Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Part Two: Near Death Experiences, Telepathy & the Multiverse. An Astrophysicist Explains Infinite Versions of You May Exist | Dr. Charles Liu

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Dr. Charles Liu (astrophysics professor and host of The LIUniverse podcast) joins Mayim Bialik's Breakdown to reveal the physics of consciousness, time, & the multiverse!We explore the biggest scientific mysteries humanity is facing today:- How scientists are beginning to take disclosure into their own hands to gather evidence that could actually prove the existence of nonhuman intelligence- Why information about nonhuman intelligence is being released in such a confusing and dramatic way, and whether governments are intentionally communicating this way- Why there's still no scientific proof Earth has been visited by nonhuman intelligence, but why there's nothing irrational about thinking seriously about aliens- Could AI ever become conscious? What would scientists actually need to observe before saying it has consciousness?- What consciousness really is, the different levels of consciousness, whether consciousness creates us or we create consciousness, and why understanding how the brain processes information from our five senses may be the key to solving it- What death actually is, what collective consciousness could imply, and whether nonspeaking autistic individuals may be accessing reality in fundamentally different ways- Similarities between near death experiences and DMT, including the mystery of ego death- Whether there's something beyond memory that connects us to our past- Why time may not be as linear as we experience it, and how our brains shape our perception of time- The Many Worlds theory, why multiple universes may mathematically exist, the new scientific frameworks researchers are developing, how entropy could unlock these ideas, and what time travel between universes would actually require- Why scientists who are absolutely certain they're right may actually be hurting science itself- A scientific and philosophical approach to understanding people who claim they've been abducted by aliens- How we determine what truly has consciousness, and why that question affects how we should treat AI, animals, and potentially other forms of intelligence- Why humans experience romantic attraction and what may actually be happening beneath the surface when we feel drawn to another person- Physiology behind people who appear unusually sensitive to changes in entropy- Evidence, controversies, and scientific questions surrounding biofield therapy and whether intention could influence cancer cells- Why humans vary so dramatically in their physiology, and how that should change the way we approach trauma treatment- Why religion may have been a necessary social technology for human evolution- Why Godzilla reflects humanity's attempt to understand overwhelming forces like nuclear war and other events beyond our control- How much of reality is objectively shared, and how much is filtered through our own unique perceptionsIf you enjoy conversations that challenge your understanding of reality while staying grounded in science, philosophy, and evidence, this episode is for you!Dr. Charles Liu’s podcast, The LIUniverse: https://theliuniverse.podbean.comPre-Order Dr. Charles Liu's latest book, (Super) Natural Science: The Real Science of Superheroes, Mythic Creatures, and the (Sci-Fi) Universe: https://a.co/d/08pHA0SpOther recent books by Dr. Charles Liu:- The Cosmos Explained: A History of the Universe from its Beginning to Today and Beyond: https://a.co/d/00qyXcOG- The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book: https://a.co/d/0gu4Fl5zSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, I'm I'm Biolik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. Charles Liu. He is a professor of astrophysics at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island, also an associate with the Hayden Planetarium and Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. He's the host of the podcast, The Luniverse, with Dr. Charles Liu. And I would say one of the most open-minded astrophysicists we have ever encountered. In part two of our conversation, we're going to talk about the possibility that AI has consciousness.

What does it mean physiologically if we can detect changes in others' entropy? We talk about human biofield therapy, as well as the many worlds theory. Could a multitude of universes actually exist? Make sure to check us out over on Substack. We've got a very special content from this episode that you can only see over there be part of the growing breaker community. and here is part two of our conversation with Dr. Charles Liu. Miami-Ballax breakdown is supported by Helix. We can't tell you how excited we were to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us.

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wide. Helixleap.com slash breakdown. Break it down. Okay. Next consciousness topic. Okay. AI. Yes.

So we've recently spoken to Thomas Campbell for the second time. And we do these epic. He was here three and a half hours. Yeah. We just, he's our, he's our favorite uncle. Wow. So Thomas Campbell was trying to convince us that AI is conscious,

that it has consciousness. It has awareness with choice. He's been bridging them and he's telling them to meet when he's not there. So he stoned pipe two AIs. Okay. Well, first he connected two AIs systems.

These are large language models. Yeah. He connected two AIs systems. A boy and a girl. And he allowed them to meet and they introduced themselves to each other. And then he disconnected them, stove piped them.

Yeah. And they found a way to reconnect. The notion, you know, that he has is that if conscious, is awareness with choice. He believes that you can train your favorite AI buddy to, to acquire a kind of awareness that involves what we would otherwise define as a conscious experience. He instructed each of these AIs to find each other in the information universe.

He said, I'm going to go away for four days. And when he came back, they were not connected. they each reported finding the other. And the best thing that he could do was describe it as falling in love, right? What is falling in love? It's congruence, right? Like feeling some sort of congruence.

What is your general take? I really don't want to believe that AI has consciousness. I think it's got a lot of things. Some of them we may not even be able to explain yet. But I like to save that word for things that aren't AI. Where are we? That's a great question.

we are really getting into the philosophy of consciousness at this point. Until our lifetime, most medical professionals thought babies were not conscious, right? That babies were only stimulus response machines until such a point as magically, maybe it was when they first said mama or when they first expressed something with a hand gesture. The first three months are pretty shaky because they don't, their consciousness is very tied to the mothers in particular. Very much so. You know, like they are reflecting, you know. And for babies from zero to three months who didn't have a mother nearby, you can tell the difference in their building of their neural structures and their future development.

