Speaker | Time | Text |
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Asian capital city of the Philippines, Manila, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, the very largest program of its sort in the nighttime across the U.S., Canada, or any other land on the face of the globe. | ||
Hi, everybody. | ||
I'm Art Bell, the original creator of all this, I guess. | ||
And it is an amazing thing, I tell you, that I am here right now. | ||
Absolutely astounding, actually, that I'm here at all right now because I've got a little bit of a story to tell you. | ||
We went through one hell of a typhoon. | ||
We still do not have electrical power here in, I believe, the majority of Manila. | ||
There are spots that are beginning to get it, but we have been without power here now for four days. | ||
Four days ago, I had seen it coming for about two days. | ||
I had seen this crazy thing coming. | ||
There's a website up there called Para, P-A-R-A, which is the Philippine Amateur Radio Association website, and they had a pretty good take on what was going on with this typhoon. | ||
And I saw it begin to turn. | ||
First, it was going northwest, then it began going west-northwest, then it turned finally at the last minute, the last few hours, into a westerly direction. | ||
This thing had winds of about 160 kilometers per hour, and it came right over Manila. | ||
Now, we woke up that morning, and I'm telling you, it was sheer terror. | ||
Now, these 160-kilometer winds were at the ground. | ||
Bear in mind, we're on the 19th floor of a condominium building. | ||
That puts us about 190 feet, 180, 90 feet in the air, something like that, almost 200 feet in the air. | ||
And so let me tell you, it was some terrifying experience, to be sure. | ||
The windows, and they're really extra thick windows that we have here in this kind of minium, really thick with big hard closers, you know, that kind of deal. | ||
You could put your hand on the window and you could feel the window. | ||
It was almost like a horror movie. | ||
Have you ever seen those horror movies where the door or the window is bowing in? | ||
You know, actually, you can see it bulging in. | ||
That's what was happening to our windows. | ||
And we could look out, dangerous as it was, we could look out the windows, and we could see other windows breaking in adjacent condominiums and or falling out completely. | ||
There was a fair amount of damage to our building. | ||
I think the first floor flooded. | ||
We lost a lot of windows and some facade at the beginning of the building. | ||
And of course, almost all the trees are down. | ||
So in order to walk outside, you're just walking over downed trees and God knows what else. | ||
Manila really got hit hard. | ||
Manila really, really got hit hard. | ||
So we still do not have electrical power. | ||
And the way I'm operating is we have a backup generator in this building, and it supplies a little bit of power so that you get a little bit of power for some things. | ||
Like, for example, one air conditioner is allowed to be run in the master bedroom. | ||
And a couple of power outlets are active and that kind of thing. | ||
So I sort of jerry-rigged the ability to get power in here to power up my computers and the equipment that I would use to get on the air. | ||
And that's how I'm on the air right now. | ||
It's all running on backup generator. | ||
Now, somehow or another, magically, we still have, although it comes and goes, we have internet and we have some television. | ||
So we're able to see what's going on around the city. | ||
And that would not be most people are totally in the dark without the ability to cook unless they have gas. | ||
And it's been four days now. | ||
And this is a major capital city or the major capital city, of course, of the Philippine Islands. | ||
And they're out there, Moralco, our power companies out there, doing the very best they can. | ||
But I mean, big, the big 25,000, 50,000, 100,000 volt lines, those came down, you know, into twisted masses of metal. | ||
It was just really, it's a wreck out there. | ||
And they've actually declared a state of calamity is what we have here, a state of calamity. | ||
So here I am. | ||
If we're able to get the correct photograph up, and I think we will be able to eventually, I'm unable to get it here. | ||
And I checked with the guys back in California just prior to the program, and they're not really getting it either. | ||
But I think Lex and everybody back at the website is working on getting that picture to refresh. | ||
If it does, what you're going to get, instead of a picture of Aaron and myself, is a picture of Abby Dos. | ||
Now, Abby Dos, of course, the cats totally went berserk during the typhoon. | ||
I mean, this was scary. | ||
No, this was actually terrifying. | ||
It would be more appropriate were it terrifying. | ||
My God, it was terrifying. | ||
So it was terrifying for the cats, too. | ||
Abby ran to the back of the condo and ran. | ||
We have a little door, a swinging door that we installed. | ||
And we have a maid's quarters back there. | ||
We don't have a maid, but we have a maid's quarters. | ||
And there's a little comfort room, otherwise known as a bathroom in the United States, for the maid to use. | ||
And we don't use it. | ||
So Abby ran back there and jumped into his typhoon shelter, which was, in this case, the maid's sink. | ||
So that's where Abby spent his typhoon time in the maid's sink. | ||
Now, it was dead dark in there, so I thought it was so funny. | ||
I went back looking for any humor, got my camera, and took a flash picture, but it was dead dark back there. | ||
And you can see Abby, Abby Dos, curled up in his Little typhoon shelter there, if that picture will refresh for you. | ||
All right, that's it. | ||
So we've had a typhoon. | ||
We are now into our fourth day without power. | ||
The sun has come out now in Minila on this fourth day, and so it's hotter than hell out there. | ||
We walked down the street. | ||
We have a pancake house here, and we walked down the street prior to the program this day and thought, well, we'll grab some breakfast. | ||
Well, they have no power down there at the pancake house, and let me tell you, baby, it's hot out there. | ||
You know, it's the way it is when a storm ends, the sun comes out, it's very humid, and they had no power at all in the pancake house, and those poor people back in the kitchen, my God. | ||
Actually, as we left, they said, that's it. | ||
We're closing. | ||
Even we can't stand it. | ||
And the Filipino people are pretty tough when it comes to heat. | ||
But they said, no, we've had enough. | ||
We're closing up. | ||
You're the last customer. | ||
See you later. | ||
And that was it. | ||
We ran back here, and I knew I had the show to do, and so forth and so on. | ||
And so they've just closed their doors. | ||
Everybody's waiting, hoping, praying for power to be restored. | ||
I imagine that will occur shortly. | ||
We will do open lines coming up early this hour. | ||
So if you want to get a head start on that and begin calling right now, you're certainly more than welcome to. | ||
In a moment, I'll take a look at the world situation and a bit more. | ||
I did for the hams out there last week, just one day before the typhoon, went to this organization known as PARA, P-A-R-A, Philippine Amateur Radio Association, and applied for my reciprocal permit to operate here in the Philippines. | ||
Oh, my God. | ||
I'm glad I didn't have an antenna up. | ||
Not that I have been given permission to put one up or anything. | ||
I thought I'd wait until I receive the license, but that's well underway. | ||
So I will have my Philippine operation license here shortly. | ||
Took them all the appropriate paperwork. | ||
Everything is done with a lot of paperwork here in the Philippines. | ||
And then the next day, the typhoon struck. | ||
I guess I would say that was the most terrifying thing I've ever been through. | ||
As you know, my wife is from here, and she said it was the most terrifying one she's ever been through. | ||
And if you were to look around Manila right now, last I heard there were 23 dead, which is a fairly small death toll when you consider the size of this typhoon. | ||
So there you have it. | ||
I've heard, by the way, there is another typhoon out in the Pacific turning around right now, and for some reason, I think it might head our way. | ||
So we have that to look forward to as well. | ||
So there you have it. | ||
Manila totally clobbered by a typhoon. | ||
When we get back, we'll look at the rest of the world. | ||
Lex or Sean, if you're listening out there, I'm still not getting any refresh that shows the new webcam photograph. | ||
Too bad. | ||
It's really cute. | ||
That's where Abiydos chose to stay throughout the typhoon. | ||
God, what a terrifying experience it really was. | ||
And then one other item. | ||
I mentioned this last week, and I'm going to mention it again now because it's very, very important to me. | ||
A number of years ago, somebody wrote, the FBI believes it was written at the University of California at San Diego, some letter slamming the Philippine people on my behalf. | ||
They signed my name to it. | ||
Of course, I would never write such a thing. | ||
But somebody anonymously walked into the library at the University of California at San Diego and wrote this letter, putting my name to it, slamming the Philippine people. | ||
And now that I'm here in the Philippines, of course, they have decided to recirculate this letter, making life rather dangerous for me here, and I'm getting a lot of death threats. | ||
So once again, I have had them post this hoax alert, and I would appreciate it if you'd take a look-see at that. | ||
But I'm getting a lot of death threats, and it's a little scary because over here that sort of thing, well, that sort of thing is just kind of dangerous, we'll put it that way. | ||
Baghdad shut down on suspicion of attack. | ||
U.S. military said a captured al-Qaeda suspect and members of his cell were in the final stages of planning an attack on the green zone. | ||
What's the green zone? | ||
It's supposed to be a safe area. | ||
An unprecedented curfew prompted by the arrest left millions of Baghdadis stranded at home on Saturday without any supplies during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. | ||
The U.S. military said the suspected al-Qaeda in Iraq member was arrested late Friday at the home of the senior Sunni Arab political leader there, where he was working as a personal bodyguard. | ||
Representative Thomas Reynolds, head of the House Republican election effort, said Saturday that he told Speaker Dennis Hastert months ago about concerns that a fellow GOP lawmaker had sent inappropriate messages to a teenage boy. | ||
Hastert's office said aides referred the matter to the proper authorities last fall, but they were only told the messages were, quote, over-friendly, end quote. | ||
Reynolds, a Republican from New York, was told about emails sent by Representative Foley and is now defending himself from Democratic accusations that he did too little. | ||
Foley, a Republican from Florida, resigned Friday after ABC News questioned him about the emails to a former congressional page and about sexually suggestive instant messages to other pages. | ||
Israeli military officials said the Army withdrew the last of its troops from Lebanon early Sunday, fulfilling a key condition of the ceasefire that ended a month-long war with Hezbollah guerrillas. | ||
Pullout ended a nearly three-month troop presence and now clears the way for the UN to come in and make what peace or keep what peace they can. | ||
Military helicopters Lowered a rescue team by rope Saturday into the remote Amazon jungle site where an airliner slammed into the ground. | ||
Authorities, though, held out little hope of finding anybody alive among the 155 on board. | ||
It's 155 people. | ||
Team began clearing dense vegetation near the wreckage site so a helicopter could land. | ||
In a mountain meadow not very far from where she was shot by a gunman who invaded her school, those who knew Emily Keys and many who did not came together on a bright, breezy fall Saturday to remember the teen and hear a message of forgiveness and hope. | ||
Family friend Louis Gonzalez asked mourners to embrace Emily's last words to her family. | ||
A text message that said, I love you guys, sent to her father, who was standing in view of the school as she was held hostage. | ||
An overpass near Montreal collapsed Saturday, crushing two cars whose occupants were feared dead, at least five other people injured there. | ||
A previously unseen video made by Mohammed Atta, ringleader of the September 11th attacks on the United States, has been obtained by Britain's the Sunday Times. | ||
The newspaper reported Saturday in editions available late Saturdays that it had been handed the so-called martyrdom video, but did not reveal the source of the tape. | ||
Researchers at NASA are saying Earth's temperature, get this now folks, has reached levels not seen in thousands of years, and this phenomena has begun to affect its inhabitants. | ||
That would be both plants and us animals. | ||
Reporting in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, prestigious, right? | ||
The researchers led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York said Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit a decade for the last 30 years. | ||
And this has brought the overall temperature to the highest point since the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago. | ||
They said the warming is higher in the far north than elsewhere as melting ice tended to expose the darker land and rocks beneath the snow cover, which in turn has begun absorbing more heat from the sun, more on the land than water. | ||
Water has higher capacity to hold heat than land, changes temperatures slower than land. | ||
The researchers found the warming has been significant in the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans, which have major impact on climate change. | ||
They're concerned that any warming there could lead to more El Niño episodes. | ||
Hansen said in a statement, the evidence is indication that Earth is getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution. | ||
He said human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate change factor. | ||
He added, quote, if further global warming reaches two or three degrees Celsius, we're going to likely see changes that make Earth a very different planet than the one we know now. | ||
The last time it was warm was in the middle, well, about 3 million years ago, actually, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters higher than today. | ||
Imagine that now. | ||
No New Orleans, that's for sure. | ||
The researchers say, although warming is most noticeable at the poles, higher latitudes are still among the coolest spots around. | ||
For animals and plants, it can survive only within certain temperature ranges. | ||
These will be the only places to go as their current home or homes, I guess plural, will become intolerably warm. | ||
In a study done in 2003, it has been brought out that nearly 1,700 plant and animal species had moved toward the poles or about four miles per decade in the last 50 years. | ||
And this from Great Britain. | ||
The Ministry of Defense went to extraordinary lengths, apparently, to cover up its true involvement in investigating UFOs according to secret documents revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. | ||
The files show that officials attempted to expunge information from documents released to the Public Records Office under the, quote, 30-year rule, end, quote, that would have revealed the extent of the MOD's interest in UFO sightings. | ||
In particular, the ministry wanted to cover up the operation of a secret unit dedicated, dedicated, mind you, to UFO investigations within the Defense Intelligence staff. | ||
UFO conspiracy theorists have linked the unit called D-155 to a sort of men-in-black agency for defending the Earth against invasion, but the release documents show this is far from the truth. | ||
One 1995 memo from D-155 to the MOD's public UFO desk said, quote, I have several books at home that describe our supposed role of defender of the earth against alien menace. | ||
It is light years from the truth. | ||
The files were made public following FOI Freedom of Information requests by David Clark, a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hollum University and his colleague Andy Roberts. | ||
Quote, these documents don't tell us anything about UFOs, but they do show how desperate the MOD has been to conceal the interest which the intelligence services had in the subject. | ||
The trail begins with a request in 76 from a UFO enthusiast called Julian Hennessy for access to the MOD's records on UFO sightings. | ||
A note from the UFO desk to the MOD's head of security on March 23rd shows that officials intended to refuse him access, all on the grounds that the files contain confidential information and it would be, quote, of very little value to a serious scientific investigator, end quote. | ||
Hmm but the note continues, this is not to say that the investigation is not taken seriously. | ||
The branches have their own methods and the public UFO desk has no need to know about them. | ||
But we are aware that D-155, for example, sometimes makes extensive inquiries. | ||
So there you have it. | ||
Again, more from Great Britain than we get from our own country. | ||
All right, listen, I would love to get emails from you. | ||
Obviously, I cannot answer every email I get, but I'm making the very best attempt I can to answer as many as I can. | ||
If you would like to email me, I am Art Bell. | ||
That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at A-O-L.com, or perhaps better yet, Artbell at mindspring.com. | ||
That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L, all lowercase, just simple art, A-R-T-B-E-L-L, at mindspring.com. | ||
And I depend on many of you for relevant information, stories that would be of interest to the entire listening audience, stories that I think are appropriate for this program, which is not so much the regular news, but the abbey normal news, if you will. | ||
So there you have it. | ||
I would love to hear from any of you who feel you have anything earth-shaking or even semi-earthshaking that the audience would like to hear. | ||
