Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] [Intro]: Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: Rajnish Khanna, master's and PhD, is a Senior Investigator, Biosphere Science and Engineering at Carnegie Science, Stanford. Rajnish is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of I-Cultivar, Inc.
TerreLocal, and co-founder and Executive Director of “Urban Green Project”. He is a strategic biotechnology consultant, plant and soil health scientist applying multidisciplinary approaches for research and development.
Known for empowering the industry through strategic partnerships with academic institutions, facilitating technology transfer into real world applications, and deploying advanced technologies such as CLASlight, a unique software to quantify and monitor crop and tree health at global scale. For agroeco projects, Rajnish applies photobiology to explore the science of consciousness. He has developed a unique and testable “Theory of Spatial Relativity” related to the origins of consciousness, which aligns modern science with ancient concepts of spirituality.
Rajnish is the host of TerreScience, a podcast YouTube channel focused on soil and planetary health. Rajnish, thank you for coming to the Brainforest Café. Welcome.
[00:01:55] Rajnish Khanna: It's my pleasure, Dennis. Thank you for having me on Brainforest Café. I'm excited to discuss the research with you.
[00:02:06] Dennis McKenna: You are a good example of a polymath. You're interested in very many subjects, all generally related to life sciences and of course the nature of consciousness, which is not the first thing one thinks of when you think of a plant physiologist. But we have had these conversations and we probably have similar views on topics such as plant intelligence and that sort of thing, and plant consciousness in fact. So why don't we start there? Tell me what your understanding of consciousness is and how that fits into your work with plants.
[00:02:56] Rajnish Khanna: Sure, that is a good place to start. So I think the first thing that I will say is the terminology consciousness when we talk about plant consciousness. I'm sure many of my plant science colleagues will cringe. And so I'm not really talking about that type of plant consciousness as some people get idea of immediately. However, I do believe that the word consciousness itself has not been defined yet very well. So there are many people who will say that consciousness is deeper. It was predated, predates BigBang. There are people who say that some people from that viewpoint to, you know, pan consciousness type of viewpoint to consciousness is a product of our brain and only humans have consciousness. So we have this whole spectrum of when we use the word consciousness. So it's very difficult to do science in this field. And you know, as though as it has been said, consciousness is the hard problem. I think one of the reasons it is, the hard problem is because there is no definition, good definition of it, then how do we start to do research on it?
But I got to this point after I had started doing research and I wasn't really going after plant consciousness. My simple question was, is there an ability for plants to respond to environment?
Just like we take in information and we respond, if somebody is talking to us, we hear it and we respond. Or if somebody turns the lights on in the room, we know the lights are on because we are perceiving, we're receiving information from the environment.
Then we process it biologically.
And then during that time, there is a decision made, some part unconsciously, but sometimes involving conscious decision making, and then we react or respond.
So if that process is part of what we call consciousness or the experience of consciousness, then we can find all of those different parts in plants.
[00:05:30] Dennis McKenna: Right?
[00:05:31] Rajnish Khanna: So then the mechanisms involved may be very different. Or are they different? That was my question.
So if we think about consciousness as awareness of the environment and responsivity to it, then if plants can also do that, and we know that they do that, so how can I ask a question?
What are the similarities and what are the differences? So I wasn't going after whether plants are conscious or not. I was simply asking a question.
What are the similarities and differences?
[00:06:04] Dennis McKenna: They obviously do. Like all organisms, they respond to their environment and optimize their interactions with the environment.
And if that reflects intelligence of a certain kind, then perhaps intelligence is a better word than consciousness, because consciousness is so slippery, as you know. But certainly I think that a lot of the work that emerges out of what you're doing and other people are doing are showing that when it comes to plants there, they do optimally react to their environment. And if that's consciousness, if that's intelligence, then so be it. Brains are overrated, right?
[00:06:56] Rajnish Khanna: Right. You know, I mean, if you just think about the evolutionary process, let's say the Earth was formed 3.8 billion years ago, and, we can trace them back to 2.7 billion years ago. We know that mitochondria are present both in plants and animals, and mitochondria are prehistoric. There are proto bacteria that form synergistic relationships with the predecessors of plants and animals. So that's why we, both plants and animals and humans, we all have mitochondria. Similar thing happened, similar thing happened later, which was cyanobacteria, which formed plastids and, you know, chloroplasts. And that happened after the branching out or when Animals and plants differentiated. But that does mean that before that differentiation happened, there was a common ancestor of plants and animals. There has to be. Right.
