Neuroscientist explains why modern entertainment is making us mentally obese

Erik Hoel [00:00:00] It, it becomes a very obvious problem when you talk about things like sudden wake ups during anesthesia, where you're under anesthesia, you're paralyzed, you can't communicate. And sometimes people wake up 'cause they haven't had enough anesthesia. Now the you're experiencing the pain of surgery, you know, at that time. And that's can be a very traumatic. I'm Miriam Hoffman, a full-time college student living in Carbondale, Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:28] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today is an exciting day for me. I got to interview a man named Erik Hoel, who wrote a fantastic book called The Revelations. Many longtime podcast listeners know that I have been talking about Eric for quite a while. He wrote an article called Enter the Super Sensorium, and it had a jarring impact on me. You'll hear me talk a lot about that, but it is a great introduction to an exceptional writer and a guy that is thinking about the world in very different ways than the ordinary people. In fact, we get most of the way through this interview and I put forward a hypothesis that's really kind of in line with what he's been saying and all of a sudden he is like, well, you could come at it from this totally different angle and approach the ideas for in a, in a different way. And I really love that about him. He was just a, an exceptional person that was able to take ideas and play with them and make you look at things from a totally different direction. So we're gonna get to that in just a moment. But before we do, I have posted a class called Introductions and it is all about teaching people how to talk about yourself, your business, what it is that you do, what it is that you're passionate about. And this is an important skill, whether you're doing it on Zoom, the way we have been with the digital world, or now that we're gonna be getting in public with other people a lot more regularly. How are you gonna put forward what you did with your time while Coronavirus was going on? So I have about a 60 minute course and it teaches you how to think about introducing yourself, telling a story, not overloading people with details, and having the end of your introduction line up so well with the beginning that people feel that sense of cathartic release because you landed the plane and you prompted them to come up and start a conversation with you afterwards.

Vance Crowe [00:02:18] So if you're interested in that class, go to store dot Articulate Ventures. Also, if you've been a long time listener of the podcast, you've been hearing me talk all about the network. We continue to grow and grow. We've added some really interesting characters in the last couple of weeks. This is a place where you can go to have the sort of digital neighborhood that I think has been lacking in this world of the internet for so long. Sure, there are places where we can go and it's free like Twitter and Facebook, but you don't get to have deep in depth conversations. You don't get to meet people and really ask them for what do you think about, how do you view what's going on in this part of the world and get real authentic answers. So if you've been looking for a neighborhood, a group to join, a place where you can learn to get better and really go after some bigger goals that you've had with a group of people cheering you on, then consider joining the Articulate Ventures network. You can do that by going to Network dot Articulate Ventures. We're really proud of what we built there and we would love to welcome you to our community. Alright, without further ado, we're gonna head to an interview with my man, Erik Hoel Coel, welcome to the podcast.

Erik Hoel [00:03:30] Thank you so much, ants. Again, this is super excited to be here,

Vance Crowe [00:03:34] Man. You wrote an article called Enter the Super Sensorium and it completely blew my mind. Not only did I share it everywhere that I could, but I would say there's never been an article that I've just kind of randomly read on the internet that had a profound impact on my, my actual physical world life. I, I started avoiding alcohol, I made it sure I was going to bed on time 'cause I wanted to have dreams. So if you were gonna give like an overview of what this article was about and kind of what motivated you to write it, how, how would you do that?

Erik Hoel [00:04:07] Sure. Great question. I mean, I think, well, first of all, thank you. But second of all, I think that one reason maybe why it hits so hard is that it focuses in on what I think is the defining quality of contemporary life, particularly, of course, I mean American life. And that is its saturation in entertainment. I mean, if you wanted to choose one thing that's very different between the current day and say what a Roman citizen experienced in, you know, 50 bc actually a lot of the political conversations will be relatively similar. And, you know, you, you, they, they would be able to quickly understand what's going on in the modern world. The one thing that they will be shocked by is the degree to which we consume entertainment, produce entertainment, which to them they would quickly understand as basically you've taken the Roman arena and you've made it, you know, into a screen and you know that, that, that, but on the face of it seems fine, right? Like there's, there's absolutely nothing wrong with watching TV or reading books. Like I'm a writer myself as I'm, I'm sure we'll get to. So like I want people to consume fictions, right? But what happened recently is that much as food production, you know, it used to be that you had your milkman, you had your baker, you had your butcher, right? And but the, all of that was condensed into a supermarket, right? And, you know, it's, it's really unsurprising.

Erik Hoel [00:05:38] If you chart the rise of supermarkets and you chart the rise of obesity, they basically look, you know, the same because it's a one stop shop for, for everything you need. And it's very low prices. And, and, and that it presents a problem for us. Like as biological beings, that's a, it's a problem for us to be exposed to infinite calories, like every single human being every day makes choices about that. And so I wanted to point out that something similar had happened over the past about 30 years with regards to entertainment where books, films, TV, streaming, all this stuff got put together into the screen, right? And basically, once you have a screen, you have like a supermarket for experiences. You have a super sensorium where you can just, you can just experience almost anything through this. And, and the costs are incredibly low. And so I, and I think that, you know, this, this in a sense troubles me because I recognize in my own habits, you know, a a habit towards consumption of junk, right? And I think that that's a, it's a very real concern. And, you know, plenty of people destroy their lives with video games as surely as if they were just mainlining heroin. Like, like really? And like I'm, I'm sure like you have your own kind of little, you know, quirks and not quite addictions may maybe, but like your own quirks and, and stuff that you would like rather spend.

Vance Crowe [00:07:04] Oh, 100%. If I get caught up in the, in a, in a YouTube thread, right? I can convince myself, oh, I just don't want it to be silent in here. So I, I put on YouTube and just let it run. And instead of me thinking or being alone with my thoughts, or I just let it play all the time in order to keep my brain stimulated. So as you were describing in this article and what you're describing now, it is me to a t

Erik Hoel [00:07:32] And and I think that, and, and this is something that people don't particularly, I think maybe quote, quote unquote successful people don't want to talk a lot about, right? Because it's like, okay, well how, how many hours a day do, do you really spend watching tv? Right? And the answer can be like a lot. And it can be like an amount that's uncomfortable for people to talk about because it's such a private thing where you can now you can watch TV in the shower. You, you know, it's, it's, it, it's, it's kind of absurd. And so, you know, this, this got me thinking, watching this change and having it really happen in my lifetime. 'cause I remember the first time I bought, I bought an Xbox, and that was what prompted this that I turned the Xbox on, and I expected only to be able to play games. And I turned the Xbox on and it was like, oh wait, I can do anything. Like, I can watch movies, I can do it just, it, it is just like a box and it just contains everything, right? And as someone who produces fictions themselves, because I'm a fiction writer, you know, that kind of terrifies me. And I got to thinking about what it would mean to have an immune response. Like what does it mean to manage yourself as a person in response to an overriding inflow of entertainment? And I think it means very, being very choosy about what fictions you consume. But the problem is that in contemporary intellectual life, at the same time we've had this technological marvel, or maybe hard, depending on which, which way you lean of the super sensorium, we have also had the complete obliteration and denouncement of any notion of sort of an objective aesthetic spectrum.