In a moment, we're going to go to open lines. | ||
Anything you would like to talk about for the next half hour, and then we're going to delve into the world of consciousness. | ||
There is so very much to talk about in that world. | ||
From Manila, ravaged by a typhoon in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell. | ||
Indeed so, from actually devastated Manila, Philippines, man, I am telling you, this typhoon just ripped through here. | ||
I bet that our windows, and we have very, very strong windows here, but I'll bet that those windows were bowing in about an inch. | ||
You can actually feel them. | ||
It was like a horror movie they were moving in so far. | ||
It was just amazing. | ||
My God, that was a strong typhoon. | ||
In the last, I don't know, a few hours, it took a jog to the west, which put it basically right over Manila. | ||
And again, we're into our fourth day now without power. | ||
They tell us that just about any day now, we may get power. | ||
And once more, I would like to make the simple request that as many of you as possible go to the Coast to Coast AM website. | ||
By the way, I'm told that about, I don't know, half of you are getting the picture of Abby Doe sitting in the sink, and the other half are not. | ||
I'm told by those in charge of the website back there, it depends on whether you're shoveled off to a proxy server or not, whatever that means. | ||
So some of you are getting the correct photograph, others not. | ||
I imagine that'll slowly straighten out as the servers straighten out. | ||
And then just one additional thing, again, this is becoming a very, very dangerous situation for us over here because of that damn Filipino bogus letter that was sent out years ago and it's now been sent recirculating again, causing me to get, and my wife to get a lot of death threats. | ||
So since we are here in the Philippines, it's particularly dangerous because obviously there's not as much exposure to the truth over here. | ||
Even though, believe it or not, the Philippine Inquirer, a newspaper, the major newspaper here in Manila, actually went ahead and published that letter without ever checking out whether it was true or not, then retracted it for about a week. | ||
But with it circulating once again, people don't realize it's old and wrong and bogus, and that's the way it is. | ||
And so obviously it makes it dangerous for us here. | ||
So if you could send out to as many of your friends, particularly Filipino friends, as you know, the fact that it's not true, hasn't been true for years, isn't true now, wasn't true then, we would certainly appreciate it. | ||
In a moment, we move to all of you. | ||
That is to say, open lines. | ||
Larry in Eugene, Oregon says, hey, Art, glad to hear you're okay. | ||
Could you feel your building swaying, moving during the typhoon? | ||
Was curious since you're on the 19th floor. | ||
Answer, yes. | ||
Oh, yes. | ||
Could feel the building moving. | ||
The pressure was astoundingly large. | ||
The pressure of the wind was just unbelievable. | ||
A couple of times, the windows blew open. | ||
The vibration, you know, try and put this into words for you. | ||
It's almost impossible how severe it was. | ||
I imagine we were getting 200 kilometer per hour winds here on the 19th floor easily, easily. | ||
And the vibration was so much that occasionally one of the windows would pop open and it would take the both of us to close it. | ||
Now, Erin, being a native Filipino, was prior to this typhoon, was very casual about it. | ||
I kept saying, hon, this typhoon is turning more toward us. | ||
She said, I've been through so many of them. | ||
Don't worry about it. | ||
We're used to them here. | ||
Well, she has a whole different attitude now. | ||
I mean, she was absolutely terrified, as was I. This was really something. | ||
All right, let's go to the phones and see what awaits. | ||
East of the Rockies, you are on the air. | ||
Hello. | ||
unidentified
|
Say East of the Rockies? | |
Yes, I did. | ||
unidentified
|
Awesome. | |
How you doing, Art? | ||
Well, I'm all right. | ||
As I mentioned, we're into our fourth day with no power here, but otherwise. | ||
unidentified
|
Well, I just wanted to call you and tell you that I'm so glad that you're all right. | |
Well, George was worrying us last night saying that they couldn't get a hold of you. | ||
It's a little worried about you, but it's good to hear that you're all right. | ||
Well, thank you. | ||
Yeah, lines are down everywhere. | ||
Big steel structures. | ||
You know, not the little ones, but the big steel power structures that hold the lines. | ||
They're down and they look like just a mess. | ||
So that gives you some idea what it's like here. | ||
When we walk to a restaurant or something, we have to step over down trees. | ||
So it's pretty serious. | ||
unidentified
|
Wild. | |
Wild. | ||
Well, I'm calling from Oklahoma, and we have some bad storms, but usually nothing that bad. | ||
Well, you have tornadoes. | ||
It's always something somewhere, right? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, you guys get a little bit of warning. | |
We don't get much warning, so that's kind of the trade-off, I guess. | ||
I guess. | ||
unidentified
|
All right. | |
All right. | ||
Thanks very much for the call, and take care. | ||
West of the Rockies, you are on the air. | ||
Hello. | ||
unidentified
|
Was that West of the Rockies? | |
Yes. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, this is Chuck in Port Moody, British Columbia. | |
Hi, Chuck. | ||
unidentified
|
Congratulations on us surviving you and your wife that terrible storm. | |
Beats the alternative. | ||
unidentified
|
I was in the Army during the war and was in a typhoon on the way to Manila in 1945. | |
And I know what a typhoon's like because the ship was not very shipworthy. | ||
Oh, boy, that's the last place I'd want to be is out on the ocean. | ||
I can't even imagine going through a typhoon in a ship, even a big one. | ||
unidentified
|
Anyway, I want to wish you the best wishes to you and your wife, and tell her ini Ibikita for me. | |
Okay, buddy. | ||
Thank you very much, and take care. | ||
We'll go to, I think, the first-time caller line and John in New York someplace or another. | ||
Hi, John. | ||
unidentified
|
How are you doing? | |
I'm glad you and your wife are safe and secure. | ||
I just have a question for you. | ||
How far are you inland and you have to worry about storm surge and even though you're 19 stories up, but storm surge and flooding? | ||
Manila Bay. | ||
I can see, I can look out the window here, and I can see Manila Bay from here. | ||
But it's quite a ways away, and it would have to cross a lot of land and a lot of city before it would get to me. | ||
So I'm not saying it couldn't, but I think we're okay in that regard. | ||
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
Okay. | ||
Thank you very much. | ||
Oh, you're very welcome. | ||
And anything, you know, I understand that a lot of Americans don't really understand exactly what our situation is here. | ||
And under normal circumstances, you know, I'm totally open with my audience. | ||
And so I would not hesitate to actually describe precisely where we are with reference to everything in Manila. | ||
Under the current threatening circumstances, I think I'll let that one go. | ||
First, make that the wildcard line. | ||
You're on the air. | ||
Hello. | ||
unidentified
|
Hi, Art. | |
Longtime listener, first-time caller. | ||
Glad to hear that you and your wife are safe. | ||
Thank you. | ||
Over the years, I've been listening for years, and over the years, you've turned me on to so many great things, whether it be the subjects that you talk about or television shows like Dead Like Me and the music that you listen to. | ||
You've turned me on to Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra and even Johnny Cash, which I said I'd never listen to Country. | ||
Anyway, I thought I might be able to return the favor. | ||
And you were talking about Enya the other day and played a little bit. | ||
There's a band called Clanned, C-L-A-N-N-A-D, and they did an album called Lore and L-O-R-E, and they did a song called Trail of Tears. | ||
It has a Native American historical significance. | ||
I'm not really sure of it, but there's a story behind it. | ||
But the real reason I called is there is a gentleman by the name of Chris Rea, and he's relatively popular in Europe. | ||
He's done many, many, many albums, but he's right up your alley. | ||
He's a slide guitar player, blues singer, and deep voice like Lee Hazelwood. | ||
All right, well, you need say no more. | ||
I will absolutely check it out, and if it's appropriate, we'll give it a shot. | ||
unidentified
|
The album is called The Road to Hell. | |
The Road to Hell. | ||
unidentified
|
Very trippy music, and it will be a surprise. | |
For instance, he does a song called You Must Be Evil. | ||
Well, he's talking about the news stations because they're playing news that isn't fit for children, and his daughter is sitting crying on the floor. | ||
Listen, buddy, that's a fact. | ||
The news is not fit. | ||
Heck, a lot of it's not fit for adults. | ||
It's not good news. | ||
What's going on in the world right now is not good. | ||
We're obviously more than not, and there are exceptions, of course, to this, but more than not, we're not on the right track. | ||
Humanity is not on the right track, and we're still kind of a warrior species, inclined to be more warrior-like than not. | ||
And I don't think that bodes well for a very long-term existence for all of us. | ||
On the international line, you're on the air. | ||
Hello. | ||
unidentified
|
Hi, Art. | |
Hello. | ||
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
It's Nena us here, Tom and Nena from British Columbia. | ||
How are you doing? | ||
Now, this young lady came to visit us here in Manila. | ||
As a matter of fact, she just made it out of here before the typhoon. | ||
I think she flew on Sunday out of Manila, right? | ||
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
You know, I was really lucky. | ||
My God. | ||
You know, I have been phoning my kids, and it seems I can't get hold of them. | ||
But we're glad you're okay. | ||
Tom was saying, say hi to art. | ||
My God. | ||
We're so worried, you know. | ||
Well, we're okay. | ||
You probably cannot get through because obviously most of the phone lines here are down on the ground. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
It's scary when you're on the 19th floor. | ||
I can imagine your building, my God. | ||
Well, you can because you were here. | ||
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
How is Yeti? | ||
Both Abby Dos and Yeti are fine. | ||
I don't know whether you can get the photograph or not, but that's where Abby Dos spent his typhoon time. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
In the sink. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Or in the image room. | ||
Yeah, that's right. | ||
unidentified
|
I saw that. | |
How is Irene? | ||
Oh, God, that's scary. | ||
Irene made it through fine. | ||
unidentified
|
So you went to Pancake House again? | |
Well, as a matter of fact, we just got this morning. | ||
You know, because there is no power, you don't want to cook in here because you raise the temperature here in the condo when you cook. | ||
So we went to Pancake House, and they had no power. | ||
Their generator was not working. | ||
And I saw the cook come out a couple of times, and there was so much sweat coming off his brow. | ||
The manager finally said, That's it. | ||
When you're gone, we're closing. | ||
And so I got the last meal, as it were. | ||
unidentified
|
You're lucky. | |
You're lucky. | ||
But anyway, you're safe there because it's Little America. | ||
I know the place now. | ||
It's really fantastic. | ||
Well, I would rather not identify exactly where we are. | ||
unidentified
|
I know, I know, I know, I know, I know what you mean. | |
But anyway, I'm glad that you're okay. | ||
Say hi to Ireland. | ||
I know she's out there reading a paper. | ||
I will do that. | ||
And you say hello to Tom for me. | ||
That was a young lady who did make a trip here recently to Manila and came to visit us here in the condos. | ||
She knows exactly where we are. | ||
Wildcard line, you are on the air. | ||
Hello. | ||
unidentified
|
Yes, hello, Art. | |
Your screener tells me I only got just a very brief time to tell you what I'm thinking. | ||
Sure. | ||
Okay. | ||
Uniform expansion of the universe is based on the observation that wherever you are in the universe, the farther out you look, the more redshifted stars are. | ||
I'm sorry, the more wherever you are in the universe, I mean, suppose you were, wherever you are in the universe, the further out a star is, the more redshifted it is. | ||
That's correct. | ||
unidentified
|
And therefore they say, well, the universe is expanding. | |
It's linear. | ||
It's expanding everywhere no matter where you are. | ||
So the universe is expanding. | ||
But there's another theory, a possibility. | ||
Time is simply speeding up. | ||
If time were speeding up, then what would happen is a million years ago, and it's been speeding up all along, because, well, okay, never mind because. | ||
It's less problematic than what they got. | ||
They have to say, oh, there's dark matter. | ||
It's pushing the galaxies apart. | ||
There's multiple universes, multiverse. | ||
I've heard on your program before. | ||
But if time are simply speeding up, then you get the same redshifts anywhere you looked, anywhere in the universe. | ||
Yeah, you know, that's a definite possibility. | ||
And scientists are constant, astronomers are constantly revising what they previously thought, whether it's the expanding universe theory or whether it's when the Big Bang actually occurred. | ||
I think they recently changed their view of that by about 2 billion years. | ||
So one doesn't really know. | ||
It could be time speeding up. | ||
These are areas that are at the very fringe of our knowledge. | ||
And so virtually anything is possible. | ||
East of the Rockies, you're on the air. | ||
Hello. | ||
unidentified
|
Hey, how's it going, Art? | |
Just fine, sir, under the circumstances. | ||
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, I'm glad you made it. | |
So I've got a story here for you. | ||
I'll start from the beginning. | ||
My father and sister were deceased when I was five. | ||
And, well, when I was 12, me and my mom were having a conversation about them for a couple of hours in depth. | ||
And then that night, it was stormy. | ||
And it was about 2 or 3 in the morning. | ||
And one of my sister's dolls started singing a song. | ||
You know, you pushed its wing and it sang a song. | ||
So I woke up. | ||
My mom, I was a little scared. | ||
She came in and pulled that out of the closet and they take the batteries out. | ||
Well, there's no batteries, and it quit singing. | ||
And I just thought that was, you know, some sort of connection between the two worlds, perhaps, or, you know. | ||
All right, I think that's entirely possible. | ||
Here's what I think. | ||
I think that, for example, if you're, for example, sitting in your living room, you spend two hours talking about a couple of people who are deceased from your family, that you form an intent that probably opens or may open some doors and make communication somewhat easier. | ||
I really think that a great deal of all of this has to do with intent. | ||
Now, that does not go to whether it's really communication from the other side or it's something within your own brain or it's some sort of mass consciousness, which, by the way, is going to be the topic next hour or any of the rest of it. | ||
But I do think simply talking about it and thinking about it creates an intent that makes it entirely possible for that kind of communication to occur. | ||
Let's go to this wildcard line and say, hello, you're on the air. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi. | |
Hi, Art. | ||
I'm in Cliff in Houston, Texas. | ||
Yes. | ||
And I got a question for you. | ||
I have a very good friend of mine that lives in Mindanao. | ||
How bad were they hit? | ||
They really weren't. | ||
Mindanao got some heavy rains from it, but it is many, many miles by plane. | ||
It's about one hour to the south of where I'm located. | ||
Mindanao is my wife's original home. | ||
She's from a place called Bukidon. | ||
unidentified
|
Super. | |
And if you would like, I have a super story that happened to me in 1973 about the Devil's Triangle. | ||
Going to have to be pretty quick. | ||
unidentified
|
Okay, I was fishing in the Florida Keys. | |
I was standing there on a place called Indian Rocks Bridge. | ||
I was in a boat about a half mile from shore. | ||
I heard another boat approaching from my left coming up behind me. | ||
Paid no attention to it. | ||
All of a sudden, the engine stopped. | ||
I turned around to look at the boat. | ||
No boat. | ||
There was foam from the propeller wash in the water. | ||
Boat was gone. | ||
That is a true, true story. | ||
Well, it is a strange, strange world. | ||
And I certainly don't have explanations for all of it, but if you, and that's what we're doing here, is opening doors, opening a few doors, allowing all of you to tell these kinds of stories. | ||
And who knows, perhaps even doing a radio program like this opens doors that otherwise would not be open, which counts for why a lot occurs during this show. | ||
East of the Rockies, you're on the air. | ||
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
Art? | ||
That's me. | ||
unidentified
|
Well, this is someone from Mississippi, and I wanted to tell you what happened to us. | |
I'm sorry you were in that typhoon. | ||
I have never been in a typhoon, but I've been through many hurricanes. | ||
But this last storm, Katrina, we stayed home. | ||
The roof blew off to begin with. | ||
The ceiling fell in on me, so I went to another room and got in the bed. | ||
And all of a sudden, water was over the top of the bed. | ||
And we looked at the stars for four nights before we could get the roof on. | ||
But I'm telling you, I've never seen a storm like that. | ||
I hear what you're saying. | ||
Bad as what we had here was, and it was bad, obviously what occurred to you was far worse. | ||
But I was worried about windows. | ||
