Neuroscience, mediums, and messages on the radio

Neuroscience, mediums, and messages on the radio

Adam Jacobs and Dr. Laleh Quinn Ph.D.

Dr. Laleh Quinn has a Ph.D in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. She has been a neuroscience research faculty member in the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD for 25 years. She also teaches mindfulness meditation to students, faculty, and friends.

Laleh Quinn: I think the God that they have in mind is not the same kind of God that you're talking about. I don't think it's a transcendent God. I think it's a God that is just equated to all that. Is that just mine --

Adam Jacobs: Pantheistic

Laleh Quinn: Pantheistic as opposed to panentheistic, right? So that God is just consciousness. And if you believe that consciousness that a particle has consciousness, consciousness need not have any kind of attribute that we would attribute to God or that others would attribute to God, maybe you and I would attribute to God, right? Love, connection, purpose, meaning a soul journey. None of that is ascribed to by the idealists that are out. They're academic idealists,

And they're not ascribing to anything beyond what they define as God. And so I think it's missing a great deal. And one of the things that I heard, I don't mean to focus on Bernardo Kastrup so much, but one of the things that I heard him say, which made me very sad actually, and I'd love for us to be able to mitigate this for all the people who listen to him, is that his worst fear was to go on after death as Bernardo troop. That's his worst fear, and he's happy that it won't happen. And there was kind of a mirth about people who believe that there's a personal soul that continues after we die. And I was thinking about, and where does that come from? And I think where it comes from is that he hasn't had the types of experiences that maybe some of us have had to indicate these kinds of things. And so I'm not sure I can argue, have a theory that can counter, I don't make me debate Bernardo troop. I wouldn't be able to handle it. He is just way too smart.

Adam Jacobs: He's very smart. But you and I, we should work on this. We should develop an additional step for the idealists.

Laleh Quinn: I think we should because it's gaining a lot of traction, and it's becoming something that even Christoph Koch is now ascribing to, and it's like they can only make the baby step because they're still within the confines of academia. They're still afraid of being laughed at by their colleagues, which they're going to be, I mean, it happens, right? It's going to happen. I mean, Tononi's work shows that there might be consciousness everywhere. Like pantheism was ridiculed by a large number of his peers as being pseudoscientific....