Erik Hoel [00:09:06] Like the notion that, hey, maybe you should go watch if you're gonna watch a four hour epic. Maybe you shouldn't watch Justice League. Maybe you should watch Lawrence of Arabia, and you're actually gonna get something more out of watching Lawrence of Arabia than you are from just watching this CGI slug fest. Right? And that, just, just even saying that is like, people are like, whoa. Right? And so I wanted to, to come up with some way to kind of combat that and think about the difference between good fictions and bad fictions. And that led me to thinking about dreams.

Vance Crowe [00:09:39] Yeah. The, so before we go to the dream part, because this objective like measure of whether or not there's some kind of quaia about the art that you have to me, really, really is important, right? Like, you start thinking about, well, it's really easy to say there's no such thing as objectively better art. It's just whatever people like more or whatever you want more. But as you start to dig into that, you start saying like, no, there's some artists that are able to figure out how to make you feel something when you look at the object that they created. And that feeling and its ability to like consistently jar some feeling out of people is, is, is really important. Because I, I think one of the things that was really remarkable about your article was that art doesn't have to be something that you like, right? It's that it's, it's that it's forcing you to have to deal with things or put them in perspective in a way that you don't in your ordinary life. Because entertainment fits already the narrative and the model that you already believe the things that you already understand about the world. And so art is like pushing you in another direction. And yeah, say more about the distinction between art and entertainment, if you wouldn't mind.

Erik Hoel [00:10:57] Yeah. So, but I think that in order, like what do, what sorts of arguments do people respect? Well, frankly, they don't respect any argument from the humanities or philosophy, because those were precisely the arguments that were destroyed by people like Pierre Bordeaux, who was a sociologist, you know, who argued that, you know, the reason why rich people read literature is to distinguish themselves from four people. So everything is just about power structures and, you know, these power structures completely govern our lives. And like, your tastes are just an expression of this. And that is, was such powerful asset against contemporary against, at, at the time, contemporary notions of like beauty that it just, it just ate through those in the academy. Whether or not it should, let's leave that aside. So, but to me, what sort of arguments do people respect? Well, they respect scientific ones because, you know, you know, frankly, pier burdo can go make his little criticism. But if you've got a, a scientific response, you know, then, then there's very little that, that that one, one can argue against. So my question was, is there a scientific justification for an objective aesthetic spectrum? And I, especially when it comes to fictions, like stories, like TV shows, films, video games, books, and well, I think there probably is because evolution invented fictions, it invented dreams. So for some reason, evolution has keyed in on this idea that every organism should be exposed to made up fantastical stories for a particular period of time every single day.

Erik Hoel [00:12:30] So wait, like, wait a minute. Like, that's so strange. Like, why, why, why, why, why would evolution invent fictions? Right? And so, you know, that that led me, I, I I, by the way, I have a PhD in neuroscience. And that led me to thinking about, well, okay, so what are the contemporary scientific theories of why we dream? And maybe if you can come up with a good theory for why we dream, you can come up with a good theory for why we consume fictions and why we should or shouldn't consume various types of fictions. And so this, this what the, that whole article, and then also, you know, if people want to check out something called the overfitted brain hypothesis, which is it's more scientific version or form, and in it, I'm, I'm just arguing that dreams effectively prevent you, help you generalize, help organisms generalize by being a very out of distribution sample compared to the regular life. So organisms actually have a very boring life, and they're very much like when you're training an artificial neural network, if you show them too much of the same data, even if it's very relevant, they'll get too highly fixated on it and they'll learn it too well. And you can prevent this overfitting by feeding them basically hallucinatory stuff that looks very different from what they normally see and is very like sparse and so on. And I actually think that that's probably the reason for dreams, which is that organisms that learn have a tendency to learn too well and over fit to their daily lives, and then they can't generalize and dreaming helps 'em do that.

Erik Hoel [00:14:00] And so if you kind of, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll kind of skip over all the various scientific reasons to think that this might be a good hypothesis and where it fits in. But if you, if you buy that, then you get pretty close to something like an objective aesthetic spectrum, because you could say that, listen, if, if, if what you're, what you're giving me in terms of the fiction, right? If, if I think about it like an artificial dream, and I think about it in terms of the cognitive utility very broadly, by the way, the, the sense of cognitive utility is being used here immensely, broadly. You can even just think about it as good for me, right? Then I can say, well, listen, if, if your art is just all stereotypes, that is doing the opposite of helping me generalize, right? It's, it's, it's forcing me to, to kind of overfit the world. Like, if, if all I watch are Marvel movies, right? Then I'm going to think about the world in terms of heroes and villains, right? And everyone's either a hero or they're a villain. Well, it turns out when you age, you realize that there actually are no heroes. First of all, there probably are no heroes, but there are definitely no villains, right? So like the, nobody thinks that they're the villain of the story. Everyone is operating under the assumption that they're the protagonist, not the antagonist, right? And the number of people who think I'm evil and I'm gonna go do something evil is so vanishingly low that they almost don't even impact life, that you don't even really ever meet them. But you do meet people who are evil, but it's only because of some circumstance and they're reacting to it or so on. So, you know, and, and so that, that's an example of, I think a very simplistic example of this overfitting.

Erik Hoel [00:15:35] But to me, it's very important to be able to have some sort of justification of an aesthetic spectrum and also to feel good about the fictions that I put out in the world. Because what I don't want to do, and I think every writer should think about this, is I don't want to just contribute like another icon that's there that keeps people entertained. And that's all it does. And you are just like this blip in this super sensorium, and you weren't kind of giving your, your audience anything.

Vance Crowe [00:16:02] So in some ways that means that if you're writing, you have to break the model in, in some way, right? Like, you have to take what, what people think that they're going to expect, particularly if you're reading, right? You have to have characters that people can somehow inhabit or see and say, I recognize those as human beings. They're taking actions that are somewhat along the lines that I would, and then something has to happen, or the character has to make a decision that doesn't fit in your current paradigm.

