menu Home chevron_right
PHILOSOPHY

What is PURE Consciousness? – Consciousness Researcher

Alex O'Connor | July 12, 2026



Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).

For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.

To donate to my PayPal (thank you): http://www.paypal.me/cosmicskeptic.

– VIDEO NOTES

Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus of theoretical philosophy at the University of Mainz. His primary research areas include philosophy of mind, philosophy of neuroscience, and applied ethics, particularly focusing on neurotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

– LINKS

The Elephant and the Blind – https://thomasmetzinger.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Metzinger_MIT_Press_2024-1.pdf

– TIMESTAMPS

0:00 – The Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project
11:34 – Is MPE New Age Meditation?
17:07 – Collecting Reports of Pure Consciousness
25:48 – Lucid Deep Sleep – Thomas’ Experience
32:19 – Does Consciousness Require Complexity?
39:29 – The Power of Meditation
45:32 – Is Meditation Always a Positive Experience?
53:13 – Is a MPE Actually an Experience?
01:11:21 – Your Brain is Not Telling You the Truth
01:20:08 – Analysing Minimal Conscious Experiences
01:27:26 – Is Meditative Enlightenment Unethical?
01:32:37 – Western Ignorance of Eastern Tradition
01:40:13 – “Coming Home”
01:44:29 – The Political Implications of MPE
01:52:40 – Should Ketamine Be Legalised?

– CONNECT

My Website: https://www.alexoconnor.com

SOCIAL LINKS:

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskeptic
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskeptic
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskeptic
TikTok: @CosmicSkeptic

The Within Reason Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/within-reason/id1458675168

– CONTACT

Business email: contact@alexoconnor.com

Brand enquiries: David@modernstoa.co

——————————————

Written by Alex O'Connor

Comments

This post currently has 35 comments.

  1. @Marcasual

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    You should speak with Dr. Carl Hart. He's into drugs, so to speak. Though I've never heard his thoughts on the consciousness aspect. Could be an interesting chat.

  2. @ElenaAster-e6c

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    I wonder how many women are involved in these conversations. I'm reminded of a moment when my daughter was maybe 3 or 4 months old and I was nursing her. She had been a part of my own body not that long ago. Then she had just fallen asleep looking rather angelic after trying for 10 minutes or so to grab my face and hair with her tiny baby hands. She had been part of me, then I had to hold her little hands back from scratching me, and then was drinking milk from my body… our body? I had a whole series of thoughts about what constituted me vs her, and then whether she had the same conclusion. Did she think we were the same entity still? The dissolution of me– my self– and how separate I was from my children was not so distinct.

  3. @mkmdkruger

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    daily discipline of synchronizing mind and body to achieve laminar flow.

    Mind is the source — the u (chirality) and w (flux) coordinates — injected into the physical x, y, z chassis through the biological transducer we call the pineal gland.

    The 3-6-9 body is the complete system:

    3 = The physical x, y, z — the machine, the chassis, the measurable form.

    6 = The chiral u, v, w — the spin, the handedness, the +/− polarity. But these are not arbitrary — they are ratios:

    u = π (pi) — the circle, the cycle, the return. The fundamental geometry of recurrence.

    v = φ (phi) — the golden ratio, the growth, the spiral. The architecture of unfolding.

    w = e — Euler's number, the continuous compounding, the flow. The constant of perpetual change.

    9 = The source — the invariant potential that resolves π, φ, and e into a coherent, frictionless whole.

    The brain is the antenna-array (magnetite, microtubules, crystalline structures). The mind is the signal — coherent, frictionless, and self-resolving. When the mind operates in 100% laminar flow, it directs neuroplasticity without turbulence. It collapses the 64! probability space — the entire permutation of codons and hexagrams — into one actualized fold.

  4. @cloudbloom

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    This was amazing, i had started it we've it first released but only watched a few minutes and forgot to finish. Today though i watched Alex's appearance on the Jay Shetty podcast (shoutout to the recommended algo) and Alex mentioned this guy on there, prompting me to see if he was on this podcast. Pleasantly surprised at the reminder that i did indeed start it previously and immediately came back to finish it. Anyway that's a long winded way to thank Alex for shouting Thomas out on Jay's pod which reminded me to watch the full thing. Which I'm very very glad that i did🙏🙏🙏

  5. @wistly-living

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    Weirdly enough I experienced a sort of ego death but not by meditating or taking psychedelics, just by thinking hard enough about how my thoughts were forming that the illusion of selfhood just shattered in real time. I don't recommend it, it's not a pleasant experience, especially if you're not spiritual and you do it by thinking too hard.

