Episode 3: Anil Seth – What Is Consciousness? (and Other Easy Questions)

Jared  

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete  

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

Pete  

Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of Faith for Normal People. And our topic today is: what is consciousness and other easy questions? With our guest Anil Seth.

Jared  

Super excited and honored to have Anil, he’s a world renowned neuroscientist and- 

Pete  

You were such a nerd. 

Jared  

I was nerding out.

Pete  

You were totally nerding out. 

Jared  

I was nerding out.

Pete  

Guys you should have seen Jared nerding. 

Jared  

Anil is a best selling author who studies and speaks on the science of consciousness, artificial intelligence, art/science collaboration. He’s the lead scientist on an ambitious science/art collaboration called “Dream Machine.” He’s the professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and all kinds of other things. Editor in chief of the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. He has a book called “Being You: A New Science of Consciousness,” where he really breaks it down for everyday people. So I would encourage you to check it out, it won a lot of awards. And if you wanted to take another step, he has a new project called “The Perception Census” where you can learn more about some of this stuff, but you can actually be a part of the research. So if you want to learn more about that go to PerceptionCensus.DreamMachine.World, and you can learn more about it.

Pete  

And before we get into the episode, just a very quick reminder; don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the interview for Quiet Time with Pete and Jared, during which we reflect on the interview and how the conversation ties into our own personal journeys through a life of faith. It’s just ever evolving.

Jared  

Alright, let’s dive in.

Anil  

Pete  

Anil, welcome to our podcast!

Anil  

Thanks for having me on.

Pete  

Absolutely. Well, let’s just start with a really easy question. Right? This is so simple. This will take you two seconds to answer. What do we mean by consciousness?

Anil  

Pete  

Anil  

But actually, maybe it’s not that hard a question. Consciousness is at once one of the deepest mysteries we face, and it’s also one of the most familiar things. Consciousness, the way I see it anyway, it’s any kind of experience whatsoever. It’s what you lose when you fall into a dreamless sleep or go under general anesthesia. And it’s what comes back when you wake up or come around again, from anesthetic. It’s any kind of experience whatsoever, whether it’s the appearance of a sunset that you’re looking at, or the smell of your favorite food, or the pang of jealousy, or a feeling of pleasure, all of these are instances of consciousness. But to be conscious is the difference between being awake and aware like I am now or being a table, which just exists, but for the table, there is no experiencing going on.

Jared  

And where—Just kind of a follow up as we think about the history of this—Maybe evolutionarily, where did consciousness come from? It seems like maybe there was a point at which there wasn’t consciousness, and then there was consciousness. So what’s the prevailing theory about origins here?

Anil  

There’s a lot of disagreement. The one problem with answering questions like that is that consciousness and mental processes in general don’t leave traces in the fossil record. So it’s very, very hard to know. We have to infer it indirectly, based on what we think consciousness is useful for in ours now, and creatures now, that exist now, whether they’re humans or other animals. What is gained through this capacity for consciousness? And depending on the answer to that question, you will come up with different answers about when, in evolutionary history, there was experience first happening. For my money, it’s probably quite a long time ago, I think the basic brain mechanisms involved in consciousness, you can find them in all mammals. So that takes us already back several hundred million years. 

And then, before mammals, it gets harder to say. You know, whether earlier creatures like reptiles—or what were reptiles then—were conscious? Maybe. I personally don’t think you go back as far as the single cells or very, very simple creatures with just a few cells. I think you need a certain amount of complexity in the organism. And I think the thing that makes a difference is what consciousness really does for us is it brings together a lot of information in a single unified way that helps guide our action. If you think about what a conscious experience is like, any kind of experience, it brings together, vision, sound, smell, taste, touch all our senses in one format, if you like, and in a way that we are at the center of. It gives us a picture of the world, as it affords us actions that help further our goals. So that’s why I think you need to have organisms that are faced with a certain amount of complexity and the need to integrate a certain amount of information, at that point, consciousness becomes useful, and at that point, it probably appeared in the history of life.

Jared  

So maybe you can correct me, one way that came to mind as you were just talking about that, as this unifying format is almost like consciousness is an operating system that brings—You know, there’s all these components that have to be brought so that when we’re looking at our computer screen, it’s intelligible to us and there’s this operating system working behind the scenes that brings all that data together and presents it in a way that’s unifying.

Anil  

I think that’s partly right. I tend to feel a little suspicious of computer-based metaphors, because I think they’ve done a lot of disservice to how we think about the brain, especially now. It’s far too easy to imagine the brain has some kind of computer, and the mind as some program that runs on the wetware of the brain. But while there are some similarities, brains are really very different from computers. And I don’t think consciousness is a kind of mindware program. The way I tend to think about the brain is that there are multiple levels of organization: we’ve got neurons, we’ve got groups of neurons, brain cells, we’ve got brain regions, we’ve got activity patterns that cross all these different scales…And I don’t think there’s any one level that you can isolate as that’s the operating system, or that’s the software program the brain is running, and identify one of those with consciousness, it’s really intertwined all the way down. For me, it’s really life that’s important for consciousness, not a computer-based analogy. We’re living systems and for me, I think that’s really critical to the fact that we have this wonderful capacity to experience the world and the self.

Pete  

Yeah. So I want to ask the question, I don’t really understand what I’m saying, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Is brain development and heightened consciousness—are they correlated in an evolutionary perspective, like, is the nature of consciousness dependent on the size and the abilities of the brain?

Anil  

To some extent, but there’s another trap here, which is, I think, the trap of human exceptionalism. You know, we have this tendency to put ourselves at the top of every pyramid, the highest point on every scale, and then arrange other creatures in a single scale beneath us. And I think that’s not correct. I mean, clearly, we humans have capacities that some other species don’t, but then other species have other capacities too.

Pete  

Right.

Anil  

And consciousness, I don’t think, can be organized along a single scale of lower to higher. Different creatures inhabit different regions in a vast space of possible minds. And to some extent, you might you can arrange them in a particular way. Certainly, I think, human beings have a capacity for mental time travel, imagining distant futures, and remembering the distant past, that exceeds the capabilities of other creatures. But in other ways, you know, other creatures have attributes that we don’t. So consciousness is multi-dimensional. And I think that’s part of the challenge, to understand how consciousness varies between different species, but also between different human beings, none of us experience the world in exactly the same way.