[00:08:01] Dennis McKenna: So you mentioned cyanobacteria, which are photosynthetic, and they're eukaryotes. Right.
[00:08:11] Rajnish Khanna: Well, cyanobacteria, they're prokaryotes, they're single cellular.
[00:08:17] Dennis McKenna: But they have mitochondria, which we think of as organelles.
[00:08:22] Rajnish Khanna: That's true.
[00:08:23] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. And those are the most ancient organisms phylogenetically, that are photosynthetic. Right. I mean, they're. And the Archaeobacteria, which I guess is the precursor to virtually everything, are not photosynthetic plastids showed up at some point.
What I actually think of, I mean, it's not, but I think of it as a miracle of photosynthesis.
[00:08:55] Rajnish Khanna: Absolutely.
[00:08:57] Dennis McKenna: It is sort of a miracle because it's the.
It's what enabled, you know, this very basic ecosystem to begin to bring energy in from. From the solar system, from the sun, and it enabled a much higher degree of cellular differentiation and all that. And then, of course, because of photosynthesis, plants effectively evolved into virtuoso organic chemists, basically very much more creative than human chemists at making interesting compounds.
[00:09:41] Rajnish Khanna: Yes. Well, I also think, like you, that photosynthesis is a miracle. Mainly, of course, it's a complex process.
We cannot synthesize sugars out of water and sunlight in a test tube yet because there are so many components involved. But essentially the ingredients are six molecules of carbon dioxide, six molecules of water, and photons.
So if you think about it, it's light, water, carbon dioxide is air. So converting light, water and air into food that we can bite into, it's matter converted, you know, sugar produced into. Through multiple reactions. So it, it is a miracle. And plants are able to do that because they went on, they acquired the ability of photosynthesis from cyanobacteria. But before, before that, that branch separated, there were. There was a common ancestor of plants and animals.
[00:10:41] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:10:43] Rajnish Khanna: And like you said, the cyanobacteria, even those, you know, they are one of the more ancient. And one of the pathways that I know you also studied, as we have discussed before, was the shikimic acid pathway.
[00:10:56] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
[00:10:58] Rajnish Khanna: And that is one of the most ancient biochemical pathways.
[00:11:04] Dennis McKenna: Yes. And that kind of skews into some of the conversations we've had about tryptamines and indoles in general. And it's always been interesting to me that. So you've got this amino acid, right. Tryptophan, which is universal Everything has.
It's apparently one of the more most ancient amino acids. And if you go one way, you get the plant hormone, you get the oxens, the indole acetic acid. If you go another way in mammalian systems, you get the tryptamines, the nitrogen containing indoles. And I've always thought, although I can't articulate that precisely, but I've always thought there's kind of a mystery there in a certain way that because serotonin has so much to do with consciousness, the way it manifests in mammals, yet plants have serotonin too.
And you've looked into this a bit. You've looked.
[00:12:20] Rajnish Khanna: Yes, yeah, yeah, well, and actually humans also have auxin. You know, our bodies don't use it, it is discarded mostly. But that tryptophan pathway is a precursor to indole acetic acid. Like you were saying, auxin in plants, which is, I would say, in functionality. Well, in some ways biochemical synthesis mechanisms are similar to production of serotonin. And both are active in the absence of light. More active in the absence of light. Serotonin is active at night, peaks at night. And the indolestic acid pathway is also shut down by light. So when light comes on, that pathway is inhibited.
[00:13:14] Dennis McKenna: And melatonin similarly.
[00:13:16] Rajnish Khanna: You say melatonin similarly? Yes, because they're both. So essentially tryptophan as an amino acid is incorporated into protein synthesis. About 1% of that is used to make these other compounds. And that percentage reduces significantly going into that production when the light is on. And these pathways and the accumulation of auxin as well as serotonin or activity is more in the absence of light. So light is turning these things off, activity of these things off. So in both. So now if we go from there, so we know, we have established that there is this mechanism that is more active in the absence of light. And now if we think about it again, I'm just going to follow the data.
So in plants, auxin is involved in many processes. It's really an important hormone. And one of the things that, as a photobiologist that I've been interested in is phototropism, which is if we turn the light on here, plants will bend towards light and they only bend towards blue light. So there is a.
