Your Brain Is A Quantum Time Machine (ft. Eric Wargo)

Go to https://buyraycon.com/JESSEMICHELS for 30% off sitewide! Brought to you by Raycon On today's episode of American Alchemy, we welcome Eric Wargo, a science writer and author known for exploring the mysteries of time, precognition, and the human mind. Eric's works, including Time Loops and Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self, delve into the profound connections between consciousness and the nature of time itself. Support American Alchemy by Becoming a YouTube Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join Links Mentioned: - The Physics of UFOs: Eric Weinstein + Hal Puthoff: https://tinyurl.com/PhysicsofUFOs SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify DISCORD ➤ https://discord.gg/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Personal) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Show) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [email protected] Original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. #quantumphysics #timetravel #consciousness #science #podcast #technology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Jesse Michels?

  Think about this. In your life, have you ever had a premonition of an event that ended up happening? You just kind of knew something was gonna happen before it did.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  These key elements in that dream you'd had almost three decades earlier came true in his life. And he never acknowledged that that dream was a premonition.

• 1:16Jesse Michels?

  Maybe it was the passing of a loved one. Thinking about somebody right before they call or re-enter your life. Having a gut feeling that you know you need to quit that job, take that other job, travel somewhere, get back in touch with someone, even though it made no rational sense to you at the time. It just felt like a download you got. A gut feeling.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  Patients would bring him precognitive dreams all the time, because people have these dreams all the time.

• 1:39Jesse Michels?

  Have you ever had a dream that's turned into a reality? Have you ever seen somebody else predict an extremely low-probability black swan event with bizarre precision and accuracy? Well, if you answered yes to any of these, you are not alone. This happens literally all of the time. And thanks to this guy, we're discovering the science behind it right now.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation.

• 2:03Jesse Michels?

  But before we get into his work and who he is, let's go through all of the insane examples of modern prophecies. American fiction author Dean Koontz wrote a novel called The Eyes of Darkness. It centered on secret experiments involving the perfect bioweapon developed at a lab near Wuhan, China, called Wuhan 400. The novel is set in 2020, exactly like COVID. The only thing is, the novel was written in 1981. Author Morgan Robertson wrote an 1898 novella called Futility, or Wreck of the Titan. Futility tells the story of the Titan, the largest and most luxurious ocean liner ever built. In the novel, the Titan hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic on an April night and sinks. But before that catastrophe,

• 2:46Jesse Michels?

  the ship was described as unsinkable and the largest liner in the ocean. Ring a bell? Well, because Wreck of the Titan was written about 14 years before the Titanic, the most luxurious ocean liner built at the time, described as unsinkable, with elite families like the Astors onboard. Both ships were almost identical in size and features. The Titan was 800 feet long, whereas the Titanic was 882 feet long. Both vessels were traveling at high speeds around 24 to 25 knots while they were crossing the North Atlantic in April at the time of their collision with an iceberg. They both disregarded ice warnings, and both lacked a sufficient amount of lifeboats onboard. In 1952, former Nazi and father of the American space program,

• 3:30Jesse Michels?

  Werner von Braun, published a science fiction book titled Project Mars: A Technical Tale. In this novel, he predicted a future mission to colonize Mars, led by a figure referred to as Elon. And what about this 1958 Western called Track Down, in which a man named Trump, with magnetic charisma and a cult-like following, comes to a town promising to save it by building a wall?

• 3:55Speaker 05

  You ask how do you build that wall? You ask, and I'm here to tell you.

• 3:58Jesse Michels?

  One of the townspeople comes after him, accusing him of fraud.

• 4:02Speaker 05

  You're a liar, Trump.

• 4:04Jesse Michels?

  What about Trump's recent assassination attempt?

• 4:09Jesse Michels?

  Did anybody predict that? And then I saw an attempt on his life. This bullet flew by his ear, and it came so... So close to his head that it busted his drum, eardrum.

• 4:23Jesse Michels?

