Mu Lucas Perry

This is an exploration between Shinzen Young and Bernardo Kastrup on mysticism, science, and liberation. Shinzen Young is a mindfulness teacher, the author of the Science of Enlightenment, and is the co-director of the SEMA lab at the University of Arizona. Bernardo Kastrup is an analytic philosopher, computer engineer, metaphysical idealist, and executive director of the Essentia Foundation.

Essentia Foundation: https://www.essentiafoundation.org/

Shinzen Young: https://www.shinzen.org/

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/syb-oSaDZZE?si=ShNPJXXmuEBHGVDC

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucasFMPerry

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro
2:46 Can philosophy, science, and mysticism align? 
7:39 What does liberation consist of? 
11:38 Bernardo’s path to insight 
17:43 The paradox of cultivated improvement vs. nothing to improve 
31:16 Blocking ourselves from life’s teaching 
36:01 Did Spinoza have mystical experience? 
48:58 The truth is not vulnerable 
51:29 Training people in the spirit of science 
1:06:59 Reflecting on Bernardo’s insight 

Jordan Myska Allen is CEO and founder of The Relateful Company, an organization focused on building inner peace and interconnection through truth and love. At the heart of their approach is Relatefulness, a practice emphasizing present-moment relating, construct awareness, and non-duality. Jordan is also a practicing life coach, the author of A Beautiful Apocalypse, and a long-time practitioner of A Course in Miracles.

The Relateful Company: https://www.relateful.com/

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/9ENdAlvkOQ0

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Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro
3:24 Switching between the ultimate and the relative
5:48 Everything is either love or a call for love
7:52 ACIM doesn’t comment on the world of form 
9:21 Fundamental existential guilt 
11:58 Leaning into what we flinch from 
14:31 What it means to flinch from God
20:12 Transcending but including all that is
25:20 The opening quote of ACIM
26:36 What does it mean that “the world is an illusion?” 
33:15 What’s so good about choosing fear over love? 
36:43 The choice between love and fear, and coming to surrender
42:40 What is forgiveness? 
54:27 Clarifying perfect forgiveness 
1:00:32 The Diamond Sutra 
1:05:24 The gateless gate 
1:12:45 Key takeaways 
1:19:17 Final thoughts

Federico Faggin is an engineer and physicist who invented the world's first commercial micro processor, the Intel 4004. He is also the founder of the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation which is dedicated to the scientific study of consciousness.

Faggin Foundation: http://www.fagginfoundation.org

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/7HgXwbIMRsc

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
2:54 Federico’s awakening experience
12:36 Consciousness, free will, and identity 
18:09 Truth and freedom from suffering
21:55 “The one” that seeks to know itself
26:22 How “the one” becomes the many
28:55 “The one” and classic/quantum physics
41:51 Fundamental entities with free will, identity, and consciousness 
44:15 Consciousness needs classical memory to store experience
46:06 Was the Big Bang a free will choice
56:06 The reality of the irreducible 
1:00:39 Semantic space 
1:04:41 Methods of inquiring into symbolic and semantic space
1:11:17 Will everything eventually converge? 
1:14:58 Taking semantic reality seriously 
1:21:13 Near death experiences 
1:23:33 Taking experience seriously 
1:29:28 Quantum information as a representation of inner experience
1:33:03 What do we do given this understanding? 
1:35:37 We are not machines
1:42:15 Negating the reality of the soul
1:46:08 Meaninglessness and dynamic truth 
1:51:29 Goodbyes

Bruce Tift is a licensed Psychotherapist and the author of Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation. He is a long-time practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism and was a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Bruce's website: https://www.brucetift.com/ 

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/cESdYTKz0dM

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Timestamps: 
0:00 Intro
3:09 What is freedom? 
4:39 What is conscious participation in open awareness?
6:47 Is this the fruitional view? 
9:09 The western therapeutic perspective of healing core wounds
11:18 How do the fruitonal view and the developmental view relate? 
14:31 Commiting to experience sense of problem without trying to resolve it
19:12 The path of Vajrayana Buddhism
29:42 Belief is a substitute for groundlessness 
34:21 I give myself permission to never experience what I most want in life
38:13 What is non-divided reality?
43:29 Freedom is not synonymous with positive feelings
47:47 Neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity 
51:35 Falling through the air with no parachute
52:25 Challenging our identification with hope
55:17 Bruce’s gradual shift towards freedom
58:00 Being profoundly limited
1:03:03 Asking if what you most want is available right now
1:04:44 One taste 
1:05:54 Impermanence and dependent origination
1:10:27 Enlightenment 
1:13:24 Trying to experience no-self can be motivated by fundamental aggression to experience
1:15:04 Maintaining a center through problem maintaining
1:18:53 The function of neurosis
1:26:00 What’s fundamentally disturbing about our experience? 
1:33:05 How does groundlessness fit into freedom and nirvana? 
1:34:33 Do we know anything? 
1:39:05 What does it mean to be “Already Free?” 
1:43:24 Neurosis is a clever way to pretend to ourselves we’re addressing our life while guaranteeing nothing happens 
1:47:08 What’s always available?
1:48:08 Final words from Bruce
1:50:30 Outro