Pete  

I mean, there’s philosophers and others that I’ve come across over the years, they use some phrases that I’m wondering if you can define them for us, because they’re so common. And then we just riff on how you see these issues, but one is “the mind-body problem,” and the other is “the hard problem of consciousness.”

Anil  

Yeah, so there’s a multitude of ways of facing this basic mystery of how minds experience mental stuff, broadly construed, relates to physical stuff. And when we have two very different stories about these kinds of phenomena. We have the history of science now, which has been very successful in explaining properties of the physical world and revealing things way beyond the imagination of any thinker. You know, the vast expanses of space and time are truly mind blowing. And explanations of the physical world have been just massively successful. And then we have a whole other sort of set of phenomena about personal experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and I think it’s been the case for thousands of years that people have wondered about how these two domains relate to each other. Descartes was very famous for dividing the universe into these two kinds of things. He called them “res cogitans,” the stuff of the mind and “res extensa,” the stuff of the body and the rest of the world. And Descartes’ challenge was then how do you put these two domains back together? He gave birth to the philosophy of dualism, which is still, I think, intuitively attractive to most people, which is this idea that there’s a realm of the mental and the realm of the physical. 

The mind-body problem is an aspect of that. It’s how does the mind depend on the body? How does it interface with the body? Does the mind control the body? Does the body generate the mind? Descartes’ solution was that there’s this tiny bit of the brain called the pineal gland, which is the interface between the mind and the body. Now, this turns out to be flat wrong. But it’s sort of interesting that basically any answer might be, in principle, wrong, because just dividing things up this way, invents a problem that might not actually exist. The heart problem is the kind of modern take on Descartes’ problem. But instead of being the question of how the mind relates to the body, it’s more general, it’s how could it be that conscious experience is a particular aspect of mind now, because some aspects of mind can be explained in terms of physical stuff. Just in this, we do get back to some computer analogies here, right? Because computers have memory, we have memory. So in principle, we can explain certain kinds of memory in terms of stuff happening in the physical world. But consciousness for David Chalmers, who coined the term “the heart problem,” for Descartes, and for many of us, seems different. Consciousness. Conscious experience just does not seem the kind of thing that can be explained in terms of physical processes, in the same way that other aspects of mind might be. And that’s the hard problem, as David Chalmers put it: why and how should any kind of physical processing be associated, give rise to consciousness at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should and yet it does.

Jared  

Yeah. And so in some ways, it is a more specific iteration of the mind-body problem where the first question, you know, in Descartes’ day, in the 1600s, is there seems to be these two kinds of things going on. We have physical properties, and as we develop scientific method and things like that, we’re figuring out that we can…There’s some predictable things going on there. But then there seems to be this other stuff in the mind. And it’s not physical, but it is part of our reality in a different way. And then, fast forward a couple hundred years, and we start getting more specific about, you know, what is the problem? And it’s that this conscious experience in particular, is hard to reconcile with what we know of physical processes that we’ve developed through this, you know, the scientific method and everything else. And we still haven’t figured out how these two relate. How did physical processes give rise to what we would call now conscious experience? Is that a way of summarizing that?

Anil  

That’s exactly right. Yeah. 

Jared  

Okay!

Anil  

You put it beautifully. 

Jared  

Excellent. I wonder if we can—Again, for our listeners—go back to something you said earlier around, you know, we’re using this word “perception.” And that’s—we’re throwing around a lot of big words, “consciousness,” “perception,” “experience.” Can you maybe say more about what perception is, in particular, and how it relates to consciousness or doesn’t? Because I want to ask another question, a follow up question, around truth and perception that I think our listeners…

Pete  

Jared  

It would be helpful to start distinguishing between this, but maybe can we start with what is perception?

Anil  

Sure. Perception is the process by which the brain makes sense of all the sensory information that it gets, to come up with sort of an understanding of what’s going on. So I think the way to unpack that a little bit is to just imagine being a brain, imagine that you are your brain. There you are, you’re locked inside this bony vault of a skull, and it’s dark in there, it’s silent. All you’ve got to go on as a brain are these electrical signals coming from the eyes, and the ears, and the nose, and the tongue, wherever. And these signals, they don’t come with labels on them about where they came from, out there in the world, or even in the body. They’re just electrical signals. They have structure, but they’re just electrical signals. Now, when we open our eyes, we see a world, with objects and people in places, with colors and shapes, and things like that. How does the brain interpret the sensory signals to create this picture in the mind? That’s the process of perception. It’s sort of making sense of the sensory signals to generate this picture in the mind. Now it’s important, and by—and picture this for vision, but you can imagine the same thing going on for hearing, for taste, for touch, is all just electrical signals. But our brain interprets them as, “Okay, there’s a table over there, there’s a car over there. There’s my friend over there waving at me.” 

But in all of these cases, you know, the brain is coming up with a description in some format, whether it’s visual or auditory, or something about some state of affairs, whether it’s in the world or in the body. That’s the process of perception. But it’s not the same thing as consciousness, right? Because consciousness is any kind of experience whatsoever. Perception doesn’t always reach the threshold of consciousness. This is one of the classic findings in psychology, that the brain can still, in some cases, interpret sensory information, figure out what’s going on out there in the world, or in here in the body, but the organism is not aware of it. So when you, for instance, you might present a picture very, very quickly and surround it with another picture, which is just sort of meaningless scrambles. That’s a technique called “masking” in psychology. If you do it in the right way, all the person sees is just this bunch of noisy marks, whatever the second image was, that obscured the real image, you don’t see the real image at all. But that real image can still affect, can still guide your behavior. So not everything that the brain perceives reaches consciousness. But I think, and this is, this is now inserting a little bit of my own individual perspective on this, I think every aspect of consciousness can be understood as some form of perception. Everything we experience is reflecting some aspects of the brain making sense of sensory data. And that goes for our experiences of the world, but it also goes for our experiences of the self, even for very provocative aspects of the experience itself like free will. And people argue about free will: Do we have it? And does consciousness cause things to happen in the world? I’m not sure that’s a meaningful question. What I think instead is that the experience of free will, the experience of deciding to do something and doing it—that’s a form of perception. That’s a particular way the brain is perceiving what’s happening in the body.

