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[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Imaginal Inspirations podcast with me, David Lorimer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When I talk to my guests about experiences, people and books that have shaped their lives and work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Imaginal sells play a key role in the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly, which is also the Greek symbol for the soul.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These cells are dormant in the caterpillar, but at a critical point of development, they create the new form and structure which becomes the butterfly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My guest today is my friend, Professor Harold Valach, who is a clinical psychologist, philosopher of science, and researcher at the interface between medicine, psychology and consciousness studies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He is a professorial research fellow with the next Society Institute of Kazimeras Simona Vichius, University in Vilnius, Lithuania.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He's the founding director of the Change Health Institute based in Basel, Switzerland, where he lives as a freelance scientist and author.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He's the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, 14 books, 100 book chapters, and is one of the 100,000 most highly cited scientists worldwide, I think about 31,000, number 31,000.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of scientists out there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And his recent work focuses on the broader spirituality and consciousness within science for our health system and our culture.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And he is also the author of the Galileo Report and the Galileo Commission report on transhumanism, which was published this year.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So Harold, welcome to Imaginal Inspirations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you very much David for having me here and for inviting me to that prestigious event.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well it's about time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I've had a lot of other people on my show and you will definitely do for an airing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So let's go straight into the first question which is about a shaping moment involving your choice of work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean there may be many shaping moments but how did you get on your track?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there were indeed many shaping moments, but maybe the most important shaping moment was when I was, after my studies, I tried to become, or wanted to become a psychotherapist, and I had a psychotherapy training with
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[SPEAKER_00]: a small group and psychotherapy school which is not very well known called psychosynthesis which is depth psychological movement that was instigated by the Italian psychiatrist Roberto Asajoli in the 20s and 30s of the last century.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When I was in that training
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had one of those very deep imaginative trips that we did there, so these were exercises we did two by two, and at one point I discovered that not going into science was actually due to the fear of being rejected.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when I discovered that, I started to think about that and thought maybe I should reconsider my idea of being a psychotherapist only.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that was probably the starting point when I reconsidered doing science going back to PhD which I had actually abandoned or the idea I had abandoned and went back to the school as it were.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I finished my psychotherapy training, but I also started my...
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[SPEAKER_00]: my PhD training or my PhD as it was at the time as a single research piece.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Will you have, I mean, you've got two PhDs, haven't you?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I haven't.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So your other one's in philosophy of science, is that right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's philosophy of science.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I always studied psychology and philosophy in parallel.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You could do that at the time and I was a student.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you had a special agreement and also a special...
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[SPEAKER_00]: Recommendation from your teachers which I had so I could do both things and I finished my psychology with a formal degree at the time But not my philosophy because then I went into that psychotherapy training and also into adult education work
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then I went back to university with my PhD in psychology.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I also started to finish my PhD in philosophy and that was the second work on that Kathuzian mystical writer from the Middle Ages, which I published in.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And remind me of who that was again?
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[SPEAKER_00]: his name is Hugh of Balma, Hugo de Balma in Latin, and I came across him because there was interested in the history of the spark of the soul, the idea of the spark of the soul or sinnederes is as it was called by the
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[SPEAKER_00]: by the German mystics of the Middle Ages and I wanted to know where does the idea come from blah, blah, blah, blah, and I came across the Hungarian writer, Andrew von Ivanka, who was a very famous platonic researcher, and he wrote at one point that he, of Bama, was the most important mediator of that idea and so I started to research him and then I just went along those lines because
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[SPEAKER_01]: fascinating.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then during this training period did you have any influential mentors or teachers that spring to mind?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well I had mentors and teachers before I went into the post-graduate research.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At the university I had a very very good philosophical mentor, Friedrich Uline who died last year.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was a very good philosopher and with him I had many many discussions when I was