And in reality, a lot of windows, you can look out my window right now and see all the blown-out windows and the ones that are detached and took a big long fall to the street. | ||
I mean, it was pretty serious stuff. | ||
It was scary. | ||
Nothing to compare to what, of course, you went through with Katrina. | ||
Coming to you from the somewhat battered but still present Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell. | ||
It is indeed. | ||
Hello there, everybody. | ||
Coming up is one of my favorite topics in all the world. | ||
It's consciousness in a very unique perspective, I imagine, with Stuart Hameroff, hope I've got that name right, a physician and a researcher at the University Medical Center. | ||
He divides his professional time between practicing and teaching clinical anesthesiology in the surgical operating rooms and research into the mechanism of consciousness. | ||
His interest in the nature of mind began during the late 1960s. | ||
You can imagine somebody who is an anesthesiologist would be very, very interested in all of this. | ||
In addition to his research in consciousness studies, he helped to organize the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. | ||
So coming up in a moment, again, one of my favorite topics in all the world, consciousness with somebody who ought to know a lot about it since he, you know, I guess I have to be careful here. | ||
Maybe he, when he does his work, he does not remove consciousness, or does he? | ||
That'll be one of the first questions. | ||
Coming up in a moment. | ||
Yarael in Lincoln, Nebraska updates me here in Manila. | ||
From the Manila Times, the latest news is the official death toll from Typhoon Millennial on Saturday rose to at least 61 dead, 81 injured, 69 missing. | ||
So it was a pretty wild typhoon here, no question about it. | ||
All right. | ||
Now, Dr. Stuart Hameroff. | ||
I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. | ||
Am I, Doctor? | ||
Sounds good, Eric. | ||
How are you? | ||
I'm just fine and very, very pleased to have you on the air. | ||
You're obviously a very appropriate person to talk about consciousness, I think. | ||
Thank you. | ||
That's all right. | ||
Go ahead. | ||
Well, I was going to say, as you mentioned, it's part of my clinical practice every day of putting people to sleep before surgery and then waking them up, but it's also something I've studied for 30 years or so. | ||
The toughest question is, I think, the first question, and that is one that I ask so many guests that I have on the show, and that is, what is consciousness? | ||
What is your personal definition of consciousness? | ||
Well, first I would say that consciousness is awareness, awareness of something. | ||
People talk about self-consciousness, higher-order consciousness, group consciousness. | ||
That's all interesting and wonderful and essential, but it's at a higher level of something very basic. | ||
So if we have a glimmer of any awareness of anything, even of nothingness, as the Buddhists, or even if a worm has an awareness of the green grass around it, that's conscious awareness. | ||
And that's the fundamental basic ground of consciousness. | ||
And of course, from there, all kinds of other things emerge. | ||
Okay, well, when I'm asleep, for example, doctor, unless I'm dreaming, I have awareness of nothing. | ||
It's just a sweet nothingness. | ||
So is that a lack of consciousness? | ||
Yeah, I would say rather than being aware of nothing, you have no awareness. | ||
As opposed to dreaming, when you have an awareness, you have dreaming and when you're awake. | ||
John Searle, the philosopher of mind from UC Berkeley, defines consciousness as that which happens when you wake up in the morning, continues all day, except when you're in a dreamless sleep, because he thinks dreams are conscious. | ||
So that kind of just basically states the obvious. | ||
But you could ask, is it a process? | ||
I mean, is it a thing? | ||
It's not a thing. | ||
I mean, it's not a mass or piece of matter. | ||
You could say it's a state. | ||
It's a particular state of the brain, but that doesn't really tell us anything, because what is the state, and why does that state cause conscious experience, the phenomenal subjective nature, the first person view of things, of having an experience. | ||
That's what distinguishes us conscious entities from non-conscious beings, including most probably computers, which can have complex behaviors. | ||
Behaviors are something other than necessarily having an awareness. | ||
Or is consciousness a process? | ||
Is it a sequence of events, for example, of actual events occurring in the universe? | ||
So those are some of the choices. | ||
When a person dreams, and if I get off into an area here that's inappropriate for you, let me know. | ||
But when a person dreams, is that a form, is it fair to say it's a form of consciousness? | ||
I would say so, and John Searle says that it is. | ||
At the last Tucson conference in April, Toward Science of Consciousness, where we have many disciplines coming from all over the world to discuss these things, there was a debate between two dream experts, Alan Hobson from Harvard and Mark Som from South Africa about the role of Freud in dreams. | ||
So I learned a lot from listening to those two talk about dreams. | ||
The dreams are associated with a different biochemistry, a different set of neurotransmitters, but have the same type of coherent activity that can be measured with the EEG as the wake state, and that's called gamma synchrony. | ||
It's a high-frequency, highly coherent, synchronized EEG signal that occurs in areas of the brain that are associated with consciousness. | ||
And the mystery about that is how the perfect synchrony is accomplished over large parts of the brain, because it doesn't seem possible that this coherence can be accounted for by normal nerve conduction velocities and so forth. | ||
Okay, you're a little over my head. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
That's all right. | ||
So are you essentially saying that when we dream, an EEG measures activity in the same parts of the brain as when we're awake and conscious? | ||
Yeah, and the same type of activity, not necessarily the same parts of the brain, because different parts of the brain are conscious with different types of consciousness. | ||
But most parts, at least the cortex, can seem to be involved in consciousness. | ||
Individual parts here connected to individual parts over different regions. | ||
So kind of global patterns. | ||
And the remarkable thing is that the neurons separated from one part of the brain to the other can be synchronized so perfectly. | ||
And that suggested something other than conventional neural pathways, for example, possibly quantum phenomena in the brain. | ||
Hmm. | ||
Quantum. | ||
All right. | ||
I have, for example, when I had my wisdom teeth removed, I had anesthesia. | ||
And I would think most adult Americans have at one time or another had anesthesia. | ||
And I recall having actually kind of a very weird dream. | ||
Little men were chopping up the world. | ||
Now, is a dream state one that frequently is remembered or is really scary or whatever? | ||
Is that fairly common with anesthesia or not? | ||
No, it's very, very rare. | ||
In fact, what you described, when you go to the dentist and you most likely breathe nitrous oxide, nitrous laughing gas, mixed with oxygen. | ||
And even you're not breathing a complete anesthetic. | ||
You're not breathing enough for you to be unconscious to have a major surgical procedure. | ||
Okay, well, let me clarify. | ||
When I had my wisdom teeth removed, they gave me a shot of sodium pentothol. | ||
Okay, well, then that's it. | ||
I remember the doctor put the needle in and just moved it a little bit, and I went, wow. | ||
Can you do that again? | ||
And he said, sure, and then put the rest of it in, and I went pump, and I was gone. | ||
But no, I was definitely completely out of it during that experience. | ||
And boy, did I dream. | ||
Well, that's still, first of all, you might have dreamt at the beginning and at the end coming out and not in the middle, because it's kind of like diving a submarine. | ||
You take it deep, and then you level off near the ocean floor. | ||
That's deep anesthesia. | ||
Then you come back up to the surface. | ||
So on the way down and the way up, you may dream, but in a deep anesthetic, you generally don't. | ||
And awareness and recall is a problem, but it's very, very rare, and it's something we work very, very hard to avoid. | ||
What is it like doing what you do, being an anesthesiologist? | ||
What does that work like? | ||
Dare I say it's a gas? | ||
Well, you can, you know. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
No, it's a very serious business. | ||
It's very critical. | ||
You know, we see patients, we don't have long-term rapport with our patients like family doctors, primary care physicians, but we see them on a very acute critical phase in their life, and they deserve our complete attention. | ||
And it's a very, very highly developed specialty. | ||
It's four years of college, four years of medical school, and then four more years of residency and internship, and then you're an anesthesiologist. | ||
So it's quite a serious deal because we have a lot of responsibility. | ||
Indeed you do. | ||
I've heard, and I don't want to get off on a tangent here, but I have heard some horror stories. | ||
For example, people suddenly waking up during open-heart surgery, that kind of thing. | ||
Yeah, and apparently there's a movie about that coming out. | ||
And as I said, that's a really terrible situation. | ||
Fortunately, it's very, very rare. | ||
The few cases that have occurred have gotten a lot of publicity and engendered this film. | ||
It's something to be concerned about, just like there are many, many possible complications of surgery and anesthesia, and that's one we take very seriously. | ||
But we're working hard to try to avoid it all the time. | ||
It's a critical issue. | ||
Well, as a matter of interest, how would something like that occur? | ||
I mean, does it mean the anesthesiologist wasn't quite doing his job correctly? | ||
He went out to get a cup of coffee at the wrong time? | ||
Nobody does that anymore. | ||
But, you know, it could be, it's possible that it's pilot error, that even you literally ran out of gas, or that the, but many of those cases are because the level of the surgery, like in a heavy trauma or something, where you don't want to give too much anesthetics, you have to kind of walk that tightrope. | ||
So there's all different types of events. | ||
But it's certainly something that you just have to find the best person, anesthesiologist, to take care of you. | ||
That's all you can say. | ||
When I was in the Air Force, doctor, I had a big lump suddenly in the, you know, on my back. | ||
And it was a tumor. | ||
It turned out to be a benign tumor in the end. | ||
But the Air Force doctor at the time at Amarillo Air Force Base, that's where I was, said, oh, listen, it's no big deal. | ||
We'll do this very quickly. | ||
We'll give you some shots to deaden the area. | ||
And we'll open it up and we'll pop that little sucker out. | ||
And that'll be that. | ||
And so I said, okay. | ||
And I got on the table and they went to work and they gave me shots as they suggested they would. | ||
However, by the time it was over, there were four doctors in there. | ||
They were very deep into my chest from my back. | ||
Thank you very much. | ||
This thing went much deeper than they thought. | ||
And once they got in, they told me, you know, that I should be getting general anesthetic. | ||
But they had me already opened up and they were already in there. | ||
And they said they couldn't give me general anesthetic at that point. | ||
So they kept giving me shots. | ||
But I can assure you they got down into my chest. | ||
And I could feel every snip, every clip, every cut. | ||
And it went on for about three hours. | ||
I mean, it was really quite an ordeal. | ||
And I was never put under. | ||
Does that sound? | ||
I've always wondered whether they told me the truth about that. | ||
In other words, once I get in. | ||
What position were you in? | ||
Were you lying on your side or on your stomach? | ||
I was on my stomach. | ||
Well, the problem there is that you can't. | ||
When patients become anesthetized, unconscious, they stop breathing and they don't maintain their airway. | ||
And when the patient is, if you're on your back and we have access to your head and your airway, then it's no problem putting you to sleep. | ||
But if you're laying on your stomach and you went to sleep, you would obstruct and you might, you know, not breathe properly. | ||
And it would be very difficult, if impossible, to insert a tube or whatever you need. | ||
It would be very, very unsafe. | ||
Let's put it that way. | ||
All right. | ||
Well, then they told me the truth. | ||
Yeah, I think they did. | ||
And they probably gave you the best care because had they, you know, had they opted to put you to sleep, they put you at risk for serious things as opposed to, you know, enduring a bit of suffering. | ||
But in the end, it was the safest thing. | ||
So, you know, patients have to contribute, too, to their optimal care. | ||
Uh-huh. | ||
Well, I contributed by yelling and screaming a lot. | ||
Well, you tolerated it. | ||
You didn't totally freak out. | ||
How did you, as an anesthesiologist, become interested in the subject of consciousness? | ||
Because as an anesthesiologist, really, your job is to snuff out consciousness, I guess, right? | ||
Snuff it out and bring it back exactly as it was, yeah. | ||
Well, actually, Art, I was interested in consciousness before I chose anesthesia. | ||
I became interested in consciousness in my college days. | ||
And then when I went to medical school and was deciding on a specialty, I was thinking of something oriented towards the brain, mind, head, and thought about neurology, psychiatry, and neurosurgery. | ||
I didn't really consider anesthesia at the time. | ||
But then I moved out after graduating from med school in Philadelphia. | ||
I came up to get an internship and stumbled into the head of the anesthesia department here at the University of Arizona, the first one, Bernal Brown, who was quite an academic intellectual. | ||
And he said, well, if you want to understand consciousness, figure out how anesthetic gases work because they're relatively selective. | ||
And that would be the best way to approach the problem. | ||
So I thought about it and did some, spent some time with him in the operating room and decided I liked it. | ||
So I did a residency in anesthesia and stayed on the faculty and began a study at the molecular level how anesthetic gases act to – because they're quite selective. | ||
Patients go to sleep with the gases, and their brain is still quite active. | ||
We can record EEG just slower, not the high-coherent, high-frequency stuff, but slower and evoked potentials. | ||
So the sensory inputs are being recognized and the autonomic regulation is going on. | ||
So the brain is quite active. | ||
So these gases literally float into our brains and occupy these little pockets and stop consciousness. | ||
virtually nothing else it's it's very selective and then they float out and the patient wakes up so it's quite an amazing process that is amazing actually i heard someone say or i read that anesthesiologists don't actually fully understand why it works well that's true that it is true that is true and um uh i just actually uh i just published a paper in the journal Anesthesiology, | ||
the leading scientific journal in the field, on the molecular mechanisms of anesthetic gases. | ||
My article was entitled The Entwined Mysteries of Anesthesia and Consciousness. | ||
Is there a common underlying mechanism? | ||
And it's because these gases float into these pockets and act, they don't form chemical bonds. | ||
All other drugs form chemical bonds. | ||
They form only very weak quantum forces. | ||
They're called London forces, but they're between neutral uncharged molecules, and they're very delicate, and yet they're perfectly spaced in like a lattice configuration throughout the brain. | ||
So they can act collectively. | ||
So the anesthetic gases affect only these, seem to, at least my argument is, affect only these quantum processes that are normally occurring in these sites throughout the brain that are responsible for consciousness. | ||
In other words, consciousness is produced by quantum processes. | ||
All right. | ||
You've said that a lot now. | ||
Quantum processes. | ||
Can you explain what you mean by you say it doesn't bond in the way most chemicals would bond or something else? | ||
What do you mean by quantum forces? | ||
Well, the anesthetic gases are basically inert. | ||
In fact, xenon, the inert gas, is a good anesthetic. | ||
There's no charge on them, so there's no electrons to donate or to even share. | ||
But they do have a very funny type of interaction between two molecules. | ||
It's kind of like each one is a dipole, is a little magnet. | ||
They're called dipoles. | ||
And as they get close to each other, the electrons in the cloud that make up one molecule push away the electrons in the cloud or the other so that they have like two little, they become like two little bar magnets pointing in the same direction. | ||
They start out, so they form these very weak quantum magnetic forces, if you will, that actually oscillate back and forth so that they can be pointing in both directions at the same time because that's a fundamental quantum property of superposition. | ||
But that gets into the quantum world, which is a very interesting area as you say. | ||
Boy, it certainly is. | ||
A dipole, of course. | ||
You mean as in when you say dipole, I'm a ham radio operator. | ||
I think of a dipole antenna. | ||
And I suppose it's somewhat similar, but you're saying this dipole is like a little tiny dipoles within a certain part of a molecule, like within a receptor, within a protein, in what's called a hydrophobic pocket. | ||
Little greasy, fatty areas within a more watery polar type of medium. | ||
It goes back to basically oil on water. | ||
You have oily material doesn't mix with water, and the oily material is made up of structures that have a lot of electron resonance. | ||