Winslow Briggs was the one who coined the term phototropin, which is the photoreceptor. It's the receptor that perceives blue light and then the plants bend towards blue light.
[00:14:53] Dennis McKenna: Has this phototropin been characterized? We know what the, we know what the structures are.
[00:15:01] Rajnish Khanna: Yes, yes, there's a lot of work on this. In fact, Winslow Briggs, he passed away a few years ago.
I worked with him, had the opportunity to work with him, and he was at Carnegie. So phototropin has been very well characterized. The protein is known. We know that, that it accumulates in the plasma membrane. It is phosphorylated when light comes on. And all of you know, all of this is known. But the reason I brought up phototropism. Phototropism is the mechanism of bending. Phototropin is the protein, that procedure, the.
[00:15:43] Dennis McKenna: Work that you presented in your presentation, you can use anesthetics to abolish this.
[00:15:50] Rajnish Khanna: Exactly. So that's where I was going. So one of the things that came to my mind, okay, we respond to the environment, and plants respond to the environment. Here is one thing that I can quantify. I can quantify how much a plant is bending. I can quantify the angle. So what if I give anesthesia to the seedling, to the plant, and see whether now it can bend or can respond to the light signal?
And I didn't even know where to start.
This was just my thought. So luckily, I have lots of people around me, like you, who I can always bother and ask questions and get the answers so that I can connect some dots. And so I went to Stuart Hameroff, who is quite well known for his science of consciousness conferences that he holds.
And, you know, his hypothesis is that orchestrated objective reduction, which was. Which is with Sir Roger Penrose. But, you know, his idea is that microtubules, which are these long tubulin chains of protein, that they are involved in consciousness. We won't get into the details of that.
So plants have microtubules too. So it made sense. So I asked him. Then he connected me with. With Bruce McIver. Who happened to be at Stanford. So he wasn't very far. And they're both anesthesiologists, so they could tell me, you know, how much anesthesia to use for these tiny little plants. So, we started there. And it's been a work that I've been doing for now almost three, two and a half to three years, just to precisely now I have now a precise method. I can control exactly how much anesthesia the plant is receiving. I have a whole concentration curve. I know exactly, you know, how. Basically. It's funny, but I think I've almost become like a plant anesthesiologist.
[00:18:13] Dennis McKenna: Not too many of those, very specialized, but that.
So. So the anesthetics in Mammals, they work on the mitochondria. Is that the mechanism? And you're postulating a similar mechanism in the plants or by being a bit simplistic here?
[00:18:40] Rajnish Khanna: That is the biggest question. So as I was doing this, it turns out that plants can be really good substitutes to study how anesthetics work, the mode of action of anesthetics, because it's very hard to study those things in humans particularly and also in animals. But plants can offer as a really good system to study how an aesthetics work. So instead of whether plants are conscious or not, the question is, can anesthetics remove the ability of, or abolish the ability of plants to respond to the environmental signal? Let's ask that first question and then the second question like you brought up, is the mechanism the way, if it is abolished, is that conserved between plants and animals and humans? So those two. So I started there and you know where, where, where it gets interesting is what you mentioned, like whether they act through mitochondria. Because it is true there are several hypotheses for how anesthetics work in humans. By reducing one is like by reducing the availability of ATP energy. So you know, if the energy is taken away, then of course the ability to respond goes away. The other very popular hypothesis which has been published quite a bit, is that they activate GABA receptors. GABA are receptors that inhibit some responses.
So the two most common mechanisms of anesthesia activity are reduction of ATP availability and activation or increase in the activity of GABA receptors.
So plants also have GABA receptors.
And the good thing is that in plants we can order up knockouts, mutants.
In humans there are many knockouts and mutants, but not easy to access.
But in plants we can order gene knockouts. We can go and precisely say, well, I want a plant lacking this gene function and so on. We can also transform plants with markers. So I created a plant, arabidopsis plant, which had a green fluorescent protein, basically a protein from fish, let's say, that has fluorescence and fused it to tubulin.
So the first question that I wanted to check was does do microtubules play a role?
Because Stuart has this hypothesis. So this green fluorescent protein is attached to tubulin, which means that we can follow it through microscope, through confocal microscope, we can see where microtubules are. In fact, when we look at the non treated plants, they are beautiful microtubules, green. You can see them very nicely everywhere.