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[SPEAKER_00]: eight together and he invited me to his home many times and we discussed a lot of philosophical issues and I had a very good psychological mentor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yohn Farm Baku was the head of the Institute of Psychology in Fryberg at the time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He also helped me always when I had problems.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I never worked formally for him except for one year when I was a student assistant in his group but otherwise he just helped me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I mean, do you remember any particular conversation with Friedrich?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I remember many conversations with him, yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But any particular insight, well, do you have an R-HAR moment, anything else?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I have many of them probably.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we had many of them, but maybe one of the important ones was when we discussed the idea of life needs, what a monarch is, and because it's a complicated concept, and I discussed with him many times about it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And at one point, he said to me,
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think that very few true thoughts, but the idea of a monad as a simple soul is one of them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Fascinating, really interesting.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Philosophically, that's very interesting, especially with the you know, the contest as it were with Newton and there are many people who say, well, I'm a live-nitsian rather than Newtonian.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds like you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're coming on now to books that are shaped your life and thinking and I'm sure there are many of those.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What strikes what would you like to share?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, depends on in which area we go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think philosophically speaking, or culturally speaking, what was most important for me was shock et cetera, actually.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The idea of different stages of consciousness through the cultures and the idea of an integrative type of consciousness that he saw looming at the horizon,
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[SPEAKER_00]: After the breakdown of what he called the mental type of consciousness in the Nazi and first world war chaos.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And this idea that there were different types of consciousness that also makes us understand how different cultures function, how different ethnic groups function.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that repeats itself in the ontogenesis, in the development of the individual.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I found that idea actually quite convincing because it also fit with my own experience, because in my own experience I had a few, I would say expansion or enlightenment experiences, whatever you want to call it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I felt when you try to integrate those, you have to go beyond the normal rational format that you learn in university and at that point Gapser came in to me very handy because it made me understand this text made me understand how that could happen and what it could mean.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So this is one very important.
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[SPEAKER_00]: inspiration, then live nets, whom I read, and started quite carefully, and Whitehead in the realm of philosophy was also very important figure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in psychology, I don't have many because I found psychology always a little bit flat to be honest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I studied philosophy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if anything of interest came up in psychology, it would be Jung and his roots, which I read later on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I would for people who don't know Jean Gemsett, the book we're referring to is the ever present origin Exactly, and just for reference It's one of the books I've already read about rather than read Which is really good It's a very good book
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, now you're not the first person to let Lawrence Freeman tell me I should read it when I saw him last and said he'd been reading it and he's another person I must invite on to the actual inspirations.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's those books and then can you think of a key moment of insight in your work in relation to the nature of consciousness?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, maybe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At one point, I always tried to understand how my opathy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was my entry point into academic work, because I did my PhD in an experimental homeopathic study.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then my post-op work was on a clinical trial in homeopathy, and I had many conflicting data and many conflicting insights, and I tried to make sense of them at some point.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I hit upon the idea that maybe a generalized form of quantum entanglement might be useful to understand all these phenomena.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when I hit upon that idea, I also saw that this would allow us to understand
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[SPEAKER_00]: the interaction of consciousness with material systems without having to go down that road of dualism in the sense that you have two substances which cannot interact, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that was one of the key insights I think because I thought along those lines we could develop a
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[SPEAKER_00]: a model where consciousness is actually indeed a reality in the world and can also interact with material systems, not causally, but in a correlational way via such a system like maybe a generalized correlational entanglement.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was one of the interesting insights I had, yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: which you also explain in the Galileo Report.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then how does your understanding of consciousness influence the way you live your life?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think it has always influenced my life from an early time on, but I always thought that consciousness, or what we would call the soul, is the most important aspect in our lives and also in my life, that has never changed, only I tried to figure out how we could integrate that into a scientific worldview and that has changed over period
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[SPEAKER_00]: of time as I develop those ideas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would say it's the other way around that my life has changed the way I thought about these things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, very good.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk a little bit about the transhumanism report and transhumanism, because this is, I think, so, topical, just for listeners who aren't familiar with our work in this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Harold is the author of the new Galilei report on transhumanism.
