first degree was in electrical engineering, but in my final year of that degree, we had an essay that we could choose on any topic. And that was back in about 1962. And the topic I chose was thinking machines, which is not a thousand miles from the sorts of things you want to talk about. And even in those days there was a field, so there was a field called cybernetics, which is the whole science of self-organizing control systems or self-controlling systems and so on. And there was also the beginning of early pattern recognition devices, and those early pattern recognizers were the forerunners of AI because they were multi-layered and so on, but in a very simple sort of way.

I realized as I was doing that in the end I wanted to do something else. Even when I was an electrical engineer, I was reading philosophy and psychology and while practicing as an engineer I was also studying to become a psychologist. In the end, I moved from one field to the other and through a long process that I won't get into because we haven't got much time, there's so many other things to discuss. I wound up at the University of London with the possibility of doing a PhD in psychology. And I really wanted to do something on consciousness. And the first thing I did was to build a machine which could expand our consciousness. So there are lots of ways you could do that in principle, but I built a machine that could double the range of human hearing, for example, because I was interested in why our sensors were tuned in the way that they normally are when other animals have their senses tuned in lots of different places.

Unfortunately, the answer to that was too obvious to get a PhD, which is that our sensors are tuned in the way that they normally are because that's where the information of most use to our particular form of life happens to be. So I then spent years organizing that machine into a different kind of hearing aid for the deaf. And only in 1975 was able to get back to the question of consciousness. But once I went through that process that I described to you about… “Hang on, I've got all this wrong. Something's wrong with the way we're thinking about things.” I then spent nine months trying to work out what the consequences of that might be if I made that assumption about consciousness. How would consciousness relate to unconscious processing? How does our conscious experience relate to what we normally think of as the physical world and so on?

And there were many questions of that kind… how does subjectivity relate to objectivity? For example, if I say this out here is part of my experience, what does that mean as far as objective science is concerned or objectivity and so on and so on. And my kind of assumption at the time is that I probably got something wrong because it seemed to be such a different starting place. So I had to kind of trace through in rough all these relationships to see if in the end, I'd run into a dead end or a, what they call in philosophy, a reductio absurdum, like an absurd conclusion, which means the starting point had to be wrong. And I found in the end, after nine months of that that I found my way all the way back to the beginning again. So whether that whole framework of thinking was correct or not is one thing, but whether it could be self-consistent, internally coherent was another thing. And it seemed to pass that test as far as I could see. 

then I spent the next nine months reading everything I could read about everything that had been written about consciousness that I could lay my hands on, because I thought, well, if it's coherent and it's a different starting place, then they're bound to be lots of people who've gone there already. Still, this is before deciding that I actually had something to say about it. And that was very interesting because having gone through all that process myself independently, it was very interesting to see where others had gone down similar paths, but then gone off in a different direction. And so I could make a judgment on each occasion whether I wanted to go with where they were going or whether I had good reasons not to.

And so I did another [inaudible] answer that. And then it seemed to me I did have something I could say at least as a kind of academic thing, right or wrong. And it took me six months to gather all my notes together. And then I worked on a manuscript for 10 years before I published anything, which was something like 600 pages, 24 chapters, completely unpublishable was the background to my thinking. And then I thought, I'll never get this published. So started publishing papers and a couple of years after I started publishing papers, someone just came into my office and said we're looking for books. And I said, well, I could write a book on consciousness. And in two further years I produced Understanding Consciousness, which is my main book. The first paper I ever published was exactly on the topic that we started with called “Consciousness, Brain and the Physical World”. And the second paper, which was published in the Behavior and Brain Sciences was called, “Is Human Information Processing Conscious?”. And that second paper takes us directly into the kind of issues I think you have to get into. 

(23:22) Briar: I've got a few questions in relation to what you've just described. Would you say that after all these years in doing all of this research, that you have been able to answer that question that you had back when you were a young boy growing up, that existential almost crisis those existential questions that you had?

(23:48) Max: Yeah. But that's a different story. So it's a much bigger story. I wasn't just doing academic work, I was also exploring, in states of the many, many years… One thing that's really nice about this topic is that although you have to be very precise about your academic work. You don't, and always feed into an existing conversation if you like, in a way that everyone will understand or you hope they will understand. There's nothing about the topic that forces you to stop your own explorations there. So the whole business of, how does my experience relate to the deeper nature of reality is a big topic. And I've explored that in many ways, not just theoretically. I've done it theoretically, and I've also done it personally in terms of, my own inner journals. There are many different paths you can take for exploring those topics personally. 

Let me come straight out and say, look, I'm 81 now, so as an aged human being I'm in a much better state than I was when I was 18. If we reverse those numbers. I do have a feeling of, of having moved a lot on those deeper issues and feeling comfortable with the place that I've moved to. Let's just leave it to that just for the moment.

(25:35) Briar: I think it's interesting when we're growing up and we find out about death and oh my God, it is a horrifying thought. We're young, we find out one day we're going to die. And even myself, I've had many different discussions about existence and what's the purpose of everything and stuff like this when, when I was growing up, especially in my early twenties and like, is consciousness, is it something that that goes after death? Because I've also been reading a book recently by Dr. Bruce Grayson, and he was sharing lots of quite interesting discussions in it about how when people had died on the operating table and he would be out in the hall and talking to somebody and have a stain down his front and things like this. And he would go back to the room and people would say, I saw you, I saw that stain and describe situations that only they could have been part of. So does our consciousness die when we die? Like, tell us a bit about this.

