A conversation with Neil Theise, a diagnostic pathologist specializing in liver pathology and author of Notes on Complexity, a short book introducing complexity theory to general readers. Theise describes the book's thirty-year gestation: his research on adult stem cell plasticity, showing bone marrow stem cells migrate through the body and contribute to other organs, which unexpectedly figured in George W. Bush's address on stem cells; and a funded recorded dialogue with the artist Jane Prophet, who told him that his description of cell behavior matched how complexity scientists talk about slime molds and ant colonies. That led to modeling stem cells as complex systems, and to a talk he first tried out at the Village Zendo in New York. He wrote the book at his agent's urging, on the model of Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
Guest: Neil Theise
In brief
- Theise's research showed that adult bone marrow stem cells move around the body and can become part of any organ, overturning assumptions about lineage fixity.
- The artist Jane Prophet's observation that his account of cell movement resembled slime mold and ant colony behavior introduced Theise to complexity theory.
- Theise reports that the same unmodified talk worked equally well for Zen practitioners, academic stem cell biologists and a fifth-grade class, which he takes as evidence the framework is genuinely simple.
- Notes on Complexity was written as a short book on the model of Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons on Physics rather than as a comprehensive treatment.
- Theise argues that solutions to problems like atmospheric carbon are unpredictable in principle, because they emerge from collective activity as unforeseeable phenomena.
- Because the adjacent possible cannot be predicted in advance, Theise says the rational response is to keep working rather than to conclude that mitigation is impossible.
Full text
hey everybody uh today I'm here with Neil t uh author of notes on complexity a really wonderful book uh and he had sent it to me U maybe a year ago or something when it first came out and I was sluggish and I didn't get around to it and finally did and I was super delighted when I understood what he's talking about um of course for anybody watching this if uh they like this content if they could please subscribe to the um Channel like the the podcast and all those nice things would be helpful uh they might also want to check out my newsletter which is Daniel pinchbecks substack docomo fan that's so cool yeah I mean I we met originally um I don't remember how uh someone else I'm wondering if it was Michael Garfield um or someone else uh had a little panel yeah downtown East villagey and um was it bill otman from mind. com yes yes that's it yeah and um that and I think the video exists online oh cool yeah so um so Neil congratulations on the book and it feels like it's kind of has a real life out there like I was just at mcnali um bookstore in New York which is the best bookstore in the city and they had it on the bestseller uh table uh uh it's it's gone into its third printing in hard cover which kind of blows me away uh paperbacks coming out in the fall and um and yeah it's getting around you know there wasn't a big promotional campaign um for this Spiegel and grow my publisher uh they have a long history as one of the most important uh imprints at random house but when Random House merged with penguin uh part of that deal was to throw them out um so they went independent I'm the second book they acquired I I think the fifth one to actually come out so there wasn't a huge budget for promotional stuff it's really been moving on its own steam uh some podcasts helped some big ones but people seem to give it to each other yeah yeah uh maybe just tell us a little bit we were just talking about it a moment ago what what what's sort of the Genesis of the book like how did it uh emerge out of The Ether yeah so um it feels very much like it emerged out of The Ether in pieces over the last 30 years or so um I started giving public talks about this stuff which is basically it's the same framework it's just broadened and deepened as as the last two decades have gone by um about 20 years ago and um it came about because I was put together with an artist named Jane profit who's a u an artist back then in the UK now she's in the US and um she had uh we had a mutual friend who got a grant to have us do an interdisciplinary thing a scientist talking with an artist and all we had to do was record our conversation so other people could look at it and I was describing to her what um the first science thing I did that kind of went viral was adult stem cell plasticity that bone marrow stem cells and humans moved around the body and could become part of any organ uh unintended consequences that led to George that paper led to George Bush's address to the nation on stem cells which was an unfortunate thing but so that happened um and uh I became very um popular for a nanc with fundamentalist anti-abortion groups in the United States um but um then they found out who I was not so much um so I was telling Jane about um how cells are moving around the body like this and and she said well that's very much how complexity scientists talk about slime molds and how ant colonies organize themselves and I'd never heard of complexity Theory so she explained it to me and we started exploring um we brought on a mathematician uh and a computational scientist and started modeling stem cells according to complex systems Theory um published some papers on that but the implications of it just kept sort of unfurling and um uh and that eventually within a year and a half uh turned into this sort of grand scheme that I present in the book and uh what was interesting the first time I gave the talk it was actually at my zen group uh the village Zeno in newk city I often try stuff out there because they're really smart diverse people um and it went over very well um then I started doing it for academic stem cell biologists who would often sit there like this and with their legs crossed but uh not too Keen initially but by the end um I had taken them places they didn't expect and the questions were always very interesting and came in from all sides um presented it my nephew wanted me to come to his fifth grade class uh and so they brought me in to give a talk to the two this was Solomon Cher and queens and teachers wound up calling the parents to tell them they were holding the school buses because lighted with questions and I didn't change the talk the for the different audiences it's simple and it was exactly the same stuff and over the years there's just been this tremendous response to it um I didn't really want to write this book um because I thought to do complexity Theory Justice uh what I was thinking in my head was a a book like Brian Green's the elegant Universe three or 400 Pages annotated and I'm not that person and I don't certainly don't have the time I'm a diagnostic pathologist I have clinical work to do and um and my agent said no no no no just turn your talk into a little book thing uh she suggested rll's uh seven brief lessons in physics as a model and I thought oh that I can do and um it turned out to be pretty hard because I'm a science writer I write science papers I don't write for a general public so I had to learn how to do that um but it seems I've managed to yeah what do you feel is like the uh the Salient like piece of of new information or kind of the the The Cutting Edge of what it is that you're putting out there that is both exciting to people and which maybe people who are more like traditional science people might feel uh a certain level of resistance to uh it's funny I was uh participating in a um now I don't have to answer that sorry um I'm in my Hospital office and I'm Uncle um so that on the one hand that's a hard question to answer because um unlike my academic talks like if I talk about stem cells or if I talk about L pathology which is my sub specialty I'll give a talk and there you know and I'm sure you feel you have the same sort of experience you're going to tell a story about your topic and