  The great American novelist Mark Twain even predicted his own death. Born on November 30th, 1835, just as Halley's Comet was passing by Earth, he would often say to people that he expected to go out with the comet upon its return. Just as he predicted, he died in 1910, just one day after the comet made its closest approach to Earth. And finally, maybe the most eerie prediction of all. Michael Richards was a talented, prolific African-American sculptor in New York.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Michael Rolando Richards was a sculptor. Like, all of his works were, like, obsessed with flight. And in the sculpture that made him most famous, he portrayed himself as a Tuskegee Airman, standing vertically erect and levitating off the ground, and being impaled by airplanes. And the sculpture is called Tar Baby versus Saint Sebastian. And Saint Sebastian was the medieval saint who, you know, was always depicted, like, pierced by arrows. So he depicted himself pierced by planes, as a martyr pierced by planes. You know, on the basis of the strength of his work, including, I assume, that sculpture, he was awarded studio space for six months in the Twin Towers. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council had been issuing studios to, like,

• 5:35Speaker 03

  cohorts of 15 artists, like, for six months, you know, so two cohorts a year. He alone among those artists had stayed in his studio the night of September 10th and was killed on the morning of September 11th.

• 5:54Jesse Michels?

  The examples of modern prophecies are endless. Alex Jones, say what you will about the guy as far as some of his other beliefs, but are you familiar with, he had an on-air call?

• 6:04Speaker 06

  Or if you let some terrorist group do it, like the World Trade Center, we know who to blame. And if there was an outside threat like a Bin Laden, who was a known CIA asset in the 80s, he's the boogeyman they need.

• 6:14Jesse Michels?

  It's just this absurd, like, you know, literally what happened. I could go on forever. Survivorship bias, you say? People make crazy predictions, pontificate all the time. If we gave airtime to all of the Wrong historical predictions made, we'd be sitting here all day. But then I'd come back and I'd say, but the level of detail in many of these predictions is beyond probability. And then you might come back and say, but the probability of a bunch of eerily accurate predictions over a long enough time scale and with the internet at your disposal is actually more likely than you're presenting it, Jesse. We can go around in endless circles on these arguments. How do we get to the bottom of them scientifically? I mean, it's not like the government looked into this stuff systematically for 20 years,

• 6:56Jesse Michels?

  employing hundreds of psychic spies to find hostages, draw up nuclear bases, and predict military obstacles. Oh, wait, they did do all of that. There was, in fact, a CIA and DIA-backed program called Stargate, which ran from 1972 to 1995. The official American psychic spy program. Every year, it got refunded because it was useful. There are hundreds of successful remote viewing cases from the program, many coming from the program's pride and joy remote viewer. Remote viewer number one, Joseph McMonigal. McMonigal used remote viewing to identify Soviet nuclear bases, predict key critical events, and he even helped locate kidnapped American general James Dozier. In fact, McMonigal even won the prestigious Legion of Merit

• 7:41Jesse Michels?

  for his work in the psychic spy program, adding to intelligence in over 200 critical national security cases. In 1979, he was tasked with remote viewing an impenetrable building in a shipyard off the coast of the White Sea in Russia. He described a massive nuclear submarine in the works. I spoke to McMonigal's colleague and fellow psychic spy, Paul Smith, about it.

• 8:02Speaker 07

  And everybody thought that was crazy, and it was pretty well dismissed. Eight months after that, those sessions were done, the Russians floated out the typhoon, the biggest submarine ever built, and its missile tubes were in front of the superstructure on the ship. Pretty crazy. Exactly as Joe described it.

• 8:20Jesse Michels?

  That same year, the Russians and the Americans were in a race trying to find a downed TU-22 Russian spy plane in Africa. There was some very precious cargo on board, highly sensitive Russian cryptic equipment. Dale Graff, who ran the psychic spy program at the time, had a woman named Rosemary Smith remote view the plane. She was given all of Africa as a possible target. She ended up drawing a three-square-mile area in Zaire. Even President Jimmy Carter recalls this being the most miraculous thing that occurred during his four-year presidential term. We located the plane where she said it was.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  It's the only time that I ever experienced something that was inexplicable while I was president.

• 9:02Jesse Michels?

  Okay, all of that's kind of remarkable. But again, real science involves collecting large amounts of data. And surely, no independent, well-regarded statisticians have looked at the Stargate psychic spy data. Well, that's actually not true. A statistician named Jessica Utz, who was president of the American Statistical Society, reviewed all of the Stanford Research Institute's psychic spy data, and a whole lot of other psychic experiments as well.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Utz did an analysis of a lot of evidence for psychic functioning, not just the Stargate program, I don't believe. And she found overwhelming evidence. And she's been very, very vocal about this.