So then we started doing the experiments and I treated plants with anesthesia and of course different concentrations and sure enough, they did not bend towards light anywhere.
[00:22:12] Dennis McKenna: So the anesthesia disrupts the microtubule structure or.
[00:22:19] Rajnish Khanna: Yeah, so they don't bend, but after, like, after 10 hours or so, they can bend. So the ability has gone transiently. And when we look inside at microtubules, soon after the treatment, all microtubules are disintegrated.
[00:22:39] Dennis McKenna: Okay. And so by analogy, in animals, so, so does the anesthetic disrupt the microtubules in animals? Is that the inference or is that known?
[00:22:55] Rajnish Khanna: So these studies are just starting to come out and it has been also, it's been known for past 10 years that Isoflurane or some of these anesthetics can directly bind microtubules. There have been models prepared, especially Stuart has been doing a lot of work on this, this area.
But it has been hard to study in vivo with neurons. So in vitro work has been there and it's corroborating what now we are seeing in vivo with plants, because in plants we can actually start to look at all of this happening.
[00:23:37] Dennis McKenna: So this is fascinating, you're right at the edge of my understanding here. But basically the naive interpretation is so microtubules, if you want to put a plant to sleep, you disrupt its microtubules function. If you want to put a person to sleep, abolish their consciousness, you disrupt their microtubule function. Is that in a very simple way, is that a justified thing to say?
[00:24:12] Rajnish Khanna: Well, so like I said, there are other ways how it has been understood how anesthetics work. So conventional understanding is that anesthetics, especially like isofluorin, they bind many things, including microtubules. So currently the understanding is that disrupting microtubules is like a side effect. And it, it causes, the more disruption you do, the harder it becomes to come back. But actually, anesthetics may work through other things that they do. So.
So now, but what the next step, of course, is to, because we have plants and systems can provide so much more amazing things. So the next step was how important is this disruption of microtubules in response in anesthesia activity?
So as it happens, I had a mutant, which we are going to publish pretty soon, in few months. Hopefully this will come out very soon. But we found a mutant, mutant knockout, A gene, a plant lacking a function of a gene. And that plant is tolerant or resistant to the anesthetic.
So there is one gene that seems to be very important in responsivity to anesthesia. And when that gene is missing, microtubules also do not disintegrate.
They stay Intact.
And moreover, everything that I'm talking about, for example, tubulin identity at the amino acid level of tubulin between plants and neurons is 89% identity in amino acid sequence.
[00:26:08] Dennis McKenna: Interesting.
[00:26:08] Rajnish Khanna: It's one of the most highly conserved proteins, tubulin is.
So the current hypothesis that that is coming up is that anesthetics like isoflurane directly bind tubulin microtubules and disrupt them or disintegrate them. And I think that they have a role to play in response to anesthesia. And if we block this disruption, either by genetic mutation or by chemical disruption or any mechanism that disrupts it, the response to anesthesia goes away in plants. Now, these types of studies are harder to do in humans, but as we start to draw parallels, I think there will be a way to connect, to see how important this mechanism that we are identifying in plants, how can it be translated to activity of anesthesia?
[00:27:09] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. Can you. I mean, in mammals, in animals, they're much harder to study. Can you get anywhere with neuronal cultures or in vitro systems, you can study these things a little more easily?
[00:27:30] Rajnish Khanna: Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think some of these early ideas can be studied, like, let's say, in earthworms or, you know, sSome of these smaller systems so that they're easier to handle, even. Even fruit flies, you know, and stuff like that.
But where we are right now, I think is. Is a. Interesting place to start to draw connections in the mechanisms of how these molecules. Because anesthetics are amazing molecules. They, at the right concentration, they simply remove the ability to respond to the environment while maintaining all the basic functions.
[00:28:12] Dennis McKenna: Right.
And so clearly, if a plant has consciousness, whatever that may mean, if it, you know, the anesthetic can abolish its ability to respond to the environment, approach appropriately to take in information and respond. And anesthetics do the same thing to humans and mammals and presumably earthworms and fruit flies and all that. So that alone is a strong evidence that mitochondria, I mean, tubules, are somehow fundamental to these processes.