everyone comes with you at the same time get to the same spot and come to your conclusion and it's sort of a uniform thing when I've given this talk um it never fails to be more like light bulbs going on across the road um at every single slide at every single statement I make there's something for someone in the room I can't predict who that's going to be and I can't predict what it is that's hitting them so everyone who reads the book comes at me with completely different things and the result is the response I'm getting to the book I kind of thought this would happen because of the talks but um I get letters from artists um it's already been used in a installation in a museum in Oslo um someone's doing choreography based on it in LA um in two weeks I'm going to a conference they're holding to discuss the book with me the yungi and analysts of Rome want to talk to me about um I'm doing a thing with sustainability in the fall um so you know and and a few science people too I think what you're probably most interested in my guess would be that um what complexity Theory did for me first of all was give me a way to understand how all levels of the universe exist in an interrelated form from the quantum from Space Time on up um the problem is that even with a comprehensive model like that that spans the quantum world to the relativistic world including all of life and complexity theory is really a way of understanding life where life comes from how life develops how it evolves and um but I couldn't say anything about Consciousness although many people had used complexity to explain Consciousness uh one example would be um uh Douglas hoffstead in uh go to ler bath famously um talked about how the structures of the brain um self-organize themselves to give rise to human mind and so the brain makes mind and the the mind is an emergent property of the self-organizing system of everything in the brain and that's one of the things about complexity it talks about how interrelating uh individuals that fulfill certain criteria give rise to larger scale structures that often appear plant like the the you know where a food line goes with the ants or the organization of people walking down a sidewalk or driving on a highway um neighborhoods cultures ecosystems we see larger scale structures and they're happening because of of complexity um the problem is that that's not a satisfying answer to where Consciousness comes from because we run up against the hard problem of Consciousness and which is that nothing we can measure in the brain explains the experience of the phenomena that are being that are being experienced so um we can say everything about you know the classic red rose a photon comes into the eye hits the retina goes up the nerve visual cortex and you see a rose but if you close your eyes you can see a rose too you don't need that the experience of seeing a rose is independent of the neuronal pathways um that's why cognitive neuros scientist I think it's very frustrating to them always have to say when they find something that correlates with a phenomenon in the mind they have to say it's a neural correlate of Consciousness because they can't ever prove that it caused it so that's been a persistent problem for them some people have addressed the problem by saying well Consciousness is inherent in smaller aspects of the world that self-organize themselves in a complex way into the Consciousness we experience as humans this is the pardon that's the pan psychist that's the pan psychism View and I was a pan psychist for a little while because I mean it seemed to make sense and um I became familiar with the work of Francisco verella autop poetic Theory where cells are the basic unit of life and in his definition cells have mind anything living has mind um anything that has mind is a lot and in fact he was a student of the dalama and the mind and life organization that organized for several decades meetings between scientists and the Dal Lama was uh Bella founded that um and called it mind and life because of this idea that mind and life went together and the smallest unit of life is the cell and so cells have mind and cells organize themselves into larger structures which have larger more complex Minds until you get to our brain which has the most complex um there are people who say that there are particles that convey Consciousness I think Kristoff Koch is uh talking about that now there are people who say well it's elements of the structure of Space Time that have some formational Consciousness um this would be Stu Hammer off and uh s Roger Penrose but they don't explain away the hard problem you still still have the same issue and so where I finally landed prodded in part by my collaborator and all the Consciousness stuff minus Catos is that an idealist point of view um and I know you quote Bernardo Castro quite a lot um he's a pal um I'm in awe of how he manages to do this philosophically um the way he does but we land in exactly the same place place which is that there is an underlying Big C Consciousness I call it in the book we don't have enough words in English to describe these things and it's the nature of that Big C Consciousness to be nonu um it there's no subject object split within it and um it's Indescribable mathematically poetically visually you name it and out of that Springs the universe and um so the book explores that as the final option and gives a coherent idea of why that would lead to Space Time quantum foam Quantum particles atoms molecules and the whole shebang so and why is that well so Minos and I we had four our our we both have had contemplate uh contemplative paths um for me uh the primary one has been Zen Buddhism um I have uh working pretty strong academic understanding of Jewish mysticism for Minas ADV vant he had a pretty good academic uh idea a version of Hinduism um but he was a a practitioner of Kashmir shavis and I we go into those four um areas to see what they have to say about the underlying stream of Consciousness that seems to um underly reality and we wrote about that in some academic papers but I summarize it in the book and each one mystical Traditions tend to focus on a particular question they're trying to answer so they're interrogating the same phenomena but they often perceive different aspects of it so in Buddhism the question is how do you end suffering and so um there it's by directly EXP experiencing the mind of clear light the mindstream that underlies existence through which all dualities disappear and when you experience that suffering disappears because everything is a single connected thing Jewish mysticism the question is uh how was the World created and how is it created in each moment and so how existence arises from that becomes a question um four worlds kabalah talks about that in detail but how that actually happens the mechanics which is your question uh Kashmir shav ism is that was their question how do you get the world of Duality from non-duality what's the transition between those lives and when they drill down contemplatively these weren't you know they were sitting around imagining things these were things they used their minds to explore and prud until they had a direct experience of it that fundamental pure awareness awareness of awareness no subject object split for some reason has an urged that it wants to know itself and in doing so has to start to conceive of the possibility of there being a subject and object and they discuss the stages whereby the idea occurs and then there's sort of a shimmering awareness that there's possibility of Separation um step five is the actual separation into subject and object to get separation separation can only be measured in Dimensions like space and time and maybe some other dimensions so the moment you get subject objects uh separation arising out of the nonuel you wind up with Dimensions which gives you space time space time is an energy-rich field and that gives you the quantum foam and that gives you the quantum particle and gives you the entire universe so the universe so the fundamental Big C Consciousness trying to understand itself gives rise to all of this wait wait how did how