• 9:40Jesse Michels?

  She based her studies on basic probability, specifically P-values. In scientific terms, this means using statistics to compare the observed results to what would be expected by chance. The P-value basically answers the question. If chance were the only factor, how likely is it that we'd see results this strong or stronger? When the P-value is very small, researchers are more confident in ruling out chance as the explanation for findings. Say you have four cards face down. You know one of those cards is an ace of diamonds. The probability that you guess which card is an ace of diamonds is 25%, or has a P-value of .25. A commonly accepted practice in the field of statistical analysis is to say that a P-value of less than 5%,

• 10:25Jesse Michels?

  so .05, would rule out chance as an explanation. In these cases, results are statistically significant. But that's not sufficient. Obviously, low-probability things still happen just by chance. So replicating these non-chance results across a lot of trials and collecting a lot of data is very important. Okay, hopefully you're following me here. Basic probability, hard to argue with. You know what makes Black Friday and Cyber Monday so thrilling? Those once-a-year deals that feel too good to pass up. But here's the best part. With Raycon, you're already getting incredible value every day of the year. And now they're doubling down with an offer that's hard to beat, up to 30% off site-wide. I use my Raycon Everyday Earbuds all the time,

• 11:08Jesse Michels?

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• 11:53Jesse Michels?

  Go to BuyRaycon.com/JesseMichaels today. That's right, you'll get up to 30% off everything on Raycon's website when you go to BuyRaycon.com/JesseMichaels. Michaels spelled with no A. All right, back to the show. Back to Jessica Utz's statistical assessment of psychic spying. First, she diligence the experimental protocols, making sure that they were sound. Protocols like this. The experimenter takes a set of 200 photographs sourced at random from the pages of National Geographic magazines. Now they take a participating remote viewer, who hasn't seen any of these photographs. The remote viewer is then placed in a completely isolated room during the experiment, away from the experimenter

• 12:37Jesse Michels?

  and away from the photos. The experimenter then randomly selects a batch of five photos, acting as a kind of beacon or sender of the information. The remote viewer would then be tasked with drawing each photo that was picked, in tightly controlled conditions. A well-tested randomizer would be used to select the photos, and the experimenters, or even anybody in contact with the experimenters, was not allowed to communicate at all with the remote viewer. A final third person then judges what the remote viewer draws, and sees how it matches the batch of randomly selected photos. These photos are incredibly wide-ranging. They could be something like a mountain view. Or a cat sleeping in a car. The study of these attempts found that there was an overall hit rate of 35%,

• 13:21Jesse Michels?

  a number that was found to be repeatable over and over again. But there's more corroboration. Similar numbers were found in the trials done at the University of Edinburgh and the Rhine Research Institute at Duke in North Carolina. So how did Jessica Utz shake out in her statistical study? What was her overall assessment? Well, I'll just quote her. "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well-established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted." Strong words.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  She said, you know, this is, the quality of the evidence is so strong that if it were in any other field, nobody would question this.

• 14:08Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Making Utz's conclusions even more meaningful is the fact that she partnered with psychologist Ray Hyman. Hyman was a total skeptic of the paranormal going into this and eager to find methodology issues and other rational explanations for the data. In fact, Hyman was a friend and colleague of perhaps the most prominent skeptic at the time, James Randi. Hyman even wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer. In fact, he had previously written a report commissioned by the government two decades earlier that was highly critical of the famous psychic, Uri Geller. While Hyman did have some minor disagreements with Utz, he agreed with her basic take. The psychic experiments were free of obvious flaws and the data was too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes.

• 14:52Jesse Michels?

  Something unexplained was going on, even in Hyman's skeptical opinion. But you don't need to take my word for it. The study has been made publicly available and the report goes into far more detail than I've covered here. The link for the PDF is in the description of this video. Unfortunately, when it comes to psychic phenomena, we can't turn them into math, repeatable processes, or technology. So we just conveniently ignore them. Even if we have statistically significant data backing these studies. Jessica Utz actually captured this sentiment well, saying that it would be a waste of resources to continue. to look for proof of psychic phenomena. And instead, resources should be directed to the real pressing matter of how this ability works. Just look at the history of even conventional science.

