Metaphysics and Consciousness with Mario Varvoglis

Mario Varvoglis, PhD, has been president of the Institut Métapsychique International in Paris, France, since 1997. He is the author of several books aimed at the French speaking market. He is also the creator of the “Psi Explorer” CD ROM.

Here he addresses many issues concerning the history of parapsychology and psychical research in France, as well as the metaphysical implications of this research.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:48 Paranormal research in France
00:11:00 Defining the paranormal
00:17:54 Theism vs. atheism
00:25:32 Postmortem survival and materialism
00:37:53 Tolerance of ambiguity
00:43:03 The “hard problem” of consciousness
00:54:06 Mathematics and metaphysics
01:01:26 Conclusion

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.

(Recorded on January 25, 2024)

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New Thinking Allowed is a non-profit endeavor. Your contributions to the New Thinking Allowed Foundation make a meaningful difference in our ability to produce new videos. Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove Consciousness and Metaphysics Hello and welcome. I’m Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we’ll be

Exploring the topic of consciousness and metaphysics. My guest is Mario Varvoglis. He is a past president of the Parapsychological Association, and he currently serves as president of the Institut Metapsychique International located in Paris, France. It would be the French equivalent of a parapsychological society. Mario has been involved in parapsychological research

And precognition, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. He is the developer of a CD-ROM called Psy Explorer. It contained the history of experimental parapsychology, a discussion of theories, case studies, and even includes a variety of computer games based on parapsychological principles. Mario lives in Paris, France, and now I’ll switch over to the internet video.

Welcome, Mario. It’s a pleasure to be with you. Great to be here, Jeffrey. It’s a first. It is. Glad to see you in this context. Yeah, we’ve known each other for a long time, but this is our first interview. I would say in the parapsychology community,

You are an unusual example of a parapsychologist because although you’re an American, you’re living in France and you even have been now for decades the president of the major parapsychological research organization in France. Yes, that’s correct. It’s been a strange adventure for me. As you know, I was working in Princeton at the

Psychophysical research labs with Charles Onerton initially and a team, a number of us, Rick Berger, Ephraim Schechter, Nancy Sandow. There were a number of us there and that was an extraordinary time. And then somebody that you know, Christine Hardy, came to the Princeton lab

And was doing part of her doctoral thesis there and we met and we kind of hooked up. And she suggested we come to France, leave when she finished some of her work there. It was time for her to come to France and I decided

To come with her and to see what Europe is about since I grew up in Europe, I grew up in Greece and it kind of felt like an interesting move at the time. Chorvar Voglis must be a Greek name. Yes, that’s quite Greek.

And yeah, so it was a big shift because contrary to rumors, France did not have a very developed scene for parapsychology in the 1980s. Au contraire, things were pretty quiet here with a few exceptions. There were a few interesting researchers here, namely Rémi Chauvin,

The biologist and ethologist Rémi Chauvin, who was quite a distinguished researcher, but kind of keeping it under the, you know, staying underground because of the strong academic pressure against parapsychology. And Olivier Costa de Beauregard, the physicist, also was strongly interested in the field from a physics perspective.

And there were, you know, a few individuals here and there. And then there was the Institut Métapsychique, which was a whole other case because that was a foundation that had been created in 1919 and that was still alive, but barely.

And so I didn’t come into contact with the Institute at the time too much. They just asked me once to come for a conference, but it was a very low key operation. There was little funding left and it was kind of just basically barely surviving.

And in the meantime, I don’t know if you remember, but I did get some financing from the Audier Foundation in Switzerland. And after a sequence of research projects and so forth, we ended up developing an educational project, which was my CD-ROM PsiExplorer. I believe you may have seen because I think you

Wrote even a recommendation for it or something. That’s right. It was a very important advance at the time. Yeah, it was a relief for educational purpose and also for kind of self-research, self-initiated research with scientists and so forth. But anyway, the point of that is that it kind of

Gave me a certain visibility in the French scene, the small parapsychological French scene. And at a certain point in the late 90s, there was an active search for a new president for the Institut Métapsychique. And that’s when the board at that time asked me to become president of the Institute.