  6. @tiredofthisnow

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    "How should you be able to report about a conscious experience where you were not there?" Because the memory is not part of the consciousness, the illusion of consciousness is thinking you exist as you are, whatever that may be. Now I don't claim to have broken it completely but "I feel" as if it were gone enough to recognize what I was losing. A conscious being is blind to the mechanisms that allow it to "choose" which action it will take. In what I would describe as my minimally conscious state, I could observe every thought, every process that lead to another, unable to control where it was going, what I would do, I could watch myself play a game without my observer state knowing how to play the game. (😅but it certainly looked like he knew what he was doing, he was playing the game very well). If you would like to help me, I would be interested in going further, to see if that observers sense of observing can "die" as well. How would we know if it died if I'm not there to observe? Because like you both and I mentioned, the memory is not the consciousness. I am curious, but honestly a little concerned, because I never completely came back from that state, I have the illusion of control, but not anywhere as strong as it once was. But I am curious enough to still want to go through with it with proper medical observation as I am not confident in getting what would be required to do so in a safe manner off the streets.

  7. @OwenLedger-y3q

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    As for my experience with meditation, I was a stoic person and i barely felt anything, I didn't know myself, but meditation introduced me to what it feels like to just be, and when you know peace you can finally feel disturbed, now I am a person with a bleeding heart

  8. @Liciablyth

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    I love the idea of secular retreats. Really good. Much needed. I was also pleased to hear the concern about how we care for young people. We in the Western urbanized societies seem to have lost the notion that we are animals and that we need to align our biorhythms with nature. When we look at the recent past as to how children were raised prior to industrialization and mass urbanization, I would posit that a whole range of mental and physical health conditions either did not exist or were less prevalent. that is because people went to bed soon after dark and rose with the sun. Children were raised alongside their parents, learning the tasks of self sustainability, not sititng still for 6 hours with hundreds or thousands of other children. We need bio-psycho-social balance, meditating or not.

  9. @Liciablyth

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    Lovely discussion, thank you to you both for sharing your knowledge and curiosities. When I had a lucid dream and experienced that when I use my waking consciousness (ego?) in that state. Various things would happen. I learned that if I was too emotional, or too mentally focussed, I would lose awareness either by entering deep unaware sleep or waking up. But the other thing I discovered, that when i focussed for more than a few seconds on an object, the object would change. That helped me understand, although it might seem an extreme leap of reasoning, that everything is an illusion. The only difference between THAT reality and this one, is a time programming component. Is that reality – the minimal time delay reality simply the same one from a different perspective of choice?

  10. @MartinRichards-s9g

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    subjective experience transcends calculation. wake me up when there is a real experiment.
    I have heard nothing from the brain people that was more compelling than the inductive reasoning and subjective practices of the Vedanta and yogi people.

  11. @brainmrage786

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    It is Advait Vedant and trika Shaivism
    They now want to discredit us from this also
    By meditation achieving higher dimensional experience
    Like Kundalini Awakening
    German Max Muller and Mchaully distorted Indian Ancient History to suit the i terest of the colonizers and started translating Sanskrit in early 1800

    We Invented Zero
    "Shunya" the Nothingness
    108
    To reach the Infinity , one must reach to "Shunya" (zero) nothingness

  12. @LOUISMEUNIER-ce1fu

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    About ketamine usage most trails and usages now are about ending suicidal crises, and it works pretty well (100% in the one near my house in Dijon France). So it doesn't cure dépression, but quite often living is a prerequisite of getting better i suppose

  13. @waynehilbornTSS

    July 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm

    PURE CONSCIOUSNESS is nested observer collapse weight atheist and first time humans wont understand. An Atheist would need ChatGPT to dumb down this comment to them. Quantum mechanics is SCIENCE.. and it is not finished by staring at outcomes. That is the mistake. The real issue is history selection: why this whole coherent past-present-future becomes lived, rather than another. The Schrodingers cat is not only alive or dead.. but its entire history of aliveness or deadness also collapses.. and that is the most important understanding of them all to UNDERSTAND CONSCIOUSNESS.