did we get from that uh pure um awareness to the quantum foam so the the the separation into subject object separation requires dimensionality okay if there's no Dimensions you can't have separation yeah um separation in which Dimensions well the only ones we're really confident about are space and time right but once you have those you have Space Time and once you have Space Time according to Quantum Theory you have an energy-rich field which then gives rise to mass containing particles because of eals mc^2 and they usually self annihilate because they're matter antimatter pairings but sometimes they don't and when they don't they get to interact with each other like members of a complex system and they give rise to larger subatomic particles which give rise like a complex system to atoms which give rise to molecules which give rise to all existence this is kind of like a um a level beneath let's say you know anything of the physical Universe this would be like pre- big bang maybe there's many Big Bangs or you know maybe that's just a misinterpretation of what actually happens well the thing is that in the nonu there's no time yeah there's no dimensionality so uh the the the idea of a big bang is kind of meaningless if there's no time and no space yeah but what but that it still could be just as the same way like a seed sprouts and creates a flower I mean you know it could be that there was something that created this particular Universe like some kind of well and that thing we would say and all these Traditions would say is that fundamental awareness that's the fundamental thing that gives rise to everything else there is nothing separate from it because it is the source of all things it's the ground of being um I'm looking over here because I'm using a quote in a talk that this is a Sufi master named hrat Nayak Khan um and he said this regard you know you're mentioning of the seed the Sufi says this whole universe was made in order that God might know himself pardon the gender specific the seed wished to realize what it is what is in it and therefore became the tree yeah so yeah that's that's exactly what it's like your metaphor is kind of spot up yeah no very cool I mean it's a you know it's a very enjoyable book it's very soothing in a way to think that everything like you know kind of maybe fits together I likeed where you talk about um kind of um you know the failure to create the theory of everything you know kind of um um and um yeah you don't have an exact reconciliation on the mathematical level but you're saying that's not the only level there is that is also kind of like well actually actually um I I there's a footnote somewhere in the book um you can't mathematically describe nwell so you know there's just there's no way to get there you can experience it directly but you can't describe it however what's happening at those earliest stages of creation that can be mathematically described and if you look at the further reading in the book in the back there are a couple of papers where we have mathematical uh ways of approaching this um one I'm using ttos Theory um uh now I'm going to on it the math is not my Str yeah though I was on the math team so I seem to have an instinct for it and I'm a co-author on all the papers these are with Manas and a guy in California named gorata yeah and I was of course also very happy you know first of all that you arrived at the idealist uh view uh which I also you know share but then also that you said hey wait a second like if this is the reality then all these areas of paranormal investigation kind of like Supernatural uh psychic phenomena the these could be very legitimate do you want to explain how you make that that leap or what what what what happened there yeah well um so the actual history of this book is I wanted to write a different book and no one would publish it unless I wrote this book first um that book was a report of my mom's last eight years during which she needed 24-hour Home Care she lived next to to us on the Lower East Side um and uh started having experiences of dead people um they started bringing in more dead people they started telling her things she couldn't possibly have known because she was never on the phone because she was deaf and couldn't leave the apartment and um and then Spirit guides from the universe started showing up I have a shamanic teacher she met him on the astral plane um which I found out about because she told me and she never had met him before I met him actually several years after she had started to decline decline um she started having uh spontaneous Awakening experiences and she died in a bliss bubble and I wanted to write that book in my Jewish Family culture the idea of talking to dead people is not a big surprise the idea that Visions can happen in dreams that have meaning is is not a big surprise so on the one hand I could go into this book and say I'm going to build a model that contains all these other things but the impulse to do it is because I've had Direct experiences of such things myself um that some of which are independently have been independently um confirmable and an example is uh one of the people who came to visit my mom was the uh the rabbi who had died 30 years before who I grew up with in our synagogue and he was a lovely guy and they had a really good relationship but he was coming by a lot and he was sort of boring her um which she was a little complained about uh she would complain about um so I came over to visit her one afternoon and I said uh any visitors because that became I wanted to know who was showing up and um she said oh Rabbi Bodenheimer was here I said oh did he annoy you no he didn't stay along he had to go greet his sister who was arriving this afternoon well his sister was Mrs Brown if she was alive she'd be over a hundred so I didn't take that literally I I hung out with my mom and then I went home and got a call from our hometown in Hartford and uh Mrs Brown had died that afternoon at 102 years old what do you do with that um you know things like that so my inclination is to go okay this is real the way my inclination has been I have experiences in meditation I never really cared whether I could find a scientific explanation or basis for them that was completely irrelevant to me um I had those experiences and I had my scientific intellectual experiences and uh the fact that they merged as they did in this book was actually a surprise moment to me that I did not seek to happen and it was a very Zen sort of experience um so what I think is happening that I can turn to this book and say how would I incorporate those experiences into this model is that this model says the world at its fundamental is nothing but pure awareness nothing but mind again we have very few English words that are good for this the world is non-material despite its appearances and so opens the possibility for there be to be other non-material um Realms of existence planes of existence that are populated by non-material beings and one of the things that's been interesting to me in the shamanic stuff I've been exposed to is how my teachers there talk about how um beings you know Loosely the astral plane beings you can encounter on the astral plane seem dreamlike they're very hard to grasp in detail though they're Vivid in a sort of experiential way that to them we seem dream like and to themselves they seem solid the way we feel solid to ourselves well my best guess to what's going on is that we know we probably have something in the universe called Dark Matter we don't know that's so great NE that was my next question I just wrote down asking about dark matter and dark energy yeah Dark Energy I don't know what to do with but Dark Matter yeah people do discuss you know the it's dark to us not because it's evil it's dark to us because we can't experience it through light electromagnetic forces through the strong force through the weak Force we can only experience it through gravity and has large scale gravitational effects on Galaxies which is how we know it's probably there but what's it made of there are people who speculate what kind of sub um Quantum level particles would give