So this was in very late 1997. And I’ve been president since then, despite several threats and menaces and promises to resign at some point because I wanted to do something else with my life, but I’m still there. That Institute has a significant history.

It was at one time associated with researchers like Richet, a Nobel laureate. Definitely, yeah. Charles Richet was at the birth of the Institute. Camille Flammarion, who is the astronomer Camille Flammarion, who is well known in France at least, was also active in the early times of the Institute.

And there was a whole tradition and interesting and very important tradition in the beginning of the century, of the 20th century, late 19th, early 20th, with people like Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie, the Nobel Prize winner also being involved. They were participating in Palladino seances and a

Number, a significant number of the intelligentsia, the high intellectual elite of France was part of the beginnings of the Institute. And they participated in probably what was the most astonishing research of that early period, which involved the Kluski, the Franek-Kluski molds, the attempt to capture ectoplasmic projections

Through a certain protocol in 3D and not just photos. And that was basically the very first research project of the instrument, and we still have those hand molds. In other words, if I remember correctly, the spirit entities that manifested in the seance

Would dip their hands into a pot of molten paraffin, molten wax, remove the hands, and there would be an impression, a three-dimensional impression left of the hand. Exactly. These were wax, you know, paraffin gloves, I would say, which were used then as a mold so that plaster would be poured into those,

And then the mold, they would break the wax part and retain the hardened plaster, you know, glove. Well, it’s no longer a glove, now it’s a statue of sorts. And yeah, and there was quite a collection of those, just about a dozen, mostly hands,

One of a jaw, a human-like jaw, and one part of a foot. And so these are quite famous objects in the lore of psychical research, in part because they’re just astonishing just from a sociological perspective and historical perspective, but also because they really have resisted reductionistic or rationalistic explanations

That would say it was all fraud and all that. They do seem to pose a real mystery that has not been resolved as to how that could be produced fraudulently. So as far as I’m concerned, I wrote a paper in this in the first Parapsychological Association Congress

That we hosted here in France in 2002. Against my own better judgment, I came out stating that as far as I can see, there is no good explanation other than a paranormal one, which does not mean necessarily that these are real disembodied spirits, but it does imply that the paranormal explanation

Remains for me the most plausible one. And that brings us to the topic of our conversation of metaphysics and consciousness. So perhaps we could begin by if you could define what you mean by the term paranormal. Well, that’s interesting because we always kind of officially object to that word.

It just seems why it should be paranormal. But the idea is that it is standing outside what we consider normal. If we take CD broads, for example, a definition of what is commonly accepted as normal, including by scientists, paranormal would be that which stands outside that definition.

Even though I should emphasize that the idea of normal is not a eternal concept, even commonsensical ideas or scientific ideas have changed and evolved over time. So it’s a very relative concept. It’s socially defined and it’s not clear what we call paranormal. At one time, subliminal perception should have

Been considered paranormal or at least abnormal because the commonsensical scientific position is that in order to perceive or to react to anything from the environment, consciousness has to intervene. There is no such thing as any sensory experience and traces of that without awareness.

And what we call priming and subliminal perception, things like that, all now have called strongly into question that definition of what is normal and not normal. My recollection is that the term paranormal came into popular usage, I think back in the 19th century, as a way of

Avoiding the implications of the word supernatural. Yes, yes, it was actually not meant to, it was meant to kind of put things on a more relaxed, more centered and let’s say partly neutral. It’s not that it’s supernatural, it’s just that it’s not fitting in what we currently define as normal.

So I think that’s a laudable approach, it’s just that it has become, paranormal has become synonymous to almost supernatural. You make a point of saying that the fundamental division that exists is between basically theism and atheism. People who believe in God have no problem with the idea of the supernatural,

Whereas scientists have felt as a result of the conflicts they had with the religious authorities going back hundreds of years that they wanted to banish anything having to do with a deity from science. I’m trying to broaden the concept of theism beyond the forms of theism that we find typically in monotheistic religions,

And saying that as soon as you introduce a principle that is non-physical, that exists and has any form of causal efficacy, that has any relevance to the world other than just subjectivity, as soon as you introduce that you’re in some form of theism, and by theism I meant not necessarily monotheistic theism,

