Consciousness, Afterlife and the Brain- Philosophy with Matthew Riddle and Darren McEnaney Episode 22
"And the idea that you would sort of blink out of existence or death, as someone like Dawkins might argue, I don't think that's a scientific statement at all. It relies on a philosophy that isn't being talked about underneath."
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Listen in for a fun philosophical discussion about consciousness and an afterlife. No you do not need to believe in God to think there is an afterlife, but what is God in the first place? While the biblical god doesn’t seem very realistic, could there still be higher states of consciousness that created the universe. While science says the most logical explanation is that consciousness is created from a brain and dies when we die, it actually doesn't make more sense than our consciousness being downloaded by brain and continuing on after our death. What makes a person themselves? Where in our body is our consciousness stored? How does English make us over identify with our bodies and treat temporary states as permanent over French? When did the first humans exist? Could humans have existed much earlier in civilizations that have been wiped out? Why was it that monkeys evolved the most? Could there have been a time other species, such as reptiles, evolved to the consciousness level of humans. Will a plastic eating bacteria save us?
In this episode Matthew Riddle of Consciousness Matters and Darren McEnaney of Seeking I delve into the philosophy of science, afterlife and consciousness. Matthew Riddle is host of the Consciousness Matters YouTube Channel where he explains that he’s “been obsessed with the nature of reality and self from 2014 onwards. I'm not here to prescribe a religion, or a correct perspective, but I want to encourage meaningful dialogue and conversation.”
Darren McEnaney is a self described “lay researcher” into consciousness, afterlife evidence and the paranormal. Like Liz, he takes a logical and scientific approach.
Science and Philosophy
So what exactly is philosophy?
All three talk about what exactly philosophy means to them. To Matt, who focuses more on philosophy than Darren and Liz, who focus more on parapsychology, he thinks of science as an underpinning of philosophy. Philosophy is more of a mental game to Liz. It’s fun, but it doesn’t give her the comfort that parapsychology does. That all the evidence of an afterlife does. Philosophy ,to Liz, is “just fun and sort of playing with your mind and limitless possibilities.” Matt does agree that “philosophy on its own can't give you answers.” But he does think it is a subset of science. But Liz thinks philosophy can also become science - it expands how we look at things and things we think about can be examined then by science and tested. Darren sees it as the opposite where science would come first with the hypothesis.
According to Matt, the problem with Darren’s approach is that you're assuming that science works, you're assuming there's some rationality to that the whole framework of the idea of science. Liz is a bit supposed and asks doesn’t he think there's a rationality to science? He does, but Matt goes further into what he means in that science makes sense is because it's a rational approach. But trying to rationalize about reality could be considered philosophy. Science wouldn't be a good framework to test anything irrational if it were to occur, because it relies on logic and consistency in order for it to function. So Matt doesn’t think it's the foundation of everything.
Is our Consciousness created by a brain?
Science can only say that there is a correlation between consciousness and a brain. It can’t say if it caused by a brain. To say that consciousness is created by a brain actually relies on philosophy. Liz replies, explaining what she used to think. That science looks at the tangible and there is zero tangible evidence that when we die and our brain shuts off, we continue. But Matt said in that case you could argue similarly about things like social sciences that aren't necessarily tangible. Those often come down to interpretation.
Matt continues that it doesn’t make sense to follow the complete materialist view - that you start out with no consciousness. Then you just take a bunch of “food,” mass and matter, smash it up and there you have it … consciousness. How would you just get consciousness from nowhere.
Liz shares how she would have replied to Matt’s statement before she learned of all the afterlife evidence, such as Dr. Jim Tucker’s studies of cases of kids with past life memories. They dig further into how memories could be stored. Are they part of the brain and attached to a physical form? Or are they stored somewhere else? Darren shares that another way of looking at all of this could be Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphogenetic Fields idea, which is that your memory is attached to your physical form and species. So as soon as you take this new form, you've got this new memory set.
What makes you you?
That’s the big philosophical question of philosophy. What is me? How much of who we are is memories and how much is are innate character traits? That question was part of what set Liz off on this afterlife exploration in the first place.
“Just because, at this point, that’s what I was thinking, that our consciousness was created by a brain. Just because it happened once to experience a feeling of being a me, why couldn't that happen again? Where I'd get to experience being a me. I didn't think, you know, karma be related or anything spiritual, just another brain, and human would create a me. I mean, who knows? Why could the dumb luck of neurons firing that create an experience that I would have feelings and experiences.And then that's where I started to think, is there any possibility we don't really know how all memories are stored? Is there any possibility that any of these memories are carried over if that's possible? Then I did a Google search, and that’s where I found Jim Tucker and, as you know, that changed my whole life.”
Where in our body is our consciousness?
Darren adds that it seems as if our consciousness is stored in all cells of the body. He thinks of the cases of people who have had organ transplants who develop memories of the person that the organ came from, and certain skills of that person. Liz also adds how muscle memories are stored in the body, and shares an experience she can still feel in her body that happened to her as a bay, but she doesn’t mentally remember it. Also emotions seem to be in other parts of our body, such as out gut. Our gut is also filled with neurons. Darren also finds it fascinating the way dogs just know things that they are never taught. They know how to behave as a dog. Are those skills built into dog brains? Did they evolve that way over time?
Liz thinks after all she’s studied that who we are is a combination of past lives, the body we are in now, and a lot of what is defined as personality is really just temporary based on the body we have,. Such as someone might be considered lazy, but really they have a body that is tired a lot.