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[SPEAKER_01]: which you can find on the Galileo Commission site slash report under the other reports as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think we both agree, Harold, this question of transhumanism in relation to what it is to be a human being is incredibly important.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So give us your thoughts generally on
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, let's start the other way around, until very recently there was a consensus at least in general terms that the human being is something special, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Christian tradition and the philosophical tradition would have started with the idea that there is something as an independent entity that is a human being.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that it has a certain nobility, that it has a certain status, which is not derived from its material makeup, but from its conscious mental enjoyment, we would say, guys thick, you don't have a good translation for that in English, but from its spiritual mental aspect, let's say, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that goes back to what I said initially, the idea of a spark of a soul, something that is deep inside and is, as it were, the guarantor of its relationship with the divine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, this understanding has been vanishing, and I'm saying has been because that's a process that went on since the 19th century at least, maybe earlier on, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And now we live in a time where people think materialism is the only option for an intellectual.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You can only be a scientist and an intellectual if you believe in materialism.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That it's only our bodies, our physiological functioning, our algorithmic functioning, that makes up the human being.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And as a consequence of that, you also put on top of that the idea,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then now comes science and improves everything because science is improving everything Okay, it's improving the purchase it's improving the the way we move It's improving the way we eat it's improving everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not improving everything but people think it does okay?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and so in the same way the human being is going to be improved It's going to improve through a through implement through implants and the brain and in other faith
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[SPEAKER_00]: bring computer interfaces, other interfaces, and genetic engineering.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And because this is also a huge driver of economy, what I'm going to see looming at the horizon is this transhumanistic enterprise that is going to try to improve in inverted commas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: on what a human being is by doing exactly that, trying to create a superhuman or a transhuman.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I find that very frightening in the sense that it will give up everything that we used to call the core of a human being.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In short,
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I try to argue in that report.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I try to report some of the movements and also argue against it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe one important aspect which I should emphasize is the attempt to abolish death.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We can hear that all the time science will abolish deaths in a few years we will have understood aging and longevity and we will be able to abolish death and I find this is such a stupid idea.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even if we were able to, which I don't think we will ever be, it's a completely stupid idea because it will lead to gerontocracy and also to a fascist type of political system that we should try to prevent by all means.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I think it's, you've got a sort of continuity with the animal kingdom, coming in from Descartes, almost, and particularly with Darwin, and we've now got this idea that humans are really machines, or algorithms, or algorithms, or algorithms, and you'll be a bit, well, it's for me, it's a category error, you know, an organism, yeah, of course it's a category error,
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[SPEAKER_01]: But it's this, this self image, if you like, that or the image of the human being is an important component in this, because it's, you can see how it's logical, if you think that we've got silicon, silicon machines and carbon machines, you just merge the two for better functioning.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it, I think it also raises the whole question of the purpose of human life, because you know, you've got enhancement on the one hand.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then you've got really transcendence and, you know, mystical fulfillment and service and being of use to other people and living an ethical life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think Steiner was concerned that if this went so too far, then we'd lose our connection with a spiritual world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think he was right there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not a very knowledgeable about Steiner, but I know about that, and that one is certainly right here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and tell us also about your survey in Germany, or the country transhumanism, because I think that's of interest to people to know this is very live.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, when I studied the issue of transhumanism, at one point it came up to me when I thought, well, how relevant is that actually?
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[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds a little bit like the madness of a few Silicon Valley freaks who think about that, but is it relevant for people?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I thought.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I wanted to figure out how widespread are these thoughts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I developed a very short nine item questionnaire of typical stances that a transhumanist would subscribe to, for instance, the idea that digitalization will
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[SPEAKER_00]: improve our health and our lives or that in the future we will have interfaces between computers and brains implanted and one of the sentences or the statements was, a God is dead, we are now God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I created this short questionnaire and took some money and asked the company that has a big panel of respondents to organize me a quasi representative sample of German respondents and they did was about 1200 people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: who responded to that questionnaire plus 200, which I used for doing the psychometric assessment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then I was quite surprised to see that easy items such as digitalization will improve our future and our health in the future.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We're answered in the positive by nearly 48% of the respondents.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and the most difficult item that means the item which was answered by the fews people was God is dead, we ourselves are God, and that was answered in the positive by 20% of the people, and I was really surprised because
