Mark Gober Shares Ideas About Consciousness from His New Book, An End to Upside Down Thinking

One evening this past month my mind went down a path that began like this: What If We’re Wrong?

I then began scribbling down notes, which I set aside to ponder later.
What if we’re wrong about what it means to be good citizens?
What if we’re wrong about voting being something that really, really matters?
What if we’re wrong about democracy being good? Is Democracy sacred? Why? Our American experiment is a little over two centuries old.
What if political action is a massive distraction from more important things in our families and communities?

When I began reading Mark Gober's book An End To Upside Down Thinking a whole new set of questions emerged, pertaining to the nature of reality and consciousness. At one time Copernicus must have asked, "What if the earth was not the center of the universe?" Gober believes that in time many of the commonly held beliefs of science, as regard consciousness, will be upended. His book is a contribution to this revolution.

The book, which I wrote about here on Friday, explores a lot of areas where commonly accepted views are being challenged, where more "what if" questions need to be revisited. What follows here is an interview with the author.

EN: You have invested a lot of time into investigating your instincts or presuppositions about consciousness. What were the catalysts or trigger events that nudged you in this direction?

Mark Gober

Mark Gober: In August 2016, I randomly stumbled across podcasts that challenged everything I thought I knew. The more I investigated, the more I realized I needed to re-think existence and who and what we are. To be clear: before this, I had no explicit instincts or suppositions about the ideas discussed in my book. If anything, my views were opposite what they now are. After my initial exposure to thought-provoking podcasts, I then researched extensively for a year while continuing in my day job in finance/consulting. Over a few weekends in July 2017, I wrote what is now my book An End to Upside Down Thinking. Why write a book? I realized the ideas represented a revolution bigger than any we've ever seen. For example, we used to think the earth is flat. Then we thought (incorrectly) that the earth was at the center of the solar system. The next one is: we used to think the brain produces consciousness.

EN: In my philosophy of mind class in college, our first assignment was to write a paper addressing this issue: what would you experience if you woke one morning and your brain had been exchanged with someone in England? This seems like a central theme, as you ask readers to reconsider the brain’s relationship to consciousness. How would answer the question posed by my professor in 1971?

MG: In my book, I first address the fact that we have no idea how a brain could produce consciousness. This is known as "the hard problem" of consciousness. All we know is that the brain is related to consciousness. But we don't know if the brain produces it. I then provide evidence suggesting that consciousness doesn't come from the brain at all, that the brain acts more like an antenna/receiver or filter of consciousness, and that consciousness is more fundamental than matter. Matter doesn't create consciousness; rather, consciousness creates matter. Furthermore, the evidence points toward the idea that we are all fundamentally connected as part of a singular, underlying consciousness. So even though we seem to have individual experiences, our minds are actually connected.

One of the phenomena I discuss in my book is called a "near-death experience." These are instances in which a person has a severely impaired brain or sometimes is even clinically dead, and yet the person reports lucid memories. In An End to Upside Down Thinking I explain why the near-death experience can't be explained as a mere hallucination but rather it may teach us something about the broader reality that our brain normally filters or obfuscates from our perception. In the near-death experience people often report a "life review" in which they experience their life in a flash, judging themselves for how they treated others. Now here's the kicker (and finally getting to your question): in many cases, the person experiences the life review from the perspective of the person he/she affected. So let's say Bob is having a life review and is reviewing a time in which he harmed Jane. In the life review he feels the pain he caused to Jane, as if he were Jane. This example points to the notion that we are actually part of the same consciousness but in our everyday experience we are viewing life through the lens of our limited, individual brain. In the life review people seem to have the ability to view life through the lens of another.

The brain and body allow consciousness to have specific experiences. So (returning to your original question) experiencing life through the brain of another would be like viewing life through a different lens.

EN: What are the implications for how we might live life and treat one another?

Carl Jung likewise asked many questions
about the nature of consciousness.

MG: If consciousness isn't produced by the brain as I argue in An End to Upside Down Thinking, then the death of the brain/body would not imply the death of consciousness. I provide evidence suggesting that consciousness exists independently of the physical body. In other words, our consciousness lives on when our body dies. This has massive implications for how we live. If we lost the fear of the death, how might we live differently? For some, this changes everything.

If we are all truly interconnected as part of the same underlying consciousness, then all separation we see is an illusion. "You" vs. "me" and "us" vs. "them" are illusions. So if at the core level we are all the same, it becomes irrational to do harm to another. Altruism takes on a new meaning: helping others feels good because we are ultimately helping our "self" as part of the same consciousness. Altruism is then the highest form of selfishness. This changes everything. Imagine how many of the world's problems would shift if we appreciated this notion. The solution to world peace and the survival of the species, in my mind, are dependent upon the realization that we are not separate.

EN: I think here of Jesus in his parable of the sheep and goats, where he says, "As you did it unto the least of these... you did it unto me."

The book has much to ponder. You can find it here on Amazon.com.