Let's get away from consciousness. Let's just fundamental to the process of receiving information energetically from the environment and processing it and producing responses.
[00:29:12] Rajnish Khanna: Right? Yes.
And that's not a surprising conclusion either, because there are these proteins called dynein, I think you may have heard of them. So microtubules are like highways, and there are proteins like dynein. They literally walk along microtubules. You can watch videos.
These are imitations especially, I think Harvard University has really wonderful video where microtubules are like this. And dynein is a protein walking like this, carrying a huge vacuole.
So microtubules are like highways. So if you disrupt that, what you have done is you remove the communication, the infrastructure, physical infrastructure of communication. So it completely makes sense that it would work that way. But now, going back to the question of consciousness. So as this starts to develop, one of the things that really I think this brings up is very important.
We don't.
The word consciousness.
How do we define the word consciousness? I think the problem is that when we think of consciousness, we want to relate it to our own experience.
But the word consciousness, we can either decide, okay, consciousness, the word consciousness only is defined for. It should be used only for experiences that are similar to human experiences and not for anything else. But that will then include dogs, dolphins, you know, then, then it starts to get broader. Where, where we, where do we draw the line? Or we can redefine the word consciousness. Think about it as the degree of ability to respond to the environment with a range of awareness.
[00:31:04] Dennis McKenna: Right?
[00:31:05] Rajnish Khanna: So it's the degree of the ability to respond to the environment. So if you have a more sophisticated system to respond to the environment, you are, you have a sophisticated consciousness system. And with a range of awareness, you may not be aware at all. Things may be having at unconscious level, but then you may be very conscious. So I think the two, two, two parts in one sentence. The degree of the ability to respond to the environment with a range of awareness, if we go with that as the definition of consciousness, it can also then help us decide whether AI will ever be conscious. And actually, it's funny, I was talking to Michael Pollan and I will quote him, he said that the way we are and the way human interest is, we will probably declare AI cautious because before we will ever declare plants conscious.
[00:32:05] Dennis McKenna: Right. Well, that's very interesting.
It looks like you're developing a good foundation to understand this. And I like that idea that consciousness is really the ability to respond. I mean, it's intrinsic to the ability to respond to the environment. And it does so over a spectrum. So you have these systems like plants, which are obviously more simple than mammals. And if they have consciousness, well, here we get into some pretty interesting metaphysical territory.
Because some of the most intelligent organization organisms I know are plants.
[00:32:57] Rajnish Khanna: Yes, absolutely. But me too.
[00:33:00] Dennis McKenna: Interesting thing. You can, like with psychedelics, you can enter into conversations with plants or what appear to be conversations. Of course, it's all coming from you, but it's the molecular triggers and the receptor interactions and so on.
That Produces these experiences.
[00:33:23] Rajnish Khanna: Well, and I want to go there. So let's go in that direction now. Okay, so now I'm glad you like that, because I think we need to have some sort of a formal, written.
At least we should try to have a written definition of consciousness. And I'd be excited to work with you on that because you've thought about this much longer than I have.
But let's go towards the direction that you just brought up. So obviously, as you know, I have also had experiences myself, and I've always wanted to understand them. Where is all this happening? So as I start to think about this, I think that there is the physical form which we, let's say, just described, has the ability to respond to the environment. But then that means the environment has information.
[00:34:26] Dennis McKenna: Right?
[00:34:27] Rajnish Khanna: Environment has signal. And even today, even at the physical sciences, we have understood at the quantum level that there are some. Some. At the quantum level, there is information or there is some signals or messages or some form of energies that are random and we do not have ability to measure. So we have the measurement problem. Things that we can measure and things that we cannot measure.
So if we don't accept that there are things that we cannot measure, but they are definitely exist. If you don't accept that we cannot do any more science.
[00:35:12] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. Yeah.
[00:35:14] Rajnish Khanna: So. So we have to draw broader hypotheses that. That start to then address that there are things that are not measurable, but they have an influence on things that we can measure.
[00:35:28] Dennis McKenna: I don't know. Now you're talking pretty metaphysical, right? I mean, what. When a scientist starts talking about things we can't measure, I mean, then it's not science anymore. Science. Doesn't science totally focus on what you can measure? If you can't measure, you can't talk about.
[00:35:51] Rajnish Khanna: No, I agree.
