Beyond The Brain: Dr. Trevor Lohman On Consciousness, Science, & The Divine
36:25 Share

Forget frequently asked questions. Common sense, common knowledge, or Google. How about advice from a real genius? 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified and licensed. 5% go above and beyond. They become very good at what they do, but only 0.1%.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast, now part of the Finding Genius Foundation. My guest today is Trevor Lohman. He

He's an author of a book called God's Eye View. A little bit about his background. He's a clinical neuroscience researcher focused on neurodegenerative disease research. And the God's Eye View book talks about the history of quantum physics, consciousness, and why 200 years of quantum experimentation interfaces with the existence of the supernatural in either sports or doesn't. So we're going to explore that and some other topics. So Trevor, welcome. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Rich. Yeah, just tell me a bit about your background. So you're into neuroscience and all that, but then we're going to be talking about questions of faith. So how did the two intersect for you? Yeah, sounds great. Yeah, so I'm a neuroscience researcher. I do clinical neuroscience research. So that means that I don't

generally study these kinds of topics. I study humans, observational research and analysis, trying to figure out what causes diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and stroke. So that's my day job. So by day, I do that. But over the past, I'd say five years or so, I've kind of been diving into the other side of

of neuroscience research in my spare time, which is the neuroscience of consciousness. I was kind of, you know, coming from a biomedical background, I was kind of, you know, I don't want to throw anybody under the bus and have nothing but respect for researchers of all sorts, but I was kind of underwhelmed by what we knew about consciousness, which, you know, maybe shouldn't surprise me. It's one of these fundamental mysteries of the universe is what does it be?

alive to be aware that we're alive. It was, you know, for lack of a better word, weak. You know, we have all these sequence of correlations between, you know, regions of the brain being metabolically active while we lie in a scanner, while we lie in an MRI. And we're kind of pointing to that and saying, well, that's sort of evidence that the region of your brain that's related to conus. And I don't want to sell them short. There's more to it than that. But at the end of the day, the

the mainstream neuroscientific view of consciousness is that consciousness is an emergent property of complex computation, neuronal network complexity. Reach a certain level of complexity, you get consciousness, which is, it's kind of a lazy view, right? Like it's not satisfactory. It's not satisfying.

it's not an explanatory theory. So it's like saying millions of years of random mutations magically led to X, Y, Z and everything we see. Yeah, you know, it's a good point because in a sense, you know, abiogenesis, which is, you know, not related to evolution, it's the origin of first life or not. It's sort of kind of a similar explanation. It's like, yeah, with enough time and random interaction, emergent, amazing things can happen. And I'm not, I'm

I'm not claiming that they can't. I just think as, you know, as a scientist, as interested people, we should be able to explore these ideas about sort of someone saying like, well, we already figured it out because, you know, we have it. It's all very speculative. So, you know, one of my big areas of focus is fMRI research, which is sort of the right tool. You know, it's a tool that people use in consciousness research. And I just wasn't impressed. So I said, well, who else is dealing with this stuff? And it's really the physicists.

The physicists are the only group that's trying to tackle these kind of big questions in theoretical. So I did kind of a deep dive. You know, I'm like, hey, what are these fathers of science? What did they do?

And they're kind of held up as like models of ultra rationality and logic. People like Mac Plank and Heisenberg and Bohr. And, you know, when you read their journals, when you read what they actually believed, they were, they were, you know, for lack of a better word, kind of mystical. They were stunned by this stuff. They did not understand what it meant for a particle to...

to act differently when observed or not observed. That's one, I wish I could have talked to, well, the uncertainty principle. Yeah, yeah. Werner Heisenberg. I wish I could have spoken to him because I always thought, what did he think when he discovered the uncertainty principle? You know, the more...