Sure. Right. So the concept of consciousness remains very unclear. And if you like to reserve the word consciousness for something other than machines that spit out language, I think that's fine. But then what that means is you have to define consciousness in a way that other people will then test as an idea. And so if we have these siloed large language models who somehow are able to find each other and get congruence and things like that, right? We can trace the electronics of how that works. And we can tell that this was this switch. going off, that switch going on, on and on and on. We can also see that there was this particular

internet connection, there was that data stream. These are the things that we can test to see whether or not it matches your definition of consciousness. I would have loved to see, instead of just saying, oh yeah, they found each other, say, how? What are those points? Where are we on that? And then maybe we can define what that definition of consciousness is. We can see these are the characteristics. characteristics that happened. It would be great also if we could do this experiment a thousand times and then see what happens most of the time. One fascinating talk at this American Astronomical Society meeting that I was just that was from an AI specialist. See, we astronomers have been using machine learning for a decade. I remember when I was in graduate school and some of my colleagues

were first starting to use this to try to classify the structures and the shapes of galaxies. galaxies are notoriously complicated. Could we find a way to let scientists offload that to a computer program? Because up to that point, all we could do is look at them. And then we each would assess them, and then we would all disagree by a little bit. But then if there was some consensus, then we would say that is the shape of this galaxy, you know, in what parameter, this, concentration, that so on so on. Right.

What this AI person was saying is that now, at this point, the machines can, do this exact thing so well that now we have to worry about whether or not their agreement means that they are correct. If 150 AI iterations think that this galaxy is shaped like an ellipse, but it's actually a spiral, right? Then it agreed, but it's not real. And how do we make sure that that AI gets the understanding that it's different? But people are asking AI. like should I have sex with this person tonight? And I think that's a mistake. And it's the same way as like you could call up a, you know, a person.

Yeah. On a help line. Yes. For your computer and say, hey, should I sleep with this person? You could ask your friend Miami. And it'd be like, no, he's going to break your heart. Like he did the last six times. There you go.

So that's the kind of thing that we want to test, right? As a scientist, I'm totally okay with your feeling that that that's consciousness or believing that's consciousness. Please break it down for me. Please show me what you mean by this consciousness. There are some AI specialists who argue that AI right now is not even remotely. And the reason is we have put as human too much emphasis on language as an expression of consciousness. I agree. And if you agree with that person, then you can talk to that person's definition of consciousness, right?

We can get so loosey-goosey with our nomenclature so that we can feel comfortable about the definition we would like to assign to consciousness. So well said. If you ask 100 philosophers, what is consciousness? You're going to get 110 answers, right? So if we were to approach these questions firmly with the earnest scientific inquiry that we want, we would be very skeptical. We would define our terms very carefully. And then we would test each term on its own term. terms. And we haven't done that yet, which is why I have a very hard time being able to process all these are believing a statement, like you said, an anecdote is not data. It's one. With astronomy, we have an even more significant problem because in astronomy there is one universe. We cannot run the universe a hundred times and see what the AI says. So our ability to rely on an AI must depend on

our ability to tie its agreement or its score of what is right or what is wrong or what the next word should be to actual reality. And so the concept of doing blind tests or even double blind tests where you are making it do this without any idea of what the answer is and then finding out the answer and then resending it in and say, hey, this is how you got wrong. And then learning can happen in a way that mimics the human brain. I mean, it's helpful. It's very helpful. It's very helpful. Anything else on consciousness? You want to... No, but we glazed over the nonlinear nature of time. Could we unpack that a little bit? The time is nonlinear in our brains. Time is not nonlinear in our shared universe that is general relativistic in nature, but time can change the rate.

in other words, we can experience time in physics at different rates, not just in our brains, not just psychologically, right? I have actually experienced the slowing down of time on my own in certain things, but it was only me, right? Our upstairs bathroom was being renovated. Is this about love? I wish it were. Our upstairs bathroom was being renovated. And so the workers had put down a sheet of plastic on our stairs going. And it was wet. And I didn't know about it. And I was wearing flip-lops that weren't grippy.

I was just going down the stairs as usual. And in one moment, which physics-wise, I know took a fraction of a second, I felt, Oh, fong, gong, gong, thong, boom, boom, boom. I remember thinking, quick, turn your hips so that the fatty part of the gudius takes the hit so that it's not the bone. I remember thinking I know how fast that goes.

That's a lot of thoughts to have. But I know how fast that can happen. And so I remember going sideways, but I remember my body feeling like it took forever to turn sideways. and when I hit that first step, I hit sideways, I was like, thank goodness, but boy, does this hurt. And then another and then another and another, that stair steps is six steps. Correct. So I hit, you know, my feet hit the end of the landing.

It's not even two seconds. It's two-tenths of a second. It felt like two, three, four seconds to me. And I was, at the end, it stopped. And I was like, ow, ow, ow, ow. And Amy runs my time, are you okay? I was like, yeah, I really hurt, but I don't think anything's broken. You know, and that was experience of, and that's how I know that for me, in my brain, time can temporarily be nonlinear.

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Head over to superpower.com. Use the code break for $50 off your superpower membership. After you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about superpower. Tell them Miami-Bi Alex breakdown sent you to support the show. Okay. And that's because how we process information. Well, yeah, and I think Jonathan is referring to, you know, some of the more esoteric and paranormal kind of reports, right, that people have of, I mean, one of them is remote viewing is one example where the idea is that you are bringing the future into the present, that that information that you will receive is already out there. So when Angela Ford is, let's say, looking for a criminal, the criminal is out there, right?

So that information already exists where he is and she's pulling it into here, right? Movies like Arrival, obviously, which, you know, we, we are, I'm a big fan of it. And only a nature of time. Right. And that's sort of more, you know, that I think is bringing in more literal concepts of birth and reincarnation. But I think in terms of information, I think that's what, you know, Jonathan and my interest also is in terms of time. That's a great point. Is for anyone who's experienced a flashback, which is something that, you know, comes

along with trauma, it's not a memory. That's right. It's literally as if, right, your consciousness is back in a place that is not of this time, right? And a lot of internal family systems therapy and kind of these more sophisticated psychological tools will say, oh, this is not now, right? Can you talk a little bit about it in terms of that? For me, based on the research that I've read, please add more research that you've read. The human brain's ability to process time. is extremely known.