Erik Hoel [00:16:30] Yeah, I'd, it's, it's, it's hard. It's much easier to define the lower end of the aesthetic spectrum than it is to define the higher end, right? So, but, but all you need to do is define one end, because if you define one end, you get the other end for free, right? So this is, again, something that's kind of missed in traditional discussions of this that are, again, this isn't to say that there aren't many other good reasons to, to, to consume fiction, both philosophically like to experience William James Oceanic awe, right? Or, or, or, or, or, or just because you have some sort of cultural justification for why you're doing it, right? But those are always more open to attack than something that has some sort of scientific basis because it's got some sort of scientific basis, then it becomes very hard to kind of attack it using maybe standard techniques. I'm aware that I speak in terms of like attack and defense in terms of ideas, like I'm an analytic philosopher. That's a bad habit that I've picked up. But, but, but yeah, I do think that you have to think about that. Like in in the revelations as, as you know, which is a novel mine that just came out like two weeks ago, you know, there, there is a murder mystery, there is a romance, there are like these classic genre elements, but then at a certain point it, it, it shifts, right? And, and you realize that you're like, maybe you're not even in the genre that you thought you were in, right?

Erik Hoel [00:18:02] And that sort of thing was very important to me. And I'm not saying that all artists should do it, but some of that, the structure of that book came out directly of thinking a little bit about the overfitted brain hypothesis, thinking about like what it is that we want from what, what it is that a reader wants in art and from consuming fiction and so on. So, you know, I, you can't scientifically design a book. Like in the end, the writer has to kind of be the one who has final say over everything. The scientist part of me can't have final say over anything in a novel, but that, that's kind of a, a one of the ways I think about it as being very upstream of, of something.

Vance Crowe [00:18:41] So I just finished your book Revelations and it was fantastic. And I would say it's exactly as you're describing, it's, it's almost like you're walking on sand and you feel it moving underneath you and you think you're reading one type of a book, and then all of a sudden you're on the other side of a dune and you're reading a different type of a book. And I found this sensation to be at first, like kind of like a, a little bit like a dream, right? Like, what is it that I'm doing inside of this book? Where is it that we're going? But at the, at the the core, I thought that one of the things that you did really, really well was explore different consciousnesses of, of all the various characters. So you would be reading the book from the main character's perspective, you could understand his thoughts, his feelings, what was motivating him, and then he would be encountering a person and suddenly the perspective would shift and it would be their perspective, their things going on, the trouble and problems in their life. And I found this to be really, really engaging. And also one that helped me jump out of my own perspective, where you're like, I wonder what's going on in my wife's perspective and how, how my baby is perceiving these things, because that's what it did in a way that would be really difficult to do if you tried to do it on a movie or television.

Erik Hoel [00:20:01] Yeah. So it's, that's, well first of all, thank you. And, and, and, and, and thank God it, it worked. You know, when it come, another reason I think, and, and something I've pointed out, there's another essay called Fiction in the Age of Screens, which is kind of a twin to enter the super sensorium. And in it I talk about the fact that it is objectively true that novels can do things that TV shows cannot do. So media are not interchangeable. I mean, I don't even know why this isn't made like a huge deal of, I mean, you, you have people like, you know, the, the, the medium is the message, you know, and stuff like that, but it's never, that's actually not even developed in, in McClean's work. Like that's not at all, even at what he's talking about. So I became interested in how different artistic medium media have different constraints, or you could say different capabilities. So you can do stuff with a TV show that you can't do in an all for sure, right? Like, like for example, you know, a great aspect of a really good TV show like The Sopranos or Mad Men is, is just like the acting that goes on, right? So there's no acting in a novel 'cause you're just imagining it, right? But, so that provides this a whole dimension that's just completely lacking. But what do novels do, right? Well, a novel is the only artistic medium where you can, where you can enter another person's consciousness so you can actually see, see the world through someone's eyes. And, and not only that novels, particularly like third person novels take place, oh, in a certain sense, first person.

Erik Hoel [00:21:40] But, but if you think about like a third person novel, it takes place in a possible world in which the problem of other minds doesn't exist. So an author can directly refer to, say, an experience like anger or the taste of coffee or something like that. So how, how do you do that in a, in a film? Well, you could, you can, you can do it ham-fisted, right? You can like show the character, take a cup of coffee and be like, Hmm, good coffee, right? And it's like, okay, great. Like we, you've gotten a little bit of access, but frankly, in a TV show, you're in the same epistemological position when you're watching a TV show as you are when you interact with other people in the world, which is that you don't have access to their inside their skulls. But in a novel you do. And that is a unique and incredible capability. I mean, there's, there's no technology that's better than that. And so I do think that there is an argument for novels as a superior artistic medium for certain kinds of stories. And that's really key, right?

Vance Crowe [00:22:39] You know, like as, as I was reading your book, man, I, I truly, I loved your book, and this is, I, i, I just really, there's not enough I could say about it, but one of the thoughts that I had while I was reading it, and because you did such a good job of changing this consciousness is in theater they talk about breaking the fourth wall. So normally in theater you have the wall behind the actors, then you have off stage, left off stage, right? Those are both walls. And then you have the, the fourth wall, which is the audience. And sometimes actors will address the audience as though they know that they're there. And to me, going to a theater when they do that, it really makes me uncomfortable. But even Shakespeare pulled this off, right? Like, there's different ways to incorporate What I realized with reading your book, and I'm an avid reader, I love reading, but the number of times that you change consciousness made me aware of actually a fifth wall, which is actually like the fifth ceiling. It's like when you do a book, you actually can stand on top of people and choose, well, the author chooses for you. This is what's going on in their mind. Now they're looking at this other person. Now you can flip the, the perspective and be in the mind of another person. And it, it was just like, by being able to do that, suddenly you don't have to do, like you had said, the ham-fisted things of showing that somebody maybe displays anger, but really what they're feeling is fear or what they're, what they're reflecting to the world, because we all do that, right? We all have like the external persona that we have, and then the internal and acting is almost never gonna be able to do that because in order to act it, you actually have to physically show it.

Vance Crowe [00:24:18] But by being in a book, you can, you can show the layer behind what's going on in the, in the human being. And truly, you did that in such a, I mean, like profound ways, not least of which were when you would make reference to two people having a sexual relationship and you actually give a glimpse into their sexual relationship and then the, the, the conversation keeps going on. So it's not scintillating for the fact that you wanna know what's going on with them sexually, but you actually understand the depth of their relationship by having had that perspective.