(26:44) Max: Okay. Another big topic and Bruce Grayson is a leading researcher in that particular area, as is the unit in which he works, which is the division of perceptual studies at the University of Virginia and Charlottesville. They're not the only ones. There are many others who've been involved in this kind of thing who have been taking phenomena like that very seriously and trying to be as rigorous as they can. But nevertheless, coming up with stories and reports and so on, which don't fit into our worldview. So the question that you ask has very much to do with a deep debate about whether reality can be fully described in terms of conventional materialist reductionism, the notion that the whole world is physical and that we too are wholly physical. And so when our physical bodies die, nothing of us remains.

Equally the presumption that goes with that is that our consciousness is a product of what the brain is doing. So if the producer dies, the product dies. End of story. Now Bruce Grayson's work and the work of others to do with near-death experiences and so on is pretty well documented. Another area that they do in that division, is past life memories. Now, again if you're a materialist reductionist, as most people are, the stories that come from young children, they're usually under five, about detailed memories they have of actually having been born in another family, sometimes in a nearby village or something of that kind, be treated with skepticism simply because it doesn't fit into our sense of what is scientifically possible.

But there's some very clear cases of the sort that you mentioned, which suggest that information of some sort relating to our lives does persist. And sometimes, is experienced as a past life memory and the various signs of, with some of these children, of physical changes in their body, which relate to for instance, the things that have happened to the people that they believe themselves to have been in some other place that are known, not to them as young children, but to the people who, were the families, for example, of the people in that place. So that would be like one line of evidence.

Another has to do with a completely different area of concern, which is kind of simpler to get at in a way and completely relevant to the question that you ask, which is how could we be conscious at all given what we understand about the nature of the brain, the body and the rest of the physical world. And although in the 20th century the default assumption within neuroscience, for example, is that it's just waiting around the corner. Okay neuroscience hasn't discovered yet what might be the necessary insufficient neural conditions for the production of a conscious experience. Nevertheless, 10 years, 20 years, you name it, that will happen. But even neuroscientists who are deeply into this at the lead end of their field, have started to move into a position of saying, actually there's something more fundamental here that it doesn't look possible in principle, if you like, without invoking magic to see how something like a brain alone could produce something like a conscious experience.

If you read a neurophysiological textbook, everything in the book will be how one set of brain circuits, might affect other brain circuits or neurochemistry. It's all if you like, within the domain of third-person science. But you can write a perfectly good book about all that and never mention conscious experience. You might have a chapter on it and then, but those neuroscientists who are most interested in consciousness have come to accept, and this is an acceptance because the same thing happened at the turn of the 20th century in, late 1890s and so on, almost the same debates that you can get in principle that the neural correlates of a particular conscious experience. But you can't show how that translates into an experience as such. In other words, you could say, whenever I'm having a visual experience of this kind, maybe this particular pattern of activation is happening in the visual cortex of this kind.

But the relationship between the two is kind of open-ended. And then yeah, I suppose my most downloaded paper is called the “Evolution of Consciousness”. And that paper actually goes into the whole topic of, at what point in evolution did consciousness emerge? And there you get a whole spectrum of theories all the way to only humans are conscious; only brains of certain complexity are conscious; only creatures that actually move could be conscious because, they approach and they avoid saying they need something like pleasure and pain. The problem is, no matter what functional organization you pick, you always have this question of yeah, I can see how it functions, and I can see what added functions are created as you get them. These systems [inaudible] more complex, but nothing there tells you why the light of consciousness should switch on.

That's what motivates panpsychism, which says, look, consciousness is more basic in the universe. Panpsychism tends to talk about tiny things. So the smallest thing that that could be an entity, could be a conscious entity. Then you have the problem with how do these consciousnesses combine together? It's called the combination problem. Then there's an even deeper theory which says, look, the primary ground of being is conscious. if you say that, and actually that's where I've come to, I actually have a chapter on that called, “Is the Universe Conscious, Reflexive Monism, and the Ground of Being”, that's 2021 chapter also online, which gives the argument in more detail. 

Once you say that and you say, well, how does that affect me? What’s it got to do with the question you ask? What about my consciousness? Then it's quite useful to think about that in psychological terms. If you think of this of the human mind as a kind of iceberg, floating in the sea. This is this common metaphor in psychology, and just the tip of the iceberg is sticking out of the water. And that tip of the iceberg corresponds to our conscious experience. Now, everything we currently consciously experience, that's at our conscious tip, and then just below the tip, but in the water and not conscious for us at this moment are all the processes that that serve the conscious tip, this cognitive processes, for example, which enable us to see and so on. And there will also be, as you go a little bit deeper, personal unconscious states of a kind which are discussed, for instance, in psychodynamics and, say Freudian theory and, and so on, that's still personal to us, our own shadows and, drives and which we're not really conscious of and so on. 

You go deep still down the iceberg and you get to things that are true for all humans, and that's sometimes called transpersonal, unconscious things that are as true for you as they are for me and, and humanity as a whole. And then you keep going down into the sea, which you can think of as the complete reality of what actually forms this universe as well as creatures like ours. But the truth is that the iceberg is a product of the sea couldn't be otherwise. Whatever the nature of being is, we're a product of it logically. It's impossible that we couldn't be. And so whatever the nature of being is, we are particular configurations of what is, and that is our deepest nature.