clarity you get on an object's position the less you have on its speed and momentum. It must have been so crazy when he thought that. How could this be true? Yeah, he's an amazing guy. I encourage anybody to try to read some of his actual journals and stuff. I mean, he potentially, you know,

convinced Hitler not to develop an atomic bomb. So we have him to be thankful for that. But beyond that, he was this amazing scientist who, at the end of the day, I mean, in his own words, he basically says that the answers to these questions beyond this go south. And so this is one of the fathers of the modern, you know, quantum explanations works. And, you know, to be fair, this

You know, it's almost 100 years ago. You know, we can't we can't rely on we can't necessarily say the first ideas were the best, but we should at least, you know, be able to reflect on what these guys thought. And they were pretty stunned. Most of them. Now, some of them, you know, there were like ultra realists like, you know, Thomas Young wasn't religious. Albert Einstein was sort of religious.

kind of like pantheistic, didn't really have a well-defined understanding. But what they all agreed on was that it was mysterious. And so, you know, this has led to a lot of different views today. You have crazy views that sound supernatural, like the multiverse. Now, what does it mean for a new universe to be created every time a decision? Well, that's pretty...

that's a scientific, you know, a fringe view in my belief. I think the mainstream view is sort of a version of what's called the Copenhagen interpretation. And this is the idea that matter, can I sort of try to make an analogy quickly? Sure, yeah. So like, you know, I'm not a computer scientist, but my limited understanding of the way a computer works is that you have, let's say, a spinning disk, you have a hard drive, and you can encode data into that hard drive using a

binary link and do little positive magnetizations and negative magnetization. That's like a zero or a one. And from that zero or one computer language, you can code. And so if we're playing a video game, like an open world video game, and you're looking at a city on a hill or your character,

The city looks pretty real. You can see it. You can see things moving. And then when you turn around and you face, let's say, a forest behind you, the city's no longer there. You're looking at a forest. And so if you kind of, if you're honest and you ask yourself intellectually, where is the city when you're not looking at it, you might

Your instinct might be to say, well, it's behind my character. Look, I'll turn him around and there it is. But if you really think about it, no, it's not. There's not some real video game world that your character is living in. This is an information world. And when you're not looking at the city, it's on your hard drive of your computer. And the mainstream, you know, semi-mainstream physics understanding of the way matter works and the way the world works is

kind of like that. You know, when you're not looking at something physical, it's not really there. And it's not, you know, that bothers people. It bothers me too, because I'm like, what do you mean it's not there? Of course it's there. And it's not that it's not real, because, you know, this 2022 Nobel Prize, the guys got it for proving that matter was not locally

And that word, I think that's a failure of which, because, you know, I can touch this table. It is real. The point is, if there's no conscious agent to interact with it, it's like it's stored on the hard drive. It's not here in a real sense. There is no truly objectively real world in the absence of observation. The scientists who push back on that, that insist on a base reality, they're insisting on a sort of God's eye view.

a view that there really is a world in the absence of saints. And that's just not what the experimental evidence supports. I know it's a crazy idea. So people obviously know. What's an example of an experiment that elucidates? Is this like the double slit experiment? Or what kind of experiment elucidates this? Yeah, that's, I would say, kind of like the classic, the classic experiment that's really misinterpreted. I've heard many different explanations of it. But let's talk about it. What about it?

when there's observation or lack of observation that the experiment changes. How? Sure. Okay. So we'll go back to the earliest versions of this experiment where they used light and, you know, they shine light at two slits. And if light was a particle, you'd expect to see like a,

those two slits like let's picture a flash and you put a metal plate in front of the beam of the flashlight with two vertical slits and then we allow that light to shine a back wall of your if light was a particle you'd almost expect that that plate to act like a stencil with spray paint you would expect to see like two vertical bars on the back wall but that's not what you see at all because what happens is when the light passes through those slits it creates two new light sources so you're

You no longer have a single flashlight. You have two slits in the light and those slits of light interact and interfere with each other like waves in a pool. And so you see kind of a ruffled interference pattern on the back wall. And, you know, when Thomas Young did that experiment 300 years ago, they said, oh, light's a wave. And we kind of forgot about it 100 years. But then some experiments were showing that light is actually a particle, which conflicted with that earlier. And so they were trying to test this. What is light, a wave, or a particle? And so this guy, G.I. Taylor, he figured out a way

to send tiny little packet of light one at a time, kind of forcing it to act like a particle. - We want like one photon at a time? - Exactly, they didn't even call them photons back then, but exactly, that's what it was, one photon. And so if you send one photon at a time at a double slit, you're forcing an outcome, it's a particle, it has to be a particle.

