Was William James Right About Consciousness? | Nicolas Rouleau

As someone who was buried/crushed under 3300 lbs of plywood, I can share that there is absolutely no moment of death. My body was being fiercely squeezed, and my head was flattened to the concrete, but because I fell near my forklift, and my head was near the left fork, the total impact of weight wasn’t able to completely collapse on my head. The forks were about 4 inches off the ground, and about an inch of the bottom sheet of plywood was dangling on the left fork. This gave me an opportunity to react. I could not move and here’s what took place: I screamed with everything I was made of. I screamed “HELP!!!!” I tried this three times and when I went for a fourth attempt to share my panic, not a single whisper was available. Uh oh! Yeah, too late to think of strategic breathing now, lol. What followed was the inevitable. I felt surrender and attempted to tell myself that there was no escaping this. Everything was happening lightning fast. However, I was never able to complete the sentence to myself or experience a moment of death because I slipped right into a space of awareness in total darkness. I was no longer in my body, and I was “fully” aware as a presence. I was the only thing that existed in this space, nothing but total awareness! I was in total amazement that I still existed. I was whole without a body. I was warm and I was complete. I had felt no pain, and the situation occurred without a hiccup. Now, because I had a Christian belief at the time, I was expecting for those teachings to begin unfolding. Yes, I carried memory into this space, and this expectation kept me from thinking or questions arising about where I was. Jumping ahead; this was realized after my return that thinking would have created experience in that space, but my faith had me waiting for occurrences to happen. It took some time, but I learned two things from this experience: 1) Not being able to finish my self-surrender sentence with death looming taught me that as long as I believe in myself, I hold the power to continue. 2) Not thinking in this space showed me how my thoughts created possibilities because without thought nothing occurred. So, there is “PRESENCE”, and all activity occurs within it. **(Identity is Activity) Reality is a mirror. It is a reflection. Reality reflects what you hold inside. We only experience ourselves!!! Everything is considered from our own orientation (from us - to us). I don’t experience others. I experience “my version” of everything. Thought is not truth. Thought is secondary. Thought is for coloring the canvas. You feel a pinch before you think about how it felt. We cannot perceive causation because perception comes from experience. Life is Experience. Experience is function. Life is Functionality! After returning to physical reality, I lived the next 6-8 years jealous of everyone who died. I still had much growing to do. I didn’t yet have recognition of experience. I no longer wanted to be here because that space was fulfilling. It was comforting. It was a total relief of all suffering and lack. There was no distance between what I AM and what IS. I was pure, singular existence. So when I hear physicist teach of quantum theory, I can grasp it even better than they do. Physics teaches that the electron is not a particle but a wave that is everywhere. I was that wave. I was everything. A thought in that space would have created reflection, which would have appeared as a particle of my wave function. Imagine this as the ocean or water itself being one whole, yet its activity appears as many droplets, waves arising and collapsing, currents, ripples, vapors, and ice. Everything is functionality, a collective happening. Science uses differentiation to a fault, and this only protects identity or agency because these both require difference to exist. At this very moment I navigate life as a collective happening knowing that existence is reception and participation. I am a monitor which the movie appears on, and this keeps me in a state of reception, gratitude, and the ability to travel lightly. I don’t protect identity to remain relevant. I don’t claim to be the whole pizza. I’m only a pepperoni or maybe even a piece of bell pepper as I navigate the “Mystery of Experience.” The whole pizza is what we are, but our individual experiences are allowed to take shape and disappear like a wave in the ocean. Life is to be experienced, not known. Reception, Participation and Allowance are the keys to Alignment. Be well!