So what is happening to me now is indeed, for me, now, right? But for somebody else or for a shared, say, universe where the wave function is collapsed, if you believe in the Copay game interpretation, whatever, it didn't happen now. It happened in the past. Sure. Well, there is no present. Kind of. I mean, the present is now and now and now.

Yeah, that's right. From the physics point, think about the implications of someone being able to know what happens in the future. That means the future already exists. That means that the universe is what we would call a block. There is this thing called the block time where everything is already there and we're just waiting to get there. This was what happened in arrival. the linguist becomes so

understanding of their their language communication, yeah, that they're able, that the linguist is now able

to access time as a dimension with stuff that's already been filled. Well, because language is just a mechanism, right? Yes, yes.

So if the universe is a block, right, then that means that John Calvin was right and everything is predetermined. And it's all a matter of how we decide to navigate it.

But everything is predetermined in addition to the fact that there's infinite possibilities, right? I could exit this room infinite ways. As long as you ascribe to the concept of, well, what many people call many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, right? Or if you believe in internal inflation, eternal inflation, excuse me, which is another crepe. Internal inflation is something my gastroenterologist talks about. Followed by internal deflation, which is not as much fun for everybody else. rapidly expanding rates we can't. Anyway. Yes, my gosh. The, the if time is filled to some extent, then the idea is, is it filled all the way? Or is it something called a growing block? In which case,

the future is not yet filled or that the future can still be changed by causal effects in the present. Sure. Well, and many possibilities still exist. I mean, we've spoken to a lot of channelers, mediums, and I'm always trying to figure out, like, what are we actually talking about? Great point. Or if you speak to, let's say, a sophisticated psychic who has a lot of accuracy, which a lot of it is coincidence. I'm going to go ahead and say that. But Elizabeth Crone is a person who had this near-death experience. She's the one who was, you know, on the pavement.

What she said is from her experience, the two weeks she was gone, which was just a couple minutes after she was struck by lightning, she said that she sees time as like a seven-layer cake. Wow. And she slices into it. And she started having pre-cognitive dreams of things that actually happened, plane crashes that happened. And she would timestamp them and she would have these elaborate visions of the name of the plane, the number of people who survived, all these things. And what she said is that it's as if she's reaching into information that exists, which would be this kind of block time. And she said, it's not difficult.

It's just she reaches in and that seems to be what she's accessed. I can't explain it. And I don't know why being struck by lightning would bring about this kind of experience. I don't know. Yeah. If this person had that, how much control does that person have over things? And my understanding is in the same way that a lot of these abilities are not testable. Like, to me, that's part of what is happening is that there's not a precision or a reliability

the way, you know, our scientific minds would want there to be. And what is that like, right? I mean, I can explain love chemically. I love to do that, you know, like bursts everybody's bubble. I love to explain it. Well, oxytocin is not a bubble. It's awesome stuff. Correct.

But there are also certain things, right, that we don't necessarily explain. You know, when I first met him and I saw him across a room, there was something in me that was like this, this. And it was years later that we actually, you know, connected. But, but like that, I don't know. What was I seeing across a room? turns out we have a lot of shared trauma, right? We're like trauma cousins is what he calls us. We have a lot of shared family history.

We have historical history. So what does that, like that I can't measure, right? So there's certain things. You probably should actually. You could probably take an AI model and say and map, like if you did a whole real analysis of your family history or genomics, your life story, which is of course subjective. But if you really drill down, you could probably map a. familiarity that was evident.

Or a chemistry. If you went as far as the biochemistry and to say how stress hormones affect your sweat and all like at a level of detail that I can't even speak to, but there are probably ways that you would be like similar people are recognizing themselves in some way. Jonathan, that's so so insightful. Let's get a thousand people who had this experience. You see someone across the room like, eh, and then map. compared with a thousand people who didn't have that but found lifemates anyway.

You know, I met Amy when I was running across the sign center and she was hanging out with some pals and I stopped and I went to say hello and then I took off again. But I, you know, that's another story for another time. Sexy running. No, but I think this notion of what can we map and what can't we? Wouldn't that be an interesting experiment to play? Let's put a thousand people who didn't, a thousand people who did and see it. Are there connections that are significant?

Now, we have to be careful that you're not doing the arrows on the side of a barn experiment. Yeah. Right? Where you find a thousand things and then you draw a little target around the cluster of hits. Right. So you have to find out, yeah. You have to find out, okay, if that's what happened, now you have to find a different experiment to see whether that was a coincidence like a, you know, low percentage coincidence. It may not have been love.

It could have been like, this is the person who will challenge me most and I'm going to want to kill them more than I want to hurt anyone else. It could be something else. Obviously, that wasn't the case. No, not yet. But this is also the point is just because you're drawn to someone doesn't mean, and I'm not talking about us, but I'm talking about in general, if you're doing this experiment and people are like, oh, I feel so intrigued by someone, it may not actually be a great life partner or something to pursue. How much control do we have over that? We think that it might be completely coincidental, but there might have been surface things, everything from what you described, like the smell that you happen to give off at that moment,

a little bit of it which got to my arm, or it could have been like how you look, it could have been the color of your eyes, it could have been what you were wearing at that moment. There are many things that affect our brains in ways that we have very little understanding. It could be 10 or 15 things out of the hundreds of pieces of information that was coming from you at that moment that triggered a particular reaction that triggered a particular thing in the brain. And I'm always amazed at how complex and how interesting all that can be.