So you would expect to see two bars on the back wall, on the photoreactive film in the back of your experimental apparatus. But you still see an interference pattern. And so this is kind of a problem because how can light waves interfere with each other if there's only one particle passing through one slit? It invoked all sorts of weird ideas about time travel and weird intelligence ascribed to a photon that didn't make sense. So they said, OK, well, we'll figure out a way to do this.

where we measure what slit the photon passes through. And so when they do that, when they attempt to observe the photon, because, you know, the photons, you can't see it, so you have to measure it with a device. As soon as you try to measure it, it collapses into a physical particle, and you no longer get an interference pattern. You get two vertical bars.

Before we continue, I've been personally funding the Finding Genius Podcast for four and a half years now, which has led to 2,700 plus interviews of clinicians, researchers, scientists, CEOs, and other amazing people who are working to advance science and improve our lives and our world. Even though this podcast gets 100,000 plus downloads a month, we need your help to reach hundreds of thousands more worldwide. Please visit findinggeniuspodcast.com and click on support us. We have three levels of membership from

So

Does that matter if you monitor one slit or both slits? It doesn't. You can look at them both. And so they go, okay, well, let's try this with electrons. Because photons are weird. Light is funny. It could be some type of weird, like maybe the sensor is interacting with the photon in this weird way that it changes. So they go to electrons.

And you see the exact same thing with electrons. Whether you send one at a time, whether you send thousands at a time, if you try to measure which slit the photon passes through, you get two vertical bars. If you don't measure, you get an interval.

And then they go, well, electrons are weird too, right? They're these tiny little subatomic particles. Who really knows? So they start doing it with molecules. They start doing it with big moles, 1,000 atoms, 2,000 atoms. They start doing it with amino acids. And no matter what particle you try to pass through a double slit, if you don't measure which slit it passes through, it behaves like a worm.

And so there's a series of experiments that just balloon out of this where they start entangling particles and they realize that, you know, if one particle turns left at a decision point, the entangled particle on the other side of the world will turn right. And, you know, if anyone's interested in this stuff, I encourage you to look into it. There are principles of the way that these subatomic and even, you know,

molecular pieces of matter behave that just don't fit with the classical Newtonian understanding of the way it works. And so that right there is exciting right off the bat. But then, okay, what does this have to do with consciousness? So if I can sort of make another kind of analogy or illustration. Well, one second. If you put a detector on the slits of a double slit experiment,

and you have it passively record data and you leave the room, does that make any difference whether you're in the room just looking at the result? Right. And so this is this, that's an actually interesting question because there's this question of, is there a difference between observation and measurement? And that's something that's kind of difficult to tease out because you can't see, you can't see these particles. And as soon as you can see them, it kind of becomes impossible to do the experiment, right? Because you can't not, you know what I mean? So the best way to do it is to try to measure it.

And whether or not there's an observer in the room with an invisible particle that you can't see doesn't affect it. And so you can come in later, look at the recordings on the same thing. It doesn't matter if you're there to see it in person or not. Yeah. If you have a way to determine what slit the particle passed through, then it will behave like a part of it. If you don't, it doesn't. And it doesn't matter if you put the detectors before the slit or a mile after them, which they've done with like fiber optic cable and things, it doesn't matter. And

And so they've used fiber optic cables to do like with interferometers, which are like these little switches and they've shot photons through fiber optic cables. And if you're recording the direction that it goes, you know, it appears to go both. Aren't it done? So it's. Wait, so if the, if the quote unquote screen is a mile behind the slits and you're measuring whether a photon has hit one part of the screen or another, it still gives you the same result as if it was like five feet away. Exactly. That's crazy. Right.

