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And welcome back to Coast to Coast georgin OORI with your doctor Jeffrey Done with us, President of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, an organization established back in nineteen ninety seven to continue the research of the effects of consciousness on physical systems carried out at Princeton University from seventy nine to two thousand and seven. His latest book is called Nexus. Jeff Dunn and on Coast to Coast first time guest, Jeff Welcome.
I am, thank you George. It's a pleasure to be here.
How did you get involved in consciousness studies?
Hereditarily? Actually, my mother was one of the main manager research manager of the Princedent Engineering and Omalis Research Laboratory, and so I kind of grew up in that environment and then over the years continued to grow an interest and an experience with it. Over the last echo or so, it became a more active researcher.
You got the bug and couldn't let it go right exactly. You tell us more about the Princeton Engineering and Anomalies Research or Laboratory or peer is that the one that so many people we've heard about have come from could be.
Yeah, this is a research effort that was started, as you mentioned, back in the end of the nineteen seventies, and what they set out to do is to take a different approach to understanding the effects of consciousness on
other things systems, especially physical systems. And what made it kind of unique was rather than trying to explore sort of gifted people doing amazing things, the research focused on regular people, everyday people who had come in and tried to have an influence on physical systems, whether were mechanical systems like balls dropping through a series of pins to influence them to go to the left of the right, or digital systems. Think of an electronic coin flipper that
was giving heads and tails? Could you make more heads and tails? And what was unique about the program was that they collected huge amounts of data to identify relatively
small effects, but effects that were statistically significant. And after the course of some thirty years, they collected such a huge body of data that it really became sort of this unquestionable body of evidence that there really was an effect here, not a huge effect, but a statistically significant effect that you would have to essentially run the universe over a few times if this is to happen by.
Chance, Jeff, are you concerned that artificial intelligence is going to do away with humanity like some others are?
A good question, you know, I don't think artificial intelligence
is going to replace human intelligence. But I worry, admittedly a little bit about the effect that artificial intelligence will have on us from a psychological and sociological perspective, because if you look at all cases in history where people have sort of stopped trying to use their minds to do things and relegated to two devices, those capabilities atrophy same way that for example, I used to be able to drive almost anywhere and know what direction was north,
and now I use a GPS, I can't do any of that. So I do worry a bit about AI having this impact on us, But I think there are aspects of humanity that AI cannot replace. The obvious one of being relationships. We are a creature that is, you know, sort of designed over the course of millennia through evolution to be social. Uh, And I don't think think AI or any kind of computer is really going to be able to fulfill that need at the end of the day.
We're talking with doctor Jeff Dunn. His book is called Nexus. We'll talk about that in a moment. What does consciousness mean to you?
Doc? Well, great question, you know that because that is a different Different people have different answers to that question. Consciousness when I talk about it, when I think about it, is sort of the ultimate expression of oneself. If you think about you know, the idea that you have thoughts, and you can be aware that you have thoughts. What is it that is being aware that you've got thoughts going on in your head? That level of self that is sort of above those sort of typical things that
you think of the things that you're doing. That's sort of the heart of what I consider to be consciousness, And that's what's that's ultimately what is the representation of self.
I don't think there's any way artificial intelligence can capture the consciousness of human mind, do you?
I don't, And in large part because people have done so many different studies and demonstrate in so many ways that the essence of what it is that we're doing as conscious beings is not a brain induced phenomenon. Whether you're talking about people sitting on an operating or part of me people watching themselves on an operating table because they've dissociated and observing things that happen while their brain
activity has stopped. We talk about just a huge array of different experiences that people have that suggests that what the brain is is more of a transducer or transmitter that connects something larger, consciousness into the physical representation. Right. And if that is the case, which, like I said, the evidence just is overwhelmingly that it is, then we're more than the physical matter. We go beyond that.
Well, I was going to say, can we really did determine whether consciousness is tied directly to the brain physical as you mentioned, or outside of the brain.
There are a lot of cases where there are things that are happening that simply can't be explained by placing consciousness in the brain. For example, if you think about people who receive information that is simply not available to them through the eyes and ears and so forth, there are channels that things are coming through, and like I said, experiences where people have sensory observations where the brain's malfunctioning suggests I think very very strongly that we are definitely
operating beyond the brain. The brain is certainly a piece of the overall puzzle, but it's not the central aspect of who what we are, and as such we've got to be beyond that.
It is dramatic, though, isn't it its abilities to do what it does the.
Brain you mean, yeah, well, you know, it's hard. It's hard to say if it's the brain that's doing it or sort of the consciousness that's doing it. And we are able to measure some aspect of that by looking at the brain. Uh, sort of like taking a picture of one side of something that's really amazing and not even appreciating necessarily that there's a lot more going on on the other side.
But of course there are times when the brain gets damaged or injured, it screws up the person.
Yeah, well, it's certainly you know, if you look at that antenna metaphor, right, it's that antenna gets damaged, it's not able to connect in the same way with whatever it was before, right, And so if even if that consciousness is out there, it's it's representation as it gets to the physical has been interfered with, its corrupted in some sense, and as a result, the physical manifestation of that, the way that we see somebody, the way that we're able to interact, and all the rest of that is
naturally going to be affected by that too. On the other hand, we're also very adaptable creatures. Lots of interesting examples of people who do have brain injuries and in time learn to sort of call it this reprogram themselves to work around the parts of the brain that aren't that have been damaged.
Jeff, what do you expect of the human brain in the next twenty thirty years?
What do you think, Well, you know, we're involved. There's no question that people are changing. It's certainly generation by generation. Is we experience different things in growing up right right right from day one. That changes how brain development's going to happen, and it changes, as I say, I think the brain is only one piece of the puzzle. Changes
how we as conscious beings evolved. So people who are growing up in a world where there is a lot of information and the challenge is to identify out of that, to sift through that to find the information that's relevant or hopefully accurate. That's a different growing up experience than somebody one hundred years ago, where the problem was just getting any information at all.
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