They can do everything we can do or will be able to do everything we can do, but they don't have any state of being. They don't exist for themselves. They're all just like my garbage collector. It doesn't feel like anything to be an LLM. They will never be what we are conscious.

First off, great to meet you, at least virtually, and, it's been twenty five years since we were together at Caltech. How how are you doing?

I'm well. It's snowing here in Seattle, which is unusual.

Christophe, so today, we're, here to talk about your really legendary career and the contributions that you've made maybe more on the physics side to the theory of consciousness, etcetera, than you have talked about in the past. But I wanna start as I often do with doing that thing you're never supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. So they say not to do that, but, what else do you have to go on if you've, never read the book? So if you'd show the book, there it is, Then I Am, Myself, The World. And this is kind of an exploration. It's almost like a travelogue at least in some ways with a near death experience. I wonder if you could tell us the origin of the title, the subtitle, and the the artwork is yeah. I could probably understand it, but tell me besides the fact that it's the University of California colors, what does the title and subtitle represent?

So the title comes actually not from a near death experience, but from a different experience, a mystical experience. And it's taken from it's translated from the germ Sebs Dan Benichte Welt. It's from Richard Wagner opera, the second act, Tristan Isolde, in which Tristan Isolde, the eponymous lovers, fall into love and they try to overcome the individuality. So Tristan wants to be become Isolde, and Isolde wants to become Tristan. And then they have this moment of rapture written to some of the most amazing music in the western canon where they become one with each other and with the universe. So it's one of the defining aspects of a mystical experience or spiritual experience when suddenly you feel the borders between you. I know I'm me, and when I touch this cup, that's not me. Even if I shake your hand where to shake your hand, I can recognize that's a different hand.

That hand doesn't belong to my body. So in a certain circumstances, these boundaries can dissolve, and then you have you can have this extraordinary experience where whatever remains of your consciousness, there isn't a self anymore in the conventional sense. There isn't Christophe anymore. Instead, what there is, there's this identity with everything in the universe. You become one with the universe. And typically, also, space and time very often also disappears. In other words, the moment isn't too short or too long. It simply is.

And the very perception of space can also disappear under these extraordinary circumstances. So that's what the title, all alludes to.

Now when you talk about consciousness being the foundation of existence, I'm get frustrated because I still don't have a good notion of what consciousness is and I've talked to many of the leading luminaries, your colleagues, and many of the top luminaries and it seems to be this tautological thing that either you can only define self referentially or it is something so simplistic that we can say that everything participates in consciousness. So how do you as a consciousness professional, what do you think of as consciousness? What is the base layer of reality when it comes to consciousness?

Do you hear me?

Yeah. I hear you.

Yeah. You hear me?

Yes. I hear you.

What is hearing? Hearing is a conscious experience. It's it's not only behavior. Yeah. When I hear you, you ask me a question, I can respond, but it's just that conscious perception of hearing. And there's nothing in the laws of physics that tells us that systems hear. If you look at quantum mechanics, there isn't anything about hearing or seeing. And and hearing is just one instance of a trillion different varieties of conscious experience. It's seeing, hearing, feeling my body, being bored, being in love, hating, dreading, imagining, dreaming.

Those are all different conscious states. You cannot imagine. In fact, many people Schrodinger has written very, evocative about that and Einstein as well. You cannot be a scientist without accessing the world by seeing it, by looking at a scope, by hearing other people talking about it, by doing manipulations of mathematics in your head, all of those involve conscious experience. So conscious experience is the is the omphalos. It's a center of existence. To me as a conscious being, when I go tonight to sleep, all we all do that. Particularly in the early phase of the night, you go to what's called deep sleep or delta sleep, which is characterized by these deep waves or at low frequency, two to four hertz crisscrossing the brain.