Jared  

Okay, that was a lot. That was a lot.

Pete  

Well, the brain’s a lot, I think.

Jared  

Yeah. And I think it, but I think it’s really, really helpful to make that distinction. I mean, I just want to acknowledge this is tough stuff that I think everybody like, I just, I think we miss a lot when we oversimplify how the world works. And I think it’s important to recognize what you’re saying. And that is, you know, what philosophers took a long time, I think, to recognize, and that is—okay, what’s happening, when I picture a tree? What’s the interaction with the world when I’m doing that? And that’s this idea of, of perception. That we all, always, and already can only process the sense data in the way that our particular mind works—And again, I don’t want to oversimplify, but the way I understand the history of philosophy, there was at first this assumption that we all do it the same way. And so there’s a lot of, in the enlightenment, there’s a lot of optimism that, “Oh, hey, we kind of figured out how this works and it seems like it’s universal and we can get to this ultimate experience where we’re all recognizing this one ultimate reality that we’re, you know, we’re all of our brains work the same way. And we’re experiencing it all in the same way.” And then there was this recognition that, oh, no, how we perceive things can actually be different based on all kinds of factors.

And this is relevant, because, again, fundamentalist religion, more of the tradition that I grew up in, there is this assumption that there’s an accurate way to see the world. It’s what we call correspondence: it corresponds to reality. And there’s an inaccurate way, and that distorts reality. And the accurate way is what we call “absolute truth.” And of course, the people in my tradition often had the absolute truth. So my question is, if we can understand that the way we perceive the world is different depending on cultural things, depending on how our brains are wired—how do we then talk about truth in a way that’s meaningful? If we can only ever, you know, we can’t step outside of our own brains and see the reality as it really is without the filter, that processing mechanism, which is what we call perception. If we can’t do that, then what do we mean when we talk about truth?

Anil  

Yeah, I think that last point that you made is absolutely critical. You know, we can’t step out of our own brains and see reality as it really is. This is a really hard thing to appreciate. And it’s partly because of the way the brain works when it’s doing this business of perception, because it’s this kind of everyday miracle, you know? We wake up, we open our eyes, and it seems to us that we just see the world as it really is. It doesn’t seem to us like there’s any kind of complicated business going on inside our heads to do this. To accomplish this, we open our eyes, and there it is—the world. Whereas when we think hard, or we’re trying to write a letter, it does seem to us that there’s something going on in our mind. And we tend to associate that, okay, that’s really dependent on who we might be as a particular distinctive individual character. 

But when we just look around, because we don’t experience all the shenanigans going on inside our brains, we just assume that we see the world as it is. But we know this is not true. As you said, you can’t remove the filter. It’s impossible to remove the filter! The philosopher Immanuel Kant made this point hundreds of years ago that he called the real world, whatever it is, the Noumenon. And we can never have direct access to that everything is hidden behind a sensory veil. And so this does raise interesting questions about what truth means, or what true and accurate perception might mean. Because it’s also not the case that our perceptual experiences and the way we see the world is just made up and arbitrary. Of course it isn’t. If it was made up and arbitrary, we wouldn’t stay alive very long. What is going on? I think the best way to understand what’s going on, for me, is that our perceptual experiences, however simple they may seem, they’re always constructions, they’re always the brain’s best guess about what’s going on out there. 

But the best guesses that the brain is making are tied to the world in very, very intimate ways that have been shaped by evolution over millions of years. So that we live within what I’ve called—it’s a little bit of a provocative term—I think we live within what can be called a controlled hallucination. I call it a hallucination because it’s generated by our brains, like when we dream or when we hallucinate, whether we’ve then taken psychedelics or something else. Hallucinations tend to be associated with internally generated experiences. But all our experiences are internally generated. It’s just that most of the time, they’re controlled by the body and the world. They’re reined in by what’s really out there. It doesn’t mean we see things as they really are. We see things as evolution has determined it’s useful for us to see things. The novelist Anais Nin put it beautifully when she said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” 

Pete  

Right.

Anil  

And then to your point, we are all different. We’re all slightly different. And it’s very hard to pick up on these differences. And I think it is a problem with traditions, whether they’re fundamentalist religion, or other traditions, that insist that there is one right way of seeing things, experiencing things, believing things, and many other wrong ways. This doesn’t mean, of course, that every way is equivalent. Now, if I fail to perceive a bus coming straight towards me while I’m crossing the road, you know, that is not a good form of perception. So that there are ranges, there are criteria that constrain useful ways of perceiving. But there is no single right way of perceiving. I think a really good example of this is color. Color seems to us to just be there as a property of the world, something that doesn’t depend on our minds, it’s just out there. The books that I’m looking at on my bookshelf right now are all different colors. But color is not a mind-independent property of the world. No, there’s just lightwaves and our brains generate color as a result of combinations of these light waves. And it depends on the ambient lighting, and all sorts of things. You know, people with color blindness, they see colors differently, other animals will have very different color experiences. Color depends intrinsically on the brain and the world. And again, neuroscience was predated many times in saying this. The artist Cezanne said, “Color is where the brain and the universe meet.” And he was dead right about that. But then so is everything. There is a real world out there, but the way the world appears to us is always a construction. A construction that is tied in useful ways to that world, but in different ways for each of us.

Jared  

How does our understanding of consciousness affect—because, and I don’t fully understand the correlation, but I’m guessing there’s something here—affect how how everyday people might understand themselves and what it means to be “a self” because, like you said, I can’t help but think about my experience, and you can have described consciousness as any kind of experience. 

Anil  

Jared  

But there’s also the sense that there’s something experiencing the world, and that something is what I would call me, myself. So what’s the interaction between those two and what, in your studies, what does it mean to be “a self” as it relates to this consciousness idea?

Anil  

This is an excellent question. I think it is here, actually, there are some really interesting convergences and divergences with spiritual traditions and much religious thinking, because the convergences might come with the certain kinds of traditions that see the self as not the thing that does the experiencing. To your point, there’s this fairly attractive, I think, especially in Western cultures, this idea that the self is this little mini-me somewhere inside my skull that is receiving all the information through the eyes and the ears, that is doing all this perceiving, having all these experiences, and then deciding what to do and making actions, guiding the behavior of the body. And what I think neuroscience and the brain-mind sciences more generally are telling us in philosophy too, is that this is not how things are. Even though it might seem as though the self is the thing doing the perceiving, a better way to think of it—certainly a way that’s more compatible with what we know about the mind and the brain is that the self is a kind of perception too. 