literally infinitely better time spent than watching politics. Obrigado

Came for the hair, stayed for the conversation ❤

His hair had close contact with electromagnetism

We often hear of the hard problem of consciousness. Why is there qualia or experience of anything in the first place? I would submit there is an even harder and more important question – why do I seem to be a specific individual experiencing a specific subset of qualia? This is the most important question that must be asked and answered but rarely is. As a matter of fact there seems to be a huge blind spot when it comes to this in discussions of consciousness. If material reductionism is to be relevant to the big questions, then it has to explain not how brains generate consciousness but how the specific brain in my head could create the specific consciousness I seem to be looking out of the eyeballs of this specific body. Why do I PERSONNALLY EXIST as an individual in the first place? Out of the infinite matter in the universe how is it that only the three pounds in my head could create me? What is different about that three pounds for this to occur? Consider that billions of bodies showed up before this one. Billions showed up after this one. None of them seem to have created my existence. This body could be running around without it being ME just like these billions of others All bodies are made of the same elements. All brains have the same basic anatomy. If all brains are basically the same and are creating consciousness then there should only be ONE consciousness looking out of every set of eyeballs simultaneously. A hopelessly superimposed existence from every possible viewpoint at once. I’m sure that materialists would claim that no, no, brains are so complex they are all different. Ok, so what would have to be recreated in another brain for me to exist looking out of another set of eyeballs? When the ontologies purporting to explain consciousness are examined critically it becomes obvious that all materialist/reductionist strategies fail completely in attempting to address the individuality question. What is the principled explanation for why: A brain over here would generate my specific consciousness and a brain over there would generate your specific consciousness? Integrated information over here would generate my specific consciousness and integrated information over there would generate your specific consciousness? Global workspace over here would generate my specific consciousness and global workspace there would generate your specific consciousness? Orchestrated quantum collapse in microtubules over here would generate my specific consciousness and orchestrated quantum collapse in microtubules over there would generate your specific consciousness? A clump of conscious atoms over here (panpsychism) would generate my specific consciousness and a clump of conscious over there would generate your specific consciousness? If an exact copy of my body was suddenly created in Antarctica would I find myself to exist freezing there while also sitting in the comfort my living room? According to the physicalists that would have to be true or their argument collapses into incoherence. Materialism already fails since it cannot find a transfer function between microvolt level sparks in the brain and any experience or qualia. In addition it’s not possible for materialistic ontologies to address this question of individuality since no measurement can be made that could verify my consciousness vs your consciousness and therefore no materialist ontology could make any coherent statements about the subject. How could pure awareness even be individualized? Physicalists demand measurements but with consciousness there is nothing to measure. There is electricity in the brain they say. We’ll measure that. Is electricity consciousness? If so then once I again I should exist everywhere at once since electricity cannot be individualized. My blender uses electricity. Is it a genius? Unless materialists can answer these questions their premise collapses like the house of cards it is. As far as other ways of thought are concerned only Dualism and Idealism can account for our sense of individuality. Dualism assumes we are all individual spirits/souls matched up to a body through some undefined process. Idealism, which states that consciousness is primary also answers the question of why I seem to exist as an individual. One consciousness exists looking out of every set of eyeballs and in the process the illusion of individuality is created in each case. In actual reality I am you, you are me, we are one.

To verify the faraday cage exleriments, 2 elements are needed: 1. Make the test persons blind using black glasses, build 2 cages, 1 real faraday cage and one mock-up of wood, plastic, etc. without any electromagnetic shielding. Do not tell them which cage they are going into. 2. Use many test persons to get statistically valid results.

Truly blown away by the intelligence and modesty of this guy. The transmissive point of view towards the brain and the use of the radio as an analogy for the brain expressing consciousness has been around with me like for decades, on an intuitive level that is ofcourse. So happy to hear the same hypothesis from a scientific person of influence!

This is the best podcast I’ve seen in years. Wow. Well done 👏🏻👏🏻

What a wonderful, wonderful interview. I'm an English philologist, studying Carl Jung and grief processes and all these makes a lot of sense. I often wonder about the brain and what consciousness is. It is true that vocabulary creates worlds and that nature is neither good or bad, it just is. I love the idea of a rational spirituality. I really struggle with science but this programme is becoming a great bridge for me to understand it better. In my passion for Gothic literature this is food for thought, believe it or not. It is all connected.

Amazing that we live in an era where we have such rich content readily available to enjoy. Thank you so much for your work. ❤