Erik Hoel [00:24:55] Hmm. Yeah. That, that's a, that's a good point. So, well, well, one, I'm super, super glad to hear it. Two, I mean, maybe we should give a brief, I I think this leads in well to like a brief description of the novel itself, because it is designed with this stuff in mind that probably makes me very different than I would say most, not all, but many contemporary, contemporary writers. I, I, you know, I I'm very much someone who considers myself like a writer of ideas, right? So I design stuff from the top down. Now, at a certain point, again, as I said, that top down control about like themes and stuff like that has to let go. And like the writer has to do their thing and

Vance Crowe [00:25:37] Make, so let me, let me stop you for just one second, but I'm gonna ask you to give a, a like a kind of a summary of the book or like kind of an overview. But if you're listening and you're like, oh, but I really wanna read this book, I'm worried about spoilers. It is not possible for someone to give you a spoiler to this book. It is truly great fiction when, when, like, I could tell you exactly what happens at the end, but it wouldn't mean anything to you. So if you're worried about spoilers, don't worry about it. Eric, gimme a summary of your new book, the Revelations,

Erik Hoel [00:26:05] For sure. Thank you. And it's not, because nothing happens stuff, stuff happens. So, you know, it, the revelations, you know, when I was younger, I, I, I was thinking about what made literature special, and this is because I actually grew up in an independent bookstore. So I was surrounded by books. So this thought about, you know, that books allow you access to consciousness. I, again, I've seen it kind of mentioned, but never really deeply explored. And I really hooked onto that as being this, this is the thing that makes literature special. But, and I also became very interested in the scientific search for a theory of consciousness. In fact, that's what I do for, for my day job. I got my PhD in that. So the, the revelations of the novel that takes place in New York, it brings together a bunch of young scientists from across the globe to try to come up with a scientific theory of consciousness. They're, they're part of this program, and one of them dies under mysterious circumstances. And the others form kind of a amateur investigation into the depth of this fellow young scientist. And, you know, eventually the mystery of the murder kind of begins to blend with the mystery of, of consciousness itself. And, you know, with the, a lot of the novel comes from my experiences in the sciences. You know, there's a lot of descriptions of how science actually operates. I wanted to capture its humanness. A lot of science is driven by ego, but also by passion, right?

Erik Hoel [00:27:38] Scientists, scientists get stuff wrong all the time. Scientists mess up. Scientists have sex, scientists smoke cigarettes when they shouldn't, you know, and I, I really wanted to get across what the actual, what it is likeness of being a scientist, particularly a younger scientist. And also what it is like to confront what may be the biggest unsolved mystery, right? Which is how it is that the brain generates experiences. And we simply don't know. We don't have a good agreed upon scientific theory. So that is a huge gap. And you know, one of the books that really influenced me a lot, all, although there are huge differences, and I, and I, you know, hate to compare myself to, to this, but you know, Herman Melville's, Moby Dick and I, I read it like five times during the writing of this. And the reason why is because what Melville found in whaling was something incredibly metaphysical and thematic and deep. Like the act of wailing, the act of killing a creature whose heart is the size of a car is, is so densely cement, semantically loaded and incredible. And I thought the same thing was true in science, like, like building a huge telescope and then making a hole in a monkey's brain and like slowly lowering this massive telescope into this like anesthetized monkey whose, whose brain you've just opened. It's dark. It's, it's weird. And it's incredible because you're confronting like the ontology of the universe

Vance Crowe [00:29:09] Yeah. And the, the, the blending of the, the reality. So the thing that struck me about your book with the scientists is you really captured what it's like to be 27, to have the world like think that you're great, you've been on the cover of magazines, you've gotten articles published, and yet you're still just a kid, you're drinking too much, you're going out with your friends and trying to find the, you know, like the good experience by having shots. And you haven't started a family and you're looking out at other adults and you're seeing the problems that they, they have and what they gave up. And so it, to be able to embed that all into a deep reflection about like what is consciousness, which I think for most people that are spend most of their lives thinking consciousness, like it's just, it's just me being alert, right? But then like you peel that away just a little bit and you start running into all sorts of problems about like, why is it that I can have a conversation with myself and have that be an entire loop for me?

Erik Hoel [00:30:08] Yeah. I think that, you know, particularly when it comes to like being a young scientist and working on a problem like this, it's, it's also immensely exciting. I mean, I hope that one thing that the book does is inspire younger scientists to, to go into this field and maybe try to hopefully solve this, this problem. But, you know, at the same time, when you're writing a book like this, it's very easy to just end up doing like a Michael Creon sort of book, right? Where it's, it's, and, and I love Michael Creon, so this is not, this is not a, a dig, but it, it is not, it's not the kind of writing that I do, which is kind of like techno adventure. I think that this is the sort of book where, again, the genre thing, it almost looks like it's gonna be a techno adventure because they're scientists and there's all this, this stuff. But I think, you know, it really ends up being about the, the characters and, and, and, and what they go through and, and finding characters who were kind of interesting enough and kind of romantic enough writ large to stand against the kind of rational analytic science that's all throughout the book was hugely important. Like the, the main character, his name is, is, is Kirk Seran, because he's, he's very similar to, to, so ard and, and you know, he, he, he's, he's almost monomania obsessed with trying to solve this problem much to his own detriment and, and often the, the detriment to people around him, right?

Erik Hoel [00:31:47] He can, he can be a real, he can be a real asshole. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that.

Vance Crowe [00:31:54] Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're writing about these people. I mean, one of the thoughts that I had, because I've never read a book knowing that at the end of the time when I'm done, I'm gonna get to talk with the author. And so the whole time I'm sitting there wondering like, are these different, you know, Damons inside of you, are these all voices that you yourself hear? Are they subjective experiences that you've had by witnessing other people? Like you created really distinct characters, like I think oftentimes authors don't, aren't always able to make their characters so distinguishable, but yours really were, and so it wondered to, it made me wonder, how do you generate this many different, you know, pure and complete voices?

Erik Hoel [00:32:38] Yeah. I, I think that, well, you, you, me, you mentioned talking to yourself, right? So that's what a novelist job is, right? You just, you're talking to yourself, right? And it's like you're, you know, like you're on stage on a play and you're, you're, you're saying a line with like the happy mask on, you know, and then you run backstage and you put the sad mask on, you come out and you say the response, and that's very much what being a writer is like. And I think it's a, I think it would be uninteresting if, you know, the, the main character Kirk, you know, he and I went to the same, we, we both went to Wisconsin for graduate school, right? You know, he, he and I may appear similar in, in many ways, but we're also different in many ways. And I think the same thing is true about other characters. Like what you want is you want, I I do think that the spark of reality can only come from reality in the end. So, you know, it's like this little magic spark. And so in the end, all characters, even in a fiction, have to be based on something real, even though they're not real people, but they have to be based on something real. They have to be based on like a perspective and understanding or, or, or, or a bunch of kind of mini sparks that you've put together. And I'll just briefly talk about one character, which is Carmen, who is probably in, in my opinion, like the, one of the better, if not the best scientist in the novel. You know, I, Kirk, Kirk is the one kind of monomania obsessed with solving the problem of consciousness. Carmen is much more of an incrementalist, but she's a very good scientist.