And then the question you ask about, might something persist when the body dies, that's conscious. The answer would be if you go this route that yes, bodily consciousness dies with the dying of the body, but if for example, it turns out that the findings of the kind that you talk about, earlier on about near-death studies and past life memories and such like are true, and I'm perfectly happy to be open to that, then information about our lives is in some way retained somehow. And in any case, even if it isn't, if you think of it as waves on the sea, and the sea is just the nature of whatever it is, and we're momentary configurations of that lack of wave on the sea, once the wave goes, the sea remains in the same way that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. If that energy turns out to be conscious, then that can neither be created nor destroyed. It simply is. So that's a quick tour. For all sorts of reasons, that's where I go with it. That's actually what I think is the case. I've spent my whole life debating with awfully clever people. So I'm well aware of what they think and nevertheless, for all sorts of reasons, we simply wouldn't have time to get into. That's my feeling about the whole thing and as well as something that I've written about to some extent, in this 2021 chapter in particular.

(39:49) Briar: Okay. Wow. I feel like I've got even more questions than what I had before. That is really fascinating to think about all of this. When we are thinking about this almost like collective consciousness, say humanity was to come together and everyone was to have more awareness about their consciousness. Could we, like, make things happen? Like could we move things like with the power of our minds together, like a hive mind?

(40:22) Max: There are all sorts of stories about things like that but in a way we could make things happen in a much more obvious way. So there's nothing stopping us from self-destruction apart from our belief systems and our feeling of isolation, alienation and, and compulsive behavior. There's something kind of mad about our attitudes to climate change, our attitudes towards truth, the othering that is typical in our world, that the defining of self-encounters a distinction to everybody else. If you actually have a realization or a deep feeling that we're all manifestations of the same thing, literally dressed up in different ways, playing different roles with our own dramas, which we have to, find our way through. But we're nevertheless deeply connected in actuality. That itself has enormous transformative potential. Because if we are connected and the same, the possibility of changing, our relationship to this planet suddenly becomes obvious. 

There's deep madness actually in our social world at the moment, and people who are very powerful and driven and accumulative are actually often deeply troubled beings. They don't have peace of mind. They're very bright often, but they don't have any kind of wisdom, I would say. Can you imagine a politics where we actually believed all that and treated each other that way? And, and you know what? I think what actually has to get into the whole business of having mystical experiences, for example, which yeah, I mean, I think some of you want to ask about death and so on. One thing that's really interesting in current explorations of the mind is the whole resurgence of psychedelics. 

One fascinating and relevant finding in all that is that one of the powerful reasons for introducing say psilocybin therapy or possibly LSD therapy or something of that kind into the alleviation of suffering of those who are diagnosed with terminal cancer, is that the depression that often follows from knowing you're about to die. And having all the fears that we do about the question that you ask, that this is going to be, the end of everything can be dramatically transformed by a mystical experience generated… well it's not generated by, enabled by say, a psilocybin experience. And the effects have been quite dramatic. And basically, it's not that people don't think they're going to die, and it doesn't mean that the cancer's cured, they just don't feel about death in the same sort of way because they've experienced something different about their own nature. That's salutary in relationship to the question you ask. 

I should say this as well, that, I can say these stories, chat on as much as I like, and I never try and persuade anybody of this. I can, all I can really do in an intellectual discourse of the sort that we're having is to say, look, these are perfectly plausible options to entertain, given the problems posed by consciousness and so on. You can't really be convinced of, for instance, what I'm talking about, consciousness in the ground of being and so on. If you're intellectually honest with yourself, without actually having such experiences, I'm simply going on my own, background of paid up sceptic, towards anything that anyone told me if I didn't some way experience it for myself and so on.

So that's part of the picture as well, but there are an indefinitely large number of ways of experiencing our connections, which fall short of that. That's far more important than somehow having the cleverness to somehow, take carbon out of the atmosphere. And, in spite of the fact that we're pumping more in than we could ever extract, when the obvious solution is to not when you're we're in a hole, stop digging is usually the best way of going forward.

(46:25) Briar: So other than psychedelics, someone listening to this podcast who is interested in tapping more into their consciousness, how could they do this? Or having more control of their unconscious mind as well

(46:41) Max: There are indefinitely large number of ways. There are many, many valuable practices within Buddhism, for example. There are there are very interesting practices to do with actually trying to do an introspective observation of what happens when your mind is completely still, and then you kind of notice that there's still this consciousness. So there are no thoughts. And then you can get into deep states where your attention is so focused that the so to speak, contents of experience fall away. And a little bit like the, the ripples on the sea die down, and it's only when they die down that you have a sense of the sea. And people also have spontaneous experiences of this kind, which can happen to them as a consequence of, say, some traumatic event or they can just happen. They might find themselves in nature on a beautiful day. And then, something about the state they're in triggers them into feeling this kind of unity with everything. There’s an enormous literature on all that. So there are many, many different methods of coming into a sense of the more than human, I could put it that way as well, and the sense of aliveness in everything.