All that’s happening in an organism like us is the generation of a whole set of perceptual experiences. Some of these are about the world and they’re calibrated by sensory signals that come from the world. And some of these create this experience of self, and some of the relevant information that constrains these experiences comes from within the body. But there are many levels to self as well. We experience the self at very basic levels as just this experience of being associated with a particular body, and of things happening that are very deeply embodied like emotions, and moods, which are really reflections of how the brain is understanding what’s happening in the body. And then we have other levels of self like the experience of the world from a particular first person perspective. And it’s somewhere usually just behind the eyes. And then there are experiences of agency, of free will, of being the cause of actions and of being the author of your thoughts. And then only at higher levels, we have the idea of personal identity, the experience of being a continuous individual over time, and even that experience is dependent on the social networks that we inhabit. And the experience of being “me” is partly refracted through the minds of those around me. And all of these aspects of self, for most of us for most of the time, they seem bound together in this sort of essence of “me.” And I think one of the illusions of self is that that essence picks out something real, and something unchanging. That there’s this essence of Anil Seth that persists over time, that anchors all these other aspects of self. And I don’t think that’s really the case, I think there’s just this unfolding bundle of perceptions that also changes over time. And that we may not perceive this change, we may underestimate this change. So the me now is not the same as the me 10 years ago, or even one day ago. Our brains are constantly inventing and reinventing this experience of self.

Pete  

So, the, you know, our changes over our lives—How can I ask this question? I’ve heard people talk like this, you know, I’m in my 50s, 60s, whatever, and I still see myself as I’ve always seen myself in my life. You know, my self has not changed. It may be developing, but there’s still a core “selfness” that has accompanied me ever since I’ve been awake enough to even think about that abstract thought. So, I think what you’re saying is that you’re not really on board with that way of thinking about self.

Anil  

Well, I just wonder what they would actually mean. In a certain sense, there’s, it’s trivially true. There’s a, the body that I am—even though the cells that make me up have turned over over time. So I’m made out of actually different stuff. There’s been a continuity to the physical object that is my body, it doesn’t suddenly disappear and reappear somewhere else. 

Pete  

Anil  

And so there’s, there’s a sort of thread of continuity. And there is a sense of “me-ness”, but I think, to take that sense of “me-ness,” as picking out the fact there must have been something essential, unchanged, all the way through from the moment of first waking, you know, I’m not sure I’m on board with that.

Pete  

Yeah.

Anil  

I think it’s easy to…It’s one of those things that, even if it’s the case that the experience of being you does change over time, it’s very likely to seem to you that it doesn’t. I mean one of the things we know about perception is that when things change very slowly, and you’re not expecting them to change, you don’t perceive the change at all—even though your perception actually changes. So it’s very difficult to go from the introspective analysis of this, you know, what you can tell from looking into your own experience, to actually what is going on. Because your own experience is compatible with any number of options about what’s going on under the hood.

Pete  

And what we “remember” from say, the age of 10, to the age of 5, is not a constant, but it’s actually filtered through our current perceptions and understanding of self.

Anil  

Actually, that’s a really good example of how our self can change quite a lot. Memory is both a wonderful thing, but it’s also highly unreliable. And the more often you remember something, the less accurate your memory becomes. Every act of memory is an act of recreation, of reimagination. And I think that if part of our identity is based on a set of memories that we take to be accurate reflections, like a photo album of what happened to us—now, that’s not going to be the case. And because our memories of events in the past changed, and our sense of personal identity is going to change too.

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

Well, I want to maybe back up, and I don’t want to get too abstract here. But I think part of what I’m hearing—and this is my own lens that I’m hearing this through—is that we privilege, in the West, we privilege sameness over difference. So this idea of identity, a continuous individual over time, we’ve learned culturally in our values to value that. And so we are incentivized—or I don’t know the right word for this—but we’re almost programmed in some ways to interpret our experiences through the lens of identity, rather than difference. So we don’t see our changes, that we are a bundle of change and difference at all times, because we don’t expect to see it. We create a narrative based on an identity framework. And I wonder, first of all, is that accurate, maybe, to say? But secondly, what are we afraid of, maybe, in the West, if we don’t have an essence? Or if there isn’t like a core self? Is there like a fear or something that we’re trying to hold on to? Because I think some people might hear this and I think it might scare them. Or it does like, I know in religious traditions, at least, you know, the one I grew up in, it was important to say things like, well, we have to kind of get rid of the contingent things, the things that are accidental, that aren’t core to who we are. And as I’ve gotten older, it’s slippery! Like what do we mean core to who we are? I’m different than I was yesterday, and different than I was last month. Anyway, I’m saying a lot of things. But is there a sense in which there’s this Western framework that privileges identity that is keeping us from seeing just how, you know, this idea of self is way more amorphous than we think? And what do we feel like we lose if we don’t have that? 

Anil  

Yeah, I think these are excellent questions. I’m not sure there’s a clear answer. I think you’re absolutely right, to point out—and I think this is echoing what we’ve been discussing—that the idea of a core self, an unchanging core essence of self, is something that we, our brains, our minds, expect. And that’s why we interpret our experiences of self through that lens. What’s responsible for those expectations? Is it cultural? Is it something to do with a Western focus on individualism and an identity? Maybe partly, I think there is some interesting work I don’t know the details about, comparing sense of self across cultures and looking, for instance, in Japanese society, where sense of self seems to be much more socially distributed. But still, I’m pretty sure that anyone from any culture will have an experience that is compatible with this idea of a core self of some essence. And that’s because I think the expectation, the fundamental expectations that are responsible for that experience go deeper than culture. There’s something very basically biological about it, which is something to do with regulation, self-preservation of the organism. And the experience of something unchanging at the heart of an organism is a very useful thing for an organism to construct, to guide its behavior, to keep the organism alive. 