Andres Gomez Emilsson is the director of research at the Qualia Research Institute where he works to build a science of consciousness to improve the lives of sentient beings. His work at QRI ranges from psychedelic theory, to neurotechnology development, and mapping the computational properties of consciousness. 

Qualia Research Institute: https://qri.org/

Andres' Twitter: https://twitter.com/algekalipso

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/xJzBjBo24g8

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucasFMPerry

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
2:13Are current AI systems conscious? 
4:10 Marr's levels of analysis 
9:16 Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment 
20:53 The binding problem 
35:25 Computers do not leverage the EM field to do computationally useful things 
46:46 Equanimity and the sense of self 
53:36  Binding is frame invariant and provides computational benefits 
56:41 Avoiding strong emergence 
58:37 Sidestepping the hard problem of consciousness
59:03 Avoiding epiphenomenalism
1:01:07 Being compatible with modern scientific world picture 
1:04:56 Experiments for testing to see if electromagnetic fields of human brain form unified global topology 
1:07:14 Merging your consciousness field topology with someone else’s 
1:14:07 Summary of if current AI models are conscious 
1:16:55 Doing and undoing the topological twist of consciousness 
1:24:56 What it’s like to be the field before topological segmentation 
1:27:43 Why is there something rather than nothing?
1:32:04 Does valence add up to zero? 
1:35:42 The symmetry theory of valence 
1:39:20 Does the static field of consciousness have an experience? 
1:41:07 Grounding ethics in open individualism and valence realism 
1:44:57 Clarifying ethical thought experiments with a science of consciousness 
1:47:33 Why does valence exist?
1:48:45 What does it mean for the field to tear? 
1:50:51 Infinite universes through the fracturing of nothing 
1:53:20 Would replacing humans with happy AIs solve the alignment problem? 
1:55:28 If AIs don’t leverage field topology for computation, does that null the alignment problem? 
1:58:30 Non-linear wave computing 
2:01:08 How does the enteric nervous system fit into sentience? 
2:03:49 Why is the electromagnetic field especially relevant to consciousness 
2:05:25 Cosmological qualia 
2:07:40 Hedonium shockwaves and Andres’ shirt 
2:08:32 The perfume “Hedonium Shockwave” by Andres Gomez Emilsson 
2:15:47 Using Hedonium Shockwave to explore consciousness 
2:17:46 The future of art given the rise of AI models 
2:22:42 Final thoughts from Andres
2:23:53Where to find and follow Andres

Culum Brown is a professor at Macquarie University where he is a behavioral ecologist studying fish behavior and cognition. He is a long time proponent of fish intelligence and welfare, arguing for interventions to improve the lives of fish. Culum has over 150 research publications and is in the top 2.5% of Research Gate.

Join the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Mu_Podcast

Donations: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/lucasperry

Video episode: https://youtu.be/LN6cgNu9QAM

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucasFMPerry

Timestamps: 
0:00 Intro
2:10 Better understanding fish 
4:44 Fish learning and memory
11:20 Social learning and culture
20:56 Cross species relationships: offering backrubs 
27:59 Fish participate in predator evaluation together
32:57 Knowing their place in the hierarchy 
37:18 Cooperating across species to hunt 
41:58 Fish accumulate cultural knowledge across generations 
43:46 Machiavellian intelligence in fish 
46:12 What brain size means 
49:04 Tool use and house building 
58:14 Intelligence in parrots 
59:28 Breadth of fish sensing 
1:03:44 Pain in fish and other animals
1:14:24 The experience of farmed, wild-caught, lab grown, and pet fish 
1:27:58 How fish are caught and killed
1:34:19 What do we do given all this suffering? 
1:37:58 Policy solutions for fish welfare
1:42:43 Can we abolish the biological roots of suffering? 
1:49:19 Why did land animals become generally intelligent instead of sea creatures? 
1:52:49 Final thoughts from Culum
1:54:18 Where to find and follow Culum