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[SPEAKER_00]: These were normal people, they had nothing to do with transhumanism, or with psychology, or with whatever.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There may be a little bit more technical problem because these panelists, they rely on computers and these are people who are often at the computer, but still.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is to me, the sign that transhumanist ideas,
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[SPEAKER_00]: have penetrated the general culture, at least in Germany, to quite some degree, and I think it's become a kind of implicit default position for many young people nowadays.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I think that's exactly right, and then how do you see, because this is a theme that interests me, but I think it also interests you, the relationship between transunism and
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they are very intensely interrelated, of course, because you need transhumanist ideas and transhumanist implements if you want to advance technology and in the other side, if you have that, you can then progress with technology, because then you can control bodies, you can control physiological functioning, and you can also
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[SPEAKER_00]: if it comes to the worst switch of people, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you have something that controls your physiology, you can use it beneficially by controlling the physiology and maybe improving on it, and you can also use it for switching physiology off or disturbing it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I think the common element also is control because you can control a machine, but you can't totally control a human being in quite the same way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can deeply influence a human being and we find this happening in the public domain all the time with sort of power of messaging and so on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So at any rate, I highly recommend Harold's report on transhumanism and we're just about to have
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[SPEAKER_01]: A printable version as well available at the moment it's only downloadable, but you can download it for free as I said from galalyocommission.org How does music and singing play a part in your life and?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Is it related to your interest in science and philosophy or is it in a separate area as it were?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I know I would say it's part of me because I've always made a lot of music in my life and There were years in my life when I did more music than anything else and I thought These were very important for me because it brings me out as Ian would say out of my Left brain mode into the right brain mode or a more mixed mode of things and therefore music was always very important
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I started singing in earnest when I lost my job, finally, in 2016, and I gave that to me as my 60th birthday present as it were.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I had great joy doing it because we had a lot of fun, we had some concerts, and I did a concert recently, which I enjoyed a lot.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So,
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a balance of kind because if you only do intellectual work and academic work, you get dull.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think any academician who does not have anything comparable, it doesn't have to be music, but anything comparable, will likely not be very effective.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, there's a proverb in English, said, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's it, really.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so what we'll do, we can link your recent concepts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I'll send you the link.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, too, which I very much enjoyed, instead, please.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Good, thank you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can listen to Harald singing, Shuman and other songs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So coming to sort of end of our conversation, Harold, do you have any Proverbs or quotes that you'd like to share with our listeners?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Proverbs or quotes?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm not living by Proverbs, I'm afraid.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think that's rather a good response.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Not living by Proverbs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then what advice would you give your younger self
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would give me the advice to the very same again but to it with more confidence and with less fear.
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[SPEAKER_01]: very interesting yes because I think that we have to have we have to develop a kind of inner resilience as we as we go along because when you're when you're going against the grain and any respect I mean researching homomorphism example then you have to have a sort of strong
25:44.431 --> 25:49.069
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very much, Harold, for joining me on the Maginal inspirations.
25:49.209 --> 25:50.635
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you very much for having me.
25:50.815 --> 25:51.538
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, David.
00:18.526 --> 00:22.492
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Imaginal Inspirations podcast with me, David Lorimer.
00:23.213 --> 00:28.442
[SPEAKER_01]: When I talk to my guests about experiences, people and books that have shaped their lives and work.
00:29.423 --> 00:36.935
[SPEAKER_01]: Imaginal sells play a key role in the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly, which is also the Greek symbol for the soul.
00:37.837 --> 00:46.170
[SPEAKER_01]: These cells are dormant in the caterpillar, but at a critical point of development, they create the new form and structure which becomes the butterfly.
00:53.795 --> 01:05.691
[SPEAKER_01]: My guest today is my friend, Professor Harold Valach, who is a clinical psychologist, philosopher of science, and researcher at the interface between medicine, psychology and consciousness studies.
01:06.652 --> 01:16.765
[SPEAKER_01]: He is a professorial research fellow with the next Society Institute of Kazimeras Simona Vichius, University in Vilnius, Lithuania.
01:16.745 --> 01:24.819
[SPEAKER_01]: He's the founding director of the Change Health Institute based in Basel, Switzerland, where he lives as a freelance scientist and author.
01:25.660 --> 01:38.943
[SPEAKER_01]: He's the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, 14 books, 100 book chapters, and is one of the 100,000 most highly cited scientists worldwide, I think about 31,000, number 31,000.
01:39.023 --> 01:41.487
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of scientists out there.