Erik Hoel [00:34:10] I think it's mentioned in the, in the book that she like just had a nature paper come out, you know, she's also like 20, 27 I think in the, in, in the book. And, but she, you know, she is a character who represents the mind body problem, right? So because her background was that when she was younger, her, her mother kind of forced her into pageantry. And then later, later into modeling, because she was kind of born almost with like this living in this biological robot, essentially, that's just stunningly almost, almost freakishly attractive. And so her mother, of course thinks that this is gonna be the best career for her, but Carmen actually turns out to be like a very rigorous, logical, skeptical person who's kind of inside this body. And she, she faces like literally a, a, a mind body problem where she has to kind of leave the world of appearances and, and move to studying the world behind the world of appearances. Now, I am not a model turned neuroscientists, right? So I've, I have, you know, that, that that's not at all who I am, right? But I think that actually Carmen has a lot of parts of me, particularly the more like raw kind of skeptical parts. And you like, like for example, yes, Kirk and I both went to, to, you know, Wisconsin for graduate school. Well, I worked at Columbia, Carmen went to Columbia, right? So, you know, e everything is drawn from, from something specific. And these characters are often, you know, designed, you know, again, sort of the analytic side of me is like, who, who can, can I have a character who like literally is faces like a walking mind body problem every day?

Erik Hoel [00:35:52] And you know, by the way, I think that women often do, right? Like far more than men, I mean, in a sense, like the mind body problem for men is this very intellectual thing for, for women it's like a lived thing, right? Where they're constantly juggling how do I look versus what ideas am I presenting, right? And so that, that was all stuff I wanted to capture in the Carmen character. And again, getting that right involves a lot of research like outside myself. But I think that any little spark that makes the character work in the end, you know, it, it, it does come from me and I feel like attached to these characters. Not that I love all of them, but I feel attached to them.

Vance Crowe [00:36:27] So let's talk about things like the mind body problem at a, at a greater level of detail. When people struggle, like a regular person thinks about consciousness, what's the first step they take towards realizing like, oh, this isn't quite as simple as what I originally thought?

Erik Hoel [00:36:45] Yeah, I, I think in the book, 1, 1, 1 way to ex one way to say it is that there, there is no set of laws or, or mappings that we currently possess that can tell you what someone is experiencing and why they're experiencing it based off of their brain state. That may sound very surprising, right? Because you may think, well, wait a minute, there's neuroimaging, there's all these things that people do, right? It's like, yes, but that all is just random correlational stuff. None of that is about any sort of like proposed lawful connection between certain neural events and experiences. You know, maybe to get an intuition about the problem of consciousness, the best way to think about it is, you know, it goes all the way back to liveness, which is, if you kind of zoomed into the brain, right? And you were able to walk around, right? In someone's brain, you, you would see mechanisms, you would see neurons firing action potentials, you would see dynamics. But you, there are no experiences there, right? Like, it, you could reasonably say, well, why doesn't this all like go on in the dark with no associated stream of consciousness? Like what a weird thing, like why is there even an associated stream of consciousness at all to, to this, you know, gray cauliflower, three pound cauliflower looking thing? And I think that that's, that, that's a perfectly reasonable question. I mean, there are some people who I don't know, don't think that they are conscious or don't seem to, to, to believe that there's some sort of problem to be solved.

Erik Hoel [00:38:26] I mean, it, it becomes a very obvious problem when you talk about things like sudden wake up during anesthesia where you're under anesthesia, you're paralyzed, you can't, can't communicate. And sometimes people wake up 'cause they haven't had enough anesthesia. Now there you're experiencing the pain of surgery, you know, at that time, and that's gonna be a very traumatic thing. But there's like a fact of the matter about whether or not you're experiencing pain regardless of if you're paralyzed and can't report, you know, or anything like that. So there's some sort of fact of the matter about experiences and whether or not they're present or absent. And there are all sorts of medical cases where that's necessary to know. So, and I think that that sort of, but, but it is a mystery. And I think that, you know, within the novel, which is again, operating via this, this, this murder mystery of the death of one of these young scientists, which, which Kirk and Carmen kind of pursue that e even that mystery is kind of made more mysterious by its connection to consciousness than the strange events that, that they experienced themselves.

Vance Crowe [00:39:32] On this podcast, we often talk about like the inner voices that you have, right? So you start a habit of jogging, and then by the third day you've got a voice that pops up in your head and it says like, nah man, you worked really hard yesterday. You don't have to do that. Right? And, and then we talked about, you know, like the voice that prompts you to go take action when things are difficult. When you are talking about consciousness, are you talking about these voices, this kind of narrative structure in your mind?

Erik Hoel [00:40:02] No, because I think, I mean, with, for human, for human consciousness, yes. Because we experience the world in a very language forward way. I mean, I, I'm there, there's something called the Sapper Wharf hypothesis, which is this idea that the language you speak and its certain peculiarities influences how you perceive the world. I, I think that's probably true to some degree, but, but not hugely. But, but, but it's certainly true that ha having language versus not changes your conscious experience. But like a dog, I think there's almost no doubt has conscious experience. I mean, you know, it's responsive. It, it, it has the same sort of mental states that, that we have. They can be anxious, they can be angry, they can be happy, they can experience pleasure and pain, like very obviously. And it's that sort of simple sensations that I think are the most perplexing because there's almost, there's very little complexity there, right? It's just like, okay, so the dog is experiencing pain because it's stepped on a thorn right now. Now the question is now there's, there's very little higher level cognitive stuff going on, right? But they might be experiencing pain as bad as we experience pain, right? I mean, it might be just as intense or, or just as, as dramatic for them. And so the question is then, well, how is it or why is it, or under what rules is it such that their neural activity is, is generating or correlated to, or the same as this, this experience?

Erik Hoel [00:41:35] And it's very unclear, again, like the, the, the correspondence there is, is unknown. But I think, you know, the problem of consciousness can almost be stripped away to just like, why are there sensations at all? Why? Like we, we have an artificial neural network. Artificial neural networks can, a single layer artificial neural network can approximate any function. We know that mathematically most people would not say that single layer artificial neural network is conscious. Like, you know, it's one time step where the next, the next a bunch of nodes just updates, yet it can perform almost any function. So the, the question is kind of like, why aren't we like that? Like, like why, why, why, why isn't everything going on in the dark? And there are some people who think that we're just fooled about this. And that actually show shows up. You know, in, in the book some of the characters, you know, all of the characters, you know, from, from, from, from, from, from Kirk to Carmen, to to, to many of the other characters all have a specific view about consciousness. And some are like more horrific and lovecraftian almost. And some are like beautiful, like, like, you know, car Carmen is, is I think kind of deep down like pseudo religious and, and very open to spirituality. And so her thoughts about consciousness are often like, quite, quite, quite nice. But other characters who maybe think that everyone's just like a biological meat puppet and there's actually no stream and everyone around them is just confused.