But just the idea that there’s an aspect nature that is not reducible to fundamental particles basically, or to chemical or neurochemical interactions. So in that sense, yes, the monotheistic religions of course are theistic, they’re into theism, but I think many, many, including for example Hinduism and some forms of Buddhism,

Many religions, of course animistic religions, are variants of theism in that sense, because they accept there is some principle other than just the ones that we all commonly accept as the physical world. In fact, I think you might go so far as to say that philosophical dualism or philosophical idealism,

The idea that there’s a metaphysical principle involving consciousness that is either supersedes or is equivalent to the principle of matter, that that itself is viewed with enormous distrust by scientists who often think it’s a way of sneaking religion in through the back door. Of course, and of course that’s the same accusation

They’ve also tried to put on parapsychologists, that they’re just crypto-religious people that are trying to sneak God back into the scene or miracles or whatever. Yeah, I would say that the all variants, panpsychism, double aspect identity theory, double aspect monism, all these are of course dualism, Cartesian dualism, maybe not epiphenomenalism,

Because epiphenomenalism basically states that that mental aspect is just some kind of epiphenomenon of brain activity. So there, of course, it’s extremely local, it’s confined, and it has no causal relevance. But most other ontologies, most other metaphysics that do dare introduce some kind of principle other than pure physics

Are, I would say, in a simplified way, we can call them theistic ontologies. Yeah, basically you were suggesting that we can reduce all of the multiplicity of metaphysical theories of which there are undoubtedly dozens, maybe even hundreds for all I know, or thousands, because it’s rare that you find two philosophers who actually

Agree with each other when you get down to the fine points. But you’re suggesting it can all boil down to theism versus atheism. Well, my suggestion was because of this, we have to go in one of two directions. Either we get very specific about what we mean between

These different ontologies that exist, and there are many. We have to be very specific about it and go into the details so we can discover where the differences lie. Or else, and or else, we first recognize that the fundamental issue that we’re dealing with is,

Is there just one principle which is reducible to the most blind form of energies and basic fundamental principles? Or is there another principle which is radically different or which contains the physical principle? Then you can go into all the variants. But I think that the first and basic argument with many,

Let’s say, materialistic visions of the world is that. It’s whether or not everything is reducible or there’s something left over which is relevant and not just, you know, we don’t have to worry about it kind of thing. Even if you were an atheist or I was an atheist,

It would seem to me that an atheist materialist, that there are many different versions of materialism. You point out, for example, that reductionist materialism is very different than what you could call epiphenomenalism or emergent materialism. Of course, of course. Yeah, I guess my statement was just

Kind of like taking a kind of a sword and making a first, a first clarification as to what the debate is about. It’s not meant to be the end all statement. But I think that the real debate is there, whether we identify materialism with a reductionistic variant of materialism

Or with an emergentist variant and other kinds of variations that might look to accommodate consciousness, but it doesn’t matter, but we don’t have to worry about that and so forth. I say that we can at least temporarily put all that in one bag and then take a whole number of other ontologies,

Which are not getting much press, at least until recently. They were completely dismissed since, I would say, the mid 20th century or probably the earlier 20th century. They’re just considered, you know, you don’t go that way at all. So I’m saying take those other ontologies, they’re coming back.

A number of them are coming back. And what’s common between them? And I think whether you go back to Descartes dualism, interactions, dualism, or you go to Castro kind of idealism, there are they do share one thing, which is they’re very clear cut, common objection to forms of materialism that only

Consider that sort of arrogance of materialism, which has been around for the past hundred and so years. Some people would say materialism can be traced back even to ancient Rome. To ancient Greeks. Yeah. Even to ancient Greeks. But yeah, the Greeks always had their say about something. I don’t know if.

But anyway, they always had something to say about different philosophies. But yeah, materialism was also part of it. The Greek philosophical scene in the third, fourth, fifth century B.C. But it was a different beast from the one that emerged in the 18th centuries with Descartes.

This hard separation that he made, which suddenly condemned everything that’s not mental to being purely mechanistic. And that was not the early Greek version of materialism. It was a more holistic materialism. I gather that Epicurus might have been viewed as a materialist. I don’t know. He was more into the ethical.