rise to this large scale gravitational entity um but no one really talks about the fact that those should be interactive with each other the way our subatomic particles are interactive with each other so pure awareness gives rise to to Duality gives rise to Space Time gives rise to the quantum foam and is obviously to me also giving rise to the quantum level uh lowest level particles or whatever they are strings whatever of dark matter and those like our Quantum entities will interact with each other to create some larger scale version of a mass-like object which then combines further um because there interactive with themselves and interacting things necessarily will combine in a complex system sort of way and give rise to a larger scale thing which will also be interactive with it other members and then you get a whole Dark Matter plane of existence that has no way to interact with us except gravitation or through the experiences of our mind because what do we both have in common us beings and those beings on those planes of existence is the fundamental awareness that we arose from so the idea that we can dip into Consciousness to experience them and they can do the same to us and of course we'd appear dreamlike um to each other um so to me that's that's a not unreasonable way to discuss things that's very cool when you you're the first person I've ever told it to and now it's out there um so I Harbor this the I am going back to work on the book about my mom and um your stuff about uh reincarnation and um after death stuff is is going to be very useful to me because um her experiences had meaning to her and to us they were transformative to her and to us and I want to put those experiences in a context that says to people hey I'm a real scientist I publish work in all the top tier science journals um but I also have these experiences and I also think that way look at the other book there's no reason to dismiss any of this out of hand what gets me upset isn't that someone disagrees it's that they're dismissive um you can't be dismissive of and be consistent yeah um yeah that's super interesting I mean I guess uh one question would be you know why you know because obviously there many people get very old and you know have like these care situations why of all these types of people your mother was the one who kind of you know had these you know kind of semiconscious or you know visit visitation kind of experiences over the course of years that you have well that is indeed a question so um there are a couple of things um this was not Not Unusual in her family there may be a lineage thing and I've had these experience yeah when I first told um one of my mom's friends that she was seeing dead people she said your mother's always seeing dead people like excuse me because she didn't talk to you about it no um I had my first experience of something like that when I was like 23 24 um so there may be a lineage thing Rel Rel ated to it um one of my shamanic teachers comes from a long line of Scottish witches um so you know um but my primary teacher in that came out of nowhere he's just an adep yeah my mom has a deep spiritual practice um her connection to her word her name for God is a Yiddish word the liba Numa which means the Beloved name um and uh in her later years when she would use it it was like she was a teenage girl talking about her boy crush and I'd say you know how are you and the liba Numa doing today and she'd go oh we're fine did her devotional practice opened her up to something the way my contemplative practice helps me to open up to a deeper experience and I make the point in the book that it isn't just contemplative practice it can be practice of service it can be practice of devotion um it can be artistic practice I mean how do you explain um gay poet what's that gay poet 19th century help me Oscar wild no no no New York um hard CRA of gr Whitman Whitman aging brain yeah uh looke wal Whitman's walking to me toward me down the street and I can't remember his name oh well um where did Walt whitmann come from his his his poetry is suffused with insights appropriate to a a Zen master where did that come from um so I don't know why my mom but whenever I know someone who has lost some um I have learned over the years and and this started during the AIDS years my husband and I came of age in New York during the AIDS years so we were surrounded by dead people all the time and it became a habit of mine when someone would tell me that someone close to them had died I said I would say have you had any experiences of them have they visited um often they'd go can that happen some people would go oh that doesn't happen but they all come back back to me um I'd say about a third of them reported Vivid experiences that that they could not explain any other one and some of those are hardcore materialists for whom this is a total mindfun because how do you explain this if materialism is your worldview yeah what you what you were saying before about dark matter I mean yeah I wrote about in that little afterlife book but I got very fascinated by a few people from the late 19th early 20th century one of them being this guy Frederick Meers who was one of the founders of the society for psychic research oh sure yeah and um so he was writing this book that he that was magnumopus that was the end published after he died called the survival of the human personality after bodily death it was like a you know 2,000 page to or something he and his friends at that point it was a lot of the top scientists in England and like Cambridge people and William James was part of it so they all were very you know seriously interested in this topic then they had some notable mistakes where they like platformed certain like mediums who were then revealed to be frauds and so they sort of went underground they lost a lot of their momentum and but they made a a a deal like a bet in between the group whoever died first would try to come back and communicate from the other side so I think Myers died around 1900 and um he wasn't that old I think he was like in his early 50s or something then like a year or two later a number of different mediums spontaneously began to say they were being visited by Meyers and in some cases his friends gathered together with the psychic and um you know went through these long conversations with Myers who described what life was like for him in the afterlife and he talked about how it's like people have like bodies and they go to the work and they have families and some it's quite similar there's different levels depending on you know if you're ready to understand that it's really like more like just a Consciousness school then you kind of begin to go up a level but he also said there their bodies and everything was made out of a slightly different kind of particle uh what we have on this side yeah I found that fascinating um it is fascinating and you know I the massive experiences out there I I spend a fair amount of time in the book um towards the end before I get into entertaining um these metaphysical ideas that you have to be really careful when screening the data you're going to include in your theory um because there's a lot of bad data there too as there is often in science right um but if you're really rigorous and you're paying attention to yourself um things happen and um I think to reject them as non-existent because they don't fit your model of understanding of existence is kind of pathetic and certainly not scientific right well there's been problem I'm sure you know Dean Raiden's work right yeah I was going to bring him up so um yeah and and um someone who I met through him who worked with him for a while don't worry about it well she's WR a lovely book on dreams um and time travel um but um yeah the scientific data is there and I heard but I know I know they've had an issue with a number of the um attempts to demonstrate reliably psychic phenomena that the first time you do an experiment there's a very strong U evidence well right it doesn't seem yeah it doesn't seem to follow our normal expectations for yeah uh empirical Sciences coret drops so it's almost as if the mystery is like