The electrons can move around over big areas, and those lead to quantum interactions because electrons are quantum particles. | ||
So it's probably best to think about the whole quantum world and how it's distinguished from our classical world. | ||
Yikes. | ||
All right. | ||
Well, I see why nobody seems to fully understand anesthesia and why it works. | ||
Because nobody understands consciousness. | ||
That's the basic. | ||
They're twin mysteries. | ||
Oh, that's a mystery, all right. | ||
So whatever it is, these little dipoles get next to areas of the brain and affect the brain. | ||
Is it kind of like I'll tell you what? | ||
We're at a break point here, Doctor. | ||
Hold on. | ||
I need to think this whole thing over to even be able to ask a proper question. | ||
Dr. Stuart Hammeroff is my guest. | ||
He's an anesthesiologist. | ||
We're talking about consciousness. | ||
And I need to formulate this question properly. | ||
From the Philippines, other side of the world, from most of you, I'm Art Bell. | ||
It is indeed. | ||
My guest is Dr. Stuart Hammeroff, and he's an anesthesiologist. | ||
Very, very interesting guest to have on the subject of consciousness. | ||
Now, he's telling us that the gases that an anesthesiologist uses are in some manner different than, for example, drugs, whatever drug it might be, that would normally bond with, I guess, your brain material. | ||
I'm going to stumble around here a little bit, but would bond, form a molecular bond, I guess, with your brain matter. | ||
These gases don't bond. | ||
They're like little dipoles with, I guess, a north and a south, and they have some sort of quantum effect on your brain in a way that other drugs do not. | ||
The whole thing is absolutely fascinating. | ||
Anyway, I'll try and ask a relevant question about this so I can get a deeper understanding of how anesthesia works. | ||
In a moment. | ||
All right, once again, I want to understand this, Doctor, as best I can. | ||
Now, things like other drugs, like, say, cocaine or Valium or narcotic-type drugs, they do form some sort of chemical bond with your brain. | ||
Is that correct? | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
Or release something that causes a reaction in the brain. | ||
I'm not quite sure, but do they, in fact, form a bond? | ||
Yes. | ||
Some drugs cause other things to be released, but many of them, or most of them, at least psychoactive drugs acting in the brain, act on receptors on the dendritic side of neurons. | ||
And these are receptors normally for neurotransmitters. | ||
So the drugs are either intensifying the activity of the neurotransmitter or blocking it in some cases, or in some cases having more complex activities. | ||
But other drugs act on other proteins. | ||
And receptors are proteins. | ||
The microtubules inside the neurons are proteins. | ||
Ion channels are proteins. | ||
The membranes are lipid with proteins embedded in them, like floating in them, but also connected down inside to the cytoskeletons, to the microtubules. | ||
But the point is that anesthetics and psychoactive drugs bind to proteins, and specifically in these pockets that have the quantum forces inside them. | ||
Maybe I got too complicated there. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
Well, some words I went sailing right past me, but again, the gases that you use form these little dipoles and act in some quantum manner on the brain material, and all of this causes you to lose consciousness in a way that nobody quite fully, completely understands. | ||
How were these gases that are used today discovered? | ||
Well, they started with, you know, kind of recreational use, ether frolics, and then laughing gas, and then it was found that having to pay if somebody breathed a lot of it, they became unconscious and were insensitive to pain. | ||
So in the 1840s about, actually in America, they began to experiment with nitrous oxide and then ether for surgical anesthesia. | ||
And it was first discovered by a dentist in Georgia, and then it was presented at the Mass General in Boston. | ||
And the first time it didn't work, and they thought it was a bunch of baloney. | ||
Then the guy got it right, and he came back, and it worked. | ||
And so anesthesia really began in America, but it was also used in England. | ||
Chloroform was used there about the same time. | ||
So they began as recreational things. | ||
They just were realized to have more useful applications. | ||
So recreational drug use really was the beginning of anesthesia. | ||
Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
Is that so? | ||
Just as a matter of, I don't know, interest, prior to that time, what was done? | ||
I mean, did somebody just take a big drink of whiskey and suffer through it? | ||
Fight the bullet. | ||
Well, I mean, alcohol, various drugs that we use, but not the inhalational gases. | ||
And so none of the other drugs are as selective. | ||
The cool thing about the anesthetic gases is that they affect pretty much only consciousness, and that's it. | ||
And the point we were raising before is that they act, the fact they act by these quantum forces suggests that consciousness in the brain is due to quantum activities, quantum processes, rather than neurochemical, which are essential and important, but kind of a system within the system accounting for consciousness. | ||
Oh, what a very, very good point. | ||
So the process that's going on in your brain that we call consciousness is in fact quantum. | ||
I believe it is. | ||
I believe it's actually a coupling of quantum forces to physical components of the brain, but that it is a fundamental quantum process. | ||
That's my take on it anyway. | ||
Oh, that's fascinating. | ||
Absolutely fascinating. | ||
All right. | ||
Computers. | ||
Now, computers are becoming faster. | ||
We're getting more storage. | ||
They're getting better and better and better. | ||
As of yet, I don't think that we have a conscious computer. | ||
Do you think, because they're beginning to toy with the concept of quantum computers, Doctor, is that, in your opinion, going to be the moment or somewhere down the line with quantum computers when a computer does attain something like consciousness? | ||
Well, I think if a computer could possibly be conscious someday, it would have to be a specific type of quantum computer, not a classical computer. | ||
But let me just talk about classical computers for a moment because many AI, artificial intelligence, computer scientists, technology people believe that computers will eventually, inevitably, attain the capacity and function of the human brain and will therefore become conscious. | ||
And that, you know, Moore's law that the computing power doubles per area every year and a half or so has held true. | ||
And they project that out and then make an estimate of the brain computational power based on neurons as the fundamental unit. | ||
And if you extrapolate those two lines, they meet, I don't know, 2030 or something like that. | ||
So that is the proposed point at which computers will become equivalent to the brain, if we're consciousness. | ||
And Ray Kurzweil calls this the singularity and has made kind of a big deal about it. | ||
I personally think it's a bunch of baloney. | ||
All right, so wait a minute. | ||
You're saying that based on Moore's Law, if it doesn't break down before 2030, and we continue to double between now and 2030, at 2030, there would be an equivalency between the human brain and even the computers we have today in 2030. | ||
Well, equivalence between the human brain and the computers we will have in 2030. | ||
Wow. | ||
But you do not think that's going to mean... | ||
It's little transistors on or off one or zero, and there's a gazillion of them, and that's, you know, and they all interact. | ||
So what's the fundamental unit in the brain? | ||
Well, the assumption for that calculation is that it's a neuron firing or not firing. | ||
And that is generally considered to be the fundamental unit of the brain. | ||
But as far as consciousness goes, that is not the fundamental unit. | ||
The fundamental unit is more subtle. | ||
It's on the other side of the neuron. | ||
I believe, and many people believe, in the dendrites, quantum processes in the dendrites in a kind of hidden layer in the neural networks of the brain. | ||
A dendrite. | ||
What is a dendrite? | ||
Well, a neuron is kind of a squid-shaped structure. | ||
You know, a squid has like one, when I think of it, on one end, it's got a bunch of tentacles That all gather into a central point, and then on the other end, one long thing sticking out. | ||
I don't know, maybe that's a good description or not, I'm not sure. | ||
But it's a cell that's asymmetrical. | ||
And on one end, it has a long axon that fires information from the center of the cell, the cell body, along the axon, a wave of electrical activity that goes out to the synapse. | ||
But on the other end, on the other side of the cell body, is a kind of a web-like, you know, almost if there were five of them, that'd be like a hand-shaped set of structures, each of which is a dendrite. | ||
They can have many, many more than five, but multiple that go out and they receive inputs from axons, for example. | ||
So that makes a network. | ||
The axon brings the information to a chemical synapse on a dendrite, and there are many dendrites, and they all integrate the input and then trigger a firing of an action potential. | ||
And that's the integrate and fire method mechanism that allows a linkage or comparison between computers, how computers are constructed, and how people think the brain works. | ||
And putting all of the weight on the firings, which are called spikes. | ||
And they're easy to measure with electrodes. | ||
So people get a lot of information and data and assume that that is equivalent to consciousness. | ||
But actually, the data from EEG shows that the activities that lead to consciousness are in the dendrites. | ||
They are in much more subtle processes occurring in the dendrites. | ||
Okay. | ||
Okay. | ||
Can you, for the sake of my sake as well as that of the audience, define what you mean by a quantum process? | ||
Well, that is the big question. | ||
The quantum world, let me back up. | ||
It seems as though the universe is described by two different sets of laws, two different realities. | ||
In our everyday world, you know, meters, centimeters, millimeters, even a lot smaller, it's the classical world. | ||
Things are predictable. | ||
Things are in one place at one time. | ||
They act like particles, objects. | ||
In the quantum world, things act more like waves, and particles can be smeared out and be in multiple places or states at the same time. | ||
And they can be connected over great distances by instantaneous communication. | ||
Let me stop you there. | ||
I've tried that line on a number of scientists. | ||
I keep saying there has to be a communication. | ||
In the world that we live in, there has to be a communication between these two, what's the right word, atoms, For example, if an atom does one thing and that atom is located here in Manila, the Philippines, and you have an atom that has been with this atom previously, and it's there, where are you located, by the way? | ||
Tucson, Arizona. | ||
Tucson, Arizona. | ||
You have the other one there. | ||
They're going to do the same thing at the same time, and therefore there has to be a communication between them. | ||
But some scientists have had on doctors say, no, not communication in the way that you think of it or understand it. | ||
Right. | ||
It's a bit of a finesse problem. | ||
It's not a classical signal, but there's some kind of there's definitely a correlation. | ||
And, you know, the problem is that signaling is prevented by Einstein's relativity because if it's instantaneous from Manila to Tucson, it means it's faster than the speed of light. | ||
And so Einstein didn't like that, which is why he developed that experiment you just described, the EPR experiment. | ||
Nobody can account for how these correlations occur, except that if you think of things in the quantum world, they're not really separated in the first place. | ||
They're really still separate, because you take time out of the picture and you take things in a completely different mode that nobody can very well even explain or understand. | ||
But quantum world, the rules are different. | ||
Things can be smeared out and be multiple places at the same time. | ||
So in the quantum world, the particle being measured in Manila and the particle declaring itself the Tucson are really in the same place. | ||
They're really the same particle still. | ||
As bizarre as that seems, that's what I mean. | ||
It is bizarre. | ||
And what it must mean, Doctor, is that obviously it's not subject to the same laws of physics that we all live within in this physical world that we understand so far. | ||
Obviously, these particles are not subject to those same laws, yes? | ||
Well, they're not subject to Newton's laws as much as they are quantum laws. | ||
The quantum laws allow them to be in multiple places at the same time. | ||
So it's usually divided in the classical world, the classical laws, Newton's laws of motion, Maxwell's equation of electromagnetism, the gas laws. | ||
And at the quantum world, you have quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's equation and the indeterminacy principle, which says that something you can't know both its location and its momentum at the same time, which means it's kind of smeared out in space. | ||
Things become wave-like in the quantum world. | ||
So if Einstein were still with us today, Doctor, would he say this is all hogwash? | ||
It seems to me you would almost have to say that, or dismiss it in some way, or else what he said about the speed of light all goes down the drain. | ||
Well, he was around to, well, I think he was around to see EPR validate. | ||
Well, I'm not sure, actually. | ||
That's a good question. | ||
But he would have liked the fact that the universe may not be random at its core. | ||
You know, he said God does not play dice with the universe because when you make a measurement on a quantum particle, whether it becomes spin up or spin down is generally considered to be like flipping a coin or rolling a dice, random. | ||
But Roger Penrose and others, for example, think that at the core of the quantum world is some kind of order, some kind of information, maybe even as Penrose says, some kind of platonic world with mathematical truth, aesthetic values, | ||
ethical values imprinted and embedded at the very fine level of detail of the universe, at the most basic level, that the universe is not random but ordered and containing information which is platonic information. | ||
Do we really have free will, Doctor, or do we just think and feel like we have free will? | ||
Well, that's another good question. | ||
You know, there's a couple aspects of that problem. | ||
One is if we act as we think we act, which is in real time in conscious control of our actions, whether we can make choices or everything's predetermined, that's one issue. | ||
But the critical issue in brain science now, I think, is that if you look at, if you perceive something and then react to it quickly, even rapid conversation or ping-pong or various athletic things, but normal everyday, even conversation, you think you're reacting consciously, but the conscious recognition of the words that the other person is saying doesn't occur until you've already verbally responded to that person. | ||
And yet you think you're responding consciously. | ||
And this occurs in vision, it occurs in all senses. | ||
And so the conventional view of neuroscience is that we act unconsciously, reflexively, and after the fact, we have the sensation of deciding and then imprint into memory this false, this illusion that we were in conscious control, and in fact we weren't. | ||
And this is the position that conventional neuroscience is put because of this, because the brain activity associated with conscious perception occurs too late. | ||
The only way out of this is, again, quantum mechanics, because quantum mechanics, you can have quantum information outside of time, like the EPR correlations, Manila or Tucson or whatever, outside of time, and in essence, going backward in classical time. | ||
And this would allow conscious control in the here and now. | ||
And so we can have something like free will, but only with a quantum mechanical explanation. | ||
But it doesn't really sound other than that possibility, and so you believe we have free will. | ||
Well, I believe that the brain is a quantum mechanism, so I believe we do. | ||
So we're not all marionettes just sort of acting out. | ||
No, that's, well, see, that is the, or as T. H. Huxley said, we're merely helpless spectators along for the ride. | ||
That's the view that conventional neuroscience, mainstream neuroscience is forced because of the measuring of this brain activity after we've already acted. | ||
But I don't think that, I think that's, I think that quantum unconscious information coming from the very near future, which is allowable in quantum mechanics and is compatible with a lot of experiments, allows us to actually, we're getting clues from the future to allow us to act in the here and now so that we actually, with quantum mechanisms, we can have real-time conscious control or something like free will. | ||
But I think only with quantum mechanisms, otherwise we are helpless spectators. | ||
Critics say the brain is too warm to be a quantum computer. | ||
Now, why do they say that, first of all? | ||
Well, there's a thing called decoherence. | ||
And it all goes back to the problem of when you have a quantum state, like you have a particle or a group of particles in multiple states or locations at the same time, which is what you need for a quantum computer, by the way, it needs to be isolated from the environment, including, it seems, heat, because heating it even slightly can disturb the quantum states and cause them to be lost, a process called decoherence. | ||
So people who are making quantum computers build them at extremely low, almost absolute zero temperature to avoid the vibrations. | ||
And they've come up with these equations that show as you get warm, the brain is too warm for this type of quantum process. | ||
But we think that the brain pumps the coherence like a laser and that by actually uses heat to generate the quantum coherence. | ||