Absolutely. But at the same time, before we could measure different colors of light, but we could see them. You could say that that was metaphysical back then.
So what we call metaphysical is just out of our ability to measure. As if we develop systems to measure, you know, get to know more things, they become part of our understanding. Then the metaphysical bubble starts to shrink slowly. So what I'm saying is that, that. So, you know, what is mystical and metaphysical is something that we don't understand, and science has not been able to approach it yet.
[00:36:35] Dennis McKenna: Right. We haven't brought it into the sphere of what we can measure. That doesn't mean that we won't eventually or that the phenomena are not real, you know?
[00:36:46] Rajnish Khanna: Right, exactly. Yeah, science progresses is that if you can see effects of something, something is being influenced or affected, we don't know by what or what it is or how.
The only way we can even address that is by accepting, okay, there is an effect.
[00:37:07] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
[00:37:09] Rajnish Khanna: And only then we can start to even think about what, how to measure something, whether it exists. So I think one of the problems that we've had in scientific community is bifurcating very strongly that this is what it is. This we can't measure, we don't care, we can't ask any questions.
[00:37:31] Dennis McKenna: Well, that's always been the problem with science.
Reduction is a useful tool only to an extent. I mean, it helps you define the sphere of what we can know, what we do measure, what we're able to measure and what we can be sort of certain about.
Although as a scientist, you understand that at least I think we are on the same page that science never really proves anything. It just develops hypotheses that explains the data, but has to always acknowledge the limitations of it. The sphere of what we know hopefully is always expanding, but we'll never get to the end. You know, I don't think we'll ever get to a point where we say that science has pretty much got everything figured out, you know, I mean, oh.
[00:38:29] Rajnish Khanna: No, I hope not.
[00:38:31] Dennis McKenna: I don't.
[00:38:31] Rajnish Khanna: I hope not. I hope not, because then I lose my job.
[00:38:36] Dennis McKenna: I think. I think, you know, it's important to recognize that as scientists, I think a certain degree of humility is justified because it's like, oh, we know a lot, but when there's a lot we don't know, which is not, say, we'll never know it, you know, I mean, that's why we're in this game, you know?
[00:39:01] Rajnish Khanna: Yeah, exactly. So, let's look at where we are now together in this conversation. So we have decided, okay, we are in a room, let's call it a room of science.
And then we look out a window and there is all this stuff that we don't know, but we ourselves can feel it. We can experience it ourselves. And everything in our room, we have measured and we know to some level. But then there is this much bigger question outside that we don't know anything about. So, okay, so how does then science progress further? Well, then we can start to look at what's in our room and start to come up with a hypothesis. So this is why, based on the research that I've been doing, I came up with a hypothesis to start the next. To ask the next question. Right and the next question has to be defined with the information in hand only. So the information that we have in hand is that there is the. Are physical forms. Some physical forms are alive, some physical forms are not alive. We know that, right? Some are living, some are not living. So, so there is, there is a fundamental difference between some form, some physical forms that, that we can measure both. But some can move and act, eat, drink, reproduce. Do all of those things experience, respond to the environment. But others are subjected to the environment. Whatever happens to them, they will, they will go through their own. They don't have that ability to respond or do any of those things. So they're non living and living forms.
So even if we take now the living forms, as you and I discussed, there can be simple forms from prokaryotes all the way up. Too complex. Let's say we put ourselves at the top, the very sophisticated, brainy humans.
So we have all this range of forms.
So my, my theory is a theory of spatial relativity. Spatial means space, right? You know, space. So space has come. So the form is obviously occupying space, space, time.
So each form has a spatial characteristic.
So that spatial characteristic will allow that form to either have one type of ability or, or a range of other types of ability. So basically it's, it's a package of a form and its experience of time is relatively different whether it's alive or not alive or how responsive it is. So the theory of spatial relativity simply is that every single form is occupying the same space time, but its ability to respond to the environment depends on its degree of sophistication or mechanisms that it has acquired to be able to do that.
So now when we start to look further, then that means that if we go further down into the spatial differences, we have to go down to quantum level.
And at the very smallest pixel of spacetime, the smallest pixel of space time, we call it Planck's lab or Planck's space, right? The smallest is the smallest. Below that we may end up with like a black hole.
So it's the very smallest space. So if the universe is full of these Planck lens, so if you were to print a photograph, it will have pixels.