It's quite topical at the moment. People are discovering things about nature, for example, about its intelligence, its interconnectedness. This is also something which, is kind of in the background of sort of things that interests you, because a lot of the kind of technological stuff that people get excited about are very me self, I want to do this, I want to do that. And somehow ignore the fact that we're embedded deeply into relatedness, our bodies themselves, are complexes of biological organisms, and that our actual experiences is this kind of higher level version of, this enormously complex set of processes that constitute our embodiment and we're deeply interrelated to the information which is all around us, which isn't just social, other people obviously, and cultures and so on, but part of nature, which supports us and to get a sense of the interconnectedness. Yeah, a lot of people do that in lots of different ways, actually. Anyone who has a love of nature, won't want to destroy it. Anyone who feels connected will value their interconnectedness. And the last thing you want to do is to tamper with that, and the whole business of love committed into it as well. Deeply.

So I don't want to be talking about things like that, if you're talking about what's going to make a big difference as opposed to, colonizing Mars, for example, which we've got the, the chances of making Mars as beautiful as the planet that we're living on is, is for the birds.

(50:43) Briar: It's a little dusty on Mars, isn't it?

(50:46) Max: It's quite insanity in my view. It really is.

(50:51) Briar: So do you worry, Max, that with our reliance on things such as phones and Netflix and social media, like people are addicted if people don't have ADHD, they've got attention deficit traits now anyway, because of this barrage of information around us. Do you worry that perhaps people aren't sitting and being and experiencing their consciousness how they should be? Because we're just so-- we're like algorithms now or we're controlled by the algorithms

(51:29) Max: Yeah, I'm not, I don't do social media for precisely the reasons you talk about, because you get lost in it.

(51:38) Briar: You'd be horrified if you saw my phone usage Max.

(51:41) Max:  (laughs) No, no, no. I'd feel empathetic. No, not at all.

(51:46) Briar: You would be horrified. 

(51:49) Max: I can see you're connected anyway. One very sad [inaudible] as far as I'm concerned, is that, all those brilliant guys, in Silicon Valley who worked out how to make these things addictive, are very careful not to send their own children to schools or expose them to precisely the know it's addictive, and so they keep their kids well away from it and send their children to Steiner schools and that kind of stuff. And that's very sad, when actually these brilliant guys ought to be devoting themselves to… not how to make more money, how to beat the competition but to, preserving all that's wonderful about humanity, really. I mean, another bit of me, just thinks humans are amazing, but I think we're seriously at risk of not surviving.

All the things we're talking about are part of the fabric of the problem here and all the way to the assumptions we make about the nature of reality, and that, yeah, if the case is, for example, that we're just bodies… when our bodies die, end of everything, and that those bodies have evolved as a consequence of a version of Darwinian evolution where the fittest survive, thanks. And the ones that don't reproduce well enough don't survive. It's not surprising if this is your belief system. And it's not surprising we're in a kind of postmodern world where all the old belief systems have fallen away and, there isn't a kind of firm ground in which to stand. And then you think, well, if this is all there is to life, I might as well get as much as I can for myself, and have as hedonistic a ride as I can because it's meaningless anyway.

If you actually have a different feeling about the whole thing, and I do stress the feeling bit, it can't just be an intellectual thing. You can entertain something intellectually, but you've got to actually kind of feel it or experience it in some way. Then you're just naturally more inclined to not in the end get addicted in into these things. Cause you can feel what they're doing to you. We’re losing touch with our own inner states. It almost has to go right into the educational process where children have to, as a norm be more mindful of what kind of things are painful, unhealthy… what sort of things really make them happy? And unfortunately a lot of that is being driven by our economic model. For example, in the states-- beware of a bit little bit of psychology.

Cause you can misuse it. I was amazed by, I think his name was Berna, who developed the idea of satisficing as opposed to something which satisfies, it's something that satisfices and something that satisfices is something that gives you a buzz when you buy it, like the latest phone or whatever. But it doesn't satisfy because the buzz is a bit like the Christmas tree presents. You open them and then you put them aside, and you might never play with them again. They, they peddle dreams, if only I had the latest X, Y or Z, I will be happier. And so on. And this case, if you get back to the whole social media thing and the addictive thing and so on, and there many aspects to it, but one central aspect is the problem of identity. Who am I? And needing to kind of find who I'm, in terms of how many clicks I get and, and how many people like me, obviously there's no harm in wanting to be liked and, and so on and be noticed and so on. But it's not embodied.

There's another story here, which has to do with the nature of the human body, if you like, if you're starting to talk about mind uploading and all that stuff… Can't help you if you actually manage to do it because you might be trapped in that, then, now this is a sting in the tail of the whole process as far as I can see. And when really what you have to accept is, yeah, I'm living in this body. It's kind of a great instrument in many ways. And yeah, suffering, of course, lots of, illnesses and stuff as well. But it's part of being alive in this world, in this, this dream, if you like. In terms of people's interconnection, it's a little bit like everyone's in separate bubbles, which are kind of communicating one bubble to the other, and you're not getting the, the, the bubbles to touch properly or overlap, to what you might call an intimate relationship, which requires a kind of openness. And being in the momentness and human ‘embodiedness’. 

We are humans, let's have the human, let's have the human experience. Most people are not having a full human experience and not through any fault of their own. Often it's that we've created cultures that don't foster it and traumatize children and… Another crazy thing is where we're working harder and harder with all this technology and have less and less time and so on. So it's obviously addictive, it's a drug and it's not doing us any good. It's not as if I'm saying anything new here. I'm just saying that there are all sorts of techniques available for stepping back from all that and embedding that to some extent in our education and self-awareness of what we're doing. Otherwise we'll do it compulsively and the end product could, could be quite bad I think.