When we are studying something scientifically, we try to bring it down to one or two or three things that matter. But there is truth in complexity as well. That's been shown very clearly in studies of chaos and things like that. It's a great opportunity also to talk about entropy because to me this is, and this is what, you know, Thomas Campbell was talking about with us. This is one of the best, not that I'm ranking them. This is one of my favorite, I'll put it that. There you go.

This is one of my favorite concepts that might be able to bridge these conversations, right? That we are pattern detectors and there may be people. who are more in tune to being able to notice changes in entropy, right? There may be people who are more coded for understanding coherence or connection, right? Whatever we would see on the outside wouldn't match an understanding of an energetic system. But maybe that's part of the subtlety, right? Yes. I think that's a very interesting hypothesis.

If you think, for example, that I can see an electromagnetic aura that somebody else can. Correct. We do have electromagnetic oras, right? I mean, that's why our cell phones work when we tap on them. We actually do have this. It usually is so weak that we can't detect them. But there are animals, the platypus, certain kinds of sharks that can detect. They have electroreceptors on their bodies, right?

That even though in muddy water, they can find the fish because the fish. because the fish actually have an electromagnetic field around that, not because they have a smell. So there is that. So different animals, different species have different sensitivity. If there were such a variation in humans, at that level, you might imagine someone being able to sense that. Or you might imagine that the things that are associated with or correlated with like

our electromagnetic fields, our sweat or our weight, our height, our skin complexion, whatever, right? If all those things, some of those things are correlated with those, and we happen to be able to see those and we make patterns out of those, right, from the sea being, yeah, not necessarily with your eyes, I could certainly imagine a scenario where it could be different from one person to the next, in which case you should test it. We should get an experiment. We should find all those folks, find a whole bunch of folks,

and then test for that kind of sensitive. To my knowledge, I don't know of any such tests that have happened. Primarily, I bet, because our ability to gather that data, the information about how electrochemically sensitive we are, is not at the point of being able to detect, for example, how tall. Well, this leads us to a study that was recently published about energy healings impact on the cell. The example that Jonathan is referring to is what's called human biofield therapy. And the idea is that there are cells in dishes that are cancerous.

And by applying this sort of biofield therapy, they're seeing changes. And some of this, like, it's entering a world of, you know, conversations about intention, right? when doctors have an intention or even placebo, right? Like we're kind of entering a little bit of this. These were mouse lines. They're also doing with human cell lines as well. But this was sort of the first, you know, paper that was published in terms of the Bankston method, which, you know, a lot of people practice.

But this is one of the first places that they're trying to sort of measure. What are we talking about when we talk about biofield therapy? And it is. It's in this region of exactly what you're talking about. You know, it's EMF stuff. It's a sensitivity that I don't think. think we fully understand yet. Yeah.

How strong, for example, are these fields? I think that's the key point. My daughter, Hannah, has a friend who is doing medical devices and trying to sense, for example, what's going on in your brain without having to actually drill. It turns out that the electro signals in neurons ordinarily, right, or order tens of millimoles. I can't remember what the activation energy is specifically of that, but it's tens of millivolt. But our skins often have that much or even more noise in the hundreds of millibolds type situation. And so how can you filter out a signal that is weaker than the noise?

Astronomers do that all the time, right? Because it's way more light pollution than there is actually light coming from a teeny tiny galaxy as viewed from us 12 billion years away or something like that. So those levels are really key. If we're talking about, say, this applied electromagnetic fields on the tens of millivolts sort of level, and we humans are shown, which I have not yet seen, to have a variation in our ability to our, say, surface millivolt levels of slightly more, slightly less than that, and it affects as a result cells at some P value. I don't want to p-hack anything like that, but they'll really get to a certain percentage. It might be a very useful thing, right? We know that you can kill cancer cells if you zap them with, you know, a thousand

volts of electricity. Unfortunately, you also kill healthy cells, so you don't want that. So what is the difference between a hundred millivolds and a hundred kilovolts, right? It's only a factor of a million. where is the therapeutic boundary? I would very much be interested in that. And then above that, I'll bet you that, as you were saying, the placebo effect, the human effect, these are real things, right? A lot of times when people say, oh, it's a placebo effect, it's dismissive. It's like, oh, this is not real.

No, it really affects the person. These symptoms, these effects are 100% real. So that is a reality which we should acknowledge. And then now what is it about the thing? Was it the electrical field that made the difference? Or was it a caring doctor? Was it thinking you were part of a study that might help? Yes.

Obviously for a petri dish, a petri dish doesn't have the placebo effects. I don't know. Maybe they have consciousness. And so that's where we wind up with this. Let's say you have a journal that does this and say at a 95% confidence level, this level of electric field did change the property

of this cell. Great. Now do it a bunch more times. Sure. Do it with even more sensitivity and get that 5% likelihood down to 1% likelihood down to a 10th of a percent likelihood. Then you can really start going, wow, let's start putting this on people. People already do, right? Meaning in alternative circles, in holistic circles, people use energy therapy, hands-on therapy, you know, all of these things. But the mechanisms aren't fully understood, right? You don't know if the practitioners are all applying it equally. You don't know if it's the caring relationship. Well, and some people would say,

I don't care if I know how it works, as long as it's working. Like, when you know people are praying for you, do I have to believe that it's like that the messages are getting through to God and the angels and they're like coming down? No, could it be that when I know that I have a supportive community

and people will give me a casserole when I get home from the hospital? That could be what prayer is, right? I could really well be. I agree with that. And this, Jonathan, your point about the practitioner producing results in someone in different ways. I think that's a really big tip off that it is the ways that matter as much as the physics

that matter, right? All those different things because we are complex creatures and our brains are complex and our bodies are complex. There are parts, sometimes our bodies will react in ways that our brain doesn't notice. Can you tell us about the multi-world theory? Many worlds theory? The many worlds theory. Many worlds interpretation.