protecting itself in some way yeah yeah yeah but um no that's that's seems to be one of its characteristics but um uh and that's a nice way of of you know de theologically what's going on here yeah the Myster is protecting itself um but the the it brings up the issue that we're talking about mind experiencing mind mind impacting on mind mind mind studying mind and so by definition that can't be empirical science because it's the self examining the self there's no subject object split which is how you get empirical science there's a subject studying an object and there's a space between and then we find out about Placebo effects and so clinical trials get all screwed up we have to figure some way to make sure they're walled off from each other um but there's never a Walling off really and this is one of the issues that I bring up in the book it's it's another core concept at this level of scale we're bounded by our skin um at the cellular level which I'm always looking at I mean here's a this is a liver biopsy see this pink yeah um so I spend half a day every day looking at bodies made of cells and at the cellular level where's your boundary well we know that 50% roughly 50% of the cells of your living body which without which you cannot be a living human are the microbiome the bacteria and a few other things that populate all the surfaces of your body and all the internal crevices and we leave that everywhere including on each other so that if you have a household if you go look at the microbiome in the household everybody shares one single large microbiome including the pets who live in the house and so where's your boundary at the cellular level well it's out here somewhere um if you want to talk human cells well the dust in your room is the shutting of your skin cells where is your boundary just take it's where you live where you exist if you go down to the molecular level cells cease to exist as independent riable things that's the end of Western medicine and Western biology because that's based on Cell Doctrine if you think of bodies as made of fluids in which you have you know aquous Solutions of molecules floating around interacting with each other as a complex system um simplest example is we breathe out CO2 for the plants and the plants breathe out oxygen for us at the molecular level we are seamlessly intertwined with the entire biomass of the plant at the atomic level there isn't an atom in our bodies that we didn't breathe eat or drink from the plant so on the one hand we can think of ourselves as lonely anxious creatures wandering around on this rock we call Planet Earth or you can think about it as the atomic mass of the planet taking three and a half billion years to self-organize themselves into creatures that think they're alone and anxious and both of those are equally true it's like wave particle duality and quantum physics and we talk about it as complimentarity and Neil bore actually said complimentarity was a universal principle not just at the quantum real and then you get so you know what's your boundary at the atomic level the entire planet well then you're down in the quantum realm and we know in want to Nobel Prize we have non-locality and entanglement so at the quantum level where's your boundary it's the entire universe so there's no way to design any scientific experiment in which you in fact are truly separate from the object you are studying because at some level of scale you were intimately intertwined with we use an image in one of the papers that um sentience everywhere paper I think um we have a picture of this entomologist studying an ant colony and that's empirical science it's the entomologist studying the ant colony but there's an ecologist standing way back over there who's like there's a human who's walked into my ecosystem and is it up you're interfering with my experiment there's never a true way to get that separation um modern science hasn't come to grips with that um this is you know and using quantum physics as the prime example the double slit experiment and how conscious observation changes whether things behave as particles or waves that's the part of the book that people really dismiss me for you don't understand quantum physics um we've moved past Copenhagen interpretation well not the physic physicists I work with um but the other part of this argument is Kurt girdle and girdle's incompleteness the so the idea of what's the best way to understand the nature of existence in our culture what we say is empirical science and we also say formal mathematics those are the two pillars those are the two lenses through which we should be able to explain and describe all existence so we already know from quantum physics and complexity theory that empirical science is fuzzier and you can't get out of the human intention of how you're doing the study on the mathematical side well formal logic formal mathematics should be able to take care of that and so in order for that to be true every theorem about mathematics should be provable from some other theorem that eventually are provable all the way from the you know from some basic axioms um an axiom the Axiom of identity a equals a one thing is equal to itself always um and you build up these proofs ever more complex around the the early Century um a big issue in mathematics was we have to prove in fact that you can prove all of mathematics that it is provable um in a complete sort of way everything can be completely understood and when you do that it would be completely consistent with itself there could be no contradictions because if you put a contradiction in a proof it opens up the possibility of of chaos you can prove anything once you have a contradiction so people were looking to see how approve that and this fellow named Kurt girdle um probably the greatest logician ever um the guy who used to walk with Einstein in Einstein's last years at at Princeton at The Institute for advanced study he's kind of that's how people know him he appears in opener in the distance um he actually proved through a remarkable kind of way which I try and summarize in the book it's pretty hard um that if you have a system of mathematics that is that includes arithmetic numbers real numbers that if you develop a complete proof of all of it it will necessarily be inconsistent and contain contradictions if you develop a proof that is completely consistent and this is the key thing there will always be Pro true statements about the system that cannot be proven from within the system so how can you know something's true and yet you can't prove it through intuition through the mind and that opens and goodle himself acknowledged that that opens the door back to metaphysics that mathematics is not sufficient to understand everything in existence and describe everything in existence and in fact we know specific there are things that cannot be proven that are true so empirical science isn't complete um and doesn't get us all the way there to understand reality mathematics doesn't intuition is necessary and what kind of intuition well we turned as I said to the contemplatives who are adapts and experts at the Mind examining itself which by definition cannot be empirical science because there's no separation it's your own mind investigating your own mind and what's found there kind of universally although how it's described or what it's its import may be um is that there is a Big C Consciousness that underlies everything idealism It All Leads to the same place yeah and that's contemporary Western modern physics mathematics electromagnetism um how does the liver process stuff there's little electrical waves traveling through the liver at microscopic scale so it's important and it developed entirely within the Earth's electromagnetic field they are not separate from each other now what happens if you take human cells and you put them in a world that has no electromagnetic field like Mars well you can expect there to be some problems both in the functioning of the physiological organism but let's get really fundamental can you have reproduction would a sperm and an egg develop normally in the absence of a magnetic field and there