The Consciousness Control System: UFOs, Entities, Psyops & Ancient Wisdom | Chase Hughes

THIRD EYE DROPS

Chase Hughes discusses his journey from neuroscience to exploring consciousness, UFOs, and ancient wisdom, revealing how personal experience

Key takeaways

• Temporal lobe seizures can induce profound mystical experiences akin to DMT trips, blurring the line between neurological events and spiritual awakening.
• Ancient texts and historical accounts often describe 'sacred diseases'—possibly epilepsy—as sources of divine visions and enlightenment.

Main topics

• Consciousness and reality
• Temporal lobe epilepsy as a gateway experience

Notable quotes

I don't think we're conscious. I think we're consciousness.

It was like DMT times a thousand. Plus steroids.

Conclusion

Reality is shaped by perception, consciousness, and ancient patterns—u

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I don't think we're conscious. I think we're consciousness. The first hermetic principle is basically saying, like, when they say the all is mind, the universe is mental, is basically saying, like, this is one thing. There's no separation. You're not separate. But it feels like there is an anti-spiritual or an anti-consciousness suppression movement. Speaker 1 (0:25) Yeah. I was actually pleasantly surprised. to see that you had a whole video on the topic of UFO disclosure and psyops. The goal Speaker 2 (0:34) of a psyop is to shift the perception, not the belief, the perception initially, and then the context. And psyops is usually the truth or a thing that is true. And most people confuse something that is true with the truth. And those are very different things. And the moment that they started pushing that stuff, like, I skyrocketed into this other dimension. Instantly, there was like a hand pressing my head back, and there were four or five beings standing around the bed. It was ontological shock. Massive ontological shock. Did the beings have a discernible look to them? My eyes were pushed back, but when I looked, it was kind of a mantis-like. kind of a creature. And the weird thing is, I have a praying mantis phobia. And I had no fear of these beings. Speaker 1 (1:35) You're somebody who's known to be interested in the mind in various ways. And I think most people consider you an expert on various topics, you know, psychology, behavior, persuasion, all of these different things. But it seems to me where you and I really start to overlap, though I am interested in all those things, of course. How can you not be interested in those things? But I think where you and I really started to overlap is our interest in where these things go a level deeper into some of the primary questions around consciousness. Yeah. What's going on here? What's the nature of mind? Because it seems like you've become way more interested in those questions as of late. Speaker 1 (2:19) both publicly and maybe even more privately if I'm reading our interactions correctly so far. I don't think my interest, well, my interest has definitely Speaker 2 (2:27) grown, but I think I've started to feel more courageous about being able to talk about it and make videos about it. So I hit a... a couple million subscribers on YouTube. So now I'm at a point where I can Speaker 1 (2:41) be Speaker 2 (2:41) like, you know what? I can make a video that I want to make and see if people like it. And they did. It was great. We made this video on ancient texts and what they Speaker 1 (2:49) all have in common. And the video was like gangbusters. Nice. I somehow missed that one. Yeah. I will have to check it out. What has led to that interest? What would you say the primary sort of drivers of that interest have been? About probably seven years ago. Speaker 2 (3:08) I was studying neuroscience. I was doing postgraduate work for neuroscience. So I take a vacation. I'm sitting in my parents' kitchen. And my parents were like, are you okay? We're in the middle of a conversation. And I kind of closed my eyes for a second. And they were like, are you okay? And I was like, why? What happened? They're like, you were zoned out for like a minute and a half. And I asked him to describe every single thing that happened. And I was like, I have temporal lobe epilepsy. I have a brain disease. And then my wife didn't say anything. She just figured, you know, he's a... He's studying neuroscience. He would know if something's going on. But these things are like loaded with amnesia. Any of these episodes were just, you can't remember that it even occurred. So like it happens to your brain and then deletes itself on the way out. So inside of a temporal lobe seizure, it is like DMT times a thousand. Wow. Plus steroids. And it is absolutely bizarre. And it's like. Speaker 2 (4:17) It's like all of your file cabinets get open for your memories and like 15,000 memories that aren't yours get randomly sorted in through your entire life's history. Speaker 1 (4:29) So Speaker 2 (4:30) like for the next two or three weeks, you don't know what's real. You don't know what's yours. And all the false memories are in the same folder. So they feel real. So it really, it kind of broke me from reality. And I was thinking like, what? What the hell is this? Like all of this, what is this? What are we in? So that just sent me down this kind of rabbit hole. And then I started doing therapeutic psychedelics, which helped my brain, if not reversed it. And I'm not making any claims, but that really sent me down the road. And just having a brain disease and then the medication they wanted to give me, the number one side effect, most common side effect was seizures. So, like, there's got to be, you know, we've been on the planet for a little while. There's got to be some stuff out there. And there's stuff that's extremely well-researched, like methylene blue and all this other stuff. And I was able to stop everything. I haven't had a seizure in a very long time. Amazing. And that's kind of what led me down that road. And I will say, on top of that, since I was 10, I've been obsessed with ancient texts, like reading Bhagavad Gita. Yeah. the original Bible or like the Ethiopian version of the Bible, the Gnostic text and the gospel of Thomas and Judas and Mary Magdalene. So I read all that when I was a kid and really got into like, something isn't right here. And it just had that feeling my whole life, like something's fucked up. Like it's not right. So. I think I had that my whole life, but it's not like you don't go to a party and say that to random people. You have to find your people to be able to ever talk about it. Speaker 1 (6:17) I think that's why I waited so long. That's funny. I think I took the opposite approach just out of necessity. The existential dis-ease that I felt always kind of drew me to those bigger questions, and then I would just talk about it and see who... like came around and who didn't. And it was like, well, I guess these are my people by default because they're, they seem to be interested in the same things, but I didn't know that about you. And that makes me feel like this conversation is going to be, um, even more fascinating that, you know, it's interesting too, because there does seem to be some, if I remember correctly, I remember reading some ancient accounts of seizures and them talking about it in a very, um, spiritual kind of sense. And now when you put it in that way, I can totally see why. And I think in another video of yours that I've seen, you Speaker 2 (7:06) - Yeah, they call it the sacred disease. Yes. Yeah. Speaker 1 (7:08) Yes. Speaker 2 (7:10) And I think a lot of people throughout history that had these visions and became mystics or were seen as some kind of a mystic had this temporal lobe epilepsy stuff. But I didn't want to sit with it. Yeah. Speaker 1 (7:25) Yeah, no. I will Speaker 2 (7:26) tell you, it was embarrassing for a long time to admit. I miss the seizures. Like I miss like the, it was like, I get to. instantly go outside of reality. And it's like, and when the seizure starts, it's deja vu that is so powerful that you think every single thing around me was arranged to set me up. It was all here to set me up. And then it's like this rollercoaster feeling and then you're in. So I have no idea where I was going with that. Speaker 1 (7:58) Well, no, it's just all really fascinating and it does lead to some really big questions for me. But one really interesting spin that you put on it in a different video is you liken it to sort of glitching through a map. And I think you're talking about the game Hitman. Yeah. Like talking about the, like for people that don't know who aren't like gamer nerds, you can do things to glitch through maps and games. Like people will figure out where there's a, I don't know, like some kind of opening in the map or whatever in an area where you're not really supposed to be able to get to. And then that lets you like fall through the map. And then some, you know, if you, if you look up videos of people speed running games, you'll see them like glitching through areas that you're not supposed to be able to get through and stuff. Yeah. And you liken the seizures to almost doing that with reality, which I thought was so interesting. Yeah. Speaker 2 (8:44) And for anybody that hasn't seen a glitch in a video game, like. let's say like we're in a game right now and like you do some kind of squat thing and then pull your pistol out at the same time while stepping on this magic thing and you can pop through the wall. Speaker 1 (8:59) Yeah. Speaker 2 (8:59) But the game mechanics are made to look beautiful while you're in it. Yes. And if you go somewhere that the developers didn't know that you could see, it looks like shit. Like there's colors all over the place. The walls are glitching. So that's a lot of like, it felt like I was falling through. Speaker 1 (9:17) something into