(59:21) Briar: I think the interesting thing about the brain as well is that, well, I will even just speak from personal experience here. So I went and got a brain test and they put all these electrodes on my brain to see how my brain was functioning. And if you had have asked me, I would've said, yeah, I'm a bit tired, but I live a, a very busy lifestyle. I travel a lot, I run multiple businesses, but no worries. I'm, no more tired than the next person next to me. I'm not stressed, I'm not this, I'm not that. Well, lo and behold, I got my brain scan back and it told me that I had chronic fatigue, like really, really bad fatigue. So I went and got I've had some, some biofeedback sessions where I watch YouTube and it shows me what my brain is doing well and, and gives it that feedback and oh my God, I feel like such a different person now.

And the reason I wanted to sort of share this, I guess, is that I think the interesting thing about our brain is that we don't necessarily- we might not perceive what's wrong with it because it becomes our new baseline, our normal for us. So yeah, I just thought that was such an interesting thing to actually go out there and, and to realize the damage, I guess, that social media and these algorithms had done to my brain. It was fascinating. And jumping into the man and machine bit. So we started talking a little bit about man and machine with the algorithms now, but I want to go further than this. So what are your thoughts about the concept of mind uploading? Because transhumanists and futurists, they often argue that in the future we could upload our brain to a cloud. There could be multiple different avatar versions of us. You mentioned before about potentially getting stuck in the mind upload, and I mean that sounds blooming awful, but if you could talk us through this, your thoughts about this concept, would it be possible?

(1:01:29) Max: At the moment, it’s not possible. Usually when we're talking about mind uploading, my assumption is that what people are talking about is uploading of our knowledge system, our general knowledge system, which somehow encodes, all our past life experience, our, in this life experiences and somehow, somehow encodes our whole history and whatever. Certainly last time I looked, we know something about what's going on in the brain, when learning takes place and so on, in terms of the synaptic growth of, well used connections and shifts therefore in which kind of circuits get easily activated versus not easily activated and so on. But as far as I know nobody quite knows how, all that is retrieved, in memory, at least physiologically and so on. And so it's not like, lifting the hard drive of the brain and loading it onto another hard drive or in the cloud or whatever. 

The other thing that's… and yeah, I almost wrote a chapter on could robots be conscious in, understanding consciousness? That was one chapter, chapter five. That had to do with the particular theory of consciousness and the theory of consciousness, which makes that sound like a possibility is called computational functionalism. In other words, the only thing that makes a mind a mind is the computations that it carries out in its more extreme versions, consciousness itself is just a particular kind of functioning as well. So it's a reductionist position, and it's a reductionist not so much to structure, but to functioning. And indeed one thing that's kind of happening with clever and clever machines is that they're functioning in more and more clever ways, learning how to learn and all that.

But is that me? Now for start and it's been a much debated issue. So presumably somebody who wanted to upload their minds onto a machine and become immortal that way would hope that they were conscious just uploading, the information, the computations, in silicon that are produced by, as far as we can tell, the brain would simply produce a functioning system. And as I said, rather the beginning, I, started life as an electrical engineer. And it sort of was always obvious to me that if I built a machine that could function in a very clever way, and I've got the model, right. You name it a task or something of that sort and voice recognize or speak or whatever. If I switch it on and I give it the right inputs, it should produce the right outputs because I programmed it appropriately.

But whether it was conscious or not in operating appropriately is kind of tangential because all the functioning is provided by the functioning, not by some associated consciousness. Yeah. So one scenario in mind uploading would be that you could in fact tap into hypothetically, all the information and somehow accessible to the brain and stick that onto a machine. But it might not be conscious there's no way of telling from that. Now, another possibility is if computational functionalism is true, that consciousness is nothing more than the functioning, is that if you replicate the functioning appropriately, then by definition you're conscious in an appropriate way as well, and that would make that possibility.

This is just the first pass of all this. We're going to get deeper into it in a second. A third possibility, is that it isn't just the functioning that matters, it's also what you're made of that matters. So if you're a machine constructed out of silicon or loaded onto, the cloud somewhere, but you haven't got a body of this kind, then any experience you might have might, be able to, well you might be able to find this system. Your mind in inverted comes your silicon mind, if, let's call it might function appropriately, but it would have a kind of machine silicon type experience. What we're having is a particularly human experience. What it feels like to be a human. If I replaced all this with machine parts, then all the contributions that go into the flavour of being a human, if you like, wouldn't probably be replicable in other parts.

That's on the theory that both what you made of and how you program what you're made of makes a difference. But if we now cut to the chase a little bit and, and say, well, what if you could do it let's say what we think of as the human soul or something, there's something essential about us, even which might survive bodily death. What if you somehow managed to upload that into the system and it was immortal, then you would be stuck there in the way that I suggested to you. This could be regarded as completely dystopian, because if the default position for us humans is that the deepest part of us can't die, it just is. But you're stuck, the individual bit to yourself out of all that and this is just the dystopian sci-fi scenario. I don't think this is possible, but I'm giving you some of the options. Then, you kind of-- it's a situation. Be careful of what you wish for because you, you might have somehow trapped that bit. I don't believe any of this, by the way, but I'm simply giving you some options. In a way, the urge to do this, the whole thing of being immortal if you, if you like, is driven by this fear of individual death. So it's driven by fear to begin with and it simply doesn't, it is not just an intellectual exercise. All that money being put into that, is driven by something a bit more compulsive than that.

