This is a Glassbox Media Podcast.

Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast team.

The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.

You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content

by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash Conspirituality.

Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.

One of the most contentious topics I've encountered in all of my years studying religion and

working in the wellness industry is consciousness. In fact, it's about as debated a term as religion

itself. In his book The Bonobo and the Atheist, primatologist Friends DeWal sums up the challenge

of defining religion. To delineate religion to everyone's satisfaction is hopeless.

I was once part of a forum at the American Academy of Religion when someone proposed we start off

with a definition of religion. However much since this made, the idea was promptly shot down by

another participant who reminded everyone that last time they tried to define religion half the

audience had angrily stumped out of the room. And this in an academy named after the topic.

Consciousness also faces such issues. I've fallen the side of many neuroscientists that state

consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. That is the physical properties of the human body produce

the state of mind we call consciousness. The religious and spiritual like sometimes to cry

this idea, turning instead to some form of Cartesian dualism as if a ghost lives in this machine of

flesh for a time being before escaping when biology stops working. It's an odd situation we find

ourselves in. Very often the burden of proof is placed on those that feel consciousness isn't

emergent by asking for irrefutable evidence that it's body dependent. From my perspective that

burden should be put on the dualist. We have millennia of biological research in a few centuries

...