[Instrumental music]

Thank you very much.

I deeply appreciate the introduction.

[Foreign language] First of all, let me say with my great appreciation to Venerable Yifa, a long-term friend.

Yifa was one of the earliest contributors to Closer to Truth, uh, going back, uh, more than twenty years.

And then recently, just a couple of years ago, we did it again several times, and she has been a major, uh, uh, force, uh, not only in the world that you know in Buddhism, but, uh, globally as we've introduced her on, uh, Closer to Truth.

Um, it's really an honor to participate with everyone today, uh, in this conference.

[laughs]

Well, let's talk about what motivated you to engage in collecting 400 different theories of consciousness and trying to assemble them into a taxonomy.

Yeah, it's something, once again, that was not originated by myself.

So to go back, I've told you the story of my interest in the brain and my work in brain science and then developing closer to truth for the categories I was interested in.

Why is there something around the nothing, cosmology, global philosophy of religion, all sorts of things about the brain and the mind, personal identity, free will.

alien intelligence, now AI, consciousness, all sorts of things.

And the experience of Closer to Truth doing that has a big focus on consciousness.

And so what happened was, it was in late, I think, 2022, one of the viewers of Closer to Truth happened to be on the editorial board of a scientific journal called progress in biophysics and molecular biology.

But the important thing about your work to me isn't so much the enumeration of the theories, while that is important, it's providing an overview, showing that there's a landscape

So, yeah, what, what sort of prompts this? Why, why do you sit and think this needs to be put into, into categorized form?

Well, it's a great question, and, uh, consciousness to me has been a, uh, a life passion.

Uh, uh, truly, when I was, uh, deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up as a teenager and planning for college, I wanted to understand ultimate reality, as you do, as, as, as a small fraction of humanity may wanna do.

We're, we're part of that passionate group.

And I thought of, uh, physics and philosophy, maybe physics and philosophy.

And then one evening, I really remember this as, uh, I don't know, 16 years old, wherever, uh, I had the realization that a- anything we can think about, physics, philosophy, whatever, comes from our brain.

And maybe if I can understand the brain, then it would be, um, kind of an orthogonal or different way to approach the nature of reality.

Fred Meyer, fresh for everyone.

the 350 theories or the one about levels of nothing.

No, the landscape of consciousness.

Right.

And this is the product of a lifetime in one sense.

So let me tell you this specific story because it directly addresses your question about the boundaries of science when dealing with what many people think is a purely scientific question, which is the nature of brain-mind consciousness.

Right.

So I've been focused on consciousness my entire life.

And once that happens, as the traditions say, you know not only who you are, you know what the ultimate reality is experientially, not just conceptually.