something. Yeah. And there's so many, it's crazy how consciousness itself seems to be able to do that kind of a thing. Yeah. I mean, with many molecules that you and I are aware of, but also just, you know, go meditate in front of this black wall and just stare at the wall with unbroken sight. Things start to look weird. It starts to look wavy. You start to doubt the solidity of the thing in front of you where you're like, intellectually, I know I'm not going through this wall, but there's also something about it, at least perception-wise, that makes me doubt. At the very least, it is what it appears to be, right? And that in and of itself is very interesting. But I guess for somebody who's so interested in neuroscience... That must have opened up some big questions for you as well, because it seems like there's a certain point where subjective experience and neuroscience must kind of decouple, particularly if you are somebody who's open to these bigger metaphysical things. Speaker 1 (10:24) Was that sort of an immediate thing for you when you like you had your first seizure and it started to open up these more metaphysical questions like reality questioning sorts of investigations? Absolutely. Yeah. Speaker 2 (10:37) So in studying neuroscience. So I did one postgraduate for neuroscience, a separate postgraduate program for medical neuroscience, and another one for neuroradiology, like imaging and MRI, CT stuff. Speaker 1 (10:51) Yeah. Speaker 2 (10:52) And one thing you'll hear every day, every class that you take, is it's believed that this part of the brain might play a role or is involved in. Yeah. It's like we know nothing about. how the brain works and it's still this materialist reductionism. And the way that I describe it to people, and maybe I stole this from somebody, is like if we have an orchestra here in front of us and there's no people, right? I have all the chairs sitting there, all the instruments sitting there. And I'm like, Michael, we need to figure this shit out. We need to figure out how. how music works. So step one, take that cello over there and cut it up into five million pieces and put every piece under a microscope. Yes. Then the strings. And then finally, we make the big eureka moment discovery like, Chase, I found the sheet music. I found the sheet music. And I'm like, okay, this is going to help us understand. What's our step one? Cut the sheet music into a million pieces and look at it under a microscope. Yeah. And all you're looking at is paper. You don't feel the music. There's no... felt experience. There's something there in materialism that's just missing. It's like it's unplugged from everything else. And back in the day, there's an Italian researcher that you can't even get his papers in English right now. His name is Marco Totoschini. Speaker 1 (12:16) And Speaker 2 (12:16) he wrote a paper called Psychobiophysica, the psychology, biology, and physical reality, like how everything is interrelated. But we've kind of siloed into these disciplines of, oh, you're studying consciousness? Oh, actually, I do science, where they're not the same thing. So I think that was a big, horrible, horrible step that we took as a species of saying, like, we need to separate these two things. There's one studying the metaphysical stuff, and there's one studying physical stuff. And pretending like they're not. Speaker 1 (12:53) Totally connected. Absolutely. Yeah, it seems like one of those things that was done out of necessity to create a methodology. But then over time, it just it spun off into being this all encompassing, you know, metaphysical and physical package for just thinking about reality on levels it was never meant to explain. There's a book called Speaker 1 (13:16) Galileo's error by the philosopher, I can't remember his name. I've talked to him. I'm going to feel really bad if I can't think of his name. But anyway, that's kind of the idea is that, you know, a lot of this creating the scientific method and approaching the world logically and rigorously, measurably can sort of be traced back to Galileo as one of the, you know, founding fathers of this way of exploring the world and the scientific method. But part of his argument is that he actually never meant to explain away all subjective experience and spirituality and consciousness. It's just that you can't really have the scientific method if you're trying to bring subjectivity and things that can't be replicated into the conversation. Yeah. So it's not that you're actually. capturing reality in all of its constituent parts accurately through the scientific method. In fact, it was never Goff. Goff is his name. So yeah, I think that we're confronting that reality in so many ways right now. And if you go down the rabbit hole of having altered state experiences in particular, I feel like if you're intellectually honest with yourself, I don't understand how you can at least not have the epistemic