01:41.467 --> 01:48.215
[SPEAKER_01]: And his recent work focuses on the broader spirituality and consciousness within science for our health system and our culture.
01:49.016 --> 01:59.409
[SPEAKER_01]: And he is also the author of the Galileo Report and the Galileo Commission report on transhumanism, which was published this year.
01:59.449 --> 02:03.794
[SPEAKER_01]: So Harold, welcome to Imaginal Inspirations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you very much David for having me here and for inviting me to that prestigious event.
02:10.289 --> 02:11.351
[SPEAKER_01]: Well it's about time.
02:12.052 --> 02:17.723
[SPEAKER_01]: I've had a lot of other people on my show and you will definitely do for an airing.
02:17.803 --> 02:25.077
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's go straight into the first question which is about a shaping moment involving your choice of work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean there may be many shaping moments but how did you get on your track?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there were indeed many shaping moments, but maybe the most important shaping moment was when I was, after my studies, I tried to become, or wanted to become a psychotherapist, and I had a psychotherapy training with
02:45.237 --> 03:04.888
[SPEAKER_00]: a small group and psychotherapy school which is not very well known called psychosynthesis which is depth psychological movement that was instigated by the Italian psychiatrist Roberto Asajoli in the 20s and 30s of the last century.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When I was in that training
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had one of those very deep imaginative trips that we did there, so these were exercises we did two by two, and at one point I discovered that not going into science was actually due to the fear of being rejected.
03:26.851 --> 03:37.868
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I discovered that, I started to think about that and thought maybe I should reconsider my idea of being a psychotherapist only.
03:37.888 --> 03:50.889
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was probably the starting point when I reconsidered doing science going back to PhD which I had actually abandoned or the idea I had abandoned and went back to the school as it were.
03:50.949 --> 03:54.394
[SPEAKER_00]: And I finished my psychotherapy training, but I also started my...
03:54.374 --> 04:02.765
[SPEAKER_00]: my PhD training or my PhD as it was at the time as a single research piece.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Will you have, I mean, you've got two PhDs, haven't you?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I haven't.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So your other one's in philosophy of science, is that right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's philosophy of science.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I always studied psychology and philosophy in parallel.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You could do that at the time and I was a student.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you had a special agreement and also a special...
04:22.049 --> 04:37.206
[SPEAKER_00]: Recommendation from your teachers which I had so I could do both things and I finished my psychology with a formal degree at the time But not my philosophy because then I went into that psychotherapy training and also into adult education work
04:37.186 --> 04:41.972
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I went back to university with my PhD in psychology.
04:41.992 --> 04:54.687
[SPEAKER_00]: I also started to finish my PhD in philosophy and that was the second work on that Kathuzian mystical writer from the Middle Ages, which I published in.
04:55.408 --> 04:57.591
[SPEAKER_01]: And remind me of who that was again?
04:58.516 --> 05:14.550
[SPEAKER_00]: his name is Hugh of Balma, Hugo de Balma in Latin, and I came across him because there was interested in the history of the spark of the soul, the idea of the spark of the soul or sinnederes is as it was called by the
05:14.530 --> 05:42.900
[SPEAKER_00]: by the German mystics of the Middle Ages and I wanted to know where does the idea come from blah, blah, blah, blah, and I came across the Hungarian writer, Andrew von Ivanka, who was a very famous platonic researcher, and he wrote at one point that he, of Bama, was the most important mediator of that idea and so I started to research him and then I just went along those lines because
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[SPEAKER_01]: fascinating.
05:44.568 --> 05:51.476
[SPEAKER_01]: And then during this training period did you have any influential mentors or teachers that spring to mind?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well I had mentors and teachers before I went into the post-graduate research.
05:57.942 --> 06:04.329
[SPEAKER_00]: At the university I had a very very good philosophical mentor, Friedrich Uline who died last year.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was a very good philosopher and with him I had many many discussions when I was
06:12.277 --> 06:21.006
[SPEAKER_00]: eight together and he invited me to his home many times and we discussed a lot of philosophical issues and I had a very good psychological mentor.
06:21.507 --> 06:25.751
[SPEAKER_00]: Yohn Farm Baku was the head of the Institute of Psychology in Fryberg at the time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He also helped me always when I had problems.