(1:09:52) Briar: What if it's driven by curiosity?

(1:09:57) Max: I was going to go there actually. I think that, and it's a good point. No, I can imagine, the engineer in me, if you like, and we're like that, aren't we? We, like to see, what's possible and all sorts of brilliant minds who just enjoy playing with what's possible. And I applaud all that. But obviously if that's just set loose because some really powerful things get invented, there are real dangers. And so it is really important to not just let you know inventions loose on the world, wiser people in politics and the field involved who know what, what people are doing and who can understand it and can work out some of the consequences and so on are there in monitoring, some of these things.

Because it will get out of hand. No question, I think. One of the problems with some of this AI is that the question that I raise, which you raise with the mind uploading. I'm saying, look, you could upload the information and still not, what you've uploaded isn't you, and it isn't you anyway. It would be another, like you, I ought to mention that there are lots of ways of immortalizing yourself. You're doing it in this podcast, as long as the podcast remains available on the web, there's the Briar, and there's the Max, or you can write a book, if you're simply trying to upload your information and your ideas and so on. Well we've been doing that since time immortally, it's really the feeling of me-ness that they're trying to keep. And as I say, the feeling, basically they're assuming an answer, probably a false answer to the question, who am I?

(1:12:10) Briar: I was speaking to a futurist called Grey Scott recently, and the way that he described artificial intelligence is he described it as this digital consciousness. It will evolve to become a digital consciousness in the future, and it would be essentially mimicking our consciousness. So we will have trouble as humans potentially identifying its consciousness, because it won't be conscious, but the way it will be interacting with us will have us tricked. It will act like its got feelings and thoughts and rights and all of these sorts of things. And he called it digital mimicry. And it made me think about how all of these wonderful things that come with humans, and then all these really nasty, terrible things that come with humans as well. With that in mind we've got the good guys, the bad guys, and we're just a complex species. So of course, therefore there is going to be good AI and bad AI because at the end of the day, technology is neutral and it's reflecting us. What's your thoughts about this?

(1:13:32) Max: Well, I think he's absolutely right that there's no problem in principle in programming a machine or, you know a data set or whatever to respond as if it were conscious, because, and in fact, people have been going down that road already. It's a simple question of what, it is like the old Turing test, isn't it? So you simply ask yourself as a programmer, what's an appropriate response to this situation or to this question, or something of that kind. And for example, it'd be quite easy. I could think of a very easy way for a machine to respond appropriately to the question, are you conscious or not? Yeah. And the simple way you could do it is a kind of basic fact about consciousness in humans, which was known since the time of William James, really, was that, of all the information that is kind of impinging on our senses at any particular moment in time, we need to select just that bit, which is of most interested or important and so on.

So there needs to be an attentional mechanism that selects from the array of available information, and once it's selected, it's fed into something like a primary memory or a working store or something of that sort, or, in one modern theory of consciousness, into a global workspace or something of that kind. It's the stuff we're working on at this moment, and that's what gets to be conscious. If you're building a machine that started to behave a bit like we do, you'd build in an attentional system, and then you'd also, have something like a working store where that which is attended to is currently being processed and so on. And then if you wanted to emulate an answer to a question, are you conscious in this moment? The machine could simply check whether there's any information in its global workspace and say yes.

Or if you ask a more precise question, are you conscious of this picture at this moment? It could check whether there's a representation in, the global workspace and if there is a representation in the global workspace it is programmed to come out with a YES response, and that would be simulating what we do, easy. But would it be conscious not by virtue of just doing that. So you're simply begging the question in a way, and as I say, within philosophy of mind, I didn't really go into this properly but if you follow the whole run of the argument about you have to separate two things clearly, and people don't, which is what are the conditions for the existence of consciousness? Yeah, that's the first thing. And then a second question is, what are the added conditions for a particular configuration of consciousness?

(1:17:28) Briar: Sometimes I wonder if, are we doing enough as a human species to be evolving our minds, our consciousness, or if we're not moving fast enough in the sense of AI and robotics seems to be moving at quite a dizzying pace, and then of course, on our side and our meat sack, so to speak, we've got all of these rules and, and regulations, which make complete sense. By the way. I'm not saying that we should all go out tomorrow and get neural links, like all those monkeys that died. But if we don't, as a human species, almost evolve with technology will we be left behind?

(1:18:12) Max: I don't see why we use all that technology all the time. So, you were admitting to carrying your phone around with you all the time

(1:18:28) Briar: For 13 hours. Okay. It's lots of work mind you. Lots of work, lots of good things.

(1:18:39) Max: Absolutely, but can you imagine a situation where you couldn't get away from that? So somehow, the equivalent of your phone is implanted in your brain. I mean, to me, that is a complete dystopia. We are evolving with machines without implanting them. The nice thing about doing it the way we're doing it now is that stick them in, we throw them in the dust bin if we don't want them anymore. The only advantage of-- well I personally can't see any real advantage of shoving it in the brain apart from seeming to be very bright. At the moment we've all got access to the internet and to the whole, and, we also have access to the, machinations of ChatGPT.