• 15:36Jesse Michels?

  We couldn't explain black body radiation when it was discovered in the 1860s. We needed Max Planck's quantum revolution in 1900. We also couldn't explain Mercury's orbit with Newtonian physics. We needed Einstein's spacetime curvature to accurately predict its path. When we discovered these anomalies, these observations were never fake or worthy of being ignored. We just couldn't explain them with math or theoretical physics at the time. Psychic phenomena is just the same. It's unexplainable, not always repeatable, and can't be turned into math. But it's real, like statistically significant real. And by many accounts, far more replicable than fields like psychology. As the great Arthur C. Clarke once said,

• 16:18Jesse Michels?

  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Well, cutting to the chase, thanks to this week's amazing American alchemist, Eric Wargo. The ability of the mind to predict the future in eerie ways is increasingly moving from magic to science. Wargo has constructed a biological, computational, and physics-based model to describe exactly how our brains might have access to the future. And it's not woo-woo or new-agey at all. In fact, while it's still theoretical, it's very hard-headed, logical, and it actually makes sense even in a materialist universe. What is Wargo's thesis? Your brain is a time-traveling quantum computer. Okay, that sounds kind of insane, but hear me out.

• 16:59Jesse Michels?

  For a quantum computer to work, it generally needs to maintain coherence, or the ability to maintain multiple states at once. In order to do that, you usually need to maintain extremely cold environments with very little noise or signal interference in the system. Unfortunately, human and animal bodies are full of blood, water, mucus, and skin. They're the last thing from cold and precise. They're warm, wet, and noisy. So people assume our bodies don't have quantum capabilities. But there's a new field called quantum biology, uncovering all sorts of biological processes that involve quantum effects.

• 17:35Jesse Michels?

  The creation of enzymes involves quantum tunneling. Robins and other migratory birds have a protein in their eyes called a cryptochrome that uses electron spin to sense the Earth's magnetic field, acting as a quantum compass and helping them navigate home. You have quantum biology, you have enzyme creation using quantum tunneling. You have birds navigating home using the CRY4 protein spin. You have other examples as well. Absolutely. And plant photosynthesis might depend on quantum entanglement. But what about the brain and everyday human perception? Well, theorists as prominent as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose have hypothesized that the brain is actually a room-temperature quantum system.

• 18:20Jesse Michels?

  What does this mean practically? And how does this allow our brains to predict the future? Well, in quantum mechanics, you of course have Einstein's spooky action at a distance, or spatial non-locality. Everybody likes to talk about this. Entangled photon pairs across the world seeming to mirror each other in ways that break Einstein's speed limit of light. But to me, perhaps the even more mind-blowing thing about quantum mechanics is that you don't just have spatial non-locality, you have temporal non-locality, spooky action across time. Say you entangle two photons with each other, photon A and photon B. You then run the classic double slit experiment with photon A. Wait a few days and run another double slit experiment with photon B.

• 19:02Jesse Michels?

  If you don't observe either photon in the experiment, you'll get an interference pattern for both photon B and photon A. If you observe photon B in the second double slit experiment, it will collapse into a particle state and go through one of the slits. But here's where things get crazy. It looks like the measurement and collapse of photon B is causing the collapsing of photon A into a particle state too, even though the double slit experiment with photon A is happening before the experiment with photon B. In other words, the two photons are entangled not only across space, but across time. This looks a whole lot like either retrocausality, or dare I say it, time travel. But this basic principle in quantum mechanics actually probably applies to quantum computers, too.

• 19:48Jesse Michels?

  In fact, instead of the bits, ones and zeros, that classical computers operate on, quantum computers operate on these things called qubits that exist in superpositional states.

• 19:59Speaker 00

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• 20:28Speaker 06

  Qubits can take on superpositions of states, right? And so what a lot of people in popular culture, popular science butcher when they describe superpositions is that they say that the qubit is both 1 and 0 at the same time. That's not true. It's not in the 1 state. It's not in the 0 state. It's not in the 1 and 0 state either. It's also not not in the 1 and not in the 0 state. It's in a superposition state.

• 20:55Jesse Michels?

