Tähenduse teejuhid (Maps of Meaning) is an Estonian language monthly newspaper that is distributed with the country's largest daily Postimees. The first issue came out in September 2020. The centre of gravity of each number is a ca 4000-word interview. We have been fortunate enough to converse with (in the order of appearance) David Fuller, Charles Eisenstein, Merlin Sheldrake, Jeremy Narby, Jules Evans, Richard Tarnas, Rupert Sheldrake, Mark Vernon, David Abram, Matthew Fox, Paul Kingsnorth, Regina Hess, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, Kyriacos Markides, David Lorimer, David Luke, Dean Radin and Robin Hull. While a couple of these interviews have already been made public on this channel, the most of them have appeared only in the newspaper. In this English language playlist we shall make them public for the first time. We start with the spring season of 2023. The interview with Dean Radin, the honorary member of Scientific and Medical Network, appeared in the 35th issue of the paper (October 2023). Here are seven highlights from this interview. The first comes from my brief introduction, the other are direct quotes.
1. At the end of the two-hour podcast I asked my interlocutors to comment on Einstein’s words that he has had much more to take from Dostoevsky than from Gauss. “Einstein has also said that the worst quality a scientist can have is a lack of imagination,” answered Jaak Kikas. Here he is on the same page with the honorary member of the Scientific and Medical Network Dean Radin who maintains that modern science sometimes suffers from a regrettable lack of imagination.
2. Children like to read fairy tales and science fiction. These kinds of stories are saturated with the idea that we are more than the everyday world. And part of the more is what we would describe as a magical thinking - that what you are thinking in your head is reflected in some way in the world at large. Although as adults we focus our attention primarily on the everyday world, something of the magical thinking of childhood will be preserved in all of us.
3.This entails some risk - sociological risk, financial risk, all kinds of risks. It also means that you cannot worry too much about what other people think. I find it boring to do conventional research. If there are a lot of people doing research in robotics or AI, what could I possibly add to that? Why do you need me to add to something where there are already thousands of people doing it? I can make my contribution most likely in an area where there are very few people doing something. That is probably a better use of my time.
4. In the reigning paradigm it is possible to explain such phenomena only in two ways: either you made a mistake or you are a fraud. However, given that we have pretty good empirical evidence that these things really do exist, there has now emerged the third possibility: there is something wrong with the basic assumptions on which our contemporary civilization is based. From a philosophical perspective this should not be surprising because every philosophy is a set of assumptions. Some of the assumptions can be tested and found to be correct or incorrect, some of them stand just by fiat.
5. Impending paradigm change may well have a very strong impact on the way that our civilization works. Because if you are your brain and the brain dies, then there can be no afterlife. If you are more than your brain then we do not know what happens. The possibilities arise that were not thought of before. I think we are heading in that direction. Science resists it because the idea of survival of consciousness is very close to religious concepts. And science really does not like religious faith at all. It wants something that is testable.
6. You see famous people saying that this psychic stuff cannot be true because if it is, we have to throw away all the textbooks and start over again. To which I would say no. We simply have to recognize that the textbooks are valid within their domain. We did not throw away classical physics just because we found that it is a subset of quantum mechanics and relativity. Every new discipline in science is a subset of what people used to think was fundamental. All we are saying here is that this is true even for the subset of reality that we call materialism. It is very effective. It makes no sense to throw it away at all. We are simply expanding this into a larger way of thinking about reality.
7. The interaction between mind and matter is modulated by belief, focus and lots of other things, which is why it tends to be pretty weak, but it is nevertheless real. That is why I have moved from full blown idealism towards dual aspect monism in the last few years. It is an easier narrative for a mainstream scientist to follow. I say to them: materialism is actually a pretty good philosophy. It works but it is not the only thing. It is part of something much bigger.
With best wishes,
Hardo