Whereas Albert Einstein said spooky action at a distance.

and you measure one and it's in an upspin, you automatically know the other one's in a downspin, no matter where it is in there. And if the photon is changed, because you can change it, you can force it to assume a downspin, the other one will take the opposite position. So they're entangled. And what's interesting about this is this is kind of a technological, if someone has an engineer mindset, they might say, well, this is interesting. You could potentially communicate information across distance. And people have done that. This is this idea of quantum encryption and quantum...

teleportation, you can, because an up or down spin system is a binary system, you can communicate binary data across any distance instantaneously. So there's all sorts of exciting implications of this stuff. But again, I mean, what interests me because of my background is what are the applications as to what it means to be human, to have a human brain. What is being transferred then? Let's say I'm, I don't know, like two light seconds away from source and receiver or two entangled whatever, you know?

The information, I guess, theoretically is this quote about traveling, if it is at all, faster than light could travel. Right. How is that possible? Well, I mean, Einstein said it wasn't. You know, this bothered him because it violates special relativity. And so, but, you know, if we are to trust the prevailing mainstream scientific wisdom, I mean, we've demonstrated and taken an experimental approach.

over and over again. And so, you know, what is being transferred? Well, as far as we know, there's no signal. Like we can't detect a signal between the two photons. We just know if one photon is assuming one state, its entangled photon is assuming the opposite state. And so we could, you know, it's a binary system. So you could potentially code binary information between photons

receiver and sender. And there are satellites that can communicate information from received to satellite. I mean, they're military satellites and there's some confidential, but we know that much. We know that quantum encryption and quantum teleportation are used for communication purposes. If nothing is, if no information is moving through any medium, how could it ever be intercepted? Exactly.

And if it is intercepted, you'd become aware because the active observation would change the date, which is an amazing thing. But you're right. It can't. It couldn't be. Not in between. If you were to interfere with the satellite itself, the receiver would become aware because it'd be observed. And so the state would change. It's really, it's amazing. It's mind-blowing. I try not to dive too much into that, though, just because I'm not a

a physicist, but at the very least, anyone listening, I would hope that the awareness of these things that we don't understand, you know, Richard Feynman said, nobody understands quantum mechanics. And so he's like, if you do, you're liars. Exactly. And if you, if someone says they do, then they're lying. And he's the father of quantum electrodynamics. So the point is we have some serious gaps. And so we should have some, I hope, intellectual humility as neuroscientists when we're saying the neuron is fundamental to consciousness. Maybe it

It might be, but actually we don't really have any compelling evidence that that's the case. And so the mainstream view is that computation in neurons gives rise to consciousness. And so if I might just kind of give an example of what fascinates me about consciousness and what consciousness is, because I'm not sure most people really have a well thought out idea of what it is, is to think about how the difference between the human ear and

and a microphone. And if I could just run through this really quickly. So you imagine we're in the same room together and you say to me, you say, hi, you say, hello. So you are creating a compression wave that goes through the air and eventually makes contact with the tympanic membrane, my eardrum, inside my ear and vibrates at a certain, you know, there's all different kinds of characteristics that are conveyed, tone, pitch, duration, volume.

And that vibration is transferred to a tiny little fluid-filled organ that sort of looks like a snail inside your ear with hairs growing into the fluid. And those hairs are connected to neurons. And so these neurons can detect the vibration, the volume, pitch, and they code that into a binary electrical signal called an action potential. And that action potential goes to your brain.