Well, Parmenides, certainly. And that whole school, the island in Segal. But maybe Epicurus too, because he said basically, you know, enjoy the good life. By that he didn’t mean go all debauchery, you know, and just he just meant that the good life is what should be pursued without any hope or any need

To refer to an afterlife or something like that. So he was kind of like a practical materialist, but not without principles and not a reductionist, let’s say. Well, it seems to me the real fundamental challenge to materialism comes from the data suggesting survival of consciousness after death,

Which is what the early psychical researchers of the 19th century were primarily interested in. Well, that’s certainly the strongest challenge. It’s not the only one. The strongest challenge, of course, that’s a total overturn. I mean, that blows the whole system apart. But I would say that certainly living psi

Research, research on psychokinesis, research on precognition and so forth, does deliver some pretty hard blows to materialism. Even if you can weave your way, one can find ways to try to explain it. But if, for example, we keep confirming that distance is that these

Phenomena like telepathy or what we call telepathy is distance independent, if PK is complexity and distance independent, things like that, then it does call in major premises in terms of mass, in terms of causality and so forth, signal transmission. So it doesn’t deliver the fatal blow as survival

Would, but it gives it really is a challenge. And of course, consciousness itself is true, but that’s more philosophers that can discuss that than psi researchers. Well, it gets very tricky. Now, in my case, I’m definitely an advocate for the evidence pointing towards survival. I don’t claim that it’s an absolute proof.

I just say it’s overwhelming evidence. And on the other hand, I don’t feel like I can dismiss materialism. I think that there are ways that you can shape a materialistic universe that can accommodate even survival. For example, by including the notion of multiple dimensions of space.

All of a sudden now you have room for an afterlife within a materialistic universe. Yeah, I must admit I haven’t investigated that route. I mean, it’s been around since we talked about astral bodies and ethereal bodies and so forth. It kind of brings up that idea, though in non-technical

Terms, let’s say, or terms appropriate to that era. I don’t know how Bernard Carr would react to that. Maybe, maybe not. But the issue of if, for example, the whole multidimensional or diverse dimensional kind of approach includes time as a bidirectional kind of dimension as opposed to a unidirectional.

And then we’re getting potentially into something indeed that could be a materialistic science of survival. At least that’s as far as my thinking goes is that in order to get to that, you may have to include something like finalistic causality or the Teilhard de Chardin kind of vision of the world

Or some kind of block universe where everything existed and exists and so forth. Maybe. Let’s say it’s beyond my wow. What is it? The Boggle? No, is that it? Your Boggle threshold. The Boggle threshold. I’m more attracted, let’s say, by a theistic version of survival, which would say that there’s only basically one

Entity and that we’re all split-offs of that entity. That, you know, we have decombined or decomposed versions. And that in some sense that after there is some kind of physical after the physical appearances go, then there’s the memory or something like that of the entity is still there or maybe more than that.

I think there’s a lot to be explored there. I think definitely the most fascinating part of cycle research for me is survival research. I’m not saying it’s the most easy to handle or the most politically correct

Or the kind of thing that will get you very far for the next 30 or 40 or 50 years, but it definitely is by far the most fascinating philosophically and existentially on every side to mention. Well, since the logical positivist movement of the 1920s and so the Vienna Circle,

There’s been this idea that metaphysics is essentially meaningless because it cannot be tested, that there’s no way to run experiments that will favor one metaphysical system over another. Therefore, we should stop talking about metaphysics altogether and just focus on our data.

Yeah, well, I think the Vienna School is dead. It’s been for a while. But yeah, because it’s wrong on both ends. It’s wrong on the end of we can’t talk about anything, and I think it’s wrong. Of course, that’s my personal take on it because there’s such a thing as converging evidence.

So there are tracks of evidence that give more or less plausibility for the rational observer, presumably to one hypothesis or the other. So it’s still even something like survival is partly testable. In other words, you can come to some kind of consensus that it’s worth continuing.

And that’s one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is this blind faith in the fact that there are some facts that are absolutely confirmed for positivists, and there’s no discussion about it when in fact our more sophisticated epistemology of these last few decades

Shows that basically we have good conversion evidence for things, but we don’t have any absolutes because there can always be a new paradigm that comes that overturns things. And so the data is now set in a different context, a different framework, and it’s no longer the same data.