humility to be like, I don't know what the fuck is going on. Yeah. Like clearly there is this horizon of mystery that we're on the precipice of all the time, whether we realize it or not. And all it takes is a little shove for you to glitch out of the map, so to speak. But there's always the thing that's so mind blowing to me is it seems like there's more and more layers of order and intelligence and mystery. The deeper you go into that, it's just like it never ends. Like whether you're looking through a microscope. we find another thing and we find another thing and we find another thing and if you use your mind as the microscope or as the aperture to do the exploring you again you just keep finding more and more layers so how you can even want to reduce that down to materialism just is is so perplexing to me it Speaker 2 (15:20) is to me too and it's it's horrifying in in many ways that like i mean how many studies out there that are there that show that neon lights are bad for your endocrine system or your brain. There's Speaker 1 (15:34) a bazillion of them. I don't know how many, Speaker 2 (15:37) right? How many are there that say, don't drink hot liquids out of styrofoam cups, and that might be bad for you to ingest all these microplastics? And then you go stay in the ICU. What are you surrounded by? Speaker 1 (15:49) Everything that there's Speaker 2 (15:50) a study that says this is not good for a human. Yeah. A human to be a human. And they're feeding you fried chicken and Salisbury steak, and you're drinking out of styrofoam cups surrounded by neon lights. This is our modern materialist reduction system at work. And I think when it comes to the consciousness side of things, you've interviewed Thomas Campbell, I think, a while ago. A long time ago, a really long Speaker 1 (16:19) time ago. But yeah, I'm definitely familiar. And Donald Hoffman. Yep, a bunch of times. You've talked to him. Speaker 2 (16:24) I think, did you ever get Rupert Sheldrake on? Speaker 1 (16:26) Not Rupert Sheldrake, no. But yeah, I mean. Don Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of these guys. Wonderful guys. Yeah. Speaker 2 (16:37) So if you go back to our species history, what's the first cool skill that we mastered? It's like making stuff out of clay. And then how do we describe God in consciousness? He is a, even in the Bible, he made us out of clay, picked us up out of the earth and carved us like a master potter or whatever it is, a clay worker, whatever the name for that is. Because that was the big technology at the time. Then we start making really complex tools. So now the universe is a set of tools and God is a tool maker. And then we have the industrial revolution and the universe is a machine. And then we have electricity start flowing around the whole world and now the universe is energy. And then we have computers and now the universe is a computer simulation. You have like real actual people. Like you can see them all over YouTube that say, well, we can't be in a simulation because it would take this much computational power. Like, oh my God. Yeah. Like that's an educated person saying this. Yeah. That we could fathom something outside of this. So, and after, and now we're moving out of the computer age. What age are we in now? We're moving into the information age, AI and all this. And now everyone's calling the universe these packets of information. Right. And every time. we make this shift to describe the universe with a different metaphor, we think, oh yeah, all Speaker 1 (18:00) the previous times, yeah, we got that wrong, but this one, we got this one. A thousand percent. We're so right about this one. Yeah. And then Speaker 2 (18:06) it'll change in the next paradigm shift that we have. Speaker 1 (18:09) Yeah, I've had this exact same thought. Like to your point, there used to be that deist philosopher who likened the cosmos to like a watch, like a clockwork that... God had made or something like that. And it's, you look back at it now and you're like, yeah, it's not wrong, but it's not right. It's not like, it's definitely does not have the explanatory power to account for all the levels of reality. And that's how I feel about, honestly, like I use the word simulation. I use the word matrix. I'll talk about these things, but I absolutely think that's a placeholder concept for something that's much, much deeper. And yeah, the idea that you can. You know, it's like saying, oh, warp drives can't exist because that would require the amount of power of like a star. You know, when you when you put things in the terms of Einsteinian relativity. Yeah, of course, it doesn't make sense, but maybe it's Speaker 2 (19:06) a Speaker 1 (19:06) paradigm shift away for it to make sense. Right. And it's always a fun thought experiment to think, what will that next conceptual placeholder be? Because if you could predict that, you could probably. predict a lot of at least theoretical concepts, but maybe even technological breakthroughs that would stem from whatever that next way of thinking about reality would be. I mean, just to spitball it, what do you think? You know, if we're moving from the... the simulation metaphor into something else, what do you think the next thing would be? My friends, we riff a lot on consciousness around here, but we cannot neglect our meat suit. Enter our sponsor, Qualia Two-Day Detox. 