06:29.455 --> 06:38.284
[SPEAKER_00]: I never worked formally for him except for one year when I was a student assistant in his group but otherwise he just helped me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I mean, do you remember any particular conversation with Friedrich?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I remember many conversations with him, yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But any particular insight, well, do you have an R-HAR moment, anything else?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I have many of them probably.
06:54.686 --> 07:07.910
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we had many of them, but maybe one of the important ones was when we discussed the idea of life needs, what a monarch is, and because it's a complicated concept, and I discussed with him many times about it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And at one point, he said to me,
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think that very few true thoughts, but the idea of a monad as a simple soul is one of them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Fascinating, really interesting.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Philosophically, that's very interesting, especially with the you know, the contest as it were with Newton and there are many people who say, well, I'm a live-nitsian rather than Newtonian.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds like you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're coming on now to books that are shaped your life and thinking and I'm sure there are many of those.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What strikes what would you like to share?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, depends on in which area we go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think philosophically speaking, or culturally speaking, what was most important for me was shock et cetera, actually.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The idea of different stages of consciousness through the cultures and the idea of an integrative type of consciousness that he saw looming at the horizon,
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[SPEAKER_00]: After the breakdown of what he called the mental type of consciousness in the Nazi and first world war chaos.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And this idea that there were different types of consciousness that also makes us understand how different cultures function, how different ethnic groups function.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that repeats itself in the ontogenesis, in the development of the individual.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I found that idea actually quite convincing because it also fit with my own experience, because in my own experience I had a few, I would say expansion or enlightenment experiences, whatever you want to call it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I felt when you try to integrate those, you have to go beyond the normal rational format that you learn in university and at that point Gapser came in to me very handy because it made me understand this text made me understand how that could happen and what it could mean.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So this is one very important.
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[SPEAKER_00]: inspiration, then live nets, whom I read, and started quite carefully, and Whitehead in the realm of philosophy was also very important figure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in psychology, I don't have many because I found psychology always a little bit flat to be honest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I studied philosophy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if anything of interest came up in psychology, it would be Jung and his roots, which I read later on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I would for people who don't know Jean Gemsett, the book we're referring to is the ever present origin Exactly, and just for reference It's one of the books I've already read about rather than read Which is really good It's a very good book
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, now you're not the first person to let Lawrence Freeman tell me I should read it when I saw him last and said he'd been reading it and he's another person I must invite on to the actual inspirations.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's those books and then can you think of a key moment of insight in your work in relation to the nature of consciousness?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, maybe.
10:28.350 --> 10:32.397
[SPEAKER_00]: At one point, I always tried to understand how my opathy.
10:32.417 --> 10:39.689
[SPEAKER_00]: That was my entry point into academic work, because I did my PhD in an experimental homeopathic study.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then my post-op work was on a clinical trial in homeopathy, and I had many conflicting data and many conflicting insights, and I tried to make sense of them at some point.
10:53.836 --> 11:03.551
[SPEAKER_00]: I hit upon the idea that maybe a generalized form of quantum entanglement might be useful to understand all these phenomena.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when I hit upon that idea, I also saw that this would allow us to understand
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[SPEAKER_00]: the interaction of consciousness with material systems without having to go down that road of dualism in the sense that you have two substances which cannot interact, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that was one of the key insights I think because I thought along those lines we could develop a
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[SPEAKER_00]: a model where consciousness is actually indeed a reality in the world and can also interact with material systems, not causally, but in a correlational way via such a system like maybe a generalized correlational entanglement.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was one of the interesting insights I had, yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: which you also explain in the Galileo Report.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then how does your understanding of consciousness influence the way you live your life?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think it has always influenced my life from an early time on, but I always thought that consciousness, or what we would call the soul, is the most important aspect in our lives and also in my life, that has never changed, only I tried to figure out how we could integrate that into a scientific worldview and that has changed over period
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[SPEAKER_00]: of time as I develop those ideas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would say it's the other way around that my life has changed the way I thought about these things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, very good.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk a little bit about the transhumanism report and transhumanism, because this is, I think, so, topical, just for listeners who aren't familiar with our work in this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Harold is the author of the new Galilei report on transhumanism.