So I think that the Vienna School was okay for its time, but it had a kind of naive epistemology at the time, also based on a naive conception of the senses and all those things, which now we know all that is anyway. We’re constructing it all the time.

When I was a young person in high school, we were really in our science classes indoctrinated into a view of materialism that was sort of like little billiard balls bouncing around, that the universe was made out of something that was considered to be solid

And had mass, and at this point it seems as if the field of particle physics has gone so far that there are no particles left at all. It’s all information. Yeah, definitely. It’s clear that I think that 1905 was a big year,

Not just for physics, but also for epistemology and even for ontology, and that as the decades went on, it’s become weirder and weirder from a broad, CD broad kind of perspective, from a commonsensical perspective, and I think it should make us far more modest about what we claim to be possible or impossible,

Or what we can claim is hard facts versus representations that we have. Yes, the universe itself, the more we look at it through a scientific lens, the more ambiguities seem to show up, the more cherished theories seem to break down. Almost every week, for example, in the topic of cosmology,

The big telescopes in outer space are encountering empirical data that totally contradicts the established theories. Even the Big Bang, we thought, at least that we can count on, has been called into question many times. Yeah, it’s accelerating this kind of question mark and these multiple

Question marks about what’s out there, what’s real, what’s in here, what are we made of, what is our relationship. We’re getting more and more question marks these days about that, and I think that’s a very, it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing to be in that state, hopefully not too long.

Hopefully there’ll be some clarification, but it’s a very creative era scientifically and philosophically, which is to contrast with the disaster we’re living through and in and causing in terms of our own survival. So, I don’t know if we’ll get to have sufficient lucidity and

Clarity and breakthroughs in terms of our vision of the world in time before we break the world ourselves. I don’t think it’s a real race, but the cards are stacked against us right now, I feel. It seems to me that one could make the argument, and

I’ve heard people make it, that materialist metaphysics, which leads to materialist ethics and social behavior, is the root of the problem because we are, you know, destroying our own home through pollution, and the idea that he who dies with the most toys is the winner.

The idea that accumulation of material possessions is the whole goal of living, and I know most people don’t subscribe to that, but enough people do that it is affecting the outcome of the planet itself, the environment, the potential for war and so on, seems to be wrapped around this

Materialistic, holistic vision that includes both ethics and metaphysics. I agree completely. I don’t know if I could draw a causal connection between those, but definitely there’s a strong correlation there in the sense that it’s a kind of framework that puts no hold on purely ego-centered behavior, on the pursuit of power over others,

Not even wealth, I mean power, and I think that’s even a more opportune way of saying it, and the total disregard of connectedness, of interconnectedness with each other, with the planet, with other biological systems and so forth. All these premises that we’re kind of exploring through psychical research are

Totally off the table for a great large proportion of those who are in power, at least those who, in terms of their actions, I don’t know what their personal beliefs are, but the actions and unfortunately the systems that have been created around these beliefs, more so even perhaps than individuals,

I think that were in very, very, very difficult systems, difficult to dismantle them, so to speak. Economic systems and political systems and now it’s communication systems and fake news and there are all kinds of things that are, I don’t know how we’re going to ever get there in time, but who knows,

There’s maybe some savior coming on the white horse pretty soon. People keep hoping for that, but it does seem to me, since you mention AI and disinformation, at the same time scientific theories are breaking down. We don’t even know what matter is anymore, actually,

And it’s not clear that we ever did, although it seemed as if culturally speaking we thought we did. I’m thinking of a medieval mystical text called The Cloud of Unknowing, that in order to achieve a mystical state one has to let go of the things that we think we know.

Perhaps as a culture, as a whole, we’re moving into the cloud of unknowing. That may be what can save us. Yeah, The Cloud of Unknowing, it’s a beautiful concept and text and it’s also the basis of creativity and innovation. In a sense, you may know that’s my other activity is creativity, innovation.