So I think there’s many layers to this, and certainly some layers may be culturally inflected, whereas others may not be. And to your other point about what are we afraid of? Like… I think this is a real challenge. And it’s something I struggle with as well. I think it’s well recognized that we humans, we have the curse of foretelling our mortality, at least in principle. It’s very, very difficult for people to really imagine what it’s like to not exist. In a strangely temporarily asymmetric way, right? We don’t seem to struggle with the fact that we didn’t exist sometime in the past. But most of us do struggle a little bit with the prospect of not existing in the future. And one interpretation of an unchanging essence of self is that this is something that either we’re afraid of losing at the moment of death, or it’s something that might, in some traditions, go beyond the moment of death and might provide us with or inoculate us against the fear of mortality. So, there’s something deeply challenging to our basic biological expectation of continuity. I think there’s something very deeply embedded installed by evolution that we expect to continue over time. But at another level, because of our cognitive sophistication, we know now that that’s probably not true. And that provides a psychological tension, which I don’t think there’s a very easy way to overcome it. But one way to begin to face it is to recognize that the self is indeed always changing. So that means in a sense, there’s less to lose, because you’re changing all the time anyway.

Jared  

Yeah. Yeah, that’s kind of how I was thinking about it, is if we could grasp that the thing that we feel that we’re afraid of losing in death was kind of always an illusion, that we’ve been losing it and gaining… We’ve been losing parts and gaining parts over a lifetime. It feels like maybe that—because also it goes into this sense of protection. But it’s not just protecting from death, but I feel like politically and culturally, I’m constantly needing to protect my identity. There’s something there, I think, in recognizing that it’s maybe not worth protecting as much as we think because we inevitably are gaining and losing it at the time. And there’s I think there’s something to valuing difference over sameness that might help break that down a little.

Anil  

Yeah, that I’m completely on board. And I think you’re absolutely right to extend this analogy to the preservation of identity too. And I do think that’s right, I think there’s psychological dynamics that unfold in a pattern that tends to be self-reinforcing. And we see this in the echo chambers of social media and other places. And I think part of that could be culturally amplified, culturally inflected. Certainly, the rise of technology has made it much easier for the self-reinforcing dynamics to take place. You know, to the extent that the culture values identity and the specificity of identity, I think that’s true that—that could drive some of these dynamics.

Pete  

Yeah. I’d like to sort of point us a little bit more explicitly towards religious experience, and just in your studies have you dealt much with this intersection between religious faith and just your study of consciousness? And maybe just some thoughts on how those things work.

Anil  

Yeah, I think it’s…a little bit, not very much, it’s not been a focus. But I do find it fascinating, because, of course, some of the questions are very much the same, you know, “What’s the meaning of life? Who are we? What happens after death? What’s going on?” The big questions are common to religion and to science, especially to questions about consciousness and the brain and the mind. And I think I’ve had most experience at the intersections of these two big traditions with people from the Buddhist tradition. And I think that’s because there you find probably the greatest evident similarities that are easiest to uncover, because there are a lot of shared concepts here about the constructed nature of perception, the constructed nature of the self, the impermanent nature of the objects of our experience. I think there’s some clear resonances there. And there’s also been—and I was delighted to discover this, when I started out in this area a couple of decades ago—already a fertile set of conversations between Buddhists and neuroscientists, including the Dalai Lama, who were not trying to sort of get one over the other side, but really trying to explore how these perspectives could be complimentary. And I thought that was really refreshing, because science need not be threatening to religion. I think they’re different perspectives on some deeply held questions that we all have. And in the Buddhist example—at least as it was being articulated by these conversations, in my own experience—explored that complementarity in a very constructive way.

Pete  

Which might be easier with a tradition that tends to think of the ego as getting in the way. 

Anil  

Yeah!

Pete  

That inflated sense of self, perhaps, that’s unmoving, and unchanging, and just sort of there.

Anil  

Yeah, I mean, it’s not to say that—I think that’s true. And of course, there are points of divergence as well. I mean, there is in Buddhism, as far as I understand it, there’s still some sense in which the self does persist after death. But it’s in a very different way. It’s not sort of associated with the distinct personality type, the sort of psychological whole entity that I feel myself to be. I mean, there are still points of difference, of course, but I think you’re right, I think it’s easy—this is one of the aspects of Buddhism that made it sort of a more attractive territory to explore, to put neuroscientists and religious thinkers and religious practitioners together to explore. But I don’t think it’s got to be limited to Buddhism. I had some interesting conversations with the former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is also able to—and knows a great deal about psychology, about neuroscience and the philosophy of mind—and able to find parallels between his religious tradition and lines of thought in neuroscience. But of course, again, points of disagreement. 

I think, of course, the main points of disagreement on both sides become when ideas get too fixed. On the side of religious traditions, when people are inflexible with respect to specific things written in specific books about the age of the Earth, and so on. Then we’re in trouble, then there’s very little complementarity to be had. And something similar can be said for science, when people become too dogmatic about what science has explained, can or cannot explain, then I think you’re in trouble too. But for my money, the beauty of science is, in the end it becomes a little bit independent of what people might believe about it. It’s the beauty of the natural method that in the end, nature will confirm or disconfirm your ideas.

Jared  

Right. And I think that, you know, kind of as we as we wrap up our time, I think that’s, you know, for me, even this whole show, you know, Faith for Normal People, it is—You know, to what you said, Pete is Buddhism, I think, has an easier time with this, because I think they got some of that maybe more right in their tradition. Like for me, it’s not just a conversation of two conflicting things, but it is, how do we, within maybe like a Christian tradition, catch up to some of these scientific realities.

Pete  

Mhm, right.

Jared  

That again, historically, the Christian tradition has not been very good at being caught up. We sort of had this reactionary, like you mentioned, Anil, the age of the earth and that kind of thing. We had, you know, we’re a couple 100 years behind because we were trying to maybe protect our, you know, hegemony or power or whatever.

Pete  

At least the last few hundred years… 

Jared  

Yeah, right. So, with that being said, I do think that there’s things that, for us, in a Christian tradition, to be brought up to speed. And I think learning from and taking the more humble approach, that we have things to learn about how the world works, you know, what do you feel like people of faith could learn from studying consciousness and perception and maybe taking more steps to follow you, to follow the studies that are happening in this field, what do you think there is to learn? And maybe as final words of wisdom, how this can be carried forward in people’s studies and what they’re thinking about, what they’re interested in?