The fact that they're not actually, wired into our bodies, thank God, not, there may be specific cases where that becomes advantageous. For example, if bits of our bodies don't function, or bits of our brain don't function, and so as medical prostheses, there's a natural field of beneficial exploration that can be done. I got involved in that a little bit when I was doing work on hearing aids, and was very interested in auditory implants for example, for people who had no hearing whatsoever or, maybe restoring vision and so on. Anyone with access to a computer or a phone has access to enormous amounts of intelligence, even though it's situated outside of our bodies. And we can make a choice. I'm not sure implanting them would, would help. In fact, there's a dystopian feel about it actually, instinctively. I'd never say never, but that's my current feeling about the whole thing in the same way that I'm much happier. Thank you. Without social media. I don't necessarily want access to all the world's information at any point in time. I might just want to walk by the river or row down the river, which I also do.

(1:21:25) Briar: Oh, that sounds very pleasant. Max Thinking a little bit about privacy and, and this kind of connectedness, when we're thinking about Neuralink and mind uploading and having things in our brain, obviously this comes with a lot of ethical considerations and dilemmas. I was reading an article about this lady in Australia who suffered from very severe schizophrenia and seizures, and she couldn't go out and function on a daily basis, and she got this mind implant and it changed her life. But then unfortunately, the company who had given it to her went bankrupt, and she tried to mortgage her house. She fought in court, she tried to do everything in her power to keep this brain implant, but they took it out and they took it away from her, which I think is a very interesting dilemma.

When we are thinking about having these things in our brain, and you even spoke about it before do we need all of this access to information? It's nice to be able to go for a walk down the river, et cetera. If we're all connected to this information all the time, then how are we going to know what's, like our consciousness and what's just this barrage of information? Like how are we going to separate ourselves from this, do you think? What do we need to be mindful of?

(1:23:01) Max: My strong instinct based on where I'm at with all this is don't do it. You've named a situation which was in that bag of obvious exceptions, where for instance, I prefer to call it a brain implant rather than a mind implant, but, doesn't make any difference. If some corrective, to neural firing patterns can actually be of medical benefit, go for it. But of course, the notion that some company has ownership of you, is deeply repulsive, deeply dystopian. I mean this is where this world that we're living in interferes with, what you might call a brighter future coming from technology, where money considerations and ownership considerations can actually impair somebody's health. I mean, that happens in the broad all the time.

But this is a dystopian world. But that doesn't mean that it isn't useful to explore those areas for the benefit of folk. And unfortunately, of course, medical research being what it is, there'll always be an argument there, oh, we're doing this because it will, potentially solve this problem or that problem. And, and therefore the question of ownership has got to be there in the background all the time anyway. That what if you do cure this or do that, are you then going to say, yeah, we can do it half a million bucks, please. If you want it. So there are those deep ethical considerations. But at the moment we haven't even talked about, what makes us happy?

(1:25:27) Briar: What can we do as a human species to be more together, to be happier? Cause obviously there's a lot of craziness in the world at the moment.

(1:25:39) Max: We've been naming all the dystopian consequences of--

(1:25:44) Briar: We went there.

(1:25:43) Max: --the way we're going with it. I don't have anything particularly original to say about this deeper question, because, we know, in the depths of our own being, we know individually what would make us happy. It is also a very well researched area, in terms of the things that make people happy and they all have to do with connection, love, community I would say some of the things that are not often mentioned, but, which I think is a deep consequence of some of the journeys into consciousness is a sense of feeling at home. So I think, a lot of our condition can be expressed as, for many people anyway, as being a stranger in a strange land, to take a biblical phrase. And because one feels a stranger, and be because one, doesn't feel satisfied or fulfilled. We’re looking for gimmicks and toys and, maybe if we're a cleverer and or had more power, had more money, dah, dah that would do it. But that's satisficing. In the end I think it comes down to being simpler being more in touch with our feelings. It's lovely, if you have a community, friends, something that you do that floats your boat, we're all born with certain gifts and whatever, and can all do something. And if one feels one can do that and gets appreciated for doing it in some way, then one can feel valued.

(1:28:05) Briar: I think what you're saying is so true. And I produced a video recently where I spoke about how humans, these days in history, we weren't privy to so much information. We've constantly got the news up. We're hearing about all of the things that are going around the world. And I think what we sometimes lose is that community. In the olden days, we just used to have our family, our friends, and the community around us. We weren't privy to the whole Globe's problems. And one of my messages that I said to people in this video was, even if we solve all the mysteries of the world, the strangeness, the conspiracies will still be stuck with our friends and our families and our communities to care for. And when you lose sight of all of that, you lose sight of yourself. And I agree, we're very much almost as connected, but as divided and as lonely as ever. It's a loneliness pandemic that we have at the moment. And loneliness kills. There's research about this.

(1:29:15) Max: Yeah, absolutely. Right? Yeah. Loneliness is a deep problem. And they're all connected together, these issues. Yeah. Feeling a part of something bigger as being apart from everything and anything bigger and so on. Those are simple things, but they're very deep things and difficult to attain things in the world as it's presently constituted, I think. And the culture that we've fabricated in our driven ways. But I know many, many folk and many groups who are trying to work in a different way.

(1:30:01) Briar: And you've obviously got such a large body of work that's out there, and you've researched for, for so many years. What would be the in terms of a final sort of message to people listening to this? What do you want people to know? What do you want people to really think when they think of with, in regards to your work?