There is this difficult, chaotic, complex, uncertain passage through I don’t know what the hell is going on or where are we or what are we doing here. It’s often part of the process, but it’s a contained process, of course. We know what we’re doing, we know how to create a container,

And we assure people that don’t worry, we’ll get on the other side because we do have some signposts and we know how this process works. When it’s at this collective level, earth-wide level with a lot of vested interests and keeping it chaotic or keeping certain people, certain systems in power,

There I have much more fear that we’re not going to see the other side. But this is, of course, very different from the issues we’re discussing. It’s just popped up like that. I guess it’s a real concern here in Europe because we kind of we, in other words,

Europeans and other parts of the world have kind of looked to the states for decades, at least since World War II, for kind of the next new thing and the brave new world and things like that. And so we’re also in a totally new world now because I don’t think

There are many who believe they can look towards the states anymore for showing the way, for being the innovators, for being the ones that are kind of truly idealistic and so forth. So we’re also having this here in Europe. But I think it’s everywhere this kind of real questioning

Of how are we going to find the way, so to speak, because if the big huge countries like the states and China and Russia don’t do something about it, what impact is a place like France or Australia or Germany going to have, let alone Cameroon or Tibet?

Well, I’m glad you brought up the concept of creativity. I actually think it’s quite relevant. It’s reminding me of one of the very first professors I had as a graduate student who encouraged me to go into parapsychology was a man named Frank X. Barron. And he was a specialist in creativity and he

Pioneered the idea that the most creative people had one particular personality characteristic he called tolerance of ambiguity. Absolutely, yeah. That’s a very, very important point. And I would add to that that tolerance of ambiguity with an intention to do something about it, so to speak.

So they live with a complexity, they live with ambiguity, but they also like to poke in there and try and do something with it. So it’s a little bit different from just, let’s say, being conscious of the present and just observing the thoughts and the complexities go by

Your head because there is this intention also in creativity to take that ambiguity and to sculpt something out of it, which doesn’t have to be universal truth. That’s the whole thing about creativity is introducing your personal expression and your personal beliefs and feelings into that sculpture.

And for most of human history, I think it might be fair to say that people were naive dualists, basically. We had sort of an instinctive sense that mind and matter are two different worlds and nobody bothered much about it. Religion and science could coexist with each other and

People could be involved in all sorts of creative activities without being concerned about are they violating the principle of determinism or something by being creative. And now, though, that consciousness, the very notion of consciousness is now being considered a topic that scientists can look at for the first time.

And so all of these metaphysical questions are rising up again, like how do we handle this? I’m hopeful that consciousness is kind of a Trojan horse for extended consciousness discussions in the sense that it’s now opening the debate and it’s showing that there’s something we really fundamentally don’t understand

With existing models of neuroscience. And so, again, it’s this question of arrogance versus some humility. I think if certain hardcore reductionists understand that there is a real issue there, that the hard issue is a hard issue, as Chalmers says, maybe they’ll start being a little bit more attentive to the issues

That are surrounding it before it gets to their boggle threshold. Like, for example, a child that has memories of a past reincarnation and starts talking about it at age three and starts putting out events and facts that turn out to be pretty close

To what actually happened to a distant family X years ago and so forth. So, I mean, if when science, you know, my mentor was Charles Onerton and he wrote this paper, has science developed the ability to meet claims of the paranormal, something like that.

But his title was much better than what I’m trying to come up with. But, yeah, I don’t know if science will actually be able at some point, as it’s defined today, to face claims of the paranormal rationally, in a balanced way, you know, with all the good things that we admire about science.

I don’t know if we’ll get there. And it may be the nature of the beast of psi or it may be the nature of, you know, scientific rigidity and paradigms and so forth. But consciousness is a good way to kind of softly and quietly go into those dark shadows of the paranormal.

Let’s go back to the expression you used earlier, the hard problem. I think that gets to the core of it and you refer to David Chalmers, the philosopher who is most associated with that term. I’m pretty sure Chalmers meant by the hard problem that if you start out

With a materialistic universe, you simply can’t get to consciousness. There’s no way you can get from billiard ball-like particles bouncing around to a conscious entity aware of itself. And I’m pretty sure a lot of materialists don’t buy that argument at all.

They say, surely there must be a way and it probably has something to do with overlapping cybernetic layers of feedback loops. And when you have enough feedback loops going on in the brain at some point, magically consciousness emerges. It could be. I mean, that remains to be seen. It’s possible.