are a few experiments out there that have been done which indicate that no this is a real problem so maybe we can get to Mars but we can't make babies there or we can't make living things that are humans like us maybe they are being that would self-organize into things that are like humans but have a different physiology and they'd be true martians because they can only exist in a martian environment although I think it more likely that there would be a miscar that the organism would survive I kind I kind of want to get to a point that I feel like in my mind I have kind of like maybe it's a little bit in coate but I have this idea that I'm like pushing towards and I and I feel like I'm not really you know I want to just maybe I just blunder it out and then from it okay sure uh so you know I'm doing this course and actually I think you know if you want to speak on it it would be great to have you uh we're doing I mean I'm doing a couple of upcoming seminars we discussed a little bit and I think you'd be a great voice on both of them one of them the one that's coming up next month is called embracing our emergency right I've SE so we're looking at um you know I guess in a way I'm trying to find a seam of Hope in in the climate catastrophe and um I have to be completely honest that the more that I've looked like I I follow a lot of different climate scientists on you know what used to be Twitter which is now X and the ones who are credible are uh you know in a state of grief at this point you know what happened in the last year was you know we've gone up to like you know 1.7 or even two above pre-industrial and you know I I was I've been like you know in my work screaming about this even though it wasn't really my baileywick you know since my first book came out back in 2002 right and um you know I felt very scared that or concerned let's say that we weren't going to make a shift in time and now it feels that we haven't made a shift in time and it you know it might be the case that we're already too late even to prevent our own Extinction um which is what some of these some of these think people think yeah I I I would just say humans are so adaptable barring some something that could literally kill off every single human without the chance to adapt like like a panhuman infection although we've never seen such a thing um there's always someone who's immune um big radiation blast that wipes out everybody humans aren't going to go extinct our civilization will go extinct yeah but humans will find pockets and start reproducing and they'll self-organize into little societies it might yeah I guess the question would be the um the oxygen right because like um you know the idea of the methane stored under the Arctic and the Siberian so if that is if that is start starting to thaw and erupt into the atmosphere then you go into a situation where it's 10 degrees Celsius in a couple of decades that it goes up and the problem the Plankton provides like 60% of our oxygen and the tropical forests maybe like % that could be an Extinction event yeah yeah exactly I and no one ever no one ever T tied that together with me yeah do you do you want to know where I go with this what's that oh you froze you want to know where I go with this yeah no but I still have a thing that I'm trying to get to oh yeah go go to your incoit thing that you're going okay um you know but at the same time that we have seems to maybe you know maybe not pushed ourselves over the edge where we've um undone our you know physical systems to the point where we really don't have a fix it uh We've also discovered you know which the Tibetan Buddhists understood or the shite you know the Kashmir you know shites understood that Consciousness is actually the foundational reality and the universe is actually kind of like ultimately made of made of magic that it's a kind of psychic manifestation it's what I'm saying yeah yeah yeah and what what I've been saying for many years yeah um you know is there then an opportunity in this last stage let's say we let's say we did have 20 years you know would it be is is there an idea or a possibility that we could put all this stuff together into some kind of like super laboratory of the psyche let's say where we um you know kind of entrained people in like a whole new discourse Paradigm I I'm very interested also in like Rupert sheldrake's ideas around morphic residence and morph fields and kind of because if you visit different indigenous cultures like in the Amazon things you know like the kogi like magical things happen that are understood in their construct in their language in their myth uh it's just it's just a whole way of being it's like a woven reality that has different POS potentialities that our that ours does and is that possible that that could happen on a global civilizational scale that would be transformative and rescue us from the horror yes or rescue us from the horror or maybe it's the doorway to something else maybe well that's it and and the doorway to something else may include the an Extinction of right but so so one of the things about one of the implications of a complexity understanding of systems is that necessarily given enough time every complex living system will suffer a mass extinction event either partial or complete and that's inherent in the mathematics and it's unavoidable um and it derives from the way interacting elements of a system uh adapt and evolve is that there's a low-level Randomness in every complex system in every live living thing so and this is at the Universe Scale um that limited randomness of the rules of quantum mechanics at the quantum level it's the rules of electron shells and chemistry the you know not everything can't happen very specific things can um um there's a limited Randomness too much Randomness you get no self-organization too little Randomness the thing becomes a machine and always does the same thing and when the environment changes there's no way to adapt and so it dies that way so you need this little bit of Randomness so in every moment what the next moment of the system will be is randomly determined it's stochastic you can't predict what the next moment will be You can predict the size and range of potentials around it Stu Koffman one of my teachers and one of the founders of complexity Theory called these the adjacent posses and every moment there's not a not infinite array of adjacent posses for the next moment so what we're hoping is there's an adjacent possible that includes some aspect of human survival and maybe a range of adjacent posses that even you know might uh save a bunch but a large Bunch but mass extinction events also inevitably happen and that's independent of what we're doing to some extent um we can influence it we can possibly mitigate it we can possibly um maybe in some C circumstances we can actually prevent it and by and large um a way to consider how to do that is looking at the other principles of how complex system self-organized because you can play play with those to get different outcomes and you know that's in the book too that's also not exactly what I'm talking about here it's almost like I know I know I know I'm now what happens when you put this in the context of a non-material universe that's made of Mind from that perspective you know um there are the blood vessels in our body formed as solid cords and then the cells within their centers suffer programmed cell death and a massive die off and now you've got hollow tubes that can act as a cardiovascular system so a mass extinction event was necessary for the life of the organism what's the organism we're talking about the anxiety to some extent comes and you know I don't this is not a way for me to shed this anxiety by any means but if we're talking about individual humans as the unit well a lot of people have a lot of trouble coming if you think of civilization is the unit some parts of it are probably in trou some parts of it are already in trouble but maybe that's going to be a partial mass extinction and civilization will morph it so but if you're thinking about the global consciousness of everything alive on Earth Gaia um well maybe that's the