32 ingredients across four formulas, one for morning, one for meals, one for an empty stomach, and one for sleep. All designed to support your body's natural detox processes. You don't need to go on some retreat. You don't even need to skip any meals. You just need to take this two days once a month. For me, after those two days, I just feel more clear. I feel less bloated. I feel more lucid and at home in said meat suit. A detox is not about punishing yourself. It's about giving your liver, gut, circulation, and sleep the support that they desperately need. Two days. four formulas, and you're back to feeling like yourself. Try it for yourself, my friends, and make sure you go to qualialife.com forward slash third eye for a whopping 50 % off Qualia's two-day routine. And there is a bonus. Make sure you use our coupon code third eye for an extra 15 % off. That is Q-U-A-L-I-A life.com slash third eye. Use that code third eye at checkout for an extra 15 % off. Thank you so much for sponsoring this episode, Qualia. I mean, just to spitball it, what do you think? You know, if we're moving from the... the simulation metaphor into something else, what do you think the next thing would be? The one we're in now, Speaker 2 (21:10) or the one we're transitioning to right now is information. So the universe is made up of bits of information, right? And next is going to be intelligence. Like the universe is somehow aware, the universe is intelligent. We might be getting closer or we may just be getting better at using metaphors that still can't touch the thing. And people are obsessing over these metaphors, which I think Thomas Campbell uses the computer one a lot, but I think he uses it knowing that it's a simulation. Speaker 1 (21:40) Yeah. Speaker 2 (21:40) Knowing it's a metaphor. I think he thinks it's a metaphor. I think over time, it's going to be this intelligence thing, but it's just like they try to tell us when they wrote all the stuff that they wrote for Buddhism. Like, if you can describe it. That's not it. Yeah. If you ever have the ability to describe a tiny fraction of it, then you have not got it. Yeah. Then you don't have it. And every book tries to tell us that. Every ancient text from the Mayans, the Mayans had this book called the Popol Vuh. We had the Bhagavad Gita. We have these ancient Vedic texts and the Egyptian, all the, there's a massive tome of Egyptian stuff. Even the stuff that was found in Nag Hammadi in the Nag Hammadi scrolls in 1950 something, like. in my dad's lifetime. And it's all telling us the same stuff. And the one thing that I think it's saying, if you were to boil it all down to one or two big things, number one, don't be afraid. You're in a video game. You're supposed to be going through something. Don't be afraid. Number two is you are all connected, but we're connected in a way that we might be one thing. exploring itself, like a recursive toroid. It's like a lot of people see that shape on mushrooms and DMT and all this, this toroid shape of what is reality. And then you zoom down into a human body and you have a blood cell that's the exact same toroid shape, you know, like as above, so below, which I think is the second hermetic principle. And if we look at that and What does that mean? So like they say you're supposed to have morals, you're supposed to have ethics, like all these books are talking about that. But what do they say right after that or right before that? It's encapsulated within you are this one thing. So like I don't need to go get educated in morals if I believe the first thing. That's right. If I believe that you're me, the morals are automatic. Every piece of morality instantly becomes I want to do what's best for me. And if I view this as we're one thing. Morality is just a downstream byproduct of knowing that we're all one thing. Speaker 1 (23:57) Yeah, man, I completely agree. And I'm always very intellectually turned on by this idea that there is this Prisca Sophia or this golden chain of true philosophers that all knew exactly what you were saying. And I think when you try to, from a scholarly POV, yes, Buddhism has very important differences from Hinduism and... even like I'm very interested in like Neoplatonism for instance. And even amongst Neoplatonists, they're not agreeing on everything, but they are broadly agreeing on everything that you're saying. Like everything emanates out from one kind of central mystery. We're all part of that mystery, yet we don't fully encompass that mystery. Reality