  Well, it turns out that you can actually reverse qubit positions in quantum computations. So in a working quantum computer, it's been hypothesized, even by some of the people building quantum computers right now, that you can send information back in time. And if the brain is a quantum system, as Roger Penrose thinks it is, then maybe the brain can access its future knowledge state. Maybe the brain can send information back in time, or have a pre-memory, if you will. Maybe that explains why humans can have incredible intuition. Humans, in their bodies, often just instinctively know when certain things are about to happen. You come out of the womb with like, you know, a fear of snakes and with a Chomsky and pre-grammar for certain things. And that's not how a classical computer works.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  Because it's that informational time travel that's already happening. You can look at biological systems as models for how it works. And yeah, in a quantum computer, you can theoretically scale up that causal indeterminacy that's happening on the quantum level. And you scale that up in a quantum computer server that you leave plugged in for many years, it really opens the doorway to actually communicating across time.

• 22:09Jesse Michels?

  But this is a really important distinction. Wargo doesn't really believe in woo-woo mind over matter. He doesn't think a psychic can simply view a downed airplane halfway across the world. They can only remote view that airplane if in the future they are given confirmation that that plane crashed in a specific location. Once that knowledge state is confirmed and stored in the person's brain, it can be sent back in time.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Feedback may be important beyond just training remote viewers. You know, maybe, maybe, maybe that's what remote viewers are really seeing. They're seeing that feedback in the future.

• 22:44Jesse Michels?

  That's a really interesting point. I actually spoke with the founder of the CIA Psychic Spy Program, Hal Puthoff. He was very open to Wargo being right that confirmatory feedback is required for the remote viewing to work. And there's actually a reason to believe that the ability to send information back in time would be extremely adaptive for survival, explaining why humans are most intuitive around life and death situations. Penrose just has a theory, and he's a theoretical physicist, not an experimentalist. What evidence do we actually have that the brain might be a quantum system? Well, Penrose's collaborator, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, thinks he has a candidate: tiny cylindrical structures found in the cytoplasm of plant and animal cells called microtubules.

• 23:27Jesse Michels?

  These structures have tiny indole rings distributed throughout tubulin that Hameroff thinks could maintain quantum coherence. When you turn the microtubules off with anesthesia, the rest of the brain functions completely normally. It's only the microtubules that shut off, and the person becomes unconscious. It's almost as if these microstructures are the on and off switches to our conscious perception. The Penrose thing, you know, this idea that he wrote in The Emperor's New Mind, that the microtubules, I guess that was the follow-up of The Emperor's New Mind with Hameroff, the microtubules are a quantum sensor that collapses the wave function into an eigenstate.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have some sympathy for going along that direction.

• 24:06Jesse Michels?

  So you think there's some sort of quantum sensor in the, in the brain? And do you have a top candidate for the specific structure?

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Well, I can't rule it out. I mean, they certainly started from a very fundamental thing, isn't that is, if you can get rid of consciousness. By using an anesthetic, then however you're doing it must have something to do with consciousness.

• 24:25Jesse Michels?

  But we have microtubules throughout the body. Where in the brain would quantum processing actually be happening? I give you Gary Nolan, a tenured Stanford professor, who believes that the neuronal density in the caudate and patamen of the brain's basal ganglia determines a person's psychic ability. In fact, if you hook an FMRI up to the brain and track a person's blood flow while they're playing the game of Go, it seems like this part of the brain, the caudate nucleus and patamen, lights up when a person makes a move purely based on intuition. In fact, these moves often seem irrational when they're made, but they somehow work out for the players that make them.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  In looking at the MRIs of some of these people, we noticed an area of the brain that seemed to be disturbed, let's say, or different in many of these individuals. So it's an area that I've talked about before, between the head of the caudate and patamen, that had increased neural density. And it was larger in all these individuals. And so you just ask the question, okay, what's unique about these individuals? Well, they're all highly functioning. And you have to make snap decisions. What is that? That's intuition. One way to explain it would be intuition, or just highly intelligent. And then surprisingly, when we looked in the family members, we found that the family members had it, which was fascinating. So that means that structure had a genetic component.

• 25:48Jesse Michels?