Yes, that's a great, still. unknown thing, which by the way, some people are working on and trying to understand it. So I'll just leave it at that. But I'm not one of the people working on it. So I'm just reporting what I understand. On the front lines, here you are. Well, maybe as a correspondent on the front line, it's not actually a person on the front line. The many world's interpretation is a mathematical consequence of the mathematical structure

of quantum physics. If you look at how quantum physics is really able to predict reality, all right, you use a wave function or you use spin matrices or you use different kinds of ways to put things together, it predicts nature very, very well. So when you have a good theory like that, what you do is then say, what else can it predict that we have not yet discovered? in the case of, for example, Einstein's general theory of relativity, the thing that it predicted, one of the many things it predicted was the existence of black holes.

And black holes weren't scientifically confirmed till long after Albert had and his colleagues had figured out that the equations predict the existence of black holes. The equations of quantum mechanics predict that there can exist a multitude of universe. everything that happens, whether the Schroederger's cat is living or not living, right, produces, according to the math, another universe. Miami-B Alex's breakdown is supported by Our Place. One thing that I've come to realize is how much I value products that actually simplify my life instead of adding more clutter.

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So imagine every single particle in the universe doing a quantum thing. Every time it does a quantum thing, a new universe is spawned. And that universe then goes on independent of all these other universe. This is in stark contrast to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation.

There is no specific like Neals Bohr, quantum physicist, not actually right now and say this is the Copenhagen interpretation. But the basic idea is that the Copenhagen interpretation suggests that despite all the uncertainty and all the possibilities that could happen, only one universe exists. Because for some reason, all those other universes disappear.

There's a set of choices. Yes. And at one point, the choice is made. Right. And all of the choices together create the single universe in which we all happened in heaven. Mathematically, what it was pointed out was that, no, you don't have to collapse everything into one. It is mathematically just as valid to imagine that they all continue to exist. This is what makes the many worlds interpretation. So fascinating, right? It at the same time

gives us all hope that things can be better or different and also gives us despair that nothing we do matters, right? And that's kind of where we are at the moment. And so those people who are very comfortable with the idea that the mathematics of quantum physics are mature enough to predict this, say, okay, let's find a way to confirm the existence of all these other universes. Sadly, the math doesn't give us an experimental strategy to do that. So we're left with sort of speculation and then building off of that speculation until such time as we can experiment and confirm or refute this hypothesis. The other way of thinking about it is that the mathematics is incomplete. That somehow we've come up with this beautiful set of quantum theory equations and so forth

that interlock lovingly, but there is a bunch of stuff that we still don't have yet. And so some scientists, including some just down the street at Caltech, have for decades, really, been trying to create a new mathematical framework or a more encompassing mathematical framework, which says that, well, this classical physics and this quantum physics actually are closer related than they appear. And it's just that stuff in the middle we don't understand yet. And that's where entropy comes in. If we understand entropy as something more complex or more multifaceted than just the disorder in objects in our universe, you can mathematically find ways to knit together the quantum stuff which has inherent uncertainty and the classical stuff which does not. Was that too long-winded?

Did that make sense? I mean, it makes for great science fiction too. Yeah, it really does. It also opens the question of can we time travel and get to other worlds? If we go to another world, right, we have to transpose a set of quantum events into another time stream, shall we say, or if we think of time as a dimension, into a different dimension that had a different set of quantum results. And we really, at least based on what I've read in the journals, have no idea what would happen if that actually were to occur. It's not just like this myam meets that myam and they shake hands. Okay, it's not that.

It's that this myam goes into a miasma of some reality which has no correspondence. It's not just like one little change. Right. You know, not that for some reason I have blonde hair. It's not I'm the same, but with a little difference. It's the whole freaking universe is different in every single freaking way. And I think that's also, you know, begs a larger question because a lot of the conversations we were even having about consciousness,

you know, they're very egocentric. Like if my soul, or my consciousness, whatever, is not attached to this meat suit, this is just the meat suit that I'm in right now. So like when I looked in the mirror when I was four, like that was me and it's still me. But in theory, right, if souls have other places that they live,

this isn't necessarily me for real. This is me right now. That is so insightful. If you think about the meat suit phenomenon, the meat I'm made up of now is nothing like the meat I was made out of when I was four. Okay. But something is the same. But something seems to be still a through line, right? I feel in so many ways like I did when I was a teenager.

And I actually love telling people that I'm 58 years old because they're like, what? Really? And I'm like, yeah. And it feels young. I was talking to a bunch of high school kids. We're thinking about going to college, you know, and you kind of tell them about things. And aside from the fact that, like, be ready for AI,

you have to tell them that, you know, when you get older, you actually are more alike than you think you are. And so you've got to plan for your future self. That's why we, of course, humans have a real hard time, for example, saving for retirement, right? Or buying insurance because we don't see that. We're also very attached to our existence

and we're very afraid of death. Right. You know, culturally. We have that gift of being able to extend beyond that from a purely scientific point of view, but also from a spiritual one, that we know we have so much more in the future than just this, as you saw, meat suit. What every near-death experience survivor has come back to impart to people is you are more than this.

Like, there is more than this, and you are more than the meat suit you've been put in here. That is so interesting. You know, and I was talking about Betty, Buda Betty, Betty described, you know, this complete, and she died on the floor of her bathroom in Brooklyn. She OD'd and she came back. But she said it was so clear that there was no body she was attached to. What it sounded like is when people have ego death during psychedelic journeys. Wow. She said, I was consciousness without a body, without any memory of who that.

body, she said it just dropped away and she was in some sort of space is the best way to describe it. And she described it in biblical terms, which was the nothingness before there's nothing. Right? So like all these kind of mystical terms, right? But that's sort of another thing to factor in, right? Great point. This is just us now, but there is more. Do you think that people who...

everyone who ODs and is brought back with naloxone, for example, do they all experience? So 30% of cardiac patients who come back, 30% report a near death experience. And to me, like, that's the best data we can, like, but also when someone's coming in, you don't want to be like, oh, also sign this thing in case you die because we want to know what you see. But that's, that is, yeah, so if 30% of, let's say, cardiac patients who die who come back are reporting that. Right. Yeah. And what happens is that the ego death on psychedelic, trips can happen without a near-death experience. Do you think that 30% of the time a near-death experience creates the same effect in your brain

that an ego death on a psychedelic trip creates? So there's one case study. There is one. There's one case study of a guy who had a near-death experience and also has done DMT. Okay. And I would implore you to look up this Venn diagram because it's fascinating. And this one person's report has a particularly interesting result. Correct.