is sort of this. Speaker 1 (24:43) hierarchy or um at least lightly graded sort of planes of uh instantiation that are closer to that initial source yeah and maybe the things that are closer to that source are maybe consciousness as we would call deities or gods or divine principles or something like that but those things too are like flowing forward into our reality and then they materialize it with little symbols in our reality and like and it just all starts to sound very much like what we experience in these altered states of consciousness like we experience that there is this flowing energy that it's that it's coming from some higher source at the very least of uh i don't know like some like some sort of etheric or Speaker 1 (25:29) something else-ness that we can't quite sense with our five senses, but we somehow feel or know is there and it's familiar when it reveals itself. Yeah, I think they're all trying to explain that same mystery and an experience of that same mystery. And then, you know, there are wrinkles or dissonances within the explanations, but not whatever it is in and of itself. And I've had that exact same thought that you mentioned too, that if you, you know, Namaste style. I acknowledge this mystery within you kind of way. I mean, yeah, man, so many things just flow forth from that initial acknowledgement that we're all fundamentally of the same substance and we're all kind of going through a similar experience that that would be such a huge leveling kind of thing to agree on in a societal level. Oh Speaker 2 (26:19) my Speaker 1 (26:19) God. Yeah, we just can't seem to do it. Speaker 2 (26:22) It would change everything. And I think the illusion of separation is the biggest deception. That has ever been created. If it was created. I'm not saying there's some conspiracy. But us. Me thinking that my skin is like. Chase stops right here. And Michael starts. We're right behind those jeans. Right. Like that's this little boundary. And there's some space between us. Speaker 2 (26:47) If you were to ask the staunch person who's just a scientist, like let's say Neil deGrasse Tyson. You say, hey, what is all this? Where do we come from? You know how he would explain it? And I'm going to paraphrase. We all come from this big, mysterious one thing. Speaker 1 (27:03) And Speaker 2 (27:04) that one thing evolved to explore itself. And this is how science describes it too. Even if you just ask him about the Big Bang, that's us coming from one thing. We evolved to explore ourselves. All of us were there at that moment whenever the bang happened, if there was a bang. Yeah. And we are, even science is telling us, they're not using these words, but they're saying like we're one thing. Like we still are one. So no matter what angle you look at it, if we could, God, if we could make that shift around the world of just like, you don't have to go buy linen pants and bead necklaces and shit. Just make the acknowledgement like. What I thought about separation yesterday might be a little bit incorrect. It might be off. And you don't have to think we're all one thing, but just we're all connected. And like, if you think about a dream that you had. And I'm going off on a huge tangent here. Please do. Speaker 1 (28:01) If Speaker 2 (28:02) you think about a dream and in the dream there's some guy, let's say you're standing at a urinal, right? And some guy comes up, by the way, don't use bathrooms if you ever learned lucid dreaming. Best tip I could ever give you, don't use the bathrooms in lucid dreams. But if you're like in a bathroom. Wait, why? Why? Because you'll piss yourself. Speaker 1 (28:21) Oh, yeah, Speaker 2 (28:23) I should have. Yeah, it's obvious. So some bad guy comes in and he's like mugging you or punching you in the head or something. Who is that person made of in your dream? They're made out of you. And that's the only way that if I just understand that I'm swimming in that reality for eight hours a day, let some of that permeate upward. Let a little bit of that come up and say, wait, this is me being an asshole to myself. Yeah. And just understand that that's maybe what this is. And if I described reality perfectly, then I failed, right? It's just a metaphor. It's a way to help us understand what's going on. And if you take the dream, can I go down another tangent? Please do. Okay. So let's think of a dream really quick. If we have an object in the room like this chair right here, and you're the one dreaming, right? And I'm in your dream. I'd say, Michael, what is this made of? And your initial reaction would be like, well, it's made of wood. Okay, what's this chair thing made of? It's made of some gray fabric, whatever it is. I'm like, all right, so now what's the distance to it? And you say, oh, it's like, I don't know, five and a half feet from your face. And then I'm like, well, I want you to make sure. So here's a tape measure. And you measure the distance