Do we have karma?
While Liz never likes the word karma, way too spiritual, they discuss ways, that if we have many lives, as the evidence seems to show, the contributions of this life will affect future lives. This isn’t necessarily direct in the sense of karma, but future lives will be born into the future world, and your past lives have had an impact on this world. If you did something in the caveman days even, it still impacts what the world is today.
When were the first humans?
But what about way before the caveman days? What about way before the dinosaurs? What if we were extinct for many years and then came back. We wouldn’t know. There would be a time period too far back to know if humans or other species existed. Have we, as humans or some intelligent being, also lived on many planets and in many galaxies, which we either ended up destroying the way we are earth, or where the sun burnt out? Darren thinks if humans had lived on earth, even way before the dinosaurs , before wiping ourselves out and then revolving, there would be some evidence. But Liz isn’t sure. What we interpret as natural or part of the world could be remnants. Also, wouldn’t there be a time cut off for remnants to last?
“How do you know in like, 100 million years, everything might have completely decomposed, there'd be a whole other set of evolution, let's say fish still survived and the same Darwinian evolutionary crawl out of the water happens again. The fish grow their little feet and maybe they evolve. Monkeys evolved into humans, but maybe the fish evolve into very intelligent reptiles. Like reptiles at our level? I mean, why was it monkeys?”
Matt thinks there is a problem of confirmation bias in investigating this because we’ve been taught that we (from the caveman days) were the first group of humans. Would we need to dig much deeper towards the center of the earth if we were to examine this? Liz also adds that we don’t even know what to look for. And to is also arrogant to assume this minuscule portion of time, in the big picture, back to the dinosaur days, is the whole picture. There have been endless big bangs, big crunches and various conscious species.
Also for all we know a species destroyed itself, and we evolved to survive what destroyed the previous one.
For all we know, sand was the micro-plastics of a previous species that destroyed them. Matt adds a positive note that there are bacterias evolving that eat plastics. Also are there advanced species in other planets that can visit us and other planets? But it seems no being in this universe could ever travel faster than the speed of light. But some might have found warps to travel through.
You can be an atheist and think there is an afterlife.
Darren shares that he had a bad experience discussing all of this, as well as afterlife evidence, on a known atheist YouTuber, Tom Jump’s, channel. Tom was lovely, but his audience berated Darren. Liz finds it interesting, and irrelevant, that atheism is always brought into afterlife discussions. God and religion really have nothing to do with thinking there is an afterlife, once you discuss the evidence and research. the Bible is just fables, to her, but whether our consciousness survives, has been examined by studies and research. Darren states that “I think people, people conflate the two that if you believe in an afterlife, you must necessarily therefore believe in God, you know, this supernatural entity who allows that to happen? Whereas I would say no, not necessarily. We're just saying that there's a part of nature that's naturally occurring, that involves our consciousness that we don't understand, that would naturally allow it to continue.”
Matt asks how you would define God, which gets them into a discussion on that topic as each examines this. They do agree that there could be higher levels of consciousness, but the God of religion that is usually described does not seem believable. As Matt says, God is often seen as “He’s an angry man in the sky that doesn't like you masturbating.” And Liz adds, who doesn't like gay people doesn't think women should have choices over our fertility. This definition of God, doesn’t make God very likable. But higher levels of consciousness, why not. They delve into the types of ways there could be something like a God.
“I mean, we don't know, for instance, that the Earth isn't one of these creations of some sort of being, or someone like us.. a consciousness experience in life, who after they lived somewhere, maybe physically or not, they decided that they might want to create this kind of thing as a project to help other consciousnesses or souls or spirits or whatever you want to say, learn through the physical, and maybe that's the God that religions are referring to.” Matt says we can look at the world in two ways that make sense, either a mind like or a machine like.
They delve into this, as well as how they might all have distorted perceptions of the world based on the fact that we can only all perceive in one of the many dimensions. We all only see things through our 3D existence. Liz shares a scene from the movie Flatlands that demonstrates this. Also, we only perceive things now in this material state we are in. It is impossible to really fathom a non-material existence.
Mathematics doesn’t work the further you go
They discuss how the laws of math and physics break down when you go too far. They cover a portion of reality, but not all. “When we start going smaller and smaller and smaller in quantum physics, the laws break down and stop applying. And apparently, as you go further and further with mathematics that stops working, and you can't get mathematical answers, and you have to bring in imaginary numbers.” None of them know enough about math to explain this further, but they all do know math works for only a portion of understanding. Another way to look at it is that these are all possible worlds, and we just find ourselves in one.
But what is God?
They are clear to make sure everyone knows this is now purely philosophical, not evidential as they delve further into what God could mean and what was would make them think there is a God, depending on the definition, versus not. Also how would you prove atheism? In their discussion of the ways there could, or could not be a form of a God, Liz brings up one of her favorite stories called “The Egg,” where a person dies, and learns they alone are going to live each life of every single person who has ever lived on earth. “God” is their parent and in charge of them on earth. Once they have lived every single life, they then become a God.
Do Psychedelics give insight into these other worlds?
Matt shares that he had profound experiences and insights while doing psychedelics. Liz and Darren say they both want to do psychedelics, but are too scared. Liz shares she has done Holotropic Breathwork, and it was a really fascinating experience. They delve into meditation and other ways they could have transcendent experiences.
The conversation closes as they continue to discuss their views on consciousness, philosophy and afterlife.
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