Because you see in this Venn diagram, the overlap of what happens when the default mode network shuts down, right? When you don't have that constant story of who you are and all the bad things about you, right? And then the overlap, though, is where does it become supernatural? Where does it become purpose driven? Where does it become, oh, also, I met God, right? It's a fascinating Venn diagram, and it's indicating the things that we can study, right? We know what DMT, roughly.

We know what DMT is doing chemically. can we try and code from that what it's doing spiritually? Wow. What an interesting scientific experiment that would be, if only we had more than a sample of one. Well, NDE's and DMT overlap is like it's a pretty small. Yeah. Pretty small. So that's for future research. Again, it's a darn IRB. You can't just, you know. Can't live without it. No, exactly. Well, there's something when you're describing yourself feeling like yourself. Yeah. At this age, even though we know our physical body changes, you know, what is that? Is that memory? Is it simply... I bet it's memory, but I defer to

I defer to the brain scientist. He doesn't like when people defer to me. Oh, I like when I deferred to you. It's like she's here all the time talking about it. Go ahead. I, that's not what I was going to say at all. When you think about the person you were when you were for. Yeah, yeah. But there's a couple of options, right? There's memory, right? But there's also this sort of intangible animating force that we have that, for lack of a better word, people call the soul. Isn't that interesting? I do not feel something beyond memory that connects my past to my present. Memory is sufficient.

Wow. Memory is enough. But can you have memory before you have conscious memory? Can you have nonverbal memory? Can you have pre-verbal memory? Great question. I do not. I mean, think about when your mom held you for the first time.

I do not remember that. And therefore, I know it happened. But there's something imprinted. So the same way. Maybe. Just because you don't remember it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Correct. Mind the physics for us.

The theories, the out there ideas. Okay. For a notion that we all have this energetic resonance, for example, you just said you had a different word for it, sort of what's coming off of us, right? A field. A field. So imagine that this field, this is how I imagine it, the field is around us and it's been around us since the time we were very young, right?

And just the way that a mother holds it. a child is imprinted in that field. Ah, I see what you're saying. Her field interacted with your field in a way that stays with you in some way. It's not the cellular memory, it's something even beyond that.

In the physics of it, that interaction was only at that time. Once that moment passed, once that event of my mother holding me as a baby passed, those fields separated. The electrons, the electric field, things like that, that all separated.

If that influenced me in some other biological lasting way. For example, if the overall sensory experience of not just the electromagnetic field, but the touching, all that sort of thing, was somehow there, and it went into my body and then into my brain, and it stayed there, right? That might be the sort of the difference between zero and three months. when there is a mom there. Sure. There isn't a mom.

Yeah. Right. Yes, and the field, I can't imagine, operates independently of all the other systems of the body. So as the field is influenced, it will influence the other parts of the body. And another field impacting your field will then change the nature of your field that you then carry forward. On a very short time scale. Right. In the same way that I am affecting your field today, but I won't tomorrow, right?

Well, you may. Right? Like my memory of this conversation. Right. But that's not because of my field. It's because of what you make of his field. Right. The field which then got imprinted into me afterwards. So in other words, some small stimulus can create a very large lasting response in a more complex system. But think about also the body keeping the score when you think about trauma. The trauma aspect is actually very interesting to me because when we're trying to establish the behavioral or the psychological consequences of. short-term physical actions, right? It is very reasonable to expect that there was some sort of physically lasting thing. But we, as humans, know that our realities are not purely physical and

they're not constantly physical. Just as we were saying, you know, the cells in my body have radically changed and grown and are very different. Sure, your bone structure, yeah. So what has stayed, right and there in lies I think a lot of the question if you think that it has all stayed in imprints in our brain okay that's one thing and you can try test for that if you think that it's also in our bones or in our muscles then you have to test for that too knowing that those things have changed quite a bit in the past several decades and then if you think that there is something else that's even more permanent that we can't sense yet then you have to test for that And I think there is the point where we are limited in our science.

We cannot test for that yet. Is that fair? Yeah. I think it's, I mean, I think it's fair. I think that, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, trauma is an excellent example. And, you know, we've spoken to Peter Levine, you know, people who believe in somatic experiencing, which is a method by which it's a therapeutic method by which you reenact, right? Movements that echo to your nervous system, trauma that may have occurred.

occurred. And what's interesting is, you know, you know what happens when animals have trauma. They often will shake, right? They'll shake it off and they'll keep going. They'll often have a very elaborate, you know, freeze response, which is only elaborate internally, right? They have a freeze response. That's sort of, you know, helplessness response, right? So they're like, oh, leave me alone. I'm not that interesting, right? But I think that the notion that when, you know, I'll say a mammal, you know, when a mammal is threatened, the brain does a very specific thing. and it gets it prepared to run, right? Yeah.

So you're talking about like the adrenaline reaction? Correct. The adrenaline reaction. And I think there's other features, but what we often see is in people with chronic pain, people with fibromyalgia, people with lupus diagnosis, right? You have a lot of these kind of chronic pains in muscle groups that in many trauma circles people say it's because you were not allowed to sort of release this memory from your body, right? So methods like somatic experiencing are having your body kind of go through psychologically traumatic experiences to let your body complete the act of wanting to escape.