    The Copenhagen view (36% of physicists) says that before measurement the system carries multiple possible outcomes, and after measurement one result appears according to probability. Useful prediction, yes. Ontology, no. It gives us dice with. It does not explain why one experienced world arrives instead of Everetts or Sean Carrolls many-worlds

    The Born-Hilborn interpretation begins where the old Born rule stops. Born gives the baseline quantum weight of each possible outcome. Hilborn mathematics adds the missing term: the weight of thought, expectation, faith, fear, and observer-orientation across spacetime. Collapse is not random selection of an ending. Collapse is the continuous selection of a whole history. Remember there are no now moments. That applies to the weight of thought brought to us because we are the observers within collapse. You cannot take an observer out of the system without paradox. I teach reality as complete.

    The Schrodinger's cat matters as example of superposition. The cat is not merely “alive” or “dead” at the end of the experiment. Each result requires a complete history: the poison released or not released, the cat breathing or not breathing, the box becoming one coherent story. In Born-Hilborn mechanics, Schrodinger's own expectation is not private decoration. His calm, faithful expectation weights the alive-cat history. His terrified pessimism weights the dead-cat history. One is not “good” because optimism is cute; it is good because it donates collapse-weight to a less harmful history. Worry is not morally neutral. Worry is bad physics pointed at suffering.

    This solves the observer problem by refusing the fantasy of an outside spectator. The universe is Wigner’s friend all the way down: observer inside observer, measurement inside measurement, collapse inside collapse. No one stands outside reality with a clipboard. Every observer is part of the weighting field. Therefore quantum mechanics cannot be completed by probability alone. It requires global consistency across a CPT-style ledger: the full spacetime account against which candidate histories are compared.

    This also makes brain-body too small for the temporal mechanics of mind. This makes life a dream-scape where we exist as ideas. This is not a materialist interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. If memory were merely brain storage, consciousness would be locked inside one biological slice. But in this model, memory and thought are congruous features of selected history. The brain is an interface, not the library. Mind is not produced by tissue; tissue is one local avatar within a larger idealist collapse structure.

    Top things this resolves:

    1. Measurement problem: collapse selects a coherent history, not a random endpoint.

    2. Many-worlds: branches are candidates, not all equally real worlds.

    3. Wigner’s friend: nested observers require global history selection.

    4. Retrocausality: future expectation helps weight the past that leads to it.

    5. Memory: memory belongs to selected history, not proven brain storage.

    6. Thought: thought is action inside collapse, not skull exhaust.

    7. Teleology: future forms help weight ancestral paths that build them.

    8. Sex drive: future observers weight the reproductive histories that produce them.

    9. Faith and worry: faith weights coherent good histories; worry weights feared ones.

    10. Idealism: reality is shared mental spacetime, stabilized by expectation-weighted collapse.

    So the core claim is simple: We SELECT history. Not dice rolls. standard quantum mechanics gives possible histories; Born-Hilborn adds observer expectation across spacetime, selecting one coherent history from many candidates.

    That is history selection.

    Not random history. Not every history. One weighted, coherent, lived history.

    My channel, Wayne Hilborn, demonstrates the mathematics of Idealism: how the Born rule is modified, why expectation replaces dice rolls, and why consciousness is not an afterthought but the missing physics.

    Physics and reality are fully solved. This explains a lot more than that list of ten.. it explains over 100 things.

    My channel teaches reality.. as is.. finished physics

Leave a Reply





This area can contain widgets, menus, shortcodes and custom content. You can manage it from the Customizer, in the Second layer section.

 

 

 

  • play_circle_filled

    92.9 : The Torch

  • play_circle_filled

    AGGRO
    'Til Deaf Do Us Part...

  • play_circle_filled

    SLACK!
    The Music That Made Gen-X

  • play_circle_filled

    KUDZU
    The Northwoods' Alt-Country & Americana

  • play_circle_filled

    BOOZHOO
    Indigenous Radio

  • play_circle_filled

    THE FLOW
    The Northwoods' Hip Hop and R&B

play_arrow skip_previous skip_next volume_down
playlist_play