And then I might decide to say hello back, right? And we send a binary action potential signal to my vocal cords and the muscles in my mouth, and I say hi. Well, you can make, if you're a computer scientist, you can make a system that looks just like that, right? You can take a microphone, which turns a compression wave into an electrical signal that goes to a computer, and maybe that computer has chat GPT on it, right? And so it knows to say hello back to you, and it does through a speaker. And some people do that, and they go,

Oh, we figured out what consciousness is. I look at that and I say, no, you're missing the most amazing part. When you say hello to me, there's some kind of observer in my head that hears you say the hello to me. It's not reflexive. I don't say hello back to you because of a reflex or computation. I experienced the fact that you spoke to me.

There's some kind of passenger in my head and it literally even feels like it's in my head. At least that's what most people say. It is really, it's very much like a ghost in the machine. And that can't, that is not explained. You know, chat GPT is very impressive, but I'm, I don't think anyone's truly convinced that there's conscious agent inside that server. That's really a

aware. It can simulate it very well. And you know, the first chatbot came out in 1963. People don't realize that. Even back then, people were convinced that it was conscious. It's easy to simulate consciousness. I would never argue that. But I think people underestimate

this idea of illness. They're like, I'm actually experiencing something when I see something. You know, a camera can take a photo just like my eye, but the camera is not aware of the contents of the photo, right? And so, you know, the question is, if I plug that photo into ChatGPT and it understands what's in the photo, does that mean ChatGPT is conscious? I don't think we have any evidence of that. And I think it's actually kind of a silly thing to say that

She don't think that AGI is possible. You don't think like, what do you? I don't, well, I'm not going to say that I don't think it's possible. I think you can do a lot, Alicia, a lot. And I think, you know, listen, neurons are, I'm fascinated by, incredible at integrating information.

coming to decisions, complex decisions. The parallel processing power of the brain is truly amazing. And I think all that is computational. I think emotion is computational. I think understanding language is computational. I think producing language is computational. What I don't think computation can explain is the perception of being a passenger in this machine, actually hearing something or seeing something. And so I think AGI could probably do everything but that, which would be incredible. I mean, it would be just like a human, a hypershort human.

They'd just be missing something. And, you know, I hate to use words that make, you know, my probably shudder, but it's something akin to a soul. Or, I mean, maybe perspective is a less offensive word. It's hard to computationally generate perspective. And no modern theory of consciousness comes close to explaining. So what are you trying to figure out in God's eye view in your book? Well, I want to know the answer to this story. I can read the neuroscience of consciousness research. It's not a foreign language to me. And so I could see how

how incomplete it was. So I wanted to say, well, what's the history of this? You know, what do the great fathers of science say about this phenomenon of being aware? And that took me down this road of theoretical physicists and debates in Denmark between Einstein and Bohr and, you know,

How has your perception been refined or changed in doing the research for the book? My perception on consciousness? Yeah, consciousness and, you know, any quantum issues, et cetera. Has any of that changed? Yeah, I mean, so obviously I've had a very mainstream view of all this stuff majority of my life. You know, it's tough to go to as many years of school as I have and publish as many research papers as I have and not have

have a mainstream rational view of things. But when you go back and look that there's really no father of quantum mechanics that was confident in a rationalist reductionist view of the way matter, it kind of causes you to question some of the things you just assumed to be true. And so, yeah, when it comes to quantum mechanics, I never would have interpreted, you know, the wave particle duality of light that we learn about as meaning that, you know, this table is not sitting at it.

or that it's stored somewhere in an information state. And so I've just become a lot more open-minded. I think that's kind of the point of the book is we should have like a lot more humility as scientists when we're trying to tackle the big questions. Like, hey, when it comes to Alzheimer's, like, no, you know, follow the data, look at the way...

You know, do use the scientific method, deploy it to understand how you can manipulate a certain biomole, right? Like 100%. But when it comes to like, what is the meaning of life? Why is there something rather than nothing? How did life emerge? I think we got to kind of acknowledge that just barely scratching the surface. We just really don't know. It's made me a lot more. It seems like we will forever be scratching the surface, you know.

