Hi Bill.
Cory here from Vermont, the beautiful state
of Vermont.
I'm a huge fan by the way.
Thank you for everything that you do.
So my one question to you is I've been reading
a lot of things about spirituality and electric
impulses, you know, really I guess stemming
through our entire anatomy and kind of the
concept of that.
Our universe is us and we are our universe.
A little out there I get it.
I know.
My question is to you, what do you think about
that?
Thank you.
Cory, this is a great question.
We, in the skeptical community, are very skeptical
that there's any life force running through
us other than chemical energy that makes us
go.
Now, I'll give you an example.
Yoga.
People do a lot of yoga and the big thing
in yoga is to stay flexible, to stretch, to
make sure your bones and muscles stay limber
through your whole life and it's very effective
and people get a lot out of it.
But along that line there are claims that
you have these sources of energy in your body
that my understanding are called chakras but
no one has been ever able to observe a chakra.
I mean they're an idea and you might experience
it in your mind but there's nobody who's been
able to cut open a human or a mouse and x-ray
a human, tap on a human, listen to a human
with a stethoscope or take human blood samples
and detect a chakra.
It just hasn't happened.
With that said, people get a lot of comfort
out of communities to know that other people
are thinking the same way you're thinking.
There's a team, essentially the humanity we'd
all work together if push came to shove.
But I am very skeptical that there's this
life force that runs through us all.
People have gone looking for it from a scientific
standpoint for centuries.
Now remember, there's a couple ideas in science
that are very important and they're described
nowadays in what's called critical thinking,
your ability to think critically about everything.
And you cannot prove a negative.
In other words if someone says you can't show
that the aren't chakras, you can't show that
there isn't a life force, you can't prove
that I am not part of the spirituality of
the universe, the spirit of the universe,
and that's true you can't prove that.
That's just the nature of negative ideas,
of nots.
So with that said, the other idea in critical
thinking and skeptical thought is it's based
on claims or assertions or hypotheses that
you have to test.
So if somebody makes a claim that there's
a life force flowing through him or her or
through all of us, how would you go about
proving that?
How would you show that it's true?
How would you show before and after, before
the life force after the life force, with
the life force without the life force?
And you can say after somebody's dead they
have no life force.
Okay.
But after somebody's dead they would be dead
whether there's a life force or not.
So that aside, there is a lot in the universe
and we don't know what it is.
I'll give you that.
Furthermore there's dark energy, dark matter,
96/95 percent of the universe nobody knows
what it is but I don't think that's what you're
talking about.
You're talking about this in the skeptical
community right now it's called woo or woo
woo, the unknown that flows through us, the
life energy.
But it hasn't been provable so you can't prove
a negative; you have to have a something you
can test.
A claim.
These are very important ideas in critical
thinking, in science.
And I'm really glad you're thinking about
them because maybe you will make a discovery
that will change the world.
I'll give you an example.
Nobody knows exactly what consciousness is.
Like I'm thinking about thinking, I'm thinking
about what you're thinking, you asked a question
having to do with what you were thinking what
I'm thinking what everybody's thinking, but
what is it to have an idea?
What is it when we are aware of ourselves
when we look in the mirror and we see ourselves?
What is consciousness?
And this to me is very reasonable.
It's related to this feeling that yoga people
get when they talk about this energy they
feel, this life force.
Furthermore, there's a lot of – people who
study neuroscience talk about the brain but
they also talk about the central nervous system,
the CNS.
And that would be your brain connected to
everything else.
And one of the things or two of the things
they like to talk about are your eyes.
Your eyes are so intimately connected to your
brain that people like to say your eyes are
the only part of your brain that you can see.
Whoa dude.
But here's an interesting study that has been
replicated many times.
If you are – they'll set up a psychiatrist
or psychologist will set up an experiment
where somebody comes into the room and you,
the subject, has to walk toward them to do
some interaction, hand then something or something.
Then they'll be another experiment where you
have to move away from him or her.
Well, if you move toward them, your tendency
is to like those other people better than
if you're required to move away from them.
So they set up a test so that these two ideas
are independent, what you're trying to accomplish
and moving toward that person are independent
of whether or not you're going this way or
that way.
And the expression that's popular right now
is embodied cognition.
This is to say something you do with your
central nervous system commanding my hand
to move toward or away somehow affects what
you feel, like your brain and the rest of
your nervous system are not independent.
So when you move toward to somebody you like
him or more her more, if you move away you
like him or her less by a little bit, by a
measurable repeatable amount.
So it could be that this idea of spirituality
and this life force that's flowing through
us, this perception of that is actually a
manifestation or a result of your central
nervous system and your brain being all one
piece and you can't do this without affecting
that.
It's a cool idea.
Maybe you'll become a neuroscience and figure
it out and dare I say it Cory, change the
world.
Cool question.