  That's, I think, how the brain works via intuition. Have you ever made a decision in your life that feels totally irrational incrementally? Like with the data you have, it makes no sense. But it makes sense in the context of an endpoint that you know happens later. To me, that is your future knowledge state, sending information back in time.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  That system is part of the reward system. And so it's involved in our registration of rewards, our learning based on rewards, our predictions based on past rewards.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  And that system, I think, is central. You know, it's central, it's kind of the central classically in that classical computer model in terms of the organism, you know, changing its behavior based on rewards and getting excited about possible future rewards and anticipated rewards and all that.

• 26:48Jesse Michels?

  Thanks to this week's amazing American alchemist, Eric Wargo. The ability of the mind to predict the future in eerie ways is increasingly moving from magic to science. We should definitely study the microtubules in the codate nucleus in Potaman. That could be the specific part of the brain responsible for intuition and responsible for sending future quantum information back in time. But there's more evidence. Have you heard of a Russian scientist with the last name Lieberman? Two friends of mine, Daniel and David Lieberman, their father knew Hammerov, or I think knew Penrose, rather, and was really interested in cytoskeletal learning. Efim Lieberman is the father of my two friends, David and Daniel Lieberman, and he was the

• 27:32Jesse Michels?

  foremost researcher in consciousness in the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s, even before Penrose was doing his work. Efim conjectured that quantum effects in which cytoskeletal membranes of cells, which is where the microtubules exist, communicate to one another and even encode semantic information. A lot of this is centered around an experiment he did with goldfish. He took four goldfish. The first, he just froze right off the bat with nitrogen. The second, he spun in a centrifuge and then froze the fish with nitrogen while spinning it. The third, he would spin in a centrifuge, then give the fish a little time to reorient, and then freeze it with nitrogen. And finally, he put the fourth fish to sleep, spun it in a centrifuge, and then froze it.

• 28:16Jesse Michels?

  He then let the frozen fish thaw back to room temperature, keeping them alive and letting them swim around after the experiment. What he found was nothing short of fascinating. Basically, all of the fish had their cytoskeletons and neurons intact, and they could all continue swimming and navigating the water normally, except for the second fish. That poor fish is Cytoskeletons had completely disassembled because the nitrogen had frozen it while it was being spun around. And so when it was brought back to normal temperature, it couldn't swim normally at all. It couldn't compute its environment or calculate where it was spatially. Just another point for cytoskeleton and microtubules being essential for conscious awareness. I think we have to be open to this quantum, you know, precognizance of the

• 29:01Jesse Michels?

  future model.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, I think that, you know, Stuart Hammeroff, I'm sure you know his work on microtubules. I think that's, you know, that's gonna be the, I think microtubules are probably gonna be the mechanism here. A lot of people simplistically say, oh, the brain is a quantum computer. It's not that simple. It's a hybrid. It's a hybrid of classical and quantum systems, you know, meshed.

• 29:24Jesse Michels?

  In the world of constant hype around artificial intelligence, I hope you've come out of this episode with new faith that the human mind will be very hard to replace with robots. Sorry, optimists. Yeah, we might lose to them at chess. Our recall isn't as good and we'll never be able to do mental math as fast as a calculator, but we can predict the future. So let's lean into our very human differences and develop this sixth sense, what is at least for now, our unbeatable intuition. As the great Marshall McLuhan once said, "Every media extension of man is an amputation." If our brains are in fact quantum computers, we shouldn't merge with classical computers. We should rigorously investigate the growing field of quantum biology and not let the cult of Silicon Valley

• 30:09Jesse Michels?

  transhumanism, or the desire to escape our human bandwidth limitations, make us overlook the magic of our own biology. So this interview with Eric Wargo was an absolute blast. I felt like I needed to turn this part into a video essay. The concepts here are so complex that I felt like they needed to be kind of cogently synthesized. There are all sorts of crazy stuff that we spoke about in our interview that we didn't get into in this essay. Here, I just wanted to flesh out the basic concepts and make a scientific compelling case for how the mind works that is distinct from artificial intelligence and classical computers. I also wanted to make a case for psychic functioning to scientific skeptics. But stay tuned for my completely

• 30:51Jesse Michels?

  unfiltered, raw conversation with Eric Worgo. That's gonna come in about a week. We get into all sorts of other crazy stuff. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Until next week, my name is Jesse Michaels, and this is American Alchemy.

• 31:07Speaker 00

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