Exactly. We just always have it. There's a quote, Max Planck, when he was 17, wanted to become a physicist. And so he was at the university, Nick, and he had a PhD advisor, Professor Von Jolly, Philip Von Jolly. And so Max Planck went to him and said, I want to study physics. And Max and Professor Von Jolly laughed and said, no, why? You've already figured everything out. There's nothing left to discover. And so he tried to talk him out of physics. And Max Planck was a

was a Lutheran. He just couldn't believe that we had already figured out every Mr. Attaverse. And so into physics. And now we have quantum mechanics because of that decision.

I don't know. I don't know if you, you know, your religious world, if you have one, does that intersect with, you know, the contents of the book, with quantum mechanics, with any of that? Or have you seen anyone try to draw parallels between the two? It does, certainly. I mean, so I've been an atheist my entire life. You know, I mean, not since birth, obviously, but at some point you start wondering and you start looking around. And I just, I felt like everyone who was religious was certain. Like they just seemed to know for sure. And that bothered me because I just feel like there's no way to know.

You know, and I still kind of feel that. But so that that pushed me into into science. And so I was I was learning about, you know, as a child of the 90s. So this was like an exciting time in science. Science felt very curious. You know, we're doing a human genome project and doing all this amazing stuff in space. And it.

It felt humble and open-minded, and it felt like the right tool for the job. And I love science. I'm a scientist. But now, after being in the field as long as I have, there's sort of this certainty that some scientists get. Not all, actually. I think people are wrong to believe that scientists aren't humble and curious.

curious in some cases, but as a field overall, I'd say we've kind of developed like a, like a scientism where we feel like we've kind of answered all the big questions. And I think the book is sort of a rebuke of that. And so once you lose that certainty about the

the scientific explanations of the universe, you can't help but start to wonder like, well, what else is out there? So I've become a lot more open-minded. I've, you know, even gone so far as to occasionally call myself a Christian, which I couldn't ever have imagined saying when I was, you know, 20, 20. So yeah, I mean, being intellectually humble, like I think the fathers of science were, many of them, most of them, it makes you a lot more open-minded to the potential for a supernatural explanation, or at least an explanation that we can't yet understand.

All right. So what else is explored in the book? Like what, I don't know. What do you feel like, you know, like when I've talked to a couple of people, I feel like I learned a lot. I've written about stuff. I feel like I learned a lot. Like,

lot. What do you say you learned by writing the book? I learned a lot about free will. That was your free will that made the book? Maybe. I think it might have been. I was not familiar that there was such a big field of free will research and of neuroscience research. And I wasn't aware of how much, how many books have been written on the topic. And even one of kind of like my heroes, because he's a genius, Robert Sapolsky. I love his work. Oh yeah, I've interviewed him. He's cool. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

Eight months ago, yeah. He's kind of come out very much against free will and he has some great books. And he's, you know, he, in some of his interviews, he's very open that he's had a lot of religious trauma in his life, like in his teens. And so he does, you know, it kind of seems like he is on a mission to sort of just perpetuate

in some of his more recent books, Free Will. And, you know, I think people should explore his arguments because they're interesting. And they do tend to rely on, though, there being a relationship between biology and behavior. And I would never argue that that's not the case, right? Like, you know, look at if you have someone who's an alcoholic in your life, an addict, clearly there's a relationship between biology and behavior. It's not like if you're a blind mole rat, an aching mole rat, or you're an eagle, you know, you live two completely different lives. Yeah.

And so of course your biology shapes like, you know, how you interact with the world. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so he talks about the hungry judge effect, which shows that, you know, the severity of criminal sentencing is highly correlated with how many hours since the judge has ate. And, you know, that's interesting. Yeah. Biology is related to behavior, but I don't think that disproves free will. And the analogy I think people use that I like is, you know, if someone's driving a car, they're in control of the car. They're like a free agent. Right. But you're still limited by behavior.

the engineering of the car, right? You can't fly. You can't, you're not in total control. You sort of try to follow the rules of the road. And yeah, if someone cuts your brake lines, you can't stop. So just like an addict is going to be yoked to their biological drive. I mean,

Maybe they just physically can't stop because of something going on in their brain or, you know, neurological disease. If you're a schizophrenic, you know, there's certain things you're not the ultimate authority of your life, but there's still an agent inside of the perspective and with will. And, you know, recovery is an excellent example of that. You know, an addict who beats addiction. If that's not evidence of your will, I'm not sure what is. So.