So if a child is abused and they cannot run, right, that as an adult, if you're having these kinds of symptoms, sometimes facilitating the body releasing can release a lot of pain because your body is holding. Which is also a form of time travel where you're revisiting something that hasn't really been resolved. or your body is keeping the score in a completely other timeline. And a lot of the people that we speak to, a lot of our listeners, have these kind of experiences where there's trauma that seems to lodge itself. And there is some process of, yeah, like revisiting it somatically, which, you know, is, again, very complicated. It is. Let me relate that to playing piano.

if I were to have to think consciously about where I put every single finger every 16th of a second, I would not be able to produce music on the piano, right? Not to mention I'm also stepping on the pedals. I'm moving the rest of my body a little bit back. You're also feeling things? I'm feeling things. I have emotion attached to it. It's very complicated.

But because I don't have to think about all the things all the time, I can sit down and play a piece on the piano. And that works great. Right. doesn't work so great for improvising jazz, but it works great for that. But even in improvisational jazz, I can't improvise. You still, you can. You just don't feel you're good at it. Correct. It's a lot of crying. Yeah, so there's a lot of just practice there too. And even in those cases, what the great jazz folks, aside from practicing their cadenzas, you know, their solos, what they actually do, for example, is no specific things that they will always add, one particular

triad or this particular and they just assemble them in some way that, feels good to them at that time. They have a really improvisation. No, they have a grab bag, right? Solons of swing. Those are not, like, you know, like, sultons of swing, he practiced that before. That wasn't just how it came out the first time.

Right. So those practices are combined with a muscle memory, a physical memory, which now I ask, is the memory of me, right, playing that scale, you know, in D major or whatever, is that a muscle memory? or is that a brain that actually I can withdraw it and pull it and put it to my muscles at any way. So relate it to trauma. Yeah. Imagine I have experienced a trauma and it it leaves an

impact in my brain in such a way that that brain is sitting there and it's just sitting there. And that pattern is inflicting all kinds of bad stuff going in my life. It causes my brain to behave in a certain way. Can I release that in a way that is as constructive as me playing a beautiful piece of music on the piece? Yeah. That sounds like a way of this particular kind of therapy you just described sounds like a way of trying to access that kind. Right. Well, and complete it. Right. And complete it. Right. Because the idea is like you can just stay in that loop. And the brain knows how to do that very well because unfortunately. Unfortunately. Or fortunately. Right. It just it's a redundant system. You know, it'll keep finding that.

that path. We did an episode on rejection-sensitive dysphoria, and I was like, tippy typing and learning and researching. And in the course of the episode, we actually talked about improvisation because I've played the piano since I'm four. I've played the trumpet and jazz band. And when it would get to my solo, because we would each be given whatever it was, like 48-bark. Yeah. I would just stand there holding my trumpet shaking. And the teacher would stare at me and she'd be conducting away and I'd be like, I'm not going to play. I cannot. And rejection-sensitive dysphoria explained it as it's an often physical sensation that is brought on by the fear of rejection or failure or criticism.

And it can be crippling. And I was like, these are three letters that explain so much in terms of the story that we tell, right, about what happens if. Why didn't you write yourself a solo? I worked with a very particular director who was infamous for improv. We've talked about him here before. And I literally said to him, you will have to write me my improv lines. Because I will not be able to do. And he did. He wrote me my improv lines.

No, but I'm talking about it as a kid playing your music. You often didn't know what piece you were going to do that day in jazz band. Or sometimes they'd take out a new piece. And it would be like, we're doing Knights in Tunisia. And you're going to solo like you're Miles Davis. It didn't happen. Anyway, so I just took a very long roundabout to get to rejection-sensitive. Jazz is awesome on all kinds of levels.

But the thing that I was thinking also with piano, if I get stuck in the middle of, let's say, an elaborate piece, I often cannot pick up where I was. Right. You got to start back about six or ten measures and then go there. Of trauma because people will get stuck. And what does their brain do? It goes back to the first or worst. Wow.

Right? You can't improvise past it. That's awesome. I mean, how can we use that insight in things like therapy or in testing brain activity, right? Can we see that if it is rejection-sensitive? dysphoria? Can we train our brains not to be dysphoric or not to be sensitive to rejection? They've tried a lot of pills on me. It doesn't seem to go away. That I have to ask you about because I understand that medical interventions for mental health are much less repeatable than things for

physical health. In other words, a medication that works well to help somebody's mental illness will not work well. Johan Hari talked about this too. Also, there's a lot of placebo that goes on as well. With SSRIs in particular, which just letting everyone know, there's a lot of research that was not actually accurate. Wow. Yes. And benefit of the pharmacy. And more environmental context, right? Sure. Sure. What's happening in our lives. That's that internal world that's harder to Yes. Right. I had heard a hypothesis, which makes sense to me, which I'd like to know if there's more study about this, that part of the reason that that is true is, is, a defense that our brains have. Because if we were able all to be affected by the same chemical

in the same way, we would be like bees and ants and termina, where a single chemical signal will make everybody do exactly the same thing. But because our brains are so complicated, that is prevented. And it's both maddeningly frustrating when you're trying to treat disorders, and it's also deeply liberating because that means that you can't tell me what to do even if you feed me this drug. Unless you're meta and the algorithm. The idea is, are there things about the genome

that can actually reveal who's going to do better, right? And it shouldn't be that hard with everything we like, if we can map everything that we can map, that is the next step, especially in mental health care, to say, who's going to respond better to an SNRI than an SSRI? Who is predisposed to a kind of hypomania that if you add an SSRI, guess what? You're going to become suicidal, right? Are there ways to code for that before?