Anil  

Okay, that’s great. But before doing that, I did want to say though, I think there’s also… The learning can go the other way, too. I think for issues of human concern, like, morality, ethics, it’s very difficult to derive these things from a purely scientific basis, you know, these are human concerns. And religion has not always got them right, either. But there are questions that can be addressed, that I think we can learn from religion about ethical moral questions, about also how we confront the issue of death and the importance of ritual in human life as well. These are things that science is not best placed to answer without involvement from these other spheres of human thought and human activity. 

Pete  

Yeah. 

Anil  

But I do think there’s something to be learned. I mean, for me, the main thing, the constant revelation, for me that science of the mind delivers, is that what we experience comes from the inside out rather than the outside in. You’re walking down the road, it seems as though you just see the world as it is. But really, what’s happening is that your brain is creating this world, is creating this experience of a world around you. It’s creating the experience of the self within that world. I find that a really awe inspiring, revelatory thought. And it has a lot of implications too, it has a lot of implications for how we deal with others. It’s much easier to build platforms for empathy, for communication, for understanding, once you really bed in this appreciation that the way I experience the world and the self might be different from the way you experience the world and the self. This scientifically-based understanding of perception can cultivate a humility about our own experiences, and by extension, our own beliefs, which I think can be really helpful. 

And also, more broadly, there’s this idea of putting things to the test, you know, what does and what doesn’t stand up, and not to see sciences as a threat to everything. But to enlarge the scope of our belief, it’s not going to replace—Science isn’t going to replace everything. And a scientific explanation doesn’t remove or drain the beauty from things. I think it enhances the beauty of things. And in my experience, it weaves us more deeply into the tapestry of nature. And maybe that’s my last point that’s worth dwelling on. Historically, at least in my—from a position of really rather naive understanding of religion—but there seems to be something, at least how religion was taught to me as a kid, that tends to elevate the human being away from the rest of nature.

Jared  

Anil  

And make us closer to God than to the rest of the world. And I think this has been the source of a large number of problems in the world. And I think, as the science of mind is showing us progressively that we are, we’re not so special, and we are very special, each of us is very special. But we’re deeply woven in with the rest of nature, we’re more part of it and less apart from it. And that’s a very nourishing conclusion to reach me. It’s a very enriching conclusion. And I think it provides a kind of, for me, a secular, spiritual alternative that makes me feel part of something bigger. And I think that is something that we all need to feel to give our lives meaning.

Jared  

Excellent. I think that’s a wonderful sentiment to end on. So thank you so much, Anil and I would encourage people to take part in The Perception Census and all the work that you have going on, so we can keep understanding these things more and more. So thanks again, for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Anil  

Thank you for a wonderful conversation! I really enjoyed that. And I’m grateful for the invitation.

Jared  

And now for Quiet Time—

Pete  

—with Pete and Jared. 

Pete  

Alright. Well, Jared, one moment of several moments of the podcast, or one that sort of stuck out to me was, “we don’t see things as they are we see things as we are.” So let’s bring this into our understanding of God. What do you think you sort of bring to the table? What’s your part of that equation, for understanding God, what you bring to it?

Jared  

Well, the first thing I would say, only caveat, something sits really right with me about that quote, and something sits not right with me about that quote. And I think the real challenge of how we understand the world isn’t that it’s black or white. It’s not that we don’t see things as they are at all, we only see things as we are. But it’s also not true that we see things as they are. 

Pete  

Okay, yeah. I guess.

Jared  

It’s always this mix. It’s like the journey is like figuring out what of my view is me that I’m projecting onto this, and what’s actually coming from, right, I always use this example of like, if I go stand in the street and get hit by a truck, I’m not seeing that as I am. Like, I’ll probably get hit by a truck and die. Like, there’s a reality out there. 

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

It’s just this weird mix of how much of it’s me and how much of it’s reality. So…

Pete  

But how about with God, though? I mean, is that different than like, okay, I’m sitting across from you at a table, I think I’m seeing something as it is. Maybe not in all its dimensions, right. But when it comes to God and the life of faith, however we define that right? It just, it seems like…

Jared  

Well, I think, I mean, for me a helpful way to think about this, the way that I’ve been able to think about this was, we all make God in our own image in some way. So we might as well make God in the image of the kind of people we want to be in the world. So for me, I hope that I am projecting my own view of God in helpful ways. Like, I want God to be a God of love, because I want the world to be a place of love. And I want to be a loving…. So I think that’s something I bring to the table in the way I—it’s sort of like, and I know that I feel like the conservative backlash is like, well, “who cares about your feelings and what you want it to be? It is or it isn’t.” But going to your point is like, well, we don’t have a lot of data here on what kind of God we have.

Pete  

And that’s where that quote I think is important. That we don’t see God as God is, we bring something to that equation. Maybe that’s the way it’s meant to be. You know, it seems inevitable to me that who we are, our experiences, go into our understanding of God. I don’t know how else to do—how do we get out of ourselves?

Jared  

Right, right. And so when there’s a God of order, it’s usually the person who paints God as a God of order, of law and justice, is someone who wants to see law and order and justice. And I’m not saying that it’s bad or good, it just, let’s be a little self aware.

Pete  

I think that’s the key. To be self aware. 

Jared  

And so yeah, I do—my view of God has evolved as I’ve evolved. That’s not a coincidence.

Pete  

Yeah, that’s true for me as well, I think thinking of God as love. And of course, you know, we bring into that notions of what love is, right? That’s inevitable, but that’s okay. That’s not like, oh, no, we’re paralyzed, we shouldn’t let our own experience affect how we think of God. Well, that’s not going to happen. I think it’s always there. But you know, it’s not like a hopeless situation. It’s just the reality of the matter. And I’ve very much come to peace with that in my life. I expect it. I don’t think too highly, I hope, of my thoughts. But I also take them seriously because I do commune with God in certain ways that are based on what I have been bringing to the table over the years, and that has changed. It’s not like it was in my 20s or 30s, or whatever, you know, it’s very different now.

Jared  

Can you speak to how has—because this ties into the podcast, as well. As you’ve loosened up on your need to identify and label who God is, have you also loosened up your need to identify and label you? Like your core identity of the kind of this is who I am? Or how does that, what’s the relationship between those two for you?