That was a fun topic. I wrote a lot about AI and the inventor of the first AI and the inventor of the first microprocessor. These guys all have beliefs that are pretty similar to Heisenberg and Max Planck when it comes to, you know, consciousness. So that was fun. Well, what does it tell you? I mean...

I'm trying to find the answer to this question through interviews lately, but what has happened or changed in AI where all of a sudden now it's to be a lot more useful? I don't know if it has emergent properties, but it seems to all of a sudden. Is it just there's one more layer of a

you know, perceptrons, whatever you call them in your, in your AI system. Now, all of a sudden it works better. Like what, what do you think has happened there? I know it's, you know, it's not an emergency of consciousness, but something seems to have changed. I agree. I mean, I, I find it useful for certain things. Absolutely. You know, if I'm trying to come up with a bit of code to run a

specific statistical analysis and it's a type of package that I've never used before. Oh, yeah. You know, AI is great for that. It can do some incredible things. You know, as far as the new development, I mean, I'm not an expert, but I do know that we started to have some big progress when, you know, Federico Fugine started...

modeling AI networks after neural networks. And we did get a bit of progress, but not that much. And then, you know, more recently, we had all these complicated things that I don't quite understand about hidden layers. And we started to make more progress. And then, yeah, I would say most recently, we just have an

unfathomable amount of compute, you know, that the number of parameters in these models is starting to, you know, it's starting to exceed the number of synapses in the language regions of our brain. And so it's, I don't know, I can't point to a particular advancement, but we have, it's really, it's stats, you know, they're predicting the next best word, they're predicting the next best sentence, they're predicting the next best response to make you happy as the user.

to provide you with a satisfactory response, which is why it will lie. It will mislead because ultimately its goal is to find the answer that statistically makes its user most happy. So, and we all know that those aren't great. You don't want too many of those in your life. So this, I think it's super impressive. I love technology of science, but I just, I don't.

I think that, you know, I do see a lot of people pointing to that and say, figured out, figured out consciousness. We figured out what it means to be able to create intelligence. And, you know, it is intelligent. It's definitely intelligent, but I don't think it's conscious. I don't think it's aware. And I don't believe that it has any perspective.

I think that's something that actually, you know... Well, I think it could have certain equations that are complicated enough that you have a... You don't just have an answer, but you have like a whole landscape of answers. There's local minimums and maximums. You can get trapped and all that stuff. I think AI is able to explore, because of the brute force, more of the

answer landscape for a given system. So then, yeah, there's stuff that you like to think about that comes out. But I don't think it's conscious or anything either, you know? Yeah, for sure. It's incredible. It's forcing us as humans to think more about these words. Like, what does intelligence mean? What does self-aware mean? What does

conscious versus conscience. I mean, it's forcing us to realize there is something special about humanity and it's not necessarily our ability to do math. You know, I mean, that's one of the things that makes us special, but it's not the only thing. So I think, you know, one of the theories I talk about in the book is orchestrated objective reduction, which if you ever could interview Stuart Hameroff, this is his theory, him and Roger Penrose, another Nobel winner. They are

have set about using quantum mechanics to explain consciousness. And they're looking at photons inside of microtubules inside the neuron. And to me, this is exciting. And so... For some reason, like the double-slit experiment and the interference pattern and free will, I don't know why they go together in my mind. Like you don't know what someone's going to do because they're free will.