And some recent experiments have suggested that biology is quite different and actually uses the natural resonances so that heat energy can actually promote quantum states rather than destroy it. | ||
All right. | ||
Well, that's a hot thought. | ||
All right, doctor, hold tight. | ||
We're at the top of the hour. | ||
Dr. Stuart Amaroff is my guest. | ||
I'm Art Bell. | ||
And from a somewhat devastated Manila in the Philippines, this is Coast to Coast AM rocking on in our fourth day without power. | ||
We've got a kind of a kludged together system here from kind of a partial generator operating in the building, and that's how we're able to do what we're doing right now. | ||
Dr. Stuart Hamroff is my guest, and he's an anesthesiologist and obviously a brilliant one. | ||
We're discussing consciousness, and we were talking about the brain being warm, and the doctor is saying traditional scientists would say, well, the brain cannot operate in a quantum fashion because it's simply too warm to do so. | ||
But he believes that the human brain has some special function that even when warm is able to operate in a quantum state. | ||
All absolutely fascinating stuff. | ||
And you've got to wonder if we're operating in a quantum state, if our brain is operating in a quantum state, then perhaps it accounts for, I don't know, those strange things that we see that seem to, I don't know, eclipse time and space and even the world between the living and dead at times. | ||
I wonder what the doctor would say about that. | ||
We'll be right back. | ||
Well, all right, Doctor, let us assume for a moment that you are correct. | ||
And even though our brains are too warm, according to the critics, to be functioning in a quantum manner, let's assume they are and doing very well at it indeed. | ||
And now I'm going to take you out on a limb here. | ||
Isn't it possible, then, that a lot of what scientists deny or simply don't understand about communications that people claim to get from the other side or from other, what's the right word here? | ||
What am I struggling for? | ||
From other entities, that some of these could be absolutely real from a quantum perspective. | ||
Well, you are putting me on the spot, Art. | ||
And before I answer that, let me just say I'm sorry to hear about the typhoon in Manila, and I hope that you and everyone there weather it as well as possible. | ||
And good luck with the next one that's coming. | ||
Thank you. | ||
But I'm not trying to evade the question. | ||
Yes, I think that quantum effects can account for many non-local effects, lumped together, paranormal, whatever you want to say. | ||
And I'd rather not address any in particular specifically, but just generally, yes. | ||
And we're getting some pretty good, you know, Rupert Sheldrick's new data in the sense of being stared at with TV monitors and all kinds of things are very interesting. | ||
And I think quantum mechanisms are the only possible explanation. | ||
I think that consciousness is kind of a process on the edge between the quantum world and the classical world. | ||
It's the quantum world becoming the classical world. | ||
And so the quantum stuff is normally on the unconscious side. | ||
But of course, we have direct access to it. | ||
So it's normally unconscious, but can be conscious. | ||
And yes, I think there can be non-local interactions due to quantum effects. | ||
All right. | ||
Well, you jumped off that one very well indeed. | ||
Are you aware of the work you have to be going on at Princeton? | ||
Yeah, the Pear Labs, Roger, Nelson, and those guys. | ||
And yeah, they've done great work for years, and the random number generator stuff with Dean Raden and Dick Bierman is very interesting and I think compelling. | ||
And I think Dean has now come out with a quantum entanglement explanation for his result in his latest book. | ||
He was at the last Tucson conference also. | ||
And so I think, yeah, that's – you know, those types of effects have to be quantum mechanical. | ||
And what do you think about the concept of individual consciousness versus collective – some sort of collective consciousness, which, of course, is what Princeton – | ||
Well, I think a lot of people are grappling with the concept that there's some kind of information, platonic information, using Roger Penrose's term and going back to Plato's idea of an absolute realm of pure truth and ideas and beauty and aesthetics and so forth. | ||
But that it's real. | ||
And that it's real in a sense that can be described through modern physics at the very fundamental level of the universe, what the universe is made of at the nitty-gritty level. | ||
String theory tries to approach it. | ||
Quantum loop, quantum gravity, quantum geometry, things of that nature, describe a pattern, a structure of the most basic level, which gives rise to everything. | ||
Because mass is, whether it's strings vibrating or curvature of space-time geometry or some types, some descriptions at that level, it's some kind of non-local medium at the basic level, which is called the Planck scale, the ultimately small level of reality where things have information and things are non-local, almost maybe holographic interconnected all over the place. | ||
Well, obviously, it eclipses time in some manner because, as you know, if you looked at some of the results they had at Princeton, oh, prior to 9-11, I forget whether it was a half an hour, hour and a half, whatever it was, there was a significant small but significant amount of time where the reaction to the 9-11 events began 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour prior to the actual event. | ||
Now, it's not just 9-11, it's many events where this occurred. | ||
So that would seem to put it outside the realm of time in some manner, quantum, I suppose. | ||
Yeah, there are a couple of ways to look at it, but from the classical world, which we basically think we live in, looking at it, it would seem effects were going backwards in time so that some type of correlation occurred from the future, from the near future. | ||
And probably the duration, how far back in time or how far into the future you can get information might, I don't know, might depend on the intensity of the event, 9-11 being the ultimately intense event caused backward time like a day, I thought Dean Raiden said in some cases. | ||
But normally I think we get information from like a fraction of a second, several hundred milliseconds in the future. | ||
But it could be longer. | ||
The thing about it is that time, you know, has no actual place in physics. | ||
I'm not a physicist, but as I understand it, we could do without the concept of time. | ||
At least the flow of time. | ||
I mean, does time really flow? | ||
In fact, an earlier viewer before I came on was talking about time speeding up, and I was thinking that we don't really know that time flows in and of itself. | ||
I mean, is it a dimension that we move in? | ||
If so, we should be able to go in both directions, forwards and backwards. | ||
Or is it a process that itself evolves? | ||
Or does time exist at all? | ||
And some people, Julian Barber, for example, says that the universe is a collage of instantaneous frames, instantaneous moments. | ||
And how they're connected is somewhat arbitrary. | ||
We think they move forward in a logical way through our memory. | ||
But that's a little extreme. | ||
What I think is that there are sequences moving forward in time that are consciousness, because when the quantum world collapses to reality, that's a frame of consciousness if it happens a certain way. | ||
And then you have another one, and another one, and another one. | ||
And these are like the specious moments that William James talked about, forming a stream of consciousness, a stream of frames moving forward that are each kind of a collapse from the quantum world to the classical world, creating reality within our heads. | ||
All right. | ||
Well, I forget who it was, but somebody described to me time this way. | ||
They said, well, prior to the Big Bang, for example, there was nothing, and therefore there could not be time. | ||
After the Big Bang, we then, as soon as we had two objects moving relative to each other, we could make an observation. | ||
We could say, all right, the moon or that planet over there or whatever is moving either toward us or away from us or in conjunction with us at the following speed. | ||
And so we now have a way to measure something. | ||
We now have time. | ||
Well, that sounds good. | ||
I don't know if that solves the basic problem of whether it's a process or a dimension or whether it exists at all, because it still remains a problem. | ||
St. Augustine said, I know what time is until someone asks me to explain it, and then I don't know what it is. | ||
And you can say the same thing about consciousness. | ||
But some people think that the flow of time is associated, that consciousness creates a flow of time. | ||
For example, if we have a certain number of, if consciousness is a sequence of frames, kind of like a movie is a sequence of frames, the audience perceives it as a continuum. | ||
We have a sequence of frames occurring in our head. | ||
The frames are in our head, and we experience each one, but it seems continuous because there's nothing in between. | ||
We're unconscious in between, like maybe in the quantum world. | ||
So roughly 40 times a second, we have these frames. | ||
But that rate can change. | ||
For example, people in car accidents say, oh, the car was spinning in the world. | ||
Everything slowed down. | ||
Everything was in slow motion. | ||
That's right. | ||
And Michael Jordan, they asked him, well, how can he be such a great player? | ||
And he said, well, when I'm playing well, it's like the other team, the defense, is in slow motion. | ||
And I can make more moves than they can. | ||
So maybe Michael Jordan is having, instead of 40 frames per second, he's having 60 frames per second. | ||
So it's going to appear to him that the other team is in relative slow motion because his conscious time is faster than theirs, and he'll be able to pull more moves than they can. | ||
That's a good explanation. | ||
Can there be a scientific way to account for spirituality or religious belief? | ||
I think it's the same thing that you asked before about the different types of communication, because I think if there is at the fundamental level of the universe a vast storehouse, | ||
I don't know what to call it, of platonic information, of wisdom and truth and aesthetic values that connect everything to everything else and can guide our actions and our conscious processes, then that approach is something that could be related to spirituality. | ||
At least pull another layer of the onion off of what's underlying it. | ||
Because I think there must be some scientific explanation. | ||
All right. | ||
Let's jump to near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences. | ||
I had one of those, and it was quite remarkable, but near-death as well. | ||
All in the same ballpark, or not? | ||
Is there some sort of separation here, or just all the sort of same quantum function? | ||
Several years ago, the BBC did a show about near-death and out-of-body experiences. | ||
It's called The Day I Died. | ||
Did you happen to see that? | ||
I did not. | ||
And anyway, they interviewed me because the guys who did the study in Europe, and they asked them how they could explain out-of-body experiences, they said, we don't know, ask Penrose or Hammeroff. | ||
Roger Penrose is the eminent physicist in England with whom I collaborate. | ||
And anyway, they asked me, and what I said, and what I say in the show, is that normally consciousness is occurring in this fundamental level of space-time geometry within the proteins and structures in the brain that account for consciousness, which couples our consciousness to this fundamental level. | ||
And the biochemistry of the brain provide the pump the coherence to create this quantum state coupling between the brain and this fundamental level. | ||
And then when the brain stops working, when the heart stops and there's no perfusion, the coherence is lost. | ||
But the quantum information is occurring at this fundamental level. | ||
So it isn't destroyed. | ||
It just kind of dissipates to the universe at large, maybe, but stays entangled so that the person's entity or soul or whatever you want, consciousness, remains coherent. | ||
And when the brain is revived, it can kind of rejoin the body. | ||
And if it isn't revived, then it just maybe mingles at that level at large. | ||
Well, that's a whole nother question. | ||
But with regard to, for example, out of experiences are difficult, but with near-death experiences, there is a certain amount of perhaps even real evidence that people are able to relate things that were going on that is just impossible for them to have known. | ||
Now, have you read enough evidence for you to believe that these NDEs, particularly the ones where they see the resuscitation efforts, they're able to relate what was said, they're able to relate what was going on in the room, that sort of thing? | ||
Well, I've seen a lot of it, and I've read some reports. | ||
I'm fairly convinced. | ||
I'm not 100% convinced because in all cases, the case that Spetzler described with the woman in Atlanta was very compelling. | ||
And I've also debated this issue with some very harsh skeptical people in the consciousness studies who claim almost all of this stuff is rubbish. | ||
Susan Blackmore, the professional skeptic from England, for example, and she'll point to this. | ||
So I'm used to debating this, but it seems pretty compelling overall. | ||
You were in the film with Blip? | ||
Yeah. | ||
What exactly did you do in it? | ||
They interviewed me for six hours in the desert with beautiful cactus, and then from that took excerpts. | ||
I'm in the film maybe a total of five minutes here and there. | ||
And at the end of the credits, I shoot a basketball, hit a jumper from the top of the key because we were filming up by a playground. | ||
And that's my claim to fame. | ||
I see. | ||
I imagine you've had a lot of feedback just as a result of that appearance, right? | ||
Yes. | ||
It was fun being in a movie. | ||
I really had no idea what it was going to... | ||
And anyway, it all came together, and it wasn't quite what I expected. | ||
It never is. | ||
No. | ||
It never is. | ||
But it planted the seed of quantum physics and consciousness, which is a great thing. | ||
So it was fun being in it. | ||
It was fun being in the follow-up rabbit hole version. | ||
And it kind of got me the movie bug because I became involved in making a film about consciousness specifically, which is something I'm heavily involved in at the moment. | ||
Doctor, I did something a number of years ago, which I'm sure you've probably heard about. | ||
I sort of got onto this whole field of mass consciousness, and I, in the early days, just sort of started fooling around. | ||
I realized that I have access to millions of people at any given moment, as we do right now. | ||
And I asked millions of people to concentrate on changing the weather. | ||
Now, I did this in locations where there had not been rain in a very, very long time in Texas and western Canada and other areas that were just absolutely starved for rain. | ||
There was no rain in the forecast, no possibility of rain in the forecast. | ||
Hadn't been rain in a long time. | ||
I got millions of people together, had them concentrate for long periods of time, from a radio point of view, four, five, six minutes, on nothing but creating, you know, thinking in their minds, picturing moisture gathering, clouds forming, and rain falling. | ||
And by God, within an hour or two, in areas where it simply could not have happened, time after time after time, doctor, we created rain. | ||
Or I guess I ought to say, rain occurred where it should not have. | ||
In one instance, there was so damn much rain that it flooded. | ||
Now, these experiments I did about, I don't know, not 10, 10 or 11 of them, I guess, total. | ||
And finally, they all worked. | ||
And they worked so well that it scared the hell out of me. | ||
And I realized I didn't have the first clue of what I was toying with. | ||
People began to urge me to try to turn hurricanes away from the coast and do all kinds of different things. | ||
And I quickly realized that I didn't know what I was doing and stopped the experiments and tried to urge anybody else with the inclination to do so to also not do it until we could possibly begin to understand what we were playing with. | ||
Does that seem like a wise course of action to you? | ||
To stop doing it? | ||
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
Well, I don't know. | ||
I think the world right now could use all the help it can get. | ||
There's a lot of things that, you know, assuming a lot of things. | ||
There is certainly that point of view. | ||
Let me tell you what I worried about. | ||
People wanted me to move toward diverting the course, for example, of a hurricane. | ||
And I thought, well, yeah, maybe we could give that a shot. | ||
But what if, since we don't really know what we're doing, what if we do divert a hurricane, for example, away from the coast, give it two more days in the ocean, and then the effect of what we're doing wears off. | ||
And during those two days, it goes from a heavy tropical storm to a category four or five hurricane, then hits land. | ||
In other words, I didn't really know totally what I was doing, and I saw many possibilities for error with catastrophic results. | ||
That's why I stopped, Doctor. | ||
First, do no harm. | ||
That's the first rule of medicine. | ||
That's right. | ||
Do no harm. | ||
And I was afraid that without understanding the force which I was willy-nilly directing, I might indeed do harm. | ||
So that's why I stopped. | ||
But you're right about the condition of the world right now. | ||
It's less than ideal, isn't it? | ||
All right. | ||
Doctor, I'm sorry. | ||
We're right up against it. | ||
We'll be right back. | ||
Stay right where you are. | ||
This is coast-to-coast, A.M. I'm not saying that there would not be an instance in which I would throw caution to the wind and go ahead and use what I believe to be a very powerful force, ultimately, perhaps greater than atomic energy. | ||
I have no idea. | ||