Chalmers, what was interesting about it is that he didn’t push all the way to the self-conscious entity. His main argument focused on qualia and just the experience of redness or the experience of a burn. And his point was that before we even talk about selves and sophisticated things like imagination or creativity,

Just the very raw experience of being burnt, which we know the equivalent as to what happens on a physical level on your hand when you get burnt. And we know what happens neurochemically and so forth. But how does that, no matter what the complexity is,

We’re still basically on the basis of what we know. We’re just having electrochemical, neurochemical interactions and they’re piled on each other and there are feedback loops and so forth. But unless you admit that there are higher level structures which have a reality, a very distinct reality, you’re not going to get to consciousness.

Now, it could be that consciousness is independent of the platform, of the matter underneath. It could be that we could get to some kind of consciousness with not with carbon based systems, with other kinds of systems. So I guess it’s not inconceivable that AI at some future date could

Develop some form of consciousness and maybe even self-consciousness. I wouldn’t totally put that out of the picture, but right now with the tools we have, the tools I’m talking about, not the methodology, but about the conceptual tools of the brain as it operates, we’re nowhere near being able to explain consciousness.

So that may be a long-term wedge that’s just going to screw up the whole physical system or it may be something that eventually gets explained. And that’s true for everything. I mean, it could be that, like you said, maybe even the soul or survival will get explained by a materialistic point of view.

We should be open to that. There’s no reason not to unless we’re religious fanatics. It certainly seems to me that materialism itself is evolving and it’s likely to continue to evolve. One of my dissertation advisers at Berkeley was a philosopher, Michael Scriven. He felt that materialism is like imperialism and it will accommodate

To whatever is necessary in order to maintain its dominant position. And if that means incorporating extra dimensions or incorporating backwards causality or incorporating new particles, sions or something of that sort, it’ll do so. So at the end of the day, efforts to come up with an alternative to materialism will at best only

Force the materialists to make some modifications. Yeah, but we shouldn’t forget that there are places like Africa and Australia and Vietnam where the imperialists were thrown out. Materialism doesn’t always work. I mean, the British Empire kind of came to an end. And so did the Dutch Empire and the Spanish. You know,

They left some traces behind, but there’s nothing destiny. There’s no destiny that says that materialism will always be able to accommodate anything. It could be that at some point the whole system just gets too heavy to hold up with added assumptions and added possibilities. And at some point you just say, okay, look,

It’s just getting too complicated. Let’s shift. But again, it’s possible. It may work that way. It may work differently. Who knows? I also happen to be in a position where I interact with many spiritual people and they have no trouble saying it’s all God.

We exist in God and if you just realize that everyone and everything is a manifestation of God, it all makes perfect sense. Yeah, yeah, that’s another I would say that’s almost like the equivalent of materialism explaining everything. You know, you could just extend and extend.

So in the end, these kinds of questions, which are metaphysical questions, I don’t I wouldn’t you know, I don’t agree with the Vienna school that they’re they’re meaningless. But you have to kind of if there’s a constant updating of your assumptions

And the number of axioms you add to explain things and so forth. And certainly materialism is up for an update right now. Like you said, maybe they just it’s minor updating, maybe it’s major. And I think also for the pure theism perspective, it definitely needs an update because it needs

To get into detail as to how do you extract the solidity of the table from it’s all in God’s mind. How do you extract, you know, whatever follies we have vis a vis each other and so forth. There are real issues that have to be dealt with.

But especially how do you get down to the quarks and the, you know, the mathematical extreme mathematical precision that we find in quantum theory for quantum mechanics? Well, that is one of the most fascinating questions in science. Why is it that the mathematics seems to work so well?

Well, yeah, yeah, it’s really quite amazing. It’s quite amazing. And what’s amazing is that it’s not easy to get that question. The circularity of it, the kind of good alien, you know, it turning on itself. We’re supposed to be the one generating mathematical models.

And yet mathematics obviously precedes us since reality is described by mathematics. So what’s going on here? But yeah, it’s fascinating. It’s sort of a chicken and egg problem. But to me it evokes the thinking of, for example, Pythagoras, another one of your Greek ancestors who basically suggested that

Fundamentally the universe is based on mathematics and even the musical harmonies associated with mathematics. That that’s what underlies everything. Vibration. Was it Whitehead or Eddington who said all philosophy is nothing but a footnote to Plato or something like that? All philosophy since for the last two and a half thousand years.