Pete  

Yeah. I think those two connect, I’d have to think about that more. That’s a really good question. But let’s put it this way. I don’t, I never really had this perfectionistic streak. I don’t think I’ve ever really had them. But whatever I may have had, I feel less that way. About myself. I just don’t feel like—I’m not on pins and needles, right, hoping that I’m going to get God right. I’m just not because I won’t.

Jared  

Right. And for me, I think the translation, kind of why I asked that question is, that’s translated directly into not just when I was able to let go of getting God right. I was able to let go of getting life right. Like, it’s not just God. I’m sort of like, okay, God’s too big. But you know what? I can still like figure the rest of this out. 

Pete  

Jared  

It’s like, no, once that was taken off the table, I was able to take other things off the table in my life, like I don’t have to, there’s not like the right way to do life. And that was a big thing for me, because then that led to, okay, well then, who am I? What am I about? Because the narrative of my Christian tradition was to like win at life. 

Pete  

Yes.

Jared  

Like there’s a finish line, there’s a way to do this the right way. 

Pete  

And you get the crown.

Jared  

Yeah, it begins with having a right view of God and a right view of the Bible. And when you do that, you’re gonna win. And whenever I took that narrative off the table, it can be scary, because then it feels like, okay, well then I have lost my purpose, because there’s not a finish line. But I think if we—for me, going through that journey, I was able to start creating this meaning for myself.

Pete  

Right, and we don’t paint ourselves into a corner as if our lives don’t develop, and it doesn’t…like our lives don’t develop, at least mine doesn’t, in terms of like greater and greater clarity of the mysteries of the universe. It’s more, it’s expanded and broadened, where I’m just seeing a bigger lay of the land. And I’m just not as interested in feeling like I have to wrap my arms around that. And that’s a matter of, I think, personal development based on experience, which then is invariably mushed together with theology, for lack of a better word.

Jared  

Why for you is that always mushed together?

Pete  

Again, we’ve talked about this a little bit in other contexts, but our connection, I mean, Calvin says, you know, our knowledge of self and knowledge of God are two sides of the same coin. I would put it more like my connection with God and my connection with myself are very, very closely related. And it’s like you, it definitely is the case that how I’ve processed my own sense of self definitely absolutely affects how I process my understanding of God. And in the same way that I’m in a constant state of evolving and developing, if I’m just aware and let it happen, my theology, my faith is going to change along with that. And I know I mean, for some I can imagine that’s gonna sound,  that sounds very subjective and haphazard. Well, it is subjective. I think theology is subjective. 

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

I think faith is subjective. 

Jared  

Yes! And I think that’s a critical, I think we can unpack, that’s like a whole episode to unpack that subjective isn’t haphazard. Because I think for a lot of people that word is, it’s loaded.

Pete  

Yes.

Jared  

With a lot of baggage that it’s untrue. Subjective means untrue.

Pete  

And so you want truth.

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

Or objectivity.

Jared  

Yes. We align those—truth and objectivity. Which we don’t need to do that. That’s a very modern understanding.

Pete  

Those subjective experiences, right. I mean, again, truth is relative. Well, in a sense, it’s sort of dependent how you define truth. It’s sort of is. I mean, the truth that there’s air in this room that we’re breathing, is a truth. But as you’ve written, right, in Love Matters More, there are different kinds of truth. And we need to be aware of those different kinds of truth. But yeah, it’s you know, “the truth”, okay? To get it from where? From reading the Bible, really? Do you want to go there? Reading the Bible is going to give you truth?! I understand what you’re saying. But I think is it the quest for truth or is it the quest for connection with God and with the spirit? And all that. That, to me, is like—that’s much more important. And I’m not going to get there (this is my growing self awareness) I’m not going to get there through thinking harder. I like thinking, thinking is fun! And I like thinking hard. And I like trying to figure things out. And I say to myself, I think I’m onto something here. But I have to sort of hold that gently. Just like, I can’t say to myself, well, “here I am, that’s never going to change. I’m going to be like this for the rest of my life!” I don’t think so. Right? So why shouldn’t our, let’s say consciousness of God change along with it? I don’t really know why we’re even talking about this, Jared. [Laughing]

Jared  

Because I think there is something in values that feels interestingly enough—what I want to say is this. That flexibility with our identity, and who we are. What I recognize is fundamentalism can attach to any set of beliefs, when there is that rigidity around our identity. When I feel I need to protect this identity, whatever that is, “I am a whatever.” But I think it’s not disconnected from what you said about connectedness. It’s like, well, I have to protect it because I think the only reason I get to belong and connect to this group is because I use this adjective. I’m a conservative, I’m a liberal, I’m a progressive, I’ve built my friends around this adjective. And so of course, I’m gonna defend it. Because if I lose the adjective, I lose my friends. And here’s the thing, this is a real kicker for those who’ve gone through a phase shift or deconstruction. You weren’t wrong! That’s the scary part! Is like, it turned out to be true. Whenever I lost the conservative adjective, I did lose my friends. And I did lose my community. And so that can swing us into kind of a fundamentalism of like, “see, I’m going to ditch those beliefs because I don’t believe them anymore. But I’m going to attach to this new belief, because this is how I connect and this is how I belong. And if I start to question that, I may not say it the next time because I know what happens. I lose that connection.” And I think that’s, I mean, I’ve kind of gone through that myself. 

Pete  

Yeah, sure. Me too.

Jared  

Like, recognizing they’re not wrong, like that did happen.

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

But I don’t think that should keep—the brave thing for me is to keep staying open even in the face of that.

Pete  

Well, brave means you’re engaging your growing self and being honest, and honoring the emotional fallout of these things, which is absolutely true. I mean, I’ve never met anybody who hasn’t gone on some sort of a disorientation journey who hasn’t paid for it emotionally. Which is what irritates me when people say, “Oh, you’re just trying to be cool,” Yeah, no. Life was so much easier when it’s like, I knew everything, you know?

Jared  

Yeah, and I was surrounded by people who also knew the same things. Yeah, we were safe.

Pete  

Well, there’s, there’s one more thing in the line of the podcast that I really appreciated, which is, we can’t step outside our brains to see reality as it is. And that connects with what we’re saying here, right? We can’t, we don’t have a point of view from the top down. We can’t share God’s point of view, by definition. So we can’t really just, we’re always going to be involved in the transaction. Like any relationship, right? That’s, to me, that’s like, you know, having a “right relationship with God.” I mean, that’s that language drives me crazy, but it’s good language. 