Erik Hoel [00:43:07] Well, they can also use that to justify their own actions and justify kind of, you know, their inability to get along with people and stuff like that. 'cause it's just another, another cellular robot.

Vance Crowe [00:43:18] I, I see this being incredibly popular right now, that consciousness is an illusion. So if I were to go out onto Twitter right now and start talking about it, people like Yosha Bach or Lee Cronin would say no. Like, your consciousness is just, it's entirely an illusion. And, and it's one of those things that's like almost impossible for me to even entertain the idea that my consciousness isn't real. So like, I think there are a lot of people that when they hear somebody say, your consciousness is an illusion, they just kind of throw up their hands saying like, how could that even mean anything at all? Because I am aware of myself. So how can you say that this is an illusion?

Erik Hoel [00:43:57] Yeah, it is. It is just like bad metaphysics versus versus good science. So bad metaphysics is like ities being, or like Xeno being like, xeno be better. Like Xeno being like, there's no such thing as as motion, right? Because I shoot my arrow at the target, it has to get halfway there, it has to get next there, it has to get another halfway there. So there's an infinite number of steps. So how can the arrow ever reach the target that's actually try to come up with an answer to that? Like, like if, if you're in, if you're in a bar and someone like really pushes Dino's paradox on you, it's actually quite difficult to argue against Zeno's impossibility of motion, right? It's actually, it's actually a pretty good argument. But of course there's motion. Like it's absurd, right? Like, it, it, it is just like you, you have this kind of like clever argument that's like obviously untrue, right? And, and you're denying something that it doesn't even make sense to deny, right? Like if there's no motion, there's no change. How can you even make an argument? Because to make an argument, you, you have to move through certain steps, right? So, okay, so you can't move through steps. So how did you just make a coherent argument, right? You just saw it off the branch that you're sitting on. It's this incoherent. So that's by the way, probably the quickest and best way to diffuse the Xeno paradox. So the same thing is true for, for any of these people, right? Like they, they, they're just bad meta physicians who aren't trusting their own like sense data. Like the number one sense data that you have, the number one, the piece of in controversial empirical evidence that you have is that you are conscious of certain things.

Erik Hoel [00:45:31] So these things are basically them being like, well, maybe we can, I don't quite understand how my stream of consciousness can fit into the material world, which is a metaphysical conception that everything is like atoms and void, right? So they're like, well, I'm democratized and I can't figure out where this goes, so why don't we just throw this away? It is terrible, terrible, terrible reasoning. But a lot of people do it. I mean, I don't really take it seriously. It's not a serious position in, in my view, but it, it's an interesting position, right? And so, so, you know, so again, that, that's with my, my scientist hat on, right? Just being like, no, no, no. But from a writer, it's actually a really interesting position, right? Because like, what, what do you do if you actually believe this? And how does it shape your, your actions? And also like, isn't it like really dark? I mean, you know, something that's thrown off in the novel is I think someone contemplating, you know, the great filter of like alien civilizations. Like, why haven't we met any aliens? Well, maybe it's because every civilization eventually figures out that it's not actually conscious and this whole thing has been an illusion and they all just like kill one another basically. Because what's the point, right? You, you're just left with religious fundamentalists who like won't even pay, like, pay any attention and nihilists, right? So it's just terrible. So maybe that explains it, right? 'cause it's kind of self canceling. And so anyway, so the writer in me, you know, really likes these sort of positions, but they're, they're bad metaphysics.

Vance Crowe [00:47:00] So you have written about all sorts of other things that I'm really interested in. Things like you are referring to Bitcoin as a, as a sort of hyper object, right? So it's interesting to me that you're in this area of consciousness and you're writing novels, but you're also making observations about current phenomena. What, what, what made you like decide to tread into this area?

Erik Hoel [00:47:29] Well, cryptocurrencies are probably the one interesting technological development in my lifetime, right? So if you think about it, you know, when I was born 1988, most of the stuff that defines the modern world is well on its way, you know, you know, okay, home computers weren't that common, but by the time I was six they were somewhat common. You know, the internet had just beginning, but it was there. People were very much talking about the internet in the early nineties, right? You know, cell phones came on the scene and that was a huge change. But again, I think a lot of the scene had been set, like cryptocurrencies come from nowhere, right? It's literally an anonymous maniac. And I say that in a good way, you know, who's like, okay, I'm gonna put this crazy scheme together, which is Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto. And one that's an incredibly interesting, again, as like a writer as like a narrative. It's, that's so interesting. I mean, I've toyed with like novel ideas that involve Satoshi just 'cause I love the, the, he's, you know, he's probably gonna be the richest person on earth, you know, if he sold the keys to his wallet, right? But, you know, so, so that is very interesting to me. And, and, and, and so I, you know, I I I'm, maybe this is a stereotype, like I'm in it for the technology, you know, like I, I I think that the, that the technology behind cryptocurrencies is very cool. And I'm very interested in hopefully the world looking significantly different when I die than when I was born.

Erik Hoel [00:49:04] Like that is a big hope for me. That the world that I die in is that is very interesting and different. And maybe that, that that's a colony on Mars and everything is, you know, if, if, if there's a colony on Mars and everything is cryptocurrency and the culture has changed a lot, then I'll be like, Hey, you know, I had a good century hopeful, hopefully long run, you know, but, but if, if I die and it's just all still people with phones yelling at one another when we're stuck here on earth and we've got no new monetary forms, right? And just better and better bits, it's not very interesting to me. So anyways, that's a very broad explanation.

Vance Crowe [00:49:38] No, I mean, I think that leads really well into the concept that I wanted to discuss further with you, which is the digital commonwealth that you put forward as this kind of concept. So, so I am very interested in cryptographic currencies. I think the ability to be able to store value without having somebody be able to inflate it away, I think having an immutable ledger where we can prove that somebody had an idea and they placed it here, and now everybody can see that over a long period of time. But the jump in my mind to a, a truly digital world, or one in which we're describing it as a digital commonwealth is a really far one for me. But I like the fact that you've put a name to it because it seems to me that you can start building around something once a name is there. What did you mean by this concept of digital Commonwealth?

Erik Hoel [00:50:28] Yeah, I, I wanna say that of, of all the stuff we've talked about, I I would say digital Commonwealth, definitely others, many others have, have, have talked about it before me. And, you know, I'm, I I'm thinking very specifically of some of the early efforts of alternative cryptocurrencies to, to Bitcoin. So things that have like voting systems where you can change the, the state of the blockchain. What I see those as are basically proto proto governments where, you know, what you're government of is just the chain. 'cause that's the only thing. But I don't think it's crazy to think that eventually having a government that's on chain where people can vote and they can pass proposals and they can do these various things, eventually begins to spill into the rest of life. And actually, I'm, I'm very interested to see what happens with cryptocurrency, particularly as the prices continue to rise. Because I think culturally it'll be a big shift. The last one of one, a really big culture change that, that also happened in my lifetime was that nerds became cool. So when I was growing up, no one knew what Lord of the Rings was like, right? Like, Lord, the Rings, it was before Lord the Rings was a movie, right? Nobody knew what Lord the Rings was. Right? And, you know, and that began to change because all these big h Hollywood style movies came out. But also like, game of Thrones, like what most popular TV show, like Game of Thrones, right? Game of Thrones is crazy nerdy fantasy.