Similarly, space time has those very smaller smallest pixels. So that means the only conclusion that I can draw is that as those pixels accumulate to form any shape or form, there is an inherent ability of those pixels to go either in any of these directions.
So now what you may call metaphysical is just things that when we are looking out of the window are those things that I have just described and These are hypotheses linking using all the information that we have. So now how can we move forward? We can move forward by differentiating how at the development stages, how different forms, at least the ones that are what we say, can respond to the environment, how different they are in their abilities, and how the form or the shape that. That they are in is different. But the fundamental ability has to be the easiest way to explain. I think this works better. Think of a stem cell. So stem cells are cells that can take any form and shape. And stem cells, we use them, we hope to use them for therapeutic purposes, you know, in the future. But as soon as a stem cell starts to differentiate it, it becomes specific or characteristic to what it's going to be. It's very difficult to bring it back. So similarly, what I'm trying to say is that, that at the very fundamental level, that, that very. At a functional level, there is a space time that has, that is like a stem cell that has the ability to, to take any form.
Once it starts to accumulate, it becomes restricted by the characteristics it has acquired and developed, and those, those restrictions will. Will allow or disallow it to interact with the environment. So, so I. So, so that's that.
[00:45:13] Dennis McKenna: Please go ahead. I'm just.
These. You always blow my mind, Rajni, that this idea of the spatial relativity, it's like the concept of the stem cell that can effectively develop in any direction. So as it develops, would it be correct to say, kind of defines its own space, time, its place in space, and time is defined by.
Well, it's expressed, it develops.
I'm not being very articulate about this, but it develops. The stem cell goes one direction and develops a certain way. That closes off all the other directions that it might have developed into. Right, right.
It's sort of becoming what Whitehead liked to call the formality of actually occurring.
It defines its own space, time, environment by the process of complexifying and developing.
[00:46:35] Rajnish Khanna: Well, both. So, I mean, if you take example of plants, again, you know, you can have varieties of soybeans, grow them north or south, or they will look different, they will develop differently. So basically a location in the big universe where something starts to develop, where it is, what's available also has an influence of what it's going to become.
[00:46:56] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
[00:46:58] Rajnish Khanna: So to simplify this, I had to come up with some terminologies just so that I could explain this in a better way. So this smallest pixel that.
I'm not saying that it's Planck's length, because I don't Want to put physical parameters on it. I am only talking in functional terms because I can't measure anything. So what I would say is that the smallest functional unit of space time, the smallest functional unit of spacetime, which is equivalent to a stem cell, I call that a spot on. S P O T. A spoton. S, P O T O N. Okay, spot on. Like a photon and a, you know, electron, but it's a small. So that it gives an idea. It's a very tiny, smallest functional unit of space time. It's called spot on.
[00:47:48] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
[00:47:48] Rajnish Khanna: And so even a photon would have many spotons because photon is already a functional, organized functional space.
So spoton will have. Sorry, photon will have many spotons. So spoton is very, very tiny. Now, within a photon, all the spotons, which will be hundreds of thousands of them, probably all of the spotons within a photon will form what I call a sparticule, like a molecule of atoms. So spot on. And in any form, all the spot ons that have developed to give that shape to that form, they together. I call that a spotty cube.
Okay, so now, functional space, in any living or non living thing, in any form, all of the functional, all of the space that is intrinsic to that form is a sparticube.
[00:48:47] Dennis McKenna: Right, Right.
So this is analogous basically to unicellular versus multicellular as cellular.
A cell, you could say, is kind of the elementary spot on. And as colonies of cells accumulate and differentiate, then you've got your sparticule. So that's a very interesting. And the spot, if I understand it right, the spoton is kind of the basic space time structure of the most simplest element that hasn't differentiated itself. It's like almost. Well, it's like a stem cell. It's all.
And nothing beyond that. I mean, the way it's going to differentiate itself hasn't happened yet. It will develop some direction and then.
[00:49:56] Rajnish Khanna: Well, Right, no, no, no, no.
Let's take one more step and then I'll stop because I know it's already getting.
[00:50:04] Dennis McKenna: But so do you wear these.
Flooded brain. My small brain. But yes. Okay, let's.