from your face to this chair. You're like, okay, we've proven it with science. And then everything else that you could do, you could lick it, you could touch it, you could taste it. I could bring out a microscope right here in your dream and you could inspect everything under a microscope. Every single thing that you would do. To prove that everything is real, you can do in a dream and in this reality. Yeah. So if dreams show us something, we can get a lesson from like, well, we're jammed into this alternate reality for eight hours a day. There has to be something in there, right? I've got to be able to kind of maybe map something onto that. It's showing us with 100%, not 99, 100 % proof that consciousness can become matter. And people are like, well, that's just dead matter. Those are just dead atoms. It is in your dream too. It is 100 % consciousness in your dream, and it doesn't have to be animate. But the chair isn't conscious. That's the big mistake I think people make. And maybe I'm totally wrong about this. I don't think we're conscious. I think we're consciousness. So when people say, will AI ever develop consciousness? No, because Speaker 1 (31:00) it's made out of it. Yeah, on some like fundamental level. But yeah, I think maybe that it gets into very like nuanced, you know. pedantic territory because you start being like, can it be conscious without being aware of itself being conscious? And, you know, maybe it's something like that. Do we have sentience, non-conscious, consciousness, Speaker 2 (31:18) non-sentience? Right, exactly. And then we have to go back and like, okay, let's define all of those words. Because then like you have a conversation about consciousness and the other person has a totally different definition and you never say anything. So I think there's a chance that this might be like... If you just look at things like sudden savant syndrome, somebody gets bumped on the head and now they speak French or play the piano and they've never touched a piano in their life. And science is like, oh, yeah, why don't they explore it? Because it's hard to measure. So that was the thing that you were talking about with Galileo. Galileo didn't pay much attention to things that were non-measurable. Right. And they don't get attention. Speaker 2 (32:06) We're sitting on a mountain of evidence, and people say, no, this can't be. You hear all these people say this. But if I have a theory that all crows are black, how many white crows does it take to completely disprove my theory? It's just one. It only takes one. And we're sitting on a mountain of this stuff. And I say this with negative numbers, levels of certainty about anything. Speaker 1 (32:32) Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that that idea is a very powerful idea that if your dreamscape can be so real that you cannot discern, and it circles back into that kind of core Bostrom-esque argument about conspiracy theory. Maybe that's foreshadowing the conversation, but simulation theory, right? You can very quickly do this thought experiment that makes that sound 100%. Speaker 1 (33:03) irrefutable. But where I typically disconnect from simulation theory is when you start to assume that just by making more and more complex simulations, all of a sudden the characters within that simulation wake up. The only thing I take issue with is that. But if you build in the assumption that no consciousness was there to begin with, then it all kind of makes sense. But then you're an idealist, and that's a no-go. That's the opposite of being a materialist, right? So anyway, yeah. Well, now that I said we're maybe foreshadowing the conversation, it makes me want to pivot. Maybe that was like a synchronistic pivot point or something like that. But Speaker 2 (33:41) you're talking about essence. Yes. And that's the true word of essence. It's like someone believes if I get enough atoms together and smush them around in a certain way, boom, consciousness happens. And we have human beings and we have these conscious beings. Speaker 2 (34:00) And that's like the essence theory of someone thinks like it's Speaker 1 (34:04) a Speaker 2 (34:04) thing because of what it's constructed of, even though like. This is, if you zoom into this, there's no atom on this piece of wood that's brown. There are no such thing as a brown atom. It's only brown because of a frequency, because of all kinds of crazy stuff. And the weird thing is, like, if you see something that's red, the one color it's not is really red. Because it's the only light that it rejects is red light, which means it absorbs every color but red. Wow. It's reflecting red light. So when you see something and you're like, oh, that's red, it's absolutely not red Speaker 1 (34:40) because it's Speaker 2 (34:40) rejecting it. It's reflecting that level of light. Speaker 1 (34:44) Yeah, this gets into that whole conversation about what is it like primary and secondary qualities.