(1:30:28) Max: Well in, in, in regard to my own work, quite apart from my own personal inner explorations. And so the work itself takes you all the way from, from that simple, question you asked at the beginning, where is consciousness? And the realization that actually, this world around us is part of our conscious experience. So we're already connected to it in a way because we've had a hand in, the-- actually we're living in a peculiarly human world because other species wouldn't experience the same energies and information in the way that we do. It's totally governed by. But that is kind of the starting point for a whole philosophy that ends with this position that I call reflexive monism, which is that can be summarized as, we live in a universe, however you conceive of it, which manifests in terms of infinitely number of varied creatures like ourselves.

And we're a particular configuration of that, that in turn have the ability to experience the universe in which we're embedded, of which we are an expression. And in participating in that, we participate in the process whereby this universe realizes its own nature, or experiences itself. And from that participatory position, whether we like it or not, we're already part of the nature of being. And the more one feels, one is an expression of the universe engaged in this curious exploration and, finding our way through all our struggles and pains and whatever, and hopefully getting more in contact with the deeper recesses of our own being. We get more of a feeling of we're doing something with the journey we're on.

(1:32:55) Briar: I bet it's been such a journey doing this kind of research on consciousness and obviously having your own consciousness as well. It must be, be fascinating to be learning about it. I love learning about… I was reading something about the mind the other day, and then it got me really thinking about my mind. And how would you describe the, journey that you've had in a few sentences, has it changed?

(1:33:22) Max: I'm very lucky, really. I took a big risk all those years ago because when I decided I was going to study consciousness that was a great way to, potentially putting an end to my academic career, because actually conscious study of consciousness had been banned from psychology at the time that I started looking at it. But there's something, completely open-ended about it all. So I have fascinating conversations all over the place, and I mean, all sorts of interesting people have all sorts of interesting experiences, and I've had very interesting experiences as well. And so it's like an enormous playground, really, work is-- I enjoy, that, but I also enjoy the personal explorations as well.

(1:34:21) Briar: What would you say has been the most profound personal experience that you've had in regards to consciousness?

(1:34:32) Max: I don't usually talk about those. But I've had some very deep experiences, which give me, if you like, a direct personal experience of the things that I've been talking about. But there are many ways of having those experiences. There's not just one way. I've had some very powerful experiences of, the deeper nature of things or that seem to be the deeper nature of things that, let me put it as carefully as I could that way. And a typical thing that people say with some of these experiences is that they, they, they seem more real than real. In other words, what we normally think of as reality seems more real than say, a dream. And then some of these other experiences seem more real than our normal realities. That's a salutary experience.

(1:35:34) Briar: What kind of experiences? It's a little bit hard for me to--

(1:35:40) Max: Yeah. Okay. So I'm talking about mystical experiences. So William James, is for many psychologists, their favourite psychologist, whatever persuasion they are, because he wrote some great standard textbooks on psychology, but he also wrote a book on the varieties of Religious Experience. And he has a particular chapter there on mystical experience. And in his day he and his friends we're experimenting with nitrous oxide. And he was having what he described as mystical experiences then. And he was giving some of the characteristics, and one of the characteristics was the sense of unity. What seemed to be a world of diversity was ultimately unified into one fundamental reality. 

Another point that he made was that the ontological import of these experiences was, was astounding. They were just so powerful. It's hard not to believe them, so to speak. And then he said something very sage as well, which is an acceptance of the situation we're in, which is that if you've not had those experiences there, there's no obligation to believe somebody who has, says they have, and I completely identify with that, because you can only be authentic, given your own experience. You say, oh sounds quite interesting, but, I'm not quite sure what he is talking about and it doesn't fit in with my belief system anyway. And given that that's the only basis on which you can proceed, that's an intellectually completely defensible position. And it probably is the position I would've taken.

(1:37:54) Briar: When we're thinking about a mystical experience, just for the listeners who are listening to this, are we talking about if we take like psychedelics or something that results in a mystical experience, what could a mystical experience look like for someone who's listening to this and thinking, what's a mystical experience? How would I know?

(1:38:15) Max: There are many people who have in different ways, something like a mystical experience. For some people it, it's a feeling of suddenly being, overwhelmed by a kind of love of a kind that envelopes them. And it can be spontaneous or it might be a consequence of a, a near death experience or a trauma. It can be often associated with light of a particular kind. Within some traditions it's a kind of deep sense of emptiness, an all-encompassing emptiness that's also a fullness of some sort. But like, the ground of being from which all things emerge with other people, it's a kind of contact with an overwhelming, energetic form of being that can constantly shape itself into anything. This is, I'm taking this line from a wise woman. I had some interaction with, because she put it so well, you climbed to the top of the ladder only to realize that it's leaning against the wrong wall.

The whole problem with a midlife crisis is this feeling that there is a self that hasn't been fulfilled in some way. So the whole notion of self-fulfillment, what does it mean for the self to feel full? And in this way of thinking, it's whenever one actually does tap into these deeper recesses of part of one's own nature that are seeking to be expressed in some way. And that can be in little things, in everyday things, in everyday relationships, in it doesn't have to be these grand experiences. It's all part of finding a place of, poise within this kind of the afflux of, this challenging world that we're all embedded in.

(1:41:04) Briar: Very interesting. Thanks for sharing that. And I think that's such a nice note to leave on. So thank you so much, max, for coming on the show. It was very interesting. And like I said, consciousness has been on my, my mind for quite a while, to be honest. So I was so happy that you were able to join us today and really share all of these things. So thank you.

(1:41:30) Max: Yeah. It's been a pleasure, Briar. Yeah. Nice to spend some time with you.