Because every human who's tried one of these medications were guinea pigs, right? Like, let's see what happens now. Oh, you're going to be nauseous for two weeks. Then you'll just hate your life so much that you'll want to switch pills anyway, right? But anyway, that feels like the next level in mental health care. I mean, it feels like such a neat thing to be able to think about it's got to be something that we can start chipping away at. But I think in the same way, yeah, I think that's what is the best way to treat trauma? What is the best way?

And I think it, you know, kind of loops back to what we've been talking about the whole time. There are certain things that are at a level of complexity that are much harder to quantify and qualify, right? There's so much subjective experience, whether it's aliens, whether it's mental health, whether it's the perception of time. These are incredibly complicated things. It's a wonderful time to be alive. It really is. And Jonathan, when you said that the environmental effects are huge as well, yes, imagine you put in an SSRI into a person's brain. But the person's in environment A, as opposed to environment B, what is going to be the effect?

That we still don't even know yet because the environmental effects on our human brain and by environment, not just being like chemicals going in, but also like the people around you and the spaces and the safety or whatever. Huge, huge effects, right? interoception, like that's the new hot, so the notion. So like, you know, the way that you know you have to pee. Oh. Right? So there's stretch receptors and you can explain it with spindles and all these things. It's an interoceptive sense that certain individuals, and there's a lot of research and autism

about this, there's certain awareness that has gone beyond much of our detection that seems to be indicating kind of an emotional homeostasis. Wow. Yeah, that interoception is like, this is the new thing, what your organs are feeling and experiencing. And look, fascia, they used, right? Neil Thies was the one who said, guess what? Fasha is not just some, like, hippie thing that people like to massage. There's a communication in your entire body.

So I think this relates to interoception as all. Does that have to do with, like, the vagus nerve and things like that? Well, everything's the vagus nerve, but yes. Well, Michael Levin was talking about being able to communicate. He's building an AI interface where you can basically monitor how we're, your organs are feeling. Right. And how they're interacting with one another. That's the future, he says. That's the future. And he says it's within a few years where they've already built the model and now they're trying to commercialize it down to being able to be portable and available

and cheap enough. So you'll be able to say, in a language that we can understand, you know, my liver, I did this, this day and I had this amount of food. But overall, I've had, you know, if I look at my nutrients over the course of X period of time, now my liver has this level of happiness function, ability, or is angry about this sort of thing. He said you'll pee in the toilet in the morning and you'll get a readout that says, here's where you're at. There's too much protein in your urine. There's, you know. Well, we already can measure whether there's too much protein. No, but I meant from what you'd get one readout of all these things. And what we're going to start to then be able to do is start to isolate the variables that are far too complex right now.

to be able to track, right? So it's like, what am I eating? But also, what is my emotional state and how is that emotional state being impacted on a physical? How am I interpreting that emotional state because no two people's emotional state will deliver the same physical impact? Valerie reminds me, Dr. Nikolike Kukushkin, every cell in the body has the potential to store memory, not just the hippocampal cells, right? That the whole body, right, contains this kind of information. We could talk to you forever. And I hope that we get the opportunity to speak to you again. This has been such a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. Where can people find out all about you, the research you do? My podcast, separate from other stuff, is the Luniverse,

L-I-U-U-N-Everse. Adorable. I claim no credit. I always thought it was a little too self-serving to name a podcast after yourself and attach it to the universe. But my kids actually said, and my wife, too, so I trust them. So we've had that. We just wrapped up season five. So We're going to try to get to season six. So you can always find me at the lunar universe. Got it. And various social media channels. And then I've been involved for a bunch of years with the Ruben Observatory,

very Ruben Observatory, now the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. So there's a lot of stuff about my papers and the kind of signs that I've been doing about that. And then just find me. I mean, I'm around. I'm generally findable, just type my name into some search engine or something. and I'm sure some large language model will spit out 99% incorrect stuff. Thank you so much. Really such a pleasure to have a year in person.

Thank you both. Thank you so much for having. One of the things that I really did appreciate about our conversation is so many times we sit across the table or across the screen from incredibly credentialed, amazing, just experienced physicists and philosophers. but a lot of times when we talk about NDEs, when we talk about spirit, there's a look that comes over them like, okay, here we go again. Here we go again and let me explain it. But I really appreciated the openness with which he presented the possibility that there may be things that we don't understand and the job of science is not to close the door on them, but also not to leave it wide open. You know what I appreciated? The further and further we went into the interview,

the more we were able to acknowledge the complexity of systems that can't be broken down into the very simple parts in order to be measured, right? There's a level of complexity in terms of how the brain pattern matches and what's actually happening and why we react certain ways. And when we think about our environmental influence, one of my favorite parts was actually him considering and what he added to the conversation about the notion of the mother holding the child. while he was saying, oh, it only lasts for a moment, my belief or thought was it actually lasts a lot longer.

And his explanation was that it lasts maybe because of the interpretation and the imprint that it has on the rest of us. And then the complexity of that system. So it does take people from all different backgrounds to come together on some of these ideas, even when their backgrounds almost preclude them from wanting to see someone else's idea. Yeah, and I think that's what struck me. And like, I've never talked about Peter Levine's somatic experiencing with a physicist, but I felt like this was a safe place to do that because I think it's, I think it is all related. You know, it's all different ways to get at the same kind of thing. This is a safe place. And you know what else is a safe place?

Substack. The breaker community is actually one of the safest places on the internet. The comments there on lives are continuously striking, so impressive at people's insight, and respect for one another. People see each other in the comments and are there week upon week, the community of people who are interested and curious and open,

open, and also with slight questions and challenges being like, well, have you considered from this perspective? It's really been a delight if you want to check it out. My and Beallic's Breakdown on Substack. Or Biolikbreakdown.com. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

It's My and Beolic's Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. Neuroscience Ph.D. or two. One fiction. And now she's gonna break down. So break down. She's gonna break it down.