Erik Hoel [00:52:00] If you think, if you think about from the perspective of 1991, right? And what changed? The nerds got rich computers, made all the nerds rich. So what does everyone like now? They like what nerds liked, right? Because that's where all the money was. So nerd culture became American culture very broadly. And I think that that has had disadvantages and advantages so that, that that, that that's led to some maybe not so great cultural changes and some really great cultural changes. And I wonder if with cryptocurrencies, the kind of libertarian ethos that, you know, the people who are getting rich right now in cryptocurrencies. Yes. Now finally it's like big companies and stuff like that. But for a long time it's been like kind of like weird, like political weirdos. And I don't mean that in a really negative way, but also like sex workers and like people like who, who are, who think about the people who are accumulating cryptocurrencies. They are not like the people who have, who have gotten rich in other, you know, land rushes. Right? Well,

Vance Crowe [00:52:59] Because the only way that you could do it would be to be, you know, going against the orthodoxy, right? So in order to even get into Bitcoin, and I remember I was talking about it back in 2012, my buddy Rob Long and I would act, were actually invited to go give talks. And it, we were like a novelty carnival act when we would go to explain this thing and people would be like, yes, we understand that you're saying this thing exists, but why would anyone ever want it? And now fast forward, you know, 10 years, not even 10 years, and, and now you see that people, the, they not only see why you would want it, but the outliers that you were saying before have now become the the kind of cool people. And man, your point about the nerd culture, the nerds got rich. I mean, it really goes along with Renee Gerard's kind of mimetic desire idea, like right, what I don't know what to want, so I'm gonna look at what other people want that are higher up in the status hierarchy than me, and then I'm gonna want those same things. That's totally true about nerd culture. And I, gosh, I really hope it's true about libertarian culture.

Erik Hoel [00:54:04] Yeah. Like I said, there, there may be so, so, you know, depending on where you are, right, there may be advantages or disadvantages, but I do think that there's the potential for that happening. Like, and maybe, maybe it's time that we have, like, I, like, you know, weird, you know, me, it's time that we had like, like really weird risk takers who are really anti-censorship and, you know, sex workers with huge old fans. And those are the people making like all the money right now, you know, because they've been accepting Ethereum or whatever for the past couple of years. Years and, and, you know, I, I like it is different. At least it's different, right? Like at least it's not, at least it's not, you know, wall Street is making a killing on this stuff. It's like weird other people. And hopefully that will, it could, it could help energize the culture in certain ways, in certain ways it could help energy.

Vance Crowe [00:54:57] Yeah, I mean, like, I think one of the ways that could be really important is changing the way that people build relationships with their employers. You know, like we have gone through this evolution where the way that we built it was we built factories and then people had to have this very hierarchical structure and, and people now come into work and the way you get a full day of work is that you come in for eight hours a day. While I guess, you know, COVID kind of changed all that, but I'm really hoping that the bureaucratic structure that I think a lot of people, the, one of the reasons they watch entertainment to go back to the beginning of our conversation is because there's so whittled away with boring, mundane things. And we don't realize just how taxing it is to be bored all day so that when we come home, the relaxation from the boredom is to get on a ski slope where all of the runs have already been run down. You just, just get on one and ride it all the way down. So I hope crypto allows people to break out of the mundaneness of life and, and allows them to charge for their services in some different capacity than what we're doing now.

Erik Hoel [00:56:00] I, in regards to this very interesting point about people coming and, and watching tv, right? Coming home and watching tv, which I think is almost like a near universal human experience, at least in, in, in like first world countries. You know, that I, I, I've shifted my perspective of that. 'cause I used to think, oh, people do it, you know, because, because it's easy or something like that. And it is like, that's certainly true. But now when I'm thinking about it through the lens of like the overfitted brain hypothesis, it's like, well, if you have a very boring the job that's day-to-day the same, what what are you gonna do? You're gonna seek out artificial dreams because you, you by the way, humans have a dream drive. If you, if you prevent people from dreaming, they will dream more the next night, right? So it's called REM rebound. So we literally have, it's like hunger, right? You ha you, you have base biological drives. One of them is the need for sleep as is the need for sleep. And within that need for sleep, there's also the need for dreams specifically, like specifically dreams. You will dream more the next night if you were just dream deprived from the dreaming part of sleep. And you know that if you, if you think about people coming and like watching TV after they kind of trudge home, you know, from like their, they'll say incredibly boring, same, same nine to five job. Maybe what they're doing is they're like, please artificial dream, help me, help me. Right? And, and then we're like, well, here's a bunch of, you know, terrible tv. And, and it's not, it's not, that's not helpful.

Erik Hoel [00:57:32] And again, maybe that's part of the defining this lower aspect of, you know, the aesthetic spectrum. I mean, one of my goals with the revelations was to give people something that was as unlike that, that, you know, it still has to function. It has to function as a novel. It has to function as a murder mystery. It has to function as something that is readable and page turning and interesting, right? So you have to spend a lot of time, you know, on, on just the architecture of that. But I wanted to give something that people had just never really even had before. And that felt novel.

Vance Crowe [00:58:08] I, I mean, it's interesting. I never actually made the connection between the word novel, like as in novelty search or going out and finding new things in novel, a book. But it is the act of trying to find something new and unique and, and, and allows your brain to go in different paths, you know, a function of your enter. The Sensorium article for me was, I, I have an eight month old with nine month now, and I really became interested in trying to expose her to as many novel things as I could because during COVID, we were just in the house and I started to realize that if I did something as simple as take her outside and show her a tree, she would sleep better. And so I started being like, I am going to try and do this as much as I possibly can. And so I go to the art museum now whenever it's raining on Friday afternoons. And it's, it's, it's, it's been a fascinating experience, not least of which is I try and name the colors to her to say them out loud. And I realize like, I actually don't have very many words for a whole bunch of experiences. Everything from smells to various colors. And the more that I focused on that, the more they have entered my own dreams. And I find this to be like something incredible about this concept that you're talking about with overfitting

Erik Hoel [00:59:29] That, that's really interesting and I'm super glad to hear it. I love the idea of like, ba babies looking at, looking at art. I think that, that, that is like the pure, at best art experience, right? Yeah. I, I I think that that's fascinating. I, you know, I'm a big proponent of people trying to make sure that they dream. I mean, I, you know, the hypothesis by the way that I'm talking about is called a hypothesis for a very good reason. Like, I literally just put it together this year. So it could be completely wrong, you know, that's how science works could be completely wrong. But even so, you know, I'm, I even like, in my own life, I've tried to figure out ways to make sure that even if I want to like drink or, or, or, or have a weed gummy, which are probably my, my two main, my two main vices, thankfully no longer cigarettes, you know, if I do that, I try to figure out ways to do it without really interrupting time, time spent dreaming, because I, I really think that there's a very good reason we evolved to do that. And also, but I think even more like sensible is to people to take that logic into their own life and be like, all, every fiction I consume is a dream. And what do I wanna be dreaming? Do I wanna be dreaming about really, really boring repetitive stereotype stuff? Or do I wanna be dreaming, you know, in art, right? And, and, and I think that there's, it's very difficult to stop yourself from consuming from the entrance, from the super sensorium.