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[SPEAKER_01]: which you can find on the Galileo Commission site slash report under the other reports as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think we both agree, Harold, this question of transhumanism in relation to what it is to be a human being is incredibly important.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So give us your thoughts generally on
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, let's start the other way around, until very recently there was a consensus at least in general terms that the human being is something special, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Christian tradition and the philosophical tradition would have started with the idea that there is something as an independent entity that is a human being.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that it has a certain nobility, that it has a certain status, which is not derived from its material makeup, but from its conscious mental enjoyment, we would say, guys thick, you don't have a good translation for that in English, but from its spiritual mental aspect, let's say, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that goes back to what I said initially, the idea of a spark of a soul, something that is deep inside and is, as it were, the guarantor of its relationship with the divine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, this understanding has been vanishing, and I'm saying has been because that's a process that went on since the 19th century at least, maybe earlier on, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And now we live in a time where people think materialism is the only option for an intellectual.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You can only be a scientist and an intellectual if you believe in materialism.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That it's only our bodies, our physiological functioning, our algorithmic functioning, that makes up the human being.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And as a consequence of that, you also put on top of that the idea,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then now comes science and improves everything because science is improving everything Okay, it's improving the purchase it's improving the the way we move It's improving the way we eat it's improving everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not improving everything but people think it does okay?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and so in the same way the human being is going to be improved It's going to improve through a through implement through implants and the brain and in other faith
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[SPEAKER_00]: bring computer interfaces, other interfaces, and genetic engineering.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And because this is also a huge driver of economy, what I'm going to see looming at the horizon is this transhumanistic enterprise that is going to try to improve in inverted commas.
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[SPEAKER_00]: on what a human being is by doing exactly that, trying to create a superhuman or a transhuman.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I find that very frightening in the sense that it will give up everything that we used to call the core of a human being.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In short,
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I try to argue in that report.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I try to report some of the movements and also argue against it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe one important aspect which I should emphasize is the attempt to abolish death.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We can hear that all the time science will abolish deaths in a few years we will have understood aging and longevity and we will be able to abolish death and I find this is such a stupid idea.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even if we were able to, which I don't think we will ever be, it's a completely stupid idea because it will lead to gerontocracy and also to a fascist type of political system that we should try to prevent by all means.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I think it's, you've got a sort of continuity with the animal kingdom, coming in from Descartes, almost, and particularly with Darwin, and we've now got this idea that humans are really machines, or algorithms, or algorithms, or algorithms, and you'll be a bit, well, it's for me, it's a category error, you know, an organism, yeah, of course it's a category error,
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[SPEAKER_01]: But it's this, this self image, if you like, that or the image of the human being is an important component in this, because it's, you can see how it's logical, if you think that we've got silicon, silicon machines and carbon machines, you just merge the two for better functioning.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it, I think it also raises the whole question of the purpose of human life, because you know, you've got enhancement on the one hand.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then you've got really transcendence and, you know, mystical fulfillment and service and being of use to other people and living an ethical life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think Steiner was concerned that if this went so too far, then we'd lose our connection with a spiritual world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think he was right there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not a very knowledgeable about Steiner, but I know about that, and that one is certainly right here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and tell us also about your survey in Germany, or the country transhumanism, because I think that's of interest to people to know this is very live.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, when I studied the issue of transhumanism, at one point it came up to me when I thought, well, how relevant is that actually?
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[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds a little bit like the madness of a few Silicon Valley freaks who think about that, but is it relevant for people?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I thought.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I wanted to figure out how widespread are these thoughts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I developed a very short nine item questionnaire of typical stances that a transhumanist would subscribe to, for instance, the idea that digitalization will
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[SPEAKER_00]: improve our health and our lives or that in the future we will have interfaces between computers and brains implanted and one of the sentences or the statements was, a God is dead, we are now God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I created this short questionnaire and took some money and asked the company that has a big panel of respondents to organize me a quasi representative sample of German respondents and they did was about 1200 people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: who responded to that questionnaire plus 200, which I used for doing the psychometric assessment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then I was quite surprised to see that easy items such as digitalization will improve our future and our health in the future.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We're answered in the positive by nearly 48% of the respondents.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and the most difficult item that means the item which was answered by the fews people was God is dead, we ourselves are God, and that was answered in the positive by 20% of the people, and I was really surprised because
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[SPEAKER_00]: These were normal people, they had nothing to do with transhumanism, or with psychology, or with whatever.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There may be a little bit more technical problem because these panelists, they rely on computers and these are people who are often at the computer, but still.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is to me, the sign that transhumanist ideas,
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[SPEAKER_00]: have penetrated the general culture, at least in Germany, to quite some degree, and I think it's become a kind of implicit default position for many young people nowadays.