That's for some future generation probably to discover. | ||
But, you know, if there was a big five-mile rock headed toward Earth, or the condition of the environment had deteriorated to the point where people's lives were threatened, albeit we're getting somewhat close to that right now, then I might throw all caution to the wind and go ahead and do it. | ||
But short of something very immediate like that, I don't think so. | ||
We'll get back to Dr. Hemeroff in a moment. | ||
Once again, Dr. Stuart Hammeroff, he's an anesthesiologist talking to us about consciousness. | ||
An incredible interview, actually. | ||
Doctor, welcome back. | ||
Well, thank you, Eric. | ||
Anyway, that's sort of my take on it. | ||
I watched this really, really happen. | ||
And when you, nine or ten or eleven times, have seen this actually occur, it's kind of frightening. | ||
I mean, it's fascinating on the one hand, but it's a little frightening on the other hand because you really can't know the ultimate outcome of some of what you might do. | ||
But it indicated to me that many minds, and this is where the question is going, many minds concentrating on one outcome can be more powerful than a single mind concentrating its intent on an outcome. | ||
What do you think? | ||
Possibly, if they were entangled together, then it would be more powerful. | ||
I have to say that it seems more likely to be able to have an influence on another quantum process, for example, consciousness. | ||
I'm impressed by what you say about the weather patterns. | ||
As I said, I just kind of look at all kinds of things as possibilities without dwelling on any one in particular, because I think overall it's pretty overwhelming for some type of non-local interaction. | ||
But if you could do, well, as you say, you don't know what's going to happen, whether it's going to go to the Gulf and pick up more water and become even worse. | ||
Unintended consequences, as we're seeing in the world, political. | ||
So, yeah, you have to be careful of that. | ||
But, you know, I think affecting something like consciousness, just people meditating for peace or whatever, is definitely a good thing. | ||
It certainly can't harm. | ||
I don't think you have unintended consequences there. | ||
I would hope not, anyway. | ||
I would hope not, too. | ||
And, you know, praying for peace, that's kind of where I drew the line. | ||
I mean, prayer is fine. | ||
Normally, if people are praying for something, it's not a negative outcome of some sort. | ||
It's hopefully for health or whatever, some kind of good outcome. | ||
And I suppose that's generally okay. | ||
But getting millions and millions of people together and having them actually concentrate on a particular outcome, I don't know. | ||
I need to understand, we all need to understand more about what we're doing in this area, I think, before playing too much with it. | ||
And, you know, the people I've interviewed on this subject who were involved in the Princeton project tend to agree with that. | ||
In fact, they were very concerned, Doctor, that even my being aware early on of what was going on at Princeton would affect their monitoring various outcomes. | ||
Just the fact that a lot of people knew about it and were thinking about it might affect the outcome. | ||
So they sort of concurred with me. | ||
Okay. | ||
Well, I think that's the safest bet. | ||
Very interesting stuff. | ||
Now, what do you think about an afterlife? | ||
If I heard you correctly earlier, you sort of seem to suggest that everything might be scattered from here to Timbuktu, still together in some quantum manner. | ||
But when you physically die, do you think there's any chance at all that what we understand to be consciousness continues in any recognizable form at all? | ||
Consciousness, including unconsciousness, as quantum information, as I said before, could be viewed as existing in this fundamental level of the universe in whatever it's made of. | ||
People call it spin, let's just say spin, as patterns of spin, which are non-local in holographic. | ||
So it's scattered from here to Timbuktu, but in a holographic-type periodic array, it's just information embedded in a different way than we normally, you know, more like a hologram than what we use in computers. | ||
So, yeah, it's possible, I think. | ||
So in other words, you're saying, yeah, it may be scattered from here to Timbuktu, but with the quantum world, it's possible that there's still enough or plenty of connection, no matter where everything is scattered to, so that there there could be some sort of consciousness. | ||
Yes, or unconscious. | ||
Unconscious, meaning more in the subconscious realm. | ||
More in the dream world. | ||
It'd be like more of a dream world than our classical world, because that's what the existence would be like. | ||
But it would be real, I think. | ||
It's possible anyway. | ||
And even under that paradigm, even reincarnation is possible. | ||
That's really interesting. | ||
It would be real. | ||
So that takes us to a definition of what is real. | ||
So a dream, even though it's a dream, is real. | ||
Well, we certainly have an awareness during our dreams. | ||
And we can argue about Freud or whatever drives our dreams or Jung or whatever. | ||
But the point is that even as bizarre as they are, in fact, the bizarreness seems to suggest that dreams use quantum logic. | ||
There was a South American psychologist, Mate Blanco, who studied dreams for 30 years and came up with this logic structure, which is different from our everyday logic. | ||
He gave various examples that things can be all in multiple places or states at the same time. | ||
Time more or less disappears. | ||
So the point is that some people think that dreams, the bizarreness of dreams, are the bizarres of the quantum world. | ||
And that dreams are quantum information. | ||
And if they collapsed and became classical, that would be consciousness. | ||
But they stay in the unconscious. | ||
So that kind of unconscious consciousness, dreaming type consciousness, I think could exist in some sense even after life. | ||
In principle, it's possible. | ||
Yeah, and you even feel reincarnation is a possibility. | ||
I've always kind of complained about reincarnation in the sense that I guess a classical view of reincarnation is that you keep coming back until you get it right, sort of a move toward perfection, kind of a classroom type deal, and you keep coming back until you get it right. | ||
But I've always complained that, well, how do you get it right if you can't remember the past wrongs, but perhaps subconsciously or through the process of a quantum connection, you at some level do remember these things you had wrong? | ||
Yeah, that's possible. | ||
Plus the whole sense of time breaks down. | ||
But I don't know that, I mean, you could have reincarnation without necessarily trying to achieve perfection or nirvana. | ||
I mean, maybe just that's just the way things are. | ||
We just keep coming back. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah, maybe it's just, in principle, it's possible. | |
That's really the point I want to make, I think. | ||
Okay. | ||
You have a Center for Consciousness Studies there at the University of Arizona, is that correct? | ||
Yes. | ||
We started that in 97 or so with a grant from the Fetzer Institute to start a Center for Consciousness Studies. | ||
We had started in 1994 with really the first international and interdisciplinary conference called Toward a Science of Consciousness, where we attempted to bring philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, | ||
physicists, biologists, meditators, gurus, artists, whoever really had a take on the multifaceted problem of consciousness, which is kind of like the blind man and the elephant feeling it by hand. | ||
It depends on your perspective. | ||
So the only way to solve the problem, I think, is to bring all these people together, which is what we try to do. | ||
And it's been fairly successful. | ||
And we've held these conferences every two years since 94. | ||
The last one was this past April. | ||
They're always April and the even years in Tucson. | ||
And it's helped to form a worldwide community in consciousness studies. | ||
Consciousness studies was kind of under a rock for most of the 20th century because of the behaviorists, you know, who thought it wasn't worthwhile studying something which couldn't be directly measured or observed. | ||
So they got into behavior, learning, memory, a lot of rats in mazes type experiments. | ||
And consciousness became almost a dirty word. | ||
It wasn't really until the 80s, late 80s, Roger Penrose and Francis Crick and some others eminent people brought it kind of back into respectability. | ||
And in the early 90s, we started this conference and later formed the Center for Consciousness Studies. | ||
Well, speaking of respectability, how has the rest of the scientific community, I mean, there's still an awful lot of resistance to all of this, isn't there? | ||
Yes, and I get slack. | ||
You know, Roger Penrose and I put out this theory of consciousness, the orchestrated objective reduction theory, it's called it. | ||
Basically, in a nutshell, we think there's a type of quantum computation going on inside these structures called microtubules in the dendrites. | ||
And people can look at my website if they want the details. | ||
But we began to attract flack immediately from conventional philosophers and computational neuroscientists and computer people who want the brain to be equivalent to a classical computer and didn't like the idea that there was a necessity for quantum computation, even though we point out that classical computing ideas cannot even begin to account for many of the issues about consciousness. | ||
So it's been quite a contentious and interesting, I guess, 12 years or so of this consciousness studies business. | ||
Well, I can understand why they would be upset. | ||
For example, the computer people here in the world obviously think that they are approaching real artificial intelligence, and if what you believe is true, they're not, and they're not going to get there until they get a quantum computer, yes? | ||
A particular type of quantum computer. | ||
It was actually Roger Penrose who began this kind of pushback against the AI juggernaut with his 1989 book called The Emperor's New Mind. | ||
Like The Emperor's New Clothes. | ||
He was pointing out that AI being the emperor really had nothing going. | ||
It was just all a bunch of hype. | ||
And we just need a bigger, faster, give us another $100 billion or 100 million, and we'll have it for you, that sort of thing. | ||
And he kind of called their bluff, and they weren't very happy about it. | ||
I imagine they're still not. | ||
They're still pissed. | ||
Oh, can I say that? | ||
Oh, yeah, you can say that. | ||
For sure, you can say that. | ||
I would imagine they are, because they think they're making progress in that direction. | ||
Oh, they are. | ||
They're making a lot of progress. | ||
The problem is that calling it consciousness and brain equivalence. | ||
Give me a test, Doctor. | ||
How would you know? | ||
Give me a test that you would lay down for them to. | ||
In other words, what would you have to see to say, okay, you've achieved AI? | ||
Well, it depends. | ||
If you mean consciousness, I mean, AI is many things. | ||
The only objection that I'm making is when they claim to be able to produce consciousness. | ||
Well, that's what we're talking about. | ||
That's what we're talking about. | ||
But a lot of times you see a lot of bait and switch things. | ||
You know, they talk about consciousness, and then they wind up talking about memory or attention or behavior. | ||
And these are all important things. | ||
These are what philosopher David Chalmers calls the easy problems. | ||
The hard problem is conscious awareness itself. | ||
But it's also, as you pointed out a moment ago, difficult, if not impossible, to prove that a system is conscious because consciousness is unobservable. | ||
We just depend on first-person report. | ||
I know I'm conscious. | ||
I assume you are, but you could be what philosophers call a zombie, a complex behaving entity that looks and acts like us, but has no inner life, has nothing going on inside. | ||
It's all just reflexive behaviors. | ||
There have been accusations like that. | ||
Listen, doctor, what kind of test would you apply if somebody represented to you that they had achieved artificial intelligence and you could sit in front of that computer and either question it or in some way question it. | ||
What kind of test would you apply to that machine to try and find out if they had actually achieved consciousness? | ||
Oh, boy, that's a very difficult question. | ||
And, you know, that applies to the AI people. | ||
It also applies to the people on my side of the fence who think that you need a certain type of quantum computer. | ||
If we did that, how would we know it's conscious? | ||
And I don't know of an answer to that right now because consciousness is completely subjective. | ||
There might be ways to tell through behaviors if they're non-computable, if they bring in something outside of an algorithm, because that's Roger's contention that characterizes conscious thought. | ||
But I don't know. | ||
There's been a lot of movies about that, of things becoming conscious and whatnot, and taking it. | ||
And it's just you can be, I don't have a good answer yet. | ||
Sorry about that. | ||
I define it as a particular type of quantum collapse, but how I would prove that that has consciousness, I don't know. | ||
A quantum, wait a minute, A quantum collapse? | ||
Right. | ||
You know, in the early days of quantum mechanics, they would have a system that would be in multiple places or states at the same time, right? | ||
And then, but it would stay that, and they knew this, it would stay that way until somebody looked at it. | ||
And as soon as somebody observed it or measured it, it would collapse the wave function, they call it, from being in, say, a spin up and a spin down in superposition. | ||
As soon as you opened it, opened the box and looked at it, it would instantaneously become either spin up or spin down with a 50-50 probability. | ||
And so they believe that consciousness caused collapse of the wave function. | ||
But we think it's the other way around. | ||
We think that a particular type of self-collapse of the wave function occurring in the brain is a conscious moment. | ||
And whenever this occurs, there is a moment of conscious awareness. | ||
That's the theory I developed with Roger Penrose because he came up with this idea of the self-collapse being something tied to this fundamental level of the universe at the Planck scale, where we think conscious experience and unconscious and conscious experience may emanate, may be embedded at that level. | ||
So we made this connection between the brain and that fundamental level. | ||
Is that theory gaining ground? | ||
You know, I think so. | ||
I get a lot more flack all the time, so I think I take that as a good sign. | ||
I think it's much better to be criticized than ignored. | ||
And there are articles attacking us all the time. | ||
And I think that's because AI really hasn't really got a real theory of consciousness. | ||
Neurocomputation, I think it'd be a more correct term for the general idea. | ||
I mean, their approach doesn't jive with the EEG data of what correlates with consciousness. | ||
It forces us to be illusions and helpless spectators because of the fact that consciousness occurs after we've acted. | ||
So without quantum mechanics, consciousness is in deep trouble. | ||
It's an illusion. | ||
It's an epiphenomena occurring after the fact. | ||
And this is what leading proponents, Daniel Dennett, Pat Churchland, Christoph Kolk believe because they won't consider the possibility of quantum mechanisms which could rescue consciousness from the sad state of affairs. | ||
Okay. | ||
Here's one that you can avoid if you want, but I'd love an answer to it. | ||
Is there any current religion on earth that you think is closer to the real thing than the others? | ||
Wow. | ||
I guess Buddhism because it's closest with quantum physics. | ||
And I've heard people use the term quantum Zen Buddhism. | ||
There have been a lot of books about it. | ||
And nobody's got it correct yet, I don't believe, but we're getting closer all the time. | ||
I mean, there are so many analogies and Similarities between Buddhism and quantum physics. | ||
In fact, the yin-yang symbol reminds me of the classical and the quantum worlds with some kind of surface or edge between the two. | ||
And then you have the universal mind, at least in some forms of Buddhism, you do. | ||
And also, and people talked about this at the Tucson conference. | ||
John Dunn from Emory Religion Professor talked about Tibetan monks who report a deep meditation of nothingness. | ||
They're just meditating on pure compassion. | ||
They report a frequency, a regularity, a periodicity occurring at this fundamental level. | ||
And they quantified it. | ||
At first, it was something like 129th snap of a finger, or something like that. | ||
But they actually figured it out the math, and it matches closely to the gamma synchrony frequency found in EEG correlating with consciousness. | ||
All right, I can't break it down that far, but listen, we've got a break coming up. | ||
So hold tight, Doctor. | ||
Dr. Stuart Hammeroff is my guest. | ||
I'm Mark Bell. | ||
This is Coast to Coast A.M. And listen, folks, when we come back, we're going to open the phone lines. | ||
I've had my shot with the doctor. | ||
Coming up, it's your turn. | ||
Indeed, here I am. | ||
My guest is Dr. Stuart Hammeroff. | ||
Brilliant interview. | ||
Indeed, he is a brilliant interview. | ||
How are you all doing? | ||
In a moment, we're going to turn to the phones and let you ask what I hope are relevant questions of the good doctor. | ||
Stay planted right where you are. | ||
Once again, Dr. Stuart Hemeroff, he's an anesthesiologist, and we've been talking about consciousness, and boy, we've been wide-ranging. | ||
So why not go here very quickly, and then we'll go to the phones. | ||
Doctor, string theorists talk a lot about vibrating strings, right? | ||
Right. | ||
Okay, well, vibrating strings would be creating some sort of frequency, it seems to me. | ||