Erik Hoel [01:01:04] Just like, it's incredibly difficult to not have the convenience of shopping a supermarket. Like it's, it's really, it's too much to ask to people to be like, Hey, don't shop at a supermarket. Hey, don't, don't consume from the super soor. Well, you can't like, like you will. But if you go in, if you, if you have in the back of your mind that maybe there is a really important distinction, like for your own consciousness to consume art versus not, then that can help guide your decisions and provide a bit of that natural immunity towards the age in which we live.

Vance Crowe [01:01:38] The, the, I like that idea of it being a natural immunity. And I can tell you man, like I've been working on some really hard problems and one of the things I do is right before I go to bed at night, I try and diagram the idea, and I find that at night I'm just tired and I don't want to do it. But if I do that, and I've exposed myself to really interesting things throughout the day, then I wake up in the morning and the solution is just revealed to me. It's just, it's just there. And you go to draw the diagram again and it's, it's so much easier. And once you have that, like you were talking about not, not taking a gummy or or drinking that all of a sudden gave me the carrot that I'd never had before about avoiding things like alcohol or THC or cigarettes, because really all you were giving up before is, oh, I might be tired tomorrow. But if you're giving up like answers to complicated problems, all of a sudden you're like, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want, I don't want to give that up. That's way too valuable to me to give up. So it's, it's worth it to me to avoid the vice.

Erik Hoel [01:02:37] Yeah. But there, there may be an argument from the opposite perspective that I've heard some people mention and I've thought about myself, which is that, you know, if you do think about the brain as constantly kind of learning too, well then sometimes you really wanna shake it up and maybe you want to do like psilocybin or something, right? Like, like maybe, maybe you really wanna have a very out of distribution experience. And actually I think, you know, a lot of the benefits that people have talked about for things like hallucinogens or, or other drugs in general, I mean by prob people probably don't do positive. Like this is again, a very humanness of science. There's probably not very many people who go into a study on like alcohol consumption and be like, let's look at the benefits. That's probably not very often, but maybe like if you, if somebody rarely drinks, you know, the experience of being drunk is probably a very different sort of structural phenomenological structure. And actually maybe it's kind of good for you to occasionally experience of, of something very different because it will literally help you generalize your, your own experiences, your own concepts and, and all these other things. Again, this isn't advice or, or anything like that. It's completely speculative, but you know, you know, but I do think that thinking about things like that, you know, can, can kind of help. Although, you know, I, I'll be honest, I I am, I'm always very leery of going anywhere beyond my expertise and like, you know, contemporary health stuff is probably, probably beyond it because,

Vance Crowe [01:04:09] So you, you bring up the, the very good point of it's become popular to, for people to talk about taking things like psilocybin or d different really psychoactive drugs in order to be able to give yourself some new experiences or new insights. I think Michael Pollen refers to it as like shaking up the snow globe so you can ski down the hill and not get stuck in the old tracks. As, as somebody that's spent a lot of time in this space. What do you think the pros and cons are of experimenting it with this, this level of drug?

Erik Hoel [01:04:49] So I'm a research professor at a university, so, you know, I probably, you know, I'll just say that I, I don't, I I don't have any, you know, highly particular, you know, advice for, for anyone like looking to try a particular drug or anything like that. With that said, you know, I think like the Silicon Valley culture of like thinking about this stuff is, is, is kind of interesting and cool. Like I, I'm glad people are, are, are kind of thinking about it, you know, I I would say as a consciousness researcher, someone who scientifically studies consciousness, I, and probably many others in the field are very leery of talking about psychedelics because psychedelics are interesting. I don't think that they tell us anything about consciousness in particular. So I I I, in other words, you could do, you could develop a science of consciousness just fine if no one had ever discovered hallucinogens, right? Like, there, there, there, there's nothing in particular about them that allows you to, you know, develop. Like, yeah, it's interesting to put people in a neuroimaging scanner like some people do and check out what happens to the level of complexity of their neural activity while they've undergoing various, you know, amounts of halls. That's cool, but it's not at all necessary to develop a scientific theory. So, you know, I, what I try to do and, and what other people I think in the field try to do is that is just because there has been this close connection to be like, you know, you don't need to be like a psycho knot to, to study consciousness. Scientifically, as I said, there's just as much mystery in like why a dog feels pain from stepping, stepping on an acorn and getting it caught in their little pot as there is in, you know, why it is that you're experiencing the birth of the universe at Burning Man after you've taken massive amounts of drugs, right?

Erik Hoel [01:06:37] Those are two equally epistemologically according to like contemporary science. Those are two equally mysterious things, right? Like we don't have a good theory as to why either happens. So it's a lot easier to figure out the dog one because you can do all sorts of controls and you know, stuff like that. Hard to figure out the other one. But I think both are just like how our experience is related to neural events.

Vance Crowe [01:06:59] Man, I did not expect you to, to say that that was a, that was a novel answer Eric, I have had a great chance to, to read your book and your articles. If people wanted to find your book, where would they go to do that?

Erik Hoel [01:07:14] Yeah, you can just type in the revelations, Eric, ERIK, Hoel, HOEL into Google and it will bring you right there. You can go to my website, which is eric p hoel.com or you can find me on Twitter. But I'm, I'm pretty easily Googleable and yeah, if, if people are interested in, you know, maybe being, hopefully not being as quite as overfit as they currently are, as all of us currently are, then maybe they can check it out and it might do you some good in that area, or at least that's the, that's the goal.

Vance Crowe [01:07:46] Well, it's a high one, 100% high recommendation for me. It is a wild ride. I think anybody that has had adult experiences in their life will be able to relate to many, but not all of what's going on there. And so it's, it's, I, I don't know. I think you did a great job and Eric, I would love to have you back on the podcast again to keep talking.

Erik Hoel [01:08:06] Yeah, absolutely. Conversation appreciated.