thing that we should be looking at and this is all just sort of yeah fine we have uh you know it gets so warm we have no Plankton we have no oxygen the mammals die off um but there's a whole bunch of other life on the on Earth that's going to survive and the dinosaur die off it was the small little mammals that none of the dinosaurs were probably noticing um and they turned into US life continues what it will continue to become will be ever more complex because that's also the nature of complex systems and in that sense the universe is alive in its entirety it is conscious in its entirety and where we grasp to defines to some extent the nature of the suffering we experience within now there's no way for me to completely let go into some sort of enlightened experience of Nirvana Where I'm just one with the the The Big C Consciousness and so I'm Untouched by suffering but that's not like um but where I go in the last paragraphs of the book my family you know my grandparents were killed in the Holocaust and as I said before my husband and I came of age in New York City during a play and what I saw is that there were people were broken by the experiences and survivors who were broken and survivors who whose lives were richer and more connected um from having survived the experience and people who didn't make it um I saw people on their deathbeds die in fear fear anger despair but I also saw people on their deathbeds who were taking care of everyone in the room around them who were already grieving and um and the dying person and my mother wound up like this um was in kind of a bliss state so what we can learn from this is the resilience comes from understanding that all of these things are happening at all these levels of scale and if we latch on to any single level of scale we're going to be missing something of imp um it's just as inappropriate to latch onto my own existence as the only thing I worry about in the middle of this which is what a lot of people are doing right just you know will I have enough stuff to survive the apocalypse um then there are people who were worrying about their cities and then there are people people like you who are Wonder worrying in part it's only a piece of what you do about global human culture but there's also the even larger more fundamental thing of what's going on in this corner of the vast mind that is everything that's just Consciousness and an evolution um so it's it's it's I I think the key thing is there are two things number one is to always have the flexibility to remember there are other levels of scale from which this needs to be observed to have an understanding of what's going on none of them are more important than any other every single one is as valid and important as every other one and if you ignore one you ignore one at your part um but the other thing is my grandparents were killed in Ria that's where the German Jews mostly were sent to and um I found I went to Ria and turned out I could find out enormous detail about what happened to my grandparents when they arrived there um now my mom my grandmom had two sons my father was sent to England on the Kinder transport five days before the war started so they sent him away never saw him again my grandfather wanted to send my uncle my my father's older brother who couldn't go was too old for the kidy transport to Amsterdam but my grandmother couldn't bear to send her other son away so he went to Ria with them I talked to my uncle about this and he said well had she sent me to Amsterdam I would have been sent to aitz and I would have died in r I was put in a work camp and I had a chance to survive she was shot in a forest um and when I found the spot I sort of there's a ghost part of this story which I can tell you some other time but the experience I had was oh I finally really have met my grandmother I know who she was and I know who she was at the moment she was dying and she was a woman who was dying in despair because because she had sent both her sons away she lost her husband she had failed in every choice she had made and I think that's the state of mind she met her death with but the fact is she was the only one of her siblings and cousins who actually saved both her children so we do what we have to do you have to show up the way you show up um it's necessary but even if bad things happen and you see them fail you can't assume that things failed you can't assume that you failed um the Solace here is we can't ever know the ends of what we do and even if we don't survive um what we do matters and any small thing can tip the balance and you may be the source of tipping that balance even if you're not here to see that and understand and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind too all of this stuff I think if you leave out any piece of this um this doesn't solve my anxiety and it doesn't solve my despair but it gives me a little perspective on it um I guess I guess like I'm you know a lot of people in the activist world are still focused on you know um fighting the corporations you know holding on um but actually I think it would be kind of interesting in a way to have you and dialogue with somebody like Bill Mc An I don't if you talk to him I but sure this type of perspective um gives him another angle on you know CU he I mean we're also having guy Nate Hain who has a uh video series and podcast the great simplification which is very good I I've I've heard it has reached my ears but but um I guess I guess what I'm thinking about is like uh kind of like if somebody was to give me like $100 million or something it would be like some kind of like super Institute for developing the psyche uh or exploring like there's a guy Tom Roberts wrote a book called the Psychedelic future of the mind and he was talking about these different mind body States and how people have different seem to have different abilities you know then you have like Tibetan Buddhists who you know go into the rainbow body where where they all dissolve kind of into rainbows or don't gor Harrison when he died what's that his rainbow body yeah if you look at the uh scorsi documentary at the very very very end his rainbow body appeared oh really yeah yeah yeah yeah that I didn't know yeah just watch the last five minut interesting or yeah the um the DS are able to like push people across you know the room with with just the energy their cheat I was doing taiichi for a while and my taiichi instructor was one of those I mean I'm here he doesn't move and suddenly I'm thrown 30 feet back and we'd always have to have someone to catch you at the other side because otherwise you'd hit the wall hit the desk Etc yeah um I just wonder in this type of Realm you know in the shanic realm and these types of esoteric Realms maybe there's something else that self-organizes that even if we lose you know kind of the the um organic realm there's like you know it's not just a technological thing it's it's like something like that yeah and but but can we ever know that and Define it probably not um or at least not as while we're you know you know unskilled and attached to our human forms but um we don't know about what's going on yeah you know we don't um I follow a lot about what you talk about in terms of civilizational cycles and you know etc etc etc even giving that all Credence we don't know what that's about we just can recognize oh there are Cycles how do the people who recognize those experience them that's an interesting question because I don't think they're making it up I don't think it's an imaginational thing I think it's an experiential thing yeah um well how do you think that sort of integrating this idealism into like cellular biology and a molecular and atomic levels you know this kind of just multi- halonic kind of like Viewpoint what what what's what's the potentially positive impact that could have on um kind of the future of uh you know culture the future of science like where where could it take us if if enough people kind of anchor this this whole this new level of uh perspective in a way well um that's another thing I'm working on um so a few years ago my other viral science stuff was the idea that the inters