[00:50:14] Rajnish Khanna: Now let's. Because, you know, I want to bring it back to that metaphysical and physical part. So now here is my form. And obviously I have many, many spot ons. And all of those spotons ultimately form one sparticule, which is all the empty space time that I occupy. That when I move around, you know, it's mine. It's my spot on or spotticule. I'm walking around with my own Spotticule. Now, you know, we can say, okay, you know, Raj, you're talking about like ancient people. You know, they talked about Atman or all of this stuff. I don't know. I'm giving you, you know, I'm giving you how we think as scientists. I'm just following my scientific process and they can be parallels drawn to things that have been said before. But I don't want to make any parallels that way because I don't have any answers for any of that. I'm just trying to first ask the right questions so I can do research.
So let's say that there is one particle that is the non physical part, which is space time, which we empty space time. We know spacetime, that space is not empty. We know that now. But that non physical part is my sparticule as I'm walking around. But here's. Here's what blows my mind. When I got this far, what appeared to me is that if the universe is full of spot ons, then what is outside of me is also made of spot ons.
[00:51:54] Dennis McKenna: Right? Right.
[00:51:56] Rajnish Khanna: But they are just not part of my form. They're not part of my sparticule, but they're the same spotons that make my spotticle.
[00:52:06] Dennis McKenna: They are the same. They're similar, yes, similar.
[00:52:10] Rajnish Khanna: You're not the same. So not the same, but identical, or they are the stem cells of the. So me, as I'm walking around with my spotticle, I am interacting with all these other spotons that have taken other shapes. Light, temperature. You know, every temperature is also a vibration of, you know, elements. You know, we know about temperature, how temperature works. So everything that is occurring is because of different functions that those photons are playing.
So that means consciousness that I experience is my ability of my characteristics, everything that I've developed in my sparticule, in my physical body and my sparticule. It is the degree of the ability of all those characteristics to interact with the. With the other spot ons and sparticules that are made of the same ingredient.
[00:53:12] Dennis McKenna: Right? Right. So, yeah. So by that way we all.
I mean, in a simple way, you could say we construct our own space time that these sparticules inhabit and we interact with other sparticules in their own space time. So in a certain sense, you're stating the obvious, but that's an interesting way to think about it. I think we've had conversations before about how a lot of what consciousness is, we synthesize our old reality internally. We take information through our sensory interfaces, a lot of which is Visual, but it's other kinds of information. Energy inputs. Information inputs, too. And we create what I sometimes call the reality hallucination.
And everything does that. Everything is within this molecule. It's this synthesized experience. And, you know. Well, we're getting into some pretty.
That's very interesting. That's a very interesting idea.
[00:54:31] Rajnish Khanna: Well, the reason I had to go that way is because, like you said, all of this is obvious, but now I'm putting flags at the things that we call metaphysical. And I've already given a different terminology because if I use the terminologies that everyone else uses, they have different meanings to different people. And then as soon as I start to talk about that, I lose most of the people.
So, unfortunately, I had to. Not, like, we need more terms, but I had to think of different ways to draw the string, you know, to. To be able to explain what. What I'm saying, so that I can then design an experiment. So now if we do this anesthesia. Anesthesia experiment, the plant has its own particle, its own limitations, its own characteristics, but it. It has many characteristics that are common with us. And when we have a chemical which has its own properties and it is so specific. That's the amazing part. Like you're saying, plants are amazing chemical factories, and they release these chemicals, including psychedelics, that can go and affect us in so many ways. But all of this is simple interaction between what's out there and what's in here. But the ingredients. But at the very fundamental level, the stem cell, let's say, or whatever it is, has to be the same.
[00:56:01] Dennis McKenna: Right? Right.
Okay. Well, there's lots of food for thought here. I'm gonna have to process this, but.
[00:56:11] Rajnish Khanna: No, sure.
[00:56:12] Dennis McKenna: I think this is a good place to end it. We're about at the top of the hour, and this is an ongoing conversation. We're going to have to have you come back on the podcast one of these days and give us an update on your research.
[00:56:30] Rajnish Khanna: Sure. Well, I would be very happy to.
[00:56:32] Dennis McKenna: Okay. That's been a wonderful conversation. You did most of the talking, and it's been wonderful. Thank you so much.
[00:56:42] Rajnish Khanna: Well, thank you, Dennis, for having me on.
[00:56:45] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. Keep up the good work.
We'll see you soon.
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