We could equate a vibration to a frequency. | ||
That's what all a frequency is, is a vibration at a certain specific frequency. | ||
So I've had all these reports, these strange reports, over the last several years, and I've been getting more and more of these reports. | ||
People seeing odd objects, we call them shadow people, it doesn't matter, little things that sort of move in the peripheral vision that you see, and then occasionally even straight on. | ||
And I've had this theory that we've been in the computer age for a while now, and we all spend hours and hours staring at monitors every day. | ||
Well, monitors have a certain refresh rate, or, if you will, a certain frequency. | ||
And it seems to me that a lot of people have reported after spending hours and hours and hours staring at a computer of a greater frequency of seeing these odd things. | ||
And I wonder if it is not possible that as anesthesia affects the brain in some way that we don't fully understand, when we stare at a computer monitor with a certain refresh rate, our brain begins to get trained into seeing a different frequency, and therefore we are able to occasionally catch glimpses of things at a different frequency than we would normally be able to visually observe. | ||
Well, I'm not sure it's the frequency. | ||
What is the refresh frequency of a monitor? | ||
Oh, I don't know. | ||
It could be 70 hertz, 60, 70, 80. | ||
It can go on up. | ||
It depends on how you have it set. | ||
Well, that is the high gamma frequency range, so it's possible. | ||
But I think if I did that, there'd be more wide-ranging effects. | ||
I think we'd probably... | ||
We do a lot of filling in so that change blindness studies where they show images of you see an image and then you see a blank or black and then you see the image again and then it alternates and there's something missing and you don't notice it. | ||
And then once you see it, it's so obvious. | ||
And you don't notice it because your brain fills in what's missing. | ||
In fact, it turns out that much of our conscious experience is actually constructed by the brain. | ||
And it's kind of a weird thing that really our consciousness is actually occurring within our heads. | ||
It's a construction, as most people would say, it's a construction within our heads created by various inputs and so forth. | ||
But the fact is that it exists in our head. | ||
What we see as the outside world is really inside our skull, as Steve Leah puts it. | ||
Well, they're even doing that with television, Doctor. | ||
In other words, scan lines and so forth on television. | ||
They found a way to fill in and make things have more, let's see, have our brains interpret what we see as a higher resolution than it actually is by filling in. | ||
Well, it could be. | ||
I mean, as I said, generally we don't see as much as we think we see because we fill in what we don't see. | ||
I hear you. | ||
All right, let's go to the phone and see what we get. | ||
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Stuart Hameroff. | ||
unidentified
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Hi. | |
Hi, this is Jeff in Gross Point, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. | ||
Hi, Jeff. | ||
unidentified
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Yes, sir. | |
Have you ever done any experiments at all and done any surveys with people who have been put to sleep in surgery and they remember what's going on? | ||
Because I've had several surgeries as a child, and I'm almost 30 now. | ||
But here at our children's hospital, what we offer our patients is In case of a shame, if you don't want to give it a shot, they can breathe through this mask. | ||
And we have several different flavors: cherry, orange, bubblegum. | ||
I'm sure you're familiar with those. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But when I've had surgeries myself, dealing with personal experience, I have noticed, and a lot of people say that you can't remember this, I've noticed the room spinning, hearing ringing that sounds familiar, but you don't can't place where, and seeing the lights change colors. | ||
And I'm just wondering if you've done anything with people who've had surgery and if they can remember things. | ||
Because I can remember my very first operation when I was three years old because I've had several eye operations because I'm blind, but I have light perception. | ||
And I remember a lot from that first operation. | ||
How old are you now? | ||
unidentified
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I'm 29. | |
So 26 years ago, they were probably using halophane to breathe you down. | ||
You know, a lot of the sensations you have, like seeing things and kind of real vivid dreams, and maybe due to the induction drugs, now we use a drug called propofol, which has some very interesting effects before you go to sleep entirely. | ||
And so it might be something like that. | ||
I mean, it could be something at the beginning and at the end of the anesthetic while you were asleep in the middle. | ||
But you don't remember not being conscious. | ||
So all you remember is maybe going down and then coming back up, which is where the vivid stuff happens. | ||
unidentified
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Well, I can remember when you're breathing in, the flavor starts out, and then the flavor goes away, and it's a really weird smell. | |
Yeah. | ||
What is the actual flavor that they put in the mask? | ||
What's that? | ||
Oh, that's just food extract, whatever you want, just so it smells nice, and it kind of covers the smell of the anesthetic, which isn't horrible, but it's a little freaky to kids. | ||
And a lot of them are brave, and then a lot of them kind of freak out at the end. | ||
But it's a tricky business because you don't want to stick the kid. | ||
You've got to do something. | ||
And it's either a shot or breathe a mask, and that's basically the way we do kids. | ||
There was a very interesting emergency. | ||
And I recall the doctor putting the needle in and then just pressing it just a little bit. | ||
And I went, oh, my God. | ||
It was like I was in a whole different world, a whole different state. | ||
And I said, can you do that again? | ||
He said, sure. | ||
And that's when he depressed the needle now and boom. | ||
I was gone. | ||
But boy, that first little clearing of the needle or whatever he did, holy mackerel, I was really in some different world. | ||
Well, a lot of drugs have opposite effect to low doses. | ||
So if you get just a little bit of a drug like propofol or penathol, then you might have something like that. | ||
And then you get the full dose and you're gone. | ||
It sure was. | ||
All right. | ||
First time calling online, you're on the air with Dr. Stuart Hammeroff. | ||
unidentified
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Hi. | |
Yes, sir. | ||
unidentified
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I'm Tony calling from San Diego, California. | |
How are you, gentlemen, doing tonight? | ||
Good. | ||
Hi, Tony. | ||
How are you doing? | ||
Good, good. | ||
unidentified
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I was wondering, Doctor, do biological processes have an effect on the quantum level that creates consciousness, or is consciousness latent on the quantum level itself and simply expressed by the organism? | |
In other words, could consciousness be the egg that somehow creates the chicken? | ||
That was a great question. | ||
I think that consciousness, that the quantum level, if you go all the way down to the basement level of the universe, what the universe is really made of, which is some kind of quantum information in spin, whatever spin is. | ||
And string, by the way, let me digress for a moment. | ||
String theory is one way to approach it, but string theory doesn't bring along its own background. | ||
You need a background for the strings to vibrate in. | ||
And approaches like quantum spin loop gravity, Lise Molin's approach, Roger Penrose's approach, spin networks can describe this fundamental lever, like a lace work that gives rise to everything, including energy, matter, and, we think, conscious experience at this level. | ||
So that's underlying in a holographic, non-local sense, everywhere. | ||
And wherever you go, there it is. | ||
And then our consciousness, our brains kind of convert this into classical information. | ||
So it's that collapse, that reduction of quantum information to classical information like 40 times a second that we think is consciousness. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
So could that be the reason that there's a dichotomy in the structure of the universe? | ||
It's a dichotomy between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. | ||
Well, I don't know if that's the reason or which causes which, but I think it is actually the dualism, apparent dualism between quantum and classical is like the unconscious to the conscious, or the unconscious to the classical, with consciousness the actual boundary or transition process itself. | ||
But I do like that. | ||
I refer to that as the quantum unconscious. | ||
And it could be Jung's collective unconscious, could be some kind of Buddhist universal mind or Hindu ancient Indian concept or Native American concept. | ||
They all have some kind of web or the South American, the shamans have various descriptions of this, which all could map beautifully on quantum geometry. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah, fantastic show tonight, guys. | |
Thank you. | ||
All right. | ||
It certainly is. | ||
Thank you. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
I didn't mean to cut you off early. | ||
Thank you very much for the call. | ||
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Hammeroff. | ||
unidentified
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Hi. | |
Yes. | ||
Hi. | ||
I love your work. | ||
Thank you. | ||
I was wondering if you were aware of scienceofthesoul.org or dot com. | ||
Say again, please. | ||
unidentified
|
Scienceofthesoul.org or dot com? | |
No, I'm not. | ||
unidentified
|
Okay, well, the mystics there teach that consciousness is the soul and that our awareness of that consciousness is being mistaken as consciousness, but in reality, consciousness is the soul. | |
In fact, they claim that subhuman life is simply aware And that human beings have a distinct privilege of being aware that they're aware. | ||
And they claim that it also puts an end to the question of abortion on the left and right side, where both sides think the soul enters the body, when in reality, a human form simply has the privilege of being aware of the spiritual energy that is in it. | ||
So how do you feel about thinking of consciousness as spiritual energy itself? | ||
Well, I think the underlying quantum component of it is spiritual, or it can be under proper circumstances. | ||
So, yeah, I would more or less agree with that. | ||
Okay. | ||
Let's go out of the country to Niagara Falls, Canada. | ||
And John, you're on the air with Dr. Hammeroff. | ||
Hi. | ||
unidentified
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How are you guys doing? | |
Amazing show tonight. | ||
Thank you. | ||
Thank you. | ||
I was just wondering, I was thinking about a definition of consciousness about a few weeks ago and came up with an idea that it's an interaction between the mind and the spirit, sort of, as in both might not be conscious in themselves, but their interaction would make the conscious experience. | ||
Does that resonate with you guys? | ||
Well, I think you said consciousness, awareness, and spirit. | ||
And I think those are all words. | ||
I'd like a physical process that can be described through science. | ||
And so a particular wave collapse is that process, which I think is consciousness. | ||
If you want to call that the soul or the spirit, in a sense, I think it is, particularly on the unconscious side. | ||
unidentified
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I see. | |
Okay, and do you think there's in the interaction, like, is there something with the mind's ability to wrap around big ideas as then sum up something into like, let's say, a word? | ||
Is there something with that? | ||
Like, would it be even storing information in other worlds on a quantum scale or something like that? | ||
Well, creativity and like the aha moment. | ||
I think definitely, A, you can possibly tap into platonic information embedded in the quantum world for ideas. | ||
And if you're using quantum computation, it's a highly efficient process for search or for whatever else. | ||
So I think quantum processes can account for that most uniquely on the fact that you're accessing platonic information that might be embedded at the fundamental level. | ||
Doctor, we've had some truly brilliant people. | ||
There's no question about that in the world. | ||
But we don't seem to have more Einsteins. | ||
Where are the new Einsteins? | ||
Oh, that's a good question. | ||
I don't know. | ||
Maybe whoever figures out consciousness and life, you know, well, first of all, as far as Einstein, we have Roger Penrose, who I think is carrying on Einstein's work. | ||
In fact, in his discussions with Hawking, Penrose takes Einstein's side that he took against Niels Bohr and their famous debate on whether there is an absolute reality beyond quantum measurement. | ||
Bohr was very pragmatic and just took it that if you can make this measurement, you didn't really know what was really going on underneath all that. | ||
And Einstein wanted to know what was reality and how could it account for the quantum mechanisms that he observed. | ||
So he was into understanding a deeper reality as Penrose is in his quantum spin networks, quantum geometry, and so forth. | ||
Whereas Hawking is more like Bohr in being somewhat pragmatic. | ||
Doctor, I know that there's been quite a bit of work on Einstein's brain, or I think there was, and other super brilliant people that we've had. | ||
Was there ever anything in particular discovered physiologically about Einstein's brain that separates him from the rest of us? | ||
I don't believe so. | ||
And I don't think they probably could have seen it based on what they were looking for because I would think you'd have to look, in addition to the number of connections and so forth and the connectivity, also within the dendrites to the level inside the cell to see how complex and how connected and how functional are the microtubules, which is where we think the quantum computations are occurring. | ||
So you'd have to show some, I suspect you'd see something there, but that's my bias, of course. | ||
So I don't know if anything useful ever came out of. | ||
All right. | ||
Wongard Lein, you're on the air with Dr. Hameroff. | ||
Hi. | ||
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
Hey, Art. | ||
Great program. | ||
PBS recently had a documentary on Einstein, and one of the pieces was on Malika, which was his, I think her name was Malika, his first wife. | ||
And they showed diaries and paper documentation that her name was on the original draft of the, what was his first theory, Stuart? | ||
The special, the 1905. | ||
Special theory of relativity? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Well, yeah. | ||
But her name was on that. | ||
And in their diaries, it was her paper. | ||
Her name got taken off. | ||
So, you know, nothing is what it seems to be. | ||
She was a physicist in her own right, and she very much seemed to have come up with those theories with him. | ||
But what I want to bring in terms of the main discussion is art, you know, a book such as Creative Visualization gives you an approach, and there are many others, in terms of doing affirmations where you actually do it in such a way where you refer it to the divine source or good audit design or quantum leap, however you refer to, you know, what some might call God, and that's a way where you don't have the unintended consequences. | ||
So I hope that you might consider getting back to that. | ||
But Stuart, I want you to, I want to put on the table very briefly, and I'll listen over the air, I want to hear how you factor in deja boo, because that's such a bizarre feeling that you've lived through something and how that factors into time. | ||
I want to hear If you've done any work around our health status and our consciousness, and also the new methods such as microwave and radio frequency, the patterns of mind control and consciousness. | ||
And I appreciate your program, and I love you, Art, and I love you now, Stuart, and I'll listen over the air. | ||
Well, thank you. | ||
Wow. | ||
Two questions there. | ||
Yeah, I might say about Malik and Einstein. | ||
I don't know about that. | ||
I do know that a woman was instrumental in the DNA structure discovery with Watson and Crick, but didn't get credit. | ||
And unfortunately, I forget her name, Rosalind something. | ||
So, yeah, that kind of thing does happen. | ||
don't know about Einstein Malik I suspect anyway what was the other You suspect what? | ||
I don't know. | ||
I actually, I don't have any data on that. | ||
So let's just leave it at that. | ||
What about deja vu very quickly? | ||
Well, I think it's just kind of a different, you know, this non-locality of time because not only is space non-local, in other words, interconnected over distances and whatnot, but time is. | ||
So that, you know, moments in a linear time that we might expect or look to experience might actually be in some sense, in some way, instantaneous in one row. | ||
Right, right. | ||
Dr. You have to hold it right there. | ||
We'll be right back. | ||
This is coast to coast AM. | ||
Yes, indeed. | ||
Erin just told me that she heard on TV that that other typhoon that's out there right now has taken a northerly turn. | ||
And what can I say except go north, baby, go north. | ||
We don't want anything to do with you. | ||
Dr. Stuart Amaroff is my guest, and he'll be back in a moment. | ||
No doubt an absolutely classic coast-to-coast AM show on this subject of consciousness, perhaps the best we've done. | ||
All right, once again, Dr. Hammeroff. | ||
Doctor, just a quick question. | ||
You can avoid this one if you want, but a number of people have fast-blasted me. | ||
I've got a little computer in front of me, changing my refresh rate, I guess. | ||
And they're asking about hallucogens, whether hallucogens are the path to anything at all. | ||