21:19.278 --> 21:31.377
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I think that's exactly right, and then how do you see, because this is a theme that interests me, but I think it also interests you, the relationship between transunism and
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they are very intensely interrelated, of course, because you need transhumanist ideas and transhumanist implements if you want to advance technology and in the other side, if you have that, you can then progress with technology, because then you can control bodies, you can control physiological functioning, and you can also
21:56.602 --> 22:00.291
[SPEAKER_00]: if it comes to the worst switch of people, right?
22:00.411 --> 22:14.003
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have something that controls your physiology, you can use it beneficially by controlling the physiology and maybe improving on it, and you can also use it for switching physiology off or disturbing it.
22:14.692 --> 22:25.548
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I think the common element also is control because you can control a machine, but you can't totally control a human being in quite the same way.
22:25.568 --> 22:35.182
[SPEAKER_01]: You can deeply influence a human being and we find this happening in the public domain all the time with sort of power of messaging and so on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So at any rate, I highly recommend Harold's report on transhumanism and we're just about to have
22:44.122 --> 22:58.182
[SPEAKER_01]: A printable version as well available at the moment it's only downloadable, but you can download it for free as I said from galalyocommission.org How does music and singing play a part in your life and?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Is it related to your interest in science and philosophy or is it in a separate area as it were?
23:04.389 --> 23:28.050
[SPEAKER_00]: I know I would say it's part of me because I've always made a lot of music in my life and There were years in my life when I did more music than anything else and I thought These were very important for me because it brings me out as Ian would say out of my Left brain mode into the right brain mode or a more mixed mode of things and therefore music was always very important
23:28.030 --> 23:40.630
[SPEAKER_00]: And I started singing in earnest when I lost my job, finally, in 2016, and I gave that to me as my 60th birthday present as it were.
23:41.491 --> 23:49.944
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had great joy doing it because we had a lot of fun, we had some concerts, and I did a concert recently, which I enjoyed a lot.
23:49.964 --> 23:50.325
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
23:50.305 --> 23:59.959
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a balance of kind because if you only do intellectual work and academic work, you get dull.
24:00.720 --> 24:11.014
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think any academician who does not have anything comparable, it doesn't have to be music, but anything comparable, will likely not be very effective.
24:11.618 --> 24:17.629
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, there's a proverb in English, said, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
24:17.649 --> 24:20.093
[SPEAKER_01]: That's it, really.
24:22.037 --> 24:26.284
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what we'll do, we can link your recent concepts.
24:26.344 --> 24:28.068
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I'll send you the link.
24:28.088 --> 24:30.953
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, too, which I very much enjoyed, instead, please.
24:30.973 --> 24:31.554
[SPEAKER_00]: Good, thank you.
24:31.594 --> 24:35.601
[SPEAKER_01]: You can listen to Harald singing, Shuman and other songs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So coming to sort of end of our conversation, Harold, do you have any Proverbs or quotes that you'd like to share with our listeners?
24:46.474 --> 24:47.776
[SPEAKER_00]: Proverbs or quotes?
24:48.356 --> 24:49.097
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm not living by Proverbs, I'm afraid.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think that's rather a good response.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Not living by Proverbs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then what advice would you give your younger self
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would give me the advice to the very same again but to it with more confidence and with less fear.
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[SPEAKER_01]: very interesting yes because I think that we have to have we have to develop a kind of inner resilience as we as we go along because when you're when you're going against the grain and any respect I mean researching homomorphism example then you have to have a sort of strong
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very much, Harold, for joining me on the Maginal inspirations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you very much for having me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, David.