I wouldn’t go that far even if I’m Greek. But still, it’s kind of a fun, fun thing for the ego to say, see, it’s the Greeks again. Yeah. And I think that it’s very interesting what’s happening also in I’m seeing this in parapsychology because there’s a there’s a kind of a

New emergence of interest in fundamental theoretical questions and even toying with ontologies and big words like epistemic and ontic things like, you know, because these are the kinds of things that before were being dismissed as being too in Anglo-Saxon circles was being too kind of,

You know, abstract or chair, chair, you know, people that are doing philosophy from their chairs or wheelchairs. It’s there is a reemergence of that. And that’s very interesting. The one thing that’s interesting about the French tradition. And I would say the continental, more than the French, there is this there’s

Always been this real interest and passion about what does it all mean? At the Institute Metapsychique, there’s of course, there’s been a lot of interest in the data and there was research starting in the 1990s and we’re still doing research today. But. We’re also really interested in what does it all mean?

And I’m it’s it’s I think it’s very good that in the past 15, 20 years, the field of parapsychology in general is courageous enough to start again bringing up these big questions and not just hiding behind statistics and meta-analyses and, you know, proof of things. I mean, not that that’s not important.

It’s essential. But I think that there’s more to our field than that. Well, yes, if you’re engaged in empirical research, it would seem to me that you’re either looking for how can we apply this knowledge? What are the practical implications of it? Or what are the theoretical implications?

How can it help us understand the universe? Because otherwise it’s just data and data without understanding, without knowledge is pretty useless. Yeah, yeah, it’s only useful in pointing to something. And I think that I’m not yet convinced about the applications orientation, even though in California, that’s been a big thing.

And I think there have been some good demonstrations with Stephen Schwartz and the whole group at Stanford and SAIC afterwards. There are some pretty good demonstrations that it could be useful. It could be put to practice. But it’s not the part that excites me the most or

That inspires me the most because humans being humans, it also inspires fear to know that we could turn that into a technology, even in technology that implies human minds. That does not guarantee that it would be ethically used. So I’d rather say how does SAI research illuminate our understanding of what is real.

What is real at a human level, what is real at a biological level, at a physics level, at all levels. It seems to me that the bottom line is simply whether it points to a theistic or an atheistic view of the world, it points to a larger view of the human being.

Clearly, clearly, exactly. We could very well, I mean, like you said earlier, you could create a system and hopefully at some point, materialism or atheism or whatever we want to call will come to that point of saying, OK, we’ve got to integrate this stuff.

And in integrating, we realized that we were a little bit reductionistic in our vision of what the mind and the brain and the human being is. And so we’ve seen our sins and now we’ve kindly enlarged our vision of human beings and maybe even biology.

So that’s fine. That’s fine, even if it stays completely within. But what’s not fine is creating stories, narratives that excludes a priori the realities, I would say, of parapsychology, the data and the case studies and so forth of parapsychology. I think that’s not fine at all. I have to agree with you.

It probably infuriates me more than anything when mainstream scientific culture acts as if 150 years of research into the, as Ryan said, the reach of the mind doesn’t exist at all. Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of unjust. That’s the part that infuriates me.

And then I say, well, there’s so many things that are unjust in this world. Yeah, this is one of them. Well, Mario, this has been a delightful conversation and also very insightful and even enlightening. It’s a joy to reconnect with you once again. Thank you for being with me.

I want to encourage our viewers, particularly our viewers outside of the United States, to look into the, I don’t pronounce it the way you do, the Institute Metapsychique. Metapsychique. That’s perfect. Metapsychique, yeah. They can look it up, just type Metapsychique, but they’ll have to figure out the spelling.

Well, it’s been around for over 100 years and it’s a repository of very important information about the paranormal and I welcome you back on New Thinking Allowed and in the future we can go into greater depth about activities taking place in France and more about

The fascinating history of your institute and so on. That’ll be a great pleasure, Jeffrey. Thank you. Thank you for being with me and for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here. I imagine that by now many of you already

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