[Music] [Music] m [Music] I don't know, it's it's in this book you

actually talk about how near-death experiences show decreased brain activity.  Absolutely, near-death experiences don't in all of them depend

depends on how you classify, how you define the term near-death experiences, but uh in most of them, I would say you

have no blood flow, uh your metabolism is grinding to a halt. Can there be some minor brain activity deep in the brain?

Yes, but if there if there that were enough to explain lifetimes of intense experience, then why on Earth have we got

the brain we've got? We could do with the brain of an ant, right? If so little brain activity were enough to explain

everything. So skeptics have to decide: do we need a brain to be conscious or not? They can't have it both ways. If we do

need a brain to be conscious, you can't explain near-death experiences with some residual, unmeasurable amount of brain

activity left. Talk to me about evolution because right now we have a model of evolution, Darwin's model, which says that there are

random mutations and then there's natural selection for the ones that that seem to be dominating; that it's entirely a

mechanical process, and consciousness is therefore an emergent property that we can't, of course, explain

how it emerges, but it must emerge because there was a universe before we became conscious; that there is a

universe. So first of all, what's your take on evolution? Is evolution driven by consciousness? Are things like

genes, like everything else, just images of processes in consciousness? And uh, what is driving this complexity, this emergence? Yeah, this

uh, experience of the universe, even if everything is in consciousness, which is my position. I'm

Sure, it's your position as well. Everything are images of processes in consciousness, excitations of consciousness. Uh, then, of course,

evolution unfolds as a process in consciousness. It there's nothing else it can be; it has to be that it's the

evolution of dissociative processes in consciousness and how they arise and how they persist and reproduce. But even

then you're left with the question: Is it meaningless and mechanical, even though it is in consciousness? Because

consciousness can unfold in mechanical ways. The laws of physics are fairly, fairly mechanical, and they express conscious

archetypes. Or does it have a—is there a, an emotional charge driving evolution towards a goal, a purpose? Yeah.

I think that is the more, the more relevant question. My position is the following: I think there is sufficient

evidence, uh, to believe that species evolve from other species by the accrual of genetic mutations that favor survival.

Uh, that's literally evolution by natural selection. The problem is that many people today embed into that term something for which there is no

proof whatsoever, which is that the mutations underlying the process are random—in other words, patternless—that they don't obey any trend; they

don't have any sense of direction themselves; that all pattern is added by natural selection after the fact; that

the mutations are trendless. There is no proof for that. We cannot run a randomness test on the set of

mutations that have happened on Earth since 3.8 billion years ago. We don't have the data to run the random

randomness test. For a randomness test, even if you lose a little bit of the data, you may

lose the pattern. The pattern may have been there, but you can't see it because you lost data. Available on curiosity.

Stream premium factual shows at CuriosityStream.com

Bernardo Kastrup & Dr. Deepak Chopra: Waking Up To Our Immortal Being