Pete  

I think it’s a really helpful metaphor, although I don’t know what it means to say “a relationship with God” when, you know, as I believe God permeates our very existence. It’s not like an outside force.

Jared  

Jared  

It’s hard to know what the other side is on that relationship.

Pete  

Exactly. But it’s a good metaphor, though, that there’s a relational thing, which means vulnerability, and change, and all that sort of stuff. And I think that’s very important.

Jared  

Well, not to be nerdy. But I think a huge shift for me that Anil’s episode touches on throughout is changing a mindset to the idea that reality is a relationship. It’s relational. It’s the in between that actually means something, we have a very Adamistic, I might call it, understanding. Where it’s like you are you and you’re an individual, and you’re over there disconnected from everything else. And I’m over here, and then we study these separately. And it’s very, it’s the scientific mindset, which has come up with many, many wonderful things about the natural world, but at the expense of seeing that at one point, at some point, an important point, all of that breaks down. 

Pete  

Well and the point that it breaks down is in quantum reality.

Jared  

Exactly. 

Pete  

And not to get nerdy—and we’re not actually! This is like, everyone should know this. We should know this, like, you know, there’s atmosphere. I think it’s that basic to our reality. Everything’s relational. There are no separate things. Everything is connected with everything else.

Jared  

And that drives me crazy that sometimes people call that like woowoo feelings based. And I’m like, no, that’s science, like we’re coming to the understanding that that’s science. The relationality is baked into the fabric of our universe. 

Pete  

Exactly right.

Jared  

You have to have it to understand what’s going on.

Pete  

And it works on the big level and also the personal level. And I mean, it’s yeah.

Jared  

So coming back to that, we recently had on the Bible for Normal People podcast, someone talking—David Lambert talking about this idea of assemblages. And he gets this idea from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who writes these books with another guy named Guattari. And they they talk about assemblages, and they talk about it in terms of relationships, too. And I think that’s part of this identity, is like, who am I? It’s a fleeting, false question to even ask because it’s more robust and true to ask, Who am I-Pete? Like, who am I in relation to Pete? I’m showing up a little differently to you right now than I am to my daughter. 

Pete  

I sure hope so.

Jared  

And I’m showing up differently to you than I am to other significant people, my friends, my business colleagues. And so sometimes we call like, we think of it as like, disingenuous or not authentic to who I truly am. But what if who I truly am is that relationship?

Pete  

Exactly right. Yeah. Right. 

Jared  

And so I think that’s important.

Pete  

And that makes a huge difference in how we think about God, and how we relate to each other. And somehow, that hard word to pin down, consciousness, is somehow tied to all this. And it’s honestly, it’s still confusing to me, like define consciousness? No, I don’t know how to do that. Right? It’s just Anil did that. Right? 

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

And I have to think about what he said, you know, but it’s, I guess it means our awareness of being aware, right? 

Jared  

Yeah, yeah.

Pete  

That’s, to me, that’s the way I think of consciousness. And we have that. And I’m not sure if a rattlesnake does. Maybe!

Jared  

But it’s not empty either. Once you are aware of that awareness, you’re also always in relationship, because we garner that consciousness in a mirroring effect, like, my view of myself is really just mirroring what other people have told me about myself throughout my whole life from the time I’m born, my infancy—

Pete  

Like “you’re worthless, and you have no meaning.” That’s what you’ve heard, right?

Jared  

No, I’ve never heard that. But you’re just garnering information. Like thousands and millions of points of data over the years, that’s constructing yourself.

Pete  

We’re almost negotiating all these relationships that come into this package, which we call the self. As if the self doesn’t change. And that’s a point that Anil made very clearly. In fact, I think, correcting me in a question. [Laughs] No, it doesn’t—the self doesn’t just change—you’re not, even though I mean, I really do, intuitively, with no data to support it. I think to myself that I remember when I was three, and I just, there is a deep connection between Pete today and Pete 60 years ago, right? But that doesn’t mean the self hasn’t changed. See, that’s the thing. That’s almost a paradoxical observation. And that makes a difference in how I think about just who I am. And the changing me. The me that’s always in the process of becoming, not just having been or is—it’s just it’s a becoming thing. And then the big question, which we’re not going to get into today, because it’s nerdy, but it relates really, to God, is God in the process of becoming as well? 

Jared  

Right!

Jared  

Yeah, and I think over time, and this is maybe a great way to end—because I think over time, what we’re talking about is a paradigm shift. We’re not just talking about how to rearrange the furniture in the living room. We’re talking about going into a different room. And that’s going to take time, to just sit with all these interconnected understandings. Because again, when we move from static entity, things are the way they are and they don’t change, to relationality and things are always becoming—that affects how I see me, that affects how I see you, that affects how I see God, that affects how I see the whole world. 

Pete  

And there are a whole theological schools that say, “Well, God has to be in a process of becoming,” right? Because if God’s in relationship with us‚ that relationship means there’s give and take. And I have to be honest, I’m rather, I’m attracted to that it. I don’t understand it. I know Tripp Fuller does and some other people, but I don’t. But I want to dig into that a little bit more. Like what are the implications of that? And, “well, but God never changes!” Well, maybe God’s love doesn’t change, whatever that means, other aspects, but that doesn’t mean God can’t also be in the process of becoming. And I know that sounds again, very nerdy, but it’s hard to escape some of these. Once you dig a little bit. Yeah, with a topic like consciousness and self, dude, you’re in the stratosphere right away anyway. But the question is, how does it affect us?

Pete  

Everything.

Jared  

All right, well, we’re gonna leave with that cliffhanger, and hopefully we come back and dig into that idea a lot.

Pete  

I have a feeling we’re gonna be coming back to this a lot in Faith for Normal People. This is a huge issue. 

Jared  

Yep! Alright.

Pete  

See ya, folks.

Jared  

Pete  

Now if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join. 

Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show.

Outro  

Thanks for listening to Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, The Bible for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Steven Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.

Anil  

I’m smelling some broccoli—why? I don’t know why I picked broccoli.

Pete  

Anil  

The taste of beer is a much better example than the smell of broccoli. [laughing]