Interesting question. | ||
You know, the gamma-EEG synchrony I mentioned earlier that correlates with consciousness. | ||
The highest gamma synchrony has been reported in, on the one hand, Tibetan monks meditating and two people taking ayahuasca in the jungle in Brazil, where they actually did these experiments. | ||
So it does correlate with the neural correlative consciousness, but what that means, you know, the connection is, well, here's what I think. | ||
There were studies back in the 70s that they looked at a series of hallucinogens with different potencies, and they measured how potent they were in a specific molecular assay that they could do, which involved transferring the electron energy from the hallucinogenic drug to the receptor, like a serotonin receptor or whatever it was. | ||
And this electron resonance energy donation was proportional to the potency of the hallucinogen, how psychedelic it was, suggesting that there's some kind of quantum electron energy transfer from the drug to the receptor and then to the whole quantum system in the brain. | ||
So I think what that does is push consciousness more into the quantum world. | ||
It's kind of like an iceberg. | ||
Consciousness in the classical world is just on top. | ||
There's this vast unconscious. | ||
And when you do things like that, you push the level down. | ||
So you become more of what's normally unconscious comes into consciousness. | ||
So it's like a highly driven dream state with a high degree of quantum superposition. | ||
It's more quantum than normal consciousness. | ||
In other words, yes. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Okay. | ||
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Stuart Hammeroth. | ||
Let me just add one thing, excuse me, but that's just the opposite of what anesthetic gases do. | ||
They stop the quantum processes. | ||
No, I've got it. | ||
Okay, go ahead, Colin. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, it's Robert from Sun Valley, California. | |
Hi, Doc. | ||
How are you doing? | ||
Good. | ||
How are you doing? | ||
unidentified
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Very good. | |
Very good. | ||
Thank you. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah, I spoke to Arnold a while back and introduced him to the idea of quicker than the speed of light. | |
I think you'll remember when I brought up the fact that there was an experiment done in the Soviet Union with an EEG connected up to a mother of a child and separated the child and the mother for thousands of miles away. | ||
And then they introduced pain into the child, and the mother read the pain through the EEG at a distance of thousands of miles away. | ||
And not only that, they said that they actually got a reading before it actually happened. | ||
Now they're saying that this is now a theory that they're proving that the psychic phenomenon is real and that the mother knew. | ||
And this happens with animals as well. | ||
They've done this with animals as well, where they separated the mother and then the small child. | ||
I think they used a rabbit. | ||
Yeah, but I believe there has to be, for this quantum thing to work, there has to be an original connection, an original closeness, and then the separation doesn't matter. | ||
They need to be entangled originally. | ||
And that happens in a biological system because in many ways, it could happen in two ways. | ||
Well, they can be together. | ||
That's one way. | ||
The other way is to be driven by a coherent system like a laser. | ||
In other words, if you had two particles that were never entangled together previously, were never physically together, and they were separated, but you drove both of them with a particular laser, you could entangle them that way. | ||
So you can drive the system with some coherent sorts, which we think happens in the brain and in these microtubules, for example. | ||
unidentified
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Again, from the psychic angle, is that since they're not physically connected, they're separated. | |
This runs into family. | ||
Like with my family, basically, when somebody is hurt or something else, they know it. | ||
A phone call will take place. | ||
And when I was a child, I used to scare my teachers really bad because I'd tell them things they're thinking and so on. | ||
But like I said, a mother and child situation that the mother on a, you know, the brain oscilloscope, the EEG, will actually read she's feeling the pain when the child is the one administering the pain. | ||
She's reading the pain. | ||
But between mother and child, there is that original connection that we just spoke of a moment ago, right, Doctor? | ||
Right, right. | ||
That entanglement is well in place. | ||
As far as the time thing, may I say, you know, the experiments done by Dick Bierman and Dean Raden on pre-sentiment, where they had people, they just measured an electrical change in their finger, just skin measure of emotional response. | ||
And they had them look at a series of images on a computer coming at random time. | ||
Some of them were conventional kind of scenes. | ||
Others were very arousing violent, sexual, or something highly emotional. | ||
And they got a greater response with those than with the benign scenes. | ||
But the interesting thing was it happened up to half a second to two seconds before the picture appeared. | ||
And they ruled out various types of possible leakage of information and so forth. | ||
Dick Bierman is a very careful experimentalist. | ||
So that's evidence of some kind of backward time effect. | ||
But see, it's at the unconscious level. | ||
The subjects aren't aware of it, but their unconscious emotional level is. | ||
So if you can have backward information, quantum information, without violating causality that way. | ||
You know, you have this problem of going backwards in time and killing your grandmother and never being born. | ||
Causal paradox. | ||
Well, the way around that is to have the unconscious quantum information do it because it hasn't been observed yet. | ||
So it's paradox-free. | ||
It's a little loophole in causal paradox. | ||
Okay. | ||
First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Amaroff. | ||
unidentified
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Hi. | |
Good morning, Art. | ||
Good morning, Dr. Stewart. | ||
Hey, how are you? | ||
Good morning. | ||
unidentified
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Art Bell, you're now officially, for me, always in tomorrow land. | |
Anyway, you've used the word awareness. | ||
I think that awareness precedes consciousness. | ||
And when, and the reason I, awareness is a thing that will bring cosmic dust together. | ||
Awareness is a thing that brings intelligence. | ||
And once the molecule, the atom, whatever, has awareness, it becomes aware of what I call CPR or chaos, probability, and randomness. | ||
And then beyond that, you get into FRT. | ||
I know what that sounds like, but that is fact, reality, and truth. | ||
And you've got, and I understand that, that reality is in between fact and truth. | ||
And it's fact and truth that create the reality. | ||
That's my understanding of the cosmos as I see it. | ||
And I just wonder, you know, I'm just trying to suggest that there's a possibility that consciousness is a derivative. | ||
It comes after awareness. | ||
I think somewhat of a semantic term, what you're calling awareness, I would call unconscious quantum information that is in touch with a deeper level. | ||
And on the surface of that is consciousness interfacing the quantum world with the classical world. | ||
Okay, not a lot of time. | ||
So Wild Guard line, you're on the air with Dr. Amaroff. | ||
unidentified
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Hi. | |
Good evening, Art and Dr. Amaroff. | ||
Hi. | ||
Top 10 show. | ||
Art. | ||
Please, a quick tribute to Roger Waters of Ping Floyd, who performed here last Wednesday night. | ||
Art, it was the most profound, shamanic experience I've ever had at a live gathering. | ||
Dr. Amaroff, quickly, does being conscious versus unconscious affect our DNA? | ||
And is the Big Bang a metaphor for the awakening of consciousness or, say, the arrival of quantum energy? | ||
Wow. | ||
Let me just take one of those points about the Big Bang because Roger Penrose has done a lot of work in this area. | ||
And he also came up with this idea of a threshold for this self-collapse that gives rise to consciousness that we think happens in the brain. | ||
Well, during the Big Bang, the initial phase of inflation where the universe expanded very rapidly, and then it reached the end of this inflation at, I think it was 10 to the minus 33 seconds, very quickly. | ||
And since that time, the universe has expanded only relatively slowly. | ||
So this inflationary period, nobody's quite sure why it happened and what caused it and so forth. | ||
But anyway, a physicist in Italy, Paolo Zizi, an astrophysicist at Padua, applied Penrose's theory of consciousness to the Big Bang and concluded that the end of inflation, prior to inflation, the universe was in multiple possible universes, and it reached this threshold and at that moment had this self-collapse, which was a cosmic moment of consciousness. | ||
And the particular universe was chosen from among many possible universes. | ||
And since this happens during the Big Bang, it's been called the Big Wow Theory. | ||
All right. | ||
Let's go west of the Rockies and say you're on the air with Dr. Hameroff. | ||
Hi. | ||
unidentified
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Good evening, gentlemen. | |
My name is Keith from Orange County. | ||
Hey, Keith. | ||
unidentified
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I have a question about the dreaming. | |
When you're dreaming, are you unconscious? | ||
And when you're dreaming and you realize that you're dreaming, is that consciousness while you're dreaming? | ||
That's a very interesting question. | ||
When you realize you're dreaming, is that a form of consciousness in the dream state? | ||
That's called lucid dreaming. | ||
Stephen LeBerge has done the most work on that, where you gain control But still manage to stay dreaming, and it becomes quite a whole art form, actually. | ||
He's written a lot about it. | ||
But I think dreaming itself is a form of consciousness. | ||
The question is: how does it differ? | ||
And looking at its logic and so forth. | ||
So I don't know if that answers your question. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah, it does. | |
Thank you. | ||
I've been able to do it since I was 15, and I just am so confused by it because I ask questions and I get certain answers when I realize that I'm dreaming. | ||
And that's why I was wondering, because you said, what was it that you have certain conscious knowledge while you're dreaming that you don't have while you're awake? | ||
Yeah, I think you're more directly in touch with, you could be more directly in touch with this underlying quantum information, whatever you want to call it, at the Planck scale, the Platonic realm will call it. | ||
So because it's more directly in control, so maybe we do get advice and whatnot if we allow ourselves to act in a non-rash, reflexive way, but a thoughtful way, to be more influenced by these platonic factors. | ||
Okay. | ||
East of the Rockies on the air with Dr. Stuart Hameroff. | ||
Hi. | ||
unidentified
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Hello, Art. | |
Hello, Doctor. | ||
How are you? | ||
Hi, good. | ||
How are you doing? | ||
unidentified
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Not too bad. | |
I told the screener that I had a story that I wanted to share with you, just to get to your opinion on it. | ||
When I was in the third grade, about eight years old, I went in for a consolectomy. | ||
While I was getting prepped for surgery, well, first they came in, they gave me anesthetic in my room, which knocked me out. | ||
The doctor had issues with a previous surgery, and I came out of that shot, so they decided to give me gas. | ||
While I'm in the operating room, they said count to 10. | ||
So I started counting, and when I got to three, I opened my eyes, and the next thing I know, I'm up on the ceiling, looking down at myself on the operating table and the doctor performing the surgery. | ||
When the surgery was done, I actually woke up in the hallway as they were taking me back to my room and started recounting to the nurses or to whoever was taking me back all the details of the surgery and then proceeded to do the exact same thing to my mother when she was in the room. | ||
She was asking me how I was, and I told her that I was fine and told her details, and then I went to sleep. | ||
Then I went back to sleep, and then I woke up several hours later. | ||
Now, from what I get from you, you say that the brain slows down, and you dream at the beginning, and you dream at the end. | ||
So I was just kind of wanting to know what your opinion of that story is. | ||
I wonder if they gave you ketamine, because sometimes you give a shot of ketamine if you don't have a good IV or the IV comes out or something like that, and that causes some, that's been reported to cause out-of-body experiences. | ||
So I'm giving the description of the case without knowing any more. | ||
You know, it's possible they gave you ketamine, and that's the kind of experience you had. | ||
Okay. | ||
All right. | ||
Is it your opinion, Doctor, that these I think I asked you really earlier in the show, but is there enough evidence, in your opinion, to justify saying, yes, indeed, these descriptions that are given are just simply utterly impossible, or is it still a big gray area? | ||
In regards to Richard. | ||
Coming back as he did, for example, and giving a description of what exactly. | ||
You know, as I said earlier, overall, there's so many things, and it's very compelling overall. | ||
I take the attitude of just looking at that rather than getting in any specifics, because I'm more interested in the theory that could account for all of these things. | ||
So Dick Bierman is a good friend of mine, and he does a lot of the experimental stuff and keeps track of that. | ||
He might be a good one to interview. | ||
If he's a friend of yours, perhaps you can put in a good word for it. | ||
Okay, well, he lives in the Netherlands. | ||
Actually, it might work out. | ||
It might be his daytime. | ||
Come to think of it. | ||
As it is mine. | ||
Okay. | ||
First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Hammeroff. | ||
unidentified
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Hi. | |
Hi, Art and Dr. Stewart. | ||
How are you doing? | ||
Good. | ||
How are you? | ||
unidentified
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Good. | |
This is Greg calling you from Cape Cod. | ||
And Art, you're right. | ||
This is the best show you've ever done on consciousness. | ||
I think so. | ||
unidentified
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I think so, too. | |
And I'm going to ask you the question where you did just before the last break where you referred to consciousness continuing on in the form of shadow people. | ||
And I wanted to ask you both if you're not. | ||
No, wait. | ||
That is not exactly at all what I said. | ||
I'm separating what people see in different vibrational states from necessarily a soul or what once was a human carrying on. | ||
I'm not saying that. | ||
unidentified
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Okay. | |
But go ahead. | ||
unidentified
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Okay, then I'll put it to you in that hypotheses that if it continues on and they indeed show up that way, I wanted to know if either one of you had happened to see what I consider proof on that show, Ghost Hunters on the Sci-Fi channel that has gotten two or three really good video clips of shadow people. | |
So they must be something. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I haven't seen it. | ||
Yeah, I haven't either. | ||
And I would like to see it. | ||
I would love to see some evidence of it. | ||
And I would be quite surprised. | ||
Although, I suppose video equipment is capable of capturing other frequencies as well. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I'll have to think about that one. | ||
Time for one more. | ||
I think. | ||
Well, Cardeline, you're on the air with Dr. Amroth. | ||
unidentified
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Hello, this is Chris from New Bedford. | |
Hey, Chris. | ||
unidentified
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A few years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing the Dalai Lama speak at a conference in Amsterdam. | |
And he studied quantum mechanics with a physicist, and he talked about that. | ||
And he said that there was no conflict at all between modern science and his Buddhist faith. | ||
And he said that. | ||
Okay, I tell you what, we're so short on time. | ||
Go ahead and comment on that because I think it's profound. | ||
Doctor? | ||
Yeah, he's had a lot of discussions with Anton Zeilinger, a great quantum physicist, experimentalist in Vienna now. | ||
And they've done a lot of dialogues. | ||
And as I said before, quantum physics is very compatible with a lot of the tenets of Buddhism, and they have a lot of common ground. | ||
Okay. | ||
Doctor, it has been such a pleasure to have you on the program. | ||
You do have a website, which is quantumconsciousness.org. | ||
Is that correct? | ||
Yes, that's right, Art. | ||
And thank you very much. | ||
I enjoyed being on. | ||
It has been superior. | ||
We'll do it again, Doctor, if given the chance. | ||
QuantumConsciousness.org. | ||
Doctor, good night. | ||
Good night, Art. | ||
Thanks. | ||
Okay, folks, that's it for this night, and what a night it has been. | ||
I'll be back, given electrical power continuing here in this part of the Philippines, tomorrow night, and we'll do it again. | ||
It has just been my pleasure, and I hope yours as well. | ||
Remember, you can reach me by email. | ||
I am Art Bell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L, at mindspring.com. | ||
That's probably the best place to go. | ||
It's a bigger mailbox. | ||
Art Bell, A-R-T-B-E-D-L, at mindspring.com. | ||
Day, night, whatever it is, wherever you are, have a good one. |