of the human body um which is basically all the Cen Rich connective tissue of the body which is a single body wide network has these fluid filled spaces in um and uh it's called the interesti and um when we published it there was a lot of news and fuss that this was a new organ I think it's actually a new organ system I think it's a level of scale up and when you're considering what's going on here you're talking about what's going on at the molecular and the fluid level of the body um and so part of one of the limitations in Western science it's what I mentioned earlier Western science and biology is defined by cell Doctrine when we looked under the microscope we saw empty boxes um they were called cells because they were like the cell of a monk or a prisoner devoid of furniture and you couldn't take an empty box and break it into smaller boxes you just get fragments and so the cell was the unit of life and that's Western medicine and Western biology but what about all the stuff that's between the cells you can think of the body as a a fluid and at which point cells as an independent existing thing disappear I think this is chapter five of the book um so the body is fluid um the body has an electromagnetic body it turns out that all this collagen probably is a giant pzo crystal and every time any piece of you moves you're generating electrical current independent of your nervous system and is that where you know are the overlapping structures within that electromagnetic field your shuckles when I um published this stuff uh there was an initially a fair amount of Anger from for example the osteopaths uh people who do ralphing cranial sacral work um the fascia researchers on the planet because they were like this is not new we've known this for 60 or 70 years I wasn't aware that they knew this because I was looking in the medical literature which excludes them so I never saw it but now I found out about when I was in China for liin um they asked me to give a talk on the inti and I did and the first um question was from someone who was attending who was very high up in their version of NIH for traditional Chinese medicine and he said what's been the reaction he asked what's the reaction been to this work and I said well you know it's Anatomy it's hard to ignore so once people see it they know it's real um but there was a lot of anger because people said we've known this for 60 or 70 years and he laughed and saides and we've known about it for 4,000 um so this complexity view allows you to open up that the body is functioning at all these levels of scale and if you just lock in at one single level you're missing all the others and different cultures of healing and health are tapping into different levels of scale none of them do all of it and it's that same complimentarity none of them can do all of it nor should we expect any one model to do everything but there are modes of healing and then we go down to the conscious level and we know that the mind can do all sorts of astonishing things in terms of healing the body whether it's your own body or someone else's body that happens too it's documented you know if you think the body is made of cells and that's all there is there's no room to accept that as truth so you reject it as data but if you understand understand that everything is just a field of Consciousness then sure why not so both the interstitium stuff I've been doing um which people from all sorts of different cultures look at and go yes that's what we've been talking um and the complexity stuff I think just open up a common language for shamanic practices for Chinese Tibetan Japanese practic IES Native American uh old Swedish um who are all considering the body from a different perspective these are all complimentary to each other and if we can find complimentary if we can understand each other's languages which is what to bring things kind of Full Circle when Jane the artist and Neil the scientists sat down to talk the first step of an interdisciplinary collaboration was to learn each other other's languages not necessarily well enough to speak them but at least to understand them and if these ideas this Anatomy this science provide a field in which people can learn to communicate with each other I think it'll transform everything the question is will it happen in time I guess that would be one last question for you and then maybe we'll leave it for today but I mean um you know of uh of this whole Theory I do feel there's like I felt boyed up like kind of excited I felt I've been marinating in this whole climate catastrophe and I was trying to articulate one element where I felt maybe there's some trajectory or some possibility that suggested but I'm curious from your perspective um like you know if you talk to somebody like um you know Nate or Bill M kimid or somebody who's really been you know mired into how you know we've overshot you know our possibility changing the system intervening you know where do you see what you're talking about in terms of complimentarity and idealism could actually give them like a new orientation or or something that would be useful and helpful so on the one hand there's this Grim notion of mass extinction events that are unavoidable but which mass extinction events happen that's an open question um the next moment of existence is determined by the range of adjacent Poss in this moment this is how I cope with American politics I don't know the full range of adjacent posses but I'm sure some of them aren't terrible there are things we can't imagine happening th this is I mean this is usually what happens we're looking over here and something happens over here uh John Lennon's you know life is what's happening when you're I can't other plans yeah yeah right while you're making yeah um so the fact is that there's always this range of possibilities that the universe is generating and some share of those are creative and adaptive rather than mass extinction oriented in fact the majority of them might be and how do you know that because life flourishes wherever life is life flourishes the universe flourishes it doesn't always work out right but you can't assume it's not there's always a possibility out there before the next moment arrives that changes everything even when the physics seems slightly incontrovertible or like hard to uh yeah I mean you know let's let's play Wild science fiction you know just because I have to come up with something for you because if I could predict what it if I could predict what that adjacent possible was we'd all be working towards it right um maybe there's someone working on something that draws methane and carbon from the universe from the the atmosphere in a really efficient way that's low energy and blah blah blah yeah we don't you know is it likely no um will sensient beings from another planetary system come and go you know we solved this problem a long time time ago and here's some help I can imagine possibilities that can happen now the two I come up with are highly unlikely but I can't imagine the likely me personally I can't imagine the likely ones because if I could I'd be telling you what they are but someone may be and you may not even know you're doing it because it may be something that arises out of collective activity as an unpredictable emergent phenomenon and every single member of the system helped make that moment possible so I think you just have to keep going you can't know you can't know we can escape it but you can be pretty certain that there are possibilities for mitigating and it may be that you can't predict where they're going to come from so just keep going all right Neil very cool wonderful to talk to you I love the book and I love that you're transmitting this uh way of thinking and and and and knowing and sensing to the world I I I can't tell you how you in particular telling me that has meaning for me I really appreciate that to hear yeah um but let's uh let's get you involved in these other seminars uh that if that works for you of course and um yeah really great to reconnect and more to come yeah okay yeah thank have a beautiful day
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.