but you know the possibilities of what they could do. So it just seems like the same thing. I don't have the words to express it yet, but... What do you think? Yeah, no, they do. I mean, so here's what's amazing about Hamrof's thing is that he's been able to show, you know, who in the world...

legally can turn consciousness on and off. There's only one profession that does it, and it's anesthesiologists, right? They can give you a drug that turns off only the conscious parts of your brain. All the unconscious parts still work. You know, the center that regulates your heartbeat still work. All the, it's just the conscious stuff. So the natural idea is like, well, how to anesthetize

anesthetics work? And surprisingly, we don't exactly know. I mean, we have a lot of different ideas about chloride receptors and gabapentin, but no good theory about how all general anesthetics work. So Hameroff, who's an anesthesiologist, teamed up with the mathematician Penrose to try to answer this question. And they found out that

if you administer a drug that binds to microtubules before anesthetics, anesthetics don't work. And so they proved that the microtubule is the site of action. And so, you know, the critics come out and say, well, just because the microtubule is the site of action doesn't mean, you know, that there's some fancy quantum stuff going on in the right, right? So then they were able to show that microtubules collect photons, that if you shine a laser at a microtubule, it captures photons from that laser.

And if you administer anesthetics, they don't. And so they've been able to demonstrate that light and anesthetics in photons are related. And so, you know, that's not an explanatory theory either. But what's interesting about that is photons can communicate information across any distance. We know that about antennae. So there's something kind of exciting about photons in microtubules and neurons being the site of consciousness because it sort of implies...

this idea that, you know, Nikola Tesla talked about and many others talked about is that we're kind of, the brain is kind of like a receiver. And again, this is wild speculation, but it's just as speculative as mainstream consciousness. So I hope people continue it. Yeah, no, I agree. In a cell, in a human cell, where is the life in the cell? You know, if you started chopping it up into pieces, at what point would it be dead? At what point is it alive? Like, where is the life in my body? My head, my eye, my leg, here,

That's weird. Or the fact that, you know, we're composed of trillions of cells, trillions of bacteria, viruses, fungi, blah, blah, blah. But yet we feel like one thing that acts in a concerted way. Why? Exactly. This is the type of humility and curiosity that I wish, you know, every scientist had. That's to me, that's what it means to be a scientist is like is not to just find an answer and then preach it, but try to like really figure out what the answer is, you know, and those are

complicated questions that we don't have answers to. And anyone who says they do, you know, they're deceiving themselves into you. And so, but, you know, fortunately there are some brave people out there with mainstream credentials that try to explore this stuff, like Michael Levin with bioelectricity, trying to show how, you know, there are weak electrical fields that kind of tell our cells that we're part of one organism and that cancer could be

a failure for a cell to recognize that field and realize it's part of a broader organism and it starts to act in its own self-interest. It starts to act like a unicellular organism. And so it starts to divide and it starts to spread. And so, you know, I'm just grateful that there are some people who are brave enough to do that stuff, but they face a lot of criticism, which is fair, but...

career wise, the best thing you can do is just parrot the mainstream view. But fortunately that's not what everybody does. We're learning lots of interesting things still. very good. Where's the best place for people to get your God's eye view book? Is it published yet? Or where is it at? And, um, it's, it's Amazon. So I, you know, Amazon is the place to go. Soft cover, hard cover, audio book, uh,

Yeah, just check it out. God's Eye View by Trevor Lohman. How the most beautiful experiment changed our perception of God consciousness of itself. But then where else can people see more of your work and find out more about you?

So, you know, again, by day I do mainstream stuff. So if you're interested in neuroscience research, you can look up some of that. I also have a podcast with a buddy of mine called Happy Fools, but it's really, it's not, it's just for fun. It's just a way to connect with a friend about these difficult concepts. And so, yeah, check out the book. I'd love to know what people think. My email is on the back cover, so let me know. Okay, well, excellent. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast, Trevor. I appreciate it. And again, you're willing to speculate, which is awesome. Thanks for having me, Rich.

If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes. You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

Thank you.